She always wanted to know, “How am I going to run twenty miles tomorrow with you prowling the flat, Jimmy?” Jimmy’s point was that the New York City Marathon was eleven months away. An eternity. What’s the point of running anyway? Jimmy wondered. Still she made him turn the TV off, lower the music—couldn’t he tell it was late?—so Jimmy started going out. He wandered dangerous neighborhoods, strolled darkened alleyways, invariably ending up at his studio, where he drank beer and stared at a blank canvas until he had to go downstairs to the pub for a real drink.

Jimmy blamed Christine, just as he knew his father had blamed his mother. He couldn’t help history repeating. It wasn’t his fault that women as much as callled to him from street corners and cafe tables: “Psst, Jimmy! Over here!” They were subtle with their perfumes and bright colored lips so no one could accuse them later. “Kiss me, I’m yours.” That was the hell of it.

In particular, there was Frances, who worked in advertising, or maybe promotion. She looked like one of those characters on a sitcom, her cute heart-shaped face twisted into a smirk. She was a slapstick girl, always telling foul jokes. In bed she jumped on him, talking dirty. “C’mon and fuck me, Jimmy Boy. Fuck me blind.”

What he really wanted, though, was to marry her.

And there it was: the past showing up again as the present.

Once he’d seen an exercise on daytime talk show, in which you recalled the significant scenes of your life, gave an approximate date, including month and year, and named if possible the meaning of each event. According to the guest psychologist, the exercise provided “ego grounding.” It turned out to be harder than it looked. The things Jimmy could name during the three-through-six-a.m. of his quiet desperation told the story of his life.

i.
Once, Jimmy’s sister Benét had brought home a stray. His father had been on one of his weekly trips to Chicago for business. This was when they lived in Silver Spring, so the dog was not exactly what you’d call mangy.

“Look at its beautiful coat.” Benét was still in tomboy coveralls and sneakers, easily excitable. “Let’s call him Virgil.”

They brushed and powdered him with things they found under the vanity. Jimmy was up for anything back then. They tied ribbons in his ears. Still when his mother came home from the school library, where she worked part-time, even in summer, she wasn’t impressed.

“Down,” she said calmly to the dog. Then she got on the phone.

Every night for a week, Jimmy and Benét made sheet tents in their beds, trying to lure the dog to sleep with one of them. Virgil merely cocked his eyebrows innocently and headed for the master bedroom.

“Down,” Jimmy heard his mother say, but it was no use. Virgil was a peculiar companion, sleeping in a complete human stretch on Jimmy’s father’s side of the bed.

A week after Benét had brought the dog home, a very handsome family in a green and brown paneled station wagon showed up to take the dog. “We’ll treat him well,” said Mr. Collins heartily. “Long walks and dog treats.” Jimmy’s mother seemed satisfied with the strength of his handshake. A beautiful woman and a beautiful baby smiled from the passenger side. Jimmy’s mother smiled back.

After Mr. Collins packed Virgil into the wagon along with the shiny new accoutrements (silver bowl, wire-tooth brush, shiny-coat pills, food and leash), two things happened. Jimmy’s father pulled into the driveway, and Mr. Collins drove off in the wrong direction, happy wife and child at his side in front, Virgil draped mopily in back. Jimmy’s father wheeled his travel tote—a gift from Jimmy’s mother—onto the driveway, kissing his entire family, who stood in a loose constellation fresh with the new absence.

“What’s going on at my favorite address?”

Before Jimmy’s mother had time to answer, the green and brown paneled station wagon rounded the cul-de-sac a second time, Collins’s slowing to offer a charming self-deprecating chuckle at their directional mistake.

“Too much excitement, I guess,” exclaimed Mr. Collins out his open window.

Jimmy had never seen his mother move so fast. Hands held out like a traffic cop, she blocked the slow moving car with body. She flung open the back door and hauled Virgil out by his new red leather collar, stuffing his shiny new belongings under her arm.

“Sorry,” she said, “we’ve changed our minds.”

Benét waltzed around the lawn, Virgil excitedly bounding behind her, like a sloppy dance partner antsy to catch up. Jimmy’s mother crossed her arms over her chest and nodded.

August 1983: Everything is reversible.

ii.
Jimmy sat on the bed. It was Sunday afternoon, and there’d been a big fight, an unusual occurrence in Silver Spring. Jimmy’s mother had been crying all morning. She’d surfaced only once in the TV room to give Jimmy $10 to take Benét on his bike to the public swimming pool for lunch. They’d swum a little, eaten hot dogs, then moped a bit at a red cedar picnic table.

“Maybe she’s sick of him traveling all the time,” Benét said.

Jimmy tried to ignore the sound of happy kids his age jack-knifing into the pool. “I don’t know, Ben. She threw a plate.”

When they got home, Jimmy went directly from the garage to the master bedroom. His father was packing for his weekly Chicago trip. He could hear his mother in the kitchen, quietly moving around the pots and pans, like someone bruised, someone who hadn’t slept in weeks. Jimmy watched the ritual of his father’s careful selection: three day’s worth of suits from the closet. “Everything okay, Dad?”

In the middle of zipping a garment bag, his father turned in profile. “Jimmy.” His name sounded like a plea, a piece of bad news.

Jimmy’s mother appeared in the doorway, her gray eyes accusingly swollen from crying. “Tell him, Burt.”

Jimmy’s father looked down at the carpet. From Benét’s record player next door, they could hear the impressive rhythm of Michael Jackson’s “Beat it”

Jimmy’s mother stood wiping her fingers on a dishtowel, speaking like a woman at an airport counter. “Your father isn’t going to live with us any more, Jimmy. He just informed me that he has another family in Illinois. He lives with them Sunday through Wednesday, but has decided to stay on with them full time. We on the other hand are dismissed.”

“Be reasonable, Elaine,” Jimmy’s father said, “I’m not trying to dismiss anyone.”

“Reasonable?”

Jimmy’s father didn’t answer.

“Another family,” his mother whispered, in case Jimmy had missed it the first time. She was staring into the bathroom from where she was standing, still half in the hallway, across the room. Jimmy turned around to follow her gaze, then looked at his father, who shifted from one foot to the next.

“Dad?”

His father made a loud throat-clearing sound.

“Another son and another daughter, Jimmy,” his mother said, “their names are Paul and Bella.”

This was the only thing Jimmy ever learned about them.

“Another address. Even a stray dog.” She stood for another minute, letting Jimmy absorb the idea before she stumbled back to the kitchen blindly to bake another peach pie. “Don’t know what the wife’s name is.”

She turned to Jimmy with clear eyes. “Can you beat that?”

Jimmy’s father left the room without saying a word.

Jimmy sat on the bed, his mother’s final sentence still ringing in his ears: Can you beat that? Jimmy couldn’t.

April 1984: People are expendable.

iii.
Shortly after arriving in New York City from college, Jimmy bumped into his father at a pool place. The table was a disgrace, as if an idiot had performed the break. Jimmy took a closer look, observing the way he held a cue, fingers curled and arthritic, a cleaning woman’s grip. The bar was smoky and entirely too green, especially the scratched covers on empty tables. It was 2 a.m. on Tuesday, the week before Christmas. To Jimmy, who’d wandered in purely by chance, the place felt like a morgue, except for the juke box which was loud and a bartender spilling out of her blouse.

Jimmy slouched closer to the group of guys in rolled-up shirtsleeves; they were smoking cigars and drinking gin, the only hot spot in the place. He was thinking that maybe they needed a fourth, when halfway to the table he recognized one of them as his father, the one with the ridiculous grip, the one losing his shirt. Jimmy hung back in the shadows, blinking to get a better look, to make sure this really was really happening. One of the guys tossed out a couple of friendly jokes about bad pool playing. “Bet you could wipe us off the table.”

Everyone laughed. His father was racking them up again.

Jimmy approached resolutely.

“Dad?” he said plaintively. What he meant was: “You bastard.”

His father turned around. He had to lean on the cue stick to focus his eyes.

“Holy shit,” his father said. He was drunk. “It’s my number one son.”

The guys in his father’s company clapped, as if Jimmy’s appearance had been planned. A couple of the guys came over to introduce themselves. They were Jimmy’s father’s colleagues and business partners. One was a client.

“Hell of a guy, your old man,” the client said.

Jimmy’s father didn’t ask where he’d gone to college or how he expected to pay off his school loans. He didn’t ask about Benét or Jimmy’s mother, and in return, Jimmy didn’t ask about his father’s second family. Or were they his father’s first? Jimmy wondered how one decided on the ranking of such things: love or chronology? Instead, they talked about Illinois and New York City—differences in landscape and weather. One of his colleagues had lived in Hawaii, so they talked about that for a while, then about the business deals they were cooking up, which had brought them to Manhattan in the first place.

“Me and these apes,” his father had said, indicating his colleagues. They were planning to make a lot of money.

Jimmy didn’t ask where or how long his father was staying. Before he put on his coat and scarf, his father wrote a phone number on the back of a business card, as if Jimmy were a whore. Then he said, “I really should have bought you a drink tonight.”

December 1994: The past will kick your teeth in.

iv.
Things got a little hairy at home the year Jimmy went to college. According to Benét, who was dating a psychologist—her own psychologist, in fact—Jimmy’s leaving restimulated the family trauma. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that Virgil had died unexpectedly in his sleep. Jimmy’s mother had rolled over, and found the dog stiff and cold.

That had given her the idea, she explained.

“Mom,” Jimmy whispered into a hallway extension outside his dorm room, “The freezer is not suitable, not sanitary.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, “I took out all the food from the spare in the garage. He’s the only thing in there, now.”

“You can’t just keep him in there, Mom.”

“It’s perfect,” she said. Things were worse than Benét’s letters had indicated. “I took out all the shelving, and he just fits, standing up.”

Jimmy watched a couple of guys meander through the dorm carrying shaving kits and towels. He nodded casually, waiting for them to pass

“I’m coming home tonight,” Jimmy continued calmly.

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” his mother said. “We’ll see you at Thanksgiving as planned.”

September 1990: Good-bye can be avoided.

v.
The little girl, a problem student, was hanging off the chalkboard. She didn’t seem to care about homework today, half asleep in the morning, wild as soon as the class was seated. She hadn’t completed her assignment.

By ten o’clock, Jimmy’s patience was all used up. He pulled her aside.

“Something wrong, Shaneequa,” he said.

“Nothing.”

She was heavy lidded and dark skinned. Her hair was pulled back so tightly in two fat braids that she reminded him of a skinned animal: scalp surprisingly shiny.

“Did you do your math?” he said.

She smiled. “I did.”

“Let’s see.”

She shrugged, but didn’t move from the chair by his desk, which he used for all important student teacher discussions. He found consistency helpful.

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t have to,” she said.

Jimmy straightened his tie. The bell rang. The other students lined up noisily behind the student teacher, who marched them down to the music room.

Shaneequa didn’t bat an eye.

“So what are we going to do?” he asked her.

“You want to listen to CD’s?”

“No,” he said.

“Do I get to skip Music today?”

“Put the CD case away,” he said.

She held up the vinyl case. “Boyz to Men.”

“Be real with me, Shaneequa,” he said. “Are you having a particular problem today?”

She sucked her teeth. “Real? With you?”

He couldn’t help smiling. Her face got tight.

“It’s a request,” he said, trying to keep a handle on his authority. “I’m asking you to tell me something.”

“I am real,” she said.

“The truth, Shaneequa,” he said.

“Stop saying my name,” she said, raising her voice a little.

Her tone threw Jimmy off balance. “I’ll say your name as much as I please.”

“No, you will not.”

Jimmy leaned forward to get his face closer to hers. “Shaneequa, Shaneequa, Shaneequa,” he said quietly.

A bit surprised, she rose from her seat and flung her small body across the cluttered desk. Jimmy felt the force of her weight, the two small fists digging into his middle. CDs from Shaneequa’s case went flying in all directions, bouncing and rolling into the hall. Some of them cracked on the hard tiled floor. Catching his breath, Jimmy yanked down hard on her wrists. She twisted as much as she could at the elbow, until he picked her up off the floor by her wrists.

“Calm down, Shaneequa,” he said, realizing he ought to avoid saying her name. She thrashed all the more. “I said stop.”

When he got a better grip and yanked her around to face him, to shake the anger out of her, she kicked her legs furiously.

“I’m trying to help you.” He could not enforce stillness on her. Could not make her stop.

“Let go!” she screamed, suddenly bursting into tears.

When Jimmy realized she’d made her body into dead weight, he let her slump to the floor.

“Okay,” he said quietly, smoothing his hair, fixing his tie. He bent down over the small heap of her on the floor. “Sometimes when we are having a bad morning, we can politely ask to be excused to the nurse’s office.”

Shaneequa arched her back and whipped her neck forward so that what landed on Jimmy’s forehead was a large gob of yellowish spit with the savored sweet pulp of frozen orange juice from that morning’s breakfast. Jimmy picked her up by the arms and shook her hard, even harder than he meant to.

“You little nigger whore,” he said.

The district’s ethics committee believed Jimmy’s side of the story: he had said no such thing, not to Shaneequa, or any of his kids inside or outside of the classroom, black or white, male or female.

The entire story was an absurd fabrication of a child aching for attention.

This was a week ago last Thursday.

Friday brought several days of freedom, a holiday weekend. Columbus, thought Jimmy. Captain of his destiny. So was Jimmy. He was also thirsty and drunk. He could marry anyone he damn well pleased, marry her twice, marry as many women as would have him. He could assemble a whole damn harem if he pleased. There was some uncertainty about how he would make it home at this desperate hour in his desperate state, followed by absolute certainty that any attempt to get into bed would wake up his wife, Christine. He wasn’t sure what he’d done with the slip of paper with Frances’s number. If he found it, he could call and wake her up. She’d stumble over to his studio just to tuck him in. He decided to sleep in his studio alone; couldn’t find her number. Sometimes he was squeamish about the roaches, but tonight he was brave. He checked his watch and discovered it was already tomorrow. He stood in the doorway of the strange building dreaming up a plan. From here on out Jimmy would dedicate himself to present and future tenses only.

He will get some sleep.

Sleep is good.

At home his wife will be happy not to be disturbed.

She will get up in the morning to run.

Christine would have a glorious future of 10k races. The thought of her now made him nearly weep; he loved her unbearably. She was his own, his very own, wife, no one else’s. He reviewed the things he loved about her: muscles, long legs, long hair, drawer full of first-place ribbons, silly accent.

He loved her and only her. (Today, Reality is Jimmy’s to create.) He could sleep alone if he wanted.

It is Saturday at four a.m., he told himself. There is nothing confusing about that. It is simply tomorrow, right now.

Mary Beth Caschetta is a recipient of the prestigious Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award and the W.K. Rose Fellowship for Emerging Artists. Her award-winning stories have appeared in the Mississippi Review, Seattle Review, Bloom Magazine, The Harrington Review, Blithe House Quarterly, Altar Magazine, and Red Rock Review, among others. She is the author of a short story collection published by Alyson Books, which Ms. Magazine called "a spectacular collection of women and girls, fugitives and ghosts, invalids and activists... a sensitive and telling portrait of contemporary American life…." Mary Beth lives in Massachusetts with her partner, the writer Meryl Cohn, and their standard poodle puppy, Violette LeDuc.

All I can see of him is the pajama tip of his left knee and his toes sticking up on the recliner’s foot rest. Then his head peeks out in left profile, and his hand brings the bottle to his lips. The light hits his black hair, and a few silver strands shine, reminding me that he’s thirty-two to my twenty-one. He spits once, twice, and the goose bumps go up my spine.

I’ve still got the supper dishes to do, and they stare at me the way my mother used to when my brother, Frank, would hit me with everything he had and I would hit him back and he would start crying. Once, when he had gotten older, had gotten big enough so that most people thought he could whip me if it came down to it, he cussed me so hard that I picked up a handful of gravel and forced it all into his mouth. My mother came to his aid that time, too. I was around eighteen then, and as he’s just two years behind me, she shook her finger in my face and told me with her horsy mouth, just as she always had, that he was just a baby, and you don’t retaliate against someone if they’re smaller than you.

The timer on the oven buzzes and I pick up my pot holders and take the cookies out of the oven. I can already see that about half the cookies are burned on their underside. It can’t be me, I tell myself; it must be the oven. I put the unburned ones on a white plate with the image of a pinkish rose and then the others on my favorite plate, which is blue and white and etched with a country scene of a man shoeing a horse. Every time I look at it I get a little tickled. The man’s got on cowboy garb with his hat way up on his head. He’s holding the horse’s left front foot between his legs, and his back is slightly bent. Five shoeing nails hang out of his mouth and his right arm is crooked with a hammer in his hand. The horse’s head is turned to look at the cowboy’s rear end, with its teeth bared as if it might want to bite and the man’s eyeballs are shifted toward his right shoulder with a look that says he’s just remembered the horse’s tendencies.

I pick up the rose plate holding the unburned cookies and head into the living room. I put the plate down on the end table beside my husband. He doesn’t even look up at me. I stand behind his chair, watching the man on TV try to ride the bull. The high-pitched voice of the head commentator, Donnie Gay, flies and squeals along with the ride as if he could help the man stay on by just being loud and hopeful. He says, Oh, you got ’em now, turn him, turn him, but the rider gets bucked off at 7.5 seconds when the bull begins to spin the opposite way he started. I walk back toward the kitchen, hearing Donnie say, Yeah, boys, that’s all she takes. Just one change of direction and you’re picking yourself up off the ground.

I take all my dirty dishes out of the sink and place them beside me on the counter. I put the drainage lid on, turn on the hot water, and squirt in some Dawn. While waiting for the bubbly water to rise, I pour myself a glass of milk and eat some of the cookies on the plate. Clarence suddenly appears in the window above the sink. He struts back and forth on the ledge, pushing his head against the screen as if he wants to be petted. He knows I have scraps, so I get everything that’s left and scrape it into the pot of leftover spaghetti sitting on the table. I turn off the water and put on my worn blue robe and fuzzy pink slippers. Outside, the night is freezing but there’s no wind. Above me the full moon surfs through the wispy clouds. After scraping out the pot for Clarence, I stand up straight and purposely blow out of my mouth and nose to give myself some evidence that I’m alive.
The air reminds me of a glass of ice water on a hot summer day. A train rumbles by on its tracks to the south. Its whistle suddenly sounds so clear that if I didn’t know any better I would swear it was in the field in front of our house. Then, after the third blow of the whistle, I hear something familiar. I can just make out the sound of cowbells, but I know my father doesn’t have any bells on his cattle. There are other sounds, too. I hear the sound of metal on metal, and underneath that is the steady hum of a diesel engine. It hits me then what the sound is, and even now I know that my uncle Anthony is sitting in the tractor’s seat.

I return to the house and begin opening cabinets. I’m searching for a white Braches bag. I finally spot it at the back of the cabinet above the oven. I stand on my tiptoes, barely reaching it with two fingers, and bring it out. The cigars and candy are still there. I put the bag on the kitchen table and then pick it up again. I bring the cigars out and go to the trash can. I pick up the tomato sauce can and shove them down into it. Then I push them down between the trash can and the rest of the debris. I put the bag in the window above the sink and put some of my dishes in to soak. I go back into the living room and sit at the far end of the couch so that I can’t see the TV. I watch the window, waiting for the lights to hit.

A commercial comes on and my husband looks over at me with his dark eyes and pretty-boy face. Did you eat any of those cookies? he asks. They were good.

A few, I reply.

You’re gonna have to quit making them or I’m gonna be as big as you.

He looks back to the TV quickly and I see the red come up around his ears, but I ignore the comment and say, I doubt that.

I do a fake stretch and my hand bumps into the chest of the mounted deer’s head above me. I feel the hair on its neck. I bring my hand down and stare at my husband. I don’t know how I got such a handsome husband except for the fact that he didn’t have a family of his own and that he kissed up to my parents. I have to admit that I didn’t notice his kissing up at the time and I guess every time he saw them he saw us, or I should say him, inheriting what they’d slaved their whole life for. My mother pretty much ate up whatever he said but my father never showed any signs of being charmed. My mother pretty much married him to me. She says he looks like the catcher for the Atlanta Braves. Javy Lopez, or something like that, only smaller.

I hesitate and then address him. Justin, I say, and he spits into the Pepsi bottle, keeping his eyes on the TV.

What, hon? he asks.

The lights hit the window through the curtains. For a moment, the tractor and the cowbells and pots and pans drown out the TV. The tractor’s engine dies, and there is nothing but the sound of voices, a scraping of feet jumping off the trailer into the gravel, and a few rattles from the cowbells.

Who’s that? he asks.

It’s a Shivaree party, I say. Do you remember me telling you about what a Shivaree is?

I think so. So I guess they’re going to throw us in a pond or creek, right?

Yeah, I say. Do you have any cigars? If you have cigars and candy to give to them, they can’t do anything.

No, I don’t have any. Didn’t you get some that first week after we were married? he asks. It seems like I remember us making a special trip to Wal-Mart just to get them.

I found the bag, I say, but the cigars were gone. I think Frank took them. You know how he’s always making himself at home.

So I guess we’re screwed, then? What are we going to do?

Well, I say, feeling a lump clog my throat, if I have the candy I don’t have to go in. The cigars always fall on the men in my family’s Shivarees.

He eyes me with what I think is suspicion, but he’s too comfortable in the recliner to take anything seriously.

Eh, they won’t do anything, he says. I mean, it’s freezing out, right? It’d be crazy to throw someone in a pond on a night like this. It might even be too iced over to throw someone in even if you wanted to.

I smile to myself, knowing he hasn’t thought that Shivaree might mean cold. I’m not sure myself. I just know it’s something my father’s family practiced with some regularity.

Maybe not, I say, but don’t be surprised if they do.

There’s no way to get out of it? he asks. I got some Copenhagen. Reckon they might take that instead?

I say, I don’t know, maybe, but even as I say it I know that I know. I get up and pick up the empty plate beside him. I drop it into the sink and go to the front door and flick on the porch light. The night air fogs out of their noses and mouths and the younger kids’ faces are bursting with anticipation. They are bundled up in coveralls, toboggans, ski masks, scarves, and gloves. Uncle Anthony stands in front of everyone, gesturing with his big hands to ask for quiet. I open the door and step out on the porch. Anthony holds up his gloved hand and brings three fingers down one by one. When the last one drops everyone yells, Cigars and candy! I manage to laugh lightly and holler back, I’ve got the candy but I don’t have the cigars.

They walk toward the porch, and I go to the window and get the bag of candy. As Anthony comes through the door I hand it to him. He takes the bag from me, and scoops out a Carmel and hands it back to the kids. He looks comical as usual, with some kind of pilot goggles on his forehead and white furry earmuffs coming down under his beat-up John Deere cap. He’s trained the cap’s bill into a sharp, triangular angle that always reminds me of the roof of a barn. Where is he? he asks.

He’s in the recliner watching bull riding as usual, I say. I don’t think he believed me when I told him what you were planning to do.

Anthony smiles and sticks his false teeth out at me the way he used to do when I was a kid. He looks at the short and stocky Clinton, my uncle by marriage, and his sixteen-year-old son, Shane, who’s already six-four, and says, Let’s get ’im, boys.
I watch them head into the living room. They don’t say a word to my husband. Anthonyabs his arms from behind, and Clinton and Shane come around in front and take a foot apiece. As they bring his body off the recliner up into the air, my husband says, I swear, if you do it you’ll wish you never met me. Uncle Anthony just smiles a little bigger. His attention has been diverted by the bull riding. The horn sounds and the rider comes off in a cloud of dust. He grins down over my husband and says, Didn’t Samantha tell you about our crazy family traditions? Somebody get the door.

At first my husband struggles, but I know who is holding him and know he doesn’t have a chance. When I was a kid Anthony used to grab my knee and ask me if I was boy-crazy, and his grip was more like steel than anything human. My husband looks for me as they bring him through the kitchen, and our eyes lock. Anthony has the tip of his tongue out to his nose as he backs down the steps in front of the door.
I feel the cold air hit my feet. I put my fuzzy slippers and robe back on and follow them through the yard at a distance. Seth, Anthony’s youngest son, is having trouble opening the wire gate across the road.

Anthony says, Pull the top of the post to your chest, Seth.

Seth does and the wire slides over the post easily. They make it through the gate, and Seth turns on his wheat light that he uses for coon hunting and follows directly behind. As they walk down the road toward the nearest pond, I see crystals of frost sparkling in the yellow and matted Bermuda grass. The grass is slick between the ruts of the road and Shane slides down and my husband manages to kick his foot free of his grasp. For a moment I think he’s going to get away but Anthony and Clinton hold firm until Shane times my husband’s kicks just right and gets another hold. It’s not until they get going again that I find I’m out of breath.

Every once in a while I hear my husband grunt in a strain to break free. He cusses them seriously for a while with cries of Let me go assholes and then he goes into denial and says, You bastards won’t do it, you bastards won’t do it.

I’m behind them at a distance with Anthony’s wife, Dana. Dana always makes it a point to attend a Shivaree because she’s been thrown into her own pond. I had been there that night. Someone had gone into their house while they were away and removed the cigars and candy. It took five men to wrestle Anthony into the pond and most of them got just as wet as he did. I remember Dana had come out crying and mad. I think I was the one who held her glasses while they made her take the plunge.

We near the pond. A cold fog rises above its surface in the halo of Seth’s wheat light. Thin pieces of ice float glassily in the brown water. Suddenly a cow looks up with water dripping from her muzzle, her yellowish eyes glowing in the semidarkness. She startles and runs over the high bank, her hooves sounding on the hard ground. Dana and I stop some distance away from the action. They’re holding my husband in front of the pond like a swing, asking if he’s ready for a bath. I hear him ask without adding a curse word, Why are you doing this?

I think that’s the same thing I said, Dana says.

It’s nothing personal, Anthony says. We’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. You get married, you get Shivareed. I don’t even know myself why we do it.

They begin to swing him then, and I hear my husband say, Wait. You know how Samantha’s mom is. We’re not married anymore. We’re divorced. You know her mom. We don’t know how to tell her. You know how she is.

They keep swinging him. Anthony giggles and hollers to me, Is that true, Sam?

No, I say. He’s just making stuff up.

She’s lying, my husband hisses. She just wants to see me suffer.

Don’t listen to him, I say.

On three, Anthony says.

As they let go of him I hear Justin’s final words: But I don’t love her.

He comes up out of the water and screams. After the first one he lets out two more. The pieces of ice tinkle against one another as the waves ripple against the shore. Everyone stands on the shore giggling and smiling as he wades out in the yellowish white of the wheat light. He comes walking through everyone in his bare feet, his pajama bottoms soaked and transparent and his arms crossed with his hands in his armpits.

Clinton chimes in around a cigarette, Looks like you got some shrinkage there, Justin.

My husband ignores the comment and the laughter. I brace myself as he nears me. I can’t see his face because the wheat light shines behind him and directly into my eyes. He pushes me aside, though there’s plenty of room for him to go around. He pushes hard but I take only one step back. I turn and watch his glistening white back trudging toward the house.

Anthony is behind me. You think he’ll get over it? he asks. You did tell him when you married that you had a crazy family, didn’t you?

Yeah, I did tell him, I say. It’s good for him to get up off that recliner now and then anyway.

We make our way up to the house. I hear Clarence scream and the front door slam.

Sounds like he’s taking it out on the cat, Dana says.

If he hurts that cat I’m gonna hurt him, I hear myself say.

As we near the house I begin calling, Kitty, kitty, kitty. He comes out from behind the house, stepping carefully. I pick him up, examine him, then put him down. I go to the door and find it locked. Everyone stands around the porch not knowing how to act. I go to my car to get the keys, and Anthony follows me.

Have you guys been having trouble? he whispers loudly.

I look up at him. He’s always been my favorite uncle. Although he easily weighs three hundred pounds and has a thick beard, his eyes reveal the youth of a boy. I don’t have any other uncles like him. My father and his five other brothers have always been too concerned with how fat their wallets are to enjoy life but Anthony always had time, whether it was a game of basketball or sitting up on the fender of a tractor so I could feel like I was driving by myself.

Oh, I don’t know if I would call it problems. Maybe we don’t have enough problems is more the case, I say, not quite knowing what I mean.

Hmm, I was just wondering why he said what he said back there.

He just wanted to get out of it, I say, looking away from him.

My body has begun to shake with cold. I don’t have on the clothes everyone else does. I open the front door and tell them to come in. Anthony hesitates and says, Nah, we better not. We may try to get Kenny and Tonya on the way home. I’m pretty sure they’ll have cigars and candy, though.

I hear Seth say, Aw, Dad, it’s cold. They begin piling onto the trailer, going to the front where the square bales of hay make a windbreak, and snuggle in together. Anthony stands alone in the light and says, Call me after a while, so I know you’re all right.

Oh, I’ll be all right. Don’t worry about it, I reply.

Okay, but if anything happens, let me know.

Okay, I say, feeling my sinuses start to hurt as if I want to cry.

I watch him climb onto the seat of the tractor, remembering how it feels to be wedged in the hay with a gang of people on a cold night. He puts the goggles down over his face and brings the scarf from his pocket to wrap around his neck and lower face. He backs the trailer out of the drive and starts down the road. The trailer rattles as their silhouette disappears over the hill against the night sky.

I close the door. The bathroom door down the hall is closed with a light underneath. I don’t know where I want to go. I go to my dishes. The lukewarm water makes me shiver and I instantly feel the need to pee. As I walk by the hall bathroom I hear the shower running. I hold my fist up to knock, think better of it, and go into the bedroom. I leave the bathroom door open here. I sit on the toilet, staring at my feet with my chin in my hand. When I look to the left I see the Pepsi bottle my husband keeps on the nightstand for when he watches my small TV in bed perched on the small table beside a picture of my grandparents and their six boys and one girl.

I pick my father out of the lineup. Like the other three older boys, he has his hair slicked back with Brylecreem and wears a dark suit and tie. Except for Anthony, who looks to be about ten, no one has a smile on his face. My grandmother sits in the middle with my grandfather, her face strained and pinched. The rest of the faces reveal no stories, except that they can and will endure the world for better or worse.

I get up and go into the kitchen. I open the cabinet and take out four trash bags, the TV blaring behind me. I shake them as I walk back down the hall into the bedroom. I double them so that I have two trash bags. I open my closet, then push my shirts and dresses down the rod and bring them out on the bed. I open up my drawers and stuff all my pants, underwear, and socks into the trash bags. I grab my purse and sling the strap around my neck, and pick up the trash bags in one hand, and get what I can of the hung dresses and shirts, and teeter my way down the hall to the front door. As I pass the TV I see the bull rider flopping up on the bull. I know from my husband that the riders tie themselves to the bulls, and, sometimes, when they don’t go the eight seconds like they’re supposed to, they get bucked off before they can untie themselves. The rider’s just helpless until the clowns can either cut the rope or untie it enough to get the hand out. I watch for a few seconds as the bull tramples the rider’s legs with its back feet. The clowns are making jumping passes up on the back of the bull at the rider’s hand. . For once, Donnie Gay is silent.

I can’t open the front door without putting something down, so I put down the hung clothes. I open the door, pick up the hung clothes again, and then put everything back down. I go over to the trash can, take off the lid and dump the contents on the kitchen table. I pick up the tomato sauce can and shake the cigars out on top of the pile so my husband will have to see them. I remember the plate then, which still sits on the counter holding some burned cookies. I let the cookies slide off onto the floor as I walk back and put the plate in with the bag of clothes.

I pick everything up again and make my way to the car. I opened the trunk, throw it all in, and close the lid. I open my door, call Clarence, and pick him up and toss him across to the passenger’s side. The car stalls for a second, starts, and I put it in reverse. Clarence snuggles against me and I push him back into the seat. My teeth chatter as I head up the first graveled hill. Through the snowflake-ice that’s crept halfway down the windshield, I see that the sky has cleared and the full moon gleams directly overhead. The stars sparkle dimly like clean silverware. A barely perceptible dust cloud rises as I near the highway. Clarence sits on his rear as if he can see out. The heat begins to warm my toes, and I switch the blower to the defroster and turn it up full blast. As I come to the end of the gravel road, I see them. Their forms dissolve into the moonlit darkness against the windbreak of hay. I turn my car the other way, listening to the crunch of gravel as my tires take the pavement, and I whisper to no one, “Thank you.”

"The Shivaree" is Keith Wells' first publication. He lives and writes a few miles from the Arkansas state line in Myrle, Missouri.

He walked down to the edge of the park, a thirty-yard spread of rye grass that led to Lake Ivanhoe, and then leaned against an oak tree, looking out into the water. I didn’t see the gun at first, only his right hand as he raised it to his face. There was a pop, then his head jerked back and he fell. It wasn’t as dramatic as you’d expect.

After the shot, my father sat up for a moment, then settled back into his world of alcohol and sleep. Out the window, I couldn’t see Mr. Cashton, only the swaying cattails that lined the shore of the lake. For a second, I wondered if the man had been there at all, if I’d only imagined seeing him and the sound I’d heard was Mr. Bird’s old Ford backfiring again. But when I looked at the ground below the oak tree, I saw his body, the tips of his black shoes pointing straight up at the sky.

I half-expected him to stand up, brush off his dress pants and white button-up shirt, and walk out of the park. Then I heard a scream and our neighbor, Mrs. Bird, was running across the street toward the body. As she got close to him, she slowed down and tip-toed across the grass, as if she was afraid of disturbing any evidence or maybe waking the man from his sleep. When she turned to my house, our eyes locked for a second before I stepped away from the window.

I considered running out to take a look at Mr. Cashton before the police and ambulance arrived. Maybe running past him out into the water, which I’d been warned not to enter because of alligators and water moccasins, and swimming across the lake. Something told me on a day where I’d seen a man shoot himself I could make it across that water without incident.

My father woke again when he heard the sirens. He sat up and wiped his eyes, climbed off the couch and stood by the window, studying the flashing lights outside. “Stay here,” he said, then walked out of the house as unsteady as I’d ever seen him and exchanged a few words with Mrs. Bird and one of the policemen.

That night over dinner my parents didn’t speak to each other. It had been more than a year since my father closed his bar because of “some sort of financial difficulties,” as my mother put it, and had gone through a handful of jobs before settling in as a night shift press operator for the St. Petersburg Times. He didn’t look up at my mother or me, but drank slowly from his can of Busch Light between bites of ham and corn. When my mother asked if I had any questions about what had happened, I shook my head.

My father coughed and scratched his dark beard. He smiled at me and ran his rough hands through my hair. I glanced up and saw my mother staring at him with something close to hate in her eyes. As soon as he left for work, she put out her cigarette and walked into the bathroom. A couple minutes later, I heard water running.

Ever since the ambulance and police drove away, I had been trying to figure out why the man would pick our park to kill himself in. And it was only then, sitting alone in the living room while my mother took a bath behind a closed door, that I remembered a summer day, a few years back, when I had seen Mr. Cashton and his son, Dennis, standing in the park, tossing a bright, green Frisbee around for over an hour. I assumed the park, while nothing more than a square of grass to me, held that memory for him.

After her bath, my mother announced it was time for bed. Tucking me in, she asked, “Are you sure you’re all right?” I nodded, told her that I was. “How would you like to go away, just the two of us?”

“I think Dad should come,” I said.

“Being alone isn’t such a bad thing.” She kissed me on the forehead and said, “Do me a favor, sweetie, don’t tell your father we talked about this.”

“I won’t,” I said.

The next morning I expected to find a grief counselor at school, talking to us about what happened to Mr. Cashton. Ten months earlier, when Dennis and his mother were killed in a car accident, the counselor had been a short red-headed man. He told us how he was available if anyone needed, or wanted, to talk. He said it was normal to feel weird, or sad, even angry when someone you know dies. But this time there was no grief counselor, no mention of the dead man, and I wondered if the teachers at school had even heard about what had happened.

While we were in the same grade and played on the same baseball team, Dennis and I weren’t really friends. He was a small, thin, blond boy with big ears and a large dimple in the center of his chin. He played right field and was well known for his ability to strike out in the last inning of a clutch game. Mr. Cashton worked downtown as a salesman for Reynolds Appliance Outlet and he’d come to the games straight from work, standing up in the faded brown bleachers and clapping every time his boy walked out of the dugout.

One day, toward the end of the last season he would ever play, Dennis stepped up to the plate—he’d struck out twice already that game—and swung at the first pitch, something Coach told us not to do, sending the ball deep into right field for a triple. As Dennis rounded second, I looked up at the bleachers and saw Mr. Cashton standing there, not saying a word, his mouth open so big you could stick an apple in it.

During the four years he owned the bar, my father would come home for a couple of hours in the evening, eat dinner with us, maybe work out with his barbells while he watched the news on TV, then go back to the bar to finish out the night. A couple times a week we’d even play catch while Mom finished making dinner. Occasionally he would sneak up behind her while she was cooking and pinch her softly on the butt. She’d jump and spill some spaghetti or green beans across the floor, and the two of them would run upstairs for a little while and come back holding hands and laughing. More than once, I had walked up the stairs and listened to their moans and comfortable laughter.

But after he lost the bar, my father became a different man. It wasn’t a subtle, slow descent into sadness and bitterness, but as if a light switch had been shut off and he decided to stop trying. While he never said so, I felt he blamed my mother and me for his failures as a bar owner. And though I know we must have done some things together as a family that one year, all I can remember is him sleeping and drinking, going out of his way to avoid any real contact with us.

The weekend after Mr. Cashton shot himself, I heard my parents fighting in their bedroom. “What were you doing?” she asked.

“We were sitting there, watching TV.”

“No, you weren’t. You were probably drunk. Goddamn it, Jerry, that man had a gun. He could have killed Wes.”

“He wasn’t shooting toward the house.”

“That’s not the point. I’ve got to know that I can trust you with him when I’m at work.”

“You can.”

“I don’t know anymore,” she said.

I walked downstairs and turned the TV on. The Red Sox were playing the Yankees at Fenway Park. The summer I turned seven my father and I had gone to a Red Sox game while visiting my grandparents. Jim Rice hit a third-inning home run over the Green Monster in left field, and I had wondered that day if I would ever hit a baseball so far and high that people would have to strain their necks to watch it sail through the air. In the bottom of the ninth, on a 2-2 hit and run, Carl Yastremsky hit a line drive deep into center field and Jerry Remy ran across home plate to win the game. As the crowd cheered all around us, my father had put his arm around me, squeezing me tight against his chest.

For my tenth birthday, my favorite gift was an aluminum baseball bat. In the days after Mr. Cashton’s suicide, I came home from school and walked past my father asleep on the couch. I tried to make noise—slamming the front door and dropping my books on the coffee table—but nothing could wake him. I’d grab the baseball bat and walk across the street, into the park, and stand where Mr. Cashton had stood. I looked around for blood or any evidence that it had happened in this spot but never found any. I thought about Dennis sometimes and how hard he had swung the bat that day he’d hit a triple while the rest of us boys sat in the dugout with cheeks full of Double-Bubble, sure that he would strike out and how Coach talked about that hit for the rest of the season. And I thought about the fact that although Dennis and his father were both dead I was still jealous of the way Mr. Cashton had stood in the stands, game after game, proud of his son. I couldn’t remember the last time my father had even been to one of my games.

I swung the bat as hard as I could against the oak tree and hoped the sound would reach my father and wake him, snap him out of his stupor. My hands stung and Spanish moss and leaves fell all around me each time the bat connected with the tree. But my father didn’t come outside and offer to play catch or throw a ball around. I wondered what he dreamed about asleep there on the couch. If he dreamed of my mother or me, or if his dreams were all about what he once had and the way things can slip away from you so quickly.

One night, about three months after Mr. Cashton killed himself, my mother came home from working a ten-hour shift at the hospital and made a dinner—Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and carrots—that my father ate in silence. Afterward, he smiled blurry-eyed at her and said, “What do you say, Angela, why don’t we go upstairs?”

They walked up the stairs and I started doing the dishes. A couple minutes later, she ran back down, wearing her white bathrobe, smoking a cigarette. My father came down a few seconds later. His face was red and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. His stomach had grown since he’d lost the bar and the hairs on his chest were dark and curly just like the hair on his head. In the living room, my mother called him a bastard and a bum and a good-for-nothing son of a bitch. He didn’t say anything for a long time but stared at her, his chest rising and falling, as if he were slowly understanding every word she said or trying to decide just what to do next. Then he slapped her across the face, hard, and she fell to the ground.

I ran over and sat on the floor next to her. My father stood there looking at his hand and then at us on the ground below him, as if he couldn’t quite decipher what had happened, as if he had somehow just come across this scene and not been the instrument of its outcome. He grabbed his blue work shirt from the couch and walked out of the house without a word. I started to cry and my mother held my face in her lap, said, “It’s okay, Wes, it’s all going to be okay.”

The next day when I came home from school, my father’s car wasn’t in the driveway and he wasn’t on the couch. I checked the garage, looking for things he may have taken, but his most prized possessions were still there: his golf clubs, his weight bench, and the small neon sign that had hung in the window of his bar announcing THE CORNER TAVERN. Even though he had not taken these things, I knew that he had left us.

When my mother pulled up, a little after six, I ran out to her car and hugged her. “He’s gone,” I said.

“I know,” she said, taking my hand and leading me back inside the house.

Later, while we ate macaroni and cheese for dinner, she said, “You know being alone isn’t all bad.”

“No?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “you’ll see. We’ll be okay.”

My father didn’t call or come by to see me for almost two months. My best friend, Roger Baldry’s parents were divorced, and Roger would tell me how he still saw his father every weekend. How in some ways it was better now because every time he saw him they would go to the batting cages, eat buckets of ice cream together, or take drives over to Madeira Beach. I asked my mother how come Dad didn’t do that kind of stuff with me. She said that he would one day. That he was having some troubles, but he’d get through them and when he did, I’d get to spend more time with him.

My mother started going out on Saturday nights with some of the other nurses from work. She told me they weren’t looking for men but were just dancing and talking, enjoying themselves, being girls. Donna Byrd, my sixteen-year-old neighbor, would babysit me and we’d watch CHiPs marathons. She said that though all her friends liked Ponch, she thought Larry was really the cute one.

One Saturday, around midnight, I heard my mother come in and say good night to Donna. Lying in bed, I expected my mother to climb the stairs and head for her bedroom, but instead music started to play. It was slow music, and I figured it was probably Van Morrison because since my father had been gone, she had taken up drinking red wine and listening to Van Morrison on the weekends.

As one song rolled into another, I got out of bed and walked down the stairs as quiet as I could. I stopped about halfway down and sat there watching her dance. She was barefoot and wearing her white dress, holding a glass of red wine in her right hand. The only light in the room came from three lit candles in a row on the coffee table behind her. She smiled as she moved across the floor with her eyes closed and her head rocking softly back and forth.

I wanted to tell her she was the most beautiful woman in the world, that I would do anything for her, would risk my life and fight an army of men to make her happy. It didn’t seem to matter though, because she was dancing and smiling all alone. She looked more content than I had ever seen her. And it occurred to me for the first time that maybe she didn’t need me or my father to be happy.

Two weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon, I heard someone knocking at the front door. When I opened it, my father was standing there, holding a dozen red roses. He’d shaved his beard, cut his hair, lost some of his belly, but his eyes still had a blur to them that spoke of uncertainty or desperation. When I hugged him, he smelled like soap. My mother walked up behind me and they stared at each other for a moment. He started to say, “I’m sorry,” but she hugged him before he could finish getting the words out.

With time, our lives seemed to move back to the way they were before he lost the bar. He started working days, and on warm Florida, November evenings, the three of us would stand in the park like the points of a triangle and play catch. We would go out for pizza on Friday nights and then to the grocery store. And while everything seemed as good as it had ever been, there were times I’d catch my mother looking at him in an odd way. It was as if she expected him to slowly slide back into the man he’d become that year and was preparing herself in the event that this happened.

A month or so after he came back, I woke in the night to go to the bathroom. On the way back to my bed, I heard muffled noises coming from my parents’ bedroom. I leaned against their door and could hear moans, springs engaged, and the word love being tossed around. I thought of that Saturday night when I had watched my mother dance by herself and couldn’t help but wonder why she had taken him back.

I wondered if she had thought of Mr. Cashton the day my father had stood at the door with flowers in his trembling hands and if she had seen something in his eyes she knew that only she could stop. I couldn’t be sure about it, and I told myself it didn’t matter, because on the other side of this door the two of them were making love again. I sat down and closed my eyes and listened to them moving together and held on to that for as long as I could while the sounds they made carried me off to sleep.

Steve Cushman’s debut novel, Portisville, was the winner of the 2004 Novello Literary Award. His short fiction has appeared in The North American Review, 100% Pure Florida Fiction, Lake Effect, Village Rambler, Rosebud, Hurricane Review and the Raleigh News & Observer. He currently works as an X-ray technologist in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Roundabout by Mia Alvar
Get Away, Little Man by Brian Joseph Hurley
Caretaking by Betsy Aaron
Five-and-Dime Valentine by Felicia Luna Lemus
Last Resort by Nova Ren Suma
Wonder Woman Grew Up In Nebraska by Sarah Gerkensmeyer
The New Children by Kira Henehan
Dumpster Tuesday by Scott Snyder

Under a salt-white sky outside of Bahrain’s only airport, I scan the parking lot with my daughter Clara, waiting to be picked up. Sunlight flashes off the cars and makes us squint. Only the Arabic numbers, etched like knife strokes into license plates, hint at any foreignness; otherwise these are the same Nissans and Chevrolets you would find anywhere. I’d have hoped for something less familiar. Some memorably alien sight to greet me right away, like a camel. At least the weather’s different, I tell myself, suit and tie growing heavy on my skin. We come from a tropical country, and in this hard new desert heat I feel like earthenware left out to dry.

From between the gleaming trunks and hoods I hear my name. “Vic!” A familiar voice. And then my old friend Ben appears, T-shirted and sandal-shod, waving. We shake hands and clasp shoulders. How long has it been? Almost ten years now, we determine. He kneels to have a look at Clara. His graying hair has thinned a little. Bahraini time is five hours behind the Philippines’—does this fact make us younger now, I wonder? “I knew your mother,” Ben tells Clara, then seems to decide against saying more. He leads us to a maroon Toyota Cressida. WELL COME! reads a sun shade drawn across the windshield. The brand-new car belongs to me: “A company perk,” says Ben, though I, like any newcomer, don’t have a license to drive in this country.

Instead it’s Ben who drives us from the lot and airfield. Clara unzips her knapsack behind us. The girl is six, but self-sufficient to a point that is unnerving. On the flight—the first of her life, so far—she somehow thought to save the food she didn’t eat: jam, a candy bar, a plastic tub of crackers and spreadable cheese. There’s a rustle of foil being torn open, and Ben glances in his rearview mirror. “Hang on, Clara,” he says, “it’s Ramadan and all the Arabs are fasting.”
“Fasting,” she repeats. “Like forty days at Lent?”

“Similar,” says Ben. He starts to tell her things he has explained to me before: the holy month, the abstinence from food and drink in daylight hours. In fact, everything I know about Bahrain I know from Ben Castro, who attended college with me back home. He came here a decade ago to jump what he calls the Black Gold Bandwagon. Of course it was Ben who told me that the oil refinery was hiring, and that if I was looking for a new beginning, far from Manila with its crowds and chaos and words like “megalopolis” now, Bahrain was the place for it. It is remote enough, a sliver of sand and limestone on the Arabian Gulf, and tiny. On some maps it is smaller than its own name. “We are guests in their country,” Ben is saying, “so you must hide below the window to eat. Can you do that?”

Clara nods into the rearview mirror and crouches behind me, licking her fingers.

-From Roundabout by Mia Alvar

A cleft lip is not so bad, says his mother.

She is kneading bread again. The entire city is without electricity, and far up into the hills they have no power, but here at the house, the gas stove is working. Anselmo’s mother has found a way to make bread.

Outside, the street is darker than it has ever been.

Anselmo brings the candlestick closer. The bright radius of the flame reveals his mother’s white elbow and her knuckles buried in dough. As she kneads, he can see the loose flesh of her arm swinging low. She rubs in more flour.

There are worse things, she says. Like being disrespectful or cowardly or running out on a family. What matters in the end is how a man carries himself.

-From Get Away, Little Man by Brian Joseph Hurley

Situations-Wanted Ad: Non-abstemious agnostic wants to live like Agnes Martin—but not during that spell when she had to work as a dishwasher. I’ve already done the shit jobs: picking out pubic hairs from motel bathtubs, selling marked-down bras and girdles to jumbo-size women, working overtime for coke fiends who used the business of documentary film production for cover.

-From Caretaking by Betsy Aaron

Patti lured me in with promises of a little extra something if I called her in the next three minutes. “A special surprise just for you,” she whispered, and caressed the heart locket Angela wore strung on a gold chain around her too-long failed-swan neck. The camera zoomed in extra tight as Patti’s long manicured fingernails grazed Angela’s flesh. Nestled right above Angela’s pert tits, the gold locket caught light and glistened. I shivered.

Patti was pretty, but not exceptionally beautiful, same as the endless call girls pictured on glossy little square advertisement flyers, their outsized curves and skinny shaved bodies strategically blacked out with jagged Sharpie pen lines in accordance with some newly enforced and entirely misplaced Pilgrim ordinance—just like the lassies littered on the sidewalks outside our casino, And even better than those interchangeable disposable girls, Patti was an excellent whore—more geisha than streetwalker.

One look and I was hooked so hard I was certain that whatever she could offer would actually edify me.

I was depleted. I’d already spent the twenty dollars of gambling money credited on the plastic card all the other tour folk had looped around their necks, but which I insisted on clipping to the inside of my jacket. Half an hour at a dollar slot machine, bored, I’d given away my two free drink coupons and headed up to my economy room. I’d agreed to come to Vegas only because Marjorie had begged. She said it’d be fun, that it’d take us out of our normal routine. I liked our normal routine. Always had. But even more than our routine, I liked making Marjorie happy.

-From Five-and-Dime Valentine by Felicia Luna Lemus

Cousin Sandy’s driveway is marked with a heart—a piece of tin hanging off the bottom of her mailbox—painted red. You’d think a therapist would want a head hanging off her box, a big head bobbing in the wind. At least then her patients would know where to turn. But instead there’s the heart and past that only tire tracks through the bright white snow. Is this where my mother expects me to spend the winter, this nowhere place of blue mountains and bare trees and actual living deer that leap out at your car when you sail around the first blind bend? My mother got into a panic when she almost hit a deer, its white-tailed backside giving her heart palpitations for the past half hour. Now that we’re safely in the house, Cousin Sandy has made my mother a cup of tea and Cousin Larry has a hand on my mother’s arm, telling her there’s nothing to worry about, the deer got away, the deer is just fine.

-From Last Resort by Nova Ren Suma

Wonder Woman rides shotgun. She turns the radio up and rolls the window down, just barely smiling as the wind whips at her and makes her hair go crazy wild. This is one of her most favorite things of all.

Lisa leans over Wonder Woman’s shoulder, her chest pressed into the back of the passenger-side front seat.

“Check my breath,” she says.

Lisa pushes her face close to Wonder Woman’s and opens her mouth. She exhales. Her soft, corn-colored hair slides across Wonder Woman’s cheek.

“Gross,” Wonder Woman says, waving her hand lazily.

“No,” Lisa insists, hovering. “Just check it.”

Another exhale. Wonder Woman smells green mint, from the gum that they all chew. And something else. Something empty smelling and pleasant that she can’t identify.

“You’re fine,” she says, reaching through Lisa’s hair and placing her palm in the middle of her forehead, giving a gentle yet solid shove.

Jane, who is driving, laughs. Lisa sinks into the darkness of the backseat and giggles. All three of them laugh, at nothing.

Wonder Woman doesn’t recognize the intimacy of such moments—getting close enough to check Lisa’s breath or absently comb her thin fingers through Jane’s hair while she drives. When the three of them are pressed tight together on her firm, childhood bed, Wonder Woman does not become sentimental. Instead, she looks for vague feelings of intimacy elsewhere, in strange places like an airport bar. She won’t recognize the closeness that the three of them share until years later, long after they have lost touch. Chopping vegetables for a soup late one winter afternoon in her kitchen, it will hit her. A heavy sadness, guilt in her gut.

-From Wonder Woman Grew Up In Nebraska by Sarah Gerkensmeyer

When the bombs went off, we were watching TV. There wasn’t cable then, by which I mean cable existed but not in our apartment, so it was a prime-time network show that we wouldn’t necessarily want to admit in certain circles to regularly watching. Those circles being our circle and the peripheral circles in which we moved, or rarely moved, per se, but were considered nonetheless a part of. It was a show about sexy singles, featuring a complicated and ever-changing system of hierarchies and feats of strength and alliances and betrayals. We watched it every week and drank short fat bottles of Jamaican beer, which along with the surfboard rug Lou had gotten me for my birthday, created a sort of tropical feel to the apartment. Lou was wearing the hands-down sexiest faded pink thing, a negligee? It was short and low and shiny, and she’d found it pitched somewhere deep in her closet that day in a fury of late-summer cleaning, for which I thanked profusely all the powers that be while simultaneously ruing them for not revealing it to her sooner. She’d filled two big boxes with cast-offs to send to my little sister and her startlingly hot aunt, and her closet still looked exactly the same.

-From The New Children by Kira Henehan

Click HERE to read an excerpt of Scott Snyder's story, Dumpster Tuesday

I mean exactly.

I was talking in a rant during the commercials about the tactics to which several of my most hated television-show characters had resorted when Lou looked strangely towards the window and said, “What the fuck is that.” I was still talking a little bit longer because I mean, you wouldn’t believe—or you would, if you happen to follow this certain show—what these people were up to, the sabotage, but she shushed me which was out of character for Lou and so seemed serious. I stopped talking though my mind was still racing with it, and muted the TV, and there they were, the bombs. “Are we being Bombed?” Lou said, very indignant. She pulled her legs down from off the arm of the big chair, where I’d been able to look over and enjoy them, and set them on the floor. She upset the ashtray with her toes. I went to the window. It was hard to imagine what else the sounds could be, but all the same, usually the things that we think are catastrophic like aneurysms or allergic reactions or gunshots or prime-of-life strokes are, respectively: headaches, mosquito bites, the courtyard door slamming, and heartburn. Not bombs.

Lou had what turned out to be heartburn once, which was diagnosed from the emergency room. Ditto the spider bite on my groin last summer. We live relatively well due to certain outrageous and fortunate conditions of happenstance and so can indulge our great fears with these emergency room visits, though we are prudent in not calling for ambulances. We walk, or take a cab.

It sounded like what you’d imagine bombs would sound like. They went off at a pretty steady pace. There was only the sound of the bombs and the erratic ticking which was normal and was a frond of the big plant getting caught in the rotating standing-fan. It always got caught, and we’d always mention it: “We should move the plant,” or: “We should move the standing-fan.” Both stayed where they were though, as we both stayed where we were, usually. The TV fritzed and we panicked. We ran for the door, although after the fact, we wondered aloud to each other exactly where we thought we were going. Why our apartment, still standing though bombs were going off out there somewhere, wasn’t as good a place to stay as anywhere else. Some open-air instinct it must be. We ran out and hit for the elevator and then took the stairs instead without discussion, both of us having perhaps an unnatural or perhaps the most natural fear of being trapped in an elevator during a bombing. Or blackout, or an elevator failure, which in the Simone Weil building was common enough.

Normally in a crisis I think we both tend to head north, where the violence is predictable and therefore manageable. But this night upon reaching the outside we saw the dam at 125th Street break and all of Harlem flood southward. The streets were packed. The bombs bombed away, but no one could tell where. They seemed to be the entire sky, though not even so much limited to up in the sky so much as all around. But everyone kept shooting nervous looks at the sky and running south.

I noticed that Lou was still in her…negligee? Chemise? I was still in my boxers and t-shirt, but it was an outfit that resembled something that someone would wear outside. Lou’s outfit however was solely crafted for the boudoir. And we were not shod.

Something I realized that night, though: I am the luckiest man alive. These people streaming through the streets, who presumably had been caught as unaware as we were by the late evening bombing, who presumably came as they were, so to speak, were wearing nothing even close to resembling negligees. They were not in faded pink silk, they did not have delicately-downed thighs poking out from under an unraveling bit of lace, they did not have haystacks of blonde hair tumulting most fetchingly out of what I like to refer to as a Fun Bun. No they did not. Only the girl with me, thank you very much.

No, thank you.

It was one of those things, though, where after the initial emergency, you realize that what had seemed spontaneous and devil-may-care turns darkly and dearly into negligee, people, street. And the door to the darkest bar in the neighborhood was open and who knew that the bombs weren’t in fact ahead of us than behind us anyway, and we’d left our beer at home.

They were giving free drinks as it turned out in honor of the catastrophe. We each got ourselves a pint of a slickly-packaged Japanese beer we both enjoy, and clinked glasses before drinking. There were surprisingly few people in the bar besides us. Some college students who looked dangerously excited and bright-eyed, an old man from the street who Lou brazenly adores, despite his evident seediness, and a table of morose-looking military men, eyeing the blackened windows and not meeting each others’ glances. “I should dance for them?” Lou said. “Is that right?” She drank a little bit more, and then, as if starting a shift at a boring but tolerable job, stepped up onto one of the small tables they were sitting around. She danced a very slow dance, almost unbearably seductive. It was like she’d done this before, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. Sure, it was probably the calamity of the century, so all bets were as they say off, but still. I mean, the bit of lace. The military men watched her without smiling, without even smirking or high-fiving. They just watched her like perfectly civilized people might watch a very serious and high-minded off-Broadway play, and she turned all around, giving them each I think a little attention. I sat down a little ways away. Her feet were filthy and I thought one of us should have remembered shoes. There’s glass on the sidewalks, and garbage. Tetanus.

She stopped at what seemed a perfectly natural time to stop, though there was no music, so there was by default no end. “Come on then doll,” one of the military men said then in a slight and unidentifiable accent, but she didn’t even pause. She slid in next to me and bit my earlobe a little, looking at them sidewise through her lashes. “I’m taken,” she said. “And I guess we can smoke, now.”

We lit up cigarettes which felt wonderful after the long time of the ban. No one argued. What could they say, when all we’d need to say back was Bombs, and look suggestively towards the ceiling which indicated the sky and so by proxy the events happening there. We smoked and finished our beers slowly, and when I threw my cigarette onto the ground I automatically stepped my foot on it to grind it out and it burned. “Bare feet oh bare feet,” Lou said during it, seeing what I was about to do but unable to stop it. She tapped her own bare feet on the ground, in a sympathy dance. “Ow ow ow,” she added.

We grimaced at each other but then she smiled so wide. Lou had been a child star, which doesn’t have what you’d think the implications might be. By that I mean that she is no more and in fact much less neurotic and awful than any single one of my previous girlfriends, who had never been child stars. Lou had been a child star of magnitude. You would know her, though not necessarily if you saw her now. She has not been a child star for many years. Nor a child. I didn’t know her then, as a child star or a child and I didn’t recognize her immediately as one of the familiar faces of my own childhood at all, and she didn’t mention it. And her name is a little bit different now than it had been in her child star days. One of my friends noticed, after a while, and suggested to me that my new girlfriend was in fact this child star. Once I knew, it was hard to not see the child star in her. I mean, not to see her child star face, so familiar to my own child self, looking out from behind her current face, so familiar to my own adult self. And it has to do with her smile.

We went back outside. We walked along with the people, south. Everyone was drinking freely on the street as they walked, from cans, bottles, paper cups. People carried their small children on their shoulders so there was a large sea of small children, of little legs and grubby feet at just about eye level. There were a hell of a lot of children. You don’t always see so many children here. The children are kept out of sight for the most part. They were out in force that night, treading the air. Who knew. I said to Lou, “Who knew there were so many children?” and she made the same wide-eyed shrug at me that I presumably was making at her.

She is my twin.

The children were exceptionally well-behaved, considering the circumstances. You expect children to cry and wail, or at least complain. Whine. When I think of for instance how I would have held up in any of the historical times, when I situate myself say side by side with Anne Frank, I always assume I would come up so terrifically short, on so many levels. I would have cried all the time. I cried as a child at fireworks. I cried at the sound of katydids for godssake, outside my grandparents’ house, summers. But these kids acted as if they were on a great adventure. Outside, at night! With all the people! Heading south!

You forget pretty quickly the specific calamity that brings about a set of circumstances, and adapt to the circumstances themselves. This was my brave thought. The bombs—what the hell! We were walking south. We had no shoes: that would be something to consider and resolve, if the circumstances themselves didn’t resolve. Lou was dressed just fine for the calamity, but not for the time, likely fairly soon, when the circumstances had gone their natural course towards normalcy. Then she would be in danger. Stranger Danger. I would have to figure something out in that arena as well. Did we have money? We did not. Did we have cigarettes? We did. We had grabbed our cigarettes and our keys, running from the house, out into the bombs. Human nature understands perhaps on some instinctual level what will be needed to get through an ordeal. What use money? Much use cigarettes. We smoked and smoked as we walked, and the sky smoked so for once we didn’t get the dirty looks. The bombs were not treating us so terribly, though presumably they were treating many many other people quite terribly.

We looked at each other, stricken, suddenly. “Where the hell are these bombs?” Lou said.

“Maybe Downtown?”

“Who’s Downtown?”

“Who’s Downtown. Who’s…are H and J still Downtown? Weren’t they moving?”

“I think they moved. I think they’re…what about…fuck what about A?”

“A.” I didn’t mean to immediately adopt the mourning tone for A, as if he had absolutely been bombed to smithereens, but A, A! A was one of our favorites.

Is. Is one of our favorites. A was okay. We only didn’t know yet. Rest assured, though, A is still committing blasphemies in bars and private parties all over the city, to this day.

But we didn’t know.

“The bombs may not be Downtown. Maybe they’re in Brooklyn.”

Everyone we know is Brooklyn. Brooklyn’s no good. We’d said to them all so many times Brooklyn’s no good but did they listen? They said oh, Brooklyn’s so great, so great. Now they’ve got the smithereens bombed out of them. “Maybe they bombed Queens.”

“My aunt’s in Queens. And my little cousin.”

Queens is no good. They wouldn’t bomb Queens. That’s how bad Queens is. No one in their right mind would bother to bomb Queens.

“The bombs are here. They’re so here.”

We nodded, both. The bombs were so here. Right here in the center of the freaking universe, where we for some reason also were, always found ourselves. Right in the freaking center of everything.

“Remember when we were going to move to Maine, or Europe?” Lou said.

I remembered wistfully. “No one’s bombing Maine.”

“Do you think they’re bombing Marseilles?” she said.

“I doubt it.” God I felt bad. “Do you think we can talk I mean seriously after all this about making some changes?” I said.

“God yes. What are we doing here, right in the freaking center of everything?”

“That’s just the same page I was on.”

We nodded vehemently at each other, and privately at the street, at the sidewalk, at this wreck of a city that would soon be a memory, if not entirely, at least for us.

Good riddance.

We’d get a little car, I thought. Some cute junker. Something friendly. We’d go to someplace Lou couldn’t pick out on a map. Which could be just about anywhere. She’s got a wide-ranging but laughably spotty base of knowledge. She knows these random things, things which come in handy and impress the hell out of me and everyone, but the gaps, the gaps. For instance: we were watching a sit-com, and a character suggested whimsically that Guatemala was in Africa. We laughed, me and Lou both. At the commercial interruption, I’d said, jokingly, “You know where Guatemala is, don’t you?” And she said, with what turned out to be a combination of surety in case she was right and apologetic jokiness in case she was wrong, “India.” Well, there it was. Turns out she could not under threat of dismemberment fill out a map of even the United States. She is not entirely sure who fought who in any single war, or who most of our Presidents have been, or in what order anything occurred. She does know about an hour’s worth of solid speech in Italian—the words, that is, though not what they mean. She played a waifish braided Italian orphan once, in a film that took place during some war or another, or some time in history when the Italians were not enjoying much popularity. She remembers to this day her dialogue, and she presumably once knew the general gist of what she was saying (I watched her in the film; it brought my entire family to tears), but no more, no more. She doesn’t know what exactly happened with the Cuban Missile Crisis, but there’s that famous picture of her sitting in Castro’s lap, wearing his hat with a rakish insouciance. She remembers everyone being tense on the Cuba trip, where she was filming a British film, but not why. She remembers Castro as friendly, and generous. She thinks the Russians were the first to land on the moon.

She is however the smartest person I know. No mind for details, sequence, spatiality, but there are other things. And they outweigh the startling lapses.

We’d reached the north end of the Park. People think the Park is dangerous, due to some bad press every once in a while, but we like the Park. We find a Park to be a friendly place. We are two of the seven people who make good and regular use of the public swimming pool in the Park, every summer. A public pool is a dirty and terrible place, but this particular pool is nothing less than a testament to modern pristine glory, due to low usage and a dangerously high chlorine level. We turned in to the Park, taking the eastern-most tine of the fork of traffic, if that particular metaphor isn’t as forced and elaborate as it seems.

Triage stations were set up all around. Lou remarked that it looked like Bosnia, and then she glanced nervously at me, the nervousness less about the state of affairs here than the state of affairs in Bosnia, presumably unsure whether Bosnia was in fact still a site of conflict and ruin. I nodded sagely.

There were makeshift tents everywhere. I don’t actually know myself what Bosnia looks like, but I’ve seen enough re-runs of MASH to know that what it looked like here was war. We approached a tent. A large woman in large white garb immediately shrunk me with a glare and captured Lou into a scratchy-looking blanket, as one might capture a freshly-bathed mongrel before it has a chance to wriggle itself dry on the couch or carpet. “You can’t be running around in the streets like this,” she told Lou, looking directly at me. “You dirty pimp,” she did not say to me, but suggested with her look. Lou looked appeasingly pathetic and hangdog. She let herself be bundled and coddled. It made me furious. Just for a moment though. Just until she made her ears poke out from the blanket and made the mouse face at me.

The nurse started in on Lou’s feet, placing a small plastic basin on the ground in front of her and carefully cleaning them with a soft sponge. Between the toes and everything. Once the dirt was off, there were a few small cuts in evidence, and these the nurse swabbed and dressed. Despite my pimpish neglect of the girl in my care, I received the same treatment. This was a good nurse. People pay good money to spas and salons for nowhere near that level of attention and care.

Once we were both bandaged, the nurse wondered around for something to keep our feet out of trouble for whatever the next leg in our journey might bring. She produced both plastic and paper bags, which she put on our feet and attached with twine. “These should last you a while at least,” she said, “though God knows why I bother. I suspect those feet didn’t start out clean, even before the bombs.”

She was so right.

Lou started to shed her blanket, but the nurse kept her swaddled with an impressive show of force, with arms the size of hams. “You keep that on until you’re home,” the nurse said disapprovingly. “And hang your coats on a hook by your door, for the future. I haven’t seen so much skin since the Cabaret caught fire.”

“Thank you,” Lou said, and took the nurse’s round face between her two small hands and planted a kiss on each cheek. “If you ever find yourself in Paris, won’t you look us up? We are at 17 Rue des Martyrs, a charming flat with plenty of light and wine. Let us repay you, please, if ever the opportunity arises.”

She got a little bit of a smile from the nurse. She didn’t exactly crack the grim clay of her face, no glistening eyes or whatnot, but Lou’s charm, even when she’s obviously lying, is hard to trump. “A bientot!” Lou cried, waving back at the little triage station, as we shuffled away in our bagged feet.

The sky was silent. It was hard to know just when that had happened, if the bombs had stopped bombing for quite some time and the roaring had just been residual echoes in our ears, or if the silence was brand new, fresh as our feet. People still moved about, but a bit uncertainly now, a step and then stopping to look at the sky, which was only now after all black and a bit sooty, not too different from how it usually was.

We, however, moved with purpose. We had only temporary shoes, and we wanted to keep our feet in the newly minted condition to which the nurse had restored them for as long as we could, for who knew when we’d ever be able to get them like that again? We moved north, against the stream. We walked on the right side of the street as though we were traffic. It seemed so much quicker home than the journey away.

The Simone Weil building stood. We used the big gated entrance, because it was the grandest way in, involving some sense of ceremony. We took the stairs. Our apartment was exactly as we’d left it—our little beers stood half-full in front of our respective sitting-places, little puddles of wet around them; the ashtray Lou had overturned was still overturned, with an ashy toeprint beside it. The TV displayed an emergency screen, which at this point, after so many false tests of the emergency broadcast system, fails to evoke any real sense of urgency or alarm. The fan whirred.

Silently.

We stared.

The branch of the plant which ordinarily was caught in the fan was no longer. Not only no longer caught in the fan, but no longer in existence. No evidence that it had ever been. We looked all around, at the plant itself, under the couch and under the big chair; we peered into the fan even though it quite clearly did not have a frond caught in its maw.

“Someone once told me,” Lou said skeptically, “that their curtain caught in their fan when they went out to grab an ice cream cone from the truck, and was completely gone when they got back except for a little pile of ashes.”

There was a little pile of ashes all right, but it was impossible to know what were overturned-ashtray ashes and what were plant ashes. The plant looked a little skimpy and off-balance. The not-ticking sound was eerie. I un-muted the TV set and the high whine of the emergency signal filled the room.

Lou lit herself a cigarette, dropped the blanket from her body, and fell into the big chair. “Oh well,” she said, stretching out her bare legs and wriggling her bagged feet, “I suppose it was inevitable.”

It probably was.

Kira Henehan is the author of two chapbooks: The Investigations (A Rest Press) and Seven Palms (Fungo Monographs). Her work has appeared in journals such as Fence, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, and Chelsea, and reprinted in a Pushcart Prize anthology. She lives in New York.

-East Los Angeles, 1984

It starts the day my father is driving to Rosarito Beach, Mexico. I’m nine years-old. My mother is reading a book. In the backseat, my sister traces the lifelines on our palms and I imagine the highway pouring through the windshield, riding over me, between my parents’ dark heads. The Tijuana hillside looms to the left. The shantytowns blur into terraced rock and crumbling cliffs, dusty and pale on the gray horizon. I stare out the window at the pieces of line-tied laundry blowing between dry trees. T-shirts. Bed sheets. Little pants. A blue dress for a girl whips over rubber tires and a cardboard wall, shifting with a string of elongated shadows across razor wire. My mother closes her book. She looks out at the hills too. She’s always said no matter how big the world seems there’s still nothing in it, that I should never let myself be tricked. My mother says this because she was a singer before she married my father and believes she has savvy. In Taichung they called her Da-Li Poadan on the radio, Mandarin for Dolly Parton. In white boots and a whirl of fringes, she delivered American Classic Country to an audience of sweaty islanders, her voice a refreshing wind across their sticky, dark skin.

I grew up in East Los Angeles, on the border of Whittier Narrows and the City of Commerce. Amid the whirl of headlights over Whittier Boulevard and its rows of pink and yellow clapboard houses, black dogs and chain-link fences, my mother’s advice about the world was all I had. In our liquor store, she occasionally remembered the best things in her life had been pretty and cheap. She would hold a bottle of White Port in front of a customer and smile, for a moment, wanting to describe the light through the glass before slipping it into a brown paper bag. At thirty, her face retained the brightness and elasticity of youth. Her eyes shone like black pools, each a distant oasis, strangely aglow beneath the neon signs and circling moths, the white ceiling vents blowing dust.

Her beauty had always been noticed. At night when the neighborhood was roamed by drunks and addicts, and