Fishflies

Erin Moon White

Inside a refrigerated convention center at the Midwest American Model Search, Amelia and her mother joined a desperate mob of kids and their parents in a long, twitchy line. A few were finishing their posters and making last-minute adjustments to outfits and accessories. They fixed their hair with black plastic barbershop combs or puffed it up with hairspray, coughing under the halo of chlorofluorocarbons. Amelia wiped gloss over her lips with a sticky pink wand and spat gum into a wrapper, tucking the cinnamal blob into the smallest pocket of her purse. When it was her turn, she lifted a homemade headshot glued to poster board then lowered it back down so the agents could take a look at her. Angling to show her profile before moving on to the next station, she widened her smile.

Amelia didn’t want to be a model or even believe she could become one. But the commercial breaks during episodes of Star Search had convinced her this pathway might be a viable loophole to an early acting career, so she’d registered, sharing the news with her mother on the morning of her fourteenth birthday. It wasn’t an audition, Amelia conceded in response to her mother’s no-fucking-way face, but it was a place to start. Carol agreed. Only on the condition of Amelia’s birthday. 

As the line moved forward from one folding table to the next, a few agents offered their business cards along with mild flattery on Amelia’s bone structure. After three hours of this process, Amelia was feeling hungry and rejected. She wanted to leave. To eat in the revolving restaurant at the top of her mother’s office building, the one with red roses floating on round white tables where Carol got a half-off tenant’s discount once per month. They planned their lunch order. Two French onion soups, one chicken Caesar salad to share. A man with a blonde ponytail jumped in front of his table to pull Amelia aside. His rabid enthusiasm about her fitness for a career in print modeling was alarming but impressive. He took them to lunch in the tower and paid for it. 

Instead of renting the mothbally cabin on Mullet Lake for a week as they had for a decade, Carol reallocated their modest annual vacation fund and bought two plane tickets. Amelia and her mother flew from Detroit to LaGuardia the day after school let out, landing during the morning commute. Their yellow cab jolted through shimmering rainbows of exhaust. It was boiling and Amelia felt carsick. At a stoplight, a bike courier approached the window on Carol’s side of the car and smiled with a mouthful of broken front teeth. He leaned forward into Carol’s face, then pointed at Amelia. Her mother rolled up her window. When the cab ride ended, Amelia opened her door and puked onto a curbside pyramid of empty green champagne bottles.

The agency lobby was mercifully chilled and playing Destiny’s Child, white couches spread out in a wide concrete box. The man from the search convention stood and waved when he saw Amelia. His golden hair breezed around his shoulders. It looked very soft. He handed two warm Aquafinas and subway maps to Amelia and her mother, then gave a rundown of Amelia’s weekend as they went up in an elevator to his office. Amelia sipped her bottled water and tried to look fresh, still shaking from being sick. The agency had arranged a rigorous schedule of go-sees and test shoots. Following a breakneck orientation that emphasized proper hydration as the best kind of skincare, Amelia signed some papers and the modeling agent, her agent she realized, was pressing the button beside the elevator going down and she and her mother were headed back out into the overheated city.

The sunrise beamed through a gap in the hotel’s blackout curtains, lasering onto Amelia’s eyelids. She kicked off the heavy duvet and took a shower. Moisturized her face and combed her hair into a smooth ponytail. Drank an entire bottle of water. After breakfast, unnerved by the subway’s aroma of piss, Carol instead hailed a cab and accompanied her daughter to an apartment in Brooklyn. A man with tangled dark hair told Amelia’s mother she could return in four hours when they were done working. He led Amelia upstairs and placed her on a barstool in his humid linoleum kitchen, a fat grey tabby panting dog-like under her bare feet.

A woman carrying endless trays of eyeshadow appeared, introducing herself as the photographer’s girlfriend. She assembled her tools—sponges, brushes, and creams—and began applying Amelia’s makeup, smearing handful after handful of beige glue onto her forehead. It kept melting off. She warned Amelia to stop sweating but Amelia couldn’t, not even with both box fans blowing directly on her. They styled her topless under a white blazer with tall black heels and the full coverage hipster briefs Amelia had worn under her street clothes. The photographer stepped back and appraised his work, reaching into a shopping bag on the floor and fluttering out a rosé satin thong.

“They’re brand new,” he said, pointing to the tags.

“I’m wearing my own underwear,” Amelia told them, crossing her arms. And this was a riot.

“She wears her own underwear!” They both began to shout and dance around. They poured themselves Sunny D and vodka, offering her nothing to drink, not even water. From behind the lens, the photographer’s wild black hair shook. He leaned his squinting face from one side of the camera to the other, wagging or twirling a finger when he wanted Amelia to move her body parts into a different formation. She was instructed to keep her chin tilted up, lips parted, eyes cast down.

“Look at the camera like you’re looking at the boy you love,” he instructed. At the time, this translated to a look of terror. The boy she’d loved since kindergarten never missed a chance to reject Amelia. But she knew what he meant. She made a face like she might be willing to have sex with the camera, but probably not, which pleased the photographer and his girlfriend.

“Yes. You torture him,” said the girlfriend. The couple kissed and the shutter started ticking again.

When it was over, they ignored Amelia as she collected herself. She pulled on her jeans and white tank top then waited on the stoop for her mother’s taxi to arrive. A woman taking out her trash next door frowned at Amelia, shaking her head as she walked back inside her building. Behind a zippered horizon of brownstones across the street, the sun was setting. It burned Amelia’s face, melting the layers of foundation into thick streams of sweat. A cab pulled up. Sliding over in the backseat, Carol surveyed her daughter with concern.

“I’m fine,” Amelia said. “They said you have to wear a lot of makeup to show up on film.” 

After a handful of tepid go-sees, they went home. Weeks passed in the liquid monotony of summer before Amelia’s freshman year, June delivering its annual plague of fishflies in prolific hoards. Winged, goggle-eyed maggots hatched en masse each morning from the lake, leaving a humid current of crotch-like musk in the air. They covered the pavement, popping wetly under car tires, and congregated on reflective surfaces in a seamy coating of walnut pesto. At the end of their 24-hour lifespan, the bugs were swept into shimmering khaki heaps along the curb, the horrific cycle starting over at dawn.

Hiding indoors from the infestation, Amelia hung out alone in the attic next to a window air-conditioning unit. She thought about her photos obsessively, replaying the test shoot in her mind. When a thick manila envelope arrived jammed into the brass mail slot, she tore it open with her teeth. Scanning the rows of black and white cells on the contact sheet for her own image, the underdressed child she found looking back with frightened eyes and her jaw set made Amelia wince. She went out back to where her mother was kneeling next to flats of pansies. Carol wiped her hands on her jeans and the sweat from her forehead, taking the folder and fanning away the flies with it. She looked down at the pictures.

“We’re never calling those people back,” she said finally, pushing her spade into the soft dirt beside rows of blue-and-white flowers. They agreed Amelia’s father would never see the prints and hid them at the bottom of the kitchen trash.

While Amelia’s parents ritually argued on the back porch after dinner, Amelia shoved her hand into the garbage bag past slimy uneaten pasta until her fingertips found the folder’s thick edges. She tucked the pictures into a magenta rayon duffel and walked outside into the late summer dusk toward her best friend’s house. Amelia found her friend working on a portrait of the family Great Dane, Margaret, in the basement where they’d spent almost every night that summer while Carly’s parents smoked pot and cigarettes in the garage and mostly left them alone. Carly cleaned her brushes over the laundry sink as Amelia presented the contact sheets one by one. “You look like you’re thirty years old, you little baby whore,” Carly howled, dumping out a jar of mud-colored water.

Amelia did an imitation of the photographer and Carly did an imitation of Amelia. “Prove to me you want to be famous,” Amelia said, deepening her voice. Carly kissed Amelia on the mouth. She tasted like berry Chapstick and mint chip ice-cream. Her tongue practiced against Amelia’s. They battled for territory and counted one another’s molars, playing for gag reflexes or little bites. Their abs were sore from laughing, cheeks damp with spit as Margaret nosed between them with her snout, begging for scratches and snacks. They fell backward onto the pull-out couch, Margaret climbing over them like a giant spider. Amelia sat up and fed the dog Cheetos. Carly pushed a tape into the VCR. When they woke to Margaret whining to be let out, it was early the next day.

There was nothing to do. There was always nothing to do, but they were sick of it. Despite an obvious reverse-snobbery that rejected the adjoining suburbs as preppy and pathetic, Amelia and Carly decided they were bored enough to spend the day shopping the main street people referred to as The Square. Wearing bikinis with cutoff shorts—optimistic about winning the attention of imagined older boys—the two friends rode their bikes the short distance to where the city ended and the lakefront suburbs began. They locked their bikes to a lamppost and wandered the quaint retail drag arm in arm, swatting at the bugs, lugging their shared ennui in and out of bookstores and boutiques and the pharmacy. They stole nail polish and sour candy and guides to astrology, Sun In and disposable cameras ripped from their foil pouches.

At the gas station they bought cigarettes, practicing inhales to a mantra they’d learned—Mom’s home, Mom’s home. They smoked while following a lush, mansioned cul-de-sac to where giant lakefront homes ended and the private park began. Nauseous, Amelia lowered her cigarette, stubbing it out against a birch tree and leaving a dark scar. Carly took off her sunglasses and surveyed the park. “Let’s go to the pool,” she said. Along the tennis courts, they found a gap between a brick wall and an ivy-tangled fence and squeezed past with bellies sucked to ribs, affecting the same casual posture that enabled successful petty theft. Through a brick hut they entered a steamy beige women’s locker room that exited portal-like onto a concrete pool deck sprawling with striped loungers and bright towels, chemical blue water bobbing thickly with swimmers.

Nobody inquired after a park pass, and somehow, there were no fishflies. Potentially, Carly reasoned, because rich people could pay to have them removed with special technology. Or maybe, Amelia thought, it was due to the levels of chlorine pumped into the pool to dilute baby piss. Their luck felt miraculous. They photographed each other with their yellow plastic and carboard cameras—posing on the diving boards and under laddered chairs where too-tan lifeguards loomed in their red tank tops, noses white with zinc, whistling with authority whenever they got the chance.

After swimming, Carly and Amelia each dry swallowed one of Carly’s mother’s Valiums. They sprayed their hair with Sun In and fell asleep on their loungers, waking up stiff and pink, heads peroxide orange and buzzy from the downers. On the walk home, they impersonated the other bathers. Fussy mommies with their coolers full of juice pouches and string cheese. Nannies with armpit hair begging in French and German accents for toddlers to please use their words and put on sunscreen. Small-nosed girls in polo shirts and tennis skorts, swim team boys in their self-serious Speedos and rubber caps. Kids tormenting the seagulls with limp concession stand fries. Amelia and Carly snuck into the pool every day after, maintaining the pretense that they hated it and everyone they encountered there.

Amelia came home each afternoon with wet hair and a deeper tan. She told her parents they’d gotten permission from the park guards to go into the pool, and her parents believed her. Amelia’s father was making chicken kebabs on the grill when Amelia returned later than usual, the long Midwestern summer dragging daylight to nine pm. She sat down with a paper plate and peeled the skin on a blistered green pepper. Her father cleared his throat. He was being made partner at his accounting firm. Amelia’s mother kissed him and set down her fork, searching for the reaction on her daughter’s face. It was like something off television. They were moving to a bigger house in the suburbs, and Amelia would be attending the public high school there in the fall. “They have an excellent theatre program,” her father added. “We thought you would be pleased.”

Amelia wanted none of it. She chucked a skewer of grilled meat across the table and knocked over her chair, releasing a nail-biting whine she hadn’t made since childhood, then slammed the front door and rushed to Carly’s house. Through copious hot tears she told her best friend what was happening, Carly’s face fixed in concentration like she was doing mental math. Margaret lifted her spindly dinosaur’s body onto the couch and stretched across their laps. Carly held Amelia’s hand. “Don’t worry so much,” she said, leaning over Margaret and resting her forehead on Amelia’s. “You won’t end up like those people.”

School began separately for the first time since kindergarten. It was still warm in October, the sky chalk blue behind a collage of yellow leaves when Amelia met Carly at The Square for the first time since summer. Amelia had on a lime green sweater set and was spritzed in the citrusy top notes every girl at her high school wore. She’d gone out and bought the same platform soled black slip-ons they all had, and she wore those too. Carly’s dark lipstick and combat boots, fishnet tights and heavy eyeliner made Amelia feel like a child. Neither of them stole anything while browsing the department store’s makeup department, but Amelia could tell Carly would have tried if she hadn’t been there, which pained her.

Outside the ice cream parlor, there were some boys from Amelia’s gym class. They eyeballed the girls eating their double chocolate scoops. “Hey Amelia,” one of them said, looking down at the fly of his tennis shorts. “Does your skanky friend want to give this a lick?” Carly fired back a litany of insults so profane an older woman passing by asked where everyone lived.

“Not in this bullshit place,” Carly answered with a mean laugh. The woman told them to go home before she called the police and the boys swaggered off, sagging cargo pants belted below their asses. Carly raged as they headed toward Amelia’s new home. “How can you stand living here?” she wanted to know, as if there was a choice. Watching Total Request Live on Amelia’s bigger and flatter television, an awkward silence began to bloom between them like algae, spreading outward each day until everything was toxic, until they stopped talking.

In the drama program at her new school, Amelia was cast in a student play. The director’s name was Thomas. He was a sophomore. Thomas’s melodramatic one-act was about a perfect family that ended with the father committing suicide in front of a police station. Amelia’s motivation playing the twelve-year-old younger sister was preadolescent shyness. In real life, Thomas was an only child with two living and loving parents. He had a borderline arrogant way of defending his script as fiction. But he wasn’t an asshole. He held eye contact and listened to people when they talked. It reminded Amelia of Carly—the way she zeroed in on people because she wanted to know things. And the way she thought she was smarter than everybody else in the room, because usually she was.

They were in line backstage during rehearsal lunch break with the rest of the cast and crew waiting for slices of sweaty cheese, shredded iceberg lettuce and perspiring deli meat provided by the stage mothers to build their own subs. Thomas was standing behind her. He whispered in Amelia’s ear, “It’s like the part was written for you.” She lunged for the scripted bait, pushing him into an empty dressing room and kissing his mouth with a measure of force meant to prove the role wasn’t written for her at all. From that point on, they were together, and when Amelia’s parents separated, she found herself shielded from grief by the bubble of having a real, first boyfriend.

Her father had rented his own apartment in a part of town with smallish houses planted in tight plots between narrow rows of driveway. Carol went over to help him furnish it. Every week, she stocked his freezer with lasagna and tuna casserole. Sometimes Amelia’s mother didn’t return until morning the next day. One afternoon after rehearsal, Amelia came home to find Carol sitting on the front porch with an empty bottle of gin at her slippered feet. Her mother didn’t drink. Amelia sat down on the same step and Carol flopped an arm around her, pulling her daughter close.

“Your father has a fiancée,” she said, breath like nail polish remover. Carol turned her head to one side, pointing out her blue topaz earring, then she turned to the other side to reveal an empty earlobe. “I left an engagement gift on her nightstand.” Crying into Amelia’s hair, Carol told her daughter how foolish she’d been. Because of course he was never coming back. He was moving to Sedona with his girlfriend, and she and Amelia were staying there in the suburbs. Carol got to keep the house. Then, years later, she put it on the market for much more than they’d paid.

They were supposed to be packing and cleaning. Amelia’s mother clutched a silver thermos of vanilla-hazelnut coffee and bourbon in one hand, phone in the other. She flicked a thumb up and down the screen as Amelia filled boxes with things to keep, donate, and throw away, updating her daughter on various people from Amelia’s past. So-and-so married that boy she went to homecoming with. Amelia’s old community theatre friend was having her third baby. Did she ever talk to whatshisname? He started a very successful restaurant downtown.

“Why don’t we go there for dinner tonight?” she suggested.

“Why do you follow these people, Mom?” Amelia asked, trying to untangle a clump of junk necklaces. “I was barely friends with them.”

“Oh, you know,” she said, taking the jewelry out of Amelia’s hands and gently pulling apart the mess of chains. “Just fun to keep up on things. I wish you were on there.” Amelia explained as she had many times before that as a therapist it was ill-advised to keep social media accounts.

“So then, how’s Thomas doing?” her mother asked. “It’s too bad he couldn’t come back with you.”

“Thomas is fine,” she said. “Much better than fine, actually. He sold his novel last week.”

“That’s so exciting,” Carol clapped. “Why didn’t you tell me? What did the two of you do to celebrate?” She scooted off the bed and put her arms around Amelia, who pulled away.

“Do you see how much there is to do before you can even think about showing this house? Also the bathrooms are filthy,” Amelia accused. “Can you please put on some clothes and grab more boxes from the garage?”

“Did you have any breakfast this morning?” Carol asked. She looked tired and hurt. “Why don’t I take over in here,” she said. “You go up to the attic and see if there’s anything you might want to keep.”

“I’m sorry,” Amelia said. “I’ll eat something. We celebrated over sushi.” Then she added, lying, “It was really nice.”

Amelia went up to the floor-level attic window where she used to read in a nest of quilts and old cushions. The blankets now were neatly folded with the pillows in a stack, but everything else was the way she remembered it. Half-melted scented candles stuck to chipped salad plates. Novels and diaries and teen magazines organized in one milk crate, scripts and songbooks stacked in another. Her mother wasn’t clinically a hoarder, but she threw away almost nothing. In a dusty water jug, an oversized bouquet of dried pink roses—the first gifts Thomas ever gave her. Amelia had gotten exactly one leading role in all of high school, and she cried for days after the play was over. 

Picking at the brittle petals, she reopened the text Thomas sent the night before. Told some faculty abt book. They asked abt drinks. Ok if we host something small at ours? Amelia felt inclined to suggest they go to the bar near school without her but thought better of it and clicked the screen shut before she could change her mind.

Cecilia wasn’t a shitty person—Thomas had written in his novel—just a shitty girlfriend. Her heart was telescopic. She could handle emotions when they were cast out at a distance, but up close, she was avoidant, non- reactive, non-self-disclosing. As a therapist, Timothy could imagine, his girlfriend was probably excellent. She was an actor after all.

Cecilia was nothing like Amelia, except that she was. Along with the rhyming name and matching career path, biographical data from hometown to graduate school had been unchanged. Granted, this was all a little lazy of Thomas. But Amelia also sensed an ad hominem shortcut. Page by page, psychoanalytic greed yanked her toward the unknowable mainframe of her husband’s emotional life, where, sequined and center-stage, she expected to find herself.

“Would you even cry if I died?” Timothy asked Cecilia as she scrubbed a coffee cup that was already clean. Cecilia stopped washing dishes and looked out through the window over the kitchen sink. She drummed her soapy, manicured fingertips on the countertop. 

Timothy remembered the way she used to come alive in school plays, how her performances made him hopeful there might be more to his girlfriend than how she was offstage, with him. As soon as the curtain fell, he would rush to the dressing room with flowers, thinking he could catch a glimpse of Cecilia in her illuminated state. But he never did. He always found the same impatient girl tugging out bobby pins or removing her makeup with a smudgy cucumber-scented wipe, pointing to where she wanted him to drop the bouquet. Cecilia, he thought, was better when she was in character.

After a moment, she turned to face Timothy and said, “Would I cry? Probably not, Timothy. Is that something that’s important to you?” Cecilia looked as though she might be sick and returned to washing her cup.

And then, after a mere thirty-seven pages, Cecilia disappeared. Amelia was slow to finish the rest of the book. When she reached the end a few weeks later, she told Thomas she loved it, consoling herself with the declining state of book publishing, on the figment of a chance his novel would ever sell. Draft after draft, she performed her role as devoted and objective therapist-reader-spouse, limiting feedback to basic formal elements: pacing, length, chronology, typos. And with each next iteration, the book’s potential seeped into her psyche like a neurotoxin. Thomas found an agent. The manuscript was sent to publishers.

It wasn’t that Amelia was jealous. It was more like being deconstructed in front of fun-house mirrors—a type of humiliation, only absurd. Because it wasn’t really Amelia she was seeing broken into pieces, it was a character. It was fiction. It was fake. Still, paranoia festered in her every time Thomas came another step closer to realizing his artistic ambition, and when the editor called to congratulate him, Amelia saw herself at the book release, fumbling with a handful of cheese and a plastic cup of bad wine failing to graciously perform the role of wife and lover who happens not to be the author’s muse. 

Whatever look was on Amelia’s face betrayed the many cozy layers of bullshit she’d fluffed up around herself in reassurance. “You didn’t think it would happen, did you?” Thomas asked, setting down his phone. 

“You didn’t think it would happen either,” Amelia reminded him.

Then, squinting a little as if to be sure he was seeing clearly, Thomas added, “You didn’t want it to happen.” Amelia said nothing.

Wedged behind a green Rubbermaid tub of Carol’s outmoded wardrobe, a pile of sharp wooden angles stuck out under a bedsheet. Amelia crawled over and uncovered a stack of paintings. On the first canvas, a girl wearing a pink string bikini was shown stretched out poolside on a chaise lounge. She wore massive dark sunglasses and boasted a slick mosaic of square abdominals. The girl was almost grotesque against the smooth aquamarine background. But she begged to be looked at, and closely. Her complexion was sunburned and oily, white streaks of sunblock highlighting bumps of acne on her chin. Her legs were equine. Hooved. It was Amelia.

In the painting underneath the first, there was another piece depicting similar themes but differently zoomorphic. The girl figure stood on a diving board, tall and winking over her shoulder. Elk antlers wreathed in a crown of bramble and burs sprouted from the top of her head, a blurry pageant queen’s sash of insects draped gauzily across her back—fishflies arranged to spell, Princess. In the bottom right corner, the artist’s initials swirled together in cursive lowercase, clc. Carly Lynne Cantor.

The last piece was larger than the other two, an envelope taped to the back. Amelia unstuck it, shaking the contents into her palm. A smaller envelope fell out first—the pool photos and their negatives—then the modeling prints. Amelia cringed, stuffing the prints under a pillow. The painting featured a stark white background and even harsher definition on Amelia’s young face. Tense-eyed and balanced in heels on skinny baby giraffe legs, wearing only underwear and a cheap suit jacket. A stroke of cadmium red blooming on her bitten lower lip.

Amelia remembered the way her best friend sometimes used to look at her, like she was reading her mind and aura at the same time. A kind of heat Amelia hadn’t felt since fourteen flickered in her, the lawless current that ran through everything she and Carly did together pulsing from a distance.

Another text from Thomas. Everything ok over there? The sting Amelia had been feeling over the novel was noticeably less acute. She took a breath. Fine by me re: party, she replied. Just packing up over here. Invite whomever. She gathered the canvasses in her arms. Downstairs in the living room, her mother was kneeling on the floor wrapping Christmas ornaments in newspaper.

“Why didn’t you tell me about these?” Amelia asked, arranging the stack of paintings in a row against the couch.

“I forgot they were up there,” said Carol, sitting back on her heels. “Carly dropped them off quite some time ago. I gave her your number.” 

Amelia remembered a voicemail Carly left for her around the time she and Thomas were planning their wedding. She said she was finishing a project for her master’s thesis and would Amelia mind calling her. Things were too busy, Amelia had reasoned, to catch up after fifteen years. Plus the wedding was small and running over budget—they couldn’t easily extend an invite if the conversation led them in that direction. Amelia made a good faith promise to get back to Carly after the honeymoon, but never did.

“When did she come by?” Amelia asked her mother.

“Oh. A few years ago, I think. When the Cantors moved up north. She said she was moving to London or Berlin or someplace?” Carol said. She stopped mummifying a porcelain angel and took in the paintings. “They’re kind of disturbing, aren’t they?” 

“I feel like they look more like me than I actually look like me. Does that make sense?”

“She certainly captured your je ne sais quoi or what-have-you. You two were so close. And wild together. Not like any friendship I ever had,” Carol admitted.

Amelia took a roll of bubble wrap and sat beside her mother. Shoulders touching, they swaddled objects from their past lives, taking care to package each item tightly, but not so tight that they would warp or break or be too difficult to unwrap later. Outside, the air shifted and went still, sky going dark green before splitting open with thunder and hail in a type of meteorological moodswing specific to the Midwest.

The summer after she moved to the new house, Amelia spent almost every day at the pool without Carly, rotating through groups of friends who never fully claimed her as their own. Whenever it grew overcast, the lifeguards would blow their whistles at the first streak of lightning or muffled boom of thunder, signaling for everyone to flee the water. The girls stood shivering under the gazebo, hugging towels around their bodies. The leaves flipped over onto their silvery undersides. Earth connected to sky by dark, vertical clouds. Amelia loved these disruptions, nature’s theatrical disregard for routine.

But the other girls were annoyed. If the rain lasted more than a few minutes, they started organizing the contents of their beach bags and combing leave-in conditioner through each other’s hair. They complained and rolled their eyes when the weather didn’t blow over, when sirens started to blare, announcing it was time to take shelter at home. As they hopped onto bikes or into their parents’ cars, Amelia stayed back and watched lightning slice through the sky. She marveled at the audacity of those storms—wind chopping up the lake and ripping into the trees. The way something invisible could tear itself apart, insisting on being seen.

 

Erin Moon White is a writer and artist from Michigan. Her work has appeared in [PANK], Blunderbuss Magazine, Mistress, Shampoo, The Oleander Review, and elsewhere, including a Mass Poetry Festival collection of ekphrastic poems. She holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University and is currently a Gish Jen Fiction Fellow at the Writers' Room of Boston.

Sandy, 2012

Kayla Kavanagh

I failed my license test last Friday. The DMV employee called driving the wrong way down a one-way a “fatal error.” This morning I am holding six sets of shaking keys and wondering which one might start Lisa Morrison’s car.

Years from now this storm will be fondly remembered by my friends for getting us a week off from school in October. They will speak of boardwalks splintering and homes melting into the Long Island Sound. Today I only know that I’ve woken up to a world sheathed in ice, every autumn leaf and every blade of grass petrified in time.

My legs slip beneath me as I shove every key into the car door. I drop the ones that don’t fit at my feet and they begin sliding down the frozen driveway. This will later become one of the details I find amusing, all those keys in my hands, the many different shapes I believed could fit into an ignition.

The Morrison boys have always been angry. They’re eight and ten and they shove forks down the garbage disposal when I babysit in hopes of hearing me shriek when I turn it on. They live at the edge of town, and when they play in the woods they come back with blood in their hair. Lisa calls this “roughhousing” and stared at me blankly one night when I told her Tommy bit through Collin’s skin at the dinner table.

Last night Lisa never made it home from work, saying the roads were too bad and asking me to stay with the boys. We sat up late and listened to ice crash against the windows. The only time I’ve ever had their full attention was when the power went out and I lit a few candles: the shudder of match against matchbook, the orange light flaring in their sleepy, slow-blinking eyes.

Now I’m almost certain Collin is dead. This almost-but-not-quite certainty will become another detail I fixate on in adulthood. I will deliberate whether my uncertainty after finding him at the base of the stairs signified strength or delusion or denial. I will be told that I was not so crazy to believe he might still be living, that spinal cord injuries can be invisible. There was the evidence of his severely bent neck, however, and the stillness of his body as I carried him from the bottom of the staircase to the car I couldn’t quite drive.

Tommy is silent in the backseat, his forehead pressed against the window, his body turned away from his dead or dying little brother. I throw the car in reverse, knowing the ice will carry us down the steep driveway, knowing it’s too early to expect rock salt at the outskirts of town, knowing the scuffle I heard after putting the boys to bed last night was not tree branches writhing against the house as I’d originally suspected.

I know the emergency room is across the street from the library, so if I can find the library, I can find the emergency room. I know my way to the library from my house, and from my house to the Morrisons’, but I don’t know my way from the Morrisons’ to the library. It’s something I will later watch my own son do when he learns to drive: losing his way in the only town he’s ever known, discovering that being a passenger does not at all prepare you to sit behind the wheel.

The car creeps toward South Main Street, where I’ll get my bearings if the snow and ice can stop emitting a searing white light for a moment, if the sun can dip behind a cloud, if everything can melt so I can see. Maybe Collin went downstairs for a glass of milk and couldn’t see without the lights. Maybe he lost his footing on the slippery staircase and that was it, his fatal error. Or maybe they had an argument. Maybe Tommy followed his brother down the hall and gave him a shove in the back, not anticipating the outcome, not possibly imagining he could wake up to snow in October. The cars are backed up on South Main because McDonald’s has a generator and everybody who’s old enough to drive wants a coffee. Now I’m turning off the car and stepping into the road, blinking at the rock salt, knowing I’ll never find the emergency room, or the library, or wherever it was I was meant to be going, and now I’m knocking on the window of the car in front of me, knowing that, years later, stuck in traffic, I will be waiting for a girl to knock on my window, too, so she can tell me that she has just failed her license test, and that the little boy she was babysitting may have died.

 

Author’s Note: Since childhood, I have been haunted by a story my father told me about accidentally piercing his sister with a pitchfork when they were young. While she turned out fine, the idea of children harming each other irreparably both terrifies and fascinates me. Hurricane Sandy had the same effect when it swept across my state one autumn afternoon.


Kayla Kavanagh is an MFA student at the University of South Florida. Her work has appeared in the West Trade Review, Little Patuxent Review, Typishly, LandLocked, Body Without Organs, and elsewhere.

Goliath

K.P. Taylor

It was almost midnight when the night crew shuffled in like a horde of caffeinated zombies. Some headed straight for the lockers to stow their pre-dawn lunches; others punched in at the time clock and immediately disappeared on smoke breaks. Lenny ambled over to the bulletin board to scrutinize the new schedule. He began tallying up his hours by counting on his fingers. Then he lowered each finger as he calculated debts and expenses until he was left holding two fists in the air. It was then that he noticed a new name on the roster–Eric. How long will this one last? Lenny wondered as he punched in. He felt exhausted already.

Two hours later, Eric set his “U-boat” cart at the end of Aisle 7. “Now what?” he asked Lenny, as though actually stocking the shelves was the furthest thing from his mind.

Now, Lenny didn’t have the greatest work ethic either, but he generally attempted to create the illusion of work, especially on a Cat Night. Cat Night­ was Lenny’s name for the first night you worked with a new hire. You’d act like a cat, stalking around with your back arched, giving the new cat the side-eye, hissing and spluttering, and all the while wondering which of you would fold first and scurry off to the litter box. Eric hadn’t fallen for any of that posturing, though. He had just come right out and said what Lenny was thinking: Now what? Lenny laughed–this kid was going to fit in just fine.

Lenny explained to Eric how things worked at Goal. The night shift ran from midnight to 8 a.m. The first two and last two hours were when they would “get the lead out.” The four-hour stretch in the middle? “That’s our leisure time,” Lenny explained. “Always keep a U-boat on the floor, though, in case the overnight manager swings by. That way it looks like you were just in the middle of doin’ something.”

Eric nodded.

Lenny showed Eric the break room with its broken coffee machine and microwave speckled with ancient grease. Then he took him to the staff toilet, which was littered with cigarette butts and obscene writing. Finally, he led him to the back of the deli and pointed out the tub of offcuts from the day’s orders. “Fine eatin’,” Lenny enthused, offering Eric the tub, “if you ain’t too particular.”

*

“You’ve been holding out on me!”

Lenny was perched on the edge of his U-boat cleaning his nails. “What are you on about, Eric?”

“The big lobster tank in the seafood department!”

“What about it?”

“It has lobsters in it!”

Lenny stopped picking at his nails and raised his head. “Well, yeah. You were expecting somethin’ different? A couple of goldfish maybe, or some of them neon tetras?”

“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think a store like Goal would even have lobsters. But since we do, I figured you would have pointed it out–since we’re tight and all.”

Lenny shrugged. “I just never really think about it. Besides, you must’ve walked past there a hundred times yourself. You didn’t see the tank?”

“Come on,” Eric said, all smiles, “let’s go look at the lobsters. It’ll give us an excuse to rile up that crabby old English guy.”

“That won’t take much.”

The pair traipsed over to the seafood department. It was almost 5 a.m., and the meat-and-seafood manager was just setting up his case.

“Bloody hell.” Joe sighed wearily as he slapped down a fillet of haddock. “You two coming up here means nothing but trouble.”

“No trouble.” Eric grinned. “We just came to see the lobsters.”

“You don’t strike me as someone in the market for lobster,” Joe said, wiping his brow with the crook of his elbow. “Unless you found yourself some young slapper and want to treat her to a lobster dinner?”

“We just want to have a look.”

Joe scowled at them for a bit before standing aside. “Go on then.”

The tank was about 300 gallons, but all the lobsters were hunkered down in one corner as if they were trying to keep warm.

Eric tapped on the glass. “Aren’t they something?”

“Looks like they’re in the middle of a union meeting,” Lenny said.

I wouldn’t thank you for one. Now, I could go for a good prime rib, maybe even a T-bone, but lobster…” Joe grimaced. “Not my cup of tea.”

“They’re awfully scrawny,” Eric said. “Hey, Joe, what are you feeding them?”

“Nothing,” Joe replied flatly, wheeling past Eric with a cartload of salmon fillets.

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“We don’t feed them anything. Otherwise, they’ll crap in the tank–and that just makes the tank dirty.”

Eric wrinkled his nose. “Looks dirty enough without them crapping in it.”

Joe wiped his brow with the crook of his elbow again. “Listen, they’re not paying me enough to be cleaning up after some free-loading sea roaches, okay?”

“Why’re ya always wiping your forehead like that?” Lenny asked.

Joe arranged a couple of salmon fillets in his case. “It’s hot back here, alright? You’d get heated too if you ever did an honest day’s work.”

“It ain’t the sweatin’ that gets to me,” Lenny countered. “It’s the elbow. Is that some British thing? Why don’t you use your hand, like a normal person?”

“I can’t do that when I’m setting my case. The minute I touch my face, it’ll start reeking of fish. Same reason I wear these gloves.” Joe’s eyes were bulging, and his face was turning the same shade of pink as the fillets he was laying out. “I’d love to see you muppets do this job. It gets really old, stinking to high heaven and getting followed home by all the alley cats like you’re some damn Dick Whittington.”

“Dick who?” Eric giggled.

“Would you two just sod off?!” Joe hollered. “Can’t you see I’ve got work to do?”

“Sure thing, old chap,” Lenny mocked, tipping his cap as Joe walked by.

“Sorry. We don’t want to cause you any trouble,” Eric added.

“Good,” Joe hissed between his teeth–as if a valve on a pressure cooker had been released and now his ire could return to a slow boil just below the surface. “Don’t try to wind me up. Just don’t.”

Eric nodded, but he had stolen a tiny piece of salmon from the cart, and as soon as Joe’s back was turned, he slipped it into the top of the lobster tank. Down it sailed, drifting one way and then another before settling on the bottom. Eric had imagined the lobsters would all pounce on it, but they just stayed put like football players in a huddle. Huh, Eric said to himself, as if this were the most curious thing in the world.

*

Eric lifted the top of the waxed cardboard container. “Why do they stuff it full of newspapers?”

“Lobsters are awful smart, ain’t they, kid?” Lenny whispered. “You…you don’t suppose they put it in for them to read, do ya?”

Eric blinked back at Lenny for a beat or two before Lenny broke into a crooked smile. “Whatever,” Eric muttered.

“Nah, it’s to keep ’em cool and comfy,” Lenny said. “Used to be, they put kelp and seaweed in there. I guess that got to be too expensive or maybe just too much trouble, so they switched to newspaper.”

“How do you know all that?”

“I worked in Receiving when I started out. Back then we’d get a shipment of lobster every day. Back then…folks had money.”

“Christ, look at the size of this monster!” Eric hauled a massive lobster out of the container.

Most of the lobsters came in looking beaten up–missing legs or with their antennae chewed down to stumps­–but this one still had its full complement of legs, and its feelers were as long and lively as an orchestra conductor’s baton.

“Don’t be messing with it,” Lenny cautioned. “If Joe finds out we were in his delivery again, he’ll be mad as hell.”

“Just look at it.” Eric held the lobster up. “It’s the Cadillac of lobsters.”

“Just like a Cadillac,” Lenny said dismissively, “big and slow.”

“Faster than any of the others, I bet.”

“You bet?” Lenny raised an eyebrow.

“Sure do. I’ll wager five bucks that Goliath here is quicker than any other lobster.”

Goliath? Lenny chuckled. “Hell, you’re on.”

So began the inaugural race of the Lobster Games. They decided on a distance of approximately 12 feet, measured out using the floor tiles. Lenny selected a rust-colored lobster about half the size of Goliath and twice as peppy. Goliath held his claws in front of him like a pair of crutches. He had advanced all of four feet by the time Lenny’s lobster reached the finish line.

Lenny pumped the air with his fist. “Hot damn! Told ya so.”

Eric placed Goliath at the starting line. “Double or nothing?”

“Sure.”

Over the course of the next half hour, Lenny won back all the money he had lost to Eric playing cards in the break room.

“Better pack it in,” Lenny said, glancing at his watch. “Joe’ll be in soon.”

Eric eased Goliath back into the container. He didn’t seem at all upset that the beast had cost him half a day’s wages.

*

“First thing I do,” Joe said, laying a bloody slab of beef on his cutting board, “is I check that they’re still alive. Sometimes they’ll ship in sleepers–lobsters that are already dead. I only have until 8 a.m. to let the supplier know. Otherwise, we have to eat the cost. Then we purge the bastards and stick them in the tank.”

“Purge them?” Eric asked.

“Yeah, purge ’em. I guess the lobsters are a little like us–they aren’t prepared to do their business until they’re nice and comfortable.”

“I’m not following…”

Shit, Eric. The lobsters won’t shit until they’re in water. So, we fill up a tub for them so they can do their business before we put them in the tank. Now, make sure you use water from the tank–seawater. It must have been my second or third shift. I filled up the tub with regular tap water. Had to have a quiet word with my manager about an hour later. ‘Good news, bad news,’ I told him. ‘Good news–the lobsters all shat themselves. Bad news–they’re all dead.’ Cost the store over a hundred dollars. I was sure I was going to get canned. But I wasn’t. And look at me now, managing two departments.”

“It’s very…impressive.”

“Innit?” Joe picked up a meat cleaver. “I know why you’re back here, why you’ve suddenly developed a fascination with the seafood department.”

“You do?”

“I’m not daft. You’ve seen the ‘Help Wanted’ sign up by the time clock. The seafood assistant position? I don’t blame you, trying to get off the graveyard shift with Lenny Layabout.” Joe waved the cleaver at Eric. “But it’s hard graft back here. No playing anymore. AND…you’d better treat me with some damn respect since I have the final say-so about who they put back here.”

“That lobster there–” Eric said casually, “he’s one impressive specimen.”

“Damn fool’s lobster,” Joe sneered. “The hell are they thinking sending me a thing that size? Folks in this town are too skint to buy a lobster that big. Just taking up valuable real estate.”

Eric nodded. Goliath had muscled his way to the most coveted spot in the tank, the rear corner where a delicate stream of bubbles emerged from the aerator. “What’ll you do with him?”

Joe shrugged. “Play the waiting game, I guess. They rarely live more than a couple weeks here, and once it’s dead, I’ll steam it up. Most of it will end up in the bin, but the claws and tail I’ll sell off separately. You know how it is at Goal–we have to make lemonade out of lemons, even if it means throwing out half the lemons.”

“Is that even legal? I heard that if a lobster died before you cooked it, it could make you really sick.”

“You just have to be quick about it. And I think it’s only illegal in Massachusetts.”

“When…when do you think he’ll be done? Dead, I mean.”

“End of the week, probably. Hell, if it isn’t dead by then”­–Joe’s face lit up, bright and toxic as a radium dial, as he slammed the cleaver into the slab of beef–“I’ll damn well kill it myself.”

*

The lobster was flat on its back at the bottom of the tank with its bound claws extended above its head. It would sway occasionally as Goliath stepped over it and used his walking legs to tear the pale flesh from its abdomen and deliver it to his mandibles.

“Looks just like Sonny Liston when Ali knocked him out,” Lenny mused. “Course, Ali didn’t start eatin’ him.”

“That’s your lobster, Lenny,” Eric said. “The one that raced against Goliath.”

“So it is. Big fella’s a sore loser, huh? No Lobster Games tonight, I guess. Joe’s gonna hit the roof when he sees this mess.”

“He must be starving.”

“It’s a monster–eatin’ its kin like that.”

“Monster?” Eric winced. “I don’t know. I heard about this plane that crashed in the Andes. The survivors were in a real jam, stuck up in the mountains and nobody around for hundreds of miles. Pretty soon the food ran out, and it wasn’t long before they started eating each other. You’d do the same as Goliath if you were in his shoes.”

“It ain’t wearing shoes,” Lenny snapped back, “on account of it being a damned lobster.” Lenny rolled his eyes. “Screw this. I’m gonna get back to work,” he said, which they both knew was a lie.

*

Lenny was in the break room shuffling cards. Eric strolled in, feigning nonchalance, but Lenny could tell that he was buzzing with nervous energy.

“I wonder…” Eric began.

Lenny frowned. “You wonder?”

“Well, I was wondering. The nearest ocean–Delaware, right?”

“Nope. Jersey.”

“New Jersey. Right. Be nice to go sometime…”

“You develop a sudden hankerin’ for salt water taffy?” Lenny fanned his cards out on the table. “Or is there somethin’ else you’d like to discuss?”

“It’s Goliath.”

“Course it is.” Lenny narrowed his eyes. “Now what?”

“I can’t bear it. The thought of him being killed.” Eric cringed as he pictured Goliath coming out of the steamer as red as a maple in the fall.

“Nothin’ you can do for that lobster.”

“I could get him to New Jersey,” Eric suggested hopefully.

“That so? I doubt you’ll make it to Jersey in that beater of yours. Or maybe you were thinking of buyin’ one of them Mylar balloons they sell at the front end and fixin’ it to that. Yessir, a ‘Happy Birthday’ or a big ol’ ‘Congratulations!’ and a fair westerly wind, and that lobster’ll be back home in no time.”

“We could take your car. I’d pay for gas…” Eric thumbed three twenty-dollar bills from his wallet and slid them in front of Lenny.

Hell no! That lobster’s caused me enough headaches,” Lenny said, massaging his temples. “And we can’t just…leave. That’s job abandonment!”

“Is it job abandonment if no one knows we left?” Eric asked. “It’ll look like we were here the whole time as long as we clock out at the end of our shift.”

Lenny laughed. “We’d have to drive like Mario Andretti to get to the shore and be back here in time to clock out. Besides, when they see the lobster gone, they’ll put two and two together and have both our balls in a sling.”

“So? You hate it here.”

Lenny reached for the cash on the table. “No damn lobster’s worth all this trouble.”

*

Lenny filled his gas tank and waited outside Goal with the car idling. After ten minutes, he shut off the engine and went inside. Eric was kneeling in front of the lobster tank.

“It’s Goliath. I came in to get him and…he was gone. I thought someone must have taken him, maybe Joe pulling a prank, but then I found him floating at the top of the tank.”

“Jesus, Eric.”

“Why was he floating?” Eric brushed his hand over the lobster. “When the other lobster died, he sank to the bottom. But Goliath…he was floating. What happened? I thought we had more time.”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry, kid. I can…I’ll pay you back for the gas. No point in driving all the way to Jersey now. It’s not like we’re gonna give him a burial at sea.”

Eric’s face brightened a little. “That’s what we’ll do. That’s the least we can do for Goliath. And those last two…” He gestured toward the listless pair. “We’ll take them as well.”

Eric put Goliath and the two smaller lobsters in a shipping box he had lined with wet newspaper. He climbed into Lenny’s SUV and held the box on his lap as if he were bringing a kitten home from the pound. “Almost there, buddy,” he told the dead lobster when they crossed the state line.

*

Lenny parked on a street crowded with weather-beaten seaside cottages, and they followed the sound of churning waves and the keening of gulls until they reached the water.

“Let’s get the little ones out first,” Eric said, and he laid the pair of lobsters at the tideline. He had scarcely set them down before they bounded off like puppies.

“Look at ’em go!” Lenny clapped his hands.

“Shit! Fuck!” Eric yelled suddenly before hurtling into the rolling surf. “Their claws!” He had forgotten to remove the rubber bands. He came out of the waves drenched and sputtering. “I got–I got one. The other…” He shook his head.

“The bands will get worn off by the saltwater. Probably,” Lenny said. “If not...better to die in the ocean than in the steamer at Goal.”

Eric nodded. “Now for Goliath.” He set Goliath down at the water’s edge and waited for the tide to slurp him up. He silently hoped Goliath would get that first lick of saltwater and spring back to life like Lazarus. But the tide just carried him away like an old shoe and spat him back a moment later in precisely the same spot.

“No good,” Lenny shouted. “It’s caught in the swell.”

Eric waded back into the ocean and laid Goliath down on the surface as gently as a child setting a model sailboat on a lake.

Once or twice, a wave threatened to crash Goliath back onto the shore, but gradually he drifted away until he finally disappeared.

“We got a calico once,” Lenny said, “when I was working receiving.”

“Calico?”

“Lobster. Super rare. Kinda like hittin’ the lotto. Didn’t get any money, but I did get my picture in the paper, and the lobster got to live out its days at a sanctuary in Virginia. They decided that lobster was somethin’ special, somethin’ worth saving. I couldn’t see it–there was nothin’ special about it to me, just a scraggly little thing looking like it had chickenpox. I guess that’s how it was with you and Goliath, though. You saw somethin’ special in him, huh?”

They stood in silence and watched the waves crash and the gulls circle and the sun inch above the horizon. Lenny knew there was no way they could get back to Goal by the end of their shift. He knew the morning crew would be there soon, wondering where he and his sidekick had gone.

Eric closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath. “Now what?” he asked, just as he had on his Cat Night.

Lenny didn’t laugh this time, because he knew the only thing ahead of them now was a long drive with nothing but a mess of problems at the end of it.

 

Born and raised in South Africa, K.P. Taylor came to the US at 29 to work at an amusement park for the summer and never left (the US, not the amusement park). His work has appeared in Hobart, Gargoyle, Dark Moon Digest, Soliloquies Anthology, and others. He currently lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, their son, and two rescued cats.

No Ghosts Allowed

Hannah Martin

The house at the end of the street is on fire. It reminds me of the fireworks the Russo’s next door are always setting off at night. Italian kids lighting Roman candles that hiss up like spacecraft taking off through my bedroom curtains. They cast shadows on my popcorn ceiling and make little faces that stretch and disappear. Mom says the people who live in the house at the end of the street cook amphetamines in their bathtub. When she says it, I see a bath filled with tang, choppy like someone’s just jumped in.

I’m standing in the middle of the street. The wind’s making all trees in the neighbors’ yards look like they’re working up the courage to step out into the road with me. It’s dark out but the asphalt is still warm from this afternoon. The summer has been all melted grape popsicles and sticky fingers and raw red feet from not walking in the shadows. The man on the news stands in front of a bunch of sweating suns and says hottest on record. Mom calls it an incinerator. We sleep with all the windows open and it sounds like the cicadas are inside our house.

Mom’s in our kitchen listening to the radio and cleaning the grout with powder bleach and no gloves again. She does this now that the boys are all gone. Ronnie, Jackie, and Dad, in that order. My big brother Jackie wasn’t looking, and my baby brother Ronnie fell in the pool without even splashing. We got him the deluxe infant casket with blue satin inside. Then two months later, Jackie died too. Mom said if his motorcycle hadn’t slid under that semi-truck, he probably would have drunk himself to death anyway. Dad left and now Mom says he’s as good as dead to us which makes me wonder what he is to other people.

A clown, Mom says.

And I imagine Dad slowly painting white over the pockmarks in his cheeks.

A dog, she says.

But I can’t imagine Dad as a dog, the image comes out wrong—he has the body of a German Shepherd, but his head stays the same.

Nobody’s noticed the glowing house yet. Everybody’s windows are dark except for a few, which are laughing and flickering blue. I’m not allowed out this late at night and it feels like I am at an amusement park after closing time, like I might see a neighbor in only half his costume. All the backs of the flamingos on Mrs. Carlisle’s lawn are glowing silver from the moon. They’re pointing toward the house at the end of the street, saying that way with their beaks. I hop one foot at a time down the cool yellow lines in the road.

At night, Mom talks to God. I hear them on the phone in the kitchen when she thinks I’m sleeping. She cries and plants her little wet seeds into the holes in the receiver. Says, God help us. I come down and tell her that my stomach hurts. It’s a lie I make up, so she’ll rub her tender red fingers and cracked knuckles over my belly. One time, she hung up the phone and pressed a finger inside my belly button. The song playing on the radio was singing about heaven and I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying.

Up close, the windows and front door of the house look like a palely drawn face winking at me in the flames. The trees behind it have all caught.

This Halloween will be exactly one year. Last year I was going to go as the little dipper. I glued those plastic glow-in-the-dark stars onto my clothes and laid on our kitchen table under the ceiling light during breakfast, so I’d really glow. But I never got the chance. Mom says this year I can dress up as anything I want except a ghost. No ghosts allowed.

Some dogs have escaped. They run past me with tongues hanging—their backs smoking.

Whenever I ask mom where Ronnie and Jackie are now, she says with God in heaven. When I ask her where that is and how to get there, she pulls my head to her chest and I can smell the Comet.

The lady singing on the radio says we make heaven a place on Earth.

I can feel the heat in my eyes. On my chapped lips. I am the color orange! My arms and legs are shimmering! The chain-link fence in front of the house is bending like a metal wave that’s going to break. The wind blows little embers that look like birds swooping across the cement and around my feet. I don’t hear any sirens and, even if I did, there’s nothing they can do. Even the cicadas have gone quiet. I look over my shoulder and I can see our house at the end of the street, dark except for our kitchen light. I can’t see her, but I know she’s there, with her knees on the tile and a scrub brush in her hand going back and forth. And the radio is playing Heaven, Heaven, Heaven.


Hannah Martin is a writer currently living in Los Angeles, California. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Otis College of Art and Design and is currently working on her first novel.

 

Mary and Me

Jon Shorr

A week before my wedding, a package arrived at my Oxford, Ohio apartment from a New York jewelry store. In it, a sterling silver frame that held an 8x10 black & white photo of Broadway star Mary Martin and her husband Richard Halliday on their wedding day. Engraved across the top of the frame, my wedding date “May 5, 1968;” across the bottom “May 5, 1940.” Written across the bottom of the picture: “To Jon and Susan Shorr, May 5, 1968, with our affectionate best wishes for your happiness always. Mary Martin and Richard Halliday, May 5, 1940.”

My relationship with Mary (I call her Mary) started long before 1968, with Peter Pan, the 1954 Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical that NBC televised live in 1955 from the Winter Garden Theatre.  Mary played the part of Peter, the boy that never grew up. She sang; she fought pirates; she flew by means of wires attached to a harness she wore under her costume. The show was so popular that NBC televised another live performance of it the following year.  They televised yet another, slightly shorter live production in 1960 and rebroadcast the color videotape of that production in 1963. I watched the telecasts and reruns; I knew the songs; I knew the lines; I had the album to sing along with.  

I didn’t think much about her as a person, though, until 1966 when I got the job of head of publicity for South Pacific, Miami University’s 1966 All Campus Musical. I was a sophomore, and the only reason I got the job was that the three seniors on the publicity committee had quit, and I was the only person left. I knew the minute I got the job that I had to invite Mary Martin, not as a publicity stunt, but as a courtesy: it just seemed to me that you couldn’t do South Pacific without at least inviting the person for whom Rodgers and Hammerstein had written the starring role. I’d seen the movie, of course, with Mitzi Gaynor as Nellie Forbush, but I knew that the real Nellie Forbush was Mary Martin, just as the real Maria Von Trapp wasn’t Julie Andrews, but Mary Martin who originated the role on Broadway and for whom Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein had created the part. My reference point for South Pacific was the Broadway soundtrack album, the one with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza on the cover, the one that my mom listened to and sang along with regularly when I was growing up.

There was no internet in 1966 when I wanted to invite Mary Martin to Miami’s production of South Pacific, so unable to find her address, I sent it to the 46th Street Theater in New York where she had recently opened in the new musical I Do! I Do! opposite The Music Man’s Robert Preston. I got no reply. Nor did I expect one.

The following November, I Do! I Do! came to Cincinnati’s Shubert Theater for a week—still with Mary Martin and Robert Preston; that’s where my girlfriend Susan and I saw it. Afterward, we wrote Mary a fan letter, telling her how much we admired her, from the first time I saw Peter Pan to listening to her in South Pacific, and finally to our seeing her in I Do! I Do!. I don’t remember where I sent the letter, probably to the theater where the show played after it left Cincinnati. I got no reply. Nor did I expect one. But then, a month or so later, an envelope showed up in my off-campus apartment’s mailbox:

 

Z  O  O  M… I certainly am flying since reading your letter! My spirits soared to new heights with your gracious and kind compliments. I’m thrilled that you enjoyed the show so much because I really have had the time of my life since I said, “I do, I do.” Do know that my thoughts shall include two darling people from Miami U, to whom I send my every best wish for happiness and success. Always, [signed in red] Mary Martin

 

A couple years later, when Susan and I decided to get married, we both knew that between my relationship (albeit one-sided) with Mary and that letter we’d gotten, we’d invite her to our wedding. We knew she wouldn’t come; we didn’t expect a reply. But we sent her an invitation with a note attached, anyway. A few weeks later, this handwritten letter came in the mail:

 

Very dear Jon Shorr,  I read your letter and know why I love to tour. How very dear and kind and heartwarming of you to share the happy news about you and Susan. You can’t possibly know how much both Mr. Halliday and I would love to be there with the two of you on May 5, 1968—you see we were married on May 5, 1940! It would be such fun for us to celebrate our 28th year by being with you two at the chapel in Oxford, Ohio! But we will be in Los Angeles, California. We have to be there. We opened our 14 month tour of I Do I Do Monday here in Rochester and open in L.A. the 29th, where we’ll play for eight weeks. We are going up and down the U.S. until June, 1969—and oh! how good it would be if our paths would cross. Mr. and Mrs. Halliday would always welcome the opportunity of seeing Mr. & Mrs. Shorr!! Many thanks—much happiness—the best of health—our affectionate best—Always, Mary Martin.

 

Wow, we thought, life doesn’t get much better than this. A few weeks later, it did: we received the sterling silver frame engraved with our respective wedding dates.

The following year, I Do! I Do was back on tour, this time with a stop in Dayton, Ohio, less than an hour up the interstate from Cincinnati where Susan and I lived and were both teaching. After seeing an ad for the show in the Cincinnati Enquirer, we wrote to Mary c/o the Dayton theater, reintroducing ourselves, and on a lark (as usual), said that if by any chance she was going to be in Cincinnati to do any TV talk shows, etc., we’d love to have her over for dinner or meet her for a drink. Of course, I expected that she would never even get the letter; I didn’t expect a reply; I have no idea why we even wrote it.

Susan and I were in our first year of teaching junior and senior high school English, came home every day totally exhausted, graded a few papers, ate dinner, planned the next day’s classes, and fell into bed, usually before 10:00. So when the phone rang one night at 11:00, I jumped up, certain that such a middle-of-the-night call could only mean a death in the family.

“Is this Jon Shorr?” the male voice asked.

“Yes,” I said, bracing myself for the worst.

“This is Richard Halliday,” the voice said. “Mary asked me to call you.” Who’s Richard Halliday, I’m thinking to myself. Who’s Mary? And then it hit me. That Richard Halliday!

“She’s so sorry that she won’t be able to meet you in Cincinnati,” he continued without stopping, “but she was wondering if there was any chance you could come to Dayton to see the show and visit with us afterwards.” When I allowed as how we would love to do that, he told us that there would be tickets for us at the box office and that she was “so excited” to finally meet us. The next morning, I said to Susan, “Did I dream that Richard Halliday called us, or did that really happen?”

There were, in fact, tickets for us at the box office, fifth row center, which gave us a much better view of the show than our usual back-of-balcony seats.

After the show, we found the backstage door, crowded with fans and guarded by a stern-looking usher whose job it was, apparently, to let no one through. We moved slowly through the crowd until we got close enough to catch his attention.

“We, um, are supposed to go backstage,” I mumbled, barely making eye contact.

“Sorry,” he said, “no one’s allowed backstage.”

“But Mr. Halliday said—”

“—Oh,” the usher’s demeanor immediately changed. “Are you the Shorrs from Cincinnati?” Susan and I looked at each other. “Come right through; Miss Martin’s expecting you.”

We walked down the hall, where another guard spotted us and said, “Are you the Shorrs from Cincinnati? Come right in,” leading us to a dressing room door. “Miss Martin will be right in.”

We went in and sat down. In less than a minute, she swept in, her hair wrapped in a striped towel, the rest of her wrapped in an orange velour robe,.

“Are you the Shorrs? Oh Jon, Susan, it is so nice to meet you, finally, I can’t believe you drove all the way from Cincinnati just to see us! Mr. Halliday is so sorry to have missed you, but he had to go back to New York.”

I don’t remember the details of the conversation, but it went pretty much like that, Mary the epitome of graciousness, me feeling like Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Cramden when he meets a beautiful woman and all he can say is “Ahma-humma, bumma-hamma,” etc.

Several years later, in the summer of 1977, my parents, who then lived in Knoxville, TN, asked if they were remembering correctly that Susan and I had had a correspondence some years back with Mary Martin and then told us that Mary was in town putting together a new show, Do You Turn Somersaults?, with Anthony Quayle at the University of Tennessee. My kids, then seven and five, who’d grown up watching and listening to the music from Peter Pan, excitedly put together and rehearsed their version of the show, including most of the songs, confident that they’d get to perform for Mary. We loaded the car with costumes and props, as well as our regular summer-vacation-in-Knoxville paraphernalia, and headed south.

When we got to Knoxville, we learned that she’d just injured her leg during a rehearsal and was at least temporarily laid up (in fact, it was a ligament in her knee, and although she was 64 at that point, didn’t miss a performance, appearing on stage in an ankle-to-thigh cast).

We felt like since we knew about her injury and were only a couple miles away, we should do something (isn’t that what friends are for?). My mom had several little beanbag frogs that her cousin had made, so we wrapped one, thinking maybe she’d like to snuggle with it, maybe holding it would make her feel better, enclosed a note reminding her of our history, and delivered it to the box office of the Clarence Brown Theater on UT’s campus. We didn’t expect a reply. Nor did we get one.

No, wait; that’s only partly true. Of course I expected a reply after all we’d been through together, Mary and me! I expected a letter or a phone call, an invitation to come and visit her during her convalescence, tickets to the show when she recovered. Part of me expected her to come to my parents’ house for a comforting dinner of matzo ball soup and brisket that would take her mind off her troubles.

In fact, we weren’t friends except in my imagination, at least not the kind of friends I told myself we were. We didn’t have a real friendship or a real relationship. My cynical brain, forty years later, says that It was only as real as she wanted it to be. That was very different from its being as real as I wanted it to be. Maybe my series of letters arrived at exactly the time that she was feeling isolated as a celebrity and craved contact with “ordinary people.” And the coincidence of our wedding anniversaries was just too irresistible not to respond to. Maybe I needed the ego validation that came from knowing that I had a correspondence with a famous person. Maybe by 1977, she’d outgrown her need to connect with us. 

My cynical brain says that it really was no different from my friend who had the Farrah Fawcett bathing suit poster on his wall and was convinced that if he and Farrah were ever in the same room, she would have seen what a great guy he was, and they would have run off together for a life of bright teeth, flipping hair out of their faces, and who knows what else. It was no different from my friend who had seen The Beatles perform at Crosley Field in Cincinnati and when Paul made eye contact with her knew that if only he’d had her address or phone number, her life would be entirely different today.

In fact, Susan and I didn’t pursue the relationship, either. What if it felt to Mary that we’d abandoned her in 1973 when her husband died and we didn’t send her a sympathy note? Or a few months later when that play they’d been rehearsing in Knoxville closed on Broadway after only three weeks of terrible reviews and I didn’t send her a “there-there” note? Should I have sent her a congratulatory note in 1986 when she got back up on the metaphorical horse after being seriously injured in an automobile accident a few years before and co-starred with Carol Channing in the two-woman show “Legends?” When she died in 1990, should I have sent sympathy cards to her children? Were we the phony friends that weren’t there for her and her family when they needed us?

Years later, I read Mary’s autobiography, My Heart Belongs. She never said a bad word in the book about anyone. She thought everyone was wonderful, from the British royal family to the royal footmen; from the children who’d come to the Winter Garden Theater to see Peter Pan and wouldn’t leave until she came out after the show and taught them to crow; to the horse she rode (on a treadmill, no less) and “fell madly in love with” in Annie Oakley. She wrote about the time “a tiny little three year old girl got away from her parents and crawled onto stage,” looking terrified. The show stopped, she said. “When she got close enough… I picked her up and took her back to her parents… She was a deaf-mute [her parents told me], and crawling onto the stage to see Peter Pan. It was the first thing she’d ever done on her own with no direction… I still hear from her and her family.” She wrote about the Catholic nun, Sister Gregory, who wrote to her after seeing South Pacific and praised its message of tolerance. Mary wrote back and later consulted with her when she was rehearsing The Sound of Music. “To this day,” Mary said, writing about it decades later, “she is one of my dearest friends.”

Mary Martin said that of all the characters she played, from Nellie Forbush to Maria Von Trapp, from Dolly Levi to Annie Oakley, Peter Pan was her favorite character because, "Neverland is the way I would like real life to be: timeless, free, mischievous, filled with gaiety, tenderness and magic." Maybe in some small way, we helped each other hold onto the belief in that version of life. Maybe that’s what attracted us to each other, Mary and me.

Mary Martin was the Julie Andrews of her day, the Julia Roberts, the Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, the J-Lo, the Jennifer Hudson. She appears to have been a genuinely nice person who loved connecting with her audiences, especially those people who reached out to her in some way. I was one of them. And that was much more than I should have expected.

 

Author’s Note: When the pop music star made eye contact with you at that concert, was it random or did you really make a connection? Was that response you got back from the celebrity after you’d sent a fan letter real or form? Did she actually sign it, or was the signature computer-generated? Ever since I got my first response from mid-Century Broadway star Mary Martin to a letter I wrote her, I’ve wondered about the nature of our relationship. “Mary and Me” documents that relationship and explores those questions.


Jon Shorr's fiction and essays have been published in Cagibi, The Jewish Literary Journal, The Write Launch, The Inquisitive Eater, Pangyrus, Tricycle, and elsewhere, and have won awards from the Writers Alliance of Gainesville, Stories That Need to be Told, and The Baltimore Sun. A retired University of Baltimore professor, he currently produces a weekly podcast for Passager Books.

A Portrait of My Father in Eight Objects

Jonathan Sulinski

1.

Dresser, pine, purchased as part of a set from a Sears catalogue in 1956. Right pull missing on second drawer. Mahogany veneer chipped away and finally removed. Crayon marks still visible on back panel. Sanded down by my father and re-stained by my grandfather several times to hide various scuff marks, including scratches from assorted dogs, cuts from a Boy Scout-issued pocket knife, and bumps from moving houses. Left carved base missing large chunk after tumultuous move from Maryland to Minnesota, never replaced.

Floor of the bottom drawer broken following my father’s attempt to pull out drawers and climb them like stairs. Top drawer containing at varied points in time: baby nappies, socks and underwear, sections of honeycomb, adopted fieldmouse, Pall Mall cigarettes, Trojan condoms, quarter pint bottle of Jim Bean whiskey. Baltimore Orioles sticker still adhered on back side, torn from unsuccessful removal. Dresser surrendered to Goodwill in 1991.

 

2.

One pair disposable bamboo chopsticks, nine inches in length. Never used. White paper sleeve advertises Ichiban Japanese Restaurant in Minnetonka, MN, where my father meant to propose to my mother on November 9, 1973. He was the son of a carpenter. Her family owned a hotel. Knowing nothing of Asian cuisine, he’d picked the fanciest, most exotic restaurant in the phone book, but had mistakenly reserved seats at a hibachi table with six other people. The two had to shout just to hear one another over the clatter of knives on the grill and the subsequent applause. The quiet romantic moment he’d pictured never came.

My mother noticed his disappointment on the drive home and said, “Well, aren’t you going to ask me?”

“Ask you what?” my father replied.

“You know. ‘Will you marry me?’”

“Yes.”

 

3.

Zippo lighter, brass with faux wood grain panel. 1.5 x 2.25 inches. Gifted to my father at his bachelor’s party by a veteran friend all too eager to show his own lighter’s engraving: a naked couple whose lustful bodies were aided by the windscreen’s back and forth motion. In times of stress, my father would fidget with the Zippo’s ignition wheel or cap and uncap it with the flick of his wrist. He did this most in places that denied smoking. The line of chairs where he awaited a job interview. The DMV. A suite at one of his father-in-law’s hotels. The waiting room at the hospital where I was born.

Of course, the clacking noise of a lighter is liable to annoy anyone. Case in point: the family alongside him in the waiting room, who were ready to leap on the payphone should their insurance company call back. They snapped at my father who grimaced and switched to pacing the room, giving them the eye whenever he passed. He was sweating and unshaven. The first pregnancy had ended badly. So had the second. A year had passed before anyone could convince my mother to try again. Along the way there had been complications but in the end: success. Upon hearing the good news, my father forgot the Zippo in the waiting room, and it was never recovered.

 

4.

Child’s swing. Two-foot-wide plank pine wood with hole bored in the center for a rope. Originally, the rope was suspended from an oak tree to entertain the neighborhood boys. My father sustained several scrapes putting it there. After a week, we grew tired of pushing each other and began climbing into the tree to leap with the rope between our legs. The added height gave us such inertia that when the swing came back up, we could almost touch the leaves with our toes.

The trick was to keep the rope taut. Any slack and the rider would be jolted as the rope straightened itself. When I jumped from the highest point of anyone, the sudden tug on the branch was so intense it snapped. Not a complete break, but enough to send the swing into the hard-packed ground. My howls of pain sent a few boys running. The others carried me home, fearing punishment but not knowing what else to do.

My father surveyed the damage: a bruise I’d carry for months, but my tail bone wasn’t broken. It’d be painful, he declared, but nothing to fret about. Unconvinced, my mother demanded he drive me to the emergency room. All her life she’d done her best to shield me from any kind of pain—no summer camp, no sports but badminton, training wheels and the best bicycle helmet we could afford. This overprotectiveness incensed my father.

“There are far worse things for a boy than a bruised ass,” he railed. “And he won’t be fit to face those things if he’s handled with white gloves all his life! It’s irresponsible!”

“Don’t talk to me about irresponsible,” she replied. “Didn’t you think to test the swing?”

He defended the girth of the branch and the strength of the knot as if on trial. But it was no use. That same night he climbed the tree as high as he dared in fading daylight, cut the rope, and tossed the swing into the forest. I’m sure it still lies there to this day, the plank rotting and the rope consumed by weeds.

 

5.

Registry book for Green Groves Inn, bound in black faux leather, containing guests from 1990-1992. My father’s precise, blockish handwriting appears every other week. The first time he’d used an alias, but quickly dropped the charade after the concierge noticed it didn’t match the name on his credit card. One might consider taking a mistress to your father-in-law’s inn an act of defiance. It wasn’t that. It was convenience. The inn was simply near her house in the poor section of town where there were rail lines everywhere and not a tree in sight. A neighborhood where no one knew him and no one would ask questions.

But questions had been asked. Accounts differ as to how my mother discovered the truth of the so-called “business trips.” I don’t dare ask mother directly. My aunt claims an anonymous employee rang mother at midnight and said if she hurried, she might catch my father in the act. Other people say the mistress herself made the call, but no one knows why. My grandfather, owner of the hotel chain, will leave the room anytime the subject is broached. Green Groves Inn was sold to a national chain a few years later. I assume the registry books were shredded after everything went digital.

 

6.  

Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book,” fourth edition. Several pages dog-eared, highlighted portions throughout. Pink slip used as bookmark.

 

 

7.

27 Sweet ‘n Low packets from the third booth in a Minneapolis diner. It was just the two of us: me with my IPA, father with his iced tea. He’d long since sweetened his drink, but as we talked about old times, his fingers fumbled with the little pink packets: folding them, twisting them, tearing them, stacking them into little piles, spilling the granules onto the table, and reaching for another. The first time we’d spoken face to face in years and his face was in a pile of sugar substitute.

I’d been shopping with my fiancée for a refrigerator when he called me out of the blue. He congratulated us on moving in together (an aunt or uncle must have tipped him off), and he asked when the wedding was. Standing in an aisle of microwaves, surrounded by weekend shoppers, I didn’t have the heart to tell him a date had been set but he’d never receive an invitation, not if we were to have an open bar. So, I merely said we weren’t sure about marriage as a concept. He laughed and readily agreed.

My father was all smiles when we met in that diner. The greetings were a bit too forced, the pats on the back a little too firm. There were so many things I wanted to ask him about: his third marriage, how he was holding up after rehab, the health problems my aunt alluded to but never clarified. Yet every time I brought something up, his face returned to the sugar packets, which had suddenly become more fascinating than anything I had to say.  Even after so many years ignoring one another, I couldn’t play interrogator. I couldn’t push him away. I chose comfort over closure and stuck to subjects as saccharine as those little pink packets.

 

8.

Mylar balloon, navy blue with “Get Well Soon” in rainbow, cursive font. Once part of a floral arrangement I bought before my father’s surgery. It was an especially risky procedure. Tumors had reappeared in his pancreas, and there was no choice but to remove the organ outright. Father survived the surgery but not its aftermath. The details are too vile to mention here.

My step-mother texted me entire paragraphs explaining the state of my father’s bowels, but I was in no condition to look up all those medical terms, especially while stranded at Boston Logan, waiting for a Nor’easter to pass. I’d been strolling up and down the terminal when I found the flowers and that silly balloon waiting for me in a card shop. For two days I hauled it around, balancing it on my luggage and failing to keep the balloon out of other passenger’s faces. The roses and lilies browned as I was shuffled from airport to airport.

I was somewhere over Lake Michigan when he passed.

Upon arrival, I stuffed the flowers in my old room and didn’t notice them again until after the funeral. By then, the dry and brittle petals lay scattered across the desk. All the helium had escaped from the balloon. A draft of air had pushed it under a chair, and it looked like some poor animal cowering between the wooden legs. With a ballpoint pen, I put it out of its misery but couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. Instead, I folded it up and tucked it in my wallet, where it remains to this day.

 

Author’s Note: I was looking through old photos and recognized objects my family owned. “Oh, I remember that desk,” I’d say, or I’d ask myself, “Whatever happened to that toy?” These possessions witnessed a lot of family history. As a writer, I wondered if I could tell a family’s story just through objects. The story would be like an inventory or a box of junk you’re taking to the thrift store. Who says you can’t find treasure in the trash?


Jonathan Sulinski graduated from Knox College (Galesburg, IL) with a B.A. in creative writing. He has published art, poetry, and short stories in several literary magazines, including The Blue Earth Review, Colere, and Ellipsis. He lives in Colorado with his calico cat.

The Second-Best Magician in Rhodes, New York

Tobiah Black

My friend Max used to be the best magician in Rhodes, New York. His showmanship left something to be desired, but the tricks themselves were legit. None of that cheap slight of hand stuff. Max was the real deal. He hated being called a wizard—said Harry Potter had given them all a bad name. But that’s what he was. When Max made a quarter disappear, it disappeared. Gone. Which was honestly kind of inconvenient come laundry day.

Rebecca always asked him why he couldn’t be a bit more of a performer. Sell it a little bit. Add an exclamation point to the end of his “prestos.” But that just wasn’t Max’s style. He needed to say “presto” in order for the tricks to work, of course—but a quiet, measured “presto” worked just as well as a zany, yelled “presto.” And Max just wasn’t the zany type.

It’s not that he didn’t like his job. True, sometimes he got tired of being a birthday party accessory, lumped in with the clowns and balloon animals and piñatas. And sometimes you’d run into an overbearing parent who wanted to direct the show. But, on the whole, Max liked his work.

But there was one big problem. When you’re hired for some kid’s birthday party, levitating a volunteer or scrambling an egg in its shell is all well and good. But there’s really only one thing everyone expects to see—a rabbit coming out of your top hat.

Max had never managed a rabbit. The best he could pull out of his hat was a fidgety, underfed squirrel. Just a regular eastern grey squirrel, white belly, obsidian eyes, its tail a little worse for wear, no longer bushy, like an old toothbrush. He assumed it was the same squirrel every time but who knows? It looked the same. He’d say “presto” pull the scraggly squirrel out of his top hat and hold him out to the audience, looking like one of those big grey stone age cell phones. After a show, he’d just take the squirrel out to the sidewalk and let it go. Squirrels can take care of themselves, right?

So when Jeremy Cippolini showed up with his purple cape and his wispy seventeen-year-old mustache and his rabbit—which he’d named Rabbit Downey Jr. and kept in a kind of bag, specially designed, that hung below his magician’s table—it didn’t take long before Max’s work slowly started drying up.

* * *

The morning it really started to unravel, Max was in his apartment above the Plaza Diner on Route 22, sitting in his boxers on the thin blue cushions of his dirty couch, watching Planet Earth when the phone rang.

Jeanne Neumann had been Max’s and my chemistry teacher in tenth grade. She was frantic—something about a bouncy castle cancellation. Max gave her his usual rates—fifty dollars for half-an-hour, seventy-five for an hour. (Rebecca, overhearing him make a similar offer once, had said he sounded like a hooker.) Mrs. Neumann said an hour would be amazing.

Max stood up and walked to the window. Across the street an inflatable Airdancer whipped back and forth in the winter wind in the parking lot of the Toyota dealership where Rebecca worked. The sun was already going down. Sitting in my apartment in Los Angeles all these years later, I can still picture that time of day in that time of year in Rhodes. The last glints of light catching those mounds of frozen, dirt-speckled snow that always reminded me of mint chip ice cream.

He dialed Rebecca and began to gather his gear. Top hat, deck of cards, multicolored silks. “Presto,” he said, holding the top hat in front of him as the phone rang. The squirrel appeared, looking nervous, as all squirrels do. Max sat it on his shoulder and stroked its head with his index finger, feeling the ridges of its tiny skull. He picked up a Cheez-it that he had first noticed on the floor under the TV three weeks earlier and gave it to the squirrel.

Rebecca picked up the phone: “What’s up?”

“Can we meet a little later? Like eight maybe? I just got a gig. My old chemistry teacher, Mrs. Neumann.”

Rebecca sighed. “At the diner?”

“Sure.”

“See you there.”

The squirrel hopped off Max’s shoulder and darted over to the windowsill. It sniffed around for a moment before squeezing itself through a space left between the air conditioner and the window frame that Max had tried to stuff with an old sweatshirt.

Max opened the door to his apartment and was hit by a gust of greasy air flowing up from the diner’s kitchen. Frozen fries hit hot oil with a sound like someone crumpling up wrapping paper. He stood at the top of the rickety back stairs and pulled the door to his apartment closed behind him. He didn’t bother to lock it. The artificial wood paneling and hollow core wouldn’t have taken much more than a nudge to break through if anybody really wanted to steal his dirty laundry or Salvation Army TV.

He got to the party late. It had taken him twenty minutes to chip the ice away from the tires of his tan Toyota Corolla with its cellulite body damage. The driveway of the Neumanns’ ranch house was overflowing with Subaru Outbacks, Dodge Grand Caravans, Honda Pilots. He parked his Corolla down the street.

He knocked on the door, top hat in hand. The muffled sound of the party wafted through the wall like a TV turned down for a not-very-important phone call.

Jeanne Neumann opened the door.

“Hi, Mrs. Neumann.”

“Oh!” she said, vertical lines of confusion appearing between her eyebrows. Max glanced over her shoulder at the living room. The coffee table had been pushed aside to make room for twelve or fifteen cross-legged kids. Max saw a flourish of purple. An adolescent voice cracked as it rose above the party din. “Presto!” A wave of awed shrieks as an apparently severed rope was restored to wholeness.

“I’m so embarrassed,” Mrs. Neumann said.

“Cippolini?”

“Tim was supposed to call you back. We were both calling anyone we could think of when the bouncy castle canceled. I didn’t realize he had already reached Jeremy.”

“I can see the quarters he’s palming from here.”

“Tim!”

Tim Neumann walked up to the door. He forked a yellow icing rose into his mouth and scratched at the tufts of hair ringing the pointy gold birthday hat perched on his head.

“What’s the problem, hon?” He saw Max. “Hey, aren’t you—”

“You were supposed to call Max Urquhart to tell him we wouldn’t be needing him for the party.”

“Ah, shit. I’m sorry, Max. You came all the way out here? Maybe you and Jeremy could do the show together.” Tim took another bite of cake. “Let him take care of the rabbit part though.”

“That’s all right. I’ll just go home.”

“Let me get you a slice of pizza at least.”

“Nah. Thanks though.”

“He’s got a lot of volume on those ‘prestos,’ doesn’t he?”

“Is the volume of a ‘presto’ the only thing that matters?” Max mumbled.

At the word “presto,” Max’s top hat rustled. A pair of obsidian eyes swam up out of the darkness. The squirrel squirmed over the brim of the hat. Tim Neumann tried to dodge it and dropped his paper plate to the ground, splattering icing across the rug.

“Sorry,” Max said, scrambling after the squirrel. The parents who ringed the edges of the party looked over at the commotion. The squirrel darted towards the living room. One of the kids shrieked. The rest followed suit and began to scatter.

“What the hell, Urquhart?” Jeremy Cippolini said. “Trying to sabotage my show?”

“Grab him!” Max yelled.

Jeremy took a cartoonishly large step. His black leather boot came down on the back of the squirrel. A thin streak of squirrel blood lashed against the trailing velvet cuff of Jeremy’s purple cape. The squirrel’s twisted body twitched once before going still.

A collective gasp drew all the oxygen out of the room. Jeremy looked up at Max. “My bad, man. I was just trying to pin it.” Max walked over and picked up the broken squirrel, holding it like an offering in his cupped palm. One of the parents began to usher the kids out of the room, whispering something about rabies.

“I can, um—get you a new one?” Jeremy said without conviction. “Do they sell squirrels at the pet store?”

* * *

Max sat in a booth near the front of the diner below his apartment, waiting for Rebecca. A menu lay open on the table in front of him, its laminated edges peeling apart and curling into dirty plastic petals. The menu was impossibly long. Famous Overstuffed Sandwiches; Buttermilk Pancakes with 2 Eggs, Bacon, Sausage, and Ham; Motzah Ball Soup Every Day; Shrimp Scampi. The pictures of the food were faded, washed out. Not that the pictures had ever looked much like the food you actually got anyway.

He was staring out the window at the parking lot when Rebecca slipped into the seat opposite him.

“I can’t believe it. He really stepped on it?”

“I’m sure those kids were traumatized.”

“How about you?”

“Maybe it’s a sign. Get a real job. You think it’s too late to try law school?”

“Come on, Max. This is your thing. Can’t you make the squirrel reappear?”

“I don’t know how these things work.”

Rebecca patted Max’s hand. “I’m sorry. I know you were attached to him.”

“I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”

Rebecca opened the menu. “I could see if there’s something at the dealership.”

“You think?”

“Sure. A bunch of people quit after the whole airbag recall debacle.”

“Maybe.”

“What’s to lose? You’ll need something soon anyway. Don’t get me wrong. It’s awful, soul-crushing corporate garbage. Wait till you watch the training videos. But it’s something. And we’d get to work together, sort of. I’ll get you an interview next week.”

“I’m starving,” Rebecca said, craning her neck around to find the server. “What are you getting?”

“I was thinking about the shrimp scampi.”

“Who orders shrimp scampi at a diner?”

* * *

Max straightened his tie and pushed through the glass doors that led into the showroom of the Toyota dealership. The room was two stories tall with glass walls and white floors. His footsteps echoed like he was walking through an empty church.

He waved to Rebecca. She walked over from her desk.

“Is this jacket too big?” Max asked.

“Yes. Nervous?”

“I’m just worried I’m not qualified.”

“You have performance experience. Being a salesman is basically the same.”

“But that was the part I was worst at.”

“They don’t know that. The woman you’re meeting with is Sandy Macklin. Her aunt owns the dealership, so if you can get in with her, you’ll be on your way.” Max took a deep breath and let it out in a long silent whistle. “You’ll be fine,” Rebecca said. “Let’s go back there.”

They walked past the front desk to a cramped office. Rebecca knocked on the doorframe of a half-open door. “Sandy?” she said. “This is Max Urquhart.”

Sandy stuck out her hand. “Nice to meet you, Max.”

“Nice to meet you, too.”

“I’ll leave you two to it,” Rebecca said.

Max sat down in a chair across the desk from Sandy. She flipped through a manila folder and pulled out his slim resume.

“So you’ve been working as a magician since college. You can make a living doing that?”

“Not a good one.”

“What kinds of tricks do you do? Pull a rabbit out of a top hat?”

“A squirrel.”

“I prefer rabbits,” she said, making a note.

“Most people do.”

“Where does it come from?”

“My top hat.”

“A secret compartment?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”

“A magician never reveals his tricks, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“But you don’t do magic anymore.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Good. There are certain rules and regulations you’ll have to abide by. Not bringing squirrels to work is definitely one of them. But the main thing you need is enthusiasm. Success in sales is entirely linked to genuine enthusiasm for Toyota products. Do you think you would have that enthusiasm?”

“Sure—I drive a Toyota myself.” Max pointed at a wall that seemed to be in the general direction of the parking lot. Sandy looked at the wall, following his pointing finger. “A Corolla.” She looked back at him. “I’d really like to upgrade to a Camry though. Some day.”

Sandy looked at her watch and stood up. Max stood up too, pushing his chair back into a bookshelf full of H.R. manuals in blue three-ring binders.

“We’ll start you off on a six-week trial,” Sandy said. “Then we can review.” She put Max’s resume back in her manila folder, flipped it shut, and stuck her hand out to Max. “Welcome to Macklin Toyota of Rhodes.”

Max didn’t mind working at the dealership. He started off answering phones at the front desk. Occasionally, a customer would remember having seen Max at a birthday party and ask him to do a trick. He would politely decline, and after six weeks Rebecca began to train him on sales.

He was better at it than he expected to be. He read diligently through lists of specifications for each car until he could recite them by heart. He learned to check how expensive a customer’s shoes were to see how many upgrades they would tolerate. A year and a half in, he was named employee of the month, and it made him prouder than he cared to admit. He even developed a certain affection for the cars. In the late afternoon, he’d look out through the glass walls of the showroom to the parking lot. The white cars nearly blinding. The black cars sleek like fish.

He moved in with Rebecca (she couldn’t stand the thin layer of grease that seemed to coat everything in Max’s apartment above the diner), and he never mentioned magic if he could help it. But sometimes, when Rebecca was out, he would slide out the box he had stashed under their bed and take out his top hat, putting his face very close to it, his chin grazing the brim.

“Presto,” he would whisper, but the squirrel never appeared—at best, a cockroach would scuttle over the rim of the hat and escape into a crack in the wall.

* * *

“Max! Look who’s here.”

Max looked up from his desk, where he had been extolling the virtues of the Avalon’s rearview camera to an elderly couple. (“I have a herniated disk in my neck, makes it hard to turn to the right,” Max would say, although it had long since healed. “I thank the engineers at Toyota for the rearview camera every day.”)

Max told the elderly couple he’d be right back and went over to Rebecca’s desk where Mrs. Neumann was sitting, twisted halfway around in her chair to look at Max as he approached. “I didn’t know you were working here,” Mrs. Neumann said. “How wonderful to see you.”

“She said she used to teach chemistry at Rhodes High,” Rebecca said. “I asked if she had ever had you in her class.”

“She certainly did,” Max said, shaking her hand. “I hope Rebecca’s taking good care of you.”

“Oh, yes. I’m just looking for a used something I can toddle around town in. These winters have rusted out my old Volvo.”

“Yeah, the salt,” Max said.

Max wasn’t going to mention the party, and Rebecca hadn’t remembered. It was Mrs. Neumann who lowered her voice and said, “You know, I never really had a chance to apologize for—you know.”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Neumann. It wasn’t your fault. And it’s in the past now, anyway.”

“I’m glad you’ve landed here. It sets my mind at ease. The magician thing never really did suit you, did it?”

Max blinked. He swallowed and looked at the floor.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Neumann said, looking at Rebecca, alarmed. “I didn’t mean—you just didn’t seem to—I thought you didn’t enjoy it, from what I could see.”

Max ran his tongue along his top teeth. He looked over Mrs. Neumann’s head, through the tall windows at the neatly planted sweetgums that lined the parking lot.

“Max?” Rebecca said. “You OK?”

“Presto,” Max said quietly. The lease agreement on the desk in front of Mrs. Neumann fluttered into a white dove. It took a few tottering steps, then leaped into the air and swooped to a high corner of the showroom before fluttering down and perching on the water cooler.

“Now, Max,” Mrs. Neumann said. “I said I was sorry.”

“Don’t worry,” Rebecca said, standing up. “This is a good thing. A very good thing.”

“Presto,” Max said, and one of the armchairs in reception sprang into a kangaroo and bounded towards Rebecca.

One of the two new receptionists picked up the phone. “Sandy, I think you better come out here,” he said.

“Don’t be a killjoy, Derrick,” Rebecca said. “He’s not hurting anybody.” She scratched the kangaroo behind its ears, and it put its front paws on her shoulders.

Sandy walked into the showroom and looked around. She walked over to Rebecca’s desk. “Max—remove these animals from the premises immediately.”

“I’d better get going,” Mrs. Neumann said, her voice shaking slightly. She pushed herself to her feet, gripping her handbag so hard her knuckles were going white.

Sandy put a reassuring hand on Mrs. Neumann’s shoulder. “If you just wait a moment, we’ll have this cleared up in no time.”

“But the lease is on the water cooler,” Mrs. Neumann said distractedly. “We’d have to fill out a whole new one.”

“Presto,” Max said, and a Rav4 lumbered into a rhinoceros.

“Do you even know how to control these animals?” Sandy said. “They could be dangerous.”

Max turned his palms to the ceiling, like a conductor coaxing a crescendo from an orchestra. The rhinoceros stood up on its hind legs and made an elaborate bow to Sandy, before charging through the open doors of the showroom and out onto Route 9H.

Through the glass windows of the showroom, Max surveyed the parking lot. Corollas, Celicas, Tundras, Priuses, Land Crusiers, and, of course, the Camrys. A full spectrum of Camrys: cream-colored Camrys, maroon Camrys, dark blue Camrys with mica-like flecks. “Presto,” Max said: rabbits, dozens of them, the gloss of their fur replicating the colors of the cars they had once been.

“The stapler,” Rebecca whispered.

Max turned and stared hard at the stapler on Rebecca’s desk. It began to hum and chatter in place. “Presto,” Max said, closing his eyes.

Max’s squirrel flashed into being, sitting regally between the coffee cup full of pens and the stack of post-it notes. The squirrel twitched and looked around nervously, holding its tiny paws up to its mouth. Max opened his eyes. The squirrel leaped off the desk and into Max’s arms. Max caught him and tucked him into the crook of his left elbow like a tiny football.

* * *

I’d love to tell you that Max went onto a big career in Vegas or had a bunch of TV specials or something. But after he got fired from the Toyota dealership, he just went back to doing birthday parties around Rhodes. (Sandy had wanted to fire Rebecca too, but her aunt said Rebecca was too valuable an employee, and soon after Sandy went to a Change Your Life with Real Estate seminar and moved to Tucson.) Plenty of people still hired Jeremy Cippolini—he had that big theatrical voice, and the kids generally couldn’t tell the difference between a palmed quarter and one that had genuinely disappeared anyway.

And if you wanted a rabbit, you still had to go to Jeremy. Max ended every show with his squirrel.


Author’s Note: I got the idea for this story in 2013. If you call it an even eight years, that’s 2922 days, accounting for two leap years. Amortizing the word count of this story over that period, it works out to an average of just over one word per day. It's not the most efficient way to write.


Tobiah Black is a writer and documentary producer. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tilted House Review, The Molotov Cocktail, and Points in Case. He also hosts the history podcast Artifactual. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and cat. www.tobiahblack.com

 

The Last Rancher

David Watson

An ominous alert tone blared on the television. Carl looked up from the breakfast table. Scrolling under the Monday morning news, the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC) was broadcasting a message. “Ranchers in the Paradise Valley area should be vigilant for grizzly bears migrating out of Yellowstone Park. Sow bears with new cubs had been reported in the southern part of the valley near Gardiner. Report any sightings to the DNRC…” Carl ignored the rest. It was the same message the DNRC sent out every spring. He went back to reviewing the list of supplies he needed for his month stay at their mountain cabin during calving season.

His wife Olivia was watching too, but now directed her stare onto Carl. “Well,” she said, “do you have the number?”

“What number?”

“The DNRC number, to report grizzlies out of Yellowstone.”

Carl waved his hand. “They say that every year. I’ve never seen a grizzly on our place.”

“Well do you have it?”

Carl dropped the pencil and sighed. He turned toward Olivia. “You don’t need to worry, I…” but his voice fell away when he saw her usual fair complexion blazing. He pushed his chair out from the table and stood. “Olivia…?”

She shook her head. “So irresponsible, so uncaring...”

Carl gazed at his wife. The last thing he wanted was to get in an argument before leaving. “I have the number,” he said. He picked up his cell off the table. “It’s in my phone.”

Olivia twisted away with disgust. She took her lunch out of the refrigerator, shoved it into her carry bag, and then swung around and faced Carl. Her eyes narrowed. “You promised to tell the boys your decision before you left for the mountains. Have you?”

Carl squirmed in his chair. Two years ago, he had agreed to let their sons, Caleb and Tristan, start up a fly fishing shop after graduating from college. He figured it would last a year at the most. But he hadn’t realized his boys’ ingenuity, and their commonsense approach to running a business.

Their shop, in the tourist town of Red Lodge one hundred and fifty miles to the east, had turned into much more than a place for local fisherman to pick up supplies. Thanks to the Internet, orders for their custom-made rods and flies came from around the world. Their store’s success had left the boys with more work than they could handle and now wanted Carl and Olivia to sell the ranch and join them.

Carl felt the muscles in his stomach tense. He didn’t answer.

Olivia let out an exasperated gasp as she opened the back door. Her voice was sharp.

“What on earth is so important about this place? It’s just a pile of rocks with hardly enough dirt to scratch out a living. The boys see it for what it is. Why can’t you? ” She slung her bag onto her shoulder, turned and slammed the door as she left.

Carl had every intention of chasing after her, of sweeping her into his arms, and telling her he was sorry. He listened to her Corolla rumble to life and the car’s tires spin into the soft gravel as she raced down the drive toward the highway and to her job in Livingston. He listened until the world fell silent and sank onto the kitchen chair.

#

Carl spent the day doing odds and ends until he could no longer put off the inevitable. He backed the trailer to the paddock to load the string of horses he would need. He unhooked the trailer’s aluminum walkway and banged it onto the ground. The sound brought his favorite, Sego, a thirteen-year-old chestnut gelding, out from behind the barn. Carl watched with concern as his usually high-spirited horse plodded toward him.

He opened the gate and let his eyes travel over his horse’s contour. Something looked off. Sego’s shoulders were slumped. Carl ran his hands over the horse’s back probing for pain, but found nothing.

“What is it boy?” With uncharacteristic affection, Sego turned and pressed his head gently into Carl.

Carl sighed and gave his horse a pat. “Let’s get to the mountains. We could both use the fresh air.”

#

The view of the Gallatin mountain range, forming the western edge of Paradise Valley, filled Carl’s view as he drove along their drive. The morning sun breaking over the Absoraka Mountains behind him cast its golden light onto his alfalfa fields. Halfway to the highway his cell phone buzzed.

Carl pressed the brakes slowing the truck and trailer to a stop. He fished his phone from his pocket. Olivia’s name lit on the screen. “Hello,” Carl said as he pressed the button to receive the call only to realize it was a text. He opened the message.

“Sorry I got mad…give the boys’ idea a thought…please be careful…love you.”

“Love you too,” he texted back.

He stared out the open window at the lush green alfalfa filling the flat of his ranch. He listened to the irrigator’s methodic swishing and watched the arcing streams of cold mountain water cascade onto the eternally thirsty plants.

He turned his gaze toward the ranch’s buildings, the barn with the cupola he and the boys had stripped and painted only a few years before, the hay sheds and the white plank fencing of the horse paddock. He saw their house with the wraparound porch and his boys’ old treehouse in the giant cottonwood overlooking Olivia’s garden.

He rubbed the stubble on his face. If he sold the ranch, he’d be giving up the land his father and grandfather ranched, the land his great-grandfather homesteaded. Could the boys really want that?

#

He drove south through the valley and just outside Gardiner turned onto an unmarked dirt road. The single tract road left the valley and immediately fell into a repeating pattern of climbing switch backs. The Ford’s engine strained to pull the weight of his horses and Carl began to worry his old truck wasn’t going to make it when the road leveled off onto the small flat where the cabin stood perched.

It was dark after he got the horses settled and even though the day had been a warm one, nightfall brought a chill in the air. It was cold inside the cabin and Carl lit a fire in the wood-burning stove. The place seemed small when his family was young. They spent a lot of time living there together. But tonight as he whipped pancake batter for his dinner, the cabin felt cavernous.

After eating, he walked over to the bookshelf and grabbed the picture of Olivia with Caleb and Tristan at her side. It was taken when the two boys were in grade school. He stared at Olivia’s slender figure, her high cheek bones and her dark curly hair. She still looked the same after all the years. Maybe a few grey hairs and worry lines around her eyes, but she was the same Olivia.

He set the picture back onto the shelf and saw the Bible laying flat with a piece of paper protruding from its pages. He opened the book. The paper marked the fifth chapter of Matthew. He unfolded the slip of paper and saw Caleb’s handwriting. It said, “Next time, I’ll tell you what Professor Hintz said about Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount.”

An uncomfortable ache bit into him. Caleb had been a history major in college. His fascination with a class studying the historical significance of the Bible had inspired him to share his findings with Carl and Tristan in the evenings when they spent summers home from college. Caleb never got around to sharing what he had learned. Carl carefully folded the paper, put it back in its place in the Bible and laid it onto the shelf, when his cell phone buzzed. This time it was a text from Caleb.

“Tristan and I are coming up for the weekend to talk about our offer. Mom’s coming too.”

Carl, ignoring the talk about making an offer, let out a joyous whoop. It had been a couple years since they’d all been together in the mountains. Carl texted back, “I can hardly wait. Bring your saddles and one for mom too.”

#

It was a bright sunny morning as Carl went to the lean-to that housed the horse’s hay and tack. He pulled out the supplies he needed for the day’s work, a bridle, saddle, lariat, a reel of barbed wire in a leather bag and the Whitney single shot that belonged to his granddad. He shoved wire cutters, cattle ear tags, a bottle of soap, long plastic sleeves, obstetrical chains and handles for delivering calves and the bear repellant spray Olivia had insisted he take into one pouch of his saddlebag. He filled the other with his water bottle, a small cooler for his lunch and the vaccines he might need for newborn calves. Almost forgetting, he pulled out a handful of rifle shells from a box on the shelf and dropped them into the pouch with the bear spray. Occasionally he used his granddad’s Whitney to shoot gophers and it was a humane way to put a cow out of her misery. But for the most part, he never used the gun.

Sego raced in circles as Carl opened the gate to the corral. The rest of the horses uninterested stood munching hay at the feeder. Sego pranced up to Carl. Carl smiled. “Back to your old self I see.”

Olivia had texted Carl the weather report before she left for work. It called for rain and possibly snow showers by the afternoon, though one couldn’t tell from the deep blue sky and the warming morning sun. Still, he knew the sky was deceiving in the mountains, and strapped his rain gear to the back of the saddle.

Sego took off at a brisk pace. The leather saddle squeaked with Sego’s long strides and it took little time getting to the pasture where the herd had spent the night. Carl and Sego made quick work tagging and vaccinating four newborn calves before they headed off for a day of checking fence.

They steered toward the southern border of his land—the rugged timbered section with deep ravines—knowing his sure-footed horse could handle the rough terrain. As Sego settled into a steady pulsing gait, Carl fell back into the thought that plagued him during the night. It was going to be difficult convincing the boys that selling the ranch was a mistake.

He knew they loved the land as much as he did. Not once did they complain about the long hours baling hay or working cattle in the rain and snow. They had always been his shadow even in high school when they should have been chasing girls or playing sports.

Carl grabbed the saddle horn as Sego knifed down the side of a ravine, then hurried his pace to climb out. Carl sighed. If only life could be like it was for his dad and granddad. Help was plentiful back then, cattle prices were good and they didn’t have to worry about health care costs, taxes and insurance. If he agreed to sell the ranch, it would be the end of the line, the end of their way of life. The thought sent a pain into his side. He shifted in the saddle to relieve the discomfort. But a way of life didn’t pay the bills.

#

They passed the day climbing through the rocky, pine shrouded ravines, and found a couple places where the barbed wire fence had been pushed down, most likely from a moose passing through. They were at the farthest corner of his land, high on a ridge when Carl saw the black clouds billowing over the nearby Emigrant Peak. Even with Sego it was a good hour ride back to the cabin. He cursed himself. He hadn’t paid attention.

As if on cue, a hard wind rushed through the surrounding trees. A flash of lightning ricocheted off the mountain causing Sego’s hair to stand on end. “Easy boy,” said Carl. He jumped to the ground, slipped on his rain gear, climbed back into the saddle, and the two broke away from the fence onto a deer path leading down the mountain.

A torrent of rain burst from the heavens and rolled across the mountainside. Carl sat low in the saddle as the wave of giant raindrops crashed over them. Lightning flashes lit the landscape like a giant strobe light. Thunder resonating off the mountain shook the ground Sego was trying to traverse. Still, Sego never wavered, never panicked, but kept a steady gait down the rocky trail, through the forest of tall pines swaying in a chaotic frenzy, toward the cabin.

The main thrust of the storm had passed by the time they reached the pasture with his cows. Carl bent his head against the steady wind driving the icy rain into his face. Though he was anxious to get home, the rancher voice inside told him to check his cows first. He laid the bridle onto the side of Sego’s neck and started a large circle around the pasture. They found several newborns hunkered on the ground, protected by their labor-weary moms, but Carl let them be. He’d work them in the morning.

He turned Sego onto the trail leading to the cabin when he heard a low bellow, the telltale sound of a cow straining in labor. Sego’s ears perked. For a second Carl thought about ignoring it. He was cold and tired; maybe she’d have it on her own. Sego stomped his foot. Carl closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “You’re right boy, we’d better check.” Without any coaxing, Sego turned off the trail and headed toward the sound of the cow.

Carl spotted her under a small pitch of aspen. She was a black-baldy on her side struggling to deliver. He eased Sego close, and fashioning a makeshift halter with his lariat, slipped it over the cow’s head before she took notice. He tied the other end to a stout branch, slipped off his rain jacket and rolled his sleeves. He went around to the back of the cow. What he saw, or what he didn’t see, caused his face to contort into a scowl. Nothing was showing, no feet or head like he had hoped. He took the bottle of soap from his saddlebag and a long plastic obstetrical sleeve. He pulled the sleeve onto his hand and arm. After gently lathering the cow’s vulva with soap, he slipped in his gloved hand. Her vagina was dry, not moist like it should be and though he had extended his arm nearly to his elbow, he couldn’t feel a calf.

Carl cussed under his breath then bent low, lay flat on the wet ground and extended his arm further past his elbow until he reached a mass of hair and muscle wedged in the cow’s pelvis. A sense of dread and helplessness seized his thoughts. The calf was coming breech, rear end first with no feet, nearly impossible to deliver without calling the vet and doing a cesarean.

He pulled out his arm and sitting on his haunches debated the options. There was no doubt Doc Schelling would come if Carl called, even on this crummy night, but he didn’t feel any movement. The calf was surely dead. Doc wouldn’t do a cesarean on a cow with a dead calf—she’d never make it.

Carl stood and walked over to Sego. As he reached into the saddlebag for a clean sleeve his fingers touched the smooth cylindrical shells at the bottom. He grasped one with his fingers, jabbed its pointy tip into the palm of his hand and pulled it out. How easy it would be to get this over with. A ten minute ride and they’d be home and out of the crappy weather. He looked at the cow in misery; the side of her face was bruised and swollen from banging against the ground as she strained in vain to deliver. She let out a loud bellow, lifted her head, then let it fall hard onto the ground.

A crack of thunder shuddered the mountainside. Carl dropped the shell back into the saddlebag. He grabbed a clean sleeve and walked around to the back of the cow. He gave her vulva a fresh lather of soap and lying onto the cold ground, reached his hand deep inside. It seemed a remote possibility, but if he could only push the calf’s rump forward, he might create enough room to slip his hand around and grasp a leg. If he found a leg…at least he had a chance.

His fingers reached the calf’s tail. He braced his feet into the dirt, pressed his hand on the calf’s tailhead and pushed. To his surprise the calf moved forward, but before he could slide his hand through the opening, the cow contracted, forcing the calf back into her pelvis. He waited for the cow’s contraction to ease, then pushed again. The calf slid forward and he forced his hand forward around the calf and grasped a tiny clawed foot. At the same moment the cow, sensing something had changed, sent a forceful contraction crushing his arm against the cow’s sharp pelvic bone. She bellowed as she strained, the intensity of the contraction ratcheting up, the force causing her rectum to relax and release a shower of watery manure cascading over his back.

He ignored the cow shit soaking through his shirt and fought the urge to let go. The cow’s contraction abruptly eased. It was the reprieve he needed. He pushed the calf forward again, grasped the tiny foot, and straightening the leg, pulled it out of the cow’s vulva.

The rain had turned to ice pellets. They pinged against the leaves of the aspen like sand paper rasping against raw wood. He scraped the manure from his back, lay back behind the cow and reached in for the other leg.

Sego stood in front of the beast stomping his foot into the dirt. His head bobbed as he let out a low whinny. “Almost got it boy,” said Carl.

He pushed against the calf’s rump again, and with a quick thrust he seized and extended the second leg. With the calf finally in the right position, a surge of energy swelled in the laboring cow. Before he could right himself, she jumped to her feet and with a lightning quick kick sent the full brunt of her hoof into his chest. The blow sent Carl flying backward. His head smacked against the trunk of an aspen. The now aggressive cow whirled around with intentions of killing Carl.

She charged. The little slack in the rope came taut, causing her to flip herself. At the same time her uterus contracted. The combined forces propelled the dead calf through her vagina and onto the ground. Before she could regain her footing, Carl scrambled to his feet and yanked the lariat off her head. Sego jumped to Carl’s side and with a quick step into the saddle’s stirrup, he was on his horse and the two slipped away through the brush.

Away from the crazed cow, Carl pulled Sego to a stop and stepped out of the saddle. He rubbed at the painful knot forming on the back of his head. He wiped the manure, blood and fetal fluids from his face, and touched at his chest, feeling the indentation the cow’s hoof had left in his flesh. It hurt too—maybe a broken rib. His hands trembled as he gingerly pulled on his rain gear.

Dusk was settling over the mountainside. The air held an uncomfortable stillness. The thick clouds had momentarily peeled away revealing Emigrant Peak. It towered like a forbidden castle into the sky. Carl’s teeth chattered. As he stared at the mountain, he couldn’t shake the feeling the land he had grown up on, the land he knew so well, was a now foreign place to him. It was as though he had never ridden its paths, forged its streams, climbed its ridges or peered into its forests.

He fumbled in his saddlebag for his cell phone and flipped it open and saw the missed calls. The names Olivia, Caleb and Tristan popped onto the screen. It wasn’t right, him being alone in the mountains, it wasn’t right. He flipped the phone shut and climbed onto Sego.

He dug his heels into the horse’s flank. “Get up,” he shouted, his voice anxious. There was a sudden urge tugging at him. He wanted to get to the cabin where he had good cell service. He wanted to call his family. He needed to hear their voices.

Sego walked at a fast pace, but it wasn’t fast enough. Carl took the leather end of his bridle and swatted it over Sego’s rump. The horse hurried into a lope.

Sego was in a full gallop as they crossed a small meadow and into a thick stand of pine and aspen, the narrow patch of forest before reaching the clearing with the cabin. Dark clouds had buried the mountain again and ice pellets hammered as Sego dove onto the trail. Only a few yards down the path, Sego’s ears perked. His head jerked high into the air. Without warning, he pulled up, his legs locked, his feet sliding before coming to an abrupt stop throwing Carl over the horn of the saddle and onto Sego’s neck.

“For God’s sakes,” shouted Carl. He scrambled back into the saddle. He kicked his heels into Sego’s flank. “Let’s go damn it.” Sego reared back. Carl whipped the rump of his horse with the long ends of the bridle. Sego bucked and pranced before taking a step forward. Carl couldn’t believe it. What the hell was wrong? In less than a hundred yards they’d be out of the forest. Another hundred and they’d be to the… He strained to see the end of the trail. He rubbed his eyes, blinked and shook his head. He should be seeing the cabin’s lights, but he wasn’t.

A breeze rustled the trees, loosening water droplets clinging to the branches and showered them onto Carl and Sego. Carl shifted his weight in the saddle. Nothing was right.

Sego came to another abrupt stop and this time, none of Carl’s coaxing could move his horse. It was as though he was frozen in place. Carl had had enough. He eased off the reins and was about to jump off and lead his spooked horse, when a gust of wind brought a foul smell. It was distinct, like of a rotting carcass. At the same instant a loud crack sounded to his right. Carl felt Sego’s neck muscles tense as a dark shadow rolled out of the trees onto the trail directly in front of them.

Carl’s mind ticked off the shadow’s possibilities: a fallen tree, a cow away from the herd. But in the time it took him to blink, he knew it was none of these. The shadow rose above Sego on two legs, opened its jaw flashing white enameled teeth and roared.

Carl clung to the saddle as Sego reared back and lashed out, striking the bear, a grizzly, with his hoof. The blow caused the bear to stumble. Carl recovered his position in the saddle. The bear charged again. This time Sego was too slow to regain his defensive posture and before he could rear back to strike, the grizzly threw a slashing blow across the narrow part of his neck ripping Sego’s carotid. A jet of blood sprayed over Carl’s face. Sego whinnied, tumbled backward and fell hard to the ground pinning Carl.

Carl screamed. The bear pounced, its powerful jaws clamping the horse’s throat before Carl could react.

In a protective reflex, Carl moved his hands and arms to cradle his head when he touched the can of bear repellant spilled from the saddle bag. He gripped it, tore off the safety latch and grasping it with both hands, discharged its contents into the bear’s face.

The grizzly stumbled back a step then took off into the forest.

Sego thrashed as he exsanguinated onto the ground. Carl braced his hands against his horse’s body trying stop the force bearing on his legs. In a final gasp, Sego kicked out with his hind quarters driving Carl’s right leg into an impossible angle and snapping it. A burning sensation raced up his spine, gripped his mind in a clamp squeezing away his consciousness.

#

Icy raindrops pattered onto Carl. His eyelids fluttered open. Disoriented, he felt the dampness of the ground, a cold stillness to the air, and a strange throbbing in his legs. He moved his hands to probe the source of his discomfort and discovered a hairy beast lying square on top of him.

“Sego,” his voice croaked. Carl pushed, trying to free himself from under his dead horse, but his legs were pinned. Reaching for anything to pry himself, he grasped the rifle still in its scabbard, thrust it under the horse and lifted. Sego’s body wouldn’t budge. Carl’s heart pounded. He gasped for air. His mind swirled in panic.

He pounded his fist into the ground. This wasn’t him. This wasn’t Carl Levinson. He had to think. He had to compose himself. He took a long breath, regained his sanity and remembered his phone.

He reached into the saddlebag, found the phone and flipped it open. A wave of hope fell over him. Little bars on the screen indicated he had reception. Three new text messages blinked. He clicked open the first. It was from Olivia. “Where are you?” sent at 9:30pm. He looked at the cell’s clock – it was nearly midnight.

The phone flickered and Carl shook it. Its light popped on again. The battery signal flashed. His phone was going dead. He typed in a reply, “Bear attack…need help…on trail to pasture.” He pressed the send key. The screen flashed sending…sending…and went dead.

Carl shook it, but there was nothing. He licked his dry lips. The bitter taste of Sego’s blood lit on his tongue. He tried to spit it out, but his mouth was parched. He groaned to himself. How many times he had preached to his sons, pay attention to the world around you, and it might save your life someday. Sego knew about the bear, he had done his best to warn Carl. Yet, his stupidness, his impatience, Carl had ignored it. Now his horse was gone and maybe…maybe…

A faint pop, a twig cracking in the forest, caught Carl’s attention. He strained to listen. One minute, two minute and another pop sounded and another. It was still in the distance, but it was a sound he recognized—someone or something was walking toward him.

Carl reached for the can of bear repellant—empty. He pulled the rifle out from under Sego’s body and groping in his saddlebag found a shell. He loaded it into the gun’s chamber.

He listened. The forest seemed empty, then another pop and maybe this time it was closer, but he wasn’t sure.

He raised his eyes to the sky. There was no moonlight, no stars to guide his eyes. It was as if he was inside a coal mine.

He clenched the gun and as he waited for whatever approached, he heard a different sound. It was a low thumping noise. This he didn’t recognize. Was his mind playing tricks? He closed his eyes and opened them, but the sound was still there. It was louder now, each thump echoing a dull thud off the mountainside. A flash of bright light shot out across the treetops above him. He pulled himself onto his elbows trying to glimpse the source of the sound, the light, but as he lifted his body a feeling of cold-emptiness ached in his head.

He eased himself onto the ground. He took in a deep breath trying to shake the feeling, but it only made it worse. His eyes felt like iron weights. The rifle slipped from his hands. There was a loud ringing in his ears before the world around him fell into silence. A vision swirled.

There was a horse walking toward him. Was it Sego? He wasn’t sure. The horse moved close. He could feel its warm breath. It leaned over draping its lead rope onto Carl.

Loud voices, strange voices he didn’t recognize, broke the empty silence spooking the animal. Carl tried to calm the horse he was sure was his. “Sego…Sego,” he heard his voice call out. The horse whinnied, moved close once again and lowering its head gave Carl a gentle shove on the chest. Carl felt the weight pinning him to the ground abruptly shift and his body float into the air. The horse whinnied again took a step backward and turned to walk away.

“Sego,” Carl yelled. Why was he leaving? Carl reached out to stop his horse. He grabbed Sego’s lead, but the rope slipped away through his hands.

The End

 

Author’s Note: “The Last Rancher” centers on how major life changing transitions can be difficult, especially in the farming community. I’ve seen the consternation and grief when a farmer realizes the time has come for a change. Add the deep bond farmers and ranchers have with their animals, and the decision becomes all that more painful.


David Watson is a recently retired large animal veterinarian from southern Wisconsin. His story ideas sprouted during the countless hours he spent traversing country roads to see his patients. After years of taking notes, he started writing his stories that are reflective of his life experiences and his curiosity about the world around us. His short stories have appeared in Foliate Oak Literary Review and The Antigonish Review.

New Bedford

Coyote Shook


Coyote Shook is a cartoonist and PhD student in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Their graphic essays have been featured in or are forthcoming in a range of American and Canadian literary magazines, including Shenandoah, The Maine Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, The Florida Review, and The Puritan.

Their debut graphic novel, Coyote the Beautiful, was the 2020 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Contest winner with The Florida Review, the first comic ever to claim first prize.