Fiction Attic

The man next door, our neighbor, is behaving badly or so it seems to me. This is not a good thing, I think. How can it be? “It can’t,” my other neighbor says. We decide to have a meeting, invite our other neighbors from farther down the block. Some come, some don’t. Those who don’t show we talk about as well.

We are a community of strangers, made friends by our proximity and the necessity of getting along. Of the neighbor to my left, we wonder, “What’s he up to?” and ask as well, “What about the others? Why aren’t they here?”

Chub Weinman says he saw my neighbor and one of those not with us now talking the other night. He says they looked serious and friendly.

“Ah-ha,” Marty Ferril waves his corn dog.

“Which was it?” I want to know. “Serious or friendly?”

“Both,” Chub Weinman says. “Seriously friendly.”

We nod at this, all of us gathered in Fergie Feckles’ basement show solidarity by tapping our chests and cursing a bit.

We’re worried about the future, we say. Worried about our pensions and our tv shows, things that continue to change beyond our control. Our neighbor in question pretends to be above all this. He drives a blue Saab with tan leather seats, wears stone washed jeans and teaches Humanities at the University. I work for BellSouth, outdoors fixing and setting lines. Chub and Marty and the others, too, work in jobs the same as mine. We know what it means to face adversity, have seen our status and security fucked with, have had to struggle and shift to adjust. To have stuck it out and at the same time, apart from the exceptions caused by human weakness, to remain decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. Our refusal to buckle, this is a page of glory in our history, I tell the others, “This is as we choose to be.”

I’ve tried to explain the situation to Jenny Darne, my buddy Earl Darne’s wife, have told her in no uncertain terms as we undressed in our room at the Tuckit Inn, how conformity is not a dirty word, is the measure of a man’s worth, his willingness to fit in and become part of the whole. “There are certain things a man can’t do,” I flip her over and make sure she gets my point.

Fergie’s wife, Lydia, has made the corn dogs and brought them down to the basement. We have beer and chips. I wonder if its such a good idea to drink during our meeting. Some of my neighbors agree while others don’t. Those of us who do not drink take note of those who do. Those who drink eventually gather together on one side of the room, near the deer head which has come off the wall, too heavy for the mock-wood panels Fergie used to refinish his basement. Andy Futts can’t resist and turns to the deer after a second drink, rolls his hips and says, “Talk about getting head.” Those of us on the other side of the room, not drinking, take note of this as well.

As we are a democracy, I ask the others to vote on what they want to do. I give them a list of four suggestions from which to choose and after some discussion I tell them, “Here’s what I think’s best.”

The neighbor we’ve come to talk about has a son who plays football with our boys on the Renton Eagle’s team. He’s the punter which says it all, I think. My neighbor comes to the games from work, stands by himself, down by the fence, and doesn’t sit up with us in the bleachers. I watch my boy at tackle go and drive the other team’s end into the ground. Jenny Darne never comes to the games. She says football is a brutal sport but she likes it when I slap her rump. I ask her to go away with me for a weekend, say that we can fish and hunt and camp under the stars. The idea makes her laugh. I blush and curse, but as I do she only laughs some more.

All is risk and danger. I feel the threat at work when I hold two ends of a severed line, feel it when I lay in bed and my own wife at a distance snores. I have heard that in his classroom my neighbor lectures on Aglaia, god of charity, Themis, god of justice, and Ares, god of peace. I see him with his own wife walking in the evenings, holding hands in the center of the street. What can such a man be thinking, I wonder? “You see how he’s not like us?” There’s talk he plans to keep his son at home for school and not let him fight in the war. I hear other things about him, strange and unsettling. I’ve shaken his hand before and his skin is soft even as he tries to make his grip hold firm.

“What sort of man is this?” I warn the others. “He isn’t like us.” He’s thin and placid, without spirit and refuses to bay at the moon. “No,” I say and tell them then, “It can’t go on. This sort of bull among us is a danger. We stand and fall on our weakest link and how can we as neighbors rely on such a sorry guy? No, no, no,” I say again and touch my chest, “There’s something we can’t swallow going on over there.”

Steven Gillis’s novel The Weight of Nothing (Brook Street Press, 2005) was a finalist for both the Independent Publishers Book of the Year and ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year.) His first novel, Walter Falls, was published in 2003 and was a finalist for National Book of the Year. He is currently at work on a new novel, Temporary People. A collection of Steve’s stories, Gifaffes, will be published this fall by Atomic Quill Press. Steve teaches writing at Eastern Michigan University and is the founder of 826 Michigan, a nonprofit mentoring and tutoring organization for public school students specializing in reading and writing and a chapter of Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia. All author proceeds from Steve’s writing go to his 826 Michigan foundation. Steve lives in Ann Arbor with his wife Mary, and children Anna and Zach. Steve is also the co-founder of Dzanc Books.

Image by this issue’s feature artist, Ira Joel Haber. You can find more of his work here.

At first Antonia thought of a shipwreck. The boy and the girl peeled off their clothes, but they were on their knees in the middle of a bed with the bedclothes hiked around their thighs, and the sheets were red so she thought of a sea of blood and had to focus on the pale flesh of their bodies–his concave chest and half-erect penis bobbing like a mole from its burrow of dark hair, her low breasts and a raised, flesh-colored birthmark at the verge of her hip. They began to make love, him thrusting his tongue, him gripping her wrists. They turned toward Antonia, and as the black fringe of the girl’s hair shuddered Antonia imagined her tongue heavy like a whale in the girl’s mouth. They stood before her, the girl’s skin glazed and tiny beads of sweat standing out on her nose, and she grasped the back of Antonia’s chair, one hand over each of Antonia’s shoulders. The girl’s face swung close, her mouth like a sucker, her tongue like a dove, and Antonia watched all the ugly things rush from those lips, the ghouls and headless children and her impenetrable faith in her husband, and she slid her thumb into that crevice, enveloping her nail and knuckle, and felt a vacuum as the girl pursed her cheeks. In this way Antonia, full of spume, stopped the flood of bugaboos and sent it back into the night.

Jenny Pritchett is the editor of Fourteen Hills. This is her second appearance in Fiction Attic.

Image by Ira Joel Haber, featured artist. View more of his work here.

She stands on one leg at the front door in the heavy dusk, balances the paper bag of groceries on her knee, and fumbles for the key. She has knocked, three times, and now listens for movement inside, peers through the dark window, unsurprised to find no lamps on.

Just inside the doorway, the bag crashes to the floor. A tin of water chestnuts rolls across the hardwood. She gropes for the light switch.>p> From the back room, his studio, he calls her name. His voice is weak, hoarse, gravelly from lack of use. “Is that you?”

She does not answer.

Nothing is left to say.

Either he’s been sleeping and is now in a black fog or else he’s been sitting in the dark again, half finished sculptures littering the tables, house dust collecting on top of the clay dust that already covers all the surfaces. For months now, he’s let her clean the kitchen and bathroom, let her vacuum the rooms and hallways, but his studio is off-limits, his cave when he needs time to think. Or not think. From her distance, it’s hard to tell.

She turns on the kitchen light and sees that everything is just as she left it the night before, the dishcloth left to dry on the sink divider, the clean cup towel folded and on the counter. When she opens the refrigerator to get out the vegetables, it is almost empty, the small containers of last night’s leftovers exactly where she left them, untouched.

“Come here.”

The flatness of his voice never fails to hurt her, although she knows she should be accustomed to it. He rarely looks at her, never touches her.

A couple of months ago he finally commented. “I think I may be coming down with the flu.”

“For six months?” She slammed the table with the coffee spoon she had held in mid air. He’d hardly blinked, as if her anger were not worth registering.

She looks around at the floor only she mops, the table only she wipes down.

When she gets out the cutting board and begins to chop the vegetables with a large cleaver, hitting the surface in loud thuds, he calls her name again, his voice no stronger than before. She pauses, listens.

“Please,” he calls to her. “Come here.” And then, when she is silent, “I need you.”

That’s rich, she thinks, too numb to laugh. All these months she’s swallowed her pride, given and given to him, only to have him call her less, need her less. In the car, she made up a haiku: “Women give and give/ and give and give and give and/ Men don’t give a shit.” In her mind, she makes excuses for him. He is tired. He has a big show approaching. One day she whispered, “I think you’re depressed.”

He was quiet, thoughtful. “I’m not depressed,” he said. “I’m just stiff.”

“Stiff?”

“Like I’m changing,” he said. “My eyes aging. Like I’m seeing in texture, everything grainy.” He seemed sad, distant. “Like my eyes are turning to wood.”

That’s so like him, she thinks now. Always the artist. Special. Ordinary depression too common. Him, he’s turning into wood. She attacks an onion with the cleaver and hears the thwack echo from the inch thick oak of the cutting board. He hates it when she’s loud in the kitchen, claims it disturbs his concentration. She opens a cabinet door and slams it shut for good measure. The noise ricochets throughout the house.

It was not always this way. She remembers in the beginning his aloofness was part of the charm. The lonely artist. His work shown in a top tier gallery, his agent dealing with the day to day. His studio: a refuge of intense meditation. His art: his thoughts 3D, tangible in clay, in sand, then bronze. Lately: just clay. Over and over, the same forms, little variation. His hands for weeks in clay.

She puts two plates into the oven to warm. She will tell him tonight that she’s leaving, wash the dinner dishes, and quietly leave. No scene. He will hardly miss her. She folds the napkins and gets out the salt and pepper. Dinner is almost ready. She puts the kettle on for tea.

“I need you,” he says, his voice rattling, “to see.”

Maybe he has finally made his masterwork, something substantial and lasting. Her job in the kitchen is almost complete, just waiting for water to boil. She wonders if it is a large piece, something new, something he has spent his energies on. She steps toward the hallway.

“See what?” she asks.

Now it is his turn to be silent.

“See what?” she repeats.

Her heels click on the bare wood; the copper bottom of the kettle complains of heat.

“I need you.” His voice: weaker, scratchy. “I need you to come here and see.”

She walks with care down the dim hallway and turns to enter his studio. She was correct. He’s in the dark. Since she never comes into this room, she does not know where to find the light switch. She feels the wall with one hand, then both. She stumbles over a chair, almost falls.

“Never mind about that,” he says, his voice little more than a whisper. “Come here.”

“Where are you?”

“Follow my voice,” he says. “Here. Over here.” His voice: raspy. “I’m right here.”

She reaches him, and—in a turn of heart—holds her arms out to him.

“Give me your hand,” he says, grasping her arm, then her right hand. “Now feel this,” he says, guiding her. “Feel my eyes.”

She feels first the wetness of a tear on his cheek. When she leans to kiss it, she smiles to taste the salt of his tears.

But then, to her surprise, when her hand reaches his eye, beneath her fingertips roll the tiny raised ripples of grain.

A.M. Garner’s fiction has appeared in INTRO, the Black Warrior Review, and other magazines and anthologies, most recently in storySouth online. A collection of her short stories was selected as runner-up for The Virginia Prize. She has taught creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University and currently teaches creative writing and a course in Southern fiction at the University of North Alabama.

Image by Ira Joel Haber, featured artist. View more of his work here.

The list of the things I did for him is inside the black silk envelope. The black silk envelope is in the top left drawer of the desk from Italy. The desk is empty, except for the envelope. The desk is in the bedroom. The bedroom is large and the desk is far from the bed. It’s next to the window that looks out on the garden.

The first item on the list is the first thing I did for him. The second item on the list is the second thing I did for him. And so on. Each item on the list is in his words.

First on the list: Please, tell me your name.

Second on the list: Please, let me take you to dinner.

Third on the list: Please let me open the door.

Fourth: Please, let me order for you.

Fifth: See me again.

Sixth: Wear a dress. I like blue.

Seventh: Stay the night.

The black silk envelope has a silver clasp; the silver clasp is in the shape of a ballock dagger. It’s a miniature version of the antique dagger hanging on the wall of his den. Sixteenth century he told me. He put the hilt of the dagger in my hands. It was a larger version of him, down there. Phallic. Larger and sharper.

Tenth on the list: Make it with two sugars, no cream. I’ll stir it myself.

Twelve: Not an omelet. Have two eggs. Scrambled in unsalted butter. Moist. A bit of fresh dill on top. Dry toast.

Fifteen: Yes, like that. Slow.

Sixteen: Never cut your hair. Except. You could trim yourself here. Closely.

Twenty: I’ve made an appointment for you. A manicure. A pedicure. Weekly. Don’t miss it.

The list is on unlined linen paper. The paper is ecru. It smells of citrus. The ink is blue.

Twenty-seven: Close the door when you’re in the toilet.

Thirty-one: Marry me.

Thirty-nine: Ah. Excellent. A private moment. Put this on under your dress. Wear it for the rest of the reception. It’s my wedding gift to you. It won’t hurt much if you move slowly.

The list is twelve pages. Seventeen items to a page. No two items are the same.

The blue ink on ecru paper echoes our time together.

Forty: If you wake in the night and I’m hard, go down on me, even if I’m asleep.

Fifty-five: Now that we’re married, there is no need for you to work. Resign tomorrow.

Sixty-one: Wear stockings. No panty hose. Ever.

The envelope was the last thing I bought for myself. After that, everything was either from him or for him.

There was only the one black silk envelope on the shelf at the store. The tip of the dagger was pointed up. It seemed fitting. It was exactly like the ballock dagger on the wall of his den. The list was just two pages then. They fit nicely, folded once. There was room for more.

Seventy: No panties on Tuesday’s.

Eighty-two: Go to that man at the end of the bar. Smile and speak softly to him. If he wants to touch you, let him. I’ll be here. Watching. Don’t look over.

Ninety-four: Put on the black lace panties and the red bra. Get on your knees and tie my shoes for me. Tie the laces in small bows. Left over right. Don’t look up.

One-hundred one: It’s a Tuesday. Time to climb. Don’t look down.

The ballock dagger on the envelope could be pointed in any direction. Depending. The silver became tarnished over time. I did not polish it. The dagger on his wall was pointed up and to the left. He kept it polished and the silver caught the light.

One-hundred twelve: Tell me your plans for the day.

One-hundred twenty-seven: End your friendship with Cleo. She’s coarse.

One-hundred thirty-one: Don’t eat garlic again. Nothing with garlic in it. You smell bad.

One-hundred forty: Leave your phone on at all times. I’ve set it so you know my call. You must always pick up when the Beatle’s play, “I Feel Fine.”

One-hundred forty-nine: Tell me what you did today. Every detail. Every thought. Every move. But first, put these on. Press them until they click.

One-hundred fifty-six: Say you’re sorry. Tell me how sorry you are.

He never looked in the desk. He never looked out on the garden. But the rest of the large bedroom, he used well.

One-hundred sixty-two: Don’t call or visit your mother, unless I’m with you. Same for your sister.

One-hundred seventy-five: Say please. Say it louder. Say it like you mean it.

One-hundred eighty-seven: Don’t cry.

Two-hundred four: Come to me, marching up the driveway, at 8:58 p.m. wearing a red drum majorette uniform with gold epaulets on the shoulders and white boots that come to just above your knees and a tall hat with a black chin-strap and a shiny silver baton that will catch the light when I take it from you and use it.

His final request.

The drum majorette uniform was fire engine red. I charged it to him.

The ballock dagger was heavy but I was strong. In its place I left the baton that came with the uniform. Temporarily.

From a distance, at night with the garden lights on, with me coming up the sidewalk marching in 4/4 time, the dagger looked just like a baton. When I threw it in the air and caught it in my white leather gloves, the dagger caught the light.

It was simple. The knife was in his hands when he fell, it was like he used it on himself. That’s what everyone believes.

His ashes are in the black porcelain vase. The black porcelain vase is on the desk from Italy. It is the only thing on the desk. The desk is far from the bed. It’s where I have my tea and look out onto the garden.

Jackie Shannon-Hollis lives in Portland, Oregon, and is working on a collection of short stories. Her work has appeared in MARY, Rosebud and the South Dakota Review, and will be in an upcoming issue of the Oregon Literary Review.

Image by Ira Joel Haber, featured artist. View more of his work here.

I live in a triangle. It’s exactly 213 square miles. It’s a place of Indian curses, ghostly apparitions, cattle mutilations, gigantic snakes, low-flying UFOs, huge birds, and ape-like creatures, seven feet in height, that leave 18-inch footprints. And I live right in the heart of it.

I work here, too, real estate, the only agent in town, although since I haven’t sold anything in six months that will probably change. Soon. The publicity about the reservoir and the Dark Forest Entry Association is killing me. After next month, when 20/20 and 48 Hours come, I doubt anyone will ever take me seriously again.

The activity centers around a 6,000 acre reservoir. Fear of the reservoir goes back 300 years, when the Wampanoag raiding parties hid among the black spruce during the tribe’s war with English settlers.

This much I was willing to discuss with the software engineers who seemed to like everything they saw – a colonial on Hemlock, the Greek Revival on Chestnut Street, the townhouse overlooking the reservoir. I spent little time on features, focusing instead on eliciting cues that might speak to what we call the magic moment – the exact moment the prospective buyer sees themselves in the house being to shown to them. If neither – especially the wife – has a magic moment, no amount of persuasion is going to save the sale. That would seem to explain his sudden departure, but I’m beginning to think it was all the conversation about the reservoir.

“This it?” the husband asked, on the balcony, sweeping his arm toward the sun-sketched reservoir.

“Pretty, isn’t it? Can you imagine having your morning coffee here, leafing through the paper?”

He said friends were paddling across one day when they came across what looked like a small orange orangutan sitting on an island. “Have you heard that one?”

“No, that’s a new one.”

“You’ve heard the rest, though, right?”

“The rest?” I must have paused a second too long, because the next thing I knew he’d thrust out his hand, a very business-like hand, and was saying thank you for my time. I shook his hand, fumbled for a card from my breast pocket. By then he was at the door, letting himself outside.

I had no more appointments so I went back to the office and copied beauty sheets. Soon my mind went back to everything I’ve tortuously catalogued under “avoid at all cost.” Stories. Stories that could not stand up as theorems, much less even marginally plausible rumors, but they seem to stick in the local collective memory like tar, stories that seem to grow deeper and wider with every rumor and suspicion.

In December 1971, two UFOs were reported to have landed on Route 77. Less than a year later, another was sighted just a few miles up the highway. In 1973, Officer Dan Sweeney claimed he saw a white bird six feet tall and twelve feet from wing to wing soar over Baker Street.

I began to think of myself as I once was. A simple, stable, ordinary high school geometry teacher. Triangles, I always told the students, contain no mysteries. If you know two angles, you can find the third. Pythagoras did all that work centuries ago.

Yet sometimes on the drive home at the end of the day, the darkness closing in on me, I avoid the back roads and yet still find myself reluctantly gazing up at the sky as if it might, out of pity, yield the exculpatory evidence I am sure is there.

Grace Pelletier insisted for years she’d seen Bigfoot coming out of the reservoir. She had a photo. One photo. It certainly looked seven feet tall. But upon closer inspection, by Bert Clemson at the Chamber, it turned out to be a tree stump; its reflection in the water created the illusion it was walking toward a canoe.

But memory is a funny thing. When I am asked, especially by out-of-staters, relos, why property values are so cheap, I avoid reservoir talk. I point out proximity to major highways, vibrant downtown, better-than-average school system.

Inevitably, the conversation circles back to gigantic snakes, low-flying UFOs, huge birds, and ape-like creatures that leave 18-inch footprints coming out of the reservoir, which I tell them I can neither confirm nor deny, which is true, because I’ve seen none of that with my own eyes.

The Dark Forest Entry Association doesn’t help. They’ve festooned Route 77 with “No Trespassing” signs, which is heart-breaking, considering the quaint beauty of the dense woods and moss-tipped stone walls, pictures of which adorn most of the Chamber of Commerce literature I’m fond of mailing, when I have money and time. Yet I often pause and look at the photo of the reservoir that adorns the front of the tri-fold brochure. I swear at times the clouds say “Go Back.”

Driving home this evening, I passed the Dark Entry Road. I felt a tightening in my limbs, a new feeling. So I stopped, put the gear shift in reverse, and backed into the little entrance by the padlocked gate.

Just as I came to a stop, a pick up truck slowed near the entrance. The driver - a large, mustached man in a tan Carthart iron worker’s jacket and John Deere cap - said, after snapping my picture and license tag, “Can I help you?”

“Yes,” I said, “Can we talk?”

“About?”

I told him. I said this foolishness was beginning to get bad for business. He glanced at the magnetic Century 21 signs on my car, and said, “Put the car in drive, step on the gas, and head straight back to where you came from.” I repeated my request. He cocked a double-barrel. Humiliated, I did as told.

When I got home, Milly asked me how my day went. I told her. She said things will get better. How? I want to say.

“Market’s bad for everyone, Dick. It’ll pick up.”

Tonight, as most nights, I’ll wake in the middle of a dream about a serpent with an Indian head dress, something with a long tail that rolls and plunges in the middle of the reservoir. I’ll walk out into my backyard, glance at the house worth exactly half what I paid in 1965, and stare up at the sky for proof, proof what everybody has been saying cannot be true.

Stephen MacKinnon’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Armageddon’s Buffet, Conte, Fugue, Just A Moment, Marginalia, Ontario Review, Plum Biscuit, The Belletrist Review, The Oregon Literary Review, The Southeast Review, The Talking River Review, Triplopia, and Whistling Shade. In addition, his stories have received award recognition from Carve Magazine, Ontario Review, Rosebud and The Southeast Review.

Image by Ira Joel Haber, featured artist. View more of his work here.

She pulled her girls in a carriage behind her bike. Their plastic high heels and necklaces clicked. The river was in the distance. So was the shopping center. It swelled like a blister. She’d been wild when she was younger. Now, she didn’t look like a suburban mom, her tattoo underneath her tank top, her skinny tan legs. She looked like a boy, like a hard insect. Red lips and unpainted fingernails. She had blonde daughters who wore ballerina outfits and said strange things, ages three and four.

Today, in her peripheral vision she saw a woman who looked just like herself. This woman had the same slouch, the same blurred red of an inky flower on her shoulder. This was trouble, she knew. Not a curse, perhaps, not that obvious. Not worth worrying herself over. She needed to get seltzer, paper clips, tortilla chips, wine. She needed things. But this woman was too close to her, right beside her shoulder. This woman was suggesting she just get off the bike, was whispering for her to rest her bike on the ground and take off. Not to drown herself in the river. Not to leap from the cliffs beyond the shopping center. But to really take off. Take off to where the signs said, 300 miles away.

She wasn’t thirty yet. She made sacrifices for her husband and children. She tried to learn practical things, how to sell houses, how to cook different recipes. She’d married her husband on a hill. He was a nice man, not like the ones who came before him, dark haired, cruel, sizzling. Her husband didn’t yell, but he certainly wasn’t kind, he certainly wasn’t the best one for her. She’d never say it, but she missed the men who tried to pull dirty things in bed, held their keys up with their drugs on the end for her. But that wasn’t all of it. Sometimes hard things like marble or cement looked incredibly soft to her.

She wasn’t thirty yet, but she’d had a baby die inside her. Her daughter’s heart had been on the outside of her body and she’d been born dead. She went out to dinner one night and tried to tell this story, but ended up dropping her wedding ring in her water glass to watch how fast it would sink. Dinner had been beautiful and expensive, the pink skull of a fish. There was a poet and both his wives stuck their heads in the oven. She remembers learning this in high school. If she knew for sure that her husband’s second wife would also stick her head in the oven, she would gladly do it first.

The woman who looked just like her was still by her side, also had her hair, her green eyes, her small breasts. This double seemed to want to give her the answers. She thought of crashing her bike, of which parts of her brain affected speech, memory, and knowing the names of things. Which parts of her brain, when stimulated with electricity, might create this image of her double. What damage had she done to herself. What hope did she have for things without explanation. Harbingers.

Later, in her garden, the woman was there again. This time she knew it meant death. It meant climb to the tops of towers and fling yourself onto the spikes. It meant put on your wedding dress and burn down the house. It meant make dinner, set the table, ask how his day was. It meant drink wine in the shower, the glass steaming up, your fingers cold. It is what it is. Everything is like being married, everything is difficult, shitty, hilarious. Everything makes you catch your breath.

She imagined her dead, baby daughter like an awful butterfly in the garden. Pink, moth-like, dangerous.

Perhaps her alive daughters would forgive her, would grow up to realize that this was no kind of life, would understand why she packed her suitcase and left, would even someday leave themselves. She walked out of the house, got in her car and drove past the shopping center, the river, the green signs that marked the miles and towns of the distance. The woman who looked like her, her double, left her side then, disappeared from her. And she knew that this woman had walked into the gleaming white house that she was leaving behind. Had walked in, closed the door and sat down at the kitchen table. Soon, her husband would be home with her daughters. It would get dark outside and be night.

See Laura Schadler’s bio at the end of “What the Parade is For”, which also appears in this issue.

Photo by Steve Shearer.

She didn’t know what the parade was for. People carried crosses. Flowers pink as bubble gum. The rain was coming in over the capital. She saw sheets of it before the drops got there and soaked through her shoulders, the top of her head. The black rainwater rolled down the street gutters. She had places and parties to go to. She jumped right in the gutter rainwater. Maybe the parade was for something bad that had happened, death, or in protest, perhaps it was a celebration. She joined with a skull made of sugar resting in her palms.

As the parade made its way through town, she saw a man standing at the top of a tall building, at least ten stories high. He was a small, shadowed figure against the sky. She saw him take part of the roof and drop it off the edge. The piece of the roof fell and fell towards the ground. She watched it as if it were a human body. Things happened because they had to. When things didn’t work it was because they couldn’t.

The parade made its way towards the water. It blocked traffic and people honked their horns. She looked back towards the building that touched the sky. The sky was full of the outlines of birds, and the avalanche of the clouds. She handed her sugared skull to the woman beside her and turned towards the building where the man was. The doors were locked but she didn’t let them stop her, she took the bobby pin from her hair and picked the lock. She took the stairs, not the elevator. Elevators are like being in the stomach of some creature, something futuristic, a gleaming, golden inside.

From the roof, the city glowed like an ornament. A bird heart. A fist. Around him she immediately spoke in hyperbole. Everything was the fucking best thing ever. One of the fucking best things ever was when the fog came in low and gray near the palm trees, like today. It didn’t look right, didn’t go together. On the roof with this man, she felt that everything was its most superlative version of itself, matchless, incomparable, and without equal. The bay glistened and was dotted with ferries.
She touched his hipbone and felt sure that she’d seen it somewhere before. His eyes were like green marshes, sticky and full and hot. They had things to tell each other.

“What are you doing up here?” she asked.

She let her fingers dart out towards him and then back towards her own body as if emphasizing a point. What was her point, exactly? She felt like a teenager, like she wished she had a bedroom door to lock and her whole life ahead of her. He was taking the roof off, the sticky black tar papery part of the roof. It came off in squares and he threw each square off the side. She watched. She saw the parade in the distance. She heard gunshots to the South. Planes flew overhead full of hundreds of people who were safe. She knew that she was never safe, she preferred it that way.

“What are you doing up here?” he asked back.

“I do have other places to be,” she said. It was true. Her red dress was for a cocktail party. She had cocktail umbrellas in her purse and small diamonds in her ears. She knew that the two of them, him and her, would never make it. But when she talked to him she felt her arteries. She wanted him to touch her dress. Her arteries sizzled like they were made of electrical wiring. The cocktail party would be under a tarp on a porch. There would be whiskey and ice cubes. She imagined looking across the party and seeing him there. She didn’t ask him if he was married. She wanted to know a lot of things about him. She didn’t ask if he wanted to go to the party with her. She imagined him fucking her.

“That reminds me,” he said. He kissed her. The first time you kiss someone their mouth seems too hard, not soft like you’d hoped, and you realize that you don’t know them at all, but then it is very very soft and you realize that it’s too late. It’s happened.

“Well, god,” he said.

She wonders if he can see her or if she’s disappeared. There are one thousand futures. They splay out. Each time, it is close. Each time, she’s there. She thinks perhaps she has one thousand decisions to make, and when she runs out, she will look around at what she’s chosen and it will be permanent. Then, like some piece of material, like something inanimate, she throws herself off the roof. She has places to be. Things start off small, but then they press down, they hold weight.

Laura Schadler grew up in the mountains of Virginia. She studied film at Bard College and will have her MFA in Writing from the California College of the Arts in May of this year. She currently lives and writes in San Francisco, and is working on her first collection of short stories, Everyone Who Feels Homesick. She has been published in Fireweed Magazine and Confessions of a Doorknob Queen. She wears high heels even though she is tall, likes mango sorbet, and overuses the word awesome. She has a few ideas for her first novel, which is, at this moment, entirely unwritten.

Photo by Steve Shearer

It costs only 50¢ to enter the Closet of Love. The nominal fee covers electricity and the occasional light bulb replacement. The light bulb is never turned on, however, except for the occasional dusting and spritz of air freshener. Because when a couple enters the Closet, all is perfectly dark. You can see only love.

The Closet of Love fits four average-sized adults, or two whose bellies say, “I am the product of beer and always taking the elevator instead of the stairs.” The Closet is open one day a week, and never on the same day or at the same time. (For everyone knows, no one knows when true love is going to come along.)

“Hello,” says the woman who wants to fall in love.

“Hi,” says the man who wishes the same.

Each hands a quarter to the ticket taker. He tears their ticket, and with a smile, hands each of them half. They walk towards the Closet door and step inside. The door shuts and the woman speaks.

“I don’t love you yet. Is the Closet broken?”

“No, but let’s give it time,” the man says, his voice shaking. He has never been good at love. Not since the prom accident 16 years ago. He still has a scar.

“Okay,” she says and stands quietly, waiting.

“What that ticking?” the man asks.

“That’s my biological clock. I hope we fall in love soon.”

“Will you marry me?” the man asks. “I love you so much it hurts.”

“I want to think it over,” the woman says. “Yes, yes, I’ll marry you. I love you, darling.”

A third voice, a man’s, interrupts. “Hello.”

If it weren’t so dark, the engaged couple would have seen each other jump back simultaneously.

“Who are you?” the woman asks, drawn towards the new man’s voice.

“Want to have an affair?” the new voice says.

“Well, I just got engaged, but something about you excites me. And I want one last grasp at freedom and what could be. Just don’t tell my fiancé.”

“Tell me what?”

“Nothing, dear. I have to work late tonight.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll just be over here in the corner.”

The woman places her hands on the large, brawny shoulders of her illicit lover and pushes him away.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she says, turning her head away in the darkness.

“But I have to see you again,” her lover says.

“I can’t. I love–” Tears sprinkle down on the floor of the Closet of Love –”another.” She takes her mistake by the hand and kisses him on the cheek. He is sad, but he will recover. It cost him only 15¢ to be here.

The Closet door opens and the woman and the no-longer-nervous man emerge, hand-in-hand.

“My scar is gone,” the man in love says.

“It will never come back,” the woman in love says.

The Closet of Love’s door closes. The ticket taker writes a note to himself to begin charging 55¢.

Dylan Lee is an advertising copywriter in Portland.

Photo copyright 2007, Andy Batt, www.andybatt.com.

You walk into the last record store on Earth. It was quite a trek to get there. The clerk has complicated hair and a tattoo that says, “John Lives.” You say to him, “I need that music from that film. The one where the guy meets the gal and she and he do things that people in movies mostly don’t do.” The clerk says, “You’re talking about Johnny Dark and the Fictioneers.” It doesn’t sound right but you’ve come a long way. “Ok,” you say, “Give me that and the one where the female singer sounds like a train colliding with a tangerine.” On the walk home you realize that it wasn’t that movie at all. It was the sequel to the one about the dying Stoic, the one with all the midges. Still, Johnny Dark rings a vague bell. He sounds like Quasimodo. He sounds like your mother. In your review you say, “It’s the kind of music you’d walk to the ends of the Earth for.”

Corey Mesler’s work has appeared in many online and print magazines. With his wife he owns Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.

Image, untitled collage 23, by Ira Joel Haber, featured artist. View more of his work here.