Fiction Attic

Turn Down Service

by Kevin Phelan

She had this red hair. She liked to compare it to a pack of rowdy schoolchildren, presentable one moment, and then all wild and out of control the next. Her teeth were perfect and straight, as was her back and posture. She said it was the product of operations, braces, and odd contraptions that, with the goal of making her ultimately attractive, had made her totally unattractive at a time when those things mattered the most. High school. If anything, she said, it had taught her at an early age that she was going to have to work for a living. While the other girls were meeting boys and dreaming of weddings, she was taking physics, computer science, and wood shop. Oddly enough, it all paid off. Now, she has her own company designing kitchen utensils. The money is in the forks and knives, she says, though she spends most of her time on the more intersting pieces, whisks, spatulas and rubber scrapers.

Weddings, yes. Our deal was this, she would plan the wedding, and I would arrange the honeymoon. A very easy arrangement for me. Her only request was that our honeymoon include a stay at a nice hotel, one with turn down service.

The wedding was remarkable, and not because the food was tremendous, the guest list artfully constructed, or the location perfectly chosen. No, the wedding was remarkable because it included me in such a prominent role. You see, I’m 39, and well, I just figured that the window had already closed on those opportunities. It’s not that 39 is a horrible age, I’m sure there are much worse. It’s simply that, before I met her, I had started to feel a certain way. It felt like a movie, like I had just seen the matinee and now the reels were starting all over again for the the afternoon showing. I had been having a lot of deja vu, everything seemed to remind me of something else. Nothing was new, but rather a variation on something old. Once I met her though, for the most part, the sense of deja vu stopped.

First, a word about turn down service. I can be short because I’m sure you’ve probably experienced it for yourself. It’s that thing you get at nice hotels, when the maid comes, usually while you’re gone at some lame meeting, and she straightens things up, folds your couple of shirts, puts your papers together on the desk, and then bends down the sheets on your bed with, if your lucky, a nice mint on the pillow. It’s stupid and unnecessary, yes, but nice all the same.

My wife’s request for a hotel with turn down service was really not all that odd. You see, my job requires constant travel to a bunch of different places, a bunch of different hotels. Some are good, some are bad, more often times the latter. In fact, one time in Bulgaria, I stayed in this by-the-week sort of place that had no bathrooms in the room, which is not totally unusual for me. The one down the hall, in this place, did not have a toilet but rather two porcelain footprints on either side of a small but workable hole. That was unusual for me, though not the reason I mention it. What was unusual was that it was on the third floor.

Regardless, ever since I met her, whenever I travel, I’ll call her from the hotel, and the first question she asks is whether the place has turn down service. She likes the idea of an extra added bonus, something totally unnecessary, but, to her, completely special. If I say yes, she shrieks with excitement, “did they fold your t-shirts too,” she’ll ask, and “how’s the mint?” If the place doesn’t have turn down service, she’ll quickly change the subject, as if she is trying to take my mind off of some bad news. It’s become a joke between us. I guess it’s something new to me, something I haven’t experienced, something I never saw in the matinee. In a way, it is this, not the beautiful hair, not the smooth skin, but rather this something else that is the very essence of what I love about her.

With that in mind, you understand how tricky it was for me to plan the honeymoon. Now don’t get me wrong–there are a lot of great hotels with really great turn down services. Hotel Gellert in Budapest, the Grand Hotel in Llubjana, the Serena in Zanzibar. I’ve done my research. The Palace in New York probably has the best. Still, I chose the Llao Llao, an odd but amazing hotel at the foot of the Andes. I studied their brochures, I accessed their website, I conferred with their concierge, and then I saved my money.

When we arrived, the manager, who remembered my previous correspondence with them, came out and met us in person, remembering both our names and congratulating us on our wedding. He then paused for a moment, smiled, and explained that he had been able to “work some magic” (my translation), and get us a special suite on the third floor. The room has a name, which I can’t pronounce, rather than a number. That’s how good it is.

We arrived late, so there was no turn down service that first night. Instead we found a bottle of champagne, along with an odd, but tasty spice cake, some Argentine custom I imagine. The next morning, we got up early and walked downstairs to the big, beautiful room where they serve breakfast. As we were walking into the breakfast place there was a group of people walking out. A guy, three women and a baby. The guy was my age, though tremendously good looking. He was carrying the baby, which was also tremendously good looking. The three women, possibly his wife, her mother and her sister, were relatively unmemorable. He looked like he had been the captain of the high school football, or, I should say, futbol team. That was years ago, but then, I suppose, people don’t really change all that much. The baby was no more than a year old, but I could tell that the guy and his wife had been married awhile. He had cheated on her before, I could tell right off. How did I know? I suppose it’s easy, really, if you pay attention, if you watch the details.

As we were walking in to the breakfast room and futbol guy and his wife were walking out, I noticed him subtly slow down. He casually gauged where is wife was, his sister-in-law, and his mother-in-law, and then he slowed a bit more. Without doing anything out of the ordinary, he was suddenly a half-step behind his group, out their field of vision. He shifted his baby over to the other arm, and then, casually but quickly he glanced over at my wife. It was like he wanted to take her to the high school prom. All so careful, all so subtle. It was like he had already planned a long term affair with my wife, and now he was simply being careful to conceal the evidence.

“It looks like you’re going to the prom,” I said to my wife.

“With futbol guy?” she said, smiling. “Really.”

“Yep.”

Later that night, we were in our room, still marveling at the view. We were preparing to go down to the hotel restaurant for dinner, when there was a knock on the door. I pulled on my pants and went to answer. It was the maid. She said something in Spanish, something that I probably could’ve translated from ten different languages. I turned to my wife, “The maid wants to know if we would like turn down service.”

“Turn down service!”

My wife screamed with joy, jumping up and down. Literally, she was jumping up and down–that’s how happy she was. Nobody jumps up and down, but she was. It was great!

Just then, in the hallway, behind the maid, fubol guy’s mother-in-law walked by. Then his sister. Then his wife. Then him. With everyone out of range, he quickly glanced past the maid and into our room, past me, and to my wife. She was barely dressed, her hair wildly out of control, her nails still painted white from our wedding, her hands in the air, jumping up and down, totally beautiful.

All in a second.

And in a second, I had my first full deja vu since I had met her. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a deja vu, but it was a very clear and unavoidable memory.

Years earlier, I had had this different job with a smaller company. We were nearly bankrupt, and things were looking bad. My boss, the owner, felt that if we could just finish this deal we’d been working on, it would save the company and everyone’s job. He and I would’ve probably been happy to see the company fold–he wanted to retire, and I was simply burnt out–but we couldn’t let it happen because we had this receptionist and these two accounting clerks that were depending on us. For a bunch of obvious reasons that I won’t go into, they desperately needed their jobs.

Anyway, the deal involved this slightly eccentric older guy. Everyone else was ready to agree, but he had final approval. Unfortunately, it was June, and he had just returned to his homeland for the entire summer. It was his wish that he spend one last summer at his family’s old cabin in this remote rural village. The problem was three-fold: his homeland was far away, there was a war going on, and the village had no phone service. Idiotically, I volunteered to go see the guy in person.

About the country: it was a beautiful place with an odd war. As far as I could tell, the war was between a bunch of people who all looked the same, killing each other for being so different. Or something like that. Anyway, it had been going on for two years, with almost all of the fighting then took place in the new capital. You probably saw it on television. All of the tall buildings were destroyed, windows broken, concrete missing. Snipers were hidden in every nook and cranny. The main street, the Boulevard of Heroes, was littered from one end to the other with old cars and dead drivers, all the product of one or two small bullet holes. The snipers were so prevalent and determined, that if someone was shot in the middle of the Boulevard, they would have to lay there to die because no one could risk running out to get them. Needless to say the place was a ghost town.

The eccentric guy did not live in the new and dangerous capital, but rather in a small village only six kilometers away. With great research, I learned that, after two years, some bus service was going to re-start their service to the new capital. It was a symoblic thing, a desperate, but naive hope to re-establish some normalcy. They didn’t actually think anyone would take the bus anywhere near the new capital. When I, an American, showed up on that first morning, asking for a ticket to the town just barely west of the new capital, they were a bit stunned.

When we left the first station, there was six people on board, including myself and the driver. By stop number four of ten, it was just me and the driver. He was very fidgety, nervous, but jovial in an odd sort of uncomfortable way. I tried to speak with him, but our languages had not a single word or gesture in common. He was wearing a bullet-proof vest and chain-drinking liter bottles of beer. It took hours to cross the slow and rough terrain. Every now and then a road would be out, and we would have to take an alternate detour. Around three in the morning, it started to snow. I had been traveling for thirty-eight straight hours, if you count the taxi ride to the San Francisc0 airport. I was very sleepy, utterly and totally exhausted. I was starving and thirsty. I had packed wrong, I had dressed wrong. It was snowing outside, and I was completely freezing.

Although the driver had turned up the stereo real loud, some pan-flute-type folk music with an oddly repetitive chorus, I still was having tremendous trouble fighting the urge to sleep. And that was the problem, if I fell asleep, I would miss my stop. Stop number nine. Stop number ten, the final stop, of course, was at the wrong end of the Boulevard of Heroes. Past the littered cars and bodies, past all of the determined snipers.

And that’s it. That’s the memory, the deja vu, whatever. Standing there in the doorway to greatest room in luxurious Llao Llao Hotel, caught between the futball hero and my wife, all I could remember was a late night on a freezing bus, snow coming down, sleep almost irresistible, rocking back and forth in my uncomfortable seat, repeating to myself over and over, “Don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep.”

Chibas Speaks by Steve Almond

(for Eduardo Chibas 1907-1951)

August, 1951. In Havana, in a studio the width of his arms, Chibas speaks. His voice swells with heroism. Clustered around wooden radios the shape of cathedral doors, listeners reach to adjust the volume.

Chibas says: Batista is a thug, the university has become a refuge for murderers, Cuba, with her beautiful girdle of mountains, her sea bass and garlic, Cuba starves. In her elegant buildings, American gangsters feast on steaks and shoot disease into our women. Roulette wheels spin and the Arawak die. Father Varela, with his elegant proofs, dies. Jose Marti dies. His victorious love and turbulent appetites, dead; moral progress fails, gives way to tailfins and murder. All that remains of history is the gesture.

Chibas speaks and thinks not of the words (they are always the same) but of his father. When Chibas was a boy, his father built him a toy bridge from slats of wood. Chibas smoothed his fingers along the wood for hours, pretended to march off to work with his father, a little man in a little coat and hat.

Where is that bridge today? He wonders this even as he speaks to the poor and the hopeful of Cuba, as he laments what the island has bec ome. There is no goodness left in this place. His father told him this.

The time has come to face the truth, Chribas says, to wake ourselves from centuries of slumber.

But something is happening. Something is happening to Chibas as he speaks; a slice of mango is falling into his mouth; like a second tongue, only sweeter. The fingers of his first lover are grazing his stomach, the glorious stink of the melacon fills the hazy studio, his father’s lemony cologne, applied, with a gentle dab of the thumb, to the back of his neck. These are the minutes he wishes were a thousand years.

He has to remind himself: this is really happening. This speech, these words, the plan behind them. He has to remind himself: duty.

The address is over. In his trouser pocket, the pistol is dense and cold. What is death but the end of a bridge that connects us to childhood? What is goodness but a kind of awful bravery? Chibas thinks: Forgive me father. He alone knows what comes next.

Steve Almond is the author of the story collection My Life in Heavy Metal, as well as a nonfiction book about candy bars, forthcoming from Algonquin Books. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, Playboy, Other Voices, The Mid-American Review, Nerve, and many other magazines. “Chibas Speaks” originally appeared in Story Quarterly. Steve lives in Somerville, Massachusetts and teaches at Boston College.

Manhattan-based artist Matt Cervenka studied at the School of Visual Arts and S.U.N.Y. at Farmingdale. Extensive travels in the Southwest, Mexico and Europe have provided inspiration, and Matt has incorporated their cultures in his work. Presently, Matt enjoys working with gouache, pen and ink, acrylic, and mixed media.Austrian Television’s Tema recently aired an interview with Matt, featuring his animal portraits. See Matt’s New York Cityscapes at Portable Muse.

contention by Jenny Pritchett

One evening at the end of May she stood with one hand holding open

the refrigerator door, staring at the grid of shelves.

“We need more of something,” she said.

He looked up from the stack of essays he was grading. A blossom of

red ink, like the mouth of a geisha, had formed where his lips met.

“What are we out of?” he asked.

“Everything. There’s nothing in here.”

She hitched her jeans at both hips and squatted, the light from the

refrigerator bulb scalloping her face like a peeled apple. She had lost

the weight from the twins already; he could imagine the jaunt of her hip

cupped in his hand. She stood, gripping puckered plastic bags in both

hands—what had been dill, carrots, basil, now muddy and smearing.

“I was going to do something with these,” she said, holding up the

herbs before tamping them into the top of the garbage pail beneath the

sink. “Waste of money.” She heaved the pail to the back door, leaving

the bag open.

“Not that much money.” He bared his teeth, rapping them with his

pen.

“Still money.” She slid the crisper drawers in with her boot and

swung the door of the refrigerator closed. The condiments rattled in

their jars.

“I don’t feel like cooking tonight,” she said.

“So don’t.” He swung his head back to his stack of essays. It was

unbelievable what the kids expected him to read. He scribbled in a

margin, “Huh??”

“What do you feel like?” She pulled at the hair at the nape of her

neck. He sat before her at their heavy, all-purpose table, heels hitched

on the rungs of a splintery chair.

“Anything’s fine with me,” he said.

She sucked the inside of her lip, watching her husband. Then she

turned and left the room. He watched the far kitchen wall, listening to

her exit through the plaster and paint, the footsteps, keys, door,

gravel, the smacking shut of the car door. He looked down at his stack

of papers. The sudden silence had mired the words in front of him. He

felt untied and wasn’t certain he was capable of grading tonight. He

imagined himself running through the kitchen to the front hallway,

nabbing his jacket from the hook he’d hammered into the plywood, the

balls of his feet spinning in the gravel as he chased down the car,

panting, leaning in the driver’s side window with his lopsided grin.

“Tony’s,” he would say to her. “My treat.”

Instead, from the front window, he watched the headlights of their

car bounce into the near-dark, past the McKutcheon’s house next-door and onto the new asphalt four-way at the end of the road that led to town.

He pulled back the curtains she’d made, tiny blueberries he pinned to

the window with the tips of his fingers. It was seven-thirty. The

evening stretched before him like a marathon.

Jenny Pritchett lives and works in San Francisco with her boyfriend, Sean, and their 140-pound English mastiff. Her fiction has appeared in Boulevard, and she is working on a collection of short stories, most of which reference her home state of Illinois.

William Diehl lives in Loma Linda, California.

merciless daylight, hot into the night, summer 2004 by Michelle Tea

Should have run upstairs to thump on Georgie’s door, I would have seen the note pinned to the wood alerting the world that she’d been selected for the sleep-study and was in seclusion at a medical compound somewhere in the city. Instead I walked the grassy parkway in the warm night, my tattoo radiating heat like a sunburn. The breeze felt like the dry air that rushes out from a baking oven when you lower the door, it didn’t help at all. Only marginally better then the cramped apartment and my pathetic fan whirring its futile breath around the room. I walked the parkway and it was lively with others escaping their sweltering homes, lots of dogs in the grass and beer on the benches. I turned down the cobblestones to UqBar and shoved the swinging doors open.

The stink of old kegs and a century of spilt liquor smacked me in the nose. I understood that to adjust to the cigarette haze hanging like a cloud cover I would be forced to smoke one myself. At least a cigarette would have a filter, you know? UqBar was packed. Not what I expected, but I guess the heat was making everyone nuts, making everyone crave a beer and respite from the terrible warm of their apartments. And if there’d only been the usual four or five people slumped on the bar, UqBar would have been pretty cool, a darkened cave, the walls black, a trough of ice behind the bar. But all the yahoos and their body heat and sweaty t-shirts had ruined it. They were crazy with the relentless summer and were drunk already and dancing, going mad, their bodies’ humidity rising into a human smog that made the air swampy. I was hoping Georgie showed up soon so we could split, maybe plant our asses on the smooth green grass of the parkway and play with other people’s dogs or something.

I found a tall stool alongside the wall and got to absentmindedly picking at the band stickers plastered all over the place. The narrow ledge was cluttered with empty cocktail glasses, their little red straws dry and lonely. Willie the bartender looked seriously stressed out, his ruddy Irish face even redder and splotchier with this bad weather and the motion of keeping up with the throngs banging on his counter for their drinks.

Wednesday nights I meet up with Georgie and we drink soda waters Willie throws down for free, fizzing them up as we empty them, plunking a fat wedge of lime into the bubbles. Typically he settles down at the far end of the bar, giving me and Georgie our privacy, and gets to work writing a play based on his dramatic Irish alcoholic family. Wednesday nights are a funny at the UqBar: me and Georgie with our non-drink drinks, a scattering of olde tyme boozers, hard-drinking senior citizens whose cauliflower noses burst with gin blossom bouquets. They resent the bar’s switch from a dank townie sports bar to a hangout for bike messengers and artists with bands on the weekends. They hate change generally and change that affects their drinking in particular, but instead of scuffling over to Dapper’s or Pat’s for their watery whiskeys they keep an allegiance to a long-past time, their tired asses hugging the busted barstools, getting tanked, glaring at everyone and starting sad little fights on occasion. So there’s us, there’s them, and somewhere in the middle is William, tossing back a shot of something every so-many-pages, never complaining about the utter lack of tips because Wednesday nights leave him alone. No customers to yank him out of the flow of his story, no visits from his dad, both the owner of the establishment and the star of Willie’s play.

I felt bad bothering Willie tonight. He was so hectic, and he hates to work. His orange hair was tugged into a messy ponytail, I was jealous of the teensy breeze it must have created as it swung against his neck. I wanted a water but I didn’t want to hassle him and I didn’t want to get up and lose my seat to a looser. I sniffed at the glasses in the lineup before me. Sniff sniff, the supposed smell-less smell of vodka cut with a juice. Sniff sniff, the sickly sweet stink of gin. The glasses with a bit of syrupy brown pooled at the bottom I ignored, they were obviously whiskey dregs, or rum and cokes. This is my favorite bad game to play with myself. Sniff out an abandoned drink, do my best–my very best–to discern its contents and, sure it’s just a harmless shot of water, toss it back. A sort of Russian roulette, if you will. But I haven’t been wrong yet. As it is an obviously twisted game for a recovering drunk like myself to play, nobody in my life lets me indulge. Like a teenage girl hiding out in her bathroom with a razor, I do my secret sniffing on the rare occasions I’m alone at a bar. Georgie, wise to the fucked-up customs of my head, even goes so far as to arrive at UqBar fifteen minutes before my arrival, so I’m under her watchful stare the whole night. But I wouldn’t do it around anyone, anyway. It’s a private ritual, like nose-picking but really, really bad for you. Bad for me.

Anyway, Willie must have spotted me with my snout in a glass cause he came swaggering over, pushing through the loaf of people globbed throughout the bar, and sloshed me a nice, clean glass of water. Water bubbling pure, honest bubbles. Water hugging a green jewel of lime. Thanks, Willie I said. He clanked the empty glasses together in his huge paws, knocking the straws to the ground. Fuckin’ Crazy In Here, he bitched. Can’t Keep Up With These People. Where The Fuck They Come From? We looked around at the townies, dudes you’d more likely see throwing darts over at Dapper’s, ladies with badly bleached mops of hair and tiny terry cloth outfits; weekend regulars drinking mid-week beers–quiet indie kids sweating in their black jeans, hairspray melting on their black hairdos. And the old guys, the geezers. It’s too hot for them in here, I motioned to death row, the curve of the bar closest to the door, where they clustered like moody crows. One of them’s gonna kick it someday, I told him. Then what’ll you do? I Got Practice With That Sort Of Thing, Willie shook his ponytail. They’ll Be In Good Hands. Willie clapped me on the shoulder and I flinched. Shit, he drew back his fingers gummy with my tattoo medicine. What’s This? He tried to back up for a look and rear-ended a frat-looking kid in a tight white baseball hat. Whiteheads, me and Monica called them. Monica being my incredibly recent ex-girlfriend but you, being my diary, already know that. The whitehead started honking, like Willie was trying to freak him on the dance floor and make him a fag or something. When Willie pulled himself to his full height, hands filled with glass, the Whitehead realized he was the bartender and got friendly again. Sorry, Bro’! Can You Pour Me A Guinness?

Yeah, Willie gave a sharp nod, all the niceness sucked dry from his face. He turned back to me. We’ll Talk About That Later, Right? Holler When Georgie Shows Up, I’ll Bring Ya’s More Water. I watched him squeeze between a thick wall of flesh and disappear.

And then there was Monica. I think she’d been in the corner behind death row since I got there, but a guy who’d been hunched over the bar straightened up, and in the gap between his undershirt and the drooled-upon bar below, I saw her there and in that instant she saw me. I felt a rush of hot and cold badness, I think it was anxiety, anxiety and anger, like what the fuck was she doing in my bar, she knows me and Georgie hang out here every Wednesday, were we going to have to do that stupid fucking thing where you negotiate where and when we can and can’t go to the various bars and coffeehouses that make up our lives? I’d thought we could do better then that, thought that common sense and basic kindness would keep her out of my few regular haunts and there she was, her intensely curly hair pulled into a knot on the top of her head, sweat shining the makeup from her face. And I felt a plain swell of sadness and simple fear. The first few days of a breakup are crucial alone days. The risk of getting back together out of basic fear, neediness and habit are strong and it was my plan to avoid Monica until I was stronger then all my most pathetic inclinations.

That’s Water, I Hope? She was there before me, being little and wily and able to slink and shove her way through a crowd with relative grace. And I said, Yeah, Of Course and was annoyed that she’d think I’d be so dramatic as to get drunk over her when I was the one that ended the whole thing. I didn’t need her mothering me or framing me as some fragile alcoholic. I wondered if she’d seen me sniffing the glasses earlier. Her fingernails were painted with elaborate leopard landscapes, pink and red leopard. The tiny rhinestone on her longest pinky-nail flashed and I remembered the balls of soggy cotton she’d leave around my apartment, stinking like poison and nail polish melted into the fiber, and I felt a wash of regret. I’ll never see those cotton balls again. Unless I find one, weeks from now, under the sink in the bathroom, behind the toilet, and am made unbearably sad by it. But this is what I wanted, right? Something to feel, some sort of life, even the life of a miserable and heartsick fuckup.

Why are you here? I asked her. I know I was pouting or talking in a fight-starting voice but I couldn’t help it. It was so loud at UqBar. Willie was blaring some awful CD, real slit-your-wrist tunes, depressing Radiohead or something. The mournful keens filled the bar and still the drunk girls on the stage danced,a s if to some Britney Spears track on endless repeat in their heads. Why was Willie playing such bleak music? It was like we were all in some indie film about grim alcoholic drama and this was the soundtrack.

I Came With Tracy, Monica said, and I looked but the old drunk had resumed his face-first plunge into the bar, blocking my view. Why Are You Here? Well, I’m not drinking, I snapped defensively. I’m waiting for Georgie, like always.

Georgie’s Gone, she told me. Georgie’s Doing a Sleep Study, She’ll be Gone All Week. How do you know? I asked. I was sounding more and more like a child, but it was a downhill movement that I couldn’t quite stop. I don’t want to talk to you when you’re drunk, I told Monica, even though I did rather like her when she was drunk. She got extra silly and tended to take her clothes off in public. Well, Talk To Me Now, Then, she said, tinkling her glass. Before I Get Drunk. By the toxic green of her glass and the sweet and sour odor emanating from the rim I guessed it was a Midori melonball. A Midori melonball, I scoffed. This was stupid, this was terrible. This was why we’d broken up–a whole lot of numbness punctuated by useless bickering. Tracy’s Drinking Irish Car Bombs, she snarked, If That’s More Real For You.

Listen, I said, how did you find out Georgie’s gone, and who’s watching the bees? Georgie made part of her money renting out her body to various medical studies, and she made the other part by embarking upon short-lived entrepreneurial experiments. Currently she is keeping a hive of bees in the backyard, in hopes of starting a honey dynasty. I’m Watching Them, Monica said. Why you? I felt totally betrayed. Georgie takes off to some sleep torture and recruits Monica to baby the bees? So that means you’re going to be at the apartment all the time?

Not Yours, she said. We Won’t Have To See Each Other.

You’ll be in the yard, I accused. I’ll totally see you.

Pull The Blinds, she shrugged. Don’t Look Out The Window.

I’ll know you’re there, I said. Don’t act like it’s not a big deal.

Georgie Asked Me. Now she was whining.

I can do it, I said. It’s my fucking yard. Why don’t I just do it.

Because You Hate It, Monica said. You Hate The Bees. You’re Scared Of The Bees.

It is true that the bees stung me repeatedly last time I tried to care for them, when Georgie had gone in for a speed study, totally ruining her so-called sobriety by having medical technicians administer government-issue crystal meth straight into her veins. It is true that I almost killed the bees, much as Georgie almost killed herself, submitting to such a jackass experiment. There Was A Fifty Percent Chance That I’d Just Get The Placebo, she’d rationed. Georgie’s Russian roulette. A whole lot dumber then mine, if you asked me. But Monica, it’s true, Monica loved the bees. She was fucking Snow White with them, they buzzed around her like she was their one true queen, they let her pet the fuzz of their backs with her littlest finger.

I Don’t Know Why Georgie Didn’t Tell You, Monica went on. When Did You Last Talk To Her? And I thought and I thought and I realized that I hadn’t talked to Georgie all week. Even our usual Wednesday the week before had been cut short. Hmph, I snorted.

What’s This? Monica said, her voice a rush of alarm and surprise. I Got A Tattoo, I said proudly. Life goes on, right? Here I am, freshly tattooed, part of the flow of life itself, giving myself a little hurt, just a human, hurting. I smiled.

I Thought You’re Broke, Monica accused. She squinted at it. ‘Joy and Monstrosity.’ She paused. That’s From That Song. You Got A Tattoo Of The Song We Broke Up To. And You Have No Money.

I quit therapy, I explained. It was my therapy money. The tattooist gave me a deal. Timotha? You know her?

Monica was staring. She took a hard suck on her straw and swallowed. Her leopard nails tapped the glasses in swift little taps. You Think That’s Smart? Quitting Therapy? Quitting Therapy? Breaking Up Like This? She swallowed hard again even though her mouth was opened. She swallowed like she was going trying to swallow her very throat turn it inside-out like a crazy magician’s trick. Are You Sabotaging Your Life, Annabella?

I don’t know, I said. I really might be. We stared at each other and I saw a moat of tears flooding up behind her eyemakeup and I grabbed her wrist. She clutched her drink harder and shook me off.

Jesus, I don’t want your fucking drink! I yelled. Probably I did want her drink, but that’s not why I grabbed her wrist. I grabbed her wrist to say, you don’t want to cry here, you don’t want to cry in front of me, go back to Tracy. I didn’t grab it because I’m some sort of booze fiend with no self-control. I got a sickening flash of Monica talking to someone–her next girlfriend, maybe a boyfriend, maybe just someone we both knew together, saying, ‘Oh yeah Annabella is such an alcoholic, it’s really intense, it was so hard to be with her . . . you didn’t know? No, she has no control, it was really, really difficult’. And the new girlfriend or maybe boyfriend would hug her tight and smooth her wild curls and they would all feel safe in their lack of alcoholism, or our mutual friend would cluck and say that’s awful and the pity would slosh back and forth between them.

You Are Such An Asshole, Monica said.

This makes it easier, I said. Just hate me, then. Sure. Then there can be a bad guy, I’ll be the bad guy. And my alcoholism can be the reason and now you’ve got a whole little story to tell everyone about why we broke up. To tell yourself. Good-bye. I slurped my water. The carbonation felt violent, seared my throat, made me choke a little. Made my eyes tear up. I waved my hand. Really, I said. Go back to Tracy. You left her in the corner forever ago. This is stupid. I’m outta here. I felt dumb for having used the phrase ‘outta here’ but really I was shaking.

You Got A Tattoo Of The Last Song We Had Sex To, Monica said.

I know, it looks really bad, I said.

You Mean It Seems Crazy? she asked.

I nodded. Yeah.

Because It Looks Really Beautiful. But It Seems Really Fucked Up.

I left the bar. I slammed and shoved my way past Monica and into the mix of people. The bad sad music howled and the drunks chattered and I chucked the swinging door out into Boston and the hot hot air hit me in the face. I had nowhere to go, so I went home.

Michelle Tea is the author of Valencia, The Chelsea Whistle, and Rent Girl. She is the cofounder of the notorious all-girl poetry roadshow Sister Split, and continues to drag herself and other brave performers across the US on grueling performance-art boot camps. Born and raised in Chelsea, Massachusetts, she presently lives in San Francisco with her transboyfriend and their weird cat. Click here to read more of her work and find out about upcoming readings.

Sara Seinberg is a writer and visual artist on her way to Brooklyn by way of Boston and before that Providence and before that San Francisco. But she is very excited to finally be living by her favorite bridge in the world. she has a dog called gus and a fear of dentists.

counting love by erin mcclusky

n equals what is left

There was no way to solve for n. They had tried, but the papers had been wrong; an algebraic equation does not always yield the same result in Wisconsin as in California. In his last letter to her he went over the proofs he had done in California and she couldn’t find anything wrong with his math, but in Wisconsin the variable n came out different. She held his letter and his answer for n and knew things would have to end between them. She knew this was emptiness but she couldn’t make herself believe this was 0; the round parallel curves seemed too smug to her. She liked the resignation of 5, the swagger of 7, the lank stance of 1. He is 1, she thought. His thinness never stopped her from wanting more of him.

She knew she would have to write to him. She had found his kidney in the toe of her running shoe and she wanted to know where she should send it to or if he would rather come and get it himself. He was already missing 5 inches of intestine that he had left with his last lover and she thought he would probably want his kidney returned. When they met he told her about the missing intestine and the 2.4 grams of skin tissue gone from his thigh and the piece of rib and he asked her if she would fix him, make him whole. She was always breaking the ends of pencils and the edges of her fingernails, so she told him she couldn’t help. She thought that would be the end of him. But he sent her lists of square roots and radicals and mixed fractions and she started to bend to him. He stood outside her apartment and recited finite equations up to her window, and after a while she let him come inside, sit at her table and talk.

He told her about how he died for the first time. He fell in love with a beautiful accountant who would have nothing to do with him and his imaginary numbers. He begged and pleaded for the accountant’s love but the accountant would not have him. The accountant wanted numbers to be real, to be whole, and divisible by 2 if at all possible. Over coffee, the accountant told him their love would never make sense, that there was no sense in their going on like this. The accountant got up from the table to leave and he, in a fit of desperation, grabbed onto the accountant’s bag. He and the accountant struggled over the bag, the accountant finally yanking it from his hands. The accountant’s payroll book slid out of the bag and fell open on the ground. The shock of seeing the perfect whole numbers written neatly in rows and columns in the accountant’s even hand killed him instantly. The accountant felt bad about killing him and brought him back to life but still refused to see him. He left California and moved to Wisconsin because, he said, when you die once you want to die again.

In Wisconsin he gave 5 inches of his intestines to a nun who prayed to St. Erasmus. The saint was martyred because he spoke too often of a theory that was a loose thread which, if tugged, would unravel everything that passed for the fabric of reality. The nun who prayed to St. Erasmus believed in the saint’s brilliance and directed her prayers to an image of him next to a ship’s windlass. St. Erasmus had escaped from persecution on a ship sailed by angels and, when they saw him depicted next to the windlass, his believers thought he had been martyred by having his intestines wound like the ship’s rope around the windlass. The nun who prayed to St. Erasmus believed that St. Erasmus had come back for her and that, to maintain the image of sainthood, he imitated the saint’s wounds and pulled out 5 inches of his intestines and wound them around a spool for the nun. The nun begged him to leave her and to carry his thread into the world. So he left the convent and the nun had the 5 inches of his intestine wound on a spool placed in a reliquary.

He told her that prayers to St. Erasmus will ease abdominal pain and he said that he always thought love would be like the loops of paper that his mother taught him to twist once and tape together at the ends. He could trace the entire circuit of the paper with his pencil and the line would travel inside and outside the paper curves. His mother said that this was infinity – the ability to draw a line and not stop. The stories he told sitting at her table were like this. She didn’t need to say anything. She listened carefully and sat with him while he talked. When he was done he stopped talking and she pulled out a pad of legal paper, yellow with red lines, and they worked on proofs, silently, until they were tired. She didn’t regret bringing him into her life as long as he did not ask her a second time to fix him, to make him whole.

There was an evening when he sat down and told her that he had to leave because he did not think he would die in Wisconsin. He told her about his room in California with a bed and a 75-gallon fish tank for his two carniverous fish. He shared sushi with his fish; he ate the rice and nori and they ate the flying fish roe. He asked her to keep the things from his room in Wisconsin – there was a bed and a one-eyed toad in a jar and a one-eyed python in Tupperware under the sink. After he left, he started to send her proofs, he didn’t write about his past loves and what he had lost, the things he talked about when they sat together at her table; he only wrote numbers and variables. She went over his equations carefully and sent him new proofs and corrections. She bought a pink-toed tarantula because she started to miss him. The tarantula had two eyes and the python slid into a funk because he was envious.

He sent her a telegram like they did to announce a death in the Civil War and it said,

I always wanted STOP love to be STOP something I could keep STOPbut love is STOP nothing but water and stars STOP n equals what is left STOP Read the rest of this entry »

More Lies by Gloria Frym

Rumor has it, this woman goes through dogs. Some women go through husbands, some men go through women, some kids go through clothes, ballerinas go through toe shoes, spendthrifts go through money, overeaters go through cookies. And so forth. But this woman, this is her sixth dog in a short time. Longer, of course if you count it in dog years.

The porch gossips say, and who knows if they can be trusted, who really knows what’s what, that she might have a disease. You know the kind they feature on “60 Minutes”or “ER”. The kind that glues people to the TV because they’re horrified and compelled like they’d be at a bloody accident or a building on fire. So long as it’s not them or theirs.

Dog #1 died suddenly. Dog #2 died suddenly after a brief illness. Dog #3 died slowly after a slow illness and many vet visits. Dog #4 died some way, no one remembers. Dog #5 rolled over and died. Dog #6 is okay now but was sick as a small puppy.

The gossips are crossing their fingers. After all they live in the same vicinity. The woman says the veterinarian says that there’s something toxic in the soil in her backyard. What if there’s something toxic in all their backyards? What if her house and their houses were built over old gas stations or car repair shops? It’s hard to believe that this woman would ever let her dogs out in her backyard. Dog #6 she carries in a baby front pack because he is very little. He’s not going to get much bigger, either. But now, she says, he’s better, and she lets him move around on a leash. In fact, she walks him. So, say the gossips, and she probably never puts him outside alone. That’s why they’re suspicious.

It could be that this woman simply has bad luck with pets.

It could be that this woman makes her pets ill so she can nurse them, right up to their death.

She has no children and no husband.

The gossips say, Thank God for that.

It is very hard, given the circumstantial evidence, when one is told of such events, not to believe them. They sound so plausible, even if there is no proof. Why do they appeal to one’s instincts rather than one’s reason? Juicy bits of information about a woman who is rather nervous and neurotic, who strolls down the street with a different dog every year or so.

Goes to great lengths, far away places to buy the dogs, after long email conversations with their breeders. Always a pure-bred dog. Always from out of state. The facts start to pile up, right? Something, if one had nothing else to do, one could take to a private investigator. He’d solve it, all right.

Can you go to jail for murdering a dog? It’s a misdemeanor. The law considers dogs “chattel.” But you remember that guy who threw a dog off the freeway? That was cruelty. That got him jail time. How about murdering someone else’s dog? That would also get you jail time.

Somewhere there is something called an Animal Patrol. Not like they take animals to the pound, but they remove abused pets from homes. Kind of like Child Protective Custody Services.

Yesterday, I lied.

A good lie, told spontaneously, is a piece of art, though it makes person like me guilty. It could be addictive. It worked that well.

It all started after I’d heard about the woman with the succession of dogs. The car wouldn’t start. The battery dead, again.

The operator at triple A says, 45 minutes.

Forty five minutes, I say, oh no! I have to pick up a child!

From school or from daycare? the operator asks.

From daycare. If you’re late, they just take the kid to Child Protective Custody Services.

Oh my God, the operator says, greatly alarmed. Is that what they do these days?

Oh yes, I say, they just don’t want to wait.

In two minutes, a tow truck arrived.

So your little car won’t start, hon?

Yeah, it’s always the battery.

He did his jumping magic with great dispatch.

When I thanked him for arriving on the scene so quickly, he said, Oh, you deserve even faster service.

How could it be faster, I thought?

Of course, he said, What you deserve and what you get are two different things in this world.

Yeah, I know I said. I mean I was just laid off, I lied again.

You in the tech biz?

No, I’m a school teacher.

A teacher! For Christ’s sake, the bastards. It will come back to them. Some kid will kill a dog because nobody taught him the right way to behave.

Gloria Frym is the author of two story collections, How I Learned and Distance No Object, as well as several volumes of poetry, including By Ear, Back to Forth, Impossible Affection, and Homeless at Home. She is also the author of a book of interviews, Second Stories: Conversations with Women Artists. Since 1987, she has been a member of the core faculty of the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco. She also teaches in the MFA Program in Writing at CCAC.

Okay, A Cake Then! by Jiri Kajane translated by Kevin Phelan & Bill U’Ren

It’s late at night and I’m alone when the word reaches me that Edmond Spaho has died. For some reason, it’s news that I need to share, so I pull on a coat, lock the door, and begin the walk over to my friend Leni’s top floor apartment. He lives at the far end of the city, across the boulevard, through the park, and past the university. Although it is quite cold outside, I look forward to the long walk, the chance to breathe in the crisp night air and the opportunity to escape the oppressive walls of this empty apartment.

Preoccupied with my work at the Ministry of Slogans, I haven’t seen Leni in a good while. It has been nearly three weeks since we met at Selman Kratka’s place to toast my fortieth birthday. Against my vague protests, Leni had invited a few mutual friends, as well as some colleagues from the Ministry. It was a rather enjoyable party, although I found myself somewhat distracted by thoughts of my ex-wife Ana and how strange it was to be celebrating another birthday without her.

I head up the back stairs to Leni’s flat and knock lightly, peeking through the brown window. A rumbling sound arises from the other side of the apartment, a light appears, and then Leni emerges, his face a little distorted through the warped glass.

“Ah,” he says, motioning me in.

“Did I wake you?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbles, rubbing his eyes. “I guess.”

“I’m sorry. We can talk tomorrow.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” he insists, lighting the burner on the stove. “Cocoa?”

“Yes, please.”

We sit at the kitchen table for a while, both quietly sipping our drinks, warming up, vaguely watching the empty courtyard below. Leni casually relates his most recent efforts to further a relationship with this girl, Kosi. She seems to like him, although I suspect she’s afraid of any commitment. For weeks now Kosi has spurned his invitations, instead requiring that each of their meetings happen only by chance—no plans allowed. As a result, Leni and I have spent a lot of time devising new ways for him to circumvent this required atmosphere of happenstance. Recently, however, we’ve been running short on ideas.

“I feel like she’s figured me out,” he says.

“How so?”

“I’ve been watching the downtown area, as we discussed, and sometimes even loitering around the museum, trying to casually run into her.”

“And this hasn’t worked?”

“A couple of times, yes. But mostly, no.”

“Oh,” I say, unable to come up with the right words to allay his frustration. Then, silence. Finally, as if the thought has just occurred to him, Leni declares that we now must formulate a brand new plan, something ingenious and foolproof. Read the rest of this entry »