1900

September 24, 2021

Jennifer Moxley

1900

An old cuss in a MAGA mask
limps past me, going against
the taped arrows on the aisle
floor. I get a close-up view
of his milky eyes trying to
focus under the fluorescents,
one arthritic hand cupping
a gallon of boxed ice cream.
Before his about-face, I had felt
the need to avert my eyes
from the pink chapped skin
and butt crack visible above
the failing strap of chestnut leather
as I awaited my turn in the
cooler. Even from six feet away.
“At least he was wearing a mask,”
says Steve, admiring the human capacity
for ideological paradox, when I recount
the run-in. As I move through
the grocery store I attempt,
beneath my social timidity, to project
exasperation solely with my eyes. Like a child
who has learned that smoking is bad
and can’t help finger-wagging
at the adults. A docile New England
citizen, I usually settle for a
Horton Hears a Who! harrumph
upon reaching the safety
of the Subaru. My internalized State
is deep, good, and fair, and I cannot
bear to part with it.
Running this market gamut weekly
we enter prepared, geared up
for a surgical strike, strategy in hand.
“Generalísimo Moxley,” Steve calls me
as I grip the four-by-six grocery list
and lay out the plan of action.
We enter through the touchless doors
to face the rows of sanitized carts.
The greeter stands before a table
of masks wielding a gun of cheap
disinfectant. He’s young and deserves
to live, I think. Someone with
his same job was just shot dead
in a Michigan Dollar Store
by a man who proclaimed before
his quivering family that he
“thought this was a free country.”
My ugly “Covid clogs,”
consigned to outings but disallowed
in the house, have acquired a piece
of parking-lot grit, a test of my
“Princess and the Pea” proclivities.
But we’re more relaxed
than two months ago, since we
became less worried about “fomite
transmission.” And more people are wearing
masks. Even the old cuss, though
loyal to Trump, follows the Hannaford rules.
Then there’s the super-tan couple—
probably from away, as they call
out-of-staters in Maine. The man
is erratic and defiant, moving illogically
through the sections, crowding the space.
His mask drifts off his face
while his girlfriend negotiates
her discomfort. She gives me a
what can you do, he’s a man
smile with her eyes. Mine is two
aisles away, in the pet section,
negotiating a forty-pound box of Clump
& Seal litter, with “ultra odor
blasters.” I think of that scene in
Can You Ever Forgive Me? when the
heroine’s drinking buddy discovers
the stores of cat poop under her bed
and I experience a shiver of disgust.
A needed “aesthetic category,”
according to a celebrated scholar,
who once poured me a large glass
of wine in a plastic Star Trek cup.
Ah! the good old days of grad school,
when we had to chat up strangers
in video stores and used bookstores
in our quest to find an audience
for our cultural savoir faire.
There are still no Oscar Mayer
Selects beef franks. And no
braunschweiger, “not even for ready
money,” as my mom liked to say,
quoting Oscar Wilde. “It’s not even
available to order,” I learn from the lifer
in the meat department. That’s
the standard response these days.
There’s a full shelf of Goya products,
due to the boycott, but the Campbell’s
canned soup has been decimated.
“At least we know there’s plenty
of soup, just no cans,” says Steve,
as he heard someone say recently
on the radio news. It’s unappetizing,
I think, to eat canned soup in
the heat of summer, the slightly gummy
gelatinous warmth of too soft vegetables
in salty broth. A few tiny cubes
of chewy chicken.
What did mass-produced canned
food taste like to the women of 1900?
That’s the year my mother’s mother,
Leola Isabel Warnock Freeman,
was born. I am ashamed to admit
that until I googled and found
a photo of her tombstone on
FindAGrave.com, I had no
idea of the day or month of her birth.
March 21. It says it right there on
the flat slate grave marker,
beneath her name and death date,
August 21, 1989, seven months
before her youngest child,
my mother, would die at home
of breast cancer. To the right
of my grandmother’s name
hangs a decorative rosary in relief.
As I zoom in to get a closer look,
an ad pops up. Three photo-booth-style
images of the same Kim Kardashian
look-alike wearing a mask
with a clear window to allow
her glossy nude lip to be admired
in full pout mode. $5.99.
“The internet knows more
about my grandmother than I do,”
I tell Steve at lunch. “That’s your
first line,” he quips, as if aware I’ve started
this poem. Too late; that slot is taken.
I find a painting by her on eBay
of naked nymphs in a green arcadia.
By a “Texas Impressionist,” the seller
states, though I know she made her living
primarily doing portraits. It was smack
in the middle of the influenza epidemic,
when she left El Paso, Texas,
in order to study painting
in Philadelphia.
As a Texan, I suppose my grandmother
might have opened a can of Campbell’s
tomato soup to take the chill off
the Philadelphia winter. In 1900, Campbell’s
won a medal for “product excellence”
at the Paris Olympic Games and International Exposition.
It was the science of condensing that gave them
the edge. Perhaps this is the secret origin
of Pound’s mandate: condensare. The soup
that changed American poetry. I never
noticed the medal on the label before.
Perhaps because I buy their
Healthy Request line, which lacks
the familiar gold disk depicting
a sensuous art nouveau Victory,
flying horizontally, laurel in hand.
A male athlete, holding a torch, sits
heavily on her back, seemingly unaware
that his weight is being supported by
a goddess in diaphanous dress.
Opening plastic produce bags
without wetting one finger with your tongue
is challenging. Steve follows behind me,
preparing several bags in advance.
I hold up a bunch of green leaf lettuce,
draining the water accumulated
from the produce sprinklers
before stuffing it, curls first, into
the bag. My effort will prove ineffectual.
By the time we get home the bag
will have accumulated enough liquid
to house a goldfish. I know I’m
not supposed to overtouch produce,
but I cheat a little. When has the first peach
you reach for ever been “the one”?
In a 1961 article in the El Paso
Herald-Post profiling the Artist of the Month,
the town’s “premier portrait painter”
is described as a “slight gray-haired
grandmother.” In ’61 my grandmother
was only, well, sixty-one, just five years older
than I am now. The article makes her seem
like a sweet old lady who thinks she’s
a painter. And the title, “Worked Eight
Hours a Day Teaching Self to Paint,”
erases her formal training. That’s her
doing, according to the writer: “She
considers herself self-taught.” “People
in the West have to be self-taught
in order to be taken seriously,” says Steve.
What was my grandmother pulling? I think.
But then again, I’d never say, “I was trained
how to write poetry in school,” though
there is some truth to it.
Was my grandmother called to paint,
just as Helen Gahagan knew she was
destined for the stage? The actress,
singer, and politician was born the same
year as my grandmother, 1900, right around
the Thanksgiving holiday. By the time
of the flu pandemic she had fled
Barnard for Broadway, never to look back.
My grandmother was studying at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
when Gahagan opened at Philly’s
National Theatre in the role
of the “simple bookkeeper Paula,”
who is kind to a beleaguered haberdasher,
in the tepidly reviewed Fashions for Men.
Perhaps Lloyd Freeman, my grandmother’s
painting teacher and soon-to-be husband,
invited the pretty young Texan out to see
the new sensation, the beautiful, earnest
Helen Gahagan, and they went in spite
of the pandemic. Twenty-six years
her senior, he held her slight waist lightly,
guiding her out of the stuffy theater into
the chilly night air.
While in Philadelphia, Helen
Gahagan was also pursued by an older
man. The famous conductor Leopold
Stokowski sent her tickets to hear
his orchestra and invited her out to lunch.
She had been warned to avoid
him if she valued her reputation.
Did she value “her reputation”?
Did my grandmother value hers? A good
Catholic away from her parents
among the bohemians in a big
eastern city …
The only liquid hand soap
left is one sad bottle of Method
in “Sea Minerals” scent.
The plastic bleachers designed
to hold the hand soaps are as empty
as the nation’s performing arts venues.
Apparently I’m not the only one
who dislikes Sea Minerals.
What is a sea mineral anyway?
Salt? Except in the kitchen
I prefer bar soap, though not
the melty frozen-orange-juice-colored
Dial I grew up with, but triple-milled
hard soaps that smell like goats.
My mother had a pet
goat named Gwendolyn whom
she spoke of with far more fondness
than she ever did of her mother.
What kind of child doesn’t love
her mother? “Such a child wouldn’t
be a child at all, but a monster.” This
is the conclusion the young
Nathalie Sarraute arrives at
in her memoir of childhood,
Enfance. First there’s the betrayal:
She finds a doll in a shop window
more beautiful than her mother.
Then there’s the naivete: She
tells her mother of the aesthetic
judgment. Instead of understanding,
the mother abstracts the young Nathalie
with a quip: “A child who loves
her mother finds no one more
beautiful than she.” I’m just a child,
among others, Nathalie thinks, a real
child loves her mother …
Sarraute, who lived to be ninety-nine,
was born in Russia in 1900, though
she sometimes fibbed and gave the date
as 1902. While influenza was raging,
she attended three universities,
the Sorbonne, Oxford, and the
University of Berlin. She studied
English, history, and philosophy
before becoming a lawyer and
then one of the most celebrated
writers of the nouveau roman.
Though they shared a birth year
and a century, I doubt my grandmother
ever read Sarraute. But she did like to read,
or so I surmise from a lost-world
tidbit my own mother shared in a 1989 letter.
She had just bought a copy of
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
at Price Club and offered to send
it to Providence after she was finished
reading it, if it was good (it was):
“My mother and I used to mail books
back and forth,” she wrote, “book rate,
which at that time was about 68¢
a pound and consequently
cheaper than buying the books on
both coasts.” Sarraute’s legendary
first book, Tropismes, was published
in France in 1939 but wouldn’t
be available in English until 1963,
translated by Maria Jolas and
published by John Calder. My
grandmother could speak Spanish,
but I don’t think she ever knew
French.
What magical time
was my mother referring to when
she was on such good terms with
my grandmother that they shared
bestsellers through the U.S. mail?
What “coasts” did she mean to
evoke, given that my grandmother
lived in El Paso, deserts away
from any ocean?
Three years after publishing
her first novel, Sarraute, who was
Jewish, refused to wear the yellow
felt star she was issued. She went
to the countryside and pretended
to be the governess of her own
children. According to the
Jewish Women’s Archive, although
Sarraute’s writing “deals neither
with the matter of being Jewish,
nor with antisemitism,” in its impulse
it counters “every sort of racism,
terrorism and tyranny.”
“She makes no apologies for
practicing a branch of art some artists
depreciate,” wrote the journalist about
my grandmother. According to her,
portrait painters “must be able to project
… into the personality of the sitter,
thinking and feeling as the sitter thinks
and feels.” A devout Catholic, my
grandmother spent many of her
later years living itinerantly. She
volunteered in orphanages
in Mexico. How do I know this?
After I was about eleven years old
I was never allowed to see
my grandmother, because
during one of her rare visits
she made the mistake of trying
to take me and my brothers to
Mass and was banned from
our house for good.
I feel so much trepidation
as I approach the popcorn section
in the snack aisle and see
a gaping hole. On bended knee
I peer into the void. To my relief,
there in the shadows I spy
a last remaining jar of Orville
Redenbacher’s Original yellow.
I feel a sense of triumph mixed
with a slight twinge of petulant
selfishness. During the first
few months of the pandemic,
this sort of last-one-on-the-shelf
experience made me panicky.
But I had to admit, when I
looked around, that though
some things were sold out,
the supermarket was still
full of food.
Saved from Leopold Stokowski’s
seduction, Helen Gahagan met
her husband, the future Hollywood
leading man Melvyn Douglas,
when they costarred in the play
Tonight or Never in 1930, the year
Lloyd Freeman, my grandfather,
succumbed to double pneumonia,
leaving Leola a widow with
four little kids. He died
twenty-nine days after his wife’s
thirtieth birthday, six months after
the stock market crash and the birth
of my mother, his last child.
Following his funeral my grandmother
was forced to return to El Paso to live
with her aging parents.
Marrying Melvyn Douglas
sounded the death knell of Helen
Gahagan’s Broadway career. But
she continued to train as an opera
singer. After a smashing tour
of Europe, she was signed
to sing Tosca in the 1938 season
of the Vienna Opera Company.
A dream of a lifetime, which
abruptly ended when an English
music critic took her into
his confidence: “Aryans such as we
have a duty to defend the superior
race against Jews,” he said. Helen
ripped up her contract and returned
to Los Angeles. Soon after, the
thirty-eight-year-old became
pregnant with her and Melvyn’s
second child.
There are no wipes of any kind
to be found on the shelves at Hannaford.
“Our entire childhood,” I say to Steve,
“we managed to live without any form
of disinfecting wipe.” The year
the women born in 1900 turned
thirty-one, the Scott Paper Company
introduced the paper towel roll,
expressly for the kitchen. It is doubtful
my newly widowed grandmother
paid any attention. Housewives,
I read on another website,
“had a hard time grasping
the concept of towels you
don’t have to wash.”
The subject line in the email
from eBay reads: “Leola Freeman Texas …
still of interest?” Yes, I think,
filled with regret. Why did I accept
without question my mother’s moratorium
on this woman? My childhood, like that
of many white Californians,
was blissfully free of extended
family. On my left hand I wear
a ring engraved with the initials
w. j .w. to j. c. s.: William Joseph
Warnock to Josephine Cecilia Sheley.
These, I can reconstruct from the
record, were the parents of my
grandmother.
I assume that Josephine Cecilia,
called “Mama Jo” by my mother,
helped her widowed daughter
to raise her four kids. I picture
my grandmother’s relationship
with my mother as being almost that
of an older and a younger sister.
In the mid-forties Helen Gahagan Douglas
enrolled her children in boarding school
and threw herself into politics,
mentored by Eleanor Roosevelt.
There’s not one single box
of Uncle Ben’s Long Grain &
Wild Rice Original Recipe
on the shelf. No rice of any kind.
I’ve eaten Uncle Ben’s since I
was a child without much thinking
about the way “Uncle Ben” echoes
Uncle Tom from Beecher Stowe’s
novel, which is why the company
has since changed the name to
just plain “Ben’s.” Sarraute knew
Stowe’s book in a children’s edition
when she was growing up in Russia
and Paris as La Case de l’oncle Tom.
Her copy, she tells us in
Enfance, was soaked through
with tears. I’m baffled by the
hoarding of rice. I thought potatoes
were the American carbohydrate
of choice. But rice is cheap
and lasts forever.
As a congresswoman,
Helen Gahagan Douglas represented
the fourteenth district in Los Angeles,
with a large African American
population. “I just love the
Negro people!” she once said
ham-fistedly at a Black church
while on the campaign trail.
This was the “love” that Richard Nixon
would use to destroy her career.
When he ran against her for the
California Senate seat in 1950,
his campaign mail-bombed the
white suburbs with a flyer
claiming to be from the
“Communist League
of Negro Women” in support
of her candidacy. That there
was no such organization
made no difference once
he’d stoked white fears.
There’s no Land O’Lakes
white American cheese in the
cooler, only Kraft, which is
thinner and more plasticky.
And “Mia,” the Native woman
on Land O’Lakes products, is
also MIA, removed out of
cultural sensitivity, though
she had been redrawn in 1954
by Ojibwe artist Patrick DesJarlait.
I grab some Philadelphia Cream
Cheese and a block of jalepeño jack.
Strangely, there’s no shortage of
cheese, but the buttermilk
is gutted. It must have something
to do with the mania for baking
that has overtaken the nation,
the comfort of pancakes
and warm dough.
Was my grandmother
domestic? There are no recipes
of hers among those in my mother’s
cookbook. In photos she’s thin
and elegant, posing behind a camera
or in front of an easel. In the fifties
she built a beautiful adobe studio
on South Concepcion Avenue in El Paso.
The inside was spare and neatly
kept. A pigskin chair, the torso
of a woman, a Mexican blanket
and water pitcher. By this time
she’d remarried, to a watercolorist
named McElroy whom my mother
rarely mentioned. Was my
grandmother sexually satisfied?
The last forty years of Helen
Gahagan Douglas’s marriage
were sexless. Melvyn wanted
to stay together but continue
to have affairs. It’s rumored
that Helen had some sort of
dalliance with LBJ. Nathalie
Sarraute outlived her slightly
younger husband, whom she’d
met in law school, by fourteen years.
I no longer need to frequent
either the Family Planning
or Feminine Hygiene sections
of the supermarket. Who came
up with these euphemisms?
After moving obediently from
one Twister-like red floor sticker
to the next, Steve and I finally
make it to the checkout. The
small woman with buck teeth
and a mustache who has worked
at Hannaford for as long as I can
remember looks like a welder
behind her face shield. She can’t
hear a word we say. Out of habit
she reaches around the plexiglass barrier
and hands me the paper receipt.
It is the year 2020
in the time of Covid. Nobody born
in 1900 is still alive. Helen Gahagan
Douglas died of breast cancer
in 1980, my grandmother of
Alzheimer’s in 1989. An African American
woman named Denilla cared
for her in her final years.
My mother, on a rare trip to visit,
had come to know this caregiver.
“Mother loved hearing Denilla’s voice,”
she wrote to me. “At times I
felt that it was the one thing
anchoring her mind to reality.”
Nathalie Sarraute
would live until two months
before the start of this century,
writing her memoir of childhood
in her eighties and publishing
up to the end.
I want to live to be
as old as my grandmother,
I think to myself, and stay as lucid
as Nathalie Sarraute. I remove
my mask once we’re safely
back inside the car. I wonder
how many hours the women
of 1900 spent on trains?
I wipe the soil, made by the fog
of my trapped breath, off
my fragile glasses. Steve helps
himself to a healthy pump
of Purell, takes a deep breath,
and starts up the car.

Uncategorized, Works

The Drama Club

July 1, 2019

Elisa Guidotti

The Drama Club

If you’re looking for the kids, and it’s a Friday afternoon during the school term, look no further than the theater down Risorgimento Martyrs Street, close to the on-ramp to the highway leading to Rome. Rain or shine, ninety-four pages left to study for a biology test on Monday or not, they will be sitting in the orchestra anywhere between the first and the fifth row, and always at the center, of course, because that’s where they can get the best view of the stage, even though some of them will actually have their backs turned to it and their gaze directed toward their friends. After all, no play has ever been performed here, no actor has ever stepped onto this stage to enthrall an audience with his interpretation of Hamlet, so the five kids might as well watch the dramas unfolding among themselves. One day the girl with indigo streaks in her hair laments the tragic loss of her most beloved book to a leak in the ceiling, her voice sonorous, her gesticulation wild, while a ray of the setting sun spotlights the fierceness of her expression. Another day the boy with an American-sounding nickname remonstrates about the frequent (and never announced) cancellation of the buses heading to the capital, and his monologue is echoed by a chorus of “Yeah,” “I know, right?” and “Fuck this town” that fades out as the sunlight dims. Some days, instead, it’s a screen that captures their attention, and they all cluster around the kid holding the phone and laugh at a comedy sketch, saying “That’s you” every time a character acts just like one of them. The “you” chuckles the loudest and agrees. “That’s me.”

To be fair, the kids do not always remain sprawled on the tiers. There are afternoons when they climb over the brick parapet into the boxes like restless monkeys, others when they roam about the building in stunned silence, taking in the geometric pattern of the truss upholding the paneled roof, staring at the scaffolding towering at the back of the stage. Like foreign tourists visiting the Colosseum and trying to imagine what it looked like in the past, the kids try to imagine what the theater would look like in the future. Rows of velvet chairs, a purple curtain dropping from the ceiling to brush against the wooden floor of the stage, the walls painted gold and the pillars a veined white to look like marble columns—the kids’ vision is detailed, and faithful to the digital rendering of the theater, a masterwork of 3-D virtual design at which they marveled when the project was first announced. That was six years ago. The kids were only ten back then, yet they won’t forget what they were promised. Children never do.

Picture this: with a seating capacity of 426, the Lavinium Theater was set to be the largest venue in the whole province of Rome, Rome itself excluded. Companies would come from all over the country to perform Shakespeare, Pirandello, and their own original pieces on its brand-new stage, and the townspeople would have the privilege of being the first audience to see productions that would go on to win national acclaim. Moreover, the theater would open its doors to schoolchildren in the morning, and to teenagers in the afternoon, so that the youth of the town could have “a place to gather, to play, to make art.” Now, you must understand that the kids have watched dozens of American movies in their lives, and that these movies have led them to entertain the belief that anything can happen at a drama club. The high school jock discovers a burning passion for singing. The shy science nerd overcomes her fears and delivers a performance to remember. Two star-crossed lovers share their first kiss behind the backcloth on opening night, while even the most austere parents tear up with pride and jump from their seats clapping after the final act. So you can imagine the kids’ excitement at the prospect of a plot of uncultivated land being transformed into a framework of pillars and crossbeams, how that excitement simmered as the months passed and the building rose in front of their eyes, all while the kids’ bodies, too, transformed, getting taller by the day, and growing hairs and breasts where there once were only glabrous, flat surfaces. Glancing at the sign posted at the entrance to the construction site, the kids did the math: the works would be complete by the time they turned fourteen, just in time for them to live their high school years to the fullest. It was perfect. Almost too good to be true.

In fact, according to the kids’ parents, it was never true. Didn’t the kids know how things worked in Italy? The owner of the construction company must have been a friend of a friend of whoever allocated the money for the theater. Anyone who took the trouble to do a little digging would soon have found out that some guy high up in government had gotten himself a penthouse overlooking the Tiber before the ink of his signature had dried on the project approval document. The building was never meant to be finished. Only to be paid for. “Don’t hold your breath, kids, or you’ll choke.” For a while the parents groused at such squandering of public money, but one can harbor such an emotion for only so long before it becomes wearying and trite. Wasn’t there a hint of satisfaction in their voices when they said “I told you so” after the workers stopped coming to the construction yard? Yet the kids, being pigheaded, as kids are, didn’t believe them. They couldn’t fathom how the workers could simply walk out on a building they’d labored so hard to raise, how they could be so indifferent after they’d sweated off fat and health to lay the foundation, brick upon brick. Years have gone by, but the kids still await the workers’ return. In the meantime, they take what they can get and claim their seats in the closed-off construction site. After all, they technically own the place.

This is what the indigo girl said to the girl with freckles on the day they first contemplated breaking into the theater: “It’s technically ours, you know.” The freckled girl frowned. Though the sign clearly stated KEEP OUT, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, she knew that didn’t mean them. But the indigo girl has always had a flair for rhetoric, more so since they studied Aristotle at school. “Hear me out,” she said. The theater was paid for with public money. Public money comes from taxes. The kids’ parents pay taxes. What the kids’ parents pay for belongs to the parents. What belongs to the parents belongs to the kids. Therefore, the theater belongs to the kids. It was a simple syllogism, its conclusion as elementary to the indigo girl as the fact that being human makes us mortal. Without further dispute, the freckled girl followed the others inside. It wasn’t like there was anywhere else they could go anyway.

When they were younger, they had other places. They could spend time in one of the playgrounds scattered around town, but now the swings creak as soon as the kids rest their butts on the seats, and elementary school children pout and glower at them. Next to each playground, even the dogs have their own parks. The kids used to have a bar where they hung out, but it has gone out of business, while the other bars are thronged with retirees playing scala quaranta from morning till dusk. Nor do the kids wish to cross paths with the other dreamers in town, the middle-aged men and women who look up at the TV screen calling lottery numbers and have faith that the next time will be the one, just wait and see, can you imagine how many things you can buy with six million euros? “Play these numbers, Anto’, quick, only fifteen seconds left before the draw.”

What about the main square? you might ask. Sure, it would be the perfect place to hang out, if only people didn’t die every other day, and mourners didn’t pour out of the church into the square, drowning out the kids’ laughter with their weeping, shaming the girls’ shrill voices into silence with their muttered condolences. And the streets? A parade of shops that have succumbed to the economic crisis, closed shutters and empty windows everywhere, sidewalks like paths through a graveyard—you’ll agree that it makes a gloomy backdrop for a stroll. Can’t they just meet in one of the kids’ apartments, then? Where? In the bedrooms they share with their elder siblings, grumpy old men at the age of twenty-eight, their degrees gathering dust on the wall while they scrape together money with temporary nighttime jobs? Or do you mean in the living rooms, where their laid-off parents pretend to watch TV from the couch while eavesdropping on the kids’ every conversation, unfailingly offering unsolicited advice as a substitute for the allowance they don’t always pay? No, it won’t do, so let the kids embark on the little adventure of sneaking through the holes in the fence and working their way through the weeds. What’s the harm in it, really? Let them have this, at least.

Look at them, how skillfully and dauntlessly they climb the scaffolding to reach the highest point—you’d think they were five Quasimodos, grown up amid pillars as naked as fleshless bones, well versed in hiding their luminous pimply faces from people in the streets. Look how cozily they sit there on the tiers, feasting on barbecue potato chips and Coke, listening to Drake, Imagine Dragons, and De André from a Bluetooth speaker, confident that the music will be drowned out by the noise of passing cars. When the indigo girl is in charge of the soundtrack, you might hear Broadway cast recordings playing on repeat. Lately she’s gotten into Dear Evan Hansen, and she takes the stage to prove to the others that she’d be a perfect Zoe, given half a chance. “We only need three more people to have the full cast. We can rehearse here. Come on, it’ll be fun.” She’s bought a book about the show, with photos and interviews with the cast. She’s listened to the album countless times. She’s seen pictures and videos posted on the official Twitter and YouTube sites for the musical, and every morning at breakfast she watches the stories of the actors and understudies on Instagram. “Trust me, it’ll be as good as the real thing.” The “American” boy is intrigued. He wants to be a millionaire, and you’ve got to start somewhere. His rags-to-riches story might take off from playing the lead in an amateur production. Who knows? He can see the headlines already: FROM THE PROJECTS IN THE PONTINE MARSHES TO A SEVEN-BEDROOM VILLA IN HOLLYWOOD. Like Jim Carrey and Jessica Chastain. Like Emma Stone in La La Land. He wants to buy his parents a house, where his father will finally have a big kitchen with the one-thousand-euro food processor he’s always said he wants before he dies. “Yeah, you’re right. Let’s do this, guys.”

Unlucky for them, not all the kids are moved by such lofty aspirations. The freckled girl has grown to like the theater well enough, but only in the most concrete sense of the word. She might concede that the building, seemingly stable and already roofed, does its job as a shelter from the rain. However, becoming a star is not in her plans, which involve studying environmental engineering and being a brain drainee in Australia. When it comes to the hulking boy and the girl with a henna tattoo, on the other hand, I guess you could call their ambitions “artistic” if you consider love to be a form of art. A painting or a poem is seldom interesting when it’s uncomplicated and its meaning transparent. Similarly, it would be too straightforward and easy for these two smitten kids to simply ask each other out, so instead they give each other fleeting glances and faint smiles, their lips quivering, their fingers itching to reach out and touch the other’s skin.

“Who the fuck did this shit?”

Clearly the indigo girl doesn’t like what she’s seeing today. And how could you blame her? On the parapet of the boxes, on the right side, some graffiti has cropped up, and nothing about it would lead them to think that the tagger might turn out to be the next Banksy. BITCHES CAN SUCK MY DICK, accompanied by an unambiguously phallic drawing. The hulking boy blushes and averts his eyes. The indigo girl is outraged at the desecration of the venue and googles “how to remove graffiti,” only to learn that she can’t simply scrub it off with bleach and water. The daub is there to stay. Gone is the confidence that when the workers come back, they will find everything exactly as they left it. The end has begun, thanks to what the indigo girl calls “a jerk with no regard for public property.” In her eyes, the graffiti counts as an act of self-sabotage. The freckled girl tells her not to fret too much about it. After all, isn’t this kind of like the beginning of In the Heights? (The musical was the indigo girl’s favorite a couple of months ago, and the kids all know the plot and the songs by heart at this point.) The indigo girl hesitates but eventually agrees, and as they walk home later tonight, the kids will feel a bit like the protagonists of In the Heights, torn between their yearning to leave this godforsaken town and their dogged determination to save it.

The henna girl already has a project in store, its blueprint mapped out down to the tiniest detail in her mind. She’s going to redeem what used to be their favorite bar by turning it into a board-game pub where a fusion of Italian food and Chinese, Romanian, Pakistani, and Ecuadoran dishes will be served. When someone expresses doubt that she’ll succeed, she says “Watch me” and smiles a knowing
smile. Little does she know, however, that she’ll be the first one to leave, and that her departure won’t be a glorious flight to Berlin or Shanghai or New York but merely a relocation to another lousy hole after her mother’s employer presents her with a simple choice: either she moves her whole family to the North or she loses her job. What good would it do the henna girl’s mother to say that it makes no difference where her ass is sitting—whether in the office here or in another branch in the North—since all she does at work is exchange emails with co-workers in India and Poland and oversee contracts negotiated on the Internet? She keeps quiet and holds on tight to the family’s only source of income. She agrees to go. The henna girl must go with her.

Farewell, native home. Farewell, ye mountains of trash at the side of the roads, ye school nicknamed Alcatraz, which now sounds like a term of endearment instilling tenderness in the girl’s heart. Farewell, hulking boy, who on the last day almost shies away from hugging the henna girl, though eventually they’re in each other’s arms, and the warmth of their bodies feeds their imagination about what they could have had: timid kisses in the privacy of the backstage, hands held in a mild PDA, and, who knows, perhaps even undressing to expose the flesh and find out what happens after a lovemaking scene fades to black. All they say before the henna girl leaves is “Let’s keep in touch.” But “touch” is a treacherous word, because touching is what they won’t be doing when they text and group-Skype, and the promises made online—”Of course I’ll come to visit you all!”—are never fulfilled, either because of the high price of the train tickets or because it is onerous to lead a double life, split between reality and what-ifs. And this is what the hulking boy’s reality will look like: though anatomy books will offer him some knowledge of women during his time in med school, he won’t be able to fathom how his own body could ever perform the biological functions that the books so accurately describe; he will never quite think of himself as a suitable protagonist for a rom-com, and even when he falls in love again at the age of twenty-seven, he will dawdle in the first act for far too long, held back by his fear of attachment, his fear of loss, the chance that his desires might never be satisfied.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The kids are still sixteen years old and still sitting in the orchestra, though there’s only three of them now. It’s been a few weeks since the last time the hulking boy joined them, and they already think of two months ago as “back in the old days,” which is what their grandparents say when they talk about the postwar years and the economic boom. None of them speaks of the theater being finished anymore. Perhaps they worry that they’d jinx their wishes if they voiced them, so instead they discuss what happened this morning at school, and to say “Fingers crossed that Mrs. Narducci won’t test me next week” is as much as they dare to hope out loud.

The theater is now littered with smashed beer bottles and cigarette butts. Graffiti has mushroomed all around the building, even in places where the kids haven’t been brave enough to venture. “Pigs,” the indigo girl mutters, booting a can of Red Bull and sending it bouncing down the tiers toward the stage. The freckled girl glances at it but doesn’t move. She used to pick up the trash, but lately it’s started to feel like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. Whatever, the workers will clean up. If they ever come back. In the meantime, the “pigs” serve the role of common enemy, which history has proved time and again to constitute the most resistant of social glues. The kids fantasize about catching the hooligans red-handed, as the saying goes, their hands in this case literally red with spray paint. The indigo girl imagines a scenario à la West Side Story, with the two gangs of kids glaring at one another, not foreseeing that it’ll be the American boy she’ll have to face one day to save this place from destruction.

When the day comes, she screams at him to stop while he punches the walls and kicks the pillars, as though he is trying to tear the building down with his blows. His knuckles are bleeding. His eyes are red from crying, and all they see now, when they look at the theater, is six million euros’ worth of waste. How many things can you buy with six million euros? Loads of food and clothes and infinite months of rent and bills. A man’s life—the American boy’s father’s, who three days ago hung himself outside of the factory where he used to work, because he couldn’t bear not being able to provide for his children, as any good father is supposed to do. How expensive hopes can be, and what’s the use of a half-finished theater, anyway? The American boy climbs the scaffolding in a fury, aiming for the top. The two girls go after him, terrified that he might decide to follow his father and jump off, but he only wants to feel the strength of his muscles, to make sure that a heart is still pounding in his ribcage. “Leave me alone!” he shouts when the indigo girl grabs him by the arm, and after he shoves her away, she falters backwards and bumps against the freckled girl, who slips off the platform and falls onto the stage.

Something cracks when she touches the ground. Perhaps a femur. Perhaps her spine. The freckled girl’s thoughts are too fuzzy to make an accurate assessment, though she can see with clarity that her friends are climbing down toward her, and when the indigo girl yells “I’m calling an ambulance!” she’s keenly aware of what this means. The town will find out that the kids have been trespassing on the construction site. Parents will worry that their foolhardy children will be the next to come back home with a fractured bone, or to not come back home at all. Concerned citizens will rally to demand the razing of the building, and in a few months, when municipal elections are held, the demolition of the Lavinium Theater will be among the campaign promises on every candidate’s leaflet, and perhaps the easiest one for the future mayor to keep. What an unhappy ending for the kids, right? And yet, if you look closely, you will see that the freckled girl is actually smiling. The demolition company her father works for has not been doing too well lately. He’ll be glad to hear that there’s business coming their way.

Works

Chorus Line

July 1, 2019

Daisy Fried

Chorus Line

After she handwashed
in a mint green pail
eleven pairs
of black tights
then hung them
on the PVC clothesline
out back, she found
the early evening
air grew too
chilly so went
in to read more
Middlemarch
on her Kindle
though her currently
difficult husband
was also within,
“divided between
the impulse to
laugh aloud
and the equally
unseasonable
impulse to burst
into scornful
invective,” and so
from the corner
of her eye she
didn’t notice beyond
the window
four deflated legs
twining into helixes
while others kicked
out at the too close
cement block wall,
risking catching
and tearing holes in
their nylon silk blend.

Uncategorized, Works

A Monkey Thing

July 1, 2019

Daisy Fried

A Monkey Thing

Inside the plate glass window, I’m putting my whites in, and bleach, and my denims, and lights, darks, and hots and handwashes, when the tourbus grinds to the curb outside to drop the teenage Southwest Drum and Bugle Corps at Clean Laundry, South Philly. There it idles, its slab sides silver, decaled script and musical notes America-colored. The kids debark pell-mell and fill, apologetically, the aisle between the washers and dryers, politely vying to put loads in, bonking their duffels to the ground, pausing confused at the change machine chucking chains of quarters into their hands and the little basin. They excavate Tide pods their moms left like chocolates in their bag bottoms. One drops to the floor, I pick it up, in my hand it has the weight and flex of a small testicle. I hand it back.

I’m invisible as air in the interstices of their conversation. Caden, Corie, Braden, Jordan, Jaden or Jerry from Albuquerque or Pasadena made some mistake at last night’s armory showcase, so they didn’t win, but gave it their all, made strides and their best effort, they’ll shake it off and, next year, nail it. Are we going to see Suicide Squad this afternoon, a teen girl says to a boy group the aisle’s full of. They lean at her with meaty lurches, swig from water bottles they unclip from belt loops and knapsacks.

But one kid’s saying how this creepy teacher, he hits on girl students like all the time, it’s gross … Does it matter? Does it? In this light, matter? “Sorry, I’m a teacher,” I say, “and a mom, and that shouldn’t be happening. You should tell somebody in authority.” They nod, shrug, turn to their affairs.

It’s interesting, being invisible, watching myself utterly unwatched.

Sixteen, I said to the volleyball player, 28, from my co-ed all-ages JCC team, who flirted and drove me home after practice, “do you want to fool around?”

“Sounds nice,” he said, never touching me, waiting for me to get out of the car, never offered to drive me home again. I heard he died young, though he lives in my mind today, with his bald spot, hard spike, already fattening belly.

If you get up early, in Paris, and walk to the zoo so you get in just as it opens, pay your way in, pass the other dispiriting exhibits, with the cud chewers, their tongues hanging out, and the sadness of thick-tailed leopards in cramped tiny jungle spaces, barely able to prowl down a hill; and ignoring the shitty peacocks, displaying their iridescent astonishments to no one who cares, with stressful screams like babies in pain; then you might round a corner—if you’re early enough—to see the baboons come out, like clowns from an improbable car, released fighting from their unknowable indoor pens to the outdoor space along the artificial rockface where they spend their daytimes. And your baby girl, a perpetual warm lump in your arms, extends her arms toward them.

They were quiet all night, you believe, and if not free now, freer, and they flash, swing, jump, chatter, and shriek at each other. They’re so killingly angry. Why don’t they kill each other? There are so many of them, how could they fit inside wherever they are, nights, and do they hate? Is hate a monkey thing? Is anger a constant baboon state, or is it the tiniest opportunity in the suggestion of breeze on the outdoor air that changes things? It’s like an energy, electric, transferring beast to beast to beast, any dissipation barely noticeable at first but there’s an eventual stilling until, bored, they settle down to watch themselves watched.

How inexperienced I am. How inexperienced I still am.

Works

Kennedy

July 1, 2019

Kevin Wilson’s “Kennedy,” first published in Subtropics Issue 27: Spring/Summer 2019, was included in Best American Short Stories 2020.

Kevin Wilson

Kennedy

John F. Kennedy was a boy in our high school, but he went by Kennedy. For a brief time, he made things pretty bad for us. We’d started our junior year without ever having exchanged a single word with him, had only seen him as he stalked the hallways, his long, greasy hair covering his face, his Coke-bottle glasses. He always wore this olive green military jacket with the name KENNEDY stitched across the right breast. Underneath that, he seemed to have every single Cannibal Corpse T-shirt in existence, a never-ending parade of skeletons and knives and blood and people with the skin ripped off their faces. He wasn’t allowed to wear the T-shirts at school, since they were against the dress code, so he wore the jacket over them, even when it was hot out, and if he sensed your weakness, he’d open his jacket and flash the T-shirt at you as he passed you in the hallway.

Ben and I were best friends, each other’s only friend, really. There were other people we liked fine enough, and sometimes we’d hang out, but Ben and I were constant. I liked the steadiness of his friendship, that if I ever reached out into the darkness, he would be there. We had known each other since we were six years old, when his family had moved here to Coalfield from Seattle because his dad taught sociology at the tiny liberal arts college in town. Ben was the only Japanese kid in Coalfield, though there were some Chinese kids who were adopted and a Korean family who ran a Chinese restaurant. He wrote experimental poetry, had won a national contest for high school kids the year before. I was just a regular kid, pretty smart, but I’d been protected by my parents, which had left me without street smarts, with no sense of how to navigate high school. My parents still kissed me on the lips, and when they hugged me, it was always for slightly longer than I wanted it to be. We played bridge after dinner, my parents and I and my younger sister; we listened to Simon and Garfunkel records, my mom singing along. The idea of going to a party, or the football game on Friday nights, never would have occurred to me or Ben. We hunkered down, made our own happiness, and hoped that maybe we’d figure things out by the time we left Coalfield and went off to college.

Kennedy ended up in our art class in our junior year. The room was some kind of converted garage, cement floors splattered with paint, and there were all these huge, heavy tables, where we sat on stools while the teacher, Mrs. Banks, lounged on a recliner in the corner of the room because her back was messed up. She barked out instructions, and we’d follow them to the best of our abilities. On the first day of classes, a minute after the late bell rang, Kennedy skulked over to the table where Ben and I were sitting and threw his backpack down so hard that it flew across the table’s surface and hit Ben’s arm. Ben took the pain without complaint. And maybe that was all Kennedy needed, that certainty that he could hurt us and we’d never tell.

Our first assignment was to do a figure drawing from this little twelve-inch wooden mannequin. Ben was pretty good at it, had always been a decent artist, and had sketched out a pretty perfect representation, but I was having trouble with it, couldn’t make the individual parts of the figure come together. Kennedy just took a graphite pencil and pressed it so hard to the paper that it nearly ripped it apart. He drew the most basic stick figure and then drew X’s where the eyes would be. “Look at this shit,” he said to me, but I tried to ignore him, still trying to get my drawing right. He suddenly punched me in the arm so hard that I gasped. “Look,” he said. Even though he was so greasy, so scuzzy, his skin was perfect and pale, not a mark of acne. His eyes looked wavy beneath the thick lenses of his glasses, but they were an intense blue.

I looked down at the drawing, the dead figure. “Yeah, OK,” I said. I went back to my own drawing. “That’s you,” he said. I just shrugged. Mrs. Banks was far away from us, maybe asleep. I stood up. “I need to get some water,” I said, and walked to the drinking fountain in the hallway, where I took a long, sustained sip. I could feel my face burning with the fear of what Kennedy might do to me, and I took several deep breaths. When I got back, Ben was staring at me with this look of alarm, like he was trying to silently warn me of some impending doom. I sat back down and
looked at my drawing. A huge, cartoonish dick had been appended to my figure. “Oh, man,” I said, looking at Kennedy, who was completely focused on his own drawing, acting like he had no idea what was going on. “C’mon, Kennedy. Please.”

“What?” he said. “Oh, wow, look at that. You like huge cocks, I guess? You look like you love big dicks.”

I tried to erase the dick, but even after I’d rubbed and rubbed, the outline was still visible on the paper. So I flipped to the next sheet of the pad and started over. While I drew, Kennedy leaned toward Ben and slapped his arm. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, you, Nip. What’s your name?”

“Ben,” Ben whispered.

“Hey, Ben,” Kennedy said. “You see that guy over there?”

I couldn’t help but look, too, and we turned to see Eric Murdock at one of the far tables. He had a full mustache and was wearing a tank top.

“That guy has a huge dick,” Kennedy said. “I saw it in the locker room. Twelve inches, probably.”

“OK,” Ben said.

“And he’s a virgin. Can’t get a girl to fuck him. Hey!” He punched Ben’s arm. “What do you think about that?”

“Nothing,” Ben said.

“What’s his name?” Kennedy asked Ben, pointing at me.

“Jamie,” Ben said.

“What about you, shithead?” Kennedy asked me.

“Well,” I said, “maybe girls don’t want to have sex with a twelve-inch penis.”

“I know a lot of girls who would like to bounce around on that thing,” Kennedy said. “Older girls. Women.”

When it became clear to Kennedy that we weren’t going to give him anything of substance, he started drawing devil horns and a tail on his stick figure and pentagrams dancing around its head. He didn’t talk to us again, like we didn’t exist, like he hadn’t punched both of us so goddamned hard, talked about huge dicks. Ben and I were grateful for the reprieve. We thought maybe that would be the end of things, that Kennedy would move on and we’d be safe.

After school, I drove Ben to his house in my hand-me-down Chevy Cavalier and we stumbled inside. We hadn’t said a word about Kennedy for the entire drive, partly because we didn’t know what to say, how we could talk about him without saying the word “dick” a bunch of times. We’d already done all of our homework during study hall, the work easy because it was only the first day, and so we ran past his mom, who translated poetry and complicated technical manuals from Japanese into English, and closed the door to his room. We decided to go old-school, put Contra in the Nintendo, eschewing the secret code that would have let us gain unlimited lives, and worked ourselves into a state of complete numbness, our eyes glazed over, like we’d plugged our brains into a machine and, in return for our full attention, it had made us happy, our bodies ice cold.

We were both obsessed with video games. We spent every dollar of our allowances on new games, and because we shared everything, we could buy twice as many. Ben had a Nintendo and a Super Nintendo, an old Atari 2600, plus a
Game Boy and even a Game Gear. I had the two Nintendo systems, plus a Sega Genesis and a Sega Master System. We would play for hours; sometimes I’d play until my hands were paralyzed, until I could no longer bend my fingers, and I would simply hand the controller, mid-game, to Ben, who would pick it up without missing a beat. It wasn’t enough to finish a game; we had to beat it in record time, playing the same board over and over and over until we figured out how to clear it as fast as possible. As each of us played, the other would whisper, “Go, go, go, go,” and it
sounded as steady as a heartbeat.

We had to have the highest scores. And when we got them, we took photos of the screen, turning off all the lights in the room until it was pitch black, wiping the screen clean with Windex so there were no smudges. Ben even had a tripod to steady the camera. And even with a perfect picture, when we got the photos developed, the images were still slightly blurred, and you could see the rounded
edges of the CRT screen. We’d get doubles, one for each of us. We kept them in a photo album, labeled and carefully curated. We thought, maybe, this might help us get into a top-notch college. Even if it didn’t, who cared? For those hours, our bodies were the bodies on the screen, and we kept them alive for as long as we possibly could.

Finally, after three hours of gaming, Ben’s mom called us to dinner. I always loved the food at Ben’s house, dishes like seaweed crumbled up in a bowl of pristine rice, a raw egg cracked over it. And Ben loved eating at my house, so many casseroles, so many variations of starch, cheese, and meat. That night, Ben’s mom had made somen noodles that we dipped into little bowls of hon-dashi and soy sauce,
little dried shrimp floating in the bowl, that fishy taste that made me so happy.

“How was school?” asked Mr. Nakamura, and Ben and I looked at each other for a second too long. “That bad?” Mr. Nakamura said.

“It was OK,” Ben finally said. How would we even begin to describe Kennedy? What could be done? I stuffed a bunch of noodles into my mouth, slurping them up. “It was fine,” I agreed. And that was that. It was like, in missing that moment when things were still normal, we had given up any chance of controlling Kennedy’s effect on our lives. He had us. If he wanted us, whatever he wanted, he could have us.

But things were OK for a week or two. Kennedy would tease us, trying to gross us out, prodding at our bodies, testing for weak spots. He’d grab my ear and twist it, making me yell out, which would rouse Mrs. Banks to an upright position, but she’d just call for order and that would be that. He once said that he doubted that Ben had
any pubic hair, and tried to pull down his pants, but Ben held on to his belt, until Kennedy grew bored. “You guys are the fucking worst,” he would say, staring at us like we were Sea-Monkeys he’d ordered that had immediately disappointed him.

We didn’t do anything. We didn’t tell Mrs. Banks, since we couldn’t imagine what she would do. We didn’t sit at another table, surround ourselves with other people for protection. We didn’t fight back. Now I understand it: we had stayed invisible for so long that we weren’t used to people noticing us, and so when Kennedy noticed us, shined a light on us, we simply froze, simply sat there and
took it, all these little indignities, and hoped that he would fuck up in some other class and get suspended, a temporary reprieve.

One day Mrs. Banks told us that we were going to work in groups. Each group was to create a replica of the Parthenon out of cardboard. The project was going to take a week to complete and would require a lot of precision work.

“How many people per group?” Ben asked, his voice quavery and weird.

“Three,” she said. “Yes, three per group.”

Ben visibly deflated, and Kennedy smiled. “You fuckers thought you could get away from me?” he asked.

“It’s not that,” I said. “We just like working with each other.”

“Yeah,” Kennedy said, leering. “I bet you like working with each other. Working each other’s dicks in your mouths.”

“C’mon, Kennedy,” I said.

“You are the fairiest fairy that I’ve ever seen. What kind of music do you like?”

There was no way that I was going to tell him that my favorite album was Tevin Campbell’s I’m Ready. I wasn’t going to tell him that I liked Britpop.

“Heavy metal,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” he said, slowly nodding. “Like what?”

“Ratt?” I said, like I was in a spelling bee and had never heard the word before in my life.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he said, laughing.

“That’s metal,” I said, confused. “I know it is.”

“You need to listen to death metal,” he said. “You need to listen to Mayhem.

The lead singer killed himself and then another guy in the band made a stew with his brains.”

“That’s awful,” Ben said, and he sounded like a grandmother who’d just heard that a lady at her church had cancer.

“You two …,” he said, but didn’t say anything else. He just stared at us. “I’m gonna work on you two.”

At my house, Ben and I played Donkey Kong Country. I used a stopwatch while Ben tried to run as quickly as possibly through the board, chaining rolls together to keep the speed boost, plowing through enemies instead of taking time to jump on them. It was hypnotic, so calming. “You’re doing it,” I said, smiling. Ben worked his hands on the controller, could almost do this blindfolded.

“I’m scared,” he suddenly said.

“Of the game?” I asked, confused, looking at the screen.

“Of Kennedy. I’m scared of him,” Ben said.

“Me, too, I guess,” I said.

“What do we do?” he asked.

“Nothing. What can we do?” I really had no clue.

“Go to the principal. Go to the police. He’s going to hurt us.”

“It would be so embarrassing,” I said.

“I know,” he said. Right at this moment, he got dinged by an enemy, and he cursed, tossing the controller to the ground. “Here,” he said, gesturing to the controller. “You take over.”

We switched positions and I started the game over, the side-scrolling making me wonder if the game would ever end, the way it kept opening up. I wanted it to never end.

“We should kill him,” I said.

“No way,” Ben said. “Not even as a joke.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s OK,” he said after a few seconds.

“We’ll be OK,” I said.

“OK,” he said, but he sounded sad. I turned away from the game, watched it reflected in Ben’s eyes, the colors so beautiful.

Our Parthenon was a disaster. Ben and I simply didn’t have the kind of brain for three-dimensional building. Nothing quite made sense, no matter how long we stared at the photo of the Parthenon—the one in Nashville, not in Greece. And Kennedy, dear Lord, he did everything possible to mess it up. I wondered how he’d made it this far in school when it was so clear how little he cared, how he would dare anyone in authority to do something about it. But it was like he was invisible to people in charge. I couldn’t figure it out.

We had to use a hot glue gun to set the pieces of cardboard, and Kennedy immediately took control of it. While we were holding the pieces together, waiting for the glue, Kennedy would touch the tip of the gun, burning hot, to our fingers, sometimes even squirting the hot glue onto our skin. We’d yelp, and Kennedy would howl with laughter.

“Kennedy, seriously,” Ben said. “Don’t do that again.”

“OK,” he said, still giggling. “OK, you’re right. Sorry. OK, hold it steady. I’ll really do it this time.”

And then he’d burn us again. At the end of the day, Ben and I held up our hands for inspection and noted all the little burns, purple and angry, that covered our hands. Looking back on it, I want to take myself and just shake and shake, like, What the fuck is wrong with you? Why did you let that happen? But I can still remember those moments, when it felt like I was paralyzed inside my own body, like I had to pull myself deeper and deeper inside of myself, away from the surface, in order to stay alive. I think Ben felt the same way. We tried not to talk about it.

That Friday, the last day of the project, we still had a lot to do, because Kennedy kept breaking our Parthenon out of spite. The night before, I’d had anxiety dreams where for the first time I got a grade lower than an A because Kennedy fucked it up for me. I couldn’t get into any colleges. In the dream, my parents kept asking, “What’s wrong? How did this happen?” which was crazy because my parents only asked that I do my best, barely even checked my grades. And now we had to stay after school, the three of us in the art room, in order to finish the Parthenon. We’d begged Kennedy to go home, to let us finish it on our own, but he’d insisted he wanted to be there, to make sure it was up to his standards.

So it was just the three of us, not even Mrs. Banks in her recliner, which was where Kennedy was now lounging, violently yanking on the lever to make the leg support unfold. He put a Morbid Angel album on the cassette player, which during class only ever played John Tesh jazz. After about an hour, we had something that resembled the Parthenon. We carried it over to the work table and put it next to the other Parthenons.

“OK, Kennedy,” Ben said. “We’re finished.”

“We’re not finished until I sign off,” Kennedy said, hopping out of the chair. He walked past the supply cabinet and grabbed an X-Acto knife, which made both of us instantly stiffen. He tested the point of the blade on the tip of his finger. A little pinprick of blood appeared. “C’mon, Kennedy,” I said. We backed away from him, putting a table between us.

“Calm down, pussies,” he finally said, slipping the blade into the front pocket of his jacket. Then he picked up our Parthenon and held it up in the air as if he was going to slam it to the ground.

“Kennedy!” we both shouted, and he gently put it back down on the table.

“Excellent work,” he said. “Makes these other Parthenons look like a fucking joke.”

“OK, great,” I said. “We have to go now.”

“Where are you going?” he asked, looking curious, as if he had never once considered the possibility that we had lives away from him.

“We’re going to my house,” I said. “Play some video games.”

“I could come over, too, if you want,” he said, and he wasn’t smiling. We couldn’t tell if he was serious.

“His mom’s pretty strict,” Ben said, thinking quickly. “She’s a hard-ass. I can’t bring people over without her OK first.”

“Well, tell you what. Next week, I’m coming over. Play some of these video games. Have fun. But right now, I need you guys to give me a ride. I missed my bus, because you fuckers couldn’t glue cardboard together. So give me a ride, OK?”

“OK,” I said. “I guess so.”

Kennedy got in the back seat of my car, and I was terrified of what he might do there, where I couldn’t quite see him. I thought he might cover my eyes while I was driving, kick at the back of my seat the entire ride. But he just kind of fell across the entire back seat, lying on his back.

“Drive out to the soccer fields,” he told us. “Over on Wrigley. Then turn onto Bald Knob Road. Bald fucking knob. Har-har. You two have bald knobs, I bet.”

For the rest of the ride, Kennedy just lay there, not making a sound. “OK,” I said as I made the turn, “I’m on Bald Knob Road.”

“Two twenty-two,” he replied. “Buncha shit in the front yard.”

We pulled up to a one-story ranch, and he was right, there was a bunch of shit in the front yard. There were two busted riding mowers, a burned-black steel drum with blackened pieces of wood sticking out of it.

He didn’t get out of the car.

“We’re here,” I said after a while.

“Just give me a minute,” he said. He didn’t move. I could hear him breathing, it was so quiet in the car.

“OK,” he said, jumping out of the car. “On Monday, I’m coming home with you.”

“Kennedy, I don’t—”

“Motherfucker, I’m coming over,” he said, leaning back through the open door, his face close to mine. “And if you try to leave me at school, drive off without me, I’ll look you up in the phone book and then I’ll come over there. And it will be bad fucking news for you two.”

“OK,” I said. “OK, you can come over.”

“Have a good weekend,” he said, running to the house.

We sat there for a while, my hands shaking.

“I think I’m sick, Jamie,” Ben said. I caught sight of myself in the rearview mirror and was surprised at how pale I looked.

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“It’ll be OK,” I said. “He won’t do anything with my mom there, and my sister too.”

“Are you serious?” Ben asked. “He’s going to kill us.”

“He won’t,” I said. “He’s just testing us. He’s just messing with us.”

“Maybe,” Ben said, but his look was far off, like something had glitched in his brain.

“Do you want to play video games?” I asked.

“Maybe just drop me off at home,” he replied. “I don’t feel so great. I think I need to rest.”

When I dropped him off, I grabbed his arm, and I hated the way he flinched when I did it. But I still held on to him. “We’ll protect each other,” I said. “OK?”

Ben nodded. “OK,” he said.

“If he did something to you, Ben,” I said, almost crying, “I really would kill him.”

Ben smiled and got out of the car. I didn’t see him the rest of the weekend, didn’t even pick up the phone.

On Monday, when school was over, Ben and I stood outside my car, shifting from foot to foot, waiting for Kennedy. “We should just go right now,” Ben said. “Let’s just get out of here.”

“He’ll just follow us home,” I told him. I had completely given up. If Kennedy wanted to kill me, if he wanted to wrap his hands around my throat and squeeze, I would let him. Ben, I think, was still hoping there was some way out of this, some code we could punch in that would open up a secret room, a place we could hide, a place where we couldn’t be hurt. I was beyond that. Whatever happened, I just wanted to get it over with.

Kennedy finally showed up, nodding his approval that we’d waited for him. “Let’s go,” he said. “I have to be home by five or my dad will kick my fucking ass.”

My mom treated Kennedy like he was a street urchin in a Broadway musical, shaking his hand, saying how nice it was that Ben and I had added a friend to our little crew. Kennedy seemed stunned by her easy kindness, her offer of a Mountain Dew, because he barely even spoke, wouldn’t make eye contact with her. She let us get some snacks and then we were upstairs, in my room. Right away, my sister, Molly, peeked in, wanting to see this new boy, but we shouted her away, terrified, honestly. We had this unstable thing inside the house, and we wanted to keep it contained in my room so that we’d be the only people damaged when it blew up.

The night before, I’d hidden everything good, all my money, my comic books of any worth. I’d shoved it all in my closet, tossed some blankets over it. I even took the SNES, because I didn’t want it to get damaged, and put it away. I had looked around the room, wondering what I owned that Kennedy might linger on, that he might use against me. And, truly, it seemed like everything in the room would give him reason to beat me senseless.

“What game do you want to play?” I asked Kennedy, trying to be a good host.

“I never played a video game in my entire life,” he said without blinking.

I couldn’t tell if he was fucking with us.

“Are you serious?” Ben asked.

“Dead serious,” he said.

“What about the arcade?” Ben asked, as if it was unbelievable to him that someone our age had never played a video game.

“Nope,” Kennedy replied.

“Well, what do you want to play?” I asked. “What kind of game? Like, Mario Brothers or maybe a driving game?”

“Something where you kill people,” he said. “Duh.”

I looked at the games I had lined up on my bookshelf. Kennedy pushed me aside and brought his face close to the spines of the games. “Whoa,” he said finally. “Holy shit, this is Rambo. Like the movie Rambo?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”

“Can we play this?”

“Sure. It’s two-player, so we can work together.”

“Cool, cool, cool.”
I handed Kennedy a controller and turned on the system. The blue and white letters showed up on the screen, and then there was Sylvester Stallone, all buff, that red headband.

I started the game. “OK,” I said, “this button shoots bullets and then this one here shoots exploding arrows. Use those to blow up the tents and you’ll rescue the hostages.”

“Yeah, fine.”

“You’re the yellow headband and I’m the red headband.”

Within seconds of starting the game, Kennedy walked right into a bullet and his character fell over dead. But he started up again, another life. The same thing, dead.

“Jesus fuck!” he said. “This game is fucking hard.”

“Just try to dodge the bullets,” I said. “Don’t run ahead too far.”

“Oh, shit, thanks, fucker,” he said, his voice sarcastic.

“Avoid the bullets.”

We played a little and then Kennedy died again, which meant he’d have to restart, which he did. “This gun doesn’t do shit,” he said. “Let’s try these exploding arrows.”

“Wait, be careful,” I said, just as he fired an arrow right at my character, immediately killing me.

“Oh, shit, you can kill each other?” he said.

“Well—” I said, but before I could finish he shot another arrow at me, killing me again.

“OK,” Ben said, trying to help out, “but that’s not the point—”

“Eat shit, motherfucker,” Kennedy said, killing me again. After this third death, the game over screen came up for my side of the screen. I didn’t push the button to restart, just let Kennedy wander around until he finally got killed again.

“This is what you guys do all day?” he asked, throwing the controller on the ground. “This sucks.”

“Do you want to play something else?” I asked.

“You guys just play for now,” he said. “I’m going to look around, see where you hide your fucking dildos.”

Ben looked at me like How long can we do this? but we just picked up our controllers and started playing, clearing the board, moving up the screen. I tried not to look back at Kennedy, though I wondered what he was doing.

And then, just as we were settling into a groove, Kennedy slammed Ben to the ground, jumping on top of him and straddling him. He had a pillow in his hands, and he put it over Ben’s face. “Sneak attack!” Kennedy shouted, and Ben’s arms started flailing wildly, just pawing at the air, not doing anything to stop him. And I was frozen there, watching this, for at least five seconds, before I finally pushed Kennedy off of Ben, tackling him to the ground. Kennedy then grabbed me in a headlock, squeezing so hard that my ears popped.

“This is more like it,” he said. “This is fun.” His voice was monotone, like none of this was real, like he was acting in a play.

I couldn’t get free. After a while he got bored and let me go. I scooted away from him to the wall, where I panted, holding my neck.

“What is wrong with you?” Ben asked him, but his voice wasn’t angry. It was genuinely confused, hurt.

“What?” Kennedy said. “This is all me and my brother did, fucking wrestling, trying to beat the shit out of each other. And then he joined the army, and now it’s just me at home. I just wanted to fuck around.” He pointed at me. “You had some fight in you for like half a second and then you pussied out.”

“I think you better go home,” I said, almost crying, trying hard not to cry.

He looked at me like he couldn’t tell if I was joking or not, like he had no idea why I was upset. “Seriously?” he said finally. When I didn’t say anything, he just shrugged and said, “Well, you have to drive me home.”

“Fine,” I said, trying to breathe normally, trying to make my body move. “I’ll drive you home.”

“I better get home myself,” Ben said, not looking at me. “I’ve got homework to do.”

“What?” I said. “You’re not coming with me?”

“You’re not coming with me?” Kennedy said, his voice mocking and high-pitched.

“It’s just …” Ben looked toward the door. “I have all this homework.”

“Please?” I said. “Please come with me.”

Kennedy turned and walked out of the room. “Come on,” he said as he stomped down the stairs. I could hear him telling my mother goodbye, and her saying that he could come by anytime he liked.

“Please,” I asked Ben again, whimpering.

“OK,” Ben finally said. “OK.”

As we walked down the stairs, he stopped me for a second. “I’m sorry,” he said, “that wasn’t cool of me.”

“It’s OK,” I said, but I didn’t know what was going on, couldn’t tell if I was making too big a deal of this. In such a short time, my life, which was boring but tender, a thing that mattered to me even as I understood that it would eventually change, had become a kind of dream. I keep trying to explain to you why I didn’t try harder, but maybe you understand. Maybe you don’t think this is as strange as
it feels to me.

When we got to Kennedy’s house, he refused to get out of the car. “Come inside with me,” he kept saying—an insistent, monotonous refrain. “Come inside. Just come inside. Come inside. Come inside and see something.”

“Please, Kennedy,” I said. “It’s late.”

“We have homework,” Ben said.

“We have homework,” I corroborated.

“Just come inside,” he said again. “Come inside and let me just show you this one thing. This one thing and then you can go. Come inside. Come inside my house.”

Inside the house, his father, his head shaved bald, gray stubble for a beard, was sitting in a recliner, watching some old boxing match on TV.

“Hello, JFK,” his father said, muting the TV, but Kennedy didn’t respond, tried to push past. His father stood, was a giant in that room, his head nearly touching the ceiling. “Who did you bring into our house?”

“Just some guys,” Kennedy said.

“Friends?” his father asked, like it was the silliest thing in the world to suggest such a thing.

“What does it matter?” Kennedy asked.

“Who are you?” his father asked, turning to us.
“I’m Ben, Mr. Kennedy,” Ben replied, but I was still too nervous to respond.

“Ben’s Japanese, OK?” Kennedy said. “Not Vietnamese.”

“I know that,” his father said. “Jesus, son, do you think I don’t know what a Vietnamese looks like?” Then he turned back to Ben. “I respect your people. Let bygones be bygones and all that. You built a hell of a society out of the rubble of that mess. Hats off to you.”

“Thank you,” Ben said.

“Who are you?” he asked me.

“Jamie,” I said.

“You friends with Kennedy?”

“Kind of?” I said, like a question.

“We have, like, a class project to work on,” Kennedy said.

“Well, I guess I’ll let you get to it,” his father said. Awkwardly he resettled himself in the recliner and turned the volume back up. We walked down a long hallway, and as we passed each open room, I noted that it was much more ordered than I had expected, considering the disarray of the lawn. Perhaps it was thanks to his father’s military background that he kept the house so clean. He even used the same air freshener that my parents did. Inhaling its flowery scent, I had this temporary moment, this little period of grace, during which my body relaxed. And then we got to Kennedy’s room. There were two different locks on the door. He took some keys out of his pocket, undid them, and opened the door. Inside, his room was pretty well organized, the walls covered in posters of death metal bands, images that, if we hadn’t already been so bombarded by the ones on Kennedy’s T-shirts, would have terrified us. “Here, let me get some stuff out,” he said, and turned on his stereo. From the speakers a deep droning
immediately emanated.

“We need to go,” I said to Kennedy, but he wasn’t listening to me; it was kind of like we weren’t even there. He opened his closet and pulled out this long box, like you’d keep comic books in, and laid it at his feet. When he removed the top of the box, he gestured for us to come closer. I was certain that there would be human heads in the box, skeletal remains. I knew it would be bad. I knew it would be hard to forget.

Ben and I looked down into the box and saw all manner of chain and leather, everything shiny, pristine. Kennedy tapped the box with his foot and it rattled. “I ordered all this from a catalog,” he said. “I’ve got quite a collection.” He reached into the box and pulled up a bee’s nest of handcuffs, so many pairs that it was hard to count. He tossed them on his bed and then pulled out a black mask that had a zipper where the mouth should be. “Sometimes I sleep in this,” he said, smiling. He seemed so proud of these things, like we were all in a club together.

“I want you to do something for me,” he then said. “Can you do something for me?”

“We really want to go home, Kennedy,” Ben said, and now he really was crying.

“I want to go home.”

“You can go home in just a second,” Kennedy said. “All I need is for Jamie to lie down on the bed and put on those handcuffs.”

“I’m not going to do that,” I said.

“If you do it, then you and Ben can go home,” he said.

I don’t know why we didn’t run, but it didn’t even occur to me. It felt like the entire world had shrunk down to this single room, that the three of us were the only people still alive in it. And even though there were two of us and one of him, I knew that it didn’t matter. So I lay down on the bed.

“On your stomach,” he said, his voice forceful, deep.

I turned onto my stomach.

“And take off your shirt,” he said, which I did. Then he handcuffed my arms to some straps attached securely to the bed frame, one set of handcuffs for each hand. He clamped them so tight that the metal pinched my wrists and I gasped.

“Kennedy,” Ben said, but I choked out, “It’s OK, Ben. I’m OK.”

Kennedy was now cuffing my ankles, so that I was pinned to the bed. I heard him rustling around in the box, and then he returned to my line of sight, close to my face and holding a kind of whip, like an octopus, all these tendrils, solid black. “This is a flogger,” he said. “I’ve never used it on a real person before.”

“Kennedy,” I said. “I’m afraid.”

He knelt on the bed, and I felt the mattress sink. And then he whipped me, lightly at first, which just made me hiss, the air rushing out of me, and then harder—again, and again, and again. And I was outside my body, just floating
above it, and I was watching myself, and I was so sad that this was happening to me. I looked pretty bad; I could see it from up there. There were all these welts on my back, but I was just taking it, just lying there.

And then I heard Ben screaming, crying, and after a little while the door burst open. “What the fuck is going on?” Kennedy’s father yelled, and Kennedy dropped the flogger. I turned my head as far as I could, looking over my shoulder, just in time to see his father walk across the room, push Ben into one wall, and slam Kennedy against the other—once, then twice, leaving a ragged hole in the drywall. When he tossed his son a third time, Kennedy fell against the window, the glass shattering and tinkling on the ground outside.

“Get him out of those handcuffs,” his father shouted, but Kennedy was muttering.

“What?” his father said. Ben was now whimpering, lying on the ground. I could just barely see him if I turned my head at an angle.

“I dropped the keys,” Kennedy finally said.

“Well, find them,” his father said.

For about two minutes, I listened as Kennedy crawled around the room on his hands and knees while his father stood there, towering over us. He turned off the music, and it was so quiet, the most total silence I’ve ever heard.

“OK,” Kennedy finally said, “here they are.” And he unclasped all four sets of handcuffs. And I was free.

“Let’s keep all this between ourselves, OK, boys?” his father said to Ben and me, but we weren’t really listening, couldn’t respond. I put my shirt on inside out. My hands were shaking. “I’ll see that Kennedy is properly disciplined for this.”

Ben helped me up off the bed, and the two of us stumbled through the house. I stepped on a plate and cracked it in two, but we just kept moving. When we got in the car, Ben locked the doors. We sat there. I put my head on the steering wheel and tried to breathe, but I couldn’t tell if I was actually breathing or not. I couldn’t tell if I was still alive.

“Can you drive?” Ben finally asked me, but I didn’t respond. “Here,” he said. “Get in the back seat. I’ll drive us home.”

I don’t remember the drive home. I don’t remember saying goodbye to Ben, who must have walked the half mile to his own house. I don’t remember talking to my parents, though I must have. I don’t remember doing my homework, but in the morning it was all done. I don’t remember taking a shower, how badly it must have hurt when the water touched those welts, some of which were trickling blood. I only remember that I woke up around two in the morning, the entire house quiet, and I turned on my Nintendo, and I played Super Mario Bros., running so fast, finding every single shortcut, just running and jumping, not letting a single thing touch me, running and running, until I’d finished the game. And then I just started over, kept running, until the sun came up.

Kennedy wasn’t at school the next day. In art class, we were making African ceremonial masks out of clay, and Ben and I sat alone at our table, not talking, not saying anything. At the end of the day, I dropped Ben off at his house and then went home. I played video games. I let the pixels burn colors into my irises. I let my brain go away. I sat inside my room and made everything quiet.

And Kennedy wasn’t at school the next day, either, or the next, and with each day that he wasn’t there, I felt worse, this kind of dread building up in my stomach. I don’t remember much of those days except that Ben was not really a part of them, and how lonely that felt. It was worse than what Kennedy had done to us, the knowledge that Ben and I might not be friends anymore.

On the third day, my parents came into my bedroom and closed the door so my sister wouldn’t hear. “We’re worried about you, Jamie,” my mom said. “Something’s not right. We just got off the phone with Mrs. Nakamura and she said that Ben has been depressed, listless. We said we’d noticed the same with you. Now, here’s what we want to know. And we trust you, so we’re going to ask you this. And I hope you know how much we love you, and how nothing that you do will ever change that.”

“OK,” I said, slow to keep up.

“Are you and Ben experimenting with drugs?” she asked, both she and my father leaning in, like I was going to whisper some secret in their ears. I’d never even smoked a cigarette. I was good. I was a good kid. I kept telling myself this while they waited for me to respond, that I was a good kid, that I was good.

“We’re not taking drugs, Mom,” I told her, and they both let out this long exhalation, like they were so relieved and things could be normal again. “I’m just nervous, you know, about my grades, about school, about getting into a good college. Ben is, too. It’s a lot of pressure.”

Then they went on and on about how proud of me they were, how much they loved me, and how, no matter what, I was going to make something of myself, I was going to find a way to contribute to the world and make my mark. And it made me love them so much, I wanted to cry. But I also wanted them to leave, wanted them far, far away from me. Then they hugged me, and then they were gone.

Only once I was sure that they were gone for good did I pick up a controller and start playing.

The next day, Kennedy was back at school, sitting at our table in the art room before Ben or I had even arrived. We stood frozen in the doorway until a kid behind us bumped into us and pushed us farther into the room. Kennedy had a spectacular black eye, and two of his fingers were taped together with a splint. And this made me happy. It gave me the strength to walk over to that table and sit down.

“Long time no see, pussies,” Kennedy said, but his heart wasn’t in it. He looked sunken, sallow. He looked like a zombie.
Neither Ben nor I said a word. We went over to the work table and retrieved our African masks, which had hardened and which we were now painting. Mrs. Banks lectured Kennedy on how far behind he was and then plopped a lump of clay in front of him. After she went back to her recliner, he took a wire brush and simply stabbed the clay, over and over again, slowly.

We worked in silence, only the sounds of John Tesh: Live at Red Rocks playing on the boombox.

Toward the end of class, Kennedy leaned toward us. “I want you guys to come over again. Tonight. I want to show you something.”

“No way,” Ben said. “Never again.”

“You have to come,” Kennedy said. “If you don’t come, you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life.”

I couldn’t even speak, couldn’t look at Kennedy. Ben said, “Never. We’re never coming over.” And I think if Ben wasn’t there that day, I would have gone over to Kennedy’s that night.

“If you are not at my house tonight …” Kennedy said, but that was it. He just stared at us. He jabbed the brush into the clay and then walked out of the classroom, ten minutes before class was over. Mrs. Banks didn’t even notice.

“We’re not going, OK?” Ben said to me, and he touched my arm. He held it there until I looked at him. “OK?” he said. “We are not going.”

“OK,” I finally said, nodding. “OK.”

At the end of school, we were certain that Kennedy would be standing next to our car, waiting for us, but he wasn’t there. We got into the car as quickly as possible and actually burned rubber getting out of the parking lot, the back of the car swerving for a few seconds until I straightened it out. As we drove, I looked over at Ben, who was frowning.

“Can I come over today?” he asked me, and I thought about it for a few seconds.

“OK,” I said. “Yeah.”

We locked ourselves in our room and played Double Dragon, punching and kicking and whipping every cartoony thug that got in our way. We stood with our backs to each other and beat the living shit out of everyone that tried to hurt us. It was too easy to be therapeutic, but it didn’t make us feel worse. And a few hours passed, and my mom called us for dinner. “Are you OK?” Ben asked when I turned off the system.

“Not really,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“Me either,” he said. “But it’ll get better, OK?”

“You’re my best friend,” I told him. I’m not sure why I said it. I guess I needed him to know it.

“You’re my best friend, too,” he said, smiling.

At the dinner table, over meatloaf and green bean casserole, my parents asked us about our day, and we talked about the masks we’d made in art class, how Ben’s kind of looked like a fish-man and how mine was supposed to be a wolf but looked more like an anteater. And my sister talked about gymnastics, some tumbling technique she’d learned, but it was hard to picture it from her description. And then the phone rang, and I jumped up to get it, walking back into the kitchen for the phone.

“Hello?” I said.

“Hey, Jamie,” Kennedy said, and I felt my whole body go numb. I dropped the phone, and it swung there on its cord for a few seconds.

“Who is it?” my dad asked. “Tell them it’s dinnertime.”

I picked up the phone again, and there was silence on the other end. Finally Kennedy said, “Hello?”

“It’s me,” I said.

“You didn’t come,” he said, and he sounded sad, betrayed.

“No,” I said.

“I shot my dad,” he said. “I just did it. With a shotgun. While he was watching TV. It was … it was pretty horrible.”

I didn’t say anything. I waited for him to start laughing. “I really did it. That’s what I wanted you and Ben to see. I wanted you to see it. I wanted all three of us to be here. But you didn’t come.”

“You’re lying,” I said.

“I’m not lying, motherfucker,” he said, his voice finally taking on some kind of life. “I just called the cops. They’re sending someone over here. That’s why I was calling too. I wondered if your parents could get me a good lawyer. I need someone really good. I’m eighteen, Jamie. I’m an adult. I’m fucked.”

“You’re lying,” I said, “to fuck with me and Ben.”

“Fair enough,” he said. I heard sirens on his end of the line.

“I wish you had come over,” he said. “I liked you guys. You and Ben. I thought you were OK.”

“I have to go, Kennedy,” I said.

“OK,” he said. “They’re here anyways.”

I hung up the phone and walked back into the dining room.

“Who the heck was that?” my dad asked.

I looked at Ben, and his eyes were so wide open.

“Some guy in our math class,” I said. “He wanted to know what the homework was.”

“Well, your food’s getting cold,” my mom said.

I sat next to Ben, and we both pushed our food around, listening to my parents talk to each other, their voices happy.

“Can Ben spend the night?” I asked them suddenly.

“On a school night?” my mom replied.

“Please?” I asked.

“If it’s OK with his parents, then yeah, OK,” my mother aid. Under the table, Ben reached for my hand and squeezed it. He held on to it for the rest of dinner, and it steadied me. It kept me inside my own body, because I wanted to float away again.

In my room, the door locked, I told Ben about Kennedy, what he said he’d done.

“I don’t think he’s lying,” Ben said.
“We’ll find out tomorrow,” I said. “I guess.”

We were silent. And then I started crying and shaking. And Ben held on to me. “I hope he did,” I said. “I really hope he did it, and he’s not coming back.”

“Me, too,” Ben said, and now he was crying, too, but not like me, not like I was.

“I’m so sorry,” Ben said. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” I said.

What were we apologizing for? That we hadn’t protected each other? That we hadn’t kept each other safe? But I knew that he was sorry. And he knew that I was sorry. And he held on to me. And I held on to him. I think about that moment all the time. I wonder where Ben is now. I wonder what he’s doing. I wonder if he thinks about it. I miss him so much.

Uncategorized, Works

Houses of the Holy

July 1, 2019

Cameron Thomas Snyder

Houses of the Holy

One century ended while another century began and my older brother and I found ourselves getting dragged like luggage, yet again, from one place we didn’t want to be in Kansas to some other place we didn’t want to be in Kansas. All around me things were beginning or things were ending.

We were in the family Bonneville, on our way to the Plum Tree for Mother’s Day dinner, when my stepfather fell into a fit of rage. He pulled over and told us, his stepfamily, to get out of the car. We got out and huddled together like tangled trash on the shoulder of the busy two-lane highway, wincing at the wind from every passing vehicle, while in the idling car my stepfather screamed. I knew then that we would not be wolfing down platefuls of much desired chicken-on-a-stick, nor cracking open manila-folder-colored cookies containing scraps of paper telling our future; our future had been predetermined by a human Harley with a poor sense of humor and a foul-smelling handlebar mustache.

After his anger subsided, he told us to get back in the car. We said no. He flipped us off, tossed my mother’s brown leather purse out the window, ran it over, and drove home to drink five or six bottles of Boston Lager. He sat on the back porch in his too short summer shorts, lobbing the empties into the yard like fragmentation grenades.

Home, in those years, was a traditional stick-built house that my stepfather paid to have constructed, custom to his own liking, right there alongside the same highway he would later abandon us on. “Stick-built” is a term I recently came across while researching the differences in modern residential homes; it simply means a house that is built on-site, unlike prefab housing, trailers, and mobile homes. I’d
seen plenty of mobile homes in the area, but it had never occurred to me that I might actually end up in one. We were simply not that kind of family, not those kinds of people.

My ex-stepfather stayed in his house, chugging domestics, while the three of us—my mother, my brother, and I—stumbled off down the highway that leads to Ottawa, Kansas, searching for a place to call home.

Mobile homes stopped being mobile homes in 1976, after the Department of Housing and Urban Development passed a bill requiring that all prefab homes be built in a factory setting under strict federal building codes. The designation “mobile” was then legally changed to “manufactured,” not to be confused with “modular.” The specifications that determine whether a house is manufactured or modular are so semantically similar, it’s hard to know what’s what and why it even matters. Both are prefabricated off-site in climate-controlled factories; both are constructed in sections; both look like they were prefabricated off-site in climate-controlled factories and constructed in sections. The main difference between the
two is this: the manufactured home, equipped with a chassis, can be moved once it’s attached to a foundation, while the modular home remains a permanent fixture
once attached, like the stick-built home.

Brochures will tell you that you can hardly tell the difference, aesthetically, between a stick-built home and a prefab one, and I’m telling you that’s bullshit. But as my mother and I shopped for manufactured homes in a gravel lot off Main Street, where the only real difference between one house and the next was exterior color, I tried to recall all the stupid prefab proverbs about houses I’d ever heard. “Family makes this house a home,” I told myself. “Home is where you hang your heart.”

I put my hand to my chest and couldn’t feel a beat. A house is a hollow thing.

Purchasing a manufactured home is the easy part; it’s the finding where to set it down that can be tricky.

My mother and I drove around in the Bonneville, combing seedy neighborhoods for a plot on which to plant our factory-built house, and found ourselves, naturally, in a trailer park. I sized up the cars and trucks and vans sitting in front of the houses, as if these vehicles somehow reflected the character and social worth of the people who lived in this makeshift community. A couple of jalopy Pintos and a few trucks without doors later and I was explaining to my mother that I had an image to uphold, that if she forced me to live here, I’d be—we’d be—commonly called, by others outside of this favela, “trailer trash.” She said she was sorry but you had to play the hand you were dealt.

We did find a lot, and it wasn’t in a trailer park. However, our manufactured home wouldn’t fit on the lot in the traditional position known as hamburger style, i.e., with the front door facing the street, so the house movers had to set it down hot dog style, meaning the side of our house faced the street while the front door faced the side of our neighbor’s house.

“Hi. We are the hot dogs on Hamburger Street. Very nice to meet you.”

We added on a covered porch and an uncovered deck and planted squares of hyper-green sod in the front yard, or side yard, whatever it was, and the manufactured home continued to be a manufactured home, only now it had new accessories, like a poor kid in mall clothes. When friends came over I’d say, in all sincerity, “This is a manufactured home, and by that I mean I do not live in a trailer,” expecting them to be convinced or impressed or I don’t know what.

When the name Kyle Flack appeared alongside the words “murdered four” in the headlines of the Ottawa Herald website in the spring of 2013, I convinced myself I’d gone to school with him, or at least with one of the people he murdered, if only briefly, but I couldn’t be sure. My life had become so gutted of meaning that I needed to say I knew a killer in order to feel alive.

I talked to my brother on the phone about it. He had come to a similar conclusion. “I may or may not have smoked with one of them a couple times,” he said. “But, as you know, my memory blocks out a good deal from our Ottawa years.”

Regardless of who knew who, Kyle Flack murdered three adults via shotgun at a three-bedroom “modular” home on the outskirts of Ottawa. He also shot and killed an eighteen-month-old girl and shoved or tucked or placed—depending on your news source—her body in a suitcase and tossed it into Tequa Creek near the Osage–Franklin county line.

Each newspaper article refers to the house differently, as if the reporters were all dancing around the same issue of what exactly to call the structure, although “trailer” is never used. “Trailer” connotes reckless backwoods Kansas folk and threatens to detract from the severity of a toddler’s death while bolstering the stigma of trailers and those who inhabit them. “Modular home,” “house,” “farmhouse,” and “single-story residence” can all be found in the various reports. Whatever it was, it belonged to the mother of one of the victims, who claimed to have spent more than $15,000 in repairs and had plans to add blue countertops to the kitchen that she would have carried out had the whole house not burned to the ground in a “possible” arson a year after the murders took place. The only photo of the house online was taken after the fire, and, judging by the charred cinder-block underpinning and the rusted chassis, I’d say “modular home” is semantically incorrect.

According to The Kansas City Star, Flack wrote in his journal that he wanted to “dye [sic] in a suitcase”; his therapist speculated that he might have suffered an early-childhood trauma that eventually led to this bizarre attraction to luggage. The precise brand or style of suitcase is not documented anywhere online—it is simply referred to as “a suitcase.” For a man who had an ostensible fetish about dying in one, you’d think Flack would have been more particular about the suitcase he used in the crime: Samsonite or American Tourister, modern trolley style or vintage, oxblood or black. Or maybe he couldn’t afford the model he desired and had to settle for something he had on hand, had to settle for less.

A suitcase is not a coffin until a child’s body is tucked inside it. A prefabricated box is not a home until a family fills it.

A couple of years after the murders, my mother was sent to the very same detention center where Flack had been held while he awaited his trial. After she served her time, my brother and I drove down from Kansas City and took her out to an early lunch at the Ottawa Applebee’s. Our food arrived and we sat awkwardly amid an ambient countryside sizzle. I asked what had happened.

“I was leaving Country Mart and I hit a kid in the parking lot. I didn’t see him.”

“What do you mean you didn’t see him?” my brother said.

“I mean I drove away before I could get a good look at him.”

“I believe there’s a term for that,” I said.

“And you were drunk,” my brother said.

“No. I ran out of wine and went to get some more.”

“Because you drank it all that afternoon.”

“Like I said, I ran out.”

She did three weeks in the female ward of the Franklin County Detention Center for a hit-and-run. She told us that all the other inmates were young and helpless and looked up to her as a mother. She made sure they had enough to eat and gave them her food if they didn’t. My mother, I thought, the maternal jailbird, fluttering around in her cage, distributing masticated worm-mash into the mouths of criminal baby birds I probably went to high school with. She’s always had a way of making me jealous.

I watched the family cat choke on a hairball, or what I thought was a hairball, by the washer and dryer, in a space that functioned as both the laundry room and the back entryway. His chest heaved as I attempted, out of pure misguided instinct, to perform CPR on him, and his rib cage cracked and crunched like a pine cone under a bath mat until a warm liquid began to soak the denim of my kneecaps, and I noticed then that the last of Pickles’s piss had vacated his body. When my mother got home, she scooped Pickles up, slid him into a black plastic garbage sack, and said, “Now go burry your cat.” The sack drooped in my doubled-up fists like a giant rotten teardrop and I did as I was told. A few months after this, I watched from our newly built porch as my ex-stepfather—who’d been nosing around our place lately, reeking of false forgiveness and stale beer—ran over my pug as he chased after the tires of the truck. His ragged body tumbled and flailed and fell limp in the gravel alleyway, and I ran inside to cry on the carpet, in private. I buried Pugsly next to Pickles in what was quickly becoming a pet cemetery. This small accumulation of tragedies made the manufactured home feel spiteful, not only to my reputation but to my emotional health as well. My ex-stepfather bought me a consolation pug, this one even dumber than the first, and the next thing I knew my mom was a lunch lady shopping at Walmart with EBT food stamps. To combat this death spiral of white-trash poverty, I got a job at Dairy Queen South as a fry cook the moment I turned fifteen, to make some money of my own. Then I adopted hardcore Christianity to prove myself better and holier than everyone around me, or maybe I had simply deluded myself, as a means of self-preservation, into believing I’d become better and holier than everyone else around me; it didn’t really matter which, because at the end of the day, it’s pretty much all the same in the head of the beholder.

Darren, the manager of the Dairy Queen, explained my duties to me. They were simple, he said, requiring the most minimal use of elementary human cognition: “Here’s where we keep the burgers, here’s where we keep the fries, there’s the grill, there’s the fryer, figure it out.” The charm at the end of his gold chain kept getting tangled in the triangle of his chest hair, and he plucked it out as he talked.

“What’s on your necklace?” I asked.

He fingered the charm and looked down, creating a stairway of chins. “Beauty and the Beast,” he said. “It’s my favorite movie of all fucking time.”

Darren was a squat, rotund man of forty-five. He lived in his parents’ basement on the other side of town and had been working at Dairy Queen for fifteen years. His favorite movie was indeed the animated Disney rendition of Beauty and the Beast, with Full Metal Jacket a close second. Anytime I found myself bombarded with orders—if more than six or seven food orders popped up on the screen—he’d scream “FUBAR!” and run back to the kitchen to help me fend off the assault. “I am in a world of shit, yes,” he’d whisper, drawing a pentagram with ketchup on the top portion of a burger bun. “But I am alive. And I am not afraid.”

A demented teenage demon named Hormones lived inside me and I smothered him with a throw pillow called youth group. I declared myself straightedge and marked my hands with thick, bold Xs: marks of a martyr, of a modern-day messiah ready to die not for the sins of the world but for my own. I painted quotes from Corinthians on the bottom of my skateboard and carved I SK8 4 JC into the grip tape. Meanwhile, the demon grew like a bonsai cat, his limbs contorting inside my religiously decorated shelter of being. He wanted out. I held him in.

The girls weren’t allowed to cook food. If they wanted something to eat for lunch, they asked me or one of the other guys in the kitchen to cook it for them. The girls stayed up front with the soft-serve machines and the Dilly Bars, where they acted as the “Cool Treats” the slogan advertised. This made me a “Hot Eat,” I guess, one that
could not be seen by customers unless they squinted through the heated order window and caught a glimpse of my visored head as I practiced my pentagrams.

Girls often snuck into the kitchen to poach fries from the heated dump station, of which I acted as a gatekeeper, and they did the same when we grimy kitchen cretins craved a stray turd of soft serve. When I wanted to flaunt my power as an edgy fry cook with little regard for authority, I’d allow the girls to dig around in the heated drawer where the fried chicken strips were kept, and if they caught me in a
good mood, I’d let them slather their strips with a squirt or two from the peppered gravy dispenser. This was all part of the Dairy Queen power dynamic, a primitive system of trading and bartering.

A beautiful blond girl began to visit the dump station far more than the others, and I got the feeling it wasn’t just for the french fries.

Brittany and I had gone to school together long enough for me to know that she only dated bad dudes, those who were academically stunted and, more often than not, built like military cyborgs. What attracted these sorts of men to Brittany, at least on a carnal level, was the unbelievable exquisiteness of what the boys of Dairy Queen called her “badunkadunk.” My eyes were not unaware of this phenomenon, but a good Christian boy does not objectify a woman’s body, because it is a sin to objectify a woman’s body. So when she started hanging around the dump station, which is to say, when she started hanging around me, I decided that it was my duty to protect her from unmitigated sexual harassment while remaining true to God by corking the wellspring of sexual urges that rose up in me when she was nearby. I was being good. I awaited my reward.

It is dangerous to confuse ethics with sins.

When word got around that I didn’t put out, or put in, or go all the way, the guys found it necessary to give me shit about it.

A big kid who had clearly never been laid showed me how to make an engorged vagina out of a warm washcloth.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” I said.

“Fuck it,” he said, laughing.

I dipped the oval end of a red plastic spoon into the burbling fryer, removed it, and used tongs to stretch out the melted plastic, creating a three-foot-long eating utensil, and handed it to the big kid.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” he said.

I shrugged, but the demon inside me said, “Eat another Blizzard, you fat fuck.”

I was becoming comfortable with my responsibilities at the deep fryer.

At home, things stopped dying. My mother started seeing our neighbor, who looked like a Ninja Turtle, and he tried to introduce discipline into our household. It was not welcome. He reprimanded me after I screamed at my mother for making us poor. “Don’t talk to your mama that way,” he said. I tried to laugh in his face but cried instead. He bought me new skate shoes for Christmas and smoked weed with my brother. My mother took some steps in the wrong direction, then the right direction, some steps up, some steps down. People are steps, are to be stepped on. My mother taught me this.

I flipped over one of the hot metal food dividers and skated it with my finger skateboard.

Darren’s red water-balloon face appeared on the cool side of the heated order window. “What in God’s name are you doing back there, boy?”

“I’m nose-blunting this hot metal food divider,” I said. “What does it look like?”

Skateboarding in front of girls was something that made me feel worthy of manhood; using my fingers to stunt a toy skateboard on fast-food kitchenware in front of girls—not so much. So when I heard Brittany approaching, I stowed the food divider and stuffed the finger board into my greasy black slacks.

“What was that sound?” she said.

“Fries frying?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, plucking a piss-yellow fry from the dump station. “You sure it wasn’t the sound of you playing with your little toy?”

To change the subject, I cracked open the chicken-strip drawer provocatively. “Hungry for something else?”

She dug around and found what she wanted. She held the warm strip under the gravy nozzle and I gave it a half squirt. She looked me in the eye and bit off the continental tail of the chicken strip. “Don’t tell,” she said.

The demon thundered in his cage.

Every Christian boy secretly desires a bite of the forbidden fruit, the razor-blade apple, the apple bottom. No, no, do not objectify emails, I mean females. Suppress the thoughts, suffocate the demon.

I rode my skateboard to the prefab skate park next to the sewage pond and stared at the fresh graffiti scrawled in Sharpie on the back of the six-foot quarterpipe: 666 SATIN. I skated home and locked myself in my room and masturbated to the last five minutes of the E! program Wild On! Here exotic bikini girls shook their bodies on circular platforms in cerulean blue fountains. Brittany was not among them.

The day came for some serious occupational advancement. Darren sat me down in the blotchy break chair and he got serious. “The time has come for you to work up front,” he said.

“You mean like making Blizzards and taking orders at the register and working the drive-thru window and having kids from school see me wearing a visor?”

“Yes.”

“Will I see an increase in pay?”

“Well, no. But you will gain experience.”
“So you want me to do more work for the same pay. Am I allowed to decline this advancement?”

He plucked the charm from his tuft and shook his head. “You’re killing me, boy.”

I requested an extra shift so as to reduce the number of hours I had to spend at home. A Dairy Queen is as suitable a place as any for a teenage boy to live. Darren could be my father, a whole slew of Cool Treats could be my mothers, and I’d subsist on buttered Texas toast and CheeseQuake Blizzards.

Darren offered me a Wednesday evening shift.

“Youth group,” I said.

“Oh, fuck, that’s right,” he said. “How about Sunday morning?”

To avoid workplace conflict and distract myself from my desire for Brittany, I began dating girls who worked at Dairy Queen North. One of these girls picked me up
after my closing shift at Dairy Queen South, shoved me in her Geo, and drove me along a desolate midnight highway to her house so we could make out and I could meet her dog. Her house was neither a house-house nor a manufactured house, but a full-blown pre-HUD-amendment trailer house. “Sorry if you’re disappointed,” she said. “I know trailers get a bad rap.”

I consoled her to the best of my ability. “We can only play the hand we are dealt, right?”

While we dry-humped on the edge of her bed, surrounded by soiled puppytraining pads, her dirty mophead of a dog whimpering in the corner, I began to think the unthinkable thoughts of a self-stigmatized man: I am trash, she is trash, we are trash. She drove me home with my feet on the dash, the window down, and I convinced myself I lived inside a Death Cab for Cutie song, when in fact I’d never speak to this girl again. One manufactured home between a pair of high school lovers was doable; two meant trash. I began to date out of my league, class-wise and intelligence-wise. My reputation as stuck-up religious skater kid preceded me, and this somehow worked to my advantage. I played my hand and started dating girls who lived in opulent houses with rich pantries. No longer, when I brought girls to my house, did I apologize or try to explain my circumstances. A museum needs no explanation; it only needs to be seen. This is my mother, drooling on herself at noon. That is my brother, hotboxing my pug in a cooler. Welcome to my home. Now go ahead and feel sorry for me. Please.

My car was in the shop, and everything outside was caked in sleet. People ordered ice cream, despite the cold. “What kind of idiot eats ice cream when it’s ten goddamn degrees outside?” Darren said.

A busful of high school basketball players walked in ten minutes before closing time and things got fucked up beyond all recognition. I drew so many sloppy pentagrams with ketchup on the undersides of the buns that they started to look more like Stars of David, but the orders kept coming. Not even God can produce a shower of manna bountiful enough to meet the needs of a busload of high school jocks. They wore matching windbreakers and watched Brittany’s ass like an after-school special. She played like she liked it, but I wouldn’t believe that. She
gave one of them her number, and I gave him the most rancid piece of prepared meat I could find in the holding cabinet.

The basketball team left and Brittany’s radiant face appeared like an angel’s on the other side of the order window. “Need a ride home?” she said.

We pulled up to the side of my house and sat in her warm, idling Cavalier. My house stood there like a sheepish animal, embarrassed to be caught off guard in the glow of her headlights. For the first time in months I felt self-conscious about where I lived.

“This is a manufactured home,” I said. “Not to be confused with a trailer or a mobile home.”

She laughed at me the way you laugh at a child who has dressed himself for the first time. To her, I was a straitlaced Christian boy who didn’t party or have sex—the antithesis of tough, a total square. But I felt things inside. Felt things? Yes, I could be bad too. I just had to tell her: “I have fantasized about peeling off your pants and fucking you from behind in the walk-in freezer and subsequently getting locked in and freezing, cryogenically, only to be discovered and thawed centuries later and, upon awakening, continuing to fuck you from behind in a strange and unrecognizable future world where the only thing that could possibly palliate our horrific disorientation would be to continue fucking each other in a walk-in freezer. Also, my alcoholic mother and retarded pug are home. Would you like to come in?”

She cleared her throat and wiped at the condensation forming on the windshield. My time to confess was running out. I prepared a different speech, one of truth: “The body sitting beside you is manufactured. It is a temporary structure liable to blow into bits in the event of a strong wind. The foundation is rat-ridden and dangerously unstable. The outside says nothing about what lives inside. I am no different from those I speak and think ill of. I am a gymnasium of jocks, an infatuated fry cook.”

Before I could say anything out loud, she popped the automatic locks and said, “Well, goodnight then. See you tomorrow at work.”

I got out of her car and she left. I’d seen this before.

Inside, my mother was sitting on the couch watching television. She showed me a free sample packet of CoverGirl foundation she’d gotten in the mail, and I squirted the beige paste onto the palm of my hand and smeared it in long, thick streaks up and down my face. I danced around the living room while she ate cottage cheese. She laughed like a happy witch. She laughed so hard a curd ejected from her throat and landed on her chin. We both laughed so hard I thought we’d never stop. I handed her the foil packet and sat down next to her and we watched Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? trying to guess the answers and getting them all wrong.

Works

Anonymous

July 1, 2019

Jana Prikryl

Anonymous

Her hair is parted in the center and this side
wall of the house ends just above her part.
The seam between the house and not-house
seems to rise out of the part in her hair.
Dandelions on the lawn are playing
sundials, their globes give out the time
of year. She’s not smiling so much
as grimacing against the pull of the brush
and squinting against the sun. Nowhere are
her feet more than tacit. She is the tallest one.

Anonymous

The whitecaps blink like second thoughts
or action captured through a fledgling medium,
made sweet and anterior, already posthumous,
trinkets. A building of pale stone stretching out behind.
Stately, in other words.
Modillions between windows even at ground level and awnings pulled in.
Shadows short as a breath caught short,
midday.
To the right of these two, a third girl is centered in the center of the picture.
She seems to sway, making a window between her waist and that of the tallest girl.
We see through this window to a window behind.
But she leans toward the tall girl, cocks her head, and looks at you.
It’s the look of a friend who knows you well.

Anonymous

Above these three pairs of dark patent boots
on the highest of three steps, where three
of the six toes jut out past the nosing
making three little cups of shadow
hanging from the top of the riser,
each little cup falling over to the right
at exactly the same angle, three columns
of girls in long coats rise
between two dark pillars on a porch, three bright
numbers running down the right-hand pillar:
1
7
6.
All three wear hats,
each hat forms a porch
around each face, each face
smiles from its porches into the aperture.

Anonymous

Just in front of the porch steps, on a flat stone
that appears partially tucked under the porch,
a ficus in a clay planter. It produces
strange sounds. The silence that comes dressed
in not the past but conditional tense
may be quietest, it’s endured the most.

Anonymous

Their dated shoes are hidden in a cloud of grasses
of the kind she’s holding in her hand.
The sound of a strand of wild grass ripping
has something human about it, you feel
the earth’s scalp object, and that’s where you assert
your difference from the earth, an unexpected
homonym, in your own perception
quickly forgotten of how a patch of soil
resists you and then ceases to resist
and then the grass is yours. This
great piece of turf, this photo-realism.
He looks into the device
with a face almost expressionless,
a subject very knowing. She smiles.
I’ll be honest with you, it’s difficult
to like the men in these photographs.
My contempt might be capable
of reanimating them, the men alone, so deep
does power lodge in them, no
that can’t be right
when it’s the soil
and they the famished little roots.

Uncategorized, Works

Rain

July 1, 2019

Robert Walser (translated by Tom Whalen)

Rain

There’s gentle but also unruly rain. We prefer the former but take it as it comes. To accept what comes and yet never lose one’s cheerfulness isn’t easy, but beautiful because of that. What tastes the sweetest? Natural honey? No, something else: peaceful, everyday work without calamity. Speaking of rain, you could say it makes the earth black and soddens the streets. I deeply hope more will occur to me. Dark rain clouds have something cozy, poetic about them. Is that it? Oh no, Mr. Author! I request a smidgen of patience so I may collect myself. Sentences, words don’t just fly to me, they want to be caught unawares, captured, attained, discovered, enticed. Sometimes the mind thinks more about zwieback than about language and the like. In general, we have spring rain, autumn rain, etc. Rain is wet. That has been the case and we assume will remain so. No one should ever succumb to the opinion that he is unique. We’re all like one another, at least I firmly believe this, and furthermore I believe everything has already happened and existed once before and that’s why all pride seems exceedingly superfluous and inexpedient.

But why, dear friend, don’t you stick meticulously to your drizzling theme? In fact, often it only drizzles. But more often it pours and rains in real torrents, as if it wanted to inundate every path, park, dear lovely garden, every field and the paraphernalia hanging there. To be drenched by rain now and then isn’t at all funny, rather it can be quite irksome, which without doubt everyone will have experienced in his dull or eventful life. In a proper rain everything becomes wet except water, like rivers, which can’t possibly get wet because they already are. What I am I can’t become, and what I have can’t be given to me. Rain moistens roofs, fills holes and barrels with water, swims and runs down slopes, washes useless stuff away, sees to it that everything all about glitters watery, swallows up and gulps down dust, is a sweeper and wiper who diligently wipes and valiantly sweeps up and makes those who don’t carry an umbrella scurry along. How richly thinged the world is; again and again we sincerely have to adore it. Should it also be permitted to think about excursions, entire cities, wide, verdant landscapes filled with fruitfulness, of Russian, Bavarian, Belgian, Thuringian, North American, Spanish, Tuscan regions moistened and injected with abundant wetness? Or about historical pageants, the dense crowd breaking up, seeking shelter that looks quite pleasant? Wouldn’t a dreamy poet in rainy weather like to sit at a dear old window so as to feel inordinately lonely? If I’m not mistaken, it rained endlessly, as it were, during the Battle of Dresden, and Napoleon got thoroughly soaked.

Many years ago, as it dripped and rained enchantingly, I promenaded and strolled along the local Bahnhofstrasse that had duplicated itself, its facades, trees, gentlemen and ladies, primarily these, boys and girls and kittens and I don’t know what all, magically reflected in the smooth asphalt and in the soft afternoon light in such a way that there was an upper world and a lower world and the unfathomable seemed almost more beautiful than the real. Desist, desist. Relent and break off. Consider whether this article perhaps isn’t already almost too grand and difficult.

(1918)

Works

Dead Dog

April 4, 2019

Sarah Edwards

Dead Dog

A Louisiana Thanksgiving, and the seatbelts burn hot ribbons across their shoulders. In the car, seventy miles down the road—bags thrown together, a cellophane-wrapped pumpkin pie sliding around on the floorboards—and they have not yet discussed what will happen to the dog. The wife can’t imagine that they’ll keep it, though she also can’t imagine giving it away. It has become worse than a bad dog: it has become a good dog who is a liability.
The husband’s family has often joked with the wife that she loves the dog more than she loves him. It is a joke about her devotion, just above average, to the animal, though its suggestive undercurrent is that she is a ridiculous person. During this visit, when the husband pulled out a Polaroid from their wedding—a courthouse wedding, a shotgun wedding, held just months before—his mother took it into her hands and squinted.
Interesting, she said. So what exactly is it that you’re wearing here?
And when the wife proudly told her that it was actually a vintage prom dress, a thrift-store find, if she could believe it, the mother-in-law stood up to clear the table. A steal, the wife said to her mother-in-law’s back as she stood before the sink. God, I mean. I swear. It feels like air.
The husband and wife had met at a party, back in May, crowded among yucca; a party that had seemed average to her but new and daring to him, glinting with bayou liquors, freewheeling and dark, an experiment. In June, they drove to the coast at midnight, speeding through conversations about coincidences and the joke/not-joke names of future children. In July, they drifted into cohabitation. By August the weather had turned muggy and biblical. The hairs on the tomato plants stood on alert ends, and impossibly long snakes tumbled out of trees, spooking up the yard’s speedboat tarp. They’d awakened one day and lain in bed with the wife’s phone on their knees, watching the green eye of a hurricane move across the screen, flickering persistently like trick candles on a birthday cake. And when, after a while, the husband walked out into the yard and picked bouquets of iris (Louisiana iris, the rare kind, artery red), one for each of them, she had laughed, nodded. OK, yes. OK—yes!
The flowers wilted before they made it up the courthouse steps, but the hurricane itself never came and swept on suddenly toward the Carolinas.
Later, when they look at the wedding picture, the juvenile shimmer of the wife’s dress is hard for the husband’s parents to swallow; also the age difference. The husband was born in 1990. The wife was born in 1978, the year “YMCA,” by the Village People, came out. Were they to learn of her first two marriages, the husband’s parents would likely find those hard to swallow, too.
The parents, who run a popular magazine about rare bourbon varieties, are famously magnanimous. They have an open-door policy. Everyone knows this. But when it comes to the wife, they cannot help but feel that she is backwoods trash. Whenever she brings up astrology, they grow uncomfortable. Children, as a topic, don’t sit well with them, either. Dogs, as a topic, have been weakly agreed upon. Dogs, so full of neutral habits. Dogs, so full of eyes and ears, noses and tails.
The husband worships his parents—the unflagging, hand-on-back grace of their devotion to each other. He wishes that the wife could see them as he does. They are good people, dog people. Until last night, they had one, too.
The wife has had hers for nine years, and … Oh! This dog! A Tom Hanks among dogs, licking babies, flopping ecstatically on the floor. A dog who sits when you say Sit, who high-fives when you say High-five. Its nose is wet as a bath faucet, its paws large and helpless as oven mitts. The dog has been through everything with her. It has been through the first husband, the second husband, the Clozapine, the tiled kitchen floor, pink like a Mary Kay Cadillac.
She has only had her new husband for a few months, and the dog will not hurt anything again—really. She will make sure of it.
Can you keep an eye out for gas? Something under $2.90? the husband says, breaking the silence, brushing the back of her hand with his. Then he says, You know, let’s make it harder—something under $2.85.
The husband likes to make little challenges like this for himself, although, maddeningly, he is not actually competitive. He is kind. Just below the surface of what he knows about himself there is also this: a belief that the marriage is, itself, a kind of kindness.
In the back of the car, the dog lets out a long, low whine. His feet stutter as the husband eases onto the brake and off an exit. He slings a paste of drool across the headrests.
The wife has heard this particular sound from the dog before. It doesn’t have to do with shame, doesn’t have to do with hazy dog-grief; no, her dog is not thinking about the other animal it killed this morning—the dog belonging to the husband’s mother; boxy, unremarkable, and patient, the dog they found when they came downstairs for breakfast. Upon spotting it limp beneath the table, the mother-in-law let out a little throat cry, high-pitched and compromising. The wife didn’t make a sound, but her thoughts began racing. She thought, Who has come and hurt our dogs? But then she understood. When she found her own dog in the front-hall closet, hiding behind a set of golf clubs—tawny hair still caught between its teeth, confused and frightened by its own strength—she knelt and gathered it into her arms.
Now hot air zips through the open windows, and a Rolodex of billboards—they all seem to be advertising either hell or something large, the world’s largest!—unfurls beside the car. Now the sound her dog is making only has to do with needing to pee. It is a need that has appeared suddenly in its brain like a suggestion, a commercial, a balloon. It is inflating, slowly, outsizing everything else. The dog is not thinking about what will happen next.
Bingo! the husband says, pulling into a station. See? $2.84.
He glances back at the dog and gets out. In the past, he was eager to volunteer for menial dog-care tasks, eager to prove some Boy Scout willingness. He likes the dog, of course, but now when he looks at it there is already a suggestion of goodbye, an appraisal of the facts: here sits a nice dog who sometimes kills things.
It was only a few days ago, the wife thinks, that she lay in bed with the husband, her face pushed peacefully up against the cleft of his shoulder—a warm, piney miracle. She wonders mildly what she would do if she were in his position, but the thought is too impossible to host. The least she can do now is get out and take the dog over to a dry patch of grass and let it do its business. That much is on her. Open the door, she thinks. Get out. OK, do it now. Now.
She doesn’t move. She adjusts her sunglasses, takes her hair and winds it into a new ponytail. The dog whines, nudges her elbow with its nose. Outside, the pavement sizzles like seltzer and smells of bruised citrus, of something sweet and newly rotten—though once, when she described something this way, the husband laughed delightedly at the precision. What a goober, he said, we’re nowhere near fruit trees!
He pumps gas, then cracks the door open and peers in. Want anything? he asks. Peanuts? Ginger ale? Shitty coffee?
What he is getting at is that she probably wants cigarettes to calm her down, to smoke her out of this darkness. He is a good man, but he wants her to ask him for the bad thing so that he does not have to suggest it.
Peanuts, she says in a secret voice, though even as she says it, she’s not sure whether she is saying it to throw him off her trail or because she really wants peanuts.
That all?
Yes, she says.
He finishes pumping the gas. No, she thinks. She cannot part with the dog. It is getting older, and with age come spurts of a dazed, feral energy. But it has never meant to hurt anything. If it comes down to it, she thinks, if the choice is between taking the dog and driving out of this gas station, burning rubber, the husband jogging behind, yelling, Maggie, Jesus freaking Christ, Maggie, come on, Mags, she’ll do what she has to. She loves the husband, loves the uneven upside-downcake viscosity of their union, but he will be fine, will be loved, always, by someone. Of course, he might miss her, but his life is male, muscled by college sports, is blue oxford shirtsleeves rolled quarter up, is still at the very beginning—he’ll move on,maybe become a youth pastor. There is always time left for a man to become a youth pastor.
He walks off in the direction of the gas station. He trots back, peers in. From inside the car, his face looms large, impossibly big, enveloped by a white glare, almost impossible to make sense of.
He drops the keys through the crack in the window. He waits.
What? she says.
Hot out here, he says, and it is as if he is baiting her.
OK, she says. OK, and turns the pleasing flashlight of her smile up toward him.

Works

Embroidered with Hail

January 22, 2019

Yousef el Qedra (translated by Yasmin Snounu, Edward Morin, and George Khoury)

Embroidered with Hail

In the beginning, he exalted himself
above the sinful act of eating the fruit.
Then he was burned by trees and frolicking
girls, causing his name and the blueness
of his soul to bleed. He searched for prophecy
carved into fire. So he was devoured
by rivers flowing toward their destination,
and he was satisfied by a line
on a skewed wall that was told by a
story in a book neglected by time.

And he was walking in the night of a story
like a murderer searching for faces,
wrapped up with dust desiring silence.
He mounted the stairs of alertness
within a sleeping dream; he slept in
the gardens of attentive wakefulness.
He was anesthetized by the veins
of countries that lost their pulses,
and his pulse started beating with names
of women he had created from dates;
their soul is grapes, and their house is flutes
made of soughs. He drew his colors like a
sword and went into illusive wars
with whiteness and illusion. He didn’t
survive, so steadfastness wouldn’t embrace him,
but he escaped to train the street always to forgive.

A doe in the forest of speech snatched him,
stripped him of answers, and dressed him
in runes made of questions; she passed through
his veins slowly and wove from his alienation
a city for dance and temptation.
She carved on his alienation
poems of water, and from his character
traits she sewed a jacket embroidered
with smooth hail.

One evening on the balcony
of words, he saw the body of darkness
running naked, chased by the idea
that’s scared of itself, so he sought shelter
in the open pages of a book.

January, 2011

مطرّزةً بالبَرَدِ

في البدء، ارتفع عن خطيئة الفاكهة، ثم اكتوى بالشجر والصبايا، نازفاً اسمه وكثيراً من زرقةِ روحه، فتّش عن نبؤةِ محفورةٍ في النار، فالتهمتْهُ الأنهارُ الذاهبة إلى رجاءاتها، واكتفى بسطرٍ على حائطٍ مائلٍ أخبرتْ عنه قصةٌ في كتابٍ أهملتْهُ الأيامْ.

وكانَ يمشي في ليلِ الحكايةِ كقاتلْ، يبحثُ عن وجوهٍ غلّفها غبارٌ يشتهي السكونْ، اعتلى أدراجَ اليقظةِ في حلمٍ نائمٍ، ونامَ في حدائق الصحوِ المتنبّه، خدّرته عروقُ البلادِ التي فقدتْ نبضها، وصار ينبضُ بأسماءِ اللواتي خلقهنَّ من تمرِ وروحهنَّ عنب وبيتهنَّ ناياتٍ من شهقاتْ. استلَّ ألوانَهُ سيفاً وخاضَ حروباً وهميةً مع البياضِ والوهمْ، لم ينجُ لئلا تحضنْهُ الصلابةُ، ونجا حتى يدرّبُ الطريقُ على العفوِ دائماً.

التقطتْهُ ظبيةٌ في غابةِ الكلام، جرَّدته من الاجاباتِ وألبستْهُ تعاويذ من الأسئلة، مشت في عروقِهِ على مهلٍ وغزلتْ من غربتِهِ مدينةً للرقصِ وللغواية، نقشتْ على عزلتِهِ قصائد من ماء، ومن ملامحِهِ حاكتْ سُترةً مطرّزةً بالبَرَدِ الناعِمْ.

وذاتَ مساءٍ، ومن على شرفةِ المفرداتْ، رأى جسدَ العتمةِ يركضُ عارياً تلاحقُهُ الفكرةُ المفجوعةُ بذاتها، فاحتمى بدفتي كتابْ

2011 yraunaJ