Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
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From the Archives
Fiction • Commencement 2010
It was the first day of April when I took from a man of about my age (though, I noted, not as hot as my boyfriend at the time) the light burden of his left eye. It was an accident, or at least as much of an accident as it could have been.
By that April, all my friends had reached their senior years of college and I was still living at home in Tucker, being what my mother in a bad mood called a “waste of space.” I worked at a grocery store in Atlanta and took (stole, really) upscale breads for my boyfriend. I’d spent the winter realizing in increments how much I needed to get my life moving in some good direction.
My life had been wandering for three years, ever since I didn’t get into the college I thought I wanted, Davidson, a college my boyfriend in a bad mood called “pretty enough.” It shouldn’t have been so bad, not getting into the right college, but that angry envelope unleashed gales that whirled my unhinged life into confusion. I mean, it really did—two days after the letter came in the mail some pre-thunderstorm weather devolved into a thrashing windstorm, which threw a rotten tree onto our garage.
In response, I retreated into my own body. I began to skip school, to ignore assignments. I fell into an easily-sustainable pattern of squalor. I was never a drinker, and couldn’t stand the taste of my throat scorching with weed, but nonetheless (and how could this be more easily forgivable?) I got almost nothing done. I would come home from school and lie down in my unmade bed and take naps punctuated by naps, and I let myself grow filthy. I would wear a shirt for days until it grew soft and tempered with skin cells. I bathed in my own odor and kept the lights so dim my eyes stung. I lay around pantsless, putting black sharpie dots over every reddened follicle on my thighs. When I did have pants on, I could not keep my hands out of them. I was furious every day, outraged with failure. Sometimes my boyfriend would come over, my river-god, to slip himself like cool gelatin into my nest. At the time he shared my fascination with unscented products: he used unscented soap, unscented lotion, unscented detergent, and I would close my eyes and breathe in his unscent.
I went to Georgia Southern for a semester, failed to complete a single assignment—hard drive failure, I’d told every professor every time, angrily like they were to blame—and came back home, thinking I’d try again the next year. But I liked being close to my boyfriend, who went to Georgia State.
I stagnated. I remember one early summer walking down to the creek that ran in the woods of a neighbor’s land. The center of the creek ran slick and green, but the edges, snagged with branches and rocks, were sluggish from the mosquitoes that laid their eggs in the water, clotted white with foamy arterial plaque. The image personally disgusted me. I had to run back to my house.
But really things weren’t all that bad, those three years. I was making money; my coworkers couldn’t smell me through the smell of the bread. My boyfriend and I were compatible in a spiritually gratifying way. I helped my mother cook dinner almost every night and I went on walks when I wanted to feel sweaty and purged.
So along came this April of my mock-senior year. That morning at my grocery store, Fowler’s, the four women who came every morning to bake the bread unexpectedly made pumpkin-seed cheese bread, which was supposed to be seasonal. I took three loaves and texted my boyfriend, who didn’t respond. He loved seasonal breads mainly because he found the idea satisfyingly non-modern, and he’d always liked pumpkin-seed cheese bread. Pumpkin-seed cheese bread has these cubes of bright-orange artisanal cheddar baked into the center. It’s a bread that refines itself. I was driving home, wondering if it would be as good in the moist springtime as in the fall. I was looking at my phone to start calling my boyfriend when my side mirror lightly hit the bicyclist.
On the first of April, this is what I became. I became a girl who could clip a bicyclist with the right side mirror of her parent’s car, causing the bicyclist to swerve, hit a rock, flip off his bicycle like a plume of water sideways from a swiveling hose, land on the ground seemingly safe from damage, and then, after skittering forward a foot, plunge his left eye into the point of a broken sign pole by the roadside.
He was lucky—how easily, sighed the doctors, the pole could have perforated his head, piercing its metallic trail deep into the lax oxbows of his brain. Lucky! Yet I removed his eye, destroyed it. I could have just as well laid my lips on his soft socket-skin and sucked the eye from his skull, wet globe with fire-red contrail, mine to round out my cheek and keep smooth in my saliva.
As it was, I didn’t actually see the accident. I barely felt the bicyclist’s contact with the side mirror. He made less of a jolt than a squirrel. But I looked out the side window as I passed to see if I’d hit anything and I saw him lying on the ground, blood on his face, hideous. I remember my body trying to swallow itself. I pulled over to the shoulder. The pole, stolidly erect, was topped with gore like a gruesome candlestick. The man moved a hand to his forehead, to his eye, screamed. He had long curly hair and work boots with orange laces. I couldn’t stand the orange laces. I called 911, of course, which was not romantic at all. I called my mother. (My father, living his separate life in northern Florida, was left in the dark most of the time.) Along came an ambulance, and my mother, who said “Oh my god, god, god,” when she arrived at the crash, if that’s what it should be called. I told her to cut it out.
It was an act easier than pulling on a hat, and more enduring. I pulled his dead eye onto my conscience, immense and bleak and spherule, like an astronaut’s globe helmet.
I avoided people beyond the grocery store for a week, as my mother made phone calls. (This wasn’t actually much of a change for either of us.) After a week my boyfriend came over. “It’s all right,” said my boyfriend, stroking his thumb down my back. “He still has the other eye.”
“Fuck that,” I said, crying. “He doesn’t have any depth perception.”
“Who needs depth perception?” said my boyfriend. “I read that Rembrandt didn’t have depth perception, and it made him better at painting. And think how easy microscopes and telescopes will be for him now.”
My boyfriend used to be celestially obsessed, but astronomy had proved too hard in college so he became a psych major. And right now he was missing the point. Why an eye, of all things? It was so wasteful—after the bicyclist had spent his entire life keeping it clean. I could as well have crept to my victim’s bedside each dawn for the rest of his life and, as he slept, applied a pirate patch to his left eye. He will never again watch the goofy dissolve of a magic eye puzzle into its quilted window, the vibrating sparkle of glitter, the springing three-dimensionality of a stereoscope. Fuck me, that stupid bicycle, my fucking boyfriend.
“Fuck Rembrandt,” I said.
“Did you take any bread today?” said my boyfriend. “Let’s put it in the oven.” He started to kiss my neck.
We had a mostly physical relationship. We didn’t make bread, of course—that’s what my boyfriend would call “too much”—but sometimes we’d heat a loaf up in the oven and then eat it in bed, in handfuls, hot. My boyfriend liked watching me get butter on my hands. I never knew why he liked me, and I used to think it was because no matter how messy he was, I was messier—how I didn’t use soap or warm water to wash my face, how I wore dirty underpants then no underpants at all, how I kept my room so chaotic that the bed was the only refuge. My boyfriend liked that I was always losing things, forgetting about things, scattering bits of myself (bitten fingernails, clipped hair). It turned him on. Anyway, he was not a “sweetie pie,” nor did he wish to “educate” me. I was the slut long before he was.
I wish I could say he was much too good for me, but really it was just that we had very little in common. “Bread,” I said. I tried to remember.
“You can’t let this drag you down,” said my boyfriend. “You can get through this. You should keep making the effort to go back to school and stuff.”
“How can I,” I said. On this point I was acting more miserable than I felt. I thought that the bicyclist and his stray eye were bound to cause some change in my life. Just what I needed, I thought.
He kissed both my eyelids. He was so large and graceful. He had large hands and feet, hands he could cover his whole face with, a rangy body that would say “big cock” to people who listened for that kind of thing. I have never loved anyone more—just the sight of his hands made me pant. We heated up the day’s airy batard, tore it into pieces, and ate the fluffy center out together before we ate the crust. This was how he sympathized with me, and I felt it. Then we fucked with violence and generosity. Sex is what we had.
My mother did all she could do to deal with the crash. She spent so much time on the phone, holding the phone cocked under her ear while she washed dishes. I wondered if she was enjoying herself, wearing rubber gloves, rubbing the sponge hard enough to cast soap bubbles into the air against bowls that she could have just put in the dishwasher. It was unlikely she even noticed. I wondered what the insurance people thought of the clinking dishes as they talked to her.
It fell out like this: a misdemeanor, reckless driving. Four points on my license, which meant six months of no driving, because I wasn’t 21 yet when it happened. I got fined five hundred dollars, which seemed so slight it was ridiculous. But the car insurance rates flew so high that I wouldn’t even be able to cover it with the money I made at the grocery store. And because my mom had to go to her secretary job she wouldn’t be able to drive me to work. My boyfriend could drive me during the summer, but when the fall came, I would have to find a new job and public transportation to it—that was the hardest thing about it, from one angle.
My mother punished me by hugging me lightly and sighing. Then I fried myself in the pan of my guilt.
I had been working at a nice grocery called Fowler’s for those two and a half years since I decided not to go back to college. I worked at the bread counter, and in the bread cooler. Four women came each morning at four in the morning to bake the bread as the sun rose. Customers liked to ask for bread recommendations, and I’d recommend whatever seasonal bread we had around that day. “Is it good?” they liked to ask after.
In the days after the crash I spent so much time hiding in the bread cooler, a square room behind the bread counter, that I’m surprised I didn’t get fired. The bread cooler was meant to keep bread cool and dry and maintain the internal lattice of yeast bubbles and the texture of the crust. The air of the bread cooler was scientific, modulated, carefully purified and locked. I liked sitting in there, picturing myself a seeded loaf in its most perfect atmosphere.
If I had gone to college, I would have studied something old, like Classics, I thought. The bakery and bread cooler were the most old-feeling places in Atlanta, so they didn’t taunt me with thoughts about how after that floppy collision the bicyclist’s world flattened out permanently. The Greeks ate barley bread and wine every morning and ate leavened bread at festivals.he Romans baked their bread in ovens with domes like temples and sweetened it with cheese or honey, and back then when no one bathed the world was flat for everyone. (I was lying to myself, of course, but it helped.)
Then dark-age monks and feudal lords would have had places like this. And the serfs at least had their bread to punch down when it rose high and soft. As a kid I called baguette crust “bark,” but raw bread, breathing and sighing, suedey and semisolid like buttocks, is so much more like bodies than trees. It is small bodies kneaded from edible clay. I’d sit in the bread cooler picturing sailors and warriors and smallpox-doomed girls passing ovals of edible clay through their digestion and building themselves up in its gradual disintegration and I’d think, me too. This sort of bread is built into our ancestral memory.
The air in the bread cooler was yeasty, fresh and lofty. Oldness pressed against me, and my eyes filled up with tears.
The bicyclist decided not to press charges. My mother called him “a darling” when she heard that. It’s possible he thought it was too much his fault for being so far into the road. It pained me that he should feel guilty.
During the May after the crash, my boyfriend and I saw each other much less often than usual. He didn’t tell me, but he was disgusted by the blood, or really the vitreous humour jelly, that I had on my hands. I could see his disgust in the way he refused to eat grapes around me. We used to love grapes. It occurred to me that we had a dirt-based relationship: I was the gorgon, he the hapless knight. Perhaps.
Despite the fact that I had ruined someone’s eye, life seemed to move on as usual.
In the shower I ran my fingernails down my legs and sloughed soft gray wads of skin cells into my fingernails. I caught a spring cold, collected my snot in napkins. I picked lint cream from my toenails. At night, I lay on my right side first, because my father had told me all the biggest organs are on the left, and if you lay on your left every night they will mash together and fuse in a heap. He told me sheep’s insides always do this. At night I imagined my organs hanging down in the emptiness of my right side, like Christmas tree ornaments pinned to my abdominal ceiling. The white clots drifted their tired way through my fingernails.
All that May, where was my boyfriend? My body asked me for him. As it turns out, I shouldn’t have trusted him with so much. (I never should have trusted him with so much.)
The fact of the crash seeped into my nonconscious body as well and I started to notice changes. I was having trouble sleeping. I couldn’t deal with the foggy noise of the air conditioner, switching on and off irregularly, so I wore earplugs. For a while I put an earplug in just one ear and slept with my unblocked ear on the pillow so I could hear my cell phone, which I put underneath the pillow. The faint sound of the air conditioning and my mother and the road leaked through the pillow like sounds underwater, like one of my ears was dead and the other one overfull with blood. But after a few weeks I tossed around too much to deal with just one earplug in, and I started using both. The wavering electric buzzing that my ears invented for themselves in the absence of sound would get to be too much and I’d pull the earplugs out most of the way, hoping for a little sound but not too much. I imagined myself floating through outer space in an astronaut suit—I’ve heard astronaut suits called the littlest spaceships—this is what outer space would sound like if something went wrong. It would be this body-deep plug right before all organs pop open and unravel in the absence of pressure, tongue unscrolling, eyes wetly bursting, body unfurling into globs of blood and muscle fiber, then disintegrating. In my two-earplug stage, I’d miss my boyfriend’s texts, which was just as well because they only told me he was busy with school. My tote bag filled up with dirty earplugs, orange-foam bullets.
My mother, after spending an hour each day driving me to work and then picking me up, decided that it might be best for me to go stay with my father in Tallahassee for a while. She hated driving after my crash, something I failed to notice, of course. Going to Florida was one of those drastic moves that had been nothing more than a bad idea since he separated from my mom during my sophomore fall and moved to go work on combat systems for General Dynamics. I’d never been down to visit him, though he came to Georgia occasionally. I gathered he spent a lot of time shooting and fishing with his equally masculine friends. I did not want to go live with him for the rest of the summer and the fall and the winter, which is what my mother told me I should do. I refused.
Finally at the end of May my boyfriend was available. My heart surged when he called. “Let’s do something special,” he said. Should we go to a movie? Go downtown? He suggested a picnic, which is why he ruled. He came to get me. Oh, smiling was so easy, and there was no need to mention all the times he’d ignored me.
We made up a picnic and put it in a canvas bag. We brought pain de campagne, a bastone, and challah. Among other things, we brought goat cheese, black olive tapenade, chicken liver pâté, apricot preserves, and gruyère, all from my grocery store. For dessert we brought crème fraîche and maple syrup. These seemed the only appropriate foods for a picnic. I miss myself, thinking about how I used to think. No wonder he had found sexiness in my messiness. I was messy as a body is messy, the mess of sweat and hair and the inevitable drift into uncleanliness. Looking back, I admire myself for my frankness, the frankness of eating chicken legs with my fingers, the rawness of cream-topped coffee yogurt, the foul richness of veiny cheese—these things I would eat in front of him, without a thought! I only realized as he was leaving me that it had always been him accepting me for who I am; it could never have been the other way.
We decided to drive up to Grant Park, which was a wooded wedge in a hilly neighborhood. We parked on the road, which followed the low creek, and hiked up a steep grassy hill. The white day sagged on the grass, straining red through its green. The top of the hill was clear and offered a view through the rumpled summer hills all the way to Atlanta. The sky hung low, dark and dense as pith, and against it the birds stirred up their usual racket. Their polysymphonic chirping, running through this liquid day like wire thread, spoke to me only of inevitability. It had taken me a while to realize that dimness, not brightness, makes coziness. Once I worked that out, bright light affronted me. I liked these threatening days, when the sky leans so low a spongiform musk covers all objects. My boyfriend and I sat on the grass and got our pants dirty, talking about school and the weather, but in the best way.
“Tell me about stuff,” he liked to say. As usual I felt the sweetness that came with being able to talk about whatever I wanted. My boyfriend, bewitchingly handsome on this viscid day, faked looking off distractedly into the distance. He was too smart or calculating to be ever actually distracted by the horizon while I was talking. (Thank goodness I was still worth listening to.) I told him about when I was little, how I used to draw landscapes where the sky was a blue strip at the top of the page, the sun a hairy quarter-circle in the corner, the ground a green strip at the bottom. Objects were always firmly attached to the green ground. What did I think all that white space was? I wish I had left that blue strip out—I wonder if I could have dealt with that idea, with no marked sky, while emptiness settles solid and heavy on each low form and crushes it onto the green edge.
Meanwhile, we glowed. Our skin was perfect and pellucid. I was a dirty, scattered person, and this weather was indispensible to me. My boyfriend knew it. It makes me irrationally sad that already then I was secondary in his life.
He breathed hot and buzzy in my ear. “You look so hot,” he said. He rubbed his hands down my arms and licked my neck. “You have the softest skin,” he whispered. It felt like he was hitting on me. I felt uncomfortable. Then his mouth tasted rotted-out, after he smoked. I could not get enough of that taste. I could never have gotten enough of that taste. I had not realized until then how utterly unimportant we were. An hour in, the sky licked down hot and thick and vitreoid, and we were devoured. It rained all over the bacon bits, the bread, the brie.
I didn’t hear from my boyfriend again for a week. My mother was getting fed up with driving, and she didn’t understand why my boyfriend couldn’t drive me, as he was done with school. She wrung her hands. I had to call in sick a few days in a row.
Then, as she had never done, she forced change upon me.
“I’m sorry,” she said one evening. “I think a change would be good for you.”
I knew immediately what she was talking about. “I’m changing!” I said.
“You’ll enjoy the warm winter. The wildlife is beautiful,” she said.
“I’ll get a bike and find a job in Tucker,” I said.
“Your father really misses you. And you can come back in December, I’d say. Just take a little break,” she said.
“I’ll get out of bed, if that’s your problem. I just don’t want to move.” As I said it, I realized how silly it sounded.
“That’s not my problem,” she said. “You’re a mess, that’s the problem.”
I was so surprised she’d noticed I almost didn’t feel hurt. Then I felt hurt. “I could,” I started. I could wear sleek leggings. I could cut my hair short as a boy’s. I could run my head, over and over, into a wall. I could cultivate a terrarium. I could tear pieces of bark from trees.
“No. I cannot tolerate you here any more,” she said. That was the forcing. I knew she’d feel bad about it someday.
The next week my boyfriend called me (he was right to call; it wasn’t really worth meeting up) and told me we should probably stop seeing each other. That didn’t matter, I knew—he would still be just as present in my life whether he actually was or not.
I ate the sand from my eyes, the scabs from my skin. I peeled flesh from the soles of my feet like skin off a fruit. The bicyclist’s single eye glittered at me. It was your fault, you eye, for changing things, I thought. The eye had added an unpleasant thought into our relationship—not a thought of the doom we’ll all face, my boyfriend didn’t think that way. More that the eye had set a palpable breach into our formerly sort-of-equal relationship. I had become a hero, not a good one of course, but at least a force of damage, a producer of real enduring consequences. My boyfriend enjoyed taking other girls’ virginities but it wasn’t the same. He was unmoored and would have loved to find himself in a situation as ends-of-the-earth as mine. Where before we could deal, when I had simply been attractive because I had lived in a puddle of my own making, a model of self-containment, the god that kneels in disguise at his own altar. Beyond the heliopause, I had been a place so empty it can only be itself.
Now I had no driver at all, so I had to sail away from my bread counter. I said goodbye to the four bakers on my last morning. Only one of them smiled at me. I stole four loaves of pain paysan, then my mother drove me home. There was not nearly enough ado, I thought, not even a dead tree falling onto our house.
Alas, I had been searching for human connection, and this is what I found; I connected with an eye. Guilt blew across my face and settled like snow.
And so I entered the slack zone of my life. When in high school or middle school I would get nervous for a test, this was what, unconsciously, I had been nervous for. When I was encouraged to study, to get up out of bed, to clean myself—this was the end everyone had been hoping I would avoid. It was only the bleakest comfort knowing that this state right here was the seeping center of my life, a black hole like my boyfriend had described to me once, which dilates time with gravity so objects seem to take an infinite time to fall in.
Six days before I left for Florida I made my mother drop me off at Wal-Mart so I could buy some toiletries. She didn’t ask (not out of delicacy; she wasn’t paying attention) why I wanted Wal-Mart, which was farther into town, instead of Target, which I usually prefer. I wanted the Wal-Mart because it was right near the stretch of road where I’d hit the bicyclist.
My mother dropped me off. I hastily bought a soap dish and three tubes of toothpaste—of course, I didn’t know how to buy toiletries—and then went out into the vast rainstained parking lot and down to the road. I walked along the grassy shoulder for ten minutes. The frank pale sky fixed itself in a glare. My mind hummed blankly. I could not connect this space (too little space, that had always been the problem with the bicyclist) to the ruin it had wrought. Walking, I reached a rhythm and became sweaty and came to another section of shops and parking lots—nail salon, pet supply store, shoe store, gym. In the vacant lot next to the gym there was a kids’ jungle gym and swingset, swings twisting above the tall gray grass in a foreboding attitude that stung my eyes. I was daring myself to go over to them when I saw a man coming out of the pet supply store. I don’t know why I looked at him. He was carrying two big sacks of dry dog food and a leash. He had short curly hair and walked weirdly with a kind of lope. As he got closer I could see his brown work boots, his orange laces—I already felt like screaming and then he turned towards me and his left eye was just gone, erased, blanked over with flat flesh.
My heart fell down but I didn’t scream. His blank socket looked dough-filled. It was a flesh-colored eyepatch, I realized. He kept staring at me. He furrowed his brow. I wondered why he was walking so weirdly, sort of stumbling, tottering like a giant avoiding stepping on the things far beneath him. He wasn’t looking at me because he recognized me (he never saw me properly during the crash, and never saw me again after). He was looking at me because I looked so afraid.
He reached his car. He unlocked the door and put the food in the back and I saw he had two huge fluffy dogs, those white ones with the hair matted over their eyes. They wagged their tails. He straightened up and closed the door to get into the front and looked up at me and smiled—the smile did not make him look any better. He smiled and I smiled (mine was the kind of smile I couldn’t have stopped if I had tried) and he got into his car. Then he drove away and the wind blew over me clean, clean, clean and I sat down on the curb without realizing I was sitting down and sat there for twenty minutes listening to the chains of the swings kill themselves in the wind.
My mother picked me up eventually. She drove me home. Then in my final five days in Georgia that June I did not go outside. (I could not go outside, my body binding me the best it could.) All my circadian rhythms messed up. I got a fever. I had ecstatic night pleasures that became cramps so severe they woke me up. I drank so much water, and peed it all out. It was sad to me, when I had learned that the feedback cycles in our bodies never rest. There is never equilibrium. Living is always a kind of pain, whether you have both eyes or not. A game for the restless: notice the itchiest place on your body and then scratch it. Immediately another itch will fill its place.
I lay in all sorts of positions on the bed but none of them felt any different. The bed heaved its weight against me. I imagined getting bedsores, their crawling progression, large mucilaginous scabs that crust over silkily, I imagined, like floured bread dough. Oh yes, I was soft. Soft as a medieval maiden, afraid to bathe to let the demons in. Soft as the fallen bird feathers I would find on the ground as a kid, that my mother would never allow me to pick up. Soft as the white pit of a pockmark. Beautiful as the lacy mold that creeps on moist leaves, plating them with ivory, coating them with tendrils. Harmless as the night sky wrapped in its dismal skyglow.
I missed my boyfriend. I pictured us: how we used to lie down and feed each other spit.
The sun would rise, then set abruptly, upset. My love for my mother churned me up, my mother who sat at the kitchen table under fluorescent lights, furrowed brow, reading glasses low, reading the local paper, frying herself an egg. These actions were not sad but they made me sadder than anything. She belonged to me only as much as an empty envelope, a pack of printer paper, a sheet of added-ounce stamps. Oh, I longed to hold her, almost as a lover would—at that time I did not know any other way. But I was perpetually bound to disappoint her, as the bread will never deign its sublime cooler air.
There was only the hope of spending the summer, fall and winter in north Florida, with my fishing father and his uncouth, beery bachelor friends—a prospect I faced with as much enthusiasm as I would face sewing myself into a pillowcase.
This is what I bear now, the jewelish ghost of some guy’s most beautiful organ.
I am left alone, holding this eye, opalescent jelloid sphere, swiveling itself to madness in my palm. Oh my ovoid child, my seeing stone, be still. You won’t get to see or scorch off the face of your son, and you won’t get to star an ancient person’s face, a solace in a shriveled moue. Unpaired, the exploded sun to a loose earth, no Greek trickster has ravaged you. My side mirror and the road’s pole—undignified end! At least we are each other’s complements, I try to think to myself. I am as fit, soft and beautiful as I will ever be. And you are rent through with iron.
Features • Winter 2014 - Trial
You’ve got to hear about this. Crazy stuff.
It begins in 400 BC, when a guy who probably isn’t real goes for a run that probably doesn’t happen. The guys who write about this kind of thing back then call him Pheidippides, which is at least a real name. Athens is playing Persia on the battlefield when the home team wins and our runner is tasked with delivering the news—a straight shot to Athens to let the head honchos know they’re good to go in the Battle of Marathon. And so we have ourselves a race.
Play the tape forward 2,400 years and a French academic is hanging out with a French academic. One turns to the other and says, “Call it the marathon, and make it a thing.” That’s a paraphrase. Long story short, the French academic with the thicker mustache is the founder of the International Olympic Committee—the IOC for short—and he’s just the guy to make this kind of thing a thing. He’s Pierre de Coubertin.
1896 was the year of the second marathon, then, and in Greece again to boot. Pierre figures it’d be good on the symbolism front if the first modern Olympics go down in Athens too. They throw in a few other events, of course, but the marathon becomes the main show, the crown jewel, whatever you want to call it. So they set up a route from Marathon to Athens. Simple enough—except one little problem. They don’t have a clue how Pheidippides made the trip. We’re talking 1896. Before-Christ territory is long gone. There’s more than one road now. They settle on a course 24.8548 miles long because it feels right.
Anyway, it’s a hit, obviously. The marathon survives. Pierre finds it to represent everything that needs to be represented. You can get from any feeling in the world to anywhere else in 24.8548 miles. Or 26.2, depending. They don’t standardize the distance for another 20 years. It’s hard to find common ground.
Pierre’s no athlete, but he’s an educator, and the way he sees it, sports can bring the world together. So that’s what the Games are about.
Which brings us to my point, which is 1904, when the Olympics are just about dead again. What was dead for thousands of years can die again and so on. Everything’s all good and well in Athens in 1896, but chaos reigns for take two in Paris, 1900. The IOC holds the Games there in conjunction with the World’s Fair—rookie mistake. The Fair easily outdoes Pierre’s gambit of men in short shorts wrestling for world peace. The Games become a footnote of a sideshow. The higher-ups vow to never hold the events together again.
Next time around they hold the events together again. But now it’s St. Louis’ fault. St. Louis, Missouri, America. They get to host the 1904 World’s Fair as a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, a good chunk of formerly French territory that probably keeps Pierre up at night. The Olympics are supposed to be held in Chicago, so what does St. Louis do but threaten to hold their own version of the Games so Chicago doesn’t steal their fanfare. Sure enough, Pierre caves in, fearing for the future of the world that St. Louis will overwhelm his Olympics. He straight up cancels Chicago and straight up gives the Games to St. Louis. It’s a mess. When the time comes in the summer of 1904, Pierre doesn’t even bother attending the Games, which is notable only because he’s in charge of the Games. Maybe it’s because he’s French and it’s a Louisiana Purchase festival. Again, maybe not, and no matter. There’s no use trying to get inside a man’s head.
Which brings us to Tuesday, August 30, 1904, 2:30 p.m. Welcome to Francis Field, Washington University, St. Louis, USA. Built for the occasion. Built for the run. The race starts here and ends here, an oval come full circle. It still hasn’t fallen over if you want to go looking for it. It seats 10,000—I looked it up.
The marathon’s always been a summer sport, all the way back to the Battle of Marathon. Might as well declare it’s also always been a battle. But it’s not for afternoons. It gets hot after noon. Simple as that. Heat is no stranger to a St. Louis summer, and this one was skulking into the 90s in both Fahrenheit and humidity. No use keeping count. Hard to say what the organizers thought could go right here.
At last it’s time to give the race a run. 36 sign up, 31 show up. It’s going to be that kind of day. But then—the Cuban. He makes it 32. This guy, Felix Carvajal, is a postman. Pheidippides might have delivered the news, but he didn’t have much to say. “We won!” he said. “Joy!” And then he died. Felix had a few more words in him. This guy could talk. He was known to be a chatterbox at mailboxes across Havana. He could talk as fast as he could run, they probably said, and he could run. That’s how you wind up in a marathon.
Thing was, he’d found himself in the wrong millennium. It was no longer a race to deliver a message. It was just a race. The Cuban delegation had no need for a courier and that was that. Felix was offered no funding.
No problem. Hat in hand, he runs the length of Cuba, sprinting in circles around town squares till crowds form. He declares he’s going to the Olympics to claim glory for his countrymen. He’d read about the Games in a newspaper he delivered. He mentions he needs their spare change. His countrymen fill his hat.
One small bunk on one big steamer later, Felix rolls into New Orleans. Then he rolls onto the New Orleans craps tables, and that’s when he loses all his money. Again, no problem. This is Felix. He hops a freight train, then another when the first starts heading the wrong direction. Throw in a few bouts of hitchhiking and next thing you know he’s here in St. Louis, penniless, starved, and delirious. But here. The way these amateur Games work, if you can reach the race, you can run the race. At 2:30 on the big day, Felix reaches the race. He walks up to the starting line with all of his possessions, which are the clothes on his back.
The clothes on his back include a thick long-sleeved shirt and everyday trousers. Below them are walking shoes, and above them is a beret. Almost proper attire for a well-mannered day. There’d been one of those days a few months ago.
They can’t let him run like that, naturally. Rules are rules, even if they just made them up. They delay the race to find a pair of scissors, which are eventually provided by an American shot-putter who’s charmed by Felix’s broken English. He cuts the trousers. Felix rolls up the shirt and refuses to part with the beret, doing the French academics proud.
At 3:03 p.m. they can finally fire the gun and the dying can begin. The thirty-two runners commence the third Olympic Marathon. Exactly 14 will cross the finish line. I say exactly only because it could have well been 13-and-a-half. Like I said, that kind of day. Not to spoil the story.
So now we’re running. William Garcia takes the early lead. You haven’t heard about him yet and you won’t hear about him for long. His snippet goes like this: he almost dies. Some runners are able to almost die and still finish the race, and we have a few of those here, but William isn’t one of them. William’s problem is the emergence of modernity, which brings him to his hands and knees and rips his stomach lining. This is 1904—Henry Ford’s halfway down the alphabet. What better way to watch a marathon than to ride along with it. Most of the runners can’t even run along. But this is 1904—the roads aren’t ready for the cars. Dirt roads, rocky, uneven, aimless, more dirt. The brave new world of spectators hops into cars and counts down the miles with them. An overzealous pair of race officials drives straight into a ditch and all but kill themselves. And then the railroad trains, and the delivery wagons, and the trolley cars. America stops for nothing.
The wheels kick up dust, the pipes kick up exhaust fumes. The forces combine into a devilish coat of unbreathable suffering that funnels straight down William’s throat. His stomach hemorrhages. He wavers, he wavers, he falls. A couple driving their brand new car find him passed out on the side of the road when they just miss running over his unmoving body. You’re not going to win a marathon by staying in place. He gets carted off to a hospital. A few pleasant days later, he comes back from the dead. And that’s that. He returns to his California home and his day job as a lather. He lathes.
And then there were thirty-one, again. Fred Lorz is the next to go. He’s a tall guy, jovial. Known to tell a good joke. It can be assumed then that he knows as well as anyone you need a good setup for a good punch line. Well, here’s his setup: cramps. Hits him right after mile nine. He slows to a walk, gives in to exhaustion. He’s a New Yorker, a bricklayer by day. He trains at night. Oops—sun isn’t out at night. He waves the white flag and hops into his manager’s car. They head back to Francis Field to collect his belongings.
Even so, USA’s still looking good. Of the starting thirty-two, nineteen are red-white-blue. Of the 651 athletes competing at these Games, 526 are born or bred American. Travel’s a hassle these days. Even the best high jumpers can’t jump the Atlantic. It’s easiest to reach America when you’re already here.
Point being, don’t count Fred out. He winds up winning the race. In the meantime, it’s about to get awkward. Enter Len Taunyane, alias Lentauw, because officials decide that’s less ornery to spell. Spectators can best recognize him as the African savage with no shoes. That’s relative to Jan Mashiani, the African savage who has the shoes. Together they’re the first black African competitors in Olympic history, and Len the first to run the marathon barefoot.
They weren’t supposed to run the thing. They were only here for the World’s Fair, headlining the Boer War Exhibit at the Fair’s Anthropology Days. If you want to know what Anthropology Days are, bad news: It’s a forum to decide once and for all how natives stack up against the white man. Filipinos, Patagonians, Pygmies, Japanese, Native Americans, everyone from everywhere, science for the world. Fair officials give them physical assignments and record their performances. And what do you know, survey shows they’re inferior. No matter that the competitions include gems like greased-pole climbing, and no matter that some are tasked with archery despite having never picked up a bow. No matter that none of them is an athlete.
So now that that’s settled, the only remaining question is how to sell more tickets. The answer, of course, is to have some savages try to run two dozen miles with no training, apparel, or warning. One of those days in one of those centuries.
So that’s how Len and Jan wind up at the starting line next to the last three winners of the Boston Marathon in the third Olympic Games. Despite just about everything, Len manages to keep pace with the early leaders. Then a wild dog chases him off track to the tune of a mile in the wrong direction. Marathons are hard, but marathons that are two miles longer are harder. After a nice reprieve from the monotony of racing, he shakes off man’s best friend and gets back to the torment at hand. Despite everything, he finishes ninth. Jan limps across the finish line twelfth. Media consensus is that they’ve done the savages proud. A few decades later it comes out that they’d been educated men enrolled at South Africa’s Orange Free State University. Among the 32 runners, they wear bibs 35 and 36.
But backtracking to the civilized. Even they are getting tired. And thirsty. Organizers figure this is the perfect opportunity to test out the emerging field of purposeful dehydration. They serve up two spots for runners to get water—a water tower at mile six and a well at mile twelve. Next thing you know everybody’s dying of thirst, but at least it’s on purpose.
Sammy Mellor, winner of the 1902 Boston Marathon, cramps up and quits. John Lordon, winner of the 1903 Boston Marathon, vomits on the mile-ten marker and quits. Mike Spring, winner of the 1904 Boston Marathon, loses the gift of forward motion and quits.
And the fun just keeps on running. Frank Pierce, the first Native American to compete, collapses from exhaustion and hitchhikes back to the stadium. Two Greeks who have never run a marathon before do a bad job of marathon running. Arthur Corey, a Frenchman, manages not tov fall over but brings the wrong legal papers and is forced to register as an American. You can’t win around here. Not even the winners.
Well, of all possible outcomes in an infinite universe, Felix the Cuban finds himself in the lead. Thing is, this is Felix. He hasn’t eaten in two days. He’s hungry. Put yourself in his shoes. They’re heavy walking shoes, never meant to be run in, especially not for 24.8548 miles. And maybe your stomach hasn’t ruptured like some stomachs have, but hunger is hunger, and like a mirage, there before you appears an apple orchard. So what are you going to do but take a breather, have yourself some fruit, take a bite from a rotten orb, endure severe gastric discomfort, and pass the time by practicing your English with spectators on the side of the road. That’s how Felix finishes fourth. He returns to Havana a national hero and resumes his mail route. He never runs a marathon again.
But try as they might to lose, somebody has to win. Arthur Corey, the man without a country, is going to settle for second. Arthur Newton, an American with a history of always finishing but never winning, is going to finish and finish third.
Somebody’s got to be left, and his name is Thomas Hicks. Tom’s from lovely Cambridge, Massachusetts, and all this time he’s been clinging to the leading pack. But everyone in said pack gives up and suddenly Tom’s the leader. Everyone knows something he doesn’t.
Each mile’s getting longer for Tom. His manager rides alongside him, demanding he go faster. Says the guy in the car. Tom’s getting dizzy. It’s getting hard to stand. His manager pulls him over to the side of the road and gives him a dose of strychnine sulphate, which happens to be the first documented use of doping in modern athletic competitions, and also happens to be rat poison. He washes it down with some brandy. He keeps running.
Footsteps come from behind him. Tom looks over his shoulder. It’s Fred. Fred smiles and waves. Fred runs past Tom. Fred disappears into the distance. Poor Tom and his morale.
Fred, of course, has travelled the last eleven miles of the race in a car. But just as Fred broke down at mile nine, the car breaks down at mile nineteen. Fred still needs to get back to Francis Field to pick up his clothes. He is a marathoner, and he has had a breather, so why not run. He jogs the last six miles back to the stadium.
And so we proceed to the finish. Ten thousand fans see Fred enter. Fred sees ten thousand cheering fans. And then the race clock still ticking, and the finish line tape unbroken. Time for that punch line. Instead of picking up his clothes, Fred runs a lap around the track, crosses the finish line, and wins the Olympic Marathon. They stick him on a podium. President Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter places a laurel wreath on his head. Someone says, “Wait a minute. That guy drove here,” more or less. They take off the wreath. They ban him from racing for life. He says it was just a joke. He says he thought it’d be fun. They cut the ban to a year.
Back on the course, good old Tom’s just conscious enough to process the news he’s in first again. His manager does the only thing there is to do. He gives Tom another dose of rat poison. One more sixtieth of a gram and it’ll be lethal. One of those days from the good old days.
Well, Tom comes stumbling into Francis Field to no fanfare. The crowd’s already cheered for a winner. He staggers, he sways, he gets dragged across the finish line by his manager. He collapses. He’s placed on a gurney and rushed to a hospital. He’s lost ten pounds. He’s the winner. The next day he’s alive. He announces his retirement.
Three hours, twenty-eight minutes. The slowest-ever winning time for an Olympic Marathon. It’s so late it’s time for dinner.
Long story short, you can’t get to 2014 without living through 1904. Here we come, Sochi. USA! USA!
Fiction • Winter 2010 - Bestiary
*Save every bit of thread.*
*Have you a little chest to put the Alive in?* ****
*** ***(Emily Dickinson letter 233 to Thomas Higginson)
—Anne Carson,*Sumptuous Destitution**** ***
**** ****
**** ****
My grandmother told me not to jump into the bay because it was too shallow. I wouldn’t have gone in anyhow—I’m terrified of the water. Also, I hate the name. Chesapeake. It’s a perpetual grey color, like skin on a rotting body, pallid and ashy. Even on sunny days, the water looks dark and rough. Also, the bay is full of jellyfish. They float by, tangling each other with their tentacles; their bodies pulsing like huge muscles, like a heartbeat. Once, my brother pulled one from the water with a stick. When we brought it to the surface, it was the size of my fist, with tentacles like knotted dreadlocks. Setting it on the wooden deck, we thought it would flop around like a fish. It didn’t. He called it Seviche. We weren’t sure if it was dead and we were both afraid to touch it, afraid of the sting. He dared me to throw it back in. I told him he should, because, Jesus Christ, he was the one who pulled it out, anyhow. He said he was afraid of being stung. I didn’t tell him that I was, too. I suggested he kick it in, gently, so he didn’t step on it. He said he was worried about squashing it, and that I should do it because I have smaller feet. And what if it got wrapped up in its own tentacles and strangled to death? I said that jellyfish can’t breathe, but even as I said it, I wasn’t sure. We decided to leave it there, on the deck. The next morning it was there, shriveled, like an old plum. I picked it up, cupping it in my hands, to throw it back in. I felt a quick, sharp jolt as its tentacles brushed my fingertips. Still, I was happy to be on vacation. The novelty of this place was still pleasant. Chesapeake. Each time I said it, it rolled off my tongue like a curling wave.
In Florida, we live by the Everglades. I used to hate the Everglades, appalled by the lack of romance and glamour. How Sawgrass can grow to be ten feet tall and is razor sharp. You can kill someone with that. Slash right through the nothing flesh of their neck. On weekends my grandfather would take me for kayak excursions or trail hikes. Each time I’d walk along the stony paths with him, I would put my right foot down, slowly, to make sure that I wasn’t stepping into quicksand. Heel, toe. Heel, toe.
Once, I saw a snake eating a frog, the two hind-legs perpendicular, sticking from the snake’s jaw. Then, I read that Indian bones and shipwrecked Spanish treasure were buried in the Everglades. Indians had lived there for thousands of years until the Spanish came and made them move onto reservations. Before the Spanish came, they ate shellfish and turtles, crafted dug-out canoes from giant trees. They used seashells for hammers, and fishhooks, knives, and drinking cups. Then the Spanish came and used the same seashells to build forts along the cost, to protect themselves from the Indians. Ponce de Leon came searching for the fountain of youth in the Everglades. Instead, he found over ten-thousand islands, long-haired natives, and sugarcane. Then, he was killed by a native’s arrow, poisoned with the sap of a Manchineel tree. Even with all of the old bones buried under the weedy paths, the Everglades still smell like dust and eucalyptus.
This one family of Indians started a business on their little plot of land, called Jonnie’s Swamp Safari. You pay thirty-five bucks and they take you out on a rusty air-boat, in circles around their two dinky islands. Then, they take you back to the main island where they have a rotting wood amphitheater with twenty bench seats. Jonnie’s daughter brings out a rabbit and a snake, and she lets you pet them. After the show, you can buy popcorn and alligator shaped lollypops at the gift-shop. A one-legged dog hobbles around the property. When we ate our lunch, packed turkey sandwiches on white bread, I fed the dog my turkey. He nibbled at it, then stumbled away, lethargic.
There are two cages of show-animals, sunk into the mud. In one cage, some dusty birds peck at themselves, picking pebbles and twigs from behind their wings. Their thick black tongues loll against their beaks. In another cage, the alligators lay in the mud. I went to the safari with my seventh grade class. Some of the boys threw their popcorn at the caged alligators, and were disappointed when they did not move. We expected them all to rise up on their clawed feet. We wanted them to try to bite at us through the cage with their jaundiced teeth. If I didn’t see their scaled stomachs inflate, I would have thought that they were dead.
Maybe I am too much like Emma Bovary. I always want to find the romance in places. I imagine myself too often in love with people who won’t have me. I’m sick of where I am and where I am not. On a transcontinental flight, I watched a documentary on India. When people die there, their bodies are thrown into the Ganges. This terrified me, but when their bodies were thrown into the water, they were wrapped in the most beautiful multicolored fabrics. As the stiff bodies fell into the river, the fabrics bloomed about them like camellias. Then, the tide carried them off and the documentary ended.
My grandmother used to sew me dresses out of different patterned fabrics. On Christmas, it was a reindeer pattern. On Easter, one with long-eared rabbits. There is a family portrait hanging in my parent’s den where I am wearing an itchy plaid dress puffed with tulle. For my seventh birthday, she bought me a sewing canvas with a huge fat cat. I tried a few stitches, pricked my finger, and gave up, burying the canvas under my bed, as if I was humiliated by it. For weeks, I couldn’t sleep, dreaming of the unfinished cat under my bed. I half expected it to grow claws and attack me in my sleep, digging its paws and teeth into my wrist, like Pet Semetary. At night, I would stare at the popcorn ceilings, watch the night-light flicker, listen to my father watching television downstairs. Then, just as I was falling asleep, I’d hear him sneak up the stairs, open my door, and gently turn on the fan. Minutes later, after I heard him tumble into bed, I’d scramble out of bed, turn off the fan, and fixate on the unfinished sewn cat under my bed.
Then, I cut my hair, read some Proust and moved out of the swamplands. I think back to the days when I would sweat through cotton t-shirts, sip Yoohoo from the bottle, pick ants from my calves, lay on the dry dead grasses and think of the romances I wanted, or maybe had. How maybe the Everglades were flooded with love. Sitting on a bench by the river, I remembered them—none native to the glades, but all born from it, sewed indelibly into its fabric.
Jonah used to make beaded bracelets during recess, when the other boys weren’t watching. Once, he spilled his beads in the sand. There were hundreds of them, small, like salmon eggs. I spent an hour sifting the sand through my fingers like a sieve, collecting each one. When I showed him how I had collected them, each one, cupped in my palm, he knocked them out of my hands and said that beads were for girls and queers.
Ferran and I sat on the hood of his car, a mile from the Everglades, and watched the lightning strike. I called it heat-lightening. He said that all lightning is heat-lightning, and then began to explain physics to me.
Ezra broke his arm in my back yard, jumping over a garden snake. Later, when he told me that he was gay, I wondered if either the snake or the broken arm had anything to do with it. His eyes were the color of an ibis.
Yael was delicate, like a heron or an egret. His mother taught piano and yelled at her students, andante! Andante!
Ollie and I slow-danced at his pool-party. He smelled like sweat and nervously inched his fingers around my waist, then after the song ended, excused himself to go to the bathroom and ran all the way home.
Jack would wink at me each time he made a vulgar comment.
Jeff buried me in sand and kissed my eyelashes before kissing my best friend on the mouth.
Judd taught me how to roll a joint and we sat together in a hammock as he smoked and told me stories about his friends who had died.
Greg had hair the color of loam. He said that he was a Communist and told me a joke about Trotsky, but I can’t remember the punch-line.
Matt first kissed me, and relieved, sighed that he was absolutely, definitely, unquestionably, surely, certainly, assuredly, positively, gay. Then he gently kissed my hand, and left my room. I wondered if maybe it was my fault that both he and Ezra were gay.
Dan said he liked to practice karate while in the muddy water because it made him feel weightless. When we walked across a footbridge one night, he pretended to push me in, and I was frightened.
Perry and I kissed while drunk and never spoke about it again.
Emerson was always nostalgic for experiences she never had, and would write moralistic journal entries about feminism and xenophobia.
Tom was afraid of the water so he stayed in his room all of the time. When I went over we’d watch movie trailers until I got bored and would make up a lie about family coming over for dinner. When I left his stale room, I breathed heavily, smelling the salty humidity.
Denny squashed a mosquito on my upper arm and I thought that I had cut myself. Then, he enlisted to go fight in Afghanistan and never sent postcards.
Alex got married to a woman with just as many freckles as I have, and I don’t think he ever knew that I loved him.
Michael slept with the journalism teacher in our high school, and he told me that he took her to a lover’s lane on Glades Road. I said, “I thought those only exist in movies and the 1950’s.”
Oz and I kissed in his grandparent’s shed, and heard an alligator floating to the surface of the lake behind his house.
Julian wrote music in the swamps and went to music festivals like Swampfest, where he shared a tent with a lesbian whom I had taken a literature course with. She had short black hair and a tattoo of a mermaid on her back. He said that at night, she and her girlfriend, an older Asian woman, would lie in each other’s arms and cry.
Pete told me that Judas really did love Jesus as we drank vodka cranberries.
Now, I am too nostalgic for the moments all lived through the people of the glades. This river is not enough, or too much. Sometimes, I feel like my heart is going to desiccate and crumple inside of my chest, and I won’t be able to stop it—like a stone, it will sink in the dark muddy waters of the Everglades, and I won’t be able to find it. I want to go back, back to the moment before the stone makes the water ripple, before its smooth tip crests under the water. Not to the place as I remember it, but to how it was a hundred years ago. Hanging mosses and ivies, thorny strangler vines, a Spoonbill whooping as Redfish nosedive into the waters. Back to when the bones were not buried, but still carving hollow canoes, floating down the waters like blue fabrics, alive, alive, alive.
Fiction • Fall 2009
The yellow light in the lobby moves through the door’s framed glass and out into the street at midnight. It understands my shape on the asphalt out front, with my outline propped delicately over the sidewalk, whose burnished edge looks weirdly razor-like in the glow. My hand is on the glass behind me, and the heat from my fingertips gets pulled off in moist prints on its surface. The door closes with a hard sound, and I take the three steps down slowly. The night is brisk and dry. All along the Seventh Avenue sidewalks, lampposts form a colonnade that guides the eye toward Flatbush Avenue on the right and the Prospect Expressway overpass on the left. Overhead, stars defy the bright communion of the metropolitan night, shining.
I’m already walking toward Flatbush Ave. when I realize that there won’t be any cabs tonight. I’ve stayed later than I should have, I know: longer than I usually do on nights like these. The walk uptown is long and strange, and there is something about the particular air that settles in the streets at night that fills men with a sense of death or cosmic loneliness. Maybe I should’ve stayed, tried to patch things up. Maybe that’s what she was hoping for, keeping me there so long. I can still go back.
It’s been this way for three months, but it only feels like a couple of weeks, and it could have actually lasted for a half-century the way it all cycles back on itself. We won’t speak to one another for days, a couple weeks at most, and then she’ll call. Sometimes I call too, but I’ve tried not to these days. She’s sensed it. She doesn’t even pretend to have reasons anymore. And then I’m there, and a cigarette is lit and a cockroach is smashed and a star collapses and we’re screaming at one another as if nothing had changed, as if we were still together. Or we’re so quiet we could both be underwater. The period that Ellie and I were together is most easily remembered as the period where we were breaking up.
And tonight is the same, but maybe she really does want me to hit the buzzer, to apologize and we’ll go to bed and wake up in the morning baffled and miserable and smiling like machines. On either side of me, the night renders the dignified and crumbling facades of the old brownstones completely obscure. I can still go back. The light inside the slouching afterthought of the Seventh Ave. subway stop is bright and depressive; a light that strikes out against secrets. Inside the turnstile, there is a sort of abbreviated antechamber tiled from ceiling to floor in off-white ceramic with hints of flower-vine patterning at the eye level. An almost life-and-a-half sized wooden bench, wrought with illegible carvings and magic marker scrawl, sits on the landing between two staircases. The left, a sign indicates, takes you to the platform for the Q and B trains running uptown, toward Manhattan, toward home. The right, says another, leads to the same trains running downtown, through Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach, past the Aquarium, all the way to Coney Island.
I’m not going back. In this truthful light, I study the blue blood beneath my skin, and I’m filled with the giddy and melodramatic impulse of all true children: to become lost beyond all responsibility. I am certain I will board the next train that arrives, and I’m certain that it will take me downtown, towards disaster and Coney Island. I imagine Ellie waiting up countless hours until she decides that I really have gone home. It’s satisfying enough to know that she’ll be wrong. I erase any thought of rest or reconciliation from my mind. Already it feels as if I’m about to board a spaceship, momentous and apocryphal.
I can hear the nondescript rumbling of the Q moving into the station, and I take the stairs to the downtown platform, where a boy with green slacks, white t-shirt and an olive complexion is standing beneath one of the only working bulbs on the platform. The youth’s hands are in his pockets. He could be about 15, but tall for his age, and he stares past me as if I were invisible. His eyes are black, or appear to be, and his mouth is shut tight. There’s something about his posture that makes him look either highly dangerous or chronically ill. When the train finally pulls in, he never moves. I walk past in silence, watching him. Maybe he has some other agenda. There’s no one in my car when the automated bell sounds and the doors of the train slide shut. Maybe he’ll get the next one. It doesn’t matter. The trains run all night.
We move. The night is indifferent to elaborately vandalized concrete walls of the trench that accommodates the BMT Brighton Line, and the only thing I can see in the window is the reflection of the car’s interior; empty plastic bucket-seats, vertical handrails, rows of leather hoops along the aisle, and my own face. Above the windows, advertisements prod those passengers absent of mind or without any other recourse, “Earn Your GED,” “Give Blood,” and “Ask For Help.” On another, a cheerful blond child is running through the spray on a beach somewhere warm with the caption, “Jimmy Doesn’t Know He Has Lymphosarcoma.”
The last time Ellie and I went out together, when she was still living with me, we rode the train after midnight back from a late movie at a revamped peep-show theater in midtown. She insisted that we take a cab, and I can remember using a sort of dismissive, parental tone I knew would irritate her. She wouldn’t talk to me then, not even about the movie, which I knew she had loved, and which I knew I had ruined for her. It was a surf-flick from the 1950’s called “Hang Ten For Two” starring a bronzed half-Latin heartthrob named Johnny Lamar. The main character was a shy surfer-girl who tries to impress the beach crowd by surfing on her hands during high tide at the infamous Big Lip Cliff. But she doesn’t realize that there’s a shark in the water, and in the nick of time Johnny Lamar paddles in to the rescue, cruising back to shore with a foot on the nose of each of their boards, performing the title’s trick—the ‘hang-ten-for-two.’ Afterwards, there’s a luau and a barbeque, and the film’s final shot is the silhouette of Johnny and the heroine in an intimate embrace as the sun goes down. Ellie always had a way of getting embarrassed at how much she enjoyed things; I could see tears in her eyes as Johnny played guitar around the campfire. She looked beautiful then. I had regretted it, felt sick to my stomach about it even as I belittled her, but that never changed anything. She had put her things in boxes a week later. After a few stops, I remember a place my grandfather used to talk about from when he lived around this neighborhood, and I get off at Ocean Parkway to see if it’s still around.
It’s a short walk down a few blocks of single-story cafes and all-night Chinese groceries where men of indeterminate age sit behind counters, utterly motionless. The bar occupies a small section of an otherwise-vacant complex whose tenant could have been a YMCA or an insane asylum. The edifice is plaster matted in concrete for three stories up, and above the sign that says “Odd Hour Tavern & Grille,” I can see the bottom half of an enormous mural of a black and gold mermaid that covers the whole side of the building. She has long blue hair replete with starfish and wistful gray eyes. A man in a heavy flannel shirt leaning against the wall outside the door is smoking a cigarette and seems to be laughing at me but he doesn’t make a sound. I ignore him and go inside.
The Odd Hour is clearly a locals-only dive, evident from the huddled conversations that collect at its corners. Its back wall is taken up by a bar whose arms reach outward at either end across half the width of the room, leaving a serviceable space in the center with tables and stools. The bar is at capacity, so I order a drink and sit at a table where two people are talking; a man in a black turtleneck and a blazer, and a woman in a blue dress who only seems to nod.
I spent most of last year in Buenos Aires, working for a friend who owns a hotel there. Beautiful country, really lovely people.”
Uh-huh.”
“Of course, I couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. It wasn’t too difficult getting around though, especially in the city, where most of them speak English anyway.”
“Uh-huh. I’ve always meant to go.”
The city was beautiful, but only parts of it really, you know? Parts of the region are still undeveloped, so the outskirts tend to be pretty seedy. Filthy, even. I’d say that for the most part, Buenos Aires is a filthy city, with some beautiful parts.”
Filthy, yeah.”
And you get that way too. It’s not just the place. It gets on you, you know? On your clothes. It’s in your food. I was taking showers twice a day, on average. I couldn’t stand the way I smelled and I didn’t want to get used to it. When it got hot enough, which it did plenty of the season, even though its supposed to be winter there when it’s summer here, I would have to stand on the roof of the hotel just to get above the smell of the garbage.”
I’ll bet you couldn’t stand it.”
“I couldn’t fucking stand it sometimes. Disease too. Something like 60% of the people between 18 and 35 have a venereal disease of some kind. And none of them get treated. One of the clerks had to take off work because of an untreated case of syphilis. This is supposed to be a democratized nation—the Americas are supposed to be developed. It’s worse in the mountains too. And don’t get me started on the rats.”
No, I don’t think I want to go there.”
It’s the same everywhere, really.”
Anywhere.”
It’s enough to convince me that these people are either schizophrenics or some sort of malfunctioning animatronic puppets, and I take my drink to the stool at an end of the bar that’s opened up. I sit elbow to elbow with a woman who, unless I’m deceived, is strikingly beautiful. She wears a long gray dress that barely reveals the tips of a pair of black flats, and short brown hair in bangs over a sharply featured face. Her eyes are green. She seems to be staring at me—back at me.
Never seen you around here,” I say automatically.
“Nice try,” she smiles.
How about a drink then?”
I already have a drink.”
Right, well. It’s a standing offer. It’s extended, like, temporally, you know?”
You’re funny,” she rolls her eyes.
That’s not the way the metal men here talk.”
The lushes around here have their own language. I don’t pretend to understand it, but how they unwind is their business. I saw that Oskar over there was entertaining you.”
They shouldn’t let a guy like that on the airlines. He’s a paranoid for sure.”
They don’t. Oskar lives with his mother. He’s never left the city. The threads are his deceased father’s. He watches the Travel Channel obsessively.”
You his nurse or something?”
He’s got a new story every week. I can do math. We get the Travel Channel in my building too.”
And where is your building?” I say, with a smile. Risks are the type of thing that one takes in a new environment.
My building is in Shangri-La, pal. Why don’t we start with names? And where’s that drink?”
Lily laughs at my dumb lines, one after the other. I haven’t used some of them in years—haven’t had to. Even when we were barely speaking to one another, I found the idea of infidelity with Ellie repulsive—beyond forgiveness—mostly because I knew how it would crush me if I ever heard something on the other end. But tonight I’m free, and I’m as lost as I can be, and the faces down the bar are like masks of solemnity and confusion, as if a funeral procession had forgotten the name of the departed, and all stood still for a moment longer than they could to ever escape. And the two of us are alive and real. I can feel in her mocking laughter the grain of softness that could be affection or love or nothing. Before the end, Ellie accused me of being an essentially methodical person; “You’ve always already made up your mind about someone, and that’s why you’ll never reach out to anyone. I feel sorry for you.” If I had wanted to say something back, it would’ve been, ‘It’s extraordinary that you know how to break what’s already broken.’
The drinking has come to the point where physical pain is no longer an issue. Lily keeps ordering a drink called a ‘Cyclone’ and I keep paying for them. I’ve let my advances fall by the wayside—I’m forgetful, if nothing else—and I’m becoming restless. I suggest we go for a walk.
I don’t know if I’m equipped for that,” she indicates a third empty cocktail glass. “You should probably just take me home,” she says in complete seriousness.
Shangri-La?” I can’t help but smile.
Charming. No, Beverly Road. You’re going uptown anyway, right? Manhattan? Mr. Heartbroken. The trip won’t take so long with some company.”
She fits herself underneath my arm and asks that we walk slowly. I forget about Coney Island and every promise I’ve made to myself. I kiss her once, gently on the lips, and she smiles. Clouds are growing paler out over the sea. Our shadows are faint and doubled by the overlapping orange light of the lampposts. We walk past the cafes and the groceries all over again, and the mermaid diminishes and finally disappears at the turn onto Ocean, its gaze barely penetrating a moment close to dawn in early autumn. I am suddenly overcome by a tension and a fatigue in the whole of my body, of waking from a dream of the world.
I never learned to swim,” I say, and my voice cracks.
What?” Lily leans her face into my cheek. Our pace is slow and the walk seems interminably long. I feel as if I could cry at any second. I’m not sure if I really can’t swim. I can’t remember if I ever learned or not, but something hurts me and those are the words for it.
I never learned to swim, its nothing. I just—let’s not stop. It’s not a big deal.”
She turns in to kiss me again, this time more forcefully. She has the lapels of my jacket in her hands and pushes her body towards mine. I can feel the hope in her eyes, which are closed. I can feel her expectations rising. She’s forgotten she has no idea who I am, and I remember. I’m certain at this that moment I’d rather be holding on to anything else. The sound of the Q pulling in to the downtown platform rips my thoughts away. I set her back on her feet and walk toward the turnstile.
Where are you going?” Gone is the nonchalance. She’s adamant in a way I didn’t anticipate. She stumbles forward and steadies herself on the ticket-taker. Something is wrong with her balance, I realize, that has nothing to do with the alcohol. But it doesn’t matter.
I’m going this way. I don’t think either of us need me to go that way. We’re both better off if I’m on this one.”
You’re not making any sense… What’s wrong? Tonight was so…” I can hear in her voice the sound of something slipping away, something frantic that can’t be undone. Her posture has become unhinged, and she’s listing back and forward. Lily falls over the metal spokes of the turnstile and onto the concrete on my side. She catches herself with the heels of both hands, sparing her chin, but fails to totally conceal the obtrusion of a hard, flesh-colored plastic mass where her right leg ought to be. A sudden gust of wind carries the beginning of her sobs and blows the sound inward to reverberate off the walls like some guttural language, as I put my hands under her arms to pull her upright. Hot tears are flooding her cheeks, tears that aren’t proportional to anything that, in an instant, could be clear. I understand that her tears have always been missing. But then the truth of it falls away from me, and it’s never near enough to grasp again, as if everything were behind an asteroid belt or a great reef. I leave her standing against the turnstile and as I walk down to the awaiting train, I can hear her or someone like her repeating the word pig over and over in the stairwell that has become an echo chamber.
Between Brighton Beach and Coney Island, the line moves out of the trench and onto an elevated track that has a view of the surrounding neighborhoods, whose inhabitants, come dawn, have either returned from their sleepwalking or awakened from the hypnosis that, by night, seems to take this city by the throat. The morning is dewy and overcast, and clouds heavy with seawater fill the sky. I don’t think I will ever see Lily again in any of our lifetimes.
Maybe it’s been so difficult to put a stop to all this because I can’t remember when it started. Is that what you want me to say, that I’ve wasted a year—it may as well have been ten—searching for someone I know I’ll never find? She was always so good at hiding, Ellie was—did I tell you that? She was like a child in that regard. She always had a way of fitting herself behind a bookshelf or in the folds of our comforter in just the right way that I would never know that she was still there. And that’s what it’s like now, except that I know she’s there and she doesn’t. Or I only know one thing and she knows everything. Or I know everything, but I keep forgetting the most important parts, and she couldn’t care less. Christ, it’s enough to make a man drunk! Where to now, Ellie? Coney Island? Is that where I lost you, where it all dissolved like a strip of film in an acid solution or a sea of ghosts? Is it that easy for me to forget the question? Or is it some new question? But the question never changes, only the answers.
The train station at Coney Island is built like a cathedral whose narthex is a shooting gallery. I pass down flights of green iron stairs with slats between them. I walk through a sort of cavernous passageway filled with grotesque mosaics; a minstrel clown, a thief and a dog. It’s still too early in the morning for the vendors to bring their carts around, and barely any customers move through here during the fall anyway. The mist is heavy over the beach as I move toward the boardwalk. A small pavilion striped in purple and white has been erected in the sand about 25 yards away, and a woman in possibly her early seventies is sitting in a folding chair, with an absent but contented expression, holding a sign that says “THE CHAMBER OF THE ASTRAL MIRROR: KNOW THE FUTURE AS ITS WRITTEN IN THE STARS. $7. NO REFUNDS.”
What’s inside the tent?” I ask when I reach her.
Oh well, what to say, it’s different for everyone I suppose!”
But what do you see when you go inside?” I’m almost pleading now. I notice that her face looks much older when she speaks, because her wrinkles stretch themselves tight at the strain with which she appears to constantly smile.
Oh well, what to say, what to say? I don’t go in much anymore, not me. Not much of a future left for me, but the Mirror—now it’s perfect for a young fellow such as yourself, I think! You see, the stars sit in the sky for billions of years—believe you me, I’ve been around the block quite a few times! But for them, our lives can be understood in the blink of an eye. When the light from our planet reaches them, they send it back in a superwave that moves so fast it catches things that we don’t know have already happened! Yessir, its no accident neither—how did you think I got the idea? I saw myself get the idea in the mirror itself! But just this mirror. It’s the one that catches the special kind of light you need. Yessir, and we take it out in the nighttime and then trap it in the chamber you see behind me. Just seven dollars! Step right in—no refunds.”
I give her three bills and I pull the flap of the tent aside. There is a fine scent of rotting seaweed inside, and propped against one of the pavilion’s poles I can see the Astral Mirror, a corroded antique looking glass with an ornate wooden frame whose white paint is chipped. Next to the mirror, four people are sitting at a picnic table in the shadows eating McDonalds hamburgers wrapped in wax paper and drinking orange juice from clear plastic cups. When they look up, I realize that the youth I saw on the platform on Seventh Ave. is among them. He’s sitting next to his younger sister, who wears her dark hair in pigtails. He doesn’t recognize me. The boy’s father, a round and balding man with a full, dark mustache, turns around and looks surprised, and then gestures to his wife, who’s similarly shaped and wears her hair in a bun. The woman looks at me.
Did my mother let you in? She’s very old, she forgets we don’t start for another hour with this. I’m sorry, we’re right in the middle of breakfast.” She whispers something to the father, who takes out his wallet and offers me seven dollars.
You’ll never get your money back from that one,” he chuckles. “She didn’t just make the policy, she is the policy.” I make a motion without words to refuse the money, and I walk back out the way I came. The old woman’s expression has changed. I can’t tell if she’s heard what her family has said, but her face is even more haggard now. She has a look as if she’s been thinking with great difficulty, as if she had discovered that it was her life through which the course of human history must proceed before there can be any rest. She looks at me, only now realizing I’ve returned, and forms her trembling mouth to the words.
What did you see?”
* * *
In the winter, the beaches and the boardwalks of Coney Island are deserted, and at dusk on this day, it would be no different except for the solitary gray form, leaning against the railing, of two people in an embrace. They stand bundled in coats and scarves, indifferent to the wind that cuts from off the surface of the water. The man and the woman never speak to one another, or if they do, their words are muffled or lost in the wind. It’s difficult to say when it begins to snow, but when the flakes fall, they collect in the man’s collar and in the long brown hair that falls from beneath the woman’s cap. The sun, almost setting, casts veins of ochre light from behind the elongated clouds. They do not turn away from one another, but in the wild of the near-night, neither man nor woman has ever seen the sky so close as it is for them at this moment on earth. A long time seems to pass, and they don’t so much as shiver, nor even seem to breathe. They remain, holding one another away, as if concealing each other from some hidden name, or a world into which they are not yet born.
2026