Author: utpress

TRAIN

By Jill Stukenberg

I imagine her emerging from the house to a bright day. Keys, wallet, coffee mug in hand—and the sun like lighting for a surgery. Eyelids fluttering, pupils shrieking with shrink, her gaze would have escaped to the black bulk of the train engine parked behind the shed.

By then it had been weeks since my parents’ move to Turnersville, in the southern borderlands of New Mexico. My mother would have thought, “Well, it’s time to return the train.”

It happens that way sometimes. The small task put off, the niggling detail, suddenly a Great Wall, a Tower of Pisa, a hulking train engine parked in your yard.

*

Tracks laced Turnersville’s oldest arteries, drew across those palm lines that had wanted to predict its future. She rolled forward with one thrilling lurch, chugging through the alleyway, waving to a neighbor raking out a garden, the Frito crumblings of some previous driver an odd comfort in the high grimy cabin (I’ve been in some rental vehicles myself) as she lumbered with picking-up speed toward Turnersville’s central boulevard. It wasn’t every day a woman rumbled through traffic in the driver’s seat of a loosed train. I see her missing the first stop sign and the engine’s nose pitching into the intersection, drivers steering around her and their children shaking lollipops from their backward-facing way-back seats.

It was a mere mile to the station. She’d be able to walk back home. But then so prepared for the stop, the turn from the track, she missed it. The wheels didn’t turn; the track led on. The feeling would have been an embarrassment and then a dread, the train continuing to lurch forward with the steady slow motion of all accidents. She went a mile, then two miles, unable to think about what she’d done until she came to the very edge of the oldest part of town where finally she braked, long and slow, stopping not too far past the doorway of a tilting bar, its wooden porch a dusty smile.

Inside, the barkeep wiped his hands on his apron, her train’s shadow through the window having come to rest over his bottles and trophies. She would have sensed the bowling lane in the back room, the cracks of balls on pins like Oh man! Damn! Did you see?

“Passing through?” He picked up a handful of nuts and tossed them angrily in his mouth.

“There’s got to be another turn!”

A cowboy with breath like spring mud intervened. “You’ll have to go all the way around. She had thought of the track as a smooth, round moon, winding round the town.

“You’ll have to cross the border.”

“She’ll have to cross the Bridge of Gods,” spat the bartender, reaching for a yellowed brochure, opening it to the two suspension bridges hung perpendicularly over a canyon, sagged at their intersection.

She would have accepted the brochure. She would have taken a handful of the nuts.

*

It would be years before I would understand; more before I could picture it like I can so easily now.

I’m sure the same could be said for my father, who, after I left home about ten years after my mother, was still building his staircase in the backyard. The desert treeless and the buildings in our speck of a town so low under that tall clear sky, it was plausible he’d get high enough to watch her coming back.

As the years went on and the staircase grew, it took him longer and longer to climb to the top. He stopped coming down for lunch breaks and then stopped coming down for weekends. When I left, I sent a note in the smoke signal system we’d devised, my goodbye and I love you taking their shapes as they rose in the air.

*

I wanted far from trains. I told people my mother had been abducted. There were still roving train gangs in those years. Fly-by-night outfits that howled through towns, mysterious even for the evidence of the track they rode in on.

I went as far as I could and then took a job as a canoe guide, leading tourists from the shore of a cold gulf in search of whales. We always found them. I don’t think those whales were ever lost once. And it didn’t matter how many times I shouted “Flukes!,” that the retired schoolteacher types fumbled with the cameras they’d had ready for hours, it was dazzling. It is not possible to be bored by a whale breaching fifteen feet from you in a canoe. Each time there’s the terror, and then the second wave of terror, and then the strangest feeling: like you would not mind if such an ugly, terrible creature did decide to drag you to the bottom and drown you. What a thing it would be just to be noticed, to be seen. Up close, a whale’s great eye is like God’s, unblinking and unmoved.

I wouldn’t have left that job except for love. A fellow guide. You should have seen the shorts we all wore—so tiny and with these adorable pockets. In those years, I thought my mother had left for sadness. For what had her life been in a desert without whales?

*

My life changed. My job changed. I heard from my father infrequently in the years I was powerful, putting in many hours and making lots of money in my office in a city skyscraper. By then he was communicating with carrier pigeons, and a therapist wanted me to make the connection between that and my new choice to work on the 101st floor. But that was just where they put us. It had to do with the sunniness of my new career: buying futures and selling options. Nor did the therapist understand how those pigeons would have found me anywhere—in a garden apartment, in catacombs—bird behavior being different than human.

My father wrote to me about sunrises. I just had no idea, he said. I couldn’t know unless I’d seen one from his tower, the rim of the sun’s disc like a dropped earring back glinting in carpet.

Sunrises? I’d seen sunrises over the breaching forms of Minke whales, the surface of a boiling sea shot through with gold and pink, foam and sea salt and the cries of gulls like this was the very place Helios came to scratch his back clean against the Earth. But no, he replied, not sunrises. A sunrise. That kind of confusion with plurals can happen when relying on pigeons.

But we heard about it again on the news: the tiny glowing dot visible over the desert horizon. By “we” I mean my children, who had, to spite me, become coal miners, each one in turn leaving school at a younger age, picking up an axe and following the older ones across town to the shaft. They couldn’t even look at the news station’s reproduction of the glowing dot, their tiny mole eyes rubble-filled caves.

They said they’d go to bed early that night. They had to work in the morning. Their generation, they were constantly chiding me, valued hard work.

“Do you value the black lung?” I shouted at the oldest, the ring leader.

He coughed out that black lung later that year, left it on my doorstep the way the cat used to leave the birds he intercepted between my father and me. About that same time it was finally dawning on me that the glowing dot in the Southern New Mexico sky was my mother in the train, returning.

*

One by one I threw my remaining children into the trunk of the car and brought them with me to the airport. They were terrified of flying but were comforted once inside the tiny plane, with its cramped leg room and stale air. For take-off they locked themselves in the plane’s bathroom, just to feel even safer.

They were also unprepared for the horses we stole just outside El Paso, for the expanse of that desert, and the sky like a lid had been taken off. The horses loaned the children their blinders and we flew. My children were helping me understand my mother’s departure: how it could have been a kind of duty that led her, like train track. I’ve heard these things alternate in generations.

We came upon the train from behind, its darkened caboose like another horse far ahead. My children caught the smell of its coal smoke and urged their horses on.

If there is joy in fulfilling an obligation, in doing a hard thing well, in not backing down, it is not to be confused with joy in having been given the challenge in the first place, the thing that took you away from all the other things: a darkened house, a new town, maybe an unruly child who wanted too much.

I could leave this story here. A part of me wants to. Imagine on your own how we took the train, jumping from our horses, clambering the caboose ladder, making our way over the tops of empty compartments and coal cars to our mother, our grandmother, unsuspecting at the helm. Our reunion could be the end of the story.

Except for the Bridge of Gods.

My mother now wore long gray hair like a cape. She put one wiry elbow around my neck, shook my boys’ hands, and then turned her attention back to the track. We were rolling into my old town, having come all the way around, the great loop of the track so much larger than she had originally pictured. She would have seen Turnersville from this angle only once before, when she and my father first rode into town, loaded with their worldly possessions.

A bird was sucked in through a window and bounced off my elbow. My mother grabbed for it, removing and replacing the little bit of paper in the capsule at its ankle.

“The Bridge of Gods,” she muttered.

“The what?” said my second eldest, pulling out his phone. “Oh, I thought I’d seen a picture of this before.” He scrolled down the screen with his finger.

“It’s a terrible thing,” said my mother. “A terrible beautiful thing.” Flying past our window now were my old middle and high schools, a car wash I could not believe to be still in existence, the Playland where I chipped a tooth.

The next thud on the roof of our compartment was my father, who was wearing a body suit with a rigid fin of wings that looked to me like small flukes, like my father had crawled from some Salton Sea.

“We’re not stopping at home, are we?” I said. My quiet children, so far from their underground nest, huddled against one another. My grayed parents trained their fierce eyes forward.

“Are we going to try for the turn to the station?”

My children took turns leaving quietly to feed coal into the train’s furnace.

“Can you pull this lumbering metaphor to a stop, at least, so some of us may disembark?”

My mother half turned her head, looking at me more fully than she had when I’d first burst through the back door of her compartment, a would-be hijacker who’d become the hijacked in this family.

It was the look I’d known forever, cool and resolute. She was a force that was unchangeable, like the very words of Gods.

And I was left to wonder how she would remember me, if she would; if it would be the frown of my brow, the kicked-up swirl of dust into which I hopped, the train barely stopped, the scream in my mind or the blood in my ears as the sound of the train, pounding away, was replaced with a nearby arrhythmic clatter—somehow like balls on pins, like Oh man! Damn! Did you see?

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Jill Stukenberg is a graduate of the MFA program at New Mexico State University, and she teaches Creative Writing at University of Wisconsin-Marathon County. Her work has recently appeared in Prick of the Spindle and Prime Mincer, and is forthcoming from The Florida Review and Wisconsin People and Ideas magazine.

PEDESTAL

By Kelly Magee

We put her on a pedestal, a real nice one, not some cheap, plastic shit, but something comfortable—not marble, it was too cold, and not concrete, that was too hard—an ergonomic pedestal made of responsibly harvested bamboo and recycled bike tires. It stood ten feet off the ground and had an orthopedic shelf on which she could stand. Because she had to stand, there was no way of getting around that. That was the whole point of the pedestal, to put her up where we could see her, hear her, where she could always be available for our worship. She was beautiful, that goes without saying, and she deserved nothing less than our best.

When the pedestal was ready, we hauled it to the park next to the playground, because that was a pleasant area of town where the grass was always mowed, far enough from the highway to be quiet but not so far from town that we’d have to fight a lot of traffic to get there. The playground, because we were considerate of those of us who had little ones. It was just a few of us at first, but once word spread, the crowd grew. She liked that, we could tell. She’d gone up there willingly, of course—nobody forced anybody, we liked to say—but we hadn’t been entirely honest about the thing. We’ll admit that. We said, Look what we made you! It really took us a lot of effort, and we’d be so disappointed if you didn’t at least try it out. We pushed her up, and she let us, and then we chanted, Speech! Speech! until she laughed a little, embarrassed, and said, This is lovely. I can see clear to downtown from here. We applauded, and she bowed. There was silence while we waited for more. She was so bright, standing up there against the sun. It was perfect. She peered over the side of the pedestal. So how do I get down?

She was different things to different ones of us. She had a lot of names. Some, like mother, like friend, like daughter, you’d expect. Once strangers started showing up, she got different names, some that couldn’t be boiled down to a single word. The-one-into-whom-I-pour-my-nightmares was one. The-keeper-of-our-marital-infidelity was another. When we gathered, sometimes we were surprised to see how many new people had showed up. Celebrities. Thugs. We didn’t know each other. There were a few of us who’d known her from before, but now most of us hadn’t. Some of us brought lawn chairs. Some prostrated ourselves. We didn’t stay long. We had lives, didn’t we? Jobs. Hobbies. Shows saved on the Tivo. Before we left, we made sure someone was always there to keep her up.

When she spoke, we wept. Sometimes we didn’t even listen to the words, just ingested her voice. She could say anything—I’m hungry, I’m bored—and it was like manna. Yes, we thought. We are all hungry. It’s true, we thought. We are all bored. We went home and ate, and paid attention to each bite, concentrated on it, thought about how grateful we were, how each new meal was a gift she’d given us because we wouldn’t have noticed it without her, and we were lucky, we were just so goddamn lucky to have found her. And we looked into our boredom, our terrible jobs, our terrible lonely lives, and we found her there, telling us to embrace ourselves in that space, to be present, to breathe, and we did, and it was good.

She grew more beautiful by the day. Her skin turned deeper and deeper shades of red until she fairly glowed. And the more her skin tone changed, the brighter her eyes got. They seemed to float out in front of her. The pedestal wasn’t large enough for her to do much, so we savored each movement, how she reached down to scratch her bug bites, how she shaded her eyes to look over us, past us, beyond us to where the rest of the city buzzed all the way to the horizon. My children, she said once. Where are my children? We pushed our children forward and threatened them with spankings at home if they didn’t cooperate. They all belong to you, we told her, we are all yours. She shook her head. We knelt as one, every person in the crowd, like a miracle, and she lifted her hands over us, raised her face to the sky, and said, Then you, my children, my flock, let me go. I will be with you always if you set me free.

Of course we couldn’t do that.

We held our breath when she crouched to sleep. A few of the stronger ones gathered around the pedestal to make sure she didn’t fall. They held her body. Afterward they looked at their hands, the parts of them that’d touched her, and they seemed unable to do anything else for a long time. When they could speak again, they talked of the heat. Her skin, like a furnace. An ember. Their hands carried the heat of her into the city, and then into their homes. They made love furiously to their husbands and wives. To themselves. The heat passed to whomever they touched, and they breathed her name as they came, felt her there, in their mouths.

Our population swelled until we realized—suddenly, collectively—that we had a problem with equal access. We’d run out of space. The lawn couldn’t accommodate our numbers, the playground was blocking half the crowd’s view, and there had erupted several scuffles over parking. A small faction had staked out territory by pitching tents around the inner circle, and they never left, and that wasn’t fair to those of us who had jobs. That, we said firmly, was discrimination. We asked the tent faction to rotate people in, but there wasn’t enough time to get to everyone, and some people were all the way in the back, standing in the street. She spoke less and less often, and some of us never got to hear her at all. There was talk of video screens, of microphones, of webcams. We asked her to say a few more things, for the people who’d missed that last bit. We asked her to speak up. She didn’t. We gave her more water, handing up the silver chalice and reveling in the contractions of her neck as she drank. We envied that water. It made us crazy. We said, We understand that you are just one person and we are many, but the whole reason you’re up there is so we can see you and hear you, and if we can’t see you or hear you or speak to you like the ones in the back can’t, then this is not going to work out. We are going to need to change something.

She told us not to move her. If we want to be really honest, what she did is she begged us. She’d been up there a long time by now, her hair whipped into delicate knots, salt crystallized on her face. This is my home now, she told us. Do you understand that?

We said we did, but the truth was that we’d gotten off work late, and we’d just had a fight with our spouses, and our children were rotten messes, and we’d burnt dinner, and we couldn’t get it up, and we needed her to be who she was to us a little more. We needed a lot more, but we were willing to settle for a little. She was so near to perfection by that point—a huge improvement, once she stopped producing solid waste—that a little bit went a long way. At the very least, we needed to be able to see her.

We all chipped in to pay for a new location. There were enough of us that it didn’t take much. A few bucks here and there. Coffee money. We told her, We are taking you to the fairgrounds, isn’t that nice? Didn’t you once say you liked to go there? We tried to get her to come down and ride in the cab of the truck, but she refused. We think she was afraid we were going to take away the pedestal and leave her there, and we’re not going to say the thought didn’t cross our minds. Some of us had expressed interest in trying out the pedestal, and there were a couple we suspected might really be pedestal material. But she wasn’t going to give it up. She draped herself over it in this unflattering way, arms and legs spread, and hands and feet gripping the sides, so we picked up the whole thing with her on top and secured it to the truck. She wasn’t holding on very tightly. There was some atrophy to work around, and she was so thin and red and dry that, as soon as the truck started moving, we feared she might disintegrate in the wind. Honestly, we may have wanted that to happen. It would’ve been easier to know what to do with her dust, and we considered where we might scatter her, the kind of ceremony we might have, the covered dishes we’d bring. The memorial we could erect. But we only entertained those thoughts briefly. Because, of course, she was not disintegrating; she was still alive, still there, still upright. It pained her to be moved, though. It wasn’t a good look.

But then it was over, and there she was, finally, atop the pedestal in the new location, the Main Grandstand, high up on the stage so we could see but not reach her, the pedestal aglow in warm, safe light. Plenty of space for us in the bleachers. We leaned in. Put our arms around each other. It was a good feeling, what we’d done. A successful transfer. It began to snow. One of us sang this low song, maybe a spiritual, and the sound made us warmer. We thought of peace. We fell in love all over again.

We got a lot of mileage from that moment. We’ll always remember that, and what she did for us.

The day she finally fell was a hard one. We’d let it go on too long, past the point we were comfortable with. One of us should’ve done it, we knew, should’ve brought her down and put her in a home. She was just so damn adamant. You get the fuck away from me, she’d say when we hadn’t done anything but hand her the chalice. Mine, she’d hiss, mine. Those were tough times. A lot of us stopped coming. By the time she fell, we didn’t even fill the bleachers. Half of us who were present were playing games on our phones and missed the final moment. We heard the gasp and looked up to see the empty pedestal rock back and forth twice, then stop. We took a deep breath. It was the end of something. That much, we knew.

We got up to find her body, to set up the memorial, but she wasn’t there. Some of us folded our hands, then. Some looked skyward. Accusations flew. Infighting ensued. The cops had to be called. When the dust cleared, we saw that the pedestal had been pretty badly damaged. That sobered us right up. We got to work repairing it. It would be better this time, we vowed. Safer. More comfortable. We were smarter about this kind of thing. She’d taught us how to do it right. The new one, we decided, would be built in her honor.

We still don’t know what happened to her body. Some of us think she shattered on impact. Some think she walks among us. We keep photos of her as our screensavers. We don’t say she died, we say she fell. We say she lived, and in so doing, gave us life. We say we can still hear her voice when the wind blows. We say if we are guilty of something, it is loving her too much. We say farewell and amen and the end. Then we go home and resume our lives because that’s what she would’ve wanted us to do.

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Kelly Magee’s first collection of stories, Body Language (University of North Texas Press, 2006) won the Katherine Ann Porter Prize for Short Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Kenyon Review, Swink,Nashville Review, Diagram, Ninth Letter, Black Warrior Review, The Journal, Crab Orchard Review,Colorado Review, Cream City Review, Indiana Review, The Journal, The Pinch, and others. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.