Fiction

CASITA

by Cameron Hunt McNabb

The house smelled like Seventh Avenue on a Saturday morning, as if all the bakeries and markets had moved into our kitchen. That was funny because it actually was Saturday morning, but I’m pretty sure the stores were all still there.

I could make out ropa vieja from Papi’s factory friends and picadillo from his patron boss. Someone had brought pasta, which I’d only seen in the window of the place where Papi played bolita. The bay leaf on the floor meant that pan was on the counter somewhere, and I ventured to guess that no fewer than six pots contained either rice or beans. Mami kept stirring and sorting all of it, saying she was as overwhelmed as the kitchen counter.

It didn’t make sense to me—bringing someone food because their father died. I knew I shouldn’t be difficult, but I didn’t even feel hungry. To escape from the food, and the people who had brought it, I snuck out to our porch.

Even in the shade of the slatted roof, the summer heat found me. But I knew it wouldn’t last long. The clouds would get heavy, soaking up every drop of water they could until they hung low in the sky. Then, by late afternoon, when they could hold no more, they would give up, uncouple their arms, and drop all the water. During the summers, I liked to guess how much each cloud weighed—ten pounds, twenty pounds—to see how much rain will fall that afternoon. Today looked like ten-pound clouds already, and it wasn’t even noon.

“Casi? Casi, have you eaten? I brought you a plate.” My tía emerged from the door with rice and beans stacked high. I took it with a slight nod. Tía was the only one in my family to give me a nickname. She knew I hated my name, but what she didn’t know was that I hated her nickname for me even more. Casi. It means “almost.”

I was almost a lot of things. I almost wasn’t born.

Mami said that I was always difficult. Difícil, she’d say. When I was born, Mami was supposedly in pain so long that the doctor had to come get me out. The idea of my mother being in pain for more than a moment still shocks me. If Papi hadn’t told me the story, too, I wouldn’t have believed it.

The doctor showed up with his gringa wife from the city, and soon I was born. “She looks just like you. What’s her name?” she asked, to fill out the birth record.

“Cazadita,” Mami replied, which means “little hunter.”

“Oh, Casita?” the gringa replied, likely repeating the only Spanish word she had ever caught on our streets. I guess I should just be grateful that my name isn’t “Gracias.” Papi heard the mistake but knew better than to correct a white woman. Mami and the doctor were too busy with “other things.” Even Cazita would have been a bit better—”little prey.” (I secretly suspect Mami had this in mind all along.) But, no. I’m Casita: “little house.”

I did my best to eat some of the food Tía had brought, but I mostly just shuffled it around on my plate. Mami would be furious if she saw me like this, playing with my food, making the family look bad, being difficult. But, when she would turn her back, Papi would catch my eye and smile ever so slightly. Today, I smiled back at no one and dumped my food over our porch rail.

As soon as my rice and beans hit the ground, a young woman came through our front door—probably one of Mami’s friends. I envied her white linen skirt, which matched the embroidery on her camisa, because I couldn’t wear anything white. I’d get it too dirty. But she wasn’t dirty. She had flowers in her hair and a bruise on her cheek. She carried an empty pot onto the porch, and I didn’t think she noticed me. One pot down, five to go. As she turned to leave, though, she glanced at me long enough to say caliente before ducking back into the house.

I didn’t need her to tell me that pots were hot. When I was six, I accidentally touched one filled with boiling water. I was trying to help Mami move it but had yet to learn why she always used rags to do so. The tip of my finger turned pale white and bubbly, and I cried louder than I should have. In a flash, Mami took an egg out of the basket, broke it in half, and shoved my finger into the clear, gooey part. “Hold that, and you’ll be fine.” And, sure enough, I was. The pain went away and the bubbly part seemed far less bubbly. I was amazed that my mother knew this trick, and that she’d been keeping it from me. Maybe she expected everything to be that easy, and maybe that was why everyone seemed so difficult to her. So I knew exactly what to do when I was climbing our grapefruit tree the next day and got a mosquito bite. The pale blotch, slightly bubbly, would be fine in no time. I cracked the egg over the bite on my ankle and waited for its healing powers to stop the itching. But before they could set in, Mami found me on the floor, covered in egg, waiting. She let out her usual loud cry of Que? Que! and snatched my hand hard. Together, our hands looked like a tumbled ball of brown yarn, coming undone. But her furious shouts shook me from that thought: “Burns. Not bites. Burns!” As she dragged me outside to wipe me down, I could hear her repeat under her heavy sighs, Difícil. Muy difícil.

The memory of the sticky egg on my ankle and my thighs being dragged across the knotted wood floor heightened my fear over being caught wasting my food. I crept alongside the yard and used my shoe to shove the dirty rice and beans between the brick columns that prop up our house. Just in case.

I was waiting dutifully back on the porch by the time Tía came back out. “Casi, finished?” I nodded, still silent. She took the plate inside and I hoped she would stay there, among the smells of Seventh Avenue. I just wanted the ten-pound clouds all to myself. But I was not so lucky. “I brought out some dominoes, if you want to play?” she said.

My eyes widened at the trespass. At the black bag she held in her hand. Those were Papi’s dominoes. All the way from Cuba. The white had been so worn they looked tan like his skin and the black notches looked like his old scars. They were wholly and utterly his. “No. Just let me have them,” I blurted out, snatching them. I was surprised that my too honest reply actually made Tia leave me alone. I felt heavy now, more than the clouds, and I wished I could shove my words under our porch, too.

The smells in the kitchen and notches on the dominoes made me close my eyes and pretend I was on Seventh Avenue again, looking for Papi. It was another Saturday morning, and Papi hadn’t come home. I woke up to Mami knocking pots and pans while shaking her head with each Muy difícil. When she finally saw me, she said, “You go get him. I’m done.” So there I went, down the street, alone. The markets were opening, and women hurried in the streets. Their white skirts and camisas swayed with their steps. Some were bedecked with flowers. Some had been bedecked with fists.  As I made my way through the crowds, I felt grown—alone and on an errand—but also so small, about to be stepped on. Tía always said that bolita night was no place for children. But somehow that Saturday I was supposed to walk into a room of Papi’s factory friends, men whose hands were even more tanned and scarred than his. I knew I wasn’t wanted there.

I was right. To my surprise and despair, I found the front of the market unattended. All of the pasta were sitting obediently in their open baskets, and the dark red velvet curtain in the back surely cloaked Papi and his friends. I kept my eyes on the scuffed wood floor as I tip-toed toward it, past the pyramid of tomato sauce I once had knocked over and the butcher’s counter where Mami sometimes bought chorizo. When I made it to the curtain, I held onto it for a moment and closed my eyes. Then I managed to slide it aside just enough to peek my head in. But when I opened my eyes, the cigar smoke and smell of liquor formed a cloud so thick I couldn’t see anything, let alone Papi. I guessed the cloud must have weighed twenty pounds. “Papi, Mami wants you to come home…” I could barely get the words out before I started to choke. I could blame the coughing and stammering on the heavy cloud, but not the crying that followed.

I waited beside the obedient pasta, brushing my tears away and secretly praying that Papi had heard me. I couldn’t do that again. Thankfully, though, Papi emerged. I didn’t even look at him, for fear I’d see anger in his eyes or that he’d see tears in mine. He grabbed my hand in his, his tan hand notched like dominoes wrapped in my small ball of yarn, and we left.

We walked home in silence, more silence than had ever been between us. It must have weighed a hundred pounds. I never looked up. At home, he went straight into the bedroom and I to the porch. I wondered what he and Mami were saying. I bet she looked up at him. I bet she didn’t cry.

I wasn’t even done thinking of Mami with her furious cries of Que! when Papi came back out carrying the black bag; he wore clean clothes and his face was washed. I finally looked up. “Dominoes, hija?”

*

People began spilling out of the house and into the street. I hugged the porch rail and kept my eyes down because I knew Papi wasn’t among them. Mami came out at last. “Casita, come. It’s time.” I decided to take the dominoes with me to the funeral. Papi would smile at me behind Mami’s back, and I figured he could use a smile today.

The church was more crowded than on Sunday mornings, and I had to sit squished between Mami and Tía in the front pew. One by one, they talked about Papi. How hard he worked at the factory. How he’d rolled more cigars than anyone last year. How he never missed mass. How he didn’t seem sick. Mami told how he was difficult sometimes—difícil, muy difícil—but that she still cared for him anyway. How life would be hard for her now, but that she’d press on. No one told about his secret smiles or that he didn’t talk back to white women. No one told about bolita or that he loved dominoes.

Everyone crossed themselves as they passed Papi on their way out. Mami had gone first. Then Tía. I managed to sneak into a corner while the line wound back out into the street. I didn’t want to get in trouble for missing my turn, but I also didn’t want Mami to see the black bag I had hidden inside the folds of my skirt. After the last man had blessed himself, I finally moved toward Papi. The thick brown box was propped up so high on the altar that I couldn’t see inside, but I knew he was there. I, too, crossed myself and then grew as tall as I could and pushed the bag of dominoes over the box’s shiny edge. I heard them clink on the other side. I hoped Papi was smiling now.

Once outside, I ran home to escape the throngs of people who undoubtedly would return to our kitchen. The clouds’ arms seemed to be getting tired because a few drops slipped out here and there. Or maybe those were my tears. I stopped in front of our little house, starring at it head-on. Then I saw it. So clearly. My bangs hung like its wooden-arched porch—peaked in the middle, rounded to each side, and then straight down in supporting columns. My eyes, too, were glassy, like the windows on either side—sometimes open, sometimes shut. My nose was long and dark, like our thin wooden door, and my teeth stacked up like our ascending porch steps, narrow at first but then wider and wider. Maybe I really was a little house, a Casita. Maybe inside of me were all the smells and eggs and dominoes. All the memories and stories. All of the past, and perhaps, all of the future.

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Cameron Hunt McNabb is currently an assistant professor of English at Southeastern University in Lakeland, FL. She is also a fourth-generation Tampa native.

SWEET PEA

by Thomas Mundt

I have Sweet Pea on hold. She needs a moment to collect her thoughts, and her bills. They are voluminous, the lion’s share issued by her aromatherapist, and keeping track of them has almost become a full-time job. Which is good, because Sweet Pea has been between gigs since conception.

When I click the resume button, it sounds like someone is “hitting” a marijuana water pipe, the kind Dateline talks about, but only in the context of recent legislative shifts in Western states. Sweet Pea is still crying, or gargling. Maybe crygling, disinfecting her facehole while she weeps. Modern women, present company included, are multitaskers.

“Sweet Pea, stay with me. Don’t you die on me!”

She gets a real kick out of the last part. It’s a line from a recent movie, the one where the Mexican president goes rogue because Congress thinks he took another man’s life in Martha’s Vineyard. He knows the only way to get out of D.C. is to stab one of the pilots of Air Force One in the throat with a mechanical pencil and take the yoke himself. He didn’t want to do it, felt pretty badly about it. Even tried to save the poor schmuck. Hence the quote.

“I’m ready, Miss Cindee, if you’ll have me.”

The colloquialism always kills me, like I invited her to my nephew’s graduation or took her in on Passover. I work in Claims at The Pinnacle because my private tutoring business didn’t pan out. Turns out the demand for Dutch Low Saxon fluency is lower than I had anticipated.

I don’t do this for my health.

*

There is talk of collectors, hospital admins threatening to repossess her Sea Doo if prompt action on her grossly-overdue balance is not taken. I remind Sweet Pea that her case remains in limbo, that unless and until an expert determines that the thing in her Sgt. Squawker’s “Buffalo Chicken Mini-Nibbler” was in fact a prophylactic, liability won’t attach. The best thing she can do at this juncture, I insist, is take care of Sweet Pea. And, stay off of eBay. I opine that she has enough figurines by the looks of the jpg she emailed me last week.

Sweet Pea responds with a passage from Deuteronomy, something about a mule and the paths the righteous must seek. I tell her it all sounds beautiful, that God was really onto something when he commissioned that particular chapter of The Good Book. Could she photocopy it, so I can affix it to the bulletin board in the break room, next to the Al’s Beef coupons? She tells me that she’d love to but her library card has been suspended. Too many overdue Dan Baldaccis.

I hear about her son again, a homosexual. His Christian name is Cole but he goes by Coley on campus, a design school in Milwaukee whose name she can either never remember or summon the strength to mumble. He sounds gifted from the descriptions of his cloaks, unafraid of color and pattern. Sweet Pea asks me for the umpteenth time to stand in her Pro Wings. How would I feel if I came back from a vittles run and found two men in my living room, kissing on each other like The Lord’s asleep at the switch.

It’s a pretty good question, one of the better ones that have been posited during my sixteen-month tenure at The Pinnacle. I hit calendar in Outlook. I have a recorded statement to take in five minutes, a man in Dayton, Ohio, who claims the deck sealant he purchased at our insured’s hardware store never dried and someone’s going to pay for all the robins that got stuck and died, either in this life or the next. I must be succinct.

I tell Sweet Pea that I hope I would be kind, that Cole or Coley is just being Cole or Coley and, whether she realizes it or not, he’s what she signed up for in the delivery room. I advise her that I’m standing squarely in those Pro Wings, their tongues wagging like a husky with kidney failure, and I’m so agitated that I have half a mind to get Granddad’s buck knife out from under the sink and start carving initials into forearms. I suggest she love her son like he’s the only one Sweet Jehovah gave her, which, per my most recent SearchMissouri.org inquiry, happens to be science fact.

I wish her a pleasant rest of the morning and flick a gnat off my Diet Coke.

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Thomas Mundt is the author of one short story collection, You Have Until Noon to Unlock the Secrets Of The Universe (Lady Lazarus Press, 2011), and the father of one human boy, Henry (2011). Additional teambuilding exercises and risk management advice can be found at www.jonathantaylorthomasnathanmundtdds.com.

THE END OF THE COLD WAR

by L.S. Bassen

25th December 1989. Leonard Bernstein gave a concert in Berlin celebrating the collapse of the Wall, conducting the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s ninth symphony, altering the lyric “Joy” (freude) to “Freedom” (freiheit). 

Rain hit the house as Cara stood snug by the front bay window, holding a china mug of English tea. During Christmas break from college, her freshman son Daniel had explained that snow was ten inches to every one of rain, so on this Wednesday night in late January, Cara imagined the rain in steep, white drifts. Most of her knowledge came secondhand from her children, husband, or news media. Her older son, a senior, had left her a book from a sociology course. It was an indictment of her life: “Upper middle class and upper class women are parasites.” If this rain had been snow, the only sound would have been the whine of the wind as it curved around the north corner of the house. The rain was now a waterfall cascading down the gutters of the home on several acres in a Gatsby-country suburb. On either side of the house, beyond walkway lights, were trees and obscured neighbors’ homes. Cara sipped the hot tea. It smelled like history: nineteenth century England and India or anywhere the sun did not set on the British Empire. She stood in her dining room while her husband Roger slept in the den with the Times still resting on his lap.

Roger had every reason to be exhausted. He was the chief American executive of a Japanese corporation, one of whose widescreens was producing a low hum of entertainment. He had only that day returned from Japan, and jet lag had caught up. They should have lived in Westchester, north of Manhattan, along with his colleagues. The Japanese were conservative about this, as about many things. But Cara had insisted on living on northern Long Island closer to her mother’s family, who still lived in Queens, one of New York’s four outer boroughs. When her husband’s Japanese associates came for dinner, Cara was not welcome at her own table. So she stayed in the kitchen with the gourmet food she had prepared and supervised the waiter she had to employ.

The tea comforted. She reached into the moment as into a cashmere sweater, one arm at a time. Then she felt a thud; tea shuddered in her mug. The electricity went out. Roger did not awaken; she did not call him.

Cara groped her way to the entryway closet and found a large flashlight. She pulled on a lined raincoat and secured the hood, foregoing an umbrella in the mauling storm. Outdoors, she panned the heavy flashlight around the front lawn. Bare oaks and maples swayed and creaked, but the rhododendrons were submissively flat-leaved; it was warm for January. Cara saw, in the blown beams of light, a jumbo jet, its back third broken away. This mangled giant, marked with a colossal red stripe, was ripped open, huge on the hillside.

She smelled metal, feared fire and explosion, then Roger was beside her. “Call 911!” she ordered, and he disappeared. Time telescoped; helicopters roared above the storm. There were sirens everywhere, red and blue flashing lights, voices on bullhorns, electric wires hissing at the rain. Roger returned and they climbed the slope of land from their property to its edge where the hulk lay broken. Cara knelt. She opened her coat to hold a baby girl against her chest and looked for the mother. She lost sight of Roger. Later, she saw him on the TV news, one link in a human chain lifting bleeding passengers from the wreckage until rescue workers, arriving in battalions, called them off and replaced them. She saw the body of the baby girl taken from a Central Casting Country Club woman’s arms, not recognizing herself but hearing the police officer telling her to go home and avoid the hot wires on the road. Cara wondered that such gentility could survive in a world where the sky really did fall.

Reporters speculated that since there had been no sound of engines, no explosion nor smell of fuel, the jet had glided into the crash because its tanks were empty. Seventy-three died.

A week went by before Cara left Roger a brief note and fled.

 

She crossed the country in the slowest way she could imagine, by Greyhound to Los Angeles. Cara didn’t want to get anywhere fast. She felt like melting, like the Wicked Witch of the West. She listened for hundreds of miles to conversation among passengers and various drivers about improved profits in 1989 and union demands for increased wages.

“SOB Fred Currey’s out to bust the union,” a red-faced passenger barked.

“Bust this,” the driver said, lifting a hand off the wheel and making a fist.

She made no effort to hide her whereabouts from the family; she knew they could easily trace her credit card use, and she did not want to cause worry. She called, her second week in LA, and told Roger she was visiting the only living relative of her father’s family–his sister, her Aunt Maria.

Cara had never been to Los Angeles before. She had never liked business trips with Roger that left her alone in hotel rooms in cities and countries where she was also a stranger to herself. Raising the boys had freed her for two decades; she and Roger were relieved by periodic separations. Except for sex, had they ever been close? As she had travelled across the country in the bus, going south and then west, the weather had brightened and warmed. She had left the cold behind in New York; in Los Angeles, it was early summer.

Her Aunt Maria had never been more than an address Cara knew and a television image now a generation outdated. But she welcomed her niece as if she’d been expecting her. She lived in a suburb where the streets were lined with palm trees. Cara thought they looked like prehistoric, giant spiders. Aunt Maria, though, looked fine for nearly ninety. She lived in a white stucco house with a Mexican housekeeper in her seventies. They clearly had been together for decades.

Aunt Maria looked like Cara’s father and was just as brusque. “Why are you here?”

Before Cara could answer, she continued, “You look like your mother. All her girls did. Tall. Very pretty. Good hair. I heard you all did well.”

Cara said, “I was told you didn’t want to hear about any of us.”

“Oh, that was your mother talking. Jealous and possessive, she was,” Aunt Maria leaned on Lupe’s arm as they ushered Cara into a sunken living room. White baskets of garish china flowers and giant lamps of the same unglazed Italian porcelain crowded table tops.

“Capodimonte,” Aunt Maria accented proudly. “Aren’t they beautiful? I’m a member of the TV Home Buying Show, and when they have them on, I buy them all. I’ve talked to most of the hosts by now. Do you get the Home Buying Show on Long Island?”

“I really don’t know,” Cara said.

They sat on brocade furniture. Lupe brought iced tea and joined them.

“Want something stronger?” Aunt Maria asked.

Neither waiting for a reply nor an order, Lupe took the sweating glass out of Cara’s hand and soon replaced it with several fingers of scotch.

Aunt Maria was blunt again. “I saw on TV an entire airplane fell in your front yard. They said that Columbians smuggled in drug-filled condoms in their intestines.”

“Colombians,” Lupe indicted in her low, unaccented voice.

“Right in your front yard,” Aunt Maria repeated.

Cara downed half the glass of scotch. “The baby girl was decapitated.”

“You’ll stay right here,” Aunt Maria said.

 

Despite having avoided the skies, Cara slept as if jet-lagged for days. She had never suffered from depression before but had heard the definition. She did not feel sad. Aunt Maria did not trouble her with doctors, or, at all. When Cara managed to come to the dinner table, she was fed. Aunt Maria and Lupe went on with their lives not as if Cara had never appeared, but as if she were a new, particularly fragile piece of capodimonte. Cara found out things about her father’s family she never realized she wanted to know.

“The Melitos are all still in Brooklyn, above or below ground,” Aunt Maria said. “I am the black sheep of the family – the one who got away.”

“The one who got away,” Cara echoed.

Aunt Maria asked Cara about her sons.

“Roger is the older one, named for his father. Roger Allen Revere IV,” Cara said. “Daniel is named for my father.”

“How do you get Daniel from Dominick? How could they knock down the Berlin Wall? Now we’ll never be rid of those goddam Republicans.”

Cara, who had begun dressing for the day again, paused at the buttons on her blouse. She had become familiar with Aunt Maria’s abrupt shifts of thought but couldn’t help worrying about mini-strokes. Lupe, however, looked as unperturbed as Cara was about having the two older women in her room as she put on clothes. In the same spirit as her aunt’s segue-less conversation, Cara said, “I’ve never been unhappy, Aunt Maria. The sixties and seventies passed me by, and I married Roger, whom my mother said was such a feather in my cap, and the boys were born.”

“What happened in the eighties?” Aunt Maria asked. “What do you do?”

Cara displayed her outfit for approval.

“What d’you care what anyone thinks? You’ve lost too much weight,” Aunt Maria said.

Cara laughed and followed her outside into the small garden where oranges, lemons, and limes grew on trees. The sun was bright and hot. Lupe did not join them.

“I run,” Cara said. She lifted the gold chain around her neck and showed her aunt its thick golden “50” charm. “I won this for running fifty miles.”

“In the marathon?” Aunt Maria said. “I thought that was twenty-five miles.”

“No, it’s twenty-six, but I run at a track at the public high school. Daniel goes to a private day school. Every day, I run at least ten miles. Even in rain or snow. I do a lot of fund-raising for his school.”

“At a track. You run in a circle ten miles every day?”

“And once a year, fifty miles. Oh, I can see how it sounds to you. You left Brooklyn and the family in the 1920s and went to Chicago.”

Aunt Maria was not about to let Cara retell her life story. “Yes, I sang and danced in prohibition saloons. By the time the thirties arrived, I headed west for the Busby Berkeley movies.” She would have repeated the story Cara now knew by heart if Lupe had not come outdoors with breakfast and taken over.

“You were part of a petal in an overhead shot.”

Aunt Maria took her story back. “My best times were the forties, dancing with all the GIs in the USO canteens. The sitcom in the early sixties bought this house, thank God, because before that, I lived like a gypsy. I never saved money. I can tell you about—”

“—all the LA real estate you could have bought when it was sand lots, but–” Lupe interrupted.

“—Bing Crosby and Bob Hope were buying it up when we all thought they were ‘on the road,’” Aunt Maria triumphantly completed her sentence.

Cara had been in California for three months. Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Roger called weekly and sent dozens of yellow roses for the same Valentine’s Day that the space probe Voyager 1 took photos of the entire solar system and the Iranians issued their fatwa against a novelist. The day after, baseball owners locked out players. Both sons had written. On March 18 in Boston, thieves stole thirteen paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Cara touched the unread copy of Satanic Verses Aunt Maria displayed with the capodimonte on the coffee table.

“I don’t feel guilty,” Cara said.

“Neither should Rushdie,” Aunt Maria said. “Oh, you mean about your freedom? That’s because it’s not about you. You came here to bury me.” Her wrinkled face stretched into a grin. “You’re in my will now.”

Cara stood up from the brocade couch. “It’s always someone else’s will. I was crazy to come here.”

“You were dying, too.”

“You’re too mean to die,” Cara said. When Aunt Maria smiled, Cara saw the Cheshire Cat in a spidery palm tree. Her heart thudded.

“Cara mia,” Aunt Maria pressed, “When you appeared at our front door, I told Lupe that in LA, the Angel of Death comes dressed like a New Yorker.”

Cara picked up an empty porcelain vase and walked to the entry, where she smashed it on the Mexican tiles. Then she knelt and picked up the broken pieces carelessly, cutting herself several times before Lupe rushed in at Aunt Maria’s yell. Even diluted by the flood of tears, Cara saw that her blood was redder than the shattered capodimonte roses.

 

7th May 2013.  Matter in the solid state maintains a fixed volume and shape, with component particles close together and fixed into place. Matter in the liquid state maintains a fixed volume, but has a variable shape that adapts to fit its container. Its particles are still close together but move freely. Matter in the gaseous state has both variable volume and shape, adapting both to fit its container. Matter in the plasma state has variable volume and shape, but as well as neutral atoms, it contains a significant number of ions and electrons, both of which can move around freely. Plasma is the most common form of visible matter in the universe. (Retrieved from http://www.clil-projects.eu/index.php/physics/states-of-matter?layout=edit&id=78)

Aunt Maria died in her sleep before Easter. Lupe was distraught, so Cara managed the funeral, burying her golden “50” necklace in her aunt’s coffin. In a month’s time, Cara stood in the May morning back in the Long Island dining room, sipping another cup of tea. Through the Japanese corporation’s power wielded by Roger, the process had begun to expedite Cara’s adoption of a little girl from the horrible, newly-opened orphanages of Romania. She would name the child Maria Romano, and Lupe would become her abuela. She remembered a son’s math text: no more circles. Tangents. But Cara was not surprised that her pleasure in that cup of tea was short-lived.

August of the same year, Roger traveled to Kuwait and was trapped with other foreigners to be used by Saddam Hussein as human shields to protect strategic Iraqi installations in the incipient first Gulf War. When international outcry and pressure secured the hostages’ release in December 1990, Roger returned to Long Island’s hilly north shore, where instead of the wintry gusts off the Sound, all he could smell was the stink of the oil fields he couldn’t escape in his nightmares. Cara awakened and comforted him. He asked her to accompany him on long walks. He talked about freedom and phase changes in matter. She talked about Aunt Maria and Busby Berkeley. Roger told Cara that under their feet rose and fell the terminal moraine of the last receding glacier. Roger returned to work, but it was not business as usual. It was the last decade of the twentieth century, the end of the Cold War.

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L.S. Bassen was a finalist for the 2011 Flannery O’Connor Award. She is a fiction editor for Prick of the Spindle, was a first reader forElectric Literature, and won the 2009 APP Drama Prize and a Mary Roberts Rinehart Fellowship. Her book reviews appear in The Rumpus, Cider Press Review, The Brooklyner, Press 1, at Big Wonderful Press, Small Beers Press, and elsewhere. She is an award-winning poet and fiction writer. You can hear her read two poems at 2River.

VOLUNTEERS

By John-Henry Doucette

A few nights before the O’Connells held their first and only pig roast, I named a ship I served aboard long before I retired as a corpsman and landed my hospice job here in Poughkeepsie. The mention came in passing, amid a wildly unstructured discussion of our troubles with Arabs, but Philip O’Connell grinned at me like a right idiot. He bashed the bar that ran through Ultach’s Pub, the tavern he owned with his wife, Aideen. Six months and forty pounds after Navy life, I was becoming a regular. It turned out I’d made USS Kearsarge’s maiden deployment with their son, one of the Marines my ship carried across the Atlantic Ocean and back. We hadn’t known each other.

“My height,” Philip said. “Real short hair.”

“Narrow it down, Big Phil,” I said. “She was a lot of boat.”

The next night, I brought in a blue-bound memento from my leaner years aboard Kearsarge, an amphibious assault ship out of Virginia. Philip methodically flipped pages of my souvenir cruise book until he found his kid among portraits of young men dressed like cartoon jungles. “Here’s Little Phil in Fat Mike’s book,” he exclaimed.

Aideen hustled in from the kitchen. “You let me see him.”

Philip pointed out the picture, one of dozens on the page. I couldn’t tell one from the next, but Aideen gently touched Little Phil’s square inch of the book as though it were drawn in the dust atop a gold chalice. I wanted to show them how, in my photo, I was bald as a cue ball, that I’d shaved off my hair for that particular deployment knowing it would grow back well before we returned, a haircut we called a “Med Head” in honor of the Mediterranean Sea, but Aideen had eyes for only one boy in that book.

“You’re sure you didn’t know him?” she asked.

“If he went to medical, maybe I gave him an aspirin.”

“He was twenty here,” Aideen said.

“Me, too.” I still wanted to show my own little picture. “Twenty didn’t last.”

“He was wild before the Marines,” she said, “but he made himself sound.”

“They help you out with that,” I said.

“We saw him off last month in North Carolina,” Philip said. “They’d painted trucks like sand. All the boys were dressed to match.”

“We’ll get those bastards yet,” I promised.

“He’s a master sergeant now,” Philip said.

“It’s a long road to general,” I replied.

“Sweet God,” Aideen said, cradling the book. “Look upon all men.”

“That cruise was six months out, Big Phil,” I said. “We hit Malta and Corfu and Barcelona, and I think one was Rota. We helped get back that Air Force pilot who got shot down over Bosnia and wandered for days. I guess we carried your jarhead around near as long as Aideen. A damn sight further, too.”

“Nah, Michael, I carried him in my belly from Belfast,” she said.

Philip jabbed my gut. “You really fit on a ship?”

I pointed to the book in his wife’s arms. “This here boat was named for a mountain.”

“Let me hold this a bit,” Aideen said. “I’ll show it ’round.”

“Be careful with it,” I said. “I get sentimental.”

“You’ll come to our pig roast, Michael,” Aideen said. “I won’t hear no.”

“Fat former sailors eat half-off,” Philip said. “Even if you don’t eat half as much.”

“You tell him the special,” Aideen said.

“We’ll eat a pig, as you’d imagine,” Philip said.

“I’ve got quite an imagination,” I said.

“We raised up our own sow for it,” Philip said. “We even named her Dinner.”

“I pray for her sacrifice to be delicious.”

Philip laughed. “You’re really a nurse?”

“You bet.”

“I hope you’re more sensitive on the clock,” he said.

I smiled. “You know what they say about hospice work?”

“No.”

“It’s a living.”

Two nights later, I shuffled back in to eat my pound of pig. Philip started pouring my Beamish before I was in the door.

“Cheers,” I said, sitting at the bar.

“Sláinte.” He handed over my glass.

A few regulars griped about the menu.

“They came the wrong night if they don’t like pig,” I told Philip.

“You came the wrong night if you do,” he said. “Little Phil, he hasn’t called since the weekend. Aideen’s doing loops. She wouldn’t let me harvest the damned pig. I told her she’s mad, and I headed to the barn. She followed me out. It was a holy show. Yelling at me there in the barn. Scaring the hell out of that pig, let me tell you. Shouting, ‘Don’t you do it, Philip O’Connell!’ And I suppose you can see how I didn’t.”

I could. “Did she hit you with the waterworks?”

“The yelling was enough.”

There was the best kind of prayer before we ate. It went real quick. Since the pig roast lacked its pig, Philip blessed six trays of store-bought beef.

“Got it from those Italians on Main Street,” he confided when I returned from trading elbows in the buffet line. Philip shook his head ashamedly, as though the white-bearded God of Irish Catholicism Himself disapproved of such transactions.

One of the regulars toasted the memory of martyred volunteers and the Sept. 11 dead, both as one, and I raised my glass to have it refilled.

Aideen kept behind the bar. She carried the old book I had loaned to her. She showed it to all the folks filling the place and themselves, even those who already had seen it. Philip fixed his old lady a plate when everyone had taken the firsts. It was no use. She would not put down such a lovely thing just to eat. She stood across the bar from me. She held my book, touched an image, but one of a good many young men all dolled up in yesterday’s clothes.

I was in there somewhere, bald as a baby, but I never got to show her how sure I looked when I gave myself to it.

“Michael, look at my fine Marine,” she said and she pushed the book toward me. She held it a bit dangerously, with shaky hands, directly above my greasy plate.

“I can see him from here,” I said.

============================================================================
Recovering journalist John-Henry Doucette is a writer and trainer for a public relations firm. He is a graduate of Virginia Wesleyan College and a recent graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University. He lives with his family in Virginia and neglects his writing blog, jhdoucette.com.

PAPERWEIGHT

By Nick Fatuzzo

“Alright, listen up, you bastards!”

I’m ten years old, and my best friend, Jonathan, has picked up his most recent favorite word from one of his parents’ arguments. It’s summer, and all the neighborhood kids are out. The five of us are sitting in the dry-rotted, wooden gazebo on our cul-de-sac. The sun is shining, simmering our skin. It’s two o’clock.

“Tonight,” Jonathan continues, “we’re going to scare the heck out of that old bastard down the road.”

“You mean Mister Sam?” Tyler pipes in. Tyler is nine years old.

“Of course I mean Mister Sam, stupid,” Jonathan says. “That bastard yelled at me the other day, and he deserves what’s coming to him.”

“Tonight, after our parents go to sleep,” he continues, “we’re gonna sneak out and throw something through his bedroom window.”

“Doesn’t he have a gun?” Julia asks. She lives next door to me.

“I heard, once, he shot someone for trying to break into his house,” Tommy says.

At this, Julia turns to me with a smirk and forms her fingers in the shape of a gun. She aims at me and fires, mouthing the word, “bang.” I smile back.

“Don’t be stupid,” Jonathan snaps.  “That old man doesn’t know his butt from a hole in the ground.” He giggles at his own joke. None of us get it.

“Well,” I say, “then what’s the plan?”

Jonathan makes a show of looking around suspiciously and then spreads his arms, inviting us to huddle up.

“So, tonight, after our parents go to sleep, we’re each gonna grab the heaviest thing we can lift from our houses, and meet up here.”

“That’s stupid,” Julia says. “Why not just throw rocks?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I don’t wanna have to steal from my parents.”

Julia smiles and winks at me for agreeing with her. Tommy and Tyler also nod in agreement.

“Are you bastards really that stupid?” Jonathan breaks the huddle and settles on one of the benches. It creaks under his weight. “We want this idiot to know who he’s dealing with. Anyone can throw rocks. This is personal.”

After a few minutes of arguing, Jonathan finally wins. We all decide to meet at eleven o’clock.

*

I’m fourteen years old, and this is the third time I’ve called my therapist a bastard.

“That’s alright,” he says. “This is a safe place where you can express yourself.”

I cross my arms in defiance. I don’t want to be here, but everyone tells me I should be here.

“You mentioned your recurring dream,” he continues. “Do you want to talk about that?”

“It’s the same as always, man,” I say. “You already know it.”

“That’s true, but I want to hear you talk about it.”

I sigh.

“I’m small and alone,” I begin. “There’s something after me. I can’t see or hear it, but I know it’s there. I’m hiding in a bush, trying to stay quiet.”

He’s nodding, jotting down notes.

“Out of nowhere, I go into a fit of sneezing, and the thing hears me. There’s a loud bang, and I suddenly can’t breathe. I try to look down at my chest, but I wake up before I see anything.”

*

I’m ten years old, and it’s 10:52 at night. My parents have just gone to bed, and my house is quiet. I’m in my father’s office, looking for anything heavy enough to break glass. Moonlight filters through the blinds, making the room glow eerily. On my father’s desk, I spot his paperweight. I snatch it and stare at it.

It’s a clear orb, slightly larger than my small hands. In the center of it is a picture of my father holding a rifle and a large buck. He had it custom-made three years ago, and I’ve lusted after it ever since.

I put it in my pocket and leave the house as quietly as I can.

At the gazebo, Julia and Tommy are sitting, looking around. Julia spots me first, and shoots me with her fingers again.

Bang.

She giggles. In her other hand, she’s holding her father’s signed baseball. Tommy smiles and waves at me. He’s got a heavy-looking mason jar filled with God-knows-what.

I approach them and sit.

“Where’s Jonathan and Tyler?” I ask.

They both shrug.

“I should’ve knew Jonathan wouldn’t come,” Tommy says.

On cue, Tyler and Jonathan appear around the corner. Jonathan’s dragging along a bowling ball, and Tyler isn’t holding anything.

“This stupid bastard said he couldn’t find anything to throw,” Jonathan says. “Whatever. You guys have stuff, right?”

The three of us show him our tools.

“Perfect. Let’s go.”

*

“Well,” my mom says. “How’d it go?”

“Same as every week,” I say.

“Talking about it will make it better,” she says. “I know you may not believe me, but I promise.”

“Whatever.”

“I heard you scream last night,” she says with a sigh.

“I know.”

“Are you still having nightmares?”

*

It’s an unusually cold summer night, and the five of us are sitting in a bush bordering Sam’s house. The building looks like it hasn’t been tended to in years. I remember my parents telling me that the old man hasn’t been the same since his wife died. Weeds and beer cans litter the overgrown lawn. Some of the paint on the front door is peeling, and the wooden supports from the front porch are beginning to rot.

“Alright guys,” Jonathan whispers. “His room is that window there.”

He points to the second window on the right side of the house.

“On my signal, we’ll throw our things through it and then run back here.” He laughs. “I wanna see the look on that old bastard’s face.”

We ready our things, and Jonathan counts down.

“Five.”

I shift from sitting to crouching.

“Four.”

Julia smiles at me and winks.

“Three.”

Tommy grabs my shoulder to keep from losing his balance.

“Two.”

Tyler sniffles and sits back.

“One!”

Jonathan runs forward and heaves his bowling ball. He isn’t strong enough, though, and it falls to the ground with a thump. Julia throws her baseball, and Tommy throws his jar. Both miss, and the jar shatters just below the window, spraying the wall with its contents. All eyes are on me as I rush forward. I take one last look at my father’s paperweight and then throw it. It soars through the air and crashes through the window. The sounds of shattered glass are drowned out by the scream within. We all rush back to the bush, and Jonathan is trying to stifle laughter.

In a matter of seconds, the old man bursts through the front door, shotgun in hand. He isn’t wearing anything, except for his briefs. From where I sit, he reminds me of a half-naked Elmer Fudd, out to hunt rabbits in his underwear. It’s almost comical, except I’m reminded of the real danger involved.

“Where are you fuckers?” He screams, swinging the barrel of his gun around wildly. He fires a shot into the air, and Jonathan isn’t laughing anymore.

Any chance we had of running away is gone, as he starts making his way toward his window and us. Julia grabs my hand and squeezes tightly. She’s shaking.

“Come out!” Sam yells. “Don’t make me find you!”

Tyler begins to cry, and Tommy has to hold his hand over Tyler’s mouth to keep him quiet.

Sam is looking at what’s left on the ground from our assault. He examines the bowling ball and then tosses it to the side.

In a fit of panic, Tyler breaks free from Tommy and tries to run. Tommy yells.

Without hesitation, Sam turns and fires into the bush.

Bang.

*

I wake up again in the middle of the night to the sounds of my own screaming. My mother rushes in, frantic.

“Is everything okay?”

I’m covered in sweat and all I can do is nod.

She sighs and slumps. “Again?”

I nod.

“Sweetie.” She sits at the foot of my bed, resting her hand on my leg.

“I’ll be fine,” I say.

“This has been going on for four years,” she says. “Therapy isn’t working, is it?”

*

My ears are ringing, and everything is blurry. I can barely hear Julia screaming as she scrambles over me and runs off. I manage to sit up. Jonathan’s eyes look like they’re about to bulge out of his skull. He’s staring at my chest. I look down, and my shirt is soaked with blood.

Between Jonathan and me, Tommy is lying on the ground, gasping for air. His small abdomen looks like it’s been torn in half. His intestines fan out from his back like grotesque tentacles. His face is as white as the full moon, and blood trickles from his agape mouth. Jonathan vomits.

Sam is towering over us, staring in horror at the small child he just mutilated. He begins to sob uncontrollably, and I’m reminded again of Elmer Fudd after an unsuccessful hunt.

“You stupid—” Sam says. “You stupid motherfuckers.”

He kneels down and reaches toward Tommy with a trembling hand. He stops, though, and turns to me. He grabs me by the collar.

“What the fuck were you kids thinking?!” he screams. His breath smells of tobacco and alcohol. His tears fall onto my shirt and face.

“What the—” He drops me. “What the fuck?”

He looks around frantically. “Oh God. Oh God.”

I look back down at Tommy, and I can see he’s no longer moving. Jonathan has already run home. Sam grabs his shotgun from the ground. Hands shaking, he eyes it up and down. He looks into my eyes, and suddenly, a calm look overtakes him.

“I’m so sorry, kid,” he says.

Before I can even scream, he aims the barrel at his face. I try to cover my eyes, but my trembling hands, once steadied by the heft of the paperweight, aren’t quick enough.

Bang.

============================================================================
Nick Fatuzzo is a fiction writer who lives in Tampa, where he pursues his degree in creative writing at the University of South Florida.