Fiction

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.

HARD FREEZE

By James Claffey

We get the 15B bus to town on Saturday morning. Mam has her shopping bag and the list she wrote out after breakfast. The Old Man is staying home by the fire, afraid to get a chill in his gammy leg. Before we leave I put a shovel of slack on the coals and the moisture causes the fire to hiss and pop like my Rice Krispies. I linger with him for a few minutes, not wanting to head out into the frosty Dublin morning, but when Mam calls me I have to kiss him on the cheek and say goodbye.

There was a hard freeze last night and the hedges on the road are white. Underfoot the ground crunches, and as we cross the road to the bus stop Mam slips and almost falls. She grabs hold of me and steadies herself. An old woman is waiting with a black West Highland terrier, and when the dog whimpers, she says, “Hush, Rommel, hush.” Mam raises an eyebrow at the dog’s politically incorrect name.

As we wait for the bus I watch Mam from beneath the hood of my anorak. The line of her jaw is round and soft, and her hair is no longer perfectly permed. It is a tangle of moss-like gray, probably on account of taking care of the Old Man. When she talks to her friends on the phone she uses the word “invalid.” It means sickly, or unwell, but it also means not important anymore, and that’s how the Old Man feels now he cannot return to work on the oil rig. She tells Mrs. Cooney his health was “delicate.”

In Arnotts’ Department Store Mam has me try on my school uniform. The jumper is scratchy and the polyester pants are full of static. She says I look “smashing,” and we make a detour to have a cup of coffee in Bewley’s on Grafton Street. I’m allowed get an angel cake with whipped cream and little wings sticking up from it. Mam smokes three cigarettes and crushes the butts in a glass Campari ashtray. The inside of Bewley’s looks like a ship stuck in a fogbank, and wreaths of smoke collect around the light fixtures.

The brass rail beside our table is shiny like a mirror, and I use it to mess with the pimple on my chin. Mam slaps my hand away and says, “Leave your poor face alone, Anto. You’ve delicate skin and you shouldn’t aggravate it.” Chastened, I slurp my tea and eat the last of the cake. Mam calls the waitress over with her “proper” accent, the one she uses when she speaks to people she considers her social inferiors. She thinks I don’t notice, but I do.

We walk back across the Liffey, and in a corner by the Irish Times building a man is taking a piss. The stream is all the way across the footpath, and Mam wrinkles her nose in disgust. I see the top of a beer bottle sticking out of the man’s coat and ask Mam if he’s an alcoholic. She shushes me and says, “God love the poor creature, he’s addled with the drink. Sure they get terrible treatment altogether.” Back on the bus I can still see the man from the top deck, and he’s slumped against the ground, his coat stained by his own pee.

When we reach the lamppost outside our house the sitting room lights are on and I can see the Old Man in his chair where we left him. Mam shouts for him to wake up when she puts the key in the latch, and when he doesn’t reply we go into the sitting room and he’s wearing his oil rig gear, the kitbag by the chair, as if he’s ready to head back to the North Sea at any moment. He’s not snoring, and Mam shakes him by the shoulder and his head falls to one side. “Oh, Ronan, no,” she says, and starts crying. The fairy cake churns in my stomach and I want to get sick.

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James Claffey hails from County Westmeath, Ireland, and lives on an avocado ranch in Carpinteria, CA, with his wife, the writer and artist, Maureen Foley, their daughter, Maisie, and Australian cattle-dog, Rua. He is the winner of the Linnet’s Wings Audio Prose Competition. He received his MFA from Louisiana State University, where he was awarded the Kent Gramm Prize for Non-Fiction. His work appears in many places including The New Orleans Review, Connotation Press, A-Minor Magazine, Molotov Cocktail, and Gone Lawn. You can read him at jamesclaffey.com.

FAMILY EXTRAVAGANZA

By Meg Tuite

What is it that struggled within my oversized head that made my body nothing more than transport apparatus beneath it? The legs moved when expected, as did the arms, but the face twitched as fast as a hummingbird swilling across the air toward sugar water and the eyes tracked horizons never met.

“So how’s your job?” my mom asked. She and I both knew the Colonel had dethroned me and absconded with my cap after I saw rats masquerading as chicken in every deep-fried basket that squealed up at me with those tails in full-salute giving me the lowdown on what was what. Amazingly, they did hire me back after a week of finding no one to replace me. “I’m on to you,” the manager, Pete, said as he stared at my breasts. Few men ever looked at my face.

“I think I’m getting a promotion soon,” I answered.

“Oh, honey, you are, with a whisper of your uncle’s ass, ‘a Broadway kind of girl.’ A tribute to the Klonstein family,” Mom said as she clapped her hands and bowed to me.

My face trilled across itself like a piano player revamping the keyboard. She’d been telling me that forever, and I still didn’t get how a job dousing chicken or what posed for chicken in Exxon-layered grease and Uncle Barry’s silent farts had made me a Broadway kind of gal.

“Mom, I’m not okay.”

“But, how could you possibly ridicule the stage, baby? You’re a goddamn gyro. The high-end cut that everyone wants a piece of. Just watch out that they don’t get a hold of your rack.” She always laughed at that one.

If my head was badly managed, my frantic breasts were racing for the finish line. They grew like a food chain long after Mom and her friends had said they had hit their full growth potential. I worked at a Greek restaurant before KFC, and that had lasted all of three weeks.

“So where’s that dark, musky Greek you brought home a few weeks ago?”

Carlos was a son of the owner, Javier. They were as far from Greek as I was from sanity.

“Mom, I’ve been to this doctor.”

“Doctor? What? Anything can be taken care of without bringing in the psycho preachers, baby. Come here, my beauty.” She grabbed a bottle of whatever crap she was sucking down. Tonight it was orange and plasmic with bubbles.

“Okay, bambina,” she pulled my elongated head to her and kissed somewhere in the vicinity of my chin. “Let’s toast to kicking up those heels and love, love, love.”

I took a glass of her cheap booze that she poured out of a raging florescent orange bottle with green letters that screamed Mimosa and swallowed it down. She never wanted to know, nor see where I was headed. I was online all the time diagnosing myself.

The psychiatrist said it was a psychotic breakdown that now needed to be managed. I nodded my head, while the voices told me my mother was no hallucination. Whether I was with her or alone, I was hearing other voices chiming in, and they weren’t Broadway material. They were more like deranged family members singing rap from the 80s. My dead cousin was one of them. “Don’t stop thinking about the attic boards. Don’t stop, until you find the electrical cords.” It was a cross between Psycho and Grand Master Flash.

I started stealing scarves every time I passed a clothing store. Aunt Christina let me know that I’d be strangled by a stranger. I hadn’t seen her in years, but her voice rasped in my ear, “Keep that neck a swaddled or you soon going to be throttled. Strangers creeping, watch your back for peripheral leaping.” I coughed when I was encased in crowds or stood in front of TV stores for hours at a time, unable to move from the spot, pretending to be engrossed in the grossness that emanated from the screens while I watched the reflection of the crowd blasting past me from the window instead, waiting for someone to rope me from behind. I was paralyzed.

My grandfather, who had been packed in dirt years ago, would sing in my ear, “Pick up them feet, girl, don’t let them predators catch you eyeing them on the street.” So I’d finally make it home, staring at the sidewalk, without allowing my eyes to falter into anyone else’s. I always had a craving to do exactly the opposite of what the voice said. I wanted to stare at someone and see what would happen. It was an amplifier turning on and off between listening and wanting to die.

The doctor prescribed Zyprexa. I gained twenty pounds in over two weeks. Most of the weight went to my face, my gut, and my breasts, which now led the way in some kind of marching band with a parade of letches following. I could hear the music, but there was no beat left in me.

“You’re every woman’s fantasy of a volcano. Look at you, baby.” Mom would snuggle up to me and try to drag me up on her lap like I was a Chihuahua in a St. Bernard’s body. “You’ve got the makings of a science project.” She’d rub my corpulent belly that was giving my knockers a run for the money. “Every day you could blow your fuse or blow a tire, you never know, but I say, keep on singing, baby, keep on singing and it’ll never catch up to you.”

I really wanted to slip some of my Zyprexa in her mimosa to see if she could see what I saw in her, but I never did. She was so full of some kind of life that neither of us had ever experienced. She was hopped up on a drug she’d never known. Mom’s psyche had become mutilated when she was a child. Some rank neighbor’s father had molested her for years, annihilated her kid-dom. She told me once that she didn’t speak for a year after that. “My mom never prepared me for bankruptcy,” she said. “What was there to say?” she’d ask and wander into an abyss that felt like trying to dig that hole to China. I knew what it felt like to dig for something that I’d never find.

“Rein them in, baby, rein them in,” she’d say. I told her the bras she bought me were a structural engineer’s fantasy capable of shooting boulders at any enemy that crossed us. She’d laugh and cup them in her hands, “By god, you’ve got a goddamn gorgeous mountain range erupting on your chest.”

Mom was a true fan no matter what I did. And I barely did much. I attempted to date sometimes. Manager Pete, or some guy who ordered a 9-piece original or another one who went for a 24-piece bucket without looking beyond my breasts, didn’t matter if they were single or had an entire family at home, would wait for me outside when we closed up. I let a few of them suck on me in their cars in the parking lot after hours, and I could understand what the marrow felt like in those bones after they’d ripped away all the meat. What is it about the weight of a breast that makes a man lose his faculties and become a slurping, corpulent baby? I guess those weren’t really dates.

So, the psychiatrist took me off the Zyprexa before I launched into the girth of the state of Texas. He told me I would lose the weight on this new drug and that I was the psychic equivalent of a teeter-totter. I can’t say I hadn’t met anyone that didn’t peer over the precipice of something.

“Mom, I’ve got to have my own room. I need some space.” The new drug hadn’t kicked in yet, so I heard rapping ancestors in the background. She held me in her lap while we watched the biography of Bette Midler and stuffed popcorn into our mouths.

“Baby, baby, please. I know what this is all about. It’s that dull textbook talk of a doctor trying to fit us into one of his chapters. We are the showgirls, the lights, the goddamn extravaganza. Of course, he hasn’t written our chapter yet. He’s yanking off in his office to the idea of us instead.”

“Mom.” I slipped off of her lap and sighed. “I adore you. But, I’m twenty-five years old. We need to sleep in separate beds.” Someone started singing in my head, “Cut the crap, get out the dope, cram in a pile, that’s the way to cope. Belt down some Boonesfarm, smack it out of the park, it’ll work like a charm, crack you out of the dark.” I think it was my cousin again. He was a sports fanatic until he got knocked into a coma by a fastball to the skull.

The doctor said these new pills might take a while to kick in.

“Okay, baby, okay! Guess what we’re doing tomorrow? We’re going to fix up that attic for my gossamer of a daughter. A perfect apartment to set off her career, how does that illuminate you?”

I smiled and hugged her. A tic started gyrating off my right eye.

“Now get out more of that orange bubbly so we can celebrate. My baby’s going to Broadway.”

We lived in Bloomington, Indiana. We were as far from Broadway as the attic was from my freedom.

Mom was up the next morning with pancakes on a plate at the kitchen table for me. “Bambina, it’s a day made for the tabloids.”

I loved her.

“Let’s get up there and make it a parallel universe of flight and space.”

I hadn’t spent much time in the attic. It was the place where voices seemed to feel at home. I could hear mumblings as soon as we mounted the wooden steps.

There were boxes of shit all over the room. I loved that it had an alcove with windows that opened out. That’s where we set up my bed.

I didn’t have much to move. I put a nail in the wall and hung my KFC uniform and cap on it. I set up my iPod and headphones next to the bed. I jammed out to Fleetwood Mac at night to keep my haunting family ensemble under a louder incestuous family so I could sleep.

“Babykins?”

“Yes, Mom?”

“Are you ready to take the stage by yourself?”

“I am,” I said. I was just as nervous as she was.

“Okay then, let’s go downstairs, order a pizza, and get on with our night.” She pulled out her box wine for the occasion to go with the pepperoni. We watched a Glen Campbell concert from decades ago that mom loved. We’d watched it at least a dozen times, but I didn’t care. Mom cried all the way through “Rocky Mountain High.” Then I flipped channels through a few sitcoms and kept the wine flowing until she passed out on the couch at some point.

I didn’t know what to do. Usually I woke her up and we staggered to her room. Tonight was its own night. I put a blanket over her and then crept up the stairs to the attic. A half moon was shining through the window. I got under the covers.

I put my headphones on and turned the iPod to “Landslide,” until it was blaring, and I pulled my new pills out from under my pillow. They were yellow. The others had been blue. I shook one out and stared at it in the moonlight.

My breasts slithered to either side of my armpits. My stomach flattened when on my back. Fuck it. This was the first night. I dropped the pill back in its container and pulled off my headphones.

At first, I heard only ominous creaks and groans of the wind. But soon the music started up again in all its 80s glory. Uncle Nate sang, “Grab a scarf and a chair, loop it over a rung, until you’ve sung your last song and finally hung.” I could even smell his farts.

Grandpa bellowed, “Never one yellow that brings you thrills, come join me child and take all those pills.”

Aunt Christina belted in her chorus. “This wood from the old rafters was once an old boat, get a blade from mom’s bathroom and slit your own throat.”

I smiled and closed my eyes. I would never have to take that stage alone.

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Meg Tuite’s writing has appeared in numerous journals including Berkeley Fiction Review, 34th Parallel, Epiphany, One, the Journal, Valparaiso Fiction Magazine and Boston Literary Magazine. She has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. She is the fiction editor of The Santa Fe Literary Review and Connotation Press. Her novel Domestic Apparition (2011) is available through San Francisco Bay Press and her chapbook, Disparate Pathos, is available (2012) through Monkey Puzzle Press. She has a monthly column, Exquisite Quartet, published up at Used Furniture Review. The Exquisite Quartet Anthology-2011 is available. megtuite.wordpress.com.

AND THE RUIN OF THAT HOUSE WAS GREAT

By Ric Hoeben

Some of the guys are wondering if we should get rid of Cinnamon and take us on a new member. If it’s not his moaning, it’s his whining. He refuses to go out and get us flounder, get us eggs, or find us shiny wrapping paper, and for the sake of our wit, we recall the times that we left the couch under the carport—despite our solid luxury, despite our discomfit, and we did what was needed, doing always what had to be done.

Cinnamon has been having his Budweiser. And he has been getting into racy television. If any of the guys has the courage to talk to Cinnamon it would be Howard, Catfish Howard.

Whenever it gets cold under the carport we bring out the space heaters and the mentholated cigarettes and, having thought, begin some level of talk. Some prefer coffee, others prefer tea. Catfish Howard prefers bourbon and Coca-cola. He is strong and he promises salvation.

Cornel Timmons was the only one of us in Vietnam.

Brighton Grey was a fullback for Northwestern for two years.

Dean Reynolds is a retired electrician and he worked for the city, but there is not a pension for him as he expected. His wife works at the Huddle House. If she is not busy, she brings us coffee—but not every day.

Cinnamon claims to have gotten his Ph.D. out in Oregon, at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, he tells us. But, we are liars; all of us are liars and all of us have caught great bass and great mackerel and great dolphin and great marlin even, some of us have claimed marlin even in a state of ecstasy.

Some of us guys feel that Cinnamon has been having far too many Budweisers and he has taken on a nasty paunch, and he has taken on an anger that could bring about much damage.

On a Sunday night, we called a private meeting. Some of us sat on the couches, some of us turned over paint cans; there was bread and there was fish. Howard, naturally, led us into the discussion of getting rid of our Cinnamon Tin’cher. One idea was to drown him. Cornel mentioned ropes and the oak tree on his property, but Dean Reynolds said that a hanging was misguided. Dean Reynolds then said that we would do all right to keep Cinnamon in the cellar behind the carport.

For many days, it was quiet and dismal and rainy. Beyond the patter of falling water on the roof, there was not much to be heard except for the lonesome tiny cries coming from Cinnamon. We took turns feeding him—basic things—frozen dinners uncooked, nutty bars, yard pears. He asked for something to read down there and we carried him Herodotus and Plutarch. He asked for a blanket and Brighton Grey urinated upon him.

There is something okay with lying when it’s lying. And we felt that Cinnamon had gone beyond lying. It was hard for us to bear his cries, knowing that he was going through the DTs, knowing that he missed his ashram and his mother, but despite all of this we could not forgive his transgression, and several votes were conducted to make sure that we indeed felt the way that we felt.

Cinnamon had a blue Cadillac and we decided to smash it with baseball bats. We told him as much. Cinnamon’s daughter came by and asked after him. We shook our heads no and we touched her and told her to bring her friends and maybe we would find Cinnamon after all, like we were performers of some kind of miracle.

Infidels, Cinnamon called us. Traitors and men without luck, without the gospel and men without everyday meaning, he said.

It was getting on to be colder and it was one night a mere 8 degrees Fahrenheit when Cinnamon Tin’cher got to howling. He could be heard well and strong, and in his lupineness we got spine bumps and worries about what to do. Some of us were drowsy and some of us had the right spirit, but all of us journeyed out toward the cellar and knelt down with great agog.

He told us we were hell-bent for destruction. He said that man was opposed to fair play and that our mothers were no better than fourth-world prostitutes—many more things of this nature that humbled us, and silenced us, in the chill of that night.

One of us guys said we should just shoot him. Everyone then began to talk about guns and ammunition and big game hunts and no one was guilty of telling the truth. Below us, Cinnamon looked afraid and confused, his brain peppering up something to get us with, something to get him out of his lacking confines. And he howled.
It was really something hard to listen to.

We decided out of mercy or out of something else to take it to a head and have another vote come to hammer. When the results came in, it looked like some among us had taken on a pity to Cinnamon and his sadness. His eyes looked like blue Easter eggs hanging in brick holes. Brighton Grey got worked up and said that he had several men he knew in mind who should take Cinnamon’s spot. Catfish Howard told him to wait on protocol, and he shoved him, powerfully. And all along, Cinnamon howled from his cellar.

And the truth of it was that he could’ve gotten out whenever he so liked. Only thick mud surrounded the door, but any of us would be able to break through it and return to the world at large. Cinnamon, however, kept a sort of chesty fortitude about him, like he wanted to defeat his plight and defeat all of us, too. Even though he did not say it outright—for he had turned into a savage wolf—he implied that he would like to destroy us each and all.

Some of us wanted coffee, and others of us wanted Budweiser cervezas. It was not until 3 A.M. that someone among us went to the store, and he went for provisions and for girls and for cigarettes. Cinnamon, ever howling, seemed to say that he wanted something as well, seemed to cry in that early morning before the dawn hit the valley.

He then came into a brief moment of sense, mentioning that he wanted to be adored. He wanted to sell us his soul if that might help. One man of our ilk handed him a candy cane from out of his coat pocket—a little move of apparent compassion. And Cinnamon returned to his wolfish frenzy, tearing up the good china in the cellar and the Italian pictures from the 13th century. None of us did a thing to stop him because we felt like he was beating a drum on our heart.

We slept on and off, someone always keeping watch on the prisoner. We all had sleeping bags and lanterns and sandwiches. Some of us talked about stones and some of us talked about roses, some of us said things of the fool and some of us said things of real gold. The Budweiser brought in from the gas station was nice, everyone agreed, and we cottoned to it greatly.

We were almost at the point of getting rid of Cinnamon and replacing him with someone far more upstanding. But no one was willing to make the final cut.

For breakfast we cooked fish and strands of bologna. Cinnamon, down below, went crazy for some of it but we did not take onto his big long waterfall of complaints. Keeping him had become an obsession and someone wrote to our preacher to ask if it was a sinful act or if it was an all right kind of thing we were pulling. Ice had formed around the hangs of the carport.

And it was not that Cinnamon had ever been a terrible or a mean, dirty sort. No, he was kind, and at times he had the heart of Secretariat. He liked pies and America and church, in small doses. But he had come to his time. And things had really come to a head for all of us guys under the carport of the abandoned house we squatted from; some of us were begging for resolution.

As for Cinnamon, he had by noon become more existential and had, oftentimes, come up to the mud and had laid his chin square in the earth, just looking around to see what’d been born, and his usual, customary howling had stopped altogether. In time, he became so brave that he grabbed an abandoned stop sign post off of our dead grass and hobbled over to us all and sat down under the carport and warmed himself by the twig fire. One of us gave him a beer. And the house was still for a while before the snow came on.

In time, Cinnamon regained his true voice and made proud claims about going into town and getting us this or getting us that commodity, whatever we might like. But no one among us would hear anything of it, and we decided on a great collective snubbing. Eventually, no one wanted to talk about new members, yet no one had the pluck in them to talk about the issue of Cinnamon either.

It is something that gnaws on us till the present.

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Ric Hoeben homes it in eastern South Carolina, holds an MFA from the University of Florida, and hopes his recently finished literary crime novel, Oceans of Gold, will be a real smash.