table of contents - juntomagazine.com deafened in its darkest depths. ... a splinter of late night...

Table of Contents

Poetry

Will Never Be Their Songbird 4Linda M. Crate

Eroded 5Bruce Crossey

Opaline Ruse 6Lana Bella

Awaking 7Lana Bella

Article

The Business Side of Art: What They Don’t Teach You in University, but Should 8Katerina Pravdivaia

Instagram Feature

Look Up 12Rachel Goehring

Blue Ridge Haze 13Will Sanders

One Bright Day 13Nicole Long

Where Flowers Bloom, So Does Hope 14Kuhanraj

Sunrise Stroll 14Jennifer Wilkin

Art

Dashboard Treasure 15Jason Kerzinski

Village Above 16Martha Clarkson

Within Reach 17Martha Clarkson

Article

Junto Magazine Talks With Writer and Director, Allison Burnett 18

Short Stories

Election Season 21Ann Schlotzhauer

The Storyteller 23Josh Penzone

Casket on a Fulcrum 27Mick Hugh

Those Who Are Not You 38Cheryl Wollner

Eclipse 41Brandon Madden

Five Flattened Pennies 53Ron Brown

JUNTO MAGAZINEPublisher

Joseph AttanasioAssociate Publisher

J. T. Ledan

Genre EditorKaterina Pravdivaia

Genre EditorAvery Gomez

Genre EditorJacqueline Dell

Genre EditorEmily Powers

Genre EditorSamantha Oty

Genre EditorBrittany Dirks

Genre EditorAutumn Rosencrantz

Editor-in-ChiefMitchell Peterson

Literature

Poetry

Art

Arrangement, articles, cover, and issue copyright © 2017 Junto Magazine, LLC. All rights reserved.

Cover photography by Warren WongCover layout arranged by Samantha Oty

Copyright for each piece individually resides with the creator of that piece. All rights reserved. Junto Magazine, LLC has non-exclusive, royalty free, perpetual, and worldwide license to use the content in connection with the magazine, including the rights to copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publically perform, reproduce, edit, translate, reformat and/or incorporate it into a collective work.

Typeset by Junto Magazine, LLC, Gaithersburg, MD

The views and positions expressed do not reflect the views of Junto Magazine, LLC or its employ-ees. Unless otherwise stated, all representations are purely fictional and bear no resemblance to any person, living or dead. Any similarities are purely coincidental.

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Lind

a M

. Cra

teBruce C

rossey

Will Never Be Their SongbirdThemes: Oppression, Politics, Rage

Junto Magazine, Volume 2 Issue 2

all my lifethey’ve tried to cage me,and make me small;tell me that i need a man to truly live my life as i ought,but i am not ready to recoil a smallrabbit and surrender my power;simply so a man can keephis ego—i am not inferior to menjust because they fearmy poweri am magic, i am love, i am light;and i will shatter all theirhollow nightmares and bones of monstersbeneath my rage for mykindness is noweakness—i will not stand down because they wantme to stand upon pedestals,be tamed,have their children;be comfortable behind gilded cages that breakmy soul and dreams into oblivion’s dust—i am wildburning like fire,and i will never be tamed;their assured cages and chains will fail themwhen they try to catch me like a butterfly in their netit will snare across their fingers to break them for i am a hurricane i will break down all their wallsshatter their glass ceilingsi am the wind i will take all their words and cut themdown to pieces with their hostilityi am the earthwill quake beneath their feet and destroy everythingthey once loved for daring to stomp on the dreams and rightsof womeni am steelmy ambition will pierce them until the crowsfall from the heavens to devour their bones.

Themes: Love, Sorrow, Faith

Old and weary traveler,traversing water’s edge.Waiting, watching, counting,the grains of time that dwindle.

A coastline’s lost and ancient friend,rises, and crests him met.Conceding forgotten silencesand remembering words unsaid.

Breathing deep of ocean wisdom,yet deafened in its darkest depths.Brewing blackness bursts the bank,flooding a soul of salt and spray.

Still, he remains,battered and broken upon the shore.Awake in her eyes,Eroded. Drowning in delicate dreams.

Eroded

Author’s comment: The piece speaks to the metaphysical search for a “paradise lost” by examining the story of a man who feels his soul has been eroded by time, experience and loss. He is ever seeking the remnants of a past love and relation-ship, which as the pieces draw closer seem to inexplicably slip away, leaving him colder than before but no closer to relinquishing his search.


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Junto Magazine, Volume 2 Issue 2La

na B

ella

Opaline RuseThemes: Unease in liminality


from the window,a splinter of late night summer slithers inlike a puppet behind all felling:with you its master,while she, the woman in the bed,is the source of sweet rusethat beckons your sleight of hand--

she turns when you come near the bed,your silhouette rises upward her stockinged feetto the opaline thighs,as the moon moves into dimness behind a net of clouds,she lifts up her rose chiffon dress--

darkness casts out the lined saffron etching on her face as she draws back towards the adjacent wall,watching you with a bemused stare as you splay the bed with petals that unfurl in a necklace of roses and hot rubies--

from one human forfeit gives forth another with return,so at the crest of such calyx wings,you skirt sideways and slide downhill on skis of her soft aria when she cuts and fits herself to your exactinstincts,as if where you are,her last breath always feels like a prayer,and her name,is claimed easy on your tongue--

Lana Bella

AwakingThemes: Unease in liminality

sometimes darkness triggered awaking and awaking triggered nerve when dust and diesel fuel spilled a blue and blind blanket of aerial flight made from you plowing head-on into a barb-wire fence--pleat on pleat tucked in the alignment of all muscle gone, you saw then flashesof light shimmied with jots of graph and torn puzzles like dimming stars before dawn; a keeper of silence, you chasedyour voice into the black under your chin,and frozen there was your heart lay nearto listen--

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Junto Magazine, Volume 2 Issue 2Junto Magazine, Volume 2 Issue 2

The Business Side of Art:What They Don’t Teach You in University,

but Should

In May 2013, on a particularly windy day in Sackville, New Brunswick, some 500 hopeful students were eagerly await-ing their moment on the convocation stage, cap in hand. This was it, I thought. The moment where I can finally spread my wings and fly. The four years lead-ing up to that moment were grueling, eye-opening, thrilling, and exhausting all in one. As I crossed the stage to shake hands and receive my Bachelor’s degree, I hoped that what I had spent my time learning would be of great value in help shaping the future.

Now in 2017, I reflect on how far

I’ve come as a professional artist. It has not been easy, and the learning has only grown since my time at Mount Allison University, but I have come to understand the fundamental side of business that is inseparable from the art world—the side that I wish was taught in university. Why is it that most people who follow the path of the arts are destined to have such a punishing time making a living from their talents? I believe it is because we rarely focus on the crucial part of being our own managers, framers, advertisers, packagers, you name it. When artists and other creative individuals transition into their professional selves, the focus shifts from simply creating to the complexities of being an entrepreneur. I am here to help lessen the confusion of what is de-sired from a modern-day artist in the art world, as recalled by my personal expe-

riences as well as industry professionals found in the brilliant book Art/Work by Heather Darcy Bhandari and Jonathan Melber. Here, I will cover some import-ant aspects on organizing yourself as an artist. What I won’t be telling you is how you should be making your work—that will always be entirely up to you. You do not have to follow everything I outline for you, but I hope some aspects will be as helpful for you as they have been for me. So, go brew yourself a cup of coffee, grab a notebook and pen, and get ready to take some notes. Let’s dive in.

ORGANIZING INVENTORY

“If I were to do something over again, I would keep really good records about where work ended up and what it sold for. It wouldn’t have been that much ef-fort but it would have been a really, re-ally smart thing to do.”

—Fred Tomaselli, artist, Brooklyn, NY

If you are anything like me, you are great at creating work. So great that you have dozens of paintings, drawings, sculptures, etc. scattered and undocu-mented around in various locations. This is where your first challenge comes in, and this one has definitely aided me in locating works I thought were lost, as well as quickly retrieving information for submissions. Creating an invento-

Katerina Pravdivaia

ry system doesn’t have to be complex. There are countless online cloud storage systems and apps that allow you to sim-ply plug in all of the information, such as ArtBase, Artsystems, and FileMaker. But for a simple alternative and just as efficient system, you can create a Word or Excel document. Make sure to include a detailed list of every piece that you’ve finished, along with all relevant informa-tion: Title, date, medium, dimensions, edition size, location (where the piece is now), exhibition history, production cost, framing, price, and a high-quality photo. You can also add on any additional infor-mation that may be useful such as if the piece was sold, the collector contact, and who it was sold by. If you prefer to have hand-written records, you can do this in a notebook. I personally have found it use-ful to have Excel documents of every few years’ worth of work saved to my com-puter, backed up on my external hard-drive, and uploaded to the cloud storage app Dropbox to have the information ready wherever I am.

PHOTOGRAPHING YOUR WORK

“I always hear ‘my work is really hard to show in an image.’ Of course it is! But you absolutely need to find a way to make it presentable in an image. It’s how you first get your work out there. That’s true for video and painting and any medium.

I did sculpture in glass. It’s really hard to photograph, so I had to learn how to do it, and when I could not do it myself, I sought out someone who could. If it’s impossible for you to pho-tograph, pay that extra money to have a

professional do it.”—Hillary Wiedemann, artist and

former gallery manager of Artists Space, New York, NY

It is crucial for you to take profession-al-looking, high-quality digital photo-graphs of your work. I took about a week to learn how to take photographs reading articles on the best lighting techniques and how to properly crop the files. You can find tutorials online pertaining to the type of art that you make. Always shoot at the highest possible resolution and match each image to its inventory record. It can be very difficult to achieve a photo that accurately portrays the colors, especial-ly for paintings, so you will also need to learn how to retouch and adjust the color in image-editing software like Photoshop or Illustrator. I use Picasa 3, and tend to later adjust my images to the current standard resolution of 300 dpi and 8 x 10 inches for press and printing. You can use an 8 x 10 inch image at 72 dpi for most other purposes. Remember, the goal is to showcase your work the way a collector or gallerist would see it in person, so try not to distort the image too much. And no matter how many times you may need to adjust or crop your file, always keep an original unedited image of every piece.

CREATING A WEBSITE

“Not having a website is like not hav-ing a phone number. You have to have it. At least get a blog and put some im-ages up. Every artist needs a website.”

—David Gibson, curator and critic, New York, NY

One of the first things I did out of uni-

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versity was create a website. I took a few days to research the platforms available and ultimately chose Weebly, a website builder. It was very easy to put togeth-er and is quite inexpensive to maintain. I also purchased my own domain name, which auto-renews once a year. Having a website is definitely the best way to make your work accessible to a wide-ranging audience and also represents profession-alism in the art world. Many art world professionals, such as gallerists, curators, collectors, and the press, rely on websites to quickly find an artist’s most up-to-date and accurate information. It is also where you have freedom to customize the style, context, and manner in which your work is perceived. Be aware that anyone can be looking at your website, so be sure to choose the work that you would be com-fortable showing everyone. Make it easy to navigate, and take into consideration that many people will now be viewing your work on tablets and mobile phones, so having a platform that is mobile-com-patible is very important. Lastly, keep in-formation up to date, such as your imag-es, press, bio, CV, and shows. If I have an upcoming show, I will wait until I reveal the work at the gallery before posting the updated images on my website. But I never wait too long to update my site with the images.

Don’t forget to include the following on your website:

• A striking home page (your first impression);

• Contact information (you can in-clude a contact form);

• Images and clips (use your best images and curate your site);

• Information for your images (title, year, medium, dimensions or dura-

tion, and edition);• A CV (your art resume, keep any

non-art related work off of it); • Text or press page (short posts of

positive articles or reviews of your work, credit the author and article);

• Biography (optional; include per-sonal details like where you were born, where you studied, where you live now, your training, ap-prenticeships, and any career high-lights);

• Artist statement (optional; only if integral to understanding your work); and

• Links to social media.

While some artists choose to do this, many gallerists argue against having prices listed on your website. General-ly, not only will your prices change over time, but they can also be distracting to visitors who are there to try to understand your art. Galleries also tend to expect that pricing will be collaborative. Some artists chose to have an art sales page, which can list select pieces for sale, or they write something like “contact me for price information”.

MAKING BUSINESS CARDS

“I’m a big fan of business cards. If I go to open studios and you have a busi-ness card with a name on it and an im-age on the back, you make everyone’s life easier.”

—Melissa Levin, program manag-er, artist residencies, Lower Manhat-tan Cultural Council, New York, NY

One of my first gallery exhibits af-ter university came up so quickly that I


hadn’t had the chance to design and print any business cards. But I knew the neces-sity of having them with me, so I created my own by hand. They had a small wa-tercolor image of a geometric form, in the dominant colors of my paintings on show and included all of my contact informa-tion. During the opening night, I was so glad to have them as they were quickly gone. My only regret was not making more. People loved the handmade quali-ty and easily identified my art by the little watercolor form.

Since then I have designed and or-dered professionally printed cards and never go anywhere without them. On the front, they have an image of one of my paintings and my name. The back has my website, Facebook page, Insta-gram, phone number, and email address. Business cards not only help you look more professional, but also help people remember your name and where to find your work. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have business cards with you at all times—you never know who you might run into or who might be interested in your work. Be prepared and create your own opportunities.

This is just scratching the surface of the entrepreneurial side of the art world, and there is still so much to learn: studio spaces, submission materials, residen-cies and grants, showcasing your work, rejection, packing and shipping, consign-ments, loans and commissions, taxes, and gallery representation. I am confident, however, that with a terrific website, business cards, an inventory system in place, and professional high-quality pho-tographs of your work, you are certainly well on your way. If you are interested in learning more, I encourage you to look up Art/Work by Heather Darcy Bhandari and Jonathan Melber. This book is filled with useful guidelines and applicable knowl-edge on everything you need to know as you pursue your art career. I hope that this has given you some practical ideas to use however you see fit. Organizing the business side of your art is absolute-ly vital to a successful career, and I wish I had learned that in university. But that is part of the challenge and journey that comes with being an artist. So be brave, throw your cap up high and fly. You’ve got this—and don’t ever forget that.

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Look Up

To celebrate National Photography Month, Junto Magazine held a contest on Instagram. Followers were asked to upload and tag their original photos of animals, nature, and the out-doors. The top five were then selected for inclusion into this

issue. Thank you to everyone who participated!

Rachel Goehring

Penn State, University Park, Pennsylvania@rlg_photography


Nicole LongSalem, Virginia@coleamber

One Bright Day

Blue Ridge HazeWill Sanders Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia

@willysandals

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Sunrise StrollJennifer Wilkin

Gardiner, New York@volcano7

Where Flowers Bloom, So Does HopeCameron Highlands, Malaysia@dark_beauty1720

Kuhanraj


Dashboard Treasure

Jason Kerzinski

Photograph

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PhotographThemes: Life, Freedom, Our Town

Village Above

Martha C

larksonJunto Magazine, Volume 2 Issue 2

PhotographThemes: Rebirth, Freedom, Peace

Within Reach

Mar

tha

Cla

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Junto Magazine Talks With Writer and Director, Allison Burnett

Allison Burnett is a man of many tal-ents. He has written screenplays for sev-eral movies including Autumn in New York (2000), Gone (2012), and Feast of Love (2007). He also wrote and direct-ed Ask Me Anything, the film adaptation of his novel Undiscovered Gyrl and stars Britt Robertson, Justin Long, Martin Sheen, and Christian Slater.

I originally reached out the author and director Allison Burnett for my own needs. Ask Me Anything stuck with me in a way I didn’t expect when I put it on for background noise one night over Christ-mas break. I decided that I wanted to in-voke the same emotion with my playwrit-ing, so I thought “Why not just adapt it for the stage?”

I sent Allison an email about how much I enjoyed the coming-of-age sto-ry of Katie Kampenfelt, which she tells through a series of blog posts, and that with his blessing I would love to adapt it for the stage. To my surprise, he re-sponded within 30 minutes and seemed enthused by the idea. He also agreed to be interviewed for Junto Magazine.

Why did you choose to pursue writ-ing, specifically screenwriting, for a career? It’s not usually something that comes up on high school career apti-tude tests.

I wrote short stories as a kid. In high school and college, I wrote comedy

sketches for school variety shows. I grew more serious my senior year in college when I won Northwestern University’s annual playwriting competition. That same year I also began to write short sto-ries and submit them to magazines, where they did not have a prayer of getting pub-lished. After I had graduated from col-lege, I moved to New York City.

At this point in my life, I thought I was going to be an actor. But after get-ting the lead role in a George Bernard Shaw one-act, which was performed, most nights, for fewer than ten people, I threw in the towel. Not only was acting a dog’s life, but writing came much more easily to me. When I wrote, hours passed like minutes. At twenty-one years old, I committed myself to playwriting.

Ten years later, I was still living in Manhattan. I had written several plays, short stories, and novels, but had received almost no validation for my work. Wea-ry of struggling in anonymous poverty, I moved to Los Angeles to write screen-plays, which I knew had to be far easier than writing plays or novels.

Within a year, I was making a living as a screenwriter. A few years later, I sold my first big script. It was only after I had been validated in this way, that I had the peace of mind and financial security to go back to writing fiction. I looked over everything I had written in my twenties, which I had dismissed as the mere fruits

Samantha Oty

of my apprenticeship, and rewrote it. Virtually all of the prose ended up being published. Since then I have published four more novels. All the while, screen-writing was the financial engine that has allowed me to take time off to do this.

What was the most difficult part of finding work and getting published when you were starting out?

Finding an agent. In both Hollywood and world of publishing, an agent is re-quired to get work, but how do you at-tract an agent when you have never worked? This Catch-22 plagues almost every young writer striving to break in. My path was circuitous. I went to a Hollywood party where I met an enter-tainment attorney. He read my work and signed me; then he shared my work with a young agent who signed me. That agent then became a manager and helped me find a new agent. With this team in place, I was ready to make my first big sale, which came not long after. I am still with my attorney all these years later. The les-son to be drawn from example is simple: When you are starting out, never say no

to a party.

Having written screenplays on your own like Autumn in New York (2000) and worked on movies that ended up with seven credited screenwriters like Underworld: Awakening, which would you say is more difficult or frustrating?

Being the first and last writers are the best positions to be in. The first writer is the creator. This is ideal because the vision is yours, and if the script is good and you are not rewritten too drastically, you will end up getting sole screen cred-it. Subsequent writers get screen credit only if they create over 50% of the story, which is a tough threshold to reach. Being the last writer means you were brought in at the end of the development process to help get the movie across the finish line. It’s fun because the end is in sight. Very often you even know who will be playing the roles.

The worst positions are everything in between. Because when multiple writers are called in, it usually means the film is in trouble. It often means that too many

people have a say in the process. It’s hard to please multiple sen-sibilities and do your best work.

Do you prefer writing screenplays, novels, or plays more? When you have a new idea for a story how do you determine the right format for it? For example, Undiscov-ered Gyrl was a novel that you adapted into a film pretty fast, was that always the plan?

Writing fiction is the great-est joy for me because it a pure Writer and Director, Allison Burnett

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authorial experience. No compromise or collaboration adulterates the process.

Undiscovered Gyrl was just going to be a novel. When it came out, I was really proud of it and felt no need to adapt it into a screenplay. After a few years, during which another writer had tried and failed to adapt it to the screen, I was ready to give it a shot. But I knew I was not go-ing to give my adaption to someone else to direct. I would have to direct it my-self. The closest joy to writing a novel is directing my own screenplay. I listen to other voices and opinions, but there is no one telling me what to do.

What advice do you have for writ-ers who are planning to write an adap-tation of a pre-existing work?

Your only commitment is to the film audience, to making sure that they are en-lightened, entertained, and never bored. With this as your aim, preserve as much of the original work as possible, but not a line more. You have no greater obligation to the original writer and the people who loved the book than that.

So, having written a screen adapta-tion of your own work (Ask Me Any-thing) and an adaptation of someone else’s novel (Feast of Love), which would you say is more difficult? Does the original author reaction or pre-ex-isting fan base make it more intimidat-ing?

I have a freakish ability to slash and burn my own novels as easily as I do the works of others. In both cases, I remain objective and try to preserve as much of the original work as I can.

Lastly, I like to ask all my inter-viewees what advice they have for the next generation of great writers and artists, whether it’s dealing with rejec-tion, bad reviews, or lack of response to their published work?

If you are meant to be a writer, you will write no matter what. Even if you never earn a cent, even if the whole time you are working nine to five at something else, even if everyone you know tells you that your work is bad. You will not re-quire validation or encouragement. You will write not for money or praise, but because you must.

You will write because it is an imper-ative of your psyche, your brain chemis-try, your imagination, and you will nev-er give up. If you do eventually quit, it means you never were a writer in the first place. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have writing talent. You might even have more talent than someone who never gave up.

Talent isn’t the issue. The world is crawling with people who have writing talent, but who work quite happily as lawyers, cops, and food servers. It’s all about what you do with that talent. Only a born writer feels compelled to weather the self-doubt, the loneliness, and rejec-tion of the writer’s life to put in the long hours to see his or her talent fulfilled.

You can find Allison Burnett on Twit-ter @allison_burnett and follow his latest creative endeavors on his website Alli-sonburnette.com. His books can be pur-chased on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and his film Ask Me Anything is available through streaming on Netflix. He is cur-rently in the process of getting the sequel to Ask Me Anything funded.

Election SeasonFlash Fiction

Themes: Politics, Freedom

called the election less than an hour be-fore. “A third-party candidate with a rag-tag campaign has won the presidency; truly an unprecedented night,” one of the talking heads had declared.

It wasn’t all that unprecedented though, and he’d begun to launch into an explanation of the impact of third party candidates throughout American history before Ellen had interrupted him: “If you wanted to be a professor, you shouldn’t have run for president and you damn sure shouldn’t have won.” The staffers had left after that. All except for the press secre-tary, who’d explained they’d start draft-ing a speech before slipping out. Not that she was really a press secretary. She’d pretty much run the campaign but hadn’t received such an illustrious title until, thinking she was logged into her person-al account, she had tweeted an Onion ar-

ticle from the candi-date. It wound up as their most retweeted. Right up until they had to respond to the frontrunner’s cre-atively horrific scan-dal two days before Election Day.

He chuckled now, feeling good and drunk; the shock helped with that.

“What is it now?” Ellen asked. She’d been his rock throughout the campaign, throughout their entire marriage, really. She was as pretty as a diamond, he’d al-

Ann Schlotzhauer

“It was going to give you the press you needed to keep your seat. It was going to be a big career boost for you, and I’d write a bestselling memoir, and that was going

to be the end of it.”

A 48-year-old man, prematurely gray, sat on the edge of the bed in a nice hotel room as dawn broke. He stared with un-blinking, unseeing eyes at the wall before him as his wife paced.

He started at the noise of her cell phone hitting the wall and raised his eyes to meet hers.

“You remember when this started? Remember why?” She wasn’t yelling, but it was more unsettling this way.

He cleared his throat though he knew it to be a rhetorical question.

“It was going to give you the press you needed to keep your seat. It was go-ing to be a big career boost for you, and I’d write a bestselling memoir, and that was going to be the end of it.”

His eyes started to sink again. “Remember? And now what the fuck

am I supposed to do? Be the least will-ing First Lady of all time?”

He looked down, pulling a flask out of his wrinkled suit jacket, “I think that was Ladybird. She never seemed like she was having a good time.”

“Don’t get fuck-ing cute with me,” she said, advancing quickly and grabbing the flask from his lips. “And quit drinking; you’re the Pres-ident Elect for fuck’s sake.”

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ways thought, but twice as hard. He’d al-ways known she was the real politician, even though she couldn’t be bothered climbing down into the swamp of it all personally. He was too idealistic to have ever won without her.

“No, it’s just,” he chuckled again, throaty and deep, “did you hear Angie? We’ll start drafting a speech, she said. We didn’t even have an acceptance speech prepared.”

Ellen cracked and smiled for a mo-ment before self-correcting. “Fuck,” she sighed, “we’ve really done it this time, huh?”

“Not sure all the credit belongs with us to be honest.”

“Oh god no,” she laughed, and his back muscles relaxed, “If the Republi-cans hadn’t nominated the least likable

candidate since Nixon and Democrats could just learn to keep it in their pants for once, the third party candidate’s name would be forgotten by November 12th.”

“As it should be,” he said. A peace of-fering.

“As it should be,” she smiled and bur-ied her face in her hands for a moment. When she looked back up, it was the real Ellen again. The fear was gone. She opened the door to the hall and asked the secret serviceman for two coffees.

“They’re both for you; get your head right,” she said as she walked back across the room.

He fell back on the bed as he heard her turn on the shower.

“Sober up, Mr. President,” he thought.

Ann

Schl

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The StorytellerShort Story

Themes: Catharsis, Secrets, Unforseen Consequences

Colleen’s pride drove her to scour the snares of the city, leading her face to face with Viktor Reznikov. Viktor’s raised hand delivered two shots of vodka. “Na zdorovie.” With her eyes still watering from the first shot, the bartender brought two more. Colleen hated vodka, all clear liquor really, but she accepted the shots because didn’t want to seem bitchy—al-though she was bitchy—and, if things progressed with Viktor, she would no doubt present her default personality as a power move. But, it wasn’t time yet for her natural proclivities, so she flashed her veneers and swallowed the poison, and began to role-play.

“You terrible drinker. You drink like little baby. You need practice. Again.” Another flash of the hand brought two more shots. He handed her one and raised the other. “To drinking better.” Down the hatch they went.

With details already beginning to spin, she focused on a mural of a man steering a gondola. She’d never been to Venice—not even to the Venetian in Las Vegas for that matter—and aside from the usual American tourists traps like dirty Flo-ridian beaches and national monuments, she’d never really been anywhere as an adult. She wondered when her first stamp would appear on her passport (Canada didn’t count). She blamed her husband for this. After the youthful and curious—yet disappointing—want for sex dissipat-ed, she quickly discovered that her choice in a life-mate was unadventurous and cheap, his actions sewn to a stale predict-ability. She tried to find the good in this,

hoping his parsimonious nature would save enough money to send their son to college. To pass time, she found herself engrossed in work—a corporate lawyer job that truly didn’t interest her—but, she was so well liked by her company, she kept receiving promotion after pro-motion, compiling those vacation days, until she became a Vice President, giving her a salary and quarterly bonuses that made her feel above the law. But being Vice President didn’t give her the thrill of being an outlaw. All the new job offered her—aside from removing her from the social world at Nationwide, where she could manipulate the gossip and the sim-ple minds—was plenty of time to Google unforgettable vacation destinations while wondering how she fell in love with her husband in the first place. Then, she re-membered. He loved to listen to her talk, to remark on the day, people passing, movies, politics, anything. His ear was all she needed. But now, she’d get home late, have a quiet dinner next to him on the couch while streaming Netflix. Witty commentary had been traded for binge watching fictional lives in silence. Once, while watching Breaking Bad, she rubbed her jaw, afraid it would one day require surgery with all the yawning she endured. But mostly she was sad because she couldn’t tell her now estranged hus-band, or anyone for that matter, her fa-vorite story.

Dean Martin crooned through the speakers above the bar. A droplet of red sauce had stained Viktor’s left lapel. A short, stocky man in a leather jacket

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passed by Viktor and whispered some-thing in his ear. Viktor considered the news, then pushed out his lower lip and spoke Russian. The stocky man nodded, then left. Upon his departure, bells on the door rang, and the silver garland swayed in the late December breeze. The rush of cool air felt good on her bare legs, perk-ing her up. “I’m Colleen,” she finally told him, her hand resting on his thigh, won-dering why she used her real name.

“So, the mystery woman now has name.” He extended his big, callous hand. “Viktor.”

“I know who you are.”Colleen winked but didn’t shake his

hand, as she chose to suck on cube from her water. Viktor’s eyes widened as he grinned.

“So Colleen does not fear danger.” His accent made small talk entertain-

ing, but it was his cocksure answers mea-sured with a menacing tone that began to excite Colleen—this was something she didn’t anticipate. She kept looking at the big strong hands she’d refused to shake. So, she’d furl her brow to make those big mitts reassure her. After the fifth time she tried this, he laughed and wagged his index fin-ger before cupping her face. He rubbed his thumb against the dimple in her chin. “I will create games. Not you.”

Frank Sinatra’s “Silver Bells” played. She hummed along to it and asked for a coffee. She turned her attention to the beginning of the How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Viktor pointed at the bar tele-vision. “I love this show.” He clapped. “Little green guy so full of fury. Makes

me smile.” The coffee came, but Vik-tor took it and moved it in front of him. “First, tell me why you’re here. Beautiful and alone. Very suspicious.”

Viktor was right to be suspicious. This wasn’t a chance meeting. She’d asked a few of her criminal lawyer friends about this restaurant, and Viktor in particular. You see, Colleen had a secret she could no longer keep, which pained her, as she had an affinity for storytelling. Throughout her life, people would instinctively seek her out, waiting for her to start up a conver-sation about something…anything. Her elocution had a seductive verve to it—a vitality—making her forever estranged to the sting of loneliness at parties. Be-fore a big social event, she’d practice her stories in a mirror, to take in the whole experience, to try to actually put herself in the listener’s shoes, of whom she’d always been jealous. She’d admire her reflection as she paused at dramatic mo-

ments, pushing the tension to the prec-ipice, knowing that saying, “rankled” over “irked” would better flesh out a character, and being cognizant that say-ing, “fingered” over “touched” would spike the comedy. Yes, Colleen Keller-man was an amazing storyteller, and this

was why she sought out Viktor Reznikov. “Heard this place had the best coffee

in town,” she said, stealing back the cup. He laughed, said something in Russian and then crossed the room to speak to a man in a black suit seeking his attention. Colleen sipped the coffee long enough to feel sober as she watched as the Grinch become mystified with the Whos joining

Josh Penzonehands and singing on Christmas morn-ing. Viktor returned and took the coffee from her.

“Let’s try again. Why is this beautiful, mysterious woman in my bar on such a cold and family oriented evening?”

“Your bar? Isn’t it called Tony’s?” she said, knowing the entire backstory.

“Tony? Tony’s back in Youngstown. This is my bar now.” Waves his hand. “I kept its Italian tradition to entertain me. To remind me of my prize.” He pushed her dress up and spread her legs, so he could lean between them. He smelled like her dad’s friend, the one that hugged her too much at her fifteenth birthday party. “So, how did you find out about my prize? Hmm?”

“Yelp,” she said, thinking of the terror of the one reviewer, stating how he was scared for his life after he had knocked over the drink of a man who made no qualms about revealing his holstered gun under his custom made suit coat.

“I am not familiar with this, Yelp. Like something for dying dogs, or whiny children? My accountant must have do-nated to this failing organization for tax purposes. But if this silly fiscal pursuit brought you to me, then maybe I won’t kill him.” She waited for him to laugh, to present this threat as a joke, but the laugh never came. His understood propensity towards violence prompted her to pat his hand. She ordered two more “Drwinks.” Her attempt at his accent made him ad-vertise his crooked teeth. He wrapped his arm around her waist. Pulled tight. She didn’t mind. She knew where this had to go.

As he drove them to his place, Col-leen predicted the evening’s sex forecast. This was something she had done over the years, both with her husband and with others, to at least make sex tolerable, as the event itself never did much for her;

however, she did appreciate the nuanc-es of its theatrics. She’d learned that ev-ery guy had a go to move, something he must’ve done once in his past to a spe-cific girl to make her scream with sexual abandon, so, therefore, he assumed every girl after liked that targeted kink. As Vik-tor rubbed her knee and sang off-key to Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” she wanted him to know that she didn’t need her nipples twisted, her toes sucked, her asshole fingered, her clit flicked, and she definitely didn’t need to taste herself as if she existed in sample cup atop a tray in the mall outside Teavana. She thought of her husband and his insistence on spank-ing her and felt a rigid pang lodge in her throat. Yes! Men’s alacrity for sexual in-eptitude had cooled her to the idea of sex in general, but she had gone on with its mechanical process, as fucking seemed to be an indelible inconvenience of life, part of a ritual in the emotional game of give and take that adults danced to while they figured out what they really wanted from one another.

She barely had time to appreciate the white lights snaked through the oak spi-ral staircase in the foyer before Viktor’s hands were on her. He didn’t give orders, but she knew what he wanted, for her conjecture was absolute. She spun around and grabbed the polished oaken banis-ter, waiting for her dress to slide up her back—which it did. There was a mere second between the jingle of his belt and his entrance. As predicted, his thrusts had only one pace: aggression. Even his palm against her cheek to make her completely submissive had been foreseen in her fore-cast, along with him sputtering fragment-ed nonsense in his native tongue.

And then it began. In being correct with her ability to tell

the story to herself before it happened, she welcomed the impulse of her own de-

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You see, Colleen had a secret she could no longer keep, as she had an affinity for storytelling. All her life, people would seek her out, waiting for her to start up a conversation about some-

thing...anything.

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sires. Her clairvoyance transcended her to a place she had yet to know, alive with the fury and joy that culminates in the crippling sexual appetite that makes men act stupid and help women finally feel free. She gripped the wood and closed her eyes, wanting to burst with a violent, profane sermon that could only be deliv-ered at the altar of sin. Indeed, she had swooned. She opened her mouth and sucked on his thumb and pushed her hips back with matching aggression, sensing a release, an isolated moment of cre-scendoed ecstasy, that would happily—if only for a few seconds of perverted delir-ium—make her commit to a remote love, as she was so close to experiencing the flush of convulsion she’d only felt with the one person she’d ever hated.

But she never got there. Just like the Grinch’s understanding

of Christmas, Viktor came. Somehow or other he came, just the same. As he pushed himself away, he offered a sen-timent of physical gratuity and spanked her, and then moved to the mahogany bar in the next room.

As she lowered her dress, the clink-ing of ice called her attention. He sat on the sofa, crossed his legs, and held out a drink. She took a sip, trying to ignore the unfinished puzzled urgency of her body, wondering if she could get back the mo-ment, like one trying to realign with a dream after waking up too soon.

“So, you said you wanted to tell me something. Now that I can concentrate on words, we can talk.” He patted the sofa, and she sat down next to him. Building courage, she sipped her drink and listened to him as he explicated the details of the furnishings and the artwork in his room.

“Do you own a gun?” she asked. “I own many guns. You need gun?”

He walked to the bar and brandished a

pistol as he walked back to her. It was sil-ver and cold. He laughed when her hand dropped with its weight.

“Do you ever shoot your guns?” “Why would I own guns if I did not

shoot guns? Guns make business go more smoothly. Less…how do you say...nego-tiation.”

At the thought of him killing someone, she dropped her shoulders and leaned in close enough so that he could feel her breath on the back of his neck.

“Can I trust you?” she said. “Trust. Yes. Trust is good.”She thought of her neighbor, the one

she couldn’t stop fucking, the one that was cheating on her with some teenager across the street, the one that she blud-geoned to death with a real estate trophy that sat atop his fireplace mantle. Forget her illustrious career. Forget duping her husband with stories as to where she’d been when she came home late smelling of booze and sweat and musk and stale motel rooms. Forget mending bridges and rebuilding her relationship with her son. Raising that real estate award was her moment—the one where she’d truly felt a purpose in this world. The palpitating aftershocks of her murderous spontaneity grew so compulsive she had to relive it.

“I killed my lover. Murdered him.” Viktor clapped. “I like this story. Please. Contin-

ue.” Once again her body quivered with

urgency. She looked at her reflection in the French doors. She knew all the cues. She took a final sip of courage, handed her drink to Viktor and placed her heels on the edge of the Oriental rug, as if it was a marked silver star on a stage. Us-ing the gun as a microphone, she parted her lips and began.

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Casket on a FulcrumShort Story

Themes: Death, Faith

Black suits and black dresses, black veils and dried streams of black mascara. The women give hugs, muffling sobs in one another’s shoulders. Men trade firm handshakes, moving into half-embraces. Hands on arms, kind words. The uncer-tain children look up at their relatives, mirror their stern faces. They are beneath a colonnade, columns that rise forceful-ly, tilted in the upper distance. There is a doublewide Victorian doorway framing a darkness into the house. People exit onto the colonnade, fading in through the dark doorway before stepping onto the stone.

Family and friends give last consola-tions, farewells; the men say final witty remembrances to make the women smile as they finger-clean mascara. The wake has just ended.

The big square house is red brick with white Venetian windows. There is a foun-tain out front in the center of the drive-way. The top of the house is bordered with ornate depictions; cherubs with swords battle a serpent, angels delivering the deceased to a paradise of matter.

Around back is a wide white porch, butlers clearing white-clothed tables. A man in a black suit stands at the edge of the porch steps, watches a red pick-up pull away across the grass. The man takes a deep breath, shakes himself out, and runs back into the house.

The beat-up red Toyota drags its muf-fler over the curb, bouncing down onto the driveway. Mark gets out of the truck faster than he gets the truck in park. He looks sleepless but unable to sleep, fre-netic but decidedly calm. His black suit

is wrinkled, his face unshaven. He hur-ries up to the front steps—relatives, in-laws look down the steps at him—Mark slows down, returns polite, commiserat-ing nods.

There is a tall, lanky boy under the col-onnade, being spoken to by uncles. The boy’s suit is tight, short over his wrists and ankles. An uncle is telling the boy, Jimmy, about by-gone baseball greats, and the man’s voice trails off.

Jimmy is spun around by a hand on his bicep. It’s his father: “Hey, come on we’re leaving,” says Mark.

“You guys coming to dinner?” asks Mark’s brother-in-law. Mark’s hand stays on Jimmy’s shoulder, leading him from behind down the steps.

“Come on, hurry,” says Mark, break-ing away to walk faster, getting his keys ready.

The driver-side door slams a compres-sion of air into the cab. The engine rattles its ignition. Mark checks his side-view, puts the truck in reverse, foot holding the brake. Jimmy opens his door but is only standing there, half-turned to the house.

“What are you doing? Come on let’s go!” says Mark.

“But I left my—” “Get in the truck!” Jimmy gets in and shuts the door,

takes too long to sit down—the tires spin and shoot the truck in reverse, and Jim-my’s inertia goes into the dashboard. The muffler clanks as the truck jerks to a stop at the hard end of a K-turn, Jimmy rush-ing to get on a seatbelt that keeps locking, and Mark gets the stick-shifter stuck just

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as a man in a black suit comes sprawling out of the front door. The man stands up straight, rushes his words out—the stick shifter moves to Drive. Everyone on the colonnade stops mid-syllable. A silent volley of glances moves around them. The man says something and shoves his finger out, directing a coordinated swiv-el of heads looking down the dogwood lined driveway, a beat-up red pick-up speeding away.

An old mother shrieks, faints. Men snap out of incredulity, red-faced, sprint-ing down the steps.

Mark’s elbows are locked pushing him back in his seat, and leg stretched all the way down the gas, shooting the pick-up down the driveway. In the side-view mirror, Objects Are Closer Than They Appear underlines the five men whose sprint down the driveway is trailing off.

Mark does not use the brake, one palm spinning the wheel and pulling out onto County Route 9. Jimmy has both hands fisted on the seatbelt. He’d heard shout-ing, tried looking out the back window, but the tint was too dark.

The truck blisters down the road, tail-pipe bouncing. There is a cap on the bed of the truck, sun-faded navy-blue, gray duct-tape covering the windows.

“Dad? What just happened?” Jimmy has big, wet eyes, distorted and enlarged by the magnification of quarter-inch glasses.

“Not now.” Mark is leaning into a GPS on the dashboard, entering destina-tion. He glances up and jerks the pick-up back to the legally-preferred lane. “I’ll tell you later.”

Jimmy’s sense of loss was vague and disconnected during the wake. He’s look-ing out the window pretending he is a video-game character, running 100 mph along the road-side, jumping over trees

and other hurdles. He hasn’t done this in a long time. Maybe this makes the emp-ty sadness retreat awhile again. She died in a tent sauna on a retreat for something somewhere in Nevada. He’s still unsure what sort of retreats his mother went to.

Dust curls in two trails on the road be-hind the pick-up.

Summertime dusk in Georgia hills is grapefruit air: hot red. The sun is a pas-sionate eye with pink cloud lashes, fall-ing asleep down over a hill in the distance along the road. Jimmy watches the shad-ows grow, darken, coalesce and devour. He pretends they reach and seep into his skin, blending into the kindred sensation inside him, deeply.

The pick-up’s headlights are cockeyed and faint, shearing away forward into the dark. The grill rattles. Through the windshield Mark is uncomfortable in the dashboard light. He looks like he needs to fidget but does not move, only guides the truck. Jimmy rests against the door. The cab has a single bench, is spacious in a bare-minimum sense. The back win-dow is an empty darkness into the capped bed, a void inhaling mind-over-matter.

The dashboard’s green digital clock is the only light in the truck. The clock is stuck on 66:99, numbers built by little green logs with tapered edges. The dots between the numbers are solid, but on magnified look have dots in their centers, smaller dots further within: ring around a smaller ring, around another ring, around a solid black hole: Jimmy’s pupils dilate inside his big wet eyes, magnified by glasses. He blinks, and the digital green disappears.

The truck’s red taillights drive off into the distance, disappear around a bend. Another pair of bright headlights appears and shoots by, a license plate with gov-ernment listed on the bottom, flanked by

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two bright taillights that dart 100mph disappearing also around the bend.

Mark is shaking his son’s shoulder. “Hey. Wake up.” The pick-up hits a pot-hole and Mark’s hand on Jimmy’s shoul-der shoves Jimmy hard against the door. Jimmy makes surprised-to-be-awake sounds; he sucks up a dribble of drool.

“Hey, sleep well?” says Mark. He has tumbleweed in his gut making his palms sweat nervously. Jimmy doesn’t answer.

“Listen,” goes on Mark. “You re-member what I al-ways used to say about your mom’s dad?”

Jimmy keeps his magnified eyes out the windshield. “That he’s a psychopath?” The question is flat.

Yes, but more like why’s he a psy-chopath is what I’m getting at.” Jimmy looks over.

“He’s a pastor. Your mom’s family owns a church. He has a TV show.” Mark says the list in clips, looking over to see if Jimmy understands the point before con-tinuing onto the next. “They’re all very rich. He was also a state senator.” Jimmy is looking lost at his dad. “Do you know what I’m trying to say?”

Jimmy is only twelve but excels at school. Awkward lankiness and wet, magnified eyes caused him at an early age to have few friends to keep him from schoolwork. He has skipped two grades but can only look blankly at his dad.

“Your mom’s family are all very reli-gious, in a way that’s like—” Mark’s body tightens upright, face frozen and exter-nally alert, hands cautiously moved to 10 and 2. There was just a Whoop. Whoop

Whoop: whimsical, in a deadening way. There are no other cars on the road, un-derscoring the obvious target of the red and blue lights in the left side-view. Mark cannot keep from sourly sweating. Jim-my is turning around to look through the back window, forgetting it is tinted, and forgetting the cap’s windows are duct-taped, anyway.

“Pull Over,” comes the megaphoned command. Mark gets the truck to a graveled stop on the road-side.

“Dad, why’d he pull us over? We were speeding?” Mark doesn’t an-swer, his face motionless in the

dashboard’s pallid green light. Has he been pulled over for speeding?

Or did the family already put out an APB? (He figured they would, is why he’s driving them nightlong west for Al-abama.) In the rear-view the cop cruiser has its front-end sticking into the high-way. The state trooper gets out, taking his hat down lower. He approaches the pick-up from the driver-side, left hand atop a hip holster.

Mark jerks out of his gaze. He didn’t realize he’d turned off the engine—the ignition stutters but the engine rattles awake, and the cop is shouting with his pistol drawn, in the side view mirror squat-legged with the pistol two-hand-ed out in front. The pick-up’s tires shoot gravel before launching out onto the pavement, bullets dinking into the back of the truck.

Jimmy is not moving, mouth wide, fists tight on the seatbelt. Mark does not know this county. The pick-up is not go-ing to outrun a police cruiser on the high-

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She died in a tent sauna on a retreat for something somewhere in Nevada. He’s still unsure what sort of retreats his mother went to.

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way. Mark brakes hard, tires locking and

the front wheels spinning left, gunning the pick-up onto a small wooded road. Sirens are somewhere behind them. The road’s pavement ends into rocky dirt, the pick-up shearing off low-hanging branch-es. The red and blues fill the trees behind them. The trail comes out to a field and a hill, a god damned driveway to a house. The pick-up doesn’t slow down, Jimmy reaching for something to hold onto to keep from bouncing out of his seat. His seatbelt is broken and not locking. The house on the hillside is a shadow. Farm-ing equipment are skeletal monsters. The pick-up speeds across the field, darts past a barn. The red and blues are faint on the hillside ahead of them, the cruiser behind somewhere. Mark gets the pick-up near ninety, catches air over the hill’s crest and the impact is hard without working shocks, and Mark pulls the emergency brake, cutting the pick-up hard to the left. The police cruiser has yet to break the hill. In the shitty headlights is another small trail up ahead through woods. Mark gets the pick-up up to speed, kills the headlights, gunning for the trail faint in the moonlight, the opening in the woods illuminated by flashing red and blues ap-proaching.

The small road comes out of the woods to a county road. Mark turns the headlights on and straightens his leg on the gas, fully upright and deeply alert.

The pick-up shoots down the two-lane, the road a chasm between fields of corn. Behind them down the road, the entrance to the dirt trail is framed by an archway of trees. The arboreal tunnel is deep and dark, and the tree boughs are filled with flashing reds and blues. Up the road, the pick-up’s tail-lights are in a dis-tant focal-point.

Mark’s heart is pounding up a con-fidence he is trying to suppress. In the rear-view, he doesn’t yet see any lights, and he’s going to take the next road and disappear for good.

The pick-up’s rear-tires slide to the right. Mark jolts up in his seat hauling the steering wheel to the left—an over-reac-tion. The pick-up loses grip and spins out of control, Mark and Jimmy’s arms and bodies flailing and tossing.

They’re still being jostled by their in-ertia; the truck has stopped spinning. The engine is hissing but still running, a pal-isade of corn up against the bumper, fill-ing the windshield view with stalks blue in the moonlight. Through Jimmy’s win-dow the police cruiser’s headlights are quickly growing large. Mark stomps on the gas and the corn splits open to receive them, swallowing them amoeba-like and reclosing behind them, just in time for the police-cruiser lights red and blue on the walls of corn flying past down the road.

There is a yellow flashlight circle on a faded white and blue map. The yellow circle traces a red line following Route 20 through Georgia and Alabama and into Mississippi, where the night gets darker as the population gets sparser. There are no other vehicles on the highway, and in the pick-up’s cockeyed headlights a blue highway Lodging sign looms up on the roadside. The sign lists only a single Mo-tel before blowing past Jimmy’s window.

The MOTEL sign juts up crooked over the dark road, red letters flickering on the rustholed white. Behind the sign the motel forms a right-angled U-shape with parking pavement in the center. Only half the building is lit: the right third has working lights over the motel room doors, the middle third has lights flickering with decreasing frequencies, and the left third with no lights at all.

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The motel is painted off-white like an old public bathroom.

The pick-up is parked in the dark half of the parking lot. Mark’s shaking a can of spray paint, holding it with a rag to keep his fingers clean. There are several empty cans lying on the ground. The cap on the back of the pick-up is half green.

“I can’t really see what we’re doing,” says Jimmy, holding a spray can and not using it.

“Why didn’t we park on the other side?”

Mark is spraying over the cap’s win-dows. “I didn’t want anyone to see us.”

This isn’t what Jimmy meant, but he doesn’t want to talk more. They finish the cap green without speaking, remove the bumper stickers, and Mark shows Jimmy how to replace license plates. Jimmy does not ask why they’re switching plates with another car. Jimmy only enjoys taking his mind off the wake.

The motel room carpeting is dark yel-low. Mark tells Jimmy to keep his shoes on. There are two mattresses with broken springs, no pictures, and cigarette-stained walls.

“Listen, Jimmy,” says Mark. His son’s sitting up in bed under the sheet, comforter down on the floor. Mark sits on the side of the other bed. “What we were talking about earlier tonight.”

Jimmy’s inner-self tightens, his eyes looking down at the bed. He stays just open enough to listen. Mark continues.

“I want you to know some more about mom. When she was growing up, and even when we met in college, her family was always pushing her to join their church. Like every chance they got, trying to get your mom to move back to Georgia and go to their church with them. But your mom thought differently than them. She didn’t want to be religious. She didn’t be-

lieve religious beliefs, but she had beliefs though. But her beliefs are a bit more dif-ficult to explain, so we’ll maybe go over that another time.”

“But, so her family—you know they’re all very religious, right?” Jimmy does. “Right. Because her father’s still a pastor, just like her grandfather was. The whole family going back generations has kind of run this same big church. But, so with her family always trying to get her to be as religious in the way they were, and with your mom not wanting to be, it caused a lot of tension in the family. That’s why your mom went to college in Ohio. And so, up to just yesterday, we haven’t even spoken to your mom’s side of the family in ten years, because when they finally gave up trying to convert your mother, they just kind of cut her off from their side of the family.”

Jimmy is looking at his leg shapes un-der the bedsheet. “You don’t have to talk like I’m just a kid.” Jimmy says this qui-etly. “I can handle it.”

“I know, pal.” “Why didn’t we stay for the funeral?” “It’s a long story.” Mark looks over

at the bedside-table clock, says resigned-ly, “Come on, it’s late. Let’s sleep a few hours and we’ll get on the road early. We can talk more then.”

Jimmy is in fetal position with his head on the pillow, eyes wide-awake in the dark and feeling his head heavily sink through the pillow, through the mattress, and under the bed. It is dark as a void down there but empty only in a material sense; his head is an undefined scatter of emotions waning in and out. Jimmy sits up against the headboard. No light comes through the black-out curtains. But even without light Jimmy can see gray-scale contours of his dad’s shape under the bedsheet, the furniture in the room,

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the pick-up’s keys on the bedside table. Jimmy has done research and found that some people can perceive electromag-netic wavelengths others cannot. Jimmy noiselessly fingers up the keys and toe-creeps outside.

The pick-up is still parked in the dark on the far side of the parking lot, and the pickup’s a shadow only slightly darker than the dark, but there’s another shadow beside it, struggling in an odd matter next to the back of the truck. Jimmy trots his bare feet quickly and quietly around the corner of the motel. He crouches behind the wall, his eyes in big glass jars peering out at the parking lot.

The man has a black dress shirt tucked into black dress pants, black dress shoes too perfect to reflect light. His face is aged with white stubble. He has a tool in his hand, hunched over trying to pry the lock to the bed of the pick-up. His breath is cursing.

Jimmy is trying to determine at what point he goes to get his dad. The tailgate locking mechanism clunks and the man puts down his pry bar, drops the tailgate, pulls up the window of the cap. The back of the truck is a mouth with its lips peeled wide, framing a maw Jimmy cannot see into. The man peers inside, almost crawl-ing in. Then he steps back, holds a cell-phone at arm’s length, and when the flash on the phone’s camera lights up it doesn’t illuminate anything: the back of the truck remains black. The man looks at the cell-phone screen, satisfied, and closes every-thing up, locks the truck. He walks back across the parking lot, pushing buttons on his phone.

Jimmy comes out from around the cor-ner, leading with his head to make sure the man has gone. The keys are heavy metal in Jimmy’s hand. Standing at the back of the pick-up he picks out the correct key,

and stands there, big eyes racing over the back of the truck to prepare himself. The key goes in, Jimmy giving it a hard push against the lock’s resistance. He turns the key, feels the locking mechanism slide. He pulls the tailgate down, pushes the window up, and stands back.

The sleek varnish of the casket still has flowers on top. Jimmy quickly closes everything back up and stands with his back against the truck as if to keep the bed from re-opening. The humidity is nebu-lized night, darkness soaking through his pores and pulling nothingness out from within.

Jimmy is eyes-wide the rest of the night, fetal position, bringing himself tightly together to try to fill the empti-ness. He faces the window; he has a dull, sad burning when he faces Mark.

The blackout shades over the window are beginning to glow gray. Morning is coming.

Mark stretches awake under the bed-sheet. He’s slept in his wake clothes. He gets his feet on the floor, buttons his pants.

“Hey, Jimmy.” No answer. “Jimmy.” Mark shakes Jimmy’s shoulder. Jimmy’s eyes are falsely shut, facing the window away from Mark. Mark tries again to wake him, gives up, finds the remote and a black-and-white about cowboy mis-sionaries converting natives.

Jimmy listens to the gunshots and shouting, a comfortable blanket over the silence. His need to cry has passed and only derision remains. He doesn’t let himself move. He figures the man he saw outside is a relative who’s followed them, trying to get his mother back. He doesn’t want that to happen. He wonders if the man will call the cops. The thought of his dad being arrested has a warming sad-ness, but he knows he doesn’t honestly

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want that. Yet, he doesn’t want to speak about what he saw.

On the second commercial break Jim-my gets up out of bed directly into the bathroom. Mark notices this, Jimmy hav-ing obviously been lying awake.

At the next commercial break the bath-room door slowly opens. Jimmy comes out of the bathroom and stands just far enough in the room to see the TV, turned with his back to Mark.

“Should we get breakfast before we hit the road?” says Mark. No reply. “Come on, then.

We can drive a while till we’re starv-ing.”

Highway vibrations whip through the open windows. Mark drives with one hand at noon, his other elbow tasting out-side sunlight. Jimmy keeps his eyes out the window. Jimmy’s stomach is eating itself, but he doesn’t mention it, wants to keep his voice inside. His empty sadness has calcified into a throat lump he feels is almost small enough to swallow. But he knows he can’t stay like this forever. In his AP science class he learned about entropy, that systems always find a bal-ance—open a bottle of carbonated soda, and the carbonation releases, pressure equalizes; everything balances. He puts up his window with the calcified lump now at the top of his throat, at the back of his tongue; nervously:

“I looked in the back of the truck last night,” he says quietly to the window.

Mark glances twice at his son, the third time looking a while at Jimmy, for-getting the road, and quickly pulling the pick-up back into its lane.

“Oh,” says Mark. “I uh, was hoping to tell you before that happened. I wasn’t too sure how to put it. It’s a lot to take in.” Mark looks at Jimmy who is miles out the window. “What do you think?”

“Why’d you do it?” Jimmy’s eyes have moved to the dashboard.

Mark puts up his window. “Your mom’s family wants to bury her in their mausoleum. It’s a big grand thing in their church graveyard. Which is also gigan-tic. But your mom—last night when we were talking. Your mom didn’t want a fancy burial. She didn’t want to get pre-served with formaldehyde, and she want-ed an organic biodegradable pine coffin. But your mom’s family did all the wrong things anyway.”

“Did mom tell you all that?” “We’d talked about it before.” “Are we in trouble?” Mark puts the A/C on. “I’m not sure.” Traffic thickens on the eight-lane near

Dallas-Fort Worth, vehicles stagnant on an asphalt field of heat waves.

“Let’s go get breakfast,” says Mark. “What do you say. We can talk more on full stomachs.”

The main strip coming off the high-way is six lanes hedged in by car lots, big box stores, discount retailers: a bright-ly colored consumer circus baking in a mid-Texas desert sun. The pick-up’s A/C blows hot air and Mark and Jimmy put the windows back down. At a stoplight, there’s a diner past Jimmy’s elbow out the window. The diner is round and soft-edged, a half full parking lot and a large grandfather clock on the roof, its pendu-lum stuck at the top of its arc. The light turns green and the diner swings around, growing large through the windshield. Mark pulls around to the side of the din-er, parks beside a tractor-trailer, disap-pearing from street-view.

The inside of the Tick Tock Diner is an Americana of clockwork: Victorian grandfathers, early-20th century manual alarms, cubist square-faces, early-90’s colored clocks, sleek new millenniums.

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Jimmy and Mark wait by the Please Wait To Be Seated sign. Jimmy takes the time to look over pictures on the wall. He fig-ures the pictures are of famous people who’ve visited, because of the signatures, but he doesn’t recognize them. There’s a black-and-white picture of two men in ironed army uniforms and a grainy col-or photo of brightly dressed people with colorful hair.

“Hi, welcome to the Tick Tock Diner. Table for two?” Mark and Jimmy get a window booth.

The waitress is Southern-friendly with lots of questions. Mark responds with curt nods and quick smiles, picking up his menu. The waitress, hints taken, says she’ll be back with the waters.

Jimmy’s chin is on his forearm, push-ing up his chin’s skin to accentuate a deep frown. His big glass-jar eyes are level with a digital alarm clock on the ta-ble. The digital has been repurposed as a timer. Following the diner’s namesake gimmick, each table has a timer and if the food takes longer than 30 minutes, the meal is free. Jimmy extends a hand, sticks out a pointer, brings it down on the start button. Mark is shifting in his seat, eyes looking out over his menu.

Mark puts the menu down. “So, bud,” he starts, composing himself to lean on the table.

“It’s broken,” says Jimmy, meaning cause-and-effect; the timer has no cer-tainty: 00:00, 58:31, 09:84, etc. Jimmy looks up at Mark. “I still don’t get it.” Jimmy’s no longer angry, too emotional-ly drained to keep spite pressurized.

“Look, you don’t believe in Santa anymore, right?” Jimmy’s head shakes no, chin still on forearm. Mark gath-ers words. “Okay, well, Santa isn’t real, but people keep the lie about Santa alive because it makes certain people lots of

money. Santa’s only been around for a few decades.”

“I mean, there was a story about him before that, but the story wasn’t popu-larized until like the 1940s or something like that, which is when people realized they could use the lie to make themselves lots of money by getting people to buy lots of presents. Santa is a lie, and people use the lie to make lots of money—you get what I’m saying?” Jimmy does.

The waitress is standing at the table holding a pen and pad, feeling out of place about interrupting a kid’s Santa talk. She takes their orders.

Mark continues. “So, the reason I brought up Santa is to illustrate another point. Which is that Santa is a lot like most religions. Like mom’s family’s church. The reason your mom’s family is so wealthy is because they own what’s called a mega-church. They have thou-sands of people in their church, and your grandfather tells them all about Heaven and after-life stuff, and it makes him lots of money.”

“Is Heaven a lie, then?” Mark sighs, fidgets, recomposes.

“Look, when someone dies, you don’t go to a place. All that’s left after someone dies is the memories other people have of them. Your mother didn’t want to be buried in her family’s mausoleum be-cause she didn’t want to be remembered as someone who was religious and very close to her side of the family. She knew they used religion to make lots of money, and she didn’t want to be remembered as having anything to do with that.”

Jimmy’s eyes draw over his father’s face, and un-focus, searching the air be-tween them. The conversational diner din is distant but swells in over his dad’s voice, Jimmy somewhere else in his own head’s vacuum.

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Mark looks at his son for something else to say, Jimmy avoiding his dad’s eyes. Jimmy puts his chin back on his forearm, pulls the timer over in front of his face. The timer seems sporadic, num-bers changing at unequal intervals: 65:31 lingers for seconds.

The waitress is placing food on the table. Jimmy has his hands in his lap, a grilled cheese with tomato sliding in front of him. He looks down at it, cheese steam rising up onto his glasses. The smell is mold in his stomach, sandwich like card-board. He looks at it, though, for a long while. Then:

Mark puts down his fork and knife, sits back in his seat, watching Jimmy get up and leave.

The tractor-trailer the pick-up was parked beside has left the pick-up in a vacancy of Texan sun. Jimmy sits down against the pick-up’s rear-wheel, out of street-view. In front of him, across an un-used parking lot with overgrown cracks, is a sinking shuttered warehouse.

Jimmy rests his arms on his knees, face up, eyes wet and tense with anger, tears pooling on the bottom eyelids. His jaw trembles as he clenches his teeth, steeling himself down against the pull of nothingness. He refuses it. His fa-ther is full of shit, damn him. Taking his mom, giving her the same bullshit fate of never-after nothingness. And screw his mom’s family, too. Like black and white, here and there; the swing of a pendulum; eternity in a material paradise, eternity in a forever void. Jimmy spites his father no less than he spites his mother’s family.

“Hey, Jimmy,” comes down a deep slow voice. Jimmy’s mouth surprises open, looking up; this isn’t Mark. Jimmy quickly uses his wrists to wipe tears from his cheeks.

“How you holding up?” the man says.

The man’s face is stubbled white. He’s wearing a black dress shirt, black pants, and black shoes with bowling ball-shine. “You don’t remember me?” says the man, friendly. His wrists end at the sides of his pants, hands in pockets moving. “From the wake? We talked a bit, though I guess you met a lot of new people. I’m Uncle Herbert. Well, Great-Uncle Herbert. I’m your mother’s uncle — was — I watched your mother grow up.”

Jimmy can feel his mother behind him, through his back against the pick-up. He looks at the ground.

“I’m truly sorry for what you went through, bud. And me and your grand-father, my brother, we’re going to make sure your dad doesn’t get into trouble about this, here, but we need to bury your mother with her family. And we’re go-ing to make sure that happens. So what I need from you is help. I would like you to talk to your father, and explain to him why you both need to return your mother to Georgia. Can you do that for me?”

“What’s the point,” comes out Jim-my’s wet lips.

Uncle Herbert crouches down. “You want your mother to go to Heaven, don’t you? She wants to be with God, and her own mother. But she needs to be buried where she grew up, so she can have a proper burial. That’s how people get to Heaven.”

Jimmy’s eyes squeeze tears, face gri-maces.

“Do it for your mother, Jimmy.” The old man glances an angle past the back of the truck. Jimmy has his his eyes squeezed shut, but is aware the man is leaving. Jimmy waits a moment before picking himself off the ground. He wipes gravel off his palms, and turns around.

“Who was that?” says Mark. He has just walked over with breakfast in a plas-

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tic bag. “Uncle Herbert?” Jimmy’s got red

raccoon eyes, nose sniffling. Mark’s wide eyes deluge onto Jim-

my: “Where’d he go?” Mark steps past Jimmy before Jimmy can mutter “I don’t know.” The plastic bag tears, containers bursting food on the pavement, Mark hur-rying into the empty parking lot, glancing around, hurrying across the pavement.

“Where’d you go? Stop following us, you hear me!” he shouts, spinning a cir-cle. “You leave us alone!” Mark listens for an answer. He rushes back to the pick-up.

“Let’s go,” barks Mark, ducking into the truck and slamming the door. The ig-nition rattles as Jimmy gets in.

The bed of the pick-up thunks as Mark speeds it onto the road. Mark keeps his eyes on both side-view mirrors, changing lanes and flying up the highway on-ramp.

Jimmy tries to put the window down but it’s locked. Mark’s been a feverish hunchback on the wheel, eyes out both side-views speeding down the interstate, a half-hour now. Traffic on the highway gets sparse and Mark blows past a dozen more cars, none of which are keeping up. No vehicles have kept up; Mark slows down to the speed limit. The air in the cab is stagnant hot, pressurized down on Jimmy’s brain and sinuses, but he doesn’t mention the window—his father has re-signed his mother to nothingness for the rest of forever, burning sadly in Jimmy’s chest, spitefully at his father.

Mark glances over twice. “What did he say to you?” The words come in drift-ing across a slow vortex of sadness and of anger, the words eventually reaching Jimmy. Jimmy’s head moves slowly to look at his dad, slowly turns back to the window.

“He said to tell you we have to go

back to Georgia.” “What else did he say? What car was

he in?” “Nothing. I don’t know.” The road vibrates the stifled heat.

Mark has a dry sweat, an empty gut im-ploding. His eyes are quick with thoughts out the windshield. Jimmy is motionless, quiet, then:

“What’s going to happen, now?” Mark takes a long while before an-

swering. During the silence, Jimmy finds his

eyes absently unfocused on the digital clock, still at 66:99. He lets his eyes fo-cus, the two dots coming into full view. He imagines they are black holes, like in his college-level astronomy class, how equations for certainty and uncertain-ty are both needed to describe them, yet when these equations are combined the values invariably reach infinity.

Jimmy is slouched motionless against the door, appearing to be asleep.

“We’re going to be okay,” says Mark to the road. “If your mother’s family was going to get the police involved—they obviously know where we are. The police would’ve stopped us already. We’re go-ing to bury your mom in the Southwest. Utah, or maybe New Mexico, where the mountains are red pillars. That’s how we’ll remember her. And then they have nothing to arrest us with. There’s no ev-idence. So, we’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.”

The rest of the afternoon they stay on the highway, the sun moving higher, hotter, the highway empty, and climb-ing gently towards a horizon where the sun glare makes a lake that rises up the same color hazy-blue as the sky. Behind the steering wheel, a needle points to E; an outline of a gas pump turns yellow. A blue highway-side Fuel sign grows large and blows past the pick-up.

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At the bottom of the off-ramp, loose dust billows up around the pick-up com-ing to a stop. Mark leans over the steer-ing wheel, looking down both directions of the road. He turns right. There’s noth-ing but a few wood-bare houses in over-grown fields. A single rusted gas station down the road has a small store.

The pick-up’s brakes squeak a stop alongside the gas pump. Mark shuts off the engine and sits back. He looks over at Jimmy, says nothing, and gets out.

The pump has analog counters flip-ping numbers up in value. Mark tops off the tank, lingers at the back of the truck for a moment. He gets back in.

“You want something from inside?” says Mark. “We kind of never got to eat breakfast.” Jimmy shakes his head, arms crossed on his chest, deeply frowning. Mark gets back out.

Jimmy stays in the truck, motionless-ly watching his father walk into the store.

One of the gifts of a country upbring-ing is learning how to drive once you can

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reach the pedals. Jimmy slides over to the driver seat,

positions himself. His hands re-familiar-ize themselves with the steering wheel, the stick shifter. His foot tests the pedals. He turns the key. The engine starts and he pulls his foot back from the brake, gives it gentle gas and coasts the truck back onto the road, back up onto the highway.

The highway is empty and bright under the Texas desert sun. He doesn’t know where they’ll go, just definitely not Utah or the Southwest. Maybe to the ocean. Maybe not. The highway is empty and in the distance, before the pavement can reach a focal point, the gently rising road becomes puddled with sun haze, a lake forming beyond it. Jimmy drives on and the mirage does not stay relative, but is approachable; the sun-glare lake on the road is the same hazy-blue color as the sky, the two undefinable and one in the same, blending, everywhere, forever at the end of the road.

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Those Who Are Not YouEssayThemes: Rage, Politics

You think about heroes a lot, right? You believe you could become a hero, questing after an elusive idea of justice. Except, you don’t know any heroes like yourself. No female superheroes you know shave their heads in their bathroom and sweep the hair off the tiles, or dress in too large t-shirts bought in the men’s section.

“I can see your mind turning,” your mother says at the kitchen table over breakfast, her fingers circling her coffee mug. “Penny for your thoughts?”

“My thoughts are worth more than a penny.”

Your mother promises to account for inflation, but you only half hear her and lift a spoonful of oatmeal to your lips.

Your superpower would be intangibil-ity and you’d be called Phaser because nothing phases you, so why shouldn’t you be able to walk through walls and step through punches? You, my dear, are a comic book reader. It’s not wrong to see the world etched off in panels and page breaks. Romanticized, yes, but it’s not wrong to want to be a hero and desire the simplicity of old school black and white.

You stare into the stains of your tea cup and wonder, what moral ground would you be willing to die for? Phaser would be moral. Phaser would be clev-er. Too clever to believe that her thoughts and words could be easily translated into Turkish.

You’re in Istanbul, Turkey for a se-mester abroad. In Istanbul, no one asks about your thoughts. No one offers a price

even after you learn to count in Turkish lira and scoop the kuruş coins from your wallet. You’re five thousand miles away from your mother’s yoga-teacher voice and quiet mornings over oatmeal. Turks don’t understand you and you don’t un-derstand them. Life has gotten far lonelier than you ever imagined and your gift of intangibility turns you into a ghost. If you are Phaser and this is your story, you’re approaching your change or die moment of character development. You’re wait-ing for something, someone, to hit you.

Your moment arrives as you stand in the shadow of Cevahir, the biggest mall in Europe, nestled right in Istanbul. You’re sandwiched between the Gucci Glasses billboard behind you and the Starbucks across the street and the consumerism chokes you more than the exhaust from the traffic. Then you look straight ahead.

You’re staring into a protest. The white-gold gleam of the mall

fades and you observe the blocky comic book art of reality. You imagine an artist’s pen inking stark lines and bold strokes, and how many hours it must take to get the hazy black shading for the cloud-ed sky descending into night. The faces in the crowd languish deep in their own shadows. But these are real people. They aren’t stock civilians staged for artistic merit. There are no heroes with bodies taut and stretched to impossible angles or covered in spandex. They have real faces contorted in real anger and flushed with real February cold. The protestors swarm and pulse like roaches under the orange

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light of street lamps.You’re staring at them.Them. The protestors. Those who are

not you, standing up for something they believe in. You’re not sure what; your lack of Turkish is crippling. You could ask someone: “Ne yapıyorsunuz?” What are you doing? But maybe that means, What do you do? What is your pro-fession? Their answer would fly right through you.

You fear taking the twenty steps out-side of the flood lighting of the mall’s paved entryway. Twenty steps and you’d be a part of them. You’d merge into the mass of bodies dotting the street like mo-saic tiles as they shout in Turkish into the night sky. Their words disappear, not even retaining the ghost quality of hot breath into frigid air.

Something in Turkish! they yell. You want to yell with them. Vent your loneliness in a wordless cry.

A young boy climbs atop a potted plant and pumps his fist. He might be twelve, maybe older, but in the dark, under street lamps, you can’t tell. He pumps his fist. He yells. His face is drenched in shadow.

You can’t be like him. Your anger isn’t righteous.

And if you can’t be like him then you should leave. You never really wanted to take those twenty steps and stand on the fringes of the crowd. Proximity will not translate their words and this isn’t your fight.

But what are they saying? What are they protesting?

Your three companions, other Ameri-cans, appear behind you. Their shadows

waver like dying flames. You forgot you had companions for a moment, didn’t you? Yet barely an hour ago, you tried, and failed, to badger your way into their friend group as they danced through the mall. You all speak English. That should have been connection enough, but as soon as they are out of your frame of sight they disappear. Side characters are, after all, disposable.

Your companions creep close, clutch-ing their shopping bags. They gawk. You fidget. The crowd chants: Something in Turkish! The boy pumps his fist.

The police arrive.You’re watching the young boy on

the potted plant and only know about the police because your companions scurry

off. Words fly from their lips; you think you hear them yell cops!

Run after your companions. Run after the other American English speakers where you’ll be safe. In

four months, go home and from the safe-ty of suburban New York, you can exag-gerate your bravery. Run like the coward you fear you are.

The Turkish police are liberal with tear gas. You read the news. You should run. But you think of the graffiti you saw in Izmir, another city in Turkey. In slash-ing red paint, in English, the wall read: “All police are bastards.” It’s too simple, but simple feels true and powerful. Black and white.

You think about heroes a lot, don’t you? Shouldn’t you be a hero and do something?

The crowd pulls together with an in-take of breath. Someone, or multiple

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Life has gotten far lonelier than you ever imagined and your gift of intangibility turns

you into a ghost.

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someones, is being attacked. Someone is attacking. You’re too short to see and too far from the action but you desire to ob-serve brutality and desperation. Ameri-can cities could teach you, but that would be too close to home, too understandable. You want to be phased.

One of your companions yells at you: Leave!

You’re on the toes of your running shoes for a better view. You want to watch rocks slice through the air. You want to confirm that police are all bastards.

Your self-indulgence stops here. You turn. You run. You don’t look back.

At the entrance to the metro your companions hover as if you should be grateful they waited.

“What were they protesting?” Your voice grates past your teeth and you grip the escalator until your fingers are blood-less.

“Probably the internet law.” One com-panion adjusts her head scarf and shrugs.

“I don’t want probably. I need to Che

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EclipseThemes: Suburbia, Trust

Rick and Suzie Edelman were wait-ing for us in the backyard. Although this wasn’t our first time visiting the Edel-mans, I found myself amazed by their house when Laura and I pulled into the driveway. Chiseled out of a creamy brick and pewter colored stone, it had the feel-ing of being cozy with well-manicured arborvitaes and shrubs hugging its cor-ners, as well as modern with large win-dows allowing one to catch a glimpse of the Edelman’s world. Peering through the windshield, a trail of smoke rose high into the cloudless, unpolluted night sky accenting the house with an illusion of a lit chimney adding to its overall feel-ing of sleepiness and quaintness as if it were out of a realtor’s magazine. Shifting into park, I turned the key as an instant chill seemed to seize the car while Lau-ra, unfazed by the cold, continued to drift along in sleep. Between her fingers lay the handcrafted invitation from Suzie. Even unconscious, her grip on the deli-cate lace card remained secure- frozen in place with a firm yet gentle touch as if holding onto a golden ticket. Reaching over, I moved my finger across a lock of her hair as it gently grazed the side of her ear. Her eyes fluttered open as she turned to face me emerging from her dream.

It was a rare event, rarer than the lu-nar eclipse we were about to watch, to get a one on one experience with Rick and Suzie Edelman: the unofficial King and Queen of Arcadia. Officially though, the couple acted more like gatekeepers than royalty. He, being the city planner – who

determined the major details of which businesses were allowed in the city down to the minor details of which color the street signs would be and where and when the city functions like the Edelman’s Memorial Day Parade or the Edelman’s Christmas Tree Lighting were hosted – and she being the town’s real estate mo-gul who selected only the best people to add to Arcadia made it so that for nearly the past twenty years anyone who want-ed to be a part of the community had to get Edelmans approval first. As a result, a certain cult of personality developed around the Edelmans to get inside their inner circle. Following a stone pathway that lead to the backyard, I couldn’t help but feel the same nervous anticipation I would when delivering a sales pitch. As if sensing this, Laura reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze, cold to the touch and calm.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s just the Edelmans.”

- - - - - - - -“Erick and Laura Peterson,” said Rick

as he got out of his camping chair, rais-ing his glass in the air as if toasting our arrival. Bundled up in a designer jacket and hat, a faint rosy color clung to his cheeks as he walked over to shake our hands. Suzie Edelman sat adjacent from him with what appeared to be a similar looking drink in one hand and a phone in the other. She rose out of her seat with a certain regal elegance as if she was greet-ing honored guests, accenting the overall feeling of hospitality with a delicate smile

Brandon Madden


know.” She puts a hand on your shoulder; the

equivalent to a pat on the head. “We all want to know.”

Her oversized rings dig into your skin before she releases you with one last pat and turns back to her real friends. She speaks mindlessly about some concert they’ll attend in a few hours and the blue flats she regrets not buying in H&M. It would be so simple to bash her head against the wall.

Side characters are, after all, dispos-able; and who is she to you? That blue mosaic tile on your right would look lovely with a spattering of brains and blood. Call it a science experiment. Call it a Jackson Pollock. Call it avant garde.

Call it crazed and manic and like nothing that’s ever run through your head before. But you want to feel power surge through you instead of blood and feel control over another creature. You want to feel like the police. You want to feel like a hero.

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and wave (the same smile and wave that appeared on ‘For Sale’ signs around town and was decaled on her office’s window).

“We’ve already started our cocktails,” he said with a laugh as he walked back to join Suzie. The campfire crackled away, producing more smoke than heat, as its tiny flame flared its embers onto the ground.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said with a smile. “It helps take the chill out of the air.”

“What’s your poison?” asked Rick reaching into the cooler between their chairs.

Uncertain of what to say since Laura and I didn’t drink often, my mind went blank for a moment trying to figure out what would be the choice that the Edel-mans were waiting for us to pick.

“Vodka tonic. If you have any tonic,” said Laura without missing a beat, keep-ing the flow of the conversation uninter-rupted

“Good call,” smiled Suzie raising her glass in the air.

“And you Erick?”“The same,” I replied.“Ah vodka drinkers,” Rick laughed

pulling out two chilled glasses and a slen-der vodka bottle. “We’ll definitely get along well tonight.”

Raising it in the air as if to inspect it the bottle was nearly empty, the remain-ing clear liquid shimmering in the moon-light.

“We might run out, but I’m pretty sure we have another bottle back inside, right Suzie?” he said filling our glasses to the rim. I wished I had known that the Edel-mans were such avid drinkers. In all of the city events they sponsored, from the Edelman’s Outdoor Summer Dance to the Edelman’s Thanksgiving Day Foot-ball Game, I had never seen them drink

in public. (Even at the official unofficial Edelman’s Bar Crawl Garage Sale, I nev-er saw them nurse a beer or sip a cock-tail.)

“No need,” said Laura. Reaching into her shoulder bag, she pulled out the same slender looking bottle. “Although it was meant more as a gift for you from Erick and me.”

She ran her hand over my shoulder, a sign that meant don’t worry, I got us cov-ered.

The Edelmans beamed with excite-ment as she handed over the bottle, and I squeezed the back of her arm.

Thank you, you’re the best.This was our preferred language in

social settings. Created by Laura, it start-ed off as a few simple hidden actions; this subtle sign language had overtime transformed every inch of our body into rich dialogue. Whereas on the outside it looked like no more than a simple caress or squeeze, a full range of thoughts and emotions were being transmitted better than expressing our thoughts than spoken word could.

We settled into our seats facing the lake. Except for the bite in the air, its opaque white ice stretching across from shore to shore was the only true indication of it being winter. Bathed in the sterling light of the moon, its unevenness along with the deep cuts edged from snowmo-bilers gave the appearance of waves rip-pling across the surface. Tonight, howev-er, was something beyond silence, as if we were the sole occupiers in a vacuum of space.

“You’ve been here for almost a year,” said Rick as he nestled himself into the camp chair, resting his glass against his chest. “That’s a considerable amount of time to become a full-fledged Arcadian.”

“Half a year. We moved last July,” re-

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plied Laura gently correcting him. She took a healthy drink from her glass.

“How do you like it here so far?” asked Suzie who had now turned off her phone and slipped it into her pocket.

“It’s really nice so far, couldn’t be happier,” Laura said. All three took an-other drink, and feeling as if they were outpacing me I followed in response. The alcohol stung as it flowed down my throat, branching out and spreading a tin-gly warmth across my chest causing a cough to escape from my lips.

“We’re lucky to be here,” I said, my voice caught in a raspy airiness. “It’s a good change.”

“Did you know that Arcadia actually means ‘Pastoral Paradise’?” asked Rick. “And boy when Suzie and I moved here it really was a pasture. Main Street was a dirt road and all the houses were wooden cottages.”

“But we loved it here so much,” said Suzie leaning closer to the fire and us, further away from Rick. “Rick and my parents took us up here every summer. His family cottage is actually still down the street. We rent it out during the year.”

Laura leaned against me moving a fin-ger across my bicep in a faint wave.

That ugly thing down the street?I gave a slight shrug trying to make it

look as if I were turtling myself further into my jacket.

“When we were your age we decided that we could never live in the city. It just wasn’t us, so we took a gamble and start-ed to build the neighborhood up street by street.”

“Of course the early 90s boom and the middle class migration helped a lot,” Rick added. “Now we have a whole sub-division of people, numerous small busi-nesses, and even a K through 8 school.”

I nodded as Laura placed her thumb

against the pulse of my wrist tapping it twice before reaching to hold my hand.

How old are these people?“But in the beginning it was tough,”

continued Rick. “A lot of late hours and no breaks. Can you believe that when we first started living in the house behind you it was just a single level, three room shack?”

“Oh yes,” I replied. “It’s beautiful. Really an amazing piece of architecture.”

“It was designed by the Johnsons two streets over, and the supplies came from the Kramers’ business,” said Suzie as she moved back in her seat, positioning her body closer to Rick. “All of the interior is furnished from Arcadia shops. At a dis-count of course, since we got each owner a great land lease for their storefront.”

“We’re very happy.”In something like an embrace, she

moved her arm around Rick’s shoulder leaning herself rigidly into his chest while his hand groped for hers. A wince of pain flashed across his face and was almost in-stantly covered up as he finished the con-tents of his glass. Like actors caught in the throes of an unplanned scene change, the illusion of the Edelmans disappeared for a moment as my eyes saw the lines and weathered marks hidden behind the makeup; the sagging and paunchy skin underneath the tailored clothes. Watching them adjust their bodies as they searched for a comfortable position as a couple, I wondered what the young Rick and Suz-ie Edelman had been like and what they would now think of the people sitting across from us.

“How’s the business going?” asked Rick with an eagerness and energy that felt out of place, hasty, defensive, as if noticing my invasive eyes. “What is it again? An outdoor store?”

“Yeah we sell all kinds of outdoor

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gear: bikes, kayaks, snow and water skies, helmets, athletic wear, that kind of stuff,” I said. “It’s a lot of long hours and hard work, but it’s finally going well. Our first year was tough, didn’t even turn a profit, but this year is already looking better. It will be different.”

“It must be very exciting and reward-ing to see your business grow, right?” said Suzie.

“That’s true, but I can’t take all the credit,” I replied squeezing Laura’s hand, flashing a smile. “If it wasn’t for Laura being such a savvy businesswoman and an amazing planner I would have been completely lost and would have failed, like a ship without a captain.”

“You know, you should sponsor one of the events this year like the Memorial Day Parade,” said Rick leaning forward. “Just think, we could brand your name on all the fliers, put it on the banners that hang over Main Street, even load a car with some of your merchandise on a car rack.”

No.“You could even do custom-made

t-shirts for the events,” added Suzie catching a spark from her husband’s ener-gy, adopting an almost identical position. “We’ve always done one with my realtor logo, but this year we could share.”

A shirt with her face on it? No.I almost laughed at the image Laura

conjured up: a street lined with people wearing their Edelman T-shirts, proudly cheering as Suzie’s face flapped enthu-siastically. Taking another generous sip, the burn of vodka held back any laughter.

“It could drum up a lot of business,” said Rick as Suzie nodded; the two were nearly in sync with thought and move-ment.

“But you should definitely pick one of the more popular events like the parade.

Something that will really catch a lot of people’s attention,” replied Suzie.

“Exactly. And something during the summer when crowds will be loitering outside.”

“That sounds great and all,” said Lau-ra, with words coming out warm, but cautious. “But Erick and I usually go out west with another couple for Memorial Day for hiking and whitewater rafting. We actually already booked the trip and plan to be away that week.”

The Edelmans looked astonished. “You can’t leave for Memorial Day,”

said Rick. “It’s the kick off to some of the biggest events we do during the year.”

“Oh,” I said looking up at the un-touched moon. “I didn’t know it was that important.”

“Oh, if only you knew. One year Anna Kramer was in the hospital having her third child, and when the doctors said she would miss the parade, she got a C-sec-tion and demanded to be discharged,” replied Suzie. “Don’t you remember the turn out last year? And the garage sale.”

“Yes the garage sale, it’s my favorite,” added Rick. “Just think, you could bring your merchandise to your house and set up shop.”

“Like an open house; I could come earlier and we could design it like a mini version of your store,” Suzie said raising her hands up as if laying out each room.

“This could be a new part of the city’s tradition,” concluded Rick. “And would solidify you as true Arcadians.”

For some reason, the idea of being an Arcadian made me miss the city life Laura and I had left. Warmth of nostal-gia blooming from the pit of my stom-ach, my chest ached at the thought of the anonymity and autonomy of our previous life. The way we could effortlessly blend into the seas of people, become faceless

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and nameless, as we moved like schools of fish in and out of the subways and along the streets where the same indiffer-ence washed over each neighbor and ev-ery floor of our apartment building. Now we were living in a fish bowl, swimming in an endless circle with eyes watching and commenting on each movement.

Laura moved her hand to the middle of my back and gave it a light rub.

Thank God we aren’t them.“We’ll think about it,” I replied trying

to mimic Laura’s warm but cautious tone. “Most of our sales are online though, and we already did commit to the trip with our friends.”

The Edelmans faltered, as if they had been irrevocably thrown off balance by the rejection. Unsure of what to do, they lingered in mid-thought and then me-chanically retreated back in their seats, trying to brush it off as if nothing had happened, but by now a heavy silence had fallen over the campsite. The only sound was the shifting of ice cubes against their glasses as they took another drink.

“Well that’s all right if you can’t do Memorial Day,” said Rick, the energy from his voice now changed from en-thusiastic to contemplative. “Maybe we can have you sponsor the middle school baseball or football team this year.”

“Rick coaches both,” Suzie said as if we needed further explaining. (We didn’t. I—and I figured Laura too—had already assumed Edelman involvement some-how.) “You know Rick’s looking for a new assistant coach. Dan McElroy won’t be able to do it this year, and it would be a great way to get involved and meet more people.”

“Dan McElroy?” I asked. “He’s the one that recommended Arcadia to us.”

“Yes, yes, we know,” said Suzie. “He’s very active in the community.”

“Yeah. Very active,” Rick echoed.Something felt off with the Edelman’s

response. Both seemed to have closed off, as Rick positioned his body away from the conversation and towards the dying flames, crossing his arms as if to keep warm while Suzie became still, watch-ing with a vacant gaze the contents of her glass gloss the sides, her hand reflexively reaching into her pocket for her phone; its faint glow was obscured by the shell of her coat as it turned back on. I moved my hand up to Laura’s neck, delicately drawing a question mark against her skin, letting it linger.

What’s up with this? Weird right? But Laura didn’t seem to notice, or

chose not to respond, as if unfazed by this strange reaction. I was waiting for her to tell the Edelmans about how she and Dan had been childhood friends, how they grew up on the same street and went to the same schools, inseparable, until they left for college. It was Dan who had raved about Arcadia to Laura, about how moving his counseling practice to the neighborhood had been the best decision of his life. I was even waiting for her to compliment Rick and Suzie with how highly Dan spoke of them to her. But in-stead she remained quiet stretching her arm out towards Rick for him to pour her another drink. In tacit agreement, Rick picked up the bottle, pouring the contents around to Suzie, then Laura, and then him until it was emptied, forgetting the tonic altogether. All three drank in uni-son so quickly, so smoothly, as if it were nothing more than water, while I tried to follow with the more than half full origi-nal glass. Giving up a quarter of the way through, I sat back and watched, feeling perplexed as I searched for any kind of sign from Laura, hoping that she would say something reassuring or explain what

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was going on. “We can’t spend the rest of the night

without something to drink,” said Rick standing up, locking eyes with me. “Er-ick, let’s go inside and get something else.”

Without time to process my thoughts, he began walking towards the house with a new determination to each step. Above, a sliver of the moon had begun to darken, but no one said anything.

- - - - - - - -The inside of the Edelman’s home felt

different from the first time Laura and I were invited over a few weeks ago for the Edelman Neighborhood Christmas Party. Swarming with neighbors enter-ing and exiting, the event had turned into standing room only with what seemed like the whole town squeezed into every nook and cranny of the downstairs area. Bodily warmth and the noise of conver-sation livened the atmosphere giving a glow to the Christmas decorations that hung throughout the house. The added touch of a decorated tree in the living room completed the Edelman’s feeling of comfort and hominess. But now stand-ing alone with Rick in the dining room, while he crouched down to examine the hideaway liquor cabinet rummaging for the perfect drink, the house felt like a mu-seum between exhibitions. Laid out in an open concept, the room allowed the eye to transition seamlessly from the kitchen at one far end to the front room to the oth-er, and aside from the long dining table that linked the two worlds together, the downstairs was scarcely occupied with furniture. Even the walls remained, for the most part, untouched and unadorned, painted off-white gray with only a few pictures hanging in lieu of the Christmas decorations. The only object of note that caught my attention was the antiquated

anchor box television that had replaced the tree in the corner of the front room across from a worn-down loveseat that I vaguely remembered being under a moun-tainous pile of guests’ coats. It struck me as strange that while the outside of the house had been meticulously crafted and finely tuned to draw the eye to its marvel, the inside had been neglected, something more so lacking any afterthought rather than a minimalist statement.

Rick stood up having retrieved a bot-tle from the back of the cabinet. He held it delicately in his hands, cradling it with tenderness, before resting it on the table.

“This is one of my favorite scotches; I only use for special occasions,” he said reaching back over to grab us two glass-es. “Make sure you sip it.”

He uncorked it and to my relief only poured a splash of the liquid into the glass so that it measured out to something just over a tablespoon or two as he raised it towards his nose to inhale. Following his lead, I took a breath feeling the bitter yet rich aroma of scotch dance in my nos-trils as it mixed with the ashy scent from the bonfire. Through the glass doors I watched as the fire smoldered and turned into a thick smoke, clouding our sight of the girls.

“You two seem to fit each other well,” Rick said still sniffing his drink as if to blanket his senses. “How long have you been together?”

“Five years.”“Ah, that’s why,” he said almost stoi-

cally as he nodded. “You’re still in young love. You haven’t put in all that hard time yet, like Suzie and me. Haven’t even had your first seven year itch or real chal-lenge.”

Perhaps it was the fog of alcohol that skewed my perception, but there was something almost malicious laden in

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Rick’s words. His face, however, did not confirm my thought showing not even the slightest hint of ill will; if anything, it was the first time he looked at ease since we entered the house.

“You see my friend, time slowly wears two people down with complications. And it’s these complications that change how you two interact and view each oth-er. One day you’re a young couple mak-ing love in the middle of the afternoon in a shack, without a care or a single eye of the world on you, and the next you’ve become business partners with all eyes on you as you run the world. All profes-sional, no sex. You’d better watch out or you’ll be in couple’s therapy next,” he said giving a wink, laughing before tak-ing a sip. “Whoops, forget about that last part will you?”

He took a sip that emptied his glass.“I am sure you two are great though,

an exception to the rule right?” he said nudging me as he placed his drink back on the table using his hand for support while leaning back. “It’s like you two have a secret language where you can talk on another wavelength that the rest of us cannot comprehend. I can tell. I can see it.”

The directness of his words along with his prying eyes seemed to numb my body with vulnerability as I took a sip of the scotch. It was as if I discovered that Laura and I had been naked in front of the Edelmans. Like a creation in their garden, their eyes already knew the flesh that had been hidden in secret from the rest of the world—something they had been intimate with once before—and were now delving deeper past that flesh to extract its thoughts and claim its lan-guage as their own.

No longer able to keep his stare and feeling a quick escape from the scotch

that ran smoothly along my throat, I turned my attention to the one picture hanging in the room. It was something abstract: two figures melded together in a leaning embrace while surrounding them broad brushstrokes caked thick, vibrant layers of colors.

“Did Suzie create this?” I asked point-ing to the picture.

“That was done by Julie Anderson,” Rick said taking a delight in my notic-ing as he turned his attention to immerse himself in it. “She invited me to watch her paint it after I made a personal re-quest for one of her pieces.”

“Oh, she’s an artist? I thought her stu-dio was for dance.”

“It is, but she is an artist in the fullest sense,” he said admiring the picture and reached out to cup the air as his hands isolated certain parts into a clearer focus. “She puts her whole body and soul into her actions. There’s a real passion that can’t be faked. Trust me, I know.”

I had seen Julie dance; rather, the whole town had seen her dance with Rick at the Edelman’s Outdoor Summer Dance. It was the first Arcadian event that Laura and I had gone to- at the recommendation of Dan when we first moved in. What struck me as odd then was that although the whole town seemed to be there, only a handful of people had actually set foot on the dance floor, keeping to the edge of area while in the center Julie and Rick danced. As if they were the main attrac-tion, the crowds gathered around to watch them, whistling and cheering when Julie would dip or spin and when Rick would strut or strike a pose. Their movements were fluid, sensual as they made their way up and down the floor, and with each acrobatic trick and advanced pose the crowds erupted with applause. At the end of the song, Julie and Rick leaned back

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in something that was a mix of an em-brace and a pose, breathing heavily with a slick sheen of sweat covering each oth-er’s skin. Laura leaned over to me.

“They are definitely sleeping togeth-er.”

“Of course they are,” I said confused by the statement. “She’s his wife.”

“No,” replied Laura pointing over to the back of the crowd. “She’s his wife.”

Standing off towards the rear of the group were Suzie and Dan, her eyes glued to Rick as he peeled himself from Julie, both of them laughing as they wiped away beads of sweat and matted down hair from each other’s face. Dan casually moved his finger across a lock of her hair that had fallen over Suzie’s eyes, tucking it behind her ear as he gently grazed it. She turned and squeezed his hand as if to thank him. Before I could comment, Lau-ra had already begun to move onto the dance floor swaying to the music.

“You have to come to the summer dance,” said Rick as he poured himself another drink. “Maybe you’ll have a shot at dancing with her.”

I didn’t bother correcting him, tell-ing him that we had actually talked that night. That I had danced with her when he traded Julie to dance with Laura.

“Anyway enough nostalgia, we still have things unsettled,” he said corking the bottle. “What do you think about coaching the little league team with me? Now that Dan is kicked out I could really use someone who would be a good or-ganizer and smart with play calling. Our team happens to be the best in the coun-ty.”

“Wait, Dan was kicked out? I thought you said he quit. ”

“Whoops, shouldn’t have said that,” Rick laughed shaking his head as he picked up the bottle, “Clearly I need to

put this away.”He placed the bottle back in the cabi-

net and turned around.“I guess you will eventually hear the

rumor, so I might as well be the one to tell you,” he said leaning against the wall. The ceiling light focused almost perfectly on him as if it were a spotlight. “Dan was found recently sleeping with someone else’s wife. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time.”

He shook his head and stared out the window into the darkness. Although I felt something like shock, its impact was di-luted by the resignation in Rick’s voice. It was as if he were listing off a series of mundane facts. Outside, the moon had become more than halfway eclipsed.

“I guess you can call it a thorn in our pastoral paradise. Of course, Suzie and I know who it is, but we’ve been keep-ing it hushed up to the best of our ability. Still we can’t let someone like that be in a leadership role. Someone who works with children should be more stable and a good role model. And who better than a young married small businessman, right?”

I must have said something, because Rick had nodded in agreement, but my mind was someplace else, splicing to-gether memories as if they were scenes from a movie:

It was weeks ago when I was briefly separated from Laura at the Edelman’s Christmas Party. I was talking to the Johnsons, or the Goldsteins, or whoev-er. I couldn’t remember what we were talking about; all I remembered was feel-ing adrift without Laura by my side. Lost in the flow of conversation, our words being carried away in the sea of noise, I felt like a ship without its captain lack-ing Laura’s commentary on the events, her insights on people, her social cues

Brandon Madden

for me to follow. I found myself scanning through the crowds, searching through the thick fog of partygoers trying to catch sight of the lighthouse that would guide me safely through the rest of the night. I spotted Laura across the room, stand-ing under the beam of the living room doorway. She was talking with Dan. Her face was glowing, luminous with a gloss of sweat from the overheated room, as she and Dan bowed their heads together, speaking under the noise of the crowd. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I saw Dan reach up to brush away a lock of hair that had stuck to Laura’s damp brow. It made me think of our sign. I love you. She made some movement that might have been a reply, but with the crowds filtering in from the kitchen, it was lost from the horizon of my sight as they dis-appeared into the flow.

I stepped back against the wall, my shoulder dangerously bumping the frag-ile fin of a mounted sunfish as people squeezed by me. Wiping my forehead with the cuff of my sleeve, I dropped my arm to my side. A muffled sound leapt up to my ears, and for a moment I thought I had knocked the pectoral fin from the taxidermy fish. I turned around search-ing for the damage until I heard the same sound again coming from somewhere behind me, through the wall. It was loud enough that the other people in the room should have heard it, especially anyone not already engaged in conversation, but nobody so much as turned their head. It was as if they were studiously ignoring the sounds, which were now coming at repeated intervals, every few seconds or so, methodical and deliberate.

Slipping into the dining room, I felt the noise of the party go silent as I closed the door behind me. The long table was covered with emptied bottles and trays of

hors d’oeurves ready to be served. And leaning on the table, as if resting from a violent battle, were Rick and Suzie Edel-man.

The room was filled with a heavy aroma—the perfumes of liquor and the greasy smell of uneaten food—but the heaviness felt more personal than that, like a dead body had been discovered and hastily moved into the corner where no one would notice. But the only thing on the floor was a spray of shattered glass, shards of crystal that glinted like gems, piling around the Edelmans like a boun-tiful fortune. Neither looked directly at the other, instead they looked at me. They had not bothered to cover their bat-tle wounds—a reddened face, a streak of mascara—but rather they laughed off the mess with an excuse while both used their feet to sweep the shards underneath the table. Rick hurriedly searched for a bottle and Suzie fixed a plate of food pre-senting it to me as if it was an offering or a bribe to join them in their party. The only sound I remembered hearing was the glass crunching beneath my feet.

“So you will be a part of the team, right?” said Rick.

“What?” His words sounded muffled as if formed in a thick haze as my brain worked through these memories, trying to sift away the perceptions and conclu-sions that had been drawn out.

“You’ll be a part of my team.”Rick stood steadfast across from me.

No longer leaning, he looked unshakable in his stance. Looking up to meet his gaze, I hadn’t realized how tall he was. There was knowingness in his eyes that made me feel vulnerable again, as if he held the encryption key to my mind.

“Yes.” “Great,” he said patting my shoulder,

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his strength echoing inside of me with each pat. “This is going to be great. May-be we can even convince Laura to cancel that trip so we can feature you in the pa-rade.”

“Yeah, maybe.” “We can do great things together, Er-

ick,” said Rick. “You know, you remind me of a younger version of myself. With my help, you’ll become a valuable mem-ber of this city soon enough.”

“Should we bring back something for the girls?” he asked eyeing the liquor cabinet again, as if unquenched.

“Your call.”“Laura and Suzie might just dry out

our supply,” he laughed. “I’ve never seen another woman go drink for drink with Suzie. She can hold her liquor can’t she?”

“Yeah, I’m discovering this.” “You don’t though,” he said drawing

attention to the glass in my hand, its con-tents seemingly untouched. “You don’t drink much do you?”

“I try not to.” “Afraid of what might come out?” Rick looked out the window. “The eclipse is about to happen.”

- - - - - - - -Wine was my poison. It was intro-

duced to me by Allison—a former co-worker—and became my preferred bev-erage to drink while I waited for her to get off work and join me. In the months since Laura and I had quit our jobs, our social circles and old life had all but dis-appeared, consumed by our business as it avariciously ate away our time with end-less streams of advertising campaigns, supplier negotiations, late night calls with shippers and customers, and vol-umes upon volumes of paperwork. So it came as a surprise when Allison texted me, asking to have a drink with me after work. I saw it as the escape I was looking

for: an excuse to take me away from the business.

Our meetings were friendly and ca-sual. A drink followed by idle chitchat. Something that would be considered or-dinary and mindless to an outsider, but to me it was relieving, almost therapeutic. She didn’t demand anything from me. In-stead, she sat quietly, attentively, listen-ing to my complaints for an hour or two carefully holding onto each word, ab-sorbing their weight and emotions while thoughtfully constructing replies that were helpful and empathetic. She listened to how stressful it was to start all over from scratch again, how draining it was to constantly put in all of your energy to the point of exhaustion day after day with no guarantee of success and failure loom-ing over your shoulder, prying at you in the middle of the night, reminding you that it was always there waiting for that one false move. She could imagine how lonely a life it could be at times, how dis-torting it could be on a marriage, how a wife could slowly morph into a business partner, a client, a boss, an employee, acting as a constant reminder of the work that needed to be done.

Allison had awakened something in-side of me, another person that lay un-derneath the surface and who was slowly beginning to emerge with each drink. It was this person that Allison became most familiar with. The person who was more excited to leave a meeting or neglect a stack of purchase orders in search of new places to meet up at with new drinks to try. Someone who noticed the changes in her clothing, from business professional to fashionable—flats to pumps, skirts to dresses—perfume that caught the atten-tion, makeup that accentuated features. Someone who upgraded the evening from drinks to meals, from open dives to

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private restaurants where we could share our secrets and fall into the fantasy of what life would be like together.

It was this fantasy that had eclipsed into reality weeks later at a hotel bar Al-lison had suggested. She had texted in the morning wanting to meet for lunch, and when I had arrived—after making up an excuse to Laura for my afternoon ab-sence—I had found her in a booth wait-ing for me. Wearing a simple black dress, she sat quietly tapping her finger against the table where two freshly poured glass-es rested, the bubbles in the liquid still climbing to the surface. I took a seat and without speaking, she pulled out a key-card tucked inside her dress and slipped it over to me with the same casualness as if she were passing over a napkin before standing up and walking away. Flipping it across my fingers, I listened to the click of its plastic against my nails feeling the warmth her body left on its surface. The room number where she was waiting written on the back of the card came in and out of my vision. I continued to do this working my way through both un-touched wineglasses until I found myself in motion, riding up the floors in an ele-vator and down the hall with the keycard inches away from the slot of a door.

I told Laura I would never drink again. Assuring her that nothing had happened and nothing ever would, I promised to devote my time to her and the business. Even during the weeks of silence that followed, I kept good on my promise, severing myself from the outside world as I worked alongside Laura tirelessly to rebuild what we had lost. Eventually she did speak to me again, mentioning that an old childhood friend had contacted her, recommending we bring our business to the town he was living in. Laura had been

sold on the idea and weeks later- we were being shown around by the Edelmans. And as I watched Rick and Suzie talk their way through the town working in unison like a royal couple satisfying the masses who rushed to pay homage I found my-self falling in love with the Edelman im-age: the image of an unshakable partner-ship. It made me hope that one-day Laura and I could be just like them.

When we stepped outside the world had lost its light. The surrounding hous-es, including the Edelman’s, had turned off their lights allowing for the natural darkness to seep across Arcadia. Above us only a sliver of the moon remained, a halo of light fighting for its survival. Laura and Suzie had all but disappeared, their voices immediately growing silent at the sound of the sliding door opening. I had to rely on following the sound of Rick’s footsteps while loosely holding onto his shoulder trying my best to use him for safe passage, anxious to get back to my seat next to Laura.

Settling into our seats, the Edelmans lost their features, looking no more than two abstract figures. I could hear the sound of Rick and Suzie’s jackets rub against each other, their movements cloaked in the shadow of the moon as they began to meld into one. Desperate to talk to Lau-ra again, I touched her shoulder feeling mechanical as I worked my way around her body hoping to create something like an embrace. She leaned into me, resting her head on my chest, tilting it slightly to keep her eyes focused on the sky. I ran my finger across her hair gently grazing the side of her ear, letting it linger, as I waited for her to respond. Above us, the moon eclipsed.

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Five Flattened PenniesShort StoryThemes: Freedom, Transitions, Relationships

I was sitting alone at a table in the Cape Cod Lounge of the Drake Hotel in Chicago. Politicians and celebrities had frequented the lounge over the years, many of whom had carved their initials into the bar. Before I sat down in a booth by myself, I gave it a cursory glance and smiled at the initials of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio.

The afternoon of business talk about computers and data communication with some of my colleagues and competitors had been exhausting. We were all attend-ing a convention in the morning to pitch our respective companies’ products. My experience with computers was selling hardware, a field with an ever-dimin-ishing profit margin. Sophisticated tele-communication software would shortly be making much of what I sold obsolete, and I had no experience selling software.

“That tradition argument is a joke, I think it’s ridiculous that they don’t put up lights on Wrigley Field,” a woman said, her voice breaking through the bar din.

There is something familiar about the way that woman speaks, I thought, look-ing up from my second glass of Chevas neat, to find the source-a pretty blond woman chatting with a group of sales-men. It was Dale. Her hair was not as blond as when she was a girl, and now she wore it in a pixie cut. Her body had filled out nicely and she cut a beautiful figure in her business suit. I scanned her left hand and didn’t see a ring. I thought back to that wiry girl in pedal pushers and tee shirt. As I watched her animated conversation with the guys, I hoped for

an opportunity to move in and talk with her alone.

As we were growing up, “a thing,” for want of a better word, developed between my best friend Steve and Dale. Whenev-er Steve was around, there was an ad-venture, and Dale was right there with him. All our families lived on the same block, and In the years after the war, we all played in the streets and in the empty lots in the neighborhood. In those days, I guess you could have called Dale a tom-boy. One summer

morning, Steve and Dale were car-rying a bunch of cardboard boxes they found behind the Ace Hardware store on Clark Street.

Steve announced, ”We’re going to build a Hitler town.”

This got the attention of me and a couple of guys sitting on the back porch steps in the alley. We got up to join them.

“I’ve got some of my brother’s fire crackers,” he said, “We’re gonna use the crackers to blow the buildings up as we fire bomb the town.”

In the center of the empty lot, behind the weeds, Dale arranged the boxes as if they were buildings in a small village. The tall weeds would block the view of our bombing from adult eyes.

“Help me tape the fire crackers inside the boxes so that their fuses extend out from under each box,” Steve directed Dale.

When everything was set, we all lit matches to light the fuses and an edge of each box. For the heck of it, we threw lit

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matches on the boxes shouting, “bombs away,” as well. Some of the boxes burned, and some spun around when the fire crackers inside exploded. The con-flagration didn’t look anything like the bombing of German town scenes in the movies, but it was fun. I looked over at Dale—she seemed to really enjoy watch-ing the burn.

One day when the older kids weren’t in their forts behind the wooden sign-boards on Clark Street, Dale joined us as we invaded and occupied one of the forts. After we climbed the ladder and en-tered one of the forts, luxuriating in our conquest, Dale pointed to a metal bucket on its side with a pipe that looked like a chimney coming out of it. “ L o o k , there’s a fire place,” she said.

When she found some skewers in a box, she got excited. Her eyes sparkled as she said, “Let’s cook marshmallows.”

Steve ran home and got a bag of marshmallows and a box of graham crackers. After feasting on s’mores, we put the fire out by crushing the coals in the stove bucket with our feet. The next morning we discovered the signboards along Clark Street that supported the forts had burned down.

“Do you think we caused the fire?” Dale asked.

I was relieved when Steve said, “No-body knows we were in the fort yester-day. Let’s keep it that way.”

About the time she was twelve years old, Dale’s brother showed her how to toss a football, and she developed quite the arm for throwing. She held her own, playing catch and touch football in the street with the neighborhood boys.

On a number of occasions, Dale said to Steve, “C’mon, practice throwing the

ball with us.” But Steve wasn’t very good at throw-

ing a ball. So he would practice getting a high arc by throwing stones into the al-ley behind our apartment building from across North Shore Avenue. One day he didn’t get his stone into a long enough arc and it landed in the windshield of a passing brand new 1957 Chevrolet. When the driver stopped, Steve ran like hell down the alley, up the back porch stairs, and disappeared into his apart-ment. The driver didn’t get out of the car fast enough to be able to follow him, but one of the neighborhood kids, a “goodie two shoes,” was standing on the sidewalk watching the whole thing transpire.

When the driver asked, “Do you know that kid?” she nodded and said, “I’ll show you where he lives.”

Steve’s dad had to pay for the damage.

In time, Steve became quite the en-trepreneur. He built crystal radio sets for kids who could afford two dollars. Think-ing back, Steve was quite skilled at sell-ing.

“A crystal radio is pure magic,” he told one of the kids from the block. “You need only attach its alligator clip to a ground-ed pipe and you’re connected to WLS or WIND. Then you can listen to pop mu-sic anywhere. By turning this knob on a variable capacitor, you can change sta-tions.” He held up the radio for effect and demonstrated turning the knob.

“This is a special feature in my crys-tal radio. The crystal radio kits available in hobby shops require assembly, and It is hard to tune them because you have to move a ferrite rod through a coil to change stations. This rod in a coil is not a stable way to stay tuned in.”

The kid was sold. He ponied up the two dollars and bought the radio on the

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spot.

But eventually there weren’t any more kids in the neighborhood who could afford two dollars and hadn’t already bought a radio, so Steve decided to diversify. He built a telephone network for kids who lived in his building using old telephones he had collected from a demolition site on Devon Avenue. By using dry cell batter-ies wired together, he was able to power the ringer in the phones. He used a cou-ple of car batteries to power the network, and charged the kids twenty-five cents a month to be on the network. It could have been a big success, but it didn’t last very long because the landlord didn’t want wires strung outside of his building and Steve’s mother found out there was acid in car batteries.

About the time he had to disband his telephone network, Steve developed a serious interest in trains. Or maybe the interest had always been there. The tracks of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad ran through our neighborhood and Steve had always turned to watch the trains go by. He used his money to build an obsessively detailed scale model of “The 400,”that passed our neighbor-hood at 4:30 every weekday afternoon. Supposedly the train made the run from downtown Chicago to downtown St. Paul Minneapolis in 400 minutes.

Dale didn’t “get” Steve’s growing ob-session with trains. She referred to him as “the train nut.” Steve started mimicking a diesel engine horn when he rode his bicy-cle. He would press his lips together and get them to vibrate. The sound was like what a trumpet player would make with a mouthpiece, but no trumpet. In some strained way, it did sound like a diesel

engine horn, especially when he would change the pitch and

volume to mimic a train going by. Dale reacted by calling him “fart face.”

In an attempt to excite in Dale his fascination for trains, Steve led her and a group of us kids onto the tracks of the Chicago and Northwestern. We crawled through a hole in the fence and up the em-bankment to the tracks just before 4:30 one afternoon. When we got up there, he gave us each some pennies and showed us how to carefully lay them along the rails of the northbound track. After he put his own pennies on the track, he put his ear to the rail.

“We don’t have long to wait,” he told us. “Get down in the grass so the engi-neer can’t see us.”

The headlight on the engine grew brighter. The rumbling of the engine grew louder. Then with a roar, The 400 blew by and the flattened pennies flew. As the train disappeared in the distance, we scrambled back onto the tracks to claim our treasure. Since nobody knew which penny was originally theirs, Steve took command of the situation.

“Okay everyone. Two pennies each!” He kept three for himself.Steve stood for a moment and smiled

at Dale who was studying her flattened pennies. Then he walked over to her and dropped his pennies, one by one, into her hand.

“Keep these,” he said.Her eyes lit up and she smiled broadly

in appreciation.

That winter, I didn’t see Steve much. He usually went over to Dale’s apartment after school, where her mother served them cookies and hot chocolate. Dale’s mom seemed to like Steve, but my moth-


er told me Dale’s dad wasn’t so sure they should be spending so much time togeth-er.

“Dale is growing more mature,” he had told her when she ran into him at the grocery store one afternoon.

I imagine he grew concerned when he learned Steve was buying her Cokes at Sid’s Soda Fountain and that they’d been spending early evenings playing pinball machines there. When I heard about her father’s concern, I thought it would be okay if they cooled it a bit, because I was beginning to feel that I was losing my best friend to Dale.

One Saturday morning Steve asked me to go downtown with him to the Dear-born Street Station to check out The 400 close-up. After we got there, we slipped by the gate-guard and walked along the platform to where the engine was idling. I pointed out a few details about the engine that I observed, but Steve ignored me. He was checking out the clearance from the bottom of the cowcatcher to the ties.

Slowly, Steve walked back along the platform, checking the undercarriage of each coach.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.“Checking for any low hanging air

conditioner units or air compressors,” he said, periodically stopping between each coach. “Sometimes there’s chains or hos-es hanging low from the couplers too.”

“Are you detailing another model?”“I’ll explain everything to you tomor-

row night.”

On Sunday night, Steve showed up at my door with a hollow metal rod and a toolbox. We walked to the fence along the embankment, crawled through the hole, and quickly moved up the trail to the tracks. Train traffic was minimal on

Sunday night and, of course, he knew the train schedule. When we got up there, Steve turned off his flashlight.

“Stay low and hold this metal rod down on one of the ties,” he said.

He used the hammer to flatten each end of the metal rod, and then forced the rod between the rails of the northbound track. I was surprised when Steve lay down on his stomach between the rails, and stretched out, holding the rod.

“Lay the inner tube over my knees,” he said.

Then noting the distance from the rod, he got up and we nailed each end of the rubber tube to a tie, so it was now a re-straining, rubber band.

“What’s all this for?” I asked him. “In short, when a train moves over the

track at high speed, it pushes the air in front of it and that causes lift under the train.”

It took me a second to realize he was going to lay down on the track and allow a speeding train to pass over him.

“You’re nuts!” I told him.He shrugged.“Do you think you can get Dale up

here on the embankment after school to-morrow?” he asked.

“You’re doing all this to impress her?” I shouted, suddenly furious at Steve.

“Look, we checked the clearance un-der the train downtown and you helped me prepare for any lift when the train passes,” he said disarmingly calm. “I’ve thought this out and I am going to be safe. Make sure she’s here by 4:15.”

There was no arguing with Steve.I’ll do what I can,” I said.She’ll probably be tossing a ball with

some of the neighborhood guys after school, so bring them along and tell them they’re going to see something spectac-ular.”

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They were a little hesitant, but I got Dale and the boys up on the embankment a little after 4:15. Steve was sitting on a rail in front of his apparatus. It made me nervous.

“Get down in the tall grass so we won’t attract any attention,” he told us.

Probably because everyone was con-fused about what was happening, they did as he instructed. Then Steve looked down the tracks and got off the rail. He sat down in the yellowing grass and told us how much fun it would be to ride The 400 to Minneapolis.

“Think about it,” he said. “A mile a minute. All that speed and magnificence with a whole neighborhood on board. Then we arrive in Minneapolis in the evening, a completely different city!”

One of the boys interrupted him to an-nounce, “A train is coming!”

We sat up and saw the headlight get-ting bigger and heard the rumbling of the engine growing louder. When the train was less than a half-mile down the track, Steve jumped over the rail, stretched out on his stomach, slipped his legs un-der the inner tube, and held onto the rod. We were frozen as we watched what was happening. The horn of The 400 broke into a loud howl of sustained warning as the loud rumbling of the engine rapidly approached where Steve lay. Sparks were flying off the wheels from the brakes as the train flew over him. Dale stood up with a loud terrified scream that blended into the squealing sound of the brakes.

We could see Steve hanging on in the space between the trucks under each coach as it passed. When I learned about Bernoulli’s Principle in physics class few years later, I wondered how Steve had known about it. The train slowed to a stop a mile down the tracks. Steve got his

legs out from under the inner tube band, stood up a bit dazed, and told us, “Get the hell outta here.”

As we all ran down the embankment, Dale ran after Steve, hitting him in the back, pounding with both fists shouting, “Asshole, bastard, son of a bitch, you scared the hell outta me.” He was laugh-ing as she chased him.

The next day police detectives were questioning people in the neighborhood. None of the kids “knew” anything. How-ever, somehow, Dale’s father found out about the stunt and he absolutely forbid her from spending any more time with Steve. I told Steve that Dale’s father’s an-ger would blow off, but during the time Dale was obeying him, I got the opportu-nity to play pinball at Sid’s with her a few times. She always got a higher score and I praised her skill. She smiled when I did this. But shortly after school was out that summer, her family moved to one of the distant suburbs.

When the group of guys she was talking with in the lounge at the Drake was breaking up, I walked over to Dale and introduced myself. After a moment, she recognized me.

“Marty, what a nice coincidence af-ter all these years,” she said with a warm smile.

“ Are you here for the convention?” I asked.

“Yes, I’ve been in data processing for about a year now. I needed a job, an-swered an ad, and fell into the business. They liked me so they trained me.”

“I can understand why they liked you,” I said.

Then I suggested we move away from the bar so we could talk. We sat on a couch and she told me her company built high


speed modems that transferred 9600 bits per second over voice grade lines. When we finished speculating about how the new Apple Mac and how its spreadsheet would affect our respective businesses, I changed the subject of our conversation.

“Have you heard what ever became of Steve? That was some obsession he had for you when we were young.”

“Looking back and thinking about it now, his behavior was pretty weird,” she said, “I’m surprised you didn’t stay in touch with Steve. You were so close.”

“We went our separate ways after high school,” I told her. “For a while we stayed in touch, but I went to university and he went to city college. Then I moved to Massachusetts when I got the job with DEC.”

“Well he called me about six months ago,” she said.

I was surprised by this and at my hes-

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itation to comment.“He had gone through a divorce a

while back and he took the time to look me up. I was surprised by the call. We talked about old times on the phone and left it at that.”

“Did he become an engineer?” I asked.She joked, “You mean on the rail-

road?”“No, like a mechanical or electrical

engineer.” She laughed.“No he’s in the television business.”“Production?” I asked.She raised her eyebrows, and sighed.“No repairing them.”Then she took out her change purse,

opened it, and shook five flattened pen-nies into her hand.

“It was good to be young back then,” she said.

Her smile was so beautiful.

Bruce CrosseyEroded

I am a 22-year-old Zoologist and full-time postgraduate student at the Department of Zoology and Entomology, University of Pretoria, South Africa. Through the use of a stream-of-consciousness-based rhetoric, my writing cen-ters around the use of “the everyday” as a vessel to invoke themes and to provide insight into many of the dynamics we are faced with daily. Previously published works include “The Watcher” (Junto Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 2), as well as works in various anthologies incorporating both po-etry and short stories. I am currently working on my first-full length anthology, “Stolen moments from secret worlds”, which will also incorporate wildlife and nature photography.

My wildlife and nature photography portfolio can be viewed on Shutterstock

Linda M. CrateWill Never Be Their Songbird

A Pennsylvanian native born in Pittsburgh, yet raised in the rural town of Conneautville. Her poetry, short sto-ries, articles, and reviews have been published in a myr-iad of magazines. She has three published chapbooks: A Mermaid Crashing Into Dawn (Fowlpox Press) Less Than A Man (The Camel Saloon), and If Tomorrow Nev-er Comes (Scars Publications). Her fantasy novel Blood & Magic was published in March 2015. The second nov-el of this series, Dragons & Magic, was published in Oc-tober 2015 and the third—Centaurs & Magic—released last November. Her novel, Corvids & Magic will release in August.

Follow Linda on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter


Junto MagazineContributors

Lana BellaOpaline Ruse, Awaking

A three-time Pushcart Prize & Bettering American Po-etry nominee, Lana Bella is an author of three chap-books: Under My Dark (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016), Adagio (Finishing Line Press, 2016), and Dear Suki: Letters (Platypus 2412 Mini Chapbook Series, 2016). In addition, Lana has been featured with over 400 jour-nals including, Acentos Review, Comstock Review, No-tre Dame Review, with work to appear in Aeolian Harp Anthology, Volume 3. Lana resides in the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she is a mom of two far-too-clever-frolicsome imps.

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Ann SchlotzhauerElection Season

Ann is a senior at the University of Tulsa, majoring in English, Psychology, and Spanish. While she enjoys creative expression of all kinds, writing fiction is her pre-ferred method. Schlotzhauer’s works have never before been published before now.


Jason KerzinskiDashboard Treasure

A New Orleans photographer and street poet. You can find more of his photos at jasonkerzinski.com

Martha ClarksonVillage Above, Within Reach

Martha manages corporate workplace design in Seat-tle. Her poetry, photography, and fiction can be found in monkeybicycle, Clackamas Literary Review, Seattle Review, Alimentum, and Hawaii Pacific Review. She is a recipient of a Pushcart Nomination, and is listed under “Notable Stories,” Best American Non-Required Read-ing for 2007 and 2009. She is recipient of best short story, 2012, Anderbo/Open City prize, for “Her Voices, Her Room.”

Follow Martha at www.marthaclarkson.com


Josh PenzoneThe Storyteller

Josh earned his Masters in Creative Writing from Wil-kes University. His stories have appeared in Five on the Fifth, Chantwood Magazine, The Critical Pass Review, and Eunoia Review, among others. His long short story “The Whitings” was published as a single title by ELJ Editions and is available on Amazon. He’s been nomi-nated for a Pushcart and he lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter.

Cheryl WollnerThose Who Are Not You

Cheryl is an asexual feminist, whose writing has ap-peared in Unbuild Walls, Polychrome Ink, GNU, Voices and Visions, The Best of Loose Change Anthology, and others. She is a Fiction Reader for Five on the Fifth, a Literary Magazine Reviewer for New Pages, the blog managing editor for Luna Station Quarterly, and most recently an editor for Polychrome Ink.

Follow Cheryl’s blog on WordPress

Mick HughCasket on a Fulcrum

Mick is a student journalist eating his manuscripts to stave off hunger. Much of his work can be found in piles on his floor. He will one day ‘make it’, and be able to write and eat at a nice restaurant once in a while. Until then, he can be found seated at his desk or curled up beneath it.

http://jasonkerzinski.com

http://www.marthaclarkson.com

http://asexualfeminist.wordpress.com


Brandon MaddenEclipse

Brandon hopes to one day become a competent writer. For more of his works please visit his LinkedIn page.

Ron BrownFive Flattened Pennies

Now I am retired and have liberated my passion for liter-ature and writing poetry and short stories. Since I have been published in only in a few small publications, I must be considered a novice writer. However during my var-ied working life in education, filmmaking, and banking,my writing talents were utilized in proposals and materi-als for programs in education, television documentaries, and sales training materials.

This is my time for another change in life. Heeding the words of Walt Whitman:

“What living and buried speech is always vibrating here,What howls restrained by decorum?”

A Special Thank YouAs ever, we want to issue a large thank you to not only our submitters—who have de-

cided to bare their souls and share their works with us—but also our readers for continuing to give us their patronage and allowing us to grow. We would not be here without you, nor without the support of our friends and families.

Another special thank you to our editors who continue to volunteer their time and talent to produce each and every issue. We are truly blessed to have such an amazing team. We specifically want to thank the below people for their contributions to this issue.

Mitchell PetersonJeff LedanJacqueline DellBrittany DirksAvery GomezKaterina PravdivaiaSamantha OtyEmily PowersAutumn Rosencrantz

Allison BurnettNicole LongJennifer WilkinWill Sanders

Rachel GoehringKuhanraj

Linda M. CrateBruce CrosseyLana BellaJason KerzinskiMartha ClarksonAnn SchlotzhauerJosh PenzoneMich HughCheryl WollnerBrandon MaddenRon Brown

Where do we go from here?On the 12th, Facebook reminded me that two years ago we made our first open call for

submissions. The company had formed in February of that year, and in May of the follow-ing year we launched our very first issue. We’ve come a long way from that first one—our readership and supporters continue to grow with every issue and even the magazine design keeps changing and evolving. The past few months have really been a great stress test as we put out three issues in four months and, as always, my editors have shown true dedi-cation and amazing endurance. I know I praise them every issue, but it is no exaggeration that they are the best team I could have hoped for.

You will have noticed by now that the poetry issue still did not go up for sale a week after its release. As I said at the time, we were looking into a new printer and we’ve finally found one. In the next few days our store page will be changing to allow you to preorder all of the issues up to this point for much less than they initially cost.

We are still on track to reopen submissions in the fall. Katerina and Avery have begun evaluating our art program to determine our next stage of evolution for that genre, while Mitch, Jeff, and I are preparing for something really big to come in the very near future. On behalf of the entire team, thank you once again for your unending support and patience. See you again soon.

Joseph AttanasioPublisher, Junto Magazine

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