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FRANK’S BOUGAINVILLEA by J. EDWARD KRUFT

“When Joey’s husband died,” Stefania stage-whispered to their guests, “he was out of his mind. You know, they moved here to begin with partly because of Frank’s house. Really! Joey’s been…what?...well, obsessed really isn’t worded too strongly.

“You know, it’s only a half a mile from here, as a crow flies.”

The outdoor speakers crackled and Stefania shook her head. “Gerry Rafferty! It’s his newest thing. Who the fuck is a Gerry Rafferty fan? I swear to God, I shit Baker Street.”

Joey approached and Stefania placed a finger to pursed lips. 

“Is she boring you with the bougainvillea story?” he asked, while Stefania wondered, a hair’s breadth from doing so aloud, if his gut was even bigger than it was yesterday.

“Who’s up for a dip?” asked Stefania.

Dip? I didn’t make dip….” said Joey.

Dip. In. The. Pool,” clarified Stefania. “You old poop.” 

“Oh. Oh oh oh oh oh.”

“I’ll dip,” said the man who was way too old to still have a left-ear earring. 

“There are trunks in the bin over there. Or,” said Stefania, “you’re welcome to go au natural.

“Stefanie!”

SteFAnia!”

The guests laughed and Joey threw up his arms and marched off to pretend to fuss with the grill. 

“Anyway,” Stefania continued, “this space here was nothing but desert – a patch of bleck.”

“SteFAnia!” called Joey. “Do you know where the corn-on-the-cob holders are?”

“Corner cabinet!” she yelled. “When our husbands were alive, we’d visit and I’d say to him, I’d say: “Joseph Andrew, for Christ’s sake, why the fuck don’t you do something about this bleck of a spot? You have this pool, mountain views, the fire pit…all you need is an outdoor wet bar and something to color-fy this Godforsaken bit of earth.”

“I can’t find them!” bellowed Joey. 

“CORNER CABINET!”

“Oh. Oh oh oh oh oh.”

The man too old for the left-ear earring splashed into the pool – au natural – causing Stefania to wince for reasons she couldn’t list in mixed company. 

“Found them!” yelled Joey.

Stefania shook her head. “Such an ass. Anyway, it is now, if you ask me, the loveliest spot in the yard. Look at that color! It transforms the aesthetic, n’est-ce pas? And really, what is a house in this town without bougainvillea? Tell me. Tell me!” The guests smiled and a few seemed content that it was time to move on. “Oh,” warned Stefania, “that’s the end of the story, but it’s not really the story. Don’t you dare wander off, now!”

When Joey first heard the story, he was dubious. To this day, he has moments of doubt. But then he stops himself in his resentments and thinks: it’s Stefanie…SteFAnia…so yes, it is possible. 

They were drunk, of course. Dov had just died and Joey was thinking of selling the house and moving up north to be nearer his sister and nephews. 

“It really gives me an ass rash,” she’d said.

“Must we discuss your sex life again?”

“That shit-brown spot over there. Look at it. Look at it!” In Joey’s version, she went on and on and on, until he passed out on the lounge chair and awoke the next morning in his smoking jacket to find all of his mother’s good teacups on the patio table, filled with water and steeping starts of bougainvillea. 

Stephanie was smoking nearby.

“What the hell is all of this?” he’d asked. 

As Stefania tells it to their guests, including the man too old for a left-ear earring, who had cozied himself to the side of the pool, no doubt, thinks Stefania, with his nether-region positioned over one of the pool jets: “Joey was passed out, on that we agree. Third time that week I was abandoned to his drunkenness. Which, I have to say, surprised me some: used to be he could hold his liquor. But we were all younger once, right? RIGHT?”

Joey slid over from where he pretended to be fussing with the grill, something of a Cheshire grin on his unshaven face, for though he enjoyed ribbing her about it, he couldn’t help but love this story.

“Look who’s suddenly alive,” said Stefania, to which Joey put one hand to his hip, and the other reflexively gave her the finger. 

“I said to myself, I said: ‘Stefania, you’ve been griping about that little piece of shit-earth for almost a decade. So shut the fuck up and do something about it already,’ right? RIGHT? 

“And that’s when it struck me. Really, it is like lightning. Not that I’ve been hit by lightning. I was hit in the head by a golf-ball-sized piece of hail once (Joey: explains a lot) and that’s no trip to Joshua Tree. Anyway, I’m creative, I can imagine, after all. So yes, it was just like being hit by lightning. 

“Off I go, hither and thither, stumbling up Indian Canyon and around the bend at Movie Colony, up Alejo Road to the front gate. I’d been there once for a fundraiser and I knew about the bougainvillea. It was everywhere. I remember having this thought about the gardeners who might have planted it back in the 50’s, maybe under Ava’s watchful eye, RIGHT? Gus and Ritchie is what I call them, and in my mind’s eye they were business partners, but sometimes, after a day’s work in the desert sun and a few cans of Schlitz, they were also fuck buddies….”

“She climbed over the Goddamned WALL!” exclaimed Joey, unable to contain himself.

“You fucking POOP! How dare you hijack my story!”

“She climbed over the wall and stole Frank Sinatra’s bougainvillea! STOLE IT!”

“Of course,” she added, already over Joey’s rudeness, “Frank hadn’t actually owned the house in 50 years, but still.”

“But still!” echoed Joey, looking at her with a fondness that was reserved for the few.

“But still,” she said, returning the look. 

“Yeah,” he said.

“Fuck you. You old POOP, you.”

And at that, Baker Street began to play.

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MISAPPREHENSION DUET by Graham Robert Scott

Even by nine a.m., the heat’s settled in like a blanket, calories by the zillions, welling out from laboring bodies and machines under the desert sun, trapped under layers of atmosphere and cloud and smog. Damp handkerchief in one clenched fist, Dale Brenner mops brow and crown. He aims his lips at the reporter—Gina? Tina?—and bellows against a cacophony of straddle carriers and trucks, of containers crashing into place: This freight’s all dead tires. Once it makes port, it’s on its way to ’Nam. A sideloader grinds by. As G(T)ina checks her phone, its driver gives Dale the bird. It’s a great deal. We don’t want this shit in our landfills, but Asia can’t get enough of it. G(T)ina interrupts, asks how many he employs. Our op? Forty-two, full-time. See, tires are mostly oil, yeah? So they burn ’em for fuel. Power cement factories with them— Annual revenue? Oh. Look, I’d rather not disclose that. I’m sure you understand. But, see, it turns out tires have some great byproducts, too, once you've pyrolized them. Crumb rubber and shredded rubber as construction additives. Carbon black— G(T)ina glances at her phone, again, and blood pressure swells as Dale squeezes his handkerchief behind his back. Hot date? Gonna write any of this down? She frowns up at him from behind wisps of gusted hair. A scribble goes into the notebook. Unclear whether it’s shorthand or doodle. Sweat builds on his face; in his pits; between folds of belly; in the crack of his ass. Far side of the yard, a truck engine roars to life. Dale leans forward, raising his voice to match, trying to smile at the same time, and looks as a result like he’s trying to eat her. It’s a win-win, see? Rare success story for recycling. Both entrepreneurs and environmentalists happy. Scribble. Gonna take pictures?  With frown and furrow, she shakes her head. Dale pulls his collar away from his neck to unstick it, let it breathe. Back in his office, a sheaf of legal paperwork rustles under the AC; he envies the document its location, loathes its existence. Now, China’s cracked down on imported used tires, which, I won’t kid, cuts off a big market. But Asia’s bigger than the Middle Kingdom, and we’re making new deals every day in other parts of that world. Exciting, yeah?  She performs an oh-look-at-the-time, tucks notebook away, extends a hand. Wait, is that it? So few questions. In particular, none about his recent EPA suit, which at first he took as a positive, a sign she’s not one of those reporters. But she hasn’t asked much else. It’s just, I thought this would be a nice story for your readers. And, he doesn’t say (because it’s understood, isn’t it?), also for his vendors and investors, show he’s back in the game, shit squared away, so they don't fucking bolt. But G(T)ina gives him that puzzled look again. Dale feels words tripping out of his mouth faster than he can edit them, as his face looms closer to hers. I mean, is this going to be a nice profile? Not a hit piece? ’Cuz I thought maybe this would be forward-looking, optimistic. We got a bright future here. Now I’m worried you only called because you wanted to write shit about that settlement deal. Regina—he remembers her name now, out of nowhere—retrieves her notebook. Her hand is smooth, without callous; her face, without wrinkle. Only now it dawns on Dale, maybe he’s misread how much she prepped for this visit.

Settlement? she asks, and clicks her pen.

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FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY by Julie Watson

Two weeks after Jane and Richard sent their only son Bobby to college, Richard lost his job. He’s been talking in his sleep non-stop ever since, nearly six months now. Jane is exhausted. She knows any sane woman would have exiled her husband to the guest room by now, or marched him into the office of a reputable sleep specialist. But for Jane, Richard’s new habit is revelatory. Since he started talking in the night, Jane has learned more about her husband than she did in the entire twenty-two years prior. 

Richard’s job search is going poorly. In order for him to sleep at all he first sought the escalating assistance of bourbon. Every clank of ice in the glass was another reminder of the bleakness of their situation. Richard’s drunken sleep was deep at first, his midnight ramblings nonsensical and humorous.

“We’re not getting a fourth cat,” he said one night with a firmness Jane found hysterical. Thanks to Richard’s severe allergies and disdain for pets in general (filthy and expensive, he said) they would never get a first. On another night, he sighed in a way that made Jane picture the disappointment on his face, so clear she was certain he was awake. Yet, when she moved to comfort him, he rolled over and said simply, “I know, but he’s a dumbass.” On still another night, she woke to Richard shouting, “the scrotum!” with William Wallace-style conviction. Jane was forced to bury her face in her pillow that night, biting down hard on the cool cotton sheets to keep from howling out loud.

With each passing week, the balance in their savings account dips lower, along with the number of Richard’s boxer shorts Jane runs through the wash on Wednesdays. When the bourbon stops working, Richard switches to a rainbow of over-the-counter pills and supplements loaded with scientifically-proven ingredients. With these, he begins to open up.

“I don’t want to fail,” Richard says.

“Fail how?” Jane asks, rising to her elbows.

Richard nestles his head into the pillow. “I’m barely a dad. I’m a half-assed husband.” The words appear in a voice that isn’t Richard’s, too supple and watery to belong to her precise, authoritative husband. “All I had was that fucking job.”

In the morning Jane tucks away his confessions like the expensive chocolates she hides in her sewing table drawer. The only sound at breakfast is the clicking of keys on Richard’s laptop, his angry, intermittent sighs. Jane buys more sleep supplements and another bottle of bourbon. 

“She never loved me the way I love her.” 

Jane has taken to coming to bed late, counting the cars that pass on the street until Richard begins to speak. Carefully, noiselessly, she leans in to hear.

“I’m just security for her, and now…” Richard trails off, smacking his dry mouth.

“Now what?” Jane says.

“Exactly.”

In his sleep Richard is someone else, by day he is exactly who he’s always been—making lists, creating budgets, complaining that Jane has purchased the wrong brand of mustard. 

“Expecting an interview any day,” he says, his voice hard with determination. “I might need you to take in my suits.” 

Jane listens to the old Richard and squints, trying to square the sound with man she sees in front of her, pale and shrinking under his bathrobe like a week-old balloon. She takes in his suits and buys the right mustard and waits for the new Richard to meet her in the night.

“What have I done?” 

Her husband’s words are crumpled like the balled newsprint he tosses into the fireplace. Jane can tell he’s crying. The same way she did when his mother passed away, or when he got that gash in his hand while cleaning the gutters, Jane touches his shoulder.

“Shhh,” she whispers, “It’s going to be okay.” 

Richard startles at the contact, his body flopping about like a fish on the edge of suffocation. Jane rolls away from his unpredictable limbs. When he sits up in bed a moment later she can see the whites of his eyes, still glossy and round with fear.

“Must’ve had a bad dream,” he says, commanding as the dark gray shadows around them.

#

Richard puts his bathrobe in the wash and tosses his sleeping pills in the trash. He rescues his running shoes from the garage and wipes them clean at the kitchen sink.

“Pity party’s over,” he announces. 

Jane cannot pry her eyes from the wastebasket. She sees only Richard’s rainbow pills, resting on a bed of discarded mostaccioli.

“I’m done with the drugs, done with the booze,” he tells her. “Getting back into running will help me start sleeping again.”

Running does help Richard. In no time at all his mood improves, his thighs harden and compact. At night he is silent.

“Feeling really good about my prospects with Whitman Courier,” Richard says over dinner one night. “Good feeling about this one.”

Jane is listening, but only halfway. She misses the night Richard and sees more than enough of the old one, his former arrogance wrung out and replaced with a fresh version in a sleek new athletic container.

While Richard is out running, Jane visits her doctor. 

“It’s just been difficult,” she tells the doctor, “What with Bobby off to college and Richard’s job search taking longer than we thought—”

Jane has looked in the mirror. She’s seen the dark rings of sleeplessness under her own eyes, her cheeks hollow with worry. She stays awake all night, but hears nothing more than Richard’s shallow breathing, the rhythmic hum of their four-bedroom, three bath suburban dream.

“And are we having trouble sleeping?” the doctor asks his clipboard.

“I’m afraid so,” Jane says. 

#

Jane starts slowly at first, unsure. Crushing the pills proves difficult, until she finds the mortar and pestle she ordered when she had designs on making aioli. Her first attempts are tentative—granules of powder sprinkled onto a chicken breast, a bit more stirred into the pudding she serves Richard for dessert. Perky with anticipation, Jane waits while he drifts into a still and wordless sleep. Richard sleeps so hard he is unaware he’s clutching Jane’s breast.

Slowly, Jane increases his dosage, searching for recipes to mask the taste. She changes the bed sheets twice a week, invests in heavier curtains. She fills their room with essential oils known to induce deep and uninterrupted sleep (or your money back). At last, Richard speaks.

“She’s taken good care of herself, but you want to know the truth…most wives get fat.”

Jane decides to research just how much is safe. She is no longer sure how many pills she is giving him, or how much it will take to bring the other Richard back. On a whim, she adds some to his early-morning protein shake. According to her findings, a nice, even release should yield positive results.

Richard returns early from his run, waving his phone in the air. 

“Just got a call from Chuck at Whitman,” he says, breathless and grinning. “They want to see me today. Right now.”

Jane opens her mouth to speak, but Richard is a blur. He grips her by the shoulders, kisses her firmly on the forehead, and makes his way to the shower. A short time later he is at the door in his perfectly-fitting suit.

Richard doesn’t get the job, at least not that day. The car accident leaves him indisposed.

“I explained the whole thing to Chuck,” he says in the emergency room. “They want to see me as soon as I’m feeling up to it.”  

Jane fusses with his blankets and cords, tells him their first priority is getting him well.

“I still just—I don’t know what happened,” Richard says, pulling at his temples, shaking away the cobwebs. Jane places a hand on his shoulder and strokes his hair until he falls asleep. 

The doctor tells Jane how lucky Richard is, if accidents can be lucky. Nothing more than a sprained wrist and some abrasions, he says, and Jane feels some relief.

“He’ll be a little stiff, so I’m sending him home with some heavier pain relievers today. Should have him back to his old self in no time.” 

Jane shakes the doctor’s hand and finds her forgotten smile.  

“I should mention,” the doctor tells her before he leaves. “You’ll want to be careful. Those pain pills will make him a little sleepy.”  

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PRAYERS FOR PIGEONS by Chris Wilkensen

On a bright summer morning, Edith craved something different to do. In the 1960s, without school, TV or a radio, she went outside and peered at the pigeon coop, maybe the only clear possessions of value that her father owned. She decided to say hi to them, the closest things she had to pets. 

Pigeons weren’t cuddly or pretty. But they were company for Edith, creatures that wouldn’t take out their frustrations on her and she enjoyed feeding them. Watching animals eat was almost like going to the movies. Edith picked up the cup inside the 50-pound bag of bird seed, making sure it filled to the top. “Breakfast time.” She opened the gate. One pigeon squeezed through the slightly open door because Edith wasn’t fast enough to feed them.

“You’re going to get me in big trouble, little bird,” she called out after it. While she had her back turned, another pigeon pushed out and flew into the sky.

“Not you too! Please come back, you have to come back! Father will notice that two of you are missing! Please.” She closed and locked the gate so no more could escape, vowing this was her first and last time feeding the pigeons. 

The more she yelled for their return, the more out of sight they flew. They had disappeared, just as she had sometimes thought about running away from her father. She scurried back to the house to make sure that no one saw.

Like most of the summer, Edith was alone during the daytime hours. Her father was at the store cutting up meat. Her stepmother worked a full, floating schedule between bakery clerk and office building cleaner. Thank God she wasn’t home because Edith’s stepmom might have told on her immediately. 

Edith wished she had a brother or sister around, never more so than today. They could have talked about what to do, how to split the blame, how to calm down her dad, something, anything. Edith locked up the house and walked to her friend Clare’s for advice. She knocked on her door, but her mother answered. 

“Hi there, Edith. I’m afraid Clare can’t play today because she’s at Vacation Bible School. You could’ve gone with her if you were Lutheran like us.” She smiled and shut the door in Edith’s face. 

But that gave Edith an idea, one she thought would actually help. She would go to her Catholic church and pray for the return of those two fly-away pigeons. Her father, who didn’t seem to like anything, didn’t seem to mind going to Saint Joseph. There, she saw him do things he never did anywhere else: kneel, cry, and, occasionally, smile.

So Edith entered the Catholic church, found a pew, and sat. She said in her heart the words to the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be hundreds of times during those hours. She also prayed directly for those pigeons, that they were safe, but most importantly, that they would return. Or that her father wouldn’t know they were gone. Everything would be OK then.

The sky dimmed to dusk. Edith’s tummy rumbled louder and louder, but she had no appetite. “It’s late now. You have to go, my child.” A nun said from behind, walking toward the front of the church.

When Edith felt the summer breeze, she got goosebumps. She knocked on Clare’s front door again because she had to be home from Vacation Bible School by now. Clare’s mother answered. “Do you have any idea what time it is, Edith? For heaven’s sake, go home!” The door closed in her face again.

Half a block allowed meant time for one more “Our Father.” Edith hoped they returned. When she arrived at the pigeon coop, she counted the pigeons. The numbers added up, including the two that left. They must have returned. A miracle! She skipped to the house, opened the doorknob that led to the kitchen. 

“There she is!” her stepmother called out. “Enough worry for one day. I found two pigeons waiting outside the coop when I got home. I put them back in and didn’t tell your father. Would you know anything about this?”

Before Edith could answer, her father came in the kitchen. “We were worried about you, that something happened to you. Gone all day.” 

Edith’s prayers, that either the pigeons would return or that no one would find out that the pigeons fled, must have worked. She was so happy she started to cry. 

“You have no idea how much you worried me by staying out all day and into the night. You’re my daughter, and I thought something happened to you. Don’t ever do this again.” Her father removed his belt, rolled it up ,belted her on the back. He started to count out loud while Edith prayed in silence. 

God, please let him get tired soon, Edith prayed on the inside, cried on the outside. It’s past my bedtime and he should be in bed. 

“Don’t be too hard on her. This is the first time she’s been out after supper. I’ll be in bed.” Edith’s stepmom walked out of the room. 

After her father counted to five, he put his belt back onto his pants. “Now go to sleep, Edith. I love you.” He turned off the kitchen lights. 

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THE FIRST ONE by Michael Wade

I got the digging part off the Internet. You can use spray or bait, but I don’t use poison on my land if I can help it. I read how in Texas they just dig 'em and fling 'em. You want a big sharp shovel. You go out a morning with no wind, before it gets hot and they get too active, and you slide the shovel right up under the hill. 

Then you fling the whole thing downwind, hard as you can. Let it fly apart. See, when they get separated from the queens, they just run around like fools til they die. And that takes care of that hill. 

Anyhow. I don’t want you to say nothing to nobody about the rest of this, T-Dot. All right?

This morning I’m down at the dam end of the pond and there’s the biggest nest I’ve seen. The hill was two foot high or more, three foot around. It’d take three or four shovels full to get it and after the first one I knew they’d be riled. I’d need to move quick.

I slide that shovel under and lift.

There was a face under that nest. Bone-white. Wide as the shovel. Great big black eyes and a narrow chin and nothing but a line for a mouth. And then something like a claw, like a crab or lobster but big, comes up below the chin and rubs over that face, like it’s trying to cover itself with dirt again. That claw kept rubbing like that, feeble-like. Them eyes looking right at me. 

It won’t no Halloween mask. It won’t no skull. It won’t nothing human or made by no human. It won’t like nothing I ever seen or you ever seen, neither. Clean and alive. No ants on it.

I don’t know. What I do know is that whole time I stood there, holding the shovel and froze cold like it was January, looking at that face and that claw rubbing over it, not one single fire ant touched me. You know I shoulda been covered up. They shoulda eat me alive. Why didn’t they? What was wrong with them?

It won’t no white rock. It won’t no damn grub worms or no mole that was moving in that ground.

It’s ten o’clock in the morning, T-Dot. And you know I ain’t touched a drop in thirty years.

What’d I do? Well I laid the shovelful gentle right back over it and I got in the truck and come here.

I’m going to let it be, that’s what. I reckon it ain’t hurtin’ nothing. Though part of me thinks I should’ve hit that face with the shovel hard as I could.

Something stopped me. Scared as I was I halfway felt sorry for it, the way it tried to cover itself again with that big claw. But them eyes. They won’t like no animal, or no human. Looking right at me. I got to thinking what if I miss with the shovel. Or what if that head is hard as it looks, like bone, what then? 

I don’t know if I done right. That thing controlled them ants, somehow. They didn’t touch me. Maybe it controlled me, too. That’s what I thought, right before I covered it up, just like it wanted me to do.

I couldn’t think of nobody to tell but you. I just felt like I ought to let somebody know. Just a feeling. In case…forget it, T-Dot. 

Forget it. Forget I said anything. Now I think about it, it prob’ly was a rock, crawlin’ with ants, the sun throwin’ funny shadows. That’s prob’ly all it was.

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MARTELLO TOWER / NATIONAL MUSEUM by Nate Kouri

Sweet memories: Ciara the star turnBroadcaster Dr Ciara Kelly—an ambassador for Dementia: Understand Together—pays a stylish visit to the 'Memories Are Made of This' show garden at Bord Bia's Bloom Festival, which opens today at 9am for four days at the Phoenix Park, Dublin.

Book with 'satanic pledge' was found in room of Boy B, Ana trial told

The copybook contained a drawing entitled "satanic pledge", a list of names, including Boy A and Boy B's names, and a list of rules. The rules included "no talking about Jesus or God, only Satan," the court heard. Boy B's father also said his son doesn't respect him and didn't want to "share his truths" with him. Boy B told Gardí he called it a "Satanist cult" because he didn't want people to join who he didn't want to join. It was really a homework club, he said. The accused, who were 13 at the time, have pleaded not guilty to murdering 14-year-old Ana Kriegel in a derelict farmhouse. Boy A has also denied a charge of aggravated sexual assault. The trial continues.

—The front page of the Irish Independent on Thursday, May  30, 2019

This is Iowa: Kids keep baseball game going as tornado touches down within sight near Montezuma.

Des Moines Register headline, the same day

How children watch scenes in the fire: flames rolling over, wheeling back into waves red and red and roped by black, flamefoam rising, spinning out into circled eyes (squeezing eyelids, batting out) spreading between, sticking under (the midnight curtain drawn).

Watching through the grass on my stomach, leaves like cornstalks tall above the children who look flat like shadows in front of the flames—skipping, linking hands, like silhouetted paper dolls spinning in a Zoetrope—I hear the squat multitude chanting and I am touched but not moved by a vision of where I used to live. Seeing again a fading footpath through the rice fields where a military marching band set down their trumpets, the sun slowly kneading its thumbs into the hot brass like clay: handleside by morning, spoutside by night. Leaving home, I passed the band sleeping, surprised (the band and I) their chests falling and falling mechanically like four lazy whiskey stills (or don’t they move?), at least like ferris wheels and I didn’t think about violence for more than a minute, the way I would have as a child when I could still feel the force of gravity dragging me by my center down until I was temptation touched so I would not move hidden in the rice field. A farm has become a place to hide to. How many rows of crops could they check? Not here where city girls pull out roots, giving his limbs more leverage, their fourdoors half-tilted in the plow’s path off to the side of the road. Or here where Boy A and Boy B are in the soybeans making marks on the stalks with their teeth like rabbits, doing things to each other so…completely unavailable to the adult imagination, things they’d never really believe, couldn’t even read if they were written down and printed prominently in the newspaper. And soon the boys will forget each other too, the uncontrollable sounds once forced from their red faces erased, yes, entirely.

Or here, the paddy rice where during the night lightning repeatedly struck the band’s bass drum, the bolts turning green as they touched down on copper screws, blowing out the drumhead hides with such bassy force that it drowned out the sounding thunder, bursting the snoring heads resting on each side, chunks of their skulls sent into the distant cornfields as their bodies were flung, limbs limply collapsing, into the bog of the rice paddy with a thick splash, water landing on the hood of a truck parked in the ditch of a nearby country road as mud swirled around what was left of them tighter with a boagrip tighter through the age of image and tighter past the century of hands, the four bodies hugged motherly close by fertile Iowa mud in the dark, drowned farmland that a thousand years later, drained and dried into a hill, would unveil them in a cauldron on a crannog, its alloy engraved with intricate animal designs, their right hands raised in blessing, left hands gripped to croziers or tillage spades, and their so-called discovery by a group of Newsweek reporters stranded by a broken-down fourdoor en route to a routine smalltown caucus report would lead to the corpses’ Caesarean removal from nature’s tomb and entrance into the whim of human designs, passed between towns in territorial diocese disputes and finally sealed—the mud vacuumed out of them, their prehistorical dandruff dusted off, leaving only muscly potatoskin shells with a few fully formed organs or limbs jutting out—by an art dealer in a plexiglass human-sized jewelry case with cute poems and crude drawings of the bodies from first and second-graders pasted under the museum display, passed idly by students pointing at a portrait of W.B. and yelping yeet yeet!

Or that’s what I would have seen at eight when I looked for drama between the flames when I knew all the chants and before I despised the rain.

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PURSUED BY FURIES: THE LURE OF THE UNCANNY IN FICTION AND FILM by Kevin P. Keating

Madeline and Sophie Ryan are identical twins. They are eight years old. They exude a rugged masculinity and are built like their merchant marine father — thick, solid, broad shouldered, with eyes so dark and glassy they seem to be made from perfectly polished pieces of obsidian. Mass murderers of spiders, flies, moths, and the exceptionally brilliant brush-footed butterflies that sail above the surface of the family swimming pool, the girls constantly hunt for easy prey. They’re also accomplished mimics who delight in doing impersonations of adults, aping their vocabulary with unnerving precision in a single singsong voice and then squealing with malicious, porcine laughter whenever their latest victim shoots them a weary and wounded look. They can be cruel to younger children but reserve the brunt of their wickedness for their long-suffering mother, relishing their roles as jailers and persecuting her in ways that only the most heartless of wardens can. Clever, calculating, supremely subversive, they understand intuitively that parenthood is a kind of indefinite prison sentence, one in which beleaguered moms and dads spend most of their days sequestered from other adults. To neighbors the girls look like a pair of wretched, half-starved urchins out of a folktale, feral creatures that search the nighttime streets for rancid scraps of food before seeking shelter in abandoned barns. They commit acts of petty vandalism. They may possess preternatural powers. They are darkly comic flourishes, or so I once believed, from my novel The Captive Condition (Pantheon 2015).

As I put the finishing touches on the book, I received feedback from several readers who said Madeline and Sophie reminded them of the eerie twin girls in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining. I was a bit mystified, perhaps even disappointed, by this comparison. I truly believed, at least to a certain extent, that the girls in The Captive Condition served as comic relief. Curious, I viewed the movie again for the first time in several years and became so intrigued not only by the iconic imagery of the hand-holding twins in their periwinkle puff sleeves and ruffle skirts but by Kubrick’s masterful storytelling technique that I decided to teach it in two of my college courses, Introduction to Folklore and Introduction to Mythology.

While performing the obligatory professorial research on the film, I learned that Kubrick, justifiably famous for his attention to detail, conducted his own survey of the horror genre and fell under the spell of “The Uncanny,” an essay by Sigmund Freud. The uncanny, claimed that cigar-chomping, glossarial jigsaw-solver of the human psyche, was the only feeling that was more powerfully experienced in art than in life. “If the horror genre required any justification,” Kubrick remarked, “this concept alone would serve as its credentials” (Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, Michel Ciment, Faber & Faber, 1999). 

Toward the end of his brief essay, Freud posits that we experience the sensation of the uncanny whenever a storyteller denies us access to our reality-testing faculties. By this he means that most reasonable people, when faced with a spooky situation and tempted by their “primitive impulses” to attribute perfectly natural phenomenon to some supernatural power, can always rely on their critical thinking faculties to quell any lingering doubts and reveal the mundane truth. For example, we may be lying alone in bed on a stormy night and hear a door creaking open ever so slowly. Our “primitive minds” warn us that a ghost is approaching and yearns to slip under the sheets with us and whisper a bloodcurdling lullaby in our ears. But because we are rational beings who have easy access to those creature comforts provided by modern civilization, we can flip a light switch and quickly confirm that a cold draft has blown open the door and that the rusty hinges need oiling.

As Freud writes, “For the whole matter is one of testing reality, pure and simple, a question of the material reality of the phenomena.” The difficulty only arises when a storyteller keeps us in the proverbial dark for a prolonged period of time and doesn’t allow the trembling protagonist, and therefore the audience or reader, access to a conveniently located light switch. In order to create and sustain a sensation of the uncanny, the storyteller must keep us guessing about the true nature of the fictitious world he has created. Freud writes, “For the realm of phantasy depends for its very existence on the fact that its content is not submitted to the reality-testing faculty.” And according to Freud the critic, as opposed to Freud the psychoanalyst, readers and audiences may retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, “a kind of grudge against the attempted deceit,” if they see through the ruse and react to it as they would react to real experiences. In this case, the intellect serves as a metaphorical light switch and exposes the storyteller as an incompetent trickster.

In Freud’s view the stories most capable of creating a sense of the uncanny are those in which the storyteller “deceives us into thinking that he is giving us the sober truth, and then after all oversteps the bounds of possibility” by bringing about events that can never happen. In the completely fabricated and precisely structured worlds of “once upon a time” and “long ago and far away,” we accept the impossible as being perfectly ordinary. No one ever questions the validity of the tale of an innocent maiden who suddenly awakes from a poisoned-induced sleep and then runs off with a handsome and well-intentioned prince. 

Similarly, in a body of literature that makes use of what Freud calls “poetic reality,” we may experience a sensation of gloominess, but because the nature of this world is still imaginary, though less imaginary than the faraway kingdoms in fairy tales, we do not experience the uncanny. Freud points to the tormented souls in both Dante’s Inferno and Homer’s The Odyssey, particularly the episode in which Odysseus makes the treacherous descent into the underworld to consult with the spirits of the dead, including the grief-stricken spirit of his own mother. In both of these epic poems, the moods are somber, the settings somewhat disquieting, but we cannot say they are uncanny.

For Freud the situation is dramatically altered when the storyteller “pretends to move into the world of common reality” [italics mine]. I believe this phrase, indeed this single word, is fundamental to our understanding of the uncanny. Through the slow and careful accumulation of minute details, the storyteller pretends to create a simulacrum of the world as we know and typically experience it, but from the very start he or she has something else in mind entirely. For example, at the beginning of The Shining, Stanley Kubrick gives his audience, and the doomed Torrence family—parents Jack and Wendy and their six-year old son Danny—a pleasant tour of the Overlook Hotel during a sunny afternoon in early autumn, making everything appear perfectly ordinary and familiar. Only after the hotel closes for the season and Kubrick turns his attention to the secret inner lives of his characters do uncanny feelings germinate. 

One of the earliest and most memorable harbingers of the uncanny comes shortly after the Torrence family is left to care for the now vacant hotel during the long, brutal winter. Jack’s son Danny, while riding his Big Wheel through the labyrinthine hallways of the Overlook Hotel, sees the figures of the twin girls and listens to their unnerving refrain: “Come and play with us, Danny. Come and play with us. Forever—and ever—and ever.” It’s interesting to note that Kubrick’s twins, though peripheral to the plot of The Shining, continue to occupy a central place in the minds of most viewers, maybe because Danny cannot possibly explain the presence of these unfortunate girls who have been badly butchered by their demented father, the previous caretaker Delbert Grady. The indelible image of these girls, purportedly based on a photograph by Diane Arbus (though Kubrick adamantly denied this), serves as a warning to Danny about the very real dangers he will soon face. 

Bruno Bettelheim, in his book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, argues that these fantastic stories can serve a trouble child and help him overcome life’s travails. “Psychoanalysis,” writes Bettelheim, “was created to enable man to accept the problematic nature of life without being defeated by it, or giving into escapism. Freud’s prescription is that only by struggling courageously against what seems like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence. This is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable.” The trick, of course, is to “master all obstacles and emerge victorious.” A resourceful child, Danny Torrence memorably manages to elude the same grisly fate as the Grady girls by entering into a hedge maze while his deranged, dipsomaniacal father pursues him with an ax. 

Throughout the film Kubrick uses mirror images as the primary means of unmasking, rather than concealing, repressed aspects of Jack Torrence’s persona. To establish this idea, Kubrick stages a scene early in the film. While eating breakfast in bed in front of a mirror, Jack reveals to his wife that he feels oddly at home at the Overlook. “It was as though I had been here before,” he tells her. “I mean, we all have moments of déjà vu, but this was ridiculous. It was almost as though I knew what was going to be around every corner.” 

Soon he begins to see ghosts in the hotel, and in every scene in which he confronts one of these spectral figures — the bartender in the gold ballroom, the deceptively beautiful woman in the green bathroom, the racist caretaker in the red bathroom — Jack is standing in front of a mirror. To fully grasp the significance of these ghosts, and all of the subsequent horrors the Torrance family must face, one must understand certain hidden realities. “The uncanny,” Freud states, “is something that is secretly familiar but has undergone repression and then returned from it.” It’s easy to see that the ghosts in the film are manifestations of past traumas, which are secretly familiar but which Kubrick renders as "uncanny figures" after they have "returned from repression.” For example, Jack Torrence's repressed alcoholism becomes the bartender, an uncanny figure who shouldn't exist but who manifests a "secretly familiar" repression. Similarly, Jack’s uninhibited lust manifests itself as the naked woman in the bathtub of Room 237.

Unable to face the terrible truth of his moral weaknesses, Jack begins to identify with these apparitions until he is in doubt about his own identity. Freud writes, “The subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which self is his, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own.” In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self, and thus we have characters who are to be considered identical because they may look or behave alike. There is also the constant recurrence of the same thing — the repetition of the same features, character-traits, vicissitudes, and — most importantly for The Shining — the same crimes. Freud explains, “These themes are all concerned with the phenomenon of the double, which appears in every shape and in every degree of development.” 

By referring to Freud's work, Kubrick seems to be making a larger metaphorical point: that the spectral images he presents to viewers are not supernatural or mysterious in origin, but rather, completely familiar. Freud cautions us that humanity’s horrors aren't something to be explained away with mysticism, ghosts, or magic, but to be fought off with logic and intelligence; nevertheless, we interpret the disturbing images in The Shining as bizarre, horrific and odd simply because Kubrick denies his characters — and therefore his audience — access to reality. His characters, because they are unable, or perhaps unwilling, to confront the troubling nature of their past experiences, fall victim to their own unconscious minds, which transform these buried memories into a series of warped and nightmarish images.

According to Freud it’s all a matter of intellectual uncertainty. Are we supposed to be looking at the products of a madman's imagination, “behind which we, with the superiority of rational minds, are able to detect the sober truth?” This is a distinct possibility, and yet our critical thinking faculties are incapable of explaining away our sensation of the uncanny. Storytellers like Kubrick know this perfectly well and attempt to manipulate our emotions by exploiting our uncertainty. We cannot be entirely sure whether the ghosts in the Overlook Hotel are products of Jack’s imagination or real apparitions. Our rational minds are searching for an explanation, but uncanniness is derived from the storyteller’s ability to make us doubt any rational explanations we might devise. The most successful stories deliver a raw, emotional experience, and in order to accomplish this goal, Kubrick used every tool at his disposal. 

“Primitive man,” Freud argues, “ascribes meaning to numbers, objects or events which are repeated.” He theorized that we equate things like repetition and patterns with “destiny” and “mysticism,” and Kubrick bathes his film in a semiotic language of repetition, hidden numbers, symbols and patterns, knowing that these images will likely lead to uncanny feelings when discovered. The audience is left confused and enticed by these mysteries and then attempts to bring them to light by creating meaning. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the imagery of “the double.”

But why is such a technique so universal to storytelling? One possibility, according to Freud, is that doubling is “a preservation against extinction.” He hypothesizes that the desire to transcend death led people in ancient civilizations to develop the art of making images of the dead in lasting materials, for example an Egyptian sarcophagus, so they could live forever and ever. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. For modern people, the “double” reverses its aspect; from having been an assurance of immortality, it has now become an uncanny harbinger of death.

This ultimately futile desire to make, or perhaps remake, the image of the dead in lasting materials is presented quite explicitly, and with tragic consequences, in the final shot of The Shining where doubling is used to extraordinary and almost vertiginous effect. As the film draws to an end, Jack Torrence undergoes a startling transformation of character until he seems to be composed of several different personalities and finally becomes a permanent part of the “haunted” hotel, memorialized in the unnerving 1921 photograph. The film’s self-referential ending highlights the ambiguity, or rather, deliberately confuses the distinction between reality and imagination. An uncanny effect can often be seen when reality (a caretaker in the present day) interacts with our imagination (the caretaker’s likeness in an old photograph). Freud says this is precisely the moment when our “infantile and neurotic elements” start believing in magical practices. We focus on mental realities and ignore the material reality. 

Despite The Shining’s bleak ending, Kubrick does allow Danny Torrence to escape from the hedge maze and reunite with his mother. As Bruno Bettelheim writes, “It is not that the evildoer is punished at the story’s end which makes immersing oneself in fairy stories an experience in moral education. In fairy tales, as in life, punishment or fear of it is only a limited deterrent to crime. The conviction that crime does not pay is a much more effective deterrent and that is why the bad person always loses out.” Bettelheim continues, “Morality is not the issue in these tales, but rather, assurance that one can succeed. Whether one meets life with a belief in the possibility of mastering its difficulties or with the expectation of defeat is also a very important existential problem.” 

Many commentators have noted that the true hero, when faced with an existential crisis, can only escape a terrible fate by coming to the realization that “the self” is an illusion created for the benefit of other people. We all craft stories about ourselves, stories that are partially true and partially false. In time they become semblances of an identity, but it is crucial that we recognize these stories as the different masks we wear in order to present—or to disguise—our true selves. The problem is just this: many of us are unable to identify with any degree of certainty a single persona that seems entirely authentic. Who are we when in the presence of our friends? Who are we with our parents? Our children? Our employers and colleagues? Who are we when we are alone? The more we think about this, the more likely we will find that there is no “I” at the center of our consciousness. The ego is a culturally conditioned fiction and in storytelling is often associated with the monster—a deceptive, selfish and self-seeking creature that spreads fear and destruction. 

One solution to this conundrum is to become egoless or selfless or, as Odysseus becomes in the episode with the Cyclops, to become Nobody. To be Nobody is not to enter some fantastic condition of egolessness. Rather, it is simply one’s willingness and ability, when the time comes, to drop the self, to let Somebody go and surrender to circumstances. As a reprieve from the cultural demands of egoism, it is important that we slip into a condition of anonymity from time to time. We always worry about what other people expect and want from us. Dropping the illusion of the ego can help us overcome these everyday concerns. Accepting that we are “nobody” can be a difficult and even frightening realization, but relying on pride and ego more often than not leads, at the very least, to profound disappointment. 

In The Shining Jack Torrence is an ineffectual husband, father, writer, caretaker, and former school teacher. Perhaps by becoming Nobody he can escape from these culturally conditioned and predictable roles. The problem, of course, is that Jack is deceiving himself more than anyone else in his life. Consumed by different aspects of his own repressed and twisted ego, he rapidly descends into madness, and this, I think, is the final point that needs to be made about the film.

Just as he uses ghosts to reveal disturbing aspects of Jack’s personality, Kubrick uses Jack to reveal something rather disquieting about human nature in general—namely, that the ego can be characterized by one basic rule: it always wants something. Thus, for the person driven by ego, life is characterized by chronic desire and chronic frustration. We are frustrated because so often in life we don’t get what we so desperately want. Jack wants to become a successful writer. He wants to have a drink and even says, “I’d give my fucking soul for a glass of beer.” He aches to posses the beautiful women in the bathtub. He wants to escape from his wife and child. Since these paths are not open to him, he naturally begins to repress his desires until they gradually transform into terrifying phantasms.  

Looking back on my own work, I can now see how Madeline and Sophie Ryan serve a similar function in The Captive Condition. The adult characters in my novel, fearful of serious introspection and therefore lacking in any kind of meaningful self-awareness, have a tendency to perceive the twins as devious little fiends and, later, as a couple of cajoling ghosts, mainly because the girls have an uncanny talent for revealing the moral shortcomings and the secret, forbidden desires of adults. At certain moments in our lives, our emotions can become asphyxiating clouds of uncertainty, and in a passage near the end of the book, I briefly make use of mirror imagery to acknowledge that, for many of us, determining the difference between what is real and what is imaginary can be difficult:

Some people, when they pass away, leave behind fond memories and wonderful legacies of love, but many more leave long trails of misery and despair, and when the bereaved claim to sense a presence floating along dark hallways or glimpse hooded figures rising up in shattered mirrors or witness fantastic apparitions advancing and receding above bogs and fens and festering swimming pools, they likely are perceiving the enduring gravamen of the dearly departed, a disappointment so profound that it somehow transcends death. So who could say for sure if the spectral figures that…floated above the streets of town were in fact ghosts or illusions conjured up by the drunk and disorderly revelers making their way home on New Year’s Eve. Madeline and Sophie wondered the same thing themselves: was this how ghosts were supposed to feel?

There can be no definitive answer to a question of this kind. We are now in the realm of the fantastic. The passage is meant to reveal more about the reader than the characters enacting the drama, but of course the whole art of the drama is to put into words and images those experiences people know are secretly true but haven’t yet noticed or are themselves unable to express. In this sense storytelling becomes a kind of meditation on the self. As Bruno Bettelheim puts it, “Stories also warn that those who are too timorous and narrow-minded to risk themselves in finding themselves must settle down to a humdrum existence—if an even worse fate does not befall them.” 

Only those who rid themselves of superstitious beliefs can see through the uncanny. Such individuals can shrug off deceptive sights, signs and repetitions, and perceive the underlying truth. In contrast, those who cling to the ways of our primitive forefathers are doomed to believe in the supernatural. Freud states that our ancestors’ fondness for mythology and fables is largely what causes our belief in ghosts, apparitions, and monsters. Thus, our current irrational beliefs are largely due to the irrationalities of our ancestors. They’ve been passed down from one generation to the next, much as generational violence has been passed down in Kubrick’s film. Jack Torrence, who clings to the ways of his predecessor Delbert Grady, reenacts the same heinous crimes simply because he conjures up ghosts of the past, which he uses to affirm his own existence. Freud cautions, “Unless a man is utterly hardened against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to these phenomena.”

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DEATH LAB by Howie Good

Air Like PoisonHey, did you see those sea turtles down there? I often see them, though not as often or as many as I did before there were boats, the bridge, some buildings, even a small amusement park. Wherever they go, the turtles seem to leave a trail of watery stools behind. The ocean feels a little sick right now. There’s actually too much sunlight. And it all comes from the same place, a place with air like poison, where you can view the millstones that early New Englanders used to crush Giles Corey to death for being a witch.Grandson (with Apologies to Werner Herzog) Now that you’re almost 8 years old, you have to know how to travel on foot. You have to know how to make fire without matches. You have to know how to catch a trout with your bare hands. (It’s fairly easy. You just have to understand how the trout thinks.) You have to know how to forge a document, let’s say a gun permit, in a country under military rule. You have to know how to open a safety lock – surreptitiously, of course, with burglar tools. Most important, you have to know how to tell at a glance night from other darkness.Lost in BlockbusterThere are places a person can get lost and not even realize he’s lost. I had to cross the creek by tiptoeing over a rotting tree, ignoring as best I could whatever that was I felt grabbing for me with big, meaty hands. Some of you actually believe in fight, fight, fight, the three worst things you can do. So it wasn’t just happenstance that no one but me happened to be there, or that it was night by then, or that everything was also nothing, a lot like when the next to last Blockbuster Video store on Earth closed. 
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MOTHER BUDGIE by David Cook

You push open the cracked old oak door and marvel as you step into the room. A whirlwind of budgies, of burnished gold, sunset red, ocean green and all hues in between, swoop down around your ears, chirping merrily, joy infused in each and every note. Others sing from up in the rafters while still more chirrup in colourful cages that line the walls from ceiling to floor. Being here lifts your heart.A woman approaches, clad in a shawl as bright as the birds that skitter around her. This is Mother Budgie. She is famous. Tourists come from all over the globe to visit her. She gestures you closer and says 'Welcome,’ the warmth in her voice reflected in her eyes. The budgies echo her greeting. 'Welcomewelcome,' they trill in chorus. She beams at them and several settle onto her shoulders and chirp 'Mommamommamomma.' Mother Budgie hand-rears every beautiful bird in her establishment and has patiently taught them all to sing these words. Their refrain is picked up by all the other budgies and the echoes of ‘Mommamommamomma’ are almost deafening. Amid all this, Mother Budgie simply smiles, a beacon of peace and contentment.As the clamour settles momentarily, she invites you to choose the birds that appeal to you most. You carefully select four, no, five; two the bright yellow of an undisturbed shore, two the startling blue of a clear sky and one the scarlet of freshly-picked cherries. Mother Budgie nods, then guides you through another door set in the back wall.This room is full of people laughing, chatting and eating. Merriment bounces off the stone walls. You sit at a table and wait for maybe twenty-five minutes as the noise of gaiety reverberates around you. Finally, Mother Budgie reappears, smiling as always, and places in front of you a delectable golden brown pie accompanied by soft mashed potatoes. ‘Enjoy,’ she says as she leaves. Five small beaks emerge from the pie’s inviting crust. Each is slightly open, trapped in silent song.Grabbing your knife, you stab the pastry surface. Rich, thick gravy oozes from the fissure and pools into the bed of mash. Another diner is admitted into the room. As the door opens and shuts you hear the cries of 'Mommamommamomma' from beyond and imagine more birds settling upon Mother Budgie’s shoulders.

You impale a chunk of meat with your fork and take a bite. It is soft, tender and exquisitely delicious, just as you’d heard it would be. Your taste buds croon with happiness. You dab your lips with a napkin and take another mouthful, already planning when you’ll return

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AL WAITS FOR RAIN by Jonah Howell

1

I haven’t worn glasses since I was sixteen, so I heard him before I could make out his features. “So you’re not coming?” Pacing back and forth at the corner of Ninth Street, he shoved the phone in his pocket without hanging up. Let the other guy do it.

He walked into a pizza shop, a narrow hallway between Ninth and whatever street runs behind Ninth. I followed. Pizza seemed wise: Forecasts showed a storm, but I was still scheduled for a long landscaping shift.

He stood in the doorway, a tall man, probably six-four but hunched to six-flat, and he kept intense eye contact. I assumed he managed the pizza shop and had been yelling at a no-show employee. I tried to relate. “Kids these days, huh?”

He responded with silent confusion, and a wide Italian man appeared from behind a mountain of pizza boxes. “We don’t open ‘til eleven.”

I left. Tall guy followed me now. “I don’t work there,” like he’d read my mind. “But yeah, I’m stressed out.”

His eyes glowed yellow, and the word, “stressed,” required serious effort. He sank onto a bench in front of the pizza shop’s neighboring laundromat and held out an enormous hand with knuckles like old brass doorknobs. “Abe.”

Looking up at a cumulonimbal colossus, I decided my shift would be canceled, so I leaned against a wall and slipped outside time. “Why so stressed?”

“My girlfriend overdosed on Monday.” He drained a Steel Reserve in a brown paper bag in one quiet gulp.

I have often been accused of pathological optimism. “Is she alright now?”

“The hell are you talking about, is she alright? She’s dead.”

I gave up. “Sorry about that.”

Embarrassed for me, he pulled a tiny book from his pocket. Prayers for Times of Hardship. “People tell me it’ll help, but I can’t get into it.” He flipped through it. The first and last pages were coated in names and phone numbers, and he had highlighted several of the intervening passages. “I want you to answer something for me.” He flipped back and forth, pausing at each yellow section. “Here. The bit with the star.”

Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.

“‘Son of David.’ Nobody’s managed to explain that to me.”

“The original verse, in Hebrew or Greek or something, probably read ‘descendant.’”

He looked at it for a while, nodding occasionally, then looked up as a beat-down Ford Explorer struggled to park parallel to us.

“That’s my niece.”

She smoked a long cigarette and yelled expletives at the cars in front of and behind her. Two kids with mid-length dreads sat in the back seat, calm and silent.

Abe yelled at her, “What are you doing with those two boys?”

She got out of the car. They stayed. She launched into conversation with Abe in an enervated whisper, so I walked to the coffee shop up the road and sat in a wicker chair three sidewalk-slabs away from an ACLU canvasser. In a neuter radio voice, he repeated to each passer-by, “Hi, I’m here defending civil liberties and human rights with the ACLU. Will you help me?” His white mustache ruffled the same way every time like an inched tape. Truly incredible. Rejection after brusque rejection.

After the thirty-seventh a man stopped, green bucket hat aflutter in the antediluvian wind. He looked about ten years older than the canvasser. His stone-blank face could have been a topological map. “Do you oppose the draft?”

“There is no draft.”

“Do you oppose it, though?”

“Well, we’ve recently forced the administration to reunite 2,173 Latin-American--”

“Do you oppose slavery?”

“Of course we’re against slavery.”

“How can you say you’re against slavery if you don’t fight the draft?”

“Sir, there is no--”

“I was drafted.”

“I thank you for your service, sir.”

“For my slavery, you mean? Good day.” 

He started to shuffle off, but the canvasser called out to his back, “Are you sure you can’t make a small donation to defend civil liberties?”

“If you don’t oppose slavery I can’t possibly support you. Good day.”

As he made his slow escape, a hoarse panhandler walked by with an unreadable cardboard sign. He fixed the canvasser with a knowing look and stepped close to him. “I hope you get it just like I do.” He walked a few steps then turned back thoughtfully. “Actually, I don’t hope. You will, just like me, I promise.”

2

Consider the geometry of our Ninth Street Rube Goldberg machine: 

On this block we have a line of forty-three rectangular sidewalk slabs, from the gutted skeleton formerly known as Francesca’s to Vintage South, whatever that is. Numbering from Francesca’s, the canvasser stands on slab four and faces the street. O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, weakly, weakly. 

My wicker chair sits on seven. In this freeze-frame, the Vietnam vet and his green bucket hat shuffle up the row, one foot in slab ten and the other lagging back on nine, turned slightly to one side. He plants his feet with every step as though the wind might blow him away at any moment. The panhandler has overtaken him. We see him paused, airborne, running, above fourteen, where Abe and his niece now reenter the frame, lumbering toward me. They have already parted to allow the Vietnam vet to shuffle between them. Outfold, infold. Like birth, the marble shoots on down the lines and curves. 

The two kids are nowhere. The Rapture, perhaps. If we focus, we see that shimmering translucent strings attach each character to the next, creating a drag on all our movements as storm clouds gather at both ends of the street, walls closing in, pressurizing. We are all Han Solo in the trash chute. The first faint snorts of thunder rattle the strings, and Abe’s eyes darken from highlighter yellow to old book yellow.

3

Niece plopped down in the wicker chair beside mine as Abe paced toward the street and back toward us. “Church said they had $130,000 in donations this month, but I’m still sleeping in the woods. How’s that?”

Niece recited, “Religion’s bad, but God is good. He sent Jesus to die for your sins, so there’s free will. It’s not religion; it’s something you believe.” She took a long drag from her cigarette and hiccupped and coughed simultaneously.

“I ain’t buying that bullshit. There’s something up there, but hell if I know what it is.” 

His shoes had no laces, so the canvasser didn’t join the conversation, and Abe ranted on uninhibited, pacing faster and swinging the book wildly.

“Grandma told us to believe in this man with a beard and all our problems would go away. Where’s he at?”

“You’ve got to change your insides.”

“I ain’t buying that bullshit. God can be good or he can be powerful. Pick one.”

Niece, exasperated and at the end of her cigarette, turned to me for help. I pointed at Abe. “Maybe he’s God.”

She lit another cigarette and walked up the road. By the time Abe realized she’d left, she’d passed the cyclery on slab twenty-eight and fished her car keys from her purse. Abe watched after her for a few seconds then took off his shoes with a sound like someone plucked the string of a homemade bucket-bass. He pointed to his grass-covered socks. “I’ve been sleeping in the woods. And that preacher took out a credit card reader midway through his sermon, had people line up, and told them not to swipe if there was nothing on the card.”

4

I wondered what Abe’s name was yesterday. I wondered what it would be tomorrow. He stared at his laceless shoes, and the canvasser stopped a hunched woman with a yoga mat, and the first drips of rain inflated the parched grass on God’s socks. 

5

A flashbulb of lightning illuminated the street, but the thunder shuddered several seconds later. Abe put his shoes back on. The tongue of the right shoe was under his foot, but he seemed not to notice. He walked back toward the laundromat, book open, highlighter in hand. Behind him, a new figure emerged from a CBD dispensary and stood next to the canvasser and yelled at a Lexus, “How’re you gonna have a nice car like that and can’t even park it? Disgusting.” He paused for a moment and leaned his head back before screaming so hard he doubled over, “Disgusting!” 

Still the canvasser didn’t turn his head but watched the Lexus roll out of his line of sight, his eyes bulging with loss. Abe had walked away and now stood statue-still on slab thirty-one, staring at the parking space his niece had occupied then gazing slowly up the street, down the street, and back at the parking space. He blinked several times, as though something were caught in his eye. He then gazed up the street, down the street, and back again at the parking space. Still unsatisfied, he blinked several more times and shook his head before gazing down the street, then up, then back at the parking space. He slouched back onto the bench in front of the laundromat. His right hand flipped the pages of Prayers for Times of Hardship twenty at a time while his left hand rubbed the bench and his eyes remained fixed on the parking space. Then it started to rain.

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