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                                Spring 2012 Issue

                                              

Flash Fiction:

 

Short Stories:

                        

 Prose Poetry:

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His Father’s Legacy
by John F. Dougherty

​

ALTHOUGH HE HAD BEEN DEAD for eighteen years, Ashley saw his father’s face when he looked in the mirror. He was the spitting image of his old man. It was hard to deny. They shared the same broad nose, the same thick lips, and he had his father’s smile. Ashley always hated his smile.

                                                                                        *

Ashley’s father spent his life drowning demons in a bottle of bourbon. He was a cruel man, twisted and broken. He left Ashley a collection of scars, but his mother bore the brunt of his wrath.

When he was young, Ashley found an old photograph. He didn’t recognize the girl in the picture. She was young and beautiful. She stood, contrapposto, holding a dandelion toward the camera with a wide smile seated in an expression of pure contentment: This was his mother at seventeen. The woman Ashley had known was joyless. Years of abuse had fashioned her into something small. She was a husk who stood idle as her husband perpetuated a cycle of violence.

                                                                                       *

Ashley’s father walked out for a pack of cigarettes one evening and was struck by a pickup returning home. A headlamp was out on the tan Silverado. He stood in the middle of the road and looked, head on, as the truck collided against his body. His father’s dying words were, “I thought you were a motorcycle.”  It was nothing profound, nothing cathartic, just the final thought of a dying mind. The driver showed up to Ashley’s home to tell him this. He had hoped to unburden himself. Ashley wondered if it helped the man. He really didn’t care.

                                                                                      *

Ashley could conjure his father with a word. He was a part of him, the worst part. He could feel him under his skin, clawing and tearing, trying to get out, trying to live again. Nearly two decades had passed and Ashley was still haunted by his father’s specter. It was his torment. Ashley resurrected his father when he was angry or frustrated. Sometimes he was able to quell the torrents of rage, but other times they would overwhelm him. He wanted things to be different. He wanted to lay his father’s ghost to rest.

                                                                                      *

Ashley stood looking out the rear window of his home. The first stars began to show their ancient light. The air was filled with the song of cicadas and the laughter of his children. His two daughters chased lightning bugs in the backyard. He felt a warm hand slide around his waist, another curled around his stomach as his wife hugged him from behind.

​

“Aren’t they beautiful,” she whispered in his ear. Ashley stared at his daughters swiping at swirling balls of light with an empty mason jar. He said nothing, just offered an empty smile. He reached into his well of emotions and came up dry.

                                                      

                                             #  #  #

 

John Dougherty works odd jobs to support his writing habit. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion Webzine and Apocrypha and Abstractions. He dedicates his free time to pursuing his passion, writing short stories from his home in Santa Barbara, California.

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Flannel Shirt
by Kristina Estebo     


HERE'S HOW it started:  I see myself cross the room, impassive, without concern or anger. I reach over to him and pull the matches from the pocket of his worn red and black checked flannel shirt. He doesn’t move or blink when I strike the match, but when I set fire to the flammable cotton of his shirttail, his eyes open wide in surprise and shock. As the flames grow, I watch him through the smoke and realize that soon the screams will begin . . . but not mine.

Dinner time. How sick I am of casseroles at five. I warm the baby’s milk, watch a movie I don’t like next to a dozing husband, then listlessly dump the dirty dishes into the sink. I haven’t bathed in days, maybe weeks. My greasy hair flops onto my greasier forehead, and I see the world through strings of despair. When we moved into the house, I loved most the first real kitchen I’d had in years; the blue tile floors, the matching mosaic pattern along the edge of the counters, the large window looking out onto the back yard.

Now I’m interested only in the contents of the liquor cabinet. I peek in and see that it contains a few bottles, mostly less than half full. J & B, Absolut, and Bacardi Gold. How much better I would feel if I allowed myself to drink and drink until lovely oblivion. I will wait until the household is asleep. Next to the kitchen the bathroom medicine chest beckons with its dozens of bottles of medications that didn’t work, prescribed by a well meaning, but totally clueless psychiatrist. She’s the one whose nose runs and who sniffles continuously throughout our 45-minute sessions. She’s too sick herself to really help anyone else. She’s from the Philippines, and she has a lovely name, Estrillita, and she is my age. Like me, she is married to an engineer. I wonder what her story is. I’d rather be her friend than her patient. Her advice to me has been not only useless, but also destructive.

As I roam the kitchen, I see the mousetraps set out behind the toaster, baited with a pretty poison named Warfarin; sounds like a traveler on the seas. Take the blue powder and drop a pinch in the baby’s bottle. No more dinners, no child wakeful through the nights. Now I’m screaming  . . .

He sends me to the hospital with four changes of clothing, a toothbrush, shampoo, makeup and lipstick, and a sewing kit filled with pins, hundreds of hurtful points. I can use them to let out the steam of my anger. Then a contract with the orderly: no violence to self or others. He takes away the pins and a compact with a glass mirror. What do they know of anger? How deep, how essential to the windings of my coiled personality.

Group therapy in a tasteful room furnished with puffed up chairs and roomy sofas. A large glass window on one side so they can see in, or so we can see out? I take the graceful wooden chair I’m supposed to sit on and slam it through the clear pane. Shards fly like vicious birds through a stormy sky. The glass-cracking sound is so satisfying, the sound of circus noise. I raise the chair to continue this carnival glee. Eleanor, who is even larger than I am, tackles me from behind. No, let me finish the job-I haven’t had so much fun since I went to the state fair with the kids so many years ago. Take your hands off me, I won’t go to the white room. No, you can’t stick me with that needle. Through the heavy air, I hear the screams of others, more victims of my rage.

 

Medication. They watch you swallow the pills. How easy to skip them under your tongue and fertilize the plants with them later. Blood levels don’t lie, now I get a shot every few days or so. Regular meals, better food than at home. Games at night. No one knows bridge, and I beat everyone at Scrabble. Assignment: write a letter to mom or dad. Tell them how you feel. I listen to the trite phrases, grade-school prose. They are crying, I am crying. Such sentiments are beneath me, the “I love you,” the “I can’t forgive myself,” the “why did he leave me?” Is this therapy? If so, I laugh, I thumb my nose. I call my daughter and tell her not to let the family know I am in here.

Queasy. They’ve poisoned me with their evil cocktails. I’m in a weathered boat on wavering seas. The sickness worsens as the day wanes. By sundown I curl into a fetal roll to minimize the gut cramps that strike with the tiniest of movements. The yoga cat-stretch position works better than the balled-up one. My cheek presses into the musty carpet and my knees curl against my rollicking stomach. I smell years of screaming, fearful, sweating inmates. The waves rise to storm height and I take the brunt of all the force in my digestive system, not in the nervous one.

​

My stomach and bowels shoot their foul juices in equal and opposite vectors, canceling the progress of my boat body, leaving me in the cross wake of conflicting currents. I wish to jump ship and I long to swim to safe ground. The waves come faster and more furiously. I suck in air before certain submergence.

 

I’m in a dizzy, liquid black storm of moving pain. I hear voices over me and feel the needle jab. No relief. I hyperventilate, and they make me breathe into a bag. What a funny cure for this sickening vertigo. I break out in pretty red lumps, raised bumps on my chest and boobs. More pills.

 

Endlessly later the seas abate. I sleep fitfully, invaded by cruel forces. I'll scream later . . .

 

The match,

A mighty little flame,
Spit checks the tender skin,
Shirt ablaze,
A cozy campfire fueled by flesh.

Red burns oozing,
The pain of my losing.

 

                                             #  #  #  

 

Kristina Estabo is a retired technical writer living in Northeast Wisconsin. After writing technical documents for 25 years she decided to try creative writing. She won a poetry contest with her first submission and since then she has been writing poetry, essays, fiction, and memoirs.

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Unformed
by Phil Temples

​

 

MOG RETRACTED ITS FOUR PROBOSCISES from the pool of warm, succulent nourishment from which it had been feeding for many cycles. Mog had no name for the thick liquid that sustained it. In fact, Mog had no name for any of the objects that occupied its world. Mog only knew that it felt satiated and content.

 

Mog did not know what it was. Occasionally, however, Mog paused from its feeding and other bodily functions to contemplate the meaning of its existence. But Mog’s attention span was short—it would grow restless and start to contemplate more immediate thoughts, like the location of the next feeding pool. In fact, Mog never really gave serious attention to its existence or to any other difficult questions. Mog simply knew that it was and that it felt content.

 

As it lay down to rest, Mog excreted a particularly large article. It felt good. The force of the particulate matter ejected by Mog made a tremendous noise, almost like a big explosion or bang. Hearing the sound made Mog feel even more satiated and content.

The particulate matter rapidly expanded, then cooled, coalescing into many parts to form the known universe.
                                         

                                               #  #  #

 

Phil Temples has written flash and short sci-fi/fantasy for nearly twenty years for his own enjoyment. This is only his second submission. He works as a computer systems administrator and lives in Watertown, MA.

 

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The Perfect Switch                   
by James Carpenter

​

 

ELI WENT INTO HIS ROOM behind the kitchen and pulled down the shoebox from the shelf above his clothes rack. Trembling, he put the shoebox on the bed and took his hunting knife with its stained leather sheath from the box, then fumbled around for his whetstone and laid it and the knife on the bed and put the box back on the shelf. Sitting with his back against the headboard and the whetstone across his skinny legs, he drew the knife in slight, gentle crescents along the length of the stone, first left and then right, shaking a little less after every stroke, each singing curve across the stone identical in motion and speed, the rhythm of steel brushing stone familiar and hypnotic. When he couldn’t make the knife any sharper, he sat completely still for a moment, then threaded the sheath onto his belt, put the whetstone in his pocket, and walked back out onto the porch.

 

His father hadn’t forgotten. What took you so long?

 

My knife needed sharpening.

 

Get going then and be quick about it.

 

When Eli was smaller, his father would rise up in his rages and break a branch from a tree and rip the twigs and leaves from it and grab the boy and lash him with it. Eli, his arm clinched in his father’s fist, his legs flailing and digging at the ground, vainly struggled to wriggle from the slicing blows, wailing, Stop! Stop! until his father, his anger exhausted, threw the switch down in disgust and tromped off, leaving the boy quivering and whimpering on the ground, snot greasing his face.

 

It eventually happened that after Eli had committed some vague infraction, his father flared up from his chair in a temper and yelled, Go cut a switch! Confused, Eli just stood there.

I said, Go cut a switch!

 

Thinking maybe his father was in some kind of rare teasing mood, Eli went out to the side yard and twisted off a thin branch hanging down from the willow and took it into the house and handed it up.

 

This ain’t no fucking joke!

 

His father went out and came back holding a seasoned length of dead oak, free of bark, bleached and hardened from months of lying in the sun, an inch and a half thick at the base and a yard long. When he beat Eli with it, it didn’t sting, but exploded in his legs and backside in thumping pain beyond anything that Eli could have imagined and rather than raising white welts on his skin, carved bruises deep into his flesh. After that, Eli’s plight when so charged was to find a switch with heft and stiffness enough to satisfy his father, but light and supple enough to inflict the least amount of pain.

 

A young woman opens a window in a room at the back of her house. Her six-year-old son wants to know what is happening, but she hushes him. She whispers to him to run up the road to the neighbors’ and tell them she needs help. She gently sets him on the windowsill and tells him to turn around and jump and be careful. He tries, but he slips and scrapes his back on the sill and twists his knee as he lands. He bloodies the palms of his hands as he tries to break his fall in the gravel flower bed below the window. His mother whispers, Run! But be quiet! He is half-way up the hill when he hears his father yelling his name. He turns and sees the man standing in the middle of the macadam road, his legs spread wide, swaying, his face twisted and flaming like a newly kindled fire bashing itself against the furnace’s mica door. Get back here!, he yells. The boy wants to keep running, not just for his mother but from fear of the man. But if he does, he will pay in pain, so he turns and walks back down the hill. His father drags him into the house and lifts him by his arm, wrenching it so that it will hurt for days, and sets him on the counter by the sink and tells him not to fucking move.

 

A hedgerow abutted the property and ran for a quarter mile or so, marking the line between two farmers’ fields that lay between this place and the woods. Red maples and white oaks grew along the line and a few birches and some poplar. Dead and rotting logs lay among the living trunks. Eli started with maple saplings, the young shoots he could most easily reach. None held a branch that satisfied both his conditions, so he walked on, passing through the entire length of the hedgerow, testing every branch he could reach, and on into the woods.

He ranged for miles through stands of oak and pine, chestnut and elm, hickory and locust, always testing. He climbed up into the thick limbs of a sycamore, trying every branch, searching for hours for a stick perfectly proportioned. He climbed back down and shinnied up the tall, straight trunk of a white pine, gauging every inch of it, working through the night under moonlight. But the lower branches snapped too easily and those high in the black sky were too yielding or crooked and he came back to the ground empty handed.

 

A small boy cowers beneath the table in the kitchen, watching his brother’s beating. He’s using the razor strap this time, the purple leather doubled over so that he holds both ends in his calloused right hand, which is better than the times he holds the bottom with the brass swivel at the free end. The boy holds his breath every time the strap swings up into the air, as if through his own inanimation he might suspend it there forever, but it spirals down ever faster, the intervals between the awful cracking sounds of leather on the toddler’s dungarees briefer and briefer so that in the end they and his brother’s screams merge and become like the sound of trees cracking apart in a great, dark storm. The boy watches until his brother’s wails become heaving sobs and the sobs silence, and it is his turn. He tries to run, but he stumbles and hits his face on the jam of the open kitchen door and is already bleeding when the strap whistles through the air above him and he knows that he will get the brass end, and the panic in waiting to be struck is as terrifying as the beating itself.

 

Weeks after he began, Eli found a candidate in a grove of birch standing as straight as the teeth of a comb, their leaves golden against a sapphire sky. The diverging halves of one young sapling’s forked trunk defied each other in every possible way: One slender and lithe, the other thick and stolid. One arrayed in absolute white, the other blotched with disease. One straight as the horizon, the other deformed. He slipped his knife from its sheath and held it at the very center of the fork and thrust down so that the sapling split exactly in two and the healthy twin fell cleanly cut to the ground. He measured an arm’s length of branch and then a little more and sliced it off. Sitting on the ground, he held the stick in both hands and slid his palm along the papery bark, feeling it to be as true as his eye had seen, without lumps or knots of any kind. He pressed the blade under the sapwood and unwound a bit of bark. With growing patience and conviction, little by little he scissored the wood from its skin. But just as he thought he was about to finish, a cancerous blemish appeared a few inches from the end, a black spot under the bark where a cicada had laid her eggs. He threw the stick into the brush and started walking again.

 

In the first decade of his search, Eli found a dozen prospects, but each turned out to be flawed in some way: With nascent twigs straining to bud from beneath the bark. Or with a bulge in its taper that could not be whittled away without distressing its symmetry. Or a healed laceration threatening to reopen itself. He found a sugar maple with a perfectly even branch high up from the ground, but when he opened it up, saw that the grain was braided and twisted so that the branch would not sing when swung through the air but cough and sputter. He discarded them all and walked on. Between each discovered possibility he took the whetstone from his pocket and honed the knife’s edge until at the edge’s very limit it was ground to nothingness, and being without presence, it could slip like a ghost beneath a stick’s bark and into the grain and carve and shape the wood with scarcely any effort at all.

 

After a few centuries, Eli no longer needed to cut a branch and remove its bark, or even to touch it, to know its essence. He could judge the flex and weight, the color and the texture of the grain, even the age, of any piece of live wood just by looking at it, and in time, he didn’t even need to look—he could know the soul of a branch simply by standing beneath it.

 

Entire forests grew up and died around him as he journeyed, new growth replacing them and dying in their turn. From lush hills he saw cities in the valleys below rise up in bustling glory and then fade and crumble. He sometimes sheltered himself in their rubble, places of seclusion and retreat upon which he could sit and contemplate his task and where he would write his name in the tablets of dust they were crumbling into. There came a time when fire ringed the horizon and all the forests of which he was then a part blazed up and disintegrated into ash, and there flowed a long span of darkness and then ice and an eon of cold in which he found no cities at all. He walked over unending expanses blanketed with scattered bones through which the wind moaned, resurrecting their ancient anguish in lingering, bitter melodies, the bones splintering beneath Eli’s feet.

 

You can hear the uncertain steps of a man descending the stairs. You can hear him stumble against the wall and you can hear the railing creak as he works his way down, a fragment of him at a time coming into view, as if he is emerging into the world from some spectral, timeless place. He wears a checkered sport coat a size too small over a brown pullover sport shirt. His khaki slacks are worn in the knees, his shoes and belt mismatched. He steadies himself at the kitchen table. His wife stands back from him, her children behind her. He sees her and says, Why didn’t you wake me up and why ain’t you dressed? You know I wanted to go dancing. And she says, You’re in no shape to go anywhere. He shoves past her and says, Fuck it! I’ll go by myself. He staggers over to the door and looks for his car keys on a nail hammered into the wall, but they are not there. He feels in his pockets and looks on the floor and then goes out into the mudroom to look in the pockets of his work pants. He comes back and says, Where’d you put my keys? She tells the boys to run and says, I didn’t put them anywhere. He yells again, Where are my fucking keys? She begins to cry. I don’t know, I don’t know. He pushes her again, harder this time. Where did you hide my fucking car keys! He slaps her across the face and screams, You know I wanted to go dancing! She falls and he gets down on top of her and straddles her chest. She tries to slap him back, but he puts his knees on her shoulders and his full weight and she kicks her legs and the skirt of her house dress flares up about her thighs and the boys see the spot of red on her underwear. He slaps her face over and over from side to side and then punches her again and again. Where are my keys? Where are my keys? Where’d you hide my fucking car keys!

 

The forests returned and Eli walked on. Orion entered the zodiac and wandered out of it, his bow unbent and his figure dissolving into the spray of stars around him and new gods replaced him and were in their turn replaced. At the end of these cycles, Eli found his perfect switch among the branches of a young hickory standing alone in the very center of a meadow filled with swamp candles nodding like yellow-robed supplicants. Reverently, he cut it from the tree and meditated on its perfection for a very long while, cradling it like an offering.

 

He began slowly, shaving the bark from the heartwood, removing from it all that was alive, leaving behind only what was useful. A century passed before he began to carve the switch out of the branch, redeeming it from its prison, the switch that had always been there, patiently awaiting its release before the tree was even a seed, before he had even begun his search. He sculpted the shaft into a compound curve so that when wielded, the strength in its middle thickness and the strength in the bearer’s wrist would also be compounded and flow into the thin tip and quicken the blow. He carved a handle at its base, with a hilt and a bulbous knob at the very end to keep the switch from slipping from the hand. Every stroke of the knife removed all and only what needed removing. He kept the whetstone on his knee and drew the knife across it after every cut.

 

When the switch was finally free, he set it aside and fashioned a snare from a root of the hickory. He set the snare and caught a young rabbit, but the animal was imperfect and he freed it, still alive. After catching thousands of rabbits and squirrels and possums and raccoons, he held one whose skin was unblemished and altogether innocent, and he killed it. He laid the carcass on the ground and holding it by its hind legs, slipped the knife under the fur and sliced downward to its breastbone, the knife finding the precise place between skin and cavity where nothing internal could be ruptured. He reached into the belly and pulled out the steaming offal. Pushing his fingers up into the animal’s chest, he drew out its heart and lungs. He twisted its neck until it broke to get a space between the bones through which he could slip the knife and remove the head. Setting the head aside, he cut off the animal’s feet and skinned it, then scraped the hair from the hide and rubbed it with a pine cone until every bit of remaining stubble was gone. He took the head and pried off its jaw, holding it like a bowl. He mashed up the brains with the handle of his knife and with his fingers rubbed the paste into the skin and wrung it out and set it in the sun to dry. When the hide was malleable and ready, he sliced it into thin strips and wove them in a crosshatched pattern around the switch’s handle.

 

Eli picked up all that he had made and looked about for a stone with which to adorn the switch. He found it miles and years away along the edge of a small stream iridescent with blue and silver fish—a small round stone, green and translucent, flecked with black specks, as if it had been spattered with fossilized blood, the record of a distant, forgotten violence. Using a short length of stout oak as a mallet, he took a splinter of flint and chiseled a hole through the stone, the whispers of the freshet harmonizing with the soft drumming of wood on stone. He polished the stone with sand until its surface was as slick and glazed as the fish in the water, then threaded it with the last strip of tanned skin and tied it to the switch’s handle, a thong through which the hand would hold the weapon and by which the hand and weapon would be inextricably intertwined. When all his work was accomplished, Eli sat in the stillness of air and water and forest and light, and lost himself in their ever changing transmutations into one another and knew a long season of repose.

 

A slip of a boy emerges from the woods, a hickory switch in his hand. He walks across the ragged grass toward a man who sits in a porch chair next to a decaying picnic table. Rust pushes through the chair’s black paint, and bits of the colors it once was flake off, green, brown, and red. The boy stops next to the table a few yards short of the man who says, That was pretty quick—you sure you got a good one? The boy hands up the switch but says nothing. The man’s jaw sets hard and the lines of his face draw tight against his skull. The man trembles as he rises. The boy turns from the man and kneels, bares his back, and waits for the first lash, his eyes tightly closed, his breath quick and shallow, his face white as bleached bones. And then the upstroke’s hissing whine and the calculus of the driven arc and finally the slicing into flesh, the boy bleeding in utter silence, the man’s fury pure and everlasting.

 

                                                 #  #  #

 

Jim Carpenter began writing fiction four years ago after a long, eclectic career in education, business, and information technology.  Since then he has placed stories in a number of journals including Fiction International, The Long Story, Chautauqua Literary Journal and Fifth Wednesday Journal.  One of his stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and in 2009 Descant awarded him their Frank O'Connor Prize.

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The Chief
by Donald Dewey

 

CALLAGHAN MET THE CHIEF during a theological seminar with himself. He had been discussing belief in God, noting how he regarded the problem of the deity the way a spectator viewed a magic show --- astounded by what he saw, at an absolute loss to understand a jot of it, but equally confident he would get over his amazement as soon as he grasped the trick involved. It was at that moment that The Chief intruded upon the seminar.

 

At first, the Indian was all chiseled features and black braids --- an old nickel head. But over the following weeks he gained details with every appearance, ultimately filling out to about 50 years, 6 feet and 200 pounds, a Venetian blind of buffalo bones over his chest, a body-long calico blanket, a hunting lance in his hand, claiming Lakota Sioux origins, and revealing that he had three sons and five daughters on a reservation in South Dakota. The one particular he denied Callaghan was his name. Whenever the question arose, The Chief hefted his lance in a menacing way and made Callaghan see how severe his profile could become. Not wanting to irritate the man unduly, Callaghan agreed to know his new friend merely as The Chief.

 

For awhile, The Chief was content to reply to Callaghan’s actions, words, and thoughts, rarely volunteering more than approval or disapproval to the agenda of the moment. Just as he conveyed displeasure through a deliberate turning of his face for accenting his pointed nose and high cheekbones, he registered enthusiasm for a Callaghan notion with a combination nod and grunt. Callaghan went through modest streaks of both responses, sometimes seeming incapable of doing anything to please The Chief, then, the opposite, feeling completely one with the man’s desires. In good streaks or bad streaks, though, he was constantly surprised by The Chief’s reactions, never knowing from one thought to the next what emotion he was stirring. If this could be disorienting, it also made for a flexibility Callaghan hadn’t experienced before. Because The Chief was unpredictable, Callaghan felt he could be, too.

 

Not that practical restraints vanished altogether. For one, there were Callaghan’s broodings on the most appropriate public forum for introducing The Chief into society. Back and forth for weeks between his apartment and his job as the night watchman at Sardi’s funeral home, he evaluated the candidates down to their shoelaces, finding each wanting in some important way. Typical was the prejudice posed by his employer, Joe Sardi. Comfortable as he had been for 25 years vacuuming the man’s carpets, replacing his candles, and straightening out his Mass card racks, Callaghan had also had to make peace with Sardi’s skeptical attitude toward the spiritual, the inspirational, and the invisible. However understandable it was as an occupational hazard, the bottom line was that what Sardi couldn’t embalm didn’t exist for him.

 

In the end, Callaghan decided to unveil The Chief at Duffy’s Tavern and Fine Wines. It turned out to be the right choice. There wasn’t even need to remind Gregory and Billie Duffy and the regular malingerers around the short arm of the bar that a significant majority of children born in New York City (93.3 percent, he thought he had read somewhere) had enjoyed the companionship of some invisible friend in their pre-teen years. For her part, Maggie Pierce confessed to having kept her Invisible Brother around until she was 25, adding that she still suffered bouts of despondency for having cut him loose. Billie Duffy didn’t go that far, but she paid so much attention to Maggie Pierce’s tale that Callaghan suspected she too had once been close to a spirit companion. As for Gregory, once over his knee-jerk sarcasm, he had to nod philosophically at Maggie’s opinion that everybody would have been better off with an invisible friend. “On the subway alone,” as Maggie observed, “it’d end all your shootin’s and knifin’s. Instead of you sittin’ there and crackin’ wise to some passenger and gettin’ yourself killed, you could keep it between you and your Invisible Brother. But where’s the politician to propose a cheap idea like that? They don’t get their graft from somethin’, they don’t want to hear about it.”

Once he had broken the ice for The Chief at Duffy’s, Callaghan met only the most foreseeable resistance. An old crab like Miles Harkleroad, for instance, hadn’t countenanced Jackie Robinson in major league baseball, the United Nations in Manhattan, or the Chinese anywhere on the planet, so he was hardly out of character in saluting Callaghan’s every entrance at the bar with a cry of “Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Here comes the cuckoo bird!” Mary Nesbitt was just as predictable in her dire warnings that the psychiatry trade might face bankruptcy if Callaghan didn’t begin spending time on its couches. And then there was the afternoon bartender Elgin, who even under normal circumstances worked the taps with the snarl of a highway patrolman: He began to demand Callaghan extend his hand steadily before being served and refused to set out extra beers for The Chief.

 

But Callaghan didn’t mind the likes of Harkleroad, Nesbitt, and Elgin. More worrisome was that, shortly after being introduced at Duffy’s, The Chief abandoned his taciturn ways in favor of issuing orders. It began one night at Sardi’s when, as Callaghan was relaxing in the Bainbridge Room with his favorite cheese sandwich, The Chief suddenly commanded him to share his food with the casket so that Mrs. Heinz could have a bite in the next world. Callaghan snorted at the notion that Havermayer’s deli concoctions were part of Mrs. Heinz’s after-world beliefs, but The Chief was intractable. It took all of Callaghan’s fortitude to put off the Sioux that night, then to ignore his sullenness over the next 24 hours.      

But two days later he proved more vulnerable when The Chief demanded he reverse a lifetime of model civic behavior by not returning to a corner trash basket to gather up the Juicy Fruit wrapper he had caromed off the rim and had left glistening on the sidewalk. Hurrying away from the mess behind him, Callaghan felt the shock of an outlawry as reviving as it was shaming. The gist of his sensation, as he worked out that night while vacuuming Sardi’s vestibule, was this: The Chief couldn’t have been the only human being not impressed by the city littering code, ergo there was more to the world than the neighborhood Callaghan had known all his life.

 

Callaghan found his conclusion as seductive as it was frightening. It was much stronger than the pull he had felt 35 years before when Ida Fleming had implored him to give up his bachelor ways and to move with her to her late father’s house in Newark. For Callaghan, having to acknowledge a world beyond the borders of the neighborhood meant more than trafficking with strangers; it also meant paying greater attention to the neighborhood people --- following the lines of their stories out into other regions of the country where they had come from. And daunting as the challenge was, raising the white hairs on his arms when he contemplated it, he got down to it. He pried more scrupulously into Maggie Pierce’s adventures with her Invisible Brother, into Gregory’s recollections of working as a merchant seaman in the Indian Ocean, and into Mary Nesbitt’s gratitude to the first psychiatrist who had prescribed pills for her depression. He listened more dutifully to Harkleroad’s explanations of how the Chinese Communists had taken over the city library system and to Billie Duffy’s nostalgia for a young Mary Tyler Moore. He assumed a more responsible vigil over his funeral home charges, too, confining his beers and snacks to the vestibule reception desk and learning of the hundred and one pains and tumors that had brought the dead to Sardi’s. He found himself becoming monitor, eavesdropper, and sneak, and managing the transition so smoothly he felt he was recovering natural skills squandered for too long.

 

But not even then was The Chief satisfied. The Indian’s orders turned more insistent and more practical. Callaghan soon began feeling surrounded --- by The Chief inside him and by the regulars at Duffy’s and Sardi’s outside him. He tried to be graceful about his predicament, giving one side its due without acting curt toward the other. For example, he saw little harm in obeying The Chief’s command one night to switch the flowers for Mr. Carabella from the Marlborough Room to the Witherspoon Room. Nor did he think it so outlandish to follow the Sioux’s instructions another evening to go marching out Sardi’s front door, parade up and down the dividing line of the avenue, and dare the after-midnight speed demons to run him over. On the other hand, he didn’t listen a second time to an order to pick up the bar knife used for slicing lemons and limes and take Elgin’s scalp. As he saw it, the difference was between reasonableness and extravagance; and for all the commands flying at him and out of him he remained the ultimate judge of which was which.

 

When both sides noticed what he was up to, they increased their pressures, wanting him exclusively. He was flattered, but only briefly, and resorted to counter-measures. With The Chief he started speaking Lakota, ignoring the Indian’s anger at not having his orders communicated intelligibly to the neighborhood people. With the crowd at Duffy’s and the avenue shopkeepers he cut off any jabber that didn’t recognize the wisdom he had acquired from tales of reservation life in South Dakota. His subtlest tactic he saved for the dead at Sardi’s --- reminding them as often as he could that wherever they were headed, it wasn’t going to be South Dakota or the neighborhood.

 

Callaghan understood when The Chief began to thunder threats at him and when Duffy’s regulars, including Gregory himself, took to greeting him with reluctant nods and then left him alone over his beers. Even by his own reckoning he had gone farther than ever, certainly farther than Ida Fleming’s father’s house in Newark, and yet not far enough, attempting the impossible feat of serving two masters at once. The fact was, what he grasped had to be incommunicable to make an impression and what he was able to communicate only bewildered others. It was a dither of a situation, but there it was. He could hardly go back on himself in the bargain. Being ignored, scolded, fired, evicted, and then institutionalized all struck him as par for the course, as did his total lack of persuasiveness in repudiating the united voices raised against him.

 

But to the end Callaghan maintained his balance between the inside and the outside, and won respect for it. The Chief remained at his side the last couple of weeks, issuing orders even he knew would not be obeyed. And when Callaghan finally succumbed to what was diagnosed as a brain tumor, Maggie Pierce was at his bedside.

 

Back at Duffy’s Tavern and Fine Wines that evening, Maggie Pierce also recounted to the other regulars Callaghan’s last words. “He was ravin’ on about believin’ in God,” she said with a conspiratorial whisper that could have been heard across the street. “And then he suddenly goes very quiet, looks up at me, and says: ‘It’s me, Maggie. I’m the magic trick.’”

Even Miles Harkleroad agreed that deserved a toast.

 

                                      #  #  #

 

Donald Dewey returns to The Zodiac Review, following his contribution of Calmato to our last issue.  He has published 30 books of fiction, non-fiction, and drama, and has had some 30 plays staged in the United States and Europe. He has also contributed scores of stories to magazines and other periodicals.

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The Man Who Prepared Himself for Death

by Allen Kopp

 

I’VE ALWAYS LIVED a thousand miles from the ocean, so it’s rather a novelty for me to be able to stand on the beach with the surf lapping at my feet and look out at the endless horizon where water meets sky. At night when I get into bed, I can hear the waves, which for me is the sweetest kind of blankness to drop off to.

 

I have a beautiful room—more of a suite, really—on the eighth floor. Except for bellboys, waiters, and the maid who picks up in my room in the morning, I haven’t spoken a word to anybody since I’ve been here. I’ve almost forgotten what my own voice sounds like, which is altogether fine with me.

 

I gave my son, my only living relative, what I thought he deserved. When I gave him the keys to my house and car, I told him I was going away and never coming back. He asked me jokingly if I was going on an expedition to another planet and I told him that, yes, in a way I was. He could sell or keep all my possessions—it made no difference to me. When he could see I wasn’t joking, I thought I saw a flicker of concern pass over his face; it lasted only a second and then was gone. We shook hands whenever we parted as if we were business partners instead of father and son.

 

On Friday evening I get dressed and go down for dinner. The restaurant is an enormous room—I’m told it used to be a ballroom—with a thirty-foot-high ceiling. The outside wall, including part of the ceiling, is all glass, giving the illusion that one is both indoors and outdoors at the same time. The only difference is the tropical plants outside are growing in the ground and inside they are in huge planters. Off to the side is a pianist on a little raised platform. One has to twist one’s head all the way around to get a glimpse of him. He plays softly and tirelessly from the French repertoire: Ravel, Satie, and Debussy.

 

Everybody in the restaurant is seated alone. I suppose it would be possible for two or more people to sit together at one table, but nobody ever does. Something else that you might find peculiar is that everybody is facing the same direction, toward the glass wall. And, since everybody is a party of one, there is no conversation except with the waiters who move efficiently among the tables in what seems a sort of dance.

 

The dinner with its various courses takes upwards of two hours. In all that time I can’t help but notice the people in my line of sight, although all I can see are backs of heads and the occasional profile. They are mostly very ordinary people, like me; people you would see on any street in America. There are the well-heeled bottle blondes and the middle-aged men who don’t wear their clothes very well because of their lumpy bodies.

 

A few of the people stand out, for one reason or another: The large woman dressed all in black with a veil over her face. I wonder how she is going to eat with her face covered, but then her food arrives and she raises the veil like a curtain. (When the show is over, the curtain comes down again.) The distinguished-looking gentleman with the eye patch and the terrible limp who obviously has an artificial leg under his trousers. The platinum blonde in the glittery gown who, you realize on the second or third look, is really a man. The “movie star” with his perfect black hair (a wig?) and finely chiseled features. (No autographs, please!) Even with my limited knowledge of movie actors, I recognize him from movies he was in ten or fifteen years ago. I believe he’s what is known as a “has-been.”

 

The one person who stands out the most (for me, anyway) is the midget. Unlike other midgets I’ve seen, he’s perfectly proportioned; his head is a perfect oval shape and is not too big for his body. With his pencil-line moustache and his evening attire with top hat, cane and gloves, he resembles a doll or a ventriloquist’s dummy. You almost want to take him on your lap and see what happens. After he has been seated, he removes the top hat and places it upside-down on the corner of the table with the gloves inside and the cane beside the hat.

 

All the people in the room, like me, have been schooled in the art of closing themselves off from others. While sitting alone in a room with a hundred or so other people, you are able to radiate the illusion in your every movement that you are the only person present.

 

One by one, over the course of the next several days, those people who stand out for me cease to exist, along with others who merely seemed like ciphers. Every evening at dinner in the restaurant I notice new people who were never there before and an absence of those who were there when I first came. First the fat lady in black takes her leave; then the glamorous platinum blonde who is a man. Then, conspicuous in his absence is the gentleman with the limp, followed by the fading movie star. They all got what they came for.

 

For several days thereafter I continue to see the midget every evening when I’m eating my swordfish or filet mignon. Even though we’ve never met or spoken a word to each other, I feel some kind of a connection with him, a familiarity. I know, without knowing, that he has a fascinating story to tell; I’m sure I would like him and he me. Then, one evening when I take my place at my tiny table and look across the room to find him with my eyes, he, too, is gone. I think maybe he is just late in coming, but then he doesn’t come at all.

 

After dinner that evening I am unnerved and maybe even a little despondent. And I had been doing so well since I came here. At one a.m., I still haven’t been able to go to sleep, so I call the night attendant. I think he can give me a pill or speak a few words of encouragement.

 

“What’s the problem?” he asks as he comes into my room and sits down in the chair by the bed, puts his elbows on his knees and clasps his hands together. He wears a form-fitting blue shirt that shows his muscular frame. His name is Paul.

 

“I’m a little unsettled,” I say.

 

“Stomach bothering you? I can give you a bromide.”

 

“No, it’s not that. My stomach is fine.”

 

“Would you like a massage? It’ll help you to relax.”

 

“No, I don’t like being touched.”

 

He looks at me as if he’s trying to figure me out. He could break me in half if he wanted to.

 

“Do you want me to sing to you?” he asks.

 

“Does anybody change their minds after they get here? Decide they don’t want to go through with it?”

 

“You know that’s not possible,” he says. “That’s why they subject you to all that counseling and screening so you know before you get here that there’s no turning back.”

 

“Do you know how they do it?”

 

“No, I don’t, and you don’t want to know either. You’re not supposed to worry about that at all. You’re not supposed to even think about it or talk about it.”

 

“I wasn’t worried about it until this evening after dinner.”

 

“Did something happen at dinner?” he asks.

 

“No, it’s just that a friend of mine who had always been there wasn’t there anymore.”

 

“You didn’t come here to make friends,” he says with a sad smile.

 

“I know. I just can’t seem to help myself.”

 

“I can give you a pill if you like.”

 

“Is it the pill? The pill to end all pills?”

 

He laughs. “No, it’s not that,” he says. “That’s not my department. It’s just a simple little sleeping pill.”

 

He takes a little bottle out of his pocket and shakes a pill into my palm. He goes into the bathroom and gets a glass of water and when he comes back I take the pill like a trouper.

 

“I’ve been here now for two weeks,” I say. “I’m a little concerned about how much longer I’m going to have to wait.”

 

“The wait is making you nervous?”

 

“A little.”

 

“Everybody is different,” he says. “When the decision is made that you’re ready, your wait will be over.”

 

“I’m ready now. I was ready on the day I arrived.”

 

He surprises me by patting my hand. “You have absolutely nothing to worry about. Maybe you’re just feeling a little lonely. Do you want me to sit with you for a while until you go to sleep?”

 

“If you have nothing better to do.”

 

He makes himself comfortable in the chair and in a minute or two he’s snoring. I must have fallen asleep right after that because that’s the last thing I remember.

 

When I wake up I look at the clock and am surprised to see it’s nearly noon. Paul is gone, of course, and I haven’t heard him leave. I have lost ten hours or more in sleep that seemed like ten minutes. I don’t know what was in the pill he gave me, but it was very effective. Oblivion in a bottle.

 

I force myself to get out of bed and take a few steps. I feel groggy and my legs feel like lead. When I open the curtains, I see the sky is gray instead of the customary brilliant blue; it’s raining out and foggy.

 

Unlike most people, I like the rain and the fog, so I get dressed and go down in the elevator and outside. I’ll walk for a while and then maybe I’ll feel like eating a light lunch.

 

The surf is choppy and I don’t see the usual small boats. It promises to be an interesting day, I think. We’ll see what all this weather brings. I feel a tiny bit of exhilaration, something I haven’t felt for a long time. Something is in the air; I’m not sure what.

 

I walk a half-mile or so down the beach from the hotel. I don’t see anybody, not even any gulls. I plan on going down just a little farther and then turning around and going back. I like the spirit of adventure, being out in wind, rain and fog that nobody else will brave. Take me for the fool I am.

 

As I continue walking, I hear a rushing sound, like a rush of air. I think it’s the wind picking up but when I turn and look out at the ocean I see a huge wave that seems to be coming right toward me.

 

The wave is so big I know I can’t outrun it. I stand rooted to the spot and close my eyes and wait for the wave to crush me. My last thought is: So this is how they do it!

 

I don’t know how much time goes by. Time has lost its relevance. I’m lying in shallow water. I open my eyes and see people standing on a small pier looking down at me. Somebody jumps into the water and raises me up. I see right away it’s Paul, the night attendant who gave me the pill. He lifts me out and places me on my back on the pier. I choke and gasp for air. When I have revived a little bit I look up at the people standing over me. It’s the fat lady in black, the faded movie star, the gentleman with the eye patch, and the glamorous platinum blonde who is really a man. Someone is straddling my chest to force the water out of my lungs. I think at first it’s Paul but then I realize it’s the midget with the pencil-line moustache.

                                        # # #

 

Allen Kopp lives in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He has had over sixty short stories appearing in such diverse publications as Short Story America, Midwestern Gothic Literary Journal, Bewildering Stories, A Twist of Noir, Planetary Stories, Skive Magazine, Danse Macabre, Santa Fe Writers’ Project Journal, Superstition Review, Copperfield Review, Berg Gasse 19, Midwest Literary Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine, Wilde Oats, Writers’ Stories, Yesteryear Fiction, Burial Day Books, The Legendary, The Storyteller, Foliate Oak Literary Journal, and many others. He welcomes visitors to his website at www.literaryfictions.com.

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Fu Manchu, Foo Man Choo, Man Chew Food

by Gregg Sapp

 

IT WAS TIME to resume clean living, starting with a nice, hot, lathery shave. It’d been so long since Honeycutt’s face had been hairless that just thinking about its possibilities made his cheeks tingle with anticipation.

 

Honeycutt was finally ready for this. As proof, he was investing a large portion of his remaining assets in shaving gear -- a tungsten machete-of-scissors to hack through the briary scrub; a sleek, aerodynamic quadruple blade for strafing the facial landscape; a glinting safety blade for hard to reach areas, a canister of frothy white “Comfoam” brand shaving cream; and a tube of “advanced” gel with aloe, for sensitive skin (which he assumed he still had, underneath). Gathering his purchases, he reassured himself again that he was making the right decision.

 

If he had been more successful with his beard, he might’ve felt justified for his misgivings about shaving. At first, he’d grown it in order to manufacture an image appropriate to his role as the bass player for a bluegrass band called the Iuka Ravine Bootleggers, but he kept it even after they fired him, because it’d just grown beyond the point where it itched constantly, and thus seemed a shame to shave now. So, broke, bearded, and bedraggled, he refashioned his entire look to shout “Kiss My Snot” to the world. This wildly whiskered demeanor became a symbol of his angst and uncompromising bohemianism, which suited his self-image as a creative martyr, someone who should be revered and abhorred. (Being indigent was not incompatible with having a healthy ego – it was almost essential, if you weren’t truly crazy). Now, though, bereft and exhausted, he was ready to bow to the need to resume a countenance that wouldn’t repel potential employers. He even figured that once he righted his financial situation, he might go back school, take a couple of business courses, which would be useful for whatever he eventually decided to do for a living.

 

The pure white light in the Zippy Mart convenience store induced Honeycutt’s pupils to dilate. At 11:18 pm, it was well past the after-work rush when people stopped to buy quarts of milk and loaves of bread, and it was also past the evening bustle of people buying six packs of beer and nacho chips on their ways to or from some activity, and the last wave of bedtime shoppers had just gotten their aspirin, cigarettes, toothpaste, cough drops, dog food, or whatever else they needed to tide them through until morning. It was at about this time that the night bodies brought their distinctive smells and edgy idiosyncrasies into the crackling static air. Honeycutt appreciated being among them – the forlorn, the insomniac, the runaways, the strung out, the night stalkers, and the secret keepers; but he felt wistful in their company on that night, for he knew that he was preparing to abandon them for a day face.

 

“Hello, hello, hello,” chirped the cherubic young cashier, whose lips quivered when she beamed, so that the delicate runnel between her nostrils and upper lip plumped into a kind of goldfish kiss. She had red hair and pixy freckles. Her name tag, pinned to the very tip of her right nipple, proclaimed that her name was Mindy and that she was Here to Help You. “How’re ya doin’ this evening?,” Mindy queried cheerfully.

 

Stroking his beard, Honeycutt found a discarded toothpick in the underbrush; he took it out and, with due consideration to the gross-out potential of his action, began to pick between his molars. He spat out the nutty residue of a Pay Day bar, and was then seized by an esophageal spasm which caused him to heave and retch. What he coughed up into his brownish handkerchief looked like a ball of something toxic. “Oh uh,” he somewhat apologized.

 

Mindy seemed unaffected by his vulgarity. She had a pert, mousey nose, dimpled cheeks and a plump chin that had no cleft whatsoever. Kinky strands of her hair broke away from her pony tail, adding an endearingly disheveled quality to her cuteness.

 

“I hope that you’re having a super great evening,” Mindy sang as she scanned his purchases.

 

Honeycutt wondered what somebody like Mindy, so clearly not a nighthawk, was doing working the graveyard shift at a sleazy convenience store in a not-so-great neighborhood. Instead, she seemed better comported for a job as a jovial office receptionist with a jar of chocolate kisses on her desk, or a short-skirted barista at some overpriced Short North coffee shop where her cuteness helped fill the tips cup, or even a comely but pleasantly dizzy weather bimbo on a local news station, where her impish looks and buoyant personality would make folks feel good about lousy weather.

 

“That will come to exactly twelve hundred and fifty six pennies,” Mindy giggled.

 

“Uh?”

 

Also behind the counter was a cross-eyed man with a comb-over his bald, mottled head, who wore suspenders with his striped Zippy Mart shirt. “She means twelve dollars and 56 cents,” he explained, rolling his eyes.

 

“Tee hee!” Mindy shrugged her shoulders.

 

“Meh.”

 

When Honeycutt dumped the loose coinage from his pockets onto the counter, Mindy immediately began arranging it into quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies… and when she found a Sacajawea dollar coin, she gasped as if she’d just discovered a gold nugget. From her pocket, she removed a crumbled dollar bill and exchanged it for the coin, which she kept. 8888Somehow, that didn’t seem right to Honeycutt. He thought about asking for it back, but Mindy interrupted his intentions by piping, “Let me get a little bag for you,” in such a pleasant, helpful voice that it made him reconsider.

 

“Umm,” he grumbled.

 

Transaction complete, Honeycutt took the plastic bag and wrapped its handle around his wrist. He looked past Mindy, to where the cross-eyed man took a cigarette from behind his ear and began fingering it; “Goodnight, Cowboy,” he said, nodding in the direction of the door. Honeycutt considered making some retort, until Mindy’s parting wish for him to “Have a wonderful night, sir” made him forget what he’d wanted to say.

 

“Urg,” he muttered.

                                             *

 

Honeycutt stood on the curb at 10th and North High Street, on top of a sewer cover dated 1966, looking toward the city, shielding his eyes from the shock white bulbs on the rows and rows of steel arches spanning the corridor and which seemed to recede in the distance when he closed his left eye, then converge when he closed his right eye, like falling and being rammed simultaneously. (This illusion might have had something to do with lasting effects of the pint of Monarch vodka that he’d drunk for dinner, and not that he was losing his mind, he reassured himself.) The autumn air was misty, dulling the tar, petrol, exhaust and assorted rotten scents from alleys and vacant lots. Honeycutt’s sister Michelle’s condo (the Jacksonian) was just six blocks away – a ten minute walk – but not wanting to return there until he was sure that she’d have gone to bed, Honeycutt paused when he reached the limestone sofa. There, he sat on a bench that was in reality a sculpture (or vice versa), in a little inset off the sidewalk, surrounded by iron railing and flanked by lanterns. It was a place where he liked to kill time and seek inspiration.

 

Appropriately, night people were out playing their roles. There was a man in flagrant violation of Columbus’s leash laws allowing his gnarly terrier to defecate on a mosaic piece of sidewalk art in front of what used to be the ticket booth for the Garden Theatre. Back in the parking lot of Magnolia Thunderpussy, there were a couple of kids sitting on the hood of a car, making no attempt to conceal that they were passing a joint. In the abandoned lot where the Good Boy Drive-in used to be, there was somebody sitting alone in the driver seat of a parked car. All were his kinds of people. Honeycutt permitted himself to doze on his sculpture, absorbing the passage of time in sodden reverie, until he was startled by the sound of a car alarm going off somewhere in the Village. He concluded that it was now past any chance that Michelle would still be awake. It was time, then, to start shaving.

 

Punching in the secret building code on the keypad, Honeycutt was careful not to let any of the loiterers outside of the Jacksonian slip in behind him. (They sometimes tried.) Michelle had left a light in the foyer for Honeycutt (it was a Mickey Mouse nite light, which she’d purchased as a souvenir of Disney World, when she’d gone there with her lousy, two-timing ex-boyfriend, before she kicked him out). The door to her bedroom was closed – not just shut, but closed; and that meant that she was yielding the run of the apartment to Honeycutt. He’d gotten over feeling guilty that she so frequently felt the need to lock herself in her own room of her own apartment in order to obtain a modicum of privacy. Michelle didn’t know that he knew that, as one of her last lucid requests, their mother had made her vow to “watch out for” her baby brother. So, he let Michelle vent, complain, threaten, and get exasperated with him, but he knew that out of respect to their mother, she’d relent to him, ultimately. There was one bottle of St. Pauli Girl beer in the refrigerator – not meant for him, certainly, but if she didn’t want him to have it, she should’ve known better.

 

Sitting on the toilet, Honeycutt pondered how to shave – where to begin, in which direction to cut, what could be felled with a blade, and what would require scissors. The seashell-shaped bathroom sink was just-scrubbed clean. He considered enclosing it in a towel, to preserve its cleanliness against the mess that he was sure to make while shaving. There’d certainly be knots, grizzle and stubble, flakes of skin, scabs and maybe blood. It was a lot to think about. Honeycutt began laying out his essential instruments: the blades, the gel, the cream, a washcloth and sponge, paper towels, and his St. Pauli Girl beer.

 

Contemplating the label on the beer bottle, the robust good cheer on the face of the buxom St. Pauli Girl made Honeycutt think of Mindy at the Zippy Mart.

 

And that’s when Honeycutt apprehended another tonsorial possibility. He hadn’t given much thought to the process of shaving, just the end result; this, it seemed now, was a failure of premeditation, putting the destination ahead of the journey. Honeycutt scratched his beard and fogged his mirror image with a heavy sigh. It occurred to him that he didn’t remember what he really looked like, and that opened his imagination to other possibilities. Such a tumultuous expression of facial hair was not something to be shorn without ceremony. This was as much a rite of passage as it was a shave.

 

Flexing the scissors, he tested their sharpness by bouncing an index finger over the serrations. He felt as if the blades were extensions of his digits, and he began snipping at the sideburns. A feeling of power surged in his hands, though, and soon he began seizing handfuls of tangled hair on his cheeks and jowls, sawing through hirsute masses in clumps, discarding the loose chunks into the sink where they were already forming a clog. When he had cleared enough of the most dense and coarsest growth, he scraped the razor blade over raw, exposed pores. Pausing to examine his progress, he surveyed a partially shaved face with sideburns leveled at the earlobes and bare jowls, but from the corners of his nostrils straight down to where the intact beard merged with chest hair, there remained a wiry mustache over a bushy van dyke beard. It looked like a firecracker had exploded in his mouth.

 

Initially, Honeycutt recoiled at this image of himself, but when he shook his head, allowing his greasy hair to spill over his shoulders, he beheld a most curious character. He looked at himself the way somebody might look at a police artist’s rendering of a crime suspect, with envious apprehension.

 

The visage in the mirror was that of a “Born to Be Wild” biker, a headbanger, and proud hellraiser. He liked it. Entering his new persona, he decided that his name would be Rip Gangrene (but anybody who addressed him had better fuckin’ call him Mister Rip Gangrene). He was bad, baaad to the bone. From his duffel bag, Honeycutt retrieved a tattered t-shirt that he’d purchased at a garage sale and worn as part of a Halloween costume years ago – it depicted a demon’s skull with an extruding eyeball in one socket and a serpent’s head in the other (a souvenir from Rob Zombie’s world tour 1999). Pulling it over his head, he mugged a fierce expression for the mirror. In this character, the bloated weight that he’d gained recently from his vodka diet suited him well; he was a man with bulk to throw around. But that wasn’t enough. He borrowed the chain for Michelle’s bike lock and wound it around his neck, its ends dangling in front of his chest. In a drawer under the sink Honeycutt found a Gallic cross earring (that must’ve belonged to her arrogant loser ex-boyfriend), and although his piercing had nearly healed, he managed at length to push it through his left earlobe. Rip Gangrene felt ready to rock n’ roll. On his way out the door, he helped himself to a five dollar bill from Michelle’s purse.

                                          ***

 

Now after midnight, few people walked alone. Gangrene stomped down High Street, passing under the arches, feeling like an outlaw looking for a rumble. He had taken one of Michelle’s skinny cigarettes, which he clenched in the corner of his mouth but didn’t light. He mumbled aloud to himself (“damn straight,” “sheee-it,” “fuckin’-A”) while walking, in a manner that seemed authentic to his character. Leaning against the streetlight at 5th and High, he glowered at drivers passing by, most of whom accelerated, or even ran the red light, in order to get safely past him. “What’s wrong with you, pussies!,” he could have screamed at their backdrafts, and they’d have just kept going because he was not somebody to be messed with. Even the young men leaving the Surly Girl Tavern took a wide berth around him.

 

After half an hour or so, though, as the street populations retreated into deeper shadows, Gangrene began looking for another stage upon which to play his role. The stark buzzing light of the Zippy Mart attracted him.

 

Outside the store, the cross-eyed man was leaning against a garbage can and smoking a cigarette. Gesturing for a light, Gangrene inserted what was left of the masticated stub of Michelle’s cigarette between his front lips and, bowing forward into the cross-eyed man’s lighter, ignited it. He sucked the cigarette mightily and inhaled several lung-wrenching drags… holding the last one in his chest as he went into the shop. He exhaled just inside the door.

 

Mindy coughed and wheezed, thrashing aside the cloud of smoke. She looked miffed, but still entirely cute, for though her lips were pursed, the sour expression on her face had caused her dimples to stand out like rosy points on a clown’s grin. Rubbing her eyes, she regained her equanimity and greeted her customer with a “Hello, sir. Thanks for stopping by this evening.”

 

“Urgh.”

 

Gangrene assumed that she did not recognize him, or at least pretended not to. Who is this irksomely vivacious young woman, he wondered, and what might be done to disabuse her of her irrepressible pluckiness? Remembering his role, Gangrene belched – a perfect “yak;” Mindy heard it but never flinched. He went to purchase some beer, which seemed like something would have motivated Gangrene to go there in the first place. The cooler was stocked with various brands representing assorted lifestyle choices, from imports and microbrews, to cheap pilsners, to tasteless light beers, to corrosive, gut-rock, fortified malt liquors… the latter of which was what Gangrene decided he would buy, since he knew that it was potent and popular with his ilk. He took down a 40 ounce bottle of Olde English malt liquor, which was the color of furniture polish, and slammed it onto the counter in front of Mindy. “Urrrr,” he said to her.

 

Mindy turned the bottle to the scanner, smiling bounteously. “Will that do it for ya’, sir?” she asked.

 

“Nyyyah,” he slurred.

 

A wisp of hair tossed over her face; she blew it away, puffing her cheeks. “You have a wonderful night, sir,” Mindy clucked, bagging Mr. Gangrene’s bomb-shaped bottle of beer.

 

 

 

“Mmmhmmm…” Gangrene intoned. Who was she, after all, to wish him a “wonderful” night? She presumed that the night had much more positive potential that he was willing to concede. Mindy gave him a thumbs-up, in case he wasn’t clear that their transaction was complete. Stepping outside, Gangrene plugged one nostril and blew a bugger out the other to re-assert his badness. “Hey, dude, that’s fuckin’ gross,” he heard a raucous voice accuse.

 

Turning, Honeycutt gulped to find himself facing a couple of leather clad motorcycle riders who were sitting in the Zippy Mart parking lot astride their chopper machines, engines revving. One of them, the speaker, wore gloves with knuckle studs. Seeking to avoid them and thus not watching where he was going, Honeycutt tripped over the curb and bumped into the cross-eyed man, who was returning from his cigarette. “Watch where you’re going there, Cowboy,” he cautioned him. The bikers chortled, while Honeycutt, conscious that his gait was not that of a genuine biker, made haste down High Street, staying under the streetlights. His discomfiture was further heightened when a red and blue pinstriped Columbus PD patrol cruiser pulled adjacent to him and matched his pace as he sauntered toward the intersection at 5th and High. Honeycutt could feel the blood swell within his newly denuded cheeks, and he realized that he was blushing in a most non-motorcycle gang member-like manner. He waited for the light at the corner to change (even though there was no traffic coming in either direction). The cop car accelerated past him, off to some more urgent destination, and by the time that Honeycutt felt bold enough to look backwards, he saw two cops and the two bikers chatting in the Zippy Mart parking lot, admiring each others’ equipment.

 

Honeycutt suddenly realized that he was carrying the beer bottle like a baby, in the cradle of his arm. He caught a passing glimpse at his reflection in a storefront window, and his instinct was to accelerate, to leave it behind. His beard felt like it was starting to crawl down his throat.

                                          *

Outside Michelle’s apartment, Honeycutt pressed his ear to the door, listening to see if the coast was clear before he entered. He was relieved that her bedroom door was still closed, but, noticing that water was running in the toilet tank, Honeycutt surmised that Michelle must have gotten up to go to the bathroom, then failed to jiggle the handle to make it stop after flushing. Honeycutt wondered what she’d thought when she’d seen the scissors, the razors, and the hairy mess in the sink. It seemed as important to her to avoid him as it was for him not to be seen by her.

 

Honeycutt turned on the exhaust fan in the bathroom and stood beneath it, feeling it lift the malaise from his spirit. It was now evident to him that he did not churn with enough vitriol to embody the character of Rip Gangrene, for he was not by nature comported for head-banging, hard-riding, raping and pillaging. He removed his ruffian accessories, the chain and Zombie shirt, and washed his face until his pores were revived. Feeling conscious of the vulnerability of his throat, Honeycutt placed his palm flat beneath his mouth, covering the lower part of his beard. A sensation tingled in the tips of his mustache. Lathering the shaving cream onto his chin and under his neck, Honeycutt scissor-ed and shaved through the brush growing in the clefts of his chin, the rolls of his neck, and the tuft of hair beneath his lower lip. Using Michelle’s mascara pencil, he drew an arc from the pit of each nostril down to his jawbone, then shaved away everything that remained of his facial hair on the cheeks outside of those lines. Trimming the long tips of the remaining mustache, he was left with a face that sported a perfectly symmetrical Fu Manchu. Ah so, he thought.

 

Honeycutt knew that Michelle had dumped all of her lazy-ass, no-good ex-boyfriend’s unclaimed clothes into boxes in the laundry closet, and he assumed that among them there must be a martial arts uniform, since that manner of activity was the bum’s special hobby. In the pile, he found white tae kwon do ribbed polyester pants and a loose V-neck tunic, and although wearing them he stretched the elastic waistband to capacity, they fit Honeycutt’s physique serviceably well so long as he didn’t bend over too abruptly. He tied a black cord around his waist and a bright band across his forehead, and he brushed his hair into a pony tail that he held in place with beads. Slipping into a pair of soft soled shoes, adorned with his Fu Manchu mustache and an Asian warrior monk’s garb, Honeycutt imagined that he looked like an assassin holy man of Kukkiwon philosophy, a serene killing machine. He was the deadly but enlightened Master Foo. He needed to be seen.

 

In all of his nights on the streets, never had Honeycutt encountered a wayfaring tae kwon do expert in martial regalia on the near north side of Columbus on a Tuesday night, now well after one a.m. If he had, he might’ve taken it as a spiritual revelation, and it seemed reasonable that anybody else might, too. So, before venturing out the door, he rubbed his eyes until they watered, fancying that their dampness evinced a look of wisdom, an expression of purpose. Walking with his hands folded in front of him – palms against palms, fingers pointing upward – Master Foo trod lightly on his feet, so as to disturb no sentient creature. He felt the loose folds of his tunic ripple as he walked, making it feel like he was flowing. When a carload full of boisterous young women pulled up next to him and called out, “Hey Kung Fu dude, show us your moves!,” Master Foo merely touched his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes, as if their catcall had inspired him to achieve yet another transcendental insight. 

 

Unlike his earlier journey as Gangrene, this time Honeycutt had a clear and immediate destination. Master Foo entered the Zippy Mart. Inside, he crossed his hands on opposite shoulders, and standing in the double doors of the entrance, slowly opened his arms in a sweeping embrace. Raising his chin, he allowed his head to drift to the left, as if following the flight of an inspiration. Upon catching glimpse of Mindy, he fluttered his eyelashes and bowed silently to her.

 

Mindy, who was rearranging hot dogs on the rollers beneath heat lamps, nearly dropped her tongs upon registering this vision. Staring, she half expected that she was involved in some kind of prank. Master Foo opened his palms in front of him and stretched his fingers, as if catching invisible energy waves.

 

“Gooood evening there, mister sir” she trilled. This guy had to be pulling some kind of joke, she figured, or maybe he was acting upon a dare; either way, she was willing to go along with the joke, up to a point.

 

“Mmmm,” he hummed over a furrowed brow.

 

Aware of how intently Mindy was watching him, Master Foo walked the aisles in a trance and examined items as if he were seeing them for the first time in his life; he held a two pack of toilet paper up to the light to read its instructions; he bobbed his head while following the rotations of a frozen drink machine; and he and studied intently his own reflection in the fish-eye mirror in the corner above the cooler. The thin stream of air from the ceiling vent rustled his clothes, which he was fairly sure stank -- a sign of Master Foo’s indifference to material things. From the produce section of the cooler, where there was a small selection of fruit (bananas, apples) and vegetables (potatoes, heads of lettuce, green peppers, and white cooking onions), Master Foo lifted a single large onion and sniffed it. Ah, the mysteries of an onion, Master Foo mused: its layers so thin and transparent; it tastes sweet but brings tears to the eyes; it can be peeled to suggest unfolding mysteries; and yet pure potential is in its core. Squeezing the onion, he was pleased that it fit his palm so perfectly. When he took the onion to the counter to purchase it, he presented it to Mindy with both hands, as if he wanted her to understand that he was showing her something important.

 

Mindy sucked the inside corners of her mouth. ‘What’re they waiting for?,’ she wondered, imagining that at any moment a celebrity and a camera crew would knock down a wall and announce that she’d just been punked! When that didn’t happen, she queried, cautiously: “Just the onion, sir?”

 

“Oomm.”

 

“Well…” she hesitated, giving the surreptitious tricksters one more chance to reveal themselves, then blurted: “Have a wonderful night. Hey, Hare Krishna, and all of that stuff.”

 

Master Foo winced at that remark. He considered saying something cryptic to demonstrate his unaffected tranquility despite what he viewed to be the girl’s impertinence, but he got distracted by the flush of a toilet and the swish of a door opening, when the cross-eyed man came out of the restroom. He was whistling “Happy Trails,” a song which Honeycutt had not thought about for many years, although it reminded him of another song, one which his and Michelle’s father used to sing when driving them home from his every-other-weekend visitations. The old man would prolong their time together by taking one of his detours along life’s scenic route (as he was wont to do), and make them sing along to “I Can See Clearly Now:”

 

It’s Gonna Be a Bright...” he’d call out, cuing them.

 

“Bright!” They’d call out in response.

 

“Bright!,” he’d reaffirm.

 

Then they’d all exclaim: “Bright Sunshiny Day!”

 

The cross-eyed man lurched and did a double take when he saw Master Foo, so hard that for a moment his eyes uncrossed. The monk gestured a Varada mudra to him, and left the store, backing out.

 

Master Foo watched over his shoulder as Mindy wiggled her finger to call the cross-eyed man forward to say something to him. In the night air, Honeycutt felt a compulsion to sneeze, which he turned to conceal so that neither of them could see, should they still be watching him. Sneezing did not seem like something that Master Foo would do.

​

When he was out of sight, Honeycutt untied the band around his head and let out the drawstring on his pants. His spiritual harmony passed like a gastric bubble. It was at approximately this hour that the night was most restless, when whoever was still out was wandering, lost, or had nowhere to go; everybody else was in hiding. At least, Honeycutt reassured himself, he still had someplace, sort of, to go. From the sidewalk below his sister’s apartment, he noticed that the lamp was on in her bedroom. For a couple of minutes, he wondered what he was going to do. But the light went out, the apartment stayed dark, and Honeycutt decided that it was safe to return. He opened the door a crack, ascertaining that the path to the bathroom was clear, and went directly there, past Michelle’s closed bedroom door.

 

Behind the bathroom door, Honeycutt tugged on the tips of his Fu Manchu, and with a heave of resignation, snipped off the right side of the mustache with the scissors. He began trimming just that half, a patch from the bridge of his nose to the corner of his mouth. On the left side of his face he still wore a Fu Manchu; on the right, he sported a spiffy, post-modern, white collar, protestant, suburban husband’s mustache (the kind that his father had always threatened to grow, but never did). Honeycutt’s bicameral reflection was like half shots of a before and after picture. It was tempting to leave it like that: half Master Foo, half model citizen.

 

Honeycutt pondered how his decision to shave had become so surprisingly multi-dimensional, with each new look another life lesson. At length, he trimmed away the rest of the Fu Manchu, grooming his new mustache with Michelle’s tweezers, plucking away stray hairs, until it kept its shape. He then scoured his face with Michelle’s defoliating scrub to buff away the crustiest of his blemishes. Returning to Michelle’s asshole of an ex-boyfriend’s pile of laundry, Honeycutt found a powder blue polo shirt with a small embroidered penguin above the heart, a pair of khaki, casual fit Dockers pants, and some tan suede loafers. Stuffing his hair under an Ohio State University baseball cap and adjusting the rim so that it paralleled the furrows on his forehead, Honeycutt’s new look was complete. He gave his mirrored alter ego a bright smile (yellowish teeth notwithstanding) and a wink, the kind of gestures that he imagined somebody who looked like this would have in his social repertoire.

 

William “Bill” Brady… that’s what he decided his name ought to be, imagining that name on a mailbox in front of one of the Victorian homes in the Village. 88888There could only be one plausible reason why a guy like Bill Brady would be out and about at such an ungodly hour on a Tuesday night, and that was he had to be doing some kind of service for somebody else. In this case, Honeycutt imagined that Bill had been dispatched from bed by his pregnant wife, Jill, whose sudden craving for dill pickle spears was “urgent.” Thus, Bill walked in a hurried, but responsible pace, a straight line, counting the arches over High Street, directly to the Zippy Mart.

 

When Bill Brady entered the convenience store, he exhaled with satisfaction and cleared his throat to attract the attention of the sweet-looking young woman behind the counter. He offered her a friendly wave.

 

Mindy, who had been cleaning the between cash register keys with a Q-tip, felt a shiver radiate down her spine in the presence of… who, exactly, was he? Now, her suspicion that she was being hoaxed was complicated by a deeper unease – perhaps this dude was just simply crazy. Still, she’d dealt with crazy people before, and most of them were, actually, quite pleasant.

 

“Hello there sir,” she greeted, dangling her voice in a way meant to encourage a response.

 

“Uh huh.”

 

Mindy wasn’t sure if he was agreeing with something that she hadn’t said, or asking him a question. For the first time, her smile slipped, just a tad.

 

The closest thing that the Zippy Mart had to dill pickles was sweet pickle hot dog relish, which Bill Brady decided would have to do (and he even pursued the logic of that decision so far as to imagine Jill eating it from the jar with a spoon). Behind the counter, Mindy and the cross-eyed man huddled in a corner, speaking in conspiratorial whispers. Murmuring, Mindy held her hand in front of her in attempt to shield her pointed finger, which was aimed at Bill Brady. The cross-eyed man nodded and shrugged simultaneously, and then he stepped forward to meet Bill Brady, who was waiting to purchase his pickle relish.

 

With a drawl of sarcasm in his voice, the cross-eyed man sighed: “What can I do for you, Cowboy?”

 

Bill Brady set the jar of hot dog relish onto a mat on the cash register counter, and offered two one dollar bills in recompense.

 

At first, the cross-eyed man acted like he didn’t want to take the money. “That’s, uh, an interesting thing to buy, hot dog relish – anytime, but especially at 2:13 am,” he remarked. That he felt at liberty to comment on his purchase at all, let alone with implicit condescension, made Bill Brady bristle. Furthermore, he was irked that Mindy had apparently requested that the cross-eyed conduct the transaction, because he felt that he’d been nothing less than a perfect gentleman when dealing with her, in each of his incarnations. But Bill was not the kind of person to return an insult. He thrust the two dollars into the cross-eyed man’s hands until he took it. At the completion of the transaction, Bill snatched the plastic bag by its handles and retreated dutifully out the door.88888“Er, have a wonderful night,” Mindy entreated, while the cross-eyed man chuckled snidely.

                                             *

 

The weight of the night was now at its most dense, the mist having become a net that pulled backwards on Honeycutt’s shoulders as he half-swam forward. A passing taxi driver misinterpreted his arm gestures as an attempt to flag him down, and when he pulled up next to the curb, Honeycutt, not reckoning what was going on, just kept walking straight ahead. “Hey, fella, d’ya need a ride or not?,” the driver rolled down the window and hollered. Honeycutt stopped, looked around, pointed quizzically at himself, and when the driver affirmed “yeah, you,” he shoo-ed him away. It was better to walk. He needed the pace and structure that walking afforded in order to think through his next action. Down to just a mustache, he was running out of options. Now, almost too late for second thoughts, he wasn’t quite so sure that he was ready to resume being naked-faced.

 

Back inside the sanctuary of the Jacksonian, Honeycutt turned his sister’s apartment key so slowly that he could hear the deadbolt slide in its track then click into place. Not waking Michelle now seemed more critical than ever, since one way or the other, he was close to being finished. The door to her room was still shut, but now ajar. Honeycutt surmised that she must be spying on his activities during his absences. The digital clock on the microwave oven turned from 2:59 to 3:00 am. This hour was the most desolate of any night, when darkness was like a drugged fantasy and staying alert required conscious effort against the common sense of sleepiness. It was a heady hour when a person might understandably have difficulty distinguishing between dreams, wishes, and reality. All along, Honeycutt had allowed to himself that it might take the whole night to complete his shave. So far he’d paced himself, but he now realized that he’d also been deceiving himself that he might, actually, keep one of the looks that he’d tried on for size. Now he felt compelled to finish his last transformation by dawn, and time was running out.

 

The soft hair under his nose tickled. Sifting his fingers into the left side of the mustache, he pulled on his lip so hard that he felt the tension all the way in his gums. He left just enough room beneath his fingers to insert the scissors, which he snapped shut in a swift jerk, and then did the same with the right side. The mirror now reflected Honeycutt’s familiar, doughy face – except for stubble under his nose. He sneezed, and the stubble glistened. Glistened! Suddenly inspired, Honeycutt shaved away the uneven parts of the mustache, down to just above the lips, and using Michelle’s nosehair trimmers, he leveled the bristle down to a fine line of pencil thinness. Petroleum jelly gave the flecks a glow.

 

Honeycutt was not done. This particular look required a total identity makeover. He shaved his eyebrows down to wisps. In front of the mirror, he tried several fashions with his hair: parting it in the middle, all to one side, braiding it, and rolling it into a bun… but nothing that he did with the limp mess of his hair suitably complemented the pencil thin mustache that was the centerpiece of this new alter ego. Exhaling with resignation, Honeycutt grabbed a whole fistful of hair, stretched it away from his scalp, and began cutting furiously with the scissors. Handful after handful, he sliced away the dirty, nappy mane, until the bare rotunda of his head emerged. He lathered the remaining stands of grizzle with Comfoam, then commenced shaving, one pass at a time over his skull. It took a brand new razor to finish the job, but when he was done, Honeycutt had a nude head. He massaged his scalp; it felt like the surface of a balloon, except for the throbbing veins above his temples. His dome was pink and felt ticklish, but reflected a halo if he leaned toward a light source.

 

Honeycutt was still not done, though, for this new look, the most challenging of all, required special adornments and habiliments. Fumbling with the applicator, he managed to paint some black mascara over his eyelashes; he puttied the creases in the corners of his eyes with bluish eye shadow, tracing a fine point of eye liner over the brows. He put on the orange and yellow floral print short sleeve shirt that Michelle’s jerkoff-momma’s-boy-ex-boyfriend had worn on their vacation to Disneyland. What pants to wear presented a dilemma, for he needed something with a gay flair, but the ex-boyfriend had nothing except creased slacks and exercise clothing. Instead, Honeycutt managed to squirm into a pair to Michelle’s cotton/ synthetic Capri sweat pants, of magenta color. He tried but was unable to find some of her sandals that he could wear, so he settled for the ex-boyfriend’s pair of penny loafers, worn over ankle hose. Now, he reckoned, he was prepared to face the world in the character of somebody whose name he conceived to be Dabney Ritz.8Dabney put all of his recent Zippy Mart purchases into an Avon tote bag and went for the door.

 

“Michael?!? Is that you?,” Michelle cried from her bedroom. “What’re you doing?” But Dabney Ritz and Michael Honeycutt were already gone.

 

                                           *

 

Bereft of human sounds -- of traffic and feet and voices -- the streets of North High between 3:00 and 4:00 am on that Tuesday night amplified stray noises: a cat hissed; trees creaked; street lights popped; and Dabney Ritz hummed “I Can See Clearly Now” out loud. Passing the cops’ car alongside the curb, beneath the first arch in the corridor, Dabney Ritz began skipping and swinging the tote bag by his side, actually hoping that he’d attract their attention. ‘I wonder what they’ll think of me,’ he pondered, deciding that if they stopped him to ask him what he was doing, he would say ‘just strolling.’ They allowed him to pass, though, without incident, so Dabney set his sights on the Zippy Mart.

 

On his way in, he bumped into the cross-eyed man who was on his way out to have another smoke. “Excuse… ,” the cross-eyed man started, then confronted by Dabney’s crooked, debonair smile, he finished, “Watch where you’re goin’, Cowboy.” He stood by a parked car a moment, watching Dabney enter the store, then shook his head and muttered aloud “freak.”

 

Mindy was cleaning the fume hood over the toaster oven when Dabney Ritz entered the store. Hearing the doorbell, she automatically greeted, “Welcome to Zippy Mart.” Dabney stopped in front of the counter, presenting himself by saluting and grinning solicitously. She wheezed. He tapped the glass in front of the hot dogs on their rollers and pointed. “Umm,” he indicated.

 

“Huh? I’m sorry.” She shrugged. “What can I do to help you?”

 

He tapped again, this time opening his mouth the approximate shape and width of a hot dog.

 

“Do you want a hot dog?”

 

Dabney nodded triumphantly. While Mindy clutched a set of tongs and groped for what she recalled was the hot dog that had been under the heat lamps the longest, Dabney leaned forward on his elbows to watch. Nose to the glass, he waited until Mindy had clamped the hot dog, then cleared his throat to attract her attention, wagged his finger to nix that choice, and instead pointed at another hot dog. “That one?,” Mindy queried, her voice beginning to break. She repeatedly failed to pick up the slippery hot dog using the thongs. Dabney kept his lips sealed but lifted the corners of his mouth. Part of him empathized with Mindy, but her discomfiture reinforced the strength that he felt in this character. Aha, he thought, there are limits to what cuteness can tolerate.

 

When she reached into the steamer to retrieve a warm bun, the cloud of moisture that rose across Mindy’s face made her cheeks sag and her eyes droop. She inserted the hot dog into a bun, wrapping them in tissue, and instead of handing the food to Dabney, left it on the counter for him to pick up himself. He paid with his last dollar, unnerving her further by nodding at her and licking his lips when he handed her the bill. Mindy pushed his change forward. Dabney scooped it up. Even though the transaction was now complete, he lingered, wondering if she were going to wish him a wonderful night… while Mindy immediately turned her back and returned to cleaning the fume hood. When it became clear to Dabney that Mindy had nothing more to say to him, he put his hot dog into the tote bag, humming his new theme song, and pranced out the door.

 

But he didn’t go far. Michael Honeycutt sat down on the limestone sofa, removed his purchases from the tote bag, and he put onion pieces and pickle relish on his hot dog and ate it while drinking his beer.

 

“What a wonderful night,” he said to himself.

 

                                        #     #     #

 

Gregg Sapp is a writer, librarian, college teacher and academic administrator. His first novel, "Dollarapalooza" or "The Day Peace Broke Out in Columbus," was published in 2011 by Switchgrass Books of Northern Illinois University Press. See www.dollarapalooza.com. 

 

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The End of Spring

by Michael Schrimper

​

 

IT WAS BEFORE DAWN when the telephone rang. Michael listened to his father’s voice through the wall as he lay in bed. After a minute, it was quiet. Michael listened as his father’s footfall came toward his door. The door opened and his father stood in the doorway. He turned on the lamp on the table by the door.

 

“Michael, I need you to get dressed,” he said. He was wearing his boots.

 

“Dad?” Michael said, sitting up in bed.

 

“There’s work on Jasper Mountain this morning,” his father said. “I’ve got to be there soon.”

 

Michael dressed. His father had been taking him on his jobs since the lumber mill closed down. But this was the earliest. Normally Michael would spend the afternoon in a field as his father worked on a fence. Michael buttoned his shirt. The windows were still dark. Michael sat in the chair to tie his shoes. He was too young to stay home alone. He looked into the kitchen and saw his father lay the two burlap sacks they used for kindling on the table. Then he laid down a handsaw. He rolled the burlap sacks toward him, enfolding the saw.

 

“Ready?” said his father.

 

They went outside to the pickup truck. The air was cool in the dark morning. It was near the end of spring but it felt like the last edge of winter and Michael hurried into the truck. It had been a rainy and cold spring. Michael’s father leaned over and put the sacks with the handsaw enfolded beneath Michael’s feet. As they drove, the bundle made a rustling sound and Michael realized that his father had lined the sacks with plastic trash bags.

 

There had never been a job on Jasper Mountain before. People did not live there, Michael thought to himself. It was a very tall mountain.

 

They parked in a gravel lot off the highway next to a semi-trailer. Behind the trailer was the steep rock face. Michael looked up the dark gray cliff and could see ledges with pine trees. The pines looked black. They started up the trail. His father walked in front of him, with the saw and the burlap sacks. Michael watched the gray rock dust of the trail and his father’s boots and noticed his father sometimes looking back at him.

 

“Dad. Where are we going?”

 

“To the North pasture.”

 

After a minute Michael said, “Isn’t that the highest one?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“What are you going to do?”

 

His father said, “I need my breath, Michael.” They walked up the steep mountainside.

 

The trail went uphill for what seemed a long time and then they came to the mist. It was a damp gray cloud on the mountain in the morning and Michael reached out to make sure his father was still there. They climbed in silence in the mist. Michael was filled with the distinct feeling that they were not alone, as though animals were surrounding them in the mist. He began to worry about what creatures lived on the mountain. He stayed close behind his father.

 

Up ahead they saw a tall black cliff. When Michael and his father reached the bottom of the cliff they walked a narrow, slanted trail. Michael kept a hand along the rock wall as he went. The wall ended and Michael’s father said, “Stay here.”

 

Everything past the cliff was mist.

 

“Sit here while I work.”

 

Michael sat on the rock. His father went into the mist of the pasture.

 

Michael was unafraid. He told himself he was unafraid. He looked into the mist. He wished he could see more of the world around him.

 

A pale yellow light eventually came into the mist. First light, Michael thought. He wished for the sun to hurry up. He looked past the cliff and wondered what his father was doing in the pasture.

 

After a few minutes, he heard a clicking noise. The noise was very close. He turned and something moved by his cheek, his nose. The surprise made him lean back and he clamped his hands against the rock. The clicking noise continued. There was a movement by his face again. A dragonfly.

 

Michael watched the blue dragonfly make a circle in the mist. He stood up. He decided to follow the dragonfly. It moved through the air and away from the cliff. Michael followed it into the grass. The dragonfly zipped away into the gloomy pasture, and he went after it.

 

The dragonfly disappeared in the mist. Michael was alone in the meadow. He wondered where his father was. The click of the dragonfly wings faded. Michael heard a different noise. It was a grating sound in the distance, up the hill: the handsaw.

 

The mist moved and he saw the pasture. He felt relief when he glimpsed the open hillside. It was a long green slope with big white rocks. It was beautiful. In the cloudiness he saw there must have been a hundred white boulders around him in the grass. He looked for his father, but the mist closed again. He stopped moving. He decided to sit there, on a rock.

 

His hand and leg came away wet. He stood and looked down at the rock. There was a white mass of wool. The dead sheep’s eyes were like a snake’s—yellow with a black point, and they were staring. The sheep’s mouth was open. The smell of the dead animal and the wet wool hit him. He must have let out a cry because in a moment he saw his father coming toward him down the hill. Before his father reached him he looked at the sheep once more and he saw its big horns; they were yellow and brown and they were curved into a coil.

 

“Dad?” Michael said.

 

His father took him by the shoulders, and began leading him toward the cliff.

 

“Why are they all dead?” Michael said. He was thinking of the white humps he’d seen on the hillside.

 

The mist moved in sheets. “It was a cold, wet spring,” his father said. After a minute he said, “It rained the whole time. Believe it or not, sheep can get pneumonia, too.”

 

Michael felt very cold. “What are you doing with them?” he said. He saw his father’s jeans were spattered with dark stains.

 

After a minute his father said, “Their horns are very valuable.”

                                              *

Michael sat beside his father in the truck. In the bed of the pickup, the burlap sacks clattered dully when they drove over a pothole.

 

“Can you feel anything after you die?”

 

“No. I don’t think so, Michael.”

 

“What about before you’re born?”

 

“No, Michael.”

 

They were seated in the truck. Michael was trying to remember things from before he was born. He tried to remember what he had seen and felt but could not remember anything. He looked at the trees against the cloud cover and saw the branches had little green buds on them.

 

“When I’m dead, will I remember this?”

 

“This what?”

 

“This truck. Anything. You?”

 

His father waited a minute and then said, “I don’t think so, Michael.”

 

Michael was quiet as they turned onto the gravel road. He was clutching the truck door handle. Maybe his father was only trying to scare him.

 

The truck continued down the road and he looked out the window, hoping that once he died he would remember his father, the earthen smell of animal carcass and the little green buds that grew on the tree branches every spring. 

 

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Michael Schrimper graduates from Indiana University Bloomington with a degree in creative writing in the summer of 2012. He is currently Editorial Assistant at Drunken Boat journal of the arts.

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Dance of the Stand-Up Man

by Janet Slike

 

A MAN walks into a bar. But it isn’t a bar. It’s a barre, the banister that ballet dancers use for balance. And it’s a stretch to call me a man since I’m only sixteen. Despite what I’ve just recounted, it’s not true that I walked into it. I was shoved.

 

But I shouldn’t have told you that just yet; I need to work on my delivery… My father performs stand-up comedy at Guffaws, and he says you need to start with the familiar or else the rubes in the plaid flannel shirts gulping their third beer will be lost by the time you get to the punchline.

 

But we’re nowhere near the punchline. Pour yourself a beer.

 

The setting, Miss Marjorie’s Dance Studio, is familiar to anyone in Winnow, Ohio, if merely because you can memorize this town in an hour tops. Then you’ll spend the rest of your life hoping that, for the sake of variety, Buster Kettering will add sherbet to the Dairy Hut menu or that Florence the hairdresser at Hair’s To You will learn to style hair without backcombing it to the ceiling.

 

I’ve hung out at Miss Marjorie’s every Wednesday since Mom and Dad divorced seven months ago; Mom signed me up for classes and then smirked when Dad’s neck veins bulged out right on cue at the announcement. Miss Marjorie’s is a three-story building between Fletcher’s Funeral Home and the Quikee-Lube. To show you how messed up this town is, the Quikee-Lube is supposedly haunted, and high school guys without a lot of smarts compete for jobs at Fletcher’s.

 

Miss Marjorie herself is a weird bird. She claims that she is a countess but she’s vague about giving out details because she says she knows valuable information about “the great conspiracy” and where certain royal treasures were kept for safekeeping.

 

We small-towners love a story full of intrigue, especially when told by a half-crazy old woman speaking with an exotic foreign accent. Winnow never questioned her story and rejoiced with her when she married its own Rufus Harrington, the pudgy, bald mayor. We never said aloud that a countess could have done better.

 

“You have talent, young one,” Miss Marjorie told me the first day of class as she reached up to touch my shoulder, tapping me with the hand that sported three amber rings.

 

I waited in the hallway to see if she told everyone this, to keep them coming back after the free introductory lesson. She didn’t. I came back.

 

To my shock and Dad’s horror, I enjoyed dancing. He made snarky comments less often once he saw that for the first time in my life I had muscles. I don’t know what Mom thinks about the classes; once she annoyed Dad sufficiently, she seemed to lose interest.

 

I don’t understand why more guys from school don’t sign up for ballet. Girls look great in leotards. Miraculously, Miss Marjorie gave me the lead in the Christmas recital, partnering me with Watterson High’s glamour girl Lucy Guss, the snob who never looks at me in school. But she looks at me at Miss Marjorie’s. A lot. I guess a leotard on a guy doesn’t hide much either.

 

One week before the recital, Lucy’s eyes drilled through me, but not in the pleasant “I want you” way I think they sometimes do.

 

“What are you looking at?” I looked down to make sure that I wasn’t sweating any more than usual. I leapt hesitantly, but nailed the landing as I usually do.

 

“My sister Leah’s picking me up. She’s home from Ohio State. Do you want me to fix you up?” Lucy was checking me out for her sister?

 

“OK. She’d go out with a high school guy?”

 

Grinning, Lucy nodded. “She’s weird that way.”

 

Leah, punctual, pretty, but a bit too painted with makeup in my opinion, looked at me for two seconds before nodding at Lucy.

 

“Hi, Matt. Lucy said you were cute and I’d love some Chinese food tonight. Maybe a movie?”

 

My stomach, on automatic pilot, rumbled. I’m not a dramatic teenager; if my basic needs are met, I’m good. They heard. Both sisters giggled. A man would have been insulted, but as I’ve said, I’m not yet a man.

 

“Sounds good.”

 

Holly Ling’s wasn’t crowded, so I asked for a table by the koi tank. The waiter shrugged in agreement and led the way past the red screen with lacquered mums and the black screen with lacquered monarch butterflies. I had never realized that when a restaurant in Winnow has the class to have lacquered screens and a koi tank, it was therefore entitled to make the average guy pay for the privilege of seeing them. As I was wondering whether I could stretch an egg roll and fortune cookie into a meal, Leah flipped her hair back. “It’s my treat, sugar; get what you want.”

 

Lucy and Leah had moved to Winnow after spending their language-formative years in Biloxi. Still, Lucy would never call me “sugar.” I could get used to college girl speak.

 

The waiter delivered mounds of vegetable lo mein and Mongolian beef and we devoured them while I tried to come up with a non-lame topic of conversation... She didn’t dance, play computer games, or watch any reality show.

 

She didn’t do any better in the conversation department. Why would I care that her sorority was paired with Sigma Chi for the Greek Games? Or that she might have a chance to spend a semester in Wales?

 

The movie was a silly chick flick, but at least we didn’t have to talk. On the way out, we ran into a couple she knew from school; they seemed surprised to see her on a date.

 

Before she dropped me off, I cupped my hand to my mouth and sniffed to see what damage the Mongolian beef had done to my breath. I was at least going to get some kissing out of this ordeal. She kissed me tepidly six times, then squirmed away and turned her head. I felt dismissed.

 

I let her go. Dad taught me to respect women. He instructed, “Back away if she wants you to. If they say no, they mean it, son.” He was always a stand-up guy, and I don’t mean the comedy thing. He backed away from Mom when she said no to the marriage.

 

I always feel like the rube. I’ll never live up to his standards, but I try. That’s what the old dude taught me. What did Mom teach me? From her, I’ll probably develop a tendency toward shopping addiction, judgmental thought, and slovenly housekeeping.

 

As you may have guessed, since you no doubt have more perception than a teenaged boy, the next day Leah’s brute of a boyfriend burst into Miss Marjorie’s and shoved me against the barre.

 

“Never touch my girlfriend again, punk,” he screamed as he lunged to shove me a second time. His jealousy-fueled strength propelled me over the barre, and I broke the mirror behind it. Shards cut into my tendons.

 

I read Lucy’s get-well card exactly when I should have been dancing the male lead, as she knew I would. Her note said: “Mitch and I are so hot together when we’re dancing and when we’re not. Things happen for a reason. Take care of yourself, dude.”

 

Mom bought me a get-well gift: a plaid flannel shirt. Having not listened to Dad in years, she was genuinely puzzled by my uncontrollable laughter.

 

                                            #    #    #

 

Janet Slike is a freelance editor of educational materials, scientific articles, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Taproot Literary Review and is forthcoming in Antique Children. In addition to writing short stories for adults, she enjoys writing children's picture books. Janet and her husband Teel live in Dublin, Ohio with their two cats.

Marie Curie and Arthur Rimbaud:

An Imagined Marriage

by Marissa Cohen

 

WORDSMITH WILDMAN meets scientific sorceress - a match made in heaven. No need to isolate elements.

 

Scorpio Marie Curie, take your radioactive heart over to Arthur Rimbaud’s flat. (Forget this husband Pierre and Arthur’s lover, Verlaine. Let’s dream a while.) After all, you and Rimbaud were only a decade apart. Even if he has left your Paris, board a German train to find him. You’ve come all the way from Poland, and Arthur sometimes loved women; it won’t be a wasted journey.

 

Trust a Libra-Scorpio cusp like Arthur to really guide you into the romantic dark. A marriage between you and Arthur would crack the gloss from museum glassware and send mirror shards spinning into space. Poetic plutonium - you’d have to be careful how and when to touch each other or both would glow. Arthur was a danger zone. You won two Nobel prizes, he was a misbegotten genius who pissed on a poet and stabbed poor Verlaine in the hand.

 

Marie, harness the chemicals of the universe. You and Rimbaud create with radioactive ink , spin worlds fantastic and deadly. How perfect for your Scorpio self to make elemental magic where it would be most hidden

 

and most dangerous.

 

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A published author, educator, and professional astrologer, Marissa Cohen writes about grammar, writing, spirituality, and women’s issues in her fiction, poetry and nonfiction. In 2003, she received the Letters Honorarium from the Fort Lauderdale branch of the National League of American Pen Women. The Poet Laureate of Florida, Edmund Skellings, called her poetry “intellectually and emotionally powerful”. Her writing can be seen in many, many print and web publications such as Grammarly, She Magazine (a monthly column called "On the Shelves"), The Survivor's Review (2009), and The Contributor (2011). She is the CEO of HappyGanesh.com (as advertised on CBS Radio), and maintains two blogs: one about writing and grammar and the other about astrological trends and events.

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Exercises in Eloquence

by V. Moriarty

 

Documentary

 

A winter's afternoon at the zoo, a low sun shining on the glass wall of the Orang Utan enclosure. A woman in her early thirties, with auburn hair, intently watches the inhabitants. There are two of the orange-furred apes inside, one squatting immobile on the concrete floor and the other moving about, greedily gathering and eating pieces of fruit. Their expressions seem morose, their faces lacking the normal human muscles of expression. Or perhaps they are morose, depressed by captivity.

 

After half an hour or so the woman – who is alone - approaches the enclosure's front wall, where the female Orang Utan sits. She raises her hand and touches the glass, spreading her five fingers wide. The Orang Utan copies her, mirroring the gesture. They look a little like prisoner and prison visitor, wanting to hold hands but having to improvise. From this perspective it isn't quite clear which individual is in prison and which one visiting.

 

Poetic

 

Family is family, however far removed. A lesson learned

 

after almost touching her, my distant

 

relation. A near miss through smeared glass;

 

our hands spread there, mirroring.

 

Fleshy finger pads mapping.

 

No speech, of course. Instead making do

 

with not quite contact, separate.

 

Her prison wall, both looking-glass and window

 

fusing my reflection, her form,

 

placing us in parallax.

 

Vulgar

 

I've always loved monkeys, ever since I was a little girl. Loved them to bits. They're so funny. To think that I never really knew about these ones before I went on honeymoon with Gary. We were in Singapore on the way to Australia, our holiday of a lifetime. At Singapore zoo they had these Orang Utangs, and Gal got me to hold a baby one while he took our picture. It was funny because I'd just turned redhead for the wedding and Gary loved it, especially when I showed him in the limo to the airport that collar and cuffs matched, if you get my meaning. Anyway, I held this baby monkey and his hair was the same colour as mine. Gary said that he hoped our kids would be better looking, and I said with my beauty and his brains they were bound to be little smashers.

 

Looks like this poor old girl might be up the duff. She's not exactly over the moon about it though, is she? And I suppose monkeys can't just go to the doctor and get it sorted the way we can. That silly sod over there can't be relied on to be of any help, either. About as much use as a chocolate teapot, he looks. He's running around like a blue-arsed fly, stuffing himself silly on bananas and oranges. She's left to bear the brunt of it. Yes, love, I know. That's how it is. Us girls have got to stick together.

 

Academic

 

The Sumatran Orang Utan, of which these specimens are typical, has a highly developed social sense. Primatologists have found that Orang Utans in captivity exhibit a complex culture centred around the acquisition and consumption of food. In this regard there exists considerable sexual dimorphism; males favour fruits with sugary or fatty pulp whereas the smaller females favour young leaves, shoots, seeds and bark.

 

Like other great apes, Orang Utans are intelligent. Studies indicate that they may have a higher problem-solving capability than the chimpanzee, previously considered to be superior in this domain. Moreover, they excel in terms of symbolic comprehension and expression. Subjects in a series of experiments were able to acquire over 30 different signs from the repertoire of American Sign Language (ASL). The behaviour of the two specimens today is, therefore, entirely consistent with that observed in the species as a whole.

 

                                           # # #

 

V. Moriarty returns to The Zodiac Review following her or his entertaining story, Relations, published in our inaugural issue. We know little about the author...only that she or he writes brilliantly and has come to us from London. We hope to hear from her or him again.

 

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                          End of Spring 2012 Issue

                       Return to top of page here.

Context Driven

by David Atkinson

​

ON THE DAY of 'the incident,' a young man with immaculately trimmed and gelled dark hair put on his turn signal and shot into the turning lane with smug perfection.

 

He waited for a brief gap in traffic before swinging a wide left turn and forcing his way into the right lane.

 

"So Collard tells me he was making sure we were behind the team. Was there anything he should know before the boss checks in on things?"

 

"What?!" A young woman in the passenger seat, compulsively fixing a loose strand of her platinum blond hair in the side mirror, exclaimed.

 

"He didn't come out and say it." The young man sneered, driving with one hand so he could make a self-important emphasis gesture. "It was all loyalty to the team. Now that things were bad, was anyone going to turn? He just wants to save himself."

 

"Wasn't it his plan? Didn’t you say it was a bad idea?"

 

"Yeah. Now I'm right and he wants to stick together so the boss doesn't know," he said with his head turned, watching for an open spot. He flipped on his turn signal and jammed the car over into a small gap. A startled driver let out an angry honk. The young man flipped on his turn signal again and sharply turned into a parking lot.

 

"I hope you told him to shove it." The young woman smirked with superiority.

 

"Oh yeah. I told him I was loyal to the team, but I wasn’t going to lie. Then I told him I didn't think the team was the problem." The young man gave a haughty nod of his head. "He knew what I meant.

 

"The young man and young woman bolted out of the car simultaneously and marched around their respective sides toward a bookstore. Shortly after they each strutted out with a coffee.

 

"Where did we park?

 

"The young woman looked sharply around. "I think it’s over there by that clunker.

 

"Both got in, carefully buckling their seat belts. The man, rubbing absentmindedly at a spot on his head like it was a bald patch, which didn't work quite right since the spot wasn't bald, started the car. He checked the rear view mirror before cautiously backing out. The woman gently reached over and turned on the radio. Soft jazz lightly filled the car. Her hands reflexively went to fiddle with glasses on her face that weren't there, dropping a second later when they didn't find glasses. The man politely waited for traffic to clear before turning out of the parking lot.

 

The man smiled beatifically and the woman smiled pleasantly back.

 

"What was I talking about, mother? I'm can't seem to recall."

 

The woman looked sweetly thoughtful for a moment. "I think it was something about the firm. It was, wasn't it? I'm sorry, I don't really remember either. I must have had one of my little moments."

 

"Sullivan! That's what I was talking about."

 

"Of course, father. That was terrible that he got let go."

 

"It sure was, mother. He's been with us for thirty years, right from the beginning. No one cares about that firm as much as he does." The man eased the car to a stop at a red light. A second later, the light turned green and he paused before happily getting on his way so that a couple of turning cars from the adjacent parking lot could merge into the lane ahead of him.

 

"Wasn't there anything you could do?"

 

"He just couldn't handle the job anymore." He shrugged helplessly. "It isn't right, but business is business. No matter how much I didn't like it, the firm couldn't keep him around."

 

"It's still sad."

 

"It is, mother." He nodded regretfully. "I told him I would help any way I could. Give him a great reference if he needs it. Even offered to lend him a little money if he gets into a spot."

 

"That was nice."

 

"I owe it to him." The man glanced humbly over at the woman. "He gave me my start. That has to count for something."

 

The woman nodded in approval. The man gently drifted from the left to the right lane after checking his mirrors. He was pleasantly silent as he continued to drive straight ahead, as if he was pondering something.

 

"This isn't right, is it, mother?" He said finally to the woman, smiling again.

 

"I don't think that it is, father."

 

The man checked traffic and carefully executed an overly wide u-turn around a cement island, driving back toward the bookstore. He pulled the car delicately but a little too closely into a spot next to another car. The other car was the same color and model. Another man and woman were standing outside the other car, grinning with polite amusement.

 

The young man and young woman got out.

 

"Looks like you mistook our car for yours."

 

The other, older man laughed, rubbing the bald spot on his head. "I nearly got into yours myself."

 

"They're identical!" The other, older woman smiled, causing her glasses to slip slightly. "I was waiting for father to let me in and I suddenly thought, My seat covers, where are my seat covers?"

 

"Sorry," the young man muttered, getting quickly into the other car.

 

"We're the Greenbergs, by the way," the other, older man said as he offered his hand through the other car's open door.

 

The young man reluctantly shook it. "I'm Brad. This is Sheila," he muttered. The woman sat stifly with her arms folded over her chest.

 

"Nice to meet you both," the other, older woman replied sweetly.

 

"You folks ought to come to one of our dinner shindigs," the other, older man quipped, slapping his knee "This would be a hard story to beat."

 

"Sure," the young man replied sharply before slamming the door.

 

The other, older man and woman waved happily as the young man drove away. He angrily flipped on his turn signal and swung a wide turn out in front of an oncoming truck, speeding up just before the car was about to be rear-ended.

 

"Well, that was weird," the young woman finally grumbled, arms still crossed tightly. "I wonder what the hell all that was."

 

"What I can't figure out," the young man snapped without looking at her, "is how my key worked."

 

# # #

 

David S. Atkinson received his MFA in writing from the University of Nebraska. His stories have appeared in "Grey Sparrow," "Children Churches and Daddies," "Split Quarterly," "Cannoli Pie," "C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag," "Brave Blue Mice," "Atticus Review," and "Fine Lines." His book reviews have appeared in "Gently Read Literature," "The Rumpus," and "All Things Pankish." The web site dedicated to his writing can be found at http://davidsatkinsonwriting.com/. He currently serves as a reader for "Grey Sparrow" and in his non-literary time he works as a patent attorney in Denver.

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​

Elegy
by Anne Marie DeVito

 

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2000

Matthew S. D’Amico, a research chemist of Consol Energy,

died this Tuesday, December 5 in Mairsdale, VA. He was 45.

 

I ONCE KNEW A MAN who drank his hot tea with milk and sugar. Not too much sugar and just enough milk to give it a tawny complexion. For lunch, he liked tuna fish salad on toast. He liked it best on Saturday afternoons when it rained. I used to make it for him, scooping heaps of salad between burnt rye and skewering green olives on toothpicks for a finishing touch. He said I made the best toast. He said it in a way that I had to believe him.

 

Mr. D’Amico was born November 6, 1955, in Fairmont, West Virginia, son of Edward and Mary Jo Carni D’Amico, who survive. He received his Bachelors of Science in Chemistry from Fairmont State Universityin 1978. He received his Masters  of Science in Energy Resources from the University of Pittsburgh in 1981. 

He wore very thick-rimmed glasses, black ones that framed his eyes. For work, he dressed in crisp striped shirts but his socks never matched. He carried a pen and a small lined notepad around with him daily. I remember him constantly making lists and taking notes, holding up the line in the grocery store while he jotted down a quick observation on life. He had a knack for starting up conversations with strangers. People liked him. They liked listening to him and being around him. He liked Sinatra’s later stuff, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the color pink. I’m not sure if he liked the color pink itself as much as he liked seeing girls in pink. He said it was a happy color.

 

In 1979, Mr. D’Amico joined the Pittsburgh branch of Consol Energy as a researcher in the stack sampling department. He bec ame the Headof Research and Development in 1986 and made significant contributionsto the company’s safety  division. His first published report, “Alternative

Techniques for Emission Compliance” introduced advanced methods to reduce air pollution and other hazardous effects from coal burning. He spoke at conferences nationwide and was a frequent contributor to the EPA Newsletter.

 

He used to make up his own rules to board games, tossing away the actual rules so no one else could read them. Then, we would be in the middle of a heated game when the stakes had been raised to several king size Three Musketeers bars. He would announce a brand new rule and be awarded a triple word score, Park Place, and 890 points. You had no choice but to lay down your tired metal horseman in defeat and try to conceal your tears.  Though, you never thought to question him.  

 

 In addition to his work with Consol, Mr. D’Amico became President of the Source Evaluation Society in 1999. The SES was a professional association dedicated to advancing the applied sciences relating to air pollution control. Mr. D’Amico was known for his integrity, intelligence, and dedication to data quality and research. His family has announced

 that a memorial scholarship will be created in his honor and awarded to chemistry students at Fairmont State.

 

This man made a lot of bets. He made bets on silly, frivolous things like how to pronounce certain words or phrases. There was an argument about “Attila the Hun” once.  It was either At-tila or Attil-a. I still don’t know how to pronounce it correctly. Although I could look it up, I know I never will. He always won the bets, but he never made you pay up. He used to say he was the smartest man I would ever know. He could have been right.

 

Mr. D’Amico married Catherine Layman of Fairmont on November 8, 1980. Catherine survives, along with seventeen-year-old son, Michael D’Amico, and sixteen-year-old daughter, Alexia D’Amico, both at home. Michael will attend University of Pittsburgh next fall to pursue criminology.

 

I knew a man once who really liked fortune cookies. He liked them so much that he bought a whole box of them. He cracked them all open and lined the slips of paper on the kitchen table. I remember that he called me into the room and said I could choose any fortune I wanted.

 

“That’s not how it works,” I told him.  “You’re supposed to pick a cookie, then you’re stuck with the fortune.”

 

“No,” he said. “You’re never stuck with anything.”

 

I can’t remember if he ate any of them, but in the end, it didn’t matter.

 

He did that a lot – just bought things for the hell of it. The kitchen was filled with gadgets that no one used. A panini press and an orange spiral peeler and an electric potato masher. One time he bought a sleek silver cocktail shaker. It made him feel like James Bond or something. After making one martini, measuring the vodka, and shaking it until the ice melted, he realized that he didn’t really like martinis. He wasn’t a martini kind of man. He was an MGD kind of man. Cold, bottled MGD. But he always liked saying that he had a cocktail shaker.

 

Also surviving, a brother, Eddie D’Amico, and a sister, Christina D’Amico, both of Fairmont. Flowers or donations can be sent to Saint Joan of Arc church. Arrangements by WILLIAM G. NEAL FUNERAL HOMES LTD., Washington, Pa.

 

He had great shirts, this man I knew. Huge, soft t-shirts and sweatshirts that had been softened to lamb’s wool in the wash. One had a chart of periodic elements on it. Another had a square and a circle, the circle shouting at the square: “Don’t be a square!”  Another was from the 1999 Pittsburgh Marathon, not for winning, just for finishing. The t-shirts would come down past my knees and cover my elbows and they would keep me the most warm I had ever been. I have never been as warm. I will never again be that warm. But it’s ok. I mean, it has to be. Because I started putting milk and sugar in my hot tea. And sometimes, my roommates complain that the whole apartment smells like tuna fish.

 

And I have this odd obsession with the color pink.

                                                                                      

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Anne Marie DeVito holds her Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Fordham University and is currently pursuing her MFA from New York University in Fiction Writing. Previously, she has published her short fiction in Splash of Red Magazine and Bumble Jacket Miscellany  Spring 2011 Issue. She has read her work at fiction readings in Manhattan and Brooklyn and recorded for NYU Radio. She is currently working on a short fiction collection.

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Spring 2012
Context Driven
Elegy
His Father's Legacy
Flannel Shirt
Unformed
The Perfect Switch
The Chief
The Man Who
Fu Manhu
The End of
Dance of the
Marie Curie
Exercises
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