Floorboarder

30. Mary

2011-06-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

Mary clenched the racquet until the rubber grip tape let out a faint squeal. Her knuckles were white. With a careful toss, the ball rose into the air, reached its peak, and fell. The ball hit the floor and bounced, lower and lower until it just rolled, slowly, to a stop. She stood, staring across the empty court, breathing hard. It was late. She needed to go home.

•••

Scraping around the edges of the jar for what was left of the peanut butter, the sound of the serrated knife dragging across the plastic made her skin crawl. When she had collected a decent dollop, she spread it over a slab of bread, trying to make the second sandwich as robust as the first. Even the bread felt heavy. She craved a shower. Instead, at almost two in the morning and still wearing her tennis gear, she stood in the kitchen making sandwiches.

A key turned in the lock; the front door opened and closed. Mary heard someone set a briefcase down and sigh.
“All the lights are on. Are you still up?” Her husband's voice was soft and tired.
“Yeah, Ben. The kids. They need lunch for tomorrow.”
He came into the small kitchen and leaned on the far counter. His tie was in his pocket, his top button undone. “Oh, Mar. The rec centre?” She nodded. He frowned. “That twenty-four hour membership is making a wreck of you.”
“I couldn't sleep. The tournament starts tomorrow, I need more practice.”
“I forgot about that. Sorry, work is so crazy, this case.” He sighed, shaking his head. “I’ve been searching the library for precedent judgments since noon. Nothing’s in our favour, it’s a sinkhole.”
“It's okay.”
“I'll see you upstairs.”
“Wait, Ben.” She moved her hand toward him, but he was out of reach.
“What is it?” He half-turned.
Whatever she had hoped for, this wasn’t it. “Nothing.”
“Well, night.” Looking at his feet, he walked out of the kitchen. Mary finished and went up to the bedroom, and finding him already asleep, got into bed, careful not to create a noticeable disturbance.

•••

Boundless energy. The kids, Brian and Sophie, both in late single-digit years, had truly reached the age of exploration. The noise of their shouting woke Mary before her alarm went off, and she rose from bed as though the children had been chanting a spell to summon her. She remembered the days when they would sleep until she woke them, gently, cradling Brian in her arms or kissing Sophie on the forehead. Now they galloped down the stairs the instant dawn’s light crept in the window. Ben had given them their own alarm clocks to teach them punctuality. Ben was a heavier sleeper than Mary. She headed downstairs, towards the coffee machine.

“I had a dream I made a car out of spaghetti,” Brian said. “It had meatballs for wheels!”
“That sounds fun,” Mary said, punching the switch on the percolator. “Did you—“
“I had a dream too, Mommy!” Sophie interjected. “I had a dream we had a puppy!”
“That’s nice, dear.”
“Can we get a puppy?” Brian asked. The puppy had been an issue with Sophie for some time, and when she finally agreed to stop asking, her brother took up the cause. The coincidence did not go unnoticed. ‘That’s how they should make peace in the Middle East,’ Ben had said, ‘have an eight-year-old kid broker the treaty. Maybe someday she’ll be a diplomatic envoy for the United Nations.’
“Not now,” Mary said plainly. “Today’s a school day.”
After corralling the kids in the white sport utility and enduring their sweet interrogations — questions answerless and unanswerable, questions that weren’t questions at all, innocuous and innocent and occasionally incomprehensible — she dropped them off in the school parking lot. How do the deer know to cross at the deer crossing sign? Do cows tell each other apart by their spots? Who decided that red should be the colour for barns? Mary didn’t know. Did anyone?
“Be good, kids. I love you.”
“Love you too!” Brian effusively blew a kiss towards the car window. Sophie shouldered her backpack.
“The bell’s ringing, Mommy.”
Was Sophie outgrowing that kind of verbal affection, Mary wondered? Still, if it was time already, they were running late, and she had her own job ahead of her.
“Remember, Bethany Wooten’s going to pick you up today, right? You’re going to go to Bryce and Kendall’s house after school?”
“I know, Mommy. Bye-bye!”

•••

A Spanish-style adobe coating covered the front wall of the regional veterinarian’s office, but every other side was plain cinder-block. It was at the edge of the suburbs, and the rows of identical houses ended here, with farmers’ fields stretching into the distance. Mary looked across the parking lot towards the wide open swaths of land. Heavy machinery occupied the next field over, signaling that suburban expansion had begun.

The bell above the door jingled as she entered.
“Good morning, Mrs. Perdue.”
“Good morning, Doctor Waldner.”
Mary and the doctor had fallen into routine over the years she’d been working there. He was a pudgy, happy man, seemingly able to smile and joke through everything. Within the hour, the good doctor had inoculated a tomcat named Ringo against feline leukemia and taken a claw on the arm for his trouble. “He’ll thank me later,” he said with a chuckle, rubbing the scratch with an alcohol pad.

The phone rang. “Doctor Waldner’s office, regional vet,” Mary said. A man’s voice was on the other end. He spoke quickly.
“It’s Aaron Samuels, we got a big problem. Saffron got her leg under the truck,” his voice was tense, tinged with fear.
Mary’s heart began to pound. “Can you move her?”
“I think so,” he said. “I don’t know, she’s panicked.”
“Wrap her in a blanket if you can,” Mary said. “We’ll be ready when you arrive.”
Dr. Waldner came out from the examination room. “Who was that?”
“Aaron Samuels. You remember Saffron, his German Shepherd? I think they just ran over her leg.”
“Oh, my. I’ll prep for surgery. Could you clear the schedule for the rest of the day?”
“Already on it.” Mary had the appointment book open and was looking down the list.

•••

“Sorry, we have to reschedule Cotton’s appointment. There is an opening on Friday.” Mary heard a vehicle pull in to the parking lot and jotted a note in the book. “Thanks very much, bye.” She dropped the phone and ran outside.
Mr. Samuels, a heavyset man with a farmer’s broad shoulders, was already carrying a white-blanketed bundle. Saffron poked her nose out from under the hem of the blanket, whimpering.
“How is she?” Mary asked. No reply. She looked at Mr. Samuels. Creases of worry showed around his eyes and cheeks.
“Sorry, Mary,” he said, “can you help me with the door?”

“This way, please. Put her down here.” Dr. Waldner helped Mr. Samuels set the dog down on the stainless steel table. Whining, Saffron tried to move, but the doctor held her down.
“It’s okay, girl,” he said, hushing her.
When the blanket came away, Saffron’s right foreleg dangled over the edge of the table at an impossible angle. Mary felt sick. “Hold her, hold her,” Dr. Waldner was saying. “Mrs. Perdue, bring me the Butorphanol, please? Second shelf, nasal spray.”
Mary found the bottle for the doctor, and he inserted the nozzle into Saffron’s nose. The dog relaxed immediately. “Now, diazepam, please?” Mary brought that bottle and the doctor placed a pair of tablets under Saffron’s tongue, held her mouth shut and stroked her throat. Saffron lay still.

“I was just on my way out, and Saff must’ve run up to the truck while it was moving. Next thing, she’s crying bloody murder, one leg under the back wheel. I didn’t know whether to move the truck the rest of the way or what.”
“The leg is very badly damaged. The bone is shattered completely.”
“So, can you fix it?”
“Well, even if the bone heals adequately – which, frankly, is unlikely – she’ll never be able to use the limb. The nerve trauma is too severe.”
“Jesus.”
“The best option, in this case, is amputation.” Dr. Waldner removed his spectacles, folded them up, and put them in his pocket.
“Jesus Christ,” Mr. Samuels said again.
“Do you need some time to think?”
“The kids love that dog. They don’t know any of this,” he gestured towards the unconscious animal. “What kind of life could she have, if she couldn’t run? She’s a farm dog.”
Mary heard, and understood what he was saying. She interjected. “No, no no no. She can still have a full life, have you ever seen a three-legged dog? They don’t feel sorry for themselves at all! They aren’t like us, their limitations don’t bother them, they can still be happy!” She stopped to catch her breath. Dr. Waldner and Mr. Samuels were looking at her with surprise. Her eyes began to feel hot as tears brimmed in them.
“Mrs. Perdue… It’s not our decision to make.”
Hiding her face, Mary walked briskly out of the room.

•••

“This is Ben Perdue, attorney at law. Please leave a message and I’ll return your call.”
She wiped the tears out of her eyes and closed the phone. The kids want a dog. They want a puppy, but they’ll take a full-grown dog. Saffron is good-hearted and beautiful, they’d love her. They won’t discriminate. Mary thought about how she could plead Saffron’s case, and she pressed redial.
“This is Ben Perdue, attorney at–”

The bell above the door jangled as she came in.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I just got a little emotional, that’s all.”
“Mrs. Perdue, you look exhausted. Would you like to take the rest of the day off?”
“Doctor Waldner, I –“
“Please, call me Terry. The schedule is clear, and I wouldn’t mind closing up early myself. I understand about Saffron.”
“Are you sure? I could help you finish up.” Mary wiped her eyes again.
“If you wish. It will only take a few minutes. I’ll need the Somulose. It’s in the same cabinet as the other sedatives. You’re sure you’re all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine.” Going to the cabinet, Mary found the box Dr. Waldner wanted. He was still talking to Mr. Samuels about disposal options as she opened the diazepam bottle and slipped a couple tablets into her pocket.

•••

“Hi Bethany, it’s Mary. You’re still picking the kids up after school, right? No, nothing’s changed, I just wanted to confirm. And you can watch them for a while? I don’t want to be any trouble, it’s just I have this tennis tournament, and Ben’s working… Yes, thanks, I just wanted to make sure it was still okay. Nothing’s wrong. Thanks. Bye.”
Mary hung up the phone and touched her face, rubbing at the tightness in her forehead. Stress would give her wrinkles, she thought, if it hadn’t already. The pill was easy to swallow. She poured herself a glass of orange punch and walked to the living room, sat down on the couch, and looked up at the ceiling. The fan was motionless. She stood up, pulled the chain once, and sat down in the same position she was in before, watching the fan spin.

•••

She abruptly realized she’d been asleep, probably for several hours; the dying light of the day was painting the room a deep orange. That was refreshing, she thought, maybe I’ll have a bath now, before the tennis tourna-- the tennis tournament. What time was it? She sprang from the couch and ran to look at the microwave. Ten to seven; she had time. Not much, but enough. She scrambled for her gym bag.

Nausea crept over her in waves; her stomach danced a jig as she drove. Come on, she thought, I need this. The clock read three minutes after seven when she crashed through the doors of the rec centre and into the registration desk.
“Mary Perdue,” she said, “singles tennis tournament.”
“Oh, you’d better hurry,” the receptionist said. “They can’t exactly start without you.” Mary was already running down the hall.

She walked onto the court, out of breath. The blonde woman on the other side of the net was spinning her racquet impatiently, and when she saw Mary, she strutted over.
“Hi,” she said. “Karen Wallace.”
“Mary.” They shook hands. Karen was younger than Mary, pretty, with straight white teeth. The umpire tossed a coin for first serve. Karen won, and smiled. Mary saw something she did not like in that smile; something conniving. They went back to their ends of the court. She wished Ben were here.

The first rally crossed the net a half-dozen times. Karen was good. She won the point and served again, a drop shot that Mary had to scramble for, barely able to return it before the second bounce. When it came back, it was too fast and too far away. The graceless way she stretched her racquet towards it in vain embarrassed her.

As her opponent readied another serve, Mary began to feel overwhelmed. The rally went on, and Mary fought, but the score climbed to forty-and-love. She tensed herself for the next serve, and Karen aced her. From across the court, she saw her smile. Mary made up her mind to win the next set. She won’t break my serve, she told herself.

The ball rose into the air, and at its peak, Mary swung. She could tell right away it was a mis-hit; the ball sprang off the edge of the racquet and into the net.
“Fault one,” the umpire called.

Grinding her teeth together, Mary began to doubt herself. She’d always thought she was capable of fulfilling her ambitions; she’d resisted compromise, determined to find the time and energy somehow. This Karen probably doesn’t have kids, Mary thought. She has the kind of toned body married men fantasize about. That porcelain smile flashed from across the court, and the racquet handle squealed as Mary clenched harder.

Slam. The force jarred Mary’s arm and the green blur shot across the court. Karen moved to volley it back but missed, and the ball ricocheted off the service line, launching directly into the centre of her face. Her racquet clattered to the floor. It was a moment before Mary caught herself smiling, and when she did, she felt ashamed.

“Are you alright?” She called out.
The blonde ponytail shook ‘no’ from side to side. The ball-boy gave her a handful of ice, which she pressed to her face. Blood dripped from her nose. She whispered something to the umpire as she walked off the court.

Mary stood still, her mouth agape. The umpire addressed the room. “The winner by default, Mary Perdue!”

29. Easton

2011-02-18T20:06:00.000-08:00

The cards felt stiff to Easton's shaking hands as he bent up the corners. Across the table, two royal blue chips worth a hundred dollars each rested uneasily in the betting box. The dealer showed a red eight. The other card was face down. Easton's eyes stared at the patterns on the back of it until shapes began to emerge.
"Stand," he said. The dealer nodded, and laid down a card for himself. Five of spades. He flipped over the down card, a six. Nineteen.

Easton sighed with a combination of relief and disappointment. He overturned his cards, a nine and a queen. Push.
He thought about leaving. There was a knot in his stomach, he couldn't stand the thought of losing those last two chips. He looked around for a sign, and an attractively made-up woman approached him, wearing the tiny uniform of the casino's servers. "Can I get you a drink?"
"Okay," Easton said with apprehension. "I guess I'll have a Rolling Rock." It was free, why not? The least they could do was comp him a beer.
"You got it," she said, and Easton watched her sashay through the aisles of slot machines and roulette tables.
The dealer put two cards in front of Easton. The chips! He'd left them on the betting line. A six faced him. He lifted the other card: a four. "Hit," he said.
The card showed a single diamond, the ace. "Stay," he said, expelling the last of his breath.
The dealer handled his own cards and reached twenty. Easton doubled his money. He held four hundred dollars' worth of chips in his hand. Four chips. They felt so small. He looked at them, snug in his palm. They weren't enough. He put two of them back on the table.
The cards came out. A five and a six. Easton felt a surge of adrenaline as the words "double down" left his mouth. He dropped his other two chips on the table, letting it all ride on this next card. A ten, a face card of any kind, would be worth four hundred dollars.
The dealer gave him a two.
Easton felt dizzy. His vision closed in on the card. Two clubs stared back at him, mockingly. Even as his eyes crossed and it looked like four, it still wasn't enough to win. It was over. He would be evicted from his apartment and starve on the street. Maybe he could sell everything he owned. Maybe he could get a loan from a mobster. They had to have those around here.
"Dealer busts." Four more chips slid forward. Easton took his hands off the sides of his head. He felt the air rush back in to his lungs. Suddenly he could see again. Four cards rested in front of the dealer: a six, a three, a five, and an eight.
"Rolling Rock?" Easton turned toward the sweet voice. A glass of amber ale stood, sweating, on the tray, inches from his face. He looked behind the cold beer, following the soft curves of the woman's body upwards, and her face was beautiful red lips, dark eyes, peroxide-blonde hair and laserbeam-white teeth. He felt a rush of triumph. Gleefully, he took the beer, collected his chips, and left the table. Tonight, he felt he had beaten the house, and was going out on top. It was time to cash out, but first he would finish this drink, his reward for skillful play. He sipped it while walking to the cashier's cage, and some of the beer splashed down his chin. Stopping to wipe it, he surveyed the floor for a place to sit down. There was an empty stool at the roulette table. His eyes were drawn to it.

28. Blake

2011-02-13T19:48:00.001-08:00

Blake craned his neck up so he could see the mirror. Past the landscape of his body – rolling, bronzed hills that could be mistaken at this angle for a set of unusually regular sand dunes – he saw the reflection of his legs planted on the floor, the same ripples of his torso, and his eyes just barely edging over the twin domes of his chest. Satisfied with his vertiginous appearance, he began his routine of high flies, bringing the forty-pound barbells together over his head and separating them, together and apart, the stainless steel weights coming together with the 'clack' sound of an office executive's desktop toy.

He admired himself. His was the body of a gladiator, he imagined, or a high-octane action film's leading man. When he saw an advertisement for some fashion product like designer briefs or cologne, ubiquitously featuring some overbuilt model's ornamental abdomen, he could legitimately make a comparison to his own physical attributes. He couldn't change the shape of his features – his nose was shaped like a bulb of garlic, and his eyes were like weekends: too small and too far apart – but in a contest from the neck down, he felt up to the challenge of any of those pampered paragons. Just in case the competition ever materialized, he moved on to complete the circuit with a set of preacher curls, skull crushers and planks, relishing the feeling of exertion, gritting his teeth until beads of sweat rolled into his eyes and stung. Let's see them do that, he said to himself.

On leaving the gym, Blake checked his cellphone, and found several text messages waiting for him. One of his frat brothers, known by the moniker 'Sacks,' wrote "Dawg, u clubbin 2nite?" Blake hit reply and typed on the smartphone's tiny keys. "ya im up 4 anething weher u thinkin?" After sending the message, he smiled, and punched in a follow-up. "Letz get CRUNK."

The pink silk shirt shone under the lights of the club, striated reflections hugging the contours of Blake's prominent chest and shoulders. The dance floor was packed with bodies, and Blake's eyes darted from each to the next, evaluating them. None of the men, he saw, were as developed as himself. There was no competition. He felt smug as his group fell back to the bar.

"Round of Jaeger bombs!" Sacks shouted at the bartender.

"How many is that?" He asked.

"One for all of us," Sacks replied, pointing at Blake and the rest of the Delta Epsilon Kappa brothers.

"When you decide on a number, let me know," the bartender said, and turned away.

"Yo, fuck that guy." Terry, one of the brothers said. "That's disrespect. I'd knock him out like a skinny bitch."

The bartender came back. "Six," Sacks said, "Six Jaeger bombs."

He lined up the glasses, the shooters, and six cans of Red Bull. "Forty-six fifty."

The boys drank fast. Sacks left two twenties under an empty can.

When the floor began to thin out a few hours later, Blake had just about had enough. The other brothers had mostly paired off with a sorority girl's birthday entourage, a matching-up that had happened so quickly it left Blake with only the last few to choose from. It wasn't that he found the selection unappealing: that was not so much of a barrier as an incentive to drink more. He could simply not reconcile the idea that he deserved better than last pick. He'd spent the hours sweating, eaten the vile-tasting protein bars and creatine phosphate supplements, read up on plyometrics and isolation presses – he didn't put in all that effort just so he could settle for substandard hook-ups. Growing despondent, he went to the bar and threw back a shot of Patron, getting ready to troll the dance floor again with meagre hopes. Just to be sure, he had another.

It was there, under the stippling light of a disco ball, that Blake saw the most beautiful girl he'd seen in his entire short-term memory. She was curvaceous yet thin, a sought-after shape that did not come easily, accentuated by matching triangles of skin revealed at the top and bottom of the girl's blouse where several buttons had been strategically unbuttoned. Her hair, a gust of blonde that had grown dishevelled over a night of dancing, fell past her shoulders. She wore flat-heeled shoes, which Blake deemed permissible because she was already rather tall. While conducting his inspection, Blake noticed a brown bangle on one of her ankles. 'Probably some kind of rainforest tree wood,' he thought, and resolved that he would mention that he cares about that sort of environmental thing if it came up in conversation. He made his approach.

"I've got two hundred pounds of dynamite," he said, and she looked at him with almond-shaped, deeply made-up eyes so enthralling he forgot the second part of the pick-up line.

"What?" she said, narrowing her eyes and pushing her hair back behind one ear.

He abandoned the tack. "What's your name?"

"Nevermind," she said, turning away.

He grabbed her arm. "You want to dance?"

She resisted, but Blake knew it was just a test. He'd read about this behaviour on the internet; a beautiful girl will deflect a guy's advances to see what he's really made of. Blake intended to persevere. He pulled her closer, her body was lithe and surprisingly powerful. "Come on, dance with me," he said, "you know you want to." The smell of her perfume gave him a heady rush. Her touch was intoxicating beyond intoxication.
Someone interrupted the moment, cutting between them and breaking Blake's grasp, pushing him away. This skinny, artsy-looking guy with too much hair and these wiry little arms.

"What do you think you're doing, buddy?" he said, getting right in Blake's face. He seemed pretty confident for a guy with earrings.
"Are you stupid or something? Don't cockblock me," Blake said, not backing down.
The guy laughed and turned to address his entourage. "He doesn't know who I am," he said. 'He's about to find out,' Blake thought, and planted a paw in his scrawny chest. He pushed him backward. The nuisance fell right on his ass, his spindly legs sticking straight out in front of him, his girlish leather boots up in the air. A strobelight seemed to have turned on as flashes of light began to appear constantly.

"Not such hot shit now, huh?" He'd show this scarecrow, nobody pushes Blake around. He began unbuttoning his shirt. "You want to start something?"

"Leave him alone," the girl said. She started to pull at his arm, but backed away as the pink silk parted to reveal the juggernaut underneath.

"I'll show you a real man," he said. He threw the shirt aside and advanced on his enemy. "Come at me," he bellowed, "see what you got!"

Someone came at him, but it wasn't who he expected. The force caught him by surprise, not hurting him, just holding him back. He lunged against the grip and craned his neck to see the black-shirted bouncers with "security" stencilled across their chests. Two of them restrained him while a third stood by, a hand hovering over the stun gun on his belt. They wrestled, forcing his back to the ground, and he looked up to see the crowd beyond his mountainous muscles.

People were gathering around now, all staring at him. Now he noticed the cameras. They seemd to be everywhere, taking photos of him being held down. He locked eyes with the guy who had started this; he was slightly bent over, looking vulnerable, with the beautiful girl at his arm, one gentle hand on his sunken chest. One of the security guards was talking to that guy now, addressing him as 'sir' and saying the words 'deeply sorry.'
"Make way, we're taking him out of here." The ground began to slip as the guards dragged Blake towards the exit, his shirt still in a heap on the floor. Blake tried to break free, and a voice shouted in his ear, "If you resist, I will tazer you. Do you understand that?" He felt a prod in his ribs and stopped struggling.

People were pointing and talking. Someone was laughing. "Respect me," Blake shouted into the sea of eyes, "Respect me!"

27. Tamara

2011-02-13T19:48:00.000-08:00

Tamara tugged on the edges of her thigh–high stockings, although they couldn't possibly slip from their place. The stage seemed like the edge of a tall building; she felt vertigo just picturing herself standing on it. "This is where I wanted to be," she thought. "This is what I've practiced for."

The DJ told the audience her stage name and she tottered into the spotlight, newly christened. She smiled, and breathed heavily, holding her frame erect; back arched, chest out. Standing in front of the crowd did seem like looking over the edge of a great precipice, but it wasn't as intimidating as she had envisioned. They all seemed to look up at her from far away, and the lights were bright, as though she had arisen into the night sky to dance among the stars.

She caught her cue late, but not so far as to make a difference as she began her routine. It was hard to hear in the narrow hall of the club – every sound reverberated, the raucous patrons and the waitresses shouting above the din, into a blended cacophony that was beaten into submission by the speaker system. She counted the beats to keep her time as the singer, speaking from a time before Tamara was born, sang about a red Corvette, about youth spent badly and exhausted too soon. It was a song she'd discovered in middle school, and taken to be empowering.

The song finished, to half-hearted applause. Orbs of green and red danced in front of Tamara's eyes where the stage lights flashed, and what she saw looked like baubles on a Christmas tree.

At first she wasn't sure what she'd expected, but the lukewarm reception fell so evenly between extremes, provoking neither pride nor shame, and was so predictable, that she felt foolish for considering the event noteworthy in the slightest degree beforehand. She didn't have much time for reflection as the opening chords of 'Kiss' cut in like a salvo of missiles to her thoughts, and she danced for the second time in front of an audience.

It wasn't that different than dancing alone. Staring at the miasma of ever–changing colour, the floodlights cycling through gels to pour over her in a panchromatic glow, she could see exactly how each motion had looked in her bedroom mirror. It wasn't real. Painted by spectacle, she became lost in another identity, a comic book in four–colour ink. Tamara was the artist, but the showgirl was someone unknowable; someone who had not existed off–stage and was free from context. Throwing herself into the performance, she easily put on a practiced face of enticement for the nebulae of anonymity, and allowed the straps of her bra to slide from her shoulders. She turned her back, and saw her shadow throw the vestment aside, the scrap gyrating like a twist of smoke in disturbed air.

Her arms folded across her cloistered chest, she turned round, making provocative motions with her hips and shoulders. As the song reached a crescendo in its chorus of acceptance and passionate love, she threw her arms open, spread wide and carefree, embracing the gaffer's flashes of orange, blue, yellow, green and magenta. She smiled, lost in this moment of selflessness. The song ended abruptly, as it does, and for a moment the lights went out.

Tamara was aware suddenly of the white pairs of eyes scattered innumerably throughout the unlit panorama, all fixed on her. The bodies were indistinct shapes in the murk of her vision, like creatures in a swamp. When the gleam of exhibition returned to blind her again, the stage seemed small and low. She swayed nervously, not attempting the same level of self-assure resplendence that had been so easy before. When the song ended, she gathered up her things and walked off stage.

Her own eyes stared back at her in the mirror, above the running water.

"You know, if you want to make any real money, you have to get back out there and do some private dances." The voice came from behind her. Tamara closed her eyes.

"I don't think I can take it."

"Nerves? You'll get used to it."

"They were all looking at me that way."

"What did you expect? They probably look at ballerinas that way, too."

"We're not ballerinas."

"Look, I don't care. You want to get cold feet, go ahead. But you don't have the right to judge me."

The interlocutor left and Tamara was alone again. Pulsing beats filled her ears as she willed her heart to slow down, to stop. She went back, in her mind, to what she had felt watching herself. That girl in the mirror, her entrancing, graceful movements, and the power she felt in them; the seductress, with her ability to command the desires of men.

26. Rey

2011-02-13T19:41:00.000-08:00

"Pepperoni and green peppers, mushrooms, olives, chives." Esteban hung up the phone and tore a page off his notepad.
"Chives? We don't have chives." Manuel scratched his mustache.
"What the hell is a chive?" Tomas was getting the ingredients ready, flattening out a dough ball and looking over the dishes of toppings.
"It's like a green onion."
"Think they'd just like onions?"
"It's not the same. Just put the other stuff."
Tomas shrugged and went about the process of making the pizza.
Reynald, who did the deliveries, came in the back door and walked behind Tomas, dropping the delivery bag on top of the oven. "Did someone order chives on a pizza?" he asked.
"Yeah, how'd you know?"
"I was having a cigarette, door was open, I could hear you guys. It's from a System of a Down song, they're probably fucking with you."
Tomas stopped, his hands on the ladle of tomato sauce. "Do I make the pizza?" He looked at Manuel.
Manuel looked hard at Rey. "Are you sure it's a prank?" His mustache blew around with his breath.
"What? I never said it was a prank," Rey said nervously, "just leave the chives off it. It's a deluxe. They probably just want a deluxe."
Manuel nodded. "Make a deluxe, Tomas."
"Deluxe," he said, and spread the tomato sauce in a circle.
"Weird orders tonight," Esteban said. "Someone else asked for a delivery with green peppers on 'half of one quarter,' no kidding."

Rey went back out to the parking lot with the pizza. He opened the passenger door of his own car, and went into the glovebox. Opening a pencilcase, he took a few postage-stamp sized baggies out, put them in his pocket, and put the rest away. He went back to his delivery vehicle, put the pizza in, and drove away.

"You ordered a pizza, right? Twenty bucks."
"Yeah man, sure."
"Pepperoni, green peppers, mushrooms, olives. And here's your 'chives.'" Rey dropped two bags of weed on top of the box. "Twenty bucks for the pizza, plus twenty more."
The guy at the door laughed. "Oh man! You are the best. My buddy told me about you, man, I thought he had to be shitting me, but you're for real!"
"Yeah," Rey shrugged, "just don't spread it around. There's already too many people asking for shit we don't have on pizzas, it's heat like crazy. Look, for future reference, just order whatever you want, none of this code-word bullshit. I'm either working, or I'm not, take your chances."
"Alright," the guy nodded, frowning. "Thanks. Sorry." He handed over a handful of bills, tipping generously.
"Don't worry about it. Enjoy your night. Thanks for ordering Pizzano's."

Rey walked out the back door of the apartment building and stopped. The sky in front of him was a striking shade of deep indigo as the peach sunset receded somewhere on the other side. Moments like this were rare, lasting only a few minutes, and Rey remembered a few other times that the entracing colours of the upper atmosphere had seemed like magic to him. He stepped over to the alcove near a maintenance door to reflect on this, reminiscing as he took a bag and a pack of rolling papers out of his pocket.

Rey drove back to the pizzeria, watching the streetlights. If he let his eyes go out of focus, they looked like an old filmstrip's edges, drifting past the top edge of the windshield. There weren't many cars on the road. He saw a red light above him, and it passed over the car, too late for him to stop.
"Shit," he muttered, but it was okay. If he'd done that in rush hour, he'd be dead.
There was a low wail behind him. Lights blared to life and a police car, sirens lit up, cruised out of a nearby parking lot.
"Oh fuck!" Rey bit his lip. What could he do? His first thought was to speed around the corner, make a few fast turns, and park in an alleyway with the engine off until the heat died down. He'd been playing too much Grand Theft Auto in his spare time. The only thing to do was pull over. It would be okay.

He waited. He waited for what seemed like a long time. Then, for even longer. Finally, the officer got out of the car, and approached Rey. He'd rolled down the window and turned off the car, and sat there with his hands on the steering wheel.
"You need to pay more attention," the officer said. "License and registration?"
"Yes, sir." Rey took his license from his wallet, and paused. He didn't know where the registration for the vehicle was.
"Is there a problem?" The policeman raised his flashlight to Rey's eyes. He tried not to wince.
"It's my work car. I'm not sure about the registration, I --"
"What do you do?"
"Deliver pizzas. Can I look around for the papers? They must be in here somewhere."
"Step out of the car, please."

Rey did as he was told. He tried not to sweat. He tried to remember how much weed he'd sold, how much he'd smoked, and whether any was still in his pockets. He didn't think it was. He didn't think so.

25. Bradford Shawe

2011-01-23T12:12:00.000-08:00

Attendance was excellent for the evening’s showing at the Trois-Avectoi Art Gallery. The building had once been a textile factory, and it was once again packed to the rafters with suits and dresses, but these recent arrivals of the sartorial sort were wrapped around the most influential buyers in New York City. Regardless, Bradford Shawe, occasional gallerist and second-tier art dealer-at-large, was afflicted with paralyzing dread. None of his artists had shown up in the flesh, leaving his personal representation the only remaining link between the paintings and high society.

The forecast was distressing. Convincing potential patrons that any of these paint-caked canvases deserved more than a passing bon mot and a laugh – by at least a five-digit sum and an obligatory unveiling party, for decency's sake! – was a task made exponentially easier by the simple presence of the artist. Moreso, by the presence of someone artistic: young, handsome, vaguely European in accent and style of facial hair; detached from the hoi polloi yet retaining selected elements of bohemia; capable of the appropriate grandiloquence when justifying some colourful contusions on canvas; and above all else, appearing to possess rampant self-destructive tendencies. The last was important, because whenever an artist has most unfortunately kicked off in as tragic, salacious and socially deviant a fashion as can be related in a diverting anecdote when polite company turns slightly cheeky after a few fluted glasses of prosecco, their final works tended to knock their market value's decimal place a column or two to the right. Bradford preferred his artists to look as though recently stricken by a near-terminal bout of hedonistic impulsiveness that had compelled them to ingest the contents of a midsize pharmacopoeia. On the other hand, convincing a prospective buyer to drop the 'prospective' was a task made markedly harder by appearing, as Bradford did, not quite a stereotypical art dealer to the élite, but perhaps a caricature of one: middle age, balding, paunchy; tailored suits not quite disguising the extraneous weight that defied his attempts to rid himself of the accumulated foie gras, filet mignon and potatoes au gratin by spitefully churning away on an elliptical machine; worse still, he was in no danger of meeting an early end for any reason apart from elevated cholesterol or perhaps a lacking sense of urgency in scheduling prostate exams; and perhaps most damning of all, he was transparently conscious every moment that a few loops of a pen could ease the pressure of the second mortgage, the alimony payments, the expensive combination of refined tastes and ravenous appetites. Bradford thought about these and other criteria in which he did not quite measure up, some of which his ex-wife had been more than ready to point out, and the renumeration of his flaws stressed him ever more.

An urbane-looking couple meandered throughout the space, and Bradford recognized the older and more ornately gilded of the pair as Evangeline D’Averjonois. An heiress, her illustrious father had trekked from his penniless roots in France to start a new life in Italy, where he spent half his life mining feldspar and then bought the mine. Through fastidious management and meticulous care he built a mineral extraction empire which, at his death, was worth nearly a billion dollars – much to the delight of the Chinese investors who purchased it at half that price from his socialite daughter, who spent the subsequent five decades languorously and vaingloriously following trends among high society. Bradford mentally prepared to make an approach as they paused before a massive canvas, entirely mauve. No, not entirely -- an almost imperceptibly small square of canary yellow was positioned just at eye level to a viewer of average height, about one millimeter to a side. This was the latest by Aldric Maël, 'Aniline No. 15.' The temperamental artist had, along with his insincere regrets, sent a statement of explanation to assist his dealer in communicating the true meaning of the piece to the evening's philistian gawkers.

'In exploring the concept of post-contemporary experiential reductionism as a means of interpreting and deconstructing world events, one begins to see more and more ways in which ideas, truths, beliefs and phenomena are not distinguishable from one another if the concept is followed to its logical conclusion. Some say all ambiguosities [sic] are shades of grey -- I believe they are slightly magenta tinted as well. All times, places, and people become one, interlinked by a pleasant purple unity. But there is yet more complexity in the world than belies a quick glance, and attentive viewers will see that the painting, too, contains an element of the unexplainable among the indistinct, like life.' Drivel would be a compliment. Though its insipidness left him reeling, the reading did not flummox Bradford's business sensibilities, which were emphatic that an opportunity lay before him, even as he began to doubt that Aldric's work had been inspired by anything deeper than the last few inches of treacly dregs remaining in the can after painting a light purple living room somewhere.

Bradford swallowed his compunctions and dove in. "Magnificent, isn't it?"

“Aahum, yes,” said the woman in a way that made ‘yes’ two syllables long. “It’s very, oh, vast.”

Bradford laughed. It was forced at the beginning, but quickly took on a life of its own and he stifled it uncomfortably. “Ah yes, it certainly is, and good to see you again, Mrs. D’Averjonois.”

She blinked in a flutter belying the heaviness of the makeup on her purpled eyelids, which resembled velvet curtains. "D'Averjonois, actually, but you have me at an, ahm, disadvantage, nonetheless. You are?"

"Bradford Shawe." Hadn't he emphasized the last syllable properly? He smiled and stuck out his hand, which she took with a grip like a used tissue. "We've met before, at Sotheby's." The cue hung in the air. "I resent the artist. Represent. The artist." He coughed to retroactively cover the parapraxis.

“This artist?” She tilted a wing towards the lavender canvas.

“Yes, Mrs.” He did not make a second attempt at her name.

“Sold at Sotheby’s?”

“Ah, no,” Bradford said, deflating slightly, “it was for another artist. Who isn’t here tonight. But we met! Briefly.”

"Good to see you again, in that case, Mr. Bradshaw." The affluent heiress curtseyed in so subdued a fashion that it was really more of a long blink, and then returned her attention to her glass of wine. Her accompaniment, a tall and arborescent gent with a furrowed brow, extended his hand. “Creighton Windermere,” he huffed. Bradford’s stomach leapt into the gulch of his throat. Windermere? The art critic? “The art critic,” Windermere added, confirming Bradford’s suspicions of his occupation while creating new ones regarding telepathy. “Tell me about the work.”

Bradford wrung his hands. “It’s a challenging piece,” he began.

“I can see that.” Windermere looked daggers at the canvas.

Bradford tried to remain unfazed. “…a museum quality, with a lot of, er, provenance behind it.”

“Provenance? At primary sale? That’s new,” came the acid reply.

“Karls Naatchi has expressed interest.” Bradford felt his back was against the ropes. Naatchi, a collector renowned for his taste and influence, had never seen the piece.

Windermere scoffed. “But not enough interest to buy. No doubt he finds the work, shall we say, less than germane? And wants it nowhere near him.” His words had sent many an artist, and their dealers with them, scurrying into other careers. Cabinetry sounded nice.

Bradford flushed. He felt the blood rush past his head, directly to his mouth. “Actually, he said it would be best to let the piece stay on the market long enough to cause a stir – always thinking of profile-raising opportunities, you know, earning more publicity by scooping up work by an emerging artist while the name is still hot on everyone’s lips?” The last word's sibilance lingered. The blush left him and he went gaunt, certain he’d just written his own death warrant with a horsefeather quill. His eyes wide on Windermere, he waited for the executioner’s axe.

“Oh,” Windermere stated with insouciance. “Oh!” His brow raised, his tone shifted diametrically. “What else did he say?”

“He, ah, he said a few things, that is, let me recall,” Bradford collected himself like a handful of marbles, “this painting is a post-conceptual reduction of experience, exploring and interpreting the demolition of the world. Ambiguousness is logically magenta, unified by interlinks with quick glances at complexity. It’s unexplainable and indistinct.” Trying not to gasp for air, Bradford flared his nostrils and inhaled deeply.

Windermere, who had been staring at Bradford as though he were an earthworm, turned to the painting like it was the overturned sidewalk tile crawling with his brethren. He sneered. “Brilliant.” The word crackled from him like a bag of glass being stepped on. “Naatchi’s instincts are perfect. This will indeed create a stir.” His lips curled with self-satisfaction.

"Should I buy it?" Madame D'Averjonois possessed the disaffected air of a restaurant patron inquiring whether refills were free.

To Bradford, the answer was obvious. "Absolutely. With luck, you might even sell it to Naatchi himself."

Windermere was tickled with the prospect. D'Averjonois was less convinced. "You businessmen, selling before you buy. Consider the décor! I'll have to repaint an entire wing in complementary color." She squinted at the bid sheet.

Bradford intervened with the confidence of an acrophobic tightrope walker. "Madame, when you pay a high price for the priceless, you've bought it. Cheaply!” He grimaced; he hadn't meant to put a pause there. “Think of the impact on a visitor to your home. The colors of the walls and such, mere ephemeralities compared to the sensation of walking into the room and seeing this. That impression, that is forever.” He smiled shakily. This seemed to satisfy her, and Bradford offered his pen. As she took it, he added, "With the level of interest in this piece, it would be prudent to avoid being outbid." Attempting to maintain his cool demeanor, he did not look at what she wrote, fearing it would elicit a giggle. His eyes probed the ceiling; he tried not even to smile.

“Perhaps,” she said, and Bradford snapped to attention, his mirthfulness shattered as she handed back his pen, “it is as you say. If the level of interest is high, this will attract many more bids. Best to, how did you put it, snap up a work while it is hot on the lips? Publicity cannot often be bought so easily. It may be worth a premium to gain that, how would you say, social capital.”

Bradford was gobsmacked. He began to stammer something about opportunities wasted, but Windermere was already speaking to the matron with sycophantic approbation. A sheen of perspiration on Bradford's forehead started to emerge, gleaming under the lights meant to enhance the lustre of the artwork. He produced a handkerchief and attempted to remove the gloss in a furtive, pawing motion.

Unsure of what else to do, Bradford was just about to begin the standard art-show valediction: looking into the crowd, he would pretend to have spotted a recognizable face, and excuse himself to go over to this fictional friend. He was momentarily diverted when he caught Windermere doing the same thing. Except Windermere didn't excuse himself, he waved his friend over. Bradford's patina of sweat replenished itself without delay.

"Greetings, greetings," said the thin man in the black turtleneck, clasping his hands and bowing slightly, "good to see you, Windy. What seems to be the astonishment of the hour?"

Bradford was searching for an escape and not really listening when Windermere said something that sounded like "pork and turn grass." Nonetheless, it echoed in his mind. He glanced towards the far wall, where a new troupe of well-dressed would-be patrons was boggling over a rectangle of crumpled foil, Untitled by Anselmo Reyling. They might yet be convinced to buy. "More than stern class." Yes, Bradford thought, he really must excuse himself and make his way over there; sales were waiting. He casually opened his mouth to say so, and shouted "Morganstern Klass!"

"Yes?" The man with the black turtleneck was puzzled, but polite. Bradford realized, all at once, who this captious fellow was. Morganstern Klass was an art dealer, yes, but his appearance before Bradford Shawe was like Amadeus Mozart before an organ grinder, and Bradford was beginning to feel like the dancing monkey.

"It's-just-I-you-here, that is, hello!" He stammered and extended a precarious hand, which Klass cautiously shook. "Bradford Shawe!"

“Nice-to-meet-you,” Klass responded, in exaggerated fashion. “Alright, Windy, let’s look at the work. What do we have here?”

Windermere indicated the next piece up on the wall, a white canvas with an arrangement of coloured circles in a strict grid pattern. “Flavian Hirts, entitled ‘Glycogen, Human, Freeze-dried.’” He waited for his respected acquaintance’s response before venturing further.

“It looks like dots.” D’Averjonois said, and finished her wine.

“Yes,” Klass said. “Polka dots. Well, haven’t seen a lot of dots on the market lately, it could probably work its way up to a few million with good representation. What do you think?”

“Mm, as a comment on the technical culture, the work simplifies molecular biology ad reductio, forcing it to play in the confines of artwork as an iconoclastic counterpart to the scientific dissection and dismissal of aesthetic contribution.”

“Nice one, Windy! What’s next?”

“Let’s carry on this way.”

“I still don’t see what it has to do with freeze-dried humans,” D’Averjonois opined.

Windermere led the group to another piece by one of the absentee artists, with Bradford trotting along silently behind. He felt swept away; not by any transcendent factor of the art, but by the way the showing seemed to be carrying on in a fashion wholly independent of his intentions.

This work, a sculpture, would appear to the untrained eye to be a table with a large tumour on its surface, a blob which made it difficult to envision using the table to stand anything on. The entire thing was painted the same shade of negative-account-balance red, and encased in a glass vitrine. It was entitled, ‘DO NOT DOUBT THE DEADLINESS OF MY KUNG-FU SKILL.’

"Hm. Anything else by this one?" Klass spoke first, and Windermere felt obligated to hold his tongue.

"Emilious Koi," Bradford interjected. "He's made all the things in this section." He nodded towards the other sculptures -- casts of a thin, angry body, painted bright shades of the same rufescent spectrum, in varied poses. Among the agonized rictuses and hackle-raising iterations, one of the figures made a gesture to snub the viewer rudely; another appeared to be in the act of manually stimulating itself, a defiant scowl on its face.

"The artist's own body?" inquired Windermere.

"More or less," Bradford retorted. Koi did look quite a bit like them, most of the time.

"I find them garish. At least a mannequin has the decency to cover up," D'Averjonois moaned. “And what’s that screeching noise coming from the table?”

Bradford checked his notes. There was, indeed, sound coming from the blob. “That is,” he read the card on Koi’s work, “'A song by the artist in his own private language.'”

"I'd like to meet this artist," Klass said. Silence swept in like the ocean upon a submarine with its hull split in two. He looked at their faces and chuckled. "Oh, sorry. I forgot! Windy, have I told you about my new plan?"

Windermere frowned. "If it involves these horrendous homunculi, I'd love to hear it." He might have said loathe.

"Well, sales at the Square Cube are reliable as ever," he began, the Square Cube being Klass' personal gallery, open on select days to privileged clients by reservation only, "but I've been jonesing after something a little more provocative. So, in London, and Paris, and Tokyo, and here, I am buying galleries."

"What, tired of the Cube, you'll start a franchise? That doesn't sound like a real solution."

"A franchise?" Klass laughed. "No, no no. One show only. I will buy and renovate the galleries for only one show. After which, I will sell the space again -- and I'll probably turn a profit on the real estate alone."

"I don't think anyone's ever done that."

"Nobody has. It's new. And new is really all that's interesting. Everyone's been to a hundred of these, you see," he swept one hand in an expansive gesture, "but there's something about temporary spaces. It's new, it's now, and nothing matters."

"It sounds apocalyptic."

"That’s a good way to put it, yes. An apocalyptic art show. Of course, there's the matter of the art. Not much point in doing the whole shindig if it's just the same old names. So to come round to the point, Windy, I need some exhibits that will, pardon my foreign tongue, make a splash like a turd in a toilet. The sorts of things, you know, that get people talking, get it in the papers, 'Is this what art has been reduced to,' that sort of thing. It gets press, I get publicity, it all becomes a grand spectacle, and some over-prosperous pinheads eat it up. No offense to present company."

"None taken," Mme. D'Averjonois said benevolently. Bradford boggled at this.

"This would be a good start. If I commission this guy to make a few more of these, price them at about three hundred thousand each, that ought to boil some blood. How can I get in touch with, ah, Elmo, here, Brad?"

Bradford staggered backwards. "Emilious. You can't get in touch with him."

"Why not?" Klass seemed to loom over him. His voice seemed different; booming, the bridled rage of stymied entitlement behind it. All conversation around them ceased.

Bradford just about swallowed his tongue. "He's, he’s… dead."

“Dead?” The effect was immediate. The room was abuzz with chatter.

“How?” “Why?” “Who?” The questions came from all sides. Bradford tried to think, but his thoughts froze. He shouldered his way through the crowd. He tried to say “excuse me,” but whatever stammered out of his mouth was fourteen syllables long, and he could not hear what he said.

Bursting through the back door to the fire escape, Bradford held the door shut behind him, subconsciously thinking he’d like to do the same thing in the event of an actual fire. His heart raced; the hot sweat pouring from his brow seemed to steam in the cool air of the night. For once, it was as quiet as the city could be: the dull roar of excitement from inside the gallery continued, but here was the reassuring whisper of the breeze, and a distant car alarm, and the shouting of drunks in the adjacent alley. Bradford began to breathe slowly. He lit a cigarette, and rested his elbows on the railing.

“It’s not your real name anyway,” he said into the cellphone, flicking the stump of his cigarette away. “Just make up a new one.” He held the phone a few inches from his head as the squawking reached a crescendo. Then he turned and listened at the door. “Hold on a second,” he said. Koi continued to yammer as Bradford opened the door a crack to get a better listen. “Actually, I think you’ll come out on top. Yes, yes, I believe they’re buying it, we’ll see where the bidding gets to. Listen, do you have anything else? I can see it now, the posthumous Koi collection. It’s not many artists who get to have two careers, you know. We’ll discuss it later.” He clicked it shut and lit another cigarette, relishing the smoke and breathing deeply. His ears perked up at a hissing sound, and he quickly saw what it was. In the alley below, teenagers in hoodies were spray painting something on the wall. Bradford watched with bemusement as they finished the four-foot-high bubble letters and ran off. He looked at what they’d painted.

“Yeah,” he said to himself, “I could sell that.”

With apologies to Yves Klein & Barnett Newman, Damien Hirst, Anselm Reyle, Terrence Koh, Lance Esplund and Larry Gagosian.

24. Thin Soup

2011-01-09T08:38:00.001-08:00

For the last hour, it’s been nothing but wheat and horizon on either side of the road. I’d started off awestruck when the fields opened up. It’s so vast; a golden sea. That was early in the morning, around sunrise. The sight seemed new again, for a little while. The prairies are incredibly something, either beautiful or boring. Maybe I’ve got used to it now. Maybe beauty becomes redundant. Just another thing I’ve seen enough of.

From a convertible, the road feels different. You’re really on it, like you could get out and run. In a hardtop, there’s glass on every side, you're inside a television. I hate TV. I like this.

Carter’s driving fast, but I can’t see the speedometer. “How fast are we?”
“Buck and a half,” he says, without looking away. “What’s the posted limit?”
“The sky,” I say. “Hasn’t been a sign since never.”

The wind’s blowing my hair around; Carter’s is short and doesn’t go anywhere. He doesn’t seem to notice how long he’s been driving. Once he gets tired or bored, I’ll take the wheel. Looking forward to it. The road’s so straight you barely have to turn. It looks easy and I think it might help.

“Man, are we ever gonna eat when we get there. It’ll be a real banquet.” Carter wipes his nose on his wrist.
“Donna went all-out for the reception, eh?”
“Sure. Can’t wait. I’m hungry already.”
“Jesus, man, you put away five jam busters at Tim Horton’s, how can you be hungry?”
“Driving, I guess. Burns through your sugars?” He laughs. “There's enough of this fucking wheat. I wish I was a cow.”
“Guess you don't take after your mom.” I laugh and Carter punches my arm.

The sun’s glaring pretty hard. We're heading straight east, so Carter bought some American-looking sunglasses at a gas station when it was still dark. It won’t be so bad soon. The sun’s rising straight into a cloudbank. Carter flicks his shades off and onto the dash. “Fucking eh,” he laughs, “seriously!” He’s looking at the thunderheads all over the south of us, a real curtain call.
“Better put up the top.” I’ve forgotten that we never put up the top on this car.
“Haven’t got one!” That’s right. He’s smiling now, a little boy grin from years ago.
“Shit.”
“Yeah!” The same old smart-ass smirk. Now I have to laugh. Nothing to do for it; just keep going. I lit a cigarette without really thinking about it. Happens when you’re thinking about something else. Habit.

Carter chucks my shoulder. “Got another one of those?” I try to remember which pocket the pack’s in. He punches the lighter in the dash; I give him the smoke anyways.
“Don’t use the dash lighter. I got a zippo.”
“Wind, man. And I can’t cover it.” He points at the road. That’s right, I used both hands on mine.
“I’ll light it for you. Don’t use the dash.”
“Why’s it matter?”

I point at the moon-shaped scar between my lip and my chin. The plug pops out with a click and I know there’s a red-orange coil right there, so goddamn hot it sickens me to think about.

“Ah. Don’t stress. Man, it’s not the lighter’s fault, you gotta let that stuff go.”
I don’t say anything. Carter replies for me, saying, “It’s all right. How far off is the storm, how much time’ve we got?”

The whole field is rippling like a yellow-brown bedsheet with someone holding the end and waving. Way off, on the far end, something dark crawled over the horizon. I think about when I’d make the bed with Karen, imagining it from her perspective.

“Five, six miles. Hits us in twenty minutes.” I look over and Carter’s smoking. Tightness of a suppressed smile in his cheek. “Fucker.”
He laughs.

It’s quiet for a bit and then he’s chuckling again. “Remember stealing smokes from my mom?” He shakes his head.
“Yeah, Christ, I can’t believe we started smoking on KOOLs.”
“I can still taste the menthol.”
“Your house reeked to the walls.”
“So did half the neighbourhood. Hell, yours too.”
“Can’t believe how long it took for her to catch on.”
He laughs. “Yeah, it was just her trying to quit that she started counting ‘em!” We laugh. He says “yeah” again. “God rest her,” and there’s some silence.

“Christ, Saturday morning cartoons.” Carter says after. "Remember those days, eh?"
“Remember the Ty-D-Bol man?” It was a commercial from about seventy-one, we were nine.
“Every time I took a shit I thought he was gonna ride up in his goddamn boat. Remember Detective Dog?”
“He was a dumbass.”
“Donna’s favourite.”
“No.” It was such a stupid show. Donna was a smart kid. Well, I guess she was young enough.
“Serious.”
“You remember that?”
“She used to play about it, say she was Detective Donna. Only we never had a dog.”
“I never knew that.”
“We would have forgotten by high school.”
“How do you remember that? It was so long.”
“Some things stand out. I think it was Deputy Dog, actually. Maybe he never made detective, ‘cause he was such a retard.” Carter chuckles about it, but I'm thinking of something else.
“So who’s the guy now?”
“What guy? Donna’s fiancée?”
“Karen’s husband.”
“You heard about that, eh? Well, don’t start about it. And don’t act sore, you’re not.”
“I’m not!”
“Not sore or not acting?”
“Either, both. Christ, it’s been five years since I even talked to her, and he must be good enough of a guy or she wouldn’t.”
“You got it. Well. His name’s Ethan. And he’s a damn decent guy, too; she could do worse. No offense.”
“Ain’t it funny, eh?”
“How’s that, you mean life?”
“Yeah, life and everything. You go away, you come back, things change. It’s what they say, you really can’t go home again.”
“Thank God for that, though, eh? You wouldn’t really go back if you could.”
“Oh yeah? Why not?”
“Well, you weren’t happy, for starters.”
“Not to, yeah, when you’re thinking of. Not to the middle, no.”
“So what, then? Back to Deputy Dog?”
“Eh. You said it yourself. So what.” A wet circle appears on the windshield with a ‘spack’ sound.

“So did you want to hear about my other sister’s fiancée, or what?” Carter asks. It seems like a long time later. Maybe a minute.
“Eh. Not really.” I’m picturing some clean-cut guy in a tux with better things to do. “I’ll meet him soon enough.”
He’s quiet for a few moments. “She wanted you to come.”
“Yeah, I heard. Just seems strange. Thought I’d never see her again.”
“When was the last time you talked? I guess she got a phone call?”
I laugh a little but it feels hollow. “Yeah, she got a couple phone calls,” I say as I stretch my shoulders. “The first ones I don’t remember too well, the last one I do, and that’s been it.” I put my elbows on my knees, which isn’t very comfortable in a car.
“Good thing for that last call, or you’d have about fallen off the map.”
“Eh, I don’t know. I’m not convinced I like the idea of her knowing I was in recovery.”
“What, like she didn’t know you needed it? Don’t be stupid.”
“That’s not the part that eats at me.”
“Of course not, it’s your pride. The whole thing’s a head fake so you admit to yourself that you have a problem.”
“Bullshit.”
“You think so? Tell me something then, when you made your calls, how many of them were surprised? How many already knew?”
I don’t say anything. He’s right.

It's starting to rain. Every now and then I feel a little touch on my skin like a mosquito taking a bite out of me.

“Wait a sec, did you talk to Karen? You would’ve had to’ve called her, but she never mentioned…”
Damn it, Carter. “She didn’t pick up.”
“Really!”
“Yes. Really. Some guy did. He asked who was calling and I hung up.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Guess that’d be Ethan.” I smile so he knows he didn’t piss me off. “Hey, how about I drive for a bit?”

It’s getting darker now and even though the dashboard clock reads eleven thirty with a seven halfway rolled to an eight, the sky looks like it’s almost night. The sound of the wind whipping over the road is outdone by thunder. The flatness of the land beats it back like a drum, and it feels like a punch in the chest. I roll my fingers on the Bakelite steering wheel, and God, it’s good to be back. If Carter had asked, I’d have had to tell him my license was suspended. I’d have to tell him I haven’t driven a car in three years. He didn’t ask.

The rain starts into a staccato on the windshield and gets heavy enough that I throw on the wipers. Carter laughs. “We’ve got the wipers on and the rain’s still hitting us in the face. That’s so fucked.”
“Nothing to do except go through with it.”
“Think you can out-drive the storm? Like, go in between the drops or something?”
I laugh. "Let's give it a try." The car shakes from side to side as I jiggle the wheel. "Nah, still getting us."
"Hey, wait, maybe you can," he pauses, thinking. "I read once that if you drive fast enough, it makes an air pocket that pushes the rain overtop, so it doesn't actually land on the car? You just have to go fast. Think that'll work?"
“Sure.” The sensation of pressing the pedal and watching the needle pass one-sixty makes my heart flutter.

Guess it was around eighty-seven, that night I pulled into Shep’s on the way home from work. That is, The Bad Shepherd, that dive off of Main & McDougal. Used to do that a lot in those days. “Double Walker Red and a Blue” was my order, and “right on” the bartender’d say as he poured them, and I’d drink my whisky and beer and smoke half a pack and maybe play shitty pool and fill the glasses a few more times. “That’s game, round’s on you,” as the eight ball dropped into the pocket too early, then I’d have to have another because I was buying. It all gave me that heart fluttering feeling. Seemed to be about the only reason I did anything.

“You’re home,” she said, trying to smile. If that was her trying to patch things up, or if she was just scared of me, I wish I knew.
“I had a lot of work to do. Lot of work, paying the bills.”
“Can I move the car?”
“Why?”
“It’s half on the lawn. Don’t worry, I’ll fix it, just take it easy and give me the keys.”
“It don’t need fixing.”
“The neighbours will see.”
“Fuck them.” That was pretty typical for when we hit the splits. I remember that night, but there are others I don’t. It was probably worse than I know. Of course I’d never meant for things to get that way, of course not. Change is like acceleration; as long as it’s consistent, you don’t really notice.

“Jesus Christ, you drive fast.” Carter’s sitting up with his hands on the dash, looking about ready to leap out.
“How about that aerodynamic pocket thing?”
“Still getting wet. How about you?”
“Yeah. I don’t think it’s working.”
“Maybe because we’re driving a fucking brick.” The box-cornered front of the ’84 Monte Carlo doesn’t seem to generate the air pocket Carter was hoping for. The rain just climbs the windscreen and comes at us from there.
“Think we can get out from under it?”
“I fucking hope so, yes.” He snorts. “Speaking of getting out from under things, you talk to your family lately?”
“No.”
“Really? Not even in step seven or…”
“Step nine. Nah, you only call people you’ve wronged.”
“That’s cold.”
“You think? Hell, half the time I was over at your place, it was because I was avoiding them. If your old man was anything like mine, shit, you’re lucky he walked out.”
Carter looks at me for a second without saying anything. Then he laughs. “Buddy! Glad I could offer a safe haven. We got through it together, eh?” He laughs again, but I saw the look on his face before this front came up and I already feel sorry for what I said.
“It was a tough time. You guys helped me.”
“Hey, remember when you flunked math and wound up in the same class as Karen?”
“Oh yeah, man, I would have flunked again if she hadn’t’ve sat next to me. I think she used to write big just so it’d be easier for me to cheat.”
We both laugh. Carter says, “Yeah, she had a generous streak, where it came to you.” This hurts a little.

Pretty soon it’s really coming down hard, and Carter’s howling with his hands over his head. It’s the kind of rain that stings when it hits you; we’re going through it at close to two hundred clicks. I think Carter wants me to slow down, rain or no rain. Something inside is saying no. I can handle this. A bone-white pillar of lightning crackles into existence right in front of me with the sound of ribs breaking. Rain hits my face and my lips and I open my mouth and it hits my tongue; the wet sting reminds me of shooters and I like it. I swallow some of the water and spit the rest on the floor. It doesn’t matter; the water’s just getting deeper anyways. The sloughs in the fields are so swollen they nearly reach the road.

“Jesus, we’ll be a sight when we get to the rentals place, eh?” Carter shouts over the sound of the storm, which has become a dull roar. “Hey, I’ll have a tuxedo, and do you have a towel?”
“I’ll just dry myself off on one tux, and then ask if they’ve got another.”
“Wring out the cummerbund. Yeah, they’d love that.”
“At least we didn’t get the suits first.”
“This is fucked.”
“That would be an accurate description, yeah.” It’s getting cold, I know, but somehow I just don’t feel it getting through.

The tires throw off tall rooster tails whenever the puddles get thick. Puddles isn’t the word once they’re this continuous, the whole road is one big slough. I was imagining before that the rain was every shot of liquor, every whiskey neat and beer chaser that I ever drank, and now I’m sitting up to my calves in it. There’s gin pouring from a great hole in the sky and hundreds of bottles worth of porch climber moonshine covering the road. I can still hear Carter’s teeth chattering, even with the road noise and the wind. He’s freezing his ass off. I feel like the scar on my chin is the only warm part of me and I touch it with one hand. My hand is numb.

“Hey Carter, do you believe in God?”
“I believe he’s taking the piss out of us right now, yeah.” He shivers. “How about you?”
“Nah. I faked it through step two.” I laugh. Fuck, it doesn’t even sound funny, and all of a sudden I’m thinking of the booze-warm belly that could just be waiting for me on the other end of this drive.

I think we’re going to crash. I can’t see the road anymore; it’s all water. I’m shivering like a cold-turkey detox case but I don’t feel anything. My body is like rubber. I take my foot off the pedal and cross my legs on the seat. The tach drops until it's just above idling, the speed decays to a crawl. Water sloshes around the bottom of the car. I take my hands off the wheel and curl up in the seat, and soon it fades away.

The whole time, I was thinking the rain would get worse if we slowed, that maybe the air pocket thing was protecting us to some extent, maybe we were holding off the worst of it by fighting, but it seems to lighten up as soon as we stop. While I’m out, I have this dream that I’m in the house I lived in with Karen, and it’s raining inside even though it’s sunny out. She tells me I have to fix the leaks, and I go up to the attic, and my father’s in there, pounding nails into the floor with this big sledgehammer, but he looks so frail I don’t know how he can lift it. When I come to, the sun’s warm on my back. I open the door and all the water rushes out to spill on the wet road.

All across, the fields are flooded and it just looks like a thin soup of grain with the still surfaces of sloughs glowing golden in the afternoon sun. The car’s gone in the ditch, of course, but there’s a town ahead where we’ll be able to call a tow. Not too far to walk, and the sky looks clear enough. I walk over to the passenger side, where Carter’s still asleep, and touch his shoulder.

“Come on, buddy. I know how to get us out of this hole we’re in.”

23. Witless

2011-01-06T17:44:00.000-08:00

Witless let himself in and he was crying. He didn't make no noise right away, but the first part of him I saw was the light from the naphtha lamp shining on his cheeks. I say "what's with you" and he don't say a thing, so I go on tying up my fishing flies like I was doing.
His big long face was drawn so tight that when my wife came in the room, she says right away, "What's the matter, Witless?" and out it comes in bawls.
"It was the most unnatural thing I ever saw," Witless says, finally wiping at the streaks on his face. “Lydia – my Liddie! – stood atop the water, clear as I see you now.” He broke into a sob. “I seen her ghost! Not one hour ago, Irv! Her spirit, my dead wife!”
The way he was, it was a damned sight. I’ve never seen a man break down like that before or since, all gulping for air, babbling and blubbering and making a damned spectacle of himself. “Quit acting a damn fool, Wit,” I tell him, “start at the beginning: where’d you see this?”
“In the glades! Her ghost walks the waterway – oh, Irv, I know you’ll say there ain’t such a thing, but I know what I saw, and –”
“Just tell it like it happened, Wit.”

He snivels a little more and my wife brings him a whisky to calm his nerves. Once he’s collected enough to swallow his sobbing, he says “Well, early this morning I set to hunting wild hog on the far banks of the lake, by the mouth of the Caloosahatchee, you know? I tied the boat there and tracked around the glades, came upon a big old boar and shot him. Only he didn’t die, just ran off with a bullet in his, in, between his shoulder blades. So I went after him, ‘cos you can’t just let a wounded animal go... Anyways, I caught up with the pig a ways towards La Belle and put him down right. It was a few hours’ chase and we’d gone real far, so I trekked back for the boat and brought it into Lake Hicpochee ‘fore dressing the carcass. Big bastard. Time I finished it was sunset, and heading back, it got real dark.”
I could see the fear creeping back into his face. Witless’ voice trailed off and he was quiet for a minute. I pour him another whisky and say, “What happened then, to get you so shook?” He drinks it and wipes his mouth on his arm, he goes on talking, and I fill both our glasses up again.
“Well,” he says, “a thick fog had crept in from the shallows and it was hard to see. I was just entering Lake Okeechobee again when the lilypads got snarled up in my propeller and choked out the engine. So I went to clean it up and the boat drifted, or maybe some eerie force pulled me in, I don’t know! Next thing, I lift up my head and she’s there in the fog – glowing, with unearthly light, standing on the water’s surface like Christ Almighty, and her face – oh, it’s Liddie all right, she’s looking right at me, and those eyes! Those dead eyes!” and he sets right back on wailing with that, won’t even take another whisky for it.
Then it’s just “all right, all right,” I’m saying, and my wife, she’s looking at me like I’m going to know how to straighten everything out. Any married man’d know that look when he saw it. So the best I could figure, since I had to have some answer and all, it was “We’ll go back out there right now and get to the bottom of this.”
“Yeah,” Witless says. There was something about the way he nodded, so solemnly, that it stuck in my memory. Wouldn't have guessed then how it would stick, but now I just look back and see old Wit saying “yeah” and nodding slow. He got real quiet and stood up, put on his hat, and walked towards the door like a man headed off to his own hanging.
Witless, despite all his howling, he ain’t a coward. Exceptional circumstances might have had the better of his courage for a while, but in spite of that, he was up and ready to go right back for another look, figuring leastaways he couldn’t be surprised twice. So we got our gear on. I never been ghost-hunting before, ain’t superstitious, figured we was just going fishing with no rods or nothing.

It’s dark and Witless is jumpy. He’s gone so rattled that when the lantern makes the shadows turn around, he thinks every rock and tree is about to pounce him. There's an almost-full moon shining through the occasional hole in thick cloud cover, light that comes and goes. We get down to the docks and there’s two boats there, mine and his. “What about that boar you killed, Wit?” I point at the bloody smear on his bow.
“Lost it,” he says with his eyes on the smear. “Got so spooked that I gunned the engine, whole boat lurched. It must’ve went right overboard.”
"Damn shame, after that work. Big hog, feed'n you for a week, two. Just chow for gators, now."
He keeps on staring at the big red stain on his boat, thinking about no good.
"Look here, Wit. I can tell you right now there's nothing out there, not on the Okeechobee, not anywhere."
He shakes his head. "Stranger things'n heaven 'n earth, Irv."
"What's that mean?"
"Don't matter." He breathes a heavy sigh. "Let's just get on with it."
I start up my engine. He gets in, we go.

The waters of Okeechobee keep a lot hidden underneath. It's real easy to hit a shallow patch and stick the propeller right into the mud without ever knowing what was coming. Hitting a stone in the glades could knock you right out of the boat; put you in the drink with the gators and snappers. There was enough moon, even with the clouds, to get around once we were accustomed to the darkness. Witless turns the lamp down low and we keep our eyes wide open to the treacherous night.
"Be there soon," Witless mutters, "Liddie." I watch him. He sways side to side with his arms around himself like he was cold, but it was balmy out, humid like sick breath over the water.
"Why d'you reckon it was her anyhow, eh?" He didn't turn to look. "Wit? You hear?"
"Wandering dead, now," He spoke like it was the night he was talking to. "You never was laid to rest right. Wasn't no priest to say a blessing."
"Well, that hardly seems worth coming back for."
"That ain't the only..." He mumbles.
"What else?"
Quiet.

What I know is, about half a year back, Wit and I went hunting on a regular basis, and one day he says, well, Lydia’s got the dengue pretty bad and I’m-a take her to a doctor. Then I don’t see him for a week or two, and he says, well, Liddie died. And that’s all he ever did say about her passing.

We come up into the mouth of the Caloosahatchee Canal. I feel then like the whisky was worn off, and if it had’ve done that while we was still on land, we would never have been on this fool's venture in the first place. Any case, there we are, and we ain't turning back, so downriver we go. There's a heavy mist drifting around the watergrasses at the banks of the river, and I can hear the rustling of animals in the bush, all them raccoons and lizards and things out at night. Witless turns to look at me and I see he's got the silver streaks of tears down his face again.
"We're almost there, Irv."
"You know what a damn fool you look like, Witless?"
"I know, Irv. But I saw what I saw. My wife's spirit come back."
"The hell it was. The hell it wasn't a cluster of fireflies, or you dozing off and dreaming!"
"Nope. Never been more awake. Not in my whole life." He sounds so sad I don't say anything. We just listen to the boat motor putter and the water lap up on the hull. "Reckon it's a blood debt she’s after."
"What are you saying, Witless? It was the dengue, what killed Liddie." He looks at me with a face, a damnable look like a dog that’s done wrong. "It was the dengue, wasn't it, Wit?" He turns away, don't say a word, but I see his shoulders move, him stifling his sobs. Then he raises an arm and points to a spot on the bank where the grasses were torn up by a boat. I steer us in and turn the lamp higher. The light makes some creature, maybe a mud snake or softshell turtle, slide back into the cover of the water hyacinths, rustling the weeds. I put us in neutral and let us coast in.

"Nothing here, Wit."
"Wait," he says, all the fear in his voice. I stare out and look for what, I don't know what for. There's the torn grass, a fresh swath of earth disturbed on the bank where it looks to have been it with a boat, but that's all. I'm turning away when a glint catches my eye. It's gone when I look back. Hair on my neck raises up, my skin starts to crawl. I look back at the opposite shore and see the moon’s gone behind some cloud. Through a couple sparse holes in the canopy, I see the silvery glow as the cloud starts thinning out.
"Wit, you see anything there? By the bank?"
"Is it her?"
"I saw something, a light, something shiny. Like metal."
"A knife?"
Looking at the grassy bank, I see it now, knife sticking up in the dirt. "What's that doing there?"
"I threw it. At the ghost."
"Why would you throw--"
"Irv," he says. "Irv."

I turn and he's looking at the other side of the boat where there stands a column of emanating light in the midst of the fog. My heart skips a beat at the sight of it standing bolt upright in the middle of the river, glowing unearthly. It’s his ghost all right, Witless goes totally apoplectic. We're moving towards it and I come to my senses. Nothing’s pulling us in, we're just drifting with the current and a stalled motor; he's scrabbling on the floor of the boat and gibbering 'Liddie please Liddie I'm sorry Liddie oh help me,' and "Witless!" I say, "it's just the moonlight for Chrissakes! Just moonlight on the mist!" but he's in the grips of panic and not thinking no more. I grab up the lamp to shine through the fog and when the light hits it anyone can see it’s just the damn fog, but Witless already made to flee and jumped overboard.

"Jesus God, man, get back in the boat!" I'm yelling to him as he flops towards shore. Maybe he didn't hear me. He grabs the knife out of the earth. I start pulling at the engine, trying to bring the boat around. It kicks and sputters and I hear thrashing in the water and Witless screams. He's fighting something, splashing in the water, and I pull up the lamp to see a gator's hindquarters as it pushes him under, and then the whole commotion starts rolling.

I make to drive in with the boat, to nail that gator on the bow, but it's too shallow and soon I'm stuck in the mud. Water’s still churning, and then the gator comes up and I grab the first thing at hand to throw at it. The lamp shatters on the creature’s scales, naphtha fuel catching fire and burning on top of the water. The blaze drives the thing away and I shout for Witless, I shout his name again and again but it’s all for naught and I can see in the dying light that the waters run red all around me.

The whole night passes, me in that boat. After the light starts coming back, I get the oar and dig out of the mud. Nothing left to do. I did go back to that place once, but there was nothing to find. Just an awful mess of snapping turtles, congregated on a sunny stone.

22. Mike

2010-08-09T19:18:00.000-07:00

"Is this somebody's case of Amstel Light?" The stranger fished a bottle out of the box by Mike's elbow. "Yours?" Mike shrugged. "Nobody's, then. Pff!" The cap flicked to the side, tumbling end over end like a shell casing. Mike's eyes followed it to the floor. He could have caught it. "Hey," the guy said a moment later, and Mike tuned back in.
"Mike." They shook hands. "I'm just going to apologize right now if I forget, I'm bad with names."
"No problem. Good to meet you anyway."
"Nice shirt."
"Thanks, yeah, it's kind of my favourite. I mean, it's a tiger with a machine gun, how awesome can you get?"
"That's a submachine gun, actually. Not a machine gun."
"Huh? Oh, okay, a sub-mo-sheen." He chuckled and swigged the Amstel.
"A Heckler & Koch MP5-K. You can tell it's a K. It doesn't have the lugged barrel."
"Jesus. Do you know how much the tiger paid for it, too?"
Mike blinked. The question seemed irrelevant. "Tigers don't have any money."
"Uh, yeah, they don't. So how come you know what kind of arms he's packing, you play a lotta Call of Duty or something?"
Mike smiled in a way that affected his mouth and not his eyes. "No, I've never played it. I'm studying to become a firearms instructor. I have a gun license. To get one you have to pass a test on several common types of weapon, disassemble and strip them, reassemble them, and follow range safety rules while firing, scoring a minimum accuracy and speed requirement. So with a gun like that I'd have to identify it and know how to field-strip it in three minutes." He produced his license from his wallet with fluid precision, perfunctorily displayed it, and with the same practiced speed put it back in his pocket.
Stepping back a little, the tiger shirt guy rubbed a knuckle into his chin. "I'm for gun control."
"Oh, so am I," Mike said, nodding. "Gun control is a very important issue. But that doesn't mean there should be no guns, only that they belong in the hands of citizens who are trained to use them safely and responsibly."
The one who'd brought up the topic was already talking over Mike, laughing. "I thought you were going to say like a Chuck Norris thing, that 'if there's a gun around, I want to be in control of it,' you know?" It was actually a Clint Eastwood quote. "Anyway, I'm going to check out what's going on over there, nice meeting you." With that he left the kitchen and blended into the rest of the party. Mike wanted to reacquire the conversation, to convince the stranger that his opinions on gun control really were well-reasoned and safe, but he really wasn't all that good with faces either. He looked across the room and it seemed like a department store, full of mannequins. One of them wore a shirt with a H&K MP5-K on it, but he couldn't see which one. The rest of the party was no more interesting.

Alone, Mike stepped up to the firing line, chambered a round, disengaged the safety and straightened his arm in anticipation of recoil. Thirty yards away, wisps of paper drifted down to the floor of the range, seesawing in the air as lead slugs shredded the target. He breathed evenly; his heart rate slowed. First he took off the orange earmuffs and the yellow glasses, then he picked up the stopwatch he would use to measure his reload time. 'Manual precision,' Mike thought, 'comes from repetition, doing it the same way over and over again, making it automatic.' He took six bullets from the box, all identical and without any differences or inconsistencies; perfect.

21. Boots

2010-06-12T07:59:00.000-07:00

"The Plymouth Gran Fury is back, and it runs like a rocket. Get yours from the Chrysler dealership in Buchanan, at Highway 24 and Main, but hurry -- they're going fast." Then the foley guy tipped the switch that played our sound reel, an engine roar and a five-second jingle that Robin's brother had whipped up on the piano years ago. Oh, Robin owned the Chrysler dealership. That jingle was on every ad, this included. All told, it was fifteen seconds tip to tail, and in the next month there were seven of those Plymoths driven off the lot. Robin was thrilled. Shook my hand like he was shaking good luck out of it. Took maybe ten minutes to write the spot, all told. That was in my first week at the Wianoke local radio station, second or third day there.

The way things were done back then, you'd be at the station by half-past eight with a coffee in your hand, waiting for the phone to ring. About nine o'clock, it rings and you get your assignment, throw two sheets of carbon paper in a typewriter and hammer out the spot, call your boss and read it out to him before nine fifteen. Maybe you get a chuckle out of him, maybe you just hear a cigar being chewed and he tells you to do the thing different. Usually it's just 'good' and you call the client for approval. Clients were all guys like Robin, all local to Cave Spring County, people you'd run into at the grocery store. Ring him up, 'hey Rob, I've got this ad for your cars,' 'sounds great, run it' 'but don't you want to hear the script first?' you know, just nice to a fault. Then you give the go-ahead to the man with the Golden Voice, who's been reading over the other carbon paper, and he reads it live on the next commercial break around nine-thirty. Right out on the airwaves and all thousand-some people listening.

Now, the junior writers today, you tell that to them and their eyes go wide. You'd get the brief and run the ad in the same day? The same half-hour? What a turnaround! You say yeah, and go on telling your war stories so they'll buy you a beer to keep you talking, but that ain't half of it. Regular schedule was eighteen of those each day, five days a week. Saturday to Sunday, that's ninety ads. Forty-five minutes of air time total. Some of the Voices at Wianoke local and other radio stations too, they do a half-hour weekly show, they don't know what it's like for the ad guy. These kids in the big agencies, they get maybe one real project a week and they're lucky if they're the only creatives on it. Don't even know they're lucky, they get scared because nobody's holding their hand. Too used to working in teams, used to taking forever and a half to get the thing done. Takes 'em a month to write a spot. The way we did it, twenty minutes was too long. Now, all the agency conference calls ending with 'let's regroup on this next week,' just makes me shake my head. No wonder the kids are scared to get things done.

That ad for the Plymouth, mind, it didn't sell seven of them because it was so well-written. It sold because they ran the recording one hundred and sixty times that month. And it was written a week in, so that was about fifty-three times a week they ran the thing. Every commercial break that came up, there was that spot for the Buchanan Chrysler! Seven guys went and bought the car, but everyone heard the ad enough times to remember, for damn sure.

Now, we used to get into the drive-in movies for free. The attendant would just wave us in, because we were all on the donkey baseball team, and… Maybe I should back up. We had some local fame. You know why? There was this thing in Cave Spring County that they don't do anywhere else, a game called donkey baseball. Better? Yeah, it was a real popular attraction. The stands were always packed. We used the little league field, and there was probably a bigger crowd for us than for the league. Everyone cheered when they brought in the donkeys, they knew all their names.

So, the way it worked was, you play baseball. Only, when you're at bat, you don't run the bases. No, you go to the donkeys. There's three of 'em, and the crowd tells you which one you get. First one, Nurse, she's real easy. You jump on, she trots around the bases, you get a home run every time with her. Second one, Trigger, he'll take you halfway, but he gets fighty and he'll throw you at second unless you wrestle a triple play out of him, but there's no way he'll take you home. Then there's Boots, and Boots throws you off as soon as you're on. Mean old bastard must have had a spur under his saddle or something, because that ass was just ornery as anything.

I was just about at bat when I got the good news about the cars. It was month-end and the air time they'd bought had just run out, but it sure paid off for old Robin and he was pleased as punch, said I was the best salesman he had and I hadn't even set foot on the lot. I'm feeling pretty full of myself when I walk up and hit a clear home run, just beam that ball over the stands, if you could've seen the smile on my face. Proudest moment in my whole life. Then the announcer, one of the guys from Wianoke local, says over the P.A., "Flew like a rocket! Good hit by the kid who wrote the ad for Buchanan Chrysler," and the crowd starts chanting "Boots! Boots! Boots!" The umpire takes me aside and says, "for God's sakes, just don't sit too high on him, he'll break your neck. Just stay low," so that's what I do. Flat as I can be, I just dive straight at the saddle, thinking, he'll just flop me over and that'll be that. Maybe Boots had that plan sussed out, because I'm in midair when he bucks up and catches me straight in the nuts, throwing me face-first into a pile of gravel. First the crowd said "oooh" real quiet, then they laughed as I got to my feet, and then they cheered as I walked, limped really, around the bases. They gave us the point, but we ended up winning by a whole three runs anyway.

The week after that, I was so sore I had to wear ice packs strapped to my, you know. But I heard two more people went down to Buchanan and bought Plymouths. And that wasn't the last time I played donkey baseball, either.

20. Marcela & Kurt

2010-04-03T11:55:00.000-07:00

Marcela looked towards the window at Kurt’s back. He leaned in the frame of light pouring through; a silhouette, a part of the room’s darkness. He lit a cigarette and translucent smoke trails curled around his head and face.

“Look at that snow fall,” he mumbled. His eyes shifted back and forth as though reading. A circle of fog appeared when he exhaled the smoke, as if it had frozen to the glass. He noticed his reflection around it; it appeared he did not have a mouth.

She looked at the black figure, the shape of him. Muscles clung to bone. It was easy to tell which of his tattoos were old, looking at the distorted shapes. Once, he had been much heavier. The skin had moved and shrank. He'd probably always been fit. The snow drove against the window, attacking him. If he were only a step forward, he would freeze in minutes.

“Come back to me,” she said. Warm.

The room had bare walls; uneven, cracked paint with amorphous areas of bleary, yellowy colour; a ceiling with water damage to match. The bed was a twisted metal frame. Marcela waited in the warm sheets, clutching the blanket over her chest, her past-shoulder-length hair a black escarole on the white cloth.

Kurt said nothing, but turned around and put his back to the window. He breathed through his teeth as his skin touched the cold glass. Something stopped him as he raised the cigarette: a smear of red on the filter's edge, and a flap of skin, thin like an onion's. He licked his cracked lips and drew on the smoke again. Embers cast a hellish glow over the angles of his face. Dropping his jaw, the tumbling cloud fell out of his mouth, and Marcela imagined the souls of the dead. He threw the cigarette. Sparks rolled out like fingertips from an opening hand.

"Alright." He smiled wryly, his teeth like the walls and ceiling. Slowly he journeyed back towards the bed, almost tiptoeing, poised on the ball of his foot like a dancer. Close, he stopped, and bent down, his heels still raised. Marcela became anxious. Kurt reached under the bed. She listened for the click of the number wheels, and the suitcase's latch being opened. It was. He shuffled the gear around and she became excited, almost giddy, and at the same time angry that he had waited so long.

The lighter flicked and flicked and the flame reached up with a palm around the crystal ball. Vapors made the inside muddy. The flame disappeared. The light disappeared. The smoke disappeared. Marcela held it inside her until it was ready to burst out, and exhaled a glittering, crystalline cloud. She felt like an angel set on fire. She heard a soft moan and wasn't sure if she had made it or if Kurt had. Soon, he fell into the bed.

He put his hand in her hair, gripped and released it; she felt the tension in her scalp. As he moved back, he ran the long fingernail of his little digit over her ear and cheekbone, and the white line it traced raised up in redness. He slid into the envelope of open sheets and the sensation of skin contact leapt over her like a thousand fleas. She shook herself out of the reverie and they became a chaotic tangle of limbs, a harmony of tongues and lips and fingertips, hands, ribs, breasts, stomachs, and something that was real, real close to being the kind of love she had believed in when she was a child, before she knew this.

19. Raleigh

2010-03-08T07:34:00.001-08:00

Raleigh smelt rubber. She shook her too-large helmet into place and pulled on the chinstrap to make it fit better. The strap pinched and the helmet was still loose, but she figured that was as good as it would get. Eyes forward, she gripped the wheel, counted to three, and pressed the pedal to the floor. Nothing.
"Hey!" The track operator didn't hear her. "Hey!"
"Cool it," he said, running blackened fingers through his ear-length hair. Raleigh thought she caught sight of a tattoo on his forearm.
She looked down the track and wrinkled her nose. The operator waved down someone else's kart and directed them into the pit, then walked over to where Raleigh waited.
"Take it easy out there, willya?" he half-mumbled as he did something to the engine. "Y'r keyed up a bit much."
The engine sputtered to life. Raleigh didn't know what he meant; she wasn't even sure what he'd said. If he said anything else as he stepped aside, she didn't hear it. Someone roared past and yelled, laughing at her. She saw his face, barely: it was Jason Rousseaux, a boy she knew from school. She started after him, but he was a long way ahead. "Take it easy, huh?" she thought. "I'll show you taking it easy."
The kart rocked around the turn and came wide out of it, making Raleigh lean heftily with the momentum. She took a hand from the wheel to wipe sweat from her eyes. Her hand was sweaty too. Focusing on the back of Jason's kart, she saw she was going a little faster on the straightaways. She was catching up, so she drove harder.
"Nice moves!" she shouted above the engines, bringing her kart alongside Jason's after four laps. He looked at her, then back at the road, then back at her. He said something.
"What?" Raleigh yelled. He said it louder and she still couldn't make out the words. Maybe they'd talk when the racing was done, she thought, get a soda at the shop by the side of the track and rehash some of the turns. Then he brought his kart in tightly, and Raleigh tried to get nearer to him so she could hear better. She steered carefully and kept her eyes on the tires, trying to get them close without touching.
He started to yell, and then they were both spinning and bumping as the karts left the road. Grass flew up in rooster-tails from the tires. When they came to a halt, he was in front of her, facing away. She fumbled with her chinstrap and called his name. His engine growled, and the kart did not move. The tires spun. A spray of dirt stung Raleigh's face.

18. Spaul

2010-03-05T15:33:00.000-08:00

Spaul plugged in the multieffects panel, the jet flange, the treadplate distortion and the harmonic octaver, daisy-chained the stomp boxes together and set the noise gate at eighty decibels. He checked the guitar tuning and put his foot on the wah pedal. The set began, and Spaul strummed variations of the same chord progression for fifteen minutes straight without changing.

"It's just, it's just that I think we should branch out, you know," Spaul stuttered. Peter held up his hand.
"Spaul, North Korean Board of Tourism is a noisepop electrosynth shoegaze band. If you want to explore other styles, that's your business."
"What's that, you mean I should just play the same chords forever?"
"That's up to you. Forcibly emphasizing a harmonic theme is a tenet of the subgenre. It's a very specific subgenre, Spaul."
Spaul was reluctant to quit the band he'd co-founded. He hadn't co-founded it with Peter.

They played another show, and as Spaul counted beats until the breaks where he'd crank up the distortion or turn on the octaver, he watched what Peter did. Writhing with his guitar, making the work of the looping digital echo look like tremendous effort, Peter showboated at the front of the stage, singular notes almost inaudible inside the wall of sound. Spaul pulled the strap over his head and leaned the guitar against the nearest amp, letting the feedback rise to obscene levels as he walked off the stage. It took Peter a couple minutes to realize.

Almost three and a half years later, Spaulding lightly tossed a few bills on the table next to the empty glasses. "I'll get this round," he said, standing up. "Get another if she comes by?"
"To moving up in the world!" One of his friends laughed. "Sure thing, cheers."
The flyer taped above the urinal made Spaulding do a double-take. NKBT.
'Great acronym,' he thought, 'like a dyslexic New Kids on the Block.'
The photo had only one face he recognized. He stared at his former bandmate. The names of the musicians were written below.
"Speter?" He blurted in disbelief. "Speter? That doesn't even make sense!"

17. Earl

2010-01-31T18:57:00.000-08:00

It wasn't a good idea, but Earl didn't know that as he fastened the chinstrap on his helmet and inched the shopping cart over the edge of the ravine.

"Accidental-slash-dental coverage. No, that's not a typo. It's the category of insurance related to incidents of an unintentional sort, resulting in damage to your teeth. I'd say that's about what we're dealing with here, wouldn't you?"
"Yef. I gueff fo." Earl nodded.

The tissue around the stumps in Earl's gums was the colour of turnips. One eyetooth, mostly intact, jutted out at a ridiculous angle. The dentist prodded it with a latex-coated finger. Pain exploded from that spot in a pattern that reminded Earl of spiderwebs, or maybe the stripes on a watermelon. "Yep," the doc said, "that's a mid-root coronal fracture. This one's got to go, too." He picked up a pair of grippers. "Want to do it right away? No sense in waiting."
"Uh-kay." Pain again. Twisting, white-hot rivers that began with the motions of the dentist's wrists and traveled at light speed through Earl's head, straight through his brain and out the other side. "Uhhhh," he said.

"...so that's pretty much why I can do this," and Earl pulled a beer out of the plastic ring pack and opened it against his front teeth.
"What was that, Earl, four years ago?"
"I reckon five." He swigged from his can.
"Think you could bite open a bottle?"

16. Arnie

2010-01-31T17:22:00.000-08:00

Arnie's old man worked the second shift on the line, standing eight to ten hours a day fixing roll bar after roll bar to one four-door chassis after the next. It wasn't a job with a lot of variety, but he wasn't the sort of man who needed much of that. The job kept him and Arnie and Arnie's mom fed, clothed, and under a roof, and that was enough. Some thousand-odd times each day, the pneumatic drill sped up to however many RPMs and back with a sound like an overgrown kazoo, and it was from a couple decades of that happening, what made Arnie's old man go a bit hard of hearing.

Arnie walked to school and sat up at the front, because he wasn't much of a reader and it helped to keep close up. He was doing a times table and counting up sixes on his fingers when something struck him in the back of the head. He yelped with surprise and forgot his math problem.
"I saw that!" said Mrs. Carver. "Now you get up here, and you give me that pea shooter!"
Tanner Edwards stood up slowly and walked over, glowering.
"You're sitting in the corner for the rest of the day, mister." She walked over to Tanner's desk and began moving it towards the wall.
Tanner looked at Arnie like it was Arnie's fault Tanner had shot him. Arnie looked down, at his workbooks, at the numbers. He tried to think of how many times to add sixes together to get forty two. The numbers blinked out as Tanner's fist crashed into the side of his head. Arnie jumped out of his seat and tackled him.
Mrs. Carver turned around, pushed her cat-eye glasses up to the bridge of her nose, and sighed at the fracas.

The principal looked at Arnie, who sat fidgeting, counting the tacks in the fringe of the leather-upholstered armrest. Arnie counted 'one, two, three' in his head, 'one, two, three' so many times he didn't know how many.
"I've called your father," said the principal, "but there's no answer. His work number, as well, to no avail. Hard to get a working man on the line, it would seem. Foreman doesn't think it's fair to use up his break minutes before their time." He touched the corner of his moustache. "Look at me, Arnold." Arnie did as he was told. "Mrs. Carver tells me you hit that Edwards boy. Bloodied up his nose. And I know he hit you first, but that doesn't mean I can just call it settled and done." Arnie looked at the principal's shiny forehead and said nothing. "Now, seeing as you live within six blocks of the schoolhouse, the rules allow that I can send you home as a disciplinary measure in accordance with what's laid out as appropriate for this situation. Can I send you home, Arnold?" The principal leaned forward and raised his eyebrows. Arnie sat up straight. He looked around, then looked at the principal and nodded.

When he walked out the door and far enough on that nobody was watching, he decided he didn't want to go home. He wanted to see his dad, and to sit in the car, and to hear the few words of advice he knew his old man would have about this. "Bullies are like balloons," his old man had said before, "they look real big until you pop 'em." Well, he'd popped Tanner Edwards, now what? Arnie walked along the dirt path towards the automotive factory. He knew where there was a part of the fence to climb over, and the big bay doors that were always open during the day. He knew where to find his old man.

The factory floor hummed with machinery and the sounds of labor. Pounding engines running and stamping sheet metal forms, pneumatic this and that whistling and the staccato shot of spot riveters all came together in a kind of harmony that made Arnie's young heart lift up with joy. He sat down near the door and looked at the grassy field and the sun-filled sky outside, and then to the working men and the enormous machines, the sparks and motion that lay further in, every part of it alive with rhythm, with purpose. He wanted to be a part of it, to make this music every day. That was it, he thought. He was through with school. He'd had enough of school.

15. Seth and Annie

2009-10-15T20:40:00.000-07:00

Seth tugged on the strand of skin fraying off of his fingernail, and hissed through his teeth as it bit into the quick. The newly torn fissure yielded a trickle of blood. Seth popped the finger into his mouth and wished he would have just left it alone.

The first six notes of "The Star Spangled Banner" tore from Annie's guitar like bullets from a revolver. The crowd caught fire; Seth looked up with worry lines on his forehead. This wasn't on the setlist. He didn't know the bass line. The audience was already into it. What was he supposed to do?
"Just kidding," Annie laughed into the mic, and dropped the impromptu Hendrix homage. Seth's shoulders rose and fell with an unburdening sigh. He chuckled at himself. What a free spirit that girl was, he thought. There was no one like her.
The songs went on as scheduled, and Seth's hands, programmed by obsessive sessions of practice, plodded along on autopilot. He was proud of his consistency. Note for note, he played precisely what was written, with no deviation whatsoever. Not that anyone noticed.
Annie seemed never to repeat herself exactly. Seth had an ear for this and he would notice the spatchcock revision of a score, especially careful to discern improvisational adaptations from mere mistakes. As he would point out, Annie did not make mistakes. She seemed possessed by a force that made her fingers fly, spewing riffs humbucker-hot when necessary. Sometimes she'd put the tempo just where it felt perfect and find, somewhere in those strings, scales that made harmonies with key changes that would break your heart, break it exactly right. Seth couldn't believe the enormity of the music in those hands. Her arms were so thin.

The highway lights made the tour bus interior a carousel of warm orange glows. They overlapped and faded away. The singer, reclined and serene, looked like her skin was the colour of caramel, then of milk. "Annie?"
"Yeah? Oh, hey Seth."
"That show, it was a great show. You were great, you're always great."
"Yeah, thanks."
"No, I mean it, you're really something else. Something special."
"Mm, thanks for the compliment. And you're a great bassist, you are." She yawned. "Yeah, really... great, Seth. But look, I don't like too many compliments on my playing, you know? They just stop meaning anything. It starts to be just a sound people make. You know what I mean?" She shifted her shoulders, settling back into the seat.
Seth took this for humility. He fought the urge to kneel. "I mean, more than just music." Looking for the right words, the road noise filled the cabin.
Annie opened her eyes and turned. Seth, leaning so far forwards that he barely made contact with his seat, picked at his fingers. She wondered what she should say to him, what she could say.
"You know, Seth," she said, looking up to the roof, "for a bass player, you're very high strung." She smiled in a good-natured way and looked over. Passing lights from outside made shadows spin across Seth's features like a sundial in time-lapse. He looked at his hands, fingers all working over each other, probing irregularities.
"Sss," he muttered, and put a bleeding finger in his mouth.

14. Old man and grandson

2009-10-15T20:11:00.000-07:00

"The only thing that might keep us alive in there was if we got off the first shot. There was a thing they'd say. Shoot first, you're a hero; shoot second, you're a casualty. Those of us that made it, well, being clever counted for a lot. Some of the time, when we came to a bunker from around back, they'd know we were coming. You'd see a little further around the hatch than where you could point the gun, so they'd just turn the big machinegun right around and train it on the door for when we came in. When they did that, we'd stay put. Lob a grenade through. Clear out the whole room."
"You'd frag 'em?"
"Would 'n' did. A dozen times." He looked into his teacup and saw the reflection of his face. When he picked it up, the image shattered into ripples.
"What was your best kill?" asked the grandson, who knew only youth.
The old man thoughtfully set down his tea and leaned towards the impetuous boy.
"One German saw the grenade come, and he ran for the door. The explosion took off his arms and head. Threw the rest into the hallway. He looked like a sweater with the sleeves rolled up."
The grandson didn't think much of it at the time, but the words created for him a special part of the season in late September. When the first autumn chills crept in, and the cold mornings gave way to warm afternoons, he would see again and again the specter of this ragged corpse of the man who had not made it to the door.

ESL Kids -- Nami, Jinho & Kevin

2009-10-02T23:09:00.000-07:00

Kevin was out of options, and he knew it. "Time to say goodbye, Nami," he said, a note of warning in his voice. She wouldn't dare try to stop him, or would she?

"Are you going back to New York?" she asked him, knowing that whatever he said would be a lie. The question was intended to throw him.
"Yes, I am," replied Kevin, hurrying through the last step of the con: exit, stage left. Without the need for any further prevarication, he considered his fraud complete. He turned away from Nami, and solemnly looked to the eyes that had trusted him most. "Goodbye, Jinho," Kevin said. Though his eyes were still, his heart was not. At least the hard part was over. "Goodbye, Nami."

His adrenaline surged. He was thinking of everything he would do after the getaway, counting the riches that awaited him overseas. He noticed nothing unusual as Jinho and Nami said a goodbye even more rehearsed than his own. "Take care, Kevin. We'll miss you." Even a fraction of Kevin's perception would have detected something amiss if he wasn't distracted by his own hubris as he raced through the final goodbye. It was too late. He'd been had.

"I'll miss you too. So long, everyone. I love you all." Kevin made a mental note of a possible flaw in his facade: he could not maintain eye contact when he told the truth. He got into the car, still unaware of how early his plan had unfurled before the eyes of his would-be accomplices, and how masterfully he'd been outplayed.

With an acknowledged equal hand in the crime, Jinho and Nami closed the door together.

Kevin believed he'd finally pulled off the master con, playing these dupes right into his hands. He believed it right up until the parking brake let go.

Jinho watched the coupe careening down the hill. He wondered what Kevin would do, or try; picturing the smug bastard realizing the brakes were cut and the doors were locked for good. Would he have time to break a window? Jinho thought, for only a moment, that he might be as badly off now as his nemesis. Was it wrong to kill a killer? The car broke through the guardrail and took a nosedive. He decided to let karma judge him for this one, he owed that much to Ann. Whether it had changed the path of what was to come, he wouldn't know until it happened. He was still in reverie as he said, "See you, Nami."

She snapped him out of it. "See you again!" She turned with strict professionalism, but he knew it hadn't been all business with her. Yeah, things were on a different path now, all right.

ESL Kids -- Kevin & Ann

2009-09-24T15:11:00.000-07:00

Ann stood alone and solemnly coaxed the first plaintive, uncertain notes from the violin. She had barely begun to address the demons of her own shattered confidence when she was interrupted with a staccato burst of applause. Kevin stood in the doorway. She froze. It couldn't be. How had he found her? He stormed towards the stage, wordless.

She lowered the bow, poised to flee as Kevin raised his hands. Instead of striking her, he clapped again; the sound of impact echoed, dominating the music hall air in a way her strings could not. She tentatively opened her eyes from the instinctive wince. His face was unreadable: his eyes were cold, calculating.

"You are great. When is your violin concert?" Kevin demanded.
"June 15th," said Ann, instantly wishing she had lied. She tried to keep the fear from her voice, but could not refrain from a nervous swallow after speaking the words.

Kevin's facade slipped for a moment and his brows crumpled, stifled rage playing across his features as briefly and brilliantly as Ann upon her Stradivarius. "What's the date today?"

Was this another stratagem? Ann cursed inside her mind. How could she avoid playing into his trap? Why couldn't he just tell her that he'd discovered her infidelity, and have it out right then and there! She knew he didn't have the stomach for confrontation. To Kevin, mendacity was so much more palatable. "June 11th," Ann said sharply, striking back at him with a vocal tone that did not match the pretense. Had she given too much away? She didn't care anymore; there would be no backing out now, and she would have to be ready.

Kevin seemed taken aback, as though he had not expected her to match his fire for fire. She would not be intimidated, not this time. He backpedaled, looking for reconciliation. "Oh! This Friday?"

Ann sensed his weakness, and her opportunity. "Can you come to my concert?" she asked, sweetly as she would have when they were still in love. Behind her eyes, though, was something that had not been there when they first met on that day so long ago; a day too lovely to foreshadow what was to come. It was something Kevin could not see: it was the deceptiveness she had learned from him.

"Sure," he said.

Oh, how the tables would turn.

13. Bethany and Doug

2009-09-22T19:21:00.000-07:00

Bethany knew it was Doug by the way he slowly turned his key in the lock of the front door. He was trying to make the bolt slide silently, and it did not. She might have slept through it if she'd been asleep, but it made little difference. Any of the incriminating sounds produced by Doug's pre-dawn infiltration could have sprung her eyes open with the fear of burglary; as it was, she sat and thought about how much the slow groan of the door hinge followed by the slight hiss of Doug swearing in a whisper sounded like a bow and arrow being drawn and fired. She stepped where the floorboards met the buttresses and moved through the hallway darkness without sound.

Doug had the fridge open, but was looking at the floor. Bethany rested her forearm against the wall and watched her husband, trying to think what he was thinking.
"You been out?" She spoke gently and did not startle him.
"Been out, yeah." He nodded his head. He'd been drinking, she could tell.
"Doing what?" She leaned a little more into the wall, tilted her head against her arm.
He looked at her; she smiled. He cast his eyes down again to the floor. She stood up straighter and took her arm from the wall. Her lips parted slightly. She thought for a long time and said plainly, "How much'd you lose?"
Douglas had been reaching into the fridge for something and he froze. It was as though he'd finally decided what he wanted from in there and the question had undone it. He stood up and closed the fridge. "It wasn't much."
"Just tell me."
"Well," he turned one way, and then the other, seeing little except the outlines of the furniture in the dark and the pale relief of his wife in her white camisole. He sighed, and approximated eye contact. "I guess for us and for cards, not much money is two different things."
"Oh, Douglas." She felt very tired all of a sudden. If it was worth fighting about, she thought, it would be better fought about in the morning.

His wife dissolved backwards into the shadows and Doug looked into the fridge again. The light from inside blew back the darkness and his eyes closed pinhole-tight; everything outside the grasp of the little bulb ceased to exist. Doug took the bottle of milk and shut the door. He stood drinking, unable to see the walls around him, or the floor he stood on.

12. Stephanie

2009-09-14T09:16:00.000-07:00

Stephanie laughed, and immediately felt exactly as she would have if she’d punctured the lid on a can of fish that had spoiled inside the tin. She wished she hadn’t done it. Her mother’s eyes lanced her.
“It isn’t funny.” Her voice was quiet and taut.
“I know, I just…” Steph had time to finish, but she didn’t have the words for it.
“You just nothing. Have some respect.”
Stephanie looked at her feet, studied the grout in the tiles of the kitchen floor. She wasn’t sure why she had laughed. Nothing seemed funny; she wasn’t sure how else to react. Her mother turned back to the telephone. As Stephanie walked to her room, she heard her mother’s voice spilling into the hallway, offering cooing susurrus of consolation not meant for her.

“I think it was, like, this mental image of one of those horse-drawn carts from the olden days, you know? And it, like, losing a wheel or going off the road or whatever.” Stephanie took a sip of grape Fanta, trying not to slurp from the can in case her friend could hear. She took in the other half of the conversation through the plastic pink cellphone and emphatically, though her friend could not see the gesture, rolled her eyes like a pair of volume knobs being twisted to maximum. “I know! My mom just doesn’t understand at all. Like, what’s so great about being what's probably the most crappiest, y'know, way to be, anyways? They’d be so mad if I got that way, but for my sister it’s all, like, good job. If it was me, they’d kill me for sure.” She sat down and looked in the mirror. She looked at the things on her desk, reached for something and stopped, bit her lip. “Yeah no, well, that’s okay because he pulled out.” She sipped at the Fanta again and, finding it empty, threw the can in the garbage.

11. Mickey

2009-09-13T15:55:00.000-07:00

The static buildup made a spark jump from the guitar into the patch cord as Mickey plugged in. The pop was as loud as a gunshot. 'Electric frustration,' he thought to himself. 'Builds up when it's not connected to anything. Guess I can relate to that.'
Mickey strummed a few barre chords and decided the guitar wasn't too badly out of tune. He took a swig from his beer and set it down on the amplifier, then turned to the mic. He scanned the rows of empty tables, the few patrons lingering by the bar with their eyes fixed on television screens. He checked his watch; the show was scheduled to start. He looked to the bartender, who gave him a shrug and went back to filling a glass. Mickey turned to his bandmates and twirled a finger in the air.

The first time they'd played a real show, Mickey had screamed 'Are you ready to rock?' and meant it completely. This time, he leaned into the mic, said "We're Downtown Meltdown" with indifference in his voice, and started strumming the same song they always opened with.

Meandering through the lyrics, Mickey realized he'd switched the order of the verses without meaning to. 'Nobody'll notice except for the band anyhow,' he thought. They'd had better nights than this and they all knew it. Irv was probably thinking about his new kid at home more than the drumming, and Ryan was sitting out of most jam sessions these days. He was pretty focused on his job. Mickey didn't think it would last a whole lot longer.

How did it get from there to this?, he wondered. When they started, the three of them would play in the garage until three in the morning was a distant memory. All of them were writing songs, or at least parts of ideas for songs, and somehow a debut album never materialized. The first few shows were packed with their friends, beer was on the house, and it was easy enough to take a girl home most every night they had a set.

"This next song, it's a new song," Mickey said, his eyes panning the room. "It's called, 'All You People.'" He tossed his head back so that the snort of a bitter laugh wouldn't reach the microphone. He turned back, smiling, and nodded to Irv. He nodded back. Mickey thought he looked tired.

They went through it, and in the middle, some new people walked in. They were young, Mickey couldn't place their ages, but the group looked about as old as their fans had when the band first got together. Mid-twenties somewhere. The group stayed for a minute or two and went out to find a different bar. 'What the hell,' Mickey thought, and played very hard on the guitar solo that ended the song. He leaned into the mic and said, "Thank you, everyone. That was our last show. You've been great."

He turned around and put down the guitar. "Thanks," Irv said.

10. Nancy

2009-09-13T15:37:00.000-07:00

Nancy microwaved the coffee left over from the day before, fed the cats, fished her keys out of the crumpled receipts and subway transfers piled in her purse, and left for work.
"Fuck fuck FUCK," she shouted through gritted teeth as the traffic light went from yellow to red. She stood on the brake and reached for the mirror, turning it towards herself while reaching for the tube of lipstick in the cupholder.
She was only fifteen minutes late. She stormed towards the corner office without acknowledging her intern, Laura. The first thing she noticed was that, reflected in the immaculately dustless glass frame of her niece's graduation photo, she could see the blinking light of her desk phone. She'd missed a call already; there was a voicemail waiting. Nancy did a one-eighty. "Hell," she grumbled, setting down her half-finished grande vanilla chai frappuccino on a filing cabinet.
"Looks like I'll have to call you back," Laura said as the thumping heels came back around the corner. "Yeah, more parakeeting. Thanks, hun."
"Laura!" The screech drowned out completely the sound of the cellphone clicking shut.
Laura swiveled in her chair. "Yes?"
"I hired you to take my messages! Tell me why there's a call waiting -- do you expect somebody else to be minding the phones? Have you got something more important to do than your job? It shouldn't be too hard to find someone to perform this simple task..."
As her boss continued the tirade, Laura subtly twisted the ring on the third finger of her left hand, ensuring that the light from the diamond sparkled all the more belligerently.

9. Blode

2009-09-12T16:03:00.000-07:00

Blode didn't have much luck when it came to changing the toner in the Xerox machine.

The amber light traitorously flicked on and off at Blode as his blood pressure increased. It was the fourth time he'd opened the side hatch and tooled around with the mechanism. He was sure he'd done everything right.
"Fucking shitstick cockerel," he muttered.
With great effort, Blode did not kick the machine with a foot that that had proven itself capable of reducing a crackhouse door to splinters in one go. Nor did he punch it with the fist that had floored more than a few pushers, pimps, and low-level thugs. Blode just walked out.
"Betty, if you could get the copier working, my reports need to get Xeroxed for the D.A.," he called across the typing pool. "They're on my desk."
"Sure thing, Sarge," she called back.
Blode left the station and looked at his watch. Three fifteen. Time for a drink.

"Pint of stout and one shot Johnny Black," he barked at the bartender, some new kid who barely looked old enough to be drinking, let alone pouring them. The kid got to work fast enough, at least. "Where's old Saul? Don't tell me he's retired," he asked, and threw back the shot.
"Oh, Saul's gone. He passed away a couple weeks ago."
Blode didn't choke on the whiskey, but he slammed the empty glass down so hard that he broke his pinkie finger.

8. Arliss

2009-09-12T15:51:00.000-07:00

Arliss swaggered into the store, looking for a pair of snakeskin boots. Wouldn't be a Texan wedding without a pair of snakeskin boots, went the thought that had rang out like a spittoon can struck in the saloon of Arliss' mind over lunch. He had to get a pair in time for tomorrow. What's more, Newell probably needed a pair himself. Now what was Newell's boot size? It'd been a few years now since he'd seen his old kin, not counting the morning's exchange at the airport and on the drive to the hotel. Arliss pulled a pair of ropers from a shelf and looked them over. Yeah, Newell's boots were probably about that same size. Maybe one smaller.

"C'mere, bredder!" He clapped the man on the back and pulled him into a familial embrace.
"Arl, you ol' son of a bitch, it's good to be home," Newell said, but his tone of voice didn't back it up.
"Wait until you see the dinner what's waiting for you at Braymoth," Arliss said, accenting the name of the family farm with the jab of a cigar-sized finger into Newell's ribs. "That is, if you haven't lost the stomach for real food."
Newell was quiet for a moment. "New York's been good to me," he said.
"And how about that woman you met up there? She joining us?"
"Actually," Newell said, blasphemously, "she's vegetarian."

7. Sophie & Brian

2009-09-12T15:17:00.000-07:00

The scar looked like red wax dripping straight down from Sophie's hairline, narrowly missing her eye. She turned towards Brian, and he cringed.
"Long time no see," she said.
He found it difficult to make eye contact.
"Yeah, I uh, I'm glad to see you're up and around."
"Are you kidding? I've been out of the hospital for a month already."
He was silent. She bit her lip, knowing she'd meant that to sound less forceful.
"Look, I don't want you to worry about this," she gestured towards the side of her face, "okay? I'm over it. You don't have to beat yourself up."
Brian made a face like he was trying to force something that wouldn't come. He turned away and expelled the breath he'd been holding in, then tried again with his right hand over his heart. "I think it would be better if..." he trailed off, losing the nerve to admit what she already knew.
Sophie waited, and breathed deeply. She smiled politely. He's such a goddamned actor, she thought. He looked down.
"I can't help blaming myself," Brian said to his feet.
"That's something you'll have to get over."
When he looked up, she was waiting for him. Her gaze locked on to his. She knew exactly how pretty she was, or used to be, and the only penance she asked was that he would carry on like nothing had changed.
"Every time I see it," he began, and looked away. "I hear the squealing tires, the breaking glass..."
"That's a fucking Pearl Jam lyric, Brian." Her voice cracked. She was tempted to hit him. She attempted to calm herself, to keep a grip on the situation. If they shouted it out, she knew he wouldn't call her again. He'd consider it over and try to forget. She had already looked in the mirror and swept her hair over her face in a dozen variations. It didn't work.
He looked at her with uncertainty. No words came. He felt angry that his life hadn't prepared him for this.

"Want to see a movie?"

6. Tasha

2009-09-11T20:27:00.000-07:00

Tasha liked Hayden as soon as she set eyes upon him. He always appeared disheveled, and yet composed, as though careless attractiveness were a quality he could not suppress through sheer lack of effort. His manners matched. Tasha could tell Hayden's attention was valuable by how sparingly he laid it out. Eventually she worked up the nerve to approach him, and was relieved to find herself accepted in his presence, not the target of the mysterious, sarcastic scoff he doled out frequently. She had met his unfathomable standards. She felt unique; Hayden was so often alone.

She asked him to have coffee with her and he laconically agreed. They went out. She told him all about herself and he laconically approved, of everything. She told him she found him handsome, and they returned to her dorm room where he laconically made love to her. Afterwards, he began to get dressed. She asked him why. He said something which, though he didn't know it, completely and irrevocably changed the way she perceived him. He might as well have torn off his face.

Once he'd gone, Tasha went out by herself and walked in the snow, inventing obscenities so potent that no words existed with which to express them.

5. Henry & Angie

2009-09-11T20:10:00.000-07:00

Henry might have miscalculated.

Some way to put it, Angie thought, stuffing clothes into a suitcase with such single-minded determination that she barely registered what she was putting into it. Her mind was on making the suitcase full, not of things she needed, but simply full, as if its compensatorial overflow could spill into this new emptiness of which she was keenly aware. She packed the red Naugahyde suitcase with shirts and blouses and her toothbrush and a bottle of Aspirin, forgetting socks and toothpaste and the address book which she'd remember only as she attempted to contact the sister with whom she'd planned to stay.

Henry didn't understand this reaction at all. So he'd made a mistake! Didn't he suffer the consequences of that just as much as she did, if not worse? She should feel sorry for him, not angry -- after all, it had been hard work keeping the secret all these years, and he'd done that for her sake, trying to keep her happy. Where was the appreciation for that, he wondered? Right out the window. Henry had trouble articulating these thoughts. If only Angie had remembered -- and he had reminded her that very morning! -- to go to her appointment with the ophthalmologist right after work, he would have had time. Everything should have been normal by the time she got home, but no. It was so like her!

"Angie, please." He tried to sound soothing, but the words came out with exasperation. She passed him wordlessly and went down the hall, dropping some items from the partially-open suitcase. The salesman came down the stairs, stuffing his necktie into his pocket. Henry handed him his shoes.
"Is there," he turned his head at a sound, turned back. "Anything I can do?"
"It's better if you go."
The man nodded. He walked out the door and called back over his shoulder, "Sorry, Henry." He wasn't sure Henry had heard him.

4. Russel

2009-09-11T19:50:00.000-07:00

Russel was small by any measure of a man except personality. Whether the fault of genetics or just a lean diet during his youth, he'd never grown taller than five foot one, or heavier than one hundred twenty five pounds. He didn't blame anyone for his being short. That was just facts. For feeling small, though, he blamed the whole world.

When he happened upon the bike at an automotive trade show, Russel knew he had to have it. Russ wasn't much of an enginehead -- he went to the trade show mostly just to look and to try a few pick-up lines on booth girls, worth the price of admission in his mind -- but the bike looked exactly what he'd waited his life for. The cowling was sleek, sharp in places like an ancient weapon, contoured exactly as a body lying supine waiting for his to fill the space on top and complete them both. It promised to dissolve him. "Lethal," he mouthed, tracing the shape of the bike with a hand an inch above its sacred surface. He spread a down payment over two credit cards and a post-dated check.

He fell in love with the anonymity of the helmet, relished the impunity with which he snaked around slower vehicles. He could thread a needle at one hundred miles per. Nothing could touch him. Even the expensive sports cars were clumsy by comparison. They were all too big.

A pickup truck with a broken tailgate got the better of Russ as he tried to blaze past it. When it left him behind, the bike sped on riderless for over three hundred yards, as though it had never really needed him after all.

3. Walter

2009-09-11T19:10:00.000-07:00

Walter lowered the stock from his shoulder and un-winked his eye. The cordite smoke hung in the windless air like a blot of bird shit on a clean pane of glass.

The buck hadn't died right away; it was still kicking out its last. They do that sometimes, Walter knew, before they shut down entire. Echoes of the shot rumbled distant. The peal of the gun diminished into a murmur of assent, speaking to the heart of the hunter.

Waiting for the throes to stop -- a single kick from one of those hooves can split a man's brain-pan as it were a grapefruit, he'd heard -- Walter did a few things. He took off a glove and scratched his ruddy brown moustache, smelling the leather scent remnant on his trigger finger. He checked his buck-knife to see that it was sharp; it was. The kicking stopped. The animal would still be breathing. Walter decided it was time to take care of it, and began to cross the two hundred or so yards that separated them. Hell of a way to meet somebody, he thought.

He found the deer next to a tree that looked so goddamn much like twelve-point antlers. How in the hell. The doe stretched its neck up, its eyes deep and watery as a woman's, taking in the sight of him. Walter saw the fight go out of the quiet creature. He made it go quick.

The next day, he shaved his moustache.

2. Simon

2009-09-11T18:47:00.000-07:00

Simon gazed out into the yard where his labrador was rolling in the overgrown grass. When the dog stood up and shook the loose blades from his long golden coat, Simon lapsed out of his reverie and decided he'd mow the lawn. Today was the day. That lawn was getting mowed.

It had been two or three weeks now, partly because Simon had decided he liked the way the overgrowth looked at night. It reminded him of tumultuous waves on a stormy sea, and at 4 A.M. on a Thursday he'd leaned out an upper-floor window and imagined himself the captain of a Spanish galleon, trading sugar cane from Jamaica for Darjeeling tea. Before that, the reason for not mowing it was because of a slight twinge of tendonitis in his left knee, and he feared that pushing the mower might cause the condition to worsen. Before that, he had decided that gas-powered mowers were environmentally unsound and resolved therefore to get a push-powered one. Simon had forgotten all of this now. Today was the day.

The transformation from ragged green shag to cropped carpet was a surprise to Simon in the same way that haircuts often were. The rumbling engine and the smell of masticated vegetation inspired good feelings in him. When he surveyed his handiwork, a self-satisfied salute keeping the sun from his eyes, he caught a glint of something shining among the clippings. It was distinctly un-grasslike.

It took Simon a moment to piece together what it was. He guessed a ring would bounce off the front door, about that far, if someone were really and truly not coming back. "I'll pick it up later," he thought to himself, and went around to mow the other yard. When he'd finished, he went in, and the dog playfully followed.

1. Joan

2009-09-11T18:34:00.000-07:00

Joan raised her head from the Times' Style section and stared with exasperated disbelief at the crimson puddle spreading across the table. Kendal had pried the lid from her sippy-cup. Results were typical. With infantile glee, Kendal laughed and shook the cup while her mother felt the creases deepen around her mouth. At this rate, the lines in Joan's face would have her looking like a marionette by the time her daughter was ready to drive, and after that would come a whole other set of frustrations. It hadn't always been this way. Before Kendal -- a time period which had become as much a matter of historical reference as "before electricity" -- Joan had considered herself free. A prison without doors, however, is still a prison if one does not leave, or so the logic went at the time. Proving that she was, in fact, free entailed quite a bit of dancing, drinking, and repeating; the friends and the nightspots varied over time, but the events were largely interchangeable. Things had turned from that to this in a fashion not unlike the way buildings collapse -- first a little, then the rest. Kendal's juice reached the corner of the paper. As it soaked through, the style page became semi-transparent. The makeup model's face became a palimpsest of words from page eight, her smoothness marred by a chaos of lines.

0. Self-portrait.

2009-09-11T18:25:00.000-07:00

He stood by the window. Rain fell.

He removed his forehead from the back of his hand and allowed his eyes to focus on the wet glass. Had it really been so long since he'd written anything? Though his internal narrative had not lost its grandiloquence in fabricating the usual sequences of self-aggrandizement and self-beration, he'd committed nothing to paper.

"Fuckles," he uttered. The word was to be his last.

On the floor below, in three adjacent apartments, circumstances convened such that the following events occurred almost simultaneously with the author's minced oath. Konstantin Philalopolous was making an unauthorized renovation to his bedroom wall in an effort to accommodate the Murphy bed he'd purchased after his live-in girlfriend saw one in a rerun of an old sitcom and caught on to the fad thirty years late. Two doors down, Jeffrey "Meatsteak" Flynn and Doyle "Sack-Dog" Saks, football enthusiasts and latent homosexuals with a combined body-mass index testifying to the unbalanced spectator/participant ratio of their involvement with sporting events, were vicariously celebrating the success of their team in a meaningless preseason game by re-enacting a recent tackle with enough physical force to mask the sensuality of the experience. Both side walls of the olfactorily-disabled Mrs. Ethyl Dorplaster's lonesome apartment crashed in simultaneously, ventilating the space that had previously lacked a favourable oxygen-to-gas ratio just as the widow was attempting to re-light the pilot on her stove and wondering why the match wouldn't strike.