Letter from the Editor

Welcome to the December issue of InkSpin. We hope you will enjoy its contents.

Naturally, we wanted a Christmas story. Click on Janet Salvage’s “The Christmas Box” for a tale that weaves a lost gift into a surprise conclusion. Chelsea Polk’s flash fiction “Bright Wings and Wax” is based on the Greek myth of Daedalus who conjured wings to escape from the labyrinth. Linda Oatman High’s “The Smallest Church in the World” is a delightful, humorous story of an overweight woman stuck in a pew. “Fruits” by Phyllis Ring draws attention to the poverty and hunger of the worlds’ children. We found it especially appropriate for the holiday season where we Americans all too often focus only on the commercial aspects of Christmas.

John Steele’s “Perfume” (with its unusual formatting) meshes reality with the supernatural and draws attention to remembrances of war and lost love. At the age of twenty-two, John has written a poignant story about a haunted man more than twice his age. KR Mullin’s flash fiction “By Another Name” delights us with its unusual, quirky ending. Click on Lynn Bey’s “At the Villa” for a subtle flash story about a scorpion that kills.

I wish to extend special thanks to my Associate Editor, Jim Bell, for his encouragement and editorial assistance. And, of course, InkSpin would not exist were it not for the commitment of our Editorial Board—Amelia Klock, Paul Ferguson, Gerry Kozak and Robert Laszlo. My heartfelt thanks to them as well.

Em Kersey (Editor-in-Chief)

The Christmas Box

by Janet Salvage

 

From where I stand huddled between my open car door and the seat, I notice a pile of cardboard boxes across the street on the sidewalk. Scraps of Christmas wrapping flap in the wind. It's Christmas Eve. A family inside the townhouse must have celebrated early. A large empty box sits at the edge of the trash near the curb. At least, I think the box is empty, and I must have a box for the quilt.

I've thrown my purse and my nurse's uniform into the back seat. I have my daughter Caroline's Christmas present—which is a quilt that Janice from work and I have
sewn—inside a shopping bag still resting on the street in front of me. I've lugged it two blocks from the hospital. If I grab that box, I can mail the quilt to Seattle. It would get there by December 27, only a tad late for Christmas.

I check out the dark, deserted street. I'd heard on the radio that the cops swept through and took the homeless to the North Street Shelter. Brightly lit candles glow in
the windows of the townhouse. The blinds are almost closed but there's light behind them. A family, together, I suppose.

I heave the quilt in its shopping bag across the street. If it fits, I'll stuff the quilt inside the big box, then be on my way to pick up Janice, and we'll go to the party. It's 9:15. After my cold walk from the hospital, my earlobes sting.

The streetlight shines dimly on the trash, but it's bright enough to see there are no rats. I set the shopping bag on the steps of the townhouse. I stoop to pick up the big box, careful not to ruin my new black velveteen pants, which all the nurses admired. The box is awfully heavy when I try to upend it. It moves by itself.

"Jesus Christ, lady, what the hell do you think you're doing?"

I gasp as a bundle of fabric pushes itself from the flaps of the box and sits up straight on the sidewalk. The man in a ski cap exudes a pungent odor of cheap booze as he attempts to extricate himself from what now appears to be a sleeping bag. The coveted box has been thrust aside.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, sorry!" I scream. "I didn't mean, I didn't know—"

The man has pulled out of the sleeping bag. He looms stiffly in front of me, about five inches taller than I. I back away and start to run for my car, but the quilt is behind him on the steps.

"Nadine?"

I freeze. "Excuse me? How-how do you know my name? Oh no, you're not—you are!" Oh God, it can't be! I don't want any more surprises, Christmas Eve be damned. I am not
going to have anything to do with you, Toby—or is it Tobias tonight? I will run away and leave you alone on the street. My best friend, Janice, persuaded me to go to the party tonight, even though it's been only eight months since my husband Gary died. But Janice thinks I owe it to myself to go—it is Christmas. So I am going to pick up Janice on time, and it's almost time—I catch my breath—and shake my head and hear myself inquiring:

"How are you, Toby?"

He grunts and shouts something unintelligible. Through the brisk wind, I yell something equally so. A window of the townhouse screeches opens. "Hey, lady, you want me to call
the cops?"

"I am the cops," shouts Toby. He flashes a no-longer-valid badge.

Back in my car, I cruise alone through light traffic towards Janice's. A horn honks and a large van on my left narrowly misses me. I've driven through a red light. I'm a zombie.
I've lost Caroline's Christmas present—it’s back there on the steps. But I've done my best for humanity—the homeless—because now I've left a quilt for Caroline's father. He'll be warm this Christmas Eve.

Oh shit.

Over on Eighth, I run into Janice's sublet. I tell her to go on to the party by herself. I'll be there, but a few minutes late.

"Why?" she asks, but before I can answer, she starts to say I don't look right, but well, actually I do look very pretty except for the distress bubbling over my face. She says, "That is one gorgeous, red sweater, Nadine. I love the earrings. Is the mistletoe on the hoops real? Danny will be suitably impressed!"

Yes. Danny. One of the doctors from the hospital is throwing this party. He's told me Danny, another doctor, has been invited. He wants to meet me.

Danny Martin sounds like a lonely hearts ad: loves to dance, go to movies and jazz concerts, but Danny will have to wait.

"See you at the party, Janice," I shout as I scoot back into the street. "I've got something to take care of.” Not that I'm sure what that is.

Back in my car, I wonder why I haven't made phone calls from Janice's. I don't know who I would call. Toby's old buddies from the force? I'd worn out my welcome with them
when we'd been married. A wife ought to handle these things on her own, they believed.

Toby is sitting hunched over on the townhouse steps. Caroline's quilt covers his knees. He's examining the pieces. Not good. This quilt is made from memories. Each
piece has been carefully dissected from parts of Caroline's childhood. Her yellow chiffon prom gown, her white lacy confirmation dress, her tiny red and white polka dot umbrella.

Toby bought her the umbrella when she was six. A cutting of her blue graduation gown from Rutgers, four years ago, is stitched into the quilt; that was the last time I'd seen Toby.

He'd come alone to the gym for the ceremony. Gary and I had spotted him in the first row. Toby would have been hard to miss. Wearing a hazard-cone orange baseball cap, stuffing his mouth with popcorn he'd brought along, he bobbed in his seat, apparently bragging to all who would listen that his daughter, Caroline, was the valedictorian.

Near the end of the ceremony, Toby had a brush with Security. He had, in fact, been ushered out. Caroline, in her speech, had credited her dad as having been one of the
most influential people in her life, after which Toby had raised both arms, then whistled—one of those two finger kinds—and stomped his feet, yodeling a bird call. You
would have thought it was some kind of sports event, which it was, I suppose. It was competitive.

I squeezed my husband Gary's hand while he pretended indifference to Caroline's misguided compliment. I rubbed his back, put my head on his shoulder. It had been Gary who happily helped Caroline with her math and I, otherwise, shared in her upbringing since she was six. Go figure.

Now I tentatively cross the quiet street to Toby on the steps. He's crying. Frustration threatens to drive me off again.

 

"Look," I say, crouching down beside him on the frigid steps—to hell with my new black velveteen slacks. "it's Christmas Eve. Why aren't you with Gloria?"

Gloria is his sister and his on-again off-again residence. Other times he stays with old friends he made back when he was on the force. I guess they connect, law enforcement
and whom they protect. But would someone—couldn’t someone—take him in on Christmas Eve?

Toby wipes his eyes on his sleeve. "Nice quilt."

"Yes. Thank you. I'll drive you to Gloria's."

"No. I have to watch the street."

I nod.

A pink neon light glows from Anderson's coffee shop down the street. I touch the edges of the quilt, the yellow eyelet ruffle. I remember a time when this stranger beside
me and I were married. Desperate for advice, I had asked one of Toby's psychiatrists: Should I play along inside his world, or do I try to convince him those voices he hears
aren't real? Answers were frustratingly ambiguous: You try this, you try that. In the end, I had no choice but to run.

I stand and stomp my feet to warm them. My breath forms a cloud in the air. I long for the warmth of my car, and I decide to believe that Toby will be all right. After all, he's got a sleeping bag, a box big enough to house at least part of him and now a quilt. Caroline's quilt. I think he can survive the night. I look at my watch. Ten. I remember that somebody named Danny wants to meet me at a Christmas party. A party full of food and drink and merriment. I'm going. "Merry Christmas, Toby."

I swing open my car door as he watches from the steps across the street. There's an empty paper coffee cup sitting in my cup holder. Toby loved coffee, even got mad if I ran out of
it. I slam the door, walk back to him, and offer to go down the street to Anderson's. I'll bring him a cup of coffee. It's something. Then, I'll call Gloria.

In the overheated, hole-in-the-wall coffee shop, Toby sits across from me in the cracked vinyl booth slurping coffee. My cup has been pushed aside because it arrived emblazoned with somebody else's red mouth print. Toby followed me here. I heard him behind me carrying the shopping bag with Caroline's quilt brushing his leg as he walked. I'd hurried along the darkening, windswept sidewalk as uneasiness pulsed in my chest trying to bury my memories: This man hears imaginary voices.

Have those mysterious voices ever wanted me dead?

But here in the coffee shop is relative safety, since we aren't alone—not quite. Anderson, the obese owner in a grease-stained apron, spills over a stool at the counter. He stares at us curiously while he counts coins, forcing them into wrappers. We are some ex-couple. A man, tattered, hungry and homeless, with a widow, hardly merry—but she's dressed for a party.

The phone is just outside the ladies’ room in this godforsaken little hovel. I receive no help from Gloria when I call. Her husband Stan, who has consumed one too many eggnogs, answers with a raucous laugh.

No “how are you, Nadine,” not even “Merry Christmas.” Only, "If you hadn't left Toby in the first place, I wouldn't have him under my roof," he slurs. "You're the nurse, Nadine. Mix up some pills in his coffee. He's got Christmas money. He'll be okay."

"Why didn't you fly out to see Caroline?" the man I don't trust asks from across the table. None of his business, I think. I've ordered eggs for him. He's mopping underdone whites with overdone toast. A musty smell permeates the air across the table ever since he's removed his worn, blue ski cap. Greasy black, tinged-with-gray hair is both matted and
tufted above a face that hasn't seen a razor in awhile.

He says that he'll pay for the eggs, he has enough. As he rifles through his wallet, I spot a hundred dollar bill. He says with apparent sincerity that he's sorry about Gary's death last May, but what about Caroline? "Why didn't you go to visit? She won't have the quilt for Christmas," he accuses.

After Thanksgiving, Caroline left for Seattle and a new and responsible job as a Neiman Marcus executive. We planned a reunion next Christmas, if not sooner. We'd talk soon,
tonight, in fact. It was only eight in Seattle. She'll know what to do about Toby. She's managed a deeper understanding, a rapport.

I slip away again “to the bathroom.” Toby's involved with his eggs and the TV, which is high on a shelf, across the restaurant counter. TVs sometimes "talk" to Toby. They
tell him what to do. That scares me.

Caroline's machine answers and I'm not up to leaving this particular dilemma as a recorded message. She's regretted leaving her father, more than she has leaving me. "You can take care of yourself," she argued. Over and over, she's asked me how she might convince Toby to move to Seattle. Jobs are plentiful. Maybe she could even get her company, or her apartment building, to hire him as a handy man or a security guard.

She hasn't witnessed some of what I've seen twenty-seven years ago, but I'm a nurse and I wonder if we see alike.

Back in the booth, across from Toby, I'm feeling very warm in my new red sweater. I'm fidgeting and planning my getaway. Toby has moved into normalcy, or what sometimes
passes for it.

While I was gone, he found a new friend in Anderson, talking sports, and lying—or  fantasizing. Says he's a plainclothes cop, protecting Anderson while he counts his
money. Wouldn't Anderson be surprised had he known the truth: a man with no job watching him count his money. I wonder how long Anderson will stay open. The guy's a
mind-reader. "Merry Christmas," he announces. He flips the sign, CLOSED.

Around midnight, Toby sits beside me in my car as we drive through silent streets. I'm dropping him at Motel 6. The box that has brought us together—as ridiculous a union as
this is—sits behind us like a sentry on the backseat. The quilt is folded neatly inside.

As I drive, I try to forget Toby is here. It's a defense mechanism I've learned from the past. I think about the Christmas party and how it's probably still in full swing, and that there's still time to meet this wonderful guy, Danny.

Here I am, having babysat my ex-husband through Christmas Eve. I've cared for Gary through his bout with lung cancer. But I don't want to get back on that mental track
and start crying. I’m finished with tears. Caroline is surely and happily at a party. I smile. Had she known whom I was with, she'd have freaked—current vernacular.

The sign tells us VACANCY at Motel 6. He does not budge.

"Toby?"

Beside me in the car, he stares straight ahead. The closeness, the aloneness of this tiny space in the car is stifling. The windows cover with steam and the parking lot is empty.

"Did you get hold of Caroline?" he asks.

He knew me well enough to know I'd tried. "No."

"I did."

I turn to him. "When?"

"While you were in the bathroom."

Liar. I never went to the bathroom. He's hearing voices?

My words tumble out before I can stop them. I feel like a comedy actress in a new-age stage play, but what the hell, I just say it: "Have you talked to Caroline through the AT&T chip they've stuck in your head, Toby?" I cringe; this is so bizarre. I've just repeated the pronouncement my then-husband delivered in a wild frenzy 27 years ago at the dinner table.

I was 22 and frightened. I grabbed baby Caroline and we ran from the house.

We never went back.

"What are you talking about, Nadine?" The words drop emotionless as if from a robot plunked in my car. It stares straight ahead, as if through, foggy windows.

I don't know, Toby, I just don't know. I'm trying, I'm playing along.

 

"What did Caroline say when you spoke to her?"

No answer.

I drive with him hanging onto the dashboard, sixty miles an hour in a forty-mile zone. We careen through darkened streets. I hope to be stopped by a cop—a real one—because I must talk to somebody who will delay me from doing what one of my own “voices” has told me I have to do, since Toby has, under no uncertain terms, refused to get out of my car at Motel 6.

We're at my apartment in the city and I'm still frantically trying to listen to my own voices for advice. There is nothing. What would Gary do? Janice? And Danny, who wants to meet me—me, who has been described to him by my friends at the hospital, as a warm, outgoing “fun” woman. I never see myself that way.

What about Caroline? I imagine I hear Caroline “speaking” to Toby and “giving” him her old room for the night. I don't know who or what to believe, I'm just rolling along on
automatic, but one thing I know for certain is that it's Christmas Eve and I've always felt the magic in Christmas.

Off the elevator on the sixth floor, I show Toby to Caroline's old room and offer him towels for a shower. He smells foul, but declines the shower. Instead, he stares at
Gary's clothes in Caroline's closet. I've moved them out of our room to hers so I don't see them every night when I go to bed alone.

Caroline's white lacy curtains and bedspread lend a ludicrous backdrop to this bedraggled stranger who stands staring at Gary's beautiful clothes. He's forgotten I'm
there. Maybe he doesn't even know where he is. I find myself wishing I had tried harder to nurse Caroline's father back to health.

Lamely, I offer, "Take the clothes. He was your size." Whether he hears this or not, I can't tell, as he stands transfixed in front of the closet. I leave him and head for my room. I feel his troubled eyes on my back but I close Caroline's door without looking at him. I lock my door and lean against it. My heart beats a cadence against my chest. I've made a bad decision, bringing him here. I don't know why I've done it, but it's what Caroline would have wanted.

The lock on my bedroom door is flimsy. Even I had once bypassed one of those when I'd locked myself out of a house, years earlier. Suddenly, I'm the crazy one trying to shove my triple dresser against my door, but the massive furniture does not budge. I pull out the drawers and drop them on the floor to lighten the load. I don't care about the noise. It's my apartment and I can do whatever I want. Drawers slip out of my sweaty hands, banging as they hit the floor—my neighbors below must be cursing—but I don't stop until I have the damn dresser barricading my bedroom door.

I'm thrown from my own little world, as I hear my ex-husband call out from the next room, "Do you need any help?"

Morning light gleams at the edge of my blinds. Lying across my bedspread, I awaken, not sure where I am, or even who I am. I'd been dreaming in disconnected fragments, at one time hearing water running, as if someone was taking a shower—or was that real? I'm wearing a wrinkled, bright red sweater and black velveteen pants and earrings with
simulated mistletoe. I am Nadine Norris, that's who I am, mother of Caroline and in the room next to mine is Caroline's father.

It's Christmas Day and I volunteered to work. Before I go, I'll start coffee. The aroma will, no doubt, wake him up. Sunlight streams through my windows. It turns the previous night's horror into something I can deal with. Then we will call Caroline together—her  father and I—and wish her a very Merry Christmas, which is a very good plan, except as a predictor of the future, I fail.

Driving into work at the hospital through empty streets, I scan the neighborhoods for the box that is missing from my back seat and for the man who left my apartment in the middle of the night without so much as a good-bye or thank you. When the aroma of coffee brewing had not awakened Toby, I'd gone to his door and tapped lightly to silence. Slowly, I opened the door and peeked inside. Caroline's bed had not been slept in. The door to the closet was open part way, enough to see Gary's clothes; they were still
there.

The only change was a strong manly scent of Old Spice replacing the sour odor of the night before.

In the bathroom, the shower curtain had been wet. I'd tried to call Caroline. Still no answer. She'd probably stayed overnight with friends.

At work, I'm very busy with my patients. It's festive for those well enough to enjoy Christmas. I try to join in the banter, but I'm sorting out a strange mixture of emotions: anger, concern for Toby's future, wondering what more I could have done for him. Weren't there words—healing words—that would have reached down inside his battered, tormented soul?

Yet, I try to purge him from my mind, knowing at least he will be as warm as possible if he does, in fact, choose to live outside and "watch the street" as he'd told me last night. Maybe I had done what I could, after all. I made a quilt.

Caroline doesn't have to know what she didn't get for Christmas. I'll find her something else.

I'm sitting at the nurse's station, sorting paper work, trying to concentrate. At 5 o'clock, Caroline calls. "Mom! Guess what?"

"Caroline! I've been trying to reach you yesterday and today." I hear kitchen sounds, mixing, whirring. "Who's there? The new guy you told me about, the one who drives the Mercedes? Sounds like you're cooking for him."

"No, Mom! You know I don't cook. Get ready for this, Mom—Dad’s here!" She's giggling. "He's cooking me Christmas dinner. I picked him up at the airport after he called. "Mom, the quilt is fantastic, so much work! I love it!"

I'm stunned, trying to decide what question to ask first. Toby must have hitchhiked from the apartment to the airport, or taken a cab, dragging along the quilt. There'd been at least a hundred dollar bill in his wallet. I'd seen it at Anderson's when we had coffee. But an airline ticket to Seattle cost a lot more than that.

I hear them, father and daughter, talking excitedly back and forth about last night. I tell her I'll call back later and we wish each other Merry Christmas. And I say, "Caroline, are you sure you're all right?"

"I'm great!" The connection breaks.

Two more phone calls follow. Gloria, Toby's sister, wife of drunken Stan, calls. He'd just told her about my call last night. Gloria and I chatted the stilted talk of ex-sisters-in-law. Toby had been given money from the family for Christmas in lieu of gifts. He always gave away his boxed gifts. Cash gifts, she said, gave him a responsibility of making choices, which admittedly, were sometimes poor—and sometimes not.

"Gloria, I have to ask you this. Has he ever hurt anyone physically? Will Caroline be all right?"

There was a pause. "He's never struck anyone, Nadine," Gloria said quietly. "He would've recovered if you hadn't run out when he needed you."

She'd said it before. The guilt in my gut is like a tumor, heavier than ever on this particular Christmas. What if I had stayed in that nightmare marriage, would it have helped? My daughter Caroline believes it. Gloria, Toby's sister, believes it. Toby, himself, believes it.

I escape from myself and tend to my patients. I plump their pillows, attempt to induce chuckles, holiday cheer.

But this is the department of pain management; even if they wanted to, most cannot smile with me on Christmas.

Back at the nurses' station, my phone rings yet again. It's Danny who says I missed a great party but he still wants to meet me. Me? Says he's heard some wonderful things. . . .

Bright Wings and Wax

by Chelsea Polk

This is where Daedala likes to play: her stickman legs thrust out before her as she sits in a patch of cloudy light, tired of her uncle Russ coaxing her—one more step, another, stronger every day, my dear, stronger in every way, my dear.

They live in the rectory, but Daedala likes it here among the grey whispering stones of the nave, near the tumbled-in wall and the bright gemshards of glass still in their leaden webs. There peeks the red graceful fold of a robe, here a fragment of a bare humble foot, and there almost entire the Madonna, like the bombs couldn't bear to hurt a lady.

Daedala loves the angel window best. She sits on the floor by tumbledown pews where she can see its golden halo, its staring eye, and one bright wing. She had studied it when she planned her machine, until Uncle Russ brought her a dead starling and spread its speckle spotted wings for her. She chants the names under her breath—scapula, humerus, radius, ulna, car-po-meta-car-pus, phalange.

Daedala sits with her broomstick legs in front of her and plays. Clever fingers shape and bend, make and thread waxed parchment feathers to the skeleton of her wings. Uncle Russ had worked out the dimensions, and when she pulls the strings and spreads them wide, each wing spans half again her height.

The frame is sturdy. It will hold the wind, but the motor is too heavy. It pulls down on her shoulders, drives the skeleton's scapula into hers. It runs hot, and cooling will add more weight. She'd have to remake the wings, make them bigger, but even with salvage there's not enough left. Daedala looks at the grey morning sky, and down at her bird thin legs.

Stronger every day, my dear. Stronger in every way, my dear.

Daedala looks at the sky once more. She will trade.


 

The Smallest Church In The World

by Linda Oatman High

Pearl, who is fifty and big and stuck in a pew, is cursing a blue streak in The Smallest Church In The World. She’s somewhere in the Georgia boondocks, alone, heading home from a Weight Watchers meeting. Pearl pulled off I-95 at exit 12, because she had to tinkle. She saw the cute little church and decided to go inside. She was praying to lose weight, number one. Also she was praying for her mother who’s terminally sick with liver cancer, and for the vicious one-eyed potbelly pig who lives next door to Pearl. She added an optimistic PS to her prayer, requesting that maybe someday she could be on that TV show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Then she got wedged in-between the two Lilliputian pews, her ample gut and butt stuck. Just goes to show what praying does for a person.

Pearl is a lapsed Catholic. She hasn’t been inside a church—any church—in a coon’s age. But lately she’s been dreaming in Catholic. Pearl thinks that maybe it’s the lack of calories causing the dreams of nuns and priests, rosary beads and Jesus and a skinny Virgin Mary. Weight Watchers should put a little fluorescent green sticker on their frozen dinners: WARNING! CONSUMING THIS PRODUCT MAY CAUSE CATHOLICISM.

Maybe Pearl got stuck because this isn’t a Catholic church. It seems non-denominational. There are just a pint-sized pulpit, a few dinky pews, and a teensy-weensy stained glass window. There’s barely enough room for Jesus in here, let alone a plus-size lady. Pearl is being punished for something, she’s sure. Could be The Divorce. That’s when Pearl left the Catholic church, after Mack left her for the dentist’s receptionist. Pearl converted for him, and look what it got her. She wonders if Denture Woman has left her holy roller church for Our Holy Mother Of Providence. Pearl used to be a Baptist. That was B.M.—Before Mack. It also could mean bowel movement or Big Mama or boring marriage. Or baptize me.

Pearl was the church secretary, back Before Mack. She typed the Baptist Bulletins on a clacking gray Brother typewriter, in the days before Spell Check. Pearl made mistakes on purpose, just to see if anybody would catch them. She made jokes of the announcements. One of her favorites was "Ladies’ Bible Study will be held Tuesday at 6:00. After the B.S., there will be refreshments." And "An Ice Cream Social is planned for Saturday at 8:00. Ladies Giving Milk, Please Arrive Early." And "Low Self-Esteem Group Will Meet on Wednesday at 7:00. Please Use The Back Door." And "Weight Watchers Will Meet On Thursday at 7:00. Please Use The Large Double Doors." That was when Pearl was confidently slim, and she thought that she was pretty darned funny. Sad thing is, nobody ever got her jokes.

Pearl’s been questioning her faith lately. She smells a rat in God’s promises; anything as good as Heaven’s supposed to be can’t be free. Pearl wonders sometimes if maybe the Pearly Gates has one of those time-share plans, like when a tropical resort mails you a letter saying that you’ve won a all-expense-paid week at their hotel. There’s got to be a catch somewhere.

"So," Pearl says out loud, her husky large-woman voice booming in The Smallest Church, "if you really do exist, you’ll perform some miracle-workin’, Sir. Get me unstuck. Make me thin as a rail. Bring back Mack." No, strike that last one. Don’t bring back Mack. Send somebody different. A new improved model.

Pearl was a good wife. She was a fun wife. Once, she perched her glasses on Mack’s penis, pretending it was the nose of a bespectacled professor. She named her breasts: Milk Dudetta and Nipsy Ann Russell. She didn’t wear long johns to bed. No socks either. She formed a club for her lady friends called SCROTUM: Society Committed (to the) Respect Of Titillating Unforgettable Men. The mission of the club was to be nicer to husbands. Pearl was the President.

Pearl shifts her weight in the pew. She tries to stand. She can’t. She’s still stuck. Her buttocks are asleep.

"Some joke," she says. "Ha, ha. Very funny. Let’s make Pearl really fat and then trap her in a pew in a dwarf church."

Pearl sighs. "You know, I don’t mind telling you something, Mister God," she says. "I’m pissed. I’m mad as hell. I’m mad at Mack and I’m mad at Denture Woman and I’m mad at Mother for being sick. I’m mad at Catholics and Baptists and all the other good Christians who don’t give a shit about their fat, divorced neighbors."

A shiver of delicious guilt shudders down Pearl’s spine. She’s never cursed in church before, or leveled with the Lord about how ticked off she really is. Pearl’s making some big changes, right here in The Smallest Church In The World.

She’s sweating bullets. Pearl can feel pools of wetness beneath her cheeks. There’s enough sweat for a midget to go for a swim.

I wasn’t always fat. This wasn’t always me. Nobody stays the same. Pearl knows that, but sometimes it seems so unfair. It’s like she lost one person - Mack - and gained another. There are now two Pearls where there used to be one.

Mack had blue eyes and a black heart. He didn’t even cry when they lost the baby.

The baby. The image pangs hard in her gut. Pearl hasn’t thought of her like this, in such a grieving way, for years. The baby didn’t have a name, but she had ten fingers, ten toes, and a soul. She was buried in the Catholic cemetery, in a purple velvet-lined box, and her stone had an engraved angel. She wore a pink sweater, and white crocheted booties with silver bells. Her duck fuzz hair was yellow and downy and oh, so fine. She smelled like the candle-lit inside of a silent church - sacred and holy and straight from another place - the first and last time Pearl cradled her. Pearl could still sense the quiet weight - eight pounds, one ounce - in her arms, next to her heart. She could feel the baby kicking and moving and turning in the depths of her body. She held the sensation of the water breaking, the birth, the death. The pain.

"Oh, baby." Pearl whispers this. "Baby." She wishes there was a name.

Pearl’s grief is so big; it’s filling to the brim the entire insides of her. She’s puffing up like a cooked marshmallow with sorrow. What was once tiny and tight is no longer compact; it’s swelled, and Pearl is going to suffocate beneath the billows. She begins to wail.

Rivers of waters run down mine eyes. That’s from the Bible. Pearl wonders if the person who said it ever lost a baby with duck fuzz hair. Or a husband or a mother or a best friend. Funny how easily people can become detached from one another, as common as socks in the dryer. Maybe God should think about Velcro For The Human Soul. Stick souls together, and even death won’t part them.

"Are you okay? Ma’am?"

Pearl jumps, jolted by the deep and resonant voice that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere, all at once. Pearl McAndrews? This is God speaking. May I have your attention?

She turns and there’s a man—a tall and bald giant of a man—with a face like a cherry pie taken too soon from the oven. He’s wearing baggy khaki pants and a faded and wrinkled denim shirt; no woman’s touch obvious. His eyes are the most beautiful things Pearl’s ever seen: green and sparkly, starred emeralds that radiate kindness. God eyes. Pearl gazes, sniffling and snorting, into those eyes. They could save her soul, she knows. It’s him, she thinks. Who? she asks herself.

"Do I look like I’m okay?" Pearl didn’t mean to be snide; it’s just that she never learned the fine art of biting her tongue. Smack-aleck comes natural to her; Pearl is the poster child for Chronic Sarcasm. She feels a blush spreading across her neck. Snot drips from her nose. She puts a hand to her hair. Pearl’s hair has become wispy-thin and gray in places not easy to hide. She doesn’t even try anymore. But it used to flow over her shoulders like a nun’s veil: blonde and sleek and shiny. Pearl wishes this too-tall man with the extraordinary eyes could have seen it. This wasn’t always me. There’s been a mistake. Was this always you? Real me: meet the real you!

"I heard you crying," says the man. He hovers in the doorway, hunched, awkward. He looks beaten down. Pearl can relate to that.

"Yeah," she says. "I was crying." Pearl wishes she was wearing something nicer than this polyester rose dress from the fat-lady section of Wal-Mart. She wishes she had bothered to poke earrings through the closing-up holes in her ears, and to put on some makeup. Pearl was an Avon lady, but now she doesn’t take the time for stuff like eye shadow and liner and mascara. It only gets messed up when she cries, anyway. She pictures how she must look in this guy’s eyes: blotched and puffy and plain.

"This is a little church," Pearl says. "Too damn little."

The man nods. He looks around, then back at Pearl.

"It’s little," he confirms.

"Do you live nearby?" asks Pearl, just like she’s making idle conversation with somebody she met in the Wal-Mart parking lot. She imagines a rickety-wheeled cart full of soap and toilet paper and dish detergent, M&Ms and Diet Coke and Fruity Pebbles: all the necessities of everyday life.

"I’m just over the hill," says the man. "I live that way." He tilts with his square jaw, indicating the direction of where he lives. He lumbers over to Pearl and extends a hand like a ham. Pearl takes it. It’s warm and dry, comforting as a non-preaching pastor.

"Sam Phillips," he says.

"Pearl. Just Pearl." She shakes his hand. It’s soft as church silk: the kind of satiny fabric that angels wear in Christmas plays. Pearl thinks that touching this man is like wearing fancy silk gloves that go all the way up to the elbows. An elegance.

"Well, Just Pearl," he says. "What are you doing here?"

"Oh, twiddling my thumbs until kingdom comes." She doesn’t want to tell him that she’s stuck. Pearl is tickled with her answer. It’s clever. It rhymes.

She says it again: "Twiddling my thumbs until kingdom comes. I’m a poet and don’t know it."

He lowers himself into the pew beside her. It squeaks, and the two of them fill the entire seat.

"So," says Pearl, "what do you do, Sam Phillips?"

"Breathe," says the man. "Eat. Walk. Sleep. Dream."

"No. I mean, what do you do? For a job?"

"Oh. I’m a news reporter. Write features and news for the Daily Local."

"How nice."

"My best headline ever," says Sam, "was this: ‘God Robs Wa-Wa.’"

"God robs Wa-Wa?"

Sam nods. "It was a fella named George Otis Derwood. Changed his name to God, for his initials, you know? Wacko. He robbed the Wa-Wa store in a long white robe he stole from Motel Six. Got caught on video."

"Went to jail?"

"Yep."

"Funny how folks mess up the only life they have," Pearl says. "Poor God."

"Yeah. Poor God."

They look at each other and smile. Pearl likes this man, instinctively. She trusts him. He could be a serial killer or a rapist or a Wa-Wa robber. He could be, but he’s not.

"I used to type church bulletins, years ago," Pearl confides. "I did funny stuff on purpose, like this: "A Bean Supper Will Be Held On Sunday Afternoon. Music Will Follow." And "Please Pray For Those Who Are Sick Of Our Church And Community." And "The Pastor Will Preach His Farewell Message, After Which The Choir Will Sing ‘Break Forth Into Joy.’"

Sam snickers.

"You’re the first person who gets it," Pearl states, and he raises his eyebrows. They’re bushy as pussy willows.

"So," says Pearl. "Are you married?"

"Was. I lost her when she went to find herself."

"I’m sorry," says Pearl. Not really, she thinks.

"Mine left me for the dentist’s receptionist. She sleeps with her teeth in a cup. Hope he’s happy."

"It’s hard, isn’t it?" asks Sam. "People leave, and we become bitter."

"Yeah," says Pearl. "Look at me: fat, fifty, alone. No hope."

"But you have to keep the faith. Without hope, you die. You die while you’re still alive. That’s a bad kind of dead."

"Well, I guess I have some hope. I hope that someday I get to be on that TV show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire."

"Good hope. Hold on to it. You just never know."

"No. You don’t."

They’re quiet for a moment. The air is thick with something Pearl can’t quite name. Maybe it’s faith. It smells like flowers.

"So what’s your religion?" Pearl asks. "I’m a former Baptist, now a lapsed Catholic, so I guess that makes me a nothing."

"My religion," says Sam, "is Human. Human Being. I believe in living my life the best I can before I’m dead."

"I like Human Beings. They don’t have as many rules or dos and don’t as Baptists. Not as much guilt as Catholics. The whole world is their church, rather than some little church being their whole world. Don’t have to dress up for it, either."

Sam ponders this. He scratches his head.

"Too many folks take their clothes to church, instead of themselves," Pearl states. She straightens her shoulders.

"Good point," Sam says. He shakes his head.

"Well, Just Pearl, I need to go home and write a story. Deadline’s coming. See ya on TV"

Sam heaves up his colossal frame, stretching. He touches the ceiling.

"Nice talking to you," he says.

"Likewise," adds Pearl. Don’t go. Not yet. She’s too embarrassed to tell him about being stuck. Give a fat lady a helping hand, kind Sir? Pearl’s eyes search the floor for a hole to crawl into. The shame in telling him is just too great. No, she’ll either lose a few pounds and shimmy her way out, or she’ll die. Multiple choice: A or B. She circles A. But what if some invisible all-powerful hand is choosing B?

Sam trudges away, the weight of the turning earth on his hunched shoulders. Pearl watches him go. He shouldn’t have to bear his burdens alone. She sees the world outside the open door of The Smallest Church. There are lilacs and trees and birds that sing. There are lots of fish in the sea. There are Weight Watchers meetings to attend and a sick mother to bathe. There are TV shows to watch, and a potbelly pig to eat Pearl’s stale bread crusts and supper scraps. Maybe the pig will get skinny, now that Pearl’s tossing him leftover Weight Watchers dinners. She can’t wait to see.

"Hey!" Pearl calls. "Sam?"

He turns, puzzled.

"Can you give me a hand? I’m . . . well, this is so doggone embarrassing, but I’m stuck."

"Not to be embarrassed," Sam replies. He comes back. "Everybody gets stuck once in a while."

He reaches down and takes Pearl’s hand. He pulls her up, easily. She’s free.

"See?" Sam says. He lets go of her hand. "Nothing to it."

"Nothing to it," Pearl repeats. She smoothes down her dress and touches her hair. She clears her throat. She looks at the wooden seat, and there’s a sweat stain on the pew, where Pearl was just sitting. The shape is that of an angel: the exact shape of the angel on an unnamed baby’s grave.

Pearl catches her breath, but she doesn’t point out the angel. It’s just for her. Her heart hammers hard, and something flutters in her gut. A bit unsteady, with a sound like wings or wind swishing in her ears, Pearl walks shakily with Sam to the wide-open door of The Smallest Church. They step together out into the world.

Fruits

by Phyllis Edgerly Ring

The banana peels never had a discarded look.

Bejan Sabet's dark eyes followed their descent from the roof overhead to the dust of the roadside.

They landed gently, custard-colored petals spreading open like lotus flowers, an unexpected bloom, soon to be devoured by a passing goat or cow.

From his seat by the window, Bejan watched the crowd of human shadows huddled atop the dark oblong the bus cast beside him in the afternoon sun. His eyes had kept watch on them during the hours that the bus had lumbered out of Allahabad, these figures that gestured in animated debate, bodies swaying with the coach's rough progress.

At times his brown fingers had clenched the seat's peeling vinyl, two urgent vises that seemed to hold the passengers above him in place with each jostle and bump.

Their discussion drifted down to him through the open window. The sounds trickled in, rising and falling. Though he spoke little Hindi, the sound had a pleasing familiarity to his ears.

He was beginning to savor the open way people looked at him here, especially in the small villages to which he traveled. He was hailed as an important visitor now, a respected horticulturist come to oversee their accomplishments.

Somehow, the villagers always made time for him at the end of their long days. In those evenings of simple friendship, they immersed him in the kind of sociability he had never found during his education in America.

The work with the fruit trees progressed slowly, but it did progress, and always, when the people helped decide how things would go. Bejan liked the keen expression their faces wore when they consulted together about the tree-planting project. It showed reverence, almost, as though decision were a sacred act.

The diesel coach, whining louder and louder, had at last ground its arthritic gears to a shuddering halt. Bejan heard the rooftop passengers scrambling for balance overhead as the engine lurched, then quit, in a protest of angry steam.

A host of passengers disembarked behind the turbaned driver, commiserating in a symphony of voices as the hood was wrenched up.

Across the aisle, Stouffer swore softly.

Stouffer's wife investigated the bulging straw bag near her feet. Her small white hands drew forth stacks of sandwiches and a thermos bottle of tea.

Stouffer mopped his face with a yellowed handkerchief. “Godforsaken place.” He fixed watery eyes on Bejan. “We'll never get there by dark, now. It's a fruitless task, anyway.” He laughed indulgently at his words.

Bejan pretended not to understand the joke as he turned his gaze toward the window. He shifted in his seat in search of comfort, without success.

A quarter of the sandwich in Stouffer's hand disappeared in single bite. “Could've flown back to the States for all we'll accomplish this week.” Crumbs flew from his mouth, accumulating in the folds above his waist. “Some nice university orchards will seem like paradise, after this.”

Bejan turned to face him slowly. “We will see.”

Stouffer's wife offered Bejan a sandwich.

He declined politely.

“You won't see much.” Stouffer helped himself to another sandwich and sucked a glob of mustard from his thumb. “Just thousands of hard-earned American dollars rotting in some place where they can't keep the flies off their children.” He belched, then paused to gulp the tea his wife had poured.

“They will surely have begun harvesting the fruit now,” Bejan said.

Stouffer waved a hand at him. “Hell, it'll be a miracle if the trees have borne fruit at all.” His sniff used most of the muscles in his face as it wrinkled his nose. “Hunger.” The word had a discarded sound. “They eat their food like animals. They've got more important things to do than grow trees—like watch their cows starve to death.”

Bejan felt hot anger surge like liquid inside him as the hands that rested palm up on his thighs curled. “It is the women's project. They understand that the trees will feed their children's children.” His brown stare was unblinking.

 Stouffer's wife's pale eyes darted away to where voices were rising in quick bursts near the hood in front.

“Waste of money.” Stouffer's headshake was the kind with which he closed conversations firmly. It said, “I am done talking. The conversation is complete.” He plucked large crumbs from his lap.

Money seemed to mean a very great deal to the Stouffers. In the days since the Service had teamed him with the Americans, Bejan had watched how eagerly they sought out goods to buy with it; how reluctantly they parted with that money when goods were at hand.

Shortly after dawn, Stouffer had tried in vain for long, impatient minutes to find someone who would break a two-rupee bill when the vendor at the station had been unable to make change. Bejan had figured the difference to be about eight American cents. The vendor's face had sunk with resignation as Stouffer berated him. Bejan had withdrawn nearly twice the purchase price from his pocket and pressed it into the old man's lined hand. Boarding the bus, he had felt disgust churning inside him.

Outside the window now, two small figures had paused to eye the banana peels where they spread their petals upward in the dust.

The girl, perhaps seven or so, wore a ragged sari whose crimson color was bleached pink in spots. The small boy beside her, probably a brother of four or five, was dressed only in an oversize shirt of faded madras.

Beggars, Bejan thought, and watched them through the pitted glass. He reached toward his pocket. His hand froze when he realized their intent.

The girl's back was perfectly straight when she squatted beside the peels and slowly brushed sand from them. She pulled a stained cloth from the tattered folds of her sari. After her precise fingers smoothed out the rumpled square in the dry grass beside the road, she gestured for her companion to sit.

With slow, meticulous effort, she pulled the soft portion of each peel away from its skin and placed it gingerly on the cloth.

The boy's dark eyes followed her progress along with Bejan's until she finished the job and tossed the tough outer skins into the grass.

The driver's turban reappeared inside the bus as the winged jaws of the hood slammed shut with a crunching sound. Triumphant cheers from the makeshift engine crew followed when the engine roared to life on the first try.

Beside the road, the girl scooped up half of the peelings and placed them in front of her brother.

The boy sat cross-legged, the girl, with thin legs folded alongside her as, dark heads bent in the sun, they sampled their meal in small bites.

Perfume
by John Steele

Sometimes, when the night gets so hot that the sheets stick to my skin, I dream about the mosquitoes along the Quang Ngai River. I dream of C rations and salt tablets. I’m sinking in the river’s muddy banks and there’s a fire fight coming. The mosquitoes are killing me, taking bits of flesh with every attack. When I wake up to the coppery taste of blood, my hands slapping my face, I don’t go back to sleep. My breathing calms as I see the bluish outline of Jenny’s bare shoulder, still and smooth in the darkness of our bedroom.  My eyes follow her naked outline

(blue moonlight illuminates the fine sheen of sweat on Jenny’s skin, the soft line of her spine disappearing into the sheets, which gather around the widening of her hips; the rest hidden in shadows)         

until my mind quiets and the buzz of mosquito wings and helicopter blades leave me. 

When my eyes follow her slender arm back up to her shoulder and neck, where her damp blonde hair lays against the white pillow, I get a hold of my mind, and I realize it’s not Jenny

(not Jenny?)

lying next to me, but Sue. My wife. 

I swing my legs out of bed and squeeze my eyes with my finger and thumb.

God. It’s been

(“Joe,” she’d whispered, her skirt billowing in the breeze. “Kiss me.”)

twenty-seven years since I last saw Jenny. 

I stand and walk to the bedroom door, feeling the heat press against me from all angles. 

It’s a strange thing. To know there’s a beautiful woman

(your wife)

sleeping in your bed, and to feel a sadness creep inside your bones when she’s not the woman you expected. 

***

They shut down the Paradise Theatre in ’68.

Jenny’s father owned the Paradise and when he died her mother couldn’t make it work.  Said she didn’t have a knack for running a business the way Jenny’s father had. Said she’d only ever been a house wife and that was all she knew. Without Jenny’s father

(selling tickets, running the projector, making the popcorn)

the Paradise wasn’t the same. It seemed forlorn when Jenny’s father had died. Like all the air had been sucked out. The carpet began to tear, the paint to chip, and the popcorn went stale. The huge glass double doors below the theatre’s marquee

(George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead Showing Nitely at 7 & 9)

had once looked new and polished, gleaming as passing car lights reflected off of its surfaces, making it look proud. After Jenny’s dad died, it looked like a hollow skull with soaped-over windows and doors for its decaying teeth.

Jenny liked to go there. After her mother went to bed. 

I picked her up around eleven, waiting across the street in my ’57 Bel-Air. I opened the passenger side door and she slid in, the hem of her skirt rising a little and her lilac scent filling the car.

It was the cool, summer breeze; it was the purr of the 283 engine; it was the motion of something solid (the unyielding hardness and purpose of Detroit steel); but mostly it was Jenny’s smooth thigh pressed against my leg and my arm around her shoulders, gathering her to me—that’s what made everything seem like suspended animation. The world might go on and on, but inside the Bel-Air, Jenny and I would never age, would never grow weary, would never fade. 

(but eventually, the wheels fall off—don’t they?)

The sound of her heels on the pavement went click clack, click clack as she hastened beside me, as if frightened by the scent of her perfume. A breeze swirled at our feet when we stopped under the Paradise’s marquee. It billowed the thin fabric of her skirt

(fluttering like the petals of an upside down flower)

and, for a moment, lifted her dark hair off her shoulders. 

“Joe,” she said, “kiss me.”

The vapor of our kiss hung in the air, and I knew she’d been crying.

Her face tightened with concentration as she struggled to insert the key she’d taken from her mother’s bureau into the lock of her father’s theatre. The lock tumbled free, and the Paradise accepted us into its dark lobby.

“Jenny?” I said. “Want some Junior Mints?”

“No,” Jenny said. I grabbed the Junior Mints anyway. They were her favorite.

I could only see her purple sweater as she disappeared behind the curtained doorway to the actual theatre. I followed the smell of lilacs in the dark.

It was darker behind the curtained doorway. Perfect darkness. I felt her lips press against mine, moist and warm

“Are you sure you want to be here, Jenny?”

“Yes. I’m sure. Come on,” she said, taking my arm. “I want to show you something.”

She led me through the dark seats and a hidden door. She flicked on a light, and we climbed the stairs to the projection booth. The stairway smelled of pine and old popcorn and creaked under my weight. Jenny seemed to glide up the stairs in front of me; not even her heels made a sound.

The booth was a mess. Posters of The Seven Year Itch and How To Marry A Millionaire adorned the walls flanking the projection machine.

“Bet your mom wouldn’t have appreciated these posters in your living room.”

Jenny smiled. “Dad sometimes snuck out to watch Marilyn. He didn’t think Mom knew, but she did.”

Behind the projection machine Jenny’s hand went to a silver, round tin, indistinguishable among the others, at least to me. She knew its place by heart and handed it to me.

“It’s my favorite, ever since I was a little girl.”

White tape, black lettering: CASABLANCA, 1942

“I’ve never seen this,” I said, embarrassed that I hadn’t seen her favorite movie.

“You’re going to love it.” She took the tin back and pried it open. 

The reel made a whispering noise as Jenny pulled it out and fed it into the machine. It sounded like her thick, soft hair brushing against my pillow. 

She turned the projector on, and a beam of light illuminated the theatre’s screen. 

“Let’s find a seat before they’re all taken,” she said.

Her hair bounced back and forth (so did her skirt) as she hurried down the steps. The credits

(Humphrey Bogart & Ingrid Bergman, with Claude Rains & Peter Lorre)

displayed in elegant black and white across the screen. We sat in the back. Jenny took off her heels and stretched her legs, resting her bare feet on the seat in front of us. She nestled into the crook of my arm and, as her head rested against my body, she discovered the box of Junior Mints in my breast pocket. 

“Mmm, chocolate.” She peeled away the lid. “How’d you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

Her elegant finger came out of the box covered in a glob of melted chocolate. 

“Mmm, melted,” she said, sticking her finger in her mouth. “Want some?”

“Are you kidding? Melted is always better, especially on your finger,” I said.

She laughed and stuck a chocolate-covered finger in my mouth. It melted there, against my tongue. She withdrew her finger moments later. On the screen, Ilsa was walking into Rick’s café; in the dark, Jenny and I were melting. 

(the Junior Mints fell to the floor)

Later, I found out what became of Rick and Ilsa, once Jenny had started the reel over. 

(play it again, Sam)

***

Walking down the stairs in the dark I feel a familiar pain

(Jesus, it hurts—IT HURTS—“Fucking gook booby trap”—“You’re lucky to be alive Joey” (I’d like to consider that one a while)—“Fucking gooks”)

in my leg. Running my fingers over the shin and knee of my left leg, I feel the rough scar tissue. Feels like a cheese grater. 

At the base of the stairs I turn left into the laundry room. I grab jeans out of the dryer and put them on. Best not to think about that booby trap.

Pale blue moonlight floods the living room. I don’t need to turn the light on to find the tape. I pull it out of its sheath and push it into the VCR. A cool breeze wafts in through the open window; the curtains billow.

The TV comes alive with its ritual hum. I turn the sound down, way down, so as not to wake Sue. Our son’s left for college

 (“thanks Mom, Dad—you guys don’t have to stick around for orientation—I’ll be fine”)

and she hasn’t been sleeping easy. I’m not sleeping easy either. I keep wondering what’s in the brown package

(Return Address: Jenny Schuster, 427 Vermilion Street, Longmont, Co 80504)

sitting on the cherrywood desk in my study. I’m afraid of what I might find inside. Or what I won’t. It’s been sitting there for two and a half weeks. I keep finding errands that prevent me from opening it. But its presence, its (maybe) lilac scent, never leaves my mind. Every time I look away, I catch it out of the corner of my eye. It’s like that damn song Sam keeps playing—As Time Goes By.

Sue asks what’s wrong as she enters the living room, tying her robe around her waist and pushing her hair back. Ilsa’s walking into Rick’s café.

I hit the STOP button. An obnoxious, fast-paced commercial replaces the smooth, languid beauty of Casablanca.

“Nothing,” I say. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Have another one of your nightmares?” She sits on the couch flanking me.

I nod my head. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No, the heat did. What are you watching?”

“Just an old movie.”

“Are you having an affair?”

“What?”

Her face, bathed in TV light, is somber.  “An affair—are you having one?

“No—where the hell did you get that idea?”

“The perfume. I’ve been smelling it on your clothes and in the study. Whose perfume is it?”

“What are you talking about? Perfume?”

“Is it someone from work?”     

“What— No. Beth doesn’t wear perfume, and there’s certainly nothing between us.”

“It’s not just the perfume.  I—there was lipstick on your pillow last week,” she says, her voice flat-lining. 

“Are you sure it’s not yours?”

“Do you even remember the last time I wore lipstick? Let alone left any on your side?” 

Her hand plows through her blonde locks, raking them on top of her head. “You’ve been somewhere else for a long time. I feel like there’s been another woman in this house.  Tell me. Are you with someone else now, too?”

I remember the guilt I felt when she first came down the stairs.

(turn it off—don’t share this with Sue)

“No.” I’m not lying. “There’s no one else, Sue. You know me, and you know I sure as hell wouldn’t bring another woman into this house, into our bed.”   

“Then whose lipstick?  Whose perfume?  Don’t lie, Joe, you’re no good at it.”  

“Sue, I . . . ”

“Don’t, Joe. Can you say you love me? Can you?”

(is saying I love you to your wife a lie when your heart doesn’t believe?)

I hesitate too long, and Sue’s face slumps against her skull, slack and despondent. 

“Christ, Joe. Have you ever really loved me? Were you lying when you came back from Vietnam? Was I some kind of debt you felt you owed to my dead brother?”

“You don’t know what it’s like over there,” I say, so detached it scares me. “There’s things you can’t even begin to understand. And when I came back. . . .”

“You settled for me—didn’t you?”

I can think of nothing to say, nothing to explain. I can’t find enough veracity in any words to illuminate the truth for Sue. Or myself. 

“We should separate,” she says. “I’ve already talked to my sister about moving in for a while.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know.”

She stands up, turns and walks to the base of the stairs. For a moment, I think she will say something. She turns and starts to, but then her mouth closes, expelling a tired little sigh, but a sigh only, and she ascends the stairs to pack her things. 

Not enough truth in the words.

***

Her anklet shimmered in the sun.

It was a clear day, the apotheosis of summer. The Bel-Air glimmered, basking in the warmth of June, parked beyond third base. I pinched some dirt between my fingers. I felt its graininess and watched as the breeze blew it from my fingertips. 

(there’s no dirt like that along the Quang Ngai River)

(just mosquitoes—big as sparrows)

Jenny’s tan was golden. She wore cut-off jean shorts and a bikini top; she wore my ball cap crookedly, her ponytail sticking out the back. 

“You gonna throw that fast ball, or are you gonna play in the dirt?” she taunted, a smile creeping across her face.

“I’ll show you a fast ball.” I rose and let the ball rip. It sounded like a pop gun as it impacted with her glove. 

“Aw!” Jenny threw her glove, the ball rolling away, and rubbed her hand. “That hurt.”

“You asked for it.”

She turned her hand so her palm faced me. It was red. 

 

“Sorry.”

“You’re the one who’s gonna be sorry,” she said, coming after me. 

I ran, but not too fast. I wanted her to catch me. Jenny tackled me around the waist in the green grass of left field, bringing us down. She straddled me and grabbed a hand full of grass. 

“Oh, no, you don’t.” I struggled to get my hands around the thinness of her wrists before it was too late.

“You’re gonna get it now.”

She smeared my face, getting a few blades in my mouth. It wasn’t terrible. It tasted warm and natural.

(better than C rations and rice)

I put my black glove over my face to block her. The leather smelled worn and old, like my grandpa’s workshop. 

A few moments later she asked, “What are you doing under there?”

“Come here, and I’ll show you.”

She lowered her face to mine, and I grabbed her, my hand behind her neck, and pulled her lips to mine. She kissed me and hit me in the shoulder.

“That’s a cheap trick.”

“Maybe. I got plenty more where that one came from.”

“Oh?”

I rolled her onto her back and pulled my ball cap off her head. “Jenny?”

“Yes.”

“You think we’ll still be doing this when we’re a hundred and twelve?”

“God, I hope so.”

“Good.” I kissed her. “I’ll need you to help me up off the ground and find my dentures.”

“You brat!”

We had the field to ourselves till sundown. Jenny hadn’t been wearing her lilac perfume, but she smelled sweeter to me than I ever remember. She smelled like grass and leather, faintly of sweat and young skin. She sat backwards on the park’s top bleacher watching the sun go down with her hand pressed between mine. She swung her legs out of rhythm while they hung in the air and hummed a familiar song.

(play it again, Sam)

It wouldn’t be until I trudged across the Quang Ngai River for the first time that I’d recall where I’d heard that song.

***

The paper boy misses Sue walking to the car by inches. After she drives away, I pick up the paper and take it inside. Somehow the house doesn’t feel as empty as it should.

I walk upstairs to the bedroom. A shaft of sunlight warms my bare feet as I stand in front of the closet. Sue’s half is nearly empty. I pull one of my shirts off of its hanger and smell it. Smells like Tide. I sample another shirt. Still nothing. No perfume, and no lipstick.

Downstairs a radio turns on. CCR, Who’ll Stop The Rain. 

I go downstairs, half-expecting Sue to be back. Her car isn’t in the driveway.

The study is empty. Only the radio playing. And the package waiting on my desk. 

(first class mail)

I turn the radio off and promise myself to open the package at the next earliest occasion.  Right now, the lawn needs mowing and the dishwasher needs emptying.

I’m halfway through the door when a smell assaults me.

Lilac perfume. Jenny’s perfume. But Jenny couldn’t be here, could she?  

No. Of course not. But the smell is there, isn’t it. And you’re not the only one who’s smelled it.

(“are you having an affair, Joe?”)

I walk back into the study. 

“Hello?”

Of course there’s no answer. I’m alone. Still, I smell lilacs—it fills the room. I pick up the phone from my desk and dial 411. 

“Yeah, I’d like the listing for Jenny Schuster.”

(“Joe!—I’m so glad you called—I’ve missed you so much, Joe”)

“Longmont, Colorado,” I say. “You want the zip?”

 

The operator says she doesn’t. She tells me the number and asks if I want patched through. 

(“that’s a cheap trick, Joe—calling out of the blue—we haven’t spoken in thirty years!”)

“Ah, no. Thanks.”

I scribble the number on the package, just in case. I definitely (maybe) smell lilac as I bring the package to my nose—but not enough to fill the study. Could be someone’s lilac bush blooming. The study window is open. Could be. Still, what could it hurt to call, and hang up? To hear her voice. To know she’s in Colorado.

(303-727-8631)

“Hello?”

“Hello,” I say, my ear sweating against the phone, “this is Joe Bowman. May I speak with Jenny?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bowman, Jenny died two weeks ago. I’m her neighbor. I’m here helping with the estate. She left me as executor.”

(NO)

“Were you a friend of hers?”

***

It rained the day I left for Vietnam.

In the morning, before the sun broke over the horizon, I could hear the rain pattering on the roof,

(later, it was a giant leaf the rain pattered against, me crouching below, waiting for EVAC at dawn, smelling the scented letter Jenny sent)

and I could smell its freshness wafting in through the window. We’d been lying in bed, Jenny’s head resting against my shoulder, warm breath on my skin—more soothing than the soft hush of rainfall—ever since we’d made love.

If  I’d known I would never make love to Jenny again (never see her again) I would’ve memorized every curve and nook of her body. I would’ve pressed my face into her hair, memorizing the satiny feel and smell. I would’ve said to her all things I’d ever thought, ever felt, ever wondered. I would’ve memorized the gap between her toes, the weight of her breast in my hand, the weight of her head on my shoulder. Her skin on my tongue like the smoothness of thought. I would’ve looked in her eyes and seen my life echoing in shades of blue.

(later, I would need to remember her; and no matter how hard I tried not to, I started to forget; I’d been trying desperately to remember her one day, walking through the bush, when I’d tripped a wire—“lucky to be alive Joey”)

But I did none of these things. We made love in a passionate farewell, exhausting ourselves. Neither of us knew what to say. I drifted to sleep before I could tell her I wanted to marry her. 

The rain pattered on the roof.

When I awoke, feeling for Jenny, opening my mouth with a million things to say, her side of the bed was cool. Her pillow still held the indentation of her head. A dark hair abandoned there.

Jenny’s perfume lingered. She didn’t like goodbyes.     

The sun’s going down and I’ve mowed the lawn twice, washed the car, and jogged over most of the neighborhood. I have no more excuses. Not even the fear that a terrible sadness will creep over me and devour me.

(what will I do if the study still smells like lilacs?)

I open the door and walk in. My stomach grumbles and I head to the kitchen, by-passing the study. 

The kitchen is dreary in its cold, stainless steel hues reflecting what little light remains of the day.  Shadows are dangerous in this lighting, as if they sense that soon all light will be gone and then they will be complete. I turn on the sink light. It flickers twice before staying on. The shadows retreat.

Fridge door open, I rummage through its contents. I take out the left-over lasagna, stick it in the microwave and hit reheat. I’m glad for the noise it makes and the light coming through its door.

I spin the bag of Italian bread until it untwists and take it, along with a bowl of salad, to the dining room table. I glance down the hallway to where the study’s door is half-open.  It’s dark and, as far as I can tell, scentless.

Walking past the curio mirror unsettles me. There seems to be too much movement reflecting. I make my way back to the kitchen and grab a Rolling Rock. As I twist off the cap, I hear something, almost inaudible.

(like the breathy exhalation of deep satisfaction)

(like Jenny in the back row of the Paradise)

My ear strains. The microwave dings and I spill beer on the tile of the kitchen floor. Get a grip, Joe.

(“there ain’t no gooks out there tonight”—“what if there are, Joe?”—“then we’ll waste them”)

Unfortunately, Uncle Sam kept my M-16.

(what about spooks? No, no, gooks)

I fork lasagna on my plate and, with beer and plate in hand, return to the dining room.  First, I’ve got to make it past the curio mirror . . .

“Joe.”

I halt, feeling as if someone has grabbed me and turned me upside down.

“Joe.”

I tell myself not to look at the curio mirror. I look. The lasagna splatters on the floor.

“Jenny?”

She swirls in the mirror, wavering.

(but her face is perfect)

The beer drops next. Beautiful. 

(dark spools of sentient hair)

Like looking through a suffusion of water. A vapor.

(gather round eyes that reflect)

And she sees right through me.

(like an ancient serpent’s stare)

There’s a hand on my shoulder (the mirror’s reflecting what’s behind you), but it’s warm, not cold, not dead. Living.

“Joe,” she says, her hair settling, her features sharpening, as if she’d walked out of a wind tunnel. “Kiss me.”

I do. And her lips are real, not phantom at all. Every part of her is real. But most real of all are the shades of blue in her eyes and I know it’s Jenny. 

“Joe, when I left that morning, I knew I’d never see you again. I couldn’t bear to say goodbye. I’m sorry.”

“Jenny, I love you,” is all I can say.

Somehow, Jenny and I are back in our old bed, where the silk sheets are indistinguishable from Jenny’s hair. Her skin is smooth, like water. I feel as though I may cause a ripple by touching her. And in a sense, I do cause a ripple, as she has caused a ripple in my life.  I’ll feel that ripple till I’m a hundred and twelve. 

As I drift to sleep with Jenny in my arms, I hear her say, “goodbye, Joe.”

(“are you having an affair, Joe?”)

(no, the affair was with you, Sue)         

I wake, as the sun breaks over the horizon, and I feel the phantom of Jenny’s leg entwined with mine. I know before I open my eyes.

Her perfume lingers. 

(fading)

I walk stiffly downstairs and into the study. The smell of lilacs has gone. I pick up the package and tear its seal. It falls into my hand.

White tape, black lettering: CASABLANCA, 1942 

(play it again, Sam)

By Another Name

by KR Mullin

“I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.”

Seemed like a simple enough thing to say, but, after talking to her for an hour or so, I couldn’t bring myself to say it.  If Mel Gibson had said it, or Harrison Ford, she’d probably think it was downright sexy. But, from me, it would sound more like a bad host on Saturday Night Live. After all, when Mason introduced us, I hadn’t been expecting any great shakes. I mean, I come to his monthly parties because that’s what a good employee does, not to meet girls. But this green-eyed redhead was, dare I say it, fascinating. A real traveler and a good storyteller. Unlike the daytime drama drone or the celebrity addict I usually encounter at Mason’s soirees, this one had not only been places but had done things worth the telling.

I started through the alphabet, hoping to kick my memory into gear by thinking of women’s names that begin with each letter. Not an easy thing to do while holding up one’s end of the conversation, and it must have showed.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Fiona,” I answered.

“I beg your pardon.” She looked around. “Has a friend of yours arrived?”

“Uh, no. I’m sorry. It was just—well, it just popped into my head for some reason. I hope I didn’t derail your train of thought.”

“Hmm. Well, yes, I’m afraid my engine has jumped its appointed rounds. Perhaps I should let you engineer the conversation for a while.”

Oh, great. No more alphabetic review. If only her name had been. . . .

“Fiona.”

“Yes, we’ve already met.”

“May I call you Fiona? It’s such a great name for a redhead, you know. Or do you actually like your own name? Many people don’t.”

“There are people who don’t like my name?”

“No, no. I mean, well, when I was a kid, I hated the name Kermit. Kids called me Kermit the Hermit or Froggy and such. I always wanted to be a Steve or a Joe, something simple and straightforward. Didn’t you have a similar experience?”

“No, not really. I guess I was lucky, sharing my name with a movie star, you know, and she won the award when I was in sixth grade, so it never bothered me.”

“I guess I shouldn’t call you Fiona then.”

“Well, I think it’s a little early for you to be changing my name.”

It took me a tick or two to catch her drift, distracted as I was by her bright smile and the way it faded in the face of my confusion.

“Oh,” I said. “Duh! I feel like such a—I mean—well, you’re very good with words.”

“Thank you, kind sir,” she said with a smile and a nod of her head, “but then they’re the tools of my trade. I’m a travel writer for the Express.”

I raised my eyebrows. “What a wonderful job. And here I thought you were an heiress with a yen to travel.”

“Au contraire, Monsieur. I’m more of a yenless wanderer I fear.”

“But quite a fascinating one. I wish I knew your name.”

It popped out unbidden. My face began to warm. I stared at her in shock, no doubt glowing like a heat lamp on high.

She smiled. “What an interesting problem. The host introduces you to someone, and you don’t catch her name. Or don’t pay attention. Whatever. But later you have to figure out a way to discover the name, so what do you do?”

“Well, I started through the alphabet, but I got interrupted at Fiona.”

She laughed, her eyes twinkling. “Ah, and that’s when you offered to change my name. A good recovery and a very interesting ploy. I’ll have to give you some credit for that.”

“So, what would you have done?”

She stared at me, tightened her forehead, and sipped her drink.

“While holding up your end of the conversation,” I added.

Her features relaxed. “Good point. How about this? You’ve got a book on the subject, whatever the topic is, but you can’t remember the title or the author, so you whip out a business card and ask her to write down her name and phone number.”

“A bit forward, perhaps,” I said. “And there’s the chance that she wouldn’t include her name, so I still wouldn’t know what to call her. Besides, wouldn’t you be offended by such an obvious ploy?”

“Maybe.” Her forehead tightened again. “But does it matter? I mean, if she won’t give you her number, it makes the whole thing rather moot, doesn’t it?”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “I could always go to Mason and ask him who that clever, witty, and fascinating redhead was.”

“Ah, and you seem to have a way with words yourself. But! Do you have a business card?”

I produced the item and handed it to her. She produced a pen, scribbled on the back, and returned it to me. Under her phone number, she’d written “Fiona.”

I jerked my head up. “No way.”

She raised her eyebrows. “For your tongue only—Froggy."

I must admit the nickname sounded downright sexy.

At the Villa

by Lynn Bey

“Mon Dieu! One sleeps here inside my shoe!” cried the girl.

“Yes, because it’s dark there,” said the wife, “and moist, like a kind of crevice.”

“They’re harmless,” said the husband, waving a glass of wine above his tight, bloated stomach. “The Italian kind are the harmless ones, I keep telling you that. Wearing shoes is a waste of time.”

He’d explained when they arrived, and every day since, that the small black scorpions were without venom. It was the tan ones they had to watch out for. Why couldn’t she remember that? The black ones were nothing; they slept inside cracks in the walls all day, or anywhere that was dark, coming out to eat moths or spiders at night. “Just ignore them,” the husband said. “It would be a lot quieter, like a real vacation, if you ignored them.”

“I cannot,” said the girl. “I cannot ignore, as you say, unpleasures. That is not how I am.”

The husband sighed; this girl was very young. “Unpleasures is not a word,” he said. “We were told you spoke English.” He closed his eyes and tilted his head into the sun, sweat beading in the cracks on his forehead.

“What do I care for words?” the girl asked. “Psst!”