Issue 10 - Fall 2020

fiction

Camber

Philip Glennie

It was the powder that did it, the miles of machine-groomed trail that wove through the lonely town and the vast Alberta parkland beyond. He’d never thought of himself as someone who’d become addicted to exercise, thinking this was reserved for those lithe specimens who lectured about runner’s highs and tried to convince you that the stabbing huff of intense cardio was anything other than vanity-fuelled masochism. Booze, coke, Christ, even cheeseburgers, now those were things a guy could get addicted to. Funnily enough, it was a fear of becoming an alcoholic that’d pushed him into cross-country skiing to begin with. Getting into the sport was all but inevitable when he first moved to Camrose from Kingston, Ontario. Even in the summertime, there was little to do in his new town other than sip a flavourless mojito at one of the chain restaurants that skirted the heavily trafficked Highway 13. The historic downtown area offered nothing to a person of his age and interests, save for maybe the Alice Hotel, which had cheap beer and video lottery terminals, and which he feared would become his self-destructive oasis once the temperatures dipped below -30C.

It was at a mixer for newly arrived university faculty that he first became aware of how seriously the people of Camrose took their endurance sports. Staying close to Melanie’s side, he toured the room and met faculty members of all genders who were rakishly thin and more often than not of Norwegian descent. Later that same evening, when a group of these faculty invited Melanie and him to the Alice Hotel, they quickly descended into a conversation about the finer points of cycling, running, cross-country skiing, and of the various nationwide competitions they’d participated in over recent years. They also drank heavily, and between these counterbalancing extremes of drinking and intense exercise, he detected a space in which he might be happy. He learned that the faculty were all members of the local ski club, which was staffed on a volunteer basis and which maintained over 15k of perfectly groomed trails that were made available for free to the townsfolk. In their Norwegian ancestry and commitment to fitness, he saw the beginnings of an identity for Camrose, a sense of place that he’d found painfully absent in the chain restaurants and box stores that occupied most of the town’s acreage. The summer was nearly over and he was grateful for it, because he was much less enthused by the thought of joining the faculty’s running club. Jogging had always been a painful chore for him. His five-foot-ten, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame was too much for his knees, which at the age of 34 became sore enough to stop him dead at the 5k mark. But cross-country skiing?

“I think that’s something I could get into,” he said to Melanie, who turned to him with a smile and put her hand over his on the bar table. It was an act of encouragement that communicated her appreciation of his willingness to uproot his life and move across the country with her. For a humanities professor seeking a tenure-track job, you needed to go wherever you were lucky enough to find a position, and if you wanted your marriage to remain intact, you needed a partner who’d go with you. His own passions had never been place-specific, as they were solitary pursuits like writing and music, and for that same reason mobile. Still, he hadn’t anticipated how strongly that first drive into town would depress him, and he knew Melanie could feel it from the passenger seat beside him.

Now, the trick would be getting a handle on the basics of cross-country skiing without humiliating himself in front of his sinewy Nordic neighbours.

When he walked into the Edmonton ski shop a week later, the first thing he noticed were the antique snowshoes that hung from the wood-panelled walls, their darkened grains and crusty leather bindings exuding an authenticity that was lacking in the fibreglass skis that leaned against the sales rack. Nonetheless, he approached the rack and picked up a pair of skis, glancing about the store in search of help. Idling behind a distant sales counter was a sandy-haired kid of university age with a thin, muscular build that was accentuated by his long and equine face. The boy met his searching eyes with an enthusiastic nod and crossed the store with a loping stride.

“Hey man. Think you want to have a look at those?”

He glanced at the skis in his arms, which he hugged as though he were gathering sticks for a life-saving bonfire. He handed them over to the kid, who led him to a rectangular wooden box at the end of the rack and laid the skis across its surface.

“‘Kay, so if I could just get you to hop up here and try to balance on the skis, we’ll see if they work for you.”

He placed his chunky Blundstones atop the two skis and felt the muscles in his feet straining to stay balanced on the narrow bindings. “So with thin skis like this,” he said, “am I supposed to stay in those two slots that run along the side of the path?”

“Those are called the track,” said the kid, who cleared his bangs from his eyes with a flick of his head. “And yeah, that’s for classic skis, which these are. The other kind are skate skis. Most beginners start with classic.”

He felt a prick of shame in the base of his neck. “I’m not sure how I’m supposed to move forward.”

“Right. No worries.” The kid bent down and slid a slip of paper under one of the skis, moving it back and forth beneath the part that was directly beneath the boot. “See here? This middle section under your foot isn’t touching down because each ski is a little bit bowed. When you put all your weight on this leg, though…”

He followed the kid’s instructions and shifted fully to his right. The kid tried to slide the paper again, and this time tore it. “So yeah, when you put all your weight on one foot, this middle part of the ski presses against the snow. That curve in the ski is called the camber. If we apply a sticky wax to that middle part and a glide wax to the front and back of each ski, they’ll press down and grip the snow when you push off each foot.”

 A dim light flickered behind his grey eyes. For months, he’d felt that the world around him had lost its definition, as though he were sitting in some distant room and viewing life through an old television screen. But this felt real, like he was learning something new and valuable, and he was surprised at how closely he was able to follow the kid’s ensuing explanation of different grip waxes – Red, Blue, Green – which were designed for temperatures of increasing coldness.

“I’ll take them,” he said.

He’d moved twice before in his life, once to Nova Scotia for his undergraduate years and again to Ontario for graduate school. On both occasions, his above-average comedic timing and love for weekday drinking had quickly made him all the friends he needed. On any given day, it wasn’t hard to find a fellow scholar who’d go five rounds at the nearest bar. Better still, it’d only take one pint before these friends would dispense their views on nearly every aspect of human experience, be it personal or philosophical. He hadn’t been able to recreate this success a third time, though. All social events were tied to the university, and Melanie had asked him not to get too drunk or candid with her colleagues, whose opinions would matter when she came up for tenure in five years. Working from home as a remote marketing consultant had made the move painless from a professional standpoint, but had narrowed even further his chances of meeting anybody independently of Melanie. When he wasn’t sitting in the basement of their vinyl-sided bungalow, playing guitar or writing short stories, he’d visit the local Canadian Brewhouse to watch Edmonton Oilers games, chatting with the fresh-faced staff who smiled politely but never asked him anything about himself. Some of Melanie’s young colleagues would occasionally ask him to meet for a coffee on a Saturday afternoon, but he found them just too cerebral about everything. Yes, he had a PhD himself, but there was a difference between the people who attended grad school and the ones who went on to secure a tenure-track job.

When they’d first met in their Master’s English program at Queen’s, he and Melanie had bonded over their mutual love of critical theory, still reeling from the thrill of having their skulls exploded by the writings of Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and Franz Fanon during their undergrad years. Hours after their peers had left the grad club, they’d still be there, tilting back their sixth or seventh pints, riffing off one another’s observations. Every moment between them seemed to bring about a new epiphany. Melanie’s spirited commitment to social justice made him feel like he was becoming a better person through sheer proximity to her.

Not long after writing his comprehensive exams, though, he’d become fed up with the self-congratulatory way his professors described the competitiveness of the academic job market, and decided to finish his degree as economically as possible and enter the private sector, where after three years of part-time, commission-based straggling, he landed a full-time job with a marketing consulting firm. Melanie had used these same years to continue with her thesis work. She’d emerge from her home office in those days and ask him to attend on-campus talks about Treaty lands and the plight of LGBTQ++ students on campus. He followed her to all of them and would nod with vigour at the points being made. But the fatigue was always there, the desire to go home and rest instead of sitting in an uncomfortable auditorium chair. He knew that he was indulging his privilege as a cishet white man, that he couldn’t possibly imagine the threats and indignities that marginalized peoples faced on a daily basis. But he didn’t care and didn’t know how to make himself care.

It was around this time that he realized how often he cried. He’d always been one to indulge a good cathartic discharge three or four times a year, but these became more common after Melanie announced with glittering eyes that she’d landed a tenure-track job in rural Alberta. When he was alone again, he found that the objects in his TV room seemed as distant as the moon in the evening sky. He tried to articulate his feelings to himself aloud, but only managed a loud, stupid “Uhhhhhh” that filled the apartment, as though he were a bat trying to test whether the walls were truly there.

It wasn’t long after their move to Alberta that he began complaining to Melanie more often about his work. She’d come home from campus, and he’d list off every stupid annoyance he’d had to endure that day: executives who debated one another for hours before realizing that they were arguing the same point, colleagues who’d rather “bounce their ideas” off him than perform the hard work of articulating things for themselves, all of it done without any regard for his plummeting blood sugar. Melanie would stare at him with the silence of a psychoanalyst, never so much as nodding at one of his points. He tried to be more specific, complaining about a much younger co-worker named Jessica who seemed hellbent on correcting him at every opportunity. In one instance, he’d asked her to start making her edits directly in his documents without sending them back with her trademark tracked changes. Jessica had replied that if he didn’t see what she was fixing, he’d never learn from her.

“I mean, who the hell says that?” he demanded.  

“She’s pricking your male fragility,” Melanie answered.

“Damn right she is! I mean seriously. You don’t find a comment like that a little bit rude? What if I’d said the same thing to her?”

“It wouldn’t mean the same thing.”

“Jesus, why can’t you indulge me from time to time?”

“I do that all the time. You just don’t know it.”

The world kept nudging him forward, but he couldn’t tell if it was pushing him toward a better life or the edge of a cliff.

On his first trek onto the ski trail, he kept his eyes directly on the grooves in front of him to keep from falling. He tried to remember what the kid at the ski shop had told him, placing all his weight on one ski and pushing off of it, then doing the same with the other. He only lifted his gaze when he sensed that he was being watched. On a hill to his right, three young snowboarders in orange and camo-coloured jackets were taking turns on a homemade jump, but they’d stopped to watch him pass. He lowered his head again and pumped his legs as hard as he could to reach the nearest patch of birch. Once he was out of the kids’ sight, he noticed strange clumps of brown hair littering the trail. He glanced farther up the path and spied two crimson patches on the snow that were roughly the size of living room rugs. A sensation of dread passed like a ghost through the walls of his stomach. He’d been eager all day to finish work and go for his first ski, and didn’t want to turn back so early in his journey. It was another fifty feet from the scattered tufts that he found the deer’s mutilated carcass. It lay just off the side of the trail, half-concealed by ruby strands of young birch. Four coal-black hooves had the remnants of forelegs clinging to them. No body, no head. A spinal cord remained, picked so clean that it looked as though it’d been stolen from one of the biology labs at the university. The ghost passed through his gut again. His hands tightened around his poles, fuelled by the fear that he might need to use them as spears at any moment. He turned and headed for home, glancing back over his shoulder every few seconds. When he emerged from the birch, he came across the three young snowboarders again. He thought about warning them, but was embarrassed to show his ignorance of local predators and the things they were capable of.

The next day, he returned to the trail and found no trace of the deer’s carcass. It’d snowed heavily the night before. The trail was freshly groomed. He hesitated over the creature’s absence, unsure of how many coyotes or cougars might be lying in wait for him in the surrounding trees. But however horrible, he knew that this fear was preferable to the lobotomized fog that would envelop him if he returned to the couch in his basement. He put all his weight onto the camber of his ski and propelled himself forward, pumping his legs and arms. He saw no one else on the trail, and kept going. When the path finally looped back toward the town, he stopped and stared out over a farmer’s field made completely white by winter. He blinked hard and felt a crunch at the corners of his eyes, where his tears had frozen. As he stood staring over the field, he realized that the tears weren’t the product of a cold headwind. He was crying.

It didn’t make sense. Wasn’t exercise supposed to be an antidote to depression? Here he was, working out as vigorously as he’d done in years, and he was crying? He sniffed a shard of frozen snot down his palate and left the trail, setting off into the farmer’s field, ploughing through powder that was so dry and deep that snowshoeing would’ve been faster. He only turned around when darkness had fully descended. The temperature had dipped so low that he couldn’t produce enough heat to overcome it. It was eleven-thirty in the evening by the time he made it home. He collapsed through the front door of his house, and crawled away from Melanie, who was crying and demanding to know where he’d been. He called in sick to work the next day.

It took him three days for his muscles to recover, and when they did, he put his skis back on and repeated the same route, staying out again until deep into the night. There was no thinking behind it; the sheer absence of anything better to do left the activity unrivalled for his attention. He was proud of himself for exercising so much, feeling like he’d finally broken through the wall of discomfort and avoidance that’d made his thirties the flabbiest decade of his life. On his fifth trip, he stayed out so long that he came home with the tip of his nose gone black from frostbite. Melanie dropped her glass of water when she saw his face and drove him to the hospital, where the dead flesh was removed and his nose bandaged. Melanie insisted on sitting with him when the diminutive doctor with a tightly tied bun of black hair sat down across from them and asked whether he wouldn’t mind answer a few questions. He told her about moving to Camrose with Melanie, about his newly discovered love for skiing, and even about how much he cried when he was alone.  The woman held him with steady eyes for a few moments, then tore a page out of her book.

“I’m going to write you a referral to a psychiatrist here in town,” she said, “and I really think you should follow up on it.”

Melanie pressed her hand tightly over his as he received the piece of paper. He turned to her and smiled, and continued to hold her hand as she drove the two of them home. When they got back, she went to her office to check whether she’d received any emails from students complaining about their midterm grades. He walked into the kitchen to clean up the water and broken glass Melanie had left on the floor when she’d rushed him to hospital. He tossed the rag in the sink, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and walked into to the bungalow’s small living room. On the coffee table, his laptop lay closed. Beside it sat his cell phone, which he picked up to find that there were no messages or missed calls.

He glanced back to the unopened can of beer in his hand, which was very cold, and set both it and the cell down on the table. Tears returned to the corners of his eyes as he glanced toward the house’s front entryway, where he’d left his ski boots.

Philip Glennie is originally from Saint John, New Brunswick. He is the author of two novels, Ill Humour (2013) and Lune (2016). He currently lives in London, Ontario.

Captain Marisol

Charles Haddox

My Aunt Concha welcomed us into her tiny apartment under the elm trees lining Calle Pípila in Cd. Juárez. The door of the apartment faced the sidewalk. There was no yard, but the elms rose out of boxes to shade pedestrians as well as the fronts of the presidios, one story apartments plastered with stucco on the inside and outside. A red-handled mop stood beside the door, drying, drying. Its grey hair, its grey curls, scented with lemon. Her place sparkled. The floors smelled of soap and pine oil. We had chicken soup for lunch in her rather outdated kitchen, and for dessert she let us pick out a candy from a pink tin box covered in plastic daisies that had probably once held Marías or some kind of shortbread.

“One. No more,” my Aunt Concha said in Spanish. She always said the same thing.

My Tía Concha. When my mother was a child, Concha was a party girl. Now she dressed in black and wore a black lace veil and was very thin, with a stern, withered face that had once belonged to a girl who could dance all night at the local casino. She was an old lady, and we were children. Aunt Concha was actually my great-aunt, a sister of my mother’s father, who had passed away when my mother was a child. Since Concha never had children herself, she always grew tired of us after a very short time. My brother and I were sent to play in the park just down the street so that she and my mother could drink coffee and talk about politics, about the family spread out on both sides of the border, and about the old days, when everybody lived in Guadalajara and northern Jalisco.

The sunlit park, shaded in places by tall Chinese elms and light green ash trees, was a world of wonder. Yellow and black butterflies soared on the breeze like flecks of light. Whiptail lizards, furtive as fish, rustled in the grass. Regal mockingbirds whistled and tittered as they looked for mates or defended territories. An escaped pet parakeet sat on the head of Vicente Guerrero’s bronze bust (the park was named for him) and ate a discarded peanut.

On a little pedestrian bridge at the edge of the park, which extended across a steep, dry gully, Don Freddie and his daughter stood like sentries. Alfredo Marquez was nicknamed Freddie, even though he was Mexican. His daughter was Marisol. Freddie was slight and ascetic in appearance, with a long black beard and small, childish hands. His daughter was also rather small for her age. She was eleven. Freddie was a librarian at the local university, but he was also a kind of living astronomical clock. The heavens had outsize influence on his daily behavior: when Orion sat in the sky, he was brave as a tiger, but when Leo raised his brilliant mane, he would run and hide; when Venus, queen of the stars, arose, he was amorous with all the women of the neighborhood, including my elderly aunt, though the presence of Aldebaran in winter would sometimes put a temporary check on his adolescent behavior. When the moon was full, he could only eat bread and tortillas, but when Mars burned red among the constellations, he ate carne asada and barbacoa. The ardent morning sun made him happy and optimistic, but a fading sunset always brought him profound melancholy. On that Saturday afternoon in the park, with the sun sitting high in the sky, Freddie was sober and alert as he stood with his daughter on bridge sentry duty.

“Buenas tardes,” he said to my brother Tomás and me.

Marisol just nodded to us from under a blue baseball cap. She was a year older than me, and I liked her a lot.

“What’s the password?” Freddie asked us in English.

“Chupa chorro,” my brother said.

Marisol gave him a gentle whack but let us onto the bridge.

The air surrounding that old stone bridge was cool and fresh—a celebration of pleasant caresses and murmured music. The scents of melon and lemons and freshly cut grass enveloped us in rare perfume. We played all afternoon on the bridge, pretending it was a ship. Marisol was the captain, as she was the eldest of the kids. Her father was the boson, and I was the navigator. My brother was the chief steward. At one point, Señor Freddie sent him to a nearby beverage stand to buy lemonade for us.

Marisol found a stout wooden beam under the bridge (below deck) that had been discarded long ago, along with empty tin cans and a rather gruesome cat skeleton. After dragging it onto the bridge with her father’s help, she kept an eye out for minor peccadilloes on the part of her crew that would give her an excuse to make us “walk the plank.” Cursing was forbidden. Everyone had to be addressed by their titles. Shirttails were to be tucked. Gig lines straight. Marisol was clever, but also a little bossy.

“Disciplina, marineros,” she would insist.

Even her father seemed overwhelmed by her, and our antics on the bridge eventually wore him out. He retired to a nearby bench, leaving us alone. That’s how Juárez was in those days. Children could play by themselves in a public park without the least thought of harm. Don Freddie read a newspaper bought from a roving vendor for a few minutes before promptly falling asleep, the newspaper over his face. The three of us kids ran up and down the pink tezontle bridge and even climbed over the side with a ladder made of fallen tree branches, down into the deep, dry gully, which was filled from end to end with weeds and trash.

Marisol would call us back to the ship, careful not to raise her voice in a way that would wake her father.

I stared at her pretty green eyes as she tied an old bicycle wheel to the side of the bridge with bits of copper wire. Green or blue eyes are called “colored eyes” around here. Marisol was completely engrossed in her effort to provide the ship with a steering wheel—but it wasn’t long before she was back to giving commands.

“Navigator, tell me how far it is to Palm Island.”

“I’d use my sextant to study the mar y sol, captain, but unfortunately, my hands are full, because she’s making me hold her shoes and her cup of lemonade.”

“General Order Seventeen. All jokers and complainers will be sentenced to walk the plank.”

“Besides,” my brother Tom chimed in, “you’ve already done plenty of studying.”

I whacked him on the shoulder.

“Cut it out, asshole,” he said to me in English.

“One more time and you’ll walk the plank, steward,” Marisol warned him. She knew all the American curse words.

To show us how serious she was, she wedged her salvaged plank into one of the rectangular embrasures on the parapet lining the bridge. It extended far over the gully. She sat down next to it with a pensive look on her face.

I approached her carefully. She was using a lip balm stick she had taken from her little tooled-leather purse.

“Why don’t you have a mother, captain?” I asked her.

“Because she’s dead, navigator,” she said matter-of-factly.

I didn’t know what to say.

“Why doesn’t La Señora Concha have a husband, navigator? Is he dead?”

“I don’t think she ever had a husband, captain. Who’d want to marry her?”

“Who’d want to marry you?” Marisol said with mischief in her eyes.

“How about you?”

“I’d rather walk the plank.”

“Come on,” I said. “I’m not so bad.”

I pulled a pizza-parlor arcade token out of my pocket and gave it to her.

“Pirate’s gold, captain,” I said.

She took two twenty centavos coins out of her purse and put them into my hand.

“Ship’s wages, navigator.”

“Pieces of eight.”

“Time to explore Palm Island, sailors,” she said as she lowered herself over the bridge and onto our makeshift ladder.

When we arrived back on board, our lemonade cups were attracting ants. Marisol ordered my brother Tom to throw them overboard.

“What did your mother die of?” I asked Marisol quietly.

“She died when I was born. That’s why my father’s crazy. Let’s set sail for Shark Island, sailors.”

I brushed an ant off her shoulder.

“Crazy. Just like my aunt.”

Freddie was calling, “Marisol, Marisol.” He had woken from his nap. His voice sounded melancholy and forlorn, but we knew it was just because of the falling dusk.

Charles Haddox lives in El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, and has family roots in both countries. His work has appeared in over fifty journals including Chicago Quarterly Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Folio, and Stonecoast Review.

Afternoon

Bruce Meyer

You posed with your arms slung over each other’s shoulders, holding fish in your free hands with a dock in the background.

I never knew my own father. But yours? He was a father you were close to, a father who would listen, who’d be there, an ‘old man’ who would tell you what’s what but in a kind way. A father who took you out for a damned fine steak on your eighteenth birthday because you were a man and steak is what men eat. A man who stood you a drink as if you were an old friend.

Sister Macklin said he’d hang on for the rest of the afternoon and a can of warm pop and a questionable sandwich of dried out white bread and a slice of ham was all the respite you were given. The generators had failed. The corridors were sweltering. Ices  melted in the freezer. The tea and coffee machines weren’t working, and though it was a hot day everything you touched was cold. I tried to take your hand but you turned to me and said, “No.”

We’d only just pulled the tabs on the warm Cokes. We’d only just taken one horrifying bite from the sandwich when Sister Macklin appeared, her black hair rolled under her white nurse’s cap, her forehead sweating from doing the flights of stairs and the return trip awaiting us as we had to navigate the stairwells lit by dim evacuation lights to the seventh floor, all so we could look upon a man who was no longer there. The dying leave us breathless.

You entered the room. The sister, perhaps to spare you or give you a moment that is so important between a father and son – not between a father and son and the son’s boyfriend – was right out of Hamlet.

You had to go in alone. You had to cradle the truth in your arms, tilting the head this way and that, saying nothing but mouthing pain none the less.

You had to be told the truth of his demise straight from his spirit. I felt as if you’d walked into the fog on a battlement and a horrible truth was about to be revealed to you. That’s all it was. The truth. It wasn’t horrible. It just was the truth.

I never told you that just before you left his room and stood talking in a low voice to the sister, I went to him and opened one of his eyes and I was the last thing he saw or didn’t see. He probably didn’t see me. If he had, I would have felt I violated your relationship with him.

The eye did not look at me as much as through me. I asked his forgiveness but none was forthcoming. How could it? He’d said all he had to say during his life. It wasn’t forgiveness. It was just acceptance. The way he accepted his own death. The way he believed he would never see a grandchild of his own. It was just a loneliness. Isolation. Living with so many ends unanswered for, so many threads that could not be neatly tied up into a neat conclusion he dreamed of knowing in his isolation. It was abandonment. You were there, but no matter how close you stood, leaning over him the night before so he could whisper secrets in your ear, he was abandoned. And he abandoned you because that’s the way death leaves things.

His face had collapsed in on itself, his false teeth taken out for mercy’s sake, and the round O of his mouth caked with what looked like dried oatmeal but is the crap that comes out of the mouths of the dying.

I looked in that one eye. It wasn’t seeing anything. It was just there, staring. But as we climbed up the fourteen staircases, sixteen if you count the fact the cafeteria is in the basement, I heard you growing short of breath, huffing, and then the sound of a sob, your shoulders going up, and your hand gripping the stair rail. I thought, “Don’t hold back on my account. Don’t show me your grief if you aren’t.” I was the jealous lover that Keith Douglas describes in his poem about the dead Panzer man in the burned out tank. Vergissmeinnicht. I don’t remember the lines and even if I did you would hate me for thinking of them.

I wished we’d all gone fishing together. I wanted more than anything to have been a better part of your life. I could see what I had missed, what I could never understand.  Long conversations. Steak on my eighteenth birthday. The advice poured shot by shot at the kitchen table.

And as you stood there weeping into your hand, standing like a shadow over the body of your father, I could picture you and me together, maybe not in the past but someday, somewhere, maybe if I had kid of our own, and we’d be standing there with our arms around each other’s shoulder, the little guy proudly holding up the undersized fish we caught and should have thrown back, and some guy hanging around the dock we hand our camera to and hearing him say, “Smile” and clicking the shutter because it all is over in the blink of an eye. And what we fail to love or be loved by makes us see what we have or should have had, or ought to hold on to even though it is slippery and it fought for its life on the end of a thin line. And as an afterthought, after the hook is removed from the fish’s mouth, you persuade the child that all things deserve the lives they have struggled to live. You lie flat on your stomach and lower your hands over the side of the dock. The fish is inanimate. It stares at the sky. And then, to the boy’s amazement and yours, its opens and closes a gill as it is submerged, its tail awakens, and it disappears into depths we will never completely understand.

Bruce Meyer is author of sixty-four books of poetry, short fiction, flash fiction, and non-fiction and has seven more books forthcoming in the next three years. His stories have won or been short-listed for numerous international prizes. He lives in Barrie, Ontario.

Aurora Borealis

Zach Murphy

Leo showed up 35 minutes late to his stepbrother Tim’s funeral. He also dipped out right in the middle of his own speech.

“I always preferred funerals to weddings because at least with funerals people cry over something that is permanent” wasn’t the best line to open with.

After hiding out all day, Leo emerged from his humiliated sulk and decided to go for a walk through his hometown of Duluth, Minnesota.

The evening clouds watched the waves crash against the jagged rocks of Lake Superior while Leo trotted along the Canal Park boardwalk.

He thought about the time when he and Tim were kids at the beach and Tim buried him beneath the sand and nearly suffocated him to death.

He thought about the time when Tim convinced him that lightning bugs were evil creatures that were out to electrocute people. Even as an adult, Leo still had nightmares about them.

And he thought about the green T-shirt. That stupid green T-shirt that Tim always wore. It was forever ironed into Leo’s brain.

Leo stopped to sit on a weathered bench. A few feet behind him, there was a bush where a group of lightning bugs were congregating. After a few minutes passed, one of the lightning bugs landed directly on Leo’s shoulder and he froze with fear. But when he got a closer look at the blinking creature, he admired its shine and realized it was quite a peaceful little thing. He was even disappointed when it zipped away.

Just then, he thought about Tim again. He was mad at himself for missing him. And he knew that if Tim knew about this, he’d make fun of him for it.

When Leo got up and continued on his walk, the wind diminished, the waves calmed, the clouds cleared, and an effervescent green light glowed brightly across the sky.

As Leo gazed out at the stunning sight, he shook his head and smirked. “Fuck you, Tim.”

Zach Murphy is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema. His stories appear in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Ghost City Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Spelk Fiction, Door Is A Jar, Levitate, Yellow Medicine Review, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Crêpe & Penn, WINK, Drunk Monkeys, Ellipsis Zine, and Wilderness House Literary Review. He lives with his wonderful wife Kelly in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Neon

W. T. Patterson

New Orleans, Garden District. Magazine Street sits quiet on a lonely Tuesday night, the humid air thick enough to chew. A neon sign flickers green above the entrance to a two-story dive, Tommy Rouge’s, where inside, two patrons sit against the bar tipsy off spirits and stories. The high ceilings and low fans do little to mask the lingering high watermarks from Katrina that run the walls, black and fluid, like old whiskey in a dirty rocks glass.

The owner, Bobby Rouge, doesn’t tell his only two patrons about the financial troubles. He wipes the sticky counters in obsessive circles staring into the string lights that line the jukebox and thinks about whether or not to unplug the second floor’s unused pinball machines to save money, to sell the scuffed up pool tables with dents from too-rough shots and circular, flammable stains thanks to sweating beer glasses. The disaster insurance for fire would payout enough to live comfortably in retirement. He wonders if his father, Tommy, would be disappointed that his son couldn’t keep a bar afloat in a city known for boozing.

The air inside is dense with the savory smell of dried liquor and sweet with old, spilled beer. Outside, young people pause and look at the empty second floor balcony with iron tables and chairs, with flickering electric candles inside of purple glass holders, with sun-faded cardboard signs for domestic beer near the door, and decide to keep walking. Bobby has noticed a significant shift in patrons with the uptick in microbrewers and craft beer connoisseurs, even though he believes beer is beer and gets a person drunk just the same. A bar is a social experience, he tells himself, not an art adventure.

The wood paneling along the inside walls is bowing, it has been for years. Bobby’s only two patrons laugh on their cushioned stools, a man and a woman, probably thirty years between them. The woman wears a flowing sundress and blue jean jacket, her smooth legs crossed at the hips, frizzy blonde hair wild and unkempt. She raises her arms, glass in hand, and sways to the slow jazz rendition of Satchmo’s St. James Infirmary as though she isn’t mid conversation with a man twice her age. Her eyelids droop heavy with liquor and Bobby gets the sense that something else is going on with the woman, something deep and pained.

The man smiles and sways with the woman dropping the conversation mid-sentence to mimic her movements. He laughs with a smoker’s gruff. Sun damaged skin wraps his body, baggy Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to the sternum, loose cargo pants running into worn out boat shoes. All evening he has sat facing her, knees apart, leaning forward and back to the beat of Allen Toissaint and Johnny Dodd’s Black Bottom Stompers. He has purchased all of the woman’s drinks and Bobby has obliged, happy to have the business.

“All I’m saying,” the woman says, her words slurred and rounded, “is that there are things you can say, and things you cannot say anymore.”

“What can I not say?” the man asks, smiling so large that his teeth reflect the neon sign for drink specials glowing pink behind the bar.

“Things,” she says, and bites her lip. She leans forward. “Certain things.”

“Things are things,” the man says, and takes a sip of his brown drink, still dancing. “I can still say things, don’t mean you have to like the things I say.”

“I’m just saying,” the woman says, leaning forward and touching the man’s lips with her pointer finger, long nails painted green. “There are things you can’t say.”

They both laugh. Bobby pours them another round and says it’s on him. He knows better than to cut them off this early, even though something feels unusual about the pairing. All those years growing up and learning the trade behind the bar with Dad, the solo years after Katrina when his father’s mental and physical health slipped away, he knows when something is awry and these two, he thinks, ain’t exactly trouble, but ain’t exactly saints either. The dark wooden stairs to the second story flash orange with lights from the pinball machines upstairs and Bobby checks his watch. Ten PM. Too early. The smokes in his shirt pocket poke against his chest. He knows he should quit, but damn if they don’t soothe his nerves.

The man reaches forward and pinches the bottom of the woman’s wild, frizzy hair.

“I love blondes,” he says, swaying, smiling.

“I’m a blonde, my mother is blonde,” the woman says. She lets him touch, indulges him, part of her starved for attention.

“Blondes are my weakness,” the man says. He laughs at his own honesty, then coughs thick and gurgled from deep inside his chest.

“Put your hand on my leg,” the woman says, and grabs the man by the wrist. She plops his callused palm on her exposed thigh. The slap of skin on skin snaps through the space. It fills the empty bar with promises, a taste of things to come.

Bobby tosses a damp, worn-down washcloth over his shoulder and leans against the top shelf liquor along the back mirror. He thinks about sharing a bed, what his ex-wife might be doing with her new husband out in the Midwest, what his son is up to in New York City. They’ve made it clear that they want nothing to do with Tommy Rouge’s, and left New Orleans years ago.

Bobby’s son Terry might have had a kid out of wedlock. He’s seen pictures online, the baby sharing the family’s long crooked nose, but it could belong to someone else. He’s never reached out to ask even though he feels compelled to send his son money. Money he doesn’t have. Money like his father did for him. He figures the time will come, because all things come back around, even if they don’t feel possible. It’s why he hasn’t sold the bar. Katrina killed the city once, but then it came back twice as strong. This lull, it’s nothing more than an intermission between sets for musicians bar hopping Frenchman street. Soon, the horns will fire up, the stand-up bass will walk, and the drums will swing.

The man coughs into his balled fist, then wipes it on the counter. Bobby leans forward and wipes with his rag. The woman giggles a type of desperate, flirtatious giggle. The ice clinks the edge of her glass where red lipstick marks smear the rim like a shriveled slice of watermelon. She looks at the man’s balding head, at the oily thin hair brushed across the open top.

“Say something you’re not supposed to say,” she says.

“What am I not supposed to say?” the man asks.

“If you think you’re allowed to say it, don’t say that,” the woman says, and arches her back. Her chest pushes against the thin fabric of her sundress and jean jacket.

“I think all sorts of things,” the man says, bending forward. His hand squeezes her thigh. “I say things, too.”

The woman lifts her arms and sways to the New Orleans Jazz Viper’s rendition Brother, Can you Spare A Dime? She moves like the melody is a hot shower, the water cleansing and smoothing her skin after a long day. The man leans back and lazily claps to the rhythm. Bobby wonders if he should cut them off, but if they leave, he knows he’ll be alone.

At one time, the crack of the pool table sliced through the shouted conversations of shoulder-to-shoulder crowds. The glowing neon signs had to be replaced every few months after the spontaneous zydeco outbursts that twirled bodies into walls where lovers whispered beat poems against the wooden panels dodging the occasional rough’em ups that loomed with alcohol and crowds. At one time, Bobby bought a state-of-the-art sound system and had it installed. Small speakers no bigger than the box Terry’s baby shoes came in hung in corners pumping local music into the room.

Now, whenever he walks by other bars on the nights that he closes early, Bobby hears the deep electronic bass of bounce, of radio pop music, of songs written by a computer. He’ll put a cigarette between his lips and stare into the purple glow of sky wondering what he’d ever do if he left the city he loves. A city, his family tells him, that he loves more than them.

“Ever been with an older man?” the guy asks. He flashes a crooked smile. His teeth glow pink and green.

“I love an older man,” the woman says.

“As an older man, that’s something I know I shouldn’t say,” the man says, and sways with his shoulders. The brown drink spills onto the bar, but not much. Bobby wipes it with the damp rag from his shoulder, then grabs well whiskey. He pours a splash and winks at the guy. The guy laughs a deep, gurgled laugh and turns back to the woman. The dark wood stairs leading to the second level flash orange from the pinball machines again.

Originally purchased as an investment, a source of passive income to sustain an already thriving bar, Bobby took his father’s advice and called a wholesale warehouse specializing in “retired” carnival fixtures. He financed six machines using the mortgage on his home–not bar–as collateral.

“With enough quarters,” the salesman told him over the phone, “you can pay’em off in three months. Everything after is bank, padre.”

When the units came, Bobby didn’t realize that they were so bulky, that they ate up space where paying patrons might otherwise stand. They jutted into walkways, crowded high top tables, and, on busy nights, served as a table of their own. Their flashing lights and primitive blips seemed alien in the two-story bar, a crude orange and black screen flashing the three letter names of record holders.

For a while they worked, the quarters stacking nicely into ten-dollar rolls, but three months turned into three years of payments with interest. Bobby couldn’t keep up, and his wife told him to get rid of the damn things. She didn’t care how. If he didn’t figure it out, she told him, in another few months, she’d be gone, too.

Even young Terry lost interest, though most of the units held his high scores from playing over long, lazy afternoons waiting for his father to open. This was before the move to New York, before he may or may not have had a kid of his own.

The carnival company eventually bought back two machines for the amount of the remaining payments. A third went to a private buyer. The remaining three sit along the wall near the bathrooms and by the stairs. Bobby would be surprised if he opened up the front to find any quarters in the slot. The closest they ever got to use was during the middle of the day when tourists brought their young kids inside to look around and soak up the classic NOLA architecture. These same families snapped pictures of the high ceilings and low fans, the second story’s iron grate with fleur-de-lis tips, the jukebox containing only local jazz and blues. Even the speakers in the corners crackled and fizzed like a record player, a far cry from the crisp electronic thrum pumping through the clubs up on Bourbon. They always left without purchasing drinks, naturally, but if Bobby was lucky, one of the parents might ask to buy a Tommy Rouge’s tee shirt with his father’s mantra Unlike lovers, a place cain’t never leave ya to commemorate the trip.

“I love blondes,” the guy says again. His words have become oil slicks inside his mouth getting worse with every sip.

“I’m a blonde, my mother is blonde,” the woman says. She uncrosses her legs, and re-crosses to the other side. She pushes the man’s chest when he temporarily looks away.

“Sounds like I’d like your mother, too,” the man says.

“Now that’s something you shouldn’t say,” the woman says, and pouts. She quickly laughs to prove she’s not actually upset. The man puts his hand back on the woman’s exposed thigh and leans forward like he has a secret.

“I’m old enough to be your father,” he says, and they both howl with delight.

Bobby’s insides clench. This same man has spent too many nights hunched over the bar weeping over an estranged daughter he never sees. This conquest toward a younger woman feels compensatory, feels like some Freudian mishap waiting to happen. But he also knows they’re both adults, and pain is pain, and comfort is comfort.

The jukebox kicks on the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s rendition of When the Saints Go Marching In and the woman stands up. She swings her hips and shoulders back and forth in opposite directions. The man stands and does a stumbling two-step. Bobby taps his foot remembering every reason he hasn’t left, how the city lives in his DNA, why he’s a lifer. In that moment, all three are connected to each other under the neon glow of pink and purple and green in the sweat-filled momentum of a shared experienced.

The man turns in a circle wagging his finger in the air. The woman turns around and shakes her rear pulling the dress taught against her backside. Bobby slaps the countertop with finger-drums. He thinks about stepping out for a smoke, but then thinks no, not with customers inside.

The woman sits down still bopping with her shoulders. She sips from her glass and winces at the burn. The man sits down on his stool and rubs his eyes cracking a joke about the spins.

“What’s the difference between an alcoholic, and someone from New Orleans?” he asks.

“Tell me, what is the difference between an alcoholic and someone from New Orleans,” the woman says, flipping frizzy, untamed hair out of her face.

“An alcoholic needs a drink,” the man says, and claps his callused hands to the rhythm of the song. “Someone from New Orleans already has one.”

Bobby laughs. It’s one of his favorites, no matter how many times he’s heard it. They wouldn’t get it in the Midwest, he thinks, or in New York City. He hears his father’s voice barking deep in a memory, something about booze revealing the face of God, of the women who come and go, come when they want something, and go when they get it. Bobby wonders about his own mother, who she is, if she’s still alive, why she never went looking for him.

“This is my first time in this city,” the woman says, leaning forward over the bar.

“Won’t be the last,” the man says.

“There’s a first and last time for everything,” the woman says. Bobby thinks she’s still trying to flirt, but something about her words ring truer than true.

“What brings you to the city?” Bobby asks, inserting himself into the conversation. He knows this is a bartending faux pas, a gamble, an invasion of privacy, but he’s been at this long enough to know when to listen to his gut. He’s used the same distributors for thirty years—the same trusted people his father had contracts with, though most have since retired and sold off their shares—even when the young guns sidled in with promises of better variety for a fraction of the cost. He sunk money into a sound system, which more-or-less paid off, chose the bar over family to remain in the only city he ever loved, has chosen to let his son live his own life, make his own decisions like a real adult living in the real world. He tells himself he’s made the right choice, that he’s surrounded by people who love him, that he’s never really alone. Looking at this man and woman, something isn’t adding up.

“Came here to find my biological father,” the woman says. “Hired a P.I., got as far as the city, couldn’t bring myself to look at the name or actual address.” She goes stiff after an evening of expressive motion. Bobby looks at the man’s shining head, the small strands crossing the scalp, into his swimming, hungry eyes.

The jukebox clicks off and it’s silent, save for the omniscient buzz of the neon lights and the whoosh of the lazy, low-hanging ceiling fans.

“Daddy issues,” the man says. He smiles and licks his lips. His eyes are almost fully closed. “Baby, I ain’t ever been a man to back down from a challenge.”

“Let’s call separate cabs,” Bobby says, and picks up the cordless phone charging next to the framed liquor license at the end of the bar. The woman waves him away, drops three crumpled twenties onto the counter, and pulls the man from the stool onto clumsy feet. She ducks under his arm and holds him steady, both of them laughing as they tromp toward the door. They push open and step onto the dark of Magazine Street, turn left, and are gone.

Alone in his bar, Bobby checks his watch and considers calling it an early night. He clicks off the neon lights and feels the room say goodbye.

Bobby locks the doors and pours himself a whiskey neat. He lights a smoke, flips off the rest of the downstairs lights and walks to the second story, sits on the corner of the used-up pool table, and watches the pinball machines flash the high scores with the initials of his son.

“Could be worse,” he says, and takes a long, slow sip until it is gone. He balances the half-smoked cigarette on the edge of pool table as the embers creep toward the sticky wood, then walks downstairs and out the delivery door. He wonders if his son will answer this hour, and what the cost of a small place might run in the big city.

W. T. Paterson is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, MFA candidate for Fiction at the University of New Hampshire, and graduate of Second City Chicago. His work has appeared in over 70 publications worldwide including The Forge Literary Magazine, The Delhousie Review, and Fresh Ink. A number of stories have been anthologized by Lycan Valley, North 2 South Press, and Thuggish Itch. He spends most nights yelling for his cat to "Get down from there!"

Truth and Toe Shoes

Melissa Ridley Elmes

They say there is a time for everything, and the time for me to hang up on my mother this evening was 7:33 p.m.

It was my fault, this time. I shouldn’t have brought up the Kavanaugh hearings. We had spent over an hour arguing over the difference between The Truth and someone’s lived experience as truth, and no matter how many times I invoked the Wife of Bath’s “experience, though noon auctoritee” or tried to explain to her the fundamental concepts of factual relativity, model-dependent realism, or how lived experiences of trauma and privilege affect human understanding of “truth” and “fact,” she wouldn’t budge. It was when she started in on how since Christine Ford did not have any “facts” her story was a lie, and how poor Brett Kavanaugh had been dragged through the mud for nothing because she was used by the liberal media, that I finally snapped.

“Yeah? Well THE truth is that you are a judgy Fox News-swilling bitch, and MY truth is that I’m fucking sick of it! Call me when you decide to be a decent human being instead of a demonic force of evil. Also, your daughter-in-law says “hi,” not that you care!”

I hit the red phone button to hang up on the call with all of the force my index finger could muster. For the thousandth time in my adult life, I wished for one of those phones you see in old films and television shows, the sort that you could slam into its cradle with a satisfying, solid plastic thwunck! that reverberated with a follow-up metallic-sounding thwingthwingthwing that might have come from the ringer or from the electronic components inside, but definitely signaled the end of a call much more satisfactorily than a sore fingertip did. With an inarticulate growl of frustration, I flopped my head onto the back of the couch and closed my eyes, rubbing my temples.

A noise alerted me that I was no longer alone. Opening my eyes, I saw Desiree’s head pop into view at the doorway dividing the common space of our apartment from the bedroom. “You done now?”

I nodded. “And I don’t have to call her again until Christmas. At least there’s that.”

She looked at me sympathetically, then walked across the room and sat down next to me on the couch, drawing my head to her shoulder. I sat there for a moment, taking in her warm, solid strength. Then I let out a shuddering sigh.

“How can anyone be so—wrong?”

“I know.”

“I mean, she just has no understanding at all! None! And she doesn’t even care! She’s happy to be so ignorant! She rolls around in her ignorance like a pig in shit!”

“I know.”

“She’s all, ‘oh, I’m just a small-town Idaho girl, I don’t know anything, I never went to college, I think those liberal professors are trying to brainwash our youth, only Republicans are right about anything, women who come forward like that with sexual assault charges years after the fact are just liars trying to ruin those poor men’s lives.’” I let out another wordless howl of frustration.

“Hey.” Desiree pulled my head off of her shoulder and looked me in the eye. “Hey. Stop this. It won’t do any good, and you know it. She is who she is. You are who you are. You can’t change her, and she surely can’t change you. But you also can’t let her destroy you every time you talk on the phone. Look, she is a thousand miles away,  fifteen-hundred miles away. You don’t have to do this. Don’t beat yourself up for her.”

I sighed gratefully and sank my head back down on her shoulder. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” She stroked my hair gently with one beautiful hand, her other arm wrapped firmly around my shoulders, hand tucking in just where my breast met my armpit, fingers lightly resting on the gentle swell. I wrapped my arms around my middle and huddled into the curve of her side. We sat like that for a while. One of my favorite things about my wife is her ability to sit perfectly still, to be alone or together without a word, sometimes for hours, a silence more intimate than any conversation could ever be.

In the security of her embrace, with no need to speak, I let my eyes roam around the room, reminding myself of my own reality, my own truth, so far from the lonely and painful one  I’d fled from when I left home for college. The first thing Des had done when we moved into this apartment, shortly before our wedding almost three years prior, was head to Home Depot and buy a hundred- and fifty-dollars’ worth of paint. But the deposit! I protested. She just laughed: “Girl, we go and paint them right back again! But if we’re going to live here, we need it to be our space, not this generic white space. I am not a White Space kind of woman.”

I had never in my life painted the walls of my bedroom, much less an entire apartment. My parents wouldn’t have stood for it. They liked a clean, white wall with minimal decor, a holdover from my Navy father’s constantly being redeployed and thus, our constantly having to move, necessitating the prevention of wall damage that had to be dealt with in order not to lose rental deposits. Des, on the other hand, had never met a space she couldn’t or wouldn’t decorate. Her parents had lived in the same house for fifty years, she had carte blanche to decorate her room her way, and I loved looking at photos of her bedroom in all its stages: cotton-candy pink when she was five; a rich purple when she was eleven; sunny yellow, a strange pinkish-red with a black accent wall, and then teal, as she progressed through her teens. I was wildly jealous of her freedom to create a space that was entirely hers.

She dangled that carrot in front of me that afternoon at Home Depot: “Come on, Abbie, now’s your chance. Whatever wall color you want. I will live with whatever you pick, except white. Go for it!” Hesitantly, I pointed. She cackled with glee: “Yass, Girl! I knew you had it in you!”

The color I had selected for the common space of our apartment was a warm terra cotta that changed tone throughout the day with the pattern of the sun: bright, rich orange in the early morning, melting to a comfortable orangey-brown in the mid-afternoon, and then fading further into a gentle brown-orange in the evening. We paired it with a cream trim, and I thrilled at how these choices complemented the heart pine color of the wooden floor. The couch and loveseat were a rich, dark brown leather with blue and cream-colored accent pillows, and we had added a blue-and-cream area rug and blue curtains. Desiree’s friends’ art hung on the walls, and our photographs—of college, of trips, of our wedding, of just us—mingled companionably with my books and her signed toe shoes on the wall of built-in shelves to one side of the room. On the other side of the room, I looked through the window at the night sky—we were lucky to be on the unimpeded side of the apartment building, and five floors up. A bright harvest moon peeked in through the glass at us, observing, reminding: See? Everything actually is okay.

I broke the silence when I was ready. “Des?”

“Hmmn?”

“She’s never even met you.”

“Umm-hmmn.” I could feel her nod.

“She’s never seen this apartment.”

Desiree nodded again and pulled me closer into her warm.

“How is that loving your child? How does she pretend to herself she cares about me? She doesn’t know anything! She doesn’t know!”

I felt her shrug. “Abbie, you’re doing it again.”

I nodded, and felt the tears come. “I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize. I know it hurts.”

The tears slipped down my cheeks and I let them and so did she. It was our way. Desiree was a big believer that you felt your feelings, and you released them. Like a thousand other things she brought into my life, this post-phone call ritual enabled me to feel sane, to feel like I wasn’t broken, to feel like I did have a place in this world.

When this wave of feelings subsided a bit and the tears stopped leaking from my eyes, I took a deep breath. Desiree, feeling the muscles in my body preparing to move, released me on cue. I shifted my position, so I was looking at her, and pulled one of the pillows into my stomach, hugging it against the hollow ache that replaced her arms around me.

“I love you,” I said, my voice small in the giant space between us.

Her warm, sad eyes softened. “I know. I love you, too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

She let me look at her, with a dancer’s understanding of audience admiration, the need humans have to gaze at the beautiful thing in front of us, to take it all in. Even off-stage, even in the security of home, her poise was innate, her confidence breathtaking. I traced her face with my eyes—the long, angular cheeks, the high cheekbones, the wide forehead, down between the almond-shaped, golden-flecked amber eyes, the impertinent slope of her nose with its upturned tip, the freckle next to the wide and generous mouth with its slightly off-center smirk, always just a second away from flashing a toothy grin. My eyes raised back to meet hers. Only then, when she saw I was done, when she saw I was full, did she speak.

“Do you want to know The Truth?”

I swallowed and nodded.

“The Truth is, you are the thing I love most in this world, and My Truth is, I miss you and I want you back.”

I sobbed. “Oh, God. Oh, God.”

She reached for me again, pulling me in to her, my head on the pillow between us. Cradled across her lap, I gave voice to grief and pain and frustration, a torrential outpouring of the feelings that threatened to destroy everything, the feelings I couldn’t hold in and couldn’t let go of and couldn’t share. I lost myself in my senseless, wordless primal response. I don’t know how long it lasted—an hour? Two hours? More?

When I came to my senses again, I felt Desiree’s tears dripping onto my bowed head. I wiped my snotty nose onto the pillow, leaving a streak of slime, and sat up to look at her. Her tear-stained face was pale, lined with grief—for herself, for me. She wiped the remaining wetness from her cheeks and looked at me, waiting for me with her infinite patience and grace.

“I have to tell someone,” I said finally.

She nodded.

“But, I – but, I – but—”

“Sssh.” She held a finger to my lips, demanding I look at her. “You know what happened. I know what happened.”

“You weren’t there.”

“I don’t have to have been there. I saw you after. I know you. I believe you.”

“They won’t believe me.”

“We’ll make them.”

“But it’s been too long.”

“No.”

“They’ll say I’m just trying to ruin his life. Or that it couldn’t happen because I’m a lesbian.”

“No.”

“They’ll ask me why I didn’t report it right away.”

“And you’ll tell them why. You’ll tell them it’s because you were afraid no one would believe you, because you’re afraid everyone will judge you the way your mother judges you, because this world, this society, is so damned unfair to us. Because you had just found the life you wanted and you were terrified it would be taken away from you.”

The tears came dangerously close to the surface again. “It was.”

She shook her head. “No.”

I looked to the window, gazing past the glass pane at the world and considering all of the pains and hopes and desires it contained. Desiree stared at the bookshelf that held our shared life in suspension. I joined her eventually, looking over the photos, the books, the toe shoes. Des had a tradition of displaying the final pair of shoes she wore on stage from each ballet she was in. There were five new pairs since the last phone call to my mother, the last time I was here, the last time my need for Desiree’s supporting presence outweighed my inability to forgive myself for being hurt and hurting in return. Five productions; five, six-week preparations and eighteen performances, five finales. Almost another year. I let my eyes linger on the books, the ones I hadn’t taken with me, the place-markers for my return, when I was ready to return.

Desiree noted the direction of my gaze. “What are you teaching next semester?”

“Intro to Gender Studies. Advanced Research Methods. An independent study.”

“And then?”

“A sabbatical. I’ll be working on my book.”

She unfolded her long, slender body from the couch and walked over to the window, looking out at the moon. Impulsively, I stood to join her, wrapping my arms around her, drawn to her in the indescribable way I had always been drawn to her. She reached up and cupped my face with one hand, the other curling over my arms.

“Can you stay, this time?” She asked finally.

I shook my head, tears welling in my eyes again. “No. not yet.”

After a beat, I felt the tension in her body as she took a deep breath. “Will you ever?”

She wasn’t asking me if I would ever stay. She was asking me if I would ever tell. If I would ever let go of the things that stood between us. I wanted to say “yes.” I wanted to promise her that I’d go to the police tomorrow to file a report, that I’d call my mother and tell her the truth, that I’d been raped, by that neighbor’s boy, that nice, wealthy Christian conservative boy she hoped I’d end up with, that he’d done it after I had married my wife, after I had moved away, after I had thought I’d put that world and its people behind me, that the entire time, he’d gloated: “Think you’re a lesbian? You don’t seem so gay to me right now! Admit it, you want this! You want dick!” That he’d laughed, and actually spit on me when he was done, and tucked his shirt back into his pants with so much smug satisfaction I wanted to kill him then and there, and gone downstairs to join the Christmas party-in-progress. That I had dragged myself into the bathroom, sore and with his sperm leaking down the insides of my legs, and washed up as best I could, and gotten into my car and driven away without speaking to anyone—to anyone—because what could I—the rebel, the liberal, the lesbian—say, that any of them would believe? That I’d driven the two days back to this apartment with the stink of him still on me, and stumbled in, terrifying Des, who wasn’t expecting me home for another three days. That she had begged me to go to the hospital, to call the police, but I had refused, believing I had already waited too long, that no one would believe me, that I had fucked everything up, like I always did, like my mother expected of me. That everything since then had been wrong—except for her.

“We only had a year, here.” I said finally. “Just one year.”

“We have as many years here as you want. I’m not going anywhere. You can come back, you can stay, I’m here for you, this is here for you.”

“Not until I tell.”

“You will. When you can.”

I closed my eyes, willing the violent memories away, willing myself back into the present, to my lived experience, to the reality of this woman I love and who loves me so wisely and so well. Standing there in the light of the moon, in the space we carved out for us, in the truth we made that was more true than anything in my old life, I thought again, for the hundredth time, the thousandth time, maybe I can tell.

Melissa Ridley Elmes is the author of Arthurian Things: A Collection of Poems (Dark Myth Publishing, 2020) and her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Spillwords, The World of Myth Magazine, The Blotter, Ink Quarterly and the Sweetbay Review, as well as in several anthologies. She holds a PhD in English and an MFA in Writing and is an Assistant Professor of English at Lindenwood University.