It had been a pleasant day till then. The people I met had been hospitable. The day’s climate had soaked my skin, lulling away my state of fatigue and weariness. As the day dropped down to a still, silent winter night, with the numbness of air established in the ambience of my room, I laid on my bed, wrapped up inside a thick blanket that reached up to my shoulders. A cupful of caffeine had proved efficacious in drawing my consciousness out of some much needed sleep.

As I turned my head to my right, I breathed out some air that froze to visible fog. It retreated unto my face after rummaging the silky surface of the cover of the cushion that lied adjacent to my head. Startled by the abrupt, momentary cold of my own breath, my eyes opened with a meek flutter of my lashes. I felt an old and odd  vacuum stepping back sneakily into the vicinity of my blurred vision. Stepping out gradually from my blank thoughts stained with unwanted reverie, I realized the smidgen of winter winds entering my room through the casement had a rasping influence on the Brahms lullaby that I had played to assist myself in sleeping.

Irked by the grating of the sound, I sat up, though with utmost disinterest in getting out of bed. I splayed my arms in the empty air around, shifting on the bed-sheet that had gotten dragged a little to my side.

I stepped down on the wooden floor, bare-foot, and began to move towards the casement. It unexpectedly seemed totally different as I reached there. The air. It was a baffling mixture of awe and serenity, laced with a few whiffs of forgotten love. The whispers of my steps, moulded into unheard voids, had already whidded into thin air. Varying ebbs of the peculiar aura overwhelmed my calm. It was one of those times when you feel something tickling your mind, sending you into spasms of weird pleasure, the reason of which you’re unsure of, or maybe you know; something compelling, something ethereal, something unimaginably real.

I shut the window. The wind was gone now. Its chilling claws were rendered half-dead. But, the wind had left its traces. I could still smell the ambrosial aroma of the odourless wind that wafted through the air around me. I was doubtful, though, regarding my assumption that they were the traces of wind.

It wasn’t the wind; I was sure now. A moment I couldn’t decipher in the simplicity of words. I didn’t see it occurring. Nor did I hear any creak. I walked in haste to find out. I hurriedly stepped out of my room. For almost a minute, I fumbled in the murk of my house.

It was in the dining space. My feet were still bare against the cold pulses the wooden floor offered. All the eeriness racked my spine, creeping over my nerves at a steady pace. My gaze was fixed at a settee that had its front left leg cracked. It provided to me an uncanny mélange of tranquility and delirium that cocooned the compass of my thoughts. It radiated familiar ripples of memories; memories that I had vowed to bury, but was always eager to embrace. She loved sitting on that settee, reading a book, or just losing herself to a slumber, with her left hand resting on the rough patina of the settee’s right arm as her left foot rested lightly on her right upper-thigh. The very remembrance held me frozen, my mind befogged from all other imaginative constructs.

I was adeptly hauled back from the reminiscence by an uncanny creak as someone walked behind me. It left me addled and wondering. It sounded like a dagger chiming against a metallic bangle dangling on a woman’s wrist before cutting and piercing, slowly, grotesquely, but painlessly, into her wrist. It sounded much like a cacophony disguised as a melody. I turned back to realize it was a silhouette of a lady. I couldn’t see anything except the beautiful outline of it that certainly appeared categorically intimate to my eyes. I hadn’t seen a scene as such before. It appeared like a beautiful diadem made of prosaic, crushed crystals, or maybe like a flickering candle. A flickering, black candle: disgusting, and treacherous, burning off fumes of irrational apprehension. A few moments of rambling through the possibilities inside my head and I knew it was her. There wasn’t even an iota of suspicion regarding this. It was a labyrinth, paradoxically both pleasant and ghastly. I had turned cold and numb. But, proximity to her aura solaced my senses down to warm, visceral sensations of love that swirled inside each of my organs. Her mere presence caressed subtly the contour of my face like her angelic, sorcerous hands used to.

I was supposed to be struck with astonishment, with jitters crushing my conscience to nothingness, and my skin turning to shades of pastel. But instead, I was transfixed, with eccentric idyll churning inside my guts, and my eyes evaded the fear, looking at her with the old, dormant love.

But, this time, it was different. I didn’t want to get inside the confines of her breath, grasp her wrist, knead her hair with my shuddering right hand, or massage her arched back gently. All I yearned for was to stay there, look at her, and delve into the divinity of her realm just by gazing at her dark outline. I was intrigued by this alteration in my emotions. However, I didn’t want to comprehend the situation, or my love, because staying intrigued is solitarily central to the art of loving someone unattainable. And she was unattainable. After all, that’s what real love is—free from the desire of being requited, free from the wild cravings of touching the flesh. It’s like the warble of a musical note. It enthralls your sensibility without the existence of any physical aspect.

When I was somewhere lost between my own thoughts, she vanished. She was gone, again. Everything receded back to normalcy. The warmth inside me dissolved into the cold pulses of the floor. The redolent aroma diffused. The air was more nipping, but less benumbing. My insides provoked me to lament over her departure. But then, I realized that was what she was destined to do. In the semi-dark house, she had to depart with all her insidious essence. She had to vanish. Because that’s what dead souls do. They vanish.

---

SWAPNIL is an 18-year-old high school science student who loves to write. He has deep love for poetry as well. He loves to sing and listen to soul-soothing music at his leisure. This is his first publication.

 

The video was too cheerful: “If you’re a boater, like me, then the locks at Bonneville Dam…” But Charles didn’t own a boat, and the one time he had been on one, he found the instability on top of the water discouraging. Today he was just a visitor to the dam. The drive on Interstate 5, beautiful, windy, and prompting a sense of desolation, demanded he stop. The river, which had been his companion for most of his journey, kept going, but Charles pulled the car into the crowded parking lot.

As he pushed his body from the driver’s seat, he grunted. Thus continued his war of attrition with gravity. But it is a constant, and will win in the end. Age marks itself strategically, in heavy cheeks, a drooping neckline and a descending chest. Even the heart drops.

He felt old. Not a nice round number kind of old, which his age belied, but old nonetheless.

Admission was free; he needed only to let a guard look in his trunk, which was empty now. He’d dropped off his last child at college; his wife had beaten him to the grave; he was alone.

“You never let me win at anything,” his wife had joked after the doctor told her the cancer was terminal and had given her an estimate. The number of months she might live was like a payment plan for a small appliance.

It was true that during game nights, especially when they were younger, the children always said, “I’m on daddy’s team.” And he had won a lot. Only when his son had started listing boys won and girls lose in a litany of childhood facts did Charles try to lose more often. No point in giving the world another misogynist.

Still, after Delia was gone he found himself loving her and hating her in intervals. What right did she have to take death’s offer first? They had only settled into the first years of middle age when she went.

Now, alone and peering at the rush of water on the top part of the fish ladder, Charles struggled to accept her absence. On another morning he would have stopped somewhere on the highway and set up his easel, painting the changes of light, losing the sounds of traffic with each brushstroke. But not today, not when his solitude was confirmed so completely.

Before she had gone, Delia tried to find something new for him to do.

“Something different than painting. Not just a way to spend your time,” she said. “I don’t like to think of myself as that. But really, something useful.” It was a reminder that he still had to be present for the children, to serve as a role model.

She talked him into buying a book to help him learn Latin.

“You speak Spanish, so it should be simple.”

It wasn’t. While he recalled Spanish vocabulary, declensions in Latin felt like another reason to despise Delia. Still, he stuck with it because the book helped him remember her, even if he forgot ablative forms and how to feel in Latin when the text closed.

He spent a long time reading the signage in the visitor center, learning how locks worked. It felt like such a natural exchange: water either filled or drained so a boat could reach the level of the river; it was how Charles felt, needing to match up to the world. He wasn’t sure he wanted to take the tour, but they started every hour, and it was early in the day—he had been driving since five—so he delayed.

On the lowest level, visitors could watch fish climb the ladder or navigate the twisted path to their next stage of life, and learn how to identify the types of fish passing by. Some job, he thought, to numb workers with counting fish, sometimes more than two thousand in a day.

Still, without the pressure of numbers, the fish hypnotized him. Occasionally they were thrown back by the surge of water in the maze engineers had created, but usually the fish appeared suddenly and pushed on, disappearing again, unconcerned with being tracked.

“Here come some,” he said, his face a few inches from the window. Although he’d already watched fish glide by for fifteen minutes, he still spoke with a touch of surprise.

He became so absorbed in this study that when a voice over the public address system announced, “A tour of the dam will begin in five minutes,” he jumped, as though he were encased in glass, the victim of a sudden, incessant tapping.

A small group gathered for the tour, which began with a more technical video and a presentation by the ranger. Then, at last, they were moving, no longer held by the unseen force of the ranger’s green jacket or the authority of that voice.

The group took a short walk down to the powerhouse. An osprey had made its nest on one of the towers and Charles wondered how many fish it prevented from returning to spawn.  Once inside, he marveled at the size of the turbines.

“That’s modern engineering for you,” a man next to him said.

“Yes, they’re so clean,” Charles admitted. This answer apparently failed to meet the man’s expectations and he wandered away. Charles stared. A line on the wall marked how high the water was outside the dam, and suggested, playfully, that visitors consider where they stood.  If they were outside the powerhouse, they would be underwater. Charles envisioned the rush of noise and life around him.

The tour ended and parties moved back leisurely to the visitor center. A few moved singly, but more often they came in pairs or families.

Charles felt the day turning, time itself victim to the force and whirls of thought. He crossed the parking lot and retrieved a travel set of paints. In Delia’s absence, and with all his children at college, he always kept the paints in his car. You never knew when… he didn’t finish the thought. If you didn’t have the tools, you had only dark spots on the imagination.

The bathrooms in the visitor center were on the top floor. Charles picked his way up slowly, confident that no obstacle would be insurmountable. He almost laughed, looking in the mirror—how serious his face had been.

Besides Halloween, he seldom used mirrors for painting. The first curved lines took the longest, because he was at his most cautious. Soon though, his hand moved quickly; both the process of his flapping arm and the result seemed perfectly natural. He studied his new reflection. Yes, his face looked as though it were covered in scales. He’d become a fish.

Exiting the bathroom, he held one arm over his head. Now he moved swiftly, unable to contain his excitement, a journey near its conclusion. He took the stairs, knowing most visitors opted for the elevators, and that it was more appropriate to the moment.

When he reached the lowest level, a few heads turned, registering surprise first, then interest. Charles ignored their gaping and walked to the viewing windows. He sat against the glass in one corner and stared back at the people who came to watch.

After all, he wasn’t a boater, and not everyone needed locks to get through the dam.  With fish patrolling behind him, he would stand, eyes unblinking and lips parted, in the basement of the visitor center, until they closed.

---

MATT KOLBET teaches and writes near Portland, Oregon.  Besides stories and poetry, he is the author of the novel, The Futility of Nicknames.

Woman, 52, medium-build, brown hair, seeks man (N/S, GSOH) for dinners out, walking, friendship +

Dee wrinkled her nose and poured herself another glass of Rioja. The only interesting bit was the plus, but she wasn’t even sure if she dared include it.

“But it matters! It matters almost as much as the friendship,” she murmured, staring at the page. Plus encompassed a whole gallery of dreams, moons, rainbows, candlelit caviar, weekends in Paris and fabulously naked bodies writhing under the bedclothes…stuff that at fifty-two you weren’t supposed to feel that bothered about. But bothered was exactly how she felt. She grabbed the biro and scrawled ten more plusses all over the page.

If only Alan could see her now!

She frowned. How were you supposed to make yourself sound desirable without either boasting or lying? The ads in the magazine by her elbow were peppered with words such as ‘attractive’ and ‘slim’. But could she in all honesty describe herself as either of those?

She forced herself into the hall and inspected her reflection in the long mirror from every angle; close-up, distant, directly under the glare of the light-bulb, a little back from it, stomach sucked in, stomach released into habitual paunch. It wasn’t good news.

There must be something about her that could kindle a spark of interest in the male psyche. Men had, after all, shown interest in the past. Alan had anyway. But interest was a slippery issue that came in many shapes and sizes. She would need to mull it over for a while.

The evening sun was filtering through the spots and smears of the kitchen window which she should have cleaned months ago. She downed her Rioja and went outside. The garden always helped when inspiration was called for. She noticed a couple of foxglove plants pushing up through the cracks between the paving stones. They would be better off in the border; they could fill up that bald patch of earth she disliked so much. She transplanted them tenderly one by one. Digging was always a therapy, the quiet rhythm of it, the warm, private feel of the soil.

Half an hour later she laid down the trowel with a sigh and took up the secateurs. Brambles – they were her job now, like so many things.

“You need me, Dee,” Alan had said. “You need me and I need you. We’ll be together forever.”

Forever! She grunted and tore at a bramble. It tore back at her through her gardening gloves. She winced. Her tolerance levels were not what they used to be. It was all to do with hormonal changes she believed.

A chill hung in the air and dew was beginning to form on the grass. Dee went back inside, looked at the wine bottle and got a pot of tea instead. She allowed herself just one chocolate hobnob. The brambles had pierced through her sleeves in several places and scratched long, red lines that criss-crossed the other wounds on her arms.

Back to business.

 Woman, 52, very passionate, a dreamer, chestnut hair and eyes to match, likes foxgloves, dislikes brambles. Seeks N/S man to share Rioja and friendship +

She liked that better. Yes, perhaps the secret was in being specific. Maybe she should be more specific about him, too:

 …seeks man not in the least bit like my ex-hubby, Alan.

No, she could not write that.

…seeks kind, caring, honest, reliable, gentle, lovely man.

Now she was being ridiculous. Did any such creature exist? Her mind zizzed round in circles a few times and refused to focus. She’d have to sleep on it.

Alan came to her in her sleep. He sometimes did that these days. This time he was walking towards her with a pair of shears, slicing them open and shut in slow motion. She did not run or scream, just stood there, interested to see how far he would go.

She was relieved when she woke up. The dream had not been very real – shears would not have been his style – but it made her shudder all the same.

She missed him, in spite of everything. She was not used to being alone.

Woman seeks man. Desperate. Please love me!

 

They strolled around the lawn together, their shadows growing long. It was a compromise, of course. Matthew was not everything she had ever dreamed of, but he would do. She had pitched her wording just right in the end, keeping the ‘passionate’ and the ‘dreamer’ and mentioning her love of gardening – that bit had obviously registered. Matthew was courteous if a little full of himself, could not exactly be described as handsome but had nice dimples when he smiled, and he had bought her a pink camellia for the border (pink was a kind, gentle colour, she thought). Matthew worked in a bank, so money would not be a problem. And he liked food and travel, which boded well. It was even quite romantic, the speed of it all. He was moving in with her next week. He had wanted it to be the other way round but she’d insisted. She would never sell her house, her garden. Not now.

They’d already toasted their future and were a little tipsy. Soon would come the fabulously naked bit. But now, as they meandered, the talk was of the camellia.

“Where will you plant it?” he asked, hand linked in hers.

“Oh, there, I think, next to the foxgloves.” She’d been so busy with the border recently there was only one little space left.

“Lovely!” he said.

She smiled. She’d have to be careful not to dig too deeply. But it was nice to think of the camellia growing there right over Alan, drawing up new life from his pitiful remains. An image of herself baking his weed-killer pie flitted through her mind, but she quickly banished it.

That was in the past. Now she had friendship plus, and that was all that mattered.

---

HAZEL PRIOR has written many stories for both adults and children and has won several national writing competitions. She is currently working on her second novel. In between writing, she teaches English as a foreign language, sings a lot and enjoys being a freelance harpist. She lives in Exmoor with her husband and two cats.

 

The blades of the ceiling fan rotate lazily above her and she stares right at them, her thoughts sluggish, matching the pace of the fan. She is in the room again, the four walls of enclosed space which she never could relate to as ‘hers.’ It is stripped bare of any sharp objects- even her toothbrush is taken away after her supervised shower time twice a day. It was painted a muted shade of white and has just an iron bed, a white bookstand, a white night shelf and a white cupboard. A few belongings lay around, memories of a life, long outlived. There are a few books around, but she feels no interest in them. Papercuts barely hurt and she needed to feel a lot more pain than just a few drops of blood a tiny piece of slivered skin.

The fan casts shadows over her as the sun goes further down the horizon. She hears the call of birds as they return to their homestead for the night. She had once wondered how flying would feel. The notion of weightlessness as she roared through the air for just a split second, before gravity would blessedly pull her towards the earth had put a brief smile on her face. She had wondered how her blood would pattern the sidewalk, pondered about the angles which her broken limbs will be bent into, speculated about just how long would she be alive to feel the blissful pain. She had dreamed about all of this, that fateful day at the hospital. As soon as all the formalities were complete and she was free to go, she had gone up to her neighbour’s terrace.

She had ascended the water tanker at the top, something she never had the courage to do in The Before. She vividly recalled the gentle breeze which had caressed her naked face. She was awarded with a view of the city, which lay peacefully like a patchwork quilt before her eyes. She had widened her legs and had taken the stance. But before she could leap, her neighbour had pulled her down. Everything went blank from there and the next thing she remembered, was being brought into the hospital again. The nice doctor later told her that she was hysterical and they had had to tranquilize her.

The sun goes lower and it is now time for the bars on the windows to play the shadow game. Seeing them, it evoked another memory of how a bird had once gotten trapped in her classroom. This was of course, in The Before. She no longer goes to college and she no longer cares. The bird had gotten in through the open door and couldn’t get out since all the windows in that room had bars as well. The bird had valiantly tried to find a way out, completely forgetting the way it had gotten inside. Those bars in that classroom were supposed to keep evil outside and they ended up trapping an innocent life. What are these bars for? Are they for keeping the evil inside of her to ever get out?

The bird incident was in fact, very close to the beginning of The After. It was actually just a couple of days before The Event. It was slightly funny how she would sometimes be struck with crippling recollections of the most mundane things which happened in The Before. The most burning of it all was The Event, for obvious reasons. She could picture the entire day, as if it had happened just yesterday.

The wide open door of her house.

The merriment of her entire extended family and friends.

The smiles on the faces of her parents, as bright and as constant as the sun.

The huge white cake, in the shape of her graduation cap.

The black robes she had laughingly insisted on wearing the whole day.

The copy of her admission letter in the most prestigious institution for her chosen Masters.

All these memories have a happy tinge to them. The joy of that day is still painfully tangible to her. She could taste the vanilla cake and she could feel the warmth of the champagne as it slipped down her throat. Her mind was still imprinted with the photograph of her and her friends in their black gowns, throwing their caps into the air. She was sort of glad that she no longer had the actual picture. Everything was lost in The Event, both literally and figuratively.

Her recollection then takes on a slightly black haze, as she remembered the shaking of the floor under her 4 inch black pumps. In a flash, she was back in the brightly lit living room, with the neon balloons and the floaty streamers. Her eyes took in the oft repeated scene in front of her.

Ducking under the heavy, wooden dining table out of instinct.

Watching in mute horror as the entire roof fell on all of her beloved.

Concrete covering up the sides of the table and she could no longer see.

Praying in the dark, using up every molecule of oxygen, her lungs burning for more air, her organs slowly beginning to shut down.

She could still conjure up the haunted dreams that her slowly dying brain presented her. They say that when one is close to death, they usually walk in a long, dark tunnel which leads up to the famed light. But, all she could hear were wailing noises and see bright, flashing lights. In retrospect, that really should have been the sign that she was, unfortunately, alive. Her next memory was waking up in a bright, white hospital room, very similar to this one. Turning to her side, she wonders why all the medical rooms, in what seemed like the entire world, were designed in the same manner. In The Before, it might have led to a hilarious discussion with her friends. Right now, she did not have the will to laugh.

She had seen the headlines in the news channels later on, from the hospital. The earthquake was, by everybody else’s accounts, a small one. Everywhere else, no lives were lost. Only a few walls had fallen down and the city was mostly praised for its effective disaster management. Only the epicentre had reported causalities. 47 dead, 1 survivor. A tagline she would have to always live with. She wishes that she could tell them that there were no survivors that day. She is a victim.

She now knows how almost dead felt like. She had come very close to it the day she had jumped into the sea. It was right after she had left the hospital for the second time. She had been declared mentally fit 4 months after she had tried to jump. She had gone to her newly rebuilt home and had eaten a lunch of dry bread and jam, before going over to the docks.

She recalled with relish, the feeling of floating under the water’s surface, watching the blue sky get farther and farther away, the water feeling silky to her skin. She had forced herself to not breathe in the water as long as she could, but her gag reflex had finally won that particular battle. As soon as she had opened her mouth, water rushed in and burned her lungs. Everything slowly started to shut down.

The dark tunnel with the light at the end of it? She can now say with proof that it is all true. Before she could reach the light and beyond that, her beloved, she was pulled out and sent to this place. She is now on Constant Suicide Watch which involves being locked up in this white room during all times, except when it is time to talk to the psychiatrist.  Survivor’s guilt, with major suicidal tendencies. That’s her identity now, in the midst of the rest of the crazy folk.

The sun has now completely gone down and the last vestiges of light tinge the sky a lovely shade of pink. She suddenly feels a little breathless, though she is lying flat on the bed. Struggling to take deep breaths, her mind wanders to something she had once read for her Philosophy class. “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” The memories were so vivid, that she could almost feel them surrounding her.  The love in her parents eyes, the warmth emanating from her friends, the tight hugs from her aunts, the proud pats from her uncles, the stories from her grandparents and the laughter of her cousins. They crowded around her, suffocating her, squeezing her chest.

She gasped and rolled on her bed, unexpectedly falling out of it to the floor, onto her back. Tears ran down her cheeks as she took stock of all the symptoms wracking her body. Tightness in her chest, shooting pains traversing through her arms, her stomach rolling with nausea, her struggle to take a breath.

Heart attack.

The finality of her self-diagnosis calms her down and she relaxes into the pain, occasionally flinching. She struggles to paint on a smile, at the irony of it all. A broken heart could do what trying to drown, jump and cut couldn’t do. Her life flashes in front of her eyes like a movie reel; giving her a short glimpse of all the labels she had been given.

Daughter

Granddaughter

Niece

Cousin

Friend

Student

Patient

Survivor

Suicidal

As she takes in another breath of her very limited ones, her eyes finally close, no longer able to be propped open. Her dying brain echoes with the calls of her loved ones and her failing heart lifts a little at the thought of being with them again. Her last coherent thought is whether they would finally change the headline. 48 dead, no survivors.

---

SNEHA RATAKONDA, 20, currently lives in Hyderabad, India and is a lover of all kinds of fiction. A Chartered Accountancy student who is currently stewing over the books at home, she writes when ideas strike her or when the world frustrates her.

I was afraid of him all my life. I think my sister hated him. Her children gave her one of those memory books with questions to answer about your life, but she left it empty because it contained a page called My Father. For me, it’s more complicated. I can’t eat a hot dog without thinking of him with a warm inner smile.

He was mean and loud and yelled a lot, especially at our mother. I wish I could talk to him about that, but he died 16 years ago, and even if he were still with us, I doubt he would listen. I tried once or twice when he was in his eighties, but he could never acknowledge how wrong he’d been, how bad the tension was in our home, or how scared we all were. The digestive problems my sister and I have struggled with all our lives surely stem back to our childhood at his table, where we were called down for scraping our forks or not eating everything on our plates and from the trauma of seeing blood in his mouth after he cut his tongue licking a knife.

Just often enough for me, there were special days, different ones, when he picked us up from St. Stan’s elementary school and took us to Brownie’s for Mexican Hots. At Brownie’s, he didn’t yell or lick a knife while eating a hot dog. And Mom wasn’t there for him to fight with.

He worked the second shift in the hours from four to midnight, at General Electric in Schenectady, 17 miles away, assembling and inspecting steam turbines for power plants. A big and husky man who loved to eat, he burned off many calories on the job, and after eight hours’ sleep, it was time for lunch.

He waited for Betty and me at the door of our school on Cornell Street and drove our black Chevy sedan down the steep hill behind the little complex of school, convent and church to East Main Street where the little restaurant called Brownie’s Lunch awaited the hungry.

Ours was a busy town in those postwar days, brimming with optimism. People like my parents had jobs and money to send kids to parochial school, and to build a little white house all their own.

But even in good times, my father’s temper flared, often when we least expected and mostly at home, with no one to see or hear it but his wife and daughters. In a public place like Brownie’s Lunch, we knew we were safe from his wrath.

Anticipation of hot dogs with sweet green relish filled the two or three minute drive downtown until he parked at the curb, our mouths already watering.

Mom never took us out for lunch. She worked the day shift in a sewing factory, and I just can’t imagine her liking Brownie’s Mexican Hots. At home in our kitchen, she boiled hot dogs in an aluminum pot on an electric stove, the smell of greasy water lingering as she served them on plain white rolls with ketchup.

I don’t remember either of my parents being affectionate with each other, or with us. But children will take what they can get, and forgive almost anything. At Brownie’s with my dad, I could enjoy what he enjoyed: a good working man’s lunch, a hot dog on a bun with special sauce. And I could see him happy.

---

LINDA C. WISNIEWSKI shares an empty nest with her sculptor husband in Bucks County, PA where she writes for a weekly newspaper and teaches memoir workshops. Her memoir, Off Kilter, was published in 2008 by Pearlsong Press, and the introduction, when first published in Mindprints, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in places as diverse as The Quilter, the Christian Science Monitor, and Massage Magazine.

 

Back in the day, he was walking down Lafayette Street in the East Village. Just another actor manchild.  You could tell because he was fit and, under his leather jacket, he wore a button down shirt with jeans and carried a battered leather shoulder bag. Although he wasn’t really pretty enough to fit the classic stereotype. His most distinctive feature was his luxurious and unruly shrubbery of curly light brown hair.  Because it was in fashion at the time, women would stop him on the street and ask where he’d gotten it permed. He enjoyed that a lot. Because he knew he wasn’t really pretty enough.

It was a dreary, grey March day on Lafayette Street. The cold, raw wind didn’t move the low hanging clouds that lazily spouted a light rain. The raindrops pelted the small piles of dirty snow and made nasty sodden blobs of the paper garbage and other crap on the pavement. As usual, he didn’t have an umbrella or a hat. With a practiced ease, he zig zagged down the street, simultaneously dodging pedestrians and cleaving to the shelter of the building overhangs and canopies. Walking between the raindrops, he called it. At the intersections and in the open spaces, he lowered his head and let his shaggy mane blunt the force of the wind and water.

He scurried along past Joe Papp’s Public Theatre. That soured him and painted the hint of scowl on his features.  Because he’d never worked there, just auditioned at Equity cattle calls.  He’d seen parts in “Backstage” casting calls there that he’d been perfect for. So many times he’d dutifully risen at 5 A.M. to wait in line to sign in. The line was, for all practical purposes, composed of two hundred people just like him.  Except that they were mostly prettier, but couldn’t boast as glorious a shrubbery of hair. But he would keep at it until the day he couldn’t stand being a begging supplicant anymore.

The rain quickened and he lowered his head, as the Public Theatre gave him no more shelter than affirmation. Only the crannies created by the building’s vertical supports offered cover. And the one he was approaching was occupied anyway. A gaunt black man, dressed in rags, huddled in it to avoid the rain. A homeless junkie, he reckoned. He’d been in New York for a few years now, so, while he couldn’t identify a single flower other than a rose or follow an animal trail in the woods, he could spot a junkie, pickpocket, or gangbanger at fifty yards. Not that he’d had any trouble—he was male, kinda big, and obviously poor. Anyway, it was raining harder still, and he was barely on time for his acting class. So he didn’t pay any attention to the nodding pile of humanity wedged into the cranny. Until that pile of rags came to life and spoke.

“Man, with hair like that, you don’t need no umbrella.”

They both laughed and their eyes connected for a moment before his quick pace carried him past the sheltering column. It was a nice moment. And, for some reason, it made his work better that day. He loved his coach—she was a theatre actress of great talent and integrity who also had an Oscar. Despite that, she was one of the least pretentious people he’d ever met, so much so that she often came to class dressed little better than the junkie in the cranny.

That could have been the end, but it wasn’t. Because an inviolable law of nature is that junkie stories don’t have happy endings.

He was headed for acting class again. But now he poured sweat and his skull felt suffocated underneath its thicket of hair on this hot, fetid, vilely humid Manhattan summer day. He still swiftly zig zagged down Lafayette Street, aching for the caress of the air conditioning in the studio. Now he bent his head down from the heat instead of the raw wind. Wafts of various stenches came off the pavement and assailed his nostrils. He was churning by the Public Theatre when he heard a rattle. He knew it wasn’t a rattlesnake, although stranger things have happened in New York.  It was a death rattle. Coming from that same cranny. But this junkie was white and not much older than he was. Still a little pudgy so this guy hadn’t been at it that long before this OD. As he watched, he heard the rattle once more, followed by a whistling sigh. Then the essence wooshed up out of the prone man. He swore he saw it. Then there was no man, only a body. He looked around—nobody else was near. Uncertainly, he stood there, what was he supposed to do?  Call a cop? He had a vision of passing a couple of hours talking to the police in the blistering heat.  Was that necessary?  He’d miss class. And the guy was obviously dead. Dead as a doornail, as they said in the sticks where he’d grown up. So he walked away. He wondered if that made him a shit.  But he did it just the same. Maybe he finally had his New York state of mind.

He couldn’t focus on the scenes presented in class, but his partner didn’t show so he didn’t have to work. Just as well. After the class, he and the coach and a few others adjourned, as they often did, to an unpretentious bar/restaurant nearby for burgers and beers. His coach was in a Broadway play, which they’d seen, so they teased her about cheating towards the audience because once she’d critiqued a Shakespeare scene in class by sweetly saying, “Where is the audience in your castle?”

She smiled indulgently at them, “You know, when Simone De Beauvoir was asked how she could live with Sartre after writing The Second Sex, she said, ‘That was philosophy; this is my life.’  Well, acting class is art, and Broadway is show business.” Then her face clouded and she sadly added, “Acting in New York is hard because you have to put up walls around your feelings just to walk the streets without going mad, but you have to let down all those defenses on stage.”

He felt like she was talking just to him, but of course, she wasn’t.  He didn’t say anything but it assuaged his lingering guilt for walking on. He felt full of affection as well as admiration for her in that moment.

That moment too consoled him. Right away. For the next day, right before her matinee, she stroked out and died.  She was only in her sixties.

There was a memorial for her in a Broadway theatre. He went. Stars of stage and screen eulogized her.  And they all described the same woman he knew from the master class. That struck him—he’d seen very few people who were exactly who they are. And most of them were junkies.

---

CHRISTOPHER HORTON‘s work has been published in the print anthology, Literary Pasadena, and online at Hollywood Dementia, Maudlin House, Page & Spine, and Shout Out UK. He lives and writes in Hollywood, which at least sounds romantic.

 

There’s a small town in Ireland where this word exists: Quare.

It can be used interchangeably, in several contexts, in order to narrate a disaster. The word was only invented so you wouldn’t have to go too far to tell a story.

 

Quare (pr. kwair, rhyming with square)

1. Adverb, meaning ‘very’ or ‘especially’

It was quare (1) dark in there, the lights all off. I was walking by the house, right, and there was nobody on the porch for once. That was a quare (2) thing in itself. But you remember I always liked the girl, and I thought I might call in when her mam wasn’t around. I never liked the mother. So I walked on up to the door, and I was going to knock on it – though I wasn’t sure what to say if she answered. I was sort of building up the courage. I was in two minds. And I was arguing amongst myself when I heard a rattle inside. It wasn’t the door; it was farther away than that. It sounded like it was very loud somewhere within the house, but maybe out at the back or in the basement, and then was a bit faded when it echoed all the way out to the front. I thought it was a bit off, so I knocked and I knocked again. And then, funny enough, the door was unlocked so I slipped inside. Just a bit curious.

2. Adjective, meaning ‘strange’ or ‘unsettling’

She’s a quare (2)  one, alright. Her mother is an odd one as well. Must be where she gets it. The mother sits in a chair by the door all day, and she knits. The funny thing is, she keeps knitting and knitting. She doesn’t ever finish anything. She could make a scarf, and then keep going until it’s a Doctor Who scarf – you know the one – and then keep going farther. She doesn’t realise what she’s doing.  I think she’s not all there. I think her daughter takes it off her and gets a new one started every once in a while, otherwise the whole porch would be grey with wool. But the daughter is another story. A bit more pleasant. A bit more there. She has a cat though, and she brings the cat everywhere; on her left shoulder. Can’t tell me that’s normal. I went into the shop the other day for a tub of butter and there she was behind the counter, cat on her shoulder. Health and safety, that’s all I’ll say. That deli counter is probably covered in cat-hair. I’ll go there for milk and butter and a paper since it’s only next door, but I won’t be buying meat in a hurry. Oh, they’re both quare (2) ones. Runs in the family. But do you remember, the father left. He never struck me as an oddball. Heard some shouts from the house once in a while, and then you might think someone was throwing things, but he always waved to me in the street. Fixed my gutter one time, too. That one Winter, you know the one where it rained all that.

3. Verb, meaning ‘to cause a problem’

You know, that lad has been missing for a while now. Young Frankie. He was always a nice fella, gave me a lift home from the shop a few weeks back since I had so many bags with me. Very good, he was. You wouldn’t think he’d go missing like that. His mam is awful worried he’s quared something up (3) and got himself in trouble. Hardly seems the type now, he’d hardly touch a drink and he’s friendly with the whole team. No girlfriend, he’s often been eyeing up the young one from the quare house (2) but that’s about it. No, he should make an appearance some time soon. Sure, we haven’t had anyone go missing in donkey’s years. Not since yer man from the quare house (2) but then he left of his own accord, presumably. Here one day, gone the next. Sure, the mother in that house would drive anyone out the door with them knitting needles clinking all the live-long day.

---

ROSE FORTUNE is from a small village in Ireland, which has survived every attempt at modernization to date. She has been published in several issues of irregular literary publication The Runt, and anthologies such as Fishing for Change and Where Dreams and Visions Live. Her writing can also be found here.