Adelaide Award Anthology 2018: SHORT STORIES, Vol. Two

SHORT STORIES

Chapter 33

Two weeks before our third anniversary, we fought about my dad.
Sailor asked why she had never met him. Why I was ashamed. Sailor
had broached this topic before and each time I had not given an
answer and Sailor had simply left the subject alone, but this day was
a different day.

Sailor gave reasons why she should meet my dad, reasons why
she felt I had not introduced them, and and ultimatum:if this did
not happen she was not sure how much longer this would last.

After the ultimatum, Sailor stood silently behind me, waiting.
I turned off the stove and moved the pan of spinach ravioli to
a cold eye. Then I stomped outside and angrily pulled weeds from
my garden.
Sailor walked to the other side of the yard. Though she didn’t
stomp, I heard the angry swish of her dreads.
After I finished weeding, I walked inside and called my father.
He told me he looked forward to finally meeting this elusive Sailor
that I refused to bring to our steak lunches. I explained Sailor was
vegan. My father gave a smoker’s cough in return and said that
was fine, his doctor had been trying to get him off of red meat and
smoking for years, he could accommodate. I said I loved him and
would see him the next day. My dad pulled on his cigarette over the
phone, I could see him scratching the back of his neck and flicking
the cigarette away from himself. “See you tomorrow M&M.” Then
He hung up.



My middle name is Maybelle, my father was the only person who
knew. Sailor did not know. I liked it that way.



I walked back outside and watered my plants. Sailor started her
routine from the beginning. Neither of ofus said a word.

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Sailor finished and walked past me.
Twenty minutes later she came back with a small tree. Sailor
dug a small hole for the tree.
Then she picked up the tree with both hands, raised the tree
above her head, and shoved it into the ground. Then she picked up
chunks of bright red clay and dumped it into the hole. She crumbled
the clumps between her fingers, while facing the kitchen window.
Smearing the clay soil on to her palm and between her fingers. Her
dreads jumped up as she dumped every handful into the hole.
I stood back behind the kitchen window watching her, unsure
of how to approach this situation.
When Sailor was finished, she walked back to the other end of
the yard and started another routine. Her face was scrunched up and
her breathing was heavy. Her breasts seemed to jump up with every
movement. Her dreads danced behind her back.
I went over to the tree and removed the clay. I removed the tree.
I dug a deeper hole because the hole was too shallow. Then I mixed
some spongy black soil from my front yard with a bit of the clay and
some plant food. Then I tucked the trees roots into the soil. I put a
bit of the soil mixture into my mouth just to make sure it wasn’t too
acidic, then I sat back on my feet, feeling Sailor standing behind me.
She felt menacing for the first time in our almost three year
relationship.
I continued looking at the young fruit tree but I said, “to-
morrow at noon.” I heard Sailor’s dreads hit her back as she turned
away and walked to the other side of the yard to do another set.

Chapter 34

I remember Sailor would massage sandalwood scented conditioner
through my fro. We’d talk, her hands busy in my hair and me with
my eyes closed and waiting for her to finish and slide her hands into
the water.

On one such occasion we were talking about the soil out in San
Luis Obispo. How where she lived as a girl near the beach, the soil was

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salty. The cucumbers she grew there with her mother were naturally
salty and how she used a small amount of brine from that sun warmed
ocean to pickle her cucumbers. Her mom would pick one up with
her hands, gnarled by arthritis and eat them straight out of the barrel,
while Sailor watched and smiled. Her mom had smiled everytime and
told her they were the best batch of pickles she had ever made.

Sailor grew quiet. She leaned down and kissed the back of my
neck. She reached around and held me against her chest. Like she
was trying to find the comfort she needed. She whispered in my ear,
“Rosie I wish I could mark the back of your neck, so that your next
lover would know I existed and that I loved you.”

I turned around, mentally shutting away the feeling of his
shiver underneath my hand. “I hate that name.”

Sailor laughed, wide mouthed and silent. “Well Rosebud when
you open up to me, then I’ll stop.”

I stood up, turned around, leaned over her, and kissed her
smiling mouth.

Chapter 35

Sailor’s dreads hung limp on her shoulders. Her eyes were red
rimmed but she had not cried yet. “Whose hair are your hands
itchin’ to run through? You wrap your arms around me. You sleep
with your face next to mine. But you never run your hands through
my hair. You raise them to me like you want to, genuinely, but your
hands always drop limp at your sides, like there’s no point.” Her
voice quieted to a pleading whisper, “whose hair are your hands
itchin’ to run through?”

I felt the outcome of this last conversation before it could come
from Sailor’s mouth.

I stepped into Sailor’s atmosphere and put my hand up to her
cheek. Sailor leaned into my palm. Her tears seemed to appear and
fall at the same time. I didn’t disturb them. I moved my hand to the
back of Sailor’s neck and spread the tips of my fingers into her hair.
Then I pulled Sailor’s trembling lips to mine.

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Chapter 36

When Sailor would love me, she would come into the kitchen
swaying her hips. Most of the time there would be no music playing.

I would look up and smile at her. Sailor would offer me her hand.
I would tum off the stove and place my hands in hers.
Sailor would spin me in a small tight circle, then bring me to
her chest and hold my hips as we swayed and turned in circles.
I would lay my hands on Sailor’s chest and lay my head be-
tween my hands. I would hum one of my daddy’s songs, which
Sailor would never know belonged to both my father and I. She
would close her eyes too and rest her chin on the top of my head. I
could hear her eyes close because her breathing changed, it would
get heavy.
Sailor would run her hands up to my lower back and rub it
while kissing my throat. She always knew how to get me to throw
my head back and moan. When I would open my eyes there would
be Sailor looking at me with her “I love you eyes.” Big and hopeful
and needing.
For a full minute this would go on. I couldn’t stop it.
I could only look past Sailor’s eyes. Into them but not con-
necting with anything. Just staring at her pupils until they became
nothing. Then the nothing would change into the funnel. Black and
spiraling and coming for me. Death would always be coming and
Sailor could do nothing about it. It was coming for me. I would see
this in her eyes. Always to the rhythm that Sailor swung our hips.
Then Sailor would kiss me. Hard and sudden. Taking my
breath away and making me dizzy.
I hated the look. I asked Sailor why we couldn’t just have sex
and look at each other any other time, like usual.
Sailor asked how two people could connect if they didn’t look
at each other? I laughed and said I looked at her plenty. It didn’t
mean that much.
Sailor replied, ‘’we create meaning, Rosebud.”
I looked her in ther eye and ask, “then why is this so important
to you?”

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Sailor went out back and I heard the sound of her dreads
dancing even from the kitchen.

Chapter 37

After the kisses that left me breathless, we would make love on the
floor of the kitchen, just like after our fights. Except after, I would
get up stark naked and cook Sailor fried okra and plantains. The oil
popped toward my naked body making my heart beat quick.

After I was finished cooking, Sailor would pull me down to the
floor and we would make love again. The kind with bites and friction
burns, though we weren’t angry with each other.

Then I would lay on the kitchen floor breathing heavily with
my legs spread wide, while Sailor ate fried okra with hot sauce I
made from jalapenos I grew in my backyard.

Sailor would slurp and hum as she ate. I would lay on the
floor and feel the vibrations from my orgasm still rippling through
me.

After Sailor moved out and 3,000 miles away, I would lay on
the floor of the kitchen. The smell of newly made fried okra and
plantains sitting in the air. I would touch myself to the smell.

After, I would cry a few tears, get up and throw it all away.
These were the only times I allowed myself to miss her.

Rebekah Coxwell.  I am a Black American woman and mother.
I identify as an existentialist and love to watch movies and shows
that make me cry or that scare me enough to keep me up at night.
I enjoy reading literature that makes me feel an emotion deeply.
Currently, that is John Okada, Toni Morrison, and Albert Camus.
I am currently attending Arcadia University’s MFA program. Sailor
is an excerpt from my manuscript called “Falling”

203



Candy Colors

By Richard Klin

The radiator clicks and bangs to alertness on this chilly morning. Its
noisiness serves as a de facto alarm clock; as loud as a real one, and
certainly much more pleasing than a standard alarm clock’s shrill,
jarring wakeup summons.

There is a dull throbbing in his head. It is not at all a hangover,
but instead the fatigue of the previous night’s mild dissipation: al-
cohol, smoke, coffee, loud music.

The heat begins to drift through the small apartment, spreading
out to the ungainly, sagging couch and overstuffed easy chair, to the
little table with its ancient formica top and odd, 1950s stardust design.
The table is flanked by a garish pink lamp, which he had purchased
at a stoop sale for only a few dollars and dubbed it, in honor of its
ornate tackiness, the “Vegas lamp.” The heat reaches the small, squat
refrigerator and the seldom used, rickety oven, which only functions
via the constant lighting of the pilot, an unwieldy, faintly perilous
operation. And then the heat reaches his cramped little bedroom.

The radiator, many times painted over, is a formidable old
warhorse. It continues to crank out more heat. The apartment is
now warm throughout, including—luckily—the bathroom, with
the sturdy, almost industrial, toilet, the old bathtub with its thick,
metallic shower head, and equally sturdy sink with two large faucets
and heavy handles, one stamped with an ornate H and the other
with an ornate C, as if ascertaining which faucet dispenses hot water
and which one dispenses cold is an incredibly complicated endeavor
that requires perpetual cognitive reinforcement.

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Ablutions completed, he retrieves his clothes, some of them
still strewn on the massive couch, the rest crammed into the bed-
room dresser. Books, comix, music zines are all scattered about the
apartment, but the domicile is sans pizza boxes and takeout detritus.
He draws the line at food. Mountains of discarded food seem like an
entirely different level of slovenliness. And there is no need, not re-
ally, to bring food into the apartment. Park Slope is a mecca of cheap
eateries, Seventh Avenue—its main drag—the home of pizzerias,
Chinese restaurants, the barbeque place, Athenian Diner, and huge
Dominican restaurant that abuts Flatbush Avenue, where he and
his little gang meet up on an almost weekly basis, his order stead-
fastly unwavering: fried chicken, sweet plantains, Dr Pepper, café
con leche. These gustatory preferences are so ingrained that at times
the cook, in the far back of the restaurant, spots his entrance and
automatically begins to prepare the chicken and plantains without
a word being uttered.
The accouterments for today’s stretch of copyediting are then
gathered up: Chicago Manual of Style, well-worn dictionary, and the
jumbo, unwieldy manuscript, fat rubber bands holding the pages
together. And then the rest: the red pencils, pens, erasers, yellow
Post-its, all stuffed into a sturdy backpack.
As he makes his way down the stairs and exits out the front
door, he is aware of how perpetually quiet the building is. One rarely
hears the sound of neighbors; face-to-face encounters are equally
unusual. There is the musician on the third floor. He can occa-
sionally hear the steady pulse of bongos emanating from her apart-
ment. There is the couple down the hall from him on the second
floor; pleasant enough but certainly not worth getting to know. The
overbearing, didactic tenant on the third floor is gone. Apparently
unable to pay his rent, he stealthily moved his few possessions out of
his apartment and then vanished, whereabouts unknown. And there
is the ground-floor peril in the form of the oddball, bearded Finnish
engineer who occupies the apartment near the front entrance, often
lying in wait to trap an unwary passerby in pointless conversation.
Leafy, expansive Prospect Park lies to his immediate right. A
day in the park, of course, is not on the agenda. He proceeds in the

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opposite direction, to quiet and composed Eighth Avenue. At night,
in this colder weather, he can occasionally smell wood smoke as he
traverses the stately avenue.

Lugging his backpack, he cuts down to the decidedly un-
stately Seventh Avenue, soon passing the little clump of stores—the
small real-estate office, deli, newsstand. And he begins to anticipate
food and coffee, pondering his breakfast options as he strolls by the
TV-repair shop and Szechuan Palace. A bolt of inspiration strikes
in the form of the huge diner here in the nether reaches of Seventh
Avenue. The diner is where he will eat this morning.

Eggs, toast, bacon, coffee. There are only a handful of cus-
tomers in the morning, this diner a poor relation to the more bus-
tling Athenian. At night it is nominally more crowded, presided
over by a hulking, gravelly voiced older man who is perpetually
embroiled in a series of loud conflicts, hanging up on a disrespectful
customer, inveighing against the various hustles perpetrated against
the diner. There is one evening when—in direct contravention of all
the accepted norms of customer service—he accuses two busboys of
laughing at him in Spanish.

Breakfast completed, he makes his way along Seventh Avenue.
December has been unreasonably warm, an unexpected respite from
the season’s usual frigidity. This stretch of warmth has lasted far
longer than the norm, but snow is set to begin this afternoon, which
is very apparent by simply looking at the sky. It is an absolute cer-
tainty: Winter will finally come into play, all reprieves exhausted.

So these are absolutely, positively the last few hours of warmish
weather. Never, as far as he remembers, has the change of season
been so delineated.

It is often the norm for him to stop at the scattered bookshops
or tiny record stores that dot Seventh Avenue, or linger at Otto,
the crowded emporium packed with its hodgepodge of used books,
music, comix, old magazines, along with vintage clothing and used
furniture. The place, actually, is not named Otto; Otto is the faded,
barely discernible name in large letters that is emblazoned on the
building’s side, a remnant of some long-ago, forgotten business. It
has occurred to him, in one of his meaningless epiphanies, that the

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word palindrome should itself actually be a palindrome. Otto is a
perfectly good candidate for a replacement word.

For whatever reason, he is less inclined to linger this morning.
Stanley’s is his ultimate destination. The weight of his backpack, which
is dangling from one shoulder, feels like a nagging pain and serves
as a reminder that he must fulfill his quota of copyediting for the
day. And so he walks along, the south Slope morphing into the more
established, less déclassé north Slope, with the large Middle Eastern
restaurant coming into view, a few boutiques, the store that specializes
in Indonesian kitchenware, and the sparkling white exterior of La Pa-
netteria, home of white-chocolate latte and elaborate muffins.

Up ahead are the first glimpses of the Stanley’s sign and its dis-
tinctive coffee-cup logo. He quickens his pace ever so slightly. In
the warmer weather—especially on weekends—Stanley’s is packed
to the gills, the interior awash with people, the outdoor bench lined
from end to end. He is a known quantity at Stanley’s amid some
other known quantities. There is the rough-hewn, abrasive mid-
dle-aged man who—in an amusing contradiction—is the owner of
the New Age crystal shop on the corner of President Street. There is
the friendly guy from the record store, the old man who always wears
a Walkman, the gracious, pleasant Turkish man who—through no
fault of his own—has creepy, vampire-like facial features, and the oc-
casional fellow copy editors, most of whom he doesn’t like. And then
there is her. She is often at Stanley’s just when he is, and although he
cannot place her, he is sure he has seen her before, perhaps at Seven
Seas while the Insomniacs or Makers were onstage, or at one of the
many shows at the dive bar on Fifth Avenue—a dive bar for real, so
authentic as to lack urinals in the men’s room, opting instead for a
long trough that necessitates the need for everyone to line up and take
a collective piss into the melting ice. This woman from Seven Seas or
the dive bar on Fifth Avenue or somewhere else entirely always nurses
a cup of coffee, deep in solitary concentration, or is engaged in writing
a letter, all activities that preclude initiating any sort of conversation.

Those distinctive olfactory sensations of Stanley’s—coffee in
their various incarnations–hit him as soon as he opens the door. He
orders a fortifying cappuccino and takes his seat, listening to the satis-

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fying hissing and clanking of the cappuccino preparation, the hot caf-
feine flooding out of the little spout and into the cup, which he collects
and brings to his table, cappuccino positioned carefully as he arranges
his Chicago Manual of Style, well-worn dictionary, jumbo, unwieldy
manuscript, and the rest: red pencils, pens, erasers, yellow Post-its.

The reference books and manuscript pages give off the aura
of erudition, as if he is engaged in some sort of scholarly endeavor.
It is the opposite, of course, as evidenced by his current project, a
novel in which the protagonist uncovers a decades-old massacre—
described over and over in loving, graphic detail—that has trans-
pired in his small town. There are hackneyed mystical elements as
the book progresses, touching on the eternal nature of suffering and
redemption, all handled with the so-called profundity of something
you’d expect at that crystal shop on the corner of President Street.

He sips his cappuccino, tasting a clump of brown sugar. At
their customary Sunday brunches, he and Vanessa would always
divvy up the packets of brown sugar. At some point in their rela-
tionship, feelings of annoyance at having to share the table’s brown-
sugar allotment began to creep in. He would begin pretending to
absentmindedly snatch up the brown sugar packets, leaving her
with the white sugar. In retrospect, the resentment over having to
share brown sugar was probably the harbinger of doom for the re-
lationship. He, not Vanessa, had initiated the breakup, which had
backfired completely. She had quickly found another boyfriend. He
hadn’t found anyone.

Plunging back into the manuscript, he continues with the
work at hand. The mystery of this long-ago massacre can be ascer-
tained via the discovery of a hitherto unknown diary, written in a
cryptic style that the modern-day protagonist needs to decipher. He
stifles a yawn, then gazes out the window onto Seventh Avenue. It is
hot inside Stanley’s, the heat obviously cranked up in anticipation
of the impending winter, now just hours away. Last week, here at
this very table, he had overheard a conversation between a man and
woman at the adjoining table. He soon ascertained that these were
two beginning ministers, engaged in the most utilitarian sort of
shoptalk: obtaining choir robes, preferred hymnals, heating costs.

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There are no conversations to overhear today. He plows on.
It is intimated that the grisly, long-ago massacre will once again
commence in the perpetual cycle of death and retribution. There
is a discrepancy with a character’s name, he suddenly notices, and
queries this on a Post-it, snaps it off the little pad, and firmly affixes
to the side of the page. Depending on the variables of the individual
copyedit, he can be a zealous affixer of yellow Post-its, unafraid to
plaster a sea of yellow onto a manuscript.
He works some more, then flips idly through the pages of his
Chicago, randomly alighting on the section that offers guidance on
the specifics of Chinese transliteration, something, as far as he re-
members, that he has never encountered and most likely never will.
His usual concerns are along the lines of dreaming up new words for
palindrome. And ruthlessly, unmercifully eliminating the aberrant
donut whenever he finds it, restoring the word to its proper styling
of doughnut. On this, there is no compromise.
It is time for another cup of coffee and he ambles up the
counter, ordering a regular coffee this time, and returns to his work.
The cryptic diary entries come back into play. The sounds of hissing
and coffee preparation float through Stanley’s. It is very warm here.
He goes off to take a piss in the lone bathroom, copyedits some
more, considers getting another cup of coffee, rejects that option, ap-
plies a few more yellow Post-its, concludes that he has done enough for
one day, leans back in his chair, stretches, and then carefully reassem-
bles the manuscript, applies the thick rubber bands, gathers his Chicago
Manual of Style, large, well-worn dictionary, red pencils, pens, erasers,
yellow Post-its, stuffs it all into his sturdy backpack, and exits Stanley’s.
Seventh Avenue has picked up its pace, people scurrying back
and forth; last-minute preparations for the impending snow. He
passes the bank, florist, cheese store.
Just like that, the snow begins to fall. As if making up for lost
time, the snowflakes are thick and substantial, quickly pelting the
sidewalk and parked cars. The pedestrian traffic speeds up and more
people, it seems, are traversing the avenue, Park Slope poking its
collective head out, partaking of the season’s first snowstorm and
dramatic change in climate.

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The Athenian Diner lies across the street. There is another
moment of inspiration: grilled cheese and fries, more coffee. By
now it is snowing for real. As he makes to cross the street a woman
suddenly appears, her long hair flecked with snow, thick sweater
and scarf also streaked with snow and winter moisture. Perhaps the
snow has caught her by surprise. They smile at each other, these two
people braving the weather on Seventh Avenue, and both of them
inch across the street, a much more involved endeavor than it was
a mere half-hour ago. The cars are now crawling along, the drivers
extra-cautious at this suddenly difficult terrain.
Both he and this snow-flecked woman make it across the street
in tandem. He lets her take the lead. To his discomfort, they both
reach the heavy glass doors of the diner. He feels thoroughly odd.
In essence, he has followed this woman right to the diner. There is
no choice, though, but for both of them to enter.
The Athenian Diner is packed, a rarity on a weekday, but the
snow has made the restaurant a sudden refuge. He begins to make
his way to the counter, but notices the snow-flecked woman is also
making her way to the counter, and he is—again–inadvertently fol-
lowing her. This is bad enough, but there are only two remaining va-
cant seats at the very end of the counter. Both seats are adjoining. He
couldn’t have planned this better, but of course he hasn’t planned
anything. Now he has followed her across the street, into the diner,
to the lunch counter. For a moment he actually considers turning
around and exiting.
But that is absurd, of course. He certainly didn’t intend to
follow anyone, nor does he have any control over who sits where,
nor did he engineer a packed counter with only two remaining seats.
The Athenian Diner is one his mainstays. He even knows what the
shouted order whiskey down means: It is diner-speak—paradoxi-
cally–for “rye bread.” Surely anyone who knows the meaning of
whiskey down is no outlier and can eat here whenever he so chooses.
And so he proceeds to the nether reaches of the diner and
sits side by side with this woman, who seems not bothered in the
least by his presence, smiling and even shifting slightly so that he
can position his backpack, which suddenly feels horribly intrusive

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and even slightly embarrassing; lugging around this stupid backpack
filled with red pencils and yellow Post-its.

They both place their orders. Two steaming cups of coffee and
glasses of water are placed before them. The diner’s usual hubbub is
magnified in the capacity crowd. Shouted orders and the clanging of
utensils constantly ring through the air, waiters and waitresses scurry
back and forth, plates and cups are stacked and hurriedly removed;
new plates and cups spring forth.

She has an almost languid air about her, this woman sitting
next to him amid the frenetic Athenian Diner, informing him that
she is a recent arrival from Washington Heights, now living a few
blocks away on Sixth Avenue. Their orders are served at the same
time, thrust in front of them.

And so they converse. There is a subtle intricacy to the way she
speaks, a life that somehow hints of twists and turns. They speak
some more, skipping around from topic to topic. He wishes to know
much more about this person, this snow-flecked woman who once
lived in Washington Heights and now lives on Sixth Avenue.

It would be a long, astonishing distance to traverse, this
journey to know all about her life. Perhaps it will happen. He may
indeed know so much about her life; the college she had attended,
her friends, her family. What she does now.

And they may even, eventually, share a bed and go to brunch
and on Fridays see three ear-splitting bands for ten dollars.

But he will never fully understand. He will get so, so close. But
he will never fully comprehend the things she speaks of. He will never
see the things she has seen. He will never feel the feelings she has felt.

Richard Klin is based in New York’s Hudson Valley and is the au-
thor of the novel Petroleum Transfer Engineer (Underground Voices,
2018) as well as two works of nonfiction. His witting has been fea-
tured on Public Radio International’s Studio 360 and has appeared
in the Atlantic, the Brooklyn Rail, the Forward, Akashic Books’
“Thursdaze” series, Flyover Country Review, and many others.

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Crowsong for the Stricken

By Ted Morrissey

The village constructed a special awning on their porch above the
door, hung strips of heavy opaque plastic from it to form a kind
of chute or anteroom, and initiated the lottery among the men to
see who would use the pole each morning to deposit a paper bag
of food and medicine before their door. It was a simple, time-hon-
ored procedure: A bag with handles would be used. Standing on the
strickens’ uneven brick walk, the designee would use the wooden
pole to place the bag on their porch, pushing through the strips of
heavy plastic, slide the pole from the bag’s handles when the supplies
were in position, then use the pole to thump once upon the door.
The stricken knew to wait a full minute before opening, to give the
designee time to remove himself off their property and across the
street, where the curious would gather to watch the door open and
see a vague figure emerge just far enough to retrieve the paper bag,
then shut the door.

The onlookers could not help but measure the length of time
to open the door and retrieve the bag, to listen to the force of its
shutting—and to try to interpret it all for news of the stricken, as
peoples of old were said to have read bird-sign or spider-webs or the
haphazard arrangement of animal bones spilled from a lacquered
box.

It was a traditional two-story house, similar to perhaps three
quarters of the homes in the village, except that the council had
designated it a “plague house” by unanimous vote on December

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seventeenth and the awning and plastic were erected on the eigh-
teenth. It was nearly spring now and snowmelt ran in the eaves.
Theirs overflowed because the rooks had nested.



Each morning Thomas stood in the cold and watched. He liked to
imagine it was she who opened the door. Rachel was somewhat taller
than her mother and nearly as tall as her father, none of whom could
be mistaken in form for the grandmother or the twins. But screened
by the heavy opaque plastic it was impossible to say with certainty
who appeared on the porch to take in the village’s offering, its “daily
bread” as many liked to say.

He wanted to call out something—Rachel? How is Rachel?—
but communicating was forbade as inappropriate, as a challenge to
His will. Even the telephone connection was severed. The village
would know in time, who survived and who did not; there would
be a great burning in their dooryard, fired by the survivors’ hand; or
the house itself would be fired by the village’s.

Thomas had known three firings in his fifteen years, all by the
village: McCluskys, Donovans, Fergussons—their names painted
in gold inside the village gazebo on the square, added to the others
from before his time, some names so old the paint would begin to
fleck and have to be retouched. He only recalled the Fergussons’
with any clarity. When five paper bags collected on the porch, on
the sixth day the firing took place at sunset. A freak wind sprang up
and the fire department had to work through the night to keep the
flames from spreading to the Harpers’ next door. It became the mis-
sion of the whole village. Thomas and Rachel were nine but stood in
the empty-bucket line passing them for hours. Even then he knew
where she was, that four sets of hands separated them, and he felt a
baffling hurt at the knowledge that she had no awareness whatsoever
of his place in line.

It was a crisp October wind and orange embers bright in the star-
less night fell upon the Harpers’ roof like God’s wrath become visible.

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

Thomas often reflected on another October night, when autumn car-
nival was underway. His mother’s rhubarb pie had won third place
so the family’s spirits were high on the final night of the festivities.
They decided to join in the masquerade reel and rummaged through
the attic to piece together their costumes. His mother dressed as
Seraphina in a dark blue dress, with an old pine plank belted to her
back. His sister, more dramatically, went as Flora, using a concoction
of karo syrup and raspberry pulp to stain her lips and chin as if blood
ran from her mouth, and attaching wads of cotton to her shoes to
suggest levitation in the clouds. His father donned a canine mask and
took up a walking stick as dog-headed Christopher. Thomas used a
tattered brown blanket as a habit and hood, and he borrowed his
sister’s homemade blood to stain his hands in stigmata, wanting to be
Francis, whom he loved because he spoke to animals and was thought
mad because of it. He and his sister and mother wore simple white
masks to conceal their identities, his sister trimming hers at the nose
so as not to cover her exquisitely bloody mouth and chin.

At the reel, masqueraders divided themselves by age. Thomas
watched the costumed girls and tried to figure which one was Ra-
chel, if she was even among them. However, the lighting was sub-
dued in the village “barn,” which was in fact a large hanger from
the war-days when the village had been home to an airfield; and
among the masked and milling revelers he could not begin to guess
if Rachel was there.

The band was about to start the first juvenile dance when a
Lucy came to him in a red-flecked white gown, her face wrapped in
gauze and blood flowing from her eye-sockets. Without exchanging
words, as was custom, they took hands and stepped into the square
marked off on the concrete floor. Lucy was slight of frame and a few
inches shorter than Thomas, as Rachel would have been, but his
partner moved with grace and self-assurance that he did not associate
with the girl on whom he had had a crush since grade school.

They held hands as they reeled. Colored lanterns on cables cast
weird-angled shadows upon the floor. Lucy’s poise infected him and

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Thomas danced far better than he ever had before; he danced with
the confidence of a practiced adult.

Throughout the evening they partnered for several reels and
Thomas became convinced Lucy was not Rachel, but this bloody-
eyed girl began to supplant Rachel in Thomas’s imagination. He
thought of holding her close, of dancing as the married couples
danced, as Christopher and Seraphina danced. He began to feel
that his crush on Rachel had been childish and misdirected, that
he should prefer this girl, whose confident maturity had urged him
toward an awakening of his own.

At the end of the evening, adolescent boys formed one line,
with adolescent girls across from them in another, arranged alpha-
betically beginning with Ambrose and Ada. The band provided a
drumroll then the revelers all at once removed their masks. It took
Lucy a moment to unwrap her gauze—Thomas’s heart pounded
like a snare itself in anticipation—and even fully revealed Thomas
needed a few seconds in the strange lighting to recognize the myste-
rious girl: Rachel, whom he had abandoned and betrayed all evening
with this new girl. Rachel smiled shyly toward him but he was so
ashamed he turned and rushed from the barn, into the bitingly cold
October night.



The sun had not yet fully risen when Thomas hurried from his house
toward Rachel’s. For two mornings the paper bag of supplies had
not been taken in from their porch. The gathering of the curious had
increased in number as they awaited the designee. It had snowed
lightly in the night but the sun was rising in a cloudless sky and by
noontime the dusting of snow would only persist in the village’s
west laying shadows.

The designee—Mr. Reynolds, the village’s neatly trimmed
and tonicked barber—arrived and carefully positioned a third bag
upon the porch then knocked once on the door with the pole and
retreated back across the street to stand with the curious. Thomas
hugged himself in the cold, dry air and watched the plague house

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for a sign. It had been nearly six months since the carnival yet shame
still burned leadenly in his chest and he had not been able to speak
to Rachel, who had quit regarding him at all at school and who must
have wondered at his sudden change.

More than thirty minutes passed with no sign of life and the
curious wandered off, one by one, to work or home or school. So
did Mr. Reynolds with his wooden pole. So did Thomas finally. As
he walked away he heard the rooks cawing in their eaves and the
crowsong sounded like accusation.



At spring council, his father was given the honor of playing the role
of Plague in the summer Passion; the mayor brought the good news
and the black costume, so that his mother would have plenty of time
to alter the Plague outfit as needed and his father would be able to
learn the lines by heart. They were the same every summer but it
was one thing to hear them and quite another to utter the words
oneself upon the stage, erected on the square near the gazebo, with
the whole village looking on.

His father tried on the costume of black crepe, its sleeves tai-
lored to resemble plumage. Thomas could tell his father was beaming
with pride to be given the honor, even with his expression hidden
behind the crow-faced mask with its beak of glistening black. His
mother waved her hand in front of her nose and recalled that last
summer’s Plague was Mr. Abernathy, a heavy smoker, and when
his father removed the costume she hung it in the back breezeway.



Thomas slept poorly, his dreams dark and jagged with foreboding.
He gulped down coffee with cream for his breakfast and all but ran
to Rachel’s. Even still, he was not the first of the curious to arrive. A
half a dozen villagers were already there, the sun just washing pink
the eastern horizon, and more were arriving as Thomas joined them.
The light was too weak to see beyond the opaque plastic strips but

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the village’s assumption was that the three bags remained on the
porch.

As they waited for the designee adults began to reminisce about
other plague houses, about the McCluskys and the Fergussons, the
Johnstons and the Mesmores, about what sorts of day it was—hot
and cloudy, snowy, rainy—when the fifth offering was left untaken
and the council had to order a firing. They also spoke of how the
eldest O’Brien girl emerged on the afternoon of the sixth day, her
sores scabbed closed and her fever broken, to start the bonfire in her
dooryard, less than two hours before the council planned to set the
house ablaze. The event was twenty years before Thomas’s birth and
he had heard the legendary tale countless times.

A great many of the curious had gathered, fifty or more, when
Mr. Reynolds arrived and confirmed that the three paper bags of
supplies remained. He added the fourth then joined the onlookers.
A blustery spring breeze had risen with the sun and it moved the
heavy strips of plastic, making it seem once or twice that Rachel
or another family member had stirred them. Each time it proved a
cruel hoax and Thomas’s soul sank a degree deeper in a morass of
despair as he stood silently with the curious, who in contrast could
not fully conceal their mounting excitement in anticipation of the
tragedy.

Again he was the last to leave and again the rooks taunted him.



As the day wore on he became increasingly restless and agitated. At
dinner everything his family said and did added to his agitation,
from the mundane reports of their days to the scraping of fork-tines
against their front teeth. When he could stand it no longer, Thomas
asked to be excused and went up to his room. Alone, his thoughts
were no less agitating. One in particular came to him again and again
imposing itself on his mind like the belief of the overzealous.

Thomas washed his face and brushed his teeth but with no
intention of going to bed. In the dark Thomas kept vigil at his bed-
room window listening to the house subside to quiet and watching a

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nearly full moon ascend above Hollis Woods. Clouds were few and
thus moonlight illuminated the village streets, which was not to the
advantage of Thomas’s design.

However, he was supported by good fortune, perhaps as a
sign from Him, and when the house was perfectly still, going on
one o’clock, Thomas stole from his room fully dressed, shoes in
hand, and went cautiously but directly to the breezeway. Though
he was seeking it, Plague unsettled him hanging there as a black
figure against the moonlit dark of the yard. He was counting on the
costume’s profound blackness as he pulled it on, clumsily hooking
the front closures and even putting on the ebon mask.

He hoped Plague rendered him invisible.



On the fifth morning the curious, now more than seventy strong,
were surprised to discover there were no bags on the porch of the
plague house. Praise God, Blesséd Jesus, Thanks Be Almighty—even
as there was an air of disappointment and onlookers dispersed more
speedily. No one came out to retrieve this newest offering, yet none
of the curious deemed it strange.

Nor did the rooks protest in their secure nests.



The gnawing in her stomach woke her. The sheets clung heavily
to her damp skin. She was weak, terribly weak, but the fever was
abated, and when she switched on the small lamp next to her bed
she saw that the sores on her hands were scabbed over. She felt her
face and discovered the same. She became aware of the profound
stench in the house.

She must learn what has become of her parents and grandmother
and brothers but first she must regain some strength. Her nightshirt
was pocked with stains of dried blood. In the mirror appeared a ghost
of a girl, a revenant of pestilence. As she made her way downstairs she
had no choice but to note the silences of her family’s rooms.

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She had to rest a minute on the bottom stair, her head against
the banister. There was little light in the house and the mantel clock
within view was silent as no one had wound it in who knew how
long. There was blackness in the outline space that ran along the
edge of the window’s drawn shade but whether it was the blackness
just beyond sunset or that just before dawn she could not say.
Half dozing on the stair she wavered between a frightening
dream state and a more frightening state of lucidness. How long
she remained such was unclear, as was whether the noises coming
from the porch were from a state of sleep or one of wakefulness.
She thought of the food and medicine on her doorstep and knew
that she must wait a full minute after the knock—but her flickering
consciousness kept no sense of time.
The gnawing made her believe time had passed and she forced
herself to a standing position. With more ease than she would have
suspected she went to the door and pulled it open. Her mind must
have been feverish still, for in the queer light was an enormous
crow—an hallucination conjured by hearing the rooks’ constant
rustling in the eaves these many months.
The shock was too much and Rachel collapsed upon the door’s
threshold.



Thomas, equally startled, dropped the bag of supplies, spilling them
across the porch, and began to bolt . . . but even before he could
escape through the strips of plastic he observed Rachel fall. He
stopped. He saw this waif of a girl crumpled in a heap but he also
saw the door of the plague house standing agape—open portal to
horror and death. In spite of the crow-faced mask the stench reached
him, nearly corporeal in its potency.

He felt he loved Rachel, had issued countless prayers for her
survival in the plague house, but suddenly she had transformed into
the very personification of Death, of Pestilence, as if a character from
a Poe story—except this was no storyteller’s tableau. He feared her
and pitied her, yet he also was afraid of being found here. . . .

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In desperation he thought that maybe the costume’s mask
would offer some protection, the way a surgeon’s does. Thomas
hastily returned the articles to the paper bag, reached across Rachel’s
insensible form to deposit it inside, then gathered her in his plumed
arms and stepped across the threshold.
After shutting the door, he placed her on a sofa then went
through the contents of the paper bag, where he found powdered
milk and farina. So he went to the kitchen, uniquely foul with odors,
and ran tap water to prepare a kind of pabulum. The pipes trembled
and moaned for want of use.
He sat in a chair that he had positioned next to the sofa and
carefully spooned the pabulum past Rachel’s cracked and bloody
lips. Without fully waking she worked her swollen tongue to swallow
the tasteless paste. He knew not to overdo it so after only a dozen
tiny spoonfuls he put the bowl aside and let her rest. For a long
while he looked through the eye-holes of Plague at Rachel’s ravaged
form, so thin her hands—the hands that he held during the reels
while convincing himself Rachel was someone else, someone more
desirable—seemed almost transparent, her cheeks were sunken and
shadowed, and the black scabs stood out like leeches on her face,
neck and arms.
He placed his hand on her lusterless brown hair and felt the
scabs on her scalp. Tears began to burn his eyes.
He rose from the chair and started upstairs. The stench inten-
sified with every step. He needed to know of Rachel’s family. Room
by room he discovered each in an agonized pose of death. Each had
died alone. Her mother and father were in separate rooms, as was
her grandmother, and even the twin boys were putrid and bloated
within their own lonely spaces. He fought the nausea that would
force him to remove his mask.
Downstairs, Rachel appeared to be merely sleeping now. There
was a crocheted afghan on the back of the sofa which he used to
cover her against a chill. He sat quietly for a long time just listening
to her rhythmic breathing, perhaps even dozing himself. . . . She
stirred and it seemed she was waking. The idea of Rachel opening
her eyes to crow-faced Plague was more than he could bear so he

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removed the mask. He held his breath for longer than a minute
but at last had to breathe normally. Before he could consider too
deeply what it meant to inhale the house’s corrupt air, she awoke,
disoriented:

She asked, Am I dreaming?
At that moment there was a single sharp rap on the door.
Yes, he replied, starting from his seat.
He replaced the mask before gripping the brass knob.



Mr. Reynolds was still on the brick walk when the sound of the
door opening arrested everyone’s attention. They watched the darkly
opaque figure beyond the strips of plastic. The form paused for a
moment before its plumed arms separated the plastic and it stepped
into the light of day.

They say several of the curious were overcome and fell breath-
less to their knees, crossing themselves and mouthing prayers to the
Redeemer.

They say Plague then walked the streets of the village—a
murder of crows cawing in advance of his black course.

Ted Morrissey is the author of seven works of fiction. “Crowsong
for the Stricken” is the title piece from his 2017 prismatic novel
which won the International Book Award in Literary Fiction as well
as the American Fiction Award from Book Fest in 2018, and was a
Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2017. His most recent novel is
Mrs Saville (2018). His current work in progress is “The Isolation
of Conspiracy,” two excerpts of which have appeared in Adelaide.
Visit at tedmorrissey.com.

222

The Wolves

By Ben Rosenthal

And then the world becomes a little quieter. Libor has shaken off
the rifle cracks and the soldiers have laughed themselves silly, done
firing fragmentation rounds to drown out the drumrolls of the Rads
guns. Libor has whistled them down. Silenced.

He walks to the tree line, radiocollars hooked to his waist, the
metal echoing like tambourines with the forward push of bowed
trotters against the snow. He has a jar of wolf urine hooked to his
tool sash for baiting traps. The radiocollars with their locators are
bound to lead anywhere the remaining wolves will be.

Behind his back, the soldiers smirk, hock strips of green mu-
cous, rechamber their guns.

Two weeks of exposure, snare drum sounds from the Rontgen
counters, and for what?

Libor smiles at the sight of the forest that has no business
being there; arbors that have spread fancifully outward in a human
vacuum.

“Do you suppose we have them all?” I ask him. “As many as
we’ll get today,” he says.

The young soldiers crack their numb wrists and set to the work
placing the collars, the ice-coarsened haltering belts. They try hard
not to stare at the hulk of Chernobyl across the marsh.

By 3 PM, Libor has united his primal confederacy in a wide
pen inside a garrison of stretched wire, his has haltered his collected
wolves, tagged the ailing for radiotherapy; some of the more mal-

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formed to be billeted in “rehab” dens. Upon recovery, every wolf
on the leeside of the Dnieper River is to be precisely radio-tracked,
each pup counted in a ledger; locks of white pelage run under slides.

Trapped like the canids, the men sit flat on their haunches,
eating chicken skin off a hay bed and downing Staropramens cour-
tesy of Libor’s stash. I get periodic smirks from these men. I under-
stand: my figure is no balm to faith; an aged hobble, a bulbous nose
on the tip of which deflated capillaries have massed into a strange
rosette.

There is a whimper. An omega with mange lesions is scratching
at its underbody sores.

Libor bends down and shines his penlight.
“Poor bitch,” he says. “Twenty years ago I’d’ve caused her such
misery myself.” A young soldier shakes his head. We should shoot her,
his smile says.
The soldiers are accustomed to winters, patrolling the barren
oblasts near Belarus in subzero times, but the wolves reduce them
in some way.
They simply can’t fathom this detail.
Why has the commander returned, hellbent on packing his
wolf corral? The naval scientist was infamous in the preceding years
for his brash style in one thing: culling. When the wolves came back
in ‘96, ten years after the abandonment of the district, Libor had
commanded a killing squad, a kind of Einsatzgruppen for flushing
envenomed canids. The story goes that Libor had special hand-wear
made by a glover in Kyiv, gloves of pig’s-hide running up in per-
fect contour to the elbow joint, like burnt skin peelings that had
somehow rethreaded themselves to the underlying flesh, and that
he used these gloves for “reducing” the wild wolf populations in the
irradiated zones: they were his killing costume. He had the regal
lethality of his training commanders have, and compelled lackeys in
his baritone to search out the contaminated predators. Indeed the
wolves came back duly haltered and beset with abnormal pains. They
experienced unusual dysplasias, mirrored the neoplasms of humans;
aplastic red cell lagging, stools black as opals, thyroid drag. The men
went to work; shooting with kidlike fervor. Libor led.

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It was prolificacy.
They couldn’t just torch the piled yearlings for the quantity of
cesium to fill the air. Libor had them buried on the fly, the animals
submerged and packed twelve-deep like protohistoric artifacts in
vast trenches.
But Nature survived him. The wolves returned.
Now, twenty years since, he has, too: a feral tracker, keeping
the wolves alive, working to preserve them in number. I am as con-
founded as the soldiers.
We hear a scream from the paddock.
A fumbling greenhorn is attempting to salve the wolf with the
sore gut. The thing whimpers, snaps, rears back to slide clean of its
halter; tries a miracle swing of its tongue to lick the incensed node of
flesh. The greenhorn holds on to the writhing pelt, his face stamped
with certain failure. Libor pushes him away. The greenhorn swipes
mucous off with the flat of his hand, spitting.
All of the sudden, as Libor is trapping its muzzle so to buckle
the halter down, the wolf spins, as if springing its cervical hinge, and
bites, driving a bloody rent into his hand. Libor’s face compresses,
activating crow’s feet as deep as coin slots. I bend to check the cut,
already noting the shallowness, when I look up and see the creature
jump the wire fence and bolt to the forest.
The greenhorn, his pig-nose popping snot bubbles, raises his
gun. Libor backhands the gun barrel to the side, using the forehand
swing of the same arm to send the private hurtling to the snow.
“That isn’t a tranquilizer gun, you nitwit!” yells Libor. When
we turn back to the woods, the wolf is gone.
“Mika,” he says, sucking at the wound on his hand. “We’re
going to leave these hatchlings to their fizz.”
“I’m sorry, sir?”
“The wolf is sick. We’ll have to retrieve it.” “Why me?”
“You were an original liquidator, were you not?”
I nod, looking at the carapace of Chernobyl across the marsh.
“Another pilgrim,” he says.
I am, I will admit it. I had been a liquidator, which did not
mean corralling wolves but carting away poison topsoil; dropping

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dolomite sacks to where the zirconium fuel rods had fractured,
helping to round up confounded citizens to ride the municipal
school buses out of town, fleeing Pripyat, but I am heartened Libor
thinks me a searching candidate; he was the reason I have requested
this detail; for leaving Rostov and the enviable comfort of First
Rank.

As the wind snaps our coat collars, Libor retains his smile by
expanding it, hard against a hidden pall within.

“Another pilgrim,” he repeats.



Libor unfolds his fallout map, charting our path with a pen through
the red-shaded areas; wildlife clusters where a runaway lupine would
be. Depending on its hunting pattern, we might encounter a vacated
Pripyat, all ours. I fear it. I have been out of the area since ’86, after
the forced march of the Pripyatans to sounder corners of the land-
scape where the Rontgen density did not make the Dosimeters go
haywire. The land bounding the core, uncradled by the State that
had cleared out the forests for farming chains in the Motherland’s
collectivist frenzy, has seen animal life assert its primordial right of
return. The town has become a crazed terrarium. As for humans,
they have remained humbly scarce here, and nothing has been
touched. Each half- buried teacup is a tabernacle; each child’s doll,
shaken loose from their grip in the tumble of a panicked herding,
remains unturned on its little patch of earth.

“It wasn’t radiocollared,” I say as we set off, watching as Libor
belts on a sedative gun. “How will we ever find it?”

“I can howl,” says Libor. “I have summoned some.”
Libor has, in his fashion, become a wolf; in some prelingual
manner he can dialogue almost caressingly with the roving packs. It
is evident in him now. When the detail began he had a pornographic
beard but now he is shorn and in aspect of chin is sorely wanting.
Somehow a four-fathom cleft has burrowed its way into the nullity;
my eyes look to his eyes, then automatically run to the cleft: a tri-
angle, as seamlessly tapering as a wolf’s face.

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We have to cross the solidified water into where the first
marked soapstone of a village will notify us of a former human pres-
ence. Libor goes to one knee, cups his hands around his mouth;
releasing a feral warble that begins its shimmering ride through the
surrounding lindens and ends in a throat-raking volley from over the
marsh, a howl that ebbs and returns, like an accordion.
He rises in the angular motion of certitude.
“It didn’t go to the city,” he says. “Near enough. We’ll have to
pass through it.” My face betrays me, and he pats me on the shoulder.
We tread some narrow defiles and slide rump-first onto some
frozen scrub; a finger of scaly land where the Dnieper forks off into
the significantly more contaminated Pripyat. We are waved through
the checkpoint where two soldiers strain for warmth inside the high,
galvanized iron coils of an open watchtower. Winds filtered through
from vacant box-buildings across the Dnieper River scrape their
rouging faces to the quick. They are there to spot horse poachers,
fences who traffic in metal scrap, “free spirits” chancing the becquerels.
We enter the empty city from the East: amid the obscene vege-
tation, snow-caked, a dust that is almost fur. The dolls are present, as
I might’ve guessed. One, in overalls, lies akimbo on a stump near to
a rust-bloodied monkey bars. Another lies on its side, a dark-haired
stripling; dust packed in the bow slot of her lips. There is a toppled
crossing sign, a green Lada a shade of green lighter where the oxi-
dized metal led to verdigris.
I have come very far afield from my comfort as Captain First
Rank, if only to ask the gloved culler a dangerous hanging question,
and here, in the reliquary, I go forth.
“What brought you back here?” I say. “To preserve the wolves?”
Libor says nothing, walks a few strides ahead of me down the
street. When I catch up to him we walk parallel, silent, until he
swerves towards me and bumps me almost flirtatiously, then stops
in front of me.
“Here is one for you,” he says, snapping a hand off my chest.
“Two squirrels are on a date in a restaurant. It’s a human restaurant.
The male is ordering for the female, as is his pleasure, very chivalric
animal. He asks the waiter about the special. He says ‘We’d like to

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share your special. What is your special?’ ‘The special is trout in a
yogurt sauce,’ says the waiter.

Squirrel asks the waiter, ‘Is there dill in the yogurt sauce?’ The
waiter says, ‘Yes. There is dill in the yogurt sauce.’ The squirrel says,
‘I can’t stomach it. Raises Cain in me. No dill.’ The waiter says, ‘It’s
already in the mixture. We can’t remove the dill from the mixture.’
The squirrel says, ‘Fine, no trout, then.’ Now, looking at the menu
again, the squirrel says, ‘We’ll have the braised beef and noodles.’
Waiter says, ‘Of course.’ The squirrel then asks, ‘Is the beef from a
Red Gorabov head of cattle?’ The waiter says, ‘I don’t think so. I’m
not sure.’ The squirrel asks the waiter to go back into the kitchen and
ask the chef the source of the beef. The waiter does this.

Comes back, says, ‘The chef isn’t aware of what breed of cattle
produced the noodle beef.’ The squirrel says, ‘Pity that. I adore Red
Gorabov beef cuts, my wife Vasilisa just the same. We’ll pass on
the beef.’ ‘Okay,’ says the waiter. ‘What might I get you in lieu?’
Squirrel ‘hmmms’ a little and says, ‘Yes! We’d like the Selisian-style
pheasant dumplings.’ Folds the menu up. The waiter says, ‘Good
choice.’ Writes in his little pad snappily, sets to go. ‘Ah,’ says the
squirrel, his hand up. And he asks if they contain ground chives.
The waiter sinks and says, ‘Yes.’ The squirrel says, ‘I find the addi-
tion of ground chives too much of an Asiatic note, a touch which is
fine in your Uyghur dishes, your provincial West Asian consommés,
but here, in I find it registers fatal on the tongue; anomalous.’ The
waiter says, ‘Once again, the chives are already wedded to the ground
pheasant. We cannot undo it.’ The squirrel says, ‘Can I request a
new batch of ground pheasant? My wife and I will gladly wait the
while.’ The waiter says, ‘I’m sorry; it’s too late. All our dumpling
meat is prepared in the morning.’ The squirrel says, ‘I figured as
much. Well,’ - and now he peruses the menu again - ‘What about
the pork hocks in beer?’ The waiter scrambles to write it in his pad,
says ‘Great!’ and grabs their menus, begins walking away; snappy,
happy waiter. But then the squirrel says ‘Wait.’ Waiter sighs, turns
around, says, ‘And now?’ Squirrel says, ‘Are those hocks deboned?’
‘Waiter says, ‘No, and I can’t debone them.’ Squirrel says, ‘What are
the chances someone else does? Can I get them deboned?’ Waiter

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says, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. No.’ Squirrel says, ‘Can you
check?’ Waiter says, ‘I think they’re very busy.’ Squirrel says, ‘It’ll
only take a second.’ ‘They’re very busy,’ repeats the waiter.

Squirrel says, ‘Oh, I don’t think so. If you’d do me the favor of
going and asking, I’d be so pleased.’ The waiter sighs, ‘Fine.’ Squirrel
says, ‘Thank you.’ Waiter goes off. Minute or so passes and the
waiter comes back, says, ‘We can make an exception.’ ‘Wonderful,’
says the squirrel. Waiter writes the order again and begins walking to
the kitchen. Then the squirrel’s arm comes up. ‘Just one more thing,’
he says. Waiter stops dead, takes a mortal second, turns, leaden,
positively leaden. Squirrel says, ‘Can we have the hocks with a side
salad?’ ‘Of course,’ says the waiter, beginning to sprint away. ‘But,’
says the squirrel, ‘can we have red leaf lettuce instead of the standard
kohlrabi?’ Waiter says, ‘We don’t have red leaf.’ Squirrel says, ‘Fine,
but we’d like extra fennel in the salad.’ Waiter says, ‘Fine. Done.’
Squirrel says, ‘And if you please, could you mince the endive and
put it in an anchovy sauce?’ Silence. ‘You want the endive minced
with anchovy sauce,’ says the waiter, incredulously. ‘Yes,” says the
squirrel. ‘My wife likes it that way. Would you make sure before we
order it?’. Waiter shakes his head. ‘I can’t go to the kitchen again.’
Squirrel says, ‘It’ll only take a minute.’ ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ says the waiter
lurchingly. ‘Fine! We can mince the endive and put it in anchovy
sauce.’ ‘I don’t believe you,’ says the squirrel. ‘I’d like it confirmed
if you don’t mind. It’s not that I don’t trust you, you’re quite the
server, I’d just like to know if the endive can be minced in anchovy
sauce before we proceed. From, if you will, kitchen sources.’ The
waiter says, ‘I have other tables, if you don’t mind, sir. If you don’t
mind.’ ‘Oh they’ll wait,’ says the squirrel. ‘They know what your job
is.’ The waiter sinks, his shoulders sort of die in the air, and he goes
back to the kitchen, comes back with a handwritten note from the
chef which says indeed they will mince the endive and put it in an-
chovy sauce. The squirrel reads the note approvingly and says, ‘Fine.
It’s settled. My wife and I will have the pork hocks in beer.’ The
waiter exhales a beautiful, rapturous breath, the greatest exhalation
of his days, and begins heading back to the kitchen when the squirrel
says, ‘You know, I think we’ll cancel the hocks and just have a bowl

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of nuts.’ ‘Nuts?’ says the waiter. ‘Yep. That’s it. Just nuts. Nice big
howl of nuts. Nuts will do.’ Waiter stands there, silent. The squirrel
smiles as wide as the day is long, thinking of nuts; the throbbing of
a native appetite in his gut.”

I shrug.
He exhales.
“I was made a waiter by the State,” he says. “I ran to the
kitchens thinking I could better the nature of Nature. I thought it
insufficient as it was.”
I shrug again.
“Think of rams,” he says. “They need horns because some other
animal has talons. Well there would be no need for horns if their
adversaries did not brandish those riving claws. None of these pred-
ator scrums bears an Empyrean footprint and so, I thought, let us
devise laboratories; let us create a kingdom of noncombatants who
dwell among the forests in perfect synergy. Only a human could rain
peace on the animal kingdom. Then the power plant; the updraft
that killed it.”
“You were going to engineer animals from scratch?” He shakes
his head.
“I had faith. I thought we could be an example to them. We
are the only species that does not accept death, which is the stance
one should prefer. Eventually this nonacceptance would eclipse the
warfare way; our science would render acceptance of death unfash-
ionable. If we couldn’t accept our own death, we wouldn’t accept
anyone else’s.”
He puffs some air out.
“You stay real within yourself, loyal to the spirit of Man and
then without even the faintest renunciation you wake up godless and
fat. Your Man-God has failed you.”
“Is that when you began wearing your gloves?”
He starts at these words, his cold breath joining the wind
against me. “When did you hear about those?” he says.
“Lore among the initiated. Everyone knew.”
“I’ve never been good with disappointment,” he says. “Someone
had to pay. Anything nonhuman accepts death. And I couldn’t kill

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my countrymen. So it was the wolves.” He shakes his head, rub-
bing his wounded hand and repeats, lower this time, “So it was the
wolves.”



You will not sympathize with Libor. All right then. He is military.
He is government.

I am military.
I am government.
Everyone knows we hid what happened. When the reactor
failed. Then our air turned up in Norwegian reindeer; curling like
fugitive eels in their reindeer blood. We took phenomenal heat for
their reindeer; the reindeer became bellwethers of the drift.
To be sure our neighbors have had reindeer trouble. I believe
still there is much they do not know that I know, as does the grand
ferreter of canids Libor Sachko. I know I was once a conscript
medic, in a helicopter that spun above the smoking reactor core,
the propeller lulling me, when my pilot, a certain Yuri, looked over
at me and dropped a lick of drool that unspooled from his lips like
a measure of yarn. He began crying and told me to kiss his wife, his
mother, and to do my best to become him, parrot his gestures in
front of his kids. “Be me,” he said, more urgently and farcically with
each jounce in our hover near the smoking core. He was crying like a
confession, like he’d waited years to tell me. I had only met him once
before. The helicopter began to drop, a straight fall; unrecoverable.
I awoke burning, seared in a jangle of engine wires a pinch wide
of the smoking reactor.
For hours men were loath to come for me; eventually I screamed
“Brothers!” enough that the anticontamination suits began alighting
on the scarred rim of the core. I lived in a bubble for a month, a
reinforced egg among neonatal monitoring tools, a sort of sterile
chrysalis where a mobile of sucking hoses wheezed and rattled, de-
manding a rebirth, gratitude.
“The nuclear magnetism froze your controls,” said my colonel,
standing over my little bubble. “Did the same to your pilot. Ex-

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pired.” So I would have to mimic for his kids. I had lived, healed
clean save for the enduring rosette. Why I was pardoned I do not
know. I haven’t done much asking around to the Fates, have never
probed the Four Winds for answers, they who listen with an open
mouth, not ears.

I never did find his family. They were resettled: ostensibly no-
where, which puts them everywhere, much too thriving to repel with
a stolen conscience.



The street of the little town, its name chalked on a hard rind of
monzonite, has the air of a soundstage, or say, a fairgrounds where
a ride has gone monstrously off-tilt. On one knee in the center of
town, Libor raises his head and howls. An accusatory baying rings
off the iron rails near the shunting portion of the dead train tracks.
High above the station sits the old school, some windows plucked
out. Libor points. I look up. There is the indelible sense that the
wolf, wounded, has followed something unnamable to its birthing
ground. Libor pries the door open and we head inside.

On the wall, exemplary papers flap. There is a caustic barking
upstairs. We walk through the halls, painted green on the first floor,
unfaded baby blue on the second; the stairs leading up to it all snow
and radon. In the hall, Libor slows his gait just a little as we hear
snarling in a classroom, the door marked Kindergarten in colored
paper scraps. He walks in, waving me over from the door. I’m drawn
to the cubbies, where old rucksacks rest in cramped space, and in one,
a blonde doll sits as if on a proscenium stage. Across the room the wolf
cowers in the corner with a snapping jaw. It backs in a few inches and
retracts its head, whimpering. It wants acceptance of something and
Libor is not going to give it; the closest thing he will proffer is the
sedating barrel of his gun, raising it, and the soft plug of the tranque
against its body makes the wolf ours again for the keeping.



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And I stand, in this room, lifting the doll off its stage. Libor
has saved so many wolves now they may never remember there were
people here, that their shredding cries were once the cries of those
less inclined to acceptance.
But if the children are gone, the classrooms are frozen by their
innocence, which volleys from hidden light years on a different
Earth, on the banks of other rivers, safer houses, garishly shielded
from the accosting phantoms of alpha decay. But here in the cubby-
holes, kids’ dolls still nest; peated by the dank of infinity. The dolls
have no breasts, no organs, but their living likenesses who never got
to read the books on the shelves, volumes that stand smirking, these
likenesses have commanded that we forget and let the animals have
their way, for these children can never be as animals again. Who
can blame them for running? It would be hard not to run from the
dust that was invisible but powered the motions of those who fled,
blocking out all the nascent suns.
Somehow the doll, hair turned a shade darker and dusty in the
flat palm of my hand, sees behind it and regrets not having words
that might get its secret to the kids; who are no longer children, far
away, in distant oblasts.



We are headed back to the camp. Libor leading his wolf on a sled
found in the school’s gymnasium storage, the dash runners braised
with a kind of phosphorous light, easily seen if one wants to, the
wolf’s long tail fanning the air though it is soundly sleeping. There
is laughter across the Pripyat; the unproctored ranks in the camp,
playing like hoary field rodents, the closest thing we have to hu-
mans until the job is done. A little ways across the river ice, the wolf
opens its left eye, looks up at Libor and I know what it wants: it is
asking for relinquishment, but Libor, looking ahead, offers only the
promise of birth.

He is angry. I am grateful.
It is snowing and it will snow till it doesn’t.

233



Hooked

By Terry Sanville

The moving van rumbled downhill, away from his mother’s home
that overlooked Jones Valley. Daren passed it going in the opposite
direction and watched it disappear from his rearview mirror. He
pulled into the shade next to the house he’d left as a high school
gradate twenty years before.

Climbing out of his SUV, he circled the building, checked
the windows and doors of the mock log cabin tucked beneath the
crest of the hill and bordered by pine forest. The estate sale staff had
cleared out the house and locked it tight. The realtors had already
hung a lock box on the front door and posted a for sale sign off the
county road.

Daren sat on the front porch’s heavy timber bench and fin-
gered his carved initials and those of his boyhood friends and sister.
Mourning doves cooed in the late afternoon, as if welcoming the
cooler air and relief from summer.

His gaze passed over the ramshackle garage separated from the
house by hard-packed ground. What started as a board & batten tool
shed had been enlarged by his father to include space for the family
Jeep Wagoneer and his Pop’s workshop. The same old railroad padlock
hung from the side door. Daren wondered if the estate sale people had
removed the junk. He moved to the garage’s lone window and stared
inside. The dirty glass and the darkness didn’t let him see much.

He considered breaking the padlock, but instead used the
SUV’s tire iron to pry off the hasp screwed into the rotting door-
frame. One quick yank with the iron and the door swung open. He

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reached inside his sports coat, grasped the pocket flask and took a
long drink. Entering the darkness needed fortified courage, to ward
off ghosts he told himself.

Sliding along the garage’s front wall he unbolted the rollup
door, grabbed its handle and heaved. With a high-pitched screech,
the metal door slid upward until the setting sun lit everything. Most
of the fifty-years worth of junk was gone. A few of his Pop’s corroded
hand tools hung on the back wall and Daren’s rusted mountain bike
dangled on hooks from the rafters. The garage smelled of Pennzoil,
Tide laundry detergent and sawdust.

A tiny fishing rod and reel hung from a hook on the sidewall,
a present from his mother for his ninth birthday. The reel had a
pushbutton plastic drag. The stubby rod had lost one of its line
guides. He took it down from the hook and moved outside, slumped
beneath a pine, and stared down-valley at glimmering Shasta Lake.
He remembered the weekends fishing its coves with his father. The
memory of the last time when he was thirteen flooded his brain. He
took another swig from his flask and continued staring.



“Hey, Dare, get the lead out,” his father shouted from the front
porch.

“Just a frickin’ minute. I’m coming, I’m coming.”
“Watch your mouth,” his mother said and handed him a bag
full of snacks for their all-afternoon outing. His father had already
taken the ice chest to the car.
“Yeah, yeah. But why do I hafta go fishing with Pop? We never
catch anything and I end up getting burned.” Daren pointed to his
peeling forearms.
“Well, put some of this on.” She handed him a tube of greasy
suntan lotion. “And be nice to your father. He loves your afternoons
at the lake and he needs somebody there with him to…”
Daren opened his mouth to utter a wisecrack but decided
against it. He knew why his Pop liked to fish with him, and it wasn’t
for some male bonding bullshit or love of the outdoors.

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“I just need to unwind a bit,” his father had told a nine-year-old
Daren when they first started fishing. “You understand, don’tcha
son? The damn grocery business is hell.”
“Sure, Pop, sure, I guess.”
But it took young Daren a couple of years to figure it out and
it scared him, and later made him steaming mad.
He pushed through the screen door spotted with flies.
His father leaned against the Wagoneer, sipping a Budweiser
tall boy. “Come on, come on. I wanna get there before the sun hits
the ridge.”
Muttering to himself, Daren slung the snack bag onto the back
seat and climbed into the front. His father tooted the horn and waved
at his wife. She stood on the porch grinning, but with sad eyes.
Daren saw that look more and more often. He and his two-
years-younger sister whispered about it after lights out in their
shared bedroom.
“What’s wrong with Mama?” Bridget asked. “She looks so sad.
I found her crying.”
“How should I know? Probably something you did.”
“Oh shut up. I didn’t do anything wrong. But Pop…”
“Yeah, something’s going on but I don’t know what.”
“You think he’s cheating on her again?”
“Hell no. That was a long time ago. And what do you know
about cheating?”
“I’m a girl. We know stuff.”
“Well, he’s not messing around. I think his…his girlfriend at
the store, ya know that blonde checker, left the county.”
“Why do men do that?”
“You’re asking me? It’s too weird to talk about, so shut up
already.
“You shut up.”
His father steered the Wagoneer downhill toward the county
road, the beer wedged between his legs where he could reach it easily.
They drove in silence for miles, the August sun blasting Daren’s face
through the windshield. His father slowed the car and turned onto a
barely-visible dirt track, at an unlocked gate with “No Trespassing”

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posted. Daren hopped out and opened the gate to let his Pop drive
through. He worried that some day his father would keep on going
and leave him there, stranded. He wondered what would be worse.

Daren closed the gate and rejoined his father. They bounced
across fields clogged with dried wild oats and over hills covered with
new growth pines until descending a knoll to the lake. Low rolling
ridges separated their deep-cut cove from adjoining ones. The lake
stood at least twenty feet below high water level and looked like a
bathtub with a dirty brown ring. Daren and his father set their gear
near the forest’s edge at the base of a tree and walked down the steep
slope to the water.

“Nothing will be biting until the sun drops a bit,” his father
said. “You can fish if ya want but I’m resting in the shade ’til then.”

His father trudged upslope, slipping on the gravely soil, and
propped himself against the tree. He took out another beer, the pop
of its pull-tab breaking the silence. Daren joined him in the shade
and retrieved his hardback collection of works by Joseph Conrad.
He read to pass the time and to take him away from that boring pas-
toral setting. His father offered him a beer, a bribe to keep him from
telling Mom about his behavior. Daren shook his head and kept
reading Heart of Darkness, the slow-paced but masterful novella. In
some ways, he felt that the featureless pine forest that surrounded
them must be like the impenetrable African jungle.

When his father finished the beer he handed the empty to
Daren who walked to the lake’s edge, filled the can with stones and
water, then heaved it as far from shore as he could. It was a feeble
attempt by his Pop to hid from his wife how much he actually drank.
As usual, after the fifth or sixth tall boy, he started singing: old rail-
road tunes from his youth; hippie-dippy folk songs from the ’60s;
and love ballads that he had sung to Daren’s mother back when he
played guitar, before his hands developed the shakes that only went
away when he drank.

Daren sat with his father reading the long novella until the
light turned from silver to gold and the sun rested on the far hills.
He picked up his rod and tiny tackle box, skirted the woods and
dropped down into the next cove, leaving his father singing to the

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squirrels and stellar’s jays in his off-key tenor voice. He continued to
read, trying to concentrate, to let the story take him away. At least
the ridgeline between the coves blocked his father’s caterwauling.

The dusk came on gradually. The mosquitoes came out for
their evening meal. Daren rolled his shirtsleeves down and raised
his collar, but the insects proved merciless. He grabbed his gear
and hustled back to his father’s drinking spot. But he wasn’t there.
The ice chest laid open, empty beer cans scattered around it. Daren
scanned the forest and the lakeshore but couldn’t spot him.

“Hey Pop, where are ya?” he yelled, the muggy dusk sucking
up the sound.

After repeating his call several times, he checked the car, fig-
uring maybe the drunken songster had stretched out in back and
fallen asleep, not the first time. But the Wagoneer stood empty.

“Hey Pop, where the hell are ya?” he yelled, heard the fear in
his voice, a feeling that grew as the darkness came on.

With no wind, the lake stood quiet, its copper-colored surface
glowing in the twilight. A few feet from shore, a rock piercing its
lacquered surface, one that he hadn’t noticed before. He squinted
his eyes and focused. It wasn’t a rock, but the toe end of a man’s
boot. Letting out a shriek, he tore downslope, almost falling, and
splashed into the water. He stopped, then moved toward the boot.
In the waning light, he stared down at his father’s submerged face,
eyes and mouth wide open, head and neck twisted at a painful angle.
No bubbles floated to the surface.

For a moment Daren couldn’t move, a scream stuck in his
throat. He reached forward and grabbed his father’s shirtfront and
hauled him up. Water poured from the open mouth. The eyes stared
at nothing. Daren lurched toward the shore, dragging his father, and
laid him out. The body seemed small, not much bigger than his own,
as if its vastness had shrunk when the spirit departed. He pressed a
finger against the artery in his Pop’s neck, felt nothing. Tearing open
the shirt, he placed an ear against the hairless chest…nothing. He
heard no breath sounds. Nothing moved.

Daren rolled the body on its side and pounded its back. He
started mouth-to-mouth and chest crunches, trying to remember

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what the firemen had shown his class at school. The darkness came
on but he continued working it, sweating. Salty tears streaked his
cheeks and dripped from his quivering upper lip. He continued until
his arms gave out, leaving him gasping. A night heron flew overhead,
squawking. The first rustle of wind wrinkled the glassy lake.

Rocking back on his haunches, Daren stared into the near
darkness. His hands trembled from fear and exhaustion. The last
glow of sunlight faded. He retrieved the flashlight from the car’s
glove box, pulled his father up and carried him to the tailgate, in no
hurry to do anything, except maybe flee.



Far off Shasta Lake looked beautiful in the sunset. Daren stared at the
dust-covered fishing rod lying by his side. He should give it to his own
son; his wife would like that. Maybe they could fish the Sacramento
together, build some kind of connection between them before teenage
hormones pulled them apart. He picked up the rod. His hands trem-
bled. He reached inside his jacket and grasped the flask of booze. A
night bird flew overhead, squawking. He reared back and heaved the
flask into the thick forest, closed up the garage, and drove away.

Terry Sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his art-
ist-poet wife (his in-house editor) and two plump cats (his in-house
critics). He writes full time, producing short stories, essays, poems,
and novels. Since 2005, his short stories have been accepted by
more than 280 literary and commercial journals, magazines, and
anthologies including The Potomac Review, The Bitter Oleander,
and Shenandoah. He was nominated twice for Pushcart Prizes and
once for inclusion in Best of the Net anthology. His stories have
been listed as “The Most Popular Contemporary Fiction of 2017”
by the Saturday Evening Post. Terry is a retired urban planner and
an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist – who once played with a
symphony orchestra backing up jazz legend George Shearing.

240

International Bridge

By Steve McBrearty

Traffic near the entrance to the International Bridge from
El Paso, Texas, into Juarez, Mexico, was infuriatingly stop-
and-go this Saturday after New Year’s, 20 ____ . The bridge
was clogged with tourists, shoppers searching for bargains, and
college students searching for simple pleasures of the soul—or
simple pleasures of another kind. The afternoon sun through a
haze of dust and pollution seemed a stupendous red globe, as
garish as the piñatas and the straw monkeys and the jade rings
hawked in makeshift stalls in the Juarez city square. Though
clear and bright, the day was harshly cold, and along the Mex-
ican side of the riverbank a kind of vagabond army warmed
itself around ground fires built from abandoned furniture, tree
limbs, paper bags, toys. The aroma was a tangy chemical stew,
prosecutions and lawsuits on the American side, a simple act
of survival over there.

On the American side, I nudged my Nissan hatchback along
the jammed-up inside lane toward the bridge entrance, feeling
about as romantic as a tub of wet laundry. (And I wanted badly to
feel romantic—it seemed essential to my survival—my entire fu-
ture depended on it.) Smoothing the back of my hair with a free
hand, a nervous, almost autonomic movement calculated to buy
time in stressful situations, I stole a glance at my live-in girlfriend
Jane Fountain, who sat scanning the beleaguered landscape through

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her passenger side window. Jane provided no outward sign of my
existence. The back side of her blond hair seemed to rebuke me. She
seemed determined to ignore me, my grimly optimistic smile and
my gestures intended to convey a certain cultured savoir faire, and
these gallant signals fell wasted, like trash to the bottom of a dump-
ster. I recognized her tone. Our 580-mile drive here from our home
in Austin had been pretty much a wall of silence interrupted by an
occasional grunt or groan. These communications seemed a fitting
summary of the last year or two of our life together.

I fought back an urge to shout, to grab Jane by the shoul-
ders and shake sense, shake zest, shake excitement into her. An en-
lightened as well as practical young man who understood the legal
and emotional ramifications of physical assault, I exhaled through
clenched teeth instead.

“What’s wrong, Sweetheart?” I said.
“Nothing,” Jane said. She always said “nothing” when I asked
her what was wrong and there was obviously something wrong. She
seemed to stare even harder out the window. She was one person
who could really put the old stone face on. She could freeze out an
exploding volcano.
“I mean, you’re being so quiet,” I said.
“I’m not being quiet,” she said. I tried to think of some way to
crack her unbending façade of silence.
“Hey, isn’t it great being back here again?” I said hopefully.
“I had such a great time then. Didn’t you? Man!” I punched the
steering wheel with an open fist, a cheerful, jovial, fooling-around
sort of punch, the punch of a contented young man just hanging
out with his favorite girl. A girl who liked to talk to him. A girl who
laughed at his jokes. A girl who thought he was damn worth hanging
out with.
“I had a good time,” she said. That was all she said. I bit my
lip to keep from screaming. I gripped the steering wheel tight. That
didn’t seem near enough to say for such a monumental occasion in
our lives.
We eased forward in traffic, soaked in silence. For me, anyway,
the unspoken motive for our trip to the Mexican border and then

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to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in New Mexico was a last-ditch
effort to salvage our dying relationship. Years ago, we had traveled
this same dry, desolate route in the first idyllic throes of romance,
still college students, and all was bliss and wanton pleasure and plans
for the future. We had met as staff members on The Daily Texan, the
university newspaper—I was a features writer and she was a photog-
rapher—and we finished falling in love on an assignment to cover
small town life in Kyle, Texas, 30 miles south of Austin. She thought
I was funny then. She thought I was smart and goofy and a little bit
smartass, with the smartass enhancing the other qualities. We joked
about her name—I called her Fontainebleau, Overflowing Foun-
tain, Fountain of Plenty. Now I didn’t know what she thought. We
had lived together for more than five years now and the glamour and
allure of those halcyon days had hardened gradually into drudgery
and routine. Sometimes we passed each other in the hallway like
sleepwalkers, no eye contact, staring straight ahead.

We crossed over the bridge into Mexico and the traffic was
moving faster, helter-skelter it seemed, cars coming from every direc-
tion, drivers honking, gesturing through open windows, shouting.
Jane leaned forward suddenly, attentive, alert, and from her changed
posture I assumed she was poised to offer some words of advice or
support. I caught a glimpse of the Jane I knew riding with me to an
article assignment, camera cradled in her blue-jeaned lap, sunglasses
perched pertly atop her head. Instead, she pulled her bulky ski jacket
more tightly around her shoulders. Her head swiveled to scrutinize
the street scene.

“Do you have any idea where you’re going?” she said. The
question threw me on the defensive, puncturing my spirits further.
I scrambled to answer.

“Sure I know,” I said. “I remember this street from last time.
This doesn’t look familiar to you?”

“Notreally,”Janesaid.Shewavedherhandimperiously,likeaqueen
reviewing the royal guard. “It all looks like one big clusterfuck to me.”
“Really?” I said. “I mean, I remember all of this. That big statue over
there. The dentist’s office. The market.”

She shrugged.
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“Remember, you took pictures of everything? You were going
to send them to Shutterbug magazine.”
“That turned out to be a dud,” she said.
“They were great pictures. You always took great pictures.”
We drove on, searching doggedly for a certain Caribbe-
an-themed seafood restaurant where we had enjoyed a sumptuous,
romantic dinner that first time through. The restaurant had assumed
almost mythic proportions in my mind, a deep, dark, mystical cave
of a place, with a roaring fireplace and background big band music
and waiters who swarmed to our every need like Ninja mind readers.
After dinner—and a Courvoisier nightcap—we had returned to a
sparkling clean Holiday Inn on the American side and made love
madly, frantically, desperately, languidly, casually, all at the same
time. I remembered the peaceful glow after, a serene security, the
sure promise of many happy years ahead. In the present, I screeched
around a corner, swaying to dodge a one-legged man with crutches
and one pants leg dangling loose.
Dusk was turning to dark now, but I pushed on, dogged now
in my depression, jaw clenched hard in determination. Daydreaming
as I barreled through an intersection, I fantasized a sexual encounter
with a younger, more affectionate Jane that was intense and exquisite
in its detail. In that split second, a mangy brown dog squired out
from behind a parked car, followed by a thin, dirty boy, his uncut,
uncombed black hair bouncing up and down on his shoulders like a
cape. I hit the brakes hard, skidding sideways to a stop in the center
of the road. A car pinballed around me, honking. Jane screamed. I
cursed. Dog and boy alighted on the far curb and trotted on, seem-
ingly unfazed. The air smelled like burnt rubber. My arms and legs
flopped spasmodically. Jane covered her face with her hands and
began to cry. Depleted, emotionally drained, I lashed out, releasing
all of my pent-up frustration in a geyser of ugly emotion. I felt it
coming on. I couldn’t stop it.
“What the hell has happened to you?” I said, pulling the car
sharply to the curb, engine idling. I knew that my voice sounded
strident and shrill, that everything I said would only serve to aggra-
vate the situation. The car radio played on, a heavy bass throbbing,

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as if in mockery, as if by divine orchestration. “Nothing pleases you
anymore. Nothing makes you happy. You seem pissed off all the
time. I feel helpless. Am I that big of a jerk, or what?”

I tried to move Jane’s hands from her face but she jerked away.
I slammed the palms of both hands against the steering wheel, hard,
bruising myself. The horn sounded. Jane screamed again.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Are you out of your
fucking mind?”

“Maybe so,” I said.
“Shit,” Jane said. “I don’t think I can do this anymore. I don’t
see how we can be together anymore.”
Her words resounded in my mind like a gong of death. I tried
to regroup. I tried to pull us back together. I tried to will us back.
“Come on, Sweetheart,” I said. “Let’s try. We’ve got too much
history behind us to give up now.”
“Let’s find the restaurant,” Jane said. “Let’s just find the god-
damned restaurant.”
“I’ll find the restaurant,” I said.
Leaning forward, I drove savagely through the dark, myste-
rious, shadowy streets of mid-town Juarez, past a row of food mar-
kets, past doctor’s offices advertising discounts to Americans, past a
moribund shopping center, silence pressing in on us like a cosmic
force. It felt like driving through a rat’s maze, every turn leading us
farther from a solution. Praying, praying harder than I had in years,
I turned left onto a broad, stylish boulevard, well-lit and divided
with a median and lined with palm trees and sleek storefront win-
dows—and stopped.
“It’s here,” I said.
“What’s here?” Jane said.
“Our restaurant is here,” I said. “It’s right up ahead. I’m sure of it.”
Jane shrugged.
“What do you think?” I said.
“Go for it,” she said.
Fortified by that ringing vote of support, I prowled slowly
down the avenue, scanning for the entrance to the restaurant. Every
move seemed existential now, rife with consequences, every decision

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make or break. Desperate now, I pulled over suddenly to ask a man
standing on the sidewalk.

“?Que el es risarante pescadora?” I said. I remembered this much
Spanish from my college years.

“!Aqui!” he said, waving his arms animatedly, as a man who is
pleased and proud to be of service is wont to do. He pointed a finger
to direct us to turn right at the intersection ahead.

“!Gracias!” I said, shouting. I straightened in my seat. “See
Babe, I was right! It’s right down there!”

“Fabulous,” Jane said, tightening her coat around her shoulders.
We turned onto a smaller cross street, quiet and empty. It was
almost completely dark now, a winter night setting in, our head-
lights piercing the inky cityscape like tracer bullets. And then—there
in the middle of the block was the restaurant, it’s neon sign flashing
like jazz music. But no parking lot. The space next door was filled by
a dentist’s office. The street parking was full. We idled uncertainly
outside the restaurant entrance.
Another shaggy-haired boy materialized outside my window
then, pointing, I assumed, to tell me where to park. I looked uncer-
tainly to Jane, who shrugged assent. I thrust a $5 bill into the boy’s
hand, and we followed him running down a narrow alleyway that
seemed to absorb all light. We were nowhere, anywhere, a pinpoint
in the universe, an electron rocketing through space.
“?Aqui?” I said.
“Si,” the boy said.
“Gracias,” I said.
Praying valiantly, desperately, hopelessly, I parked against a
high wall in a narrow space between battered pick-up trucks. Be-
neath the tires lay gravel, large chunks like rocks. Opening the door,
I meant to thank the boy, but he had already disappeared. I slipped
my arm around Jane’s shoulder—God, I was happy that she let
me—and we walked slowly together in the darkness, heads down,
tacking against the wind.
“This is spooky,” Jane said.
“You want to blow it off?” I said. “We can go back and find
something on the other side.”

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“Let’s get inside the restaurant,” Jane said. “Let’s go on in.”
Going in seemed essential now, a line that must be crossed—
or our relationship would be over. That seemed unbearable, un-
thinkable, unimaginable. I couldn’t live without Jane. I couldn’t be
without Jane. I’d never find another Jane.
From outside, the restaurant seemed smaller than on our last
visit, wedged in between buildings. But it was still marked by a can-
dy-striped awning and a generous bay window, hand-lettered with
the especial de dia. A doorman in livery ushered us in, guiding Jane
along with a decorous hand behind her back. Inside, the lively strains
of 1930s American Big Band music wafted through a bewitching
world of chandeliers and cigarette smoke and white-clothed tables
with flickering candles set in liquid wax. The maître d’, a husky,
middle-aged man with a gray mustache and a bow tie and bow legs,
rushed to us with alacrity and concern, taking Jane’s hand in his,
treating us like torrid young lovers, not jaded live-ins searching for
a whiff of vanquished romance. We were seated, with ceremony, at
a rear table, near the fire, arranged so that we were scrunched up
together, pushed against the wall. I tried to take advantage of the
situation. I tried to pretend that nothing had happened in the search
for the restaurant or on the drive over or in the last two years.
“Well, here we are!” I said, popping the table top sprightly
with a fist.
“Yes, we are here,” Jane said. There was a glimmer of recovery
in her tone, a vestigial trace of her sweet, silly, jokey, amorous self.
The word “yes” was one she had always said when were in the middle
of a good quality back-and-forth exchange. She smiled—I think
it was the first time all day. I didn’t want to overinterpret, but I
thought I detected some movement in a positive direction. I smiled
cautiously myself.
The menu arrived. It was extensive, six or eight pages, an eclectic
mixture of the exotic and the sublime—Lobster Thermador, cabrito,
Blue Marlin, Blackened Tuna Steaks, Buffalo Chops. The Blue Mar-
garitas we had ordered arrived promptly, with a touch of fanfare,
tall and icy with a line of salt around the rim and a multi-colored
mini-parasol sticking up gaily.

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“Good!” I said, taking a sip.
“Strong!” Jane said.
“That’s good!” I said. I held my glass out and—after a mo-
ment’s hesitation—she bumped mine with hers. I took another
chance. I placed my hand carefully on top of hers. And squeezed
softly. She didn’t pull away.
But conservations stopped abruptly as gunfire sounded from
somewhere near the building. Pop! Pop! Pop! And everyone ducked
down instinctively, scanning the doorway for armed intruders. I
threw my arm around Jane’s shoulders, holding her tight against me.
The maître d’ appeared to reassure us.
“Fireworks,” he said. “The new year.”
“Are you sure?” Jane said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It is a tradition here.”
“Give me my goddam drink,” Jane said.
A strong Margarita mixed with fireworks that you thought
were gunshots is perhaps a guaranteed mood-changer. Maybe my
brain was addled from our long drive on a cold winter’s day, bucking
a stiff north wind the entire way. Maybe the physical contact with
Jane triggered some long-dormant fountain of desire in both of us.
Whatever, my outlook began to change. I began to unwind. My jaw
loosened up. I smiled. I took another long sip. Jane looked pretty
and sweet—and approachable. Relaxing, unclenching, I could see
again the allure and the humor and the romance in our relationship,
the affection we felt for each other, the powerful attraction ignited in
the beginning. We had gone through a lot together. We had shared
hopes, dreams, aspirations. We had met with adversity.
Jane smiled, radiantly, effulgently, wantonly, I thought, in a
way that I couldn’t remember seeing in a long time, and impulsively I
leaned in for a kiss. She turned her face toward me. Our lips met. My
heart was beating fast. I wasn’t sure what was happening. I wasn’t sure
why it was happening. But I felt a change. In this instant, in this place,
I felt safe and good. Maybe this was the crossing we had to make.
Maybe it was necessary to hit rock bottom before we could climb
back out. A little while earlier was rock bottom. This was the first step
up and back. The recent past receded. I remembered then why I had

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