Adelaide Literary Award Anthology 2018: SHORT STORIES, Vol. One

SHORT STORIES
even his father couldn’t keep him from being sent off to Sockanos-
sett, the youth reform facility in Cranston. He was still there when
his father got on the bad side of someone better connected and was
shot down in the street. Tony showed no reaction when he was told,
but immediately began planning his retribution.

He bided his time and at the age of eighteen started working
for a friend of his father doing odds and ends. It didn’t take long
before he was given some additional responsibilities as an enforcer
and driver for his boss who trusted him. Not long after that the
same local crew that had encroached on his father’s territory started
leaning on his boss. Tony volunteered to eliminate his father’s killer
and make a statement while doing so. This was his first hit and it
established his reputation, especially when the man’s head turned up
in a dumpster owned by his boss’s rival.

They were still badly outnumbered and probably wouldn’t have
survived if his boss hadn’t established an alliance with Albee. It was
a violent couple of years, even for Providence, with killings taking
place all over the city including Federal Hill, the Italian stronghold
once always thought to be a safe neighborhood. The violence became
commonplace and somewhat accepted and a small Italian restaurant
on Atwells Avenue became popular after a sanctioned hit took place
in a booth near the front door. Customers would request that booth
and be willing to wait. Providence was always a very tolerant city
with corrupt politicians being forgiven for their crimes and some-
times reelected. Albee recognized Tony’s potential and took him
under his wing. Albee was smart enough to treat Tony as you would
any explosive; useful in certain situations but needing to be handled
with extreme care.

Providence wasn’t the same city today, with tourists now vis-
iting a much safer Federal Hill, eating at sidewalk cafes and pur-
chasing traditional Italian pastries and other desserts.

Prostitution wasn’t even legal anymore. For years it wasn’t a pri-
ority due to the lack of specific laws and codes for prosecution. Street
hookers were harassed and picked up occasionally in the neighbor-
hoods but for the most part ignored when they lined up outside the old
railroad station. A small hotel on Washington Street was once known

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for its large number of prostitutes hanging out in the bar. Rooms were
let by the hour, not the day. Today it was now low income housing
helping to provide homes for some of the city’s homeless.

Tony didn’t know what to expect when he pulled up in front
of the large old Victorian. It badly needed a coat of paint. Just off
Prairie Avenue in South Providence, the neighborhood had changed
too, from a mostly black population when Tony was growing up to
a mixed neighborhood including Asians and Hispanics. Always a
poor and violent area, it still attracted immigrants as a place to get a
start or a foothold but also street gangs fighting to protect their turf.
Tony did feel a connection to the woman in the house, somewhat
protective. If asked he wouldn’t be able to explain his feelings.

He was just about to get out of the car when his phone began
vibrating. Tony rarely got calls but had expected this one. He could
tell by Albee’s voice he was pleased.

“Our friends in New York were very appreciative of your assis-
tance. Will you be back tonight?”

“Dunno, stopping in Providence.”
“OK. Talked to our partners. They are in agreement that
maybe we should get involved with that thing I’ve been worried
about. Has to be handled very carefully. We’ll talk in the morning.”
“All right. I’ll be back early.” Albee had already briefed him
on what he wanted him to do. Albee had had also stressed that he
should minimize the violence. He would try but things happen.
He sat in the car for a few more minutes staring at the house.
When he was a boy he had come here with his father at least once a
week. Often they would stay overnight. The women here were kind
to him and he would often bring some toys with him when he was
small. He would wait in a room off the main parlor and they would
check in on him and bring him snacks from time to time and marvel
on how well behaved and quiet he was. If they weren’t staying over
his father would come out after a few hours and they would go home.
If they were staying, she would come out and get him and bring him
back to her room. His father would already be asleep on one side of
her bed with the blankets and sheets in disarray. She would climb in
beside him and pat the place next to her. Laying down next to her,

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she would cover him up. He remembered falling asleep smelling faint
traces of her perfume with her arms wrapped tightly around him. This
was the only woman he could remember his father ever being with.

Knocking on the door, it only took a few seconds before it
opened, someone must have been watching the street. A young,
pretty, dark skinned woman stood smiling at him, stepping back to
let him enter. She led him into what used to be called the parlor. It
was late and only a few women remained. The room hadn’t changed
much with its old fashioned furniture and floor length velvet drapes.
The wingback sofa and chairs looked like they may have been reup-
holstered, he couldn’t tell, but the furniture was in good condition.
There were a few scratches on the end tables and the coffee table.
The only significant change was now the women were of multiple
races and not just black.

The woman who let him in turned and still smiling addressed
him. She had one hand on her hip. “How can we help you, sweetie?”

“Vanessa.”
“Nessie? Nessie don’t do no business! She’s what you call man-
agement.” She was laughing when she said it.
An older woman who recognized him from before spoke
up. “She’ll see him, tell her Tony is here.” The serious tone of her
voice made it clear it wasn’t up for discussion. The younger woman
shrugged and left the room.
Tony stood patiently waiting and no one invited him to sit
down. He was aware as always that he was scaring them, and again,
without intending to. They were relieved when Vanessa entered the
room. She smiled at him and he actually smiled back.
“Long time, Tony.”
“Long time.” Tony stood there looking her over. A tall attractive
black woman, she had aged well. Her hair was all gray now and she
seemed a little curvier but not really fat. She had to be at least sixty.
She knew better than to hug him in public so she took him by
the hand and led him back to her room.
Her room was larger than the others and had a sitting area and
a small kitchenette. Several prints depicting Narraganset Bay were
on the wall.

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“Coffee?” He nodded in response and she poured him a cup
from a half full coffee pot not having to ask him how he took it. She
didn’t bother to offer him something stronger; she knew he didn’t
drink.
They sat on the small sofa together and she talked while he
listened, nodding from time to time and occasionally offering one or
two word comments. She talked about people they both knew and
about things from the past and about her life now.
“Do you need anything, are they treating you all right?” This
was the first thing of any significance Tony had said and she smiled
in response.
“No, honey, I’m fine. They leave me alone but how about you?
Are you hungry? I could make you something.”
“No, thanks. I stopped and ate on the highway.”
“Are you staying over? You look tired.” She looked genuinely
concerned.
“I’d like to.”
“Come on.” She reached out and took his hand again and he
followed her to her bed. She was already in a low cut nightgown and
climbed in and patted the place beside her.
He slowly undressed putting his shoes under the bed and
folding his clothes neatly and placing them on a nearby chair.
Stripped down to just his boxer shorts he climbed in with his back
towards her. She wrapped her arms around him tightly and within
minutes he was fast asleep.

152

The King of Siam

By M Cid D’Angelo

Bernie Dill had a life beyond the dark grit of the nasty garbage
existence wound up in his bedroll; a bedroll made up of cardboard
and rags and papers meant to keep the night cold away, even in the
desert. The desert was cold at night.

To be precise, Bernie had had a life beyond it all, at one time.
Nowadays he’d had little to show for it in the dregs of the squat-
ters repose. The Repose. The VILLAGE. Ah, now, who had once
dreamed that name up? The same person with a penchant for New
Age philosophy and flair who tacked a Tarot card up on the grimy,
damaged wall yonder, no doubt, he’d often wondered. The card was
the Four of Swords. A man lay there on that card in a tomb, his
hands clasped on his chest. Repose from the World. How long had it
been tacked there? No one there would say or could say. It remained,
despite the ins and the outs and the go-betweens.

Four of Swords. That was like the Four of Spades on a regular
poker deck, Dill realized, guessing from the time he’d haunted the
card sharp tables. The Four of Swords and the tomb were apt there in
the squat, possibly, because no one who squatted gave much thought
to the luxury of gambling save for their very lives. Everybody needed
some spirituality.

“Who stole my parasol!” From Bony Delia atop the heap of
ragged raggedy rags and chaos from the center of the hovel. “Which
one of you stinking bastards stole my parasol!”

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“You don’t have a fucking parasol!” Came the retort from the
old man, Lee, his scrunched up Asian face like a prune. He was over
two hundred years old, or so everyone thought.
“You stole my parasol!”
“No one stole your goddamn parasol you crazy fucking bitch.”
This led to a series of scowls between the two ancient beings
who, tempered and worn by the elements, could be twenty years
old as much as they could be a thousand. Leather faces, wrinkled
and creases. Lee, for example, was a wicker basket of a man. Bernie
figured someone could carry him around like an empty sack over
his shoulder.
“Black Nigger Bitch.”
“Asian Bastard!”
So on and so on. And then Bony Delia strode over and began
hitting the old man with a stick. Seriously. She’d found a two-by-
four in the rubbish that served as her pile. There was enough power
and spryness within Lee’s limbs to take it from her and twist her
brown arm behind her back and make her yelp in pain.
“Shut up!” Cried Gonzalo in the only English (reputedly) he
knew.
“There was a chance that Bony Delia was related to Lee, despite
being black. It was speculated among higher circles of bums along
the Village. She could be his daughter, or his wife, or his mistress –
was or had. She had this Asian look in her creased burlap face. Asian
Black American.
She found her disputed parasol in the shadows of the damaged
door.
“Anyone have a match?” Bernie asked because it would be get-
ting cold soon.
Gonzalo flung a book of matches at him.
It was best to save for later because it was nowhere near time
to do anything. Lee bitched to him about it. Hey priest, father, give
me that book back if you ain’t gonna make us a fire.
“I’m not a priest,” Bernie said. “I was a preacher. A Pentecost.”
“Preach it then, preacher.” From Gonzalo who rolled around
in his dirty rags. He told everyone that he spoke no English. No

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habla, Jack and Jill. He was crazy. Everybody thought that. Even
for a Mexican.

“Make some fire rain down,” put in Lee. “You’ve got the Voice
of God you sonofabitch.”

“He’s a holy sonofabitch,” said Gonzalo.
Racism is strong among the swine, Bernie thought. Who was
going to care?
“You’re speaking some mighty fine English for an illegal Mex-
ican who doesn’t speak English,” Bernie said.
Gonzalo shut up, remembering.
“Spanglish,” reminded Lee.
“As if you should talk, Slant,” from Bony Delia.
They all went quiet for a long moment.
“Give us a prayer, preacher man,” Bony Delia said. “Bless this
mess sorta stuff.”
“Fuck off.”
Everyone hated each other. They knew this. It was just the way
of things. It was the one thing they could all agree upon.
“Somebody stole my cigarettes,” Bony Delia cried, casting
about in her squalor. “Which one of you assholes stole my pack of
cigarettes?”
“No one stole anything from you, you crazy bitch,” said Lee and
the whole cursing insult thing began again. “I’m the King of Siam!”
“You’re the King of Bullshit.”
“Make us a fire, preacher,” said Gonzalo in English again.
Not yet, Bernie thought. At least there were matches this time –
no more trying to cause a fire with friction by thrashing a stick back
and forth on concrete. That didn’t work – it just made a huge noise
that kept everyone awake.
“He’s not making a goddamn fire, he just wanted the book of
matches,” Bony Delia said.
“Give those back you thief,” Lee said. “Preachers are always
stealing things. If not your money, your belongings. What’s God
going to say when you die off, preacher man?”
“I’m not a preacher anymore. I’m not a priest. I’m not a
preacher.”

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“You can say that again.”
Gonzalo was fully awake now, staring at Bernie.
“What’s wrong with you, José?”
“Que?”
“Bullshit! You can speak English better than anyone here,”
Lee said.
“Why are all of you so fucking negative?” Bony Delia said. “We
used to sing songs. Come, Bernie, make a fire and will sing songs like
we did back on the beach when I was young.”
Not yet, Bernie thought. It wasn’t cold enough.
“Where did you sing songs?” Lee.
“When were you young?” Gonzalo.
“I fucking told you that Mexican spoke perfect English!” Lee
cried, pointed at the offender.
Bony Delia smiled, despite the attack. “On the beach. You
know. In the sixties. Me and my friends in California. We surfed.”
“Yeah, right, a black surfer girl from the sixties. What hap-
pened to you?” Bernie asked with no softness. “You too dark for
Annette Funicello?”
“Fuck you.”
“So fucking what? As if that’s some sort of fucking achieve-
ment! I was in Vietnam, serving my country!” Lee suddenly ex-
claimed, uninvited. “I was all over the fucking place. Rata-a-tat-tat
with my M16. MeShong. Punang. I’m a fucking Purple Heart
Veteran. And this old shriveled bitch is going on about her days
on the beach.”
“Fuck you,” Bony Delia said again. “You’re a goddamn Asian.
You fought for the other side you mean. You can’t fucking trust
those goddamn Asians. They’re sneaky.”
“Fuck you.”
And: “Fuck you” back.
“And lemmee tell you something: I was all over with the women
overseas. I probably have kids I don’t know about.” Lee grinned.
“So what? I probably have kids I don’t know about,” Bony
Delia said.
Bernie and Gonzalo had a good chuckle over that.

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“We’re not interested in your drug days, stupid,” Lee said,
truly offended.
“I was valedictorian in high school,” Bony Delia said.
No one said anything because, frankly, no one cared.
“Make the fire,” Gonzalo prodded Bernie.
“Why aren’t you a preacher no more?” Lee asked.
“Because I became the Archangel Michael,” Bernie said.
They all laughed, and Bernie didn’t argue with them because
he knew they wouldn’t understand.
“There are mental institutions a’plenty with Napoleons and
Archangel Michaels,” Lee said.
“You know that from experience,” Bony Delia said. “Lee’s
been in every one. ‘I’m the King of Siam I am.’”
This appeared to make the old man so angry, all he could do
was shake a fist at her helplessly.
“What the hell is that all about?” Bernie said with a laugh.
“I can’t get up and kick her black nigger ass because of my back.”
When the N Word came out, nobody flinched like they’d do
in a corporate office somewhere – not even Bony Delia.
“Old Vietnam War wound?” Asked Gonzalo with a snicker.
“Fuck you, you goddamn Mexican.” Lee took a deep breath.
“I hope they build that fucking wall.” The old man then went silent
and turned his back on them.
“I am the King of Siam I am ….” Sang Bernie under his breath
because the tune was stuck in his head now.
Bony Delia found her cigarettes and asked him for a light. She
sat against the wall, the remnants of her hair arranged on her head
in a last dash to make herself presentable to a male audience. Bernie
wondered truly how old she was. Seventy? Eighty? She had to be up
there somewhere.
“Were you really a preacher?” She wanted to know between
puffs of smoke.
He didn’t answer her.
“I know why you left ‘cause it’s all bullshit. I mean, back in
the day I was all churchy. I kept looking for Jesus to come save
me,” she told him. “After awhile all the words from preacher men

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were bullshit. Like they all wanted something. I stopped going to
church.”

“You never went to church,” Lee accused.
Bony Delia didn’t say anything.
“Hey is Bony Delia your wife?” Gonzalo said in English … again.
“She ain’t my wife,” Lee said.
And Bony Delia blew a raspberry because a raucous fart would
be undignified.
Bernie had an unopened can of O’Malley’s chili. Bony Delia
had some bread. Lee pulled out water bottles. They all divvied up
and gathered about, and ate what crap there was. No one asked
where any of the food came from because it didn’t matter.
“Light a fire,” suggested Gonzalo in more English, of course,
but everyone knew it was too caliente for that.
No one there knew much about the Mexican. He had an ac-
cent, though he spoke English most often than any other thing, and
he was always bucking that for some reason. No habla. Most of the
time he’d just grunt or say nothing at all. He had a mustache. It was
big and woolly and was kept up, even though he was a sorry, grimy
sight and smelled from a long way off. No one blamed him and for
some reason no one there could smell him anymore.
Lee wondered once out loud if he was an out-of-work migrant,
or an old cartel drug enforcer, or a drug dealer. Gonzalo certainly
had had the build for it and the scars to boot.
It was too hot to stand out there on the street corners with
cardboard signs, so no one volunteered to do anything. It was an un-
workable cell of laziness. That’s not to say anyone in the VILLAGE
wouldn’t be out there plying their off-trade. Peddling was the only
thing left to them, because no one had the looks or the youth for
prostitution.
“Give us grace,” Lee asked Bernie. When he did, the older man
asked him if he knew anything else besides the Lord’s Prayer.
“Last Rites,” was his answer. No one said anything, obviously
disturbed at the joke.
“I am the King of Siam I am,” mumbled Lee, but he didn’t
know the song.

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And then Bony Delia went on some cyclical tirade that began
with her bitching about somebody in the VILLAGE stealing some-
thing of hers, or wronging her, or something or rather – Bernie
couldn’t and wouldn’t sense of it. She made up people. Imaginary
friends. There was always something bothering her, some clandes-
tine conspiracy from the Powers That Be. She blamed Bernie most
of all for some reason; maybe it was because he’d been a preacher,
or he was a cracker. Of course, soon Lee became her focus and her
ire, and she shouted and swore and cussed at him as if everything
that was wrong with her life was because of him merely lying there
in squalor next to her.
And then she shut up.
Silence for a good space.
“She has fucking Turrets Syndrome,” Lee said.
Bony Delia was lying on her side with her back to them. Gon-
zalo nudged her to see if she was still alive, but she remained abso-
lutely still.
“She’s fucking dead,” muttered the Mexican.
“I’m not dead,” she told them in her shaky, squeaky voice.
“Too bad,” Lee observed, and they all went quiet again for a
time.
All the talk about his past made Bernie think about being a
preacher. It was almost a dream from a long time ago, and as such,
the details seemed hazy, indistinct. Forget what had happened to
make him go away, to drop it all, he’d argue with anyone who cared
– at least in his mind – because those days were nothing but dust and
smoke and wisps of alcoholic fog. All he could tell anyone – again,
who would care – was that all he could feel in that space of what he
used to be was a big hollow cavity with something still in it. Even a
shadow has substance in the hollows of somebody’s past. At least, he
would argue, I’m not a goddamn child molester.
“Were you really in Vietnam, Lee?”
But the words that came back were not about Vietnam. In-
stead, the old man went off on a long tangent about photography.
Shutter speeds, lens sizes, arc of lightning; it was a long circle of
nothing to do about being a Vietnam Veteran. Somehow, after all

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that, Lee threw at them his experiences as a gravel salesman in Ar-
izona.

“I still have friends working down in Glendale,” he told them
all proudly.

“Well there’s that,” Bernie said with less sarcasm than he’d
intended.

Gonzalo snored, in the middle of it all.
“Fucking beaner,” Lee snorted and threw an empty plastic cup
at him. Gonzalo snored.
The Asian then poked his head in the jagged hole in the wall
and shouted at no one, save for the invisible beings that he thought
lived there. Or, maybe there was somebody there. Or, maybe not.
“Lee, you seem a little focused,” muttered Bernie.
“You’re crazy,” said the old man, calling the kettle black.
Bony Delia was found staring at Bernie the Preacher with a
faraway, thoughtful expression because for once, her eyes seemed less
bright than when she was angry – which was all the time, it seemed
to him. She was old, yes, past it. Yet Bernie thought she might’ve
been good looking back in the day, the time she’d claimed to be a
beach girl. A black girl on a white beach with Frankie and Annette.
Her face was browner than burlap sacks at the bottom of neglected
dumpsters, and her creases were trenches of every misplaced emotion
given to the race of man since the beginning of time.
Beach Blanket Bingo. There was no way to imagine her there.
No. Freaking. Way.
“Bernie,” she whispered suddenly, as if caught in a rare epiphany.
They waited for her to finish that, save for Gonzalo who only
snored on his mat. Nothing arrived.
“Geez, I thought you were going to say something,” Lee said.
Bernie had his own epiphany instead. He cast a slow glance
around, wondering if maybe he was the only person there, in the
shack, and if all these people around him were just parts of his per-
sonality. He was loopy, he’d admitted on more than one occasion;
he could have made them all up anyway. He couldn’t blame the
alcohol because he’d been dry now for weeks. So, it had to be some-
thing else. Maybe he was schizo.

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No one there understood that he had a Class-A phobia about
that. Bernie the Preacher sometimes would poke people with his
index finger, lightly, just to be certain they were real. No, it wasn’t
that he’d ever had schizophrenia or even knew if it had been a
prominent mental illness in his family tree – he – he just wanted to
be certain he wasn’t losing it at times. It was somehow important
to him, even there in the Village. There was nothing on the mend
in the Village. For a moment he married the Village to Siam and
the song in a self-indulgent, crazy fit. He was the King of Siam,
after all.
“I’m going to shoot myself,” Lee said, thrashing around him-
self as if for a misplaced item.
“I know where you can get a gun,” Bernie said in a half-joke.
“It’s getting late, someone,” Bony Delia said, meaning Bernie.
“Build a fire. I have some beans to cook.”
True to her word she did, they all found. Gonzalo provided the
kindling and some wood, and Bernie the matches. It wasn’t that cool
out yet, but it would be soon. Lee warned he would stab them all in
the eye if they started singing beach party songs together.
Cigarettes.
Warm Coca-Cola.
Gonzalo got up and left for a short time who-knows-where.
Lee supposed he got work from time-to-time with the other Mexi-
cans down at store parking lots. For a poor illegal Mexican, Gonzalo
always had money. He never used it, though. Or, maybe, he just
went out for a shit.
Lee, Bernie assumed, never had any money in comparison.
One could hand cash over to him, and somehow, right then and
there, it would vanish from his pocket. Maybe he had a hole in
it – the pocket.
It must have been late when Gonzalo showed up again, but no
one had a watch to tell the exact time. They all smoked cigarettes and
ate some sandwiches from the Soup-Line du jour. Bernie decided
to give everyone the Last Rites just to shake things up a bit and to
tease Bony Delia.
Lee stirred the smoldering ashes of their fire.

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Sometime after midnight, the wind began to blow out of the
northeast – a harsh, warm wind born of endless desert and the great
expanse of lands untrod, unexplored, and unseen. It brought with
it a dust from the hills that appeared like reposing Indians with the
battle-scars of dirt roads and trails. Distant voices of the final frontier
glided along with that breeze – voices unheard or by even the most
perceptive ears. The mongrels, sniffing along the roads that went
nowhere save the shacks of the dispossessed, whined, and sniffed
for elusive odors that even they couldn’t find. It whispered, the
wind, along the course and congested byways of the Village, where
those aforementioned mongrels whined and howled and yipped and
barked, singing the anthem of a never ending day that ended only
for those who were too lost to realize they were lost.
The draft kicked up the soiled and yellowed newspapers from
the abysses of night from the corners of the room, where they lazily
rolled around in the smoke-filled air before lighting themselves on
the lingering coals. These fires didn’t grow, yet merely produced
a dragon-like breath that became thicker and thicker and thicker.
Within the growing soot there was a great beach where younger
people danced among bonfires, singing along with Frankie and An-
nette; and an Asian gravel salesman in a thin tie and possessing
a balding pate waited for landscapers to fill up their trucks with
multi-colored soil and huge rocks; and where a forgotten man with a
straw hat from Old Mexico wandered great stretches of arid lands in
a vain hope to reach a land full of avocados, but instead found balls
of fire falling down like glowing meteors from an endless blue sky;
and there, on the hill, the smoldering ruins of a Pentecostal church
blew a tarnished smoke from crosses that never ceased to burn and,
from a group of thickly-accented Southern people, a gospel hymn
that the preacher could never hear properly rang hollow in the heavy
air. At once, every voice there in the repose of the place where hung
the Four of Swords was silenced.
And no one ever knew.

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The Impersonator

By Richard Dokey

I opened my door just as The Priest across the hall opened his. He was
a usual priest, black hat—creased in the center—black suit, turned-
around collar, black shoes and socks. He held a leather-bound Bible
in his right hand. On the third finger of the hand was a broad, gold
band, in the center of which a perfectly round ruby took the light
from the yellow bulb overhead, the way a whip takes the air.

The Priest walked to the elevator. He held the Bible against
his chest. The elevator was a clankety, old elevator in a clankety,
old building in a clankety, old part of town. The elevator had a tele-
scoping gate. The bowels of the building grumbled. Chains rattled.

Standing in the hallway, I smelled the smell of the fifth floor,
which I have identified as predominately fried chicken and onion
rings. The smell emanates from the door on the left, at the far end of
the hallway, where Harry The Slinger lives with his wife. Harry is the
afternoon cook at The Fry Shack across the street. His wife stands in
the hallway to see Harry off to work. She watches Harry. She watches
me sometimes watching her when I leave my room. Two fat puppies
snuggle under her pink sweater, their muzzles pushing and poking.
She makes the muzzles stiffen when I look at her. I call her Tits.

Each floor in the building has a true smell. I discovered this
when checking out the rooms before moving in. The building has
ten stories. There are ten true smells. I conducted a test one after-
noon. I walked down the hallway of each floor, checking one door
against another, like a sampler of fine wines, or a cigar aficionado,

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sniffing the wrappers of Maduro or Corojo robustos. At the tenth
floor I found a delicatessen of smells, meaty hints of pepper and
spice, fried fish, beer, Roquefort, the smell of everything left on
kitchen tables overnight, risen, like heat, to the top floor. The smell
made the building personal.

At the moment The Priest entered the elevator, I heard a com-
motion through the open window behind me. I ran into my room.

Below, a man in shirt sleeves was sprawled face down in the
street, his head crushed against the curb. His left shoe was gone.
People converged. The man in the black suit, black hat and turned-
around collar came out of the building, saw what had happened,
hurried to Shirt Sleeves and knelt down. I made for the stairwell and
bolted, two steps at a time.

Shirt Sleeves was dead against the street. The truck had gone
over him. The driver stood with his hands on his head. Blood came
from Shirt Sleeves’ eyes and ears. It leaked from his mouth. It came
together below his head and made a single line of Shirt Sleeves’
blood, wriggling into the drain.

Shirt Sleeves had a phone. On the screen was the picture of a
young woman. She wore a two-piece bathing suit. The woman was
slender and pretty. She smiled and waved. Beyond her was the sea.
The tip of a white sail pinched the horizon. People stood. They held
phones. They took pictures. Shirt Sleeves was on Facebook.

The Priest prayed. I heard a mumbled Dominus. He prayed
and prayed. The meat wagon came. The Priest touched Shirt Sleeves’
chest. He touched Shirt Sleeves’ eyes and forehead. He held the
Bible in his right hand, elevating it above Shirt Sleeves. The sun
whipped the ruby against a leaden sky.

Two men in white coats put Shirt Sleeves on a gurney, covered
him with a white sheet and lifted him into the wagon. The Priest
said nothing. No one approached him. He was a serious, committed
priest. The wagon went away, red light rounding and rounding. The
Priest walked across the street. He walked toward St. Michael’s,
which was down a block. I followed.

The Priest went into the church. I was at the door in time to
see him disappear into a confessional. People were kneeling in the

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pews. An old woman stood, worked her old-woman way out of the
pew and raised the curtain on one side of the confessional.

I sat down. A priest came from the front of the church. He
wore a gold cross. He went to the confessional and opened the door.
Surprised, he backed off and took the other confessional. A young
man in a sailors uniform stood up. The others waited their turn. I
waited too.

After a time the old woman pushed back the curtain. She was
crying. She shuffled to the altar. She removed a rosary from her coat
pocket. She went down, one knee at a time, collapsing over the rail,
lowering her head and fingering her beads. A skinny teen-age kid
with a pimply face, greased hair and a white t-shirt that said What
Are You Looking At? went in.

I thought about what to think about. A dark quiet filled the
church. It was quiet all the way up to the vaulted ceiling—shadowed
in darkness—quiet in the pews and across to the far wall, where the
stained glass of The Stations of the Cross glowed in the afternoon light,
reminding me of the beer signs at The Jupiter Lounge, where I go for
a drink sometimes to forget the failure of a long day’s work.

The curtain flew back. Grease Ball fell over himself getting to
the door. The other priest poked his head out of the other confes-
sional to see what the ruckus was about. The Priest opened his door.
He walked past me out of the church. I walked after him.

He stopped two blocks further down. He pulled the turned-
around collar from his neck. He fluffed out the collar of a white dress
shirt. He turned the coat inside out. It was a beautiful coat, black
with gray pinstripes. He put the collar into his pocket, removed his
hat, smoothed his hair, shot his cuffs and stepped inside. The place
is called Ecstasy. The waitresses wear open blouses and pleated skirts
that stop at the thigh. I returned to my room.

Out the window Shirt Sleeves’ blood was washed away. Across
the street the movie theater, next to The Fry Shack, was closed. Ju-
rassic Park was on the marquee. Further on was a run-down apart-
ment building. I had checked it before making my choice. The ac-
cumulation of smells at the top floor was unsatisfactory. Other clay
or brick buildings went up and down both sides of the street. Blue

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sky was squeezed above them, but was no consolation. Airplanes
used the sky. They came up and went down. Sometimes, from my
room, when I can’t think, I pass the time identifying airlines by the
colors on the fuselage. It was an old neighborhood in a rundown,
old part of the city.

Harmonica Man plays in the room next to mine. He’s a very
old man who eats in his room—mostly liver and onions, if my nose
is correct. Sometimes I smell bacon and eggs, over easy, I’ll bet, be-
cause that’s the way I like them. His whole life is in the room, and
he can play that harmonica. He’s playing now, sitting at the window
to make it easier on the others.

He’s a virtuoso, a Larry Adler, who was popular in the early
days on black and white television. He plays classical, sometimes
jazz, and even country, when he’s happy. Mostly it’s Beethoven,
Mozart and like that. Stravinsky, can you believe it? The Firebird is
like no other Firebird until you’ve heard it on the harmonica. Co-
peland sometimes. If he’s sad, though, it’s Chopin.

When he plays, I can’t work, which is just as well, because I
don’t know what I’m doing anyway. I am not consoled by the no-
tion that, in the long run, it doesn’t matter. I want Harmonica Man
to play his harmonica, so I can justify not playing mine.

Sometimes, when it’s windy, the notes of his harmonica ride
solemn waves of solitude into my room. Then I want to listen
most of all. I close my window, open the door to my closet, which
is positioned exactly in line with where he sits at his window. I
put my ear against the wall. I try to catch some measure of his
loneliness. Though the notes are muffled, they are uniform and
somehow purer notes, and I have the illusion that we are in a cave
somewhere high in the mountains, it’s dark, and he plays in the
darkness, and I meditate about the long run and try to see light at
the end of the tunnel.

I am ignorant of why he is here. Each melody, so beautiful,
often, so mournfully so, makes me believe that he should play in
paradise. I think of him as glorious, but fallen, a tragedy of love or
loss. Nothing works for me. He plays. That’s what he does. He fills
the emptiness. He plays so that I can hear him play.

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The Priest had been gone long enough for me to bore a tiny
hole at eye level in my door and install one of those magnifier peep
things that allows one to see who’s standing outside before turning
the knob.
There was a knock at my door. Harmonica Man quieted and
coiled away. I peeped. The muzzles of two fat puppies pushed at me
through a pink sweater. I opened the door.
“Hello, there,” she said. “I’m Vera. Down the hall at the end.”
She pointed. “I’m out of cigarettes. You wouldn’t happen to have
a cigarette I could borrow, now, would you?” The puppies pushed
and nuzzled.
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t smoke cigarettes. A cigar sometimes,
but that’s it.”
“All right, then,” she said. “Worst luck.” She smelled like a
flower counter at Loew’s nursery. “My husband, Harry? He took the
last pack when he left for work.”
“I know your husband,” I said. “Well, I don’t know him actu-
ally, but I eat sometimes at The Fry Shack across the street. I’ve seen
him at the grill. Mostly it’s his back I’ve seen.” I grinned.
“The Grease Shack, you mean. That’s what I call it.” She laughed.
“Deep fried chicken. Deep fried fish sticks. Deep fried French fries,
Deep fried pork. Deep fried every damned thing.”
“I like deep fried,” I said. “I mean, sometimes. The wings are
great at The Fry Shack.”
“Oh, they’re all right, I suppose,” she said. She was surprised
that I hadn’t asked her inside. She tried to peek around my shoulder.
“Harry does most of our cooking at home. That’s fine with me. I
hate to cook. But deep fried? All the time it’s deep fried this, deep
fried that. It’s what Harry does. But a girl wants a little change now
and then. Maybe a shrimp or Caesar salad once in a while. A girl’s
got to watch her weight, but Harry, he can’t stand any salad for
dinner. With him it’s fried this or fried that. My hair’s deep fried.
My underwear is deep fried. Hell, my ass is deep fried. My name’s
Vera. What the hell is yours?”
“Milton,” I said.
“I mean your first name.”

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“That is my first name.”
“Milton? What kind of name is that, Milton?”
“English, I think. There was an English writer named Milton.
Anyway, it’s my first name.”
“I never knew any Milton. How about if I call you Milt?”
I laughed. “You have a point. Milt’s fine.”
“You gonna ask me in?”
“Well—“I said.
“Oh,” she said, glancing up and down the hall. “That’s the way
you think, is it? Anyway, what are you doing here, Milt?”
I grinned. “You mean philosophically speaking?”
“What?” she said.
I thought of Harry The Slinger’s forearms, which were like
Popeye’s. His hands were enormous, worth three of mine. I thought
about Tits the way Tits wanted me to, but some things should be
left to the imagination. Standing there, with her puppies, I imag-
ined Tits and me in bed, doing everything I’ve never done, and
Harry coming home because of a migraine from all that grease and
finding us there, puppies unleashed like wolverines, pouncing and
pounding, blankets thrown aside, Tits and I, The Beast With Two
Backs, and good ol’ Harry the Slinger, with his bucket of blood,
ready to splash us to oblivion. Imagination can save your ass.
“So, what’s going on, Milt?” she asked. “You don’t seem the
type to be hanging around here.”
“I’m working,” I said.
“Working? Working on what?”
I hate honesty when it’s unnecessary, but I can’t willfully be
dishonest, so I fudge from time to time and do the best I can.
“I’m taking notes.”
“Notes,” she said. “Notes about what?”
“About my work,” I said.
She tossed her hair. The puppies rolled. “You lost me, Milton.”
I grinned. “I know all about being lost,” I said.
“Listen here, Milt,” she said. “Harry leaves for work at noon.
Why not come down sometime? Bring your pencil. Maybe I can
help you work.”

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“Vera,” I said, making one syllable out of two.
“Later, maybe, Milt?” she said. “But not too much later.”
She turned. I said. “Vera, maybe you can help me now. Tell
me, who’s this priest who lives here across the hall?”
“Priest,” she said. “What priest?”
I pointed at the door. “He lives right there. He’s a priest.”
“No priest lives there. Priests live in churches. Why would a
priest live in a dump like this?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” I said.
“There’s someone in there,” she said. “I’ve seen a guy, but not
any priest.” She turned sideways and let me have both puppies. “Every
day at noon, Milt, except Monday. Harry has Monday off.” She smiled
and walked that walk all the way down the hall to the end. I watched.
She knew I watched. At the door she smiled and blew me a kiss.
Later I heard the door open across the hall. I went to the peep
hole. Black pants, black shoes and socks, a black coat with gray pin-
stripes disappeared into the room
The next morning I was at the peep hole. I saw a stooped figure
in a rag-a-muffin coat, dirty, frayed pants and scuffed brown shoes.
The figure wore a brown Jimmy Cagney cap over gray, frizzled hair.
The figure held one of those shoeshine boxes I’d seen in an Our Gang
movie. I waited until I heard the elevator door close. Then I sprang
down the stairs two steps at a time.
A barber shop, one of those neighborhood things with a dirty
window and a striped pole that doesn’t work, was two blocks up on
the other side of the street.
He stood outside buttonholing men when they came out. I
could not imagine anyone in the neighborhood needing a shine for
anything, but there he was, Shoe Shine Man. He had the routine.
Stooped, humble, sliding his feet, moving his head deferentially,
smiling without teeth, he was every part of what he was.
A man put his right shoe on the box. Out came the tin of Kiwi,
brushes and a worn cotton cloth. Shoe Shine Man applied the wax
with his fingers. He rubbed the wax into the leather. He brushed
the sides of the shoe, back and forth, with two brushes. A rhythm
arose. He hummed and whistled, brushes taking turns now across

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the toe of the shoe. The rag rolled and popped across the toe. He
sang a perfect shoeshine song in a perfect shoe shine voice, chanting
in time to the popping rag. He was Shoe Shine Man, a pro, right
down to the way he held out his hand to be paid. He worked an
hour, gathered his box and came toward me. I turned and looked
at the sidewalk. He passed, shuffling and scuffing. It was a perfect
Shoe Shine Man walk. Amazed, I followed him to our building and
watched him disappear inside.

Subsequently I followed him uptown. He was dressed in a
wind breaker, polo shirt, jeans and sneakers, beard and pony tail
sitting over a Philly Cheese Steak, tapping the keypad of his phone.
He blended perfectly with the others, who had come in talking and
laughing, but were nested now into their chairs. No one spoke.
Forks and spoons found their way somehow to mouths cupped
to one side, like troughs. Fingers tapped. Thumbs slid an index of
photos. He did that for a half hour, an ambassador of electronics,
not speaking, not looking up. He went into the street, tapping his
keypad, looking neither left nor right. With uncanny skill he crossed
the intersection, tapping, sliding the thumb, sensing, like a blind
man, the tons of steel hurtling around him. It was a phenomenal,
if perhaps exaggerated, performance of everyone around him who,
like himself, was not there.

I saw him become a police officer directing traffic at an in-
tersection in our neighborhood, where no police officer directed
anything. The traffic obeyed, one hand up that way, the other had
motioning to go the other way. He walked up one side of the
street, peering into shop windows, tapping his policeman’s cap,
twirling his policeman’s stick. People were surprised and grateful
that the city had stopped judging them by broken glass and trash
in the streets.

I saw him as a clerk in Value Grocery. He slid boxes of cereal
and cartons of eggs across an electric eye. I saw him in a beard dis-
tributing religious tracts on a street corner and, again, sitting against
a building, dark glasses, a black cane, a raggy cap at his knee. He
raised his right hand in gratitude for donations. The ruby threw
spears of light that way and this. When I saw him in a doctor’s

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smock enter the door of the local emergency clinic, I could bear it
no longer.

The superintendent of the building is a fat, affable man. He
tells jokes. He sleeps in the basement under the stairwell next to the
elevator. When he discovered that I liked cigars, he invited me in
from time to time to puff one of those awful things he buys in tins
at the liquor store down the street. I take along a couple bottles of
Anchor Steam to stay even. When he lies about women, I believe
everything he says.

He was on the floor below me, working on a broken faucet. I
told him I had locked myself out of my room and could he lend me
his master key, just for a moment, he was so busy and all. I’d get my
door open and the key back to him immediately. He gave me the
key. I went upstairs and took a wax impression.

I had a key made. One day a Marine uniform came out of
the room. I waited for the elevator to descend, crossed the hall and
opened the door.

The room was empty of anything but what any other cheap
room should have, a bed, a table and two chairs and a mohair sofa
that had seen better days. No TV. No radio. Nothing to play music.
No paraphernalia of ownership. Nothing that might indicate who he
was. Except a silver tape recorder on the kitchen counter, and, next
to that, a pile of discs, labeled carefully. He studied occupations the
way an actor studied roles. I opened the closet door.

On the rod hung a costumery for life. Nothing matched. Work
clothes. Jackets. Uniforms. Jeans. Pants. A white dress shirt. A gray
suit. A blue sport coat. Hats. Baseball caps. Metal hats like those worn
by construction workers. A single, white and blue striped tie. At one
end of the rod was a tuxedo. On the floor were scuffed shoes, shined
shoes, a pair of cowboy boots, sandals and tennis shoes. In a box on
the shelf above I found wigs, beards, stuff to make eyebrows bushy
and, in a second box, an entire assortment of grease paints, powders,
brushes and combs. He was not an actor, but he was an actor.

I wanted to wait for him. I lived across the hall from an insane
chameleon, and had no idea what made him tick. I never saw any
face that was a true face, but only the pretend face that he wore each

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time he left his room. He was like a man in a department store who
tries on one thing after another to see what works, but everything
works.

I see no way out of such a dilemma, except to choose the
brown one, the one with checks, even the plaid one. Hell, any one
to escape the no man’s land of not knowing what to choose. Pos-
sibilities are intolerable. I am defeated and walk out wearing what
I wore in.

Lying in bed later, I thought about it. I thought about Har-
monica Man. Harmonica Man will leave, and take his melodies with
him. I amuse myself thinking of Tits, waiting for me to cuckold
The Slinger and climb her Everest. She wonders if I have the balls to
reach the top. However, Tits is Tits. Minimal experience, coupled
with imagination, makes a refuge.

But mostly it’s the man across the hall. He infuriates me. How
can you watch a man and not figure out what you’re watching? It’s
my own damned fault. I put myself through it. The moment I went
into the room I knew I had bitten off more than I could chew. It’s
torture to peel back skin, to break bones and to find nothing at the
center. I punish myself, wanting to get to the bottom of something
that isn’t there. I have no ability to see what others do not see. If I
can’t find him by watching and listening, as others watch and listen,
then discovering him as a physician discovers a patient upon a table
is only to find Tits, waiting for me at the end of the hall, her puppies
mounding and pushing. Everything is what it is.

I’ve moved away. I’ve taken two rooms, one for sleeping and
the other for whatever else, five stories above a clean street in a better
neighborhood across town. There is no smell in the hallway. People
shine their shoes. No one plays the harmonica because harmonica
playing is not permitted. My window looks out over rooftops to a
ribbon of sea that reaches everywhere I have not been. I imagine men
who sail the sea. They are lonely men, homeless, upon a vast, rolling
emptiness, where hope promises only landfall.

I have a job in a public library. The work suits me. I am sur-
rounded by others who have written. There is something definite
and sure about returning dead souls to their proper place. I bury

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them each day, shelf upon shelf. In the long run, a man, as the actor
says, should know his limitations. I can’t live with someone who
doesn’t exist.
Richard Dokey’s stories have won awards and prizes, have been
cited in Best American Short Stories, Best of the West, have been
nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have been reprinted in nu-
merous regional and national literary reviews and anthologies. Pale
Morning Dun, his collection of short stories, published by Uni-
versity of Missouri Press, was nominated for the American Book
Award. His writings have appeared most recently in Adelaide Lit-
erary Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Grain(Canada), Natural
Bridge, Southern Humanities Review, Lumina and The Chatta-
hooc-hee Review.

173



The Internal Road

By Michael Mohr

I wanted to see the untouchable woman. With her long, thin legs,
her gyrating torso, her hank of black hair falling over pale shoulders,
tattoos running up and down and across her whole body like some
archipelago of ink.

Her name was Anna. She was a dancer at Mary’s, the infamous
strip-club on Southwest Broadway in Portland, Oregon. I’d seen her
before, while visiting from the Bay Area, where I lived. And now I
was back. I’d been in town for five days and each evening I’d gone
into Mary’s. I’d walk in, take a seat in the very back, pull my bat-
tered black and white college-ruled composition notebook out, order
a Diet Coke, and start writing. I’d watch the dancers—Carla, Missy,
Dana—and then Anna would come out. She and I always caught eyes.

She danced like a wild demon, possessed, with the most ru-
inous intentions, spreading her legs and kneeling and squatting and
smiling and looking serious and grabbing the dirty silver pole in the
center of the stage and sliding up and down, a slight squeak, and
then going upside down, her black heels clutching the top of the
pole, her black hair hanging, touching the rugged stage, the sailors
and old hipsters and hippies and bearded bikers sitting up front
grunting, sipping brew, throwing wadded-up bills.

Now, I was a quarter block away from the club. It was late Au-
gust, lightly raining. Cars slowly swished back and forth on Burnside.
I could still smell the dough from Voodoo Doughnuts a block back.

I reached the club. A flickering neon red sign outside above the
tattered orange door said, “MARY’S,” with neon yellow and orange

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stars around it. To the right it said, “DINE & DANCE.” And below
that, in the white faded marquee it said, in black, “Girls, girls, girls.”
I pulled the heavy door open. Immediately it was dark. Red lights
beamed around the place. It felt like some cave, some heavenly, lustful
womb, like reentering Mother, like crawling back up inside her.

A Mexican man wearing a beanie and a wife-beater—Nick—
held his hand up, eyeing me. I nodded and whipped my wallet out,
showing him my ID. He looked at it, bent it slightly, gazed from
the card to my face, and handed it back. He jerked his chin. “Hey
James.”

“Hey,” I said.
I ordered my Diet Coke at the bar. The bar was old laminated
wood. A shelf of liquor bottles was lined up behind the counter.
The place was mostly empty, as always. I was up here visiting a close
friend. She and I were like brother and sister. We’d known each
other for close to 15 years, since high school. In 2009, I’d driven her
and all her possessions up north from Ventura, our hometown, 90
miles north of Los Angeles, all the way up to Portland. She’d been
here ever since, working as a bartender in the Alphabet District. I’d
stayed in the Bay Area. I was trying to become a serious writer. I
had a Genius Complex, fancying myself some kind of Henry Miller
or Norman Mailer.
Holding my Coke, I zigzagged around tables and snatched one
in back. There were videogame machines, old and dusty, the screens
cracked. Two of the machines said, “Video-Lottery” in yellow across
the top. A few bearded men, leather jackets slung over their chairs,
sat up front at the stage. I never did that. I craved distance, objec-
tivity. I smelled as if for the first time the stale stench of beer, urine,
the musty concrete floor.
Carla was dancing. The boom-box played “Buddy Holly” by
Weezer. Not untypical for Carla. She was short, copper-skinned,
Hispanic. She had dark eyes, dark hair, and a light scar running
about two inches across her right cheek. I wondered how the scar got
there. Violent husband? Fall down the stairs? Self-inflicted?
I liked Anna because she was beautiful, yes, but also because
she seemed to enjoy what she did. She was like butter melting in a

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hot pan, sizzling, stretching out, spreading; she did everything right.
Even though we always caught eyes she never made me feel insecure
or embarrassed. She never approached me. We never spoke. It was
understood. It was our non-verbal contract. Sometimes the girls
walked over to a man after a set and talked to them, tried to get a
lap dance. She never did this.

I started writing. My black Pilot G-2 pen rolled across the
ruled pages like some kind of chugging freight train, moving slowly
at first, then faster and faster, nailing the curves and turns like a
monster, stopping for nothing and no one.

The sounds of pint glasses clinking, old men grunting, heels
slapping together on the stage, Weezer, all entered my consciousness
as I wrote. It was here, in places like this, that I felt like a real writer.
It was the perfect place to do character sketches. Interesting people.
It was warm, red, lonely, full of despair. It was some train-wreck
of the human soul, the human condition. It made me want to cry
sometimes, it made me feel utterly vile and wretched and alone,
full of wanton lust and self-criticism. And yet, it felt like home. I
had to understand this part of myself, the part that yearned to feel
connected to The Womb, the Female Cave, Death. Man’s dark,
unchained side. His biological curse.

Carla’s session ended. A few people applauded. The orange
door opened and sunlight beamed rudely into the place, like shafts
of light penetrating the darkness of a man’s soul. A young-ish guy
strutted in, tall, clean-shaven, slicked-back hair, tattoo of an eagle
clutching an anatomical heart the size of a human fist on his neck.
He wore a shiny fake leather jacket that crunched as he walked. Blue
eyes blazed from an angular, chiseled face. He walked up to the bar,
ordered something in low tones, took the drink, trudged to the front
of the stage, and sat.

Then she came out. Anna. I wasn’t expecting it. Usually after
Carla it’s Missy. Maybe Missy was sick. The red lights around the
room glared into her pale features, the light bouncing off her ink.
Her tattoos were fascinating. Part hipster, part punk, part artist:
Tiny dots running from her pinkie toe, up her sexy thighs to her
ass; a lightning bolt, jagged, across her right shoulder-blade; the

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letter “X” on her left kneecap; a portrait of some man on her right
thigh; “p-a-t-i-e-n-c-e” across four knuckles, a letter per knuckle; a
traditional pinup woman and birds; the word “freedom” across her
back; etc. All were ink gray.

She smiled out at everyone. She wore tall black heels, a very
short skirt, a skimpy red top exposing her cleavage. Ruby-red lip-
stick, dark eye-shadow, rouge on her cheeks. She clacked in her heels
across the uneven wooden stage, touching the silver pole with her
pale palm. I coughed, cleared my throat. As she was looking through
music on the boom-box the guy who’d walked in, sitting five feet
away from her at the front of the stage next to one of the bikers, said,
“Hey baby, how ya doin?”

Anna ignored him. She kept rolling through songs. Finally she
seemed to pick something.

The man repeated, “Hey baby.”
Anna flipped around, arms clamped at her waist like little
wings, elbows jutting. She smiled. She said, “Yes?”
The man leaned back in his chair. It creaked. He rocked slowly
back so it was on two lean legs. I could only see him from behind,
the back of his head, that greaser hair, and his blue silk collared shirt;
he’d slung his jacket over the back of the chair. But I imagined him
smiling.
“What time you off, sweety?” he said.
Anna grinned wider, so wide it seemed as if her mouth became
the metaphorical cave, as if she might swallow the whole place in one
gulp, all the men, the red light, the bar, the smells and the alcohol
and the darkness, all of it. Her white teeth gleamed against the light.
She didn’t respond. Instead she turned around and pressed the
button for the song to play. It started. It was Leonard Cohen, the
song Suzanne. I was pleased. That dark melodic mellow acoustic
guitar began. A few chords, and then Cohen’s deep, slow, poetic
voice.
Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever
And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want
to be there

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And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from
China
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to
give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer that you’ve always been her
lover…
And she danced. Slow, easy, loose, as if she were under water.
She always started this way. I felt my insides squirm, my heart
beating in my chest. She got me all excited. Not horny, exactly, but
thrilled somehow to be alive, in the world. I fell in love with life
when she danced. She was a symbol, a movement inside my heart.
She reminded me of something, though what that was I could never
exactly be sure. But whatever it was, it felt raw, authentic. It felt
true.
Anna got moving, she got the machine oiled, the engine
purring. Her heels scratched along the hardwood stage. Her hands
gripped the pole and she swung around it. You could hear a sound
when she flew in a circle round the pole from her palm sliding. She
made tiny sounds from her mouth when she jumped or fell down.
She was like a ballet dancer mixed with a punker, a misfit mixed with
a gymnast. She pulled herself up on the pole, high, high, higher,
then flung herself backwards, upside down, her hair just an inch
above the stage floor, her knees and thighs gripping the metal pole,
the short skirt falling down a ways, exposing her green panties. Then
she slid down slow.
She turned around, stuck her butt up in the air, out at us, like
it was some weapon. Maybe it was. A few bikers hurled crumpled
dollar bills at her. The man who’d walked in leaned back in his
chair, as if bored. Anna shimmied her legs, her long pale legs, legs
that reminded me of the beach in Ventura, that stretch of white
sand along Pacific Coast Highway running from Santa Barbara to
Malibu. Then she lifted her skirt, facing away from us, and showed
us her ass. The green panties. Her ass was perfect and curved and
white, like some delicate eggshell. One of the few areas of her body
with no ink. She dropped the skirt; it sank sluggishly to the floor.

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She daintily stepped out of it. It sat there on the stage in a little pile,
as if it were a miniature charred animal corpse.

The song ended. She wore only the green panties and her red
top, holding back that considerable cleavage. She clacked to the
boom-box, ran through the numbers. The man spoke to her again.
He drank from his pint of brew. “Hey baby, come home with me
after your set.”

One of the bikers leaned over to the man, said something quiet
I couldn’t catch. I heard the man respond, something like, “Oh
yeah?” The biker nodded and leaned back. The man said to Anna,
“C’mon honey. Do me right.”

Anna stood facing the boom-box. She half-danced to the si-
lence, her legs lightly swaying left and right, moving to some internal
tune in her head. She pressed a button. Cohen again, this time the
song “Chelsea Hotel.”

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were talking so brave and so sweet
Giving me head on the unmade bed
While the limousines wait in the street
Those were the reasons and that was New York
We were running for the money and the flesh
And that was called love for the workers in song
Probably still is for those of them left
She flipped around. She ignored the man. She danced. Soon
she walked around the pole, then lifted herself up again, went upside
down, spread her legs wide making a human-sized capital “T,” her
legs the top, body the vertical line. I stared at her green panties. I
thought of my family back home, in Ventura, I thought of my ex,
Reece, how we’d met in San Diego, fallen in love, drunk wine all
night for months, how I’d read bad amateur poems to her until 3
AM, how we’d made love constantly, how we’d traveled Europe
together, then moved to San Francisco in 2008, living across from
Golden Gate Park. Those legs and panties made me want to beg for
mercy, for love, for forgiveness. They made me desire intimacy. It
didn’t make sense. And yet it made all the sense in the world. Anna
showed me true love in the flesh, in the physical form of Woman.

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When she returned to Earth, heels on stage, she lifted her red
top off. Her pale breasts were held in only by the blue bra. She
reached behind her back, pulled the bra off. She held it for a moment,
then finally gazed at the man and hucked it at him. It landed on his
head, on his slicked-back hair. For a moment it just sat there, sitting
on his dome like some gift. Then he grabbed it and held it. Her
breasts bounced as she danced, swaying left and right, up and down.
At last, the end act. With great élan, she jumped into the air,
landing with the splits. She leaned back, lifted her tall legs in the air,
tall as the buildings on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, gingerly
pulled her green panties off from her hips, slowly, up, up, travelling
up her long legs, to her knees, then to her shins, then to her feet,
then with her right toes she gripped the panties and flung them into
the air. They landed on the very edge of the stage in front of one of
the bikers.
Anna had her legs glued together, up high still, on her back.
Only her heels were still on. Then she unglued her legs, spread them
wide apart, opening like a human flower, letting us see her pearl,
allowing us to feel like buzzing bees bursting around that flower.
Of course I thought of sex, but I also thought of birth, and love,
and being in Naples with Reece, walking around the square, in the
cobblestone streets, in the gondola in Venice, floating around the
canals, seeing Notre Dame and visiting Jim Morrison’s gravestone
in Paris, falling into Reece’s freckled arms each night, drunk, young,
happy, in love.
The song ended. At last. Applause. Dollar bills wadded and
thrown. The legs came down, knees bent, her back still on the
floor, her head arched up gaping at us all, a smile. A biker whistled.
Someone at the bar on a stool yelled, “Yeah, girl!” Her set was fin-
ished. Something felt complete. Yet there was a lingering tension.
She gripped the pole and stood. That’s when she caught my
eye. We smiled at each other. She nodded. She’d never done that
before. What did it mean? Anna circled the stage, snatching her
panties, her red top, her skirt. Then she was gone.
Half a minute later Dana pranced on stage. She walked across
and stood at the boom-box. From the side exit emerged Anna,

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wearing the skirt and top. She sashayed, her butt rocking from side
to side. She saw me and moved in my direction. The fourth wall
was being toppled. I felt timid, worried, shy. I felt shame. She was
supposed to be distant, mysterious, aloof, unreal, solely on the stage,
my secret obsession.

As she approached the man looked over and spotted her. He
screeched his chair back, stood, and lunged over. He stood in front
of her, snatched her wrist.

“Hey baby,” he said, with a sinister tone. “Time to take off.
We’re going to my place.”

She faced him. “I don’t think so, buddy.”
“Well I do,” he said. He started to pull her behind him.
I stood, pushed my seat back. Walked up. Tapped him on the
shoulder. He turned. He looked like a gangster. His blue eyes car-
ried some kind of broken pain, like he’d been a cowboy in another
life, back when the West was still wild and rugged, being cleared of
Indians. The tattoo of the eagle clutching the heart shone in the low
red light.
I heard Dana start dancing to “In my Room” by The Beach
Boys.
“Beat it, kid,” the man said.
I swallowed, felt my pounding heart, my shaking right hand,
balling into a fist.
“Let her go,” I said.
He gripped her wrist tighter. “Hey, you’re hurting me,” she
said.
“You gonna stop me?” the man said.
I gulped the heavy load of saliva down my throat that’d been
building up. I inhaled, held, released. “If I have to.”
His eyes sparkled sadistically. He grinned, and the grin spread
into a maniacal smile, and then a full-fledged laugh. He snorted.
“Yeah? You and what army?”
I saw the meaty palm land on the man’s shoulder before Anna
did. Nick, the security guy. He clamped his palm on the man’s
shoulder and the man turned around.
“There a problem here?” Nick said.

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“No problem,” the man said, still gripping her wrist. “She’s
just coming with me.”
Nick shook his head. “No she isn’t. She’s got another five
hours of her shift.”
Nick had dropped his palm. The man dug his free hand into
his pocket, pulled a wallet out, and handed Nick two twenties. “Not
tonight. She comes with me.” He shoved the cash into Nick’s chest,
pushed him to the side, and started to walk past him with Anna in
tow. She looked behind her and caught my eyes again.
Nick jumped ahead and blocked the way to the front door.
“I’m sorry,” Nick said, “But you don’t understand. She’s not
leaving.”
The man kept his grip on her wrist. He reached into his jacket
pocket and before anyone knew what happened he held a butterfly
knife out, blade suddenly jutted, silver and sharp and nasty. He
arrowed it at Nick, circling it in the air.
“Out of my way, Spic.”
Nick raised his arms in the air. “I don’t want trouble.”
“Then out of the way, now.”
Nick stepped out of the way. It was do or die. I stepped up
from behind. Tapped the guy on the shoulder. When he turned I
swung my balled right fist as hard as I could. It connected, amaz-
ingly, with his cheek. He wasn’t expecting it and his head spun. He
lost his grip on her wrist. Stumbled back a few feet, lost his balance,
half fell, caught himself, started to stand. The knife had fallen to the
floor. Nick jumped on him before he fully stood back up, tackled
him like a linebacker.
There was a commotion and then the bartender was calling
the Portland P.D. It’d all happened very fast. “In my Room”
was finishing. Dana still danced. The bikers were unaware of the
side drama, entranced, enthralled, eyes watching the half naked
woman.
Anna turned and rushed me, slamming into my torso, hugging
me. She leaned her face into my neck. She smelled like peppermint
and perfume. Her breath smelled like beer and whiskey though.
Her thin pale arms were wrapped tightly around me. Her body was

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so small compared to mine. On stage she seemed like an ancient
Greek goddess, magnified, magnificent, humungous, the size of
planet Earth. But here, now, she was tiny.

She pulled back. Looked up at me. “Thank you.”
I held her arms. “Are you okay?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
She shook her head. “No. I just want to sit with you.”
I said nothing. I walked back to my table. My college-ruled
notebook was still there, open, half a page written, the last sentence
stopped mid-way. It said, “The only thing I can tell for sure about
this woman is that she…” What was going to be the end of that
sentence?
She sat in the chair next to me. I sat in mine. We faced the
stage. Dana danced. Nick was outside with the man, probably by
now talking to the police. The orange door was closed. We were back
inside the stillness of the womb. Anna reached her pale hand over,
her fine, delicate hand, and gripped my palm. It was soft and sweaty.
I felt like I was in eighth grade again.
She gazed over at me and smiled. “So what are you writing
about in that journal of yours all the time?”
I shrugged. Felt coiling nerves. She lifted the journal with her
other hand, started reading the half page. I startled. Was there any-
thing bad, obscene, terrible? I couldn’t remember. Her dark eyes
scanned horizontally across the page, line by line. She set the journal
back down.
“Was the last sentence about me?”
I nodded. I remembered the ending now, what I’d planned
to write.
“What was it going to say?”
I hesitated. “‘The only thing I can tell for sure about this woman
is that she is some kind of pure symbol of love.’ ”
Her eyes grew bigger. Her mouth was scrunched, like a sea
urchin at low tide, puckered, a thin tight line. Her hand still held
mine. She gripped harder. She said, “Thank you. I don’t even know
your name. I don’t know who you are. You’re just the guy who

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comes here during the week in the early evenings and writes in his
notebook. I’ve seen you here many times.”

“You always make me happy,” I said.
She shrugged. “I just dance. It’s my job.”
“And I just write. It’s my passion.”
“I guess we’re equal then,” she said.
“No,” I said, squeezing her hand. “You’re like some goddess,
some female Christ, some spiritual dancing guru, some perfect
being.”
She laughed. “In your mind maybe. I have plenty of problems.”
“Only humans have problems. You’re transcendent, beyond
human frailty. You’re like some gem I found on the beach, hidden
under sand.”
She giggled. “Ok, Mr. Poet. I have to get back to work. Go
backstage. Get ready for my next set.”
I removed my hand from hers. We severed the umbilical cord.
“Yes. You must go. Thank you.”
She stood abruptly. “Until later, Mysterious Writer.”
“I’m James.”
“Anna.”
Awkwardly, we shook hands, some formal greeting we still
clung to.
“Later,” I said.
She didn’t respond. She clacked across the floor, heels clicking,
opened the side door, and disappeared into the backstage area.
I snatched my journal, closed it, rose, and zigzagged around
the tables.
I pushed the orange battered metal door open. Nick stood
outside, talking to the police. The man was in back of a squad car.
One cop took notes as Nick spoke. Sunlight zoomed into me like
some hallucination. It was now sunny and bright. I realized in that
moment that I was still young and free, that my whole life lay ahead
of me, one long unfurling twisting road. Where that road would lead
I did not know. But that was okay. For now all I needed to know was
that the road existed. Foggy and winding, confusing and special, it
wound around the mountains and deserts of my soul.

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There was no destination, only that curving road. I walked
down Burnside, toward Voodoo Doughnuts, arrowing myself in the
direction of that road. Towards love.
Michael Mohr is a Bay Area writer, former literary agent’s assistant
and freelance book editor. His fiction has been published in: Ad-
elaide Literary Magazine; Bethlehem Writers’ Roundtable; Fiction
Magazines; Tincture; Flash: The International Short Short Story
Magazine; and more. A new story is forthcoming from Concho
River Review (Dec, 2018). His blog pieces have been included in
Writers’ Digest, Writer Unboxed, Creative Penn and MASH. His
most recent client accomplishment is a memoir, White American
Youth, by Christian Picciolini, a former neo Nazi skinhead who
changed his life. (Hachette, Dec 26, 2017.) Michael edits memoir,
adult literary and commercial novels, YA and suspense/thriller. His
writing/editing website is www.michaelmohrwriter.com.

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Cat Dance

By Scott Kauffman

Jacob Jones sighted down the oil shiny barrels at the skinhead
standing before the open refrigerator door, gulping from an upended
carton of milk. He deadcentered his gun bead on the skull and cross-
bones arcing the skinhead’s cranium and thumbed back the shotgun
hammers. At the metallic clicks of the twin catches, the skinhead’s
angled arm flinched and drops of milk splat the linoleum between
the mismatched sneakers, one black with pink shoelaces, the other
pink with black shoelaces. Jacob sucked in a breath.

“I’ve owned this Frigidaire for going on ten years. It works as
good as the day I trucked her home. I don’t need to be doing busi-
ness tomorrow at Sears for another because your brains got slopped
all over the inside of this one.”

The skinhead stood graveyard-stone still.
“And stop drinking my milk, goddamnit.”
The skinhead lowered the carton, but instead of returning it to
its shelf, stood swishing milk around the bottom and looking into
the refrigerator, head cocked and shaking back and forth as though
studying with disapproval its meager contents.
“What’re you gawking at?
“Can’t say you’ve got all that much to gawk at, Pops.”
Jacob’s cocked eye flicked opened. “Izzy?” He lifted his finger
a hair’s length off the triggers. “That you?”
“The prodigal daughter herself.” She stretched out both arms.
“Come home in the flesh.”

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“What’d happened to your hair, honey?”
“Shaved it off in prison.”
The kitchen clock ticked.
“Yeah, once the diesel dyke running the show on my tier fig-
ured out who I was nothing would satisfy her but to add me to her
string. Thought shaving my head would leaven her libido some.
Slinky told me later I bought me more than I bargained for. Way
more.”
The two stood, Jacob deadcentering the shotgun at the back of
his daughter’s head, she holding out her arms, a full moon burning
like ghostfire in the window, her cruciform shadow pointing at
Jacob.
“What time did you get in?”
She looked up at the clock hanging above the sink. The digital
numbers through the terminal window had blinked 8:33 when her
bus pulled into the Columbus station. She had not hurried to get off
as the door swung open but sat watching the passengers step down
onto the platform, and only when she was the last one, the driver
drumming the steering wheel with his leather-gloved fingers and
eying her in the mirror like a man desperate to relieve himself, did
she reach under the seat for her Disneyland bag. It was twilight, the
terminal dimly lit, but she kept her sunglasses on and pretended to
ignore the stares at her head, her face.
The restroom smelled of Lysol and diapers. A dozen women
crowded inside, but the sink at the far end stood vacant. She rested
her near empty bag underneath and stripped, folding her clothes
with care atop a smiling Mickey. She raised her eyes, for the first
time in a year and a week seeing all of herself naked. Scarecrow thin
missing only tuffs of straw. Chicken Legs the women on the tier nick-
named her in the last months before her parole. Once full breasts
that a year before men laid cash money on the bar to nuzzle now
wasted to only their nipples. The woman at the next sink wearing a
Buckeye sweatshirt hurried away and none dared to take her place.
Izzy held a paper towel under the faucet and washed, drying herself
with a half dozen more. She took from her bag her only change of
underwear, a pair of boys’ boxer shorts shoplifted at a Goodwill in

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Cheyenne. She studied the Tampax dispenser on the wall. When
had she last bled? Two months? Six? She stepped into her blue-
splotched painters pants and buttoned up the chambray work shirt,
faded and two-sizes-too big, folded into its breast pocket the last
nine dollars out of the five twenty-dollar bills the prison guard at
the gate had handed to her in an envelope along with a telephone
number and a wink. The guard but shook his head when she tore
up the number.

You’re goin’ to be a whole lot less uppity come a week from now
when you’re dying for your fix.

She pulled on her athletic socks, black at the heels, and finally
the Converses she had tricked out on the Omaha layover. For the
first time in a year and a week she looked at her face, showed her
teeth to the mirror, once white pearls metamorphosed to obsidian.

Meth mouth, whispered the sweatshirted woman to a teenage
girl she yanked by the arm out the door. Let that be a lesson for your
smart-ass.

She tried to make the face cry, but her eyes remained as dry as
her womanhood.

“Got in a while ago. Can’t say the University seems much changed.”
“Where was it you were getting in from?”
The refrigerator began to hum.
“Can I close this? What little food you’ve got is going to spoil
on you.”
“Sorry,” Jacob said, and lowered the shotgun, his eyes nar-
rowing as she turned to him. “That another tattoo on your face?”
“Kind of. You could call it a valentine tattoo of sorts. Shaving
my head pissed Diesel off something royal, so she had three of her
ponies hold me down in the showers. The one weighing in at some-
thing north of two hundred pounds squatted on my head while
Diesel straightrazored her initials.”
The veins roping Jacob’s hand knotted.
“Better uncock your shoulder buster before you lose a foot.”
Jacob could only stare.
“Pops?” She raised a finger to the shotgun. “Would you mind?”
“Sorry.”

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He leaned the shotgun in a corner adjacent the doorjamb.
“Have you eaten supper yet?”
“No, sir.”
“When did you last?”
“Hard to say. On the road, you lose track. Meals. Time. It’s
wonderful in a way. To lose track.”
“Let me fix us something.”
“I saw the inside of your frig. You don’t have enough to feed
a fat mouse.”
“I’ve some eggs. Bread I think in the pantry. You still partial
to french toast?”
“Cookie’s specialty was grits. Boiled for breakfast, fried for
lunch. Can’t say I’m partial to poached grits for supper.”
“Sit and talk to me while I fix us something.”
She shrugged but crossed the kitchen to stand behind the chair
that two years before had been hers as he got a quarter-loaf out of the
pantry and took a carton of eggs from the refrigerator. In a drawer
beneath the oven he found the skillet, and he brought a chipped
bowl out of a cupboard and went to crack the first egg on its edge.
“How many slices will you be wanting, honey?”
“I’ll start out with six.”
The egg fractured in Jacob’s hand. He turned to her, stringy
goo hanging from his fingers, his daughter’s eyes caged, looking at
nothing all.
He broke seven more eggs into the bowl and poured in two
cups of buttermilk and added a dash of nutmeg and a teaspoon of va-
nilla, whisking it all with a tarnished fork. He turned on the burner
beneath the skillet and reached up into a cupboard for the Folgers.
A breeze off the Hocking River whispered through the window,
carrying in it flecks of the last of the summer poppy from his garden.
She crossed the kitchen and looked out across the backyard, pools
of moon shadow spreading through the trees. She arched up on her
toes. “When did you get rid of our old doghouse?”
“After your mother . . .” Jacob’s hand stopped midway between
the can and coffee pot. She stood with her back to him, her hips as
slender as when she was ten. “Did you get my letter?”

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She nodded.
“I held up the services until I was certain you weren’t coming.”
“I was in jail. Awaiting trial before my bitch judge who had
zero interest in letting me sashay home, my mama’s funeral or no.”
“You couldn’t write?”
“Yeah, like that’s just what you wanted to hear.”
“It was, really,” Jacob whispered into the coffee can.
He finished measuring and held the enamel pot under the
faucet. “I supposed it was something. I wrote six, eight times after
we received your Christmas card. Never got word back.”
“You send them from the school?”
“No, I left them with Janet. She kept the stamps in her desk.”
“It’s been my observation that our Sanitation Department does
a really rotten job of delivering letters posted with them.” She again
looked out the window. “You know what?”
“What, honey?”
“We always had that old doghouse but never a dog.”
“Had him until you were about a year old. Little more than a
puppy when we . . . lost him.”
“I remember when I was maybe five asking what happened to
him. It was while we were having breakfast here at the table. You
looked at Mom and she at you. Then she grabbed my hand, almost
wrenching my arm out of its socket when she pulled me from my
chair and said if you ever breathed a word, just one, you could start
packing your bags.”
The melted butter began to spit. Jacob laid four slices of battered
bread in the skillet and opened a cupboard door, pushing aside the
contents. “I don’t recall us using up the last of the Aunt Jemima’s.”
“When was the last time you cooked french toast?”
“Maybe a week before you left.”
“Don’t worry about it, Pops. With your recipe we can skip
the syrup.”
She walked back from the window to behind her chair, picking
imaginary lint off her shirt, returning to the window after a minute
and again looking out. Then back to the chair, back to the window,
back to the chair. Only the light above the stove lit the kitchen, and

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as Jacob watched the browning toast and she paced the room, their
garbled shadows met and danced and parted.

“You didn’t say in your letter how she died.”
Steam from the sizzling toast clouded Jacob’s face. He did not
look up. “Carbon monoxide.”
“In our garage like she tried to before?”
“No. Not there.” He fished through the utensil drawer until
he found a spatula. “I take it the dude ranch you wrote us about
didn’t work out.”
She folded her arms across her wren’s chest.
“I’d hoped it might. You were always partial to horses. They
seemed to help when I took you out to McGill’s.”
“It was a brothel, Pops, not a dude ranch. The only horses I saw
were when they dropped their jeans.”
Jacob studied the toast. “She said that’s what it was. The Post
Office box in Reno. No phone number.”
“She was right. As always.”
“No, not always.”
“Whore madam or no, Debbie’s a sweet lady. Drove six hours
on desert roads even in summer to see me come visiting day. Took
up collections from the gang and sent money orders. Offered to pay
for my rehab once I got paroled.”
“I understand the P.O. box. Her ranch wasn’t a place where
you’d want us popping in uninvited.”
“It gave me somewhere to go on my day off. Do some shopping.
Pick up the mail, mostly catalogs with girl stuff. Hoping for a letter.”
“Yes. A letter.”
“I walked next door when yours came. Downed six shooters
quick as the barkeep could pour them. Never so much as capped his
bottle once. Bad side of town to be shooting tequila. Got to talking
to this cowboy sitting across the bar. Cowboy looking. Zig Zags
hanging out his shirt pocket. Complained to him the tequila was
getting me nowhere. I thought he was dealing me Mexican wallop.
He testified it was Peruvian cocaine. Figured he was clowning, the
way guys will in bars like when they invite you to step out to their
pickups so you can inspect their twelve-inch peckers.”

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Jacob slid the browned toast onto a plate, and after he cooked
the other four he stacked six slices on his daughter’s plate and two
on his. He filled a tumbler with milk and set it before her. Izzy stared
at her food. “Do we still say grace?”
“It’s been some time.”
She looked at the chair opposite her father. “It seems odd with
her gone.”
Jacob sliced his toast.
“When did you stop wearing your wedding band?”
“The day she told me you left.”
“You mean the day she ordered me to get the fuck out.”
“Yes. Janet admitted as much after we got your card. If it means
anything, she was crying when she told me.”
Izzy’s first bite fell from her quivering fork. Jacob kept his eyes
focused on the food before him. She stabbed at the fallen piece of
toast.
“I know nothing about her. Nothing about my real dad except
what little that Iris told me. Mom spun off on a tizzy the one time
I did ask.” The girl gave a shutter to her shoulders. “Didn’t make
that mistake twice.”
“It was a difficult year in her life.”
“You could say the same about all twenty of mine.”
“I know, honey.”
Izzy finished all of her toast before Jacob had eaten half of his,
and she sat picking crumbs from the table and licking them from
her fingers with the tip of her tongue. Jacob pushed his plate toward
her. “I’ve not as much appetite as I thought. Why don’t you polish
this off?”
She stacked his dish atop hers and started pulling the toast
apart. Jacob pushed back his chair.
“You still take your coffee with a quarter cup of sugar?”
“Straight,” she mumbled, swallowing.
“That’s new.”
“Tepid’s the only way they brew it in stir, so it doesn’t need
sugar. Said they didn’t want us getting any more menstrual than we
were already, to which I said amen, sister.”

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She watched him as he poured their coffees. “I know nothing
about you either.”
He set their coffees on the table and though he too drank it black,
he sat stirring his cup. “Just your run-of-the-mill science teacher.”
“I don’t even know where you were born.”
“Pittsburgh. Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Nuns found me on the back steps of Saint Timothy’s,
sleeping in the proverbial basinet. No note. Five dollars pinned to
my blanket.”
“So why were you maybe born in Pittsburgh?”
“There used to be a bus depot two blocks down.”
“Buses and girls down on their luck seem to go hand in glove.”
She sipped her coffee. “The sisters raised you?”
“Up until Sister Beatrice informed me at senior commence-
ment that I was going to make one crackerjack priest. Crackerjack.
So the next morning I stole twenty dollars from the poor box and
bought a ticket for Schenectady. Joined the Army. They sent me to
Germany. That’s where I met Janet. She was still married to David.”
“You knew my real dad?”
“He was my sergeant, I his corporal. David introduced us at
the NCO club on New Years’. Evenings to come I sat with her
until he came in. Or didn’t. We wrote after you two returned to
Iris’s. Enrolled in the University when the Army handed me my
discharge. On the afternoon after registration I walked up the hill.”
Jacob smiled into his cup. “She thought I was still in Frankfurt.”
“And you married her, adopted me.”
“Two of my happiest days.”
“I always remained her daughter.” Izzy’s fingers wandered her
sleeve. “She wanted me gone before I was born.”
“That’s not true.”
“You forget the summer she poured hot grease on my shoulder.”
“That was an accident, honey.”
“Right after she threw Iris out. She was cooking fish. I was
sitting where I am now, drawing Iris’s picture.”
“Janet always deeply regretted.”

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SHORT STORIES
“Who drove me to the hospital for the grafts? For months after
to the doctors?”
“Both of us.”
“You did. You were the one who held me in the car. Told me
it was hard to be brave but I had to. For you. Her only deep regret
was missing my face.” Izzy brushed a knuckle across her cheek. “Even
dead she gets her way.”
The breeze coming through the window fell away, the kitchen
air still as a held breath.
“I ask myself often if I could have done more.”
“You had your teaching. Trying to earn extra money coaching.
Working on your masters.”
“So often I considered divorcing.”
“I’d be lucky to see you for an hour at Christmas, in the garage,
whatever you gave me going in the trash before your car got out of
the driveway.”
“Sometimes I daydreamed about the two of us running away
in that old Rambler.”
“Life on the lam with Dad?” Izzy’s scar disappeared within the
folds of smile. “Cool.”
“Fun to imagine. No life for a child.”
A neighbor’s window thudded shut.
“Where did she die?”
A dog howled in the Appalachian foothills above town then
settled.
“Tell me. Please.”
“I was away. Pheasant-hunting with a couple of fraternity
brothers. It was a cold night. The police found them parked beneath
a burned out light in the back seat of Doc Albert’s Mercedes behind
the Slideaway Saloon.”
“I’m sorry.”
“After she threw you out, I gave up caring what she did.”
“I’m sorry for you being a teacher in a college town.”
“A very small college town. Now when I enter a room conver-
sations end mid-syllable. Appointments forgotten get remembered.”
“Where do you find the strength?”
“I’ve no strength left in me to find.”

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Adelaide Literary Awards Anthology 2018
He reached into a pocket of the ratty bathrobe she had given
him eight Christmases before and began taking out the shotgun
shells one by one and lining them up across the middle of the table.
“When I heard you downstairs, I was wiping the barrels.”
“Do you clean it often? At night.”
“There’s a dream. It started after your Christmas card came.
When I wake I find things to clean. Your room. My gun.”
“What do you dream?”
He took the last shell from his pocket and laid it on the table,
giving it a spin. When it stopped the shell pointed at him dead center.
“I’m walking through town, across campus, dressed as I am
now. No one notices. Everyone I meet I ask if they’ve seen you, and
they all say, yes, they saw you an hour or a week or a year before,
going north, south, east, west, running or walking or sobbing before
a tree, your head facing its black hollow. The sky changes from sun
to rain to snow as I walk out of town, the road turning from asphalt
to gravel to mud. The day is cold, my breath gray. Following me is
a dog with a gargoyle head hanging askew as if it had been tossed
from the window of a speeding car. I stop at each farmhouse, and
everyone says, yes, they saw you an hour or a week or a year before
going north, south, east, west, a stuffed pillowcase held tight under
your arm. I come to the next town, one I do not recognize, the dog
following at a distance. I inquire of a policeman, ask at a gas station,
enter an all-night diner. Everyone says, yes, they saw you an hour
or a week or a year before going north, south, east, west. On the
edge of town I stop at a house, and the woman tells me, yes, a girl
with forget-me-not eyes had indeed stopped there asking for a glass
of water, and she offered her a place to stay, but the girl shook her
sparrow brown hair that lay about her shoulders that the woman
says she knew men would pay to grasp if only for an hour and said
no, thank you, but maybe she would pass this way again if she did
not find her way home. She shows me to the door, and I continue
down the road, the dog following, and when I reach the bend I
look back. A girl in an upstairs window with dark hair about her
shoulders watches the dog, the winter sun distorting her behind the
glass, but I can make out a cat on the sill before her.”

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SHORT STORIES
Jacob again spun the shell that lay between them, and again
when it stopped the shell pointed at him dead center.
“A one-eyed gypsy at the county fair counseled me that once
cats dance into your dreams the gates of Heaven have already begun
to swing shut.”
The silhouetted shotgun leaned in the corner, Jacob never let-
ting the spinning shell come to rest before spinning it again. Izzy
rubbed her fingertips back and forth along the inside edge of the
table, and when she went to pick at the lint not on her sleeve she
grimaced at them and wiped the oily grime on the thighs of the
painter’s pants splotched blue by some prior owner. She reached
across the table for the spinning shotgun shell and dropped it in her
shirt pocket that held the last of the nine dollars from the five twen-
ty-dollar bills. She covered his hand with hers, put two fingers to his
wrist where her own was razor scarred, felt the pulse of her father’s
heart. Jacob raised his wet eyes to hers. “When was the last time you
cleaned in here, Pops? I mean gave it a really good scouring.”

Scott Kauffman. I am an attorney in Irvine, California, where my
practice focuses upon white-collar crime and tax litigation with my
clients providing me endless story fodder. I am the author of the
coming-of-age novel, Revenants, The Odyssey Home, published
by Moonshine Cove Publishing, and the legal-suspense novel, In
Deepest Consequences, published by Medallion Press. I am a recip-
ient of the Mighty River Short Story Contest and the Hackney Lit-
erary Award. My short fiction has appeared in Big Muddy, Adelaide
Magazine, and Lascaux Review. Photo attached.

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