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Best short stories by the Winner, seven Shortlist Winner Nominees, and eighty-seven Finalists of the second annual Adelaide Literary Award Competition 2018 selected by Stevan V. Nikolic, editor-in-chief. THE WINNER - Toni Morgan; SHORTLIST WINNER NOMINEES - Lazar Trubman, Pam Munter, Susan Pollet, Esq., Jose Recio, Peter Freeman, Michael Washburn, Janet Mason; FINALISTS - Andrea Lorenzo, Brooke Reynolds, Heather Whited, Jack Coey, Darrell Case, Alexandra Lapointe Edward D. Hunt, M Cid D'Angelo, Richard Dokey, Michael Mohr, Scott Kauffman, Olga Pavlinova Olenich, James White, Thomas Larsen, Patty Somlo, Rita Baker, Janine Desvaux, Mark Albro, Skyler Nielsen, Rachel A.G. Gilman, Jim Zinaman, Carolyn L. Bell, Robert McKean, Royce Adams A. Elizabeth Herting, Tara Lynn Marta, John Wells, Heide Arbitter, Jeff Bakkensen, Jeffrey Ihlenfeldt, Bettina Rotenberg, Hina Ahmed, Peter Hoppock, Matthew Byerly, Tim Rodriguez Riley Bounds, Wayne Hall, Dennis Nau, Kathryn Merriam, Sam Gridley, Jonathan Maniscalco, Harold Barnes, Mattie Ward, Brenna Carroll, Barbara Bottner, Beth Mead, David Macpherson Judyth Emanuel, George Korolog, Peter Gelfan, Mary Ann Presman, Deborah Nedelman Rebekah Coxwell, Richard Klin, Ted Morrissey, Ben Rosenthal, Terry Sanville, Steve McBrearty Richard Key, Max Bayer, Amada Matei, Sydney Samone Wrigh, Ross Goldstein, Zia Marshall, Lisa Lopez Snyder, Peter K. Wehrli, Joshua Hren, Maureen Mangiardi, Carolini Cardozo Assmann D. Ruefman, Lynette Yu, Mandi N Jourdan, Masha Shukovich, Annina Lavee, Meg Paske, Emily Peña Murphey, Clay Anderson, Niikah Hatfield, Jose Sotolongo, Carl Scharwath, Kaleigh Longe Maryna Manzhola

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Published by ADELAIDE BOOKS, 2018-12-14 08:52:26

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

Best short stories by the Winner, seven Shortlist Winner Nominees, and eighty-seven Finalists of the second annual Adelaide Literary Award Competition 2018 selected by Stevan V. Nikolic, editor-in-chief. THE WINNER - Toni Morgan; SHORTLIST WINNER NOMINEES - Lazar Trubman, Pam Munter, Susan Pollet, Esq., Jose Recio, Peter Freeman, Michael Washburn, Janet Mason; FINALISTS - Andrea Lorenzo, Brooke Reynolds, Heather Whited, Jack Coey, Darrell Case, Alexandra Lapointe Edward D. Hunt, M Cid D'Angelo, Richard Dokey, Michael Mohr, Scott Kauffman, Olga Pavlinova Olenich, James White, Thomas Larsen, Patty Somlo, Rita Baker, Janine Desvaux, Mark Albro, Skyler Nielsen, Rachel A.G. Gilman, Jim Zinaman, Carolyn L. Bell, Robert McKean, Royce Adams A. Elizabeth Herting, Tara Lynn Marta, John Wells, Heide Arbitter, Jeff Bakkensen, Jeffrey Ihlenfeldt, Bettina Rotenberg, Hina Ahmed, Peter Hoppock, Matthew Byerly, Tim Rodriguez Riley Bounds, Wayne Hall, Dennis Nau, Kathryn Merriam, Sam Gridley, Jonathan Maniscalco, Harold Barnes, Mattie Ward, Brenna Carroll, Barbara Bottner, Beth Mead, David Macpherson Judyth Emanuel, George Korolog, Peter Gelfan, Mary Ann Presman, Deborah Nedelman Rebekah Coxwell, Richard Klin, Ted Morrissey, Ben Rosenthal, Terry Sanville, Steve McBrearty Richard Key, Max Bayer, Amada Matei, Sydney Samone Wrigh, Ross Goldstein, Zia Marshall, Lisa Lopez Snyder, Peter K. Wehrli, Joshua Hren, Maureen Mangiardi, Carolini Cardozo Assmann D. Ruefman, Lynette Yu, Mandi N Jourdan, Masha Shukovich, Annina Lavee, Meg Paske, Emily Peña Murphey, Clay Anderson, Niikah Hatfield, Jose Sotolongo, Carl Scharwath, Kaleigh Longe Maryna Manzhola

Keywords: anthology,short stories,fiction

Amongst Beetles and Beer Cans

By Skyler Nielsen

One could hop from pizza box to pizza box, crossing the living
room without ever touching the ground. Between the cardboard
stepping-stones stood empty bottles of cheep beer with an occasional
crushed Heineken can left by Andrew Drummond. The man was a
self-declared dilatant, whose favorite snooty comment was, “I don’t
get how you can drink that peasants swill.”

The bookshelf and television top were littered with red plastic
cups, some still holding drink. Along the outer edge of the lino-
leum dining area stood a circle of chairs surrounding the shattered
dishes that a party crashing, frat boy knocked over. If the plates
had smashed an hour earlier there might have been someone sober
enough to properly clean the mess, but by the time of the fall, a
barricade of chairs was universally accepted as the proper course.

Before collapsing onto the broken down lazyboy near the
sliding glass doors, Joey Helmore put on his coat and pulled the
hood over his eyes. It’s the bane of the lightweight, and though
he only drank three shots of bourbon chased with half a gallon of
cranberry juice, he’d be hung over all day.

Lying on his stomach in the center of the floor was Guillermo
Cabal, who demanded everyone call him Walt. He was wide-awake,
and perplexed to find the remains of the party outlining his body.
Walt concentrated, but no matter how he arranged it, he couldn’t
imagine moving without rolling through the layer of garbage. So
Walt found distraction watching a small, black beetle crawl across
the carpet.

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Adelaide Literary Awards Anthology 2018
Finally Theo Lewycky emerged from his lair. After clearing
space on the coffee table by kicking everything to the ground, Theo
took a seat, burying his throbbing head in his hands. Walt and Joey
still wore the same clothes from the night before, but Theo had never
been one for surrender. So while his roommates snored, Theo stum-
bled into the bathroom to take a drunken shower before slipping
into a clean pair of underwear and falling asleep.
“We gotta stop inviting Felicia,” Walt coughed.
From under his hood Joey muttered, “When was the last time
she got invited anywhere? Felicia just comes.”
“How’s she find out?”
“That girl knows everyone. Unless one of us tells her to piss off,
she’ll always be here.”
“What’s the big problem with Felicia?” Theo asked.
The little beetle turned and Walt watched as it headed directly
toward him. “Are you kidding?”
“Well, what she do last night?”
“Same thing she always does,” Walt said. “She got wasted, then
spent the night jumping in the arms of every guy who already had
a date, screaming ‘I just love you’ all because she gets off on drama.
Five guys left this apartment only to get chewed out by their old
ladies because of Felicia. How many of them are ever coming back?”
“You’re just wounded because she turned you down last se-
mester,” Joey said.
“You watch, we’re going to end up loners because of her.”
Joey pulled himself upright without removing the shielding
hood from his eyes. “I’d rather have Felicia ruin my social life than
be stuck with the guy I talked to all night.”
“Who was that?” Walt asked as he blew the little beetle a few
inches, and watched it turn, and head back toward him.
“Some friend of Jennifer’s. He walked up, introduced himself,
then said, ‘Thanks for having me, I had a big fight with the wife, and
I needed to get out for a night.’”
“Oh I hate that!” Theo exclaimed. “It’s a damn set up. Every
married person I’ve ever known pulls it on single people.”
“Explain.”

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SHORT STORIES
“Oh, I’ll lay it all out for you, clear as day.”
Walt opened his eyes, and the beetle had wandered under his
nose. He blew harder, causing the innocent creature to tumble vi-
olently across the carpet. It landed on its feet, and headed off pur-
posefully in another direction.
“Alright, lets hear it Theo.”
“Don’t rush me, Walt. First we gotta set the scene. It starts
with your married buddy giving you a call because they had it out
with their wife. So you do your due diligence, and invite him out
for coffee.
“You meet at the local cafe. You’re friends got the problem, so
you buy the coffee. That’s fine, but without asking, you’re buying a
muffin too. This is perfectly acceptable because of the myth perpet-
uated by the married community that all single people are rolling
in wealth.”
“That’s true,” Joey said, “they all do that. Where’s it come from?”
“Because, every once in a while a married person gives fifty
bucks to their spouse, so they think they’re living with a financial
burden we don’t have. Kids are different mind you, but kicking
cash to a spouse doesn’t mean a damn thing. Anyway, we get our
coffees, he’s got his muffin, and we sit down at the only available
table. Then he starts in.
“Now I won’t comment on the trivial nature of the complaints.
I want to talk about the trap. It’s set up after he’s done venting, and
he looks you in the eye and asks, ‘What do you think I should do?’
This is it; you’re screwed before you say a word.”
It would likely be the most interesting part of the morning, so
Walt rolled over, landing on an empty beer bottle. He slid to the
right, and pushed the bottle away, but ignored the pizza box.
Theo paced, the thread of thought taking hold as each frantic
step ground more trash into the tattered carpet. “There are two roads
to take from here gentleman. You can side with your friend. It’s the
compassionate thing to do. You say something like, ‘Well I don’t
think your wife’s being fair dude. I think you should tell her to back
off a little.’ I mean maybe you’re gentler with how you say it, but
you get the gist.

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“What does this consideration get you? ‘You know I may be
here bitching about my wife, but I love her, and it doesn’t give you
the right to badmouth her. I mean she’s my wife, man.’ Now you’ve
got to apologize for being on his side. At the very least, you were
only saying what you thought they wanted to hear, when deep down
you didn’t even care.”
Walt and Joey smiled at each other. It was a joy to watch Theo
driven to madness by the sound of his own voice. Most of the time,
they didn’t understand what their friend was talking about, but it
always entertained.
“Taking the other side is no better. In fact it’s worse. You look
at your friend and say, ‘Maybe you’re being a little hard on her man.
I can see how it could get annoying, but you got to try to look at the
situation detached from emotion, you know. You got to get along
with your wife if nobody else in this world.’
“Now what happens? ‘That’s easy for you to say. You get to sit
around totally free, doing whatever you want, and you’re going to tell
me I shouldn’t take it so hard. As if you’re so good at it. You’re not
married because you’re worse at getting along with people than me!’
“And there you sit, being dumped on like an unpaid therapist,
forbidden to give advice. The worst part is that down the line, you’re
not allowed to get any payback because when YOU need to vent
a little, you can’t even get through a sentence before being inter-
rupted. ‘You think you have problems, let me tell you what my wife
said last week.’ And there you are again, having to stand and have
someone dump on you, and you can’t say shit.”
The pounding became unbearable and Joey vowed never to
make the mistake again. Pressing the tips of his fingers against his
forehead dulled the pain for a moment, but it wasn’t enough.
The relief ended and Joey murmured, “Man, I’m sorry I
brought it up?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I feel like crap. I need coffee and something to eat, so
who gives a damn about Felicia or some sad, unhappy bastard from
last night, and what’s the big deal with having to lose a few hours
playing marriage counselor. None of this is helping my headache.”

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“I was just saying.”
Pulling himself upright, Walt paused to repress the urge to
vomit. “Manuel’s is having its monthly champagne breakfast buffet.
How bout some hair of the dog.”
“Ech!” Joey wretched, “I’m not drinking anything ever again.”
“Don’t drink, but country potatoes and scrabbled eggs would
do you good.”
Theo stood and headed toward the short hallway leading to
his room. “I don’t know why I waste words on you two idiots. One
of the great philosophers of our time, and look what I have for
disciples.”
Skyler Nielsen.  Growing up in California’s San Joaquin Valley,
Skyler began writing fiction after the farm went under in 2003. He
moved to the Santa Cruz, CA in 2005 before relocating to Southern
California to work at his alma mater as landscape supervisor. He
graduated from the University of California Riverside with a BA
in History in 2003 and his work has appeared in Adelaide Literary
Magazine, Main Street Rag, the Literary Nest, Crack the Spine and
Oddball Magazine. His first novel One Left Inside the Well will
appear with Adelaide Books in the Spring of 2019.

253



You As Well

By Rachel A.G. Gilman

“Are you okay?” Aaron asked.
“Uh, yeah.” Violet shifted underneath his chest, the blue, floral

fabric of her silk bra skimming his skin. “I think so,” she said.
She had told Aaron it should be Valentine’s Day weekend, so

that her first time could be “special.” Aaron did not argue. He liked
Violet, more than he had liked other girls, including the one he had
met two summers ago on his family’s vacation to the Italian coast
that he had ended up giving his virginity.

Violet sniffed then rubbed the end of her nose. “I can’t
breathe,” she said, quietly.

Aaron rolled off her and into the wall where her twin-sized
dorm bed was pressed. His foot bumped into the now empty bottle
of wine he had purchased using his father’s credit card and a fake
I.D. stating he was twenty-three instead of seventeen and named
Henry Simpson.

“Do you not want to do this?” Aaron asked. He crinkled the
purple condom wrapper between his fingers, playing with it like
bubble wrap.

“No, I just...”
Violet looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath. Aaron
watched her chest rise and her cheeks fill up with air, growing
chubby like one of the chipmunks that had forgotten to hibernate
in the quad at their boarding school. She squinted, pushing her dark
eyebrows together in the middle of her forehead, then blew out the
air, sending her bangs.

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Adelaide Literary Awards Anthology 2018
“Are you mad at me?” she asked.
Aaron was mad he had forgone eating a steak at dinner so Vi-
olet’s vegetarian mouth would not feel guilty about kissing him. He
was mad his dick was hard and starting to hurt. But he was not really
mad, only disappointed. He dropped the condom and rolled away.
Violet moved closer. Aaron felt her fingers start to shake as she
walked them down the side of his arm toward his bicep. He turned
around, looking at her in the little space between them on the tiny
bed. Violet looked back with moist, marbled blue eyes, biting down
on her chapped bottom lip. “Aaron, I’m…”
“It’s fine.” Aaron took her hand and rolled onto his side again
as Violet tucked herself into his back, like one of the chipmunks
finally able to burrow for the winter. He breathed out slowly, too,
nodding off to sleep.
It started snowing in the night. Aaron woke up before Violet,
the sun infecting his early Sunday eyes. No one had bothered by
morning to clean the paths between dormitories at the Academy. He
slipped out of bed so he could start the trek back his room. Grabbing
his sneakers, he turned and looked at Violet. He did not know what
to say to her, even if she was awake. Nothing felt right. He departed
before he had to come up with something.
Aaron felt a chill when setting out to cross campus. Snow
seeped into his shoes. The dormitory halls – which were too hot, as
usual, with air gushing out upon entry – were for once a relief. He
felt around for the key to his room, jamming it in the door only to
realize the knob turned easily. He had left it unlocked last night, pre-
maturely excited. Aaron kicked the bottom of the door and dragged
his feet across the muddied mat. He turned toward his bed and saw
his father sitting on the corner of his mattress.
“Dad,” Aaron said, stumbling back. “What the hell are you
doing here?”
The last time they had seen each other was Christmas. They
had sat down when Aaron had needed information for his college
applications. But they had been at the Academy together since Aar-
on’s freshman year. His father had dropped him off and left without
honking good-bye unlike the other parents.

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Aaron’s father was the longtime Chief of Staff at a hospital in
the Boston area. The place was his kingdom, where he spent his time
lording over hordes of nurses and doctors rather than being home with
his family. Aaron’s understanding of his father was in blips, like how
he had worn the same wrinkled khaki pants for the last ten years, the
same ones he wore while sitting on the bed. For a change, his father had
donned the cashmere zip neck sweater Aaron’s mother had gotten them
both for Christmas. Aaron had left his back in his childhood closet.
His father sat up, rubbing his palms against his thighs. “Hi,”
he said. His eyes fell on the carpet. “Your roommate let me in. Said
you were out.”
Aaron stood up straighter; though he had always figured if you
sent your kid off to boarding school you gave up the authority to
have any kind of influence on their decisions. Those were the rules
they had lived by for years. “Why are you here?”
“There’s something I need to tell you,” his father said. He
turned his head to the side. “I got into some…trouble at work.”
“With a patient or something?”
“No, not like that.”
His father closed his eyes. He refused to look at Aaron. He had
not acted this way since he had accidentally killed Aaron’s pet fish
in kindergarten. Aaron watched as his father dug his fingers into the
fabric on his legs. “Please, sit,” he said.
Aaron sat down on the edge of the bed. He saw the reflection
of his own face in his father’s glasses. He also saw the veins pulsating
around his father’s brown irises and the grey hairs making up his
beard. His father was not usually a facial hair person except for va-
cations and family engagements like funerals.
“I’m…” His father started. “I’m being accused of something
by my female colleagues.”
“Of what?”
“Of inappropriate behavior.” His father said the words slowly,
pronouncing each sound carefully as if they were part of a different
language. He scratched his beard. “They have filed reports.” He
looked back at Aaron. “I wanted to prepare you. They gave me a
day, before it goes public.”

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Adelaide Literary Awards Anthology 2018
Inappropriate behavior. Aaron did not understand. From what
Aaron knew, his father was a workaholic who liked doing Sudoku
and swimming laps. He fell asleep on Sunday afternoons with NPR
on in the background. He wore boat shoes. He was…dull, so dull,
in fact, it was a joke Aaron’s mother had made to her friends at gath-
erings when she had gotten pregnant with Aaron’s younger sister,
Elyse, thirteen years after having Aaron, saying it had taken her that
long just to get her husband to come to bed.
Aaron did not like his father, but this did not make sense.
His father turned away from him. “I’ll be at your uncle’s in
Florida for a bit.”
“You’re leaving town?”
His father looked at Aaron, his eyes implying, You’re not getting
it, are you? Aaron sucked in his lips.
“I should be driving back,” his father said. “They say it’s going
to snow again and I don’t want to get stuck on the interstate.” He
picked up his coat. “Call me, if you want. I should be settled to-
morrow night.” Then he left.
Aaron stood in the middle of his dorm room, looking at his
wet sneakers making a puddle and staining the carpeting. His father
still sounded like a doctor, like the ambivalent voice giving generic
responses that were required to be devoid of emotions. Aaron did
not know what party in that scenario he felt like more – a family
member being told their loved one was too broken to fix, or the
patient who had not come in for the check-up in time to get the
best treatment. He sat in the middle of his dorm, silent, staring at
the sneakers and trying to remember what he was doing before this
all happened.
The next day, Aaron skipped class and stayed in bed. He told
his ice hockey coach it was food poisoning. He emailed his teachers
calling it acute frostbite. He simply ignored Violet’s SnapChats and
emoji-filled text messages. He kept refreshing The Boston Globe’s
website but the top story would not change: Chief of Staff Henry
Simpson axed from Mass General Amid Sexual Assault Allegations.
Anger moved through Aaron as he read the article. The feelings
were primarily directed at his father, his distaste for him going well

258

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beyond his lifetime absence, expanding to his inappropriate behavior
and destruction of families outside of his own.

Aaron found he was angry with others involved in the situa-
tion, as well. He was mad at accusers for not using their names so he
was unable to determine if they had been friends, women his parents
had entertained at holiday parties and helped throw baby showers.
He wanted to determine if he knew these women and if he did, he
wanted to ask them, “Why now?”

He also felt anger towards the newspaper. They did not have
to be so indulgent. They did not have to explain how his father had
cupped the ass cheeks of nurses or tried to push residents into coat
closets to sneak kisses on late shifts. They also did not have to put
everyone else involved through all the suffering, especially when Aar-
on’s father himself was probably off in Florida, on a boat with a beer
in hand, unconcerned. His father would never read the articles. He
only subscribed to news blurbs from the Golf Channel.

When his roommate went to dinner, Aaron called his mother.
The sound of his sister screaming filled the background after she
had answered.

“Hi, Aaron,” she said quietly. “How are you doing, sweetie?”
“I should really ask you the same.”

“Ha,” his mother replied, dryly. Aaron had never heard such a
thing out of her. “It sucks, doesn’t it?”

“That’s all you’re going to say?”
“What do you want me to say, Aaron?”
Aaron’s head was filled with questions. Did his mother know?
Had she always known? Why would she stay with him if she did?
Elyse’s cries grow louder and sharper through the receiver to break
up his thoughts.
“He’s a bad guy,” Aaron said. “He’s a really bad guy.”
“He did some really bad things,” his mother replied. “I hope
those women can find peace now that all of this is out there for ev-
eryone to know.” She sniffed and for the first time sounded as if she
may have been crying. The clink on a hard surface that followed was
undoubtedly her wine glass being set down on the marble kitchen
counter.

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Adelaide Literary Awards Anthology 2018
“I don’t want to see him again,” Aaron said.
“You’ll be eighteen soon,” his mother said. “It won’t be part
of the divorce.” She paused. There was another clink. “He will still
pay for college, though. It’s the least he can –”
“I hate what he did. I hate him.” Something ached in Aaron’s
throat when he said it. “I really hate him.” It hurt more than he
expected.
Elyse squealed in the background again. “Do your friends
know?” his mother asked.
“Nobody reads the Boston newspaper, Mom, not in Rhode
Island.” Even if they did, Simpson was a popular enough surname.
“You have to try not to think about it. The article doesn’t say
too much about us. At least we have that, I guess.” His mother must
have picked up his little sister as her voice cooed into the phone,
sweet little girl laughs straight from the belly. “There’s nothing else
we can do,” his mother added.
“It’s not that simple,” Aaron said. “When he came and told
me, he didn’t tell me everything.” Hearing his mother and Elyse’s
voices made Aaron think not just of them, but all girls, and how they
would someday grow up into women, and how someone like his
father might make them feel uncomfortable, and how while he had
never thought about it before he now realized it was exceptionally
wrong, too wrong to, in the words of his mother, “try not to think
about it.”
“Focus on school. Please?” His mother said she loved him and
made Elyse say it, too, before she hung up.
Aaron wondered if his mother in her half-drunk off wine state
of mind truly understood the situation and then immediately felt
terrible for thinking she would not. Of course his mother under-
stood. It was her husband. His mother knew best of all. Aaron’s
doubting her made him stupid, misunderstanding, careless. They
were all things he associated with his father and noting them of
himself made him feel more ill.
It was snowing again and the stupid chipmunks were bouncing
around. In his window ledge, Aaron had a frame with photos his
mother had put together when he had started boarding school. The

260

SHORT STORIES
first was her holding him in her arms at only a few days old, swad-
dling his body in a blanket and running her fingers over his pert
nose. The second had him and his father, standing outside of his ice
hockey tournament in elementary school with rosy cheeks on their
solemn faces. The third was the only one Aaron remembered. It was
from his last birthday before Elyse was born. He stood in between
his parents. He could see almost none of his mother’s light, delicate
features in his appearance, certainly not in her smiling face as she
kept one hand on Aaron’s shoulder and the other perched atop her
pregnant belly, draped in a denim kimono-style dress with elaborate
embroidery on the chest. All Aaron saw when he looked at himself
was his father. They had dark eyes, dark hair, and dark expressions
overwhelming what his mother had intended to be a bright moment.

Aaron tipped the frame upside down and pulled the covers
over his head.

His first class for the week was Social Behaviors, notoriously
the “easy A.” It was a requirement to graduate in order for the stu-
dents to have supposedly healthy social interactions in their adult
years. The teacher – a fumbling, middle-aged man with a collection
of belt buckles from different states and a nylon cord attached to the
ends of his glasses – Mr. Jansen, announced he wanted to change
the lesson plan. He separated the class clumsily into boys and girls,
leaving the young women in the hallway. Aaron noticed Violet but
avoided eye contact.

When the boys were settled in the lecture hall, Mr. Jansen
opened his computer. “In light of the current social climate, I
wanted to pull the gentlemen aside to talk outside of the syllabus.”
He pressed a button and the first slide came onto the screen: Sexual
Assault in the Work Place.

Aaron slid down in his seat.
“I’m sure all of you have heard about this one way or another,”
Mr. Jansen said. He tapped the screen where the projection was dis-
played and the photos of women and men who had been involved in
these accusations passed by, including the headline from the paper
the day before regarding Aaron’s father. “Tell me, how would you
define sexual assault?”

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Adelaide Literary Awards Anthology 2018
Aaron felt more uncomfortable. He felt like everyone was
staring at him. He wondered if he been wrong, if they did know
something.
The screen changed to a definition Mr. Jansen read aloud.
“Sexual assault is…an act in which a person sexually touches
another person…without that person’s consent, or coerces or physi-
cally forces a person to engage in a sexual act against…their…will.”
A list of inappropriate actions flashed up on the screen.
“This is lame,” one of the young men shouted from the back.
“Yeah. why don’t the girls have to sit through this?” another
asked. About a half dozen boo-ed in agreement: this was “bullshit,”
they claimed.
Mr. Jansen trudged on. “Look at these pictures and tell me
what all of the situations have in common.”
He flipped to another slide with a selection of photos of
women and men, some of which Aaron recognized because they
were famous. He thankfully, had no photo of Aaron’s father. The
images were carefully chosen so the women were smiling, wide-eyed
and cheery, while the men had grimaces across their graying faces. It
was same sort of expression Aaron’s father had in all of his pictures.
“The women were victims to these men’s behaviors,” Mr.
Jansen said. A slide came up with a slew of statistics about alcohol
and drug usage as well as suicide rates and STDs. “Women between
the ages of 16-19 are four times more likely than any other group of
people to be the victims of sexual assault, and this can have major,
damaging effects.” He pointed at the classroom. “But you guys, sit-
ting right here, are the future, which is why we need to talk. The
principal agreed with me. You, as well as the girls, must be aware of
this issue.” Someone joked it was clear Mr. Jansen had not gotten
laid in a while and after the laughter died down he reminded them,
“This is some serious stuff, guys. It can ruin entire lives.”
Aaron remained silent. The last slide had the word “victim” in
italics and red, over and over and over again. Aaron did not doubt
the women featured in the presentation were victims – that wrong
had been done to them, things that no one should ever have to
think about. He had spent the last thirty-six hours understanding

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this situation. But what Aaron really wanted to know was about the
families of the men in Mr. Jansen’s slides, the people behind the
person who had done the wrong thing, if those people were victims,
too. To Aaron, his mother was a victim. His sister was a victim. In
his own way, Aaron himself felt like a victim, even if he should not.
How did they play a role in “this issue”? The newspaper headline, the
feeling of his father sitting in the dorm room avoiding eye contact,
the photograph of his painfully optimistic, pregnant mother not so
long ago; Aaron closed his eyes and raised his hand.

“Yes, Aaron?” Mr. Jansen said. His posture improved.
Slowly, Aaron lowered his wrist. “Can I go to the bathroom?”
Mr. Jansen sighed, slouched again, and nodded.
Aaron picked up his backpack. He tried not to look at the girls
sitting outside, scrolling through the screens of their cell phones and
working braids into each other’s hair. He was not ready to think
about how they might be able to answer his questions.
A week passed before Violet approached Aaron in person.
“Walk me back to my dorm?” she asked. They kicked through the
snow across campus. “I wanted to see you before today,” she told
Aaron. “But…”
“It’s my fault,” Aaron said. “I’m sorry.”
“Maybe it’s both of our faults,” Violet said and smiled. Aaron
shrugged and they continued walking.
Violet pushed open the door to her room. Her roommates
were gone. “Do you want to sit down?” Violet set her backpack in
her desk chair then pointed toward her bed. Aaron leaned on the
edge of the mattress and she nervously laughed. “You don’t need to
act weird. It’s not like you haven’t been here before.”
Aaron had been there before, but he felt bad admitting he had
spent so little time looking around the place that it now felt foreign.
He had only ever been concerned with hooking up with Violet. He
did not recall her movie posters and history books and the pennant
flag from Wesleyan where she had already been accepted on a full-
ride. His eyes wandered over these things on the walls while Violet
slipped her coat off, hanging it in her armoire before walking toward
Aaron, sitting next to him. He looked at her, noticing the strange

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blend of blues that made up her eyes and the skinny veins in the
same shade that were visible inside of her wrists. He wished he could
have noticed them sooner, to see them as something beautiful and
not as he saw them now, something fragile.

Violet leaned closer. “I missed you.”
“I’ve just had a weird week,” Aaron said.
“So I didn’t do anything?”
Aaron shook his head. “Of course not.”
“Okay.” Violet moved her hand to Aaron’s kneecap, wrapping
her fingers around and squeezing as she pulled herself closer to him.
She pushed her nose into the side of his neck, breathing into his ear.
Aaron kept his hands at his sides. She breathed out with her mouth
pressed below his earlobe before she started kissing his face. She
pulled herself into his lap as she moved her way across to his mouth.
“If it’s okay with you, I’d like to do something…now?”
Aaron kept his eyes shut. He could not enjoy the smell of Vi-
olet’s vanilla body lotion or her fingers kneading into his shoulders,
anything about her that he had wanted so badly a week ago. He could
only think of his father and the nurses and the residents, of his mother
trying to get his sister to stop crying and how she likely did the same
by herself when the wine ran dry, of whether Violet really wanted to
him or if somehow he had made her feel like she was obligated to per-
form. He thought of himself as a victim and felt incredibly ashamed.
Aaron could not open his eyes, even as he felt Violet take his
hand. She laced their fingers together and moved them to her chest;
under her woolen sweater so it was on top of the same lacy bra she
had had on the week before. He stopped and pulled his hands away.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really, really sorry.”
The watery consistency returned to Violet’s eyes when she
looked back at him. They were so glossy Aaron could see his image
in them, his dark hair sprouting the way his father’s always did, grey
in his face around the eyes. “I don’t under—” Violet started.
Aaron started to cry.
“Aaron, I didn’t mean to…” Violet tried to articulate herself
over Aaron’s tears. “Can’t you tell me what is going on? Please?”
She pulled back.

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Though he could not get the words out, anyway, Aaron did not
want to answer the question. Until he could find some sort of way
to handle the emotions – not by filing paperwork like the hospital
employees, not by drinking like his mother, not by screaming his
head off like his little sister, and certainly not by taking Mr. Jansen’s
definitions like biblical law when anyone could see it was not so
black and white – it was no use simply acknowledging the problem.
Violet took his hand again and held it in her lap. She asked
once more, “Are you okay?” Something inside of Aaron hurt and
he wondered if it was the same way the other victims felt, too. He
wondered if trying to call his father (even if he would not pick up)
would help to make it go away.
Rachel A.G. Gilman is a writer whose work has been featured in
Minetta Review, Verdad, and others. She has also contributed to
TV Guide Magazine and Popdust. She holds a B.A. from NYU and
is pursuing an MFA at Columbia University and an MSt at Oxford
University. Additionally, she founded the feminist literary journal,
The Rational Creature, and hosted the award-winning radio show,
“The Write Stuff”. Find out more at rachelaggilman.com.

265



Going With The Vibe

By Jim Zinaman

Will León awoke to the shake of his shoulder by Bruce Murphy
reaching back from the passenger’s seat. He bolted upright to kneel
upon the floor of the rental panel van, widening his eyes and running
his fingers through his close-cropped hair to rouse himself from what
had only been another four-or-five-hour escape from having to be on
watch. Yet something like the ringing of the crickets remained in his
ears. It fell over his whole consciousness in a veil of faint music he
once felt as a younger man to be something calling him to another,
higher place, but over the years he had accepted as merely the sleep
his body was telling him he needed, but never found time to afford.
Pink streetlights blinked out on Forty-Seventh Street. The wee-hour
dimness was giving way to the tide of another summer morning haze.

“What’s up?” Will asked, as he climbed forward between the
seats and slid behind the steering wheel, following the direction
of Bruce’s finger, which pointed several parked-car-lengths up the
street at the three yellow vans parked along the opposite curb.

Behind his ear Bruce tucked a shoulder-length curtain of
shaggy hair that was the color of flames. He drew a mango to his lips
and, closing his eyes, took a long luscious bite. He swallowed. “That
Michael Silven guy and a hot-looking chick got into the last one.”

“Pray to God it’s Angela,” Will said.
Bruce reached down between his calves into the lime-green
knapsack he had found along with breakfast a few weeks ago in a
dumpster behind McDonalds. He withdrew a little clear plastic bag
encasing a marijuana cigarette.

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“Relax,” Bruce said. “It’ll be her.”
Will sighed. “I don’t know about this snatch.”
“You’re just tired, man.”
“No shit. But it’s more than that,” Will said.
“You checked Silven out, right?”
“Of course I did. My wife grew up with him.”
“She knew he was into this shit?
“He got her into the cult when they were in high school. When
I deprogrammed her last year, he started having doubts and reached
out to her.”
“Sounds like he was really into her.”
“Oh yeah. They went out in high school and hung out in the
cult.”
Bruce leered. “And he’s spending time with her lately?”
Will snorted. “Not every guy is devious like you.”
“Dangerous to presume they’re not, my man.”
“The guy’s legit,” Will stated. “When I talked to him, he re-
gretted having gotten involved in the Lovers. He wants to make up
for all the people he recruited into it, or as many as he can, before
he leaves.”
A clank and squeal of springs called their attention to a passing
delivery truck. Right behind the truck was the first yellow van fol-
lowed by the others.
Two taxis passed before Will started the engine and charged
out of their parking space. He raced up the street between the un-
broken rows of parked cars to arrive at a stop with the two taxis
between themselves and the yellow vans.
Will followed the vans across Seventh Avenue by Times Square,
which was a coliseum of advertisements flashing at him. The one for
Schindler’s List caught his eye: the bare hand and taut wrist tendons
of a mother clasping the tiny hand of a child, holding its red-sleeved
arm up from a darkness. On Broadway the taxis turned off to the
left. He slowed to allow another delivery truck to slip in front of him.
The yellow vans were heading toward New Jersey to stock up
for the day’s street sales of Mexican hanging flower pots. Michael
Silven had said they would probably stop for gas at a block-long gas

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station near the taxi garages. The station was perfect for Will and
Bruce: open on three sides–54th and 55th Streets and Tenth Avenue.
Hardly anyone around. By the time someone called a cop, they’d be
way up the West Side Highway.

They could not have asked for better timing as they hit green
lights at Eight, Ninth, and Tenth Avenues. At Tenth they all turned
right, the delivery truck heading up the middle of the avenue, the
three yellow vans swinging in single file to the left, the same side of
the street as the block long gas station two intersections ahead. Will
eased toward the left-most lane so that the vans were more than a block
ahead of them. When the middle one turned into the station, he sped
up and swerved to an abrupt stop by the curb across the street from the
station’s nearest corner. The other two vans turned left onto the street
bordering the far side of the station and came to a halt along the curb.

A station attendant walked to the driver’s window of the van at
the gas pump island. After a moment he went to the pump, opened
the gas tank door at the side of the van, and stuck the hose nozzle
into it. Then he moved over to a taxi at another gas pump island.

A brazen-faced young woman with a mane of raven-black hair
emerged from behind the passenger’s side of the van. Her breasts
bobbed beneath a hot-pink halter top. Shiny red shorts clung to her
butt above deeply tanned legs. Hands on hips, she arched and stretched
her back with elbows pointed out to the sides and started doing deep
knee bends. Then she stood and surveyed Tenth Avenue. Her stance
conveyed the commanding demeanor described by her parents.

The slot on the other side of the gas pump island was empty.
He floored the accelerator, cutting across the street just in
front of an oncoming taxi, and hit the brake so that the van ambled
through the Tenth Avenue entrance of the station and glided into
the slot beside the gas pump island.
The station attendant withdrew a gas hose nozzle from a pump
on the other island and moved toward the rear of a second taxi that
had pulled up. He looked at Will. “I’ll be right with you.”
Will waved him off. “I’ll help myself. You look busy.”
The attendant gave an acknowledging nod and yanked the hose
so that it extended over the trunk of the taxi.

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Will turned to Bruce, motioning with a glance toward the rear
windows. “Where is she now?”
Bruce scurried in a crouched position to the window, keeping
his head low so that his eyes barely cleared the bottom edge. “She’s
just walking around with her arms folded across her chest.”
“Beside the van or behind it?”
“Beside it. The gas pump is between her and us.”
Will grimaced. He glanced out the rear windows and then the
driver’s window. The two vans would be hard to get a good head
start on if he immediately took 55th Street to the highway. And
54th Street was one‑way in the wrong direction with early morning
rush-hour traffic streaming toward the parking lots of mid‑town
Manhattan. The Tenth Avenue side of the station was clear, though.
He shifted into neutral with the engine running.
“She’s behind it,” said Bruce. He quickly ducked below the rear
window. “Now she’s walking right behind us. Where’s Michael?”
Suddenly a young man with finely styled black hair and bril-
liant blue eyes emerged from the driver’s door of the van.
“Guess who joined the party,” Will said.
Bruce crouch-walked to the front seats.
Michael gave them a quick wink, turned abruptly, and walked
briskly toward the vans parked on 55th Street. He beckoned with
both hands for the drivers to get out of their vehicles.
“What’s he doing?!” Bruce said.
“Saving our butts. He’s getting them out of their cars so we
can get a good jump on them down 55th Street.” He put a hand on
Bruce’s shoulder. “Go out your door and circle around the front
of the van like you’re checking out the tires. I’m going to open the
back doors. Wait until they’re fully open, and count to three so I
can get back to my seat. Then grab her, keeping her arms pinned.
Okay?”
Bruce looked down.
“What’s the matter?” said Will.
“Michael was supposed to approach the van and help me.”
“He is helping you. He’s got them distracted.”
Bruce did not reply.

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“You’re twice her size,” said Will. “You can’t handle her your-
self?”
“Of course I can. But the plan–”
“Fuck the plan. What’s happening is happening.” Will reached
across Bruce, opened the passenger door, and pushed him out.
Bruce grabbed the door window frame to maintain his balance.
He whirled around. “What the matter with you, man?!”
“Get moving. We’re going to lose our chance.”
Bruce stared at him. “We’ve already lost it, Will.”
“Lost what?”
Bruce started walking away beyond the front of the van.
Will stuck his head out the driver’s window. “Where are you
going?” he said in a fierce whisper.
Bruce stopped and swung around. “You said, ‘Get moving, right?’”
“But I need you!”
Bruce returned to the car passenger doorway. Ducking inside
with his knee upon the passenger’s seat, he took Will by the shoulders
and shook him. “Better believe you need me. I’m all you’ve got.”
“What are you talking about? I could’ve gotten anyone to help
me.”
“Yeah? Like who?”
Will glanced over Bruce’s shoulder through the doorway to
see Lovers by the vans in Mexican peasant shirts and white painter’s
pants finish their jumping jacks under Michael’s direction. Michael
then led them in toe-touches. He shot a look at Will and Bruce as
he reached down toward his outer foot.
“Bruce, please,” Will said. “We don’t have time for this bullshit.”
“I’m not bullshit, Will. Who else would you’ve gotten to help
you?”
There was only one way to short-circuit this discussion. “You’re
right,” Will said. “I have no one else.” He sighed and gazed down-
ward. “I’m sorry I shoved you. If I could just get some fuckin’ sleep...”
Bruce patted his shoulder. “I know,” he said. “I know.”
Will glanced up to find Bruce gazing at him with a warm smile.
The apology had worked. “Can we get back to the snatch?”
“If that’s all you want.”

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“If that’s all—what the fuck else would I want right now?”
Bruce watched the station attendant thumb through a wad of
dollar bills to give the Lover van driver his change. He glanced out
the back windows at the Lover woman. Hooking his hands upon the
car roof, he swung back out of the passenger doorway.
“What you always want,” Bruce said, closing the door quietly,
never taking his eyes off the Lover woman. “More.”
As he had been trained by Will, Bruce walked slowly around
the front of the van, glancing intently at the tires as if he were in-
specting them.
Will almost asked himself how he had ever ended up with such
a loser as Bruce Murphy. In the ten or so minutes he had been awake
he had almost forgotten the answer. It was not just that everyone
else who had ever helped him on cult deprogrammings had left to
move on to a better life–or at least, an easier one–the freshly depro-
grammed cult members who had been his assistant deprogrammers
returning to college or graduate school, the abduction men and secu-
rity guards pursuing union jobs or other trades with health benefits.
It was not just that he had known Bruce since dropping out of St.
Augustine’s, attending Donne High with his newfound friend and
tasting the heaven of earthly delights known as girls and marijuana.
Nor, upon his return home from deprogramming after deprogram-
ming around the country, his mind still immersed not so much in
what was wrong with a cult member as in what was wrong with her
family, in what led her to seek the refuge of a cult and what made the
never-ending advertisements of the good life in America blare more
and more as the perpetration of the biggest lie, that he found Bruce
to be the only other person in Donne, NY, who found their home-
town to be such an alien land. It was just that Bruce Murphy was
the only one who understood that beyond trying to be an attentive
husband and a responsive father and a talented auto mechanic with
a thriving business, Will could not live without believing that there
was more to it than this, that there just had to be more.
As Bruce approached the driver’s door, Will sensed that things
were moving too fast. Maybe this snatch was not meant to happen.
He didn’t even know for sure that this young woman was Angela.

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He reached out the window and grabbed his friend’s bicep as
he was about to pass toward the rear of the van. “Bruce,” he said,
“let’s hold off.”
“We’re so close I can taste it.”
“Doesn’t feel right,” Will said.
“Look, man. You know I could use the few thousand from
the fee.”
“I know, but–”
“Let’s just go with it,” Bruce insisted. “A few more minutes. If
it still feels right, we go for it. If it’s not, we walk away.”
“But the vibe–“
“The vibe,” Bruce interrupted. “That’s right. The vibe got us
to this point, and the vibe will tell us what to do.” Will returned his
stare. “And,” Bruce added for the clinching argument, “if you don’t
take her now, how do you know you’ll ever get another chance?”
Will could not deny the point. It had taken him nearly a year
to find her. And as one of the Lovers’ Community Coordinators,
she was subject to the whim of Guru Mamaraji, who at any moment
might call upon her to proselytize and organize in another part of
the world.
Will nodded. “I’ll open the back doors and check it out. If I
keep them open, you move.”
He could not take his hand off Bruce’s arm nor his eyes off the
play of sunlight upon his friend’s face, the teeny pool of shadow in
the dimple of his chin. Crickets sang in Will’s ears once again. He
wanted to say something more, but no words came to mind.
Bruce drew his arm away and proceeded to a point just short
of the van’s rear, and paused there, leaning forward slightly to peek
around the corner at his prey.
Will whirled around and moved to the rear doors before Bruce
could do anything hasty. Angela still stood facing Tenth Avenue with
her back to the van. She was close enough so that the doors could
just swing open without hitting her. He depressed the latch handle
with a loud clunk and quickly pushed the doors all the way open.
She suddenly turned around and smiled, a shine of utmost
bliss in her deep dark eyes. “Hi,” she said. “Looking for company?”

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Will was at a loss to respond, momentarily frozen with his
arms extended to the sides from just having pushed open the doors.

Before Bruce could sweep in unseen from the right, he caught
the corner of Angela’s eye. She turned to him and with her eyes
shifting from Bruce to Will to Bruce again, she assessed the prospect
of two strange men, two big strong men, at close range suddenly
staring at her. She placed her fists upon her hips. “Well,” she said,
“it seems the company is looking for me.”

To any passerby it would have appeared to be just another
whore from Eleventh Avenue who had crawled out of the woodwork
to solicit her morning’s work one block east. Yet Will knew her
come-on line to be a stock Lover recruitment ploy: sink the hook in
a prospective male member’s groin and then reel him into attending
an introductory Lover meeting with her.

Bruce played along with it. He nodded toward Will. “My
friend over here always accused me of looking for love in all the
wrong places.”

Angela smiled. “Maybe he just needs to get to know me to
convince him otherwise.” She glanced at Will. “How about you and
I take a walk?”

“Forget about him,” Bruce said, suddenly sweeping her up in
his arms.

Her eyes widened with alarm. She swallowed and then re-
gained her cocky composure. “And what are you up to?” she said
with a leer.

Bruce grinned. “May I?” He began carrying her around in lan-
guid pirouettes as he turned and stepped to the haunting stealthy
beat of his favorite Rolling Stones tune, which he began to sing:

But don’t play with me,
‘cause you’re playing with fire.
Will remained with one knee upon the floor of the van, almost
transfixed by his friend’s performance if it were not for the fact that
he knew this was no time for playing around.
The leer fled from Angela lips when Bruce resumed singing.
Her eyes sharpened with impatience.

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“Okay, stud,” she said. “You can let me down now.” She glanced
at Will. “This is getting a little too kinky with the two of you.”
Will retreated to the front of the van, wishing Bruce would just
shut up and make the move.
“But we’re just getting started, baby,” Bruce replied.
“No we’re not.” She reached up and grabbed his hair. His head
wrenched back. He staggered a few moments trying unsuccessfully
to twist free of his captive’s clutch as she writhed and screamed and
kicked to get free of his.
“Just get her in!” Will shouted, jumping into the driver’s seat.
He shifted into drive and turned to the rear with one foot on the
brake pedal and the other on the gas as the engine raced. “Get her
in! Get her in! Get her in!”
Bruce charged toward the van bear-hugging the woman. There
was a bang. Will thought, “Who the hell is shooting off fireworks?”
when suddenly Bruce’s head flipped back with spray of blood. He
dropped Angela on the pavement. Bang. The left rear van door
clanged. Bang. Its window shattered. Bruce staggered in a little circle
with his face webbed in blood.
Will charged out of his seat, his foot pushing off the gas pedal.
The van lurched forward and sent him stumbling out the back
doorway. He belly-flopped onto the asphalt. When he managed to
get to his knees, Bruce fell into his arms, knocking him back on
the ground. Van doors slammed shut, engines roared. Will rolled
to the side, propping himself up on one elbow with Bruce’s blood-
drenched skull upon his other forearm. There was blood running
down a strand of Bruce’s hair into his unblinking sea-green eye.
There was the unending roar of rush-hour traffic headed for another
day of work. And rising once again, immersing every other sound,
was the scream in his ears of those goddamn crickets.

Jim Zinaman is a recruiter for finance, accounting, and IT pro-
fessionals. After graduating Yale, he hitchhiked around the United

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States, working as a carpenter and a restaurant cook, and joined and
later helped deprogram members from a cult. Jim grew up north
of New York City and lives in eastern Connecticut. With six short
stories published to date, he won Adelaide Literary Journal’s Best
Short Story of 2017.

276

I Call Her Lucky

By Carolyn L. Bell

Heck, I don’t even think she knows how lucky she is…a husband
who comes home nights, grownup kids with real jobs, nice house.
When I pull up to her fancy neighborhood in my rusty old hatch-
back, lift the trunk and drag out my mop and pail, I can’t help but
wonder why the good Lord makes it so goddamned uneven.

Got pregnant at fourteen. Dexter, the neighbor kid who hung
around all the time, came after me in the barn. Hay fever clouded
up my eyes so bad I couldn’t see, and I tripped stumbling through
the bales. Couldn’t get away. After a month, I knew. Momma knew
too, but she didn’t say anything. It was Papa who threatened him.
“You knocked her up. Now you best take care of it. Be a man.”

Seems like I’d just barely found out how babies were made
before I had the first one. Growin’ up on a farm left me no time to
learn much ’cept how to scatter chicken feed, milk the cows, scratch
off the milkstone, and wash the dishes.

Forced to marry the boy I hated more than a rabid dog. Had
not one single happy moment with him. Had to watch everything
I said so’s not to set him off. He’d easier thwack me hard than turn
around. His mean ways brought two more kids into the world.

After the third kid with Dexter, I fell in love for the first time
at a VFW dance. Danny. He and I got together in secret for almost a
year. I figured I didn’t owe Dexter nothin’ because everything he got
out of me, he stole. Anyone who forces himself on you is worse’n the
dirt under your toenails. Downright mean, that’s what he was, and

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from what I’ve heard that’s what he still is. Incarcerated in federal
prison. Multiple counts of rape and robbery. Hope he never gets out.

But Danny was different. He treated me nice, like a human
being. One Sunday, when Dexter was out on his usual toot, drinking
day and night, Danny and I and a bunch of us went to the pond, at
the end of Carver’s Road. Right before my eyes, Danny drowned.
Happened so fast, I froze solid to the spot. Cried my eyes out for
days, mostly because I couldn’t save him. Neither one of us could
swim. There was nothing left for me after that except the kids.

I was already pregnant with Danny’s daughter when I packed
up the next day and ran to Danny’s mama. She drove me and the
kids to the bus station, gave me a huge hug and folded enough
money in my hand for bus fare for alla us plus meals. I bought tickets
to a place as far away as I could travel on the money she gave me.

Now I’ve got five kids, Kelsey, Kevin, Katy, Kristen, and Kelly.
The fifth just happened one night with a total stranger at a truck stop
where I was waitressing. I was lonely. All but one are grown now.
Brought ’em up on my own with no help from anyone.



Angie’s cleaned our house for fifteen years. She does a darned good
job considering the fact that she only comes for three and a half
hours every other week. It’s a lot of square footage to cover so I’m
grateful to her.

When I first hired her, I thought now here’s a natural beauty,
pure and sweet as a nun. She spoke gently, moved quietly, and ex-
uded humility. Like a lovely dream. A communion of work and will.
I learned no one’s untarnished, not even nuns. We’re all evolving,
moving in and out of phases of our lives.

When Angie and I talk about our kids, as different as we are,
we find things in common about parenting. When your kids are
little, you want them to be safe and not crazy. As teenagers, you
want them to be free of drugs, out of jail, and not pregnant. After
they get married, you want them to be financially independent,
give you grandchildren and not reject you completely. That’s about

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it. Everything’s gone pretty much great so far for me. I consider
myself lucky.

But Angie? There was a lot more under the surface than first met
the eye. I’ve had to sit down on the staircase, listen and wait, while
she rests her chin on the upright vacuum hose and spills tears down
her shirt, telling the saddest stories I’ve ever heard. It’s one thing to
read about people in a book, but when you know a person, whose life
is so sad, and you count on them, you can’t exactly shut the book.

I try to comfort her. “Angie, I’m sorry those things happened
to you. You’ve got more courage than most people I know, that’s
for sure.”

“Prayer helps,” she tells me. “Jesus walks with me every step of
my journey.” After about a half hour of her stories, she says, “Well,
I better get back to work. Sometime It feels like you’re my big sister.
I think we’re just alike. ’Cept you have your college degrees and a
man and a house and...”

I just hug her and try to keep her from seeing my own tears
welling up.

Today I had some errands to run…mani-pedi, gas, groceries
for the dinner party I’m having Saturday, shop for a cute sundress,
something fresh and flowery, for our friend’s daughter’s wedding,
nothing earth-shaking, but I wanted to leave before Angie arrived. I
feel guilty she doesn’t have the luxury to do these things, so I took
off as soon as she arrived.



I’ve been cleaning Diane and Don’s house for fifteen years, but I’ve
got a problem. When I pull up to their house, I recite my mantra:
I will not, will not, will not snoop around in her stuff. My heart starts
beating when I think of what she’s got in there. I get itchy all over. I
mean she’s got real sterling trays and antique candlesticks everywhere
(polished by me), mahogany furniture that shines like glory. I should
get a piece of her action. After all, I’m the one taking care of it.

I enter with my special garage door code, shut off the security
system, and get settled. First, I fill my water bottle with ice from

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their fridge. If there’s a lemon already sliced, I take a wedge. I like
to pretend I’m at a fancy luncheon. I squeeze the juice into my
metal mug and put the lid on right away in case she comes home
and sees me. It’s only a little lemon, but still…dreaming helps quiet
my breathing.

Second, I dial up K-Love, my favorite Christian station, or
Praise FM. I switch back and forth between them. It inspires me
to focus on my work. She, by that I mean Lucky, has NPR on. It
depresses me, soft for a while and then crashing all loud. I need a
more upbeat kinda sound. Jesus has been by my side through thick
and thin, and even though I’ll never be without sin, I have to keep
on trying. I figure if I leave the radio dialed in after I leave, Diane
might catch on to the right way of thinking. You see, Don and
Lucky Diane are nonbelievers. Even with all that money, they hav-
en’t found The Lord. They’re missing something valuable.

Then, I begin my routine. Dusting, turning things over and
wiping underneath. I like finding what’s under the surface. Cleaning
what’s dirty. Especially dusting the blinds and getting rid of dead
spiders laying around on the wood floor. Sometimes when I’m am-
bitious, I open the sliding glass doors and find bundles of white nests
full of tiny spider babies. It makes me sad to spray Windex up and
down the rubber gasket, but they’d be crawling around and taking
over otherwise. Enough babies in the world already.

Scratching around in private places is one of the things that
keeps me coming back. I learn how the other half lives so one day I
can live like they do. Otherwise it’d be just bleach and rags. Vacuum,
mop, scrub, polish and more rags.

Once I finish the two lower floors, I get ready to go upstairs.
Made-up stories have already started in my head—what it would be
like to live here, to come home to this big house ’stead of my little
one-room apartment, where I can barely turn around. I’m already
thinking about my reward. My heart has started to jitterbug.

You can tell a lot about folks based on what they keep in their
bathrooms. Dirty combs with tangled hair left in them. Shampoo
bottles with hardened liquid. Expired laxatives. Hibiclens from
old surgeries. Diane and Don have surgeries the way folks have a

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good bowel movement. They feel a lot better afterwards and they’ve
gotten rid of something important. Then there’s the old-school basal
thermometer, a leftover, before they had the “Answer” test you can
pick up at CVS. Diane’s youngest child is in her thirties, so it was
a long time ago when Diane was trying to get pregnant. Why don’t
they throw that old trash away? No one needs it in the 21st century.

First thing I do, I take a deep breath. Then I dive deep under
the main bathroom sink, holding my nose away from the powdery
smell of old perfume, and reach in to where I know she stashes her
scrips. Her really good pills are in an old gold tin box—Oxycontin,
Vicodin, Percocet. The oxys are old, but still pack some punch. Jesus
H. Christ in a chicken basket. She’s had every imaginable kind of
surgery, from feet to eyelids and I don’t have the insurance to cover
regular doctor visits. She’s lucky that way too. If there’s something
wrong with me, I am SOL.

Diane’s little blue pill splitter helps me measure half, just
enough to relax into the vacuuming. Stroke forward. Stroke back-
ward. Forward. Backward. Matches my heartbeat. I’m blissed out
when I have that lovely stuff inside me. If I’m too slow, I take Ad-
derall to speed up.

I kiped that from another client.
Well, after months of crossing over a few lines, one day in
April, everything came apart. And I mean everything. It was spring,
but the heat in her house was on like blazes. It felt musty and stuffy.
I’m in my change, having hot flashes. Makes me crazy. I felt the
sap rise up to boiling inside me, so I opened all the windows, and
turned on the radio. Instead of preachment I picked something slow
and jazzy, reminded me of days long ago when I used to lay on the
beach. The sand under me and the sound of the water sent me clear
to heaven. I used to spend the night at the beach with my flavor of
the month. More than once, I woke up covered in flea bites and
happiness that lasted all day. I just loved to be loved by the water. I
wonder if Diane ever had that much fun.



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So I came home that spring day, to find the windows cranked
open, the heat still on, and the radio blasting some crazy sound.
“Angie!” I shouted. “You’re heating the whole block. Where
are you?” I looked all around. No sign of her on the bottom two
floors, so I went upstairs.
There she was, rolling the vacuum back and forth, popping and
snapping noises up all kinds of hair and grit from the bathroom tile.
She looked strung out. Believe me, I know the signs. Straggly hair.
Pale face. A very sick nun.
“What’s going on, Angie?” I stood right in front of her. “You
know, for awhile I’ve noticed things are a little off. For example, the
fringes on one side of the rug in the dining room are at least an inch
shorter than the others? Why is that? What happened?”
She flicked off the vacuum and looked back at me. Then she
cut her eyes, a sure sign of lying. “They’ve been that way for a long
time. That side just got walked on more.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Angie. You go into any carpet store
where customers walk on rugs all day long and the fringes are all the
same length. All the way around.”
She didn’t answer. She took a long breath. I stood my ground.
“Angie, what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. I need to process certain things. It was really hard
for me to come to work today. I don’t really feel well. I’m having a
rough time.”
“Well, look, I’m sorry. Your hands are shaking and everything.
If you’re sick, maybe you should go home and make up the time
another day.” Something small and white on the floor caught my
eye. A round white pill. I picked it up and rolled it around in my
hand until I knew what it was.
“Looks a lot like oxycodone to me. How’d this get here? I keep
mine put away. Angie, have you been taking my pills?”
I just stared at her for a minute and she stared back. We were
both shaking. Finally, she said, “Diane, I’m sorry. I promise it won’t
happen again. I just found one of your pill bottles one day and
thought maybe if I took one, I’d stop feeling this way. Maybe I could
stop feeling at all…”

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“Angie, don’t you listen to the news? We have an opioid epi-
demic! Oxycodone and Oxycontin can lead to overdose, even death.
Between Dan and me, we’ve had a lot of surgery. I should have
thrown out the pills we didn’t use. That’s my fault. I kept them in
case of emergencies. I have no idea how many I had. How many
have you taken?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, how long has this been going on?” I sat down on the
edge of the bathtub, ready to listen.
“I don’t remember.”
“How can I help you, Angie? This is serious.”
“It’s okay, Diane. I’ll quit.”
“Quit? You mean you don’t want to clean here anymore?”



Oh, God, here it comes, I said to myself. She can try, but she will
never understand what it feels like to drag the heavy vacuum hose
around this gigantic house while she’s out shopping or having lunch.
Almost every time I clean, the wastebasket in her closet is full of
department store tags. Scattered little plastic tags snipped off. White
tags with orange clearance strips pasted over the original price. Black
tags with extra buttons that no one needs. Half the stuff in her closet
doesn’t look wrinkled or worn. Even I know you can pick up clothes
at Savers for a couple bucks. In a corner of her closet are giveaway
sacks. What’s a disabled vet gonna do with a cashmere sweater or
lace panties? Maybe she doesn’t do pills, but she’s got her own ad-
dictions, that’s for sure.

It was careless of me to drop the pill. As for the rug? For
months, I’d been catching the fringes in the power head of the cen-
tral vac. I’d been trimming it with a razor blade, spending a long
time evening it out, working downward and out, trying to make it
look natural. I didn’t realize it showed. So I lied.

Then there was the time, several months ago, I didn’t think
she’d notice if I took a T-shirt. She has tons of them. Tons. I forgot
I was going to her house the day I wore it. Not until I walked in and

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started talking to her and her eyes went up and down, checking me
out. I could feel beads of sweat on my forehead.

“Isn’t that funny?” she said. “I have that very same T-shirt.
That red looks better on you than it does on me, though. I don’t
know what I did with mine. I seem to have misplaced it.”

“Oh, one of my other clients gave it to me.” I had to think fast.
She had a funny look on her face.

“You mean Sandy? Yah, she and I were together when we got
them. It was for the Animal Humane Society walk. That was a great
day.” Somehow the way she said it made it easier to squeeze in a lie.
But now, I was caught, so I kept talking.

“It’s hard to know exactly how to help other people. You
know, I’m a lot better off than those homeless guys staked out on
street corners.” I couldn’t slow down. Too much speed. I kept jab-
bering. “Once I forgot to eat the sandwich I brought to work so on
my way home, I saw this guy who looked bad, all dirty and hungry,
and I thought, ‘Hey, that could be me if I’m not careful.’ When he
stuck his hand through my window, I forked over my lunch sack.
Instead of saying thank you, and God bless, he dropped the sack in
the street.”

I felt all weird when I could see she was studying me, so I kept
going with my homeless story. “Another time, I noticed duct tape all
around a guy’s backpack and shoes, all artistically arranged in flowers
and geometric patterns. Somehow, I wanted to make a connection
with him, so I called out my window. ‘Hey, nice job on the tape.’
He gave me the finger.”

“So, Angie, what do these guys have to do with you?” Diane
said. She really didn’t get it. How could I expect her to understand.
She was just born lucky.

“Well, if you must know, sometimes I feel jealous of you. I call
you Lucky. You make life look so easy. It’s not your fault. You aren’t
responsible for my problems and I’m not responsible for the lunch
bag guy or the duct tape guy.”

“Ok, Angie. You need to slow down. I don’t really know what
you mean. I’m sorry life has been so hard for you. But, I’m not sure
what you need.” I was feeling impatient. I’d lost track of this con-

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versation. It felt like she was just dancing around her own deception
and had forgotten the steps.

“Well, I’m not sure. I have some ideas…”
“I’m listening.”
Christ on a bike, this was getting hard. I could barely string
my words in a line. “Well…Lucky, I mean Diane, for a long time,
I’ve thought about school.”
“That’s okay. You can call me Lucky. Makes me feel good.
So…School?”
I really wanted to just take up the vacuum again and stop
all this zooming around. It was making my head hurt, but once
I started, I just couldn’t stop. “I was thinking I’d like to finish my
psych degree.” There, it was out. It sounded pretty dumb.



When Angie told me she wanted to go back to school, I was very
happy. Being able to help her felt like a good way to even out the odds.
I know I’ve been lucky. She mentioned once that when she started
college, she had to quit when she ran out of money. I was curious.

“Wow! Sounds like a great idea.”
“Okay, but wait a minute, I don’t have enough for tuition.”
“Well, Angie, I have some thoughts about that.”
“It’s probably a stupid idea. I can’t even afford the interest on
a loan….what kind of thoughts?” For a moment, I could picture her
finding a better life for herself. I’d be out of a cleaning woman, but
she’d be better off.
“Right. Well, I’d be happy to give you a no-interest loan to
help with tuition. But, first, of course, we’d have to strike a bargain.
You’d have to stop taking these little white pills.” I reached under
the cupboard where we both knew I kept the heavy drugs. I shook
the bottles for effect and threw them in the bathroom wastebasket.
“Don’t worry. I’ll empty it.”
Angie’s shoulders started to pulsate and before I knew it,
she was sobbing. “You must think I’m a terrible person!” She was
choking on her words.

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“No, I don’t, but I can’t afford treatment and college, so you’re
going to have to figure that part out. Addiction doesn’t go away
because we want it to.”
“Okay.”
“What else, Angie?”
“That’s all I can handle right now.” I handed her the Kleenex
box, picked up the basket and said, “I’d love to continue this
conversation next time you come.” I had to walk out. Too much
drug talk for one afternoon. Angie’s stealing my pills brought
back tons of old tapes from my using days. You never really get
over addiction. It’s a shape-shifter. Turns out the t-shirt and rug
fringes were only one layer of Angie’s skin to peel back. I’d been
missing certain things and telling myself I just misplaced them.
Antiques. Jewelry.
Next time she came, I summoned the nerve to ask her about
it. Turns out she’d been pawning things for cash. I couldn’t tell
Don. He’d have fired her on the spot. Not me. I just got deeper into
it. She doesn’t have anyone helping her, as far as I can tell. I’m it.
Responsibility comes in many forms. I don’t want to scare her away
now that we’ve started down this road.
Maybe it’s ’cause I’ve been so lucky. We’re both learning. I
know promises are only that…promises. If she finishes school, I’ll
feel like I’ve evened out the imbalances in the world.



I’m back in school. The campus with all the people hurrying in
and out of buildings looks like hope to me. Trouble is, I’m still
counting out pills, lining ‘em up in neat little rows, tossing ‘em
back. Difference now is I’m trying to measure out my take. My
supplies are down since Diane threw out my stash. When I think
about Lucky, her big house and her surgeries, I figure my life is
pretty good. Prayer has helped me before. It’ll help again. I keep
telling Diane I’m working on it. It’s all I can do. After all, we can
both be lucky.

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Carolyn Light Bell is a photographer, writer, and educator. As a
writer, Ms. Light Bell draws from nature and strives to capture the
beauty of the divine. She has published poetry, essays and short
stories in many print and online magazines. Her awards include
the Croton-on-Hudson Review Award, Allen Ginsberg Award for
Poetry, Editor’s Choice Award for Poetry.com. Ms. Light Bell is
the author of a collection of poetry DELIVERY, and two children’s
books: ELEANOR AND THE LITTLE TORTUGA and LALA
AND HER FRIENDS.

287



Mrs. Kattlove’s Clerk

By Robert McKean

“What are we to make of this, Mr. Wolding—this stunt you’ve
pulled?” “Ah, you know journalists, they sensationalize everything.”

She was new, this woman. Their former caseworker, with
whom he had established a working relationship, would have given
him her Almira Gulch face, then accepted the story for what it was,
a piece of zany stage business, and gone on to ask about his ward’s
grades. Not Virginia Poorman. She ran her finger—searching for
something—down the front page of the Chronicle. “There was no
motor in it? No motor? Were there, dear God, brakes?”

His experience with the Family Court had taught Tody Wolding
a few things, don’t argue, don’t explain. Risking the suspension of
his rules, he said, “Sure, sure. We got a mechanical genius, Harold
Robinson, born in a gas station, he was our Dogberry. It was enclosed
in a track, you see? Like a big chute? We didn’t need a motor, Harold
ditched the motor—to make it lighter? It was a stage prop, that’s all,
a mock car. Like a giant soapbox derby, sort of.”

The curls of Mrs. Poorman’s white hair were as stiff as cup
hooks. She shook them in a tidy passion of disapproval. “Sailing
down from the roof? Mr. Wolding, you’re thirty years old— have
you no commonsense? None?”

“We thought it all through.”
“Thought what through? You could’ve killed yourself!” “Nah,
there wasn’t any—”
“As well the actress who was fool enough to be in that car with
you—and I don’t care two figs if it was a mock car, whatever that

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means! For heavens’ sake, man, it says here you nearly ended up in
the lake? What were you thinking?”

He was a small man. The air-conditioner, gurgling on its
phlegm in the window, chilled him through his light shirt. He
chided himself: He should’ve worn a suit and tie. Costumes were
important. So was contrition, even mock contrition. Don’t argue.
“You’re right, one hundred percent.” He gave it his actor’s best.
“Super dumb move.”

Finding no need to respond to his remorse, Mrs. Poorman fell
to her papers, busying herself. In the heavy silence, Tody studied
the floor. Strands of gluey hair winding round the base of the desk
legs, fume of stale cologne in the air, like turpentine. The soulless
government office brought back the smear of afternoons that he
and Shelly, his half-sister, had sat sitting on their hands in judges’
chambers. But the thing was, speaking in his own defense, it had
not been a dumb move, Harold Robinson’s motorless DeSoto. The
forsaken vehicle, a convertible coupe from the 1940s, wrested from
a soupy pasture and stinking of cows and foxes, had been inspired,
the climax of a climatic year. Reaching the limits of what he and his
half-sister could endure, Tody succeeded in having his stepfather
declared incompetent, removed from the house and institutional-
ized. It had not been pleasant: George Namarian had not gone into
that good night peacefully. And on Shelly it had fallen hard. With
the long illness and death of their mother and George’s descent into
alcoholic psychosis, Shelly, entering her teenage years, seemed to
be witnessing her life—all life—coming apart at the seams. Even
though Tody had for a decade functioned essentially as her mom,
he and Shelly were not that close,. Confronted with the dissolu-
tion of their household, however, they fell into a prickly partnership
and formed an ersatz family, as Tody—unmarried, an effeminate
man who clerked in a yardage shop, someone subject to small-town
rumor—strived to gain the court’s reluctant confidence. And from
that precarious victory, as if released from an evil spell, he had de-
cided, out of the blue, to persuade his ragtag troupe of amateur
thespians, the Lake Biddleford Players, to undertake the challenge
of a Shakespearean play.

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It was mad.
The weed-entwined hulk of the DeSoto, once somebody’s rolling
boudoir, made a huge sucking smuuuuch! as Harold’s tow truck hoisted
it out of the mire. They had to be insane. Ask anyone in community
theater: the complexity of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan grammar; the
length of the speeches to commit to memory; the size of the cast re-
quired; the suspension of disbelief you are calling upon an unschooled
audience to exhibit—Who’s that man behind the tree? Why can’t they see
him? Oh, it was audacious, it was demented, it was glorious.
But not if it destroyed his life.
Virginia Poorman, satisfied with the disposition of her docu-
ments—perused, sniffed at, stacked—returned to him her troubled
eyes. “Mr. Wolding, you know our only purpose here is to safeguard
Shelly? She’s undergone what appear to be some rather traumatic
experiences for a young girl, I know you recognize that?”
That actually sounded sincere. “That’s true,” he admitted. “She
has.”
“I’m going to visit you tomorrow, and I’m going to ask that the
three of us have a good frank talk. And I want Shelly there, I want
to hear from her. She’s old enough to be part of this conversation.
Should we say two? You own a fabric shop, is that what I read?”
“No, no, I just clerk in one—Kattlove’s. Would it be easier on
you if we came here?”
Ignoring him, still troubled, the woman let her eyes drop again
to the Chronicle. “There’re some things I still don’t quite grasp? This
chute business? It extended—is that it?—all the way through the
audience?”
The paper that lay before her was filled with reports of riots,
bombs falling in jungles, politicians at each other’s throats—and
their caseworker was obsessed with a chute. “Well, no, not exactly.”
“Then how far exactly—to use your word—did it extend?”
He forced himself not to squirm like a schoolboy caught in a
prank. “To the bottom.” “The bottom of what?”
“The lodge, in front of the verandah.”
“So, you were, in essence then, by the time you reached the
audience”—Virginia Poorman’s eyes on him, reflecting her dawning

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comprehension of the scene her imagination was gradually painting
in, grew round with disbelief—“free-wheeling, if that’s the proper
expression?”

“Well, yeah, I guess you could say that.”
“You drove a car straight through a seated audience?”
“But see, we thought of that? We made the center aisle plenty
wide, and we had tons of room since we were staging the play out-
side, so it wasn’t—”
Mrs. Poorman’s hardened curls quivered. Breaking in on him as
if he were no more than an errant schoolboy, she cried out, “Let me
ask you a question—two questions, pardon me! One, was your sister
in that audience? And two, did you think of her safety, Mr. Wolding,
ever?”



Honestly, it had never crossed his mind.
On the drive back to Ganaego, Tody had ample time to ponder

the caseworker’s two questions. Where had Shelly been? She only
came the first night. Terribly self-conscious, she’d never had much
use for his Lake Players. She helped the run crew. But when the play
ended she was not backstage. What Virginia Poorman didn’t know,
and Tody Wolding fervently prayed she never found out, was that
the instant the DeSoto hit the chute the first night Harold’s brakes
failed. With Ortensia Costello—Beatrice to his Benedick—beside
him, no longer acting but throwing her arms up into the night and
screaming, it was a stomach-churning shot down and a wiggly bowl
through the astonished and also, probably, terrorized audience. The
Ganaego Bee, the weekly freebie, had run a story about the old car on
the lodge roof, an advertising gimmick for which they had obtained
permission. But the unauthorized swoop down the chute was so out-
rageous that the Chronicle, the town’s dour paterfamilias, tut-tutted
them down its long vinegary nose, the story that had scandalized
Virginia Poorman. But it worked! That was what was so tremendous
about it—it worked! That week the Lake Players printed extra tickets,
rented extra folding chairs from Tonnesdatter’s, and entered—after

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decades of plying their art in obscurity—the public mind, entered
it in a big way.

Had Shelly been out front? Where else could she have been?
But he couldn’t worry about that. Home, Tody wended a path
through scattered piles of unwashed laundry. Upstairs lay more piles;
in the cellar more. Dirty dishes teetered in the sink. The corners of
the rooms were rounded with cobweb catchers’ mitts. Black sugar
speckled the sills. The single toilet in the house was toxic. The beds
were unmade. Who ever made a bed? Not bothering to dignify that
question with an answer, Tody tied himself into an apron. Shelly was
at work, her first real job. She prepared lunches at a nearby nursing
home. At a minimum she had to, if not help—and, given the frosti-
ness of current relations, he doubted she would—at least redd up her
room, stuff things in drawers, wash her face, make herself presentable
tomorrow.
When she came home, they quarreled. “I’m not missing work.”
Shelly worshipped money. Moreover, she appeared to be good at
earning it—a talent Tody figured must run in the Namarian blood.
Certainly did not run in the Woldings’. “You got us into this, Tody,
you get us out.”
A big girl, big frame, big hips. She took after her bruiser of a
father, George’s dark lank hair, his meat cleaver nose. Already, she
was taller than Tody. But she was thirteen, on the cusp of four-
teen: She had too many zits, not enough friends. She had also been
asked to bear more than any child should have to. George, to Tody’s
knowledge, had never gone after her sexually, but he had with a belt.
Respecting her feelings, he said, modulating his voice, “Shelly, you
don’t show tomorrow, we’re food for the fishes.”
“I didn’t get my name in the paper.”
“I know you didn’t, babe, but we gotta deal with the conse-
quences. Trust me, this new caseworker smells blood in the water.
We need to look like one big happy family.”
She slammed her bedroom door; the little house rocked. That
happened enough these days Tody feared that the screws would
pop out of their hinges. He transferred an armload of clothes to
the dryer, reloaded the washer as if it were a revolver, attacked the

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kitchen. He tried to imagine the inside of his sister’s head. He vi-
sualized a nuclear power plant control panel with all the needles on
the dials bouncing in the danger zone.

At dinnertime she showed in the kitchen. “I’m going out.”
Half-girl, half-woman: She had swept her hair back into a po-
nytail, sprayed herself with a perfume from Pitzele’s that smelled—
to his nose—like Mr. Clean. “Would you mind,” he asked gently,
“if I tidied up your room a little?”
She slammed the refrigerator door. “Keep the hell out of my
room!”
He was not her father, not her disciplinarian. But he distinctly
did not appreciate being sworn at. “We’re not going to have a door
left on its hinges,” he joked. “I’m making a meatloaf. Why don’t I
make some Gooseberry Fool for dessert? You like that.”
“Why don’t you just marry this Costello whore?” “Shelly, I’m
not going to answer that.”
“Dress her in one of your frocks, stick one of your plastic di-
amonds on her finger! You gonna tell the caseworker about your
Saturday nights? I’m sure she’d just looove to hear about those.”
“How about some meatloaf before you go out?” “It’s too hot
for meatloaf!”
Well, about that she was right. Fanning himself with the
newspaper, Tody sweated his way through a plate of soggy meat
and potatoes. With each laundry cycle requiring an hour, he might
finish by two tomorrow. He might have time to mop the kitchen
floor, broom down the cobwebs, straighten up his disorderly study.
For washing the windows, for mowing the grass, for proposing to
Ortensia Costello and marrying her, there would be no time. In the
feverish weeks of his editing Much Ado About Nothing into a script
the Lake Players had even a snowball’s chance to master, bringing
the setting into the 1940s, the manic months of rehearsals period-
ically derailed by Officer Dogberry’s morose benders, there had
been time for his simultaneous affairs with Ortensia and Harold,
time for extracting petrified condoms from the moldering uphol-
stery of a blasted car, time Saturday nights to slip into hose and
a pretty number and drive to a certain unlicensed speakeasy, time

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for anything and everything—except Shelly. Maybe it hadn’t been
so glorious, after all?

Maybe it had been nothing more than tawdry?



You couldn’t, from Plan Ten, see the steelworks. But you knew it
was down there, all nine rusty miles of it pressed against the river
like a grimy lover. Across the night skies the open hearths sent up
strobes like summer heat lightning; the tube mills clanged and jan-
gled; pillowcases hanging in the backyard came inside streaked with
soot and a taste of chemicals lay on your tongue. He worked a year
in the mill, shoveling glowing chunks of slag in the slag dump, a
brutally hard job in a place that seemed to have nothing to offer
but brutally hard jobs. One side of him flinched from the searing
heat; the other side froze from the wind that rose like a knife from
the river. He lost twenty pounds he didn’t have to spare, received
a suspension for getting caught stoned, saw a man lose a hand to
a train’s coupling. Bolted to the wall beside his locker had been a
sign: Please Do Not Spit on the Floor. One morning, rather than
punching in, he appeared in Lillian Kattlove’s office on the mezza-
nine of her yardage shop and begged the tightfisted old crone for his
high school job back. Mrs. Kattlove’s clerk—that’s what people called
him. Twelve-thirty, switching off the wheezy Hoover, Tody listens
to a neighbor’s Good Humor truck noodling its way home, the peal
of the bell through Plan Ten’s crooked brick streets sounding like a
town crier announcing the end of another long, useless summer day.

But no Shelly.
One-fifteen, she breezed in and past him as if he were the maid,
tee shirt outside her jeans, reeking of tobacco. When she said, “So
when’s the big wedding?” Tody was about to round on her, then bit
his tongue. One argument at a time. “Babe,” he said, “please stop
with this business about Ortensia, all right? I’m not the marrying
type. I’ll pay you double what the nursing home’s going to pay you
tomorrow, I just need you here—you need you here.”
“Tody, I can’t—people are depending on me.”

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Adelaide Literary Awards Anthology 2018
And I’m not? he wanted to snap, then realized, chagrinned,
that she was sincere. “And you’re doing swell, babe, but maybe the
golden-agers can get along without you for a day?”
She turned her back on him. “I’ll think about it.” “She’s
coming at two. Her name’s Virginia Poorman.” “Why would I care
what her name is?”
Somewhere just shy of three in the morning, Tody swallowed
two Excedrin PMs and crawled in bed. Harold Robinson had magic
pills that would knock you flat in ten minutes. But Walt Pitzele’s
little blue oblong capsules worked, you only needed patience. Some-
times when he couldn’t sleep, he would pull back his roles. He had a
lockbox memory: Willie Loman, Brick Pollit, Major-General Stanley,
Captain Hook. Sometimes, he would block out a play his group
could never conceivably mount. Tonight Tody thought about his
half-sister. Living with him could not be easy. He’d always been the
odd duck, the scrawny little boy who had been taunted, shunned.
And Shelly caught—still caught—some of that bigotry. Maybe she
would be better off in a foster home? Wafting up through the house
came the exotic—exotic for them—scent of Clorox. Once he mixed
chlorine and ammonia and nearly asphyxiated the family. The firemen
in their big black helmets delivered him a stern scolding. Under his
breath, one fireman hissed, Damn faggot. The last thing tonight that
Tody Wolding takes cognizance of is the patter of drops on the roof,
a summer rain. Maybe next year they could do Singin’ in the Rain?
Wouldn’t that be a hoot?
He slept through the alarm, would have slept until ten had not
the crash of the front door brought him off his pillow: Shelly leaving,
blowing him off, blowing them off. It had been Harold Robinson,
who, because he lubed cars alongside teenagers, reminded him of
what he had forgotten, the exacting rules of the teenage world: You
hurt me, I get to hurt you, and, if I can’t, I get to hurt someone
else—which might be me. Tody, downstairs, alone in the kitchen,
considered the underpants and socks lying before the cellar door
like commuters waiting for the next train and understood that, if
Shelly wanted to break up the family, there was nothing he could do
about it. He shaved and went to early mass, as he often did. While

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sleepy Father Opsatnick wiggled a finger in the canal of his ear, re-
moved it and gazed at it inquisitively while mumbling Praybrethren-
thatmy sacrificeandyoursbeacceptabletoGod,thealmightyFather, Shelly
Namarian’s guardian appealed to the minor—but no doubt one
hot-ticket—deity who watched over cross-dressers.

Whichever that one was.



“Tody, you gotta come to my grand-opening party! Lookit!”
Exiting St. Ursula’s, he had made a decision. And he granted

the point that, for these occasions, you were supposed to have
flowers and little boxes from Fischman’s—except there was no time
for props. Tody, before he could lose his nerve, had driven straight
to Ortensia’s. But just as he was to embark on a speech that—actor
or no actor—he had immense difficulty envisioning himself deliv-
ering, Ortensia thrust in his face one of her new business cards. She
was in her real estate agent costume, suit and heels, dangly earrings.
“We’re gonna have cold duck and cupcakes and we’re gonna cut the
ribbon and make toasts and things—just like on TV. Now, you’re
gonna come, promise?”

“Sure, sure. When’s your debut?”
“Three weeks!” Ortensia preferred shrieking to talking. “You
know Aziz’s Pizzas? It’s right beside that! I already have four clients!
They’re lying low in the bushes until I get things squared away. God,
Tody, I haven’t slept a wink since I signed the lease!”
Ortensia and he had met taking modern dance lessons at his
step-Aunt Julie’s studio. In high school they co-starred in a dusty
Our Town. She invited him to her wedding, a short-lived union that
barely lasted past her baby’s christening, and accepted their long-
term on-again, off- again affair for what it was, a tension release. But
this business side of Ortensia’s, Tody never fathomed. He exclaimed
over her calling card, searching for a route into his proposal.
“Every penny I got I’ve sunk into this,” she ran on. “You think
someone in Oak Grove is gonna trust their Taj Mahal to some stiff
working out of the front seat of her car? You gotta have desks, butts

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Adelaide Literary Awards Anthology 2018
in seats, maps on the walls, paperclips—stuff like that.” Stopping for
breath, Ortensia peered at him. “Why aren’t you at work? Lillian’s
gonna have your head. What’s up?”

His cue. But he could not mouth the words. Desperate, how-
ever, not to lose the opportunity, he decided on an oblique ap-
proach. “I was thinking, why don’t we do a musical? Something big,
lush, maybe even an orchestra?”

They were about the same height. Ortensia pecked him on the
cheek. “Tody, you came all the way rushing over here to tell me that?
You’re turning me into Old Lady Wendy to your Peter Pan. How’s
this, I’ll promise to help? But you can’t count on me anymore. My
diva days are over.”

He felt like a fool, like a peculiar little boy with peculiar little
dreams. He might someday be Hamlet or Stanley Kowalski or even
Macbeth Thane of Cawdor. But Ward Cleaver he was never going
to be. “Oak Grove? You really aiming that high?”

“I’m tired of working my ass off so someone else can get rich.”
Ortensia’s face shone; she gripped his wrist. “Tody, they’re painting
my name on the window today! I want it all, every last bit of it.”

The pity of it was that Shelly, despite her sarcasm, liked Or-
tensia. He hugged her. “Break a leg, babe.”

When the Virginia Poorman came striding up the walk, at-
taché case at her side, he met her at the door and told her directly.
“My sister’s not here, I’m sorry. She works in a nursing home and
felt she shouldn’t take the time off.”

The caseworker’s snowy curls quivered. “Mr. Wolding, I’ve
come all the way from Sutton.

It’s a very warm day. I would like to get out of this sun—if
you don’t object?”

The thought had occurred to him of stopping at the nursing
home and begging his sister to come to this meeting. But Shelly
had—as Virginia Poorman herself pointed out—a voice in this
matter, even more than he: Maybe this was her way of saying
what she could not say aloud? Last year he had assured her that, if
she wanted a start in a new family—and, given their family, who
wouldn’t?—he’d support her in that decision.

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