Category: fiction mojo21

By Alison Ruth

Jay had watched the moon landing as a kid. Inside his homemade lunar module, built from dining room chairs and a quilt, he cracked Jiffy-Pop from a saucer-like aluminum container. Ready for the command of his own Apollo 11 mission, though buttoned in plaid pajamas, he blasted from the vinyl couch to the LaZBoy, his own landings aborted onto the floor. He would splay there, arms and legs spread out, floating through the comfort of his own space. In the zero-gravity pause of his imagination, his father had lectured him over a Lucky, that inside their new Zenith TV console, an ion gun fired electrons. His grammar-school son found this almost as wonderful as the pixelated image of the moon it projected at hundreds of times per second. He rolled over, and shot back at the TV with his own ion gun.

Forty lunar years from that rec room hopefulness, he kneeled in front of the back door, and extricated a coping saw out of his battered attache case. He unwrapped the saw from its envelope of tabloid newsprint hysteria. Then he slid on his stomach, the gravel piercing his Oxford shirt. He brushed aside the weeds that had grown with their own sunlit ambition, in the spaces where car after car had once been parked, with red cardboard tags affixed to their windshields, their prices cut in half, and then, as the months rolled by while they remained stationary, by another thousand more. Then when he found price could no longer drive a sale—neither a 0% percent down, nor a 1% interest rate—he and his fellows could analyze Jets plays each morning without the interruption of a single balloon-dodging shopper, threading their way through their acre of parking lot, was when Detroit evicted them. They were at the mercy of forces larger than a sales manager, district manager, regional manager. Jay drank a second cup from the percolator, in the boxed walls of nowhere more distant than his kitchen. He had nowhere to drive that next day. He who had once dreamed of commanding his own crew.

For as TVs had grown larger, his ambitions had grown smaller. The imagination that had thrust him into the exosphere from the height of backyard branches had been erased after his first voyage on a DC-10, the beauty of the Newark Airport takeoff documented from the comfort of his window seat. So he jettisoned his rocket fuel, and propelled by his own arms from the town pool’s diving board, launched himself again and again into the lower levels of the stratosphere.

As a teenager, even the magic of airline flight descended in importance when his father helped him buy his first used car, and he drove through his seventeenth year in a state of V8 bliss. Senior year Jay had briefly considered applying to the Air Force Academy, and squealed in to a Bloomfield recruiting office on his way to an Upsala football game. The officer crushed Jay’s hand in what Jay imagined was a signifier to civilians. The recruiter’s face was pockmarked as if he’d been shot with an ion gun, but he managed a military smile as he seemed to mentally check off Jay’s able body on his daily quota sheet. The officer handed Jay a brochure, a glamor shot of a mission-bound F-16, deployed at a daredevil’s angle through a Venusian-like sunset. Then Jay confessed his GPA. The recruiter slapped down a mud-action brochure of a camouflaged truck marked with a single star. So Jay fell back in love with his 1975 Camaro instead, and a series of girls fine as his car. One chick stayed. The Camaro decayed.

The first American flag on the moon was from New Jersey. Plastic flags snapped over an equally deserted parking lot. He’d drifted into sales after the massacre of his first semester at college. After a particularly infinite Finite Math class, he outwaited the rest of the students, and confessed to his professor his interest in flight. Jay knew math was involved somehow, and wondered if there was anything he could learn about it. On one of the many blank pages of Jay’s notebook, the professor penciled a few equations and the library section of flight theory and aerodynamics. But the relationship between flight and numbers was impenetrable; if Jay had to demonstrate the Bernoulli Principle, he’d land in his parents’ hedges, needing stitches.

An auto-shop buddy, bemoaning the decrepitude of Jay’s Camaro (sudden-death drag races had taken their toll), told him there was a discount at their town Chevrolet dealership for salesmen. The temptation of a 1985 IROC-Z seduced Jay enough to fill out the clipboard application. He shrugged at wearing a necktie; it was a symbol of his status over the vo-tech graduates, newly minted mechanics with whom he’d shared joints in high school. But then the year-to-year trajectory of commissions in the thousands of dollars became as seductive as morning takeoffs. The showroom shimmered in this winter’s isolated slanting dawn, advertising nothing but its own emptiness. A space of veneer desk, a still pen, a vacant electrical outlet, as if the salesman had just stepped out to consult with his manager in the midst of a last-ditch negotiation.

In the center of this Plexiglas octagon, a trophy car used to rotate, a turntable that had last played the modest luxury of an Impala. The basement elevator rose each season with its new high-gloss showpiece. He wondered what was inside the elevator shaft now. The detritus of the sales floor: rats starving without their scraps of Dunkin Donuts, hibernating inside the New York Post sports pages. The men who paced above them, right before the final handshake, their tenuous peace was gone long ago, even before Detroit headquarters sent the letterhead notice that this dealership was on their final closeout list.

The recession had ground deliveries to a halt. The Midwest manufacturers waited for work orders that never transmitted. That autumn Impala lasted through spring of the next year, dizzy from its circular nowhere. Customers elbowed by its Windexed windows, asking about used. Outside rows of winter-washed tires leaked air. Jay had seen the dreary Detroit autoworkers on high-definition TV. They were used to sticking up their air guns, surrendering their drills before lockouts. But this recession was different; futility had padlocked the entire supply chain.

Jay punched the wall around the hole in the sliced Plexiglas. The lock assembly fell backwards on the carpet. He pushed the showroom door open, his shoes crunching on disintegrating ceiling plaster. There was no chair at his desk. He knelt next to it, but not to pray like his wife did. Before a morning Bible study (she’d believed more in God in inverse proportion to his decreasing commissions), she asked him over a box of cereal she’d opened herself, if the moon landing was a hoax. His coffee cup seemed to explode into fragments. He ransacked the desk drawers as if he would discover more than a yellow lined pad. Back when gas stations had been closing across the country, the pumps and tanks had been uprooted for strip malls. But no one knew what to do yet with shuttered car dealerships. This octagon would rot awhile.

He did not mourn selling; he who had once wanted to be an astronaut. He scorned his suit and tie, even if now he could wear nothing else. He did not miss drinking Styrofoam coffee, sliding on the oil that clung to the soles of his loafers, test driving that same round-the-corners mile. He watched the sunrise from another angle, its sharpness gleaming over the only chrome left, that which framed the building. He himself was now for sale.

Inside this transparent structure, the suburban ghosts still wrangled over next year’s models, their bored kids who hung their slack bodies over their chairs, as if they’d been left out in the sun too long. He kept a glass jar filled with Chevy-red lollypops, turning their whining mouths vampiric. He yanked a drawer off its track. A crumpled sales sheet, from a successful summer sales month, had to be a decade ago. He balled it back up. Where was the man who’d typed those numbers?

He dragged the teeth of the coping saw across his wrist, a scrape of faint white over the blue runes of his veins. If he pressed, or drew it fast, slicing raw steak, the cut would be deep. But this was a fake teenage protest against fate, and his wrists were left as he’d found them. He jumped off the desk, to open the door to the basement.

New cars once drove a short spiral down here, landed on the elevator disc, and rose incrementally to the sales floor, smelling of new rubber and possibility. Gone now, that last new car had never been sold, but flatbedded away to the Darwinning dealership down the highway. Acres of cars, heralded by Fourth of July balloons even in the icy dead of January. The magnate was proud to be patriotic; he hadn’t been executed by the economy yet. Jay turned back to stare at the carpeted display disc that doubled as the top of the elevator. Kidlike he pressed the button, waiting for the hum and the counterbalance of the cables, compressing, releasing. As if one more car could be conjured.

Back in junior high English, his class had been assigned a science fiction story, a break from the tiresome archaic classics they had to be forced to skim. The unlikeliest hero was a boy their own age, born—or crafted to maximize his heartbreaking misery—so severely disfigured that he wandered through school alone, spent his time in his room at home. The author—regrettably forgotten, he’d searched for his name years later—had hinted at the boy’s alien birth, and Jay, his own mythology molded by a summer of Star Wars matinees, immediately summoned up a distorted human his own age, a face elongated as a horse’s. The boy’s sorrowful existence was measured only in paragraphs, but lingered after class in his imagination, the way anything about space did, and his own snub reflection in the locker room mirror seemed to shapeshift an alien monster beneath his own freckled skin. And then, the twist of the story: there were colonies on other planets. A planet had been discovered where the strange residents all looked like the unfortunate boy. The parents hugged him, weeping, and sent him away by the author’s destiny-bound rocketship, to be with his own kind. The ending was something like anxiety and something like hope, that he would see other mutants like himself. Jay wished him godspeed on his voyage before he closed the book.

The sunrise crested the car lot, an American flag slumped down its pole, the vacuum that was space. The signage had fallen letter by letter, but CHEVROLET was a long word. As he stomped past each pane of the octagon, compressed as if he were in his own spaceship, he surveyed the ragged junipers and shredded maples, the grocery delivery trucks careening down the street. The sunrise view that blinded him every winter morning at 9 AM.  

Phantoms hustled around him, clicking their pens as they perpetually sought phones with cords that had not been cut. He himself no longer answered his phone at his house; there was nothing left to say, there was nothing left to sell. He eyed the desk and his coping saw. Too much like work. He drummed the Plexiglas. It would not break at a punch. Even the bulbs had been unthreaded from the ceiling. They were afraid of fire. A door still shut on its hinges; what need was there of privacy in a Plexiglas building? He kicked it open to his manager’s office. Filing cabinet looted, as if decades of sales had never happened. He kicked it, admired the first dent, kicked it again until the room reverberated with a metallic emptiness.

He stared at the mangled tin torso of cabinet, drawers caved in by his shoe. The echo had stopped, the sound of nothingness decreasing as it reached the ceiling. Commuters drove by the For Sale sign, their radios drowning out his last futile protest; the sun now risen, Jay himself was on display, but no one turned from their windshields. He had thought he would be a spectacle inside this octagon, but he was too quiet, too engrossed. The saw had cut in a murmur, the cabinet had fallen on carpet. He would be his only witness. The snow outside would not melt from cold but from sunlight today. Still in his sport jacket, his tie almost tight enough to choke him, he centered himself on the top of the elevator disc, where the showcased car used to revolve, like its own shining Earth.  Jay lay down on the disc, with his spread arms and legs, outstretched the way he’d done as a kid, to feel the Earth spin. It was better on backyard lawn, with an equally imaginative friend, when they could both yell, “I feel it!” Jay found if he closed his eyes, he could still feel the Earth turn its way through space. But he opened his eyes just in time to see the Plexiglas glint, before it shot him up through the dawn.

By Jake La Botz

The Devil’s Pump

By Jake La Botz

Like a lot of hungry songwriters in Nashville, I took paying gigs where I could get them. Mostly cover bands: Top 40 for tourist joints. Classic country for honky tonks. 60s rock for one-percenter clubs. I was as good as anyone on the scene, but no one ever asked me to join their band. I was always “the fill-in guy.” I’ll admit I played a little loud and squeezed my own music into sets whenever possible, but hell, everybody did those things. It was hard to get original songs out there. I ought to know.

Twice a week I hoofed it up and down Music Row, dropping off demo CDs and promo sheets. I could almost hear my records hitting the wastebasket on the way out. It got so the only outlet I had for playing my own stuff was busking on Lower Broadway, and you can believe there was no glory in that. Felt like I was a janitor at a member’s only club, hoping they’d ask me to join one day.

One night I picked up a spot with a country band called Hill and Holler at a downtown dive bar. We must’ve played five hours straight. The asshole singer kept yelling, “Play it diff ‘ernt,” like I was supposed to know what that meant. At the end of the night, when they divvied up the tip jar, I only got eighteen bucks. That was the breaking point. After three years in Music City, I was ready to give up for good.

The bass player on the gig, Chad, said he needed a lift home. On the way to his place, I told him how sick I was of Nashville and the low-paying gigs, that I was ready to leave. He said I complained too much. I thought that was funny since he was catching a free ride in my car. Then he started jabbering about church gigs, saying they paid better than bar bands and it didn’t matter if you knew the music or not.

“Same five chords you already hit on that old six string. Only difference is the words—they only sing on one subject. Ha ha,” he said.

Through some kind of gospel grapevine, Chad knew of a weekly spot for a guitarist at New Life Pentecostal out in Duck River.

“Course, I’d take a small finder’s fee for hooking up a money gig like that,” he added.

Like a lot of sidemen in Nashville, Chad was a bottom-feeder, only looking out for numero uno. The more he talked the worse the church thing sounded. At best I figured it meant wearing a suit, sitting through boring sermons, and strumming along to corny confessionals in a sterile, too-bright room. At worst, I imagined bible-waving rednecks trying to convert me to their snake-handling, tongue-talking ways, withholding my pay ’til I got baptized.

Most of what Chad said went in one ear and out the other, until he got to the part about free fried chicken. I perked up then. Considering I was living off rice and beans, and didn’t have enough cash to leave town anyway, I agreed to check it out.

A couple days later, I called Chad’s contact and drove out to New Life. It was only an hour southwest of the city, but my little beat-up Toyota looked immediately out of place soon as I got off the Interstate and started following country roads toward Duck River.

I pulled up in front of what looked to be a repurposed funeral home. The cross stuck on top and the sign out front let me know I was in the right place. Somebody was moaning a hymn inside. There was nothing in me that wanted to go in there, but my hand turned the knob and creaked the door open anyway.

“Welcome,” a voice called from the chapel, “you must be Steven.”

An older man near the pulpit waved me to an empty seat across from his.

“I’m Elder T.W. Peabody,” he said, motioning me to sit down.

His grey hair was pomped in a conservative Elvis kind of way. He wore an old-timey herringbone suit—probably bought twenty years before I was born.

“Tell me ‘bout yourself,” he said as I sat down.

“Well, I’ve never played gospel music before. Or been inside too many churches…”

“I’m gonna stop you there, Steven. Rather than tell me what you haven’t done, how ‘bout telling me what you have done. I hear you write songs, is that correct?”

“Yeah. I mean I haven’t gotten much going with them yet, but…”

“There you go again ‘bout whatcha haven’t done. Why don’t you just play me something.”

The Elder chewed some tiny thing between his front teeth while he waited. I fumbled the latches on the guitar case and placed the instrument on my knee. I thought, if this was an audition it was the weirdest one of my life. There was nothing in my repertoire that matched the occasion. Every song I’d written was about love gone wrong, drinking to excess, or revenge. I picked what I deemed my least offensive number. It was called “Ruffled Feathers.”

“Ruffled Feathers on bumpy skin. A bumpy face bottle of gin. Bumping you was my joy in life. You rolled me like loaded dice. We played ’til the games got rough. I called you mine, you called my bluff. But I squeezed outta that pigeon trap with a ruffled feather in my cap…”

When I finished, to my surprise, Elder Peabody was smiling.

“Good. Very good, Steven. But, as the drunk said to the bartender, ‘Got anything stronger?’”

I watched him make the little chewing motion again, wondering what to do. I started on the heavier stuff then: alcoholic anthems, smutty stories, libelous rants about wrongdoers, murder ballads specific to how I’d accomplish the dirty deeds. After playing an entire set of my darkest tunes, the Elder applauded.

“You’re just the fella I’m looking for.”

He stood and waved for me to follow. At the basement door, he fumbled through a large ring of keys, unlocked a couple deadbolts, and started stepping down.

“This is where we keep the snakes, Steven,” he said, turning to me with an earnest expression.

Before I could think what to do, the Elder let out a belly laugh so hard he had to hold the railing to keep from tumbling downstairs. When he turned on the lights, first thing I noticed was an old-school printing press.

“We write ‘em, draw ‘em and print ‘em ourselves. Have done for fifty years,” the Elder said, handing me a small booklet with a picture of Jesus and Satan locked together in a wrestling hold on its cover.

There were stacks of the things everywhere bearing different designs. One showed a man accepting a bible on his deathbed. Another showed a nuclear fireball burning people alive while a few floated safely toward God in the sky. I’d seen them before. Little five-by-three-inch comic books handed out on street corners and left on buses. Whacko things about salvation, sins, and “the end times.”

“Whatever this is, I’m not interested,” I sneered, backing toward the stairs.

“You got me wrong, son. I’m not trying to turn you. Thing is, your songs have the bump and grind of Satan in them. I could almost see his big red hips just a-switching side to side whilst you belted ‘em out. See now, that’s what these tracts need. The syllables, they have to sing out and grab ya’ like lyrics. Like your lyrics. That right there’s the key. They gotta have that deep maroon in the setup. If they don’t match Satan’s vibrations they cain’t do a thing. You gotta open that dark door inside a man—where the Devil hides—‘fore you can plant the seed of Christ. My bible tells me ‘make a joyful noise unto the Lord.’ Yours is the noise part. The chaos. My part is planting the seed. Helping people follow a new leader…”

“You want me to write religious tracts?” I interrupted.

“You’d be surprised to know who we’ve hired in the past. People with big names in country music…”

“What’s it pay?”

“He he… there’s that maroon again. Three hundred per,” the Elder laughed.

“But I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Satan’s all around, Steven. All you have to do is look.”

Driving away from New Life, a red warning light flashed on my dash letting me know I was low on fuel. I stopped at an off-brand gas station outside Duck River and pulled three smashed dollars, like aborted origami, out of my pocket. A pasty yokel with a bowl cut smoothed them out with his meaty paw, down-smiling at me like I was the biggest loser he’d seen all day. By the look of him, he was bound to be a New Lifer. I imagined him on Sundays, feverishly flapping his fat hands in the air while the Elder spouted Satan’s-gonna-getcha sermons.

Gas prices must’ve gone up again. The three dollars I pumped into my rust bucket didn’t even shut off the fuel light. I banged on my dashboard and cursed when I saw that. Weirdly enough, an idea for a tract came to me just then. I scribbled it on a napkin so I wouldn’t forget.

On the way to work one day, Johnny stops to fill his tank. But when he sees that gas prices have gone up from the night before, he only adds a couple gallons. At lunch, he goes to buy a sandwich from a truck, but it costs so much he can only afford a bag of chips. When he gets home that night, his landlord tells him he’s raising the rent. On Friday, when payday comes, Johnny decides he’s better off spending his hard-earned wages on a gun so he can rob a bank.

At home, I wrote it out like a song and called it “Rob a Bank to Fill the Tank.” It wasn’t too bad. I came up with an arrangement on guitar too, figuring I might as well make music for my own catalog while working on the Elder’s Christian cartoons.

When I drove back to New Life the next day, I was greeted inside by an old deacon who was cleaning the place. He introduced himself in a mumbly way and pointed me to the basement. I expected to find Elder Peabody down there, but instead, there was a young woman. She sat at a drafting table with her back to me like she hadn’t heard me come in. By the shininess of her red hair and the way her dress hung on her curvy figure, I knew she’d be pretty before she showed her face. After a minute of standing there, and her not acknowledging my presence, I asked where the Elder was.

“You talk to me from now on,” she said flatly, sketching on paper with a colored pencil.

“I wrote a tract.”

She turned around then. Her freckles, full lips, and little blue veins shining through translucent skin gave an otherworldly look. She was beautiful alright, but in an alien or ghost-like way.

“Give it here,” she said, snatching the notebook from my hand.

She sighed and shook her head while reading it.

“Why Elder brings you half-wit musicians around here, I’ll never understand. First off, it’s not a goddamn poem. There are no couplets in a tract. Second, it’s not a children’s story. You don’t call the protagonist ‘Johnny.’ Third, the story has to be believable, something people can identify with…”

Her voice was high and twangy with a slight lisp. It would’ve been charming if she hadn’t been cutting me to shreds.

“Do I get paid or not?”  I asked.

She turned back to her drafting table, pulled a fresh page from her sketchpad, and pencil-carved it into three boxes. In the first one, she sketched a grinning devil inflating gas prices with a bicycle pump. In the next, she sketched a dopey-looking man toting a guitar. The ears were bigger than mine and the gapped front teeth more pronounced, but it was clearly a caricature of me. Behind the man, she sketched her same devil creeping up and making a maniacal face. In the last box, she drew me and the devil again, this time with him inserting his pump hose into my backside, causing cartoon-me to fill up with anger. I was embarrassed, but it was amazing to see my story come to life.

“I might be able to fix it,” she said, dialing an old rotary phone on her table.

“Pay him half,” she told someone on the other end.

The old deacon was upstairs waiting with an envelope. I counted out one-fifty in my car, half of what the Elder promised, trying to understand what’d just happened.

Embarrassment turned to anger on my way out of town. I stopped at the same no-name gas station as before, dropped a twenty on the counter, and dagger-stared the cashbox yokel. No down-smiling off his ugly mug that time.

Driving home, I saw a bunch of shiny show print posters stapled to telephone poles. They advertised a tent revival featuring none other than his holy-rollerness, the Elder T.W. Peabody. I imagined him up there, bamboozling superstitious bumpkins, lining his own pockets with bible-greased greenbacks while he wouldn’t even pay me what he promised. But it was the caricature lady and her humiliation tactics that really got to me. As I considered how to settle the score, an idea for a new tract circled in my mind. I wrote it out when I got home, making sure not to rhyme sentences or call the protagonist “Johnny.”

The next day, I bolted out of bed early, ready to confront the rude redhead with my new story. When I got to New Life, the old deacon let me in and showed me to the basement without a word. She was down there sitting at her table like before, ignoring me like before too. I stood there and waited.

“You again?” She asked, without turning around.

“Might like this one,” I said.

“Doubt it,” she sing-songed, spinning her wheely office chair to face me.

When she finished reading it, a slight grin lit in the corner of her mouth. She turned back to the table and sketched wildly. The drawings—caricatures of me and her—were more elaborate than what I’d written. She added Satan into the mix too—small at first but growing larger in each scene—as a spectator, watching her and I in various intimate positions. In the last frame, she drew the Devil masturbating furiously while he watched me take her from behind, bent over the drafting table.

When she looked at me again there was no hint of humor in her face.

“Is that what you want, fucker?” She asked, holding up the pictures.

Though I’m sure the lump in my pants told the story, I nodded anyway.

“You wish,” she said disgustedly, erasing the images of herself from the sketchpad, leaving only me and the Devil.

When I got upstairs, the deacon was standing in the middle of the chapel with a broom in his hand, staring at me. I wondered if he knew what’d just happened.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Who, Doreen?” he said, moseying over and handing me an envelope.

In the car, I counted three hundred in the envelope cash, unsure why I’d been paid. More than the money, I was puzzled about Doreen, wondering what made her tick. I replayed the details the whole way home.

It wasn’t just what she drew, but how she drew it that was so strange. Especially the way she sketched herself. Her cartoon face feigned surprise, but there was nothing passive about what caricature-Doreen did in those scenes. The more I thought about it, the more I realized she had made herself the story’s main character. She was the real ‘Johnny.’ Me and the Devil were just following her lead frame to frame.

For the next few days, I funneled my obsession with Doreen and her drawings into a new tract. It was about an attractive woman too proud of her beauty and talents to be kind to others. In the story, she spends her days hunched over a sketchpad drawing fanciful pictures while avoiding the real world. On the rare occasions she looks up from her art, everything and everyone appear to her as ugly little specks littering the landscape. The only one good enough for her is God up in heaven, though she even takes issue with Him at times. When she complains to the Big Man about how awful others are, how nasty the world is, he pats her on the shoulder and says, “I know, Sweetie.” As the story goes on, as her arrogance intensifies, we see that the god she’s been worshipping has sprouted tiny horns from his haloed skull while the shade of his glorious skin shifts from light pink to deep red. I couldn’t wait to see what she’d do with that one.

On a clear bright morning, with my notebook by my side, I drove the long way to Duck River—meandering past farms and country houses, wondering if Doreen lived in any of them. When I got to New Life, I walked purposefully toward the entrance, ready to one-up Doreen at the humiliation game.

The deacon, who was outside trimming hedges, put his sheers down and called to me.

“That it?” He said, pointing to my notebook.

I ignored him and tried the door. It was locked.

“She ain’t here,” he said.

I searched his wrinkly face. Not sure what I saw there. Maybe pity. He pulled an envelope from his overalls and reached for my notebook. I scribbled my phone number on the back before handing it over, telling him to make sure she got it.

On the way home, I convinced myself it was all just part of the game. She was probably in the basement reading my story at that very moment. I was winning. She would see that.

When I pulled up to my building, I heard a phone ringing in the distance. Somehow I knew it was mine. I leapt up the stairs three-at-a-time and jabbed my key into the lock, but I was too late to catch it. The little red light on my answering machine was blinking when I walked in.

“Steven, this Elder Peabody. I’m calling to terminate our partnership. You held up your end of the bargain and I held up mine. Satan’s dark door is open wider than we’ll ever need for my tracts, and it’s dangerously open in you. I pray that you invite the good Lord to set up shop in your heart before it’s too late. But not in my church. I mean it. Don’t come back.”

I paced my apartment a while, motherfucking him and motherfucking her. It was just a crummy church in Duck River, but it felt like I’d been kicked out of another of Nashville’s closed clubs. Doreen was behind it. I knew that much. She had made the Elder call me, just to see if I’d come crawling back. No way I was going to give her the satisfaction.

I wrote a new batch of tunes over the next week. Maybe you’d call them love songs. I’d say they were hate songs. Of course, they were all about Doreen. I took them down to Music Row, hoping to pitch them to publishers, but it was harder than ever to get a meeting. When the big shots wouldn’t give them a listen, I went crosstown to Lower Broadway and set out to busking.

Though I played all morning, the only tips I got were little jingly coins from the bottom of people’s pockets—the lint-covered ones they wanted to get rid of anyway. My guitar case looked like a trash can for tourist’s pocket corners. Then, as I was belting out my darkest Doreen song, something else dropped in the case. The man who tossed it walked away quickly, handing the same little booklet to everyone else on the block. I stopped mid-song and picked it up. It was titled: The Devil’s Pump by Elder T.W. Peabody.

It was my story alright. They even kept the protagonist’s name as “Johnny.” Out-and-out plagiarism is what it was. It’s not that I wanted my own name on it, but the Elder was making money off it somehow, and I knew I’d never see another dime. Then I thought about the two of them—the Elder and Doreen—wondering if he was screwing her, or if she was his daughter, or maybe both. In a fit of fury, I upended the nickels and dimes from my guitar case and stormed off.

I went over to Chad’s house, the bass player who sent me to New Life in the first place. He said he didn’t know about Doreen, or Peabody, or the tracts they made, and that anyway he was about to leave on tour with a top-name act and didn’t have time for me. I said I wanted to get the hell out of Nashville too, asking if he knew of any tours I might get on. As he was closing the door in my face, he stopped and asked,

“Want to sell your guitar?”

I knew Chad was a scumbag, but I didn’t expect him to snake me like that. He must’ve seen how desperate I was. In the end, I took four hundred cash for my vintage J-45 and went home to gather my things.

It didn’t take long to load my little Toyota. I left the furniture, kitchen stuff, and even the stacked-to-the-ceiling boxes of shrink-wrapped demos. It was time to move on from all of it.

Unsure where to go, I headed West on the Interstate, imagining a new life on a California beach. An hour later, when I got near Duck River, I passed a billboard for Bud’s Guns. I’d seen it before, driving to and from the church, but this time there was a poster for Peabody’s tent revival stuck to it. At that moment I noticed something strange. My body felt kind of flat, two-dimensional, like it wasn’t a real body at all. I imagined Doreen hunched over a little drafting table in my head, drawing my hands on the wheel and my foot on the gas, leading me frame by frame through another comic strip. I pulled off at the next exit.

As I stepped out of the car, I felt fuller, stronger. In fact, I felt great. I knew exactly what I wanted before walking into the store. Of course, Bud tried upselling me on foreign models and fancy grips, but I held my ground and bought a simple snub-nosed .38. I was through with assholes and rip-off artists.

There’s not much more to tell, or that I should tell, except that I wound up back in Nashville when all was said and done, just ten miles from Music Row. You could say I made it into one of Music City’s closed clubs after all.

It’s not so bad. There’s a hell of a band here. Best I’ve ever played with. Besides that, I’ve got plenty of time to write music. And the people here, they appreciate my songs. I haven’t played a cover in years.

Speaking of covers, I saw a little five-by-three-inch tract lying on a table in chow hall the other day. There was a sketch on the front of a man behind bars, looking up at Jesus in the sky. I flipped through it. The story was pathetic, the drawings were too. Nothing like what Doreen and I did in that church basement way back when. Nothing like that at all.

Thompson, Steven—Inmate #00225301

Riverbend Maximum Security Institution

7475 Cockrill Bend Blvd, Nashville, TN 37209

By Mary Durocher

My brother Leo was pulled out of the Mohawk River in early March. After Dad identified the remains by the peace sign tattoo on his shoulder, all he could say to Mom and I was that the ice had thawed too quickly this winter.

I kept hoping it’d all turn out to be a practical joke, like how as kids we hid in the supermarket aisles and our names were called out on the speaker. But Leo stayed dead. Mom and Dad stewed in their grief while taking time off work they couldn’t afford. That spring, I fell in love with Sophie Pelky who waitressed with me at Mac’s, a diner right outside of Cohoes that during the peaks of summer had a barbeque pit in the back.

On the morning of Leo’s memorial at our old high school, I sat in front of my mirror and  remembered with a jolt that school administrators were planting a tree for him later. I slashed thick lipstick lines across the glass and threw the tube onto the floor, its plastic shell splitting down the middle. I didn’t clean it up before driving off to the diner.

Sophie waited for me in the gravel parking lot before our early bird shift. Leaning against her Toyota, she puffed on a Camel and regarded the far-off, blue mountain peaks. Before she said anything to me, I noticed a coffee stain underneath the name tag pinned to her uniform. I warmed at the thought of her sweet annoyance as she threw it in the wash nightly, praying it might come out.

“Morning, Allegra,” she said. She squashed the cigarette butt beneath her heel before we headed towards the diner’s silver doors.

“You know Harry’s gonna give you hell for that,” I said, motioning towards the stain like it was a birthmark I wasn’t supposed to see.

Harry, the head cook, was relentless in picking the meat off of Sophie’s bones. One day, she was too bitchy and too fat. The next, she was angelic as he dragged her to tailgating in abandoned lots with Mac, the owner. I often found her smoking in the bathroom, violating health codes with her lips twisted in disgust at his hounding.

“Let him,” she shrugged, while throwing her chestnut-colored hair up into a high ponytail. “What about you? Don’t tell me you’re working the full day.”

“I’m supposed to leave in a few hours,” I said, holding the door for her.  “But I might just stay.”

“Allegra, don’t,” she said, tilting her head. “I really am sorry. I saw the segment about him on the news last night. He looked so…”

“Normal?” I asked as her cheeks erupted in patches of red. I hoped to soon be distracted by carrying piles of dirty dishes. Maybe then that news photo, of the two of us in a day trip to Lake Sacandaga, would dissipate with the fumes of onions and dish soap.

“I saw you girls loitering outside,” Harry called out from the back of the kitchen. “No one is paying you to chat.”

“Gotta focus on the morning rush, right, Allegra?” Sophie whispered as she pushed a strand of hair out of her face and started to wipe down the sticky tabletops with a wet rag. One slouching, retired man, Mr. Callahan came in and sat at the counter where I rearranged raspberry danishes in the plexiglass display case. He’d come in each morning and sit for two hours as I refilled his coffee.

“I’d drive all the way from Albany to see that pretty smile,” he said as I passed by, his chin resting in his hand.

“Hey, Mr. C, wanna stop being a flirt?” Sophie said, her words light but her tone fierce. She would’ve tackled him to the ground for me. I wanted to tell her how I carried the image of her at daybreak with me as I drove back down the long roads to the house. My parents and I would sit on the couch in silence, slathered in the T.V.’s blue light, and knowing I’d see her again carried me through the days. I’d never confess this. Really, we barely knew one another.

“Okay, okay,” Mr. Callahan grumbled, his focus settling on the T.V. in the corner. The local news was replaying the segment about Leo, reminding viewers of the time we’d be slouched in front of the high school. I stiffened as the news anchor mentioned the inevitable; he washed up at the first signs of spring.

“Table for four?” Sophie asked as the bell on the front door dinged and a young family clamored inside, their shoes tracking in bits of gravel and mud. I half-watched as I brewed a fresh pot of coffee.

“Yeah, hon,” a man with balding hair and an oversized Carhart jacket said. Behind him, a young woman in a hoodie dragged two tiny girls with uneven pigtails and pink overalls. Maybe they were twins. Impatient, I rang up Mr Callahan’s bill as he scooped the cash out of his pocket and huffed out the door. My phone kept buzzing in my back pocket but I let it go, not wanting to see.

“She’s not getting a sundae in the middle of the day,” the man said, leaning across the table. His voice dominated over the low hum of the T.V., making me alert.

“But it’s a Saturday,” the young woman objected.

“You’re a piece of work, you know that?” he said, slamming the palms of his hands against the table and making the cups of water tremble. I stood still, horrified, as he stormed out of the diner. Sophie emerged out of the kitchen with a banana sundae and a stack of Mickey Mouse pancakes. The young woman swayed with her head in her hands. The two girls were too composed, their faces blank. They’re used to it, I thought as I wiped down the counter.

“He’s not coming back in and I don’t…,” she stammered, unzipping her backpack to show Sophie it’s lack. “He has the cash.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sophie said, glancing back to make sure Harry wasn’t listening. “I’ll cover it.”

“No. We aren’t a fucking charity case,” she snapped, carrying the twin girls out back to whichever vehicle their father was fuming inside of. Sophie sighed, sliding into the booth, with her chin resting on her hands. She turned towards me. “Wanna share it? The ice cream’s gonna melt.”

“I guess you paid for it,” I said, going over and sitting down next to her. We took the two spoons and dug into the ice cream’s softness. The first bite gave me piercing brain freeze but I couldn’t stop digging in. I let her have the maraschino cherries, laughing at the ring of red that formed around her mouth.

“You got some syrup,” she said,  dipping her thumb in a cup of water before reaching over and wiping off the chocolate syrup. Her touch lingered on my lip, and, as if it we’d done it  before, she leaned in to kiss me.

Suddenly, I ceased to be Allegra Grisanti. Suddenly, life hummed again with alternatives, possibilities. No longer was I the waitress. No longer was I the community college dropout, a few credits short of an associate, when my brother vanished.

See, I wanted to argue with Leo, things can happen. Leo always pinned me as a sucker. He often reminded me of this when I found him lying in the driveway after going out with friends to the park. “Nothing ever changes, Allegra,” he’d tell me as I tried to sober him up with instant coffee, “the future is just working till we drop.”

“Sophie and Allegra, I’m gonna ask you again what you think I’m paying you for,” Harry demanded, emerging from the kitchen. He stood with his hands on his hips. Despite it being the beginning of the day, his white undershirt was stained with sweat and his hair sprouted up in exasperated tufts. We’d sometimes joke that he’d forsaken combs after his girlfriend and kid left a year ago. “Where’d that family go?”

“They got into a fight and left,”  Sophie explained as we distanced ourselves from the booth and half-eaten food.

“Goddamn it,” Harry said, rubbing his eyes as he focused on the two spoons still stuck in the sundae. “Hold on, did you two have some it? Who told you to do that?”

“We paid for it, Harry,” I protested, hoping he’d go easy. When I was first hired, he’d play the oldies station on the radio in the kitchen and sing along with a powerful baritone. He’d say Sophie and I reminded him of his sisters in Buffalo. He used to make us shrimp baskets on the house after our shifts.

“Who told you to do that?” he repeated, turning towards Sophie. “You’re the last person who should be eating that crap. No one likes a fat girl, Soph, I’ve told you that a million times.”

“I paid for it,” she argued, her cheeks flushed at his casual cuts.

“And look at that stain,” he said, putting his hand right where the coffee stain sat on her uniform. She jerked away, bumping into me. “It’s like you pride yourself on being a slob.”

“Come on, Harry,” I begged.

“Why are you even here today, Allegra?” Harry said, shrinking slightly in shame. “Isn’t it your brother’s thing?”

“I like working,” I insisted, tugging at a thread on my uniform. “I’d rather be here.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said, shaking his head as he sulked back to the kitchen. I wished I had chucked the entire glass case of danishes at him. I wanted to see his clothes stained with raspberry frosting.

“He wouldn’t say it so often if it wasn’t true, right?” she muttered, tears splattered across her cheeks.

“Can I go back to your place after we get out?” I whispered, holding her face in-between my hands. She pushed against me at first, needing to understand why I’d bail but eventually she saw that I had no tidy explanation. All I knew was that I couldn’t go to the memorial. I wanted to be with her. I sent off a text to Mom that Harry insisted the diner needed me, that there was no way out. Maybe there wasn’t. The evenings of making boxed mac and cheese for Mom and Dad, my fingernails stained with yellow powder, were so constant it left me nauseous. Some nights, I was terrified to find myself bowed into believing in Leo’s idea of permanence. Would the dead be quicker to forgive if I was trying to escape their own convictions?

The afternoon sun was high by the time we emerged from the diner. Our shoulders tense and clothes splattered with kitchen grease; we didn’t say anything while getting into our cars. I didn’t turn on the radio as I followed her down back into Cohoes. My head was at ease, I was euphoric. She rented the ground floor of a Victorian two-family house coated in a ugly yellow and navy blue paint, unsteadily nestled next to the river.  It was remarkable how silent we were as I followed her into her bare-bones space.

A map of the New York City subway system with curled corners was tapped above her twin mattress. Stacks of books on Adirondack hiking trails and herbal remedies were strewn across the scratched wooden floor. Enough dirty dishes were pilled in the sink that I tried not to stare.

Sophie didn’t offer me coffee or tea or even water before we shed our spoiled clothes. All at once, as she laid out on her cheap mattress. I held the indents of her hips in my hands, I kissed her collarbone, I took in the scent of her soap. I pressed myself as close as bodies permitted. It was damp and cold inside the house, so afterwards, Sophie rested on my chest while cradling my waist.

“I’ve already been waitressing for six years. Can you believe that shit?” Sophie said while staring up at the water-stained ceiling.

         “We never would’ve met if you hadn’t kept with it,” I admitted, unable to recall the season we first met. When I started at Mac’s, I was consumed with commuting to Troy for classes, erratically seeing a girl from high school, and trying to make sure Leo was on track to graduate. Those bursts of busyness were alien to me now. Truly, there was only Sophie who burned through the dullness. Leo would’ve laughed at me for pinning my salvation on one person. He never believed in love like that, as if there was a choice.

“Don’t be sentimental, Allegra,” she scoffed, drawing back to grab a cigarette. “I’m not staying. Not for much longer, anyway.”

“Why?” I insisted, splitting into two. She stared at me as she smoked, unwavering in her resolve. She told me, calmly, that there were no family obligations to stick around for. Her mother had been a blank space since childhood. Her father had moved back to Montreal a couple years back. He’d bought a cabin up in the Adirondacks and that was where she was heading to. I’d never heard of the town so she showed me lush green photos of the High Peaks area. She was not worried about money: she’d sell vegetables at the Plattsburgh’s farmers market or take on seasonal gigs. Before I could interject, she proposed that I too leave the sting of Harry’s remarks, the blanched pharmacy aisles, and the tired call of our lives.

I didn’t respond to her offer, irritated at her indifference to Mom and Dad. I slipped on my clothes and willed myself into saying my mind wasn’t made up. As I drove back to the house,  I tried to not think about the last message Leo sent me before he died: “I will not conform.” The text I dismissed as a stray, stoned thought. All of the lights were off were shut when I swung into the driveway. No one was home. I ran straight to my bedroom, locked the door, and took two melatonin gummies.

I dreamt terribly that night. Right after Leo was found, I had vivid dreams of being at Falls View Park and looking down at him as be sunbathed on one of the stones jutting out of Cohoes Fall. We’d watch one another without saying anything. Maybe, I thought after waking up, he’s finally somewhere peaceful. That night, though, was different. Leo stood directly in front of me, comically covered with sludgy algae. He looked inpatient.

“Do you remember when we were kids, Allegra?” he said. “We’d go to the park with Mom and Dad and you’d get so freaked out about the slugs frying in the sun on the pavement.”

“You were so mean to me about that,” I said.

“I was,” he sighed, adjusting the strands of algae.  “Do you still read our horoscopes, Allegra? Tell me that you do, please.”

No, why would I? I thought, already awake with the sheets sweated-through and twisted around my ankle. Out of sleep, I remembered Leo picking at a bowl of cereal as he read the Aquarius and Pisces predictions of the day to me. The sharpness of the memory made me huddle in bed, calling out sick for my shift, and dodging Mom’s worried quizzing. I couldn’t explain that I was in mourning. I didn’t have to read anything to know what I was going to do.

Sophie and I didn’t leave for the cabin immediately. We kept waitressing at Mac’s while hiding our plans from Harry. We kept cojoining on her mattress after our shifts. Afterwards, we’d sit in fold out chairs on the back porch, smoking her Camels. I often envisioned the two of us in future Julys, plucking ripe cherry tomatoes and weeding a wild garden.

I refused to comprehend what this would do to Mom and Dad until it was too close and I was forced to. In April, Dad began to buy subs and heat up frozen pizza without me. The photos of Leo were stuffed in a drawer. This was also when Sophie packed the car with dry goods and supplies. You ready? she texted me one night in late April as I watched T.V. with Mom and Dad. I peeled myself off the couch and shut myself in my room.

As I rushed to shove clothes into suitcase, I barely noticed Mom cracking the door open. She stood in the doorway, expressionless, and didn’t demand to know what I was doing. Instead, she turned away as she shut the door. I sat cross-legged on the carpet, guilty and desperate by my need to be anywhere else, to follow Sophie, to get away from the sound of my my brother’s knuckles rapping underneath a sheet of ice. In the end, on the night I left I put a long letter with the cabin’s address on the kitchen table.

I met Sophie a little after midnight, on a country road outside of Mechanicville. She was parked on the side of the road, her window rolled halfway down. Across the road was a small trailer park indented into the woods. I could smell the nicotine and hear bits of a Gillian Welch song as I approached the car.

“Where have you brought me?” I laughed, leaning against the window. She didn’t respond as she stepped out to meet me.

“Just trust me,” she said, grabbing a box cutter out of her corduroy jacket. She took my hand, starting to drag me across the road. “And keep quiet.”

  “What are you doing?” I insisted. We crouched down in front of a trailer on the edge of the enclave with the lights still on. I flushed as I noticed inside was Harry. He was spread out on a salmon-colored couch, Utica Club cans on the coffee table and the T.V. blaring. In such a comprised perspective, he looked small.

“What do you think he deserves?” she whispered as she swiveled towards his truck.  She stabbed the box cutter into the tire’s meat, creating frenzied slashes. It was impossible to watch the tire deflate; all I could see was her frightening determination. “Do you dare me to go inside, Allegra?”

“No, no,” I said, tugging on her arm. She resisted my pull and continued towards the trailer, and a surge of rage filled me as I tackled her onto the ground. How dare she risk it? We were so close.

“What are you doing?” she asked me, her mouth curved downwards as I grabbed the box cutter from her and tossed it into the grass. I held her face in my hands, I kissed her hard. How was I now realizing that her presence, which I’d grown so warm to, was one of a stranger’s? Harry too was just a man sleeping man on his couch, as formless to me as anything else.

“Sophie, we’re leaving,” I said. A dog had begun to bark, I imagined it straining against its chained.

“That could’ve been amazing,” she said as we ran across the road. I climbed back into my car, leaving her oblivious to my fright or my hidden dry heaves into a plastic bag before we drove off. I turned up The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust as loud as I could stomach as I trailed her into the Adirondacks. While singing along I lost all of my cell reception.

We took an abnormally long time getting there. We even drove past the town to stock up on supplies in Plattsburgh. One night, at a motel off of the interstate, we smoked on the concrete balcony with our knees drawn up to our chest. We spoke of the many things we desired, like yarn blankets for our bed and herbal tinctures harvested from our garden.

None of it turned out that way, but that’s not the point. The point is that was the beginning because, as Sophie lit up her second cigarette, I started to sob. Sophie attempted to comfort me, she kept asking if I was hiding regret or unhappy with her. I think she was frightened by my outburst. She looked at me as if I wasn’t her Allegra at Mac’s. I didn’t know what to tell her. She was my ecstatic lifesaver, my brazen instincts followed through. This would give me more happiness than imagined. Yet, I was unable to stomach that soon summer would be returning. The mud would harden again, the seeds would sprout, and I’d find it easier to breathe high up in the mountains. Leo would never be there with me. All I said to Sophie, which she never understood, was that life really is unforgivable.

By Melissa Llanes Brownlee

It bursts in my fingers, pink pulp dripping, black seeds spackling the oil-stained concrete beneath my bare feet. I press skin and flesh, seeds scraping, against my palms. I flick my hands open, lick the juice from my arms, my hand, seeds clinging to dark pink strings, dangling. I pull another one off the tree, green and unready. This time it’s firm, hard, and I use both hands, and it resists. I place it under one of my feet and step down, the green skin splitting under my weight and I think of cousin’s head this time, imagine bone and brains, white flesh, white seeds oozing from each jagged crevice, and my face crinkles in jagged response.

By Tony Concannon

I followed people one summer. I followed a woman who worked at the library. She always smoked a cigarette as she walked. I followed one of our neighbors. I followed the man who owned the small grocery store on Main Street. I was thirteen and I was practicing surveillance. I imagined myself a detective. It came from reading the Hardy Boy books all the time.

An old man was the person I followed the most. One evening I saw him sitting on the bench in front of the Town Hall and I followed him back to a rooming house. His name was Jim and he’d been a friend of my father, who was dead.

The next afternoon I waited across the street from the rooming house. Jim paid no attention to me when he came out. He walked quickly and I had to hurry to keep up. He went into the drugstore on the corner of Main Street.

I followed him inside. He was sitting at one end of the counter. I sat at the other end and asked for a vanilla milkshake. I wondered if he remembered me. He’d come to the house once when I’d been little.

The waitress brought him a plate of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and peas. Then she brought me my milkshake. The book I’d read on being a detective had said to take notes whenever you followed someone and I took out a small notebook and a pencil and began writing. After Jim finished eating, he asked for a second cup of coffee. While he was drinking it, he counted out several coins on the counter and handed them to the waitress. I put the notebook and pencil back into my pocket. I’d filled two pages. I drank the rest of the milkshake, paid, and left.

***

My mother rarely asked me what I did all day. She worked at a bank, so she wasn’t home. She must have worried about me but I’d never been in trouble and I got good grades at school. She’d been different since my father had died. She’d started smoking and she rarely smiled. There was only the two of us. It was the first summer I hadn’t signed up for the playground. I didn’t like baseball anymore, which is all they did there. What I wanted to do was play football.

We’d have dinner together every night and afterward she’d sit at the table and have a cup of coffee and smoke cigarettes. Most nights I sat with her. She’d tell me about the people she worked with at the bank or one of our neighbors she’d run into. I listened but didn’t say much.

“When’s football going to start?” she asked.

“They’re going to call me.”

Her cigarette burned in the ashtray. I’d stolen a few from her and smoked them but I didn’t like the taste.

“Your father loved football.”

“He was good, wasn’t he?”

“He was very good.” 

***

Jim did the same thing every day. He ate breakfast at the diner and dinner at the drugstore and he sat on the bench. One thing puzzled me. He never ate lunch. Twice I saw people give him a dollar and I wondered if he didn’t have enough money.

He spoke to me once. I was on my way home and I passed him sitting on the bench.

“Your father was a good man,” he said. His voice was deeper than I’d expected.

I stopped. “Thank you.”

He didn’t say anything else.

***

“Do you know what day it is?” my mother asked when we were having dinner.

I shook my head.

“It’s the anniversary of Daddy’s death. A year ago today.”

“August 11,” I said.

“That’s right,” my mother said. “Do you miss him?”

“Yeah. I don’t think of him much, though.”

“I think of him every day.”

“It’s too sad to think of him.”

He’d been a big man and he’d loved to wrestle with me. He’d let me wrap him in a hold before he’d suddenly pick me up and dangle me upside down. When his brother had come out from Minnesota to visit, the two of them had wrestled in the living room.

There were tears in my mother’s eyes.

***

The following week Jim did something different. After he’d had breakfast at the diner, he walked past the Town Hall and headed out of town. I was on the other side of the street so he wouldn’t notice me but it didn’t matter since he never looked back. We reached the top of a long hill and started down the other side. At the bottom, on the right, was a pond. He turned into a path. I crossed the street and trailed after him. The path curved to the right around the water. The growth on the sides was thick. I stopped at the edge of a clearing. Jim was on the other side, staring down at the water.

I didn’t want to get caught and I ran out to the street and hid behind a telephone pole. A few minutes later he emerged from the path and headed back to town. I walked around to where he’d been standing. The water was too dark to see anything. I found a big stick and stuck it in. It didn’t reach the bottom.

That night I got a telephone call from Mr. Rogers, the Pop Warner coach. The first practice was the next evening. I’d never played football before and I couldn’t wait.

I stopped following Jim after that. Football practice was fun. I was the biggest kid and the coaches made me a defensive end. I even had to lose a few pounds to get under the weight limit. Brian Conley, who I knew from school, was on the team. He was friendly with some of the girls in our class and we started hanging out with them. We met up with them in front of McDonald’s or at the ice cream shop. Some afternoons we danced to records in Susan Harrington’s basement. One day, when we were outside McDonald’s, Jim walked by. I hadn’t thought much about him since football had started.

***

I came home on a Friday night and found my mother crying on the couch. Our first game was Sunday and we’d had our last practice.

“Why are you crying, Mom?”

“Do you remember Jim Curran?”

“Who is he?”

“He was a friend of Daddy’s. He liked to sit on the bench in front of the Town Hall.”

“What about him?

“He drowned.”

“Where?”

“In the pond at the other end of town.”

“How did he drown?”

My mother was still crying.

“He killed himself.”

“How do they know that?”

“He told John Lydon last week he didn’t want to live anymore and he was going to drown himself. Then when John didn’t see him this week, he called the police.”

She couldn’t stop crying.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“He was a very nice man.”

That night I read through all my notes about Jim. In the morning I walked up to the pond and took the path to where he’d stood looking at the water. There was nothing to show anything had happened there. I didn’t even know if it was where he’d drowned himself.

***

My mother told me there had been only a few people at Jim’s funeral. That Saturday I rode my bike up to the cemetery. At the rear there were several new graves. For each one there was a short post with a card on it stuck in the ground. On the card was the name of the person. I found the one for James Curran.

In the woods behind the cemetery there were purple flowers growing and I pulled up a handful. I had nothing to tie them with and I arranged them carefully on his grave.

I went back into the woods and pulled up more flowers. Holding them, I rode my bike back up to the front, where my father was buried. I hadn’t been there since his funeral.

I placed the flowers in front of his headstone.