There is a creek in Cherry Hill, Tennessee where I’ve hidden my memories from childhood. Mom and I would walk down to the creek every day to escape the tiny apartment and everything and everyone in it. At the water’s edge, I would tie each memory to a stone with an invisible string and throw them one by one into the middle of the creek.

Mom thought I was trying to skip stones. “You have to throw them sort of sidearm to make them skip,” she’d say, demonstrating. “See? Like that.” She would smile when she said it. She was pretty and young and had a nice smile that I liked to see. I hated to disappoint her, but I had no intention of letting the stones skip around willy-nilly. I knew what I was aiming for.

“Okay,” I’d say. I would secretly secure another memory to a stone and throw it like a rainbow into the middle of the creek. The rock would make a satisfying slap against the water before sinking.

“Maybe next time,” she would say, giving my hair a tousle.

On the days we couldn’t go to the creek―because it was too cold or because my mother was too tired―the memories would expand in my head and threaten to lodge themselves permanently. On those days, I would hide in my room, take the memories out, and close them up in an old Swisher Sweets cigar box my father had given me. But the memories were clever and wouldn’t stay confined. They would sneak out and wait patiently at the foot of my bed for me to be awakened―by the yelling or the thumping or the slamming of a door―and rush back in my head again and force me to watch and re-watch them until I finally fell asleep.

The next morning, I would beg to go to the creek straightaway. On those mornings, mom would sit quietly on the bank and watch me frenetically pitching stone after stone into the creek. There was no talk of skipping stones. There was no talk at all.

On my sixth birthday, she told me we were leaving―Dad, the apartment, Cherry Hill. I didn’t ask why. Instead, as I looked into her deep brown, wonderfully sad eyes, I simply asked: “When?”

“Right away,” she said. “I’ve packed everything up and we need to go now.”

“I have to go to the creek,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “One last time to the creek.”

I ran to the door without waiting for her. I tore across the parking lot and down the little bank. I stared at the creek and, for the first time, spoke to it. “This is it,” I said. “You’ve got to take them all now.” I picked up handfuls of stones and smashed the memories into them. No time for delicate, invisible strings. I threw them, carelessly, hurriedly.

Mom joined me at the creek and told me she had the car warming up and that it was time to go. I threw one last fistful of rocks and dusted my hands on my corduroys. She reached her hand down to me and wiggled her fingers in the universal parental language that says, “Grab on.” I did.

Years later when I told my wife about the creek, she laughed. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “If you threw all your memories into the creek, how can you be telling me about the apartment and Cherry Hill and the creek itself? You wouldn’t remember anything at all before you turned six.”

She doesn’t understand.

If I were ever to go back to the creek, I would stand with my wife on that tiny bank and hold her hand so maybe she could understand. I imagine that the creek would offer up my memories to us both. But then my wife would want to see them, and she would bend down to the water and ask the creek to send them to her. And if the creek decided to float those memories to her on paper boats, I would have to throw rocks and sticks at the boats to sink them. “I’m sorry,” I would say. “I can’t let those reach you.”

_______________

Jason Stout lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and five children.  His stories have appeared in Flashquake, Every Day Fiction, Shine! and Pequin.  Recently, his story, “Larry Legend,” was nominated for a Pushcart.

Nobody comes to the circus anymore. Hemingway, the last elephant, trumpets a sad note as his girlfriend is packed away into a truck to be sold. All us clowns line up in front of the big top to wave goodbye. My wife, Lulu, takes it hardest. She won’t even put on her make-up anymore. Last week, she crushed her rubber nose under her heel and it squeaked apart into two pieces. “What’s the point,” she said, “if no one laughs?”

The recession has hit us hard. Our boss sells off the animals: first the monkey that couldn’t ride its bicycle, the one that reminded Lulu of our lost son; then the tigers, which got meaner as they got hungrier; and the lions (ditto); now the elephants.

As the truck’s engine starts, Lulu rushes in front of the bumper. My boss pushes me forward to stop her.

“Please?” I ask Lulu. “You can’t prevent this.” It takes three of us to pull her away out of the road.

Hours later, I stand in front of rows of empty bleachers and perform tricks for three elderly folks who come once a month, for free, from the nursing home. They don’t pay any attention. One man is clearly drunk. The other man and the woman talk about the past without making sense. Lulu skulks around behind me, just outside the open tent flap. When I look back at her bare face, I realize how old we’ve gotten. Not quite elderly, but long past having another child. Her blond hair sticks up at untamed angles and her wrinkles quaver as she cries. She kisses Hemingway on his trunk. He unfurls it around her shoulders like an arm.

I squirt the rest of my plastic flower’s water at my partner and hurry out of the ring. Hemingway’s  trainer leads him in, and I want, for Lulu, a minute or two more. The trunk is a comfort, I know. That wrinkled gray flesh. An elephant never forgets.

As Lulu opens her hands, I see the red halves of her rubber nose. She stares at them with regret, and I can tell she’s thinking of our son. Split. Irreparable. We had let him camp with an older friend―they never returned. The friend showed up dead just two months ago, after twelve years of no news. This was around the same time we started feeling the effects of the recession. When she heard about the death, Lulu wanted to leave and renew our search for Danny, but he disappeared so long ago, really. What was I supposed to say? I told her we couldn’t leave our jobs. Not when so many others needed the work we had. Not when we couldn’t even afford a local pint, a night out we deserved.

I didn’t know she would blame herself for not saving any of her income. I didn’t know she would handle losing the animals like she was again losing our flesh and blood. The day the tigers shipped, she managed to get into a cage with one of them. I swear she looked disappointed when we got her out without a bite taken.

I walk up to her now and the smell of gas fills my nose. She hoists something off the ground and strides past me, into the tent. As she goes by, she takes a book of matches from her pocket. With Danny, she used to light an entire book and put it into her mouth, where the flame would go out. It always made him laugh. It was his favorite trick.

This time, though, she lifts what she picked up over her head, and liquid splashes over her clothes. It’s gas―I realize it’s gas―and then I’m running, watching her drop the canister and pull a match from the book.

She sees me coming, and her eyes light up in a way I don’t understand. I tackle her. I try to keep her head from smashing into the ground. The smell cuts into my lungs. I will always remember this smell, the smell of not burning. I reach for her arm and make sure she can’t strike the match.

“What were you thinking?” I ask, holding her down.

“I wasn’t going to do it,” she says. “I just wanted someone to care. I just wanted someone to care that I care.”

The elderly folks are watching now, out of their seats.

“Tomorrow the bleachers will be full,” I say as she looks up at me. “Everything will be a little less empty.”

_______________

Matthew Salesses is the author of a chapbook, We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius), and stories in or forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Witness, The Literary Review, American Short Fiction, Pleiades, Mid-American Review, and others. His fiction has received awards from Glimmer Train, MAR, University of New Orleans, and IMPAC. He edits Redivider.

For fun, my wife and I sit around and watch documentaries about the lives of extraordinarily fat people so we can feel better about ourselves because we work hourly jobs and live in a crappy apartment because our GEDs didn’t take us as far as we hoped. We got our GEDs because we wanted to get married. We wanted to get married so we could have sex because back then we believed what our parents told us about going to hell if we fornicated.  At that point, we had done everything but have sex and we knew that the disposition of our souls was in grave danger if we didn’t do something drastic. Our parents told us we couldn’t get married until we had our high school diplomas because we were too young and we needed a good solid education before we could make adult decisions and we thought they were delusional because we actually went to school every day and knew that they weren’t teaching us shit. We showed them by going across the state line to get married. But then the sex wasn’t that great, and then we couldn’t find jobs that didn’t involve customer service, and now we’ve accepted that this is as good as it’s going to get.

We watch as the extraordinarily fat people tearfully explain how they got to 1,000 pounds, how it was a slippery slope, how they tried diets, how now they’re stuck in their soiled beds and have to be cut out of their homes and taken to a special fat hospital for emergency surgery with the assistance of special fat SWAT teams with good back strength who wear latex gloves and very serious expressions.

The best part of these documentaries is when the medical professionals talk about the fat people like they understand, like they sympathize, like this is all normal, when you know that when those doctors and nurses get home, they sit in bed crying, eating a tub of ice cream, asking themselves how tragedies like these happen. The wife and I giggle when the doctors use the word “staggering” or when the fat person says, “I let things get out of hand.” For the next week, we’ll repeat that phrase as often as we can and then laugh uncontrollably. For example, I’ll get home late from work and the wife will be at the kitchen table waiting and she’ll be kind of irritated because she took the time to bake a Stouffer’s lasagna in the oven and microwave some frozen broccoli, so I’ll say, “I let things get out of hand.” She’ll try not to crack a smile, and then her cheeks will twitch and she’ll start shaking and then we’ll both laugh so hard that there’s snot coming out of our noses and we’re laugh-crying and she’s forgotten that I was late and won’t spend the next hour interrogating me about why my shirt reeks like cigarette smoke even though we both know that I’m late because I met my best friend—whom she hates mostly because he did finish high school and isn’t married—for a couple beers at the bar he owns.

The sex between the wife and I has improved significantly over the past seven years. I think we’re starting to resent getting married at seventeen a lot less. After we watch documentaries about the lives of extraordinarily fat people, my wife fucks me like she’s auditioning to become a porn star and tells me that she’s so fucking glad that we’re both thin and that we have families who love us enough not to feed us to death and I tell her I’m so fucking glad we’re both thin and I lick her nipples and get extra creative and we both moan and pant and I want the moment to last so I think about the poor S.O.B. who needs a team of physical therapists to give him a bath and how he groans in pain as they heave and shift his folds and awkward deposits of fat, all so it will take me a little longer to come. Mornings after Thank God We’re Not Fat Sex, the wife and I tend to hate each other a little, so we don’t speak and make as little eye contact as possible. Instead, we move silently through our morning routines as we try to assess any damage we may have caused. She brushes her teeth and takes a shower and shaves her legs and uses all the hot water and leaves little tiny leg hairs around the drain and curls her hair and puts on her make-up and forgets to cap her mascara. The entire time, I’m sitting on the toilet pretending to read a magazine, but really I’m just staring at her naked body because she’s hotter than me.  She starts the coffee, makes it too strong just the way I hate it, fills her travel thermos, leaves for her job as a receptionist at a beauty salon, and I get to spend an hour or so alone in our apartment watching Home Shopping Network until I have to go to work at a copy shop where I spend my day in front of a Xerox machine pushing buttons.

At some point during these documentaries about extraordinarily fat people, there comes a time when a surgeon has to cut away chunks of belly or upper thigh and the fat person is lying on the operating table, vulnerable and spreadeagle. The surgeon uses special tools to spread and pull and dissect. Then, the surgeon triumphantly raises the bloody, excised body parts and shouts out how much they weigh. Everyone in the room gasps frenzied-like. It’s painfully obvious that they’re all really turned on and after they’re done sewing the patient back together like they’re channeling Mary Shelley, you get the impression that one of those surgeons is going to pull one or more of those nurses into a supply closet so that they too can have Thank God We’re Not Fat Sex. The wife doesn’t like to watch the operations―she calls it human butchering. Blood makes her nauseous, and she doesn’t even like to change her own tampon. So, when we’re watching the surgical procedures, the wife covers her eyes and buries her head against my shoulder, and I narrate in explicit detail how the fat is yellow and serpentine and pulpy and slick and how the excised body parts are dropped into biohazard bags. Then we speculate about what happens to the dead fat deposits of extraordinarily fat people and we think it would be nice if they had backyard burial ceremonies for them the way kids do for dead pets.

One night when we’re watching one of these documentaries, the wife turns to me and says, “There are no happy endings in these stories,” and then she swallows about half of my beer. She looks like she’s about to cry and then I feel like I’m about to cry thinking about these large people living such small, impossible lives, so I say, “It’s a happy ending when they’re wheeled out of the hospital and they only weigh 500 pounds, and they go back to their special chair at home where their loved ones will feed them the same way they’ve always fed them, so that in three years they’ll weigh a ton again and we’ll have another documentary to watch,” and with tears in her eyes, my wife will crawl into my lap, straddling me, and she’ll hold my face in her hands and she’ll say, “I love you so fucking much.”

__________

Roxane Gay’s writing appears or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Necessary Fiction, Keyhole, Monkeybicycle, Pindeldyboz and others. She is the associate editor of PANK and can be found online at roxanegay.com.

My wife’s world has turned upside down. Last week, I came home to find her standing on the ceiling, drinking coffee.

“Come down this minute,” I said, but she didn’t.

She eats up there, sleeps up there. I tell her that I cannot possibly have every conversation with my neck lobbed back, that it’s uncomfortable, but she stays up there anyway.

Today, she is sitting at her computer and typing. She has brought a chair up there and a desk too. She has a mattress and pillows, sheets and blankets. She put a ladder against the wall of the bedroom so she can get up and down freely. We have quite a tall ceiling, so she needed one of those industrial ladders, the kind the painters use when they need to reach the roof.

“Are you having lunch?” I ask.

“Maybe,” she says, not looking down.

“I will not have this,” I say, “I will not have this at all.”

“I’m working,” she says.

At first, I thought it was a phase, maybe some kind of sickness or something. I asked the doctor, and he said this happens sometimes, after something like this. “It’s normal,” he said, “don’t worry.” But it has been almost five weeks now, and she has not come down for longer than it takes to use the restroom or take a shower.

In the beginning, I asked her nicely, kindly, in a way I thought might make a difference. “I understand,” I told her, “but please come down.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“It gives me a headache. My ears ring.”

“That is ridiculous,” I said, but she just shook her head.

I go into the kitchen and start fixing sandwiches. After a few minutes, I hear her above me.

“I’d prefer no mayo,” she says, shuffling her feet.

“Then come down here and make it yourself.”

I finish her sandwich and hand it up to her. I have to stand on the counter to be able to reach. She grabs it and shuffles back into the bedroom.

“Wash your feet,” I yell. There are smudges all over the ceiling. I see them at night when I lie in bed, tread marks of oil and dirt.

The television is gone by the afternoon.

“You cannot have that,” I tell her.

“Why not? I want to watch.”

“Then come down here.”

“You don’t understand,” she says.

“Try me.”

“You’re still down there.”

“What else can I do?”

“You could come up here.”

“How?”

“Just try.”

I try. I can’t. I climb up the ladder but I’m afraid to step off.

“I’ll fall,” I say.

“No, you won’t,” she says, “look at me.” She demonstrates, swinging onto the ladder above me and back off again.

“Here goes,” I say, but when I do the same thing I fall, straight to the ground.

“Are you okay?” she asks, looking down.

“No,” I say, looking up.  My wrist is throbbing, my leg is in pain. We look at each other, our foreheads squished, our faces distorted. “Come down.”

“I told you, it makes me sick.”

“You make me sick.”

“Then don’t look up.”

I hear her walk into the bedroom. She comes out dragging something, probably her mattress.

“It shouldn’t have been like this,” I say. I am not sure she hears. I am not sure she is still in the room.

****

We stop speaking, almost entirely. The ceiling becomes littered. Old socks and dishes. Newspapers, breadcrumbs. Papers everywhere. A few weeks later, one of them drifts down. I pick it up and turn it over. A name, scrawled in the top left corner.

“I’m starting to forget,” I tell her that night. She is in the living room lying on her mattress. I look up and can see the outline of her torso through the blankets, the curve of her breasts, the shape of her hips. It is odd to me that her body looks the same, that she hasn’t changed up there, mutated or something.

“What?”

“Everything.”

“Oh.”

“Is it better up there?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Yes, you do.”

“How could it be?”

I walk from the living room into the bedroom. I leave the door open. She follows inside. I lie down on the bed. She lies down on the ceiling. We are exactly opposite. I can see her features perfectly. Unlike her body, her face looks older. I want to reach up and touch her, put my palms on either side of her face, and hold her head in my hands.

“I miss him,” I say, “but I miss you, too.”

She reaches out her hand, and I do the same. Our fingers don’t touch; there is too much space, but the intention comforts me. Then she drops her hand, takes a deep breath, and gets out of bed. She goes over to the ladder and climbs down.

“Okay,” she says, when her feet are on the floor. She gets in bed next to me.

“How do you feel?” I ask.

“Fine.”

“Really?”

“Let’s sleep,” she says.  She curls into the fetal position, tucking her knees tightly into her chest. I put a hand on her cheek and run it down her neck. She brushes me away and lifts the pillow out from underneath her head. “Goodnight,” she says, and turns over.

The next morning, when I wake up, she is already out of bed. Immediately, my eyes dart to the ceiling, but she is not there. I keep my neck in my hands as I make my way into the living room. I am so focused on the ceiling—her discarded blankets, the same shape as the day before—that I knock right into her. She is standing in the kitchen, making eggs.

“Good morning,” she says.

“You’re here,” I say.

She smiles and rubs her forehead, motioning for me to take a seat at the counter. “Do you want toast?” she asks.

“Okay.”

We eat in silence. It takes her a long time to finish her food. She keeps coughing and scratching her neck.

“What should we do today?” I ask. I take our plates and stack them in the dishwasher. I cannot remember whether the others are dirty, but I run them all anyway.

“I’m kind of tired,” she says, “I may just go lie down.” I notice that her face is red. It looks swollen, filled, ready to explode.

“You’re sick,” I say.

“Maybe,” she says.

“Come on,” I say.

She gets into bed, and I lay a cool compress on her head. I take two pillows and stack them under her feet.

“Thanks,” she says, quietly.

In the afternoon, it is worse.  Her face is sweating, her hands and feet white.

“Go back up there,” I say.

“It’s okay,” she says, eyes closed.

“You have to,” I say, “or you will die down here.”

She shakes her head.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“For what?” she asks.

“That it’s like this,” I say, “that we’ve ended up here.”

“It’s not your fault,” she says, reaching for my hand. She takes it to her cheek, which is so hot that I think it might burn my skin.

“We should have done something differently,” I say.

“How could we?” she says, whispering.

I help her out of bed and up the ladder. I hoist her onto the ceiling, see the blood drain out of her head, down her neck. I see her wiggle her fingers, stretch her arms.

“I’ll go,” I say.

She nods and opens her mouth, but no words materialize.

I start packing my stuff immediately, dragging the two trunks out of the closet and filling them. It seems ridiculous to leave; there isn’t even a reason to, and it’s not as if we share this house anymore. I wish she could go on living up there and I could go on living down here. I remember what it was like to have her down here. To watch her picking up the toys, turning off the lights. The memory is too much, but it is for precisely this reason she will never leave.

I close the trunks in the living room and walk back into the bedroom. I can hear her up there, typing softly. She stops when I stop. We are both silent, still, our breathing like a harmony, one note on top of the other.

“Please,” I say. I offer this word up like a prayer.

I drop to the floor in supplication, placing my head on the hardwood, my palms flat. I am not sure whether I am expressing sorrow or hope. With my head still pressed to the ground, I hear her move above me. I know without looking that she is prostrating herself, too. We lie like this: I am on the floor, and she, is on the ceiling. Both on the ground, like children.

_______________

Rebecca Serle is a writer living and working in NYC. She is the founder of Nurturing Narratives, an organization that brings storytelling and narrative building workshops to young children. Rebecca holds a MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and a BA in English from The University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in SLICE Magazine, The Ampersand Review, The Raleigh Quarterly and KP Press among others. She is an avid fan of yoga, the written word in all its forms, and, of course, New York.

A man and his wife are walking through a museum when the man sees a shield on the wall. Look at that! he says. Isn’t that remarkable?

The two of them walk a little closer.

What’s so remarkable about it? says his wife.

Well, the workmanship! says the man. It’s exquisite!

It’s just a shield, says his wife. It’s a big hunk of metal. There’s not even anything painted on it.

Well I think it’s nice, the man says, after a while.

But there isn’t really much more to say.

****

That evening, the man and his wife go to dinner at a friend’s house.

You should have seen this shield, the man says.

Oh? says the friend. Tell me about it.

There’s nothing to tell, the wife says. It was just a shield.

I’ve always wanted to be a knight, says the man. It just seems like it would be so much fun.

Fun? says his wife. It’s a good way to get killed!

Not with a shield like that! says the man.

And the friend, at least, laughs along with him.

****

On the way home, the man has a hard time concentrating on the road. He has had too much to drink, and, in his mind, he is jousting with another knight on horseback. He is doing very well; he is winning. Let’s stop by the museum, he says to his wife.

What? his wife says. Are you kidding?

The man is not kidding. He drives to the museum and parks across the street from it.

You can’t be serious, says his wife. You’re going to get arrested.

No I won’t, says the man. Don’t you have any faith?

The man heads toward the museum.

His wife stays in the car.

****

Inside, the museum is dark and very still. The man makes his way down the long rows of artifacts. He keeps an eye out for guards, but none seem to be around.

Finally, he stops before the shield.

There you are, the man says, and lowers it from the wall.

In the gray light of the darkened museum, the man becomes aware of something strange. There is actually a figure, almost transparent, painted on the shield. It is a horse—a white, winged horse.

The man holds up the shield to admire it.

Then he slides it down onto his arm, and mimes a sword fight across the museum floor.

The man fights and fights and fights and fights, and then he fights some more, and then he fights just a little more, and then he takes a break, and then he fights some more, and then he fights and fights a little more.

Finally, after hours and hours, the man is completely spent. He is dripping with sweat, and his muscles ache.

Thank you, shield, the man says. I’ll see you again some time.

And he puts it back up on the wall and goes out to the car.

****

That night, the man lies in bed with his wife.

I can’t believe you did that, she says. You jeopardized everything–everything we have.

Everything? the man says. Like what?

Your freedom, our money, our reputation, says his wife. You would have lost your job if you’d been caught.

My job, says the man, making a noise of disgust.

What exactly are you trying to do? says his wife.

Trying to do? the man says. I’m not trying to do anything. I just like the shield; that’s all.

****

The next day—the man can’t help it—he goes back to the museum again. It is during business hours, so the place is very crowded. It takes the man quite some time to elbow his way through all the people down the hall to medieval arms.

And then, when he gets there, he finds something terrible. The shield–his shield–is no longer there.

In its place on the wall hangs only a sword.

The man stands in silence and stares at it.

Where is the shield that was hanging there yesterday? the man says to the guard on duty.

What shield? says the guard. That sword’s been hanging there for as long as I can remember.

The man looks back in confusion to the sword. The sword is not the shield, any way you look at it.

Can I touch it? he says.

If you want to go to jail, says the guard. It’s your choice, doesn’t matter much to me.

The man stands and stands there.

And then, suddenly, he lunges.

The fight lasts for some time. With the sword, the man is invincible. The guard has a gun, but really can’t use it. The man swings the sword around in a protective circle.

I just want the shield, he yells. Just give me the shield and I’ll go!

****

That night, the man sits in jail. His wife was supposed to bail him out, but she didn’t. The man sits and frowns. Then he hears someone humming.

An old man sits beside him on the bench.

Hello, says the old man.

Good evening, says the man. What did they get you for?

Vagrancy, the old man says. Nothing too exciting. What about you? You don’t look like much of a lawbreaker.

Well, the man says, I had an altercation at the museum.

Ah, the old man says. The shield?

You know it? says the man. His eyes are very wide.

Well of course, the old man says. Doesn’t everyone?

The man doesn’t know where to start with the questions, but it turns out the old man knows nothing.

It’s the drink, the old man says. Really, I’m sorry. I just have a lot of memory problems.

****

When the man gets out of jail, his wife drives him home.

Look, the man says, I want a divorce.

You’re not the only one, his wife says. Let’s do it. In fact, let’s do it tomorrow.

The proceedings are begun. The man moves out. He gets a small apartment on the cheap side of town. His stuff sits in boxes; he has an old chair from Goodwill.

Luckily, the two never had children.

****

The man goes to work every day as usual. He comes home, eats something, watches TV. Sometimes at night he goes out for a stroll.

One night, he goes by the museum.

It is dark outside, of course—like it was when he broke in. But now the place appears heavily guarded. There is a fence and a guard with a big dog and a gun. The man stares up at the window where he squeezed in. He thinks about that night in the silent museum hall, the night he spent with the shield. Those were the good times, the man remembers. The times when anything seemed possible. The man finds himself whistling on the way home. He doesn’t know when it started, or what the song is. It’s a strange song—though familiar—and as he whistles it, it starts to remind him of something. It reminds him of a place he once went before, a place beautiful and very far away. And the remembrance of that place seems to spur him on, and suddenly he’s picking up the pace. He’s jogging down the middle of the road, and then he breaks into a run. And then he’s running as fast as he can, and it feels like he’s about to take off. By the time the man gets to the cheap side of town, he’s never felt so good in his life. And he blows right by that dingy apartment and off into wide open space.

_______________

Ben Loory lives in Los Angeles, in a house on the top of a hill. His work has appeared in Wigleaf, Dogzplot, PANK, Danse Macabre, decomP, Word Riot, and more. He was awarded an honorable mention in the November 2008 Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers Contest. His book Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day is currently seeking a home.

After the wind blew the willow tree over in the side yard between our place and the Getty’s, my brother and I ventured out to take a look.

Mom screamed from her couch, “You boys be careful out there!”

The tail end of the storm was howling over the back fence and over the swampland like some banshee-bred creature, busting over the earth and searching for its parents to tell it a thing or two. What was left of the wind was whipping our striped shirts around our skinny torsos. We had both worn these rugby shirts for six weeks straight. We had vowed not to change or take a bath until Dad came back. Ketchup and mustard and all manner of ten- and eleven-year-old  summer-gore clung heavy to the thinning cotton.

My older brother, Ricky, reached the hole first, but he didn’t see it right off. I held back in awe at the roots reaching up like tentacles; great chunks of lawn clumped and clutched in the arms of the upended tree.

I stepped up to the hole beside Ricky. His greased hair was oblivious to the wind and smelled like fried chicken. The ground was soft underfoot like a pillow, and I looked in the hole. Where once the tree stood was a gaping maw of violent, torn earth. The old tree was ninety-degrees wrong. It once had a branch low enough for even us to reach and pull ourselves up and then shimmy and work our way hand over foot as high as we could; then Dad would come under us in his camo and wonder aloud, “Where are my boys? Where are the men to go hunt in the swamp and bring food to the table?”

The old willow. Dead like a deserving man shot in the head.

I saw it there in a crevice where a root had been—a fat brown rabbit. Quiet, nose twitching, ears flat and down over its back. I pointed. Mute. It looked at us. We looked at it.

Our hunger. Mom’s trouble. Dad gone. Though we didn’t believe or understand those men on the porch: “The Secretary of the Army has asked us to inform you, Ma’am, that your husband has been reported missing in action outside of Tikrit, Iraq since March 5th.”

Ricky took the stone from above him, a big one hanging in the roots. He looked at me. I nodded.

My big brother, always the one who knew what was right, always the one who said, “He’ll come back,” cocked his arm, elbow just inches from my ear, and let the fury fall on the wonder born in the hole next to our home.

__________

Larry Menlove writes from Utah and has works in 42opus, Dialogue, Dogzplot, Storyglossia, Sub-Lit and others. He was the winner of the 2008 Irreantum Fiction Prize.

It’s dusk when we pass through the trailer park and drive over the footprints of children who have played in the dusty road. Clothes are drying on lines in the shape of the strangers who wore them, and I imagine these strangers in their homes—all pink flesh and vulnerable nakedness. Hanging on the lines are worn brassieres, torn underwear, graying slips. It feels wrong to be able to see all this on display, to know these strangers so intimately. I turn away, look at my father, who’s been driving all day to see his dying sister, my aunt Johanna, in Tennessee. I’m looking at his profile, yet all I can think of is his underwear that I see sometimes in the wash, the waistband torn, the cotton stretched, stained. They could just as well be his clothes hanging on the line, his footprints we drive over.

We find Johanna’s home on the other side of the trailer park separated by a stream that glows supernaturally blue as the dusk deepens. She’s been sent back from the hospital to die in the home she shares with her boyfriend and daughter. I follow my father to the porch, where Johanna’s boyfriend smokes a cigarette in his wheelchair, the stubs of his legs puckered above the knees, like lips perpetually kissing the air.

My father asks how his sister is. There’s a moment as Johanna’s boyfriend takes a drag on his cigarette—a moment when we don’t know what will come out of his mouth with the sigh of smoke, a declaration of death or life—but then he exhales, says she’s holding on, and there’s a nurse inside making her comfortable. We could go in, but Johanna’s out of it.

We don’t go in. I don’t know why, but my father wants to wait. We sit out on the porch, and my father has a cigarette with Johanna’s boyfriend, who introduces himself to me as Hal. We hear the whirr of fans, machines keeping Johanna alive—for us? Out here, the crickets begin to sing, and without either of us asking him, Hal tells my father and me about how he lost his legs.

It happened years ago, right before he met Johanna. He had been drinking pretty hard at the time, working here and there. One night, it was maybe Christmas Eve or some other time near Christmas, he was walking home from the bar and saw some pretty statues lit up on someone’s lawn, a manger scene. He stopped in front of it, transfixed, the glowing Mary, the glowing Christ. It reminded him of going to church when he was a kid. He sat for a long time, doing something like praying, he said, but then the owner of the house, a big man, came out with a shotgun and told him to get the hell off his lawn. They began fighting, but when the first shot rang out, Hal ran, ran down to the train tracks, the only place he could think of to hide. So he lay down beside the tracks, scared the man with the gun was following him and, because he was scared, he took out his flask and drank some more. Then he fell asleep, legs stretched out over the tracks. When he woke, he was in the hospital and his legs were gone.

I wonder how many times Hal has told this story. He tells it like it happened to someone else, laughing at a part that might seem funny, silent at the end, until my father slaps him on the back and says, That’s tough. And then Hal looks up directly into the porch light, says, Well, that’s just life. He’s silent for a moment. Then I met Johanna, he says, looks back at my father and me. I try to imagine Hal and Johanna’s first kiss, their younger, but still broken, bodies knowing each other for the first time, maybe making some sort of whole.

But he doesn’t tell us that story. We’re silent again, the three of us enveloped in the porch light’s orange glow like a bubble, like the old orange Volkswagen Bug in which my first boyfriend and I found each other’s bodies years ago. I remember we’d park in my old elementary school’s lot, listen to Bob Dylan on the car’s tape player, and how the orange streetlight would make our skin and hair look like it was lit from within, flaming. Anytime I heard “Visions of Johanna” after those nights, I thought of him, that orange light; now, I think of her—will she die while we are sitting out on this porch?—and this night, this light.

Right before I met him, my first boyfriend had tried to kill himself with pills and had burned his forearm by holding it above a candle. Some of those nights, while sitting with him in his car, I took his forearm and held it in my lap, running my finger over it. So white, so soft, so young. And that burn, like a swollen mouth wanting to kiss me.

__________

Jacqueline Vogtman, originally from New Jersey, currently resides in Ohio, where she is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University. She serves as an assistant editor of Mid-American Review and teaches.

I promise this marriage will last longer than our previous two.

I promise to cherish you even when you come home late from the bar and swamp the bed, or flick your lighter when you want me to drive faster, or eat the center of a pan of brownies. And I promise not to file for divorce if I catch you showing your “Cherry Jackpot” tattoo to some guy at the bar. Even if it’s almost four in the morning and I had to bring the kids in their pajamas.

I promise to “bend like a sheaf of field grass,” as the good Reverend says, not “snap like a twig.” This Reverend focuses on the positive, like the fact that we fixed that mold situation rather than going on the Caribbean cruise. We can build on stuff like that. Even it means I never get to meet Sammy Hagar or see whales blow off steam.

There’s about a quarter as many people as there were the first time, but the ones here, they’re about as true as friends get. How many former bartenders would travel 600 miles to Reno on a Thursday night? How many former girlfriends would agree to watch our kids?

I’ve been hit in the head with a crowbar twice now and had my spleen removed, and you had that tummy lift, but underneath all this middle-age crap, we’re still the same two kids who fell for each other doing whipits in the walk-in cooler at HoJo’s. And that dress looks as good on you now as it did for wedding number two. I like the bow in the back, even if makes it hard to sit in.

This time, we got it right. No ’80s band with a Cure obsession. No live goldfish on the buffet tables. No kids hyped-up on fudge. Just us, our closest friends, and Aunt Caroline’s collection of stuffed angels.

If we do get married a fourth time, I promise not to hire my cousin or anyone desperate enough to hock their camera for a few spins on the roulette wheel. In fact, if there’s time after the buffet, I may swing by the casino and string that little crappola up with my cummerbund. Choke him until his eyes look like double zeroes.

As for work, I promise to get some. It’s not really my fault that I’m allergic to paint or that bounty hunter gigs are so unpredictable.

There’s other stuff I could work on, though, like not trying to get people at service counters to agree with me. And pretending their opinion is more important than yours. Especially about stupid stuff like whether pie crust should have sugar crystals on it, or whether your blouse is cut too low.

As for parenting, I promise not to hand Luke or the Zeb-meister over to you if they’ve got a poopy diaper. And I promise not to overuse the TV and Pack ‘n Play as “babysitters.” They’re great kids, even if they can really be stinkers. Like when they use the leaf blower in the living room or wipe feces on the dog.

And I promise to wrap this up soon. Or now. I told you I was about to wrap it up, so the throat-slicing motion wasn’t really necessary. I was trying to open my heart, like the good Reverend told me, and now I’m having a hard time blowing like a grass sheath. A really hard time. So, I guess what I’m saying is, whatever you got to say right now…well, it had better be good.

__________

Eric Vrooman has taught creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College and Tulane University. His short fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Passages North, The Cream City Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.

My daughter is again saying how she doesn’t like her name: How could you name me that? What were you thinking, Mom? When I’m old enough, I’m going to change it anyway. To Carol. Or Alice. Or Mary. I want a normal name. Not some psycho-hippie name.

I don’t say anything. It has been one of those days. Even the cat seems out of sorts, rolling on the kitchen floor like it has an itch or a tumor. I’m sorry, I tell her. I’m sorry you don’t like your name.

There is dinner to prepare. But first, dishes need to be done. The name was the name of a Hindu goddess. The name meant something to me back then. Now, it is just a word―it is my daughter, with all her wonders and quirks and teenaged layers, and it will always be her, no matter what she calls herself.

Parvati.

Whose love saved the world.

_______________

Andrew Roe’s writing has appeared in publications such as Tin House, Salon.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times and One Story. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he lives in Oceanside, California, with his wife and three children. Predictably, he has a blog.

Eighth grade dance, we kissed, that was a long time ago. Once, I saw a mother kiss her baby on the forehead. I was surprised at how soft your lips were. Were my lips that soft, almost unreal? It was a soft kiss, an understanding, but that was a long time ago. Once, I saw a mother kiss her baby on the forehead, but that was different, a deeper understanding. You used to keep journals, black spiral bound notebooks, and I used to tease you, saying that I would read everything, everything, so you hid them all, all of them. I wonder if you wrote about our kiss. Once, I saw a mother kiss her baby on the forehead. Once, I saw this mother running to her car. Once, while I was driving through Providence, a car hit the guardrail, kicked up dirt and gravel, formed a cloud, and heaved onto its side. This mother was thrown from her car, but she ran and reached for her baby through a broken window, the crumpled door. This mother kissed her baby’s forehead, only once. It was a simple kiss. Just enough pressure, a prayer, a plea to God. She could hardly breathe because she was shaking. That’s not what our kiss was like. Our kiss was not that simple. Our kiss was not that pure. It was nervous, calculated, too soft. Once, I saw a mother kiss her baby on the forehead. Her lips were pale, grass protesting in her hair, blood drained from her face, groping to find her heart, her stomach a knot so tight, a star might have died within.

__________

Ross Rader lives in Pittsburgh, PA. His work has appeared in Word Riot, Foliate Oak, and elimae.