e S C E N E
                             1 9 9 7
=====================================================================  
                Diana Gabaldon, 1997 Guest Editor
                  Jeff Carlson, Series Editor
              Shannon Christenot, Assistant Editor


eSCENE is a yearly electronic anthology dedicated to providing
one-click access to the Internet's best short fiction and authors.
The stories featured within are culled from a collection of electronic
magazines ("ezines" or "zines") published on the Net from across the
globe during 1996, and feature both established and previously
unpublished authors.

For more information about eSCENE, including recent news, visit the
eSCENE Web site at <http://www.escene.org/>, or email
<editor@escene.org>.

=====================================================================

World Wide Web: <http://www.escene.org/>

ASCII, PostScript, Adobe Acrobat PDF:
anonymous ftp at <ftp.etext.org/Zines/eScene/>

Email: <editor@escene.org>

=====================================================================

eSCENE 1997
Contents

About eSCENE

Foreword:
	"Big Questions in Small Packages" by Jeff Carlson, Series Editor

Introduction:
	"Miniature Kaleidoscopes" by Diana Gabaldon, 1997 Guest Editor

The Stories:
	"Atlas' Hips," by Darrin Navarro
	from The Alsop Review
	
	"Festival," by Victoria Lancelotta
	from Mississippi Review Web
	
	"Just Another Night and Day," by Lucy Harrison
	from Oyster Boy Review
	
	"Kosher," by Gregory Cowles
	from Blue Moon Review
	
	"Saved by Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald," by Allen Woodman
	from Mississippi Review Web
	
	"Selections from the New World," by Marcus Eubanks
	from InterText
	
	"When Something Goes," by Neal Gordon
	from InterText

	"Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband," by Robert
	  Olen Butler
	from Mississippi Review Web

Information:
	About the Authors

	About the Editors

	1997 Nominated Authors and Stories: The top stories of 1996, as
	nominated by participating ezines.

	Ezines: Most of these, with the exception of very new ezines,
	were contacted about submitting material for eSCENE 1997.

=====================================================================

About eSCENE 1997

Diana Gabaldon, 1997 Guest Editor
Jeff Carlson, Series Editor
Shannon Christenot, Assistant Editor

-	What Is eSCENE?
-	Register with eSCENE
-	The eSCENE Process of Selecting Stories
-	Writer's Guidelines

What Is eSCENE?

eSCENE is the world's only yearly electronic anthology dedicated to
providing one-click access to the Internet's best short fiction and
authors. The stories featured within are culled from a collection of
electronic magazines ("ezines" or "epubs") published on the Net from
across the globe, and feature both established and previously
unpublished authors.

Register with eSCENE

This registration is purely for my own use in counting the number of
people reading eSCENE and seeing where they came from. I won't sell
the list, or use it for any marketing purposes, or anything of the
sort.

I would, however, like to build up an informal mailing list of eSCENE
readers, so that I can send out short messages when something has
changed or been added to the site.

To subscribe, simply send a blank email message to
<escene-on@list.moo.com>. To unsubscribe, send a blank email message
to <escene-off@list.moo.com>.

The eSCENE Process of Selecting Stories

After explaining to people what eSCENE is, we're usually asked about
how we select the top stories each year. Here's our Method:

Request Nominations: We honor the hard work that ezine editors put
into their publications, and therefore believe that they represent the
best front line of selecting the year's best stories. eSCENE queries a
large number of ezine editors, asking them to nominate the top 25
percent of pieces that appeared in their journals during the year.

Request Permission: Once the nominations have been received, and
before a single word is read, we contact the story authors and request
permission to review their works for possible inclusion in eSCENE. In
the case of most ezines, the rights to a story revert back to the
author upon first publication (usually defined as the point at which
the material becomes publicly available on a Web site, or sent out via
email). We also want to avoid any complications arising from
publishing a story that the author may have submitted elsewhere.
author upon first publication (usually defined as the point at which
the material becomes publicly available on a Web site, or sent out via
email). We also want to avoid any complications arising from
publishing a story that the author may have submitted elsewhere.

Reading Blind - Round One: When an author grants his or her
permission, the author's name and originating ezine title are stripped
from the manuscript, which is then read onscreen or in printed form by
Jeff Carlson (series editor) and Shannon Christenot (assistant
editor). The stories are rated on a three-point system (3=accept,
2=consider, 1=deny). After the stories are read, the scores are
tabulated, and the top 15 to 20 stories are chosen to proceed to Round
Two. At this stage, most of the selections are obvious, though there's
always some amount of arguing and championing stories.

Guest Editing - Round Two: The first round stories are sent to the
year's guest editor, who reads the collection and marks stories on the
same three-point system. This usually narrows the field to between 10
and 12 stories, at which point all three editors jointly decide which
stories will appear in that year's edition. It's usually at this point
that we discover which authors and ezines will be represented.

Final Editing and Production: The authors are notified of whether or
not their work will appear in eSCENE. The chosen stories are edited
where necessary; if significant changes are required for a piece, the
author is consulted and brought into the process of editing his or her
story. The guest editor writes the year's Introduction. Production
begins, and eSCENE is assembled. After a last round of copyediting,
the year's best online fiction is published on the Web.

Writer's Guidelines

eSCENE is an anthology of work that has previously been published
online, and is therefore not in a position to accept manuscripts
directly from authors; each year we query magazine editors, asking
them to send us the top 25% of material they published during the
previous year.

To be regarded for inclusion in eSCENE, your work must first appear in
an online magazine. For a near-comprehensive list, check out John
Labovitz's "E-Zine List" at:
	<http://www.meer.net/~johnl/e-zine-list/index.html>.
I highly recommend that you submit your work to one of those.

=====================================================================

Big Questions in Small Packages
 1997 Foreword
   by Jeff Carlson, Series Editor


I visited my local bookstore recently with a definite science-fiction
jag running through my head. It had been a while since I'd done any SF
reading, and something in me said it was time to remedy that. (Plus, I
was feeling socially deficient for having never read Douglas Adams's
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)

I also wanted to dig into some longer works in order to kick myself
out of the short story vein I had been absorbed in. After reading a
tall stack of short fiction for this year's eSCENE, I was looking
forward to curling up with prose that didn't feel obligated to wrap up
after 15 or 20 pages. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy reading the best
short stories published online; but reading a lot of short fiction can
be a taxing endeavor. There's often an added layer of anxiety and
perspiration wrapped into shorter works, an extra sense that every
word has been re-evaluated several times over; it's a layer that
novelists can afford to gradually fold into their narratives. The best
stories I read this year managed to capture and funnel that layer
effectively.

So it came as no surprise when, after a few weeks of immersing myself
in lengthy tales of deep space, I found myself thinking bigger
thoughts than usual. Amid the maelstrom of my daily schedule, I would
lose track of time and drift from HTML coding or article editing to
some of the Big Questions: How large is the universe? Are we really as
insignificant as it would appear? Will I ever get the chance to leave
my planet and view the stars, unfiltered by smog and haze?

When I was a kid, questions like these came quickly and easily to my
young imagination, boosted in no small measure by images of Luke
Skywalker and Han Solo blowing away Tie Fighters from the gun turrets
of the Millennium Falcon. Of course, I didn't have any answers then,
but it was easier to tumble the ideas around in my head when they
weren't colliding with thoughts of bills, deadlines, and schedules.

I still don't have those answers, but while I was lost in space with
my books, it came as a surprise when my thoughts began drifting back
to short fiction. Many stories touch on those Big Questions, while
some ignore them altogether. But in all cases, at least on some level,
short stories are expressions of our attempts to answer those
questions.

Consider the nature of short stories: they are limited in length, and
therefore often (but not always) limited in scope. For many writers,
short stories are harder to write well than longer works. Once
written, finding a market to publish them can be immensely difficult.
Once published, there isn't much money available for payment, so
basing a career on short fiction borders on the impossible.

Daunting, isn't it? And yet, millions of people are writing short
stories all the time, some intended for publication, others written
solely because some itch in the author's gut compels him or her to
start organizing words into narrative form. There are so many things
that could be accomplished in the time it takes to write and read
short stories, but you'll never convince a writer, reader, or editor
to drop their pile of fiction to go do them.

This, to me, speaks of a connection between written words and those
Big Questions. The voice that asks, "Where am I in the universe?" is
almost always the same voice that says, "Write down the experience of
this sunset; you'll need it for a story someday."

I have been extremely pleased to be able to assemble this year's
eSCENE, despite the long delay in getting it to the pixels you're
reading now. The stories selected for this edition all touch on things
larger than can be encompassed in their words: Tom's knowledge and
frustration that great things are just beyond his grasp in Lucy
Harrison's Just Another Night and Day; Loretta's peculiar vision of
her world in Robert Olen Butler's Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on
Philandering Husband; that intimate twilight period just before a
first child is born, changing everything, in Darrin Navarro's Atlas'
Hips.

Now, energized again by the possibilities offered by short fiction,
it's time to put away those long books with their extended narratives
and sink my teeth into more short stories (after I go pick up the next
book in the Hitchhiker series, of course).

=====================================================================

Miniature Kaleidoscopes
 1997 Introduction
  by Diana Gabaldon, Guest Editor


I've always been fascinated by short stories. It's not just admiration
for the technical artistry or the intensity of vision involved--it's
sheer bafflement. How on Earth do people write Neet Stuff in such a
small space?

I'm now and again invited to contribute short stories or novellas to
anthologies. So far, I've been obliged to tell the anthologists that
I've never written any fiction under 300,000 words, and I'm afraid I
really don't have time to learn how to write something shorter just
now.

There's a basic difference of opinion operating there, of course; some
folks see short stories as simply miniature versions of novels (or see
novels simply as expanded short stories), while others see them as
Completely Different Things. (No bonus for guessing which side of this
controversy I come down on.)

Now and then, beginning writers come through the Writers Forum on
CompuServe (where I run a section on Research and the Craft of
Writing), asking whether it's a good strategy to start with short
stories, then "move up" to novels. Some people always reply that it
is, in their opinion: the writer can have the satisfaction of
finishing a piece in a much shorter time, can get quick feedback on
their work, and even--possibly--sell it. Then as their skills are
honed, they can go on to longer forms.

Personally, I figure any writing is worthwhile. My own background
credits involve Walt Disney comic books, political speeches, and a
400-page doctoral thesis on Nest Site Selection in Pinyon Jays (or, as
my husband says, "Why Birds Build Nests Where They Do, and Who Cares
Anyway?"). The act of putting words on paper is virtue; if they make
sense, so much the better.

When I first started looking carefully at the work of other writers
(I'd always known I wanted to write myself; I just didn't know how (I
still don't, but that's another story)), I was heartened to observe
that with writers who had several books to their credit, the books
normally got better as they went along. Even if I'd liked an author's
first or second book a lot, I could usually see that the fifth or
sixth one was done even better.

Aha, I thought. Obviously, if you keep writing you get better at it!
This seemed not only a revelation, but A Good Thing to Remember. Even
if I didn't think what I was doing at any given time was worthwhile,
I'd have the hope of getting better--so long as I kept writing.
And--in spite of the dismal examples of some bestselling novelists--I
still think this principle holds. If you keep writing, you get better
(always assuming you care about getting better).

But does it make a difference what you write?

Well, yes and no. I mean, there are certain mechanics that underlie
all good writing of any kind--not only grammar, punctuation, and
spelling (sorry, kiddies, Spel-Chek is not a substitute for the Real
Thing), but the basics of elegant prose and composition: sentence
construction, phraseology, imagery, and pacing.

Learning any or all of these elements will stand you in good stead,
whether you're writing nonfiction (I once had the editor of InfoWorld
call to tell me that the piece I had just sent him was the most
elegantly-written software review he'd ever seen), short stories,
novels, or even poetry (you wouldn't believe how many people say they
think they'll write poetry because they "aren't good" at "all that
other stuff, like grammar." You wanna bet they won't be any good at
poetry, either?).

Beyond the elements, though, there is Form. And if you come right down
to it, well, no, I don't think short stories are tiny little novels,
and I don't think novels are big, fat short stories. Each kind of
fiction is a distinct form, and it takes different skills to write
them.

I can tell you what it takes to write novels. Patience, mostly. Also,
abiding curiosity, and the inability to leave things alone. Look at
that dog in chapter three--where did they get him? How come he's only
got three-and-a-half legs? And Aunt Petunia, who showed up with the
prune-whip at the house-warming; I bet there's something funny about
her, just look at the way she was off in the corner muttering with
Joe's younger brother, oh, but then we need to explain about Uncle Tom
and the silver El Dorado and the burglar who broke in and took the
cake-plate, and....

To write novels, you have to see patterns, and explore threads, and
fit things together. But I don't know what it takes to write short
stories.

Look at 'em. Little jewels. Miniature kaleidoscopes, with all the tiny
chips perfectly balanced to give you one pure crystal vision. How do
you guys do that?

So, my profound congratulations to all those who have stories in this
issue, and to all those who submitted stories. You have my undying
admiration. See, I understand the art of story-telling. You keep
asking, "And THEN what happened?" and the answer is your story. But
what I want to know, whenever I see a beautiful short story like one
of these, is: "How the HECK do you know where to stop?"

=====================================================================

Atlas' Hips
  by Darrin Navarro

We heard somewhere that you cannot do it in the ninth month, but that
sounded ridiculous to us, so we have proved them wrong. Whoever,
wherever, they are. And now we lie here, visible only in our outlines,
still sticky, parts still heavy, my big hand resting as it likes to do
on the smooth globe of her abdomen. My fingers trace the base of that
great curve down to the fringe of her hair, back around under the
swell of her breasts, and up along her dark line to rest again. We lie
like this, waiting for the boy to move in there, she feeling from the
inside, me from the outside, and we talk. We have spoken about names
before, and plans. Tonight we make a list of things we won't be doing
anymore.

Number one is this very thing: sex. For a while anyway, we will each
be healing. At our ages, we agreed we should stop at one, so once we
know the boy is here and healthy, I will hang my balls over the edge
of the doctor's papered table and fulfill this promise to ourselves.
And she will likely have wounds of her own to tend to, so we will
bitch to each other while we get over it, and soon we'll do it like
rabbits again. Sex, then, perhaps doesn't qualify. It will be resumed
in good time.

"I'll tell you one thing," she insists. "I'll never take another
picture like Billy Shore." In the authoritative tone I am occasionally
permitted to take with her, I agree: "That's right, you won't. If you
ever try, I will stop you."

In the shot, sixteen-year-old Billy sits on the chest of a British
soldier whose head he has just broken apart with a found chunk of
concrete, and he is doing nothing so much as weeping, the lines of his
tears cutting through the splattered blood on his face, his arms limp,
the stone holding his knuckles to the street. That was how the world
had seen Billy Shore. She had cut across Falls Road like a country
squirrel to get it, through the smoke of a burning troop carrier, less
than ten seconds ahead of a second one coming up through the ghetto.
She had time for one exposure before she ducked the gunfire. Billy
never knew his picture had been taken, and from all I caught he did
not see the other soldiers approaching, nor hear the rifles.

"If I'd been quicker, I'd have stopped you then. It's good that I
didn't, and I'm even slower now, but I would stop you, for sure."

"It won't ever be necessary, my old man," she tells me, using the term
I occasionally permit in return. She slips her hand under mine,
resting near the flat circle her navel has become. I hold still for a
moment or two, then set my hand elsewhere on the stomach, to keep
waiting. The boy will move within minutes of her coming. Orgasm and
Indian food will always get him going.

"There," she says.

"Where?" She slides my hand over silently. He is rolling his head
around, nearly pushing it through her skin like a baseball into my
palm. Six months of this has taught me the head from the rear. I can
tell a foot on a good day. This, I've realized, is the husband's
greatest privilege. When we were children, an expectant woman - a
mother, an aunt, maybe a teacher - might tell us her baby was kicking,
and all of our hands would be there, eight, ten, twenty, but only for
a half-minute or so, most of us left to walk away protesting that we
hadn't felt a thing, the rest lying that they had. A husband can spend
hours doing this, feeling every roll against his own fingers, speaking
into there, even, nearly shaking hands with the boy.

"It's your turn," she says. "What aren't you ever going to do again?"
Seeing that some version of a confessional game has gotten under way,
I roll onto my back to think. This game requires only that I recall
the stupidest things I've ever done, so it is easy to play.

Sent once on short notice to photograph the insides of tombs for
Cond&eacute;Nast, we neglected vaccinations until we were already in
Cairo. A overseas call to the CDC directed us to a dusty room in an
old hotel, where a lone uniformed nurse dropped the pants of ailing
locals and negligent visitors like us, lined us up and shot us down.

We got into the King's Chamber at Gaza at seven the next morning to
beat the tourists - crawled in there nearly on our knees. Then the
shot took effect. My head became hot and felt swollen. In five minutes
there was nothing left in me. At seven a.m. that stone chamber was
already one hundred degrees. The room, four, five thousand years old.
The room that old. She left me in the corner to get shots of some
New-Agey gal in a gauzy dress who had come in early to lay in the
sarcophagus, undisturbed, while I traced my finger up and down the
corners of the room, five thousand years old, and my head threatened
to drop me in a faint. When she was done, we left the gal in her
coffin, crawled out again on our knees, into the blistering Egyptian
sun where small boys rushed us with metal buckets full of warm Coke
bottles.

"I won't be doing that in the future," I offer.

"Would you want to?"

"Oh, again and again," I say, and I mean it.

It was all either of us had ever wanted to do: to not rest until we
had seen every corner of God's acreage under the light of day, to dive
into the world's coldest waters knowing we could see Aurora Borealis
when we came up. She mentions a morning in Pradesh so uncommonly sweet
that she was stupidly moved to wade in the Ganges. She never expected
any sympathy for the dysentery which followed, but she still talks
about the sweetness of that morning. And we have been lucky with
trust: a Russian stranger in the old Soviet Union who invited us to
his home for dinner; a friendly Malay policeman with a small offer of
hashish. Already I'm inclined not to trust that way anymore, and it's
worth lamenting.

I turn onto my side again to feel. The child is quiet for a long
time,and eventually only kicks. "That," she says.

"What?"

"That. You're not going to be able to do that anymore." And she pats
the back of my hand where it lies. I feel his head roll by, followed
by what might be a very small shoulder. She is right, and I'm startled
that it hadn't occured to me before, that so late in the day I'm being
told how soon it will be gone. I know this: a moment will not stop for
you. It is an acquired skill to see one. There is nothing to signal
its approach, no bell or light. It isn't there, it is there. See it.
There it was.

All night we lie there, waiting for the boy. I do not roll over to my
side of the bed. Around midnight I ask into the darkness if she wants
me to go out for some Indian food, but she has gone to sleep. Just me
and the boy are still up.

(Originally appeared in Oxygen, #14, 1995.)

=====================================================================

Festival
  by Victoria Lancelotta

There were these things I saw through the window: our parents' coffee
table, askew, furrows in the carpet from where it usually sat - that's
how well I could see, how clearly. The light was on, dim light but
enough - it was dark where I stood in the backyard, outside the living
room window. So: there was the table, the couch of nubby plaid, my
sister on her back, head hung over the armrest, blonde hair brushing
the floor, and on my sister was a boy whose name I've since forgotten,
jeans crumpled to his knees, skinny hips, white ass, rocking himself
into her like that.

Then I was fifteen, old enough to know enough to watch - that would be
me in a year, I thought, standing in the backyard, waiting for the dog
to finish, cold wet grass and weeds scratching at my legs. I moved
closer to the window, to the side, my cheek almost against the brick
of the house, angling, squinting. Watch, I thought then: this is a
thing I need to know.

This boy on my sister, on her pretty white skin. We'd slept together,
my sister and I, curled into her narrow bed after our mother turned
out the light. After she shut the door I left my own bed, fit myself
against my sister like a snail to its shell, my face in her tangled
hair. She smelled like yewberries then, at eight or nine, still taller
than me and thin, dirty feet, hands stained red from berry paint.

I pressed my face against the house, shooed the dog away, watched this
boy on top of her. I watched the shadows on the ceiling, shaped,
humped, moving in almost even time, sharp above the lamp and blurry
farther out. I watched my sister's hands on his back, gripping the
cheap fabric of his shirt and my own hands I know now were clenched,
fisted tight against my legs. I was afraid to open them. I watched
until I saw the last thing, the thing I saw before they finished:
beyond the couch, up three steps to the doorway of the kitchen, the
wall there covered with pictures of us, straw hats, sunburns, sand,
our father lifting us both above a wave, one on either hand, tracking
the steps up to the kitchen landing, to where our father stood.

If my sister had lifted her head, had opened her eyes enough to see,
their eyes would have met. I watched our father watching them, my
sister in between us with her hair dragging the carpet and her arms
twisted above her head in her tangled sleeves.

I cannot, now, imagine his face, shadowed, outlined, nothing more. I
thought he must have had no face, not then, not watching that - how
would that face look? Mouth set or slightly open, eyes bleary or not,
hooded, red-rimmed, shot through with gin-soaked veins. His little
girl, his darling - I knew who he loved best.

My sister taught me this: that our father could be charmed, teased,
bought - with drinks at the door when he got home, with kisses to the
back of his neck as he bent over the paper, with perfume behind our
ears at dinner. Our mother was no competition for her. Our mother, who
had been beautiful, had woken one morning in a house that was no
longer hers, had woken to find it given over to her oldest daughter
while she slept. Walls, windows, doors, fingerprinted and smudged,
strands of my sister's hair like voodoo trails all over.

They slept in separate beds, our parents, the reach of a nighttable
between them, their door open across from our closed one, and in my
sister's bed I smelled yewberries, faint, bitter and early in August.
We mashed them in the backyard into paste, striped our cheeks and
foreheads, sharpened sticks the length of babies' arms into spears. My
arms were mapped with scratches, scabbed and then picked clean. We had
the same hands, thin-skinned, backs traced by veins in winter, dark
with dirt and sun in summer, too smooth yet to be leathery then. Our
feet, too, the same, narrow and bony, toes like monkeys had said our
father, long and grasping. My sister could write her name with a
marker held in her curled toes.

My sister's husband, the first time we were together, said to me She
told me the two of you were the same. He wrapped his hands in my hair,
darker than hers and not as long, never quite as long, wrapped his
hands and pulled until my head rocked back, until I thought my breath
would stop. He licked the sweat that slicked my throat, that ran
between my breasts. We were in my bedroom which was hot and
oven-close, windows facing an alley, the back lot of a church. There
was a festival: the bingo hall, the wheel of fortune, the priests who
sat at paper-covered tables and ate sausage wrapped in dripping
napkins and foil. There were the smells of grilling meat and fried
dough, burnt sugar, sweat and sweet perfume.

My sister's husband told me things about her I already knew. He told
me he loved her and he told me how much.

Yewberries are poisonous. Our mother scrubbed our hands and faces with
soap and disinfectant. She dusted tables and polished mirrors, served
us dinner. She never wore an apron. On her dresser were jars and
bottles, makeup I never saw her wear. We used this, then, after the
berries, warpaint first and then done right, lips red, eyes lined,
practicing. We sat for dinner one night like that and our mother said
Get that garbage off your faces. I will not have that at my table.

For our mother, it was that simple: the protocol, the rules, the
things we could not do. We knew not to set the table with napkins laid
on plates, with goblets upside down.

Later, through the bedroom wall: Your daughters run wild, Richard,
like trash. And our father's voice, indistinct, not soothing, and the
clink of ice on glass. When the lights were out I heard him walking,
his tread uneven, one step heavier than the other. He limped, a
fracture badly healed, his car accordioned a year before. I knew when
he stood in our bedroom doorway: that tread, the creak of door, the
smell of cigarettes still on his shirt from work. This was a smell I
hated, a smell I pulled away from when I hugged him every night, the
smell of where he'd been. I didn't think of this until later, until
after my sister had gone and I stood waiting by the side of the road
for a car that didn't come, waiting for that boy to come for me like
he had come for her, lighting one cigarette off the end of another.

Now, I time myself. A cigarette on the hour, every hour: not even a
pack a day. There are lines around my mouth, at the corners of my
eyes. Suck, pull, squint. I am aging by the clock.

The boy that night was Joe, or Jim, I think - the name on the patch of
a shirt I'd seen him wear before, the kind mechanics wear. But those
are shirts got used, a quarter from a bin at the back of a thrift
store, wrinkled and stained. Our father watched that inside his
daughter, a boy in a shirt with someone else's name on it, and I
waited outside the window, how long? Only minutes, I think now, with
the dog whining at my ankles, waiting. Ten years later I stood next to
the altar, watching her on our father's arm, coming almost crooked
down the aisle, almost lurching our father was by then, and I thought
the limp was hers, that by the time they reached the altar I would
have to hold her up. Across from me the groom cleared his throat,
coughed, looked down at his shoes. Our father's eyes up close were
yellowed, and I thought for just one moment that he would stop, refuse
to take another step; that he would pick my sister up and run with
her, back up the aisle and out the door.

Her husband called me on a Sunday, after how many months? Not even a
year. He called and said Please, meet me, I need to talk to you.

It would be a lie for me to say I didn't know then. I dressed: nothing
special, not outright, and black silk underneath. He would tell me
there were problems, he would say they were her fault, and I would
believe him because it would be easy, because I would have no reason
not to. I put on lipstick and perfume and got into my car, thinking. I
would say: She is difficult, she has always been difficult. You are
not to blame if she lies to you, if she hides things from you. We all
know. I would put my hand on his and speak quietly, make him lean to
hear me. Do you want me to talk to her, I would say.

As it happened: I bought him a drink and listened to him talk about
her, things I'd heard before in my mother's voice. Anything that
happens to her will be your fault, Richard, do you understand that? We
sat in a bar for an hour before leaving. He followed me back, parked
in the back lot of the church. I thought as I walked up the steps,
opened my door, and let him go in first: This is the worst thing I've
ever done, the one unforgiveable thing, and there will be no
witnesses.

And I waited for someone to stop me. I stood in front of him and
unbuttoned my shirt, stepped out of my pants, waiting for him to say
Don't do this, stood in that underwear I'd bought with my sister, let
her pick out and never worn because I didn't wear things like that. I
stood, waiting, waiting for anything, for my father's voice in my
ears, for his face I couldn't see from where I stood that night. My
sister's husband put his tongue in my mouth and I thought I tasted
her.

Once, not long after my sister had gone, I climbed from my window and
ran down the street, ready to spread my legs in the back of a stolen
car. I walked two miles. I stood at the locked gate of a park by the
road, I leaned up on chainlink fence and smoked. I waited an hour
before turning back, before walking home thinking There was an
accident, he got caught, got arrested, and wanting these things to be
true.

When I got home every light in the house was burning. Stupid little
whore, my father said at the front door, my mother behind him,
shaking. He caught me by my hair, pulled me in, his bad leg dragging,
catching on the carpet's edge. His glass was on the coffee table, the
ice cubes melting, condensation puddling on the wood already shadowed
by old water stains. When he slapped me his hand was cold and wet. I
should take your pants down, he said, but that's been done already.

All right, I thought, think that, it's the easy thing, the thing
you've gotten used to.

He hadn't stopped them, that I know. I didn't watch them finish. I sat
down in the grass, the dog's head in my lap, wet nose quivering,
snapping at nightbugs. I didn't hear them finish, but if I had, would
I have known the sound - a choke of breath, a long exhale? I didn't
hear our father walk away - it must have been so hard for him, to be
that quiet on his leg, to balance all his weight on the sloping
kitchen floor. There was no sound that night until the boy's car
pulled away, and even that was not so loud; distant, low in the humid
air, giving out to crickets and the whining of the dog.

There was, at the festival, a wooden pole, twenty-five feet high and
covered in grease that dripped and ran in the sun. Men lined up
beneath it, shirts off and given to their mothers or wives to hold,
and dipped into a pile of sawdust at the base of the pole. They
covered their bare chests with it, slapped it onto arms and legs,
rubbed it between their sweating palms, and each, in his turn,
attempted to climb. There was a cloth affixed to the top of the pole:
this was what needed to be gotten.

From my bedroom window I could see them climb: the tops of their
heads, hair matted with sweat and sawdust, faces tilted back or
pressed to the slick wood, eyes squeezed shut to the glare of sun. The
best came close, gripping with chalked knees and bare feet, taped
hands, shoulders bunched and knotted, sunburnt, gaining inches, half a
foot then slipping, praying for a rough spot where the grease had
melted off. Some bled before they fell, each allowed three tries
before moving to the side.

There was a band as well, and majorettes around the pole, girls eleven
and twelve, most of them heavy, their wide dark nipples showing
through the bodysuits, or else in bras that held up nothing, the flesh
of their legs jiggling as they tossed and dropped batons. We had never
looked like that, never been so soft and doughy. Our mother would not
have had it. She starched and ironed t-shirts, made sure our nails
were clean before we went to bed.

Our father took us on his lap until we no longer fit, even with our
legs curled tightly to one side, and even then my sister kept on,
twisting herself, tucking her knees up under her shirt until it was
stretched and torn. In the summer, he held her there on the back
porch, both of them watching my mother and me kneeling in the garden,
digging rows for lettuce and for mint. If someone had seen us then, he
would have smiled, thinking only of our parents, how lucky they were
with their two girls, their garden and their house.

My mother taught me to pile dead leaves around the lettuce to protect
the soil from the scorch of sun. She worked with heavy gloves on, her
fingers moving through the earth and leaves, faster than I could
barehanded. With me, though, she was patient; she had learned that
much.

If someone had been watching he would have imagined our table at
night: tomatoes and cucumbers piled, fresh mint and basil, the kitchen
door opened onto our backyard, and peach souffle for after, because
our mother's hands could do that, could coax up eggs and milk and
fruit, suspended, quivering, impossible to figure.

Her silence I only heard in relief, I only recognized when I heard her
voice at night, rising up through the vents in our bedroom floor, or
coming shrill from across the hall, and I thought What has my mother
said today, what has she said before now? I heard my sister's name,
enunciated, drawn out, my mother's voice insistent over her husband's
slurring. My mother had been to college.

What are you teaching her? I heard my mother say, as clearly as though
she were in bed next to me. Do you have any idea what will happen to
her after you're done with her? I won't let you do this with the other
one, Richard. Not with her, not both of them, not both my girls.

I had never heard her call us mine.

My face was to my sister's back, scratched by brambles from the woods
behind our house, drops of drying blood on her nightgown, bits of bark
still in her hair our father's brush had missed. When he came up to
our room he knelt beside the bed, laid his head on the flowered sheet.
I didn't move or turn: I could hear my mother moving in their room,
the clink of jars on the dresser, the creak of closet doors, and our
father's catch of breath in a haze of gin and lime. My sister slept
on, turned away from me beside our father's hands.

There is no one thing that I remember, not before I watched that boy
on top of her, nothing even after. She circled my father like some
small moon, kept at no great distance by any force of gravity on
either side of that night - before, after, no difference I could see.
When she packed to leave, my mother and I sat at the kitchen table,
waiting. The kitchen door was open, the grass outside high,
brown-tipped towards the field behind our lawn where my father never
watered. There was forsythia and pussy willow edging the garden, there
was a vase of them on the table. The dog lay between our feet. We
drank iced tea with mint.

I thought: If someone gets to the top of the pole, manages to snatch
the cloth from it, one quick turn before sliding down and he would see
us, would see my sister's husband pulling me to him by my ankles
across the bed.

After my father slapped me my mother followed me to my room, closed
the door behind us and took me in her arms. I wore no makeup, I had no
money, my hips were narrow like my father's. The window I'd climbed
from was still open. She turned down my sheets, took my clothes as I
stripped. She brought her pillow in from her bed, propped it against
the wall and sat.

The next morning she had not moved, not that I could see. My clothes
were folded on my sister's bed.

The festival ends today. The crowd is denser, men pressed around the
stalls. My sister's husband leans from my window, naked, visible to
the line of his hip for anyone who wants to know. His back is slick,
his hairline almost dripping. I think he could climb the pole: if he
were my husband I would want him to.

He has told me, these past days, that he does not know what to do. He
says this over endlessly, as though by saying it he will somehow come
to understand. I can't make her hear me, he says.

I have no explanation. I think of her, of sleeping at her back, of the
paint striped on her skin. I tell him: I don't know her, I say, I only
know the things I saw. She has her secrets.

But this is not enough. I could say to him: Did she tell you what our
father saw? Did she tell you what she let him see?

I could say: If it had been me, he would've beaten me until I couldn't
move, torn my hair out by the roots. I have no doubts, none.

Or I could say: She planned that, she wanted him to see. She brought
that boy into our house and she saw the lights were on. Your wife was
on her back, her arms bound up in twisted sleeves, her legs locked
around his hips beneath the fabric of his shirt, of someone else's
shirt, and her father stood and watched.

We are not the same, I tell him

In my garden, I would plant tomatoes and cucumbers, I think. Peppers
and lettuce, dark green and leafy. There is no room here for that, for
mosquitos and caterpillars, forsythia. But I would fill it: parsley,
mint, small shoes, plastic shovels, dolls, tiny arms and legs on
climbing vines, sun-warmed and fleshy.

Outside my window I can see the procession: the pastor of the church
in gold and crimson robes and behind him the other priests, the
extraordinary ministers and their wives. The last, finally, are the
nuns, habits billowing in the hot wind, rosaries tristed through their
fingers. They walk behind the float, a statue of the Virgin Mary
crowned with plastic dimestore flowers on a wheeled plywood frame.
They walk and parents push their children forward with money clenched
in greasy fingers, bills the nuns attach to money clips that line the
edges of the float, and their faces shine with rapture.

=====================================================================

Just Another Night and Day
  by Lucy Harrison

Last month we rented that movie, The Piano, from the Pick-a-Flick
video store down near the big dock. My brother liked the part where,
at almost the end, the piano goes sliding off the boat into the water,
the rope tied around it catching Holly Hunter by the foot and dragging
her down into the deep, cold ocean. That piano sank like a rock. But I
said, I still say, that a piano is made of wood, and filled with great
spaces of air and lightness. It wouldn't sink, it would float.

I bring it up again, now, as we are driving north on I-75 in my
father's pick-up truck which we borrowed, or stole really, in order to
go to Georgia.

"That piano," I say. "It would have floated."

My brother, Tom, says that it is symbolism, a metaphor or something,
and that it doesn't really matter except that it mattered to the
story, to make it mean something.

"It's a metaphor," he says. "That's all. Now shut up and read the
map."

"North," I say. "North to Valdosta. That's all. It's a metaphor,
really."

It's almost dark now, that heavy Florida darkness which comes slowly
and then sudden, the air looking grainy and filmed over. The
headlights of each passing car light up the inside of the truck for a
moment before it slides by us.

"Maybe we should experiment," I say. "When we get your piano. We could
throw it off the big dock and see what happens."

Tom smiles a little, for the first time all night. "You talk like
that, I won't ever let you touch it," he says. He fiddles with the
radio dial until he picks up a classical station out of Jacksonville.
He plays his fingers along the top of the wheel. The notes of the
music tumble like a waterfall. Like a fish leaping out of the water to
flash in the sun, water like diamond bits crashing all around it, and
then down through the blue light to gather strength to do it all
again.

"Damn," he says. "I can't believe I'm really doing this."

Once, when I was very young, he told me a secret. We were behind the
cedar tree in the back yard, watching the fire ants crawl in columns
over everything they found. We stood plastic soldiers in their path,
but the ants just divided and flowed around it as water flows past a
rock. Tom said he was going to tell me a secret, and I couldn't tell
anybody.

Annie, he said, I'm going away from here one day.

No, I said. I laughed.

Nobody ever went away from here. Or if they did, they came back
eventually. Our mother had been gone longer than most, but she'd be
back too, someday.

I am, he said.

He held out his hands and told me to look at them. They looked as they
always did, brown, scratched, bug-bit, the nails chewed down and torn.
A mark across the palm where my father had slapped him with the belt.

My hands, he said, are a gift from God. Miss Rose said so.

Miss Rose, the music teacher up at the high school, who could play
seven different kinds of musical instruments and sing highlights from
operas in three foreign languages. She was engaged to Henry Dumas who
owned Hank's Tavern on Dock Street and who also owned the only piano
on the island. Hank let Tom play the piano on Saturday and Sunday
afternoons. Sometimes, if there were men in the bar, they would yell
at Tom to play a song they liked, and give him dollar bills. If he
needed extra money he'd tell me to come in and sing with him, Patsy
Cline or The Night They Burned Old Dixie Down. Miss Rose always
smelled like peppermint lifesavers.

She says I play like an angel, Tom said. She's going to teach me how
to read music too, and then she says I can write my own ticket out of
here. And I will, too.

I felt, stupidly, like crying. I looked down at the ground and picked
up one of the soldiers.

Hey, Tom said. It ain't anytime soon. Just someday. And besides, I'd
take you with me. I wouldn't leave you here.

And that was fine. Someday, I knew, meant never.

Is that what we're doing, here, tonight?

I reach down to the floorboards and pick up an old pack of cigarettes.
Tom watches me do this out of the corner of his eye. I light one, and
even though it's stale I breathe it in and turn my head so I can see
myself reflected in the glass of the half open window. I let the smoke
trickle out of my mouth, over my chin, curling out the window where it
is snatched away in the slipstream and is behind us in the blackness.

"Tom," I say. "What are we going to do when we get there?"

"Load up the piano and go."

"That's it?"

"He wrote for us to come. He told us to come get the piano or he was
going to chop it up for firewood."

"But what should we say?"

Tom shrugs. "Just say we've come for it."

"Just say, Hey there Grandpa, we've come for our Momma's piano now, so
let's load it in the truck and then we'll be on our way."

"That's right."

There's a bottle rolling around somewhere under the truck seat. Not
empty, either. I can hear it sloshing. We have twenty dollars and a
half a tank of gas. I hope it's enough.

"He must be old," I say.

Tom turns the dial on the radio again. Willie Nelson is singing with
Ray Charles. They are singing that there were seven Spanish angels at
the altar of the sun, they were praying for the lovers in the valley
of the gun.

"He must be lonely," I say. "Since our grandma died."

And when the battle stopped and the smoke cleared, there was thunder
from the throne. .. .

"That Ray," he says. "He can play the piano like time standing still."

And seven Spanish angels took another angel home.

"I wonder is Momma there," I say.

Tom's hands clench on the wheel. The skin turns white over his
knuckles.

"Toss that thing out the window," he says. "Ain't right, a girl of
twelve, smoking. And take your legs down off the dash. Any passing
trucker could see right up to your panties."

"No he couldn't," I say. "I'm not wearing any." But I throw the
cigarette out and Tom relaxes his hands a little.

Tom has said that he will pick only watermelons this summer and will
not go out on the boat at all. He says watermelons pay better than
oystering. This, of course, is the right tack to take, since Daddy has
to give in on all matters financial. But the real reason, I think, is
that he doesn't want to mess up his hands. Oyster shells are sharp as
a knife edge, and wicked too. You can't wear gloves. You have to pry
them loose with your hands sometimes. The oysters turn slick and
slippery in your hands, and slice deep into water-softened skin. They
can tear you to ribbons. And then, also, there is the time when you
look up from the bottom of your boat, from the empty nets and croker
sacks, and the water stretches away from you like it always has,
swelling and rocking, the color of gun-metal, of slate, flat uncaring,
and after a while it starts to look like desperation made liquid. Tom
has seen it. I have too.

Twenty dollars is a lot to save from watermelons, when your father
turns to you when you walk in the door and holds out his hand. Fifteen
is too old to be slapped across the arms and legs with the flat
knife-edge of a belt. Twelve is not. Fifteen is too young to buy
whiskey. Twelve is not, not when the liquor-store clerk knows who it's
really for. Fifteen is too young to drive and is the sum of all the
years spent standing still. Twelve is a fraction of the time spent
running. Time spent in a stolen truck heading north on I-75 is no time
at all until it is divided by the Georgia state line and you see a
patrol car over on the side of the road, lights flashing blue and red,
but not for you.

"Maybe we could stay, when we get there," I say. "Maybe he'll ask us
to stay."

"Cigarette," says Tom, and I fish him one out of the pack and light
it, hand it to him. His hand is not shaking, now, at all. He is calm
and steady now. He has his purpose.

"You can stay if you want," he says. "I ain't staying with no old man
I only met twice before in my life. Even if he is my grandpa."

"But what if Momma's there?"

"She's not."

"You don't know.. ."

"I do. She's not."

Maybe he does know something I don't. Maybe he's been hiding things
from me. Letters, perhaps. A postcard sent from some exotic place from
time to time. A line scrawled on the back in a feminine slant: I'm
fine don't worry I miss you I'll be back sometime. Maybe he has a shoe
box filled with such things hidden in the back of his closet under his
baseball mitt. But then I know that can't be true because he wouldn't
have left them behind, he would have taken them, knowing that he was
leaving forever he would have taken along these things that matter.
He's taking me along.

But would she write to me?

"Are you doing okay?" I say.

"I'll be fine," he says.

I remember our father in his policeman's uniform, with the buttons
shined so that the sunlight glanced off them and hurt my eyes. I
remember his hat tilted back on his head. He stretched above my head
like a tornado reaching up into the clouds. I'd seen people shot on
television and I cried that my father would be killed too. He smiled
and patted the gun in his holster and said: I'll be fine.

Tom throws his cigarette out the window, half-smoked. He starts to
talk angrily now, fast. His face is splotched with green light
reflected from the dash. His eyes are shadowed.

"I had to do it, Annie. You know that. I had to get away. If it wasn't
his it would have been something else soon. You can go back if you
want he won't blame you. It was me he knows that. Annie, it was like
pushing your way through mud up to your chest. I couldn't breathe I
couldn't think clearly there, not anymore. It was everything.
Everything I've ever wanted and not got, everything I've dreamed about
slipping away from me forever. It was like being out on the boat with
a catch, a big load of fish, and then the wind turns, or the boat
rocks and they're slithering towards the edges of the boat and back
into the water and you know if you don't do something it will all be
gone but there isn't anything you can do."

I half close my eyes and let this voice wash over me. I wait to hear
myself, to open my mouth and say: Yes, me too, I've felt that.

He reaches for the cigarette pack and I see that his hands are shaking
again. He drops the pack and the cigarettes spill out over the floor
beneath his feet. I bend down and pick them up.

"You don't need to explain," I say.

He lights the cigarette himself.

"Well," he says. He breathes the smoke out slowly. "So that was why.
But you can go back, if you want."

A green sign flashes past us on the right. Valdosta, it says. Three
miles.

"What will you do?" I ask.

He shrugs. "Pick watermelons. Work in a gas station. Eventually I'll
find a band."

"And the piano?"

"Take it with me."

I laugh. "By yourself?"

And I wait to hear him, to open his mouth and say: Come with me, come
with me, come on.

He takes another deep drag on his cigarette.

"Valdosta," I say. "Next exit."

There are the things you say when there is nothing else to say. There
are words that shape themselves naturally into your mouth, filling up
the spaces between your teeth and tongue. You can speak and not say
anything at all.

Hello, you say.

You're welcome, you say.

I'll be fine, you say.

And the whole time your mind is spinning off somewhere on its own,
twisting on its own trail, dreaming of angels or dragons or death. The
trick is to let your face mirror your mouth and not your mind, to let
your words form the shape of your lips and not the other way around.

I think about what I will say to my grandpa. I wonder is my Momma
there.

In Valdosta, we stop at a Swifty store to ask directions. Tom takes
the letter inside with him, and I can see him through the window
showing it to the man behind the counter. The man gestures and points
for Tom, and hands him the letter back. Tom is almost as tall as him.
He is broad across the shoulders. I hadn't noticed that before. The
man looks him in the eye and smiles as he talks. He is not thinking:
this is a boy who stole his daddy's truck. He sees a man. There is a
group of girls sitting on the corner step of the store. Maybe they are
a little older than me. The one with the dark hair has a pink ribbon
tying it back. She looks at me and licks her ice-cream cone. Another
girl leans toward her and points at me. Whispers. When we drive away I
twist my head around and stick my tongue out at them, but the girl
with the pink ribbon just stares at me, licking.

If I was more pretty, if I had dark hair tied back with a ribbon, or
knees that were not scabbed over. If I stood up straighter and wore a
white dress. But even then, would it have made a difference?

"You can go back," says Tom. "It'll be okay."

"Oh, just shut up about it," I say.

We are sitting in the car in front of our grandpa's house. The house
is dark except for a light burning in the front room. It is the only
house on this long road. The road is dirt and there are long grasses
growing up the middle of it. There is the big square shape of a barn
off to the right of us. Tom opens his door and gets out.

"I'll go knock," he says, and I get out to follow him.

Before we are halfway across the wet grass in front of the house, the
door opens. A man is standing there with the light behind him. Tom and
I stop dead still. I stare at the doorway, trying to make out the
features on his face. A long oblong on light spills out from the
doorway onto the grass in front of his, but stops before it reaches
our feet.

"Your father called me," our grandpa says. "Haven't had that pleasure
in years."

"Sir," says Tom. He looks down at the ground and even though I can't
see him trembling I know he must be.

"Did you bring his gun with you?" He steps out onto the porch.

Tom shakes his head, but then realizes he can't see him in the
darkness and says: "No Sir. I left it."

"Well, he can't find it," he says. "I figure he's too drunk to see
straight."

"It's on the stove-top," says Tom. "I left it there, after."

I can hear the tree frogs singing in the silence that follows. The
scratch of Tom's foot against the dirt where he scuffs it back and
forth. A gust of wind which shakes the leaves free from the treetops
and sends them rustling down to the ground.

"Well," says our grandpa. "I won't turn you in, but that's all. He
tried to get them to come up here after you, but I guess they figure
you ain't done anything that bad." He pauses. "You got your sister
with you?"

I turn to Tom. I make a small noise, a choking in my throat. I draw my
finger across my throat to tell him to be quiet, not to tell. Say you
don't know, say you're alone, say I no doubt am hiding under the big
dock where I always do. But he can't see me, anyway.

"She's here," says Tom. "She's fine."

"Send her in," he says. "That's the stupidest thing of all, taking her
with you."

"I don't want to go back," I say. Even to myself my voice sounds
childish, small, confused.

"Send her in and then you can just go on your way. I won't stop you."
He slaps his hand against his thigh. "Come on, Annie," he says. Like I
was a dog.

"No," I say.

Tom takes a step forward, and another. His feet are in the light now,
and his legs, and I can see his fists clenched against his sides. I
think he is going to fight for me, to stop the world from taking me
away. He would protect me against anything, he has said, many times.

"Sir," he says. "But the piano?"

"The piano?" Our grandpa takes another step forward, so he is standing
at the edge of the porch. "Good lord, is that all you care about? You
could be in some serious trouble here, son. Let your little sister go.
Forget the piano. Just go."

Tom opens up his hands, rubs his palms against his jeans. "It's what I
came for," he says. "It's my piano."

The silence stretches out between the two of them again, and I can
feel my breath catching in my chest. If he doesn't want me to go then
he just doesn't, that's all. But I am not just a shadow in this night,
I am not a thing to be left behind on a rain-damp patch of grass in
Valdosta. I am not the wind, voiceless, or the tree frogs chirping
randomly. I will speak my mind and tell them what I will do.

"Stop it," I say. "Please, just let him take it. I'll come in, I'll go
home, but please, just let him take it."

But that is not what I meant to say, at all.

"Please," I say.

Our grandpa turns to go back inside. "You got half an hour," he says.
"Then send her in and be on your way. Piano's in the barn."

"Grandpa," says Tom.

He turns back to look at us again.

"Sir," says Tom. "That is. .. ain't you going to help me load it?"

Our grandpa holds his skinny arms out in front of him. Gestures to his
stick-frail legs. "Son," he says. "Does it look like I could load
anything? Do it yourself, if you can." He goes inside the house and
shuts the door behind him.

There are the things you do when there is nothing else to do. You can
stop pretending that everything will be all right, accept that the
world is a cruel place and torturous, unfair. A life spent looking up
from the bottom of an empty boat. Torn nails on your hands, torn holes
in the bottom of your only net. Crabs scuttling along the roots of
drowned trees. A whiskey bottle, a cigarette perhaps to ease the sharp
edges. A piano, for some, would be enough. Or, and this is the part
that happened next, you can throw all that away. Rip the pages from
the top of the notebook. Crumple them up, one by one, the pages where
you messed up, lines drawn through the screwed-up arithmetic of your
life. Rip them off and throw them away until you are left with only
the clean white pages, freshly lined and ready for the mark of your
next pen. You can decide not to fight by the new rules. Take arms
against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end.

Tom has crossed that line. When he heard my father say no. There, in
the kitchen of our old house when he said No.

What? said Tom. He was already arranging the furniture of the living
room, in his mind.

I said no, he said. We ain't going to Georgia to get that piano.

But Daddy, I said. Why?

Because I just said, that's why.

He picked up one of the sandwiches I had made for supper and took a
bite.

Daddy, said Tom. I could go. You could let me go borrow the truck and
I could go tonight. Be back by tomorrow morning. You wouldn't even
know I was gone. It wouldn't be no bother. Anyways, you'll be. .. .

He stopped.

I'll be what? said Daddy.

Tom's face turned red.

I'll be what?

Drunk, said Tom. He pushed a flap of hair off his face with the back
of his hand. Drunk, that's what you'll be. Drunk, just like always.

Oh, son, he said, softly. You most definitely ain't going now. You
most definitely ain't going anywhere, not for some long time, now.

He started to walk over to the door to get the wide belt which he kept
hanging there, and that's when Tom did it. It was just so natural, I
suppose. It was just laying there on the table and Tom picked it up
and pointed at him and said: Yes I am. Daddy, I'm going now.

When you see your brother pointing a loaded gun at your father, and
you see in the set of his face that he will use it. When you see in
your father's face the understanding dawning. When your father looks
at your brother's face and sees that he will use it. The air around
you moves slower, the sun seems brighter where it splashes across the
carpet. The sounds of the walls seeming to settle themselves into new
spaces. The person you love best, who is suddenly someone you've never
seen before. Or once, when you were children, and he found an old
picture stuffed under the cushions of a couch, and his face turned
blotched with red, his lips white, and he tore it into small pieces
before you could look at it. Maybe then.

These are the things you think. When there is nothing else to think.

Tom can't move the piano. He can move it forward a foot or two,
screeching its way across the barn floor. His face turning purple with
the effort and the cords of his muscles standing out across his back.
But then it is stuck. He can't do it. I tried to help, but didn't. He
sits down with his back up against the piano and puts his head between
his knees. His breathing fills up the spaces in the barn, echoes in
the big wood beams above us. He has turned the truck so that its
headlights shine into the barn. The dust we have raised up dances in
the headlight beams.

"Annie," he says. "I can't do it."

He stands up and walks over to the truck. Opens the door, reaches
under the seat and pulls out the half-empty bottle of whiskey that had
been rolling around under there. He reads the label, holding the
bottle down close to the headlights. He comes back over to the piano.
Puts the flat of his hand on the smooth wooden top. Rubs his hand back
and forth across it. He upends the whiskey and drinks.

"Tom," I say. "What are you doing?"

He looks at the label again.

"It's not strong enough," he says. "So I may as well drink it."

"Not strong enough?" I say. I think he means himself. I can't think
what he is saying to me.

"To burn," he says. "It would have to be at least one-fifty proof. And
it's not."

He takes another drink and laughs. "It's just old cheap stuff," he
says. "So I may as well drink it, and find another way."

He looks around the barn. There is a coil of rope lying in a corner.
An old oil lamp rusted red. An axe propped against the wall. An empty
five gallon bucket lying on its side. Otherwise it is empty, with only
the straw and the dust, the piano, and the faint old smell of cows.
Tom walks over to the bucket and picks it up, then sets it down in
front of the piano as a seat. He sits down, lifts up the cover of the
piano. Moves his fingers up and down the keyboard, though an inch
above the keys. Slowly, so slowly, he takes one finger and plays one
note. The sound comes out sweet and clear. How can you tell if it is
good or bad? Flat or sharp? In tune or out? It is just a note.

"Annie," he says. "Come here and sing with me."

I move towards him as he begins to play. I know the notes. The song.
The floor of the barn is smoothed beneath my bare feet. The hay
scratches between my toes. I raise my hands up and it is as if I am
conducting this all, I am conjuring this song up from the night air,
this music from the old piano that my mother played.

I sing: "Just another night and day, and then I'll see Kingston Bay,
and when I see Kingston Bay.. ." I sing. I forget the words but it
doesn't matter. Just another night and day, just another night and
day, and I wonder if it is true, after all, that my parents met while
she was playing the piano. That he was struck silent by the music and
the way that her hair fell across her forehead, curling around her
ears. That he knew, then, that he would take her back with him. Show
her the water purple at sunset, the crabs amongst the tree roots, the
music of the currents when they run swift, not deep, and carry you
miles out to sea.

And is that why, after all?

This is another night. The day will come.

Tom stops playing, and the last notes hang around us in the air. He
stands up. Takes another drink from the almost empty bottle. He walks
over and picks up the axe where it is propped against the wall. He
walks back over to the piano.

I see what he is about to do, and I open my mouth to say something, to
stop him.

But he is swinging the axe, now, bringing it down swiftly on the top
of the piano. It bites deep into the wood on the first swing, and
there is a whisper, a stirring of the strings beneath the lid, low and
uneasy. The second stroke cracks the wood in two. Then the third.
There is a crash like all the wrong notes in the world playing
together, like a burst of thunder just above the head, discordant,
loud, jangling. A sound like cats screaming in heat in an alleyway and
elephants trumpeting their anger. A sound like a wave when it has
trapped you on the ocean floor and you can hear the sands themselves
heaving around you. It is the strings parting and zinging, the wood
splintering, the ivory-covered keys crashing to the floor. I can feel
it thrumming through by bones. I put my hands up to cover my ears.

It dies away, slowly, the thunder drawing further away, the lowest
notes lasting longest and holding themselves, repeating, echoing in
the space above us.

Tom drops the axe. The dull thud of it falling against the old wood
floor. He raises his arm up and wipes it across his face. I see that
he is crying. I see his throat working, his shoulders hitching up like
when he was a boy, when he was sobbing.

"Oh," he says. "Oh."

This, I think is all. The sound you make when there is nothing else to
make.

=====================================================================

Kosher
  by Gregory Cowles

In 1980, when I was in the sixth grade, I had a cruel and important
friendship with a boy named Josher Frank. "Josher" was a nickname for
Joshua, I'm sure, but in the elementary school blacktop jungle it
never stood a chance: From the time he joined our homeroom on a cold
November morning, rocking on the balls of his feet and gnawing at his
upper lip, everyone called him Kosher Frank, as in hot dog.

Kosher was new in our school; his father had just died and his mother
moved to Brewster because it was more affordable. My mother learned
this over tea with his mother; their house was just across the
cul-de-sac from ours and at dinner my mother told us the details as
she set out a plate of rice and tomatoes. The husband had died of lung
cancer, she said darkly, and she looked at my father, who was smoking
over at his side of the table. My father shrugged. The wife--Kosher's
mother, Mrs. Frank--was a children's book illustrator, so she could
live where she wanted and still get her work done. And there was
something else, my mother said, something interesting: Kosher had an
older sister who was retarded.

"Really?" my father said, pushing out his cigarette in an ashtray at
his elbow. "How severely?"

"I couldn't tell," my mother said. "I mean, she could talk. And she
was affectionate. Physical, really. She hugged me when she came into
the kitchen. Actually, it was kind of sweet."

"I've seen her," said Donna, my older sister. She put her glass down
and made a face by sticking her tongue into her lower lip and pulling
at the corners of her eyes with her thumbs. Then she laughed, her
features settling into their normal soft glaze. "She's a freak."

"Donna!" my mother said, but she was trying not to smile, I could
tell. "That's quite enough of that."

Donna smirked and picked up her glass of milk again. Now that she was
in high school she had started wearing makeup, and she looked across
the table at me with serious, startled looking eyes, a trick she'd
figured out with mascara. Then she smiled. "You should invite the boy
over," she said. "Kosher? You should try to be his friend."



It was inevitable, really. Not only did Kosher live right across the
street, but his birthday was in the same week as mine, and in the
elementary school way of things, those two facts bound us together. We
had to be friends.

Kosher was short and dark and almost fat, with a scared, pained look
on his face whenever he was with a group of people, as at that first
day of school.

In groups, he had an extraordinary range of nervous tics--blinking his
eyes rapidly, clenching his teeth until a blue vein stood out on his
temple, gnawing and gnawing at his lips and the inside of his cheeks.
But relaxed and away from others, his expression became more beatific,
and he approached his surroundings with a good-natured curiosity. One
day he greeted me at the bus stop holding a robin's nest, and pointed
out with a certain awe the places where the bird had woven telephone
wires in among the twigs and grass.

Another day he showed up with a harmonica and, grinning broadly,
played the opening blues riff from "Like a Rolling Stone." This was
Kosher, alone. But no sooner would the other kids show up at the bus
stop, bending to lock their bikes' rear tires and laughing about
sports, than Kosher would shut down.

His whole body sagged and he retreated into this sullen place inside
himself, clicking his teeth together in a little rhythm.

Every Wednesday Kosher had permission to leave school early. That was
the day Mrs. Frank met her coping-with-grief group ("Weeping Widows,"
Kosher whispered to me), and he had to take care of his sister until
she returned.

On these days he would call me after school got out and ask for the
math assignment, then stay on the line talking about his friends in
Wilton. He told me he used to go horseback riding when his father was
alive, and described brushing down his favorite mare after a hard
trot. Or he talked about his old best friend, Alex, who did magic
tricks and could make an egg disappear just by closing his hands
around it. Mostly I didn't believe these stories, but I let Kosher
tell them anyway. Now I'm not so sure--the stories may have been true,
even--but at the time I felt a smug and determined satisfaction at
seeing through Kosher's lies, and letting him go on telling them.

Once his sister picked up the other line while we were talking. There
was a click and a humming silence while Kosher paused in his story,
then a clumsy voice filled the receiver. "Hi Josher," it said.

"Hi, Laurie," said Kosher. Another pause; I heard ghost voices from
other conversations on the line. I didn't know what to do, so I
waited.

"Hi Josher," she repeated. I walked with the phone to our kitchen
window and looked out at their house, trying to guess where they both
were. It was starting to snow lightly and small snowflakes swirled in
the wind, nothing that would stick to the ground. At this point Kosher
and I had been friends for more than a month, but I still hadn't seen
Laurie; every time I went over there she was somewhere else. Donna,
who left for school earlier than I did, saw her every morning waiting
for the minibus to her special school, and said that she sometimes
turned cartwheels in the driveway while she waited. Once she had waved
to Donna and my sister had shyly waved back, then turned away.

"I'm on the phone, Laurie," said Kosher. "Hang up now, okay?"

"I love you Josher. I called you up on the telephone to tell you I
love you."

"Jesus," said Kosher. "I'm on the phone, okay? I love you too. Now
could you hang up?"

There was the sound of someone breathing thickly for a second, then a
fumbling loud click as she replaced the handset in its cradle.

"Nathan?" Kosher said.

"I'm here."

"Sorry about that," he said. "That was just, you know. My sister."

"It's okay," I said.

"She can be a real pain in the ass."

"Hey," I said. "No skin off my back." This was an expression my father
used.

"Anyway," Kosher said. "I guess I should probably go make sure
everything's all right. Catch you later?"

"Catch me later," I said. After I'd hung up I stood at the window for
a while longer, looking out across the street at their house until the
streetlights all came on in the early winter twilight and the snow,
which was falling more heavily now, finally made it impossible for me
to see anymore.

-----------------------------------

That was the winter I learned to play ice hockey. Every Saturday
morning I grabbed my skates from a hook in our basement and warmed up
the car in our driveway so my mother in her nightgown could drive me
to the frozen lake. One Friday, a couple of nights after Kosher's
sister had interrupted our phone conversation, my father rapped his
knuckles against my doorframe and walked into the room. "Hey,
Trooper," he said, ruffling my hair. I smelled cigarettes on his
clothes.

"Hey Dad."

He walked over to my desk and picked up a hockey puck I kept there as
a paperweight; he turned it over and over in his hands without really
looking at it. Finally he said, "I think it's nice of you to spend so
much time with Josher Frank."

I watched him and nodded; I didn't say anything.

"It must be tough to lose your father at that age, and then moving to
a new town and all that."

"I guess," I said.

He put the puck back down on my desk and smiled at me.

"How's hockey going?"

I nodded again. "I scored twice last week."

"Good!" he said. "That's great. Hey, tell me something. Does Josher
play any sports?"

"Kosher," I said. "We call him Kosher."

My father frowned. "I know. I'm not sure that's the wisest thing,
actually, but. . . ." He picked the puck up again and spun it idly
between his thumbs. "I guess it doesn't really matter, if he hasn't
complained about it." It seemed like he was talking to himself, so I
kept shading in the sailboat I was drawing. My father went over to
stand in the doorway again, looking out into the hall. "I think sports
are important for developing a boy's character," he said.

A few months earlier, while I was working on my bike in the garage, my
father had come up to me in this same manner and stood looking at me,
rubbing his beard. "I want you to remember something, Nathan," he'd
said, then fell silent again while I squeezed some oil onto the gears
and spun the back tire. He took a long draw on his cigarette and
exhaled. "All that you are," he finally said, "and all that you can
ever become, is a sum of your past experiences. Do you understand? You
should do what you can while you're young, because you don't want to
turn forty and realize you don't like who you've become, or feel like
you've missed all your opportunities in life. Okay, sport? Am I making
sense?" A few days later he'd handed me the Brewster Islanders
brochure and schedule and told me he'd signed me up to play.

Now, in my bedroom, he was using the same serious voice while he
looked out into the hallway and talked about Kosher Frank and the
importance of sports in a young man's life.

"Kosher plays soccer," I lied; actually, I'd never heard him talk
about any sports except riding horses. I added some more whitecaps to
the waves in my picture. "He's a fullback."

My father beamed and tossed the hockey puck so it landed in front of
me on the bed with a small thwack. "Well," he said. "Good, good for
him." He turned his back and faced into the hallway again, stretching
his hands above his head and resting them against the top of my door
frame. "A fullback," he said. "Good for him."



I don't know if I ever fully believed what my father had to say about
people, that we are no more than a culmination of our past experience.
People move past their mistakes all the time, it seems to me; and we
are different things at different times.

Just before Christmas, Kosher invited me to spend the night. This was
on a Saturday, after I got back from hockey, and I packed a bag with
pajamas, shampoo, a toothbrush, toothpaste. Although I was only going
across the street, I also included my walkman and--after a moment's
hesitation--a stuffed brown bear I'd had since I was a baby. Then I
walked into Donna's room and stole a joint from the carved stone box
she kept on her bookcase, and put that in my pocket.

After I rang Kosher's doorbell I turned and looked across the
cul-de-sac at our house. It was the purple part of the evening, with a
few early stars visible, and the carriage lamps on either side of our
front door were turned on. Upstairs in the family room the blue light
of our television flickered against the window and I saw Donna sitting
on the couch. Even from the outside you could see that our house
wasn't as nice as Kosher's--there was a hole in the garage door where
Donna had backed the station wagon too far, and our trim needed a new
coat of peach paint--but for me that night, standing there looking
back, it didn't matter. I was filled with a longing I couldn't name, a
strange blend of homesickness and nostalgia, and I felt my throat
tighten in the cold. Then the feeling passed and I turned around again
to face Kosher's door.

It was Laurie who let me in. Through the narrow rectangle of glass in
the door, I caught my first-ever glimpse of her: Kosher's retarded
sister, padding carefully down the stairs, holding onto the banister,
placing first one foot and then the other on each step. For some
reason she was wearing a bathing suit, a lycra one-piece with red and
white stripes. Her face was broad and flat, and I remembered in a
flash Donna's dinner-table impression. My sister, I saw, had done a
decent job. Laurie looked something like an Eskimo, with a squat body
and round, fleshy arms; she had the tilted almond eyes Donna had
suggested. She also had a real chest, I noticed, bigger than Donna's,
filling out the front of her bathing suit, and I remembered that she
had hugged my mother the first time they met.

She opened the door and stood grinning like a Labrador retriever for a
second, framed by light and the house's warm interior. Then she spread
her arms in a casual welcoming gesture, a shrug or a hug, and she
blinked at me. "Hi," she said. "I'm Laurie."

I stepped inside without looking at her and stood blowing on my hands.
Laurie swung the door shut and I snuck a quick peek at her, then
looked away again. The Franks' entry hall was familiar to me by now,
with its long rug and its watercolor paintings of hippos in hair
salons and cats with tutus, evidence of Kosher's mother at work. A
side table stood against the wall, and I leaned back on this. I looked
at my feet. "Um, is Kosher. . . ?"

"Um, is Kosher?" she repeated, and giggled. She took a step closer to
me and I felt myself blush. The snow on my shoes was melting into
puddles on the floor.

I swallowed. "Is Josher home?" I asked.

"Is Josher home?" she mimicked again in her slow careful voice, her
tongue against her lower lip. She laughed. "You're Josher's friend,"
she said. "I can do a somersault. Wanna see?"

I shrugged and nodded, mumbled "okay," and Laurie took another step
towards me. I watched her come; I couldn't move. She was still
grinning that open-mouth grin, and her left hand picked nervously at a
seam along the edge of her bathing suit.

She's a monster, I thought.

But then, at the very last moment before she reached me, something
strange happened; I couldn't have explained it then and I still can't
now. Whatever it was, and however subtle, something real shifted
within me. I smiled; I took the final step forward myself; and I let
Laurie hug me.

She felt sticky, the way a plastic placemat feels five minutes after
you wipe it with a sponge. Her face nuzzled my shoulder, and her hair
was soft and light against my neck. I felt her breasts moving as she
breathed; my hands, splayed against her bathing suit, felt her back
move in and out. Now that I had committed to this hug, I wasn't sure
what to do; I felt awkward and overly aware of both of our bodies. And
Laurie smelled bad--not nasty, but sickeningly sweet, like babies
smell.

Yet I made no move to leave. Just the opposite; I gave myself in to it
instead. I relaxed my body against hers and listened to her raspy
panting; I stood and swayed with her, the two of us solid as something
in nature, rocking lightly back and forth on our feet for what seemed
like forever but was really just until I looked up and saw Kosher
sitting on the steps watching us, with a dark, troubled look on his
face.

"Hey, come on," he said--gently wheedling, annoyed at me. "Here I am."
He stood up and put his hands on his hips, and his face twitched as he
nibbled his lower lip. He shrugged, almost imperceptibly. "Anyway," he
said, "I'm right here."



The cold rough wood of the porch felt alien under my hands, which I
moved in slow circles behind me. My mouth was dry and my thoughts
seemed to be moving randomly. My brain is a train without tracks, I
thought, and I giggled.



Later on that night, after dinner, Kosher and I stood outside on his
porch. The moon was full and his back yard was striped with the
glitter of snow and the dark shadows of pine trees. Vaguely I could
make out the bows of the big yellow ribbons Kosher and his mother had
tied to each tree for the hostages in Iran. In his room earlier, I had
taken the joint from my pocket and cupped it in my hand to show
Kosher, and his eyes had grown wide. "Crap," he'd whispered, and he'd
let out a long low whistle. Now I produced it again with a flourish
and we giggled nervously, our breath collecting in the air around us.

"Look, watch this," I said. I raised the unlit joint to my lips and
sucked hard, exaggerating the casual draw of breath my father used to
start a cigarette. I closed my eyes and imitated my father's peaceful,
dreamy expression, then rounded my lips and blew a puff of breath into
the air, where it materialized as white vapor.

Kosher laughed and the pom pom on his hat shook. "Let me try," he
said, and I passed the joint to him. "Rock and roll," he said,
crossing his arms. He hummed something under his breath, a snatch of
song I recognized from one of the albums in his collection, and we
sang together out into the backyard: "All in all, you're just another
brick in the wall." He grinned and faked a drag on the joint, then
exhaled to create the magic cloud of breath. "Hey, teacher," he said.

I laughed and sat down. "Leave those kids alone," I said.

Kosher walked over to a portable heater on one side of the porch and
switched it on. In a few minutes, the coils were glowing bright red
and I felt a pocket of warm air against my neck and the side of my
face. I liked the warmth; it felt good, like having a campfire in the
snow.

Kosher lit the joint by resting it against the hot coils and inhaling.
His face became skinny for a second as his cheeks caved in and his
eyes bulged out, then he started a short spasm of sputtering coughs
and released a cloud of white smoke. He held a hand up; his eyes
watered. "Damn," he said. "That hurt like hell." He smiled weakly and
passed me the joint.

I glanced behind us into the house, where the living room was dark and
empty. Mrs. Frank was probably standing at the kitchen sink washing
dishes, or upstairs reading to Laurie. Anyway, Kosher had said
earlier, she couldn't say anything even if she did catch us, because
he had found a stash of marijuana and rolling papers in her bed table
just before they moved. This fact amazed me; I was still at an age
when adult transgressions and plain blind desires could surprise me
just by the fact that they existed at all.

We stayed on the porch for ten minutes smoking. When our joint had
burned down to half an inch and the end was soggy from our saliva,
Kosher stood up and cracked his knuckles. "Do you feel anything?" he
asked.

"I don't know," I said. "Yeah, I guess." And I did feel different: The
cold rough wood of the porch felt alien under my hands, which I moved
in slow circles behind me. My mouth was dry and my thoughts seemed to
be moving randomly. My brain is a train without tracks, I thought, and
I giggled.

"I know what to do," Kosher said. "Come on." He walked down the steps
and into the yard, then turned to look at me. "Come on," he said, and
I remembered vaguely--from a distance, like he had told me years
ago--that he wanted me to follow him.

"I feel weird," I said, feeling my tongue move in my mouth. My
thoughts spun dangerously, giddily, on a precipice. But what could I
do? I got up and walked towards Kosher in the snow.

It really was a beautiful night, clear and cold and a million million
stars stippling the sky. No one had been in the Franks' backyard since
the surprise snowfall a week ago, and the trail of our footsteps from
the porch to where we stood now looked like vandalism, a rock through
a stained glass window. "We ruined it," I said, a little mournfully,
and Kosher tilted his head at me, considering. Then he lay down in the
snow and shut his eyes.

"No," he said. "See there?" With his eyes still closed he extended one
arm to point at some hatch marks scratched across the snow's surface.
He nodded. "Bird tracks," he said. "The blue jays ruined it before we
did."

"Oh." I sat down next to him and leaned back with my hands in the snow
behind me. Above us a satellite crossed the sky, twinkling, flashing
like a bottle cap in the sun. "That's a relief," I said, but I
couldn't remember for sure just what it was we were talking about
anymore, just that I felt this mild and comforting sense of reprieve.
I thought about Laurie, her hair tickling my neck, the surprising
weight of her breasts against my body. Her closeness, her warm breath.
I slid my hands backwards until I also was lying in the snow, feeling
the ground cold and hard beneath my back and watching the fat moon
beaming down on me. The pine trees stirred in the breeze. A burst of
TV laughter carried from one of the neighbors' houses, and a door
slammed. My hands felt frozen. Next to me Kosher was moving his arms
and legs slowly back and forth, apart and together, his eyes still
shut so he seemed to be swimming a slow backstroke in his own universe
without moving anywhere. I propped myself up on an elbow, flexing my
fingers against the cold, and watched him for a moment. "Kosher?" I
said, but he didn't answer, didn't even pause in his swimming, so I
lay back again and shut my own eyes. I shivered.

Some time later--maybe ten seconds, maybe ten minutes; I couldn't tell
how long--the sound of Kosher's arms against the ground finally
stopped and I heard him sit up. His jacket rustled, his boots crunched
on snow, and without opening my eyes I knew that he had moved a few
steps closer to me. He felt for my hand on the ground, and pulled it
so my knuckles just rested against his face and I could tell in the
dark that he was crying.

"I miss my dad," he whispered, and sat down. "Nathan?"

I felt some loose snow at my shoulders slide towards him, a mini
avalanche. "Nathan?" he whispered.

I thought of him sitting on the steps earlier that night, watching me
with Laurie, not saying anything until I noticed him there. I didn't
answer.

"Nathan." Softly insistent now. He took my hand away from his wet
eyelashes and lowered it to the ground again without letting go. He
sat like that for a moment, no more than twenty seconds, then he
leaned over and kissed me on the mouth.

We are the sum of our past experiences.

No. We are different things at different times.

I didn't move right away, just sat there and played dead with Kosher
leaning over me, his lips soft and light against mine. I felt his
breath in my mouth, felt a tremble or shiver run through him. Water
dripped onto my forehead and I wondered idly, stoned, whether it was
tears or melting snow from his hat. Then I remembered Laurie again,
with a sudden forceful clarity--her back moving in my hands, her smell
of baby shampoo--and I rolled over onto my side, away from Kosher.

I opened my eyes to see him sitting up, a slack stunned look on his
face, and his breath curling away from his nostrils. Behind him where
he had been lying on the ground was a perfect snow angel, wings
arched, ready to fly, with three footprints leading to where Kosher
was now.

I turned away from him again, looked back at the dark porch and the
house looming beyond it.

"What are you doing?" I said. My own mind raced and jumped; my heart
pounded. I felt like I might start crying myself. Kosher snuffled.
"I--"

I shook my head. "Get the fuck away from me," I said.



Yesterday, at the home for retarded adults where I work now, my boss
handed me a state newsletter on mental retardation and said, "Isn't
this where you grew up?" The article she pointed to was about a
Special Olympics coach in Brewster who was 80 years old and still swam
the butterfly every day with his kids. I didn't know the man, but as I
looked at the picture of him at the edge of the old YMCA pool, flanked
by four Downs patients with their broad flat moon faces, I found
myself thinking about all of this again, remembering things I hadn't
remembered in years, with an urgency like panic balling and swelling
in my chest. I handed the newsletter back. "No," I said. "No, I grew
up across the border in Connecticut."



In the week following that night in Kosher's backyard, the last week
before we broke for winter vacation, I would look up in homeroom and
see Kosher staring at me, his dark eyes swimming, his teeth working
savagely at the inside of his mouth, and I would look away again
quickly. On Wednesday, when he called for the math homework, I had
Donna tell him I was somewhere else, over at a new friend's house. It
was that easy, cutting the friendship short. My other friends
congratulated me for breaking free. I didn't talk about what had
happened, not at first anyway, but they saw the change and approved.
They had never understood how I had endured him in the first place,
they said; they had privately worried about me. But now all of that
was over; my life shifted smoothly back into its old patterns; I
didn't miss Kosher at all.

But of course it couldn't be that easy, not really. Nothing ever is.
On the first day after school let out, exactly one week after the
night in Kosher's backyard, I showed up for hockey practice with my
team. It was a warm day, unseasonably warm, and we were all horsing
around--sending up little sprays of shaved ice with our skates,
laughing that the lake was going to melt before we could finish
practicing on it. Coach Wilkins was losing patience, trying to take us
through his passing drill one more time. Pass the puck through zones
A,B,C; receive it through zones C,B,A. Come on, guys, he said, skating
backwards while he looked us over. You can do this. One more time,
then I'll let you goof off.

I had cocked my wrist and wound up for a pass across the ice to Billy
Lane when I happened to glance up and see Kosher sitting on a picnic
table on shore, watching us. He had on the same red jacket he had worn
the week before, with a hat and scarf poking out of one pocket; it
wasn't cold enough for him to actually wear them. He saw my glance,
saw me recognize him, and he quickly ducked his head and stood up to
leave. He hadn't meant for anyone to know he was there.

But it was too late. Waiting for my pass, Billy Lane followed my gaze
and saw him there also, climbing down off the table. "Hey," he said,
leaning on the end of his hockey stick. "Isn't that Kosher Frank?"

That might have been the end of it right there, and probably should
have been--the rest of the team looking up, seeing his retreating
back, snickering. But Lance Campbell laughed meanly and said "faggot"
out loud, and I shot him a sharp look.

"No he's not," I said, feeling the heat rush to my face. Everyone
looked at me.

I swallowed. "I saw him kissing his sister," I said. The lie slipped
out easily, hung in the air. "I mean really making out," I said. "It's
true."

They looked at me and waited.

"You can't tell anyone," I said, knowing what I was doing, knowing
that the story would spread and grow and take on its own proportions.
"He made me promise I wouldn't say anything," I said. I stopped
talking and rocked back and forth on my skates.

Their eyes were wide; they were fascinated and repelled by the
possibility of it.

And it came to me then--after I had finished talking, while I stood
nodding at my friends' disbelief and watching the red of Kosher's
jacket disappear back into the woods until it was no bigger than the
flash of a cardinal--it came to me that my father was right after all:
That what I was doing here was building a life, my life, piece by
tentative piece, and for a moment I was so dazzled by the pure and
absolute sureness of this knowledge that all I could do was blink,
every bit as disoriented as someone who wakes up to find that it has
snowed during the night so that light is moving in a million different
directions over the landscape, and nothing old looks familiar, and
never will again.

=====================================================================

Saved by Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald
  by Allen Woodman

It was George who first told me about the nudist woman.

"There's no modesty left," he said, as he picked me up after work at
the bookstore. And he was right. Even in the bookstore, a job I liked
because of its slow pace and few customers, women were opening their
blouses and suckling their babies right in front of the Motherhood
shelf. George called them walking chuck wagons. It was enough to keep
me from dozing.

The nudist woman's apartment was just a few doors down from mine. We
pulled up in front of it in George's pickup truck. It was a little,
foreign truck, the kind that's now being made in the USA. At the time,
George couldn't afford the full-size American version. He couldn't
even afford to put a radio in it. This was one of the reasons he had
become so observant. "See," he said, pointing, "she's got her curtains
pulled all the way back." I looked at the house and, sure enough,
there was a woman sitting there, in the downstairs apartment, as
silent as a fish in a tank. Through George's binoculars, you could
even make out that she was naked from the waist up, sitting at a
table, eating creamed corn straight out of an open can. "George," I
said, "this woman has just moved into this house. It's been vacant for
a month. She probably hasn't even had time to put up her window
dressings."

"That doesn't explain her chest," he said.

"It's hot. Men go topless all summer long."

"Yeah," he said, but I could tell he was thinking. He took his
binoculars back, and took another long look. "You've got to meet her
for me. Tell her you're from the Welcome Wagon or something."

This was how it always started. George would see a woman. Get me to
meet her. Then we would introduce him into the picture in a real
natural way. He said it made them more open to him, more receptive.
But it never worked out too well.

The last woman, he saw in the bookstore. She was in the Psychology
section, thumbing through a book on schizophrenia. I was just about to
tell her that the bookstore wasn't a library when George motioned me
to meet her. I tried to think of something nice to say. "My mamma
forever told me as a child that it's okay to be schizophrenic as long
as both your hearts are in the right place."

She looked up and smiled a sort of funny smile. Turned out she wasn't
nutty at all. She just enjoyed reading books about people who were
ill. Not just books about mental stuff, but any disease. The bookshelf
at her house was filled with books on everything from Alzheimer's to
zoophilia.

Her name was Jackie, and the initial part of George's first date with
her went fine. They drove around in his truck, and she smoked a pack
of Virginia Slims cigarettes. She had this fancy Zippo lighter that
had a clear body that held the lighter fluid. Suspended in the
flammable fluid was a pair of miniature dice. Every time she lit a
smoke, she would shake the lighter and call out the number. "Seven,"
she'd say, or "Four," and she'd always follow the number by saying,
"That's my favorite number." Then she talked about her classes over at
the Auburn University extension college. She was in general studies,
but she was thinking about changing her major to nursing. The word
nurse was always a green light for George. It meant a woman knew
something about anatomy and other things.

Then she told him how her brother had been run over in the street in
front of her house and how when her mother had seen his body she had
screamed that she had wished it had been Jackie instead. George didn't
know how to respond to that, so he pulled the truck over to the side
of the road, real slow and easy. Then he put his arm around her and
tried to touch her breasts.

She took a felt-tip pen off of the dash of his car. It was a pen he
had borrowed from me at the bookstore. She started writing on his
jeans. It was too dark for George to read what she was writing. I
would have wondered whether the ink would come out in the wash, but
love makes you stand for funny things.

After he dropped her off, he came by my house and stood under my
yellow bug-away porch light trying to read his pants. When I heard him
whistle long and hard, I opened the door and let him in. "Look at
this! Just look at this!" he was shouting, and pointing at his pants.

He explained to me how he came by the marks. He was forever telling me
what happened to him. Right there emblazoned on his inner thigh in a
pretty script was the word copulation, as plain as day. Above it, as
if floating on a cloud, was the caricature of an intertwined couple
that looked a lot like George and Jackie.

He wasted no time in driving around to the open service stations,
searching for an appropriate condom. There was something about all
those books on disease that had prompted him, but, after all, he said,
a nurse would expect him to be professional. The service station
choices were limited. The French Tickler, with its octopus-like
extensions, seemed too personal for a couple's first time, and yet, to
George, the plain old rubber Trojan just didn't seem sophisticated
enough. Those were the days before glow-in-the-dark prophylactics or
condoms with miniature batteries and moving parts. He felt optimistic
enough to purchase one of each.

He entered her apartment filled with expectation. She had some piano
music playing in the other room. He came right out and asked her if he
could sleep over. At that moment, her daughter came out of the back
room. She was waving her hands and screaming. The girl had the longest
fingers George had ever seen. They were twice as long as normal
fingers. She was waving them in front of her like she was warming them
over a fire.

Jackie hugged the girl to her and told her to hush. She took her back
in the other room and the music started again.

When Jackie came out, George was just sitting on the couch. "She's my
daughter Jenny. She's an idiot savant, just like her dad."

"Her dad?"

"Met him over at the institution. I was doing volunteer work. He liked
to play the piano. He was good with his hands. He and Jenny's one of
the reasons my mom wished I was dead when she saw my brother was the
one she backed over in the drive."

George didn't know it had been her own mother who had run over her
brother. He wanted to say something about it. He also wanted to ask
about Jenny's fingers, but just then he felt some other hands going to
work up and down his leg. He cleared his throat. "Well, ah, what did
your dad say?"

"I only heard my dad speak about once a year. He'd grab his shotgun on
New Year's Day, walk out into the front yard, and fire a shot into the
ground. Then he'd say the words 'Bad earth, bad earth,' over and over,
like the lawn was a truant child."

"Things didn't go too right for him?"

"The earth finally won," she said. "Mom gave me the gun to keep. It's
the only thing I have left of my father's. I keep it right by my bed,
just in case."

Somehow the hand on George's leg felt a bit rough.

"You want to turn in now?" she asked. "Jenny normally stays in the bed
with me, but she'll be asleep in a few minutes. You just wait a little
bit out here on the couch."

Only the fact that she had recently installed one of those
double-deadbolt locks on her door, the kind that takes a key on the
inside to open it, kept George from slipping out into the night. He
sat on the couch and decided to pull the old I'm-Sound-Asleep ruse. He
stretched back on the couch, full-length, and commenced to lightly
snoring. As facts often follow fiction, he was soon really asleep.

When he woke up, he imagined he was still dreaming. He saw Jenny, the
little girl, waving her long fingers in front of her like she was
warming them over a fire. Only this time he could really see the fire.
Then he saw it was his pant's leg. She had set his pant's leg on fire
with Jackie's fancy lighter, and his flaming pants were setting the
couch on fire. "Two," Jenny said, "that's my favorite number."

When the fire truck came, George drove off without saying his
goodbyes. His leg wasn't burned. Only the hairs had been singed, and
his good jeans ruined. He could see Jackie in his rear view mirror,
still talking with a fireman about all the different types of burn
cases that he had seen.

George got me to introduce him to a nice Christian girl after that.
She was a member of my Baptist church family. But that relationship
didn't last too long because of his record collection. He would get a
special price at The Record Shop on albums that didn't sell too well.
One Sunday he made the mistake of playing a new Yoko Ono album on his
stereo, just as his Christian girlfriend came walking up his drive.
She told me that she didn't have to listen twice to know that the
moans of ecstacy were coming from an Oriental woman he had in his
house with him.

I pondered the question of how I could meet the nudist woman for
George for several days. Finally, the bookstore answered for me. She
entered the store fully clothed, but I could still tell it was her.
She went back and started looking around in the fiction section. I
walked over and asked her something I rarely said, "Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for a book by Mr. Fitzgerald."

"What?"

"You know, that author that lived in Montgomery."

I was taken a bit aback. The store's bestseller had consistently been
the Bible, followed a close second by Gone With the Wind. In fact, in
front of the Baptist church there was a sign that proclaimed
"Montgomery, Alabama, is #1 in Bible reading!"

"You know, Zelda's husband."

"F. Scott Fitzgerald."

"Yes, he's the one. I live in his house. Well, just the downstairs
part. It's apartments, now."

This was my chance. I didn't know that Fitzgerald had lived down the
street from me. I guess he had to have lived somewhere. "Oh, yes, I
know your house very well. Yes, the Fitzgerald place."

"My landlord told me that it's the last house left standing in town
that he and Zelda lived in. That's why he doesn't allow tenants who
smoke."

After the Jackie incident, I knew that George would be glad to hear
that the nudist woman didn't smoke. "Books by F. Scott Fitzgerald," I
said, trying to remember what I had learned in the freshman English
course I took before dropping out of college, "ah, yes, Gatsby, The
Great Gatsby." My teacher was always going on about that book,
something about some doctor's eyes and a green light. It was still the
age of the great literary-symbol hunters.

"Gatsby?"

"Yes, he looks something like Robert Redford." Luckily I had seen the
movie. "He's rich. He's got lots of shirts. That's how he attracts the
girls. They like to see his shirts."

"Did he write that book in Montgomery?"

Now it's a shame that people expect folks who work in bookstores to
know something about books. I didn't know where Fitzgerald had written
the book. "The biscuit of it is that critics aren't too sure," I
confided. "He was very secretive. Drank a lot, too." I was losing her
interest. "But I have done my own study, and yes, yes, that's the book
he wrote in your house." Her eyes opened wide.

"Do you have a copy of it?"

The plan came into focus. "No," I said, "it's a classic work of
literature. It's very hard to come by in bookstores. But I'm sure I
have a copy of it in my home library." I lied. Actually, the only
reading material I was sure of having around the house was a Bible and
a two-month old copy of Playboy. George had loaned it to me from his
collection. He had every issue ever printed, cataloged and filed in
their own special cabinet. "Why don't I drop a copy of it by your
house on Saturday morning?"

"Can you make it Saturday night? Saturday's a busy day. I work at City
Florist. I'm a funeral designer."

"A funeral designer?"

"You know, I make the flower arrangements for the funerals. Blankets
of carnations to go on top of caskets. Broken wagon wheels cut out of
styrofoam and covered in chrysanthemums."

"Now that must be an interesting job." I thought about my dull
surroundings.

"It is, it is. Once a woman came in and wanted me to make an
arrangement to look like a shotgun. I cut out the styrofoam to look
just like one. I spray-painted the flowers brown for the stock and
silver for the barrel. It was pretty."

"The deceased must have been a big hunting enthusiast."

"No, she told me he was a suicide."

"Oh." I didn't know what else to say. I wondered if she ever went to
funerals, just to see how her work affected people, kind of like how a
playwright might sit in back of a theater during a performance.

"I'd better be going. I'm gonna be late to work," she said, before I
had time to ask.

George couldn't have been happier if I was making him a box of Kraft
macaroni and cheese. George must have said more good things about Mr.
Fitzgerald and his book than a whole room full of college professors.
When he had said his final "God bless Gatsby and Mr. F. Scott
Fitzgerald," he turned to me and asked to see the book.

"I don't have a copy of it," I explained.

His face fell. "But your home library?"

I held up a copy of my Bible in my right hand and Playboy in my left.
"This is the entire contents of my home library," I said.

George looked at the Playboy issue lovingly, the way a student looks
at a test question he had actually studied for and could answer with
ease.

"The bookstore?"

"Can't order it in time."

"The other bookstore?" There was a chain store at the new mall.

"It's a literary classic."

George looked downcast, but George was always a thinker. He ran to my
phone and called the public library, not that either of us had a
borrower's card. He waited while the reference librarian checked the
status of the book. When she came back on the phone, his whole body
looked like it was sucked down into the ground all the way to China.
He slammed the receiver into its black cradle.

"Out!" George hollered. "Out for two weeks. Why would someone check
out a book that isn't even new?"

"It's okay," I said. "I'll just tell her I couldn't find it."

"Don't you understand? This isn't just a book. It's the first thing
she's asked of us. It's . . . it's a quest."

George always liked to use that word quest. He picked it up where he
worked at the King Arthur Burger Court. George had advanced in the
last year to assistant manager, his uniform had the name Sir Lancelot
emblazoned over his pocket, and the word quest was used repeatedly in
his management training manual. He used to be a student at the
Methodist College and Seminary in town, until he kind of snapped one
day, dressed up in their basketball team mascot hawk outfit, and
started preaching across Montgomery, saying the words to all who would
listen, "Oh, Israel, that I could gather you up like a hen gathers her
chicks . . . ." The hawk outfit was just old enough and in poor,
sagging shape to give George the look of a giant mother hen.

He sat down on my one good chair, a La-Z-Boy. He pushed his weight
back all the way and his feet shot up in the air. Somehow, the way he
was sitting there, all sprawled out like a tire with no air, made that
chair look like the world's saddest recliner.

Finally, he said the only words he could muster, "We have been
betrayed by Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald." It was a melancholy exclamation,
born of mental exhaustion, and that's the way he sat for about an
hour.

I had only seen him like this one time before. We had gone up to the
Lake Jordan Dam, to do some fishing. We waited for hours with our cane
poles in the water, watching the red and white bobbers floating up and
down with the wind. The fish were not biting. We were just drowning
one worm after another.

A man walked up to us and asked us how we were doing. I said I hadn't
caught a thing, but George's imagination did not live on a small
budget.

He started to tell the man how he had been catching catfish all day,
so many, and so quick, that he had to just keep letting them go. He
was just about to go into great detail about how one was bigger than
me, since I'm about a foot shorter than George, when the man asked to
see George's fishing license. He was a game warden. He wrote George a
ticket for fishing without a license, but he let me go, since I hadn't
caught anything.

After the man left, George just sat on the bank, looking the same way
he did about this Gatsby business. Finally, I had to just load all of
our stuff back in the car. George followed along, quiet like, and
didn't say another word on the drive back to Montgomery.

I barely had spoken the words, "I wish I'd finished my freshman
English course and not sold my books back to the college," when George
shot up out of the recliner like Jonah from the whale's belly.

"College!" he shouted.

"But, George, I went to school out of state."

"Not yours, mine. Professor Peter J. Dickinson at the seminary. He has
his own collector's library." George grabbed me by the arm like a
fishing pole on a sunny Sunday afternoon. He deposited me in the
driver's side of his truck and screeched down the street towards the
Methodist College and Seminary.

The Methodist College and Seminary parking lot was a busy place to be
on a Friday night, all because of the Red Lady. Years before, a rich
woman attended the college. She was obsessed with her money and the
color red. Her room was decorated in red. Everything she wore was red.
She didn't make friends easily. When she received a letter from her
father saying that they had run out of money, she hung herself in one
of the top-floor rooms. It is said that if you watch long enough after
midnight, you can still see her unearthly, crimson image in one of the
rooms on the top floor of the building. It was the traditional
Southern date suicide story. For some reason, women in the South
expected you to tell them a horrifying story before you attempted to
unsnap their bras. This was one of the reasons for the popularity of
the parking lot in front of the main building of the Methodist College
and Seminary. It's also the reason for the proliferation of Southern
authors.

The building was laid out simply. The first floor was administrative
offices and the chapel. The second floor was classrooms and faculty
offices. The third floor was the men's floor. And the fourth floor was
the women's.

We got out of the truck and walked past a row of cars with fogged
windows.

When we arrived at the office door of Dr. Peter J. Dickinson, there
were signs of life coming from it. There were more than signs of life,
there was genuine liveliness, from the smell of burning hemp coming
out from under the door to the giggles of a person considerably
younger than Dr. Peter J. Dickinson.

George knocked on the door. There were the sounds of furniture and
clothes being rearranged. Then there was chanting. "Ommmmm."

Eventually, the soft words of the good doctor called to us, "Enter in
peace."

The room was heavy with the medicinal smell of Lysol air freshener.
Dr. Peter J. Dickinson was sitting cross-legged on the floor, next to
a beautiful, raven-haired coed, the kind of young woman whose clothes
must be grateful to so perfectly contour her body. Things seemed a bit
blurry to me in the room. I felt funny. They both had their hands
raised in the air, as if they were trying to attract signals from some
Far Eastern radio station. "We can continue our meditation session
tomorrow, Mary Lee. The incense seems a bit strong, in here, but . .
." the professor was saying, until he looked up and saw it was just us
and not some official group of administrators and parents.

"Dr. Dickinson?" George said.

The mixed emotions of relief and irritation fought to gain precedence
over the professor's facial features. "What? Who? Young men, you have
interrupted a very important religious experience." He paused and
looked right at George.

Maybe it was the incense that was doing the talking for Dr. Peter J.
Dickinson, but he started laughing. Not just an ordinary laugh, but
the kind you laugh when you finally get grape jelly at McDonald's for
breakfast, instead of mixed fruit, or you find real paper towels in
the bathroom, instead of one of those hot air blowers. It was the
laughter of small miracles.

"Chicken Boy!" he howled.

George's face went red.

"You're Chicken Boy!" The professor turned to Mary Lee. "This is
Chicken Boy!"

Then Mary Lee started laughing. "Why," she exclaimed, "you're more
famous than the Red Lady. All my teachers talk about you in their
classes."

"Everyone wanted to know what happened to you," Dr. Peter J.
Dickinson, said, "after the incident and all."

They were alluding to the chicken-suit preaching incident. George had
to go up to the hospital in Birmingham for a while.

"He's in hamburger," I blurted out.

"I didn't expect him to be at Kentucky Fried Chicken."

"The quest," George threw in. I could tell he did not want me to go
any further into his current occupation.

"Quest?" the professor asked.

"We are in dire need of a copy of The Great Gatsby."

Dr. Peter J. Dickinson's eyes were bright. He tasted a story bigger
than a King Arthur Burger Court Royal Burger, the kind of story
professors dream of finding to one day top those told by their
colleagues in faculty mailrooms and lounges.

"As it so happens, I do have a rare, first edition collection of
American Authors." He pointed to a fancy, glass-fronted bookcase.
"These books are priceless," he said, more for the benefit of Mary
Lee.

"We only need to borrow your copy of The Great Gatsby."

"Fitzgerald's masterpiece of preposterous love and the superannuation
of traditional American belief. . . " again, Dr. Peter J. Dickinson
waxed a bit for Mary Lee's sake.

"Right," George said. "About the book, can we . . . "

"I'm sorry, but it's far too valuable to loan out. It's inscribed by
the author, you know."

George looked through the glass at the book the way a hungry dog looks
through a butcher's window. The professor unlocked the case and took
the book out. It was sealed in plastic, so you couldn't open it. He
handed it to George to look at. I had only seen a moment like it one
time before. It was an exhibition of trained German shepherds. These
big dogs were made to stand very rigid and still, while their trainers
placed dog treats on top of their noses. Their look of desperation and
anger reminded me of the look in George's eyes.

"Note the dust jacket," the professor said, no longer for Mary Lee's
benefit, but more in the celebration of knowledge itself. "It was
painted months before the book was finished." The cover had a pair of
these big brooding eyes. "The artist thought he was painting Daisy's
eyes, but when Fitzgerald saw it, he wrote them into the book as the
eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. Hemingway thought it was the ugliest
thing he'd ever seen."

I wanted to ask about the shirts. I thought I remembered Robert
Redford throwing an armful of beautiful shirts up in the air and Mia
Farrow crying into the glorious pile because it made her so sad that
she had never seen such beautiful shirts before. I wondered whether
that had been in the book or just the movie. I thought maybe I'd
better read the book, it being a classic and all, and that way the
next time someone came into the store asking about it I'd know
something to say, but George's hand on my sleeve interrupted my
reverie.

In the background the professor was still talking, something about
colors and symbols and the American Dream. But George was pulling me
from the office. Pulling me from the thing he most desired.

George's heart was breaking into about a million pieces and falling
into the wasteland of accumulated King Arthur Burger Court soda cups
and burger wrappers on the floorboard of his truck. George believed in
his quest, but that Fitzgerald book kept receding before him. To have
it in his hands and then . . . no matter. George was always one to
say, "Tomorrow, I will run faster, I will stretch out my arms farther
. . . ."

"Boats against a current," George said, as we slowly drove back to my
house.

I wanted to say the word persevere, but it wasn't a word that came
naturally to me. It was a word I had seen in the title of several
self-help books at the bookstore. When I finally managed to speak, I
said the word "preserves."

"With hot biscuits," George said. I guess I couldn't have said
anything better. Food was the small consolation for life. "Or sausage
gravy." George smiled.

Right at that moment it became clear. We were just a few doors down
from my house, and there was the sign. The nudist woman's lights were
on. No, it wasn't her lights. She was sitting in a chair in front of a
television set. The curtains were still not up. Her naked body was
bathed in the blue light coming from her TV. The National Endowment
for the Arts couldn't have funded a more artistic vision.

"She is an angel on Earth," George said. Then he hit the gas pedal,
and I knew where we were heading.

If there was one thinking spot in Montgomery for a love-sick man, it
was Hank Williams' grave. It was the place that the local police
always visited to drink beer and celebrate a big drug bust. It was the
place George and I always went to when his heart was falling apart
like a dropped jigsaw puzzle.

The songwriter's grave was in the oldest cemetery in town, just behind
a row of Confederate graves. This was actually his second grave. His
first plot was too small for a fitting monument, so they dug up a
couple of French pilots who had died in a crash at Maxwell Air Force
Base and moved Hank to their spot.

The monument was a respectful marble slab, and on top of it was a
stone cowboy hat. The titles to some of his songs were etched into the
slab. George always read them out loud like a litany, "Your Cheatin'
Heart . . . I Can't help it if I'm Still in Love with You . . . ." At
the top of it, it read, "Praise the Lord, I Saw the Light." Then there
were clouds with giant sunbeams breaking through them. Beside Hank's
grave, there were marble benches for the weary to sit on and think
about life and death.

After George recited the song titles, he would start to sing. As the
night wore on he really did begin to sound more and more like Hank
himself, wailing away. George would sit on the slab and sing, and I
would fix the drinks.

I dropped a whole aspirin each into two bottles of Coca-cola, although
I preferred to pour a package of salted peanuts into mine, but it was
a Southern form of dope used since the miraculous invention of the
dark elixir in Atlanta.

George finished his bottle in one long gulp, and started singing about
a whippoorwill who felt too sad to sing. I nursed mine along a bit.
Hank Williams' stony white monument shimmered in the night. All was
still, giving the place a kind of serene beauty. The scene was
communicating something to us. Something about how you needed to live
life. Thinking about Hank's body reclining on the ground below me made
me want to spend as much time as I possibly could standing up.

George stood up, too. He touched the red artificial roses that filled
the two marble vases beside the grave. It was one of those swift
moments of decision that would lead him irrevocably towards ruin or
salvation.

It was only after we had gotten back to the car that I realized that
the Gatsby business wasn't over. Now I'm a bit gentle-witted, but I'm
also one of the few honest people I have ever known. But what George
proposed would end all of that. I would have to become wise and less
than honest. George wanted me to provide a diversion. "That bookcase,
it's right in front of the window. All of those necking fools out
front, waiting for the Red Lady, would see us up there."

"We will need your red dress," George said. I knew what he meant. It
was really Scarlett's red dress in Gone With the Wind. Rhett made her
wear the dress to Melanie's party, after a group of old biddies put
the word out about how she was seen hugging Ashley.

George had entered a Southern Costume Contest at the National Guard
Armory. George wanted to go as Rhett Butler, but his girlfriend at the
time had walked out just as they were getting dressed for the event.
She had found a pair of women's underpants in his laundry basket.
George tried to explain that he had dropped off his laundry at his
mother's, that there must have been a mix-up in the dryer, which was
true, but George was never too lucky in his explanations to women.
George pleaded with her not to desert him until after the contest. He
had spent a lot of money on the costumes, but she used Rhett's own
words against him. "Frankly, my dear," she said, "I don't give a
damn."

I will not tell you anymore about that night just now. Suffice it to
say that I would be recreating the role of Scarlett for the second
time in my life.

They say that practice makes perfect, but my second performance as
Scarlett was tinged by a certain world-weary quality. I guess I had
gained a bit of weight since last suiting up. In the dark, inside the
Methodist College and Seminary building, George helped me pull up the
zipper. I had to almost completely hold my breath in order not to bust
out of the gown.

George's part of the mission was to climb through the window over
Professor Peter J. Dickinson's door and steal the book. He had a tiny
penlight to use to help select the correct volume.

In the dark, I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. If the dress
hadn't been so tight, someone could have heard me wheezing. George had
told me that at the center of the floor was a laundry and ironing room
that had windows that looked out towards the front. He gave me a
candle to light and carry in my hand, while I pranced back in forth,
up and down, in front of the glass, pretending to be the ghostly Red
Lady.

When I entered the room, I could barely see. The windows were open, so
I walked towards them. I lit the candle and started my distraction.
Then I heard a voice.

"Professor? Peter? Is that you?"

I stood as still as death. My heart pounded in my chest. I gasped for
a breath. The restrictions of the tight dress made the quick intake of
air impossible. I did what any other normal, corseted, Southern Belle
might do. I fainted.

When I came to, I was in the arms of Mary Lee. She recognized me as
the friend of Chicken Boy from our visit to Dr. Peter J. Dickinson's
office. She thought it was the sweetest thing that I had dressed up
like a woman to sneak all the way onto the fourth floor to see her.
She also said she found the idea of making love to a man dressed up
like Scarlett O'Hara kind of exciting.

My mother told me that as a baby, she read GWTW, as she calls it, to
me in my crib, but I could not remember anything from the book to
prepare me for the rest of that night.

George waited for me outside, but when I didn't show up, he decided I
could find my own way back. The quest could not wait.

He drove over to the nudist woman's house.

She answered the door wearing a Japanese kimono. George explained how
I had asked him to deliver the book. He was sorry he was so late, but
he had seen her light on. He said it was his own copy. It was a signed
first edition.

She invited him in. He sat in the same chair where he had so often
seen her sit. She unwrapped the plastic cover that the professor kept
around all of his collectable books. She touched the jacket cover
gently.

She opened the book to the first page, but something was wrong.
Something had changed in her expression. The title on the first page
read The Illustrated Kama Sutra, even though the cover had proclaimed
it to be The Great Gatsby, and, under the title, there was a picture
of two people intertwined in a way that would seem humanly impossible.

George wanted to explain that somehow the cover must have been on the
wrong book, but the woman started screaming something about him being
a pervert. Then she started hitting him with the book. George's hands
flew out in front of him. His hands were shaking. He told me later
that his fingers looked real long, waving out in front of him,
defending against the potency of literature.

George went running out into the dark night, his arms outstretched in
front of him. He jumped in his truck and drove all the way through
town, back to Hank's grave.

He started singing again, a forsaken cry went up among the graves.
Then, in the moonlight, he saw her. She was beautiful. She was the
first woman he had ever met without my help. She was drawn to his
song. She was a stripper down in one of those New Orleans clubs. She
said she always did it to Mr. Williams' music. She was wearing her
tiny work clothes. She was on her two-week vacation, and she said that
she just wanted what was left of Hank to see her act, and, by George's
account, it was enough to raise the dead.

George helped her get a job at a local Dairy Queen. Later that month
George was promoted to full-time night manager at King Arthur Burger
Court and got to wear a real crown. Over his uniform pocket, they
embroidered King Arthur. You might say that George and his new
girlfriend became the king and queen of Alabama fast food.

I didn't see George but a few times in the months that followed, but
it didn't matter because I always knew that there were people like him
left in the world, people of honor who would follow their quest to the
end, steadfast and ceaseless. About the others? For understandable
reasons, Professor Peter J. Dickinson never mentioned the break-in or
the loss to his extensive pornography collection, and the nudist woman
bought some unbelievably thick curtains.

Me, I'm actually reading that book, The Great Gatsby, and those shirts
are really in there. I'm also thinking about going back to college.
Mary Lee has convinced me that there's a real benefit to education. In
a way, we were all saved by Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald.

=====================================================================

Selections from the New World
  by Marcus Eubanks

The recurrent thought, looping over and over again like a mantra: Of
all the stupid ways to die.

I come back to myself when it dawns on me I'm clutching shards of
blood-slick glass in my hand. It seems I managed to forget the beer I
was holding until the slender pilsner flute collapsed under my grip.

"Fuck!" Oblivious to the neighbors, I eloquently express my discontent
as the pain hits me. I've cleverly cut myself to ribbons -- though
some remote part of me notes clinically there's nothing deep enough to
merit sutures. For the life of me, I can't tell if I'm irritated more
because I've wasted several ounces of excellent beer (which in my mind
represents flagrant alcohol abuse) or because I've opened my hand to
the possibility of infection. The fact that the glass was fine lead
crystal is irrelevant.

Not that it matters. I wipe my bleeding hand on my Levi's and laugh.
It doesn't matter either way.

I kick the broken pieces into a corner of my third floor balcony and
grab the bottle, which is still roughly half full. After three long
swallows I toss it over with the shattered glass.

I blot my hand again on my jeans as I walk into the house to grab a
six-pack to restock the outside fridge. I pry the cap off one with an
elegant opener that Vicram gave me a while back -- one of the first to
be made from one of those insanely strong ceramics they started coming
out with a few years ago. He had thought it hysterically funny that a
technology which could spin bridges from thin silken strands was being
used to make trinkets to open beer-bottles.

Back on the balcony, reclining in the bristling wet summer heat on a
teak deck-chair, I thumb the system's remote so music from inside
washes over me. I'm imagining my friends here, leaning against the
rail to torment passers-by or maybe to seduce them into joining us:
"Hey you - yeah, you. Wanna beer? No no, you gotta come up and talk to
us while you drink it. No drink and run here, no sir!" - or just
milling about in endless conversation.

There, squatting by the railing, should be Francois, messing with one
of the candles. Frankie of the dry dangerous wit, fresh out of a
prestigious fellowship in cardiothoracic surgery. In spite of the
unpredictable schedule of transplant work, he always managed to find
enough time to make the Fearsome Foursome complete at least a couple
of times a month.

Dean would be sitting in one of the chairs, or sprawled out on the
decking with his back to the three-story drop, doling out beers from
the weathered little fridge he rested his feet on. He was a master of
the absurd, helping all of us to avoid the grim pitfall of taking
ourselves too seriously.

Finally, there was Vicram, laughing and harsh. He would be needling
one of us about something, leaning up against the building's exterior
wall with his legs stretched out along the wide rail on which he
perched. Vic always pushed his assault right up to the line, but only
rarely beyond. Paradoxically, he was strangely astute and gentle when
any of us was upset about something important, like women or work.

Francois bit the big one because of some obscure strain of strep that
one of his patients, who happened to be a smack addict, had growing on
the valves of his heart.

I remember Frankie joining us that night down on South Side, observing
in numb shock that the resident working under him that day had slipped
spectacularly with a needle while they were closing a chest after a
valve-replacement. He had managed to breach the wonderfully thin but
resilient gloves that the surgeons were using back then, reinforced
densely with strands of Kevlar. Later that night he'd joked about it,
showing us the line of sutures marking the deep laceration the cutting
edge of the heavy needle had opened in the web of his thumb.

"I'm probably going to come down with that new strain of Hepatitis G -
you know, the one they couldn't isolate well enough to cover in the
vaccine," Frankie had said, looking at Dean. "And one of you goddamned
internal medicine fleas is gonna end up filling me with gunk up to my
yellow eyes so my liver doesn't fry my brain."

It's drizzling now, rain dropping on the roof of my carefully restored
townhouse on Pittsburgh's north side and falling into the alleyway.
That was what, '04? We barely had a fucking clue, even then. Viruses?
Ebola had been a name to conjure with, especially after the fiasco in
Cairo, and Bible-thumping assholes were agitating to set up
quarantined ghettoes for victims of HIV. Prions were nasty to be sure,
but turned out to be almost impossible to transmit unless you were
eating infected meat. Still, we remained blindly panicked about the
so-called scourge of immunology even then. We were idiots, all of us,
even those of us who knew.

Frankie was just fine until he developed the vicious streptococcal
heart disease the same time he came down with intractable pneumonia.
Strep - the very same bug kids everywhere had been getting penicillin
or amox for at first sign of a scratchy throat for the past forty
years. Apparently the bug had been sitting semi-comatose, probably on
one of the valves of his heart, for the three months since the
needle-stick. It had waited patiently for his immune system to sag for
a moment, and then it seeded his lungs.

After that, Frankie DuBois started dying aggressively of a grim
combination of pneumonia and heart failure, which even ten years
before could have been cured with a course of antibiotics. Hell, the
cardiac part wouldn't have happened at all, or at least not that soon,
but the bug had somehow found a way to make itself look even more like
heart tissue to the body's own defenses. As a result, his own immune
system chewed up his heart in the process of trying to beat the
infection.

So at the tender age of thirty-four Frankie had been hacking up bloody
gobbets of lung, rattling obscenely with every breath. We smuggled
beer into his bay in the intensive care unit daily in an attempt at
forced good cheer until the morning the unit team decided that he
needed a tracheostomy tube so he could be placed on a ventilator.

The next afternoon Frankie had mimed for pen and paper and scribbled
in tortured letters "KCl, 40 mEq IV push." He looked up at us in naked
feverish pain, begging. Two and a half hours later he suffered cardiac
arrest when a tragically mislabeled vial of potassium chloride was
pushed into his circulation. We looked on dispassionately, three
visiting attending physicians, as the residents and students on the
unit team tried futilely to revive him.

We spent the rest of the day back here on my balcony, profoundly
drunk. It turned into one of those startlingly mild late October
evenings, and my candles finally remained unmolested. Dean had gone on
a tirade about the laissez-faire street economy which made antibiotics
available indiscriminately.

"They are taking away everything I have, dammit!" he said with the
precise diction of the thoroughly impaired. "War on drugs? Jesus!" He
stopped and turned such an ugly glare toward us that I had to remind
myself forcibly that this was one of my best friends; that it wasn't
meant for us. "If they're so hell-bent on keeping us from killing
ourselves with drugs, then why the fuck don't they interdict the
dangerous shit, like Keflex and Biaxin?" He lapsed into silence,
staring morosely at his beer.

It was an old complaint. As far back as the early '80s it was known
the unrestricted use of antibiotics in Asia, Africa, and Central
America was selecting out some frighteningly vicious strains of common
bugs like strep and TB. It was also happening in our own inner cities,
but no one wanted to think that we might somehow share the blame. It
had proven impossible, of course, to get people in positions of power
to take any notice of it. When the nets reported that a small hospital
in Sioux Falls had isolated a strain of Vancomycin-resistant staph
from a patient's wound back in '98, surgeons and infectious disease
people all across the country collectively soiled themselves. The
world as they knew it was over, their last line of defense against
this ubiquitous organism was blown to hell in the time it took to read
one preliminary journal abstract.

Even then, the Feds turned a blind eye, busy as they were with
isolationist economic policy and internal power struggles. Besides, it
was all taking place in shitty third-world countries and American
inner cities. Their unspoken policy was along the lines of, "Whatever
those people get is their own fault anyway, right?"

We used to joke about it in school. Dean observed one evening a lot of
it was our doing as well: "I figure North Philly is like my own
private petri-dish. I'm doing an experiment - figure I'll create a
nice resistant strain of, oh I dunno, gonorrhea or uh, pneumococcus.
'Cause I'm a humanitarian. Yeah, that's it, I adore the human race.
Yeah. So here's some pink stuff for you, some Biaxin for you, and for
this lucky dog over here, Unasyn. Big guns, kiddies. You can have the
biggest, nastiest antibiotic I've got, even though you don't need it.
Heh. Enjoy."

Eighteen months after we buried Frankie, Dean responded to the Deep
South's desperate call for docs to manage the epidemic of Blackwater
Shakes. He steadfastly refused to let Jan go along, finally resorting
to dumping her cruelly so she wouldn't try to follow him. Dean had
picked up a masters in Public Health during his residency and had
studied quite a bit of epidemiology. He knew exactly what he was
getting into, and damned sure didn't want to subject anyone he loved
to it, even of their own free will.

Three days after he left, I took a leave of absence and followed him
down, figuring I could finally put my mostly theoretical training in
disaster medicine to some practical use. The flight into New Orleans
was unremarkable until I woke with a start, realizing how unusual it
was to be able to stretch out across three seats to sleep on a morning
flight into that city. As the cab from the airport approached the
Claiborne Avenue exit, it edged over to the shoulder and stopped.

"This is as close to the city as I get, brother."

I paid him then, and climbed out shaking my head in disgust. Idiot. He
probably would have been better off in the city, with the mosquito
foggers going day and night.

I hiked three miles to the Garden District, where Dean was staying.
Not one of the passing cars even slowed down to look at my
outstretched thumb.

Blackwater Shakes, or Mekong Flu as some of the media was calling it,
was a strain of P. falciparum malaria the microbiologists labeled
Burma IV. So many names for such an old disease. This particular
variety had been bred out of the jungles of North Thailand, Laos, and
Burma, and was resistant to every anti-malarial drug known. Therapy
was mainly supportive, in the hopes that victims would survive initial
bouts to gradually bolster their own immunity over the course of
several years. That the disease was transmitted by mosquito rather
than by casual contact with other people was ignored by the greater
fraction of the populace in their panic, as marked by the black X's I
saw spray-painted on the entries of several houses.

"We might as well be back in 1907 for all the good we're doing," Dean
said one evening as we sat in a French Quarter courtyard bar. The
Quarter was strangely quiet, robbed of the tourist traffic that kept
it alive. We had worked all afternoon and most of the evening in a
vast tent that had been set up in Charity Hospital's parking lot to
handle the added volume of patients. "We're going to run out of packed
red cells for anemic crises sometime tonight, and that military
fluorocarbon shit isn't going to cut it for more than a couple of
days."

All I could do was nod. I'd been at the same morning meeting as Dean,
called so officials from the Red Cross, the CDC, and the city
government could meet with some nervous-looking representatives from
the Federal government. It seemed the Feds wanted to know what needed
to happen so the situation could be brought under control in the next
few weeks. Me, Dean, and the dude from the CDC looked at each other in
astonishment. The CDC guy was working desperately to stifle a laugh.

"Have you listened to a single word we've said?" Dean asked.

It was too much of a straight line to ignore. "No man, he's an
administrator," I said. "You know better than that. They specialize in
talking."

Dean ignored me while the poor bastard from the CDC tried to keep from
falling out of his chair in hysterics. He hadn't had any sleep in
days. "Let me try to make it simple," Dean continued. "This is going
to take years, and that's just to control it locally. The foggers are
going non-stop and we already have some of the best water control in
the world, but the mosquitoes just don't drop like they used to. This
place will never be safe for people who haven't been through it
already." The Federal rep tried to interrupt him, but Dean plowed on
relentlessly. "There is no medicine now in existence that will kill
this parasite. None. Do you understand me now?"

Six weeks later, I figured they had as much of a system in place as
they ever would, and took off back north. Dean remained behind,
proclaiming his sick joy in being back in New Orleans, crippled though
it was.

He had done okay actually, surviving his initial infection and several
relapses. He lived to see all the Interstate highways leading out of
Florida and Southeast Louisiana blockaded by National Guard reserves
and then regular Army troops. The Coast Guard had set up off the Gulf
Coast and around the Florida peninsula with air and sea support from
the Navy. It was idiocy, of course: the species of mosquito that
harbored the parasite couldn't survive outside the affected areas
anyhow. The good people of the United States had taken notice,
however, prodded by the horror show broadcast daily out of Miami and
New Orleans. They demanded the government do something, and damned
well do it immediately.

Gibbering politicians, in defiance of every recommendation from the
CDC and other groups, responded to the mandate of the people by laying
down the largest and most effective quarantine the world had ever
seen.

Dean was killed in the New Orleans riots.

My hand has more or less stopped bleeding, but it smarts like hell.
The music changer stutters once, and strains of Dvorak's New World
symphony pour out into the damp heat.

It doesn't really strike me at first, but suddenly I start laughing
and find myself utterly incapable of stopping. Doubled over in
hysterical giggles, I reach into the little fridge and grab another
beer. I struggle for sips of air, finally managing to stop laughing so
I can take a hit from the bottle that leaves it less than half-full.

New World. Christ, that's sick.

I start laughing again.

With Vicram it was almost anticlimactic, lost as he was in the local
media hype that surrounded the whole affair. Mucormycosis had somehow
found its way into the ventilation system of the hospital he was
working in. It used to be one of those fungi that normally only
infected people who were pretty badly immunosupressed, like AIDS
patients and folks getting chemo for cancer or transplants. But like
so many other opportunistic pathogens, it had inadvertently been bred
for aggressive resistance to antibiotics for nearly half a century.
Candidiasis was bad, but people can live with a recurrent yeast
infection on their skin and, ah, other moist places, as long as its
not injected into their bloodstream. Mucormycosis, on the other hand,
was invasive as hell.

Aggressive as it was, however, investigators later came to the very
public conclusion that few if any of the 372 patients and hospital
employees who died would have been susceptible had they not been
subjected to huge innoculums of airborne spores for weeks at a time.
The fact that the same problem was cropping up in other places on a
smaller scale didn't seem to sway their judgment in the slightest.

I went to see him in isolation at Pittsburgh General. Vic was dark to
begin with, but now he was sunburned from the UV lights they had
pouring down on him day and night - PGH's administration was taking no
chances on a repeat of the disaster that had taken out their
competition across town.

Vicram looked up from a tissue that held a macabre mess of clotted
blood and dark fungal hyphae. "What's the matter, triage-boy, you
scared of hanging with sick folks?" he asked, laughing. I guess I'd
gone pale when I saw what came out of his head. "The Foursome is
looking pretty fucking anemic these days, eh?" He turned serious.
"This shit's gonna cross out of my sinuses and into my brain in two
days max. Listen bro, I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but
how about you don't come back upstairs to visit me any more after
this, all right?"

As it turned out, he became septicemic that night and died the next
day while I was working a shift in the E.R.

The rain is over. I lean back in my chair and look down at the remote.

Program finished, it says. Select another or # for random play.

I toss it over my shoulder so it lands on the carpet inside. I guess
it hits hard enough to push a key, because a blues piece with a funky
Hammond organ starts playing from the depths of my library.

The pain from my hand has calmed down enough that I notice the angry
welt on my forearm once again. The TB test has been sort of a ritual
for me: every six months on the solstice I get a nurse or a medical
student to hit me with the subcutaneous PPD injection. Up 'til now, it
has always been negative.

It itches, but I resist the urge to scratch. I cough, and wonder if
it's the cigarettes or the first manifestation of the infection sure
to blossom in my lungs.

Tomorrow, of course, I'll start the standard six-drug regimen. Ain't
gonna help much, though. Multi-drug resistant TB, probably brought
here on a bus from Manhattan, made it to Pittsburgh about a year ago.
It's been at least three months since any of the hospitals in town
have treated a case that was even slightly responsive.

I drop the bottle to the balcony floor. It rolls on its side, beer
slowly spilling away.

Aw hell. What an incredibly stupid fucking way to die.

=====================================================================

When Something Goes
  by Neal Gordon

A spider's web floating in the air lands, ear-cheek-nose, across my
face. Instinctively, I close my eyes and reach for it. My mother told
me when I was seven that spiders put out the little filaments like
parachutes, lots of them, until the wind catches them and the spider
is picked up and transported. She called the strands gossamers.
"Angels collect the little strings and sew them into wings," she said.
"They're the thread of angels." We were in the garden looking at her
roses and azaleas and a silk thread had drifted into us.

She reached out with the steak knife and cut off a bachelor's button
for me. "Now you don't ever have to get married," she said, calming my
fears about being asked to a girl's birthday party.



I'm the first one home. Sarah won't get in until tomorrow. Funeral's
day after. I grew up in this house. Sarah grew up in the old one in
Des Moines. I still have a room here, somehow, even after nine years.
The front door's not even locked. Who's got Sam? The place seems odd
without her barking.

I drop my bags inside the door, leaving it open to air the house, turn
and go back out. I should go by and see Mrs. John, thank her for
calling me. Ask about Sam. I walk out and across the street, past
Jerry and Alice Satory's big yard to the tiny green house. I knock,
loudly.

"That you, Ty?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Come in, come in," Mrs. John calls from behind the front door screen.

"Nice to see you again," I say, walking into the living room, touching
her arm slightly as I pass. Her flesh is very soft. She points to the
wingback chair and I sit in it. The radio plays the baseball game.

She is a big German woman. Her vision is getting worse every year -- I
know from the writing in the birthday cards she still sends me with
two dollars in them. The same two dollars I've gotten every year since
we moved here when I was six. Now, at twenty-nine, I wonder how many
more years she'll be sending them.

"I wanted to say thanks for calling," I start, but she puts up a hand
to me. She was my mother's best friend.

"I baked a pie for you. Don't let me forget it."

"Thank you," I say, looking at the threadbare gray carpet of her
living room. This heat, without air conditioning, and she baked
something. I look up slightly, seeing her knee-high stockings over
those big legs that aren't very sturdy. "Would you like to ride with
us to the funeral?" I ask.

"No, that's for you kids. Family, you know, just family," she says
leaning forward, her hand on her knee. She blushes a bit, the old rose
growing back into her cheeks as the fan sweeps the air past her,
moving her hair. She tucks the loose hair behind her ear as delicately
as if she were a girl of sixteen.

"You're family," I say, quietly.

"I'll go with Tom Brodie," she says. For a moment, no one speaks and
I'm struck with a memory of sitting on her back porch, listening to
her tell me about her late husband and how he used to play baseball
for the St. Louis Browns. Third base. She showed me his old glove and
let me put my hand inside. It was hard and stiff, but it felt like
baseball, and all my ideas of it. He had big hands.

She taught me how to throw a spitball. How to line up the seams and
scuff 'em with your glove and work spit into that place so the ball
would just sail.

"Sarah's coming in tomorrow. It's just a drive for me, so I came on
right away after making arrangements."

She settles back into her chair with a sigh. "I've been sitting here
all day, listening to the game and remembering. Pat had the most
beautiful hollyhocks in town, you know. We used to sit on that little
patio back there and have a drink and listen to the locusts." I can
remember leaning out the back door and asking Mom if it was okay for
me to go to the movies, or to the park, or downtown. Watching the two
of them split a beer. And that electric noise of the cicadas in the
trees.

Later, I'm sitting in the bathtub. It's an old iron one, with curled
feet under it and a body about three feet deep. Full of hot water. I'm
reading the latest letter from Anne's lawyer. Sarah's acting as mine.
It's about division of marital property. There are two lists; things
she thinks are hers and things she thinks are mine. Everything has a
dollar amount next to it. The rest of the stuff is up for grabs, I
guess. I'm supposed to decide what I want. I really haven't had much
say in things so far. She left, so she's handling everything. It's not
her fault that it won't, didn't, work out.

I close my eyes and lean back, soaking. Mom would tell me to get out
of the tub -- it's thundering outside. "Water is a great conductor,"
she'd say, leaning in the door, rolling her eyes. I'd be embarrassed
that I was talking to her from the bath, and she'd laugh and come in
and sit down on the toilet and keep talking. Mom never saw me as
anything but her youngest child. None of us was very private. It's one
of the things Anne had a hard time adjusting to. I listen to the rain
for a minute.

I can remember standing on Sarah's balcony atop the back porch, one
night when I was fourteen. It was summer and Sarah was in law school
and I had taken over her room. I was wearing headphones at about
two-thirty in the morning, listening to a radio station that doesn't
come in during the day. There aren't many good stations up here, but
at night you get more of them. It helps that we live on top of a hill.

I was looking out over the backyard, past the fence and over
neighbors' backyards down our block and up the hill of the next. All
the yards were laid out under the moon. At first I could barely see
the heat lightning way off north. It grew slowly, and I could only see
the effect of the black clouds overtaking the bright stars. It was
like the stars were being turned off. When I could hear the thunder
over the music, I counted, under my breath, between the sight and the
sound. The storm came in and I went back inside and lay in my bed
watching the lightning, hearing the storm's voice and thinking about
Sarah's being gone.

It's almost midnight when I call Annie.

"Hello, Anne?"

"Mmmm... Tyler?" I woke her up.

"I shouldn't have called."

"It's late. What's the matter?" Her sound is thick, syrup.

"My mother died."

"Where are you?" I know her eyes open in the dark, wide.

"At Mom's house. Home."

"Are you alone?"

"Just me and the house. Even Sam's at the kennel."

"You shouldn't be alone." Her voice is gentle.

"It's okay. I just thought you should know."

"You should have called me, I'd have gone with you."

"Would you?"

"Yes," she says, but it's a very quiet yes. A hard-to-admit yes, a
late-at-night-only yes. Like something that's covered with tissue
paper but you can still tell what it is. We both hear it.

I climb into my old bed, the bed I grew up in. Twin beds are big
enough if there's only one person in them. I'm used to a queen-sized,
but the only queen-sized is Mom's. I'm okay in here.



When I get back with Sam from the kennel, Sarah is sitting in the
living room. Sam looks at her and turns towards the kitchen. The dog
never did like her. I start for a second realizing just how much Sarah
looks like Mom: thick black hair and deep laugh lines. Mom was more
relaxed, though; Sarah is stiffer. Mom would be sitting back in the
chair, but Sarah sits on the lip, with a print cotton skirt over her
knees. "The front door was open, so I just came in," she says, getting
up to hug me.

"It's your house as much as mine." It feels nice to be hugged.

"We need to talk about the house and everything, don't we?" She pulls
back some, like Dad always did when it was time for a talk.

"Yeah, I guess so. Mom wanted us to divide things ourselves if we
could. If not, she left a list."

"Well, you're in charge, she never talked to me about it." She begins
to guide me toward the front door. "Let's go for a walk," she says. "I
don't want to be in here." Outside, she takes hold of my arm and we
cut across the yard, heading up the hill toward the Presbyterian
Church. We don't say anything for a few minutes.

"Do you want the house?" she begins.

"Do you?"

"No, but I thought we could sell it." We're walking past the Dean's
house. Its blue Victorian trim looks freshly painted. It's a fine
house.

"I don't want to," I say without looking at her. There's been some
work done around the eaves.

"What are you going to do with it? I mean, especially now that you're
divorced?" I wince and my eyes move down the house.

"I'm not divorced..." The basement windows haven't been painted.

"And I know you could use the money." A green hose snakes away from
the water spigot.

"It's my house..." It moves through the grass, coiling around the
Japanese maple.

"I know, but let's try to be reasonable. You need to think about what
you want." She tugs on my arm, but I can't seem to pull my eyes from
the garden hose. It ends in the flower bed. The water is running over
johnny-jump-ups and peonies and mums. You shouldn't water flowers in
direct sunlight. It can kill them. You've got to be careful with
things like that. "Now that the restaurant is popular, you can't live
here, and you can't keep the place up otherwise."

We sit on the hill of the Presbyterian church. it's the highest point
on our end of town. We used to come here when we were kids and watch
the fireworks. They always mowed the lawn just before, and you could
smell the freshly cut grass, feel it poking the back of your legs
through the blanket. The sky would be full with exploding stars and
M-80s that you felt in your chest a split second before you heard them
in your ears. When it was over, the sky looked out-of-proportion big
and the stars were dull as you waited for one more volley. The sky was
huge. I lean back in the grass.

"So you want the silver and the china?" I say, feeling like a
game-show host instead of a grieving son. And the rest of that on a
Spiegel gift certificate, Ron. I chuckle at the thought, and Sarah
looks at me.

"I think we should keep them together." She spreads her skirt over her
knees.

"I'll take the round table, and the chairs." I feel a little queasy.

"Do you want the sideboard?"

"Not particularly," I say, getting up. "Let's go back."

From a block away I see the car in the street and stop dead. I helped
her pick it out a year ago; I should recognize it. Anne's here. It
takes a moment for Sarah to figure it out. "What's she doing here?"
she asks.

The front door is still open when we get there. "Annie?" I yell out.
No answer. Her stuff is on the stairs, though. She brought an
overnight and there is a clothing bag hanging from the railing. I go
upstairs, expecting the bathroom to be closed. It's not. "Check the
back patio," I yell down to Sarah. I turn into my room and there are
American Beauties on my neatly made little bed.

I walk back downstairs just in time to see Anne coming out of Alice
Satory's backyard, azaleas in hand, still talking and waving back. I'm
struck by how good she looks, her strawberry blond hair loose and a
yellow skirt flowing around her legs. Alice's yard is lined with dark
evergreens along the back and Anne seems highlighted against them.
Alice and my mom would take a wheelbarrow out there with buckets and
gardening tools and pick the raspberries and strawberries and
huckleberries that grew between the trunks of the trees. I can
remember seeing Mom's backside sticking out between the trees.

Anne gives me a hug and a small kiss and I squeeze her a moment,
remembering how nice she feels. It's been a couple of months since
we've seen each other. The only real separation since we met nine
years ago. "Where's Sarah?"

"Out back," I say, starting to let go, but she pulls me closer. Into
her neck, I mumble, "Thanks for--"

"Sssshhhh. You're still my husband." Sarah comes back in and she and
Anne exchange nods. They used to be close, like sisters maybe. Sarah's
my lawyer now, though, and she turns up the stairs.

"Can you give me a hand a moment, Anne?" she says over her shoulder.

"Sure," Annie says, backing away from me without looking away. Her
free hand catches the banister perfectly, and she slowly turns up the
stairs. The azaleas are for Sarah's bed, I guess.

I stand, listening at the bottom of the stairs as they walk down the
hall. "I didn't think you'd be coming," Sarah says.

"I thought I should."

"For him or for Mom?" I hear Sarah as she closes the door to Mom's
room. Without really thinking, I walk into the living room, losing the
conversation for a moment. The house used to have steam heat and there
are these round grates between all of the floors. We're not a very
private family. I stand under the one to the bedroom, looking out the
front window at the street and listening to them upstairs.

"Well, I don't think it's very decent of you to come here, knowing
he's upset about the divorce," Sarah says.

"We're not divorced," Anne says. A green pick-up truck passes. Looks
like Moraine's.

"Then what are all of those letters I keep getting from your lawyer
about?"

"I'm not sure about the whole thing." I look up, wanting to read
Annie's face. There are silver cobwebs in the grate.

"This is a damn good time to be unsure, after you've screwed him."

"Why are you suddenly acting like you care about him?" I hear Anne's
voice rise like when we fought about having children and when she told
me she'd slept with my ex-friend Dodge.

"Because he's my brother and my client, and I won't have you come here
and upset him any more." I feel sick with the memory of Sarah
protecting me. When I was ten she pulled two boys off of me in a
fight. I started crying, not because I was hurt but because I was so
mad.

"He called me and wanted me to come."

"When?" She couldn't understand that it was okay to be mad and
fighting and ten years old, and I was too mad to speak.

"Last night, late." There is a long silence.

"I hear you've got another lover." Sarah can be very condescending.
She is much older than Anne in some ways.

"I left him. It wasn't right." Annie's voice cracks. Someone sits down
on the big bed. I can hear it.

"Well, good. I hope it was awful," Sarah says quickly.

"I don't have to listen to this." The begonias in the living room are
blooming, I notice.

"What makes you think you can come here after you've pulled all this
crap?" One of them moves across the room and I look up again.

"He called."

"Of course he called. He loves you. And you'd better understand the
responsibility of that." A shoe steps on the grate. It's Sarah's shoe,
and I step out of view.

"I do."

There is some quiet talk that I can't hear, as I think about who is
responsible for what. She had said that I'd lost myself in the
restaurant. That I'd let go of the things she wanted from me. I didn't
let go; I just got too busy to live.

"He's going to be very successful, now that the restaurant is getting
good reviews," Sarah says, after some time. She sounds a little
softer. I think Annie's been crying. I go out to the front porch.

At dinner time, I'm in the kitchen with Anne. She's taking the peeled
sections out of oranges for a salad. I showed her how to take the peel
off and then the individual sections out of their skins.

"I hear you're dating," I say. I don't think she knows that I listened
earlier.

"No, I'm not," she says, picking up another orange.

"Oh." I start to pick the cooked chicken meat from the bone for the
chicken-walnut sandwiches. There are lots of tendons and small bones
that you have to watch out for. I throw a piece of the chicken meat to
Sam, who snaps it out of the air. Her thick tail slaps the ground.

"Are you?"

"No," I say without looking up. This is a very complicated task that
requires attention.

"I did see someone for awhile," she says. "What else do you want in
this?"

"Do some of those pears. What happened?" I say, looking over at her. I
have to stop what I'm doing to do this.

She looks straight at me. "I had to tell him everything. We didn't
have anything between us."

"Oh."

"He didn't know me."

After dark, the three of us are sitting on the back patio. It is so
dark that I can see only outlines, shadows. The crickets have replaced
the cicadas' rhythmic whir. I feel much better than last night.

"This was a lot worse for me when Dad died," Sarah says.

"I was just there with Mom, mostly. I couldn't break down until it was
over."

"What was he really like?" Annie asks Sarah.

I hear Sarah's ice cubes clink in her glass as she sits back. "Firm
but very fair. Like when I got hit by a car -- "

"When did you get hit by a car?" I've never heard about it.

"Way before you were born. A lot happened before you were born, Newt.
Dad spanked me the next day. I know he didn't want to, but I think he
really felt like he was supposed to. I think he did a lot of things
because he thought he was supposed to." She takes a small sip of her
drink. She hasn't called me Newt in ten years or so. It was Dad's name
for me.

"That's not the way I remember him. I remember that he always knew
exactly what he was doing." I look at Annie; she's heard my side.

"He just acted that way around you. He used to call me in college and
ask me how he should handle things with you."

"You're kidding."

"No, he really worried about how you and he were. Everyone knew you
were Mom's. I used to be mad at you that he died first. Isn't that
stupid?" I shift a bit in my seat and so does Anne. It's funny to
think of my family talking about me. And Sarah getting upset. We all
sit still for a minute.

"He used to wash his feet in the bathroom sink," I say, more for
myself than for anyone.

"With Ivory soap. I used to sit there, talking, while he stood on one
foot, washing the other," Sarah adds. Anne laughs.

"Why did he do that?"

"I never thought to ask at the time, but I found out from Mom that
when he was in the war he didn't want to catch anything and he really
didn't get a chance to bathe too often so he washed his feet in his
helmet instead," Sarah says and sets her empty drink on the ground.

"I tried to wash my feet like that a few times, but I had to sit on
the sink ledge because I was too short, and Mom had a fit."

"I'm going up to bed." Sarah says and stands. The crickets stop
chirping and I hear Sam stretch and get up.

When the back porch screen bangs closed, Anne puts a hand out to me.
"I've really missed you," she says. The top of my chest feels tight. I
can't say anything. The crickets start their chorus again, reassured
by my silence.

"I'm not going through with the divorce, unless you want me to because
of what I did," she says.

"It's history. I never wanted you to leave in the first place."

"I'm going to bed. Coming?"

"Yes," I barely say, standing. My knees are a little shaky.

Lying in bed, Annie's arm across my stomach, her head on my shoulder,
I stare out the window of my room. This is the same window I have
looked out for years. I've seen the seasons change here enough times
to know exactly what they look like. I know the way the backyards look
under the blue streetlight in winter, when everything is asleep. I
know that our yard gets more leaves on it than Brodie's. I know it
perfectly.

"I think we should try dating first," she says into my neck. I can
feel her breath on me.

"You sure?" I can hear Sam's legs move; she's dreaming.

"More than I was when I left." I feel her kiss my shoulder.

"You'll have to get used to a dog," I laugh.

"Okay."



Twin beds are too small for two people, but for right now, it's fine.

Mom is shaking me. "You're wasting the day," she whispers into my ear.
I hunch my shoulders and giggle, pulling the covers up around me. I
know the blankets are untucked at the bottom of the bed but my feet
don't reach down there yet, anyway. "Do you want to go to the store
with me?"

"Yeah." I sit up.

"Then get cleaned up quick. I'm going in ten minutes."

At the grocery, she pushes the cart. "Get a cantaloupe," she directs
me and I go over and begin to pick them up, one by one, until I find
the heaviest.

I hand it to her. "This one?"

"Well, it's pretty good, but it's not ready. You see the little veins
on it?" she says, tracing one with her pinkie.

"Yeah." I trace one too.

"When the color between the little veins is orange, then it's ripe.
Otherwise they're still green, and you have to wait."

"Okay," and I start to look for another one. When I find it we buy
both; the other one will be ripe in a few days.

When I wake up, Annie is gone and I smell the air outside through the
open window. The Satorys are mowing their lawn. I look out the window
at the two of them. Jerry pushes the mower in diagonal stripes over
the yard while Alice works along the edge of the sidewalk. The lawn is
different colors of green depending on which way the mower went over
it, like velour. I'm nine blocks away from my mother's body, but she
is still in this house. Out back by the gate fertilizing her hollies,
tying Sam to the run, or digging grass out from between the bricks of
the patio like Alice is doing. Today, I put my mother in the ground
that she loves, that I love, so much. I wish we could bury her in her
own garden or back under the evergreens and strawberries across the
street. That's where she belongs.

"We're going to try to work things out," I say to Sarah, sitting
together while people come by to shake my hand and say, "Hello. Your
mother was..." Annie is talking to Pastor Lucas. I can see them.

"I know."

"Mom would be happy, don't you think?"

"Mom's happy regardless of what you do."

"What do you think?"

"I don't think this is the place," Sarah says, leaning forward to hug
Mrs. Paterson, whom she doesn't know. Then she leans over to me and
hugs me tight, just for a moment, and I know she's happy from the
hitch in her throat. She protects me because she loves me.

When we get back to the house, there is a sort of reception. People
come by. I know almost all of them, Sarah knows less, Anne knows most
of the ones I do. In the afternoon, I go out in the backyard. I sit
down next to the garden and let the tears come up. Mom's flowers are
better than the ones at the church, I decide, and somehow this stops
the crying. Then I see the steak knife in the dirt. I pick it up and
go over to cut a bachelor button to put it in my lapel, but then I
think better of it and cut an azalea instead. I put the knife in my
pocket. I need to tell Sarah that, more than anything, I want this.

=====================================================================

Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband
  by Robert Olen Butler

This is how I found out I could see things in another way: one night
Roy and me had a big argument and this wasn't unusual for us, really,
but he was calling me some pretty bad names and one thing and another
happened and my glass eye popped out. He never hit me. Not like the
husbands and wives I sit in front of to take down their words in the
courtroom when they're on the stand. But Roy can talk pretty rough. So
he says, "Loretta, you are one stupid bitch. Like right now. You
should see the stupid look on your face. I've never seen a stupider
face."

I don't know what to say about this. I'm real hurt, I know. But for a
long moment there's just silence and there's nothing inside me. Like
the silence in the court when my hands have been going a hundred and
seventy words a minute and it's like they've been listening on their
own and then they stop. Some woman is on the stand crying and keeping
the sound down because it embarrasses her. I just sit and wait and I
know she's crying but I don't even look up and I'm just empty. So I'm
like that in front of Roy right after he says he's never seen a
stupider face than mine, and he's waiting for me to tell him he's
right, I guess, and then I hit myself. My hand just flies up and
punches me in the face. It's the only logical thing, I guess. He won't
quite do it, so it's up to me.

And all of a sudden I'm looking at Roy and he's a little alarmed, but
in addition to his face in my head is another sight. A blur of
miniblinds and china hutch and then the ceiling and the pink oriental
rug and the ceiling and the rug and the ceiling. And then both of
these things are in me, both real, both clear as can be: the temples
on Roy's face throbbing and the little red light on the smoke detector
flashing. My glass eye has flown out of my face and is lying on the
rug about ten feet away and it's staring at the ceiling and I'm seeing
through it.

Roy says, "This is too goddam much, Loretta. You did that on purpose."

I close my eye--the one in my head--just to check this out and sure
enough, I'm still looking at the ceiling. When I open my eye, Roy is
gone. I hear his voice trailing out of the room. "Put your glass eye
back in, Loretta. You disgust me."

I've come to accept this thing about me, having a glass eye. It's a
very good one. A good match. So I'm not disgusted by this. I go over
to where it's lying on the rug and I look down. And I look up. At the
same time. There's my cornflower blue eye lying there on the pink rug
and all I can say is that it looks astonished. Wide eyed, I guess. And
in my head is my face staring down, one more cornflower blue eye, and
one sunken pucker waiting to be filled.

"Aren't you pretty," I say. And that's as big a surprise to me as the
punch.

That night Roy and I have made things up, as we always do. We're lying
in the bed and it's dark and I'm thinking about all this. I've heard
the lines before. From him. From the stories of the women on the stand
in divorce court. At some point the men start getting angry over
little things. And they stop touching you. And then once you suspect
them, there's a brief time they try to be nice. Just for a little
while. I think these are the men who have some little bit of a decent
thing in them and they know that they loved this woman once, this
woman they're betraying. Roy gave me flowers out of the blue a couple
of weeks ago. "Why?" I say to him.

And he says, "Because, you know, because we're married. And you're a
good woman."

I've heard enough of other peoples' stories to know those are scary
words. I say, "That doesn't make sense, Roy. You haven't given me
flowers in. . .years." I almost say fourteen. I know it's fourteen.
But I don't want him to know I know. It struck me once that a lot of
time had gone by since the last gesture like that and I figured out
how much and then I waited and counted. It's pretty sad, really,
waiting those years and noticing it all along and you don't even have
it in you to say something.

But I don't have to tell him the number in order for the mood to
change in a big way. He gets real angry real fast. Another sign. "Then
to hell with it," he says and he takes the flowers away from me and
throws them across the room.

So I lie in the dark on the night my eye popped out and I could see
through it, and I think about Roy and me. He's building an airplane in
the garage. A real airplane, from a kit. He built one before and he
flew it around for a couple of weeks and then he sold it. This is the
work he has made for himself. The new plane sits out there and he goes
to it every day and its bones are exposed, its ribs and its spine, and
he puts his hands to it while I go off and take down the words of all
the women who waited to speak and then it was too late to save
whatever it was they had.

And that makes me think about what I have. I like Roy. This is Roy: he
was a pilot when I met him, teaching people to fly Cessnas out at the
airport. So on our first date he says, "I want to show you the greater
Cedar Rapids area like you've never seen it." And he takes me up and
we go a little way out of town and we do figure eights over the corn
fields and we fly down low and we chase some steers across a pasture
and we swoop up and ruffle the tops of some water oaks and we go and
do a lazy ring-around at the grain elevator, and he's saying, Look at
this, look at that, look what there is to see, Loretta. And he makes
the Cessna leap and soar and he laughs and touches my hand to make
sure I'm noticing all this. And what I'm seeing is this grown up child
of a man pedaling real fast on a trike and showing off for his girl,
and I like that. I want to reach over and tousle his hair. And he'll
take me out to the garage sometimes and show me what he's done. Even
still. Even a few days ago. Look Loretta. I'm putting her skin on.

But it's not the plane in the garage I'm jealous of. I wish it was
just that. I think about how he still shows me sometimes what he's
done and then I think of the woman he must be seeing and then I think
again about him in that Cessna on our first date and he sees something
off to his left and he lets out a little cry of delight and he doesn't
say "Look" yet. Instead, he pulls us onto our side and we loop around
and we're flying in the opposite direction and he's leaning over me
and he says "There, Loretta," and I can see the sun in a thousand
flakes on a little pond out in the middle of a pasture. "I'll always
turn us around for you," he says to me and he means because of my eye.
He took the news of my glass eye without a flinch even before he asked
me on this date, and he even said it just made him realize how
beautiful my other eye was.

But he can talk mean. And he can go to bed with some other woman. This
is something I know from all the experience I've had with how these
things go. And from the fact that he washed the sheets the other day
without telling me. From our very own bed. This is a bad sign.

I'm thinking all this and I find my fingers moving faintly under the
covers. Taking it all down. It's a familiar story to them. And then
they stop. Because there's a silence in my head. And tears starting to
come. I didn't tousle his hair when I first had the urge. I waited
till the first time we made love, which was on our wedding night,
which was the way I wanted it, which was still the way it was pretty
much done in our circle in Cedar Rapids, even though it was the early
seventies and everywhere else things were pretty loose. And on this
night of my eye jumping out, I realize something about those ten or
twelve months that I said, No. No, not till we're married, Roy. I
realize that was the last time I really felt I had some control over
my life. It was very nice, to tell the truth, those months with Roy
before the marriage. Not that I didn't want to put my hands in his
hair and all over him. But the holding on to my life was better.

Now I turn in the bed and he has his back to me and he's snoring
softly and I reach out my hand to his head, but I don't quite touch
him. His hair is the color of those galloping steers. And it's matted
and swirled like them too. And I still want to take the tips of my
fingers and furrow them through. Does she do that too? Now I want to
furrow through like a plow. Like a sharp, hard plow blade. Somebody's
been in this bed. Maybe that very day. I hold back a cry. I lay flat
on my back and I look into the dark above me and I think of my glass
eye watching the flash of red. My face burns like it should be setting
off all the alarms. My eye. I know from countless cases that marriages
can blow up on you from no more than this, some sheets in the washer
and some suspicious kindness. I don't want to do it that way. And
suddenly I have a plan.

The next night Roy is in the bathroom with the door closed. He's
hiking his throat and passing wind in plaintive little moos--he has
never passed wind in my presence in all the years we've been married,
a thing I sometimes credit him for and sometimes blame him for. He
either respects me or he has no sense of closeness to me. But I can
hear him through the door of the master bathroom and I'm ready to act,
but first, on an impulse, I pull back the quilt and look closely at
the sheets. They haven't been washed. I bend to them and I sniff and
sniff and I'm trying to catch a whiff of her perfume or her sex, but
there's nothing but the second day fade of Tide. Then the sounds end
in the bathroom and I straighten and I've prepared a glass of water--a
simple, clear dr inking glass--and I pick it up and wait.

Roy comes out buttoned to the throat in his pajamas and ready for
sleep, and he doesn't look at me right away. He goes to his side of
the bed and he pulls back the quilt and he plumps the pillow. Then he
realizes I'm not doing the same and he looks up. When I have his
attention, though I make it seem I'm oblivious to him, I reach up and
press and pluck and out comes my glass eye. I carefully launch it into
the surface of the water, and though my face is turned away, Roy and
the far side of the room ripple and then clarify and its like he's
rising up but it's really my eye sinking and Roy rises, gaping, and
then I've settled at the bottom of the glass and I'm looking at him
from there, clear and steady.

"Loretta, what are you doing?"

"I called the doctor. He said to give my socket a little rest at
night."

I don't like the way Roy shrugs, like he's saying it doesn't make any
difference anyway. But that's what we've come to, Roy and me. So he
climbs into bed and I carefully position my glass of water on the
nightstand. I can see the whole bed from there. I've even put a vase
of flowers on the stand, as well, to make the glass a little less
conspicuous. He has not noticed the flowers.

Then the lights are out and we're lying side by side, and Roy hasn't
turned his back to me yet. We're both lying with our faces up and our
eyes are closed, and of course I'm seeing all of this. And I don't
expect to be so moved by it, but I am. The covers are pulled up to our
throats and our two faces float side by side in the dim light,
drifting into unconsciousness together, Roy and me, with all we've
been through, the flying around over Iowa, the living in a house. And
even the fighting, getting all worked up together. There was even some
sense of closeness about that. So there we lie, very quiet, in
profile, only my good eye showing, and there's a kind of sweet feeling
in me about what I'm seeing, and a sudden sad feeling about what I'm
doing. I almost fish my eye out of the glass of water and put it back
in my head and keep it there. But I don't. I have to know. Things have
popped out of their socket and I have to see.

The night was odd. I slept but I didn't sleep. I dreamed but I didn't
dream. The only thing in my head, no matter how far deep I went in my
sleep, was Roy and me lying beside each other, him putting his back to
me pretty quick but turning to me again later in the night and even
letting a sleeping arm fall around my quilted waist for a time, a
gesture that seemed so natural that I wonder how many of these
unconscious embraces there were that I never knew I got.

In the morning I put my eye back in and I went to work and Roy went to
his plane and, at some point, to this other woman. Or she came to him.
But I wasn't quite ready to deal with that. I had to get Roy used to
the eye in the glass. And so it went on like this for a week and then
two, and one night I thought I smelled some cheap perfume in my bed
and the next day I came home from work and found the sheets washed
again, and then I knew it was time.

That night, while Roy was farting in private, I put the glass of water
with my eye right in front of the flower vase and arranged the flowers
to dangle down over the top of the glass. And in the morning I got up
early and whispered to Roy that I had to get to the court to
transcribe some notes and I put my sunglasses on and I went out, my
glass eye still sitting on the night table.

It wasn't easy driving. I'm glad he just slept for awhile or I might
have killed myself on the highway. But it was hard enough just
watching him turn on his back, his hair matted and cowlicked. He's
still a handsome man. He draped a forearm over his eyes to block the
morning sun coming through the cracks in the blinds. And he moved his
legs and a horn blared at me and I was drifting into the next lane,
drifting toward the movement of Roy's legs. I jerked the car back and
looked in the rearview mirror and my face was there, masked by the
blank stare of my sunglasses. I knew what was underneath, and the
sunglasses wouldn't do in court.

So I stopped at a drug store a block from the court building. There
were some choices to cover my socket: white gauze stick-ons;
flesh-colored stick-ons; a cloth patch with a band to go around the
head, all in white with tiny pink flowers, like a baby's pajamas; a
black eye patch with a black strap, like from a pirate movie. But I
was the audience, not the movie, and though Roy was still sleeping, he
was getting restless, his head angled back now and his mouth wide
open, his legs slowly swimming under the covers. Roy was the star of
this movie and he was ready for his big scene. I grabbed a box of
flesh colored stick-ons and took them to the counter and a young woman
was there, rather pretty but still struggling with pimples at her
juiced up stage of life, and I wondered how old the woman was who
would come before my waiting eye. This young?

I pulled out a twenty dollar bill and I shoved it at this poor girl,
ready to take out this fear on her, and Roy suddenly snaps awake.
"What do you hear?" I say.

"Pardon me?" This from the clerk.

"Nothing," I say to her and Roy cocks his head. "Is it her?"

"Is it who?"

"What?" I say to the clerk. I don't know what she's talking about.

The girl shoots me a funny look and works fast at giving me the change
and for a moment this seems suspicious. Like she's late to go see Roy
or something. "You going off duty?" I ask her, even though I'm already
letting go of this brief, crazy thought.

"No."

But then it's suddenly clear that the cock of Roy's head is him taking
a crick out of his neck. He's moving lazy now. "Not yet," I say. "You
bastard."

There's money being forced into my hand. "Count the change yourself.
And you're an old bitch."

I'm moving away from the register and the girl says, "When I do get
off, my boyfriend is here waiting." I'm out the door and Roy is
sitting on the side of the bed wiggling his toes. Smug. He's watching
his toes and he's feeling smug. I want to drive home right now and
find something around the kitchen to hit him with. But at least I
realize he isn't the kind to go hang around a drug store to pick up a
girl with pimples when she gets off work.

I'm in divorce court today and I go in to check my machine. Roy has
been gone for awhile, off in the bathroom, I think. I sit and load the
paper and pull out the receiver in the back. We still use an old
paper-punch machine and it makes this real soft, squishy sound under
my hands. A nice sound. I roll out a few test words and all of a
sudden Roy is there naked before me. He's still damp and it's been a
long time since he just walked into a room with me while he was naked.
Especially in the daylight. And even though it's just my eye and he
doesn't even know it's there, I feel for a moment like he's doing this
on purpose, just for me. Then something in me jumps the other way and
I get hot: he's doing it for her, she's about to walk in. Then the
juice goes out of me. I realize it's for neither of us. He looks
around much too casually, and then he scratches his butt and heads for
his underwear drawer.

I discover that my hands have been at work. I force my attention away
from Roy and I pull up the folds of the steno scroll and I translate
it back from the little runts of words I'm trained to put there. "He's
naked," I've written. "He's standing by the bed and it's been a long
time since I've looked at that dangly part. You've got a sweet dangly
part, old Roy. I wish you'd walk like that for me. But she's just out
of sight. I can feel her. And this part is for her. Some woman knows
this better than me now, you smug son of a bitch. Go put your boxers
on, I don't give a damn about your body."

This is a little scary for me. I tear off these words at the next fold
and crumple them into my purse. I get up and I stagger down the
hallway to the our little clerk lounge, and by the time I get there
Roy has thrown his clothes on and gone away. The bed is empty. The
room is empty. I'm glad for that, and I pour a cup of coffee and I sit
down in a Naugahyde chair. And I drink the coffee fast, so that it
burns my mouth. I do that on purpose, I think. And then I think I
should pour the coffee on my hands and burn them and it will give me
an excuse to go home, and I should hurry there before anything can
happen, maybe even before she arrives, and I'd come up the drive
honking my horn, just in case she was early, and wait, pretending to
fumble with my purse or something, waiting for her to slip,
undiscovered, out the back door, and then I should go into the house
and get my eye and put it back in my head so that I cannot see.

But I don't. It's enough for now that my mouth burns and the bed is
empty. I convince myself that this is the way it will be all day long.
He will touch only his airplane and I will return home this evening
and things will go on just the same. That's what I want now, I think.
Briefly.

They make the first call for the court and I go out of the room and
there's only this empty bed before me. I have not filled this bed
either, I realize. I have climbed into this thing and lain, still and
passionless, for years. The image of that floats in me with every step
I take, every corner I turn in these corridors.

And then I am in my place before my machine and I am ready to think
with my hands. There is a soft murmur of voices nearby, from the
gallery, and we wait and the bailiff speaks and we all rise, and there
is only sunlight creeping in my head. Thin stripes of sun from the
blinds, moving slaunchwise across the bed, too slow to follow in the
moment, but clear, also, in the longer minutes, like the hand on a
clock moving.

I'm in a quicker place. My hands fly now. A woman is fed up. She wants
out. She's sitting on the stand and she has a moon face and puffy eyes
and she's near enough that I can almost reach out and touch her. There
are children and she wants complete custody. Roy and me never had
children and we never figured out why. By the time it occurred to us
that this was so, we weren't caring anymore.

At the very moment that I think this, there's a pause for tears on the
stand and I feel my hands write, "A sad story," and it's about me, I
think. Nobody's said those words in the courtroom. I tell my hands to
pay attention. The bed before me is empty. The sun is gone from it. A
tissue box passes from the judge to the woman and I'm writing, "You
fly in figure eights over sunlight scattered on a pond and then you're
lying on a bed in a dark room and you don't care to touch and you
don't care that no life at all has come from you."

I lift my hands and flex them, wring them together. Try to squeeze the
distraction out of them. A nose brats softly nearby. Pay attention, I
tell myself. I put my hands to the keys. The woman says that she's
ready now.

And Roy and his woman stagger into my sight. They're in a clinch
already and they spin around the room. I gasp. Aloud, I know. The
judge has a round face too. It rises over the sidebar and I turn the
gasp into a cough and hunch over the keys. My hands are afraid of the
judge and they listen to the testimony, but the rest of me sees a
woman not even thirty with a long, tangled hairdo like she went to bed
wet and slept on her head. And she's got her arms around my husband
and now her legs too and she and Roy fall on the bed.

I'm pressing this eye in my head shut. But it's my eye in the glass
I'm wanting to close. I've seen enough. "He won't leave me alone," my
hands write, the words of the woman on the stand. But then, "They rip
at each other's clothes. I will find the bed full of buttons tonight."
I open my eye and I can't hear the words in my hands now but I beg
them to behave. "Please don't," I whisper, very low, and I'm talking
to my hands and I'm talking to my husband and there is anger on the
stand to drown me out and I whisper it again, "Don't. Don't."

And they are naked and she's got a butt that spreads more than mine
and she's got something of a pot. "Flab," I whisper. But listen to me.
Have I got a right to criticize? At least her flab is against Roy's
and he wants it that way and she rises over him and he's on his back.
And he's on my side of the bed. My side. "Move over," I say aloud.

"What's that?" the judge says.

"Can I hear that over?" I say.

The judge turns to the witness. "Please repeat your answer for the
stenographer to record it."

Concentrate. I close my good eye again and I listen to my hands and
they're saying something about a husband who won't listen, who doesn't
care, and maybe I'm writing down this woman's testimony and maybe I'm
just writing down the words in my own head. But I don't care either,
to tell the truth. I stopped listening too, to tell the truth. The
woman is thrashing her tangled hair around and her head is thrown
back, her face lifted to the ceiling. I look at Roy. From the water
glass beside our bed I look at my husband's face. His face will tell
me.

"He doesn't care." I've said this aloud, I realize. Roy's face has
told me at once. His mouth is set hard. His eyes are dead.

"Have you missed again?" the judge says.

"Yes, your honor. Is it, 'He doesn't care?'"

"You're right," the woman on the stand says, her face turning to me
eagerly. The judge is a man. Her lawyer is a man. Her husband's lawyer
is a man. She turns to me and she is glad to know someone understands.
"You're right," she says.

The judge says to her, "We want to know what you said. Not if you
agree with what the stenographer thinks she heard."

She's talking again, repeating, my hands are working. But then they
stop. The woman in my bed has lowered her face and turns to look
straight at me. Her eyes widen. Her mouth moves. Roy's face turns to
me too.

And the judge says my name. He's looking at me too, half risen from
his chair. "What's happening? Are you all right?"

The woman climbs off my husband and off the bed and she's coming to
me, I realize. I rise up from my chair. As if I can confront her now,
beat the crap out of her.

The judge says to the two lawyers, "Loretta is my very best
stenographer."

The woman bends and her frizzy hair drapes down and she brings her
face near to me, her nose bulging from the curve of my glass.

"What is it, Loretta? Your eye is bothering you?"

"Yes," I say and I'm glad I chose the stick-on patch that looks like a
big band-aid.

The woman has big eyes the color of dirty engine oil. I growl from
looking at them and I put my hand over my eye, but it's only the
patch.

"Can you continue?" the judge asks.

I think of Roy's dead face. He might put this woman aside. He might
still want me. I say, "I don't know if I can continue."

"Do you want to try?"

"I don't know," I say.

But then the woman's hand appears out of nowhere and the water blurs
and I can see only darkness and then I am eyeball to eyeball with this
woman and then the room whirls around and falls over and I'm steady
again, but looking sideways at Roy. His face isn't dead anymore. His
mouth is hanging open and his eyes are wide in amazement and I realize
that the woman has stuck my eye in her navel like a belly dancer's
jewel.

"Oh no," I shout.

"What is it?" the judge says.

My eye is approaching Roy's frozen face.

"My eye," I say.

Roy can't snap out of it and I think he knows I'm watching and I am
very near him and his face begins slowly to sink. She is standing
before him and pushing him down.

"Stop!" I shout.

"We'll get a replacement for you, Loretta," the judge says.

"No!" I cry.

"It's for your good," the judge says. "You're obviously in pain. You
don't have to do this if you're in pain."

Roy pops back up and he and the judge are side by side in my head.
Then Roy's face angles up and he smiles at her, a smile warm and full
of shit.

"I'm in pain," I say.

"Then stop, Loretta," the judge says.

Roy's hand comes at me, snatches my eye, and I am flying into the
bedclothes and darkness.

Now there's only the judge before me. My hand goes up and it touches
the patch on my eye. Touches my face. Very gently. "I can leave," I
say.

"Yes," he says.

And I do.

=====================================================================

eSCENE 1997 Authors


Darrin Navarro, Atlas' Hips
<navarros@earthlink.net>

"I live in a modest house in Glendale, California, with my wife and
our two kids. There is a detached garage behind the house which serves
during my prolific periods as my writing space. I've recently cleared
it of a bunch of stuff that we don't really need, and am trying to
jumpstart one of those periods again.

"The mortgage on the house is paid with work I do for the movies."

Of Atlas' Hips:

"Atlas' Hips was inspired by two things, each of which had a similar
effect on me. The first was some traveling my wife and I did just
before we conceived our first child; the second was her second
pregnancy. We had travelled very fast, visiting dozens of countries in
too short a span of time, and we rarely had an opportunity to
thoroughly soak up a moment. By the time our first baby was seventeen
months old (the second was due within weeks) I had the same sensation
as I had at the end of our trip: that some marvelous things had gone
by me very quickly and I'd not known how to observe them fully before
they were gone.

"This feeling was distilled and made literal for me when my wife and I
were walking past one another in the house and I casually put my hand
on my her belly to feel for the new baby. She said, "You're not going
to be able to do that anymore." (We were in agreement that this second
was our last child). That line seemed to descibe many of the very
small but magnificent things I had seen over the previous couple of
years."

---

Victoria Lancelotta, Festival
<vfl@netdoor.com>

Victoria Lancelotta was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, before
driving south a few years back and winding up in Hattiesburg,
Mississippi. Her fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Threepenny
Review, the Mississippi Review Web, and other magazines. She has been
a resident of the MacDowell Colony and the Djerassi Resident Artists'
Program and will be a visiting scholar at the 1997 Breadloaf Writers'
Conference. She is the fiction editor of the Georgetown Review.

"I usually agonize over stories for months at a shot, taking weeks to
get a single paragraph down and right (or rather, as 'right' as I can
get it). "Festival," though, was different - as soon as I had the
opening scene on the page, the rest came in a rush, fast and furious:
I think because I had such a clear idea of what the backdrop of the
action would be. The greasy pole (a real and annual contest at a
particular church carnival in Baltimore), the heat of summer, the
character's sense of witness and waiting, and the way family members
can betray one another without a word: these things seemed to 'tell'
themselves."

---

Lucy Harrison, Just Another Night and Day
<LHARRISO@ircc.cc.fl.us>

Lucy Harrison works full time as a Reference Librarian at a community
college in Florida. She has been writing fiction for some years now,
since taking Harry Crews' creative writing class at the University of
Florida. Many of Lucy's works have been published online in the ezine
Oyster Boy, and another one of her stories, "Sanctuary's for the
Birds", was also selected for inclusion in eSCENE 1996.

The inspiration for "Just Another Night and Day" came from a trip her
boyfriend took to Georgia, to pick up a friend's piano. From there it
evolved, very slowly, and with a lot of help from Oyster Boy editor
Damon Sauve. Lucy welcomes email questions, comments, or inquiries
about her work, and is always open to publishing in new forums.

---

Gregory Cowles, Kosher
<gc125@columbia.edu>

Gregory Cowles is pursuing his MFA at Columbia University, where he
has a teaching-writing fellowship, and where he serves as editor of
Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. He is writing a novel.

"It's been so long since I wrote Kosher that it's a little strange to
revisit that time and remember what gave rise to the story. I did have
a friend with a retarded sister while I was growing up, and when we
were in seventh grade the rumor went around school that he had taken
her to bed; I never spent a lot of time wondering whether the rumor
was true or not, but I suppose this story is a way of letting him off
the hook all these years later. When I started writing it I was
working, unhappily, as a paralegal in California, and taking hockey
lessons in an attempt to enrich my free time: hence hockey's
appearance in the story. Beyond these autobiographical nuggets, Kosher
is wholly invented, and stems from my obsessive neurotic musings on
conformity and betrayal."

---

Allen Woodman, Saved by Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald
<allen.woodman@nau.edu>

Allen Woodman was born and raised in Alabama. He was educated at
Huntingdon College and Florida State University. Woodman's latest
collection of short stories, Saved by Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, was
published in 1997 by The University of West Alabama's Livingston Press
(Station 22, Livingston, AL 35470), in their Contemporary Writers
Series, specializing in offbeat and Southern literature. Woodman is
also the co-author of several children's picture books, including the
popular classic, The Cows Are Going To Paris. He now lives in
Flagstaff, Arizona, where he directs the Creative Writing Program at
Northern Arizona University.

"As a child, I used to play in the cemetery where Hank Williams is
buried. I also attended a small, liberal arts college, not too
different than the one in the story. Yes, there was a 'real' George
and the Red Lady still walks the halls of the college. Oh, the
Fitzgerald house is still standing. I guess there's something in the
story about man's quest for a nude bibliophile, something for the
great literary symbol hunters to enjoy, but, mostly, I hope the story
makes the reader smile."

---

Marcus Eubanks, Selections from the New World
<eubanks@pobox.com>

Marcus Eubanks' day (and often night) job as an Emergency Medicine
resident at a big inner-city teaching hospital leaves him rather less
time for writing than he'd really like. He has an almost maniacal
passion for the work though, so he puts up with it. His sole regret
about the whole thing is that unlike the characters in the tv show
E.R. he has yet to arrive home after work to find a lovely
dripping-wet nude woman waiting for him in his living room.

When he's not working, writing or trying to make up for chronic sleep
deprivation, he can be found on various balconies around Pittsburgh,
drinking beer with friends and occasionally shouting at passers-by.

"Selections" marks his second appearance in eSCENE.

"'Selections' was conceived during my training in Philadelphia where I
saw report after report reveal that our options for treating
infections caused by organisms we'd cultured from patients were
becomming increasingly limited. The characters are friends of mine,
and yes, I do wonder occasionally if our jobs might not quite
literally kill us one of these days.

"The title is courtesy of the editorial staff of InterText. Without
their encouragement, and specifically the help of Jason Snell who
helped me shape the piece, it's likely that I would have abandoned my
attempts at writing years ago."

---

Neal Gordon, When Something Goes
<gordon@ea.pvt.k12.pa.us>

Neal Gordon began studying writing at Iowa State University under Jane
Smiley. At her recommendation, he transferred as an undergraduate to
the University of Iowa creative writing program. Following completion
of his degree in general studies, he took Frank Conroy's
recommendation and left the Midwest for the east coast. In 1991, he
began to study with David Bradley at Temple University in Philadelphia
and completed graduate school while publishing several stories,
including an excerpt from an unpublished novel. Currently, Gordon
teaches at the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia and works with the
Working Writer's Group, a long-running critical group residing in the
Philadelphia area.

"I remember that I was interested in writing a small, quiet story.
'When Something Goes' stems from a few pieces of disparate
information. Gossamer threads, the fireworks displays of my childhood,
and a stormy night when I was 14 or so, living in a small town in
rural Iowa in the middle of my parent's disintegration, are the
sources. I tried to let the emotional content of those items dictate a
tone for the story. The plot itself was simple enough to allow for a
wide range of memory and digression while encapsulating a short time
sequence.

---

Robert Olen Butler, Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering
Husband
<dewbutlr@sprynet.com>

Robert Olen Butler has published nine critically acclaimed books since
1981 - seven novels and two books of short stories, one of which, A
Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
in 1993. The other collection of stories, Tabloid Dreams, was
published in the fall of 1997 and included "Woman Uses Glass Eye to
Spy on Philandering Husband." Though some of the stories in that
volume first appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, Esquire,
and The Paris Review, two of them made their debut online, at the
Mississippi Review Web. Butler's short fiction has been chosen four
times by Best American Short Stories and six times by New Stories from
the South. He is currently co-producing a proposed HBO series based on
Tabloid Dreams.

"'Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband' was inspired,
as were all the stories in Tabloid Dreams, by the headlines in that
bottom rack at the supermarket, the fantasy-apocalypse rack, which
includes The Weekly World News and The Sun. I figured these papers
consistently got the headlines right but the stories all wrong, so I
took on the first-person voices of the central characters behind the
headlines and set the record straight. I could have placed this story
in a print magazine, but I made the conscious decision to embrace the
Web. Sitting at my computer screen with the whole Internet laid out
before me, I feel the same way my great grandfather must have felt
sitting on his front porch watching his first horseless carriage go
by. The technology still may be crude, but this is the future."

=====================================================================

eSCENE 1997 Editors

Diana Gabaldon, 1997 Guest Editor
<76530.523@compuserve.com>

Diana Gabaldon holds a master's degree in marine biology and a Ph.D.
in ecology, and spent a dozen years as a university professor before
turning to write fiction full-time. Her previous publishing history
includes scholarly articles and comic book stories for Walt Disney, as
well as the award-winning novels Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber,
Voyager, and the recently-released New York Times bestseller, Drums of
Autumn. She lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, with her husband, three
children, and a large number of animals.


Jeff Carlson, Series Editor
<editor@escene.org>

Jeff spent several years doing desktop publishing before jumping into
the Web publishing arena by founding and editing eSCENE, the
Internet's only yearly anthology of the best short fiction appearing
on the Web. A stint as Managing Editor at a small Seattle-based book
publisher convinced Adam and Tonya Engst that they should tap him for
the same position at the widely-read newsletters TidBITS and NetBITS.
Jeff has published articles in Macworld and Adobe Magazine, and was a
contributing editor and columnist for Adobe's online venture,
adobe.mag. In addition to writing and editing, he's an accomplished
Web designer and consultant through his company Never Enough Coffee
creations. People around him seem to possess strong urges to
constantly ask him questions.


Shannon Christenot, Assistant Editor

"Many aspects of editing fascinate me, but the effective use of
language is more stimulating to me (for the sake of a now very
extended metaphor) than a good cup of coffee. Language can be both
startlingly aggressive and powerfully delicate. Therefore, I spend as
much time as I can, while still making the rent, reading both
literature and garbage. In the midst of a horrible novel I'll find a
brief passage of lyrical brilliance that simultaneously amazes and
depresses me. Amazing, because it captures and immortalizes a brief
piece of truth; depressing, because the rest of the novel is so bad.
In these instances, I flash back to a childhood fascination with those
globe paperweights full of snow that look suspiciously like that
Southern delicacy grits. The trappings were tacky, the snow swirled
sluggishly, but at the heart of it was an immutable scene.

"When I'm not dividing my time between the literary canon and whatever
else in reach from the couch, I passively-aggressively garden in my
window boxes (I will grow peas), ignore both my refrigerator and my
treadmill (they cancel each other out in the great cosmic weight
battle), see an occasional movie, and take an occasional walk."


=====================================================================

eSCENE 1997 Nominated Stories

The Alsop Review
<http://www.hooked.net/~jalsop/>

	"Atlas' Hips," Darrin Navarro
	"Disconnection," William Trapman
	"The Swing," Jaimes Alsop
 

Blue Moon Review
<http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/bpq/front-page.html>

	"Kite Hill," Jordan 
	"Kosher," Gregory Cowles
	"Rhododendron," Jennifer Buxton
	"A Small Indulgence," Aldo Alvarez
	"Wind Across the Breaks," Lisa Norris
 

Clique of the Tomb Beetle
<http://www.tyrell.net/~rmcheal>

	"The Face In the Window," Michael J. Albee
	"A Site For Sore Ahyahs," Frederick Rustam
	"What Bled Through the Wall," Jacqueline Carey
 

CrossConnect
<http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect/>

	"Cowboy," Hal Jaffe
	"Monday at Le Bon Temps Roule," Doug Fine
	 

Edifice
<http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~lmgorbea/>

	"Lucid Confusion," Brandt Ryan
	"Spider Man," Daryl Sunny Mileaf
 

Instant Classics
<http://www.instantclassics.com/>

	"A Walk Before Dinner," David L. Ulin
 

InterText
<http://www.etext.org/Zines/InterText/>

	"Danielle," Edward Ashton
	"Facing Myself in the Dark," Carla Brumble
	"Fade Out, Mrs. Bewley," Rupert Goodwins
	"Iowa Basketball," Michelle Rogge Gannon
	"Selections From the New World," Marcus Eubanks
	"Waiting for Waves," William Trapman
	"Wave," Craig Boyko
	"When Something Goes," Neal Gordon
	"With Thoughts of Sarah," Christopher O'Kennon
 

It's a Bunny

	"The Aviary," Andrew Mullins
	"The New Pants," Jennifer Duncan
 

Lexicon Magazine
<http://www.ozemail.com.au/~lexmag>

	"Acheron," Clayton Elliott
	"Heavy Brackets," Shawn Kerivan
	"Quid Pro Quo," Hamish F C Keddie
	"The Unknown Soldier," Rob Bretz
 

Mississippi Review Web
<http://sushi.st.usm.edu/~barthelm/index.html>

	"10K Rob," David Alexander
	"Clinic," Jane Armstrong
	"Credentials," John Holman
	"Faux Pas," P.J. Jason
	"Festival," Victoria Lancelotta
	"The Golden Monica," Ben Marcus
	"The Monitor," James Poniewozik
	"Rocket Man," Thom Jones
	"Saved by Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald," Allen Woodman
	"We're Sorry We Hit Your Dog," Beck Finley
	"Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband," Robert Olen
	  Butler


Morpo Review
<http://morpo.com/>

	"Me and Ritchie," David Alexander
 

Motley Focus Locus
<http://www.motley-focus.com/>

	"Lightning on a Chicken Fence," Harley Dartt
 

O Shenandoah! Country Rag
<http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/1293>

	"February," Hank Zimmerman
	"The Loch," Grace Willetts
	"The Secret Garden," John Waybright
	"This One's Gonna Break Your Heart," Jae Harris
 

Oyster Boy Review
<http://sunsite.unc.edu/ob/>

	"Just Another Night and Day," Lucy Harrison
	"Lucy," David Lee Parker
 

Purr Magazine
<http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/c_hinse>

	"Consumption," Jessica Barron
	"The Gnomon," Tony Giovia
	"I Am," Michelle Grieff
	"Requiem For Ryan," Walidah Imarisha
 

Roar
<http://www.altx.com/silence/www.monster.com/roar>

	"Danger: Hole in the Floor," Rebecca Schuman
	"Splendid Isolation," Lea Deschenes
	"Window of Attraction," Jessica Barron
	 

Story Bytes
<http://thor.he.net/~stories>

	"Before the Hermitage Threshold," M. Stanley Bubien
	"The Euthanasia Machine," M. Stanley Bubien
	"Four Days on a Trail of Tears (A Four-Part Serial),"
	  M. Stanley Bubien
	"A Passing on in the Night," M. Stanley Bubien
	"Priestly Obligation," M. Stanley Bubien
	"The Stench of Evil," M. Stanley Bubien
	"Wide Awake in the Empty Room," M. Stanley Bubien
 

Transformation Story Archive
<http://www.t0.or.at/~thomash/tsa/>

	"All For My Lady ...," Wanderer 
	"Beginnings from Endings," Brian Eirik Coe
	"The Bingo Pool," Gavin Steyn
	"DNA II," Stephanie 
	"The Island," Bob Stein
	"The New Exhibit," Daniel Craven
	"Questions and Answers," Brian Eirik Coe
	"Rachel's Collar," Bryan Derksen
	"Reality Bites," Brian Eirik Coe
	"Reassignment," Thomas Hassan
	"Seamless," Wanderer 
	"Shell Game," Bob Stein
	"Sometime Near the begining," #6 
	"The Swan Curse," Circe 
	"The Trickster's Ways," Mark van Sciver
	"The Truth about Redstone Ridge," Brian Eirik Coe
	"What I Really Want...," Jack DeMule
 

Zuzu's Petals
<http://www.zuzu.com/>

	"Mobius Strip," Marjorie Levenson
	"Walter's Game," Luann Jacobs
 
=====================================================================

Ezines

This list of ezines should get you started when looking for more
online writing. It is by no means comprehensive, and doesn't
necessarily reflect involvement with eSCENE.

256 Shades of Gray
<http://www.primenet.com/~blkgrnt/index.html>

Acacia
<http://bchi.com/acacia/acacia.html>

AfterNoon
<http://motley-focus.com/~timber/afternoon.html>

Alsop Review, The
<http://www.hooked.net/~jalsop/>

Alt-X
<http://www.altx.com/>

Ariga
<http://www.ariga.com>

Barcelona Review
<http://www.web-show.com/Barcelona/Review>

Bearlife
<http://www.bearlife.com>

Beatrice
<http://www.primenet.com/~grifter/beatrice.html>

Black Swan Review
<http://www.theblackswan.com/review/index.htm>

Blithe House Quarterly
<http://www.spectra.net/~aalvarez/BHQ.html>

Blue Moon Review
<http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/bpq/front-page.html>

Bonebox, The
<http://www.hway.net/netgru/bonebox>

Bridge, The
<http://www.bri-dge.com/>

Burst!
<http://www.real.net.au/>

Caffeine
<http://www.hallucinet.com/caffeine/>

Circuit Traces
<http://www.ctraces.com/Circuit_Traces>

Clique of the Tomb Beetle
<http://www.tyrell.net/~rmcheal>

Compass Rose Review
<http://www.simmons.edu/~CRR>

Conjunctions
<http://www.conjunctions.com>

Crasher
<http://www.boudicca.com/crasher/>

Crisp
<http://www.crispzine.com/>

Cyberkind
<http://sunsite.unc.edu/ckind/title.html>

Dark Planet
<http://www.sfsite.com/darkplanet/>

Deep South
<http://elwing.otago.ac.nz:889/dsouth/vol1no3/issue3.html>

Delores Darling
<http://www.deloresdarling.com>

Dream Forge
<http://www.nauticom.net/www/drmforge/index.html>

Eclectica Magazine
<http://www.eclectica.org/>

Edifice
<http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~lmgorbea/>

Enterzone
<http://enterzone.berkeley.edu/enterzone.html>

eSCENE
<http://www.escene.org/>

EWG Presents
<http://members.aol.com/ewgroup100/index.htm>

Far Gone
<http://www.imv.com/lit/fargone/>

Furious Fictions
<http://www.slip.net/~ffiction>

Garrett County Journal
<http://www.cyborganic.com/People/garrett/>

Gay Place Online
<http://gayplace.com/>

Geek
<http://www.kaleidanet.com/geek>

Gutter Voice, The
<http://www.io.org/~gutter/voice.html>

Hawk, The
<http://www.cruzio.com/~hawk/>

Hyperizons
<http://www.duke.edu/~mshumate/hyperfic.html>

In Vivo
<http://freenet3.scri.fsu.edu:81/users/jtillman/titlepage.html>

Instant Classics
<http://www.instantclassics.com/>

Interbang
<http://www.azc.com/client/bertye/>

International Quarterly
<http://mailer.fsu.edu/~vbrock/>

Kudzu
<http://www.etext.org/Zines/Kudzu/>

Lexicon Magazine
<http://www.ozemail.com.au/~lexmag>

Literary Fragments
<http://www.teleport.com/~cedarbay/index.html>

Maple Syrup Simmering
<http://web.idirect.com/~canuck/canzine.html>

Mind's Eye Fiction
<http://tale.com/>

Mississippi Review Web
<http://sushi.st.usm.edu/~barthelm/index.html>

Net Books
<http://www.timeout.co.uk/TO/NetBooks/>

Netstory
<http://www.netstory.com/>

Night People
<http://www.az.com/~katrinat>

Nufoto Online
<http://www.nufoto.com/>

NWHQ
<http://www.knosso.com/NWHQ/>

O Shenandoah! Country Rag
<http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/1293>

Open Scroll
<http://www.hooked.net/users/scroll/>

Oyster Boy
<http://sunsite.unc.edu/ob/>

Passing Show, The
<http://www.europa.com/~kbsadler/passingshow.html>

Pegasus Online
<http://www.pegasusonline.com/>

Pif
<http://www.pifmagazine.com/>

Purr
<http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/c_hinse>

Pyrowords
<http://www.microtec.net/~lamiel/>

Quanta
<http://www.etext.org/Zines/Quanta/>

Roar
<http://www.altx.com/silence/www.monster.com/roar>

Salt Hill Journal
<http://www-hl.syr.edu/cwp>

Silence
<http://www.altx.com/silence/>

SLUMMIT
<http://spider.netropolis.net/slummit/default.htm?>

smug
<http://smug.com>

Sour Grapes
<http://www.bdt.com/home/brianhill/created/>

South Asian American Literature
<http://alumni.eecs.berkeley.edu/~manish/index.html>

Sparks
<http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~jmesch/sparkspage.html>

State of unBeing
<http://www.io.com/~hagbard/sob.html>

Story Bytes
<http://thor.he.net/~stories>

Super AM
<http://www.superam.com/>

t@p fringe
<http://www.taponline.com/fringe/>

Tension
<http://www.vsd.cape.com/~mesh5>

think
<http://think.ucdavis.edu/>

Totally DeCapitated
<http://skylarking.com/leo/>

Transformation Story Archive
<http://www.t0.or.at/~thomash/tsa/>

Typo: Magazine
<http://home.earthlink.net/~typo>

Web Del Sol
<http://www.cais.net/aesir/fiction>

Weslovian Gazette
<http://fly.hiwaay.net/~jmiller/table.htm>

Whole Wired World, The
<http://www.pictograph.com/TW3.html>

Word
<http://www.word.com/index.html>

Zuzu's Petals
<http://www.zuzu.com/>

=====================================================================

eSCENE 1997. eSCENE (ISSN 1084-6506) is published electronically on a
yearly basis. Reproduction of this electronic manuscript is permitted
as long as the manuscript is not sold (either by itself or as part of
a collection) and the entire text of the manuscript remains unchanged.
Copyright (c)1997, Jeff Carlson. All stories Copyright (c)1996 by
their respective authors. Artwork and design Copyright (c)1997, Jeff
Carlson, except where specifically noted.

Email <editor@escene.org> for information.