Donna Stramella is a fiction and non-fiction writer from Baltimore, Maryland  who recently completed her Master of  Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Tampa . Her work has been published in Columbia Magazine and The Baltimore Sun.  She breaks away from her writing room to travel, hike and listen to live music. 

       We all knew Uncle George liked ice cream. He couldn’t pass a soda shop, ice cream truck or corner convenience store with a “hand-dipped” sign in the window. He was obsessed with it, really.
      One summer, he and my Aunt Gia were visiting from Pennsylvania on a sweltering summer day in Maryland. There was no air conditioning in the small Cape Cod-style house where I lived with my parents and two brothers in the late 1950s. It was late afternoon, with everyone crowded in the sterile white kitchen drinking well-iced, well-sugared tea, the window fan circulating warm air around the room when George pushed the flimsy screen door open for the quarter-mile walk to our small neighborhood grocery store.
            When he returned, he pulled a half-gallon of strawberry ice cream from the paper bag, opened a few drawers to find a spoon and sat down at the table. If he saw three little hopeful faces across the table, he blocked us out. Our eyes widened as we stared quietly, Uncle George slowly dipping his spoon in the cardboard tub, the ice cream soft from the short walk back to the house. His glasses temporarily frosted as the coolness rose, the corners of his mouth turned up slightly as he closed his eyes—seeming to savor the flavor as well as the temperature.
            “You’re not going to offer the ice cream to anyone else?” Aunt Gia asked, waiving her hands in the air. “You’re going to eat the whole thing all by yourself?”
            Her husband didn’t say a word, continuing his slow rhythm, dipping the spoon in the cold ice cream and then into his mouth, dipping and eating, dipping and eating. Embarrassed and angry, his wife stormed out of the room.
            My brothers and I remained quiet. There was a chance that at any moment, our uncle would rise from his chair to find three spoons. A stream of pink ice cream eased down from the corner of his mouth. He reached up with his left index finger to mop it up, closing his eyes as he placed his finger over his tongue to enjoy a nearly-lost drop. A satisfied warden whose escapee was back in the cell.
           We continued to stare and he continued to eat, until we heard the metal spoon scraping the cardboard bottom. Uncle George tilted the container to be sure he finished every bit of the now-melted treat. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, threw the carton in the trash can and tossed the spoon in the sink, the metallic sound echoing in the small kitchen.
         Uncle George didn’t visit us the next summer. Or any other summer. He and Aunt Gia divorced after just three years of marriage.
         Fifty years later, my 90-year-old Sicilian mother tells the story once every couple of years. And each time, she begins the same way.
           “That son-of-a-bitch ate all the ice cream…”
 

I

   The print on the ticket blurred as he stared at it in the flickering, blue-white and buzzing fluorescent light of the station’s lobby. Minot. He’d never heard of Minot before his sister was stationed there over ten years ago. Even now, Adams did not even really know where it was, except that it was far north, near the Canadian border, and it was very cold.
   He wandered sleepily, dragging his full duffle bag, toward an empty wooden bench where he would sit until the bus began to board. Even at this late hour, the station was filled with a small crowd of people milling around, looking for seats, waiting in line for tickets, scurrying to the restroom for a last-minute visit.
   The lobby was a vaudeville of characters. A heavy black woman held a child, perhaps a bit over a year, drooling, asleep on her shoulder as she paced back and forth before the frosted window panes of the station. Two benches down from where Adams sat, a 20’ish couple, dressed in leather and chains, with high leather boots, tongue-wrestled each other furiously while pawing at each other’s shoulders.
An elderly Jewish couple limped to the end of the ticket line, he with a cane in one hand, his wife’s arm in the other, kippah perched atop his crown, his mid-chest beard severely silver-specked. A single large suitcase was nestled in the grip of a foldable, two-wheel carrier they pushed before them. Adams shook his head.
    In addition to the duffle bag with his clothes and personal items, Adams carried a small backpack containing several books. He thought they might engage him during the long bus ride to Minot. Two novels and five or six slim volumes of poetry that had been sitting on his kitchen table, waiting to be read. But there were no medical journals, no medical texts. Adams had stopped reading those the day he retired. That was nearly two years ago.
   At nearly 11:30 a voice boomed overhead. “The 11:45 bus for Little Rock will begin boarding at Gate 3 in five minutes. Five minutes.” Adams began to gather his two bags, thinking of moving early to the Gate area, but already he was preceded by a horde of other waiting passengers. His hopes of getting a choice seat were dashed, not that it really mattered. It was not long before the next announcement, “The bus for Little Rock is now boarding at Gate 3; all passengers, please prepare to board now.”
   Adams moved to the end of the forming line. It was already long enough to suggest that the bus would be nearly full. As the line began to snake forward, Adams went through the automatic glass door and into the cold Memphis night air. His breath was immediately visible. It occurred to him, as he handed his bag to the driver for storage, that this temperature was probably balmy compared to the weather in Minot. He climbed the steps and began working his way down the aisle, past the portly bodies lifting small bags into the overhead storage. About two-thirds of the way toward the back, he angled into an empty seat, and positioned himself next to the window, settling in to continue his people-watching as others wound their way down the aisle.
   Adams was not in the mood for company, and he hoped that he might get lucky, like a gambler at the roulette wheel, and have the seat beside his remain free. He was not usually in the mood for company most days lately, but especially on a long bus ride.
   Surprisingly, Adams seemed to be in luck, as seats around him filled, leaving the one next to him untouched. He glanced at his watch. The bus was due to depart in two minutes. “Bingo,” he thought. He would be able to stretch out, encroaching into the neighboring seat, and enjoy his solitude.
   The driver climbed aboard the bus, which was already running and warm inside, and took his seat behind the wheel. The door hissed, and slammed shut, and Adams waited to hear the gears shift into reverse. Just as he was getting comfortable, the bus door hissed again, hissed open. And a young woman stumbled laughing up the stairs, exclaiming “thank you” to the driver in a voice loud enough to be heard back where Adams was sitting. She weaved her way down the aisle, scanning for a seat, and she stopped by the seat next to him.
   “Is this seat taken?”
   “No. You are welcome to it,” he lied.
   “Thank you.” And she unloaded one bag on the floor in front of the seat. Stretching on her tiptoes, she lifted the other into the overhead bin. Then she took off an enormous down coat, a coat fit for an Inuit, and stuffed it on top of the bag in front of her seat. At last, she pirouetted into her seat, turned her head to Adams, and said,     “Hi. I’m Penny.”

 
II
   The call had come Thursday night, two days before, at a quarter past one. Adams roused himself from a good dream, and sleepily answered the phone. It was his brother, Bruce, who lived in Ohio.
   “Jack, I’ve got some terrible news.”
   “Oh, no,” Adams said, waking some. “What is it?”
   “It’s Charlotte. No, not Charlotte, but Marie.” Charlotte was their sister in Minot; Marie was her 20-year old daughter.
   “What’s happened?”
   “Marie was in a car accident. She and her boyfriend apparently were hit head-on by a drunk driver…”
   Adams felt suddenly nauseated. “So, what happened? Is she all right?”
   “No… She was killed. They said she died instantly.”
   “Oh my god. You gotta be fucking kidding me!”
   “No.” Adams scarcely breathed. “I’m afraid not.”
   By now Adams was sitting on the side of his bed, the cordless phone pressed tight against his ear.
   “No way! This can’t be true.”
   Bruce said, “Yeah. It is true.”
   “Oh my god! What are we gonna do?”
   “Charlotte says they are having the funeral Tuesday morning. There won’t be a viewing.”
   “OK. OK,” Adams said, trying to gather his wits. “I guess I need to make some plans pretty quick. Thanks for calling.” And then, almost as an afterthought, “How is Charlotte.”
   “She’s pretty messed up.”
   “Yeah. I guess so.”
   Adams and Charlotte hadn’t been close since they were kids. And especially after she got married in her first year in college, he felt her drift farther and farther away. Her marriage had lasted a year, maybe two—Adams couldn’t remember. But she was left alone, fortunately with no kids, but with tuition and living expenses, and few solutions for financing her continued education.
   Charlotte had always been the resourceful one of the three siblings. After the divorce, she began to explore ways to continue school, and she soon discovered the opportunities offered by the different branches of the Armed Forces. She explored tuition reimbursement through the Navy and the Army, finally settling on the Air Force program. Since she would graduate with a degree in nursing, she could receive a year of tuition and a living stipend in exchange for two years of service after graduation. She jumped at the opportunity, signing on for two years. Her new military lifestyle did nothing to breach the ever-growing distance between her and Adams.
   After graduation and four years of practicing nursing in military base hospitals and clinics, Charlotte went back to school, again promising more time to the Air Force. And there came a second husband and then two children. Marie was the younger.
   Adams’ sister had become a career military person. They saw each other rarely, at a wedding or a funeral, but seldom spoke, and when they did an argument almost always ensued. She was querulous, and she was always right. Anyone who thought differently from her was simply wrong. It became easier just not to talk to her at all.
Charlotte and Adams had not seen each other in over ten years, and he had not seen Marie since she was four or five years old. The extent of communication between the two was a yearly electronic birthday card and a mass-mailed Christmas letter.
   Adams was dreading the meeting in two days. Despite his dread, there’d only been a moment’s hesitation in his decision to go. Nothing could possibly be worse than losing a child; even his sister should not have to endure that. The bus trip was over 30 hours, with transfers in Little Rock, Kansas City, and Minneapolis. Adams would have plenty of time to prepare for the reunion.

 
III
   Penny. He looked at her wide blue eyes and bubbly smile. How could she be in such a good mood, in a dark Greyhound bus, near midnight, on a dismally cold night in Memphis? Penny. Adams’ mind began playing word games.
   A penny for your thoughts.
   Would you care to swap seats for a little change?
   Your coat looks warm as toast, to coin a phrase.
   Adams did not utter any of these, but said simply, “Hi, Penny,” and reached for his backpack to retrieve a book of poetry. The bus coughed, then jerked into reverse, before moving into gear and heading toward the entrance to I-40.
   “Where are you headed?” Penny asked in her singsong voice.
   “Minot.”
   “Mine what?” she frowned.
   “Minot. North Dakota.”
   “Oh, wow!” she exclaimed. “I never heard of it before.”
   “Me either. Hardly.”
   “So… What’s in Minot?”
   Adams feared he might not be reading much poetry. “Well, a huge Air Force base mainly.”
   “Why there?” she asked, her eyes shining interest.
   “I don’t know. I suppose because it is so far away from everything else. That way the Russians would probably not think to bomb it while they nuked away New York and Washington.”
   “Why would they do that?” she asked, a hint of anxious wonderment on her face.
   Adams tested her. “Did you ever hear of the cold war?”
   “Yeah.” She glanced down at her hands. “Sort of.”
   “Well, they flew bombers from Minot that were in the air 24 hours a day, every day. They carried nuclear bombs. And there were nuclear missiles at Minot, too. All ready to nuke Russian cities if they tried to nuke us first.”
   “That’s pretty sick,” she glanced at Adams, twisting her mouth.
   “Yeah. It sure is.”
   After a short silence, Penny spoke again. “So, are you in the Air Force or something?”
   Adams mused about his notion of teens and young adults. Weren’t they supposed to be sporting iPods in their shirt pockets, with earbuds blocking out the rest of the world? He wondered where Penny’s iPod was.
   “No, I am not in the Air Force.”
   “So why are you going to Minot?”
   Adams sighed. “My sister lives there.”
   “Oh, that’s cool! So you’re going to visit your sister!” Penny exclaimed with excitement.
   “Yeah. Cool,” Adams muttered.
   The bus was easing onto the highway’s entrance ramp, and soon began the crossing over the Mississippi River bridge. The lights in the bus dimmed, and a few overhead reading lights brightened down the aisle. Penny leaned forward and reached into the pocket of her oversized coat, retrieving a granola energy bar. She began to unwrap it, peeling the wrapper down to the bar’s waist. She turned to Adams.
   “You want half?”
   “Uhm… No, thanks. But, thanks. Really.”
   “So… What’s your name?”
   “Adams. Jack Adams.”
   “May I call you Jack, Mr. Adams?”
   Adams rolled his eyes. “Sure.”
   “So… do you have any plans with your sister and her family?”
   Adams sighed again, more noticeably this time. “No, not really.” He paused. And without knowing exactly why, he added, “I’m going to a funeral.”
   “Oh, shit. I’m sorry. Who is it?”
   “My niece. She was killed in a car accident the night before last.”
   “Oh, God! How old is she… I mean, was she?”
   “Twenty.”
   “Oh, shit. Same age as me.”
   Adams added, “Too damn young to die!”
   Penny removed her knit stocking cap, freeing a tangle of frizzy, dishwater blonde hair. He could hear the crackle of static electricity as she removed the cap. She was cute, kind of. Adams wondered what her story was, but he was not about to ask.
   Penny began to munch frugal bites of her granola bar, slowly and deliberately enjoying each chew. Adams could see her pleasure at the taste of each morsel of peanut, oat flake, or raisin in the half-smile of her moving cheeks and lips. This endearingly annoying young girl could be his daughter, or even grand-daughter. She was that age.
   Adams again began to think of settling in, perhaps turn on his reading light and absorb a bit of poetry before dozing off.
   “So… What was your niece like?”
   Adams was startled back into the moment, annoyed again. “I don’t know,” he replied, honestly.
   Penny was silent for a few seconds, taking in Adams response. “What do you mean, Jack?”
   Adams suppressed a barely audible moan. “Well… OK. If you must know, I haven’t seen Marie since she was about five years old. I haven’t seen my sister in over ten years.”
   “Damn,” Penny muttered. They were silent. “Why not?”
   “It’s a long story.”
   “We have a long ride ahead of us,” she replied with anticipation.
   “Yeah, well… It’s kind of hard to talk about.”
   “OK,” Penny replied. Disappointment dripped like thick molasses in her voice.
   Adams felt bad. He felt as though he had cut her off, when she was only trying to be interested and conversant. To redeem himself, he asked, “So, where are you going?”
   “Minneapolis.”
   “And what’s in Minneapolis for you?”
   “My aunt lives there. I am going there to spend a week or so with her. My mother’s sister.”
   “Well, that’s nice. I hear Minneapolis is nice. Even though it is cold.” As an afterthought, “Although I don’t think it’s as cold as Minot.”
   “I don’t know. I’ve never been there before.”
   Adams was curious, but decided not to ask any more questions.
   They were quiet. Eventually, he could see the city lights of Little Rock in the dark sky ahead, and soon they were pulling into the Greyhound station. The bus wheezed to a stop at one of the gates. The bus lights brightened, and sleepy-eyed passengers began moving and gathering their carry-on belongings. The bus door hissed, folding open like a Japanese fan. Adams fished out his backpack from where it was half-stuffed under the seat in front of him, and Penny stood to retrieve her bag from the overhead bin.
   Just then, Adams realized that they would be boarding together the next bus to Kansas City, and then the one after to Minneapolis. He smiled slightly to himself.

 
IV
   To say that Adams’ retirement was bittersweet would be half true. The truth is that his retirement was just bitter. He had practiced Emergency Medicine in the large Emergency Room of one of the urban medical center hospitals in Memphis for over thirty years. It had been his life, a life he loved more than he would ever have believed possible. Maybe he loved it too much. Had his long hours, and his ineptitude at leaving work at work had perhaps contributed to the breakup of his twenty-year marriage, now more than ten years past?
   Adams had married during his residency in Cleveland, Ohio. He was happy. He thought he was happy nearly to the end, when he learned just how unhappy his wife was. Still, the knock at his door at 6 a.m. startled him, but not so much as when he saw standing on his porch the court officer with the envelop in his hand. His wife was away visiting her sister at the time, and he had no idea why a county clerk officer would be knocking at this hour. He unlocked and opened the front door of his house.
   “Jack Adams?”
   “Yes, sir?”
   “I have papers for you. You will need to sign here.”
   Adams’ stomach was like a pouch full of acid twisting on itself. He shakily signed the paper. And that was the beginning of the end. When Barb returned, she moved right away into a furnished apartment she had already temporarily rented, and they did not speak. Adams was left in a cavernous house that had already been too large for the two of them, and now there was only him.
   Adams was not much of a fighter. “Irreconcilable differences” was fine with him. And Barb got the house, half of their joint savings, half the value of their two cars, and half of his entire pension. And Adams was so heartsick, he really didn’t care. He soon moved into a small, two-bedroom apartment near downtown to try and rebuild his life. It was medicine that saved his life. After that, his vocation continued to be his source of fulfillment and his life-saver—at least until his diagnosis.
   That was just four years ago. It started with a slight tremor in his hands. Only slight, and not always present. But as it grew more frequent, he mentioned it to his internist. His physician, whom he had known for years, Allen—they were friends—did a basic neurologic exam: finger to nose, hands outstretched with eyes open, then closed, reaching for and holding objects between fingers, handwriting sample… and more.
   At the conclusion, Allen said, seriously, “I don’t know, Jack. There is something there. Definitely a tremor. It’s partly an intention tremor, but it seems slightly present at rest as well. It could be any of a number of things, as you know. I am going to refer you to a neurologist.”
   The neurologist wasted no time in arriving at a diagnosis: Stage I Parkinson’s.
   At first, for the first year, Adams was lucky. The tremor was not debilitating, sometimes barely noticeable, and there were no other symptoms. But with time the tremor became more pronounced, and soon Adams began having difficulties doing his work in the Emergency Room.
   Procedures, in particular, were a problem. Placing central lines—large catheters into veins in the neck, groin, or beneath the collar bone—all essential to the work of an Emergency Medicine physician, was a challenge. At times, intubating—placing a breathing tube into a patient’s windpipe—was the same sort of challenge. Adams would often have to ask the assistance of one of his colleagues.
   After a time, Adams realized that he could not safely go on with his practice, and began to significantly reduce his clinical responsibilities, instead emphasizing more his teaching role. Adams knew that his disease would eventually progress, either slowly or rapidly, finally incapacitating him. And that is what led to his decision to retire early, two years ago. If he only had a few years of “quality” life remaining before the Parkinson’s took over, he wanted to be sure that he enjoyed that time as much as possible.
   Adams was eligible for disability, which paid 60% of his former salary. With his more humble lifestyle of apartment living, money was not an issue. There were no women to devour his paycheck, and he lived his life simply. He spent days reading and writing, reading good fiction and poetry, and writing some poetry on the side. He also cultivated a taste for fine, single malt Scotch, which he enjoyed after dinner every evening. To some it would seem a lonely life, but Adams was content. He certainly missed sex, but he was content.

 
V
   Penny and Adams shouldered their way into the line of disembarking passengers. Adams had only his small backpack, which he loosely slung over his shoulder. Penny, on the other hand, had put on her bulky coat and stocking cap, and carried similar sized bags in each hand. As they climbed down the steps of the bus, Adams said, “Here, let me carry one of those,” and Penny gladly handed over one of the bags. Together they moved to one of the wooden benches, glancing at the bulb-lit sign silently announcing departure times for the few remaining late-night buses. It was 3 a.m. The Kansas City bus departed at 3:15.
   Sitting next to Adams, Penny pulled another energy bar from her coat pocket. Again she peeled the wrapper halfway, and without speaking held it out to him. Adams felt a slight gurgle of hunger in his stomach, and said “Thanks.” Penny smiled and broke the exposed half of the bar off, and handed it to Adams. He admired her foresight in thinking of food, and admonished himself for not thinking of the same for himself.
   Adams rose from the bench to get a coffee from the vending machine. “Would you like a coffee?” he asked Penny.
   “Sure,” she smiled.
   “Cream and sugar?”
   “Naw. Straight up,” she replied. “Black as night.”
   “My kind of girl,” Adams smiled, and moved toward the machine. He returned with two steaming cups, hot to his fingers, and handed one to Penny.
   “Thanks.”
   A minute passed as they blew over the hot surface of their bitter coffees, and sipped carefully. A blistered palate was not something Adams was eager to endure for the rest of the trip.
   “So… Jack… What was it between you and your sister?”
 He sighed once again, more reflectively this time. “I don’t know, Penny. It just happened. The years passed, and we became so different that we didn’t even like each other. In fact, it got so bad, we couldn’t stand each other. I don’t know. It doesn’t make me feel good. It makes me feel sad. And a little guilty. We both dealt with it the same way. We stopped talking.”
   Just then, the overhead speaker: “The bus to Kansas City is now boarding at Gate 5. Gate 5 for Kansas City.” Adams was partly relieved by the interruption. He and Penny gathered their bags, Adams again carrying one of Penny’s. As they moved toward the glass door, Penny asked, eyes opened even wider than usual, “Jack? Is it OK if I sit next to you again?”
   “Absolutely.”
   They retraced the steps they had taken from the Memphis bus, only in reverse, working their way toward the back, bags in tow. This bus was far less filled than the earlier one. Adams would ordinarily have been glad, for he would have been assured a seat by himself. Instead, he was glad to have Penny sitting next to him. Together they settled into a seat in almost the same location as on the previous bus.
   “Would you like the window seat this time?” Adams politely asked her.
   “No, thanks. I have a bit of agoraphobia. I hate feeling closed in. I need the aisle seat.”
   Perfect, thought Adams, as he vastly preferred the window seat and its view. It was like a re-run. He quickly tossed his backpack in front of his seat, and Penny laboriously took off her enormous coat. Again she tossed one bag in front of her seat and then began to pack the down coat in on top. Then she began the contortions in preparation for the tip-toe stretch to the upper bin for the second bag.
   Adams stood up. “Here. Let me get that for you.”
   Penny grinned. “Thank you!” Adams returned to his seat, and Penny turned and plopped ungracefully into hers, a smile still spanning across her still fresh face. Adams watched her, and shook his head slightly with a faint smile of his own.
   The bus door wheezed closed, and the gears began to grate into reverse. It was not long before they were on the highway again, headed north, and not long before Penny spoke again.
   “So… you were saying?”
   “I was? What was I saying?”
   “About you and your sister. You both stopped talking. And you felt sad. And guilty. Why did you feel guilty?”
    Adams thought a minute. “Wow. You ask tough questions, don’t you?” He paused, reflecting. “I don’t know. I guess you shouldn’t just stop talking to your sister, you know. No matter what. Although, she stopped too.” His comment felt empty to him, as though he were trying to redirect the cause of his guilty feelings.
   “No. She really did stop. But it was me who stopped my talking. So, it is my fault. At least half my fault.”
   Penny was half turned in her seat, looking directly into Adams’ eyes. He felt a little uncomfortable. It was as though she were waiting for him to continue.
   “I don’t really have anything more to say about it.”
   Penny wouldn’t give up. “Do you ever regret not knowing your niece?”
   “If she was anything like you, then yes, I regret it.”
   He thought he could see Penny blush, but she was smiling. Then her face turned serious. “If I were your niece, I would really be sorry that I’d never gotten to know you.”
   Wow, he thought. The flattery and the guilt he felt were formidable. Adams did not say anything. He didn’t know what to say.
   They rode for a surprising ten minutes of silence. Penny remained half-turned in her seat, her gaze distant but not wavering. He cut his glance to the side so as to see her without being caught. She had a musing look, as if contemplating something serious and complicated. Finally, she spoke again.
   “So… how will it be seeing your sister after all this time?”
   Would she never stop taking him by surprise?
   “I have no idea. Terrible. I will be awkward. And she will be angry, and hateful. That’s how she always was. And now she has a damn good reason to be.”
   “Terrible? Yeah, it probably will be if you go into it thinking that way,” she said.
   Oh, Jesus… now she is going to lecture me? Adams didn’t say anything.  It was nearly 5 a.m., and soon the sky in the east, to the right, would be pinkening. This leg of the trip was a little over fifteen hours, with stops in Harrison, Arkansas, and Springfield, Missouri. But no bus transfers until Kansas City.
   “Are you tired?” he asked the girl. His own eyes were starting to sting. After all, they’d practically pulled an all-nighter.
   “Sort of,” she replied. “Just a little.”
   “Maybe we should get a little shut-eye before it gets light.”
   “Okay. You don’t seem like you want to talk anymore anyway. At least right now.” She turned back in her seat, and eased the seatback into a semi-reclined position. Once again she removed her knit stocking cap, with its electric crackle. Adams watched as she settled back, closing her eyes. He wasn’t so lucky. He was sleepy, but not enough to doze off at that moment. He watched his new friend, who seemed to fall immediately into dreams. He watched as her mouth gradually drooped ungracefully open, and she began quietly mouth-breathing. He watched her breathe as the eastern sky turned pink.

 
VI
   It was about 7:30 when the bus pulled into the small, single-gate station in Harrison. It pulled in and stopped without turning off the engine. After five minutes, and no departures, no new passengers, the bus ground into gear again and headed back onto the highway. Penny had not stirred. It would be an hour and a half before they arrived in Springfield, Missouri, their next stop. Adams pulled the poetry volume out of his backpack again, and began to read.
   Penny continued sleeping, while Adams finished the book of poems. Springfield was a short distance off the interstate, and it was a little after nine when they pulled into the station. The driver announced that this would be a fifteen minute stop, and if anyone wanted to exit and stretch their legs, it would be fine.
   Adams’ stomach was audibly growling now, and he decided to see what could be bought for breakfast inside the terminal. He managed to step over Penny’s coat and bag, taking care not to jostle her knees as he crawled past her. He tried hard not to waken her, and was pleased that she did not budge; her eyelids did not even flutter.
Inside, Adams was surprised. Just past the rotating door was a short order grill. Possibilities were more numerous than he’d dared hope for. Pancakes, bacon and eggs, bagels and cream cheese. Adams asked the cook if he could make an egg, cheese and sausage sandwich on an English muffin. The cook replied, “Oh, yeah. Just like an Egg McMuffin. Of course I can.”
   “I’ll take two,” Adams said, “and two large coffees. Black.”
   “Yes, sir. Five minutes.” Adams wandered to the end of the line, and picked up a copy of the morning’s Springfield News. When the sandwiches were ready, he took the bag to the register at the end of the counter, paid, and returned to the bus. Penny was awake. “Good morning, sunshine,” he greeted.
   “Hi.” She took the sandwich from the bag he handed her. “Oh, thank you!” She beamed at him.
   “You missed the sunrise,” Adams told her. “It was actually quite pretty. The flat land gave us a plain view of the sun coming up from behind the horizon—no pun intended.”
   Penny giggled as she unwrapped her sandwich. “I was having some crazy dreams,” she said between mouthfuls.
   “Oh, really? What were they?”
   The motor of the bus turned over, and the last stragglers of passengers re-boarded the bus, along with a few newcomers.
   “I don’t really remember exactly, at least not a lot of details. There was a big bird, a big beautiful bird, like a swan, only bigger. And it had multi-colored feathers, like a peacock. It was really beautiful, and it was floating down this pretty, calm stream, with clear water that reflected the sunlight.
   “As it moved down the stream, I could see a huge whirlpool, or something, right in its path. It was like in a bathtub while it drains, only bigger. The bird was floating right toward it, but didn’t even notice. And then suddenly the bird was caught in the outskirts of the whirlpool, and it got whipped around, fast, in a circle. It looked back at me, and there was terror in its face. I wanted to help, but there was nothing I could do. And around and around, the water whipped the bird around in smaller and smaller and faster circles until all at once, at the very center, the bird got sucked under.”
   “Wow. That’s pretty powerful. What do you make of it?”
   “It made me feel very sad, very sad that this beautiful bird died so terribly, looking at me for help. Only I couldn’t. And I felt guilty. I wanted to cry. In fact, I think I may have cried in my sleep.”
   “That’s pretty heavy. You should probably think about that one some more.”
   “Yeah.” Her smile faded into a distant look. She took another bite of her sandwich, and a sip of her coffee, looking blankly ahead. Adams was quiet. He did not say anything, wouldn’t have known what to say if he had wanted to. He also took another bite of his sandwich, pleased that it actually tasted better than an Egg McMuffin.
   They rode in silence for ten more minutes, until their sandwiches were finished, and their coffees nearly so. Adams was surprised that he found himself wanting conversation, more conversation. So he took the risk and struck it up.
   “Don’t you have an iPod? I thought everyone your age had an iPod, and that their ears are never separated from their earbuds.”
   “I have an iPod, but I left it at home.” As an afterthought, she added, “On purpose.”
“Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”
   “Somehow it didn’t seem like this was the right kind of trip for iPod music.”
   “Why’s that?”
   Penny shrugged, “I don’t know. It just didn’t.”
   Adams felt he was treading on sensitive ground, and changed the subject to one more comfortable to him. “Do you like poetry?”
   She said, “Oh, yeah. I am not too fond of some of the old fashioned rhymey stuff like they mostly teach you in school. But I like some of the modern poets that I have read.”
   “Oh, really?” Adams perked up. “Who have you read? What do you like?”
   “I have read e.e. cummings. I like some of his stuff. Kind of weird, but pretty fun. And someone told me I should read William Carlos Williams, that he was the father of modern poetry. I liked everything of his I read, like ‘The Red Wheelbarrow.’ Pretty amazing—so much said with so few words. Someone else told me to read Sylvia Plath. I did, and she blew me away, but some of her poems were too scary and too depressing.”
   It was Adams who was blown away. He would never have guessed that this 20-year old girl, woman, would know these poets. He was impressed. “Would you like to read some of what I brought with me?”
   “Oh, yes! I really would!” Her exuberant smile had magically reappeared. Adams retrieved from his backpack the book he had just finished. It was a volume of poems by his favorite poet. He handed it to Penny, and said, “Try this. He may be a little different from what you’ve read before, but I think you will like him. He is not overly complicated, and his images are like magic. He was the poet laureate for the United States for two consecutive terms back in the mid-90’s. If he is not to your liking, that’s OK; I won’t be offended.”
   She eagerly took the paperback from him. “Thanks.” Adams reached back into his backpack and took out another thin paperback—a short novel recommended by several of Adams’ friends. He had chosen that as one of his novels for this trip. Kansas City was about three hours’ reading time away, with a few short stops along the route, but no transfers. Adams and Penny both settled into their reading.
   The ride was pretty boring, without the conversation, but the reading was good. Adams was hooked by his novel with the first page. Penny seemed equally engrossed, slowly and deliberately reading each poem, and then rereading. A couple of times, during moments when Adams rested his eyes and adjusted his reading glasses, he noticed her turning the pages back to an earlier poem, already read. He was pleased.
   Adams had purchased two bottles of water in Springfield, and he reached into his backpack and fished them both out. He opened one, and handed it to Penny. And then he opened the other for himself. Penny took the bottle without lifting her eyes from the page.
   The traffic was starting to get heavier. They were getting close to Kansas City. They would have to transfer to another bus there, and maybe have time to grab a bite of lunch.
   Penny gently closed the book of poems, and let out a long, slow sigh. Adams wasn’t sure what the sigh meant. He turned to her and asked, “So?”
   “He is unbelievable! He creates images with words that are absolutely alive, perfect, with such detail. Images of things that are common, everyday things. But in his hands, it is like magic. They become something much more than words, so much more than everyday things. They become sad so I want to cry. Or funny, so I want to laugh out loud. Or just mystifying. They leave me feeling like I just left a wonderful church service. Like God just winked at me, or something.”
   Adams felt something inside his chest. She had just described how the poems made him feel as well, and he was thrilled that she had enjoyed them so much. He also felt, oddly, proud of her.
   He was jarred back to the noonday winter sun of Kansas City by the hiss of the bus pulling into the station, a station far bigger than any of the previous ones. Once again, they gathered their belongings and headed up the aisle. Inside, the terminal was crowded and dingy, but right next door and adjoining, there was a small food mart, like the ones in malls, and an open area with tables. A Burger King and a Subway were the first to grab their attention. Adams looked at Penny and asked, “Care for a Subway, mademoiselle?”
   “Mais oui, merci.”
   So… she could speak French too, even if only a little?

 
VII
   After Adams and Penny finished their Subways and cokes, it was time to find their next bus. Adams scanned the notification screen, and found the bus bound for Minneapolis. They walked to the gate, and the waiting passengers were more numerous than at the last station. Together, Adams and Penny took a seat on a bench near the door, and when the boarding announcement came, they quickly took a position near the front of the line. Neither wanted to take a chance on not sitting together.
   The sliding glass door opened, an attendant checked their tickets, and another took their checked bags to load into the belly of the bus. Adams and Penny took their carry-on bags and worked their way toward the back of the bus, and claimed squatters’ rights in nearly the same spot as in the previous two buses. And then the same ritual of placing bags into the overhead bin and on the floor, and they took their seats. Soon the new bus was on the road again. This leg was a little over eight hours, with one stop in Des Moines. It would be long after dark before they arrived in Minneapolis.
   Adams started the conversation this time. “Penny, what are you going to do in Minneapolis?” He realized that he knew next to nothing about her, nor her immediate plans, though he did realize that her massive coat prepared her well for the cold of Minnesota’s February.
   “I don’t know,” she replied, speaking into her hand as much as to Adams. “I guess I’ll be doing whatever Aunt Elizabeth has planned pretty much.”
   “How well do you know your Aunt Elizabeth?” Adams ventured.
   “Not all that well. She was kind of the black sheep in my mom’s family. She never married. She works with investments, or something. Never married, but lots of boyfriends over the years, from what I hear. She is free-spirited.
   “I only see her every couple of years when the family gets together for the holidays or something, not very often at all. She seems pretty cool.”
   “Sounds like you might enjoy your time with her,” Adams offered.
   “Yeah.” Penny did not sound too convincing, but Adams let it go.
   Penny was silent for a long while. Adams left her to her thoughts, and plucked the second novel from his backpack, since he’d finished his first before they arrived in Kansas City. Penny’s energy was changed. She was immersed in thought. Even though Adams didn’t really know her, he sensed something was different.
   “A penny for your thoughts,” he tried, half smiling.
   Penny half-smiled in return; she caught the pun, but she said only, “Nothing. I’m not really thinking anything.” Penny may have fallen for the pun, but Adams did not fall for her reply. He wondered what she was thinking, why her exuberance had become so serious. But once again, he let it go.
   “Would you like to try this?” He offered the first, shorter novel to her. Penny said, “Sure,” and accepted the paperback from him. And they both sank into their respective books. They rode reading in silence for an hour, and then Penny struggled from her seat, saying she needed to pee, and she began working her way down the aisle to the back of the bus.
   Adams had a fleeting thought about his own hygiene at the moment. He was used to a daily morning shower, more to help wake up than for personal cleanliness. But somehow eighteen hours riding a bus, passing in and out of dirty bus terminals, made him feel grimy. He wished the bus had a shower.
   Penny returned and climbed in over the coat and bag in front of her seat. The window next to Adams’ cheek was cold, like ice, and its bottom was made translucent by a narrow band of frost. The landscape beyond the window was nearly flat, with the remnants of summer cornfields, stalks now leafless; furrows between the rows were dark earth pocked with patches of snow. The sky was bullet gray.
   They rode another hour, reading in silence. And Adams asked, “Penny, are you OK?”
“Yeah, I’m OK.” Adams was not convinced.
   “I’m just reading.”
   Adams returned to his book, but the 24 previous sleepless hours caught up to him, and he began to drift, soon fully dozing despite his efforts to keep reading. He continued to doze fitfully, losing his place in the book, for an hour.
    “Jack? Jack, are you awake?” Adams found himself back on the bus sitting next to Penny, and he smiled. “I am now,” he answered.
   “Jack…” She stared at her open hands in her lap. “Jack, I am pregnant.”
   Adams sat upright, suddenly fully awake, and his book slipped to the floor in front of his seat. “What? Uhm, really? I mean, uhm… Congratulations. Right?”
   Penny was half-turned in her seat again, looking straight into his eyes. Adams was suddenly speechless, though he felt a pressure to say something more. Penny spoke first. “No. No congratulations. It’s not good.”
   “Oh,” he said, sounding dense. “Do you want to talk about it?”
   “I don’t know,” she hesitated. “I feel so stupid.”
   Adams waited. Penny continued, “I feel so stupid. I have had only one serious boyfriend. We were together, dating, for two years…”
   Adams waited.
   “I thought we would be together forever. Probably get married, you know? We just couldn’t, not right now. And when we started, you know, having sex… making love… we were very careful to time it around my periods, so this wouldn’t happen. He didn’t like condoms. I guess our timing wasn’t all that great, was it.”
   Adams felt as out of place as a circus clown at a Catholic mass. He wasn’t sure what to say at all. So he remained quiet.
   “When he found out I was pregnant, he was really upset. Angry. He said he didn’t want it. The baby. I was very confused, and I told him I didn’t know what to do. He told me I should figure it out, and then I didn’t hear from him for three days. When he finally called, he was still angry, and he asked me what I’d decided. I didn’t know what he meant, and I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t even told my mom yet. He told me to figure it out. That was the last time I heard from him, over a week ago.”
Now it was Adams turn to twist in his seat. He looked Penny directly in the eyes, and asked, “Did you tell your mom?”
   “Yeah. She was really pissed. She said that I had to get an abortion, but she didn’t want me to do it in Memphis. So she was the one to arrange my trip to see Aunt Elizabeth. My aunt knows lots of people, and one of her friends works at this clinic. That’s why I am going to Minneapolis.”
   Adams kept looking her in the eyes. He felt completely out of his element. He was used to difficult conversations from his years in the Emergency Room. He had mastered the art of being both factual and compassionate, and he’d learned the art of listening. But this was different. Here was this young woman he’d known not even 24 hours, and she was telling him a story he’d never dreamed hearing—her story.
   Following his instincts, he asked her, “How do you feel about all of this.”
    “I am really pissed at my so-called boyfriend, for starters. At my mom, too. She never really talked to me about it. She really didn’t give me any choice, not that I would have chosen different.”
   Adams pressed a bit more, gently. “How do you feel about the abortion?”
Penny replied quickly, “Scared.”
   Adams waited, then asked, “Scared of what?”
   Penny wavered. “Scared of… Will it hurt?”
   And then, quickly, “No. That’s not what scares me. I am scared of how I am going to feel afterward.”
   Adams continued gazing into her royal blue, serious eyes. “What do you mean, Penny?”
   “I don’t know,” she continued. “I mean… How will I feel when it’s gone, and it was my decision?”
   For a fleeting moment, Adams wished he’d trained in psychiatry instead of Emergency Medicine. But he did at least know that asking open questions was usually a good thing, a helpful thing.
   “How do you think you will feel, Penny?”
   “I’m not sure.” And they fell again into silence. Adams was not sleepy any more. He was alert, and thinking deeply.
   They rode in silence for what seemed like a long while, both apparently in deep thought. From the little Penny had shared with him, Adams wasn’t sure if this was all her choice. He wasn’t even sure if she knew well enough what her choice would be, if it were hers to make. It sounded more like this was a choice her mother and her boyfriend had made for her. And he felt bad for her to be in such a lonely position, at the beck and call of others. He wanted to be helpful, but he didn’t know how.
   “Penny, I just don’t know what to say. I have so many thoughts spinning around in my head, but no words for them. I feel so bad for you, and I’d like to be helpful. How can I help?”
   “You can’t help, Jack. No one can. I am in this all alone.”
   Adams turned back in his seat, facing forward again. He glanced out at the still barely rolling farm fields and the gray sky. It was nearly 4:30, and it was already starting to get dark. He caught sight of a lighted sign announcing 20 miles to Des Moines. He was suddenly aware that he was hungry again, and he wondered what he might be able to find to eat in the station in Des Moines. It would only be a 15-minute stop, so he wouldn’t have long to decide, as if there would be much to decide upon any way.
   Without looking, Adams could feel Penny staring straight ahead at the back of the seat in front of her. “Penny,” he looked at her, “are you OK?”
   “Yeah…” Then, “No.”
   “I am sorry. I’m sorry for you.”
    “Don’t be. It’s my fault. I was so stupid.”
   They fell back into silence for the rest of the way into Des Moines. When they arrived, Adams said, “Hey, I am going to see what they have to eat. Want to join me and stretch your legs?”
   “No. I think I’ll stay here.”
   Disappointed, and concerned, Adams stepped over Penny and her luggage, and made his way inside the terminal. It looked a bit like the station in Kansas City, and a bit like the one in Springfield. There were not many people, but there was a grill. Adams ordered two hamburgers, two fries, and fixed two cups of coke from the fountain. After paying, he returned to the bus and wound his way back to his seat, handing Penny her bag and cup, while again climbing over her to his seat. Before they spoke, the bus was in reverse, and then headed back to the highway. In another four hours they would be in Minneapolis.
   Adams and Penny both chewed their burgers and fries in silence. Adams was sipping on the straw of his coke when he heard Penny. “Thanks.”
   “You’re welcome,” he answered.
   When they’d finished, they both wiped their fingers on their napkins and stuffed them along with the wrappers into one of the two sacks, and that sack into the second, which Adams pushed between his seat and the wall of the bus.
   The bus was soon dark, with the “ambient lighting” only, and a few overhead reading lights dotting the ceiling along the two rows of seats. Adams leaned a bit toward Penny’s seat. “Penny, may I ask you a question?”
   “Sure. I guess.”
   “I was wondering how you feel about this abortion. I mean, is this something you want? Or is it something your mom wants?”
   She was thoughtful for a moment, and then she answered, “Well, my mom wants it for sure.” A pause, and then, “I am not sure what I want.”
   “Penny, I am no expert. I am not even a father, no kids, and if I did have kids they would probably be boys, so I still wouldn’t be much of an expert. But there is one thing I know, I think I know, that is true in many kinds of situations.”
   “What’s that, Jack?” Penny asked, now really interested.
   “I think it is really important that every person faced with a difficult choice follow the path that they feel right. Not the path that somebody else feels is right, but that they, themselves, truly believe is the right choice.
    “If you feel that the abortion is the right thing for you, then don’t doubt yourself. If you think it is not the right thing for you, then don’t let someone else make your decision for you.
   “Either way, you have the strength within you to figure out what is right. And then you have the strength to make the choice work for you, even if it is a challenge.”
   She didn’t say anything further.

 
VIII
   The bus arrived at the terminal in downtown Minneapolis a little past 9. The lights of the bus came on, and people began foraging for their belongings. Adams and Penny repeated their now familiar ritual. Penny put on her coat, and this time her cap as well, retrieving it from the large pocket. Adams helped her with the bag in the overhead bin, and they joined the others working their way to the front, Adams carrying his backpack and one of Penny’s bags.
   When they got inside, they wandered over to where their checked bags would be brought. Penny looked around, searching, a bit anxiously. In a few minutes the passengers’ bags were brought in on a large cart. Adams retrieved his duffle bag, and Penny her suitcase, and they stepped back from the rest of the small crowd. Penny looked around, then suddenly started waving. Near the exit of the terminal, also waving, was a middle-aged woman who looked nothing like Penny.
   Only then did Penny turn back to Adams. She threw her arms around him and hugged him more tightly than he ever remembered being hugged. When they finally separated, he saw tear tracks on Penny’s cheeks. She said, “Bye, Jack,” and turned abruptly and walked toward where her aunt was standing.
   Jack stood alone, and watched as her figure already seemed to grow smaller and distant. Halfway to her aunt, Penny suddenly turned and yelled loud enough for everyone to hear, “Jack! Jack! Good luck with your sister!”

 
IX
   Adams found the gate for the bus to Minot, which was leaving in 45 minutes. It was now habit: when the time came, he showed his ticket to the attendant, he dropped his duffle bag on a pile of luggage waiting to be loaded, and climbed the steps of the bus. Hardly anyone was aboard, and the line behind him had been short. Four uniformed youngsters and a few other stragglers. The bus would be almost empty. And, also by habit, Adams moved to the seat that would have been his and Penny’s.
Adams tossed his bag and coat on the aisle seat, and sat down, half sideways, in his window spot, sprawling into the adjacent seat. He pulled out his book as the bus started and began backing out of the gate. His overhead reading light on, he picked up where he’d left off--The Road. Cormack McCarthy.
   It was very different traveling alone. Adams had always thought that this was his preference, choosing whenever possible the seat with an empty one beside. And if this seat were occupied, he would choose not to speak, or to speak as little as possible. Now, he missed Penny beside him, and even though absorbed in his novel, he couldn’t help being distracted by thoughts of this vivacious, joyful, and very sad young woman. He wondered how she would be. He thought that she would be okay.
For the next eight hours, Adams dozed and read. Once he got up to go to the bathroom in the back of the bus and pee. Twice he opened a bottle of water to sip while he read. Time passed slowly, and he was wistful.
   Around 5:30, the eastern sky behind the bus began to brighten. It was still cloud-covered, and it looked cold. In another half-hour, they were pulling into the small Greyhound Station in Minot. Adams waited until the other passengers had finished gathering their belongings and had exited the bus. His intestines felt like someone had tied them in a knot, and his mouth was drier than he ever remembered.
   He put on his jacket, slung the backpack over his shoulder, took a deep breath, and headed to the door. He was not even sure what his sister looked like.
 
 
 

​Eyes beneath furrowed brows follow me as I stroll through the Barangay, a white foreigner trying to keep my step light and my heart open. When I utter Visayan greetings of respect, like a wrinkled sail to the wind, faces smooth over and Visayan replies are heard. I can speak the dialect and this matters. Sometimes the replies are in the English of my own. Other times I say nothing and just amble on, telling myself that as long as I keep to the common way it doesn’t matter, I have no need to feel uneasy. It all depends on my mood. Always I try to remember that here respect is more than just a word. And my kind are not overly known for it. But I seldom become anxious for I know that if you just take it easy and don’t try to always have your way the Philippines can be a laid back place. I also know that it can be a hot hassle if your tolerance of the different is low.
     “Hey Joe, where are you going,” a young woman sitting in front of a sari sari store asks. Joe is the common name given to many foreigners, dating back to the GI Joe of the World War Two liberation troops.
     “Just there,” I say, not pointing, but lifting my head and pursing my lips toward my direction of travel. The sweet smell of barbecued chicken wafts over from a little grill she is attending near the bench where she sits. The natural beauty of the women here can leave me a little tongue tied at times but my smile must say this for they seem to sense my appreciation. They are not stupid of their worth and my take usually pleases them.
     “It is too hot for walking, take a rest,” she says as she pats the bench beside her and scoots over.
     I am twice her age but her eyes and smile make that seem like a small matter. I have seen her around the Barangay before and at the local market. I think she is the owner of this store and lives in the added on back part. I am hot and she has invited me, why not? When I take a seat she is happy as she claps her hands, goes in the store, and returns with a coke which she offers to me. When I go into my pocket for money she says, “Oh no, it’s in the house.”
     “ You mean, on the house, free?” I say.
     “ Yes, on the house, people will see you and come to buy something to see what we are doing. I will make a few more pesos. You are nice to business.”
    “You mean good for business.”
    “Yeah, yeah, good for business.”
     Before we can continue our conversation another customer arrives and the young woman must go back inside. She was right, it isn’t long before there is a small line of curious customers, eyeing me, and waiting to buy laundry soap, candles, or mosquito coils among the everyday things that they use. I thirstily finish the coke and, after the line disappears, return the bottle through the little wire enclosure at the front of the store.
     “I will go now, my name is Paul, what is your name,” I ask as she takes the bottle.
     “I am Mary. Thank you for coming to my store, Paul. Balik-balik, palihug,” she says, mixing English and Cebuano, as she bids me to please return.
     “Salamat,” I thank her and head off again feeling indeed rested and fresh under the tropical sun. Should I return this way, I think that maybe I will be known as OK. It is nice for me here. With just a wee bit of effort, I can get along with people. Back where I come from, after the war, I had such trouble with people that I just quit trying and screened off as much society as possible.     
     Living here is not as easy in substance, yet it is easier in style. Even with the various armed insurgencies in many places not far away, there is no patriotic requirement to be scared and drum up enemies that too often resemble the boogiemen outside of children’s bedroom windows. Here they try to find a way to live with mal-contents, there is no money to be made from war….by rich nor poor. Life is already cheaper, why push it more so?
     At the edge of the Barangay I come to a large field bordered by coconut and banana palms with a well worn footpath cutting it in half. Following the path, I pass a young goat herder, sitting on a large rock, smoking, with his goats staked out and grazing on the scrub that grows there. He waves as I pass and as I wave back I can smell the distinct odor of marijuana coming from his smoke. When I do a double take on him he smiles broadly, I guess figuring that I will not tell the authorities. Or not caring if I do. He is right, I will not tell. It is even legal where I come from. One day it will be legal here as well.  Reaching the other side of the field, I follow the dirt track that leads to the sea. There are no people along this way except an occasional returning fisherman with his catch. That’s why I come here, to be alone and watch the ships coming in and out of the Cebu Strait to their anchorage in the Mactan Channel at Cebu City. Far across the strait the Island of Bohol can sometimes barely be made out. This spot is a good place to sit and think.
     The dark blue of the sea stretches to the lighter blue of the sky, embedded here and there with patches of high cirrus clouds. This Zen-like tableau brings me to a seat in the sand where I can hurl my thoughts upon the sea and see what comes back. Far out near the horizon there is a small tug towing a large barge across the sea. Probably coming from Mindanao, the Muslim region, where there is much unrest. Yet negotiations and trade continue. Not like where I am from where wars against an idea have confiscated many of the freedoms we used to have--always in the name of the current war du jour. There different generations have different wars to pester their thoughts. Even though my war was  long ago parts of it stay present like the jettisoned flotsam that the currents carry here and there, kept ever swirling by each new war. Turning my thoughts away from that over which I am powerless, I bask in the salty air and hot sun and try to tune all else out. It is easier here….. in spirit. 
     After a while I head back the way I came, feeling lighter and more at ease. When I get to the short-cut across the field I see that the goats and their tender are gone. Near the large rock where the tender smoked there are now many men forming a noisy circle. Excitement in their voices as money changes hands is accompanied by laughter or resignation, depending on which way the money is going. Two cocks, each with a razor sharp spur strapped to one of their legs, are leaping, flapping and kicking toward one another in the center of the circle. It’s hard to tell which one is winning except for the occasional flash of a bloodied spur. The fight lasts only a couple of minutes until, like a nesting hen, one cock squats to the earth and hangs its head. When the referee can not restart the fight by manually bringing them face to face the cock left standing is declared the winner. The loser immediately loses its head, gets scalded in a boiling bath set over a large fire, and plucked for the home pot. Then, after bets are paid, a new pair begins another fight. Most of the money I can see is won by an older smiling Chinese-Filipino with a cock under his arm. He is a small thin man dressed better than most and wearing real shoes--one of the minority that is older than me but shown much respect by those he interacts with. While he counts the money his young assistant collects the winning cock and gives it a quick examination to determine if it can fight again.  Finding it in fairly good shape, he strokes it a few times, affectionately smoothing its feathers, and returns it to its cage. 
     I have seen these fights before and there is not much interest there for me in the betting nor the fight. However I find it curious that the cock, which is the national bird, plays such a role in this culture. A culture of give and take and, for the most part, acceptance. I wonder how it would be in America if we fought bald eagles instead of other people. Turning this over in my mind as I exit the circle of fight fans I must be smiling for my thoughts are interrupted when I hear, “You like the cock fights, yes? You are from the United States?”
     It is the Chinese mestizo. He and his assistant are leashing the cocks before putting them in their cages which are stacked in a nice new Toyota truck at the edge of the field.
     “I think it is hard for the birds,” I tell him, “but I guess it saves a trip to the market for the loser.”
     He laughs and offers his hand as his assistant continues to tend to the small flock, not paying much interest in our conversation but all ears I can be sure.
     “That is most correct. To waste when people are hungry is very bad. You are an American, no?”
     I don’t much like revealing my nationality, some places that can hurt, but this man seems honest enough so I reply, “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I have to win at everything. Your English is very good.”
     “Thank you. Maybe someday I can go to America. Only to visit. I would like to see New York, the place that so many wars come from.”
     “New York is OK,” I tell him, “I’m from the other side, Seattle.”
     When he hears this he eyes widen and he begins to shake my hand again.
     “Yes, yes, Seattle too, I want to see Seattle first.”
     Most of the people are now starting to exit the field, many with a dead bird, plucked bald, hanging from their hand. Others, fondly petting a winning cock under arm. By this time the assistant is standing by the truck and all the cocks are caged. The older man looks over at his waiting truck,  then hands me a small card and says, “I go now. Here is my business in Tabunok. Stop by and see my many fine carpets sometime. Maybe you can tell me about Seattle some while I make good deal for you.”
     “Maybe I will,” I say, as he waves and gets in the passenger side of the truck with his assistant now behind the wheel.
     After the truck leaves I examine the card which says only, “Sun Chan, Fine Tapestries, Tabunok.” Placing the card in my pocket, thinking that Sun Chan seems a bit better off than the average Filipino, I follow the last of the cock fighters out of the field.
     The bench in front of Mary’s sari-sari store is occupied with customers as I pass by. It is past noon and my appetite tells me it is time to eat so I stop at the next eatery along my route, explore the contents of the various pots and pans and order some squid, rice, and sautéed ampalaya or bitter melon. After paying eighty pesos or less than two dollars, I look for a place to sit. All the wooden tables that border the area between the eatery and the walkway are full of customers so I sit on a leftover cinder block near the corner of the eatery and begin to eat. A melody of clinking spoons and bowls is pleasant to my ears and it is easy to see that the people here enjoy their food. Many of the other customers are school children from the nearby elementary school, having their lunch and curiously stealing glances in my direction, no doubt wondering where I am from. It is something I have gotten used to with children. They are bold but polite in their inquisitiveness and rarely are they any bother. I would never be able to tolerate the whining, loud, shopping mall children of America in the same way as I do these kids.
     The food is lami or delicious and I clear my plate quickly knowing that what I have just eaten is good for me and known by many experts as some of the best there is. These thoughts remind me of how different living here is from life in America and the value of an attitude that can see when less is better. After returning my empty dish and spoon I head back to my little rented place near the center of the Barangay, still thinking about how the obvious is not always so obvious.
 
Not far from Gaisano in Tabunok, amid the clutter and pollution of a thousand vehicles coming and going, along with multiple businesses stacked upon and beside one another, sets a large two story cinderblock building directly on the national highway. Attached to the front of the building is a large sign with Chinese characters over an equally large sign in English that reads Chan’s Oriental Carpets. Dropping coins in the hand of the conductor standing on the back stoop of the jeepney, I step down from the passenger compartment and stare up at the sign. A loud musical air horn sounds and I quickly step onto the sidewalk before another jeepney pulls over into the spot that I have just vacated. It is always crowded here during the day and I am semi-relieved when I make it across the stream of pedestrians and inside the building, finding it cooler and calmer in all respects compared to the outside. After my eyes adjust to the less sunny interior I can see that indeed there are many beautiful carpets here, hanging from the walls and cross beams overhead. A young Filipino approaches me when he sees me just standing there.
     “ You like to buy,” he asks.
     “I don’t know,” I reply, “is Sun Chan available?”
     The young man seems at first a little let down, seeing no quick sale at hand, but after a moment smiles and leads me to a back office before asking, “Does he know you?”
     “No, just show him this card that he gave to me at the cock fight.”
     He disappears through the office door and in a moment he is back with a smiling Sun Chan.
     “Come in, come in, my friend,” Sun Chan says to me and tells the young Filipino, “Antonio, get us some tea and part of the cake that’s in the refrigerator.”
     “A pleasant surprise, amigo,” Sun Chan says, “I don’t even know your name. Please have a seat and tell me what I can do for you.”
     “My name is Paul and with your extra winnings from the cock fight I thought that maybe you could give me a good deal on a nice Oriental rug.”
     Sun Chan laughs.
     “What will you do with it?”
     “I will use it here in the Barangay,” I say, “my little apartment is pretty bare. I think it will brighten it up some.”
     “I see, will you sell it if you take it to America? You could make an easy profit.”
     “If I have to leave I will not take it with me. I will leave it here somewhere safe. It would become my mind beacon, a thing that I care for and look forward to returning to. A purpose to my travel.”
     “A mind beacon. That’s pretty good,” Sun Chan says as he stands up from his desk, “come with me. I think I might have something that can give you plenty of purpose.”
     As we are leaving the office Antonio appears with the tea and cake.
     “Just leave it on the desk,” Sun Chan tells him.
     I follow Sun Chan up some steps to the second floor and down a long corridor to a large metal door with a big padlock and an electronic apparatus that appears to be some sort of coded lock. It is similar to some vaults that I have seen. Once Sun gains entry he leads me in and switches on the light. I can see right away that this is a very special room with several beautiful rugs displayed on bamboo racks. Sun leads me to the center of the display and a very nice medium sized rug of darkly shaded blues and greens with some bright patches of yellow near its center. When one looks at it in a certain way the colors come together to form an impressive overall appearance of a lush garden in the abstract. It is very nice. We just quietly look at it for a time then Sun turns over a corner edge of the rug for my inspection. Branded into the fabric in Persian Farsi and English are the words: Made In Iran. There is also a price tag that bears a price way beyond my means.
     “You like?” Sun Chan asks.
     “Oh yes, it is very beautiful but way too expensive for me.”
     “Maybe not,” Sun says, “ let's go back to my office and have our tea and snack.
     Back in the office and comfortably enjoying our snack, I am resigned to not having a Persian rug because of the expense when Sun says,  “My friend, you can have your mind beacon, as you call it, for free….if you will help me with a business problem. Also if you have to leave the rug here because of travel I will secure your carpet in my vault until your return. Truly secure places are not easy to find for such large valuables and mine is one of the best----twenty-four hour armed guard, night and day.”
     “What is it that I can do for you?” I ask.
     Sun Chan explains that he is in the process of trying to begin a business relationship with another Chinese businessman who owns an import-export business in Seattle. This business has all the required licenses, shipping connections, and many other requirements needed to be successful in a global market. The man’s name is Robert Lee, a big Seattle sports fan, particularly of the football team. Sun goes on to explain that during their communications he has pretended to be a fan also, hopefully to gain Robert’s favor for negotiating a sort of partnership. Trouble is Sun actually knows nothing about Seattle nor football. And if I would tutor him in this, to his advantage, he would present me with the carpet for free.
     This seems like so little to me that I find it hard to believe but Sun Chan assures me that, to him, it is of monumental importance. I know enough about football, even know some of the Seattle players from all their press, which I get on the internet when I read the news. It is easy for me to agree with this trade off and help Sun. So for the next couple of weeks or so I spend a few hours printing out internet stories on the Seattle team and instructing Sun in the basics of football. A quick learner no doubt, he digest all the different stories about the players and their opponents and soon can reasonably pass as an ordinary Seattle supporter. In fact he tells me that his notes and conversations with Robert are going very well, that the prospect of their partnership is in full bloom. Then, as fate would have it, Seattle wins the NFC Championship and the right to play in the biggest sports contest in the world, The Super Bowl.
 
As I enter Sun’s store and close the distance to his office I can see him through the office window. Head in his hands, a small TV that he is not even watching planted on his desktop, he does not look good. I peck on the window and he waves me in.
     “I am glad you are here,” he says, “I just finished on the phone with Mr. Lee. He thinks that we can do business together and he wants to begin with a mutual bet on the Super Bowl. Plus he wants me to pick the spread, whatever that means, and the team, Seattle or their opponent New England.”
     “How much is the bet?” I ask.
     “Two thousand dollars, a thousand each. I told him I would do it but I have no idea about this kind of thing. Do you?”
     “Not really, when I do it I lose more than I win. What did he say about the spread?”
     “He said it was Seattle and six points. What does that mean?”
     “That means if you bet on Seattle they must win or not lose by six or more points. If you bet on New England that means that they must win by more than six points.”
     “What if it's only a six point difference, is it a tie?”
     “No, there are no ties for the bet. The bookie or bet taker wins all ties. You lose.”
     Sun Chan’s face is the most somber that I have ever seen it.
     “A thousand dollars,” he says, staring straight ahead, seeing God only knows what. After what seems like a long time he looks over at me, seated in the guest chair, and wishing I was anywhere else but here.
     “So Paul, what would you do. You Americans are educated in such things. What can you say?”
     “Let me go back to my place and study the internet some. All I can say right now is that I think New England has an older and wiser Quarterback. He is very good and I think that is why there is a six point spread to Seattle. New England is expected to win.”
     “OK, OK, you do that. Study hard and meet me here tomorrow morning about 10. We will go out and buy a snack and you can tell me what to do.”
    
I am glad to get out of Sun Chan’s business and catch a trisikad back to my place. The slower pace of the small bicycle with sidecar gives me time to think. The sweating young man pumping us along the crowded roadway,  the nearness to the road surface, and the other faces coming and going along its stretch, ground me back to where I am and what I am doing. I tell myself to just do the homework and then make my guess. Whatever happens, life and its ebbs and flows will go on. The carpet is a small matter over all. Its Sun Chan’s luck that I hope will be good. I have few friends here. And I have no enemies.
    
The next day as we have the small meal between breakfast and lunch, which here is called the morning snack, I look over my notes from the sports websites that I have surfed since our last meeting. We are seated at a small table in a Gaisano fast food shop near Sun’s business. The air-conditioning and relative quiet compared to the hot dusty hustle and bustle outside, mixed with the sweet and sour smells of seafood prepared in an Asian way, make it easy for me to relax a bit. Not so Sun Chan, he is edgy and worried about not being up to snuff on the Super Bowl, not to mention the money that will be at stake. After looking at my notes I tell him, “Sun you must realize that I don’t have a sure answer for you. It's all pretty much a gamble. And you don’t need to worry about the carpet, I can live without it. It’s not a big deal. I don’t want to be responsible if you lose.”
     “Yes, yes, I mean no, you will not be responsible if we lose the bet. Just tell me who you think will win and by how much. I have to talk to Mr. Lee later today and he wants my pick by then.”
     “OK, my best guess is that New England will win but Seattle is a younger team and I think they will give them a hard time. I don’t think New England can beat them by more than six points. So I would take the six points and bet on Seattle. It is only a guess, Sun. If you have to do it, Seattle is the one to take.”
     “Yes, that is good. I am glad to hear that. Robert says that he hates to bet against Seattle but if I pick New England he will bet against Seattle because it is a business decision. Our first business decision and an omen of what our partnership will be like if we make the deal to work together. Thank you Paul, I must go now and prepare for our phone conversation and the money transfer.”
     Sun Chan quickly gets to his feet, uses a table napkin to wipe his sweaty brow, and hurries out the door leaving most of his snack untouched.
                                                         
                                                                ***
 
On the Monday of the Super Bowl, which is Sunday in the United States, I am in Sun Chan’s office where he has a large widescreen TV set up. Somehow he has managed to get a live feed of the game over his cable service. It is early afternoon here, not many customers in the business, and Antonio seems to be able to handle all that is going on in the large area of the building outside the office. In fact it has appeared to me that there is really not that big of a demand for Sun’s carpets. Maybe that is why he has placed such importance on this potential business arrangement with Richard Lee. Maybe Lee has a good market and Sun has a good price. But this is none of my concern and I wonder if I should have gotten involved in all this to begin with.
    
Except for a Super Bowl halftime coke, Sun and I have not moved from our chairs in front of the TV. Now late in the game, it is very close between the two teams. New England has just scored with a touchdown and extra point and leads by four points, 30-26. With Seattle plus six points, Sun’s chances look very good since there is only 30 seconds and no timeouts left in the game as New England kicks off.  Seattle fields the kick-off in the end zone and runs it out but is immediately tackled by New England on the four yard line. On the next play Seattle tries a surprise draw running play which goes nowhere as the clock ticks down. With a hurry-up offense and snap Seattle attempts to throw a hail Mary, all or nothing, pass for the last play of the game but the quarterback, now throwing from his own end-zone, bobbles and drops the ball. He is able to immediately pick it up but before he can throw it he is swarmed and tackled by two New England linemen, scoring a two point safety for New England as time expires. The final score is New England 32, Seattle 26. So happy only moments before, Sun and I sit stunned, knowing that if the point spread ends with a tie, the bookie or bet taker wins all ties. For Sun Chan and his bet the score is 32-32.
     “Oh shit, what am I going to do, I have lost it all,” Sun cries, rocking back and forth.
     I feel terrible. There is nothing I can do but offer up a feeble, “Maybe since it was a tie Mr. Lee will not drop the whole deal.”
     “No no,” Sun says, “we must win for the deal to go through. It is part of the omen for Chinese prosperity.”
     Except for the after game revelry coming from the TV, moments pass in silence as Sun holds his drooping head in his hands and quietly sobs. I reach over and turn the TV off and try to think of something to do that will make this situation a little better. Then the phone rings.
     Sun’s head jerks up and he looks at me with red eyes the size of saucers. Frozen like that through two more rings he finally quickly says, “My God, that is Mr. Lee with the bad news.”
     When he finally answers the phone I watch his face as he listens and returns the conversation with an occasional, “yes,” and “I see,” and ending with, “of course that would be fine.” The tragic mask of Sun Chan’s face gradually changes to one of shocked surprise. And when he hangs up the phone there is a funny thousand yard stare on his face that leaves me completely dumbfounded about what has just happened. A moment ago he was sobbing, now he looks as if he is in a trance.
     After waiting for him to say something, I finally ask, “Well what did he say?”
     As if by rote, from that same trance-like state, Sun slowly says, “We won. The money is being transferred to my bank right now--two thousand dollars. And he wants to be my partner. The papers are on the way. He made a fortune on the game, lots and lots of money, and he said it’s all because of me and the luck of the Chinese. He said everybody was saying New England would win big but because of my faith in Seattle he went with my opinion.”
     Relieved but utterly confused I say, “That’s great Sun. I am happy for you but I used to bet some and I know that bookies and bet takers are a tough bunch, they never give up a tie. That must be some new kind of gambling system.”
     “No, I don’t think so,” Sun says, “I think that it's just part of a formula that Mr. Lee uses in his businesses. He is the bookie.”
                                                       
                                                                 ***
 
My little apartment seems to glow with deep blues and greens from the Persian rug and my toes like to curl among its soft bristles. Out my window the small noises of life can be heard, a distant barking dog, a girl hawking fresh shrimp from her man’s catch, and the occasional scratch of a palm frond on my window screen. Always there is a sent of the sea in the air and the security of having my Zen perch nearby. At night, even at Christmas, I can look up at the balmy sky and gaze upon that hunter, Orion. He is on stand far above the pretty Christmas decorations of the Barangay and its search for peace on earth.   

​A start up writer from Bangkok, Thailand. S. K. Inkslinger speaks three languages, fluent in Thai ad English while being moderate to novice in Mandarin. He currently studies as a first year medical student in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His many passions lie in tales of fantasy, action, and thriller. His love of reading and writing stemmed from the fantastical tales and stories he had been exposed to over the years, and his desire to craft one of those stories by his own hands.  
Published Works:
THE BEAST OF STONE (short story, The Ronin Express, Volume Two)
THE FLUTTERING HEARTBEAT (short story, The Ronin Express, Volume Two)
THE CREEPING SHADOWS (short story, The Ronin Express, Volume Two)
The Knight of Chimera (upcoming standalone fantasy novella July 2017)
The Bejeweled Chest (short story, Cirsova Magazine Issue #6 Fall 2017)

   I ran.
   I felt pain erupted along my face. Branches raked through my skin, leaving trails of red along the pale flesh.
   Still, I ran.
   It’s getting closer. Breathing in exertion, as if my lungs, my windpipes, had turned to acid. As if each breath was like a thousand needles piercing the viscera.
   Still, I ran.
   I couldn’t see anything. It was dark. So dark. I felt the trees only when I scraped against them. Gory bruises peppered my arms and legs, the pain nearly overwhelming.
   The trees seemed to be whispering among themselves. Or maybe that was just the wind.
   Still, I ran.
   I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it. Feel the forest shifted. Patches of darkness where moonlight dared not shine.
   I smelled it. The distinctive odor like the rotting of a million rat carcasses.
   I tasted blood within my mouth. 
   Still, I ran.
   I felt my legs wobbled, weighted, as if by lead. I felt my mind went fuzzy, dragging me down toward the rotting earth. Yet my heart was threatening to tore itself from my chest. I bit my tongue harder, and tasted blood erupting in my mouth.
   I must go on.
  I stumbled, tripping over a hidden stone. My jaw hit the earth with a sickening crunch. I felt my head swam, threatening to drive me unconscious.
   I feel it getting closer. Cold sweat trickled along my back, driving me forward with a fear worse than death.
   With my fingers I clawed my way through the dirt. I felt my nails snapped, fingers cleaved and torn by the jagged rocks. The pain was blinding, and I grunted through clenched teeth.
   I couldn’t do this. A wave of desperation flooded my mind.  
  It’s getting closer. I could feel the forest make way. With that was a low, guttural, inhuman sound.
   The shadows… With a final heave, I pulled myself into the hollow space of a rotten log.
 
   The world was darkness as I am slowly crushed from all sides. I squirmed forward, afraid to leave even a bit of me out in the open air. A worm wriggled into my eye, and I desperately try to shake it free. Insects crawled across my bare flesh, and I try my best not to scream.
   I remember my Cecille, my lovely Cecille, drowned in a pool of her own blood. I remember the remains of my parents, torn and mangled upon their own beds. My friends and neighbors, their skulls smashed in, their faces barely recognizable. I howled their names in agony, but they could no longer hear it. Their eyes were cold, glazed, staring straight ahead in shock and terror.
   Tears welled up in my eyes. I struggled to bit back a sob.
   That was when all went quiet. The insects stopped their movements, then wriggled back into their holes.
   A chill crept into my bones. The shadow thickens. I could hear the forest parting. I hold my breath. Listening. Waiting. Drenched in a terror as dark as the night.
   The sound passes overhead. My heartbeat slowed, and I let out a breath in relief.
It’s gone now. It’s over.
   I squirmed toward the end of the log.  I glanced downward, checking the ruined condition of my hand. I looked up,
   And it stared right back at me. Eight humongous eyes like blood rubies, amidst a sea of formless shadow.
   I screamed at the top of my lungs. With my heart throbbing in terror, I forcefully yanked myself out of the log. My arms and legs sheared against its wooden surfaces, splinters of wood embedding into the wound.
  I ran, my deaden legs a step away from collapsing, propelling me away from the shadows. The shadow that devours men and beast. The shapeless horror.
   With each and every step, I could feel it getting closer. Feel it catching up.
  One of its legs grazes the back of my neck.
  I tripped, and rolled down the side of a steep hill. The world became a mad jumble of twigs and fallen stones. I hollered, trying to grasp a foothold in vain.
   I rolled until the end of the slope. I plunge down a hand, trying to slow the descent. All was futile. I didn’t have time to cry out as my head cracked against a wall of timber.
   My vision went black…
 
 
 
 
 
                                                                             The Man

   I woke up with a gasp, my bare flesh drenched in a sheen of cold sweat. Feeling a certain stiffness, I glanced down. My body was covered in bandages, from my scraped and torn fingernails, to the cuts and bruises that peppered across my body.
Where am I? Before I could voice the question aloud, a young woman emerged from a side room.
   “I see you have woken,” She said, a bright smile upon her face, “You had slept for the better part of a day. I was quite worried there.” She was beautiful, her eyes glimmered, and sunlight was in her hair. She was a rare beauty such that I had never seen in a long time. Ever since… ever since my wife had passed away.
   She reminded me of Cecille. My eyes refused to glance away from her. Despite knowing that I was staring at her. Despite knowing that I was being rude.
   For some unknown reason, she reminded me so much of Cecille. So much, that it hurts... I turned away, trying my best to avoid her gaze. Filled with so much care, so much love.
   “Is there something wrong?” She asked, quickly approaching me, her voice full of concern.
   Instinctively, I flinched back.
   She seemed pained, but tried her best not to show it, “Are those wounds still giving you pain? I could change those bandages if you want.”
   Before she could move any closer, I quickly asked, “Where is this place?”
   “My cabin.”
   “Do you live alone?” It seemed rather odd, that a young woman like her would be living in the midst of the woods, isolated from the outside world. Surviving in this place, all alone.
   After a long pause, she gave a hesitant reply, “In truth, I do.” Her eyes were downcast, her voice solemn. I had expected her to give a longer reply, but she just stood there, her gaze filled with a sense of bottomless grief.
   I shouldn’t have interrogate her, I felt a pang of regret, She saved me when she could easily have left me out there. Out there for that… that thing….
   “I am so sorry.” I went over to her, despite my throbbing wounds, “How can I be of help?”
   I had planned to stay for only a few days at first, but time seemed to flow by. Days turned to weeks, and those weeks eventually turned to months. As I stayed, I eventually grow accustomed to her company, of that feeling of warmth like that I had never felt in such a long time.
   Slowly but surely, I increasingly became fond of her life. Our life. This continues until one day I decided to stay for good, living out the rest of my days with her until we are brought apart by death. I told her, and she accepted. For we had fallen in love with each other, and both of us knew it.
 
 
 
 
                                                                          The Woman
   
   We had been together for a while now, but he still seemed so secretive. He won’t mention his past, no matter how many times I would ask it of him. Sometimes, when I pushed too far, he would become enraged, and then he would hit me. He would really hit me…
   Once, while in his cups, he let loose that he once had a lover, who had been killed by that “monster” of his.
   There would be times when he would cry while staring out the cabin’s window. Claiming that he saw the monsters out there. The shadowy fiends that had slain his family and his friends.
   For the first few times, I went out, striding into the midst of the night time forest. To find nothing there, noting out of the norm, not a single trace of the giant shadowy beast that he had claimed to glimpse.
   Along with that, there’s something else that also bothered me. I had asked him about his village, and he was able to let that go easily enough. My knowledge in these regions, the small villagers that dotted the landscape, were unmatched, but I had never heard the name of his village before. Not once in my life. Nor had I heard tales of his shadowy monster, or any tidings of destructions or havoc that they have caused, much less than the deaths of an entire village.
   At the back of my mind, a small part of me seemed to wondered. Wondered if he, this man that I love, could still be trusted…
 
   In the lone cabin amidst the woods of night, there was an echo,
“I am going to be exposed… I am going to be exposed…”


                                                                        The Man
   I couldn’t believe how closed she still is, after all this time. I had trusted her, told her about my village, about what had happened to Cecille and the others. About the monster that had pursued me through the shadows of night.
   Still, she remained secluded, walled off whenever I mentioned her private life. Up until now, she had never revealed a single detail, no matter how minor, about her past before she met me.
   There were several occasions in which I would just attempt to ask about it, and she would shriek at me. She would screech and threw objects with a violence I had never thought imaginable. Once, a vase shattered just inches beside my face, and their jagged pieces flew and left a deep gash upon my cheek.
   Then, in the cabin’s underground basement, I had found a shoe. A man’s shoe, in a size larger than mine.  She rarely went to the basement, and on that day, I had gone to check at the food store.
   She hadn’t known about it. Hadn’t known that when I saw that single shoe, my world and my belief had almost fallen apart.
   It was probably her father’s shoes, I thought, yet unable to convince myself. To think about it, she had never mentioned her father, or other members of her family. Had never mentioned why she came to live alone in these woods, far away from any other towns and dwellings. Far away from anyone else…
   Unbidden, my mind wandered back to the those old campfire tales I was terrified of as a kid. Tales of a beautiful lady living alone in the woods. Tales of a wary traveler stumbling upon her lonely cottage, and ending up staying there for some time. Tales of how the woman turned out to be a sort of monstrosity, a she-devil who lures on men and feast upon their flesh.
   How the man-traveler in those stories would run. Cold sweat trickled down my skin, pricking my back like a thousand icy needles.
   She is the woman I love, and I wanted to believe in her. But at that moment I’m no longer sure if I could still trust her…
 
   In the lone cabin amidst the woods of night, there was an echo,
   “I am going to be exposed… I am going to be exposed…”
 
                                                                              The Woman

    There were woman's claw marks on his body. When we first met, I had patched up the various wounds upon him. There were bruises, cuts, and scrapes he had sustained during the hectic run through the forest. However, underlying those, I found a series of claw marks. Women’s scratch marks.
   They were vicious, covered in dried blood and purple bruises. They were not the marks of some casual love making, but something more... upsetting. I don't know what at that time. They seemed superficial and unimportant compared to the other wounds, so back then I had ignored them.
   Now, I wasn’t so sure that it was nothing. He told me about his lover, and how she had been killed by the shadowy monster. But what if… what if that wasn’t the truth? What if those wounds had been her last attempt to defend herself? That as her dying scream was choked off, she had raked her nails against her lover's back, desperately fighting the man who is killing her? Her final message, her final struggle? 
   Today it is his turn to gather up firewood from the surrounding forest. I acted normally, as if nothing had happened, as if this suspicion had never clouded my love for him.
   The instant the cabin door banged shut, I leaped up the stairs. Taking them two at a time, I arrived at the second floor, where the bedrooms are located. With a heart thumping madly, I pushed open the door into his room. It parted with a slow, mournful Creak…
   I ravaged through his objects, picking through them in a fit of desperation.
I just needed something that will prove he is innocent of all this. Please. Something!
   That was when my hand struck against something. It was cold and hard. Metallic. I bent over, reaching my hand deeper into the dark space of the drawer.
   It was a locket. Heart-shaped. Covered in blood.
   Its lids clasped over a sheet of paper. A letter, its edges slightly torn and tattered.
   With trembling hands, I unfolded the wrinkled pages of the letter. They were written in a woman’s handwritings, but the words seemed rush, barely incomprehensible in some places.
 
 
Dear, you know that I love you.
I would never even imagine betraying you.
You know that I would never do it. I will never leave you.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
I’m sorry for what I have done. I’m sorry I even consider it.
I will never do it again.
Please, let me go…
Please.
 
Cecille
 
   I clamped a hand over my mouth to kept myself from screaming. That was when I heard the door banged shut...
 
 
                                                                            The Man

   After I banged the door shut, I waited for some moments before sneaking back into the cabin. It had been my turn to go and fetch firewood today, so I pretended to leave, only to return.
    There is a room in the basement that I had never been able to enter. The thick wooden door was kept closed by a lock of iron. Whenever I asked her about it, she would always change the subject, if not went outright furious. The only way to access the room is through a key she always kept on her body.
   Yesterday night, I had given her a present. A necklace I had made by looping beads of colorful stones along a strand of rope. I felt the sting of betrayal as I saw the genuine smile upon her lips. I clasped the ornament around her neck, then moved down my hand to hold her by the waist.
   There, holding her, I slipped my hand into a pocket of her dress and pulled out the key. She didn’t suspect a thing as I kissed her, and told her that I love her.
   I really do love her. I just wish, with all the love I have, that I could trust her.
   I didn’t see her, didn’t caught even a glimpse, as I crept toward the basement.
She is probably in her room.
   Making as little sound as I could, I gingerly lifted up the door leading down to the basement. It opened soundlessly, the oiled hinges gleaming against the light of my torch.
   With cautious steps, I made my way downward. Everything is pitch black, and I would have lost my way without the torch.
   Holding my breath, I tiptoed toward the locked door at the far end of the basement. Slowly, I slid the key in, and winced sharply as the lock open with a sharp Click.
   Hearing no sounds of movement from above, I assumed that the sound was muffled enough that she didn’t hear it. I continued forward.
   It was a small room. Feeling the walls, I could say that much. From the dim light, I couldn’t make out most of the things in the room. However, it was enough to illuminate an object besides me.
   A closet.
   With blood roaring in my ears, I pry open the doors of the closet.
   Inside were male clothes. Dozens of them. Splattered in red.
   Besides this pile was a knife. Its blade crusted with dry blood.
   I gasped, drawing back as if I had been slapped. My fingers slipping, I let go of the flaming torch. It clattered against the floorboards, and they caught alight instantly. I cursed and rushed out of the room, banging the doors shut behind me.
 
 
                                                                        The Woman

    I leaped down the steps, taking them two at a time, almost tripping in my haste.
I need to run. To get myself as far away from this place as possible. I raced down the steps, heart pounding, as I finally reached the base of the stair.
   That was when I saw him. Emerging from the basement, smoke billowing around him. His face filled with a madness I should have picked out long ago.
   “Darling.” He started. His voice was warm and soothing, like they always are, but she could see through them now.
   “Get back away from me!” I shrieked, grabbing hold the kitchen knife and pointing it towards him.
   At the same instant, he ripped out an iron poker from the flaming hearth. Its tip glowed with heat as he held the rod menacingly with both hands. His arms flexed, ready to strike.
   “Darling, calm down,” He said in a tone that was supposed to be gentle. Yet I could hear it. The calmness that belied his suppressed emotions. The rage that boiled dangerously within.
   “I will stab you if you get any closer!” I screamed, desperately backing away. “Murderer!” I glanced back toward the cabin’s door. It’s not too far away.
   “I’m not a murderer!” He roared, losing all pretense of serenity, “You are!”
   “I should have known from the start,” I said, trying to buy some time. “Those monsters that you talk of. The dark shadows among the trees. It never really exists, does it?”
   I stole a quick glance at the door. It’s closer, but still not enough. “You were the one that killed your lover and the people in your village!”
   He flinched visibly, and stared at her with an incredulous expression “You are truly mad, are you? I discovered your secret room in the basement. You lured men here, using your charm and your pretense of kindness.” His voice was shaking, his hands gripped tightly around the poker. “Then you kill them!”
   I stole another quick glance at the cabin door. This time it’s close enough for me to sprint toward. Curls of smoke rose up from the floorboards beneath, and I saw him glance over his shoulder, fear plain in his eyes.
   “Back off!” I yelled, swinging the knife at the man whom I used to love. The blade went nowhere near him, but it was enough to make him back away. With that, I bounded toward the door and kicked it open.
   It was midnight, and everything was black as pitch. Gritting my teeth, I sprinted forward into the dark, misty forest.  
 
   It was so dark I could barely see anything. I stumbled forward blindly, hoping against hope to run into some kind of human dwelling.  
   I heard the forest shifted. My steps came to a halt.
   It’s not possible. He was a madman. A murderer. I clutched at the knife’s handle, feeling my hand went numb with the exertion.
   I smelled it. The odor like that of a million rotting rat carcasses.
   It isn’t possible. 
   “Get away from me. BACK AWAY!” I hollered, swinging my knife madly at the surrounding darkness. I turned around,
   That was when I see it. Eight humongous eyes, like blood rubies, staring right back at me.
   What he said about the monster was true...
   I screamed as the shadow launched itself at me. 
 
 
                                                                              The Man

       The flames roared around me, engulfing the wooden cabin like a ravenous beast. I could feel the heat radiating off it, threatening to burn off my skin. Smoke churned and clogged the air. I could barely see. I could barely breathe.  
   I stared dumbfounded at the single entrance out of the cabin, the entrance which she had used to escape.
    The monster lurked in those woods. Either I die by its hand, or by the flames.  
Pillars of flames blazed around me, dancing like a living thing. The fire has spread through the entire structure now, reaching up to lick at the timber ceiling up above.
A searing beam crashed down from the ceiling, just inches before where I was standing. Completely blocking off my escape path as the door itself burst into a wall of flames. 
    Realizing the utter hopelessness of my situation, I laughed.
   I laughed madly as I felt my clothing caught on the flames. Then I screamed.

                            Lub-dub
                            Lub-dub
                            Lub-dub
   It hurts…. Pain, so much pain. I felt as if my body is tearing itself into pieces. My vision, my world, is blackened.
   I could hear it, the rattling of the bed’s metal railings. The deaden sound as their wheels rolled along a smooth, polished floor. The smell of drugs and chemicals wafted in the air like a haze, embracing those in it with the stench of the dead and the living.  
   “Doctor, he’s losing his consciousness!” A shrill cry sounded from my left, the speaker moving, breathless, along with me. High-pitched. A woman. I mused distractedly, my mind meandering with the drugs.
   “Isn’t the ER ready yet? Darn it!” A man’s gruff voice barked from the right. “I notify them 10 minutes ago that we’ll have a patient coming in!” My vision lightened up periodically as rows upon rows of neon light passes overhead.
   Am I… dying? It was a strange thought. I had never fear, even thought, of dying before. Now that the final moment is upon me, images from the past starts drifting into my head, like a current of memories, both cherished and long forgotten.   
   I could remember the warmth as she would caress me. Her touch gentle as we hold hands. Her bare body bronze with hours she had spent in the sun. She would giggle as we strolled along the beach, her ashen blond hair streaming with the wind. Sometimes they would lay there, and made love upon the course sands, the ocean waves crashing against sea rocks in the background.
   I miss her. I miss those old days of ours…  
   In my whole life, I had love, had discover love, only once. She was my one and only. She alone no one could replace…
   As I recall the love I had for her, however I also felt a sense of amnesia induced horror.  My memories are a jumble of torn-up fragments, and I can’t recall who she is. Who is she?
   I mused as the railings bang jarringly besides me, the whole bed shaking as if it was coming apart.
   “He’s losing a lot of blood!” One of the nurses cried out, her voice trembling with uncontained anxiety. “Grab that packet of blood over there!” The male doctor thundered, and I could feel strings and needles being passed beneath my skin.
I could still remember that Christmas party, from years ago. We were classmates, but she was also my first crush. That day, she made a gingerbread man cookie for me. It had always been a joke of ours, what with both of us having hazel brown eyes. Her hair, however, was different.
   Now that I think of it, what color was her hair?
   A voice seemed to whisper to me, the voice of an adolescent girl,
   It was a family trait. This color of Christmas flowers…
   The bed jolted to a stop. “His pressure’s dropping dangerously low.” The doctor shouted in a tone of urgency, “Give me 500 mg of epinephrine!”
   I heard the sound of a cap being popped open, then felt the pressure as a needle was inserted into my arm. As my heart gave off a more vigorous beat, the procession scrambled on, the rush of their steps indicating an ever increasing sense of urgency.  
We met at work. I glared at her, that first time. She eyed me like a freak, for we barely knew each other then. What was most striking about her was her hands. They were rough and callused, hard from years of use. She told me that she had to work hard to supply her family over the years.
   She told me that she came from another town. Then why did I felt that she was so familiar? As if I had seen her somewhere before, somewhere within this vortex of memories that was mine… Who is she?
   I sense a violent jolt as I was lifted up and place onto another bed, this one nailed against the ground.
   “Doctor, he’s undergoing cardiac arrest!” There was a rush of commotion as carts and trolleys of equipment were pulled in, their contents haphazardly brought into usage.
   “Start preparing the defibrillator!” The male doctor ordered sharply, and I felt a pair of rough hands pressed savagely against my chest.
   She was beautiful. Oh, beautiful beyond imagining. My meager skills at words would do her no justice. As mediocre as my local café was, she stood out like a sore thumb, a pale idol amidst the faceless crowd.
   I went to her table, as usual, and we chat about the common things; the weather, the local news, our dreams and aspirations. Despite being some years older than I am, I could feel that she was nervous. Tremendously so, for she had a shy and timid nature.
   Come to think of it, I had never seen her talk to anyone else besides me. I know that I will never fall in love with anyone else.
   “Charge the defibrillator to 300 volts!” A gruff command ripped through my fading consciousness. All of a sudden, the skin above my chest was dabbed with a smooth, gel-like cream that sends prickles along my bare flesh.  
   I felt cold. So cold…
   “Clear!”
   She had always been kind, despite the heinous things other kids had done to me. We would engage in a chase, where I leaped and stumbled, waving my pudgy firsts and squealing in childish laughter.
   We would skulk around the bushes for hours, playing games of hide and seek, until her father came out calling for her. In the growing hours of the night, I often fail to spot her, from the color of her skin and eyes and hair. It was a past time we always repeat daily, until the day she moved away.
   After that, I never saw her again, or did I?
   Who is she? My head throbbed abominably, feeling as if it was going to split. I swear that I could tasted blood on my mouth.
   “500 volts!” The voice came again, and my whole body shook as if I was on fire. As if I was dancing a tune of life and death.
   “Clear!”
   She was kind to me. She was timid and shy. She was confident. She was a classmate. A colleague. A childhood friend. Her skin was tanned bronze by the sun. Pale and creamy white. Dark as a moonless night. Her hands were soft and gentle. They were rough and callused, like a man’s.
   How could I trust myself, if I couldn’t trust my own memories? My mind, my body, my memories were fragmented, like scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. My head pounded incessantly, driving me to the verge of insanity. To the verge of splitting apart.
   She is the one, the true love, the only love of my life. I had known no one else, nor had I ever given my heart to another. Yet as I am sure of this, I am no longer certain that I could believe in myself. In all truths, there is that one question that is still bugging me.
    Who is she?
   “1000 volts.”
   “Clear!”
   Then all was darkness…
 
 
   My hands felt numb, my fingers blistered from hours of use. Come to think of it, I had never invited her to my place. Especially not here.
   I am standing in my own backyard, surrounded by low-lying bushes on all sides. The floor was carpeted with green grasses, interspersed with small clumps of trees and rocks coated with moss.
   I grunted as I heaved up another pile of soil and dumped it on the ground beside me. After hours of work, I had finally done it. At long last, I had discovered it. The secret behind my fragmented memories, my broken mind.
   I gaze down at the large pit I had unearthed in the backyard. In there were the women I had glimpsed in my near-death flashes of memories. Them, and many more…
   She had hazel-brown eyes, and hair the color of Christmas leaves. She had ashen blond hair and skin tanned bronze by the sun. She had skin as dark as midnight, a kind and caring childhood friend. She was a pale, radiant beauty, despite the fact that only her skull is grinning back at him now. Them, and many more, much more than he could have counted.
   With a grin, I leaned forward and took in the sight,
   Finally, I had found her. I had found them all…
​

He was chosen because he listened empathetically to what people said before giving advice. Too many people, too often, give advice to others based on their own personal beliefs and personal experiences, disregarding the feelings of the people they are trying to help. But in sympathizing with someone’s position before offering advice, you validate their emotions and they know you understand them. This leads the person to be more receptive to listening to what you have to say. Michael always did that with friends and family. That’s what Vega said.
Michael huffs, out of breath again as he takes a few steps backwards. Then, he takes off in a sprint, gains momentum, and leaps across the stars. When he reaches the surface of the closest moon, his boots skid across the dirt. 
“I’m certain there is an easier way,” Michael mumbles as he heaves in air and feels his lungs expand with the sensation. He is thankful that he no longer feels as light-headed as he did a few seconds ago. 
The darkness of the universe is dotted with white, pink, blue stars and as Michael exhales his breath turns into ice crystals that mix in with thousands of celestial dots.  For a second, it is difficult to tell the difference between the two; that is, until the crystals dissipate.         
Michael scans the infinite universe. It is annoying to be left here alone with no idea what direction to go. But at the same time - this experience is exhilarating! The protective shield that Vega mentioned remained despite Vega’s disappearance; Michael is still able to breathe, is somewhat protected from the cold, and is not drifting about in space as Vega told him he would without it. Michael smiles, and to no one says, “I’m the first man in space.” 
“Depends on what year you are in,” a voice echoes from behind him. “If it’s your time, then you’re the first man.  But if it’s after April 12th, 1961, it’s a Russian, named Yuri Gagarin.”
Michael turns around, smiling at the familiar face and voice saying, “Those are the first words from your lips? You left me alone out here for almost an hour.”
“Yes,” Vega answers. A sparkling crystal bridge forms under his feet as he swiftly strides towards Michael.
“What?” Michael asks bewildered. “All I had to do was take a few steps forward?”
“Yes, Michael.” Vega gives him a stern sideways glance. The “look” is the same that Michael’s father gives him when he has forgotten something that he should have already known.   
Michael looks down for a moment and then suddenly remembers what Vega said before he disappeared: it’s a leap of faith. When his eyes meet Vega’s, Vega gives him a crooked smile.   
Michael asks, “Russia is the first to make it to our moon?”
“No, the Russians are the first to go to space. The moon is different.”
“Are you going to tell me who gets there first?”
“Not tonight.” Vega answers seriously as he turns to face him. Vega’s clothing and demeanor are casual: leather jacket, dress pants, and boots with hands casually draped and folded together in front of him. But his words are earnest, “Michael, you remember your task this night? Millions of lives are depending on you. General Usia’s course must be corrected.”
“That’s right. Give me the most arduous task to start.” Michael answers louder than intended and with a crackle in his voice.
A few hours earlier, Vega explained to Michael that he was born from the stars. His role was to travel across time in search of a person who was empathetic to other people’s problems and who would offer neutral advice. Vega’s role would be to help the chosen person get to where they needed to be in time, explain the situation, how they must correct it, retrieve them, and guide them on their next mission.
Michael asked Vega why he couldn’t help General Usia to change her course. Vega simply answered: it’s not one of my strengths.  Vega, with god-like qualities, admitted he had limitations. Most humans are unable to admit their shortcomings. But Vega could. That’s the reason why Michael came.
“Michael, this will not be your most difficult task. There will be others, with much larger consequences.” Vega states this casually as if they were discussing how best to harvest apples.
Harvesting apples is what Michael should be doing tomorrow in Vernon, BC, with his father. He prays that he can complete his task in the next few hours, and return home in time to help.  His father needs him: his mother just passed, and while his father still works as hard as he does on the farm they own together, there are times Michael has had to hold his father up when he nearly collapsed on the fields. Grief has taken his father’s appetite, and in these early days, he will barely finish a meal. In combination with this, and the occasional spastic fit of weeping in losing his wife of over 30 years it has left what was a very strong man in a frail state.  The work is also terribly difficult and Michael is the only son.    
Michael’s breathing becomes shallow as he thinks about the two problems he faces. He loves his father, but the one that weighs heavily on him is that he might not be able to help General Usia. If he had a second longer to consider his decision when Vega asked, he may have chosen differently.
Michael looks around wondering if the shield Vega provided to protect him is starting to fail; his skin is cold and clammy and small beads of sweat gather on his brow. The galaxy begins to spin around him causing the potatoes he had for dinner several hours earlier to be tasted again in his throat.     
Vega watches Michael closely.
“I’m ready.” Michael says.
Vega nods and walks a few feet away from Michael. Then, he snaps his fingers.
Immediately, Michael is thrust forward into a vortex of stars and blackness. The uneasy feeling that he felt is amplified in intensity as he spins around in circles. It’s as if he is caught in a riptide. It stops only when Michael finally crashes to the ground on his knees.  
                                                                       ***
Michael takes in a big breath of air as he assesses his surroundings.
Within the confines of the space, the room is cold and stale. The floor is steel and there is a grey, circular structure in front of him. On the circular structure, Michael notices thousands of buttons like what might have been on the bridge of the Titanic before it sank off the coast of Newfoundland last year. As his eyes drift across the knobs, he catches sight of something else: a woman with hair cut short like a man’s, wearing a black shirt, pants, and boots to match. On the woman’s jacket, Michael notices several stripes on her upper right arm etched into the fabric.   
Her hands are steady as she points a silver, smooth object at Michael that looks like a weapon of some sort. It looks menacing. But the menacing part is really this: she’s pointed it directly at Michael’s head.
Michael shifts one leg from behind him as he slowly tries to move to a standing position while asking, “Do you know where I can find General Usia?”
“You’re looking at her!” She snaps. Before Michael can say anything else, she says, “Stay where you are!”
“Sorry,” Michael says with hands raised in the air. He hopes this is still the universally acknowledged surrender position. He abides with the order given as he slowly places his foot back behind him and resumes a kneeling position.
Michael looks closer at Usia: her eyes are reddened and slightly moist from perhaps rain, but possibly, also tears.
Michael steadies himself. With arms in the air he makes an assumption softly saying, “General Usia, I’m so sorry about your children.”
General Usia’s eyes narrow at the stranger. Hands tremble. A sharp pain is felt in her stomach as if someone punched a knuckled-fist into it. She says, “How do you know about them?” As her mind quickly pulls random facts together she barks, “DID YOU KILL THEM?”
“I had nothing to do with it, General.” Michael says his voice gentle, like the sound of fall leaves that swish together.  
“Who the hell are you then?” General Usia asks with a growl.
“I am a friend, General.” Michael answers as he tries to formulate a plan.
“No friend of mine would wear those clothes,” she hisses. “You look like you just stepped off some 20th century farm. Fuck! Do I smell horse?” She asks as she swipes at her nose. A tickling nasal drip has commenced with the smell of horse and hay that lingers on Michael’s clothes.
“I’m an old-fashioned man,” Michael answers wryly. “General,” Michael says more boldly. Vega warned him the window to change the General’s mind was ephemeral. “I know your children were killed a short time ago.”
 “Killed today,” she answers. Her voice is suddenly void of all emotion.
Michael pauses as he mentally questions Vega’s decision to deliver him so soon after the event. The General’s children: executed in the fields of their home by the other side were just seven and nine years old. Michael feels the blood drain from his face, stomach swirls again with nausea as he thinks, they were children? How could they? Their whole lives were in front of them and now they are turned to dust, carried away by wind, leaving behind a void of nothingness.   
Michael regroups, pushing onwards. “General Usia, I am truly sorry. But, I beg of you - as a General you must exercise restraint and keep your heart calm. You must not let hatred rule your troops and gunfire.”
“Have you ever been to war, Sir?”
Michael shakes his head from side to side while answering, “No.”
“Then, don’t tell me how to feel, or how to command my troops!”
Michael’s head throbs. Panic overwhelms him. The sound of a ticking clock pounds in his mind as he feels the window of time closing in on him.
Desperate, he takes a bold approach.
“General Usia, I’m not from your time. But I met a man that said if your military decisions are fueled by grief, a young woman will die that would bring an end to the war in a few short years. But with the young woman’s death, this war will linger on for more than one hundred years. Millions more will die that never should! As a mother you can be angry; but as a leader, you must exercise restraint.” 
Usia looks at Michael saying, “as a mother and a General, I can do whatever I want!”
From behind Usia, the door swishes open interrupting their conversation. The General swivels around to face her second intruder. 
“Sorry to interrupt,” Captain McKay says. He glances at the gun General Usia holds tightly in her grasp. “We just need the final order to release the 630TZ bomb.”
General Usia turns to face Michael.
But Michael has vanished.    
“Where did he go?” She snaps at Captain McKay.
“Who?” Captain McKay asks perplexed.
“The man! The man! He was just here!” She barks as she circles the bridge.   
“I didn’t see anyone.” Captain McKay’s face is lined like a geological map in confusion. 
General Usia’s eyes dart around and with thundering words that are so loud they are heard several hundred meters down the hallway of the ship she asks, “Computer, how many people are in this room?”
“Two.” Computer answers. “Captain McKay, and yourself.”
“Computer, check again!” She roars.  
“The result is the same, General Usia.”
“Computer,” General Usia says, “Has there been any unknown personnel on this ship?”
The Computer takes a few moments to review the data history of the ship, and then it responds, “None.”
“General Usia,” Captain McKay presses onwards unwilling to be diverted from his task. He never wanted to carry out this order but she insisted, and honestly, he can’t imagine how she feels. Both of her children - executed. The cruelty.
General Usia’s duty, like all of them, required her to leave her family behind - even if her husband had been killed in battle a few months earlier.  She left the children with her parents because the war had not extended that far. The General thought they would be safe with them. But then in a few short days, the war was on the city’s doorstep. General Usia wanted to move her family to another city but had to make arrangements on her own. And honestly, the General would never ask for help. She knew that many soldiers in the military have families that are under threat of being killed in the crossfire.
The only kindness given to the General was that her parents were left alive. But this is a doubtful kindness. One can only assume that her parents were left alive for the sole purpose to tell the General the details of her children’s deaths.
But even with everything that’s happened to General Usia, he knows obliterating a whole city in revenge to pay for the sins of a few is tantamount to murder. He’s conflicted as to whether he should follow this order. But, General Usia has always been a good, fair General. She must have other reasons for attacking the city that she has not shared. General Usia would not use her position for revenge, he’s certain. Captain McKay prods General Usia, “The bomb is prepped. We just need the final order.”
General Usia looks up at him. Then, she turns away from Captain McKay. Was the man a creation of her mind? A guilty conscience? She knows killing millions of people, civilians, is considered a war crime.
But they were her children.
Her hands shake. Her mind fumbles. There is something that the man said. Something important. That as a mother she could be angry, but as a leader she must exercise restraint.
Choking on tears she hesitates. He was real, or he was a creation of her mind.  The computer found no trace of him. It seems more probable he was a ghost she fabricated, probably from all her historical reading of the early 1900’s.   
She understands the implied meaning behind the words the spirit said: that she should lead as a leader would in battle, and minimize innocent casualties. Do only what needs to be done. General Usia’s face crumbles as she thinks of the deaths of her two children, but also because she nearly made the wrong decision. 
She answers, “No, let’s wait.”
“Are you sure General?” Captain McKay asks with small droplets of relief peppered throughout his voice.             
“Yes,” she answers. “Find witnesses. Get descriptions of the perpetrators. We’ll focus on the individuals responsible for killing the people in my city.”
“Very good General,” Captain McKay says as he feels his lower lip tremble gently. He bucks up though, before he loses control of his emotions. Then, he salutes her as a woman who lost so much, but also as a General who refuses to allow the savagery of war to change the leader she is.  

       Jodi Cinto stepped out of the hotel room shower and toweled herself off. She looked at her reflection in the mirror, and was satisfied with what she saw. No bulges in the wrong places, she thought. Even after three kids.
       Cinto went into the bedroom and started taking clothes out of her suitcase, being careful not to wake the woman in the next bed.  Her staggered mouth breathing had kept Cinto up most of the night.
       There was a knock on the door. Glancing at the bedside clock, Cinto saw it was 6:47 AM. “What the hell,” she muttered.
       She went to her companion and shook her gently awake. The woman gasped in pain, and opened her left eye to a slit. Her face was still too battered for her to open her right eye.
       “There’s someone at the door, Lindsey,” Cinto said softly. “Get on the floor beside the bed while I see who it is.”
       “Do you think it’s Jared?” Lindsey asked through her wired jaw, her fear pulling at the edges of her eyes.
       “Could be,” Cinto replied, glancing toward the door as another knock came.
       “Who is it?” Cinto called, while Lindsey crawled out of bed and lay on the floor.
       “Hotel maintenance,” a muffled voice said. “There’s a leak from your room to the room below. We need to check it out.”
       “Just a minute. I’m not dressed.”
       Quickly pulling on a sweatshirt and sweatpants, Cinto put on the room lights and grabbed her Glock. Then taking the ironing board from the closet, she went to the door. Laying on the floor against the entranceway wall, she pushed the ironing board up so that it cast a shadow over the peephole. As soon as the peephole was darkened, a fusillade of shots came through the door right where she would’ve been had she been peering through. The bullets passed over her head, blasting the ironing board from her hands. The door was kicked open and a man burst in carrying a smoking submachine gun. Looking past her into the room, he didn’t notice Cinto at his feet.
       Figuring that he might be wearing body armor, Cinto shot him in the groin. He doubled over screaming in pain, and with his face right above hers, she shot him between the eyes. He fell backwards into a second man, causing the other to fire wildly into the ceiling. Cinto shot the other man twice in the head, hoping neither her shots nor those of her attacker hit anyone on the floor above.
                                                                       ***
       After a seemingly interminable session with the police, Cinto was allowed to leave. It probably would’ve been worse had she not been a former NYPD detective.
       “Those guys were Jared’s two youngest sons,” Lindsey said, as she hobbled after Cinto. “He’s determined to kill me. Should I just run away?”
       “Not a good idea,” Isadore Feinstein, Lindsey’s lawyer, said. “The bright side of this attack is that it weakens the case against you. A lot. The prosecution just offered to reduce the charge to voluntary manslaughter, and they’ll only ask for five to ten. You’d be eligible for parole after three, and they said they won’t fight it. But, if you want to plead, I’m sure I could get them down to involuntary manslaughter, two to five. You’d be out in less than a year.”
       “Izzy’s your attorney and you should listen to his advice,” Cinto said, hailing a cab. “But if it were up to me, I wouldn’t take a plea deal.”
       “What do you think?” Lindsey asked Feinstein. “I did shoot Gil. While he was asleep.”
       “After he beat the shit out of you,” Cinto reminded her, reaching for the door as a taxi glided up to them. “For the umpteenth time. He deserved whatever he got.”
       “Let’s discuss it after we get to my office,” Feinstein said, as they climbed into the cab. “By the way, since Jodi’s my chief investigator, I need her to look into Gil’s pattern of abuse.”
       “Then who’s gonna protect me from Jared?” Lindsey asked in a panicky voice.
       “I’ve hired a security guard,” Feinstein said.
                                                                       ***
       As the three entered Feinstein’s office, Cinto was surprised to see Mendez, her partner when she’d been with the NYPD. Seeing him for the first time in more than two years, she felt an almost visceral sensation run through her body. She hadn’t been with a man since her husband was killed. She and Mendez had always had a connection that she could never shake or deny, but while the two were partners, she’d made sure their relationship was strictly professional. The two hugged.
       “Moonlighting?” she asked him.
       “I left the job about a year ago,” Mendez said. “Alimony was killing me. It wasn’t the same without you anyway, so when SF Security offered me this position with more money, I took it. Then my ex remarried, so no more alimony. Go figure.”
       “The money was a good reason why I left,” Cinto said, with a wry smile. “But primarily, after Joe was killed in that crash, I wanted a job where there was less chance my kids would become orphans.”
       “Then you got involved in a shootout,” Mendez said, with a grin.
       “Yeah, well,” Cinto said, shrugging.
       “Why shouldn’t I take the plea deal if I’ll be free in less than a year?” Lindsey asked, as all four took seats in Feinstein’s conference room.”
       “A couple of reasons,” Cinto stated. Holding up one finger, she said, “You asked if you should run away. Since you’re under indictment, that’d make you a fugitive. If, or I should say when, you’re caught, you’d go away for a long time. If you took a plea deal and were out in, say, eight months, you’d be on parole. Your movements would be restricted. You still couldn’t run. Your mobster father-in-law wants you dead. This morning he lost two more sons. Your fault, in his mind. How long do you think you’d last staying at home?”
       “So you think I should just go to prison and stay there?” Lindsey asked, tears in her eyes.
       “Not at all,” Cinto said, a grim smile on her face. Holding up a second finger, she said, “You have one of the top defense attorneys in the country. If he gets you acquitted, you’d be free. You could run away. Or, if you prefer, since you’d then be able to inherit Gil’s money, you could hire full-time security.”
       “Do you think you could get me acquitted?” Lindsey asked Feinstein.
       “Highly likely,” Feinstein said, a feral grin on his face.
                                                                   ***
       It was fully dark outside. Mendez, another security man named Glastok, Feinstein, and Cinto were sitting in Lindsey’s living room as Lindsey fluttered in and out of her bedroom, packing clothes, anxious to get out of town. At least for a while.
       The long, arduous trial had just concluded. Thanks in no small part to Cinto finding multiple incidents of Lindsey’s late husband acting abusively toward women, the jury, that afternoon, had returned a verdict of “Not Guilty.” A celebratory drink was in order, but care had to be taken. Jared had not reacted well to the verdict.
       Feinstein had just raised his glass when Mendez said, “I see movement outside.”
       They all turned toward the front. Suddenly there was a blast, shattering one of the windows. A hand grenade came through the opening and rolled to the center of the floor.
       Mendez grabbed an armchair and dived on top of the grenade, covering it with the belly of the chair. The grenade exploded, throwing Mendez against the back wall. He was stunned, but alive. His quick action prevented further injury from the shrapnel and the force of the explosion. All the lights went out.
       “Everyone down!” Glastok screamed.
       Cinto, from the floor, grabbed Mendez’ foot and pulled him into a prone position, just as the house was raked with bullets. The onslaught seemed to last forever, but in fact was over in about a minute, all the shots passing over their heads.
       “You okay?” Cinto asked Mendez.
       “Yeah, I’m good,” he wheezed, shaking his head and struggling to sit up.
       “Glastok, take the front!” Cinto ordered. “The door won’t be easy, so we’ve got a few seconds. Watch these windows. Mendez, come with me. I hear them trying to break in the back. Izzy, Lindsey, head for the basement.”
       Glastok tipped over a couch and took a position behind it, raising an Uzi. Using ambient light from outside and staying down, Feinstein and Lindsey headed for the door leading to the basement. Cinto and Mendez dashed to the kitchen. They could make out people trying to breach the backdoor.
       “Get behind that counter,” Cinto said, in a low voice, directing him to the spot. “As soon as they break in, shoot. The doorway’s too narrow for all of them to come in at once.”
       “What are you going to be doing?” Mendez whispered, as he took his position.
       “There’s a small window on the top shelf of the pantry,” Cinto said, pointing toward the pantry door. “It looks out on the back entranceway. I think I can get a couple of them from there.”
       Keeping low, she scurried to the door, entered the pantry, and started climbing.
       The backdoor burst open and a man ran in with another right behind him. Mendez opened up with his Uzi. The first man fell back into the guy behind him, screaming in pain. The second one fired wildly, as he was knocked back outside.
       Cinto, from the pantry window, saw men trying to get into the house. She opened fire with her Glock, emptying the fifteen round magazine, and then jumped down to the floor, just before return shots hit where she’d been. She ejected the empty magazine and slammed in a full one. After a few seconds no more shots were coming in, so she climbed back up and peered through the window. The outside storm door hung open by a hinge. A man lay sprawled on the ground, and she could make out two others racing away, one of whom was limping badly.
       Descending again to the floor, she looked around the door of the pantry. A man lay motionless on the floor, half into the kitchen, preventing the inside door from closing. Mendez was inserting a fresh magazine into his Uzi. Shots could be heard coming from the front.
       “You okay?” Cinto asked.
       “Fine,” Mendez replied, looking toward the front.
       “The assholes back here are toast,” Cinto said. “Let’s see if Glastok needs any help.”
       Just as Cinto and Mendez reached the front of the house, the front door burst open and two men started to enter, firing at the couch behind which Glastok was crouched. Cinto shot the first one and Mendez the other. A third man appeared in the doorway, and Cinto took care of him.
       Hearing a primordial scream coming from outside, Cinto crawled to the window and peeked over the sill. Jared was standing up blasting the house with a submachine gun. She took careful aim and put two slugs into his head.
       “Got him!” Cinto said with a grin, which faded as she turned and saw Mendez slumped down, the right side of his shirt covered in blood.
       “Mendez!” she yelled, running over and taking him in her arms.
       “Not too bad,” he said in a weak voice. “Got me in the arm. You’re bleeding.” He kissed her on the mouth and passed out.
                                                                           ***
       A week after the battle, Cinto was back home with her children. The front doorbell rang. Mendez was there. His right arm was in a sling, and he was holding the hand of a young girl with his left. The girl looked to be about eleven or twelve years old. Cinto stepped back so they could enter. She started to hug him, and he winced.
       “Cracked rib,” he said.
       She gently wrapped her right arm around him, put her head on his shoulder, and felt her eyes starting to well up.
       “I was so worried about you,” Cinto said, wiping her eyes. “I’ve thought about you a lot over the last couple of years.”
       “How are you doing?” he asked, a pleased expression on his face. “Last time I saw you, you were bleeding.”
       “Just minor cuts and bruises. Flying glass. You’re the one who got shot and took the brunt of the grenade blast.”
       “I’m fine,” he said with a grin. “Could be worse. Convalescent leave with pay. Be out of action for a while, but full recovery expected. Any repercussions for you?”
       “Naw. Clearly self-defense. Jared’s not the kind of guy the cops mourn. With him out of the picture, Lindsey’s home free. Jared and his kids are gone, so the rest of the mob doesn’t give a crap about her. Turns out, for tax reasons, Gil put most of his assets in her name. She’ll also get a good chunk of Jared’s estate. Feinstein got a nice payday, and I got a bonus. Who’s your friend?”
       “Let me introduce you to my daughter, Selena,” Mendez said, turning to the girl beside him. “Selena, this is Ms. Cinto.”
       “I’m pleased to meet you, Ms. Cinto,” Selena said, holding out her hand.
       “Happy to meet you too, Selena, but you can call me Jodi,” Cinto said, shaking the girl’s hand. Then pointing to the three children behind her, she said, “These are my kids. Joey, Marty, and Marissa.”
       Selena waved to the other kids, and they waved back. Then she said solemnly, “Daddy keeps talking about you. Are you going to be my stepmom? I don’t like my stepdad. He yells at me all the time for no reason.”
            Mendez blushed and started to say something, but couldn’t think of the right words. Cinto grinned and hugged him again. “We’ll see how it plays out,” she said, knowing the odds of a stable relationship were slim in her field. Knowing the next case Feinstein took might be even more dangerous than the last. Wishing she ​wasn’t looking forward to it.

​Rick Edelstein was born and ill-bred on the streets of the Bronx. His initial writing was stage plays off-Broadway in NYC. When he moved to the golden marshmallow (Hollywood) he cut his teeth writing and directing multi-TV episodes of “Starsky & Hutch,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Chicago,” “Alfred Hitchcock,” et al. He also wrote screenplays, including one with Richard Pryor, “The M’Butu Affair” and a book for a London musical, “Fernando’s Folly.” His latest evolution has been prose with many published short stories and novellas, including, “Bodega,” “Manchester Arms,” “America Speaks,” “Women Go on,” “This is Only Dangerous,” “Aggressive Ignorance,” “Buy the Noise,” and “The Morning After the Night.” He writes every day as he is imbued with the Judeo-Christian ethic, “A man has to earn his day.” Writing atones.

 
          I just returned from dropping off my daughter. I hate this. No, I love my daughter more than my next breath but it’s so fucking unnatural. When I was married to her mother whom I respect but do not like, being with my daughter was a natural flow. Sometimes we’d play, talk, laugh, argue, even ignore each other but always we were in that zone of comfort called family. Since the divorce I get her every other weekend and it’s not a flow, it’s an event. I feel like the entertainment director. I’m always a little anxious in planning the two days. A movie, a day in the park, the zoo, choices choices choices...it’s unfuckingnatural. There’s no flow, just doing, not being. With my own daughter for God’s sakes. And of course I’m always on my best behavior, laughing, joking, whatevering, during those two days. And finally when I drop her off at home...at home...shit, at home was always my, our home...but no more. She’s at home with her mother and going to school and studying and playing with friends at home...her, their home. Not my spacious apartment which serves for moments with Daddy but not home. And finally, after a successful weekend with Beckah...successful? I’m rating my time with my daughter! Gawd! Okay, we had fun, we connected in a way, and now...I am sad and relieved. And I feel guilty for being relieved now that I’m alone. With a touch of devastating discovery. When I was married and we were family, I assumed my importance as the stereotypical man of the house. As Beckah’s father. She needed me. I was needed, yes. And now, ugh now the revelation that I am really not needed. Not in that visceral paternal life-and-death-father-protector need. I am now a weekend father. An unwelcome sentience.
          A knock on my door. I was not in a mood for company and uninvited whomever’s out there felt like a rude intrusion on my conflicted solitude. The knocking gently persisted as I stormed to the door assuming some unsolicited person intends to sell me something. I slammed open the door ready to do battle but before I could aggressively do my what-do-you-want demanding voice...
          She had skin like the sun was yearning to break through. Her cheekboned structure would have made Rodin proud. Her thin body would give thanks to Giacometti, although with gradually curved breasts peeking out of the top two unbuttoned man’s shirt. Her mouth was a generous invite all topped off by her eyes. Dark brown almost black eyes that seemed to shine.
          My voice originally intended to insult the uninvited knocker came out as raspy breath.
Yes?
          Yes, she responded in a tone approximating weightless sand-papered velvet.
I would like to have a conversation with you.
          I thought I was going crazy as I lost any frame of reference just wanting to swim in her subtle invitation of loveliness.
A conversation?
          Yes.
          With me?
I felt deservedly stupid because there was no one else but me...and god, her. I extended my vision to check if there was anyone else, a camera perhaps to get a moment with an unsuspecting response to this apparition from the gods. No one. Just her.
          Yes, with you. May I come in?
          I laughed although nothing was funny...just a reaction to this bizarre...what? A beautiful stranger, a young woman wanting to come in and have a conversation. What the hell, I rationalized as a distraction from my feeling loss with Beckah.
Sure, come in.
          She walked in with straight backed posture yet in a rhythmic pulsation that made her small shaped butt sway.
            Pull up a couch.
           Her move could have been choreographed by Bob Fosse as she nodded and slid onto the couch with sensuous ease. She spoke in a honeyed voice that made me want to hug her.
             Do you mind if I scrunch up my feet, without my sneaks of course?
             Be my guest.
          She scrunched and then dug into her bag, a huge canvas thing that didn’t seem to fit her short skirt and man’s shirt, pulling out a pad and ball point pen.
I have a list.
              A list.
              Items I want to cover.
             During our conversation.
             Exactly.
             Can I get you something? Water, juice, ice cold vodka, how old are you?
             Twenty six tomorrow.
           She moved her body in a sort of rippling undulation accommodating the pad on her lap, the hem of her skirt higher. Of course the male animal I am wondered if she was wearing panties. She must have sensed my libidinous thoughts as she adjusted her skirt denying me visual access.
             I’d love a glass of juice. What kind?
             Orange, freshly squeezed.
            Yes, with a little ice cold vodka. That’s called a screw-driver.
             I know. I’ll join you.
      I may scramble in a non-linear way but it’s important that we have this conversation.
            Why?
          I asked as if we were involved in a normal situation which this was mos def not.
I need to find a reason.
           Bringing over the drinks, setting them down on the table in front of the couch, I sat in a nearby stuffed arm-chair that had seen better days although I don’t know when.
             Reason for what?
             For being.
           Being. Like being alive? Being a woman? Being a what? Actually we don’t need a reason to be. Breathing in and out is all that is required.
         Beingness demands a reason. A person cannot go through life in ignorance. A person smarter than me said wisdom is the reward for surviving our own stupidity. Are you happy?
           Am I happy? That’s out of left field. But you warned me about being non-linear. God, this is, you, me, conversation...far-fetched bordering on suspicious.
           Are you happy?
           Okay. Happy. Happy? Maybe if I lowered my standards I’d be...listen, I’m talking to you as if...why did you knock on my door? Yes, I know to have a conversation. But there are other doors.
           You were the fourth. One did not answer. One slammed the door in my face saying I don’t want to buy any prescriptions. He said prescriptions but he meant subscriptions. Another answered but she was drunk and despite her invitation I passed.
         You know this is totally strange bordering on bizarre? You don’t have your phone recording this, do you?
         I don’t have a phone. Anymore.
          Why?
         Phones and Facebook are a distraction.
          Distraction from what?
      Internet, instagram, Facebook, linked in, linked out, millions, trillions are now hostages in avoidance.
         What are we avoiding?
         The reason for being.
         I’m beginning to feel like Escher drew us into a lunatic graphic ink blot. Jesus, what is your name already? I’m William.
          Will I am. I like him.
          Me, too. You?
           Rebekah. R-E-B-E-K-A-H. Don’t forget the H.
          Oh God. My daughter’s name.
            There are no accidents.
           What does that mean?
           Perhaps after our conversation we’ll both understand more.
            I wouldn’t bet on it.
            Did your parents love you?
           Talk about a one-eighty.
            Did they?
            Only during TV commercials.
             You are divorced?
             Yes.
            How many years were you married?
            Ten.
            Did you have a ceremony?
            No, we married on the fly, city office and...
        I mean when you broke up. People should have closure. As a matter of fact, married people should have to take a test every year to determine if they have the right to remain married because too many stay together not out of love but out of habit.
         Why are we...Rebekah...tell me again, but make sense...why are we, two strangers, having this conversation that doesn’t seem to have a theme or a purpose?
            A person may try but cannot fake authenticity. You are an authentic man. How do you deal with challenges in such an absurd world?
          I let the world go mad as I pay my bills including the mortgage on a home I used to live in, do my work, and occasionally indulge in goodies to escape the mendacious mundacity of this incarnation.
             Mundacity. What a wonderful word. What does it mean?
            Just stretching mundane.
           I like words. Oxymoron. Isn’t that a great word. Oxymoron. It sounds like bovine drippings.
            Lost discoveries. Oxymoron.
           Civil war.
            Recent past.
           What kind of work do you do?
           I’m an architect.
           That’s impressive.
         Not if you came to the edifice of Sampson Simpson and Freiberg. I’m one of many, many architects, lately designing a bathroom for some Mid-Eastern potentate.
              Bathrooms are important.
         Yes but a gold plated toiled seat is stretching the importance beyond the purpose of a toilet, wouldn’t you say?
             If you had enough money not worry about having enough money what kind of work would you do?
             Artist. Pencil, charcoal, water color although that’s bitch, oils are easier.
           How wonderful. Can I see some of your drawings.
            No.
           Secret?
            I don’t draw. Anymore.
           But you have the gift.
            How do you know?
            I have an ability to know some things. You no longer have the need?
            Need is relative and as I don’t have enough money not to worry about enough money...blues. What about you?
           I’m a waitress at a Steakhouse. Three nights a week dealing with an officious manager, a state of the art sleaze who is like a substitute teacher wearing a pinky ring.
            But how do you really feel about him?
            That’s a joke, right?
             I hope so. Customers must hit on you often. How do you handle that?
           I invisibilize them.
         What would you do if you have enough money not worry about Mr. pinky ring and meat lovers?
          A rapper.
           Did you say rapper?
           Yes.
          I thought I grew too cynical to be surprised anymore but you do surprise me. In fact this whole scene is edging into the chasm of surprise. Rapper. Whoda’ thunk.
Give me a theme, a word, a thought, a pleasure, a complaint.
           You’re going to rap, here and now?
            Or not.
             No, please, yes, what do you friends call you?
           Rebekah. With an H.
           Okay...roll it, Rebekah, rap away.
          Subject.
           I don’t know...anything.
      Rebekah’s head started to move in a subtle pulsating recurrent nod...and grunted a few sounds as if she was a muffled drum machine...her hands started to move in syncopation and then she started her rhythmic rap reminding me of my word, anything.
Anything...anything goes, everything went
Life full ‘o noes not heaven sent
Berate the weight of human fate
Insane pain’s sooner than late
Rip a gash in the flash of the show of life  
No blow to escape the rape of strife
Don’t look down your nose in a tedious pose
Stop reeling and dealing sensations unkind
Make room for elations the feel good kind
Erase your head of low level dread
Slow down yo’ frown ease up your pace
Mo matter the tatter you can’t buy grace.
 
         I was stunned. Her spontaneous rap based on a meaningless word, anything, flowing freestyle with grunts and weaves and bobs of her body and hands, hypnotic.
Fantastic, Rebekah. Fanfuckingtastic. Whew. Blew me away. You are a rapper. Do you go to, where, coffee houses, clubs, I don’t know the scene but there must be...I mean you kick butt, people got to know, this could be a career.
            No, It can’t. Won’t.
            What are you saying. You obviously have the gift.
          When I get in front of more than person I freeze. I tried. Three times. Now it’s just a fantasy that I can do alone, sitting on my fire escape or facing my grimace in a mirror, or with one authentic individual, thank you, William.
Well you could record it. Even set up a video camera and...
         No, I can’t. I tried. Just a fantasy which I let out every now and then...mostly then.
Hard to let such a gift...okay, I see your frown...I’ll let it go.
          Good.
        Okay...now, to reality. A beautiful young woman knocks on my door saying she wants a conversation - with a stranger...who knows, I might be dangerous but you just ease on in and rap up a storm and now that we’ve had the conversation Rebekah with an H, now what?
          You need to dot the I’s and cross the t’s do you?
       It’s the architect in me and perhaps just a sentient man needing to fill in the spaces. What impels you to...
           Having conversations stops me from...would you rather I go now?
          No, not at all. I want you to stay and yes, conversate, talk to me, linearize...
          Linearize?
          Linear, an architect’s need and bane, one and one makes two, this line leads to the horizontal leading to the vertical. It makes sense.
           Life does not make sense. Not my life.
          Me neither if I take a good hard look at it but I’m not knocking on doors lusting for conversation with strangers. Talk to me, Rebekah, too much unsaid. Talk to me!
She started to move her body in rhythmic tremor accompanied by grunting sounds as she fell into her charismatic rap as if it was an entity demanding voice.
 
Mindness kindness does not give birth
Lacking mirth on planet earth
Garbage is still garbage in a human form
Stretching and retching far from norm
I don’t have a care or even a bother
That I shot my salacious ungracious step father
Who was diddling my body’s sweet sixteen
Sexuating me if you know what I mean
I didn’t tell Mom I don’t know why
Maybe ‘cause I liked it on the sly
But I also hated the smell of his breath
Fantasized the cause of his very own death
Even while I came on his evil grinning face
His foul drooling mouth whispering base
Words I heard when he made me come again
I had to do him harm I just didn’t know when
Until the book club night Mom was out
Watching TV he boldly coldly reached out
Splitting my thighs I demised a pushing back
Ran to the dresser for the Glock attack
Opening the drawer I pulled out the gun
He dared me to shoot as if it was fun
I surprised both when I pulled the trigger
He grabbed his leg screaming bitch of a nigger
Plopped own on the rug with his bleeding thigh
Just a flesh wound doctor he just wouldn’t die
I calmly packed some things in this bag
Including the gun stuffed wrap in a rag
Step father and me had just enough
No more promises of disposable fluff
I try to forget but it just won’t go
Somethings you just cannot unknow
That was many years ago and revenge ain’t glory
There you have it William, the end of my story
 
        The silence was profound and palpable. I slightly shook my head in empathy simultaneously trying to ground myself in this...this what...it was...it was what? Nothing fit. I didn’t know if this experience, bordering on outrageous maybe, a strange beautiful young woman who...
          Talk to me William
         Yes, okay...Rebekah...with an H, I am stunned. True? You shot him in the thigh?
         She reached into her huge canvas bag and pulled out a gun, holding it up.
With this little sucker, yes.
           I jumped in response to the gun.
           Put the gun away please, I do not feel, just put that sucker away!
       She shrugged her beautiful slim shoulders as if apologizing for a inadvertent burp...put the gun back into her bag and then looked at me with those beautiful dark ebony eyes.
            Would you like to have sex with me, William?
          I gasped, or maybe a stifled laugh in the face of nothing funny.
         Maybe another time, Rebeccah, but no, not now. As a matter of fact I think your request for what...oh yes, conversation has been fulfilled and now, now I need to be alone.
            I’m sorry. I so enjoyed being with you. Are you sure?
          I stood and walked to the door, opening it as an invitation for her departure.
         She nodded in a gesture of sweet, gratified acceptance.
          I enjoyed my time with you, William.
          She tip-toed so her face was close to mine. Leaned in and kissed me for three seconds of lunatic sweetness and eased her body out.
          I closed the door, leaning against it I slid to the floor muttering.
           What the fuck was that!
 
                                                                               -    -

         Alex and Maria led the way down the dimly lit alley, with Charlie following behind. A late afternoon thunderstorm had cleared most of the heat and humidity from Prague’s medieval streets, but in return left a treacherous field of slick cobblestones and opalescent pools of unknown depth.
            “Oh ye of little faith, look at that. I knew the Blue Note would still be here.” Alex gestured towards a flickering neon arrow pointing down an uneven set of limestone stairs, then signed to his deaf wife. A rusting metal eighth note hung above the failing neon.
            Charlie looked down at his feet, where the arrow’s reflection danced across the surface of an oil-slicked puddle to the beat of a bass line that he sensed more than heard. He wished he knew American Sign Language so he could ask Maria what she felt. Alex and Charlie had worked together for more than a year, Alex in sales and Charlie in software solutions, but this was the first time Charlie had met Alex’s wife. In her late twenties, Maria was ten years younger than Alex and Charlie. Her parents still lived in Hungary, and now that the project was finished Alex and Maria were off to Budapest tomorrow while Charlie was flying back to Charlotte alone. Maria was the most beautiful woman Charlie had ever seen, taller than either Charlie or Alex, with almond-shaped eyes and long black hair, red lips that matched her high-heeled shoes. She had smiled and laughed at every new twist and false turn their journey had taken in the ancient streets.
        Charlie didn’t get out often. After school he’d gone on a couple of dates with women that his mother had found for him, or the occasional friendly co-worker with nothing better to do, but they hadn’t led anywhere. By the start of Junior High Charlie had stopped growing, although recently he’d been putting some weight on his slight frame. Every pound showed when you were only five foot three.
         Most of the women he’d been set up with had been too big for his taste, chunky and comfortable like Charlie’s mother and grandmother, but he still tried to have fun, tried to show them a good time. Then, after his mother died and he moved back into his childhood home, he stopped trying altogether.
            “Doesn’t sound like any blues I’m familiar with,” Charlie said.
          “It’s the Czech Republic, Charlie, for Christ’s sake. Who knows what kind of Euro-pop, Russian punk, Afro-Carib jazz fusion opening act they’ve got here on a Tuesday night? Come on Technical Support, let’s get your mojo working. Show us how the geeks roll.”
            Maria signed something short and barked her odd laugh that Charlie had already gotten used to, then rolled her eyes grandly at her husband for Charlie’s benefit before Alex led them down the stairs. She could only read lips a little, Alex had said, although she seemed to read her husband more than well enough. The steps led under a low stone arch and on to a passageway lit by a single bare bulb. The corridor ended in a massive wooden door blocked by an equally massive bald-headed man wearing a too-small white tuxedo jacket over a black t-shirt and grey sweat pants. The doorman glanced at Alex and Charlie, then stared at Maria for a lingering moment before holding out a stubby hand. He wore heavy silver rings on his thumb and little finger.
            “Pět sto koruna,” the doorman asked.
            “English?”
The doorman brushed an invisible speck of lint off one satin lapel, ignoring the question.
            “German? I mean, sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Alex tried again.
            “Fünfhundert.”
            Charlie did the math in his head, something he was good at. “Five hundred crowns? That’s more than thirty bucks. Kind of steep for a cover charge.”
            “Capitalism,” Alex said. “The Czechs might have come late to the table, but they’re making up for it. Not to mention what the dollar’s been doing lately. Pay the man, I’ll find a way to expense it.”
            Charlie shrugged and stepped up to the door, pulling a selection of brightly colored banknotes out of his overstuffed wallet and handing them one at a time to the man. When the pile totaled five hundred, the doorman held up one thick finger on his other hand. Charlie looked back at Alex.
            “Five hundred each?”
            “Of course. And don’t forget to tip. I’m serious.”
        The iron-bound wooden door opened and the three Americans pushed through the vibrating wall of backbeat and cigarette smoke that swirled just inside the entrance and stumbled down one more block of dark stone into the club.
           There were no tables or seats, not even stools along the brushed aluminum bar that snaked the length of one wall. What lighting there was came from blue neon tubes running under the liquor shelves, plus strings of oversized red, white, and blue Christmas lights taped across the low stone ceiling. A dread-locked pale-skinned DJ sat behind an impressive array of electronics on a low stage opposite the bar, controlling the pounding dance music and the dancers who thrashed at the sounds along with him. The floor was full but not packed, a few couples but mostly young women dancing by themselves or in small groups, wearing low-cut blouses or lacy, see-thru dresses with chunky plastic bracelets in pastel colors. The majority of the men clustered around the two bartenders, forming a smoking, gesticulating, hard-drinking mass.
            Charlie pulled Alex next to him and shouted in his ear.
            “Doesn’t look like a blues crowd to me.”
            “Well, we already paid, might as well stay and get some drinks. Maria will like this music better, anyway. Lots of boom-boom. Why don’t you dance with her?” Alex shouted back, signing to Maria. Without waiting for a reply he headed towards the bar. Charlie shrugged at Maria, who smiled, momentarily wrinkling her nose, then shrugged back, and they pushed into the gyrating mob of slender bodies and glowing polyester.
            Charlie remembered the last time he’d been dancing, at a cousin’s wedding reception almost twelve years ago, not long after his father’s accident. He’d escorted his mother to the wedding of two people he barely knew, and then to the reception in a nearby Knights of Columbus hall. It took them more than three hours to drive to Raleigh from home.
        For most of the party Charlie sat with his mother while she received condolences from the same stream of people they’d seen at the funeral. Every once in a while Charlie would get up for another bottle of beer, and the occasional Tom Collins for his mother. Later, when the afternoon had worn down into the evening, one of the bridesmaids asked Charlie to dance with her. He remembered joking with her about her outlandish dress, a whirlwind of shiny pink ribbons and white gauze, and they shared a laugh while writhing to an old Isley Brothers hit. Later in the car, his mother let slip that she had asked the bridesmaid if she would dance with Charlie.
            “Promise me you’ll find someone you can have fun with,” his mother said on the ride back to Charlotte. “That’s the only thing I want from you.” That was the closest they ever came to talking about what they both knew, about how unhappy his parents had been with each other since well before Charlie, an unexpected and unwanted only child, was born. He always wondered what motivated his parents to stay together until that morning when his father drove into a bridge abutment on a clear September day, on the same route he’d driven to work every day for the past fifteen years. Probably it was for him.
            Back at the Blue Note, Charlie ran through what few dance motions he remembered before settling into a semblance of the local crowd’s jerky arm and leg movements that let him spend most of his attention watching Maria. He wondered if she heard any of the music with her ears, or only felt the beat as vibrations through her feet, or the fluttering of air on her skin.
            He wondered if she liked him, and he twisted down to his knees in an Elvis-inspired spin move, hoping to make her laugh. The twist got a broad smile from Maria, and loud giggles from a Czech girl dancing next to Maria, apparently by herself.
            “American?” The girl shouted to Charlie in heavily accented but intelligible English. She wore a transparent sleeveless blouse over a black bra, and a short red skirt with a wide gold belt and matching heels. The girl had slashes of blue makeup across her cheekbones and over her eyes that, together with her outfit, made her look like a comic book character moving at super-speed.
            “I am Zelenka, hello. Are you lovers?” Zelenka pointed with her thumb from Charlie to Maria and back again. Charlie started to shout a negative, then stopped and looked over at Maria. Maria smiled politely, and continued dancing. Charlie wondered what he, they, must look like to prompt such a question. Happy, he guessed. Like happy people that should be together. Something different for him. He knew it was only an illusion, but appearances meant something, and maybe he wasn’t ready for reality.
            Charlie glanced over toward the bar. Alex was nowhere to be seen.
            “Yes, yes we are. We are lovers. We are happy lovers!” He shouted at Zelenka, beaming and gesturing first at himself and then at Maria.
            Zelenka clapped and laughed, then moved closer and rubbed up against him, her pelvis against his hip, and ran long red fingernails down both the front and the back of his shirt, all the way down to below the belt of his black dress chinos.
            “Too bad. Need extra girl more sex? Maybe sex both of you? Good price.”
            Charlie could feel his smile falling away, as something that he had only pretended he had found was already lost. Maria stopped dancing, threw back her head, and laughed.
            “No. No, thank you.” Charlie shouted.
            Zelenka moved away without another word and vanished into the crowd of swirling arms and legs.
            The DJ cut smoothly into a new song at about the same time Alex returned with three bottles of beer. Charlie ignored Maria’s rapid signing to Alex, took a beer, and shuffled over towards the other men at the bar, muttering an apology to no one living, an apology that no one could hear, to no one other than himself.

Drew Thompson received his Bachelor of Arts in English from Kent State University in August of 2014. He won the Anna Ulen Engleman Creative Writing Award from Kent's English Department in 2012. His work has appeared in The Long Story. Currently, he resides in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he works as a route driver and writes fiction.

 
            The editor for the city newspaper was at her desk, going over the copy for the morning’s issue, and she was exhausted. Long days blended into longer nights—the way of the world as electronic media continued its slow but certain infringement. The results were taxing, as evidenced by the surrounding mountain of cigarette butts and Styrofoam cups.
            Everything looked okay. Not spectacular, but okay. Nothing much in the way of real news had happened for weeks. A state senator’s visit, a city official’s divorce, the occasional mugging and shooting (it was a city, after all), but that was it.
            The editor went over everything one last time, and was preparing to okay it, when she noticed something amiss. She double checked again, just to be sure, then picked up the phone and dialed out.
            A cracking male voice answered. “Yes?”
            “Stevens, get in here at once.”
            “Coming.”
            A moment later Stevens came in, timid as always. “Is there a problem?”
            “Where’s the obit column?”
            Stevens stared dully. “It’s there.”
            “What—where?” The editor flipped through the sheaf once more.
            Stevens picked at his mustache. “It’s there.”
            There it was: between the op-ed and comics. In the wrong order. But that wasn’t what concerned the editor. For the single page, entitled OBITUARIES with today’s date, was blank.
            “What the hell is this?” she demanded.
            Stevens just looked at her.
            “Get Monroe in here.”
            A minute later the two men shuffled back in, Monroe looking especially hangdog.
            “Monroe, what is the meaning of this?” she cried, waving the nearly-blank sheet.
            Monroe mumbled something unintelligible.
            “Speak up!”
            “There were none.”
            “Excuse me?”
            Monroe repeated his assertion.
            The editor picked up the phone and punched the button which speed-dialed her friend and colleague, another editor to another newspaper in a nearby city.
            The editor told her colleague of her odd predicament. The other editor, sounding somewhat reassured, informed her of a similar situation. After exchanging basic information, they promptly reached the same conclusion: no obituaries had been printed because none had been reported; the lack of reports came down to the lack of bodies. More research would be required to make certain, but as of a quarter to one in the morning on Thursday, the preceding Wednesday had passed without blood or mayhem, indeed without soul-passage of any kind, in two respective cities.
            The editor hung up and leaned back, massaging her temples and giving herself excuses to light another cigarette. She had once given thought to quitting, but the stress of her profession was too great.
            She was about to leave, having temporarily resisted her urge, when the phone rang again.
            It was the Chairman.
            The editor immediately thumbed her lighter and breathed deeply. She reminded herself to pick up another carton. She would need it.
                                                                      ***
All was quiet in the stadium when the Chairman stepped up to the podium. All was dark, too. Not the darkness of night but of extinguished electricity; the stadium was of the enclosed kind.
            “Thank you,” the Chairman addressed the crowd, “ladies and gentlemen of the Litigious International Association of Reportage Supreme, for your expediency and solemnity in address of the matter at hand. Also due thanks are the Elite Gonzo Organization, without which meetings such as these would not be possible in such magnitude; and last but not least our colleagues in the Global Reconnaissance Ensemble of Erudite Disseminators, a funder par excellence of all of our work abroad which, as you know, can be quite the strain on the ledger.”
            The crowd laughed politely.
            “Thank you all,” the Chairman continued. “As I’m sure all of you are by now aware, we are at a great precipice, the defining event of our careers, daresay our lives; our collective presence this early morning is due to something magnificent, unprecedented in recorded history, very unlikely to be reprised. I don’t need to highlight just how crucial the next twenty-four hours are to our organization, let alone our profession, our passion. If each and every one of you didn’t already have a headliner on standby, simply jittering to jump into print this very morning, you wouldn’t be the outstanding newspapermen and women I know you to be.
            “Let us make no mistake: these headlines must sell, and sell they will. You are all people of incomparable wit and brains as infallible as your sense of integrity. I do not need to tell you that our industry has fallen on hard times. The media has been infiltrated with the kind of festering gangrenous sickness that has poisoned and will eventually kill every principal and scruple we stand for, which, as we all know, number numerous. The rampant commercialism of today’s daily media output, while sharing the enthusiasm and omniscience for which we in this industry strive, has ultimately—and seemingly irreversibly—prevented real news stories from enjoying the spotlight, the unassailable reverence and endurance, they so deserve.
            “Ladies and gentlemen, a few years ago I had a dream. As many of you may know, my career choice was inspired by the legacy of my father, lauded as the finest, shrewdest newspaperman of his generation. One evening, savoring an iced coffee of particular gusto, I dug through my father’s files and pored over his stories, articles dating from the stock market crash through the first Reagan inauguration. A long, distinguished, accomplished career, preserved in my own personal archives, yet, having coincided with the last century’s most extraordinary events, become, like history itself, immortal.”
            The crowd hummed respectfully.
            “That night, my dream manifested itself. It was of a simple corner kiosk, like a million others on a million city street corners. The air was permeated with the mist of early mornings in the city, the kind that rises out of the ground itself and fills the air like an old-fashioned tramp steamer—a pungent fog. An elderly gentleman was setting out the day’s magazines, circulars, and newspapers, preparing for a day’s grind in the kiosk. He was the only living soul present.
            “Then, as soon as the city’s four newspapers were loaded in their appropriate racks, people began to appear, out of the fog like ghosts from the night. They hurried up to the kiosk, brandishing money, eager as children at an amusement park attraction. Quickly the morning sun dissipated the fog, and the attendant saw an incredible thing: the line of customers stretched as far as he could see, at least ten blocks away, and as fast as he could sell the newspapers the line seemed not to shorten but to grow.
            “Ladies and gentleman, I was in this kiosk with the attendant. I wondered what sort of cataclysmic event had occurred to bring customers in such multitudes, and I had no sooner passed the thought when the elderly attendant put a paper in front of me. The headline read ‘NO ONE DIES.’”
            The crowd waited breathlessly.
            “Then, a great wind lifted me up, and I saw the city, and then the next city, and the next, and finally the state, and I floated higher and farther, until finally I traversed the world over, and saw the situation was the same. My heart soared with the possibilities such an extraordinary phenomenon would achieve for mankind. Visions as clear as day came to me.
            “I saw bars and lounges and clubs open twenty-four hours a day, and newspapermen had the VIP room. I saw dignitaries honored with royal and political festivities, and those dignitaries were newspapermen. I saw the most affluent, important citizens of our nation and others bestowing in all fields of social activism the highest honors upon newspapermen. I even saw the awarding of the Nobel Prize—to a newspaperman. And, I’m a bit sad to say, it was not me.”
            The crowd laughed jovially.
            The Chairman smiled good-naturedly.
            He continued, “I jest, but let there be no doubt at my astonishment, my wonder—and my conviction. I have always believed that what I witnessed was no mere dream but a vision of the great times of old days, and a prediction that it would be again. This day, that vision has been realized. Ladies and gentlemen, we stand on the verge of greatness once more.”
            The stadium thundered with applause and cheers.
            “And now, I urge you to do what newspapermen and women do best, and hit the pavement. Go to work. Tell the story that the crowds will knock each other out to hear. And do it in print. Do it with dedication and passion. Together, we can chronicle one of humanity’s finest moments, and we can do it in style.
            “But this is only the beginning of a fabulous new era for our industry. When the people hear, in loving print, the story of this monumental occasion, they will embrace a new lease on life. All over the world, everyone will feel blessed with another chance, a fresh start. Your duty, as always, is to show the people what they need before they know they need it.
            “Now go out and show them.”
                                                                         ***
They did, and the world entered into an unprecedented era of peace and unity.
            Before the end of that first day, the stock market soared, the value of currency increased, and the American presidential approval rating was the highest in history. Politicians everywhere set aside petty differences to make decisions that would soon benefit everyone. Multibillion dollar corporations dumped vast amounts of money into the world’s neediest charities, and before the week was out, both cancer and the common cold had been cured.
            And the media were lauded as heroes (compliments to themselves who reported the lauding). People took to the kiosks on street corners once more; they cared about and invested in the news. The Chairman’s vision had come true.
            Pride and goodwill were not merely confined to reporters and editors, but to each and every individual on the planet, from the oldest human vestige down to the freshest cognizant toddler. People took pride in their work, their homes, their activities—every aspect of their lives. People cared about their neighbors. People believed in something once more, and the world was a glorious place.
            For two whole days.
            Now, neither of those days included the day no one died. The following day, the day people first received and celebrated the news, held plenty of deaths, as did the day after; but these deaths were expected, natural, peaceful, smiling. After all, the seven-hundred sixty-eight people who perished the first day had lived to see a day without death. It was the happiest moment of almost all their lives.
            The same went for the second day, whose death toll numbered more than double the day previous. Another milestone: never before a day with more pleasant endings.
            The third day was different. It was, in fact, the most disastrous in all recorded history.
            It began, appropriately enough, with fire raining down on Pompeii. Not from the volcano—the first eruption in almost two thousand years came that evening to wipe out the rest. No, the first hell came from the smoldering wreckage of a midair collision at twelve-oh-seven in the morning, Pompeii time. (Whatever deity the world owed this relentless reckoning certainly possessed an earthly sense of punctuality.) Two commercial airliners lit up the midnight sky in a great explosion; almost everyone on the ground—Mediterranean Europeans being by and large night owls—saw it happen, from cafes and fiestas, and most tried to escape. Not many did. Three-thousand five-hundred-and-six people died that warm summer night, the bulk of which were citizens of Pompeii, having the terrible luck of enjoying life beneath a populous commercial flightpath.
            Pompeii kicked off a day of unthinkable catastrophe. The strangest thing about that terrible day was how at once staggered and restricted the long list of disasters seemed to be, according to the vagaries of world time. The survivors who were in charge of the tallying uncovered an odd pattern: every horrible thing that occurred did so on the shared calendar day of which the Pompeii collision started. For example, at the time central Europe was breaking the new day, Australia and New Zealand were well into the morning. So, their day up until then had passed as normal.
            A meteor shower, undetected by the most precise radars, rained down on Sydney and Auckland (at eight-ten and ten-ten a.m., respectively), leveling the cities in a matter of minutes to a desolation surpassing the bleakest parts of the Outback. (New Zealand did not have time to resent this, as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high created by an asteroid sank the whole island by three o’clock, their time.) Eighty-five thousand people were struck down while eating their breakfast. Most of them never knew what hit them.
            As the earth spun slowly on its axis, the gods of destruction shed the gleam of red carnage across its surface; a satellite—had they not been obliterated by one of the seventeen meteor showers to riddle the world that day—might have captured pictures of the wonderful blue tinged a pale crimson:
            Tsunamis plagued Southeast Asia and the Oceanic Islands, flooding whole cities and drowning untold millions.
            A Palestinian ship mechanic, on a routine check, accidentally triggered a torpedo to blast into the side of an Israeli cruise liner, killing six-hundred seventeen civilians and inciting another war in the Middle East.
            Russia was besieged by wolf attacks. Thousands of wolfpacks descended upon villages across Siberia and decimated legions of citizens. One mauled survivor said it was as though the beasts were under some kind of trance.
            A league of underground terrorists orchestrated the deadliest mass attack in history. In a single move, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, and Rome were blown to bits. It had been long in the planning; the concurrent annihilation of the day was just luck on the part of the terrorists. The following day, remaining newspapers across the world were printed with a picture of the Eiffel Tower collapsing.
            Africa and South America, aside from a few minor natural disasters, were relatively unscathed. Cynical scribes later postulated that they had already suffered enough.
            America, being at the westernmost end of the axis, and having seen obliteration washing the world bloody, edging nearer their way as the day wore on, received its fair share of mass shootings, gang wars, train and car and plane wrecks, but the fact was the most devastating day in human history was, for America, not too worse than a normal, pre-deathless day. Of course, much of the citizenry, being Americans, would claim otherwise; tales of America’s heroism in participating in and surviving the world’s worst day would be reviled at barbecues and in taverns and clubs by millions of sloshed patriots until the end of their days.
            The ongoing celebration of America’s peerless virtues had already begun in honor of the day no one died. Millions of people, in a newfound vitality, had taken the week off to enjoy the blossoming summer, and were enjoying pool parties and bocce and cookouts. One such group of newspapermen and women gathered on the lakeshore deck of the editor’s house.
            “A fleet of ours just sunk in the Atlantic,” Monroe said, nose to his tablet, fingers busily scrolling.
            “Yes sir, the world as we know it is ending,” Stevens said for perhaps the fortieth time that afternoon. “It’s only a matter of time now.” He sipped his beer and sucked on his mustache.
            “Shut up, Stevens,” the editor said. “Don’t be so goddamn negative.”
            “Steaks are almost ready,” the editor’s husband said from the grill where juices hissed and spat.
            “Right on, bro,” said the copyist, who kept shuffling a deck of cards to entice (fruitlessly) potential opponents, and peered (not quite as fruitlessly) up the editor’s skirt.
            “Oh God,” said the receptionist. “Do you really think it is?”
            “Without a doubt,” Stevens said at once.
            “Shut up, Stevens,” the anchorman said, rising. “Need a hand there, Jeff?”
            “Just another minute and we’ll serve ’em up,” the editor’s husband said.
            “D.C.’s been bombed!” Monroe cried. “Wait—no, just bomb threatened. False alarm.”
            “God help us all,” Stevens moaned.
            “Shut up, Stevens,” the anchorwoman said. “You know what I could use right about now? A good steak and a good lay.”
            “I could help you with one of those,” the copyist said. No one responded. He had always been a letch.
            They were silent for a while. The editor’s husband, with the unnecessary aid of the anchorman, distributed the steaks, and the editor fetched the potatoes and salad from inside. Everyone sat around and ate their food and drank their beer. The anchorwoman drank iced tea.
            The anchorman, dipping a bite of steak into a puddle of A-One, declared, “You know something, if it were all to come crashing down at this very moment, I couldn’t complain. Not a bad way to go, in my estimation—in the company of coworkers and friends.”
            Stevens burst into tears.
            “Shut up, Stevens,” everyone said.
            Stevens did not, and had to be escorted indoors by the anchorwoman. The copyist quietly seethed with jealousy.
            “A toast, if I may,” the anchorman went on, unfazed. “To good friends, now and forever, be that an afternoon or a century.” He raised and tilted his beer.
            “Cheers!”
            Three hours later, after a nuclear bomb was detonated as it dropped into Lake Michigan, creating a tidal wave that destroyed everything and everyone up to half a mile inland (by far the most shattering event in America that long, horrible day), two men sat together in a dark office in another city, drinking from a fifty-year-old bottle of Chivas Regal.
            “Well, sir,” the assistant said to his boss, “where do we go from here?”
            The Chairman, ragged, unshaven, and bleary-eyed, swigged the last of his scotch. “Why, the pavement, of course,” he said. “We hit the pavement like always.”
            He paused and gazed across the desk at his assistant. “Where else?”

           Sunlight filled the hallway in jagged shafts, raking the bustling crowd.  Teenage morning buzzed against the walls, down the halls, groggily shaking itself alive.  A tight pack of girls strode down the center of the aisle, passing Mr. Riley, who stood at his post outside his classroom.  The pack’s chatter grew low and quiet, and as they passed one of the girls was graceless enough to look back at Mr. Riley; she was immediately censored for the indiscretion, although re-absorbed soon enough, the slip forgotten or even implicitly condoned.
              The usual commotion subsided somewhat after the pack of girls passed but there was a rumble of sorts, barely distinguishable from the general roar, coming from the back of the hallway.  Riley looked down the hall to see in the distance Richard Jennings walking, alone, as though within a cone of alienation.  Richard’s gait was always awkward and shambling in a way that suggested that he was not entirely in control of his body.  The clothes he wore hung crookedly on him as though they were inching away from his body, reluctant to be implicated. 
            Today Riley watched Richard shamble down the hall in a bright red shirt and thought he is wearing it like it is a hump on his back, and the red is not right; somehow the way he is wearing it makes the entire color seem wrong, as though it should not exist.  And every time I see him in the hallway he seems to be walking aslant, as though his body were edging away from itself.  Richard was smiling today, if it could be called that—a kind of sick death’s head grimace that seemed plastered onto his face, and Riley inadvertently averted his eyes from Richard as he passed closer to him how often have I done that without even realizing I was doing it; now I am more aware, I am hyper-aware, I can smell things other people can’t, I can see things buried--
            Riley shook his head smartly, as if to awake himself, as Richard passed on alone.  He stretched a hand out to the doorframe and succumbed to memory:  a year ago, a table at a painfully trendy restaurant, across from a young, increasingly nervous new teacher.
            “Well, six years ago I was very sick—I was in bed for two weeks.  It was July so school was out, and sometimes I felt as though I could die and sink away deep into my mattress a rotting corpse and no one would miss me, or find me even, until September, when Peterson would send someone to bang on my door, right?”
            The reference to the principal was apparently a sign for the young woman to acknowledge recognition, and she did, nodding briefly with an anxious smile, her eyes darting about the room.
            “I just watched television all the time—or really I just had it on all the time and my eyes would stare at it for a while and drift away for a while, and my brain would barely register the difference.  But—and here’s the thing, see?  When I would get out of bed, my feet would hit the floor in a different way, as though something inside of me was off, like my body had been readjusted within itself and was left slightly off-kilter.  I would get up and stumble across the floor as though I were on different sized stilts, all akimbo.  I’d lean against the bathroom threshold with my head hanging down, feeling my two disjointed selves clash within me.  Can you understand that?  Do you know what I mean?”
       Riley’s amped, edged excitement was unnerving the woman almost completely, and somewhere within him he felt that, but he was going too fast to slow down.  She could only muster a series of polite sounds, the barest of communication, but it was enough to keep Riley going.
            “It was as though there was another me inside of me!  As though my skeleton had somehow disgorged another, newer skeleton, and that new thing didn’t want to share my body but it had to, and I could feel it inside of me—but what was me?  Do you see?  Can I even say me?  Are they both me?  Ah—it was horrible, agonizing!
            “I am not sure if I have really recovered.  Yes, my body is back, I suppose—it eventually was slammed back into place, into one piece, a whole, if you can call it that—but the realization that it can happen, this kind of division or attempted division, this has permanently altered my consciousness.  There is an I within my I and at one point the two were—misaligned?
            “At points in those dreadful weeks I wanted violent death.  Now, though, I aligns with I—if shakily—and ‘I’ walk around with a new consciousness of what ‘I’ is, what I am, and it is not altogether reassuring, I tell you!”
            To that point his memory of the night was clear, all too much so, but after that the evening was blurry, a swirl of tension and alcohol.  His face wrenched up while thinking of it, his free hand clenched into a fist.  Richard’s alignment is out.  I can see it, but I wonder what he feels about it or if he even realizes.  Maybe he’s always been that way, maybe he thinks it’s normal, maybe he knows its not but he’s always been that way and cannot change it, and so he embraces it, with that devil-smile.
            “Mr. Riley?  Are you all right?”
            Angie.
            “Yes.”   
                                                                       *
            From Angie’s journal:
            “I wrote a poem for English class.  It was homework.  I had never written a poem before.  I didn’t even have to do it, I could have written a one page essay instead, but I wrote the poem.  I’m not sure why.  I sat cross-legged on my bed and I just came up with some words and put them together.  I think it was all right.  Mr. Riley liked it; he gave me an A.
            I think Mr. Riley likes me.
            He shouldn’t.  I have so many things inside me.  I don’t want him to see them.  Plus, he is my teacher and he is at least thirty years old.  It isn’t right.  But I have seen him looking at me and I have seen Jamey see him looking at me and it makes me uncomfortable and she makes me uncomfortable and sometimes I just want to go to the garden and cry and cry.  I like going to the garden but it makes me sad sometimes.  My favorite time is later afternoon, in the spring and summer, when the sun is not as strong as at mid-day but there is still light, and enough so that I can leave before night falls.
            I went there today and I sat and thought about Mr. Riley.  He was looking at me today during class and I don’t know if he wanted me to notice or not or if he should have been more careful or if he didn’t even care.  Either way I was slow leaving class and he saw me again and I didn’t not look.
            He asked me how I was getting along in class and there was a lizard in his voice.  I told him I was doing fine I thought but what did he think.  He said I was doing quite well and I didn’t hear the lizard.  He said how he liked my poem a lot.  A lot he said.
            I said I had never written a poem before.  He said I was good at it and I should write more sometime.  I had to get to my next class.  He smiled and nodded and said he would see me tomorrow, and I could hear the lizard again.”
                                                                            *
            Mr. Riley’s classroom was under control, barely, but a strong undercurrent of late May electricity and hormones crackled just below the calm.  When the bell rang the current broke and the students madly dashed toward the door.  Angie, among the last as usual, slowly made her way behind the pack.  Mr. Riley said, too quietly, “Angie.”
            Angie thought he doesn’t want to let the lizard out.  She kept moving but looked in his direction, an awkward way of acknowledging what she shouldn’t, what she felt he didn’t deserve. 
            “Angie,” Mr. Riley said, at a regular volume, in a tightly controlled voice. 
            Angie stopped and looked not quite at him.  The last of the rest of the students filed out, the final few, Jamey among them, darting eyes backward.  Mr. Riley did not yet speak, but
            I want to touch you.  I know I know but.  I am on the edge of an abyss.  I will not touch you.  I will not.  But rather I would burn with you for you with you together.  And I do not care what it would do to me to you to us.  Us.  At least there would be an us.  At least I could stand in front of the demons of hell and say there is an us, some kind of untouched virginal holy us.  But I would know I was in hell and I brought us both there. 
            “Angie.  Do you know Richard Jennings?”
            Angie still did not quite look at him, but looked up near him.  “Yes—I think so.”  An image of deviant electricity flashed through her mind, ending in a reddish shudder.  Her arms clutched each other against her body tighter, squeezing her school books against her breasts, her fingers resting on the lettering on the cover of her notebook.
            “I thought maybe the two of you might like to get together some time.  He’s—I don’t know, a little awkward, I guess, and maybe it would be good for him to spend a little time with someone—with you, maybe.”
            “Does…is he…writing a poem too?” 
            “What?  Oh, ah, no, not that I know of.”
            “Well…what should I help him with then?”  Angie asked, at this point her eyes finally making contact with Mr. Riley’s face.  “I was going to ask someone for help myself maybe, with Beowulf, it’s really hard.  I don’t know how I could help him.”
            Mr. Riley paused but only for a moment.  “I was just thinking that maybe since you both were kind of alone, you might like to spend a little time together.  You are—alone, right?”  The words seem to hover shakily in the air, un-owned.
            Angie unconsciously tightened her grip on her schoolbooks at her chest.  “I have to get to next period,” she said in a voice that seemed small and far-away.  Without actually moving she seemed to shrink into herself and away from Mr. Riley.  A bell sounded. 
            “Sure, sure,” Mr. Riley said, his voice getting cheerier but more strained, scratchy.  “But wouldn’t you like to maybe get together with him, just to try it out?  I know this little restaurant that would be a nice place for you to go if you want—just an idea,” he added quickly, feeling his face begin to flush.
            Angie started edging away from him, sideways towards the door.  In a voice that was even more removed she murmured, “Well, I don’t know, I…”
            “Hey, why not?” Mr. Riley interjected, almost desperately.  Sweat started to trickle down his neck.  “No harm, right?  Just a couple people getting together, spending a little time together, right?  Do you some good,” and with that Mr. Riley’s hands betrayed him and he hurriedly stuffed them into his pockets to grasp the lining.  “What do you say?”
            “…all right, I guess,” Angie barely uttered, in a choked voice, and for the first time today she looked, for an instant, at Mr. Riley’s face.  Recoiling, she swerved around, bumping into the doorframe, and left the room hurriedly. 
                                                                      *
            From Angie’s journal:  “I am a virgin, and yet.  I know what it means to have bones on you, in you, grinding against you while inside you.  I know now what it means also when they say ‘bone tired’.  My own bones are tired and they are cold, so cold.  I have been up too late too many times, and the rising early every day.  I can feel the bones around my eyes and they are old and tired.
            “Sometimes I feel my bones grind against each other.  It is a terrible feeling.  Once I felt that while I was in the garden and so I ran out, I did not want that associated with my garden.  If I have to experience that at least I want to separate it from the garden my garden my nice place my good place.
            “I do not want to have bones at all.  I want to be limp and spent—or rather I want to have never been spent, to have not been used, for that to have never been an option at all.  People would say, ‘Angie, she’s not that—she is not.  She doesn’t; she isn’t.  There is no it at all with her’.  And leave her alone.” 
                                                                   *
           Richard looked around the restaurant.  His eyes seemed to be trying to read the air and the walls.  Angie watched him nervously.  Her head from time to time darted to the side, as if to look through the wall to the outside.  There were no windows near them.  Angie was unsure whether to feel protected or imprisoned by this feature. 
            “Do you come here a lot?” Richard asked.
            “No, I don’t.”  Angie replied.
            “It’s near your house though?” 
            “I guess so.  But I didn’t know about it.  I mean, until—until…”
            “Until what?”
            “Until now?”  Angie volunteered weakly.
            Something in Richard’s eyes flamed up; he moved his vision around as if to douse the fire.  He ended by staring at something in the distance.  Angie’s mouth curled up tightly.  After a few moments, she ventured,
            “Do you…are you…” but trailed off.
            Richard did not respond, but after another few moments turned to face her directly.  Staring intensely into her eyes, he put his hand out towards her as though he wanted her to shake it.  Angie, eyes widening, looked from his hand to his face with growing concern.
            “Shake on it?”  Richard inquired, with a conspiratorial air.  Angie just looked back at him helplessly.
            “Ah…on what?” she asked weakly.
            “Pleased to meet you!” Richard enthused, in a voice loud enough to turn a couple of nearby heads their way briefly.  “I’m Richard and you are Angie—Angela, I presume, is your full Christian name?”
            “We’ve…met already?”
            “But this is in the way of a salute—to what is and what may be.  Shake!”  It was something like an order, and his hand remained out, hanging over the table.
            Angie reached out cautiously and grasped his hand lightly.  At full contact Richard closed his massive paw on top of hers and vigorously pumped it several times over the table then, still holding on, solemnly announced, “Acquaintances.  Friends.  And now,” he proposed as his index finger began caressing her wrist while their hands were still clasped in the handshake, “maybe something more?”
            Angie stared at him, frozen.  Her hand was still caught in his grasp, and she didn’t dare to try to pull it out.  Her lips parted slightly but she made no sound, and had no idea what to say.  Out of the corner of her eye she caught a movement that she could not fully see and felt trapped, caught within the grasp of Richard’s now sweaty palm.  Growing agitated, she tried to wriggle out but Richard now did not even seem to be aware of her, his face was tilted upward and he was grinning in a way that Angie did not like at all.  She exhaled, a sound like a anxious wave, and said,
            “Is that him?  Over there?”
            Richard relaxed his grip but did not let go of her hand. 
            “Is what who?  And where?”
            A slender man in his early thirties walked into the main room of the restaurant.  After a couple of searching glances about the room he sat and began to lightly drum his table with his fingers.
            “That guy?  What about him?”
            “Nothing.  Nothing.”  Angie pulled her hand away and put it in her lap, safely encased in her other hand. 
            “Do you know him?”
            “No!”
            “All right, no need to get upset.  And I see you’ve gotten away from me, naughty!” 
            “Please,” Angie began, “I—I…” she trailed off, her eyes pointing down at the table. 
                                                                           *
            The meal over, the aftermath hung in the space between them as an unanswered question.  Angie had eaten little; Richard had cleaned his plate and ordered an additional appetizer, plus dessert.  His eyes shone and bulged as though they had been fed, too.  Angie looked at him as little as possible.  From time to time, she looked about the room nervously, as though in search of someone.  Richard had noticed, but somehow resolved the issue in his mind to his own satisfaction and was thus unaffected. 
            Angie started again as her eyes locked onto something in the distance, just out of Richard’s vision.  Unnerved, she blurted out, “We have to go.”
            Richard said, “Well, that makes sense.  Our meal is finished!”  He leaned back and thrust out his chest.  Angie signaled clumsily for the waiter and paid him before Richard even realized; when he did, as Angie stood, he said, “Oh!  Did you pay?  Well—that means I’ll pay next time!”
            Angie, shuddering, said, “We need to go.  Now.” and motioned slightly for him to follow her as she strode toward the door.  Richard, after a confused pause, stood and followed.
                                                                       *
            “Where is this?” asked Richard, looking around, his eyes blazing with curiosity and maybe something else mixed in.  Angie’s mouth taut and tight, she seemed to be curling into herself as she surveyed her garden. 
            “This is mine,” she said in spite of herself, knowing it was ridiculous.  The garden did not belong to her.  But it was hers.  “It’s mine, and I brought you here.”
            Richard stepped toward her.
            “You’re trespassing,” Angie said.  Richard stopped.  “But I brought you here,’ she continued.  She was speaking to herself, it seemed, and as such Richard did not reply but remained motionless inside the garden, hovering in a field.  “Yes,” she went on, “I brought you here and so it is all right.”
            After a moment, Richard replied, “Yes, you brought me here.”  After another few moments he said, “I’m all yours.”
            Angie stiffened and her mouth curled.  “No, that’s not it.”
            “Why are we here?”
            “To get away.”
            “From what?” Richard asked, curious, but not moving or looking around.  He stared at Angie.
            “From…him.” 
            “Who?”
            “Him,” Angie repeated, less forcefully. 
            “Who?” Richard repeated, more forcefully.
            Angie did not respond.  Her eyes glazed and she almost fainted although her body made no movement. 
            “WHO?”  Richard bellowed. 
            Angie scattered; she burst away from him farther into the garden with a whimper.
            Richard, after a calming moment, without moving, projected his renewed question towards her:  “Who?”
            Angie said, “You know who.”
            “I don’t.”
            “You don’t?”
            “No,” Richard replied evenly, taking several slow steps towards her so that he was standing near but at a respectful distance from her.  “I don’t.”
            A long pause hung between them but did not divide them.  Richard waited.
            “Mr. Riley.”
            Richard stirred.  “What do you mean?” he asked.
            “Isn’t he the one who brought us together, who…”
            “He is?”
            “…yes.”
            “I thought you wanted to go out with me,” Richard stated simply.
            “…………”
            “What do you mean?” Richard asked.
            Angie stood miserable, her head hanging.  Her right hand started to shake uncontrollably, as though all the tension within her was manifesting itself inside that one body part. 
            “What do you mean?!?” Richard shot, harder and firmer than the previous time but without the bellowing, a firmly controlled question and implication. 
            Angie’s hand reached out to grasp the branch nearest her; her fingers draped a fading white flower and near-crushed it. 
            “Please stop,” she said slightly.  Richard said nothing but his purpose was in the air between them, simmering.  Her hand leaped back from the flower:  a thorn had pricked her and a drop of blood surfaced on the flower, a trembling orb that held together for a moment and then smeared itself down the petal and dripped to the earth. 
            “Just please stop!” Angie cried.  Richard stopped.  The tension from his body released into the humid night air, crackling like electricity through the darkness.
            Richard broke the silence quietly.  “What did you mean?  What does Mr. Riley have to do with this?”
            Angie looked up and beyond Richard.  A wind or a disturbance seethed through the trees.  Something shifted. 
            “Is that him?” Angie whispered harshly. 
            Richard stared at her.  “What?  Is he following us?”  He started to turn but she stopped him.
            “I don’t know.  Maybe.  I don’t know.”
            “But—why would he do that?”
            “I don’t know.  Maybe not.”
            The garden was silent.  As moments passed Richard watched Angie’s body gradually dissolve and then reconstitute itself, shakily, onto a stone bench that he had not seen before.  The bench was large and seemed to emerge from the darkness of the garden, as though it had roots in its soil. 
            Richard surveyed the landscape around him in a visible attempt to command it without moving.  Ascertaining something within his head, he nodded briefly to himself, and then turned back toward Angie and the bench and sat down in the center of the bench.  Angie did not register his presence; she sat there uninterrupted and unresponsive; after re-creating herself on the bench her body began to fold into itself.
            For the next three minutes Richard sat completely still and blank, as though the lights had been turned out inside of him.  Then in the silence, broken only by the gentle rustle of a leaf, he returned to life, as if after a brief re-charge, quivering, his head turning toward Angie, who was crouched into herself with a haunted look in her eyes.     He gazed at her, taking her in, noticing the way her hair hung limply but not unattractively against her shoulders, seeing the modest but distinct curve of her chest, and how her left arm, pale and delicate and pretty, slumped onto her thigh so carelessly it looked as if it were a discarded spare part.  In an attempt to reclaim it, Richard slowly, tentatively, stretched out his hand toward her, and stealthily made contact, placing his hand gently on her forearm. 
            Angie’s body tensed up from within, a radiating pressure emanating from her gut and spreading throughout her whole body, but without causing a ripple on the surface, just a faint glint of electricity.  Her head did not move, she made no sign of noticing Richard’s touch, but her lips trembled slightly.  Her fear of what he might be thinking was balanced by being touched at what might be a simple awkward gesture of an awkward boy trying to help in a delicate situation. 
            Richard’s hand remained on her forearm motionless for several charged moments, and then Richard began to pet Angie slightly.  As if sensing her coiling up at this he stopped, letting his hand rest for another few moments on her forearm.  Then, when Angie and Richard had both been perfectly still for a timeless period, Richard’s hand slipped down her forearm and landed on her thigh, which it began to stroke and caress.
            Angie whipped her head around at Richard, her face a frozen mask of pain.  She stared accusingly, imploringly, outraged, at Richard, and saw in his face a strange, creepy grin, as if he were thinking I’ve comforted you now give yourself to me and she thought no no this is wrong and it contaminates my garden and she whipped her leg away from him, her whole body twisted around and she huddled to herself on the side of the bench shaking, saying, “no, no, no, that’s not it, that’s not it at all, that’s not right—no!”
            Before Richard could tabulate and respond there was a rustling coming from somewhere just outside of the garden.  Angie on hearing it leapt up and threw herself away from the bench, from the sound, from Richard.  Richard, hearing it too, stood and glared all around him like a tiger defending uncertain territory.  His lips bared back and his eyes bulged; his arms slowly spread out on either side of him and he began to slowly turn around in a teetering circle, strong but shaky, discordant.         
            “Hello?” he spoke, softly at first but with rising fire in his voice.  “Hello?  Who is there?”  No response, but one quick rustle and twig break and what could have been a scurrying off.  Richard’s face narrowed and darkened.  “Who is it?”  He looked over at Angie, who remained standing but hunched over, curled up into herself.  After a reflective pause, he said, quietly, “Mr. Riley?”  He stared into the darkening silence for another few moments, then spoke, with more authority, “Mr. Riley?  Mr. Riley?”
            Angie looked toward him with something like hope almost.
            “MISTER RILEY?!?!” Richard roared into the night.
                                                                 *
            Angie stood inside the dead silence of a summer midnight in the garden, her face a shattered mosaic as though it had been ripped apart and pasted back together roughly.  Her hand clenched a kitchen knife.  In the center of the garden like the middle of an endless maze Angie stumbled and half-collapsed, her knee pressing the edge of her yellow dress into the soil. 
            Trickles of moisture dropped down her cheeks and touched the darkness of the night and of the earth.  Spreading herself out on the ground she drew the blade of the knife roughly, shakily, across her left wrist and blood sprang out to join the tears.  As she pulled the blade across her right wrist, flitting towards unconsciousness, she let out a mournful cry that scraped across the sky.
                                                                      *
            Refracted through the twinkling twilight and the blur of street lights and traffic lights and the moon Richard, his face marred and out of control, marched down the street in a caricature of military posture with a barely concealed gun in his hand in the pocket of his loose-fitting zip-up sweat-jacket.  His mouth open, soundless rage spilled out into the air, bleeding into the atmosphere.
            On Mr. Riley’s block, hospital lights blaring inside his head Angie’s head on the generic hospital pillow looking blankly at him, at the wall at nothing at no one then she turns away eyes still wide open tears trickling down the side of her face.  Her mouth opens but nothing comes out.  Back there Richard cannot see he is not there but he is his mind sees and rages red:  smeared red throughout the night heading for the dawn. 
         Mr. Riley’s house is on the corner of the block.  The shadows casting across the front of the house make it seem as though the windows are unseeing eyes.  Richard lurched up to face the house.  He drew the gun and pointed it at the house, a slight tremor running down the length of his arm.
            The first bullet smashed one of the eye-windows, ripping into the quiet night.  The second bullet slammed into the brick between the eyes.  The third shattered the other window as confused, frightened noises started to be heard inside.  Richard, his arm steady now, released a low, resounding laugh from the bottom of his stomach; his mouth curled into a leer.  He muttered curses through the smile as he contemplated his next shot.  A light went on inside the house and then quickly shut off.  A crash was heard inside, followed by hurried footsteps and the sound of a voice speaking frantically.  
            Richard walked slowly toward the door and stopped just before the few steps up to the porch in the center of a brief period of silence, although the silence is that of something that is broken and lying in pieces.  Then it was broken from within:
            “Who is that?” asked a quivering voice.
            “You know who it is,” Richard responded.  After a shuffling moment,
            “Is she…how is she…?”
            Richard raised the gun and pulled the trigger.  The fourth bullet crashed through the door.  A siren spoke in the near distance, volume increasing.  Richard stepped onto the porch.
            “Richard!” cried Mr. Riley in a choked voice. 
            Richard kicked the door; it collapsed easily enough to reveal Mr. Riley ghostlike just inside.  He held out his hands limply. 
            “Don’t,” Riley whispered.  “I—I’ll leave, you’ll never see me again.  Whatever you want.  I’m sick, I know that—let me just get away.”
            Richard took careful aim and shot Mr. Riley once in the stomach, throwing him to the floor.  Richard watched stonily as Riley writhed atop a growing puddle of blood.  Blue and red lights lit up the night but failed to illuminate Riley’s washed-out, pale face.  From behind him, just outside the house, policemen shouted at Richard. 
            Richard stared down at Riley.  Riley’s body was contorting itself on the floor as though something inside of it was trying to get out.  Richard stared curiously at the struggle as the shouts from the policemen continued.  A sad lopsided smile crept onto his face.  He turned around to face the police and lifted the gun slowly, carelessly; a volley of bullets tore Richard’s body apart.