Mary​ ​hears​ ​the​ ​all​ ​too​ ​familiar ​ ​ cadence ​ of​    ​ her​     ​doorbell.​      ​ “I​ ​ swear​      ​ ​if ​ it’s​ ​ ​those ding-dong-ditchers​ ​again​ ​I’m​ ​gonna​ lose​     ​ ​it.”​ ​She​ pulls​ ​​open​ ​the​ ​large​ ​mahogany​ ​door​ ​quickly with​ ​a​ ​scowl ​ on​     ​ her​    ​ face.​  ​ “Get​​ ​away ​​from ​ ​my​ ​door!”​ ​To​ ​her​ ​surprise​ ​she​ doesn’t​​ ​find​ ​fleeing pre-teens. ​ She​     ​ sees​   ​ no-one.​        ​                             Instead,​ ​laying ​ ​on      ​ ​her    ​ door​  ​ mat​   ​  she​    ​  ​finds ​a​​  ​small,  ​  ​strange        ​  ​black ​  ​box.  Hardly​ ​the​ ​size​ ​of​ ​a​ ​novel,​ ​the​ ​box​ ​doesn’t​ ​appear​ ​particularly​ ​special.​ No​      ​ return​ ​ ​address.       ​ Affixed​       to​ ​the​ ​top​ ​is​ ​a​ ​plain​ ​white​ ​address​ ​label​ ​with​ ​only​ ​her​ name​ ​ and​ ​ information.​  ​ There​ ​  ​are    ​ no​     markings​ ​from​ ​shipping,​ ​nothing​ ​to​ ​indicate​ ​what​ ​it​ ​is,​ ​who​ ​sent​ ​it​ ​or​ ​who ​ delivered​​ ​it.​ ​She​ ​leans down ​ to​ ​ grab​   ​ ​the​ ​box​ ​but​ ​stops​ ​abruptly.
 
            She​ ​begins​ ​to​ ​wonder​ ​if​ ​she​ ​should​ ​I​ ​open​ ​the​ ​mysterious​ ​box​ ​or​ ​call​ ​the​ ​bomb​ ​squad.​ ​Her eyes​ ​narrow​ ​and​ ​she​ ​groans.​ ​“I​ ​bet​ ​it’s​ ​full​ ​of​ ​poo​ ​from​ ​those​ ​damn​ ​neighbor​ ​kids.”​ ​Grabbing​ the​ box ​ she​ ​ ​finds​ ​that​ ​it’s​ ​much​ ​lighter​ ​than ​ ​expected.​ ​It ​feels​  ​​empty.​ “What​ ​ ​the…”​ ​she ​​trails​ off​ ​​as she ​ lifts​       ​ the​ ​ top​    ​ off​    ​ ​the    ​  box​   ​ ​and   ​ sees   ​ ​ ​nothing        ​  ​but​  ​a ​ ​black ​ ​void.  
 
              It​ ​seems​ ​endless​ ​in​ ​nature.​ ​No​ ​bottom,​ ​no​ ​sides,​ ​just​ ​black.​ ​“Never​ ​in​ ​my​ ​life​ ​have ​ I​ ​ seen​ anything ​ like​  ​ this.”​ ​ She​   ​ furrows​        ​​her    ​  ​brow ​  ​as     ​ ​she ​ timidly​   ​sticks​ ​​her​ ​hand​ ​in​ ​the​ ​box​ ​to​ ​investigate. She​ ​feels​ ​nothing.​ ​She​ ​can​ ​stick​ ​in​ ​her​ ​arm​ ​all​ ​the​ ​way​ ​up​ ​to​ ​the​ ​elbow.
 
         ‘What​ ​the​ ​hell?​ ​What’s​ ​happening?​ ​What​ ​is​ ​this?’,​ ​she​ ​thinks.​ ​But​ ​what​ ​comes​ out​ ​ of​ ​ her​  mouth​ ​is,​ ​“​C'est​ quoi​  ​ ​ça?​ ​Que​ se​ ​passe-t-il?​ ​ Qu'est-ce​ ​que​ ​c​ ​est?”  
‘Wait,​ ​what​ ​did​ ​I​ ​just​ ​say?​ ​What​ ​language​ ​was​ ​that?’ 
 
            Out​ ​of​ ​shock​ ​she​ ​puts​ the​      ​ box​   ​ on​     ​          her​ ​ side​        ​ table​  ​ and​   ​ ​        places ​ ​the  ​lid​ ​ ​over   ​  ​the    ​  ​top    ​  ​of     ​ ​the    strange​ ​box. ​ ​She​ ​stares​ ​wide​ ​eyed, ​scared​​ ​to ​ speak​          ​ or​ ​ move.​           ​Maybe​         ​ ​she    ​ was​   ​ simply​         ​ imagining​ things. ​ The​   ​ ringing​        ​ ​of​ ​the​ ​doorbell​ ​disrupts​   her​ ​ ​as​ ​she      ​ ​dwells ​over​ ​ the​    ​  decision​       ​ to​ ​ reopen​     ​ ​the ​lid​ and ​ peek​ ​ inside.​         ​ She​   ​ turns,​ ​         her​​  ​actions    ​hurried​         ​ and​   ​         nervous.​ ​       ​She​  ​bumps ​ ​the    ​  ​small ​  ​table  ​  knocking​ the ​ box​    ​ to​ ​ the​         ​ floor​   ​where​          ​ the​     ​​lid    ​ pops​  ​ off.​ ​ Hearing​      ​​the    ​  ​giggles        ​  of​ ​ ​neighborhood     ​  ​children       ​ as​     ​  they​  flee,​ ​her​ ​footsteps​ ​become ​ ​hurried.​ She​  ​ ​opens​ ​the​ ​door​ ​and​ ​yells,​ ​“​Alejarse​ ​de​ ​mi ​​puerta!” 
 
           Startled​ ​at​ ​yet​ ​another​ ​foreign​ ​language​ ​emerging​ ​from​ ​her​ ​lips,​ ​she​ ​forgets​ ​about​ ​the hoodlums​ and​ ​ slams​ ​ ​the​ ​door ​shut.​​ ​She​ ​leans​ ​against​ its​​ dark​​ ​cool​ ​wood​ ​to​ ​collect​ ​herself. ​ ​‘That was ​ Spanish.​        ​ Why​  ​ would​         ​ I​ ​      be​​  speaking​   ​ Spanish?’​     ​  Mary​  ​​was   ​  ​a ​ ​Spanish    ​ ​instructor       ​  ​before         ​ ​she    retired.​ ‘But​   ​ before?​        ​ Was​  ​ ​        that.. ​French?​​ I’ve​​ ​only​ ​heard ​​the ​​language​ a​​  little​    ​ on​     ​ television.​    ​ How​ could​ ​this​ ​happen?​ How​      ​ ​could ​ ​I​ ​suddenly​ ​start​ ​speaking ​​different​ ​languages?’
 
         She​ ​slides​ ​down​ ​to​ ​sit​ ​on​ ​the​ ​floor.​ ​Either​ ​something​ ​odd​ ​is​ ​happening​ ​or​ ​she’s​ ​losing​ ​her mind. ​ Laying​ ​ in​ ​ front​       ​ of​     ​ her​    ​ ​is ​ the​         ​ box.​  ​ The​    ​empty​ ​​void.​ ​The​ ​unexpected​ and​​ ​unknown.​ ​‘That’s it! ​ Every​   ​ time​  ​ the​    ​ lid​    ​  ​is​  replaced​   ​ and​   ​ ​then ​ opened​  ​again​​ ​I​ ​speak​ a​​ ​different​ ​language.’​ She​​ ​stands to ​ clean​      ​ ​up​ ​the​ ​foyer.​ ​‘Is​ ​that​ ​even​ ​possible?’ ​​She ​​collects​ ​the​ ​box​ ​and​ ​lid.​ ​‘Maybe​ ​I’m hallucinating.’ 
 
        ‘What​ ​am​ ​I​ ​going​ ​to​ ​do,​ ​call​ ​the​ ​police?​ ​They’ll​ ​have​ to​ ​ find​ ​ an​ ​  ​interpreter…​ then​​ ​they’ll call ​ the​         ​ psych​ ​ ward.​ ​ Who’s​   going​ ​ to​ ​ believe​      ​ my​   ​story?  ​I​​  ​ opened  ​​a ​ damn​       ​box​ ​​and​ started​ ​​speaking a ​ different​ ​ language.​     ​ Yeah,​ ​ sure​   ​ you​   ​ did​   ​ lady.​   ​ Now​ ​ come​  ​        ​with  ​us​         ​  and   ​ ​ we’ll​ ​ give​ ​you​ ​​a ​nice​ ​​warm coat ​ that​       ​ lets​   ​ you​ ​ ​hug   ​ yourself!’​      
 
               Frantically ​ she​ ​ begins​ ​ to​ ​ ​open​ ​and​ ​close​ the​ Iid.​ Each​​ ​time​ ​yelling, ​​‘Test!’​ ​and ​​hoping ​ to​ hear ​ her​        ​ native​          ​ dialect.​        ​ After​ ​  an​     ​ hour​  ​ ​of     ​  failed​ ​ attempts,​      ​ she​    ​ ​slumps ​  ​to ​ the​         ​ ​floor  ​  ​defeated.     ​ At​    ​  this​   point​ ​she​ ​has ​ no​      ​ clue​   ​ ​what​ language​​ ​she ​​is​ speaking​​ ​and ​​no​ idea​​ ​which​ ​one​ ​could​ be​  ​ next.​ ​ Her​   own​ ​tongue​ ​is​ ​betraying​ ​her.​ ​Her​ ​mind​ ​is ​ playing​ ​ tricks​ ​ on​     ​  her!​   ​ ​Maybe         ​​all      ​  of     ​ ​ ​this   ​ is​​  just​ ​a​​  ​dream?     ‘Please​ ​don’t​ ​let​ ​this​ ​be​ ​real.’ 
 
                Tired​ ​and​ ​devastated​ ​she​ ​stands​ ​up.​ ​She​ ​trudges​ ​to​ her​ ​  plush​ ​ blue​ ​ recliner​   ​ and​ ​ drops​    the​ box ​ in​ ​ her​     ​ lap.​   ​ ​Closing        ​  her​    ​ eyes,​ ​  ​she    ​  decides​        ​ ​on     ​ a​  ​     ​much​  ​needed ​  ​nap. ​ When​    ​  ​she    ​ ​wakes         ​  she’s​ scared ​ ​to​ ​speak. ​ ​‘What​ ​if​ ​I’m ​ still​ ​  speaking​      ​ a ​​ ​random​ ​language?​ ​How​ ​many​ ​languages ​​are​ ​there in ​ the​     ​ world?​   Will​  ​ I​ ​ ever​   ​​speak ​  ​my    ​ own​    ​ language​     again?’ 
 
               With ​ so​ ​ many​ ​ unanswered​ ​ questions​     ​​she ​ decides​ ​ ​to ​    take​​  ​action. ​  ‘Here​ ​ goes​ ​ ​nothing.’    She​   shuts​ her​  eyes,​ ​ gingerly​   ​places ​ her​   hand​ ​​on​ the​​ ​lid ​​and ​​opens​ ​the​ box.​​ ​She​ ​places​ ​her​ ​free​ hand​   inside.​ ​What​ ​she​ ​finds​ ​is​ ​more​ ​shocking​ ​and​ ​disturbing​ ​than​ ​her​ ​previous​ ​ordeal. 
 
          Inside​ ​is​ ​a​ ​book​ ​titled​ ​‘Languages​ ​of​ ​the​ ​World’.​ ​It​ ​holds​ ​lessons ​ ​for​ French,​​ ​Spanish, Creole ​ and​ ​ any​   ​ other​ ​ ​other​ ​language​  one   ​​ ​could ​​imagine.​ ​She​ ​giggles​ ​to​ ​herself​ ​as ​​she​ ​realizes how ​ silly​      ​ she​ ​ must​  ​ look​   ​ right​ ​ now.​   Sitting​     in​ ​ ​    her  ​favorite​   ​ ​        recliner​  ​scared         ​ ​of​ a​ ​​box ​and​ ​thinking​ that ​ when​  ​ she​    ​ opened​        ​ the​    ​ lid,​    ​  she​    ​ would​         ​ speak​  ​random​ ​​languages.​ ​Her​ ​smile​ broadens.​​ ​‘How silly!’
 
         What​ ​comes​ ​out​ ​of​ ​her​ ​mouth...​ ​“Koliko​ ​glup!”​ ​Her​ ​eyes​ ​grow​ ​as​ ​large​ ​as​ ​a​ ​silver​ ​dollar and ​ her​ ​ smile​   ​ quickly​     fades.​

Just one more time all the way through and then I’ll look like something. The thick comb snaps and leaves the handle in my hands.
      “Dammit, I swear everyday it just gets harder and harder to do this,” I sigh in defeat. My hands hop over my head trying to find the biggest part of the comb and detangle it from my deadly snarls. “I honestly hate my hair, it never wants to work with me.” I throw the pieces of the comb in the trash and leave the bathroom.
       My head turns to the mirror on the dresser; honey brown eyes, warm cocoa skin, small round nose, full lips and a fluffy mane of curls and waves stare back at me. I groan and pull at the strands trying to flatten them to my skull but despite my efforts they just bounce back.
        “I hate you and I wish you were just straight and flat like the other girls. But no,  you like to be puffy and all over the place and break brushes, combs, and hair ties,” I say looking at the pieces in my face. My mom hears my commotion and comes to check on me.
     “Sweetie, what’s all the stomping for? You sound like you have elephants in here,” she says as she cocks her head at me.
          “Mama, it’s my hair. It never does what I want and is always making me look bad,” I say while wiping away my frustrated tears. She smiles softly and begins to pet my head, soothing me. I unknowingly turn into her touch and my tears slowly stop falling.
         “Do you know why you are so lucky to have this hair, Tamara?” Her eyes find mine as I shake my head. “You are lucky because it’s a beautiful gift that you can wear however you want. Do you remember when you were a little girl and I would put those beads in your hair and you would dance all around the house?” she says holding my face.
“Of course I do. I liked the colors and the ever changing music my hair made for me.” I smile now. I used to skip down the street just to let everyone know I was coming. My hair sounded like the pattering of rain down a window and the more I moved the stronger the storm became. “One of my favorite styles was when I would just let it be wild and free. It would surround my head like a globe and go with the flow of the wind.”
            “That’s right,” she laughs “You are lucky to have such a crown of hair as thick as a forest and softer than cotton candy with vines that defies gravity. Your hair is a reminder of your power my young queen, be proud of it.” she places me in front of the mirror and I can see what she is talking about. My hair is a collection of  raven, mahogany, and coffee colored tendrils of curly waves all intricately woven together to form my hair. “ And if it makes you feel any better some people make themselves broke trying to buy what you were given naturally.”
         I laugh thinking of a few people try to achieve my level of hair and the silly ways they go about it. I turn my head and examine my hair at different angles in the light. Mama did make a point,  my hair is uniquely me and won’t be found exactly the same anywhere else. It’s not all that terrible when you think about it, just challenging at times. “Well, I can see what you’re saying and I guess you were right and I was…less right,” I say turning to face her.
          She beams at me and gives me one last hug. “Besides, if it really can’t stand it like you say there is always option number two,” she says shrugging her shoulders. I feel my eyebrows knit together and frown slightly in confusion. She runs her hand over my hair and says, “Cut it all off and be bald like your dad.”
         My jaw hits the floor and I back away in horror clutching my hair to me. I laugh at her, shaking my head. “Don’t even joke like that mama. I could never do something like that in a million years.”
         “And why is that, Tamara? I think you could pull off the babydoll look.” Her eyes twinkle with obvious enjoyment.
        “Because I love my hair,” I say with a smile.
​

​The tension in the car made it hard to breathe. Silence filled the air and all Allison wanted was to swing the door open, leap out, and leave Ryan, her now ex-boyfriend, in his car. What does one say when they leave a relationship? She wasn’t sure, and that’s why she was stuck in her driveway, only feet away from her house, her escape.
“I’m sorry,” Allison said picking at the fringe of her jean skirt.
“Don’t apologize. If this is what you want then it’s fine,” Ryan said, trying his best to keep his voice from wavering but failing.
“That’s it? You’re not even going to fight for us?”
“What is there to fight for? You said you don’t think you love me. There’s nothing to fight for.”
That was what Allison needed to leave the car. She opened the door as if she was going, but looked back at Ryan one last time, a small part of her hoping he would stop her. But he didn’t. He kept his eyes straight, and his knuckles were almost white from the harsh grip he had on the leather steering wheel.
“Can you leave, please? You’re letting the AC out,” Ryan said through clenched teeth, a tear spilling down his cheek. She stepped out entirely and shut the door, the heat immediately causing sweat to form at the crown of her hair. She hadn’t even taken a step away when he reversed out of the driveway and sped down the street, leaving charcoal skid marks on the road and the smell of burnt rubber lingering in the air.
Allison didn’t shed tears. She loved him but she knew she wasn’t in love with him. She wanted to be wrong, she wanted to believe she could maybe make herself fall for him to spare his feelings, but she knew that was something she couldn’t fake. She was only 17, but she believed she knew what love was.
Love was the way her father looked at her mother as if she held the whole universe in her eyes, as if she was the universe. Love was the way her mother held her father’s hand when they were on the couch watching a movie, clenching on to it as if it were her lifeline. Love was the small kisses they stole in the morning and randomly throughout the night after they got home from work. Love was the flowers her father brought her mother when he knew she was having a rough day.
She walked through the front door, welcomed by her mother sobbing on the couch. She ran to comfort her. She had never seen her mother cry, unless she counted the one time they watched Me Before You together, which she didn’t. She was about to ask her mother what was wrong until she looked at the wall next to the door. She hadn’t noticed before, but there had lied her father’s suitcases and bags.
Her father walked out of her parent’s room, or what was her parent’s room. He was about to announce that he was leaving until he saw Allison. He felt as if there was a frog in his throat, choking on the emotion that had built seeing his only daughter.
“You were going to leave without even saying anything to me?” Allison asked, her voice cracking.
“It was easier this way,” he said.
“Bullshit.”  Allison’s voice couldn’t go as high as she wished it would have. Not when she was holding back her sobs to stay strong for her mother who was still crying into her hands.
He went to place a kiss on her forehead, but she stepped away from him, not wanting to be touched. He sighed, gave both her and her mother one last look, grabbed his bags, and walked out of their life.
Allison couldn’t believe what just happened. She looked at her mom and wondered what went wrong and when it wrong.
“I tried to love him, and he tried to love me, it just wasn’t there,” her mother told her through her sobs.
That’s the moment Allison realized what she hadn’t noticed before. Her mother and father hadn’t had movie nights in years. There were no longer flowers decorating the table. They had no longer stolen kisses from each other, they rarely even looked at each other. That’s when Allison realized she had no clue what love was.
 

When the rains stopped we were dry and for weeks afterwards my father complained that a man wasn’t allowed so much as a chance to rinse the pollen from the roof of his car, his 1982 Buick Skyhawk having sprouted a phlegm-yellow layer of fur seemingly overnight. It was during these particular times of anguish when he would spit into the palm of his hand and drag it across the windshield, holding up the jaundiced stretch of skin afterwards, flat and wide fingered, to the line of pines overlooking the driveway like a zealot pronouncing his testament against God and tree—which of the two fueled his wrath more, one could not discern.
The man would drive to work like that too, despite my mother’s fervent harangues and then out on the highway one could see him blinking and squinting through the single half-moon shaped eye afforded to him by his spit swish method until one of us mustered up the decency or the gall to pour a pail of water from hood to hatch. Even then the man had enough brass to bemoan streaks in the glass, his nose pitches in an absolute wrinkle as someone awaiting a bandage to be torn off or whose wine had gone all to vinegar.
This played out over and over and over again, never deviating once in my father’s outrage with the world around him and a near admirable tenacity with which he placed blame upon the very many things that lay outside his control.
I always thought to myself what an absurd grief that must be, and throughout my daily preoccupations I made a solemn oath that I would never risk handing over the reins of my yet ill-conceived adulthood to the indomitable clutch of petty troubles.
I had never experienced the drought before, but had listened briefly as the old ladies squawked about it like a murder of crows as they dabbed at their neck pouches with flailing wisps of gossamer tissue. I passed by their mumblings through the streets radiant with heat that seemed to shimmer upward from the asphalt in dizzying ripples of warmth and recalled how just last summer a boy had sprinted barefoot the length of the avenue on a dare and when he finally sat down in the cooler grasses, you could scrape the skin from his sole with a pointed stick.
Just as I was entering the grocery, Patty the Oleander barkeep was passing by, his collar dark with sweat and thick dark lines wringing the softness out of his eyes. I could tell he must have been on some crucial errand or he would have still been in bed.
“Aye there, Jeffy boy! Haven’t seen your pa about it some time. Ain’t with sickness, is he now?” Patty had always been a pleasant sort: quick with a joke and a hearty whack on the back. In the winter months, he’d come to our house on nights when business was slow and play cards with my father long into the night.
I could hear the lilted tone of Patty wrapping up a punch line and the fluttering quilts of laughter that fizzled up through the floorboards of my bedroom even after everyone else had turned in for the evening. As far as I knew, my mother did not care much for him, but I had always found him a friendly, albeit boisterous face in a sea of strangers.
“Naw, he’s just been busy, that’s all,” but really as the words so automatic and instinctive unfurled from my tongue, I realized I could not pin the man down wriggling to any one legitimate pastime you could attribute to being busy—nothing outside the realm of his unpredictable furies.
“Ah, that’s the crack, is it?” Draught hits everyone I s’pose.” And with that he palmed a rough tussle atop my head and staggered off into the sweltering morning.
These days the sun stoked the skies so long that you scarcely knew what you were about before you were rounded up and herded back home by voices of mothers that could either sound like fingers running along the brass flutes of wind chimes or else the scrape of a scrub brush scouring a filthy pan.
Nobody watered their lawns anymore. The scorched crowns of grass blades advanced across the yards like a straw colored pestilence, choking off even the stubborn dandelion heads, the misunderstood clover, and the fecund torrents of ivy. Thistles dried up and plopped to the ground like a scatter of shattered Christmas bulbs and even the sprouts of wicked crabgrass seemed so long a thing of the past.
The whole of the earth had gone dry, even the asphalt appeared thirsty: the nooks and cracks in the stretch of street now vacant, the arid hollows orphaned and overlooked by the expressionless brick facades as commuter vehicles chugged past.
One could not even seek out the solace of the old watering hole where dozens of students would flock every summer, released finally from the dank chambers of school halls brimming over with idle chatter and the smell of sweat and chalk. Now it had shrunk down to a brackish sink where not even the most intrepid starling would touch down, though every birdbath all across town stood as blank saucers where now and again one might perch and stare down into the imperturbable and desiccated abyss, the stone monuments a somber reminder of the situation at hand.
At the watering hole, the children, young enough to sweat still without the threat of odor, line the banks in crestfallen pairs, seated in disbelief as they gaze out across to the place they had heard whispered about by the other boys, the place you simply had to be. It is akin to waking up Christmas morning to face a gaping plain beneath a bare tree.
I toss an empty bottle of St Ide’s into the water, watching it slowly fill to almost halfway before disappearing with a final belching bubble beneath the surface.
The rattle of my father’s weekend snoring is now nothing more than absent lullaby and the household that could often sleep soundly well past noon most Saturdays and Sundays now seems to positively wail—the familiar sound now replaced by thunderous hammering echoing throughout the walls from somewhere outside the house and thumping footfalls upon the roof, almost as if someone was struggling to somehow batter their way back inside.
With the coming of the dry spell, suddenly everything required replacing almost overnight. My father preached the necessity of upkeep like a sermon, hounding my brother and I with a litany of prices, figures, and impossibly disparate logistics should we seek asylum from his repetitious frenzy in order to busy ourselves with far less taxing matters. My mother simply lamented over her worry that one day the walls would cave in, knowing full well my father was not particularly gifted in the role of handyman.
His thoughts seemed some cyclical sort of fixation, as if his mind had broken free of one orbit only to float off and immediately into another and the entirety of his time, energy, and endeavors served only to feed into the nebulous center around which it undeviatingly revolved. It was as if he had done something one way his entire life without question and now he did it in another so that the very nature of the pattern itself remain unchanged and had been merely reassigned so that he might yield to the needs of others.
While the rest of us knew a draught was only a dry spell, my father remained entirely unconvinced and struggled with the notion of permanence that jostled around in the back of his skull. Waking to yet another rainless morning time and time again had convinced him he had discovered irrefutable evidence of what he had known to be true all along.
On Wednesday, a large grey raincloud passed shadow over the dusty flowerbeds, pausing momentarily before drifting lazily on, unbroken. A cool breeze followed off the tail end that whispered through the dead grasses, ruffled the rugs of pollen, and shot through the open windows of homes, clattering shade slats, displacing low stacks of newspaper and igniting a false hope that moisture was soon to be pattering down, impinging upon the parched earth in one uninterrupted soaking sheet.
I awoke to my socks stiff with dried sweat and they produced an audible scraping sound when I stirred them beneath the linens. It is one habit I’ll admit I’ve retained since childhood. For whatever reason, I would not be able to fall asleep without a pair of socks on my feet, and each night my father would slip silently into my room and gingerly pluck them free from my toes so that discovering my feet bare each morning, I would believe that some foul, ungodly creature was stripping the socks overnight in order to ingest them.
It certainly sounds absurd, but since then, I imagined my socks were the single line of defense against waking up to find my toes taken, the socks creating a sort of barrier between it and I, ensuring I never went to sleep barefooted. It was a ritual to which I tenaciously clung, exerting some sort of control over an anxiety that plagued me at my most private moments. I dared not confess it to anyone, preferring my fear of the nameless nocturnal foe to the bouts of ridicule I would surely endure should anyone discover these secret transactions, the necessity of which now seemed so undeniably improbable that to ponder them even a little while cause incredible distress, akin to a flood of nausea.
At the breakfast table, my father gnawed his morning toast in silence, appearing as if he relished it just as much as if he was instead chewing a slab of cardboard. He finished it off, butterless and without so much as a word, leaving the three of us, his glass of milk untouched before him, the sides coated in a crocodile skin of condensation. It was a motion that suggested frustration on his part, but over what we could scarcely guess.
My mother arose with the emptied dishes and headed to the sink, and, placing them securely in the basin, mounted the bottoms of her palms on the counter, her elbows locked and shoulders arched high like a cat’s back For a moment her body seemed a rigid branch poised to snap underfoot. However he form soon relaxed, her spine as pliable as a feather as she leaned forward and began to scrub the dirty plates, speaking to herself slowly and steadily as someone attempting to convince themselves they, in fact, situation within a dream.
“Not to worry now,” she said. “It won’t be much longer now.”
Outside my father’s voice trailed off like a distant riot as he pulled from the driveway and out into the otherwise quiet street, a fading field of echoes in his wake.
***
“My old man says yours is a sack of horse-plop, Jeffery.” Kreuther badgered more with his eyes than his words, the two fidgety orbs giraffing out of an un-tucked blue button up two sizes too big for him as we stood at the presently defunct watering hole. His eyes had a way of volleying back and forth over your person in a way that made most anyone feel rather unclean, though to Kreuther’s credit, it was not for want of being invasive, but instead because neither one could remain focused for any single object long enough to stop from jittering. It lent him a restless, rabid look—a trait further emphasized by his slight build and gaunt cheekbones. He was of the sort one would have a difficult time turning one’s back on for fear he would sneak up from behind you and sink his teeth into the skin of your arm.
At present, a noticeably pink ring of raw flesh lassoed about his lips: a consequence of running his tongue around the perimeter of his mouth every chance he could. He was like some sad, emaciated clown or a young girl applying makeup for the first time in her parents’ bedroom.
“Come off it, Kreuther. If so’s my old man then so is yours if not worse.” It was the fairer route to take with a boy like Kreuther as I knew if I gave voice to what I really wished to communicate, he would actually feel the sting of rejection and attempt to probe his invective even deeper, rankling an intolerable nerve for which then there would be no remedy.
I had come to hurl rocks into the hole from which now a fetid odor arose, having become a marshy ditch for garbage and animal droppings that now skimmed the surface with nowhere to drain.
We stood now on sand where once the water rose clear above our heads. You could see from the exposed slopes of the banks where the surrounding trees had worked their roots down into the water. Now they just hung there unhinged like pairs of gnarled knotty fingers—something foreboding and horribly arthritic.
A stone broke a barrier of plastic bags and what looked to be the frayed remainder of a dead cat, sinking down into the murk. Even with the rest of the watering hole dry, this remained the deepest part: how far down it went, nobody knew—not even our own fathers who once used to swim here as young boys, bare bottomed and free, like little silver-scaled fish jettisoned out into a summer’s evening and covered head to toe in the cleansing waters.  
Immersed is the word my father used to describe his time before we were born.
“He says your old man owes him money.” Kreuther tossed a stone, his eyes skittish as if he scanned the broken surface nervously for his fortunes to be told. “Lots of it. Told me himself. Pockets tighter than a nun’s twat.” I didn’t begrudge Kreuther that comment for now he merely resorted to his old tricks—his feeble attempts to get a rise out of people which in the past have earned him a sock in the stomach and a torn shirt collar from some of the older boys. He never knew to quit while he was still ahead, that one should not cash in all his chips time and time again and ought to instead hold something back for himself.
Through observation and a fair bit of trial and error, I concluded he could be a tolerable fellow under the right conditions. He actually required very little maintenance and realized early on that girls and sneaking off to smoke cigarettes o the pier after dark were not in his near future and so he troubled me very little on the subjects. It was not so trifling to bear the brunt of his hollow insults from time to time, and to allow this now and again was akin to watering a thirsty houseplant.
“He said something else too. He said your old man’s just dried out and that’s all he’ll ever be is dried out like a pickle left out in the sun that no one wants.”
“You take that back, Kreuther.”
Kreuther folded the whole of his upper lip into his mouth so that he resembled some decrepit old coot who had lost his teeth, sucking so hard you’d think his face was attempting to swallow itself. When his lip again emerged, the skin shone reddened and raw, a film of moisture reflecting the light like a sheet of plastic wrap in the sun.
“No, Jeffery,” he hissed, dragging the crook of his elbow across his newly moistened spout. “I will not.”
**
The following week the draught broke with a storm that squatted firmly over us for the better part of three days, bringing with it a furious deluge that flooded the dry, dead soil and relieved us of the omnipresent pollen and every car that passed by our house looked freshly emerged from a soaking blissful bath like slick honking ducks.
My father had collapsed a few days prior and I prayed the incident at the watering hole was not the reason behind what my mother had calmly described to my brother and as sever exhaustion. There was even a part of me that believed he had discovered the true reason behind my nightly ritual of the socks.
The weekends roared out in the absence of my father’s usual hue and cry as voices flooded my head with thoughts of guilt and private treachery. For several days my father was restricted to unpermissive bed rest and was under no circumstance to be disturbed.
I had overheard my mother speaking to one of the charitable clergymen who sometimes visited my father from time to time. He had come bearing a basket of bruised fruit.
“Some men take the in betweens harder than others. Now more than ever it’s crucial to keep the faith—for his sake of nothing else.”
I confronted my mother and asked if the man had performed last rites and she replied no, not last, and that she never imagined I would grow into such a curiously solemn boy.
The rains kept most everyone inside but that much had not changed for me after they had pulled me off Kreuther, his nose already squashed like a strawberry someone shoved in his face. Some of the boys at school patted me on the back encouragingly and said “Good show, Jeffery” and “He had it coming” and some of them even wanted to strike up a bond with me, but the whole situation had my stomach so uneasy and I always believed it improper and even damnable to reap benefit from the misfortunes of others. And so those who had paid me little attention before now treated my reluctance with silent dismay so that I experienced an unspoken caution around my peers, almost like grasping your doorknob in the middle of the night and discovering it hot to the touch.
It was not many mornings later I began to find the familiar sight of mustard glasses in the skin, the ice slowly dissipating into the thin pool of liquid the color of weak tea lining the bottom. It was the surest sign my father had returned from the land of the dead, and just as if a mechanism had been greased and then wound, the household jounced alive into hushed industry, returning to task as the giant in the next room thundered in repose.
The watering hole in turn was declared an environment hazard by the county, cited as a breeding ground for mosquitoes and other vermin. The trash did not help either and rumors surfaced that a pipe expelling raw sewage had been discovered on one of the far banks, a leftover from the heyday of the old paint factory.
At times when I awake and feel the chill in the sole of my foot, I imagine that my father had returned to me over the course of the evening and stealthily plucked free my cloistered feet. But when I look down there they are same as before--the pale wrinkled bladders, wriggling as if waving back to me: the pallid leviathan of all sins hunched in the moonlight.
I am never alone.

​

Mary Zahniser is an aspiring writer aiming to weave her stories for potential use by television studios. A long time fan of serial television shows and web series, she has always dreamt about contributing her ideas to the shows that she loves. She has dabbled in a variety of styles including, but not limited to, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Psychological Horror, Romance, and Comedy. Mary has the unique ability to adapt to almost any sort of genre or story line.
Currently she is studying as an undergraduate at Full Sail University to sharpen her writing skills. She has been writing since the age of twelve. She started on her own, simply writing fan fiction about her favorite shows, but began to branch out into her own stories. She still enjoys writing fan fiction and participating in collaborative writing sessions online with other writers. Her goal is to one day work for a major television studio or web series producer.
Mary currently resides in Lawton, Oklahoma and works a full time job while continuing her schooling. She can best be reached in the evening by email,[email protected] or [email protected]. 

The dark circles around Sam’s eyes were getting worse. He hadn’t slept in days in fear that if he did, he would not wake up. The virus would take him eventually, he knew that. However, that was not his concern. He could see her out of the corner of his eye, sitting there on the bed, blanket pooled at her waist. She, too, looked worn. A dark streak tainted her porcelain skin now, indicating that the virus had progressed sometime in the night. She had attempted to hide the mark under dark strands of hair, but to no avail.
         “It’s gotten worse…” Sam said as he shuffled into the room, moving his hand to her forehead. Her skin was like fire, but somehow, she seemed content. “I should get you some water.” Her hand snapped up, grabbing his wrist, stopping him in his tracks. “Kimiko—” Her lips parted to speak, but before she could utter a single word, there was a knock at the door. Sam’s eyes shot towards the window, body tensing. No one was supposed to know they were here.
         “Samuel…” she mumbled, voice weak. With a soft sigh, he moved his other hand over hers, gently grasping it. Steadily, she released him and allowed him to move away.
         “Just wait here a moment,” he said, eyes still darting between her and the window. There was an intense fear building the closer he got to the door. Had they finally come to take them away? With Kimiko’s progression, it would mean certain death for her. He might survive, but he knew she wouldn’t. This thought caused him to hesitate, hand positioned over the handle of the door. With a deep breath, he pulled the door open, preparing for the worst.
         However, the worst never came. Instead Sam was met with a cold gust of wind, causing him to snap his eyes shut for a moment. “—Hello?” he called out, squinting against the blinding snow as he glanced around. Had he been mistaken? Had there even been a knock? Sighing, he moved to shut the door, stopping only when he caught a glimpse of a small black box positioned on the concrete wall. He hesitated for just a second before snatching it up and shutting the door.
         “Sam? –What’s going on?” he heard Kimiko ask, causing him to tense again. His eyes stayed fixed on the small box with a note taped neatly on the top that simply said ‘Survive.’ Taking another deep breath, Sam closed his eyes, calling out to Kimiko.
          “It was nothing. Just some kids playing pranks,” he said, shaking his head as he shuffled to the kitchen, setting the box on the counter. “I’m gonna cook something for you, just gimme a moment,” he added, staring at the box. After another moment, he pulled the top off, revealing two syringes filled with a vibrant blue substance. “—Shit.”
           His first though went to a cure. His second, however, went to the virus. What if this was a trick? What if this was the virus. “But why would it say survive, stupid,” he said to himself, rolling his eyes. Without a thought, he pulled one of the syringes out, making for the room, but stopping just at the hallway. He could save her. He could save them both. But—even if he did, the virus would still be out there. They could still get infected again. They could still die.
           Take it to the CDC. Have them make a cure for everyone. Blue eyes settled on the syringe. There were two. One clearly meant for Kimiko and the other for himself. She wouldn’t survive the time it would take to synthesize and manufacture the cure. He could—well, maybe. Hopefully.
          It was decided. He’d save her. She had to survive. So without another thought, he moved into the room, settling beside her and taking her arm. “Don’t move,” he said, looking up at her. He could see the fear and confusion in her eyes, causing his stomach to tighten. “Please don’t look at me like that,” he said, quickly administering the vaccine.
         “W—What is this? Is this the cure?” she asked, her eyes wide as she sat up. “What about you?” With a soft smile, he moved his hand to her face, brushing strands away, the dark lines already beginning to fade.
         “Everything’s gonna be okay. I promise.” Quickly he stood and moved to the door. He would survive and now, so would the world. 
​

​Drip. Drip. Drip by the faucet. Faucet off. Off in a trance, zen somewhere, not here. Blood in the sink and blood on the brain. Eris doesn’t notice because she won’t turn away from the TV, one leg folded over its smooth other over by the couch, legs for miles. I’m standing. Leaking. Hiding.
We haven’t made up. I can tell we haven’t made up because we haven’t had sex.
“I’m just...tired,” she told me in bed last night, rolling over, burying her eyes in a forearm.
“Are we good?”
“Yeah.” Her feet twitch. A heel rams my shin. “We’re good.”
I pinch the vein and a few more drops emerge and it’s gone again. This, pain, painful, mindful, mindless, less is more, is better. Here, this silence, sinful, deafening, is not peace, but closer to something else.
“Are you going to fix that faucet?” she says over her shoulder, a blue haze over her face. She must have slipped the tab into her mouth already, probably one, maybe more. She just bought a quarter sheet, LSD on one side, the sketch of a comic book hero on the other. She prefers to do it alone, and when she does she gets everything in order before it kicks in. This, acid, acidic, gasoline, funeral pyre, is something I’m told by our narrow-eyed therapist I should “respect.” That it’s exactly who she is. And I do, because tonight, moonlight, candles, fireside, I’m confronting her. She’s going to tell me the truth.
I turn on the faucet and twist it off again. A warm steam rises from the bowl, and for a moment it smells like Utah when it rains--the iron in the earth smells of blood.
“All good,” I say, stalking behind her. Cartoons flash from the tube and I hold my open wound above her head. A drop steadies itself, an olympic diver ready to plunge into her shining brown hair. She’s separated a bag of Skittles by color on the coffee table, judiciously plucking one at a time, cleansing her palette with water between tastes. Eris has an unflinching sense of justice this way, equality, one I used to love; all for one, one for all. She refused to act in a play adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird in high school because Tom Robinson doesn’t get justice, and because she was the best actress in the school they changed the whole production to My Fair Lady. She’s immaculate when it comes to being anybody she wants.
We can feel each other’s presence without even touching. We’re too close.
They say blood in your veins is blue, blank, empty and weathered until it faces the world, its toes over the cliff. A drop throws itself off my arm, down, face in wind, before I catch it. It splatters on my palm over her head. She doesn’t notice, entranced, hypnotized, captured by the cackle of animated humans in the black box. A boy is being strangled by another, his throat closed, aching, broken, wrist flailing to express, revolt against silence. He’s thrown to the ground. Blood seeps from his knees and suddenly they’re all friends again. How nice.
Our grandfather clock next to our bookcase ticks, tick, tick, time invading, infesting. Minutes roll down the lane--gutterball. I wonder if, to her, its hands will melt before the night’s out.
I retreat, run a finger across my wrist and take a taste. I like it. I like the immediacy, my whole biology focused here and nowhere else. The blood is thick like packing snow, and warm. I press a paper towel to my wound, my fourth, a vertical tally mark level with the preceding three. I think I’ll make the fifth diagonal across the other four so she can see what she’s done to me, my family, our family. And won’t it look nice--every half-inch scar parallel to the others. Orderly and sane. Calm.
 
I told her not to go to the cops about Hastings, my brother, my family, my everything. I’ve already given her my sob story. That blood is thicker than water. That Hastings might be dopey (not knowing into his twenties that a “Train Xing” sign meant “crossing” and not a new word “ex-ing”), but he raised me from when our parents went over a guardrail in 1995. That we can get him help. Yes, we were there, we saw him nearly kill a man at The Reservoir, but we can handle this ourselves. That she and I have been handling ourselves just fine these last six months.
I remind her it’s been that long since I got friendly with razors in our bathroom sink last June. That we did what we needed to get by, move on. How she used to hold my hand above a wrapped wrist and say, “Whatever it takes.” Her hands were softer then.
Are we happy now? No, but surviving, some kind of victory. Sometimes that’s what a marriage calls for, doesn’t it? Compared to our last six months Hastings should be easy, put one in the win column, pop some champagne, stretch some rubbers.
“You’re a team,” our therapist said. “Cheer each other on.”
Well, two days ago I had a feeling. I followed her to a half-empty used car lot off Port Washington Road, watched as she slid a thin envelope to a pimple plagued kid over the counter. He’s the son of a Shorewood detective, Gibbons, who lives across the street from us. One of our now too friendly neighbors after I got home from the hospital with bandaged, whole, but vulnerable wrists. Word traveled fast. She doesn’t know I followed her or that I’ve been checking our phone records and mutual bank account. That I know she snitched. That she tried to hurt me again.
I head upstairs to suss this out while lying on my half of the bed, the only square inches of this house, dungeon, chains, locks--throw away the key--I can’t feel her seeping into.
Some teammate. She’s done for.
 
Yesterday I got a call from Hastings hold up in his house, his voice spiking. “Greg, the cops are...shit...the cops are here.”
“Are?” I say.
“Were,” he corrects himself. “Somebody’s talking. I haven’t left in days, and I wasn’t going to call, but...They know you were there. Somebody’s talking.”
“Where’d you tell them you were?”
“Solid Gold, where else?” It’s a strip club on the south side, and yes, he spends time there lining panties with singles like he’s installing insulation in them. He thinks the employees will cover for him, but I know that only lasts as long as they stay in law enforcement’s good graces.
“Well, you know it isn’t me,” I say.
His temper flares. It always does. “For fuck’s sake, it’s a pretty short list of who gave me up, then, innit?”
It is. One.
 
Six days ago it was both a Wednesday night and a Thursday morning, almost bar time at The Reservoir. The place smells of barley and cigarette smoke still lodged in the bar’s wood since the ban levied years ago. Every surface is sticky with dried liquor. Ants commiserate in the corners. The Reservoir is located a place no one goes: Shorewood’s west side. It’s beyond the river, past the freeway, past Messmer High. It’s a lower tax bracket in that part of the city--and in the Milwaukee area where there’s a lower tax bracket, there aren’t any cops. We thought we got lucky.
It’s a signless bar run by a faceless man whose apron dangles like theater curtains. There are no ceiling bulbs, just pool table lighting, a chest-down glow. It’s almost burlesque, speakeasy, faces lingering in the shadows, dark, foreboding. The faceless bartender hardly ever emerges from the basement office doing god knows what. We would stomp into the rotting floor when we needed another drink and wait long minutes for him to emerge, but that night Hastings got tired of waiting--grabbing bottles from the well and pouring himself. It’s the magic of youth and the eternal spring of it inside Hastings, that the rules, boundaries, out-of-bounds, fifteen yard penalties, personal fouls don’t seem to apply to him. He started by reaching for rail liquor over the bar before working up the courage to walk around it and drink top shelf, whiskeys older than pop stars.
I remember it. I remember it because I was there with Eris, and I put my hand on the small of her back when he flipped a bottle of Glenlivet 12 in the air and she cozied into my shoulder giggling. Genuine, full, whole. I used to think one good night would get us past these tough months, past just surviving. Maybe tonight, I thought. Maybe now we’ll be happy. How stupid. Memory bends to no one. That’s why you’re happy when you’re young. You only know possibility, the future, odds in your favor, odds against, bet the house, buy a house, rent, never settle, never compromise. You’re weightless. Then the past adds slow ounces and pounds of memory and it never stops.
A lethal Wisconsin winter fills the window with dull white streaks of snow. Inside it’s the three of us and a lonely, bearded man at the end of the bar. He’d be quarterback tall if he stood or even sat up straight. He wore dirty wingtip shoes, khakis caked with mud. He never bothered to ask for a refill on whiskey, just brandishing a flask and doing it himself. Not that it was all that often--he stared into his glass for hours and appeared to almost fall somewhere, heaven, hell, or limbo. Until he didn’t.
Hastings’ twirled a shiny pool cue for us between his fingers, end-over-end like a windmill. He danced a two-stop as he did it, booze flushing his cheeks, making a real meal of it. I pulled my wife close. Tonight, I thought.
            We stared at the stick and his fingers. Yellow nails, tough skin, moving as if rapping them on a desk. There was a mystery to their movement and we didn’t want any explanation. We preferred the illusion, a wonder that for a few moments lifted the lacerating, trapping anvils from around our ankles and minds; everything less complicated than it was in the minutes, seconds before. “My wife and I” were just that, and my brother was his best version of himself: bumbling yet charming. It was wonderful. But the bearded man just had to say something. He just had to, didn’t he?
            “I could do a lot better with that stick if you bent over, big boy.”
            The pool cue crashed to the hardwood. Hastings put a fist around an empty bottle of Old Style on the bar (it could have been there for days). His words came from a coal fire inside him, and someone down there was shoveling fast.
“The fuck you said?”
Hastings took slow steps toward the bearded man. Hastings’s feet filled the silence, heavy on the floor. The jukebox clicked off. The bearded man didn’t flinch in his response.
            “You don’t speak English goodly, do you, big boy? I said--”
            Hastings flattened the glass bottle over the man’s eye. It shattered, split, cut, slit the whole socket. It happened with such force it made a bright, collective sound, like a service bell you strike with your palm.
            It knocked the bearded man out cold. He slid silent off his stool into the bar and settled on the floor, blood dotting his cheeks and running from his scalp like exposed veins. Hastings’ hand was bleeding, swollen.
            “Hastings!”
            “Well, shit,” he said.
            “I’m calling the police,” said Eris.
            “Like fuck you is,” said Hastings. He pointed a crimson, bayoneted finger at her. “I’ll take that glass pitcher on the bar and do you with my other hand. How’s that?”
Eris pushed me. “Is that how you’re going to let your brother talk to me?”
            Murmurs rose from the floor. The bearded man pasted a painted red hand over his eye, and wobbled to consciousness. He let out a shriek that could have blown cake off birthday candles.
            “I’m blind,” he wailed, sobbing. “911, 911.”
Eris started to panic. “He needs an ambulance.”
            Just then, a rumbling from the basement: “The hell’s going on up there?”
            Hastings’s head was huge, splitting with rage. “We gotta get out of here now, and you’re both coming with.”
He grabbed the neck of the broken bottle from the floor and pointed its tip at me. The end shined in the billiard lights, dripping something. I hoped it was beer. Then I met his gaze. He spoke in the almost fatherly voice he developed in the years after our parents’ accident. “Gregory, right now.”
Eris spoke up. “I’m not--”
I clutched her arm. Hard.
            “Now,” I said.
 
---------------------
 
            It’s been a half hour since I treated my newest wound. Cartoons are bending Eris’s neurons into knots when she texts me. I’m upstairs in our room. Breathing, living, one second at a time.
            “Honey...come back down here,” it reads seductively. Honey. A year ago that meant she loved me. These days I’m betting it’s something else. She wants something.
            “Sit,” she tells me.
            I sit on the far side of our plaid couch, rife with coins and crumbs; a mouse bungalow. She looks at my chest, then my whole face. I make no expression.
            “You’re waiting a couple hours to talk to me, aren’t you? Until I’m peaking.”
            I don’t respond because I don’t need to. She’s beat me to the punch. One of the reasons I married her.
She leans in, drags a fingernail painted red down my forearm. She digs, craters, burrows into my skin and laughs. “But honey, we’re not going to talk at all, because you’re talking to the police.”
            “What?”
            “Oh.” She punches numbers into her phone, “you better shush.”
            She turns the screen. It shows “911” with her thumb over the call button.
            “You can’t,” I plead, as if she’s in any mood to discuss. “Hastings’s got no future if he goes away. Prison doesn’t cure a man of anything except goodness.”
She purses her lips and speaks in a velvet voice. “Oh, honey. This has little to do with your brother.”
            “Then what are you threatening to call the cops for?”
            “I’m not going to turn Hastings in. You are.”
            A violent shiver drives up my back. “Me?”
“This is about you--you doing the right thing. And” --she sighs-- “as always, I’ll help you get there.”
“Wait, what are you doing?”
            She lifts her shirt and shows a fresh purple and orange bruise over her flat belly.
“Whatever it takes.”
I shoot to my feet and start backing away, trying to cover the low panic in my voice. “Whoa, now. I didn’t do that.”
She keeps her shirt up as she’s talking. Her pupils dilated. “Who’s going to believe you? You’re emotionally unstable.”
“I’m fine.”
She laughs, lipstick shining in the television’s furious glow. “Nobody who carves a scoreboard into their wrists is fine.”
I’m too upset to speak. Eris draws forward, lowers her shirt. “Feel my pulse, baby. Go on.” I don’t move. But I imagine the peaks and valleys over her skin, soft, almost lush. “It’s even. I’m calm...for now. All you have to do is do the right thing, honey, and this bruise,” she’s lifting my chin with her finger now, turning her tone sweet, “and all our other bruises go away with it.”
            “The kid at the used car lot--”
            “Ah, shush,” she says, raising the phone again. Calm, in control. “I gave my statement. Written, sure, I tried to do justice. I couldn’t call. I knew you’d check our records. Listen, they need you to corroborate the story before they’re comfortable making the arrest. I got a letter from Detective Gibbons, they’re going to come here tomorrow afternoon to talk to you, but I want you to pick up the phone and call them right now. No more bullshit. That man lost his eye, and Hastings needs to pay.”
            “He’s my brother, Eris. We can get him help--real help--chairs, addicts, first-timer chips, and coffee. In-patient clinic if he needs it. He’ll come out of prison a real criminal in a year or five. I swear--”
            “Now, or I call the police. Use your phone or I’ll use mine. And if I use mine, this gets ugly.”
            Laughter emanates from the television and I sidestep in front of it to see her face. It’s pale, chilly. She repeats herself. “Your phone or mine.”
            I turn and sprint out the door to my white sedan, peel out to the avenue. I roll stop signs, ignore yields, punching pedals with years of tracked-in dead grass matted beneath them.
 
-----------
 
“Are you sure nobody followed you?” Hastings whispers.
“We’re in your house, why are you whispering?”
“I don’t know what they’ve set up around this fucking place. They were here again an hour ago, knocking on my door, looking through my fucking windows.”
He’s not shaking, but he looks startled, eyes still, unreal, like a plush doll. I sniff the air. It smells like dried dill pickles.
“Hastings, are you high?”
“Calms me down.”
“Fucks you up,” I say. “Makes you paranoid.”
“Wanna hit?”
“No. But you better get rid of it before the cops quit knocking at your door and just kick it down.”
Hastings lives in a dark, single-story ranch. It looks near vacant, idle; a veritable warehouse. The lamps are set on the floor and don’t have shades, just bulbs that’d do a better job with a good dusting. The interior consists entirely of a sofa and a fat television with wires running from its back like cobwebs. Nothing else. He has no bed frame--the mattress just lies on the carpet and it’s got the stains to prove just how charming Hastings can be when he pretends to put himself together. The best decoration he has is the small pipe and baggie resting on the sofa armrest next to him.
I’m a little pissed. This is my brother in vintage form, but I always believed there’d be a time when he’d understand TV personalities don’t smile as much off screen as they do on it--that when the cameras are on you, when you’re being scrutinized, you just do what the audience wants. As I came over here I actually thought with the cops nipping at his heels with a prosecutor not far behind he might rise to the occasion and play nice. A pipe dream that was. I calm myself as best I can and explain everything that had just happened to me: Eris, the bruise, the phone.
“Did she call? Are you just dragging them here?” he says.
“I don’t hear any sirens. Least not yet. Besides, she’s tripping, nobody’s nuts enough to call any cops while--” I stop myself. She just might.
Hastings packs another bowl in his filthy green glass piece, lifts it to his chin. “That wife of yours, I tell you…”
            He makes an ass of himself, wants my help, and has the balls to bitch about my wife and what she did. Someone may wrap my wrists in metal and call me an accomplice, an accessory, and they’d be right. I love my brother, but I have my limits, cliffs of my own, and I’m wondering if I’d rather push him off before going over it myself. I won’t be taken for granted. My hand smothers the pipe and I bare my teeth.
            “You don’t get to tell me anything about my wife. You took out a man’s eye. I am your everything right now. If I don’t talk, they don’t have enough to arrest you. You do what I tell you. And for starters, you shut the fuck up about my wife.” Hastings pushes my hand away and presses a flame to the bowl, inhaling sharply, pausing, exhaling white smoke.
            “Little Gregory finally stands up to big bro, but still lets his woman push him around.” Hastings cackles, forcing a cough, “like the puss he is. Oh, this is rich.”
            “God, screw you.”
            Hastings sits up and makes himself big. A grizzly; dominant. “People say a lot of things, but Greg, it’s what they do that counts. Nothing else. Your wife scared you and you acted. I’m proud of you for not just folding like a lawnchair right then. Didn’t it feel good?” He lets the next words slide off his tongue, born from the smolder and smoke in his lungs. “Yeah, I put a bottle into that man’s eye, but I’d do it again right now. The only way I’d respect him is if he took that pool cue and shoved it up my shithole. You earn respect with action. An eye for an eye. Sure, I’m scared right now, but I’m scared of prison. It’s five-to-twenty years in this state for aggravated assault, but I’m not sorry for taking that guy’s eye. I’m not sorry one bit. You talk shit, you get hit.”
            “Jesus, you need help.”
            He lights another flame between his face and mine. “There is no Jesus, Greg. There is no God. I’m Jesus, I’m God. You’re Jesus, you’re God. Don’t you get that?”
            “Aren’t you sorry?”
            Inhale, exhale. “Yeah--sorry you got hurt--but look at the stones on you now.” He claps me on the back, “a real man.”
            He walks to the refrigerator, his open leather jacket dangling, ripped, split ends, splitsville, a chasm, looming, swaying from his broad shoulders as he pours us milk in the only two glasses he owns. “You remember that Bruce acoustic tune, the one about family Dad used to lecture us about whenever the boss came on the radio?”
I do. “Highway Patrolman.” I start to whisper the chorus and Hastings picks it right up and sings the rest: “A man that turns his back on his family, well he just ain’t no good.” And Bruce is damn right, I think. When it all goes to shit you fall back on your family, whether you like them or not. The people who keep you alive, who keep you at all. This isn’t the first time we’ve recalled this particular song together, but today is the first time I’m not sure I believe myself humming the words. But I shake the feeling, take the milk and sock my brother in the arm.
“So tell me,” says Hastings, packing another bowl. “How are you going to turn her out?”
Up on the ceiling there’s a brown water stain shining in the moonlight. Tap water drips in the sink, it echoes, sharp. Wind whistles under a crack in the window pane.  The sounds ground me where I am. Not just in that house, but as Hastings’s only ticket out, ticket punched, I’ve got a front row seat, climbing on stage. I slam the window shut.
“Grab your shoes. Get in the car,” I tell him. “And gimme the key to the back door.” He hands me the key and is almost out before he darts back like I know he will, stuffing the pipe and baggie into his jacket pocket.
 
--------------
 
Hastings spoons the last of his buttery hash browns into his mouth, hardly chewing at all. “Two hours in this shithole diner and you still haven’t answered my question.”
“Which question?”
He doesn’t have to say--I know what I’ve been stepping around, stepping out, cheating on. He’s rocking on his stool all doped up, pawing at it for balance.
I take a sip from my fourth coffee. “Well, is this place a shithole compared to prison?”
He removes the paper placemat beneath what’s left of his hash browns and scrambled eggs to dangle it in front of me. “It’s not exactly the Taj Mahal, now is it?”
We’ve taken two short spinning stools at a twenty-four hour diner just off of the local university campus. It’s three-AM, and there’s two other tables of drunk college students who, like all drunks, are either celebrating something or celebrating nothing. I recognize the sole employee serving and cooking for all the tables and imagine he’s making decent cash tonight. He’s got thick sideburns and thicker muscles, and he’s been doing variations of pushups every half hour on a blue mat he brought in and spread on the slick tile. We’re sitting close enough to the grill to hear the sizzle and smell his handiwork. Close enough to hear him mumble about these  “addicts-in-training,” how it’s all poison, how sad it is to soak your brain in “alcohol,” though nobody who drinks ever calls it that. He treats his body like a temple; Hastings treats his like a landfill.
“This whole place smells like burnt toast,” Hastings says.
The cook chimes in. “It’s the customers more than the food. Fights every week.”
“Ever call the cops?” asks Hastings, a little loud. The cook snickers. “Never anything I can’t handle.” Then he considers me, staring further and harder into my face every moment. “You sure you never been here before? You look familiar.” Immediately he’s hailed by one of the loud tables.
Hastings leans into my ear as he walks away. “No way that guy smokes reefer. He’s straight to the bone.”
This much I’m counting on.
The table has six people, four boys and two girls, a blonde and a brunette. Each of the boys has gelled hair and polos of varying colors, all one size too small to showcase their muscles (child’s play next to the cook’s). Their nipples jut out of the cotton and they know it. Hell, they flaunt it. One gets up for the bathroom revealing a tiny lower body and I suspect they all share this characteristic; four wine glass shaped boys eating with two attractive women. He passes, smelling like a mix of pit stains and Aqua Velva.
By the time he returns his friends have emptied the table caddy, folding the paper silverware wraps and launching them with forks. The ketchup and mustard squirt bottles lay on the table, salt shaker overturned. Their laughing grows louder, as does the yelling, too, with every swig of the brown flask Mister Universe doesn’t notice. The boys make dramatic gestures and the girls lean toward the table to show what they’ve got. It’s a drunken hormone carnival.
“Ah, shit,” I tell Hastings. “It’s cash only. Don’t move, there’s an ATM right around the corner.”
I have to walk right by the table of six to get through the door and two of the guys eye me up in drunken paranoia on approach. I’m counting my steps on the maroon tile, breathing steadily, even, odd, measuring my strides, planting heel-toe-heel-toe until I’m close enough. Then I fall. Face-first. Right over. On my way down I reach out my left hand, squishing the ketchup bottle and dousing a boy in a tight white polo with red ooze.
The white polo cusses and the girls thrust napkins at his torso. The other polos slosh to a standing position. One grabs the mustard bottle and squirts the yellow goop all over my face. That’s when I hear Hastings. He lumbers toward us and plants a fist in the teeth of the mustard guy. Fists fly. I kick out one of their legs. There’s a crunch. One slips on the goop and everybody tumbles onto me. My gut takes a hard elbow and now I’m getting hit. Sides, head.
I hear the cook from far away. “Hey, what the hell?” A spatula hits the floor and I hear him slide over the counter.
The girls and onlooking table treat the fight like a hot frying pan, reaching to help then retreating. Hastings is squished next to me, fighting anyone around. Backs slam against the underside of a table when we try to push them off, rattling the plastic cups and dishes on it. A drop of blood falls on Hastings’ forehead.
I feel the cook pull off one of the guys with a single swing of an arm, and I turn over on top of Hastings in full view of the onlookers before he can pick up anyone else. A fist tightens on the back of my shirt to pull me off. Hastings is focused, propping another polo up on his knee, taking cracks at the kid’s ribs. I thrust my hands into Hastings’s jacket pocket, tighten my fist, and tear out all I can. The small pipe and baggie spill across the floor. I’m thrust backward and the momentum throws me into the metal counter. When my body stops my insides keep going, squishing and curdling into my spine.
One of the girls whispers to the other. “Wait, is that…”
It’s about this time, with Hastings still tussling on the floor with the only jock left, that the cook spots the goods. They’re bright on the tile among the grime and spilled condiments. A vein pops out of his head. He hulks both fighters off the floor and twists their arms into their backs. The detained jock is bleeding from above his eye, and it spurts lightly every time he blinks.
“Somebody call the cops,” commands the cook, and the blonde girl obliges. The entire onlooking table bolts for the door like undergraduates will when anyone uses that particular word: “cops.”
“Is that theirs?” the cook asks, his upper body heaving for air.
The brunette points right at Hastings, accusing, prosecuting, judge, jury, executioner. “No, it came out of his pocket.”
Hastings tries to jostle himself loose to no avail. “She’s lying, she’s fucking lying. That bitch didn’t see anything.” He scrambles for words. “G--Greg, tell them. It was those kids who just ran out. Teenage dickbags. Tell them, Greg.”
The cook looks at me. The ketchup-stained boy at the bar covered in napkins turns, too. Soon it’s everyone.
“Go on, Greg. Tell them it’s not mine.”
Police sirens wail in the distance. Hastings’s voice shrills, desperate.
“Fucking hell, Greg. Tell them.”
 
----------------
 
I’m a man. I don’t much care if anyone thinks I’m a good one, whether I’m fat, thin, big dick or small, whether it’s coming from a crusty homeless guy on Oakland Avenue or my own mother. I’m a man because I’m here. I’m alive. And I’m free.
“It’s tender, let me go,” I tell Eris as we’re spooning on the couch. She’s rubbing my hand over the bruise on her stomach. She laughs deep and hearty, then I join in.
She moves my hand over her breast.  “How’s that?”
The television glow flashes across our faces. It’s a commercial, a man explaining how to install a window air conditioning unit.
Remember, water is going to leak out the back of the unit, so be smart, put a bucket under it. After a few days or weeks, give the plants around your yard a good bath. Amateurs patch the leak with putty and all they get is mold. Use the leak, don’t stop it.
“It’s good to have you back, honey,” she says, reaching for an acid tab from the table. She runs her hand across the marks on my forearms, then up to my fingers, separating them equally. Her breath is hot against me, searing, permanent, branded.
“Assault and possession? The judge will lean toward twenty,” she whispers. “He got what he deserved.”
I taste the words on my own tongue. “He got what he deserved.”
“You’re a good man,” she says.
“I’m a good man,” I say.
“You’re my man.”
“I’m your man.”
“And you won’t ever hurt me like this again.” She shoves my hand back over her stomach. I think I should shudder, but I don’t. The skin is tough, enduring.
“And I won’t ever hurt you like that again.”
See, martyrs never do anything but wither, sink, opening their veins to become a sentence in a book, a platitude for a sacrifice that won nothing and stays smothered, closed, scabbed, eaten. I’m here and I’m alive.
Eris tries to slip the tab into my mouth, but I stop her. We catch eyes and her jaw dips as I take the tab and do it myself.
 

Once again, he showed up at a town event drunk.  We had an event to celebrate another year of our small town every second Saturday of November. Everyone showed up. There were lights, food, and smiling people. It was probably one of the happiest events of the year, but as soon as dad got there everyone just stared.
        They've been doing that quite a lot every time he arrives. He was never the same again after mom passed away. Mom was the “rock” of the family. She kept us all grounded and always knew what to do. Her words knew how to stop any war you were having with your inner self and most of all she made dad happy. They were the “high school sweethearts” of their time. No one could top them. She made dad into a better person and when we lost her it was like he lost a big part of himself. His usual confident strides turned into shaky uncertain steps and his determined strong voice turned into slurs no one understood.
         He's a mess. How does he even provide for his daughter? No wonder he doesn't have a job. I tried not to take any of what anyone said to heart. They didn't know what he had been through.
            “Come on dad,” I said as I tried to keep his body upright. “Let's go home and get you into bed.”
            “No,” he slurred. “I need another bottle.”
           “Okay dad, we can get you one at home, where you can be more comfortable watching tv.”
         I tried to do everything that I can so that he would give in and come home with me and it worked. The cab ride was much longer than the usual with dad arguing with the driver about how slow or fast he was driving. I'm surprised we didn't get kicked out.
          When we finally got home, dad went straight to the couch and turned on the tv.
 
             “Where's my bottle?”
              “I'll go get it, just lay down and rest for a bit.”
             When I came back from the kitchen he was already asleep. I looked at him for a while. All those people didn't know him. They didn't know how weeks before my birthday he took extra shifts at work to get the present I wanted. They didn't know how no matter what he's going through he makes breakfast every morning for us. They don't know how he's the best person to talk to when you're sad, or happy, or even mad. They don't know any of that. They just see this man who lost his wife and is drinking his life away.
           It had been a while, then I started to feel dad move in his sleep, like he was having a nightmare he couldn't get away from.
            “No, no, no please. Manda!”
            “Dad,” I shook him. “Wake up dad, it's just a nightmare.”
          “I saw her. She was right in front of me and then she just disappeared,” he grabbed me and started crying.
           It’s the worst thing when you see someone you love suffer so much. No one saw this side of him, the side that made me love him more than anything else. Everyone always just saw the big picture but I saw the little things that you wouldn't regularly pay attention to.
“It’s okay dad, I’m right here.”
             He hugged me tightly and cried for a while. When he eventually stopped he layed down on the other side of the couch and went back to sleep. I walked over to him, kissed him on his forehead and whispered, “I love you.”
          As I was walking up the stairs I heard the faintest sound coming from him.
           “I love you too.”
 
 

Pam Munter has authored several books including When Teens Were Keen: Freddie Stewart and The Teen Agers of Monogram (Nicholas Lawrence Press, 2005) and Almost Famous: In and Out of Show Biz (Westgate Press, 1986). She’s a retired clinical psychologist, former performer and film historian. Her many lengthy retrospectives on the lives of often-forgotten Hollywood performers and others have appeared in Classic Images and Films of the Golden Age. More recently, her essays and short stories have been published in The Rumpus, Matador Review, The Manifest-Station, Litro, The Coachella Review, Lady Literary Review, The Creative Truth, Adelaide, Canyon Voices, Open Thought Vortex, Fourth and Sycamore, Nixes Mate, The Legendary, Scarlet Leaf, Down in the Dirt and others. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. 

 
Note: As with most historical fiction, the people in this story were real. The situations, however, are wholly imagined. This is one of the stories in a series that was inspired by the lives of early Hollywood legends.
 
                                                                        Frances
 
            The irony didn’t escape Frances that though she was the premier screenwriter of her time she couldn’t find the right words to describe how she felt about Mary. Or why. 
           It didn’t seem like that many years ago. World War I was raging but Hollywood was thriving, existing in a cocoon. Frances had come to the editing room at Biograph and found Mary alone. She was startled when Mary turned around, her petite frame dominated by her big blue eyes and long, curly blonde hair. “I know we’re going to be best friends,” Mary had said within minutes of their meeting.  “I don’t have many friends,” she had confided. “No time.”
             Frances knew it had to be more than that. Mary was an international icon, untouchable, unreachable some would say. And the most powerful woman in the industry. That was more likely the issue. “I would like to be your friend,” Frances echoed, carefully. She felt an unfamiliar jolt come and go from within, like a blast of hot air. It wasn’t at all unpleasant but surprised her with its intensity.
 
                Now some 15 years later, Frances looked forward to seeing Mary again, even thought she was unsure what she would find in that house tonight. She remembered a time when there was no ambivalence or anxiety about her dinners there. They were fun, lively events full of lawn games, alcohol and opium. She was amused that Hollywood’s highest paid stars would find it hilarious to shoot home movies of each other, each trying to outdo the other with outrageousness. It was about making each other laugh and it wasn’t hard to do. Someone would always be thrown into the huge pool in their evening clothes or go down the slide backwards.
              That night, she had invited Bill, her fourth husband, to go with her. But it had been a half-hearted gesture on her part.
                 “It’ll just be another night of drinking,” he said, his face stern.
           “Since when has that bothered you?” She gestured to the wet bar that dominated the east wall of their spacious, well-appointed Hancock Park living room. So much unfinished business between them. All those times Bill would disappear into the night, returning a day or two later without explanation or apology. In spite of her best efforts, she had married another alcoholic. How had this happened again?
                   “You know what I mean. This whole town is drowning in booze.”
                Frances knew he was right. Prohibition hadn’t affected the community at all, it seemed to her. And now that it was gone, the use of all chemicals, illegal and legal, ramped up right on schedule.
                    “You’re not worried about driving in Beverly Hills, huh?”
                    “No. The studio is taking care of the ticket. They always do.” She knew she could trust the power of MGM’s publicity honcho Howard Strickling to handle any difficulties with the law, no matter how severe. Even director Busby Berkeley’s running down that poor, elderly woman on the sidewalk when he was drunk was finessed by the studio. Frances wasn’t worried about her own intake, anyway. That wasn’t her poison. In fact, she knew she would confront her much more forbidden addiction that very night.
              “What will you do while I’m gone?” she asked even though she knew his response would be a lie. His latest girlfriend was probably eagerly waiting down the block, watching for Frances to leave. 
                “Oh, I dunno. Probably just listen to the radio and look through magazines. I might go to bed early.”
              Looking over at his stooped frame, she wondered why she had married Bill after knowing him such a short time. He wasn’t smart, their sex was a cruel joke and the more she thought about it, she didn’t like him much personally, either. There must be a reason she had gone through four husbands, each impotent in his own way – perverse, inept, clumsy or drunk. She wasn’t sure what it was but now and again, inklings of possibilities caused her too much discomfort to pursue the thoughts any further. 
                  It had been at least a decade since Frances had been invited to Pickfair, the Beverly Hills home of iconic silent movie stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. There hadn’t been a falling out, not really, but the distance between Frances and Mary seemed to grow imperceptibly over the years. Hollywood itself had gone through cataclysmic transitions. Just five years ago, silent movies had abruptly given way to the talkies. Major studios had morphed into rapacious whales, gobbling up all the smaller fish. Even Mary’s United Artists had experienced pressure from the biggies. And poor little Mary. She was a casualty, too. She had quit the movies. Or did they quit her? Frances’ screenwriting career had taken off and she was now the highest paid in the business. Is that what happened?
             Frances eased herself into her newly waxed burgundy Auburn Phaeton convertible. It had taken most of her screenwriter’s salary from “The Champ” to pay for it. For her, the car wasn’t just a Hollywood status symbol but a reflection of her conspicuous success in the industry. It made her feel almost invincible. She turned the key in the ignition and the roar of the engine revved her thoughts back to that first day, the morning she met Mary so many years earlier. Frances was looking for a job as an artist, hoping to create portraits of Mary for movie posters. Instead, she was surprised and a little thrilled at how quickly their friendship had happened. They were almost combustible together—thoughts, ideas, shared experiences sparking the air almost from the start. 
                   Frances drove down the darkened and nearly deserted Sunset Boulevard toward Pickfair, keeping an eye out for any motorcycle cops who might be looking for her car. There had been enough “episodes” that they likely were on the lookout for her. For just an instant, she thought about returning home and ambushing Bill but thought better of it. It might be fun, she mused, but she really didn’t care. She knew this marriage, like the last, would be over soon. She would divorce him and move on, as she always did.
             As she checked her lipstick in the mirror, she realized that it had been so long since they’d be in touch that Mary didn’t even know about the last two husbands. Well, Mary knew about the first one because they’d talked about their love lives over drinks one night at the Sunset Inn. The drinks just kept coming that night and before she knew it, Mary had told Frances about her hardscrabble childhood on the road while playing burlesque houses, something she never told anyone. Maybe it was the highballs or perhaps being touched by the trust but it made Frances cry. Mary got up from the table and walked around to comfort her, caressing her back ever so gently. When they stood up to leave, the long, tight hug elicited that same, now familiar tsunami, etched in her emotional memory bank and nurtured all these years. She was afraid to want more, wondering what it all meant. But after that evening, Frances was more careful about the extent of her alcohol intake around Mary.
               The last time she saw Mary she was still “America’s Sweetheart,” with her screen swashbuckler husband Douglas Fairbanks, ceremoniously placing their hands and feet in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Flashbulbs popping and fans screaming, everyone wanting to touch Mary. Could that be five years ago, she wondered? With the size of the crowd and the reporters, Frances couldn’t find a way to maneuver herself close to Mary. Even gossip maven Louella Parsons had trouble getting a quick interview for her radio show with the world famous stars. After a while, Frances gave it up, settling for an enthusiastic wave to Mary from across the expansive forecourt.
 
                In the rearview mirror, Frances saw the flashing red lights closing in on her car. Shit. She didn’t think she had been going that much over the speed limit, but she pulled over anyway, and cranked open the window.
                “Oh, it’s you, Miss Marion.”
                “Hello, officer. What can I do for you?”
                “Have you been drinking?”
                “Not yet.”
                “You were going mighty fast back there.”
           “I’m on my way to dinner with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Wouldn’t you be in a hurry, too?”
               He stared at her for a minute, probably not used to hearing those names as a defense for speeding. Frances remembered a conversation with Joan Crawfish in the commissary a few days earlier. Joan had been stopped by this same Beverly Hills cop more than once and got out of the tickets by spending a few minutes with him in his back seat. Frances suspected Joan didn’t need much encouragement for this kind of behavior. She was getting a reputation, undoubtedly contributing to her rise at MGM. Frances hoped she wouldn’t have to do that with this guy. She was coming to think of men as sexual marauders, anyway. Though she had made her mark in Hollywood without lying down, it wasn’t because those studio bosses hadn’t tried. She might have gone for Thalberg but he never came on to her, much to her disappointment. He had settled for that cross-eyed Norma Shearer. Tonight, her thoughts didn’t linger on all that. Her mind and body were poised for the trip up the hill. She wasn’t ready to admit to herself what she wanted from Mary but she knew it had nothing to do with this galoot cop.
                   “OK, Miss Marion. But you be careful tonight.”
                   “I will, officer.”
                  She put the window back up, took a deep, relieved breath and continued up Beverly Drive to Summit. She was glad she hadn’t reached for her flask along the way. She knew there’d be plenty of booze once she arrived. Mary would see to that.
           At the stop light, she decided not to tell Mary about all the times she screened the movies they made together for her friends and her husbands. Or the times she watched them alone when Bill was out.
 
                That day of their first meeting, Mary’s physical presence and charisma were so riveting that Frances couldn’t break her gaze. There was something in her manner, too, that was vaguely seductive – the sideways glances, the sly smiles, the gentle touch on the shoulder. She dismissed it, knowing Mary was not only married but having a secret and salacious affair with Douglas, whom she later married. She was glad Mary felt she could confide in her about that. It had only brought them closer. Maybe Mary was, well, flirtatious with everyone, not just her. It was just her imagination, she thought. But still. That feeling.
            Frances often reassured herself that she wasn’t “that way” and knew Mary wasn’t, either. And yet, every once in a while, when they were together having drinks, Frances would have to fight off those thoughts, those intrusive and unwelcome pictures in her mind. Before they were vanquished, though, she took comfort in the certain knowledge Mary wouldn’t be brutish or thoughtless and would always take her pleasure into account. Of course, Mary would have to make the first move. But she was unwilling to linger on those daydreams for long. They made her nervous. It just wasn’t right. Was it?
 
               She turned right on Beverly Drive and headed up the hill. She had made that drive a hundred times but tonight she couldn’t help but grin, remembering that wonderful day on the set when she and Mary had staged a revolution against that autocratic director, Maurice Tourneur. They’d become almost a single unit in moviemaking, Frances writing the screenplays and Mary in her customary starring role. But they were both tired of the goody-two-shoes character Mary’s public seemed to demand.  One day on the set, she took Mary aside before the filming began.
                   “I think we need to have a little fun here, Sweetie. It’s so stodgy. Same old stuff. We’re shooting the hurricane scene today, right?”
                 Mary looked at her, eagerly awaiting her friend’s idea and nodded. They had always loved laughing together.
                    “Now, when Frenchy says ‘Roll ‘em,’ you trip over the furniture and…”
                  Mary joined in immediately.  “…And then I’ll bump into Hobart, knocking him over.”
                  “Then,” Frances said, “you are so surprised you fall backwards on to the couch and knock it over.” 
               “I’ll fall ungracefully to the floor then watch everyone’s reaction.” Mary leaned in closer to Frances to share the next part of the plot.
              “And just when they think it’s over, we’ll have Hobart get up and pour a bucket of that hurricane on me.”
                 They could hardly contain their anticipatory glee.
As soon as the camera was rolling, she pulled her prank. Frances watched behind the camera with her hands over her mouth as the cast and crew stifled gasps and laughter in equal amounts. This was not the self-contained, pure and innocent Mary they were used to seeing. The director was not at all amused. He bellowed out, “Cut!  Cut!  Cut! This is not in the script! You ladies are horrible. We need to get to work here. No more games, please.”
                By now everyone was cracking up and it took more than an hour to return to the serious business of making movies. With the towel wrapped over her dripping curls, Mary threw her arms around Frances in triumph. There was that electric jolt again.
                Yes, they had been a team, all right. 
 
                She maneuvered her car up the long, winding driveway, the house lit up like one of Mary’s movie sets. Why hadn’t she seen or talked to Mary in so long? Hardly a day went by that Frances didn’t think about her, wondering what she was doing and with whom.  There had been that disagreement when Frances wasn’t included in that big United Artists deal but that was so many years ago. And truthfully, Frances wasn’t fond of Douglas from the start. Did Mary sense that? He was a brash show-off, a little boy, she thought, and not nearly good enough for Mary. But then who was?
             She already knew the answer to that, in spite of her best attempts to distract herself. It was a truth that had haunted her for many years, through four husbands and nearly twenty pictures with Mary.
              She wondered why all this was skipping around in her brain tonight. Was it just because she hadn’t seen Mary in so long? What did she want to have happen tonight, anyway? Nothing, nothing, she reassured herself, grabbing the rim of the steering wheel more securely. Everything will be just fine. A lovely dinner with old friends, that’s all.
              She left her car with a tall black valet and, stepping out into the night, felt engulfed by the sweet scent of jasmine. The oversized carved wooden door at the entrance swung open to reveal a formally dressed butler. She remembered him from all those years before. Morrison was his name. He must be close to seventy now. She admired how loyal Mary was to her employees, if not to her husbands.
          “Come in please, Miss Marion. We’re so happy you’re here tonight. Miss Pickford has been looking forward to your arrival.”
               “Thank you, Morrison. I’m very glad to be here.”
               “Let me take your coat. It’s chilly tonight, isn’t it?”
It won’t be for long, she thought.
             “Congratulations on your Academy Award, Miss Marion. I enjoyed seeing ‘The Champ.’ Very touching.”
           She smiled. She was used to such accolades. Even so, they made her feel special. Largely thanks to her work with Mary, she was admired as a brilliant screenwriter, a skill that would inevitably outlast beauty in the fickle Hollywood milieu.
                “Thank you. That’s very kind of you.”
            She stepped inside the ornately decorated foyer, full of cut flowers and Greek statuary. In the distance, she could hear the sounds of a string quartet.
            Pickfair was just as she remembered it. It seemed that nothing had changed, right down to the intricate imported doilies on the arms of the couches. The rooms were still too commodious for human habitation, the overstuffed chairs almost comically dwarfing their guests. The living room, if it could be called that, could have accommodated a hundred or more people. There was nothing cozy or intimate about this place. She looked through the big windows toward the bright lights of the streets in the distance, and it felt as if she had stepped into a time capsule from 1917, some 15 years earlier. All the furniture was in the same places, an ornate ashtray dominating the center of each table, placed just so. Even the slipcovers looked to be the same pattern and color. She wondered what else had remained the same.
            Frances scanned the room for Mary but didn’t see her among the buzzing crowd. In fact, she had a hard time recognizing most of the 30 or so guests, milling about with drinks in hand. Off to her far left she could see part of the massive dining room, which she knew would be perfectly set. She hesitated for only a moment, then scooted unobtrusively down the long corridor. Scanning the room to the left and then to the right, she circled the massive dining room table, checking the place cards. There was an unfamiliar name to the right of Mary’s card. She quickly found her own a few places down and switched the cards, giggling just a little. She knew Mary would appreciate her sleight-of-hand and gesture of affection. Entering the living room again, Frances saw a young woman approach.
                 “How do you do? You’re Frances Marion, aren’t you?”
                 “Yes, I am. And you’re - ?”
              “I’m Peg Entwistle. Oh, Miss Marion. I’m so honored to meet you. I have to ask. Doug thought you wouldn’t mind. Would you write a screenplay for me like you did for Miss Pickford? You made her famous. I really need a job.”
           “It doesn’t work that way, Miss Entwistle. You need to be under contract to a studio. And, please. I didn’t make Miss Pickford famous, my dear. That was what she did for herself – with talent.” She knew she had to pull away from this desperate, naive woman. How did she get invited to Pickfair, anyway? Not like the old days. Not by far.
              “If you’ll excuse me….” A slight smile crept across her face as she turned away to see the four overstuffed chairs next to the glass doors where Harold Lloyd would perform card tricks for the guests before pulling out his Ouija board. Those were such good times. Moving closer to the center of the room, she gazed up at the portrait of Mary over the mantel that still seemed to dominate the room. It had been painted when she was at the peak of her fame. She was breathtaking.
                  She felt an arm on her shoulder and turned to see it was Doug.
                 “Hi ho, dear Frances. You look lovely tonight. How are you?”
                “Hello, Douglas. I’m doing fine, thanks. And you?” She never really knew what to say to him. It was common knowledge that he was screwing every young thing on the lot. All those nights with Chaplin and the young girls. Mary always knew about the others but she didn’t seem to care. But it made Frances lose all respect for Doug, if she had any in the first place. 
               “Mary will be down in a few minutes. She’s been getting ready for hours.” His voice dropped into a hoarse whisper. “She’s been drinking heavily, you know.”
               Frances felt her spirits drain but she wasn’t surprised at his comment. Doug never approved of Mary’s drinking, even in the old days. “The body is a temple,” he would intone whenever anyone would listen. She thought about Bill back at the house and what he had said about the town drowning in booze. She hated it when he was right about anything.
               “Oh. I didn’t know.”
           “Yeah. Yeah,” he repeated, absent-mindedly. “Sometimes I think these parties are just an excuse.”
         Frances was growing more uncomfortable with this conversation. She thought him cruel and quite inappropriate. 
               “I’m sorry,” was all she could think of to say. She grabbed a drink off the silver tray proferred by an unsmiling, uniformed maid. At that point, she didn’t care what it contained. This wasn’t starting off well. She hoped it hadn’t been a mistake. She moved to the bottom of the staircase and was tempted to sit down, lost in reverie, but didn’t want to wrinkle the special electric blue gown she had selected for this night. Why had Mary invited her now, tonight, after all these years? Could it be that she was going to flash that coy little grin and tell her the marriage to Doug was over? Is this the night that she would invite her upstairs and…
             An abrupt raucous noise cut through the chatter and all eyes turned to the top of the stairs. The room fell silent. Frances looked up to see Mary, steadying herself against the dark wooden railing. With the floor-length puffy-sleeved yellow dress doused with beads and feathers, she looked as if she were headed to the junior prom – in 1910. But that wasn’t the worst of it. When she squinted to get a clearer look, even from this distance Frances could tell those eyes that always caused such a flurry in her were blurry and a little sunken. The makeup was artfully applied as always but her face looked as if it had melted.
           “You there!” Bracing herself against Mary’s uncharacteristically strident call, Frances could sense the room around her battening down. “Frances! Is that you?”
Frances carefully modulated her tone in response, trying not to sound either eager or alarmed. “Hello, Mary. Yes, it’s me.”
             “Frances?” She repeated, a little louder. There was a collective intake of air in the room. Frances could feel all eyes on her, everyone studying her, as if she might be held responsible for what was to come.
         “Come on down, Sweetie.” she said, smiling, encouraging her with a forced lightness. Frances could always buoy up Mary when she was feeling depressed or angry, almost as if she could reach inside her and toggle a switch. She started up the stairs to greet her, hope in her eyes.
            “Noooo. You stay down there, right where you are.” Mary gestured with her flapping left arm. What’s going on? What’s wrong? Where was her Mary?
            “Frances!” she bleated again. “Why the hell did you write that script for Mary Miles Minter?”
              No one moved.
            It took her a minute to understand what she was talking about. She tried to squelch her rising anxiety in a sea of reassuring appeasement.  “Mary, dear. That was years ago.”
             “How could you write for that slut? And she killed Taylor!”
            Frances knew Mary was referring to the still unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor. Minter had been one of the last to see him alive. Her career had fallen into the abyss from the scandal and the subsequent loose talk. Mary and Frances had gossiped about it at the time but that story was passe and not meant to be polite dinner conversation. Why was she bringing this up now? And why was she so angry at her?
           Frances’ tone grew more pleading. She reached out her hand upward in supplication. “Mary, please. Come down to dinner.” She still hoped to salvage this spectacle somehow, even without the help from anyone in the hauntingly silent room. Frances was riveted on Mary up there on the staircase, seemingly unreachable. She wanted so much to help but could not will herself to disobey Mary.
              She watched the drama unfold in slow motion as Mary unsteadily struggled to make her way down the lengthy marble staircase. Why didn’t Doug go up there and help her? How she hated him at that moment. 
             Half way down, Mary stopped and fixed her eyes again. “Frances. Why did you do that to me? That bitch was fucking my husband.”
           Her mind raced, trying to think of something to say, something to make this better, anything to make Mary love her again. Had Mary ever really loved Frances? In that instant, she knew she had to take a chance.
         “Sweetie, please don’t be angry with me. I would never do anything to hurt you. I love you. I always have.” Astonished by what had just escaped from her lips, she so very much hoped Mary would hear her, take her in, treasure her words like a sweet caress. She looked up at Mary, waiting for a response. Any response. When her words of vulnerability were met with thundering silence, she watched herself stepping back and shutting down, trying to protect herself by envisioning this as a two-shot in a film, where the famous writer is rebuffed by the fading movie star. In her wildest dreams, though, she would never have written this ending.
            Her gaze sank from Mary’s waxy face to the floor. She knew nothing could make this right or send her back to that splendid, simple time when she loved Mary unconditionally, wanted her in some forbidden, unspoken way. She felt lightheaded.
            Breaking through the tableau of frozen guests, Frances turned and moved quickly toward the anteroom to find Morrison standing there without expression, her coat in his hands.
               “I’m sorry, Miss Marion.”
           She kept her eyes on the floor, reached for the coat from his outstretched hands and walked out the opened door where her car was waiting for her. The encounter had been like a choreographed dance, everyone familiar with its dramatic arc except the Academy Award winning writer who was left without words, the past muddled, her future uncertain.
 

​            Kramer spent the weekend cleaning the house, making sure everything was in its proper place, not because he cared greatly for order, but because Bobbie did and he wanted her to return to an orderly home from her trip back in time.  He even purchased red and white carnations and placed them in a cut-glass vase on the round kitchen table.  Their effect was invigorating and he made a mental note to make it a weekly habit.  The round, soft shapes and intense colors added energy to the room.  Bobbie’s interest in flowers and plants suddenly made sense to him.
            Separation from Bobbie due to his business trips was a normal occurrence, but this was the first time he was the one left behind.  He wrestled with anxiety and confusion, not to mention a measure of astonishment when she informed him she’d purchased just one plane ticket to Chicago.
            “It’d be a complete bore for you and you know it,” she explained easily as though she were doing him a favor.
            It was true he’d been dreading her tenth high school reunion but thought he’d been successful covering his sentiments and was completely taken aback by her decision to attend alone.  Experiencing difficulty swallowing, he choked, “Are you sure?’
            Either completely missing his flustered reaction or choosing to ignore it, she shrugged.  “Of course.  You don’t know a soul.  No one knows you.”
 
            They married after dating just three months.  Aside from being the most passionate period of his life, it was by far the longest romantic relationship in which he’d been involved.  Ashamed of his sheltered existence, he kept it to himself and never built enough nerve to ask about her past, in hopes it had been just as uneventful.  As he watched her pack her suitcase, taking careful notice of every particle of clothing, especially the choice of lingerie and whether or not she packed her diaphragm, (which she didn’t), he was faced with the existence of her past and it frightened him. He had never experienced jealousy but her obvious slight was a warning signal he couldn’t ignore. Another possible reason to leave him behind, at least in his own mind, was just as alarming, and that was the fact he might just embarrass her.  Tall and lanky, his looks could at best be described as plain. Balding with eyes as tiny as a bird’s and a long narrow nose set above paper thin lips.  Bobbie was the first woman who had ever looked twice at him.
           
            He chose to mope without verbally expressing his disappointment in hopes she would recognize his discomfort, feel guilty and change her mind.  He pouted.  He slouched.  He sighed anxiously.  Nothing seemed to distract her focus.  She drove off without even a glance in the rearview mirror while he jogged after the car waving and calling her name.
 
            Bobbie couldn’t look into the rearview mirror because she feared even a peek of her devious smile might give it away.  Twenty minutes after leaving the house she pulled into the Comfort Inn off Interstate 95 and checked in to a room for $69 a night.  She paid cash.
            “And how many nights will you be with us?” asked the rotund desk clerk, peering over his Number 2 reading glasses with a hint of curiosity.
            “I’ll do two nights to begin with.  If I want to stay longer, will it be a problem?” She knew it wouldn’t but it sounded good.  She liked projecting the image of a carefree woman, not tied down by any particular anchor.
            He stood up straight, his bulbous belly smashing against the desk as he scrolled the computer screen.  “Looks okay.  Room 166 is around the corner to your left.”
 
            A week shy of their second anniversary he awaited her return from the reunion with the exhilaration and curiosity of a newlywed.  Her absence had rekindled his passion and the anxiousness was so strong he found it impossible to sit still.  The emotional peak he rode was a great leap from the numb aura he felt before her departure.  He recognized the rut they occupied but had done little to change it because it was an atmosphere in which he found comfort.  Why did he feel so needy in her absence when he experienced what bordered on tedium in her presence?  His existence had become so routine and self-absorbed he wasn’t even aware nor really cared how she felt.  In her absence he suddenly lacked confidence in their relationship.  He searched for clues of her discontent, anything he might have done to drive her to attend the reunion alone.  His emotions bounced back and forth between his own jealousy and her possible humiliation at having him as a husband.  Both feelings made him nauseous.
            Finally it was Sunday, the day of her return. On the verge of exploding, he paced apprehensively in front of the living room picture window, unable to contain his exhilaration.  He roamed the house, inspecting and grading his cleaning effort.  In the living room the tables wore the lustrous sheen of lemon oil.  The sweet scent of pine deodorizer, used in the special compartment of the vacuum cleaner, hung in the air as he admired the even knap of the blue shag carpet.  He now understood her need for order as he fell to his hands and knees to perk up the trampled pile in the path he created by pacing.  He would never take her for granted again.  From this point forward he vowed to be her partner, her helper in chores around the house, one who shares his feelings and above all, listens.
 
            Bonnie struggled a little with guilt but not enough to keep her from eating pizza and drinking a few beers, and certainly not enough to keep her awake at night – there was something about the muted blue-gray haze the television emitted in her dark room that lulled her to sleep both nights.
            “Hope to see you soon,” the same desk clerk chirped as he handed her the receipt.
            She nodded without a word as she crumpled the receipt on the way out the door and flipped it into a garbage can.
 
            Kramer burst into euphoric song when he spotted her car approaching.  His bliss was of such magnitude he knew he’d remember it the rest of his life and paused in mid-stride to drink in its power.
            Bobbie was short and stocky with a face too long for her body and a nose that fit the face, but as she emerged slowly from the car she appeared like a super-model to Kramer.
            All morning the dry heat had been overbearing. The leaves on the trees hung limply like tears. The desert-like climate had scorched the landscape, washing out all color and brilliance, but as soon as she approached a dazzling radiance simmered through the twisting waves of heat and engulfed her in a surrealistic ambience.  He leaped the three steps from his porch expecting to sweep her into his arms and transporting her effortlessly up the stairs to the bed where they would devour each other as they had in the early stages of their relationship.  Their curiosity had been childlike, each new territory a mystery.  That was before the inevitable adult insentience arrived.  It hadn’t even been two years.
            Kramer’s smile stretched to its ultimate tensile, giving him an awkward appearance of agony instead of the ecstasy he felt.  As he reached for an embrace she sidestepped him agilely and gave him a peck on the cheek as light as a butterfly’s wing.  Her quickness left him grasping at thin air and he tripped awkwardly into the car.  The impact stunned him and by the time he turned she was entering the house.
            “Bobbie?”
            “Inside,” she called back.
            In the seconds it took him to get into the house he manufactured visions of her dancing with an old boyfriend, maybe someone who had left her during high school and now wanted her back.  Or, maybe it was a man for whom she’d always pined and could now possess.  Their dance quickly jumped to the bedroom and he shook his head in an attempt to exorcise the painful image.
            Fitfully glancing about, he yelled, “Where are you?”
            “Upstairs.”
            He took the stairs two at a time, abruptly abolishing the image during the climb.  Maybe it was a game she was playing.  She was waiting for him in bed.  She had missed him and shared his hunger.  When he burst into the room and saw the untouched bed his jaw dropped with his hopes.
            “Where?”  His voice cracked.
            “In the bathroom,” she called over the echo of the toilet flushing.  When she emerged, zipping up her pants, she frowned.  “Where’s my suitcase?”
            He shrugged holding out his empty hands.
            “I left it in the backseat of the car,” she explained, walking to her dresser.
            “I’ll get it later,” he promised, taking a step toward her.
            “I need it now.”  She was pulling underwear out of the top drawer.
            “Why?”
            “I’m going to Fantasy World.  It came to me on the flight back”
            “Huh?”
            She checked her watch in between trips from the dresser and the bed where she was stacking clean clothes.  “I don’t have a lot of time.  My plane leaves in three hours.”
            He gurgled. Queasiness spread in his gut which caused a slurred fizzle, like the sound of air escaping a balloon.  His hands were hanging out helplessly in front of him.
            His throat closed on the way to the car.  His cheeks blossomed into swollen pouches and for a moment he feared suffocation.  Finally his tongue took command and thrust itself through his lips, allowing a long gasp to escape.
            “Fantasy World!  God, not again!” he cried incredulously as he yanked the suitcase from the backseat.  “What is it with Fantasy World? It’s just some low-rate Disney!”
            He lugged the suitcase upstairs.  She had already changed into a bright blue flowered dress.  He wanted to beg her not to go, in fact thought about forbidding the trip but couldn’t. That would make matters worse. It was obvious she’d made up her mind and he felt powerless to change it.
            “How long?”
            She shrugged.
            She’d always wanted to go to Fantasy World, so much so that she’d admitted early on in their relationship that if she could choose any place in the world for her honeymoon it would be there.  She hadn’t brought it up in a year, but in the beginning she talked about it all the time.  Kramer, who could think of nothing so dull, took the strategy of ignoring her and thought it finally worked.
            He found it hard to stand straight, wavering back and forth. His throat was raspy and his eyes watered.
            “Are you going alone?” he whispered.
            She shot him a glare with eyes hard as steel, but said nothing.
            The look started waves of panic washing over him.  Fearing collapse, he grabbed the dresser with the grip of a drowning person reaching for a lifeline.  Sweat sopped his shirt.
            Taking a long glance around the room, she announced, “I’m ready,” and shut the suitcase.  The clicks of the latches were like bullets to his heart.
            He watched helplessly as she left the room.  As soon as he gained his composure he chased her outside and stood by the car.  Before throwing it into reverse, she paused to throw him another cold stare, then backed out of the driveway and drove away.
            It was dusk before he made his way inside. Shadows danced across the living room as he fell listlessly on the couch.  His temples throbbed and every muscle in his body ached.
 
            “You didn’t have to check out, you know,” the desk clerk informed her as he pulled up her information on the computer, shaking his head which caused his belly to jiggle under a white shirt so stretched out it seemed transparent.
            “Well, I really did,” she began as she counted out the cash.
            “And that would be a why?”
            She looked at him with a smirk.  His brow was covered with sweat and she noticed large yellow circular stains extending from the wet pits of his white shirt.  He’d probably enjoy it, might make his day and she would have liked that, but held off, at least for now.  It was probably better kept a secret.  “I might tell you someday.”
            “When you check out and come back the same day next time?”
            She laughed, took her key and picked up her suitcase.
            He called to her as she walked down the hall.  “Notice I gave you a different room.”  Muttering beneath his breath, “Different trip and different room.  Makes sense. Oh and there is free beer in the lobby tonight.”
 
            The hollow gongs of the grandfather clock woke Kramer.  He’d drifted off on the couch, but couldn’t recall sleeping, though he had vague recollections of harrowing visits from anonymous men and wondered if they were from Bobbie’s past.  He couldn’t focus on any particular details but judging from his general feeling of faintness figured they couldn’t have been too positive.
            He struggled to his feet and stumbled to the hall mirror with the agony of a man with a fierce hangover.  His face was ghostly pale and his thinning hair reached into a maze of cowlicks.  Large, dark circles dragged his eyes to his hollow cheeks and the lines of a frown were chiseled deeply around his mouth.
            Their wedding photo stared up at him from the hall table.  They’d been married at the courthouse.  He wore a black suit and looked mournful.  Wasn’t it a happy event?  He never looked good in pictures.  Bobbie appeared impatient, but then, at that particular time she thought they were going to Fantasy World on their honeymoon.
            “Are you really sure you want to go there?” he complained as they descended the wide steps outside the courthouse.
            “Absolutely!” she screamed with glee, actually leaping down the last few stairs.
            He’d never seen her so happy.  Why hadn’t he given in to her request?
            “Do you think its romantic enough?”
            “We can find romance anywhere.”
            “But, at Fantasy World?”      
            He held fast.  He refused to go and she spent the first night of their marriage on the couch.  She wouldn’t climb into their bed until he promised to take her there on their first anniversary.  When that date was approaching he conveniently scheduled a business trip.  She stopped mentioning it.
           
            Bobbie got into her pajamas in Room 172.  It may have been a different room number but it was the same room.  The same two double beds with dark floral patterned bedspreads stretching to dark oak veneer headboards; the television sat on the same matching oak veneer dresser. 
            She reached into her suitcase, rummaging beneath her clothes and pulled out a tattered doll, dressed in a deep tan uniform wearing a pith helmet.  “Well Ranger Rick, we’re awfully close.  Princess Anne will be pleased don’t you think?”  She leaned the doll on the first double bed’s pillow.  “Shall we ask her?”  Acknowledging an answer only she could hear, she walked back to the suitcase and pulled out Princess Anne.  Dressed in a threadbare pink gown that had been repaired on both sides; the shabby attempt obvious in the uneven raised stitches. A tarnished silver crown sat askew on her golden blonde tresses.  “Damn pleased, she says.”  Bobbie placed her gingerly next to Ranger Rick
            Shattered when Kramer avoided the trip on their first anniversary, Bobbie began struggling with the marriage.  His obvious slight meant he didn’t care enough about her to want to experience and share what excited her, so what did that say about their relationship?  She’d never loved another man, never really even dated anyone more than twice and when he called her for the third date she was shocked but pleased.  The fact that a man with his obvious experience showed an interest was befuddling and she wasn’t about to question it.
 
            “Thirsty are ya?”  The desk clerk was balancing precariously on a thin-spindled wood chair, belly rubbing the small round table on which his bottle of beer stood.
            “Have to admit I am,” she chuckled, pulling her robe tight around her throat.
            He pushed the chair away from the table, struggled to stand and waddled to the cooler.  They were the only ones in the lobby.  Hauling it across the room he set it down on the floor next to them with a groan. 
            She watched with amusement as he winced while twisting the bottle cap off with his thick fingers. 
            “Here ya go,” he huffed, the exertion causing perspiration to bead on his wide forehead.
            “You must love these nights,” she commented with a sarcastic smile.
            “Free beer.  Chips.  Can’t beat it.  Course with what they pay me, it is a well-deserved perk.”
            “Chips?”
            “They’re gone,” he admitted sheepishly.  “I wasn’t expecting company.”
            She nodded, taking a swig. “I got lonely.”
            “Along with thirsty…”
            “Yes.”  She stared at the bottle and wondered what Kramer was doing.
            “You don’t strike me as a traveling woman.”
            She snorted softly and shook her head.  “No.  This is a scheme.”  The confession was emancipating.
            The clerk leaned closer, “Oh do tell.  Schemes don’t happen too often in this fine establishment.”  He rolled his puffy eyes.
            Bobbie hesitated. 
            “Has to be pretty important to spend, what, now, three nights in this dump.”
            She shrugged.  It was important to her.
            His bushy eyebrows rose in curiosity and a smile spread across his thick lips before he downed the rest of his beer in one draw.  “Well?”
            Tightness gripped her chest and she raised her hands above her head in an attempt to loosen it.  Another swig might help.  “Are you familiar with Fantasy World?”
            “Second rate Disney?”
            She winced, but chose to ignore the comment.  “That’s where I’m supposed to be right now.”
            He curled his lips in a devious smile and nodded slowly, but remained quiet.  He didn’t want to appear too intrusive for fear of chasing her away.  Then he frowned.  “What about earlier?”
            She snorted again, cheeks blushing rosy.  “My tenth year high school reunion.”
            He held his meaty hands up as though he were defending himself.  “I’m confused, but I’m also curious.  Why Fantasy World?  Why not Disney?”
            She sighed deeply then took another sip.  “Long story.”
            “Long night.”
            “You ever get fixed on something and set your heart on it so strong you couldn’t let go?”
            He rubbed his stomach.  “Food mostly.”
            She ignored his attempt at humor and continued.  “I got my heart set on going to Fantasy World when I was a kid.”
            “Not to beat a dead horse, but why Fantasy World?”
            “That was the place one of my foster families went.  They’d just returned when I came to stay with them and ever since I’ve wanted to go.”
            He shrugged.  “Then go!”
            She gazed across the empty lobby.  “Can’t go alone. It’s a place that families go.”
            He nodded slowly.  “Yeah, I guess.”
            “They had so much fun there.”
            “Your foster family?”  He turned the top off another beer and then wiped his brow.
            She nodded. “For weeks after my arrival I watched Kathy and Danny Boswell play with brand new Ranger Rick and Princess Anne dolls, souvenirs from Fantasy World.  Though Kathy was coolly polite, she made it very clear that Princess Anne was off limits, which just made me more envious.  Danny kicked me in the leg one night when he caught me playing with Ranger Rick. ‘That is not your property.  Stealing will end you up in jail with your mother.’
            “When no one was around I flipped through the pictures of that trip and became so adamant and consumed I just never shut up about it.  Gazing at the smiling faces of the children in those pictures was euphoric.  I couldn’t imagine a more perfect place.”
            He opened another beer and handed it to her.  “Stay long with this family?”  He wanted to bring up the mother in jail but was afraid that might be crossing the line.
            “Just a couple of months. One day when the family was out, a caseworker came and told me to pack my things. I was going to a more permanent home.  I was shocked.  Angry.  She waited for me downstairs while I packed my suitcase.” She smiled as she recalled racing from Kathy’s room to Danny’s.
            “Okay,” he huffed as he shifted in his chair, a bit bored with the back story.  “Obviously someone thinks you are at Fantasy World.”
            Bobbie had said enough.  Standing up she nodded and smiled, “Thanks for listening.”
            He called after her, “Hope it all works out.”
           
            Scratching the two-day growth of whiskers on his chin, Kramer gazed at the flowers that Bobbie hadn’t even noticed and wondered how he was going to manage without her. 
            Sick of being cooped up in the house, but hating the thought of venturing into the outside world, he wandered aimlessly into the backyard garden at dusk.  He had never paid much attention when Bobbie worked there and was amazed at the order of the rows.  He marveled at the size of the tomatoes and cucumbers and realized he had never praised her for anything she did, either ignoring it or taking it for granted.
           
            “I suppose you’ll be back,” the desk clerk chuckled the next morning, his triple chin rolling like waves.
            She shook her head.  “Not that I didn’t enjoy my stay.”
            “That’s good I guess,” he said with a quizzical frown.  Then leaning across the counter, close enough for her to smell his sour odor, he whispered as he glanced about to make sure they were alone.  “Can’t you let me know who the target is?”
            “I’m sure whatever you’ve conjured up in your imagination is more entertaining than reality.”
            She put her suitcase into the car trunk then drove to the airport where she parked in the long-term parking lot, grabbed the suitcase and boarded the shuttle to the terminal to call a cab.
 
            The doorbell stirred him from a dream.  He was chasing Bobbie through a crowded airport, pleading shamelessly for her to stay.  Her reaction was a weak smile.  He had lost her in the crowd when the bell echoed again, worming its way past his wall of sleep.  He opened his eyes onto her pillow.  Recalling the scant traces of mascara and the rich scent of perfume he regretted washing the pillowcase.  Rising up to his elbows, he noticed the chair in the corner.  Normally her red robe would be strewn across it.  The chair looked barren without it and he winced at the thought of it lying across some hotel chair, possibly under some man’s robe.
            The doorbell rang again.  Shivers ran across his skin as he struggled with the prospect of facing someone and having to explain Bobbie’s whereabouts.  His stomach reminded him he hadn’t eaten since her departure.  Struggling to get his robe on, he finally stumbled downstairs.
            “I’m coming,” he called, becoming painfully aware of the arid, sour taste in his mouth.  “I’ll probably scare the person away,” he mumbled as he unlocked and opened the door.
            “Phew!” Bobbie gasped.  “I figured you’d gone to work.”  The plan was working, since he hadn’t.  “I lost my car keys.”
            He glanced outside at an empty driveway as she slipped past him and padded down the hall to the kitchen.  He took her suitcase in and left it by the door. Was this too a dream?  He blinked hard and took a deep breath.
            “Want coffee?” she asked.
            He let the screen door slam and walked slowly down the hall.
            “You look like you could use some.”
            He caught his image in the hall mirror.  His gathering of cowlicks had multiplied into a rat’s nest.  He had never appeared or felt so worn out.
            “Do you realize how much it costs to take a cab from the airport?”
            He rubbed his eyes.  She leaned casually against the sink.  It was a familiar pose, one he’d seen her assume hundreds of times.
            “Forty bucks.  Can you believe it?” she continued.  “It was all I had. I couldn’t even tip him and he peeled off when I was ringing the doorbell.”
            He glanced skeptically around the kitchen, then peered fearfully back down the hall.  Without the evidence of the suitcase he might be able to pass off the whole incident as a terrifying nightmare.  He basked in the normality of the scene and thirstily drank in her presence, amazed at how it warmed and filled the room.
            “I like the flowers.  They’re pretty,” she commented motioning to the carnations.
            They were drooping over the top of the vase.  Like terminal patients, they were on the verge of death.  “I forgot to water them.  They don’t look too well.  Probably won’t survive long,” he sighed, shaking his head.
            “Naw! They’ll perk right up with a little care,” she claimed as she grabbed a water pitcher from beneath the sink.
            He smiled.  The cage of anxiety that had rendered him helpless during her absence had crumbled.  After all, they were the only witnesses to the last few days but as the sour confusion and anguish seeped back, anger rose.  Something told him to stand up to her and punish her for her actions.  He should demand an explanation, or at least an apology.  But, then, wasn’t he at least partially to blame?
            Pushing off the sink, she glided by him and reached out, quickly and softly pinching his behind.  It was a blind move, smooth as a point guard’s behind the back pass that completely astonishes an audience - totally unexpected and that much more exciting because it is.  He followed her into the hall and watched her approach her suitcase.
            “How was Fantasy World?”  He flinched as soon as the words slipped out.  It sounded as though someone else asked it.
            She stopped but waited a moment before looking back over her shoulder.  They really hadn’t made eye contact until then.  Her bottom lip quivered and her vulnerability both surprised and excited him.  She finally shrugged, but it wasn’t a light gesture, more like trying to lift the weight of the world from her shoulders.  Slowly, one word at a time, she sighed, “Wasn’t what I expected.”
            Some inner instinct advised him to attack when she was down.  If he passed up the opportunity he may never have the chance to gain the upper hand again.  He recalled the agony caused by her absence – the emptiness, the death-like existence, but her attendance, her admittance of disappointment started burying those feelings of angst. The fact she was back injected him with the confidence he’d been missing for days.  Now she was back, did anything really have to change?
            She waited for his words, his offer to join her. She was ready to let her mouth drop open and widen her eyes as she’d rehearsed in the mirror.  It was the expression of a young child who receives the gift of a lifetime.  The words ready to leap from her tongue were, “Really?  Fantasy World together?”
            And as her fingers gripped her suitcase, Ranger Rick and Princess Anne stuffed safely inside, she waited.
 
                                                                        THE END

​We connected via an online dating site. Cleo lived in North Philadelphia with her mother. She didn’t drive, so I traveled down to visit her. She lived on a street in an area some people would call a “bad neighborhood.” But within two weeks, I had visited three times. I felt compelled.
Imagine watching an old movie. It begins with an animation. A road map from New York City to Philadelphia fills the screen. A cartoon car chugs along a winding blue line that represents the distance between the two cities. It seems the automobile has been destined to make this journey since it left the assembly line.
The fourth time I drove down was to give her a ride back to my home for the weekend. That we lived a city apart was irrelevant. Cleo had told me she had never been in an airplane, and felt apprehensive about flying. But I would have driven to Buenos Aires if I had to.
Cleo was waiting in front of her house, a suitcase in her hand. Her glowing, caramel skin and red felt bowler hat were visible halfway down the tenement-lined block. I stopped and climbed out. Before I could say anything, she grabbed the rear passenger-side door handle and tugged. She registered surprise when it didn’t open.
“It’s locked,” I said.
“Locked?”
I pressed the button on my key fob and the door latch snapped open.
“Now,” I said. 
Cleo looked at me with a furrowed brow. She pulled on the handle again. The door opened. She put her suitcase on the rear seat, and slammed the door shut. Then she opened the front door and slid into the seat before I could act the gentleman. I sighed audibly, and got back in the driver’s seat. She slammed her door so hard, the whole car shook.
“It’s not the hatch of a submarine,” I said.
“We’ve never owned a car,” she said. I made a right turn on Susquehanna. I was focused on finding the way to the turnpike entrance, so I didn’t say anything.
“You’re my Nile goddess,” I said, once we got on the turnpike. Cleo nodded diffidently. It was true, though. She had beautiful copper skin, and a heavenly smile. She seemed captivated as we drove, as if she had never been on a highway before. I surreptitiously eyed her. It struck me that she was looking out the window as if she was viewing a magic kingdom—not the anticipation of traveling towards one—but as if we were already there. Her beatific bearing and wondrous gaze. As I drove, I pondered how I felt blessed even though I was an atheist.
I explained that New York City consisted of five boroughs, and that Staten Island was one of them.
“I don’t know much about Staten Island."
“Joan Baez was born there.”
“Who?” 
When we reached the Outerbridge Crossing that connected New Jersey to New York, she took out her phone.
“Could you lower the window?” she asked. She held out her Samsung and began videoing the Staten Island Sound below, improvising a verbal travelogue. Her melodic voice imitated a tour guide’s script.
“You’re clever,” I smiled. “Making up a story on the spot.”
“Is that okay?” she said. She lowered the phone, and placed it on her lap.
“It’s not a criticism. I do that when I write. But I need something to inspire me.” Then Cleo revealed that puzzled look again.
“We’re here,” I said. We pulled up to my house. It was an old Victorian, somewhere between quaint and dilapidated. I lived on a residential street, and the trees—in their leafy way--had decided that spring had arrived and wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon.
Cleo reached out and took a few strands of my hair, and twisted them around her finger.
“Don’t make my hair any curlier than it is,” I said.
“And to your left, ladies and gentlemen,” Cleo pretended to hold a microphone, “are Peter’s thick brown curls.”
“Definitely not a tour highlight,” I said. Then we kissed.
For dinner, I made spinach salad, and we drank Pinot Grigio. Cleo never had wine before, and she got dizzy. I walked her over to the leather sofa. I prayed she wouldn’t throw up. She leaned against my shoulder and I stroked her henna-tinted hair.
“Your hair is curlier than mine,” I said.
“Maybe it’s in my genes,” she said quietly.
“That could be easily misinterpreted.”
“It could?” she said. Then there was that furrowed brow.
“Let me know when you feel better.”
I reached out to the coffee table. It was strewn with oversized books and periodicals. I grabbed a cycling magazine that lay beside my notebook and began leafing through it. Cleo’s head felt heavy on my shoulder.
Occasionally I glanced at her, trying to read her facial expression. One minute it seemed to signal a deathly illness; the next, a hunger for affection. She opened her eyes, took a deep breath, and sat up. She was scanning the wood floor that stretched outward to the opposite wall, meeting the lowest shelf of my ceiling-high bookcase.
“You have lots of books,” she said.
“Hazards of being a teacher.”
“Why hazards?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Oh,” she said, followed by an expression of dawning recognition. “But I do.”
“Enlighten me then,” I said. She seemed to perk up.
“Sometimes you read about the mysteries of the universe, like ancient history or the dinosaurs, and it’s as if you’re walking around during the time of the Romans, or you’re in Jurassic Park.”
“That’s fair,” I said tentatively.
“But other times.” She emphasized the word so deliberately, I had the feeling she was imagining herself getting off the back of a Tyrannosaurus. “Other times you have so much reading to do, you feel your head is about to explode.” She raised and lowered her arms dramatically as though mimicking a bomb being detonated.
“Feeling better now?” I asked. Instead of responding, though, Cleo reached out and picked up a large book about Michelangelo that lay on the table. The dust jacket displayed the famous image of the finger of God reaching out to touch Adam.
“The sixteenth chapel.” Cleo drew the book to her and put it on her lap, marveling at the cover as though we were touring the Vatican.
“Sistine,” I said.
“I knew that wasn’t right,” she said.
“It’s all right with me.” I gently tugged on the book. “Want to see the terrace?” I pointed to the double doors. 
“That sounds like fun.” But she jumped up so suddenly, she began to wobble.
“Everything O.K?”
“A little dizzy, that’s all. Sometimes I’m a klutz.”
“A ravishing klutz.” I thought for a moment. “Sounds like an oxymoron.”
“A what?” Then that look of bewilderment.
The door to the terrace was stuck. Layers of paint had built up over the years, so I had to pull on the door extra hard. We were outside, but I thought how if I didn’t fix the loose doorknob, I’d soon wrench it out along with the screws.
“If you look up, you can see stars.”
“Very unique,” she said.
“Meteor,” I said, and pointed.
“Missed it.”
“Another one,” I said. But it too was already gone.
“Here’s what we do,” I said. “Use my finger for a guide. Stare in the direction it’s pointing. Eventually a shooting star should appear. It’ll be quick, though.”
I stretched out my arm and pointed. It felt like we were staring through a single telescope. My arm began to grow tired.
“I don’t see anything,” she said.
“Patience.”
“There!” we shouted together. Then it was gone.
“Be right back.” I rushed inside and grabbed a pencil. I opened my notebook and scribbled something.
“Sorry I left you out here alone,” I said, as I stepped back outside.
“Where’d you go?”
“I had a moment of inspiration.”
Cleo raised her long bronze fingers and ran them through my hair. “Did you mean that about needing inspiration to write?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I am.”
“How?”
“Written all over your face.”
“No one’s ever told me they can read my face.”
“I can read invisible ink,” she said. She made the same motion with her fingers. It felt nice until she grabbed my hair and tugged.
 “Ouch. That hurt," I said.
“Serves you right.”
My Nile goddess. I knew we were at the start of a long, intimate, and unpredictable journey. I imagined an animated film. There was a rocket ship, crudely drawn. Cleo and I were climbing into it. I wasn’t sure what Cleo thought, but I felt I had no choice. It was clearer to me than anything I had ever known.
We headed for the door to go back indoors. I stopped momentarily to glance up at the stars. Then I looked at Cleo. Her expressions of bafflement had disappeared. It was replaced by a thin veil of what I could only describe as wacky wisdom. When I took hold of the doorknob, I grasped it firmly, and pulled hard. But I didn’t have to. The door opened with ease.