Wild Musette Journal

by Donna Migliaccio

Beep…beep…beep…

The faint bleating finally pierced the fog of Birdy’s drugged slumber. She cracked her left eyelid open and after some moments, identified the source of the noise: a monitor, screen glowing green, at the left side of her bed. Of course, she thought. Operation. Guess it’s over. Guess I made it.

Through the haze of her stubby grey lashes, she took slow, deliberate stock of her condition: IV in the crook of her elbow, oxygen tube taped to her nose. Mouth dry, throat sore, belly painful. More tubes down there. Gasp and sigh of machines pumping stuff in and out. Another glow, this one bluish, off to her right. She peeled open her other eye to look.

Laurie was sitting in the light, head tilted down, eyelids lowered, like an angel, Birdy thought, her heart swelling so suddenly that her chest ached, like an angel lost in prayer. Laurie shifted position then, rolling her shoulders wearily, and Birdy saw that the unearthly blue light was, in fact, a cell phone, and Laurie was not praying but absorbed in some game. “Laurie,” Birdy tried to say, but her tongue was as dry and limp as an old sock, and although her lips moved, no voice came out.

A nurse came into the room then, shoes squeaking on the linoleum, brisk and efficient in pastel scrubs. “Evening,” she said. For just a breath Laurie looked up, and on her face was the expression Birdy had come to loathe: mouth pursed and pulled down at the corners, brow furrowed, eyes hard and squinting. A disappointed face, a disillusioned face, a face too old for such a young woman. It made Birdy want to weep.

The nurse fiddled with a monitor, made notes on a clipboard, then leaned over Birdy. “Well, hello,” she said. “You awake now, Mommy?”

Mommy. Laurie had called her that, long ago, when her blue eyes had been wide with innocence and her face baby-soft with trust. Mommy.

Although she was not Laurie’s mother. Aunt Birdy, that was who she was, spinster Birdy, practical Birdy, the dependable, sturdy, and unimaginative older daughter with a steady, boring job. Birdy, who lived at home with their aging parents while Laurie’s mother, ten years younger, the lovely, lively daughter, lived a harum-scarum life, replete with laughter and wild parties and man after man after man. Their parents had disapproved, and Birdy had joined in their disapproval, and as a reward had been willed everything, money and house and all. After the parents were gone Laurie’s mother moved with her latest man to another city, but within the year she was back, down and out, with baby Laurie in her arms. She swore to change her ways, and for a few months she did, but first the drink took hold and after that the drugs. More and more Laurie’s care fell into Birdy’s stolid, capable hands. Laurie’s mother would sing to the baby, yes, slurring tunes of love and regret, and toss her in the air and tell her that she loved her, but it was Birdy who fed the child, Birdy who diapered her, Birdy who walked the floor with her at night when she was colicky. And it was Birdy who, holding the helpless little mite in her arms, felt for the first time in her stolid, solitary life the flickering flame of love.

Mommy.

The night nurse laid one hand on Birdy’s brow and frowned. “Open, please,” she said, producing a thermometer.

And when Laurie’s mother died after one wild party too many, it was Birdy who held out her arms when Laurie took her first steps, Birdy who taught Laurie her ABCs and walked her to the school bus and sat with her while she did her lessons and all the while, her love for Laurie spread like a bonfire in her virgin breast.

The nurse whisked the thermometer from Birdy’s mouth and peered at it. “Bit of a low-grade fever,” she announced. “The doctor may want to prescribe stronger meds for your mother.”

Laurie’s eyes flicked up from the cell phone. “She’s not my mother. She’s my aunt.”

Not your mother, some meddling neighbor had told the child one day. Teary-eyed, Laurie had come home for reassurance, but pragmatic Birdy could not bring herself to lie to the child. She could not lie, no matter how her love for Laurie consumed her. She told Laurie the truth and watched the light of innocence fade from the baby-soft face. Over the next few days the hurt in Laurie’s face hardened into distrust and Birdy would have given anything, anything at all to get it back.

She had never indulged the child in make-believe, but she did now, filling Laurie’s evenings with storybooks and songs about princesses and unicorns and gentle magical dragons. Laurie turned the pages and read the words and hummed the tunes, but when Birdy encouraged her to extend these flights of fantasy into her own play, Laurie stuck out her lower lip and frowned. Why, Aunt Birdy? Laurie would say. I know it’s just pretend.

“Ah,” said the nurse. “My mistake.”

“It’s okay,” Laurie said. “She pretty much raised me.”

How I tried, Birdy thought, her insides trembling and hot with sudden misery. Again and again she had tried to ignite Laurie’s sense of wonder. Took her to the movies, to concerts, to thetheater, to the ballet, anything to stir Laurie’s imagination, to curve and soften the walls of her world. Dancing swans and nutcrackers, boys and girls who could fly on broomsticks and work magic, talking lions and hippos and little robots—any and all of it. In the darkness Laurie’s eyes gleamed with yearning for such wondrous things, but in the banality of daylight her practical side stubbornly asserted itself. It was fun, but I don’t believe in all that stuff, she would say. I know it’s not for real.

“Day shift told me you’ve been here since this afternoon. Must have been dull.”

Dull rote schoolwork set by dull rote teachers; Laurie excelled at that. Just like Birdy. Numbers and science problems were her forte, composition and literature her demons. As she got older she excelled at algebra and chemistry and grammar; struggled with English lit and poetry and mythology. Why did people believe this stuff? she would grumble. Half-human things like griffins and centaurs. Impossible things like phoenixes. Why would a bird burn itself up to live again? What’s the purpose of that?

“The hospital cafeteria closes in half an hour. The hot food’ll be mostly gone but they’ve got some nice sweets down there today. Coconut cake and apple pie.”

Laurie had a weakness for sugar, but all through high school she watched her weight and counted her calories. Her body was trim and taut when she left for college, but when she came home for Christmas break she was softer. It’s my Freshman Five, she told Birdy, laughing. Every freshman gains five pounds. But in addition to the softened body Laurie wore a softened expression and Birdy soon found out there was a Boy, a Boyfriend, Jason by name, a junior who had spotted Laurie in biology class and had scented her freshness like a fox scents a mouse. For the next few months Laurie’s calls home were all Jason this and Jason that, setting off alarm bells in Birdy’s head and fears of a future that mirrored Laurie’s mother’s, but she made herself say nothing, forced herself into silence. Let her believe, Birdy told herself. She dreams and wonders and trusts at last. Let her believe, and hope, and maybe it will come true.

“Thanks, but I don’t eat that stuff.”

“Well, how about soup? Nothing fancy today, just chicken soup with rice, but it’s good.”

By the end of the school year Jason had broken Laurie’s trusting heart and when Laurie came home for the summer it was all gone: the soft yearning flesh and mouth and eyes, and when in her senior year Laurie started dating again this time it was a practical boy named Doug who was in ROTC and had his career in the military mapped out. He was a square young man, with a square boxy body and a square jaw, an unimaginative but steady suitor, well-mannered and stalwart but a little dull. His level-headedness meshed with Laurie’s stubborn pragmatism. They had a practical courtship and a practical wedding and they seemed happy enough because they had a Plan, a plan for their lives together.

The nurse was peering at Laurie now. “You all right, miss? You need a drink of water or something? You look a little pale.”

“I’m fine. I feel a little off today, that’s all.”

A little off. Ah, no, not again.

Laurie had felt a little off in the first year of her marriage, and the doctor confirmed her suspicions that she was pregnant. Doug and Laurie’s Plan skewed off track because babies were not supposed to be in the picture, not yet. It didn’t matter, though, because practical Laurie and practical Doug became almost silly at the idea of Their Baby. They had a sonogram and proudly showed it to Birdy, who was bemused by the shadowy creature in the photo. Do you dream already, little thing? she asked it silently. Do you wonder? And Doug and Laurie giggled and called their little unborn pet names like Peanut and Button and Nugget…

And then.

Doug was on maneuvers and Laurie woke up feeling sick and went to the doctor and bled and telephoned Birdy and cried in Birdy’s lap until Doug arrived still in muddy boots and sweat-stained fatigues and Birdy sat quietly as they grieved and then bucked each other up and listened to the doctor and agreed to Try Again.

And again.

And again.

And with each failure Laurie’s face grew harder and colder and Doug’s jaw more square and his spine more stiff beneath his uniform tunic.

And Birdy grieved for them both, because she remembered how Laurie’s sweetness had blown out the walls of her own safe, square little box of a life, and she could not bear to see Laurie’s eyes grow hard forever.

With an effort, she turned her head toward Laurie. Look at me, Laurie. Look at me.

“I think someone’s awake for real now,” the nurse said.

Laurie put down her cell phone and hitched her chair a little closer. “How are you feeling, Aunt Birdy?”

“Probably won’t be able to talk just yet,” the nurse said. “The intubation and all.”

Love of my life, Birdy tried to say. Child of my heart. But all that came out was a gurgling hiss. She twitched her hand toward Laurie. You opened my soul. You opened the world to me. You gave me wonder. You showed me how to dream. I would give anything to see that wonder in your eyes again. Anything in the world.

Laurie patted Birdy’s hand with long, cool fingers. “What’s the matter, Aunt Birdy?”

One of the machines let out a little ping. “What’s the matter?” the nurse echoed, peering at its screen.

…I would give it all back to you: Santa Claus and dragon riders and griffins and the Easter Bunny and fairies and Peter Pan and centaurs and dancing swans and phoenixes…

Birdy gripped Laurie’s wrist with all her strength. Her heart beat hot and fast. She closed her eyes.

“Aunt Birdy?”

…phoenix…

Blood throbbed in Birdy’s temples. It hissed through her veins, rattled up from fingers and toes, coursed to the furnace of her heart and hesitated there, churning and heaving like a sea of lava. Go, Birdy commanded. Go now. Go fast.

With a single great heave of her body, she sent her own life surging and pounding toward Laurie.

“Her temperature’s spiking…” the nurse cried, and stabbed at a button with a frantic finger.

“Aunt Birdy?” Laurie’s voice scaled up like a child’s. Beneath Birdy’s smoldering fingers Laurie’s pulse suddenly ratcheted, and Birdy sensed the blood, freshly heated, rushing through veins and arteries and capillaries, through flesh and muscle and organs, toward the little life nestled deep in Laurie’s body but already fading, growing cool…

The nurse was at the door, shouting for assistance. Laurie was on her feet. “She’s burning up!” she cried. “Aunt Birdy! Aunt Birdy!”

Gasping, Birdy thrust the heat of her life and her love toward that small weak one, sent the heat of her heart tumbling through Laurie’s body until it collided with the little new life and enveloped it, swaddled it, embraced it. Wake up, Birdy told the little life. Imagine. Hope. Look at the world with your fresh new eyes, and Laurie will see it with you and learn to dream again, just as I dreamed through her.

She opened her eyes. All around her the nurses and doctors were shouting instructions and the machinery was beeping and pinging but still she held onto Laurie’s hand, warm now, warm even as Birdy’s own body grew cold.

Phoenix, she thought. Phoenix, rise up.

And smiling, Birdy breathed her last.

Donna Migliaccio is a professional stage actress with credits that include Broadway, National Tours, and prominent regional theatres. Fiery Seas Publishing began releasing her fantasy series The Gemeta Stone in August 2017, which includes Kinglet, Fiskur, and StoneKing. When not on stage or in front of her computer, she can usually be found curled in a chair with a good book, or tramping around muddy fields and leafy woods with her binoculars, looking for birds.

donnamigliaccio.com

by Ali Jones

You must cross his palm with silver,

or he cannot pass; he cannot explain,

currant eyes peering beneath clouds

of leaf hair, unruly enough to be fashionable

and hide that which should remain secret,

lest it cause distress.

He will take you

by the hand, clothed in the fashion of the day,

bright logos, shoes made for speed,

although he does not need them, bony fingers

imploring, can you spare 60p? Only

an adamant shake of the head if asked why.

You hand it over because you do not know

what else to do, then walk the uncomfortable line

away from him, among billboards, cigarette butts,

receipts, coffee cups, curling in the rain.

He is gone, his measured pace too fast

for the human eye flashes him away,

like a door into something, opening.

Ali Jones is a teacher and writer, living in Oxford, England. She holds an MA in English, focused on poetry in domestic spaces and has written poetry in a variety of forms for many years. She is a mother of three. Her work has appeared in Fire, Poetry Rivals Spoken Word Anthology, Strange Poetry, Ink Sweat and Tears, Snakeskin Poetry, Atrium, Picaroon Poetry, Mother’s Milk Books, The Lake Magazine, Breastfeeding Matters, Breastfeeding Today, and Green Parentmagazine. She writes a regular column for Breastfeeding Matters magazine, and blogs for The Motherload. She was the winner of the Green Parent Writing Prize in 2016, the runner up for the Mother’s Milk prize for prose in 2016, and has also written for The Guardian. Her poetry pamphlets, Heartwood and Omega, are forthcoming with Indigo Dreams press in 2018.

by Nikita Andester

It wasn’t until they moved in together that he discovered the egg. Lee and Tammy each nursed a lukewarm beer as they sorted through boxes. Lee was working through one of Tammy’s boxes, in which she had  lumped things that, to Lee, had no evident connection. So far, he had found a soup ladle, two romance novels, her jewelry shoved into a plastic bag. And this. His hands closed around something dense and round, protected by several thick layers of newspaper and warm under his touch. He swallowed, then paused at the steady warmth radiating under his hands. Removing each sheet of paper like petals or onion skins, he uncovered a sphere. An egg. Roughly the size of a grapefruit, it looked like unpolished stone, its navy shell unyieldingly flat. If someone had asked Lee what he thought it might taste like (and eventually he would lick it during a consuming flood of restlessness and curiosity), he would have told them that it tasted like asphalt after a thunderstorm. The warmth rippled down his hands, starting at his fingertips toward the base of his palms in a patient rhythm.

He looked up at Tammy, who was hoisting books out of a box. “Hey, Tam. What is this?”

Tammy looked over her shoulder and paused before shoving books onto the shelf. “That?” Her voice sounded high, light, pushed out of her diaphragm. “Nothing. It’s gonna hatch one day.” She laughed before grabbing it out of Lee’s hands. “Here, let me take that. I’ll just put it …” She trailed off as she walked with it cradled in her arms to the bedroom.

That night he found himself cross-legged on the bed with Tammy, drinking whiskey and playing cards, a wooden pedestal cradling the egg on the dresser beside them. He asked her again.

“What’s the story with that sphere, really?”

She paused before continuing to shuffle the cards in her hand, reluctant to answer. Her smile was stiff when she said, “Oh, you mean the egg? Come on, Lee, I told you. It’s gonna hatch one day.”

Despite his gentle prying, she refused to answer anything more, peeling his questions off her like stray hairs on a sweater, and pouring him another drink from the bottle nestled between her legs.

That night, Lee dreamt of grey hands pressing the egg toward him, of a voice whispering so close that its warm breath hummed against his ear. Lee tried to understand the whispers, but the voice was too near, too urgent, and the dream gave way to morning, where Lee’s eyes were pinned to the egg. The navy whorled like a Jupiter storm before solidifying back into the unyielding flatness he had believed it to be.

“Tam,” he licked his lips, rubbing her shoulder to wake her.

She turned to him, a sleep-sodden smile pleating her eyes. “Yeah?”

“The egg. I saw it, its colors; they were swirling.”

Tammy’s face collapsed into a mask. “No, they weren’t.”

He propped himself up on one elbow. “They were! Isn’t that wild? I wonder why it did that, I wonder what it…”

“You must have been dreaming, Lee.” There was no whisper of sleep left on her face now. Her statement was an answer, an end, a fact. She swung out of the bed, grabbing the hairbrush from the dresser and attacking her hair in the vanity mirror. “Could you make us some coffee, angel?” Her tone belied the furrow between her brows.

Lee raked his hand over his face and to his neck. “Yeah. Yeah, sure.”

He watched Tammy in the mirror, watching him as he looked once more at the egg before shuffling out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. He knew what he had seen. He hadn’t been dreaming, not then, not after the whisper had coaxed him awake.

In the days that followed, Lee found that he couldn’t lie down in bed without opening his eyes to watch the egg in its hallowed pedestal on the dresser, hoping the colors would swirl again, hoping he could puzzle out why. Each night, the egg forced itself into his dreams, shattering his restfulness into slivers he couldn’t reassemble. Morning after morning, he ground his elbows into the table and pressed his coffee mug against his eye socket, hoping the heat would shock him back to the waking world.

One evening, Lee was rubbing lotion into his feet when Tammy brushed a “Good night” from her mouth to the egg with her fingertips. The navy sang green where her fingers had been. He blinked. The navy—solid, guileless—returned. Tammy and Lee’s eyes locked for a moment before he began rubbing the lotion into his feet with renewed vigor. Tammy knelt in front of him, grabbing his hand and kissing his knuckles.

“I love you, Lee,” she said, studying his knuckles as she rubbed them with her thumb. “Some things are just for me. Some things are just for you. Let this, you know, be for me. Okay?”

Chastened, Lee looked at her ears, her chin, her eyes. “Of course, love. Of course.”

They had sex that night, intimate and rough, clawing. As he came, a flash of grey hands shuddered across his eyes and down his spine. He fell asleep curled into Tammy’s side, praying for a night uninterrupted.

But he dreamt again.

Each day, the chasm between Lee and Tammy broadened. When Tammy asked him to play cards, he lost every round. When they went out for happy hour, he drank in jerking, marionette motions, checking his watch as if he were waiting for someone. At night, the gap between them was palpable, the space between their bodies in bed so vast their pinkies only grazed. If she did reach for him, he held her with the pain of the inarticulate, unable to tell her that the question threatened to swallow him whole.

His growing preoccupation fractured his work ethic. He was unable to read on the bus like he used to. Any progress his clients had been making faltered.

A receptionist knocked on his office door. “Your ten o’clock’s here to see you.”

Lee ran his hand through his hair. “Yeah. Okay. Right. I’ll call for her in just a minute.”

He looked at his desk, dismayed to discover that he had been drawing circles and filling them in with his ballpoint pen, covering papers he needed to file. Had he really spent the past half hour this way? Shoving them into his drawer, he called his client in. As expected, no breakthroughs were made.

On the bus home that afternoon, anger grew hot inside of him. Why should Tammy have a secret? He had shared everything—almost—with her about his life. Why this mystery act around a stupid sphere? What was she keeping from him? What else was she keeping from him? Lee’s anger rolled through him for the next thirty minutes, his teeth grinding tighter and tighter at the thought of her.

She was already home when he got there, humming to herself and hanging a painting of a naked woman. She smiled at him as she stepped back, checking that the painting was straight.

“Why are you hanging that there? Above the couch.” He was still in his shoes, still clenching the strap of his messenger bag in his tight fist.

“What? I guess it just seemed like a good spot. I’m not married to it here though; I could take it down.” She moved to take it from the wall.

“That easy? You don’t care where it goes? You’re really that fickle?”

“The hell are you talking about, Lee? I got off early and thought I’d work on things around here.” She gestured to the boxes on the floor and the paintings stacked against the wall. “What’s up with you?” She walked over to him, taking the bag out of his hand and setting it by the door. “Bad day?”

Lee pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Something like that.”

That night in bed, eyes half-lidded—still watching the egg through the darkness—he wondered if Tammy would notice if he punctured it with just one thin nail on the underside. He traced his memory through the past two weeks of their new life together. He had never seen her lift it from the pedestal. No, he thought, Tammy wouldn’t know if the egg were punctured. It would be so easy for him to…

Tammy shifted in her sleep, turning to face him. Her features softened in the moonlight, her bare shoulder seemed luminescent in the dark. Of course he would never puncture Tammy’s egg. Of course not. He curled against her, kissing her shoulder until she opened her sleeping arms to hold him. He felt sickened and relieved by Tammy’s unquestioning welcome back into the familiar jigsaw puzzle of their sleeping bodies. When he finally drifted into sleep, he remained there through the night, undreaming.

The next morning, he whistled as he tied his shoes on the way out to work, and fell dreamless that night into Tammy’s arms. The week passed quiet, rested. When Lee reflected on his obsession, it felt like a fever dream, seen through a camera lens that wasn’t his own.

Saturday came. Their apartment was mostly unpacked, the painting of the woman had been hung back above the couch, and Tammy and Lee had decided to reward themselves with a brunch that had meandered across three mimosas apiece before ambling to the farmers market, where they were sampling their way from booth to booth. Tammy stopped in front of a vendor selling eggs.

“Oh, Lee, look! They’re so beautiful, let’s get them!” She was pointing to a dozen pale blue eggs.

The vendor looked proud. “Aren’t they beautiful? They’re from Araucana chickens.” She pointed to a glossy photo in a plastic frame beside the eggs. “Real rare.”

Tammy looked at Lee, open and expectant for these eggs that probably tasted like every other egg. Did she not see that they were blue? Lee thought about the egg at home in its pedestal, so navy and large next to these delicate, watery ones in front of him. How did Tammy not see the connection, this slap in his face? Lee smiled back at her, tight. “Yeah, love, let’s get them.”

For dinner, Tammy scrambled them for sandwiches, delighting in the pale shells. “We can plant some seedlings in them.”

Lee nodded and sipped his whiskey in silence.

That night he dreamt. He looked down to see the navy egg nearly black against the grey hands that were pushing it deep into his stomach. He was filled with dark blue light, and began warbling a monochromatic swan song. His song turned into a deep cough that rattled his lungs and tasted of blood. He doubled over with the spasms until he coughed out a single, shining, bloodied nail into his palm.

The next morning, Lee waded through an egg-laden dream fog into the kitchen, kissing Tammy on her temple and helping himself to some coffee. Taking a tentative and scalding sip, he watched Tammy already at the table, blowing on the steam rising from her mug and poring over The New Yorker, which she would be lost in for the next hour. Urgency rose in Lee like vapor, and he understood that this was his moment, that he had to see what was inside that egg, that if he waited any longer, he would explode. He looked at Tammy reading, silent. He felt certain that the hunch of his shoulders, the mug in his hand, even his bedhead, somehow incriminated him, and if Tammy so much as grazed her eyes over him, she would know what he was considering.

Taking one large swallow of still-burning coffee, he ran his hand through her hair, and walked toward the bedroom, grabbing a nail and small hammer from the utility closet before shutting the bedroom door with a click and a sigh.

He eyed the egg, so innocuous on the dresser. The egg eyed him, conspicuous by the door. If Tammy called for him, he thought, he would take it as a sign and never think about the egg again. But Lee didn’t hear any call, and so he closed the space that separated him from the dresser. Tossing the hammer and nail onto the bed, he carefully—reverently—lifted the egg from its pedestal, touching it for the first time since he had unwrapped it several weeks ago. The egg sang green—neon, luminescent green, the brightest green Lee had ever seen!—where his fingertips touched it. Lee sat on the edge of the bed, his eyes never leaving the egg, and cradled it in his lap. He plucked up the nail and hammer. Lee inhaled.

A single tap to lighten the weight of his dreams. A single tap to answer the question he had unearthed. A single tap to shatter the upper corner of the egg, to slake his frenzied curiosity. Squaring his shoulders, opening his eyes, Lee peered through the hole. Inside stood the smallest bird that Lee had ever seen—the size of a flower petal, a bottle cap, Lee’s wide spade thumbnail, but all the same a complete bird—with opaline blue feathers and a grey beak. The bird stood at the bottom of the egg, warbled one drowning note, and collapsed onto the hollowed bottom.

The floorboards groaned. Lee looked up. Tammy stood in the doorway. “See?” Her chin trembled. “It was gonna hatch one day.”

Nikita Andester‘s nonfiction work can be found in Loam Magazine, an environmental activist publication, and The Shapes We Make. Currently a graduate student at the University of Denver for creative writing, she lives in her van around the greater Denver area. When not writing, Nikita can be found covered in glitter, reading fantasy novels, drinking coffee from her French press, or making art from trash.

by F. J. Bergmann

Some dream only of clouds
roiling with trapped light,
not of a paradise on the other side.
The critical part of an experience
is the beginning, which becomes an end
in itself. There’s a certain freedom in indecision,
romance in being thwarted.
Life is an assault on the void, a song
humming at the black limits of space.
A cavalry charge through drifting petals,
not the blood-soaked, splintered grove.
Shopping for a bottle full of good times,
not a damned cage for a dwindling,
less-than-human figure. Lovers
slow-dancing in a field of flowers,
not the rotting pumpkin of a marriage.
Another prince searches rain-emptied streets,
holding the glass slipper before him like a lamp.

F. J. Bergmann edits poetry for Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association (sfpoetry.com) and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com), and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets.

fibitz.com

by Melissa Crandall

After the pandemic had killed everyone but him, Emerson left the city and wandered without purpose, a shambling thing half-dead with grief. He longed to lie down and die as well, but a hot kernel of regret kept him walking; guilt for having failed Imogen.

He slept wherever exhaustion claimed him, sometimes falling to the  ground between one step and the next, and ate little when he remembered to eat at all. Haggard and filthy, he broke into houses and took away whatever he fancied. He lay on dead people’s couches—but never in their beds—and found damnation rather than salvation in his unlikely survival. For all he knew, he was the sole human alive on the planet. Certainly nothing in the wider world suggested otherwise.

One night, he discovered a baby grand piano in the living room of a suburban home. He stared at it for a long time, then slowly approached; hesitant, as if it might bite. He ran his hand along the lid, disturbing months of dust, then sat on the bench, wiped his palms against his pants, and laid his fingertips on the ivory keys. The opening chords of Moonlight Serenade conjured Imogen—the swirl of her favorite purple dress as she swayed to the music, the shift of long dark hair against her back, her smile. He played to the end, and then cried until he vomited.

❦

When at last the thought of another day spent walking became more than he could bear, Emerson settled on a small abandoned zoo as his refuge. The reasons for this were visceral rather than conscious—the place had an air of safety, like a fortress, and Imogen had loved the children’s zoo near their apartment.

He spent several days exploring, salvaging anything of use—tools, medicine, pre-packaged food and plastic bins to store it, a rifle and ammunition, books to pass the time. His footsteps echoed in the empty cavern of the bear grotto, the elephant barn, and the cement building where big cats once prowled in shoulder-rolling silence. Overgrown grass wicked softly against his boots as he wandered the empty paddocks. In the ape house, swings and climbing ropes hung motionless.

There were bones everywhere.

It wasn’t difficult to imagine how events had played out. The pandemic had struck with such unexpected violence and speed that no one had remained to care for the animals. Open cages attested that many of the smaller creatures had been set free, but not the larger beasts or predators. Tooth and claws marks scarred the walls and doors of their enclosures, evidence of their desperate struggle to escape. He tried not to dwell on the gut-twisting hunger and burning thirst they must have suffered; the confusion and terror when, day after day, no one came to tend them.

❦

Spring turned to summer. Emerson kept himself occupied by tidying up the place, moving from office to laboratory, clinic to nursery, anything to keep from thinking too deeply. With a vague sense of winter lurking somewhere in the months ahead, he foraged for wood, chopping and stacking with diligence. Never a muscular man, he grew hard on the strenuous labor and meager diet, portioning his food like a miser dispensing alms. The work toughened him, but its real blessing lay in sleep without dreams, free of the violence of Imogen’s final seizure.

He carried the rifle everywhere, not as protection—what was there to defend against?—but as insurance. If he meant to survive, he’d need to learn to hunt before the easy food ran out, but the prospect of killing filled him with an oily cold he couldn’t shake. If he were honest, he might have acknowledged the weapon also granted him a sense of control. It represented possibilities, should life without Imogen prove too arduous to contemplate.

❦

One sultry night, he woke to sound. Fearful, he lay without moving, listening. This was no fox or raccoon; he’d learned to identify their noises in the night. This was different, something … exotic. Rising, he shoved his feet into boots, took up the gun, and hurried outside.

The zoo was full of animals.

Emerson rubbed his eyes, positive he must be dreaming. He pinched his wrist hard enough to raise a welt, but the creatures remained. Translucent as fog and glowing with moonlight, the phantom beasts tread familiar paths, weaving among their bones, colorless eyes bright with a sense of soul. They saw him, and responded to his presence with strident demands for food and water.

“Go away,” he commanded harshly. “You’re dead.” He fled back to his den and locked the door behind him. Throughout the night the animals trumpeted and howled their misery, making sleep impossible. Only as the eastern sky grew pale with impending dawn did their cries lessen, weakening as each once again relinquished hope and lay down to die. As the last faint wail shredded on the morning breeze, Emerson slept.

The next night, and every night after, bedlam rang in the zoo’s caverns and corridors. The noise settled at the center of Emerson’s skull, denying him rest. He became largely nocturnal, napping only when daylight silenced the cries.

The sensible thing was to leave this place; walk on in any direction until he found a house with a fireplace, a soft couch, and no noise. But the thought left him queasy. He couldn’t abandon the animals as their keepers had done, even if that betrayal had not been intentional, but what could he possibly do for them if he stayed?

❦

Long ago, he’d read somewhere that ghosts were nothing more than troubled spirits unaware of their own death. To lay them to rest, one need only convince them of their demise. Emerson spent an entire night walking the zoo grounds, chanting, “You’re dead. Move on.” The animals watched him with bleak, begging eyes and cried their hunger, growing gaunt as the dark hours waned. The sight of bones pressed in stark relief beneath their hides made him weep with despair, as he’d wept over Imogen.

He staggered to bed in the predawn hours, the sun a faint pearlescent glimmer in the east. Animal moans dwindled in his ears as he plunged into a dream in which he entered a familiar sickroom bearing a bowl of soup on a tray.

“Lunch, dearest,” he announced softly to the woman in the bed.

Imogen’s eyes, enormous in the wasted planes of her face, tracked away from the ceiling to look at him. “Thank you,” she murmured without energy or emotion, drained of everything except disease. Her body, withered and twisted, barely disturbed the covers.

He placed the tray on the bedside table and drew up a chair. Snapping open a napkin with a flourish, he tucked it beneath her chin. “On today’s menu,” he said, adopting the ostentatious tones of a maitre d’, “we have Dr. Emerson’s Super-Duper Beef Barley Soup, guaranteed to cure what ails you.” It was a name he’d made up, same as Grandma Charlotte’s Really Good Grilled Cheese, Uncle Harry’s Penicillin Pumpkin Pie, and half-a-dozen others in an ongoing attempt to stimulate his wife’s flagging appetite and make her smile.

Imogen offered what passed for one these days. “Mmm, sounds delicious.” But when he lifted the spoon to her mouth, she grimaced and turned her face away. “Sorry, darling.” Her eyes begged him to understand, to not see her refusal as rejection of him. “Guess I’m not as hungry as I thought.”

“Perhaps later, then.” Heartbroken and hopeless, Emerson set the bowl aside and folded his hands together between his thighs. He stared at the clock, the lamp, the half-drawn window shade and the bright day beyond without really seeing them. These days, he made it a point not to look closely at things, afraid of what he might find lurking in the shadows, waiting.

Imogen sighed. In that sound was all the misery of the world they shared; the small one confined by these few walls, and the greater one beyond their apartment where countless had died and more lay dying, lips bubbled with pustules, internal organs dissolving into mush.

“Dearest,” he said into the silence, “if you could have anything to eat, anything at all in the whole wide world, what would it be?”

“Strawberry shortcake.” Her reply came with a surprising lack of hesitation, almost as if she’d been expecting the question and held the answer ready. “The kind my grandmother used to make, with sweet biscuits and clouds of whipped cream.” Enthusiasm he hadn’t seen in weeks animated her face, filling her eyes with light. “We picked wild field berries as small as the nail on your pinkie. They smelled like warm wine and tasted of sunshine.”

Emerson touched a finger to his lips in thought, and then made a cup of one palm as if holding a small bowl. He imagined it full to the brim with the sweet goodness she’d described. “You know, darling, it just so happens that your grandmother’s recipe has come down through the ages, written on papyrus and delivered by a wee sparrow this very day for madam’s pleasure.”

He saw at once that she understood what he was doing, that this game of pretend was not only for her amusement, but might also encourage her to take a few useless mouthfuls of soup. Her chin dipped in a barely perceptible nod. She focused on his empty hand. “More whipped cream,” she whispered.

❦

He woke sobbing. “Thank you, darling,” he said, palming tears from his eyes like a child as he sat up. “Oh, thank you!” Pushing to his feet, he scrubbed his hands through his greasy hair. Taking a chocolate bar and a small bag of corn chips from his stores for breakfast, he spent the day riffling through file cabinets for information on what the animals had eaten, scribbling notes on quantity and serving method in a barely-used steno pad. In the feed rooms and prep areas, he located buckets and pans, cleavers and knives, everything necessary for his pantomime.

Physical props were helpful, but Emerson understood that the chief element to success lay not in creation, but in his ability to make the animals believe. For three days, he hardly slept; rehearsing until the motions became fluid and the images fixed in his mind—a barrel of fragrant yellow grain, fronds of leafy green bamboo, cold water gushing from a bone-dry hose.

On the day of his premiere, he went to bed at first light, slept deeply, and woke refreshed. Stripping off his rank clothing for the first time in months, he bathed in a bucket of cold rainwater, making a ceremony of it. He trimmed his hair and beard with surgical scissors, and dressed in a too-big keeper’s uniform taken from a locker.

He emerged from his den as the first sounds from the rousing animals reached him like the opening chords of an overture. Pushing a variety of tools in a wheelbarrow, he went first to the tiger because its cries were the most strident and pathetic. Beneath the animal’s intent, colorless gaze, he brought out a cleaver, hacked at an invisible joint of horsemeat, and tossed a chunk past the bars. The cat stared at him and cried, seeing nothing. Emerson swore and clenched his eyes tight, drawing up the images he’d practiced so assiduously. The cleaver’s sharp edge caught the moonlight as he raised it high, paused, and brought it slashing down. It bit into flesh—he felt it!—and severed the haunch at the joint, revealing gristle and a bright circle of bone surrounding the marrow.

Grasping the meat in both hands, he swung and launched, putting his shoulders into the effort. The tiger bounded after the rolling lump of meat like a kitten pursuing a toy and fell on it in a frenzy of hunger. Elated, Emerson turned on the empty hose, filled the drinking bowl with water that existed only in his mind, and moved to the next enclosure.

Hours later, as the sun stroked its first pale fingers of light across the ground, he watched the animals fade one by one. Wishing them well, confident that their spirits had been laid to rest, he barely made it to bed before falling unconscious.

Their cries woke him at sunset.

Emerson sat up, bewildered and disappointed. He’d seen to their needs and watched them consume their ghostly meals with vigor, yet they remained. What had he done wrong?

There was no time to ponder the question; animals were waiting to be fed. The dispensing of grain, meat, hay—like a sacrament to the sinner’s soul—now bound him to the beasts, made him theirs. So he rose, splashed water on his face, and went to work.

His chores became first routine, and then habit, as weeks passed and he grew more adept. Like any muscle, his imagination strengthened with use. In his care, the animals began to flesh out again, pale hides shining with robust health. Their panic at being abandoned waned, and they began to greet him as well as the bounty he provided. The tiger—Joe, according to its file, a stupid moniker for such a magnificent beast—rubbed its chin against the bars at his approach. One night a chimp—Bella—caught his sleeve as he passed her a banana. She pressed the back of her hand against his and drew him into a brief embrace as Emerson wept.

❦

The pythons were the first to vanish. He arrived at the reptile house with his ephemeral dead chickens to find nothing in the glass-fronted enclosure except old bones and desiccated skin. Rather than being elated by their departure—here was proof that his idea did work!—he felt grief at the loss. But perhaps that was right and proper. Now that they were truly gone, their excitable ghosts laid to rest, sorrow was the next logical step.

A few nights later, the zebra was absent, and then the gazelle. After that, the process sped up, taking at least one species a night, sometimes more. He watched Bella fade before his eyes, and hurried to unfasten and swing wide the cage door before she departed entirely. He did the same with Joe. The big cat strolled through the open doorway like a king, paused to rub its head against Emerson’s thigh, and evaporated into moonlight.

The Asian elephants—Sundar and Thoda—remained, standing together at the cage bars, rocking slightly on massive feet, trunks coiling ghostly fodder into their mouths. “What are you waiting for?” he asked. “All the others have gone.” They met his gaze with placid, enigmatic eyes and flicked their ears in response.

Because they were the last, he spent most of his time in their company—standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the moonlight, or sitting on the floor with his back against the stout pillar of a leg as the first chill of autumn crept from the cement. By day, he pored over every file in the elephant keeper’s office, seeking to better understand the animals. As incentive to leave, he propped open their cage door. They moved through it willingly, and often followed him on strolls about the grounds, but seemed content to remain in his company.

Until one evening.

He was leaving the cage, having laid out a small mountain of food in front of each elephant, when Thoda suddenly abandoned her meal, pushed rudely past him, grabbed the cage door with her trunk, and slammed it closed in his face. Instinctively, he cringed back and quickly slid through the man-width space between the bars as if that might make a difference. She met his gaze with intensity never before displayed, then eased open the door and slammed it again.

“All right!” he said loudly over the clangor as she repeated the motion a third time. “You have my attention. What is it?”

Sundar moved up beside her and the two elephant cows looked down at him. To Emerson, small in their presence, it felt like being regarded by the eye of a god. From his reading, he’d learned that elephants were widely regarded as a “keystone species,” one capable of modifying its habitat to the benefit of others. He knew also they existed within a web of family experience that stretched both backward and forward through time, using infrasound broadcast in the bone and through the ground across countless miles to bridge the distance between herds. In this way, each elephant knew the location of every other.

Emerson put a hand to his mouth, breathless with sudden understanding. If this zoo could hold the spirits of the animals that died here, then so could every other. How many shades haunted those places, bound by starvation, unable to move on? How many needed him to set them free?

The elephants dogged him with long-legged strides as he ran to the office. They waited patiently outside as he tore through every file, searching for something he knew he’d seen, but could not remember where. Finally, he found the booklet containing a list of every zoo in America. Maybe not the small road-side attractions, the ones he now knew were called “mud shows,” but he’d find them as best he could, and the elephants would help because elephants know.

Three days later, on an evening whose sky bled with an extraordinary sunset, Emerson shouldered the rifle and a heavy pack and stepped through the zoo’s front gate. Heart beating strongly in his chest, he set his feet on the road south.

And the elephants walked with him.

Melissa Crandall writes fantasy, dark fiction, and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Tricks and Treats: A Collection of Spooky Stories by Connecticut Authors, Allegory online magazine, and Chicken Soup for the Soul. She is the author of three science fiction media tie-in novels. A nonfiction book, The Man Who Loved Elephants is currently under consideration. She lives in Connecticut, where she spends her free time cooking, gardening, and beating her husband at Scrabble.

www.melissacrandall.com

by S. L. Scott

I see her each day: the woman with the feather in her hair. On my way to work in the morning, I catch a glimpse of her. A black trench coat is always hugged tightly around her, each strap and buckle drawing the eyes down her figure, which shifts like smoke as she moves. Auburn curls collect at her neck like flames fluttering away in the wind, and tucked  amidst them is the feather. Streaks of orange and yellow blended into the bright red; a phoenix’s feather plucked from the bird right before it burst into fiery oblivion to decorate the fire of her hair.

Some days I see her strolling slowly through the crowd that hurried past her as if the wonder of her could be missed so easily. They didn’t pay attention to the way she walked close to the buildings, peeking into lobbies and windows as she passed them. I imagine she’s wealthy. She holds herself with such grace and poise, she couldn’t be a trust-fund baby, spoiled and obnoxious. A young widow, perhaps, wandering the route she took with her late husband every morning. Each day she would look in at the building he worked and trace the path he took across the clean tile floors to the elevator where he would disappear behind closing doors. His smile would be the last thing she saw. Now she waits a moment, wanting to see his face again, but finds only her own reflected back in the polished glass.

Other days I barely catch sight of the feather trapped in the hair streaming behind her as she leads the rushing horde down the street. On those days she’s a leader, a changer—a woman of power determined to make the world better. She has so much to do; she hurries to her office where a small throng of doe-eyed volunteers work late into the night. Her voice would be strong and certain, inspiring those beneath her to continue the fight. Or maybe she is running off to stand at the forefront of a protest, that red feather a rallying sign of defiance against those who would demean or oppress. She would stand there calling out their crimes until the greedy and powerful would strike out with the law and then she’d sit in the center of a crowded cell in silence. Her serenity would give the others strength to weather the storm until morning.

Once I had to go to the regional office and saw her on the metro. The car was filled by the time she walked in, me in a dirty seat a few feet away. Without complaint or searching eyes, she raised a hand to the center rail and waited. Despite the cramped quarters, no one stood near her, as if they, like I, knew she was someone more than she seemed. An actress or singer, who still enjoyed the simple pleasures of a normal life. She would soon walk into a marble-floored building and a half dozen people would swarm around to attend to her every whim before she even made it to the top floor for her meeting. But for now she was ordinary, riding the metro with nothing but a bright feather to betray her true identity. I almost stood to offer her my seat, but to speak to her would break the spell she cast on me each morning.

One morning, I left early; I had a long day ahead of me and did not expect to find her on the way, but there she was in a place I’d never seen before. A low fog hid most everyone from nosy eyes, but the red feather stuck out like a knife cutting through the distraction. She sat at a small, white table by herself. There, with a book in her hand, the world stopped existing. The bustle of walking feet, the chatter of morning phone calls, it all faded away from her. She sipped her coffee and turned a page. She was a businesswoman, hounded every day by a thousand different people with a thousand different priorities, but before she entered that world of conference calls and legal speak, she took a moment for herself. No calls, no voices, no demands—just a drink and a fantasy world in broken binding.

Sometimes I wonder which woman is true: the widow, the protester, the actress, or the business woman. Or is it none of them? Is there another woman hidden behind the feather more amazing than anything I could imagine? Did I really want to know if there was?

I don’t know why she struck me so profoundly that day. Perhaps she didn’t leave my mind, because this time I’d envisioned her close to my own world. I sat in the dull conference room, picking at the cracked sugar coating of my yeast donut worried that the woman with the feather in her hair would walk through the glass door and introduce herself. The magic would be gone and she would become real. She would be a name with a job that I would never be able to forget the next morning when I saw the red feather floating amidst her curls.

I was relieved when she didn’t show. Chuckling to myself, I brushed off the trepidation, only for it to return with each woman’s voice speaking through the phone. Thoughts crawled in like termites burrowing deep into my bones until I feared every stranger would be her. But it never was, and my colleagues jeered my nervous spirit.

At the end of the day, my supervisor leaned against my office door like a fat cat on a couch and invited us all to dinner in thanks for the early start. I found myself searching for red among a sea of dull black and brown coats huddled in motion. Not that she was there. Relieved, or maybe disappointed, I followed them to a small, brick building I didn’t know existed. It wasn’t where we normally went. The tablecloths were clean, but torn and frayed at the edges and displayed a myriad of over-patterned primary colors that assaulted the eyes as much as the taste. A haze of smoke threatened to smother us as the host snaked his way through chairs too close together to lead us to our table.

Ten minutes passed before a tired woman with a notepad finally approached us. Her hair hung in limp strands around what once might have been a controlled bun at the nape of her neck. Circles darkened puffy eyes that struggled to focus even as she rubbed the exhaustion from them. Her white shirt hung loose over a pair of mom jeans stained with ketchup and a green substance I couldn’t identify. The only thing that remained of this worn-out woman’s energy was a smile that didn’t quite do the job.

“Sorry for your wait; we’re a bit busy today. I’m Julie. I’ll be your waitress. What can I get you?”

Once she’d taken our order and left again, my colleague rolled his eyes. He’d already determined she’d get no tip from him. I gave her double to make up for it. It wasn’t her fault she was stuck in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant.

The wind had picked up by the time we left, a cold whip that stung my skin through the cotton pants. I turned to speak with my companion and over his shoulder I saw the overworked waitress, hair still amiss and a black trench coat slung over one arm as she pocketed her meager tips away in her purse. I don’t know what kept my gaze, but the drone of my friends soon fell away. She pulled on her coat to bar the bitter chill and wrapped it tight enough to reveal a figure lost in her bulky uniform. As the stiff collar turned up, the tangled strands of hair at her neck gathered into a wistful dance behind her that drew me in. A familiarity settled like the glimpse of a long forgotten dream.

From her pocket she pulled a red feather. It sat in her hand like a single stroke of lipstick: striking, bold, but incomplete. Julie placed it in her hair, turning what was once a mess into the wings of a phoenix. She turned and in her playful gaze we shared a secret no one else understood. She was no longer Julie the waitress, an overworked, stressed-out person of the world. This was the woman with the feather in her hair, and, as she disappeared into the ignorant crowd, she could be anything.

S. L. Scott has a Master’s degree in Professional Writing and Publishing. She placed Honorable Mention in the 2012 Tuscany Prize for Catholic Fiction for her short story “The Morning Star,” which appeared in Eyes that Pour Forth and Other Stories, and received an Honorable Mention in the Writers of the Future 2014 First Quarter. She has been published in Bewildering Stories magazine, The Rogue’s Galleryanthology, and was editor of Helix: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Research in 2013 and 2014. Currently, she writes about the craft of world-building in her blog, Woman in the Red Room.

womanintheredroom.wordpress.com

by Marjorie Jensen

inspired by the Joshua Barnhart song at the Presidio Yacht Club

Inside, green lights
float over us—
your strings
my hands
her shoulders
her feet—
spin notes over skin,
through my hair.

Outside, bridge lights
traveled over water—
over boats
over her ocean-soaked feet—
and in through the window
to meet the green-lit notes
to join us on the dance floor.

Waves reflect the bridge lights
and we try to hold
the green-lit notes
in our bodies
like that watery embrace,
to reflect moon-dreamt rhythms
back to the stage.

Marjorie Jensen is an Oakland-based writer, educator, bibliophile, dancer, and witch. She was the editor of Arcana: the Tarot Poetry Anthology, and taught tarot writing workshops at U.C. Berkeley and The Liminal Center. Marjorie studied intersections of magic and writing at Mills College as part of her M.F.A. program, and she currently reviews occult books and tarot decks for Spiral Nature Magazine.

tarotpoetry.wordpress.com

by Dani Clark

The pre-dawn darkness outside his bedroom window waned and distracted Nathaniel from his book. Wind stirred the maple trees outside. The tree leaves curled like rippling water and the branches reminded him of happy girls, dancing. The changing leaves had already become orange and red, and he thought of highlights in auburn hair.

Nathaniel shifted, bones in his back cracked, and he looked back down at the book. In the sonnet a beauty’s fairness faded. Nathaniel flipped through the book, halting at a sprig of wilted baby’s breath pressed into a page.

The horizon lit up slowly and Nathaniel smiled. The baby’s breath again, slipped into a heavy volume. Autumn did this each time he’d given her a bouquet, and here their relationship was preserved: tucked between the pages of classic volumes. Sometimes he’d find sprays of fluffed ageratum heads amidst passages of Marquis de Sade’s Justine, modest twists of monochromatic gardenia petals flushed the pages of Dickinson, and snaps of faded clover nestled in the stanzas of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Someone stomped past Nathaniel’s room and the metronome on his desk ticked awake under its own volition, pacing time between turned pages.

His calf muscles clenched when he got up from the bed and paced himself to the writing desk. He stopped to look out the window again and coughed, his phlegmy throat bellowing. The window encompassed an entire wall in his bedroom. The view clouded his brain with majesty. Outside a Persian cat crunched through a pile of veiny leaves. The feline skidded in the mulch.

A stand by the window held a pot of roses. Nathaniel tried to remember if they’d been there the night before. The petals crinkled with dryness, but their scent was sweet and musty.

He stroked a petal. The flowers retained their silkiness though they were deflated with dryness. Nathaniel brushed the stamen aside and began to rub the pistil’s stigma. It parted under his fingers like smiling labia, and he stroked the ovary underneath. He rubbed the flower as though conducting an experiment. The ovary gave no resistance. The rose quivered at his aggressive touch. It began to come apart, petals falling to the floor, stamen and pistil ripped and dry.

Nathaniel studied the petals scattered on the floor and resumed his way to the desk. His fountain pen squirted blue-black ink against the stationery, and he wrote:

Autumn,

Your lack of response testifies that I’ve acted unjustly toward you? I sit here every day, thinking about you when you don’t even care enough to correspond with me.

Don’t you know how much I miss you? Don’t you remember the wild bouquets I brought you? Your favorite pair of dancing shoes? It is a miscarriage of justice that I’m reminded of these things every time I read poetry or come across dead flowers.

It’s been so long since I’ve seen you but I remember the way your hair used to curl up after you took a shower. Those overripe strawberry strands stuck in the tines of your hairbrush and I’d stand there picking at it for you, in a steamy bathroom, prying your hair loose while you towel-dried and put cold cream under your eyes.

Your skin always flushed in that heated room. Your pretty nose with all those tiny pores, like the skin of an orange, practically escapes me now. You’ve been so selfish and elusive.

But, and this is where I sigh, sometimes I think it’s me who is overly sensitive.

You probably have adequate reasons for staying away.

My truth is that I know I was wrong. No one has ever wronged you as much as I did. I’m sure my worry over your silence is for nothing? You always let me make amends, and never stayed away for very long. Please join me for dinner this evening. You know where I reside if you’ve been getting my letters, even if I cannot call it home without you here.

Love to you,

Nathaniel

Nathaniel folded the paper and slid it into a lilac-scented envelope. He inscribed Autumn across the face and tried to remember the street number that should come next, but couldn’t recall her address. It had been right there, in his brain. Only a few left turns and one roundabout from the avenue where he stored the memory of her russet hair. The place he’d indexed for later use.

“You old, haunted thing,” he uttered when the boxy metronome beside the ink well ticked again.

A woman in blue medical scrubs came to the door of his room, her brunette ponytail bouncing. “You need help calling the elevator, Mr. Rendeaux?”

When she said his name Nathaniel remembered her, annunciation too fast, gibberish to elderly ears. “Rendeaux, not Rando! I tell you every time, don’t you remember? Do you remember Autumn’s address?”

The laugh lines around the woman’s mouth drained and Nathaniel remembered her name: Pia—sometimes a patron saint of compassion. She met him there every morning. With tender lines constricted around her eyes and a sideways twist of the lips. Then he remembered where he was. And he remembered about Autumn; she’d gone.

“Autumn isn’t around anymore, ay?”

“She’s not, Mr. Rendeaux,” again with the lazy pronouncement. She lifted a cellular phone from the pocket in her scrubs after it lit up through the fabric. Her eyes dawdled over the screen before she slid the phone back and away.

“I see.” Nathaniel rested a hand on his walker. “The flowers in my room have died. I’d like to bring new ones in. Something lovely and alive.”

“Oh? What kind of flowers do you want?” Pia held the door while Nathaniel lumbered past her into the hallway.

“Anything with color. Dark colors; red, blue. Bouquets with baby’s breath.”

“Sounds beautiful.” Pia ignored her phone as it glowed in her pocket again. “Would you like to go for a walk in the arboretum this morning? The flowers and leaves are turning. They’re most beautiful this time of year. Their colors fade, they seem lusterless, but really they’re just waiting. Quiet and ready to go.”

“You young people think everything is waiting to die quietly, don’t you? I thought that too until I learned nothing is ever that quiet by design,.” Nathaniel placed a hand on his walker. “Now there’s a raucous! Waiting until the situation is just right. Not going quietly the way nature wanted it!”

Pia shifted her weight and Nathaniel tossed his hand in the air.

“I’ll go through the arboretum anyway. I need to drop this in the mailbox,” he lifted the envelope, crisp and new between dilapidated fingers. “I haven’t heard from Autumn in quite some time.”

Pia’s phone lit again, this time buzzing too. She let out a long, fluid breath. “Of course. We can do that.”

❦

Outside, old people were led around like circus bears on leashes. Pia had Nathaniel stop and talk to every person they encountered.

“Mr. Rendeaux, have you met Madge?” Pia held Nathaniel’s arm as he tried to hobble past. “She’s a new resident here. Her daughter just gave birth to quadruplets. When Madge was younger, she had quadruplets too! Maybe you’ll get along better with Madge than you did with…” Pia’s phone rang and she stepped aside to whisper-shout into it.

Nathaniel and Madge faced each other like leaning towers with crumbling foundations.

“Quadruplets, huh?” Nathaniel watched leaves swirl in the air between two trees in the distance. The leaves whirred away from one tree, slantwise, as though gracefully offering a hand to the other. “Those must’ve been hard to push out.”

“It could have gotten difficult,” Madge’s hair stirred as the breeze picked up. The leaves circled behind them in a drowsy whirlwind. “Goodness is I have these birthing hips.”

Nathaniel thought of a potato sack pulled thin when he looked at Madge’s skin. Her hair, fine and stringy, shimmered the way silver coins do in sunlight. He wanted to sniff it for copper scent. By the texture of her thinning hair he supposed she’d been a brunette before her hair lost color.

“Do you have children?” She asked him.

“My wife and I almost adopted a little girl once, when we lived overseas. Didn’t work out though.” He muttered aloud the words, mulling the question like a deciding juror in a deadlock. “My wife.”

“Does she live here with you?” Madge continued the conversation gladly. Her teeth clicked past her lips when she talked. “I’ve only just gotten here. My son died and I’d lived with him ever since my husband passed away. My daughter is too busy with all those babies.”

“My wife never did move here, did she?” Then he remembered and turned to Pia, “why’d you bring me here to walk around with all these mossbacks?”

Pia still hush-argued into her phone.

“If Autumn is going to receive my invitation to dinner in time to get here I need to get this in the post. I haven’t seen her in a while!”

Pia raised her palm. He’d seen the palm before. It meant stalling attention.

“Well don’t let me and all these other old folks tether you to your job. You just stay there on the phone all day. I’m only your problem until you clock out.”

Pia hung up and turned to Nathaniel. “The mailbox is why we came this way, Mr. Rando. The mail hasn’t gone out yet.” Pia’s phone vibrated, the hum loud enough to hear, but she let it stay in her pocket. “What did you think of Madge? Did you hit it off?”

Pia and Nathaniel had already passed through the arboretum courtyard three times, looping the yard like skydivers caught in an updraft. All around the old folk coiled the terrace the way satellites revolve around a sun, while attendants fussed around them as possessively as the moon’s tug on Earth.

“Here’s the mailbox. Let’s not pass it this time. Then we’ll head in for brunch. How does that sound?”

“I’ve not worked up an appetite!” Nathaniel wrenched his walker from under Pia’s guiding hand and crouched over the box, moving slowly and stopping to cough into his shoulder. He kissed the envelope before letting it fall through the open slot.

❦

For lunch he faced the window, from a long cafeteria table occupied only by him. He’d brought stationery from his room in case inspiration struck him. Leaves breezed along the ground outside, and he pulled his sweater more snugly around himself before he took up his pen:

Autumn,

I remember when the weather turned for us 45 years ago. Thunder and rain the day we’d planned to drink cherry juice and eat finger sandwiches between salsa dances in the courtyard, do you remember?

You woke up early to pluck the pits out of the cherries. You sat at the dinette, leaning right against the window. The wind and rain rushed at you from the other side, tormenting, but you were completely untouchable. You just pitted those cherries with a walnut pick as though the rain didn’t harass you on the other side of that glass. You ignored it the way a stubborn cat ignores mid-day traffic.

I leaned over you to look out the window, grumbling at the idea of a day spent indoors with records and board games. You licked the cherry juice dripping along the side of your hand and said, “We have plans today. This won’t last.”

You kept squeezing nectar from those ruby fruits and the rain got lighter, clouds started shifting. Before mid-day we were on our way, just as planned. Oil in the streets reflected rainbows and the evergreen spikes on the pine trees were damp, but we went along, doing everything we’d intended.”

“What are you writing? Can’t you get peace from your pen and paper for one brunch?” Nathaniel peered up from his letter and saw Beth, the lady with dyed-hair from the room down the hall, across the table. He hadn’t heard her rumble over on her motor scooter.

“Beth,” Pia rushed to their table, “Remember that you aren’t supposed to sit with Nathaniel at lunch anymore. Since he got here first you need to find another place.”

“Oh, well look Nathaniel,” Beth pointed her scooter toward another table, “You have your own personal attendant now to help you walk with that scooter and shoo away anyone who tries to talk to your high and mighty self.”

“Beth!” Nathaniel shouted as she sped away on her motorized scooter, “You need that seat to take you everywhere because you’re such a fat lady. At least my aide offers me conversation.” Nathaniel looked up toward Pia, who crossed her arms in front of her, “When Beth sits around the house, she really sits around the house, doesn’t she?”

“Nathaniel, you’re the one who can’t get along. Remember what your daughter said the last time she visited here.”

Nathaniel waved her away and picked up his pen again,

Things turned our way all the time, do you remember? Not just the weather. Everything between us was so copacetic, and I know we have a fair shot at getting it back now, regardless of years that’ve passed.

But say, I should cut to it. No use skirting around what I should be diving into. This thing has been so long between us that I will not refrain or hold back.

I have to let you know that I’m sorry. Yes, I’m apologizing. I still have a lot of hope for the two of us, even though we’re both so old. I love you, even though we haven’t seen each other in so long.

“Honey, I’d like to sit right over there, with Nathaniel,” he heard a demure voice say. Madge slid onto the bench across from him, aided by her attendant who walked away after she was seated. He would have rather been alone, but wouldn’t mind watching her hair shine in the daylight. It sparked like threads inside a cornhusk when the sun hit it, filtered through the window. She looked at him and proclaimed, “The days are growing shorter.”

“So’s my patience,” he said and laughed.

Beth came back around and situated herself close to Madge at the edge of the table. The two women gabbed together. Nathaniel looked around for Pia, but couldn’t catch her attention from where she lounged in an overstuffed chair by the chess table and spoke into her phone. Madge broke from her conversation with Beth every so often to bat lash-less hazel eyes at Nathaniel.

Nathaniel hadn’t always disliked Beth. She was large and beautiful. A sheen of perspiration glistened on her skin. He thought of healthy auras and angel’s haloes as he looked at her. The inauthentic hair color she’d gone with did not speak to his taste though. It was a look on a lot of women who wanted to hide grays. When tired of looking at Beth his gaze alit on Madge’s clear locks again.

A tray with plates and bowls of food was put in front of him. He batted away the young worker’s hand, pinching the limb that barred him from mealtime.

“I want mayo for my jello, you!” He shouted as the server slumped off with shrugging shoulders.

“Well someone’s a grouchy Gus today.” Madge pushed a mouthful of Caesar salad onto her fork.

“I wouldn’t be so gruff if they remembered I always like mayonnaise to accompany my jello. I ask for it the same way every single day, but they never do it right.”

“Well don’t take your mood out on the ladies at this table,” warned Bad Dye Job Beth, “us ladies wanna eat our pa-tay-tas in peace.”

“You go sit somewhere else and tell them on your way out to get you an appointment at the beauty school! Couldn’t you just age gracefully without that who-knows-what in your hair? And I was here at this table first.”

“We are stayin’ put, let me tell you!” Beth’s corpulent finger pointed at Nathaniel, “and who wants to put mayo-nnaise on their jella, anyhow?”

“Who exactly wants to dye their hair blue either?” Nathaniel left the table, gliding along the linoleum floor with his walker in front of him. He tried to remember how to get to his room.

He passed Pia, still seated in a chair next to the chess table, and heard her laughing. Another attendant sat in a chair beside her and their voices sounded happy and unrestrained.

“Autumn, is that you? You received my invitation just in time! The main course was served minutes ago. The victuals today are quite pleasant.”

Two women were dressed in blue medical scrubs. One of them had brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. Nathaniel saw her face in profile, a jagged chin and mouth hemmed in with little lines. She wasn’t Autumn.

“Finish your lunch already, Mr. Rando?”

“It’s Rendeaux. I believe the meat here is rancid and the service is terrible. I’m going to my room.” Nathaniel headed back toward the hallway.

“You’re going without me?” Pia called after him.

Nathaniel continued to walk, but was halted by an involuntary tickle in his sides. He tried to swallow the cough, but his body shook and the sound that escaped from him was between a throat clearing and gasp for air.

“We need to go to the nurse’s station sometime today so she can listen to your lungs,” Pia turned to the other attendant again while Nathaniel shuffled away.

Nathaniel heard the women talk after he’d left the cafeteria. He pressed the elevator’s call button, but still heard them chat from the hallway.

“What did he call you?” the other nurse asked.

“Autumn, he does that all the time.”

“Who’s Autumn? Is that the lady who visits him?”

“No, it’s his daughter who visits, and pays the stipend for a personal attendant. Autumn is the one who got away, I think.”

“Maybe Autumn was his wife? Didn’t you say once he’s a widower?”

“I don’t think so. I think the wife’s name was Pat, but I could be wrong.”

The other attendant was silent.

“When he came here all he brought were books. He really likes flowers though. He always asks me to bring him more. His daughter only orders roses, even though he seems to want all kinds.”

Nathaniel stepped into the elevator and watched the doors slide closed. Pia’s voice grated on him. He felt his body temperature rise with stress.

He walked down the second floor hallway, and stopped when he heard the steady metronome as he almost passed his room.

The roses had been taken away, but a few wilted petals still lay forgotten on the floor. He opened the closet door: a pair of pajamas, four pairs of slippers, faded t-shirts, the protuberant corners of a small box on a shelf above the hangers. Nathaniel reached for the box, ignoring the twinge in his calf muscles as he stretched.

He took the box to his desk. It was unremarkable; a box meant to hold shoes, plain, undecorated.

Petals and branches spilled out when he opened the lid. Some flowers were still thorny and waxen. Toward the bottom of the box lay twigs brittle with age, browned rose heads, and petals reduced to fragments and dust.

“Autumn,” he muttered as he began to unpack and examine each twig.

❦

Night had fallen when he crammed the last thorny branch back into the box.

Beth whirred into his bedroom on her scooter, “Will you turn that rackety thing off? I have been trying to dry my new nail polish, but can hear it from all the way down the hall!” She pointed her electric blue finger at Nathaniel’s ticking metronome.

“You’re spying on my room?! No one can hear that small of a tick from that far away, and I did not tell you that you could ride that thing into this room!” Nathaniel pointed back at Beth. He tried to speak again, but white and red spots floating in his vision. He panted, his finger still raised toward Beth, whose eyebrows disappeared beneath her side-swept blue bangs in a look of surprise.

Pia came into the room. “Beth, you know you should not be in here!”

“I think he may have lost his balance,” Beth said as she reversed her scooter around Pia and out the door.

“Are you okay? Lie down in the bed, will you? The nurse is off-duty until tomorrow, but she’ll come to your room first thing tomorrow.”

“I will not get into bed! I have told you that the door to my room in this establishment needs a lock.” Nathaniel placed two steadying hands on his desk.

“You’re right, she should not barge in here. There are privacy protocols.” Pia felt Nathaniel’s forehead.

“If you agree with me, then we’re half-way there.” Nathaniel swiped her hand away.

“I don’t like how warm your forehead is. If you don’t feel well you should turn in.” Pia walked toward the door. “It’s bedtime soon anyway.”

Nathaniel shooed her away once, then ignored her an hour later when she came back to check on him. Other residents prepared for bed, banned from the commons rooms after finishing a last game of checkers and warming their bedtime cups of cocoa.

Nathaniel sat at his desk, quiet and still, with the closed box of wilted flowers on his lap. He pulled the letter he’d started that day at lunch out of his pocket, steadied his hand, and continued with a well-inked fountain pen:

The real issue here is: I have no reasons anymore to hold grudges, or pretend like the whole thing was you and me together, or just you altogether, when the whole thing was really all me, alone. I should have said this all that time ago, but I was selfish.

When I look closely I believe I was very much afraid of what we had. You and I were a collage of the most complimentary things possible, but I had to remove myself to understand that. The way our lives were together, comfortable and thriving. We still had the passion, but it surfaced differently after some years, and I thought that change hurt us.

All our years we had a tacit understanding of how we worked in our relationship together and separate from one another. Realistically two people don’t crash into each other, not in our world, and become so perfectly agreeable all at once. We hit it off understanding that we came together as individuals. Forward thinking for the times, no? Or maybe we were just another self-satisfying cliché?

I’m trying to say that I remember us. Our understanding about life and how it wasn’t quite that fairytale everyone else prepared for, but there was still something surreal and otherworldly going on when we were together. We were so connected and in touch with each other. I’ll admit I started to believe all that who-ya about soul mates and people being meant for each other, even though I’ve always been practical when it comes to that metaphysical la-lee-la.

I never got tired of coming home to you. We went on so blissfully for years. We were happy because we never forgot who we were individually, and so we stayed good for each other and for ourselves.

Do you remember when the shift occurred? I do. It was unfortunate and the single-most deprecatory thing that’s happened in my lifetime. It could have been a specific time period in our relationship: the shift. As though it were an aging process that started under the roots, like a landslide. As if our bond were the waterlogged nutrients built up in the soil, too much for the roots to absorb. Then one day our saturated foundation became so slick with goopy sediment that our roots couldn’t hold anymore and the mud spiraled away off some hill right out from underneath us. Trees tumbling, earth, the whole hillside just kaput!

That’s not what happened at all. There was no slow build up. I remember the exact day the shift happened. I can even narrow it down to an increment of ten or twenty minutes.

It happened early one day, I woke up and lit my morning cigarette. I was more achy than usual because the weather turned cold. You were in your studio room dancing out a new tap number. You had soft music going, but those tap shoes rapped on the floor evenly. The sound of it grated against my nerves. Each tap caused a ribbon of pain to announce itself as a migraine and run across my eyes from one temple to the other. I looked in the bathroom mirror, my jaws were clenched, the teeth shuddered in my mouth, clicking to the beat of those damned heels on the wood floor. It made me angry. I’m ashamed now of my anger. The steadiness of your dance, our comfortable relationship, my reflection, it all angered me.

My face looked jowly. I had grey patches all over my skin. Among the endless dance classes we taught together, the Jazzercise, the multi-vitamins and herbal teas, I’d acquired a spare tire! I was ashamed of myself and that’s when I started taking it all out on you.

I drank a bitter cup of coffee in the kitchen and mulled over impending mortality. You came to the kitchen, bribed by the buttery warmth of caffeine and cocoa in the air, and I saw you differently too.

This is where I have to brace myself to tell the absolute truth: You looked older, but you were still so beautiful. We’d both aged, but you looked less exhausted than I. There was so much more zeal in your step. You smiled, the lines around your mouth looked eloquent rather than clenched and old.

I can only fathom my own jealousy caused what came next.

You leaned over me to grab a cup, and put your hand on my stomach. Right on the fatty place I’d just noticed in the mirror, and I was so worried you’d see me the way I’d seen me. Ugly and old. So I moved your hand and grabbed your derriere and said, “Whoa. Something’s growing here!” and jiggled your buns with pinching fingers.

Do you remember that specific occasion? That was the shift. We’d been living together so happily. Didn’t need marriage or families. Weren’t going to give in on our ideals. I didn’t want you to see me, or to leave me. But that was the very instant we both started to pull away.

A rift. A schism. You backed away and your face curled with the look I’ve seen you make after clearing the fridge of decayed tilapia and said, “Excuse you?” But there really was no excuse for me.

Truth was I had no real problem with any part of you. I thought if I started making little remarks, bringing your flaws up every so often, you’d have a moment like the one I had. You’d see yourself in the mirror and turn inward on yourself. Then you wouldn’t notice how ghastly I’d become. Then we’d go back to that understanding we had at the very beginning. We’d be at that same place again, like new.

The problem was that you had never left that page. It was I who’d moved on to these other thoughts, wracked with a lack of confidence and self-judgment.

Now decades have passed, and we haven’t seen each other in so many years. The time lapse doesn’t matter at all though. It didn’t matter in any of the love stories. None of the heroes and heroines we played in our dance theater care about time lapses. My Tristan and your Isolde, our Tita and Pedro, or Scheherazade and her king.

You transformed into something older, but not grotesque. I was the haggard one. The ethereal loveliness radiated throughout you entirely.

Your hair, the auburn pieces, only lost a bit of luster. They weren’t fine and smooth anymore, they started to stem flyaways here and there. Instead of a great wave of silky hair you had frizzier, rougher matted locks. That charming color never faded, not at all. Just the texture changed. Your hair became like tendrils of knotted hemp on your head.

Your skin changed too. It went from feeling soft to feeling the way parchment feels. Dry, wrinkled, thin, a little transparent, marbled with blue veins that cropped up along your limbs. Those veins caused verbal dissonance between you and me, but I thought of graceful moldings like patterns carved by rain streams on tree bark when I saw that color on your skin.

Remember those tiny spider veins you groaned about? Sometimes it was just as bad when you noticed flaws in yourself. Had I simply said what I thought of those tender little lines of mahogany that traced your thighs and calves you wouldn’t have been so ashamed by them. They were like calligraphy marks across your skin, exotic like the rest of your transforming body.

We still managed to have fun. Around that time we danced at the Smithers’ wedding. The pianist kept time, the monotonous stamping pattern of it beating back and forth to our rhythm, but we cut a rug so deep all the other couples watched us. The bride looked at us while we spun on the dance floor. She watched you though. Not envious of you for being with me, but of your twirl, and lift and spark.

I’d say everyone at that reception looked us over with envy. We were happy. Only alone together did my manners change. I’d complain about your cold toes against my legs at night. I’d get grumpy, the old man already, and then you’d humph and roll to your side of the bed.

I never minded any aging on your part, I only pretended to. Not the toes, the wrinkling skin that puckered like lichens hugging a tree, or the short tufts of silvery hairs that spread over your lip and chin the way moss subtly grows over bark. I knew for every enchanting thing that transformed in you, something more awful and wordly happened to my own body.

My slurs wheedled their way in though. You stopped walking around the house cinched in corsets like you did before. No more Anaïs Nin reenactments between us. Your breasts began to sag like round bark knots unerring in devotion to the law of gravity. I caught you secreting them away, pulling at the straps of your brassiere to give them lift.

It hurt me to see you take my words so hard. Usually you sloughed off the words of man like transparent water drops slinking off a reptilian back. You never planned a counter attack to my cruelty because you didn’t have any bit of malice in you. I grew worse in my assaults on my own.

There were tiny surges of invigoration when my words deterred you from seeing the haggard old puss I turned into. You never said a thing when my belly bulged with stress and ulcers. I never knew if you could tell I’d ground my teeth to stubs while I slept, or that my temples always throbbed with migraines. The thing you noticed was my gait, how hard it was for me to keep up with you after a while.

You won’t believe it when you see it, so I’ll prepare you for it: I’m in an old folk’s home! Get your laughs in, because I bet its karma. I bet you’re out there somewhere, graceful and svelte as ever in your old age. You probably wouldn’t even want to see me this way. All hunkered over, leading a walker everywhere. There’s no boyish charm in that.

Please forgive me for that last day together. I don’t know if I can still my hand as I relive this. I still feel terrible. It was those kitten heels. I’m sure you remember. You walked along and those shoes hit the pavement, and the clack they made was so steady.

I could have told you the truth about the thin, lacing migraine that unraveled across my forehead, but instead I laughed at you in those shoes. They looked so blessedly beautiful with your long calves, but I told you they were abominable. I said you were too old to hold the illusion of pulling those shoes off. And you’d had it after that. No more of me for you. It had gotten to be too much. Too adversarial. Too cyclical.

I confess I don’t recall the exact words we flung at each other, but I know they were harsh. They had meaning and resonance too because you were gone after that. That’s the most grotesque transformation that took place. You left.

You know, I tried again after you. After the greatest love of my life I tried again with others. It always came apart the same way though. A loose ball that gently unraveled after months or years of me subtly picking at it. Finally one stayed because her body; her skin and organs and muscle, weren’t made of what normal women were made of. She was made of something tougher and less tender, less mammalian. Her molecules and atoms were less susceptible to heartache and mean words.

She and the others didn’t matter though. I kept badgering, kept stinging, kept ridiculing because I wanted them all to leave. I watched them all go gladly. As soon as another one slinked away it was a chance for me to go ahead and find you. I searched, but I’d only turn up the next one, and the next one, another one who wasn’t you and didn’t lead me to you.

I’ve wanted you back all these years, but by the time I saw it was all me I had no idea where to look. Your family was scattered, and I didn’t think you’d gone to be with any of them anyhow.

There was nothing at all in my marriage. Maybe her hair was similar, it lit the same way yours did when caught in sunlight. But still… It’s been years since even that and it only came so close as an imitation.

She knew about you. Whenever she and I fought she’d tell me she regretted not having someone to hold me up against the way I held you on her. She wished she had someone to think back on, an earlier version of me to compare with. There wasn’t anyone other than me though, and no one failed her the way I did. We lived overseas when my health got bad, and even though she tried so hard to fix me, I just thought about you finding me there, and us reuniting in some fantastical way.

I failed her for you. I’m sure you’ll take me back after you read this letter, because I’m turning a no-bullying leaf. I’m going to deliver it directly with no more procrastination.

I won’t idly place this letter into the mailbox like all its predecessors. I’ll find you, Autumn, and we’ll reconcile in person. Before I hand you this letter I will preface it by telling you how special you are to my memory. And how time has only acted like a marinade to sweeten our love.

Loving you,

Nathaniel Rendeaux

“Once more for luck,” Nathaniel puckered his lips as he bent over the lilac-scented envelope and graced the folded paper with a kiss.

The words he’d purged revitalized him. His calves ached as he slowly jitterbugged across the carpeted floor. Back muscles creaked a warning when he tried to dip to the floor in a swing move known as the death drop, but when he thought of how Autumn would echo the words he’d written for her he felt renewed again.

Nathaniel walked down the airy hallway, shuffling across the linoleum in slippered feet. In the elevator he buttoned his cardigan against the breezy air that swirled as the contraption glided down. On the first floor a draft padded around the building on mystical toes, like androgynous Ariel stirring up a tempest.

The sun still slept. Nathaniel hadn’t realized it was so early. He brushed the chill away with thoughts of warm reconciliatory satisfaction.

The double doors did not yield to his grip, so he scuttled to the mess hall and looked for an unlocked side door. Circles of smoke misted into fog through a cracked window in the cafeteria and he saw a bent figure cloaked behind the curtains.

“Who’s hiding back there?” Nathaniel croaked, the smoke sticking to his old voice.

“It’s just me!” She bellowed as embers fell from a shaking cigarette tip.

“Who’re you again?” Nathaniel moved closer, breath heavier with each step. “Oh, just Madge.”

Madge peered around the curtain; “I come here some mornings to wake up like a normal person, before I was an old fuddy-duddy.” She looked him over with a dull expression, “what’re you up to?”

“I have something to deliver.”

The wrinkles around Madge’s eyes popped as she dragged from the cigarette filter. The curtain dwarfed her, though she seemed sturdy in her petite frame.

“We didn’t know they were so dangerous when we started, did we?” Her peaceful smile didn’t reach the eye wrinkles, “When we learned the truth we were already hooked.”

“I never smoked,” Nathaniel looked at the glow on the tip of Madge’s cigarette. “How old are you anyway? I bet you’re younger than you look. Those things age people. Anyway, I can’t dawdle, today’s a big day. I’d suggest I’m making arrangements to take myself away from here, but I wouldn’t want to rub it in the faces of those who must remain miserable.”

Madge pursed her lips, the smile eking to her eyes finally, “I’m not miserable here. As long as I never have to change another diaper.”

“I hold my pleasure in much higher esteem, I suppose.”

“Beth was right about you, Nathaniel,” Madge paused and put the cigarette to her lips. She pulled and the tip of her cigarette withered, reduced to ash as she inhaled. When she spoke again smoke circled her words. “You aren’t the only one here, everyone is having some sort of hard time. If you were nicer to people you wouldn’t be so lonely. You’d even be helpful.”

Nathaniel walked away, his gait only disturbed by the soft tap of his slippers against the floor.

A doorknob in the kitchen turned under his grasp and he skirted out.

The wind was harsh. The trees swayed. They reminded him of carefree women, dancing with their arms in the air, hair flowing around their bodies.

He hobbled to the bus stop and sat on the bench, hunkered inside his cardigan, curled toes inside his slippers.

Time passed, no bus came. Light came over the horizon slowly. The aroma of coffee and pastries whirled in the air. Two businessmen in suits and a young woman in dirty jeans joined him at the bus stop. The businessmen glared into electronic tablets and cellular phones. The young woman leaned her face into a book beside Nathaniel on the bench.

Demons met his gaze unflinchingly from the cover of the young woman’s book. Her jeans had holey knees. Her viscous hair looked spray painted purple, too light for black, but too dark for red or violet.

Nathaniel looked harder at the girl. She shivered through lace sleeves that covered her arms with tapestries. The colors in the fabric wove into grotesque figures like the characters on her book cover. He leaned in and thin hairs on her arm stirred in the wind. He realized her sleeves were tattoos, not fabric, and tried to focus on her face. His eyes bugged when he saw the metal lynched in her nose, like a shrapnel horseshoe hanging from between her nostrils, held in by steel balls on either side. A pain in his arthritic toes and knuckles shrieked.

“Excuse me,” he waved at the woman, “why’d you go and do that to your face?”

The girl blinked into her book a few times and slumped lower on the bench.

“You just don’t look like the type of girl who’d do that to herself.”

She flicked her eyes upward. The two businessmen shuffled, infallible in dedication to their electronic devices.

“From where I’m sitting you look like you have fishing tackle in your nose.” Nathaniel knocked on his knee with curled fingers and chuckled. “And you could be so pretty, if only you washed that hair out and— well, from a distance you look like you have long nose hairs dangling out. You don’t look like someone who’d let herself go like that though.”

The young woman closed her book and looked over, not directly at Nathaniel, but toward his walker. “It’s there because I want it there.”

Nathaniel laughed, thankful for the interaction, “But what if you want a boyfriend someday? He wouldn’t be happy to see that in your face every time he went to kiss you.”

“I’m married actually,” the young woman said as her bus pulled up to the curb, beeping loudly.

“Really? You’re married?” Nathaniel followed the girl, clamoring along with his walker and rheumy toes in tow.

She wiggled the finger on her left hand and Nathaniel caught the sparkle of a black diamond on her ring finger.

“Well, I’ll be.” Nathaniel gasped as the businessmen scurried around them to get on the bus. “What does your husband say? He has no problem with them even though they’re so unnatural?”

“I’d listen to what my husband thought about it over some gnarly old square who can barely walk or breathe on his own. You have to drag that clunky thing around with you because you’re barely able to stand on your own and you call me unnatural?”

Nathaniel stood still as she entered the bus and its doors slid shut behind her before the bus moved along. He took a few steps back and sat on the bench again, stinging.

Buses came and went in front of him. He couldn’t remember which one to take so he sat on the bench, shivering. Drizzle began to patter on his face and shoulders. People filtered in and around buses that came and went. The drizzle hit harder and turned from sludge to rain. Dense droplets landed on his head as he pouted on the bench.

A breathless woman jogged up to him and said, “Mr. Rando? Mr. Rando, we’ve been looking for you all morning.”

“You have?”

“Well, yes! For hours. Madge said you had something to deliver so we checked the mailbox. We looked in your room, everywhere else inside. A bus driver called and told us an escapee was sitting at the bus stop, watching all the buses pass by.” Pia knelt over, trying to control her panting with hands on her thighs as the rain pelted her scrubs. “And there we were, looking all over for you, inside.”

“Oh yes, I did have a letter to mail. But you see—“ Nathaniel bit back the words and coughed. The cough racked his body and sounded phlegmy, strong as if it were tearing skin from his throat.

“Can you walk? You need to be inside.” Pia leaned toward Nathaniel, “You’ve been out here a long time, just sitting in the rain. Casual as ever when I ran up. Sitting at the bus stop as though you’re waiting for someone to arrive. Everyone indoors is scouring the place, the entire morning routine uprooted for you. I’m going to tell your daughter this happened. Well, can you walk?”

“Of course I can walk! I’ve been walking for years!” Nathaniel stood and crashed back down. Invisible fingers pressed against his spinal cord, and every time they squeezed Nathaniel felt his bladder loosen. He sneezed and ribbons tightened around his head.

Two strong orderlies guided Nathaniel up the walk and back inside. Pia ignored her vibrating phone, shaking like an active grenade in her pocket. As Pia tucked Nathaniel into bed he held her wrist and whispered with a shaky voice, “You know, Autumn would still care about me even though I’m a geezer. She wouldn’t mind it. She’d think it suits me eloquently.”

No matter how they bundled him he couldn’t get warm. His arms tingled. He felt as though his stomach were a plundered stalactite mine, an excavated hole in his icy chest cavity.

Pia called in a doctor. Orderlies and nurses shuffled about the room. Every morning the doctor asked, “How long was he out there? Just outside at that bus stop? With the weather turning?” Then he’d shake his head and say, “well, it doesn’t look good.”

Pillows were fluffed, sheets and elderly hands pressed. Residents slowed their wheelchairs or walkers as they passed Nathaniel’s room, gawking past the open door like rubberneckers at an interstate catastrophe. Sensitive volunteers lingered for extra long visits in Nathaniel’s room, mourning him to his face while they pressed his jelly hands between their meaty ones. Insensitive volunteers read Nathaniel’s charts and eyed his room for valuables and leftover kitsch upon learning his next of kin was out of state.

The doctor made his morning visit on the third day and said, “anytime now.”

Pia shooed everyone from the room and turned her cellular phone completely off. Only she and the doctor hovered over Nathaniel, splayed in his bed, sweaty and tossing in delirious reveries.

Above the bed, Nathaniel saw a light in his eyes like the sun reflecting off the ocean. In his delirious state he didn’t realize the light was just a handheld device the doctor pointed at him, to see if his pupils reacted.

Nathaniel caught a dark silhouette, lit by a bright halo. His groggy eyes peered. “Autumn. You’ve returned just like I imagined.”

Pia stood back, but her outline remained in Nathaniel’s vision.

“I understand why you never wrote back.” Nathaniel swallowed, a dry gulp like cotton raveled on skin. “You’re going to forgive me, aren’t you? I’m so happy you’ve returned.”

Pia looked at the doctor, who stood in the room, dumbly, not moving the light in his hand. “Who’s Autumn?” he asked.

Pia shrugged,

“Of course I’ve forgiven you,” Pia leaned toward Nathaniel, in the light.

Nathaniel placed a shaking hand into her hair. The strands felt like melting glaciers to his dry fingers. “I knew you’d be here for me in the end. I held on for this.”

Pia brushed her hand against Nathaniel’s face. She leaned over the shaking man. Her breathing lips dipped onto his dying mouth and she kissed him.

Nathaniel’s eyes closed and his shivering body stilled. Pia left the bedside. She walked over to the desk and finally dismantled the irascible ticking metronome.

The rustling trees stood still for a moment, then their branches and leaves spirited in the air again like happy girls, dancing.

Dani Clark earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from St. Mary’s College of California in 2011. Her most recent fiction credits include pieces in S/tick Magazine, Literally Stories, Crack the Spine Literary Journal, Slink Chunk Press, and Pure Coincidence Magazine. Dani writes quarterly news articles for San Francisco’s Western Edition newspaper and is also the Director of Volunteer Services for an Oakland-based animal rescue. When not working or writing Dani’s favorite pastimes include snake-wrangling, cultivating kombucha tea, and socializing feral kittens.

www.stmarys-ca.edu/dani-clark-mfa-fiction-11

by Brandon Getz

My father was an avalanche.

People would ask me, How is it that your father is an avalanche?

I would go to the mountain to ask him. I would shout into the hills, and he would crash down the mountainside, tearing old spruces up from their roots. I would be covered in a spray of powder, and his only answer was the sound of his fall.

Each time I went to the mountain, my father was smaller. He uprooted fewer trees. One winter, I went to ask my father how I could be the daughter of an avalanche, and he did not come down at all. The peaks above were all bare stone.

Later, I fell in love. I felt the dizzying heights of the mountaintops, the weight and thunder inside my chest. The fear of being uprooted and lost and consumed. The unending tumble.

I married. I had a son. My son was born a waterfall.

My husband left us. He couldn’t be the father of a waterfall. He didn’t know how to love a geological formation. He’d wanted a son who would be a woodsman or a blacksmith.

People ask me, How is it that your son is a waterfall?

And I tell them he is like my father.

As he plays on the lichen-scabbed rock between the pencil pines, I don’t ask him how or why. I close my eyes. And listen.

Brandon Getz earned an MFA in fiction writing from Eastern Washington University in Spokane, WA. His work has appeared in Versal, Burrow Press Review, The Delmarva Review, and elsewhere. He is currently finishing a serialized adventure novel about a werewolf in space. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA.

www.brandongetz.com

by Jordan Taylor

“Ireland’s Fairy Tours:” The green, Celtic script took up almost half of the guidebook’s page. Droplets of rain plinked onto the page and ran down its silken surface, briefly highlighting letters, words – “A,” “I,”  “hills,” “sky.”

I was lost.

I’d sunk onto a bench outside of the nearest pub and opened the guidebook at random, one page surely not any more helpful than the next. Commuters rushed past me, umbrellas held over their heads, scarves wrapped around their necks. Lights and laughter spilled out of the pub, though it was not yet 5 p.m.

Dublin was a maze in the rain. I’d been roaming the city in a borrowed raincoat, the guidebook I’d checked out from the library back home clutched in my hand. I’d been to see Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, the National Museum, the Writers’ Museum, but I hadn’t really seen them, only piles of wet stone, a grey blur, there and then gone.

And now I was lost.

He had always been the one with the sense of direction, the one who led the way. I felt safest under the open sky.

❦

The Louth Valley, in the rain.

I woke into darkness, the fat drops pounding on my earthy roof. I rose and stretched like an earthworm, humming a song I’d once composed to my own beauty and grace. The roots poking through the roof twined to my music as I went about my morning routine, teeth sharpened on my special tooth-sharpening stone, hair parted down the middle with my stolen hair-parting comb.

Oh my cleverness! Oh my glee!

I crawled out of my burrow into the wet morning, and all the hills sang for joy.

❦

Dublin, in the rain. My phone told me to take the number 9 bus back to the neighborhood I was staying in, and I prayed that I would be able to make the right change with my foreign bills, that I would recognize my stop.

That I could find the bus station.

I had come to Ireland on a whim, really, chosen this city for the wonder evoked by its name, for the round, rising vowel sound and the descending trill on the end, like a green, wet-furred hill in the morning mists. Dublin.

In the rain. It had been pouring when my plane touched down, the pilot banking into a turn and circling back, wary of the slick runway.

It had not stopped drizzling since.

I’d needed to get away from my Chicago apartment, whose 500 square feet had seemed so suddenly large with him gone. I felt as if my life had come to a blind curve, one which I was stuck in the middle of, that I couldn’t see behind or ahead. Instead of getting any work done I’d been sitting at my desk and staring at my computer screen while ignoring my editor’s calls.

I’d never been abroad on my own before, but I’d thought the sound of it —abroad— like an independent Victorian woman on a pleasure trip,was exactly what I needed.

Now I remembered that it had been he who liked cities, not I. Not the girl who had grown up in a tiny town just west of suburbia, mud between her toes.

After several years, I thought, it was easy to forget.

It will be easy to forget.

Still, I briefly wished he was here, he who could turn the map in my guidebook at just the perfect angle so that the tangled lines and the snarl of streets matched up, like two pieces of a Chinese puzzle.

See? See how simple?

❦

The Louth Valley, in the rain, and the wonder of a perfect morning.

I made my rounds, I gave my good-mornings. I spoke to the crowding slick stones, to the bone-snapping hard-root wind-bending trees, to the dark-eyed birds and the ancient hills.

And they spoke back to me.

Greetings cousin, they said, greetings, and they gave me gifts—a round polished stone, a wet green leaf, a shimmering black feather, the wind on the heath.

❦

Back in the apartment where I was staying, the rain knocked against the windows like a chorus of tiny fists. I’d had to ask for directions to the bus station, my face burning as I’d stopped a kind-eyed woman on the street. The cheerful young couple who lived in the apartment was still at work, the brightly decorated rooms holding only their remembrances, their ghosts.

I was sleeping in their somewhat cramped extra bedroom, which I’d found on AirBnB. My first day, when they’d seen that I’d brought nothing but my old wool peacoat, they’d said, “You can’t go out in that!” and pulled a black raincoat spotted with tiny yellow dots out of their hall closet, threaded my arms through its sleeves, smiling at me as if they were my parents.

Now I paced the Kilim rug in their living room—a fake?—dialing a number in the travel guide’s registry of fairy tours at random.

When I was a child, I’d believed in fairies.

I’d believed, not in silly leprechauns and winged dancing sprites, but beautiful beings, magical beings who could change at will, like the elementals of the Victorians. I’d seen them, or so I’d believed, dancing in the moonlight on the lawn outside my bedroom window, peeking from behind trees and between the underbrush as I played in the scrubby woods which bordered my house, seen them for a second and then they were gone.

A trick of the light? An arrangement of branches and leaves?

As I grew up, I’d lost my belief somewhere along the way, like a religion, my former sightings chalked up to childhood imagination and natural occurrences. There was no place for them in an adult life, a life lived in front of my fluorescent-blinking laptop screen, in metal-shelved grocery stores, in a roaring, synthetic-upholstered car and a tiny city apartment three floors up, surrounded by iron fire escapes and filled with stony silences.

Once I could have explained why. That seemed so long ago, now I could not even do that.

“We’ve room for one more tomorrow,” the man on the other end of the line told me. I imagined him elderly, smiling, with glasses so small they’d be called spectacles and arthritic fingers like twisted roots. He gave me the address of the nearest village, where the tour company had an office, and when to meet everyone there.

I typed the address into my phone’s GPS. I could take the bus. It would be a long ride.

❦

In the Louth Valley, it was still raining.

I mused on the sound of Louth as I tramped through the wet grass. Louth, Louth. My editor would tell me I did this too often. She’d also introduced me to him at a local conference, and so on this trip I had decided to hell with her.

Louth was the wind through the wet grass. Louth was a thrown stone.

The village where that morning I’d met up with the rest of the group had been called Knockbridge, which was itself so comical and twee as not to be believed.

On the bus ride over, I’d chewed my nails nervously, suddenly wondering what kind of tourist signed up for a fairy tour, wondering if the whole thing would turn out to be unbearable.

The others, gathered on the sidewalk in front of the gaily painted and carved little building which held the company’s offices, had been a mixed batch. There were some of the expected weirdos—a tall, British woman who told everyone within earshot that she was a witch, “a good witch,” two teenagers with badly-dyed black hair and heavy makeup—but there was also a happy Chinese family with an eight-year-old daughter, two little old ladies who looked too frail to hike through the hills, and a backpacking couple from France.

One, an overweight, middle-aged and clearly American man in a brilliant red windbreaker and foggy glasses, came over to me and introduced himself. He was traveling the world and “doing all of the nature stuff,” he told me, rattling off names like Peru and Alaska, because that’s what his wife, who’d recently lost a hard battle with breast cancer, had always dreamed of.

I tried to imagine him in Alaska, standing on the deck of a fishing vessel, his thinning hair dripping with icicles, but could not. Instead I saw his wife, charging into the imaginary battle, her sword in her hand.

“She’s home with Jesus, now,” he’d said with a smile, and seemed so pleased by this that I, who had lost all faith somewhere between the 10th grade and my first full-time job, could only blink at him and smile feebly in return.

Now he puffed steadily by my side as we climbed through the hills. Their green hummocks spread out around me like a story. Droplets of water clung to my skin, slipped from my borrowed raincoat. The air smelled fresh, as green as the hills, and I breathed it in, panting from our climb. The wind brought tears to my eyes.

The two little old ladies had fallen far behind us, as I’d worried they would, and the British woman, the good witch, turned back to help them.

The tour guide, an older woman herself, but with muscular thighs and a long, grizzled braid down her back, narrated our journey from the front of the pack, though I was only halfway paying attention.

“Louth was supposedly the birthplace—and death place—of the legendary Irish hero Cúchulainn…”

The stillness into which her words fell was astounding. The soft, round hills appeared to be sleeping, slumbering giants that might blink awake at any moment, but did not. Not for me. Not anymore.

“It is said that Louth’s hills are full of the graves of Irish warriors, and also that these graves are pathways into the realm of the fairies. They’re often called ‘fairy mounds…’”

My spirits should have been soaring—like the raven I could spot riding the air currents above the hills—but all I felt was a weak flutter. Once I’d seen fairies in the undeveloped land outside of suburbia. Now I saw nothing, even as I climbed through their mounds.

And yet—I turned in place on the hilltop where the tour guide had finally let us pause, the wind whipping the air from my lungs, my eyes streaming, the startlingly green grass singing around me—I did feel something, out here, away from the city, under the open sky. Was the wind washing the scales from my eyes?

“Perhaps they are here even now,” the tour guide was saying, “running through the grass with the wind, peeking out at us from behind those stones.”

❦

The hills.

In the rain.

And a party of humans who were moving nearer.

I tiptoed beside them through the mists, tiny dark footprints in the wet grass, though they were so deaf and blind—surprise!—none looked my way. I winked at them like the rain.

I donned my shimmering feather, my body shivering into the change, and I soared over them as a raven, riding the high air currents. Droplets struck my feathers. The humans moved below me like prey, and suddenly I was hungry. Hungry for mischief and trickery! Hungry for mirth!

One of the humans, a sad-eyed woman in a spotted raincoat, looked up at me, and I became the wind in the heath, whispering through her brown hair.

Did you see me? Do you see?

I landed on the earth with a thump. I peeked out at her from behind the tumbled stones, for a moment showing my nose in the wide blue air. I knew where I came in. I had heard the tour guide’s spiel many times.

When she left with the group to return to the village, I followed them, a green leaf in the wind, a thrown stone.

❦

The village of Knockbridge was full of squat stone cottages and painted wooden storefronts smiling in the rain. There was no bridge, or none that I saw.

The faux-medieval carvings that graced the building housing the tour guides’ offices reminded me of the couple who had taken me in. Half of the bright building had been made a souvenir shop and, reluctant to return to the grey city from this place of hills and wide skies, I followed our tour guide and some of the other guests inside.

The interior of the shop was just this side of tacky, the local and seemingly authentic mixed with the cheaply imported from China. Cloth fairy dolls and children’s gossamer wings sparkled in one corner. A bundle of carved wooden walking sticks stood by the door. After the wind on the hills, the air was stuffy and warm, and I unbuttoned by raincoat as I wove through the shelves.

Handmade geode jewelry clacked on a nearby display, and I reached out to pick up one of the necklaces, an opaque dark stone shot through with green veins, a large hole bored through the middle, hung on a leather thong. Something about the stone jogged my childhood memories, tugged at me like a child playing blind-man’s-bluff.

“No Sight, love?” the tour guide asked from behind me.

I turned in surprise, the stone clutched in my hand.

“That’s used to see fairies,” she clarified with a smile.

“Oh,” I said. And, “No, not anymore. I seem to have lost it.”

❦

I slipped through the shop door in a gust of wind and rain. A little brass bell jingled at me, and I put my finger to my lips.

Shh.

On my way in, I’d plucked a hair from a tourist’s head—the head of the happy man who had walked beside the woman in the raincoat—as he turned down the street to the bus stop. I’d been invisible, and I’d laughed as he slapped a hand to his head, confused.

I could see the raincoated woman I was after, the one who had spotted me when I was a raven. She held a special stone in her hand. I waited until the tour guide walked away from her, and then, taking the shape of the happy man, I approached.

“What’s that you’ve found,” I asked, as I took the stone from her hands. Her hands! So small, so delicate in these large ones I wore!

It was a stone from the hills, one with a hole bored through. A rare thing, and luck. I had seen such a thing before. With such a thing, I knew what to do.

“A Seeing Stone,” I said. And I held the stone up, up to my man’s eye and the lens of glass he wore there, and I looked through the empty circle at her.

She stared at me, her face frozen and stunned, and I stared back, knowing that I saw what she had become, and that she saw what I had become.

“You see?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said, and she laughed.

Jordan Taylor grew up in a small town in the American South, where she was raised on equal parts Jesus and fairy tales. She has since lived in New York, Portland, and now Raleigh, NC, where she keeps several bookshelves full of books and one cantankerous corgi.

www.jordanrtaylor.com

by Jenny Blackford

My oldest friend (so young!)
attacks a bowl of limp green leaves
coated in white slime—the only option
at this trendy pub for all her sensitivities:
mind, body, spirit. I spoon gloopy risotto,
envy the lady down the table
with her sizzle-pot of prawns.
We’re the bad girls up our end
drinking bubbles. Sometimes
small pleasures are the best.

Our young mat-mate tells us
(true confessions) how her new man’s
ex-wife’s friends despise her,
though the bond was long dissolved
when they fell.
One of the unfriends even spat on her
in a Westfield mall. We gasp. She says
his kids call her his “bit of fluff.”

Mass giggles. What a sizzle-pot!

Jenny Blackford‘s poems and stories have appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, Cosmos, Westerly, and more. In 2013, Pitt Street Poetry published an illustrated pamphlet of her cat poems, The Duties of a Cat. Her most recent poetry prize is first in the Connemara Mussell Festival Poetry Competition 2016.

www.jennyblackford.com

by J.M. Young

How did I get here?

❦

We had made the choice that ending our engagement like mature adults was the best course for the both of us. We weren’t good for one another, in that way. Ethan took a job as a professor in Boston. I refused  to leave my photography business in Tennessee. Long distance was torturous. He has a daughter ten years my junior who hated my guts. He made me cry almost every time we were together. The list goes on.

But we were good in the sack. So we christened our breakup with a weekend stay at a bed and breakfast in my hometown. He ran his fingers down my ribcage and we didn’t discuss that it would be the last time. And it was hotter than ever. I bid a fond farewell to my engagement ring, pulled up the handle of my suitcase, and thrust out my hand. “All the best.”

He grabbed my hand. “Let’s remain friends?”

We stayed frozen in the handshake as I considered his question. I was grown up enough to handle that. I most certainly was not going to get in my car, turn on our song at the highest decibel my speakers could handle without blowing out, and cry while recklessly driving home. I wouldn’t sit at home in my bathrobe with lighted candles and pretend I was one of those B-rated actresses in the rom-coms that play at Christmastime who go into hysterics before getting a makeover and emerging like Elle Woods with a bedazzled briefcase. I could be friends with Ethan. It was the responsible thing to do. My girlfriends would applaud me on this final graduation into adulthood. I was not only surviving losing my fiancé, we were thriving together.

“Friends? As in we will occasionally like each other’s statuses on social media or friends as in we will actually want to talk to one another and spend time together?”

“Friends. As in when I see you on the street, I won’t awkwardly look away. I’ll hug you.”

The way he repeated my cadence always made me think we were on the same wavelength. How did we get here?

“Friends.” I pumped his hand vigorously and set off on my own to drink my rosé while contemplating my singlehood.

To his credit, we did remain friends in the strangest way possible. We sent each other text messages with funny pictures, let each other know when our favorite bands were in town, and we hung out together (always in the company of mutual friends). I went on a mission trip to Guatemala. His daughter, Kelsey, stopped hating my guts. Life was good.

❦

Returning from Guatemala, I felt like I had conquered my breakup like a champ. I changed the world for three months. I was tan. I had purged social media for three months and succeeded! I was going to start a juice cleanse.

I sliced a large red apple with my right hand and fed the pieces into the juicer, while my left hand rummaged through the pile of unread snail mail. A heavier cream envelope stood out and I tore it open with my teeth.

You are cordially invited to the marriage ceremony of

Laura Ginny Freeman

&

Ethan Theodore Banks.

‘How lovely.’ I thought. ‘How good for my friend. Perhaps I’ll wear pink.’ I fed another apple slice into the juicer and my fingers got too close to the whirring blades. The tops of the pads were swiftly nicked and the blood mixed with the juice.

❦

The wedding itself took place outside/inside at an old-fashioned home that specifically functioned as a one-stop for all buy. Having the event there meant that the caterers were included, the florist came with, and the day of coordinator was complimentary. Mercifully, it was not one of the locations we had looked at together.

Ethan was married under a trellis with a red brick wall as the background. There were lights strung in the trees and around the gazebo where the band played. They had opted to write their own vows and Laura’s were corny and contrite.

“I am the luckiest woman in the world. I do not deserve your love…”

The cliché lines went on and on. Ethan smiled in what I could only assume was pain at his fiancé’s uninspired speech. He cleared his throat and began to speak.

“I am the luckiest man in the world. I do not deserve your love.”

His words were an exact copy of hers, a perfect mirror and word for word reflection of her promises to him. His repetition breathed life and love into her tired phrases, exhuming them into sonnets. He was the completion to her musical stanza, as satisfying as “Shave and a haircut…two bits!” The in-unison cadence swam dizzyingly fast about my head.

After the kiss, the couple lingered to take pictures with the family. The rest of the guests surged inside to partake of the buffet as the ceremony bled into the reception. I ran inside with the stream, trying to push past the famished bridesmaids as I searched for a restroom. I decided to try my luck up the wooden staircase. Rounding the corner, I found two stalls excessively close together with toilets very near to the floor. There was a bathtub off to the right and it struck me again that this was once an actual house and not an exclusive wedding destination. I wondered who the original owners were. How did they get here?

Curiosity overtook me and I lingered upstairs a bit, searching for clues of the past. Across the hall was clearly the bridal suite. I felt like a peeping Tom as I hurriedly snuck over. The room was spacious with lavender walls, a day bed, and a center chandelier. A small table was set near the slightly opened window which allowed a breeze to ruffle the white curtains and flicker the tea candles. ‘So they opted to have their first meal as a married couple secluded.’ I thought. I wasn’t a fan of the premise when it was explained to me on many of my tours. There were ladybugs crawling on the ceiling.

“I love you. I love you. I love you.”

Ethan. Ethan leading his bride to the bridal suite. Ethan.

I stopped breathing and all rational thought scurried like bugs when their rock home is lifted and they are subjected to the light. I didn’t have time to think. I opened the window, got out on the ledge, and half closed the window again. I scrunched myself into a ball and hoped the darkness would hide me.

Ethan held Laura’s hand and led her to the small table. A pane of glass and a gossamer curtain were all that separated me from Laura. If Ethan so much as removed his eyes from his wife’s face, he would see me. But, he didn’t.

Hanging out on window ledges wasn’t all that new to me. They had been my place of escape in my childhood home. I would crawl out to sit in the unrelenting sun with a good book and a pair of sunglasses. Ethan had brought me a smoothie, then left me to my reading and oh God how I loved him!

“Would you shut the window? Insects are getting in.”

“Of course.” Ethan stood up and I froze in horror. But he never took his eyes off his wife’s smile.

That adoration! That commitment! But how? Not a year ago he professed that commitment for me! Or did the person not matter? Was it just the action of commitment? He was ready for it, for all of it. The window clicked when he shut it and I realized I was locked outside on the roof.

Surely there was another window open somewhere. I would rather break both of my legs in the fall than ask for their help. I was wearing flats under my maxi dress. The roof wasn’t that steep. I could do this. I climbed up and over to the other side of the house.

So, here I am, looking through the skylight as the chef brings the dishes up the stairs for my ex-fiancé’s first meal as man and wife. How did I get here?

I remember Guatemala. I had threaded together a bracelet with beads for a little boy named Yanna. I wanted it to remind him of me, of our time together, and that there was someone out there who cared about him. I tied it around his small wrist, hoisted my backpack on one shoulder, and prepared to leave the shed I had spent three months building. At the last second, I smiled over my shoulder at Yanna. He had torn off the bracelet and thrown it in the dirt, no doubt waiting for the next herd of volunteers. How long would they stay? What promises would they make?

I bang my fists on the glass, startling the chef who is carrying up a bottle of champagne. It rolls down the stairs, spurting liquid, until it cracks on the floor.

“Miss?!”

“I made a mistake.” I mouth on all fours, my breath fogging the glass.

—

*Author’s Note: This piece was written in response to a prompt from the book 642 THINGS TO WRITE ABOUT by the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, published by Chronicle Books. The prompt was “You are looking down through the skylight as chefs prepare dinner for your ex-fiancé’s wedding”.

J. M. Young is a graduate of the Florida State University with Creative Writing and Theatre degrees. At Orlando Repertory Theatre, she gained experience as a​ ​co-playwright for “Writes of Spring” (an annual creative writing program for students K-12), and as a writer of original shorts for the Rockin’ REP REC Fest. She is currently working on a novel set to debut in early 2018.