Author: Editor

She didn’t know what the parade was for. People carried crosses. Flowers pink as bubble gum. The rain was coming in over the capital. She saw sheets of it before the drops got there and soaked through her shoulders, the top of her head. The black rainwater rolled down the street gutters. She had places and parties to go to. She jumped right in the gutter rainwater. Maybe the parade was for something bad that had happened, death, or in protest, perhaps it was a celebration. She joined with a skull made of sugar resting in her palms.

As the parade made its way through town, she saw a man standing at the top of a tall building, at least ten stories high. He was a small, shadowed figure against the sky. She saw him take part of the roof and drop it off the edge. The piece of the roof fell and fell towards the ground. She watched it as if it were a human body. Things happened because they had to. When things didn’t work it was because they couldn’t.

The parade made its way towards the water. It blocked traffic and people honked their horns. She looked back towards the building that touched the sky. The sky was full of the outlines of birds, and the avalanche of the clouds. She handed her sugared skull to the woman beside her and turned towards the building where the man was. The doors were locked but she didn’t let them stop her, she took the bobby pin from her hair and picked the lock. She took the stairs, not the elevator. Elevators are like being in the stomach of some creature, something futuristic, a gleaming, golden inside.

From the roof, the city glowed like an ornament. A bird heart. A fist. Around him she immediately spoke in hyperbole. Everything was the fucking best thing ever. One of the fucking best things ever was when the fog came in low and gray near the palm trees, like today. It didn’t look right, didn’t go together. On the roof with this man, she felt that everything was its most superlative version of itself, matchless, incomparable, and without equal. The bay glistened and was dotted with ferries.
She touched his hipbone and felt sure that she’d seen it somewhere before. His eyes were like green marshes, sticky and full and hot. They had things to tell each other.

“What are you doing up here?” she asked.

She let her fingers dart out towards him and then back towards her own body as if emphasizing a point. What was her point, exactly? She felt like a teenager, like she wished she had a bedroom door to lock and her whole life ahead of her. He was taking the roof off, the sticky black tar papery part of the roof. It came off in squares and he threw each square off the side. She watched. She saw the parade in the distance. She heard gunshots to the South. Planes flew overhead full of hundreds of people who were safe. She knew that she was never safe, she preferred it that way.

“What are you doing up here?” he asked back.

“I do have other places to be,” she said. It was true. Her red dress was for a cocktail party. She had cocktail umbrellas in her purse and small diamonds in her ears. She knew that the two of them, him and her, would never make it. But when she talked to him she felt her arteries. She wanted him to touch her dress. Her arteries sizzled like they were made of electrical wiring. The cocktail party would be under a tarp on a porch. There would be whiskey and ice cubes. She imagined looking across the party and seeing him there. She didn’t ask him if he was married. She wanted to know a lot of things about him. She didn’t ask if he wanted to go to the party with her. She imagined him fucking her.

“That reminds me,” he said. He kissed her. The first time you kiss someone their mouth seems too hard, not soft like you’d hoped, and you realize that you don’t know them at all, but then it is very very soft and you realize that it’s too late. It’s happened.

“Well, god,” he said.

She wonders if he can see her or if she’s disappeared. There are one thousand futures. They splay out. Each time, it is close. Each time, she’s there. She thinks perhaps she has one thousand decisions to make, and when she runs out, she will look around at what she’s chosen and it will be permanent. Then, like some piece of material, like something inanimate, she throws herself off the roof. She has places to be. Things start off small, but then they press down, they hold weight.

Laura Schadler grew up in the mountains of Virginia. She studied film at Bard College and will have her MFA in Writing from the California College of the Arts in May of this year. She currently lives and writes in San Francisco, and is working on her first collection of short stories, Everyone Who Feels Homesick. She has been published in Fireweed Magazine and Confessions of a Doorknob Queen. She wears high heels even though she is tall, likes mango sorbet, and overuses the word awesome. She has a few ideas for her first novel, which is, at this moment, entirely unwritten.

Photo by Steve Shearer

It costs only 50¢ to enter the Closet of Love. The nominal fee covers electricity and the occasional light bulb replacement. The light bulb is never turned on, however, except for the occasional dusting and spritz of air freshener. Because when a couple enters the Closet, all is perfectly dark. You can see only love.

The Closet of Love fits four average-sized adults, or two whose bellies say, “I am the product of beer and always taking the elevator instead of the stairs.” The Closet is open one day a week, and never on the same day or at the same time. (For everyone knows, no one knows when true love is going to come along.)

“Hello,” says the woman who wants to fall in love.

“Hi,” says the man who wishes the same.

Each hands a quarter to the ticket taker. He tears their ticket, and with a smile, hands each of them half. They walk towards the Closet door and step inside. The door shuts and the woman speaks.

“I don’t love you yet. Is the Closet broken?”

“No, but let’s give it time,” the man says, his voice shaking. He has never been good at love. Not since the prom accident 16 years ago. He still has a scar.

“Okay,” she says and stands quietly, waiting.

“What that ticking?” the man asks.

“That’s my biological clock. I hope we fall in love soon.”

“Will you marry me?” the man asks. “I love you so much it hurts.”

“I want to think it over,” the woman says. “Yes, yes, I’ll marry you. I love you, darling.”

A third voice, a man’s, interrupts. “Hello.”

If it weren’t so dark, the engaged couple would have seen each other jump back simultaneously.

“Who are you?” the woman asks, drawn towards the new man’s voice.

“Want to have an affair?” the new voice says.

“Well, I just got engaged, but something about you excites me. And I want one last grasp at freedom and what could be. Just don’t tell my fiancé.”

“Tell me what?”

“Nothing, dear. I have to work late tonight.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll just be over here in the corner.”

The woman places her hands on the large, brawny shoulders of her illicit lover and pushes him away.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she says, turning her head away in the darkness.

“But I have to see you again,” her lover says.

“I can’t. I love–” Tears sprinkle down on the floor of the Closet of Love –“another.” She takes her mistake by the hand and kisses him on the cheek. He is sad, but he will recover. It cost him only 15¢ to be here.

The Closet door opens and the woman and the no-longer-nervous man emerge, hand-in-hand.

“My scar is gone,” the man in love says.

“It will never come back,” the woman in love says.

The Closet of Love’s door closes. The ticket taker writes a note to himself to begin charging 55¢.

Dylan Lee is an advertising copywriter in Portland.

Photo copyright 2007, Andy Batt, www.andybatt.com.

You walk into the last record store on Earth. It was quite a trek to get there. The clerk has complicated hair and a tattoo that says, “John Lives.” You say to him, “I need that music from that film. The one where the guy meets the gal and she and he do things that people in movies mostly don’t do.” The clerk says, “You’re talking about Johnny Dark and the Fictioneers.” It doesn’t sound right but you’ve come a long way. “Ok,” you say, “Give me that and the one where the female singer sounds like a train colliding with a tangerine.” On the walk home you realize that it wasn’t that movie at all. It was the sequel to the one about the dying Stoic, the one with all the midges. Still, Johnny Dark rings a vague bell. He sounds like Quasimodo. He sounds like your mother. In your review you say, “It’s the kind of music you’d walk to the ends of the Earth for.”

Corey Mesler’s work has appeared in many online and print magazines. With his wife he owns Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.

Image, untitled collage 23, by Ira Joel Haber, featured artist. View more of his work here.