Category: early-issues

The Continuity of Light
by Brent Foster Jones

Richard and I moved into the house on Sunday: a white, two-story in Marina Del Ray that had taken seven months to renovate. He left two days later.
He told me he tried to put her behind him, but he couldn’t. “I tried,” he said. “This house was your dream. Now it’s my turn.”
I walked out onto the balcony and watched him drive away in the Mercedes.
Today is Friday.
There is nothing in the house. The furniture we ordered arrives next week. I wanted to stay in a hotel, but Richard thought it might be romantic to sleep on a mattress and eat take-out. “It might be romantic,” he said.
Now I’m alone.
I walk through the rooms at night, wandering, inhabiting. I step into the living room and run my fingers along the white walls, staring into the large, open space. I picture what it might look like when the furniture arrives: the contrast of the white with the dark walnut of the side chairs. I see the beige cashmere sofa and the silver legs of the cocktail tables. I imagine the sheer curtains, the muted Los Angeles light.
The palette we planned together cools and quiets me.
In the new kitchen – we gutted the previous one – there is a bottle of white wine, cigarettes, prescriptions. The room is white, blank – it has no history. I pour a glass of wine and take an Ambien.
I go out on the balcony in the chiffon nightgown, light a cigarette, and wait for the sleeping pill to set in. I look out towards the hotels, the yachts, the shimmering water, the lampposts. Marina Del Ray was a dream – the plan. This is a place for lovers, for companions.
I step back into the kitchen and turn the outdoor lights on, dimming the recessed bulbs. I get something from this – the glow. The light has an editing quality: it tightens and organizes the features of the doors and balcony. It enhances. It arranges.
I take refuge in false comforts, in constructions: in lines, in light – the shape of a bench, the limb of a small tree, the play of moonlight off glass.
It’s later, and I can’t fall asleep. I’m wide awake. I feel leveled, razed.
I’m standing in the redesigned bathroom, easing the nightgown off my shoulders, looking into the mirror at my breasts.
I turned 47 two months ago. My skin is fair. A friend suggested Botox this summer and now the lines on my face are faint, like traces.
Each month I go to a salon in Beverly Hills to have my hair colored—black.
This morning, I saw a photograph in a magazine of a Washington D.C. socialite whose hair is white, like alabaster. In the picture, she is wearing pearl earrings and a crisp, white blouse. I’m picturing my hair white like hers: elegant, confident, and wise.
I’m a decorator. I arrange things and plan patterns. I bring order to rooms. I pair things. Richard is an architect. He sketches. He creates structures and disrupts them. He rebuilds. We have a practice together, and I’ve agreed to dissolve it next month.
“What should we tell our clients?” Richard asked me yesterday in our office.
I didn’t respond, looking into the icy blue curtains.
“Are you all right?” Richard said.
“I don’t know,” I told him.
He walked over to me and touched my arm. “I want you to be okay,” he said.
“Don’t say that,” I said, angrily. “Don’t ever say that to me.”
To temper what stings, what stuns me, I plan and envision. I pace the house and mentally blueprint each room – the arrangements, the lines. I think about the 1950s chrome lightning fixture for the hallway and the David Tomb charcoal drawing for the dining room. I wait for ideas, for images. I wait for a sense of things.
Now it’s 3:30 in the morning.
I go into the bedroom and lay down under the white sheets. I pull an Ivory cashmere blanket over my legs and stare out the large, rectangular window. I wonder how it happened, where things started to break down between us.
I decide it was either her or me, and he chose her. As I dull from the Ambien, from exhaustion, I imagine that things have righted themselves: that he chose differently – me.
A car door closes softly outside, and I pretend Richard is back. I wait for him to enter the house. I pretend he is lingering outside, admiring our home, his life.
I look down at the contours of my legs, the landscape of my body under the cashmere. I imagine my hair dramatic and white. I feel an earned sexiness – our intimacy – as I pretend he is walking up the stairs. I feel wanted as he reaches the second level, passing the rosewood credenza, moving towards the room. Then I look up. Nothing.
I cry and reason.
I look over at a print from a Japanese gallery that’s still on the floor. It was a gift from Richard. Two black brushstrokes against white. One of the brushstrokes travels across the other, arcing over it, and then it comes back down across it, through it, and to the corner of the print, away.
I turn off the floor lamp next to me.
I close my eyes, and I picture this: I am a line, a piece of light, a direction.

photo by Jason Fuges, photo design by Bernard Kyle.

Brent Foster Jones was born in Texas and raised in Louisiana. He is completing his M.F.A. in writing at California College of the Arts. Brent is the recipient of a California College of the Arts All College Honors Honorable Mention for his fiction writing. He is currently at work on a collection of stories and a play.

Jason Fuges lives in San Francisco and works as the art director at Berkeley Rep.

Tie Goes to the Runner
by Debbie McCann

Tie goes to the runner, in baseball, anyway. Remember? All those hot summer nights on our old block, with parents on the porches and no reason to call us in until way past the slow-falling dark. The whole neighborhood played, teenagers high-fiving little kids and hardly ever any fights. Everything tempered under that blunt wet generous heat. Even the rough tar-and-gravel road softened, giving a little under our bare feet.

We both know it’s over at the very same moment. A tie. So whose ending will it be?

We met playing baseball. You were the new kid, wearing an old glove of your dad’s that was way too big on the wrong hand. We were nine. Our birthdays were a week apart and we both got long plastic rainbow streamers for the handles of our bikes. That summer, I taught you how to pop wheelies and how to skid through the hard-packed dirt gullies behind the houses on your side of the street, and my brother taught us both to throw. You sucked one lip up under the other and the ball flew out straight and hard. You still do that, when you’re concentrating. I taught you how to make a real fist. You got your period first, the only time you got to be the expert. You were always more of a girl.

We were best friends, lab partners, roommates, and then the rest. Everything. And now we are standing on opposite sides of an open apartment door, me on the porch, you on the carpet. You sigh. I am not breathing.

I want the old rules, giving the win to the one who runs her heart out, pounding hard towards the goal so singlemindedly she has to overrun it sometimes. That’s a rule too–they let you overrun it. That shows you how hard it is to get there.

I can’t even count all the things I suddenly long for about those days, before we knew what lay before us. Baseball. Nights that came on so gently it was hard to tell when they’d fully arrived, that dense heat blurring all the edges. The smell of tar on the soles of our feet when even the street wasn’t solid for sure. Back then, just trying hard counted as success. They graded us on it. “But you got an ‘A’ for Effort,” my mom used to say when report cards came home. “And that’s what counts.”

It used to count. I used to be able to salvage any situation on will, on the strength of pure desperate charm. Make anything right by making you laugh.

But here we are with our toes nudged up against the same conclusion. Tie goes to the runner. I’m looking right at you, hurling my whole self at you. When you look down I know it will be like blinds yanked shut and you’ll be gone.

I look. You look away. You win.

Debbie McCann is a writer, performer, and social worker who lives, works, and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of the short story collection A House in Order (Blinking Yellow Books, 1994).

Photo by Robert McCann.

The Innocent
by Annee-e. Wood

When they said ovens, she imagined the soldiers wearing enormous bakers’ hats as they filed people through. She imagined the people came out on the other end as gingerbread families, and the whole thing all just seemed so fake, like a cartoon or a ballet, and she imagined the soldiers as friendly as witches, grotesque and sad, just part of the plot.

She imagined the end, when if finally came, would bring sweet revenge for children and restful, dreamy nights. But she was older now, and losing innocence. So the first night they made love, the first night she made love to anyone, she listened. When she asked him where he came from, he told her he had been sent to England by boat and he didn’t remember what his father looked like and he didn’t remember what his mother looked like, only her smell: lipstick, meat, ash. He remmebered some human packed trains were going one way and some human packed trains were going another, and he remembered the last thing his father told him before he turned away: there are no good or evil people, only the very lucky and the dead. He remembered the snow, and the impossibility of comfortable warmth, only extreme chills and extreme blasts of heat. As he held her, he told her how he imagined the inside of the ovens. And the temperature at which flesh begins to sear.

When they said love she didn’t imagine the hurt. She didn’t imagine hiding naked in the sweat of blankets. She did not prepare for the sour smell of skin. She had not practiced the bareness of rubbing or the strangeness of eyes that held the pain of old ghosts. She did not imagine his cries of pleasure would sound so lost. She did not know the rocking wetness would be sore and tender or that his breathing would make her weep. Or that when he pulled out she would feel the empty space between her legs, and sense a cold abandon. Later, in the morning, she tasted salt. The bitterness of hair. She felt a cavernous scar on the small of his back. She wondered if somehow she had caused the burns, if their heat and friction and persistent touching irritated the skin. She promised herself she would remember every fold of his body, every mole, every line, she would take notes, she would write it down, she would listen, so that eighty years from now when she’d think of heat, she’d think of love, and never forget.

Anne-E Wood grew up in New Jersey and studied theater and writing at Macallister College in St. Paul, Minnesota. She now lives in San Francisco, where she is getting her MFA at San Francisco State University. Her stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from Beloit Fiction Journal, Cream City Review, and Other Voices.

Giacomo’s Seasons

by Mario Rigoni-Stern

One evening at the end of May, Irene told Giacomo she wanted to go to the foot of the mountains where her family had fled in ‘16. They’d stayed in a tiny house in a meadow–Giglio’s Meadow–surrounded by alders, birches, and wild cherry trees. For three years they’d lived there, dirt poor, in that tiny house no bigger than a stall. Her sister Orsola had died there, a little girl Irene never knew. Her brother had talked about this place; so had her grandfather before he died. “I’d really like to see it. How about the two of us going by bicycle one Sunday?”

“We’d have to figure out the road,” Giacomo said, “and we don’t have bicycles.”

“We could rent them from Toni Folo. They won’t cost much.”

“I’ll see what I can find out. I’ll ask your father what road to take.”

And that’s what Giacomo did. The road in the best shape went through Costo and Caltrano; then from Caltrano they’d ride to Calvene and ask someone how to get to Giglio’s Meadow. But the shortest route was up and over Barental, Granezza, Malga Mazze and Calvene’s Mountain. The round trip would be around forty kilometers. Renting two bicycles would cost four lire. They decided to go one Sunday in June, taking the Barental road on the way down and the Costo road on the way back.

To get an early start that Sunday, they went for the bicycles Saturday evening. Toni Folo asked where they were headed and for how long; from the dozen or so bicycles he had available, he chose two with multiple gears and good tires.

“The roads you’ll take are full of sharp gravel,” he said. “You’ll need good, solid tires, good gears, and good brakes. And I’ll throw in a pump and patch kit in case you have a flat.” He turned to Giacomo. “You know how to fix a tire?”

“Sure, I’ve seen my friends do it. Looks easy.”
“So what’s below the mountains? You going for fun?”

“We want to see where my family went during the war–near Calvene,” Irene said.

“My sister died there of the Spanish flu.”

“Ah, those were hard times, children–hard times! My family went to Noventa. I was transferred from the Alpine forces to the air force. Because I was a mechanic. Listen, go slow downhill and pedal hard uphill. Bring the bicycles back anytime Sunday. You can pay me then.”

They took some small loaves of rye bread with them, some garlic salami, and some cheese. There would be springs to drink from along the way. Barental was cool, still in shadow; they hurried past Luka and the British cemetery. They had to walk their bicycles up Lapide, and they stopped to rest on the stone bench where–so the story went–the Hapsburg Archduke Eugene once sat waiting to go down to the plains. But then the Italian Infantry had arrived.

When Giacomo and Irene reached the Granessa Tavern with its grass enclosure out back, they stopped once more, this time for a lemon fizz. The Pûne sisters ran this local tavern from May to October; after the snow closed the roads, they’d return home with their four cows and two calves. Refreshed now, Giacomo and Irene set off again, pedaling hard for the Granezza Plain. At Mazze, on Mount Boccetta, they could see the Brenta and Astico Rivers, twisting and disappearing over the plain, and the air was flooded with the intoxicating smell of narcissus. The meadows were so white with them, you could barely see the green of the grass. The children stopped and stood there, holding hands, looking out over that new, unknown world–the meadows full of narcissus, the districts farther down, all the red tile roofs, the distant towns with their bell towers. Maybe those dark spots out there were cities. And far, far away–beyond the plains–what were those hills, blurring into the sky?

“The world’s so vast,” they both were thinking.

“Wait,” Irene said. “I want to pick some narcissus for my sister.”

They left the bicycles lying by the road and climbed to the nearest meadow.

“Pick ones not fully bloomed,” Giacomo said. “They’ll last longer.”

“I’m picking the prettiest ones that smell the sweetest,” Irene answered. “It’s all so beautiful!” She threw her arms wide, as if she wanted to hug the world.

They picked two large bunches, and Giacomo tied the flowers to their handlebars with twine. Then they started the downhill ride to Calvene’s Mountain. Along the way, they crossed paths with some shepherds who were moving their flocks to the Altipiano. The children stopped to let the men go by. They were from the Dalla Bona family; Giacomo had met them when he’d gone for recupero, scrap weaponry, with his father at Blackberry Hills. The shepherds recognized him, too. “Hey there!” Guerrino called. “What’re you doing in this neck of the woods?”

“We’re headed to Giglio’s Meadow. This girl’s family was there in ‘16–they were refugees.”

“We were just there this morning. Now we’re making our way up to Peloso Meadow, Reitertall, then Galmara. Little by little. Should take a week. We’ll see you later.”

And shepherds and flock moved slowly on, lambs bleating to their mothers, ewes bleating to their babies. Now and then a sheep or two would stray off the road, tempted by the tender meadow grass; then a shepherd would give a wave or whistle, and a dog would sail off to herd the animals back. The rams stayed in the middle of the flock; one in particular, his strong, curved horns held high, kept his eyes riveted on the backs of the ewes. Donkeys–jacks, jennies, and foals–were mixed in with the sheep. Some of the donkeys carried the new lambs born overnight in Giglio’s Meadow in their saddlebags. The strongest donkey carried the kettle for polenta and the flour and salt, another the tarps and skins for the shepherds’ bedding.

When they’d all gone by, Giacomo and Irene got back on their bicycles. Once on Monte, they asked directions, then again up in the Capozz Mountains and on Malso. Finally, past the little valley, they reached the abandoned house where Irene’s family had lived. There were still coals in the fireplace from the shepherds. The house smelled of sheep.

How sad it must have been, this poverty. Their house, the gardens and meadows of home, forgotten. A miserable fireplace, sky showing through the roof, nettles and brush up to the kitchen door, windows sagging on rusty hinges.

“My nonno said you could hear the fighting in the mountains from here,” Irene told Giacomo. “But our neighbors were good people. A lot of them tried to help as best they could.”

“They were poorer around here than by us,” Giacomo said. “Because rich people own the land here.”

“My brother, Matteo, told me he left here to work for the military engineers. He was just a little boy.”

They stood quietly, looking around the small, filthy kitchen. They climbed to the room at the top of the narrow stairway; a straw mattress still lay on the plank floor. From the broken-out windows, the children saw the mountains to the north, the plains to the south. “Nina and Orsola slept in here with my mother,” Irene said. “Nonno and Matteo slept in the next room. My father joined them after the war.”

They left for the cemetery, asking directions from some peasants out picking cherries. The peasants told them, then asked where they were from.

“So, you lived at Giglio’s Meadow,” one man said. “Come. Come have some cherries. We’re the Nicolis. Do you remember us?”

The children had only heard about the Nicoli family. They’d been born after everyone returned to the Altipiano. Irene explained that they’d ridden down here to look around and to lay some flowers on her sister’s grave. The Nicolis remembered Orsola, that she’d died of the Spanish flu, and they remembered Matteo, her mother, her father. They asked after her family, and so they learned that Matteo had left for Australia with his new wife and that her grandfather had died. “Come back here after the cemetery,” they said. “Come have a bowl of soup. We’d love to visit.” Giacomo and Irene exchanged glances, then agreed.

They rode their bicycles to the cemetery. They looked for the smaller graves; the children were buried along the wall, in the sun, a row of graves marked by small iron or wooden crosses. On some of the crosses, you could still read the names. On others, they’d faded or disappeared. The children couldn’t find Orsola’s name–maybe it was covered in grass and wild flowers. So they laid the two bunches of narcissus in the grass and flowers.

“Like soldiers who died in combat,” Giacomo said.

It was noon by the time they got back to the Nicolis’. In the big kitchen, there were two extra places at the table and soup to eat and polenta with beans. The Nicolis talked about those times, about Irene’s family fleeing to the meadow and the war in the mountains, the British soldiers, the Spanish flu that also took their Caterina. They wanted to know about Matteo, if he was doing well in Australia. Giacomo and Irene felt a bit dazed by all the attention. The Nicolis insisted they take along a bag of cherries. “Put them in your haversack. Eat them when you get to the top of Costo. It’s warm out today.” And they gave Irene a bottle of their sweet white wine. “For your mother,” they said. “Tell her it’s from the Nicolis.”

The family stood in the courtyard, waving goodbye as the children left. And they pedaled along, not talking, until they reached Caltrano and started the push uphill.
Then Giacomo said, “Good people, those Nicolis.”

***

Summer dragged on. The first of the tourists arrived after the hay harvest; most of them were ill and had come up to the woods to clear their lungs. And, in spite of the sign posted outside town that said no begging allowed, there were always poor people downtown, knocking, begging, at the doors of the houses.

When the soldiers arrived and set up camp or held field maneuvers, children would grab whatever container they could find for the leftover rations. Or they’d run errands for a half-loaf of bread: mail a letter, buy cigarettes, carry laundry back from the washerwomen. The enormous Fascist-Youth camps had either closed down or been moved, but the provincial Fascist-Party meetings were still held around here. There was always the one world, the official world that ran the communities, the gymnastic exhibitions, military maneuvers, and ceremonies, and then there was the other world of emigrants, the unemployed, the starving. Families counted themselves lucky to scrape up two meals a day. In the stores, the bills on the books just kept growing.

Now and then some temporary job helped pay for things like a pair of shoes, a pair of pants, two hanks of wool for knitting a jersey, a tooth to be pulled by the doctor–necessities that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.

And raspberry season started. For two to three weeks, if heavy rain or hail didn’t ruin everything, the women and girls would leave at sunrise to gather the raspberries; then they’d bring the fruit to the local distillery, which used them for syrup or resold them to Zuegg of Bolzano. Carrying baskets and wooden tubs, the women and girls would head for the wide clearings left from the war.

Irene went, too, with her mother and the other women. They’d climb one of the mule-tracks leading to Mount Wassagruba or Peeraloch, and they’d chat on the way, telling one another their stories and small secrets–there were more secrets to tell picking raspberries. Sometimes they sang the song about the miner returning from the mine or the one about the young man’s house that was full of stones and spider webs but that to his love was a palace with embroidered curtains. The women’s serene voices spilled over those places where not long before, the crash and din of battle could be heard, along with the groans of the dying.

There was a female grouse hanging about to eat the berries; some mornings, she’d explode into flight–a jump back, heart pounding–then the women would sigh and laugh together. When they each had around two kilos of fruit in their baskets, they emptied the berries into the tubs they’d set under the shady fir trees, or in a cool tunnel. They all met by a spring to eat and figure out how much fruit they’d gathered. Old Nina would light her pipe. The girls stretched out and napped for a half-hour while their mothers whispered together about their men or the latest gossip. Sometimes during this midday break, the raspberry women were joined by the recuperanti who’d been digging for scrap weapontry nearby and heard the singing. Then the talk grew more cheerful, more lively–the Pûne brothers’ bashful, off-color jokes had something to do with that.

Later in the afternoon, the women would head back down the mule-path, their tubs brimming with berries and swinging on the poles they carried between them, across their shoulders. The horse and cart would be waiting for them at the Austrian captain’s headstone, and they’d load the day’s harvest, then all walk together to the distillery on Via Mount Ortigara, to weigh the fruit and collect their pay. Mario would be waiting for the women; sometimes he’d ask Irene for a handful of berries. Raspberries paid from eighty centesimi to one lira and twenty centesimi per kilogram. If a girl was quick enough, she could gather ten kilos’ worth, and so those ready to marry could buy something for their dowry, hemp or flax, for spinning that winter.

Mario Rigoni Stern is from Asiago, Italy, in the Veneto. He is one of the most prestigious writers of northern Italy and has published fifteen works of prose with Giulio Einaudi Editore and Il Melngolo. His Il sergente nella neve (1953), The Sergeant in the Snow, is considered one of the great novels about the Italians at the Russian front during World War II. His works have been translated into twelve languages, and he has won numerous awards, including the 1978 Campiello Prize for the novel, Storia di Tonle (The Story of Tonle) and the 1999 Pen Club Prize for the short story collection Sentieri sotto la neve (Paths Beneath the Snow). Le stagioni di Giacomo (Giacomo’s Seasons) won the 1996 Grinzane Cavour Prize and has been translated into French; it was also adapted as a play in Italy.

Roger Boyle is Professor of Computing at the University of Leeds in the UK. His skill as a photographer is as limited as his skill in bicycle maintenance (that’s according to Boyle himself…we happen to love this photo!) He has a deep affection for southern European countries, in particular Itlay.

loner’s valentine
a short story by Julie Gard

I was in love once, with a man not many could appreciate. I watched him fix cars while eating dinner with the family, back when I was an enthusiastic middle school science teacher in plaid polyester and nuclear warhead-proof glasses. We had a shining picture window and I took in Buford Paulson while chewing well-ketchuped meatloaf and forkfuls of canned corn.

Buford never finished college. Pedants! he cried with a wrench in his hand. He didn’t have a wife because they demanded too much, he told me in a muffled voice from beneath an aqua Corvair. He was pure, a modern-day suburban Thoreau living off of social security and a modest inheritance hidden beneath box springs (or so neighborhood lore had it), a proto-Unabomber sans violent streak. I admired a man who didn’t compromise.

My wife and I made the most of 1960’s life in suburban Cincinnati. After the kids were in bed, she lay on the couch and swooned to Janis Joplin and I retired to the attic to “grade papers.” I had a fine view of Buford from there, since he spent evenings working on odd projects in his own cluttered attic space. He burned a single bulb that hung on a cord from the ceiling like a make-believe moon, casting a double of him against the slanted wall.

When I got up the nerve I’d stand next to Buford while he worked on one of his junkers, breathe him in while making up questions about brakes and engines. He seemed to enjoy the company; he never had a lot of friends.

I always had a lot of lab reports to grade.

You’re a science teacher, he said to me one particularly sweaty summer evening. Can I show you something.
We went into his home, dim and fantastically cluttered, and down narrow basement steps. I tripped over a wooden ski jutting out into the cleared path. Buford reached for my hand to steady me, and he held it. His eyes were two starless nights.

Jim, he said.

I ran my fingertips along his palm as I pulled away, felt lifelines blur into calluses and a swooning heat. I turned and walked through the clutter, up the stairs, into a glittering slice of freshly mown July. It was 1971.

My wife left me in ‘74. The children were grown at that point, at least as much as they’d ever be. I purchased a townhouse in an eclectic part of the city where I still live now as a feisty old man in vintage plaid. I can’t complain about my late introduction to the lifestyle; I had my share of fun in the fading days of my youth. Through all the fun, though, I never forgot about Buford.

He refused to talk to me after the incident; his eyes never met mine again, not even through glass kitchen window. A few years back, I heard from my ex-wife that his home had been condemned and he’d moved into a boarding house in the city.

I thought you should know, she said.

Until yesterday, I hadn’t seen Buford for 28 years. I knew right away it was him, those same stolid biceps and funneled gaze. His hair has gone white. I saw him riding a rickety Schwinn along the riverfront, determined among wandering families. I closed my eyes as he disappeared and could still sense the darkness, cool scatter of lab reports, and bite of scorched sawdust from Buford’s workroom just ten feet away.

I have always been careful, with a closet full of well-ironed shirts and one clean gin and tonic a night. I think of the young maple growing through a rusted Chevette in Buford’s yard, in a neighborhood of polished Fords that knew nothing of nature. The tenuous passageways between stacks of newspapers in his living room, the basement full of broken record players and half-finished model airplane kits. And I can’t explain my longing for the wildness of it all.

I will search for him in a hopeless section of town; I will teach him what it is to love an old body like mine, an old body like his. I will show him what has changed and how nothing has, as I slip my hand under his wrinkled white T-shirt and the heat of my palm burns into his chest.

Julie Gard is an assistant professor of English at Bismarck State College in Bismarck, North Dakota. Her writing has appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, and a number of other literary journals and anthologies. After completing an M.F.A. at the University of Minnesota, she lived in Vladivostok, Russia as a Fulbright Fellow from 2000-2001.

I Am Screaming at the Top of My Lungs
By Chet Kozlowski

The first time you meet him it’s at that crazy corner of 23rd and Broadway, where that building that looks like a long piece of layer cake comes to a point. It’s where the streets are the widest, where they all come together and cross over each other and split apart every which way. It’s late afternoon: lights switching, horns honking, pedestrians pedding, cell phoners barking. So much hubbub it’s amazing more don’t collide. It’s a very complicated place, and you just watch your shoes and go with the herd. You’re small enough to glide through, young enough to go unnoticed. What’s more invisible than a girl with a skateboard? You mutter lyrics and scratch your itchy nose. You’re heading home after doing the bag in the park with Demo and the crew. Who cares about the chaos? The bag makes it all a warm blur.

You’ve been hearing him without even knowing it. His voice is just one of the street sounds, until you get closer. Then it slices through: “Can somebody please assist me? Won’t somebody give me hand?” A chant, clear and patient, over and over.

You’re not one to be curious, but you look up now. There he stands, in the middle of the sidewalk. “Won’t somebody just help me, please? I need assistance.” Nobody answers him. The crowd surges past, breaking around him.

You’re not one to stop, but you do now. The herd behind you jostles and swears. He stands rooted against the tide. “Can’t anybody help me here?” He clutches a stick to his chest. “I am screaming at the top of my lungs,” he says, which makes you giggle, because he’s not. He’s just talking loud and clear, like a teacher leading a fire drill.
You’re not one to help, but now you’re standing in front of him. Up close, he’s a big guy, maybe as old as your dad, crewcut, khakis, sneakers and a yellow tennis shirt. He stares over and past you, straight ahead.

You clear your throat. “What do you need?” you say. Your mouth is gummy — that’s the bag — and your voice sounds like it belongs to somebody else.

He cocks his head and peers down. “I need help crossing the street,” he says. His eyes roll around, knuckles in brine. When you don’t answer he asks, “Are you there?” He can’t see you. He’s blind.

“I’ll help,” you say.

“Good.”

You don’t know where to touch him. “Take you by your arm?” There’s a food stain on the front of his tennis shirt. The collar’s all twisted.

“Let me put my hand on your shoulder,” he says. You come around. “Short,” he says. You walk him to the curb.

Traffic lurches and whooshes past. “Busy corner,” you say.

“Tell me about it,” says the blind man.

“Gotta wait for the light,” you say.

“You’re a kid,” he says.

You shrug.

“Not many kids stop for me.” The light changes.

“You’re a good kid,” he says.

“Cross,” you say, and you lead him into the street.

The crowd comes at you. No ducking and weaving now, you’ve got this guy in tow. A straight path is what’s called for here. Make way.

“Folks stop for me, but not many kids,” he says. “I’m at this corner every day. I ask for help and sometimes I can feel somebody right next to me, not saying anything. I hear them breathing. I say to them ‘Can you help me?’ and they just don’t answer.” His hand is soggy on your shoulder. “What is it with people?”

You shrug.

“What’s your name?” he says.

“Abra.”

“Abra?” He snorts. He gazes up blankly; his eyes roll. “What’s your last name, Kadabra?”

Ha ha. Like you never heard that joke before. “It’s short for Abigail Ramona,” you say. “That’s my whole name. Abra’s my nickname.”

“Pick up your feet.”

“What?”

“You shuffle your feet.”

“Do not.”

“I can feel it.”

“Curb,” you tell him. “Step up.” You two made it to the other side.

He lets go of your shoulder. “There’s a restaurant right here, right? A Keough’s or something?”

You look around, see nothing but a stone wall with windows. “It’s a hotel, I think. No restaurant.”

“Yeah?” He flicks out the stick he’s carrying; it telescopes into a cane. “Oh well. You should stand up straight, you know.”

“I do.”

“You slouch.”

“Do not.”

He clicks the skinny cane on the sidewalk. “It’s never too early to develop self-respect. Stand tall.”

Your shoulder twitches where his hand was. You still feel it there.

He cocks his head. “Hey, you’re not coming from shop class, are you?”

“No.”

“Making model airplanes?”

“No,” you say, but you know what he means. You sniff your shirt.

“I just picked up a whiff off you. Strong smell. Like turpentine. Or glue of some sort.”

That’s the bag, you want to say. Demo sprayed a lot this time. The smell clings to your clothes. It’ll wear off by the time you get home, but right now, whew.

“Oh well,” he says. “Better hope nobody lights a cigarette near you.” He turns and starts tapping his way up Fifth. “Thanks for the help, Abigail Ramona,” he calls back. “See you around.” And then he’s gone.

On the walk home you go back to watching your shoes.

What’s he say, the blind man? He needed help and you helped him and he starts talking trash. He’s wrecking your high with this hoohah.

What’s he mean, self-respect? You got it, as much as you need to.

Short? Maybe, for your age. Slouching? Makes it easier to slip through the cracks. Shit, what’s he know about anything anyway? He’s blind. Goodbye, Buddy, you should’ve said. Don’t walk into any walls. That’s one thing you know. There are walls everywhere. If he could see, he’d see them there.

Walls to get over, walls to get around. You try to be the smartest, the fastest, the best, but the walls always come up in front of you.

There’s the wall of how much you know and how much you don’t. The wall of how pretty you are and what clothes you wear. The wall of not understanding no matter how much it’s explained. That’s why being with Demo’s so good for you.

Demo says chill, you chill. Demo says run, you run. Demo sprays inside the bag, says breathe deep, you breathe deep. Take a whole headful, Demo says. Demo says and you do.

The bag doesn’t break down these walls, or get you over them. It just makes you not care they’re there. So what does the blind man know? Some walls you can’t get over, no matter how much you don’t shuffle or slouch or have self-respect. All you really need is the bag. The bag makes things better.

By the time you get home you’ve got yourself convinced.

You see the blind man again, weeks later, in a bus shelter. You’re with Demo and the crew and he taps in. Everyone goes quiet. He folds up his cane and stands to the side. He holds it to his chest. You ignore him.

“Can somebody tell me when the #42 comes by?” he asks.

Nobody answers. Demo and the crew snicker, and you do, too.

“Can any of you assist me? I know you’re there.” That calm request.

But something’s in the air and he sniffs it. That’s the bag.

“Abra?” he says, but you don’t answer. “Abigail Ramona?” Demo and the crew wonder and nudge. But you just look away and watch your shoes. 
— 7/21/03, New York City