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  • How Fish Sleep
    by Jane Wong

    Fish Scales, cut glass by Franci Claudon

    cut glass by Franci Claudon

    When people came to the funeral, they came by foot. They came with plates of sweet pork and pound cake and sorrowful faces. The women in suits stood closest to the grave, dabbing their eyes with packaged tissues and thinking of what to cook for dinner. Behind the oaks, their children were fast asleep in fat parkas, their bellies heavy with meat and leaves. It wasn’t raining that day, but each mourner brought his own umbrella. Like mushrooms, they dotted the hill.

    The mourners weren’t family. They were the talkers, the ones who told stories of the Leung house over poker games and laundry. “The husband was cruel. That’s why,” the women said. “Her mother-in-law was overbearing. Must be,” the men said. Sometimes families would argue over dinner, waving soup spoons to stress their version: she was crazy in the head, she had a lover and felt ashamed, she was lonely and hated the weather. They even talked about her when the television was on, rising out of their worn sofa seats. If it was a good program, they’d wait until the commercial. Whenever children would ask what their parents were talking about, they would bop them over the head and give them extra ginseng soup. Soon, the children became quiet.

    At work, over the roar of the factory machinery, the father heard all of the stories told. Day after day, they told the story about the forbidden lover, who seduced the mother behind the prickle bushes. One of the co-workers always wrapped his arms around the group, winking as if the forbidden lover was standing right before them, holding the secrets to her modest curves. When the bell rang for lunch, the co-workers averted their eyes, convening in the gravel lot behind the factory with their brimming lunch
    pails. Alone, the father put on his cap and walked back to the house alongside the railroad tracks. Sometimes he took off his gloves and sat down on the tracks, picking out rocks and cheap beer caps. Sitting, he strained to hear the whistles and shouts of the school boys calling for the pretty girls across the field. He could imagine them unclasping their ties, swinging their jackets over their thin shoulders. When the train came, his body shook with its heated hum. Underneath a cloud of dirt and movement,
    he stumbled aside and watched as the train moved its way closer, its engine roaring steam. Soon, the train passed and he was left with silence. The boys had gone home. He wiped his eyes with his greased gloves and went on.

    When the father came home from work, he entered the room under the attic trap with tall boots and a garbage pail. It was late. The grass tracked in was wet with morning and the grandmother had left. Carefully, he felt around his mother’s jars and bowls. As he touched the oranges, the fruit flies roused, moving their wings about his face. He felt the slow weight and the white rot of the oranges as he placed them into the garbage pail. It was then that he eased the ladder down, the old latch rusted and willing. In the attic, squirrels were dropping one by one, their tails oily and matted to the wooden slabs. The father stayed there in the attic, cleaning death with the garbage pail. Squatting on the damp planks, he picked up each small body and trembled as he felt their thin bones, useless as the insides lost form. It was here, at this hour, that he wondered why things died.

    The grandmother heard the stories too, even though she stayed inside the Leung house. The voices seemed to worm their way into the molding, into the shutters and wallpaper cracks. They flew into the mushroom soup she ladled into bowls, into the pages of the old newspapers and mail coupons stuffed under the hungry couch. It was only when she prayed in the room under the attic trap that she began to speak. Sometimes, when her knees ached too much, she shuffled the girl’s plastic play stool into the room, the seat curved and cracked like a palm. Speaking softly, she rolled her weathered hands over the oranges and plums that lay by the shrine, ripening them until she fell asleep. The pictures, curling from the heat of the incense, seemed so distant when she spoke to them. Her parents’ framed, gray faces stared back at her blankly, wondering why she thought they knew everything.

    The girl must have known the stories so the neighborhood children ran away from her, for fear of being bopped on the head. She was often found alone in the backyard garden, singing school songs (“Sunny after Rain”) and turning rocks over to find her father’s cigarette butts. The stumps looked like teeth to her, so she placed them into her dress pockets and saved them for tooth fairies. From counting class, the girl learned she was five. She used to give her mother five items – five flower buds, five candy wrappers, five potato bugs. The mother used to count with the girl (one two three four five) and place them into her pockets and tell the girl she wanted to take a walk alone. When the girl cried, she made her promise to find more fives for her when she came back. Surely, when she’d come back, the girl would have a pile of fives waiting for her in the garden. Once, when the mother came back, she was weeping. The tree beside them sighed down its leaves. “Don’t cry, I have fives,” the girl said, crawling into her mother’s willowy lap as the sun fell and the fireflies blinked. “You always do,” the mother whispered, smoothing her child’s hair. As the girl fell asleep in her lap and the sky plumed with color, the mother lifted her head back and placed the fives into the wet of her mouth.

    Around dinner time, the mushrooms started to leave in packs, taking their empty plates and sleepy children with them. On the other side of the hill, the father and grandmother added spirit money into the fire, waiting until one curled and spit before putting in another. Fast asleep beside the flickering fire was the girl, her small lips pressed against the warm earth. The family stayed until there was nothing left to burn.

    The three descended the hill and walked back to the house, past the neighbor’s dog fence, through the front door and into the lit kitchen. The grandmother took off her shoes, pulled up her wool socks and moved into her fraying slippers, which were waiting by the oven for her arrival. Above their heads, the squirrels skittered over the planks and pink filler. The girl stubbornly clapped her hands to her ears.

    “Are you hungry?” the grandmother asked, putting water on the stove.

    “No,” the father said, awkwardly lighting a cigarette. The pack fell on the floor and the paper fumbled in his mouth. He paused. “Are you?”

    The grandmother shook her head. On the floor, the girl sighed and fidgeted, squashing ants with her hands and feet. The girl stared at the injured ants in her black dress with big eyes and freckles down her neck. Stunned, they stepped back. The girl looked up.

    “Can you take me to the pond?”

    The question should have been abrupt, but it wasn’t. A moment ago, the father had already begun to tremble as he trembled when he held the squirrels.

    “Will you take me?” the girl asked again.

    He couldn’t understand why the girl asked and why he couldn’t say no. Holding hands, father and daughter went through the kitchen door, past the neighbor’s dog fence, and down the street to the pond where the mother, hair splayed like a silk cobweb, had drowned.

    When they reached the pond, the father felt the pull of the water, which lapped at the rocks. His hand grew sweaty and the girl’s hand slipped out of his. He couldn’t move from the grass. Something kept him there, his tall boots stuck in the worm mud. The slowness of his heart was frightening in the growing night and he pressed his thin frame against an elm tree. As the sky dimmed, the girl walked past him, her hair trailing in the cold (the father grew more fearful; the freckles on her neck were too familiar), and
    onto the oily rocks at the pond’s edge. There, she sat and played with the water bugs. She dipped her hand in and watched it move under the gleaming ripples.

    “How do fish sleep?” the girl asked, her small voice casting its course across the water.

    “They swim deep down in the water, the whole family, mother first, where the fish castle is. They wait until the clouds fall and then they have blankets. They close their eyes and move their fins slowly,” the mother replied, brushing her toes against the water.

    “Mommy, what do they dream of?”

    Her mother sighed and felt the weight of the rocks in her hands. “Of things that fish do. We don’t know.”

    “I can dream like a fish, can’t I? Then I’ll know?” The girl looked at her hopefully.

    “If you are a fish,” the mother promised, her hands, now scales, glimmering in the water’s reflection.

    Taking her hands out of the water, the girl dipped her toes into the muddy bank. Slowly, she waded in until the water reached her waist. The black dress filled with air and puffed around her, weightless as she stood in the water, digging her toes into the pond weeds. The girl closed her eyes and tried to think like a fish would. She imagined her arms would spurt into fins and her mouth would open and close without talking. Looking back, she saw her father pressed against an elm, his hands over his face. The girl wanted to tell him not to cry. As the moon shone and the fireflies lit the air around the water, the girl waited for the clouds to fall as her father trembled. In the house down the street, the squirrels flooded every room, their tails and feet squirming to cover each crack of the flowered wallpaper. Underneath the attic trap, the grandmother laid her head down to the ground and listened as the animals covered her, whispering in their animal voices.

    Jane Wong is a young writer from central New Jersey whose work has appeared in journals such as Chronogram, Bard Papers, and the Asians in America Project. She is also the poetry editor of Verse Noire, a literary
    magazine based out of Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

    Franci Claudon is a glass artist who lives in San Carlos. View her work at Wavecrest Designs.

  • Giacomo’s Seasons by Mario Rigoni Stern

    translated by Elizabeth Harris Behling

     

    editor’s note: 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. An earlier excerpt of this novel, also translated by Elizabeth Harris Behling, appeared in issue 14.

    15.

    Autumn came early. The insistent rain that always marked the woodcocks’ leaving kept the recuperanti, the men who salvaged scrap weaponry, from going out much. One Sunday afternoon in November, four friends were huddled under Piero Ghella’rs cantilever roof. Hands in their pockets, shivering, they watched the sadness blowing gently over the piazza and the streets. A short while before, they’d added up their pocket change.

    “Four of us!” one of them burst out. “And we can’t even come up with four lire to go to a movie; we don’t even have one lira to get ourselves a half-liter of wine at the tavern! What kind of life is that!”

    “I’m joining the fascists. Then maybe I can get into the border guard.”

    “You’d be better off trying for the forestry militia,” the first one said.

    “It’s harder to get in,” another answered. “You’ve got to have good recommendations. And there’s no telling when those jobs will be posted, either.”

    “Tomorrow,” the first one said, “I’m going to the town hall to see if there’s some jobs listed–any job. I can’t stay around here anymore. Maybe I’ll sneak into Switzerland and find some work, way up in the mountains. Like Toni Ballot did.”

    “I think I saw a job posted over by the public bathhouse. Let’s take a look.”

    It was a notice to sign up for two years in the royal carabinieri with reenlistment into regular service. The one who’d said he was anxious to leave slowly read the notice out loud. Then he said, “Tomorrow morning, I’m going to the Registry Office to get the forms. I’ll sell the recupero in my shed to get my papers stamped.”

    “Not me,” another one said. “I’m not going into the carabinieri. I’m waiting for the forestry to be posted. And I’m joining the Fascist Party, too–and I sure hope my pink card doesn’t come in the meantime.”

    That pink card was your draft notice ordering you to present yourself for military service that also served as a pass from home to your designated barracks.

    The four men watched as Albino Vu made his way slowly up the street. They greeted him and asked if he was going to the movies.

    “The movies!–what for?–life’s one big movie! Last night I was out drinking some and I wound up spending the night at the carabinieri’s. Good people, them carabinieri. So now I’m sober, and I’m headed back to Boscosecco.” He stopped and took a deep breath. He hadn’t talked that much in a long while. But he’d watched these four grow up, had known them since they were kids out hunting with their shotguns.

    “There’s a good movie playing,” said the one who wanted to go into the forestry militia. “It stars a beautiful actress, Greta Garbo. She plays the queen of Sweden.”

    “I don’t care if they’re beautiful or Garbo–don’t you listen to women’s garble.” Vu shuffled off again, his recupero sack over his shoulder.

    People said Albino Vu acted that way because of what he’d discovered after he came home from the war: while he was off in the trenches, his girl was fooling around with his friend who’d been rejected by the army. After that, Vu left town, his house, everything. He headed into the mountains where he’d fought and he’d lost so many real friends–and he stayed up there, even in wintertime, in some pasture, or holed up in a bunker, waiting for spring. He didn’t need much to live on, almost nothing. He found quality recupero, not quantity, and always small stuff. Dried gun powder for the hunters that he traded for shoes or old clothes. Copper he’d sell to Seber to buy himself just enough food to hold him a time, and never more than that. The rest he’d spend on wine at Pozza’s or Toni della Pesa’s where he’d sit and have philosophical debates with Motorcycle Gigi. The four friends watched as Vu walked off, singing a song that cheered up the street.

    The recuperanti had a crisis on their hands. The lira had been revalued, so metal prices dropped. Even worse–the forestry militiamen and the local woodsmen were saying the recuperanti’s digging was destroying the topsoil in the pastures and damaging the seedlings so the woods couldn’t grow back. Someone informed the authorities, and they threatened the recuperanti with fines, even prison.

    One day–it was nearly summer of that year, 1931–we found out the National Fascist Party was planning to set up an enormous camp, right here by us, for the children of Italians in the Fascists Abroad Organization. They picked a spot in the fertile meadows around the Rendola River, and the hay was cut and gathered early.

    “So,” the recuperanti said, “you get fined for digging up rocks in the mountains. But destroy our best meadows, and you’re a hero.”

    Giacomo’s father went down to the Rendola one afternoon to get a look at this famous camp for himself. They were marking the spots for the tents, setting up the kitchens, and digging the latrines. Two commune workers were there and some folks he didn’t know who must have come up from the valleys. Maybe they were in the Volunteer Militia For National Security.

    “Hey, you!” A man wearing shorts and no shirt was calling to him. “You wanna work?”

    “Yeah, but not for free.”

    “Get your jacket off and come here.”

    So that’s how Giacomo’s father found work for almost two months. The first thing was arranging the tents in a row according to the blue prints. The entrance to the camp, down a lane off the local road, was framed by two enormous pennants with the tri-colored flag and the Savoy coat of arms. All along this lane were still more pennants with flags leading up the gentle slope to the top of the hill, and finally, to a huge portrait of Mussolini with his bald head. The clearing around this portrait would be for camp gatherings, for raising and lowering the flag. One tent could hold maybe twenty kids; there were enough metal-frame bunk beds for a thousand teenaged-fascist Avanguardisti. To carry water from the town aqueduct, the men had to build an above-ground piping system fitted to dozens of washtub taps. In other words, quite a job.

    Right away you could tell Giacomo’s father knew what he was doing. He always went home at night with something in his jacket pockets: bread, bologna, quince fruit bars wrapped in tissue paper. They gave him a big noon meal and a snack at five–a real waste of food–so he brought the leftovers home for dinner.

    He’d been working fifteen days when the province fascist party secretary and the fascist mayor, the podestà, arrived along with other officials up from Rome, all of them there to see how Camp Mussolini was coming along. Chauffeurs and aides were bouncing around like grasshoppers.

    “You’re behind!” the party secretary said. “Get going! Get those pine branches up on the arches–and the fasces, too–get those axe blades and sticks tied together! And how about the sentry boxes? The truck will be here tomorrow with the muskets. Have you set up the gun racks? Hop to! Hop to!”

    To speed things up (seeing how the volunteer militiamen liked to slip into the tents farthest out for a little nap after eating), Giacomo’s father told the director he ought to hire some other workers: “I know a couple of good men. Men who know how to work and to work hard.”

    “Maybe you’re right,” the director said. “Bring them along tomorrow and we’ll see how they do.”

    The next day Giovanni showed up with Moro and Moleta, two recuperanti. Between Moro Soll’s shouting and Moleta’s quieter approach, they got the workers moving.

    The Avanguardisti started to arrive by cablecar. “Our fine boys from the Italians Abroad have heard Mother Italy’s great voice calling, and they answer with affection. They are coming to the Altipiano from all over the world. From scorching hot Africa and the wintry North. From the distant Americas to our neighbor nations of the Alps. Here in Camp Mussolini, Dante’s words beat a path into every heart. Our Mother Tongue, sweet vehicle of faith and solid fortress of our nation, stands proud among so many exotic languages, enchanting all with her sweet song. As these boys wander our mountains, they will grow to appreciate the beautiful, heroic stories of their fathers, those brave men who volunteered to fight for their country, who told their stories in a distant land, among a foreign people. Now, in our mountains, these fine boys will understand the silent eloquence of their fathers’ memories and they will be filled with a greater, ever more vital pride in being sons of Italy.” And so on.

    One day the camp director (who was really a marshal on loan from the light infantry) asked Giacomo’s father if he knew how to cook, too. Giovanni automatically said yes. And that’s how he wound up a cook’s helper, along with Moro Soll.

    The last of the Avanguardisti were there now. The days went by with the bugle call: reveille, breakfast, fall-in, flag-raising, prayers for the king, for Il Duce, for the country, for the far-off families. Choir practice: “Rising Sun,” “Youth.” Then gymnastics, close-order drill with muskets, group games for “instilling discipline and order, physical excellence, quick decision-making and reaction time, and for improving all bodily systems.” There were also group hikes in the sacred mountains of the motherland, everyone marching and singing:

    We are Fascists from abroad
    Marching fast and proud
    With Mussolini at our side
    We know how to fight
    We know how to die.
    If the reds dare show their snouts
    Smash’em!
    Give’em our heels and fists
    Smash’em!
    Then to show what we’re about
    Smash’em!
    We’ll finish ‘em off with a club
    finish ‘em off with a club!

    At that song, Giovanni and Moro shook their heads. “Poor Italy,” they muttered.

    After evening rations, lowering the flag, and changing the guard at the camp entrance, the Avanguardisti were off-duty. They went out in groups in their snappy uniforms, wandering through town, looking to strike up a conversation with some girls, trying to impress them by speaking another language, but they always swore in Italian. Mario and Nino met a few Avanguardisti from Casablanca and Salonica, and they and the girls would all wind up playing together on Via Mount Ortigara.

    One morning the local officials and the podestà were inspecting the camp and saw Giacomo’s father at work in the kitchen, and they protested because “he was a suspicious element–not an official party member.” Old Sharpshooter (that’s what everyone was calling the technical director of Camp Mussolini by now) told these officials that it was fine by him, that he couldn’t care less if Giovanni was a white shirt, a black shirt, a red shirt, or a yellow shirt. Then came the night, after evening rations, when Giacomo’s father went off to the Villa Rossi grove with the leftovers from the kettle and almost got himself fired. Once again Old Sharpshooter came to his defense, this time against Padre Salsa, the hero-chaplain who had three rows of medals over the red cross on his chest. The padre had joined the camp to carry Faith and Country to these fine lads of the Fascists Abroad.

    Giovanni had arranged things with Giacomo and the other local children to make sure any pasta or minestrone left over after rations got back to their homes. The children, crouching in a trench with their pots, would wait for him every afternoon and evening. Padre Salsa surprised him just as he was scooping some pasta out from the kettle.

    “What’s this?–caught you, you thief!–you swindler!”

    “Padre, sir, this was extra food. Leftovers. They were just going to throw it away.”

    “Scraps should be saved for the farmer’s pigs!”

    “But this is still good. Giving it to hogs–that’s such a pity. And these children going hungry.”

    “These children are lazy, raggedy beggars! They’re never to show their faces around Camp Mussolini again! They’re a disgrace to Italy! Now–out!–out of here! Scat!”

    The children fled, nearly crying, with what little pasta Giacomo’s father had been able to give them. Padre Salsa ordered the kettle knocked over; the rest of the pasta spilled into the dirt. He went straight to Old Sharpshooter. “This has got to stop–our boys from abroad mustn’t see them! Shameful! That man should be kicked out of here!”

    “He’s worth more than five soldiers. I’ll see to it this doesn’t happen again.”

    That night, after Giovanni and Moro Soll cleaned up the kitchen and prepared for the next day’s caffellatte and cocoa, they went home and decided on a plan. Every evening at the same time Padre Salsa ate at the Croce Bianca Inn. Moro would keep watch and at just the right moment, he’d whistle for the children hiding deep in the bushes. Old Sharpshooter pretended not to notice; so all that month the local children enjoyed Camp Mussolini’s delicious pasta and minestrone–and they weren’t the only ones. Things went the same the following year.

    In the spring of 1932, work started on the ossario or “bone” monument. It was going up on the Laiten Hills, east of town, where the bombed-out houses had been left unrepaired. The boys from town, and their fathers before them, used to climb those hills to play.

    In the spring, kites would rise in the sky. “Dragons,” they called them. Vittorini from the pharmacy could make the very best dragons out of wax paper, bamboo slats, and glue. He’d also come up with a type of wooden reel with iron pins that let out or wound the string, depending on what the dragon needed as he soared up above, higher than the larks, the crows, the circling hawks.

    Summers, even though the owners didn’t like their meadows trampled, boys and girls went up and gathered armfuls of red lilies (“archpriests”) before the grass was cut.

    In the fall, the Piazza boys and the Uptown boys used to have wars at the very top of the Laitens, on all the rocks from the cannon volleys, which had been piled in one big heap. Sometimes they’d have sling-shot battles with lead pellets for ammunition. Lucky for them, their helmets were Austrian, not Italian.

    Winters, they set up a ski-jump on those hills where everyone had first learned how to ski. And that’s how Mario broke his arm one February afternoon, making a jump.

    It was a summer day when the engineers and surveyors went up the hills escorted by the podestà and the fascist party secretary. With their range finders, their tape measures, their theodolites, the technicians got to work surveying, measuring, scribbling. And so, after numerous proposals, offers, conferences, tests, and on-the-spot investigations, the Roman authorities decided that a great monument was to be built and that this great monument holding the remains of our heroes who’d died on the Altipiano (for the country’s salvation) would go right here, on our hills of play. To make room for the imperial-style arch, all the quiet cemeteries in the meadows and woods were leveled. Hundreds of workers started in with picks and shovels, digging up the rocks, preparing the foundation, the cement and marble burial niches. Everything dug up was loaded onto Decauville handcarts, then brought down to the meadows near town and dumped, for future road construction.

    17.

    They were waiting on the spring thaw like they’d never waited before. The larks had returned to the sunny river banks, but since it still froze up here at night, the birds–or so the older people claimed–would fly back down to the plains at dusk. Everyone was waiting, too, for the jobs to start up again and for the time when they could start spreading manure on the potato fields. The Grass family was already hauling manure in panniers, early in the morning, step by step up a path, over icy snow and patches of bare ground: over “harnust and happar” as they used to say in the ancient tongue. The Grasses were getting a head start on all the field work, making sure everything was done at home in case jobs opened up on the huge ossario monument (the bone monument) or on some community road project.

    And when the late-morning sun was high enough to warm the communal fields, Giacomo and his father would go up with picks and shovels and work their small plot of ground by the woods. Both Giacomo’s father and his grandmother thought this plot would be good for lentils, maybe even potatoes the year after that. Twenty kilos of lentils in the house by November meant good minestrone all winter.

    They would borrow five kilos of seed lentils from the Zais, who’d had an excellent crop the year before with their big field on Poltrecche. If they couldn’t pay the Zai family back in lentils, they’d do it selling recupero.

    And they weren’t the only ones clearing the communal fields by the woods, out past the private properties. With winter coming to an end, smoke rose from the burning brush and turf in the sunniest spots on the hilltop. Glacial moraine and rocks were gathered to make dry support walls for reducing the slope. The rocks and gravel piled up from the digging were placed below these walls. If there wasn’t enough manure to spread, beech leaves and red-spruce shavings would do. By the time the cuckoo returned in April, the finished plots would be so neat and orderly, so harmoniously sculpted from the landscape, so breath-taking as seen from Petareitle Hill, that they’d be called “The Gardens.”

    With the noon bell, the neighbors gathered together to eat, to talk a little about life and smoke a pipeful in peace. Gigio Rizzo, the municipal guard, would pass by once in a while to check on their work and to make sure everything was going according to the unwritten laws: no damaging the woods, no trespassing. He also had the job of figuring out the total area tilled by each family for the annual municipal tax on their permanent lease.
    Gigio Rizzo was stern but fair, a man of a few, choice words. Always dignified in his forestry uniform and well-oiled boots, carrying that cornel-wood cane with the curved handle, walking with that fast, sure stride. You always felt his presence, even when he wasn’t there. He didn’t wear a sidearm and if he sometimes heard subversive talk, well, he certainly wasn’t reporting anything back to the podestà. Like that day Giacomo’s father blew up about all the misery and how Il Duce’s revaluing the lira and decreasing wages was helping out the capitalists, not the proletarians.

    With snow creeping back toward the heights, the men started going out for recupero again, leaving the women to plant and tend the plowed fields.

    And work started up again on the ossario monument. The touchy inspector from the public works office was incredibly stubborn about the big white blocks from our few Altipiano quarries–the slightest defect and the marble was rejected. Sometimes the quarry workers tried filling in a chip or flaw with marble dust and putty, but nothing got by the inspector. He’d smash the block with a sledge hammer so it couldn’t even be used on some less important job.

    The blocks, from quarries sometimes as far as two hours away, were dragged up the Laiten Hills on horse- or mule-drawn carts. The stonecutters would finish the marble up there according to the designs: each block had its number and assigned place in the monument. With levers, rollers, jacks, and tackle, the workers hauled the blocks up to the masons, who set them in place. The construction site was one big swarming, organized ant hill. The foremen paid attention to every last detail. The engineers from Ferlini & Roncato Contractors were afraid of the touchy inspector–he’d pop up silently, bark out a few words, and with a single wave of his hand have whole sections knocked down–they’d been carelessly done–or a block already up there had to be replaced.

    One hot, muggy June day, a foreman spotted a worker whose shirt wasn’t soaked in sweat.

    “You! Yeah, you! Come here. Why aren’t you sweating? What have you been up to?–lying around in the shade?”

    “I never sweat, Boss. I just naturally don’t sweat.”

    “Bull. Don’t give me that. Everybody sweats here. We don’t want any wise guys working on our hero monument.”

    “It’s not my fault I don’t sweat. My comrades’ll tell you. Ask anybody.”

    “Doesn’t matter–you’re fired. And remember: ‘buddies,’ not ‘comrades.’ Come back Saturday for the rest of your pay.”

    Maybe this foreman was in such a rotten mood because he’d gone into the workyard latrine that morning and seen “Death to Il Duce” scratched in charcoal on the planks. As a model for the workers, he pointed out the innocent giant who’d just been discharged from the mountain artillery and who, rumor had it, used to present arms with a 75/13 howitzer barrel. He was strong as a horse, with the spirit of a child. Using levers and rollers, he moved solid blocks of marble around like they were pumice stone.

    At noon, the workers would find some shade in a ditch or by one of the monument walls under construction. They’d make a fire from carpenters’ shavings and set a mess kit on the embers, warming up their soup and polenta brought from home. During this hour break, some of the town boys would climb up the Laitens, maybe to see what their play-hills were going through, but also just curious about all the work. The boys started to know these laborers by name, these men from nearby towns. Some were young, almost boys themselves. Others were old and gray-haired. Many had been in the Great War, but they didn’t seem all that moved to be building this enormous monument for the bones of their comrades.

    Mario climbed the hills almost every day. A number of the men knew his family, and one day a group asked if he’d bring them a bottle of wine. There were eight of them, sitting around a fire, toasting some polenta on the coals, and with thirty centesimi each, they came up with the two lire and forty centesimi needed for a bottle of local wine. Mario raced down to his family’s shop, bought the wine, and raced up the hills again, knowing the men had to get back to work. This way, they could at least have a couple of mugs of wine in peace.

    Later at supper, Mario’s grandfather said, “You should go up there every day at ten-to-twelve with six bottles in a couple of baskets. I bet you can sell every last one.”

    And so at the foreman’s whistle, Mario would make sure he was up on the Laitens with his baskets and his six bottles of wine. He’d work his way through the groups as the men put their money together for the two lire and forty centesimi. Sometimes when payday was far off, they’d ask for a bottle on credit and Mario, just like his grandfather taught him, always agreed without drawing up a note. The poor don’t cheat. When the wine was all sold, he’d sit and listen to the men’s stories.

    One in particular stayed with him. Nando dell’Ecchele told them how he’d sold his recupero one night, then stopped at Margherita’s for a glass with Vu. Afterwards, going home, when he was just outside town by the cross, there was this silent line of soldiers on the road right in front of him. The full moon kept slipping through the clouds–it was bright out just then, so he got a good look. The soldiers were pale, silent, walking without a sound–except their sighing. The long line of soldiers was coming from the mountains to the south, marching through the hollow between the hills, and up again, through the Nos Valley, toward the higher mountains.

    Other scattered groups of soldiers in single file trickled down from the mountains into the valley. You couldn’t see a beginning to them, or an end. Nando just stood there, absolutely still, until the dawn grew light, and the moon went down, and they all disappeared.

    “The dead soldiers’ spirits,” said an old worker who’d been a driver in the war.

    “Sure,” another said, “but were they Italian or Austrian?”

    “I can’t remember,” Nando answered. “Maybe both.”

    “You ask me,” another man said, “you had one glass too many with Vu. Who knows what that glass was telling you.”

    “I barely had a drop. A half-liter’s nothing split two ways.”

    “And now,” said the one who’d spoken first, “here we are, building a monument for the soldiers’ bones. And their spirits, out wandering the mountains.”

    They stayed quiet until the foreman’s whistle called them back. Mario, unsettled, went straight home, not stopping in the meadows, and up in his room he sat at his desk and wrote a poem, long gone now. Just three lines are left:

    In the cold moonlight
    they walk the mountains together–
    the living and the dead.

    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.

    Elizabeth Harris Behling grew up in Arizona and Kentucky and now teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota. For her translations, she has won several awards, including the Dudley Fitts Award and the Gary Wilson Award. Her stories and translations of Italian prose and poetry have been accepted in Other Voices, Denver Quarterly, Florida Review, Northwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other magazines. She has had fiction-residency fellowships at the Blue Mountain Center and the Ragdale Foundation.

    The image: This poster was created by Luigi Martinati in 1935.

  • Mirceau Doviescue

    She had beautiful furniture and a number of fancy rugs. There was a bed, of course, with several well-worn quilts, a large comforter, and hundreds of pillows. On a cold day in Timisoara, it would lure you in and not let go. If the curtain was pulled back, you could lay there in luxury and warmth, and see all the way down Podul Decebal, over the river, and out past the bus stop where less fortunate people huddled together in ice and snow, waiting for a bus that might never arrive.

    Mirceau Doviescue (1934-1992), The Girl From Arad

    Raven Archives

  • An American Story
    by Kelly Lundgren Pietrucha


    photo courtesy of the Library of Congress

    Just as I’m filling my mother’s glass with more wine, she tells me she doesn’t love my father.

    Don’t say that, I tell her.

    You don’t know me, she says.

    She takes another drink of her wine and returns the glass to the table. We have just finished eating dinner. My husband is away and she says so is hers, but she does not mean it in the same way I do. My husband is fighting a war in Iraq and her husband is asleep on their twenty-year-old couch. It’s like we are living in two different worlds, my mother says. I wash the remains of our dinner into the sink and flick the switch for the disposal.

    We have dinner together in silence, she says.

    But my mother and father have always been silent with one another, even among words.

    Behind my mother, on the buffet my husband and I bought together with our wedding money, there is a picture of my grandmother on Ellis Island. She is only eight years old in the photo, strapped to her uncle’s side like paste. I found the picture in my ninth grade history textbook, in a chapter called “The American Dream,” and despite the years I recognized her immediately. I showed my grandmother the book and she couldn’t stop touching the glossy pages.

    Maybe you just don’t want to love him anymore, I say to my mother. She doesn’t answer. She picks her glasses up from the table and begins rubbing the lenses with her napkin. My napkin.

    The day after my grandmother saw herself in my book she decided to take me to Ellis Island. You are a woman now, she said, and ready to know about struggle, the inevitabilities of life.

    The American Dream, I said, remembering all I’d learned in school.

    Genocide, she said, also remembering.

    She had only been back there twice: once with my grandfather, and once with my mother. We walked through the building and said nothing to each other. Outside, between the East River and the Atlantic Ocean, between Brooklyn and Manhattan, between Manhattan and New Jersey, between New Jersey and Staten Island, between so much world and us, my grandmother said this: The worst was leaving my mother in Armenia. She kissed me and I knew we wouldn’t see each other again.

    My mother puts her glasses back on. I should have known you wouldn’t understand, she says. She gets up from the table and walks into the bathroom. She turns the light on, stares into the mirror, looks back at me, and then closes the door. She does not come out for almost fifteen minutes.

    When I first brought my husband home to meet my family, my grandmother didn’t like him because he said something about how Armenia and America are almost the same but with just a few letters in different places. She smiled to be polite and then left the table.

    Come out of the bathroom, I say to my mother. It’s time for dessert. I can see her feet under my newly painted bathroom door, so clean and bright in its whiteness, just as I had wanted it to be. I walk back into the dining room and hear the handle turning and the bathroom door opening, and soon we are both back in our places at the table, eating dessert.

    I’m leaving him, she says, her mouth full of chocolate cake. She has icing on her chin and I want to say something to her, but all I can do is hand her a napkin.

    It’s not fair that they will take your husband like that, my grandmother said when I told her he was being sent to Iraq. There was a hummingbird feeding on sugar water outside her kitchen window.

    Mom, I say and she stops thinking about whatever it is she is thinking about and turns to me. What did you feel when Grandma took you to Ellis Island? I have been wanting to ask her this for thirteen years.

    Loneliness, she says. The tablecloth is worn and dirty and unsuitable for use anymore. And also anger and sadness. For her. What about hope, I say. I thought it was supposed to be a place of hope.

    My mother leans back in her chair. I guess you know what everything is supposed to be, she says. She is moving the stem of her near-empty wine glass in circles on the tablecloth as though she is getting ready to drink the first sip and not the last.

    It was not an easy life, my grandmother said on the ferry ride home from Ellis Island. I was never American.

    You could have been, I said.

    She looked at me, cold and foreign, and said: You think everything is so easy.

    My mother gets up from the table and goes to the closet for her coat. I want to offer her something else but there is nothing left: the wine bottle is empty, our plates are bare and there are no words left for us to say.

    The night before my husband left, he asked me how to fight for things you’re not sure you believe in. We had just finished making love and his chest was still heaving under the sheet. I reached to the nightstand and turned the light out, because it was all I could think of doing.

    I can’t stand the way he breathes, my mother says at the door, one more grievance to add to the list, as if she is still required to convince. He pushes the air out of his lungs so forcefully, like he’s disturbing it, making it do something it doesn’t want to do.

    You have a choice, I say, because I still want to believe in something.

    Kelly Lundgren Pietrucha holds a Masters in Fiction from Temple University, where she now teaches creative writing and literature. She also teaches at Rutgers University and Camden County College in New Jersey. Her fiction has appeared in Pindeldyboz.

  • The Tao of Wade, Sept. 19, 2005

    Fussy, a few things:

    1. I want acknowledgment that I was the one who named you Fussy (full name, “Little Miss Fussybritches”) way back when in Arkansas. It’s turning out to be my only claim to fame.

    2. Why beat up on poor old Garrison Keillor? I got a soft spot for the guy. Prairie Home Companion is generally a snooze but it sounds good in our sixties house on a Saturday afternoon when the light through the door into the backyard is just right and if you turn the radio down just low enough that you can’t hear it and you drink yourself into a whiskey stupor, and his Writer’s Almanac takes a beating (some poet really railed on him in Poetry magazine recently) but it’s interesting to know when writer’s birthdays are (I guess), and I haven’t read any of his books, but every now and then he publishes a little essay in The Nation exhalting democracy that will bring tears to your eyes. Yes, his lawsuit against that guy for dissing Prairie Home Companion is kind of lame, but sometimes you just gotta let the old guys stand outside and yell at the kids to get out of their yards.

    3. David Koen was going to come stay in our house (which we haven’t sold yet) until all that New Orleans crap gets sorted out, but he can’t get Kittie to move to Houston.

    4. Whatever happened to the Suite? I bet Kevin published it for a million dollars and didn’t give us our cut.

    5. I’ll be your literary executor if you’ll be mine. I think I’d be an awesome literary executor. You would be too. We’d both be good ones.

    6. Remember that song “It’s just you and me and we just disagree?” For awhile there was a guy who worked here named Dwayne Mason, which is what I thought the name of the singer of that song was, and I was always making little jokes when I ran into him in the elevator about how he just had that one hit back in the seventies and now look what happened to him. That sort of thing. Anyway, I found out the singer’s name was Dave Mason, not Dwayne, so no wonder that guy never had any idea what I was talking about.

    7. Our weird little neighborhood has its own monthly newsletter called the Shepherd Park Plaza Pulse. It reminds you when heavy trash pickup is and includes a few daffynitions, points to ponder, that sort of thing. It also lists the residents who have birthdays that month. Janet was excited when we got our first issue and saw the birthday listings. “Wow, it’s a really young neighborhood. Nobody here is over 31 years old!” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that those numbers were the birthdates of the people, not their ages.

    8. I’ll send you some pictures of our old house. Maybe somebody in San Francisco wants to buy it just for the novelty of owning a house in Houston. That’s why we bought it and we’ve never regretted it.

    Love,
    Wade

  • Abducted

    Abducted

    flash fiction by Stephen Graham Jones

    Every time Donald saw a UFO, he got an erection. The problem, of course, was that UFO’s didn’t seem to be quite as common a phenomenon as they’d been in his youth. Dr. Collins smiled politely, in appreciation, and studied the holes in the tops of his loafers.

    “So what you need then . . . ” Dr. Collins said, narrowing his eyes to keep up, to record all this for his wife, “what you need is some way of bringing the aliens back, yes?”

    Donald didn’t have to look away to answer. There was never any eye contact during the examinations. Dr. Collins had given up on that years ago; it was why he’d had the large window cut into the room – to give his patients trees to study, birds, squirrels, life. Anything but the fourteen thousand dollar chair in the corner, the tile around it splashed with iodine.

    “Maybe if they could just do a flyby once a week or something,” Donald said, smiling. “Flash their lights a little for the wife, y’know?”

    The wife. Dr. Collins filed that one away too, crossed the floor to the side counter, for the prescription tablet he had to keep locked in the drawer now. The reason for Donald’s visit, according to the chart he’d filled out in the waiting room, was prostate, which he’d spelled prostrate. It meant to throw oneself facedown on the ground in humility.

    Without looking up from his tablet, Dr. Collins asked, “Is that all you need, then? Some more, um . . . close encounters?”

    “You can arrange them?” Donald said, his voice rising, incredulous, his hands gripping the examination table.

    Dr. Collins signed his name with a flourish, letting the s trail out longer than usual – a comet tail, he thought – and shrugged for Donald, said, “You still have to provide the candles, I guess.”

    Donald laughed with him, and for a moment they were just two gentlemen from different generations, each raised well enough to know how to discuss delicate subject matter. The way Dr. Collins would tell it to his wife, he knew, would involve some of the things he should have said, about implants, maybe, about how the discs they were both talking about were essentially the same, it was just a matter of scale, of provenance: one came glittering down from the sky, the other across the counter of a pharmacy. But then Donald stepped down, took the prescription Dr. Collins was offering. He looked from it up to Dr. Collins, then out the window again.

    “I assure you -” Dr. Collins started, trying not to smile.

    Donald didn’t let him finish, interrupted not so much with words but by centering Dr. Collins in his old man eyes, his face still angled slightly away, as if he were embarrassed.

    “I think you maybe misunderstand, Doc,” he said, still picking through his words in a way that Dr. Collins could tell there were a lot not being said. “I didn’t get the hard – I didn’t get excited about the UFO’s myself, see. No, no. They never were much but a bother to me, with what they did to the corn and all.”

    Now he was handing the prescription back. Dr. Collins looked at it between them like it was from another planet, and from it up to Donald, just as alien now.

    “Then . . . what?” he said, not sure if he should be ready to smile or not.

    Donald shrugged, rubbed his rough chin with the side of his hand in a way that Dr. Collins couldn’t tell if it was the hand itching or the chin.

    “The wife, I mean, y’know?” he said finally, looking outside now, but up, too. Dr Collins looked with him. “Every time they buzzed our house back then, me, I’d go for the barn, to keep the horses from kicking their stall doors out. But the wife, she’d run out after them, see? Then come back – God – come back to the porch an hour or two later, corn silk in her hair, spider web trailing off thesleeves of her dress like a shawl I guess, her chest just rising and . . .”

    Dr. Collins studied the sky long after Donald was gone, his new prescription not a prescription at all, but a referral, for his prostate, spelled without the r. That’s what he had really been there for. Dr. Collins didn’t tell his wife about that part of it, though. Instead, the next morning, Saturday, he found himself awake in the house earlier than usual. No coffee in the air, no cars outside. Just dawn, seeping in through the blinds over the kitchen window in beams that, for a moment, seemed to be feeling, scanning.

    Dr. Collins – Stan on the weekends – walked through the beams to the front door, and out onto the different world of the porch, the automatic sprinklers flowing up into silvery mushrooms, the whole landscape of the neighborhood suddenly alien, so that, until his wife came gasping up from the street, her morning run complete, he knew he believed.

    “Getting too old for this,” his wife said when she could, her hands made into fists around the knees of her sweatpants, her lungs trying to wring all the oxygen they could from Earth’s thin atmosphere, and Dr. Collins shook his head no about that. She wasn’t.

    Stephen Graham Jones is the author of The Fast Red Road-A Plainsong, All the Beautiful Sinners, Bleed into Me, The Bird is Gone: A Manifesto, My Heart Is a Chainsaw, and many other books. An Assistant Professor of English at Texas Tech University, Jones is really, really into Elvis.

    This story appeared at fictionattic.com in 2005.

  • 10 Questions with Rachel Pastan

    This Side of Married cover
    Rachel Pastan grew up in suburban Maryland and attended Harvard College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has published short stories in magazines like The Threepenny Review and Mademoiselle, and won the Arts and Letters Fiction prize and the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. She has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board and the Delaware Arts Council, and she has been a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. This Side of Married was selected for Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers series. This interview was conducted in 2005 by Michelle Richmond.

    What are you reading right now?

    Imamorata by Joseph Gangemi, as part of my campaign to be familiar with the work of Philadelphia writers (I moved to the Philadelphia area a few years ago). It’s the story of a psychic-phenomena debunker in Philly in the 1920s–very well written and compelling. My favorite book of the past few months is Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett, the story of the author’s intense friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, who died of a drug overdose (suicide?) several years ago.

    2. Do you write to music? If so, what was the soundtrack for This Side of Married?

    No, I write to silence. I’m always going around turning off radios and CDs and the children’s story tapes, and putting ticking watches away into drawers. Anything with a rhythm gets in the way of the rhythm of the sentences.

    3. What’s the most surprising comparison you’ve heard when people talk about your book? Has anyone compared your novel or your writing to the work of another author in an unexpected way?

    I was surprised that my editor felt This Side of Married was like a Laurie Colwin novel. I love Laurie Colwin but had not thought our work was alike. Then I reread Family Happiness and the parallels in subject matter and mood were frighteningly apparent.

    4.Sisterhood is at the heart of This Side of Married. Parents always say they love all their children equally, but I have a hunch they’re just being diplomatic. Which of the three sisters are you most attached to?

    Oh, I love Isabel! She’s not as mean and impossible as Tina, but she has more of an edge to her than Alice. Alice can be stern sometimes, but I like someone with an edge.

    5. What’s your favorite book from childhood?

    Charlotte’s Web. I wish I had a more interesting choice, but E.B. White takes everything he knows about life–and death–and works it all into this book. It also has some of the most beautiful sentences in all of literature.

    6. What’s your favorite Philadelphia eatery?

    Vetri! Incredible Northern Italian food in a the lovely, relaxed atmosphere of a Society Hill townhouse. The only drawback is how difficult it is to get a reservation. In a (much) more informal vein, I also love Johnny Brenda’s (a dive bar with terrific food–grilled octopus, falafel) in Fishtown.

    7. What other titles were in the running for your book before you decided on , and why did This Side of Married seem like the perfect fit?

    At First Sight, The Second Sister, Men and Other Reptiles. This Side of
    Married makes it clear the book is about marriage/love/relationships without being too straight-forward about it.

    8. Which question would you least want an audience member at a reading to ask?

    Well, the question I get asked most frequently that I don’t like is: Why did such and-such a character do *that*? I think the person asking really wants me to explain why, but I feel the book itself should explain way. If it doesn’t, then the book has failed. So I hear those questions as criticisms, whether or not they’re meant that way.

    9. Let’s say someone fell in love with your book and wanted to show his or her appreciation by bringing a gift of a food item to one of the readings. What item would be most likely to inspire your everlasting gratitude?

    Buratta, the mozzarella-like cheese from Northern Italy; or petit fours.

    10. What’s in your attic? If you don’t have one, what’s in your hall closet?

    I’m not sure what’s up there, except what’s closest to the stairs: suitcases, outgrown clothes from one child waiting for the younger one to get bigger, winter boots, sharp nails sticking out of the floor, and a vast quantity of filters for the air conditioner.

    Since the publication of this interview in 2005, Rachel Pastan has published three more novels: In the Field, Alena, and Lady of the Snakes. Visit Rachel Pastan’s website to learn more.

  • Landfill

    flash fiction by Stephen Ausherman

     

    Delores lived in a split-level ranch home set upon a landfill. She stored peach preserves in her storm cellar, but they didn’t taste right. Her husband, before he died, took good care of her. He built a shed on the property, a place where she could keep all the animals she liked to make out of corncobs and gumdrops, life-sized antelopes and ocelots with cellophane eyes and sugary hides. And he erected a satellite dish that pulled in a variety of shows on art, nature, and troubles in the world she could never have imagined on her own.

    It stood out in the yard, an enormous unblinking eye that stared at the heavens and shared its visions on a 15-inch screen. It revealed a multitude of ministries from Florida to California, each in desperate need of prayer, forgiveness, contributions, whatever you can afford. Earth is so crowded, they said, and yet so empty. We need your help to fill the void.

    Delores could afford little more than hunger, and so focused on the new forms of worship she learned from the TV. She meditated. She danced in circles with her hands in the air. She took a vow of silence and broke it by speaking in tongues. She tried fasting, only to end up with a vitamin deficiency that nearly blinded her. Light from the screen took on an unbearable glare. Soon even the softest glow seemed to sear her eyes.

    She sought refuge in the storm cellar, moving in with the spiders and paint cans and peaches in mason jars. Her eyes remained shut, yet cracks of daylight crept in and spread like crimson webs pulsing in her eyelids. She spent days with her face pressed into her knees, just waiting for the night.

    Six months of experimental rehabilitation at St. Luke’s inBirmingham restored her sight and relieved her pain. It also afforded her a detailed knowledge of the hospital, its prayer halls, operating rooms, and most of all, its disposal units and incinerators. She soon amassed an impressive collection of surgical leftovers: exhausted organs and severed limbs. She pickled them in formaldehyde and placed the amber jars on the bookcase in her bedroom to keep her ever mindful of the suffering of others.

    As her collection grew, she made room in the shed, setting her gumdrop animals loose in the yard, where they blanched in the sun and decomposed in the rain. The satellite remained fixed upon heaven. The needful people on TV grew insatiable.

    She retreated once more to the cellar, this time with her jars of humanity. There, in the darkness, her heart beat out its subterranean percussion, talking drums she swore would wake the world. Through the thundering rhythm, she spoke to the jars, whispered to the ears and bones, hands and hearts. She had all the pieces she needed feel whole again. She told them all, one by one, welcome to the family.

    Stephen Ausherman’s first novel, Typical Pigs, was nominated for the Peter Taylor Prize and won the Llumina American Writers Contest. He is also the author of a collection of travel essays, Restless Tribes. View his profile on Psychology Today.

    This story was originally published on Fiction Attic Press in 2005.

    Submit your flash fiction.

  • 12

    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.

    Bernard Kyle is a photographer and independent curator and works for Other Minds, a
    non-profit. He is a graduate student in the art history and museum studies programs at San
    Francisco State University.

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

  • 9

    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.

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