Poetry
Karen R. Porter
Washing
I am taking
all confessions now.
Line up.
Phone it in.
There is nothing
you can say
that’s too revolting.
My ear is open,
eager to hear
tangled confusions,
bad choices
seeded then
left to grow
soft rotten fruit.
Each dish
upon your wobbly table
is unpalatable.
Give it to me.
I can eat
most anything.
Show me
the secret photos,
the trail of guilt
that follows you
like body odor.
Let me be rain
to wash each torment
out to sea,
or fire
to destroy,
to purify
the whole damn thing.
Karen Porter resides in the Pinelands of South Jersey where she writes and tends to lots of critters. Recent publications in Pacific Coast Journal, Iodine, Chaffin Journal, and Clare.
Heidi Czerwiec
Fault. Lines.
Incline Fault, Salt Lake City
Next to your house the ground has slipped
away, a dip that divides you
from next door by forty vertical feet. You sensed
the rift growing. You were not
inclined to notice. In faulty
logic there is slippage between two planes
of thought. Between two people. How ice
sends cars slipping
against steep curbs. How any day now, geologically speaking,
the Big One could hit. When it does,
when it all slips away, when he
slips away, first there will be heat, then some form of stasis,
however askew. It will be called no-fault.
And though you think you can’t
you will climb and cross
two continental divides, the miles
slipping away beneath your car
until you come to a place lacking topography,
its absence of altitude palpable which is to say
without fault, slippage here only
horizontal, in a place only horizon.
Heidi Czerwiec teaches at U North Dakota where she is director of the annual Writers Conference. She is the author of Hiking the Maze (Finishing Line P, 2009), and she has poems and translations in many publications.
Laura Chalar
Marrying the Earl of Silence
And so I left home’s ragged dawns,
my high-sailing balconies
and the boisterous love of friends
for his cold fiefdom.
He’d had our bridal bed strewn
with pine needles—
I froze at the touch of his hand.
Birds sang alarm at blue windows,
and when I tried saying his name
my mouth filled with briny water.
But that was a long time ago.
Now the sounds of my old language
turn to ash inside my letters.
No one writes any more.
I rustle along the grey lawns,
don’t shy from his wood-moss fingers.
From the dull eye of the pond
a bloated face stares back blankly.
I am countess of thin air
and carry water inside me.
Laura Chalar is a 33-year-old lawyer, writer and translator (not necessarily in that order) from Montevideo, Uruguay, currently living in Buenos Aries, Argentina.
Jason Wesco
Working in the Vein
riding the tail chain of a dayblind mule, pitborn and small
like old man Brown taught you
left hand on the mule
left foot on the tail chain
right foot on the bumper
right hand on the car
ride with give so as not to get jounced
crouch low and squeeze in to clear the timbers and ribs
and throw the sprag on grades lest the car climb
the mule’s hinders with you atween ‘em
cost da man
a hunert dolla mewl and a ten cent driva
you whistle
a trapperboy opens the mine’s throat like a flue
it’s bluebitter, the mule’s breath like cold smoke
from a chimneystack
ahead of you
and it carries
the retch of the wheels on the trackman’s steel
the vent fan’s whir
the hoist’s twinge under the heft of men
the toothy bit’s twist
the shot’s sulpher blast
the shouts under fallen roofcoal and slate
the trapperboy’s cigarbox full of beans
the mad clatter
the damn clamor
the sounds of what men in mines do
to each other in a town short of women
and you remember that song old Brown
taught you for times like this
I am a jovial collier lad
As blithe as blithe can be
And let the times be good or bad
It’s all the same to me
It’s little of the world I know
And care less for its ways
For where the Dog Star never glows
It’s there I spend my days
and you trill it into a pitmule’s backside
Jason Wesco lives among the played-out coalfields of southeast Kansas. His most recent book of poetry is Rough Traces. Jason is at work on a book-length creative biography of southeaset Kansas labor leader, Alexander Howat, told through poems, prose, photos and period documents. Email him at: zeke@219press.com.
Stories
Amanda Frost
Spearwa
His name is Paul, and he’s blind. Well, no, that is how he’s thinking of himself now, standing in line at the Ohio DMV, waiting for them to tell him, like his doctor, that he needs glasses or they’ll revoke his license.
It snows outside in Bithynia, the city named for the Greek town. Paul does not think of this fact, doesn’t even know it. He’s not troubled at the prospect of having glasses. He’s troubled at the thought of having to have them. He just turned eighteen, hasn’t even graduated from high school. He’s not even a good driver. He’s already bruised his ’89 station wagon with dents and scratches. In spite of this, he likes to think of himself as independent. In truth, the blurry world scares him. He won’t admit it, but it does. He scares himself. Right now though, the glasses—which Paul images as thick, black, rectangular—they represent the central struggle of the moment.
Let’s return to the snow. Outside, it is a dark 4:30. The snow leadens the sky’s color. Paul, through the fogged windows, can see it falling through the streetlamps’ red coronae. It makes him think of the way the snow flies diagonally at the windshield while driving, the way the flakes clot in the window cracks. It has such a hypnotizing effect on him. He often finds himself struggling to watch the road beneath the falling snow. It can be worse if snow does not stick to the concrete, if it zigzags along the pavement snake-like.
. . . in wintertime, and the fire kindled and your hall warmed, and it rains and snows and storms out; a sparrow comes and quickly flies through the house, comes in through the door, through the other door goes out. Listen, he, in the time that he is inside, is not touched by the winter’s storm; but that is an eye’s blink and the smallest time, but soon he from winter to the winter comes again. So then this life of man . . . He’s a nerd to know this passage from Bede, famous though it is, but the weather and the florescence around him recall it. The line has not moved in seven minutes. Life in the DMV seems to him no warm hall, ringing with song. An older man next to him talks on a cell phone to his girlfriend. The man, whose jeans are dusted with white plaster, has recently gotten out of prison.
“My probation lasts eight more months.”
Behind Paul, a young mother and her own mother talk about Halifax. The older woman’s uncle moved there after his marriage.
“He saw three whales on Sunday, sees more every year. I wish I had the money to visit right now.” The young woman’s baby dressed in yellow smells like a used diaper. Paul doesn’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, but red fuzz bristles over its head. Its hair is the same color as the mother’s. The baby looks at him with wide gray eyes then starts to cry.
One poet, repeating another, wrote, “In childhood I had an inner life.” I won’t say his name; he irritates me too much, but Paul still has this inner life. Really, most of us still do, we just suppress it, act as if our dreams had no meaning for us.
What goes on in Paul’s inner life? Who is he really? Or who is he today in this moment?
He has finished running through what he memorized from a snapshot he took of his doctor’s eye chart: O, F, C, L, T, B, T, E, P, O, left, right, left, up, right, up, down. It becomes incantatory, loses all significance. Soon Paul slips into a different story, something more exciting than this setting, the walls adorned with various examples of vanity license plates.
It’s the year 755, and the West Saxon scribe suffers from confusion about who is supposed to be doing what in this old repeated saga. But the actions are the important thing, not the individuals. Mostly, he uses pronouns—he, he, they, they—without differentiating the parties. This is what Paul has made of it:
The king has been killed. Paul is the one Bret-Welsh hostage left after the slaughter. Cyneheard attacked the king, killed him as revenge. The king had murdered his brother, Sigebryht, and stolen his land. That does not make the dead king illegitimate in these parts. In fact, seizing power and murdering rivals here make his men all the more loyal. They stand outside his captured fortress now, his alderman Osric and his thane Wiferth and all the men that he did not take with him to see his woman. Paul sees her hair, red like the woman’s behind him, spread over the floor like blood. She lies among the dead too, her cries having alerted them to the surprise attack. The dead, Paul sees them hewn and cloven by the weapons of those days, the pikes, the ash spears, swords, and poleaxes, called Francas because they come from the Franks who traded them with the Huns. The iron smell of blood pervades everything. The king’s body slumps to the left of the door, the big door he rushed out of trying to kill his rival. Much like a later King Harold, a linden spear’s splinter pierces his right eye.
The negotiations for the body go like this in the modern tongue. Translation admittedly dilutes the heroic flavor of the chronicler, but that is inevitable.
Someone says, probably the men inside, “we’ll give you all the horses and lands that you want if you let us rule.”
Then the king’s men outside the gate, “We’re not going to follow our king’s slayer. We don’t care what he took from you.”
“But if you let us leave with our lives . . .”
“You made the same offer to our friends.”
“True and we slew them all.”
They’ll all be dead too by the end of this.
As we can see, Paul spends as little time as possible being himself—a reason he is ill-prepared for his future. The young woman behind him clears her throat. He comes to himself and sees he has not been moving forward. Paul does not want to be the helpless hostage anymore. It matches too closely his hated reality. He stares hard at the gray carpeting, flecked with burgundy and blue.
He moves backwards into the story. Paul’s no longer Paul. He’s Cyneheard. He sees the king who has come looking for him. Cyneheard lowers the linden spear toward the king’s face.
Paul stands to the left of the main desk. A large eye chart is in front of him. He can read the top letters easily, but examiners never start at the top. People sit at desks behind him taking various driving tests. Paul stands on a short strip of peeling blue tape. The woman with dyed-blonde hair gives him the exam. She is in an irritable mood, tells him to read the fifth line. Paul strains his eyes. The letters look like they could be anything.
“E—no—P-C-T-L—I mean—I” Paul tries to remember the sequence, wishes the test was over. He knows he does poorly. His eyes feel heavy. They water. As he forces himself to focus, he can see the letters changing shape on the white poster.
The kingdom’s rule goes to Cerdice, who appears suddenly like Fortinbras after the playwright has littered the stage with his corpses, and my sister tells me that she wants to read more about Sigebryht’s initial quarrel with the king, though the chronicler is silent on this, even less interested in it than in his own story where he can’t keep the participants straight. The scholars characterize this as a “breathless” narrative. It gave me a headache 1300 years later.
The scribe participates in his story by way of his syntactic eccentricities more than I am present here with my attempts at Standard English. There’s no real use in hiding. The truth is that I once had to take an eye test. And if my eyes watered on the way home or if I let my nose run at the stoplight, I didn’t care about the glasses either. They stood for dependence. Or my dad saying, “I thought you were your sister,” or “What does this say?” even though the print’s large.
Let me explain it this way. When entering my apartment building one night, I hear a weak voice calling for help. An old woman on the first floor has fallen and broken her hip. I call the ambulance, and, after it comes, a neighbor I have never seen confides in me that she wondered what the noise was but did nothing to help. Or I come to my car on Monday morning and find the battery dead. Another tells me he saw the car with its lights shining but did not know whose it was, did not bother to discover. People I pass everyday. And if it always snows in Bithynia, if it’s always January, it’s because I miss the winter.
Paul fails his test. And as he walks through the parking lot between the streetlights’ orange pools, the flakes hit his cheeks, cling to them momentarily before melting. I wish I could feel them.
Amanda Frost received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her M.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin where she was associate editor of Bat City Review. She is currently working toward her Ph.D. at the University of Kansas.
Tommy Zurhellen
What Light Through Yonder Window Breaks
Anna had set the latest one on his pillow, another fancy envelope with the smell of Chanel and a postmark from Firenze. Charlie got home late from the store and crept quietly up the stairs, even though their son was probably still wide awake in the catacomb of his room, under the covers with a flashlight and one of his mammoth library books. The kid liked to read; just once Charlie wanted to catch Max in there doing something a thirteen year-old boy was supposed to be doing at midnight on a Wednesday, like making fireworks or talking online to a Russian hooker. Charlie hung his jacket on the bedroom door and glanced down at the envelope.
“You already opened it,” he said.
Anna was standing by the window, still dressed. “I couldn’t help it,” she said. “I thought this time she’d send you something more racy, you know, like a shot of her draped across a statue of Saint Peter or something.” She rubbed her hands together, like it was his birthday and the time to open presents had finally come. “But this one’s a courtyard—it’s really beautiful. There’s these orange trees and a wall covered with ivy. Ring any bells?”
Charlie moved past her and dumped out his keys and loose change on the bureau. “I thought we were going to forget all this nonsense.” The first photograph came a couple weeks ago, a close-up of an old fountain shaped like a lion’s head that Charlie could faintly recall from his semester in Florence all those years ago. Then came the one of the goldfish pond the American kids used to toss coins in as they went to class, wishing for luck. Now it was surrounded by weeds and moss. He thought Anna would laugh the whole thing off, a product of an old girlfriend’s midlife crisis; but now she seemed addicted, waiting for the mail every day like a girl stranded at summer camp. When they came she’d sit at the kitchen counter and look them over like she was solving a mystery, inspecting every detail with a plastic microscope she dug out of one of Max’s old experiment kits. She would ask Charlie all sorts of questions. She even bought a street map of Florence and taped it to the icebox, plotting each photo on the map.
Anna went over to the bed and opened the envelope. “She’s awfully romantic,” she said, flipping the picture over and back, reading the note scrawled on the back. Then she put it back the way it was, even smoothed out a fold in the pillowcase. “You two must have been in love.”
Charlie rubbed his forehead. “I haven’t talked to Kathy Jubilee in twenty years.” Now he was the one standing by the window, gazing out through the leaves of the big dogwood they shared with the house next door. He could make out the neighbors around their grill, watching something burn.
“It was college. I had a Ford Tempo with no rear window. I listened to the Spin Doctors. My nickname was Bean Burrito. It was a long time ago, okay?” He let out a long breath. “You want to know if I was in love? Sure, I loved her. I loved her like a nineteen year-old boy loves a girl: for six months I couldn’t think of anything else, and when we broke up I thought I was going to die. Then two days later I got over it.”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Your nickname was Bean Burrito?”
He sat on the edge of the bed and untied his shoes. His feet hurt. “I was kind of shaped like a Bean Burrito.” He patted the jelly around the cavern of his belly button. “I guess I still am. Now can we drop all this and go to bed?”
She sat next to him on the bed and leaned on his shoulder. “Well, for the record, I like the way you’re shaped.” Her breath felt warm and good on his neck. “What else can you remember about her?”
He kicked one of his shoes across the room. “What do you want to know, Anna? You want to know what we got each other for Christmas, or what perfume she wore? You want to know what I whispered in her ear when we made love twenty years ago? Give me a break.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” she said and kissed him. “Just tell me about this last picture, and I’ll stop bothering you, I promise.” She reached back for the envelope and put it between them.
“You really want to know?”
“I do, Charlie, I really do.”
He didn’t need to see the picture; he knew that courtyard well. “There’s a window above the orange trees,” he said, lying back on the bed, his arms stretched out. Twenty years ago it was Kathy Jubilee’s window, and when her dormitory doors locked at night it was the only way to see her. He closed his eyes and told Anna everything he could remember: jumping the squat iron fence that separated the courtyard from the alley; climbing the tree, its spindly branches barely holding him, then lunging for the thick ivy that ran past the window. From there it was a short leap to grab the windowsill and pull himself up. She would be there, waiting for him on the bed, her body still, sometimes wrapped only in a towel.
“You wanted to know,” he said.
Anna lay on her side next to him and looked at the ceiling. She bit her lip. “God, that’s so romantic.” She opened the envelope again and ran her finger up and down the picture, as if tracing his route up to the window. “Why didn’t you marry her?”
“Because I was waiting for you,” he said right away, his eyes still closed.
She laughed. “Where did you get that from, Manny?” Manny was Charlie’s older brother; they had both inherited the hardware store when their father passed, even though the closest Manny came to working there was shooting dice at the loading dock. “I bet that’s one of his corny lines.”
“You’re right, Anna: the whole thing’s corny. And I promise if one of your old beaus starts writing you love notes, I won’t put you through the wringer.”
She laughed even louder this time. “My old boyfriends? Yeah right. If they did, the note would probably say something like, Yo Anna—still wanna bone? Peace.”
“Not a lot of romantics in your past, huh?”
“Don’t tease me,” she said, her smile now gone. She got up and stood over him for a moment, her arms crossed. “You know you were the first guy I ever really loved.” Then she went into the bathroom and closed the door.
Manny and his boys would show up around eleven and stand around the loading dock, Charlie listening from his little office as they talked about bikes or women. There were always four or five of them, a rotating crew of greying delinquents with names like Choo-Choo and Bugface and Claw; they were the kind of guys the local police liked to call “persons of interest.” Charlie actually enjoyed having them around, since they weren’t too loud and they were always nice to Max when he came by after school. The kid was good at calculating probability, which was handy around a craps game. Around lunchtime, Charlie would bring out a sixpack and some sandwiches and watch them shoot dice, usually content to stand against the wall and listen.
“Anna’s so crazy these days,” Charlie blurted out. He was about to turn forty and yet he was still that kid in the playground who told bullies just wait until my big brother shows up. No one was paying much attention, until he mentioned the pictures from an old flame.
“Whoa, whoa,” Manny said and motioned to hold up the game. “Are these like, nude photos?”
“Nothing like that. Just landmarks and stuff. You remember that girl I met over there, Kathy Jubilee? Well, I guess now she’s gone back to Italy on some kind of nostalgia tour. Anna’s so jealous, she can’t stop looking at these pictures. She put the last one on my pillow.”
“On your pillow?” Manny grunted. “She’s not jealous. She’s fantasizing.”
“Fantasizing? About my old girlfriend?”
Manny shook his head. “Think about it, bro. Anna never went to college, right? Hell, far as I know, that girl’s never been anywhere. Where did you go for your honeymoon again? Hoboken?”
“Atlantic City.”
Everyone laughed. “It don’t take a rocket surgeon to figure this one out,” Manny said.
“What do I do? I just want things to be good again.”
Manny shrugged. “Maybe make some changes,” he said and sipped some beer. “She’s got to know that you care. Start working out. Wear deodorant, drink white wine—you know, sensitive shit. Look at me and Gina: a year ago I walked into that running store down the block and bought all this expensive running gear and brought it home. Best investment I ever made.”
“Running? I don’t know. I’m so out of shape, I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Listen closely, little brother,” Manny said and put his arm around him. “I didn’t say you’ve got to work out. All you got to do is buy the gear: the fancy shoes, the shorts, maybe even one of those watches that tell time in Pakistan. You bring that shit home and for the first week or two, you let her see you going to work out. Then you just wear the fancy shoes around the house like you’re about to work out.”
“That worked for you?”
“Are you kidding? My old lady still thinks I’m training for a 10K.”
When Charlie got home that night, Anna was sitting up in bed with the courtyard photograph and a guidebook called Tuscany On $50 A Day. Charlie always thought she looked hot with her glasses on; there was a time he’d lie in bed just to watch her read.
He started to unbutton his shirt. “You look like a sexy librarian in your glasses.”
She closed the book and dropped it on the floor. “If you’re lucky, I’ll leave them on.”
Charlie worked the buttons on his shirt, tugging at them. He swayed to some unknown music and felt like he looked like a man being attacked by wasps in slow motion. A couple of the buttons came off.
“Come here, baby,” she said and held out her hand.
“Let’s pretend we’re two kids in college.” Anna leaned back and lit the candle on her bedstand. Then she clicked off the lamp and slid down under the covers until she was flat on her back. Charlie crawled in next to her. She grabbed his hand and pulled it down under the covers. “Let’s pretend we’re in Florence,” she said. Her hand guided his lower. She closed her eyes. Her hips moved up and down under his hand, her hips slowly moving back and forth. A faint groan escaped her lips. “Make love to me like we’re in Florence,” she whispered. “Make love to me like you did to her.”
He pulled his hand back. “I feel silly,” he said. “You’re my wife.” He rolled onto his back, and for a while they just lay beside each other, silent and motionless.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally. There was a hard lump of frustration in her voice. Her hands moved on the blanket like nervous birds. “I just wanted to feel like we were nineteen again.”
Charlie sat up. “Well, we’re not nineteen. I’m thirty-nine, you’re thirty-four, and our son is thirteen. Why can’t you just be happy where we are, instead of some dream world you made up from some photos I got in the fucking mail?”
Anna put her hands over eyes and began to cry.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that,” he said and slid back under the covers beside her. He touched her arm. “I didn’t mean any of it. Sometimes I want to be nineteen again, too. I just don’t know how to do it.”
For a moment her hand met his; then she rolled away onto her side. “Goodnight, Charlie,” she said and blew the candle out.
The next day Charlie left work early, which meant leaving Manny in charge, but it was a risk he was willing to take. He walked right into the running store and found himself in front of a wall of sneakers. After a few minutes a kid with a buzz cut came up to him. “Can I help you find something?”
“Maybe,” Charlie said, hands on his waist. “Any of these good for a midlife crisis?”
The kid didn’t flinch. “What size?”
Twenty minutes later, Charlie was the proud owner of a pair of sneakers called Carnivore, along with a form-fitting t-shirt that was supposed to recycle body sweat into energy and a shiny pair of shorts he knew were too small. When he got home he went straight up to the bedroom, right past Anna and Max in the kitchen, clutching the bag under his arm. Charlie closed the bedroom door behind him and unpacked his gear. In the mirror he thought he looked vaguely athletic. One thing was for certain: he owned the whitest thighs on the planet.
He came down the stairs like a president greeting guests at the White House. “Going for a jog, shouldn’t be long,” he announced from the hallway. He walked into the kitchen, attacking the linoleum like a runway. It was hard not to hear him, the soles squeaked. On top of that, some kind of suction cup in the heel made walking on linoleum hard work, like walking on the ocean floor. Still, Charlie got no reaction. Max kept reading something about dinosaurs at the table, while Anna stood in front of the sink, her back turned, whacking vegetables for dinner.
“I’m going for a jog now,” he said again, even louder.
Max finally looked up. “Say I’m going for a run, Dad. ‘Jog’ makes you sound old. And slow.”
“I’m going for a run, then.” He came up behind Anna and put his hands on her hips and rested his chin resting softly on her shoulder. “Want to come?”
She kept whacking, back still turned. “Um, no.”
Max examined the contraptions on his father’s feet with a blend of fear and wonder. “You’d better break those sneakers in before you run in them, Dad.” But Charlie was busy trying to find a place on his body to stash his keys; the shorts didn’t have a pocket. He tried to stuff them into his sock but they just spilled out.
“Leave your keys,” Anna said, not turning around. “Don’t worry, we’ll still be here when you get back, Carl Lewis. We promise.”
“I won’t,” Max said. “I’m staying at Spider’s house tonight, remember?”
Charlie dropped the keys on the counter. “You have a friend named Spider?”
“Yes, I do.” His head disappeared back behind the book. “I also have a Dad named Bean Burrito.”
It was a grand total of eight-and-a-half blocks before Charlie’s legs began to cramp up. Eight more and his arches felt like someone was jabbing them with a spear. Somehow he made it to the center of town and made a wide turn around the fountain to head back home and claim at least a moral victory. It was getting dark. The old fountain had seen better days, put there to commemorate the fallen from an old war but now covered in layers of car exhaust and mold. Charlie remembered when kids used to splash around in its basin during the hot months of summer; he’d bring Max here when he could barely walk and they would spend hours here, side-by-side under the wide waterjets that spouted from the mouths of bronze turtles and fish. But now there were only a few inches of brackish water, its drain clogged with cigarette butts and plastic bags.
Two girls leaned against the fountain, waiting for something. One wore a shiny gold cowboy hat, the kind most people would only wear at the county fair, and a gold halter top that matched. She’d stuck a pack of smokes in the bra. The other girl had on a ripped Ramones t-shirt with a red jeans skirt and was texting furiously on her cell. Under the severe makeup they looked around college age, and in the fading light the gold-plated one reminded him of Kathy Jubilee — or at least the way he imagined she had looked, all those years ago. The way these two were dressed, Charlie figured they were probably experienced with men. He sucked in his gut.
As he ambled by, Goldie watched with a confused smile, shaking her head. “What are you supposed to be doing?”
“Just trying to get into shape,” he said, wiping his forehead with his shirt. For some reason he was still running in place. “How do I look?”
“You run like a pirate,” Goldie said, taking a long drag on her cigarette. “You know, with a wooden leg.”
The other girl looked up from her cell phone and tilted her head as she looked him over. “Maybe a really fat pirate,” she said, still pressing the buttons, the phone giving her face a pale glow. “I think he runs like the tin man before Dorothy gives him the oil.”
“Yeah,” Goldie said. “A tin man with a wooden leg.”
The other one nodded. “That’s it,” she said, going back to her phone. “Keep it up, old man. We’re rooting for you.”
The streetlights were on by the time Charlie rounded the last corner back to his block. He saw no cars, no neighbors letting their dogs do their business. As he crossed from the sidewalk onto their front lawn he looked at the house and saw no lights inside; the entire house looked dark. So much for Anna’s promise to be home. But there was her SUV. At the door he saw a piece of cardboard tacked there, a big arrow drawn hastily in magic marker that pointed towards the side of the house. Was something going on at the neighbors? Anna must have been next door at the neighbor’s.
Charlie felt his way through the yard. Dark shadows, trees, branches made the path seem dangerous. Around back, it was just as dark. The neighbor’s lights were off too. Charlie breathed. His legs ached and his stomach growled and he thought he’d faint from thirst at any moment. Then, a leaf blinked. He looked up through the branches of a gnarled tree next to the house. Soft light flickered in their bedroom window. Candles?
“Anna?” he called out. “Anna, you there? Come down and open the door, okay?”
Anna appeared in the window. Her body was wrapped in a sheet, her long hair draped over half her face like a veil. She was beautiful. “You come up.”
Charlie looked at the old twisted tree. “Are you serious?”
“If you make it up here, I’ll make it worth your while.” She let the sheet slip off her body and fall to the floor. “I promise.”
He had seen her body so many times before, but never like this—part beautiful damsel, part lady of the evening. In a moment, she was gone from the window. The room went dark, the light snuffed out.
“Anna?” There was no answer. A dog barked in the distance. “This is fucking crazy.”
Charlie looked at the tree trunk. In Italy, the tree had blossoms, smooth bark. It was a young as he was, it could bend without breaking. This tree, though, it was rigid, formed. Older. Everything about it seemed too thick or too sharp, not at all inviting. He gave his hands a look that dared them to do it and they did. They grabbed the lowest branch and his arms pulled him up and the Carnivores pushed against the trunk. He started to climb. The bark scraped at his legs and made him re-think the short shorts for the millionth time since he put them on. Both his arms and legs were talking, grousing, making it plenty clear they were plenty tired already. But Charlie clamped his jaw tight and pulled, up, up, up. And then, it was like he was a boy again. Hands gripping, arms pulling, Carnivores pushing. Climbing. It all came back to him.
Charlie stopped when his feet reached the branch that was closest to the window. He stepped on, one Carnivore, then the other. Charlie grabbed the branch above his head and started toward the dim outline of the window. One step, two, maybe four or five till the branch creaked a cracking sort of creak. It suddenly sagged and Charlie hands slipped. The bark tore at his palms but he held on somehow. He was too close not to.
He leaned out, grabbing for the window, stretching his arm till his rotator cuff screamed. It was no good. Too much air stood between his fingers and the sill. Charlie looked at the window then the ground then the window then the ground. The branch bowed. He thought he heard a murmur.
Anna.
The branch creaked again.
The ground, the window. The kid on the tree.
He would have to make a jump for it.
Tommy Zurhellen’s stories have appeared in Quarterly West, Passages North, Carolina Quarterly, South Dakota Review, The MacGuffin, Appalachee Review, and elsewhere. He teaches writing in upstate New York.
