Short Fiction

Selected by Julie Zuckerman, author of the novel in stories The Book of Jeremiah (runner-up for the 2018 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction)

“Genetics, Human” by Elizabeth Edelglass

“Off Ramp” by Tim Fitts

“High Above Horse Tail Falls” by Milena Nigam

Genetics, Human

Gladys stopped typing the minute Mr. Mirsky’s door opened and Doc walked out. What would be better after Mirsky’d just given him the ax, a respectful hush or the routine clack of fingernails against keys? Her fingers were poised, deciding, while Doc double-timed it past her desk without stopping for a look or a word from her.

Well of course not. Who was she to him? Al, he’d once told her to call him, back in the ’50s. Now, blink your eyes and they’d been together eighteen years. But don’t kid yourself, she worked for him and Mirsky, not with them. So she’d settled on calling him Doc, because of his white coat in the lab, not because he was a doctor, which he never tired of reminding her he wasn’t.

She knew what Mirsky’d been up to, the creep. Wasn’t she the one who’d posted the job announcements, scheduled the young pipsqueaks fresh from grad school for interviews? Probably didn’t even shave yet, some of them. What did they know about running the lab? Did they know not to waste time collecting samples in downtown Newark, where markets foisted off dairy products past expiration, useless for testing? This, Doc had taught her.

Now she’d had to lie to him, for weeks. Pretending visiting job applicants were selling office supplies. That was a switch. Usually it was men lying to Gladys. Not the other way around, her lying to a man who couldn’t tell a lie to save his life.

Then, of all the nerve, Mirsky has her call Doc into his office this morning. As if all of a sudden Mirsky doesn’t know how the intercom works? Not that he has trouble buzzing her when he wants his coffee or jelly doughnut from the break room. “One sugar, Doll,” he’d told her on her very first day, fresh from Katharine Gibbs, standing in his office with her steno book, thinking to show him eighty words per minute.

A hellofa sense of timing Mirsky has, firing Doc the week before Thanksgiving. He should choke on his turkey. Her mother used to cook the turkey neck special for her father, who’d suck and savor until all that was left was a pile of tiny bones on his plate, turkey vertebrae she guessed. One of those little suckers would slip perfectly down Mirsky’s throat, lodge in his windpipe like God had invented it for just that purpose.

 “I just might quit,” Gladys said that night at her sister’s. “With Doc gone by Friday, then what?” She leaned forward on the couch gripping Faye’s baby, his head bobbling like a carnival prize.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Faye said. Then, “Give him here.” For the baby in the family herself, motherhood sure had made her bossy. Their own mother, dead and gone, seemed to hover every time Gladys came near that baby, tsking.

“I’m not kidding,” Gladys said. “You think I’m gonna work for some kid, after Doc?”

“Doc, Doc,” Faye said. “A boss is a boss. They all put on their pants one leg at a time.”

“If I have to look at that bastard Mirsky one more day…”

“Mind your language,” Faye said, cupping the baby’s head, so tiny she could shield both ears with one hand.

“He can’t hear me,” Gladys said.

“God forbid!” Faye was unbuttoning, putting the baby to her breast.

“You know what I mean,” Gladys said. “Why don’t I make up a bottle?” The baby nurse Faye had hired to fill in for their unavoidably unavailable mother had promoted bottle-feeding, sterile technique. Gladys knew about sterile technique from Doc at the lab.

“Don’t even think it.” Faye insisted on breastfeeding, said that’s what Ma would have wanted. It was good enough for you girls, Gladys could hear her mother saying. “You gotta pay the rent,” Faye went on. “Groceries don’t grow on trees.” Then, “Shit,” and she grimaced as the baby latched on. “Look at him, a regular barracuda.”

“You mind your language,” Gladys tossed back, then they both laughed, like the old days, sharing secrets under the covers, sneaking chocolates from Ma’s box that Pa brought her every Valentine’s Day. On Rosh Hashanah there’d been flowers and on Passover macaroons, but every February 14 he’d show up with a grin and a red box of Barton’s shaped like a heart.

“Seriously, Glad,” Faye said. “You need the security. It’s not like you can count on anyone else.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Don’t take it personal.”

“How else should I take it?” Faye should only know about the bank account Gladys had socked away, nobody to spend it on anyway.

Suddenly the baby lurched backwards, letting go, Faye’s breast in full view, milk squirting in his face and down the front of her blouse.

“Will you look at that?” Faye said, gazing down at herself with pride.

“Here, mop up,” Gladys said, “this looks clean,” and she handed Faye a diaper that’d been draped over the arm of the sofa like one of Ma’s doilies.

Faye pressed down on her breast, then lifted the diaper to see if she was still erupting. Her nipple was huge and erect, the white breast mapped with blue veins. Everything else about Faye was a mess right now, her famous blond hair in tangles, her perfume a blend of urine and spit-up. But this breast. A regular marble statue. Put it on a pedestal at the museum.

“It doesn’t hurt once he gets going.” Faye said, seeing her stare. The baby barely a month old, and Faye already a mother lode of knowledge.

As if on cue the baby opened wide and somehow drew that massive nipple into his mouth, gulping, steady and rhythmic. Gladys felt a startling wetness down below. Ridiculous. There was no fella at her breast.

“Won’t they need you more than ever, with Doc gone?” Faye said. “After, what’s it been, twenty years, don’t you feel some loyalty?”

“How old do you think I am?” Gladys said, stretching a leg to smooth her nylons over one slender calf—her legs were her best feature, the only part of her body that could always measure up to Faye’s. “And what about loyalty to Doc? Eighteen years we’ve been there, together. If they think I’m waiting around for them to fire me, too, they got another think coming.”

On Friday, Doc brought boxes to pack his stuff. Except they looked like they’d been fished from the dumpster behind some supermarket, not the flat folded kind he always had Gladys order for year-end files. This from a man who’d worn a clean white shirt every day for eighteen years. When he started mindlessly stacking books from shelf to desk, she picked the cleanest-looking box and reached for the next book from his hand.

“You don’t have to,” he said. “Packing’s not in your job description.”

“I got a job description?”

“Check inside for my name, at least.” He wouldn’t take anything that didn’t belong to him.

Al Weiner, in neat square printing, inside the front cover of Dack’s Food Poisoning. “New secretary won’t have any trouble getting the hang of your writing,” she said, “not like Mirsky’s scrawl.” She stuck out her hand for the next book, but he was fingering through whisper-thin pages of Stern, the bible of human genetics, like it was the real Bible that Pa cradled in his lap at shul. Bacteria have DNA, too, Doc once explained when he noticed Gladys dusting his Stern. “Why don’t I just start on your desk?” she said now.

It was convenient she’d saved the Star Ledger for wrapping. He had framed diplomas and photographs, his whole life in that office. His wife and the two girls. From babies to Bat Mitzvahs, and then just last month the older one’s wedding—the little girls all of a sudden all grown up, Susan the big one dolled up in white, and Mrs. Weiner with her hair touched up and her breasts pushed up and around her neck a chain with a diamond heart. When Doc bought her that necklace back on their twentieth (platinum, not gold, he’d said, Pa’s same grin on his face), he’d asked Gladys did she think Ruth would like it. What’s not to like?

“I shoulda baked you a cake,” Gladys said, hiding the wedding photo in a wad of newsprint.

“It’s the thought that counts,” Doc said. “Which reminds me,” and from his briefcase a box of chocolates. “Just a little something to remember me by.” Barton’s, like Pa, except not heart-shaped, of course. “But don’t remember for too long,” he added with an awkward chuckle. “Eat them before they go stale.”

The last thing he said, on his way out the door for the last time, was, “You be nice to the new kid, Gladdy,” and he tipped his hat. Was there another man on Earth who still tipped his hat? Who even wore a hat anymore, besides Doc? It was five o’clock on the dot. That’s the kind of man he was. If you were paying him until five, he was there until five. Couldn’t do it any other way.

It turned out to be a long weekend for Gladys, and not in the holiday sense, the usual marketing and ironing dragging minute by minute as if the clock had stopped. Sunday night, laying out clothes for Monday morning, she draped her gray tweed skirt over the bedroom chair, then accidentally pulled the brown cardigan from her dark closet and didn’t bother to go back for the gray. Brown, gray, who was she trying to impress?

In the shadows from bed that night, it looked like Gladys herself sitting on that chair, dressed for her first day of work. Hadn’t she been laying out her clothes like that for eighteen years? Skirt and sweater in winter, blouse in summer. Mod and mini weren’t for her—she knew better than to show much leg when taking dictation from Mirsky. All night, she dreamed of the new pipsqueak at Doc’s desk, in Doc’s lab, wearing Doc’s white coat.

Sure enough, Monday morning the new pipsqueak was indeed at Doc’s desk, with a shock of hair in his eyes and a dark suit a little big like it belongs to his father. And what does Gladys see first thing when he calls her into his office to get him coffee but a nameplate, shiny brass like new: Dr. Joe Schmo, she doesn’t even read the whole name. Huh, her mother would say, a Ph.D. doctor, not a real doctor.

Gladys brought Dr. Schmo his coffee, all right, closing her nose to the flowery smell of his aftershave. Then she cornered Mirsky with his jelly doughnut.

“That’s it,” she said. “I quit.”

And Mirsky with a mouthful—if he dripped red jelly on his tie, what a shame. “We can’t afford to pay you more, Honey,” wiping crumbs from his pencil-thin mustache with his pencil-pushing fingers. Doc didn’t believe in facial hair, said it could contaminate the cream samples.

“Who asked for a raise?” Gladys said. “Just mail my check after the holiday.” Thursday was Thanksgiving, ready or not.

She unfolded the A&P bag she’d thought to bring in her purse. It was Doc who’d taught her to shop at the A&P, their dairy products being the freshest. Five minutes was enough to pack her things. A couple of lipsticks, some hairpins, her own version of the family wedding photo (Ma and Pa with Faye and Robert, Faye in white satin and Ma’s diamond earrings, her golden hair glowing even in black-and-white), and a tin of Midol, she shouldn’t misspell Clostridium perfringens even when the menstrual cramps hit, every twenty-eight days like clockwork.

“Your mug’s in the break room,” she told Mirsky hovering in the doorway watching her pack, she shouldn’t steal anything. “Two sugars.” Let him get fat.

Then it was Thanksgiving at Faye’s—a capon, not a turkey, it being just the three of them (no bird for the baby) plus kugel made by Faye, she had Ma’s recipe. Gladys brought the soup—she wouldn’t have put it past Faye to boil up a chicken in the big pot she used for boiling diapers.

“Maybe they could use a girl down at the plant,” Robert said. Leon’s Laundry, not plant manager like he’d bragged to her sister back on their first date, but he always came straight home from work, brought his paycheck every Friday.

“No thanks,” Gladys said.

“You got something better lined up?” Faye said, unbuttoning for the baby right there at the Thanksgiving table.

“In the office, I mean,” Robert said.

“Or the hospital,” Faye suggested. “Aren’t those doctors all men?” she smiled, “and they’re doctors.”

“I got ideas,” Gladys said.

“Ma always said you were the smart one,” Faye said.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Gladys said, and she did when she showed up for her interview at Kelly Girls on Monday. Time for a change. Who needs the same office every day for another eighteen years, and where had it gotten her?

She had on her Rosh Hashanah suit and black pumps. The last time she went on a job interview she wore white gloves, but she knew that was passé, even for Kelly Girls. All the other girls waiting were just that—girls—tight minis and teased hair. Just call me past expiration, Gladys thought, even her name old fashioned—Gladys—thanks a lot Ma.

There was a man doing the interviews, naturally. “Got any computer experience?” he asked, checking off boxes on a form without looking up, shirt sleeves rolled up like he’d been checking boxes all day. “Ever done punch cards?”

“I’m good with scientists,” Gladys said. “Numbers and such.” Maybe Doc’s new office, wherever, might have need of a temp.

On the walk back to the bus stop, she passed McCrory’s, Ryan and Daughters Insurance, Glazer Brothers Fabric, and the big public library with its pillars like a Roman temple. Also a drug store, a pawnshop, and the shoe store where they carried the extra narrow she liked for the way it set off her foot, never mind how it pinched the toes. Gladys happened to know that Doc favored McCrory’s for coffee and also the library for those travel books he liked to read at the office, but only during break. Not that he actually traveled much, just the one time to Paris, and that trip planned entirely by Mrs. Weiner, Gladys never once required to phone the travel agent or the airline.

So Kelly Girls it was, with a different job every day of the week never mind about computers, don’t ask how much typing and filing needs doing in one office or another, the regular girl on vacation or home with a cold. And if Gladys thought she was going to get out in the world, experience life as a Kelly Girl, well maybe she does. At the dentist’s office, she answers phones, wipes up after patients’ sweaty heads on the dental chair, and says no thanks to the married dentist’s offer of a ride home after work. At the Ford showroom, she types invoices midst a hubbub of mechanics who seem to come into the office for no other purpose than to brush up against her hips and call her Doll Face. Even at the high school, where she spends two days subbing for the attendance secretary, she can almost smell the feral teenage boys passing by her window, gangly arms around girls, nuzzling hair, necks, any fleshy parts that their fingers, noses, lips can lay claim to before Principal Harris shoos them along.

Every Friday at lunch she schlepped downtown to Kelly Girls to pick up her pay. One Friday around Christmas she thought she saw Doc heading into McCrory’s at noon and almost called out, except she’d’ve had to run to catch up, and wouldn’t that have seemed out-of-breath and eager? Then in January, paper candy canes in windows turning brown around the edges, she got assigned a day typing prescription labels at the drugstore and thought she saw Doc again, this time pushing through McCrory’s plate glass doors just as she stepped off the bus at five to nine. Morning coffee? But she couldn’t stop to say hello, couldn’t be late her first day on the job, even if it was her only day on this job. Promptness—one of the things she’d learned from Doc.

Doc, the one guy she could trust never to jostle her in the break room, never whistle under his breath when she walked past his door, never leer even if she crossed her legs while taking dictation. Trust, another thing he taught her. His new job must be around here, although the only lab Gladys could think of nearby was the blood drawing station at Doc McGinty’s. Test tubes and microscopes, but not exactly the same skills her Doc had for quality control of dairy products. And who there would call him Doc?

In February, Kelly Girls gave Gladys a full week at Ryan and Daughters Insurance, the receptionist laid up with the flu. First thing Monday morning, she hustled from the bus ready to face those daughters too high and mighty to answer their own phones. And there’s Doc, again, heading past the red paper Valentine hearts into McCrory’s. No coffee pot at his new place? All she sees is his back, but there’s no mistaking that hat slouched at the usual angle, same old briefcase probably filled by some new secretary barely old enough to drive.

Ryan and Daughters only gives twenty minutes for lunch, what with phones ringing off the hook from folks whose cars have crashed or their houses have burnt down. (True, if they’d let contaminated milk or cheese slip by back at the lab someone might’ve gotten food poisoning or even God forbid died, but they never phoned Gladys to complain.) From her perch in the daughters’ lunchroom, with her sandwich from home, if Gladys craned her neck, she could spot Doc heading back to McCrory’s every noon. No coffee pot, and apparently no fridge at his new place, for his lunch that the Mrs. always packed him. Doc wouldn’t leave a tuna with mayo sitting out all morning, never mind stash it in the lab fridge, breaking every rule of sterile technique.

Did Gladys ever run down to say a quick hi? For that matter, did she ever cross the street from the bus when she saw him every morning, stride up and shake his hand in front of McCrory’s? Not that she was avoiding him. It was just something magnetic, or anti-magnetic, how two like poles pushed in opposite directions. Doc showed her once with a couple of magnets he had in his pocket from some science project he was doing with one of his girls. He musta been good with those girls, a smart teacher like him. Bet he’s the one who taught them the facts of life, all scientific and patient. Not like Ma, who neglected altogether to teach Gladys, so the first time she got her period was on a sixth grade trip to the Statue of Liberty, and her with only a Kleenex in her pocket. It was Gladys who made sure Faye was prepared when her time came.

Faye. On Thursday, Faye shows up at Ryan and Daughters at noon straight from Doc McGinty’s for the baby’s shots, so Gladys has to march into the sisters’ office (which they share—the tall one, Irene, and the pretty one, Kate, who’s the young one, of course) to beg an extra ten minutes to treat her sister to the tearoom at B. Altman, where how long could it take to eat a tea sandwich? Irene just stares, but Kate gives a flick of her red-painted fingers, the dented fenders and flooded basements can wait an extra ten minutes, this once.

“Ryan’s nice?” Faye says, settling into one of B. Altman’s flowered chairs and pulling out a jar of baby food, thank God not a breast.

“He’s dead,” Gladys says.

“So you work for the daughters? That’s different.”

“They’re particular how they like things done,” Gladys says, “but at least nobody calls me Doll Face.”

“Don’t you miss having a regular job,” Faye says later, when Gladys reaches for the bill, “not to mention a regular paycheck?”

“You think a couple of cream cheese sandwiches will break the bank?”

The baby was getting big, none the worse for no bottles, bouncing happily now when Gladys dared hold him, grabbing for the fake pearl earrings she’d bought to go with the pearl necklace she inherited from Ma. Faye’d gotten the diamond earrings, and why shouldn’t she, a married woman who might have occasion to wear diamonds.

“Smart boy, knows what’s pretty,” Faye says, and Gladys’s face heats up despite herself. If she could get them to leave, she might catch sight of Doc before having to punch back in.

So it came to be Friday, and Kate Ryan gave another flick of her red fingernails when Gladys said she had to run out at noon to pick up her paycheck from Kelly Girls. Friday, which happens to be Valentine’s Day, so maybe time to give those magnets a shove? She headed straight for the McCrory’s sign, with its two broken R’s, but who can tell since McCrory’s doesn’t light the neon until five. Like cocktail time in a Grace Kelly movie, which is what Gladys might as well be dressed up for although who’s she kidding in her Rosh Hashanah suit—hemmed up just last night to the new shorter style—and Ma’s pearls and even Faye’s diamond earrings. Told Faye she was taking the pearls to get appraised, after spending a week in insurance, offered to take the earrings too. Gladys pauses inside the door, by ladies’ magazines, to freshen her lipstick, red like the Valentine-heart cakes on the magazine covers.

The lunch counter is in the rear, mottled plastic that seems like it’s been around longer than Formica’s been invented, and sure enough there’s Doc at a corner stool bent over a bowl of soup with his coat on, even his hat, as if ready any minute to rush off to someplace better. Even his briefcase on the floor at his feet—at least Mirsky used to give him a break from paperwork during lunch.

The stools are covered in red plastic that could stick to the backs of your legs, except Gladys hasn’t hemmed up her skirt that short, and of course she has stockings covering any exposed skin. So she slides silently onto the stool next to Doc. “How’s the soup?” she says.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he says, bringing the spoon to his lips.

“Guess I’ll have a frankfurter,” Gladys says. Behind the counter, rows of glistening franks revolve on a grill that looks like it hasn’t stopped turning since the First World War.

This gets Doc’s attention. “In that case, stick with the soup,” he says, and now he looks up and smiles. “Gladdy,” he says. “It’s you.” And then, “Didn’t I teach you anything about what’s in a non-kosher dog?” He removes his hat and sets it on the counter beside his bowl.

“Just kidding, Doc,” she says. “How’s tricks?”

“Not so bad.” He turns back to his soup. “Sorry to hear they let you go, too,” he says between quiet sips, he’s got good manners.

“How do you figure?”

“Phoned looking for you. Bill Mirsky himself answered.”

“Poor thing,” Gladys says. But what she’s thinking is, Doc tried to call me. For once she’s glad to be dark complected, not a blusher like Faye.

“Who else could I count on to keep my story straight? In case Ruth called?”

“Oh,” Gladys says. “Mrs. Weiner calling Mirsky?” She produces a laugh. “Gonna give him a piece of her mind, huh?”

“Not exactly.” He puts down his spoon. “Buy you a cup of coffee, piece of pie?”

Gladys examines the tired pies and cakes in the glass pastry case, some down to the last slice, none bearing any resemblance to the cakes pictured on the ladies’ magazines up front. “Sure, coffee,” she says, and he lifts a finger and a waitress comes over with the pot.

“For the lady,” he says, and the waitress gives her the once-over before slapping a cup in front of her and sloshing it full to the top. She wears a drab green uniform and a name tag that says Sally.

“Ruth doesn’t know,” Doc says after Sally sidles off to serve a shriveled old lady down the counter.

“Doesn’t know what, Doc?”

“About the job.” He’s talking in short choppy sentences, pausing for breath as if he’s been running. “That I’m not there anymore. At the lab.”

“What do you mean doesn’t know?”

“I didn’t tell her, I guess is what I mean.”

“Didn’t tell her?” Gladys feels like she’s caught in that ridiculous Who’s on first? routine that used to crack Pa up.

“About getting fired,” Doc says, his head bent over his bowl as though inspecting for microbes swimming amongst the noodles. “She might call looking for me, Ruth might. But so far so good.”

“Why not give her the number at the new place?”

“What new place?” Doc’s laugh turns into a phlegmy cough. “Not much market for a man my age. And not a real doctor don’t forget.”

There are three at the lunch counter besides Doc and Gladys, old and older, all with coats on like they’re still out in the cold. Thinning blood, Ma used to say. But it’s not cold in here. It’s overheated, sweaty hot, steaming up the mirror behind the counter, which is OK, because then you don’t have to look at yourself sitting here.

“So what does she think’s going on, the missus?” Ruth Weiner had been a nice enough boss’s wife, always sent a box of stationery or toilet water on Gladys’s birthday. When she phoned for Doc, always asked after Faye and Robert and then the baby, as if it was Gladys’s husband and child by proxy.

“I still go to the lab every day, as far as she’s concerned.”

“That’s what you tell her?” Gladys says.

“I don’t tell her otherwise.”

Gladys is beginning to understand who’s on first. She has a sudden mental picture of Ruth from the wedding photo, in her chiffon and her cleavage, sitting at the dinner table asking her husband how was work today, could you stop off at the dry cleaners on your lunch hour tomorrow? Humph, she hears her mother whisper, loyalty schmoyalty.

“And what do you do? Every day, I mean.”

“A little of this, a little of that. The library. Coffee here in the morning, soup at noon. This morning, the pawnshop. What a place. You ever been?”

“Can’t say as I have.”

“They have guns there, and even somebody’s teeth. Owned by a young girl, if you can believe it, the shop not the teeth.” He sets his spoon on his plate, polite, not sticking up out of the bowl like a rube. Gladys is happy it’s chicken noodle, not tomato—Ma had stories about hot water and ketchup at Horn & Hardart during the Depression. “I pawned Ruth’s necklace today,” he says. “The heart, with the diamonds. You remember?”

Ma’s tiny diamonds in Gladys’s earlobes feel suddenly heavy like boulders. If only she could cover her ears with a hand so easily like Faye with the baby.

But Doc keeps right on talking, “With luck I’ll get it back before she misses it, she’ll never know,” his voice gone soft, so Gladys can pretend not to hear.

“Well,” Gladys says. Then, “unemployment?” glad of an idea to change the subject.

“On the state?” he says. “My mother would kill herself if she wasn’t already dead.”

“Maybe…” Gladys takes a deep breath and dives in. “If you could use a small loan…” How old do we have to get before we stop trying to please our dead mothers?

His head snaps back, then sags on his shoulders. Silence, then he spoons up more soup and says, “But what am I burdening you with my mishegoss?”

“Guess I’d better be going,” Gladys says, fumbling in her purse for her wallet.

“Put your money away, it’s on me,” he says. “I insist.”

Just then, the shriveled old lady signals for another refill, and Sally the waitress turns her back. As if in slow motion, Gladys leans over to plant a peck of a kiss on Doc’s cheek.

But two things come between Gladys and the plan she didn’t know she had. First, he flinches away, so her lips almost end up planting a scarlet badge on the graying collar of his white shirt if she didn’t jerk her head back just in time. Second, she remembers who’d be seeing that scarlet badge, back at his house, who’d be dousing it with Wisk while protecting him against ring-around-the-collar.

“Take care of yourself, Doc.” And the next thing Gladys knows she’s out on the sidewalk as if landed from Mars. She touches her lips. Then checks her watch. She could get back early to Ryan and Daughters, maybe pitch in with some filing without being asked. Maybe that receptionist’s flu will turn out to be morning sickness, and they’ll have need of a permanent replacement. Working full time for the daughters wouldn’t be so bad, what with them being women.

~~~

Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer and book reviewer living in Connecticut. Her stories have recently appeared in New Haven Review, Tablet, The Sunlight Press, and JewishFiction.Net, as well as in four recent anthologies, including The Bridport Prize Anthology 2018. She has won the Reynolds Price Fiction Prize, the Lilith short story contest, the William Saroyan Centennial Prize, the Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, and an artist fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.

OFF RAMP

It was stupid, and an accident, but they had broken Jesse’s hand, and now somebody had to pay for it. Jesse had laughed about it in the car once the initial shock had worn off, but then he turned damp, pale, and all the humor drained from his face.

“Why does anybody have to pay for it?” Marcellus said. “It’s the emergency room. Just let them fix it and go home.”

“It’s not free,” Ranger said.

“It is if you walk out,” Marcellus said.

“Somebody has to pay,” Ranger said.

“Then, Jesse,” Marcellus said. “Jesse’s the one who broke his hand.”

“You did,” Ranger said.

“All I did was shut the trunk. I didn’t put his hand in the way.”

“You convinced him to get in the trunk.”

“So what?” Marcellus said. “Big deal.”

“So you shouldn’t have told him to get in the trunk.”

“This here is the crux of the problem,” Marcellus said. “I told him to get in the trunk. He complains that he’s too tired to skate. In other words, too chickenshit to drop in. If you’re too scared to drop-in, then don’t come along. Don’t waste everybody’s time. Jesse gets on the platform, and his trucks are too loose. Or his bearings are tight. Or this, or that. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and fucking forth. If he is so goddamned tired, then stay home, don’t go to sleep in somebody’s trunk. How did he not know I was going to shut the trunk? When you live your life that gullible, then it’s your fault.”

In the ER waiting room, at North Florida Regional, the three friends decided that Jesse could stay behind the curtains until midnight, for all they knew. In the waiting room, they had a Coke machine, but somebody had hung an “Out of Order” sign on the snack machine. They were hungry, tired and bored.

Ranger felt, to some extent, that Marcellus was right, but he blamed himself as well, at least partially. Ranger had in some ways trained them to expect Jesse’s gullibility. He had told them how he had once convinced Jesse that he had made out once with Wynona Ryder at the Oldsmar Flea Market, and that Abraham Lincoln had resurrected, like Christ.

“Fuck that guy,” Hogan said.

“Let’s lay it out,” Marcellus said. “Jesse’s a mooch and a prick. We stop at Dairy Queen, this guy always leaves his wallet in the car. Never buys gas. Never buys beer. He brags about all the girls he’s laid, but can’t name one time, place or technique.”

The four of them had driven up to Gainesville to visit a friend and skate a ramp he had built on the backside of his friend’s family property out in La Crosse. A killer ramp, twelve feet high with two feet of vert and a three-foot channel on one side. The ramp was tucked a mile and half down a dirt road so sandy that if you slowed down, tires could sink down completely. They ran an extension cord from Ranger’s cigarette lighter and strung flood lamps up in the trees, allowing them to skate into the early morning until the Masonite became too wet with dew, then they slept on the platform until sunrise for a morning session. Then Jesse had broken his hand.

The three decided there was nothing else to do but leave the hospital. Marcellus said that Jesse would be released, walk into the waiting room, look around, and call his mom. Jesse’s mom would drive up and handle everything. She would pay the bill or make arrangements, mop his tears, look at him out of the corner of her eye every now and again and wonder why she had given birth to such a living turd. With the decision in mind, the three stood up and walked out of the hospital, climbed in the car and took Arch Street to 34th, then down to 441 and south to Dunedin.

~~~

By the time Newberry Road hit SR 24, Ranger regretted leaving Jesse behind. Jesse’s hand was powder most likely. From the looks of things, a bunch of knuckles probably got knocked out of whack, and he was going to need surgery, titanium, and a whole mess of physical therapy. No big loss with the use of his hand, since Jesse didn’t do anything anyway, but he would be walking into the waiting room with this information, and on top of it all, be alone. When his mother arrived, the loneliness would amplify and separate and settle into each of their psyches for the drive, and thereafter taking up permanent and humble residence.

~~~

 In Ocala, the four stopped at a Publix and bought groceries: peanut butter, jelly, two loaves of white bread and three quarts of milk. They made double decker sandwiches and ate them in the parking lot. Ranger told Marcellus and Hogan about a girl he had saved while he was touring the previous summer. In Ranger’s mind, the upshot to life off the tour bus and his new econo travel arrangements was that they had more freedom to engage in emergency situations. They followed fire engines, ambulances, drove towards plumes of smoke, and in the Midwest, when the clouds turned blue, they slowed down and scanned the landscape for tornadoes. They had pulled children from burning houses and overturned cars and helped pull a partially trapped horse from what appeared to be quicksand.

Once, he even saved a girl choking on the side of the highway. Ranger said he could see her face was blue, and her father, or whoever, was just about squeezing the life out of her trying to dislodge the candy. Ranger told his friends that somehow he told the family he was a doctor, grabbed a Bic pen from the man’s pocket, got the girl on the ground and opened her trachea, found the space with his fingers and plunged the hollowed out plastic tube into her windpipe.

“Just like that we were back on the road,” he said. “I didn’t even realize that there was blood all up and down my arms, even in my hair until it caked up and dried. My hands weren’t even shaking. I didn’t even really care about the girl. I was just overcome with a spirit of spontaneity and precision.”

When Ranger thought about these times, he wondered about all the other possible kids choking on the side of the road, or trapped animals, all of them waiting for a band of maverick skaters to save them. How many were out there now? Probably none, he thought.

All of the situations were uncommon, and probably rare. It was just time and fate. Two points of magnetism. It seemed as if all significant moments in his life and those around him contained these points of magnetism and should not be ignored. In the Publix parking lot, he tried to explain to this to Hogan and Marcellus, and it was this choking girl, this kid, blue face with a Bic pen stuffed in her trachea that had triggered this in him. A calling, in a way, or something like that.

“Useless parents,” Hogan said, biting into his sandwich. “What a retard.”

“Yeah, but the dad had just panicked, that’s all,” Ranger said. “He’s on the side of the highway. What can you do?”

“You do something. That’s what you do,” Marcellus said.

“It’s true, my friends,” Ranger said. “I could feel this moment growing and pulsing until we saw them on the side of the road. I could see them. A point on the horizon that shimmered, then gradually expanded and radiated. It just doesn’t seem like a coincidence. It’s just energy forces, that’s all.”

“Now, you’re the retard,” Hogan said.

“It means something, though,” Ranger said. “It’s not an accident or chance.” He chugged from a quart of milk between bites. He didn’t know if his grades from a single semester at junior college were good enough, or if he had the stamina to stay in school, but he wondered about the possibilities. He could be a field doctor. Somewhere out in Louisiana, or Arkansas, where, if you messed up, it didn’t matter. No way could he work in a hospital. No chance. “Hey,” he said to Marcellus and Hogan. “I have to say. I’m heading back. I can’t do this.”

“Go back where? The girl on the side of the road?” Hogan said. “She’s dead by now. They’re probably looking for you.”

“I’m heading back to Gainesville. Shands.”

“What for?”

“Jesse.”

“Fuck Jesse,” Hogan said, his eyes closed in the back.

“Nah. I gotta go back,” Ranger said.

“Drop us off first,” Marcellus said.

“No,” Ranger said, and pulled the car onto the easement. “You guys take the car.”

“Then what?”

“I’ll find my way back.”

“How?” Marcellus said.

“I don’t know. Bus, car, whatever. Just drive the fucking car home and stop asking so many goddamned questions. Park it at my house and let Julie drive you home. Whatever. You want to go home? Go home. I’m going back because I want to go back. I don’t want to complicate things by bringing you two assholes along. Just drive the car back and don’t wreck it. Can you do that?”

Ranger left the keys in the ignition and walked north. Ranger heard the car accelerate and blend in with the intermittent white noise of 441. Just as quickly, Marcellus and Hogan washed from his mind.

While cruising up the shoulder of 441, Ranger skated past intersections where fiberglass swimming pools were propped up on their sides, stabilized by two by fours. He passed fruit stands selling giant bags of giant oranges, and boxes of taffy and pecans.

~~~

As it happened, Ranger skated ramps with a similar spirit that he had saved the girl. When he jumped from roofs onto ramps, his body fueled itself with gravity, his legs drawing up and taking their spot on the grip tape, then compressing his knees, leaning forward, standing up, across the flat bottom then shooting up the transition straight into the air on the opposite side, the landscape below him and horizon in full view at the tree line. It was not something he thought about at all. Pure impulse. Hogan had simply been gifted with greater physical abilities. Moreover, he was gifted with a sense of time, or the ability to slow and speed up time when necessary, by fully engaging his brain’s processing speed. He compared this ability to Tibetan monks who can slow their heart rate down to voluntary beats. Ranger felt like he could tap into this on ramps and use it to his advantage. Time spread out and in waves, inertia gathered before him like puddy, something to be molded and crafted, all for his specific needs and purposes, the end result a cascade of endorphins flooding his neurotransmitters. All of this, the flair, grace and illusion that during moments in mid-air he possessed full control, manifested itself into winnings, sponsorships, contracts and so much money that he might spend a lifetime wondering how he could spend it. Unlike every other pro skateboarder he knew, Ranger paid off his house, sank money into CDs and paid his taxes. The reckless and magnificent synergy of art and finance converged and allowed him to focus his dark energy appropriately – his competition – one’s constant struggle, free from financial crises. Then came the kickflip.

Did the kickflip build upon the craft of street-skating, creating a subculture of avant-garde based on technical prowess and innovation? It did. Did the kickflip instill future and past knowledge of the form? Perhaps. Did the kickflip ground skaters in a foundation, constructing a vast repertoire of tricks? Of course. But the kickflip also marked the end of extended runs, where landscape and environment dictated tricks, along with wind, weather, speed, inertia and audience, formulating a dialogue that played itself out in a stream of grace, harmony and adrenaline, all made capable by fundamental proficiency, where beauty existed in sustained patterns. That was the voice. Even when vertical skating died, beauty remained in traditional street skating, where landscape dictated tricks, and you expressed the stunts by moving from one location to the next. The kickflip stopped all of that, while sustain, flair, and sheer balls became quaint and unnecessary. Vert skating was something different altogether. Skating ramps and handplants functioned to meditate. Grinds functioned to accelerate, graphite trucks on metal coping, gathering momentum and inertia for proper descent and compression. Airs functioned for more air, and then it was on. Method Airs functioned for style, 360s, 520s, and 720s, functioned for rotational force. The greater the spin, the greater the speed at reentry. Each stunt functioned to throw the audience into a temporary state of disbelief, then emerging back to reality. Kickflips, however, functioned to beautify what needed no beautification, and unless you are the singular physical genius who can string them together. In reality, the kickflip functioned to kill the run and the carve. The kickflip destroyed the concept of flow. The kickflip spelled doom for vert skaters. All of them.

The month after Ranger had gone pro, he received his weekly merchandise check with a note attached telling him that vert skating was dead. The checks immediately shrank from ten thousand dollars to just over five hundred. Everything was getting scaled back. “The great American skate bonanza is over,” the note read in blue ink attached to his last significant paycheck. The note went on to say that the skating fashion was now all about street skating. A shift in culture. Kids wanted street gear, street boards. It was all about the urban landscape. And parents. Parents wanted kids off ramps. Too dangerous. Plus, the current generation of skaters lacked the common sense to even build their own ramps, and that was the reality. If skateboard merchandise companies wanted to remain profitable, they had to adapt.

As predicted, the massive crowds dwindled and nearly disappeared altogether from vert competitions. Then it ended. Goodbye tour bus, private bunk, private bath, four star hotels and a per diem. Hello marathon trips in VW Bugs. Hello motels and couch surfing. If it weren’t for groupies, Ranger would have suffered malnutrition and sleep deprivation. Ranger’s team of skaters said yes to every event just to stay relevant, hitting demos in Lincoln, Nebraska, one day, then Springfield, Illinois, two days later, then back to Atlanta, then up to Nashville, zig-zagging the map with a trunk full of boards, T-shirts and stickers. When he came home, he skated ramps around Florida with Hogan and Marcellus just to stay in game shape.

~~~

A sound appeared behind Ranger that buzzed as if an industrial fan had been clogged with plastic. The snapping and popping and growing louder until a yellow Mercedes coup drove past Ranger, stopped and pulled to the side of the road. Ranger thought the car had suffered some great injury or death, but as he approached, a hand emerged from the driver-side window and waved. He stepped to the opposite side of the car and looked inside.

A woman leaned across the front seat to see him through the passenger-side window. “I would say ‘Hey Stranger,’ but you are an actual stranger.” Ranger couldn’t tell if she was young or not. Her voice sounded both young and old. “You want a ride?”

“Sure,” he said.

“You’re not going to murder me, are you?”

“No,” he said.

“That’s what you would say if you were going to murder me.”

“If I wanted to murder you, I’d have murdered you by now,” he said.

The woman gave him a fake frown, then reached across the front seat and opened the door. “This is only out of pure selfishness,” she said. “I am only giving you a ride to make things easier for me in the next realm.” The woman paused. “The after-life.” She leaned further and threw the door open. “Kindness begets kindness.”

They drove, and the sound of the slapping fan had suddenly warmed and resembled now the timbre of an engine on the fritz. Ranger wondered if all of the sand and dirt embedded in the carpeting absorbed the sound, but the car still shook as if each vibration suggested breakdown.

The woman punched the cigarette lighter, pulled a pack of cigarettes from the space above the cassette player. She held the orange glow close to the tip, and the end of the cigarette seemed to magically transform. “You mind if I smoke?” she said as she opened her mouth and let the smoke slowly escape.

 “Smoke your brains out,” he said. When Ranger toured, he always noted when girls smoked, as they were always, pound for pound, easier to sleep with. He theorized that this habit reflected both self-loathing and a carelessness about one’s own well-being in regard to pleasure. After contests or demos, he used this system as his primary filtration round. Wipe all the nonsmokers off the board. If he won a contest, he needed no other filtration system. Smoking also suggested politically liberal women who viewed sex as a pleasure without any regard to responsibility and emotional attachment. Pleasure was a right, not a function. But unlike his skater friends, Ranger desired only one woman each evening. More than one woman only dissipated the pleasure, blurred focal points. He enjoyed finding an emotional connection through an evening of beers, maybe finding a lake to take a swim in the middle of the night, creating a lifetime of memories packed into one sleepless evening, only indulging in physical pleasure when the sun began to lighten the sky. All based on whether the groupie smoked or not. Then you wake up at noon for a single goodbye round and catch a ride to the next city, or if there was no next city, then the next session, where you woke up with a bag of donuts and a cup of coffee and an afternoon of skating until you were tapped. And then it started all over again, beginning with the scan of hangers on who sat off together huffing down cigarettes, or not huffing down smokes. Of course, he was careful to use protection and avoid at all costs some skater chick showing up at his door or crawling through his window with a clinic bill and a machete. He called his wife every evening to say goodnight and touch base with headquarters. His son was not yet old enough to speak, but Ranger felt that his own voice would creep into the infantile brain and settle. Did he mind if she smoked?

They continued driving and passed more fruit stands, pecans and taffy, snow globes and shot glasses. More fiberglass pool shells propped up by two by fours, while Speed Limit signs vacillated between 25 and 55, luring out-of-state drivers into speed traps.

“I’m Autumn,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”

“My name’s Ranger.”

“That’s not a real name,” she said.

“I’ll show you my driver’s license,” he said.

“I quit,” the woman said. She took the cigarette from her lips and tossed it out the window. “These assholes,” she said, nodding at the pack. “Do you know how old I was when I started smoking?

“No,” he said.

“Ten. Ten fucking years old. Some asshole. Some full-tilt prick. Sells a pack of Kools to a ten year-old. Probably filled with fiberglass. Maybe she’ll come back and give him a hand job. Know what I mean? What kind of monster does that?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I do,” she said. “Seriously. And it’s not just that asshole selling me cigarettes. What kind of company sells things that kill people? They kill you in a gross way and jack up the chemicals to make sure you stay addicted. I could kill them. If there was one goal in my life, it would be to kill one corporate tobacco fuck. One pencil pusher, number cruncher, some advertising campaign motherfucker, I don’t care. I’d kill a tobacco farmer. I would like to walk up to him out in his field. Rip open my chest and show him my gunked up lungs. You know what I mean?”

“Well,” Ranger said.

“I’m serious. One farmer. Some hick in North Carolina thinks he’s not doing anything wrong by growing tobacco plants. No. He can grow apples. Or soy. Some other high-yield cash crop. Flax. Hemp. Do you have kids?”

“One,” he said.

“Then you know,” she said. “Or you will know. If you don’t know, then you’re a shitty dad. Are you a shitty dad?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We’ll, you’re not home, but I won’t judge.”

“I’m going to help a friend of mine. He’s in the emergency room.”

“Okay, good dad,” she said. “Do you cheat?”

“Do I cheat?”

“On your wife.”

“No. Not emotionally.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means what it has to,” he said.

“Who’s this person you’re helping in Gainesville. One of your girlfriends who you are not cheating on your wife with?”

“No, he’s a buddy.”

“What are you helping him with? He sick?”

 “Broken hand.”

“How’d he break his hand?”

“He got it smashed in the trunk of a car.”

“How’d he smash his hand in a trunk?”

“He didn’t. Somebody smashed his hand. A kind of accident.” Ranger explained the situation in rough detail, that the incident had not been intended for significant harm, but to teach him, in so many ways. They were going to let him out, and then Ranger was going to tell him to use some common goddamned sense.

“I can see that,” the woman said. “Better to learn it from friends. Kind of.”

“Exactly,” Ranger said. “Drastic changes require drastic measures.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. You have to see situations with some objectivity. Let’s say I were to kill some guy. If I were to kill a tobacco executive. His family would suffer, but only momentarily. They’d get over it, and they would have a monumental life insurance policy that would take care of everything, forever. Ten years later, nobody notices the difference. In fact, ten years later, half of the family is relieved he’s gone, since they won’t have to worry about taking care of him when he’s old, and so many financial issues have been taken care of. Meanwhile, half the nursing home population sucks air from oxygen tanks. You have to choose which side you want to fight for. Plus, the message gets out that these fucks, these tobacco terrorists are not free from responsibility.”

“Right,” Ranger said.

“But your situation’s different,” she said. “He’s your friend. And chances are, he’ll listen to you. You can grab his shoulders and say, ‘Hey! Wake up!’ I can’t do that to the tobacco man.”

“True.”

“It sounds like your friend would help himself if he could help himself. Who wouldn’t? But he can’t. It’s not that he doesn’t want to, but he can’t. So, he doesn’t. He’s trapped, if you think about it.”

“So,” Ranger said. “So, what?”

“So, you have to,” she said, reaching above the cassette player for the cigarettes, then physically remembering and pulling her hand back. Ranger could tell that this action was going to develop into a sort of tic until she bought her next pack and went through her whole routine all over again.

Ranger told her this guy was not just a parasite. Ranger said that it wasn’t that this kid was a spastic, or cheap, or a liar, or a pud, or a dildo. Jesse just lacked the thing that makes you a normal person. Ranger told her a story about him and Jesse’s mother, when she had walked downstairs one night and he had been eating leftover mashed potatoes and salsa. She had straddled his lap and placed a doob into his mouth. She made him take shotgun hits until they both reached the fifth dimension, then Frenched him and went back to bed. “He’s not normal. He’s abnormal. A normal person does not bring people over with a mom like that. What did he think would happen?”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

“Then you should have known better,” she said. “Fourteen-year-olds know the difference between right and wrong. Did you enjoy it, or were you traumatized?”

“Of course, I enjoyed it.”

“Then you shouldn’t have done it.”

“All Jesse has is money. His dad left him and sends him a check every month, but he never tells his mom, and she gives him more money, and then they both agree to give him money jointly, as an allowance. But he doesn’t pay for shit. He’s the cheapest little prick you’ve ever met. Somebody like that who cannot see with his own eyes needs his hand smashed every once in a while to get the point.”

“Then you have to protect him,” she said. “That’s your job.”

“I’ll pass,” he said.

“You can’t pass. It’s not allowed.”

“Trust me. I’m allowed.”

“No. There are consequences for both him and you that neither of you will ever be able to escape.”

“I have been protecting this little fucker.”

“Then you should have seen this coming. Besides, you have already accepted it. You’re going back, aren’t you?”

Ranger knew Autumn was right. He told her about a time early in high school when he and some friends had been swimming at a hole on the Weeki Wachee River. They had found a spot in the middle of the woods that opened up into a clearing with a canopy of trees overhead. They had spent the morning swimming, then ended up drinking a bunch of beers and smoking a bunch of Jesse’s mom’s pot. Ranger said he’d had so much that he was literally catatonic on an old vinyl lounge chair they had found. Eventually, he and Jesse were the only two left, and a couple of other teenagers had shown up. Jesse rolled them all a joint, and they got to giggling, when one of them said they knew a kid just like Jesse at their school. Same exact type. One said it was like we were all wired the same, but different, and each high school was just a different arrangement of the same types. Eventually, you’d get some hot chicks, some ugly chicks, some jocks, some geeks. Some kids filled the religious gap, and other girls got abortions. Some would get abortions and wouldn’t feel guilty, and others would end up cutting themselves up all the time. But at their school, they also had a Jesse. His hair was cut the same. His parents were divorced. “Were yours?” they asked Jesse. Jesse said no. “Bullshit,” they said. “And this kid’s mom is so fucking hot, you want to blow your brains out. And do you know why his dad left?” Jesse asked why. “His children. His children were such fucking losers that he couldn’t take it anymore.” Ranger told the woman that at that point, he had found something. The two forced Jesse to his knees, and started tying him to a tree with vinyl cords from the chairs, his back to the tree and his hands behind the trunk, one of those live oaks that got mites all in their bark, something happened in his head, some chemical reaction broke loose, and two little atoms had forced together, and with that energy, he had picked up a stone and swiped it down the taller kid’s head. The second teenager bolted into the woods.

“What happened?” Autumn said. “Jesus Christ.”

“I don’t know,” Ranger said. “I haven’t even thought about it since then.”

“Did he live?”

“I guess he did,” Ranger said.

“Did the cops show up?”

“We didn’t live near there, but it wasn’t on the news or anything.”

“Yeah, they don’t put everything on the news. Was he white?”

“Yeah.”

“They would have put that on the news.”

“I guess,” Ranger said.

“But in your heart, you killed him. Whether he lived or not is immaterial,” she said. “Right? The intent was there.”

“In a sense.”

“In a sense, nothing,” she said. “If intent was there, then it was a crime. And if you divulge a crime to someone, they become culpable. The become accomplices. Your secret is safe with me, but I am legally obligated to turn you in,” she said. “I can tell you’re a kind person. I can see that – I could see that before I even stopped. That is why I stopped. But you have to fix this. You should find out if that kid survived or not. In order for the moment to be complete, you have to know.” The woman looked ahead as she spoke, nodding his direction every few moments. “Even though you were right. There has to be consequences for people like that, and people need to know.”

“What if he didn’t survive?”

“What do you mean? He probably didn’t survive. But not because of you. Those assholes walk through life spreading their poison. What do they think is going to happen?” she said. “But don’t think about that. That’s the wrong perspective. Think about all of the people you saved.”

“I don’t know,” Ranger said.

“Listen,” she said. “If he did not survive, and you’re telling me the truth, then there is only one solution,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s easy.” Autumn held the wheel with her knees and unbuckled her seatbelt then rubbed her hands together. “Grab the wheel,” she said. “Keep it steady.”

“Why?”

“Just hold the wheel. I want to do something.” She rubbed her hands together again and tested the heat against her cheek.

Ranger leaned over, holding the wheel with his right hand, his head closer to hers, above the gear shift, looking forward.

“Okay, don’t wreck,” she said. Just keep looking. Straight ahead. Okay?”

“Don’t get weird,” he said.

The woman sat up, with her foot still on the accelerator, she turned toward him and placed her left hand on the back of his head. Pulling his head forward, she placed her thumb on his forehead, between his eyes, an inch or so above the bridge of his nose, then pressed until he could feel her knuckle whiten and the space between her thumb print and his skull darken, his nerve endings defining the cranial grooves behind the thin layer of muscle. She released and she sat back in the same motion, the sensation of her pressed thumb remaining in the center of his forehead. She regained control of the wheel. “There,” she said, looking at him and smiling. “You have been marked.”

~~~

Tim Fitts lives and works in Philadelphia. He is the author of two short story collections, and his fiction has been published by journals such as Granta, The Gettysburg Review, Xavier Review, Boulevard, and Shenandoah, among many others. His story "Teeth," originally published by The Apple Valley Review, appears in Best Microfiction 2020.

High Above Horse Tail Falls

Shelly checks her rearview mirror vigilantly. The rental car is newish, devoid of personality except for the smell of overripe bananas that sticks to the dashboard and seat belts. The Avis representative at the Barcelona airport handed Shelly a flyer along with a stack of pages to sign away additional insurance. Foreigners, the flyer stated in English, beware of highway kidnappings.

Naomi and Nico nap with their shoulders touching in the backseat, split hairs pulling out of Naomi’s ponytail like stripped-down tufts of feathers in Shelly’s view through the mirror. Shelly’s legs tremble and twitch with adrenaline as she navigates her way out of the city, dunking into the darkness of early mountain tunnels and then leveling off through a brown haze coating fields of grasses. It takes her two hours before she acclimates to the idea of maybe not being kidnapped.

Shelly’s mother told her the trip was a death wish. “A woman can’t hike in Europe alone with two children. Not an Asian woman. Not a woman with no husband.”

And it’s true, Shelly is scared. She is so far outside her comfort zone she feels like she’s left and come back as a different person, a new Shelly who has no reference point for anything. Why would the twins have even trusted her to board the plane in San Francisco? Their survival instincts should be better than this. And no one had warned Shelly about Spanish kidnappers.

They break at a rest stop. She has to lift sleepy Nico out of his seat so he can use the bathroom. Between the flight from San Francisco to Philadelphia and the flight from Philadelphia to Barcelona, and now the hours in the car, exhaustion drags everyone down like waterlogged wood. They buy cold Fanta citrons and the kids get pork-flavored chips that Shelly makes them eat outside on picnic benches. Fortified, roused, verging on delirious, Naomi and Nico chase each other in circles around the small playground built at the side of the parking lot, yellow metal ladders and red plastic seats and rubber coated chain links holding fast amidst the whirling movement of the twins. The land as far as Shelly can see is flat and empty.

The twins will turn ten at the end of the summer, and she wants to march her children into a new decade with snapshots of clean mountain air and the sun streaming through pines that grip the edge of cliffs with no sign of letting go. Much of the last twelve months were spent at their father’s bedside: at home, at the hospital, back at home. And then without him.

Cars pull in and drive away. Men alone, young men and women together. Every time the door opens to the rest stop building, the sound of Spanish television sprinkles the stale air with murmurs and music. Shelly imagines the chef behind the counter, who sells the soft drinks and cooks the grilled sandwiches, lives in a back room and never gets off the travel plaza. Maybe he has a cot with a thin mattress tucked into the back storage room.

A bee slips into the garbage can when they lift the lid to toss their wrappers and bottles. Shelly can hear it knocking against the metal can as they walk back to their rental car.

They pass one set of mountains, not the Pyrenees. The highway curves around mounds of tall grasses, then the GPS goes a little buggy when they come to a lake the color of nuclear waste. They drive for miles next to an expanse of green melted-popsicle water, punctured in places by partially submerged trees. Wearied from the trip and her nerves, Shelly can’t decide if the lake is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen or the most disturbing. Naomi wakes from a second nap long enough to eat another bag of pork chips and complain about the banana smell. She has no opinion about the lake.

“My engineer’s hat,” Nico calls out suddenly, as if from a nightmare. “We didn’t pack it.” When Shelly looks through the rearview mirror, part of Nico’s cheek is fat pink from where he slept on his hand. He sucks in and blows out his upper lip and looks like Roger, except for his straight black hair, which resembles Shelly’s.

“We packed it. It’s in your suitcase in the trunk.”

A car appears on the horizon behind them. The lake still stretches out along the highway to their right, the stubby trees in thicker clusters. Shelly watches the car. It catches up with them fast, and Shelly’s heart beats quickly, her eyes flickering between the road in front of them and the car behind. What will she do if it forces them off the highway?

“Are you sure?” Nico whimpers, too young for being almost ten. Naomi, also done sleeping, slaps the empty center seat. The car, a yellow Volkswagen, jets by them on the left, the motor shuddering in its wake. Shelly pumps the brakes, her hands shaking against the steering wheel. She reaches into the console for her sunglasses and her fingers hit on someone’s old hard gum.

Fuck, she says in her head. To the backseat, “I’m sure. Nico. We packed it together.” She puts on the glasses. The lake in her periphery turns blue, like a science experiment. “Naomi, stop slapping the seat.”

Shelly slows their rental car into the tighter curves of the road, leaving the lake behind. The mountains begin to climb around them, bald with layers of limestone. Green meadows stretch up the sides of the cliffs. Shelly hopes the twins are watching out the windows. “Can you believe we’re going to be hiking out there tomorrow?” No one replies from the backseat.

They reach the medieval town of Torla in the late afternoon. At the hotel, the twins roll their suitcases over the gravel parking area and Shelly holds open the enormous wood door. The air outside is cool, blown off the mountains. The hotel seems made for a snowstorm: cavernous fireplaces belly out from the walls; bottles of amber liquor line the bar; peaks rise out the windows, many in the distance still topped white even though it’s June. The concierge holds out a small sign with the Japanese flag, but Shelly tells him they’re American. He goes on to speak English without a trace of Spanish accent. Shelly asks him about the hike she’s planned.

“Yes, señora,” he says. “This is a very popular hike. Many children do it.” He wears a hotel uniform: a black jacket with buttons up to his neck.

Shelly is surprised at how quiet the hotel is. She guesses everyone is outside exploring the mountains.

“I’m not an experienced hiker,” she says. “And the kids are little.” She indicates toward the twins, but they’re no longer standing with her. She panics, then sees they haven’t gone far. A plastic replica of a large brown bird is on display just past the lobby desk. Naomi walks in circles around it, her hands sliding over its talons. Nico sits at the bar, watching a car race on the TV. The communal space on the first floor is masculine, smoky like cured meat.

They unpack. Nico begs to put on his swimsuit and try the outdoor pool, but Shelly tells him it’s too cold. Another day.

“Here’s a funny thing,” says Naomi, coming out of the bathroom. She holds a Swiss army knife with the saw blade sticking out. The white cross is almost completely rubbed away and the name Andt is written across the red body in sharpie. “Is it a bottle opener?” she asks.

Shelly takes the knife.

“It’s a saw blade, Nomo,” Nico says, trying to finger the teeth. “Could be good on the hike.”

Shelly closes the blade using the dotted bed covering. The room is colorless in sage greens and putty whites, decorated, most likely, back in the 1950s. The twins’ bright American rain jackets hang on the back of the closet door like flags on the moonscape. Nico’s engineer’s hat sits on top of one of their hiking packs. When it’s time to sleep, the night sky is so black Shelly doesn’t bother closing the curtains.

They leave early the next morning, their sleep schedules so confused by jet lag and time zones that it seems they could wake or sleep at any time. Shelly has planned the itinerary tightly: a two-day hike, stopping at a mountain refugio for the night where they’ll sleep in rows of bunk beds. Nico will be allowed to sleep with them in the women’s dorm, although he’s a little upset about that. Then back to the Torla hotel for two more day hikes and swimming for the kids in the cold hotel pool. They’ll spend the final three days of their vacation in Barcelona. The overnight hike is extreme in order to take them out of their element, find restoration in its newness, and Shelly is so fearful of it that she doesn’t allow for delay.

Her mother hadn’t understood the need for Spain. “There are mountains in California. In Utah. In New Hampshire, if you need to go far to find what you’re looking for. Or we can rent a vacation home on Vancouver Islands.” She held onto Shelly’s arm. “You don’t need to be alone. Roger wouldn’t have liked it.”

But Shelly thinks Roger would have liked it. He would have chosen Spain, the Pyrenees with their sheer faces climbing out of meadows and swift-moving streams, oxygen wrung thinly from the air like spun cotton. The nomadic trails that crest and dip across borders. The stone cloisters rising from the valleys to lead one home. Roger always helped Shelly see that the kids were capable of more than she assumed. Surviving his death, for example.

In Torla, a bus of Japanese tourists unloads at the trailhead where Shelly has parked their car. The twins pay no attention; they are chasing a red chipmunk over a small footbridge, but Shelly introduces herself, in English, to the guide, a short Spanish man holding a walking stick tied with a bandanna of the Japanese flag. He speaks both English and Japanese, and wonders if Shelly isn’t part of his tour.

“No, I’m American,” she tells him. “Hiking with my two children.” She asks if the trail is safe for children, and he shrugs, tells her it depends on the child. The Japanese tourists slowly put on their packs, stretch their limbs and adjust their shoulder straps. Shelly doesn’t think they look like outdoorsmen and women. They look like typical tourists, many with gray hair. She starts to feel more confident that she has chosen the right hike.

The idea is to walk leisurely, to not push the kids to exhaustion. The hotel packed them a picnic lunch, and Shelly brought candy bars from the States. From the trailhead to the refugio the path will cross forest and alpine meadows, several smaller waterfalls and the popular Cola de Caballo falls, then shift to the most difficult part of the day: switchbacks, and a long cliff trail that disappears behind one of the mountains to where the refugio is protected from wind. Shelly’s guidebook and the hotel, and now the tour guide, confirm that the hike, start to finish, should take about four hours. Shelly has allowed for six, which will get them to their lodging before six o’clock, before there’s any chance of nightfall and well before the hearty dinner promised by the refugio’s kitchen. They have packed rain gear and long underwear, fleece hats and mittens. The weather is said to change suddenly and extremely, depending on the terrain. It’s a beautiful early summer day at the parking lot.

“We’ll see you at the top,” Shelly tells the guide, and she catches up with the twins.

They march along. Naomi and Shelly sing the songs Roger used to play on his ukulele, folk songs by Dylan and a couple of Beatles hits. Nico uses the saw to fashion a crude walking stick, then Naomi wants one, too. The forest part of the hike is reassuringly familiar: slippery brown pine needles under their feet, squirrels and chipmunks darting in and out of underbrush, geometric shapes of sunlight running down tree trunks or across boulders moved and positioned by ancient glaciers. A blue jay appears and disappears, and Shelly plays with descriptor words in her head to capture its creamy blue wings. The truest of blue, she thinks. The same saturation of color as a green apple in a book of fairy tales. Every now and then they hear the group of Japanese tourists behind them. Occasionally, more serious hikers pass by, their rolled sleeping pads strapped to canvas rucksacks.

It is so quiet and so noisy at the same time. The shuffle of their feet on the pine needles, the pulsing of insects. After a time, Shelly realizes that the distant shush is running water. They push out of the forest to a rockier trail climbing beside a modest waterfall, and the twins exclaim with joy. Here, along the edge of rushing water, people are gathered in small groups or individually, some with their eyes closed under the glorious sun and untarnished sky. Shelly had no idea there were so many people ahead of them on the trail, and there are several families with children. Naomi and Nico scramble up a series of boulders and call to Shelly that they’ve found the perfect lunch spot. She joins them, keeping her eyes trained on the crevices, looking for snakes.

When Roger was alive and healthy, Shelly’s vigilance was a source of humor. Roger could do that. He could find a flaw and love through it. Shelly was always more judgmental, upset at the ways he deviated from how she wanted him to be. When Roger’s health began to fail rapidly, especially right before they brought him home for the final weeks, Shelly was ashamed at what she begrudged: his emaciated limbs, his pallid complexion, his fatigue. She wanted him strong. She wanted to look up to him. It was only after his death that her admiration for him, for his character and for his love, brought her to her knees.

The Japanese tourists file past them, their walking sticks tapping the stone stairs built into the path. They bob their heads, say hello as they pass. Even the smallest hiker, an older woman perhaps in her sixties, stays tight with the group. Shelly tries to picture her parents on this hike, part of the tour. Her mother in a sun hat, her father in his fishing vest that he still wears to Dow Chemical Labs, tic-tacs and tissues filling the many pockets. They would hike up front behind the guide, asking polite questions and wanting to make his job easier by not lagging behind. Shelly thinks that doing a guided hike would have been a good idea for herself with the twins. She has never really liked doing things alone. Although she had a good two decades on her own before she married Roger at the late age of thirty-seven.

The sun is hot during lunch but within an hour, they put on their jackets and hats. Nico’s gloves don’t fit, so Shelly gives him hers and her fingers stiffen in the cold. The sky has grayed and spits sleet that splashes loudly against their rain gear. The hike takes them to a high-altitude meadow, and to everyone’s surprise, cows graze to the sides of the path, their bells clanking every time they shake their heads.

The twins are both unhappy. Naomi has left her walking stick along the side of the trail, and Nico resents the work he did preparing it for her at the beginning of the day. They’ve been hiking for four and a half hours, the slow pace that Shelly had counted on, yet she starts to worry they won’t reach the refugio by dinnertime, especially now that the weather has turned. Families with young children pass them in the opposite direction, heading down the mountain to the parking lot. Day hikers, perhaps, who started especially early to see the Cola de Caballo, or the families from the picnic spot, aborting their hikes. They keep their heads down, focused on the trail. One little girl is covered in a transparent plastic poncho, water running over the back hump of her protected knapsack. No one looks American.

Shelly has to shout above the noisy sleet. “We should be at the switchbacks soon. Then we’ll have an amazing view of the valley and be on our way to the refugio.” She says refugio like it’s a carnival. They pass the Japanese tourists, who have taken shelter in a warming hut along the side of the path. “Remember, the weather changes very quickly here. We may get sun in the next few minutes.”

They don’t get sun, but they do pass the famous falls tumbling over the side of a truncated mountain. In the gray, the water seems an affront, as if it’s blocking their way. The noise roars around them, the veil of precipitation coating the rock bed like ice.

Shelly and the twins begin traversing switchbacks that ascend the mountainscape. The wetness from the sky clears, but the waterfall has flooded part of the lower path, so they pick their way across larger stones and try to keep their shoes dry. The twins aren’t that good at balancing. High above them, Shelly sees a thin line cutting through a massive cliff. Dots of color, spread out and in separate groupings, slowly make their way across the line: hikers. There’s no way Shelly can know for sure they will be walking that trail, but it seems likely that the switchbacks ahead of them will plateau there. It’s very high up.

The path under their feet is just wide enough for single file, and Shelly follows Naomi and Nico from behind, her heart skipping with each careless step they take. The twins walk obliviously, as if on a sidewalk, immersed in their individual games. Nico has turned his walking stick into a lightsaber and is battling the air, making electronic pulsing noises through pursed lips. Naomi counts her steps.

“Mama, already 246 steps since the last turn! What if we get up to a thousand?”

“Just pay attention where you step while you count. Nico, the rocks are spilling down the side when you throw your stick like that.”

“It’s his lightsaber,” Naomi says after counting 261.

“It’s my lightsaber,” Nico says. “I have to keep fighting.”

The first crosses back and forth are not terribly bad. The trail is rocky and loose, but the meadow is still so near. The number of visitors gathered at the foot of the waterfall calms Shelly. She keeps hoping to see some of them, especially the families, begin climbing the switchbacks, but none do. She wonders if the Japanese tourists turned around during the worst of the weather.

Naomi gleefully shouts “five hundred” and the trail curves farther to the side, the waterfall and meadow disappearing from view.

“How’s everyone doing up there?” Shelly calls out. She needs to take some of her steps holding onto the cliff face beside her. Her backpack tips her weight, and there are moments when she is focused so much on her own footing that she is unable to watch the twins. Nico drops his stick and it slides a few inches off the trail, lodging in the rocky grade. He looks over the edge.

“Nomo, get my stick,” he says, bracing himself against the cliff face, away from where the stick has fallen.

“Get it yourself.” she says.

He stands quite still.

“We’re too high up,” he says.

Shelly allows herself to look down. The drop is steep and long, dizzying. Before Shelly can stop her, Naomi reaches over the path for the stick.

“Here you go,” she says, handing the walking stick to Nico. “Easy peasy.”

“I don’t like this walk,” Nico says. “I want to go swimming at the hotel pool.”

“Not me,” says Naomi. “The refugio!” she says like Shelly, earlier. “We get to sleep on top of a mountain tonight.”

Shelly doesn’t like this part of the hike, either. The problem is, they can’t see much higher than their current path. Because of the angle of the mountain, she can’t tell how close they are to the top. If Roger were with them, he could help Shelly guess. Will they hike another twenty minutes, or another two hours? Is it leveling off or getting steeper? And the bright dots of hikers way in the distance, cutting across a mountain ledge: Shelly wonders if they originated from the same switchbacks she and the kids are currently following? If so, how much farther ahead are they? They’ve seen no one else hiking since they left the waterfall.

“Let’s take it one turn at time,” she says to both kids, and to herself. “We’ve hiked five and a half hours already. It’s probably just a bit more up, and then we’ll cut into the mountain and find the refugio.” The refugio!

When Roger learned he was sick, the cancer was already stage four. He drove straight to Shelly’s office at Stanford.

“Pancreatic cancer,” he told her, his hands in the air like a tipped scale.

“But it was just back pain. How can they know?” she’d asked, and then her legs gave out beneath her.

There was never the option to take things one day at a time. The lab results, the increasingly hopeless status updates, the way one day became one week became final stage cancer and hospice care pushed them from a precipice and tumbling into freefall. They waited a month before telling the twins, but in the end, it was probably a mistake to withhold the information for as long as they did.

Nico gives a little sniff.

“I’m too scared.”

“Why don’t I lead for a while?” Shelly says. She carefully passes Naomi. Nico can’t figure out how to move his body to make space for her around him so he continues cautiously in front. They go around a turn and start up the next switchback. A small stream crosses the path, not even an inch deep of water. Nico stops walking. Shelly has images of slippery ground, invisible algae slickly coating the path, the twins sliding off the rocks and over the ledge.

“I’m not crossing,” Nico says.

“It’s just water,” Naomi moans from behind.

“Two steps and you’re through it,” says Shelly as cheerfully as she can, but she feels lightheaded. Nico doesn’t move. “Let me go first,” Shelly says, and she gets down on her hands and knees, her backpack pulling at her balance even on all fours. She crawls past Nico and through the ice cold water. Her entire body trembles.

It’s too much. She tries to stand, but now that she’s crawling she can’t remember how to support herself on two feet.

“Why are we stopping?” Naomi asks.

Nico starts crying. “I’m not crossing. Mama, carry me.”

Shelly talks from the narrow trail. “I can’t hold you right now. Give me a minute.” She is sweating and shivering in her rain gear. “I’m not sure what to do.”

“Now we’ll never make it to the refugio,” Naomi shouts. “I hate this!”

“Nomo,” Nico cries, “stop shouting. Mama, she’s going to make us fall.”

The fog rolls in. Thin fingerlike threads swirl above their heads, around the edges of the trail. The white clouds thicken, pile onto each other, crowd into Shelly and her children and pour icy vapor down their lungs. It’s a crazy situation. They’re trapped on a switchback in the Pyrenees. Roger’s been dead for half a year. And within minutes of having a total meltdown, they are now completely enveloped in fog.

“I can’t see!” screams Nico.

“You’re so stupid, Nico! You’re ruining it!” yells Naomi.

Shelly pushes herself against the mountain face. She grips at the ground to turn herself around in small increments and tries to rise slightly on her feet so that she can find Nico with her hand.

“Shhh. Nico, we’re OK. We’re all fine. It’s just scary, the high trail, and now the fog.”

“Can I go ahead?” says Naomi, exasperated.

“Just a minute, Naomi. Let me figure out a plan. Maybe we can sit for a few minutes until the fog thins out.”

“I’m cold,” Nico says, sniffling.

“Oh-wah, me too!” says Naomi. “It’s too cold waiting like this.”

Shelly can see the twins’ shapes behind her on the trail, fading in and out from sharp to ghostly as the fog moves through. It’s dark, not like night but like shutting a door.

“Let’s go!” says Naomi.

Shelly can’t go on. She’ll tell the twins they’re turning around and will have to hoof it back to the parking lot to make it off the mountain before true dark. Naomi will be furious. With Roger, perhaps they could have separated; he could have continued ahead with Naomi, Shelly returning to the hotel with Nico. Or maybe Roger’s presence, alone, would have given all of them the security to stick to the trail and finish the hike together.

An arm and a stick emerge through the fog. A bandana of the Japanese flag. It’s the guide, and he stops behind Naomi. The Japanese hikers pile up behind him, steadfast on the trail. They are dressed in parkas and wool hats; they hold their commercially manufactured walking sticks attached to their wrists. The fog swirls around them. Shelly can’t see the precipice below.

“Are you all right?” the guide asks. There are murmurs from the tour group.

“No,” says Shelly. “We have to turn around.”

No!” shouts Naomi. “We won’t!”

Nico starts crying again.

“It’s very late to turn around,” says the guide. “Perhaps better to keep going to the top.”

Nico grips Shelly’s shoulder. She realizes she is still crouching.

“I can’t make it to the top,” she says.

More of the tour group crowds forward, emerging and disappearing in the fog.

“We must get past you,” says the guide.

Shelly nods her head, yes. The guide passes Naomi and Nico and Shelly, without caution or fear. This is his job. Shelly can’t comprehend his ease. The older woman—the very petite woman—passes next. Shelly thinks of her mom once more. Someone who makes good decisions, reasonable decisions. She doesn’t fly to a different country with two small children only months after losing her husband. When Roger was sick, Shelly’s mom planned for the extra childcare, coordinated their meals. No, her mom is practical, unromantic and reliable: stay close to home, close to family.

There is no way for Shelly to shake her fear until she’s off the mountain. In her current state, she cannot reason with perspective. She thinks of all the ways she’s failed her children.

“Wait,” she calls after the guide. “My daughter wants to spend the night at the refugio.” She reaches across Nico, stretching her body so that she is again on her hands and knees. When she can touch Naomi, she pulls her up the trail. Naomi’s eyes are wide. The fog rolls off her and she stands wholly, in front of Shelly.

“You can’t send me alone!” she cries.

Shelly shakes her head yes. She tells Naomi she can barely make it down the switchbacks, herself. Nico will need all her attention. “You’ll be safer with the tour guide, with the group.” Tomorrow, the supply van to the refugio will drive Naomi back to the town, Shelly promises, although she has no idea if there’s an access road, has no knowledge of how supplies make it in and out. She’s speaking fiction. Making it OK to give her daughter up to strangers because she can’t see how to save them all in the fog, on this trail. “You will get to sleep on the mountain. In the refugio.” It’s not the carnival she had fabricated before.

The Japanese tourists push upon them, dispassionate. Shelly pulls out the Swiss army knife and puts it in Naomi’s jacket pocket. The guide is lost ahead of them. She sends Naomi after the older woman.

“I love you,” she says, turning her head to follow Naomi’s progress, her orange flowered rain jacket, Shelly back on her hands and knees. Her daughter begins to walk, and the tourists file behind her. In just an instant they have all been swallowed up by the fog. Nico stops crying, and once the last sounds of the group’s hiking boots scraping the rocky trail disappear above them, it is very quiet.

Shelly pulls herself to standing and takes a deep breath. The cold air tears down her bronchial tubes. She unclips her backpack and drops it to the ground. Without Naomi, Nico’s terror has shifted. He asks for a Snickers bar, and Shelly splits one between them. She chews the salty peanuts; chocolate melts between her teeth. Nico unzips his own pack.

“What do you need?” Shelly asks.

Nico takes off his fleece hat.

“It’s too cold,” Shelly says. Her legs have been shaking since she crawled through the stream water. “Keep your hat on and we’ll figure out what to do.”

Nico takes out his long underwear. He turns on a small plastic flashlight that glows a circle through the nylon of his bag. He’s searching for something.

“She stole my hat,” he says. “My engineer’s hat.” He turns off the flashlight and knees his pack, then throws it down at Shelly’s feet. “You made her leave with my engineer’s hat,” he says, and the fog blows across his face.

 Shelly’s ears start ringing.

“My god,” she says. “Those people don’t even speak English.” The fog is so thick. “What time is it?” She pushes back her jacket sleeve and peers at her watch. “We still have time,” she says to herself. It’s difficult to catch her breath, and Shelly gulps at the shivery air.

“Nomo,” Nico calls up the mountain. “Nomo, my hat!”

Shelly grabs Nico by his arm. “We have to find your sister. Get your flashlight.”

In the fog, they have no sense of day or night, although dusk will fall soon. Shelly pulls Nico’s fleece hat over his head. She fills her pockets with Snickers bars. They leave their packs on the trail.

“Don’t worry, Roger,” Shelly says into the hidden expanse. “I’ll get her.” 

Nico’s flashlight bounces against the murky soup. Shelly moves them forward hunched over, one hand gripping Nico’s hip, the other tracing the side of the cliff as they ascend. She strains her eyes for her daughter’s orange raincoat. It should be easy to see in the dark.

~~~

Milena Nigam’s work has appeared in YARN, Pithead Chapel, Slice, Full Grown People, Hippocampus Magazine, and elsewhere. Her short story “Switchbacks” was nominated for the 2019 Pushcart Prize, and she was a 2016 fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Milena lives in Pittsburgh and is a nonfiction editor at the online zine Halfway Down the Stairs. She recently completed a novel set in Vienna.