Press 53 2020/2021 Short Fiction

Originally from Alabama, Jennifer S. Davis is the author of two collections of short stories, Her Kind of Want, winner of the Iowa Award for Short Fiction, and Our Former Lives in Art (Random House), a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. She has published prose in such journals as The American Scholar, One Story, The Paris Review, Tin House, Zoetrope: All Story, Oxford American, Epoch, The Georgia Review, and Fiction, among others. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of English at LSU, where she serves as Director of the Creative Writing Program.

We Were Angry

At our town, with its shuttered strip malls, its buckled porches, its peeling paint, its overgrown parks, where we spent idle nights screaming “Bohemian Rhapsody” and puking up Boone’s Farm behind the broken playground equipment. At our teachers, with their beefy hips and feathered bangs and perky calendar-tracking sweaters: jack-o-lanterns, grinning turkeys, ho-ho-ing Santas, heel-clicking leprechauns. At how they made us kneel on the cool tile in front of the class during homeroom to press a yardstick against our knees to measure the length of our skirts. At our guidance counselor, with his lopsided mustache and shiny tie, his wall of books on ACT exam prep and colleges, books he never opened while he talked to us about exciting career opportunities in cosmetology or medical billing, the practical virtues of a vo-tech track. At the monotony of our days, their promise to unfurl one after the other with a bruising consistency as far as we girls could imagine.

Most of our fathers had left us years ago, some for women other than our mothers, some for booze or pills, some in foolish, selfish deaths: a truck wrapped around a telephone pole, a drunken dive in too-shallow water. Our mothers had us young, some of them younger than we were then. Our mothers were tired. Our mothers were angrier than us. They’d been fooled. They’d been cheated. They worked two jobs, sometimes three, spending their rare nights off at the Rodeo Club—their faces purling into their sun-freckled chests—bitching to some wannabe cowboy about the men who had done them wrong, the bosses who underpaid them, the daughters who were hell-bent on becoming everything other than what they’d hoped. In their absence, we experimented with different shades of eyeliner in the small bedrooms of the cramped homes we all lived in, the fans perched on our thrift-store dressers swirling clouds of our cigarette smoke, the music loud and thumping, or we drank PBR down by the boat landing in skimpy outfits we’d lifted from the sad selection in the Auburn mall, some dumbass boy strumming Zeppelin on his guitar, hoping to sing his way into our low-slung skirts.

We’d attended kindergarten in the church basement, the same church our mothers dragged us to each Sunday to prove to the rest of the town they were the kind of mothers who worried about such things as their daughters’ souls, the gleam of their patent leather Mary Janes. We exchanged friendship bracelets, folded notebook paper into hand-held magic contraptions that foretold our futures: who we’d marry, how many children we’d have, how much money our husbands would make. We traded make-out partners at church sleep-ins, writhed to “Purple Rain,” spent an hour each morning plastering our bangs with Aqua Net, sneaked cigarettes from our mothers’ purses, shotgunned beers on rundown pontoon boats sidled up to the expensive MasterCrafts of cute-enough out-of-town boys. And even though most of us had boyfriends, boys we’d known our whole lives, we always hoped someone new would notice us, see that we were meant for something better. So we allowed those other cute-enough boys, vacationing on the lake for the weekend or week from Atlanta or Montgomery or Birmingham, to lay us down on the beer-stained couch in someone’s basement. And sometimes we rode in the passenger seats of their Beamers, the thud of the stereos pounding in our chests, out the opened windows, while we worked the zippers at their crotches, their clutched beers resting on our heads as their thighs twitched and tightened. And we saw what we were doing while we were doing it, as if we were watching ourselves in some bad afterschool special, a cautionary tale about young girls heading down the wrong path, the kind of girls who blew nice girls’ boyfriends in the school parking lot for a joint.

Because none of this mattered. None of this was real. This was the early ’90s, before girls like us could spend their nights constructing better, public versions of themselves on social media. Our true lives were spelled out in private, in our journals, our scrapbooks, the covers of our school notebooks: our names intertwined with those of movie stars; lists of our top ten places to live; magazine cut-outs of wedding gowns pasted onto snapshots our mothers took of us before dances or proms, our hair fluffed, our lips stained and puckered in the self-conscious way of girls still young enough to hope someone might actually be watching.

Mandy Miles was not us. Mandy was tall and blonde and blue-eyed, with a zippy little Miata her father bought her because Mandy was the kind of girl whose father stayed, a father who bought his daughter a brand-new, apple-red car for her sweet sixteen, a father who named his boat after her, a father who owned a pharmacy a town over, a better town. He scooped tiny pills into tiny bottles for old people and anxious women and men with back injuries from the textile mill, and he made so much money doing a job that didn’t seem nearly as complicated as working a cash register or remembering a ten-top’s dinner orders. Mandy’s mother didn’t look old or sad or dried out. Diana Miles was a prettier, softer version of Mandy. The same blonde hair. The same blue eyes. She wore a heart pendant encrusted with sparkling diamonds, and she was in the habit of poking one delicate finger through the heart of that heart when talking, and Mrs. Miles was always talking. She was the kind of woman who assumed people wanted to hear what she had to say. She was the kind of woman men listened to. The Mileses lived in a sprawling house on the side of the hill overlooking the lake, and we imagined them there, sitting on their porch in the late afternoon in matching chaise lounges, their iced teas sweating in the circle of their hands, the sun fading like a shutting eye into a thin seam of light as they admired all that lay before them.

Once, when we were in grade school, we went to a sleepover birthday party at Mandy’s sprawling house on the side of the hill by the lake. Our mothers dropped us off with our Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bags, our stashes of drugstore makeup we’d swiped from their purses, our presents for Mandy, cheap gifts—puzzles and marbles and plastic, marble-eating hippos—that embarrassed us the minute we stepped into that house with its matching appliances, sleek hardwood floors, and artwork lit by separate little lights. Mandy had recently moved to our town from Atlanta, her parents in search of a slower pace, a rural life—fishing off the pier, golfing in the middle of the week, small-town values—and we assumed this party was her mother’s idea, her mother’s want for Mandy to make new friends in a new place. Mandy’s father brought Pizza Hut from the next town over, where he worked, the better town that had a Pizza Hut, a Quincy’s Steakhouse, a Red Lobster, but did not have the beautiful lake with the more affordable lakefront property that was still too expensive for our mothers to own. We ate pizza, a birthday cake shaped like a Barbie, ice cream hardened by Magic Shell. And Mandy, who was plump then, her middle round against her acid-washed jeans, sat silently each time her mother placed a new treat before us, cramming bite after bite of food into her mouth.

Afterward, Mrs. Miles drank red wine while we sipped sparkling cider from champagne flutes. Mandy, who’d ignored us most of the night, finally said to her mother, “Why are you doing this to me?” Then she sat in a corner and read a book while an apologetic Mrs. Miles, who called us beautiful young ladies, who called us darlings, who called us sweet things, sat cross-legged on the floor in a black satin negligee—which astonished and thrilled us, her assumption we were accustomed to sharing such sophisticated intimacy—and dealt us our fates from her tarot cards. She kept them wrapped in red velvet tied with blue ribbon, like our fates were something worth protecting.

When it was time to go to bed, a tipsy Mrs. Miles herded us into Mandy’s room, with its soft pink carpeting and a light fixture engraved with floating rose petals, and a canopy bed netted in miles of butter-yellow lace, and we unrolled our sleeping bags on the floor in a tight clot in the middle of the room, a room as big as all the bedrooms in our homes put together. And after Mrs. Miles kissed us all good night, her lips hot on our foreheads, we pulled out our school pencil bags, where we hid the cheap makeup we’d stolen from our mothers, and plastered our eyes in silvery blue, our cheeks in too-bright red. Mandy sat at the fringe of our circle, a silent lump. We forgot she was there until she snatched a lipstick, a deep coral that made our mothers’ teeth look like the color of weak coffee, and circled her mouth again and again, the lipstick spreading in concentric rings, like water rippling from a thrown pebble. “Pretty?” she said, and then she laughed for the first time that night.

Our mothers, with purple-smudged eyes and morning hair and our younger siblings chittering in the backseat, picked us up the next day before their early shifts, and when Mrs. Miles escorted us to our cars with only a short robe wrapped around her lovely negligee, they said, “What kind of respectable mother walks down her driveway in broad daylight in her nightgown?” They frowned suspiciously as Mr. Miles stopped washing his Mercedes long enough to offer them a sudsy wave, said, “That husband of hers sure has an eye for expensive things.” And we knew—like us—our mothers had a long list of things they wished for: a sprawling house on the hill right by the lake, a boat named after them, matching appliances in a brightly lit kitchen, a silk negligee so soft and finely woven it felt like a second, better skin.

In Sunday school that morning we sang:
He’s still working on me,
To make me what I ought to be,
It took Him just a week to make the moon and the stars,
The Sun and the Earth and Mercury and Mars,
How loving and patient He must be,
Because He’s still working on me.

Before big church, the men, dressed in their sport jackets and khakis, sat in folding metal chairs in the church kitchen and sipped coffee from Styrofoam cups. They talked about factories moving to Mexico and the disintegration of the traditional family and the misguidedness of atheists and feminists and the removal of Christ from schools and the moral downfall of the country in general, and they strategized a game plan to right the world again, speaking in the language of sports: discipline, comeback, rebuilding, an eye on the ball, step up to the plate, not much time on the clock, offense, send in the heavy hitters, total dominance.

What we girls saw when we lay shoulder to shoulder on our backs on the merry-go-round in the church playground: drooping power lines threading one house to another, a cloudless sky with no beginning or end, the dark shadow of the old church steeple spinning in and out of sight.

We decided we hated Mandy after that sleepover. What choice did we have, really? And when she grew tall and impossibly thin, a book reader, a smart-girl darling of all the teachers, maybe we gossiped about her—about what she didn’t eat, about what she was probably doing with the college boys we imagined she hung out with. And maybe we huddled in the halls at school when she passed, all blonde light and blue eyes, giggling at her skinny butt, her skeletal fingers. And maybe we rolled the trees in the front yard of that sprawling house on the hill right on the lake when we were bored on Friday nights, scrawling shaving cream obscenities on the hood of Mr. Miles’s Mercedes. And maybe we drew cadaver-like cartoons of her and let them slip to the floor after class for her to see, calling her a stuck-up cunt when she stepped over them without looking down or at us. Or even once, after a long night of shotgunning beers on the boat landing, maybe we all snuck over to her house in the back of a pickup and shoved one of our boyfriends’ hunting knives into the tires of that apple-red Miata, laughing riotously on the drive back home, our hair whipping in the moist wind. And maybe we should have felt bad about these things. Maybe we shouldn’t have blamed Mandy for the names that replaced our own in the mouths of some of the cute-enough out-of-town boys: white trash, redneck, slut. Maybe we should have considered we might be part of the reason why Mandy rarely ate, why during fifth period when the halls were empty and she didn’t think anyone would hear that awful, guttural hacking, Mandy threw up in the girl’s bathroom what little she did eat. We saw her compulsion as yet another sign she didn’t deserve what she had, didn’t see how good she had it. Believe this: we felt righteous.

None of us would admit it, but sometimes late at night, lying alone in our twin beds in the bedrooms of the small homes we all lived in, the fans perched on our thrift-store dressers failing to stir the leaden air, we imagined we were Mandy lying in her bed in that sprawling house on the hill, the mattress so plush that we felt we were floating, like we’d laid ourselves into the late summer lake, the temperature the exact warmth of our skin, so there was nothing separating us from water and water from us, just a fluid softness. The evening sounds of our cramped homes became something else, something other than the tired, solitary workings of our mothers: the late-night murmurs of a father laughing at a talk-show comedian’s antics; the soothing hum of the dinner dishes in a stainless-steel washer; the swooshing pendulum on a grandfather clock that bore our family name. And in this way we tricked ourselves into a gentle, comforting sleep, the pulse of the crickets outside of Mandy’s imagined bedroom overwhelming the anxious whisper of our own hearts.

Some of us had a tender spot for Mrs. Miles, even though we were never invited back for a sleepover or a BBQ or a swim party. So when we heard that Mrs. Miles went missing that summer before our senior year, that she’d left home after breakfast to get groceries and never returned, that a scarf she might have been wearing was found on the side of a red dirt road a few miles from her home, some of us, most of us, were genuinely concerned. “Holy shit,” we said, thinking of what we would feel if some horrible thing happened to our own mothers, women who lived hard lives many thought invited such trouble, although the only danger we’d ever really feared in our town was an inability to leave it. And maybe, just maybe, some of us felt a small, unsettling satisfaction, thinking of Mandy, of how scared she must be now that her life in the sprawling house on the hill right on the lake wouldn’t be her life anymore, because we were angry, but we still believed in God then, and if he loved all of us equally, why did she have a father who stayed, an apple-red Miata, her own jet ski, a future that promised escape? Perhaps it seemed stunningly fair she should lose a mother who said things like darlings, like sweet things, who saw something more in us girls than her own loss.

We’d heard about Mrs. Miles’s disappearance through one of the boys who had a scanner, heard about it as the police were hearing about it, and that night, when we were shotgunning beers on the boat landing, our boyfriends’ hands tucked firmly in our back pockets, their chins tucked in the flesh of our necks, we thought, What kind of fucked-up world is this? We girls had all agreed that Mrs. Miles was dead, that no woman in her right mind would willingly abandon the life the Mileses lived, but we were surprised when the boys announced, “If she’s dead, Mr. Miles did it. You saw the way she dressed, the way she carried on with other men. I bet he dumped her in the creek that runs back where they found the scarf. Ditched her car in the lake. It ain’t right, but who could blame him, really? You don’t know what a woman can drive a man to do.” Their confidence pissed us off because we thought we were women, and we thought we knew exactly what a woman could drive a man to do, and we spent most of our energy trying to do just that. “There’s going to be a search tomorrow morning,” the boys said, animated in a way we’d never seen them before. They talked about which guns they would bring, what they would do if they found Mrs. Miles’s body, because surely it was out there somewhere, discarded for them to find, and their photos would be on the front page of the Lakeview Record, and they would look respectful, their rifles propped beside them, their caps held in their hands, their mussed hair pushed from their earnest eyes. For the first time we girls began to wonder what our boys wanted in life, if they dreamed of places other than this, of girls other than us, what they thought of when holding our bared bodies against their slight, trembling chests, and we were angry that yet again we were not enough.

Our mothers said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to get in the car and start driving and never stop? I couldn’t even imagine it. Starting over. Everything new. A new name. A new life.” They looked at us in a way that let us know they’d imagined it often, said, “I mean, I would miss you kids like crazy, but I can’t help but wonder. When is it my turn?”

Of course, the next morning we were all there standing along that red dirt road where they’d found the scarf just as the sun slid into the bluing sky. The boys with their trucks, their worn boots, their baseball caps pulled low to hide bloodshot eyes. The sheriff, his broad stomach swelling in his tan uniform. The sloped-backed men—the lobes of their nostrils fern-veined from too much booze—with their rifles, their hunting dogs, their fingers twitching against coffee mugs as they barked clipped instructions: Keep an eye out for piles of brush, earth recently moved, clothing, personal items. Stay in groups. Watch for moccasins.

We didn’t even notice Mandy at first, sitting quietly with Mr. Miles on the tailgate of someone’s pickup, clutching a stack of fliers. “Thank you for coming,” she said, offering a flier to anyone who passed nearby, subdued for once, not like she was in class, always ass-kissing the teachers, always raising her hand to answer questions we didn’t think needed asking, talking about internships and scholarships and sororities and travel-abroad programs while we worried if our mothers would be able to save enough money to send us on the school trip to Panama City or pay for senior pictures. Her father said nothing. We tried not to stare at him. Tried not to think of how Mandy could sit there and hold the hand that might have killed her mother, although, of course, there was no hard evidence that he’d done it, or that she’d even been killed, not yet anyway. And if he didn’t show up and sit quietly holding his daughter’s hand, that would be a kind of evidence in itself, we reasoned.

But he looked so lost, so stricken, we began to think that maybe he didn’t murder his wife and throw her body in a creek, that maybe he loved Mrs. Miles, who, everyone agreed, was a wonderful lady, a kind mother. “Mrs. Miles is a fighter,” we all murmured. “God will watch over her,” we all said, not knowing how these statements made sense, or if they were appropriate, or what was appropriate when searching for the body of a mother lost in the woods. But everyone nodded gravely, said, “Yes indeed, God will watch over her,” and we couldn’t help but ask ourselves where God was when Mrs. Miles had been snatched from the grocery store parking lot, or when she looked at the groceries sitting on the backseat of her car, decided she didn’t want to be a wife and mother anymore, and turned away from home, or when our mothers were knocked up just out of high school, some even earlier, or when our fathers disappeared into their own misery.

The flier read:
MISSING
Diana Miles
Age: 39
Hair: Blonde
Height: 5’6’’
Weight: 120
Last seen at the Piggly Wiggly in Lakeview on July 1st at
10 AM wearing a pink sundress. Bring our wife and
mother home.

Beneath the print was a smudged photo of a smiling Mrs. Miles in a dark, low-cut swimsuit, sitting in a lounge chair on a pier, Mandy in oversized jeans and a baggy T-shirt standing behind her, Mandy’s eyes wide and clear even in print, her blonde hair so light it bled into the white of the page. “It’s my mother’s favorite picture of us,” Mandy explained when some of us stared wordlessly at the image because who puts a photo of their mother in a swimsuit on a missing persons flier? “She looks real happy,” we all agreed. “Real pretty.”

Mr. Miles and Mandy searched with the lead group, their orange vests flashing bright against the deep green of the woods. We girls stayed close together as we wove through the maze of trees, the forest ground thick with leaves and vines and mud from summer rains, our matching white Keds ruined by the iron-red dirt. Of course, we all wanted Mrs. Miles to be found, but unlike the boys, who were plummeting through the woods ahead of us, breaking branches, leaping over felled logs, barely containing their enthusiasm, none of us wanted to be the one to find her. We still had hope then of tidy lives filled with beauty, of rich boyfriends and romantic proposals, of fantastic careers as interior decorators and makeup artists, of blissful days lazing on balconies and poolsides with stunning views of beaches and bronzed bodies far from our old town. None of us wanted to be touched by a deliberate act of savagery, which somehow seemed so much more profound than the careless acts of savagery we’d encountered in our young lives: boys accidentally shooting each other while hunting, drunken classmates hurtling their cars into trees, men getting caught in the machinery at the mill. We couldn’t help but wonder what witnessing Mrs. Miles’s body would mean to the future us we still believed would tumble out of our town the day after graduation, taking nothing more with us than beer-hazed memories of sweet boys promising sweet things we expected to find somewhere else.

So when the dogs started barking in the near distance, a frenzied howling, we stilled for a moment, all together, as one breathing organism. “I don’t want to see,” someone said, but we were already moving toward the commotion, the mud from the rains sucking us into the earth and releasing us reluctantly. And then we were in a small clearing, a campground of sorts on the edge of the creek, the sun high now in the blazing blue sky, a perfect summer day for laying out at the lake, squeezing Sun-In and lemons in our hair, shotgunning beers pulled from scuff-scabbed coolers. The dogs were circling something at the silt-rimmed water, the men shaking their heads and talking on their radios, gesturing at the clamoring boys to stay back. Mr. Miles stood under a tree, his thin face pressed into his thin hands. Mandy was squatting next to a leaf-covered mound, stroking what looked like matted hair. We all stopped breathing for a moment, our hearts raging in our chests.

And although we were standing right there, seeing everything, we felt like we often felt, as if all of this was happening to some other girls, and the lives we were destined to be living were already in motion, waiting for us to step in, to catch up with ourselves. “It’s an old dog,” Mandy said quietly, not lifting her head, her pale hair curtaining her face. “Looks like somebody shot it. Who would do a thing like that?” And suddenly, we were embarrassed, by the boys’ disappointed faces, by the time we took that morning to line our eyes and roll our hair in case the newspaper took pictures, by Mandy’s tenderness toward an old dog put down by his owner in a way as familiar to us as mothers who worked the late shift and left TV dinners for us in the freezer, as fathers who failed to call on our birthdays. And we were angry. Angry that girls like Mandy were allowed such ignorance.

Mr. Miles sold his sprawling house on the hill right on the lake and moved Mandy back to Atlanta at the end of the summer. As the weeks passed and Mrs. Miles remained missing, we wondered less and less about what had happened to her. What did it matter? We girls understood that people leave or are taken or die in a hundred different ways, and in the end, they are still just gone. And we’d almost forgotten about Mandy, who headed off to Tuscaloosa for college the summer after graduation, where we heard she’d painted her dorm room and fingernails black, shaved her head, spiked her nose with a fat silver bar, and tattooed some saying about the purpose of life in Latin on her bony back, her professors awed by the spectacular suffering she detailed in her heartbreaking essays, her grief-stricken poetry, which only made her angrier.

And most of us had forgotten our silly dreams of fantastic careers as interior decorators and makeup artists, of blissful days lazing on balconies and poolsides with stunning views of beaches and bronzed bodies far from our town. Girls like us were expected to forget so others could get on with the business of living by forgetting us. But we would never forget seeing Mandy standing in the stark light of her bedroom window the night we thrust that hunting knife in the tire of her apple-red Miata, the way she lifted her nightgown over her head and tossed it aside, the accusatory way she stood nude and silent, watching us, the big bones of her joints pressing against her skin like clenched fists, how shocked we were to see our own anguish staring, unblinking, back at us.

• “We Were Angry” first appeared in American Scholar

Clifford Garstang is co-founder and former managing editor of Prime Number Magazine. He is the author of three collections of short stories from Press 53, House of the Ancients and Other Stories; In an Uncharted Country; and What the Zhang Boys Know, which won the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction. He is the editor of the three-volume anthology series, Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, also published by Press 53. He has two novels: The Shaman of Turtle Valley (Braddock Avenue Books), and Oliver’s Travels (Regal House Publishing). He holds a BA in Philosophy from Northwestern University, an MA in English and a JD from Indiana University, an MPA from Harvard University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Bellevue Literary Review, Blackbird, The Hopkins Review, Cream City Review, and Whitefish Review. His book reviews have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Rain Taxi, Washington Independent Review of Books, and elsewhere.

THREE FLASH FICTIONS FROM
HOUSE OF THE ANCIENTS
& OTHER STORIES

The Year of the Rooster

 Bali is the perfect place for Oliver. It feels like the end of the road, the end of the world, where everything stops. No pressure, no pretense. Just the waves on the beach, constant, tempting. The bars in Kuta, art in Ubud, temples, music, beer, beautiful Australians, men and women.

He’s backpacking with a guy he’d met at the hostel in Bangkok, Barry, a sour kid from Brooklyn who couldn’t wait to get out of Thailand and now can’t wait to get out of Indonesia. He wants to leave, and Oliver wants to stay, maybe forever. So go ahead, Barry, go, have a nice life. Replacing Barry with a girl, or another guy, or both, could lead to a new world of possibilities for Oliver, arousing possibilities. But Barry backs off, says he isn’t serious about leaving, and, to show there’s no hard feelings, he’s got a special treat for Oliver.

Oliver is skeptical. In Bangkok, Barry’s idea of something special was a whorehouse. Not that Oliver didn’t thoroughly enjoy himself, but that was Bangkok. Another planet.

Barry leads him to a café. It looks like all the other cafés, and bottles of Anker beer arrive, along with a menu.

“A very special menu,” Barry says.

Special, indeed: blue meanie omelets, blue meanie soup (with carrots), blue meanies sautéed with onions and garlic.

They order the omelet, to share, and, when it comes, Oliver has to make a choice. This could be a colossal mistake. He’s heard about the effects, that mushrooms are like LSD, which somehow never came his way during college, and, although he’s curious, he’s just plain scared. He wants adventure, he wants experience, but it could kill you, right? Warp your mind?

The omelet is greasy and gritty, barely edible, but that’s hardly the point. When nothing happens, Oliver recalls the first time he smoked pot, how it had no effect. Barry is disappointed, too, and they go in search of a real meal.

As they walk down the sandy street, Barry jumps over the shadow of a palm tree. Oliver sees the same shadow, but suddenly it’s writhing like a snake, and Oliver is rooted where he stands. Barry laughs and jumps back over the shadow, kicking sand onto Oliver’s feet, and then he grabs Oliver, dragging him forward. When Oliver tries to pull free, they both tumble, laughing, into the sand.

As the mushrooms take hold, they return to their inn near the beach, where Oliver hopes to ride out the trip in safety. They sit on the porch, and he grips the railing, afraid he will fall or—and this seems a real possibility—drift into the endless sky. He’s thirsty, thirstier than he has ever been in his life. A beer materializes at his side, and then it is pouring into his mouth, dribbling down his chest.

A rooster struts through the courtyard. It picks and pecks, cocky. Peck. Cock. Prick. Cocky cock. The rooster looks at him and speaks, but he’s speaking Indonesian. Whatever he’s saying, it’s hilarious, and Oliver laughs. He can’t stop. Barry pulls his dick out and pisses on the rooster, which is even funnier. The rooster cackles and leaps away. Barry runs after him, spraying piss on himself, on the rooster, all over. Oliver is laughing so hard he spills his beer, and that makes him laugh more. He falls backward onto the porch. His head lands on the hard wood with a thud.

~ ~ ~

Oliver opens his eyes. He remembers the rooster and he remembers hitting his head. He feels his head now and there is a bump. But he’s no longer at the inn. He’s on the beach. He’s wearing shorts, but he’s shirtless and barefoot. His skin burns. The sun is sinking, nearly gone.

He stands, dizzy. On the way to the inn he comes across a shop and asks for beer. His thirst is still epic. He reaches into his pocket, but his wallet is gone. He pats front and back, back and front. He runs back to the beach, anticipating the relief he will feel when he finds the wallet. But the entire beach looks like someone slept there, sand troughs and sand waves, and although he does find a spot that seems right, there is no wallet.

Did he have it when they went for the omelet? It was Barry’s treat, he knew he wouldn’t need money, so maybe it’s in the room? He runs now, with darkness deepening, and finds the inn.

The rooster still struts through the sand. Oliver jumps onto the porch. The door to their room is open, but Barry isn’t there. Barry’s backpack isn’t there, either. Oliver’s is there, though, open, disturbed. He pulls clothes from the pack, his guidebook, his journal, piling it all on the bed, until the pack is empty. His wallet is gone. The linen pouch with his passport is still there, but the travelers’ cheques are not. His camera. The tiny ruby he bargained for in Bangkok. The batik he bought in Jogjakarta. Gone.

He slumps on the porch, as close to tears as he’s been since childhood. If Barry appeared right now he might kill him. Oliver pounds his fist on the porch once—take that—and then again—take that—and again. The violence helps. He pounds the porch again. Better. He pounds the porch one more time and, when he looks up, sees that he’s being watched. In the glow of a lamp across the courtyard, two travelers, tall and blond, a man and a woman, lift bottles of beer in greeting. The man reaches into the bag by his side, pulls out another bottle, and holds it toward Oliver.

Oliver rises. The dizziness—whether from the mushrooms, or the fall, or the sun—is still with him. As he crosses the courtyard, the rooster eyes him warily and then, in a moment of clarity, runs for his life.

In Hoan Kiem Lake

 Oliver has just emerged from the Metropole’s air-conditioned lobby and already Hanoi’s damp envelops him. Beneath his shirt, sweat trickles. With a handkerchief he blots his forehead, but it’s unstoppable.

Unstoppable, too, are the boys who accost him each time he leaves the hotel.

“Buy from me,” they shout.

Postcards. Pirated copies of The Sorrow of War, The Quiet American. He once thought of them as entrepreneurs, but now he knows that the boss operates nearby, doling out inventory, collecting receipts. It’s big business, Dickensian.

He waves the boys off and crosses the street, dodging cyclists and motorbikes. His negotiations with the Ministry finished for this trip, he can relax and reflect before flying home tomorrow. He passes behind the Post Office and joins the crowd strolling around Hoan Kiem Lake. The lake’s appeal to the locals puzzles him. Litter mars its surface. Shore trees are stunted. A crumbling pagoda occupies a tiny, lifeless island. Each breeze carries the smell of sewage and decay.

More of the postcard brigade assail him and now there are boys with shoeshine kits. He points to his sneakers and shakes his head, but the boys are relentless.

The heat and damp are finally too much and he claims an empty bench. The black water ripples under a hot breeze. His eyes close. His mind drifts to a dark childhood lake, an unexplained accident.

When he opens his eyes he has company, a woman with a swaddled baby. As if on cue, the baby shrieks. He knows the trick: the woman’s hand inside the blanket has pinched the child to draw sympathy and cash. He’s not heartless, but there’s nothing he can do for her, or for the boys who still hover. A fistful of cash will not help. He’s seen it all, wherever he goes, the beggars and the whores and the boys. What the country needs, he alone cannot provide.

The woman shouts over the baby’s cries. She holds out one hand while the other pinches again, screams renewed. He turns away, but she grabs his arm. She lifts the baby and swings it in the direction of the lake. She holds out her hand again, and when he doesn’t move she points to the lake, swinging the baby over the water.

Oliver understands what she intends, knows the bluff. But he knows, too, that poverty here is beyond crushing. It obliterates. What if this woman isn’t a con? What if she’s come to the point where there is no choice: money, or they both die.

The woman shouts again and swings the baby in an arc that will land it in the lake, beyond reach. Oliver imagines the bundle taking on water, sinking, its cries silenced. In the water he sees the placid faces of the baby and his drowned brother. And in the instant before the woman might let go, he leaps, wraps his arms around her and the howling child, and the three of them sink to the hot, hard ground.

The Learned Lama

 Snow fills the Ulaan Baatar morning. As arranged, Oliver meets Ganbat outside the hotel. The boy’s ruddy face is soot-streaked, and Oliver knows he has slept underground, relying on steam pipes to survive another bitter night. Like many streetkids, Ganbat knows beggar English and has offered, for a thousand tögrög, to guide Oliver. Oliver’s here on business, but wants to do the right thing, to help, so he’ll employ Ganbat for one morning, and hope it is enough.

Oliver pays and they both enter the Choijin Lama Monastery. He thinks he sees disapproval on the gatekeeper’s face, but he doesn’t care. Ganbat leads him through the grounds, tries to explain the significance of the temples, but he has too few words.

Ganbat waits outside while Oliver browses in the monastery’s giftshop, a jumble of handicrafts displayed in a traditional ger. He examines a Mongolian woodblock—Buddhist scripture, the clerk tells him—and his eyes settle on a row of tiny bronze statues. He lifts the smallest, no larger than a molar, surprised by its heft. The clerk holds a magnifying glass and indicates the features of the diminutive Learned Lama: pointed cap, raised hands, enigmatic smile. Oliver pays a small fortune for the statue and carries it in his closed fist, sharp edges biting into his flesh.

The snow is thick now, and wet. Ganbat waits for him at the gate, shivering. Oliver shows him the Lama. He presses the little statue into Ganbat’s hand and watches the boy’s eyes grow wide.

• “Year of the Rooster” first appeared in r.kv.r.y quarterly; “In Hoan Kiem Lake” first appeared in Northville Review; “The Learned Lama” first appeared in Six Little Things

Clint McCown is the only two-time recipient of the American Fiction Prize. Besides his most recent book, Mr. Potato Head vs. Freud: Lessons on the Craft of Writing Fiction, he has published Music for Hard Times: New & Selected Stories; four novels (The Member-Guest; War Memorials; The Weatherman; and Haints), and six volumes of poems (Labyrinthiad; Sidetracks; Wind Over Water; Dead Languages; Total Balance Farm; and The Dictionary of Unspellable Noises: New & Selected Poems 1975-2018). He has also received the Midwest Book Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the S. Mariella Gable Prize, the Germaine Breé Book Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and others. He has edited a number of literary journals, including the Beloit Fiction Journal, which he founded in 1984. He teaches in the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

The Mule Collector

The new mule pushed his way in among the others and pressed his muzzle tentatively against the sparkling walls of Glen L. Hanshaw’s glassed-in patio. Glen L. stood for a moment in the kitchen doorway, iced tea in hand, admiring the scene around him. All six of his mules were out there, spaced irregularly around the patio’s three exposed sides, running their lips and tongues along the sticky surface, sometimes clacking their big teeth against the shatter-resistant glass. Even through the smeared slobber that partly clouded his view, he could see the inner workings of the mouths, the jaws moving in a chorus of silent conversation, telling him things that only mules could know.

He moved methodically across the flagstone floor and eased himself into the webbing of his lounge chair, careful not to spill too much of his tea. He’d overextended himself today, first on the golf course and then with the mules, and now even the mild strain of steadying his full glass brought tremors from some fault line in his legs or back or brain. He set the tea on the floor beside him and closed his eyes to rest.

The tournament had taken more out of him than he’d expected. He’d ridden in a cart, of course, but, even so, a full eighteen holes was more than he was used to these days. He’d fallen into the habit of playing only abbreviated rounds—starting at the fourth hole, which ran parallel to his mule field, and finishing on the seventh green just across the fairway from his house. Maybe a two-day tournament was more than he could handle. Already he felt the muscles along the backs of his legs and arms stiffening like old leather, and the thought of having to play another full round tomorrow gave him a sudden chill.

Or was that the air-conditioning? The blistering heat on the course today had baked him like a clay pot, so as soon as he’d made it back to the house, even before tending to the mules, he’d cranked the thermostat into the blue arctic range. Now goosebumps rose from his raw patches of sunburn. That was all right, though. He enjoyed being uncomfortably cold on the hottest day of the year. That’s what being rich was all about.

For their part, the mules seemed perfectly content, the half dozen of them ranged in the long shade of the house, pressing their gums against the cool, sweet glass. They knew how to tolerate the heat, how to pace themselves against the mercury, moving only when they had a better place to go. Glen L. hadn’t understood that as a boy. He remembered walking the plow behind his father’s big pair of drays, breaking sod for a late-summer crop. On hot days the mules worked more slowly, keeping him longer in the fields, and he had hated them for that. But now he understood their stubbornness: a bad sun called for a slower pace, plain and simple. Why hadn’t he known that back then?

“Hey, Dad! Are you home?” The voice startled him, and Glen L. suddenly remembered that he wasn’t alone in the house this weekend. One of his sons had come to visit, and they were partners in the member-guest. But what the hell was his name?

“I’m out here,” Glen L. called. “On the patio.”

“I got us a couple of steaks, and all the fixings,” the boy announced from the kitchen. Glen L. heard the papery rattle of grocery sacks being dumped on the counter.

Harold, that was it: the boy’s name was Harold. Bill was the one who was dead.

“I thought you’d be going to the tournament barbecue,” Glen L. called. “It’s already paid for.”

“I’m not much on pork ribs,” Harold said. He stepped out onto the patio. “I thought maybe we’d get out the grill. . .”

Glen L. looked up at his son: not a boy anymore, but a fat, bald fifty-year-old with broken blood vessels mapping his cheeks and nose, his mouth now hanging open like a clubbed fish. But Harold wasn’t a fish. He was something more lamentable, more obsolete. A 1966 Chevy Corvair barreling flat-out for the scrap heap. But how could that be? How could a son of his be such an old man already? And where did that leave Glen L.?

“Jesus Christ,” Harold muttered. “What the hell’s going on out here?”

“I’m watching my mules.”

“But, I mean—” he gestured toward the smeared walls, “what the hell are they doing?”

“They’re licking the glass,” Glen L. told him. He pointed to the small plastic bucket and broad-bristled paint brush stationed by the patio door. “I coat the walls with wet sugar every afternoon. It’s their special treat.”

Harold sat down heavily in the Barcalounger. “But it’s grotesque.” He scanned the row of mules uneasily, his blue eyes bright and watery like his mother’s.

“The mules seem to like it,” Glen L. said, reaching down for his tea. “Especially the new one. I think the group activity helps him fit in.”

“New one?” Harold scowled through a quick count, then shook his head. “Christ, Dad, you can’t keep doing this.”

Glen L. smiled. “I found an old sugar mule over in Able County. Got a great deal. Sugar mules are pretty rare around here. The farmer didn’t even know what he had—thought it was a cotton mule. Can you imagine that?”

Harold sighed and reached over to steady the cut-crystal glass in Glen L.’s hand. “Here, let me help you,” he said, lifting it away, and Glen L. realized he’d sloshed some tea across the front of his shirt. He wiped at it clumsily with his fingers, pressing the cold spill against his stomach. When he looked up, Harold was standing by him with a roll of paper towels.

“Now I’m in the market for a couple of good pack mules,” he said, dabbing a wad of towels along the stain. “But this is the wrong part of the country, so I might have to wait a while.”

Harold cleared his throat and stared at the mule directly in front of him, a male Missouri with crooked, blackened teeth. “Six mules is a pretty big responsibility.”

Glen L. snorted. “Six? Six is nothing. You know what my inventory is down at the car lot? I can show you sixty brand new Cadillacs any goddam day of the year.”

“I know, Dad. But running the dealership isn’t the same thing as filling up your yard with mules. I don’t think you can equate the two.”

Glen L. felt a flare of anger. What the hell way was that for a son to talk to his father? I don’t think you can equate the two. Like some schoolteacher talking to a backward kid. If Glen L. had ever said anything like that to his own father, he’d have felt a leather strap across his backside. “I can equate anything I want,” he said, though he knew that was a lie.

He could never equate Harold and Bill, for example. Bill had been a born salesman, like his father, and could have done anything—run his own company, maybe, or had his own TV show, or even gone into politics. But Harold had become—what was it again?—some kind of accountant. An actuarial accountant, that was it, working in a sunless office up at the state capitol. Gray rooms and long numbers and cold marble floors. True, Glen L. had never actually seen the place; but he’d been there in his mind, and it felt just like a morgue.

Harold stepped over to the glass wall and drummed his fingers lightly above the Missouri mule’s head, but the animal didn’t seem to notice.

“Don’t get them started,” Glen L. warned.

Harold stopped tapping the glass. “What do you mean?”

“I mean they’re quiet now, but if you spook one he’ll start to bray. And if one starts, the others are liable to join in. That’ll make one hell of a racket.” He smiled at the thought. The truth was, he loved it when his mules got rowdy. Of course, from time to time a few upstarts from the Country Club complained about the noise, but that didn’t worry him. It was his club, after all. He’d helped found it back in ’48, and had written most of the bylaws himself. For the last twenty years, he’d even been club president. Let the new members grouse all they wanted—he knew the board would never dare take him on.

“Sorta like a zoo, isn’t it,” Glen L. said. “Except we’re the ones inside. That makes it better, I think.”

“Sure,” said Harold, but from the way he chewed his lower lip Glen L. could see he wasn’t sure at all. Lip-chewing was a giveaway Harold had inherited from his mother—a skittish woman, really, overly polite, who almost never spoke her mind. For thirty-eight years she’d kept her conversations with Glen L. on a sort of cruise control set below the speed limit, and he had learned to look for meanings in her face, rather than her words. “How are you feeling?” he would ask, and she’d always say, “Fine,” even in the end, when her body made it clear she was dying.

Glen L. reached again for his glass of tea, and with a concentrated effort lifted it smoothly to the armrest of his chair. “Remember the time I took you boys to the Washington Zoo?” he asked. “Nineteen-fifty-six. We saw the real Smokey the Bear. I bet you forgot about that.”

Harold smiled. “No, I remember,” he said easing himself back into the Barcalounger. “We fed him a bag of peanuts.”

“That’s right. You boys fed peanuts to Smokey the Bear. That’s something to be proud of. It’s like being part of American history.”

“Well, I guess. . .”

“Then we went to Mount Vernon. Drove out there in the snow. Had just about the whole damn place to ourselves.”

“And froze our butts off,” Harold said.

Glen L. frowned and waved the notion away as if it were a puff of smoke. “That part doesn’t matter.” He leaned over sideways and took a careful sip of tea. “You know, this instant mix is pretty good stuff. It’s got the sugar and the lemon already in it. You don’t have to do a thing but add water.”

“Uh, yeah, I think I’ve had it before.”

“The thing I hate about regular iced tea is you can’t ever get the sweetness right. No matter how hard you stir, the sugar won’t ever dissolve, it just swirls around a while and then sinks to the bottom.” He lifted the glass briefly between them. “But this stuff is great,” he said, and for a long moment they both stared at the sweating half-glass of tea, almost as if they expected it to do something.

“Maybe I’ll have some later,” Harold said, finally.

Glen L. suddenly remembered why he’d brought up Mount Vernon. “George Washington was the first commercial mule breeder in America,” he announced. “I bet you didn’t know that.”

Harold looked at him suspiciously. “I didn’t think you could breed mules,” he said. “I thought mules were all sterile.”

Glen L. shook his head. “Christ, Harold, did you just fall off the turnip truck? What I mean is he imported jackasses to crossbreed with his mares.” He sighed and wiped the back of his wrist across his lips. “Anyway, only the males are guaranteed sterile. Your grandfather had a female hinny once that turned out to be fertile.” He paused. “But I guess you don’t even know what a hinny is.”

Harold shrugged. “Some kind of mule, I guess.”

A slow smile smoothed the wrinkles from Glen L.’s lips. “It’s exactly like a mule. In fact, you probably couldn’t tell the difference in a million years. But,” he said, widening his eyes to emphasize the mystery, “it’s not really a mule at all. Not in the least.” He settled his head back against the chair webbing, satisfied that he’d just given Harold the clue he needed to make his way properly through life.

Harold didn’t appear to notice. “You seem to know a lot about mules,” he said.

“More than I ever knew about cars.” Harold wouldn’t believe him, of course, but it was true. After forty years of owning the local Cadillac franchise, he still couldn’t explain the difference between one car and another. Oh, he could sell them, all right—but that didn’t mean much. He supposed that was the secret most salesmen lived with—that the talent to sell was a thing in itself and could live, even thrive, with no real connection to the product. In Glen L.’s case, he had memorized the options lists and the names of all the technical features that complicated each new model’s engine, but rarely had he comprehended even the simplest mechanical workings behind the words. In his own driving, the most basic forms of car maintenance had remained alien to him—things other people might consider routine, like changing an oil filter, or tightening a fan belt, or replacing a wiper blade. In fact, it had always been a point of pride with him that whenever the slightest thing went wrong with whatever car he was driving, he’d just turn it over to his mechanics and pick another demo from his endless stock of cars. And he never used the self-serve gas pumps.

But mules were something he had studied all his life—or at least it seemed that way to him now.

“Pretty soon you won’t see any mules at all except in zoos,” Glen L. said, pushing himself up from his chair. “There’s just no call for them anymore. It’s all tractors now.”

Harold rose quickly and steadied Glen L. by the elbow, then caught the glass of tea as it slid from the aluminum armrest. Glen L. looked at the rescued drink in Harold’s hand, then up at his son’s sad eyes, and felt things going wrong inside. The stepstones in his mind seemed suddenly too far apart, and he couldn’t make the leaps. “Too fast,” he said, meaning he had stood up quicker than he should and had been swamped in a blood-rush of dizziness. This had happened to him frequently, he knew that much. Brief spells of confusion, always worse when he was tired. Hardening of the arteries, that’s what they used to call it when a mind slowed down enough to lose its way. These days they probably had a dozen labels for troubles in the brain—names as specific as Oldsmobile and Chrysler, each with its own set of options. In the end, he imagined, they were all more or less interchangeable. Besides, it hardly mattered what name his problems went by—medical terms were just as meaningless to him as the numbers on an engine.

“That’s progress, I guess,” said Harold, offering a weak smile, and Glen L. saw that whatever he’d just said to his son must have been misunderstood. He tried to speak again, concentrating hard to keep the words from turning into strangers, from unforming themselves on the tip of his tongue and stalling him in silence. But the dizziness came again like a cool, damp cloth behind the eyes, wiping his thoughts clean. He cleared his throat and tried again, certain he had to say something, even if it made no sense. Awkward pauses made customers uneasy, and that was bad for business.

“What is it you’re here for?” he heard himself asking. What is it you’re here for? Glen L. turned the sound of it over in his mind. Yes, it was a good, sincere question. He knew Harold had come to stay with him for a couple of days, but the reason had momentarily escaped him. Asking about it seemed only logical, a simple step to steady him with a frame of reference. But Harold only blinked and turned his gaze toward the floor. It was his guilty look, and even though Glen L. couldn’t immediately sort out the language to say so, he could see that the boy felt stung, as if the question had gone deeper than he’d intended.

“Let’s talk about it later,” Harold said.

“No such thing,” Glen L. snapped. Hadn’t this boy learned anything from his old man’s four decades in sales? There was no later; later was a sham, a sidestep, a customer’s excuse, a pitch gone wrong. It meant no deal, no dice, no chance in hell.

“I just thought it might be better to talk some other time.” Harold waved a chubby finger toward the line of mules. “You know—when there aren’t so many distractions. What I want to say is kinda serious.”

“Everything’s serious,” Glen L. said. “Rebates, dealer prep, destination charges, factory incentives. Everything.” He wasn’t sure that was quite what he meant to say, but it was close enough.

Harold raised his head and looked steadily at him. Glen L. tried to meet his gaze, but suddenly shivered, recalling an expression in his own father’s eyes, that same look of—what? What was it he saw there? Weariness? Disappointment? Or maybe something else, something Glen L. couldn’t remember the word for. Maybe there was no word. But it was a dark look, and it had always made him feel small and troublesome, a boy who somehow didn’t measure up. What right did Harold have to wear that look? It wasn’t a son’s look at all.

“Well, I’m just a little worried, is all,” Harold said.

Glen L. nodded. “My mules,” he said, and stepped away from his chair to the streaked patio wall. The animals had finished licking away the sugar coating, and stood now staring sleepily ahead into the cool blue tint of the glass. Beyond the mules, Glen L. could see a late foursome trudging up the fourth fairway through the now-broken afternoon heat, and he felt a wave of contentment. He loved living by the Country Club. It gave him a view greener than his own father’s farm. So quiet and picturesque—like a postcard of some foreign land.

Emily had been happy enough here, he felt sure of that. Happy as she could have been, anyway. Some people were born to be alcoholics and some people weren’t, that was the way Glen L. saw it. Maybe it was genetics or maybe it was some other stroke of fate, but whatever the case, there was nothing anybody could do about it. There was certainly nothing Glen L. could have done about it. Emily had just been one of the unlucky ones. That wasn’t Glen L.’s fault.

It wasn’t even Bill’s fault, though that would have been an easy place to put the blame, with his killing himself like that. Killing himself. That was the one thing Emily never could get past. Of course, Bill hadn’t done it on purpose. He’d slipped, that was all. Glen L. was sure of that. All kids played on water towers, and sometimes accidents happened. There was no reason in the world for Bill to have jumped.

And the boys, too, they’d loved living here and having the room to romp as far and wild as they pleased. The yard had been unfenced in those days—no mules to keep in. Though there might have been a dog.

“It’s not only the mules, Dad. I’m just not sure you can keep on living by yourself like this. You’re not—well, you’re not as sharp as you used to be. You need somebody to look after you.”

Harold stopped talking then, and in the space that opened between them, Glen L. gradually assembled Harold’s meaning. It crystallized slowly, like a ball of ice, growing clear and hard in his mind. The more he thought, the more he understood; and the more he understood, the colder he got. Harold wanted him put away, that was the gist of it. After all he had done for this boy, Harold wanted him hauled off to the dump like some rusted-out junker. Well, by God, he wouldn’t have it. Glen L. had never needed anybody, his family included, and he’d be damned if he’d let a son of his tell him what to do with his life. Maybe Emily would have put up with that kind of disrespect, letting her precious boys say and do whatever the hell they wanted—but not him. No, by God, no son could talk that way and get away with it—that was the one thing he’d learned from his own father. He’d teach this boy who ought to be put away. He’d whip the sonofabitch until he bled. Glen L. could still do that, he still had the right. He’d show this little shit which one of them was boss.

He groped along the top of his trousers for his belt, but couldn’t find it. Someone had taken it from him, and he hadn’t even noticed. What the hell was happening to him? He began to panic.

“What is it, Dad?” Harold asked, putting his hand lightly on the side of Glen L.’s arm. Glen L. flinched at the touch. Snake. Harold was a goddamn snake. “What’s wrong?”

“Need my belt,” Glen L. stammered. “Need—” He patted desperately at his stomach and hips, but it was no use. His belt was gone, and his words were failing. He couldn’t argue, and he couldn’t punish. The rage rose up in him, huge and spiteful, but found nowhere to go. A gulping sob broke from his throat, and he closed his eyes tight, fighting for control.

“It’s all right,” Harold told him. “You didn’t wear a belt today. These pants have an elastic waist, see?” Harold hooked a finger in the top of Glen L.’s pants and tugged. The waistline stretched like a rubber band, then snapped back smartly into place.

As Glen L. stared down at the front of his plaid, elastic pants, he felt the blood surging in his head, and the instant he felt it, he knew his thoughts were scattering again, that some unfathomable tide had swept over him, dragging his mind away from whatever he’d been struggling with. His anger, unmoored from its source, flaked apart like old sheet metal, and he felt suddenly calm again, pleasantly lightheaded, with no particular need to sort through the fragments that remained. He had asked a question about his belt, he remembered, and Harold had answered him; Glen L. had no belt, and it was all right. Why had he worried about his belt, he wondered? It had something to do with Harold—Harold had said something wrong. But what did the belt have to do with it? Harold had teased him about his pants. That was probably it—they really were pretty silly-looking off the golf course. Well, no matter. No harm done. Harold was always putting his foot in his mouth. He never had the gift of gab like his brother Bill. That Bill was a born salesman. Poor Harold couldn’t make a pitch if his life depended on it. But they were both good boys.

Funny that he couldn’t call to mind how Bill had died. It might have had something to do with cars—an accident of some kind. But maybe not; maybe he was only mixing up parts of the past. Anyway, it would come back to him sooner or later. The important things always drifted back, sometimes even after he’d stopped expecting them.

Looking out across the golf course now, he remembered why Harold had come home to visit. They were partners in the member-guest, just like last year and the year before. Just like every year since the tournament began. They’d actually won it a couple of times, back in their salad days. Harold had once been a pretty fair golfer. Better even than Bill.

“These tournaments are rough on an old man,” he said cheerily. “How about you pick us up some steaks, and we’ll bring out the grill tonight.”

“Sounds pretty good,” Harold told him.

“Did you get a chance to check the leaderboard before you left the club?”

“Yeah, I checked it.”

“How’re we doing?”

“We’re doing fine, Dad.”

“Within striking distance?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, don’t stay out too late tonight. Tomorrow we’ll make our move.”

The shadows were lengthening now, and Harold switched on the floor lamp by the patio table. A shiver of movement passed among the mules, and as Glen L. turned again to watch them, he saw his own faint outline hovering in the glass. Then his eyes focused on the gently swaying mules, and for a moment he forgot why they were there.

This wasn’t the view he’d expected his life to come to. He’d expected to pass his days sitting on the patio with Emily, the two of them watching their grandkids tear across the neatly trimmed lawn. He’d even imagined putting in a pool for days like this. But now he was an old man with brittle bones, and the lawn was a ruin, cut to pieces by the sharp trampling of hooves. There was no pool, there were no grandkids, there was no Bill, there was no Emily. Harold was his only remnant. Glen L. might as well have been a mule himself, for all he’d leave behind him in the world.

Glen L. took his iced tea from Harold’s hand and gulped down the last few sugary swallows. His dizziness had passed for now, and he felt clearheaded, more like his old self. But the spells weren’t over, he knew that. If anything, they’d come more often now, stealing treasures from his mind like so many pickpockets, each theft so smooth he might not ever know what he had lost.

Was that a good thing, or a bad?

He looked at Harold, who stood in the kitchen doorway now with his fingers laced beneath his belly as if he were holding himself up. “You need to take better care of yourself, Harold,” he said. “You look like death on a shingle.” Harold smiled, almost like a boy again, and for a moment Glen L. felt younger, too. “Let’s kick up our heels,” he said, and before Harold could even ask what he meant, Glen L. turned toward the mules and banged the heavy iced tea glass sharply against the patio wall, rattling the panel in its frame. The new sugar mule jerked its head violently to the side, knocking the bad-tempered Missouri in the teeth. The startled Missouri let out a bray and shoved itself sideways against the line of mules to give itself more room to fight. The still-panicked sugar mule drew its head upright and tried to retreat from the wall, but stepped into the fetlock of the dray on its other side. The dray nipped the sugar mule viciously on the shoulder, and now all three mules began to slam back and forth against the line. In a matter of moments nearly all the mules were stumbling sideways in confusion, stepping all over one another, snapping and kicking, braying angrily at the disruption in their lives.

Glen L. leaned forward against the cool plate glass. It was a thrilling spectacle, better than Mount Vernon or the Washington Zoo, better than anything he could ever remember seeing. “It’s like a piece of American history,” he said happily as his son pulled him back from the glass.

They were all singing now, all six of them, and they’d never been in finer form. Their clamor echoed through the porch, raw-edged and harsh, but still oddly tuneful, a sassy chorus crowding out the air. It was the most complicated sound Glen L. could imagine—far more complicated than the chugging of an engine; more complicated even than the salvaging of lost words.

In some ways it was ugly, like a hopeless pain worming between the ribs.

But that wasn’t all of it, not by a long shot. It was a good sound, too—solid and strong, with a wild streak flashing crazily through its heart. If he closed his eyes and listened without thinking, it lodged in his bones like something native, something inborn, something older than his father’s oldest mule.

In those ways, it sounded like laughter.

• “Mule Collector” was awarded the 1993 American Fiction Prize, judged by Wallace Stegner.

Robert Scotellaro is the author of What Are the Chances?: Flash Fictions and has published widely in national and international books, journals and anthologies. His stories have been included in Best Small Fictions (2016 and 2017) and Best Microfiction 2020. He is the author of seven literary chapbooks, several books for children, and four full-length story collections: Measuring the Distance; What We Know So Far (winner of the 2015 Blue Light Book Award); Bad Motel; and Nothing Is Ever One Thing. He has edited, along with James Thomas, New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction published by W.W. Norton & Company (2018). He is one of the founding donors to The Ransom Flash Fiction Collection at the University of Texas, Austin. 

Leaping

After my aunt left him, my uncle took to mastering sailors’ knots for hours by the window facing the yard. Looking up from his intricate tangles to peer out now and then at the red bougainvillea that climbed a fence (my aunt’s favorite color, always on her fingernails and lips). Still wearing that fat brown tie with a marlin leaping nearly off of it. Even when he sat, just in his boxers, he wore a dress shirt and that tie, knotted tightly.

Told wild stories of the sea, though the closest he ever got was the beach at Rockaway. Told pirate tales. Said there were even women pirates, but most people never knew that. And how sailors, seeing manatees sunning on the rocks, thought they were mermaids. “Ugly pieces of work, those manatees,” he’d say. “Can you imagine the disappointment?” As I stood there with my ball and two gloves, hoping he’d take one, and we’d play catch. Back and forth in the yard like we used to: high balls and grounders, and those fast ones that nearly took your head off. Kept you on your toes.

“Watch, you’ll learn something,” he’d say, biting his lip, threading the rope up and over, around and through. Tugging on it when he was done, to demonstrate its reliability. A symmetrical art he framed with his hands, hanging for a moment in his sailorman’s Louvre. That marlin leaping from his chest, the bougainvillea leaping the fence in still life. The pirates leaping onto ships from that kitchen chair parked in front of the window. The baseball burning a hole in my hand. Not leaping anywhere.