Editor Selections for Issue 241
Poetry & Short Fiction

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Marco Etheridge is a writer of prose, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His work has been featured in more than one hundred reviews and journals across Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA. The Wrong Name is Marco’s latest collection of short fiction. When he isn’t crafting stories, Marco is a contributing editor for a new ’zine called Hotch Potch. Visit Marco’s website.

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Maya Jacyszyn is a multi-published poet and the Assistant Director of Neumann University’s Writing Center. She received her bachelor’s degree at Saint Joseph’s University where she also served as Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine titled, Crimson & Gray. More recently, her work is featured in the Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, The Ignatian Literary Magazine, Quibble Lit, and Clepsydra Literary and Art Magazine, among others.

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Robin Michel has over twenty years’ experience as a writer, publisher, editor, creative writing instructor, and communications consultant. She has received support and recognition from the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, the Soul-Making Keats Awards, and the Ina Coolbrith Circle. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in BlueHouse Journal, Blue Mountain Review, Comstock Review, Cloudbank 17, The MacGuffin, Sisyphus, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere. Robin grew up in Utah, but has now lived most of her life in Northern California.

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Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx, and neurodivergent writer originally from Sacramento, California. Their debut full-length collection, Salamat sa Intersectionality (Okay Donkey Press, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. They’re also the author of the poetry chapbook Dela Torre (Sundress Publications, 2022). They live in the middle of the Nevada desert.

Seattle, 1986

I followed bread crumbs. Some were obvious. Go to a big city. Find where artists and outcasts live. Head west not east. Some were only hunches, rumors, like my cousin who came back home after two years working for the electric company in Spokane dressing like a man, even when she wasn’t driving a tractor and mending fences.

But I chose Seattle. It was farther away and bigger. Once I got here, though, I couldn’t find them. There was no Masonic social group for lesbians, no Order of the Eastern Star Chapter for dykes, nothing I could look up in a phone book. I went to the women’s center at the university but they didn’t know what to do with me.  I wasn’t a student.

When I did find them it was mostly in bars. Still, I was invisible, some twenty-year-old girl with a bad haircut and the wrong kind of jeans. Money was a problem. Finding a place to live was a problem. Finding work was a problem. What little money I had was for food, not beer. I grew too hungry to think about girls, and too broke to spend five dollars on the cover charge at the Wildrose only to stand in the corner, trying not to stare at the middle-aged biker-chick with her younger girlfriend on a leather choke chain.

I didn’t want to lean against the low wall that separated the bar from the dance floor with all the other girls on women’s night at Neighbors waiting till some blow-dried, bolo tie-wearing thirty-five-year-old dyke in sales asked me to dance. I had been thirteen when every wannabe ranch hand in Asotin County decided I was theirs for the choosing, and I was damn ready to do my own choosing.

Then there she was.

I watched her two days in a row sneaking a smoke out the rear window of the number 7 bus as it headed down Broadway. I tried to catch her eye, but she was looking out the window. She wasn’t there the next day or the next. Then she was. An old man slept in the seat next to her so I slid into the seat behind and leaned forward. She spoke first.

“Was wondering when you’d get the nerve.”

All I could do was stammer. “What?”

“You better ask me out fast. This is the last time I’m taking this mobile urinal.”

Beth.

My choice.

Picking bits of tobacco out of her teeth, cigarette scissored tight between two fingers, pinky raised like she was holding one of my grandmother’s china tea cups.

Beth’s breasts hidden under one of my ratty t-shirts, encased in an expensive black silk bra. I’d never seen a black bra, and the skin on my fingertips was too rough for the slick fabric.

One of Beth’s college friends told me, “Beth always attaches herself to the smartest, most beautiful person in the room.” She couldn’t figure out why Beth was into me.  She said, “You must be lucky.”  

It sure felt that way.

Beth’s apartment was a second-floor walkup at the corner of Tenth and East John, right where Tenth crosses John and becomes more of an alley than a through street.  A block off Broadway, she couldn’t have had a gayer address.  The street names were a roll call for every lonely, closeted gay man. John, Thomas, Roy, you are welcome here. There were no sign posts for a girl like me, though I was often mistaken for a boy.  I wanted to claim the neighborhood for my own but I was scared. Before I met Beth, a group of skinheads had come after me, yelling “Fucking faggot, you can suck my dick,” as they chased me down the same alley that Beth’s bedroom window looked out on.

We entered Beth’s apartment by the metal fire escape in that damn alley. She didn’t like to go through the building’s front door. She wasn’t unfriendly, only careful to limit her contact with the other tenants in the remaining seven units, all elderly single men. The whole building was painted a dirty pale blue inside and out. The apartment was beat but it was all hers.  It had a bedroom with a door, a real bed with a headboard and a box spring.

The bra, the apartment, the bed, each one should have tipped me off.  But I was an amateur when it came to following such clues.  It took me a while to realize Beth didn’t have a real job. She worked all the time as an intern “dramaturg.” I thought she said drama turd and laughed.

“What’s so goddamn funny?”

I learned to wait, ask questions, till I knew what was what.

The theater company was called Chekhov’s Folly. They shared space in an old warehouse in Pioneer Square with the Feminist Theater Collective. There was no money to pay an intern. I had no idea where Beth’s money was coming from. She drove a silver Saab. Said it had been her grandmother’s and had only three thousand miles on it. I think she was ashamed of all she had, and embarrassed by all I didn’t.

The first night we hung out I wanted to kiss her so much it hurt. I watched her mouth and I waited for my chance. Beth expected me to make the first move. I thought she thought I was more experienced.

Later, I realized she didn’t want the responsibility of desire.

But I’d been dragging her all over the city like it was mine to show off, not hers.  We rode the ferry over to Bainbridge Island and back at sunset without getting off. You could do that back then. Nothing had been blown up yet.

At midnight we ate breakfast at the Dog House. My regular beehived-waitress, so used to seeing me alone, played along and called me honey and girl. Donna, the drag queen who played the piano, could tell it was a big night for me, a watershed. She honored my date with her affection, sending all the right and utterly false signals to Beth, my stellar queer credentials, my established membership in the club of hip outcasts. It was all smoke and mirrors, a lie. It was perfect.

Truth was, I was the outsider here, just like I was back home, and no way was I gonna admit it was my first date with a girl. I was so sure I’d screw it up. I was tired. I had been working rotating shifts as a janitor at the same women’s shelter where I had stayed when I first arrived in the city. I never knew what time was the right time to eat or sleep. I finally let Beth drive me home. We pulled up in front of the boarding house in the U-District where I shared a room with two other girls.  Beth double-parked. She turned the car off and got out. She leaned her back against the side of the car as she fumbled in her pocket for another cigarette. 

“This okay with you?” She gestured to the cigarette.

“No.”

She bristled and I reached for her hand, carefully moving it away from her mouth. Her head tilted and I could see her recalibrate her impression of me. Her lips were slightly parted as if the cigarette were still perched there.  I leaned forward and kissed her. She tasted like an ashtray. I didn’t care. I willed myself not to care.

With Beth I learned to be careless.

But that night it was all good. More kissing up against the car. Her thigh pushed up between my legs. When I was dizzy with her she shoved me toward my door.

“Get some sleep, farm girl.”

She got back in the Saab and drove off.  I didn’t hear from her for a week. Though I called her apartment every night at all hours and in the morning too. Finally, I just stopped. And then there she was one morning as I got off work, standing on the corner of Ninth and Terry, across from the hospital, holding a big white flower, a calla lily. I’d never seen one.

She took me to breakfast at Eggs Cetera on Broadway like we’d been together all night. Everyone in the place was eating their way out of a hangover or trying to make up for whatever had or hadn’t happened the night before. I was hungry. It had been hard to stomach anything those days when she was gone. We made out in the booth. She tasted like maple syrup and coffee. I barely noticed the aftertaste of nicotine. Beth was like that; up and gone for a week with no explanation, then indignant and hurt if I asked where she’d been, going on and on about the inherent trust between women, and the need for a new relationship paradigm.

Oh, Beth was accomplished. She used words like cunt, fuck and pedagogy all in the same sentence. She was good at sniffing out the raw spots, pushing on bruises. She had a gift for weaponizing words long before it was a thing. 

I hit her once.

Her mom had hit her too.

I was driving. She was picking me apart like a scab. I yelled at her to stop. She didn’t. I punched the steering column so hard it cracked. I thought I’d broken my hand. She didn’t let up. My hand flew up of its own accord and came down like a hammer on her thigh, raised a bruise, that spread and grew for days. Later, when I was going down on her, I glanced up and saw it, purple and swollen before I ducked my head back down and redoubled my efforts to make her come. One orgasm after another easing my guilt. When I looked up again, my throat raw, I caught her looking at the bruise with a slight smile. With both hands she gripped my hair, holding my head firmly in place.

“It’s never enough with me. Is it?”

She said it like it was something to be proud of.

Beth wrote plays about people she would never meet in real life, highway flaggers, toll booth attendants, and used car salesmen. The dialogue was smart, fast, cutting. It bore no resemblance to any conversation I had ever heard. I wondered if I was one of those people in her plays. The baby butch from Eastern Washington. The cliché with a GED and a job as a janitor taking literature classes at Seattle Central Community College. She called me Beebo Brinker, a “boyishly appealing” character in one of the reissued, 1950’s lesbian pulp novels she’d bought at the Red and Black Book Collective on 15th. She’d written a love note on the cover page, inscribed it just for me.

Back then, I went by Day, not Dayleen. My brother, Mitch, started calling me Day when we were kids. He could see me even before I could.

“No way are you one of those dumb double-E girls.”

Rayleens and Maureens populated our town.

When we were older and he followed me to this city for reasons not much different than my own, he confessed he’d called me Day because I was his “day and night, his North Star.”  He was sick by then and prone to grand poetic pronouncements, the showy verbal expressions of love I could never muster. Not even with Beth.

Everyone was changing their names back then. Beth said they were throwing off the remnants of the patriarchy embedded in their given names. The shelter manager was named Sunshine and there were two counselors named Raven and one girl who called herself Max. Beth, whose name means “god of plenty,” thought all these name changes were hilarious. She was secure in her own bounty.

Still, she said, “You’re the brave one, Day. Not me.”

One night we were at a straight bar in Pioneer Square with some of her theater friends. They sent me to the bar with a fist full of bills to buy a pitcher. The place was filling up and several layers of bodies formed between Beth and me before I could get back with the beer.  As I got close, I could hear her voice in the crowd.

“She’s a lesbian wet-dream. Nothing like college girls, she’ll do anything.”

“No way.”

“Yeah. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“What about your folks? They must be freaking out.”

“Yeah.”

There was such pleasure in her voice, I didn’t know what to feel. Later, back in her bed, I told her I had heard what she said about me.

“Oh, babe. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Then why did you say it?”

“It’s not that simple.”

I felt like she was saying I was too simple. But she also told me I was the kindest person she had ever known. And I suppose she was right about the sex. Why not do anything? I had waited so long.

I said, “Don’t you know, I’m crazy about you.”

And I wanted her to say, I’m crazy about you too.

But she would never say anything like that.

Instead she said, “You got out, Day, left a small place full of small people.”

But she had never been to my town or met those people. It was like she was talking to one of the characters, in one of her plays, instead of to me. And what if I wasn’t that person? What if I was no better than her or her mother, a grown woman with an expensive haircut beating her little girl with a slotted spoon? 

Leaving home had been easy compared to this.

* * *

I was out of breath when I told my parents I was taking off, even though I was standing stock still. It wasn’t fear. It was anticipation and I was panting like a dog. They could see it, and they weren’t the type of people to hold anyone back.

* * *

As soon as I got to Seattle I cut off all my hair, I figured out how it should look by watching the dykes on Pine Street. I bleached my dad’s undershirts till they glowed and tucked them into a pair of my brother’s Levi’s, ironed stiff, cinched tight with a thick leather belt. I copied the look from the slim-hipped boys who cruised the rhododendron bushes in Volunteer Park.

It took me years to realize that I might have been more than a collector’s item to Beth. We were so young. We had never seen anyone else so close up. We barely knew how to behave. No one had ever paid such close attention to me and so little.

When I entered her apartment, I knew by the smell what sort of mood she would be in. The stench of unemptied ashtrays and unwashed coffee cups with curdled cream were harbingers helping me prepare myself for our next conversation, forcing me to care for her. She had a coffee maker. What twenty-one-year-old has her own coffee maker? She smoked Marlboros and then clove cigarettes for a brief time after she fucked the famous visiting playwright who looked like a cowboy but wasn’t. She confessed, bragged about it, but only after I asked her about the change in smokes.

I ran out the kitchen door and down the fire escape, scared more by my desire to hurt her than by any gay-bashing skinheads in the alley. I stayed away for three days. It was all I could muster. This was us. Beth disappearing. Beth sleeping with some random theater guy.  Me fleeing. Me coming back.

Once we got together, I never went back to the bars with her. I’m not sure what we did. She smoked and wrote. I read my way through her bookshelf. She was proud of that bookshelf. She had built it herself, three bricks and a board, three bricks and a board all the way up to the ceiling. When I was around she made a half-assed effort to smoke outside, standing in her kitchen with the door open. Mostly she cracked the window and blew smoke rings in that general direction.

I walked around the city in a constant state of arousal. It took me a long time to separate my attraction for Beth from my love of Seattle’s irregular grid, the seven hills, Elliot Bay and Lake Washington. I couldn’t tell the difference between how she made me feel and how I felt watching the topless baby dykes at the beach near Denny Blaine or the long-haired girls in black making out in front of the Free Mars Café on Western. They were all muddled together, the spoiled, brilliant, depressed girl and the corner of Nineteenth and Aloha.

In the end, I wasn’t loyal to anything but the place.

I should have taken her to my sister’s wedding. The whole town would have been oblivious, assumed her nothing more than a nice girl, some co-ed from the city. She thought I was a hypocrite, or worse, ashamed of her. She was sure I would have brought her in a minute if she was a guy. But it wasn’t that. It had nothing to do with her being a girl. I didn’t want to see her through their eyes. I was afraid of what they might notice that I had ignored.

She had a way of making me feel guilty for things I hadn’t even thought of doing yet. So when she told me about her own betrayals she would have an excuse or justification for her behavior. Nobody was polyamorous. I don’t think the word even existed yet.  We took our models from the straight world when it came to cheating and loyalty, or at least I did. I stayed true. My heart is conservative. 

Sometimes I was able to lure her out of the apartment.  We’d walk up to Volunteer Park with the blanket from her fancy bed.  She wouldn’t hang out by the amphitheater with all the other dykes and faggots. So we headed to the grassy area behind the museum ducking under the branches of the giant Sequoia, and lay there shielded by the foliage. We drank Thai ice teas and ate bagel sandwiches. She didn’t want to be kissed in public during the day when I couldn’t pass for her boyfriend. She was sure they would come for us like they had the Jews in Germany. She knew. She was Jewish. Or maybe she just didn’t like to be kissed.

She let me take her into the mountains and toward the end we drove all the way to the Canadian Rockies, camping out in Yoho, Banff, Jasper. When the stink of our unwashed bodies got to be too much she used her dad’s credit card for a motel room in Calgary. In the morning, we were all tangled up, mouths, hands and legs. The maid opened the door. She stood frozen, staring at us. She held the door wide open so we could see the long hallway of doors stretching out behind her. She stayed there holding a stack of thin white towels, just looking. Her voice was low and crystal clear despite her heavy Russian accent. “For shame, think of your mothers.” Beth grabbed the sheet off the bed and wrapped herself toga style. She strode across the room, a warrior princess, and slammed the door.

Afterward, we laughed, but our hands shook and our mouths were chalk dry. We got dressed and slunk down to pay the bill in cash.

We didn’t talk about it.

That summer a man named Steven Roy Carr fired eight shots straight into the tent of Rebecca Wight and Claudia Brenner. They were hiking the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania. They were making love. Carr was a good shot; only one of the eight bullets missed its mark. Rebecca was dead.

We had been lulled into safety in the small Canadian city. We’d been far more vigilant in the woods, never once having sex.

After that trip, I finally met her parents. They were rich and started out polite, until her mother tried to pull me into an alliance as she belittled and criticized Beth’s weight. Her father was chummy, treated me as if I were Beth’s boyfriend. My hair was shorter than his. He talked to me in a knowing, man-to-man way. He made wildly inappropriate sexual jokes, and commented on the size and shape of his daughter’s perfect tits. Her mother made skinless grilled chicken breasts and a lettuce salad. There was no dessert. Driving home, I rested my hand on the hollow spot on Beth’s chest below her collar bone and above the swell of her breast. She shrugged it away.

“Don’t start, Day. Don’t look at me. That is how my family does love.”

I touched her cheek. She shook her head.

“You’ve got no goddam protective shell. It’s a liability. I don’t know how not to hurt you.”

I put my hand on her thigh and she smashed my hand and her leg into the underside of the glove compartment.

“Use your words, Day. I’m not some fucking cow you can soothe.”

“I know that.” I turned my face toward the window. I didn’t want to cry.

“Don’t fucking mumble, Day. Fight, tears, apology, talk. That’s how we do it in my family. You couldn’t possibly understand.”

“Try me.”

“Just look at yourself, Day. You dress like a boy. But...”

“But what?”

“You’re such a fucking girl—too pretty for your own good. Boys have always been into you.”

I was gonna say, you’re beautiful too, but she cut me off.

She said, “Maybe I sleep with women because only women think I’m hot.”

And later she explained that was why it was okay for her to cheat on me with guys. The logic was all Beth—brilliant and full of shit.

“Don’t worry, babe,” she said. “I’ll never sleep with another woman.”

Fight, flight, apology, fight, flight, apology. It would have gone on forever. I was jealous. She wasn’t. That was enough to get me up out of bed naked in the middle of the night, pull on my jeans, and head out into the rain. There was nothing different about the last time I left, except that I had my own truck by then. I had nowhere else to go but that truck, having abandoned my room in the U-District long before.  So I got in it and drove away. I slept in the truck for a month, moving it from street to street in South Park and Georgetown, before I found my own place.

The city was different back then. A constant beat under everything. I was either sated or frustrated. There were lots of other girls. But I kept my own place after Beth. One girl called me “out-right stingy.” But I always paid my own way and hers too. Still, I knew what she was talking about.

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Hillary Behrman’s fiction appears in New Ohio Review, The Madison Review, High Desert Journal, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2020 Chris O’Malley Prize in Fiction and a 2022 finalist for the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, the Tobias Wolff Short Story Award and the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Prize. Her unpublished short story collection, Lake Effect, was a finalist for the Hudson Prize, the Fiction Prize at Autumn House Press, and the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Hillary is a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA in Writing Program. She lives and writes in Washington State where she has worked as a social justice advocate and public defender. Find Hillary at her website.

The Ground Beneath Our Feet  

The earthquake yanks Julia from her afternoon nap and tosses her face-first to the wooden floor. The trinkets and books skip off the shelves and crash near her face. Julia covers her head and closes her eyes, praying. Glass shatters and screams erupt from outside the window. Julia counts backwards with her nose to the reverberating cold ground wishing for it to stop. The violent roar of the cement buildings shaking ravages her ears and engulfs her whole body, and just as she is about to give up on the belief it will ever end the movement ceases. The seismic energy rattles her legs as she rises to witness the drawers, clothes, cosmetics, and other pieces of her life scattered in piles about the floor. From her window, she sees a crowd of people fleeing onto the streets with their arms over their heads. People coated in dust are on their phones, while others take videos. It is then that the building right across from hers topples like a deflated cake, crumbling while bystanders cover their heads and scatter. People hold each other and weep, their ashen bodies bleeding into the concrete.  A huge cloud of dust balloons into the sky and she closes her open window quickly before it forces its way inside. A muffled siren screeches through the cloudy streets. Julia touches her head and arms, feeling no pain. She places the palm of her hand on the brick wall closest to her wondering why it didn’t fall.

* * *

It’s all over the news. An earthquake rocks Mexico City during the disaster-preparation drill on the anniversary of the deadliest earthquake that hit the city in 1985. The TV shows buildings crumbling into the ground creating thick clouds of smoke, people fleeing across bulging streets, police hoisting barricades near damaged intersections, and people grasping each other with tears streaming down their dust-filled faces.

A knock on the door rustles Julia from the couch. She opens the door and Luis leaps at her. I tried calling you but you didn’t answer, he says, embracing her until she finally peels him off. He looks into her apartment. My place is completely trashed, he says, I thanked God that the walls kept hold. He lifts his hands, revealing the cut marks on his palms. I thought the whole building was going to fall, he mumbles. She stares blankly at him, everything is pretty much okay here, she shrugs. You were always lucky, Luis sighs, brushing the feather crop of hair on his head, especially when we were kids. Remember when we got into that car crash? Everyone got injured except you. It’s like you’re invincible. The news babbles during the brief silence that follows. A piece of ceiling has fallen in the hallway. An old man sweeps up the debris in the stairway. Will you be okay alone? Luis asks her. She brushes bits of dust from his shoulder. He is trembling or it could still be her. I’m still standing, she says smiling. After a slight push, he reluctantly leaves. There’s cheering from the television. Someone has been saved.

* * *

The bed shakes violently. Julia throws off her sheets and leaps to the floor…the shaking stops. Her heart drums and breathing quickens. She opens the window and takes a deep breath, sucking in the hot night air. Her eyes fall upon the stack of bricks across the street.  There are pieces slathered over the sidewalk. She wonders when they’ll clean it up and start building something new. A black car inches by, stopping at the apartment building beside hers. A car door opens, shuts, and then the engine rumbles as it continues away. As the exhaust lifts skyward, a tiny voice takes flight with it. The voice is so faint, gliding like a feather.  Julia leans towards the voice to get a better idea of where it’s coming from. She makes out familiar words, breathless, rising like an airplane taking off. A song? Julia hangs further out the window. She’s convinced it’s a song, but from where? The school?  Someone could be alive down there. Are they are calling to her?

* * *

Luis lays out tortillas, queso, carne asada, and salsa on the table. He asks Julia to turn off the television, but she refuses. The death toll rises. The smell of food relaxes her nerves. She hasn’t eaten since the earthquake. Luis tells her about his friend who spent all last night with firefighters digging out people who were trapped in buildings in Roma. It’s all because of those greedy putas who put billboards on the roofs, Luis says, if it wasn’t for those billboards, the buildings might not have fallen and so many people wouldn’t have died. Julia tells him about the song she heard last night coming from the school across the street. It was a girl, she says, I think she’s trapped beneath the rubble. Luis quickly picks up the phone and calls the authorities. While he does, Julia eats and watches the news. A man lifts a woman gently from beneath a pile of heavy rocks. Her dress is ripped and blood drips from her head and mouth. In tears, she embraces the man. Julia can’t tell if she knows him or if he’s a stranger. Everyone else is clapping and whistling. The news reporter calls the man a hero. Julia is ecstatic. Her eyes swell up. They lead the injured woman to an ambulance that is waiting on the street. The woman will never forget that man who saved her.

* * *

A number of volunteers and police and firefighters converge on top of what remains of the school shouting, hija, nina, where are you? Spectators create a semi-circle along the perimeter of the area. Luis stands on the cusp: one foot on the rubble, one on the street. He is akimbo, wearing jean shorts and a tank top, gazing over the scene pensively. Julia sits within the window frame, away from the bodies that collect on the street. A news van honks its way into view. A reporter and cameraman spill out of the van and push their way to the front of the spectators. She wonders what it will be like when they find the girl. Will they ask Luis how he heard her? He will mention her, she’s certain. The people lift the bricks and hand them off until they land in a garbage truck. The sun climbs to the zenith, searing their backs, but they keep working. The mound shrinks, but there is no sign of life below. The news reporter is the first to retreat back into the van and drive away. Then the crowd trickles off into different directions. The people searching shrug their shoulders, cross themselves, and step off the cement. Luis scratches his head and looks up at Julia’s window, but she isn’t there.

* * *

Julia remembers the small leche gripped in her hand while skipping to the elevator and doors closing like they always did and the numbers decreasing and she took three sips from the plastic bottle while waiting for the number 1 to appear and then the walls rattling and roaring making her topple to the floor spilling the remainder of the leche and the lights frantically flickering and everything stopping and shutting off and she was there in pitch-black darkness not rising off the floor and not being able to see anything and past the doors were muffled cries and screams and she’s wondering where her parents were and why they let her walk to school on her own and why they didn’t walk with her but it was only a few blocks and they had things to do and it isn’t everyday an earthquake happens and her crawling through the sticky puddle to the doors and touching them but not knowing what to do besides wait so she put her ear to the cold metal door and listened for anyone calling out to her anyone who might worry about her but she wasn’t hearing anything and figured no one would hear her either so she sat crying quietly with no way of knowing how long she would be there maybe it could be forever she figured but the darkness scared her crawling over her entire body and suffocating her and closing her eyes she tried to calm her breathing and then shouted as loud as she could for help shouting so hard that her throat became hoarse and she collapsed fully on the floor exhausted with no perception of time her lying there until the doors were forced open and light spilled onto her once again as she was hoisted out by firefighters who somehow knew her name.

* * *

The temperature dips low during the night. Julia stretches out in her bed, unable to sleep. Pedro Paramo’s novel is bookmarked beside her pillow, but the black ink won’t sit still on the page. Flicking through the channels yields no stories about the earthquake. Everything is starting to continue on its normal path. Opening her bedroom window, she shivers, gazing longingly at the pile of rubble. She could’ve sworn she heard a voice rising from there, but maybe Luis was right, it was just the wind. If there was someone buried alive beneath there surely, they would scream for help. Julia grabs the window and is about to shut it when she hears the song again, clearer this time. Estrellita, ¿dónde estás? Quiero verte cintilar… It’s as if she is whispering it in her ear. Julia calls out to her, but the girl ignores her and keeps singing. Julia dawns her robe and slippers and rushes downstairs. She halts before crossing the street and calls out to the girl again. The muddy voice of a man garbles hola, emerges from the threshold of the building next door. His eyes are as red as tomatoes and his shirt is blotchy with sweat. Did you hear a girl’s voice? Julia inquires. Y-yeah, the man slurs, yours. He takes one heavy step in her direction. An onion odor grows stronger as he stumbles closer. He’s being held up by the wall beside him. His entire body shutters. Julia retreats, peaking at the once-upon-a-time school across the street, and then flees into her apartment building. She double locks the door before going back to the window. The singing persists, but the man’s voice bellows from within the halls along with it. He’s calling her, shouting for her to come back out. No one comes out for him.

* * *

Luis is reluctant to call the authorities again. He explains to her that they searched everywhere for the girl, but found no one and didn’t hear anything. The activity outside is flowing like normal. A line of cars honk and inch along the streets and the sidewalks are packed with peddlers. They don’t glance at the rubble anymore. She’s there, I know it, Julia says, they just have to have a better look. Luis shrugs and calls the police again. It takes more convincing this time, but eventually they send people to take a look at the destroyed property. They step carefully on the bricks with their black shoes, shining their flashlights between the cracks, and call into the void below. No crowd gathers at the perimeter. They work for about an hour before stepping off the rubble and into a restaurant nearby. Julia rubs her head, feels tears coming. She knows what she heard, but why can’t they find her? Luis wraps his arms around her waist and whispers, it’s okay. A shiver funnels through them, but she isn’t sure if it was him or her. When he plants his lips on her neck, she inches away, towards the open window.

* * *

His snores make the bed quake. She’s never heard someone snore so loudly before. She removes the sheets from her naked body and peers at his open mouth. The thought of smothering him with the pillow flares up, but instead she throws on shorts and a t-shirt and descends to the street. She shakes out a cigarette, trying to light it with a match, but her hands are too unsteady. A car crawls past. When the cigarette finally catches, the song comes back. It sounds as though the girl is using a microphone. Julia tosses the cigarette on the pavement and rushes across the street. She slips as she hops on the bricks and cuts her knee. She calls out to the girl, spider-walking along the rubble, attempting to peer between the bricks, but all she can see are shadows. She picks where she thinks she hears the voice the loudest and starts to toss aside the loose bricks that she can lift. The song feels so close to her. She picks up speed, launching brick after brick until the pile at her knees shifts and she tumbles alongside the bricks and lands with a heavy thud on her chest in what used to be a classroom. Bits of blood drip along her forehead. Her chest blinks with pain. The song stops. A busted pipe from the ceiling is dripping water, creating a halo. She lifts herself up. The desks are neatly lined up in the classroom. She calls out but only an echo responds. The moonlight falls like strands of white hair into the room. There is a math equation scribbled on the chalkboard but the answer following the equals sign isn’t there. There are no bodies lying on the floor. She is completely alone. She gazes at her wet feet being submerged by the circular puddle growing wider and wider. A bruised and battered woman stares back at her from the water. An intense tremor begins to radiate within her. The walls surrounding her begin to quake and it feels like the ceiling is about to collapse. She clamps her eyes shut, chest rising with each calm breath, counting down from 10, ignoring the rumbling and the shattering and the screaming, hoping that when she reaches 1 everything will stop moving, and her body will stop rattling, and she can finally sleep soundly again.

~ ~ ~

Mario Perez is a south-side Chicago guy who fled the city in his mid-twenties and he never looked back. He taught English in China, which allowed him to travel the world. Throughout his travels, he scoured bookstores for authors he'd never heard of and scribbled story ideas in notebooks. He's currently working on two novels that he hopes will make it to a bookshelf one day.

Sarasota

1957, 1971

Once the last party was loud enough, Roman and I followed Naomi into the rigging, up toward the canvas’s comfortable sag. We were bold with champagne. We’d held out our punch cups several toasts in, and Naomi’s dad poured, one gulp each. The tickle in my nose made me giddy, though I was the responsible twin.

Roman thought he was responsible, but he wasn’t. He could idle all day watching the other acts or Naomi.

The adults drank and laughed and took snapshots with flashes that popped as we climbed away from them, past the net, the trapeze platforms, the wire. Climbing was Naomi’s greatest skill. It was most of her act. That and her dragonfly wings and her leaping and her sparkling insect beauty. Her dad, Sid, owned the circus. She would be seven soon like us, but she didn’t grow.

Naomi paused above a gray hammock. Between it and us, the air opened straight to the ground. The idea of the ground pressed on me, but not on Naomi. She flung herself in. The hammock sagged and recovered. “Come on,” she hollered. “It’s easy.”

I took one hand from the rope ladder and reached overhead, toward the waxy mustiness of the canvas, and I pictured the sky above it, dark and velvet. I’d rather have been out there jumping onto the top from the other side. Suddenly the air was hot, an invisible cloud risen from the grownups’ talking. Naomi squirmed in the hammock to lie facedown. I imagined real dragonfly wings tucked under her shirt, itching, and I squeezed my eyes shut to jump toward her, before Roman had the chance.

“You can see through it,” she said. Of course we could. Roman dropped in and we all looked down. Our father—Roman’s and mine—was directly beneath us, a light brown head of hair, beetle-brown shoes, a hand jostling a drink. He was talking to a couple of gold-headed aerialists and also to the two Mels, the fat ladies who loved him. His barking sounds rose through the lesser hum. For the first time, the circus was ending, and he was proud and angry. He was often so. Roman and I didn’t belong to him the way we belonged to my mother, the way we belonged to the circus, the way Naomi belonged to Lana and Sid.

Below us the older kids darted and tackled, fast as mice. They were more skilled than us, they spoke Italian, some of them, and they knew how to dodge. Sometimes they stepped on feet or bumped into a lady, sloshing her sideways, and an arm lashed out to swat at them, but it didn’t matter, because they never cared about being hit. They were like horseflies, buzzing and pestering until suddenly they’re gone.

The Mels were dressed in pink, like cakes.

Roman said, “I bet we look like mummies.”

Naomi said, “People don’t look up.”

My arms were jittery, already asleep. I twisted them together behind my back. “If we had ice cubes to drop on them.”

Naomi said, “Ha. Right into their drinks.”

There was a safety net far below, but Roman and I hadn’t been taught how to fall into it. If you fell not knowing how, you’d break legs and ribs or snap your neck. And everything would stop until they got you out of there slumped and boneless like a caterpillar.

“Ruby?” Roman said.

I knew he meant to ask if I was afraid. I nodded my head and imagined it tumbling off my neck like a spool of thread off my mother’s sewing machine. A bobbin. We lay there, and I thought they were considering how to reassure me, but then the rushing sound faded in my ears and I heard lips. They were kissing. Roman and Naomi. I thought of dolphins.

Finally the smacking stopped. Roman, I knew, had never been so happy. We both loved Naomi. He said, “Kiss Ruby.”

Naomi pushed my shoulder to roll me sideways, and the fronts of our bodies touched. Her toes scrunched just beneath my knees. Her chin struck mine, knocking my teeth together, and her breath was quick and hot on my nose, and then she closed her soap-green eyes and kissed me. It tickled at first. I wanted to laugh. We’d watched people kiss lots of times when they didn’t bother about us, but the kiss wasn’t what I expected. I could have licked up her face like frosting and swallowed it, looked out of her eyes and felt kindly toward the world. We kissed for a long time. Roman thought I wouldn’t be afraid once she kissed me, and he was right. I wasn’t anymore.

* * *

All through that last season, Roman and I had two acts in the show, the first with the Leds who trained us and the second without. We exited the first time standing on the Leds’ shoulders—Roman and Mr. Led in the lead, me and Mrs. Led following, my legs shaking with the effort of what we’d just done. That night when she set me down and pushed me toward the dressing tent, I lost my balance and twisted my ankle, and the jolt made me take off running. Outside, away from the show lights, the shadows shifted. Roman always said it was stupid to get lost when the yard was the same everywhere, but sometimes I did. I stopped short. My bladder dropped, and I just kept from wetting my tights. An electric shock shot up my leg. Far away the crowd did their impolite laughter. I wanted to follow the sound to where Roman would already be in his next costume, watching the clowns and fretting that I was late.

Then I stopped worrying. Hush. I thought I’d lie down. The hot night huffed around me. My mother had a book of Chinese dragons, which Sid gave her to inspire her costume designs, and I thought of that book, thought there might be a Chinese dragon in the orangish-black color of the early-night sky near a city. I got up and pinched myself, stood there a moment, and took back my responsibilities. The back yard was familiar again.

* * *

That crowd loved our second act. The Leds had rolled us out all hidden in a rain barrel, and then after their act, their bows, and a lighting change, we oozed forth, dripped down the barrel’s sides. We became a small heap of earth that I grew out of, hesitant but straight up. To the sound of a soaking rain, I shook my head and released the crinkly yellow petals of my headdress. The light shifted to orange, and Roman was an inchworm, circling, then rearing up cobralike at the sight of me. Already I was water starved, twisting, leaf-arms rippling in different rhythms, pleading for moisture. Roman arched toward me, balanced upside down with his toes on my petaled shoulders, writhed and overweighed me, so that we waved as we’d practiced, tipping this way and that until my ribs and my stomach muscles burned. He curled around my shins. I shed black spangled seed-tears as I struggled, then bowed my head graciously and died. Once again we were indistinguishable, a heap holding our breaths as the crowd broke into applause. And Naomi was high above us, still making her own dragonfly twists and flops and rope-to-rope skitters, nothing to do with our act but much more interesting, if anyone wanted to look.

She had always been smaller than us. She seemed to get smaller as Roman and I grew. The three of us were still the circus’s youngest. Our father liked to dismiss Naomi, to call her the little Setterle. He’d say, This circus isn’t going to last forever. I don’t want you two getting too attached. And then he’d reach an arm around one of the Mels, snuggle in, and they were circus, too, with their husky, dusty voices. They had their own trailers and they’d been there watching the three of us all our lives.

* * *

The kissing was finished, I thought. We lay there together staring up at the canvas. We were exactly as warm as the air, so I couldn’t tell myself from Naomi from Roman. I turned my head and breathed deep.

The voices of the party pulled into separate threads and I listened to my mother. Her words and her laugh-sounds all ran together, and I pictured her as she often was, closing her eyes and shaking her head slowly, like the world had surprised her, and what could anyone do about that?

Mama had burned her feet a long time before, both at once when she was holding Roman and me, maybe rescuing us—this was when we were babies—and that’s all I ever knew about it, except that she liked to joke about walking on fire. Like some kind of lizard, I thought, but the jokes were mostly, Don’t. It’s not as easy as it looks. Sid was almost a father to her but not a grandfather to us, and he always tried one more way to cure her feet. Ice and comfrey balms with secret ingredients and Epsom salt soaks and mud baths—I knew he repeated the cures, but every time they both acted as if it were something new and would probably work this time. And maybe it did, but it never lasted. It was Sid’s circus, and my mother thought he worried because the circus was losing money, but I thought he hardly cared about money. He cared about Mama’s burnt feet, because he’d been a real doctor before he bought the circus, and even so he couldn’t make her feet like new again.

The night of the party, he’d set her up with a folding chair and a bucket of ice water, a bucket of tomato juice. The ice clinked and popped as she dunked her feet, and the sound was part of the talk she had going with Lana and Sid. They talked about nothing, like birds. They always did.

Then the party paused. Just like that—three breaths’ worth. As it started up again, Roman said to Naomi, “You could hide us somewhere. So we could stay with the circus.”

She lifted our arms and struck them together over her. “You get to stay. My dad said. I heard him. Everyone else gets let go, but not you.”

My mother had already warned us that we’d go to a real school that winter in Sarasota. All three of us. “You’ll have to have something to do with yourselves.” As if we’d do nothing at all without the show.

“We should stay here,” I told Roman and Naomi. The men could roll the hammock around us and the tent around the hammock, and we’d be the same when they unrolled us and shook us back into shape wherever the truck stopped next.

I kissed Naomi’s cheek, which was fat like my father’s chin, and I wanted to kiss her lips again. She said, “You two have to kiss now, to close the circle.” It was sickening, a little, but we loved Naomi, and we’d always known that luck could turn, and so we did.

* * *

Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that we were only seven that night. Seven years old—what could we have known about love and failure and disappearing? But this is what I need to tell you: between then and today, there’s no difference of attention, no real alteration in the fierceness with which I believe myself alive. I didn’t think about being seven. Why would I? We were small, and we knew less. But we understood about work and family.

Because here is something else: last November, with the circus long gone, with our mother gone, too, Roman and I turned nineteen. We were half a world apart. I blamed him for our separation, though he’d been drafted. In December, he crawled into a tunnel and was shot through the face. I know this precisely, though it’s not the story the army told us. I know because I know Roman. He was strong and not as afraid as he should have been, and like me he could dislocate his shoulders and hips, and he wouldn’t have hidden any of it. The army, like any army—like a circus—took advantage of his skills. After the official notice, after my father and I met his body at the airport, three soldiers wrote to me. I burned the envelopes unopened. I burned them because I know what happened. I couldn’t bear to have others tell it to me, least of all young men who might have loved my brother, too. And I would have burned their villages to the ground if they told me that I should be proud of him.

* * *

The night of the last party, we climbed out of the hammock as if leaving forever. As if everything might go wrong. I wondered: would we stop speaking to Naomi once we were on the ground? Once we were all at school? I wasn’t afraid, climbing down. My skin ached because Roman looked different, all peaks and points, and he whistled as if Naomi and I weren’t there, and I thought we would turn against Naomi in the big Sarasota school, and she’d die of loneliness. And then we would die, too.

Then I remembered something. Long ago, another party. My mother held me on her hip, jiggling me. I don’t know if I fussed because of the jiggling or if the jiggling was the way she tried to settle me down. The rhythm was wrong, too regular, too insistent. I believed she was gone, though she was right there. A low bellow. I smelled wool. The light squeezed away. On either side was warmth, pressure, heartbeat. The light came back. She’d passed me to Scott Green, the animal trainer. I believe I recognized him.

I remembered this as we climbed down from the heights. We touched ground. Mrs. Led spotted me through the minglers. There was no mistaking her recognition. “Ruby. Roman,” she called to us. She reached out, toddling, her long boneless arms. “Ruby Rattle. You should be asleep by now.” We hurried away, out of earshot. It was cooler outside.

I tripped, Roman crashed into me, and Naomi piped up, “Stop.” A croquet ball ricocheted off my toes. We went on stumbling through the match, which took up more ground than it should have, and the adults told us to watch it, but we didn’t listen. They were quivery with whatever they’d been drinking. It was too dark for croquet. And they didn’t make a difference to us, because we three were of one mind. We were headed toward the pole barn, because Scott Green couldn’t decide if he liked us, and we had just now remembered that he had a new bear.

* * *

We were sure of the new bear, though no one had told us. We’d heard things: That you’d think Scott Green would hold off, considering. That it would be half-dead, flea-bitten. That the sellers should have paid him, or where was the bargain. Naomi said it was a lone bear, but I imagined Scott Green had two, the second hidden behind the first. I imagined the light brown fur loose like a rug, the whispery voice. I imagined the smaller bear was sheltered in the larger, taking only a sliver of the crate’s space. I thought of the bears, and I wrapped that thought around the thought of what I’d seen, knowing I wouldn’t tell anyone, knowing I would have to find Naomi’s mother over and over, or I would never be sure that she was still alive.

Because I saw her. I saw Lana, who looked like my mother except prettier, though I would never say so. I saw her after I was lost, after our first act, and I could make out the back of her neck, beneath the polka dot scarf she liked to tie around her hair, its two ends flopping like small rabbit ears on the top of her head. She was outlined in the white light. I didn’t see her face, which was turned toward my father. He took a step back and swung his fist lazily at the side of her head, her human ear. And his other hand, his fingers, sharp and white on her shoulder.

In one burst, Lana twisted and got away. He caught her blouse, and her knees buckled. She saw me. My father yanked her backward and grabbed her arm. She said, “Ruby, go.”

She must have been wearing her red shoes with the square heels, though I can’t say I saw them. I tried to say Rattle, my father’s name. It was our last name, too.

He giggled. I don’t think he knew me. “Priceless,” he said. I don’t know why.

Lana said, “Go, Ruby. I mean it. Now.”

And his knee came up into her back. I saw her face crumple. So I ran for the dressing tent. My legs knew the way. Mama was waiting. I thought of the dragon that I’d imagined in the sky and the soft earth that might have absorbed me. My ankle didn’t hurt again until much later.

* * *

We lolled around for a long time in the pole barn with Scott Green, telling jokes and riddles, elbowing one another, playing cards because Scott always had a deck, dozing with the bear’s crate and all the half-asleep animals. Scott drank from a pot-bellied green bottle that he said was a gift from the only people who considered him, the Mels.

“Mama considers you,” I told him.

“That’s your loyalty speaking,” he said.

Roman and Naomi were right there with me, but I felt as if I were all alone when I pressed my eye to an air hole in the bear’s crate and blinked away sawdust. A bulk shifted. I didn’t know how to ask Scott about the second, stowaway bear, because Scott was trickier than most people. He was like another kid in his sudden sulks.

Inside the crate, there was a furry diagonal. That’s all I saw before the smell drove me back: piss-soaked wood, manure, rotting berries, something rich and oniony like an adult’s sweat. The three of us stood there brushing at our faces and swallowing hard. You didn’t mention animal smells to a trainer. Scott told us, “I don’t ordinarily drink.”

“Do you think there’s another one?” I blurted.

He reached out toward me, and I tugged his wrist and leaned back to help him stand. He said, “There’s always another bear, Ruby. Bears in the wild have a baby every January. You can hardly stop them.”

He put down his bottle and lifted me onto his shoulders, and I reached up toward the cobwebs and the rough beams.

Naomi asked, “What will you do with him? Make him ride a horse?”

Scott lifted me again and dropped me, caught me. That was what we liked about him, how careless he was with us. He said, “Who told you that?”

“No one.”

“If I did, the horse and the bear would hate me for it, No-Me.” That’s what he called her. He dropped the “a,” even in front of Lana and Sid.

He let me down, and the four of us stood there, leaning toward the crate, our hands on the unfinished wood. We listened to the bear’s quiet huffing. I had a good voice, which was not much use in a circus. At odd times, such as then, I started to sing, making up sounds, making up words, nonsense, which Roman and Naomi tolerated from me, just barely. I knew the animals like it, and Scott Green didn’t tell me to stop.

“Anyway, No-Me,” he said as I caught my breath. “This is a female bear. People always assume that circus bears are males. Impossible. Now, quiet a minute. Keep listening.”

Scott tucked his chin into his neck and growled. The bear yelped and whined.

“Puppy,” Scott said.

“Does she have a collar?”

“She used to. It grew into her neck. And she wasn’t with a circus then. Nope. She was with a married couple. The man hunted down her mother, BAM, and then, what’s that? A cub. Aw, so cute, it’s just like a puppy. Then Bear here grows up. Man and wife, they get afraid. That puppy could rip their throats out if they’re not careful. So what do they do? Keep her down in the basement, give up the bottle feeding, right, start throwing her raw hamburger and stale bread and quick slamming the door. They’re terrified. People do horrible things, you should know that. People do horrible things when they’re afraid of an animal.”

The bear was quiet now, listening to its own sad story.

“Then you found her?”

“Then they put her up for sale. So, what I believe is that she needs to forget about the collar. She’ll always have that dent in her neck, but she needs to forget how it got there. She should forget about people. Ideally. That’s why she’s in the crate. It’s her den. In a day or two she’ll go into hibernation, or so I hope, her heartbeat will slow, and when she wakes up, she’ll have turned back into an honest-to-God bear.”

He kicked the bottle and sent it spinning. “She cries herself to sleep. Bears don’t do that in nature.” He swallowed a burp and said, “Bears don’t even do that in a circus.”

The bear chattered its teeth. And Scott Green said, “You have to harden your heart.”

* * *

In the morning we would drive to Sarasota, where the circus would shrink to the size of a church parking lot, so small that the Mels and my father had to rent their own cottages, across the street and through a neighborhood, above the gulf. And Scott Green would wade and swim with us on the weekend days when we visited the Mels and my father, visited the cottages that were painted the pastel colors of wedding mints. One day, though, Scott Green was late to the ocean. Our father kept watch from his lawn chair up the hill by the cottages, alongside Melanie or Melinda, whichever Mel wasn’t preparing tea for that day, but our father wasn’t like Scott. We knew he would watch us drown, if it came to that. There would be three heads, and then there would be two, and he’d hardly notice. I shivered, but I liked the thought. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be the one who washed out to sea.

We were in water to our stomachs, Roman and I, and Naomi beside us was in nearly to her shoulders. I raised my arms and rushed forward until the water lifted me under the armpits and yanked me down. There was a broken glass sound and sand dragging. My skin stung. Then the sunlight hit my face. I coughed saltwater and forced it out through my nose, and Roman and Naomi were splashing toward the beach, arms up, and Scott Green’s bear stepped from the dry sand onto the darker sand that the water had already reached.

* * *

Each afternoon when we finished swimming, we would have tea with the Mels. We ate in one cottage on one visit, and in the other the next, and I believed that Melinda and Melanie both had exactly the same round table, the same teapot, the identical china and silverware and three-tiered silver cookie plate, even the same sugar tongs that bit into the cubes.

We ate cookies, lemon squares, cakes, bonbons, swirls of pastry, tiny round sandwiches that looked as if they’ve been cut with a salt-shaker top. We ate as much as we could while Melinda and Melanie watched us. My father drank tea with slices of lemon or a splash of brandy, sometimes both. He did not eat his share. He was picky and has never had a sweet tooth. The Mels didn’t notice. Finally even Naomi could eat no more, and one of the Mels said, “Rattle, you should make up a package for the circus. It’ll just go stale by morning.” And he got the waxed paper from the kitchenette, and he smiled as he tore off a sheet and picked out a few things and folded the paper around them. He handed it to Naomi every time, saying, “Bring that to your mother.” He never gave us anything for ours.

But I thought about how he had fought with Lana. I remembered his ugliness as he walked us back to the church lot in the peaceful dusk. I thought of it even in the water, and sometimes, in the water, my bladder let go from the fright. My father was still young then, and stronger than he looked. He didn’t work like the other men we knew, but he was strong. He forced his knee into her back. He might have broken her neck. I thought I should tell Naomi, but I couldn’t forget that he was my father, and I thought I should tell Roman, but I didn’t want to tell him, and the scene became a secret I carried only for Lana, as if keeping her safe. Every morning, when I saw her yawning over her coffee, I wanted to cry with relief.

Over the winter, because the memory of the fight wouldn’t settle, I began to imagine that my father robbed Lana. Slowly what he took came clear in my mind: a pale green carving of a frog that would fit in the palm of his hand, the kind of object Lana kept, more beautiful than a real frog, round and elegant, made of a stone that the light could almost shine through. Celadon. Once I fled, he would have turned her toward him and bent her hands back at the wrists. He would have pried her fingers open. My father was greedy the way children are greedy. I knew that. I know it still. He would keep the frog because it was really Lana’s, and if she ever managed to steal it back, it would be if not ruined at least changed, because everything of his couldn’t help but resemble him.

* * *

I cannot remember what happened after Scott Green’s bear stepped onto the wet sand. After Roman’s funeral I asked my father about it. He was drinking in my little apartment, drinking the scotch we’d bought for the priest who had declined it after all.

My father said, “Green’s bear? That thing. Had to be put down, as I recall. It didn’t last the month.” But I could picture the leash hanging slack like a jump rope, could hear the Mels laughing. After that, nothing. And so I imagined it.

Scott and the bear waded in. The water beaded and rolled off her fur and his stomach. She was slow at first, and he waded closer, folding lengths of her leash toward him. Once close enough, he unbuckled the collar and slipped it from her neck. The skin was gray. Sickly. We’d waded out, too, though we were tired, and so we all four dog-paddled along with her. She snorted as she swam, like a horse drinking; like a horse swimming, she kept her head up. Before we turned back, I dove under to watch her paws go, so foreign and so confident.

* * *

But on the night of the party, almost nothing had happened yet. We sat with Scott Green and the bear in the crate. We wouldn’t leave unless he asked. He had a new bottle, or he had recovered the first one. He said, “People never had friends when I was your age.” He said, “You all truly like each other?”

We didn’t answer. “Let her out,” I said.

He said, “I can’t do that.”

I sang back the words. Scott smiled but told me not to get smart. The animals chewed and lapped water and pissed into their straw, and finally we lied to bring Scott Green back to the party. We told him that the sun was coming up and that Naomi’s mom was frying doughnuts; we pretended to be certain, though we couldn’t smell doughnuts in the barn with the animals.

“You all go and bring me back a plateful,” Scott said. “I trust you.”

Naomi said, “She won’t let us.”

I said, “We’ll forget.”

Roman said, “She doesn’t let people walk away with her plates anymore.”

Scott shook his head, pushed onto his feet and stood, brushed at his clothing. He breathed into his palms. Naomi said, “Don’t worry. You look fine.”

We set out across the yard. The sky was beginning to lighten after all, and the air was delicate with doughnut grease. Most everyone had gone home or was lying asleep on a table or the ground or a couple of chairs. We found Sid and Mama seated by the stove. Lana with her tongs was lifting a doughnut from the oil.

“Scott Green,” Sid said. “You’ll agree with me on this one. I’ve been telling Ann that none of us should be awake at this hour.” He smiled from Scott to Mama.

“He’s been telling me,” Mama said. She stretched her legs before her and her arms up, then flexed her feet. There were dirt footprints on the soles of her anklets. “And I keep pointing out that it doesn’t matter, because here we are.”

Naomi danced up to her father and tapped his knuckles. He tugged her hair.

Scott coughed. “I think the drunkness is wearing off.”

Mama said, “You watched the children.”

There was an empty lawn chair next to her, and she lifted it with one hand, shook it, and set it down. A feat of strength, I thought; no one else seemed surprised. Scott settled there. She looked at him. “You might as well scoot in a little.”

Lana said, “Ruby.” She gave me a paper sack, and then she gave one to Naomi, and the last to Roman. She pointed. “Regular sugar. Cinnamon sugar. Powdered sugar.” The powdered sugar would melt away, but no one cared. We shook the sacks, and the doughnuts drummed around inside. She said, “Okay. That’s good.” She pointed at Sid, Mama, Scott. We handed over the sacks. The adults tore the greasy paper at the corners and peeled it down.

Sid said, “Wait a second. The baker gets first pick.”

Lana took one of each. Then we took ours. I closed my eyes. Most animals sounded better than people did when they chewed. The doughnuts were sweet and warm. Roman, Naomi, and I licked our fingers. We settled to the ground and moved together into a loose heap. Naomi’s hair smelled like the whole night. In the dimness I saw Scott Green lean sideways and turn my mother’s face with his big hand and kiss her, or I thought I saw it. I’d never seen him do such a thing before, and I would never see it again.

Sid said, “Sarasota.” I imagined a girl spinning, hanging by the foot.

Scott cleared his throat. “Well, I could make us some coffee if anyone wanted.”

For as long as I can remember, for the rest of that night, no one moved.

~ ~ ~

Jessica Roeder's fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines including Threepenny Review, Kenyon Review, Agni, and American Poetry Review. She teaches dance and generative writing and also works as a copyeditor and proofreader. "Sarasota" is part of a linked collection.