Our Judges for 2023

POETRY

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Judge’s Comment: This poem draws me in with its intriguing interplay of words and meaning, using the poem and its prosodic elements to draw us out of the more closed space of the philosophical poem into more expansive yet grounded scenes the poem allows the poet to breathe life into. It reads well with the eyes and mind and also aloud, each word perfect and palpable and transcendent. Reading it aloud, for me, felt like reading a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem aloud. The poem, with its pairing of the abstract and the concrete, sets up that “making of mystery” that allows us to reside in poesis as we read the poem. Each phrasing is perfect, too, as in this perfect sentence embedded in the last stanza:

           Slide shows on a sheet are
the heat lightning of kinship, the rune of
our rooted history and remembered affection
no paragraph I know can contain.

~ ~ ~

Fred Gallagher is Editor-in-Chief at Good Will Publishers, Inc., a family-owned publisher and public relations firm that began operations in 1938. He formerly worked in the addictions field as a counselor and an award-winning editor. Fred is the author of three memorial volumes on bereavement and three children’s books on character development. He has also authored a novel entitled The Light Hiding in Spindle. Fred has published poetry in Agora, Sanskrit, Cold Mountain Review, St. Austin Review, and Amethyst Review. He resides with his wife, Kim, a former jazz singer, and their dog, Lily, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Fred and Kim are the proud parents of three grown children, all of whom are cherished beyond belief.

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E. R. Lutken’s collection Manifold: Poetry of Mathematics (3: A Taos Press, 2021) won the New Mexico First Book Award 2022. She is a family physician by training and worked for the majority of her career on the Navajo Nation. After retiring, she taught middle and high school science and mathematics in rural Colorado for several more years. Now she spends time reading and writing, and fishing in the swamps of Louisiana and mountain streams of New Mexico. Her poems have appeared in Cagibi, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Ocotillo, Mezzo Cammin, Thin Air, Think, and other journals and anthologies. Most recently, she edited her father’s memoir A Thousand Places Left Behind (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2023). Visit E. R.’s website.

Resurrection in Nueba Yol

1.

A story in the newspaper
about the lost and the found.
About convergence
like the fusion
of African and Taino
drums.

A miracle as in resurrection,
Lazarus-like,
though without a cadaver,
or winding cloths,
or a summoning-forth messiah.

But a wonder, nonetheless.

And exultation in the news story
that a life had not gone down into the earth
forever.
  

2.

A woman in Puerto Rico,
broad-hipped, henna-haired.
And her brother in Nueba Yol,
dominoes champion of the street,
brash as a Borinquen rooster,
salsa-strutting,
shouting, jumping,
palms slapping
together, high-fiving
his victory
over his long-time posse:
Flaquito, El Payaso, and Tres Ojos.

Call it love inscribed into DNA,
despite fathers who did not claim their children
and mothers who disappeared.

Call it serendipity, synchronicity,
or karma on a Bronx street corner

that a freelance photographer and a reporter,
hearing timbales and a voice pouring
like dulce de leche out of a boom box
had to check. it. out.

They find four viejitos,
one with a baseball cap the color of a peacock’s breast,
and they snare the wearer in the camera lens—

El Gallo, The Rooster,
whose hands are flying,
whose dominos clack like dry bones.
who’s making arroz con pollo
of Flaquito, El Payaso, and Tres Ojos.

3.

So, a distant cousin
sees the photos and the story on the web,
—¡Ay, Dios mio!

sees The Rooster strutting on the Bronx street corner,
—¿Cómo?¡No puede ser!

and she makes a call to Hatillo,
—Sí, chica. Es él de verdad. 

4.

Now come the business of passports
(strongly recommended in these days of terror),
plane tickets, and a weepy reunion at JFK,

—¡Mi hermano! ¡Pensaba yo que tú estabas muerto!

The reporter didn’t say
how
brother and sister came to be separated in the first place, or
why
they hadn’t searched for each other in twenty-years.

But explanations are beside the point—¿verdad?—when
the stone rolls away from the tomb.

 ~ ~ ~

[note: Nueba Yol is the transcribed pronunciation of “New York” by many hispanophone Caribbean people. It derives from the apparent slippage of the sounds  b/v and r/l in Spanish. Not confined solely to the Dominican Republic, this form can be heard in the conversations of folks from such places as Cuba and Puerto Rico.]

A North Carolina Poetry Society Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet, Maria Rouphail is the author of three poetry collections: Apertures, Second Skin, and All the Way to China. Senior Lecturer Emerita and PhD, she is retired from the English Department at North Carolina State University where she taught courses in world literature and where she served as an advisor for the English major. She is the Poetry Editor at Main Street Rag. This Small House, This Big Sky, Rouphail's fourth poetry manuscript, is currently in progress.

SHORT FICTION

Tea with the Queen

Nawarat sees his father for the first time in seventeen years through the ticket window at Lingonberry Diner. He is sure it’s him. In his Facebook profile pic, his hair is spun silver like too much tinsel on a Christmas tree, and slung in each elbow is one little girl, ready to be thrown in the ocean. Everyone is shrieking with laughter. It’s so good to be at the beach house on Hilton Head. At the diner, Nawarat’s father holds a tiny hand in each of his and leads the girls bouncing into a booth. Their names are Kelsey and Taylor. They were “an IVF journey.” Nawarat figures they’re five now. He scratches his cheek.

Jack nudges him.

“Dude, you’re burning the eggs.”

Nawarat looks down. No one wants brown eggs. Jack kicks a bin to the edge of the grill and Nawarat tips the ruined eggs in. When he looks up again, his father and the girls have crowded into one side of their booth. Kelsey or Taylor is standing up, smacking her father on the head with a menu as he fusses with Kelsey or Taylor’s shoelaces.

“Maybe I should go out there,” he says. Jack leans into him to peer out the ticket window. He smells like all of them do in back of house: pores thick with grease, hair a Brussels sprout fart. It’s comforting.

“Let Marlene take care of it,” Jack says. “You know how Andrej is.” Nawarat can feel Jack looking at him, but he keeps watching his father as he plucks the menu from Kelsey or Taylor’s grip, strokes a big hand over Kelsey or Taylor’s blonde head, points to the choices on the menu and asks what Kelsey or Taylor wants. Jack tugs at his arm and Nawarat startles.

“You gotta stop scratching your scar, Now-man,” Jack says. “It makes it look more gnarly than it already is.”

Nawarat touches his cheek. He’s raised welts along the border of his scar. A rind of blood limns his jagged fingernails.

“I gotta wash my hands,” he says.

“I got this ticket,” Jack says. “Wanna take that garbage out to the dumpster?”

Outside, Nawarat flips the dumpster’s lid open and swings three bags of garbage into its maw. They land with a ripping sound. He rises on his toes to peer inside. The bags have torn open on the edges of a big wooden dollhouse with one side of the roof caved in. It’s a sprawling Victorian manse, once mint green with pink trim, now faded and peeling, covered in Lingonberry detritus. 

Nawarat clambers into the dumpster. He can fix this thing up. He can fill it with a cast of enviable characters and all the tiny furniture. He can bring it to Kelsey and Taylor and say, I’m your brother. I’m so happy to meet you.

* * *

The dollhouse is heavy, a hardy construction from back when things were made to last. Nawarat will have to save for real maple in the repairs. In the meantime, he sands it down and primes it to repaint. He agonizes over what the girls might like best. Are their rooms done up in shades of pink? Does one of them insist she only likes blue? Would they prefer rainbow with glitter trim? In the end, he restores it as he found it: pastels in mint and pink. 

Inside, he paints the walls with stripes and fleur-de-lis and great big florals. Someone took care with the moulding in each room, so he gilds that with a size 3 detail brush. He buys a box of jumbled furniture on eBay for $20, and when it arrives he finds gems among the chaff: a tea set, a claw-foot tub, a velvet fainting couch, a set of wingback chairs, a baby grand with matching bench, a wardrobe he fits with a mirror inside the door, a four-post bed he drapes with a gauzy canopy, a vanity.

Fancy people would live in this house. English people drinking tea with their pinkies up. There would be a little dog that never barked or got underfoot. The mother would delicately give birth to three cherubic children, and when she wanted to paint or play piano or take a turn about the garden, she would pass them off to an imperturbable governess. The father would spend one half hour each evening dandling a child on his knee; they would rotate their turns throughout the week. Perhaps he would smoke a pipe and read them fairy stories at bedtime. Every autumn, they would go on holiday to Italy, where the clean salt air is good for their lungs. There would be no divorce.

* * *

When Kelsey and Taylor return to the diner, Narawat realizes he must build their figures himself. No store-bought models can capture the angle at which Kelsey’s or Taylor’s jaw tilts into her excitable chin. No insipid mass production can replicate the spray of freckles across Kelsey’s or Taylor’s nose. No cookie cutter machine with its automated paint spray can recreate the exact shade of Kelsey’s or Taylor’s strawberry shortcake complexion.

He pushes gyros around on the grill and watches the girls rock in their booth. Kelsey or Taylor ordered pancakes; she whines as her father cuts her short stack into tiny pieces for her tiny esophagus. Kelsey or Taylor ordered grilled cheese; she moans and thrashes when her father pushes her plate out of reach. She must wait for him to cut that too. 

When the rush passes, Jack smacks Nawarat in the arm and jerks his head toward the back door. Nawarat sits on the concrete and pokes his phone as Jack leans against the building, sucking on an American Spirit.

“We should open our own food truck, Now-man,” Jack says. “No more of this early morning weekend shit. No more Andrej breathing down our necks.”

“What would we sell?”

“Thai soul food fusion, obviously,” Jack says.

“Oh.”

“Pad Thai pot pies. Thai tea-pioca pudding. Tom yum gumbo. Tom yumbo!”

Nawarat scratches his cheek. Jack levers himself off the wall. He flicks the cigarette away.

“You’re Thai, right?” Jack says. “Oh fuck, you’re not like, Vietnamese or something, are you?”

“No,” Nawarat says. “I just don’t know how to cook Thai food. Do you?”

“No, dude, I figured you did. Shit.”

“My mom worked all the time,” Nawarat says. “Everything was microwave meals ’til I was tall enough to reach the stove.”

“Right,” Jack says, “and nobody teaching you but you.”

“Yeah.”

Jack sits beside him and shakes out another cigarette. He learned to stop offering them to Nawarat a long time ago. Man, he’d said. I only started so I could get more breaks.

“I looked at culinary school, you know?” Jack says.

Nawarat grunts. Jack tilts a half smile at him, but his eyes skitter away when Nawarat meets them. Nawarat’s scar tugs at the corner of his mouth in a curlicue. When he smiles, it puckers his entire cheek like the ass end of an orange rind, so he tries not to.

“Who could afford it?” Nawarat says.

Jack nods, holding in a lungful of smoke. He pokes Nawarat in the shoulder.

“A food truck, Now-man,” he says on the exhale. “That’s something attainable.”

Nawarat scrolls through some trucks for sale, but “attainable” isn’t the right word. He clicks on an art supply shop and orders polymer clay and a set of M-series tools for miniatures. Jack blows smoke rings that drift into Nawarat’s body and dissipate.

* * *

Nawarat dumps countless hours into each figurine. His first tries break or burn in the oven, but Nawarat improves as he goes along. Soon he’s got a Kelsey and a Taylor, a father and a mother, a corgi and a Queen Victoria. He sculpts a little brown Nawarat and paints him into a butler’s uniform. Jack becomes a valet, Marlene a housekeeper, Andrej a gardener who keeps overpruning, and all the Lingonberry waitresses ladies-in-waiting. With what’s left of his clay, he designs his own mother for a maid.

When they’re finished, Nawarat curses himself. He should have found a way to articulate their joints. They stand stiff and architectural through their scenes, unable to make use of the furniture. Nevertheless, Kelsey and Taylor prepare the parlor for an audience with the queen. They berate their butler until he brings out the tea service and a selection of sandwiches, sponges, and macarons.

“We’re ever so chuffed you’ve come, your highness,” says Kelsey or Taylor, curtseying deeply.

“Forgive us this blasted hole in our roof, your highness,” says Kelsey or Taylor, bonking heads with her sister.

“We are always in the market for a good high tea,” says Queen Victoria. She leans against her wingback like a rake in a shed.

“Are there any openings for a new princess at Buckingham Palace, your majesty?” ask Kelsey and Taylor.

“We shall have to consult our ledger,” says the queen. “My, this tea is exquisite. Pray, what is the blend?”

“Our butler is ever so discerning, your highness,” says Kelsey or Taylor.

“He harvests it himself every fortnight in India and China,” says Kelsey or Taylor.

“We should like to meet this butler,” says the queen.

Kelsey and Taylor clap their hands, and Nawarat’s figurine stumps into the parlor and bows. The queen recoils when he rises.

“You, butler. What’s that on your face?”

“A scar, your highness.”

“How did you come by it?”

“I was attacked as a child, your highness.”

“Who did such a thing?”

“It was random, ma’am.”

“A dog? A wildcat? A Gila monster?”

“Just a man, ma’am. Just a man with a knife passing by.”

“It is hideous and disfiguring.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Hide yourself from us at once.”

Nawarat puts the butler in a shelf. He takes out Jack, whose expression is frozen into permanent surprise. His clothes, at least, are queen-appropriate.

“Perhaps her highness would like to sponsor a food truck,” he says.

“You are a very handsome young man,” says Queen Victoria. “We do appreciate symmetry. The crown shall post you a check.”

Kelsey or Taylor shoos Jack away. Kelsey or Taylor pours the queen more tea.

* * *

Jack intercepts Nawarat at the door when he’s late for Sunday brunch.

“You had car trouble, all right?” he whispers, arm slung tight around Nawarat’s neck.

“Huh?”

Andrej rounds the corner, mustache quivering, and Nawarat staggers as Jack lets go of him.

“Now-what!” Andrej says in a voice that rattles the pots and pans. “Third time in a month!”

“I’m sorry,” Nawarat says. “My car wouldn’t start.”

Instead of sleeping, he’s been scouring YouTube for how to make figurines that move. He’s kept the queen and Kelsey and Taylor in tea and conversation. He’s watched the butler creep around the house to avoid its master.

“I write you up, Now-what!” Andrej says. “We gonna have big talk about your future at Lingonberry!”

He rants on and Marlene appears behind him. She mimes the way he blusters—hands on hips, bellying around like a peacock, muppet-mouth flapping. Nawarat can’t help it: he laughs.

“Mother Mary!” Andrej cries. “What’d I tell you about smiling?”

He throws his hands up and storms out of the kitchen. Marlene smirks and hands Nawarat an apron.

“That shithead should be happy anyone smiles at him,” she says. She nods out the ticket window. “Shitheads across the board today. Lord, let them tip well.”

Nawarat’s father and the girls sit at the counter. His father reads the paper. Kelsey or Taylor spins in her seat, screeching. Kelsey or Taylor pours sugar in a line across their placemats. If they look up, they’ll see him cooking for them.

They don’t look up.

* * *

Kelsey and Taylor discuss what to do about the queen, who is increasingly upset about the hole in the roof. Conversation grows difficult, however, as Kelsey or Taylor looks perpetually constipated, while Kelsey’s or Taylor appears forever on the verge of tears.

Andrej could stand in for Super Mario, and all of the ladies-in-waiting are vacant as blow-up dolls. The mother and the father have smelled something unmentionable, while the butler and the maid look hunted, liable to cringe from any outstretched hand. 

A sudden blaze in his gut pushes Nawarat out the door, figurines in hand. He dashes them against the pavement, little bodies shattering into shards and dust. He collects the heads one by one.

Inside, he sits at the worktable and turns his lamp on to begin again.

* * *

Andrej calls Nawarat into his office. Jack casts him a look from across the kitchen: big eyes tragic over an exaggerated frown. Nawarat bounces his eyebrows at him but wipes the expression from his face when he closes the door. He sticks his hand in his pocket, where a few clay heads roll into his palm. He rubs them like amulets.

 “You been late five times in last two months,” Andrej says.

“Sorry,” Nawarat says. “I’ve been dealing with some stuff.”

The dolls are restless.

“You know it puts us in shit position.”

“Yeah.”

“So.”

“So.”

Andrej sighs noisily and smooths his mustache out in a compulsive, rhythmic gesture. He kicks back and regards Nawarat with narrowed eyes. Nawarat is thinking about getting a mini-lathe. He’s thinking about taking up sewing so everyone can have a selection of dazzling outfits. He’s thinking Andrej should say what he wants to say and let him go home if that’s how it’s gonna be.

“I’ll be straight with you, Now-what,” Andrej says. “If we weren’t short-staffed, I’d have to let you go. You are lucky, this time.”

“Thanks.”

Andrej’s mouth sours in its nest of hair. He flicks his wrist towards the door in dismissal. As Nawarat leaves his office, he calls,

“Oh and Now-what? Don’t cook right behind the ticket window no more. You are alarming the customers.”

* * *

Sometimes, when Nawarat can’t sleep, he sees his father slip from his marriage bed and into the maid’s chambers. They argue. They weep and rage. They clutch at one another. They have congress.

It’s not long before she tells him she is with child. He tells her he is glad for it. He hopes for a son.

“Will you turn me from your home?” she asks.

“Never, my love.”

“Your bastard boy will be a mongrel.”

“A half-breed but best beloved.”

“I will be a fallen woman under your roof.”

“I will protect you with my life.”

After the maid gives birth, the father sees that the child is deformed, and while its mother sleeps, he drowns it in the river.

* * *

Jack bounces from foot to foot before the grill. Nawarat’s new station is off to the side, where the customers can’t see him. It’s just as well. He smiles more these days, wondering what might unspool next when he gets home. Kelsey and Taylor are fighting over the queen’s attentions lately. The father is conducting an affair with a lady-in-waiting. Andrej is being investigated for tax fraud.

“Ugh, this asshole is back,” Jack says, stabbing his spatula into the air. “We gotta strike out on our own, man. You just say the word and we’re outta here.”

“We would still have asshole customers with a food truck,” Nawarat says. “Which one is it now?”

“The shithead who lets his kids fuck everything up.”

Nawarat inches over to the window. Kelsey and Taylor are coloring their placemats and the tabletop while their father diddles his phone.

“…and it wouldn’t be so bad with a food truck,” Jack says. “They order their food, they get it, they leave. No cleaning up after them, no hanging around having to be nice.”

Nawarat grabs table 44’s ticket. A chicken souvlaki and two kids’ breakfast specials.

“You do the souvlaki,” he says. “I’ll handle the specials.”

Jack makes a face bright as a lime. He knocks his elbow into Nawarat’s and leans in, lips against his ear.

“You want me to spit in it, Now-man?”

“Nah,” Nawarat says. “But make it good.”

With a glance at Andrej’s closed door, Nawarat plants himself in his old spot. He spills the eggs and potatoes out onto the grill and pokes them idly.

The crayons are gone. Kelsey or Taylor is singing but it’s more like shrieking. Kelsey or Taylor stacks the jam packets up in a precarious tower. Nawarat’s father hushes one and collects more jam from nearby tables for the other. Kelsey or Taylor kicks her father under the table. Kelsey or Taylor pouts because her tower toppled.

Perhaps the queen will grow weary of them. Perhaps she will tell them there is a contest, a battle of wits and wills, and whoever wins shall return to the palace with her to take up the office of princess. Perhaps Kelsey and Taylor will challenge one another to a duel as the queen rides off toward Balmoral, hands clean.

Nawarat will have to fashion swords, or maybe pistols.

He finishes the specials as Jack sets the souvlaki in the window. Nawarat taps the bell but no one responds. A cluster of waitresses loiter by the toast machine, whispering back and forth.

“I need a smoke to deal with his ass,” one says.

Nawarat’s father sits on other side of the booth now, arms around both girls. He rests one cheek in Kelsey’s fine hair, or Taylor’s. He speaks to them softly. He squeezes them.

Nawarat drags his nails along the livid line of his scar. It’s been twenty years, but it still itches. It still aches. His pulse still beats at its edges. He parcels out the clay heads like counting the rosary until his pockets are empty.

He fluffs up the eggs. He balances all three plates in his arms and sweeps into the dining room. Jack hisses his name at his back.

When he gets to table 44, his father looks through him, unseeing. Nawarat is of no more consequence than a shadow. A waitress. A butler. The father drops a kiss to Kelsey’s crown, or Taylor’s. Nawarat slides their meals into place and smiles.

~ ~ ~

Judge’s Comment: A beautifully crafted story and a beautifully imagined character equal in an unforgettable reading experience. "Tea with the Queen" is just that. Told with an abundance of humor and pathos, the story places the reader beside the main character as he goes about constructing an imaginary home for himself and the two little sisters he'll never know, as he's standing behind the grill watching his despicable father, and longing for his love. This story is clearly a winner.

Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow and Indiana University MFA alum. Their fiction and creative nonfiction has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Wigleaf. Their book, The Anchored World, was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. They serve as an associate fiction editor for Fairy Tale Review and teach creative writing outside of academia. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives outside St. Louis.

What That Meant in Miles

Midge stumbled a bit, and almost fell forward onto the footholds the guide had stamped in the ice. Sixty-six years old, she was already fatigued, not even a third of the way up. Each step toward the volcano’s summit deepened the dull but persistent pain in her calves, and every breath of cold air ripped at the inside of her lungs. She regained her footing, paused, and looked towards the bottom of the steep slope. The idea of tumbling down that white, frictionless sheet made her palms sweat, at the same time she was invigorated to see how far they had come.

Her husband, Henry, was several steps ahead and hadn’t seen her stumble. But the Russian hiker behind her cleared his throat. “Are you all right?” he asked.

She was startled by how confident his English sounded. “Yes, I’m fine. I was just taking it all in.”

At the front of the group, the head guide Felipe fashioned their path. For each step, he formed a foothold by slicing his pickaxe down into the ice and kicking the incision. Behind him, Henry watched in admiration, imagining Felipe’s life best he could. He asked the man in Spanish how often he made this ascent and he said cuatro veces por semana. Imagine that! Four times a week up the face of an active volcano. Waking before dawn, at the summit by noon, then back down and having a drink before sunset. A hell of a life to lead. Henry would never tire of a life like that.

There were nine of them in all, trekking single file in a zigzag pattern up the slope: Felipe, a younger guide whose name Henry didn’t know, him and Midge, the Russian, and four Swiss girls. Henry had meant to be further back, with Midge, but in his eagerness had fallen in line right behind Felipe. Before they began, Henry had tried out what German he knew on the Swiss and had done all right, he thought, until they started talking back. Midge had been on him lately to get a hearing aid, but he’d dismissed this advice.

Henry was keeping up with Felipe just fine, though the vibrations from the pickaxe were starting to bother his hand. He held it like the guide had said, driving the spike down into the ice with each step, always on higher ground so if he fell he could hang onto it rather than be impaled. Deaths on the volcano were rare, but not impossible. There was nothing to grab onto once you started rolling down, no way to stop the terrible inertia.

He wanted to pause for a moment, to squeeze his hand into a fist. This sometimes helped the arthritis, to let a little air into the joints. But he didn’t want to hold up the others, and it was too soon to start taking breaks just yet.

Midge’s breathless spell had passed quickly. Her throat was dry and the small of her back ached, but her feet fell steadily again. No more stumbles. After a while the guides let them stop on a flat space next to three gray boulders sticking out of the snow. They were told in English to sit down. Midge took off her sunglasses and looked out onto the landscape. The sky was brighter blue than anything she’d ever seen, and all the surrounding mountains, their solid masses straining up into the sky, seemed intent on reminding her how much longer they’d be around than she would.

Henry sat down beside her on one of the boulders. “My god,” he said. “That Russian has no sleeves.”

“Shh. He speaks English.”

“It can’t be more than twenty degrees out here. Where are the boy’s sleeves?”

“I’m sure he’s used to the cold.”

“What is that in Celsius, anyway? Twenty degrees.”

Midge tried to calculate. “Ten below, maybe? I don’t know. Give me some water.”

Henry took the bottle out of his pack. “Here. You better have a cereal bar too, if you’re half as hungry as I am.”

“A cup of coffee, that’s what I could use. Why didn’t we bring the thermos?”

“You must have forgotten to volunteer to carry it,” Henry said, and winked.

Felipe clambered up the tallest boulder. Cupping his hands dramatically around his mouth, he called out that in five more minutes they’d move on.

“He can’t be serious,” Midge said. “We just sat down.”

Her face was covered in sweat and she shivered when the cold wind hit it.

“Try not to think about it,” Henry said. “Here, let me get your coat.”

Henry leaned over and dug in her backpack for the puffy jacket the tour company had provided. She put out her arms and he helped her get it on. “Funny how you don’t notice the cold when you’re moving,” he said. Before they’d been fine in just sweatshirts.

“How’s your arthritis?” she asked.

“Hush,” he said. “You don’t want these people knowing I’m an old man, do you?” He kissed her on the cheek. “I’m going to go ask the guide a question. I feel like speaking Spanish.”

Midge smiled and shivered and looked out at the view. The way the clouds jutted up against the white snowy summits made it look like pieces of the taller mountains were floating away, becoming clouds.

The air here was a hell of a thing. It was thin and cold and pure. She felt like it could cure anything. Like she could bring a jar of it back to the U.S. and tell someone who was feeling sad, “Here, just take a deep breath of this.” Poof! Their depression would disappear. Midge knew this was silly but still half-believed it. At first she’d been reluctant to attempt this climb, but now was sure it was just the type of thing they’d been missing for so many years. For a long time they’d been saving every penny so they could travel the world when they retired. This three-week trip through Chile was just the start. And why not? They had nothing tying them to any one place.

The Russian came and sat down beside her. He still hadn’t put on his jacket. He introduced himself as Vlad.

“Midge,” she said. “Aren’t you cold?”

“We will be moving again soon. How are you feeling?”

Her cheeks grew suddenly warm. “I’m fine,” she said. “I think I just needed water.”

“You are very strong. I hope I am climbing volcanoes when I am your age. You have children?”

Midge looked down at her feet, as if she were studying the way the laces lay on her boots. She felt a familiar pressure, as if her rib cage were suddenly pressing in on her heart and lungs. This was not a conversation she wanted to have. But after all these years she still didn’t know the graceful way to avoid it. I used to have a son is not a thing people let slide by without questions and condolences. So she said what she always said.

“No. I don’t have children.”

* * *

As they trotted up the great white slope, it filled with other trekking parties. Most were bigger than their own, and many moved faster. Each group had its own color jacket. Midge and Henry’s were sky blue, the color of baby clothes.

Henry was disappointed their group had no Chileans. Four Swiss and a Russian, that was no good. “¿Dónde están los chilenos?” he asked Felipe.

Felipe motioned gruffly toward a cluster of red jackets, and responded in English. “If they are here, they are in the big groups, not the small ones. Cheaper that way.”

Behind them, Midge listened and started to feel dizzy. Her throat was suddenly dry and her head hurt again. She concentrated on setting one foot in front of the other, pickaxe point pressed firm into the ice.

Henry tried again to get Felipe to speak Spanish with him. “Ustedes tienen un país hermoso.”

Again Midge stumbled, worse this time. Her boot overshot the foothold and skidded rightward, down the slope. She let out a cry. Clinging tight to the cold pickaxe handle, she tried to regain her balance, but her other knee began to buckle. From behind, two large, gentle hands steadied her under her armpits. She squeezed her arms tight to her sides and it was like when she was a child, a thermometer under her arm, her mother telling her Keep it tight against your body. She felt unbearably light, like whoever was holding her could just swaddle her and carry her easily to the summit.

“Careful,” Vlad said in her ear. “You feel sick?”

Midge nodded. She shook the Russian off and sat down in the snow, suddenly surrounded by concerned faces. She took off her sunglasses, but it was too bright so she put them back on. Then Henry was crouching on the snow beside her, asking what was wrong, was something wrong?

“I think she’s dizzy,” Vlad said. “She almost fell.”

She looked up at the Russian and he was the age of her son, the age her son was, when.

“We should go back down,” Henry said.

“No. I’ll be fine.”

“Baby, we’re not even halfway up.”

She smiled. She loved this about him, that after all these years he still called her baby.

“I’ll be fine. I have some aspirin in my backpack.”

Though she was sitting in snow, she couldn’t feel the cold through the snow pants they’d given her. Henry dug in her backpack for the aspirin. He handed it to her, along with some water to take it with.

“You need to drink a lot of water,” Felipe said. “For the sickness.”

“Will she be all right?”

“She will be fine. But maybe she should try to climb another day.”

“There is no other day. Tomorrow we’re off to Punta Arenas, then Torres del Paine.”

“It can be dangerous if she is dizzy. And we are losing time.”

Henry looked around the slope. There were still groups below them, but fewer than before. They were being overtaken. The younger guide said something to Felipe and gestured toward the peak.

Henry looked down at his hand and squeezed it into a fist, trying to loosen the joints. This had been his damn fool idea, this climb. Midge had said it might be too much for them, but he’d refused to believe it. It was the sort of thing they’d put off for so long. A lifetime, it seemed. And now the time had passed. What was he doing here, crouched on the side of a volcano with aching knuckles and a poor wife he’d made sick by being so stubborn?

She took his hand. “You go on ahead. One of the guides can take me back down.”

“Like hell.”

“It’s okay. Really. I’m just as happy to wait at the hotel.”

Henry stood up. “And then what? I go for another half hour then get dizzy too and go down by myself? No, you were right. We shouldn’t have come.”

He looked up at the sky. Two distant mountains cradled the sun, as good a view as he was going to get. He took the camera out of his jacket’s breast pocket, snapped a picture, and turned to the younger guide. “¿Puede bajar con nosotros?”

The guide nodded yes, he could take them down.

“Listen to me, will you?” Midge said. “I want you to keep going.”

He put the camera back in his pocket. He sat down beside her and put his head on her shoulder. Her jacket was big and bulky and soft on his cheek. “No, I don’t want to. It’s no good without you. If we can’t go up together we can at least go down together.”

She looked around at the other travelers. The Russian had put on a coat. The Swiss girls were standing with their arms crossed, speaking German to one another in low tones. One glanced at her then looked away with an expression like she’d just sniffed sour milk. They wanted to get moving again. Part of Midge wanted to go with them. A large part. A part she forced herself to ignore.

For some minutes the guides spoke to each other in machine gun Spanish too fast to follow. They seemed to be arguing. The younger guide kept pointing up to the peak and Felipe was shaking his head no. Felipe said something into his walkie talkie and listened to the crackly response. He nodded his head, his eyes on the younger guide. “Vale,” he said. Then he addressed the tour group: “I’m afraid we cannot take Midge back down, not yet.”

He explained that their boss was very strict, and that climbing higher with the rest of them would mean too many hikers to a single guide. Instead, Felipe would continue on with the Swiss while the other guide, Pato, stayed behind with Henry and Midge and Vlad. That group would move slower up the mountain, with more breaks, so another guide could catch up with them. Then if Midge and Henry still needed to go down they could.

Midge felt bad for Vlad, for making him hang back. She told him so.

Vlad shook his head. “Altitude sickness is common. It can happen to anyone.”

“It didn’t, though,” she said. “It happened to me.”

* * *

When they started up again, Midge walked up front, behind Pato. She watched his slow, methodical work with the pickaxe. After a while he stopped, turned his head slightly, and called back over his shoulder. “Everyone okay?”

She didn’t like that. She knew it was a question for her, and she knew Henry and Vlad knew it too.

“I’m fine,” she called back. “Thank you.” When he started walking again and she was sure no one would see, she stuck her tongue out at him.

When Henry had first brought it up, Midge had been nervous about the climb, sure it would make them feel their age. She had pictured her and Henry trailing behind a bunch of twenty-something body-building backpackers who would barely break a sweat. But by the time they’d arrived in Chile, the volcano had transformed in her mind into something of pure beauty, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The night before the climb, this had excited her to no end. She had been outright giddy, and she and Henry made love for the first time in ages. She laughed as he fumbled with the childproof cap on the prescription pill bottle. “Here,” she said, “let me.” He turned red. “At least we don’t have to use condoms, right?” she said. He smiled and nodded and kissed her deeply. But when he pushed her back on the bed and started to undo her belt, fingers growing surer, she looked up at the chain dangling from the ceiling fan and felt strange remembering how long they had used condoms after they were first married, how excited they were when they stopped so they could start trying for Billy. When they finished she was sure he saw the tears in the corners of her eyes.

She heard Henry behind her now, and knew he was hurting. The pain in his hands. The pickaxe would be hard to hold. She’d lived with him living with his pains so long they felt like her own. His legs would be aching too, but he’d be too scared to say so. He wanted to be the strong one, to impress her and the guide and poor sweet Vlad, who’d had to stay behind with them. So let Henry be the rock. When they got back down he’d confess his hands and legs had been hurting, and she would say, Oh! I had no idea. This was the story of her life with Henry. His hidden pains, her bleeding out in the open despite all her best efforts.

* * *

They walked for some time with no break. Henry was in the back. He wanted to be watching Midge, to make sure she was all right, but he had to keep his eyes on where his feet were falling. He had to trust the guide, the Russian, the grips on Midge’s shoes. He knew she’d stop if she needed to. She’d be embarrassed, but she would stop. And he knew that Vlad would catch her again if need be, and damn it if he wouldn’t do a better job than Henry ever could. Anyway, it seemed her spell had passed.

Eventually they rested on a big rock and had lunch. They were now the only group on this part of the volcano; everyone else was further up, and many would be at the top already. They made small talk while they waited for the other guide. Henry took Midge’s hand. It was a strange sensation, holding someone else’s gloved hand with his own, the material bunching between them. A touch without warmth, like resting a hand on the body in a casket.

After a while Pato took out his walkie talkie and started talking. Something staticky answered back. “¿Cómo?” he said, again and again. “Sí, sí, okey, entiendo.”

He put the walkie talkie back in his bag.

“The other guide isn’t coming,” Midge said.

Henry looked from her to Pato. “Is that what they said?

“We do not have enough workers today,” the guide said. “They have no one to send.”

“So what do we do?”

“We keep moving. We hope your wife is okay. If no, we all go down together.”

Before they started moving again, Midge went off with Pato to find a place for her to pee. As private a place as one could find on a wide-open slope above the tree line. The guide walked ahead of her, carving out steps in the snow until they found a flat spot half-hidden between some large rocks. He stood with his arms crossed and his back turned as she unbuckled and squatted, steam rising around her.

Meanwhile, Vlad and Henry shared an energy bar and an awkward silence. Henry felt unmanned by Vlad, who had kept his wife from falling.

“Your wife is a good woman,” Vlad said. “How long have you been married?”

“Forty-one years.”

The Russian whistled. “I cannot imagine knowing someone so well. All that time, just the two of you.”

Henry licked his lips. “What do you mean?”

“Midge says to me you do not have children.”

Henry trained his eyes on the interweaving sets of footprints leading up, unable to tell which were theirs.

“That’s only half true,” he told Vlad. He licked his lips again, flaps of dead skin chapped from the cold. This was the conversation he never wanted to have but always ended up having anyhow. He felt suddenly a bit lightheaded himself, and took a deep drink of water.

They had had a son once, Henry wanted to say, but that didn’t seem like the type of thing one said. Not there, trapped with this man at who knew how many meters above sea level or what that number meant in miles anyway. A million little interventions he might have made, that was what Henry would always remember. Especially that answering machine tape, that last message Billy had left, and the cassette player that ate it: Henry with his clumsy arthritic fingers and bad vision made worse by tears, tugging desperately until the ribbon ripped. They’d never thought to make a copy, wouldn’t have known how without Billy. One last failure to intervene, one last loss chocked up to bad luck. Just one of those things. Everything was always just one of those things.

When Billy was born he was blue-faced and not breathing, umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. Henry was stuck in an airport in Pennsylvania, traveling for business like usual, pacing back and forth. Something in the way the clouds hovered outside the bay windows told him it was all wrong. The first and only birth Henry had witnessed was as a child, a prolapsed heifer at his uncle’s farm in Norfolk, her insides turning inside out as the calf was born. A bad omen. He was not religious nor superstitious but he wasn’t blind either. They unwrapped the cord immediately but the boy was never quite right. Stole a car at sixteen just to show he could, abandoned it still running in an Osco parking lot. Sold the younger kids at his school spray paint to huff. They knew the drinking was a problem, and the driving too, but it was just one of those things.

But Henry didn’t tell the Russian any of this. Instead he found himself telling him about the tape and the damn machine that ate it. Midge had been on him to get a new cassette player for the bedroom. It was as old as Billy was when the accident happened, the geometric symbols on the gray buttons all but smudged away. Some nights, when Midge could sleep and he couldn’t, Henry would pop in the tape and watch the white spindles rotate. Here came Billy’s voice, “Hey ma, it’s Bill, just wanted to say, you know, thanks for everything...” It was from the night following the intervention, when after a lot of tears and fessing up and hand wringing he’d sworn off the bottle. There was something in his voice on that recording that Henry couldn’t stop going back to. It was shaky in all the right ways, filled with a worn, tired kind of perseverance Henry had never heard before.

“I remember thinking,” Henry said, “that this is what hope sounds like. This is what I need to carry forward. But now for the life of me I can’t hear it in my head. I can’t remember my own son’s voice. I remember hearing it, and what I thought at the time, but I can’t hear the thing itself. Not now that the damn machine ate the tape.”

Midge came crunching back across their boot prints from before. Over the rhythmic steps came Henry’s voice. As she got closer she started to pick out some words and she understood what he was talking about. What, though maybe not why. Something about that tape, it tore at Henry. She’d tried so many times to tell him it was bound to happen. A cassette tape was not a permanent medium. Nothing was. But it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t hear her.

“Henry—”

She was standing next to the guide now, a few feet away from Henry and Vlad, who sat together on a small boulder. Vlad had an all-too-familiar look on his face, full of pity and deep discomfort. He glanced at her for a moment then quickly looked away.

* * *

Soon they were moving again. She didn’t know what to say to Henry nor to Vlad, so she didn’t say anything. They were all but alone on the slope now. The cold air bit at her lips and eyes and her whole body was sore, fatigued. Sweat pooled in her armpits and slicked the palms of her hands. The air grew thinner and thinner, her breath more ragged, the exertion more exhausting. She watched her steps fall, trying to block out all else. They had been walking for so long but she was certain if she stopped she would not start again. She started to feel dizzy and she told herself, No. This is not what happens here. The guide said we were close.

Henry was behind her, wheezing. Ahead, the Russian grunting. She beat back the urge to look up at the sky. She had to be careful where she put her feet. One wrong step and down you went. One wrong step was all it took. But her thoughts felt lighter up here in the thin air. Like lily pads floating down a stream. In her mind’s eye she saw herself trip and fall sideways, losing her grip on the pickaxe, tumbling down the slick white surface. How many years would that cut her life short, anyway? Twenty, thirty? Maybe ten, or even less? They wouldn’t call that tragedy. Somewhere along the way she’d reached the age where death became unfortunate, rather than tragic.

She tried to let her mind clear, to let her senses carry her. She heard her husband wheezing behind her, Pato whistling up ahead. Her ragged breath sliced into her like a hand saw, pressure building in her kneecaps until she was sure they would burst. How long had her knees been aching? Maybe forever.

Glancing down she could not tell where she was on the volcano. It seemed like the same stretch of footprints they’d been walking for hours. We’re going in circles, she thought wildly. They’ve tricked me. They’ve found a way to always move up but never reach the top. Then she felt a strange quaint certainty that if she turned around she would not see the gray-haired Henry who shared her bed last night and almost every night these last four decades, but the hippie with a long black beard who first winked at her at age twenty-one and offered her a drag off his cigarette. It was not an altogether unpleasant thought.

“Henry?”

He huffed along behind her.

“Yes, I’m here.”

“I don’t feel so well.”

Henry looked up. He saw that he and Midge had fallen behind. The others were ahead by a couple dozen paces or more.

“Okay, Midge, stop there.”

She slowed, but took another step.

“Midge, baby, it’s okay. Wait where you are.”

“Do your hands hurt?” she asked.

He squeezed his right hand into a fist. It felt like a small explosion of white-hot pin pricks between the joints.

“I guess they do,” he said.

“It’s strange how you don’t notice the pain after a while. Unless someone brings it up.”

She took another step.

“Midge, cut it out!” he said. He took hold of the back of her coat with his free hand. The other held fast to his pickaxe speared into the slope beside him. “Just stay still a minute,” he said.

Midge turned and twisted her body back toward him the best she could without stepping outside her footprints.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. She let her pickaxe go and grabbed onto his arm gently with both her hands.

“Here, sit down,” he said.

“Did you know you look like Billy? I suppose you don’t notice.”

“Listen, I’m sorry I brought it up. Blame the altitude. No, blame the Russian.”

“He’s a good boy you know.”

“The Russian? I know. I’m just joking. Listen, sit down a minute.”

“Not the Russian.”

Henry’s mind stuttered. “Who do you mean, honey? You mean Billy?”

Midge half fell, half sat down in the snow. She looked around, lost.

“Henry. Henry’s a good boy.”

Up ahead, Vlad and Pato had stopped. Henry couldn’t see the expressions on their faces but Pato was pointing back at them. Henry held up a single finger. One second. Just wait one second.

“Who did you say? Who’s a good boy?” He sat down beside her. He took her hand. If he could just bide time. Wait for her to get her bearings before they tried to move.

“Henry. I know you don’t like him. His hair is too long.”

“Midge, who do you think I am?” he whispered.

Confusion crept across her face, written in the folds that formed as she narrowed her eyes. Her lips moved slightly, as if reading a set of complicated instructions. Still she clasped his hand. Henry’s heart galloped along faster and faster as she studied him.

“¡Amigo!” he heard Pato call. “¿Todo bien?”

“¡Esperen!” Henry called back. “Wait one minute, damn it!”

He looked back at Midge. She wiggled her hand in his and giggled.

They’d seen this sort of thing in both their mothers, at the end. But this was too soon, just too soon. Sure, Midge could be spacy. They both could. He’d noticed her water the plants twice in one day, or unlock the front door when she thought she was locking it. Once she’d tried to make an appointment with the dentist and called their old dentist, from years prior and several states over. She hadn’t realized her mistake until halfway through the conversation, then hung up the phone red as a beet without a word. They’d both eventually laughed at that, though, thought nothing of it. Now a million similar instances jumped to his mind, a tapestry he’d refused to see as a whole.

He looked into her eyes and tried not to see an icy glimmer of things to come. “It’s just the altitude, Midge,” he said. “You’ll feel better in a minute.”

She nodded. “I’m starting to feel better now.”

He glanced up to where Pato and Vlad were standing, watching and waiting. Then, for the first time, he noticed that there was hardly any more mountain above them.

“My god,” he said. “I think that’s the top. Right over that ridge there.” He called out to Pato, pointing. “Is that the peak?”

“¡Sí, claro!” the guide shouted back, hands cupped around his mouth. “We are almost there!”

Henry looked at Midge and she was looking back at him. She dug into her pack and pulled out a bottle of water. Smiled. And with that it was her, Midge was Midge again.

“Billy loved this about you,” she said. “This stubbornness.”

Henry wasn’t sure what she meant. “Pato says that’s it, right up there,” he said.

She took a long gulp of water. “Remember when you bought Billy that Nintendo, then stayed up all night with his friends helping them beat Super Mario?”

Henry smiled. “We thought the damn thing was broken at first. We were sure it couldn’t be so hard.”

They fell silent. The sounds drifted down from the peak. They could hear the other tour groups now, whooping and hollering in several different languages.

“I think I’m ready,” Midge said, and handed him the bottle of water.

* * *

Further up the slope, Vlad watched Henry help Midge up. She seemed shaky. At first Vlad wished he’d noticed sooner that they were falling behind, and stayed down there with them. Then he was glad he hadn’t.

Beside him, Pato muttered something that sounded like profanity. Vlad didn’t understand Spanish. As he watched, Henry guided Midge’s hand to the pickaxe she’d left standing in the snow, then grabbed his own pickaxe, holding onto the back of her jacket the whole time. Midge took a shaky step forward, then Henry took one too. After Midge took a second step, surer now, so did Henry.

“Chucha,” Pato said to Vlad. “We will be here forever.”

Vlad waved his hand dismissively. He took a flask out of his pocket, figuring they were past the hard part, and while he drank he decided to return to this volcano when he was Henry’s age, to prove that he could still do it, too. All around them, the wind whistled across the hardened snow.

Below, Henry and Midge wound their way up the volcano. Vlad and Pato watched the old couple in silence, and after a while it was impossible to tell who was helping who, Henry holding Midge aloft by the back of her coat or Midge guiding Henry forward, one wavering step at a time.

 ~ ~ ~

Bruce Johnson holds a PhD in Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Southern California, as well as an MFA in Fiction from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. His stories appear in Best Microfiction 2023, Sycamore Review, The Cincinnati Review MiCRO Series, and The Adroit Journal, among other publications. He lives with his wife and son in Santiago, Chile, and can be found at brucejohnsonfiction.com

The Chesterton Girls

On a warm spring morning, the Sunday before Memorial Day, the Chesterton twins stood in front of the church talking to the minister and his wife. The sisters mirrored each other, with the same polka dot dresses and French-rolled hair, identical eyeglasses and cream mid-heel pumps. Even from a distance, though, you could see that one sister’s hair was slightly askew, that it was really a wig.

Everyone called Emma and Anna Chesterton “the sisters” or “the girls,” even though they were no longer girls. They’d celebrated their seventy-eighth birthday in March with a cruise to the Bahamas, something Emma had wanted but Anna didn’t. They had argued bitterly over the cruise. Anna didn’t like to travel, and she was still weak from her most recent radiation treatments. By the time they got home to Nashville she was painfully thin with exhaustion and racked with a sinus infection that lingered even now as they headed into the warm, humid days of spring, and despite her regimen of pink antibiotics. Anna sniffed back moisture and touched the side of her nose with a tiny lace hanky as Emma finished her story—the story about the church trustee who ran off with the choir director all those years ago, long before Reverend Blanchard arrived. The sisters talked over each other sometimes, finished each other’s thoughts.

“Howard Tice,” Emma said. “Name of Tice, and he had that car dealership way down on Granny White Pike.”

“That’s right,” Anna said. “Now I remember. Just couldn’t remember the old goat’s name.” 

 “I always thought he was nice, and that rhymed with Tice,” Emma said. She let her smile flash—that bright over-bite of a Chesterton smile that always reminded Anna so much of their Daddy.  

Anna gave a little “humph” and pursed her lips, dabbed at her nostril some more. Reverend Blanchard smiled a skimpy smile, then looked to his wife as if she might offer some way of escape. She offered nothing. She just smiled back at him.

Finally, the reverend said that he had a meeting and excused himself from the sisters. “Please stop by anytime,” he said. “Always a pleasure, Miss Emma, Miss Anna.” He shook their hands and went into the church quickly, leaving his wife to find a way to disengage from the sisters. It would be another twenty minutes before she would find a way. Those girls could just talk and talk.

They’d been talking about the choir, reminiscing about some of its old members, because they were planning their annual dinner party. Emma had been in the choir for years, and the girls had a gathering for the other members twice a year, a covered-dish affair in the spring, and a holiday feast at Christmas. Anna didn’t sing in the choir because she knew she couldn’t sing. Emma’s voice was almost as bad, but she either didn’t care or didn’t know, and no one ever said anything to her about it, so she’d been a mainstay in the Belmont United Methodist choir for years.

This year, the spring party would be late. There had been the cruise in March, and Anna had been terribly weak, sick off and on since then, so the dinner at Hickory Stream, the old home place down by Franklin, wouldn’t be until the weekend after Memorial Day. They'd planned it for a Friday night, so on Wednesday the sisters drove down to open up the place, to air it out and stock the kitchen. A maid service came in on Thursday to make sure everything was swept and dusted, the ancient bathroom fixtures shined and operating properly. And all during that week it was hot—into the 90s by mid-afternoon, but cooling rapidly at night from the lack of clouds.

On Friday morning, as Anna slept and tried to recover from another headache that came with her sinus infection, Emma ran some errands, picked up some things for the party. She took the Chrysler with the deep, wide trunk, so she could stow some things from the back porch there and have plenty of room left over for the supplies she would get from Walmart. She detested the Walmart, was offended by the cheapness of the place.  Their own daddy, Captain Chesterton (Cap’n, everyone called him), had a prosperous furniture store down at Franklin when the girls were growing up. The best merchandise, the very best clientele. Many of the folks who bought his furniture were the same folks who came to the elaborate salons and garden parties that their mother would put on at Hickory Stream. When their daddy finally sold the business, just a few years before he died, it brought a tidy sum and helped to support the girls over the years. The funds weren’t inexhaustible, though, and the meager retirement and Social Security the sisters got from having worked in the Nashville school system for some thirty years weren’t enough to support a spendthrift lifestyle. So, sometimes the girls had to go to Walmart.

That morning, Emma cleared some things from the back porch, some boxes and old canning jars that she wanted to take back to Nashville. Anna’s little dog, a nine-year-old border collie named Robbie (after Robert Burns), a dog the sisters had come to love like he was their own precious child, scurried about as Emma walked to the trunk of the car with the boxes and jars. He liked to follow the girls wherever they went, would run back and forth from house to car, distracting himself, wrestling in the grass once in a while and stretching. Then he’d take off across the field out back. Age had begun to catch up with him though, and he tired quickly. Emma closed the trunk, looked around for the dog but didn’t see him. Thought he must have gone back in the house, maybe down to the pond. She was already worried about her shopping list, her driving, her need to stay focused so she wouldn’t be a hazard to herself or others on the road.

She stopped at Walmart in mid-afternoon. She bought some fancy Chinette paper plates, the kind that wouldn’t bend, and she picked up a vegetable tray, some soft drinks and some cheeses. When she was ready to wheel her cart out into the stifling heat, she asked the greeter if he would help her. She assumed he was there to help, as if he were a concierge. He pushed the cart along behind her as they headed toward the Chrysler. She beeped her key and opened the trunk. There was a moment's hesitation, and then she staggered back suddenly, bumping the cart. She put her hands to her mouth as if to prevent something from escaping. She screamed then, a raw sound from deep back, as if it might damage her throat. She covered her face with her hands and turned away from the car.

The young man walked over and looked in. There on the compartment’s clean maroon carpet, as if it were asleep but clearly dead, was a dog. Its tongue lolled and its eyes were glazed as if it were a stuffed animal that had been manufactured to look dead. A fetid sweet stench rose up from the heat of the trunk already, and Emma sat hard on the blistering pavement and panted as if she’d just run a mile.

* * *

She would not, could not tell Anna. Her sister was too frail and sick, too sensitive. So, Emma carried on with the party as if nothing had happened. She told Anna that Robbie would show up by morning, that he was probably just out roaming the fields, avoiding the commotion, asleep for the night under one of the huge old boxwoods. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done that before. Nothing to worry about. After the guests went home and the kitchen was cleared, Anna took some of her headache and sinus medicine and went to bed.

When Emma was sure that Anna was asleep, she took Robbie from the trunk, wrapped him in an old quilt, and dragged his stiff body down to the far end of the yard, just to the edge of the fence that separated yard from hayfield. The night was clear again. It was a strange spring, and there hadn’t been a drop of rain in two weeks. The dirt where Emma dug was packed dry clay, hard enough in spots that the flimsy garden shovel blade just bounced. She worked until midnight, her heart pounding, her head spinning and light. She dug and dug, and still she could get the hole no deeper than a foot. It was like mining limestone, and Emma herself was too frail to dig any more.

She pushed the dog into the hole, turning it this way and that, but it wouldn’t go. Rigor mortis had set in, the legs gone rigid and stretched straight. To fit the dog into the meager grave, she had to flip him onto his back, his legs pointing skyward. She packed the quilt down around his body and shoveled loose dirt. When she was finished, though, when she had covered him as much as she could, there were still four furry feet sticking up out of the dirt. Little clawed and tufted sprigs.

She was exhausted. Arms and legs leaded. She looked around helplessly into the corners of the yard, as if something might be found there. She leaned on the handle of the shovel, breathing quickly, the air whistling over the dryness of her throat. She tried to think of what their daddy might do. Then she went to the garden shed to get the sharp, curved saw they used to prune the cherry trees.

* * *

Who knows the reasons? Emma didn’t know why she did the things she did. Probably just because she could. Ever since they were little girls, Emma had been the strongest, the one who would lead while Anna would follow. Anna had been the shy sister, the demur and quietly pretty one. Even though they were identical in almost every way, there was always something just a little softer, a little paler about Anna—something a little less harsh in her features and movements that gave the impression that she was beautiful in some way that Emma was not. When they were very young, their parents thought Anna might be just a little “slow,” as they called it, but she eventually grew out of that. Emma overheard Daddy and Mother describing the girls to an acquaintance once, trying to sort them out for her, and Daddy had said, “No, no. She’s the sweet one, the pretty one.”

When the girls were at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, Emma was the one who went out for horse riding, fencing, and the drama club. Anna studied quietly, reading poetry and the classics. And Emma was truly surprised when Allen Langhorne III, of the Lynchburg Langhornes, chose Anna. They were in their last year at Sweet Briar, just before the Christmas break in 1950, when Mr. Langhorne, who was just starting in his father’s law firm, asked Anna Chesterton to marry him and asked permission to call on their father in Franklin. They talked about a date in June, as soon as Anna finished school. Before that, Emma hadn’t really paid much attention to Mr. Langhorne, thought he was stilted and stuffy, until he’d had a little too much to drink, which he often did. And when he drank, he talked incessantly about his time at Brown and Yale Law, as if he were afflicted with some mental defect that had narrowed his focus of interest to one thing: himself. Emma teased Anna about it sometimes. Said she hoped that Allen would be able to overcome the handicap of his Ivy League education someday.

Anna seemed overwhelmed by it all, as if her delicate emotions were simply overloaded, as if she were delusional about Mr. Langhorne’s faults and about whether she could tolerate living away from Hickory Stream. She took a long time to respond to his proposal, but eventually she answered yes on New Year’s Eve. And in January, Emma began to flirt with Mr. Langhorne mercilessly. She didn’t really have an answer why, except that she could. She was bold in that regard, strong—whereas, Anna was weak.

Emma would see Mr. Langhorne at a restaurant or on the street in Lynchburg. Sometimes she’d go there alone just for that purpose. Take his arm, brush up against him, smile her toothy smile right up into his face and invite herself out for a drink. Chatting about this and that, fawning, telling him what a lucky girl Anna was and how thrilling it was going to be to have Mr. Langhorne as a member of their family. And one night in February, just before Valentine’s Day, they'd both had too much to drink. They had stayed late at a restaurant, closing it down, taking a bottle of wine with them as they left. When they got to Allen’s car, he pulled her to him, kissed her clumsily, slipped a cold hand up under her sweater. She pressed back against him, grinding into him and kissing hard with an open mouth, allowing him just enough to know that she had won. Then she pushed him away, brushing at her clothes as if she were brushing snow, and said that perhaps it was time for him to drive her back to school, please.

The roads to Amherst were patched with ice, snow banked high from a storm that had settled over the area two days before. By the time they reached the winding drive into the campus, Emma was stiff with fear, almost sobered by Allen’s erratic steering, his complete inability to judge distances. He was, of course, very drunk. She told him to stop inside the gates and that she would walk from there. And as Emma trudged up the dark, snow-packed drive, hugging herself, looking back to see Allen turning his vehicle this way and that, backing and then spinning forward, she was almost certain he was going to get stuck. And how would they explain that to Anna? When she looked back again, though, he seemed to have made it. His headlights inched along south on the highway, slowly, deliberately. Snow had started to fall again.

The police found him the next morning. There didn’t appear to have been a crash. Instead, Mr. Langhorne’s new black Studebaker rested in a little hillock of snow along the Old Amherst highway, just parked there. He might have been sleepy, too fogged and intoxicated to go on. Pulled off and rested. Drank some more wine and slept. When he pulled to the side of the road, though, let the car drift to a stop and slide backwards into the ditch, the piled and gravel-crusted snow clogged his exhaust pipe. He left the engine running while he slept, and by morning he was dead.  

Daddy and Mother had insisted that the girls come back to Hickory Stream for a while after the funeral, worked it out with the school so the sisters could still finish in the spring. For a while, it was as if Anna had slipped back into a form of mental “slowness.” She would lose her thoughts, lose her way from this place to that. Emma was weighted with guilt, shame, and the need to make amends in some way. She needed to protect and watch over her weaker sister now—to finish her thoughts for her. They became elementary school teachers in Franklin and Nashville, roomed together, took care of each other. They never married and never spoke one single word to each other about the night that Emma came in late shivering, covered with snow and smelling of cigarettes and liquor. The night before Mr. Langhorne was found dead not more than two miles from their school.

* * *

On the morning after the choir party, Anna was up first. She felt a little better, headache gone, but still weak and in a fog. She scraped the teapot onto the burner and stood at the sink, looking out into the yard. Down by the back fence, just before the hayfield, the Cruikshank’s hateful little terrier from the next farm over was digging at something furiously, throwing dirt up into the air behind him like a crazed machine. Emma came into the kitchen then, pulling her robe around her, pinning up her hair.

“Would you look at that?” Anna said. She pointed out the window with a teaspoon. “Cruikshank’s dog is tearing up our yard something terrible, honey.” She leaned toward the window, squinting as if trying to focus. “I’m surprised Robbie isn’t out there just chasing that ugly little beast away.”

Emma looked out the window in horror, paling, knowing what she would see before she even saw it. Dirt was flying, the annoying dog pawing and pulling, snagging at the quilt that lay just beneath the surface. The sky was orange and gray, and heavy sagging clouds moved low across the hayfields.

Anna said, “I’m going to go see what that mutt is doing.”

Emma touched her arm, squeezed it gently. “No,” she said. “You don’t need to go out in that chill, honey. You let me go see.”

Emma pulled her flowered robe around her tighter, cinched the belt, and put on a pair of garden shoes in the mudroom. As she crossed the long expanse of grass, she clapped at the dog, told him to shoo! He ran away then, skittered sideways across the yard and looked back at her accusingly, black eyes glaring from beneath tufts of white hair. Blanket and fur had been exposed where he'd been digging, and Emma could see the four wet, curly stumps sticking up out the quilt and the dirt. It looked as if the terrier had been chewing on one of the stumps, gnawing on it as if it were a cowhide chew toy. She looked back toward the house, the kitchen window, but she didn’t see her sister. Her heart pounded furiously, sweat trickled down from under her sagging breasts.

She went as quickly as she could, limping, her hip catching some as she walked back through the dewy yard. She went to the garage to retrieve the shovel that she had propped there last night, next to the trash barrel where she had wrapped and buried the severed feet within the folds of an IGA grocery bag, stuffed them deep beneath the discarded food and greasy paper plates. When she came to the front of the garage, Anna stood in the driveway looking down at a pile of trash scattered at her feet. The trash barrel had been tipped, its lid clawed and pried, tossed to the side. Paper plates chewed, bags ripped open, trailing from the tipped barrel off into the grass. Raccoons.

Anna looked at Emma. She adjusted her glasses and said, “Well, would you look at this mess?” She looked down at the ground, steadied herself with a hand on her knee, and bent slowly to pick something up. She stood up and held the thing close to her face, examining it in the gray light, turning it in her hand a little then dropping it suddenly as if it were electrified. Anna screamed then, long and loud—a chilling cry that Emma had never heard before. Anna stood there vibrating, lurching forward a little and gargling up anguish and pain like glossolalia. She hadn’t put on her wig, and the patched tufts of her short hair were completely white. Her robe had fallen open, and the thin cords of her neck and her skeletal clavicle reminded Emma of those pictures from the Holocaust. Anna tried to say something that just came out in stammers of “Why? What have you? Why?”  

Emma didn’t know how to explain what she did, and she didn’t know what to do now to help her sister. She reached for the shovel, still filmed with dirt from the night before. She walked toward Anna with it, raised it high over her shoulder like an axe, and wondered if she could still be the strong sister now, to help the other along in some way, to finish her thoughts for her one more time. The sisters stood frozen like that for a moment, staring as if trying to puzzle out who this other person might be. Suddenly it began to rain. It was a cool, steady rain that washed over the girls as they stood their ground, alert now—watching for any sudden movements.

~ ~ ~

A native of St. Joseph, Missouri, Mark Lindensmith lives and works in Virginia, where he is a lawyer and, sometimes, a writer.  He is the author of the short story collection, Short-Term Losses (Southern Methodist University Press), and his fiction has appeared in journals such as Another Chicago Magazine, The Hook, South Dakota Review, New Letters, Thema, Southern Indiana Review, and Make: A Chicago Literary Magazine. He was the 2005 winner of the Chicago Literary Award for short fiction, and has had fiction selected as prize stories in Southern Indiana Review, Writer’s Digest, and The Hook. He has also published legal articles in numerous magazines, journals, and books. Lindensmith has been a fellow in fiction writing at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and received a grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts for a novel-in-progress, which also was a finalist in the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society fiction competition.