Editor Selections for Issue 251
Poetry & Short Fiction

~ ~ ~

Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer and poet. She’s the author of two chapbooks and one poetry collection—This Strange and Wonderful Existence (poetry chapbook, Bottlecap Press, 2023), Take Me Home (nonfiction chapbook, Belle Point Press, 2024), and Lightning Is a Mother (poetry collection, ELJ Editions, 2025). Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023 and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Connect with Bethany at her website or find her on social media @BethanyJarmul

Jade Mountain, Minneapolis Institute of Art

Chinese characters climb the sheer
rock face like bird tracks

splayed across a pale green wilderness,

below,
tiny figures with their cups of rice wine
sparring in friendly competition. 
They mingle forever
in small circles, or stroll in pairs
through the pleasant park
with its slope-roofed pavilion,

where not even the rippling water
and frail new buds want anything more.

Idly, they sail their poems in the stream. 

Those little poets, dwarfed

by such splendid peaks,
almost an afterthought
among the twisted trees and winding paths,
the lines and crevices that
make me want to touch,

except for the sharp pane of glass
between us,

a warning to stay away from heights,

an invitation to enjoy (as they do)
a nice day,

someone laughing,
in what might be sunlight.

~ ~ ~

Diane Scholl is Professor Emerita of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, where she taught American and modern British literature, poetry courses, and literature by women. Her poems have been published in Cider Press Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Cold Mountain Review, Louisville Review, and Ruminate, among other places. In 2019 her chapbook, Salt, was published by Seven Kitchens Press. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, she misses the multi-cultural neighborhoods and tree-lined streets, but has grown to love hiking and biking among the scenic bluffs of NE Iowa.

~ ~ ~

Michael Simms is a poet and novelist, as well as the Founding Editor of Autumn House Press (1998-2016) and of Vox Populi (2014-present). His most recent novel is The Green Mage (Madville, 2023), and his most recent collection of poems is Strange Meadowlark (Ragged Sky, 2023). His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Southwest Review, Scientific American, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day. He lives in the historical neighborhood of Mount Washington in Pittsburgh.

Cat People

Goddamn cats. There are enough cat people in your life and you want nothing to do with them. Your office is full of cat people, because your office is full of inscrutable graphic designers whose wildest dream is to design a book. Ideally, an art book. Exactly five people will see the goddamn art book and they will probably also be cat people.

Your boss, the only extrovert in the office, is bizarrely into cats. His screensaver cycles through Brutalist architecture, but he keeps two cats in the office like team mascots. The studio manager spends more time taking the furballs to the vet than doing actual admin. The copywriter uses the cats like stress balls, especially when she’s dreaming of writing the great Beijing novel. Five Box, the only one who you can really talk to, had three cats. When he met the love of his life, they ended up with six cats between them. That explains why you never see him outside of work again.

As far back as you can remember, you just have no luck with cats. When you were seven, an auntie gave you a kitten from a litter. You took the newborn home, but the darn thing meowed all night long. Your red-eyed demon mom forced you to return it the next morning. You still remember the way the plastic bag dangled from your bike handle with the kitten inside. The kitten poked its head out from the bag when you lost control of the bike. You watched as blood gushed from your knee, mixed with dirt and gravel. The kitten meowed while you cried. You swore off cats after that. The little compartment in your heart that administered affection for small animals fluttered shut. So now after a long night at the office when a stray cat appears at your compound, you walk past it like it’s a ghost.

To be fair, there are a lot of cats around where you live. Your compound is old—near the Forbidden City kind of old. There are two six-story buildings with no elevator overlooking a gray splatter of hutongs. The cats like to lie on the low, tiled hutong roofs, lazy as kings, taking in the sun with their bellies up, but you’ve never seen one taken with a human before.

At first, you were thrilled to settle into such a prestigious address. When people ask where you live, you feel Old Beijinger when you say “at the foot of the Imperial City.” It’s all very romantic, except your office is over and across town. After a long day at work, the tangled commute only leaves you feeling Old.

That’s why you choose to still not see the cat until you’re halfway inside your compound, when the cat’s shadow is suddenly eating into yours. When you finally turn to look at it, you see a dirty and malnourished thing. It’s a ginger, with white patches from the neck down and stripes of orange at its crown, back, and paws. When the cat looks at you with its bright, copper eyes, you feel as if a mouse is pitter-pattering down your spine—like you know those eyes, and you love those eyes. You avert your gaze, the way you dodge those kids in Sanlitun selling roses to lovers when you're obviously alone. You keep going without looking back, stealing straight for the safety of your building in the innermost corner.

Of course, the cat follows you. You duck inside. Sticker ads for plumbers and escorts speckle the concrete stairs. Usually you slog up. This time, you’re a thief in the night. You scamper up so lightly you don’t even set off the janky motion-detecting light bulb on each floor. Of course, the cat sticks to you. On the third floor when you finally stop to gawk at it, the cat gawks back. Its eyes glow like reflections of the tiny moon outside the rectangular window on each floor. 

You really pick up your speed after that, like you’ve gone and robbed a bank and the getaway car is on the sixth floor. This results in, frankly, the cat breaking into a chase after you, heroic in its ascension while you almost shatter your shin. By the sixth floor, when the cat is still there—well, that’s more commitment than you’ve seen in most of your relationships.

You squat down and face the cat.

“All right. All right. You win,” you say, and you let the goddamn cat in.

~ ~ ~

A part of you considers if the stray might be looking for the black cat who used to live in the apartment. You took over the one-bedroom from Persimmon, the first friend you made in Beijing who was, of course, also a cat owner. You lucked out on it (minus the commute) when Persimmon suddenly eloped and settled in Thailand. She took her cat, but left the litter box under the window with a view and two drawers full of cat food. As for the rest of the stuff, she told you to “do as you please” in a voice that suggested she was never ever coming back.

Persimmon had a lot of stuff. You excavated stuffs from inside cabinets, between drawers, and underneath the bed. Some were even tucked behind radiators. There were clothes, pottery, mementos, and balls of yarn. You kept what you could and threw out the rest. You held onto some mementos, but didn’t have the wherewithal to do away with all the cat stuff.

Apparently, there’s a reason for everything. After you feed the stray with a can of cat food, your heart becomes as knotted as the ball of yarn you’ve given it. When night deepens and you open the door and the cat doesn’t budge, you think, this is it. You might finally become one of those goddamn cat people.

You shut the door. The cat finds the litter box. You get ready for bed. When the cat is still there after you shower, you shrug. You turn off all the lights and bury yourself in bed. It takes about ten minutes, before insomnia even sets in, when you trip into a nightmare of meows. You tiptoe to the source and finds the cat scratching at the door and whining on loop. You’re relieved to open the door and let it out. The cat moves so fast your eyes can’t catch it going all the way down the hollow of six flights.

~ ~ ~

You’re sure the cat incident is a complete fluke. The cat probably saw you that night and marked you as an easy target. Of course, this dog-tired woman would give me food if I follow her home. The cat must have thought. She thinks she hates cats, but by the sixth floor she’ll want the company. The cat must have surmised.

When the cat follows you up for the second time, you feel surprised but too tired to bother. It’s easier to repeat the motions. You turn on the TV for background noise. It’s tuned to Tsui Hark’s Green Snake, the part where the two snake spirits, learning to be human, wriggled as they walked. You open a can of cat food and watch the cat eat while the snakes giggle and you think, this time the cat might stay. Only after lights out the same happens. The cat claws at the door, and without missing a beat, you let the cat out.

Maybe the stray really is looking for Persimmon's black cat, unaware that black cat had been packed away and flown across seas where they will never meet again.

Maybe the cats were lovers, or at least compadres. You imagine the black cat skipping out the window with the view—down six floors via drain pipes and air conditioners—finally plopping down on the hutong roof baked warm from the sun. That might be how they met. Bellies up.

“Tired of the view from your midair palace?” the stray cat might have said.

“Ah yes, the times they are a-changin’,” the black cat might have yawned. “Fuck solitude and fuck capitalism. I just want to be a part of the hutong cat collective.”

After this happens three more times, each time with the same urgency in the cat’s chase and inevitable escape, you begin to feel a little uneasy.

~ ~ ~

“I have a cat now. Well, sort of,” a whole month later, you tell Five Box.

The last time you sat together over drinks, he spent the majority of that conversation insisting the guy who ghosted you had, in fact, not lost his phone and very much intended to ghost you because he never wanted to see you again. You felt a little bruised by all that radical honesty. Afterwards, the two of you went dancing at a gay club and had a blast. That was before he met the love of his life.

“You? Cat? No way,” says Five Box.

“A stray’s been following me home every day for the last month.”

“Really…?”

“My apartment is on the sixth floor. No elevator.”

“Wow. So, you adopted it?”

“Not exactly. I feed it. I play with it. Every time I think it’ll stay, it meows at the door until I let it out.”

“That’s magical.”

“That’s insane.”

“Who wouldn’t want to be a cat. So magical. So insane.”

“But why?”

“Cats choose their companions,” Five Box almost sings.

“But then why does it always leave? Help me out. Don’t you have like, six cats?”

Five Box sighs. “Cats are … solitary. Maybe she just sees you as a Five Star hotel. That doesn’t mean she wants to stay forever. Anyway, I may not be the best person to ask. I’m down to one cat now.”

“What do you mean?”

“We broke up. A few more of the cats than I’d like—went with him.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Like I said. Cats choose their companions.”

~ ~ ~

Somehow, this conversation only makes you more determined to provide exceptional service. When you learn that balls of yarn are actually dangerous because cats can swallow them and die. Or, get tangled in them and die. You start stealing cat toys from work. You try to come home early. On the rare occasion you do, you cook a meal and rip the fresh meat or fish from the bones to feed the cat.

On the forty-fourth day when the cat follows you home, not only do you feed it and play with it, you completely lose your mind and attempt to give it a bath, something you’ve never done for another living being. In the back of your mind, you recall that felines aren’t so fond of water. No matter. When you finish washing down the cat and it doesn't maul you in the face, you feel guided by some higher power. You trim the cat’s claws with a nail clipper—gently and painstakingly—as one might a human baby. The strange pleasure you derive from cutting off the cat’s claws, one by one by one, is reciprocated by how docile the cat is in your arms.

When you’re done, the transformation is stunning. You marvel at how white and how orange the cat’s fur is. The cat even smells of your pomegranate shampoo, so sweet that in a tender moment, you nuzzle the cat in the face. Your noses and foreheads touch. Instead of leaving the cat in the living room, you plop it down next to you in your bed. When you move into a cuddle and the cat purrs, you laugh maniacally and think that this is it. You will become one of those goddamn cat people.

For the first time, in a long time, you fall asleep swiftly and peacefully. So, when you’re woken up by the meows again, you’re so frustrated you let out a scream. You bolt from bed and march into the living room. “Go!” You thrust open the front door and shout. “Go away and never come back!” That’s when the cat gives you a look before disappearing down the stairs and horror washes through you like nightmares from childhood.

You move quickly. You jump into your shoes and start down the stairs. The cat is way ahead. After rushing out of your building, you find it at the entrance to the other building inside the compound. The cat is sitting still with its back to you, tail curled up like a question mark.

You sigh with relief, but the moment you call out, the cat darts inside the other building. You follow the cat. You chase it up all six floors. When you get to the sixth floor, the cat is nowhere. Unlike your building, there’s only one apartment unit on this floor. A wooden ladder is perched on the other side, right under an open roof hatch. The cat suddenly appears from the opening and peers down at you. You rattle the ladder before angling for a climb.

You climb and climb until you’re out of breath. The opening is so close but for some reason you’re like Jack climbing the beanstalk into the heavens. When you finally poke your head out onto the roof with a soft “plop,” it feels like you’ve broken through a thin membrane to a secret universe. Or, like the newborn kitten you returned, who poked its head out from the plastic bag and saw the world as it was—big and free and dangerous—and for the first time, felt like it could breathe.

But the cat is nowhere again after you fully emerge onto the roof. Instead, the stars look overcooked, melting across the sky. The full moon is a bright dot, but you keep seeing a pale duplicate next to it, like a lens flare bouncing off some hidden mirror. You squeeze your eyes and blink. When you refocus, the ghost dot shoots toward you like a pinball. A second later, you feel a crystalline dot pierce through the center of your forehead with another soft “plop.” You fall into a backwards arch and see the world upside down. The ghost moon dissolves in your bloodstream and spread throughout your body.

All of a sudden, you miss Persimmon. You miss Five Box. You miss your mom. You miss Five Box’s cats for Five Box. You miss the cats you’ve never had. You miss dirt and gravel, blood on your knees, primal existence. You miss crying. You miss falling asleep. You miss looking people in the eye.

When you come back up, you feel upgraded and renewed. A thousand new vistas unfold before you. The street lights lift away like dandelion seeds. The 9,999 rooms of the Forbidden City cascade in front of you like a deck of golden-backed cards. The hutongs whip up like a giant squid against the inky sky. The trees below grow taller and taller until they almost touch the edge of the roof. You move toward them. The leaves rustle like they are swallowing you between pages of a forbidden book. You kneel and reach until you almost touch the folds, until a voice draws you back.

“Don’t go over the edge like that. It makes me nervous, like watching Michael Jackson dangle a baby over his balcony.”

You flinch and the trees mirror you, shrinking back to their former selves. When you whirl around, you find the prettiest man. He's dressed in an ancient-looking silk robe the color of burnt orange. When you meet his copper eyes, you realize—you know those eyes, and you love those eyes.

“It’s you,” you say. “You’re the cat.”

“Me,” says the cat man, running a hand through his luminous, silver hair. “How many people like me? Almost perfect.”

You laugh. You laugh until you hiccup. You hug your knees in. Tears streak down your face. That’s when the cat man reaches toward you with one hand. He dabs your wet cheeks dry with his thumb. You catch a whiff of pomegranate. The universe stills. The stars settle. The Forbidden City and hutongs fall back like Tetris blocks.

The cat man says. “I worry you don’t get enough sleep.”

“Don’t worry about me,” you say without thinking. “I don’t even worry about me.”

The cat man curls a lock of hair behind your ear before letting his hand fall. Your body strains forward, missing his touch already before you remember something.

“Smoke?” You dig out a rolled-up joint and lighter from a pocket and hold them out from the palm of your hand like tiny talismans.

The cat man scoops them up and lights up, taking a slow hit before placing the joint between your lips, watching as you inhale. The two of you sit on the edge, squinting at the full moon, the very normal trees, taking turns hitting the joint. To your surprise, the cat man doesn’t cough like a newbie, doesn’t hack up a fistful of furball. He isn’t at all put off. His inhale is deep and his exhale is smooth, as if he’s been doing this for years, maybe millennia.

“Where’d you learn to smoke like that?” you ask.

“The Silk Road,” says the cat man. “Some good memories.” 

When the two of you finally make your way back to the hatch, chuckling softly, you find the ladder pushed to the side. An old couple is staring up at the two of you, their eyes and mouths wide open in shock.

The old man snarls. “Who are you? What are you doing on the roof!”

You stomp on the joint and speak to him in the slow and reassuring voice you use for clients. “Hello there. I’m in Building 2. My friend and I just wanted to see the roof.”

“See the roof? At two in the morning?”

Two in the morning is a surprise. Unfazed, you look to the old woman this time, pleading to her feminine, romantic instincts by stating the obvious. “Oh, we were only looking at the moon. It’s a full moon tonight—”

The old woman makes a sour face instead, as if that's the dumbest thing she’s ever heard. In a voice more cruel than the old man, she snaps, “You’re lying! You’re trying to break into someone’s house from the roof! We’re calling the police!”

You’re so stunned by this escalation you choke. “What do you mean? We’re just kids! What the fuck is wrong with you old raisins! It’s a full fucking moon!”

That may have been the wrong thing to say. The old woman whips out a phone from thin air, wielding it like a knife. Before you can react, the cat man pushes off the ladder into the most elegant forward somersault. To the old couple’s horror, he lands on his feet before bowing to them. “Pardon us.”

The old man throws out his arms and yells for his wife to “call the police now!” The cat man reaches up toward you with his open hand. You do the only thing you can. You grab onto his hand and jump down and together you start running down six flights of stairs. You run so fast you think you’ll crash head first anytime now. Just as you’re hurtling forward senseless and your feet can no longer keep up, you feel your head lurch forward and your torso float up. You let go of cat man’s hand to grip the earth and you’re going down those stairs like you’re flying.

When you finally scramble out of your building, outside of your compound, the cat is disappearing into the maze of hutongs. You chase him through the narrow lanes and sharp turns. When you think you can’t keep up anymore, he appears in front of you from a side alley. A tiny white mouse dangles from his bloodied mouth. The rodent’s nose and claws are bright pink. Its neck a clean snap. You look down and away. That’s when you see yourself for the first time, paws black and furry, a shadow unfamiliar. An eternity passes before you look up. When you meet the cat’s copper eyes, he gives you a proud, majestic look. A look fit for kings. Your limbs stay numb until you tap forward with one paw, then another, until two of you are side by side, and together you break into a run.

###

Qing Qing Chen writes in English and Chinese. At age ten, she emigrated to the American Midwest from Tianjin, China. That rupture in time inspires much of her writing, resulting in at least sixty-six multiverses, an obsession with the past, and a lifetime of indecisiveness. After a stint in New York City, she now lives in Beijing. Her work received Honorable Mention for the 2023 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. "Cat People" is her first publication. Find her on the web.

The Prince of Denmark

I.

Two weeks with a madman and nothing but cigarettes and fish soup, cold, choppy waters, and bile rising and falling within you as the ship rides the waves. Within a hundred nautical miles of the North Pole, you wonder how you agreed to this.

“Forget me, forget everything,” says Sebastian, the photographer, launching into his morning pep talk. “You are not a model. You are a fisherman—who loves to smoke. Don’t pose, don’t act, just be, live as the fisherman.” He hands you a fishing pole. “Now smoke.”

The wind is fierce, your hands numb. You fumble with the lighter, drop your cigarette. The assistant passes you a lit one, unfiltered. “Watch the clothes,” says the stylist. You have already burned two holes in your cable-knit sweater. Above, the mainsail flaps and lulls, the wind undecided. Blood red with giant white letters, the sail reads: Prince of Denmark Cigarettes. Everything is blood red: your clothes, your shoes, the trim of the ship. They even brought along an Irish setter, which lies limp on deck, lifting its head only to retch.

It’s high summer—3 a.m.—though it feels more like the dead of winter. Infernal days—the sun never fully goes down. It only bobs briefly on the horizon before beginning to rise again.

“Ach, das Licht!” says Sebastian. “Unglaublich schön!”

He points the camera at you, fires off a few rolls. You bite down on the cigarette and flash a smile.

“Nein! Nein!” He shakes his head, pursing his lips in that oddly German manner, and exhales. “You still don’t understand, do you? None of that model crap. Simple. No tricks. Just be. Okay? Can you do that for me?”

You nod. Banners of crimson light arc over your head. You start again, staring heroically out over the water, taking a long drag, still astonished by the tobacco’s foul, bitter taste. Smoke funnels out of your nostrils. You begin to cough, lightly at first, then uncontrollably, while the nausea gathers force. Soon you are hanging over the edge of the ship, moaning, eyes watering, torrents of fish soup, coffee, Saltines, half-digested seasick pills gushing out of you.

The photo team turns away, giving you a moment to regroup. The thought of smoking another cigarette sets off the gagging reflex again. You lied through your teeth at the casting—“Smoked for years,” you said—when, in point of fact, you had had maybe two cigarettes in your life. At an average of eight packs a day, you wonder if cancer can strike in two weeks.

You were thrilled when you first heard about the job. The photographer was famous, cutting-edge, known for sepia-toned images of gaunt, bug-eyed girls strutting across the desert. And the money was good—your day-rate plus ten grand for every picture used. But then you began to think: Cigarettes killed your father at fifty-three, scorched his throat and lungs as if by wildfire. How could you allow yourself to promote the very thing that fucked up your life?

But here you are, nevertheless, wondering if you still have an ethical bone in your body, buffeted between waves of greed and guilt.

Off starboard a small killer whale, about the size of an SUV, rolls over on its back, showing its white belly. “Schaut mal!” cries Sebastian, pointing, frenetic. “Get him out there!” He turns to you, his eyes bloodshot and pinwheeling. It occurs to you he is either drugged or deranged—perhaps both. “You—James. Get into the dinghy.”

“Huh?” You want to sit down and discuss this a moment, consider all the variables, when at once you are hustled over to a small rowboat hanging off the side of the ship.

“Keep rowing,” offers the assistant, handing you a cigarette. “You’ll stay upright.”

“What about a life vest?” you ask, as they slowly lower you—turning a pair of cranks—into the swells. No one answers. A second whale has been spotted, the two rolling together, cavorting, displacing mountains of water. The hull smacks against the surface. The last of the rope pulls through its rings. Suddenly you are adrift.

“Okay,” shouts Sebastian, “get as close to them as you can.”

You begin flailing the oars, puffing madly on your cigarette, drenched in sea-spray. The dinghy bobs like a child’s toy. The whales draw closer, circling, then darting beneath you, as the dinghy shudders and spins and freefalls before popping up again. One of the whales glides leisurely along next to you. For a few seconds, its massive eye, glistening like crude oil, fixes on you, and you see yourself, your reflection, as the whale must see you—a helpless thing, lost, the color of fresh blood, possibly breakfast.

It gradually registers that Sebastian has been shouting at you—“More cool!”—and you realize your face is fixed in a mask of horror, the cigarette, now extinguished, dangling from your lower lip. You can see Sebastian bounding about on deck, his assistant continuously loading and feeding him cameras. Cool, you want to point out, is no longer in your repertoire.

One of the whales slaps its massive tail against the surface, dousing you in a sheet of water, then abruptly dives, followed by the other, and at once both whales are gone.

Sebastian hands the camera to his assistant and, almost as an afterthought, waves you back to ship. For an instant, you consider going on alone, making for the nearest shore, as you stare wistfully at the charcoal smudge on the horizon.

When you look back, the deck is clear except for Nathalie, the hair and make-up artist. “Quelle catastrophe!” she shrieks. “Regarde-toi! Viens là… allez, vite. We must re-make you, tout de suite.”

~ ~ ~

You drop anchor off the coast of a small, hilly island about the size of two city blocks, bare but for patches of gray rock and fluorescent grass. The photo team begins climbing down into the rowboats. Suddenly, on a whim, delirious to be going ashore, you leap from the deck and land hard on the dinghy below.

“You crazy or what?” cries the assistant. “Scheiße, you almost landed on me!”

Sebastian smiles. “Do it again,” he says.

“Nein, Sebastian…” protests the assistant.

Sebastian shoots him a look. “Genug,” he says as if scolding a child, then orders everyone back on deck.

Soon you are standing once more on the edge of the ship, looking down on the bobbing dinghy, the faces of Sebastian and his assistant staring up at you—camera poised.

Idiot! And you jumped why, exactly? You light up, taking a moment to observe the cigarette, which—drawing life from your breath—appears to delight in its own destruction.

“I want to see you fly!” says Sebastian who, you realize, has let himself drift, so that an alarming expanse of water now lies between you and the dinghy.

You shake your head. “No way, man. Get closer or forget the whole thing.”

You can see his jaw clench then grind as if chewing on something. “But, James,” he says, “this is it! I can feel it. This is the shot. You—flying through the air like a fucking phoenix. All over Europe. Magazines, buses, billboards. Think about it. I’m going to turn you into a god.” He closes his eyes, as if picturing it, nodding in appreciation.

It’s ninety percent crap, but that ten percent has got you thinking. It would be something. But worth breaking a leg, going into hypothermia? Behind, you can feel the eyes of the team on you.

“Listen, James, forget it. If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. Kein Problem… I’ll just fly in another model tomorrow.”

Bastard! The leap is one thing, landing quite another. Gripping the cigarette squarely between your teeth, you take three steps back and assume a sprinter’s pose. “You ready?” you call out. “I’m only doing this once so you better be”—adding under your breath, “you crazy son of a bitch.”

“Ja, ja. Ready.”

“Attends,” cries Nathalie, running up behind you. She adds some mousse to your hair and tosses it like a salad. “Bon voyage, chéri.”

As you arc out over the water, you become intensely aware of details—the hard glare, the goose bumps on the back of your neck, the taste of cigarettes and salt, the gusts of cold air rising. Arms spread wide, legs like a pendulum, you bear down on the small dinghy. With little hand movements and hip adjustments, you try to direct your fall into the black maw of the photo lens. You have, however, overshot the boat slightly. The realization comes, surprisingly, with a sense of resignation. There is really nothing you can do. Sebastian and his assistant duck, shielding themselves with their arms, as you sail by overhead. Your right foot clips the gunwale—the pain searing—which flips you end over end into the sea.

“Schweinegeil!” says Sebastian as they row up alongside you. “I’ve made you into a gottverdammte deity today. You hear me, James? Like Jesus or Krishna—only cooler. You’ll double your rate. People will stop you on the street. You should be grateful. Hell, you should kiss my fucking feet.”

The cold is so devastating you cannot speak, can barely breathe. Though numbed, you are certain your foot, or maybe your ankle, is broken. But why is no one pulling you out of the water? For an instant, you seem to have blacked out, because your reality comes shockingly back into focus.

The assistant grabs your arm.

“Einen Moment,” says Sebastian.

“Was?”

Sebastian leans over the gunwale—to pull you out, you assume—his face inches away. “Don’t look at me that way … with those disapproving fish eyes, you ungrateful model you”—the word contorts in his mouth like a slur. “You want magic, miracles? Well, I give it to you. Want to be rock-star hot? You got it. But don’t expect it easy. Dramatic measures—that’s what it takes. Nothing less. You should thank me. You understand? I have resurrected you from the ordinary. Now thank me.”

“Sebastian, bitte,” says the assistant. “Es ist zu kalt.”

“Well?”

It gradually dawns on you that he is waiting for a response. Lips like jelly, you bark, “Whaaa?”

“Thank me.”

You look to the assistant, his face like that of a whipped dog, then back to Sebastian. Another minute you may not survive. Gathering yourself, you kick down sharply and lunge, grabbing hold of Sebastian’s collar. His jacket—blood red with Prince of Denmark across the front—is nothing but silk and feathers in your hand. As you sink back into the water, you twist and pull.

“Hilfe!” cries Sebastian, his face deliciously horrified, camera still slung around his neck. As he grips the gunwale, the boat begins to tip.

“Mein Gott, nein!” yelps the assistant.

“The film, James! Not the film!”

You almost have him, can feel the balance begin to shift, when, all at once, the collar tears, shearing away in your hand, as tiny white feathers, like snowflakes, swirl about you and float down delicately upon the water.

II.

September in Paris. Leaves scuttle over the cobblestones of the Marais like crabs. Parisians stride purposefully along the avenues, their tans faded, scarves flung around their necks with deliberate nonchalance. Chestnuts roasting on metal drums suffuse the air with a sweet, earthy smell. Your cast is off at last, though you still use a cane. The doctor recommended walking, so you go everywhere by foot. You cross the Seine, from right bank to left, weaving through the herds of tourists near Notre Dame, then begin the long climb up to the Sorbonne to meet Sophie.

Your mother called from Washington this morning. Strange you can’t bring yourself to tell her about the campaign. But after everything she went through with your father…. As it is, she doesn’t understand the modeling. She lies about you—you’ve heard her do it—tells her friends you’re a businessman. Sophie, of course, supports you, whatever you do, though sometimes you wonder if that would still be the case if you could no longer afford the apartment on Place des Vosges, keep her in Kenzo and Dior. 

You haven’t worked since the Denmark job and worry that you might never work again, that you have gone out of style, grown too old, fat, thin—un-cool. You know one day it will come. You can picture it: there you’ll be, a bit paunchy and gray, hanging around at castings like a bad smell. You’ll have to give up the fancy apartment, holidays in Greece, perhaps even Sophie. Then what?

You cross an intersection, the cane click-click-clicking against the pavement. The wind picks up and you zip shut the collar of your jacket.

Sebastian, the photographer, called the agency last week, said that you lied, that you had never smoked before and it showed on film. He recommended that the client refuse to pay. The agency has set lawyers in motion.

You drag yourself along rue des Écoles—vaguely intimidated by the high stone walls of the university—until you reach Place de la Sorbonne, where you find a quiet bench to wait for Sophie. Luminous, dark-haired and almond-eyed, with thick-rimmed glasses, she brings to mind a librarian from Persia. With only a semester left in her studies, she speaks now of nothing but travel. You are considering asking her to marry you but haven’t yet found the courage.

You prop up your bad foot, which has begun to throb, and watch the students pass. A main point of rendezvous, the square swirls with young couples running up to one another and kissing. It’s like watching the climactic scene of a dozen romantic films. They appear so vibrant and real, while you feel one-dimensional.

A light rain begins to fall as the smell of cordite rises from the street. Everyone scatters, then reconvenes, huddled beneath the awnings of the cafés. You remain on the square—the only one—as raindrops patter down on your shoulders. You recognize that some of the students are looking at you. You are briefly the subject of conversation—the man who waits in the rain. You can almost hear them, the disparate strains of dialogue: “Who’s he waiting for? ... What happened to him that he should need a cane? … He has une bonne tête—no? … Why won’t he get out of the rain? ... Perhaps a touch of madness about the eyes… Quite obviously American…”

You glance at your wristwatch to have something to do. She’s late, by eleven minutes. You’re starting to feel drenched now, hair flattened, rivulets running down your neck beneath your collar. You really should move, but you don’t. You continue to sit there, suspended.

Just then one of those turquoise-colored Parisian buses pulls up alongside the square, brakes hissing, and there you are, pasted to its side: The Prince of Denmark. Arms reaching outward, legs together, you form a perfect, blood-red cross hanging in mid-air, like a Christ-figure—somehow both crucified and risen at the same time. The cigarette looks digitally enhanced, as do your eyes, which appear impossibly bright, the very shade of the sky. You look good, ridiculously good, heroic, maybe a little enraged, your jaw chiseled—airbrushed?—like leading men of the ’30s. Sebastian was right—the bastard: it is an amazing shot, one in a million.

You turn to look for Sophie, to share your excitement, impress her, show her the optimum you. But the square is empty. When you look back, the bus has just left, and you watch yourself—that supreme version of yourself—drift away.

###

Jay Kauffmann is a former international model, travel writer, and award-winning poet. He holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has taught at Randolph College, the University of Virginia, and the Miller School of Albemarle. Author of The Mexican Messiah and Other Stories (forthcoming from Cornerstone Press), he has published in CutBank, Hunger Mountain Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, upstreet, Mid-American Review, and other journals and anthologies.

Humans

PETE: I hear you got kicked out of Crozier’s Market.

MAD EDNA: Yeah. Went in there to buy a barbecue rib.

PETE: Crozier’s got good ribs. What happened?

MAD EDNA: There was a new fella working. I bought a rib from him, then I saw his name plate. Name was Adam. Well, it hit me all suddenly. Here was a chance that mightn’t come again for thousands of years! I could give Adam his rib back! So I tried and tried, explained the whole thing to him, how we could go back to the beginning, start the whole creation thing from scratch, skip all that original sinning stuff, get things right this time. But he wouldn’t listen, kept asking me if there was something wrong with the rib, if I’d tasted it or anything. Wouldn’t listen to reason. Made me cry. Terrible missed opportunity. 

PETE: Sad.

MAD EDNA: And they won’t let me back in Crozier’s anymore.

~ ~ ~

I.

I’ll start with the door to Dante’s Inferno opening behind me—a trivial moment, but for some reason I think of it as the beginning of this story. I jerked around at the sound. It’s the way you react after you’ve been robbed at gunpoint twice—a silent, suspended moment of certainty that something awful is about to happen.

To my relief, it was only the Ax Murderer coming through the door.

I’ve always rather liked him. Oh, I don’t doubt for a second that he really is as dangerously psychotic as he looks. The Ax Murderer is kind of pudgy and he hitches his pants way up above his waist—you know, the way men used to do. His face is round and babyish but in no way innocent. He has close-cropped gray hair and narrow little slits for eyes. His small, thin-lipped mouth never smiles.

Still, the man always behaves like a perfect gentleman at Dante’s and tips me way more than he can afford, I’m sure. And when he came through the door that day, at least I knew he wasn’t likely to pull a gun and lock us all in the walk-in cooler.

I relaxed, and everything fell back into plumb. The angles and shadows of the dim old space squared up, and I became aware again of the scattered chatter in the dining room, the clatter of utensils in the kitchen. I looked around. At first I thought nobody had noticed my nervous twitch. Then I saw Sol, the restaurant owner, watching me from behind the cash register with a sad smile on his thin, heavily-lined face.

Sol nodded toward the two beat cops with guns and Tasers who were sitting at a table in plain sight. He was reminding me that, so far, there’d never been a holdup at Dante’s when uniformed officers were present.

~ ~ ~

BETH: So what have you been doing now that the story is over?

DARCY: I don’t think it will ever be over. I’m still trying to figure out what it means to be human. If we say something is “inhuman,” everyone thinks they understand. But what does human even mean?

BETH: Something weak and imperfect, as in “we’re only human” … something kind and considerate as in “the human thing to do.”

DARCY: How can a dichotomy be a definition?

~ ~ ~

My name is Darcy Curtis. I’m thirty years old and only slightly larger than medium height and build, and I’m a little on the pale side, except for my dyed-black hair. And like almost all the other wait people I’ve ever met, I originally started doing this kind of work while waiting in a much wider sense. Of course, after a while you stop expecting anything.

“Hi, Darcy,” the Ax Murderer said in his perpetual bleak whisper, without making eye contact. He seldom makes eye contact with anybody.

 “Hi,” I replied and showed him to one of the dimly-lit booths. I was pretty sure that his boon companion, the Chainsaw Killer, would arrive shortly. The Ax Murderer muttered a polite but grimly tight-lipped thank-you.

Then, because of my residual nervousness about that door, I went over to take the cops’ orders quicker than I normally would. They already had their coffee, but hadn’t ordered lunch yet.

“Whaddya guess the perp musta been doing under that bridge in the first place?” Chuck was asking Mel, snickering with a little wheeze, the way he does when he gets excited.

“Looking for something maybe,” Mel replied in his thin, nasally voice.

“Nothing there worth stealing.”

“Looking for somebody then.”

“Nobody’s there that matters.”

“Can I take your order, guys?” I asked.

They just kept going without dropping a beat. The worst of it was, I already knew what they were going to order

I don’t know if you’ve ever served tables, but it’s very awkward standing around with a pad and pen in hand ready for an order that isn’t coming any time soon. So I shoved the gear into my apron pocket and crossed my arms.

“Okay, what are you guys arguing about?” I asked.

Both Chuck and Mel turned and stared. They looked astonished to see me.

“You hear about the murder under the Pocatello Bridge? Down by the river?” Chuck asked. “Happened last night.”

“I haven’t seen the news,” I replied.

Chuck snorted derisively. “Not likely to be there. Victim was a bum, a low-life. Folks called him Jumper.”

“Because he jumped people?” I suggested.

“Right!” Chuck exclaimed, clearly impressed by my intelligence. “Don’t know’s he had a last name. Aggressive bastard, for a bum. Looked like there was a struggle. The killer must’ve been tough, ’cause Jumper wasn’t no creampuff. All his buddies fled the scene, so we couldn’t find anyone to interview.”

Chuck took a sip of coffee, then added, “Guess Jumper tried to mug the wrong fella.”

“We should head back to the Pocatello Bridge,” Mel suggested. “See if his buddies’ve come back.”

“Naw, we should leave well enough alone. Look, let’s face facts. Jumper wasn’t exactly making a meaningful contribution to society. He wasn’t even what you might call an authentic person.”

~ ~ ~

By the displacement of an atom a world may be shaken.

—Oscar Wilde

~ ~ ~

“Still, it’s our job,” Mel said with a shrug.

“You’re deliberately missing my point, aren’t you?” Chuck grumbled.

Chuck took another sip of coffee. From his determined expression, I could tell that their discussion was about to start all over again. I pulled out my pad and pen and wrote up an order for a meatball sandwich and an Erma. If Chuck decided he wanted something different, he could take that up with Sol.

I took the counterfeit order back to the kitchen. Then I went to the wait station to get coffee for the Ax Murderer. He just wants your basic filter-brewed coffee straight from the wait station, with gobs of cream and a toxic quantity of sugar—the same lousy stuff I guzzle to stay pleasing and perky. I fixed it and took it to his table.

“Are you ready to order, sir?” I asked with a pleasant smile.

He stared at the upholstery of the chair across the table for a few seconds. Then he said in his hushed, ghastly manner, “A cup of minestrone.”

“Coming right up,” I said cheerfully. I started to walk away, but then I heard the Ax Murderer murmur…

“Wait!”

I turned. His expression hadn’t changed. He was still staring at that same spot on the other chair. He didn’t say a word for a few seconds.

“What were Chuck and Mel saying about Old Jumper?” he muttered at last, without deflecting his gaze or moving a single facial muscle.

“Did you know him?” I asked with surprise.

He nodded. I could barely see it, but I was sure that he nodded.

“Jumper’s dead,” I said as gently as I could.

“How?”

“He was murdered under the Pocatello Bridge. I’m sorry.”

“Jesus,” he whispered. His expression and gaze still hadn’t altered, but I thought I felt a change, a sadness swelling inside him.

What had Chuck just said?

“Jumper wasn’t even what you might call an authentic person.”

I was about to ask the Ax Murderer how he happened to know Jumper when the front door swung violently open again, noisily cracking against the adjoining wall. It was the Ax Murderer’s pal, the Chainsaw Killer, in mid-conversation with himself and waving his arms to emphasize whatever point he was trying to make. He’s about five foot ten, lanky and stooped. His long face, gouged with pockmarks and crevasses, is framed by patchy tufts of sandy-blond hair.

Then the Chainsaw Killer located the Ax Murderer.

~ ~ ~

PETE: So they call you a Chainsaw Killer, do they?

BARKER: Yeah.

PETE: So what do they call me?

BARKER: Ax Murderer. Whaddya think of that?

PETE: I been called worse things.

BARKER: Yeah.

PETE: Lots of worse things.

BARKER: Yeah.

PETE: And lots of them were true.

~ ~ ~

“Hey!” he exclaimed, with a voice like extra-coarse sandpaper rubbed across the low-pitched strings of a grand piano. With a trot and a skip, he dashed over to the booth and sat down across the table and clasped both of the Ax Murderer’s hands and shook them intensely.

“How ya doin’, big guy?” he asked. “It’s great to see ya!”

The Ax Murderer’s expression still didn’t change, except that now his narrow eyes appeared to be focused on the Chainsaw Killer’s chest rather than the upholstery.

“I got bad news,” the Ax Murderer said without varying his monotone.

“Yeah?” the Chainsaw Killer replied with an expression of sudden concern. “Whassat?”

“Jumper’s dead. Murdered. Down under the bridge.”

The Chainsaw Killer’s ebullient disposition vanished, like he was a popped balloon.

“Holy shit,” he said grimly. “What’s the world comin’ to?”

“How did you guys know Jumper?” I asked.

“I used to live under the Pocatello Bridge,” muttered the Ax Murderer. “Still go back from time to time to see the guys.”

I’d had no idea that the Ax Murderer had ever been homeless, though it wasn’t impossible to believe.

“Where do you live now?” I asked.

“South End Storage,” he said.

It’s one of our city’s great landmarks, a big, quasi-historical brick building in an unsavory area.

“I didn’t know they had apartments,” I said.

“I live in a storage locker,” the Ax Murderer explained. “Barker’s a janitor there. He locks me up at night and lets me out in the morning so nobody will notice.”

He fell silent for a moment, then added…

“Barker got me off the streets.”

The Chainsaw Killer wasn’t paying any attention to our conversation. His face was knotting up bitterly.

“Old Jumper,” he said in a quiet snarl. “Why would somebody knock off Old Jumper? What the hell’s the world comin’ to, will ya tell me? Will somebody just fuckin’ tell me?”

I couldn’t think what to answer. The Chainsaw Killer’s face was twitching now, and his eyes were darting every which way.

“Bring me a double bourbon,” he snapped at me. “With ice. No, not with ice. Just bring it to me straight.”

It was surely a bad idea, but since he didn’t seem to have been already drinking, I wasn’t exactly in a position to say no.

The very second I started to walk away from the booth toward the bar, the Ax Murderer grabbed my wrist.

I froze in my tracks.

He’d never touched me before. His grip was hard and cold and purposeful.

“Don’t bring him that drink,” the Ax Murderer whispered. “He’s an alcoholic.”

He let go of my wrist when I turned to look at them. The Chainsaw Killer’s eyes were focused defiantly on the Ax Murderer’s face. And for once, the Ax Murderer was returning his stare through those narrow slitted eyes of his.

“You got a fuck of a nerve,” the Chainsaw Killer growled at his companion.

“Don’t bring him that drink,” the Ax Murderer repeated to me.

I stood there for a moment, wavering and indecisive. The Chainsaw Killer was known for abrupt and savage mood swings, and he could get out of hand. I looked toward the cops, who were skillfully ignoring everyone else in the place.

II.

“Sit down,” Mad Edna told me. “Warm yourself. This flame is something special, good for the cold and anything else that ails or troubles you. But don’t touch any of my medicine, d’you hear?” She patted her bottles of non-prescription cough syrup. “This stuff is for cats, subhuman primates, and me only—nobody else. This stuff is privileged.”

I sat on a piece of cardboard that was on the ground near a kerosene camping stove.

She had on a heavy woolen overcoat draped by an old quilt, and she wore wool gloves with the fingers snipped off. Her skin was dark, and the hair protruding from below her cap was curly, but I couldn’t tell whether she was black, white, Asian, or something else entirely. And I had no idea how old she might be.

She reached for a bottle and took a long swallow. She had several other unopened cough syrup bottles handy, and a bunch of empties were scattered around. She set the bottle down and warmed her semi-gloved hands by the little stove, apparently oblivious to the fact that it wasn’t lighted.

“I guess the neighbors told you they call me Mad Edna. I don’t mind. Don’t take the moniker the wrong way, ’cause it’s meant to be ironical. My brain is wired up to code. No-sir-ree-bob, not schizophrenic in any degree, and not paranoid either. I’m bicameral. That’s a whole different beast. It gives me access. It gives me sanction. It puts me in control. I’m authorized, let me tell you. I’m in charge of these folks, I’m their highest elected official, because I’ve got credentials, qualifications, academic degrees, and in my better days I served in board rooms, think tanks, brain trusts, so I’m the one here who stays lucid and sensible, and if it weren’t for me, things’d get right strange.

 “Heard of Jumper, have you? Know that he died? Know how he died? I do. I’m the one who knows. I’m the one who can tell you.”

Her smile widened avariciously. She knew she’d piqued my interest. She took off her cap and set it upside-down beside the stove.

“Any questions?” she asked, pointing at the cap.

I fumbled around in my purse for a dollar bill and tossed it into the hat. She nodded her approval, took another deep swallow of cough medicine, and wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

“Ol’ Jumper. Did you know him? No? You should’ve. Then again, you shouldn’t’ve. Young thing like you, living sheltered all your life, you’d have learned something from him, a thing or two about the human spirit, both the light and dark of it, but on the whole he was bad news, not a good influence, so maybe it’s just as well.

“God rest his soul, and not to speak ill of the dead, but he didn’t play nice, he didn’t share. I guess he never went to kindergarten to learn everything he needed to know in life.

“Anyways, the other night, two or three of the neighbors here heard ol’ Jumper screaming like a banshee somewhere off a ways. Then everybody went ’round whispering to one another, and word of Jumper’s screaming went all through the place, and ’twasn’t more than thirty seconds before everybody knew about it.

“Now the other folks here, they got all afraid to go out and look, shivering in their socks, which is why they sent me out looking, ’cause looking for folks screaming is always my job.”

~ ~ ~

FROM AFORISTA’S DICTIONARY

monster: n. An essential character component of humanity.

~ ~ ~

“Yessir, I found Jumper’s carcass sprawled out on his back under the Pocatello Bridge. And no, I didn’t call the cops. And don’t start lecturing me about my civic duty. Do I look like I’ve got a phone? Do I look like I can afford one? Besides, I’m what’s known as an undesirable, a pariah, a delinquent, a social derelict and a ne’er-do-well, so what would happen if I did call the authorities? The last thing I want is to get snatched off to some laboratory and subjected to a lot of probes and ’xperiments, which is damn sure what would happen and you know it.”

She fell silent for a moment and glared at the unlighted stove.

“Any questions?” she asked.

I tossed another dollar into her hat, hoping she’d get through her story before I ran out of single bills. I didn’t want to start giving away my larger denominations, because I didn’t have many of those to my name.

“There’s one thing I’m sure those cops didn’t tell anybody. They don’t want folks to know. Kept it out of the papers, off the TV, off the Worldwide Web. But I’m gonna tell you anyhow.”

Edna leaned forward and squinted her eyes and her voice rumbled deeper and quieter.

“Ol’ Jumper, he was wearing a scarf.”

Then she nodded sharply and straightened herself up and arched her nonexistent eyebrows.

“Didn’t know that, huh? Betcha find that interesting. Did they say there was any kind of robbery? The cops?”

I shook my head.

“Well, they told the truth there. Part of it, anyway. Selective about it though. Cops always are. Selective. You can trust ’em to tell the truth partly. But don’t trust them further than that. Never. D’you hear me?”

I nodded.

“Jumper’s scarf wasn’t fancy, just made out of felt with soft rainbow colors, kind of muted, nothing bright, don’t know whether it was on account of dinginess or faded with age or if it was made that way, but the colors were subtle.”

Her voice dropped into a conspiratorial rumble again.

“And he was still wearing that scarf when I found him. ’Twas all stained up and bloody from where his chest was caved in, but ’round his neck anyway, snug and warm. ’Round his neck still. Now what do you think about that?”

I had no idea what to think—or what I was supposed to think—so I just emitted an affirmative little “hmmm,” and she went on talking…

“Now a bright girl like you, I’m sure you couldn’t help noticing, just looking at me—I’m not wearing a scarf. Bet that’s been troubling you. Bet you’ve been wondering why.”

I tilted my head a little and let out another hmmm.

“Well, just keep your pants on, and I’ll tell you. I got back here after I found his earthly remains, I told the neighbors about it, and they ran off in all directions, the cowards. I stayed right here though, all alone, figured if my time was up it was up, and running wouldn’t do any good. I fell asleep by and by, and when I woke up … I saw … standing right there, just behind where you are sitting now …

“… him.”

Her voice choked on the word, and she shut her eyes tight and shuddered deeply. Unable to stop the reflex, I glanced over my shoulder, making sure no one or nothing was there now. 

At that moment, the sun peeked through the overcast sky, lighting up Mad Edna so that I could see her like I hadn’t seen her before, every pore and wrinkle in that weather-beaten face. And I shuddered too. The sudden burst of sunlight felt unbearable somehow, too revealing of her terror, too merciless in how it ripped away her mask of rugged self-sufficiency, and I wanted it to go away both for her sake and mine, wanted the sequestering relief of darkness, or at least a little shadow.

~ ~ ~

PHILOSOPHER: Keep in mind that I’m an atheist, you’re a man of faith.

THEOLOGIAN: And never the twain shall meet?

PHILOSOPHER: Exactly.

THEOLOGIAN: But what if God never meant to create humanity—Adam and Eve, all their progeny, you and me? Not as we are, I mean—free, autonomous, self-aware. Suppose he made us what we are by accident—and not even a happy accident? How well might that comport with your worldview?

PHILOSOPHER: A little too well.

THEOLOGIAN: There are things that God was meant to leave alone, my friend. We are such things.

~ ~ ~

“What did he look like?” I blurted.

She opened her eyes and stared at me mutely.

“Please tell me,” I said, nodding toward the hat and reaching into my purse.

“Oh, no,” she said, her voice filled with dread as she covered the hat with her hand. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t afford me.”

She gulped down a suffocating lump of fear.

“I looked at him and he turned toward me and looked at me, and it was too late to shut my eyes and pretend to be asleep, and I couldn’t shut them now if I wanted to, and light from the street fell on his eyes and…

“No—oh, no, I can’t tell you.”

Her teeth clenched and chattered as she went on …

“And he looked me over and over. And I sat myself up. And I was so, so scared, but I was also something else, I felt something else, because a man, a thing like that, loose and alone in the world, scared to death himself surely, not a kindred soul to talk to, well, how could I help but feel…?”

She paused again.

“And I said to him, ‘What do you want? What can I do for you? How can I help?’

“And he knelt down right here. And he reached toward me, oh so slow, that big hand of his stretched out like this…”

 Her whole arm trembled as she reached out and showed me the frayed palm of her dirty glove, spreading her fingers out as far as she could.

“… and I remembered Jumper and how his chest got all caved in, and it gave me such a fright I peed myself some, but then I remembered…

“Jumper’s scarf! It was still on him when I’d found him! This poor man was cold, just like the rest of us, and he’d wanted a scarf, nothing more than that, but ol’ Jumper’d just hung onto his, so selfish and all, and one thing had led to another, things had gotten out of hand, and by the time it was over Jumper’s scarf was all bloodied and no use to anybody, so the man didn’t take it…”

~ ~ ~

When some object in the environment becomes part of your cognition and is also part of someone else’s, the two cognitions merge.… This fluid back-and-forth sharing of information between you and other people is often so dense that it can be difficult to safely treat you and them as separate systems. If a tool that enhances your capabilities can become an extension of “who you are,” what about another person who enhances your capabilities?

… There’s an old Spanish proverb that goes, “Dime con quien andas y te diré quien eres”: Tell me with whom you walk, and I’ll tell you who you are.

—Michael J. Spivey, “The Remarkable Ways Our Brains Slip into Synchrony.” The MIT Press Reader, 18 Dec, 2020

~ ~ ~

She touched her throat.

“… and I was wearing a scarf. My Aunt Louise gave it to me when I was little. Nothing fancy, a long blue knitted thing with fringes on the ends, but it was all I had left of Aunt Louise or anybody else, the last belonging I had to remember my childhood by. And I remembered what Louise said when she first draped it around my neck.

“‘Leslie-Ann,’ she said, ‘someday you’ll meet an angel—Angel Unawares, he’ll be called. I don’t need to tell you what to do when he comes. It’s all writ down where you can find it. Leviticus nineteen, thirty-three thirty-four. Matthew twenty-five, thirty-four thirty-five. Romans twelve, thirteen. Hebrews thirteen, two. You’ll know what to do.’”

The woman opened her mouth and smiled. A beam of sunlight lit up her teeth—yellowed, capped, filled, and decayed, wherever they weren’t missing altogether.

“And here he was, right in front of me at long last, just like she’d said, my very own Angel Unawares! And I did know what to do! I held it out to him…”

She pretended to hold the end of her missing scarf toward me.

“… and I said, ‘Here, it’s yours.’ But he didn’t know what to do for a moment, wasn’t used to this sort of kindness, because he’s the kind that folks regularly turn and run away from, scared and all, unless you’re Jumper and you’re mean enough not to be scared…

“… and I said, ‘Why, you’re just a child, aren’t you? You’re just like any of the rest of us here. You’re one of us lowdown ‘least’ folks, the Least of These. Take it. You need it more than I do. Take it and get yourself warm, bless your heart.’

“And he took hold of the end of it, looking at it real close, like it was something too good to be true, and he tugged on it while it was still ’round my neck, and I knew that if he pulled hard on it like that, I’d get strangled, so I let him, I let him…”

With a graceful twirl of wrists and a playful fluttering of fingers, as if she were playing a harp, she delicately pantomimed loosening the scarf around her neck so that the stranger could slide it gently off. As she did, she closed her eyes and sighed blissfully.

“… and he took it. And then he seemed to notice that that this stove wasn’t lit. He reached toward it, like he was going to warm his hand by it anyway, and a flame…

“Oh, it’s hard to explain, but a flame lit itself backward, jumped out of his fingertips and into the stove, which burned brightly and warm after that. And he rose to his feet, and held the scarf in his hands and looked at it like it was some long-lost treasure, because it was his, all his forever, and he walked away. And that was the last I saw of him.”

She pointed to the unlit stove.

“… but Angel Unawares gave us this flame, and it’s no ordinary flame, because it both warms and cools, heals up the blisters and the frostbite alike, preserves from suffocation and hypothermia, cures all the affliction that’s coming to everyone. Warm your hands a bit while you’re here, girl, while you can.”

~ ~ ~

There is a very true sense in which we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet.  Yet even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily all vanish, and we must make the most of them.  We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.

—Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings

~ ~ ~

III.

Now both men were hunched over their table, glaring across at one another. The Ax Murderer’s lips were moving, and he seemed to be holding the Chainsaw Killer in thrall. I decided to see if they could work it out together.

I took the order for the Ax Murderer’s cup of minestrone back to the kitchen. I wrote up another for the sausage sandwich the Chainsaw Killer always ate and gave the slips to Big Fred. I picked up the cops’ sandwiches, which were hot and waiting in the kitchen window, and served them.

Just then, I heard the Chainsaw Killer’s voice—not shouting exactly, but definitely rising above the ambient noises of the restaurant…

“Darcy! Come over here!”

When I arrived at their booth, the Chainsaw Killer was laughing and smiling. The Ax Murderer’s unsmiling gaze was no longer focused on his companion’s eyes but vaguely in the direction of his chest again.

“Darcy, cancel the soup and sandwich,” the Ax Murderer murmured. “Bring us a couple of bowls of vanilla ice cream.”

“Hey, that’s an idea!” the Chainsaw Killer exclaimed cheerfully. “With chocolate syrup!”

I breathed a huge sigh of relief as I walked to kitchen. Big Fred roared curses about the canceled order, but I didn’t give a damn. I went to the freezer and personally prepared two chocolate sundaes in cold and shiny stainless-steel bowls covered with pretty little droplets of condensation. I topped the sundaes off with puffs of whipped cream and maraschino cherries. By the time I got back to the booth, the Chainsaw Killer was positively gushing with happiness and goodwill.

“Darcy, I want ya to take a look at this guy,” he bubbled, waving at his companion across the table. “I’m tellin’ ya, this motherfucker is a saint. He saved my Goddamn worthless pitiful piece-o’-shit excuse for a motherfuckin’ life. When I was drinkin’ myself to death, he hauled me into AA and made sure I stayed with it until I was clean and sober.”

“You got me off the street,” whispered the Ax Murderer.

Then, without further ado, they started eagerly munching their ice cream. For sure, I wouldn’t want to be alone in a dark alley with either of them, but my eyes stung and my throat ached a little as I hurried away from their table.

###

Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin are a married creative team who have been collaborating happily for over thirty years. Their co-authored novels include the experimental The Jamais Vu Papers and the thriller Terminal Games. Their hybrid novel-in-progress, Thing of Darkness, is about the question of what it means to be human. Wim is also an award-winning poet and playwright; Pat is a published, exhibiting visual artist. They live in Carrboro, North Carolina.