Editor Selections for Issue 257
Poetry & Short Fiction

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John Glowney's poetry has appeared in Narrative, Canary, Catamaran, Baltimore Review, The Shore, Cloudbank, Rattle, The Bitter Oleander, and a full-length collection, Visitation (Broadstone Books, 2022). A new chapbook, "Cold-Hearted Boys," is forthcoming later this year from Main Street Rag. HIs poem "Darien Gap," recently placed second in the Crosswinds Poetry contest, and his poem "Sunday Morning" was a finalist for 2023 The Lascaux Prize for Poetry. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize, and the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Award. A graduate of the University of Michigan, he lives in Seattle.

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Romana Iorga is the author of Temporary Skin (Glass Lyre Press, 2024) and a woman made entirely of air (Dancing Girl Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared in various journals, including New England Review, Lake Effect, The Nation, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com

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Trevor Moffa is a poet from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He helps as a reader for Chestnut Review, and his poems earned an Honorable Mention in Nimrod's 2020 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers. Trevor's recent work has been included in Chautauqua, Sleet, Under a Warm Green Linden, The Fourth River, and Midway Journal.

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kerry rawlinson is a mental nomad. She left Zambia decades ago to explore and landed in Canada. Fast forward: she’s still barefoot, tiptoeing through dislocation & belonging. Awards: Glittery Literary and Edinburgh International flash contest winner; notable poem Best Canadian Poetry; Pushcart nomination; Honorable mention/ finalist for several contests, e.g. Bridport; Proverse; Fish Poetry; Canterbury Poetry; Room; National Poetry Society and Palette. Recent work in: Suburban Review; Topic Take Up; Grain; Freefall; Rochford St. Review; Prism Review; Event Poetry; Prairie Fire, and more. When not challenging established norms, kerry kayaks and drinks too much (tea). kerryrawlinson.com @kerryrawli

The Rendering Plant

The mare was still alive when Lever found her. She lay on her side just off the highway, eyes wide, both front legs shorn off at the knees. He angled his truck to cast a light on her, shut his engine and listened.

Lever’s own leg was torn up too so he’d fashioned a crutch from the branch of a dead boxelder to get to and from. He made his way to the horse, knelt beside her and whispered her name. She recognized his voice immediately and that calmed her. At sixteen Lever was broad around the shoulders and chest and used to the cold but the wind was up. He stayed with her as long as he could and then worked his way back to the truck. He cranked the engine to get the heat up and called his father.

This was the second time in a year that one of Lever’s horses was hit. A foal had come through the same section of fence in September and a tractor hit her so hard it took Lever two days to find all of her. Lever’s father told him then to set a new anchor post but he could see now that it hadn’t held. It leaned out and to the left and the tension wires fell away into the dead grass.

Lever could hear the wind against his truck by the time Deacon pulled up alongside him.

“Where’s your rifle?” Deacon asked through his open window.

“House.”

Deacon looked toward the mare and then back at Lever. “Which horse?”   

“Tempe.”

Tempe was one of the ranch’s thirty-odd mares. All Morgans, and Lever knew each one—age to the day, weight, height, when they took a halter and saddle for the first time, which ones could ground tie and which couldn’t. But he knew Tempe best. And she him. She’d come early in the season and underweight, and Lever, twelve at the time, wrapped himself in his father’s long coat and stayed with her for two days and nights on a cot in her stall until she could stand and nurse on her own. Since then, the two were bound, clear from the way she leaned into him when he stood beside her.

Deacon stepped out of his truck with his rifle. Lever made to follow but his father waved him off.

“You mind that leg.”

Deacon walked to Tempe, knelt and ran his hand along her cheek. Then he stood and set the barrel of his rifle to the center of the mare’s forehead.

Inside the truck, Lever closed his eyes, wanting sleep.

~ ~ ~

The Moore family settled in Albany County in south central Wyoming in 1911. The property sat at the base of Centennial Ridge at a good elevation for breeding horses and growing root crop. The ranch itself was modest and counted the main house, which Lever’s great-grandfather built, two barns, a machine shed, paddocks and a hundred acre of pasture.

In a good year, the mares might bring a dozen foal, and each spring Deacon would hire three, sometimes four, hands to help manage the horses and a mechanic to keep the equipment.

Save for schooling, that was how Lever came up. His mother had passed when he was four and from that point on, he and his father spent the winter months on the ranch alone, the horses for the most part sheltering and feeding in the near paddocks and run-in sheds. Come spring, the men would arrive, usually driving up in empty box trailers or pick-ups, occasionally on foot. Migrants up from Texas, line workers from the kill floor of a slaughterhouses in Laramie or Cheyenne, millwrights, stable hands, trainers. Deacon would meet each one at the end of the gravel drive. They would discuss terms, their hands pushed deep in their pockets and their shoulders raised up against the winds. An agreement was marked by a handshake at which point Deacon would turn and direct the man to the main house where Lever would put out meatloaf and tap water and afterwards show him where to set camp.

In this way, a reciprocity took shape over the years. The men sent Lever to fetch shedding blades and hoof picks and dandy brushes. He mucked stalls and pushed hay and tacked the mares before the men rode them in the back pastures and, when they returned at midday, he brought them biscuits and water so they could eat in the shade.

In exchange, the men kept him close and showed him how to groom the horses and watch for thrush and rain rot and, when he had the strength in his hands and his legs, how to saddle-break the younger mares and ride by touch. By twelve, Lever could steer a horse bitless at a full gait down a gravel hill if he chose.

Other lessons came when Lever, in his teens, joined the men around the fire at night and listened to their stories about horses and cattle and crops. It was then that he came to understand the natural order to life on a ranch that began with the birth of one animal and the death of another, a dry winter that pushed deep into May one year followed by an early and warm spring the next, pestilence by abundance. There was reason and balance and around the edges of the fire and in the company of those men, Lever felt rooted to the ground, as if he were a product of it.

Some nights, the talk would turn to the outside world, to the wives and children that the men had left behind and to drinking and fistfights and other indignities. Lever heard the regret and sadness in their voices and knew he wanted no part of that.

~ ~ ~

The year Lever turned sixteen, the mares birthed eight foals—six filles and two colts. Deacon hired three men—two brothers from Juarez, who had worked the ranch the past two seasons, and a mechanic named Freddy Beck, who told Deacon that he was studying in the seminary in Laramie and worked the summers to pay his way.

Beck was in his early thirties, about six feet and long in the limbs. He was generally quiet; he had the bearing of a man who had had a wife or a family once but had lost them and had since separated himself from the parts of life that might remind him of that past, like someone in a city who chose to avoid certain streets or whole neighborhoods.

The brothers arrived in a box truck and set up alongside the stables. Beck came on foot so Deacon offered him the sleeper cab of an old Peterbilt tractor pushed up against the backside of the cattle barn. It was rusted out and timothy grass came up through the chassis and side fairings every spring. Its rims and tires were long-gone and the body rested on cedar blocks. The truck looked half-dressed. But the sleeper cab was dry and there was a pad to lay on and a kerosene lantern, and Beck told Deacon that would suit him just fine.

~ ~ ~

The events that led to Lever losing half his leg began on a Tuesday morning about three weeks after the men arrived on the ranch, when a gas engine that pumped water to a stock tank in the back pasture for the horses shuddered and then started to blow white smoke.

Lever and Beck walked out to it. Beck had a spud wrench in his back pocket. When they reached the pump, Beck shut the engine.

“You got oil in one of the cylinders,” he said. “You can tell from the color of the smoke.”

Beck lay on his back, pulled himself under the pump and felt for the drain plug. Once he found it, he began loosening it with the wrench.

Lever knelt and watched him work.

“What’d you do before seminary, mister?”

“Rode bulls. Mostly around Cody and Encampment.”

Lever smiled. “God’s truth?”

“God’s truth.”

“You mind if I ask how you learned?”

The drain plug fell to the ground. Beck counted off until two quarts of oil pooled on the dirt next to him. He set the plug back and tightened it. He pulled himself out from under the engine and stood and wiped his hands on his pants. Lever stood too, the smile still on his face.

“A man named Dryden Gray taught me,” Beck said. “I was young when I took up with him. About your age.”

Lever stood. His smile faded. “That the same Dryden Gray who got gored in Landen?”

Beck scratched at the back of his neck. “Same man.”

Both were quiet. Lever started with a question, hesitated, but it came. “You see it happen?”

Beck chewed at his lip. “I did,” he said. “From the chute. Dryden got hung up about six seconds into the ride and the bull dragged him a good while before he dropped off. Then that animal turned on a dime, set his head down at Dryden’s and hooked him under the chin. Horn went right up through the roof of his mouth.”

Beck spat to clear the dust from his mouth.

Lever knew the details of Dryden Gray’s last ride. He’d seen it on the television, same as just about everyone else in Wyoming, if not as it happened then on the news.

“I’m sorry for your loss.” Lever said.

Beck nodded. He leaned toward the engine, cranked it and opened the throttle full. He let it run loud and hard. White smoke poured from the exhaust and the mares nearby lifted their heads at the noise. Finally the exhaust ran clear. Beck shut the engine and waved at the last of the smoke. The fields fell quiet again and the mares leaned back into the grass.

~ ~ ~

That night, Lever joined the brothers and Beck around the fire and ate soda bread and gravy. Deacon came down from the main house afterwards and shared a bottle of whisky and asked about the foals and the dams.

After some time, Deacon left, followed shortly by Beck. Lever and the brothers lay on their backs staring at the stars, warmed by the last of the whisky. Lever practiced his Spanish and the brothers laughed.

Eventually, Lever stood, clapped the dust off his pants and walked the same path as his father, up along the backside of the cattle barn and past the Peterbilt. In the dark, he heard a sharp clap as the door to the sleeper cab swung back.

Beck called to him.

As Lever approached the truck, Beck turned and disappeared inside the cab. Maybe because of the whisky, Lever never considered any option but following. He pulled himself up on the step box of the Peterbilt and his momentum carried him inside the truck. The cab door closed behind him.

What light there was came off the lantern set on an upturned five-gallon Roper bucket pushed into the corner. A toothbrush and paperback copy of the Jerusalem Bible sat beside it. The space smelled of kerosene.

Beck drew back a heavy fabric curtain that separated the sleeper cab from the driver’s compartment. He lowered himself into the driver’s seat and it popped and groaned under his weight. Lever followed and eased into the passenger seat. Beck pulled two warm beers from a brown paper bag between the seats and handed one to Lever. They opened their beers and drank in silence.

Then Beck spoke. “Psalm 147:3: ‘The Lord heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.’”

Lever said nothing.

“You tender that?” Beck asked.

“Tender what?”

“That the Lord heals the brokenhearted?”

Lever was quiet at first. “I reckon there’s some hurt in this world that even the Lord can’t mend.”

Beck nodded. He drank the rest of his beer and pulled another from the bag and opened it and drank. He reached to his left and cranked the window down and a trace of cool air moved across Lever’s face. The stench of kerosene lifted. Lever closed his eyes and drew a breath and at that moment he sensed a shift in the direction of the air against his face. He opened his eyes. An uneven, ocher light moved along the walls, first up, then down, and he felt heat on his backside and he coughed at an acrid smoke.

Lever turned and saw the kerosene lantern on its side on the floor of the sleeper cab. A raft of flames moved toward the walls like a set of low waves. Lever turned back and reached for the passenger side door and pulled hard at the handle but the brittle metal broke in his hand. He looked to his left and saw Beck push the driver’s side door open. As the door swung back, air swept into the trailer and the flames in the sleeper cab rushed forward. Lever was now beneath a blanket of flames. Beck pulled himself onto the step box outside the driver’s door and then turned to face Lever. Lever leaned in Beck’s direction and held out his hand. It took Lever a moment to process what Beck did next. He slammed the door closed and fell out of view.

Lever pivoted on his seat, pulled his legs back and kicked at his own door. He heard it move in its frame. He pulled his legs back again and at the moment he delivered the kick, the heavy black curtain separating the driver’s compartment and the sleeper cab, now consumed by flames, fell over him. He saw nothing. He felt only the skin on his head and chest and legs rage. He heard his father yelling. The door swung opened, he felt men grab at legs and his waist and then he was in the air, on fire.

~ ~ ~

The next morning, smoke still rose from the shell of the Peterbilt. Beck was gone. The brothers told Deacon they saw him walking in mud boots and a heavy sweater through the near pasture toward the highway.

~ ~ ~

Lever spent eight weeks in the hospital in Cheyenne. Deacon brought him home on the first of December and pushed a folding bed into the living room to spare Lever the stairs.

The hair on Lever’s head, a coppice of brown and red before the fire, was gone and would not come back. His left ear had fused to his skull so the surgeon cut away the flesh, leaving a dime-sized hole that in a mirror looked bottomless and unclean. The skin along his neck and the length of his arm and his chest was uneven and, in concentric circles, various shades of red—ugly crimsons and scarlets.

The worst of it though was his left leg which now ended abruptly at the knee in a nub of bandages. The doctor said that the curtain that had fallen over him had wrapped itself around his leg as he struggled and burned first through his pants and then his skin and finally the muscle below his knee. Where only bone remained, the doctor amputated.

Through December, propped up on his folding bed, Lever considered his half leg. He thought of the natural balance of life on the ranch; the death of one animal offset by the birth of another and pestilence followed by plenty. But he could not reconcile this bandaged stump of his and his place on the ranch and as December moved over him, he felt loosed from the ground.

In January, an infection set in on Lever’s backside—a buckshot cluster of red blisters that ran along his buttocks. The doctor sent silver nitrate powder that Lever mixed with water and stirred into a bone-white paste. The itching eased but the infection lingered and Lever could smell it in the sheets.

~ ~ ~

In March, Lever drank coffee with his father at the kitchen table before sunrise. Deacon asked Lever if he recalled his older cousin on his mother’s side.

“You mean Ellis?” Lever asked.

“That’s right. Ellis.”

Deacon drank his coffee. “Just before you were born, Ellis and his folks come up to the ranch after church one Sunday for coffee and biscuits,” he said. “Ellis was maybe eight or nine. And while your mama and me and her sister and husband sat at this very table talking about what was going on in town, Ellis slipped out the back of the house, climbed into the paddock and started slapping the back of one of the mares with a switch. Just Ellis hitting that horse over and over while we drank our Sanka, none aware.

“After a bit that horse had had about enough of that switch and she kicked poor Ellis in his rear end and he flew halfway across that paddock. I’ll tell you I never heard a child holler like that.

“So we ran down to the paddock and picked Ellis up off the ground and rubbed his back end and finally he stopped his howlin’. But I’ll tell you what. That Sunday marked the last day of little Ellis Cooper’s ranching career. He made himself scarce till he turned sixteen and then he told his father he was going to Cheyenne to open a paper store.”

“He do it?”

“He did.”

“He still at it?”

“He is. In fact, he’s got a second store in La Grange.”

Lever knew what his father was telling him. He looked up at the ceiling to try to hide his tears.

Deacon pushed his coffee aside and leaned forward. “Listen to me now. People already have all sorts of theories about what you were doin’ in that truck with that man in the first place, and you know as well as I do that if you linger ’round here, at some point you’re gonna get yourself into a corner.”

Lever looked at his father.

Deacon’s eyes were wet now too.

The two sat in silence. Finally Lever spoke. “There a seminary in Laramie, Pop?”

Deacon leaned back in his chair. “There is.”

“You go down there looking for him?”

“I did. With the brothers while you were in the hospital.”

“You find him?”

Deacon stood, walked to the sink and set his coffee cup on the counter. “We did,” Deacon said, his back to Lever. “He was scared at first ’cause he knew what was coming. He cried some and then told us he done the same as he did to you to some other boys in the Central Valley in California.”

“Then what?” Lever asked.

“We prayed with him. And then we brought him back here.”

Deacon poured what was left of his coffee into the sink. Over his shoulder, Lever could see the first of the sun through the window but the light barely carried.

~ ~ ~

Deacon put one shot to the center of Tempe’s forehead. He knelt and ran his finger along her naked eye to make sure she was dead. There was no movement. He walked back to his truck and pulled onto the highway. Lever followed.

It was near midnight when they pulled up to the main house.

“You want help with the Tempe tomorrow,” Deacon said as Lever lowered himself on to the folding bed in the living room.

Lever shook his head. “The winch does all the work,” he said.

Lever lay awake for a time. He knew exactly how the morning would unfold. He’d been through it with the foal in September. At dawn, he would drive back out to the highway, set a cable to Tempe’s back legs and winch her onto the bed of his truck. Then he would drive to a rendering plant in Portville half-an-hour south.

At the plant, he would back his truck up to a skid steer. The driver would swap chains and drag Tempe off the back of the truck, across a pitted dirt lot and onto a conveyor. The conveyor would carry the horse through a swinging metal-clad door to the interior of the plant and feed her into an oversize auger that would grind her into quarter-by-quarter inch pieces. These would move by way of another conveyor to a boiler where the meat and bone meal would separate from the lard and tallow. The fat would be sold for suet and the meat and bone meal dried, machined and turned with soybean and corn to make feed.

Over the course of an afternoon, Tempe, and any potential she’d had to be a mount, a cutter, or an easy keeper for a rancher in Cody or Pinedale, would be ground to a coarse residue, packed into fifty-pound feed bags and stacked up against the cinderblock wall of the plant waiting to be trucked to a hog farm.

~ ~ ~

Lever woke at dawn to a silent house, dressed, took his rifle from the closet beneath the stairs and walked slowly to his truck, careful where he set his crutches in the dirt.

He drove until he saw the outline of the mare on the shoulder of the road. He stopped the truck ten yards short of her and watched her for a time. A mare upright is a sight but too long on its side and it collapses under its own weight. Finally, he reached for his rifle on the passenger seat, pushed his door open, and made his way on his crutch toward the mare with the thought in mind to finish the job.

###

Max Block began his career as a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq (embedded), Mali, Honduras, Nicaragua, Tierra del Fuego and elsewhere. He is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Vassar College. He works in finance.

No One Wants to Be Here

The phone rings as I step out of the shower. Water is still dripping down my legs when I answer it. It’s my son’s high school principal. The new one. The young one. The one so many other mothers said was too young, too inexperienced, too urban for this town. Not me. I thought he was just what we needed. A chance to start fresh. A clean slate.

“There was an incident,” he says. And I’m pulled back to that primitive place. My heart pounds. I steady myself with the back of the dining room chair waiting for the impact.

But the new principal must understand where every parent’s imagination goes when the principal calls, and so he hits the release valve by saying my child is safe. 

I let go of the chair. More details come:

The other student is safe.

Technology misuse. 

Grounds for expulsion.

None of this makes sense. He must have the wrong student, I think, the wrong phone number. “My son, Jonah? It must be a mistake,” I say.

“Your son, Jonah Ryan. It’s not a mistake,” he says.

~ ~ ~

I’m led to the principal’s office by one of the women who sits in the fortress of desks outside its door. She doesn’t make eye contact with me, and I can’t tell if this is just her way or if she remembers me from before.

The office has been rearranged since I was here last. The old principal’s desk has been pushed to the wall, and a small circle of chairs, where Jonah and the new principal are seated, has been put in its place by the window. The new principal rises from the circle. Holds out his hand and introduces himself. Dr. Bryant. We shake hands. Jonah doesn’t look up at me. He’s looking at his running shoes. The soles are worn and coming apart at the toes. Just now I remember he had asked me for a new pair at the start of the school year.

“Thank you for coming,” Dr. Bryant says and offers me a seat.

I sit, both feet on the floor, purse in my lap. I look at the walls. They have been painted a shade of green that a therapist would say is meant to soothe.

The story comes together. Dr. Bryant explains that my son gained access to a classmate’s computer. Typed something he shouldn’t have into the search bar. Something that could be considered harassment if the other student had felt threatened, felt victimized.

“Did he?” I ask.

“Did he what?” Dr. Bryant asks.

“Did the other student feel victimized?”

Dr. Bryant folds his arms. Sighs. “No,” he says. And then, “but that’s not the point.”

I’m messing up. Again. I know what Dr. Bryant wants to hear from me, and I’m failing to take ownership. I’m failing Jonah, my good son. The quiet one. The one in advanced math. AP English. The one who plays the piano. The one I always say I never have to worry about. Not like Dell. I can ignore Jonah for days as long as I leave a box of cereal on the counter, as long as I leave a container of milk in the fridge, I always say.

“I understand,” I say. But I don’t understand. Then, to Jonah: “Why did you do this?”

He doesn’t look at me. He lifts his shoulders in a slow shrug. “Someone said it would be funny.”

Something in me splits open and I ache on his behalf. “Someone funnier than you?”

He doesn’t answer me.

Dr. Bryant sits back. Props his left ankle on his right knee. Drops his hands at his sides. His body language suggests he’s satisfied that we’re getting somewhere.

“We know Jonah’s a good kid.” He smiles at Jonah. “He’s not on our radar.”

I imagine Jonah’s file has a big red Post-It note on it that says Father Deceased, Single Mother like a Get Out of Jail Free card. Then I think no, of course not. It’s all electronic now.

“I’ll let you know if the other student decides to press charges,” he says, turning to me.

I pinch the top of my purse. “Thank you,” I say.

~ ~ ~

My oldest son, Dell, he’s the one I used to get calls about. Pulled a fire alarm in eighth grade. Was caught vaping in the bathroom. Chris had just died, so his behavior was understandable, everyone said.

“We understand how hard it’s been. For all of you,” the previous principal said to me from across his desk, pinching the lapels of his jacket, then adjusting his tie.

“We understand,” he said again, and I glanced at the corners of the ceiling for cameras.

He was older than me. Late fifties. Sixty, maybe. A voice like polished granite that had been bred into him. There was a photo of his younger self on the wall, a football player, gripping the ball. Quarterback, at this very school. His gray hair had once been blonde. Blue eyes and pale, freckled skin that won’t stand up well to years of excess.

 “Thank you,” I said.

He stood, offered his hand. He was tall. Muscular despite his middle-aged spread. I took his hand. It was warm, big, soft, and I imagined slipping my hands inside his blazer and feeling the warmth there, too. Just then one of the women from outside his office came in and handed me a page with a list of family therapists. She glanced at us and then withdrew.

~ ~ ~

Outside the school, I want to call Chris, so I call Dell. He’s on the mountain. He picks up his Facetime. He has a white stripe on his nose. His snowboard is upright next to him. He says he has five minutes before his next student. Dell has Chris’s forehead. His brows lift in the same heartbreaking way.

I tell him about Jonah. I ask him to talk to him. “To find out…” if it’s my fault, I want to say. “To find out if he needs anything,” I say instead.

“Mom,” he says, and I wait for him to continue.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Nothing,” he says. “Just- just, don’t do anything.”

“What does that mean?” I say more angrily than I meant to sound.

“I mean, I’ll talk to him,” he says.

“Thank you,” I say and hang up.

~ ~ ~

When I got pregnant, Chris and I weren’t sure we were going to keep it. We weren’t even sure we were going to stay together. He wasn’t the type, Chris said, to be a father. To settle down. He’d been married before. Had gotten girls pregnant before. I wasn’t even sure myself; neither of us had good role models. I kept making and then canceling my appointments for the procedure. But then Chris’s mother died, and he said he felt all alone in the world. We were in the car on the way home from the funeral when he pulled over. He put his hand on my belly and said we should keep it. I burst into tears. It was exactly what I wanted to hear.

~ ~ ~

The third time I was called to Richard’s office was after Dell was caught cheating on his French exam. His blazer was off when I arrived, his blue oxford shirt rolled up to his forearms. No tie, unbuttoned collar.

“Your kid showed some ingenuity this time.” He smiled and placed curled pieces of masking tape on his desk. Dell had taped the vocab words to the underside of his shirt, near the bottom. During the test, he was caught flipping over the hem to check his answers.

“Je t'accuse, tu m'accuses, on s'accuse…” He laughed and shook his head. I laughed uneasily.

He came around his desk and sat on its edge. “Listen, I’ve been doing this a long time. Kids react differently to grief. For some it’s all internal. For others, they can’t help themselves; they have to tear apart the whole school.”

I kept my eyes on the carpet. A horrible beige. Finally, I said, “I just don’t know what to do.”

He leaned toward me, put his hand on my shoulder. We sat like that for a few moments, my eyes focused on the floor.

I knew that if I looked, I’d be able to see the bump of his cock. I knew he would see me look, and that this would be the signal. This would tell him it was all right with me. 

~ ~ ~

Chris died on his motorcycle. A truck hit him on the narrow stretch of state road at the edge of town. The kid who was driving was on his first delivery job.

I’ll never forget that day, picking them up from school. Dell read my face, knew something bad was coming. But Jonah, sweet, sweet Jonah—his pockets stuffed with plastic dinosaurs as always—suspected nothing. He was telling me on the ride home about Pterodactyls, how their wings could span the length of a school bus. I just listened, knowing that when I finally spoke, I would extinguish everything good from his life.

Later, I drove myself to the crash site. I had to see it for myself. Pulled over when I spotted the shards of glass and plastic the cleanup crew had left behind. A long strip of metal hung from a shrub along the shoulder. I went over and pulled it off, flung it into the woods.

For days—for weeks afterward—we cried. Jonah would awaken in the night crying and tell me he missed Daddy, and I’d sit on his bed, pick up the plush Brontosaurus that had fallen to the floor during the night, and tuck it in next to him and say, I miss him too, and we’d sit there in the dark together, bewildered.

We went to those therapy sessions, and Jonah went back to collecting bugs and riding his bike and running over to the neighbor’s to play on their trampoline. Sometimes I’d wake in the middle of the night, and there he’d be, asleep next to me. His cheeks sunk into the pillow. Lips parted, his mouth drawing and releasing breath. It was reassuring, knowing he could escape into such a deep sleep. I thought, how lucky I was to have a kid like that.

It was Dell who was trouble. It was Dell who got me called to the principal’s office.

~ ~ ~

Richard and I met at my house on Friday mornings, when the boys were in school. Not often. Once or twice a month or so, whenever he could somehow manage to slip away. I worked from home on Fridays—a perk of being a widow. He parked his car around the corner but otherwise didn’t conceal himself. Maybe he didn’t think anyone knew him on this end of town.

Richard filled the doorway. His head nearly touched our ceiling. When he came over, the pressure in the room changed. Everything bent in his direction. He’d fix his eyes on me, hook his arm around my waist and pull me toward him, so it was impossible to want anything but the presence of his hand on my backside.

He liked Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Music from another time. I’d pour him a bourbon or sometimes a vodka. Put on lacy lingerie. He’d set his phone on our counter and move me around the kitchen to Summer Wind. He was good at not looking around at our stuff, of not appearing to judge our kitchen table covered with scuff marks from the kids’ arts and crafts projects or our hand-me-down sleeper sofa. I couldn’t help but imagine his kitchen looked like one from a magazine spread, his wife at the marble island in front of her Vitamix. Our bed creaked under his weight. Once, when I was on top of him, I said, “This place must look like a real slum.” He was pinching my nipples. “That’s why I like it,” he said. 

~ ~ ~

The way those therapy sessions went was this: first we helped ourselves to pizza and pink punch that was set out in long tables in the basement of the church, and then all the kids took a seat in a circle in the middle of the room while the adults moved into a smaller meeting room. I hated leaving Jonah and Dell in there with the sisters whose mother died of breast cancer. With the boy whose father died of kidney failure. With the remaining twin whose brother drowned in the family pool. And the therapist with his Basset Hound face—it was too depressing. All that grief.

Our therapist, Margo—the one who facilitated the adult’s group—was no better. She looked like a young Joni Mitchell—long, blond hair and a taste for embroidered tunics. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. Thirty at the most. Maybe a grad student still working toward a degree. She was always trying to get us to explore the source of our grief. It was a waste of time. I already knew the source. We all did. The person we loved had died and left us holding the bag.

Still, we did our best. Phil had gained forty pounds since his wife died, he told us, exhaling a long cloud of cigarette smoke. I’m not sure how smoking was allowed, with the heavy red drapes on the windows. “She wouldn’t recognize me now,” he said. Pamela spent the whole hour crying. She cried for her husband whose kidney’s had failed. But mostly she cried for her son, for all the baseball games they wouldn’t get to play, for all the football games they wouldn’t get to watch together. I know we were supposed to offer each other comfort, but instead I said, “Maybe your son could try racquetball.” Pamela looked at me, hurt. Margo eyed me disapprovingly. She held the tissue box out to Pamela and asked her to explore the source of her grief. The only one who sat silent every week was Helen, whose son drowned in the pool while she was just steps away in the kitchen preparing the hamburger for the next day’s cookout. I don’t know how you get over something like that. Margo never cracked her grief. She didn’t even try.

Outside in the parking lot, Margo ran up to me just as I opened my car door.

“Wait,” she said to me, a little out of breath. “Can I talk to you a sec?”

I looked at her, and then my open car door. “I guess. Yeah,” I said.

“You act like you don’t want to be here,” she said.

Behind her my boys emerged from the church basement.

“No one wants to be here,” I said.

“I just want you to know, I’m just trying to help everyone heal.” She put her hand on my arm. “There’s such a thing as growing too attached to our pain.”

I pulled my arm away and waved the boys over.

They looked at Margo cautiously as they slid into the car.

I got into the driver’s seat.

She waved as we pulled away.

“What’s she want?” Dell said. “Should I wave back?”

“Don’t look at her,” I said as we drove out of the parking lot.

~ ~ ~

The picture I keep at my bedside is the one of Dell and Jonah sitting on Chris’s motorcycle. Dell is eight. Jonah is two, and Chris is standing behind him, holding him steady.

Chris was a good father. Good as in he took fatherhood in stride. Never questioned it, never complained about getting up to change a diaper, to do a midnight feeding. These obligations were no different than taking an overnight shift at the DPW, or replacing a bad gasket on his bike. It came with the territory. And he wanted to be in this territory.

Not that fatherhood changed him. It didn’t. He didn’t give up drinking with friends on Friday nights or riding his bike. He had always been independent, leaning toward reckless. It’s what made me fall for him in the first place. And I knew I couldn’t expect him to be anything different.

Though we never discussed it, I’d gone back on birth control just after Dell’s first birthday. It's not that I didn’t want more children, it’s just that I didn’t want anything to tip the scale. But Jonah came along anyway, and I cried when I told Chris, but he took my hands and made me believe we could do it.

~ ~ ~

“My wife only does this on my birthday,” Richard said one time when my head was between his legs. He was sitting on the sofa; I was crouched on the floor in front of him. His hand was on my head; his thumb caressing the skin behind my ear. I had missed that feeling, someone’s fingers touching me like that.

~ ~ ~

The phone rings. It’s Dr. Bryant with good news. The other kid isn’t going to press bullying charges, he says, which means that Jonah needs only to attend Saturday detention.

“Thank you,” I say and hang up. I keep my hand on the receiver for a few seconds, I am so Goddamn tired of saying thank you.

~ ~ ~

On Saturday, I walk with Jonah to the library for detention. I’m holding the bagged lunch I prepared for him even though he said he didn’t want anything. He’d get Pop Tarts out of the vending machine he said. We’d fought about it. I said I wanted him to eat something nutritious, so I packed those small rounds of cheese covered in wax that he likes.

Dr. Bryant waves us in when we come to the door. He’s at a desk in front of a handful of students seated in a horseshoe of desks. It’s like the Breakfast Club in there. He shows Jonah where to sit, next to a kid who looks like he could be thirty, like he could beat the shit out of any of us.

Dr. Bryant walks me to the door. Tells me to come back at three. I almost forget about Jonah’s lunch and, at the last second, I hand the bag to Dr. Bryant.

“What did you do to get stuck doing detention?” I joke.

He smiles, thank God. “I volunteered. Keeps me connected to the kids.”

He’s sincere, I can tell. “You’re different,” I say.

“Oh yeah? Different from what?”

“From the other principal.”

“I hope so,” he laughs. He folds his arms. He glances back toward the kids. Our conversation is over.

Richard had resigned quietly, quickly. No one ever said a word to me. I don’t know if anyone knew about us. There were plenty of other allegations. Verbal abuse in the workplace. A toxic professional environment. I asked Jonah what he’d heard about him. He looked at the ground, shrugged, and said “nothing.”

~ ~ ~

At 3:00, I walk back to the library. The other kids are filing out. Jonah and Dr. Bryant are looking at something on a computer. They are smiling and talking. I want to go over, but I don’t. I stay at the door and watch them.

“So what were you and Dr. Bryant talking about?” I ask Jonah on the car ride home.

“Nothing,” he says.

“It didn’t look like nothing. You were talking and laughing. About something on the computer.”

“Just a YouTube video. There are these guys. They make funny science videos. You wouldn’t know them.”

I glance at him. “That sounds cool. Dr. Bryant sounds cool. Do you like him?”

Jonah shrugs.

“I mean, do you feel you can talk to him?”

“I dunno.”

“I mean if you wanted to. Say, if you needed someone to talk to, could you talk to him?”

“I guess,” Jonah says.

“That’s good. He seems like a nice guy,”

Jonah shoots me a look. “Why? Why do you care? So you can screw him, too?”

My stomach drops. My throat tightens. I slow down the car so I don’t lose control of it.

My mouth is open, but I don’t say anything. I turn onto our street. Then I pull over, even though we are two blocks from our house. “Jonah,” I say. He is looking out the window. “Jonah,” I say again.

“What the fuck is it?” he says.

I have nothing to say.

He rolls his eyes. Pulls his backpack from the floor and gets out. I watch him walk home.

I drive slowly behind him. His gait hasn’t changed since he was five years old and insisted he walk to school by himself. Finally I pass him and pull into our driveway. Unlock the front door. Put down my purse on the counter and put the kettle on the stove.

“Jonah,” I say when he comes in.

He walks right by me. Slams his bedroom door.

“Jonah,” I say outside his door. He turns on his music.

I make two cups of tea. I bring them to his bedroom door. I lean my forehead against the doorframe. “Jonah, I made tea. Let’s talk,” Let’s explore the source of your grief, I hear Margo’s voice saying.

He doesn’t open the door. So instead I bring the tea back into the kitchen and pour it down the sink. Then I open the cabinet and pull out all the Jim Beam and Absolut Vodka and pour those down the drain, too. I rummage through the junk drawer and find the Frank Sinatra CD Richard brought over and throw it in the trash. Then I take it out of the trash and bring it to the garage. I find the hedge clipper and shred the CD. I go into my bedroom and slice my lingerie into pieces.

I go back to Jonah’s door. “Please let me in,” I say, my knuckles barely tapping his door. “I made a mistake. I’m sorry.” Then I say, “It’s over. It’s been over for a while.”

He turns the music up louder.

~ ~ ~

The last time I saw Richard he was standing naked in our bedroom in his stockinged feet. By then he’d stopped romancing me; if you could call the dancing in the kitchen, romance. He no longer looked to me like the man sitting behind his desk or making speeches at the assemblies. He was just a middle-aged man with a white belly and graying pubic hair and flat feet stuffed into argyle socks his wife had probably bought for him. I crawled onto the bed so I didn’t have to look at him. I saw the photo of Chris with the boys on his bike, and I bit my lip. I squeezed the pillow. I put my forehead against the cool sheet and knew this was the last time I’d do this.

Afterward, I thought I heard a noise. A voice. A door closing. I shushed Richard and we lay there frozen, listening. But there was nothing. That wasn’t the first time I had imagined hearing things. How many times had I heard Chris’s voice before falling to sleep. How many times had I seen his face in the downtown bus. But still, I got out of bed, grabbed my clothes and went to the door. “Hello?” I called into the hallway. No one was there. I went into the bathroom to clean myself up.

When I went back into the bedroom, there was Richard sitting on our bed, pulling those socks over his doughy feet.

“Get out,” I said.

“What?” he said.

I picked up his clothes from the chair and threw them at him. “Get out now!”

I didn’t wait for him to leave. I got into my car and drove to the beach where we had scattered Chris’s ashes. It was early spring. The wind off the water was cold. I walked to the shoreline, picked up a handful of rocks and threw them. They plunged into the water like metal into flesh. Tears streamed down my face. “You sonofabitch,” I screamed into the wind.

~ ~ ~

Sitting outside Jonah’s door I hear my stomach growl. I realize that I haven’t eaten all day. Jonah must be hungry too and suddenly I’m grateful that there’s dinner to be made, dishes to be washed, garbage to be taken out. And so, I rise. “Jonah, are you hungry?” I say into the crack of his door. “You must be hungry.” Still nothing, but thinking about a shopping list has given me some renewed energy. I resolve to buy the Thai dumplings Jonah likes. “I’m going to the grocery store, Jonah,” I say loudly, nearly shouting, above his music. “I’m going to get those dumplings you like.” Still nothing.

The store’s parking lot is so full I have to park in the lot next to the children’s playground. When I come out, I see Dr. Bryant in the playground, calling out to a little boy trying to climb up the slide, telling him to be careful. He looks about four or five years old, and I assume it’s his son. Just then, a bigger boy comes down the slide and knocks Dr. Bryant's son to the ground. He begins to cry. Dr. Bryant goes to him, picks him up and the boy’s crying gets louder, angrier. The other kid looks over his shoulder at the boy, but then goes up the ladder again for another round at the slide. Dr. Bryant holds his son, rocks him slightly, says something softly into his ear. His son’s limbs are now thrashing, trying to break free of his father’s hold; he’s looking over at the other boy who is going down the slide. He doesn’t want to be consoled. He wants to be angry, and he wants his anger to reach the other boy. But Dr. Bryant is resolute. He holds the boy. He’s still holding the boy when I get into my car and drive home.

~ ~ ~

I am at the stove sautéing the dumplings. I don’t hear Jonah approach because the sound of his footsteps are drowned out by the sound of the sizzling oil. He’s holding his phone out to me.

“This is the video I watched with Dr. Bryant.”

“Oh, OK.” I can barely get the words out.

We lean against the counter, letting the video play.

# # #

Elizabeth Christopher’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Solstice, HuffPost, The Boston Globe Magazine, Bacopa Literary Review, Passengers Journal, and elsewhere. Following a twenty-plus-year career writing for the tech industry, Elizabeth is a freelance writer for universities and social sector organizations. For fun, she volunteers her time building a creative writing community at Follow Your Art Community Studios, a nonprofit arts center in Melrose, Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband and three teenage children.

A Fistful of Schadenfreude

AUTOEROTIC ASPHYXIATION.

That’s what they put on my big brother’s death certificate.

Two impossible to miss, impossible to forget words.

Typed there as plain as day in rigid capitals even though every other piece of information was in lowercase, they seemed to take up half the page. They can’t be removed. They can’t be changed and they can’t be ignored now and, staring at his flag-draped coffin, I can’t stop thinking of them.

“I never met Billy Ray Scoggins,” Reverend Fraser rasps, his voice hollow in the near-empty church, “but after speaking with his beloved wife, Kellyanne, his son, Buck, his daughter, Vicky Lynn and his brother, Jimmy Lee, I wish I had. Honest and hardworking, he was a true community leader who never gave a thought to lending a helping hand...”

There’s a noise from somewhere, a cough, a sniffle or, more than likely, a giggle. It’s choked and muted, and only me and my brother’s hound dog, Roscoe, head resting by the casket’s wheels, ears twitching slightly, notice.

“... Few of us have had the honor of meeting a real American hero,” Reverend Fraser continues, “but Billy Ray was the epitome of one, a man who represented the values we all hold dear...”

Hushed snorts and quiet chuckles have been coming and going for the entire service. They were in the parting murmurs after sputtered condolences, the whispered remarks between scripture readings but mostly, they rose up during the viewing when the mourners ambled past the open lid and saw the unnatural, almost gratified smirk the funeral director put on my brother’s lips.

“An Eagle Scout and an all-state fullback, Billy Ray cast aside his scholarship to the University of Nebraska to join the Army in the wake of 9-11...”

The old clergyman never glances up from the half-dozen sheets of paper in his trembling hands. Reading from the notes he’d scribbled during our two-and-a-half-hour drive across the plains from Denver, I guess I should be thankful he didn’t ask why our local pastor wasn’t here or why we’re having the service in Haxtun, ten miles from my brother’s home.

“... Winning a Bronze Star, he set aside the horrors of war by coming home to marry his high school sweetheart and open a hardware supply company...”

For a while, I was certain the whole state had known of the “accident” but luckily, Reverend Fraser had never heard of my brother. Nearing eighty, his vision’s poor, he doesn’t watch television and he hadn’t read the story in last week’s Logan County Standard—the one about the body with the belt around its neck in the back office of Scoggins Hardware, a crushed Budweiser tallboy on the floor, a can of Berry Blend Skoal on the cabinet and an empty box of Kleenex on the desk.

“... There, he began building a new life by the sweat of his brow and the toil of his never idle hands...”

A chortle rises but turning, I only see lowered heads.

Spread out upon the hard pews, I still can’t believe there aren’t more people here. One or two of our cousins, a handful of his regular customers, a trio from the VFW post in Imperial, there’s barely a dozen and there should be so many more.

“... Always willing to stand up for the little guy, he joined the Fleming Volunteer Fire Department where he helped save his hometown during the 2015 brushfires...”

There should be the neighbors whose driveways he plowed in the winter and the ranch hands who’d shoot the shit with him in the church parking lot on Sundays.

His poker buddies from the Rotary Club and the farmers he delivered parts to.

The politicians who begged for his endorsement.

The Chamber of Commerce who’d call on him to help with the Autumn Harvest Festival.

“... Service and sacrifice were in his blood and he left so much of himself behind...”

At the very least, his old high school teammates should be here, especially the ones he fished with in the summer and hunted with in the fall.

“... From library book drives to decorating cemetery plots to pulling the floats at the Fourth of July parade, his selflessness was legendary and I’m sure he was thinking of someone else right up to the very end...”

There’s a gruff snort but before I can scowl at the hired pallbearers by the entrance, my eight-year-old niece whimpers from the crook of her mother’s arm.

“... He was an example to us all, a true follower of Mark 12:31: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself...’”

There’s another snort and I look at my twelve-year-old nephew beside me, his face buried in his hands.

“... And though this is a solemn occasion, we can take comfort in the fact our dearly departed brother is, at this very moment, covered in the Lord’s glory and reveling in the happy ending he so righteously deserves...”

Suddenly, the church erupts in laughter.

Then Kellyanne shrieks.

Vicky Lynn wails.

Roscoe howls.

There’s the clomp of Tony Lamas rushing toward the exit.

And, with the reverend finally glancing up and pausing in confusion, I hear a sound from my nephew.

I’m not sure what it is at first but, when I realize he’s giggling, I don’t know what’s harder to bear: the fact they’re laughing at my big brother or how much worse it’d be if they actually knew.

Because, last week when I originally found him, it wasn’t a box of Kleenex sitting there on the desk.

It was his Bronze Star.

###

J. Paul Ross is a graduate of Metropolitan State University of Denver and a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. His fiction has appeared in numerous online and in print magazines and journals including 34 Orchard, The Antioch Review, The Bacopa Literary Review, and Fiction International. Currently, he is working on a novel set along the Pan-American Highway.

Locked In

The door is jammed—and that’s the first and only thing I’ve been sure of this whole evening. I shouldn’t have shoved it so hard, but my mouth was burning and my hair was stuck to my cheeks, and the restaurant music was oontzing too loud and the door wouldn’t close and I wedged my shoulder against it and rammed it into the frame before I could think a single cool thought. 

If I’m in here with my face under the faucet for too long, she’ll think I’m pooping. Or hiding. Or that I’ve walked out after twenty-five minutes of the date. She’s waiting for me, and time stretches when you’re alone in a restaurant, tracing lines down your sweating glass, trying not to meet anyone’s eyes or glance towards the bathroom. I don’t even know her yet, just know that sleek line of dark hair cut to her jaw, the way my thumbs hooked through her hoop earrings when I held her face in the throbbing corner of the bar, a gay bar, my first, and I wasn’t sure if I belonged there, but I’d been unsure for so long that it felt like a kind of sure. We were dancing and then kissing and then I shouted into her hair, “Hey, I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m new to this and I don’t want to be using you to figure it out—” but she cut me off with a laugh and yelled, “Me too,” and we grinned our teeth back together. We swayed, a tiny moment of quiet in the middle of the dance floor.

Then we were alone in the corner booth with tequila shots, then with her hands under my shirt, then texting plans into place while I lay on my bedroom floor googling “how to text a girl??,” then sitting across from each other at a table by the window, and now I’m locked in the bathroom while she sits out there, eating my food.

Though I’m not sure it’s my food. We shouldn’t have ordered the same sauce—tikka masala, basic move—with different proteins: I’ve been craving paneer, and she picked tofu. We differed on our spice levels, too: I pleaded, “Very mild—very,” my weak salt-and-mayo ancestry showing, and she said medium was good. So when two steaming bowls of white cubes floated to our table, we got the wrong ones. We must have. My cubes squished instead of squeaked under my teeth, and my tongue burned at the first bite. Sweat oozed to my forehead, and I do sweat when I’m nervous but this was more than that—this was hot wet spice sweat. Meanwhile she bit blissfully into my paneer, nodding and turning a cube over in the orange sauce.

I tried to intervene. “Um, does yours seem okay? I’m not sure we got the right dishes.”

When she lifted her eyes to mine, I could feel exactly how much I was sweating. But she smiled, “Yeah, it’s good.” And while I’m not sure how to go out with a girl, I’m almost sure that fighting over food is bad date etiquette regardless of gender. How could I insist that she doesn’t know cheese from tofu when I’m not even sure, not sure of anything? So I kept eating her fire-death maybe-tofu mush. 

I lean into the sink again and let the cold water run over my tongue. I’d been doing well: not shifting in my chair, finding places to put my hands, making enough eye contact. But if I were actually gay, wouldn’t it be effortless? Once the food arrived, I thought we’d have full mouths to buffer the conversation. Instead, I had a mouth full of fire and mystery protein.

Her eyes were on me, feathered darkness between the fringe of her eyelashes, god, she’s beautiful but maybe in the way all girls are beautiful—am I attracted to women or are they just all attractive? I’m not gay enough to be here, I can’t be, I’ve always been hungry for boys, their ankles and wrists, the fine hair on their arms, their quick laughter—and the rules to them are clear. Nothing else is quite so painfully clear.

Even in high school when I first wondered about my drawing club teacher, when I couldn’t stop picturing her soft heart of a mouth, the loose down of her hair falling free from its tangle, her sweet gravel voice leaning over my blank pages—even then, when I was afraid I wasn’t looking at her like a straight girl would, I didn’t think it was clear. The thought made me angry: after all my straight pining, staring at boys and then at my own body through their eyes, after bra straps and razor burn and all that, I’d like girls? I made myself picture it, to be sure—our lips against each other’s, her fingers trailing down my arms, the down on our cheeks peaching together as she brushed past my face to pull a bloom to the surface of my neck—pictured it all, didn’t feel much, and decided I had my answer. Straight—safe and sure. But once I’d pictured it, the images never stopped, flashing over and over on a screen in a dark room at the back of my mind.

The fire on my tongue had spread down my throat, but I was aware of a second heat: the warmth of her gaze on me. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

The restaurant seemed hotter and louder than before, the air dense. So much noise and this table between us, keeping us from the moment of velvet quiet when she touches me. “I’m not sure,” I managed, pushing back my chair. “I’m not sure—would you excuse me?”

And now, I’m not sure of anything but that the door is jammed, and I’m stuck in this bathroom, and I just want to walk the straight line of her jaw to the heat of her neck, want to feel the skin silking down her sternum, want her hands pulling me out of myself again, going dizzy looking into the abyss of skin between her belt and her shirt’s hem. Instead, I look at the sweaty, trembling, straight girl in the mirror, not gay enough to be here, unsure, unsure of everything except that this door is locked behind her and she might never come out.

# # #

Claudia Schatz lives in Philadelphia. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Prime Number Magazine, Blue Earth Review, Santa Clara Review, Lunch Ticket, descant, Ruminate, and X-R-A-Y. She is an editor of The Spotlong Review. More of her work is at claudiaschatz.weebly.com