Editor Selections for Issue 263
Poetry & Short Fiction

POETRY

Driving the Western Dakotas
with My Husband’s Dying Stepfather

Mule deer and pronghorns bent to the drought’s gold grass,
sun-gilded bodies devouring sun-gilded stems.
Buttes cast flat-topped shadows east, 
ravines ran black, and green-capped
pheasants winged on the wind—
so much sky, so much land. But Papa slept
in the backseat, beside our children,
the cancer sown in his pancreas
gone to seed in his chest.
Always a little pain, he said, to manage. 

In my womb, a cell split, split again—
wondrous, but each cramp a portent,
like Papa’s sighs and the dusk
through which we passed,
calling to our daughters and son
about antelope and jackrabbits,
Papa roused by our exclamations
at the gaudy clouds of sunset.  

Come dark, ungulates grazed the road’s rim,
blinking at our headlights’ invasion
or bounding before us. What sense
in life enduring on dry mouthfuls
and water thick with sediment,
in looping Papa through the Black Hills and Badlands
as his tumors flourished and fragmented,
in birthing a baby into the infinite? 

I tapped the brakes at each glimmer
from the prairie’s margins, eyes or
reflectors, omens of the unexpected:
sudden turns, bodies in our path.
The tires hissed, Life, death, no sense,
nonsense, pain we manage.
A pang—
but I kept my foot on the gas.
Papa’s breath whistled over
our children, who dreamt against him.

~ ~ ~

Anemone Beaulier’s poetry and essays have been published by Cave Wall, Columbia Journal, Cumberland River Review, North American Review, The Pinch, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Rattle’s Poets Respond, Salamander, and The Southern Review. Originally from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, she lives in Laramie, Wyoming, with her husband and children.

Horse Funeral

A dead horse is never something the scouts can be allowed to see.
In truth, though, they find out no matter how we try to hide it.
We can bury the secret in the ground and the animals retrieve it
like a message, delivered to my girls at night on the roofs
of the cabins they pretend not to climb. We can wash it down
the river, but the water will spill the words, like tea, into the mouths
of the girls when they dive down for shimmering rocks.
And if that doesn't work, the minnows will shrill the tale
in their ears, like sirens do, when they careen out of their canoes.
We have tried leaving the news with the trees, but the birds
peck it right out of the branches and go singing it down the hill
to the ball courts. It snags in the tennis nets, hanging there all day
until the scouts resume their game after lunch. 

The woodpecker and the warblers are the worst,
teaching their young how to stow our secrets in their feathers,
their nests, their neon beaks. They make such a mess
with their forgetfulness, stuffing the heavy deaths in the wilds
for anyone to find without a care in the world. The news
of our first horse's death, Captain, still sifts through the mist
where the girls collect their blooms for the day, and they come
to us huffing about a horse they never even knew, long dead
thirty years past. Even when we give it the sun, it burns back
the horse's name into their very skin while they lounge
in their suntan temples.  

I still remember the most foolish thing we ever tried.
Ducky attempted to sneak Ranger's death out of the camp
under the cover of cool darkness. With mud,
we smudged onto her arms and legs the symbols of secrecy:
a hunter, two braided wands of wheat, a rose, a key with a knot
between the handle and the tooth. But when she dashed
through the thicket, wild and quick, thorny fingers scraped
against her hieroglyphs, tearing free her hair and her precious cargo.
Something dark and quicker than light sped around Ducky
that night, but she said she never saw what it was that stole the words.
This is the nature of the horse in death. No grave, no lie, no trick
can hold back a horse that has shed its blood.
They spirit home, always, to the girl.

~ ~ ~

Lauren Crawford holds an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. A native of Houston, Texas, she is the recipient of the 2023 Willie Morris Award, and her poetry has either appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Passengers Journal, The Appalachian Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Ponder Review, The Midwest Quarterly, THIMBLE Lit Mag, The Worcester Review, The Spectacle and elsewhere. Lauren currently teaches writing at the University of New Haven and serves as the assistant poetry editor for Alan Squire Publishing. Connect with her on Twitter @LaurenCraw4d

Chip Bag De Re

It was drawn up high by the winds in Pitkin Plaza
when I saw it, the last emperor, male monarch
with spotted eyes, once borne of milkweed
and shitting frass in lumps on wet cement outside
someone’s garden, until it was about to transform,
like all things in nature which come in due time.
That I stood and watched, and waited by the double
star graffiti, thinking wishfully on its migration
to the cul-de-sac of some dead-end street suburb,
not so far as Mexico, but passed the salt-flung winds
of Fairhaven, its silvery lining sparking in flurries
like horse shoes on the blinding trail, its flimsy-
willful tenacity in spite of all, in spite of us—I
believed in some inert thing, carelessly abandoned,
not a species damned.

~ ~ ~

David Capps is a philosophy professor and writer who lives in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of four chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming). His latest work, On the Great Duration of Life, a riff on Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, is available from Schism Neuronics.

To Be the Vowel in an Abjad Family

is like being a trombone among tubas,
trumpets, cornets, and French horns.
The only daughter, a rebel like exiled vowels
in a consonantal family.   

Today I rhythm down to curious
learning the French word for paperclip. Like
one found in the faculty lounge, pulled
from a Staples box, flimsy cardboard coffin
to be forgotten, Le Trombone in red. 

A child is like a trombone, an instrument
without valves flapping open and shut. The one
member of a brass family using metal slides
to change tune, its U-shaped tubes
forming an S or fetal coil of possibility  

like a daughter pulling away, fists unclenching. 

My late father played the trombone
for Scranton High’s student orchestra, the one
football player who loved making music
more than blocking passes or sacking quarterbacks:
Curious boy running down the shape of
expectations trying to be more than tough. 

The early trombone was called sackbut,
French for saquer (pull) and bouter (push), its one
repetitive movement to attach and detach.
Like siblings extend and slide
into each other’s worlds until torsion
breaks the bonds, dislocates. Reality’s funny 

friction fails to hold papers in the mouth
of a clip. Productivity, portability, and loss are
the metal tongues of language—buzzing lips
of a mother who still feels small, her mouth
gripping the brass heart’s-bell rage between never
enough and hazy vibration of half notes 

like the paperclip I’ve now untwisted. Or acrobatic
Hebrew letters in a book on the table, the one
with words right to left for your father
and fog. Curious why they’re spelled the same
but only one wears nikudot (vowels).
I ask my Israeli colleague: 

How can a word have no vowels? How
can such different words be clipped
together?  

This ancient language is an Abjad, one
whose vowels are discarded, unnecessary
because we Hebrew speakers just know
where the vowels would be. She laughs,  
no one would mistake fog for father.  

Most orchestras seat three trombones
like my parents’ pit of two sons and me, the one
who’s unclipped from our family, unfolded
and picking locks, reaching hard places. Fog horns
pull ships to shore while bugles push graveside
for those left off life’s page, muted.  

An only daughter is the truth-teller, down
like a family wound, wounded and unwound.  

To be a simple paper clip found is to be
Le Trombone in red script or a vowel in an abjad
language, ancient and holy. How so much
power is found in small things.

~ ~ ~

Candice M. Kelsey [she/her] is a poet, essayist, and educator living in both Los Angeles and Georgia. A finalist for a Best Microfiction 2023, she is the author of seven books; her latest chapbook Postcards from the Masthead has just been released with boats against the current. She mentors an incarcerated writer through PEN America and reads for The Los Angeles Review. Please find her at https://www.candicemkelseypoet.com/

SHORT FICTION

One Writer Against Oblivion

A Paper Presented by Peter Murray at the International Conference on the Written Word, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, June 14, 2012

Arnold Plutowsky was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on January 6, 1940, and died in Sherman, Ohio, on January 22, 2000. The author of six books, including novels, works of poetry, and a pair of short story collections, one of which is unpublished, Plutowsky has no national reputation and, from what I’ve gathered during my exhaustive research, including interviews with Ohio booksellers past and present, only a miniscule state-wide reputation.

Inevitably I’m asked, “Why devote a paper, much less an entire dissertation, to Plutowsky?” I have a two-part answer, the first of which is my personal connection to Plutowsky via his great niece, my fiancée, Loretta. Professionally I have this response: Plutowsky is one of hundreds of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American authors—indeed, one of tens of thousands of American artists in a variety of fields, including classical music, visual arts, theater, and dance—who in the face of persistent obscurity and consistent lack of financial reward, continued, and continue, to produce works of indisputable merit. The question I’ve sought to answer in my examination of Plutowsky’s life and career could be asked of any artist similarly situated: Why persist?

Boyhood, Youth, and Early Adulthood

Plutowsky’s Russian immigrant parents, Vladimir and Tatiana, were, in his oldest sister Helen’s words “present all the time, yet also invisible—like bodies in a cemetery.” She confessed that she and her sisters, Elizabeth and Natasha, “were no angels” in their treatment of their brother. “One evening, when Arnold was all dressed up to go to his eighth-grade formal, we handcuffed him to his bed and alternated reading chapters of Pride and Prejudice to him. Where his work resembles Jane Austen’s, we take all the credit.”

From an early age, Plutowsky dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player. He was cut from his high-school team, however, because of what his coach, Bob Robinson, called Plutowsky’s “amusing but annoying tendency to write poems in the dirt of the batter’s box.” Robinson added, “He couldn’t hit a curveball to save his life. But when it came to writing sonnets, he was an all-star.”

Plutowsky was a good-to-excellent student in high school, excelling in English and history and doing passably well in other subjects. One of his classmates, James Semantis, claims that the short story Plutowsky published his senior year in the school’s literary magazine, The Crier, was his. “I gave it to him in exchange for a pack of cigarettes and three pieces of Bazooka bubble gum,” he said. “That’s like Beethoven trading his Ninth Symphony for a snuff box and a lollipop.” Semantis, who’d heard from an acquaintance about my work on Plutowsky and initiated contact, is an unpublished novelist who spent the bulk of our two-hour interview grilling me about agents and publishers who might be interested in his 627-page novel, The Stranger Arrived Carrying a Briefcase Full of Demon Love. He appears, even after Plutowsky’s death, to be jealous of his former classmate, although he proudly, even defiantly, says he has read none of the Plutowsky oeuvre.   

After graduating from high school, Plutowsky attended Ohio State University on a tuba scholarship. Although he’d picked up the instrument only two years before, he managed to convince the chair of the Ohio State Music Department to give him an audition. “He played ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King,’” recalls Professor Emeritus of the Recorder Sebastian Reynolds, one of three members of the scholarship committee. “By the end, he was red-faced and on his knees, but he’d hit every note.” As a member of the Ohio State marching band, Plutowsky met Sally Jean Daniels, a baton twirler in the same unit, and they became on-again, off-again lovers during Plutowsky’s four years in Columbus.

Daniels is the author of an unpublished memoir, Twirl Girl, which she insisted I read before we spoke. Our conversation over espresso and carrot cake at the Blue Piccolo, the Columbus café she owns, began pleasantly, but when I failed to produce the name of an agent or publisher who might be interested in her work, she grew monosyllabic, leaving me with no more expansive a portrait of Plutowsky than she’d provided in her memoir, in which she summed him up as “four years of forgettable.”

Big City, Big Dream

Like hundreds of young writers before him, Plutowsky ventured after his college graduation to New York City, where he hoped to find a job at a publishing house as a precursor to launching his literary career. He was, however, unsuccessful. A pair of letters he wrote to Michelle Hopper, a woman he met at a rest stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and with whom he had a seven-minute affair in the back of her nineteen-foot U-Haul, speaks of his disillusionment. “Big city, big nothing,” he complained. After three weeks in the Big Apple, he was reduced to playing his tuba on subway platforms.

Of the six extant photographs of the young Plutowsky—a trove of family photo albums was ruined when a sewer overflowed into Vladimir and Tatiana Plutowsky’s basement in the mid-1970s—three are of him in the 96th Street and Broadway subway station. His beige suit is at least two sizes too large, and it accentuates, rather than hides, his thinness. Beneath his mop of black hair, his ears appear as round, and nearly as large, as Frisbees.

Eventually, Plutowsky secured a position as a hotdog vendor at Yankee Stadium. This experience would inform his first collection of short stories, Little Dog in a Big Park, published a decade later. According to Michelle Hopper, Plutowsky supported himself after the baseball season by gambling at the dog track in Yonkers.

As part of her stipulation for agreeing to talk with me, Ms. Hopper asked me to announce on my social media platforms that her novel, The General Dressed in Gray, the Lady Dressed in Scarlet, a 1173-page saga of the Civil War South, is looking for representation.

The Sportswriter

Before the next baseball season, Plutowsky returned to Ohio, this time to Cleveland, where he joined the sports staff of the Plain Dealer. Although Plutowsky’s former editor, Jim Lang, is deceased, his widow, Barbara Jane Lang, told me she had “a garage full” of documentation from the fourteen years in which Plutowsky plied his writer’s craft in Cleveland.

When I visited her house in Rocky River, she presented me with her husband’s complete works. In addition to his sports editor job, he was an aspiring novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. I dutifully read his six novels, four plays (including, blessedly, a one-act), and two screenplays. In his novel He Got What He Deserved, the main character, a former sportswriter turned published author named Arnie Neptuneowsky, is brutally murdered by a trio of critics appalled by his weak prose.

During his fourteen-year journalism career, Plutowsky never covered anything but high school sports. Why was he not promoted to cover one of Cleveland’s professional teams or even one of its college squads? I suspect Jim Lang saw a colleague with the same kind of literary ambitions he had—and with far more talent—and did his best to sabotage Plutowsky’s ambitions.

The First-Time Author

Two months after his thirty-first birthday, Plutowsky published his first book, the aforementioned Little Dog in a Big Park, with Southeastern Illinois State University Press. I have discovered only three reviews of the book. The first, in Publisher’s Weekly, found the collection “frequently humorous, although obsessed, sometimes to the point of stultifying, with condiments. How much does one need to know about mustard?” The Plain Dealer obliged Plutowsky with an eight-paragraph review, mostly a summary of six of the twelve stories. The Williamsport Post-Gazette, however, made Little Dog in a Big Park the featured review of its Sunday paper on April 25, 1971.

It was doubtless this glowing review that earned Plutowsky an invitation to read at ceremonies marking the opening of the 1971 Little League World Series, held August 24 in Williamsport. In a letter to the underworld figure Bo “Dog Face” Bowkowski, whom he’d met at a cock fight on the shores of Lake Erie, and whom he greatly admired because of his unusual lack of literary ambition, Plutowsky confided, “For my reading, I’m hoping for a crowd of several hundred people—baseball fans eager to hear a good ballpark yarn, short-story fans hoping to discover the next Hemingway, literary critics ready to champion a rising star. This is my World Series. I need to hit it out of the park.” (Plutowsky’s side of his three-decades-long correspondence with Bowkowski can be found in Bowkowski’s FBI file, to which I gained access via the Freedom of Information Act. Bowkowski’s side of the exchange consisted exclusively of postcards, with never more than a dozen words on each. Forty-two of his postcards state, simply: “Persevere.”)

Unfortunately for Plutowsky, organizers of the Little League World Series scheduled a celebrity softball match at the same time as his reading, and although the exhibition game’s most notable participant was Kirk Funk, who played a pizza deliveryman on an episode of the I Love Lucy Show, attendance at Plutowsky’s reading suffered as a result. The Williamsport Public Library’s head librarian, Janice O’Malley, who organized the event, noted in her diary: “I was one of at most ten souls present. We had five time this number for Teach Your Granddaughter—or Grandson!—How to Quilt Day.”

In a letter to Bowkowski the day after his reading, Plutowsky mentions O’Malley: “Librarian slinks up to the table where I’m supposed to be signing books—except no one’s buying—and asks if I might be free for a drink later. I’m thinking, There might be something smoldering behind those horn-rimmed glasses, so I say okay. I meet her at a bar around the corner, and she tells me about her novels and asks me about my agent. I slip her his name and number. She goes off to the bathroom—and never returns.” (The unpublished writings of Janice O’Malley take up an entire shelf at the Williamsport Public Library. As part of her settlement with the library over withheld overtime pay, the library agreed to make her complete works—twenty-six volumes of diaries and six unpublished romance novels—accessible to the public for fifty years.)

As for Plutowsky’s bildungsroman, records from SISU Press show that Little Dog in a Big Park sold 414 copies during its first year of publication and forty-two copies in the four plus decades thereafter.

Failing the Fame Game

For the sake of a more compelling story, I would like to report that Plutowsky’s sales increased with each subsequent book or that, amid his poor-selling output, he had The New York Times Best Sellers anomaly or a Pulitzer Prize winner. But if I did so, I would be writing about the career Plutowsky hoped to have rather than the career he did have. Plutowsky had a two-book deal with SISU Press, which in 1975 released his novel, Small Cat in a Town of Lions, a surreal but nevertheless autobiographical account of his year in New York. The book received an upbeat review in Publisher’s Weekly and respectful notices in mid-sized newspapers in the Midwest, including the Des Moines Register, which praised Plutowsky’s choice of narrators in a chapter set at a dog track: “To tell the tale from the perspective of the mechanical rabbit was pure genius. If Hemingway had only been so clever in The Old Man and the Sea—what a story the sharks might have told!”

Good reviews didn’t lead to significant sales, however. Small Cat in a Town of Lions, his all-time bestseller, fell fourteen books short of 1,000 sold. Plutowsky himself bought fifty-four copies. Pulling from his favorite metaphorical world, he wrote to Bowkowski, “As a writer, am I destined to be a mere singles’ hitters—a singles’ hitter in the minor leagues, no less?”

The Author as Teacher

After the publication of his novel, Plutowsky quit the Plain Dealer and returned to school, earning a master’s degree in English at Cleveland State University. Soon thereafter, he secured a teaching position at Ohio Eastern University, in Sherman. Plutowsky became the university’s second professor of creative writing, joining poet Bart Emerson. Department newsletters of the time make regular mention of Plutowsky-Emerson collaborations on projects ranging from a Monday night reading series to a “Vegas Night” fundraiser for a cancer-stricken graduate student. Behind Plutowsky’s friendship with Emerson was a more complicated story. Soon after he was hired at Ohio Eastern, Plutowsky began an affair with Emerson’s wife, Helene.

Helene Emerson’s novel The Professor’s Wife, which she has posted in its entirety on her Web site, is the story of a five-year affair between the titular character and a novelist and short-story writer named Pluto Arnoldowsky. The affair ends either comically or tragically—it’s difficult to interpret the tone of Mrs. Emerson’s work, as it seems to change from paragraph to paragraph, even from sentence to sentence—when Arnoldowsky, in despair over the end of his affair, hurls himself out of a university clock tower, only to be caught by the second hand. Because the clock runs on a nuclear battery no one knows how to safely disconnect, Arnoldowsky is destined to spend the rest of his life whirling around the clockface.

In real life, Bart Emerson left his wife for the university’s field hockey coach, and Helene Emerson moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where she leads seances to summon the ghost of William Faulkner.

Plutowsky’s two books of poetry were written in the aftermath of his affair but neither addresses the subject. Instead, he utilizes dark humor to tell the tale of his literary obscurity. In “Janice,” he moans, “Who the hell will read this book/brilliant though it might be?/Not even a librarian in Williamsport/Janice—take off your glasses and show me your conniving eyes!” In the title poem of his second book, “Alone,” he writes of living in “a midnight of our culture, under a philistine sky/in which even the moon is watching TV.”

Initially, I interpreted his foray into poetry as an unconditional surrender of his dream of attracting a sizeable readership. As he’d written a few years before to Bowkowski, “Is it possible to write anything less obscure than poetry? Even the fine print on cake-mix boxes enjoys a larger readership.” Now, however, I view his intentions as more complex. Obviously he was aware of poetry’s small audience, even when compared to the audience for literary fiction. At the same time, I believe he felt both a legitimate calling—his poem “Mozart” in his first collection refers to poetry as “the means by which I, the unmusical, sing to the gods”—and a crazy gambler’s hunch to bet on something with even longer odds of securing him the literary recognition he desired.

Neither of his poetry collections sold over 100 copies.

On average, Plutowsky published a story and three poems a year in university literary journals. He never published in the major magazines, although he did once wallpaper his bathroom with rejection slips from The New Yorker. Of the five journals in which he published most frequently, only one had a circulation of more than 500. Nevertheless, his steady, if nearly anonymous, output allowed him to climb the ranks at Ohio Eastern. He became an associate professor in 1984. Six years later, he earned the rank of full professor. Neither in letters to Bowkowski nor elsewhere does Plutowsky mention anything about his teaching, his students, or his service to the university.

Literary Obscurity

As Plutowsky grew older, and as his literary output yielded neither fame nor fortune nor widespread critical recognition, he saw his pursuit of what he called “literary immortality” as delusional. “As the gods exist only in the prayers and fears of their worshippers, so do writers exist only when their readers open a book,” he wrote Bowkowski. “But who opens a book in a movie theater, at a rock concert, in front of a computer screen? Most authors are buried in untouched volumes on dust-covered shelves. We plead, ‘Disinter me.’ But only a few blessed books are pulled from obscurity and opened to the light.”

Plutowsky composed these words three months after the June, 1989, publication of his second, and last, novel, The Day, about a novelist whose wish to trade places with a professional baseball player is granted—but only for a single day. The novelist makes the most of his opportunity, hitting a pair of homeruns in a pennant-clinching game, granting interviews to the crowds of reporters crammed in front of his locker, and engaging in marathon sex with a trio of groupies in a bourbon-bottle-strewn hotel suite. But the magic ends after twenty-four hours, and the novelist must return to his customary world, where “although his characters are written with the precision of a fastball thrown to the outside corner and his plots are crafted with the grace and energy of a center fielder’s pursuit of a fly ball, he is less consequential than a peanut vendor.”

The Day was published by Simon and Schuster, Plutowsky’s first New York house, but its sales were slow due to a flood of baseball memoirs, with their supposedly authentic revelations about life in the big leagues, published during the same season. Even Simon and Schuster worried about Plutowsky’s novel cannibalizing sales of one of its nonfiction titles, My Plate is Full, a memoir of Epicurean indulgences by New York Mets catcher Buster Jones. Believing it had to put its advertising dollars behind either Plutowsky or Jones, Simon and Schuster chose the latter. Six months after its publication, and after fewer than 800 copies were sold, The Day was remaindered. There was no paperback edition.

In a despairing letter to Bowkowski, Plutowsky wrote, “Why do I write? Why did I ever write? Why do I continue to write when I could fit all of my readers into my kitchen without requiring any of them to stand?

“Am I a man shouting underwater, preaching in an empty church, playing a guitar without strings?” He admitted he craved praise: “I want awed reviews. I want letters from dumbstruck readers in Topeka and Tokyo. I want prizes—every last one of them. And if some money comes my way, I won’t turn it down. I need it, after all I’ve lost on dogs and horses and the fucking Super Bowl.”

Plutowsky finished with this exhortation: “I must find meaning in my art even when my art has no audience. I must learn to love my literary oblivion.”

What followed, however, was the first fallow period of Plutowsky’ life. His gambling increased—he made frequent trips to Atlantic City—and his writing ceased. In the publication category under which all professors at Ohio Eastern University are reviewed each year, he received five consecutive evaluations of “unsatisfactory.” There were periodic rumors he would be made an administrator. In a brief letter to Bowkowski written in the fifth of his fallow years, he confessed: “I am considering applying for early retirement. When I talk about writing, I feel like a man speaking of a lover who dumped his ass.”

Love

Plutowsky seemed headed for a melancholic last chapter to his life. But in the fall of 1997, he fell in love. Hilda Meyers was three years older than Plutowsky and confined to a wheelchair since the age of twenty as the result of a skiing accident. She came to Ohio Eastern on a three-year guest professorship in the philosophy department. She’d admired one of Plutowsky’s stories in Western Humanities Review, which in the same issue had published her essay on Albert Camus’s fatal motorcycle ride. By the time she came to Ohio Eastern, she’d read all of Plutowsky’s books.

Plutowsky liked Meyers’s resilient optimism as well as her scholarship, especially her work on Camus, whose novel The Stranger was an early influence on him. And he was enchanted by her beauty. Despite her age, her hair remained a vivid black, and although I won’t embarrass or titillate you with the details of their sex life, believe me when I say it wasn’t dull. (On the other hand, it’s possible that Plutowsky embellished in his letters to Bowkowski. Their correspondence could, on occasion, take the form of a stereotypical men’s locker room exchange.)

Meyers was Plutowsky’s ideal reader. She was intelligent and insightful and open to delight. Although she could be critical of his work, she was never callous. To Bowkowski, Plutowsky wrote, “I don’t think I would trade my one beloved reader for an audience of a million. Perhaps all artists, if they’re lucky, find the one person who understands and appreciates their intentions, who ratifies and celebrates their vision.”

If Meyers was his beloved reader, she also became his subject matter. His final ten stories address the theme of artist and audience. In one story, the artist is a dancer; in another, she’s a concert pianist; in a third, he’s the drummer in a small-town jazz band. A fourth protagonist is a different kind of artist, a minor league baseball pitcher who falls in love with the team’s mascot because only the mascot—Out-to-Leftfield LuLu—understands the intricate challenge of throwing a knuckleball. If the stories tend to approach the sentimental, they always pull up short. Plutowsky never surrenders his trademark understanding of the way life tends to unfold—in short periods of happiness, in long periods of tedium and sorrow—and even if some of his endings are of the happily-ever-after variety, they are always earned.

Death and Legacy

On January 19, 2000, Meyers died of a brain aneurysm. Three weeks later, after leaving the building where he was teaching a course on “The Literature of Baseball,” Plutowsky stepped onto Campus Drive and into the path of a FedEx truck. His death was ruled an accident, although some of his colleagues suspected suicide.

Plutowsky’s last ten stories, which he’d compiled in a manuscript called Clown and Crowd, represent by far his best work. Behind every story, one feels a sympathetic, generous, and understanding presence—someone both wise to life’s disappointments and failures and awed by its joys and triumphs.

Plutowsky never tried to publish Clown and Crowd, which he finished six months before Meyers’s death. His prized reader—his muse—had declared it his masterpiece, and this was good enough for him. “I’ll never see one of my books scale The New York Times Best Sellers list,” Plutowsky wrote in his last letter to Bowkowski, who was himself to meet his maker, via an axe in a Cleveland Heights parking lot, two months after Plutowsky. “I’ll never win a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award. But I’m sincere in saying I don’t care anymore. While I don’t think I could ever reach the point where writing for myself alone would be enough, I have forsaken my deluded dream of a million readers and, instead, have realized an even greater glory of having found the One.”

Posthumous Glory—Please

Clown and Crowd has yet to find a publisher, despite my efforts. If Plutowsky had given up on his dream of being a writer of influence, someone who matters in modern-day America, I, on his behalf, have not. Perhaps I have been caught up in his early ambition and am discounting his later acceptance of obscurity, but I also feel confident about the superior quality of the stories in his final collection. They are as good as anything published in the last fifty years. The problem, of course, is that the author isn’t alive to market his book, to do readings, to appear on NPR and Oprah. Plutowsky was never good at self-promotion, but, as one of the publishers I spoke with was happy to point out, he would be terrible at it now.

Even so, I believe in Arnold Plutowsky. I don’t believe in his New Age, New Buddhism, late-in-life equanimity, which—let me be honest—strikes me as fatalism masquerading as blissful resignation. I believe in his final, love-inspired book. And, if you can refrain from laughing, I’ll make this request: If anyone here knows an agent or a publisher—or even a friendly writer who might be willing to pass on Plutowsky’s manuscript to an agent or editor—please come see me after my talk.

Yes, I’ll confess: I want the fame and fortune they all want, all those writers and would-be writers and outright hacks, although if Plutowsky’s collection were to become a million-seller or a major award-winner, I would be only on the periphery of acclaim and reward. After all, Plutowsky’s manuscript isn’t mine. Yet to be the midwife of something great, I’m betting, would be as sweet, in its own way, as being its creator.

Please—no need to be shy. If you’re a publisher—or merely someone six degrees removed from a publisher who’s willing to help an amazing work of literature see the light—let’s talk. I’m free all day, all month, all year.

~ ~ ~

Mark Brazaitis is the author of eight books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose. His novel American Seasons will be published this summer. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program and the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop.

The New-New Speakeasies

Andrew Delaney didn’t invent the modern speakeasy, but he did create two of its most celebrated early prototypes: Don’tSay, in Hell’s Kitchen—accessed via an empty soda fridge at the back of a Korean grocery store; and, later, ExtraSecret—hidden behind a tumble dryer in an East Village laundromat. Delaney’s goal, in opening the two bars, wasn’t simply to make money. Financially—as a successful restaurateur of considerable renown—his position was already secure. It was, rather, something stranger and more personal—a love of secrets—a craving for what was hidden and inaccessible. A student of the Prohibition, he’d often gazed longingly at those grainy images of old speakeasies—their tiny, ill-lit, secret rooms—and he ached to recreate the feeling of those spaces in the modern cityscape: bars that had no obvious entrances or exteriors, bars that felt otherworldly when you entered them, bars whose lighting conjured a new reality. The first patrons of Don’tSay and ExtraSecret spoke lovingly of their weirdness—the sense that these spaces were nestled between the folds of reality, and that anything might be possible inside them. They emphasized, in particular, the light conditions of the two bars, which in the case of Don’tSay was evocative of late afternoon sunlight filtering down through vats of fermenting apricots, and in the case of ExtraSecret was an almost amniotic, rose-tinted glow.

The modern speakeasy—like the original, true speakeasies of Prohibition—has a complicated relationship with secrecy. Too much, and the speakeasy is unknown, and therefore unvisited; too little, and the speakeasy is exposed, and therefore endangered. And while the modern speakeasy is never physically endangered in the way the old speakeasies were, it may, through over-exposure, undergo a kind of death, and become a “Speakeasy-Only-In-Name.” Hence the special love for the undiscovered speakeasy, the speakeasy that still feels like the real thing, where the entrance—behind the curtain—through the sliding door—feels illicit, forbidden, dangerous. The visitor to the speakeasy doesn’t want to sit alone at the bar, but does want to be one of a small, select few: peering at each other, over drinks, in the half-light. Unfortunately, the profound agreeableness of this experience makes it very difficult to engineer. The most enjoyable speakeasies have a powerful tendency to become popular, even if the proprietors of these establishments, like Andrew Delaney, take ingenious steps to delay and complicate the inevitable.

In the case of Don’tSay and ExtraSecret, the bars enjoyed a few glorious years of secrecy each, before their inexorable slide into popularity began. ExtraSecret was fatally damaged by a glowing review in The New York Times, ranking it #3 on its “Best of the City” bars list, after which it became horribly over-exposed—a line around the block—everyone jostling and taking pictures of themselves and disrupting the regular functioning of the laundromat as they waited to shimmy in via its legendary tumble dryer. It had, in other words, become a Speakeasy-Only-In-Name. At Don’tSay, meanwhile, the Korean grocery store owners were soon so irritated by the large numbers of well-heeled New Yorkers snaking around their produce aisles that they forced Delaney to create a separate, ordinary entrance to the bar outside the grocery store: in effect, despeakeasying the establishment entirely.

Delaney, smarting from these wounds, tried to regroup. He opened three exceptionally well-hidden speakeasies later that year: Subrosa, in an antique book shop near Gramercy Park; ShadowBlend, behind an arcade in Coney Island; and Incognito, on the third floor of an obscure art gallery in Tribeca. The interiors of these bars, if possible, were even more gorgeous and otherworldly than Don’tSay and ExtraSecret. Subrosa evoked a sort of a subterranean pleasure dome of magical delights; ShadowBlend was sleek and metallic, with hundreds of mirrors embedded in the floor, walls and ceiling, making the bar and all its inhabitants repeat in every direction to infinity; and Incognito was like an old school Prohibition-era drinking den, with tables formed of old barrel tops and, behind the bar, misshapen bottles containing unusually strong distillations, all under the flicker of candlelight. While the bars, in and of themselves, were brilliantly hidden, now Delaney introduced an additional layer of friction to the process of accessing them. In the case of book store-co-located-Subrosa—accessed via a secret passage behind a section of shelf space devoted to the Romantic poets—the mechanism was calibrated such that it would only open if Songs of Experience, by William Blake—this work and no other—were gently pushed a quarter inch into the shelf. In the case of arcade-nested ShadowBlend, the enterprising bar seeker first needed to start a game of the original Donkey Kong, then die in a very specific way, hitting a particular barrel, at which point the arcade game would swivel around on an axle, depositing the bar seeker in a pitch-black chamber, from which he or she would stumble through layers of velvet curtains into the eerie metallic lighting of the bar. And in the case of art gallery-contained Incognito, the trick lay in locating a particular painting of a sunset, then staring unblinkingly into it for thirty seconds—no mean feat in itself—before the painting slid down into the wall, revealing the opening of a chute, at the bottom of which was a pile of soft mattresses, and, just off to the side, a doorway, flickering along its interior frame with the reflected candlelight from the bar.

Unfortunately for Delaney, while his plan had been to hide the bars, ingeniously, and complicate the process of entering them—all with a goal of reducing the number of clientele to a tiny, serendipitously fortunate few—precisely the opposite occurred. In a kind of Streisand effect, the very steps taken by Delaney to hide and gatekeep the bars had the effect of drawing attention to them, creating a sort of aura of excitement which attracted, rather than deterred, would-be patrons. After just a few months, the bars were huge commercial successes—which is to say, they too had become Speakeasies-Only-In-Name—and Delaney, defeated once more, returned, wearily, to his drawing board.

It may be illustrative, at this point, to describe some of the more obvious solutions considered but rejected by Delaney in his quest. He could, with his reputation and economic resources, easily have swapped speakeasies for private members’ clubs: elite, financially exclusive institutions with prohibitive annual membership dues. This would certainly have enabled him to create the sorts of intimate imbibing spaces he dreamed of, yet also seemed to run counter to the democratic ethos of the speakeasy, which was hypothetically open to anyone, even if hidden from most. He might have given up on his speakeasy quest entirely, and simply opened exceptionally good cocktail bars, pouring his energy and creativity into the quality of the drinks and the vividness of the décor, but this, too, seemed a rejection of all he held holy. There remained something irresistible to Delaney about the promise, the meaning, of the secret drinking den, and he knew it was his life’s mission to tunnel ever deeper into that territory.

Deeper, initially, was where he committed to travel: deeper behind, deeper beneath. At Subrosa, under a table in the darkest corner, he now constructed a narrow tunnel that led through the back wall and into a brand-new drinking space—SubSubrosa—with three bar stools organized around a tiny, shrine-like bar in amethyst-suffused light. At ShadowBlend, in the communal handwash area that served the two bathrooms, he placed a full-length mirror on hinges and created what looked like a walk-in closet behind it, this actually serving as the mouth of a secret passage that led through layers of velvet curtains into an almost-pitch-black drinking den called DarkSwill. And finally, in a dim corner of Incognito, Delaney created a mechanism whereby, every so often, a particular barrel top table would softly unlock on one of its sides, enabling those in-the-know to slide the barrel top over to reveal a small hole in the floor, on one side of which was a ladder, which could be climbed down to access a new secret drinking chamber, Cognoscenti, hidden in its bowels.

These speakeasies-within-speakeasies, the first of their kind, he revealed to no-one except the bartenders working inside them, hoping that this total lack of disclosure would slow the rate at which, inevitably, news about their existence entered the city’s nervous system. And so, for several weeks, the new bars were entirely unvisited—save for Delaney—who often sat enjoying the thrillingly temporary peace and quiet of their undiscovered rooms. Eventually, of course, a guest appeared, then another couple of guests, then a few more. There was an initial, golden period of semi-awareness, during which the bars functioned as exceptionally well-kept secrets, rarely with more than a half dozen patrons inside them, and during which Delaney felt that maybe this time he had done it, maybe this time he had slayed the speakeasy dragon. Alas, inevitably, like the breaching of a dam, the trickle of curious guests was a strictly temporary condition. Soon the bars were busy, then they were over-crowded, and finally it seemed that the higher-level speakeasies that contained the new bars had become little more than elaborate line-waiting places for the main attractions, which were the lower-level speakeasies nested inside them.

Delaney’s dismay—after SubSubrosa, DarkSwill and Cognoscenti each quickly deteriorated into Speakeasy-Only-In-Name status—was even greater than when the same fate befell each of their parents. On a drive outside of the city, he was grimly assessing the feasibility of adding another layer—to create speakeasies-within-speakeasies-within-speakeasies—when he glanced out of the window and, famously, experienced a career-altering vision.

He happened to be passing through an industrial district—gray, non-descript buildings under a sheen of lightly falling rain—when he gazed through a space between rusted water towers and suddenly, very vividly, imagined a speakeasy nestled in that gap: a tiny cocktail bar hiding in plain sight. And while his mind initially rebelled at the idea’s absurdity, he found himself increasingly obsessed by it, he felt as if the ghosts of the old, true speakeasies of Prohibition were urging him in a new direction.

What followed, of course, was one of the great creative rejections in the history of the speakeasy: a casting away of definitions, a re-imagining of forms. Like all revolutionary breaks, the change seems inevitable in retrospect. Delaney’s insight was to recognize that—if he could not burrow down deeper, into ever-smaller nested spaces—he would have to travel in a new, previously un-imagined direction: upwards, into daylight. Secrecy itself was to be redefined: the new goal would be not ultra-hiddenness—which inevitably drew its own kind of attention—but, rather, semi-concealment, gentle obfuscation, and camouflage.

Gone were the secret entrances and rotating panels—the chutes, ball pits, and tunnels. Gone were the invisible exteriors, whereby each speakeasy had to be nested in some other, more prosaic establishment. In their place came a new generation of speakeasies that hid their identities in plain sight, that made use of their surrounding geography—whether natural or man-made—to obscure or lightly veil their entrances. In this new paradigm came speakeasies in locations that had never before been associated with cocktail bars: there was MystBower, in Van Cortland Park, Yonkers, nestled in the immense branches of an ancient sycamore tree; Subterrene, in Harlem, a short walk through the southbound 1 tunnel from 145th Street subway station; Landschaft, in Red Hook, naturally concealed between hedgerows on the outskirts of a working dairy farm; Trade, in Newark, located inside a converted shipping container in the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal; Buff, hollowed into one of the sheer cliff-faces of the Palisades, accessed either by rappelling down from a high hiking trail or climbing up from a tiny pier on the Hudson River; and, of course, RustHaven, in Long Island, wedged like a jewel box between two vast, heavily rusted water towers in the Hauppage Industrial Park.

The new-new speakeasies—which in some cases required a bus or train journey to get to—and in other cases forced the enterprising bar seeker to navigate actual physical danger in the process of accessing—filled their occasional customers with delight. They were thrilling to enter, but unlike all of their ancestors, lightly attended, and never over-crowded. Delaney, after years of toil, had bequeathed to the world a collection of speakeasies that were genuinely deserving of the name.

More significant than the bars themselves was the movement they helped inspire, which, as everyone knows, has transformed the urban environment. A casual walk down any street in the country reveals a half-dozen micro-speakeasies—some of them consisting of just two or three barstools—partially hidden from view. The new-new-new speakeasies are in back yards and alleys, on balconies and rooftops, in cellars and basements, on street corners, elevated walkways, the outskirts of public swimming pools. They are in parks, vacant lots, construction sites, woods, fields, and caves. The concealment is always partial—a section of curtain, raised above the ground, obscuring the faces of the speakeasy’s guests but exposing (like a bathroom partition) their shoes—a trellis fence, covered in vines, revealing in its tiny apertures the amused, intoxicated expressions of those drinking their strong cocktails mere inches away from sober passersby—a panel of frosted or clouded glass, through which the blurred smudges of merry cocktail drinkers are visible, fleetingly, like shadows. Dozens more are revealed on any train ride outside the city, where the repeating hedgerows flash with the sparkling gems of tiny, half-concealed speakeasies—more than anyone thought possible. Some of these bars are fixtures in their geographies, with names and postal addresses and bartenders drawing regular checks; others are more ephemeral, existing for mere hours before dissipating on the winds. The new bars are both secret and exposed, they are hidden yet visible, they are, in their own way, like skirts, like veils, like the lightest of light scarves. And, increasingly, they are everywhere.

Unbelievably, Delaney still is not satisfied. He’s still searching for the next level, the next concept, the next frontier. The new-new-new-new speakeasies, conceivably, may involve novel kinds of transportation technology: airborne speakeasies in the manner of small zeppelins, which loom into view before letting down a rope bridge, taking up a few guests, then vanishing just as swiftly from view. Or waterborne speakeasies that lurk behind the horizon line of the ocean, accessed via Jet Skis and motorboats. There are plans—still not fully fleshed out—for a new generation of subterranean speakeasies, where the concept of successive speakeasy layers (each bar containing a secret entrance to a lower level, and so on, into the earth’s crust) may be deeply, vigorously explored. While the movement has its detractors—the teetotalers—the antisocial—most of us are happy to live in this new world, and crave what still lies waiting behind the furthest horizon. We gaze out toward the pinkish sky of early evening and, from where we sit, on our barstools, at our tables, the future looks tantalizing and strange.

~ ~ ~

 Toby Donovan’s fiction appears in numerous publications, including Cimarron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Catamaran, and (upcoming) december. His stories have been nominated for the Masters Review Winter Short Story Award and the Glimmer Train Family Matters Award, and he was also named one of three finalists in the Crazyhorse Crazyshorts! flash fiction contest. A Londoner by background, he currently lives in Philadelphia.

No One but the Two of Us

 And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird

—Emily Dickinson

When Henriette bit her toast in her precise way, I was rapt. A Redmond sax riff played in my head, poignant and gorgeous. Then she said she thought her great grandmother had been buried in this little town; we’d passed the cemetery when we arrived the day before. She folded her napkin into a perfect pleated fan, and said, “I’d like to look for her grave before we head back to Montreal.” She yawned as tidily as a little cat.

I didn’t think of Henriette as having forebears of any kind. She carried herself as if she arrived complete—urbane in her style and sensibility, with her fitted clothes in muted colors—her autonomy visible. Her eye for color and gesture in the work she represented at her gallery on William Street, plus her nuanced business savvy, had made her a darling of the city arts scene. Having a rare weekend off from my regular gig playing jazz bass, I’d brought her to explore the small towns of Vermont. I love the creaky old inns with tired mattresses and white cotton window dressings. At my invitation, Henriette had widened her eyes, flirtatiously, “Mais oui, peut etre.” She shrugged one shoulder, “An experiment!” She’d never been with a woman before.

The last we’d heard about the hurricane coming up the East coast of the U.S. was during our ride south. The storm was predicted to bounce off Manhattan toward Cape Cod. We’d cocooned in the car with Chick Correa’s “Focus;” she, curious and charming, not missing a detail of the changing scenery; me going on about the red clapboard barns and hillsides dotted with cows. At the inn, we’d both been too focused on Henriette to go out and mingle with the locals where me might have heard about the incipient weather.

In a light rain, it was a sweet old cemetery, a knob of land with rows of gray stones sloping downhill. Henriette sashayed on the mossy paths between headstones in her tailored raincoat, the same plummy shade as her umbrella, reading the old protestant names in her Québecoise, Hathaway as “Ahtowy,” and Hubbard as “Oobarde.” I wanted to kiss her pursed lips. Maybe she’d let me and maybe she wouldn’t. She moved quickly down the rows looking for her great grandmother, Mandana Lamb, as if she were flicking through an antique rolodex.

On our drive to Vermont, she’d pulled her blouse down her shoulders and danced in her seat to Esperanza Spalding’s “I Know You Know.” We’d laughed, belly-laughs at a French bulldog riding in a motorcycle side-car wearing goggles, with posture, as Henriette pointed out, as upright as hers. Our conversations had been as exhilarating as those I’d enjoyed with her in the club, where for the last few weeks, she’d been hanging out after my last set. The amber light of the wood paneled room brought out the spice and russet of her eyes and hair. Watching her social aptitude at the bar, the way she accessed the clever thing to say, her easy connection with people she didn’t know, was like following a gifted athlete through an obstacle course. Her rule was: talk to everyone. Her vivacity and grasp of abstraction in art and music beguiled me. She told me, “The bass line in jazz has to be both foundational and probing… conjectural, which must be what keeps it fascinating for you.” I’d felt suddenly seen, excited and embraced. Because the jazz scene—the hours, the practice and dedication—had remained alien to my last girlfriend, that relationship had ended after a couple of years of loneliness. The first time I met Henriette, she’d said, making eye-contact with herself in the bar mirror behind me, “Bass players — they are the most mysterious of musicians. And the bass itself is evidement, the sexiest. So much passion constrained by the limits of the instrument.”

We often talked, alone and with other admirers of hers, until early in the morning. She’d had many lovers, mostly artists, older men. With a shrug, she’d dismissed them.

Now, the rain picked up tempo, pattering on the leaves.

She said, “Look how saturated the green is in those trees.” She stretched her free hand out into the rain as if receiving a blessing. “See how the wetness intensifies the colors? It’s all so vivid!” She pointed, and the trees glowed with heightened beauty.

“Are you staying dry?” I asked.

“Do you mean you’ve had enough? Be direct, Leah.” She rested her umbrella on her shoulder and twirled it like a parasol. “You can always wait in the car.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Lamb doesn’t really fit as a family name for you.”

I grew up in the plains outside Toronto, the only child of my old parents, and Henriette had swept the dust off me. Her enthusiasms steeped the moment and the next and the next with possibility. She opened the world of art to me; not just brush strokes or media, but the whole intoxicating appreciation of creativity, of making or saying or singing or playing something new, of knowing about what other people make and how they think about it. Henriette’s capacity for curious and enraptured observations supercharged me. When she was in the audience at the club, I hummed with new energy and lost awareness of crucial details like my hands and fingers, my surroundings, as I played.

We crossed the cemetery lane, skirting huge puddles. I imagined, if the sun shone, that this would be a gentle place to spend eternity. The old stone walls, the moss, and the dripping off-white blossoms of the shrubbery sweetened the sadness of the graves. A small man passed us, armored head to toe in the sort of L.L. Bean rain gear that tourists might buy for a trip to the National Parks. Henriette said, “What a storm!” And when he didn’t answer, she said, “I wish I had a rainsuit like yours.” He nodded several times as he passed, smiling enthusiastically, clearly not understanding her. I wondered—if he could see through his rain-spattered glasses—what he made of the two of us; Henriette, wrenlike and trim and driven; and me, towering and shambling in my clomping boots and oversized raincoat, peering from under my hood.

The night before, she’d done in most of the champagne she brought. I could have drunk her up, every effervescent bit of her, the bite of the bubbles, the smooth flow of her skin. She’d pushed me down on my back and told me to close my eyes. “Keep them shut. I will give you tastes.” She brought her lips to mine, bringing the scent of cedar, of bay. But only for a moment. Then her shoulder was there for me to kiss. She laughed and a finger, two fingers, explored my lips delicately, slipped in and out, and then she was missing. “No, keep them shut!” Her breast brushed my lips and away. An ear, a pause, then her breast, her throat, there, teasing, and not there. In this luscious way, slower and slower, she introduced her body to my lips.

“Open.” She laughed again and lay back, giving herself over. She subsided, at first deliciously, closing her eyes, and sighing, and then she was asleep, suspended, spread on a diagonal, gorgeous among the pillows, and gone. Passed out. Aching, I’d covered her with the white cotton blanket, and eventually, slept curled in the corner of the bed.

Now, we were alone with the ancestors in a hard rain. My mood dragged down with the numbers of children’s graves in the older part of the cemetery. Their parents had carved in granite the months and days they’d spent on this earth. I drifted from stone to stone, piecing together family stories from the inscriptions. The heartache was too much to linger with. I didn’t know if I’d ever have the chance to introduce a child to the beauties and mysteries of life. Henriette’s life was the one she nurtured, but maybe she wanted more. I barely dared to wonder if she, or anyone, would want to be with me. I live enclosed by my music, in the three-cornered box of practice/ rehearsal/ gig, repeat. The rain poured harder, in sheets. There was no birdsong, and a low ceiling hid the hills and pressed down on me. The nearby brook riffed wildly.

“Driving in this rain will be a challenge. We should get going.”

“This is my one chance.” She might have been about to take my hand, but she kept looking.

I followed. The rain pummeled us.

Her Mandana’s stone was a small, plain one. It said, She did what she could.

“This is all she gets?” She flipped her palm open. “She was a crack shot, smoked cigars, dressed like a man and outlived all four of her husbands.”

“Sounds like a good lesbian.”

“She left my infant grandmother with relatives and never admitted she was her mother, though they both had the telltale curl in their left ears.” She pulled her hair away from her own ear to show me what I knew was there, the extra swirl of sweet flesh in her own auricle. Holding my breath, I leaned under her umbrella to kiss it. She pulled away, saying, “Look!”

On the wooded rise by us, last year’s leaves—dried in graceful ribbed curls—twitched on the ground. At first, I thought the raindrops hitting them made them move. They jerked and paused like toy jumping beans. Henriette’s cheeks dimpled, delighted under her umbrella. The leaves shifted again. One, two, lifted and took off bow first, like tiny boats skimming down the hill on barely visible rivulets. Others followed. The surround-sound of percussive rain drowned out any noise they made, but I imagined they moved to a tune that started with a drum beat, slow and soft that built to a crescendo like “Bolero.” The little leaf boats stuttered and sailed, and we were charmed. But the launching of the leaves should have been a warning: the soil had passed its saturation point.

We turned back to the car. I said, “Want to get sandwiches for the trip home?”

“I was thinking of an Aperol chez Bar le Mal Necessaire.”

Immediately, I was thinking of a tango. Of how she’d just invited me to extend our weekend into the evening, of how a tango, the rush and bend, the intoxicating swivel on a heel could unlock her if I, as ungainly as I was, could learn the steps. Absurd, but the idea appealed.

When we’d approached the graveyard, I hadn’t noticed that the walkway crossed a brook. Now it was an impassable torrent and was between us and our car. The stream widened while we watched, boiling out of its banks.

Henriette, withdrawn under her umbrella, said, “NON! Non, Non, Non. Go see if it’s passable up there.”

Hoping for stepping stones, a bridge, something—I strode up the slope, following the stream. The sounds of moving water encompassed me. The brook couldn’t keep up with its own tempo. The river, down the hill, hidden by trees, hummed a bass sostenuto. When my quartet’s in the true groove, the music’s power begins to play me; the notes, the spaces between the notes, the connecting rhythms, take over and I am part of a miraculous cycle of creation; I join and bring the heartbeat to the flow; the music comes into me, lifting me off, a synchrony of forces out of my control, but also dependent on me. Standing near the brook we needed to cross, the crescendo of water sounds—a sensation of the power of that water—engulfed me. Wasn’t this like love? That feeling of overwhelm, desire tinged with fear?

“Love Is the Drug,” Grace Jones’ rendition, began in my head. There wasn’t an obvious safe route to our car, but I was still sure we’d find a way. My boot began to leak and squished with each step back to where Henriette stared into the face of her phone. “No goddamn service.” Beneath her umbrella was the only the place in sight where rain didn’t hammer the ground.

“Join me for a drink?” I said, tilting my open mouth to the sky. The drops exploded on my tongue, the back of my throat, tasting clean, quenching my thirst with mineral flavors I imagined had been swept up into the storm in the Bahamas, or Barbados.

“You aren’t even paying attention! Are we trapped here?”

The little red zip car I’d engaged for the weekend was parked by the cemetery entrance next to what must have been the other tourist’s car. With their lovely roofs and dry interiors, they sat smugly, maybe two hundred feet away on the other side of the impassable water.

“We could climb up to that ridge and cross at the beginning of the stream,” I suggested, pointing to the top of the steep hill at the back of the cemetery. But on closer inspection, it bristled with young pines packed so close together a cat would have had difficulty maneuvering. “Maybe on the far side?”

Our footfalls made a syncopated sloshing. Henriette said, “This is ruining my boots.” Water flowed in sheets, flattening the grass, washing over the paths — gravity illustrated in a silvery rush across the cemetery hill. I imagined sweeping her up in my cradling arms, the delicious weight of her.

We found the cemetery’s other boundary—a treed gorge where an impressive, menacing plume of muddy water cascaded and bounced off rocks. “La Merde!” she said. As we turned back, the light was the color of lichen. A sudden wind came out of nowhere, as if the earth exhaled a long, powerful sigh that turned the trees inside out, and made me reach for Henriette’s hand. We leaned into that tropical breath, and her umbrella collapsed. Awe washed through me. The clouds piled on one another above us—huge dynamic air, filled overfull and dumping water on the spongy earth. I tried to pull her to me. She hung on to her broken umbrella, making my hug askew.

She stepped back, “How long does it take to die of exposure?”

I didn’t know. As unexpectedly as the wind had begun, it stopped. But not the rain. The rain was astounding.

“Find the tourist in the rain suit,” she said. “Maybe his phone works.”

Approaching strangers, I always struggle to get over my shyness. “Come with me?” My words carved a space in the downpour and echoed back. Sound like a memory of sound.

Instead, she began trying to turn her umbrella right-side-out.

I found the other tourist peering out from under a small tree on the rise in the middle of the cemetery. He waved back. I made the sign for talking on the phone. He pulled his out, shaking his head sadly, and sheltered it from the rain like a poor dead thing. I nodded and turned away, leaving him with his back to the trunk, his arms folded, like someone waiting for a train.

The sounds of rolling boulders in the gorge sent me seeking better shelter for us. But there wasn’t any. I found a large bench carved with the name WINTER, not far from the creek with a view of our car, and waved Henriette over. I spread one edge of my raincoat so she would have a “dry” place to sit. But she stood.

My coat was starting to leak at the seams. I said, “We’re really lucky there isn’t any more wind.”

From under the one small section of her umbrella not hanging off broken tines, she gave me a withering look. “Why didn’t you tell me it was stupid to look for my great grandmother in a storm?” she said.

I drew my arms deeper into my sleeves. The heat was being pulled out of me.

With the fabric of her broken umbrella resting on her head like a hood, she drew cigarettes and a lighter out of her purse. She narrowed her eyes, said, “Don’t judge,” and tried to light up. Nothing would catch. She hurled the matchbook into the puddle at her feet.

While we waited for whatever would come next—because whatever would come next was coming and there was nothing we could do about it—I thought of making up a game to distract her: Find the gravestone made of rose quartz. Find the plot with the wife buried between her husband and her lover. Find the woman next to you, humming with desire to know and be known by you.

My knee began to bounce. I pressed my hand down on it the way my mother, in Sunday meeting, used to, her big workworn hand requiring and enforcing calm. Would the shape of the hill protect us from being washed away? How long could we keep ourselves warm enough? Hypothermia was something I hadn’t had to think about since being a Girl Guide, and all I could remember was that to be a hero, you were supposed to strip and get into a sleeping bag with the shivering girl.

I saw myself making a tent out of my coat, of suddenly having a knife to whittle saplings into supports, mounding our clothes into a mattress of sorts. The luminous skin inside her wrist. The smattering of a birth mark at the nape of her neck. I imagined us making preposterous love sheltered from the storm, so delectable it would erase the non-event of the night before.

“What are you going to do?” Henriette interrupted.

“We should have checked the weather.” There was a low rumble of thunder.

“What are you going to do?” D-flat.

“It makes sense for you to be feeling anxious.”

Her lips tightened. “You don’t know what I feel. I don’t even know what I’m doing here with you. You with your idea for a road trip to this boring town and your dowdy twentieth century inn with the dry toast — and the overly cheery woman who welcomed us with that singsong voice. I hated the way you tipped her, as if you were a man, and I was your little weekend fascination that needed to be looked after.”

The sweet freckle beside her lower lip slipped out of focus. “Aren’t you even slightly worried?” She spread her hands. “Do you FEEL anything? How can you be so insensitive… so… so dull?”

“I’m hoping if we don’t do anything stupid, we’ll be okay.”

“You’re hoping?”

“What would you suggest?”

“I thought you were different, that you were more immediate and imaginative. I thought you lived on the creative edge, that being with you would be intriguing. When you’re playing your music, you look passionate. You seem taken by the power of it. I believed you were a true artist. How can you be so nice all the time? Si fade. Bland, even in an emergency.”

The curves of her face, her eyes, the allure of her diminutive body—the whole perfect package of her—leaned in to call me boring. I wasn’t sure how to hold my face.

She stalked off, splashing through the puddles, leaving me on that stone bench.

At first, I tried to get past the meanness of what had just happened. There was a buzzing hum in my head and a steady thumping, one note, an F-sharp, with the pulse in my ears. Her acerbic sensitivity had attracted me, but I’d thought—I don’t know what I’d thought. That we were allied so I’d be spared, that I would never be her target? That my hopes and fine intentions would protect me? They did not. Henriette could not be trusted to be kind to me.

The high of being with her, the extra fine layer that her way of seeing and thinking brought to my experience, unique to her, new to me, the excitement I felt in her company—her vibrancy—it all teetered and crashed right there in the downpour.

The assumption that I might influence anything, the next minutes or hours, or any part of our relationship, drained away with my body heat. She could not be trusted to be kind.

There was a sudden movement over by the cars. someone in various shades of camo was trying the doors of the tourist’s SUV. He cupped his hands to see in the windshield. I couldn’t remember locking our car. I jumped up squeezing the key fob in my pocket. No matter what he was up to, he was our chance to be rescued. I got as close to the raging brook as I dared, and called across the noise of it, “Hello! Hi! We’re stuck here!” The man in camo straightened up, surprised. I only had time to see a sharp little goatee on the face under the hood before he turned away.

“No! Hey!” I yelled.

 He disappeared behind the cemetery wall.

“We need help, asshole!” The words came back at me from the wall of rain. It was probably going to take a helicopter to get us off that hill. I pictured us bound in foil blankets, strapped into our separate ambulance sleds, dangling from cables over the rushing water. What was a would-be thief going to do?

Later, Henriette straggled back to the bench, hunching her shoulders. She was crying. Expecting an apology, I tried to offer a tissue, but—soaked—it shredded as I pulled it out of my pocket.

She said, “Don’t talk to me.”

I had nothing to say. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t. As she slumped onto the bench, I rose.

She had encouraged me to sit with her at the bar after my quartet’s last sets were done. Something had motivated her to come with me for a weekend away. I’d believed it had to do with me. But maybe it was all a game about winning my attention, maybe she just wanted to be the kind of woman who could say she’d been with men and women, either or both. Maybe I was just a ready tool to her self-definition. The champagne-soaked details of the night before filtered through. The warm bedside light on her clavicle, her throat. God, that skin. After her initial bravado, how her energy slipped off and extinguished itself.

Her feet hung now, not reaching the ground, and tears mixed with the rain on her cheeks. She closed her eyes and shrank into her coat. Her wet hair pressed to her head and her ears stuck through as vulnerable as a child’s. “Could you hold me?” she said.

I sat back down, drenched in sadness. I took one arm out of my coat. I stretched it over both of us, and wrapped her close. She fit so well under my arm. I sat dumbly. I had just wrapped us up together in nothing but irony. The cold edge of my hood let go a trickle that found its way down my neck. No one but the two of us was responsible for what we created — or failed to create between us. The blunt smell of mud settled.

Sadness pinned me there on the bench like the heavy blanket we didn’t have. My neck seized up. At our feet, flowing water gouged into the sod, making patterns in the mud like river deltas. What said the gravestones themselves were solid enough to stay put? A terrifying tympany echoed up from the river. The sound of roots cracking and trees crashing punctuated the roar of water. At last, fear crashed through, and I began to shake.

Time—counted by nothing but a number of incomplete visions of how we’d die—floated in the silence between us, and stalled. Huddled in my coat, we kept losing heat. I tried to formulate the right question to ask myself. What measure of denial does hope require? Measure enough to make one a fool? Finally, I managed, “Are you always this careless with people?” Her eyes flew open, but she didn’t look at me. I should have said more. Anger might have warmed me. She shut her eyes again. I knew I should get up and move around, but my legs and arms were sandbags. The more I couldn’t move, the heavier the sad panic. Dying of exposure is supposed to be less painful than other ways to go. Sleep comes first.

If we survived, mundane days and nights without the frisson of her presence would roll out ahead of me. I saw myself trudging through them. And how would I trust my attraction to anyone, ever? For Henriette, this would be the benighted weekend trip she once took where she ended up in a flood in a cemetery with an awkward and bland lesbian who’d had a huge crush on her—and they had almost died of hypothermia and it was the worst road trip she’d ever been on, so awful she might not even regale her future friends at the Bar le Mal Necessaire with it, so awful that it, and the woman she’d been with, were best forgotten.

Her lips were blue, and I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore. My ears and skull throbbed. I sucked in a deep breath and freed my arm from her. “We’ve got to move! We need to do jumping jacks or something. Get up.”

She pulled her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them. A wave of violent shivering passed through her. The rain had slackened to a sprinkle. I marched, swinging arms with numb hands flapping at their ends. “It helps,” I said. Henriette rested her forehead on her knees in a tighter ball.

Mixing with the roar of the river, an engine growled. A big yellow bulldozer came on past the cars like a tank on its track pads, chewing up a muddy path, churning through. Somehow, I understood, it was coming for us, cutting past from future, rain from dry, cold from warm, changing everything.

The other tourist scuttled down the hill and stood nearby. The rain had stopped. I thought maybe the machine operator would try to make a land bridge for us, but he pushed directly, stolidly, through the dangerous creek that separated us from our car. The rusty yellow arms extended, slathered with black grease, proffering us the bucket like a gift, a grubby, all-too-real amusement park ride. With some grinding and a jolt, he set the bucket down. He stepped down from his cab with a blanket under his arm, which he handed me, saying “This is a hell of a day.” He was bow-legged and squarely built, with kind, down-sloping eyes. He gestured to the bucket, as if to the basket of a Ferris wheel, “Climb in.”

“Can you walk?” I asked Henriette. She rose, shaking. I guided and steadied her while she climbed in.

The little tourist and I tucked the blanket around her. She smiled into his face, and whispered, “Thank you.”

Wedged into the bucket, we were lifted into the air, herky-jerky. While trying to keep from banging against the sides of our unforgiving seat, the three of us were borne toward the cars.

At the time, with relief bubbling up in me, I was envisioning the righteous moments when we’d reach the car and I’d step away, shrug out of my soaked coat, settle in with the satisfying click of the seatbelt and drive off with the heat blasting, leaving Henriette to find her own way back to Montreal.

But that, too, was just another concocted way for me to cope. With cold like a spike in the brain—for that is truly what it feels like to be so dangerously chilled—I squatted for the rough ride in the earth-moving machine, not yet understanding that the storm’s damage to the roads meant we were not returning to our car, which was as stuck as we were. I held tight to the bucket’s edge as we passed through the crazy creek and on through the cemetery gates where white hydrangeas posed—dreamers—heads bent to breaking with the weight of water.

~ ~ ~

Tracy Winn is the author of Mrs. Somebody Somebody (Random House, 2010), winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award. With support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and MacDowell, she recently completed River in the House, a story cycle about a catastrophic flood, based on her interviews with dairy farmers, housecleaners, heavy equipment operators, and local naturalists. Her stories about the effects of climate change on a small rural town have been published or are forthcoming in Epiphany, Four Way Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Harvard Review, the Swannanoa Review, and Waxwing Magazine.