Nightingale & Sparrow

Category: Prose

  • Penn Station Sunday, 1942

    Penn Station Sunday, 1942

    Tony Press

    Henry walked the 40 minutes from his family’s apartment on 72nd Street, the September morning already muggy and warm, and entered at seven-thirty. Penn Station was bustling — when it was not? – but because it was Sunday it was both bustling and calm, if that were possible. The vast hall hosted hundreds of people, some sitting, most standing or walking, and a few running, yet it felt expansive.

    He’d lived in New York his entire life, all nineteen years, had even worked right here for a summer, two years ago, selling magazines and newspapers, cigars and cigarettes, and gum – so many packs of gum – from Jimmy Vincenzo’s booth. That was a good job.

    His next job, he wasn’t so sure about.

    He was taking the 10:40 to Pittsburgh, then transferring to another line, and then another, to end up in Texas in a couple of days. Today was Sunday, yes, but tomorrow was Monday, and on Thursday he was reporting for duty at Camp Maxey, near a city called Paris, which made no sense at all. Wherever it was, he’d be lugging his bag the whole route.

    Upon arrival, he’d be issued a new set of clothes, Government Issue, army green.

    He bought a Daily News from someone at Jimmy’s booth, someone he’d never seen before, grabbed a coffee from another vendor, and found a bench with a direct view of the massive clock. In truth, there likely were very few seats without such a view. He had a good two plus hours to wait but he was fine with that. He believed in early arrivals: in his mind, “on time” was dangerously close to tardiness. More, he wanted a last Penn Station immersion. When would he be here again? And where else, he wondered, did he feel so at home? Certainly not “at home,” despite the best efforts of his mother, his stepfather, his little sisters. There was nothing horrible about any of those people but God that apartment was small. It was like it had hands, hands that too often clutched his neck. Yes, an exaggeration, but it was damn hard to breathe there. 

    And there was one more reason to be here this early, in this spot. Call it hope. Better, call it by its true name: Sheila.

    Sheila, whom he’d met only two weeks ago, at a CYO dance way out in Brooklyn. Sheila, who had moved from Kentucky to New York only six months earlier. Sheila, who had kissed him that night, on the R train back to Manhattan, and who had kissed him on three separate nights since then. She did the paperwork in her uncle’s plumbing supply company in the Bronx, lived with a cousin in lower Manhattan, and took care of the cousin’s kid pretty much every hour she wasn’t on the job. Her going to that particular dance had been such a fluke – such an Act of God or something, given the odds – in fact, it was her first dance since leaving Louisville. And he had been there, too, also almost completely by chance. He’d gone with two buddies, a spur of the moment decision by the three of them, each a recent high school graduate: “Class of ’42, that’s who!” 

    Since the June ceremony, the three had often found themselves sitting and wondering what to do next. Classes were boring, and pointless, many of them, but you knew where you were supposed to be, knew what you were supposed to do. He guessed that he’d again soon be told what to do, twenty-four hours a day. The other two guys were shipping out next week, Merchant Marine.

    The kisses on the R Train. The kisses the following Tuesday, and Sunday, and Tuesday of this week. And today was Sunday. She knew he was leaving – he’d told her that first night, a few minutes before they reached Canal Street, her stop. He couldn’t not tell her. The look on her face the moment he told her, whatever else happened in his life, that look he would never forget.

    He sipped his coffee, regretting the lack of cream. He opened the paper to the sports section. The Yanks lost yesterday, but he knew that, and they’d already locked up the pennant. The Series was starting on Wednesday. He closed the paper, set it beside him, stood, stretched, and sat down again.

    A group of fifteen or twenty people crossed in front of him, all following a guy holding a sign above his head, a sign that said something Henry had missed, going to his left, probably to the stairs to the next level.

    He got up, walked ten steps to the trash bin, and tossed his empty cup. He returned, opened the paper to the crossword, pulled a pen from his pocket, stared at the puzzle for a moment, but did not begin. He closed his eyes, pen still in hand.

    When he opened them, Sheila was standing five feet away, wearing the same green dress she’d worn in Brooklyn. Little white flowers danced on the shoulders. She was smiling. He didn’t know if his own face was smiling or crying or both.

    And then he saw, on the scuffed floor beside her, amid cigarette butts and crumpled napkins, the most beautiful sight of his life, a red and black Samsonite suitcase.

    Tony Press

  • A Wedding

    A Wedding

    T.M. Semrad

    Dramatis Personae

    The Bride                                    The Groom
    There is not a clear picture of the groom yet.

    The groom sketches a self-portrait. He begins with the feet. They are practically shod. His feet ache. The shoes are black lace-ups with rubber soles. They are planted wide. He erases and begins again. He starts with the feet. He wears socks: nubby, cream, and thick. His feet get cold walking across the bare floor. He erases and begins again. He starts with the feet. They are bare, wide, the toes short. The big toes curl slightly up. He erases. He brushes the pale pink crumbs and pencil dust from the page, now smudged gray.

     

    The Midwife and Sister-in-Law of the Groom and her Husband, the Younger Brother of  the Groom and two children.
    Parents of the Bride
    The Mother
    The Father
    Wedding Party
    The Matron of Honor and Sister of the Bride and her Husband and two                                  children, one grown.

     

    The Best Man and teenage Son of the Bride
    The Responder and Brother of the Bride
     and his Wife and two children
    The Elder Brother of the Groom >and his Wife
    and two children
    The Clown
    Reptiles of wide variety
    Birds of wide variety
     

    Scene: The deck of a many-windowed wooden house, the bride’s parents’ house, high in Arizona’s Mogollon Rim at sunrise in late June. The red cliffs glow pink orange. Dead pine trees strike poses among the living. Multi-colored paper heart garlands blow in the breeze. Among the manzanita and cacti beyond the deck where the children sometimes search for stones and other treasures, the Bride, in pajamas, squats and rubs a horny toad behind the ears, who giggles in a reptilian way until a rather large and decrepit graying crow pulls the Bride inside the house by a curly lock. You can hear the rumble of complaint even with its beak closed.

     

    The Ceremony

    Enter the Clown [or exit as it were from the house] wearing a sober and well-tailored gray summer suit and tie. In her pocket there is a perfectly folded pocket handkerchief.

    Clo. Welcome. Welcome. We apologize for all the flowers. She sneezes. There are tissues available. She uses the pocket handkerchief to blow her nose loudly as Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring begins to play. 

    Enter the Family. The women and one girl wear flower wreaths and floral cotton dresses. It’s a riot of flowers. The men carry cameras and take pictures constantly. The men and boys wear shorts and loud plaid tops with flowers pinned to their chests. The Matron of Honor’s son sports a top hat with a flower wreath circling its brim. They gather around a table bedecked in white with brightly colored dinnerware and crystal stemware filled with orange juice. Also on the table, there are more flowers and nests each with a bird and different number of eggs. Other birds bring the Family hors d’oeuvres and drop them into their open mouths. The Family laugh and talk among themselves. 

    Enter the Midwife as Vilvadi’s Allegro from the Four Seasons begins. The Family takes their seats around the table. Enter the Groom and the Best Man. The Midwife and the Best Man are dressed as the others, though the Midwife’s flowers are embroidered with silk thread befitting her position. The Groom wears a white t-shirt and high-waisted, pleated, pinstripe pants held up by pink suspenders with a large, red-orange hibiscus bloom. He is barefoot. They all take their places standing at the end of the table. The Midwife pulls a gold piece from the Groom’s mouth, inspects it, bites it, shrugs, and puts it in her pocket. She pulls a piece of string from the hem of the Best Man’s cerise shorts. She pulls and pulls with one hand. Then with the other, she holds the top of the string attached to the shorts and gives a firm yank. She measures the string, holding her arms out and bites it in two so that she has a piece as long as one outstretched arm to the heart. A green, iridescent hummingbird whirs past and carries off the other half. She ties one end of the string to the wrist of the Groom. Pachelbel’s Canon in D begins and everyone stands. 

    Enter the Bride, the Mother, and the Father. The Bride walks betwixt. Their arms are linked. The Mother and the Father are dressed as the others. The Mother steals an intermission between acts in another play, a tragedy, to join this one. Her hair germinates whiskered white from her perfectly shaped head. A beautician has attached thick, long, black eyelashes and the Mother thinks the Father won’t like them, but he does. He loves his wife’s eyes. They glisten, they storm, they bug, they merry. The Bride wears a white cotton sundress embroidered with white flowers and a tall white crown. White tulle blows in a long tail behind her. She carries yellow roses. The Groom and Best Man sprout grins as big as soup bowls. They all beam at each other. It’s rather blinding in the early light.

    Mid: Who gives the Bride?

    The Mother wraps the string tied to the Groom ‘round and ‘round her hand. She places her bound hand upon his head and pushes him to kneeling. She leaves her hand on his head.

    Mot: You will be true and good and careful. Full of care. 

    Mid: Who gives the Bride?

    Mot: I will. I will it be. I do. I keep her as mine too. I give her you.

    The Mother unbinds her hand and untwines a second string and puts it between her teeth. She ties the Groom to the Bride. The Bride pulls the second from the Mother’s teeth and ties it around the Mother’s finger. The Mother lifts the Groom from under his armpits, planting a kiss on his bald head on the way up. She takes the Bride’s face in both hands, brings it down to her own and kisses her. The Father guides the Mother to the head of the table.

    Mid: Dearly beloved: Be love, be dear, love together, and witness. Bless me. [The Clown sneezes.] Bless you. All. Bless these two joined together by the Mother, a mother who births worry and care and raising up and joining and giving over while maintaining. She ties the string that binds sacred and true, a sacred and true string, a memory string, a union between the human and the divine.

    Will you have this man to be your husband?

    Bri: I will.

    Mid: Will you have this woman to be your wife?

    Gro: I will.

    Mid: Will all of you as family and as witnesses to these promises do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their having of each other?

    Fam: We will.

    The Midwife directs the Family to sit, and they sit at the table. The Bride and the Groom remain standing facing each other. The Groom lifts the veil and takes the Bride’s hands in both his.

    Gro: I take you to be my wife, to have and to hold for all days and nights and times between the two, to love and to cherish. To too and too.

    The Bride and the Groom exchange rings. The Midwife rummages in her pocket. She pulls out a steering wheel. Puts it back. She half pulls out a riding crop and quickly puts it back. She pulls out a tape measure and measures each and nods her head.

    Mid: Just so. Look happily upon this couple who come to you seeking your blessing and assist them with your grace that with true fidelity and steadfast love they may honor and keep the promises and vows they’ve made. 

    All: Let it be.

    Everyone sits. Geckos walk on their hind legs carrying trays between them with steaming bowls of porridge and cream, cinnamon, cherries, blueberries, strawberries, mangoes, pomegranates, peaches, passionfruit, melons, plums, ripe raspberries dripping, and plump purple bunches of grapes. They eat. Husbands peel grapes and feed them to their wives. Wives break apart pomegranates and immerse their hands up into the wrists tearing out flesh and seeds. With red juice staining from hand to elbow, they use the other hand to pick out one red glowing seed, hold it in the sunlight, toss it in the air for their husbands’ tongues to catch. The children turn crimson-faced and grow intent on shoveling porridge discreetly into their mouths.

    Finished, the Younger Brother pulls out his guitar and begins to sing with the Midwife some song about two cats in the yard, and everyone joins. The Matron of Honor and her family recite a poem about old and new worlds, one departed and the other trembling and blooming with new stories. The Elder Brother’s two children recite the nursery rhyme,“The Owl and the Pussycat.” The Bride turns a little green at the idea of boats but feels better at hearing of moonlit dancing. The birds and reptiles squawk and hiss. They think there’s been too much mention of fanged felines and do not believe an Owl would ever marry a Pussycat. The Mother shushes them all and reads from the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13, her glasses perched at the end of her nose. 

    Mot: Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal … Love suffers long and is kind; … bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things … Love never fails … And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

    The Responder responds, the brother of the bride. Recall the Responder connects each families’ gifted reading, and in this case, a menagerie. Somehow, this son, this brother, this husband, this father weaves cross-species marriages with the thread of stories freshly told and love’s making easy. Then he tells of fathering and being fathered and of love. He deftly maneuvers the stick shuttle through the weft, love, to create his tapestry.

    Blackbirds bring them dark chocolate and champagne, sparkling cider and jelly beans for the children. The one girl begins to sing, and the Bride and the Groom speak tied together by a vivid red string.

    Gir: Splinted wings mend.

    B&G: We place coats around each other’s shoulders to shelter beneath.

    Gir: More than plumage, feathers dress wings.

    B&G: We walk on the street side to block the other from harm.

    Gir: Earthbound, blackbird does not see.

    B&G: We play to keep the other from unwarranted seriousness.

    Gir: Unfettered, blackbird unfold your wings, fly high.

    B&G: We rub each other’s heads because their close enough to our hands; we grab each other for a dance because the music plays; we text each other something sweet because the thought arises.

    Gir: Blackbird fly.

    B&G: We trust the other to follow our imaginings.

    Gir: Blackbird fly.

    B&G: Take to the skies and make merry.

    Gir: Blackbird fly.

    Bri: Heart, soul, divinity…what is the word we search for?

    B&G: We unlock this in each of us. Though now bound, we are free. 

    Tears pool before cresting the Groom’s cheeks leaving behind salt tracks. All are silent. Fingers search out hands.

    Play Bach’s Arioso in G. The Midwife hands a paper to the wife to sign. The Wife hands to the Husband. The Husband to his Elder Brother. The Elder Brother to the Father. The Father to the Midwife who signs with a honeysuckle blossom and folds into an envelope which flies away. The Midwife stands and walks to the foot of the table where the Bride and the Groom sit.

    Mid: Now that these two have given themselves to each other by solemn vows but merry, with joining of hands and the giving and receiving of rings and the ministry of our words, I pronounce, announce, and proclaim that they are husband and wife.

    The Midwife rummages in her pocket again and pulls out a plastic dinosaur. She gives this to the black-necked garter snake coiled at her feet. The snake uncoils and drapes itself around the dinosaur, darting its tongue at its belly. She finds a small indigo bottle and sets it on the table. She pulls out the stump of a candle and sets it on the table. She hefts out a galvanized steel tub and sets it at the Bride’s and Groom’s feet. She digs in the pocket biting her lip. Finds what she is searching for, pulls out a broom and dustpan, straightens out a few bent straws, bends to sweep up some dirt which she blows in the Bride’s and Groom’s face. Both sneeze and look askance. Each has a smudge in the middle of their forehead to remind them they are dust and will go the way the Mother goes when her intermission ends. 

    Mid: Let their love for each other be a seal upon their hearts, a mantle about their shoulders, and a crown upon their foreheads. Bless them in their work and in their companionship; in their sleeping and in their waking; in their joys and in their sorrows; in their life and in their death. 

    All: Let it be.

    The Midwife picks up the candle stub the color of a Palo Cortado Sherry. Sticks it out into the sun which is over the rim now and hot. It ignites. She pulls out the shirt of the Groom from his chest and drips wax onto it. She repeats with the dress of the Bride. She picks up a very small tortoise just passing and presses its shell first into the wax on the Groom’s chest and then the wax on the Bride. It leaves behind the imprint of a heart.

    Mid: Peace be with you.

    All: And also with you.

    The midwife uncorks the indigo bottle and pours its contents into the steel tub and pours and pours and pours until the tub is filled. Water is scarce in the desert, so it is only a miniscule bottle. Dirt, on the other hand is plentiful, so they wash each other’s feet. The sheets on their bed are white and freshly cleaned. The Groom washes the Bride’s feet, removing her shoes, and the Bride washes the Groom’s. Each turns the feet of the other in the direction the sun travels. The Groom’s shed bits of eraser. Pink pieces float in clear water smudging gray. The Groom’s feet become more and more defined with each journey, and the evidence of his true and generous nature which was there all along becomes real. The birds flutter. When the couple finishes, the birds bathe until the gray feathered crow scolds them.

    Mid: You may kiss your bride.

    The Best Man twists the end of a Chinese canon which explodes yellow purple blue pink gold silver confetti and glitter into the air. Peace is given and peace is received with shaking of hands, hands pull into hugs. Lips bestow kisses. Bubbles are blown. Strings are pulled and small explosions occur. There are wishes and anecdotes and performances and festivities.

    Clo: Mother and Father, you open your home and give us an example of passionate love, faithful and unconditional, enduring and strengthening with time.

    And you dearly beloved, honor us by joining our celebration where earth’s upheavals and slow changes tell of life’s wonders and of lives connected. You teach us gratitude. Go forth and live and love and laugh knowing grief will come.

    T.M. Semrad

  • Threshing

    Threshing

    Don Noel

    Howie was insistent: “Dad, I want to get you signed up before you start back.”

    “We’ve just buried your mother, for God’s sake!” Howard balked. “I haven’t been a widower two weeks yet!”

    They had returned this morning with fresh flowers, just the two of them, yesterday’s handful of mourners already a distant memory.

    The cemetery, with its sculpted trees and manicured lawn, was a bright green postage stamp in the wheaten vastness of the Nebraska prairie. One horizon was punctuated by the town’s lone church steeple and, in the nearby railroad yards, stark concrete-tube grain silos. In all other directions the flatness went on forever.

    Ellen had wanted to be buried here, in a family plot, close to the Platte River and the sandhill cranes she remembered from early childhood. They had come once, years ago when she was vibrant and coherent, to marvel at the birds — wheeling through early spring skies to glean any kernels that escaped the fall’s harvest, roosting and croaking on river sandbars at night — and to make basic arrangements for them both at the cemetery. It had not seemed so windswept and bleak then.

     “Two weeks? More like two years, Dad. Longer, really. Three, at least.”

    Which was true. He’d managed to keep her at home for the first few years, although powerless to slow her descent into the grip of the damned disease. The day had finally come when he begged Howie to come to Connecticut for a few days to help with the move to Harmony Acres. They got Ellen into the “memory unit” – a euphemism for no-memory, their son complained – and then moved Howard himself into the adjoining apartment block, walking-distance away.

    As she slipped inexorably into the vacuum of Alzheimer’s, he had indeed gradually become, emotionally, a widower. Not a day went by without his spending a few hours with her, every day harder. Near the end, nothing he offered could prompt the least remembrance of friends or family, distant lands visited, theater moments, signal achievements — anything of their rich lives together. He counted it a blessing that she never entirely forgot her husband and her own children – and at the end, a blessing that pneumonia spared her more days or weeks or months or dear God years of blank existence.

    Meanwhile, he’d settled into the life of a vibrant retirement community.  He made new friends, far from alone in having a spouse in the memory unit or recently snatched away. He steadfastly renewed subscriptions to pairs of tickets to the symphonies, operas, chorales, plays and musicals that had been such a part of their lives. He invited his new friends, both men and women, to keep him company using “Ellen’s ticket.” He always made clear that he considered himself a married man, company for an evening but nothing more.

    Now he was headed back to Harmony Acres fully a widower, and Howie wanted him to look around for new companionship through an online dating service, a damnable app on the new smartphone he was still learning.

    “Dad, you’re just seventy. Gramps and Gramma lived twenty years beyond that.”

    “Doesn’t mean I will.”

    “Not a certainty, maybe, but likely; it’s in your DNA.”

    “I looked at the website you sent me to. All that stuff about ‘renewed intimacy in your golden years.’ Like they were selling donuts.”

    “Well, I guess they’re in business.”

    “And when you scroll in a few pages, they’re invasive as hell.”

    “You’re one up on me, Dad; I haven’t looked. Tell me what that means.”

    “Can’t remember it all offhand. They want me to write down all my hobbies and habits. What I eat. What I wear. Excruciating detail. What I watch on TV. How far I walk every day. And what kind of woman I’m looking for.”

    “So?”

    “First of all, I’m not looking for a woman; that’s your idea.”

    He paused. His gaze on the freshly-laid, too-bright green sod a few feet away blurred unexpectedly. A light morning breeze was rich with the smell of ripening grain. From the distant rail yard by the grain silos came the throaty mutter of a Diesel engine and the high-pitched, mourning bleat of its horn.

    Finally: “And I never gave your mother a catalog of things she might not like about me. In our day, you found out the faults little by little.”

    “In my day, too,” Howie admitted. “After we’d found out the things we liked, I guess.”

    “Exactly. This online stuff is selling instant – what? friendship? love? intimacy, whatever that’s supposed to mean?”

    “Maybe not instant,” his only son replied. “Just a few shortcuts.”

    He felt himself warming to the argument, the incipient tears dried. “Your mother and I didn’t need shortcuts. We dated, began to more than just like each other. And if we’d decided it wasn’t going to be a good match, we’d have looked elsewhere.”

    “Mmmm. Seems like you could save some time with this computer matching.”

    He looked out at the fields of grain. “Winnowing.”

    “Yes,” Howie said. “Getting the chaff out of the way, maybe.”

    “You assume I’m looking. Threshing. I might someday. More likely, may never.”

    “Dad, Sue’s out on the West Coast; I’m down in DC. We don’t want you to be lonely.”

    “Son, your mother was pretty special. Almost fifty years. It’s not like I’ve lost a fork, hurrying to find a replacement so I won’t starve. I have friends. I’m not saying it’s impossible I might discover a special friend, but that would take time to ripen. What I don’t need is . . . .”

    “Instant intimacy? I hear you, Dad. Forget the app. Let’s start back.”

    The freight train bleated again, hoarse, more distant now, its voice falling. He bowed his head, eyes moist again, fixing the sound in his memory, an element of this Nebraska scene to cherish. Like the cranes, he would someday come back, to be again with Ellen.

    “All right,” he said at last. “Let’s go.”

    Don Noel

  • Perhaps

    Perhaps

    Essie Dee

    A first encounter. Shy smiles, a nod hello. Side glances. Warmth inside, feeling things that shouldn’t be. But it will pass.

     

    But will it pass? 

     

    Distracted thoughts most inappropriate. A click of picture taken in discreet. Avoidance that does not last. Sit apart and glance too long. Has anybody noticed? Then seated side by side, legs bump and elbows brush. That warmth becomes a flame.

     

    Standing near, and then too close. A full body lean, inhaling the scent of one another. Gently one hand slides over the other, fingers weave. Flame burns, breath quickens. Heads tilt and eyes meet, a silent question lingers. Not a moment for witness, unspoken promise of later and parting ways.

     

    Later finds them on a forest stroll, fingers laced. Birds flit about in anticipation, noting an excitement that hangs in the air. Will it? Won’t it? Should it? Want it.

     

    A moment chosen. Gently, carefully, hands find their way. Breath becomes heavy as flushed cheeks graze one another. Spirited eyes close as lips meet and part.

     

    A groping moment before they separate, carnal hunger in their faces. One leads the other off the path into the shade of trees, dried leaves crunching beneath their feet. An old knotted oak is chosen, pressed upon. Clothing is unbuttoned, fumbled loose.

     

    Promises broken while making, making, making.

     

    Bitten lip, bitten shoulder, nails drag down back. Birds cease to sing, leaving the rustling leaves above to mingle with the sighing crescendo.

     

    And then the realization of the moment, no longer pure fantasy. Confusion. Uncertainty. Shy smiles and side glances. Will anyone find out? Is this where it ends? Is this the start of something?

     

    Perhaps.

    Essie Dee

  • Coffee Date

    Coffee Date

    Catherine Thoms

    Clara Wells has had a haircut since the last time Sam has seen her. She doesn’t expect him to notice, but he does. Clara Wells, Clara Wells, her name always comes out sing-song in his mind. 

                “Your hair is different,” he says as she shakes out of her coat. She makes a face and puts a hand up to her head. 

    “Oh, yeah, I’m not sure how I feel about it yet,” she says, though she is pleased he’s noticed. 

    In his memory, her hair falls in long, loose waves down her back, swishing one way and then another as she looks back, brushes it out of her face, and holds a hand out to where he stands behind her on the stone steps. Now it dusts the tops of her shoulders and curves inward to frame her face, making her look smaller, but somehow more fierce. 

                Clara can count on one hand the number of times she’s seen Sam in the past year and a half, though he appears often in her dreams. In these dreams, he looks much as he does now: tall, broad-shouldered, with long fingers and an easy smile that cuts through the sharp planes of his face. The dreams are never sexual, but she wakes with a yearning anyway, for the ghost of a touch on her cheek or a firm arm around her waist. These dreams embarrass and confuse her. Sometimes she tells Sam about them, but only of the vague, superfluous details: we were shopping for toasters, or, you were counting my spoons. She likes him to know that she’s been thinking about him, even if only subconsciously. 

    Sam doesn’t usually remember his dreams, which he tends to think is for the best. 

    The server deposits their drinks, and Clara nearly upsets a small decorative vase in the process of pulling her teapot closer. Sam catches it before it can fall to the floor, tipping its contents back into place and setting it out of harm’s way in the center of the table.

    “Did I ever tell you about the dream I had where there were flowers growing out of my chest?” Clara asks, reaching out to test the plastic bouquet for life. 

     “No,” Sam says, taking a sip of his coffee. 

    Clara Wells talks with her hands so much that his mother had once refused to believe that she didn’t have any Italian heritage. He watches and listens as her slender hands cup an invisible flower in front of her chest, opening and closing her fingers as if each digit is a petal in bloom. She makes a twisting, scooping motion with her hands, which have now become trowels, then places her palms out in front of him on the table like an offering and moves her thumb across the pads of her upturned fingertips as if she’s scattering seeds. When her hands flutter to rest, he feels as though a performance has ended. 

    “What do you think it means?” Sam asks. 

     “No idea,” Clara shrugs.

    “So how was Zurich?” she asks, busying herself with the teapot. “Did you and Sarah have a nice time?” 

    Clara only half-listens as Sam recounts his latest adventure with his latest girlfriend, marveling appropriately at the photos of mountain landscapes and historic cathedrals as he flips through them on his phone, though she’s already seen them on Instagram. Mercifully, he does not show her any of the pictures of them together, though she’s already seen those too.

                “And how’s your new boy?” Sam asks, stowing his phone in his pocket. “Is he in love with you yet?” 

    Clara rolls her eyes, but smiles. “Probably,” she says. “I’m very charming, you know.” 

    Sam does know. Clara Wells is never alone for very long. 

     “Are you in love with him?” Sam ventures. Clara looks away, as if searching for a witness to his impudence, then looks back, narrowing her eyes into what might be a dare. 

     “What makes you think you can just ask me a question like that?”

    Sam presses a hand to his heart as if applying pressure to a wound.

     “Because I am your oldest and dearest friend,” he says, though he already has his answer. In all the years that they have known each other Clara Wells has been in love many times, or maybe just the once. 

    “All right then, friend,” Clara returns. “What about you? Is she the one?” 

    Clara hates the way her stomach begins to churn at the way Sam smiles into his coffee, so she focuses on her breathing, the way she’s practiced in her yoga classes. She counts the seconds of her inhale, holds it at the top of the breath, and slowly exhales to a silent count of eight. Clara likes yoga. She likes that while other people are chatting at the beginning of class she can curl up into a tiny ball and press her knees into her eye sockets until she sees galaxies. She likes the way her muscles burn as she holds the poses during class, how the fire distracts her from thoughts of anything other than her moving breath by which she marks the time. She likes the way time finally slows down in the darkness, as she lies in savasana with a towel over her eyes, how socially acceptable it is to embrace that darkness. She wishes she could close her eyes now. 

    “That’s sweet,” she hears herself say. “I’m really happy for you.”

    And she is, he knows she is. 

     

    Sam has forgotten just how much being around Clara Wells unsettles him, how in everything she says he feels as though there might be a double meaning: truth in a joke, or a joke in truth. Most of the time he doesn’t know which is which, and it makes his head hurt. 

                Once, after a college formal after-party that had bled into the early morning, they snuck into the old campus bell tower to watch the sun come up over the sloping hill of the quad. They had both been quite drunk but were in the process of sobering up, passing a plastic bottle of water back and forth on their ascent. When he thinks of that night, it comes to him in snatches of swirling vision: Clara’s long hair swaying under the colored lights, the fabric of her skirt fluttering as she spun – or maybe he was the one spinning. He had thrown up just the once, in the bathroom of the venue, and continued to drink. And after the formal came someone’s apartment, red cups and loud music, and Clara’s hand finding his again in the heat and the crush of people, pulling him out into the cool spring night. It smelled wet, of dew, or maybe rain, though he couldn’t remember it raining. The stone steps of the bell tower were slick. He remembers very clearly the soles of Clara’s bare feet, darkened from having discarded her heels long before. And he remembers her hair, long and tangled, the way it swung as she turned around to watch him stumble and, laughing, offer him her hand. 

                “What were they teasing you about, right before we left?” She asked him once they reached the top. At the time, he remembered feeling grateful that she had not heard, had shrugged off the teasing of his so-called brothers and decided it wasn’t worth repeating. Which made it all the more shocking for him to hear the words bumble traitorously out of his own mouth. 

    “They were saying we’re gonna get married,” he admitted. Clara Wells had thrown her head back and laughed. He remembers how her throat looked, pale and exposed in the dawn, and how he had had the sudden thought that he could kiss it if he wanted to. Not that he would have. The thought came to him like thoughts of jumping did whenever he found himself in a high place, on rooftops or mountainsides – or bell towers, for that matter. He was vaguely aware of the fact that he would never dare do something so foolish, but physically, the possibility was there. 

                “But we are getting married,” Clara Wells had said, looking sideways at him with the laugh still on her lips and leaning backward onto her hands. 

                “We are?” He asked, stupidly. 

                “Oh sure,” she said. “I’ve always thought so.”

                Clara had looked at him then and smiled. She did not think he would remember any of this in the morning, so she took his hand, squeezed it, and held it until the sun came up. When she woke up much later that morning with a bottle of Advil and a full glass of water beside her bed, she was surprised she could remember anything either. Sam had never forgotten.

                Clara has been drinking her tea slowly, but Sam’s coffee cup has been empty for a while now. When his eyes dart to his watch for the second time, she decides to call it. 

                “I should probably get going,” she says. “I’ve gotta pick up some groceries if I want to eat tonight.”

    Sam is both relieved and disappointed. He has been anxious about being the one to end the conversation, but now that she has done it, he wishes they might have stayed a little longer.

    “Me too,” he says. “I told Sarah I’d call once I got settled.”

    “Are you settled already, then?” Clara teases.

    Sam shrugs. “Close enough,” he says. 

    They walk to the train together, and at the mouth of the subway entrance, she has to stand on her toes to put her arms around his neck. She debates kissing him on the cheek – isn’t that what grown-up friends do? – but decides against it. It would be too weird.

                In the station, Sam goes uptown and Clara goes down. She is relieved to see her train already at the platform and rushes through the closing doors, glad to have avoided the awkwardness of waving to each other from opposite platforms, or worse, attempting to maintain conversation by shouting across the yawning gap of exposed tracks that spans the distance between them. She lets out the breath she has been acutely aware of holding, counting to eight as she exhales in an effort to settle her stomach, her heart. 

                Sam watches the train carrying Clara Wells pull away from the station. He looks for her in its windows but doesn’t know which car she has gotten into, and soon enough she’s gone again. He looks around at the station walls and blinks as if only just coming round to the reality that this is his life now. Clara Wells, Clara Wells. Her name is stuck in his head.  

    Catherine Thoms

  • Love-drury

    Love-drury

    Nicola Ashbrook

    Mummy’s sad. I can tell. She used to sparkle like bubbles in lemonade – the pink kind – but now she looks grey. I think she’s stopped asking the hairdresser to put the golden bits in and she’s stopped wearing pretty dresses, too. She has grey clothes, grey hair and grey skin.

    Daddy doesn’t look happy either. He stays at work a lot. When he is home, I see him in the garden, staring at the air.

    I need to cheer them up again. I know I can, I did it before, but it’s harder now.

    My grandpa told me once that in the olden days, a very long time ago, if you loved somebody, you gave them a ‘love-drury’ to show them. He said it was a present – anything that meant something. I want to send a love-present to Mummy and Daddy but I keep trying and I don’t think I’ve sent the right one yet because they’re still sad.

    I sent daffodils in the spring and snow in winter. I made sure it was the fluffy kind that sticks well, but they didn’t make any snowballs at all. They didn’t pick the daffodils either. I’ve sent rainbows and shooting stars and an owl to TWOO in a tree and a friendly cat with a patch eye and sock feet. But they’re still sad.

    I’ve been thinking really hard, like Mrs. Piper always told me to do if a sum had big numbers, and I think I’ve got the right answer now. I’m sending it tonight.

    *

    Mummy is wearing a pink dress today. It has a ruffle at the bottom which swishes when she walks. She looks very pretty. Daddy isn’t at work. He’s walking with her and holding her hand like he used to.

    They’ve been to feed the ducks in our favourite place. A dog jumped in near Daddy and splashed him. He was hopping about and Mummy was laughing and laughing, then Daddy laughed, too. Their laughs are my very best thing. And Mummy’s sparkles; I collect those.

    Mummy’s tummy is big now. She keeps one hand on it all the time and Daddy likes to rub it, too.

    Mrs. Piper was right – if you think hard enough, you can get the right answer.

    I can’t wait to see my love-drury – my sister – she’s going to be beautiful.

    Nicola Ashbrook

  • Love Letter to a Young Man in a Foreign Land

    Love Letter to a Young Man in a Foreign Land

    Marie A Bailey

    I’ve started this letter many times, and many times I’ve ripped the paper from my notebook, crumpled it into a tight ball and tossed it into the wicker wastebasket. The last time, the crushed paper ball ricocheted off the mountain of other paper balls and rolled under my bed.

    The night you left, that December night where we stood outside my apartment, I told you I loved you. The sight of me had surprised you. You didn’t expect me to throw on my thin blue bathrobe and race down the stairs into the parking lot. The night sky was clear. The air was cold. You knew I was naked underneath. 

    I said, “I love you.” 

    You said, “Don’t say that. I might run away to another country.”

    But you were leaving for another country. Ecuador. You had joined the Peace Corps and would be gone for two years. We had only been dating a few weeks, but I loved you already. 

    I’ve been writing this letter every night since you left. At first, I just wanted to get the pain out and on paper, hoping that I might at best numb myself. I thought you were perfect, yet you weren’t at all what I expected or had ever loved before. I had, until you, loved tall, dark, lanky men. Men made of wire, whose hair and eyes were black and unsettling. Men who were artists and slightly insane. 

    You are nothing like them. Fair skin, fair hair, blue eyes. Thighs like rocks from all your years of long-distance cycling. A chest with soft hair that I loved to rub my cheek against. You are made of muscle and sinew, and I disappear in your arms. You are analytical. An engineer. Your sanity is so sharp that I’m almost driven insane.

    Except that I love you. And this is the one letter I haven’t yet sent. I’ve written other letters to you. Boring letters about the people we both know, the places we’ve both been, the movies you are missing. I sent you news clippings about the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, articles from Harper’s Magazine. You wrote to me about the water tank you were building, the village you live in, the bartering you had to do for supplies, the language you barely know. You sent me alpaca yarn. You beg for letters. You are lonely.

    You don’t say you love me and I haven’t said it since that night outside in the cold, dark parking lot. You held me tight then as you kissed me one last time. And then, in that coolly sane way of yours, you turned away. I stood and watched you go and realized that I was barefoot. Did you ever wonder how long I stood out there?  Did you look for me in your rearview mirror as you drove away?

    When, more than a year later, you invited me to visit you in Ecuador, I began making plans before writing to you to say yes. I researched flights and bought underwear from Victoria’s Secret. We had only three months to secure our plans. We had only letters. You were able to come to Quito one day to stand in line and then place one phone call to me that could last only ten minutes. I felt special. For you, though, this was simply life in Ecuador.

    After only a couple of days with you, I made the mistake of telling you I still loved you, even that I would marry you. We were still in Quito, on the verge of taking a bus to Baños and beyond. We had been drinking. Voicing my fantasies unraveled the plans.

    I had made the common mistake of thinking I was more than a friend to you, that I was the only woman you had invited. Rather, I learned, I was the only woman who had accepted your invitation. You became angry. I ruined everything, you said. I should have been angry too but instead, I prepared to accept defeat and return to the States early, hide in my studio apartment until my scheduled return to work, and then lie about my fun trip to a foreign land. I wondered if I could survive the lie.

    In the morning, your anger was gone and instead of trying to find me an earlier flight back to the States, you suggested I stay longer. You didn’t want me to go back. I was the only friend who had regularly written to you, sent you cassette tapes of the Talking Heads. You wanted to show me Ecuador. I promised you I would not say, “I love you,” again. We would just have fun.

    In the small touristy town of Baños, I followed you up a long steep curving trail, learning quickly that you are the sort to say, “We’re almost there!” at every bend. My left knee went out on the climb down and I had to sidle to keep the pain at bay. You thought it was funny and yet you declared that I was a “superior woman.” I was keeping up with you and I could see you were impressed. I met every challenge you threw my way, from spending a couple of dank nights at a hotel in Otavalo where hot water was available only a couple of hours a day, to standing in line for a shower at a hostel, to helping you clean up your apartment after another Peace Corps volunteer crashed it for a party.

    At last, I had to leave and while you said again you would come back to the States, I didn’t kid myself anymore that you would come back to me. I didn’t let our growing ease with each other trick me into forgetting your anger that night, your sense of betrayal. You had only wanted a friend. What you needed then was a friend, nothing more, and I had let my own needs get in the way. 

    Now you are finishing your tour and preparing to return to the States. In your last letter, you wrote that you would come back to California. Not to me, you didn’t write that you would come back to me. Only that you would come back to this state, to this part of the country where we met. 

    And so I’m trying one last time to write this letter. To say again what I haven’t said since that awful night. I love you. But as soon as I write these words, the fear comes over me. Will those words drive you away? Should I toss this letter with all the others I’ve never sent, never finished? Should I wait? Should I wait for that moment when I’ve disappeared into your arms, my fingers tangled in the soft hair of your chest, my lips near your ear? And then can I say I love you, finally?

    * * *

    Epilogue: I waited. I never sent the letter but he did come back and when he came back it was to me. We have been inseparable since he drove back into my parking lot on a warm June night in 1986.

    Marie A Bailey

  • Earth to Earth

    Earth to Earth

    J.S. Watts

    At the end, we all return peacefully to the elements that gave birth to us—unless the element that took us claims us first and for itself alone.

    The world is full of echoes: the fading shadows of the taken. Water flows with the spirits of the drowned. Flames crackle to the anguished screams of the burned. The thin shades of those whose last breath was ripped into the air flock the ether and those whom the earth swallows lie absorbed within its vast unforgiving darkness.

    #

    The town of Blackhill squats deep in the heart of the Draymar Mountains. It has been a mining town for centuries. Coal runs under its skin and in its blood. It was home to the first Draymar Mine, and then the Great Draymar Mine and then the New Great Draymar Mine, but the mining ended in 1927 with a cave-in at the New Great Draymar that claimed the lives of over one hundred men, tearing out the bleeding heart of the town and seventy-three fragile families.

    On that day, Death walked through the town’s streets hand-in-hand with despair. For the families left behind, it was the not knowing that inflicted the most damage. Many men were killed instantly, crushed like dry seeds by the weight of the mountain’s falling guts, but others…  Those cursed ones lived on for days after the cave-in, buried alive in their waiting graves while the earth and rock around them slowly ate them: absorbing their breath, their strength, their anger and hope, and finally closing-in forever on the husks of the men they had been and taking those too.

    My only son died in the disaster, leaving behind a distraught young widow, an endlessly grieving mother, a baby daughter who’d barely had the chance to know him and taking with him the future of our family. He had been the focus of all our hopes: the way out of the coal dust. He shouldn’t have been down the mine that day. We thought we had given him a hard-scraped escape route, an education invested in by our back-broken labour and the daily struggle of our lives, but with a new baby, he needed more money and such were the times, he went down the mine to work a shift or several alongside me. On the day of the disaster, he had gone down into the dark to work one last shift. He never came back up.

    His loss and the manner of it were bitterly unbearable, but worse still was my solitary knowledge that it was not an accidental death. I knew it was murder, but I could do nothing with that knowing. It surrounded me, held me in. There was no escape.

    Without the mine, Blackhill withered and declined. Those that could, abandoned it and its all-consuming poverty. McKillip, the mine owner, was amongst the first to go. He had lost a mine but had gained a fortune through insurance deals. He went off with his young family intact to start afresh in another town, abandoning the one his mine had gutted.

    Years passed, even if their passage no longer seemed relevant. Changing times brought fresh opportunities for some. In due course, the son of the mine owner returned to Blackhill, though whether he did so in the knowledge of his father’s past actions, I neither knew nor cared.  What drew me to him was the blood that pumped through his veins: his father’s blood. I sensed it and it awoke the living hatred that had held me together all the while. Time became relevant once more: it was time for revenge.

    #

    Marcus McKillip came back to town on a storm-battered day. It felt as if the elements themselves were protesting against a McKillip’s return. The wind tossed leaves into the air and then branches as if they were leaves. Rain poured down like the torrential gush of water from a giant hosepipe. Under the weight of so much water, the earth became heavy and started to move, sliding down the hillside towards the road that McKillip was on, but he drove a flash, fast car and out-ran the mudslide.

    “Eh, it’s a wild night out there, boys,” was all he was heard to say, and then he smiled, as if the anger and wildness of the elements was of no consequence. A home-coming drink at the local inn and he was off to reclaim the family house. I observed and waited.

    The next day there was an unexpected earth tremor, but McKillip kept on smiling as he went about his business. “It’s good to be home,” he said and he made himself properly at home, reopening his father’s old house, reclaiming its formal garden from the natural wilderness it had become, digging deep into the poor soil that many of us had greater cause to call home. The earth showed him what it thought of this. The earth tremors continued for days and more mud slid down the hillside towards the town, but not far enough to do any real damage.

    Then the purpose of McKillip’s return became clearer. He sent men to the mine with measuring devices and surveying equipment. He did not dirty his own hands, just stayed at the family house where he shipped-in rich, fresh, alien soil for the garden and the thirty new rose bushes he had ordered: soil that did not come from the Draymars. His feet no longer walked on our earth.

    A week after the surveyors and engineers left, he announced he was re-opening the mine as a theme park. The graves of brave men, the workplace and lifeblood of hundreds more, turned into a mindless place of amusement for the unknowing, thought-free public.

    Safe in his father’s grand house, McKillip watched as the diggers came, gouging into the soil and rock that had formed us, tearing up our past and then unceremoniously uncovering things Old Man McKillip must have thought covered up for good. Revealed at last to the knowledgeable few was evidence that the ’27 cave-in had not been a natural disaster.

    Marcus McKillip came to the mine then. I watched and waited to see what he would do, all the while the blood-hate pounding inside me like a shaman’s drum. But I held back. Yes, he was his father’s son, but he was not his father. Some faltering vestige of humanity held me back.

    I looked on as Marcus McKillip stared down at the sabotage that was the brutal work of his father, the physical manifestation of his father’s greed and the black ruin it had brought crashing down on us. He said nothing, but smiled, a slow thoughtful smile and still I hesitated. Then he was gone, back up the hill in his fast car to his grand house and gardens. Within the hour the McKillip family secret was once again buried, this time beneath one hundred tons of pulverised rock and liquid concrete. The work of constructing a tawdry theme park around our suffering and misery continued unabated.

    It was as if the earth had been holding its breath and then finally let go. There were more tremors and mudslides, this time more destructive, but McKillip just brought more men in to shore-up the workings. Finally, the unquiet earth claimed a man, but it was not McKillip. Accidents happen and McKillip did not care. He felt no need to come back to the mine.

    Eventually, despite the restlessness of the earth, the monstrosity was completed. It was called the Draymar Theme Park Museum of Mining, but it was no academic temple to the past. Children, and adults little better than children, were to ride fake coal-trucks down thrill-inducing slopes into what was left of the original mine, laughing and screaming within feet, and sometimes less, of where men had struggled and lost, desperately relinquishing their souls to the soil. It was an intolerable abomination. And still, McKillip stayed away from the mine.

    The day of the “Museum’s” grand opening and at last Marcus McKillip came back to the mine in person to gloat over his desecration of our rock and soil. He walked slowly up the new path to the old pithead, past the waiting crowds, smiling broadly as if he thought he had laid claim to a fresh gold mine. 

    He took the new, shiny cage, far bigger than the original had been, down into the mine and then began a slow, satisfied, lone walk along the new corridors and passageways he had created. His expensive leather shoes glided over the smoothness of the artificial flooring. His pride oozed from the pores of his skin and into the air that surrounded him. I could smell his heavy aftershave, no doubt expensive, but certainly not subtle, and the pride that underlay it. I whispered his name, but there was no sign he heard me.

    He continued the inspection tour of his grand work. He slowed as he neared the site of his father’s iniquity. It was buried beneath the new flooring, but there was still an old access passageway, left, no doubt, for authenticity’s sake, that skirted the area. I whispered his name again and he paused and then stepped off the new pathway and into the old passage, his shoes making contact with the soil and dirt of ages that had accumulated there. He bent down and scooped up some of the dry earth, letting it run between his fingers as he walked further down the passage, away from the new and into the old.

    I waited, close to where Old Man McKillip had secured his own family’s future by taking away mine and the lives of one hundred and four men in their prime. For a third time, I whispered McKillip’s name and this time I think he heard me. He stopped and looked around. That was when I made my move to restore the true balance of the Earth.

    The floor of the old tunnel shook and soil began to shift, trickling gently and unnoticed at first into the passage from the walls and ceiling and then accelerating its cascade. Mud and coal dust began to pour into the shaft. Out in the new area, honest dirt was sliding behind and around the fake mine fittings, but Marcus McKillip would not know this. It was his turn to be trapped, becoming rooted to the spot as his expensive leather shoes sank into the loosened earth of the tunnel. He shouted out. Fear took hold of him. But it was not just fear. The earth continued to shift. Verticals buckled and horizontals tilted. Thick fingers of soil and coal dirt seized his ankles and then his calves, wrapping themselves round him like stout blackened vines and pulling him backwards and down into the ground. As he fell, the rock itself parted like torn flesh to allow him entry to the bowels of the mountain and the deeply buried grave that had waited over thirty-five years for McKillip flesh and bone to lie in it. Then it began to close back over him, filling his eyes, nose, and mouth and suffocating his final frantic cries.

    Now it is his: his grave, his coffin, his shroud. He will, though, have to share it with what is left of what I was, but he is welcome to it. What do I care now? Vengeance is mine: an elemental truth enunciated and let go. The anger that has held my echo captive flows with McKillip into our resealed tomb. In the earth I died. In the earth for so long I remained. To the earth I now return.

    J.S. Watts

  • Seeking the Dead

    Seeking the Dead

    DW McKinney

    The nursing students lived in Meadowlands residence hall with a baby’s ghost. He wasn’t really a baby, but of an indeterminate age lost to the longevity of his tale. When I first heard about him, my womb quivered at the thought, and I believed the dead to be an infant.

      “Let’s go find Blue Boy,” Julia said one night.

    It was a foolish idea only made possible with the helping hand of Smirnoff. It wasn’t surprising either—Julia had dropped out during our freshman year due to personal and financial problems. She returned every few months to pick me up so we could spend a weekend together. 

    We often talked about mortality when she visited. Her interests were spurred by debilitating pain from an ongoing genetic disorder that had worsened over the past two years. At the time, I was given to risky behaviors and morbid curiosities. 

    Prior, on my twenty-first birthday, Julia had taken me to the Winchester Mystery House. It was a mansion in San Jose, California, that underwent ceaseless renovations for thirty-eight years to protect Sarah Winchester from vengeful spirits of people killed by Winchester rifles. Staircases ended in windows or walls, doors opened to nothing. 

    As we entered the mystery house, exhilaration couched in mild fear pulsed through me.  During our tour, I waited until our group left the ballroom to marvel at the ornate architecture alone. As I approached a set of closed doors with windows, I saw one of the brass knobs slowly turn. It could not have been someone on the other side trying to get in. There was no silhouette against the sheer curtains, but I had to be sure. I peeked past the curtains, but I didn’t see anyone. I ran out of the room and smacked into Julia.

    “The doorknob turned on its own,” I sputtered. 

    We peered into the room, and we could hear the knob rattling. We fled, certain that we had narrowly escaped a ghost. 

    That experience must have lingered with Julia, a faint itch she couldn’t satisfy. Searching for Blue Boy was her attempt to scratch it.

    Julia and I strolled around the university campus, stars twinkling in the night sky. It was eerily quiet, the soft rustle of fluttering leaves an invisible audience watching our every move. Vodka burned through veins as we stumbled across the creek bridge toward Meadowlands.

    The university’s crown jewel was an iron-grey mansion. It sat at the head of a sprawling green lawn ringed with verdant gardens and mulberry bushes. Acacias dropped blossoms on the bordering pathways and during the day, the sun swept across the residence hall as if it were in constant receipt of divine blessings. In the shadows, ivy strangled its walls.

    Once inside, the floorboards creaked with whispers of the boy’s death. Campus ambassadors skirted mention of the child to prospective students and their parents as they toured the Wicker Room, the dormitory’s common area that frequently sat devoid of human presence. Parents snapped photos of the lattice windows and marveled at the architecture. Their questions disguised their excitement—they wanted their high school seniors to register for this specific dorm, the best dorm. 

    The dorms at Meadowlands were often the featured image on the university’s brochures, the glistening red apple color to tempt the naive. It exuded a faux elitism that followed everyone who lived within its walls. When I stared at the glossy images on the brochure, I searched the attic windows, hoping the unsuspecting photographer had captured a tiny silhouette. 

     

    Before it was subsumed by academia, Meadowlands’ countless leaded windows brought light into the Victorian summer home of Michael H. de Young and his family in the early 1900s. I imagine when the nanny wasn’t washing adventures off the children in the grand bathtubs, the children scampered down the wide staircase spine that curved from the great entry hall to the second floor. Their exuberance thudded across the sun-kissed floorboards, their laughter lifted the curtains and carried through the house like a gentle breeze. The building was later converted into dorm rooms with walls and floors so thin that residents couldn’t clear their throats without their neighbors hearing them. 

    Julia and I dragged each other through Meadowlands’ main student entrance and tripped up a flight of squeaking steps. A thick hush blanketed the hallways, the faintest movements behind the series of closed doors startled us. It was quiet hours, which meant Blue Boy could rip our throats out or frighten us to grotesque, disfigured corpses and we’d have to endure it in silence or risk receiving a noise violation. 

    We lingered in a study alcove hoping to coax unsuspecting nursing students into telling us more about Blue Boy. Julia had heard about his existence before she left school, but she didn’t know the full story. Filled with equal parts bravado and reluctance, and keeping my voice low for fear that Blue Boy would hear me speaking ill of him, I gave the details.

    The legend, or its patchwork frame that I had stitched together from various storytellers over the years, was that the boy’s mother or his nanny, depending on who told it, submerged him underwater in a rage and drowned him in a bathtub. He died blue and bloated, succumbing to the strangling hold of the bathwater. After his death, the family quarantined the tub in the attic and never used it again. Who is to say why M.H. de Young sold the house to an order of Catholic sisters for ten dollars, but his son’s murder, the tub still slick with his young life, might have played a role. The bathtub stayed abandoned in the attic along with the spirit of de Young’s son who became Blue Boy.

    Resident Advisors claimed to hate it when it was their shift to monitor Meadowlands. There was too much paranormal activity, the television in the RA office turned on and off on its own volition. The room became frosty on cold nights despite the heater being on, and sometimes the heat rose exponentially until the radiator clanged in protest and the room blistered. Wet footprints appeared on the hardwood floors in the entry hall, disappearing without a trace in the middle of the foyer. No one was ever sure if Blue Boy was malevolent, but they wanted to keep their distance all the same.

    When I finished speaking, a thick presence clung to the air. Thinking of my grandfather’s folktales, I believed it was the remnants of a haint—recalling Blue Boy had churned up parts of him in the atmosphere, giving him the power to materialize and harm us. I held my breath so that I wouldn’t accidentally inhale Blue Boy’s essence and tether him to me. But his name burrowed under my skin, forming a connection that unsettled me.

    “I don’t know if I can do this, dude,” Julia said with a nervous giggle. 

    We cast furtive glances over our shoulders, expecting to see the worst we could imagine lurking in the corner. Julia and I waited in the alcove a minute longer and when no one appeared, we choked back our fear and scurried down the hallway to explore the rest of Meadowlands. 

    We blustered into the Hunt Room where students gathered for murder mystery dinners and study sessions. A mirrored bureau rested against one wall near its entrance. I walked over to the fireplace and tried to pry open the metal grates sealing it shut. The metal whined as I pulled but did not give. Mismatched wooden chairs surrounded a rectangular dinner table. The cool wood delighted my fingertips as I ran my hand over its surface. In the wall’s faded paintings, red-coated hunters and their hounds chased prey across the grounds. The flooring popped and crackled as Julia and I walked across the room, and I entertained the feeling that at any moment, it would open up and we’d tumble into some long-forgotten basement, dragged to our deaths by devils. 

    We crossed into the great entry hall and circled the large oak table at its center. We called out to Blue Boy, beckoned for his presence behind titters and muffled laughter. We dared each other to be louder, to bark out Blue Boy’s name as if commanding the dead. I imagined a pearl-white, claw-footed tub filled with water, a boy lying peacefully at the bottom. As our words rose toward the attic, the tub frothed with greying bathwater that spilled over its edge as he emerged. We had awakened him, the burning intensity of our voices attracting him like a moth.

    Julia and I walked into the Wicker Room. Lamps lit every corner and the overhead lighting cast the room in an amber glow, yet a general discomfort pervaded the air. We shook our heads and scampered back, and after finding another staircase, we paused to catch our breath.

    “What do you want to do?” Julia asked.

    I wanted to find the attic. I craved something more than just an aging tale of a dead boy.

    “Let’s go,” I said and jutted my chin upward.

    Julia trailed behind me. The twisting staircase swallowed the light and muted sound from the hallway below us. Our clunky footsteps echoed in concert with the sorrowful groans of the stairs. We wanted to go higher. To see him. Yet, our excitement puddled into trepidation and we paused every two steps.

    “I dare you to go first.”

    “Come with me.”

    The stairs stopped at a closed door. Whoever entered had to step up into the room, or whatever exited would fall directly out of it and onto us. We stood a few steps below, eyeing each other and the door. Julia’s unsmiling face peered back at me in wide-eyed recognizance—we shared the same thought. There we were again, another door and another ghost.

    “You go,” Julia said.

    “No, you,” I exclaimed. 

    We giggled at our absurdity and peeked over the railing to see if anyone was coming to reprimand us or save us.

    “I dare you,” she said.

    “And what do I get if I do?”

    “I’ll give you five dollars.” She held the ‘s’ until it hissed between her braces; I was Eve being tempted toward an unknowable fate. 

    I clasped her clammy hand in agreement then shook jitters from my body. I inhaled, letting the exhalation propel me to the top step in two bounds. 

    “Get ready to run,” I said over my shoulder. 

    I grabbed the knob, turned and pushed. It didn’t budge. I shoved my shoulder into the wood. Nothing. I looked back at Julia and then fueled by adrenaline, bent down to peer into the keyhole. I had to at least lay eyes on the bathtub.

    I nestled my eye into the keyhole and as I focused, a grey figure brushed past. I cried out and stumbled back down the steps. My nails dug into the lacquered railing as I steadied myself. Julia screamed and hobbled down the staircase. I jumped over the rest of the stairs to the landing and trailed behind her, restraining the urge to push her out of my way. As I glanced upward to see if Blue Boy was in pursuit, I caught sight of a moth fluttering toward the buzzing fluorescent light. 

    Months following this adventure with Julia, during my senior year I would request to live in this residence hall. I could think of no better place that befit my suffocating loneliness than a haunted mansion. When night washed over the campus in a velvet wave, I turned off my bedroom lights, cracked open my window blinds, and crawled into bed. My breath blunted by the comforter pulled to my mouth as I stared out the window, waiting for a specter to play at the foot of my bed on the moonlit carpeting. I was moored in a melancholic depression, eager to embrace the dead rather than sit upright to eat with the living.

    DW McKinney

  • O’Leary’s

    O’Leary’s

    Donna Vitucci

    A gloomier house you would not find, perched there atop the hill, complete with a German Shepherd to guard it and a rattle trap barn in the rear. The main structure stood at the end of a long gravel drive, amid trees whose dark and icy shadows embraced our slight shoulders. A wind rattled the last leaves on the spindly branches, and the ones that scuttled across the gravel like crabs and mice and lemmings. 

    The house stands unoccupied, abandoned by the owners, the O’Leary’s, now living in Pennsylvania.  They are unable to sell the once-magnificent white clapboard house with its grand staircase of now rotting boards to trip the unsuspecting. So imposing it doesn’t need locks. Its reputation for horror and bad dreams are quite enough to keep out vandals. Or maybe vandals themselves contributed to its demise what with the clap-trappy state of the place.  Nevertheless, this frightening structure is rooted like a vine deep within our imaginations. 

    In the front yard is a well, where we drop many a stone and a penny to try and hear it hit water or dirt.  We are just looking for some definition to our boundaries. There are signs reading “Don’t Trespass” and “Danger” which we never mind anyway. The bottomless well, the lonely tire swing swaying in the wind or its own haunted propulsion are not enough to stop us. 

    We stand on tiptoe at the kitchen’s back window to peek inside at the shifty stacks of mail on a table, nothing opened, all unread.  Our sight continuing to sweep the room, over the kerosene lamp, andirons, and butter churn until the German Shepherd’s bark runs us off. Yet, the dog has never been seen and though the house is never entered, it creaks all the same.  But we are drawn to the barn. 

    The barn we can get into so we do.  Bales of straw piled in corners for long ago sheep whose stench remains in the barn-boards and the stalls, some of their wooliness in cobwebs.  The straw was ideal for extending fire. Matches enthrall me. Once I set a book of matches on fire, dropped them in the ashtray and watched as the ashtray split from the heat. 

    Firebug, my dad called me.  My mom told me to quit. 

    Younger children revere me.  I enter O’Leary’s barn near dusk with Tracy and Ellen following.  Fire and esteem have my head swimming. I am going to strike a match.

    The neighbor girls’ eyes shine bright, their eyes fastened on me and what I take from my pocket.  School teaches fire safety; our families scold, “Don’t play with matches.” But like the warning signs on the O’Leary’s property, I ignore them.

    “We’re in O’Leary’s ramshackle barn,” Tracy says. 

    “Our shoes are caked with mud,” says Ellen. 

    “We’re going to be whipped anyway,” I say. The sulphur smell in the air, the match I strike illuminating the three of us, the stalls, and straw. “Voila!”

    The first match’s flame descends until I have to drop it. Two, three, four, five more.  One, when it drops, touches a strand of straw and glides along it before winking out. Once each match goes out, the barn appears eerier, darker, bereft. Our small hands huddle together holding a teepee of straw. A lit match makes it burn brightly. Ever more teepees, ever more burning, until I touch the last match to a whole straw bale and then the fire takes the next bale and the next, eventually catching the stall boards and the posts. Like an electric bird it flies to the rafters and cuts across the main beam. We stay rooted, watching until the roof comes down and the sides fall in. 

    Outside the grass slashes so cool against our ankles. Dead grass, but grass all the same. Once green, it almost feels wet to us. We remember we want a drink, and run to the well.  No water there, but we are a little out of our minds. Fire does that, it covers everything and then clouds, scars. It makes you forget. It overcomes you. It overcame us. It’s why horses panic in a fire, why they stampede and why they mow down one another in their fright. We try to find each other in the dark, and only come up with two and still parched.

    “You pushed Tracy in the well!” Ellen cries. 

    I swear it was like flicking a match, it was that easy. 

    Screams and sirens and suffering smoke. You can’t tell who is alive or dead, white or black, blond or brown. Neighbors are everywhere, rescue folks, gawkers you can’t begin to count.  The revolving red lights of night where all numbers, letters, identification burn. Even the long-dead sheep are screaming a cry I never want to hear again. Call it purified, the burning barn is beautiful to me.  My fingers itch to strike another match.

    Tracy disappears, but not in the well. But, we knew that, didn’t we? She walked out of the barn like a stick on fire, her blond curls sparking, her fingertips smoldering, her shoes burning a path brightly to O’Leary’s back door, where she knocked, where she bleated with what was left of her voice, her little handprint a ghost burn on the bottom of the door.

    Donna Vitucci