Collective Bargaining, by Jay Robinson

1. Intersection

Economy, she told him, is synonymous with evanescence. At the intersection of Main Street and Liberty, four blocks from their apartment, nothing behind their reflection in the window shops’ windows. Once upon a time, he wanted to say, there was this thing called industry. Once upon a time, it was a different time. Now it was Saturday, early spring. No desks at the GM dealership. Only a red phone placed in the center of the showroom floor, and left off the hook. Spreadsheets balled-up like dust in the corner. I hope they’re not on hold, she said, plucking a blonde hair off her shoulder. For a moment, she flew it like a kite in the breeze. Above them, no hawks hovered in the cloudlessness. And all the manikins one block north, he added, have filed for unemployment. She looked at him dubiously, auburn eyebrows titled at the angle of exhaustion or sudden unfamiliarity, he couldn’t tell which. Did  it matter? It is what the newspaper reported, he insisted after a pause. He turned a quarter over and over between his thumb and forefinger. But she wasn’t buying it. Because she didn’t have patience for other people’s humor, couldn’t admire the crocuses. Because even her hyacinths mocked her with their bald resiliency. So she stared at the steaming cup of coffee in her hand as if she could only see her reflection in silhouette, or when she expected someone else’s. Where were we walking to again? he wanted to know. But she was thinking of the abandoned steelworks on the other side of the city, and had been for weeks: If she moved in there, she wondered, would she need to redecorate? Would she want to? Lemon sheets to match the blast furnace! A bright orange duvet to soften the mill train! Tiger lilies like sparks in all the windows! Even the ones that hadn’t been shattered by the baseball-sized hunks of quartz she would stack into a pyramid as a monument to indifference. Sometimes their affair was as volatile as the stock market. Sometimes he was as unaware of it as the weather. It didn’t make sense, therefore, when he started short selling in the fall, which–he would say to anyone on the other end of the phone–is another of the ways we see ourselves. Was it even an affair anymore, he asked his secretary, after you married? And by winter she had resorted to insider trading, which meant mojitos with Chad from Accounting after hours at the Sheraton. Once upon a time, we believed in fairy tales. Once upon a time, he liked to say, a story wasn’t just something we were telling ourselves. But nobody wears those slippers anymore, she wanted to tell him. Rain boots are all the rage now, no matter the weather. Neither, though, was saying anything at the moment. The cold breeze lifted their hair at the same angle. They stared down Main Street at the lack of Main Street. And without a glance, they started walking in the same direction. Away from home.

2. Absence

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the Winter of Their Discontent? No. It was more than that. It was the Winter of Their Plunging Portfolio. The Dawning of The Great Separation, and it all started in the spring. Some of the best minds of their generation, she told herself, staring out her window, had filed for bankruptcy. Some of the best minds of their generation, he thought, popped pills to stave off their madness. But for every pound she lost, he felt more bloated. As if someone had inflated his body with the space hers no longer required. Or the value of his client’s mutual funds. His diet, she claimed, resembled a Bull Market. But he said the question of whether or not to Supersize it was rhetorical, and every time she ordered a Cobb salad, called her The Incredible Disappearing Woman. Even though she was only a size four to begin with, unemployment had leveled off. Why don’t you ask for the burger on the side? she told him. She slid another packet of ketchup across the booth. He hoarded the salt. According to a recent survey, he joked with his boss, she protested these and other nicknames. Then she didn’t come home for two nights, and he called her The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy instead. She chopped her hair; he didn’t shave. Every time she peed in the second floor bathroom at her mother’s ranch house in Kalamazoo, he suppressed a gag reflex sitting on their re-upholstered couch in the basement, Coke can on the ottoman. He watched re-broadcasts of Tigers games he couldn’t remember watching as a teenager. Bottom line, he liked to say, There are only losers. Back at home, she laughed, told him it was impossible for a building to be evacuated, grammatically speaking, when the smoke detector shrieked. Something was burning, but they couldn’t locate the smell. Was it indoors or out? he wondered. He excused himself and walked across the hall to answer the phone at his desk, and she burped in the mailroom at her office three miles away. One night she claimed symbiosis was all that was left of collective bargaining. Didn’t she have it backwards? he decided. Then again, she’d had two martinis, and he knew exactly how many Buttery Nipples he’d had. I made him sign a contract to solidify the details of our intimacies, he heard her joking with Pam when he came back to the bar. And he forged his father’s signature on the bottom line. When this baffled him, she completely understood. By the next afternoon she’d packed up and left. But in the absence of sense and each other, he kept talking on the phone. One sentence following another. He liked the comfort of talking dirty, even if he couldn’t do it correctly. What aren’t you wearing? he would ask. What can you afford to take off?

Jay Robinson teaches Creative Writing and English Composition at the University of Akron. He's Co-Editor-in-Chief / Reviews Editor of Barn Owl Review. Poems have recently appeared in 32 Poems and The Laurel Review, among others.

Home All Day, by Stephanie Wilbur Ash

My neighbor Charlene asked me to take a photo of her. It was so her dear husband could have one for his desk at work.

She said it was part of their therapy. They are those kind of people, the kind who think their perfectly natural distrust in human beings is neither perfect nor natural, and that therapy can erase this distrust, ushering in a new era of domestic bliss and better cuddling after sex. You know—a stronger, sturdier sense of self, sucked from others.

The therapist had suggested tangible ways to help Charlene feel emotionally safe in the relationship. This translated into me taking a photo of Charlene wearing lipstick in her bedroom.

This is what I get for being home all day. 

And having to hear about it all the time, I get that, too. The specific gist is that Charlene feels her husband loves their daughter more than he loves her. “All that cuddling he gives her after sex?” I want to ask, but do not. I’m a good person, but obviously not a trained therapist.

So I put a movie on for the kids and went next door and took some photos of Charlene standing against her bedroom wall, which is painted a bloody uterine red with a shiny gold wash over it, in an effect I like to call “Crime Scene in a Brothel,” but only to myself. She kept saying things like, “Did that one turn out good?” And I kept saying things like “So good you’ll have to give me one for my desk!” And then she said, “I feel so close to you, like we’re sisters!”

What I got for that was a framed photo of Charlene for my own personal use.

I tried to be a good person and actually put her photo on my desk, but there wasn’t room for both a photo of her and my framed photo of Sartre. I ended up setting hers on top of the printer-scanner on the utility desk in my kitchen. It means that all day long, out of the corner of my eye, I see Charlene’s smiling and lipstick-ed face mugging it for me or her husband (who knows which?) and that I have to move her every time I print the lunch menu from the kids’ school or the bank account.

But what can I do? She looks for it every time she comes over.

That, apparently, is what good people do for each other—keep their eagle eyes peeled for pictures of themselves in other people’s homes.

My ex-husband came to pick up the children at the appointed hour, wearing the khaki pants and blue button-down of Expert Anonymous Office Man, as is his custom. He saw the photo on the little utility desk and laughed his ass off.  “Sartre I get,” he said. “But Charlene?”

“We’ve become like sisters,” I said.

It was none of his business anymore whose pictures I displayed. I could display a picture of two golden retrievers humping, a very large picture, even—an 18 x 20, hung over the sofa—and there was nothing he could do about it anymore, especially if the dogs were important new friends of mine, dogs I had grown to love in my new life as a non-married woman with the free time and space available to develop important connections with a new and wonderful community of humping dogs, a community that he did not have—nor never would have—the wonderful pleasure of knowing, especially given his uninspired attire.

“Sisters, or ‘sistas’?” he asked, and then, as usual, backpedaled with, “I don’t even know what that means.”

“Meaning has never really been your ‘thang,’” I said, and then—briefly—had the vague awareness that if I were cursed with the can-do moxy of the self-improving and hired a therapist, he or she might make something delicious out of all of this. This was an interesting exchange between us here; I could sense that. Perhaps it was even a humorous one.

“Touché,” my ex said. Then he raised his eyebrows and pointed to the ceiling, clowning, like a white-bread Groucho Marx, “And I don’t know what that means either.”

He opened the fridge, took a gander in it, saw nothing of his interest, gathered the children, and left.

Afterwards, I went to my desk to print out the lunch menu for the week, and saw that the kids had been playing around the kitchen utility desk and had left there these pirates made out of clothespins. The clothespins had transformed into pirates when the children had glued tiny felt pirate clothes and tiny martini olive swords to them during some sort of artsy-fartsy daycamp their grandparents had sent them to, a camp specifically for children like them—the poor little heathen children of divorce.

I brushed my hand over the usual detritus to collect the clothespin pirates and their tiny felt pirate clothes, and then I threw them into the garbage. I thought about how the glue didn’t stick to the felt very well, or for very long, so little pieces of cloth shaped like eye patches and boots and Napoleonic hats, all smaller than a pinky fingertip, stick to my forearms as I sit at the utility desk and print the lunch menu or check the bank account, and how those tiny martini olive swords jab me—without the benefit of actual martinis—and how when the tiny felt clothes fall off those clothespins pirates, the clothespins cease being pirates and become just clothespins again, and how those naked clothespins have no real utility either, seeing as we’ve all been living with the miracle of the clothes dryer since Lucy Ricardo squeezed out Little Ricky, divorced Big Ricky, and then spent the rest of her years chain-smoking wisecracks around the house in cute little capri pants.

And I thought about taking a trip. Yeah, I thought about maybe taking a trip somewhere.

Where?

I don’t know.

Anywhere.

Stephanie Wilbur Ash is one of the founding creatives behind the Lit6Project, Electric Arc Radio, and PowderKeg Live!, and co-creator of the original musical Don't Crush Our Heart! Her fiction, reviews, features, and essays are locally and nationally published. Track her movements at www.stephaniewilburash.com

Confirmations

One of my most impressionable memories of church is of the morning I accidentally stapled my hand in Sunday school. 

The staple's legs didn't fold under they way they did when I pressed down hard, flattening my palm across the end of the smooth, flat arm in search of that satisfying Ka-Chunk that let me know when the staple was securely in place, legs bent under meditatively.  Instead, the legs went straight down and nearly all the way in.

It wasn't until the blood began to seep from the holes the staple had made that I fully realized what I had done. It happened when I reached down to pick the stapler up from the floor, against my teacher's warning that I might hurt myself, and that I should let her pick it up for me.  I was eight years old.  I had used a stapler at home many times.  Almost every art project I made at my mother's kitchen table that had parts attached had staples in it. I preferred the sleek, definitive purpose of staples to the sticky, ambiguity of glue at that age. 

I used to make masks from medium sized, brown paper bags that I could slip over my head, corners neatly tucked over with staples in order to match the curve of my skull. I made movie monster masks of Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, and the Werewolf.  For the werewolf, I even fashioned a mangy shock of fur made from yarn, each piece dangling down loosely from where it was stapled on at the top of the mask. 

I would cut nose and eye holes into the bag with scissors.  I would slip the neatly contoured bag over my head and press a marker tip against my face where the bag met my eyes, nose, and mouth, to mark the places where I should cut.  I would hold the mask with one hand inside while I pierced, with the scissors blade, the marks I had made. It never occurred to me that this was dangerous, that I might accidentally pierce the skin of the hand steadying my work from inside the bag.  I never once heeded the warnings of my mother, who stood by watching closely though she never interfered, willing to let me test the give and resistance of the world even then.

The stapler had fallen off the low table to the floor.  It was either an arrant elbow or a careless hand that knocked it there from the table where we sat making easter baskets from brightly colored construction paper for our moms. The mouth of the stapler was pointing up.  When I reached my young hand down to grab it, I hadn't expected to find it that way, open and baring its tender underbelly to me. Suppliant.  It happened before I had a chance to even consider the danger.

After staring for a second or two at my palm, just at the base of the thumb, I reached over with my other hand and pulled the staple out, amazed that the staple had not attached itself to my hand, content with letting the blood drip slowly down my wrist and arm and beneath the cuff of my sport coat. I held the staple closer, eyeing the legs for the slightest bend, the very ends tainted with my blood. It wasn't until I looked back at the wound that I felt any sort of pain at all.  My wounded palm began to throb, pain and blood pulsing through me simultaneously. 

"Like Jesus," I said, holding my bleeding hand up for the whole class to see.  And though I meant it earnestly, somehow believing that the pain I was feeling matched the pain of crucifixion, my teacher, who I did not like and who did not seem to like me because she spent most of her time telling me not to do what I wanted to do, took exception to my remark.  The other kids in the class looked at my bleeding palm blankly, some nodding modestly, mouths open, in agreement to my claim. It was, after all,  Palm Sunday.

The teacher grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me from my seat.  We marched across the room, out the door in to the hall to the boys' room two doors down, her holding my wrist, my arm extended above my head. She exclaimed while we marched that my mother would hear about this, as if she believed I had somehow impaled myself on purpose. 

She pulled me roughly through the empty bathroom, our footsteps echoing loudly against the light blue tile, to the sink, where she shoved my hand beneath the faucet to cleanse the wound.  The hot water and soap stung, and only then did I begin to cry.  She held my hand in the water firmly against my attempt to pull away.

"Hold Still," she demanded.  "I'm almost done with you." She paused then, and stared down at the rising steam before turning the faucet handle slowly, finally shutting the water off, her actions burdened by the heavy weight of her thoughts. 

And though, even then at eight, I knew she meant my hand, that she was nearly done chasing away infection, she achieved the opposite affect, her words assembling the lingering doubt we realized then we both shared.

We walked back to the room in silence. Her hand rested softly on my shoulder, while I held a damp paper towel against the open wound. She took a bandage from her purse and pressed the adhesives to my hand, rubbing her thumbs across them to secure the small arms in place across my palm.  When she was done, she looked at me with a forced smile, and with a heavy sigh, she turned her back to the table where the baskets were being filled with green paper grass, where everything but my stapled basket corners had begun to come undone, the glue still wet and changing colors from the dye. 

Le Chien, by Melanie Faith

I. Le Woof-Woof:

I crouched on the cobblestones, a bright fuchsia bougainvillea shrub and scuba-gear store at my back. Framing the dog’s expressive face across the street at the café, I silently willed him look over here, come on, just once more--there we go! My shutter a split second too late. Ah! A soundless exhale, my left hand reaching out, assuring him I am friendly, my right hand releasing the shutter. The anguish! Take three. Le Woof-Woof exhibited the kind of patient ennui that his master, who did not happen to be anywhere nearby, would have found fitting. Like most European dogs I had encountered, Le Woof-Woof did not have a leash. European dogs in general did not run with wild abandon in the carefully landscaped public parks--they stuck to the owner’s sides or were carried. They were a curious mixture of spoiled senseless and disciplined. This, after all, was the land of General Charles De Gaulle, who one quipped, “The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.” Sure, they demonstrated a modicum of normal dogness--sniffing curiosity, intent observation, alertness--and yet most exhibited nary a bark nor signal of aggression. These were not their boundless and infinitely energetic American cousins. Le Woof-Woof tilted his head twenty degrees to observe tourists climbing steep steps through village roads carved deep and twisting into the mountainside. Then, unaffected, just as easily glanced away, straight over my shoulder for my third try is a charm.

II. Dog-Less:

Growing up, we were forbidden to have a dog. “Dogs are too much work,” Mom pronounced--and she would know, having grown up on a dairy farm where housework and barn chores were a perpetual facet. Being typical children, however, My sister and I circumvented this ruling through pet shop visits, attempting to get Dad to sneak a dog home (no such luck--although Dad did rescue two pigeons from an about-to-be-demolished building, which we named Maude and Claude, and housed in a coop in the apple orchard), and when all else failed, we begged. Finally, my sister and I started bringing home a menagerie of “allowed” pets including hosts of fish (dead-in-a-day goldfish along with tropical fish that did not fare much longer), a rabbit my sister named Licorice that was a prize from a country fair ring toss, and a host of stray outdoor cats from surrounding farms and their legions of kittens that we named, cuddled, and set free. When I was sixteen, my sister bought a guinea pig, Daphne, who would squeal on cue whenever the freezer door was opened because peas were her raison d’être.

III. Hot Dog!:

Google Search:

“Dog”: 286,000,000 results

“Puppy”: 35,000,000

“Dog Quotes”: 34,300,000

“Man’s Best Friend”: 17,600,000

“Canine”: 16,100,000

“Pooch”: 2,870,000

IV. Princess:

My cousins across town had a large and affable border collie. In a family with five children and scores of cousins dropping by on weekends, Princess was gentle beyond all good sense. You could pull her fur and ears, or ride her like a circus pony (which several younger cousins attempted) and she would stand unflappable, her tail wagging. You could hear her toenails like high heels scampering across the kitchen tiles to find the nearest clump of children and there she would hang out in the huddle, pleased to be included, even when that meant attempting to sausage her into doll clothes too small for her. French dogs, I could tell upon study, would have none of that.

V. Le Chien:

My sister and I took the train into Nice (testing our flagging high school French skills: “Je voudrais un billet, s’il vous plait”). Crowded with buskers, tourist shops and fast food restaurants, we had wandered from the platform to streets along the main thoroughfare, past the bookstore vendor who scolded me in rapid fire for photographing a poster of Nicolas Sarcozy through the window. After several days in Spain and Italy, we wondered if France would be a wash.

Then, after our return trip “sur le train,” we ambled through a tinier nearby village, Villefranche. This visual map dotted the atmospheric fulfillment of every picture-book-American-in-France fantasy Hollywood ever envisioned. From the friendly vendeuse who sold me batches of postcards and initiated chatty conversation about how I had picked the best ones and was going to keep them all for myself (I kept one), to the ancient apartments, louvered shutters flung wide to display laundry, the pristine white power boats bobbing in the harbor, the damp cathedral vestibule with candles flickering but no supplicants in sight, and even the toddler on his tricycle pedaling home with two trailing parents close behind (one with the newspaper, the other with a bakery bag). Parfait! Sister wanted espresso while I wanted freedom to amble the tourist bazaar, so we parted amicably. Five minutes in--after perusing milled lavender soap bars that I could purchase for a third the price at home and lovely hand-painted silks--I spotted him. Le Woof-Woof.

What first struck me about the dog was his expression, which resembled a long-ago acquaintance. Not that it is a detriment to either’s handsomeness--quite the contrary. But it wasn’t only this doppelganger quality to the dog that drew me in. On a Mediterranean June afternoon, Le Woof-Woof reminded me of a landlocked rural farming community: home.

I thought of the future--and in that future I imagined a similarly lounging dog on painted porch boards on a lazy Saturday. Dogs symbolize the unconditional security we crave and, at the same time, an inquisitive spirit that we yearn to retain. As European novelist Milan Kundera has noted, “Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring, it was peace.” In a world that can be anything but secure or sensible, dogs represent something deeply tender, observant, yet optimistic in us, the better qualities we lose track of in the gleaning and grasping and running breathlessly forward.

MELANIE FAITH holds an MFA in poetry from Queens University of Charlotte, NC. She recently had a travel essay featured in Quicksilver (U. of Texas, March 2010), and another published essay (Shape of a Box, Oct. 2009) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work won the 2009 Anne E. Sucher Poetry Prize for the Iguana Review, and her articles about creative writing were published in The Writer and Writers' Journal. Her current poetry chapbook, Bright, Burning Fuse, was published by Etched Press (www.etchedpress.com) in December 2008. Her poetry and photography are forthcoming from Schuylkill Valley Journal, Porter Gulch Review, and Old Red Kimono (Spring 2010).

Everything That's Transitory Is But A Metaphorical Reference

     1.

We are on the ground when it happens.  The Minneapolis, Saint Paul International Airport. The tarmac is wet and slick. Ice patches and quilts the pavement that hasn't yet been touched by the sun.

US Airways flight 1549 was only in the air for three minutes before it began its descent, marching its way back to earth, to its watery landing atop the Hudson.  It would never reach its destination:  Charlotte, North Carolina, the Queen's City. 

"If someone's going to land a plane on the water, this seemed to be the best possible way to do it," an eyewitness is saying, his voice rising higher as he brings the plane down to the water.  He uses his hands, brushing palm against palm, to show how the plane hit, belly first, the nose tipping up just a little right before it came sliding to a stop, narrowly missing the Washington bridge. And he holds it there, his hand, the plane, as if watching, waiting for the passengers to begin to appear, afraid to look away, to look up to the camera once more until he is certain that everyone is safe. When he does look up, he looks all the way up, past the camera, to the sky, shielding the sun from his eyes.

The terminal is silent, our heads craning upward, eyes fixed on the news, as we watch the plane descend, still frame by still frame to the river.  When the passengers are finally shown exiting onto the wings and into the rafts waiting in the icy January waters, we lower our gazes one by one, to make contact, with anyone, everyone accounting for someone, before we rise from our seats, baggage in hand to fill the cabin of our own plane. We all look back once before we slip through the gate, smiling at the person behind us in line, until the very last person is left eyeing the seats where we once were sitting that are already filling with strangers. 

2.

In Charlotte, the Queen's City, the City of Churches, birthplace of Billy Graham, the crime index is one and a half times the national average.  It is yet to outlive its Revolutionary roots, a "hornet's nest" still. In New York, the rate is less than one, as if the passengers had a better chance on the water there.

In Minneapolis, it is just under two. In Boston, where we are headed, it is one and a third and safer than where we are. Of course, we have no way of knowing as we board, file down the narrow aisle to our seats, the news of the downed US Airways flight still fresh on our minds, that a year from now, almost exactly to the day, we will find ourselves reading about a young girl who chose to take her own life, hanged herself in a stairwell, dying each day for months before her death, pushed to the end by her peers, their anger swelling and consuming her. And when the news will break, it will feel heavy, as if we are watching the hull of the plane bobbing on the river once more, doors open and taking water in, wing tipped and waving one last time in the air, though, sadly, the allusion will end there, with the nose of the plane being pushed under by tugs.

But, all cities are built on our memories of their dead. All thin cities,  trading cities, hidden cities, continuous cities, and those who stay become reflections of the memories themselves. We stay in order to become them. 

We have maps, with trajectories in blue and red to help us find our way.

News of her death will touch us all, and we will set our papers down, sun creeping in across the morning to the tables where we are sitting, waiting to start the day. Though we may pause only a little while, we will take the story with us to work and carry it back home at the end of the day, when the sun is finishing its long, slow downward climb. The news will serve to reshape us. It will reshape the way we talk about lives.

Joseph Campbell argued that, "We all need to understand death  . . . to find out who we are. We must constantly die one way or another to the selfhood already achieved." We must constantly die because "becoming is always fractional.  And [only] being is total." 

The very next day, after the young girl's death, we will hear of the crash again, the one year anniversary, watching the footage once more from the safety of our homes, finally able let it all go when we hear that everyone on the plane survived, that all one hundred and fifty-five people survived. 

But even still, the living are outnumbered by the dead.* 

3.

When we are finally seated, pulling the belts tight across our laps, locked securely into the belly of the whale, you look out over the heads before you, eyes fixed on the woman explaining how to ensure we stay safe while we are in the air.  Without turning your head, while the woman is pointing out the exits at the front and to the rear, her arms bending and unfolding in crisp clean lines, you tell me, "It's the long winters. The long winters are to blame." And though you never say it, I know we have been thinking the same thing.  Soon, the Minnesota grounds buried deep beneath the snow will be behind us, tailing away as we climb into the clouds.  Through our windows, the land will look whitewashed, as if the ground itself were lighted from behind, and it will feel good leaving the light behind. Transformative. We will break through the clouds into the deep blue sky, waiting for the moment when we land, when we rise once more from our seats, and out into the very world for which we are escaping these lives. 

The title and the lines from Joseph Campbell are taken from, The Power Of Myth.

*from a line in Italo Calvino's, Invisible Cities.

When In A Fit Environment For Man

The rain was so heavy we had to pull off the highway.  We inched along the exit ramp, following the taillights of the semi trailer truck before us, rain pelting the roof and hood of the car with a solid sheet of noise. We took shelter at a Sunoco, beneath the canopy beside the pumps, watching the water hit the pavement hard and turn to mist. The mist hovered above the ground like a low, dense fog.  We were thirty-three miles from Albany, one hundred and sixty-nine miles from Boston, twelve hundred and sixteen miles from Minneapolis.  You looked back to the rain shrouded road behind us as if to gather back the miles we had traveled just to end up stranded here.

"It will pass," I said, resting my hand on yours, though just then I wasn't sure it would.

Interstate ninety stretches just over three thousand miles.   From coastline to coastline. The longest highway in the U.S. We talked about traveling from end to end one summer, summers from then, stopping at every city and town we had passed along the way here:  Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, South Bend.  Even then we knew we never would. But, we needed to believe that we would make it to our final destination, that we would stay there long enough to need to be freed every now and again, knowing that the surest sign we were "home" would be when we learned to need to leave.

"This is my first time in New York," you said, unable to hide the disappointment, though it had nothing to do with the rain, as if you thought it would be smaller, the Manhattan skyline stretching across the entire state, leaving it in shadow.  When you looked out at the rain, leaning over the wheel, chin resting between your curled fingers at eleven and one, your eyes wandered, scanning for the horizon you had imagined you'd find, head tilted to the side, lips pursed with concern.

We traveled out of Erie to get here. A one night stay in a road side hotel, in a small city of hotels. We arrived late. The desk clerk eyed us with some interest and some concern, hesitating a moment, dangling the room key above my hand before setting it down carefully, slowly, her fingers resting on the edge of the card until we both looked up from the exchange. "Enjoy your stay," she said at last, sliding her hand away, though I could tell what she really meant was "I hope you get to sleep soon" aware that where we were was nowhere near where we were headed. I could see it in her eyes. The pity I had for her for being anywhere just like here reflected in her inward stare. But, I'm sure she saw it often. The pity. The mourning for her life.  Everyone there walked hundreds of miles ahead of themselves, each eyeing the next day's travels, calculating the mileage in their heads, dividing the world into two halves, where they had been and where they had not been. 

The next day, driving away, we eyed the horizon for long stretches of time. Every once in a while we imagined we could see the shore of the lake by the same name, the sound of it wearing the hope in our hearts away. And though we never said it, we vowed never to return, our labored breathing giving us away.

There were brief patches of sun along the Ohio Indiana border, where everything stretched on for miles without apology.  Otherwise, it had rained the whole way. I tried to explain it later, the difference between the two, to new friends who had asked about the drive, about what we left behind to journey here as we drove through rural Massachusetts, littered heavily with houses, with town after town of thatched roofs and narrow, brightly painted doors.

"Imagine metal so rusted, you can picture it no other way," I said, the comparison lying wait in the pause,  " . . . and that is Indiana." The slow upward nods of their heads told me all I needed to know, the image settling in, the weight of the world shifting, if only for a moment, and resting in the tall grasses there, and maybe for longer than that, too. 

The trip had been stretched from two days to four.  There were quick stops with family along the way.  Madison.  Dundee.  In Dundee, at my brother's home, we stayed the night, the rain breaking long enough that we headed out into the back yard, the grill, the lawn chairs shiny and wet, the clouds holding off from letting go of the next two days of rain, to let us pick up a bat and ball.  A three inning game, the laughter rising high above the score. When the sun was gone, the clouds too heavy to hold off any more, we headed in to eat, alone together, at the table set for six. There was no way to know when we would pass this way again. And after every bite, we looked across the table at someone new, smiling, words dying humbly in our mouths, each unspoken word meeting its mark, soundly. 

At last the rain began to lift, passing on just as suddenly as it came.  We inched back into our seats little by little, until we could feel their full support, our bodies pressed without regret against them.  We watched the front pass beyond the ridge of trees a few miles ahead, waiting even longer still to make our way out onto the road.  To our surprise, the sun followed close behind.  Just as torrid as the storm. Without a word between us, together, we opened the doors and climbed from the chamber of the car, our gazes focused on the clouds delivering rain to the towns and roads that lie ahead where everything else in the world was happening, and even further than that still. 

*The title is taken from a line in William Gass's, "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country."

UP : RODNEY'S

The stairs lead up. I pause. Stand in the sun shining down through the skylight. I am in the hallway long enough that the man at the desk behind me clears his throat. 

Can I help you? 

I do not turn around, but raise a hand and wave.  A slight wave, to say, no, not right now, but I may need you. There's no way to know for sure that I won't need you. I can feel his eyes on me for a few moments longer before he looks away, or down, or inward, just not at me. Yet, what I want to do is ask him if it is okay to climb the stairs. I want to climb toward the light. I want to knock on every door along the way to the top. I want to ask anyone who answers how long they have been here and if they notice the light when they come in, how it's like being under water, the way everything looks green, the soft pool of light shining through the surface where the sun shines on us brightest, as if to say I see you there beneath the waves.  We would lean out over the railing, staring into the light, following the line of my arm pointing up, pointing at the glass but far, far beyond that, too.  One by one, everyone would step from their doors, and we would all stand in the stairwell, leaning out over the railing, looking up to the light, to the infinite possibilities.

The stairs are old.  Marble. Beveled where they have been traveled most, marking the way in and out of the building.  Years of travel rest in the shallows of the grooves.  Footfall both soft and sound have worn each step away. I follow them with my eyes, up from the landing where I am rooted, the way I used to follow the snow sled treads my neighbor made out across the open lot behind my mother's house to the edge of the field, plowed and tilled and covered with snow.  I would stop there every time, at the very edge, the tracks finally disappearing at a distance well beyond what I could see from where I stood. I only wandered out into the field to follow his trail but once.  I followed, looking down, eyes fixed on the tracks, feet falling between the lines, making my way slowly across the snow covered ground until I realized I had gone so far I could not see my mother's home, and the treads had begun to disappear, covered over by the wind. I looked ahead of me and behind me, turning back and forth unclear what moving forward might mean, sure I could not find my way back home.  When I was certain I would be stranded where I stood, consumed by the snow and cold, my neighbor rode up beside me, stern and unsmiling, uncertain why I might be following him.  He didn't say it, but I could see it in his eyes, the shield of his helmet raised to the top of his head. He didn't let me on. Instead, he motioned to me with a quick wave to follow him.  I followed him on foot, behind the sled, back across the field until both our homes could once more be seen in the distance. He pointed briefly in the direction I should head, his finger extending for a second to show me the way before he sped away, swallowed by the drifting white.  I ran without looking back, eyes focused ahead of me, tripping on the uneven ground over and over, tumbling to my knees now and again, scarring the knees of my jeans, until I reached the lip of the field, safe and sound, planting both feet firmly on the ground there. It was months again before I followed his tracks, though I'd watch from the safety of my mother's kitchen as he would ride away, the roar of the sled pulling me from my seat to the window every time.  When at last I chose to follow him again, determined not to lose my way, armed with a small bag of seeds and stone to mark the path behind me, I found the tracks broken by patches of green, winter finally giving way to spring.

I lean further back, to frame the well, to aim my focus so that it reaches all the way up to the light, capturing the details of the rails and stairs all along the way. A bag of postcards hangs off my wrist, rustles against my arm. It's why I am here. The postcards. Each one with a specific destination. Each one with a specific set of directions. A way to reach out to the world. A way for the world to reach back. They are black and white photos:  Jack Dempsey; Memphis Slim;  Port Blakely, Puget Sound. The post card of Port Blakely is of the harbor, where two large four masted barks and two schooners are docked. It is winter.  The sails are drawn.  The dock, but for the boats, is empty, barren, littered with snow and under construction still.  William Renton landed here in the calm waters, first, the wake of the ship drifting still on the water behind him. And those who had journeyed with him, spilled from the belly of the boat, walking out on to the untouched land, hands stretched before them, waiting patiently no more to grasp at possibility, to claim a land so white it glowed.  Clean.  Clear. Open.

A quick click of the shutter and the photo is mine. I cap the lens, the image trapped inside for later. My footfall echoes down the last staircase. The door is heavy. I lean into it, press my shoulder against the wood. The street outside is loud. Cars, people, busses pass each other before me, merging then pulling apart. Storefronts fill and empty. Everything is destination. We are destinations.

HAPPINESS : ALLEYWAY

We wandered here from Harvard Square. With each step, we moved inward. Contented. Centered. We had shared ice cream from J.P Licks just steps before. Coffee mocha lingering on our tongues. We had eaten it too fast, standing by the doorway, huddling against the wind, trading the spoon and cup back and forth between bites, our hands touching each time. We both eyed the other's hand before looking away when we were sure the cup had been passed safely. The sidewalk was crowded and no one noticed us there, voices and faces lolling, together. When we were done, you pocketed the spoon, licking one side and then the other, holding it up to show that it was clean. Satisfied still. 

Only moments before, we had paused at the "question wheel." I walked slowly all the way around, leaning down, the cards flipping in the wind.  Some were white.  Some were yellow, pink, or blue. I read them.  Each one.  Working my way from top to bottom.  I could feel others leaning in behind me, reading over my shoulder, whispering the questions out loud, as if voicing them might make them come true. And I whispered them, too.  Everyone was whispering. I read until I came face to face with the man who curated the wheel.  He was standing there, announcing to anyone who stopped to ask, that he answered all the questions, and there had been over 12,000 questions posted so far. There were questions about love and love lost, about death and the death of hope. Some questions were about dreams, how to achieve them when the path to them was overgrown. Some questions were about ambition and whether it was wrong to want others to fail.  Some were about pets that had run away and if he thought they might return.  Some were about tests in school and of personal strength and sometimes both. Some were about the questions themselves.  Some were about his answers, why he thought he had the right to try to answer them all. He was a big man.  He had to be because each question was really about him, what we all wanted to know about him, how the pieces of our own lives allowed us to take a piece of his. And I imagined him bigger still, before today.  How each day, each question, each answer nicked and chipped away. What we might have thought would be revealed was difficult to say.

Raising my camera, I focused the lens, adjusted the light meter, the aperture. I took a photo of the wheel. I took a photo of him. He was standing in front of the descending sun, the light seeping around his raised arms, his torso, his head, as he beckoned people to come nearer, to ask him anything they wanted. "You can ask me anything. What do you want to know?" his voice was full and deep. It filled our chests when he spoke. Rattling in our rib cages.  Beating like hearts. Or, at the very least, the hearts we thought we ought to have instead. 

"Ask me anything . . . ask me why the earth is round . . . ask me why all empires fall . . . ask me about the difference between loneliness and being alone . . . ask me anything at all . . ."

People stopped and listened, glancing at each other, at strangers, unsure how they should feel. I listened and glanced, too. He promised to answer all our questions.  Every one of them.  Even the ones we were forming then. And, we, who were listening, gave in, released from the heavy burden of our lives, if only for a little while and for the first time since we left our families, the wombs of our lives together. It wasn't what he said, though what he said was perfect, but how we heard what only we could hear, nodding, believing. 

When he finally lowered his arms, we moved to write our questions down, waiting in line, crowding three or four at a time around a card table filled with empty cards. When we reached the table, I set my camera down, lens open to eye the horizon. I wrote my question quickly, in bold, elongated strokes. I didn't want an answer. Not really. Just asking was enough. I already had the answer. I looked out across the square.  The sidewalks were lined with people, rivering beside the streets. Cars drifted beside them, slowly. The subway rattled the earth beneath our feet. Geese cried almost unnoticed.     

It was the first cool day of fall. Cool enough for a hat and scarf. Cool enough to capture our breath, to capture the breath of this man, yelling out to anyone who would hear, his words clouding up, as if the words themselves were spirits, lifting slowly into the air above our heads. The sky was graying. The clouds shifting, backlit by the descending sun.  It was my first New England fall.  It would be my first New England winter, as would be the everything in between.

I dropped my question through the narrow slot.  I heard it land atop the countless other cards beneath it in the whitewashed box then turned and waited patiently for you to do the same, though you lingered, pen spreading black ink across robin's egg blue. You wrote deliberately.  Carefully. Others finishing their questions around you.  And when you were done, you looked up as you stood from leaning down, satisfied, determined, slapping the card against your palm before slipping the card into the box.  You paused a second, or maybe two, then turned, okay with letting the question go, looking back just once. 

We walked away in silence. Hands jammed into our coat pockets, you clutching the plastic spoon, cameras slung around our necks, our eyes watering in the wind. The crowds thinned. Storefronts reflected the street perfectly, as if we were inside looking out. Until the alleyway, and we stepped in.