Intersections

I walk gingerly along the catwalk.  The boards bend and sway beneath my feet with each step.  I move along the edge of the boat, the smell of varnish heavy in the air.

"Careful not to raise any dust," she calls out from the other side of the boat where she is laying on the final brush strokes.  "That varnish is still fresh.  Don't want to have to start over."  

I nod in agreement. I hold each rafter I pass under, still unable to gauge my weight against the give of the boards. I hold firmly. But carefully.

She smiles at my caution, wiping her hands on a clean corner of a towel she has pulled from the waste of her pants.

"So, you built this," I state, the magnitude of what I am seeing still settling in.

"Yes,” she nods.

"From scratch?"

She nods again.

The sides are newly painted, too.  White, with royal blue trim.  It reminds me of the boats I had seen docked along the coastline of the small fishing towns I had visited in Greece twenty years ago, my friends and I invited by men who spoke no English to sit at their tables and share bowls of olives and bottles of Greek wine, the invitations made obvious by toothy smiles and broad sweeping gestures over the empty chairs beside them. We responded each time with one of the very few Greek words we knew, "Epharisto," and sat most afternoons, eating and drinking, listening to these men talk, their voices arching and falling from somewhere we had no access to.  The cafes faced the shores where octopi fisherman unloaded their catch.  One man outside one cafe tenderized his octopi on a large stone.  He smiled when he noticed us watching.  He winked then slapped a new octopus down against the stone. He continued this way until he had made his way through his entire catch, emptying one basket and filling the other.

She walks around the bow, catching up to me quickly, her feet sure of themselves over the graying boards. The board we stand on together bows under our weight, then settles.  

"See?" she asks leaning toward me, pointing, her shoulder grazing mine.  I lean forward, too, trying to see what she is showing me. She glides her finger slowly from one end to the other.  I look at her in amazement.

"One board?" I ask, unable to find a crease or a hem from hull to stern.  She simply smiles.  I look at her hands.  Her fingers are long, like a musician's. Slender.  Smooth.  Not the hands I expected. Not the hands I imagined for this kind of work, for sanding and planing.

A man pokes his head around the wall, eyes us attentively, suspiciously, as we slowly make our way around the entire boat. She shows me where the sail mast will rise, the setting for the wheel and rudder.  We stop only once we have come full circle and are standing at the bow again. She leans her head to one side and smiles.

"Interested?"

I glance at her once then turn my gaze back to the boat.  "It's beyond my means."  We stand in silence for a moment.  "Any others?" I ask, still eyeing the boat in front of me.

She pulls me along with the sideways nod of her head. We descend the buoyant ladder, each rung giving a little with each downward climb. She reaches a hand up to my back to assist me through the final rungs, her fingers spread and pressing through my shirt as I back down into them.  Her hand is strong.  Direct.

She opens the door directly behind us.  The room is filled with machinery and long tables filled with tools.  Sawdust and shavings cloud the floor. Sunlight drifts through the big windows tucked tightly beneath the roof high above us. The air is heavy here. The boat here is half the size of the other.  She motions me with the pull of a finger to the far side, the side closest to the wall with the windows.  Without saying a word, she points out the work, the sanding, the breaking down of old paint and water damage. She leans in again, this time I can feel the heat of her body, the cradle of her shoulder resting against mine.

“When did you know this is what you wanted to do?” I ask turning to face her. She reaches and wipes away some loosened paint from the boat’s side with a slow downward brush of her hand.  She lets out a short, abrupt laugh. Then breathes in.

“I’m not sure.  But I knew when I knew.” She rests her hands on her hips, tossing her elbows back just a bit. “I usually do. About everything.”

She places a hand in the small of my back and urges me forward with the other hand.  We stop when we are on the complete other side.

“This is a remodel,” the man who had poked his head around the corner while we looked at the first boat says. “We don’t nearly do as much of this kind of work, but work has been a little slower this year.”

He stands just behind us and between us. We each look straight ahead.  “I prefer to build than repair,” he says finally, breaking the silence. “Wouldn’t you?”

I nod slowly. I ask him how long he’s been building.  As we talk, she turns and walks away, out the door we came in, without a word. I stare straight ahead, listening to her footfall over the dusty floor grow fainter until she is out of range. We talk until he is done and there is nothing left to tell me about how the contours of his life led him here.

“Stop by again when you’re back on the island,” she calls down from the catwalk as I duck out. She says it without looking, staring deep into the hull.

How Queen Saowapha Holds a Snake, by Jennifer Marcus Newton

From the moment we emerge from the cool dark of the Atlanta Hotel into the dead end of Soi 2 Sukhumvit Road, we are soaked—first from the heat and humidity, and then from the sudden downpour that quickly overcomes drains, backing up gray rainwater and oily residue into the street. The rain arrives with its own peculiar odor, while muting the stench of rotting garbage and decaying organic matter piled under the highway overpass. Traffic chokes streets as we make our way single file past the garbage and decay, umbrellas taut overhead, muddy pant cuffs rolled to knees, and toes sliding across the surface of perpetually slick flip-flops.

Bangkok isn’t actually our destination on this journey—it’s a way station, a meeting point, a gateway to a more remote, reflective trip to a Tibetan village inside Shangri-la in the Yunnan Province of southern China. But Bangkok’s vivid nature refuses to stay reticent, as it masterfully weaves and twists colorful fibers into flamboyant tassels on either end of our trip. Ribbons of taxis painted the bright colors of summer pedicures speed down roadways and side streets. Swarms of whirring scooters flow around cars and trucks at stoplights to collect closest to the intersection, then take off en masse at the hint of green. Tuk tuks belch and sputter tourists from market to wat to tailor and back again. Water taxis thrust the city’s workforce through filthy waterways, outlined by shanty structures and vibrant textiles drying in the midday sun.

Really, it’s the smell that never fails to stick with me when I think about Bangkok. Photos and journal entries are steeped in the pungent, reassuring scent of citronella inside the private courtyard gardens of our hotel; in the odor of farm-fresh vegetables and noodles cooking up at May Kaidee‘s vegetarian cooking school and restaurant; and in the most repugnant a smell I’ve ever encountered—the stagnant puddles inside the fish market after a long, hot day of mongering, with castoff fish parts collecting in floor drains and pooling to each side of the walkway and mangy, flea-ridden cats asleep atop boxes and tables, bellies full of gut.

And, of course, there’s the acrid smell of shame craftily sewn into the tight seams of Bangkok.

I take full responsibility. I’m the one who can reliably say “no” in any language and mean it. My flashy American smile is quick to fizzle at the first suggestion of street trickery. Bamboozlers, who soon sense that I’ve actually been around the block and won’t be easily swindled, back away from me with eyes darting to and fro and body rigid like a spooked stray dog.

So I struggle to piece together the string of events leading up to our moment of weakness on this now perfectly cloudless afternoon. I can’t fathom how a ruse this obvious can play out on me, a seasoned traveler. My disappointment hangs heavy from my shoulders. My shame drains the color from busy markets. My sadness silences the sounds of horns and bells. I suddenly realize that I’m neither clever nor streetwise. I’ve easily been used up and tossed aside with the rest of Bangkok’s trash.

Maybe my usually steadfast suspicions have been lulled by the miles of tree-lined streets with plump orchids clinging provocatively to trunks, or by the blocks of fruit vendors showcasing sticky towers of exotic mangosteen, rambutan, and lychee, or by the restorative foot massages outside the dusty courtyard of Wat Pho, just a stone’s throw from the Reclining Buddha, or by the hauntingly familiar Atlanta Hotel, with its timeless writing desks, well-equipped library, and dozing housecats.

Then again, perhaps it’s simply the nauseating stench of the tuk tuk’s exhaust that’s deprived me of oxygen. Or maybe it’s the cunning tale delivered in a mesmerizing Thai-British accent by the friend of the tuk tuk driver, the brother of the monk inside the temple where we’ve just prayed, that poisons my better judgment. Or maybe I place too much trust in government officials who kindly flag down, on a busy street no less, a well-timed tuk tuk driver to whisk us to a little-known wat, free of the glut of wide-waisted tourists. But whatever it is on this ill-fated afternoon, we become the proverbial fools soon parted from our money.

Maybe I should have paid more attention to the signs at the snake farm. In the heart of Bangkok sits a century-old laboratory called Queen Saowapha Memorial Institute. Oddly enough, it’s a popular stop for most tourists, the draw being the dramatically paraded king cobras, Malayan pit vipers, and banded kraits through crowds of white faces. Of course, this is not the main order of business at the snake farm. Workers here put life and limb in daily peril as they extract venom from some of the world’s deadliest snakes. Their work accomplishes two very good and noble things. First, regular milking renders these deadly snakes as harmless as the children who beg tuk tuk-exhausted parents to let impeccably dressed Thai workers drape a Burmese python around their tiny, sunburned necks. Second, the poison is spun into life-saving, anti-venom serums.

The message I overlook, of course, is that one never knows what lurks below the surface; in Thailand, the potential for danger is everywhere. I am late to see the parallels between the snake farm and the venomous network of dollar hounds lurking in front of government buildings, holy temples, and tailor shops. And this is my undoing.

And so we retreat down the now-dark soi to the cool calm of the Atlanta Hotel. Silently we pass the front desk and trudge up concrete steps to finish packing by rolling freshly stitched, grossly overpriced suits alongside muddy khakis and t-shirts in travel-weary backpacks. As we enter our deluxe room that comes with air conditioning and hot water for a few extra dollars a day, I flip the light on and catch a glimpse of an 18-inch reptile as it slips behind a pipe in the bathroom.

Two Girls For Every Boy, by Mary Biddinger

They lied to you, and they lied to me, and they lied to the store clerk that nobody needed a gun around there, to every housewife in a long skirt who lingered too long at the front window, not checking her hair but adding up the dimensions of the property for rent. They lied into their own mouths and then they swallowed it. Back then such things were possible, the same way a carload of losers could unload and unload until half the school was on the lawn and everyone tangling to the point that limbs couldn’t be identified.

Imagine a job behind a counter with three dusty mini fans blowing up-skirt and still that did nothing. All local girls learned to make a potholder on a small plastic rack. It was a rite of passage, the girl with the most even potholder weave assured a life that involved crying over the wrong size plastic bags or a sudden desire to drive a car into a grocery store. The girl with the second-most-even potholder weave was guaranteed a place at the bottom of a ravine somewhere out of town. After that, they stopped awarding ribbons. It was unseemly. Everything was. The way a girl would have to lie about thinking armpit hair was sexy on a man. The photographs mandated by Town Hall, everyone lined up as if in a family reunion, except the few sent to stand behind the library and eat shaved ice out of paper cups.

One day a man just wanted to destroy a bathroom, and who could stop him? When he was a boy his grandfather took him fishing in all the places where it was forbidden, and he thought of this when he decided against bailing the toilet before shattering it with a sledgehammer. It was an upstairs bathroom, and outside the window he noticed a pear wedged in the gutter of his neighbor’s bungalow. This was not his favorite body shape on a woman, so he ignored it completely and wondered how much the antique tiles could fetch at a swap meet. Only he was not the type to attend a swap meet, and this word was not in his vernacular, but slipped into his mouth somehow like somebody’s pinkie, a faint taste of lime on it.

His favorite body type on a woman was the type that kept falling from the trees every mid-April, and he would have to sweep her up and burn her, and even when she burned she was the same shape, which was somewhat like the song the lady downstairs played on her piano in 1978 when she had too much vodka on Wednesdays, only halted when the cabbage started to boil over and the whole building became a crypt. When she wasn’t issuing from the trees, the favorite worked at the liquor store, proud of the gradual glaze she was impressing upon her corporate-issue polyester apron. She made a point of ringing up all of his items incorrectly, to be playful. When she saw his car pull into the lot she’d start warming a penny in her hand. As a transfer student from upstate, she had never learned to make a potholder on a rack. Sometimes the penny got pretty hot.

The new toilet was in the living room. They had lied to him about it. It wasn’t supposed to be some modern low-flush contraption, but in reality they didn’t make them any other way. As a child he tested his demons by accompanying his father to the hardware store and doing his best not to try out the floor model toilets, projecting a stream onto the wooden floor below. That floor looked like the one they ripped out of the historic one-room schoolhouse when somebody spread a rumor about radon. All of the mothers got out the nit comb, not knowing what else to do. Of course it was a lie, but the gas station built in its place had both men’s and women’s restrooms, where sometimes a veneer of blood would shimmer in the toilets of both at the exact same time. Nobody considered this to be a miracle.

He most despised the shape of an eggplant, and would make no mention of it, but it existed. Sometimes it was the color of a birthmark on a cheek, or a wine stain on a wall in the stairway. His neighbor had a variety of vegetables in his yard, but no eggplant. If you followed the same alley north, you’d reach the commercial district, and not that he considered romance in terms of plumbing, but there was something majestic about certain external fittings, even if his favorite type was the opposite of a standpipe. Once in a while, she who was not a standpipe stepped out the back of the store for a cigarette, because isn’t the favorite always doing something with mild peril, like dropping her new purse into a fountain? The favorite would have her own catalogue of imperfections. She’d tell lies sometimes. That she was from somewhere other than upstate, and had an uncle who was her exact twin. That she had no idea how to define the word finials.

At this point the woodgrain pickup truck filled with losers stopped circling the block and halted in front of an ice cream joint blocks away. Still, in his mind he revisited the martial arts of his youth. The favorite teetered near the standpipe, in the way that favorites are always about to tumble into something blunt. On his way down the alley he’d passed the real estate office, its humble offerings scanned daily by so many potential housewives. Some day he would take his whole house apart, and then leave it. Perhaps he would sell the best brass embellishments to an antique dealer, because something had to be saved. That pear would grow no tree in the gutter, and the oaks wouldn’t come back in April. They would be long gone and goodbye.






Mary Biddinger walks the line between good and evil in Akron, Ohio, where she writes, edits, teaches, and takes pictures of inanimate objects. Her photographs interrogate everyday items in the hope of finding their hidden motivations and passions. She has a particular interest in standpipes, tissues posed like swans in the grass, and traffic cones that have trouble hiding their excitement. You can find more of her pictures (and words) athttp://wordcage.blogspot.com.

The Naming of Things

We walk slowly.  Buying time. The studio is not far from here.

We are huddled close under one umbrella, shoulder against shoulder, hands stacked one on top of the other, gripping the handle. Rain is tapping and tapping just above our heads.  Henry, her English pointer, is in the lead, nose to the ground, pulling hard against the leash. We have been talking about family.  Heritage. Names. The naming and not naming of things. Testing our own resistance.  

"Counselor of Wolves," I say, "My name means counselor of wolves."  I can tell she has raised her head up from watching the sidewalk to look at me. 

"It fits," she says, still looking at me, still thinking about what I have told her.

"My dad had a book on the origins of Anglo-Saxon names," I continue, without looking up, answering the question that always follows at the announcement though she has not yet asked. "On hot summer days, my sister and I would to go down into the basement and lie on the floor in my dad's study to read to each other from his books.  Once, we looked up the names of all our friends and wrote them down and memorized them.  When we saw our friends the next day we called them by the meaning of their names.  We didn't tell anyone why we did it until the next day and we showed them the book. I don't know why I still remember that."  We walked in silence for a few more yards. "We tried to teach ourselves Latin, too."

She laughs.  I smile.  "It's true," I say, after a brief pause.

"I know it is," she says.  And I know she knows by the way she says it.  In earnest. It catches us both off guard that we have managed to come this far so fast. She laughs again, to break the silence.  To take our minds off what we've both been thinking.

She's been bottling things.  Mostly beetles.  A "friend" of hers sent her a bottle of Paris air for her collection. She keeps it in her purse.  She has her hand in her purse and is holding the bottle now.  I can hear her rings rattling on the glass as she moves her palm over it. A dream deferred, of sorts.

She stoops down to eye a beetle Henry is sniffing at on the sidewalk before us. She hands me Henry's leash and gets down on her hands and knees and nudges the beetle with her finger.  It takes a couple of steps away. The giant mandibles jutting from its head are menacing looking.  I stay standing. She rises to her feet, fists punched to her sides. 

"Still alive," she says, unable to mask her disappointment, eyeing the beetle intently, as if it might roll over on its back if we watched just a little while longer. She is considering taking it with us. But we have nothing to carry it in. I can tell she is thinking about the bottle in her purse.  

She's obsessed with Joseph Cornell. Compartmentalizing the world around her. It is a way to feel safer in the world.  To see how easily it fits in little jars. Her studio is lined with them.  The windowsills.  The shelves.  The desk.  The chairs. She's even begun to line them against the walls on the floor. Most of the jars are clear.  Some are light blue or light green. We stopped at a garage sale just a few blocks earlier.  She eyed some old mason jars but bought none.

Looking back behind us, in the direction of the sale, she fights the urge to take the beetle with us, and with the wave of her hand, she brushes the thought off, as if to say,  It's just as much about the jar as what's inside.

She turns to look at me, the rain beginning to mat her hair down.  She is smiling.   We are smiling.  I nod my head to the side, to usher us forward. Henry, anticipating my move, tugs on the leash, pulling my arm out before me.  She looks back down at the beetle then back at me. She pulls the jar from her purse, unscrews the lid and holds the jar upside down to let the air out, shaking it after holding it inverted for a second or two, to get every last drop out. 

She squats down, placing the container before her prize and nudges the black creature forward into the jar. I am amazed at her boldness. I always have been.  She holds the jar up for me to see, then fastens the lid, glancing at me for my reaction.  I am peering into the jar, turning my head one way, and then the other, watching the beetle try to climb the slick glass walls.

"Shall we?" she asks, slipping the bottle down into her purse. She takes Henry's leash in one hand and my hand in the other. It is the first time we have walked like this. "You don't think that was cruel?" she asks moments later, addressing my silence. She is looking at me.  Waiting. 

"No," I answer, after a moment's pause.  "I do not." Her hand relaxes in mine.  She swings our arms the rest of the way. 

When we reach the studio, we hang our wet things over the radiator to dry. The heat emitted is low because of the time of year.  She lifts the jarred beetle from her purse and sets it on the floor.  No signs of life.

The rain is finally letting up, the sun drifting cautiously across the floor to where we stand. Henry shakes himself dry, then sprawls his wet body out on the cot against the wall, urging us to rub his belly. And we do. Our hands touching Henry, our eyes fixed on each other.

"We will soon drift off the edge of the map," she says, nodding matter-of-factly, prophetically. "We will be insatiable."

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.