“I have brought the melancholy of my heart
up the hill
to the wild roses in flower”

-Yosa Buson (1716 - 1784), translated by W.S. Merwin

Yosa Buson stared at the bloody circle before him. The noon sun was directly overhead, and its sunlight poked between a handful of white ocean clouds, the sunlight reflecting off the blood’s deep, oozing red. The result looked like a rose in full blossom, plucked and thrown carelessly into the wind. 

The sounds of the townspeople began to creep back into his consciousness. The muttering gossip of the victim’s neighbors peppered into Buson’s ears. He felt the close perspiration of the poor fishermen around him; the summer humidity did little to comfort the grisly scene. Thirty villagers had come to see this man’s execution, yet no one knew his name. They knew only what he’d done two nights ago.

“Excuse me. You there. Excuse me.”

Buson looked down to his left at an aged fisherman. The man’s flesh was torn and leathery, like the stunted skin of a turtle. 

“Oh, sorry. I apologize . . . my mind was elsewhere,” Buson said.

The old fisherman grimaced, revealing only a few remaining yellow teeth. “I understand. You look like a young man, traveler. First time seeing an execution?”

“Sadly, no.”

“Hm. Guess blood’s still flying across the country. So much for our hard-earned peace. Our daimyo hasn’t been here in all his life, I guarantee that.” The man took a step back and casually bowed a respectful angle. “I’m Beniya. A pleasure to meet you.”

Buson kindly returned the bow. He felt his white kimono stick to his sweaty back. “Friends call me Buson.”

“Strange name for these parts. Strange day for all of us, I suppose.” Beniya turned and looked across the slim road to the rapist’s body. “Did you know her . . . the victim?” His voice was low, breathless.

“Briefly. I knew her name.” Buson felt the sentence leave his cracked lips like bitter wine.

“She was a real beauty for a town like this. Yes, she was. Shame. At least she’s with her ancestors now. No place in this world for an orphan.” Beniya bowed again and walked off toward the market. The rest of the villagers gradually dispersed back to their daily chores, their boats, their weaving. Buson watched four boys tiptoe toward the corpse to get a better look. The two samurai were talking quietly to each other, the executioner leaning on his sheathed katana. One saw the boys and swore them off.

With his hands behind his back, Buson stared at the bloody rose-print. He couldn’t strip it from his mind. This tragic, bloody ferocity had coursed through a killer’s veins minutes ago. Enthralling. Paired with the sun, it was a shade of red Buson had never seen recreated by man’s hands, not in Edo, nor in Kyoto. Mankind’s truest paint is hidden until death, he thought. As he slowly picked up his pack and straw raincoat, he felt his head spin. His knees wobbled until he caught his balance. Blood was on his mind. Blood and loathing.

Takahama’s only izakaya was full that night. Men packed shoulder-to-shoulder drank the town’s unique brew of sake by the pitcher-full. Buson sat on the last stool of the restaurant. Back slumped like his shoulders were melting down his chest, he stared into the clear liquid sloshing around his cup as he tilted it left and right. The paper lanterns hanging from the izakaya’s wooden posts shed warm, flickering light across the small restaurant. Behind him he felt the pleasant coastal breeze. Cold specks of rain danced in from the night and kissed the nape of his neck. 

He remembered when he’d been here five moons ago. Hanako had been piling used wooden plates and ceramic cups from the bar, careful not to make eye contact with anyone. Anyone except Buson. Her long hair had been tied in a tight bun behind her head, casually held in place by a long black hairpin. A scarlet ornamental flower crested the top of the pin. The flower was a splash of color in contrast to Hanako’s pale skin and grey kimono. Beads of sweat had raced down her forehead. Buson had imagined he could feel her anxiety on his own back, and he’d wished he could take it, keep it for himself. When her duties were clear, she had come over to Buson and chatted about menial things. The color of the moon, local gossip, the new Buddhist bhikkhu in town. It hadn’t mattered what she’d said to him. It was the way she traced her hair behind her ear, the way she smiled with half a grin when she spoke of her dreams. 

Now two mature women were tending to the bar. Both wore the same grey kimono. Both wore deep frowns set like stone. Buson shot back the rest of his cup and slammed his hand on the bar for a pitcher. The night weighed against him, waiting to ambush him when sleep would inevitably roll along. The dreams would stab silently, without expression. Buson could feel the sake burn in his chest and the tips of his ears. The room began to spin, just like he’d hoped it would.

A few pitchers later, Buson stumbled through the quiet night’s muddy streets. He hoped he was moving toward the town’s meager ryokan to spend the night, but he wasn’t sure of his steps. Uncertainty, he thought. That’s me tonight and tomorrow. Forever. What is a poet if not a vagabond? His mind swam in the warm mud seeping between his sandaled toes. He was missing something, looking for something inside his organs. Hollow, like an oak infested with wood beetles digging through its branches. A young woman appeared at Buson’s side and grabbed his elbow. She was leading him toward a wide, lit house. In the dark, Buson looked up at the clear sky. Stars spread themselves haphazardly across the night. All of them swirled around one another. Hypnotizing. Buson stopped the girl and rubbed his eyes. He looked again at the stars and saw them for what they were: innumerable eyes of a spider staring at him, gods watching his thoughts closer than he’d ever know.

The following morning, Buson’s nausea eclipsed his nihilism. He had a feeling he’d wretched a few times last night, but he couldn’t remember. The ryokan’s staff were pleasant to him, but stiff and forced. After tea and a small bowl of rice, Buson paid them well. As he exited the sliding door, he paused and got the attention of the ryokan’s owner, a middle-aged man with pock-marked cheeks.
“Pardon me,” Buson said. “Who’s the current bhikkhu at the temple?”

“His name is Yamanoue. Been here for over thirteen moons by now. Go easy on him.”

Buson shared a bow with the ugly man before heading south, uphill. The morning sun was veiled by low clouds streaming in from the sea. Buson inhaled the rich scent of brine as he plodded up a heavily worn trail. The grass here was practically dancing it was so alive. Emerald ferns on either side of the trail fought for Buson’s attention. He heard a woodpecker rattle away somewhere in the shaded forest.

Unlike Edo, Takahama’s Buddhist temple had not been added upon over the past hundred years. As Buson stepped through the temple’s arched gateway, he noticed native ivy overwhelming the wooden structure’s accents and angles. Through the gate, twin healthy beech trees stood side-by-side in the center of the temple courtyard. A flock of crows perching in the two trees cawed and croaked, a shrill break in the temple’s otherwise still atmosphere. Buson looked behind him, down the winding hill to the small village below and the sea beyond. Even from this height there was a limit to how far he could see—the clouds were a solemn wall hiding the horizon. Perhaps when the sun has had its say I’ll look again, Buson thought.

He stepped further into the temple grounds. From what he could sense, Buson seemed to be the only person up here. Directly in front of him and on the other side of the trees lay the main hall. The front doors were open, and Buson could see the lower half of a bronze Buddha within. But for his purpose, he needed to find the bhikkhu. The temple’s rusty bell stood outside the lecture hall, a building no larger than an ordinary home in Takahama but far more ornamental. Here, too, ivy bordered the building’s curves and edges, as if the encroaching ivy hoped to hide what lay within. Feeling his sandals pull against his toes, Buson shuffled toward the meeting hall. As he approached the sliding door, Buson heard brief footsteps behind him. He stopped and turned. 

A tall, calmly smiling bhikkhu stood to the side of the bell. He wore a brown rakusu over his robes, the rakusu neatly sewn together with a brick pattern throughout the garment. Buson thought the over-robe looked more like a large, adult-sized bib. Even with the oversized Buddhist robes, Buson could see the man had been a warrior. He had the thickly muscled neck of an ox and the posture of a plank. A vertical scar raced down his forehead and left cheek. His bald scalp shone in the overcast light.

Hands and sleeves together in front of him, the bhikkhu bowed.

“Welcome, pilgrim,” he said, his voice deep and melodious.

“You must be Yamanoue,” Buson said, returning the bow.

“That I am. With whom do I owe this pleasure?”

The sun peaked out from overhead and caused Buson to squint. “Most know me by the name Buson,” he said.

Yamanoue’s expression lifted. “You don’t say? Truly, the poet from Edo, the one who studied under Master Hajin?”

Buson grinned. “I’m afraid so. One and the same.”

“The honor is mine, senpai. Master Hajin’s poetry is what led me to The Way of Buddha, away from war and worry.” Yamanoue bowed again, this time deep, almost to the waist. “What brings you to our humble temple?”

“You, actually. I was hoping to have a conversation.”

Yamanoue nodded. “Certainly, certainly. Please, follow me and we can discuss The Way.” He walked past Buson, up the steps, and slid the wooden door open to the meeting hall. Buson followed him. The interior of the meeting hall smelled of wet wood. There were no ornaments inside, other than a small Buddha at the front of the hall. Tatami mats formed the structure’s flooring. Yamanoue smoothly knelt to both knees in the middle of the room and gestured for Buson to join him. As Buson knelt, his nausea returned to buffet him. He reached up and rubbed his forehead.

“So, senpai, what do you seek?” Yamanoue said.

Buson sighed and shook his head. “It’s . . . not easy to explain. See, I’ve lived many things, and I’ve felt them too. Spring’s first thawed mud on the mountains. A young samurai weeping while he holds a dead infant in his arms. Bears ripping into each other under a full moon. I’ve been there, lived there in those moments. That’s what I write. Master Hajin taught me well . . . but it wasn’t me that lived those moments. I was only a reflection, a pool begging for ripples.”

“That is your dharma, no?” Yamanoue said.

“Yes, I suppose so, but let me explain. I thought I knew dharma—the principles, the duty, the me among the nothing. But . . . but then I met her.” Buson exhaled and looked up at the ceiling’s long pine beams stretching parallel to one another. “I first came to Takahama twenty-six moons ago. I was only passing through, see, on my way east for an autumn festival. The gods saw fit to dump their tears on us that day. The thunderstorm was impenetrable. So, dripping wet, I stumbled into the izakaya for shelter. I was the only one there, other than the owner and a young woman . . . Hanako.” He said her name like it was opium.

At the name, Yamanoue leaned forward slightly. Buson knew that the bhikkhu had known her. Hanako had spoken highly of him.

“There was nothing else to do but talk and drink since the roads were flooding. I learned that she was old enough for marriage—I learned that very quickly—and that she was an orphan. She talked to me like we’d known each other since childhood. And the way she laughed when I shared my poems . . . no one laughs like that. The veil of deluge behind me, I found the flower that’d been blooming in the dark. Hanako.”

“Did you pursue her?”

“No . . . as soon as the rain ceased, I rented a bed and dreamt of her. But when morning came, I did what I knew: I moved on. Traveling, always traveling. Like nature, eh? I made plans every chance I got to come back here. Every time I planned how I’d propose to her, take her away with me back to Edo, or maybe settle in Kyoto. I structured how I would profess my love. Poem after poem—they were all her. But whenever I walked into that izakaya, I would only reflect what she was. I could only observe and swallow the moment, feel it swirl in my belly. Sometimes we talked for hours. She liked me. I knew that from her eyes. Clever and keen. As if she were taunting me to ask her.”

Buson raked his fingers through his hair. “I never did.”

Slowly, Yamanoue asked, “Is it regret, then?”

“Guilt. Guilt, that’s what it is.” Buson allowed his chest to boil. “Because I always left and always returned, I always moved, yes, but I left her alone by staying alone myself. There was no one else for her. No one. An orphan girl in a piss-town, serving sake day and night to drunkards and peasants. And what happened, Yamanoue? Not me, that’s for sure. She was taken, snatched, raped. And you know what I was doing mountains away that night? Staring at the open stars, thinking how wonderful it is to be alive and how I’d surely share my life with her this time.” His nostrils flared with his breathing as his nausea flipped his anger on its side. He looked down at his open palms. Empty and shaking.

Buson heard the bhikkhu inhale and exhale a deep breath.

“I am . . . sorry she had to feel the pain she did,” Yamanoue said. His voice quavered. “She would visit here often to learn The Way of Buddha. She was pious, yet original. She knew she’d lived a difficult life. But she also knew Buddha’s truths, just as you do, that existence is suffering, and that suffering has a real breeding ground . . . attachment. Craving. She saw past them.”

Buson met Yamanoue’s eyes. “How?”

“To see past the future is to see the present. Nothing, absolute nothingness. She awoke her buddha-nature and cleaved to letting go of all of this. She discovered what’s beyond the mind. Beyond the tools of reason. So . . . when she died, I imagine she already knew she’d exist still, the very same existence she witnessed in zen.”

“I can’t not crave her,” Buson said. “The past is not some rope I can let go. The past and the future are my hands, my left and my right. I can’t grip a decision without feeling what isn’t there. That’s the nothingness you worship, isn’t it? Well, it’s a devil to me. I cannot move without feeling my own bones’ oppression.”

A single crow barked in the courtyard. Yamanoue parted his lips, but he paused and shut them again. Finally, he asked, “Do you know of Takahama’s Shinto shrine?”

Buson frowned. “No. I wasn’t aware there was a shrine here.”

“Few people know of it. It’s far in the hills, and the path is no more than a cluttered deer trail.” Yamanoue rose to his feet. “You can find the trailhead behind our temple’s main hall. Legend says a local kami still visits its shrine. I think there you may find the setting for your search.” He surveyed Buson. “Strange that a traveling poet is missing a yatate. I think you’ll probably want one when you reach the shrine. Here, it would honor me if you would take mine.”

Yamanoue walked to the Buddha at the end of the room, leaned behind it, and pulled out a small, rectangular wooden box, a corked gourd of water, and some spare parchment. He brought them to Buson and presented them. Buson rose and accepted the writing set, bowing.

“Thank you, Yamanoue. I’ll go find this hill,” Buson said.

Yamanoue clasped his own hands together. When Yamanoue bowed farewell, Buson thought he could feel the potential serenity of a sweet, inarticulate gravity press against him, empty beyond nothing. Buson took a few steps backward before turning his back to Buddha and heading toward the Shinto trail.

At this elevation, mainly cypress and cedars crowded the thick forest. Although past mid-day, cloud cover remained overhead and crept through the vegetation’s intertwined branches. Paired with the stagnant, humid air trapped under the forest canopy, the raw richness of life overwhelmed Buson. The trail was fragmented but still discernible enough to follow. It continued onward up-hill, driving through meandering rivulets and run-off. Buson’s feet and legs were quickly caked in mud. The trail had wound on itself so many times that Buson had lost his sense of direction. He knew only that the path went forward and backward. The choice was linear.

Unable to gather enough sunlight to thrive beneath the ancient trees, few shrubs and ferns lived on the forest floor. The forest seemed oddly forlorn and forgotten, despite its life. Looking ahead, Buson could see a break in the tree line, where the hill finally plateaued. Breathing hard, Buson tentatively approached the forest’s edge. He rested his hand on a healthy fir on the border and tried to make sense of what he saw.

The “hill” was, in fact, an ancient, isolated mountain peak overlooking the northern sea. A solitary grey torii gate stood planted on the cliff’s edge. The rest of the peak was carpeted in waving, pale grass, the canvas for blooming red rose bushes chaotically spread before the torii. A cold breeze swept against the clifftop, swaying the roses enough to catch crimson petals and gently carry them wistfully against Buson’s chest, before his feet. He could smell their wild liberty. The wind had ushered the clouds south enough to allow sunlight to bathe the cliff. Buson stepped forward and saw a large ball of copper fur beside the base of the torii. Intoxicated by the scent of the roses, Buson inched forward, careful to avoid the thorns beneath the blossoms. 

It was a fox. Dead and on its side, the female fox’s eyes and mouth were shut. The edges of her mouth were slightly curved, as if she were sharing a dream with someone she loved. Someone who’d stay by her while roses covered her fur under the sun and under the moon.
​
Buson stared at the fox like his soul had found breath. His eyes filled with tears that the wind flicked away. He shrank to his knees and pulled the yatate from his kimono, the gourd, the blank folded parchment. He spread the paper across his knee, opened the yatate, let his tears and water mix into the inkstone. The writing brush dipped into the ink and flowed on its own, captivated by its master’s heart. When he finished the poem’s seventeenth syllable, Buson’s limp fingers let the brush drift into the grass. He inhaled the sea, the wild roses. The nostalgic kiss of loneliness drifted across his lips, a clear prophecy that they would surely meet again.


Truman Burgess grew up in the Pacific Northwest and the Shenandoah Valley. He has a Bachelor's of English and currently works as a writer for St. George  News in Southern Utah. When he's not writing, you can find him dancing with his wife or climbing trees with his kids.

1

​​She has a peasant's face, the kind Mao would have wanted to see on a CCP poster during the Cultural Revolution: It's pleasantly round. Her cheeks have no high, affluent cheekbones, indicating wealth and aristocratic breeding. No. Her face, its roundness, gives one the impression that she's from peasant stock, perhaps a village in Hunan province, far up a remote valley that is only reachable by footpath. The village is a cluster of crumbling, mud-splattered homes. The roofs leak. At a communal well, old women who chew betel nut and have no teeth often gather to drink tea and gossip about a girl in a village in another valley (a village they have never been to), who has left home to work in Shanghai. They're sure a boy is involved. A girl who isn't pregnant would have no reason to leave the village until she's married.

2

Back in the sixties, when the rice paddies in this village shined with black spring mud, young women, their heads covered with scarves or straw hats--the peasant girls Mao would have favored--were calf-deep in the mud, stooped over, planting rice seedlings. They all had blissful CCP smiles. This girl with the round peasant face might have been in the black mud back then, working cooperatively alongside these CCP poster girls for the good of the country, but in modern China she has her own ideas about her future. The Cultural Revolution was long, long ago; she has only heard stories of it, handed down to her by uncles, aunts, grandmothers, and fathers, stories of their friends who died of despair or disease at the hands of Red Guards waving Mao's Little Red Book in one hand while holding shackles in the other.

3

​She lost her virginity when she was seventeen to a married cousin with a son who lives in the same village. Virginity had been a burden to her, and once she was free of it she felt she was in command of her future. She becomes eager to explore that world outside of her village. The married cousin was the easiest way out. She leaves the village after meeting a man on WeChat who lives in Shanghai. He's married, but she doesn't care if he is. She's not interested in marriage. She only wants to put that village behind her. The man puts her up in a modern flat in the Luwan District, the former French Concession. People in the building keep to themselves, don't ask questions. She quickly adjusts to this and no longer wants to return to her village, even on the Chinese New Year. She only sleeps with her lover nine or ten times a month. Maybe they have dinner out but always go to a hotel. He doesn't want to be seen with her in the flat, which is just fine with her. She has a lot of free time. She reads the Moments on WeChat of celebrities, watches movies, occasionally goes to a bar at one of the better hotels and meets a man and sleeps with him to earn some extra spending money. Some of the men are Western. They are kind, interested in her, and pay her well. She meets some other girls, too, who are the mistresses of rich Chinese men. She and the other girls sometimes talk about their lives, compare lovers. They all know that they can't go on living like this forever, but while they're young it's a good life, theirs. One night her lover tells her he doesn't want to use a condom anymore. She knows why, too. When he's drunk he tells her what she had suspected: that he wants a son. He has a daughter by his wife, but he needs a son to carry on his family name. The one-child policy won't allow him to have another child by his wife. He begins to weep, begging her for a son. She thinks he's weak and foolish. She does become pregnant but has a secret abortion and leaves him when she meets a man in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton who lives in Shenzhen. He is an executive at a software company there. She's had enough of life in Shanghai.

4

​This man, too, sets her up in a flat in one of the better areas of Shenzhen, the Nanshan district. Her flat is similar to the one she had in Shanghai, one bedroom, a living room, kitchen, bath, terrace. She's gotten used to this kind of life, private with pleasing surroundings, where people don't greet each other when they pass in the hallway or ride the elevator together. From the terrace, where she sits from time to time at night drinking French Wine, Pinot Noir, she looks across Shenzhen Bay to the mountains of Hong Kong. She can't see the city, only the mountains of the New Territories. On a weekday she and a friend, whom she has met on WeChat (a girl from a village in Hubei province) venture into Hong Kong for a shopping spree. They buy lotions and creams and shampoos, soaps and perfumes that aren't for sale in Shenzhen. The girl from Hubei buys a lot of expensive makeup. But this peasant-faced girl doesn't wear makeup. She's known even before losing her virginity that her face, which is out of place on her slender neck and rakishly thin body, is what draws men to her; and she's learned over the past few years that it's her eyes that cast the spell. She keeps her lips clasped when she smiles. Men are never quite sure what's on her mind.

5

​In Shenzhen, too, she sleeps with men other than her lover to make some extra money. She begins to prefer Westerners, because she can't speak much English, and they can't speak much Chinese. The conversations are more direct and honest. They communicate using the translate function on WeChat. They are often looking into their phones rather than the other's eyes. She likes it this way. There's freedom in it. One day the software executive, after sex, tells her that his wife is going to divorce him. He weeps. Too many men are weak, she thinks. She resents his weakness. She thinks of her village and where she's come from while he's weeping. She's known what it's like to face a nothing future, and this man has never experienced this. One night when he's drunk he asks her to marry him. She demurs. He won't give up and sends her message after message on WeChat, at first as many as fifteen, then later fifty, and when the number hits a few hundred she blocks him. He stops paying the rent on her flat. She had expected and prepared for this.

6

​With the money she's saved she rents a room in the Longgang District. It's dark and smelly, and the view out the solitary kitchen window is of a paint factory wall. Men and women who work in the factory come and go in their blue company uniforms. Many speak in a Hunan dialect. She begins to feel that her life is returning to that nothing life she had in her village. She sometimes regrets she didn't marry the man she blocked. She considers unblocking him and getting in touch but resits. One day she's had enough of her self-pity and decides to take control of her future. She makes a plan. She continues to go to the best hotels in Shenzhen and meet men and sleep with them, to make enough money to feel that she has the means to escape that dark room, but she doesn't know what kind of escape she'll pull off quite yet. This worries her from time to time. For the first time in her life she has trouble sleeping. She becomes fearful of aging. One evening at the Shangri La she meets a man from Germany who has come to Shenzhen to buy children's toys. He works for a German toy store. They spend ten days together. He takes her to lunch and dinner. The restaurants are always expensive ones. They communicate by using WeChat. He makes jokes, tells her she's beautiful. She thinks he makes her feel happy from time to time, but she isn't quite sure. She smiles, but her smile remains puzzling. She doesn't want him to know how he makes her feel, that she has never been happy with a man. This troubles her a little, but she accepts it. One afternoon he takes her to a building near the Hong Kong border where there are optometrists, tailors, and vendors who sell cheap electronics, and shops that have fake designer bags and Rolex watches. He buys several dozen fake Rolex watches to take back to his friends in Germany as souvenirs. She comes up with an idea to have a future for herself. She tells him that she could work as his agent in Shenzhen, to negotiate the terms for glasses, men's suits, women's dresses, children's toys, and fake watches, anything he wants.

7

​Within a year she has made enough money as his agent to move out of that dark room facing the paint factory wall. She rents a small flat in the Yintian district. It has a kitchen, bedroom, and a terrace. There's a view of the Minsk, an old Russian aircraft carrier, now a tourist attraction, in the harbor. From time to time men whom she has connected with through the German man come to Shenzhen on business. Some ask her to sleep with her. If the men make her smile, she does. It's satisfying for her to sleep with the men she wants to. Some of them give her money, though she doesn't ask for it. She takes the money. Not only does she need it, but to refuse it, she feels, would be rude. She's not having sex for money. That was another life.

8

​Her business grows. She takes English lessons at the Open University, learns to write emails in English, to communicate with men, and now a few women, who come to Shenzhen, looking for products to buy and import back to their countries. She has clients from all over the world. One day an American man comes to Shenzhen who works for a company that makes drones. He's there to negotiate a price for the motors for his company's drones. She acts as his interpreter. They go to several companies, searching for the best deals. He's married, has three children, lives in some city in California. He's almost twice her age, nearing sixty. They have lunches and dinners together. She wonders why he doesn't ask her to sleep with him. They get along well. He's witty. She makes her smile naturally. Now and then she breaks into laughter, rare for her.

9

​At the end of the week, late on a Friday, when they are sharing a taxi back to his hotel, she is the one who propositions him. She hadn't planned to do this. It just seemed to be the natural thing to do, suggest they spend the night together. He looks at her and thinks for a moment, and she is nervous. She has never felt this way with a man before, unsure of herself. He puts a hand on one of her thighs. He tells her that he'd like that. They spend the night in his hotel room. There's more talk than sex. In the morning she feels that she has slept well. They spend the next day at the Mission Hills Golf Club. He talks to her about golf. She has never given golf much thought until this day. But he is so passionate about the game that she becomes interested in it. For the rest of his time in Shenzhen they sleep together, and when he leaves she feels she might cry but stays in control of herself, as she's always managed to do.

10

​They stay in touch, using WeChat, sending messages to each other several times a day. They tell the other good morning and good night. She continues to sleep with other men, only because she needs them from time to time to satisfy herself. Several months pass before the man from California says he can meet her again. He wants to attend a conference on maritime security in Singapore. They meet in Bali and stay at a resort that has cottages on the beach and a restaurant near a shimmering blue pool. They spend more time sitting in beach chairs in the shade of palm trees, looking out across the Bali Sea talking about their lives than swimming or going on tours of the island. As their time together shortens to a few days, they talk more and more about their futures, how to come to terms with these long separations, hoping that they'll arrive at a solution, but they don't and she, after returning to Shenzhen, starts to post anonymous Moments on a fake WeChat account, writing about her relationship with this man. Her Moments attract thousands of readers. Within a few months, her posts are some of the most popular on WeChat. She meets the man every few months, posts Moments about her affair with him, and reads her followers' advice on what to do, but all these solutions seem foolish or beyond her grasp and, well, it's the feeling that she's a celebrity that is important to her, if but as an anonymous one.

11

​After a while, she stops receiving texts from him. She thinks that maybe his wife has found out about them and forced him to delete her as a contact. She likes to think that she can forget about him, but even after a week or so she hasn't, and she wonders why he hasn't contacted her. It isn't like him to be like that. He would have at least said goodbye, it's over, my wife found out, something like that, and then she could move on with her life, and so she starts to wonder how she can find out what, if anything, has happened and uses her VPN to bypass the Great Fire Wall to do a Google search and track him down. It doesn't take her long to find out that he had died in a forest fire in a town called Paradise. He died with his wife. His house was turned to ash. She has difficulty understanding how this could happen, that a forest fire would catch the two of them while they are in their house and burn them to death, but she has to accept it and does.

12

​About two weeks later she receives a text from someone in her village in Hunan, who tells her that her father has died. At first, she doesn't think much about the text. People die every day. Her lover died a horrible death. Her father was old and, well, death comes to old people. It's the suddenness of death that frightens her, the way her lover died, so unexpectedly, the way people die in car accidents or slowly die before their time from a disease they had been carrying around with them for years, perhaps since they were born. Their death was predetermined when they were born, these people with certain diseases, she thinks, and she wonders if she has a disease that will show itself before her time. She begins to wonder how her father died, and this begins to affect her work; she can't concentrate on making connections between foreign buyers and Chinese suppliers. And so to put an end to this and get her business back on track she decides to return to her hometown.

13

​In a way, her village has changed a great deal. There are new, modern homes where traditional brick and mud ones had been, and many people have cars. The road to her village is, to her surprise, paved and maintained. In another way, her village hasn't changed at all. The people there are suspicious of strangers, even her, who wear designer clothes and have expensive shoes and wristwatches. The cousin whom she used to rid herself of her virginity has three children, in violation of the one-child policy, but up here, in a village in a remote valley, no one from the central government is likely to check on him, or others, on how many children they have. The doctor at the local clinic, who visits from time to time, and the nurse, don't have any interest in how many children a family has, because they, too, have as many as they like, or are willing to accept bribes. It's that kind of place, her village, which is still stuck in the past in spite of the modern homes and the cars and the new road. And then, there's her mother, who tells her she's heard she's a prostitute.

14

​Her father's corpse is laid out in an ornate red coffin trimmed with gold leaf. She can't even recognize him, to her surprise, the mortician has done such a poor job, maybe using photos of him as a young man to give him a degree of never-known affluence and dignity. But she never remembered him as a young man. He had a hard life as a farmer and his wrinkled, leathry face showed it. But it doesn't matter, all that thinking of her father. Or that her mother accuses her of being a prostitute. She says goodbye to her father, to her mother, who really has become unrecognizable, too, shriveled up like a raisin. She hires a university student from the village to drive her to Changsha, where she catches a flight back to Shenzhen, and feels, as soon as she starts to walk through the new terminal building, that she is home. That little muddy village in Hunan has nothing to do with her.

15

 ​That evening she opens a bottle of South African Pinot Noir and drinks it on the balcony of her flat while eating cabbage and shrimp dumplings. As she drinks the wine, she looks out across Shenzhen Bay at Hong Kong and contemplates her life and wonders if she will ever share it with a man as so many other Chinese women do. She's an outcast and she knows it. After a few more glasses of wine, she realizes that she has always been an outcast. She drinks more wine. The sun sets and she opens another bottle and drinks and continues to think about her life and concludes that other women wish they lived a life as free as hers. They are the ones who are entangled in unhappy marriages, tied down with the educational expense of a child. She drinks. A few stars appear. The waters of the bay are dark. She sees the lights of a ferry as it crosses the bay from Shenzhen on its way to the Hong Kong airport. Seeing the ferry gives her the idea of going on a vacation somewhere alone, a country she hasn't been to, in Europe, possibly even Japan, because it's so contrary for her, and other Chinese, to go to the country that is so despised by many Chinese but not her. Japanese design and its culture have always fascinated her, and knowing that many Chinese hate Japan makes it a particularly appealing country to visit. She knows it has many specialty shops where she can buy electronics she has only read about, austere, elegant jewelry, and the latest rice cookers that will probably never be available in China. Perhaps she'll buy an expensive watch, a pearl necklace. She's fine with her decision, going to Japan alone. She no longer needs a man. She drinks some more wine. Yes, she'll go to Japan, stay in a fine hotel, the Keio Plaza in Shinjuku, shop on the Ginza and write about her experiences on WeChat, to make other women envious of the life she leads. 


James Roth lives in Zimbabwe and parts of the American southeast where snow is rare, if it falls at all. He writes fiction and nonfiction in most genres but leans toward noirish stories and creative nonfiction. His stories have appeared, or are forthcoming in, “Close to the Bone,” “Fleas on the Dog,” “The Bombay Review,” “Mystery Tribune,” "Crimeucompia: It's Always Raining in Noir City," and the "Careless Love" edition, and “Verdad.” He has a novel which is set in Meiji era Japan coming out in late 2022. Before coming to Zimbabwe, he lived and taught in Japan and China. He likes to say he was "Made in Japan." His parents lived there during the occupation, but he was born in an Army hospital in the U.S., to his lasting regret, and that of his mother as well.

Newly arrived in Ann Arbor for graduate studies at the University after five years of personal sabbatical in Europe, I knew no one. It did not take long to find an apartment, some used wheels and to check in with the Institute while awaiting the formal opening of class registration. 

Every July the town has a massive art festival on its downtown streets. With nothing further to do, I wandered from booth to booth examining works of art and chatting with the artists. Despite living in France and Italy, I know nothing of art, just that certain blends of color are pleasing and classical designs hold layers of meaning for me. In addition to the artist booths there are those for organizations such as the Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Alliance Française, and Michigan Drone Club. At one such booth an enthusiastic young woman, not attracting as much attention as I would have expected, was touting the virtues of geo-thermal energy. Pleased to have found someone to listen, Kitty invited me to join her in the booth. 

Never have I met anyone so knowledgeable about geo-thermal energy. Never have I met anyone so enthusiastic. We passed the rest of the afternoon talking and passing out literature. The effort seemed educational rather than directed at recruiting members or soliciting donations. Her black shorts and black running shoes highlighted her light-skinned legs. Her black tee-shirt with red block letters reading “Geo-Thermal” below the scripted “Go For,” highlighted the rest of her. After three hours, Kitty said, “Some of us are having a party tonight. Why don’t we get dinner together and then you can come along.” I had no reason to refuse.

“Since you are new to town, I can give you a walking tour along the way.”

She proposed a Japanese restaurant, a personal favorite as sweet soy sauce goes well with anything. I chose the beef teriyaki. 

Kitty chose sushi, tuna maki and salmon nigiri. “Isn’t it amazing that they can prepare raw fish that people like to eat?” 

We shared a small bottle of warmed sake, offering numerous toasts to new towns, to adventures, and to geo-thermal energy. 

“Excuse me, but I have to use the little girl’s room. Be right back.” 

I enjoyed watching her leave, the tight shorts twitching as she walked toward the back of the restaurant. Moments later a black cat dashed toward me from the back of the restaurant, stopping beside the table to sniff the air, before scampering out the front door. The server shrugged. “Must live in the neighborhood. I see it often enough.”

Kitty was gone longer than I expected. “Always a line for women,” she laughed, suggesting we go to the party as it was after 7. We walked toward Burns Park, a wealthier neighborhood.

“A longtime professor of geology, Professor Bubb, is out of town and letting us use his house.”

Arriving at the party, we climbed the stairs in front to enter a crowded foyer and living room. Kitty found me a place to sit on an old red velvet couch and went to find beers for us in the kitchen, obscured by the crowd, squeezing between them to the obvious delight of some. She returned with two cold cans of Scratch Ale, with a devil head caricature of “Old Scratch” on the can. 

“Artisan brewing is a big thing now, especially in Ann Arbor. This is one of the best. See if you like it.”

After a few moments of conversation as the crowd thinned to other parts of the house, “Oh, I see some people I need to talk with. Will you be okay?” And she disappeared.

I savored the beer, considering what I might do next, reflecting upon how juvenile this party seemed after five years in Europe. I remembered college parties whose only purpose was to put a lot of people and beer in one place. 

The living room furniture belonged to an earlier age. The one item alien to a Victorian sitting room were the lamps, whose Tiffany shades would belong but whose bases were made of black or gray igneous rocks, a geology professor’s affectation. The bulbs were red, barely visible as the summer sun in Michigan does not set early. 

A woman with straight, long black hair was seated opposite me across the room. She was staring at me. Her eyes bluish-gray. Her eyeshadow was black as was her lipstick. I smiled. Her expression did not change. Her tongue moistened her lips. I looked at my beer, took a sip. She was still staring. She soon rose, wearing thigh high cage stiletto boots, and walked across the room toward me.

“May I sit down?” 

I shrugged.

She sat on my lap, pulled my head toward her and began kissing me passionately with the taste of alcohol and tobacco on her lips. I accepted the kisses, wondering what Kitty might think if she returned. When the passion had faded, she said, “Now that we have been introduced, my name is Charona.”

“Unusual name. I don’t think I have heard it before.”

“It’s Greek. There is a large Greek community in this part of Michigan.”

After the usual chit chat of people who have just met, she got up from my lap, took my hand and offered to show me the rest of the house. We walked into the kitchen so I saw where Kitty had found the beer. I grabbed another. Charona said that the professor kept his papers and other valuable upstairs so that was off-limits. We descended the steps beyond the kitchen. Amidst the regular party noises I heard murmurs, uncertain of their origin or import. There were moans, of pleasure, and of pain, sometimes indistinguishable, one from the other. And the click of her stiletto heels on the tile floors.

The lower level seemed larger than I expected, with many rooms and longer corridors. Suddenly a door opened to the right, ahead of us. A man tumbled out onto the floor. He was middle-aged, his hair already white. I reached down to help him. His eyes registered fear as he stared at me and then at my hand. He grabbed for my hand and began to cry. As I helped him to his feet, a large, muscular arm tattooed with swastikas pulled him back into the room. The door slammed. 

Charona’s eyes narrowed. “It is late. Probably time to go.” When we had returned to the living room, its sole illumination against the night was the lamps, their red glimmer reflected on the rocks that supported them. A black cat rubbed against my shins and darted toward the kitchen. 

“This may not be your kind of party.”

“Before I went to Europe, a college party, gathering to drink beer, splitting off for kinks, had more appeal. Will I see you again?”

“Perhaps. We are here most weekends, but you have to come to party—and for kinks.” She winked. 

Kitty appeared from the direction of the kitchen. Her hair was disheveled. Her face was flushed and moist. She was wearing a different top, black but without lettering, than the one she had been wearing. 

“Sorry we got separated. Hope you had a good time.” She took the hand Charona had been holding and led me toward the door. 

We walked the half block to the corner. She turned left as I turned right. “Thanks for inviting me, Kitty. It has been an interesting evening that passed quicker than I expected. Hope to see you again.” She waved.

After a few moments of reflection, a few more steps, I looked back in her direction. A black cat was disappearing down the street in the direction of the house.

Although Ann Arbor is a medium-size town with a large university campus, I expected to run into Kitty or Charona but never saw them again. An online search of “Go For Geo-Thermal” a few weeks later brought no results. I have returned to Burns Park, unable to locate the house. Indeed, the University of Michigan has no department of geology, just Earth and Environmental Sciences, and only one Professor Emeritus of Geology, whose name could never be mistaken for B. Z. Bubb. 

Sometimes a small black catalyst triggers the search for mislaid memories of that strange time. Is it that shadowy speck, scurrying just ahead? 


An American retired to his wife’s native Singapore, Samuel “Sam” R. Kaplan holds graduate degrees in Economics and Russian Studies. A longtime member of the US Society of Professional Journalists, he has also taught English conversation in France and Italy. Working as an economist at the University of Virginia Cooper Center for Public Service to produce economic projections was perfect preparation for his current project of writing fiction. 

​The curtains were glowing when Camilla’s alarm woke her, and for the first time in her life, she cursed the sun. She decided that, for once, she was going to get what she wanted that day. She knew it was Sunday because Sunday was the only day she got up early. She rose, hobbled over to the toilet, sat down, and remembered that she still had not learned her solo sequence for Mass that morning. 
She walked back around her snoring husband and went outside to get the newspaper. The neighbor’s evergreen clashed with the pale Bermudagrass around it. It was a bad tree for that yard. Anyone could see that. What was wrong with those people? Twigs were growing into branches and the tree was calling to her (in a waltz cadence): 

I'm getting bigger and you can do nothing, you can do nothing, you can do nothing! 

I'm getting bigger and you can do nothing, you can do nothing, you can do nothing! 

She dropped the newspaper. With slippers flopping on the pavement, she pushed through the gate to her backyard, opened the shed and grabbed the rose pruners. She walked straight to her neighbor's tree and started trimming. One branch, two, three, four... She held branches in her left hand, but most of the cuttings fell to the ground. Then she gathered everything into her arms and retreated, ignoring how the branches irritated her skin. She threw them into her yard waste bin, picked up the paper and went back inside. 

Ah, satisfaction!

She squeezed through the darkness of her living room. The "den of dreams," her husband called it. The sofa and TV were pushed up against the wall and she had not seen the fireplace in years. A treadmill, grand piano, harp, nautilus fitness set, harpsichord, cello, organ, and stair master filled the room and made it all but impossible to use. She squeezed past the items and into the kitchen, brewed herself a cup of coffee and made breakfast.

She ate, went back upstairs, showered, dressed, and made herself up. She piled her hair so that it swooped straight up and back. She knew that the eye shadow made her look like the Bride of Frankenstein, but without it she would look much older than her 68 years. Her ears sagged, but earrings covered up most of that. She puckered her mouth into a tight wrinkled smile, and saw, once again, that it looked ridiculous; but she still believed that this smile endeared her to others. 

A red Cadillac awaited her in the garage. Her husband stopped coming to church with her long ago. Damn him! She could not use his cravings anymore since he did not have them. At least he got her a nice house close to the cathedral. At least she could still give money, time, and direction to the church.

After zipping through desolate daybreak streets, she parked outside the parish office, pulled out her keys and slipped inside. She went to her mail slot. Camilla was not an employee, but she was on the Finance Committee, the Environment Committee, the School Board, and the St. Vincent de Paul Steering Committee. Her own slot had nothing, but the Music Director's box held a fat envelope. She wondered what was inside. 

The envelope called to her (with a bouncy, playful, taunting rhythm):

I know something you don't know, you don't know, you don't know! 

I know something you don't know, you don't know, you don't know!

The song thumped through her head, and she started dancing to its beat right there in the office, pumping her feet and her fists in front of the mail slots. Then she looked around. It was still early, long before the first Mass. No one else was in the office, and she had not turned on the lights. She took out the fat envelope and opened it. It was (ugh!) youth music. Who in their right mind would sit for that repetitive crap? Copy by copy, she tore it all to shreds, putting increasing muscle into each successive octavo. Pieces of paper fluttered to the floor in a widening circle around her. When she finished, she was gulping down wheezing breaths. She got on her hands and knees, gathered the torn music, and stuffed it all to the bottom of the receptionist's waste bin. She took deep breaths to calm herself and walked out the door without looking back.

Ah, satisfaction!

As Camilla opened the door to the empty rehearsal room, she remembered once again that she still had little clue how she was going to solo the sequence that morning. Then she saw a guitar hanging on the wall. 

She knew where that guitar came from. It belonged to the lead guitarist for the Spanish Mass. Those Mexicans. She once attended that Mass for a presentation of the St. Vincent de Paul. The Mass was a mess. Vendors sold sweets by the doors, children roamed the aisles during the sacred liturgy, and the constant din of talking never ceased. 

Those people met for other services during weeknights in the parish hall. The sound of a plodding bass intruded on her meetings with the finance committee and the school board. Those people were irreverent and destructive. She wanted nothing to do with them.

That guitar hung on the wall like a dead chicken, an insult to music and the sacred liturgy. It did not even have a proper guitar strap. Instead, an orange nylon rope drooped from the neck, and, on the other end, hooked into the sound hole. The hook was scraping away at the guitar’s face. What a horrible way to use such an instrument. 

The instrument sang out its defiance to her (in a Hispanic accent, and with the trumpet blasts of a Mexican Hat Dance):
​
I play for those you despise, whether you like it or not! 

I play for those you despise, whether you like it or not!

I know that you don't like me, but it's just too bad, too bad, too bad! 

I know that you don't like me, but it's just too bad, too bad, too bad!

She marched across the rehearsal room with her hands outstretched and tore the guitar from the wall. She grabbed it by the neck and raised it high, smashing two fluorescent lights in the ceiling by accident. White powder and thin glass rained down upon her head, but she had a pressing task at hand. The guitar came crashing to the floor, again and again.

By the time Camilla finished, she was left with the guitar’s neck in her hands, strings swinging freely, and wood fragments strewn about her feet. 

Ah, satisfaction!

Cleanup was the price to pay. She pushed the pieces onto some sheet music and threw it all into one of the cabinets in the back of the room. The debris covered up a set of bongos.

Now, what had she been thinking about? Oh, yes, that solo. It was a chant. She hated chant, especially Gregorian. And all chant sounded like Gregorian to her. Other people might say they liked it, but other people did not actually have to do it. Camilla had complained, and it seemed, for a moment, that the pastor might relent and allow the hymn instead of the chant. But then he made up his mind. Pastors could be such pains in the butt.

She took out the sheet music for the sequence. It had two sets of lyrics: English and Latin. She would do the English. She hated Latin.

She did try to learn this sequence the previous Wednesday, the one evening she had free. She had no meetings with the any of the committees. She was not visiting her mother, nor ushering at the theatre, nor having dinner with friends, nor working at the antique shop. That evening was free. She tried to plink the sequence out on her grand piano while the handlebars of her exercise bicycle dug into her back. After ten minutes she gave up. But she did get through the first three verses, kind of.
The director promised Camilla they would go through the chant together at the end of rehearsal. But they both forgot. 

As Camilla shook her head and paged through the chant, choir members started arriving. The director was late. Margaret, one of the altos, had a new pair of small wire rim glasses. She asked the others if she looked like a schoolmarm. Joe and Mona had just returned from their vacation in Santa Fe. Their photographs of the cathedral, the mountains, and the local street vendors showed a lovely town accustomed to tourists. Nancy's doctor had prescribed her a new anti-inflammatory that was working pretty well.

Erin, the director, arrived twenty minutes late. "Sorry! I had a hard time getting up this morning!" 

"Overslept again," thought Camilla. 

They rehearsed the Psalm, the Acclamation and the songs selected for that Mass. Then it was 7:52 and Camilla had to go. She flipped through the book one last time and blurted out. "Erin—I need to practice the sequence!" The director looked confused, then concerned. Then she sighed. 

"I think you're just going to have to wing it," she said. "Remember what I told you about sight reading."

Camilla closed her eyes and exhaled. Then she slapped her music book shut and walked off to the sanctuary. She sat in the cantor’s seat on the right side of the altar and reviewed the sequence again. The assembly would be following along in their missalettes. They would understand the words, but would they understand the music? She hoped not.

Monsignor Crowley waved from the back, signaling time to start. She got up to the podium and made the announcements.

She led the opening song but was not thinking about that. The Psalm went okay, even if it was dreadful and slow. Then came the sequence. After the introductory notes from the organ, she began. The first three verses seemed to go okay. For the rest, she simply raised the pitch of her voice when the notes went up and lowered it when the notes went down. The organ tried to accompany her, but it was getting one chord wrong after another. The words were interminable. Eight verses. The assembly sat quiet and stony-faced. Even the small children lay still in their mother's arms, dense as rocks, staring at her.

Camilla spent the rest of the Mass re-playing the chant in her head, trying to count how many mistakes she had made. The assembly looked at her, but no one else did: not the pastor, nor the director, nor anyone else in the loft. How bad was it? She wanted to get out of there.

After Mass she was alone in the musician's side of the sacristy, putting away her mic and talking on the phone with her old friend Dolores. The 9:30 AM Mass had already started. Brittany, a new cantor, began the sequence. Her voice was clear, young, and beautiful. It rang with undiluted confidence as she chanted in Latin. The voice itself spoke to Camilla, provoking her (like a 1980's hard rock song, with lots of guitar distortion):

You can't sing like me, poor dear! 

You can't sing like me, poor dear! 

You can't chant and you sound like an old lady! 

You can't sing like me, poor dear!

Brittany's voice was loud, and Camilla could hear nothing else. She looked around, went to the sound board, found the slider for the cantor, and turned it down. Brittany's voice faded to nothing.
Ah, satisfaction!

Camilla slipped out the back door of the sacristy. A young man and woman were coming down a walkway. The woman was pushing a stroller with a lovely baby. The woman asked the man, "What did you think of that Mass, dear?" Camilla hid behind a pyracantha bush and listened.

The man pushed his hands through his hair, and then let them slap down on his thighs. "The Mass was fine, except for that awful cantor. Good heavens, how can that poor girl still be singing at the cathedral?" 

Camilla stopped breathing. She circled round the bush as they passed, careful to remain hidden. 
The man went on. "And that sequence was the worst! I don't think she got a single note correct! What a laughable disaster!"

After they rounded the corner of the presbytery, she emerged from behind the bush. A song in her head pounded like dynamite. (Screamed to the grinding refrain of a typical alternative rock song):

They hate you! They hate you!

They think you're shit! They hate you!

Camilla watched the young family from behind the corner of the presbytery. "Who are they? Who are they? Where do they live?" 

She had to find out. She saw the couple put their baby into a white Sienna and climb inside. The last three letters of the license plate said "7C4." The car pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street. 
Camilla tromped to the office, head whirling with such vigor that she could not walk in a straight line. The receptionist would not arrive for another 30 minutes. Camilla pulled out her keys and let herself into the office once again. She whipped through parish records, tearing pages and letting folders fall to the floor. She gulped heavy breaths as she leaned on the file cabinets. 

Then Camilla remembered the parish directory with family photos. One was lying on the receptionist’s desk. She collapsed onto the chair and gawked at every photo, nose only a few inches from the pages. Her vision was becoming like a dark tunnel, but she had to find that family. Faces and words marched by, and her world closed around that book. 

Finally, in the letter M, she found them. The McNamara family photo had a lovely husband, wife, and baby girl. She looked around the desk for something sharp, and her hand swooped down and grabbed a ball point pen out of a large cup. She accidently stabbed her wrist on a letter opener and blood started to flow. The office was tilting. She clung to the desk with one hand and raised the other hand high. It came down, again and again, smashing the point of the pen onto the photo of the family, leaving gashes across the father, mother, and baby girl. Camilla’s blood got all over the desk.
The walls spun and Camilla fell to the floor. The fluorescent lights were the only thing she could see. The rest of the room was turning black. She could not draw breath. The world was sliding away but she had gotten her satisfaction.


​Mike Neis lives in Orange County, CA and works as a technical writer for a commercial laboratory. His work has appeared in Amethyst Review, Rind Literary Magazine and elsewhere. Besides writing, his outside activities include church music, walking for health, and teaching English as a second language.

Hurley suspected the horseradish on his hot dogs had gone bad before he had the foil totally open. Something smelled fermented. In a weird way. 

There were typically lines at flea market food stalls, so Hurley always brought his own, wrapped tight in aluminum foil he used at least twice before it went into his recycling. Leftover hot dogs with horseradish were a favorite.   

Hurley didn’t entirely trust his old nose, so he asked a younger passerby for an opinion. 

“Do these smell funky to you?” Hurley said, waving his partially unwrapped hot dogs under the surprised teenage boy’s nose. “Not James Brown funky, but like I might suffer for it later?”

“James Brown?” the idiot kid replied blankly. 

Hurley sighed, then gave his lunch an easy underhanded toss into a nearby trash bin. 


Brian Beatty is the author of five poetry collections: Magpies and Crows; Borrowed Trouble; Dust and Stars: Miniatures; Brazil, Indiana: A Folk Poem; and Coyotes I Couldn’t See. Beatty’s writing has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, Conduit, CutBank, Evergreen Review, Exquisite Corpse, Gigantic, Gulf Coast, Hobart, McSweeney’s, 
The Missouri Review, Monkeybicycle, The Quarterly, Rattle, Seventeen and Sycamore Review. In 2021 he released Hobo Radio, a spoken word album with original music by Charlie Parr. Beatty lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. 

/ one hundred and seventy / You’re standing in the aisle of a plane, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 / one hundred sixty-nine / It is 1972. You're working a flight from Stockholm to Belgrade. / one hundred sixty-eight / Someone sneezes. Someone dings a flight attendant. / one hundred sixty-seven / Three fourths of an hour into the flight you walk to the galley in the tail, / one hundred sixty-six / tuck a wisp of your blond hair behind your ear, / one hundred sixty-five / the last normal gesture you make. / one hundred sixty-four / You feel the engines’ vibrations through your feet, a / one hundred sixty-three / shutter of turbulence then fire and sound and the world lurches / one hundred sixty-two / people scream / one hundred sixty-one / claw at themselves / one hundred and sixty / a howl so horrible that maybe you pass out / one hundred fifty-nine / gravity is wrong / one hundred fifty-eight / so wrong that it knuckles you against the galley’s lockers / one hundred fifty-seven / a food cart, heavier than ever before / one hundred fifty-six / rams against your ribs, breaks a few / one hundred fifty-five / a passenger shatters into the wall next to you / one hundred fifty-four / eyes twin budges of skull / one hundred fifty-three / doubled over like a safety pin / one hundred fifty-two / the world is filled with ragdolls / one hundred fifty-one / you try to inhale / one hundred and fifty / the most human of gestures / one hundred forty-nine / but even this fails in the / one hundred forty-eight / hurricane of nothing / one hundred forty-seven / your eyelids freeze shut / one hundred forty-six / your tongue lulls against your locked jaws / one hundred forty-five / the rest of the plane sheers away / one hundred forty-four / sheers everyone away / one hundred forty-three / confetti in a tornado / one hundred forty-two / less than that / one hundred forty-one / the temperature is -55° Celsius / one hundred and forty / something like -70° Fahrenheit / one hundred thirty-nine / your eardrums rupture / one hundred thirty-eight / frost forms along your cuticles  / one hundred thirty-seven / and inside your nostrils / one hundred thirty-six / did you know that wind can blow so hard / one hundred thirty-five / it becomes a maw / one hundred thirty-four / ravenous / one hundred thirty-three / you tumble / one hundred thirty-two / the tail of the plane / one hundred thirty-one / all of reality / one hundred and thirty / the horizon above and beside you / one hundred twenty-nine / so fast it’s simultaneous / one hundred twenty-eight / for the first time in this new world / one hundred twenty-seven / your lungs fill with air / one hundred twenty-six / the only right thing about all this / one hundred twenty-five / you wake / one hundred twenty-four / maybe / one hundred twenty-three / the most important mercy / one hundred twenty-two / your neck cracks as a whip / one hundred twenty-one / you shatter your upper molar / one hundred and twenty / the small things are important here / one hundred nineteen / the house key in your pocket / one hundred eighteen / a bit bent because of a sticky lock / one hundred seventeen / the garnet ring that has always been too tight / one hundred sixteen / the outline of the rip in your cardigan that you mended by hand / one hundred fifteen / these will be the things they use to identify your body / one hundred fourteen / these will be the things they mail to your mother in a neatly taped package / one hundred thirteen / centrifugal force / one hundred twelve / is called a false gravity / one hundred eleven / but there’s nothing false about how it / one hundred and ten / tramples you against the lockers / one hundred and nine / crushes the drink cart against you / one hundred and eight / you don’t know this yet / one hundred and seven / but that cart is saving your life even as it cracks more of your ribs / one hundred and six / your whole existence is reduced to / one hundred and five / cells and cells and cells / one hundred and four / faced with a physics problem / one hundred and three / the plane had been cruising at over 33,000 feet / one hundred and two / six and a quarter miles in the sky / one hundred and one / if you were walking it would take you two hours / one hundred / to cover this distance / ninety-nine / if you were running at a world record pace / ninety-eight / it would take you twenty-six minutes / ninety-seven / but you / ninety-six / you're about reach the ground in less than three minutes / ninety-five / at two hundred miles an hour / ninety-four / all of reality is condensed to cause and effect / ninety-three / as if this is ever not true / ninety-two / whenever the tail whips around / ninety-one / screeches against the wind / ninety / the windows are / eighty-nine / filled with streaks of brown and blue / eighty-eight / that old pilot joke / eighty-seven / the one that goes / eighty-six / when crashing / eighty-five / it isn’t speed that will kill you / eighty-four / it’s the deceleration / eighty-three / do you think of your grandmother’s stories / eighty-two / of Vikhor, the spirit of the whirlwind / eighty-one / do you think about the other Vesna / eighty / that other stewardess / seventy-nine / the one for whom the airline’s scheduler mistook you / seventy-eight / because you aren't supposed to be on this flight / seventy-seven / the most cosmic of jokes / seventy-six / do you think about how, right now, that other Vesna might be at the butchers / seventy-five / do you think about how it'll take her longer to receive a cut of meat / seventy-four / then it will for you to hit the ground / seventy-three / do you think about the passengers / seventy-two / still buckled into unmoored seats / seventy-one / a constellation / seventy / of bodies / sixty-nine / drops of rain / sixty-eight / do you think of the Croatian nationalists / sixty-seven / who planted the bomb in the luggage compartment / sixty-six / or do you think  / sixty-five / of gravity and all that / sixty-four / you curl your fingers into fists / sixty-three / the only part you can move / sixty-two / the worst of all dreams / sixty-one / you, half-awake  / sixty / primordially frozen by / fifty-nine / a silence that you know isn't there / fifty-eight / you hallucinate  / fifty-seven / not of death / fifty-six / not for you / fifty-five / not this time / fifty-four / and without asking, you know that  / fifty-three / when the plane crashes / fifty-two / when the falling stops / fifty-one / sometimes in a snowy field and sometimes on a wooded slope / fifty / the force will rip your three-inch stilettos from your feet / forty-nine / you'll break your left tibia / forty-eight / you'll fracture your skull and crush two vertebrae / forty-seven / you'll snap your pelvis in two places, three more ribs, and your right femur / forty-six / you'll be dying only because you won’t be dead / forty-five / but here’s your secret, the one that is going to keep you alive / forty-four / the one that almost disqualified you from working for an airline in the first place / forty-three / it’s your low blood pressure / forty-two / which is so low that to pass the physical exam  / forty-one / you drank enough coffee that you shook through the whole thing  / forty / so low that when the plane impacts / thirty-nine / your heart won't burst in your chest / thirty-eight / and there is luck here too / thirty-seven / a whole life’s worth, a world's worth / thirty-six / used in one moment / thirty-five / you don’t survive something like this without it / thirty-four / the only reason you weren't sucked out of the plane / thirty-three / like the rest  / thirty-two / was because you were in the galley, crushed by that food cart / thirty-one / the only reason your bones won't liquify on impact / thirty / is because the fuselage will land right-side up / twenty-nine / crumpling the bottom, not the metal around your head / twenty-eight / the only reason you won't bleed out in the wreckage is because  / twenty-seven / your low blood pressure will slow your bleeding / twenty-six / long enough for your screams to attract help / twenty-five / because you’ll be awake / twenty-four / of course you will / twenty-three / and the only reason you'll live long enough to reach a hospital / twenty-two / is because the first person who will find you, a woodsman  / twenty-one / of all things, was a medic in World War II / twenty / how’s that for luck / nineteen / how many coins will land on edge the moment the plane hits / eighteen / right up until a brain hemorrhage will put you in a coma for ten days / seventeen / you'll hear the doctors say you won’t live / sixteen / and if you do you won’t walk / fifteen / but you know that the first thing you'll do when you wake is to ask for a cigarette / fourteen / and a month or two later, you’ll be strolling around the hospital / thirteen / won't even have a limp / twelve / all thanks to what you'll say is a childhood diet of chocolate, spinach, and fish oil  / eleven / you know that in the future, whenever you board a plane / ten / which you'll do often because you resume you job as a flight attendant / nine / people will want to sit next to you  / eight / especially those who are afraid of flying / seven / but you aren't there yet / six / for now, you're still falling / five / a blink from the ground / four / what else is there to say but / three / here / two / it / one / comes / 


Patrick Kelling received his doctorate in Creative Writing from the University of Denver and is the fiction editor for the literature magazine Gambling the Aisle (www.gamblingtheaisle.com). His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and to Best New American Voices and Best Small Fictions.

Poppy slid the loan paperwork across her father’s desk and watched him riffle expertly through the documents. “You remind me so much of your mother,” he said lightly. “Such a spendthrift. If she had five cents, she’d spend ten, remember?” 

She didn’t reply. His nostalgic tone was confusing. Money problems were the big reason her folks had divorced when she was little. Now her mother was on her fourth husband and her fifth bankruptcy, and Poppy was sitting in her father’s Salish Bank office asking for money. 

He looked at her over his reading glasses. “So, what’ll be different this time?” 

She got up. “You know what, never mind. I don’t need the hassle.” 

“Sit, sit.” He waved her back into her chair. “I’m just verifying it’s all here. You say your financial counselor recommended taking out a loan?” 

“Yes. To get me back on my feet.” This part of the lie was easy. 

“And the counselor’s name?” His fingers clenched a pen.

Now they were edging closer to things he didn’t know about. Her arrest, the court appearance. She’d have to hedge the truth, help him hear what he needed to hear. “Well, I’ve been going to this city-run place that offers sliding scale fees. Emerald City Credit.” 

He wrote this down. “Good, good, very reputable. Shall I call them?”

“No!” she blurted. She added, calmer, “I don’t see a specific person. I talk to whoever’s on duty. I’ll just ask someone to sign next time I go in.” The last counselor she’d seen, dark-eyed Clement, had talked earnestly about budgets and financial hygiene while diligently ignoring her flirting. She’d tossed his business card in the trash on her way out, along with her coffee cup.

Attaching a yellow Sign Here sticker, her father gave back the paperwork. “Great. Have them sign and we’ll get you into the system. I’m proud of you for doing this the right way.”

She got up. There was always one more step, one more rule to follow but she couldn’t let him see her irritation. The last cash she’d skimmed from Grammie was nearly gone. Would her grandmother even notice the theft? Poppy doubted she or Aunt Bick did more than glance at her financial statements, but Grammie was a tightwad. She’d survived the Depression. She still clipped coupons from the grocery store flier.

“See you at church Sunday,” her father called, as she left his office. She didn’t reply. She’d figured the Lord would be a part of the equation. 

Poppy’s relationship with money had always been troubled. On her eighth birthday, her parents began issuing a weekly allowance. Yours to spend however you like, her father said magnanimously, as her mother counted out dollar bills. Her joy palled when they forced her to tithe on the sum, a fixed ten per cent placed directly into the church collection plate. 

Her friend Diane showed her how to get her money back, to take a bathroom break during the Sunday sermon and make a quiet detour to the deacons’ office where the plates were stacked. Sometimes Poppy withdrew a little extra, so she both tithed and made money. 

It seemed to her that life should always be like this. Why was someone else entitled to her cash? Even now she couldn’t bear to look at receipts or bank statements or tax forms. Seeing what was being taken from her made her feel so cheated. So not in control. 

Even broke, Poppy was generous. She needed to prove she wasn’t her spendthrift mother, nor her sly father. During father-daughter dinners at Olive Garden, he’d boast about how much he was raking in on his investments, then leave a dollar and a Gospel tract as a tip. So Poppy gave, to bake sales and raffles and fundraisers for people whose houses had burned down or needed money for pet surgery. 

Her giving philosophy hadn’t mattered at all when Citibank sued her over her delinquent credit card bill. A ponytailed public defender had negotiated her sentence down to a repayment plan and a pledge to go to financial counseling. He cautioned, You have to actually do it. If you don’t, they can arrest you. 

Beat the system, Poppy had crowed on social media, but she was smarter now. She’d spend the loan money fast, before any of the big banks found out about it. 

That night, she went over to her Aunt Bick’s house. “I’m glad you can get some me time,” Poppy said, sitting at the kitchen island and sipping Chardonnay.

Her aunt was rummaging through her purse. “Oh, you didn’t need to come all the way over here. She’ll just snooze in her chair til I get back from Bunko.”

“I’m wide awake,” Grammie announced from the living room.

“Bless her heart,” Bick chuckled. “Caroline and Carl were over last night. They just got back from a month in Mexico! We had seven-and-sevens and Grammie beat us at pinochle.”

Poppy set down her glass, irritated. Caroline and Carl were Bick’s children, the perfect grandkids; thoughtful, kind, selfless citizens with jobs and good haircuts and useful hobbies. 

Jangling her keys, Bick said, “I’ll be home by nine. If you need to go, just lock the door. She’ll be fine.”

“We might be up until all hours.” Poppy went into the living room. “Right, Grammie?”

Her grandmother was dozing, a colorful afghan crocheted by Carl draped over her lap. Poppy sat down on the love seat across from the TV, watching out the window as her aunt’s Lexus glided into the street. A few minutes later, Grammie blinked awake. “Poppy?”

“I’m here. You need the bathroom? Food?”

A moment, as Grammie made internal surveys. “Well, Bick has been hiding the fudge.”

“I’ll look.” Poppy knew she was being conned. Grammie was forbidden chewy items, anything that might disturb the fillings in her fragile teeth. It only took two minutes to locate the Tupperware of store-bought fudge, concealed behind a stack of cookbooks. 

Grammie bit into her treat. “Mm. I tell you what, that’s good eating.”

Poppy sipped her wine, silently praying that the ancient amalgam stayed put.

“Have you had any luck looking for a job?”

“I’m interviewing,” Poppy said stiffly. “I’ve temped a bit. I’m not going to tie myself down to just anything.” 

“Bick says you have money troubles,” Grammie observed. Her eyes had a hard sparkle.

Poppy bristled. “I’m fine. My credit card was billing me for things I never bought.”

“We never had credit cards in my day. It’s a dangerous game, Patricia.”

“Oh please. You had accounts at Penney’s and Sears when I was little.”

“That was different.” Her grandmother leaned forward, reaching for the fudge.

Poppy nudged the Tupperware farther away. She was being petty, but so was Grammie. “Stop being a stinker and give me the fudge. And the remote,” her grandmother ordered.

She did as she was told, then sat back and finished her wine. She’d hoped to poke around at Bick’s desk after Grammie fell asleep, but her grandmother had turned on a game show. 

Poppy closed her eyes. People in her debt counseling class wept as they talked about the stress of being broke, describing ulcers and headaches and insomnia. In the back of the room, Poppy chewed gum and tried to look interested. Not having money felt liberating. Debt was just a minus on someone else’s spreadsheet. Pruning Grammie’s money market, she only took enough to cover Lyft rides to her credit counseling class, the textbook, coffees to stay awake. Grammie wouldn’t want her to go without, she reasoned.

She might want exactly that, another part of her mind whispered. Grammie had survived the Dust Bowl and the Depression and two world wars. She’d grown up with one pair of shoes. She’d likely frown upon Poppy’s iced triple mochas. She most certainly would want her to go without.

It took an Adderall and half a joint to get Poppy in shape for church. Also, she had to get rid of her overnight guest. “Clement? This has been great, but I have to be somewhere.”

The financial counselor rolled over in her bed. His dark hair and smooth skin looked luscious against her sheets. “No worries,” he said, yawning. They’d adjourned to her apartment after yesterday’s appointment. She’d asked for another business card, making sure her fingers brushed his. 

She added, “I’ll make us coffee. Could you sign that paperwork?”

Pulling on his jeans, he said, “Okay. But Poppy. We shouldn’t do this again.”

“No. Definitely not,” she said.

The first person Poppy saw when she entered the church foyer was her old friend Diane. “Patricia Ophelia Dixon, how are you!” Diane exclaimed, handing her a program.

Poppy eyed her mauve skirt suit, the matchy aubergine nails. “Hi. You look, uh, great.”

“And don’t you look wonderful,” Diane said softly, as though she were envious. 

But the truth was, Diane envied no one. She was as calculating as a pawnshop clerk. They’d bonded over summers at a county-run jobs program, calling out sick from their minimum wage assignments, shoplifting diet soda and beef jerky sticks for lunch at the park. We’ll fight the system, they swore. I’ll always have your back. Call me anytime. I’m your one a.m. friend. 

Fast forward a few years to the night Poppy was arrested on the delinquent funds warrant. Diane sleepily accepted the collect call. “It’s your one a.m. friend,” Poppy said.

“You’re in jail? What have you done?” Diane wailed.

“Nothing, it’s all a big mistake,” Poppy said. The cop on guard duty rolled her eyes.

“I’m not sure what I can do,” Diane was saying. “Maybe I can pray for you?”

“You promised to have my back,” Poppy said, into a dial tone.

Instead of arriving the next day with a skeleton key, a knife baked into a cake, grinning anarchy, Diane sent a bald man with rodent eyes and an insincere grin. “Poppy, I’m Mr. Mayer.”

“As in the wieners?” Poppy said, irritated. They sat down in the jail visiting area. 

“As in Diane’s better half.” He handed her a bag of Avon toiletries and a Bible. 

Poppy ruffled the gilt-edged pages of the Bible and slid it back across the table. It crash-landed into the cushion of his belly. “You know Diane’s just in it for the money, right?”

He stood up. “She told me about you. We’re not paying bail. Don’t bother us again.”

“Poppy?” Diane handed out her last program. The church vestibule was filling up. “Want to sit with Mr. Mayer and me?” 

Poppy smiled. Maybe she could guilt Diane out of some cash. Before she could reply, a bony hand clenched her arm. “It is so good to see you in the Lord’s house,” Grammie exclaimed. 

She hugged her grandmother. Aunt Bick leaned in, zipping up her burgundy choir robe. “Will you sit with her? And I need to talk to you, Poppy. After the service.”

Taking Grammie’s arm, Poppy found seats near the front. Her father couldn’t miss seeing them from his perch with the other deacons, five jowly men in Macy’s suits. As the collection plate was passed, she sat on her hands and thought about Clement. He’d told her the loan was a bad idea. A debt trap. Salish Bank would collect double-digit interest. You mean if I pay it back, she’d said, and he’d just sighed and signed by the yellow stickers.

Now the sermon. Poppy had decided she’d slip out during the closing prayer, leave the paperwork under her father’s windshield wiper and go. If Aunt Bick wanted to talk, let her call. 

Across the sanctuary the Mayers sat looking prosperous and smug. She and Diane had taken so much from each other, Poppy thought. Boyfriends, gas money, trust. She missed her friend, but what was the point of nostalgia? They were speeding along parallel tracks. Intersection now would be fatal.

The congregation rose to sing the final hymn. Poppy pulled on her coat. Her grandmother took her arm again, murmuring, “Toilet.” A helpful usher whisked them out a side door and again Poppy recalculated. New plan. Get Grammie into a stall, text Bick, slip away. 

But as she reached the edge of the parking lot, Aunt Bick’s Lexus glided into view, silent and menacing as a shark. The passenger window lowered. “Get in.”

She looked inside. “I’m late for an appointment.”

“You left these on your dad’s car.” Her aunt brandished the manila envelope.

“Those are legal documents. That’s a federal crime--”

“Oh, get in. I’ll give them to you when we’re done.”

Poppy slid into the passenger seat. How many times had she sat here, sullen, in trouble, her aunt the only one who bothered to show up? And thus, the target of her rage. “Two minutes. Then I’m going.”

Aunt Bick sighed. “Poppy, someone’s stealing from Grammie. She writes big checks to Manna Ministries sometimes, but this is different.”

“How much are we talking?” Poppy stared down at the immaculate floor mat, the indentations where her shoes had disturbed the expensive pile. 

“At least fifteen thousand. I’m not accusing you but--”

“You think I took fifteen grand from Grammie?” Her outrage felt real. “Investigate away. It’s not me.”

“I know you’ve taken a few hundred here and there,” Aunt Bick said quietly. “The police are sending a forensic accountant on Tuesday. I wanted to give you a chance to put it back.”

“I’ll get you a check tomorrow.” Poppy got out of the car. “Can I have my envelope?”

But Aunt Bick was tucking it under her thigh. “Tomorrow. When you bring the money.” 

Standing in the parking lot, Poppy looked back into the car. “So, who took the fifteen K? Darling Carl and Caroline, fresh from Mexico? No wonder they let her win at pinochle.” 

Her aunt put the Lexus into gear. “You know all you have to do is ask. If you need money.”

“But it’s not about the money, is it?” Poppy laughed. It was an ugly sound. 


Elise Glassman is a Seattle, Washington writer whose stories and essays have appeared in journals such as The Colorado Review, Main Street Rag, The Portland Review, Per Contra, Spank the Carp, and most recently, San Antonio Review. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and blogs at busysmartypants.blogspot.com.

Most of the jobs on Craigslist were looking for girls willing to sell their bodies. “Exotic bottle service girls, girls needed for bodywork, surrogates needed ASAP, Wall Street $$$$$$ is back!! Earn 6 figures year 1 no license needed.” Half of the postings were completely unintelligible. It was clear though, that most people on the site were either overseas bots seeking to extort you, or sleazy promoter types looking to sell sex. 

It caught my attention immediately then, when I came across a post from a legitimate-sounding company called Uptown Dermatology. “Dr. Azarian has been in practice on the Upper East Side for over 20 years, and boasts a roster of New York’s elites as her loyal patients. We’re looking for a professional, personable, and attractive face to greet our valued patients. The Medical Receptionist provides exemplary customer service and is responsible for handling front office reception and administration duties, including but not limited to answering phones, handling company inquiries, collecting all paperwork associated with patient registration, and maintaining inventory.” 

That would be fun. I always loved skin. When I first heard of trypophobia - the fear of holes - I diagnosed myself with trypophilia - an intense, compulsive attraction toward them. Trypophobia was a common loathing, apparently. People were especially freaked out by clustered, microscopic, sinister-looking holes like pores. Me, I couldn’t get enough. I’d stay up late at night watching pimple popping videos for hours. Pore strip slow-mo’s, botworm removals, and cyst excisions were my kryptonite. I loved inspecting the disgusting build-ups of sebum and bacteria, the suspense of the aesthetician pushing, pushing, pushing against the patient’s sealed-tight pores. The will it or won’t it of it all. And finally of course, the satisfying release as the skin’s surface breaks, bursting forth the hardened lesion. 

It felt dirty, perverse even. So untoward in fact, that I clung to my secret for two years before finding out there were lots of fellow trypophiles out there - a condition I’d always thought of myself as having invented. The videos online, initially targeted at med students and dermatology residents, were a hit with a whole population of derm-obsessives like me. It was such a hit that they made one derm’s page into a TV show, Dr. Skinner. Patients cried tears of joy as Skinner MD pointed to the benign tumor that had finally been removed after fifteen years of neglect. Still glimmering with a gelatinous sheen, it would jiggle in the kidney dish as the patient hugged Dr. Skinner, the camera panning in for a close-up, no matter the freshness of the now-gaping wound on the lower back, the shoulder, the cheek. That was my jam.

This job was perfect, then. I could speak passionately about cysts, nodules, whiteheads, blackheads, blisters, burns, hives, keratosis, rosacea, carbuncles, psoriasis and melanoma. Sing the praises of regular facial resurfacing. Wax poetic about waxing gone wrong. I did so promptly, not holding back an ounce of my dermatological zeal in a single-spaced cover letter. I hit submit and headed out the door, stopping for an almond milk cappuccino and heading up 1st Avenue toward Gramercy to see what it might take to sneak into the park.

I hadn’t made it past 18th street when my phone buzzed in my back pocket - a 212 number. “Hi, is this Louisa? This is Catrina from Dr. Azarian’s office. Is now an okay time for you?” Their last receptionist had left last week on maternity leave. She’d gone into labor three weeks earlier and they were scrambling for a replacement, she explained. “Do you have any availability today? We’re really looking to fill the position as soon as possible,” Catrina said, her voice sweet but urgent-sounding.

I looked down at my watch. The office was at 86th and Park, thirty minutes on the Six. “I can be there by 3:00,” I replied, looking down at my workout leggings. I pivoted on my heel, heading down toward Union Square. I could duck into Forever 21 and pull something together. It’s not like I had anything worth wearing at home anyway. 

The Union Square Forever 21 was gigantic - the bottom floor was filled with spaghetti-strapped crop tops and ass-hugging mini skirts. Nothing decent enough for a job interview. I grabbed a three-quarter sleeve cream sheath dress off the sale rack, hidden deep in the recesses of the third floor clearance section. It was a little low-cut and you could see my cleavage peeking out of the V-neck, but it was a cosmetic dermatologist’s office - this could be exactly what they were looking for. An attractive and friendly face. According to the derms I followed online, the French face went from your forehead to the skin below your breasts. The V-neck framed my moisturized and tended to French face. It would show them I knew their business inside and out. The value of a well-kempt décolletage. At the very least, it would have to do for now. 

The women working at Dr. Azarian’s office all had the same lips. Their pouts looked fresh and dewy, their cupid’s bows a perfect U-shape - a smile within a smile. Each of the nurses wore black jogger-style scrubs. They had long, thick dark hair, all straightened in the same smooth style. Their skin glowed warmly, their faces made up simply. Their deep complexions highlighted lightly at the cheekbones, thick groomed eyebrows framing their faces, not a hair out of place. When it came to skincare, they led by example. I wondered whether they were all related.

Dr. Azarian, or Dr. A as they all called her, was an East Coast surgeon. Her clientele was considered sophisticated, unlike the nouveau riche LA housewife types that populated plastic surgery Instagram. Instead of maximally inflated lips and taut shiny foreheads, Dr. A was known for her subtlety and her light touch. Her philosophy, detailed in gold looping script framed behind the front desk, was to perfectly balance science and art to enhance her clients’ natural beauty.

Catrina, the medical assistant I’d spoken with on the phone just an hour earlier, offered me a Pellegrino and walked me down the quiet hall to an office in the back. The halls were lined with mirrored shelves. Rows and rows of quartz-colored bottled serums, lotions, cleansers and toners, all branded with the same silver Uptown Dermatology script. I glanced at myself in the reflection of a shelf as we passed by, suddenly noticing where I’d mindlessly picked at a scab on my right temple. It was too late now to do anything about it. 

Catrina offered me a seat in the dusty blush velvet armchair that sat centered in front of a large glass desk. She took her seat opposite me, swishing her perfectly coiffed jet black mane behind her shoulders. “So Louisa, tell me about yourself. Why are you interested in working at Uptown Dermatology?” I smiled and rattled off an answer about my lifelong curiosity about dermatology, my background in customer service, my interest in aesthetician licensure. It wasn’t a lie - I was enamored with the idea of becoming a licensed aesthetician if I could ever afford the program in New York State. Nothing would energize me more than waking up to a day of pimple popping and lasers. This job aligned perfectly with my career interests, I summarized, feeling self-assured as Catrina nodded, scribbling something in bubbly handwriting in the spiral notebook on her desk. 

“Well, great! I think this sounds like a great potential fit. I’m going to go get Dr. A so she can meet you. Is there anything I can get you while you wait?”

I shook my head no, trying not to look overly excited. “I’m all good, thank you!” Catrina shut the heavy glass door behind her on the way out. I swirled the Pellegrino in my bottle, watching the bubbles slowly migrate to the top and then burst on the water’s surface, like little lesions being freed from the epidermis. 

Above Dr. A’s desk hung her diplomas, each framed in the same rectangular mirror-like frame, seamlessly coordinated with the shelves that lined the halls. Bachelor of Science from UCLA, Doctor of Medicine from Johns Hopkins, Dermatology Residency from USC, Mohs surgery fellowship from Memorial Sloan Kettering. Impressive. I shifted in my seat, pulling up the collar of my V-neck. Clicking my dark red nails against the glass desk, I imagined coming into work here each morning. Carefully making sure each quartz bottle was aligned. Offering the parade of patients a cappuccino, an espresso, a sparkling water. Waning daylight streamed through the chiffon curtains lining the office’s entrance. It would be a nice place to sit and pass the time. Perfectly pleasant, to be surrounded by pretty things and pretty people.

It felt like an hour had slipped away by the time I heard the door swing open behind me. I stood up, turning on my heel and extending my hand. Dr. A smiled wide, extending both of hers. She touched the back of my hand with her left as she shook mine, a professional embrace. Her skin felt poreless and soft like cashmere, her long fingers wrapping around my hand. Like Catrina and the nurses I’d seen walking the halls of her office, she too had long, inky hair which she wore parted perfectly down the middle. She looked luminous – somewhere between 45 and 48, I gathered. Her skin showed no signs of wrinkling but also wasn’t stretched too tight, either. Instead, it rested effortlessly across her striking bone structure - her cheekbones high, her jawline square. She looked familiar. I wondered whether I’d ever come across her Instagram and forgotten all about it deep in a late night state of dermatological fanaticism.

“So, Catrina tells me you’re interested in joining the Uptown Dermatology family,” she smoothed her beige silk slacks as she sat down in the swiveling desk chair, flashing a gleaming white smile. I repeated an abridged version of my earlier spiel - what a fan I was of her work, what this job would mean to me, what I could bring to the table - er, front desk haha.

She didn’t ask any more questions, just told me how nice it was to meet me and that she was really looking forward to working with me. “I’m out two days a week. We have a shop at the Fontainebleau and I have clinic there on Thursdays and Fridays. Catrina will email you with the details regarding orientation. Anna is the PA who covers for me here when I’m in Miami. The main thing for you to know is not to schedule any Mohs surgeries when I’m not here. Anna is great for lumps and bumps though - she can do everything else besides Mohs.”

Dr. A pulled out a light pink cardstock folder, pushing it toward me across her desk as she stood up to leave. “It was so nice to meet you sweetheart. I think you’ll fit right in here,” she reached for my hand again and I didn’t want to let go. Her handshake, so soft and warm, felt like a hug. “Catrina can show you out.” 

Embarrassed as I was, I squealed audibly as I shut the building door behind me, a crisp fall breeze almost blowing the folder out of my hands. A little old lady in a beige pea coat turned to look at me as if to question what it was someone like me was doing on her block. It didn’t even matter, though. I had a job in New York City. A nice, fancy, dermatology job at a nice, fancy dermatologist’s office on the Upper East Side. 

I stopped in Dean and DeLuca and bought a celebratory chai latte. It was more money and more sugar than I normally would’ve gone for, but I deserved it. “Autumn in New York,” Billie Holiday crooned into my headphones, “Why does it seem so inviting?” I was a walking cliché, but I didn’t even care. “It was written, I should be loyal to the cliché of my choice,” I thought.

Still beaming, I walked all eighty blocks home to my apartment that evening, watching the sunset through the impeccably groomed Park Avenue trees, their leaves just starting to turn. As I walked, I leafed through the folder, which included a “Welcome to Uptown” packet and my salary details. At 35 hours a week and $18 an hour, I’d net out at just under $33,000 a year. Nowhere near enough, but it was better than nothing. That was part of moving to New York, right? Besides, that was before factoring in savings on skincare. 

***
​
New York, I was quickly finding, was a great place for someone like me. Despite the offensively high rents, the stench of hot garbage that permeated the city, the fruitful, multiplying rats, it was a great place. In a city of strivers, there was a real market for someone like me – an undisputed non-striver. People’s faces would soften as soon as I told them I’d stopped going to school after community college, their Botoxed brow falling a millimeter as they realized they didn’t need to worry so much about impressing me. As far as they were concerned, the separation between us represented safety. I wasn’t after their job, their man, their child’s spot in the preschool class. They were safe with me. 

Maybe I should’ve gotten a CIA job or something.  I was so unassuming here, it made people want to spill their guts. The bartender at the place on my corner told me he’d been stealing from the owner. A crying girl on the train told me about her abortion. Four different little old women on the street told me I was pretty. One said I had an open face. 

Once I started working for Dr. A, I discovered that there was a whole economy in this city devoted to accomplishing the aesthetic goals of the overeducated, upper middle class women who ran it. We weren’t exactly the Uber drivers who ferried them from brunch to yoga, or the Doordashers who left Sweetgreen outside their door as they rolled Zoom calls. Instead, we were a subclass of girls and gay guys dedicated to waxing, sugaring, microneedling, styling, CoolSculpting, blow drying and training these wellness devotees into the women they wanted so badly to be. Physical beauty was a religion here, and these women practiced it with fervor.

For the most part, these underlings were like me. Attractive enough that the clients at a place like Uptown would feel okay about leaving their face and several hundred dollars in my hands every few weeks. A majority of the women who went to Dr. A’s would complain of sagging brows, discoloration, deepening laugh lines. My favorite part of the job though, would have nothing to do with Botox or microdermabrasion. My favorite part were those Monday and Tuesday morning appointments, when we’d schedule patients for Mohs surgery. 

Three weeks into my receptionist responsibilities, Dr. A had me follow her into the operating room, where a 70-something year old man lay supine, his body covered entirely by a light blue surgical drape, aside from his nose, which poked out of a hole toward the man’s head. A rough, brown splotch of melanoma decorated the side of his nose, circled clearly in purple ink. 

“How are you feeling, Mr. Johnson?” Dr. A asked, placing a hand on his shoulder.

“Pretty good, other than I can’t feel my face,” he chuckled, his disembodied voice warm and gravelly. “I’ll feel a lot better when you get this thing off of me.” 

At Sloan Kettering, where Dr. A had done her fellowship, she explained, a trained lab tech would’ve been the one transporting samples to the path lab. They had people who did nothing else all day but run from the OR to the lab and back again with tissue samples. “But hey, now I’m training you!” She exclaimed, her hand steady as she carefully removed the top layer of the affected skin.

The precise excision of the tumor repeated layer by layer soothed the part of my brain that liked methodically raking my little Japanese Zen garden in concentric circles. In a world where entropy so often prevailed and a random mutation could result in the uncontrolled multiplication of cells, this procedure represented a methodical return to order. If only this same surgery could be applied to the ugly, malignant parts of my entire life. I would give anything to lie anesthetized in Dr. A’s office, eyes closed as she peeled back the layers of my compulsive drive to hit the self-destruct button. As each layer of my malignancy was removed, she’d follow some other lab tech out of the room, examining the sample under her microscope, making sure not a trace was left behind. She’d stitch me up, the stiff blue stitches a reminder of the psychic ugliness that had once threatened to kill me.



Emma Burger is a writer and healthcare professional working in oncology research. She splits her time between Ann Arbor, Michigan and New York City. Her debut novel, Spaghetti for Starving Girls, was released in September 2021. You can find her work in Schuylkill Valley Journal, Across the Margin, Idle Ink, and The Chamber Magazine, or online at emmaburgerwrites.com.

I hadn’t meant to start a war, but his email was so petty and it rubbed me the wrong way. You have to understand. I think anybody in my situation would have reacted how I did. I sent the final draft of the project, and everything was good to go. I was ready to move on with it. The client was happy, everybody on my internal team thought I’d done a great job. Then Todd’s email came. He was even smug enough to send it with a High Importance tag. He said: 

Josh, 
First of all, nice work. 
But look at page 67: the graphic you placed at the left-bottom of the page, it’s a little off-center with the one on the right. Please correct and send back ASAP. 
Todd. 

And OK, maybe it was slightly off, I’ll admit. But it was a big project, I’d worked on it for months, little mistakes like that happen but they never get noticed. Where did he get off on being so petty and pedantic? He could have fixed it himself if it was that big of a deal. Hell, typing up the email took more time than it would have for him to fix it himself. But here’s what set me off, what set The Great Petty War in motion: he copied my manager on the email. He hadn’t been on any of the emails before, but then this pedantic prick face Todd decides to rope him in as some way of tattling on me and holding me accountable. 

Well, that didn’t sit right with me. The first shots had been fired. I was the victim of a needless attack, so I fought back. I responded with the corrected version, and this time I copied Todd’s manager on the email. 

And what does this asshole do? He replied: 

Thanks for fixing. We can’t be making mistakes like that. Let’s not make it a habit. 

On this email, he copied the president of our company and our client’s entire C-Suite. The nuclear missiles had been armed. Troops were advancing inland. The war was on. 

So, I immediately replied: 

You got it, boss man. 

And in the words ‘boss man’ I hyperlinked a definition of the word ‘pedant.’ I also copied everybody in our entire company on the email. Over four hundred people received and read that email. I had nuclear missiles, too, and they were aimed directly at Todd. 

He replied with another pointless, curt comment—both of us were hellbent on getting the last word. And he copied everybody in the client’s company. 

So, I fired back. I sent my troops and copied a couple other clients on the email. 

Todd replied, copying all of our clients on his email. 

I copied everybody I knew, friends and family and loose acquaintances, and sent my response. 

Todd copied everybody he knew. 

I stared at his email. 

Thanks Josh. 

The message glared off my blue light glasses. I scrolled through all the names on the email. There were thousands of people now involved. It was between Todd and me, and I sort of felt bad for bringing others in, but it needed to be done. It was a part of The Great Petty War; it was how the game was played.  

I looked online, and I found a database that let me pull every email address in the United States, and I threw them on the email chain. 

Todd replied with all of North America. 

Have a good weekend. 

I replied: 

You too Todd. 

With all of Europe copied on the email. I logged off for the weekend, thinking the war had ended with my final word. 

Then on Monday morning I logged on and saw this fuckhead had copied all of Asia. 

Hope you had a good one. 

I fired back, bringing South America into the mix. 

Todd pulled the big guns and brought everybody else in. Now everybody was in the fight. North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, hell, even Antarctica had some skin in the game. 

The entire world watched our emails go back and forth, salvos of corporate pettiness volleyed from target to target. 

Monday at 5:40, I logged off and went home. That night, I turned on the TV and every station was talking about us. Apparently, Todd and I had started quite the fuss. People were taking to the streets, proclaiming their side. Some were Team Todd, others were Team Josh. It split households and friend groups. A small newspaper in Albuquerque had dubbed it The Great Petty War, and that name stuck. 

The Great Petty War kept raging the next morning. I replied, Todd replied. Nothing of substance was said. At many times, I wondered why we even kept up the war. It had been going on so long that sometimes I forgot what we were fighting about anyway. But then I’d remind myself it was about pride, it was about principle, it was about the good guy coming out on top. So, I kept the war going. 
The whole world paused for The Great Petty War. There was no more fighting in Myanmar or Afghanistan or Yemen. Colombia became peaceful. Somalia dropped all their arms to watch. The entire world was invested in The Great Petty War. 

World leaders and countries took sides. Kim Jong-un and North Korea sided with Team Josh. I had some compunction when I first heard this. I knew he wasn’t the best ally to have, but I figured, hey, despite everything, he at least had good judgement. So, I gladly accepted his support. The European Union disintegrated over The Great Petty War. There was too much of a divide between Team Todd and Team Josh supporters. The United States couldn’t unify for a side, either. States became factions, then cities and counties, then small militias formed for each side. 

The first casualty in The Great Petty War happened on a Thursday, six days after the start of the war. Some drunk Team Todd supporter got into it with a Team Josh supporter at a bar in Delaware, and he shot and killed the guy outside. “Viva Team Todd!” he yelled, as he drove away from the scene. 
Both sides took up arms, and Todd and I kept emailing. We were impervious to any of the real fighting. We had become figures—we were no longer just people. We were symbols of unity, but at the same time symbols of division. The people knew taking one of us out would be fruitless for their side. If a Team Josh supporter assassinated Todd, Todd would become a martyr, and the history books would say Team Todd came out victorious. 

So, the people took to the streets and made it their battleground. They fought over Todd and me. The whole time, Todd and I sat in our cubicles, only fifteen feet away from each other. Either one of us could have walked over to the other and settled the thing in person. We’d probably just laugh about it and get a beer after work. It was petty, we both knew, and the project ended well, but the people were involved. We had to think of the people. So, we kept emailing and they kept fighting, even though Todd and I had both lost interest. The email chain had run so long, it meant nothing. 
My replies devolved into emojis at one point. I sent the thumbs up, the smiley face, the OK fingers. Then Todd replied with a gif, and that really pissed off Team Josh supporters. That was a whole new weapon; it had to be in violation of some Petty War convention. 

Three months after the start of The Great Petty War, Todd put in his two-week notice. He found a job somewhere else that paid 30% more. Todd and I didn’t dare disclose this to the people, though. We didn’t want them to know that their great war would end soon, that it would end so anticlimactically. Though neither of us cared, we kept the war going, for the people. Truthfully, I was happy for Todd. He’d been at the company for a while, and he deserved better. But I couldn’t let Team Josh supporters know this. In their eyes, Todd was my sworn enemy. 

Todd’s final day came. On his way out, I nodded to him. He nodded back and smiled. It had been a hell of a war, and it was over now. I sent one final email to him, with the whole world copied on it. He was moving companies, he no longer had access to the email address. Team Josh had won the war. Almost a million casualties were suffered on both sides. 

Things settled down after a week of no emails. A month of no emails, and fighting started up again in Myanmar and Afghanistan and Yemen. Colombia went back to war. Somalia picked up their arms. The Great Petty War was reduced to small fringe groups fighting for the cause in contained firefights. A year passed, and many had forgotten why The Great Petty War was fought in the first place; the email chain was so long, who had the time to go back through it all. Five years passed and The Great Petty War was a distant memory for most. 

I ran into Todd the other day. I’ve since moved jobs, moved cities, but I ran into him when he was on a work trip. We caught up over a few drinks, and toward the end, when we were both feeling drunk and uninhibited, he confessed, “You know, I didn’t really care about that graphic alignment. I was just having a shit day, man.” 

I looked into my beer and bit my lip. I took a big gulp. “Todd,” I laughed. “It was pretty douchey by you, but I definitely overreacted. I mean, the hyperlink, the emojis. Way too much, man.” 
Todd slapped his hand on the bar and laughed. 

“I was sick of taking so much shit there,” I said. We both laughed. 
​
Todd grabbed my shoulder and looked at me. His eyes were glazed; he was about to say something sentimental. “Hey man,” he said, “it was a dumb little thing, but it’s over now. At least we came out of it fine.” 


Riley Winchester is from Michigan. He's been nominated for some Pushcarts and he's been shortlisted in some contests, but he's never won anything.

When the world realized the power of the girl, they began begging at her door. At first the line formed at sunrise and was gone by sunset. Before long it spread from city to city, until it circled the earth. The people built bridges and boats and left their families for years, just to find respite.

And when the girl realized the need of the world, she opened her arms wide to allow them in. She listened. When she heard about the heartbreak from the doe eyed lover, she felt the weight settle into the crook of her neck, with the weight of a kiss and the sting of a wasp. All their sorrow soaked into her body through the place on her chest where they rested their head. The burn of it poked at her: a twitch of muscle and a flick of pain. She ignored it, clinging to her guest because they needed her, and she needed them. When that same doe eyed lover left with a sunshine smile on their lips the girl buried that biting feeling inside. 

In they stepped, one by one, into the cottage that housed the girl determined to heal the world. The scent of tobacco and patchouli enveloped them as they entered her haven. They sat by her side and wept. And she wept too. Soon their tears were acid, leaving little trails of rashes and blisters on her skin. Their burdens got heavier, stiffer, like boulders stacked one by one on top of every part of her. Eventually she boarded the windows and lit candles because the daylight burned her eyes. When the feet of the visitors wore through the floorboards, she lined the walls and floors with the rest of her clothes, ensuring that everything visitors touched would be covered in softness. They would lay in the fabrics and wrap their fingers in her silk gowns, while she stroked their hair and sang to them.

The day she stood to stretch, the weight of it all collapsed, causing her to stumble. Her ankle snapped, unable to carry the weight of everything the world left behind. She wrapped it with a scarf and pulled the bones tight into place, until she could feel them touching again. A few days later she removed the knitted fabric from her bruised and swollen skin, wrapped it around the neck of a farmer and kissed their forehead goodbye, wishing them luck in their harvest. Steadily, their troubles were crushing her. A banker whose loans had gone bad broke her ribs, the parent with the ghost child collapsed her lungs, and the artist with a knife to their neck snapped her spine. Each one leaving and swiftly forgetting the girl in the cottage with the rosewater lips. 

She became mangled as visitors off-loaded themselves onto her twisted body. They laughed as they left while she cried all their tears and felt all their sorrow. All too soon she could not move to hold them, her muscles, and joints all ripped at the seams. So, they lay on top of her to weep into her hair and hear her basket heartbeat. When the beat started to slow, drowning under pressure, they began taking small pieces of her before they left. A vial of her tears, a loose tooth slipped into the pocket, a toe bone whittled and strung into a necklace. They made sure to shoo away vultures that alighted on her roof and came tapping at the door.

And when the priest came and realized there was no confessional for him there, he turned to close the door for good. From the darkness came a wheeze, a rise and fall of what could have been thigh or could have been chest. The remaining bits of fingers reached for the man and begged him to wait, a rotting stench leaked towards the door, sickly sweet like dying fruit. The pulp palm opened, revealing the girl's doldrum heart.

“Bring them,” she cried. “Bring them one by one.” 


Kalie Pead is a queer poet, writer, and activist from Salt Lake City, Utah. Home for her, however, is somewhere between the red rocks of Moab and the wilds of Wyoming. She is currently an MFA Candidate in Poetry at the University of Notre Dame where she lives with her partner, their two cats, and their dog. 

In preparation for the search for Benny, Silver Lake was drained. For hours, aquamarine water spilled through the retaining dam as if a balloon had been punctured. Ever so gradually, the level of the half-mile-long pool receded, revealing a hidden ecosystem littered with dead fish, garbage, seaweed, and sundried vegetation along with a bevy of long-sunken canoes and kayaks.

My dad and Mr. Steinberg paced along the shoreline until late afternoon, when they were persuaded by Officer Hennigan, the leathery-faced, thick-necked local police chief, that it was futile to stay. 

“Will take until tomorrow,” Hennigan whispered in a gruff tone tinged with kindness. 

We climbed into Dad’s Chevy for the short drive back to the Palace Hotel, a popular summer lodging in the 1960s for escapees from the city. At Mr. Steinberg’s insistence, we dropped him off at the pub on Collins Street. 

As dawn broke the next day, I biked to the top of Langstrom Hill, which overlooked the lake. The early, piercing chill quickly faded and a rising sun illuminated white-uniformed state troopers and a growing crowd of spectators. With a pair of binoculars Mom used for bird watching, I scanned the depression that stretched like a caramel brown saucer between the trees crowding the surrounding slopes. Searching, to no avail, for my friend and his telltale green swim fins. 

By mid-morning, overcome by a sense of gloom, I lay back on the blinking grass and baked in the cleansing sunshine. Gradually, I slowed my breathing as my father had taught me to do whenever I felt upset and listened to the whoosh of the wind and rustling of leaves—sounds that had woven together and repeated since primeval times. 

Soon, the stench from the pit reached me. As I considered abandoning my watch, my father appeared and plopped down next to me. He wrapped an arm around my shoulder and pulled me to him.

“I have bad news,” he whispered. Taking the time to compose himself, he continued, “They found Benny’s body, less than fifty yards from land.”
​
I felt the need for tears but could not summon them up. Instead, I tore up a stretch of earth covered by grass and flung it.

“Jake,” Dad said, “I’m so sorry. I know how close you two were.”

I pictured myself discovering Benny’s stiff body and wiping mud from his carrot-red hair and freckled face. I imagined him with a radiant smile stretched across his face, the one he’d flashed when I last saw him. The remembrance both warmed me and made me gasp inside.

“Dad, why did this happen?”

“Benny wasn’t a good swimmer. He should have been wearing a life preserver.”

“No, I mean, why do bad things like this happen?”

“Oh, I see.” Dad’s lips came together in a mysterious grin. “That’s a question I'm not sure I can answer. I think you’ll need to figure it out yourself when you’re older.”

With his arm draped around me, we sat together for the longest time, each passing minute inching me further from Benny and my connection to him. Further away from a time when all was good, or could be made so. 

When the moment was right, we rose and walked down the hill, our long shadows intersecting. Dad’s turquoise Impala was parked under the shade of a red oak tree. As we tossed my Schwinn two-speed into the back of the car and climbed in, a warbler’s trill greeted us. In its voice I heard Benny calling me. Seeking to comfort me. 

Dad studied my somber expression.

“You okay? Wanna go get egg creams?”

I shook my head. “It was my fault.”

“Your fault?”

“I was supposed to go swimming with Benny. But I overslept and he left without me.”

Dad sighed deeply, making a sound like the release of air brakes. He leaned toward me and said, “You can’t blame yourself.”

I nodded, then words rumbled out of my mouth. “Dad, do you think Benny is at peace?”

“At peace? That’s an interesting question.”

“I heard one of Mom’s friends say that Benny is with God and at peace.”

“What do you think that means?”

“That he’s not suffering, I guess.”

“Yes, I do think he’s at peace. But what’s important to me at this moment is whether you’re at peace.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I feel so sad, so I don’t think so.”

Dad started the engine and we headed down the hill toward town, passing a doe and two yearlings picking their way along the side of the road. While stopped at the only light on Main Street, Dad grabbed a half-full pack of Pall Malls from his shirt pocket and tapped out a cigarette, which he lit expertly and jammed into his mouth. With no car behind us, we sat at the light for several cycles of red, orange, and green, mulling over what life had offered that day and might bring us next. Finally, Dad turned to me so that our eyes met. 

“What I learned at your age is that we all owe the world our death. What I later learned in the Navy during the war is that there’s always sadness and joy around us. They ebb and flow together. Where you are in them depends on the tide.” 

He kissed my temple. “It all depends on the tide.”



Jeff Ingber is the author of books, short stories, and screenplays, for which he has won numerous awards. His first screenplay was the basis for the 2019 film “Crypto,” starring Kurt Russell. One of his novels, “Shattered Lives,” is being made into a documentary film by MacTavish Productions. His books have won numerous awards, including Elit, New Apple, New York Book Festival, Next Generation Indie, North Street, and Readers’ Favorite. His short stories have been published in various journals and magazines. You can learn more about his works at jeffingber.com. Jeff lives with his wife in Cranford, New Jersey.

It was the worst of times and, yet, also the best of times. For, you see, a bad sickness had fallen upon all the world and all the little boys and girls everywhere had to stay at home. No school, no zoo, no parks, no visits with friends, and many couldn’t even visit Grandma and Grandpa’s house.
 
But little Levi was happy. He had his Mommy. He had his Daddy. He had his home. He had his toys and his books. And, at night, he had his new little friends, the Frogs.
 
One night, as Mommy laid little Levi down to sleep, they heard a noise outside. “Ribbit!” “Ribbit!”  Now, Levi didn’t even have to ask Mommy what was making the sound as he had already read about the Frogs in his story books. He knew immediately that this was a “Fwog.”
 
From that night on, every day and every night, all day long and all night long, Levi asked Mommy and Daddy about the “Fwogs.” He even said “Fwogs” in his sleep!    
 
One night, after Mrs. Sun went down and Mr. Moon came up, it was time for little Levi to go to sleep. But he just couldn’t seem to fall asleep. All he could hear was the “Ribbit!” “Ribbit!” and his mind was only concerned about the Frogs. 
 
“Fwogs Daddy. Fwogs Mommy,” said little Levi. “Fwogs!”
 
So Daddy asked little Levi if he wanted to go meet the Frogs and little Levi said “YES!…Fwogs!”
 
Mommy and Daddy slipped a pair of shoes onto little Levi’s feet and out the front door they went to find the Frogs.
 
Now little Levi, as luck would have it, lived right beside a small pond. A pond with rushes and lily pads and full of insects…everything that a Frog could ever want or need. And there was a well-worn path that wound about the pond, so Levi and Mommy and Daddy went for a walk around the pond.
 
Mr. Moon shone his light brightly so that little Levi could see. Mr. Moon liked to look at his own reflection in the pond and so did all of the people and other creatures that lived by the pond.
 
“Ribbit! Ribbit!” exclaimed some Frogs in the distance. Levi heard them too. “Fwogs!” he said.     
 
Along the path, Levi encountered a creature. “Fwog?” he asked. “No, I am a duck said the creature.  Quack, quack.” “Duck” said Levi. And off little Levi went on down the trail.
 
Shortly thereafter, Levi saw something else move in the darkness. “Snake!” said little Levi. Yes, that was Mr. Snake. But Mr. Snake crawled away before little Levi could  even say “Hi.” Levi was not bothered by this though for he was determined to find the Frogs.
 
Next, little Levi heard a noise in the trees. It was Mrs. Woodpecker. “Fwog?” asked little Levi. The Woodpecker replied, no, young man, I am a woodpecker…a bird…I dwell in the trees. I have seen no frogs this evening. I bid you a fond good eve.” And the woodpecker flew away into the night sky. 
 
About halfway around the pond, little Levi saw yet another creature that looked very much to him like a Frog. But it was very big and did not say “Ribbit” but, rather, croaked. “Fwog…big Fwog...” said Levi. “No, young sir, I am a toad!” “Toad,” said Levi. “Toad.” “Yes, a toad said Mr. Toad.  We toads are distant cousins to the Frogs, but we are not Frogs and they are not toads.” And then, with one gigantic leap, Mr. Toad was gone.
 
Little Levi looked and Mommy and Daddy, “Fwogs?” he asked. Mommy and Daddy looked at one another and were worried that little Levi might not meet the Frogs this night, for they were nearly full circle around the pond and nearing home. “Fwogs! Fwogs!” exclaimed Levi and the little family continued to walk until they could see the light on their patio. But the light drew nearer and nearer with no sign of any Frog. 
 
Mommy and Daddy looked at each other and then little Levi and said, “Well Levi, we didn’t find the Frogs tonight, but we will come back tomorrow…each night until you DO find a Frog.” Levi looked at Mommy and Daddy and said with a whimper, “Fwog...” Little Levi was sad. Mommy and Daddy felt bad.
 
Soon, the little family was home and as Daddy went to unlock and open the door, and as Mommy picked up little Levi to walk inside, little Levi cried out, “Fwog! Fwog!” And sure enough, there sitting on the edge of the window by the front door, was a little Frog!
 
Levi and the little Frog exchanged greetings and other pleasantries and, as it turns out, while little Levi was out looking for the Frog, the little Frog was out looking for little Levi.  And now, each night before bed, little Levi and the little Frog take a walk around the pond together before bidding each other, "Goodnight." 

​Carolina bit into her caramel apple. Or, at least, she tried to bite into it. She turned it around, hoping to find a weak point. She shrugged and tossed it into a garbage bin. Walking beside her, Devon hung his head.

“Look, I thought this would be fun,” he told her. “We can leave any time and go have a nice anniversary dinner.”

“I told you—I’m happy here,” Carolina replied. “You don’t have to try so hard. We’ve done a fancy dinner every other year.”

“Yeah, but ten years is a big milestone. I wanted it to be different…and perfect.” He casually touched his chest, ensuring that the jewelry box was still secure in his inner coat pocket. The carnival may be a bust, but the earrings would bring some redemption—he knew she had been looking at them online for months.

“Come on. Let’s go on a ride,” she suggested. “Stop overthinking things and live in the moment.”

Devon smiled but couldn’t shake the feeling that the carnival was a mistake. If anything, the feeling in his stomach after a ride on the tilt-a-whirl reinforced that thought. Glancing up, he could barely make out the words Starboard Amusements on the sign as they left the ride.

Carolina spoke up as they passed a booth. “I remember that you were quite the pitcher back in the day. Why don’t you try to win a prize?”

Devon laughed. “I haven’t held a baseball in years, but why not?”

His skill clearly hadn’t vanished with time. He knocked down all six milk bottles on his first throw.

“A fine throw,” said the woman running the booth. “Try again and see if you can win a bigger prize.”

Another bullseye.

“One final throw,” the woman said. “Can you win the biggest prize of them all?”

Devon looked around the booth. “And what would that be?”

The woman leaned closer. “First you throw. Then we talk.”

Once again, all six bottles went flying.

The woman’s eyes lit up. “At long last. Meet me at the back of the booth to claim your prize.”

Devon’s eyes narrowed. “Why can’t you give it to me here? Too big to carry?”

“This prize cannot be carried.”

“Then what did I win?” asked Devon.

The woman smiled and replied softly. “Happiness.”

Carolina stepped in front of Devon. “I don’t know what you have planned, but I am not sending my husband back there with you.”

“You misunderstand,” the woman replied. “Please, both of you come.”

The back of the booth was a storage shed, packed with boxes of prizes. The only thing out of place was a red door, mounted on a frame but detached and leaning on the wall.

The woman greeted them. “Eighteen years, I’ve been running this booth. You are the first to win the grand prize.”

“Just hand it over, and we’ll get out of here,” said Carolina.

“I told you that it can’t be carried. What I offer you is the happiest day of your life.”

“And how are you going to make it so happy?” Devon asked suspiciously.

“I will do nothing. The day will be just as you recall it.”

Devon and Carolina looked at each other, then back at the woman. “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” he said. “How can you give us a day that already happened?”

“First, we must address the ‘us.’ You have won a single prize. I offer this to only one of you. Pass through this door, and you will return to the happiest day of your life.”

Devon walked over to the door. He stood it up and walked around it. “This door takes us back in time? Is this a joke?” He looked at Carolina for support but saw that her eyes were wide with excitement.

“So, if this is real, you mean that we can’t both go back?” he asked.

“One of you must go immediately. The other may play the game again.”

Devon looked at Carolina, willing himself to believe for her sake. “You go,” he told her. “I’ll play until I win again.”

Carolina walked quickly to the door. When she opened it, Devon saw the stacks of boxes that stood behind it. His shoulders sagged with disappointment, and he realized that he had been almost as excited as Carolina. But when she took a step through the door, no trace of her was left behind. 

“It’s real,” he mumbled. He turned to the woman. “It’s real!”

“I would not deceive you. She has traveled back to the happiest day of her life.”

“Well, come on. Let’s play again so I can go!”

Once again, it took only three balls. When Devon opened the door, it looked just the same. However, having seen Carolina vanish gave him the confidence to step through as well, and the carnival vanished behind him.

He had hardly dared to hope, but the green lawn of the university stood before him. The gazebo where he had proposed. He looked at his clothes—the spring coat gone, he was dressed for summer. He closed his eyes and replayed the scene in his mind, watching her walking toward him in the morning sun. The excitement in her eyes as she accepted the ring.

He checked the time on his phone, smiling at the outdated technology. She should be here arriving any moment. Sitting down in the gazebo, he pulled the ring box out of his pocket and smiled. He might be the first person in history to experience his happiest moment twice. Again, he got lost in the memories. The harbor cruise in the afternoon. Dinner by the beach…

He glanced at his phone again. 9:06. That couldn’t be right. They should be on their way to breakfast by now. The restaurant they had visited was across town, and they stopped seating breakfast customers at 9:30.

A tired young man walked by. “Excuse me,” Devon called. “Do you know the time?”

“My class ended at 9:00, so it must be just after that.” He checked his phone. “Yeah, 9:06.”

Devon’s stomach tightened. Why wasn’t she coming? He got up and looked around. Someone was coming. He pulled out the ring box, eager to get the day back on track.

It wasn’t her. “Sorry to bother you,” he asked the woman, “but is it May 14?”

The woman stopped, puzzled by the question. “Yeah. Not too late to call your mom if you forgot Mother’s Day yesterday.”

“No, I just…I mean…May 14, 2012?”

She hesitated. “Yes.” She tilted her head, considering the situation. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, all good,” Devon replied. “All good.”

As she walked away, Devon looked down at the box in his hand. How could this be the best day 
of his life if Carolina didn’t show up for the proposal? He opened the box and stared.

Earrings. Not only no Carolina, but no ring.

He scrolled through the contacts on his phone. She wasn’t listed. He called her number anyway. “Carolina? Sorry, you’ve got a wrong number,” a man’s deep voice replied.

Mark could straighten this out. He had introduced them. “Devon! I’ve been out of town all weekend. Sorry to miss your poker night.”

“No problem. Listen, I’m having a hard time getting hold of Carolina.”

“North or South?”

“My girlfriend. Carolina. Come on, I’m getting worried.”

A pause. “You and Christie broke up last month. Did you forget about that…and her name?”

“Never mind. I’ll call you later.”

Clearly something strange was going on, but if he could just track her down…

Her mom. A no-nonsense woman, she wouldn’t get involved in a prank like this. But even as he dialed, Devon already knew the answer…”

“Carolina? You must have a wrong number.”

“Mrs. Simchak? It’s Devon. I really need to speak to Carolina.”

“This is Mrs. Simchak, but I don’t have a daughter. I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what’s happening. Who did you say you are?”

He hung up without a word.

Here he was, reliving the best day of his life, but without anything that had made it so good. There was only one possible explanation: the woman at the carnival had lied.

If she got him into this mess, she must be the one to get him out of it. He remembered the sign: Starboard Amusements. If she had been with the carnival for 18 years, she must be traveling with them now.

After a few guesses at the password, Devon was able to log in to his university computer account. The carnival was on its was to Kokomo, Indiana—only a few hours away. Unfortunately, as he only had a bus pass during his university days, getting there might be easier said than done. He thought he had left his hitchhiking days far behind him, but this was an emergency.

It took three rides, but the third was heading straight for Kokomo. They wanted to talk nonstop, and Devon did what he could to at least sound polite. He got out where the carnival was setting up on the edge of town.

He walked quickly between the booths and rides, ignoring staff who told him that they weren’t yet open to the public. At last, he found her. He had expected her to look ten years younger, but the woman looked exactly the same.

“What happened? What happened to my wife?”

The woman looked at him in confusion. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I know you…or your wife.”

Of course. This was ten years before they had met. “I’m from the future, I guess. I knocked down all the milk bottles, and…”

“And you won the opportunity to see behind the red door?” the woman finished.

“Well, yeah. But you said it would be the happiest day of my life.”

“I don’t choose the day. The door chooses. What made this day so happy?”

“I proposed to my wife, but she isn’t here. Where is she?”

The woman thought for a few seconds. “She should be here. The only other possibility is…”

Devon waited for the sentence to finish, then prompted. “Is what? What is the other possibility?”

“Did she also pass beyond the red door?”

“Yes, she went first. We were going to meet and relive the day of our engagement.”

The woman frowned, realizing the truth. “Did you discuss what day you would revisit?”

“No, I guess not. Just the happiest day of our lives.”

Silence.

“What’s going on? What do you know? Why isn’t she here?”

The woman hesitated, searching carefully for her words. “It would seem that…while today might be the happiest day of your life…”

The truth dawned on Devon. “It wasn’t the happiest day of her life?”

“I’m afraid not, my friend.”

“So then, where is she?”

A rueful smile. “I think the real question is ‘When is she?’”

“What do you mean? She’s got to be somewhere?”

“Alas, if she has entered another timeline, she exists only in the past or the future. She does not exist in the present.”

“Okay, then, when is she?”

“I am sorry, but the answer lies behind the red door. I have no way of knowing.”

“Okay, then let’s play the bottle game.”

“I’m sorry,” she frowned, “but the game only allows you to return to the happiest day of your life, not hers.”

“So, there’s no way to find her?”

“There is one. But you have only one chance.”

“No problem. I’ve hit the bottles six times in a row.”

“This one is more complicated. To visit someone else’s past, you must knock the bottles down from a distance of fifty feet. You have one attempt. Do you accept?”

“Of course.”

“Knowing that, if you miss, you will remain in this timeline forever?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“Never reunited with your wife?”

“Yes, yes. Just give me the balls.”

“One ball. And here it is. I will set up the bottles, and then you will walk back until I tell you to stop.”

Fifty feet had never seemed so far. In his days as a pitcher, it was sixty feet, six inches to home plate, but this seemed infinitely farther.

“When you are ready, my friend.”

Devon stared at the middle bottle on the bottom row. It would take a perfectly aimed shot, just off center, to knock them all down. Even the state championship seemed like an easy feat compared to this.

The state championship, in which he had given up seven runs in the final inning. The day he had always considered the worst in his life…ironically, until he had won the privilege of reliving today.

The carnival employees stopped to watch. He let the ball fly. Right on target.

Five bottles crashed to the ground, but one still stood. He had knocked it to the back of the platform, but it remained upright.

“I…I am sorry, my friend. The door must remain closed. I hope you will find happiness in this timeline.”

“One more chance?” he begged. “I’ve got another dollar.”

“I don’t make the rules. You had but one throw. I regret that I can do no more.”

“Is there any other way to reach her timeline?”

“I am sorry. I know of nothing aside from the red door.”

The door. Devon ran around to the back of the booth. The door leaned against the wall, just as he remembered. He stood it up and pulled on the handle.

Nothing.

“It will not open. Many have tried, but the rules of the game can neither change nor be altered.”

Devon stared at the door for a few seconds, a tear running down his cheek. He walked away without a word. The door may not open, but there must be another way. He would find it, even if it took…

A crashing sound interrupted his thoughts. When he looked back, the platform was empty.

“Did you just…”

“I did nothing, my friend. You threw one ball, and no bottles remain on the platform. I will meet you at the red door.”

Devon rushed to the back of the booth. “But you must have…”

“I did nothing!” she shouted. “The bottles have fallen, and the door will open. Ask no more.”

“But I don’t know what to do when I find her. Do I stay in that timeline? Can I bring her back?”

“I can answer no more. You will know what to do. If you will pass through the door, it must be now, speaking her name as you enter.”

And so he went, speaking clearly as he walked through. “Carolina Worth.”

He saw nothing but boxes. He turned around and saw the woman, a sad frown on her face.

“What happened? Why didn’t it work?”

“I am sorry, but it seems that there is no Carolina Worth in her timeline. Perhaps she might have another name?”

Of course. If she was in a timeline before they were married…

“Carolina Simchak,” he said as he stepped through the door.

He was seated on a boardwalk along what appeared to be an ocean. Glancing around, he saw her, standing with a group of friends. There could be no mistaking that smile.

He rushed over to her. “Carolina?”

Clearly puzzled, she replied, “Yes. I’m sorry…do I know you?”

“It’s me. Devon.”

She thought for a second. “Devon Huddy, from second grade?”

“Devon Worth. You know…your….” He stopped, as the realization hit him. The best day of her life had been before they met. But how could he remember the red door at the fairground when she remembered nothing?

“I’m sorry. I can’t place the name. How do I know you?”

He looked around in desperation, wondering how to regain the love of a woman who didn’t even know him. Starboard Seafood Shack. The name rang a bell, but, as he examined the building, he noticed something even more important…

“Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met. But…I was sent to give you a message.”

“A message. From who?”

“Your mother. Mrs. Simchak. She needs you to call.”

Carolina’s face paled. “Is everything alright?” She pulled out her phone.

“No!”

“Why? What happened?”

“No, I mean…she’s alright. Everything’s alright. But the cell reception is terrible here. You can use the phone at my restaurant.”

“Your restaurant?”

“Yes, the Starboard Seafood Shack,” Devon improvised. “A family business.”

“And my mother called a seafood restaurant 800 miles from home to give me a message? Why didn’t she just call me directly?”

“It must be that bad cell reception,” Devon answered quickly. “Our phone is right inside the restaurant, if you will follow me through this red door.”

She gave him a skeptical look but followed. Sure enough, they found themselves back at the booth. Devon glanced down at his spring coat. So they had returned.

“I’m sorry. What just happened?” Carolina asked.

“You were reliving the best day of your life.” He looked her in the eyes. “A day that apparently didn’t involve me.”

“Don’t act like that. I’ve had lots of great times with you.”

“But better times without me?”

“That’s not fair. I guess I just liked the freedom…”

“Of life before we met?”

“Well, they were easier times. Being an adult isn’t easy. You know that I don’t love my job, and…”

“But even the early days of our relationship couldn’t compare to a visit to the coast?”

“Those are my best friends.”

“You’re my best friend. I was excited to relive the day that I proposed to you, but you…”

“I’m sorry. That day was great, but…”

“Forget it.” He turned to the woman at the booth. “When I traveled back, I remembered everything. How come she didn’t remember me in her timeline…or the door?” 

She frowned. “The heart chooses what to remember. Apparently, you wanted to hold on to everything, but…”

“It’s fine. I get it.” Devon turned to Carolina, tossing her the ring box. “Happy anniversary, I guess.” He handed a dollar to the woman running the booth. Two minutes later, he opened the door, looked back without a word, and disappeared.


Kevin Hogg teaches English and Law in British Columbia's Rocky Mountains. He holds a Master of Arts degree in English Literature from Carleton University. He writes in many genres, with his short stories leaning toward slipstream, and has spent four years writing a narrative nonfiction book about the summer of 1969. Outside of writing, he enjoys thistles, rosemary, and pistachio ice cream. His website is https://kevinhogg.ca and he can be found on Twitter at @kevinhogg23.

Madan examined the game. His grandma, whose turn it was next, waited. He ran his left hand through his hair; She slammed a three of spades. They had a pre-assigned symbol for every suit and hair was for spades. The game was Mendicoat, a popular card game in those parts, and Madan’s team, comprising him and his grandmother, had gained an edge with the move.

“Darn it,” cried Janak. “You signaled at her, didn’t you, you cheater!”

“Did you see me do that?” Madan responded, in a taunting calm manner. “Did you see me do that?" he then asked Kanchan, Janak’s partner for the game. 

“How will I! You people are experts at it. Grandmother especially!” Kanchan said.

“May God take my eyes if I did it!” Their grandmother, reliably shocked, exclaimed, and the game continued. 

The sun was raging and they were seated on a charpoy under the shade of a huge Madras thorn tree in a shed next to their house; It was too hot and stuffy inside the house, a modest one-bedroom hall affair that was supposed to house more than fifteen people - matriarch’s four sons and their families - during the summer months. 

Madan went on to win the game, and consequently, the bet, terms of which stated Janak would take him to Karsanbhai if he lost. “I do not understand why you’re aiding Madan in such foolish endeavors,” Janak complained as he flung his cards. His grandmother told him she just wanted to win the game. She did not give two hoots about the bet. 

“Don’t blame me if something happens to him,” he said, “These city people come here with their fancy ideas. What do they know of the laws that govern life here!” 

“Come on, I just want to write an article on him. There’s no need to blow this out of proportion. Nothing will happen,” Madan said. 

“What do you know! Just want to write an article, he says. You have no idea what you’re dealing with. Think about it for a day or two.”

“Today is Wednesday. You know he only performs the ritual on Wednesday. Next Wednesday I won’t be here.”

“Let it be then. No need to go.”

“But I won the bet.” 

“I don’t care about the bet.” 

“Okay, I will go alone then.” 

“Let’s see.”

The game over, Janak and Kanchan shortly left to go to an aunt’s place, and Madan lay down, placing his head on his grandmother’s lap. 

“What is this new mischief? Nothing to do with your mother, I hope, may God bless her soul,” she said.

“It’s work Grandma. I was talking to my boss about our village before coming here and I must have mentioned Karsanbhai. He was intrigued and asked me to do a piece on him.”

“Why do you go around telling people about Karsanbhai? Do we look like samples to you Mumbai folks?”

“No Grandma, it’s just what he does, nobody does nowadays. I don’t know of anybody else who claims to put people in touch with the dead.”

“Don’t say ‘claim’. I know you will not believe it, with your education and all, but don’t assume you know everything just because you have a degree.”

“I never said I don’t believe it. My job is only to report, not comment.”

An atypical frown appeared on her face. “I don’t like this thing you’re doing. Writing about us as if we’re something to be read about and interpreted.”

“Why are you clubbing the entire village together? I’m not writing about you.”

“We’re all one people. Also, Janak is right. These are delicate matters. I hope you have thought it through."

He turned his gaze to her face. She looked concerned. He saw no point in stretching it any further.

“Maybe I won’t go.”

She looked at him for a moment and then breaking into a mischievous smile, said, "I know you will go. You've taken after me. Once you decide, you don’t listen to anybody."

"Nothing like that granny. It's a job, that's all."

"What are you planning to do? Interview him? Will you be there when the ritual is performed? Be warned, it’s not for the faint-hearted!"

He looked down, pinched his nose lightly, and said, "I will manage.” 

"On another note, I do hope you have taken after me. Your father isn’t the bravest of men when it comes to these things,” she said and laughed her grandmotherly laugh.

Harsh beams of sunlight poured in through the branches above and met with his eyes. He covered his eyes with his right arm and turned to his side. His gaze fell on the closed window on the sidewall of the adjoining house. The house had stayed closed for as long as he could remember. He realized with some surprise that he did not know who lived in the house and why it was closed. He asked his grandma.

"Oh, you don't know? The owner's son, a little boy at the time, drowned at the beach. His parents who were naturally in deep grief and shock left everything and moved to the city. This was more than fifteen years back and they still haven’t done anything about the house.” 

He looked at the window and shuddered. He wished he hadn’t asked. 

*

Peacocks announced the arrival of the evening with their screams and people recommenced their outdoor activities. 

Madan went out the door and put on his left shoe.

“This boy won’t listen. I have told him multiple times and in clearest terms that this is a bad idea. But who will pay heed to my advice!” Janak complained inside, to whoever was listening.

Madan put on his right shoe.

“Okay do whatever you want. But you will find yourself alone in this. I am not coming.”

Madan set out. He looked about and realized not much had changed in the village. The houses, the pathways, the people looked the same as the last time he came here. The pace of life, of progress, was the same as the pace of vehicles that had to be driven cautiously in these narrow, unpaved lanes, lest they get scratched by a thorny branch. 

As he turned left out of the lane, not a hundred meters away came a bungalow on the left, the first house along the path, which was infamous throughout the village as a place of horror, a place to stay away from. There were various stories associated with the bungalow. The one that had stuck with Madan was of two teenage girls, twins, who had hung themselves. As he had grown older, he had forgotten the story but had not been able to get the picture out of his head - the sisters helping each other out probably, a serene look on their faces as life went out of them.

Now, as he passed the bungalow, Janak’s phrase from earlier came to his mind, “Laws that govern life here.” What was that about? He had heard the phrase uttered by these people innumerable times since he was a little boy. Are these laws not the same everywhere? Was he a fool to walk into the unknown?

Just at that moment, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He shrieked and rushed a couple of steps and then realized who it was. 

“Woah, what’s the matter?” Janak said.

“No, nothing. You surprised me, that’s all.”

“So gutsy! I fret to think what will happen to you when you see the ritual,” he said and spat.

“I thought you weren’t coming.”

“Might as well be there in case something goes wrong.”

Ahead came the village chowk. They turned left and entered the lane with the Community Hall on the right and a compound with a huge tree, home to crying peacocks, on the left - an especially creepy place. As he walked on, he felt he walked further into darkness. All of a sudden, he wanted to return to the safety of the city. Something was not right. Hanging twins, drowning boy, communicating with the dead, the laws that govern this place, nothing seemed right. What was he thinking, getting into this mess, this darkness? 

He looked about to see if Janak was still there. He was. The world was running out of light though. The day was slowly wishing him goodbye. The night would see him now.

*

Karsanbhai stayed in a small room in a compound that also housed a temple. The large open area in the center was used for temple activities. It is here that Karsanbhai performed the ritual. 

As a boy, Madan had found it frightening yet inviting. Every Wednesday at ten in the night people would gather, some to witness and some to take part in the ritual. It was said nobody who came went back unsatisfied. Every participant believed they had communicated with the dead. 

It was pitch dark as Madan made his way into the compound. He was a little feverish, a result of the twenty-hour car ride he was sure, half of which was in the scorching heat. 

Karsanbhai wasn’t home. His apprentice met with them.

“Say, Janak, how come you decided to call on him?”

“This is my cousin Madan. He is from Mumbai and works there as a journalist. He has come for a week. He wants to write an article on Karsanbhai. Tonight, when the ritual is performed, he wants to observe it and interview Karsanbhai afterward, along with a few participants.”

“I am sorry, but we cannot allow it. This is a sacred ritual and we believe it should not be publicized. An interview with Karsanbhai is out of the question I am afraid.”

“That’s not why we’re here for. I want to participate in the ritual,” Madan said.

“No no, this is not what we discussed. You are not participating. Why do you want to participate? You really think this is a game, don’t you? I will tell your father,” Janak protested.

“I am participating. I want to talk to my recently deceased mother,” he said.

“No no. Let’s go home. Let’s discuss this and come back. Let’s talk to your father. Let’s see what he says. You cannot do this.”

But Madan had made up his mind.

*

Madan’s father had spent the evening walking the lanes of his childhood, with the people he had grown up with. Going back to his house now he was as satisfied as one is after a good, heavy meal.

Entering the house, he asked his sister-in-law to make tea and went into the bedroom to change into a lungi. He noticed somebody sleeping on the bed with a couple of thick blankets on. He inched closer to ascertain the person's identity and realized it was Madan. He asked his sister-in-law about it. She said he was feeling feverish. 

“Happens to him when he's out in the sun for too long. Driving all the way from Mumbai was a bad idea," he said.

He went inside and felt Madan's forehead. "Pretty bad, isn't it?" he said. "Give him a tablet after dinner.”

Shortly Janak too rushed in and checked on Madan. "I had told him it was a bad idea," he said.

"What are you talking about?" Madan's father said.

"He wants to participate in the ritual. He wants to communicate with his mother. We went to see Karsanbhai."

"What is this madness! You people should have stopped him."

"I did discourage him. I told him he should stay away from all this. But he would not listen."

Madan's father looked at Grandma questioningly.

"I did not know," she said.

His face changed all of a sudden. He sat down on the chair, closed his eyes, joined his hands, and mouthed a brief prayer. 

Madan started murmuring in his sleep. It seemed he was having a nightmare.

*

The nightmare
Madan was at peace. He picked up a handful of sand and let it slip through his fingers. Ahead, the waves continued with their rhythmic ebb and flow. The sun looked forward to dipping into the sea. His family members were having a good time. The older ones sat at a distance from the seashore and looked at the sunset and the younger ones stood in front of the waves, shrieking with delight every time a wave crashed into them. 

He drifted into a vision from his childhood. He wore a bright red t-shirt, sky blue shorts, shades, and a yellow cap. He walked about without a care and kicked up sand every few steps. Having seen something in the sand a few steps ahead, he rushed toward it and crouched to examine the curious object. Then he looked back. Madan realized the boy looked nothing like his younger self and in fact, the boy was in front of him, actually there. It's the boy who drowned, he realized.

Madan looked about. All his family members had vanished. A wave came and snatched the object out of the boy’s hand. He rushed to reclaim it. Madan stood up and sprinted toward the boy like a madman to save him. He ran and ran. And he realized he was running on the spot. He had not moved an inch forward. The boy reached the seashore. Madan ran on, helpless. He spotted something in the sky above the ocean; two girls, twins, preparing to hang themselves, the same serene look on their faces. He let out a series of screams. The waves came closer to him.

The first wave crashed into him and he saw his deceased mother. 

The second wave crashed into him and he saw his father. 

The third wave crashed into him and submerged him and his hand emerged out of the water and he rose.

​
Manish Bhanushali is based out of Navi Mumbai, India. His works have appeared in Livewire and Gulmohur Quarterly.

Professor Smith awoke to the most extraordinary feeling - as if she’d been married with children for twenty years. Yet nothing could be further from the truth: coupling with some sweaty, farting, hairy man had always been repulsive to her, such that she had long since banished any such thought from her mind. 

She gazed out at the neatly-trimmed lawn of Marlowe Court, which had stood in the centre of this Cambridge college for centuries. While her own tenure here amounted to just 25 years, she felt more kinship with its ancient granite and sandstone than she did with any of her lust-bucket fellow humans.

After her customary boiled egg and slice of toast, consumed with a cup of Earl Grey to the soundtrack of Radio 3’s morning programming, she sallied forth to the Porter’s Lodge to check her post. 

***

Professor Smith hadn’t received anything other than rare books and journals in her cubby-hole for more than a decade, and even that rarely. These days, she went to the Porters’ Lodge for the banter with the all-male, all ex-forces Portering team. A particular favourite was Mr. MacGuinness, an ex-Beefeater and Guardsman who became an enthusiastic alcoholic following his military retirement. His red face and handlebar mustache made him look like a drunken sea mammal, while highly polished shoes and an earthy reek of tobacco confirmed his military history. 

“Good morning Professor Smith! It’s looking a bit empty in your hole, I’m afraid.”

She stared at him, wondering whether he had just stated a fact or flirted with indecency. She allowed herself the beginnings of a smile before gathering her Incan poncho about her:

“Good morning, Mr. MacGuinness. Perhaps you’d prefer it if I enlarged my post-bag?”
 
“I don’t know about that, Professor. But a gentleman called for you and” –

“A gentleman? Now there’s a rarity. Especially at eight AM.”

“A Mr. Felipe Silvio, he said. He left a mobile phone number.”  

MacGuinness handed over a pink slip torn from an ancient message pad. Professor Smith looked at the handwriting and didn’t recognise it. But then, she didn’t get the chance to see a lot of handwriting that wasn’t six hundred years old: these days it was all text messages and whatnot. Even student essays were sent by email or posted on something called an “assessment hub” which she’d yet to access.

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“No, Professor. Er, something about a fragment from Padua.”

“I see. Well, thank you. I shall give him a call.” 

Returning to her rooms, she put the kettle on for tea and tried to remember whether she had ever met this Felipe Silvio and what he might want. She set her last clean tea-cup down, pushing unwashed plates and cups up against a pile of essays she was avoiding marking. Then she picked up the receiver of her ancient Bakelite desk phone and dialled the number given to her by MacGuinness: 

“Pronto?”

Professor Smith hesitated. Although she’d been reading and speaking Italian for thirty years, it was just – well, whenever she spoke to a modern she feared her immersion in the language and politics of the fourteenth century might manifest itself.

“Sono Professore Smith”, she managed at last. “Ha chiamato per me?”

“Yes!”, boomed Signor Silvio’s voice. “Professor Smith! I have the fragment. The fragment from the original Canto Twenty-Three of the Purgatorio what you wanted.”

“I see”, Professor Smith mused, unsure whether Silvio had switched to English owing to her poor accent, or because he wanted to show off. “Well, where is it?”

“I am here, qua, in Cambridge with the fragment. Please we can meet?”
​
Any meeting, and especially an off-the-cuff meeting with a stranger, was anathema to Professor Smith. Her timetable was mapped out for the entire term in advance: undergraduates knew any request to rearrange a tutorial was met with tight-lipped disapproval. Colleagues had even observed her disquietude if dinner in hall should be served five minutes late.

She checked the pocket diary lying on her desk. Other than a tutorial with a second-year rower of Olympian stupidity she’d scheduled for the end of the working day, that afternoon was empty.

“Why don’t we meet for tea at three? Shall we say the Copper Kettle on Kings’ Parade?”

“Perfetto”, Silvio confirmed. “Ci vediamo dopo, Professore!”

She put down the phone and clenched her fists. This was most unusual. She couldn’t remember asking to see any original fragment, or indeed whether such a fragment existed. Sighing, she picked up the essay by the aforementioned, ungifted rower and spotted two errors and a grammatical infelicity in the first paragraph. As she ploughed her way through the boy’s confection of plagiarisms, stultifying regurgitations, mistakes, mis-quotes and naïveté, her head drooped against the hand that propped it up against the desk. Before long she was asleep.

***

In her dream, Felipe Silvio was a raging bull chasing her through the streets of Cambridge. She was young again, racing across the market square on her undergraduate sit-up-and-beg bike with its wicker basket and heart-attack-inducing absence of brakes. However hard she pedalled, Silvio’s hooves beat harder against the cobbles and she felt his hot breath against her back. Eventually she could pedal no more and found herself succumbing to his masculine persuasive force, having ran out of puff on Jesus Green. The swans on the river craked as they witnessed her willing surrender to Felipe Silvio in the guise of a Taurean Lothario.

Professor Smith awoke with a start to feel the sun on her face. Her head lay among the undergraduate essays, dirty cups and plates streaked with butter and egg yolk. Her Bakelite phone swam into view together with the shell from that morning’s egg. She glanced at the alarm clock on her desk. Ten to three – just minutes before she was due to meet Felipe Silvio.

She rushed into the tiny bathroom in her set, pristine as it was (except the sink) through lack of use. She sniffed the hem of her jumper and realised she’d not changed her clothes for three days, or bathed. Never mind - nothing a dose of “Eau de Reine” couldn’t change.  She duly doused herself in perfume, gave her teeth a perfunctory brush and looked in the mirror. She mussed her frizzy hair to the left and right, trying to cover up the grey. Then she carefully applied lipstick and headed for the Copper Kettle, remembering her keys and purse. 

As she strode across the quad her mind was fogged with sleep and her heart with Felipe Silvio: what he might be like, what he might say. She half-ran up Kings Parade, sniffing her wrist furtively in the worry that she’d overdone the perfume. Oh well, too late now.

***

She recognised Silvio straight away. Where she’d pictured a broad-shouldered, mustachio’d Italian, she found instead cords and a round-necked sweater, thick glasses and nervous eyes that jumped around the room. She approached his table.

“Mr Silvio?”

“Professor Smith! An honour! I have read your monograph on the demotic and divine in Canto XXIII and I” –

Elaine Smith blushed for the first time since her teenage years. Someone had read her work.

“Oh, I – it’s nothing really. You’re most kind.”

They ordered coffee and Silvio produced a thick cream envelope, leaning forward conspiratorially into the steam rising from their coffees. 

“What you are looking for is here”, he said. 

“I see.” Professor Smith was put out by Silvio’s business-like tone. “The thing is, I don’t remember ordering it. That said, I will admit to an interest in the original orthography of the Purgatorio.”

She gave a little hoot of laughter, a nervous tic she had never rid herself of despite much self-admonishment whenever it occurred. Silvio tapped the side of his prominent nose conspiratorially and smiled. 

“It is gift. From a secret admirer. More I cannot say. Arrivederche, Professor Smith. Please allow me the honour of paying for your coffee.”

Silvio rose from the table. They shook hands and Elaine felt the comfort of his warm, smooth, strong grip. Silvio pulled out his card to pay at the counter, saluting her as he left the café.  After he left, Professor Smith reached into the envelope and found a scrap of taut, aged vellum. She pulled it out gingerly and her heart skipped a beat. Someone had just given her a textual variant from Canto XXIII. 

In twenty years of scholarship she had never heard of such a thing. Suddenly all the self-denial, the loneliness, the undergraduate essays devoid of residual brain-stem activity – it all seemed worthwhile. Of course, Felipe Silvio had been something of a disappointment. But she wasn’t finished with him yet, either.

Returning to college, she tripped and fell against the sill of the ancient oak entrance. The initial stab of pain was replaced by a wave of regret in her heart, the same she’d felt earlier when she thought about the time she’d spent writing, marking, reading – all those activities she’d devoted herself to without anything else to focus on. Then she began to laugh and cry at once, softly at first, then with a ferocity that astounded her. Through her tears, she saw Mr. MacGuinness the Porter and one of his colleagues approaching.

“Come along, Professor Smith. Let’s get you a bandage and some painkillers. Poor woman.”

***

Elaine Silvio woke with a start on her sofa in Herefordshire. She’d had the strangest dream: she’d become an academic after graduation, rather than going into banking. Everything seemed different in her dream, and not in a good way – she dreamed herself to be sad, frustrated, middle-aged and unmarried without children, yet globally celebrated by a tiny coterie of scholars. In this other version of her life, her undergraduate interest in Dante became an all-consuming obsession that had eaten her womanhood. 

Elaine sat up on the overstuffed sofa and rubbed her face with her hands. Billy the Welsh Springer lay asleep on the carpet before her. He snuffled and turned over, inviting her to rub his tummy. 

It was Friday, she knew that much. She’d been up at four for a conference call with San Mateo about digital payments strategy. Accepting crypto. KYC, carry rules, AML and all those acronyms. So boring, so dull. But it paid for this house, and the kids’ education. 

Felipe’s passion for rare books didn’t pay their groceries, even if he was one of the most well-known antiquarians in Europe. He must have got the kids off to school while she was working. And she must have fallen asleep after lunch.

She got up and stretched and looked out the window at the long expanse of the Welsh hills behind them, wondering what her life might have been like if she’d taken that PhD. Then she remembered it was her birthday, and she was due to meet Felipe and the kids in the centre of Hereford. For once, Felipe had agreed not to go to an Italian restaurant. The kids wanted Chinese – and they’d won.

***

When Professor Smith awoke, she lay alone in bed. The fragment Felipe Silvio gave her sat on top of the undergraduate essays, dirty cups and egg-smeared plates on her desk. Wincing in pain as she stood up, she hobbled over to her desk and peered intently at the fragment. She could hardly make out the words, they were so faint and hastily-scribbled. But there they were, clear as day, written above the accepted version. Where the Dante we knew had written:

          … « ché ’l tempo che n’è imposto
          più utilmente compartir si vuole »

Professor Smith could see words that didn’t mean, “the time of our life/can be used more fruitfully than this,” but instead – “time is our life, and time/is for none to dictate its use.” 

She looked at the text four times from different angles. She turned the scrap over and tried to read it through the fading afternoon sun. She was certain: it was genuine. A real discovery, the first in Dante scholarship for centuries.

***

Elaine Silvio entered Hang-Sui House looking left and right for her husband. She’d dressed simply in a black trouser suit and a blue silk shirt, the same clothes she’d worn for work that day. But she’d refreshed her makeup, brushed her hair and added a spritz of “Eau de Reine,” the perfume Felipe always said reminded him of when they met. She wanted to make an effort for their celebration after a rushed journey to the restaurant from their home, caught in the traffic she’d forgotten existed since she started to work from home. The kids texted to say they’d be late – something about Anthony having to wait for Bea to finish hockey. At least it meant she’d have some time alone with Felipe.

 When she reached their table, she kissed Felipe, his brown eyes smiling. She accepted a menu from the waiter and ordered a large glass of sauvignon blanc, scanning the menu. When her wine arrived, Felipe raised his glass of red in a toast:

“Salute, carissima. My gift to you.”

Felipe handed her an envelope. Inside there was another envelope containing a scrap of old parchment about two inches wide and three inches long. Elaine could make out some squiggly handwriting on it, thick with crossings-out and editing.

“What is it?”

“It is a lost verse from Dante’s Purgatorio. I found it in an antiquarian’s in Padua and persuaded them it was a medieval shopping list of minimal value. The words tell us no-one has the right to dictate how we live our lives. I know how much you loved his work, so…”

She kissed him again and turned the scrap of parchment over in her hands. She could hardly remember her Italian at this distance, let alone read such ancient handwriting. 

“Grazie, darling,” she managed at last. The children arrived in a flurry of schoolbags, teen-speak and undried hair. The waiter brought prawn crackers and food was ordered. Laughter and chopsticks and toasts followed. 
​
Pushing out into the gathering dark two hours later, Elaine waited with the children while Felipe went to fetch the car. Not listening to the kids griping at each other about some perceived slight visited on Bea by a girl at school, Elaine’s eye turned to the display window of a bookshop on the high street behind them. She caught sight of a pile of books in the window with a poster of the book’s title behind, and clutched for her son’s arm as she fainted: