Fifty Percent

Fire With Fire

2006-12-15T04:29:00.000-05:00

FIRE WITH FIRE (after Willy Shakes)
Written for RTP 2.2, December 2, 2006.

I'm sure the formatting's sloppy, but you'll have to deal.

CHARACTERS
ORWELL HEDGE, the President of the U.S.
GERRY DONNELLY, a senator
DEVORAH SCHULLER, the Israeli Prime Minister

SETTING
The White House, sometime next year.

COSTUMES
You know...whatever the President, the Prime Minister, and some generic senator dude might wear. Also, a janitorial-looking outfit for Schuller, and a cap.

PROPS
Broom/mop, cell phone (Schuller)

SOUND
Cell phone ringing
Gunshot
SCENE I
HEDGE. Within the year ’twill be two-thousand-eight*
And in that year this noble face and leg,
This stunning breast must needs be re-elect.
What worth a breast without its purple heart?
This nation claims a Christian heritage
But worships at the wingèd heels of War:
Lincoln bathed his throne in Southern blood;
Adolf polished Franklin D.R.’s crown;
And whence the praise of Washington? For what?
For being first? We prize no guinea pigs.
The homage that we pay him is in thanks
For freeing us from Britain’s curving claws.
E pluribus comes unum ringing cry:
“Give us this day our daily enemy!”

DONNELLY. But surely, Mr. President –

HEDGE. But what?

DONNELLY. You can’t be seeking war for warfare’s sake.

HEDGE. I do not seek. But if perchance it knocks,
I will not hesitate to crack the door.

DONNELLY. (Aside) And if it chance the knock you hear so clear
Is naught but timber creaking in the wind?

HEDGE. Devorah Schuller is arriving soon.
A pleasant hour or two is sure in store.

DONNELLY. She’s grown on you, then?

HEDGE. Ha, what do you mean?

DONNELLY. Two months ago you nearly struck her face
When she requested aid i’ th’ Gaza Strip.

HEDGE. ’Twas not that which she asked that angered me.
I thought her then a liar.

DONNELLY. Why, wherefore?

HEDGE. She swore to me her country has no nukes
But I was loath to trust her at the time.
DONNELLY. And you have changed your mind.

HEDGE. I know her now.
I must be off; that knock means she’s without. (Exit)

DONNELLY. And your mind, being changeable, will shift
Again, under my hand, as ocean waves
Must change under the moon, will they or no.
The people thirst for enemies, it’s true.
When war’s unjust, the enemy is you. (Exeunt)

SCENE II
HEDGE. Come walk with me, Ms. Schuller.

SCHULLER. Devorah, please.

HEDGE. Are we fast friends so soon? Just three months past
It was “Prime Minister,” or naught at all.

SCHULLER. Initial reservations cast aside,
You’ve proven a staunch friend of Israel.
I’ve come to thank you for your country’s aid
Over the past few weeks.

HEDGE. I heard you speak.
I heard you, making address to the Knesset.
What was it that you said?

SCHULLER. Was this the night –
The bombings –

HEDGE. Yes, the Haifa bus.

SCHULLER. I said
Not much of note, I think. A word or two.
“We must not choose fights when we have no cause – ”

HEDGE. “But when there’s cause, we do not have a choice.”
They’re noble words. They’re words I can admire.
Let’s walk a bit more.

SCHULLER. If you so desire. (Exeunt)

SCENE III
DONNELLY. Prime Minister. Ms. Schuller. Here.

SCHULLER. Who is’t?
DONNELLY. A friend.

SCHULLER. You look familiar. Do I know you?

DONNELLY. Keep your voice down. You’re in danger here.

SCHULLER. Danger, in the White House?

DONNELLY. Do you laugh?
You’ll soon be laughing through a different hole
When someone bores a bullet through your brain.

SCHULLER. You’re saying someone’s out to kill me.

DONNELLY. Yes.

SCHULLER. I’m Israel’s Prime Minister, you know.
There’s always someone out to kill me.

DONNELLY. Yes.
But this time someone’s going to succeed
If you don’t trust me.

SCHULLER. Who’s this mastermind?

DONNELLY. The President.

SCHULLER. Of the United States?

DONNELLY. That’s the one.

SCHULLER. You’re crazy.

DONNELLY. I can prove it.
Wear you these.

SCHULLER. They stink of dust and pine.

DONNELLY. The uniform of cleaning personnel.
Tuck up your hair into this cap. Be quick.
Then stow yourself away in here –

SCHULLER. The men’s room?

DONNELLY. Hide you inside a stall. Stand on the seat
So no one sees your ankles, legs, or feet.
You’ll hear from Mr. Orwell Hedge anon.
SCHULLER. If you are lying, Donnelly, you’re gone. (Exit)

DONNELLY. And if I craft our words to taint her ear,
She’ll sound for Hedge that knock he longs to hear. (Exeunt)

SCENE IV
DONNELLY. What news from Schuller?

HEDGE. Merely offered thanks.

DONNELLY. Just thanks?

HEDGE. Yes, thanks for all our country’s aid.

DONNELLY. And what else did she want?

HEDGE. Naught.

DONNELLY. Naught?

HEDGE. Ay, naught.
Look you incredulous?

DONNELLY. It merely seems –

HEDGE. Go on.

DONNELLY. It’s nothing, Mr. President.

HEDGE. Man, speak.

DONNELLY. It merely seems – oh, I know not –
A lot to go through for a simple “Thanks.”
A card shipped overseas would have sufficed.

HEDGE. You wonder why she had to ship herself.

DONNELLY. Well –
HEDGE. What are you suggesting?

DONNELLY. I, suggest?

HEDGE. You think she has a motive unexpressed.

DONNELLY. I do not think a thing.

HEDGE. Ay, but you raise
A point well taken. It was a mistake
To turn my admiration into trust.

DONNELLY. You have no reason to suspect her, sir.
Why don’t you speak with her? I’m sure a talk
Will help renew your trust.

HEDGE. Let’s find her, then.
I warrant she’s not even left the grounds. (Exeunt)

SCENE V
SCHULLER. I can’t believe I’m doing this. It can’t
Be true. Why would Hedge want me dead? And why
Would he be such a fool as to attempt
To kill me while I’m in his –
(SCHULLER’s cell phone rings)
Oh my God.
I’ll answer it. I can’t. What if it’s – who?
You’re batty, Schuller. No one wants to kill –
Nobody in the White House wants to kill –
But what’s the sense in taking chances? No.
Let’s wait and see. Into the men’s room, go.

SCENE VI.
HEDGE. Can’t find her? Cannot find her! Search again.
I spoke with her not half an hour since.
You’ve called her? And no answer? Try once more.

DONNELLY. No luck, sir. None.

HEDGE. What can this mean?
She’s meeting with her spies.

DONNELLY. What spies?

HEDGE. You don’t
Think that they’ve got informants everywhere?

DONNELLY. Well, every nation has a spy or two –

HEDGE. I’ll kill her, Donnelly. Conniving snake.
She wriggled in and gained my trust, and now
She’s slithered off to plot our country’s doom!

DONNELLY. Keep talking, but let me use the restroom. (Exeunt)

SCENE VII
HEDGE. I’ll kill them! Every solitary one!
I’ll start with her, that lying, cringing bitch –
She fly from me? I’ll teach her how to fly.
To hell with her, and see if she flies back.
And then her precious country: damn them all.

DONNELLY. You’re getting all worked up.

HEDGE. Damned right I am.
Well, don’t you see it? Donnelly, it’s war!
“But when there’s cause, we do not have a choice.”
The bitch said it herself. We have no choice.
I’m going in the hist’ry books for this.
Christ, Donnelly, you finished?

DONNELLY. In a sec.
Why don’t you go on out? I’ll join you soon.

HEDGE. OK, you take your dump. But hurry up.
We’ve got a war to start.

DONNELLY. Yes, sir, we have. (Exit HEDGE)
Ms. Schuller, are you in there? Come out, quick.
And now do you believe what I have said?

SCHULLER. I do not understand. What can have happened?

DONNELLY. He hates the Jews. He’s always hated them.
Well, you, that is. He’s crazed. A lunatic.
He keeps a photograph of Hitler in
His wallet.

SCHULLER. Oh, my God. Does no one know?

DONNELLY. About his lunacy? He hides it well.

SCHULLER. He does. But still, he wouldn’t kill me here.
He wouldn’t dare. He knows it would mean war.

DONNELLY. You heard him talk. There’s nothing he craves more.

SCHULLER. What can I do?

DONNELLY. There’s one thing that he fears:
DONNELLY (cont). The threat of nukes.

SCHULLER. Who doesn’t?

DONNELLY. But his fear
Is absolutely pathological.
The merest mention of an I.B.M.
Will melt him down like cream cheese in your hands.
If he thought Israel would drop a bomb
Or two, or three –

SCHULLER. But we don’t have –

DONNELLY. I know.
But he does not. In fact, he’s sure you do.
He’s got himself convinced that everyone
Has got a set of W.M.D.’s
And every crosshair trained on the U.S.
He’s paranoid as hell.

SCHULLER. So you suggest
That Israel should threaten him with nukes
Until he lets me leave?

DONNELLY. That is correct.

SCHULLER. And that will work?

DONNELLY. I stake my name on it.
As you can see, I am his confidant.
I know him better than his mother does.

SCHULLER. But all the world will know about our threat.

DONNELLY. Oh, no. You’ll send it just to him. And he
Will start to shake, and twitch his mouth in fright,
And straightaway call off the hounds on you.
He’ll be too terrified to say a thing
To anyone but me.

SCHULLER. You need to go.
He’ll wonder where you are.

DONNELLY. You’ll heed my words?

SCHULLER. I said, get out! (Exit DONNELLY) My God, my God, my God.
SCHULLER (cont). The U.S. should rethink a few details
Since they’ve put into office Joe Insane
And no one seems to notice or to care.
Can Donnelly be trusted? This is nuts.
Am I considering a nuclear war?
It’s just a fake one, Schuller. But what if
He’s wrong, and Hedge is not so eas’ly spooked?
A crazy man may do much harm, and fast.
Then all the more persuasion now to strike,
Evaporate his bloody war with flame.
First my life, then all of Israel lost –
That is, of course, if I fear now to act.
I cannot lead my nation from the grave.
(Dials number on cell, then speaks into it)
It is a strange request I have to make,
But ask no questions, for our country’s sake. (Exeunt)

SCENE VIII
(Enter SCHULLER with a mop or broom; she hears HEDGE’s voice, off, and hides; HEDGE/DONNELLY enter on his line)

HEDGE. It’s true! The bastards have nukes, after all!
And think that we have Schuller hostage! Christ!
They must have gone insane.

DONNELLY. Well, here’s your war.

HEDGE. They used to say you should fight fire with fire
But that was when they had no I.B.M.’s.
Fight fire with I.B.M.’s, eh, Donnelly?

DONNELLY. You mean –

HEDGE. Return the favor. Right you are.
Nuke them all before they get to us.

SCHULLER. You can’t do that!

HEDGE. What – who the hell are you?

SCHULLER. We don’t have any nukes, it’s just a bluff!

(HEDGE misinterprets SCHULLER’s brandishing of her broom as an attack and defends himself with some prop on hand; brief “sword fight” ensues)

HEDGE. Goddamn it, Donnelly, do something here!
HEDGE (cont). Save your President! Get out your gun!

(DONNELLY shoots SCHULLER)

SCHULLER. Donnelly, you...shot me. But I thought that –
Oh, I see now. Oh, I see, I see now.
Now I know why I thought that I knew you:
You’re the man who ran for President once
Many years ago. The Green...Green Party.

DONNELLY. One half of one percent of all the votes.

SCHULLER. Saw your face in papers here and there, then.
Lost to Hedge’s father. But you fancy
Having one more go, then? Knew you didn’t
Stand a chance against this guy if he tries
To run again?

HEDGE. What is he speaking of?

DONNELLY. He’s just a dying madman, sir. Who knows?

SCHULLER. Madman? (Takes off her cap)

HEDGE. Schuller? I don’t understand what –

SCHULLER. Never mind. You’ve got your war now. Sorry
That I was a fool. (Dies)

HEDGE. I’m not sure how this happened, Donnelly –
But we just killed Devorah Schuller.

DONNELLY. We?
You told me to.

HEDGE. Yes, but I didn’t know
That it was the Prime Minister. But what
Israeli will believe it? Not a one.

DONNELLY. It’s war, then, after all, sir.

HEDGE. Yes, it’s war.

DONNELLY. Your name in all the hist’ry books.

HEDGE. That’s so.
But somehow I don’t – never mind. You ought
HEDGE (cont). To go and tell someone.

DONNELLY. Yes, sir, I will.
(Aside) And tell the world that Gerry Donnelly
Come Tuesday in that bright November next
Will brightly fill your inept shoes, and walk
In all the stumbling footprints that you left.
You listened, Orwell Hedge, just for the ringing knock of war;
The knock of opportunity’s the one worth list’ning for. (Exeunt)

Hold Me Tight

2006-12-15T04:24:00.000-05:00

I would post "Hold Me Tight," my most recent short story, but formatting is a big part of it, and doing columns in a blog...I'm not up to that. Currently.

So I'm just going to say this: I like it. I don't often like my short stories, but I like it. Better than "Vinegar for Flies." It's experimental, it's forward-looking, it's sciencey. I continue to improve as far as interdisciplinary writing is concerned.

In addition, over winter break, I will be writing 10-12 short plays.

That Time

2006-09-12T02:14:00.000-04:00

        Some July – the clearest I could remember – then or since –
        and she: but it will be all right won’t it?...you know it will be all right don’t you? and I saying no, it won’t be...and not sure that it won’t be but saying, no, it won’t be...be what? All right...and she: but I want to...and I saying you only think so and later you’ll regret it...
        That time – blue sky – asphalt clean from rain – that time – we walking together – hand in –
        and I saying, I’ll hurt you...no you won’t...I will though...you won’t...I will and they always do...who does? We...and she: you will never hurt me...you could never...not you...and I saying, what if I do, what if I am, what if I am that one who hurts you...
        Blue sky – no clouds – finishing our hot dogs – that time – hand in hand – the first time – hand in hand in hand in hand in – like the octopi – she not eating the last bit of her bun – all mustard-soaked – like she does – never eating the last bit – not of anything – back streets – and the last bit always left in some green dumpster –
        and she: someone has already got that title...and I saying, you can always do one worse...and she: no never, not you...
        That first time – when I touched her hand – fingers warm – nails coming over the ends – you don’t expect that – and warm from the bun – just like a girl – nails long enough to feel over the ends of the fingers – never expected that – but it made sense – they have nails – and we don’t – and she striding – and me with my chest thudding – and the blue sky scarred by wires – and a pair of scuffed Nikes knotted together – against the blue – slung over the wires – and those nails that will tickle your hand near the wrist – like the little round plastic at the ends of shoelaces –
        I’m hurting you I am...
        No you’re not...
        I am yes I am just tell me...
        And she: you aren’t.
        That first time...with her crying...pretending not to, and still crying, and her head sliding up and down on the pillow...and me not saying but thinking yes I am and I will more too after you begin to love me...
        Yellow mustard – and she tossing it aside – the breeze rocks the sneakers – some bird will have it – the way it is – always something picking up what’s left – and she: why do you think they are always there? – the shoes she means – on the wires – and I saying they got stuck on their way up to the stars – and she: do any ever make it? – and I saying nothing but clutching her hand tighter now and thinking this is it – the first surrender –

Brack scholarship

2006-07-09T20:57:00.000-04:00

UNTITLED
by Cory Tamler

Characters*

THE MAGICIAN Foucault’s Pendulum. Youngish, passionate. Scattered.

THE CRIMINAL Young’s Double-Slit Experiment (applied to electrons). Nondescript.

THE DETECTIVE Millikan’s Oil-Drop Experiment. Older, rigid.

GALILEO You remember him. Italian physicist.

THE DOUBLE Played by the actor playing Galileo.

*Note: Although the Magician and the Detective are written as women and the Criminal and Galileo/Double as men, the characters’ genders are flexible. Lines may be adjusted accordingly.

Setting

The dressing room of a theatre.

Synopsis

To be filled in later.

Costumes & Props

To be filled in later.
SCENE I. The interior of the MAGICIAN’s dressing room. Here we find all of the things one would generally find in the dressing room of a theatre: a closet and a dressing screen in particular. There’s a main door leading to the rest of the theatre and another, smaller door that opens into the bathroom of the dressing room. The MAGICIAN is preparing for a performance.

She opens the closet and takes out her cape. She puts the cape on and momentarily assumes her magician persona, swishing the cape and gesturing with her arm. She looks at her empty hand.

MAGICIAN
Wand.
(She searches her pockets, then the room)
Wand, wand, wand...
(The wand isn’t in the room. Exit MAGICIAN into the bathroom. Enter the CRIMINAL, a nondescript but suspicious looking personage who looks around and slips into the closet. The MAGICIAN immediately re- enters, dumping out the contents of a bag she’s brought back with her. Juggling balls and a pack of cards fall out, but no wand.)
Where could it possibly...
(She goes to open the closet, but just as she does, the lights flicker out; she yells. Beat. The lights come back on; the closet door is closed and in front of it sits a top hat. The MAGICIAN, a little disoriented, picks up the hat and overturns it; a pair of gloves falls out. Still no wand. The MAGICIAN swears under her breath. There is a knock at the door.)
Go away!
(Another knock)
I said go away, I’m in the midst of my pre-show ritual!

She drops to her hands and knees to look underneath the furniture

DETECTIVE (off)
Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you, but I have reason to believe that a dangerous fugitive –

MAGICIAN
Oh, fine, come in.
(The DETECTIVE enters, soaking wet; the MAGICIAN, still on the floor, continues to search for the wand)
Who the hell are you? Good evening. Is there a storm?

DETECTIVE
A light drizzle.

MAGICIAN
The electricity all went out a moment ago.

DETECTIVE
(Flashing a badge, at which the MAGICIAN doesn’t look)
I’m an investigator. I’m looking for –

MAGICIAN
Lovely to meet you. I hope you realize you’re absolutely destroying my concentration.

DETECTIVE
You wouldn’t happen to be in the business of harboring desperate criminals?

MAGICIAN
Not a chance. I’m too busy falling to pieces. First the wand, now the electricity...how they expect me to perform if the lights go out I have no –
(Crawling into DETECTIVE’s legs)
Do you mind?

DETECTIVE
So then you’d have no objection to me looking around a bit?

MAGICIAN
Not at all. Best of luck to you. If you find a wand, let me know.

DETECTIVE
(As she searches the room)
A wand?

MAGICIAN
It’s a stick, a wooden stick, mostly black with a white –

DETECTIVE
I know what a wand is.

MAGICIAN
Well, it’s very important. I have a show in half an hour and I can’t go on without it.

DETECTIVE
Is it one of those trick wands?

MAGICIAN
No, just a regular wooden stick.

DETECTIVE
Then it isn’t really necessary, is it?

MAGICIAN
Certainly it’s necessary. It’s the most necessary thing of all.

DETECTIVE
But if you don’t do tricks with it –

MAGICIAN
Magic isn’t tricks.

DETECTIVE
There’s no such thing as magic.

MAGICIAN
Maybe not. But Galileo will be in the audience today –

DETECTIVE
Galilei?

MAGICIAN
– someone I’d like very much to impress, as it’s he who made my work possible, after all. Look, exactly who are you looking for and what makes you think whoever it is would be hiding in my dressing room?

DETECTIVE
I tracked him here. But I’m not surprised he’d come here. He’s a theatrical sort of fellow.

MAGICIAN
Well, he clearly isn’t in here, and I haven’t seen anyone but the call boy for hours.

Beat.

DETECTIVE
I don’t think I caught your name.

MAGICIAN
I didn’t give it.

Beat.

DETECTIVE
Would you mind giving it now?

MAGICIAN
Not at all. I’m Foucault’s Pendulum.

DETECTIVE
Millikan’s Oil-Drop Experiment.

MAGICIAN
Oh – I’ve heard of you!

DETECTIVE
And I of you.

MAGICIAN
Have you? From whom?

DETECTIVE
Oh, I could hardly miss the posters they’ve been plastering all over town for the past month. They seem to indicate that you put on a...spectacular show.

MAGICIAN
Spectacular! At the least. Good magic always has a generous helping of spectacle.

DETECTIVE
Your tricks must be something to see.

MAGICIAN
Are you staying for the show this evening?

DETECTIVE
Well, I’ll need to have a look at the audience, see if he’s managed to lose himself among the crowd, but I don’t know about –

MAGICIAN
You’re in for a treat! Not that my regular schtick isn’t impressive, of course, what with juggling fire and vanishing jungle men in boxes and the like, but tonight – well –
(She hands the DETECTIVE a program)
It’s not often that I get to do it. The space has to be right – high enough ceiling, appropriate place to rig equipment...and it takes some setting up. But it’s –

DETECTIVE
(Reading)
“??? (come see the world turn)”
(To the MAGICIAN)
Quite a claim.

MAGICIAN
It’s my specialty.

DETECTIVE
Fascinating. And you said you’ve heard of me?

MAGICIAN
Here and there. In the papers. You always seem to be solving some big mystery or other. I’m impressed. I never had the mind for that sort of thing.

DETECTIVE
It does require a kind of – rigor.

MAGICIAN
They say you always get your man.

DETECTIVE
So far.

MAGICIAN
Quite a claim.

DETECTIVE
Indeed.
(Beat)
Well, if you see anything suspicious, you’ll let me know, won’t you?

MAGICIAN
Maybe if you told me who you’re looking for, or what he looks like –

DETECTIVE
A physical description would be virtually impossible, as he rarely looks the same twice. In fact, he isn’t even always a “he.”

MAGICIAN
But how is that –

DETECTIVE
By use of a particularly perfidious theory of quantum mechanics.

MAGICIAN
What’s his crime?

DETECTIVE
The murder of reason.
(Beat)
I don’t subscribe to that ludicrous superstition of bidding one to break one’s lower limbs before going onstage, and I don’t imagine you’d appreciate me wishing you good luck –
(The MAGICIAN covers her ears)
– so I’ll merely say goodbye. For now.

MAGICIAN
Are you going to get a seat?

DETECTIVE
Hardly. I’m going to search the rest of the theatre.

MAGICIAN
(As the DETECTIVE exits)
Try not to move too many of my props –

SCENE II. GALILEO, from the driver’s seat of an automobile, talks on his cell phone as he drives.

GALILEO
The rational mind, pah! I’ve no faith in it anymore. Science has become so popularized nowadays any fool thinks he can discourse adequately on it...Well, certainly, but that was the seventeenth century...No, it was quite different...No, I’m telling you...When you looked into a man’s eyes and explained to him the Copernican system, when you dragged him by the hand to your telescope and showed him the Medicean stars, he denied your proofs, he denounced the idea of a heliocentric system in spite of all reason, but there was a spark in his eyes...a spark...am I breaking up? I have three bars of – how about now?...Good. There was a spark in his eyes that said, “I know you’re right, I’m just too terrified to believe you”...No...Not anymore. Everyone knows the earth revolves around the sun now, but they know it in the same way our seventeenth-century theologians “knew” the earth was the center of the...no, it’s not rational, it’s what they’ve been told...it was once a triumph of reason, now it’s blind lazy habit...how is it worse? You haven’t seen it?
(There is a flash of lightning)
Blast this storm! I’m saying that the public has commandeered science in the name of – the name of – well, I’ll be damned if I know what it’s in the name of, but it isn’t reason! Reason is dead!...Yes, you’ve said that, but I don’t agree...There is no one thing you can pin the death of reason on...
(Seeing an object pass by his car, he explodes in rage)
See! That! That! That right there is what I’m talking about...It’s a disgrace, it’s a – mockery...A giant billboard advertisement for a car, right there, in black and white...No, it’s what it said...”Sticks to the road like a positively charged electron”...WELL I KNOW IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE! Why does it need to be a positron? Is the road supposed to be negatively charged? The road’s attached to the ground and the ground is – grounded! And who do you think wrote that piece of tripe?...Some everyday ordinary schmuck who took a freshman physics class twenty years ago and decided he was qualified to share his ignorance...No, I’m sorry...I’m sorry, Detective, I can’t – no, I won’t help you, not this time...Because I don’t think it’s worthwhile...What’s the use of punishing anyone for the death of reason? Won’t bring it back to life...

SCENE III. The interior of the MAGICIAN’s dressing room. Everything is exactly as in SCENE I. In fact, this scene begins exactly when SCENE I began. You might call it an alternate reality.

The MAGICIAN is preparing for a performance.

She opens the closet and takes out her cape. She puts the cape on and momentarily assumes her magician persona, swishing the cape and gesturing with her arm. She looks at her empty hand.

MAGICIAN
Wand.
(She searches her pockets, then the room)
Wand, wand, wand...
(The wand isn’t in the room. Exit MAGICIAN into the bathroom. Enter the CRIMINAL, a nondescript but suspicious looking personage who looks around – as the MAGICIAN re-enters, dumping out the contents of a bag she’s brought back with her. Juggling balls and a pack of cards fall out, but no wand. The CRIMINAL sits)
Where could it possibly...
(She sees the CRIMINAL)
Who the hell are you?

CRIMINAL
A – fan of yours. A great fan.

MAGICIAN
Really?

CRIMINAL
One of the greatest.

MAGICIAN
How did you get backstage?

CRIMINAL
Nothing is impossible to the truly devoted. Would you be so kind – ?

He pulls a business card from his pocket, and a pen.

MAGICIAN
(Signing)
Never had anyone ask me to sign their business card before.

CRIMINAL
They’re a convenient size for collecting.

MAGICIAN
(Looking at the front of the card)
“Young’s Double-Slit Experiment Applied to the Interference of Single Electrons.” Is that you, then?

CRIMINAL
None other.

MAGICIAN
Well, I’m glad to meet you. I always enjoy meeting my fans.
(She takes the top hat out of the closet and overturns it; the pair of gloves falls out)
I generally prefer that they don’t barge into my dressing room unannounced, but –

CRIMINAL
Are you looking for something?

The lights flicker off, then back on after a beat, as in SCENE I.

MAGICIAN
What was that?

CRIMINAL
There’s quite a storm outside.

MAGICIAN
Oh, this is perfect. I’ve lost my wand and now we might lose our lights – some show this is going to be –

She is on her hands and knees searching for the wand.

CRIMINAL
You lost your wand?

MAGICIAN
Yes, before what might possibly be the most important show of my career, and don’t say it.

CRIMINAL
Don’t say what?

MAGICIAN
That it’s “just a stick” or “only a little piece of wood” or “Couldn’t you use a pencil instead?” or any of those things people always say. It isn’t just a piece of wood and it is important. To create the –

CRIMINAL
Spectacle. I know. I wasn’t going to say any of those things. I know how important a sense of...flair can be.

Beat.

MAGICIAN
Oh.

Beat. There is a knock at the door. Neither MAGICIAN nor CRIMINAL seem to hear it. Beat. Another knock.

DETECTIVE (off)
Hello? Is anyone in there?
(More knocking)
Hello?

MAGICIAN
Yes, what is it?

DETECTIVE (off)
Open the door.

MAGICIAN
This is a private dressing room.

DETECTIVE (off)
I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am, but I have reason to believe that a dangerous fugitive may be hiding in that private room of yours.
(Beat. The MAGICIAN and the CRIMINAL do not move)
Ma’am? I’m an investigator.

MAGICIAN
There’s no one in here.

DETECTIVE (off)
I’d just like to have a look for myself, if you don’t mind.

MAGICIAN
I do mind. I’m in the midst of my pre-show ritual.

DETECTIVE (off)
This will be easier on all of us if you let me in.

MAGICIAN
Do you have a search warrant?

DETECTIVE (off)
Rest assured, I can get one.

MAGICIAN
Then come back when you’ve got one.

Beat.

DETECTIVE (off)
Certainly.

Long pause. The MAGICIAN resumes her search.

CRIMINAL
Why is tonight’s show so terribly important?

MAGICIAN
A special guest in the audience.

CRIMINAL
Who is it?

MAGICIAN
Galileo.

CRIMINAL
Aren’t you going to ask me about –

MAGICIAN
About what?

CRIMINAL
Whether I’m a dangerous fugitive.

MAGICIAN
If you were all that dangerous, you’d have a gun to my head by now.

CRIMINAL
Perhaps I have other ways of dealing with my victims.

MAGICIAN
I’ll risk it.

CRIMINAL
Why?

Pause.

MAGICIAN
Are you really a fan of mine?

CRIMINAL
I’m a great fan of your work, yes. To be strictly accurate I’ve never observed it myself, so I’m not acquainted with it on a personal basis, but there’s a particular act of yours that I’d be thrilled to see.

MAGICIAN
Come see the world turn.

CRIMINAL
I hear you rarely perform it.

MAGICIAN
Tonight is one such occasion.

CRIMINAL
Because Galileo is coming?

MAGICIAN
Let us say – that Galileo is coming because I’m doing it.

CRIMINAL
Do you mind if I ask – why magic?

MAGICIAN
What do you mean?

CRIMINAL
I understand you love – the spectacle of it. It’s something I love and admire too, very much so. But the thing you are in fact famous for, while indeed spectacular, is – far from being a magician’s stunt.

MAGICIAN
Is it?

CRIMINAL
Well, yes. It’s a proof – a visual and elegant proof of the spinning of the earth. Instead of deceiving the senses, it awakens them. Instead of blinding reason with illusion, it is awe-inspiring precisely because it appeals to reason.

MAGICIAN
Do you really think that people enjoy magic shows because they think the magic is real?
(Beat)
People like to watch magic because they like to play “figure out the trick.” A well-executed bit of magic is the highest tribute to reason that there is. It’s – it’s – watch.
(She picks up the deck of cards and shows the top card to the CRIMINAL)
What card is it?

CRIMINAL
Five of diamonds.

MAGICIAN
(Shakes the card back and forth; it becomes the Jack of clubs)
Is it?

CRIMINAL
Impressive.

MAGICIAN
And what’s your brain saying to you right now? Do you believe that I actually used some sort of occult power to literally change the five of diamonds into the Jack of clubs?

CRIMINAL
Of course not. There’s a trick to it – some sleight of hand involved –

MAGICIAN
But you don’t know what it is.

CRIMINAL
No.

MAGICIAN
And that’s what makes the trick worth seeing, isn’t it? You’re in awe. Not of magic, but of the triumph of reason that allows a person to figure out a way to make something look magical. You know there has to be an explanation and, what’s more, you know that if I told you the explanation, you’d understand it.

CRIMINAL
But what does that have to do with your pendulum act?

MAGICIAN
That’s just taking the whole thing one step further.

Innocents

2006-04-05T16:43:00.000-04:00

You can say what you like. You can spout your facts and figures but you cannot deny that the innocent do not deserve to die. At all costs we must protect them. At all costs. Any cost.

Six million people died at the hands of Adolf Hitler for no crime other than their race. Six million! You like to think that now, we wouldn’t sit idly by, we wouldn’t let such a travesty occur. But still the innocent die every day. Think of Rwanda. Think of Darfur.

In the Middle East innocent women are persecuted. They are made to hide themselves in mountains of clothing – they are treated as property, their bodies abused, they can be stoned to death for a transgression as small as showing an inch of skin. They are treated as criminals – worse than criminals: slaves. For no crime other than their sex.

Here in America helpless children are the victims of abuse. A drunken father, a hysterical mother, these verbally and physically abuse their children, and often friends and neighbors turn a blind eye. And there is rape and there is murder. There is an illness in this country. We are failing to protect the innocent.

There are abortions. Who more innocent than an unborn baby, still dependent on the dark, safe warmth of its mother’s womb for life? A fetus is so helpless it cannot even cry for help, and yet we refuse to be its voice. We tear it from its mother’s body, murdering an innocent for no crime other than being a fetus.

And puppies. A chain of drug dealers smuggled drugs into this country by cutting open puppies’ stomachs and hiding the drugs inside. Many of the puppies died of infection. And if one network was doing it, you can be sure they were not alone. How many other drug lords are stuffing puppies full of narcotics for their mercenary purposes? Perhaps some are even using – violating – kittens! I tell you that we must protect these innocent creatures. Puppies must be dying by the hundreds and we say nothing.

And let’s not forget lab rats. This is the ultimate cruelty. Exploiting poor, helpless rodents in the name of science? Of medicine? A cure for cancer or AIDS in exchange for the deaths of countless white mice? It’s hideous! People need to stop contracting AIDS, that’s the answer! These rats and mice have committed no crime other than being born rodents!

We must protect the innocent! And we must remember that every time an innocent mind is corrupted, another innocent has died. Every time a ten-year-old child learns the definition of sexual intercourse. Every time a young boy walks into a drugstore to buy his first package of condoms. Every time a young girl chooses a bathing suit that will showcase her breasts. These are all deaths. More than deaths. They’re murders. We murder these innocents by allowing their childhood to be ripped from them too soon.

----potential monologue for a one-act

Memory

2005-10-05T03:08:00.000-04:00

I am driving home. I can still taste blood. My tongue is coated; the back, thick. You must be driving home, too. This is not in my mind. In my mind you are still parked miles behind me, in the gravel lot, in the strained silence, your headlights cut, ahead of you the jungle gym stiffly clawing the sawdust and the swingset whimpering. I am driving home along a road that radiates out from the central point of you, it is all relative to you, and I am at this moment fixed distance from you but I am in every direction. Together you and I define a sphere.

The taste is as if a cold sore sharply burst from the back of your mouth onto my tongue.

What to make of you? We sat in the back seat of your car. This is a ritual. We have performed it before.

The road is twisted, there are no street lamps, trees hang over the asphalt. My window is down. Summer hangs from my mirrors. I have the radio on. These songs are supposed to be telling me about my life. These are supposed to tell me how I should feel right now in the wake of you. I don’t know what to tell myself.

You tried to speak. I was too quick for you, had mercy on you, kissed you before you could heave up the words to your lips.

Now I think about your car. It is never my car we use—this is the ritual, step one. You never think about the smell of a thing until you stop smelling it. Away from the deep scent of leather, of car freshener and your long neck, I know that your car has a smell. I can’t remember it now; but years and years away, when everything has changed—if I told you now it would you would not believe me, but I know in this moment we are not forever—years, and lovers gone by, if I opened your car door I would know you again for a lifetime. I would be seventeen as I am always seventeen in some part of me. In memory, the bone that never grows.

The two-tone man

2005-08-01T14:31:00.000-04:00

jenny’s best friend is a two-tone man.
they met at the shore with their hands in the sand
and their salty smiles and waterskis
and they lit cigarettes to swim in the sea.

the two-tone man had a two-tone door
in his two-tone house in the summer by the shore.
jenny passed through it, jenny was lost –
said “a friendship’s worth only as much as it costs.”

they beachcombed all summer for horseshoe crabs.
the two-tone man could always get a cab.
and they’d ride through the city with jenny’s hair down.
he was always around. he was always around.

in the winter the man, he had snow and sleds.
he slept out of sight in a quilted bed.
his Pennsylvania wife was white and red
with a lace blue apron and a shrunken head
and her pantry was stocked with mops and jams
and locked to keep out her two-tone man.
her two-tone husband still loves his jam.
he nicks it whenever he can.

jenny’s best friend is a two-tone man.
he’ll be back when the summer sizzles the sand.
jenny loves chocolate and she loves the ocean
she loves her life here, she can always go boating

and the calendar clings to her bamboo wall
as the months bleed by and softly fall
while outside the markets are shouting all year
and it’s snowing somewhere, but there’s always sun here.

jenny guts fish, the pink wife strains berries
jenny goes swimming, the wife feeds the canary.
he’ll be back when the summer sizzles the sand.
he won’t think of the woman he married for jam.
by the sea he is jenny’s. he’s her two-tone man.

A snippet

2005-07-29T14:10:00.000-04:00

Lisa May and I walked arm-in-arm down Sycamore. We were convinced the greatest feeling in the world was walking arm-in-arm down Sycamore in the springtime with your best friend. Even years later, I’d have to admit that there is something to be said for the easy physicality of closeness—the parallel drawn between hearts and arms. The sidewalk was damp from rain. I looked forward to walking into Lisa May’s house through the back screen door, hearing my rubber soles squeak up and down the linoleum kitchen floor. We were eleven. Squeaking was the sound of clean.

I didn’t see it there; I stepped on it; it was square and foreign under my weight. It stuck to the wet on my shoe, as paper will, and I peeled it off. A purple-and-white square with a raised circle in the middle. A package—like those HandiWipes they gave you at the diner down the street with your buffalo wings. “What is it?” I said.

“A rubber,” said Lisa May. She took it and put it in the pocket of her windbreaker. She had three older sisters.

The beautiful in spite of it

2005-06-29T17:47:00.000-04:00

the beautiful in spite of it
wanderlust, love or bust
dust in firefly eyes

the beautiful in spite of it
shed their crust, fast adjust
rust and thunderthighs

minimizing functions on their fingers
five variables: sticks and powder blush
shadow and foundation and a brush
five variables, no degrees of freedom

the beautiful make light of it
lullabies, long goodbyes
prizing lip from mouth

thrive on wetness
thrive on tightness
thrive in corsets
thrive on tightness

the beautiful in spite of it
counting sounds, counting pounds
rounds of gin gone south

----I think that these are possibly song lyrics. If I can get someone to write the melody; I know nothing about music.

The Myth of Jane Grey

2005-06-22T21:07:00.000-04:00

I've decided that The Myth of Jane Grey is a great name for a play. I just don't know what it's going to be about.

Great. I've got two good titles for plays -- The Myth of Jane Grey and The Nevers -- and no idea how to write either of them.

A fascinating problem: the one of translating the beauty of science into art. That is, how to make art-appreciaters appreciate the beauty and simplicity of a scientific idea. That's the research project for next summer. I will be figuring out how to dramatize the ten greatest experiments in history. I don't have a title for that yet. I'd say Genesis, but can we say "overdone" much? Something will pop up in research. I have faith.

Something I wrote in an email today

2005-06-18T02:30:00.000-04:00

The long and short of it being that I think I finally grasp what everybody's always talking about when they say "Write what you know." And it seems to be working for me. Not in the sense that I'm necessarily a better writer, but that I feel better about what I write. That it's more complete.

The Nevers

2005-06-14T14:32:00.000-04:00

BRENDA

I’m obsessed with the name Charlotte. It’s the perfect name. First off, there are so many nicknames. You’ve got Char, Charlie, Charles, Arlie, Arlo, Charlo, Lottie, Lots, Lot, Lot-Lot, Cha-Cha, Charcoal, Charlottery (or just plain Lottery). That’s just an example. You could probably come up with more. Compare that to some plain old girl name like – Kristen. You’ve got two choices: call her regular old Kristen or bubblegum-and-pigtails Kristy. And what if you named your kid Kristen and she didn’t turn out to be a regular old Kristen or a bubblegum-and-pigtails Kristy? Name her Charlotte and she’ll find some nickname that will fit her. Listen, that’s my problem. Do I honestly look like a Brenda to you? Wouldn’t you say more of a – Zooley, or a Quincy, or a Rubix – something not too common, with lots of end-of-the-alphabet letters? I would. There’s nothing good can come from Brenda. Bren? That’s barely even a syllable. It sounds like a cereal.

MAGS

So go by Charlotte.

BRENDA

I can’t. Not where I live.

MAGS

Why?

BRENDA

My dad’s ex-wife’s name is Charlotte.

MAGS

Well, I don’t know your dad’s ex-wife, and I’m calling you Charlotte.

BRENDA

Nah. Don’t. I’m sorry I brought it up, it’s stupid.

MAGS

Charlotte. Or would you like one of the nicknames? Which did you say – Lottie? Charlie? You’re not a Lottie.

BRENDA

I said don’t. Brenda is fine.

MAGS

But maybe a Charlie. Definitely a Charlie.

BRENDA

Don’t call me Charlie.

MAGS

In a couple days tops I’ll have the whole campus doing it. A whole new you this summer, Charlie.

BRENDA

Don’t!
(Beat)
I was kidding. I like Brenda.

//

HOSANNA

Late drunk nights in a friend’s apartment after another failed geometry quiz, another failed family dinner. Tuesday night, too early in the week for the nail-polish burn of Absolut chased by Hawaiian punch but we’re washing our mouths with it anyway, clean us out before bedtime, instead of Colgate, instead of Listerine. We all have our own ways of doing it. My chemistry teacher used to drink a third of a cup of white vinegar in the mornings before school. That was his way of cleaning out. We could smell it on our tests when he passed them back, the red ink – minus, minus, minus – filtering through the white pages; like some slit-wrist albino bleeding his life out on a linoleum floor; and so I associate vinegar with chemistry, and chemistry with death. Alcohol is chemistry. Alcohol is the sourest death of all. Late drunk nights in an apartment in Oakland, in a dorm room, in a parents’ basement, in a deserted parking lot or a clearing on Mount Washington but mostly in an apartment with my college friends, the ones I met through my brother. Me, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and they’re twenty-one, two, three. Some older. They can’t pass Intro to Logic and I can’t pass geometry. We’re stagnating. Together wedged onto the couch six at a time passing around the shot glass (there’s only one, from somebody’s parents’ trip to Vancouver too long ago to remember), overfilling it each time, trying to toss it past our tonsils – usually missing, gagging. Larry drinks tequila for the first time one cold January and he’s gone, so gone, and somehow it’s me next to him on the couch, his hands all over my thighs, everywhere. Pretty soon it’s all of him all over all of me, everywhere, and we leave the couch together somehow holding hands, and the funny thing is, I don’t know what happened. Where we went, what we did. I don’t know if I’m still a virgin or not. And the next day I failed another geometry quiz, on proofs this time. My cell phone’s cluttered always with frantic messages, my parents, “Susie. Susie. Please call home. It’s two o’clock in the morning and we don’t know where you are. You haven’t been home in three days. Susie.” I never answer. They can’t do anything. I’ve worked full-time since I was fifteen, I’m a manager at the restaurant now, I am self-sufficient, I can pay for anything I want or need. They should kick me out of the house but they won’t. I only go home to paint. And recharge the batteries on my CD player. Drunken nights, they last forever, wet paper memories. Because afterwards it mostly comes back, but in pieces – not a smooth photograph but an impressionistic Monet – better, a pointillist Seurat. Bits of static that come together into something comprehensible if you step back far enough but beset with incongruity, dark nothing between the bright colored pinholes, irretrievable, invisible moments that may as well never have happened, even though they existed once in the painter’s mind, because you can’t see them there now. I fill the darkness with sound. It’s why I always have my CD player. The same soundtrack, over and over, since freshman year – that way, in case of emergency or malfunction, I can still hear it playing in my head. Sarah Brightman is my only angel. Why do you think I’m called Hosanna?
(Singing)
“Hosanna hey sanna sanna sanna ho...”
(Pause)
I don’t know how to live in daylight anymore.

The Break

2005-05-09T00:52:00.000-04:00

She had stopped crying, her mother set her
on the shock of metal, the doctor was there,
her mother's cheeks had drained like kosher chicken,
the doctor's hands (dry but damp in seeming)
encircled her small thighs

look, it's sticking out the skin, said mother; it cut
right through, like butter, I saw it happen,
behind her eyes she saw it--a sports replay,
ocean wave falling
from fabled height.

The break is very clean, said doctor.

I let her play on the monkey bars.
I let her play alone.
I didn't think. The day was so fine.
I was thinking the chicken needed defrosting.

It's the cleanest break I've ever seen, said doctor.

I let her--The fine fingers slid up and down the pole
of the girl's thin leg, new sirens of pain
wailed, you could see it, sharp like driftwood
through a lake, shattered china,
clean, the bone

Twin

2005-05-07T13:04:00.000-04:00

If I were to ask you, she said,
how many colors your hair holds
why you bleed as remedy
or for the breadth of your shoe--

do you know that in all the world’s yawning
we would find no other such pairing?

I told her You have been reading, called us
cream and lemon, soap bubble and
breath. But why then (she said) do I find his face
in your secret places? sacred silence? You are glass,
your back silver.

Stop looking for a mother

Stop fingering the curtain--you have years enough for this
self-scrutiny
and maybe you don’t believe in LOVE
but you wont deny me mine goddamn you
say it. Say you love him Ill swear you do
to any wholl listen I know
I know you
cant help being born you--god I wish I wasnt born you

She raised chamomile, hot, his honeyed lips, to hers

Maybe then I wouldn’t have to love him

Vinegar for Flies

2005-04-12T02:28:00.000-04:00

On your way home from work today you stopped in the Starbucks downtown, as usual. You’re friends with the girl who works there until seven, and as you tipped her you mentioned your birthday. Tomorrow.

What do I do? I don’t have a present for you. Nothing. I can’t think of what to get you. I’ve been racking my brains since I got home. Nothing.

I sit here and think of what it is that I know about you. I know you like walks. You take long ones. Existentially alone, your hair swept back in that wispy sweatpants ponytail that signifies you don’t give a fuck whether anybody sees you or not. That’s one of my favorite things about you. The way your arms swing with your strides; god, my eyes could get caught up in that forever. The way your arms swing with your strides; sometimes I see us in a boat together, matching stroke by stroke, you with your muscles like little hills growing dipping the oars in and out of the water. Just gliding. That smooth, like the lake is made of caramel, and we can’t feel a thing. But what do you get for a girl who likes walks?

You work for a software company downtown. You eat banana and peanut butter sandwiches, on one folded slice of untoasted bread. You read books on Java programming and on digital logic like a girl I once knew read romance novels. You have eyes that are light brown or green, I can never decide which. Your waist is just the right size to fit, wrapped, inside my arms. Your favorite drink is a Long Island. You’re clumsy sometimes, you fell down the last four stairs running to catch the T last week with your arms full of paper-bag lunch and briefcase and your feet strapped into black two-inch heels. You hate heels and wear them anyway. I know, Ana, that in less than twenty-four hours you’ll be turning twenty-eight. My lists just go in circles when it comes to you. I never seem to be able to take the next step – like now, because what does it all tell me? I still don’t know what to get you.

Something to hang on your door? I always think of your door when I think of you. I can see it when I close my eyes: the key-scratched brass doorknob, the deep oak brown set with panels that taper and sink, squarely, like keys on a keyboard. There’s a little round window at the top with pie-piece panels. You’ve got bells hooked up to it somehow on the inside, so when it opens or closes there’s that ghost of a silver jingle, frosted on the ear. You’re always coming or going, and I don’t know which I like best. When you are coming, it’s from a long city day full of crosswalks and conferences and public transportation. Your tight morning hair has started to come loose, turning your face into a flower, with those wisps of floating red-brown the petals. Sometimes you’ll be humming “Five O’Clock World,” empty thermos (full of chicken rice soup when you left for work) swinging at your side. You’ll strip off your heels even before you get to the door, and your stride lengthens, legs hungering to relax in the cloud of a couch cushion. A dayful of conversation clings to your lips, and laughs dangle weary with your earrings from your ears. You glow quietly from the inside.

When you are going, you have another kind of life. That door, in the morning, snaps open, snaps to attention beneath your sharp hand, afraid even to blink its single eye. You step outside and the day is beautiful to you; rain or shine, you pause a moment, lean back against the jamb, and watch the day fall into place around you. By breathing it in you make sense of it. This is why I first noticed you. Your hands clench; you want to grab the world and shake it until it adores you. So I first saw you going, on a bright Tuesday two months ago, and that image is always in my mind, always when I think of you.

Doors are strange creatures. I first saw Shelby at a door, too. The cabin in the pine forest. The summer of ’99. The door, roasted golden brown by July sunshine, melts open, scattering the reflection of her question-mark body on the lake where I float in my canoe, staring.

But when you’re going, sometimes you’re not going to work anymore. Sometimes, now, you’re going with him. I’d forgotten that. That’s new.

I like you when you are coming better.

. : I can think of nothing, all day nothing, there is nothing anywhere good enough for you. To clear my head I took a walk earlier, and when I came home my hands just ached from emptiness, until I didn’t know what to do, until I couldn’t keep my feet still but had to ease their burning by doing jumping jacks in front of the bay window, curtains slightly ajar. I was waiting for you to come home, although I knew it would be at least another hour. My beagle flopped in from the kitchen, yelping at me, stumbling across the threadbare patches in the carpet. I kicked him and he flew halfway across the room, spiraling like a football. I’ve had him for six years; but as he scrambled, limping, towards the doorway, the tender look he gave me was as if he was falling in love with me for the first time.

You’ve finally come, three hours late, but it isn’t alone. It isn’t your routine; you aren’t stripping off your heels. You are wearing a dress with fabric shimmering like a river and your hand is entwined in his. He must have picked you up from work in the glisten of his BMW and I can feel his breath on the back of your neck from where I stand frozen at my window. How could you bring him home? Are you going to let him inside? Two weeks, Ana. I was there when you met him at Kiva Han, his finger briefly brushing yours as he handed you your caramel cappuccino (the server had gotten your orders confused). I was there and I heard the introductions. Two weeks and your door opens for him. And his hand settles into the small of your back as it closes and my lids close and that hand is burned into my irises, and I sear through it, until now I can see the muscle and veins, until the veins burst and muscle tears and there is the bone and I twist and splinter it like a cedar…I call my beagle and when he comes his face is not right so I strike him again and again with my foot and hand until the wriggling and squealing stop and he lies on the carpet, breathing in gasps and shivers, and his left eye is fixed unblinking on my face, rolling and wet and achingly full. “You are my only friend.” I am convinced I will be alone forever. “You are my only friend,” I say to the beagle.

Sometimes I dream that he is a timber wolf and we live in igloos that I build myself, night by night. In the morning before the sun is up I harness him to my sled, and when the whip cuts into his shoulders his wild chest swells with passion until he leaps through the snow, his heart turning on my every syllable.

. : This morning I called off work again, and from my supervisor’s voice, tinny and displeased through the speaker of my phone, I guessed that I had lost myself another job. Don’t let it worry you – waiting gigs aren’t in short supply in Pittsburgh. I should know. I needed to see you off to work again, anyway. You should take that as a compliment; I don’t ride the T for just anyone. It’s like riding in the intestine of some feverish mythological animal. It shudders with passion, roaring through the October orange of the tunnels, feet bound in steel shackles to the underground tracks. Someday it will break loose and come tearing up through the asphalt, a twisting violent worm, spitting chunks of granite through windshields and toppling buildings with its thrashing tail. If I could ride on its back I would want to be there – but to see it from inside, when all is hot and roiling, stinking with blood and the pain of digestion, is less alluring.

But here we sit; I control my nausea, stealing glances from over the fringe of my Post-Gazette. Your sway has the rhythm of a summer afternoon, and the yellow tunnel lights flicker on your hair like sunshine. You are reading a book with a cover lake-blue and green; your fingers turn the pages in an ambling laze. Colors around you become intense, or twisted as if through a prism. That’s just the way Shelby read, that summer. Every day I’d find her out by the lake, reading, but slowly, without purpose, like a boat adrift floats on water: ten minutes per page. Her thin tan fingers stroked and turned the leaves.

She holds the book bent open, paperback cover spreading and creasing its wings in her hands. There are woodpeckers in the pines, beating an erratic tattoo. Her skin smell is a hot oily mix of banana suntan lotion and pine. I ask her to go rowing with me. This is the third time I have asked. No, she says. I’m reading.

Shaking the checkered curtains in the cabin window, her father calls her name. He named her after the beagle he had as a boy and the way he calls her, rough and low on the first syllable rising sharply to a yelp on the second, makes it sound like a dog’s name still. The back of her neck straightens as if a wet finger is running up it. She waits. It’s like holding your breath until you can’t keep from breathing another second or you’ll die…Then she turns her head to the cabin. A permanent shadow traces in purple the outline of her eye.

You exit at Steel Plaza and by now I know your routine so I can afford to wait for the next stop while you run to Starbucks for a chai. I cross paths with you on Wood Street – today there is a sharp breeze that lifts the hem of your cotton-twill shirt, fluttering it like a flag until I see a brief band of white – and I feel you slip through the revolving door of your office building behind my back. Now you’re safely at work and I can begin my search.

. : I spent hours meandering through department stores and art galleries, ruffling the pages of coffee-table books and fingering teddy bear paws. I walked to the Strip and found some wreaths in a flower shop, but they were tacky and overperfumed. Everything that I found was either gratingly wrong for you or too expensive; Squirrel Hill rent is high, and I can’t seem to hold a job, so I hoard every cent I can get. Eventually I wandered back to where I’d started.

Downtown Pittsburgh is the last resort, and not only for me – a confused patchwork of the city’s stale steel past and colorful, masked present. I am not sure why I thought I could find anything true or real for you here. The net is transparent but the knots in it show clear. How can I buy you a pair of symphony tickets or passes to the theatre when I know this will thrust you for two hours (plus intermission) into a sea of sagged lips, cataracts, bared gums, nails cracked and yellow as desert? I have always known the city was dead, dying, sick; I don’t need graphs in some high-sheen magazine to tell me it’s one of the biggest vacuums for singles in the country. The city is in my blood.

I got desperate enough by late afternoon that I wandered into a jewelry store, but walking through the front door was like staring into a disco globe. The glass cases and glittering colors burned at my eyes until I didn’t know where to look, until the sick fluorescent wash of yellow light melted into the dim glare of mortification – the paralysis of awkward embarrassment fossilized my limbs and I was back on the high school dance floor. I didn’t realize how long I’d been standing there until the clerk came up to me and asked if he could help me.

The first thing my eyes focused on was a curtain of a necklace, droplets of amber hanging together like honey spread across a knife. He took it out of the case and I didn’t know what to do, so I held it up against my neck and looked into the mirror. Ana, I don’t think I slept much last night. It’s all this worry about your gift. The dark bruises of exhaustion were almost encircling my eyes, and my eyebrows hung shaggy and brooding, two hairy shelves, over the top – I looked like a raccoon. Right then I saw her face again. She turns her head to the cabin, but this time she was looking right at me, straight ahead through the mirror, right at me standing there with this ridiculous necklace around my neck. Her right eye (her father was left-handed) stared mournfully into mine, plump and purple as a tea-bag, swollen as if with sleeplessness. Her cheeks puffed with quick breaths, undulating, and her mermaid hair swam about the corners of her face. Those eyes – wide, half-crossed, searching – died with love. But it’s no use anymore, Ana. It’s no use pretending to forget.

. : The city is in my blood; we share a history; I am its topographical map; study me, and you know all you need to know. Vanessa whose glasses I stole every day in Mrs. Belden’s class and who poked my eye (on purpose) during the chorus concert. Carly with knees skinny and bruised from falling on the playground who went to my church and called me Zit Pus. Katie One, whose mother made her drink milk for healthy teeth, so she kept a plastic bowl in her backpack and at lunch poured the carton of milk into it and lapped it up like a cat. The girl with pointed brown pigtails who lived across the street from me in sixth grade and whom I followed to the library on Tuesday afternoons – an early echo of you. Jamie. Katie Two, whom I asked to Spring Fling every year of high school; she smiled in her refusals, showing rainbow braces that she exchanged for InvisAlign in senior year, but her friends giggled when they passed me in the halls. Shelby, the girl from the cabin across the lake from the one where we spent the summer before I left for the University of Pittsburgh, with red hair like the cherry wood of a violin and puffy child’s eyes. A face in my four hundred seat Psych lecture of whose sex I was never certain, but with jetliner cheekbones, cumulus lips stained rose, it didn’t matter. Jeanette Anders, my academic advisor, and her long seaweed face tangling in hidden grins when I told her I was dropping out. You, Ana, you, and the street and the silence and the man that divides us. My romances. And only one kiss, scattered kind words, to show for twenty-three years of life. I have traveled with my city from childhood industry, hard labor for the future, to shaggy-haired disillusionment and pollution of my most sacred places, to sleek sideways-glancing appreciation of progress and culture, but we are so painfully self-aware that we cannot shake this being alone. Wandering past the bent mannequins, sharp elbows, blank faces like strangers in the Kaufmann’s display cases, I feel that it is deeply wrong of me to expect salvation from you; you are nothing but another child of these stone trees, glass rivers.
One of the mannequins wears a shawl. Yarn-woven, whorls of staring red and gold for approaching autumn, they are tousled in imaginary wind. The shawl follows me. I walk quickly but it catches up. It covers over my vision as I walk, losing track of where I am going. Over my vision as I pass under the bridge that leads to the Point. Over and under – over – under – with the brown flashes of her fingers moving in patterns, and the crooked sticks with knobs like knuckles bound into a cross.

I wonder what it is.

“A God’s Eye,” she tells me. She learned it in Girl Scouts. Her room, she says, is full of them – all colors, all patterns.

“Will I ever get to see your room?”

She doesn’t answer, but ties a piece of gold yarn onto the end of a red piece and continues to wind the cross, over – under – and I suddenly know that I want something from her. I want to grab her wrist and hold it, my fingers a steel bracelet. I want to keep her heart inside my mouth like a dog carries a water balloon. I have never even touched her. I wish the yarn on the God’s Eye were her hair, and her fingers were mine.

She ties off the gold yarn and slips the God’s Eye into her jeans pocket. “So someone will always be watching,” she says. I have never even touched her.

I’m glad I ended up here, where the two rivers crash endlessly into one. I would never have found you something in a store. Here my footsteps tap a hollow drumroll on the shaggy grass. I feel an echo of what it’s like to walk behind you, a bend in the sidewalk or a wide strip of black asphalt separating us. Princely tall, rabbit-footed, I am a spectral guardian whose presence you have never suspected. And now I know what I am going to give you. A present from the heart. Because I love you, Ana. I didn’t know for sure until this moment, but I do.

I meet up with you on the way home. I can feel the twigs – two solemn soldiers – in my breast pocket, and, bolstered, I speak to you.

“Mind if I sit here?”

The T is just full enough that this question isn’t awkward.

All I want is to hear your voice speaking to me. But you just nod, not looking up from your book. You pull your knees together under your skirt as I settle into place – even discreetly brushing my leg up against yours becomes an impossibility. The subterranean monster roars forward, devouring the tracks, and you turn the pages of your book with cold precision. All I wanted was a word from you. It should not be so dear. You speak to your colleagues at work, to the clerk at Penney’s, to cashiers, to a woman who stops you on the street and asks the time. You spoke to him, a stranger in a coffee shop. Spoke to him and opened your doors, but for me your lips refuse to stir. I should reach out and twist them from you, from your face; they are mine; they are ripe and ready, and they would fall off easily in my hand. Oh, you breathe, do you? You do; the air leaves tracks as it slides down your throat; I could follow it on the outside with my thumb where a simple pressure could stop the floodgates and your words would be mine, too, given or withheld at my command. But be patient. I will try to play the game.

“What are you reading?”

Now you look at me. Your eyes do not see me. They are Shelby’s eyes; they are my beagle’s eyes. I will take your face between my hands. You still say nothing – you hold up the paperback, cover to me, so that I can read the title, but I don’t. I don’t read anything. It blurs and fades into transparency. I will take your face between my hands, your cheeks, and shake your head until you see me and it is right.

. : The shower sprays hot and hose-heavy on my back and neck. I am so calm, unrippled. Your gift is lying on my bed and a change of clothes too and the water, it sifts through my hair in surges and waves. There is nothing so much as something that is a part of me, you are not so much until you are a part of me, until you are mine your nothing is your everything, I will swallow you into myself I will digest you I will integrate you into my body and when I touch you I will feel it in the deepest part of my body and when you touch me you will be touching yourself and when I touch myself it will be you and you all over and we will never escape, it will be you, you in this shower, you in this body and wearing this skin and heaviness, you oh, you, oh, oh oh OH

. : From the back row of the Squirrel Hill movie theatre I monitor the closeness of your head to his. He has not put his arm around you yet. If he touches you I will vault over the seats that separate us. It will be sweet hot pleasure to sink my nails into his throat.

When will this movie end? When will he walk you home through the patchy starlight, holding your hand (a gesture I will allow only so that he can let go)? When will he kiss you goodnight and leave you on your doorstep – you will not invite him inside again, you cannot – so that I can follow after, ring your bell and wrap your fingers around your gift? Because the moment you see it you will know. And his dinner and movie, pale birthday gifts of the body, will fade into the unmentionables of our neverending past together under the blazing light of my gift of the soul.

The girl in the movie tosses her hair. She smiles a wide, red smile. Her accent is Southern. I have never met a Southern girl. She has a fire in her that I recognize and admire.

He must be drawing the same parallels between her and you as I am. My stomach threatens to incinerate.

You, darling, you and I. Together on a mountaintop, on the shore-side, deep in a forest – wherever you want to go. I will build you a house. Cut the wood myself, mix the paint, gather slate for the floors. Together on a winding lonely path, lost among the trees, because with me, you will never want to walk alone again.

On the screen they are in a boat. The lake is full of trees and waterlilies. The oars are silent.

You and I, with your thin brown fingers resting on your pulled-in knees. The banana and pine smell of your cotton-twill shirt snapping in the breeze. You and I, with the red-brown floating petals of hair shadowing the swollen teabag of your eye. In a boat, you and I, on a lake, rowing, rowing, rowing.

Shelby likes me. She does. I couldn’t be sure until now, but she kept our rendezvous and we row on the lake together like one body, taking turns. It is hers now. Her muscles, like little hills swelling and receding, pull the oars in and out of the water. We don’t talk. Secrecy is so heavy on our shoulders; my parents are fast asleep, her father passed out, drunk, in front of their cabin’s fire. The moonlight washes the color from her hands.

I put mine on hers and she stops rowing.

My thumb feels the contour of her hand. There is a contrast between giving skin and toothy bone. Up to her wrist, small and turning. Beneath my touch the hairs on her body stand at attention and I feel, for the first time, that I am worthy of something, worthy of touching, worthy of taking.

The wrist is a doorway to the arm. The arm is a path to the neck. Like holding a glass to drink, I cup my fingers around it, and like holding a glass to drink, I pull her to me. The boat rocks, then stills. We look at each other, not believing. Then I drink.

I am wrapped in cotton and down. I am washed in a sunbaked wave. I am full of her. I am full to bursting of her ripe fruit and I will never be hungry again.

She jerks away.

“Shel – he doesn’t know.” I have lost her. “He’s passed out, he doesn’t know.”

Her eyes snap to the shore, to where the light ripples in the windows of her cabin. There is the terror of a cornered wild thing in them. The blackened ring around her right eye, in this dark, shows skeletal, rotten. “I can’t,” she says. She does not love me. Her hand moves, shrinking, up to the right side of her face. She does not love me. She loves her father instead of me. She loves him.

I am empty, empty. I have nothing inside me, I am washed with numb. This is not right. This look in her eyes – not right. Me, I am the one she is supposed to love. I slap her cheek and my palm stings. She looks at me but is still holding to him, clinging, so I slap her again and again, I think I punch her in the jaw. A slight red spring discovered in the corner of her mouth. She is so light and small. The instant before she tumbles into the water, her face snaps into serenity and it is the acceptance of what we are. Of my love.

But she is in the water and sinks like an oil-slicked bird. In the black she is lost. I dive again and again, because she is my love, because she finally knows that she is my love, but I am blind in this wilderness midnight and she is lost. I swallow lake water thick as honey, choke, tread water. I take deep breaths so I can dive again. On the surface of the water, made choppy and stormy as a sea by my propeller limbs, Shelby’s red and gold God’s Eye has wriggled free from her jeans pocket and there it bobs, staring.

He is kissing you in the dark.

I am frozen to my seat.

A vampire, his white fangs shine in the silver movie-screen light. He gnaws your lips off like two small fish. Swallows.

His arm is a stole around your shoulders.

I want to crack his head on cement, like an overripe grapefruit.

His fangs, mouth, drip with blood. He chews on your neck, exposing the sinew, gulping you down (flesh blood and bone all), internalizing you.

I want to break every finger. Nose. Neck. Jaw.

He climbs on top of you. He straddles you. He forces your small shoulders back into the seat. The tip of his tongue is barbed and scrapes the insides of your mouth. He struggles free of his pants, and again and again he is inside you, and this tip is barbed as well. A long crack begins between your legs and runs up your body, bisecting your belly button, splitting your breasts, clefting your chin and lip to the top of your head. You are cloven in two.

I want to rip him from you and beat his face until his eyes are swollen teabags and he cries red tears. But he will love me for it. What am I to do? To have you love me, he must love me, too.

Again and again he beats himself against you, on you, into you. He is not himself. I am him. I feel this, every moment of it. Beside you a man I have never seen before sits, gently kissing you, while I strike like a spear so deeply inside you that I pierce your heart.

The God’s Eye I made you sits in my back jeans pocket. The crossed sticks are hard and sharp and they bite into my skin through the jeans. It’s hurting me. Stop. It’s hurting me.

Fire In Your Pants?

2005-03-31T17:45:00.000-05:00

listen, i do not
speak without meaning, i don't
deal in frivolities, listen:
when i have words
i have words as heavy as breathing.
and yours are of no consequence.
i am never yours; i am
my own mouth.

yes i swear when i handed you
that corner of me, it was
not native mask, derring-do,
not what you gave me,
but a brass token. a leather medallion. something
ugly, something
real.
with long scratches
marring your reflection.

dontattemptforcing that
crystal goblet of nectar
down my scraped throat.

i am parched,
but your sugar ocean
is no remedy for dry curling edges.

liar.

Not Again

2005-03-20T23:09:00.000-05:00

why call your words white satin
when -- wet them,
they rip like paper

your oil and my water
won't mix, won't unmix
there you sit,
hovering atop my mind

Oh?

2005-03-09T13:48:00.000-05:00

Block-walking on a March twilight in zephyr masquerade
we stumble on sidewalk buckles, we race these young hearts
until they give. We are old. We have eaten too many
       hamburgers. Sung too often without dancing.
       Felt the Pittsburgh cold
hacking at our bones too early. I know
you have spent solitary nights curled, clenching your insides,
body snapping (in spite of it) open repeatedly
until you break, your breath
rejecting you. Raw as family.
We are too new
to wear these wrinkles. I have taken for granted the
       movement of these legs
but she sees the shadow on my lip,
sees that I am not a beauty.
What is the use of nineteen
if I can't run without wind? catch his eye? laugh, and hold
no reserve? There is no genius in spring, only green, only
       jasmine;
the genius sleeps til December;
what use these months of half-snow? icicle flowers?

Lekh Lekha

2005-03-03T12:09:00.000-05:00

. : Saturday morning and Becky’s little cousin stood on the bema, hair scattering into a loose pool the bright cold winter sunlight crowding in through the giant windows that made up the synagogue’s back wall. Mara (after their great-aunt) looked down at the wide wooden podium that held her prayer book and the silver yad with its gently curled fingers (the index however unfurled and reaching hungry for the words) and a Torah open to a chapter in the middle of Sh’mot. She gripped the sides of the podium until the bone of her knuckles gleamed through the skin, stretching it into translucence; this fortress, this knotted grained prism supporting her frame like a pillar, she was stuck to it, a butterfly blown against a tree in a storm. Her puppet-joint fingers twitched with minds of their own, tapping where she held, the chipped black fingernail polish (bitten) in contrast with the lavender of her dress, her white shoes, that Mogen David from Aunt Edna that lit up her throat on a silver chain. She held her shoulders conscientiously straight, but her right leg would not keep still. Now its toes grazed the floor. Now it was airborne. Now it dipped down for a fresh landing, skating across the bema in a smooth arc, leaving a darker semicircle stamped on the carpet as it rubbed against the nap.

Becky was conscious of Thad’s hand in hers. Nobody was watching of course. Eyes ears hearts on the Bat Mitzvah. Still, the energy of the room seemed centered, made concentrate, somewhere between her boyfriend’s fingers and her palm. This was the locus of all points. You can bring a date if you want. You’re a big college girl now. Yes Mother, and shall I teach him “sit” and “heel” and “stay,” before I come? The looks in her parents’ eyes when she walked into the hotel lobby on Thad’s arm, knees still weak from the four-hour haul from Pittsburgh. Thank God she’s not a lesbian at least. Some of the grandfolk looking disconcerted, a bristling flock: but he’s not Jewish. We are an accepting people. A tolerant people. As she told Thad that first night, wanting to put her arm through his but frozen from it by the night, by the stillness, the newness of him: Your people and mine, we have a lot in common.

Through those windows at the back wall was the yard with its hedges and growing snowbanks, the parking lot with its minivans and station wagons (it was a Reform temple) partially obscured by the flakes that had begun to stick to the asphalt like a tongue on a popsicle. Still the white tumbled down in trembling feathers, silent, winking like the whites of eyes. It didn’t seem safe somehow. All that glass. High winds could break it. It made the room so much colder; not an effective barrier against the fourteenth of February, against mounting winter.

Mara bent forward, a straight line pointing from her nose to the roll of sheepskin before her. Her hair was too thick and full for her thinness; it tossed foamlike about her face; her eyes peeked out from an underwater cave. She was all bone, all mousy thirteen-year-old, all shrinking child. Becky held her lips together. The need for air clawed hollowly at her chest, lungs, but she kept herself still and unfulfilled. She didn’t want to miss the miracle.

The rabbi dipped his head at Mara. She raised the yad like a cup. There were rose petals in her hair and her legs were lollipops. She began to sing, her voice a choppy sea. The pointing finger pulled her along by the hem of her dress. When? When? The frail pipe of her voice quivered in high wind. The Hebrew carried it, blew it ahead in gusts, and once it stumbled on her lips. Then Becky saw the click, like a light switch. The struggle dissipated – the motions were all the same but Becky saw the meaning was different, it had changed, there had been a rebirth. Mara’s fingers stroked the podium without strangling it, her feet held firmly to the floor, her load lifted, her voice settled into the rocking-horse gait of the Torah trope. It would be all right. Becky knew. Mara was Bat Mitzvah now. She was all grown up.

. : More than four years ago. The first day of school. The first day of high school. All summer Becky Weinblum, fourteen and growing, had dreamed and planned and scribbled lists on yellow legal pads. To Do: Highschool. She needed a friend. Not just a friend, she had friends, no this had to be a special friend, a best friend. A girl, a girl who kept up with the news and drank coffee from a thermos and didn’t wear mittens or a coat in January and always had a date to the school dances. A girl with a secret in her smile. One nobody knew yet; but Becky would know her. They would join the volleyball team together, revitalize the school newspaper, and double date to senior prom. Top of the list. Number one priority.

At lunch there was a table in the corner, and Margaret Fulbright sat there alone with her key lime yogurt and a copy of the New York Times. This was the “Love you darling! – Mags” of Becky’s twelfth grade yearbook. This was Mags who spilled milk on the carpet in Becky’s basement a few months later, who threw Becky a surprise Sweet Sixteen in North Park. This was Mags. And Becky, as if she had known it would be all along, sat down beside her, set down her purple tray, and said, “I’m Rebecca.”

Mags turned her eyes up in welcome. They were brown oceans. It’s like everyone said – there are things you can know without any words.

. : The road called to them, but by the time the service was over it had vanished, hiding under a new tight skin of snow. It was all right, it was only one o’clock and there was a reception in the basement of the synagogue and Aunt Edna had made a pumpkin cheesecake you didn’t want to miss. Nothing was ruined. Romantic weekend proceed as planned.

“Mazel tov.” Not bad for a goy. It took Becky a moment, but she recognized. That half-laugh punctuating the ends of his sentences. His fast wet eyes.

She touched Thad’s elbow, said of him, “My boyfriend.” Then, “Thad, this is James. He’s an old high school friend.”

“Come with me,” said James. That look. Becky hadn’t seen him since last summer, but that look was as familiar as if she had it hanging in her dorm, framed.

“Where?”

Tugging. “Outside.” She laughed. Thad shifted. “It’s snowing. It’s beautiful. Look. We’ll make a snow angel.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Becky. She couldn’t stop smiling.

“Let’s have fun. Hey, Beck? We never get snow like this. Thad, you like snow?”

“We have plans,” said Thad.

“We can’t,” said Becky. “We have dinner to make, and a reservation at the Renaissance Hotel. As soon as this lets up – ”

“Right. Right,” said James, mock-angry. “Happy Valentine’s Day. See you guys later.” His hands were parallel to his thighs as he walked off, a fixed distance from the floor even as his body bobbed up and down with his gait. Becky should have expected to see him there; he was hooked on bat mitzvot. From all those summers he spent at the JCC. Families knew it and invited him.

Thad walked her to the punch table and drew them each a glass. “We were good friends. We’ve kind of lost touch though.” She loved her mother’s punch, the citrus fuzz of cold sherbet and 7-Up washing the insides of her cheek, always the same. “He’s funny. You know…I like him. He makes me nervous though. I don’t know why.”

. : At Pitt she lived in a single in Holland Hall, an all-girls dorm. Most other freshmen had doubles. Don’t you feel you’re missing out on something, not having a roommate? No. No, not really.
She was orderly, but not excessively neat. Windbreakers and playing cards and tennis balls weren’t always put away, but everything did have a place; if she needed to clean it, it wasn’t too much trouble. The windows were small and tended to stick, and there was no air conditioning, but she dimmed them with curtains, anyway. The city was too busy when her eyes were tired. It distracted her from her reading. She wasn’t used to city life yet, it had been six months at this school and still sometimes she couldn’t wrap her head around it. She had grown up mostly in Mississippi. Her family moved to the South Side of Pittsburgh when she was in eighth grade. Also not too far from Pittsburgh, in Ohio: that’s Mara – and Becky’s aunt and uncle and a few other assorted cousins.

The last girl who lived in this room, she wrote all over the walls, all over the wooden frame of the bed in soft lead pencil. It was mostly quotes. How do you shoot the devil in the back? What if you miss? and I have a bad bad feeling about this bad bad feeling. Probably from movies.

Thad went to Carnegie Mellon, down the street. Thad grew up in the Bronx. His family was poor, he was even homeless for a year in grade school, but he did all right for himself. He did more than all right. He was salutatorian of his graduating class, now was at CMU on a full scholarship for minorities. Won some sort of science competition as a junior. Placed in a national essay competition in twelfth grade. Worked like a dog now, both at schoolwork and as a waiter at LuLu’s Noodles. Determined to keep his pockets full. Facts, details, names, dates, times. The tick marks that define a troubled past. The tallies that add up to a boy worth admiring. He told Becky the stories of his scars (jawline, knuckles, right calf, right eyebrow), she told him about the boys who broke her brother David’s nose after school. “Kike,” they screamed. “Kike.”
Becky had a wall papered in twelve calendars. There was one for every month of the year. They were all different, and they were all turned to different months, and arranged in order. The special days were outlined with highlighter, the occasion scribbled in with pen. Pink was for birthdays. Yellow was holidays (Yom Kippur, Thanksgiving, Pesach, Sukkot, Valentine’s Day). Orange meant a special occasion. That was for spring break, and the big tennis tournament at the end of March, and Mara’s bat mitzvah, in February. And Becky’s three-month anniversary with Thad, on the thirtieth of January. Not so long past.

Becky didn’t do cute calendars. No bulldog puppies or peppy Daily Inspirational Quotes! for her. She liked to smile or to tilt her head, and to these ends she had a Far Side and an Escher, a Norman Rockwell and a Magic Eye. The last of these might have been her favorite. For the month it was turned to, the secret picture, buried in an irregular yellow-gold pattern like crumpled daffodils and squashed bumblebees, was a wall clock, 12:15 is what she thought it read. She liked the way she had to make her eyes go lazy and far away to see it. Like she could look through walls.

On her birthday, in October, she’d gone to a CMU frat party. She’d gone with friends but left early and alone, having liked beer less than she thought she would on the first try. She had still been glad she’d gone. The drinking barrier seemed an appropriate one to break on her first college birthday. Thad found her stumbling along South Negley in the wrong direction, humming “What a Wonderful World” and sometimes stopping to spin herself dizzy. He walked her home. They had been inseparable ever since, but sometimes she caught herself examining his face as if she’d never seen him before in her life.

. : Three-thirty. Outside the snow blunted the afternoon angles, visible static, white noise. The guests cooed over the cheesecake and Aunt Edna glowed. Mara moved from one crumb-encrusted table to the next. Becky could see she’d grown an inch at least, maybe two, since the scared little girl she had been that morning. “I can’t,” she had whispered, and clutched Becky’s hand. Now her shadow fell long in the fluorescent basement light, the fullness of what she had accomplished spilled from her lips and eyes. She and not her mother selected and set aside the gift table, and with uncharacteristic restraint she shook not a one of her presents in search of hints. She’d open them tonight, she said, before bed. She did not ask to change out of her dress. Her voice had deepened and she chose her words with precision. That smudge of color on her lips that had been gaudy at noon was now understated, sophisticated. “Did I do all right, Becky?” But she knew that she had.

Becky remembered her own bat mitzvah. That sudden, seizing moment. Those moments she lived for.
“If we don’t leave soon we’ll lose our dinner reservations.” Thad could not stop playing with his tie. He rubbed its silk on his cheek. He lipped it like a horse. His wristwatch waved frequent hellos to his eyes.

“Can I control the weather?”

“We’re just going to have to risk it, pretty soon.”

“It’ll let up.” There was no question. This snow, this intensity, this couldn’t last forever. This cold. The salt would bite through. Nothing for it but to wait and numb the mind.

The rabbi had turned on a radio. It was sitting on the gift table in a nest of tissue paper and silver bows. The older members of the congregation had begun to huddle around it as if it were a fire, and it crackled off severe weather warnings and updates on the condition of the roads. Nobody had left. Only a few families who lived close enough to walk. Mr. Meisner leaned his seventy years dulled ears in towards the warmth of the weather report. His wife sat by the window, watching the sky come to pieces. The metal glow of her wheelchair gleamed reflected in the pane. She was in profile; the right side of her face, pulled tight and diagonal by stroke, Becky couldn’t see. She could move nothing but her eyes. Up and down, up and down they flicked, spectators of a vertical tennis match.

. : Junior year, Becky and Mags organized a ski trip to Seven Springs. It was for Forensics. They got permission from the school board to fundraise (by candy, by cookie, by hoagie) and recruited eight other girls and boys from the team. By winter break, everyone had earned enough to pay for his or her own trip. The weather was perfect. The bus came on time. No one was injured, no one fought, no one got too cold. There were enough snacks for everyone and the thermos kept the hot chocolate hot. All day Becky tramped about in skis and orange-tinted goggles, thinking, Look, this worked. This worked. It’s working. All day she thought of nothing else. She was silent, plumped with joy like a grape, as she as Mags rode the lifts, legs dangling with the skis swinging heavy from the ends like spears of kosher pickle. She was so busy smiling she forgot to laugh when they passed over the bright red trash cans, white lettering screaming PITCH IN. She was so busy overflowing inside that she forgot even to love how her skis looked each time, pointing straight down Little North Face before she took off, parallel and prepared. The wind.

. : Six-thirty. Sunset’s last orange bled from the windowpanes in the main sanctuary. Those giant windows. Great and blank and clear. Becky pressed her fingers against them, the utter lack of heat they carried as sudden as electric shock. The snow divested them of meaning. There was no separation anymore between the chaos outside and herself, where she was, here. Below, the adults had opened the wine. To keep warm, they said, and really, only one or two were in danger of overdoing it, yet. “Would your mom let us have some?”
Becky looked at Thad, forehead quirked. “Well, yes.” Wine had, somehow, never occurred to her as alcohol in particular. There was, after all, the tradition of the youngest drinking from the cup after Kiddush. So Thad was gone, to borrow warmth. The structure of the day, its foundation, felt – loose. No. Intangible. Their night could not be ruined. Their romantic weekend. This snow was a transient, not here to stay the night, not here to settle in. They should be able to do something about it. Shouldn’t we be able to do something about it?

“Come with me.” James again, appearing behind her. Funny how the same words coming from the same mouth can combine differently with time. But I should tell Thad first. There was a metallic taste behind the fingers around her wrist, although James’ grip was gentle enough. He’ll worry. Where…?

“So he’ll live. We’ll be back.” The steadiness of the look he gave her was enough to make following him the easiest thing to do.

They were outside now. The yolk-orange puddles from the streetlamps twitched feverishly on pillows of snow. They were walking. The shine of his dress shoes pressed a patterned rail into the blankness on the ground. Becky had changed out of her skirt two hours ago, tugging khakis and a hooded sweater (P-I-T-T) from her suitcase in the back of the blue Chevy she and Thad were going to drive to the Renaissance soon (soon, when this damned snow stopped, when they could find the road again, when they could reclaim the day). Already the synagogue faded goodbye.

“What are we doing, James?”

They walked a little longer. James’ hair was thicker and longer in the middle than on the sides – a shaggy hedgerow. It looked brittle in the cold. Snowflakes hung from it like leaves, the wiry strands the twigs of the tree. Quiet the night grew more settled, flushing its lighter, mixed blue into navy. Like crickets hummed the streetlamps, and the rest was silence.

Finally James said, “Blankets.”

“What?”

“It’s fucking cold. In the temple. Those windows suck the heat right out, and Mrs. Meisner is looking pretty bad.” He lit a cigarette as he walked. He offered the pack to Becky; she shook her head. “We’ve got her under tablecloths, but there’s nothing warm enough. There’s a Wal-Mart down the road. I hate it, but you know. Nothing else nearby.” He seemed about to go on. He didn’t.

“You hate it?”

“Yeah, don’t get me started.” His whole body was right now centered on his face, which was concentrated on his lips, which were pursed, gripping but loose as fingers, around that cigarette. “You should see what…Don’t get me started.” He pulled abruptly with both hands at his hedgerow. “But for an emergency, you know…Sorry, I needed you because, well, we should bring back more blankets. Than just one. In case everybody has to stay the night.” No no no no no no no. “Besides.” He shoved his hands in the direction of his pockets; they fell in by accident. “It’s an adventure.”

“It’s a good time for an adventure, I guess,” Becky said. Things were righting themselves. The pattern was growing clear again. “Mags and I decided last year, you know, this is our first year of college – we’ve got to have an – experience of some sort. Brush with death counts. Close calls. This fits I think.” She saw the piece fall into place. Neat. Clean.

James chuckled then. Soft, like coffee. “Did you.”

“Like we decided we needed to have our first kisses in tenth grade, and we both did, almost the same night too. It’s funny, how there is a right time for things.” James was looking at her. She felt, without seeing, how his eyes squinted upwards in silent laughter.

“I don’t think you know Mags as well as you think you do,” he said.

This was silly. “She’s my best friend.”

“Maybe.” James let out a lungful of smoke that curled like a flooding river in front of the stars. “She ever tell you about the time she ran away from home?”

“Well. No. Of course I don’t know everything about her life. Not if it’s from before we met – ”

“This was the summer after junior year. When you were on vacation in Florida. She called me one day. Told me ‘See you, James,’ and hung up.” He stopped walking, sat down in the snow, tossed away the dying cigarette in a long arc. Becky hadn’t noticed until now, but he wasn’t wearing his jacket. He must have left it at the synagogue. He was in just a blue button-down, and the sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and the collar unbuttoned. Well, he loved the cold. “She hitchhiked to Texas to stay with some girl she’d met online. Came back three weeks later, she’d had an amazing time, she said. Spur-of-the-moment, totally.”

There was a vague memory, a photograph of a vivid redhead in a cowboy hat stuck to Mags’ mirror, the Post-It note underneath proclaiming “Cassie” in Magic Marker. But Becky had never heard the story. She’d thought there wasn’t a story to tell. Just some friend, Mags had said. “That doesn’t sound like her at all.”

“Well, she is who she is,” said James.

“Didn’t know you guys were such good friends, for her to tell you all that.”

“You don’t know a lot of things. Sit, Beck.”

“In the snow?”

“Sit. We’re making a snow angel.”

“I’m going to be soaked. Freeze my fingers off.”

“Get down here.”

“I’m going to get frostbite.”

“Snow angel.” He pushed at her legs, catching her off balance, and she fell, found herself sitting, facing him. He leaned forward and she was afraid he was going to slap her or kiss her or shout obscenities in her ear or sing. She was afraid he would do nothing; there was no end to the possibilities of what he would, what he would not do; but he looked at her then, and his eyes were cinders and they were wet as a thunderstorm in summer, and he, burning and melting and rushing and growing now, dark seeping from his pockets and starlight glowing from his hands, whispered: Go.

. : They came back. Their hands were red and shining in the main sanctuary’s stillness. They dropped the blankets, floral-patterned and vacuum-packed in plastic, but their fingers stayed frozen in birdclaw rigor mortis. James went to the bathroom, to run his under warm water. Invisible until he’d left, Mara was sitting in the corner, alone, and everyone else still downstairs. A parabola of starlight through the window patterned her shoulder and the rest was shadow. “Mara, take one of these down to Mrs. Meisner,” said Becky. While these thaw.

The Bat Mitzvah stood, came to Becky. She took her cousin’s blood-slowed hands in her feather ones. “You’re so cold, Becky.” They were regaining life. Mara’s gaze was down, fixed on the pairs of hands intertwined. This was the first time, Becky remembered, that she’d touched Mara since the bat mitzvah. Woman, woman, woman, Becky heard in the girl’s breath, felt in the unspoken knowledge of her touch.

“It’s okay. I’m fine. The blanket, Mar?”

Mara looked up and her eyes – look at them, they almost wrenched a gasp from Becky’s throat. They were two small brown fish, drowning in tears. They made her think of Mags’ eyes.

“Mara?” But Mags was not Mags, not always. She was Margaret also, sometimes. Maybe, even, there was someone somewhere who called her Meg.

Mara was moving her head. Her nose pointed towards her right shoulder, then her left, then her right again. “Can’t.”

“Why not?”

She could not speak. Her new words were swallowed. She wrapped her arms around her cousin’s waist. “Say something. Come on.”

Mara said, “She got so blue.” She was talking into Becky’s chest, her voice causing thick hollow vibrations like in a cave. “Mrs. Meisner. She’s blue. First she was yellow, you know how she’s always been yellow, but then she got blue like – like the bottom of a swimming pool and.” Some hard, some difficult breathing gasping through tears. “She. Scares me.”

“She’s probably blue because she’s cold. Don’t you get a little blue when you’re cold? Around the lips? She’s just a person, Mara.” Becky took those thin shoulders, straightened her arms until she had her cousin whole in front of her, and made her eyes relax, seeing through walls; rearrange this, make sense of it. But Mara pulled away.

“Nobody gets blue like that,” she whispered, and ran. In her wake her shadow, stunted in the starlight, broken.

. : Eleven fifty-eight. Downstairs the hot breath of the sleeping mingled in a visible mist and they were all drawn deeper into dream. Snowstorm forgotten. Prison melted. It’s tomorrow already for them.

The moon, so much stiller than the sun, painted Thad’s face, painted the hollows of his neck until Becky decided that her head fit right there, like that. “I guess we lost our reservations,” said Becky, and they laughed.

“At least now I know what a bat mitzvah’s like,” said Thad, and Becky said, “Well they’re not normally like this,” and they laughed again.

“It’s almost gone.” Thad looked at his watch.

“It is, and we didn’t celebrate.”

“We did our best.”

“That hotel.” The weather was perfect the bus arrived on time nobody fought. “Our romantic weekend.”

He kissed her. But that was nothing new.

“Look,” she said, and something here was tugging at her, was important, was fighting its way up like a climber out through her esophagus, was needing to breathe, was. “I needed to get out. You know? To get – someplace. To not – stagnate. I know you know. I know, you,” he must understand, “I have always felt with you, with you, when I met you, when my eyes and your eyes – Well, yes…”

She stared out the windows, that back wall that was not a wall but the world. The eternal flame, a frosted bulb in a metal frame, that light that in honor of the first temple in Jerusalem they could not let burn out, hung above the bema like a private star. Outside she could see shapes, threatening to become, to grow, to evolve; her eyes said stop, shapes, and they did. “You think I’m smart. You don’t know who I was. Who I probably still am. I had to work. Things don’t come naturally to me; I had to fight to move ahead, it didn’t just happen. I’ve told you things about me. I haven’t said me…They beat up my brother, they called me kike too, before we moved to Pittsburgh, it’s been fine here, discrimination isn’t my life, but a shape, a general shape, a sort of – I had to fight hard. I had to make lists. I had to show myself the way. I wouldn’t be here.”

He must have understood, because he said, “Yes. To make plans. Me too.” Things they both suspected. “An hour for calc. An hour for English. A half-hour for play.”

“Growth needed a time slot. Like studying or eating.”

“Yes.”

He must have understood, but had she? What had she meant? She thought she saw him now. She thought her eyes were in focus, at attention. But she still ached, this ache deep and unreachable that she’d been feeling her whole life – made unbearable now only by her knowledge of it. It was inside her, it was pushing, it was crying for birth. This was new; she trembled in the face of this quake from the inside, an invisible one, an inversion that attacks without warning. And it was quite clear in her mind, this day, this night: the crackling radio, her own flippant nonchalance when she knew, must have known, the bird was flown, Mara’s spurt and shrink spurt and shrink like a yo-yo, but he’s not Jewish; a cold shower of snow down her back, Mrs. Meisner’s blue blue hands as she tucked the blanket around her, and those words – James’, when they had finished their snow angels and were lying there tracing the stars with the fingers of their souls: Beck, why don’t you ever let anything happen? Her head and her chest were caverns and her life was sound and it was all echoes, yodeled from wall to wall, and she was blind, of a sudden, to things that had been clear, and saw others she could never have guessed. In that hotel, I am sure you know, I think you sense it, what I was going to give you tonight, and she wasn’t sure whether she had said it aloud or not. I saw my path, was it too obvious? I’d laid my landmarks and the signs all pointed one way…But now the foundation’s melted and nothing’s sure…

You know how the sky’s the only perfect thing there is? James had said. She hadn’t known but she had felt it. The snow she was lying on melted into her shoulders. For the moment there were no blankets left in the world; there was a more immediate risk to take. And everybody’s always making categories out of it and pictures and shapes. Giving it names. The Seven Sisters. Orion’s Belt. The Dippers Big and Little. Pretty soon, they figure, we’ve got to be able to get it all down.

A beautiful idea, she’d said.

No, he’d answered. He’d sat up and his look got its hooks into her, pulled at something inside of her. Because you can’t ever. Get it all down. The star you’re looking at might have already died. It’s so many lightyears away you’ll just never know. Constellations will change, because stars will die and planets will die and there will be black holes and wormholes and holes and not-holes, all sorts of things we don’t know about yet or understand. And the universe goes on and on too, off into infinity, in a way we can’t comprehend. There have to be things out there we don’t have a clue about. Certainly things we’ll never see; things that change, grow, every day or every second. Things we couldn’t pin down at all, even if we knew they existed. Even the sky isn’t forever. Even the sky doesn’t have a plan.

Not a word he had said made sense. Not then.

Now, she looked at Thad. She felt James’ presence, his words, he was there, but he wasn’t in Thad; he was somewhere else. She did not know what Thad saw as she looked at him. She did not know what she wanted him to see. She was about to do something, anything, nothing; she didn’t know what she was going to do. The endings were endless, and they were all beginnings. Delicate and clear, her breath pulsed through her throat as if through a reed, teasing her mouth open, and she felt, rather than heard, the round and endless syllable of the word she passed on to him.

--for S.H.

Octopus

2005-02-04T17:38:00.000-05:00

I. ERIN

My friend went to college. Daydreaming of being whisked away by a shaggy-eyed starry-haired Artful Dodger of the twenty-first century brand, she sat with her back to the window of her triple, wrestling with differentials and painting over the real Boston in favor of her fairytale. She was a junior. Meghan, her roommate, was a junior. Erin, the third roommate, was a freshman. She was sixteen, had skipped a grade and started kindergarten a year early and here she was. Erin was fiery pale and Irish and in green became April in flames. My friend would finish the description with, "She looked like she had sex. She was a virgin though."

"How do you look like you have sex?"

She'd give me a look. Silly question. I knew girls like that.

Their first night in the room, Meghan and my friend stayed up late, kept the microwave beeping with mug after mug of waterbase hot chocolate, trading disposable camera photographs already sticky with the fingerprints of a parade of curious girls. Sniffing each other out. Meghan's ex was broad-shouldered with a sharp farmer's smile; here they were on a Ferris wheel at a county fair, his wide hands burying themselves in her long curls as if to hold her back, or to keep up.

Erin sat in the center of her desk chair. She wore head phones that covered her ears entirely. No, she didn't have any pictures to share, really. No, she didn't want to see Meghan's ex (thank you for asking though). She thought she'd go to bed early. She had to get over her jet lag, having just come in from California; and her first class was at eight.

Every night at ten Erin whispered "'Night, Dad," and hung up her cell phone. She changed into her pajamas in the room's walk-in closet. She set her analog alarm clock with a twist and rattle. She took off her blue puffs of slippers that swallowed her small feet and placed them side by side under her bed. She crawled under her mountain of a comforter to sleep until 6:06 a.m.; Meghan and my friend never even noticed her alarm go off. They thought she woke up automatically. Some people can do that. She was always gone by the time they stumbled awake.

They tried to make conversation. "How are your classes?" Meghan would ask.

"They're nice."

"Any cute boys?"

"I guess. Yes." She would flush. But a week later Meghan asked the same question and Erin, straight and white over her Western Civ reading, said "No," and didn't look up.

A month into the semester my friend came back to the dorm a little stoned, Meghan was still out (on a date she thought), and the room was pale and empty. Erin's bed had been stripped. Her computer and books were gone from the desk. My friend laughed. She thought the room had been robbed. She laughed, although she didn't think it was funny. She wondered where Erin was. The room seemed sterile and white, like a hospital room. I think she got confused then. She called me, I remember, her words clear but tangled, I didn't understand her. "I've misplaced them," she said, giggling and burping a little -- she used to make these tiny little burps when she was nervous or stoned or both. "And I'm in the hospital." I was worried. I didn't get the straight story for a few days.

It turned out that Erin had moved into the walk-in closet. She had set up a nest on the floor, kept her laptop by her pillow, arranged her books in a pattern like a flower or the arms of a windmill at the very back. Every night at ten she took off her blue puffs of slippers. Every morning at 6:06 a.m. she left the closet, showered, and went to class. Then she came back. She lived this way the rest of the year. Meghan and my friend would knock on the closet door most nights. "We're going to the dining hall, going to get some food. Want to come?"

No, she didn't want to come, but thank you for asking; she'd already eaten. They saw her in the dining hall some afternoons. She only ate lunch, and she always ate alone.

II. COLD SNAP

Girl and boyfriend. High fuzzy boots, faux fur on the collar of her pink winter jacket. He's sporting a beanie, macho braving the cold in just a hoodie with four felt letters (P-I-T-T) stitched across the front, split by a zipper. I will pass them on the left, where they are walking slow and eyes entwined, crowded against a bank of snow patterned with birth-control saplings.

Girl grabs at his arm in a blur of knitted mitten. Eyes that could melt the snow. "Oh." The breath tears quicker out of her throat, cold in, hot wet fog out. "Oh."

He looks, his eyebrows contract, then he twitches, mutters a laugh. "Think that happens a lot?"

They walk on. I pass the spot. Next to one of the little trees chattering in the January wind, a pocket of collapsed snow. A squirrel lies stiff, inert on its belly. Paws frozen in a clutching spasm, buried in a drift. I wish someone would cover it over. Even if it was still a lump -- just a shape. It's almost eleven. My class will be starting soon. Now my head will be filled with dead squirrel. Dead dead freezerburn squirrel. I try to imagine my hand frozen. Fingernails eternally scraping across an ethereal blackboard.

III. HONEY THERE WERE SO MANY THINGS THAT I WANTED TO TELL YOU BEFORE I GO AND NOW I'VE LOST MY VOICE I WANTED TO WRITE THEM DOWN FOR YOU TO FIND WHEN IT'S TOO LATE TO DO ANYTHING BUT CRY WHITE MOONS MARY JANES WEAR PINSTRIPE MORE OFTEN DID YOU KNOW I WAS FALLING FOR YOU DON'T PANIC MORE MUCH MORE BUT I JUST DON'T THINK I'LL EVER FIND THE TIME

all endings are the same ending

all endings are the same ending

in the womb of the beginning sleeps the ending

all endings are

IV. ZIPPER

The cafeteria smelled like catsup, even in the mornings, and the western wall was painted red. This I thought symbolic. Bethany High's own Wailing Wall. Written small and neat in black Sharpie, there was even a wish inscribed, a private attempt at communion with God: Fuck Jordan Burke up the ass. Nobody knew who wrote it. At a class reunion Jordan told me wryly that if God had only sent someone to grant that anonymous tenth-grader's plea right away, it would have saved Jordan five years of heartache and a mid-youth crisis.

I sat at a full lunch table every day. I always felt alone. They called what they did "talking music." Every day the conversation sounded the same. I didn't listen to music. I had nothing to say to them. Two of them wanted to start a band.

"...you know, like we'd be, it's hard to say, but we're thinking something along the lines of, well we want to call ourselves, well it's this way, like a mix between Wilco and, and The Clash, right? Except more folk-hero, more..."

"Dylan," chimed the other one.

"...yes, more, yes, exactly. Like, 'We are the voice of the future.' I think it'd be big. We need somebody who can play keyboard, you know?" This was the kid everybody called Madge. His hands slapped and pulled and stroked the lunch table like gnats against a lightbulb. "Then we can start. And for a name, we were thinking like, 'Hurricane' or something with hurricane in it because..."

"That's the most retarded name I ever heard, Madge, in fact that whole idea is retarded. Wilco and Dylan and who else, The fucking Clash, is that it? Go home and listen to B-94 and paint your toenails for a while, why don't you. Hurricane. Jesus."

"I don't like that word."

They thought I was kidding, laughed. "Jew," said Madge, shoving my shoulder.

I laughed too. "Yeah." But that wasn't what I meant.

The zipper on my backpack was stuck. I stayed at the lunch table, fiddling with it. Hair curtained my face, which was hot, flushed. My throat was tight, like crying. "Hey," said Eric. He was waiting for me. He reached to help, pulled too hard, the tab of the zipper snapped off. His face went blank. "Thanks anyway," I said. "Now I feel like an ass," he said. "It was kind of stupid I guess, but you're not an ass," I said. "It's fine. The books won't fall out with it open I guess." I shifted one strap onto my shoulder. Sharp textbook corners nipped my shoulders.

"Adva. I hate when people use that word too." I thought he'd misunderstood like the rest, but he said, then, "My little sister, she's retarded. She had meningitis when she was three and just...Well, yes. It's nice that I'm not the only one it upsets."

"Oh." I hadn't known he had a sister. We were never good friends.

"Well."

Neither of us knew what to say. I stood looking at him, the hair that fell across his eyes like a feather, twisting and twisting the nylon strap adjuster on my backpack.

V. SECURITY GUARD LOOKS UP FROM CROSSWORD PUZZLE

The cheap ink has smudged like soft pencil lead on the pink of her fingertips. She hides her chin in her scarf (hand-knitted) and zipped-up parka neck, her wire-rim glasses fogging and clearing and fogging with the rhythm of her breathing. If my grandmother were black, she could be this woman. She holds those newspaper-print hands out and I hand over my student I.D., stamped with "Adva R Reuben" and a photograph she doesn't glance at, although she doesn't know me or anyone else in the building.

A pop version, remix, of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" rasps from the jukebox she keeps under her desk. She taps the fingers of her right hand on the countertop, in a pattern, in time with the music, three index finger taps and one middle finger then repeat. The sound of her manicure striking the surface is plastic and staccato. She's handed me back my card, but I stand there, pretending to check the time on my cell phone. She has a tight little kissing mouth. The sags and wrinkles on her neck are chocolate mountain ranges, folds in soft rock.

She is humming. The glass of her booth is mostly closed to keep out the cold air. She hums, rocks. If you get there before I do, Comin' for to...

"Baby," she says to me, "you know this word?" Presses the pages of the crossword puzzle book up against the glass. Squashed like a cheek. Eighteen down. Four letters. East of ____.

Her hand, tapping out the time like Morse code, scampers here and there across the counter. It lives. Its many legs stretch, cobwebbed, twisted like licorice. Comin' for to carry me home. I look at the puzzle without seeing it. Comin' for to carry me home.

VI. MISCARRIAGE

Eric’s little sister had been born five years before him. Still the whole family called her that, more like a nickname than anything else: Little Sister, capitalized. She had lived through three of her grandparents’ funerals but still asked her father, periodically, when they were going to visit Pap-Pap and Non-Non. “They’re in heaven, sweetheart,” said Mr. Kelley. “How far is that?” asked Little Sister.

She introduced herself to me as Ariel. I can’t remember her real name anymore; thinking of her, the first image that comes to mind is a pair of humpbacked Disney eyes, a pillow of red hair, the scalloped top of a seashell bikini: that cartoon mermaid, her perpetual unblinking poster-frozen smile that greeted me every time I walked through Little Sister’s bedroom door. The carpet was thick and green like kelp. She had a collection of stuffed plush fish on her sea-blue comforter, guppies and koi and a rainbow trout. Plastic safety plugs in the electrical sockets were adorned in metallic seahorse stickers. Her night light was in the shape of a seashell. On the top of the high dresser, beyond her reach, sat a goldfish bowl, empty and misty-eyed. Eric had won its long-deceased inhabitant at a county fair for her the previous summer. I asked her once where her fish had gone. “Flounder took a vacation.”

February, March, April; I visited the Kelleys more and more. We sat in the living room and played Pictionary. Eric’s parents took turns cooking, although his dad did it more often as the year raced towards spring, insisting that Mrs. Kelley keep her feet elevated while we waited. Watching that unexpected swelling in her stomach – she was forty-nine, although her face and eyes glowed years younger now – was like watching a basketball inflate.

The twelfth of April I sat with Eric on his couch. He clung to my hand with both of his. The space between our shoulders seemed endless. In the kitchen, papers crumpled, rustling violently in Mr. Kelley’s crushing hands; he was cleaning off the refrigerator, the endless months of Little Sister’s crayon drawings and Eric’s report cards, his dependable 3.74 QPA. Magnets clattered to the floor and his breath rushed out heavily when he bent over to pick them up. Afterwards he would move on to mop the floor. Anything. He would clean the house from top to bottom, only skirting the master bedroom, upstairs, where his wife lay, hollow-bellied, months too soon and nothing to show for it after all.

Little Sister stumbled into the room. She was making a noise, low and monotone, a keening sound. She had been doing it all day.

“Little Sister, are you crying?” Eric asked her.

She took off her right Mary Jane and threw it at him. “I’m Ariel and I’m twenty,” she shouted. I had never heard her raise her voice before. “I’m not the little sister. The little sister went away.”

“You’ll always be the little sister,” said Eric gently.

She stomped her foot. “No. The little sister went away. Mommy lost the little sister. She went away forever.” She stomped her foot, again and again.

I Am Best So

2005-02-02T16:30:00.000-05:00

The room was too warm. Flushed with wine, Mary's brother rushed from cluster to cluster of guests, his roadrunner feet burning holes in the shaggy carpet. The apartment was white and red, muscle and bone. Devin's salami fingers were wrapped around Mary's wrist and forearm, limp, the bits where their skin touched slick with sweat. They were sitting on the couch, which kept creaking in the clinging way leather has each time Devin adjusted himself to squeeze closer to her. He drank little but his tongue was already dulled. Mary wetted her lips again with merlot, turning her head to avoid Devin's eyes, sunk beneath heavy lids. She still had not managed to finish a glass.

Across the floor a girl in a spring dress with a dew of pearls wetting her throat leaned against the stereo. She tapped the glass case protecting the speakers lightly with her French manicure. She was chattering, wide-smiled, her laughter frequent and blending with the music that surrounded her in a visible spray of sound.

"How long?" Devin asked for the fourth time. His breath was humid against her ear and her shoulder tensed.

"You said you'd stay until eleven."

"It's eleven."

"It's ten-thirty."

"We've been here for four hours. Christ, Mary." He scratched at the knees of his khakis, his fingernails whispering on the fabric. "We don't even know these people."

Mary's brother tapped a spoon against a glass somewhere. A chorus of Speech! Speech! rose in shimmering waves, and then diffused when Mary's brother protested. Short attention spans. Blobs of people, friends and friends of friends, fusing and breaking and forming new connections, a human lava lamp. Like the parties in Devin's apartment back at Kansas State. That wasn't so long ago. Mary drank more wine. Devin's arm pressed her into the couch.

She said, "You'd know them if you'd talk to them." And, "Wasn't it you who said if you're going to be the boyfriend you should try to get to know my family?"

"This isn't your family. These are your brother's college goons."

"Same thing," Mary said, although she wasn't sure that it was.

He didn't answer. His right leg bounced and jiggled in that way he had when he was nervous or impatient, or both. A log of gelatin. It signified his superiority to the small talk, the pettiness, the everyday glare of ordinary human existence that descended upon him when other people were present. Sometimes she would feel him do it in bed, when he thought she was asleep.

He wanted to go home. To what? Back to his apartment, which they hadn't left for weeks, if you didn't count work or dinner or going to see foreign films at the crusty theatre down the street. They would sit at the kitchen table. They would play the Shins low from the bedroom. They would play Walrus and Carpenter; they would talk of many things. Mary would fiddle with her keychain, feeling the shift in weight, the loss of substance that still felt unfamiliar, even though she'd taken off the key to her own apartment (no, not hers anymore) four months ago.

They would stop talking. They would smell the hot aftertaste of the candles Devin insisted on lighting every night they ate in -- candlelight dinner after candlelight dinner. They would eventually make love. They would lie in bed afterwards, twenty fingers twenty toes four eyes sixty-odd teeth two people in all the world. One pair and one wide world.

The girl with the pearls was alone momentarily. A fluke. She sat down in a free chair, her face a flushed rosebud, fanning with her hand. With her tongue she moistened her lips like the back of a stamp. Mary imagined the pearl girl had been a few years behind her brother in college. Mary imagined her a recent graduate, still suffused with the victory of white cap and gown, nostrils frothy and sour with the memory of frat beer. Mary thought that she had traveled overseas, that she had just returned; she had that polish. And after this party she would return to a bright apartment, walls slathered in the art of her pretentious but talented friends that didn't have to conform to anyone's taste but her own, sofa stacked with books she didn't have to put away. She had a black leather notebook full of addresses and phone numbers, and maybe she would call her friends -- she had so many -- on her portable phone and they would go out, to a club or to see a silly romantic comedy or to drive along a lonely stretch of road past the diners and fleets of sleepless truckers and not come home until tomorrow; and maybe she wouldn't. Maybe she would eat peach frozen yogurt from the carton. Maybe she'd get a dog. Maybe she would dance naked in front of the mirror. Maybe she would have a new boyfriend each week, sometimes overlapping, and use them for the stars in their eyes. Maybe they would pass through her life like a sieve. She would hold no water. She was not that type. And what would she say if Mary were to bridge the channel across the room, to walk up to where she sat with knees knocked lightly together under the yellow hem of her dress, and say without preface "I'm Mary," like that?

Devin squeezed her knee. She looked at him. His wet, melting eyes. She sighed.

"OK. Let's go," she said.

He spread his panting smile and stood, gave a stretch and shake. Well, looks like it's about that time. Thanks, Jack, it was a great party. Was it? Fantastic. Mary and I had a wonderful time. That's great. Glad to see you're treating my sister right. Oh, well...I try. The square bulge in the left pocket of his khakis shifted as he walked. A ring box, mouth clamped tight around the secret Mary knew.

-- for william carlos williams

Shock

2005-01-13T08:34:00.000-05:00

the first time that I used a tampon it
went in angled oddly, the plastic applicator
snagging, my left leg crooked
propped on the toilet seat,
like in the diagram.

I crouched on the ceramic tiles
my father had installed last christmas (cursing, slicing his thumbs
over and over – a trace of blood
still rust-stained the grout beneath the sink,
no matter how much you scrubbed),
trying not to feel the
dry, angry column of rayon fiber
corking me like a youthful merlot

e-z-glide, the package had promised
but the red tears on my fingers, knuckles, under my nails
exposed the lie.

my seal broken,
I considered the nursery of tissue
crying itself to sleep,
buried in a cylindrical pillow.

I had to take it out. it didn’t fit, and dance class
was in an hour. the ballerina had used it in the
commercials. her leg had stretched like the arm
of the pharaoh’s daughter, hooking the ceiling
to safety with her wooden block toe. no one knew
that her body was broken, a frightened animal
bleeding its life out in gasps from the inside. on
the floor

where I placed it,
dead center of a square of toilet paper,
it steamed like a dead tadpole,
limp and mozzarella white and
I waited for it to wag its tail.

I have this grief and I don't know why

2005-01-13T08:16:00.000-05:00

I am in an elevator these days
every day
when you cross my mind

you've got me bobbing up and down,
a puppy on an elastic leash.

You are the secret in my future,
you are the pocket of smiles I reach into
when I'm fading.

I don't remember the first thing about you.

I remember that I don't believe
in the way you make me feel
the same way I stopped believing that
wishing was enough,
or that the showerhead held a mystery,
or that one May day I'd lift off --
suddenly, without warning, without rehearsal.

Your words have gone missing already.
Last weekend is fuzzy with the warmth
of alcohol, sweet under my tongue, your tongue
sweet under my tongue, burning sharper
than the first shot. I couldn't feel you then,
numbed.
It was all imaginary.
I wish I had called you right away.

Now the empty shaft between us lengthens
and I am afraid of the echoes
if I whisper your name
will you come to me
if I whisper out to you
is it worth the breath
or is my cable already cut

2005-01-12T23:45:00.000-05:00

Don't take back the faith you put into a person.