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CONTENTS

Welcome to the nineteenth issue of

Tubs

How the Burkhina Faso Bicycle Fell Apart

Grebe's Gift

Dropkick

Phone Call Overheard on the Subway

The Troll in the Cellar

You Were Neither Hot Nor Cold, But Lukewarm, and So I Spit You Out

Things That Make One's Heart Beat Faster

The Bride

Dear Aunt Gwenda

Lady Perdita Espadrille

The Slime: A Love Story

Sliding

Such a Woman, Or, Sixties Rant

The Entertainers

* * * *

Lady Churchill's

Rosebud Wristlet

No.19

Welcome to the nineteenth issue of

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet

Which is also the tenth anniversary or so of the first of these foolishnesses. Perhaps there will be an anthology of fictions forthcoming from these pages. Perhaps.

In the intervening years we have come to abhor editorials. After all, does not the work speak for itself? Yea, verily, it doth. And, be it not seen that editorials can take on obnoxious registers and be fill'd with utter twaddle? Readers of the Wall Street Journal will all please nod in agreement.

However, this being the anniversary issue we will take a moment to pick out a few facts perhaps of interest to our readers. We commissioned two polls* (from Gallup and Zogby) to consider the vast swath of our national and international readerships. Both polls told us that readers thought the title (pending further research) should be changed to Lady Churchill's Snake Tattoo Wristlet. This, however, neither rolls off the tongue nor opens itself up to as many misspeakings or as many abuses of the acronym. So the title stays, or will perhaps be foreshortened to LCRW. All other poll results ("Send more chocolate!” “More funny stories.” “Less of your so-called humor.” “Why are there no stories in other languages?” “For the best new ring tones, click here!") were suspect due to the lack of polls taken and will be ignored.

Apologies for the lack of recipes, crosswords, happywords, naked centerfolds, and drawings of deceased writers in recent years. When we began this zine we had no idea that this was the way to increase circulation and since we learned this we have been too busy perfecting one recipe (a secret until perfected) to work on any others.

We also dropped the “occasional” part. We discovered that regularity is perceived as a strength by those outside our galactic HQ: hence the switch to twice a year. Or thrice if and when we fall behind.

Lastly, in a very small typeface, we leave you with our stolid, uninspired, falsehood of an editorial from the long out-of-print first issue of this zine.

* A lie.

Welcome to the first issue of

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet

Except, we decided not to run it. After all, it can be read on our website. It is also not very good as well as being conscious of that very fact.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Tubs

Ray Vukcevich

1. Nobody Knows

Nobody knows how many rooms there are in the mansion. We don't even know if it really is a mansion. We call it that because the room we share has a very high ceiling, and there is a carved cornice made up of chubby winged children playing stringed instruments. Harps, of course, but way over there is a little fellow with what looks like a guitar. None of us can get close enough to him to confirm that it really is a guitar. Maybe it's a shadow or a spider web.

Nobody knows how we came to be here precisely. It may have been something we said. We know we are criminals. We know this is our punishment. We also know we are alive. This isn't Hell, as Hell is usually understood.

There are no windows in our room, and the door cannot be opened. The light comes from frosted panels in the ceiling. After lights out, no matter how hard you look, you can never detect even a glimmer in the absolute darkness. But we think there must be many tub rooms just like this one, maybe hundreds of them, because you can hear lives being lived elsewhere through the walls and beneath the floor.

* * * *

2. Tubs

Our room might have been a parlor or dining room at one time. It's big enough to contain the five of us and our tubs. Our tubs are also items you'd likely find in an old mansion. I'm thinking Victorian or maybe earlier. They are claw-footed white porcelain bathtubs—one for each of us. When you run your hand down the outside of your tub it's like the cool smooth belly of some animal—a cow or a horse, or maybe it's more like a big porcelain pig with little stubby legs ending in claws. Well, I suppose pigs don't have claws. All of our claws are different. I can tell that by sneaking quick looks at the claws on the tubs of the other men. It's a bad idea to be openly staring at the claws of another man's tub. It would probably cause a fight and we'd all get shocked. But from the little peeks I've taken over time, I know that the claws do not seem to be based on the same animal. It's like they went to a used tub store when they built this place with all of its windowless rooms filled with tubs and men in tubs.

We sit naked in cold water and carefully avoid looking at one another. Sometimes our gazes do cross, though. Sometimes it's on purpose, and a huge fight breaks out, if you can call grown naked men sitting in Victorian bathtubs shouting at one another a fight. We seldom get physical, but it is not unknown. When that happens someone somewhere flips a switch or twists a dial and shocks us all senseless.

* * * *

3. Rule Number One

Rule number one is that only one man can be out of the tubs at a time. This arrangement is supposed to give each of us time to squat over the hole in the far corner and do our business. If more than one of us touches the floor at one time, we all get shocked.

They don't care if we share our food or not. It comes through a food slot at the bottom of the locked door one tray at a time spaced out by an interval calculated to give the eater time to get his tray and get back into his tub. The five of us have come to an uneasy truce about food. We all know that if someone doesn't get his, he will take every opportunity to jump out of his tub while someone else is already out and shock us all.

Our ancestors might have looked like this—stringy hair and ragged beards, no animal skin clothes yet, no fire, no tools. But they would've had women, too, and no tubs, and their Rule Number One probably wouldn't have involved getting shocked.

* * * *

4. Holding Down the Dead Guy

The reason we know we are alive is because one of us isn't. He died some time in the indefinite past, and now he's really stinking up the place. We have discovered the smell is dampened a little if someone holds him under the surface of the water in his tub.

We take turns. One of us gets out of his tub and runs to the hole and does his business if business is what he needs to do and then hot foots it over to the dead guy's tub and pushes him under the surface. When it was my turn for the first time, I discovered pushing the dead guy under was like trying to hold an inner tube under the surface when you're a kid and your dad gives you an old patched tire tube and lets you go down to the gas station and get it blown up. You roll it up the hill and down the other side and throw it into the pond and jump in after it, and your hands slap down on it just in time to keep you from going under, because you don't know how to swim yet, but you almost do almost. Soon you'll let go of the tube, but for now you can push it under, but you can't keep it there for long. It pushes back just like the dead guy. I always look carefully at his face under the water. I used to think he looked scared, but now I think he's developing a smile.

* * * *

5. My Feet

It's Digby's turn to hold down the dead guy. I'm settled into my tub with the cold water lapping around my chin, and I see my feet rise from the surface down there by the knobs like two sea monsters. Maybe they're brothers. Maybe they're lovers. I would be the one on the left. Maria would be on the right. Maria always had an unattractive streak of the right in her, but I loved her anyway. We would still be together, I'm sure, if I had not said something and been seized, beaten up, and dumped in this tub. I nuzzle my right foot with my left, and she slaps playfully at me and moves away but then floats back looking shyly the other way and then boldly leaps on me, and we make a tremendous splash! The alarm sounds one sharp warning. It's like being jabbed in the ear with a stick. Or both ears at once. Two sticks. Splashing is not allowed.

Why splashing is not allowed is a mystery. It's not like they're worried about the water that flies up and out over the edge. Surely we drip more than that from our bodies when it's our turn to get our food or do our business at the hole in the corner. I think it must have something to do with attention. They want us to be paying attention to the here and now. A playful splash probably indicates that we have gone off in our minds to somewhere more pleasant with Maria who even now rises back to the surface and peeks up at me.

The others are muttering curses at me for that splash and the resulting sharp blast of the warning buzzer. I hope two of them don't go crazy at once and rush me or we'll all get shocked. If they conspire to send just one man after me in revenge, I'll leap out of my tub, and we'll all get shocked.

"I won't be pushed around!” I say just loudly enough so everyone can hear me. Whoever watches us doesn't really care if we speak loudly, but we've noticed that when there is a lot of activity, the chances of a random shock are much greater. It's like we get noticed, and whoever is watching gets bored and sooner or later shocks us just to see our teeth chatter.

Sometimes we talk about past crimes and plots. We go into great detail. We name names. We hope we will say something that will please the people who watch and listen. This strategy has its dangers. If they decide that one of us is just making stuff up, we all get shocked.

Sometimes we sit on the edges of our tubs. You'd think we'd spend a lot of time on the edge, but these are not your modern tubs with flat edges. The edges of these old tubs are artfully rounded and that's pretty hard on your naked butt. Sometimes when I'm sitting on the edge, I use my hands to raise my butt up a little, but who can stand on their hands like that for long? No one. A trained gymnast could only do it for a little while. Then it's back into the water. After trying to get comfortable on the edge, it's a big relief to just relax down into the tub again. It's not a pure feeling, though, because the water is so cold.

* * * *

6. Nomenclature

The dead guy never had much intelligent to say. That's probably why we're still calling him “the dead guy” instead of whatever his name was when he was alive. Aside from me, the guys still living are Digby, Doolittle, and Snell. I've arranged them that way so it would sound like a law firm. I may have forgotten my crime, but they were surely lawyers. Or I could call them Tom, Digby, and Harry. But I would be lying about Harry. There is no Harry. His name is Mike. Likewise Doolittle. Nobody would ever admit to being named Doolittle in a place like this. No one knows if Digby ever had another name. If it weren't for me, there would be only three, and they could be the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. Boy, my head voice is humming down to a kind of low moan like a crowd of people very far away. Maybe I'll get my feet to have sex again. Not that they really had sex the last time. Well, there's a first time for everything.

Digby is still holding the dead guy down. He's been out of his tub for a long time. A very long time. Too long, in fact. It's my turn to be up and about and doing my business and then holding down the dead guy. The upside to holding down the dead guy is that you're up on your feet without standing in cold water.

"Digby,” I say. “Your time is up."

Digby looks at me, and then he looks above my head. It's like a slap in the face. I know he's looking at the cherubs over my tub. He must know I can't let that go by. He's reminding me about our argument over the word “entablature.” He's bringing it up again with that look of his. We'd come to a truce, but he's broken it.

Once again, he's telling me I don't know what I'm talking about when I say the ridge of cherubs is called a “cornice."

"Entablature,” he says and looks right at me.

"You idiot,” I say. “To be an entablature a thing has to have columns! That's the whole point of being an entablature!"

"Nonsense,” Digby says. “What kind of dumb ass thinks entablatures have to have columns?"

I put my hands on the edge of my tub and tighten my entire body like a spring. I will come up out of my tub like an angry badger now.

Digby makes a disgusted noise and lets go of the dead guy. He walks back toward his tub.

"Your brains have gotten so soggy you've forgotten everything about architecture,” he says as he sinks into his water.

If we had not been naked men in tubs, prisoners, we could have walked across the carpeted library and taken down a dictionary and settled the argument like civilized people. Or we could have used a search engine if we were having this argument by email or one of those sites where you can post your opinions on absolutely anything. I remember people used to find common ground in those electronic places. Except when they were talking about politics. People never budged an inch on politics. Or religion. Or the kind of man or woman they wanted to meet. Or global warming. Or world hunger. Or universal health care. Or whether you should use this kind or that kind of operating system on your computer.

Maybe we were already doomed before we got here.

* * * *

7. The Meaning of Life

We are all the time trying to make bargains with invisible powers. We tell them we surrender! You win. We'll talk! What do you want to know? What do you want us to say? Whatever it is, we'll say it, sign it, go on TV and confirm it. You name it.

No response.

In that respect, things here are no different than on the outside. We do stuff. We always just do stuff. And the question is can you ever find meaning in life given where you are and the stuff you have to do?

Digby is not done with me. Now I'm holding down the dead guy, and he's looking at me from his tub. It's like we've switched places. Probably because we actually have switched places, but I'm not looking at the cornice over his head, and, to be truthful, he's not really looking right at me. If he were pointedly putting his eyes on me, it would be like he was touching me, and that would mean I would have to respond, and everyone would get shocked. Instead he's stealing little glances at me, letting his eyes linger just a little too long on all the wrong places, and he knows that I know he's doing it. My knowing he's doing it is the whole point of him doing it.

Digby's constant picking at us, well, at me mostly, is just the way he passes the time. It's what it means to be Digby in the Tub Room, but today his glances go way beyond the usual. It's like he's made a decision that today things will change.

"Your crime,” he says, “was probably mixing up your building terms."

It isn't possible to hold all of the dead guy under the water now. There are flakes sloughing off of him like wet bits of paper, and you have to shake them off your hands when you let go of him. I sometimes think Digby likes it when we all get shocked. I hope he doesn't, because it's about to happen again.

* * * *

8. Hope

We can't hold down two dead guys.

What are we going to do?

The air is already bad enough.

The others aren't speaking to me. I'll get no help from them. They are waiting to confirm that what I've done is really an option. I bet they're thinking that if there were only the two of them, they could better coordinate turns at the food slot and at the business hole. Cooperation is always easier when there are fewer people.

But here's an idea! What would happen if we moved Digby's body into the tub with the other dead guy?

My cell mates don't offer any ideas, so I decide to go for it.

"Be still,” I tell them. “I'm going to move him. Hey, this could be good. Digby will hold down the dead guy and give us a little break before we have to start holding him down."

"You'll just get us shocked,” one of them says. The other one makes a noise that sounds like agreement, but neither of them moves.

I discover that getting a naked and wet dead man out of a bathtub is not so straightforward as you might think. Just getting a good grip on him is a problem.

I pull him up to a sitting position and lean him forward. I try to get my arms around him, but his butt keeps scooching out from under him, and I can't get any leverage. I get in the tub behind him and wrap my arms around him and lock my hands. He is not a small man, and now I'm beard to beard with him. He has a funny smell that I can't place, but then I decide it's just that I haven't been this close to anyone for a long time. Maybe I'll stay like this for a little while, just a little while, a couple of minutes, maybe. He's so smooth and rubbery, and he's still warm, solid, more than just a concept.

I'm thinking this is the time when it turns out he's not dead after all. His eyes spring open and he jerks his head around to look at me. He'll be kicking and screaming and pretty soon I'll be the one in trouble. No. Not this time. He's meat, and I'm still moving. I get back up on my knees and struggle his top half up and over the side of the tub.

I put my hands firmly on his back and stand up and get out of his tub. He's sprawled over the edge with his head near the floor, his arms and legs still in the tub and his butt in the air.

"You're not so smart about your stinking nomenclature now, are you?” I ask him.

I don't wait for an answer. I put my shoulder under his body a little way up from his stomach and lift. My feet slip, and I scramble to keep my balance and bang down hard on one knee. I take a few minutes to get my breath and then try again. I push him up and up and then I'm standing with my legs braced against his tub.

I try to turn but his feet are still in the tub. I make a little jerk to the left and another to the right, but I can't get them out. I take a step back and then another. Digby's legs stretch out before me. He is hanging on with just his toes now. I take another step back, and his feet break free, and his legs swing down hard at me, and as I brace myself for the impact, I suddenly wonder if we will still be two men out of our tubs even if he isn't touching the floor. He hits me hard, and I'm knocked back but not over, and we don't get shocked. I take a few steps to keep my balance.

I glance over at the others. Maybe I'm expecting applause. They are both hunkered down and hanging onto the edges of their tubs obviously looking for the electricity to arrive any moment now.

It hits me that if I fall, we are doomed. As soon as we both hit the floor, the electricity will come, and it will be so strong I will never be able to lift Digby again. I will have to crawl away to my tub and get in it, and once I'm in my tub, there will still be one man on the floor—dead Digby who will never get up again. We three survivors will be trapped.

If I drop him, I kill us all.

I see the others have realized this, too. I smile at them like I'm saying to hell with it, I'm going to drop him, and they get wide-eyed, and I turn away from them.

I walk Digby over to the other dead guy's tub and dump him in. There is a foul splash. The alarm hoots twice. I cover my ears with my hands. I should have seen that splash coming. I should have lowered him gently onto the other dead guy.

Too late now.

"It's still an improvement,” I tell the others when I'm pretty sure we're not going to get shocked.

They won't even give me that much.

I use the hole. Then I walk around like a rooster. Maybe the others don't think the way I'm walking is anything like a rooster. Maybe they think I've gone completely crazy. Good. Let them think that. I give them each a direct you-want-a-piece-of-me look and then get back into my own tub.

I consider the faucets.

Probably on a regular basis (how would we know when all of our moments are of different sizes) the cold-water faucets turn all by themselves, and cold water gushes into our tubs to replace the loss from dripping and evaporation (and sometimes splashing). There is a hot water faucet, too, but it never moves.

The hope of my life is that someday the hot water faucet will move and not only move but be effective. Someday hot water will rush into my tub. Steam will form above the surface. I will submerge myself in bliss.

But in the meantime, we take what meaning we can from the things we do. I wonder who will be Digby now, and if he will have anything intelligent to say.

I decide to get the ball rolling again. Why not? It's not like we're going anywhere. I speak without turning to look at them. “So, tell me, boys, what is your thinking on the matter of friezes?"

[Back to Table of Contents]

How the Burkhina Faso Bicycle Fell Apart

I guess the little straps of leather dried to beef jerky or ligaments of shriveled toad while it still looked ready to hit the (tiny) road from its home on a shelf next to a Blue Guide.

Admired, even as its dusty tendons were loosening, it dissembled well, until one day, it dis—assembled into the hectic chumminess of true collapse, wires released from miming mechanical form so you could no longer discern what had just been handlebar, mirror, kickstand.

Even the naked wheels couldn't be spun.

An artist, not some hack, made it by hand and couldn't have intended such a grim display of how easily attachments fall away.

Forwarding Address

Summer afflicts me with a certainty:

if I return to Rome I will again meet gnomic Ruth at Piazza Cairoli, typing the gossipy truth—not dead at all—about days with Carlo Ponti,

Sophia, and the Master (we smirked) who gave her the rules for living a Hindu life, still calling us “girls"

and warning us about “boys” who might ask for a date, their syringes trashing her sixteenth-century gate.

Rome was Ruth's—she taught us diciassette,

the melted scream of Giordano Bruno's story showed us glittering swordfish in Campo dei Fiori, the Sistine before the soot was cleared away, and angels in Trastevere's Santa Maria.

Ruth of the catacombs, not trattoria.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Grebe's Gift

Daniel A. Rabuzzi

"All kinds of eggs, any kind you want, mein Herr, like dewdrops from the sun,” she said, her German a flatlander's dialect strewn with Livonian vowels. Among the rookish farmwives on the market square under the bell tower of Saint Nikolai, she was a goldfinch with her yellow head-scarf and her coat piped in red. At her throat was a bronze brooch. I had never seen her before and was certain she was not from any of the farms that ringed Ollemunde or from anywhere on Fennica Minor at all. Everyone knew everyone at the market; the same farmers had brought their goods every Tuesday and Saturday their entire lives to the same buyers. Yet nobody knew who the young woman was. I had asked Frau Giesemann, from whom I bought my honey, and Frau Ockel who sold me beets and cabbages, and even old Fraulein Hemmel the herbalist, who was considered half-mad, but none of them had ever seen the young woman. To ensure that I did not cause offense to the league of farmwives, I had bought some eggs from the Widow Harloff as I always did, and then I had ambled over to the stranger's stall with the blandest look I could muster.

"What are those?” I had said, my feigned incuriosity disappearing as I looked at plates heaped with eggs large and small, speckled, streaked, bluish, greenish, some the color of mud, some of sedge. She kept her gaze fixed on the hillocks of eggs. A braid of hair red as berries peeked out from under her scarf. Staring at the braid, I almost missed her explanation.

"Those are teal's eggs, unhatched in rushes next to the nale and neeve,” she said, using phrases that we did not use in the High German of Ollemunde or any other city I knew. “And these are jewels from the reyer-duck that dawdles down restharrow dunes. Those that seem carved from elfin-bone ivory are of the eider-duck, and these brash-brown like chestnuts are gifts from the sheldickle. More, sir? Yes, these beauties are from the goosander, the pochard, the scoter."

I shook my gaze free of her chokecherry braid, and contemplated the landscape of eggs. She had only indicated a fraction of those she offered. I queried further, trying to catch her eye. Her head stayed inclined to the eggs as she continued to recite: hazel hen, partridge, ower-hen, bittern, stork, crake, plover, lapwing, redshank, whimbrel, curlew, woodcock. I shook my head at the litany. The birds that laid these eggs weren't kept in a coop like the chickens on the Widow Harloff's farm.

"...and here an egg like a pearl from the grebe that dabs in the dike, and there two burnied eggs from the godwits that cry over the mud-rappling river,” the young woman finished. She still did not look up. “What's your pleasure, sir?"

With a guilty glance across the market square at the Widow Harloff's booth, I bought the grebe's egg and several varieties of duck. Who had ever heard of eating such things? Moreover, I would be eating eggs at every meal for the next two days. Feeling a little foolish, I handed the young woman some coins. As I put the eggs into my basket, I asked the stranger where she was from. My question brought her face up. She had eyes bluer than cornflowers. I had thought her perhaps eighteen but something in her look made me feel younger than my twenty-seven and younger than her.

"I came to Ollemunde in my little boat,” she said, waving in the direction of the harbor. (When she said that, I believed I heard in my mind the sound of wings over a sweep of fir-trees.) I asked for more detail but she demurred, saying only that she came from across the water. I could see the Widow Harloff staring at me and knew I should be going. I thought about coming back later but, after all, one has one's dignity and besides everyone knew everyone else at the market and I could feel the accusatory looks of Frau Giesemann and the others following me as I left. I contented myself with the thought that the stranger might well be back on Saturday for the next market.

Herr Classen arched an eyebrow when I arrived in the office with a basket full of eggs, some of them not of the usual sort. Herr Classen had worked for my family for many years, keeping all the accounts straight so that neither I nor clients of Gersterbusch Widow & Son could ever complain. (I am the son, my deceased mother the widow who greatly increased the fortunes of the firm my father started.) The skills that made Herr Classen such a fastidious bookkeeper were the same that kept him from being an entertaining dining companion. He made it clear that he had no intention of eating any egg that a chicken had not laid, unless it was the egg of a goose but that was as far as he was prepared to venture.

"Adam tamed some birds but not others for the purpose of egg-laying,” he said. “Wild duck's eggs will surely cause you an upset stomach, and those others you named just aren't fit for the table. Think on it, Herr Gersterbusch, it is well known that grebes eat worms and other muck from the bottom of ponds. I shouldn't want that in my guts.” He went back to our accounts full of forebodings for my health and thus for the viability of the firm, which inevitably led him to concerns for the safety of his employment. I suggested that the ingestion of one egg, no matter how strange, was hardly cause for alarm and that the firm needed instead to worry about the state of the currency markets in Hamburg and the prospects for the grain harvest. I left him to his fulminations and brought the eggs to Elisabeth Sophie, who doubled as cook and maid.

"Mysterious is what it is, Herr Gersterbusch, just a mystery to everyone who she is and who she might be,” said Elisabeth Sophie as she inspected the alien eggs. “I heard already from Caroline Marie, you know, the maid at Herr Fridericius the wine-merchant's around the corner, about the strange woman selling even stranger eggs at the market this morning. No one else bought any of her eggs, they did not dare! Oh, you poor man, to be taken in like that, begging your pardon, sir, but I really ought to have gone this morning and not you, no matter how much you enjoy going to market. As your departed mother, may she be forever blessed, used to say, rightly speaking you should not be going at all, you a man and head of the house. She, your mother that is, would tell you, sir, that not even your lack of a wife is an excuse for your buying kitchen-goods in the square. There, I've said no more than the truth, sir, hoping you don't think ill of me. Now, about that seller of uncertain eggs, she is probably one of the Old Folk from out of the forest, or a witch who sailed across from Oesel or the Kurische Nehrung in a boat like a shoe, raising the wind herself. I hear she wears a yellow headdress, with feathers in it, and has a big cape held in place with some kind of heathen brooch."

I chuckled at the description and knew that by nightfall the stranger would be described in far more outrageous terms. I could not, however, deny the truth of the assertion about the mystery of the young woman's origins. I kept hearing the melody of the egg-seller's recital and the peculiar phrases she used, as if she were translating literally from another language. I kept thinking of her vagueness about coming from over the water, surely a deliberate ploy since Fennica Minor is, of course, an island famous as the crossroads of the Baltic: anyone who is not from here comes from across the water. I wanted to dismiss the cook's charge that the egg-seller was uncanny, after all we are nearly at the end of the eighteenth century, and I had studied the enlightened views of Thomasius, Schloezer, and the Englishman Hume on the primacy of rationality over superstition. Yet, if nothing else, I wondered how the stranger had managed to collect so many eggs from so many elusive wild birds and transport them here before they spoiled.

Elisabeth Sophie fried in a separate pan the eggs I had purchased from the stranger. I was the only one to eat them. The cook and the bookkeeper inquired several times that afternoon how I was feeling and seemed disappointed when I told them that neither worms nor stones had appeared in my stomach. The grebe's egg was especially tasty, and I looked forward to acquiring another one at the Saturday market. Another look at that hair and those eyes would also be nice, I admitted to myself. I decided I would ask her name and not leave until I knew where she was from. I did my best to concentrate on business for the rest of the week but bills of lading and customs declarations paled beside my anticipation of seeing again the stranger who sold eggs. Friday evening I laid out a fresh shirt and buffed my shoes, while checking my pocket-watch every ten minutes. I fell asleep practicing what I would say to her, carefully using Low German and avoiding the diction of the counting house.

She was not there on Saturday morning. I searched the entire market, pretending to look for bargains at every stall and weaving questions about the young woman who sold eggs into every conversation. No one knew anything about her or why she had not come that day. The farmwives were pleased that the stranger was absent. Only the herbalist Fraulein Hemmel had more to say on the matter, as she packed some betony and mint into a pouch for me. I did not really need her herbs but I had always taken kindly to her when so few others did. I suspected there was wisdom mixed into the eccentric words she spoke, if one cared to listen.

"I'll not be the only one who has noticed your interest in that girl, mein Herr,” said old Fraulein Hemmel, who was rumored to be a quarter Lettish on her mother's side. “You've always been kind to me, so I will be kind in return. You know that you've set tongues to wagging in the past, you have, with your visits to the ruins of St. Adelsina's Convent by moonlight and your poetry readings, as you call them, and inviting that so-called natural philosopher from Rostock into your house last summer, the one who accused Frau Schlomann's oldest girl of being a changeling and who claimed that the Deputy Lord Mayor's grandmother had danced and more with elves in the birch-woods. Even if these things might be true, you know how it is here: you cannot simply talk about such matters as you would the weather or the state of the harvest or the market for ship's masts in London."

No one had let me forget the episode with the philosopher from Rostock. He had come highly recommended from that city's society of experimental inquiry. In hindsight I suppose they were all too eager to rid themselves of such a disruptive character, as we in Ollemunde were in our turn when we recommended him for his new appointment in Reval. I was irritated that I should be the target of invective most appropriately aimed at another, but knew better than to complain. Besides, the man from Rostock had demonstrated the latest experiments in animal magnetism and physiognomic divination. His very presence suggested a world of thought beyond our pinched streets, our counting-houses, the market square, and the looming shadows of our churches.

"Now you've got the burghers’ tongues clucking again,” said Fraulein Hemmel. “You should not have been so open, asking questions all over the market today about the girl who sold those eggs. Be careful, mein Herr, people like to believe all sorts of things when they do not understand them. Your streets press upon you here. A cradle of narrow alleys and courtyards protects you, yes, but keeps you blind to what walks on the moors and in the woods outside. People do not want to know the origin of the winds that rattle their chimney-pots at night, it frightens them. They abide me only as long as I mumble and fumble and sell harmless posies. An honorable merchant, son of merchants, has much more protection, but also a longer way to fall. Once a generation or so the city demands such a fall, it is the way of things. So, be wary, mein Herr, do not stick out too much. If you do, they will hammer you back or pull you out altogether."

I shrugged as I handed Fraulein Hemmel an extra Pfennig but I knew that she spoke the truth. My mother had often spoken of poor Sieveleben, the Lord Mayor's son who had fallen from grace at the time of Karl the Twelfth. He had declared his love for a merrow-maid, and was found one summer night on the beach, curled up naked but holding a long strand of seaweed. He had been sent to a sanatorium in Hamburg and never returned to Fennica Minor. At the time of the Seven Year's War, the malt-master's son had left the island because his drawings of botanical “irregularities” (walking willows? mares nesting in alder trees? we younger ones were never told) had aroused intense suspicions about his stability or honor or both. He had fled to Amsterdam and from there took service with the Dutch East India Company. He died in Java.

About the women who had lost their way we heard less but felt more. In previous centuries some had been hung as witches in the market square. In our enlightened eighteenth century they simply vanished, off “visiting relatives” in Riga or Danzig or Hamburg. Fraulein Hemmel was right: Ollemunde's equilibrium had to be maintained at all costs, at the expense of any one of its sons or daughters. The bells must toll the hours in St. Nikolai and St. Jakobi, the ships sail in and out of the harbor, the grain and chalkstone and timber must be weighed and assayed in the customs house, the Town Council must meet every fortnight as it has since the founding in 1257. Then Ollemunders could doze in the tidal pool of their minds, rousing themselves with a spinal whinny only when absolutely necessary and just long enough to chase out the alien and unconventional.

I pondered Fraulein Hemmel's words and vowed to speak to her more often. I affected great indifference on the next market-day and the next and the next, all throughout the summer and into the fall. The stranger who sold the eggs did not return. I did not inquire about her. I made a show of commenting on the glory of Frau Ockel's carrots and beans, the velvety sweetness of Frau Giesemann's honey, the incomparable delights of the Widow Harloff's hen's eggs (after all, I would say loudly, what other kind tastes as good?). The young woman who sold eggs faded from our minds, a one-day wonder. I began to think that she had never existed, that I had imagined her and the grebe's egg.

Other wonders crowded her out in the summer and fall of 1789, both local and foreign, above all the events in France that we read about in letters and newspapers. Even at our distance from the storming of the Bastille, we in the Eastern Sea sensed the first stirrings of a great war. The Duke of Lithuania, the Czar in St. Petersburg, the King of Sweden, the King of Denmark, and the Margrave of Brandenburg were all neighbors with big ambitions, linked to the House of Bourbon either as allies or enemies. We read the decrees of the Holy Roman Emperor and his Aulic Council. We sent our delegates to the great conclave of the Hanseatic League, the Hanse Theutonicorum, in Luebeck to discuss how the united merchant-cities of the North and Baltic Seas should defend themselves as neutrals in the event of war between the Powers. Closer to home we were astounded by Frau Borchardt the baker's wife giving birth to triplets, two of whom survived. We marveled at the restored organ in St. Jakobi, with its sublime sound and ingenious wood carvings. The Town Council passed a resolution to install a new waterworks. Just as our ancestors had done before us, and we had done all our lives, we ate roast goose on St. Martin's Day, lighted candles on St. Lucia's Day, dropped lead into water to read our futures on Sylvester Night. Grain prices rose in our Hamburg, London, and Amsterdam markets. We began to ship cargoes as spring arrived in 1790.

My first ship of the season, bound for London with fifty lasts of wheat, sailed with the morning tide on the day that the stranger who sold eggs reappeared in Ollemunde's market square. I stood a long while in the shadow of St. Nikolai's watching her before I dared approach. I was not mistaken: it was her, in the same yellow head-scarf and red-inflected coat. From across the square I still saw the brooch at her throat flash in the sun. I could see that she disturbed the market, which rippled and hummed in a different register this morning, as if trying to digest something that refused to be digested. At the opposite end of the square Frau Giesemann and the Widow Harloff were talking with the customs official and the master of licensure. I strode to the stranger's booth. She offered no explanation for her absence and sudden reappearance. She waved her arms over the booth's topography of eggs. As she did so I thought I caught a scent of pine trees and tall irises on the banks of swift running water.

"What do you wish today, mein Herr?” she said. I looked into her eyes. They were green, like the color of waves just before they crest and crash onto the beach. I was so certain they had been blue, bluer than cornflowers. My gaze dropped to her brooch, which was like lace spun of bronze. She smiled. I asked what she had and she told me.

"Delicate as peas, mein Herr, are the eggs of the chaffinch, the siskin, the hawfinch, and the hampling. Something more robust perhaps? The dove's egg, that of the whinchat or the wheatear? Might you fancy the stippled egg of the wagtail, or something heartier still, say, the brightness of the sea-swallow or the garbled offering of the mew and the wake? I can give you these."

I heard a commotion in the market and guessed that the farmwives were coming with city officials to the stranger's booth. I could not make up my mind. Seeing my hesitation and hearing the commotion that drew nearer, the young woman touched my arm lightly (how I felt that for days afterwards!) and pointed to a pair of eggs on a yellow plate by themselves.

"Dabchick eggs,” she said. “The little diver, your favorite. The grebe. I begged her for a special offering, since you so enjoyed the last one. She was pleased to give you two this time."

I nodded, placed a Schilling on the counter, took the eggs. I could see the crowd boiling towards us. For the second time I asked her where she came from. For the second time she shook her head. I asked her name, and this too she refused. She urged me to go, not to be caught up in the coming spectacle. I saw her logic but would not leave. She pushed me away, gently but with strength I would not have imagined in such a slight body. My shoulder burned from her touch. I ducked into the crowd, in the opposite direction from the Widow Harloff and the Frau Giesemann. Just before I did so, I turned and saw her green eyes following me. The stranger who sold the eggs whispered: “I came from the west of East, from the east of West. I came in my little boat. Call me Olipa Kerran."

The tumult did not die down in a day or a week. The master of licenses could not find the young woman's name in his book and commanded her to leave. Witnesses said she just smiled and began to pack up her booth. Someone jostled the booth and the egg mountains crashed to the cobblestones. Albumen rivers ran between the stones, puddles of yolk glistened in the sun. I was told the stranger's look mirrored the devastation. Although a crowd followed her down Grey-Brethren Street, through New Wolgast Street and Long Street to the Miller's Gate, no one could say where she went once expelled from the city. I heard this from the wise woman Fraulein Hemmel, who was there, and from my cook Elisabeth Sophie, who was not, and from a dozen others within the hour. The rooks of the market square had cast out the goldfinch while the tower of St. Nikolai looked on and the weigh-house scales creaked their approval. No one bothered to clean up the broken eggs. Dogs and cats lapped up the mess.

I did not admit to buying the two grebe's eggs. I fried them surreptitiously, ate them alone in my room. They tasted better than I had remembered. Herr Classen and Elisabeth Sophie may have suspected my sedition but they said nothing, for which I was grateful. I spent long hours in the next two weeks reviewing accounts with Herr Classen and conducting a great deal of business in coffeehouses and other public places. I was a torrent of commercial intelligence and was often quayside to greet the captains of my ships. Yet at all hours I felt her touch on my arm, heard her voice, tasted the eggs she had gone as supplicant to gain for me. At dawn, at noon, at midnight, I saw her eyes, sometimes blue, sometimes green, it did not matter. “Olipa Kerran", I chanted to myself, “Olipa Kerran, wherever you are, east of the West and west of the East, Olipa Kerran I will find you."

I risked queries to my nearest kin, who I might rely on to be discreet. I wrote my younger brother, who had set up on his own as a merchant in Riga, and my sister, who had married an apothecary in Stockholm, as well as our cousin in Koenigsberg, who claimed an acquaintance with Kant and was widely read, and our uncle the professor at the university in Greifswald. Had any of them, I asked, any knowledge of a similar event in the markets of those places? Had they ever heard of a young woman who sold eggs of finches and terns and herons? A young woman who wore a yellow head-scarf and a brooch that looked like woven sunshine? None of them had, though my cousin kindly said he would inquire of Kant himself if I wished (I said I did not think that would be necessary) and my uncle recommended a treatise by Herder on folk customs of the Baltic peoples. My brother said he had seen a dancing bear in one of Riga's markets last year but nothing like what I described and he wondered what our mother would think of me chasing an egg-seller, a flatlander to boot. My sister sent all her love, suggested I speak with Fraulein Hemmel, and then quoted Goethe to the effect that I should dream through moonlight and into daybreak if that is what I must do to find this woman. I missed my sister more than ever (the house had been so quiet since she left) and pledged to read more Goethe.

In April we Ollemunders celebrated St. George's Day as we had done since before memory and as everyone did from London to St. Petersburg, with a pageant in the marketplace reenacting the dragon's slaying. The entire city watched as the dragon, whose wings were cleverly worked by puppeteers running along side, attacked St. George. Mothers comforted children: “Shhh, my darling, it is not real, see, that's the butcher Wachmann holding up the tail, and the tinsmith Flegel making the jaws snap open and shut, and that is only red paper cut up to look like fire spouting.” The protonotary's son was bold and dashing as St. George, and got great applause when he plunged his spear into the beast. That evening Elisabeth Sophie, Herr Classen and I took turns polishing the medallion called the George Thaler that we (and every other house in Ollemunde and around the Eastern Sea) had nailed into the door lintel. As I did so, I thought again of my sister Dorothea Luisa, who had always loved the St. George pageant and was probably polishing the George Thaler in her Stockholm house even as I polished ours in Ollemunde. My sister was right: I needed to speak with Fraulein Hemmel for more than a few minutes in the market place.

I recalled the pageant to keep myself company the next day as I left Ollemunde by the Knieper Gate and walked for two hours to Fraulein Hemmel's cottage right up among the first of the great firs that dominated the interior of Fennica Minor. The road through settled farmland had dwindled to a path when I arrived at her cottage. I stopped at the edge of her herb garden. As I looked at the old horse collar above the doorway, the goose bones arranged along the eaves, and the broken rake placed carefully on the roof, I heard Fraulein Hemmel call from inside that her house just might walk away on chicken legs if I lingered outside much longer.

Fraulein Hemmel looked even stranger in her own surroundings than she did in the city, swaddled in a patchwork shawl, wearing mismatched bits of amber as a necklace, a lump of a hat on her head. She was smoking a pipe. The cottage smelled of tobacco, wood smoke, and a hundred herbs. She was brewing tea and had set a place already. We exchanged Ollemunde gossip as we drank the first cup of tea, and then she asked me what was wrong. I told her about my desire to find the woman who sold the wild bird eggs, the stranger named Olipa Kerran.

"Olipa Kerran?” said the fraulein, the wrinkles at her eyes like ridges on very old leather but the eyes very bright.

"Yes,” I said, leaning forward. “Do you know that name?"

"Indeed I do,” said the fraulein, and she laughed long. “It isn't a name, my boy. ‘Olipa kerran’ means ‘Once upon a time’ ... in Finnish."

I looked helplessly at the old woman, who became very serious. She continued: “We Germans forget so much. Here we sit in the middle of the Eastern Sea on our Fennica Minor, the Little Finland, the Pieni Suomen in the language of the first-comers, and pretend that we have always been here, but we know that is not true. We came on the great crusades six centuries ago and met others here before us: Pomeranians, Wends, Letts, Livonians, Finns, Estonians, many others. We lump them all together as ‘the Old Folk.’ Some we conquered, some we drove off, some survived, some did not. We imagine that the names we use for places are their original names, their true names. Oesel we say, and Oesel it is to be sure, but it is also called Saaremaa by most of those who live on that island. Our Windau is also Ventspils, our Reval is Tallinn, our Dorpat is Tartu. Separate kingdoms hidden in plain sight, you could say, tracings and boundaries not on any of our maps, destinations not named in our shipping manifests."

I knew this history but had never considered its implications. Yet were we, after so many centuries, still to be considered newcomers? Sitting in a wattle-walled cottage under the boughs of the silent firs, I was less confident of my response than I would have been in my counting-house. I thought I heard voices, low and deep, in the silence: a raven karking, a bear brumming, something else making a sound like boulders grinding. I wanted the walls of Ollemunde around me, the towers of St. Nikolai and St. Jakobi with their copper-green onion-turrets peering out over sea and hill to protect us, slate-tiled houses, the six gates, the breakwater in the harbor. The fraulein seemed to read my mind, shook her head.

"Stay your course, lad,” she said, making another effusion that she said would help ease my ache. “The girl is not making a fool of you, no matter how much you think she is. She is testing you, and she is protecting herself. You saw how the burghers and farmwives drove her out, smashed her eggs. They would do the same to you if they saw you as a threat to order and balance. Draw no attention to yourself or the stones of your city will crush you. Flatlanders know that better than you do with your towers and gates. Whoever she is, or whatever she is, time will bring you together. The girl did not come to Ollemunde to sell eggs. Rather, she did, but she came to sell eggs to one person only. She will return, though perhaps not into the city itself. You may have to meet her outside the walls."

When I asked the herbalist where I might have to go to meet the woman who sold the eggs, Fraulein Hemmel shook her head and said something about weathervanes, flax-spinning, and the grinding of salt that I did not fathom. I thanked her and left, looking back at the forest as the sun began to set. I was happy to see the lights of Ollemunde before the gates were barred. Fraulein Hemmel had raised my spirits and for the next week Herr Classen and Elisabeth Sophie remarked on what the bookkeeper called my “frivolity” (which I was not sure was a compliment), but, when the stranger who sold eggs did not reappear, I sank back into depression. The stranger did not return that summer of 1790 or that fall or that winter.

I tried to lose myself in the routine of Ollemunde life. As war gathered around us, Ollemunde stuck doggedly to the rhythms of our ancestors. We read about the Jacobins in France and shuddered at the disruptions of their revolution, determined that no such disequilibrium would shake Ollemunde and Fennica Minor. We made our midsummer bonfires the tallest they had ever been and burned them on every holm and tor, dancing with unaccustomed abandon on St. John's Eve. On St. Margaret's Day we ate mock dragon's tail made of marzipan, to honor the saint's victory over the worm. We scoured the stoops and bollards on St. Boniface's Day, collectively throwing the dirty water out of the six gates with the song about pitching the old serpent out on his ear. And we went to market every Tuesday and Saturday, while the ships sailed in and out of the harbor.

The Baltic was fired with rumors: a Russian fleet was said to be heading west through the Danish Sound to land troops at Calais and Boulogne in aid of the Bourbons, the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin was said to be planning war against the Margrave of Brandenburg, Swedish troops were said to be advancing on Skaane. The warships from Bremen, Hamburg, and Luebeck, our Hanseatic confederates, were no rumor, appearing in Ollemunde's harbor to our wild cheers and a shower of fireworks. An English frigate also visited our harbor, the first of what we were certain would be many such visitors, each politely testing our neutrality, each politely received and assured of our good intentions. The Town Council stopped the planning for the new waterworks and diverted the funding to repairing the harbor's defenses. Crews of men scrubbed the rust off the cannons that had not been maintained since the end of the Seven Year's War and not been fired in anger since the wars of Karl the Twelfth almost a century ago.

I did my part, contributing to the treasury as part of the wartime levy and supervising the repairs to the Harbor Gate, but my heart was elsewhere. I sought constantly if clandestinely for a sign of a woman with green eyes whose touch was restrained fire. At Wackerow the dry-goods merchant's, I sought yellow cloth of the sort that had covered the stranger's head but was told that no such material could be gotten except possibly from India via the London emporia and that the cost would be ransom for a baroness. At Behn the jeweler's, I found a brooch that looked somewhat like the one the stranger had worn but, when I asked Behn how he had come by it, he could not remember, saying that he thought it might have come from a correspondent in Memel or then again, perhaps with traders from Aabo. Despondent in the long blue twilight, I watched the grebes that dove in the channel between the Olle River and the harbor, thinking that one of them might leave a message. I was always disappointed: they vanished the way the egg-seller had, leaving nothing but a quickly dispersed swirl as evidence that they had been there at all.

We ate goose as always on Martinsmas, watched the procession of lights on St. Lucia's Day, tried to divine our futures on Sylvester Night. 1791 arrived with a blizzard. Spring was late that year. The news that flowed in as the Baltic permitted shipping again was full of skirmishes along the Rhine, battles in Lombardy and the bombardment of Toulon by Lord Nelson. We began to bury our silver under flagstones in cellars. We ordered more shot from Sweden for our harbor cannons. Flatlanders with relatives in the city began to move into attics and other spare rooms, and to tether the cows just outside the gates of Ollemunde.

I had done such a good job overseeing the work on the Harbor Gate that the Town Council asked me to do the same on the remaining harbor gun emplacement still needing restoration. The bunker was the most remote from the city proper, sitting beyond the mole at the entrance to the harbor. In wind and rain throughout March and April I worked with the engineers and builders to brace the ramparts, directing several crews and halting work only so all could watch the St. George's Day pageant. By early May we had nearly finished the restoration. Late on a Saturday afternoon, with the crews dismissed for the day, I inspected the site. I had done this every Saturday since we started, which gave me an opportunity to see for myself what had been done and to form opinions without the influence of others. As the season advanced, the inspection also provided me with an excuse to enjoy the sunset in solitude. I sat on the embankment that Saturday, as dusk approached, alone, far from Ollemunde's lamp-lighted gates, listening to the slap of the tide. I loved to see the sun reflected off the windows of the Town Hall and the Customs House. I loved the glow from the towers, the shiny black of St. Nikolai, the rust-red of St. Jakobi, the grey of St. Bavo the Dutch Church, the nearly yellow brown of the Danish Friderik Church.

As the sun began to set I became aware of two things. The first was a pair of grebes diving just off the mole. Down they'd go, seeming to pierce a hole in the harbor floor, finding the key to an underwater door, miraculously popping up hundreds of feet from where they'd disappeared. The second was a small, empty boat bobbing at the foot of the embankment, where the mole met the rocks of the shore. Then I became aware of a third thing: a figure carrying a large wicker basket was coming down the path that ran between the city and the redoubt. The hair on my neck rose. In the dusk I could see the yellow scarf on her head and the brooch on her breast. Her shoes were made of silver birch bark that gleamed in the purple light. She entered the redoubt and walked up to me. I could smell her, an indescribable scent of catkins, hawthorn blossoms and the small yellow flowers that grow in rock crevices. She put the basket down with great care and then straightened up to look me full in the face.

"Es war einmal...” I said, just before she spoke.

"Ah, ‘once upon a time,'” she said with a laugh. “'Olipa kerran.’ I am sorry for the deception, but you so desperately wanted a name, any name, that I thought of that. You must know I did it to guard us both."

I wanted to say, shout rather, “I forgive you,” but that did not feel right. I felt more like asking her forgiveness for doubting her. Instead I said, “May I ask your name for a third time?"

"Yes, though we must wait a while longer for my truest name,” she said. Her eyes flashed, a silvery grey. “I am Piritta. Wait, wait a little longer, I will tell you more, but first tell me your full name, so I know it is really you."

"Johannes Ehrenfried Erasmus Gersterbusch."

"Ah yes,” she sighed, so that I thought I never wanted to leave her breath. “It is you. I have waited as long as you have, only I have been awake for the waiting longer than you have."

I blinked. She laughed again and said, “Such long names you have. Mother says that it is because you don't know your true names and try to make up for the lack with four or five when one is all you need. I think I will call you ‘Hannu,’ to make matters plain and simple."

I laughed. Hannu and Piritta. I liked that. I suddenly realized that Piritta was speaking flawless High German, and a dozen questions rushed to my tongue. She put her hand to my mouth before I could speak. I would have stood like that with her in the redoubt through the thickest of bombardments. She was blushing.

"I brought you an egg,” she said, pointing at the basket. “A very special egg that we shall share together, if you will."

We gathered scraps of wood and straw and lit a small fire. Piritta opened the basket and took out a large frying pan that had been resting on a tripod, removed the tripod and placed it over the fire, and then rested the pan on the tripod. She knelt down, reached into the basket again, and held up the largest egg I had ever seen, an oval that filled both her hands, an egg almost as large as her head, whiter than snow except for one red streak that circled it like an equator. The very last rays of the sun and the glow of the fire combined to give the egg a luminously orange sheen in the near-dark. She held the egg out to me.

"Mein Herr,” she said, and the brooch quivered. “From beyond the stiled coasts and the flustering streams, from the heart of the hatch-nale and neeves, I bring you a delicacy that is the rarest in the world, one that will change your life forever. And mine as well. Hotter than fire, colder than ice. An egg, mein Herr, of the earth's first-born, the egg of a lohikaerme, the egg of a lind-worm. The egg of a dragon."

I peered at the egg like Tycho Brahe examining the stars, like Leeuwenhoek gazing at animacules through his microscope. My hand trembled as I touched the shell, traced its longitude, found it as hot as the Tropic of Capricorn. I asked her how she had got it.

"My little boat took me across many waters,” she said. “I came to a cove on the coast of Gotland. Tall trees ring it, boulders guard it, no man goes there. I sang to the great dam of all sea-dragons and she came. An uikku-mother, shaped as a grebe, horned and tufted with a neck longer than a ship, she came out of the water. In my little boat I stood and sang our need to her. She sang back, her bill like a spear but thicker than a horse. Long we locked in kennings and verse, her wings beating foam on the water, my boat nearly drowned. At last the grebe-dragon understood our need. She agreed to make a great gift: she gave us one of her eggs."

As Piritta spoke, I saw in my mind a grebe taller than the tower of St. Nikolai rearing itself over a small but upright figure balancing herself in a boat. A dark rocky coastline arced behind the pair. Their singing carried through cold Swedish winds.

"This is the choice before you,” Piritta said. “You may eat this egg with me and join me in gaining a dragon's vision, a dragon's understanding of bird-speech, a dragon's feel for Earth's dance. Gifts like this are only offered once and they always come with a price. You would have to leave your city for a while, and you would never be of the city again, not wholly. Or you can refuse this gift, and be as you were, a burgher, a merchant, a son entirely of the city. If that is your choice, our fates will be uncrossed, and I will never be allowed to see you again."

I stared at the egg blazing with the reflection of the fire and I stared at her. The voices of Thomasius, Kant, and the Englishman Hume were in my head arguing against this madness. More loudly still were the voices of my sister Dorothea Luisa, and my brother, and even Herr Classen and my cook Elisabeth Sophie.

"But I love Ollemunde. It is all I have ever known. It is not a bad city as cities go, is it? The Widow Harloff was just scared of you, that's all, and understandably ... all she has to live on are the eggs her hens lay."

"Ollemunde is a fine city,” Piritta said. “But it will pinion you forever if you let it, slowly but surely mortar you into its bricks and tiles. Is that what you want?"

I looked at the distant church towers dimly silhouetted in the northern night. Slowly I looked back to the woman who sold eggs. When the mind has decided, the stomach still needs convincing. I said, “Knowing the language of birds is all very well but I cannot eat what birds eat. Will there be pickled herring wherever you would take me? With good black rye bread and cucumbers so crisp they burst in your mouth? Strawberries we can pick in the summer, and mushrooms we can find in the autumn?"

Piritta said yes. I mounted my last defense: “I may return to Ollemunde? I must be allowed that."

Piritta said yes. At that, I nodded and Piritta cracked the egg over the pan. The yolk was red as blood. In seconds the egg was frying, sending out a rich aroma that filled the redoubt, drifted past the cannons, and wafted over the waves. Piritta took out spoons and knives that had been strapped to the inside of the basket lid. As she did so a braid of her hair fell out from under her scarf, and dangled in front of her face. I knelt beside her and tucked the braid back into the scarf. Piritta put the cutlery into the basket, put her arms around my neck, and drew me to her. We only stopped kissing when we smelled the egg beginning to burn. Laughing she took the pan off the tripod and slipped the egg onto a plate that she pulled from a slot in the side of the basket. We held the plate between us, still kneeling, as Piritta cut the egg in two. The yolk ran like a river of steaming blood.

"Quick, Hannu,” she said. “Before it cools!” We scooped the yolk into our mouths, we forked in strips of the white. The egg burned our mouths and seared our hearts but we ate every bit, licking the plate at the end like wolf-cubs.

When we finished we sat and spoke through the night, holding each other close. I asked my dozens of questions and Piritta answered them all.

"I will leave you at dawn, Hannu, and return in three months time, time enough for you to arrange what you need to arrange in Ollemunde for your departure. We will go to another city, the sacred court under the running water, where the Twilight Mother and the World Surveyor watch over humans, as they have since the beginning."

Piritta spoke of the guardianship of the world, how the Mother and the Surveyor protected humans in ways long forgotten by burghers who thought their city-walls were all that was needed. She told me of the wild forces that city-walls could only shut out by losing knowledge of humankind's origin and purpose: Iron-Copper Grandfather who strides over forests, Hand with a Bell who comes at dusk, the Archer who is as tall as seven sables stretched nose to tail, the Glutton with iron teeth, the Baba Yaga with her pestle before her and broom behind. Mostly she spoke of dragons.

"You burghers don't believe in dragons any more but you preserve their memory. What do you think you are commemorating on St. George's Day? You eat the candy dragon on St. Margaret's Day without understanding, you recite the rhymes on St. Boniface's Day without listening. But dragons are very real and very necessary ... for human survival, if only you knew that. We shall go together to speak with dragons, to the forests where the clapper-tongued troll-owls cry, to the neeve where the dragonets play, north up the Bothnian coast, inland to the great lonely lakes above Tammerfors and Viborg clear to the White Sea. South we shall venture beyond Minsk to Palyessia and the Prypesh marshes where the mire-drakes are, to Belovezhskaya where burr-flukes hunt bison. We shall go east into the Lettish Kalns to meet the glabricaries, oldest and wisest of all, who remember still the languages of bird-kinds no longer in the world. We shall watch the hackle-worms come down to the dunes of Courland, where they sport on the empty strands between Libau and Windau, hanging like kites above the surf."

"Do you not fear them?” I asked, knowing that I was frightened, egg or no egg.

"Of course, that is the point. With fear comes learning. Dragons are not all bad, any more than humans are all good. They are wild, themselves, not bound to the same rules as people. Sometimes we will have to fight them, Hannu, kill them, to protect all the Ollemundes of the world. But other times we will need their wisdom and their help for the very same reason."

I held Piritta very tight and kissed her on the mouth, and said I did not understand but that I trusted her to lead us. She kissed me back and for a long time we said nothing. At last she said: “Mother says there is a deep change happening, a change for humans unlike anything the world has ever seen before, and that the dragons can help make the change less painful than it will otherwise be. Far off in England they have used fire to change coal into steam. In France they will slay the King and Queen, if indeed they have not already, and unleash a terrible war that will not end for centuries. I do not know much more, only that I was given the task of speaking with the dragons ... and of finding you to do so with me. Two must do it, one alone will fail. When I was a girl, Mother showed me the living image of who you would be, Hannu, and I have loved you ever since."

I kissed Piritta again and looked at Ollemunde in the distance as the sun rose. The first rays were striking St. Nikolai. I thought of the stir I would cause. I would ask my brother to return from Riga to run the business, being sure he kept old Classen and gossipy Elisabeth Sophie on. I would invest a portion of my funds with my sister Dorothea Luisa and the child she was carrying (how did I know that? She had not written that in any letter). I would give Fraulein Hemmel enough Reichsthaler to re-plaster her cottage and mend her gate.

Piritta stood up as the light grew. She kissed me a very long time, so that I was enveloped in the scent of flowers. Our tongues still tasted of dragon egg, smoky and vibrant, a taste that was salty and bitter at the same time as it was sweet as honey. She looked at me with deep blue eyes and said she would meet me outside the Miller's Gate in exactly three months. My head buzzed and I saw inwards. When my head cleared I was alone in the redoubt, and the little boat was gone. There was a smudge of charcoal on the floor but no other sign of a fire, and every scrap of eggshell was gone. For a moment I wondered if I had fallen asleep by myself at sunset and had had the most remarkable dream.

But then I understood what the grebes were saying as they dived at dawn just off the breakwater.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Dropkick

Dennis Nau

My brother gets free tickets since he's the official photographer of the South Western Wrestling Alliance, so what can I say? I used to go to a match every month or so. They're entertaining and relatively harmless.

When I met Andrea, just in casual conversation one evening, I mentioned this fact—that I occasionally went to professional wrestling matches and could get free tickets. “Really?” No, that's not the way she said it. “REALLY?” Andrea was quite an attractive young woman, and she seemed very nice, and I had been talking with her for a while, but I didn't think I was making all that big of an impression.

"Yes, my brother is their official photographer. He doesn't get paid that well, but he gets tickets to all of the matches at the auditorium downtown."

Andrea looked simply astounded when I told her that.

"Would you like to go to one?"

We went to the next, I don't know, dozen matches or so. I knew most of the wrestlers since my brother had always asked me to help him at the photography sessions, especially way back when they had flashbulbs that had to be changed after every picture.

My brother, James, has been taking pictures of wrestlers as long as there were wrestlers, or so it seems to me. James is sixteen years older than I am. James is the oldest. I am the youngest of six kids. We had a happy, if hard, upbringing. My mother never liked wrestling. I did. James doesn't much care for it, but they pay on time—the wrestling association, that is.

I was a sucker. None of my other brothers or sisters were.

"Please, Bobby, can you help me with this session? The Crusher will be there."

I don't think he paid me for the first two or three years. I didn't care then. I was a kid, and I got to see the Crusher.

Andrea didn't believe it when Fabulous Freddy walked up the stairway that Saturday night, stopped, shook my hand, and patted me on the head.

"Bobby, how are you doing?"

I thought she was going to faint. We went out regularly after that, always to wrestling matches. That night Davis and Kid Clement won the World Heavyweight Tag Team Wrestling Championship—well, that was a special night. Andrea proposed to me and I accepted.

After the match, we saw the champions. I told them my good news and they hugged me. They hugged Andrea, maybe a little too tightly. James took pictures. He didn't need anyone to work the flashbulbs by then. Yes, I knew all these guys.

A year or two later, Andrea and I had a kid and we couldn't go to wrestling matches anymore. Andrea was working as a physical therapist and changing diapers, and I was working in accounting, changing diapers, and going to school. I wasn't a CPA yet.

Those were wonderful years. Andrea was very fussy about day care and sitters. We went out very seldom. Little Luke wasn't a hard child in the beginning. He was sweet, but prone to colic. Andrea said something one night to Luke when he was maybe two years old, and little Luke head-butted her and damn near broke her jaw. Andrea got upset.

"Good guys don't head butt,” she yelled at him. Well, of course good guys don't head-butt. They use sleeper holds, dropkicks, half nelsons, full nelsons, shoulder turns—holds like that. If they hit, they always do it with an open hand, unless unfairly provoked, and then everyone understands.

They certainly don't use foreign objects.

About a week later, Andrea said, “Little Luke ... that wouldn't be a bad wrestling name."

"No, it wouldn't. He might not be little when he's old enough to wrestle."

He wasn't. We got him into a wrestling club when he was five. The kid loved it. He lost his first seventeen matches, but what could a person expect? He was big for his age, and he was wrestling against six- and seven-year-olds.

I became a CPA, and Andrea became a wrestling mom. She was beginning to learn amateur wrestling rules, and I sincerely hoped that she had gotten professional wrestling out of her head. They are not the same thing.

I had talked to her about this right after we were first married. Professional wrestling is not a real sport. It's entertainment. Granted, it can be good entertainment. “You remember that first match we went to, Andrea?” Madame Mary Lou, one-half of the evil tag team of Madame Mary Lou and Sassy Sally, was acting as the manager of the Black Sheik. There she was, in the corner, in a loose, entirely-too-loose, shiny black evening gown, which looked like it could fall off her body at any moment, except for the fact that she had her right hand on the dress over her front left breast, holding it up—the dress, that is. She'd get excited, start yelling and screaming at the referee, at the opponent (a good guy), and at the Sheik. When you yell and scream you have to point. She'd point with her right hand but immediately grab the dress with her left. There was more pointing and yelling, hands going up and down, in and out. The dress never fell off, but the audience was waiting for it to fall. At least the men were. The good guy lost, and Madame Mary Lou walked off the stage with the Black Sheik in such a haughty manner that even the parking lot attendants hated her.

"I was at Madame Mary Lou's wedding,” I told Andrea.

My brother James photographed it. I was his assistant. I don't know if I've ever met such a sweet, soft-spoken woman. Well I have. Her name is Andrea, but Jeanie was a close second. Madame Mary Lou was simply Jeanie's stage name. She was a shy woman, but she knew how to act.

I told Andrea about that time when I was maybe twelve or thirteen and there was a carnival in our section of town. There was wrestling. It was to feature Pretty Pete McKenny, the most notorious wrestler in the Southwest. It cost a couple of bucks to get into the tent, so, what the heck, I went in. They were looking for challengers to take on Pretty Pete, who was anything but pretty. He would have been prettier if he had worn a T-shirt or something, which might have hidden his stomach, which almost hung down to his knees. Pretty Pete didn't know he was unattractive, apparently, and pranced around the ring like a ballerina, looking for opponents. He was an easy man to despise, and every person in the audience was thinking, I could beat him. But they didn't volunteer.

A skinny guy walked up on the stage.

The promoter looked at him and scoffed.

"What you up here for?"

"I'd like to wrestle Pretty Pete."

"Sure, and pigs can fly. What makes you think you can take on Pretty Pete, who has two world championships to his credit?"

"Well, sir, I was pretty good at wrestling in high school, and I work out every day."

"You got life insurance?"

"Yessir."

"I don't know."

He went back, conferred with Pretty Pete, who had this evil grin on his face, and returned to the microphone:

"Pete says, what the hell, give the kid a chance."

The skinny kid—I can't remember his name—was very tentative at the beginning, but started flipping that evil Pete character all over the place. The audience loved it. He put a toehold on Pete. The audience loved it even more. They were cheering. Pete kicked the kid in the head when the referee wasn't watching. They both got up. Pete went to give the skinny kid a dropkick, but the kid moved and Pete just plopped onto the ring and bounced three or four times. His stomach bounced seven or eight times. The audience went nuts. The skinny kid tied Pete up in a knot. The referee was on his knees, crouching very low.

"One."

"Two."

Then Pete, whose legs were flailing two feet over his head, managed to catch the referee with one of them, and the referee was flung back, knocked down onto the mat. When he got up, you could see that he was groggy. He kind of stumbled forward, slowly, and crouched down once again.

"One."

"Two."

Then Pretty Pete reached into his trunks, in plain view of every member of the audience, and removed something and whacked the skinny kid over the head with it. The skinny kid fell off, onto his back. The referee, still groggy, crawled over.

"One."

"Two."

"Three."

The poor ref could hardly stand up, but he held up the hand of Pretty Pete, who jumped around as if he had just won the lottery. He pranced back and forth in the ring, stomach flopping like a dropped fish on the bottom of a boat. The crowd was ready to burn down the tent. The promoter, who must have fallen asleep and missed the whole match, stepped forward.

"What's the commotion about?"

The entire audience started screaming about cheating and foreign objects and incompetent referees and the like. Little kids in the crowd were crying. The skinny kid was moaning with his hand over the left side of his face.

"I don't know what to do,” the promoter said.

"I've never encountered anything like this before."

"We've got to talk to the manager."

Every one of us walked out of that tent, through the carnival crowds, as if we were on a mission from God, which we all felt that we were, and we arrived at the carnival manager's trailer. There was a knock. The manager appeared at the door, in a torn T-shirt, drinking a beer.

"What's the problem?"

There was shouting and some attempts at a rational explanation.

"I don't understand."

There were more attempts at a rational explanation and lots of shouting. Finally, the promoter took the carnival manager aside, whispered in his ear. I've never seen such an expression of astonishment and puzzlement. That guy was good. He shook his head a number of times, stepped up.

"I've never heard of anything like this."

He wiped his face and his forehead as if he had just been through a nuclear blast.

"The only thing that I can think of is this: we need a re-match."

Everyone cheered. A rematch! That's what we all wanted. The skinny guy wouldn't only beat Pretty Pete, he'd pick him apart.

Of course, the skinny kid was a good guy, so he wouldn't tear poor Pete from limb to limb. He'd only beat him handily, no body parts lying on the mat. We all walked back for the rematch. The promoter walked back into the tent first, then the skinny guy and Pete. When the rest of us tried to walk into that tent to see an honest man defend the honor of Western civilization against the likes of Pretty Pete, well, we had to pay another buck-and-a-half.

I didn't have but thirty cents in my pocket. I don't know who won. Maybe those guys couldn't really wrestle, but they should have been nominated for an Academy Award.

Andrea said, “Yes, I know it's fake.” She didn't sound sincere. Little Luke started winning matches.

He won thirteen in a row.

He was a little shit, though. He could play his mother. Even at seven years old, he could play his mother. I'd like to say that he took after me, but I was never that clever.

After Luke's fourth-grade Christmas party, some drunken maniac grabbed Andrea and I ran up from behind and put a sleeper hold on the guy and held on until the police arrived, maybe four minutes later.

The guy never went to sleep, but Andrea thought that I was Superman, and later that night we conceived another child, a girl. At least, I think it was that night.

Luke did very well in wrestling that year, won a medal.

My accounting firm, when I became a junior partner, gave me a nice reception. At work, they treated me like a doormat. Billable hours. That's all they talked about, billable hours. I did grunt work, for the most part. Then, one day, little Doogie Pearl walked in, and things changed. Doogie was the president of the SWWA, the South Western Wrestling Alliance. They needed a new accounting firm. He remembered me from my days with my brother, how I used to help with the alliance's photographs way back when. He remembered me from when I was the ring bearer at King Conan's wedding way back when. He remembered me from the testimony that I gave at Count Rashke's divorce case just a year earlier. Doogie was a character, a midget, and he wrestled. He had won the midget tag team wrestling championship maybe three or four times in various parts of the country.

Doogie knew something about money and about wrestling. After the alliance went through that accounting scandal, they elected Doogie to straighten things out. Big money was involved, and I started to get some respect around my peers. I was made a partner.

Our daughter was born the following September and I made a vow to myself that she would never get within ten miles of a wrestling match. You can't be too careful.

Andrea was the driving force behind Little Luke the wrestler. I never understood why. Andrea is an educated woman. She's well read and on the board of a number of professional associations. When it was announced that Hulk Hogan would wrestle in Phoenix, Andrea was on the phone for tickets within seconds. It's as if Socrates had, in the midst of one of his dissertations, said, “Oh my God, The Flintstones are on channel nine. We'll put off this discussion on the nature of humanity until some later date."

But that's Andrea, and I love her dearly.

The situation with my accounting firm and the wrestling alliance began to get dicey—very dicey. There were transactions on the books that bordered on being illegal, and Doogie was in no mood to negotiate.

"Bobby, you guys can just straighten it out."

"Actually, Doogie, we can't. There's no way we can make this unreported income disappear. We can plead ignorance. There was embezzlement involved—there's been a conviction—so the IRS will understand. But they won't forget that you owe them money."

"I don't know what we can do, Bobby. We need to raise a lot of cash. We need to raise it fast."

They needed to raise it fast. I talked with Andrea about their predicament, and she was appalled. “We've got a few bucks put away,” she said. “We could help out a little."

"Andrea, they don't need dollars. They need tens of thousands of dollars. They need some really big event."

Luke took the state championship in the 103-pound weight category when he was in eighth grade. He'd still be the state champion today if he hadn't put on another eighty-five pounds.

But Andrea had ideas about the wrestling alliance—ideas she shouldn't have had, since I shouldn't have told her that the SWWA needed ideas. I'm a Certified Public Accountant, for heaven's sake.

"A world tag-team championship would bring in money."

Give me a break. They have one every day.

"You could have Honest Earl, who's always been a good, get hit on the head with a folding chair. He staggers, and his brain goes south. He becomes a bad guy and starts attacking members of the audience. The Sheik runs up into the crowd. In a moment of faith, he becomes a good guy and takes out Honest Earl, who threatens to kill him."

"That's good, but it only draws interest for the next event. There's no time for a next event."

"How about this. You have a cage match, but not your ordinary cage match. You have an oversized ring, surrounded on the sides and on the top with fencing. There's one hole, maybe three feet by three feet, at one end. This cage mask has different rules. Whoever is left in the cage at the end is the winner."

"Imagine it, Bobby, all those wrestlers trying to throw some guy out that opening. You'd have people underneath the opening with mattresses and things to break their fall. Some wrestlers would be climbing up the sides, across the top, and dropping down on other wrestlers like Spiderman. It would be quite a show, like nothing that's ever been done before."

I pitched the idea to Doogie. He liked it. He was a midget—an emotional midget, a strong midget—and he gave me a hug that almost crushed my thighs. The match was set for March 13th in the largest auditorium that the alliance could find. Do or die. It was the motto for the match, promoted on the radio and television. It was also the motto for the wrestling alliance. If this didn't work, they were down for the count.

Our daughter, Kate, loves the nature channel, and wouldn't watch a wrestling match if it was the only show in town.

In February, the principal called to tell Andrea that Luke had kicked a fellow student in the back. Andrea almost had a heart attack. When Luke got home that afternoon, Andrea grabbed his hand, did an arm twist, spread his fingers apart, forced him to the ground, held him there—her foot on his shoulder, his nose to the floor—and she lectured him about right and wrong until Luke almost cried.

Those were tense times. If the SWWA went down the tubes, I probably would go there, too, since a couple of the older partners never liked me to begin with. If the wrestling thing worked, they might be gone. There was a lot of money and egos involved. I'd come home at night and look to Andrea for comfort, and she'd look to me for the same thing. Luke was not an easy child any longer.

Kate was a piece of cake.

The unprecedented cage extravaganza went off without a hitch. People filled the auditorium at twenty to ninety bucks a ticket. The spectators got their share of entertainment, wrestlers being cast out of that hole in the cage at five-minute intervals, bouncing once, landing on mattresses, cursing politely in wrestling talk. No person went home unfulfilled. The SWWA brought in enough to pay their back taxes and the parking lot attendants, too. That was some night. I was made a senior partner a week later and given a considerable raise. Doogie shook my hand so long my shoulder started to hurt.

The next school year, Luke told Andrea that he didn't want to wrestle any more. Just like that. He wanted to play basketball instead. Imagine. Poor Andrea, it almost killed her. All I wanted to say to Luke was, OK, you don't want to wrestle, don't wrestle, I don't care, but if I catch you smoking cigarettes or dope, I'll rip your heart out. Wait a minute ... you're a teenage punk; I'll rip your testicles off. Luke would understand that. I did say something to that effect to Luke, like, if you do this or that, you'd be grounded for a while, at least I think I did. Andrea cried for three days.

Doogie asked me to be the godfather to his third child, and I accepted. My brother James photographed the event. It was like old times, wrestling people wandering all over, shaking hands as if they were family. Sodbuster Sam was there. I hadn't seen him for quite a while. Sam has the heart and the brains that keep professional wrestling alive. He knows more about wrestling than any person on Earth, but he's never won a match, on purpose. Yes, yes, he had had prostate problems, he told me, but those problems were behind him now, no pun intended. Sodbuster Sam was a joker, so, of course, there was a pun intended, and we laughed about it for quite a while. We milled around, traded old stories, and James called us together for a group photograph.

Kate's learning to read, only five years old. She's a smart kid, couldn't wrestle if the salvation of the galaxy depended on it, thank God. Luke is still causing us problems. He's at that age. That age. That's what my mother used to say when I was at that age. She said it when my older brother was at that age and my brother before that and my brother before that. It's hard on Andrea. She believes in good. She believes in evil. I don't think she believes in anything in between.

When Luke stole that car—borrowed it, as he claimed—and was arrested, we had quite a crisis. I was afraid Andrea was going to try to kill herself or that she was going to kill Luke. She spit fire and walked back and forth across the kitchen. Doogie showed up, eight o'clock in the evening, uninvited. “I'll talk to him, Bobbie. He'll believe me. Step outside.” We did. Doogie closed the door and pulled the shade. Andrea and I sat on the step and watched the sun go down.

I never found out what transpired in the kitchen that night, but Luke was repentant. He hung his head, and I thought maybe I don't have to have Righteous Mike the Minister come to my home and put his hand on Luke's head. That always worked on Saturday night wrestling. If Righteous Mike got a firm grasp on your forehead for more than five seconds, your knees would get weak and you'd collapse on the canvas, unless, of course, you had a foreign object in your trunks, or your tag team partner could find a folding chair near the ring.

But Andrea would not be comforted. I held her tightly, and she eventually stopped crying. We talked softly, afraid to awaken more law-enforcement agencies. I understand my wife.

Gray is a color she cannot tolerate. Andrea wants the world to be in black and white.

Most people do. Things are defined that way in the world of professional wrestling. You know who's good. You know who's bad. The good guy always wins in the end. The end may be a ways off and cost you some money, but he always wins. Andrea needs heroes and villains, and professional wrestling grows them on trees. The world of accounting is not quite as certain. We talk about those damn billable hours. We tell jokes only accountants can understand. They are not very funny.

Doogie can walk into our office nowadays like the king of diamonds. Everyone goes out and shakes his hand. He's looking for me. We get a private office and talk—talk about the old days, about body slams and whether Verne Gagne said this or that, and we laugh and laugh. Andrea's idea saved the wrestling association. I know it. Doogie knows it. Don't put a sleeper hold on my brother, I told him. Just because you had your eyes closed at the last photographic session doesn't mean that it was his fault, you little bastard. I laughed.

Doogie laughed. The other partners are jealous as all hell.

I'm a lucky man. Kate's an angel who lights up a room. Luke's a minor juvenile delinquent, but we'll cure him. I'm a CPA. Andrea's just a person who believes in good and evil. Good guys are good guys. Bad guys are bad. Andrea has a sweet voice and wears beige and amber-colored sweaters. I will try to always be one of the good guys, and, together, we will keep that precious, gold championship belt where it belongs—here, wrapped around our hearts.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Phone Call Overheard on the Subway

Nancy Jane Moore

Baby, I need your loving ... Baby, I need your loving ... Baby, I need...

Hello? Oh, hi baby. Just getting up? How you feeling this morning?

Relax, honey. I laid everything out for you. There's coffee in the pot and a bagel sitting in the toaster just waiting for you to push the button. Your clothes are hanging on the bathroom door.

Baby, please calm down and speak slower. I can't understand a word you're saying.

Oh. Don't worry, baby. Your penis is on the bedside table. No, no. On my side of the bed.

Well, I just had to take it off you last night. It kept crawling around me ‘til all hours. That thing of yours got a mind of its own.

Baby, of course I love your penis. And you know I need your loving. Got to have your loving. But I had to sleep sometime if I was gonna get up for work this morning.

You got it back on now, honey? You have yourself a nice cup of coffee and things will be just fine.

Love you.

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Troll in the Cellar

Laura L. Washburn comes up in the afternoon. He pretends his basket is full and heavy with shirts folded in crisp lines. His hunched back is a sham. If you catch him stretching, you see his vertebrae are loose as a cat's.

I almost slipped once, let him know

I was watching his transformation, started to say, “My Granny's spine has more curves than yours.” Of course, that's what he wants: you have to pretend he's a slavish troll, avert your gaze, feign distaste or smile broad and sick with compassion.

If something bright catches his eye out the window, perhaps the crow who carries found gold rings in his beak, he'll turn and stare slack-jawed, riveted and dumb as the troll we all know he is not, then you can lift the first layer from the basket, look quickly before he turns back to his labors

at what is beneath the creased jeans and matched socks. I have found a briefcase there. I have seen portfolios, and once, glimpsed the spine of what's accurately a tome, Oxford's

English Dictionary, the latest version—this from the man whose elbow has rubbed a deep gouge into the wall on the left hand side of the stairwell over years, who walks before you, neck sideways, legs bent as though filled with jelly and lead. He would have you

believe with his smirks and groans that life in a dank cellar turned the body in on itself and left the mind to rot. He'd keep you outside his scope as though his words were trapped under a thick black tongue. You would think his life was a small pain, sharp like a stitch in the side, confined

and broken. Don't confront him.

Though he could tell you long stories of continents you'll never see, explain the ancient history of language, the linguistic origins of soul and heart, pater and mutti, don't do it. Don't fall for his obvious and easy trap. Don't ask any question, but give the order

every day: this for a cold cycle, make sure it lies flat, no bleach, no crease for these, air dry. If careful you can keep the fragile spell unbroken.

Though so many secrets go unexplained or lost in time, each day you'll find warm towels, fresh socks, underwear, clean and hung on a line, the way it should be, laundered careful so it lasts like new for years at a time.

[Back to Table of Contents]

You Were Neither Hot Nor Cold, But Lukewarm, and So I Spit You Out

Cara Spindler & David Erik Nelson

with love to MoJo

Once upon a time there was a Famous and Talented Horror Author with a problem: His wife was a monster in bed. The Famous and Talented Horror Author would scream himself awake in the morning with his wife, who slept soundly asleep next to him, soft and naked and warm and human and oblivious.

In the dream her face would turn fiery red and melt like wax, like Santeria candles whose smell of rotting roses might fill a tiny mercado and murkily remind shoppers of a great-aunt's house on a sleepy Sunday afternoon. Her eyes would turn charred and black, velvety and endless pools in which he'd scream and thrash and drown. Her touch was a thousand knives, abrading his thighs with a deep, epidermal ache, a burn that crawled across his whole body in a sudden phalanx of pain.

In the dream his wife sucked great chunks of his soul as he clawed and cried in his sleep. His soul was pink and viscous, like hot, unstretched taffy, and having it sucked felt like she was digging into him with a tiny, serrated scoop. In the dreams she was a terrible and boneless tentacular thing, a clinging inescapable ache. A squeeze. If a heart-attack were to be incarnated, it would be as this thing he dreamed his wife became.

At first this notion evaporated in the day's clarifying light, and by the time he stepped into the bathroom to take that first morning piss, it was utterly dissolved. But, after a few weeks of reduced sleep, the nightmare began creeping in around the edges of his day.

Did I really dream that she was a tentacle thing digging out my flesh with razored suckers, with fangs and venom slavering maw? he would wonder, sitting before his idle computer, Did I dream that? In the evening, after dinner, he would clear the table and surreptitiously watch his wife, her delicate hand tucking a stray hair behind her ear as she labored over her laptop, and dismiss the dream as ridiculous. Then he'd fix himself another Jack on the rocks to ward off dreams.

And then things went deeper. There was strange grit in among the sheets. Windows he was sure were latched when he went to bed, he found unlatched in the morning. Dots of blood on the bedclothes, not toward the middle of the bed like a period uncalculated, but up near the pillows and down at the foot, and not menstrual-dark, but a light cordovan, sometimes still sticky fresh when he went to make the bed in the morning. The carpet seemed cooler under the window, just a little damp to his feet, but when he drew his hand over the carpet, it was dry. Sometimes he found wet leaves in the bedcovers or on the window sill. Once one was plastered to his cheek.

By some mechanism unknown to him—but presumed to be a by-product of matrimony—the Author found that he knew the terrible things she did out in the world after sucking him soulless. Like frescoes on the vault of his skull, he saw them painted in among the candle-lit shadows in his head, visions unbidden and awful: crushed cats, toes raggedly torn from clean sea-shell pink feet, blood in the jaws and teeth smashed against brick schoolyard walls. The high jabber of fear, the begging: first for salvation and mercy, and then just for death. The violations of the night.

Sitting on the toilet, or leaning over the kitchen sink rinsing out the coffee pot, the Author would suddenly find himself gripped in one of these visions, these impossible memories of his wife's monstrous hungers, and he would freeze with the fear of it, of her. Often he wept, helpless, until it passed.

His wife might come into the kitchen, cheery for the morning, smart in her grey business suit, leather attaché case swinging in her arm.

"Just coffee and an egg,” she might call to him, “Gotta get to the office double-quick."

And then glance up to see her husband and the sink, ghost-white and red-eyed.

"Hon,” she'd say, “Oh, hon. What's wrong? What's wrong?” and she'd go to him, to stroke his hand, to comfort him, and he'd jerk away, as though she was hot or sharp.

"Nothing!” too loud, too quick. “Nothing,” calmer, “I..."

She drew her hand back, “Were you crying?"

"I was ... just. I just thought of something sad, from when I was a boy. It's nothing."

Nothing.

* * * *

As he wasn't really sleeping anymore, the dream took to creeping up on him suddenly, when he shut his eyes over the computer at work in the drowsy hours after lunch, or when he took a late night walk and the streetlight happened to go out.

His disturbed and disturbing thoughts—his million dollar thoughts, thoughts which petrified and drained his heart when in his head, but made him the Famous and Talented Horror Author when on paper—had always had a habit of creeping up on him throughout his days. These flashes of terror—gut-wrenching, adrenaline-pumping—had always been fun thrill-panic, like when he was a little kid and had watched a scary movie and knew, just knew that two nights from now after playing Capture the Flag or videogames at a friend's house he would get that horribly-pleasantly sick feeling walking home alone, and he would swear to himself to never, ever again watch a horror movie.

But these strange brood of his dream about his wife were something different, and getting worse. They had even started to creep up while his eyes were open, as he waited in grocery store lines, or when he answered the phone and the caller took just a second longer than normal to reply to his Hello? Sometimes, when his wife wasn't yet home from work, he would let the phone ring and ring, because he dreaded what grave-moss voice might speak to him through the miles of roadside copper. Sometimes, when she was home, he let it ring and ring because he dreaded being distracted by the caller, dreaded the tentacles catching him unaware. It had happened in one of the dreams, he was sure. She looked normal, like her heavy-eyed two a.m. self, hair askew. And then she opened her mouth, and out came a voice deeper than the holes under waterfalls, rougher than a lion's tongue or shark's blood-hungry hide. It had scraped him down to the bone. And so he let the phone ring.

The dream had crept from the back of his mind and now it perched on his shoulder, sometimes gently playing its taloned, toothed suckers across the back of his ears. The dream was so real and horrible that he started to consider the possibility that his whole life was actually a pleasant dream and the true reality was the monstrous, sucking wife-thing that tortured him at night. Memories? All the hours in his sunny home office with its dark varnished bookshelves, garnished with sunny pictures from his honeymoon to Aruba with his brown, young wife? All those other memories that made up a successful, contented childhood of family camping trips and a brother who had marshmallow toasting contests with him? Those were all memories that had been pinned into him, and were not really a part of him at all, not nearly as real and solid as the tentacles and doll's eyes, as the thing his wife became at night.

In his dazed, sleep-starved stupor, the Famous and Talented Horror Author's mind gently bifurcated. Half perseverated over those classics he'd read in college—Beowulf and Gilgamesh and the Odyssey—and what had to happen to Grendel and Marduck and Cyclops. The other half of his mind thought of guns. He'd never owned a gun—never touched a gun—but all day he thought of guns, of holding one in his hand, of slipping one under his pillow and gripping its reassuring weight as he slept, of slipping the barrel into his mouth.

* * * *

Now, this man had a brother, the Club-Footed Janitor. Since Cain and Abel, all brothers have been the same: in every pair, each is equal, but one succeeds and one fails. Sometimes this affects their love and affection, as it did with Cain rising up left-handed, and sometimes it doesn't. It was fortunately the latter case with the Famous and Talented Horror Author and his brother, the Club-Footed Janitor: They had loved each other dearly as boys, and loved each other dearly as men, despite the divergence in the paths of their lives.

Also, ever since Cain and Abel, brothers have always had secrets from each other.

The Club-Footed Janitor was not really a janitor, although he worked every day mopping floors, cleaning toilets, vacuuming thin industrial carpet. Innocuous. A relief because he was not the classic mentally retarded janitor who just can't seem to understand the importance of using the right size can liner, who speaks to us with his moist, garbled, mentally-deficient voice, cheery and vacuous, an idiot man-child unable to take the world's manifold sufferings and ecstasies in his stunted grasp. Not that kind. Hardly worthy of note at all.

But, unbeknownst to the Famous and Talented Horror Author, and largely unbeknownst to himself, the Club-Footed Janitor worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. He killed people for the Central Intelligence Agency. It didn't make sense, really, that this brother ended up in law enforcement, because when the man and his brother were younger, the Author had always been the athletic one, not due to any sort of natural talent on his part but because his brother had been born with that horrible clubfoot, so reminiscent of the turned-ankle the Irish wish on their enemies so that they might know them when they see them coming down the street.

For the Club-Footed Janitor, the younger brother, it wasn't his body the CIA needed, but his mind. Much as the Famous and Talented Horror Author had just the exact right type of mind to be what he was—over imaginative, fearful without being timid, arrogant and yet terribly insecure, paranoid—his brother had just the right mind to kill for the CIA: his brain was a set of rooms whose doors he could open and close at will, and in which he could hide from others and from himself; a warren, like the tunnels of the Vietcong or Al-Qaida or rabbits. No one could force from him the details of his orders, because he kept them locked away from even himself, and only let them come out of the room at their appointed time. When the office rats with their Franklin planners confused him with his co-worker, the aforementioned idiot man-child, and spoke to him in an exaggeratedly slow and loud voice, using sign language of their own devising, never did it cross the brother's mind to slide under their SUVs, clutch the chassis to his chest, and ride it out to the suburbs, past the gates and guard dogs and fences, and wait until the opportune moment to sneak upstairs, unbidden, unseen, and open a vial of ground glass onto their shower floor—not just one shower, but all the showers: the white marble of the wife, the pink tile of the daughters. Never, because a door is either open or closed, and when the brother was in his janitor room, he could not be in his killer room.

The Author could not know his brother for what he was, because the Janitor himself didn't know who he was. Just a crippled janitor, just a bright and quiet boy who had amounted to nothing. But a boy who became a man who dwelt in rooms and knew the truth only to be that which he saw directly in front of him, in the room with him. A man who had smothered the infant sons of drug lords, stomped and electrocuted the wives and daughters of terrorists, slowly poisoned the aged, bed-ridden and enfeebled patriarchs of white-supremacist klans. A man who slept easily in a comfortable room with no windows and all the doors firmly shut. Some doors lead to weenie roasts with his parents still alive, others to procedures performed in soundproofed, windowless rooms, but all doors are either open or closed.

* * * *

So the Famous and Talented Horror Author went to the anonymous, dark-eyed office building where his brother worked. He ducked in through the loading dock, walked through the cool halls, heard the water fountain humming metallically. The shadows were dusty and still; it was a place where it seemed completely preposterous that a face-sucking demon could hide. He took the freight elevator to the caged basement maintenance office where his brother sat in a wobbly-wheeled office-chair, his twisted foot propped on the scarred top of his cast-off desk, listening to quiet tango music waft from a plaster-caked portable radio.

The man was broken-hearted about his monster wife: a face-sucking demon in his semi-sleep; a perpetual draining worry on his sleep-fuddled brain and heart; a beast that hung in the back of all of the family photographs and sunny afternoons, of his gross sense of reality. His whole nuclear family—Author, wife, 2.5 as-of-yet unconceived children—was crumbling before it had even started, somehow broken down on a school yard where one brother played soccer and the other hung out on the swings with the girls. He had nowhere else to go.

He'd almost left his wedding ring in the glove-box of his car, he explained. Almost pulled it off as he boosted himself through the loading dock, almost handed it to a moon-faced janitor laboriously changing the bag on a vacuum cleaner, telling him, Keep it for me, wouldya? because it felt like her, warm and smooth, and maybe it, too, could connect to the netherworld and the horrible monster would find out about his plans, another function of that strange machine of matrimony.

Because even if the author's brother was a failure, even if his family hadn't been very close, he could still believe in things that we all need to believe in: our family will always love us, and help us, and offer support, be it financial, mental, emotional, or answer big questions, like Should I kill my wife? Should I kill myself?

* * * *

The Club-Footed Janitor, the assassin, leaned back in his creaking, paint-splattered chair, deep in some office building, in the bowels of some city, some late afternoon, somewhere in America. The Author poured out his story, his months of quasi-not-sleep, the gathering intensity of the dreams, the way shadows ran alongside his car, like the monster pacing him leisurely.

The Famous and Talented Horror Author realized he was babbling (a frequent complaint of his critics, he quipped nervously) and so he asked his brother, who stared at him for an endless moment afterwards, if he should kill his wife or kill himself, since he believed that she was now—or perhaps always had been—a hideous, primal monster.

The Club-Footed Janitor laughed. “You've been reading too many of your own books, bro."

The Famous and Talented Horror Author said nothing.

And his brother asked, “What do you want to do?"

"I don't know,” the Author said. “That's why I asked you."

"Either you do or you don't,” said the brother, “and you're in my office, now, telling me that you think that your wife is a monster. So you have to decide what to do. What you want me to tell you is what you think is true."

The man didn't know what to say, or what it meant, and so he waited.

"What is true,” said the Club-Footed Brother slowly, cracking his knuckles, “is what you see, and hear, and touch. You know what you have to do. Don't ask me to make that decision for you.” The Club-Footed Janitor pushed back from his desk, easing his deformed foot down, and limped to a filing cabinet atop which sat a steaming tea-kettle on a hot plate.

"It's always struck me as funny that it's a man's world,” he said idly, glancing into a mug and blowing out some dust. “All through nature, it's the females calling the shots, in bee hives and baboon troops, with lions. Species to species, males are lazy: drones built only for fighting and mating.” He opened the top drawer of the cabinet, dug out a box of Lipton's tea bags.

Doors were opening in the Club-Footed Janitor's head.

"Different in humans, somehow,” he remarked, selecting a bag. “Don't know why. Maybe that explains misogyny, spousal abuse, all these ‘God the Father’ religions. We're the only species that's inverted that ‘Ladies On Top’ order, and it takes a lot of crazy hoopla to keep the drones on top of a social order and the queens down.” He deposited the tea bag into the empty mug, set it atop the cabinet, and gingerly poured in the boiling water. “But one thing is for sure: you hit your mid-twenties,” he looked significantly at his brother, who was twenty-nine years old, and then rolled his eyes, as he himself was twenty-six, “without killing or making a baby, then you've certainly become an evolutionary aberration."

The Famous and Talented Horror Author, who had a keen ear for dialogue—the fans love prosaic dialogue in horror stories: it builds tension—felt his brother's speech building to an overwhelming question. He waited. He watched.

The Club-Footed Janitor stood at his filing cabinet, staring into the middle distance. He sipped his tea reflectively.

"You know those descriptions of the old monsters? Dragons and vampires, Bigfoot and the like? You ever notice what they have in common? The size and the fangs, the strength. Lotsa times they have scales, have wings. Just the sort of things little tiny mammals are afraid of, aren't they? Imagine what a hawk looks like if you're a deer mouse. Imagine what a four inch rodent thinks of a four-and-a-half foot boa constrictor, and all of a sudden dragons make a lot more sense, don't they? You know the way people react to snakes. It's silly, for a 190-pound man to scream and dance around like a little girl when he catches sight of a six-ounce snake, but they do. You ever seen how chimps react to snakes?"

The Famous and Talented Horror Author shook his head, but his brother didn't see: The Janitor's eyes were turned inward, to memory, and he remembered standing on the dirt floor of a tin-pot African general's compound, a cool Atlantic breeze blowing back the curtains and making the mosquito net sway around him, standing over the general, a hypodermic needle of warfarin buried in the general's neck, the Janitor's finger on the plunger. An autopsy was unlikely, but one clan assassinating another's warlord with rat poison was hardly unheard of in Sierra Leone. No questions.

What was this man, this lone man with his drug-addled army of children? Why was he important? Why did he need to be liquidated? The Janitor didn't even open the door to the room where those questions paced off their shuffling, senile lives.

No questions.

The general, eyes huge and shining in the night dark, talked, talked, talked, on and on in Krio, about snakes and bees, about drones and dragons, about women and men. Trying to buy his life with words, but only buying time. The Club-Footed Janitor, curiosity piqued, listened, and then pushed the plunger, watched the general buck and vomit and weep blood from eyes and anus. And then he left.

The next day he'd left his hotel—with a middle-of-the-road digital camera and lots of sunscreen—and gone sightseeing to a local preserve, had seen what chimps do to snakes.

"They go nuts, whirling and screaming and smashing the thing with rocks and logs, even if it's harmless, even if it's dead. Hell, they'll go nuts and slaughter a garden hose. They hate snakes. They hate monsters. It's a deep memory, an old memory. Genetic. And good. There's more than just dragons and Bigfoots out there.

"But this isn't the females, even though they'll go wild and tear you apart if you come near their young. They're strong, and they have the capacity for violence. But they don't go after snakes. They don't hunt monsters.

"This is separate from fighting and fucking, another job just for us drones: Killing monsters."

The Club-Footed Janitor took another sip of tea, then took several long, awkward strides back to his desk. He opened the drawer, and brought out a dull grey revolver, placed it heavily on the desk before his brother.

"In case it doesn't go without saying,” the Club-Footed brother said, settling back into his chair, “I believe you."

"This is ludicrous."

The Club-Footed Janitor smiled broadly. “You know that ludicrous comes from Latin, right? From ludere: to play. So it may be ludicrous, Bro, but it's still the world. Some hate the player, some hate the game, but it's still the world."

And so the Famous and Talented Horror Author walked out of the somber, now-darkened office building, and drove home, the gun awkward and heavy in his pocket.

* * * *

His wife was already in bed, asleep, peaceful and beautiful. The Author peeked in on her, and took a walk around the block. He knew that as long as he stayed awake she would be peaceful and beautiful, her skin would be smooth and warm and soft, the way that it always was, and she would move over, in her sleep, when he crawled into bed. And the man also knew, after almost a year of thin-sleep nights, that as soon as he fell asleep she would, like every other night, be a vicious, sucking, hideous beast that would hurt him and make him scream until he woke up sweating and sick to his stomach. She had always slept lightly, but now it had become his job to hear the alarm clock's chirps, to shake or kiss her awake. He wondered if he really did scream in his sleep. The dryness was there, the whisper at the edge of his speech. He wondered why his shoes would wake her on the hardwood and his screams could not.

As he had turned to leave the office, his brother had told him that we are all monsters, under the surface, and whatever this is—the Janitor had gestured around the dusty office, at the table made of a door atop saw horses, at the broken fans and shelves of grimy, anonymous parts to anonymous, colossal machines—the waking part or the dreaming part, it's the part where we try our hardest not to be monsters, to shove back whatever is evil and wicked about ourselves, and do the best we can to hide our monstrous selves. Hearing that, the man had known what he had to do about his wife.

The gun was heavy in his pocket.

* * * *

As he walked, the man thought through all of the stories he'd written, post-apocalyptic zombie worlds, vampire morality plays, houses bent on revenge, and the ghosts of cut-throats cast out of air-locks in the Great Nothing between the stars. He could imagine solutions for all of those imaginary people, those old school teachers and outcast teens and lonely widows. He could imagine a solution to this.

The Famous and Talented Horror Author closed his eyes, letting his feet and habit guide him over jagged sidewalk and irregular curbs, and he imagined himself and his wife, in bed, the shades gently shuffling in the breeze, the moon etching the curves of their sleeping backs beneath the sheet. He saw them breathe together, slower and slower, more and more shallowly, and then both relax liquidly, like quicksilver, into each other, flatten and bulge and quicken into the rolling wolfsquid that burst up to pace frantically across their hardwood floor, throwing sheets asunder and wadding the rag rug beneath their tentacular paws, building momentum for their leap through the window. Outside, he could see their silvered night lawn, and beyond that the tree line, and in the cut-felt shadows of the trees he saw the slither and tense, the whirl and lurch of everyone else, all of the other mate-monsters out in the midnight world, tearing through trees, running down lone joggers and lost cats and stoned teenagers out past curfew.

He knew then, knew in his heart of hearts, that Aristophanes had been completely right in the most completely wrong way possible: in Plato's Symposium Aristophanes had suggested, puckishly, that once upon a time everyone had been four-armed, four-legged, two-faced wagon wheels of love—some male, some female and some hermaphroditic—that these beasts were too content in their perfectly-partnered bliss and had thus been cleaved in twain. Henceforward, each half-a-being had spent his or her days looking for his other half, his better half. Gay men were the two half-a-males seeking their whole, and lesbians were two half-a-females seeking their whole, and straight folks—with their strange hunger for imperfect difference, for the unity that is unending strife and friction—they were the cleaved descendants of those strange, rolling hermaphrodites. The Author had always taken this bit of the Symposium to be metaphorical, fantastical, and convenient in its encapsulation of Greek sexuality and secular, homosocial morals. He had never taken it for what it was: the kernel of truth at the heart of the world. He saw that now, finally, saw that beneath the skin of the world there was nothing but gristle and savagery, and was afraid, was awed; for just a moment it was as though he had slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God.

In his walking dream the Famous and Talented Horror Author became live to the fact that he was not being attacked by his wife, but embraced by her, devoured by her. Ensconced in her he became her, and they together coursed out through the night: a wolf and a squid, vicious and hungry, supple and strong, pale and invisible in the darkness, velvet-eyed and noxious and strange and far more terrible than any image that had ever accosted Lovecraft from some dreamless sleep in a dimension beyond time. A World Eater. They tore through the fabric of the night and sewed themselves in; they were the terror embroidered into the velvet between the stars, the dim, rusted razor-wire at neck-height across decrepit cellar steps. There is little lovely about love.

The Famous and Talented Horror Author came back in silently, to his home, to his wife. She was cozy in bed, naked, sleeping, and he slid out of his clothes quickly, eager to be naked with her, to join together and go out into their night. Dropping his rumpled khakis to the boards he heard the revolver clunk dully, and didn't like the idea of it there, on the floor in his pocket or in a drawer. If his wife happened on it, it would worry her. A lot. That seemed cruel, so he dressed again, quiet as a church mouse, and headed back into the night alone.

* * * *

The Famous and Talented Horror Author felt fortunate to catch his brother stumping across the office building parking lot. His brother lived far out of town, and driving to his cabin was time-consuming and dangerous this time of the year, with the bucks reckless to rut and heedless of the dark road's passages through their forest.

"Hey Jess,” he called, “Jess."

His brother stopped, turned. “Fancy seeing you twice in one night. Your biggest fans must envy me."

"Yeah. Well, the ... uh, thing you lent me? I don't need it after all.” The Author looked over first one shoulder, then the other, and then did his best to slyly palm the bulky revolver to his brother, who remained unmoving, hands cradled in his denim jacket's pockets.

The Author stood there, lamely, hand out.

"You sure about that? Wife feeling better?"

"Naw. It's just, well, I rethought all of that. All of everything we talked about. I figured some things out, is all."

"But she's still a monster, right? A soul-sucking, murderous inhuman thing."

"I'm fine with that."

There was no pause; the Janitor shook his head. “I'm not."

The Author let his arm drop. “What?"

"Don't worry. Not everyone has the guts for this sorta thing.” The Janitor reached out, eased the gun from his brother's hand. “I'll make the calls tomorrow morning,” he said as he ejected the cylinder and checked the rounds, then snapped the gun shut and pocketed it. “There's proper folks for resolving this kinda thing, anyway; I just thought you'd want a shot at it first, maybe. On account of your line of work."

And the Famous and Talented Horror Author thought about lines, the lines between Cain and Abel, and swings and soccer, the twisted line of a deformed leg. It occurred to the Author that maybe he and his brother had never been that close, anyways.

The Janitor smiled broadly, “Shot. Get it, take a shot at it. It's a pun, bro.” He slapped the Author's shoulder and turned to go.

Despite himself, the Author was dimly aware of his brother's real job and associations in some low and reptilian corner of his own capacious haunted mansion of a mind. If drones are only for fucking, fighting and monster hunting, then it doubtless behooves them to, in some dim way, truly know what is in the world.

"I don't want anyone to kill my wife,” the Author said lamely, softly.

"Don't worry,” the brother called over his shoulder, unlocking his rusted Honda's driver's side door, “We've got it covered.” And the Janitor climbed in and drove away.

* * * *

The Famous and Talented Author raced home, quickly and quietly came into his bedroom, slithered from his clothes and slid between the body-warm sheets. He lay himself down, breathed deep,

breathed deep, and willed himself to

calm

willed himself to

sleep

and shockingly he dozed off, slipped the surly bonds of earth, slipped deep into his bed and sheets and wife and life and then, and then...

...and then he and his beautiful wife, they bloomed into the full snarling wheel of themselves, of their more perfect union, bloomed like the bloodgold blossom of fire blooming from a plane-struck tower, like the gout of blood from the leaping stag's heart, like the lick of flame from the sniper's barrel.

Out from their bed

Out into the night

Out through the crisp Autumn forest

They had to roll fast to beat their brother, their Club-Footed Janitor, their bloodmate back to his home, to his phone, to the copper lifeline that silently binds the web of his own dark family, spread thin over the surface of the earth, the political crust of arbitrary lines and colors that's the veneer of every school room's globe.

They tumbled and roared and tore and, of course, their arrival was in just the nick of time, catching the brother crossing from detached garage to lonely little clapboard cottage, half-way across his muddy lawn, out in the middle of woods deep and dark.

The face of the brother remained unchanged as they bore down on him—perhaps nothing could surprise him anymore, much like the Famous and Talented Horror Author himself. Perhaps he too had seen too much, had supped full of horrors, and this final serving was no affront, but just more of the same.

It is a tiring world for we fuckers, we fighters, we monster hunting drones, that look might say. Alright it might say, This is what we do, it might say, Let's roll, it might say.

Maybe Cain rose up because he'd found himself a girlfriend and there was no room in that tiny half-past-Eden world for a warped stray, not in the land of pairs two-by-two.

Maybe Abel wasn't so favored by God, as much as he was an aberrant freak, a half that could never find its better half because it had been born malformed, half-formed, quasi-modo, twisted and stunted at birth.

Maybe all of our stories are really about love, are really warnings echoing down the library halls of human history, saying “Beware: This is the terror that is love. Here there be monsters."

Maybe every little boy who thinks girls are gross and icky is more right than any man might ever expect.

And maybe the handfasted squidwolf of the Author and his wife, maybe that's not the real monster here.

The Club-Footed Janitor brought up his good right arm, the solid sanity of his gun, and coolly breathed in, relaxed, aimed, took up the slack of the trigger and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed, squeezed, squeezed, squeezed.

But what hope had those little lead bullets, each no bigger than a toddlers’ severed toe? What could those tiny full-metal jackets do to love's twin hearts? A thousand waters cannot drown love, nor fires destroy love. If a man were to offer all of the riches of his house for love, he would be utterly scorned. A dollop of lead? A mushrooming of metal? The pathetic crack of air collapsing back into its vortex? What hope had it against the awful abomination that tore out of that night set to nsolved its only problem?

There was never any hope for the brother, and the final mercy of his life was that, seeing this, and being who and what he was, the Club-Footed Janitor was able to slam every door to every room in his labyrinthine mind and walk away before the beast had even brought to bear the most glancing blow of the least of their razored tentacles, and long before their fangs sank mortally deep, before they shook their sleek head in a spine-snapping nicker, before the feeding began in earnest.

But, even with all of that, even with the body little more than a vacant lot just going fallow, it was far from a clean kill, and the Author and his wife—the feculent wax monster that tore—felt obliged to press the brother's face in the mud and hold it long, to tear at his corpse until it was far beyond utterly unmade: to be sure. And then to feed.

* * * *

The next day the Famous and Talented Horror Author awoke next to his soft, sleep-sighing wife, their sheets mud draggled and the warm blood still tacky on their body, and for the first instant in his life he was truly alive to what love is.

This is a love story, he decided. That made all the difference.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Things That Make One's Heart Beat Faster

(after Sei Shonagon)

Katharine Beutner

The glory of running down a snowy hill. To see a distant face float closer and resolve into a shape one knows and loves. To tread on a dead mouse's tail in a dark hallway (this will also make one curse the cat). To hear fright flatten another's voice. The delivery of a letter one has been awaiting, and the uneven way the flap of the white envelope tears when one's fingers shake. To drop a knife when one is barefoot—and catch its handle. The bray of the telephone in the room where one's sick father has just fallen asleep. To put one's hand to one's throat and find that a necklace clasp has silently come undone.

To hear one's name called, unexpectedly, from behind.

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Bride

Kara Kellar Bell

"How much do you love me?” It was the question she always asked.

It's not her fault, he told himself as she stood at the end of the bed swathed in white. Bloody parents. Not that he knew anything about her family. The subject was off limits, taboo. He had drawn his own conclusions.

"How much?” Neve had see-through curtains wrapped around her naked body. Her face was veiled too. Plucking fresh flowers from the vase, she walked slowly towards him. “How much?” Her tone was less playful this time.

He caught hold of her hand and the flowers fell to the floor as he pulled her to the bed. “This much."

* * * *

There was no sound except for the clicking of teacups on saucers. When his father gulped down a mouthful, his mother shot a look across before turning to Neve.

"Church of Scotland is it?"

"I beg your pardon?” Neve had been toying with a slice of Victoria sponge.

"You. Church of Scotland. Only, I asked the minister to call seeing as you're here. That's all right, isn't it?"

"Well, as a matter of fact...” Neve began.

"Mother,” he interrupted hastily, “we were thinking of something less formal."

"Less formal?” She fixed her gaze on him. “Well, you can have it as formal or informal as you like. As long as it's done right,” she said firmly. “In church. Here. In the village."

* * * *

Neve was silent as they took some air in the back garden. His father waved to them from the kitchen window.

"What difference does it make where we get married?"

"I don't want to marry in a church. I don't want all these people around.” She turned away, looking towards the hill that rose up behind the church.

"Look, I'm her only child. You can't blame her for wanting to do things properly."

She sighed then turned, standing on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. She had a way of doing it that made his knees shake, something in the way she moved her tongue. He shoved her away when he realised his parents were watching. Neve sprawled in the dirt. She looked up at him in disbelief.

"They were watching,” he explained. “Oh, hell, give me your hand."

Her long skirt clung to her in damp, muddy patches. He wondered how he could make it up to her.

"I can't imagine your mother having sex,” Neve said, as the woman came up behind them. “Much less fucking."

* * * *

He must have broken the speed limit all the way home. He seethed, jerking viciously on the gear stick every chance he got. Neve sat next to him, fast asleep, her face as peaceful and unlined as a child's. She'd been on her best behaviour after the minister's arrival.

"I suppose your own mother will want to be in on the arrangements,” the minister, an elderly man, had said jovially. “Her daughter's big day, and everything."

"My parents won't be attending,” Neve said quietly.

"Oh dear, I'm sorry to hear that,” the minister blustered. “So, have you thought about where you're going on your honeymoon?"

"The Western Isles."

"Most young folk seem dead set on going abroad."

"I prefer Scotland,” Neve said.

"How did you meet, if I may ask?"

"At a life class,” Neve said.

"Still life was it?” his mother asked. “He used to do pictures of fruit and flowers when he was a boy."

"Nudes."

"Nudes?"

"I was nude. He was clothed, obviously.” Neve bit into her Digestive biscuit.

That first time at the life class, she had walked in wearing a long green coat, shaking her umbrella before going into a side room to change. When she reappeared, she wore a dressing gown. She looked bored, accepted a mug of coffee from the female tutor, listened to the woman's chatter before everyone was settled, and then she stripped off and took up the pose indicated to her. Not once during that session or the next did she so much as glance his way.

On the third evening, after class, he hung around in the corridor trying to drum up the courage to ask her out. The classroom appeared to be in darkness, yet he was sure she hadn't left. Finally, he pushed open the door.

A hand gripped his arm and pulled him inside. “You took your time,” she said. “Why don't we lie down on that couch over there?"

"But you don't even know who I am,” he protested. “I could be anyone."

Hands worked deftly at his belt.

He reached out to steady himself, his fingers catching on the collar of her robe which slid from her shoulders. You could get into a lot of trouble if she's mistaken you for someone else, he thought.

* * * *

When Neve could not provide any bridesmaids, his mother suggested two of his young cousins. On the day they were to go to choose the fabric for the dresses, his mother called to say she was down with flu. Neve insisted she would go alone.

She took the car to pick up the girls and he was left with nothing to do. Recently, his mother had taken to questioning him about his bride's absent family and friends. “What does it look like that she's got no one? Folk'll wonder what sort of girl she is that no one wants to see her married."

"She's not inviting anyone,” he had responded last time. “There's a difference."

But now Neve was gone for the afternoon, he found himself looking in her underwear drawer, where she kept her paperwork. There were bank statements, bills from her old flat, but no address book, or letters, and no sign of her birth certificate. He searched the other drawers and her wardrobe, to no avail.

When Neve returned she was in good spirits. She and “the girls” had stopped by the old cemetery. His young cousins had indulged in their favourite pastime, recounting tales about the more notorious graveyard residents. She chatted away as he sank into a gloomy mood. He realised it bothered him that she wasn't inviting anyone.

"What about the life class tutor?” he asked her later in the pub. “You were friendly with her."

"No. I'd never met her before the class.” Neve seemed disinterested in the whole subject of wedding guests.

"And your old flatmate...."

"You can't expect her to return from a backpacking trip just for me."

At least she received postcards from this woman, he thought to himself.

She put down her drink. “Why the sudden concern?"

"You're not inviting anyone, Neve. It looks ... odd."

"Who cares how it looks?"

"Surely there's at least one member of your family we could invite?"

"Did your mother put you up to this? It's time you cut the cord."

"Stop trying to make out I'm some kind of mother's boy. You damn well know I'm not!"

"Do I?” She went off to the loos. Fifteen minutes later, she still wasn't back.

Damn his mother for putting ideas in his head. He left their half-finished drinks and walked up the shadowy hallway to the Ladies loo. Glancing around first in case he was seen, he knocked on the door. “Neve,” he hissed, “are you in there? Look, I'm sorry.” He waited. “Neve!"

A banging behind him made him jump. Turning, he saw the door to the beer garden opening and closing in the wind. He found her sitting in the rain, her coat drawn tightly around her. “Look,” he began again, “I'm sorry...."

She stood up and dropped her coat. She was naked underneath. He found himself wondering what she'd done with her clothes. “For god's sake, you'll catch your death out here!"

Neve turned and bent over a wooden table, her palms flat on the wet surface. “Mummy's boy,” she taunted over her shoulder.

"Right,” he said, furiously pushing a table against the door of the pub. “You asked for it. But if we're arrested, you can explain it to my.... “He caught himself just in time. He heard her fingers drumming on the table as he fumbled to loosen his clothing.

* * * *

Neve had taken to inviting the girls out for runs in the car and afternoon tea. Every Sunday she walked out the door, jingling the car keys. He wasn't invited. “Girls only,” she'd once explained with a laugh. She always came back with more of his cousins’ gruesome stories.

"Do you know,” she said one night as she kissed her way down his chest, “that after you're dead your stomach turns green, and you start to swell with gas, and...."

"You're not to play with those girls anymore,” he said in mock horror. “They're putting strange ideas in your head."

Afterwards he woke in a sweat from a dream where he'd withdrawn from her body only to find he'd left his penis still buried inside her. She'd closed her thighs and refused to give it back. “It's mine now,” she said. “All mine."

"How much do you love me?” she asked him the next morning.

"I'm feeling a bit off today. I think I'll call in sick.” He pulled the covers over his head.

She pulled them back off. “How much do you love me?” She shook him this time, straddling his body.

He groaned. “Too much."

Curious, head cocked to one side like a cat's, she said, “How can it ever be too much?"

* * * *

The dresses were all finished, the flowers ordered, the cars and the church booked, the reception sorted, the guests invited. Except for Neve's. All she had was a card from her backpacking friend wishing her well.

As to the ceremony itself: his father would give her away, one of his friends would be the best man, his mother would look on in disapproval, and the girls would flit about the wedding guests explaining the processes of decomposition and the likely fate of the neighbour who had been missing for the past fifteen years. “Chopped up into little pieces,” they were often heard to say gleefully. “With a machete."

"I can't imagine where they get it from,” his mother said on the Sunday before the wedding. He and Neve had been going to the services though neither was a believer. His mother had Neve down as a heathen, which Neve played up on every chance she got. “Certainly not their parents. But her, she's as thick as thieves with them. They're worse now than they ever were."

* * * *

He half expected her to be late, just to make a better entrance, but she was right on time. The church was decked out in flowers, and Neve wore a crown of blossoms over her veil. Her dress was long, tight-fitting, and, he thought for a panicked second, transparent. But then the sunlight pitching through the windows caused the fabric to shimmer, the suspicious shadows to disappear. He breathed a sigh of relief. The guests, equally gathered on both sides of the church, perked up at the sight of her. There was no doubt about it, she looked beautiful. The organ played the Wedding March. His father escorted her down the aisle through a cloud of sunlight that obscured his vision for a moment. Then she was standing in front of him. He could see her face through the veil.

Who are you? he found himself thinking as he gazed on her. Where do you come from? Who are your people, your family?

The congregation had risen to their feet to sing a hymn. His lips moved, his eyes scanned the hymn sheet. When he looked up, the minister smiled reassuringly.

"I do,” he said mechanically when the time came. It seemed only brief moments before her veil was raised. The touch of her lips, ripe like fruit, brought him back to his senses. Who was she? She was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

* * * *

The reception was at a small hotel just along from the church. They walked the short distance as well-wishers threw confetti over them. Neve laughed, kicking up the front of her dress, the girls hurrying behind, carrying her long train. Guests congratulated his mother on her new daughter-in-law. He couldn't hear her response.

Later, after the meal, he led Neve to the centre of the dance floor to the clapping of the guests. “There,” he whispered as they circled the floor, and the best man raised a glass to them. “The big church wedding wasn't so bad after all, was it?"

A cloud seemed to pass over her face, just for a moment. Then it was gone. “No,” she said. “It wasn't so bad."

* * * *

While his father waltzed Neve around the room, he decided to go out and get some air. Children ran about the graveyard, laughing. Then the girls appeared, dressed identically in raspberry satin. Like Neve, they had blossoms in their hair. They talked intensely to the other children. He decided to walk over. It seemed important to hear what Neve's only friends in the world, other than the mysterious backpacker, were saying.

Perched on a low wall, they explained that the flat grave stones in the churchyard were there to keep the dead in the ground, otherwise they could scrape their way to the surface and escape. New graves never had flat stones so those dead were always escaping. You could hear them at night, scrabbling to get out.

"And you should see what they look like when they do get out,” one of the girls said before popping a sweet in her mouth.

"They're all rotten by then,” said the other, passing round a bag of crisps. “If the weather's hot, they rot faster. When you die, they plug up all your holes so you don't make a mess."

"And that's not all."

"Your eyes turn to liquid and your hair and nails fall out."

"Your face swells up. And so do men's willies, and ladies..."

He was horrified. “Enough!” He strode forward and grasped both of them by the arm. “Where did you hear such things? Well?"

They looked up at him calmly. “Neve told us,” one of them finally said. “She knows all about it."

He let them go. “Get back to the hotel. All of you."

Some of the children were crying. They began to disperse. “I thought it was interesting,” one little girl said to him resentfully, before skipping off.

* * * *

At the hotel, Neve still danced with his father. He strode up to her, took her by the elbow, and walked her away. “What on earth have you been telling those girls?"

"What girls?"

"My cousins."

"I don't know what you're talking about. What's the matter with you?"

Aware that the eyes of the assembly were on them, he suggested they go outside.

"What for?"

Through the window behind her, he saw the girls in the churchyard. “I'll show you,” he muttered, marching her out the double doors of the reception room and through the foyer.

"In a bit of a hurry there, young fella,” one of the guests was heard to shout. “At least give the girl a chance to catch her breath."

Outside, he dragged her towards the graveyard. Cherry blossom trees, lush with leaves, lined the perimeter of the hotel grounds. The girls were again perched on the wall, the edges of their long satin dresses lifting in the wind.

"What have you been telling those girls? They were talking about rotting corpses."

Neve's face changed from angry to dismissive. “Och, that? Is that what this is about? Kids like scary stuff. What's the matter with you?"

"Sugar and spice and all things nice,” the girls sang in what seemed to be mocking tones.

"Neve, they were talking about.... “He lowered his voice. “Private parts."

"God, you sound like your mother."

"You leave my mother out of this...."

"She's never out of it,” she hissed. “She's always there. Every minute of the day."

"What are you talking about?” The singing was distracting him.

"There's a noose loose aboot this hoose,” the girls chanted.

He turned on them. “Will you shut up! Just shut up!"

The two of them fell silent, glowering.

"Leave them alone.” Neve broke away from him. “They're not doing anything."

"You put them up to this, didn't you?"

"What are you talking about? They're just kids."

"We hardly ever see my mother,” he said, changing tack.

"We don't need to. She's there in your head.” Her face seethed. “Even when we're fucking!"

Without thinking, his hand lashed out and caught her cheek.

After a shocked moment, she turned and walked over to the wall that bordered the graveyard and climbed over, her train sliding after her like a long white tail.

"Wait, Neve...” He felt sick. He'd never hit anyone before, much less a woman.

The girls fell into step behind her, their little ringlets bouncing furiously. “She doesn't want to speak to you,” one of them shot back over her raspberry satin shoulder. “Go away."

It was the last straw. “Well, while we're on the subject of mothers,” he shouted after Neve, “just where the hell is yours? This is your wedding day and your family aren't here. Why aren't they here, Neve?"

In that second, Neve spun round, mouth open, one foot catching in her dress. She seemed to topple over in slow motion. Later, it would always seem like he had had the time to catch her. The girls reached out their arms, but she fell past them, her head cracking against a flat gravestone. Her eyes looked up at him, unblinking.

His legs unfroze and he bolted forward, kneeling beside the grave.

"Neve,” he said quietly, giving her shoulder a gentle shake. “Neve.” He touched her face. His fingers came away bloodstained. She went on staring at him, her hair lifting in the breeze.

* * * *

The girls refused to go for help. “We're not leaving her,” they declared, eyes accusing. So he ran to the hotel himself. The receptionist called for an ambulance. Guests streamed out as he ran back to the graveyard. After leaping over the low wall, he came to a dead halt. The white dress lay on the ground, but Neve was gone.

He looked around the graveyard wildly. The girls sat on the wall sucking sweets.

"Where is she?” his mother called. “I thought you said she fell and hit her head here."

"Neve!” he called. “Neve!"

There was no answer.

He looked at his cousins. “Where did she go?"

"She said she was going home."

"Home,” he said. And he ran to the car park.

* * * *

Her clothes, her documents, everything she had owned, was gone from the house. It was as if she'd never lived there.

The police only added to his confusion. “What can you tell us about your wife?” a constable asked, notebook open. “Where does she come from? Has she any family?"

"I don't know,” he said. “I don't know."

"How can you marry a woman you know nothing about?” his mother asked.

"I know I love her,” he said. “I know that."

"She's gone,” the girls said to him days later when he visited the cemetery. “All gone."

He grabbed their arms, ready to shake the truth out of them. “Tell me where she is?"

"You shouldn't have hit her. You shouldn't have asked her those questions."

"Where is she?"

"Leave them alone,” a voice said.

His breath caught. He dropped the girls’ arms. Neve stood a little distance away. He stepped towards her. “Neve! We've been searching everywhere. Where did you go? Are you hurt?"

She didn't answer. Her gaze moved to the girls and she nodded. He heard their footfalls as they ran from the graveyard.

"You're angry,” he said when they were gone. “You've every right to be. I hit you. My god, I hit you. It will never happen again. I promise."

Still she was silent.

"Say something."

"How much do you love me?” she said.

His heart leapt with hope. This was the old Neve. “More than anything,” he said. “More than anyone."

"Not enough to take me without a past."

"Neve, it's perfectly reasonable to be curious about your bride's family. You know all about me."

"I never asked you to tell me those things."

"I thought you wanted to know."

Her hair lifted in the wind. There was no sign of a bruise on her face. But below her ankle-length dress, her feet were strangely bare.

"Where are you staying?” he asked.

She took a deep breath. Then she looked at him for a long moment. “Goodbye,” she said, and turning, walked away.

"Wait! What do you mean, goodbye?” He hurried to catch up. She was taking the path that led around the church grounds. “You're my wife. We were married. Neve!"

She rounded the churchyard and the hill came into view, rising up like a dome.

He paused. “Neve! You can't just run off again."

But she stepped up to the hill and walked right through the grass which shimmered like a curtain of transparent green. She walked through without a backward glance and was gone.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Dear Aunt Gwenda

The Head Cold Cranky Blues/Softer Side of Ricin Edition

Q: I would like Aunt Gwenda to find me my next boyfriend.

A: I have a cold, darlings, but even if I didn't, I'm an advice columnist, not a matchmaker. I don't have that kind of time. Choose the first boy whom you find attractive, without a Lord of the Rings tattoo. You'll have beautiful children, especially if you kidnap them.

Q: I work with opossums. Sure they smell bad and creep around at twilight, but can you really hold that against them? They also eat rats and slugs so that we don't have to. Yet many people still don't like them. Is this due to prejudice or ignorance?

A: I applaud your open-mindedness. It must be frustrating to come into ye olde office every day, typing speedily with your fingers, and watching them not, with their little grabby claw fingers. Now I'm not an advocate of workplace violence, but, truly, how can you stand it? You do know they roll around on your desk when you're not there exchanging triumphant looks with their beady, red-beam-shooting eyeholes, right? How many more times can you stand idly by and watch them play dead whenever they miss a project deadline? Stop pretending and get your ricin toxin-encrusted ink pen ready for action. Here opossum, opossum. (And let anyone who feels a pang at the likely outcome remember that terrible, hammy opossum in that folksy Chris Offutt author photo; they pay for the crimes of their species!)

Q: If all politics are local how come my mayor is a democrat?

A: Mayor McCheese, stop asking this question. You'll never get reelected in that city.

Q: When I brush my teeth using the electric toothbrush that my mom gave me because she thinks my breath stinks, sometimes I walk into my bedroom and look at the digital clocks, one on either side of the bed. When I look at the one on my side of the bed, it's nothing special. But when I look at the one on my girlfriend's side of the bed, the pieces of the numbers disconnect from each other and wiggle around. Their antics change depending on where I put the toothbrush in my mouth and how much pressure I apply. Only the numbers act this way, the rest of the clock and everything else I'm looking at look normal. Do you think this is cool?

A: Another victim of the Temporal Disassociation Electric Toothbrush Phenomenon (Bond, Nature: May 1998), I see. Do not look at that clock ever again. Also, you have to disown your mother. She's trying to kill you with a lightly-ricined toothbrush.

Q: My best friend is getting divorced and intends to move to California and I'm broken hearted. I love her little dog and often walk it for her when she is too busy. My husband is allergic to dogs so I can't have one but if my friend asks me to take her puppy I know I won't be able to say no. What should I do?

A: I can tell just by the tone of your question that you've already made a decision. You want a dog more than you want a husband. This is controversial. Who've you been talking to, Caitlin Flanagan? Really, you can have both. Is your husband too sissy for the allergen tests? Can he not take a pill for your happiness? If not, ricin is the answer. If you do get the little dog, be on the lookout for Wicked Witches. (Also, do not be friends with the gay divorcee—no one worth being friends with abandons their dog just because of marital upheaval and a cross-country move. Trust me.)

Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda, how are you? Please advise me:

There is a woman who i used to be friends with but im not so sure anymore. She moved away a year or two ago and since then we have had infrequent heart-to-hearts, i.e. meaningful conversations, on the phone or via email, which is lovely and fine.

Last july fourth i emailed her, “What are you doing this weekend?"

She emailed me back, “I am having a giant party up here on the 3rd—fireworks over the water near my house and I live right on the ocean, so I am cleaning and mowing my yard and going to get supplies—"

So i said,"I would like to come to your party. mabbe I'll show up. Can i crash there?"

She wrote, “Oh man—sorry babe but I am full up with house guest for the next 7 days!"

So i wrote, “Ok, so i don't sleep over. Can i still come to your party?"

And then she wrote, “Another time would be better, Sally, Thanks for understanding."

This hurt my feelings. Her house is about 2 hours away. I've done daytrips that are farther. i'm a big girl, i can handle the drive. should i count her out of my circle of friends since she obviously doesn't want my company at her party? thanks for your help.

Sincerely, Sally Left-Out

A: Hey Sally, I'm fine, but you're not. Nobody likes someone who doesn't capitalize their Is and who punctuates like a full-blown, full-moon lunatic. Buy a Chicago Manual of Style. Memorize it. And, just so you know, if you show up at the party she's totally going to throw a bucket of ricin and pig's blood on you, ruining your life. So stop stressing and distressing over your (ex)friend, who is clearly a rude loser, and go find someone to hang with who's nice, or at least interesting. Alternately, take up sewing and make a disguise.

Q: Having discovered some rather unsavoury cracks in the ceiling, I took it upon myself to venture forth into the attic to assess the damage. To my surprise, I found that our roof has been constructed from a papier-mâché-like substance; either that or porridge.

A: Oh my god, you're turning into a prom! You need to either get the hell out of there or buy some nice disposable cameras for the drunken young people who will be showing up any second now. With ricin.

Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda: If there are 700 trash cans, and 37 of them contain oranges, how would you know when to stop singing on the lawn outside a second story window?

A: You people honestly don't care about anyone who lives on the first story of a building. Do you? Do you think people with the foresight to know they might not always want or be able to climb stairs don't also long for a romantic serenade? Worse—do you really think you can get Aunt Gwenda to do math? What is wrong with you? Oranges. Yeah, right.

Q: Dear god, don't you people ever get to just chill in your own home and watch TV?

A: We do, we do, we do. When we are preparing the poison pens or preparing to prevent the poison pen attacks.

Q: My question to you is simple: Would swallowing two copies of LCRW, three times a day, protect me from the elements?

A: If by “the elements,” you are slyly asking about protection from ricin attack, the answer is: YES. In fact, this is the only known prophylaxis from the dainty world of non-bloodthirsty poisoners with castor bean fixations. (They hate a mess, except when producing their weapon of choice.) You must never miss a swallowing appointment though. Once you begin taking the cure, you must stay on a regular schedule or die a spectacularly painful death. I suggest you invest in one of LCRW's subscription packages that come with chocolate, an intern's appearance on YouTube, and a gross of issues.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Lady Perdita Espadrille

Tells the Story

Andrew Fort

1989. Robert doesn't know what Gecko has gotten him into. “Girl!” Lady Perdita Espadrille shouts, when he appears. “You look like you just swallowed shit.” She is glorious in a tight-fitting fluorescent green gown with orange flounces. Her wig is the color of cinnamon red-hots.

"His girlfriend just broke up with him,” Gecko explains.

"Gary!” Lady P. shouts to the bartender. “Get this girl a drink. Top shelf."

The club is like neon candy. What is grubby and corporeal during the day becomes avortinmagoric at night. Ambience is a trick of light. The club goes red, then blue. Forms appear and vanish.

Robert takes a barstool. Gary places something dark and sweet in front of him.

"Tell it,” Lady P. says. Her eyes flash. They are done up in glittery swirls of dark green.

Robert is confused.

"Tell it,” Gecko says.

"I don't know,” Robert says. “It's an old story."

"It is an old story,” Lady P. says. Some club song plays. There is a thudding electronic kick. Gecko is the straightest guy Robert knows, but he is up and dancing. Leslie the La La Girl gets up from her barstool. She is wearing a leather bustier. “Girl, you can have all the meaningless sex you want if you just come over to the other side,” she says.

"He doesn't want sex, honey,” Lady P. says. “He wants understanding."

"All the meaningless understanding, then,” Leslie the La La Girl shrugs. She watches Gecko appreciatively.

Lady P. smiles. Her mouth is conservatively made up. It's her eyes that are wild. “Girl, you even know what understanding means?” she says.

Leslie air-kisses Lady P. “Sure I know what understanding means,” she says. “The pizza delivery boy and me, we got an understanding."

"Bitch, you'd do anything with a belt buckle."

"I get my pizza for free,” Leslie says.

Gecko collapses on a bar stool. “So,” he says. “Four-year relationship, she breaks up with him over the phone."

"It wasn't like that,” Robert says.

"Don't apologize for her,” Gecko says. “It was like that."

"I don't want to think about it,” Robert says.

"You came to the right place,” Leslie says. She dances off through the crowd.

Lady P. shakes her head. She has the manner of your favorite elementary school teacher—the one you had a crush on because she spoke to you as an equal. “Lady P., you look amazing,” Gecko says.

She raises her arms to show off her outfit. “It's Arty's favorite. Was. Is."

"It's glorious."

"I couldn't even presume...” Robert says. His own problems seem trivial. D.J. Sparkle puts on a skittering electronic beat.

"Honey, in some ways it's easier. I'll never have to run into Arty on the street."

Gecko: “And you know he loved you."

"Mmm."

"Chose you. Wanted to spend his last days with you."

"Girl: did I ever tell you how the Lady was born?"

"No."

She fingers her necklace of chunky orange beads. “Those last days, when Arty was in hospice—I had to wear latex gloves if I wanted to touch him."

"That's tough."

"Honey, this was when the big A was new. 1984. No cocktail, no AZT ... before I met Arty, I was a good little fag. Teaching my Victorian Lit courses, singing in the Gay Men's Chorus."

"Redecorating your apartment..."

"And I hated queens. Hated them. I thought they gave fags a bad name."

Gecko laughs.

"Sweetheart, queens and fags don't mix. If you're a queen you want some well-hung young thing, but if you're a fag you want some well-hung young thing too. Nobody wants a queen, especially an old queen. What's the point of fucking a man who looks like a woman? Might as well be straight."

Robert sips his drink. The taste is dangerous and melancholic. He is not sure if he feels less alone or more alone. Lady P. stares out at the dance floor, where Leslie the La La Girl is dancing. Someone is singing My heart is full of love and desire for you. “Girl,” she says. “Another straight boy told me once that when he came here he felt lifted right out of context."

Gecko points with his drink hand. “Exactly,” he says. “That's why I'm here."

"To be a queen is to have no context. To be a queen is to be a lone peacock, strutting and fretting."

"But Arty,” Gecko says.

"Arty wasn't a fag, honey. He was just a man who loved me."

"Because what I see is everyone adoring you."

"Adoring, honey, maybe. But do I see any action?"

"Do you?"

Lady P. recrosses her legs. Robert is watching Gecko when this happens and he follows Gecko's gaze to find that he is trying to peek up Lady P.'s dress. Lady P. is still staring out at the dance floor, which is crowded with couples. Beyond the dance floor is the Pouf, a low-lying platform covered in the kind of cushions you imagine to be in a bordello or a harem house. Beyond that still is a platform furnished with a half-dozen tables in the shape of champagne glasses. Lady P. will tell you—and it's not clear if she's joking—that they were lifted from the set of the Lawrence Welk show. They're clearly past their prime and beginning to crack. “So here I was,” Lady P. says, “this scared little fag, until Arty comes along. And it wasn't until he got sick that I even began to consider drag. I realized that he was going to die and that it was my responsibility to become glorious, because he loved me."

Robert: “The way that someone loving you makes you what you are."

"And the way that becoming what you are makes you less and less like other people. I started dressing up to make him laugh. To keep him entertained. I'd always done the lip-sync. And after so many months of cleaning bed-pans and changing bandages I needed to do something. I was becoming this washed-out, pale, tired little fag. And drag is the opposite of that."

"You mean the costumes."

"The costumes, the make-up, everything.” She sits upright and clears the air with a wave. “You know why most men don't want to fuck a drag queen? Because they don't know what it is. Is it a woman or a man? I see straight guys come in here, get turned on by the show, and run away screaming. Is it a woman or a man? It's a drag queen, honey. It's the unholy union. And it felt like I was defeating death. Girl, I look into my mirror, I get a glimpse into that other world."

"Heaven?"

Lady P. shrugs. “What is heaven but a promise of perfection? Don't think the Lady didn't catch you trying to peep her candy. Why are you so interested? The Lady is an impossibility ... an ideal."

"Like heaven."

Lady P. smiles. “You said it, honey, not I."

Gecko finishes his drink. Robert is thoughtful. He says: “Is it easier, do you think, to believe that he still lives on somewhere?"

Lady P. looks somewhat affectedly wistful, but under the affect is a wistful man. The music continues. Someone is singing I can make a rhyme of confusion in your mind. “Sometimes it's easier just to think that he ceases to exist with death, except maybe in memory? Girls, the hardest part is just not being able to touch..."

Robert: “Or smell..."

"To know that someone—the hand of God—has put that person out of reach, except in memory."

Gecko is silent.

Robert: “To know that the stock of replayable footage is all you have..."

"...those loops of Arty smiling, crying, getting pissed off, making dinner..."

"...taking a shower, talking on a telephone..."

"...dancing ... he was a great dancer..."

"...or smiling, again, or singing under her breath..."

"...or just the way he walked..."

"Why this urge to compose things, to narrow the focus down to a tiny picture...?"

Lady P. looks sober. “So we can understand them?"

"Or so we can pretend understanding even exists..."

Lady P. nods. “There is another world."

"You mean an ideal?"

Lady P. changes her mind. “Perhaps there is not another world."

"But you mean an ideal?"

"Perhaps only a place where ideals can be.” Lady P. claps her hands together and the music stops. She is suddenly melancholy. “Death is patient, death is kind,” she announces. “Death bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” The smile skids from her face. Everyone who knows her knows she is thinking about Arty. Boys hang on her words. She touches a hand to her hair. It is as fluffy as cotton candy. D.J. Sparkle gestures to her: should he continue? She looks thoughtful. There is a moment where you would think the party would resume. But it is quiet. A boy carries her stool over to the tiny stage. She follows him and takes a seat in front of the tattered silver streamers. Puts her glasses on. She begins to tell the story.

"Once there was a girl named Thomasina.” She says it as if it takes her by surprise. Is it truth or fiction? She continues. Her voice is deep and resonant. “Thomasina was unaware of the fact that her name was a feminine derivative—in essence, a name in drag—” Hoots and hollers. Lady P. snaps her fingers above her head. There is silence. “A feminine derivative,” she says, “of the name which had been given to her great grandfather over a century before. She was unaware of her stature, her standing in the community which was determined solely by her sex.” More hoots, hollers. “She was unaware that her ragged clothing"—she gestures to her outfit—"contributed to this smallness of stature.” She closes her eyes and tilts her head as if listening to faraway music. “She was, however, aware of the herd of cows which every morning flooded down out of the forest and into the valley. Their bells, tinkling like the ripple of water, woke her from her sleep, and she would slip like a lisp from the bed she shared with her three brothers, leaving the cabin smelling faintly of smoke and apples."

"Three brothers in a bed—I like that!” someone shouts. He is genially hushed. Lady P. does not seem to notice.

"Honey, the cows swam through her sigh from the other side of a mirror lake. And Thomasina, before they had the chance to take notice of her and be frightened away, would silently shut the door and slip quietly back to the room shared with Graham, Alexander, and Ferdinand, where she would go back to sleep, not wanting the moment to end."

"Ferdinand?” someone shouts. It is the kindest sort of heckling, but the crowd shushes him anyway.

Lady P. puts a hand on her hip. Sparkles from her bracelet dart across the room. “She never saw them arrive,” she says. “But she knew she woke to their bells each morning and lost no more than a moment of their grazing. And she knew also that she lost no more than that briefest moment before their departure. Girl, and for the longest time she knew this was best, not seeing where they came from or where they went. Then one day she was promised to the miller's son.

"Now, Thomasina was plainer'n a butch dyke at a Mary Kay convention. Her parents worried, honey. They worried about the miller's son, too. He was smart and friendly enough, but wasn't he a little thin and a little fey?” She pauses for emphasis. Everyone knows what she means. “It was finally decided that he was a decent catch and would grow up, if not handsome and strong, then at least dependable and virtuous, and the two had better be promised now.

"Girl, Thomasina had always known she would one day marry the miller's son as he was the only boy other than her brothers that she had ever spoken to. And she liked him well enough, despite the fact that he was about as masculine as Miss Candi in her Dolce & Gabbana heels. These things didn't matter. But the fact of her now being engaged to him caused her to become aware that her days in the valley were limited. The mill was on the other side of the hill and across the village, and although only a half-day's journey under the worst of circumstances, Thomasina realized she would miss the daily avorting with her brothers, the warm applewood smell of the cabin, and, most of all, the mirror lake and the early morning cows. Girl, her seemingly infinite mornings or rapt attention had now been quantified, limited. Although it would be more than seven years until her marriage, her life as it was now had an end in sight."

"She would have to become a man!” someone shouts.

"Mmm,” Lady P. says. She smiles as if she knows a secret. “Girl, life went on unchanged. Day after day Thomasina rose at the tinkling of bells to watch the cows from across the mirror lake, and their beauty was even greater now that she knew there was a limit to her ability to experience it. And those moments, in the breaking of the gray light, when she lay awake hearing their bodies shuffle down into the valley, became unbearable. So she began to calculate these moments, day after day, tallying them up the way Leslie lines her shot glasses along the bar. Eventually she realized that there were hours, days, even, that she was missing. Girl, she began to ache to miser up these moments, to keep them in the locked box of her heart for later cherishing in the gray mill."

D.J. Sparkle is working the lights. The corners of the room go darker and there is a heightened glimmer to Lady P.'s gown. For the first time Robert really surveys the room. A group of Japanese businessmen is gathered at a table in the far corner. Several young men are lounging on the Pouf, arms laced around shoulders and draped over thighs. Robert is only a few years older than them, but he has never felt as young as they look. A table of straight couples sits near the entrance, in front of a sign which reads No Shoes No Shirt No Gaff No Service. One of them is a nervous-looking cowboy type. He is trying not to notice the cowboy couple across the room, one of whom has his hands in the other's jeans pockets. Robert remembers what desire felt like—what a surprise it always was to him that she wanted him. His eyes wander back to the Pouf. He has always been too old.

Lady P. continues. “The next morning Thomasina slipped like a lisp from her bed and out into the pasture before it could be filled. The cows descended like swans floating downstream. Girl, they were as graceful as Vivien Leigh descending a staircase. But something had changed. Their eyes never met Thomasina's but she could feel that they were aware of her presence in a new way. The change was slight and Thomasina was hesitant to wonder whether it was a change in her attitude or theirs. They were just as beautiful, but more aware. When she returned to the house everyone was just waking.

"Honey, that day tragedy struck. The three boys were sent to gather wood as they always were with the onset of autumn. Near evening Alexander and Ferdinand returned in a panic. Graham was hurt, they panted, Graham was struck. Thomasina's father followed the boys out into the clearing where they had left Graham. The axe-head had slipped, said Alex, and Ferdinand swore that it had chopped a second and third time of its own accord. But in the clearing Father found nothing but a rustle of leaves and the accursed axe, dipped with blood. Graham was nowhere to be found.

"Girl, the night was a long and quiet vigil spent in the company of family, with Alex and Ferdinand whispering about witchery and blood in between their salvaged islands of sleep, and Father and Mother contemplating the fire soberly, silently, and Thomasina all the night wide-eyed, her mind drifting west to east, sunset to sunrise. How was it that the bed was so full yet suddenly so empty? The two boys filled the space; in some ways it was as if Graham had never been there."

Robert leans over to Gecko. “Why did you bring me here?” he says. It is less an accusation than a suspicion that Gecko understands more than he lets on.

"And so days went on and Graham never returned; and he was not forgotten but not mourned. His life was a space which he might or might not come back to fill. And eventually Thomasina realized that weeks had slipped by since Graham's death, and one day she too would die or disappear, victim of a magic axe.

"And so the next morning she slipped like a lisp from between the blankets and through the cold house out onto the doorstep in her bare feet. And the cows had already poured into the valley, Mack trucks on ballerina limbs, and had begun grazing.

"Having missed their arrival Thomasina thought it prudent to witness their departure, and they floated out of the valley and into the forest with the early morning mist, in the same direction from which they came. The last cow to leave regarded Thomasina dolefully, with Mary Astor eyes, before it turned tail and wafted away. Nothing was left to look at but the mirror lake.

"Honey, you can only keep children in the house for so long, and that day the two boys were sent to gather water, as the season was coming upon them when the nearby creek would become clotted with ice. Near evening Ferdinand returned crying. He had dared Alexander to climb up and fill his bucket from the small falls in the middle of the creek. Alexander had climbed up the narrow slate ledge and held his bucket under the icy water. The rocks shifted; Alex slipped, and in falling cracked his head against a boulder and went under. Girl, at this point the current rose with such fervor that, try as he might to follow, Ferdinand could not catch up to the drifting body of his brother. At last, after following for miles, he had begun the long trek home.

"And Father went to the site at which Alexander had fallen, but the blood had been washed from the boulder by the running water and there was not a sign of him anywhere.

"That evening there was no talk of witchery, but a deep and stunning silence in the firelight by which Thomasina's mother and father regarded each other, with the expressions of two whose mourning had been expended. How was it that the bed was so full and so empty? Ferdinand filled the space. And Thomasina's mind drifted west to east, sunset to sunrise as she watched the shadows flitting across the rafters."

Lady P. pauses. She takes her glasses off and regards the photo mural of the Parthenon as if it means something. The club is silent. “In the following weeks Thomasina was expected to pick up some of the chores that Alexander and Graham had left, and, involved in drudgery and physical labor, began to think of the gray mill where she would eventually spend her days with less distaste than before. Honey, her Cinderella complex kicked in. And she had a vision of herself as Alex being carried away downstream, unable to break the glassy surface forming between herself and her family. And she remembered her cows.

"So the next morning she slipped like a lisp from between the blankets and through the cold house, and the cows were already settling into the valley, tinkling their bells. Something had changed, honey. Perhaps it had become performance, and performance had yet to become reality. Girl, Thomasina began to wonder what they were thinking, and where they came from, and why bells and why cows? And sooner than she could think these thoughts they were leaving.

"The last two cows to leave stared back at Thomasina from the other side of the mirror lake, absorbing her with their huge brown eyes before wafting away.

"And that day, in the midst of work, Thomasina though about the river and the mirror lake. And she began to wonder whether she would ever be sent off to live in the gray mill, now that two of the boys were gone, and now that she was doing half of the workload, and she began to think about those two spaces which had somehow been filled but still somehow existed. And she began to think about her parents, who now had two less children to work, as well as two less to feed.

"Honey, I don't have to tell you what happened next. Ferdinand did not come back when he was sent to check the traps, and Father went out searching but returned with empty hands. That evening Thomasina's mind raced from west to east, sunset to sunrise, and she fell into a dream.

"In the dream she saw the gray mill and the pale boy—the miller's son—looking out the window. The boy's face looked like an expiring star. She stood on a distant plain watching him. Behind her was the forest, and on the other side of it her parents’ house. And she was unable to move between the two. As night descended the forest fell away and became a black space—blacker, blacker still—until it was swallowed by stars. She looked to the mill, gray and forbidding in the rosy effusiveness of the sunrise.

"She woke up vexed at having such a dream, but was not daunted. She slipped like a lisp from between the blankets and through the cold house, past the room where her parents had expired of sorrow during the night, and out onto the porch just as the cows were leaving.

"Three of the cows were waiting at the shore for her. And so, as if it had never even occurred to her to do such a thing, she walked across the surface of the mirror lake and followed them up the misty slope and out of the valley. And the cows entered the forest at the top of the slope with Thomasina among them, traveling west to east, sunset to sunrise as the sky darkened black, blacker, blacker still and they all took their places with the stars."

Lady P. takes off her glasses. Her sequins blink like a thousand waking eyes.

Robert leans in to Gecko. “Is it true?” he says. But he is not sure what he is asking.

* * * *

The story is over. The club has closed. Men and boys have gone home to each others’ apartments to fill each others’ beds. Somewhere Leslie the La La Girl is sleeping on satin sheets. Robert has gone back to his apartment where a flashing red light indicates a single unanswered message. He thinks it may be her, but he does not play it. In the morning things will seem less intense, less tinged with sadness. Shadows will be banished in the flat West Hollywood sunlight.

On the boulevard the traffic has slowed to a trickle. It is quiet as the back door to the club opens. An old man comes out into the darkness. He looks like nothing special. He gets into his car. He adjusts the rearview mirror to catch a glimpse of his tired eyes. He lifts a hand to wipe a smear of green eye shadow away. Then he starts the car and pulls out onto Santa Monica Boulevard, heading eastwards to an empty apartment.

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The Slime: A Love Story

Anna Tambour

At a time of life when the slime was mature but not brittle, it fell in love—a dangerous sentiment and an alien one, but when has love cared? From being a blob of sturdy equanimity throughout, love changed the slime so that it softened to runny on the inside, crusty on the out.

Alarmed, the slime begged for advice, but all the dust in the room, lint balls on the furniture, scrap paper, crumbs, rubber bands, and even the odd bent paperclips, were useless or worse.

Shocked, the slime fled.

After almost falling victim three times, it found in a place undisturbed for many years, a book with a brittle fossil of glue clinging to the spine. At the slime's touch, the pages fell to

The Art of Correspondence: Love Letters

The slime followed all of the chapter's advice. It copied all the sample letters from one side of the affair, only changing names and omitting certain phrases, like “dear girl".

My dear Miss Searles, the slime wrote. I can no longer restrain myself from writing to you, dearest and best. I love you so much that I cannot find words. My heart has long been yours, as I will own. Just send one kind word to Your sincere adorer.

The slime signed the letters Cedric W. McCrae and addressed the envelopes to Miss Viola Searles. A love letter, the slime had learnt, must have proper names for the ‘to’ and ‘from'. Cedric cheered it, and Viola suited its love.

When the whole pile's-worth in the chapter had been written, answering every permutation of reply, expressing every occasion for sentiment including a death in the family, the time came to post them. But though the slime had carefully copied the addresses in the book, the preposterousness of the project suddenly glared, brighter than clean paper.

The object of the slime's love, the slime suddenly remembered, not only could not read, but most probably had no dear friends, nor useful advisors. The object of the slime's love would never know it cared.

The slime fled yet again, looking for answers to its state of love. It found sympathy from a piece of amber on a deserted beach, but no answers. It shadowed a shoe, actually the something stuck to the bottom of it, but the slime missed the moment when the shoe scraped the something off. The slime then wasted a lot of time shadowing the shoe for nothing.

The slime was possessed by love. It never stopped thinking of love, though one day when the slime cried “Viola!", as it was wont to do, and someone asked, “Viola who?", as ones often did, the slime could not remember who, nor even what. All the slime could remember was love, not the object of its love.

But love wrought yet more changes, this dangerous love did. The slime's outside crust now extended so far to the inside that the runny part was just a tiny dot. Then the crusty part began to crack, and that hurt more than love.

Love caused this change, the slime ah-ha'd, and began to hate its love.

The slime warmed to hate, and soon hated with a heat so hot that the crusty part melted from the inside out till one day the slime was equanimity again, with nary a crusty bit. The slime moved this way and that, felt smooth throughout, and resiliated in joy.

Hate, you did this, the slime cried out. Hate, you blessedly restored me. After that, the slime travelled the land extolling the virtues of hate.

"Hate for what?” others asked. The slime looked too youthful to be wise, too healthy to be stupid.

"For love!” the slime always answered, which sounded so wise that no-one dared question that.

The slime felt so smooth and firm and confident and full of thanks for its lesson learnt that it travelled now only the high road, to adventure and extol. You might have seen it then. You might have heard it.

The slime completely forgot its love. Its fame grew. One day when it was delivering one of its six set speeches—this one had made crowds roar oh, hundreds of times ... brrrrrr! Talking hate is dangerous. Cool words. The slime suddenly felt itself all over—cold and brittle as a marble slab. It stopped its speech and went on its way again. The slime renounced the word. Deed only, became its life. Hate constant, pure and true. And by hating with such a heat, the slime became its own true self again, youthfully soft, and even softer. You might have seen it then, this silent traveller on the high road.

And so one shimmering midday when the road felt only one traveller, the slime hating constant, pure and truer than ever melted altogether, not to be seen nor heard again.

That brittle winter, the road felt something tight. Something pulling on its body in a certain place. It looked there and saw nothing, but the thing still pulled. So the road bent its body just so, and back again. And sure enough, the pulling thing flaked off.

The pulling thing was the frozen slime, now broken into bits.

Oddly, or maybe it was fate, next to the pieces was the thing that had been scraped off the shoe so long ago.

A gust of wind, or possibly something else moved the thing that had been scraped off the shoe, and then moved it some more, so that the thing moved like a broom round the bits of slime till they were all one pile. A pile of frozen slime bits.

And then the thing that had been scraped off the shoe fell upon the pile of frozen slime bits. And though winter was brittle, the thing was resilience itself.

Come spring, it melted the slime again. It melted the slime so much, they made a whole together.

That was a long time ago. But unless I've heard wrong, they are still together.

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Sliding

D.M. Gordon

Shadows slip down driveways—bears wandering at night, disappearing behind stop signs, moaning, silver-tipped visions rocking paw to paw.

All the world is sliding—rain on green mountainsides, soft shoulders of old women, the sloping arms of pine, vanishing laps, birth canals and old age, those worn wet trails. I too slip down sluices of wet moss.

There goes an old millworks. Sliding.

A row of neat houses, a museum, a parliament.

A blind boy slides on his bedroom door, equipped with the latest paraphernalia, air tanks and dry rations. There are omens he has seen in sudden clearings.

Here's a yellow grizzly standing broadside in our way, wet-tufted and musty. The boy banks and vanishes. I prepare to crash.

Here is a glass door, a brown bear on the other side, dressed in a pin stripe suit with waistcoat.

I open the door for him, and he tips his bowler hat as he pads upright on soft bear feet across a marble floor, to my great relief, for last night I heard the banshees sing, and I thought, for a moment, they were singing for this world.

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Such a Woman, Or, Sixties Rant

Carol Emshwiller

A woman is a field upon which to play out the general malaise of the times, a field upon which to act out one's disillusionment with self, a microcosm where the larger issues of the day can be divined and clarified, where courses about to be charted across vast wastelands can be played out in miniature, a retreat where one can brush up on tactics or blow off steam, whichever is most necessary at any given moment. A woman is, in other words, a playing field, a sort of Mayan ball court where games of incredible significance, both mystical and religious, take place, sometimes several times a week. (Healthy self-conceptions are dependent on it.)

But not just any woman will do. Many women can be left to go on with their lives any way they see fit, it is of no importance. As long as they don't stop traffic or trains or disrupt shipping lanes, they can be left to their own devices.

But these other women.... They must be singularly suited to the job, and dressed for it, not only all their waking hours, but while sleeping also and perhaps even at those very private moments of actual penetration, hair spread out over the pillow, gown in studied disarray.... It goes without saying that such a woman should be eager to be of service to her county through her countrymen: senators, executives, and bureaucrats ... that she should yearn to “take part” through her boss, her pilot, her instructor, her dean, and sometimes her landlord, though she must understand (and usually does, though not always), that there are no special citations or awards connected with it.

Such a woman should be self-possessed only in as much as she defines and contains the “other” within herself so that when she looks into a mirror ... (which she frequently does—has to do, in fact, in order to make herself ready for her task) ... when she does, it is not only to assess her own image, but to imagine herself beyond herself as the “other,” imagine herself to be the very one who will possess her. How will he see her? How will he judge her? She counts on his first mpresssion. She counts on his: “What I see is what I long for,” at any given moment (or, preferably, at every moment.) She is wondering what, then, about her can make him look up staring? Startled? Will he see her as she has prepared herself to be seen? And, if not, can she face him anyway? And will she be able to read the tell-tale signs on his face well enough to program her next move? Therefore she comes either from the shower or the flower shop with the same questioning look, eyes wide, and searching for the expression she needs in order to know and to outguess the “other.” She must know him well if she would not deny him anything, wanting, as she does, to outshine all other women in his life (and most especially his mother) yet fearful that this may not be so.

None of this means that she is necessarily promiscuous. Many such women manage to fulfill their functions as practice fields quite adequately with only three or two or even, sometimes (depending on the importance of the man in question), with only one man.

A woman changes her life by changing to another man. A new man is her way of going through transformations and epiphanies. Sometimes she tries not to cause another woman pain while at the same time trying to please the other woman's man. Such a woman knows that she is handsomer than most wives.

* * * *

Such a woman is full of breathless enthusiasm for almost everything, and yet not indiscriminately so. All impermissible brands of sentimentality held in check. Also all exudings, emanations, effluvium ... all kept to a minimum so that the only blood seen or even suspected is from small cuts such as a paper cut on her thumb as she prepares, perhaps, the carrots for his salad. The drops of this blood are never larger than miniature roses which are her favorite flowers.

* * * *

Such a woman gives the world that personal touch.

* * * *

She has neither the breasts of a ballet dancer nor those of a yenta.

* * * *

Such a woman doesn't last long though she counts on duration. Duration is, in fact, what she cares about more than any other thing: duration of love (how string love out for as long as possible?) and duration of youth and beauty. In other words, she waits. She waits for him to return. She waits for his desire. Also there is the duration of motherhood, having sometimes had his children. Motherhood is of longer duration than she thought it would be and fraught with pitfalls. (She is waiting for the children in many of the same ways that she has waited for the “significant other.” She waits, in fact, for them to grow up.)

* * * *

For a long time no one knows how old she really is. These days a woman can be anywhere from twenty-eight to almost forty-six and one hardly knows the difference.

* * * *

A woman is a field of endeavor filled with pitfalls, and, in the end, she, herself, becomes the pitfall ... becomes the pit that she, herself, falls into. When this happens, not wanting to fly in the face of custom or society nor to lose her hold on reality, she, therefore, dresses for the new part, and suddenly no more bikinis.

She feels she has only herself to blame. Somehow she has allowed herself to grow old.

* * * *

A woman is a field upon which to lay a hand in order to distribute pleasure as one sees fit, and so, having pointed this out, the significant other may well lay and hand on several women consecutively for exactly this purpose so that such a woman is thinking: “What's the use?” for the fifth or sixth time, and is, perhaps this time, not to blame for her own distress. But, on the other hand, perhaps this also is her own fault. Perhaps such a woman has not given of herself even yet to such a degree that fidelity—the fidelity for which she has waited and waited—has, therefore, not been bestowed upon her.

And there are always flaws even when not visible to the naked eye and, even if not fatal they are fatal in the long run. There may be a touch of impatience or a general apprehensiveness. Worse yet, there may be a mole on the cheek or a birth mark on the thigh, breasts a bit pendulous. There are clearly flaws even in the best of women. Though the flaws are small, they may have declared themselves first, before the woman “spoke” of her own accord. A woman does, therefore, mix her perfection with defects, and now, just at the time in her life when she yearns to improve, such a woman will find herself on the decline in spite of having taken vigorous measures. Suddenly her real age shows. Suddenly she can't get into the positions for her lover. Suddenly she has begun to limp and sputter.

Such a woman may be found floating face down just off shore, perhaps (for once) wanting to be seen from another angle entirely. She may be brought back to life by a quick blow to the solar plexus and a few pats on the back and, if so, will wonder for the rest of her days if she had been thrown overboard, or if she had jumped in by herself. Or if, on the other hand, she had been set adrift in a small unseaworthy boat, and, if so, by whom? And by whose hand now raised up and why? And (especially) is it someone she can count on? And for how long?

* * * *

If there appears suddenly on the streets, as though from nowhere, a woman without language or money, wondering how she got here and where is the man who had provided for her? She says, “Ah, ah, ah, ah,” and waits at a cross road. “Ah, ah, ah.” Who will teach her the ways of the world and to speak and to speak out? There must be thousands of such women wandering about wondering how to proceed, all dressed up and with too much make-up, hobbling in high heels and mouthing gibberish. It's as if it was the playing field itself that has lost the game. More likely it's exactly as the Mayans said (their worst curse of all): You will not be allowed to play ball!

* * * *

But what if one such woman meets another and recognizes her as someone in the same plight? What if four or five of them find a common street corner? Mouthing gibberish, yes, but significant gibberish? They have keys that no longer fit locks. They have their bobby pins. They have nail files and pencils, assorted pills, garters, the heels of their high heeled shoes, and they have nothing more to lose. But the “significant other” ... all the “significant others” are not uneasy. In fact they do not think about such women at all.

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The Entertainers

Kara Kellar Bell has an Honours degree in Film and Media, and lives in the West of Scotland. Her writing has appeared in Bonfire, QWF, The Gay Read, Orphan Leaf Review, Aesthetica, Open Wide, the Showcase at laurahird.com, among other publications. She is currently completing a literary thriller.

Katharine Beutner lives in Austin, Texas, where she writes novels, eats fish tacos, and studies for advanced degrees in unremunerative fields. This is her first publication.

Gwenda Bond shoots big fish in big ponds. From Kentucky, or other, less interesting places, her blog can be found here: gwendabond.typepad.com

K.E. Duffin is the author of a collection of poems, King Vulture (University of Arkansas Press). Her poems have appeared in Agni, Chelsea, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, The New Orleans Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rattapallax, The Sewanee Review, Verse, and have been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. A painter and printmaker, Duffin lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Carol Emshwiller was recently awarded a Life Achievement World Fantasy Award. She is the author of the a number of collections, including Report to the Men's Club and I Live With You, and the novels The Mount, Carmen Dog, Ledoyt, and the upcoming Secret City.

Andrew Fort writes fiction when he is not hunting bears, panthers, dragons, or dinosaurs with a Tinkertoy gun. He lives with his wife Jennifer and son Noah in Portland, Oregon, where they are sometimes gloomy but never S.A.D. His limited-edition novel The Emerald Ballroom is available through readingfrenzy.com or powells.com.

Previously an equestrian and chamber musician, D. M. Gordon moved to The Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts and drank the waters. Now she writes. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Nimrod, Weber Studies, and the Northwest Review. She is a 2006 finalist for the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant in fiction, and a 2004 finalist for the same in poetry.

Nancy Jane Moore's novella Changeling is part of the Conversation Pieces series from Aqueduct Press. She expresses political opinions on In This Moment at hopeandpolitics.blogspot.com and home.earthlink.net/~nancyjane

Dennis Nau graduated from St. Thomas College in St. Paul in 1971, educated to teach high school English but with a burning desire to conquer the world with his guitar. He was able to do neither. His stories have been published in Heartlands and Big Muddy. He is the mayor of Gibbon, Minnesota, and gets to discuss interesting subjects like barking dogs and cat licensing on a daily basis.

David Erik Nelson is a co-founder and editor for Poor Mojo's Almanac(k) (poormojo.org), purveyor of fine prose, poetry and advice from the Giant Squid. Mr. Nelson is startlingly accurate with a small caliber pistol, and he is Cara Spindler's husband.

Daniel Rabuzzi lived in Norway and Germany, earning degrees in folklore and history. An executive in an education non-profit by day, Daniel explores a world called Yount by night and on weekends. Having finished one novel about Yount, Daniel is working on a sequel and hopes to share Yount with other pilgrims soon.

If you're the sort who keeps an ear glued to the keyhole, your eyes on the ground, and your head on the railroad track, you might have seen Eric Schaller's cartoons featuring the character Sad Bird in the zine The White Buffalo Gazette. He contributed illustrations to Jeff VanderMeer's The City of Saints and Madmen and has fiction forthcoming in Postscripts and The New Book of Masks.

Cara Spindler lives and works in Michigan. A long, long time ago, her favorite book was The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. She is suitably ashamed of this, but is willing to admit people are fallible (now).

Anna Tambour currently lives in the Australian bush with a large family of other species, including one man. Her collection Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & and her novel Spotted Lily are Locus Recommended Reading List selections. Website: annatambour.net; blog: medlarcomfits.blogspot.com

Ray Vukcevich's collection, Meet Me in the Moon Room, was published by Small Beer Press, and his novel, The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces, by St. Martin's. He also works as a programmer in a couple of university brain labs in Oregon.

Laura Lee Washburn is an Associate Professor of English at Pittsburgh State U., an editorial board member of the Woodley Memorial Press, and the author of This Good Warm Place (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Carolina Quarterly, Quarterly West, The Sun, and Clackamas Review.

Visit www.lcrw.net for information on additional titles by this and other authors.

Table of Contents

Welcome to the nineteenth issue of

Tubs

How the Burkhina Faso Bicycle Fell Apart

Grebe's Gift

Dropkick

Phone Call Overheard on the Subway

The Troll in the Cellar

You Were Neither Hot Nor Cold, But Lukewarm, and So I Spit You Out

Things That Make One's Heart Beat Faster

The Bride

Dear Aunt Gwenda

Lady Perdita Espadrille

The Slime: A Love Story

Sliding

Such a Woman, Or, Sixties Rant

The Entertainers

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