Fifteen years ago my sister married an Italian boy, equal parts smug and charming, unreasonably handsome.  To see this young man was to see beauty clogged in someone who didn’t deserve it.  This boy worked a pear orchard in Northernmost Africa.  His and my sister’s paths had crossed while swaging across Europe.  My sister assured our mother that her newfound home was a short boat ride to Spain.  We all thought she was sacrificing too much for this boy.  Father said she would come to her senses eventually; the hard days would work their way into her with a curative effect.

       But my sister was happy living in the ‘old world’, climbing ladders all day with her nose up in the blossoms, dropping fruits into pails.  Mornings they ate sweet biscuits with sliced pears.  At sunset they stewed pears in honey like the Romans had; this was once, her husband explained, the only way for a Roman to eat a pear.  One assumed sex was had like a meal, neither rushed nor leisurely, two or three times a day, he being the kind of man who used orgasms to recalibrate his ambitions.

       After the harvest my sister would wrap whole volumes of dazzling pears in tissue paper, snuggle them into fancy gift boxes and slingshot the pears all across the globe.  Those flawed—with nicks, dents or soft spots—they sold in town at a discount and kept some for themselves.  Those grossly imperfect—doomed from the start, twisted messes or sauce under the skin—she bestowed to clans of barefooted children who danced at the gates; in one of her letters she described these children: dark and scuffed as unwashed plums.  Flighty and wild like the birds.

       Eventually, I too met a man.  We married quickly and had three sons, one right after the other.  Though I had always hoped to avoid those trite suburban benchmarks—we came to measure our life in thread counts, inches around the waist, square-footage, horsepower.  These measurements fell around us as nets fall from the trees over forest creatures, and we lived (even happily) within their confines, keeping us from the wild, the wild from us.  But every day I thought of my sister who had made a lusty and savage adventure of her life.

       When our third son was born my sister surprised us with a visit.  Five years she had been away from America.  She arrived in a simple muslin dress, her only glamour in the leanness of her body, her deeply bronzed skin.  Though she came without her husband, she talked lovingly of him, of how he had found his way into a circle of people who were both bohemian and strangely powerful.  The Dragonflies, she called these people.  We did not ask.  She smiled at the children but did not care to hold them.  A quietness resided in my sister that was not there before.  My father guessed serenity.  I guessed anxiety.  My mother said, she’s not a girl anymore, that’s all.  On the last evening of her visit she vehemently scolded us for eating imitation butter, for drinking skim milk; then she laughed—a quavering maudlin laughter—and she said, what the hell difference does it make, what do I know?

       In her letters, for the longest time, she claimed to be happier than ever, at the core of a simple formula.  A white woman in Africa basking in a web of pears that stretched out forever.  She wrote again and again to say that she didn’t miss her former life, she didn’t miss America at all, and she wasn’t ever returning for more than a visit.

       Several years ago my sister fell out of touch for a terrifying length of time.  Incommunicado is the only word she uses now to explain that year when her signal had faded.  And a mischievous smile, not of the mouth but of the eyes.  From a town in Northern Italy my parents received one cryptic postcard (typed, nothing hand-written).  TRAVELING.  MUCH LOVE. One evening a crazed woman knocked at my parent’s door, gibberish spewing from her mouth, and my mother swore to have heard my sister’s name thinly laced in this woman’s rant.  My father said, no darling, you’re imagining things.  We were a few days shy of purchasing plane tickets when there came a lengthy hand-written letter telling the story of a gluttonous bug that had picked the locks on the trees, plague had found the orchard, the pears were done.  My sister and her husband were living farther south, away from the sea, raising crops for a church.

       She returned to us with one large suitcase, fine lines etched into her forehead, around her eyes.  The life she had lived with her very pretty husband, she said, was rotted as the trees that once dropped whole tides of pears; never again would she hear of him, nor he of her.

       My sister lives in her girlhood bedroom, rides a bike to a coffeehouse where she works with a tribe of lazy children half her age.  We have her over for dinner.  She doesn’t mention the butter or milk.  I am certain from the look in her eyes that she sees the richness in my life, the deep value in the children, in the real estate, in the labyrinth we’ve built for ourselves.  See the swimming pool, like a turquoise jewel pressed into the grass.  See the car in the car in the garage, like a diamond in its box.  Jealousy takes its swift clean bites from the heart.  I know.

       But my sister isn’t altogether unhappy, she has her secrets; she herself is an object of intrigue.  What life did she live in Africa?  Was it the one in her letters?  You look at someone and you see that they have flooded their former lungs, a tidal wave of secrets receding to the edges of the soul.  There is something precise—a love? a crime? a reckless evening?—a morsel vaulted deep inside her, she clings to it like a divine meal she enjoyed many years ago, all of it passed through her body, but oh, the memory!  The pears!  The man!  The children who danced at the gates!  And the rest of it that she kept for herself.  Don’t I want whole years that were mine, braided with the salt smell of the sea and a lust that yielded to nothing?   It is unclear as to which one of us has missed her chance.

1. Always Follow Directions
       It’s the second time this week that a client has been attacked because they strayed out of bounds to get a better picture—seems like there’s one on every trip who thinks they’re too good for the rules and I say they get what they deserve. Sweat stings my eyes as I stumble along the jungle trail with the power blower strapped to my back.
       Mr. Brant is somewhere under the twelve-foot tall bird-mass and it’s my job to get to him before he suffocates. Leith yanks the starter cord on the five-horsepower engine behind me and the trusty Tanaka two-stroke roars to life on the first pull. I grip the output wand with both hands, playing the five-thousand cubic foot per second blast in practiced arcs back and forth over the surface of the mass, peeling away layer upon layer of birds.
       The sky darkens as the Venezuelan cliff swallows disperse by the thousands, possibly more than ten thousand in this mass, and take to the air. After five minutes I’m down to the innermost layer of swallows, the specialized Guard Birds which undoubtedly were the first to give the alarm and attack, all males and three times the size of a normal swallow. I ramp up the throttle to dislodge these larger creatures, and finally they, too, take wing. Off to the sides are dozens of bodies of ordinary Venezuelan cliff swallows who themselves suffocated, sacrificing their lives to protect their communal nesting grounds in an impressive display of cooperative defense.
       With Mr. Brant free of birds, I shut down the engine and before I can doff my pack, Leith and Sara are by the man’s side checking for pulse and respiration. His color’s good and I relax a little; he’s going to be fine and we don’t need an Incident Report and another mark against our insurance.
       “I think he’ll be OK in a few minutes if we just back off and give him some air,” I suggest.
       Sara shakes her head gravely and reaches for her radio; she’s going to call in the Medivac helicopter.
       “You know the motto of Avian Adventure Outfitters,” she says. “‘If swallowed, seek medical attention immediately.’”

2. Good Old-Fashioned Calamine Lotion
       The Right Reverend Cotton Mather Wool, named for a silver-tongued Puritan minister whose exuberant campaign of genocide against the peaceful Narragansetts opened up a significant chunk of New England for settlement by God’s chosen, was proud of his namesake. He knew that as long as he stayed in North America, chances were he wouldn’t encounter anyone who knew of Cotton Mather’s dark passion, and with a moniker like ‘Puritan,’ how could you go wrong?
       Rev. Wool wore a smug smile as he polished the brass nameplate on the wall outside his office, a nameplate announcing to the world, or to the portion thereof that somehow found its way to, or past, his office, that he was the Solemn Premier Benedictor in the Fourth Order Prefectory of the Calvinist Church of the Reformed Christ, North American Branch. He had worked his Right Reverend ass off to get that post.
       Down on the ground floor, a wan young man leaned against a heavy oak door until it yielded, stepped in from the bright sunshine and let the door thud shut behind him. Inside was cool and musty and he blinked in the semi-darkness. After some minutes he could make out the form of a white-haired Curate dozing behind the reception desk.
       “Excuse me?” said the young man in a timid voice.
       The Curate startled, then blushed deeply, though the college student couldn’t see this in the dim light.
       The old man coughed. “Yes, yes, how may I help you, my son?”
       “I’m here about the Part-Time Assistant to the Secretary to the Administrative Assistant to the Solemn Premier Benedictor in the Fourth Order Prefectory of the Calvinist Church of the Reformed Christ, North American Branch.”
       “Yes, yes, of course,” wheezed the Curate. “Take the stairs behind me to the second floor, turn left, room two-ninety, apply with Cotton Wool.”

3. Television Remotes and Other Toxic Substances
       “As you know, the world summit on the Mars Rover Parasite epidemic has been moved here to the arctic where our isolation has spared us, at least so far, from infection. I’m told even the UN headquarters has been breached by grade-schoolers, word has it they’ve eaten every adult who was left in the building, so sad. Welcome, then, distinguished guests, all of you before me as well as those watching around the world via satellite link, welcome to Iqualuit, Nunavut.” And with that, the old Inuit chief sat down.
       The floor of the Iqualuit Community Center vibrated to the thrum of the diesel generator just outside which powered the broadcast equipment and the Center, and as a result the podium migrated toward the audience whenever it was vacated. As Ban Ki-Moon approached the podium, it approached him and he caught it, pushed it to the front and held tight.
       “I see a lot of somber faces,” he began. “There isn’t a person here who hasn’t been touched by this tragedy, and I am truly sorry for your losses.” He cast his eyes downward for a moment and paused. “Recent breakthroughs, though, offer some hope. What we’ve long suspected is now confirmed: hormone production at the onset of puberty is what protects us from the Martian scourge. For Martians it’s the equivalent of head lice, but for us—” He shuddered. “It ravages our children’s nervous system and turns them into ferocious cannibals.”
       “This morning we’ll be hearing about new in utero hormone treatments. If they work, humans will have parasite immunity from birth.” The room erupted into applause, and Mr. Ban smiled briefly. “There may be some unwanted effects but it’s our best hope for survival as a species.”
       “Later today we’ll convene a panel on new lightweight leg armor which can be pressed from natural fibers such as hemp or bamboo. This should make it accessible to just about everyone, greatly reducing injuries from small children. Finally, this evening we’ll get an update on the race for a cure. It could be just around the corner. But until that day, ladies and gentlemen,” He paused and looked around for emphasis. “Keep out of reach of children.”

4. Various and Sundry Liquids
       Emmy Bly found there’s nothing like a mud-rotary drill rig working right outside one’s home to bring on headaches. Diesel exhaust permeated the house and vibrations from the drill shook dust out from between ancient floorboards; she’d had a migraine five days running.
       On day six the foreman announced they’d hit a high-yield formation and would finish the next day. Emmy clutched a fistful of shawl to her breast. “Praise the Lord!”
       “Got that right, sister.” Jim-Bob spat tobacco juice into her marigolds. “We’ll set casing in the morning, drop the pump, take care of a few details an’ we’re outta here.” He spat again.
       The following day she watched expectantly as Jim-Bob and a young apprentice pounded casing, bang, clang, bang, but it was music to Emmy’s ears since it heralded the end of the ordeal. She watched the fuel truck leave, followed by the cube van with all their tools and spare parts. Finally the derrick came down and the outriggers went up. The apprentice left in his car and Emmy waited for Jim-Bob to drive off in the drill rig.
       But he sat in the cab chewing tobacco. Emmy twisted the corner of her shawl and pursed her lips. When the apprentice returned with a take-out bag, Emmy frowned.
       As the wide-eyed apprentice looked on, Jim-Bob unbolted the cap from the top of the well casing and poured a large milkshake down the well. Emmy Bly’s mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.
        She stomped out red-faced, her silent mouth working, but Jim-Bob held up a hand.
       “Hang on, sister, b’fore you have a cow, I gotta show you this.” He squatted next to the casing and pointed to a bright yellow sticker with bold black lettering. “Jes’ read that, Ma’am, if you please.”
       Emmy leaned over and pushed her glasses up on her nose. “My goodness, I’ve misjudged you, Jim-Bob. It clearly says ‘Shake well before using.’”

        1. The House
        As a comedian, I’m well aware of the sacrifice I make. Even the most genius of jokes is doomed to not hold up. Watch:
        There’s this glass house, and yes, it’s Christian, but it’s done, supposedly, in a loving way. Who cares, right? I mean, I’ve never been much for roadside attractions. But I guess people love it. There’s something on the Internet about it every day, and it’s made me start to wonder what’s inside.
        My own house, the one I live in, an apartment, is devoid of windows. The silverfish scurry, screaming, in my wake. My boyfriend says he likes it this way, the world growing steadily uglier and uglier since antiquity, the discarded, tarnished energy collecting like grime.
I’m trying to develop an act based on discomfort. I want to elicit the type of laughter—terrified, cramped—the type that comes from sorrow.
        That’s what they mean when they say I brought the house down.
        I watched a documentary about lights over Phoenix. One woman said the lights, which were amber and had floated silently above her, were aliens’ tentative attempts at saying hello, their way of letting us know they’re here without freaking us out. I know it seems obvious, but I was struck. It’s like the fish noticing the humans. The babysitter’s face when she hears the words I’m in the house.
        My act has been getting a lot of laughs. It’s been described as feminine, organized, composed of longer stories. My boyfriend’s routine is more frenetic and influenced by weed. Really, though, I think people prefer to see some effort.
        We’re both performing this Friday at the Moment. It could get a little competitive.
        I think I’m going to tell the one about his ex-boyfriend, how he goes to the same therapist as me. Okay, how does this sound:
         I just turned 30. I know, I know, I’m floundering. I mean you turn 30, you reach the very furthest corners of the room that is your brain, and then what do you do? You greet those corners, right? You scrape them squeaky-grimy with a little dab of spittle on your finger. You keep them laughing for the hour or the decade they need to be kept that way, and then once they don’t know why they’re laughing anymore, you throw yourself before your dour enemy, tragedy, the victorious ally of time.

        2. The Moment
        My boyfriend’s ex-boyfriend’s name is Jack, and he’s staring at me like his pupils weigh fifty pounds. I didn’t invite him, and neither did my boyfriend, I believe him when he says this. When it comes to ethics, he’s fathoms beyond my therapist.
        I look at Jack and understand: all the neon colors that thrash beneath metallics, pinched along the same bright latitude of the eye. I’m warming to him, believe me.
        They just, unthinkingly, announced my name.
        Welcome to the Moment, I tell them. Thank you for coming out tonight. Even through the barrier glare, I see my boyfriend hunched over his notes. His stonerism, pure poseury.
        Jack, I say into the mic, because he’s huddled up next to my boyfriend and laughing. Jack, I say again, then Jackmeoff. The cheapest sort of humor, no? The kind that survives.
        I’m hit with a feeling of comfort amid the encroaching unease, a warmth beyond the sound of a distant honking horn. The Moment is a really nice place, I say, deciding to embrace that comfort. Maybe I should leave the house more often.
        I don’t know why I bother living with my boyfriend. I once dreamt something insane draped over him as he straddled me. He hunched and bucked and it billowed like a heat mirage.
        How could I have forgotten my fishdom, my goal of wriggling Henry David Through? Life is tricky like that, the various things that mesmerize. You stand transfixed, watching nodules of rice that sink in cold water, when really each is as unique as a fly being tied.
        I told this to my therapist, who wrote it down. Then looked at me like she already knew.
        When will you start keeping track of the things that pass you by, she said.
        Can you believe it? I came to her asking for direction.
        Nobody’s entirely in their element, she continued. Some creatures live their whole lives as fish out of water. Let yourself have some imagination. Pretend you’re a child, for once. Either that or retired.
        I bet you tell the same thing to Jack.
        Damn straight, she said. You’re the one who recommended me to him.
        As usual, my therapist has handed me a punchline on a platter. And whether that platter is glass or Carnival glass or flaking silver plate remains to be seen.
        As of now, here at the Moment, unnatural laughter all around—and don’t get me wrong, Chaucer, it’s refreshing—, I’m already planning a road trip, a solitary pilgrimage inside that house of glass.

          One morning when the light was still yellow-tinted and not yet white, I hauled a load of laundry down a flight of stairs to our apartment complex’s shared washer and dryer. There are only eight units here, four on the lower level, four above. I started the wash slowly, relishing each dirty piece of underwear, happy about building a life with my lover, dirty sheets and all. As I loaded panties, shirts, socks into the machine, Elizabeth, our neighbor in G, watched The Sound of Music. I could hear it humming through the walls, the only thing any of us shared aside from the laundry room and part of an address. I smiled as I heard the words Soon her Mama with a gleaming gloat heard, and I smiled as I thought of the scene, all the kids and Fräulein Maria and their frantic puppet show. Once I told my sister that I wanted six children. It was the perfect number, I told her. The Von Trapps had seven, and that was one too many. My sister, who was obsessively acting out motions in fives or numbers divisible by five, disagreed. She said five was the best number, and I thought of her then tapping her fingers on the bedroom wall, opening and shutting doors (one-two-three-four-five!), counting her steps down the hallway, leaping so that her feet would only touch the carpet five times. My sister said that five was the best number, and she thought if she failed to shut the door a fifth time that one of us would immediately die.

          Roberto Bolaño tells stories like my mother, not in a linear fashion, but around an entire universe. You think he starts moving in a straight line, but his line is not only curving, forming wide ellipses and sweeping arcs, it is also traveling around multiple geometric planes. My mother, when asked what’s for dinner, will start with what happened at work that day, what song was playing on the radio, who called her while she was in the grocery store, and sometimes she’ll forget to tell you what’s for dinner. The plot, simply, is that our neighbor is dead, and the only time I thought of her fondly was the day I loaded laundry, singing along with the Von Trapp children and thinking of my sister. I, like Bolaño and my mother, want to tell you more, what car was driving by, what she did right before she died, what flowers were blooming and which ones were shriveling into themselves, like Elizabeth. She died yesterday. Any day a reader newly finds this, Elizabeth will have always died yesterday, and therefore here, I am always alive.

          The neighbors below us have two small children, and one day the toddler put his fleshy hand to the wall and exclaimed, “Hot, hot!” His parents rolled their eyes, because although they were excited about Barkley starting to use words, he was in no way using them correctly, which made communication just as difficult as when he merely cooed and giggled. But this day Barkley was right, the wall was hot. Every time we showered or washed dishes above them, the hot water gushed from the old, rotting pipes, filling the walls below ours with hot water. After several minutes of trying to communicate with his parents, Barkley gave up and went back to his train set. Later that night the mother cradled her newborn in her left arm, and as she reached for a towel in the bathroom, her right hand sensed a heat radiating from the wall. “Barkley!” she cried, “you were right! The wall is hot!” Then the mother scrunched her face up, because walls aren’t supposed to be hot, especially not hot enough to make your fingers throb, and she called in her husband, who called the landlord, who called the plumber to fix the pipes.

          The plumbers were in our apartment banging and clanking into the wall to expose its innards. My fiancé had just gotten two new microphones, and he connected them by a short bar, mimicking with the microphones the placement of each of our ears and the jumbled space between them. As a sound enthusiast, one who hears a noise and is suddenly lost in its meaning, the physics of the sound wave, the bouncing of invisible reflections from their origin to his perked ears, my fiancé wanted to record the plumbers busting through our wall with a sledgehammer. He told Carlos, the English-speaking plumber, that he would be recording, and Carlos said, Cool, buddy. Through headphones he listened to each sound as he captured it, each bass heavy thud and each melodic syllable that the plumbers spoke in Spanish to each other, and he smiled imagining them at work just two walls away. His ears had grown to him like a second set of eyes, but better, like x-ray vision.

          When the work was finished for the day, the plumber asked if we knew the woman in G. He said that he knocked on her door to tell her the water would be turned off for a few hours. He could see her through the open blinds sitting in a chair, he said, her neck craned backwards and mouth hung open. He noticed she had headphones on, so he banged more loudly on the door, thinking she was sleeping deeply to some of her favorite songs, probably Beethoven or some shit, he said. I thought she could have been listening to The Sound of Music, maybe: There’s a sad sort of clanging from the clock in the hall and the bells in the steeple, too. Maybe she’s dead, the plumber told us. Maybe she is, I said, I’ve never seen a dead body except for at funerals. The plumber told us that he had seen two dead bodies, and that one was a man named Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson was pretty old, he said, and the job at Mr. Wilson’s was taking place mostly outdoors. On the last day of the job, the plumber went to tell Mr. Wilson he had finished, and when he found Mr. Wilson’s door locked he easily picked it and let himself inside. He knew something was wrong right away, he told us, and he went from room to room with an eerie feeling, while saying Mr. Wilson!, but not expecting anything good to come of it. Then he saw Mr. Wilson lying on his bed, hands folded gently on his stomach. In Mr. Wilson’s kitchen, Carlos called the police and the list of numbers Mr. Wilson had posted on his fridge, he said, not wanting to be blamed for killing the old white man.

          His partner, probably tired of all the talking and ready to head home, walked to Elizabeth’s door and banged again. It was so loud that my fiancé winced, covering his ears with two smooth hands. Nada! he shouted to Carlos, shaking his head. Someone needs to call the cops, Carlos said as he packed up his tools. See you tomorrow, he said, and we waved.

          What if she knew she was dying, my fiancé said, and she put on her favorite music, stayed up all night to watch the sunrise, and then just drifted up or away, or wherever you drift. I nodded, considering that, and then I said: what if she got up and drank a cup of coffee, went down to the laundry room and started a load of laundry, and then, as she waited, she put her headphones on and just died, right there, with you recording it and her laundry just spinning away. Don’t be morbid, my fiancé told me, because dying is one thing, but dying and leaving your clothes damp in our shared washing machine is quite another. I thought the laundry would have added a poetic touch, but I didn’t say so because I was thinking of ghosts. The policemen came to our apartment complex, and we waited to be interviewed but that never happened. We imagined the cop sitting in Elizabeth’s apartment, waiting for something — the coroner? the homicide detective? her family? Do you think he’s drinking her tequila?, I asked my fiancé. The detectives in 2666 do that, they show up at a dead person’s house and sit and drink tequila while the body gets colder and colder, I told him. No, he’s not drinking tequila, he said. That’s crazy. Then we got high and my fiancé played guitar while I made up a song about Elizabeth in the style of Bob Dylan: Eeeeeee-lizabeth, started coffee, loaded laundry, put on her favorite song. My fiancé told me to stop, that I was scaring him, and I was scaring myself, too, so I stopped. We popped open cans of Miller Lite, tapped them together — to Elizabeth! — and we drank like only the living can.

          That night in bed I thought the room was darker than normal. We never saw policemen or firemen take Elizabeth away, and I wondered whether her body was still there in the chair as Carlos had described it, mouth open and drool pooled on her shirt. I was too afraid to ask my fiancé what he thought. With my chest pressed to my fiancé’s back, I tried to think about happy things: girls in white dresses with blue satin — no, that wouldn’t work. One word tickled the tip of my tongue, a shameful, ridiculous word: zombie.

          I woke up without a nightmarish zombie or ghost encounter, and for that I thanked the dream-gods. Carlos and his partner returned while we were eating lunch, and in an odd way we were excited to see them, to invite more life into our apartment. We told Carlos that Elizabeth had definitely died, although in reality we weren’t sure; we hadn’t seen her remains, we hadn’t confirmed with anyone. As we slurped down our spicy ramen noodles, Carlos told us that he had dreamt about Elizabeth, and that in the dream he told her he was shutting the water off and she said okay and she was walking around her apartment. Carlos told his wife that she had visited him, that she was thanking him for finding her, because who knows how long she would have sat in that chair had he not been there to fix our pipes. Our eyes watered from the spice. That was the first dead body I’ve ever seen, said Carlos, and my fiancé and I exchanged glances, remembering the story of Mr. Wilson. Carlos walked out to find his partner. He’s an Elliot, I said to my fiancé, recalling someone we once knew. Elliot, the type that enjoys telling stories, that gets intoxicated on details that aren’t totally true or false. Sometimes Elliots will forget what the truth is, since they’ve spun their yarn in so many different ways. They don’t mean any harm, but fact and fiction, to them, are one mangled, hairy, two-headed beast. My fiancé nodded and drank down the spicy remains of the ramen.

          The plumbing was complete and we were alone again, and although the pipes were fixed, there were still holes in our wall covered with sheer plastic, where I imagined blurry little ghosts hiding. I wanted to see a policeman or detective. I wanted to be asked questions: Did Elizabeth seem depressed? Did she contemplate suicide? Was there anyone who might want to cause her harm? But no one asked these questions, or maybe they just weren’t asked to me.

          Here is what I would have told them: A blue Chevrolet was driving by. A black bird settled in the branches outside my window. Elizabeth died. Our pipes were fixed.

Noor is forty-one, tan in February, with feet worn smooth and hard by seven months of walking on sand. She lives in a tent in the desert and cooks meals for tourists. For seven months now she has not taken a bath, or eaten a taco, or seen a flower that isn’t made of plastic. Her name isn’t really Noor, but she’s trying to forget that. It helps that no one at Sunset Camp knows her other name, not even Brahim, the man who’s trying to convince her to marry him.

A year ago she was in Minnesota, working the file room in the hospital’s ID clinic. A few things had gone wrong, money things, and soon she felt so poor then that she was unable to think about anything else. But sometimes now, lying on a straw mattress in her canvas tent, she thinks about how many things she used to own:  a coffee machine, small decorative pillows, a hair dryer, a bus pas, a Zen rock garden with a tiny rake to push the sand around to create soothing patterns, which she used to distract herself when the other stuff was at its worst.

Yes and she had even had a house, though they’d been trying pretty hard to take that away from her; well, by now, they’d probably succeeded. There were mortgage issues. It had got so bad by the end that she had just stopped answering her phone because nearly every call was a trap. She would pick up expecting a friendly voice, or a voice at all, and instead it would be a computer threatening her with — what? She never knew, because she’d always hang up before they got to the part with the consequences. But she could imagine. Soon enough they’d started using their better tricks, shuffling their area codes and putting real human voices on the line to try to coax her to talk. But by then she’d gotten the idea of leaving in her head, and nothing they could do could scare her.

It had been easy enough to leave her house behind. She hadn’t even loved the place. Sometimes, actually, quite the opposite — the rotten boards on the back porch, the moldy grout in the upstairs bathroom, the basement smell that had infiltrated the whole house. Maybe it was something in the heating system, her mother had suggested, that made the place smell like that. “Like what?” Noor had snapped. She thought, somehow, that the smell might be noticeable only to her, because she spent so much time in the house. But no, the part of her that had still been thinking straight knew that she’d only gotten used to it; whenever she came back from getting groceries, the stink was much stronger, mineral and stale and damp all at once. So that had been when she stopped leaving the house.

Around February of that winter, all money had started to feel imaginary, like everyone —the boy who delivered the groceries she couldn’t afford and the exasperated callers from her mortgage company and her fretting mother  — was undergoing a collective hallucination, or maybe it was just a great joke they were all playing on each other. See these numbers? Let’s pretend that they’re real, that they matter. The most complicated joke in the world, and therefore the best one. The joke so good it had forgotten it was a joke.

Not that you’d call this period of her life “funny.” “It feels like people are coming in the middle of the night and doing surgery on me while I sleep,” she remembers telling her mother. “Taking parts of me out and doing a shitty job sewing me back up when they’re done.” This had made her mother cry, but how could that be helped? It was true. There hadn’t been any obvious scars, just a stomach-centered pain to wake up to and the ambient feeling of loss. The sense of some vital process not being taken care of.

She spent a lot of time on the internet, which is where she found them: the Bedouin camp 6000 miles away that provided volunteers with a tent and simple daily meals in exchange for “hard work, a positive attitude, and team spirit.” And immediately it had been obvious:  of course the desert was what she was looking for. What was it, after all, but nature’s monument to emptiness? When she was younger, she had been an expert at running away; the problem was, she had also gotten too good at slinking back, apologizing, starting all over again. What she needed, she realized, was a place where she could deny herself everything, even grass, even birds. She would pare down what there was to think about until it was just water, sand, sky, a flat horizon and the search for something to eat. A place from which never to return.

Although when she got there, it didn’t turn out to be quite so desolate as she had hoped. The camp was a ring of black canvas tents for sleeping in, plus a cement-floored kitchen, a bathroom, a cistern for water, a place to tether the tourists’ camels. It was owned by a fat man who lived in town, and run by a handful of his lanky, Bedouin sons — he had 18, from his four wives.

But after even just a week, she hardly knew herself:  here she was, cooing over a camel’s pretty, moony eyes; here she was, mopping the foul-smelling bathroom; here she was, digging the truck out of the sand bank Yussef had mired it in and laughing about it. At night the Bedouin boys built a fire in the pit in the center of the biggest tent, and while the old men smoked outside the young ones stuck batteries in the cassette player and danced around the fire. Noor sat in the corner with her sugary tea and thought:  it is impossible what my life once was, what it is now.

But that was seven months ago, when the desert had still seemed like a place she might lose herself in. Now she knows better. Every day she follows her own footprints from the cooking tent to the dining tent, from her sleeping tent to the sunrise rock and back again. She would wear an actual rut in the ground, she thinks, if the sand didn’t fill in her tracks.

She’s been here so long and conducted herself so sensibly that they’ve made her the business manager. What that means is that three times a week she gets to hitch a ride into town to make phone calls. Town is 14 kilometers away, and there isn’t much to it — a sprawl of cinderblock houses, empty plots edged with barbed wire, camel shit everywhere, unappealing local candy, tourists wrapped up in scarves like Lawrence of Arabia. Still, it is at least another place.

Sometimes she thinks that she might marry Brahim for just that reason — in its own way, marriage might be another place.

She needs places, all the places she can get, because there is no way now for her to leave. She has no money, and she’s ruined things at home for herself. Her life here consists of:  the cat-piss smelling tent, the fine film of sand on her skin, sand everywhere, actually, embedded in the weave of her clothes so that everything she owns is tinted orange now, little piles of sand in the cuffs of her jeans, and slowly filling her shoes; small heaps in the sleeping bag every morning when she wakes up; sand in her hair; sand on her fingertips that she can’t wash away so that no matter what she touches, it feels like sand.

Brahim is kind enough to her, but tonight after an Australian tourist sneaks her rum, Noor will pick a fight with him over how messy the kitchen area is getting. She can’t marry Brahim and he knows it, because then she won’t be allowed to talk to other men and what would she do then, just sit in the tent even more than she already does? This is not what she will scream at him about, though. Instead, she’ll push the teapot over into the sand — this is very rude, and she will be instantly ashamed of herself, and sorry for whichever old man will now have to brew more, but once the action is started she won’t be able to help herself. She’ll walk out into the desert and when no one tries to stop her, she’ll just keep going. She’ll feel like she did when she secretly sold her mother’s computer and used the profit to buy the plane ticket to come here:  impressed but also a little terrified at her own ability to do things that aren’t easily undone.

It will be night, and she won’t be able to see which direction she’s heading, though she’ll aim away from town. As she walks, she’ll think about how she’s found plenty of skeleton scraps in the desert before, goat skulls and camel shinbones and sinister chips that could’ve been from anything. There are campfire stories about tourists getting lost out here. What is it exactly that she hopes will happen? She’ll be walking slower now; it will have been a while. Her brain will spin out a story where adventurous tourists overnighting in the desert will rescue her, and help her out with enough money to get out of here, a job, a new name, a fresh credit history… or maybe what she wants is to walk toward her own campfire story, something with a sudden, brutal ending.

She’ll think it’s been a good three hours that she’s been walking due south when two lights in the distance will reveal themselves to be a 4×4 bearing down on her, and it’s Brahim and his brothers. Brahim will hop down from the truck and she must look frightened, because he will rest his palm on her shoulder and tell her not to worry, that he found her, that he’ll always find her, that there’s nothing to be afraid of in the desert, that it’s just like anywhere else.

It wasn’t the best part of town that I was walking through. It wasn’t the worst either, but it was definitely sliding into such a state of disrepair that it would, soonish, become the bad side, until my grandkids’ kids — if I have grandkids, God willing — take up the torch of humanitarianism and gentrify the place. I don’t know what that means for the bad side of town, the current one, if it will get badder, or stay the same. Assuming it remains “bad,” then the city will be walled in by two bad sides, leaving a good middle. A happy median. I have to remain positive about the future.

And as I was walking through the not-so-bad-but-still-unsavory part of town I noticed a phone, a pay phone receiver, dangling by the cord, dancing in the chilly breeze. The phone booth — not really a booth, more of a pole. I don’t know what else to call it, but a phone poll is a different thing altogether, and it was not housed within a booth — it was situated on a concrete slab in between what may or may not have been a crack house — such assumptions just fling themselves at you, you know, and I try to ignore them, or at least suppress them, question them, but I go with crack house. It was almost certainly a crack house — and a severely overgrown lot that might have been the site of a house buried deep back there in the thick of the vegetation, probably with dubious vines coming out of the toilets and a young pine tree shooting up through the baseboards. It doesn’t matter if the one was a crack house and if the other was a house at all, but that dangling phone, bookended by those two sort of ominous and distinct habitudes, caused some serious feelings of apprehension and disquietude to well up inside of me in regard to the otherwise innocuous payphone receiver. So much so that I didn’t want to set foot on the slab. So much so that the slab, which was probably, in reality, no more than twenty feet long, stretched and elongated in my eye like one of those pan-in-zoom-out maneuvers you see in movies when a character realizes something really, really terrible and irreversible has happened, or is about to happen, and it’s important to the plot and/or character development.

I don’t want to give the impression that the phone was somehow calling to me. For one, it’s a terrible pun. For two, when somebody says that someone or something was calling to them, it’s usually in response to an overwhelming stimulus that comes with 1) regret or 2) something inexplicable. Like coincidence. Sometimes it’s both. Things don’t just call. The phone certainly didn’t. Not in that sense, anyway. Nor did it ring. But, and I say this now at the risk of sounding hypocritical, there was something in the pull of the dangling phone that outweighed the foreboding of the setting which made me walk to it and touch it. “Something” is too vague. I’ll explain.

In general, and by that I mean society and culture and that neighborhood and that slab and what-have-you, the phone was out of place. This is because nobody uses a payphone. And nobody uses payphones because nobody carries quarters anymore, unless, of course, you’re sixteen and going to the arcade, or you’re 27 and going to the Laundromat with the pocket of your dressy slacks full of quarters because all your good pants or your regular pants — your nonlaundry day pants — are soiled to the point of repugnance and you’re not going home to visit your parents for another week and a half, where your crazy mother will dutifully wash not just your pants but all of your clothes for you, and your “girlfriend,” who you’ve yet to commit to for nigh-on a year has been bitching your ear off all week about said repugnance of normal pants, so now you’re loaded down with quarters for the Laundromat for fear of not getting a nice, slow blowjob on Friday night after the homecoming dance, which is, coincidentally, the same night as the “anniversary” of the “relationship” you’re in with your “girlfriend.” These are the only reasons people carry quarters around. Arcades and blowjobs.

And so, the anachronistic quality of the phone pole piqued my interest immediately. That, coupled with the even more out-of-placedness of the dangling, unused telephone receiver set it in my mind that this was a wrong in drastic need of being righted. It is wrong that a telephone receiver be out of its cradle. Justice, order, peace and posterity hinged on that receiver being in its place, just as a crying baby must be made to stop crying, immediately. In the name of everything good, I sallied forth across the vastness of the slab and apprehended the dangling receiver with the thrust of a jack-hammer and the wanton grip of a novice masterbateur.

“Hello,” I said, and I said it in a tone which implying that everything was all right. Hello, like we hope God might say it. Hello, I’m here for real and you just rest your silly little noggin about the whole damn business. A hello’s all we need really. It justifies the questions. You can use hello as a question, yes, but when you say it like I said it, like, not as a question, it really solidifies all that haze you were so flustered over in the first place and makes it make sense.

And I can’t say that I was completely surprised when a voice came through from the other end. This is, after all, the reason we speak into phones. There’s a phone off its hook? There must be somebody on the other end of that line somewhere. Otherwise we’re just shouting into the dankness like a bunch of mental patients.

“Hello?” came through on the other end. But it wasn’t a question, nor was it a real statement. It was… I’ll put it like this. Imagine you’ve been going to a therapist for months and months now, and you thought you knew the answer to your problem of never being able to reach orgasm, and also, maybe, why you have some trust issues. You’re just looking for a second opinion, even though you know the
answer. Your answer is: “I was molested when I was very young,” because you’ve seen that diagnosis on television a million billion times over. “You were molested when you were very young,” which solves the problem, and “I’ve repressed it” is your explanation for why you can’t remember it. You’ve gone into this whole therapy rigmarole with some quack who was recommended to you by your lunatic brother, paying exorbitant amounts of money just to have her confirm for you that you were, in fact, molested by some adult or another when you were very young, only to have the shrink — after several months of expensive therapy, mind you — say, “This is all rooted to that experience you had in your fourth grade biology class that you told me about on our first day together,” — she uses the term “together” in a way that makes you slightly uncomfortable, to the point that you don’t expect there to be a bill every month and you’re kind of offended when it arrives — to which you reply, “So I wasn’t molested when I was very young?” And it’s with that tone, that still-uncertain certainty, that the “Hello?” came through on the other end, which was extremely satisfying for me, considering the gusto I’d put into my initial hello. I really felt like I’d accomplished something.

The voice belonged to a girl, a youngish girl, and the voice carried a horribly familiar timbre — and I use “horribly” here in the best and most nostalgically erotic way possible — that reminded me of the girl on the radio, Katie Heath, who used to run the classical music show on Mississippi Public Radio back when I was in college.

With Katie it had been something in her Rs that just really hit me deep. The letter L, for example, is liquid, pronounced with the breath at the back of the tongue, then the tongue to the teeth. The R, on the other hand, is typically pronounced with a primitive gnashing. But, Katie Heath formed the R way down there at the back of the tongue where the L comes from, just above the belly, and didn’t involve a single tooth, molar or otherwise, in the whole business. It rolled up, slithering, like an opium puff, then gathered audibly, somehow, in the bottom of the cheeks and crook of the mandible, and she had no idea about the grandiose sexuality that that R promoted. There was something clumsy about it, and something cutely inelegant about her on the whole, like she didn’t really have her life together, like she didn’t prepare at all for the 4-hour show, but she made it through anyway, every weekday from noon to three, clumsily. And it was this innocent daredevil way of going about things yoked with the girl-next-dooryness that made me want her. That R,
however it happened to ease up her slender, fragile throat, was dripping with sex by the time it came out. Good sex. Sweet sex. The kind that lasts. The kind you sing songs about when you’re sixty and your wife just left you. I never saw Katie Heath, but I knew that throat of hers was as paper white as a Beluga. And, although this person, this youngish girl on the other end of the line, did not let a single R fall from her lips or drip from her cheeks, that timbre, as I mentioned, that waver, indicated to me the potential for a soggy, sultry R that would shoot me back to those Katie Heath, radio-induced erections set to Bartok and Schumann.

With that Hello — and I wouldn’t have thought that this would happen — even now, writing it, it seems odd — I was immediately aware of the cold, dead, glass-littered slab upon which I stood, framed by crack and vegetation, and the fetid pile of human shit next to the phone pole that I hadn’t noticed until right then. You’d think I would have been lost in the moment, waiting on an R, but, really, I became miserably self-conscious and I felt just as out of place as a public telephone in the 21st century. I fought off the immediacy of my locale.

“Hello,” I said again, but this time with assurance rather than that Superman all-is-well bullshit, and immediately followed that with, “The phone was off the hook.”

“I know,” said the youngish girl.

“Well. Were you on the phone with someone?” I asked. “Did they leave you hanging?”

What concerned me about my question was that an acceptable answer would have been “yes,” and, if that were the case, this young woman had been on the phone with a native of this sketchy part of town and, to my mind, it had to — if the answer was yes — involve some shady dealings, like drugs. Bad drugs. In the short span of time between my question and her retort I had managed to convince myself that this was most certainly the case and, just as I was about to slam the phone back into its cradle and head for the hills because I was sure the drug dealer or the person to whom the drugs were being dealt was coming stealthily up behind me from the bowels of the crack house with a dirty needle in hand ready to shove it through my lungs for no reason but black-hearted malice, the girl responded. “No,” she said. Thank God.

“Oh,” I said.

“I’m an operator,” said the girl.

“I didn’t know they had those anymore,” I said. I’d never met a telephone operator before, and assumed all the operating was done by computers.

I had also, until right then, assumed that I knew what a telephone operator — if computers weren’t running the show — looked and sounded like: Grandma-ish and slightly gruff, busy and monotonous and generally pleased in a very professional and distant way, perhaps with a cigarette forever burning unsmoked in an overflowing ashtray or balancing upon a lip, and never, not ever, sharing a singular feature with Katie Heath. This girl was not, unless my ears deceived me, a gruffish grandma.

“You never know we’re here until moments like these. We
don’t get out much,” said the girl, “us operators.”

“Probably for the best,” I said. “This whole side of town’s overgrown and decaying. I’m uncomfortable where I stand. My skin crawls. It isn’t pleasant out here in the world. You telephone operators have the right idea, by gum.”

“By gum?” she asked.

It was a cognitive slip that I’d said “by gum,” just then. A little phrase I use often with my family and, occasionally, my coworkers down at the bottling company, people who know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t use “by gum” seriously, ever. When I say it, I slip my thumbs through my belt loops and rock up onto my toes and then back on my heels like an old Appalachian on an old country porch. I say things like, “And that’s the way it is, by gum,” or “You kids’ll never get nowheres actin’ like that, by gum.” It gets a laugh.

But apparently, I’d managed to subconsciously dupe myself into thinking there was enough familiarity between the girl and me for me to be comfortable slipping a by-gum in there, as if she could possibly know I was being ironic.

“How old are you, man?” she asked.

Man. Christ, because “by gum” is an oldism, a relic from days-gone-by that only grandfathers and dead-peckers hold on to and actually utilize from time to time, like “nifty” or “gadzooks.” And no, I’m not old. I’m 37, to tell the truth, but it got slippery here because I didn’t want to tell this girl I was 37, and I didn’t want to tell this girl I was 37 because she was, at the very least, a decade younger than 37, and somewhere in the back of my mind, beneath Katie Heath’s Rs and the thought of the broken glass upon which I was standing — which really summed up for me the whole miserable ambiance of the crumbling neighborhood and life in general — I was considering striking up an affair with the operator, because nobody would ever have to know about it, and it would only last as long as I could tolerate standing there.

“I’m thirty-one,” I said. “My birthday was last month. I’m a Virgo.”

The thought of a brief affair with the operator sprung up from the same naughty place in my brain that makes me look for open curtains each and every time I pass a hotel, hoping that I might get to see the naked, nimble thigh of a newlywed bride or the silky curve of a mistress’ breast, a shock of lovers’ hair flitting past on the way to the bathroom. A habit I picked up around the age of 15 after seeing some porn that only showed scenes through foggy windows. It’s called Peeping Thom 6: Bay Windows and Boobs, and a VHS copy is currently sitting in a storage unit that my wife doesn’t know about, in a box labeled “Nostalgix,” under a photograph of me and my mother beneath the Eiffel Tower wearing coats and scarves up to our eyeballs. I will give the picture to my oldest son, Robbie, on his wedding day. I will point at the picture and say, “This is the sort of mother your wife needs to be,” which will be completely unfair of me, considering that Robbie will almost definitely not marry a woman like my mother, who turned into a total nut-job about three years after the picture was taken. Robbie doesn’t know the woman in the picture. He only knows the nut. I bought the VHS when I was 19, after winning about two hundred bucks at a casino. I also bought a gold chain with a golden Nike Swoosh pendant and a dozen chocolate éclairs in cellophane wrap, because I was stoned. Two hundred bucks, gone like that.

And so, the whole idea of the affair, mostly because of the voice, and the fact that that voice carried the same value of eroticism as a boob in a window, made me really just want to go for it, so there was no way I was going to volunteer the information regarding those thirty-seven years I had under my belt.

“Really?”

“Really,” I said. “Thirty-one. September eighth.”

“What’s an educated-sounding thirty-one-year-old doing at the corner of Jefferson and Third at half past midnight on a Tuesday?”

It was spectacular the way she said “thirty.” It wasn’t the usual grinding of an R she had. It was more like she pampered it, powder that turns into even finer and sweeter powder when it leaves the tongue, and it was a good question to boot, by gum. A tough question. A question that, had I answered it as the actual me, the thirty-seven-year-old me who was out for a walk in the shitty part of town trying to score some pot because of a minor, non-physical scrape with his spouse over finances, an inability to “really” listen and something about narcissism, it would have sounded much less interesting and much more pitiful than what the thirty-one-year-old me was doing, which was:

“Taking pictures,” I said. First thing that came to mind. “I’m a photographer.”

“Really?” said the girl. I’m sure the other granny operators shushed her and cut her dirty looks at that, what with it being a violent outburst of emotion and intrigue in an otherwise droning and mildly disinterested conversation. “I’m a model,” she said. “I love having my picture taken.”

And I knew I was in. She might as well have put down her little headset right then and dropped her panties I was so in. I considered telling her to meet me at a hotel where we could do it on the third floor with the curtains slightly parted. I considered sprinting to the secret storage unit and pulling out all the classic, immaculate baseball cards I was saving for my second son, Rusty, and selling them online to fund a little one-bedroom flat downtown somewhere where me and the operator girl would meet on lunch breaks and take pictures of one another in wildly suggestive poses, but, instead, I played it cool.

“Oh yeah?” I said. “That’s interesting,” like I stuck it to wannabe models every day.

“What kind of stuff do you do?” she asked, all breathy.

“I’m doing a series on urban life,” I said. “Trying to get some grant money, you know? It’s not what I like to do, but that’s what the bourgeoisie want, you know? Offset their white guilt by quoteunquote supporting the underprivileged. I mean, all they’re doing is exploiting them, you know? Anyway… My first love,” and I knew this would get her, “is noir.”

“Oh-my-God-I-love-noir!” she said. She said it like a machine gun. Rat-tat-tat-a-tat-tat-tat.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s great. Do you know Jean-Paul Viviere?” I asked, as if that were an actual person.

“Ummm…” she said. “I know I’ve heard the name. It definitely rings a bell. Did he do, uh…that thing with the, uh…”

“Life, Pelican, Death’? You’ve heard of it?” I said. That’s not
real either, by the way.

“Oh my God,” she said. “It’s brilliant.”

“I never knew blood could be so thick,” I said.

“Wow,” said the operator girl. “You really get it.”

“No,” I said. “It gets me. He does his job well, Viviere…”

“You’re so real,” she said. “Who are you?”

“I am what I am,” I said.

I heard a rustle over my shoulder and almost squealed. I’d been so wrapped up in the conversation, pretending to be some youngish arty dude that I’d forgotten I was standing on what was, for all I knew, the most dangerous abandoned slab in the city. It was a tiny jolt of reality that I didn’t really want or need just at that moment. It put a bad taste in my mouth, the reality of it. Reality meant wife. Reality meant kids, a loony mother, a secret storage unit you feel sort of ashamed of, a decently paying job down at the bottling company where you’re well-respected but, by gum, you spend the better part of your day mindlessly pecking at spreadsheets, wishing you’d reconsidered going straight into that MBA program at Loyola where, incidentally, you met Connie, your wife, whose father owned a bottling company, that maybe you should have gone off to Colorado or someplace and worked on a ranch for a while like that Seth guy you were acquaintances with who’s now a lawyer for little crippled kids who are the products of industrial accidents. He’s a fucking saint. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. I didn’t mean to say it aloud. It was only
meant for me.

“What was that?” said the girl on the other end. Owing to the fact that she was quite obviously taken with me, she was sincerely and desperately concerned over my well-being, worried that I was about to be stabbed through the neck by a crackhead’s dirty needle.

It took me a moment to get my bearings, to remember the masquerade.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just a cat.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I should probably check on it. I think it’s sick.”

“Well, okay,” said the girl.

“It was nice speaking with you,” I said. I said it like a man
pushing forty.

RUSSELL HEHN is a landscaper in South Mississippi. Some of his other work can be seen in The Barcelona Review, pindeldyboz, and McSweeney’s.

        His voices knew the magic words. They spoke them without provocation, unsealing Bennett’s lips so the incantation could fly audibly from them. Once it did, Bennett would begin to vanish, then reappear somewhere else. A reluctant drifter leaving one life for another. It was contrary to all he believed in. Science
had been for him the last word concerning what was and what could not possibly be. How often had he drummed that into the heads of his high school science students? “If it cannot be empirically proven, what do we have, class? That’s correct. Nothing but hypothesis, pure conjecture. If you can’t take it to the lab and study it, you’re holding in your hand lots of nada, zip, nothing at all!”
        The first time Bennett drifted away, he was in the faculty room finishing a hasty lunch before fifth period. The only other teacher there sat across the table from him, his colleague Dave Rossi, English teacher and poet, with whom he enjoyed arguing about the existence
of God and an afterlife, scoffing at such “infantile preoccupations,” while at the same time defending the superiority of science.
        Suddenly, in mid-sentence, Bennett constricted his throat, locked shut his jaw, all the while screwing up his face in reaction to the burning sensation inside his mouth.
        “What’s wrong, Nat? You don’t look right.”
        Rossi stood up, walked around Bennett’s chair so that he stood behind him. “Are you choking?” he asked, but Bennett wouldn’t speak. He shook his head. Then it was Rossi yelling, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” because Nat Bennett was disappearing limb by limb, his head and torso floating above his seat, his mouth gaping in a soundless scream.
        Rossi’s screams brought the principal, a few of the faculty and even several students barging into the faculty, but by the time they got there, Bennett had completely vanished. Rossi stood there babbling and pointing at the place where moments ago Bennett sat telling him there was neither Heaven nor Hell. Now it seemed to Rossi that Bennett, in one place or the other, was recanting.
        Mrs. Carlin, the Sacramento High School principal, draped her arm around Rossi’s shoulder, trying to console him. In her decades of academic life she had seen two other teachers break down like this. Pressures build up and need to find release. She liked Rossi. She had always considered him level-headed, life-loving, in control, but now she had her doubts.
        “What happened here?” she asked.
        “He was sitting right there. We were talking. Then all at once his face turned blood-red.
        His eyes started to tear. I figured, he’s choking, having a heart attack maybe, but when I got up to offer help, I saw his arm disappear!”
        The principal, the other teachers, and the students glanced at one another, eyebrows raised.
        “I blinked. Okay, it’s a blind spot. This can’t be happening, but by then, Bennett’s head and torso –– no arms or legs! –– were floating in air. I screamed. What else could I do? Either Bennett was disappearing or I was losing my mind. The last to vanish were his eyes.”
        Now the principal was directing the boys to Room 112. “Find Mr. Bennett, boys.”
        “You won’t find him there,” said Rossi. “Not there or anywhere. He’s gone.”

SALVATORE BUTTACI is an obsessive-compulsive writer whose work has appeared widely here and abroad. He was the 2007 recipient of the $500 Cyber-wit Poetry Award.

September

To show: On the first day of workshop the first thing the professor explains is that in true literature there are no happy endings. There can be bittersweet endings. There can be tragicomic endings. Most certainly there will be sad endings.

To tell: No gets out of this program alive.

October

Struggle with duality.

You must open up your soul. Your heart must be unlocked and eviscerated, mined for nuggets of truth and sorrow, the bloody remains left for carrion birds. Every memory must be recalled, molested, touched in unwanted ways. Here’s an important lesson in contrast: there is a sinister meaning under every sunny image, a sunny meaning under every sinister image.

You must harden your soul. Every secret put to paper will be scrutinized. Your classmates will snicker. In red ink will appear the words, Fake! Not buying it! So pointless! You must bare your teeth like a cougar, drip saliva onto the page, and rewrite.

November

In seminar, the professor poses the question, What is the duty of the writer?

A blonde woman from Texas speaks loudly, It is to marry art and commerce into something that the public will buy in mass quantities.

You love her more than anyone else in the program. In workshop, she gives you flippant, derisive comments on the stories you submit. What your stories really need, she writes in her responses, is more space aliens. Why don’t you do more space aliens? When you speak to her after class, who are you and how did you get from there to here? she blows cigarette smoke in your eyes, the sting of it excruciating, exquisite.

Baby, oh baby. Yes. Material.

December, January

Go home for winter break. Get stoned by yourself on the balcony of the second floor of your house, exhaling blue smoke into the blue twilight. Under the glow of Christmas lights, you feel five again, loose limbed and pliant, stupidly giddy with the scent of pine in the air. Smile in your sleep. On New Year’s Eve you kiss no one, not even your own ass goodbye as you head back to school, back to that frozen urban tundra, back to that workshop.

February, March

A classmate introduces you to post-modernism.

It is a disembodied fist on a dirt road, index finger protracted, pointing towards the sunset, like a compass, like an accusation.

It is a broken light bulb lodged in a ceiling too high to reach.

It is during workshop when the woman from Texas dumps the contents of her purse onto the table, a compact, a tube of balm, a wallet as fat and heavy as a brick, faded receipts and gummy bills fluttering down like dirty secrets, her screaming across the room, This, this is what your stories look like!

April

It is the cruelest month.

In the darkness, in the glow of your laptop, read the news and expand your grief:

Bacteria and viruses are getting smarter. The sun is more cancerous. The weather is apocalyptic. A famous author publishes a book about people eating, gasp, other people.

Everywhere, across borders and skins, people are dying unjust deaths.

When people ask about your well-being say, Research.

May

The best you have: A man falls asleep and falls in love with his dream, unsure of which world he has created and which he has left behind. It’s lofty and indulgent and narcissistic and the worst part is, you fucking love it. Call it a memoir.

June, July, August

Back home, your father parades you to his friends like prized livestock, like rare jewelry. My son is going to be a doctor, he says, and when you try to correct him, try to explain the dull intricacies of your degree, this Master of Fine Arts, he pinches you in the side.

Later you tell him, I’m not going to be a doctor, dad.

What? he says. Something inside him deflates. His face begins to melt right before you. Wait, he says. What?

Your mother says little except when she peers suspiciously at the bags under your eyes, asking, Are you on drugs?

Your friends don’t recognize you anymore. Across bar tables and in the passenger seats of speeding vehicles they look like they are mourning. Dude, they whisper, so that’s what it’s like to get off drugs.

September

To show: Who is this person, this character, this narrator, now? What place, a place full of bear traps stuffed with blue cotton candy, are you headed to? When will that pinprick of white light, when will it expand into something resembling salvation? Where are you going with this? Why did you do this to yourself?

To tell: I don’t know how.

JONATHAN PADUA recently completed an MFA in Fiction at NYU, where he received the New York Times Fellowship. His work has appeared in pindeldyboz, Fugue, and other places.

Arturo was so much happier before the revolution. And this is how he should be remembered, performing every night of the week at La Huchina, two shows, some nights three. Old regime, new regime. It didn’t matter to Arturo. His politics ran only as deep as the acne scars on Generalissimo’s brutal face. Arturo poked fun, mimicked, took potshots from the low stage. Then he would retreat and mock himself for three quarters of an hour. His lack of height. His wide ass. His crooked teeth. Arturo flopped onto the stage and pulled hard at the fine hair on his temples, wiped the glossy sweat from his bald pate.

We don’t need another revolution, he’d say. The old one still smarts.

Draw it mild, his agent counsels without disagreeing. You want to be a captive performer in buggerer’s bay?

Fascism can be funny. But you have to tiptoe. Arturo makes a joke about the waterboarding—pretending to confuse the term with wakeboarding. Tiptoe.Tiptoe.

-o-

After the late show, Arturo gets a note from the Minister of Public Affairs and International Relations: Topical, thought-provoking jokes are welcome by the new regime. But take care not to compromise the island’s re-blooming tourism. Don’t you want to be the face on all of the colorful brochures, Arturo?

But what wit can stay shut up with parody the ruling power? Arturo wants to paint a wordless still life of the puppets and seize the island with laughter.

Arturo labels the Generalissimo’s anti-gay campaign as the fight of the fairies. His twelve-piece band plays a leaping tune. Arturo tiptoes girlishly across the stage, then implies in so many words that this battle originated internally for the Generalissimo. Tiptoe. Tiptoe.

Americanos. Canadians. Germans. The happy-go-lucky Dutch. And lately the Irish, who tend to empathize, perhaps, too much. All can generally be described as old but mobile. Men too old to veer from their vacation habits, they come to the little lemon-shaped island with half a million mature lemon trees and half a million carefree women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. They love to laugh at Arturo each spring. They love to see his perfecto impression of the Generalissimo. Without it, their vacations would be incomplete.

Arturo: Lemons are the chief export. Next come round asses and pretty tits.

Arturo is a good son to his aging mother. Forget about the early woes, the beatings that she attended to. All the new foreign coins go to his Madre. Arturo calls her his banko securo. She’d chase away any daring robber with her pistola breath.

Dig a hole, Arturo, she advises. Do it before I die, she says, crossing herself quickly. Dig it deep. And in her prayers Arturo’s mother says, Lord, I will forgive these women of today who have a higher tolerance for filth, but I better know that they wash between their legs to make a clean place for my Arturo.

Arturo to the cute touristas: Come with me. Arturo will teach you the native tongue.

The Generalissimo shares with Arturo the same taste in wristwatches, sunglasses, and young chicas. But when Arturo scores first with one the imported showgirls, the Generalissimo must not know. Still, as the Generalissimo sits at his table with the leggy blond dancer from Texas, Arturo lets his audience in on the secret of his seduction with a nearly undetectable wink right in front of the Generalissimo. Arturo can wink with both eyes at the same time.

Arturo, so sly, smooth: I only taught her to dance the lemon merengue.

Arturo prepares for Ms. Texas a double-rum-lemonita, unsweetened. She sips from a thin straw and her face craters with a painful looking pucker, involving not just her mouth but her eyes. Two days later, she is gone, gone, gone. The Generalissimo has no comment for the press.

The right friends for the island and the right enemies, too. Good rum. A Coca-Cola bottling plant running three shifts a day. The blessed lemons. It’s like they tell the little league ballers: You can’t walk off this island, slugger. Arturo swings away, no matter the count. Ball four is not an option. Always the big swing. Always thinking homerun.

A good tux but ill-fitting, comically snug. Arturo’s passable singing voice:

If you lose the coup the joke will be on you.

And all of your pretty sisters, and their sisters’ sisters, too.

Under his breath, with the microphone behind his back, Arturo sings another couplet:

And all your cousins’ uncles and the man who sells you bread.

Everyone who ever hugged you—a bullet in the head.

Tiptoe. Tiptoe.

At the end of his act, Arturo bites hard into lemon after lemon, shows his sour face to the audience. This is my country, he says. This is my flag.

WILLIAM WALSH is the author of Without Wax: A Documentary Novel (Casperian Books) and Questionstruck (Keyhole Press). His story collection, Ampersand, Mass., is forthcoming from Keyhole Press in spring 2010.

Henry King always worked his own garden. Henry King worked his garden everyday; he was working it this morning. It was just now ten o’clock and already over ninety degrees. Henry King was sweating. The highway toward Macon went past his farm. The traffic on it stayed heavy; this congestion increased the burden of heat with by adding brute noise.

In recent years suburban housing developments had started closing in. Clusters of large houses, of three thousand square feet or more, set on treeless tracts of at least two acres that had been parts of peoples farms were standing within three miles of Henrys’ land. The folks in these houses didn’t farm; Henry didn’t know what they did. There were two golf courses built in the county in five years. There never had been one in the county. The houses and golf places belonged to new people.

Henry King kept working steady; he was close to being done. His heavy breathing and the cuts of his hoe made a sort of rhythm for his thinkings.

He had always lived here, except for the war, when he’d crossed the ocean, seen it, and the killing in France. Henry had always lived on the same land, his thirty acres, in the same house that had started out over a hundred years ago as an overseer’s cabin on a plantation. He’d bought his land, the first land anyone in his family had owned, with a government loan he was able to get when he came home from the war. The last few of the once strong family who’d built the plantation had sold off the place in pieces when the young father, the great-grandson of the man who started it, who’d inherited the place, didn’t come home from the war. With the young major lost, the operation was left with only a sad young wife, the dead man’s mother and her unmarried sister to try to run it. That family took the money from the sale of their land and went to live in the widows’ fathers’ home in Savannah. Henry felt sad for them; but it was his and his kind’s only big and best chance to not work shares until they died.

Some of his kin had gone to Chicago and Detroit to work in plants; they seldom ever came back home after they left. His cousin had been able to go to work for the railroad; he lived in Atlanta. Henry had been all the way to France. He’d come home. He’d gotten the land, improved and expanded his cabin with rough oak sawmill slab he trimmed square with a handsaw. Henry added a wide porch; it was a place for his family to sit in hot evenings. After his first good season of cotton, he’d put on a new galvanized metal roof. It’d lasted. He’d bought a big cast iron fat-man stove the next fall and with the original fireplace, the place was warm enough for his family. The next pair of good cotton years, with selling his produce, and help-work on some neighbors’ farms, paid for the glass windows and screens he put in with Sam his oldest, and young Oscar helping.

The year after the war ended, when he got his place, he’d gotten electric lights, then a Frigidaire. The same well from plantation days had always stayed sweet with plenty enough for him and his. He always fed his family. His vegetable gardening was famous. Henry built a smoke house and made hams and bacon from hogs he slaughtered late each fall
after frost. Henrys’ boys and Louise never missed having a Christmas.

Until this past year, Henry had farmed. For the last four years young Oscar helped Henry make the crop. Oscar had helped out to make Henry happy. Oscar was married now, gone to trade school in Macon and learned air conditioning work, and just didn’t have much heart for farming.

While he and Oscar had worked it, they’d put half the land in soybeans; made rotation with cotton, with both crops they’d made pretty good.

Henry had gotten older. This year, Henry made a lease deal with a big farmer who had put in soybeans. Like always, Henry still made his garden himself, but since his children were married and gone off the place, his wife dead, most of it, went to his children’s families. Henry figured as soon as he was gone; his children would get together, talk a little around someone’s table, and then sell his place to a house developer. He didn’t think his children and their families would
be able to resist cash.

His wife had been dead ten years. She’d always delighted keeping the bare dirt yard swept. She’d sweep the yard twice each day; once right after breakfast and again in late afternoon. Her broom left a pattern in the red sand. The rounded strokes of her tied brush broom had looked like banks of clouds in the sky. Louise used to say clouds in the sky were the resting beds of the angels of tired people who’d got to heaven.

With Louise dead, he could now eat anything he wanted. He fixed and ate as much as he had of what he wanted. Mostly, Henry baked a pan of cornbread in the morning, ate it with butter and the preserves Oscars’ young wife made special for him. His favorite food was watermelon from his garden. He grew a big patch each summer. He mostly ate melon for his meals at midday and night. He loved the big ripe Congo melons, their smell and their rich deep green color. To himself, he thought of their smell especially after he cut one open, as a smell of rain and ground. To him, the smell referenced fertility as potent as the smell between a woman’s legs.

Now, he didn’t miss Louise; he’d stopped the aching of her going long ago. Oscars’ young wife did his laundry, but Henry wouldn’t let her clean up his house; they had fights about that. He’d always treasured his alone with his mind time. He was now able to keep to himself and he relished his thinking time being free of the distractions he had with the duties of a young family man making his way. These days’ whole worlds, ways, and whys came to his mind in sudden and surprising ways. Sometimes his mind time was as vivid as when he’d been spoken to by the rattlesnake.

He’d been real sick from the snakebite. He’d nearly died. He’d been delirious several days. Doctor Williams, and the man Stone, whose hay he’d been bailing that day, had got him through it. They’d told about his being delirious and they thought him a sure goner. His living through was like a transforming story from the Bible.

After the snakebite, he’d been out for a good three hours in the hottest time of the day, in the field beside the tractor where he’d fallen. His employer, Stone, found him. Henry was taken home to die. Stone had stayed on the porch at Henrys’ house waiting with the doctor Stone had sent and paid for, until Dr. Williams decided Henry had wrestled down
the snakes’ evil and had started to get clear of the poison. The two men told Henry his getting out of the bed was as big a miracle as Lazarus being freed from the grave.

They’d told him about the snakebite, but Henry remembered the all of it. He remembered how the rattler struck him from out of a bale of new hay and through the time his fever passed and he could sit up in his bed. He remembered tearing the big snake, a gleaming young one, but a good five footer, it hung from the side of his face, it bit his hand as he freed himself, but he managed to pitch it away from him. He’d watched it crawl beneath the fence. It had coiled, and sat there watching him.

While Henry lay in the sun, beside the tractor, the snake had spoken to him in voices as clear as a choir. Henry King remembered all this. It came in the dreams he’d had when he was sleeping off the snake poison. Over his years, on other nights the dreams from the snake still came. Once, in a gun battle in France against a German tank crew, Henry had heard a voice speak to him, but he hadn’t recognized the voice. That was before Henry was snake bit.

Stone and Stone’s friend, Liege McCondell, had found Henry by the tractor, they’d said they’d searched, but there was no rattler still around. Henry King knew the snake had stayed close and never left because he’d seen him, and heard the songs. The words of the snakes’ songs told Henry how the rattler had put a mark on him; it informed Henry King of the space in the dreams between the two of them.

Both Stone and Dr. Williams always told Henry King he was the luckiest man, black or white, rich or poor, in all of Georgia. The snake poison had left crescent shaped scars on the left side of Henrys’ face, taken Henrys’ left eye, withered that hand, and stolen the good use of his left arm; but Henry was stronger with just his right arm than most men ever were whole. Stone, Henrys’ white friend, and sometime employer, who’d fought the Germans in World War I, came to see him a lot, when they took a drink, Stone liked to say “not even the Nazi German bastards could kill Henry King the mighty man from Georgia. Who’d broke their backs and caused their widows to weep and orphan children cry when he was sent by our Living God to punish them.”

When his kids and grandkids were little ones, the babes would like to touch his snake marks and hold on to his withered hand when Henry would tell his stories about how he knew snakes spoke and carried messages between the worlds. Once, Louise had challenged him, saying such talk was the Devils’ words. Henry had blasted her with “I heard it speak wisdom as clear as hearing a bell rung telling me about the world from the hand of the Good Lord…it be louder than any preacher could shout.” After the snakebite, Henry King never attended church meetings. He knew nothing he could hear there could match or gain beyond what he had heard his day in the sun blasted field.

This day got hotter. He figured the summer would get much worse. There’d been a two-year drought in his part of Georgia. Every one he knew was worn out from it. Brush fires broke out all over, and irrigation on big farms was pushed hard; it wasn’t even deep July, never mind August. He’d hauled up hose and a diesel pump to his well for the precious watermelons and garden.

It was at the hottest yet when he found the third dead cat. He’d found one two days ago, another a week before that. His cats were members of a large inbred tribe started years ago by Louise who was crazy on cats. She’d kept getting more. Henry thought strays crossed all of Georgia and South Carolina to find his place. With Louise gone, they were his best company. He liked them; he fed them every morning. He’d cook them table meat pieces and bought sardines for them. He’d admire any new kittens or welcome a new stray.

Henry had fondness for the cats but would not baby about them. If one got killed on the road, or by quick dogs, or a snake, they just got killed. There were a lot of things in the world waiting on the unlucky. But losing three in a week was a rare odd thing and Henry King was looking out. The third dead cat looked like the other two. This one had died in a hollow place in his firewood stack. The head was swollen just like the first two he’d found under the stairs going up to his front porch. There were no marks or wounds on the swollen small bodies.

His morning was wearing out. He kept working his garden. He was almost done on the patch of watermelons. He’d decided on a particular fine big melon to pick for himself later this afternoon to have for tomorrow. He’d put it in his Frigidaire so it’d get ice water cold.

When he’d started to chop a thick clump of grass, he heard the highbuzz. His hoe cut was in motion. The diamondback was as big as Hell’s Own King and Keeper. It was dusted pale gray- pink on its’ fat sides from the red dirt, it sat in a wide coil like the mooring ropes on the deck of the ship he’d taken to France in nineteen forty- three, was better than seven feet long and was as thick as Henrys’ right arm.

Henry knew it. The rattler had spoken before to Henry King and was talking again in the same voices the words Henry had learned in Stone’s hayfield. At the moment before it struck, the snake locked eyes with Henry King the mightiest man in Georgia. It hit Henry high above his knee, recoiled, and cocked back to come again. As it severed the neck, the impact of Henry’s blow right behind the great creatures’ head shattered the hoe handle.

The snake was as dead as if it had been a man shot through the head. Henry staggered down cracking open the pretty melon he’d decided would be tomorrows’ meal. His leg burned like it’d been pumped full of flaming gasoline. The fire was grabbing him. The burning of it was filling up the inside of his chest and ripping his heart.

A memory picture ran into Henrys’ mind of a day in France, of some German men he’d helped kill, he had won a medal. The enemy soldiers were wrapped in fire; Sergeant Henry King and two other men had blown up their tank. When the Germans tried to escape the wreck, they were aflame from burning fuel. Those solders burned as they ran. Henry remembered the hard feel of the recoil of his rifle from each pull on the trigger. He saw them now. Henry had killed each man and Henry King had killed the diamondback; sadness for it all crossed him. Henry hissed, “That’s all… it’s certain… there ain’t a place for two old fellows in this world now time days. Soon Stone… and McCondell… Doctor Williams gone all them peoples in France… gone now…all of us be goin’ away…”

He stood up tall, tried to lift the huge wonderful snake over his head, but it weighed too much. Henry could not get the full length of the great rattler clear of the ground. The crushed neck remained in the red dust near the severed thick wide triangle head. For the few seconds it hung lifted by the tail in Henry Kings’ strong right hand, the diamondback throbbed and thrashed like a whip being cracked by a mindless moon- blinded child stirring up dust in the middle of patch of brilliant green, fat, and exceptionally sweet-fleshed watermelons where Henry King fell with his wonderful diamondback dead beside him. For only a moment Henry King might have noticed feathery beds of rainless clouds in a searing bright sky.

E. SMITH GILBERT is a pseudonym for a writer living in Tennessee. He is retired from a long business career. He has recently become a writer for documentary film.