By David Larsen

     The trip wasn’t Crandall’s Oldham’s idea; he would rather have stayed in Dallas and watched the Rangers on TV. But Brenda, out of a misguided notion that a weekend in San Diego might repair the fissures in their splintered, hopelessly-fractured marriage, insisted on their going. Maybe, she suggested, it would add a little pizzazz to what he already considered a lost cause.  

     “Oh,” said Brenda, “the zoo. Won’t that be wonderful? And La Jolla. The beach and the ocean. We’ll have such a wonderful time.”

     That was back in Dallas, before she purchased their airline tickets and made the reservations at the Holiday Inn. No more than two months had passed since she had confessed that she’d had an affair with a colleague, Raymond Desmond, a needle-nosed adjunct professor of humanities. “Academics,” she explained, “tend to become enamored when they’re engaged in a common endeavor.” A common endeavor? She and Raymond must have been more than slightly intrigued by the mysteries of each other’s bodies on a trip to Phoenix, a convention of some sort, or so she claimed. But the affair was over. Apparently, they’d both become bored with the other. They must have discovered that when you get right down to it, there’s only so much magic in the human body. None of it mattered to Crandall: what’s done is done.

     Stunned, but not quite devastated, Crandall took the disclosure of his wife’s indiscretion almost as if someone had told him about an earth tremor in Indonesia or Norway. His expectations in this marriage, his second, Brenda’s third, weren’t all that high. He was forty-four years old. He’d seen enough to know better than to get his hopes up about such matters as coupling.

     The zoo was nice, indeed, well-stocked, scrupulously maintained, but they’d already visited the giraffes, the bears, the zebras, strolled through the aviary—tranquil for Brenda, nerve-racking for Crandall. It was mid-May, warm even by Dallas standards. Brenda had scampered off to find bottled water for both of them while Crandall, slightly overheated, found a spot in the shade across from the gorilla compound, or whatever they called the area for the huge primates. Brenda had checked her cellphone for service before she wandered off. For what? At this point, it didn’t really matter.

     They were different, he and Brenda. Crandall knew that from the beginning, four years ago. Brenda, a go-getter with a master’s degree, compared with his BA in history, gnarled and snarled at life, bit off huge chunks, then sucked the marrow right out of the bones, while Crandall tended to nibble, then chew deliberately what little he could nip off of his smallish portion. She gulped at life like a seaman in port then savored the aftertaste while he pecked at the morsels he was offered. He often worried that someday he would have to perform an emotional Heimlich maneuver on his wife, or just let her choke on her excesses…but he could never do that, tempting though it might be.

    Not more than twenty yards from him, a humongous gorilla, black, hairy, bare-chested, sat on a large gray boulder within the fenced-in area. Crandall’s eyes met the dark eyes of the primate. Without blinking, or looking away, as any human would do, the five-hundred-pound guy stared at Crandall as Crandall stared back at him. People walked to and fro between them, but their eyes were locked, in some peculiar sense of camaraderie, a bond of some sort; they were two of a kind in a manner incomprehensible to either of them. Or, at least, inexplicable to Crandall. It was as if the gorilla was thinking, “I know how it is. I feel exactly the same way you do.”

     Oddly, this had happened once before. On a cruise with his first wife, Sandra, Crandall’s eyes met those of a man across the dining room at a table of six, just like his, a poor guy who suffered the company of boorish people who yakked it up and yammered on and on about whatever, onboard a ship that seemed hopelessly adrift in the Caribbean. Both men deadened their pain with the endless supply of mixed drinks. Without words, they shared a moment of empathy. “I know, I know,” they conveyed to the other. “This was all my wife’s idea. Like you, I’d rather be elsewhere.” They were both miserable, but resigned to what had befallen them, life.

     Today, the gorilla had that same gaze in his gigantic, soulful eyes, the same look of abandon the poor man on the ship had. They, Crandall, the gorilla and the passenger, were fellow travelers, caught in a way station not of their choosing. If only, just once, a woman understood him as this primate, a distant cousin, understood him, Crandall might find some solace in being alive. Yet, to be fully understood by a caged gorilla wasn’t exactly uplifting, but somehow, just for that moment, the connection was comforting and, perhaps, vital.

     Overhead seagulls screeched, almost as if they mocked the two kindred spirits. “Spirits,” thought Crandall. “I don’t believe in that sort of thing. But, this is real. This ape gets me, and I get him. Soulmates. We’re goddamned soulmates.” 

     “Come on,” called Brenda. “You silly goose, we’ve still got the elephants and the penguins to see. We can’t leave without seeing the penguins.”

     Over his shoulder, Crandall looked back at his compadre. The big guy sat on his stone and watched his friend ascend the incline toward the penguins. Crandall wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw the gorilla shrug his massive shoulders in resignation.  

                                                                 *   *   *

David Larsen is a writer and musician who lives in El Paso, Texas. Over the past two years his stories have been published in more than twenty literary journals and review including Aethlon, Floyd County Moonshine, Oakwood, The Heartland Review, El Portal and Bright Flash Literary Review.

 

By Sarah Sugarman

There is only so much tidying you can do before, by continuing to move things from place to place, you start to create more disorder than was there before you began. Myra realized this on the third night of being alone in her house without her children. There are long term tasks you can undertake instead, less superficial cleaning initiatives like laundering the living room curtains or weeding the children’s drawers of outgrown clothing, but these projects create temporary further disorder and do not come with the satisfaction of a visible change in the environment. And since all Myra wanted to do on her solo evenings, now that the split custody arrangement had begun – after she got home from work, checked her personal email, texted with a friend, did some yoga and ate dinner and took a shower – was to handle her children’s things, and since she didn’t want to feel like a crazy person, instead of climbing into the bed with her younger daughter’s hairs still on the pillow or standing all the way inside her older daughter’s closet right up next to her hoodies and shoes, instead of burrowing herself on the living room rug in a giant pile of their books and toys (because she couldn’t burrow her face in the crooks of their necks), or wrapping herself in their chewing gum and hoarded bubble wrap and science kit slime – she tidied their things. She reached her whole arm behind the row of books on Meggie’s shelf, hugging them forward so their spines aligned like baby teeth. She picked up candy wrappers and sticker backings off Serena’s floor with her fingers, crinkling them into a sweet smelling ball that she let fall like a tear into the wastebasket. She aligned the picture frames on their dressers just so – not to look at their faces in the photos, of course not, just to turn them to be at the best angles to catch the light.

As she worked she made a list in her head of notes to self. When after thirteen years of nonstop mothering you find yourself suddenly not-mothering, and when this lasts for days at a time, when you realize that you are subconsciously planning what will go in their lunchboxes tomorrow even though it’s not your day, when you remind yourself to do a sweep of everyone’s hampers so no one runs out of clean clothes only to find the children’s empty because you did their laundry yesterday and they haven’t been home since – there’s a reflex that needs reminding to shut off. The list of reminders went something like:

1. Stay in motion as much as possible
2. Eat actual meals
3. Plan each hour
4. Go outside
5. Question your life’s purpose
6. Try not to wonder what your children are doing now

Serena was born at 11:25 in the morning after nine hours of mostly back labor which others had told her would be excruciatingly painful and Myra might have agreed until Meggie was born four years later in only three hours culminating in two pushes that tore Myra’s pelvic floor nearly in half, which led to three hours of surgical repair. After the anesthesia kicked in and she went numb from the waist down, Myra lay on the operating table listening to the quiet murmuring of the surgeon and two nurses, all women, huddled together between her knees consulting on how to piece her back together. The flow of concentrated female care made Myra feel cradled in a basket, as later she cradled her second child, for weeks hardly leaving the bed to avoid inflaming her stitches but only sleeping, waking, and feeding the tiny human with its shock of black hair. Meggie was a few months old when Serena came down with the flu and though David was available, because they were still two parents in one household then and were not to reach the breaking point for another seven years, Serena didn’t want him that night, so Myra found herself sandwiched between her two children, one nursing at her right breast and the other draped over her left side radiating heat. Myra’s left side sweated and her right tingled as the milk let down and she anticipated the many hours of night ahead and felt she might soon be drained of all liquid, like a wrung out sponge.

Now, eleven years later with them at their dad’s, the house echoing around her, she was the opposite: an engorged breast, a blocked duct, a swirl of pent up energy swelling her like a balloon. On Serena’s desk was a lava lamp, blue liquid surrounding green waxy bubbles that clumped at the bottom of the glass until it had been plugged in for several hours, warming the contents so that the wax, at first sluggishly, then gracefully, started to rise and fall. It was dark now and Myra had nothing more to tidy. It was late. She was tired. She did not want to go to bed. All that was waiting for her there was sleep. She turned off Serena’s overhead light and switched on the lava lamp. Its blue aquarium-like glow cast a small circle of light onto the desk. Myra knew it took hours to warm up sufficiently for the bubbles to start flowing, but she had nothing left on her list. As the central heat clicked off and the house began its nightly cooling, she settled herself in the chair in the corner of her daughter’s room. It would be a long wait.

                                                          *   *   *

Sarah Sugarman (she/her) is an educator by day and writes by night. She lives with one teen, one tween, one co-parent, and a killer tuxedo cat in Berkeley, California. Contact her at sarahsugarman@gmail.com.

By Carolyn R. Russell

A thunking rhythm on the other side of my bedroom door ~ the SOS code from when we were little. Footsteps, and she’s in the room, her eyes a window slammed shut. After a while she leaves. Later, I test my ability to stand. I can. I put on the dark blue suit I was to have worn for my Bar Mitzvah in five months’ time. Something I can’t imagine following through with now. 

Downstairs, the Shiva thing is unfolding about as I’d expected. Lots of people I don’t know, or people I know but don’t want to see. A few friends of my own. There’re in various stages of freaked; I feel sorry for them and don’t gesture to them or go over. I go to the foyer where I find Dinnie slumped in a chair by herself. I wonder if I look as bad as she does and immediately feel guilty to be thinking about something so stupid and without warning I want my dad so bad so hard so much to put his arms around me and kiss the top of my head and say I smell like arrowroot biscuit. Dinney says is this really happening and I lose it. Drop to the carpet and sit there and Dinney comes and sits with me.

The new baby rabbi shows up. He sits right down on the floor next to me and hands us each a hard-boiled egg. Says to eat it, says it’s our custom to honor the dead’s blessed memory with an emblem of life’s eternal circle. I feel hot and close my eyes: a neon wash of red and orange. 

I smash the egg against my knee and say that I’m finished with symbols. The three of us stare at the crumbled mess staining my suit pants and spilling onto the leafy carpet pattern. 

“You must be very angry,” he says.

Dinney has her hands over her face now and her tears are leaking between her purple fingernails and onto the fabric of the one dress she owns that covers all her ink. She must be angry too because she pushes her sleeves up to just above the elbow; the tattoos on her forearms blaze against her paper pale skin. I place my hand on her wrist in solidarity.

“You’re good kids,” he says. 

Kumbaya I mumble.

Mom finds us and then we’re all on the floor crying. Not the rabbi, though. He leaves and I don’t know what he says to people, but no one bothers us for a long time.

                                                             *   *   *

A Best Microfiction 2024 winner and a pending Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions nominee, Carolyn R. Russell’s short stories, poetry, and creative nonfiction have been featured in numerous publications. She is the author of four books, the latest of which is a collection of cross-genre flash called “Death and Other Survival Strategies.” Carolyn lives on and writes from Boston’s North Shore. 

 

By Beverly D’Angelo

I am making dinner, everyone’s favorite, beef and cheese pie with a crescent roll crust. I don’t know why I don’t make it more often; it is easy enough. At least, since it is scarce, everyone is happy to have it.

The kitchen is warm from the oven. Guests are sipping wine, or cocktails as the case may be, and chatting casually. A couple of them get into a row about the upcoming presidential elections. Each not listening, but reiterating their own point louder with each repetition. Annoying, but I will insist they drop the argument when we sit down to dinner.

For now, there are appetizers and a charcuterie board where some of the women gather to discuss less contentious issues. That damn daycare. They might as well have a motto “give us your money, not your kids” proclaims one woman who swears she has not passed a single week without them sending one of her children home because of a cough. “Damn it, they are a daycare. Babies pass around these illnesses all the time. Mine got it somewhere. Did they send that kid home?”

Finally, we all sit and almost automatically, everyone lowers the tone and more fun and entertaining conversation flows. “Yes, Sid is going to be married in June. Her parents came around after disliking him at first. What’s not to like, he is financially stable, and a damn good-looking young man. I may not be humble about him, but he is totally self-effacing.”

“Yes, I was walking toward the pool, but looking at Jean while we talked. I walked straight into the deep end. I laughed so hard, it is a good thing I was in the pool, I think I may have peed myself.”

“Have you seen that show ‘Ghosts?’ I don’t think I have ever watched an episode without laughing out loud.”

It’s good to get away from the daily crush of obligations for a few hours with friends. Once a month, one of us will have dinner at their home and the others will bring sides or desserts, so no one is stuck with all of the prep work. 

As I finally sit down to lift and sip my own glass of wine, the phone rings. “Honey, could you grab that? My phone is on the kitchen counter.”

He does. I look to see what it is as his face becomes furrowed with a slight frown. “Ok. I’ll tell her.”

“That was Matt. Shelly had another seizure She is at Holy Family Hospital.”

The guests begin to demur, “Oh we can leave. You need to be there for Shelly.”

“No. This happens often. They will keep her in the ER for quite a while before they send her up to the floor. We won’t be able to see her until tomorrow. This makes about five times in the last four months. I just wish they could get the seizures under control. Every time she goes into the hospital, they change the medication, but it never seems to help.”

I don’t tell them nothing helps because she takes street drugs along with the medication she is prescribed. We have told the doctors, but addicts are addicts and doctors can only do so much.

I tell myself this is life. You don’t just raise your kids, you are responsible for them until you die.

We continue with a more subdued dinner for a while. Everyone perks up eventually and a good time is had by all.

When everyone leaves, I start clearing the table. Rob empties the dishwasher and starts loading it again.

Another phone call. Shelly this time. “Mom come and get me. I don’t want to be here.” 

I knew this was coming. She cries and I begin to fume. She is fifty-three and I spend more time taking care of her now than I did when she was a child. I keep my voice even and comforting. “Honey, they will send you home as soon as they make sure you are ok. It won’t happen tonight. They don’t do discharges at night, but I suspect you will be discharged in the morning.”

We go back and forth for several more minutes, then I say, “Good night, Shelly. I love you. Just relax and have a good sleep.”

When I get off the phone, I am aware of that cold dark place in my gut. I kind of picture it like a lava rock, but instead of being formed by a violent and angry volcano, it has the potential to erupt, blazingly, destructively, despite all of the padding I pour over it, “She can’t help it. I just want a day to myself. With all of the energy I put into Shelly, I am so tired and can’t enjoy the grandchildren and give them the attention they deserve. I have been trying to make cookies with Gin and Leah for at least a month. When I finally do, I am so tired I can’t enjoy it.

I go to bed and lie awake for a couple of hours before I finally take myself to the couch. I remember being told, “Go to your room and don’t come out until you have a smile on your face. If you are not happy, no one wants to know it.” My mother was so cold and uncaring. But I learned well. 

I’m just feeling sorry for myself. Until that stone inside of me starts to burn. I wish I could go get in the car and drive away and just keep on driving. The anger has no place to go and there will be more piled on tomorrow.

Eventually, I fall asleep. When I wake the next morning, I hope this day can be just me and Rob. We are retired. We can spend the day together. Maybe we can drive to the beach for a walk then go get dinner someplace nice.

And the phone rings.

                                                                    *   *   *

Beverly D’Angelo was born and raised in New Hampshire where she currently resides with her husband. She is a mother of three, grandmother of six, and great-grandmother of one. She enjoys spending time with her family, reading, writing and quilting. She and her husband are avid travelers.

 

By Edward Michael Supranowicz

It was an old clapboard two-story farmhouse. The nearest neighbor was about a mile away in any direction. When his mother and stepfather had another child, Jake was given an upstairs bedroom. It was private, but cold in winter. It got even colder when his parents closed the stairway door to keep the heat from the coal stove downstairs.

Jake’s mother had wanted a new life with her new husband, so tried to get rid of all reminders of her old life, part of which was two children from different men. Her mother did accept Jake’s older half-sister, but would not accept Jake because she had only raised daughters and really could not handle two children at her age.

Because the farmhouse was so isolated and Jake’s mother’s husband sometimes worked the night shift, a pistol was hidden above a kitchen cabinet. Jake’s mother told him where it was and never to touch it or move it. It was the country, and guns were more tools than weapons, so Jake never gave it a thought.

                                                                  2.

When or how the dreams started, Jake was uncertain, but they did recur most nights. Jake was standing on the landing at the top of the stairs. His parents would open the door at the bottom and tell him to jump, that they would catch him. Jake was hesitant, but his parents stretched out their arms and smiled reassuringly. 

Jake jumped, and they would move away at the last second. He always jumped, and they always moved away. He always woke up before he would have crashed onto the floor, but always worried that he would not wake up.

                                                                   3.

Family is important, especially when one is uncertain whether he really has one. Jake would visit his mother and stepfather in the city, a city where houses crowd around each other. Every now and then he would slip her a twenty to use for whatever she pleased, money she usually spent on Jake’s half-siblings.

Conversation was casual today, as always. Jake avoided anything resembling confrontation. But like a sudden storm, his mother stared at him, her eyes glazed over, in a coquettish voice said, “ I have a gun hidden in the kitchen. I can get to it in two seconds no matter where I am standing.”

Jake visually counted the steps to the doorway.

*   *   *

Edward Michael Supranowicz is the grandson of Irish and Russian/Ukranian immigrants. He grew up on a small farm in Appalachia. He has a grad background in painting and printmaking. Some of his artwork has recently or will soon appear in Fish Food, Streetlight, Another Chicago Magazine, The Door is a Jar, The Phoenix, and other journals. Edward is also a published poet who has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times.

A Memoir by Angela Townsend

My mother taught me to look for sticks shaped like the letter Y. No one taught her this, unless we count the Holy Spirit, who is always busy in the branches.

My mother did not learn this in Brooklyn. Not even dawn could decorate the wall outside her window. But the little girl saw more than geometry in the bricks, fingering rectangles until she felt a pulse. She smelled the sea and let it make mischief with her hair. She learned to roll her curls in cola cans to shush the frizz. 

My mother did not learn this from my grandmother, although Sicily’s daughter was a tree. In a deforested borough, mother and daughter turned flour and butter into buds. The honey balls, struffoli, burst like Eden in the mouths of aunts and uncles. Christmas came in time every year. There were no jewels in the tinsel, but figs and walnuts made little bracelets, cuccidati. They called each other “my breath,” ciada mia, and lived like queens.

My mother did not learn this from my father, the bench scientist who blew his own cover. His summaries wore garlands and gardenias. He was infatuated with adverbs and existence. The advertising department plucked him, and he grew. My parents played backgammon on the train and read T.S. Eliot out loud.

My mother did not learn this from me. I told every living thing at the Little Red Schoolhouse that my mother made my overalls! I rubbed the iron-on kitten like a Miraculous Medal. I wailed like a widow when grass tattooed my knees. I learned the psalm of  “That’s why we have washing machines,” my mother’s alto restringing my peace. I stepped gently to keep my shoelaces white.  

My mother did not leash her expectations in the suburbs. She conducted experiments. Bare sticks could be talked into springtime. The shrub outside the window was my mother’s co-conspirator in scrambling the calendar. My father brought home consistories of pink Valentine bears, and my mother “forced the forsythia” until yellow wands outwitted winter. 

My mother did not permit me to mortgage my body. We read about salamander sociology, then crawled down our spines to the creek. She took Field Natural History and placed woolly bear caterpillars on my fingers after piano lessons. She tilted my chin so I would not miss the hawk’s flap-flap-glide. She led the Girl Scout troop into a campground that smelled like egg salad, declaring a grand adventure and commanding us to dance to Whitney Houston until she could start a fire.

My mother did not show fear when the pediatrician took down the star. It could have been leukemia. It was Type 1 diabetes. We would practice injections on the stuffed bears. We would make jaunty men from syringe caps and hot glue. We would make Sweet n’ Low cookies shaped like starships. We would accept that God put this “in my book,” and we would “dance while the music is playing.” We would adopt a cat the color of a syringe cap and name him Fig Newton, and my father would call him “my good red man.” We would weep in the guest room bed when all the right things did not work, and we would get up again.

My mother did not let me stay inside. She packed glucose tablets and listed twenty-six items we had to find in Orange County Park before we could come home. We found “something yellow” and “something wiggly” and “something as fuzzy as Mommy’s hair.” We ate peanut butter crackers sitting on the cleanest log I could find. We talked about insulin pumps and my favorite boy in class, Pete. We got back up. 

My mother had her back to me when I saw her kneel. My mother knelt, and then my mother spun like a butterfly.

“YES!”

She was holding a twig no longer than a pencil, shaped like the letter Y.

She pressed it into my hand. “This is a yes stick.”

She closed my fingers around its trunk. “We will look for these everywhere. We must. When we find them, we will remember.” She raised her brows. The sun turned her eyes the color of figs. They usually looked like the herbal tea that filled our bellies when my blood glucose was too high for me to be allowed to eat.

“Yes to life. Yes to God. Yes, we are on the right track.” 

“Yes.”

We found them everywhere. We gathered them in jars and decorated them with glitter. I brought one to Pete and tried to explain. I stuck them in my ponytail when I found them on the playground. We held them like tuning forks until the music started playing. We still call each other when we find one outside the grocery store, or dropped like a fledgling on the sidewalk. 

                                                                 *      *      *

Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Pleiades, Terrain.org, and The Westchester Review, among others. She is a Best Spiritual Literature nominee. 

By Paul Stapleton

After the eviction, I took to living out of my car for a single weekend—which was more than enough—in Oak Park, Illinois, where I parked on a quiet side street next to Hemingway’s birthplace, doing my best to weigh my options favorably. Over the years, I had read enough Camus to be a danger to myself if not select others. It was summer and it was hot. I had no job. I had no apartment. I had no girlfriend. I had no boyfriend. Really, I had no people at all. I was an only child, my parents were deceased, my ex-wife had moved to Las Vegas for a tenure-track job (no kids), and I had no health insurance. 

My car had no air-conditioning. 

And as of the last billing cycle, I had no cell-phone service. 

My life as an academic, and arguably, my life in general, was a bust. 

I began contemplating a certain pilgrimage, the destination Ketchum, Idaho, the town where my personal inspiration—and the fatal topic of my dissertation—shot himself, died, and was buried. 

(I myself am a registered Democrat and not a gun owner.)

Ketchum lay on the banks of the Big Wood River in a depression of the Sawtooth Mountains next to Sun Valley, the ski resort, and from the east, the road leading to Ketchum passed some seriously deadbeat places like the barbed-wired testing grounds of the Idaho National Laboratories, a town of paint-peeling shacks called Atomic City, and a federal wilderness called Craters of the Moon, which to a solitary melancholic driver like me, just pulling in from Chicagoland, looked like an enormous abandoned parking lot, hacked by giants into huge piles of busted-up blacktop, which was actually petrified lava from ages and ages ago, a place so barren it made me wonder if death were perhaps the author of things. 

I parked my car in a tidy little campsite in the federal campground there, feeling right at home. While pondering the darkness of the rocky wilderness, I noticed a thick, serendipitous coil of rope left behind perhaps by the previous campsite residents. I figured it might come in handy and threw it in the trunk.

When I arrived in Ketchum the next morning, I easily found Hemingway’s grave in the Ketchum town cemetery where his rectangular tombstone beckoned from a bed of pine needles, recumbent beneath towering spruces redolent and casting down continuous shade. I scanned the landscape—the mountains and the clear, flowing river nearby—and wondered where the house might be where the author shot himself. After asking around, I learned the local library owned it. 

At the front desk, the librarian said I could look at a video of the house on a special computer terminal in the Hemingway Reading Room, but I could not see the house itself. He seemed to think looking at videos was the same thing as seeing things in person.  

I did not.   

I persisted in asking questions about the whereabouts of the house, and the librarian persisted in recommending the video. A few nosy patrons, a hale, keen-eyed couple—Sun Valley types—looked me up and down and declared I couldn’t see the house as if it were their business what I could or could not see. 

Then they stared at me, domineeringly, as if their eyes could whisk me into oblivion.

I was a weak-boned thin individual—for the most part thin—a forty-year-old white male in a T-shirt, cut-off jeans, and flip-flops, sporting bifocals, the kind with the line, and I was well-aware that I did not measure up to any golden ratios. 

I wiggled my toes, which broke their trance and coaxed them back to the topic at hand. 

“But the library owns the house,” I said. “It’s a public entity.”  

“The people living out there don’t care for the public,” they said.

“What kind of people don’t care for the public but live in a house owned by the public library?” I asked.

The librarian intervened. “A writer and her family,” he said. 

“How is a writer and her family living out there?”  

“Because she won a grant.” 

I assessed this new information, quickly, strategically. 

“I’d like to see an application for that grant,” I informed the librarian.  

Now he looked me up and down and said, “You’d have to be an author or scholar first.” 

“Maybe I am an author or scholar first, albeit maybe not a particularly success…,” I paused, “eye-catching one.” 

Now I looked him up and down.

He was fondling a clumsy stack of books, secure in his swivel chair. 

A flake of dandruff clung to his eyebrow.

“I’d like to see the application,” I demanded, “and the house, too, so I can decide if I should apply to go live in it.” 

He nervously fiddled with his fingers before informing me that the application was on that special computer terminal in the Hemingway Reading Room. “But the deadline has passed,” he said.

“I’ll take a look anyway.”

The Sun Valley couple persisted with their interference. 

“The people out there don’t like tourists,” the one said. 

“Tourists are a pain in the tuchus,” said the other.

“It’s not their house,” I said, “and I’m not a tourist.”  

“It’s on a private road,” the one said. 

“You sure look like a tourist,” said the other.   

“Every private road is connected to a public one,” I said. “And I’m here on personal business.”

“God damn the roads! If you go out there, you’ll regret it.”  

“Your business is to keep out.”  

At this point, it became a matter of self-respect that I go out there. 

“We’ll see,” I said before I turned and walked away.

I began imagining myself as Hemingway running into these very same people in this very same library and in the very same way, finding it a matter of self-respect to go out to the house, then publishing an article about it in some high-paying magazine. Although he would confess to some bleak initial intentions, the article would become widely celebrated for the existential implications of his search. 

While imagining this, I began searching for that special computer terminal in that reading room where I chanced upon a clean well-lighted bookcase loaded with a cache of local maps, atlases, and gazetteers quietly waiting for someone like me so they could be ransacked. 

The maps had it right, and when I got out there, the private road was exactly where it was supposed to be, as was the house, which unfortunately I never reached because of some unusually large kittens cavorting on the road in a manner I considered inviting. 

The kittens really liked my rope. 

The mother mountain lion, however, was hardly interested in the rope, and in the course of her attack, she exerted an assertiveness I can only describe as authorial. 

A crowd gathered afterwards, including the police, emergency workers, a local newspaper reporter, and that goddamned Sun Valley couple. They chastised me about how lucky I was to have escaped with my life. With something akin to admiration, the paramedic bandaging my feet declared, “Survival instinct, buddy, it kept you kicking.”

The police then arrested me for trespassing.

Surprisingly, I felt exhilarated. 

The next morning, after I was assigned a court date and given my release, I decided to forget about Hemingway’s house. Some things were better off left alone.  

I hit the road again, headed back to Chitown, hoping to find an English department in need of a last-minute instructor for the fall. As I passed through the Craters of the Moon, I tossed the court-appearance ticket out the window. In the rearview mirror, I watched it skim the highway, and catching a draft, dance into the wilderness. 

*   *   *

Paul Stapleton’s writing has appeared in Aethlon, Ruminate, storySouth, and elsewhere, and he won a Pushcart (XXXVII) for a short story in J Journal. He lives in North Carolina.

By Bryan Vale

Heather had just poured her mango LaCroix into a tall glass with three ice cubes when the doorbell interrupted her reverie. Sighing, she put the beverage next to her phone on the glass-topped table and made haste into the front room. The left side of the double front doors revealed a scrawny kid in a blue shirt, khaki pants, and work boots. Then something her husband had said on his way to the lake clicked into place in her mind and she said, “Oh! Are you the gardener?”

“Lawn care specialist,” replied the kid in a scratchy voice.

“Are you here to mow the lawn?”

“Aerate the lawn. Just letting you know I’ma be out front here. Should take ’bout,” the kid leaned and looked at the wide green lawn, “15 minutes or so.”

“Thank you!” said Heather. She shut the door. She returned to the glass-topped table, held up her phone, and opened the next book in her series; the words of the first page glowed on the screen. As she sipped the sparkling water it occurred to her that the sound coming from out front was not that of a lawnmower. Had the sprinklers come on? They were about due, she thought.

She went into the front room and peered through the window. The kid was straining in the sun, pushing a big machine that looked a little like a lawnmower but heavier. Hollow spikes stuck out of a big drum in back of the machine. She watched as the kid paused at the foot of a gentle slope at the lawn’s end; for a moment it seemed the slope would be too steep and the machine too heavy; but, face red and lips compressed, the kid made it up the rise. Cylindrical chunks of dirt fell in his wake.

Similar chunks of dirt were now sprayed all over her beautiful lawn, everywhere the kid had been with his machine.

Heather hurried outside. “Hey!” she called from the porch. The kid didn’t hear her. “Excuse me? Mister gardener?”

The kid turned off the machine and looked up. “Lawn care specialist.”

She pointed to the chunks of dirt. “Is it supposed to do that?”

“Yep.”

“What are you doing, exactly? The grass doesn’t look any shorter.”

“Not mowing. Aerating.”

“What?”

“Poking holes. In the dirt. To let the water come in better.”

Heather was puzzled. “And we’re paying for this?”

“Believe so.”

“Okay, well…thank you!”

The kid nodded and resumed his work.

Heather reclaimed her seat on the couch. She picked up the glass of water and took a gulp. Grass absorbing water…water…there was something else to remember, what was it…

Water!

Sprinklers!

Heather raced to open the front door. “Gardener!” she called. “The sprinklers are about to — ”

With a hiss the sprinklers popped out of their hidden places in the grass and sprayed the lawn. The kid, in the middle of the spray, turned to Heather, soaking wet.

“Lawn care specialist,” he said.

                                                                       *   *   *

 Bryan Vale is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. His fiction and poetry have appeared in several journals, including Streetcake Magazine, Paragraph Planet, Unstamatic Magazine, and Paddler Press. His work has been nominated for The Best of the Net, and he has read for the memoir journal Five Minutes. Learn more at bryanvalewriter.com, or follow Bryan on Twitter and Instagram at @bryanvalewriter.

By Annabel Smith

“I think there’s still something to be said for love,” he said, and his knee was touching mine. 

I closed my eyes and let my head rattle against the window of the bus. We had smoked a little weed just before we left and I felt the heat rise up in my face, the gentle pulses of every limb of my body. I shoved my hands deeper into my pockets and said, “How do you mean?” 

“I mean, if you think about it biologically,” he said. “You see monogamy in all sorts of species, right? I think we’re sorta hardwired for serious relationships. I think we’re hardwired for love. In that sense.”

“Oh,” I said. I deflated a bit. At that point we had not even kissed yet, but we had talked, in a roundabout way, about the vague, intriguing feelings that had mutually arisen, that I felt crackling in the ever-shrinking space between. “You’re very analytical about this stuff,” I added. I hoped he felt insulted. I’d been worried that if I tried out being in love with him it would feel formulaic, as if we were following the steps of some kind of algorithm. He was that type. 

“I had this dream the other night,” he said, ignoring my comment. “I had a dream that I was on a first date with this very cute girl and I kept getting recognized. Like people on the street kept coming up to me and asking for a picture, or we went to dinner, right, and the waiter kept calling me ‘sir’ and saying how it was an honor to serve me and stuff. And then we went back to her place and she was asking if I wanted to be called Mr. President, you know, in bed. I was all confused and I got up to look in the mirror and my face was George W. Bush’s face.” 

“That’s weird,” I said. 

He sat up and looked me hard in the face. “I keep wondering about what it means. Do you think it says something about what I’m like in my love life? You think maybe there’s something that’s holding me back from making real connections and Bush is the key to discovering what it is?”

“He started that whole war,” I said. “Maybe you’re at war with yourself.”

“That makes sense,” he said. He tapped his chin. 

“I’m just bullshitting,” I said uncomfortably. 

“I know.”

We reached our stop and got off the bus. It was drizzling outside, and our hair and shoulders were dusted with mist as we took off walking into the fuzzy gray afternoon. His hand brushed uncertainly against mine, then he shoved it decidedly into his pocket. I asked, “What was the girl like in your dream?”

He thought about it for a moment. “She had this French sort of bob haircut with the bangs,” he said. “But other than that she looked a lot like you.” 

                                                                    *   *   *

Annabel Smith is a student writer from Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. She is currently studying English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Her work has appeared in Sky Island Journal and is forthcoming in Bending Genres.