Stuff!

I have a few stories up this month. At The Northville Review, you can find my story "House of Boxes": http://northvillereview.com/?p=900

Also, at the The Battered Suitcase, you can find my story "The First and Last Time": http://vagabondagepress.com/91201/V2I3SS10.html

And check out my band's website (www.theargylewishlist.com) for a new video and information regarding how to purchase our new EP.

To the holidays!

actually, this has little to do with writing.

i recently joined an indie-pop band called The Argyle Wishlist. i play drums. you can check us out at myspace.com/theargylewishlist or at www.theargylewishlist.com.

we have a new five-song ep called "All Details" available.

we are very excited!

I haven't been writing enough! Turns out graduate school keeps you busy. I have a few new ones up, though:

"Elton John" at WTF PWM: http://www.wtfpwm.com/content.php?page=12&issue=1_1

"The Cotton Man" at Writers' Bloc: http://www.writersblocmag.org/archives_05/raymond_cotton.html

"How to Live Together" Colored Chalk: http://coloredchalk.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=193

I recently heard about a raquetball tournament in northern Wisconsin. It's organized by a small press up there. Whoever wins the tournament will have his chapbook published by this press.

News. "In The Supermarket Where Elton John Was Once Spotted Stealing Pears" was picked up by WTF PWM. It will appear in their first issue, which comes out this December.

Right on.

Also, my story "Box of Fire" is currently up at Writers' Bloc. Read it here:

http://writersblocmag.org/archives_04/raymond_box.html

If I can have a favorite story of all I've written, this would be it.

Don't have a lot of news here. Been getting some writing done. The first issue of Crash--due out next January--will feature a story by me called "The Sounds of Victory."

I've got 16 submissions out there. Two stories: "In The Supermarket Where Elton John Was Once Spotted Stealing Pears" and "The Best Place For Surgery."

Cross your goddamn fingers.

all right stuff. i've got some more stories up this week. they are here:

http://wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2037 (House of Holes at Word Riot)

http://www.righthandpointing.com/Issue28/fiction/raymond.html (House of Bees at Right Hand Pointing)

http://www.downdirtyword.com/authors/timothyraymond.html (The Fountain at The Legendary)

two more stories--Box of Fire and The Cotton Man--got picked up by Writers' Bloc. How to Live Together got picked up by Colored Chalk.

and i've come up with a topic for the thesis.

So, news. I've got a story up at Necessary Fiction (necessaryfiction.com). It's a fine journal, and I am very happy to contribute.

Also, The Northville Review just accepted a story of mine called "House of Boxes."

I now must go to class.

Leaf Garden Issue 4 is now up. It looks good, and it features a story by me called "The Garden." You can download the issue by going to their website:

http://leafgardenpress.blogspot.com/

so, news. i've got stories coming out in september in the legendary, leaf garden, necessary fiction, and word riot. i'll post links as soon as those go live.

meanwhile, a story of mine is up at for every year, a webjournal run by crispin best. here's the link:

http://foreveryyear.blogspot.com/2009/08/1501-co-timothy-raymond.html

also, here's a story called "the air show," which can't find a home.

The Air Show

There was an air show. It was summer. The street festival on Locust would start later in the afternoon. It would reach all the way up to Bradford Street, where we lived in our little house. The planes in the show were a part of the festival. They flew in shapes under the clouds.

I left the house to meet Joyce at the coffee shop where she worked. The shop was on Locust. Her plans were to come home after her shift, but I decided to take her out to look at flowers in the store down the street.

On the corner before Joyce’s coffee shop, a woman in a yellow bandana was setting up a tent. She was alone, looking overwhelmed and troubled. Next to her were boxes of candles, a table, and two folding chairs. When the tent finally fell to the ground I walked to her to help out. She laughed me off at first, but then accepted.

We talked.

She said, “My husband and I are trying to sell some candles. Go ahead and take one when we’re finished. For your help, I mean.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’d be great, yeah.”

Other people were setting up tents and carts on the street. Across from us was a young couple behind a crepe stand. Down the way a little was a hot dog vendor. Farther down was a tent full of coolers for beer and soda.

“I’ve never been here during the summer,” I said.

“You mean Milwaukee?”

“Yeah.”

“The festivals are fine,” she said. “I can usually sell a lot of stuff. Tom’s going to help me this year.”

I assumed Tom was her husband. He wasn’t around though, as far as I could tell. The woman’s name turned out to be Rita. That’s what she told me. She looked older than the other people setting up their temporary businesses. The bandana, from far away, made her look younger and less haggard than she really was.

“Where’s your husband?” I said.

“Over there.”

She pointed across the street to a bar. Someone had put tables out in front. A man was drinking beer and looking in our direction.

“The one drinking the beer?”

“We got married last week,” she said. “Here.”

“Last week?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Here.”

Two bars stuck out of the ground, partially holding up the awning. She put my hands on one of them to hold it all together, while she took the other two bars and put them, one at a time, into the grips in the awning.

“Let go now,” she said.

I did. I let go. Then she let go too. The tent stood well enough. She started to talk, but as soon as she opened her mouth two planes flew by, sounding off loudly so that all I got was Rita’s lips moving. This made her look small and sweet, like a doll. Like something you could hold.

Rita took me to the box of candles and sifted through. Tom came over while we looked for one I could take.

“Honeypie?” she said. “Vanilla? What scent sounds good?”

Tom said from behind us, “What are you doing?”

“Tom,” she said.

“I’m Josh,” I said.

“Tom,” he said to me.

We didn’t shake hands. Tom’s face showed that he had things on his mind. Rough things. I didn’t hold those things against him. He got the table and set it up. It all looked a little shaky to me when the two of them started silently putting candles on display.

“We forgot a price sign,” said Rita.

Tom just kept working.

That was when I left them. That was when I left Rita and Tom. I held the candle that Rita had given me. It turned out to be the one she had called Honeypie. I never actually burned it. Joyce and I really didn’t burn candles in our house. Not back then. But I carried it with me anyway.

We’d been living together for about six months. We moved from Colorado. Together.

And we have a thing that we do. But we save it for special times. What we do is, I kind of sneak up on her and then gently pull her arms behind her so that her hands touch on her lower back. The she hums a little bit and steps back into me.

I greeted her this way after I left Rita and Tom. We did our dance, proud. Her hair smelled like coconuts. I just smelled her and did my best to make sure that we were right.

The flower shop was closed, so we went to a café back towards where Rita had set up her tent. We sat upstairs and looked out of the window at the street. We watched people. That’s another thing that we do.

We watched Rita and Tom through that window. They were in the distance, looking young again.

Still I knew they would never be new again.

The table that Tom set up must have had screws loose, because it fell under the weight of all the candles. Joyce and I watched the two of them fumble around, sitting on the ground like they had died in some way. The candles looked like exotic fruits when they spilled from the table. I fingered my candle. I told Joyce that I bought it from the people outside.

That time watching Rita and Tom reminded me of the first time Joyce and I watched someone. It was in our then-new house, our first house, the one on Bradford. We could see into the neighbor’s kitchen from our bedroom window upstairs. One morning, while looking outside, Joyce noticed the woman over there cooking naked. Later we would find out that she lived alone, but that’s not what I assumed upon seeing her. I assumed first that she was living with someone else, and that somehow over the years her nakedness had become an absolute given in the household, like she and the other person were forever colliding. Vulnerable, but in a good way. This made it all the more precious for me.

It was what I wanted. It was what Rita and Tom didn’t seem to have.

That day Joyce and I had watched the naked woman until we couldn’t stand it. Then we made love.

The air show kept going. Joyce and I stayed through that afternoon. We kept watching. A solo plane passed, making a sound like it had cracked open the sky. I waited for the stars to fall through. Eventually Rita lay back onto the grass, tired with the broken table. I remember trying to explain to Joyce later that night why Rita’s giving up like that made me feel like a boy again. It was something about grace, I said to her, something about the way that old woman seemed to fall asleep out of nowhere. Something about the way she moved, so musical.

hey friends. i've got a few short shorts up at The. you can read them here:

http://welcometoyethe.blogspot.com/search/label/timothy%20raymond

Here's one that I can't seem to place anywhere.

The Day That Erin Left Us

The pile of shopping carts was just outside in the alley. I still don’t know where they came from, but I know that Frank brought them. Last I checked there were nine of the carts altogether, stacked up solidly into a shaky-looking steel pyramid.

Frank was the one from across the street. He’d been around the neighborhood since before I moved there. You got used to him quickly. You really did. His eyes seemed to be shoved too far into his head, so that his eyelids were sucked in. In an odd way the look was a comfort.

For the most part he wandered the streets, old and happy, seeking small talk with the local residents. The managers of the building across the street let him sleep and clean himself in a room in their basement, as long as he cleaned the laundry room down there when he wasn’t busy. Frank would tell you about it after you saw him a couple of times.

I had more time to see him after Erin left. She left a month before the carts showed up. She had been living with me. We told each other that we were in love. It was just us and my cat Squirrel, a fat young cat with a creamy belly. The three of us lasted two months, then it was over. The two months were good. Erin and I worked from home doing transcription work for a company called SoundIt. Next to each other we would type on our computers, smoke on the couch during our break, and then curl up and sleep for what seemed like forever. I loved it.

Eventually Erin got tired of something. Of what, exactly, I didn’t know at the time. You don’t know immediately when you’re the problem. Or maybe you do and just don’t want to admit it.

So Erin started to take long walks alone at night. Sometimes she would get in after I was asleep. These were nights of only fitful sleep for me. I would ask her again and again what was wrong, and she would just say something meant to be soothing.

“I’m just adjusting to living together,” she would say.

“Okay,” I would say.

“I’m just taking time to think about my career,” she would say.

“Okay.”

I secretly hoped that she was pregnant.

“I’m just stressed.”

“Okay,” I would say again.

After all, she was not pregnant. She was just tired. The last thing that she said to me was “You’re infringing. You’re wrecked. It’s all wrecked.” That was the real one. That was the one she meant.

That was also the day that Erin left Squirrel and me. I don’t know. These things happen. I remember that she was going out to walk around. She put on her shoes and found that Squirrel had vomited in them.

“It’s just a hairball,” I’d said.

“Infringing,” she started. “Wrecked.”

I followed her down the block when she left, but she was too fast. On my way back home I pulled an advertisement for a clerk-job working at a clinic down the street. I decided I should take it. Just get out of the house.

After taking that job I was out during the day, able to see more of Frank, who would tell me about the neighbors or about when he worked as a beekeeper. This was great for me, seeing someone on a regular basis. I enjoyed it.

Then Frank started bringing in shopping carts. Bringing them into that alley. When I saw his growing pyramid I eventually went down to him to find out what was going on.

“Frank,” I said.

“Nick,” he said. “Nick, good to see you again.”

“What’s with the carts, Frank?” I said. “I’ve been curious.”

Frank looked at the carts without changing his expression all that much. His eyes looked like cheap stones. Then he began to smile.

“It’s nothing, really,” he said. “Remember when I worked for the forest service?”

“No,” I said. “You never told me about that.”

“I worked for a forest service. I met a guy there who liked to hunt. Once he brought me to his house. He had this basement halfway underground. In the basement he kept the skeletons of the stuff that he killed. He didn’t keep the other parts of the animals. The moose, the rabbits, the deer, the birds, everything. He piled them up together. I only saw it once, but it was amazing.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“That time I saw it,” he said, “a bird flew through the window and landed on top of the pile. It just stood there for a second, and then it was gone. I was feeling bad around that time, but the bird did something to me.”

“Wow,” I said.

“It was nothing,” he said. “I was searching for something like that. It could’ve been a piece of cotton that landed on the pile, it wouldn’t have mattered. But I liked that pile of skeletons. I found this first cart in the alley here already. I got some more to make the skeleton thing again. I guess the cart reminded me of it.”

It made sense for me in my own little way. I looked again at the pile and then went home.

I don’t care now if Frank was lying about all of it, the jobs or the bones or the bird. He lived in a basement. I don’t know why. I don’t care. It’s just, there is a moment from time to time when everything gets to be too much, and you just kind of burst from the inside. It’s the feeling you get when you run too hard for too long. It’s rough, but it isn’t all bad. It’s a release. Frank was a part of all that. He really was. Whatever it was, he held it like water, and from time to time, when we needed it, he gave it to us.

First and Last Sentence Magazine

First and Last Sentence Magazine is a journal that just wants the first and last sentences of your novel. I think it's a great idea. I think it's also a brand new journal.

They published my short short novel. You can read it here:

http://firstandlastsentence.blogspot.com/2009/07/there-is-time-but-that-time-is-years.html

Update

Blog friends, hello. Thought I would update real quick here. I've got five or six stories that I'm shopping around right now. By the end of this week I should hear back from most of the journals I've sent them to. I don't imagine they'll all, if any, get picked up.

So that's my answer, if any of you were wondering why I haven't been updating all that much. I got lucky and my recent stories are getting published. But, as always, the ones that get rejected will come here.

She Worries

Meh. Tried writing one under 100 words. And I was reading some Lydia Davis.

She Worries

She takes a pill when she worries. But then she worries when she has stopped worrying. That is, she worries that she is not the kind of person to worry over important things in her life. In her mind, people who worry are on top of things.

So she doesn't take the pill the next time she worries, only to find that she is weary with her worry.

Duplex

1) I created a new blog for the comics I've been drawing. They're bad, I'll tell you right now. But you can find them by clicking on my blogger profile. The comics blog is called "Tree Talk."

2) Here is an imitation of an Amy Hempel story.

Duplex

Pam looks like she is ready to let Henry die. Henry is just an infant. He has a look on his face that isn’t scared so much as bemused. A quarter or something is lodged in his throat.

The look on Pam’s face tells me she is ready to run away from it. But you can’t give me the go ahead like that. For months we have been dreaming about leaving for the coast. We can’t let ourselves get caught up at the wrong time with the wrong thing.

The look on Pam’s face is the look that I want to give to someone who knows what to do. When Henry sits down on the carpet and starts to sway, I go to him and close my eyes as my finger goes into his mouth. I try to imagine that I’m scooping out a fingerful of peanut butter. It’s enough until I can pull out the blockage.

Henry chokes. This might be the last time we come here.

“Where did he get a coin?” I say to no one in particular.

“You should’ve seen your face,” says Pam.


From time to time Pam tells me that I look like my name should be Rosie, even though that is not my name. I guess it’s because of my red hair and pale skin. Alcohol makes my face blush a little bit.

She and I babysit Henry, the only child of a young and burgeoning Mormon couple living in the lower level of a duplex on Ivinson. The woman is pregnant again. Pam and I used to live in the upper level of the house until our landlord told us that we had to move. We had to move because we couldn’t pay all of our rent every time. He said that he was sorry to make us leave, that there was a young man of business who had just moved into town with money.

“Sorry,” he said quickly. “You know I like you girls.”

Then he paused.

“You have till next Friday,” he said.

Now Pam and I live in a single trailer across the tracks on the other side of town. We have a shed on the side where we keep our bikes because we have nothing else to put in there. The first time that I came home to Pam and the trailer Pam was sitting on the wooden porch outside making a wind chime out of a stick of wood, some string, and a bunch of old keys that she said she had found on a walk around town.

“I can’t believe I found all of these keys!” she kept saying. “In one day, in one day.”

When the Mormons found out that we had been kicked out, they were nicer about it than you would even think a Mormon couple to be. They said we could still watch Henry for them, like that was some kind of consolation. On the last day the wife gave us a pie that was partly resting on her giant belly.

“What a picture,” Pam had said.

“It’s boysenberry,” said the wife.


Five days a week I go to the call center where I work. A lot of people can say that they have worked there. Most of them can’t say that they worked there long. We have a saying at the call center. It goes We’re Always Here.

This saying is truer for some than it is for others.

Me, I’ve been Here for close to fifteen months. Twelve of those months were in the duplex. The other three in the trailer.

Pam’s job is a little different from mine. My hours working are spent on the phone asking people I would never talk to otherwise if they are satisfied with their lives. Most of these people hang up. Some say yes and then hang up.

Some say no.

Then I say, “Maybe if you had the proper insurance plan, you would feel more inclined to live a life of chances.”

The suits at the call center tell me that this works. I’m just thankful that I don’t work entirely on commission.

But Pam’s job. Pam works at a butcher’s shop. She absolutely is in love with her job at the butcher’s shop. There is a spectacle there that makes her giddy. She’s so in love with the job that she is great at being a clerk and a record keeper. She doesn’t have to cut anything. That’s not what she signed up for, she says. All this makes her indispensable. They let her choose her hours so that I could carpool with her to work during the week. What this means is that she doesn’t have to buy herself a car because she can use mine and just help pay for gas.

The car is fifteen years old. It is a Subaru. It runs well enough. In the mornings when we drive to work and in the evenings when we drive home Pam likes to say clever things to get us in the mood. Usually she just says old things in a dumb way. We Are Once More On Top Of The Road. Put On Your Hat, Partner.

I’m Tuning My Kazoo In The Rain.

That last one is for rainy days.

I usually don’t contribute to these sayings.

Pam and I have jobs. When we can, we also babysit for extra cash.

For months we have been dreaming of driving to the coast.


The Mormons come home just as the sun is starting to go down under the horizon. They come home and come in like trolls running from the moon. I got that one from Pam. I used to tell her that I thought trolls were afraid of the sun and turning into stone.

“That’s stupid,” she used to say.

The couple asks how Henry is doing. I say that he was fine. More than that, really, I tell them, the kid was an angel. Henry doesn’t do anything to spoil the story. He just sits there like still water. He is a baby.

After they give us our money, twenty dollars each, and after the wife has taken Henry into the bedroom, Pam tells the husband about a deer that she saw strung up at work earlier in the week. She tells him how it hung there and dripped blood down the driveway and into the gutter.

As long as it’s not Henry choking, I suppose she can tell him anything she wants. But in the car after it’s over I tell her that she shouldn’t mess with the religious people like that.

“I wasn’t messing,” she says. “It really was amazing to watch. It was like watching a spider trying to crawl out of the toilet you’ve just flushed. All that life just flowing away.”

“Still,” I say. “The man’s a man of God.”

“There’s only man, just man.”

She’s right, somehow. I don’t know. I don’t know what she means exactly or why I’m afraid of losing the babysitting job. I don’t particularly like the Mormons, I mean not enough to fear losing them. I don’t dislike them by any means. I guess they’re just another thing to do. They are just.

I keep driving. When we pass a convenience store Pam perks up.

“I Yell To You For Ice Cream,” she grins.


The thing about the coast is it is there, it is big, and what else is there. There is nothing else. Here there is a small town with low lights, so you can see the stars easily and fully. The starlight comes down like rain. Still at the coast is water. Ocean water that covers more of the earth than land does. The starlight doesn’t come down there like it does in small towns in the mountains, but instead the water reflects the stars so calmly that you can believe the stars actually live in two places at once. Suddenly you’re caught between heaven and heaven. This is the beach life, the kind of place that makes you think only one thing. That being, What in the world are we waiting for?

I asked that of Pam once while we were stopped at an intersection.

I said, “What in the world are we waiting for, Pam?”

She looked at me and said, “A Chevrolet.”

A Chevrolet.

“I’m So Excited,” said Pam, “And I Just Could Never, Ever Hide It!”


I tried to head to the coast one time, but I think I went for the wrong one. I never got there, anyway. In Kansas I was driving east. There was a tornado up ahead on the interstate, and highway patrolmen were there miles before herding everyone off onto the exits. They were trying to keep people safe.

In my car was everything that I cared about enough to take with me. Except Pam. Pam wasn’t there. This was during the time that we were in the duplex with the Mormon couple. She thought that she was in love with the Mormon husband. On some night he would stay up with her on the porch and talk about the planets they all would get in the afterlife. Pam thought that when he said they, he meant the two of them. That was not what he meant. I told Pam about it and she got defensive.

“You’re making it hard for me to believe,” she said.

“In what?”

“Do me a favor,” she said. “Stay away from my planet.”

“Pam,” I said. “This is the only planet you’ll ever see.”

I was even a little bummed out by this. So I took off. I had my clothes and my makeup. I brought my best dress so that I could wear it barefoot on the beach. But then I was stuck in a diner off some exit in Kansas, miles away from a tornado.

What happened is that I just kept ordering items off of the menu in the diner. I didn’t even realize it. I ate ice cream after ice cream, washing it down with coffee and a few beers. I was there for hours and hours. By the time the policemen came in to tell us all that we could slide on by the tornado, it was dark and I was low on gas money.

The tornado must have been dancing, I like to think. But I know that that is stupid. When I got back to town I told Pam that I was sorry.

“For what?” she said.

And then I took a job at the call center, always telling myself that a tornado, a sign that big, is not something that you can just forget about.


Pam’s love for the Mormon husband never really left. It just faded a little when we had to move out. That’s why she tries to sway him with stories of draining life and beautiful death. Sometimes I think that’s why she loves the job at the butcher’s so much. That being, because it allows her to pose as an expert for things that demand expertise.

She can describe a dead moose for hours. A dead duck for more, seeing that it once flew around the skies. Pam thinks this is similar to a religion. It looks to me like the Mormon husband is humoring her. This is something he is good at.

Pam just doesn’t really have an ex. I do. I have an ex. So I don’t feel desperate to know the feeling like Pam does. What it is about women, I don’t know, so hungry for the feeling of betrayal.

My ex was named Robert. I say was because I tell people that he is dead.

When they ask about my boyfriend, I say “He died.”

“Oh my god,” they say, “how?”

“He accidentally swallowed a tick,” I say.

Really Robert was a college student, and a little younger than me. He graduated and moved away to work at a business somewhere keeping their finances. The kid was just too scared to take me with him.

He had said, “We had a beautiful relationship. But if you come with me we might end on a bad note. Let’s just leave it at what we had.”

I wanted to suck him dry from the inside out. I settled for the next best thing.


The next time we are set to babysit for the Mormons is a Friday evening. We will go there after we are done at work, so around five or five-thirty.

I drive to the butcher’s to pick up Pam. I get there and she is standing outside, looking at a dog that is looking at the meat in the butcher’s shop. She sees me and comes to get into the car.

“What a boring day,” she says. “How was work?”

“Fine,” I say. “Same. Boring.”

“Yeah,” Pam says.

We drive a few blocks to the Mormons’ house. To that duplex.

“Rolling, Rolling, Rolling,” Pam sings.

I had said the day was boring to Pam, but it really wasn’t. Some of it was boring, but in the afternoon I made a call to a man who happened to live in Oregon. He was in Lincoln City, so close to the coast.

“Are you happy on the coast?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Does the water seem so beautiful that it’s scary?” I asked.

“What is this?” he said.

“I want to live there,” I told him.

“It’s kind of expensive,” he said.

We made big talk like that for twenty minutes. I swore that I could hear sand on his end of the phone. Why I didn’t tell Pam, I don’t know. I wasn’t sure that she could handle it.


We park in front of the duplex and I listen to Pam talk aloud to herself about the stories she will tell Henry. The ones about the buffalo that came in to the shop. The ones about the dogs that she sometimes feeds out behind the shop. She calls that one the Circle of Life. I’m not sure that that is the right title.


There is one other thing about the trip to Kansas that I haven’t told yet. It is really the only other thing that I remember about the trip. I try not to think about that failure too much, but like most failures there are one or two things that still and forever come through.

I was a little drunk at the diner, waiting for the tornado to move along somewhere else. Some sounds came through the open windows as I ate and drank. They sounded so beautiful and happy to me. I thought about the town that I had left, with the man on the downtown streets who played saxophone for free on summer nights.

“Is someone playing music out there?” I asked the man next to me.

“That’s a girl screaming,” the guy had said. “Probably Helen’s kids are running around.”


I remember that feeling while I am in the car with Pam, sitting out in front of the duplex. When a dog barks outside somewhere, I shush Pam.

“What was that?” I say.

“What?”

“It was a girl screaming,” I say.

“What?” says Pam. “What? Who?”

There is a silence as Pam and I sit in the car listening. The dog barks again, but that is not what Pam is waiting for. Pam will not get what she is waiting for.

We are surrounded by a town.

And there is a girl screaming. But only I can hear her.

Minimalism

In which I can't spell tomorrow.

Leaf Monster

I drew some stuff.

Leaf Monster

Show

Here's one. Well, it's a rough draft of one. I wrote it in two sittings. I think it's pretty clear where I stopped and picked back up.

Show

The guy stands next to a big cottonwood. The giant trees are everywhere and the cotton floats all around on the wind like homeless birds, some landing in the weeds or in the cactus. Some of the bigger pieces are stuck to the guy’s skin where he is greasy from all of the bug repellent. He glistens in the sun. I love the way he looks with those fluffy white pieces on him. I want to wear him like a shirt. I want him to cover me from the cold.

The guy approached me a little while earlier in the park near the small grove of trees. He was juggling these long black sticks three and then four at a time. I was there hoping to find the creek a little deeper than usual. I was just passing through the grassy area on my way to the creek. It had been raining more than usual and it was time to splash around in the water. But when I saw the guy juggling in the grass I couldn’t help just stopping to watch him. When he saw me he came over.

He said, “Do you want to learn?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh.”

“You just looked kind of musical,” I said. “The way your body was still but your hands were quick. I liked it, is all.”

He got this odd smile on his face. The guy had a bag with him, for the juggling sticks I guessed. He reached in and pulled out a bottle of water, taking a drink and making a pronounced show of how good the water tasted. His hands were brilliant and clean.

“Do you want to go for a walk or something?” I said.

“Do you want to walk through the trees?” he said. “Across the creek.”

“That’s where I want to go,” I said.

So we crossed the river and walked around in the brush. There weren’t any houses over there, not yet. The sun was starting to go down and the bugs came out of their hiding places. The guy pulled an aerosol can out of his bag and sprayed himself until he dripped. He offered the can to me, so I just held out my hands to him. He sprayed enough into my palms. I rubbed them together and wiped on my arms and bare shoulders. I held my hands out again, got some more spray, and rubbed my calves and thighs. My skin felt smooth and good.

When we got far enough away from the river I stopped and turned to the guy.

“What’s your name?” he said.

I told him, “Jane.”

Jane is not my name.

I said, “I don’t want to know your name.”

I tried to make a move out of saying this. I blinked in an awkward way and turned my head a little bit. I know that guys like that, the pretend silly girl. I appeared sweet. I can do that well. So then he kissed me when I did my little dance. That was what I wanted.

And now here he is with the cotton all over his skin, looking like an old teddy bear falling apart. I want to say that I love him just to see what happens. I know that in a little while it will all be over, and for us to have the silly fleeting romance would probably make the whole thing complete. As he kisses me, his hands work up and down my back, then up around my neck and face. He brushes some hair out of my eyes and he lightly runs a finger down the back of my neck. I pull his hips closer to mine. He does have really great hands, but he is gentler than I want him to be. I want him to cup his hand around my neck. But he is a juggler, like a musician, careful with his instruments and tiny in his own way. See what I want from romance? I want to burn shit down. Right now I want things to be sickly and perfect.

He steps away, tripping a little bit over his bag. The guy reaches down and takes another sip from his bottle of water. Everything he does seems planned out far ahead of time. He comes to me again and starts to kiss me.

“Take off your belt,” I say.

He looks nervous, but he listens to me. He looks nervous and apologetic like a young boy. For a second I wonder how old he is. Then I look at his clean and strong hands. Like a fool, he hands me the belt after he has taken it off. I smile and laugh inside a little, then I feel bright.

“Tie me to this tree,” I say.

“What?” he says.

“Tie me,” I say, “to this tree.”

“But why?” he says.

“Do it,” I say. “Come on. We’re here.”

He looks confused and I can tell that he isn’t just putting on a show. With one hand he holds his shorts up and with the other he carries the belt to the tree. I stand in front of that tree and put my arms around it. The cottonwood feels better than the guy does. It is bigger and thicker. I hug it until he wraps my wrists together and locks the belt.

“That’s not tight enough,” I say.

And so he undoes it and retries. The second time around he gets it tight enough so that I can’t escape from the tree.

“Now what,” he says.

“Save me,” I say.

I can’t see him because of the size of the tree, but I can tell from the moment of silence and stasis that he is thinking about his life in general. Then I feel his hands on my wrists and things getting looser.

“No,” I say. “Not like that. Make it real.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says.

“I want you to save me like I am tied to this tree,” I say. “Now make it real.”

“Can we just take a minute,” he says. “What is this, anyway?”

“Help!” I scream.

“Are you okay?” he says. “Whoa, hey.”

“Save me!”

I think that the guy is starting to get it. He seems to panic a little bit and move around. Every time he goes back to undoing the belt from around my wrists I stop my pleading and just tell him no. Then I become a trapped young girl again and yell in a way that should make him feel like a savior.

He runs around the tree and looks at me.

“Help,” I plead. “Get me loose!”

I look over my shoulder to make it seem like someone is coming.

I say, “Get these ropes off of me!”

He looks at me with these eyes. These eyes! There is chaos in there. I glance toward his bag, and he goes there. He looks back up at me as he digs with his hands in the big bag.

“They’re coming,” I whisper in his direction. “Save me with your sword.”

He pulls out one of his juggling sticks, this big black thing, and runs to me. The guy looks behind me and ahead of me, then he goes to the belt and starts hitting it with his stick.

“Say something,” I say. “Talk to me.”

“I’ll save you,” he says.

“Louder,” I say.

“I’ll save you,” he says again.

Then suddenly my arms are free and the belt is on the ground. The guy comes around, looking different from before. He grabs me and kisses me a little. He picks me up and carries me to the next nearest tree, where he lays my body down on a small clearing of dirt and starts to undress me. This is, more or less, satisfying for me. He is on top of me for a while, looking like he can’t believe what he is doing. I look at the sky and think of drifting on the air currents and then settling on this person’s sticky arm, where I burrow myself deep.

When he is finished he looks at me and then gets up. The dirt has stuck to the parts of his body that were repelling insects.

“I need you to take me somewhere,” I say.

“Jane,” he says.

“I need you to take me somewhere,” I say. “Okay?”

In his truck we roll down Second Street until we get downtown. I watch the buildings as they go past. Within those buildings are people, strong people and weak people. They’re all separated. On a rooftop somewhere there has got to be a kid who climbed the maintenance ladder. He won’t find anybody from way up there.

Last week I found a newspaper on the ground. I took it as a sign. In the obituaries was my name. I knew that I was alive for the most part, and I knew that my name is not exactly a rare one, but still I was shaken by the whole thing. There was a part of me, somehow, in that paper. Somewhere I’d lost just a little bit of myself somewhere else in town and died, from old age or from gunshots, and then been written up in the tribune.

What you do after that? You wander around and you make dreams come true. People tell you to live sometimes. I thought about that when I saw my name in the newspaper. Since then I have been walking the streets looking for things that are meaningful. But I know that life is not meaningful forever, so I look for things that will be meaningful for a little while and then no longer meaningful. I look for the things that will resemble life, things that can just pick up life and hold it for a little while until they dissolve.

The guy’s truck is not a good one. It is old and dirty and full of junk. It is an automatic, and I think that that makes sense when I watch the guy drive with overwhelming timidity. I am bored with the guy’s truck. I don’t know exactly where we are going, but I see a classic-car show in a parking lot next to the movie theater.

“There,” I say. “Just drop me off.”

There is a big sign that says “Classic Cars 2009.” It hangs from the movie theater next door and has an arrow that points to the parking lot. The guy pulls over his truck and I step out. He rolls down the window.

“Hey,” he says. “What about? I mean, how can I reach you?”

His truck is a sore near this magnificent parking lot full of fine automobiles.

“It’s time,” I say. “Go on.”

The sun is almost completely down now. It looks as though I have gotten to the car show just before it closes up. Some of the drivers are getting into their cars. Two or three have driven off of the lot and gone home. I walk around and admire the machines. They are all sparkling and old as stones. They are older than I am. The men, they lean against the cars and look at them just as the passersby do. Some have their hoods up to reveal their massive engines. Some don’t.

I stop next to an orange car with a yellow interior. Two men lean against the side of the car and watch me watch the car. One tells me that it is a Woodie.

“1931,” the other one says.

“That’s old,” I say.

“Older than most,” he says.

The car has a spare tire above the front wheel rim. It looks very much out of place there. I run my hand along the wooden panel on the doors, and I can see one of the men get squeamish.

“Don’t touch the Woodie,” the other one says.

I don’t know exactly how to act at a car show, so I leave the men and keep walking. I don’t have anything to ask the guys with the Woodie car anyway. Car knowledge is something that I have never had.

A man touches my shoulder, so I turn around and face him.

“You look a little lost,” he says.

“I’m just looking at the cars,” I say.

This one is short and hairy. He has a thick beard and chest hair that crawls out of his shirt. His arms are big and his hands are dirty with grease.

“Let me show you my racecar,” he says.

It is just a little car, over in the corner of the parking lot. The thing is bright white, and has all of the accessories that I imagine a racecar has. There are roll bars, an American flag pasted on the window, big seats that sink low into the car, big headlights, a little wing on the back.

It is not a classic car, and I tell him so.

“Yeah,” he says. “It was made in ‘96.”

“Can you bring a car like that to a classic show?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says.

I keep looking at the car. He does not really say anything while I go around and around. The seats look so deep inside the car that they appear to be sitting on the ground underneath.

“I want to get inside,” I say.

He opens the door and lets me in, then he goes around and gets in the driver’s seat. I feel so tightly hugged in the seat that I am afraid to try to move. The seatbelt clicks when I really strap myself in. I can barely see over the dashboard. It’s a good feeling overall, like I’m being held by some larger-than-life mother. The guy looks at me and then buckles his belt as well. He puts his hands on the wheel and then brings one down to the gearshift. His legs are just long enough to reach the pedals below. He makes some racing noises as he pretends to drive.

The keys are in the console. I take them out and hand them to the guy.

“Let’s go,” I say. “Take me somewhere.”

He looks around in a cautious way and puts the keys in.

“It’s dark anyway,” he says. “Yeah, let’s just go.”

The car grunts to a start. It is a great roar as the guy puts it into gear. He goes slow as he weaves through the other parked cars and out to the street. As we are stopped, waiting to pull into that street, a man comes running up from behind us. He is yelling. The guy looks at me and then pulls out quickly into the street. He shouts as he does this.

“Who was that?” I say.

He finally gets to talking now.

“The thing about racecar driving,” he says, “is that it’s all instinct. You have to know when to punch it and when to take it easy. You have to be aware of what’s around you. A lot of drivers have co-drivers now, I think, these guys who tell you where the turns are coming from. A good driver doesn’t need any of that co-driver stuff. You just know.”

“This isn’t your car?” I say. “This isn’t your car. Okay.”

“How they did it in Two-Lane Blacktop? That’s how I do it. Did you see that?”

“I was just thinking about it, I think,” I say.

“Well,” he says. “It’s just like that. Just like that.”

He is going very fast down a main road, weaving in and out of other cars and other drivers. I start to feel a little excited with it all.

“It’s not all about speed,” he says.

“It’s not?”

“No,” he says. “Most think that it is. But it’s more about instinct than speed.”

He drives through a red light.

“But,” he says. “But you do have to go really fast too.”

We drive and drive and drive. The guy whoops from time to time and speeds up. On the highway we are mostly alone. I think that no one can see us. I say this out loud just to hear how it sounds in the air. The guy agrees with me and turns the headlights off for a few seconds and then turns them on again.

“Stealth,” he says. “We call that stealth.”

“Who does?” I say.

He thinks about it.

“You and me,” he says.

The road is supposed to be free. That is how it is talked about all the time. It feels that way for a little while, but then it is really a slow death. You can drive really fast, still it takes a lot of time to get anywhere. Sometimes it is little more than a waste. The guy and I drive until morning. We do not talk about much except for the car. I listen to him talk about what he dreams racing to be. He is probably right. We are all racing in a way.

In the morning we find a small town and pull over into a diner for some breakfast. We sit down in a booth and look at each other across the table. His hair is dirty. He might be the shortest man I have ever known. At least he is the shortest man to ever drive a car in front of me, especially in the sunken racecar seats. This amazes me somehow. I suddenly don’t know how he can even see the road from a perch like that. Maybe he wasn’t even thinking about the road.

I say, “I had a short grandfather.”

“What does that mean?” he says.

“I had a really short grandfather,” I say. “He married a taller woman. Then they had my dad, who was taller than his dad but still pretty short. My dad married a much taller woman, and they had me. I’m pretty tall.”

“How tall are you?” he asks.

“Almost six feet tall,” I say.

“Do you mind short men?” he says.

“No,” I say. “Weren’t you listening?”

“Yeah,” he says.

He looks around for our waitress, but nobody is really around the restaurant. The sun is about to come up and thinks are mostly empty around the town.

“Do you think we should’ve waited before seating ourselves?” he asks. “I thought in these places you’re just supposed to sit down somewhere. It’s morning already. Shouldn’t there be people in here, the old people who drink coffee so early and just talk?”

I am not really listening, but I look into his bearded face. I try to see through the hair and into his skin. I consider instinct for a brief moment.

“When my dad died I wrote the notice for the paper,” I say.

“He died?”

“He was skiing when it happened,” I say. “He hit a tree. I think that the sun must have blinded him or something, because he was a good skier. I don’t know for sure though.”

“And you wrote it in the paper?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“That’s rough,” he says. “Man, in the papers, those sad little pages. Like you could ever fill in a life in a small box like that. Not even a page.”

“I know,” I say.

“What did you write?” he says.

“I remember when I was a girl,” I say, “that my dad took me one time to California. We had a small shack on the beach for a little while. We walked inland and into a vineyard. He told me not to tell anyone what we did. We just got a bunch of grapes and walked out to the beach. The grapes smelled so good, and the smell just kind of flooded out when you bit into them. I lay on the beach and ate grapes while my dad waded around in the water.”

“So what did you write?”

“I don’t remember much else with him,” I say. “My parents divorced pretty early on. I didn’t see much of him. Why I was asked to write about him is so strange.”

“What did you write?” he says again.

I look at the short, bearded man.

“Don’t leave me,” I say.

“Tell me what you wrote in the paper,” he says.

I look at the racecar outside and think about being held in the sunken seats.

“Let’s just drive forever,” I say.

“Tell me,” he says. “Okay, but tell me.”

A Tremendous Thing

Right, well. I haven't posted anything here lately because I'm submitting stories to journals that accept only previously unpublished work. "Published" includes blogs.

Thus far I am 0 for 6 on submitted stories. So I'll post the rejected ones here.

First up, "A Tremendous Thing."

A Tremendous Thing

I am standing in a house of bees. The house is mine. It smells like honey and love from the outside. Inside it just smells dead. For a few minutes I watch the clock, then when it is time I walk outside and stand on the porch, where I wait for the people come.

A bee stings me while I wait. I want to feel it but don’t.

Then fifteen minutes later people come. There is a woman with two young children. They walk from the gravel parking area a little ways away. I watch them intently as they come, checking myself over a little and shaking out any sleepy dumbness that might still be in me. Last night the bees seemed restless.

When she gets to me she stands and looks at me.

I say, “You’re looking for the bee-house? This is it.”

“I know,” she says. “I’ve been here before.”

A few months ago I quit my job. I was a wedding photographer. The thing is, a lot of people have dreams about their weddings, and those dreams include a certain kind of photographer. Brides especially seem to have a thing with photographers who are covered with red spots and aloe cream. I don’t know why. I guess I never asked them why. It’s just a blemish, I suppose, on the whiteness of things.

And we can’t have that.

Outside the house I wrap the children’s bare arms and legs with saran wrap, because it is all that I have that could work. I look at the woman.

“You’ve been here before?” I say. “Really?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t know why I lied. I know people who have.”

“Next time cover yourselves,” I say. “I mean, Christ, there’s bees in there.”

The children don’t seem to mind the wrap or the duct tape that closes up their sleeves. I try to put some on the woman too, but she refuses.

“I think I should brave it,” she says.

“Sure?” I say.

“Don’t you?” she says.

“It’s all I know,” I say.

We go inside, and I show them around. The house is not a big house. It is more of a shack, really. Outside it is painted white. Inside it mostly looks like wood. If you dream really hard, you can imagine that you’re in the woods, even though you’re in a house.

The woman starts to examine the walls, and then she makes a noise.

“Yikes,” she said. “They’re real.”

She turns to the kids.

“They’re real, all right,” she says to them.

I take them first to the back bedroom, which has my bed and dresser. That’s about it in there. I tell them that this is where I live.

The bigger of the children says, “You live here?”

“Of course,” I say, and look at the woman because I want to make fun of the kid a little but know that I probably shouldn’t.

The woman understands, though, and nods.

The kid says, “I would be scared of the bees.”

“It’s not the bees that can hurt you,” I say.

The woman looks at me. I look back. I had meant to sound smart in front of the kids, wise like a wizard. The little one seems to buy it, the bigger one no.

The kid says, “No, it is.”

The woman waits for my reply. I guess she is on my side, and for a moment I think she’s gorgeous in her dumb look. I stay quiet for a second.

She says, “You only hurt yourself, right?”

And I think, these can’t be her kids.

Everyone lets everything go, and we move into the living bathroom. I tell them that it is usually wet and steamy in here and that the bees don’t like the walls around the bathroom. They nod.

Next is the living room, which has bookshelves and chairs.

“Go ahead,” I say to them. “Sit down and feel what it’s like.”

They do.

“If you stay real quiet,” I say, “you can hear them in the walls.”

For the most part this isn’t true, but people always buy it. They sit on the edge of their seats and try to point their ears in the direction that seems the most bee-like.

The woman says, “I can hear it! I can! Kids, listen.”

The big kid says, “I am. I just hear us.”

The little one says nothing. The big kid is right, because there is no noise but our silly human noise.

As we’re sitting and listening for the bees, someone knocks on the door. Outside there is insurance man that I called the week before. I tell him to wait and come back inside.

I say to the woman, “Okay, it’s time to keep moving.”

But they don’t listen. Up in the corner of the room some of the bees have come through a tiny crack and are flying around with a purpose. The visitors are entranced by this. I let them have their fill, and eventually the bees fly into the bedroom and land on the curtain that covers my bed.

So I take the three people into the kitchen and offer them some honey. I have big jars of it sitting all over the place. The people assume that the honey is from the house, but it’s not. It’s from a supermarket downtown. There is honey in the house, sure, but I don’t know how to get it. I’m not a carpenter or a beekeeper. I’m just a salesman and a guide.

The people eat some honey with crackers and then look around the kitchen.

“This whole place smells like honey,” she says. “That’s just, it’s really pretty.”

By the table the little kid is looking at a bee that has landed on his arm. For a second I think about what the kid would look like completely covered with bees. Then I think about him flying away, carried by bees.

I say out loud, “Someday this house will be carried away by bees.”

I try to say it like I was actually dreaming it first, and saying it out loud only by accident. This usually works. This was how it started. I think that lately I actually have been dreaming it.

The woman in her beautiful way nods in approval and then chomps a cracker with honey.

And then, shortly after they arrived, the woman and the kids are gone. After they pay me forty dollars.

Outside the insurance man is standing with a few people.

He says, “I hope you don’t mind, but I told them you were already on a tour.”

“We can wait,” one of them says.

“Thanks,” I say. “I don’t mind. Excuse me, people, but I need to have a meeting with this man.”

Inside the insurance man asks if the living room is the best place.

“I mean, with the bees and everything,” he says. “They’re real, right?”

I show him the stings on my arms.

“The bathroom might be better,” I say.

The thing is, people say that bees get used to the people who are around them all the time. This has not been my experience. For me, bees are bees. They sting you if you get in their way. It’s a price to pay for running a profitable house of bees.

The insurance man says, “How did you get into such a weird predicament?”

“I’m not sure I know what that means.”

“You run a house of bees.”

“Right,” I say. “Well, I’m not ready to go into all that.”

So instead we talk about insurance. It’s difficult to get insurance for myself and for my house. The house is likely to fall any minute, most think. In fact, most think the same for me the bee-man.

The whole time the man is just talking, on and on. I don’t recognize most of what he says, but I think he is on my side because of the way he smiles at me. After a while he sighs and quits with the insurance stuff.

He says, “I didn’t come here just for business.”

Then he stops, waiting for me.

So I say, “Okay.”

“No,” he says, “I think this place is a star. A real star. I’ve been here so many times that I’m sure the bees know me.”

“They’re just bees,” I say.

“Still,” he says. “I have something. What you do, I think I can do. What you do is what I will do.”

I look at the man. I don’t think he’s crazy. I should, but I don’t.

I say, “I’ve been in this house for a long time. You want to show me something? Show me. Please.”

So he does. He shows me. We sneak out the back window and run through the trees to the parking lot. I feel new again. We get in his car and drive away, laughing at the people who are still standing outside of the house of bees, waiting to get in and get my tired tour. In the car the insurance man talks hotly about life and beauty, and I listen because I have to say nothing. Halfway down the mountain, halfway back into town, a bee flies out of the man’s shirt.

“That bee didn’t sting you?” I say.

“Jesus,” says the man. “That’s a sign. That’s a sign if I ever saw one.”

And I believe him.

In town he takes me to a neighborhood that I have never seen before. It is on the south side of town. He drives deep into the place and then pulls over in an alley.

“It’s behind this building,” he says. “Follow me.”

So I do. I follow him. Behind the broken down building is a big pile of shopping carts. There are just a ton of them, stacked up and spread out on this empty expanse of cracking concrete. It is a tremendous thing. Just tremendous.

I say, “Dear God.”

“Right,” says the man. “Right?”

He leads me to the middle of the ornament of shopping carts. No, it’s a skeleton of something long lost, something beautiful and sad and ancient. I look at the man and feel thankful.

“I’ve been gone for a long time,” I say.

“In the mountains,” he says. “In a way, I have too.”

“Who knows about this?” I say.

“Only us and lost souls,” he says.

I look at the red marks on my skin.

“I think that my soul is lost,” I say.

“That has to be why we’re here,” he says.

He brings me to the center and has me kneel down there. I do gladly. He kneels next to me and tells me to wait, so I do. I put my hands together.

“Don’t do that,” he says. “That’s not right. Just wait.”

And I do. After a while a bird lands on one of the carts stacked on the highest part. Then a while later another bird lands nearby.

“Jesus,” says the man. “This is rare.”

“Oh, God,” I say.

I wish that it would rain. I wish that it would rain a rain that could wash me all away into the concrete cracks of the shopping-cart foundation. That is all that I want at this moment.

Sometime later I jolt up. I have been nodding off. Or meditating. I still don’t know the difference, but want to. I get up with the man and feel strong and alive. I feel good. And I know that in the days to come I won’t remember how many birds came that day to save me, to lift me away.

It could have been a thousand birds. Or it could have been a single bird. In the end, I know it wouldn't have mattered.

Movers

I started to expand a story into a novella. So I guess I haven't had much to post here. I wrote this story after reading some Tobias Wolff. The man must have had patience.

Movers

They were sitting on a couch in an apartment full of boxes of books and dishes and garbage bags full of clothes. The pieces of a disassembled bed-frame leaned up against the wall opposite the couch.

The new tenant for the apartment got up and said that the two of them should go back downstairs to get the last of the boxes.

The other said, “Again, already. All right, let’s finish it up.”

“You didn’t have to help out,” said the tenant. “I really appreciate it.”

The two shook hands.

“No problem,” said the other man. “I don’t mind at all. It’s really a pain to move, especially when you don’t know anyone around town to help you.”

The tenant had been right. The other man didn’t have any reason to help the first man. The other had woken up late one morning and gone downstairs through the back door of the apartment building to have a cigarette. Outside there was one man backing up a truck and another man, the tenant, guiding the driver. Furniture lay all over the bumpy asphalt. The couches and bed were in pieces. The boxes were stacked in threes and the bags were grouped in one big pile. In the corner were a bicycle and a bag of golf-clubs. In another corner were a television and a wooden stand.

The tenant had said, “Do you mind not smoking next to the furniture? Sorry, I just don’t want them smelling like smoke.”

The other man had said, “Not at all.”

Then the truck drove away, and the tenant looked back at his pile of stuff. The other man watched him.

“Do you want some help?” he asked the tenant.

“You don’t have to do that,” said the tenant.

“I have time,” he said. “I’d be happy to help you move in.”

When they finished getting everything into the new apartment, they sat again on the big white couch and drank some beers.

“It feels good to be done,” said the tenant.

“Yeah,” said the other. “Yeah, I bet it does. Where did you move from?”

“Denver,” said the tenant. “I lived there for about four years.”

“Why’d you move?”

“I followed someone out there,” said the tenant. “Then it didn’t really work out with her. I got a job out here, so here I am.”

The other man thought and then said, “Where were you from before that?”

“Manhattan, Kansas,” said the man.

“Oh,” said the other. “That’s not too far away. Not as far as Denver, anyway.”

“Nope,” said the tenant. “When I was driving, I felt like I was coming home in a way.”

“Did you ever have any tornadoes?” asked the other man. “I mean, did you see any when you were in Manhattan?”

“Sure,” said the tenant. “There were tornadoes from time to time. I guess I never saw any up close, but I’ve been through them.”

The tenant got up and walked to the refrigerator. He pulled out another bottle and then motioned to the other man on the couch, who nodded. Then the tenant came back with the beers.

“I wonder if people in Manhattan, New York, have ever been in tornadoes,” said the other man.

“Yeah,” said the tenant. “I was thinking about how funny it used to be in Denver when I told people that I was from Manhattan. They would always assume.”

“I would have too,” said the other man, “if you hadn’t been up front about it.”

They sat in silence for a little while, drinking the beer and generally just resting their tired bodies. The move had been hard, up three flights of stairs.

The other man said, “Have you been driving through most of the night?”

“Yeah,” the tenant said. “I left Denver yesterday evening, because I didn’t want to drive during the hot days. I thought the humidity would make the drive uncomfortable.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” said the other. “Did it work?”

“I was still sweating and hot,” said the tenant.

The two laughed.

“I was soaked through,” laughed the tenant.

“Yeah, I bet you were,” laughed the other man.

The other man got up to get two more beers. There was a pile of bottles getting bigger and bigger on the floor next to the couch. In the tenant’s eye was a softening gleam, like his eyes had been open for too long. The other man’s face was getting redder.

“Another?” he said from the refrigerator.

The tenant said, “Yeah, thanks.”

The other man brought the beers back to the couch, handed them to the tenant, then said, “I’m going to go have a cigarette. Do you want one?”

“No,” said the tenant. “Not for me, thanks.”

“I’ll be right back, then,” said the other man.

Outside the other man smoked and looked around the parking lot. Most of the cars were gone. People were at their jobs or at their schools. He smoked slowly and with pleasure, like he was kissing a young girl. That was what he imagined outside.

Upstairs in the apartment the tenant was feeling good, but pleasure was not exactly the right name for the feeling. The drinks made him feel all right, but the end of the move was not a sense of enjoyment. It was something else. Probably it was just a sense of another thing done and behind him.

The two men, separated then, were momentarily very different. The tenant got up from the couch to christen the bathroom. He stared at the water in the toilet as it flushed down into the pipes below. As he did so, the other man came back into the apartment.

“You smell smoky,” said the tenant.

“Sorry,” said the other. “I’ll try not to sit on the couch and get my smell all over it.”

The tenant laughed.

“She used to get upset about smells like that,” said the tenant.

“Don’t they all,” said the other.

“I think it’s about time that we went out on the balcony,” said the tenant.

On the balcony the two men began to talk like friends might. The alcohol made them loose.

“You any good at golf?” said the other.

“I’m shit,” said the tenant. “I keep that around just for rare occasions. But I’m just shit.”

“I could’ve guessed that,” laughed the other man. “They say golf isn’t a man’s sport, but to have the patience to do it, you need to be more than a man.”

“Who says that?” said the tenant.

“I don’t know,” said the other man. “Someone had to say it sometime.”

They laughed at that.

“I can’t believe I have a balcony,” said the tenant. “I never thought I would end up with a balcony.”

“Mine’s on the other side of the building,” said the other.

Across from the balcony were an alleyway and then the rooftop of a wide building. There were groups of businesses under that rooftop.

Another pile of bottles had grown up now on the balcony, near where the men were standing and talking. They kept drinking beers until they were almost out of bottles.

Then the tenant said, “You know, I never liked our place in Denver. It never had a balcony. I never liked the couch or the TV. It was all shit.”

The other man said nothing.

“And the golfing?” said the tenant. “I’m not even a golfer. I never knew how to play golf.”

“I think I like baseball more,” said the other man.

“Yeah, baseball,” said the tenant.

He finished his bottle and then walked over to the bag of golf clubs. He unzipped a pocket on one side and pulled out a handful of golf balls.

As he did so, the tenant said, “I like baseball too, but I was usually shitty at it.”

The other man said, “I can’t hit for shit, but I can throw.”

They laughed at this. The tenant brought the golf balls to the balcony.

“Let’s throw these,” he said. “Let’s make a baseball game out of golf.”

The two men looked at the rooftop beyond the balcony. There were some columns coming up out of the flat rooftop. Two of them were on the left and on the right. On the far end was a big aluminum box, one that looked like it was there for a swamp cooler for the businesses. And nearest the two men was a small pipe for steam.

On the balcony, the two drunk men threw some practice balls at the four parts of the rooftop that looked most like a diamond. They decided that this would be the game. The two men took turns throwing the balls from the balcony.

After a few throws, the tenant hit the aluminum box on the far end. After another few throws, the other man hit the column on the right.

“That’s two on,” said the tenant.

“This is much better than golf,” laughed the other man.

“Golf is shit,” said the tenant. “Golf is not a man’s game.”

“That’s what they say,” said the other man.

“They must be right,” said the tenant.

The tenant threw another ball and hit the column on the left.

“That’s three on,” said the tenant.

The men kept throwing balls, trying to hit the pipe nearest them.

“I’ll tell you about Denver sometime,” said the tenant.

“Tell me about Manhattan,” said the other man. “I hear that Denver is shit.”

The tenant laughed.

“It is,” he said.

“We’ve got three on,” said the other man. “Just need to hit the plate. Hit the pipe to bring them home.”

And that was how it went, the two movers taking golf balls out of their pockets until there were no balls left, throwing what they had on top of a rooftop from a balcony, trying to hit the pipe there that would bring them home.

The Good Life

The Good Life

Kevin and I? We are sick of shadows. We are sick to death of them. In the mornings when we wake up I like to remind him that we are sick. And at night, before we fall asleep, he reminds me of the terror of the shadows.

He tells me, “I’m sick of all the shadows in this apartment.”

And I say, “Tell me about it.”

He concedes, “Some things, sure, are worse than turning light into dark.”

“But not much,” I say.

We have two big windows in our pretty little apartment. One is in the living room, the other in the bedroom. No curtains or blinds adorn our windows. We keep no furniture in front of the windows. Our furniture is small and our apartment is mostly bare. There are lights in our apartment, but rarely do we use them. We like to keep what we have close to the floor, because such a move minimizes unnecessary shadows.

When people ask us what we do, Kevin says, “I work in an office doing copy-work for an ad agency.”

I say, “I’m a transcriptionist who works from home.”

This is true, but in my mind I know that my real occupation, the one that counts, is nothing to do with transcribing sound files. My real job is harbinger of light. When Kevin leaves for work in the mornings, I kiss him goodbye and tell him to have a good day. He tells me the same, and I think about guarding the apartment until he gets back.

Our apartment is particularly gorgeous at two specific times. One is at noon, when the sun is directly above our part of the world. Light is everywhere then, and I like to sit on the rug on the floor, away from the window, and watch the light come in. On other occasions I go outside and lie down under the sun, in a place without trees or buildings. There is no better activity for soaking up light-beauty than floating on your back in the ocean. Accordingly, we live on a few blocks away from a good ocean.

The other time gorgeous time is at about nine in the morning, when the sun is rising in front of our east-bound windows. Kevin is usually gone from the apartment at this time. I alone must face the eye of God at nine in the morning. After much practice, I am hardened and wise in this endeavor.

There is one time that is particularly ugly, and that is the exact second at night when Kevin and my part of the world is facing outer space, not in the direction of the sun. When I wake up at night, around this time, I can get scared, because this is the moment of the biggest shadow of all. But Kevin assures me that there is light coming down from stars farther away from the one that lights our planet.

I say, “I wish it would get here already.”

“It takes some time,” he says. “Try not to be impatient with the stars.”

I laugh and say, “I’m such a stinker.”

Kevin says, “I love this stinker,” and then we make love.


One weekend morning Kevin and I woke up to see the sun come through the windows right at nine in the morning. We watched from our mattress that sits on the floor, far away from the window. I had my head on his chest, and his arm was around my neck. I could feel his hands brushing against my left breast.

Kevin made a noise and blinked his eyes.

“That’s a bright one,” he said.

“You’re just out of practice,” I said.

I let it go and then thought that maybe God was speaking to me by blinding Kevin momentarily. So I started kissing his chest a little bit. He made a more pleasant noise so I got on top of him.

“Take off the blankets,” he said.

“Turn around,” I said. “I want to see the sun while we make love.”

As he entered me, I watched the sun. I felt I was doing right. I looked back and forth between Kevin and the sun. We were bathed in light and happy.

After we were finished, I felt a little sick, leaned over the mattress and threw up on the floor. Kevin gasped and ran to the kitchen. I went to the bathroom and washed up.

“Are you okay?” Kevin asked me in the bathroom.

“It’s a miracle,” I said. “A true miracle.”

Kevin made a look with his face. I pulled out a pregnancy test then and peed on it. I had a lot of pee in me because it was morning-time. Minutes later, when the air was totally full of the smell of urine, the test confirmed that a miracle had taken place. In fact, I was pregnant with a baby of light.

“Look, Kevin,” I said. “Just look.”

“I can see,” he said. “Now I can truly see.”

“A baby from God,” I said.

“A baby from the sun,” he said.

“Our baby,” I said.

Kevin got dressed and said that he was going to get some sparkling grape juice from the grocery store. I thought that this was a good idea. After he left, I stayed in the bathroom and looked at my naked body. It was a beautiful-looking body. I imagined how my breasts would get bigger along with my belly. I ran my hands over my chest and stomach. I felt my legs and my bottom. I looked down at my vagina and then studied it in the mirror.

“I hope you are ready from the task that lies ahead,” I told it. “A baby of light is a lot to handle.”

In the mirror I thought that my body was trying to tell me that it was ready for anything. I was quick to believe it. My body hadn’t spent many days letting me down. It was the first to alert me to the dangers of the shadows. When I was young, I remember lying on patio in the sun. I was wearing a one-piece bathing suit, because my father didn’t want any of the neighbors looking at his young virgin daughter. I didn’t mind. For an hour I lay in the sun, soaking it all up, until I just fell asleep. I drifted off into dreams of flying.

And when I woke up, the clouds had come in to cover the sun. For innumerable minutes I must have been lying in the now-dark. I was suddenly freezing cold, too cold to be angry. It was at that point that I knew what the sun really meant. It was then, awaking on the patio of darkness, that I knew all of it.

Shadows are impossible to extinguish completely. They’re like love, I think. For years it was very difficult to get along. I met Kevin in college. We took many of the same classes, and he refused to sit next to the windows. He first approached me on the boardwalk near our campus. I was walking along quickly to get back home when he stopped me.

He said, “I’m Kevin.”

“I know,” I said.

“Can you move?” he said.

I looked down where he was looking, and noticed that I was somehow standing in his shadow.

“Quick,” he said.

And then I kissed him and dragged him into the big water nearby, knowing then and forever that we, in our own little way, had saved each other.


I left the bathroom to go back and lay my new body down on the mattress near the light. After a while I got up and moved to the living room to look at the light from a new angle. For some reason, I felt that I should try to get into the light there. This was a risky move, because with the angle of the sun and the window I could easily just create my own shadow without needing to. I felt my belly and looked ahead of me, and eventually decided that now was the time.

In the light in front of the window I felt good. I managed to get myself down in a way that made very, very little shadow. I was proud of myself. I spoke to the baby inside of me about my life and about its life, explaining to the baby that for now I was its sun and universe and everything.

“And I promise now,” I said, “that I will absolutely harbor no shadows for you. But in the future, you will have to learn how to do that on your own. Yours is a world of a different kind of light. Ours is a world of many sources of light that conflict and trouble us.”

Kevin eventually came home and showed me the bottle of juice. It was grand. At noon we decided to drink it outside under the noonday sun.

“It’s a cloudless day,” he said.

“It’s a day of miracles,” I agreed.

So we went to a park near our apartment to lie in the grass. We lay on our backs and drank big swigs from the bottle of sparkling juice. For a long time it was really nice. There were no trees in the way. We could close our eyes and just absorb the light.

A man approached us after a while, though, and asked us if we were drinking alcohol in the city-park. We opened our eyes to see that it was a copy, and that he was standing over us.

“No,” I said. “Of course not. We’re drunk on the light.”

The man sighed. I looked over at Kevin, who was staring in horror at my belly. I looked down to find that the shadow of the cop’s head was covering my entire stomach. Kevin yelled at the cop.

“For God’s sake,” he said. “Leave this park, sir!”

Kevin looked at me, and I stared back.

“Save us,” I said.


Kevin is Kevin. He is strong and full of light. Sometimes I know that we are being tested. This was Kevin’s test. Earlier in the day he had been blinded by the sun. I had saved him with my love. Now I knew that he was blinded because God was hitting the reset button on Kevin. I should have known that a true test of the pure soul of Kevin was coming. I just didn’t realize it at first. In my mind I promised the baby that I wouldn’t make the same mistake with him.

Kevin picked me up and ran towards the ocean, looking back and hoping that the shadows were still behind us and not in front. We were heading in the right direction, at least. It was a good thing that this hadn’t happened earlier in the day.

We kept running towards the sun that sat over the water. Kevin didn’t have time for streets. He held me up, his arms bulging and his hands close to my breasts and under my knees. He ran through front yards and back yards. He ran as I imagined God could run. He carried me across Northridge and Prospect, then across Lake Drive and beyond. When we got to a fence, he would say, “I’m sorry, baby, but I have to toss you over.”

I said, “Do you mean me, baby?”“I mean all my babies,” he said.

When we finally got to the beach, I was feeling tired and thirsty. It was the dark setting in. It was going to come right down to the end, I knew. Kevin didn’t take off his clothes, he just ran straight into the water.

He went deep enough so that his waist was wet. He held me up so that I was floating full-length in the ocean.

He said, “Here I stand with my babies. I have two of them, and they have been drenched in the worst kind of sadness. Here I stand, humbled, ready for them to be washed clean again with the light.”

He looked at me and I looked back. It was love. It was sacrifice. It was there. Kevin waded away and left me floating and looking up at the sun. I felt my face getting hot. I put my hands on my belly and wished for things. When I looked at Kevin I saw that he was floating in the same way. With my face back up at the sun, I thought about Kevin and the baby. I started to feel better.

We floated until I felt my body dissolving into water. It was a feeling that I hoped resembled death. Kevin and the baby and I all turned into the water then as we floated. We were the surface water, the water without shadows, and we were all praying strangely and thankfully for the good life.

The Clean Place

The Clean Place

In the convenience store a few blocks away from my apartment building, I was wandering up and down the few tidy aisles. I was looking for deals. The clerk up at the front of the store was eyeballing me like I was a wild animal. When I noticed him I ducked behind the end display and pretended like I had found something when really I hadn’t. Crouched there I felt ready but anxious.

Eventually my eyes focused, and I saw these packages of paper towels in front of me. They were individual rolls, but they were two for one. I grabbed a pair and stood back up, trying to make myself noticeable now to show the clerk that I wasn’t wasting the store’s time, to show him that I was being a useful, good customer. I tried not to look at him while I did this, but failed, and found him staring out of the window.

“This is a good deal,” I said at the counter.

“This everything?” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”

Back at the apartment I unwrapped the paper towels and placed them carefully in the closet next to the front door. They would sit there until I needed them. I settled into a corner of the couch and began to think about things with my eyes closed. For a good while I was there, thinking ultimately about foreign places and people, dark corners and artful smells.

By the time my mouth was watering I was in the kitchen, pouring water into a large bowl. I had never made tea before, but I wanted to because I thought that it would be mysterious. In the water I put some sugar. I cut up a lemon and let the slices float in the sugar-water.

I thought, I guess I need tea now. I put the big bowl of good stuff on the counter and put my shoes back on. But when I opened the door there was a man standing there looking back at me.

“You’re here,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I didn’t realize you were here,” he said.

I stood there with my hand still on the doorknob. I wanted to move to lean on the doorjamb but felt like that would be too much of a gesture.

“I’m sure here,” I said.

He nodded.

“I need to come in to check your smoke alarms,” he said. “So.”

“Oh,” I said. “I can usually do that.”

I didn’t know if this was true.

“Yeah, well,” he said.

“Okay,” I said finally.

The man came in looked around my place for a few minutes. I motioned toward the alarms on the ceiling and in the bedroom, but he didn’t see me. He had to find them on his own.

“Here they are,” he said. “Got ‘em.”

“All right,” I said. “Yeah, I’ve never heard an alarm like that go off.”

“Really?” he said. “It’s pretty common.”

I thought about it.

“No,” I said. “Actually, I have. Of course I have. I don’t know why I lied about that.”

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Sure, everyone’s had to hear these things.”

“No, you’re right,” I said.

He was right. I’d heard them. I’d heard them sound off like angels coming down from heaven, even if the alarms were only testing us tenants.

He pulled a box out of my closet and put it under the first alarm, the one in the bedroom. I stood next to him and watched. I thought that he should probably have his own stepladder, but figured that he was the professional and that I should stick to what I knew.

“Do you think everyone has their own thing?” I said.

“What do you mean?” he said. “I mean, well, sure, but what do you mean?”

“I mean,” I said. “You know alarms and safety. You know how to prevent things and save people. Do you think everyone has something like that, like in their own way?”

“This is just a job,” he said.

“I have a job, too,” I said.

“I still save people in other ways,” he said.

“I guess I don’t,” I said. “I can’t think of any way that I do.”

“Is that what you meant, then?” he said.

“Yeah, I think so,” I said. “It must have been.”

I was both happy and sad that he had answered me how he did. I was glad that he was there with me.

He finished looking over the first alarm and started in on the other one near the kitchen. On the box he looked kind of like this wooden figure that I saw in a museum one time when I was a kid. I wanted to tell him that, but never did, instead just admiring him.

He stumbled off of the box when he was done with that last alarm. As he tried to catch himself, he knocked over the large bowl of good tea that I was trying to make. It spilled into the living room, onto the hardwood floors. I gasped without meaning to.

“Sorry,” he said. “Really, sorry.”

“It’s not that big of deal,” I said. “Wait a second.”

“If you had had any furniture there,” he said, “it would’ve been a real problem.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re right.”

I went to the closet next to the front door and stopped for a second. The smell of lemons was drifting throughout the room like a song. Everything smelled real fresh and beautiful then, like my place was the clean place.

“Do you smell that?” I said.

I watched him close his mouth.

“Sure,” he said.

I brought back a roll of paper towels, happy to use them and be of use. I handed him some, but he sent me a look of refusal.
“Help me soak this up,” I said.

“Well,” he said. “I was just here for the alarms. Yeah.”

I didn’t know how to convince him, so I just stood there with the towels.

“Oh, okay,” he said. “I mean, I got time.”

So that was how, on our hands and knees, we soaked up lemon sugar-water from the wood floors.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Lewis,” he said.

I waited for him to ask me mine, but he didn’t.

“Mine’s Nick,” I said.

“Nick,” he said.

“Right.”

“I got a good deal on these paper towels, Lewis,” I said. “Just earlier today I got a hell of a deal.”

I was sure glad that he was there. It felt good to hear my name. It felt good to do some real work with another man. Like the sun the two of us were coming down to the ground to make things dry and smooth again. I thought about being outside and being so hot that the earth just cracked under me. It was a fire inside of me, a glorious one.

“Let me get rid of some of these wet towels,” I said, brushing him on the shoulder as I got up to walk away.

I gathered up the ones we had used up and walked into the kitchen to throw them away under the sink. The trash can was full, though, so I walked down the hall to my bedroom to throw them away in the can there. He eyed me as I walked down the hall.

At the moment that I was out of sight in the bedroom, I heard the front door open and then close again. I walked out to find that the man was gone, even though there was still plenty of water left on the living-room floor. I stood there confused and betrayed by the man. I was betrayed in the worst kind of way, I somehow knew, because we were men working. I closed my eyes to calm down for a second. I smelled the air swelling with the lemons of nature and thought no. No way.

I hurried out through the front door without even putting my shoes on again. I looked first left and then right, assumed that he probably went back out through the front door of the building, and decided to take that route as well.

Outside he was gone. For all I knew he was in the middle of the ocean. I sulked for a second under the awning of my building and looked around. I wished that it would rain. I really did. I closed my eyes again and dreamed good, sad dreams. In my mind it would rain soon, and the people would call on me for my paper towels, for my great sense of deals and forethought.

But when I opened my eyes it was still hot and sunny. The sun-me that I had made with the man was still the me that was there. He had left a mark on me, this man who had come to my house to save me from smoke and then to also spill my good tea. I realized that that must have been the best tea that I had ever made.

I started to wander around the sidewalks like cotton from the trees, and eventually what I had felt with the man in my apartment waned. I wondered if people in foreign countries smelled or tasted like flowers.

Then a few blocks up I started feeling dirty again, not like in my clean apartment. And then a few blocks later I saw a man walking toward me and smoking a cigarette. I stopped him.

“Can I have one of your cigarettes?” I asked. “I’m just feeling that way.”

He gave me one without saying much else. Then he kept walking, maybe because I wasn’t wearing any shoes.

The smoke felt good in my lungs, and I imagined that there were pine needles inside of me. I hadn’t smoked in awhile, but I suddenly remembered why people do it. Despite all of it, I felt rugged and natural again, even just for a few seconds.

When the concrete became too hot for my feet I walked to a grassy area that had some benches for people to sit on. The cool grass felt real good then, and I decided to lay myself down on the bench nearby to look up at the sky and think about the clouds.

***

A little while later I woke up on the bench, still facing the sky. There were fewer clouds now, and I knew that it was time to go home. I sat up on the bench and looked around, rubbing my eyes a little bit to reorient myself. Over by one of these medium-sized trees I saw a loner-dog barking up into the branches of the tree. It would bark and then jump up, putting its two front legs on the trunk of the tree, and then sit back down again, hackles raised and mouth open.

I assumed that there was a squirrel in the tree, but to be sure I went over to scope out the situation.

“Dog,” I said, when I got close enough.

The thing turned around to me and then went back to barking at the top of the tree. I got closer and looked up at the tree myself. I didn’t see anything there. Whatever it was that was irking the dog was hidden real well. Whatever it was, the dog really wanted it, enough so that it was willing to try to climb a tree, even though it was a dog and dogs don’t really climb trees. I thought to myself about what it would take for me to bark up senselessly at an empty-looking tree.

God, I thought, would have to be up in that tree. It would have to be God or something like that.

I started to turn to go back home, but as soon as I got a few feet away, the dog made a screeching noise like a siren would make. Looking back, the dog still was facing the tree, but it didn’t matter then, not after a noise like that.

I ran toward the tree, taking off my socks as I ran. Against the trunk of the tree I threw my body, scraping my hands and feet on the ridges of the giant before me. I mumbled to no one in particular encouragements and certainties that I will never remember. Up into the branches I went. It was hard at first, but I eventually got the hang of it. I never knew I could climb so well.

In the branches I looked around and saw nothing, really. I checked my hands. They were mostly fine, but my feet were bloodied and a little bruised. I looked down at the dog. It was still there, yes.

So I kept on climbing. I climbed like I was afraid and fearless at the same time. I climbed like I had everything and nothing. I climbed until I couldn’t climb any farther. I rustled the branches around and looked down at the dog. For a minute we looked at each other—him expectant and me defiant. Up in that tree, looking down at that dog, I knew for sure that saving probably wasn’t my thing. The cleaning and the alarms maybe weren’t either. I was a climber, a bloody climber of trees.

It was that minute with the dog, I think. For that minute we just looked. And then, like everything ever, he was gone.

A Meeting

I wrote this story today. I gotta tell you, it is a total failure of a story.

A Meeting

Let me tell you about that street. It was a long and nice street. It was not the kind of street I was used to.

I was walking north up Lakeshore Drive just after dawn, right when the sun was beginning like a burglar to peak its head through the buildings downtown. Still that was miles away. The sun wasn’t touching me quite yet.

For most of the night I was awake, tracing some of the cracks in my hardwood floors with a knife to see what would crop up. In the end not much emerged from the floor. Whether it was all empty or just that I couldn’t get to whatever was in the cracks, I can’t say with any certainty. Some dirt was there, some lint, some hair that didn’t seem to be mine. I thought there would be bugs. I guess there were none after all. That was good—after Paul moved out I couldn’t really afford the place anymore. A cleaner and emptier place would probably get me the security deposit back in full.

In the early hours of the day I started out towards the lake, walked a bit cold down the smooth black biking track that runs close along the beach, and tried to outmaneuver the day. When I got to Lakeshore I realized I was on streets and sidewalks that were smooth and as suddenly surprising as black ice. Concrete and asphalt as fresh and virgin as I imagined God’s skin to be, sitting under houses that belonged in the sky somewhere.

It was a street I had never walked along before. The houses were stone and giant. There were hedges that lined their sidewalks to keep people on the ground level from getting in too easily. I walked and watched and imagined that I was in Italy or France or the middle of the sea.

People walked by with their husbands and wives and dogs. I nodded my head even if they couldn’t see me and felt good for them. I really did. Later on down the street, when the sun was coming larger and brighter, I could hear dogs behind the hedges rolling around and being dogs.

There was one house in particular that was shaped like a lower-case letter N, with a chimney and an arch. Maybe it wasn’t a house, or maybe it was a house that was more than a house. I stopped in front of it and looked through the space underneath the N. I lit a cigarette even though I thought I should probably stop and tried to blow smoke all the way through the N house and out to the lake behind it, but settled for watching the smoke just disappear. The wind was coming up through the hole towards me, and I could feel it come up under my clothes. I let the wind come in and tried to capture it under my shirt. Then I let it all out again and felt my belly and sighed.

When I got to North Street I turned west and started to walk faster. Buildings got smaller, roads got bumpier. Things seemed to be trying to sprout up out of the pavement. There were more and more cars. As I walked, I smoked one cigarette and then another until what was left in my pack was gone.

I had almost made a big circle back to my apartment when instead I decided to cut through a small park in the middle of all the things of the city, through some trees and brush that surrounded a small body of water. I felt I should stop and look at that water, so I did that for a few minutes. It was mostly water, is all.

Some kids were scrounging around near the shore. There were four of them. They had something that they were passing back and forth. Three would laugh and the fourth would stop and look at his chest. Then he’d move and would laugh with two others while the last one looked down at his chest. I watched them and then looked at my chest too.

Then I walked over to them without really knowing why. Before I got close enough to say anything, they saw me. They had a small cat in their arms. I couldn’t really tell yet, but the cat looked gray and wonderful, especially in the arms of small children.

The children panicked and threw the kitten into the water, running off right afterward. I guess I panicked too at that point. But things sometimes just come to you when they’re supposed to, even if you don’t think they’re supposed to, and I started to forget the children and run into the water. I stopped only to check my pockets. I had some matches and some keys in there, so I was good. I waded into the dirty water up to my waist. The kitten was wet and unhappy. It was struggling. I lifted it up out of the water and held it up to where the sun was in the sky. For a second, before the sun hurt my eyes, it was there. All of it.

On the way back to my apartment I had to put the cat under my shirt because I saw some gesturing woman with a box outside of her townhouse selling pet babies. I had saved the cat, so I thought that this one should probably be mine. I just didn’t know how the woman would feel about this.

The little thing pushed its paws into my skin. Again and again it did this, and even with its little claws I felt right. Plus it was all cold in there, under my clothes. I figured if I was getting colder, then the cat was at least getting warmer. That night I talked to the kitten as it roamed around my apartment getting hair everywhere. I told the cat about people and about apartments. I made a bed for it with some towels and a mixing bowl that I put on my own mattress.

We slept well that night.

***

In the morning I got up and got the kitten ready. I wrapped some string around its body and held onto it while it peed in the dry dirt outside the building. When I awoke I had decided pretty clearly that I should drive the cat around the street I had walked on the day before.

I said, “Not everything is dark and deep like the pond.”

But I wanted to show it too. So we got in the car.

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t have any AC in here.”

The cat stumbled around on the seat and mewed the whole time we were driving. It was really hot in the car. The poor thing was probably uncomfortable there.

I stopped on the side of the nice, long street at a spot where we could see the lake in the distance. For an hour or so I just sat with the cat. I took it out on its string for a few minutes and let it roll around in the grass and chase the leaves that that blew in the wind. Then we got back in the car.

And then an older man came up and knocked on my window after awhile. I rolled it down.

“I’m not doing anything,” I said, startled and feeling guilty.

“What?” he said.

“This is my cat,” I said.

“Your tire in the rear is a bit low,” he said. “And you’re parked on the curb.”

I looked up at him standing over me. He was tall and broad. He looked beautiful for some reason, and before I knew it I wanted to cry. I put my arm on the sill and felt strange—good and bad at the same time. The cat lay on the seat, while its tail shot back and forth.

“You saved me some trouble,” I said.

He touched my arm for a second and nodded. Then he was gone. For a few seconds I was in love with the touch he’d given me. I moved the car forward off of the curb and petted the cat between the ears. I lifted it up and put its paws on the window, then let it doze on the seat again. I was sweating so I pulled my shirt up, scratched my belly and circled my belly-button with my finger. The sun was out of sight, right above us, right above our heads as we sat in the car. I dreamed of going places in that car then, riding along in perfect places where the sun was out of sight, where we were free and imperceptible like the old man on the street.

I said to the cat, “We’re going.”

And then I dreamed the whole way home.

***

Those twenty-four hours were the most gorgeous of both our little lives. But that cat died a few weeks later from falling out of my window into the backyard next door where a dog roamed around. I suppose in a way I might’ve made the same mistake.

I should’ve known about the window, but it was so hot where I lived. It was the best I could do. I didn’t realize what had happened for awhile. But when I did I stood next to the window and dreamed of falling through the cracks there into something grand. It wasn’t beautiful. I felt that it should be, but it wasn’t. Not at all.

In the following years I would get another cat and another. The baby inside of me would come out wrong and die there in the hospital. I would remember the way it was cold and clutching like it too was drowning. I would lose the apartment and most of the deposit would go to the last month’s rent. I would dream of saviors and smooth streets and find none of them for real, becoming instead some kind of broken, ambling wizard of the pregnant streets, just getting by.