The Moskitto

by Adam Ehad

“Mark but this flea, and mark in this
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be…”
(From “The Flea” by John Donne)

“…because at the end of the day, sex is just like a mosquito bite”.
“Just like a mosquito bite?”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded. “It’s an itch that just keeps coming back.”

We were talking – Shira and I – under the porch of the Nargillah Cafe in Rurrenabaque. We had met on the propeller plane from La Paz, and during the forty minute journey, I had got to know various things about her; the plump sensuality exuding from her sun-kissed skin, the Russian childhood that gave that charming tang to her lazy voice, and the fact that, having grown up in an entirely secular part of Tel Aviv, I was the first “dos“* she had actually met. As soon as she had told me this, of course, I knew that sooner or later we would have the conversation that I had already had with several others of similar background to hers. All of those questions that they had long harbored about the lives of the religiously-affiliated – “Is it true that you only eat kosher? You have never eaten non-kosher? Never?”, “Tell me, how many times a day do you have to pray?” and “Is it true that, until you are married, you don’t do sex?” – all these questions were now uncorked.

It was the last of these questions that concerned them most, of course, and Shira was no exception. “Is it true?” she asked. “Is it true that you don’t even -” she left the question dangling with a little smile. Even Israelitas, for all their notorious frankness, will only go so far. And so I tried to explain the way that I saw it; desire like an itch – you scratch it and it gets worse, you ignored it and it remains…either way, it doesn’t go away. But I was dimly aware, as her grey-green eyes flickered over me, that this was not the answer that she wanted to hear. So I gently steered the conversation into another channel.
“You know, there’s only one thing I don’t like about this place.”
“Really?” Her cat’s eyes regarded me with amusement. “Not me, I hope?”
“No, it’s all these fucking mosquitoes. That was the only thing I liked about La Paz. Not a single one.”

There are no mosquitoes in La Paz.
Coming up from Buenos Aires, the buses had traveled for three days up hill, the air getting thinner and colder with every hour that passed, until we finally arrived in one of the highest cities in the world. La Paz sits in the hollow of a crater-topped mountain, its brown slopes, pixellated by a tapestry of brown box houses, trapping the petrol fumes which choke it’s already thin air. It is no surprise that no mosquitoes survive within this cauldron of bad air. Even humans have a hard time of it. The slack-faced, thin-lipped natives, who seem to have evolved both the lungs and the grim temperament to survive here, know better than to run in the streets. As for us foreigners…well, within an hour of arriving we had all developed persistent hacking coughs, and over the next few days, you could see the natural rhythms and drives of our bodies slowing and cooling, as we adapted to an oxygenless pace of life. The boys and girls moved gradually away from each other. Relationships became more platonic. And so when Ortal, slim brown limbs and bright brown eyes, sidled up to me one evening in the restaurant and softly suggested that I come on back to her hotel room, it didn’t take too much effort to refuse, despite the fact that she was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.

Ortal. Over that last evening in La Paz, I got to know her fairly well. I liked the calm softness of her voice, the intelligence in her self-conscious smirk, and the fact that she quite patently was not a slut. That ambiguous little suggestion earlier…it had just been part of her earthy, no-nonsense Israeliness. But as the clock crawled towards midnight, I realised that I had to cut our conversation short if I wanted to be packed and ready to go in time for my flight to Rurrenabaque the next morning. It hardly mattered. She would be flying in only a day later.
Flying from La Paz to Rurrenabaque constitutes possibly the greatest climate change that it is possible to experience. You lift off from the high, cold, airless Plateau on which La Paz is situated, sail for half an hour over a cold black range of mountains that rise in sharp stabs at the sky, and land on the other side, in a world that had plunged down into a green and tropical chasm. You step out of the plane onto a bank of fresh green grass (it is an ´airfield´ in every sense of the word), in a deep humidity scented with all the trees of the rain forest. Your “La Paz-cough” dries up instantaneously in the warm air, and sweat pops out all over your skin.

To take this journey after a month or so in the acrid airlessness of La Paz is something like going through a second puberty. During the taxi ride from the airfield to our hostel, I watched the changes taking place in those around me. Layer after layer of clothing were shed in deference to the heat, the guys swatted at insects and wiped away sweat, and the girls opened like flowers. Couples became suddenly more tactile, new glances, bright with meaning, were exchanged. More than anything else that happened during my time there, I will remember that taxi ride…the way we came to life, felt our bodies straightening and stretching in the heat.

The next morning, I awoke with my arms, legs and forehead covered in mosquito bites. There is something with me and mosquitoes. Not only do they seem to find me irresistible, scoring bite after bite on my skin whilst others sleep untroubled just meters away, but I am also very allergic to them. For others, a mosquito bite is just an irritated pin-prick; for me, a red and angry sore. It’s a double-whammy that smacks of a brutal sort of irony on the part of the Higher Powers. There was a time when I spent hot and sweaty nights in a dedicated fight, swiping viciously in the dark, cursing my invisible foes and their buzzing whine. But now I just let them do their worst. Even when I tried my best to placate them, it did little good. That first night in Rurrenabaque, I had coated every limb in my body in repellent, but left my back untouched and bare, an offering which I hoped meant that the rest of me would me spared. When I woke, I found that my back was the only part of me not scored with little nipples of irritated flesh.

Shira found the story very amusing when I told it to her that morning at the Nargillah cafe. She inspected the line of bites machine-gunned down the length of my wrist. “Look at what she did to me!” I complained. “I can understand them getting thirsty. But why don’t they just stay in one spot and drink their fill? Why did she have to make such a lot of separate bites?”
“How do you know it’s a she?”
“Oh, only female mosquitoes drink blood” I told her. “Scientific fact. I’m an expert on the damn things. For instance, did you know…” But Shira hadn’t sat down next to me to talk about mosquitoes. She steered the conversation in the direction of religion, and began pumping me for all the information she had so long wondered about. But she could see that she had lost my attention. While I was explaining about eating Kosher, about prayer, about sex, I had caught the far-off roar of the airplane, and realised that Ortal was probably on it.

It was because of Ortal that I went over to the Moskitto that night. Everyone goes to the Moskitto in Rurrenabaque. It’s one of only two Gringo pubs, and the other one is quite a formal affair, patronised by older travelers. So when the sun goes down, that is where everyone under thirty goes, and that is where I hoped to find Ortal, who I hadn’t seen all day. I had even wondered if she had perhaps had missed her flight, but I saw her as soon as I entered the pub, surrounded by a tight little knot of Israelis, her back towards me, that long brown hair curling down between her bare shoulders. I stood watching her for a while, then caught sight of Shira waving from another corner. I waved back, and after I had ordered a drink, I went over to join her.

The Moskitto is aptly named. The multitude of pot plants hanging from it’s walls harbor a whole army of mosquitoes that drift down after sunset, flicking among the bare legs under the tables, under loose T-shirts, over bare arms, raising welts and itches. Notwithstanding this drawback, however, there are two things that stand in its favor. Firstly, its an absolutely horrible soundtrack, the full gamete of heavy rock from Led Zep onwards. Secondly, its varied and professionally prepared range of drinks. It’s an interesting cocktail…alcohol and hard rock, twin intoxicants that I had been starved of during all those dry, music-less weeks in La Paz. I had ordered a long, cool mix of vodka, rum and coke, and took my first sip just as the DJ got down the first track of the evening, the hard, wicked burn of the alcohol hitting at the same instant that a raw slice of electric sound coursed through the air like acoustic energy: the opening riff of Led Zeplin’s “Been a long time”.

It was around the time I was on my third drink, and Shira and the table between us had begun to recede on that familiar tide of alcohol, drifting further and further away whilst staying fixed in space all the while. It was then that the conviviality began to dissipate. Israelis don’t drink, really, and Shira began to look disturbed at this new brooding version of the friendly young dos she had, after all, only just met. She told me she was going to the ladies, and as she got up and began to weave her way through the tables, a waiting shadow detached itself from the group at the far end of the bar and made its way towards me: Ortal.

She smiled and the music lurched. Who, I wondered, granted a crescent of enamel such semi-mystic power? But there was no time to think, as she slipped into the seat next to me and wrapped a friendly arm around my shoulder.
“I hear you’re staying at the Lobbo” she said.
“Erm…uh-huh”. The music’s rip-snorting electric pulse, I dimly noticed, had taken on a new and deep significance. “Hold on, how did you know?”
“The register. I saw when I was signing in. You’re in room seventeen, right? Well, I’m next door – room sixteen.” And oh Christ, there it was, that smile again. I was wondering what the hell to say when the music suddenly stopped, replaced by an old familiar tune, the tinkling strains of “Happy birthday to you…”
“Oh G-d” – she stood up – “Be right back”, and she hurried back to where the cake was already being cut amid the celebratory flash of cameras. And I was out in the hot, humid night, the old cobbled road a moonlit white beneath my feet, the Lobbo, the stairs, my key clacking in the lock, a gulp from the vodka bottle beside the bed burning down my throat with a bang. Lights out.

Sleep. Sleep, coming and going, the alcohol and the aching exhaustion of my body dragging me down, the stifling heat dragging me back, I lay drifting between sleep and wakefulness, the heat like a body laid across me, a line of sweat inching down my ribs and across my stomach, and I was drifting down, drifting down, only half aware of the flurry of voices out on the stairs, goodnights and see-you-in-the-mornings, of Ortal’s door softly clicking to. Sleep. The gritty snap of a lighter, the sound of her softly exhaling coming through the cardboard-thin walls, and as the faintest tang of cigarette smoke tickled my nostrils, I knew exactly were she was sitting, with her slender brown legs dangling, out on the balcony, watching the river with a cigarette between her lips.

When I awoke again, it was by the wind, a cool rush snapping back the drapes and cooling the film of sweat gathered on my skin. My body tensed at the sudden cold…tensed and relaxed as the cool wind receded as quickly as it had come, and the room was suddenly stifling hot again. G-d knows how many minutes, hours passed that way, half asleep in the sultry heat, vividly aware of Ortal stretched sleeping in the next room. The dark in my room textured by the wet heat into a stifling velvet blackness, and in that blackness…

A pin-prick of sound.

aaaaa…

A high tiny point of sound.
aaaaa… rising… falling… growing… like an approaching but distant siren.

Mosquito.

That sultry stuka-whine, oozing out on the hot air, catching the ear and not letting go, a certain beauty in the rise and the fall… and I felt it then, the tiniest of feather brushing my chest, and working down. Even I know when resistance is futile, and as sticky sleep rolled over me I felt the slow, itchy burn of the bites beginning to swell. When I awoke in the morning, I knew, and looked with rimmed and bleary eyes into the bathroom mirror, I would find the bites, like hickeys, scattered all over my chest and neck.

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It Was Then

by Hadas Bigman

In my head, there are images of her peeling the banana. We had been saving the banana for her birthday, a cake. It was a creeping brown, a dark brown, a splotchy brown, and it was ready to be made into a cake. We didn’t want her to know about the cake, or the party, or the little bit of flour that we had saved for the cake, or anything. It was to be a surprise, a grand surprise, and she was to savor the cake and we were excited for the surprise. Life was dull, so dull, and we felt that if we did not have something exciting soon, bad things would happen, like father jumping off the roof again.

Father’s jumping off the roof did not end badly, excepting the hospital bill which we were trying to pay back but failing, failing, failing. His leg had been shattered in two places only, the doctor smiled as he told us, smiled inside and outside, because he was a doctor and he had a job, and he was going to go home to wife, children, food, he smiled and said that the leg was only shattered in two places and that we should be grateful. We were grateful, because his leg could have been shattered in three places, or four, but we were unhappy with Father because he had jumped. Why did you jump? We asked him. And he looked into our eyes and we looked back and he looked and said that it was all gray and it could not continue being gray anymore. And then we asked what color it was now and he said pink. We were surprised, that a broken leg means the color pink. We wanted to ask him if he meant to die or if he just wanted to paint his world a different shade, but we were afraid. The question was so big we were frightened of it; it was so heavy that it might crush his other leg.

Later that week we came up with the banana cake. It was her birthday, it was a big birthday, and the cake would be different. We took Father into our confidence. “We will paint the world yellow, Father. Banana yellow.” Father nodded once or twice and said that that was a wise decision, and that she would be very happy, and that yellow goes very well with pink, even though his pink was fading. If Father’s pink was fading, it meant that he might want to jump from the roof again and see if he could reach a different color this time, and we did not want this at all. Every time we sat down for dinner the dent that Father’s heavy work boots had left on the tin roof sat with us; we did not fear the roof’s collapse, for it had dealt with worse than Father. But every supper, the dent joined us. It was unwelcome.

The dent was unwelcome, and so we threw ourselves entirely into the project of the cake. First, we had to get a banana. Bananas were scarce at that time of year, and expensive, but it was the only kind of cake that Sarah knew how to bake, she had learnt how at her last position, before she got fired, and she was adamant. It would be a banana cake. And so we saved up, saved up, saved up, and bought a banana. It was green, bright green, and it looked like a bud against the walls of our potato of a house; it was a sign of life springing from the brown walls, brown dirt in the front, brown skin, brown everything. We passed it from hand to hand to hand, until Benjamin tried to take it with his toes, and then Sarah snatched it up quick, saying that it wasn’t a toy and that we mustn’t play with it, for God’s sake. So the banana was hidden in the bottom cabinet on the left side, inside a big bronze pot. The pot was slid to the very very back, where the blackness was, and other pots were shifted to the front. We didn’t think that she’d notice. Benjamin had suggested that we hide it under the floorboard in the bedroom, because there was nice soft dirt there, and she would never think to pick it up. She detested the ground, everything that had to do with the soil, she never looked at it if she could help it, and certainly not in the house. Sarah thought that maybe it would be not so wise to do that, because of the lots of little insects that live in the soil. They would probably eat the banana.

Father looked on, and didn’t say a word. He picked at the cast on his leg, picked and scratched and sighed. We saw his gaze stray towards the dent at dinner, and we cursed the dent and whispered conspiratorially to him of bananas and yellows and cakes and surprises, and thought that the dent would not be able to compare to a surprise such as we were preparing, and that soon it would simply become a little lake, when the winter came.

She noticed that the pots had been moved. Sarah said that we had boiled some water and added some dandelions and salt and we had eaten it. She didn’t say anything else, only looked a little sad. Maybe because we were eating dandelions, and when She was our age She had had quail eggs to eat for lunch, and sorbet for dessert, and all sorts of other things that we’d heard about and seen and never tasted, not even a small taste. Maybe she was sad because we hadn’t saved her any dandelions.

The pots were left as they were, Father was as he was, we were as we were. She was as she always was. But the banana, the banana was changing. It was going from bright green to a paler green to a different kind of green to a green that was almost yellow. We all checked its progress, never at the same time, always separately, and if we caught one of us checking into the left cabinet we pretended that they were just looking for a pot, even though we knew that that was unlikely, for there was not much to cook. It was pleasant to see the colors changing, and to think of the baked square that would come out of this little tube of colors, even though in the end it would just be a brown cake, and then it would go into Her stomach, and come out brown again. It was even more pleasant to see Father, when he thought no one was looking, hobble over to the cabinet and gently extract the yellow from the bronze, and to hold it in his hands, for several moments. When he held the banana he was no longer Father who jumped or Father who scratched incessantly or Father who was vacant. When he held the banana he was Father as he used to be.

She was as she was. She wandered about the house, touching objects, talking to herself. Do you remember, before Jose? Do you remember. Yes. Yes. I remember. Jose, who couldn’t anymore because of his cast and the tingling in his toes, used to follow her around dismally, not a step behind her, reaching towards her and never arriving at her pale skin. Her white, him brown, it would seem as though they were dancing, and that she was singing, which of course wasn’t true because she wouldn’t sing in front of Father because of the great hatred she harbored against him, and it also wasn’t possible because Father couldn’t dance, not even from before he was Father and he was only Jose.

We didn’t know how she found the banana, only that she found it. This was the scene: Father wasn’t in his chair, scratching his leg; we didn’t know where he was, we hadn’t seen him all morning. Sarah was standing there, arms crossed, lips compressed, staring at Her and willing with her eyes that the banana was back in its bronze womb, silently changing. Benjamin was staring at the floor, staring intently as if there was nothing more interesting in the world than the rotten red boards. His lips were silently moving, and we, or maybe just I, could make out the word “cake”. My hands were sweaty, I was standing just outside the kitchen but not in it, and I wanted to snatch the splotchy brown banana from her hand and run away with it and find father and eat it with him, and maybe with Sarah, and maybe with Benjamin.

She didn’t even savor it. One, two, three, four, five. The banana was gone. And the cake, and the surprise, and the canvas of yellow-gold-brown-green. Her little tongue darted in and out, she tossed the peel through the window; it made a distant landing sound, much like the sound a butterfly makes when it glides onto a branch. Or so I thought, then. The little tongue crept out again and slowly licked the cracked brown lips, first the top and then the bottom, working together with her smooth, ivory hands that were all the time going up and down up and down over her apron, ridding herself of banana crumbs that had never fallen. I couldn’t look at her eyes, I couldn’t look at her at all, I moved slowly away, out of the house, out of the yard, out of the town, from the brown to the green to the yellow until I was in the middle of the sun, the greatest banana of all. When I came back Sarah said that Mother was gone but Father was back and he was hammering out the dent in the roof. The light came out from behind a cloud and it was as if the pounding of Father’s hammer had summoned it down.

So I thought, then.

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The Reverend

by Trey Wickwire

The Reverend Goodholt Bertch sat at the kitchen table, contemplating a life that had led him to this place and time. Where had it gone wrong, when had the devil become more of an influence than the Good Lord? How could he have missed the signs? With trembling hands he reached for the bottle of Wild Turkey. In the weak light of the vent light over the stove it shown with an eerie radiance, as if it was embodied with a life of its own. For a moment the trembling hand froze as weary eyes stared at the bottle, but then it moved forward again to grasp the cold smooth surface. As the golden liquid poured into the short glass the Reverend glanced to the right where the Colt 45 automatic pistol waited with the patience of the damned.

The bourbon went down smooth and warm and the Reverend wondered what hell would be like. Was he destined for hell? Could there really be any doubt? Tomorrow the woman would talk and the world would know. But did that really matter? Even if by some miracle the woman decided not to parade his sins through the streets of the world, a feat made so easy in this electronic age, his sins would still exist. The shame would still sit on his shoulders, a heavy cloak weighing him down like the armor on a knight fallen in the ocean.

The trembling was less now as he placed the empty glass down on the table. For a moment he couldn’t remember having drank the bourbon and wondered where it had gone. He reached for the bottle but his hand fell on the pistol instead. For a moment his hand rested there on top, not grasping but not moving away either. His eyes rolled over to look at his hand, resting on the gleaming metal. The gun was a standard issue over the counter model, nothing customized, and in fact had only been fired a few dozen times soon after its purchase. The Reverend had wanted a gun and wanted to know how to shoot it, but soon the novelty wore off and it had been placed in the safe to be forgotten, like many of the other toys he a bought over the years. Slowly he picked up the gun. The polished nickel of the long straight barrel caught the light and amplified it. The walnut grips seemed out of place, too organic for a machine of precision death.

“Beautiful piece isn’t it?”

The Reverend didn’t start at the voice from the other side of the table. He recognized his own voice just as he recognized his own face staring back at him when his eyes finally looked up from the pistol. There were differences of course, the Reverend before him looked slightly younger and certainly more confident and at ease. There was even a smile although it more closely resembled a cocky leer, lacking any of the warmth the word smile implied.

“What do you want,” the Reverend asked himself.

“Want,” the new Reverend’s leer turned into a grin, “why nothing at all dear boy. I just came to watch the show.”

“Of course, I should have known the devil would want to see the results of his handiwork, I just didn’t imagine him wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts.” The Reverend placed the pistol on the table and reached for the bottle of bourbon.

“What, this old thing,” remarked the devil, pulling the brightly colored shirt away from his body as if to examine the flowers and palm trees. “Surely you remember this outfit old boy.

The Reverend did remember. It was long ago when he was still a struggling minister and had wanted to take his wife on vacation but they just didn’t have the money. He had decided to borrow the money from the churches missionary fund with the plan to pay it back. Since he was in charge of the fund and managed all the books it was an easy bit of embezzlement and he had indeed paid every cent back to the church, every single cent. The outfit was what he had worn the day he took the money, purchased the cruise tickets and surprised his wife with them.

“I remember it,” he said, “what of it.”

“Oh nothing, if it upsets you I can change,” and with that the devil’s outfit melted and reformed into a very expensive suit. His fingers were jeweled and a gold Rolex was on his wrist. “Is this more to your liking?”

The Reverend looked away, shame filling his mind, body and soul. Across the table from him was sitting the image of himself when his evangelical television show first went nationwide. He could still hear his wife, begging him not to dress so flashy or display so much wealth. Shouldn’t he use the money for the poor rather than on expensive clothes and jewelry she had asked. But no, he wouldn’t hear of it. If he was going to raise more money for the poor he had to look like someone to respect, someone to admire. He couldn’t do that looking like a small town preacher.

“You should have listened to her.”

The devil knew what he was thinking, well that made sense didn’t it? The son of a bitch was probably just his conscious having a field day anyway.

“No I’m not.” The devil smiled over the kitchen table at him. Self righteous bastard, thought the Reverend. I guess that’s why he looks like me.

“Hey Goody,” said the devil, using a nickname the Reverend had been trying to hide from for more than twenty years, “how do you like this one?”

Once again the devils outfit melted and reformed. This time it was a simple pair of slacks and a shirt with several buttons undone showing a god awful medallion hanging in the thicket of hair on his chest. The Reverend looked away and raised the glass to his lips but it was empty. He reached for the bottle, the tremor much worse now and the bottle clinked loudly against the glass as he poured the rest of the bourbon into his glass.

“What’s the matter Reverend,” the devil leaned back, “cat got your tongue?”

“You bastard,” the Reverend said between swallows of bourbon, the once smooth and warm liquid now harsh and hot, like drinking hell itself. While the devil laughed the Reverend’s thoughts went back to when he had worn this outfit. It was the first time he had cheated on his wife. He didn’t remember the girl, just the night itself, a hot and sticky summer evening in the heart of Atlanta.

The Reverend had been at a seminar with several other televangelists and had snuck out one evening to a nightclub. He still couldn’t believe he had worn that outfit. But he hadn’t wanted to look like a preacher and he had to admit, the outfit was far from what a preacher should be wearing.

And the girl, how could he have been so foolish? He had thought she was actually attracted to him. They had talked at the bar and when she asked to go back to his room he was so surprised that he simply said sure. But that wasn’t the only surprise, the demand for money came as a complete shock. He didn’t know what else to do but pay her. He wept after she left, wept for his soul.

After that he became numb, preaching on TV every Sunday and making excuses to travel as often as he could. The girls became an addiction, a need that had to be fulfilled at any cost. And now, now the true cost was due.

She was known as God’s own madam, some even said her client list went all the way to the Pope and tomorrow she was going to share that list with the world. Of course Reverend Goodholt Bertch was barely a footnote in list of famous clergy clients but it was still listed and the Reverend had a big enough following that the media wouldn’t forget to mention him.

“So, are you going to mope there all night sunshine?”

The Reverend looked up at the devil. There was no disguise now, no doppelganger staring back, just a man, lean of frame and feature, with a goatee and narrow eyes. He was dressed well and looked as though he was prepared to visit the theater or perhaps attend a formal dinner party.

“Nice to see you dressed for the occasion,” said the Reverend as he reached for the empty bourbon bottle. For a moment he looked at it, wondering why it was empty, then he placed it back on the table, not caring what the answer was. The devil grinned as the Reverend reached for the pistol. For a moment the Reverend stared at his reflection in the polished nickel. It was distorted and he wondered if it was merely an accurate rendering of his soul.

The Reverend looked up as thunder rolled across the skies above his house. When he looked back down at the devil he was smiling, same as before. “It wasn’t supposed to rain tonight, is that your idea of mood music?”

The devil roared with laughter. “Oh Reverend, you have been a fun ride I must say. I’m indeed sorry to see you go. Come, let’s be on our way.” With that the devil stood and offered his hand to the Reverend who hesitated before taking it and standing.

“I don’t understand,” said the Reverend as the devil led him to the door. They paused and the devil looked back towards the table, gesturing for the Reverend to look as well. What he saw there made his breath catch in his throat, except that wasn’t possible. His throat was back at the table along with the rest of his body.

The wall behind him was covered in blood and tissue, slowly making its way to the floor. His body slumped across the tabletop, gun dangling from one finger. The bourbon bottle had been knocked to the floor and it still spun, gradually losing momentum.

“It wasn’t thunder was it,” said the Reverend softly.

“No, not thunder,” said the devil.

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Safta’s Spice Cake

by Rachel F. Wantik

My Safta knew how to cook. She worked at the fish counter at a modest-sized supermarket in Holon commuting there by bus from her neighboring hometown of Azur. On Thursdays, she’d bring home a whole carp in a brown paper bag and on Friday she would… I have no idea what she did but the fish was delectable. For me, Safta made the most flavorful gefilte fish. The adults sat around saying “Geschmack” between every finger-licking, tongue-smacking morsel of carp (or was it pike?), from its silvery skin, with only the bones remaining.

Sometimes, Safta would bring home a chicken or two. Growing up in the U.S., I was used to a de-feathered headless bird, with its giblets packaged separately from their source, plastic wrapped on a Styrofoam tray. These fowl resembled rubber chickens from comedy acts but their distinctive smell suggested otherwise.  All parts went to good use – good food. The chicken broth was served as the finale because Safta thought it healthy to end a meal with a soothing warm liquid. Always an avid fan of the color yellow (but now with fewer negative tartrazine consequences), I’d fill my bowl with Shkedi Marak, literally soup almonds, but Safta’s soup didn’t really need any accoutrements. Aided by cavernous spoons, the family would slurp up the soup, as homage to the cook’s talents. Often, they would request seconds.

Way into the afternoon, probably around teatime although I doubt Safta had ever been to the UK, tea would be served in amber-colored glass cups accompanied by one of my fondest treats, her spice cake. She baked it in the WonderPot* tube pan, maybe on the stove-top, or maybe in the oven.

At some point in my teen years, perhaps after reading way too many books about loved ones passing on, I thought it best to obtain the recipe. I remember making a list of ingredients, with the assistance of the polyglots in the family offering translations from the Hebrew , Russian and Yiddish. Cloves, cinnamon, and the obvious sugar, flour, eggs? But that was as far as I got. How do I make that cake?

Another memory of the cake was that it never tasted exactly the same each time. Sometimes it was sweeter and other times heavier on the ginger.

It all came together when I made corn muffins the other night. Some of my friends came over and gobbled up the mini-muffins with optional maple-buttery spread. “What is the recipe?” one of them insisted. I stared at her somewhat blankly, repeating her question. “Well, I can tell you what I mixed in a bowl,” I said, “Cornmeal (which was marked as corn flour on the package), applesauce, rice milk to keep it parve, and whole wheat flour. “You don’t remember the amounts, do you?” she inquired. I smiled sheepishly. I bake according to consistency and most times the taste works out okay. Using that technique, which I must have learned from my Safta, I hope to re-create her spice cake, with a list of ingredients and scrumptious experimental attempts.

*A WonderPot was a very common item in Israeli kitchens of the past…It looks like a tube pan (as for a Bundt cake) but with small black handles. It has a cover, a heat dispersal ring and could be placed on a stove-top burner. For those without the luxury of an oven, it was indeed a wonder.

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One Sweet Ride

by Terry Sanville

For Ephraim, it was a strangely satisfying Thanksgiving afternoon at his brother’s house in Santa Barbara. His mother brought the turkey and hadn’t started badmouthing their dead father until downing her fourth Seagram’s. Rich and Elise must have fed their kids extra Ritalin; the brats stayed quiet until dinnertime. By then, a third pitcher of Margaritas was history. The adults watched college football on TV and ate off wooden trays. Ephraim fell asleep on the couch.

“Come on, Effie. Get up.” His mother shook him and he swung his legs to the floor, head throbbing.

“It’s after midnight and you’ve got a long drive. Drink this.” She slid a steaming mug of coffee onto the end table.

He grunted a thank you and sipped, his hands trembling. In the bathroom, he rifled through the medicine cabinet for aspirin. After sticking his head under the faucet, he stared at his dripping image in the mirror and tugged a blue comb through thinning hair. Shit, I look ten years older than Rich…and he’s the old one.

Before leaving the house he kissed his mother on the cheek. “I’ll send you an e-mail when you get home.”

“That’s sweet, Effie…but I’m not holding my breath.” She had settled onto the sofa and was watching a Conan O’Brien rerun.
Outside in the dark driveway, he let the Corvette warm, his breaths coming in little fog puffs. He reached under the seat for the bottle, took a long pull, shivered as the booze warmed him. In a couple hours I’ll be snuggling with Jen. Wish she could stand being with my mother…but I can’t really blame her. Still, it be nice if the family could…

He flipped the bottle under the passenger seat and drove north, the freeway deserted except for an occasional big rig rumbling along at half his speed. At the San Marcos Pass exit he turned toward the looming coastal mountains lit by a full moon. Ahead lay 30 twisting miles, a perfect sports car road.

Downshifting into third, he powered through a sweeping right-hander that opened onto a short straightaway. Up the road, taillights winked at him before disappearing around a bend. Mashing the accelerator, he grinned…I can catch anything with this baby…nobody gets away. The two-lane highway slanted upward as he entered a series of fast s-turns. The Corvette’s’ tires howled. Ephraim began to slowly reel in the fleeing car. He drove holding his arms straight, his hands clenching the steering wheel.

As he rounded a turn near the summit, high beams struck him full in the face. A brick-shaped SUV was three foot over the centerline and charging straight at him. He leaned on the horn and eased to the right. At the last moment, the vehicle moved left and flashed past.

“Fucking asshole,” Ephraim muttered. He downshifted and scanned the highway for the car he’d been chasing. But after three turns, the road remained empty. That guy couldn’t have ditched me. I never even slowed. Can’t disappear like that unless…
At the summit, he pulled onto the shoulder and hung a u-turn, motoring downhill slowly until reaching a curve where tire marks angled outward toward the canyon’s blackness. His heart pounding, he pulled onto the dirt fringe and grabbed a flashlight. Outside, the air stank of scorched rubber. He backtracked along the drop-off’s edge, examining the ground. The dirt was rutted at the point where the tire marks left the pavement.

He stared downslope. “ANYBODY DOWN THERE?”

The night stayed quiet, the highway empty. He fumbled for his cell phone and keyed 911.

The woman’s voice was all business. “This is 911 Rescue. What is your emergency?”

“I’m on Highway 154, about a mile south of San Marcos summit. There’s been an accident. Send paramedics.”

“What is the nature of the accident?”

In the moist air, a cloud of smoke wafted upward from a chaparral-covered knoll. Moonlight outlined a hulking shape. “Gotta go. Just send the paramedics…and fire.”

He began working his way downslope, his leather shoes slipping on the shale, the shoulder-high brush shredding his dress slacks. A branch raked across his face, but he kept moving until the vehicle lay before him, a big Mercedes, on its roof. The stink of gasoline was overpowering. He shuddered and shown the flashlight’s beam inside. A woman dangled from the seatbelt, surrounded by deployed airbags. Her long red hair hung like a curtain.

“Hey lady, you okay?” he managed.

The woman groaned and flailed her bloodied arms: “I can’t…I can’t get out….”

He tried the doors, but they were hopelessly mashed. “Just take it easy, helps on the…”

A flame flickered from under the wheelwell and things began to pop. Shit, this thing’s gonna light up…

The car’s windows had been smashed out. Ephraim squeezed through the rear opening in back of the drivers seat, cutting his hands on the beaded glass. He moved next to the woman and worked the seat belt release. It was jammed. Fumbling in his pocked for his Swiss army knife, he dropped the flashlight. It went out. Mother fucking clumsy idiot, why can’t I…

He opened the blade and began sawing through the seatbelt.

“Hold still,” he ordered, but the woman continued thrashing. The seatbelt snapped and she fell on top of him, screaming, clutching a leg. She was light, slender, not much more than a girl, wearing a skimpy party dress sticky with blood.  He scraped the headliner clear of debris and hauled her into the rear of the sedan. A loud pop shook the car. Flames curled up around the front fenders. Choking smoke poured inside. He pulled her to the window. She screamed for him to stop.

“We gotta go.”

“I…I…can’t. It hurts…”

He crammed his linebacker’s body through the opening, turned and dragged the girl out, her body limp.

“Hey…you okay? Talk to me.” She didn’t answer. He felt for a pulse and got a faint throbbing. The smoke smelled of burning brush. A vain of fire streaked uphill, crackling, alive and angry. He pulled the girl onto his back, clasping her arms to his chest, and charged upslope, moving to the right. His shoe came off but he kept digging. The fire closed in behind them. He fell once, twice, got up and continued pumping his legs. Move it, move it, move it. The pungent fumes burned his eyes and throat. He crashed through the brush at highway’s edge and collapsed onto the dirt. His sports jacket and her dress smoked. A fire truck rolled up with the paramedics right behind. They took the girl inside the ambulance while they worked on him, taping the gash across his forehead that he didn’t even feel. The fire crews doused the blaze before it could jump the road.

“Do you want a ride to the hospital?” a paramedic asked. “You sucked in a lot of smoke and should probably get that forehead stitched.”

“No…no…want to get home. My wife will be worried.”

“Sure, I understand. Just sign here.” He pointed to a line on a printed form.

Ephraim steadied his hand and scratched his signature.

“Will you step over to my cruiser?” a Highway Patrolman asked without it sounding like a question. He was heavyset and carried a clipboard and flashlight. “Can I see your driver’s license…and tell me what happened here.” As Ephraim recounted his actions, leaving out the part about him chasing the Mercedes, the officer recorded the details.

“Can you describe the SUV?”

“No. That asshole was on me too quickly… but I think it was silver. Say, do you know if that girl’s gonna be okay?”

“Thanks to you, she’ll be fine. A broken leg and some cuts…she’ll be fine.”

“Thank God.” Ephraim let out a deep breath. “When I saw that smoke, I knew I couldn’t wait. She would’ve fried before rescue got here.”

“You’re right about that. You’re definitely her hero. Is that your car?” The officer motioned toward the yellow Corvette.

“Yeah. She’s a sweet ride.”

“Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

“What…what the hell’s going on?”

“Just do it.”

Stunned, Ephraim turned and felt the cold steel of handcuffs clamp around both wrists. “What’s this all about? Am I under arrest?”

“I found an open whiskey bottle on the passenger side floor in plain sight. And I can smell it on you, even with all the smoke.”
“But I wasn’t… wasn’t drunk. I couldn’t have been and saved that girl and…”

“Yeah sure, you’re the hero this time. But what will you be when you run some poor soul off the road a few miles farther on? You’ll be just like that SUV driver.”

“But…but I did a good thing here,” he complained, “and this is what I get for it?”

“Sorry, being a hero doesn’t give you a free pass. Watch your head. You can call your wife from central booking.”

The patrolman placed a palm on Ephraim’s scalp and guided him into the cruiser’s rear seat. His temples pounded. He sucked in deep breaths, letting them out slowly. Outside, the officer was talking with the fire captain as the crews mopped up. The ambulance tore off, lights flashing. He yawned, and slumped against the door, his limbs heavy, lips thick and dry. No way I’m like that SUV driver…but…but what if she wasn’t looking ahead? What if she was looking at the lights in her mirrors?

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Winter by the Wayside

by Itai Rosenbaum

For the first time in her long, long life, she was cold. She remembered when she would be able to, in her youth, walk around in a thin, white, satin dress and not feel the chilly pangs of frost on her skin. Her platinum locks billowing in the wind, her fingers tracing shapes through the soft morning snow. Now, wrapped in blankets and sweaters, she was cold.

She was sitting at the foot of a lone, naked tree. The snow had melted, the grass already a lush, vibrant green. The tree, however, seemed to stubbornly cling to the cold, refusing to grow its foliage. It seemed to like its solitary browness, shunning the yellows and pinks of leaves and flowers. She liked it, too.

He didn’t.

He was smiling the smile of a man who brought a gun to a boxing match. It was cocksure and it was conceited. It was also, she hated to admit, gorgeous. His brilliant teeth, pure as fresh lilies, shone in the middle of a bronzed face, contrasting against the dark sunglasses resting over his eyes. In the lenses she could see her reflection, how had she withered so? She was beautiful, once. Now she was old. Old and weak. While he, he had time to gather strength. It seemed, now, that minutes after she had woken, he would return, pushing her away once more. She had no time to seep in. Hers was a slow strength, she needed weeks, no, months for it to build, to sink, until she had hold of everything. It seemed that under this new regime, his regime, she had barely days, and so she was weak.

He stepped forward. She slid back, away from him, pushing herself against the tree. Its tough bark pressing against her dry, cracked skin.

“It’s no use,” he said. His speech was warm, but falsely so. She knew the pretended affection was masking a searing hatred. Her blood froze as he took another step in her direction. “Yield. There is no choice. The others surrendered, stepping into my bright realm, why should you alone linger in the darkness?” His voice was dry, he sounded parched.

She felt her sobs, frozen on their journey between her throat and eyes. “And then what? Nature under your heel? Your banners blazing in the sun?” She tried to maintain a cold demeanor, but she felt herself melting under his hidden gaze. “What of us? We do not live in your domain, we cannot. It will be you and you alone, sitting upon your russet throne, with none to oppose you. No one to corral your wild reign, spreading like wildfire from here till all is sundered. You will bring drought and plague, with none to wash away the sins of heated passion committed in your name.”

“Cold words,” he laughed, “but you know well enough I shan’t be burned by them. What I do, I do not of my own accord. It is not my will, but theirs.” He held his hands out, motioning outwards. “Aim your barbs and jabs at them, as they have brought about your end.” He smiled again, and took the final step towards her. Bending down he held her gently, and they kissed.

As Summer walked away, the snow had all melted, giving way to fresh grass, tulips peeking through its blades. The tree burst into bloom, an explosion of color. Winter was gone, as were the rest, and he was left. He stepped away, his footfalls sizzling, searing. The grass beneath his steps drying, cracking into a yellow tinge of stasis. Winter was gone, as were the rest, and he was left. Just he. Eternal Summer.

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Mr. Shining Armor

by Ben Nardolilli

Gallant probably isn’t the best word. Foolish might be. Hopeless and desperate could apply as well, but only in the least. Maybe “Nice” would work best. It’s always the fallback word to use whenever someone has to say something about another person and nothing else comes to mind. Everybody who isn’t mean is nice. So I guess you could I say was being nice to that girl in the bar.
The other guy probably thought the same thing about himself too. For all any of us knew, he was being nice to the girl. In his drunken mind, his inner gears and light bulbs wobbled about and probably confused nice-looking with being nice.  The Germans probably are able to make different words for them. They probably don’t get much in trouble when they drink. If they do, they just end up invading Poland. But we English speakers are left with “nice” floating around and being used in different ways. Kind of like in the way we use “like” to mean a myriad of different things.

I’m sure I was meditating on such linguistic questions when I was at the bar. When I drink enough, no words become sensible. I receive the meaning of what people say to me. I get what they want me to get, but I end up stripping away the words they use. The containers of sound and ink are thrown aside, left bare. Sometimes they fade away themselves, melting until little gems and kernels remain that I can treasure and investigate.

When words start to become useless coverings, it’s hard to respond to anyone. I prefer using the head in such situations. Nodding is a real thing. It hides nothing. It is universal. I require no translator when I nod. Yes or No, it’s very simple. 1 or 0. It must be how a computer feels when it talks to a human. We put our words in and it gives us words back, but it probably just thinks of itself nodding, shaking its electronic head at us. Its electrons spin according to what it wants to say.

Nodding usually won’t get you in trouble. Words always do. Written or spoken, someone can take them the wrong way. A nod is simple, if you mean yes, and you want to hurt someone, then they understand you perfectly. A shake of the head tells a woman you’re not interested. There is plenty of fooling around to be had with the tongue or the eyes.

A word like “Nice” is never really expressed by head gestures. You can smile, but what does that mean? Nice is a gray word that sits in the middle of every conversation, like a rodent, gnawing away at both sides until no one is quite sure if they’ve said anything or described anyone.  Nice can be mean too. That night, when one of the drunks in the bar, who was trying to get over to a stool in the corner tripped and fell, there was a chorus laden in testosterone and booze snickering the word out between their stained teeth. Of course they didn’t mean it the way they do when a blonde with enough taut curves passes them by, but they were absolutely serious in their making fun of the poor man.

I returned to my drink once I understood what as going on. I finished it and asked the bartender to give me a few minutes before filling up the glass. I told him to keep it empty with the shake of my head and placing my hand over the rim. I then threw a few words at him like dull tipped darts, telling him I would be ready for another round eventually.

Behind me, there was a pretty young girl with some friends sitting in a booth. They were celebrating a birthday. It wasn’t hers, yet all their attention, and my attention too, was drawn to the girl with the blonde shoulder length hair that looked cleaner than anything else in the place, except maybe for her light clear skin. She had no moles, freckles, scars, tattoos, or bruises. I wanted to introduce myself to her, but she was surrounded by a mass of friends who were all forming a barrier around her so that me and everyone else could look but not touch.

I pushed my glass towards the bartender. He saw me look away from the girl and understood that I needed to have my drink refilled. While I tried to lose myself in the clanking and chipping sounds he made trying to get me another drink, I heard the laughter over where the girls were sitting suddenly die down. I turned to see what was going on. When such chatter ceases, usually one expects a song and dance number to break out. Maybe they were going to sing “Happy Birthday.”

Instead, they had gone quiet with nervous smiles on their faces. One of the bar’s patrons, younger than me and closer in age to the girls, came over to them and thought this gave him some right to voice his mind, to tell the blonde that she was beautiful and looked like a goddess compared to everyone in the bar. This attempt at a compliment of course only made her friends angry, as it made them look uglier. We, the surrounding drinkers, were not offended. Our job is always to make everyone else look better.
He continued. I was amazed at his diction. He slurred nothing even though he was spinning in his own little orbit. It might have been better that way. Then the girls could dismiss him easier and many of the things he said would be lost on them, tumbling out of his mouth and getting lost trying to find ears to listen to.

“I think you are beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

“The most beautiful woman here.”

“Thank you.”

“And I mean that.”

“I’m sure.”

“I’m just trying to be a gentleman here. You’re not just hot. You’re gorgeous.”

“I don’t think you can tell the difference.” If my hands were not so heavy, I would have applauded. Instead they remained on the surface of the counter.

He was starting to get impatient. For some reason he thought that bestowing compliments on a girl entitled him to some sort of special status. He thought that being so nice would give him the key to unlock her wherever he wanted, her mind, her heart, her mouth, or in between her legs. He hadn’t realized that she had probably been getting this sort of attention her whole life. She was, as he said, gorgeous. But the fact was obvious to everyone but a blind man. Even then, if he had hands, he would have been able to tell. I looked around and there were none in the room. He wasn’t doing anyone a favor and the girl was getting uncomfortable.

I looked at the bartender, and he nodded at me. I slid off the stool I was on without making much noise and walked over to him. I did my best not to wobble or falter. There were a few steps that I regretted taking, but the floor knew that what I was doing was right, so it gave me little trouble. The girls stopped nervously laughing and smiling. They were worried that I was coming in to join the guy and the two of us would serenade the blonde with compliments.

Instead, I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned around. Doing so let me feel how well he was built. He was young, but his shoulders were soft, which I presumed the rest of him was like. I thought this meant he would be easy to deal with, that he wouldn’t offer much of a fight. Maybe if someone just told him he was doing wrong, he would wake up and then everything would be fine. Nobody would have to worry about things like punishment and prevention.

“I think everyone knows she’s gorgeous man. Why don’t you sit down.”

Instead of leaving, he stood his ground and continued giving his compliments, and staring directly at the girl. I looked at her too and saw that she was trapped. Something had to be done. Since I was already up and well known in the place, I figured it was my job. I’m not a hero, but he was making me feel as uncomfortable as the girl. In her case, it was the fear of the man touching her or worse. For me it was having to listen to his words, dripping with desperation. He was turning words like “beauty” and “gorgeous” into terrible things. I had to save the words as much as the girl.

Even though I was older than her, maybe not her type, a little show of gruff and muscle in her defense might get her to notice me. She would feel obligated to give me something, possibly a kiss on my stubbly cheek. Maybe more. I wasn’t going to help her because I wanted her to sleep with me, if she was ugly I would’ve helped her too. Looking at her, she didn’t seem relieved to have me there, beside the guy who was bothering her. She probably figured that I had set up this whole situation. The guy was my friend, or a paid stooge. He would make things rough and then I would get rid of him. I had to show her that this wasn’t the case. This scene was natural.

I gripped the guy’s shoulder and squeezed it. I wanted to remind him of his own softness.

“I think you should take it easy.”

“It’s not of your business.”

“It’s not her business either what you think of her. Keep it to yourself.”

“Fuck off.”

“Just let her be.”

“I said stay away!”

His angry voice snapped out of his mouth and hit the boards of the ceiling, almost shaking them a little bit and knocking some dust loose. Everyone put their drinks down and their sorrows away. They wanted to see how the two of us would handle ourselves.

“I’m not here to take her from you. Just leave her alone. How would you like it if I went up and came on to you?”

“So you’re a faggot?”

“No. I’m just trying to get you to think-”

He had no time to consider being in her shiny red shoes. He only wanted to be in her pants. His fist ripped up the smoky air between us, his knuckles devouring it up like teeth. They slid into my face like a baseball player trying to seize home plate away from a catcher. Strangely, I felt the swelling in my jaw before the blow of his hand. Things were hot and dizzy. Then the sensation of his cold skin on my face hit me, but it was the least of my problems.

I fell into the bar, trying to get support. I looked over the woman. Now she was sympathizing with me. I tried to smile at her, but my mouth was warm. My lips were wetter than usual, especially after drinking. I saw a red drop slip out and fall on my white sneakers. Blood. I swallowed as much as I could and felt sick. The guy had been tired by his punch and the hand he had used was hurting. It looked like he was wearing a pink mitten.

He was coming after me. I took an empty beer bottle and swung it into the center of his chest. The air went out of him and he collapsed. His legs went first and the rest of his body sailed forward, carried on by his previous angry inertia. He landed with his head underneath a stool. He wasn’t out, but he was close. When the guy got up, cigarette butts were stuck to his hands, he threw another punch at me and I fell down.

When I woke up the bartender was cleaning my lip with a rag. It was the cleanest one I had ever seen him use. I imagined that it was one he was keeping in reserve, just for me in case I decided to be chivalrous. I asked about the guy. He had been taken outside, dragged through the alley, and given a few kicks and throws to take home. I wondered how it would feel, to have a hangover and battle scars to nurse. I then realized that this was what was awaiting me in a few hours, if I could get to sleep.
I asked about the girl. The bartender nodded his head to my left, and I looked up. I realized that my lips must have looked as red as hers. She smiled at me and brushed the hairs over my forehead. They did whatever she wanted them to. She got them to stay in place without standing at attention or falling over my eyes, something I could never get them to do. I wanted to say something to her but my mouth was dry and my throat was hoarse. All I did was nod my head. Yes. Yes. Yes. Keep your hand on my head, now, tomorrow, and forever. Yes. Yes. Yes.

After a few minutes, the bartender brought out the strongest drink in the house, some rubbing alcohol he kept for disinfecting purposes. He dabbed some on his rag and applied it to my chin and cheek. A little got on my lip. A single flame shot over my face and leapt up to my eyes and hair. I was afraid of being engulfed, but the woman held me down and kept on smiling. Things became cool again and I got up with the two of them helping me.

They asked me if I was alright, I told them that I was and they withdrew their support. Soon I was back on my favorite stool, my swollen lips battling with my engorged tongue trying to drink down a beer. The woman said goodbye to me and she left the bar. She had stayed behind, after her friends had all left. When I turned around to toast the bartender I realized that she had left me nothing but the memory of her face and her hair. There was no phone number in my hand, or stuffed discretely in my pockets. I checked.

Even if had impressed her, it was not enough. I still wasn’t her type. I was tough, but still too old. I took a few more long sips of beer, rolling the bubbles down my throat. I thought about having given the guy a good beating. I still had that. Word would get out even if there was no applause. Maybe somebody saw what I did, and they would stand up to another asshole trying to mess with a girl, or just another random female stranger. Or a male one. I sat on the stool, trying not to fall off, thinking that a revolution was getting started, thanks to me. For nothing, I had given up myself to save another.  No money, no tail, not even someone to hold. Nothing. The beer was from the bartender, but I hadn’t gotten into the fight for his sake.

Maybe gallant was the right word, and still is. And celibate too.

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Heidi

by Lindsay Foran

The rain had been coming down unwanted for hours. It wasn’t until I felt the first drops on my forehead that I knew we were in trouble.

Every year, Dad took one week off work in August to help save us from the heat and boredom of our summer holidays. There was no pool for swimming and we lived miles away from any friends. Summers for Jeff and me were spent biking up and down the laneway, building forts in our backyard or, much to mom’s discontent, watching the afternoon soaps. By the time August arrived, we’d have exhausted all our play options and time would seem as unmoveable as the air itself. I would lie out on the grass while Mom locked herself in the house, blinds drown, lights off. Once Dad’s car pulled in the drive, she’d quickly lift up the blinds and smear blush on her cheeks to cover the heavy lines on her face.

When Dad announced we were leaving in two days for our annual camping trip, we felt rescued from an otherwise lost summer. All kids know that on the first day back to school you’re always asked to report on your summer vacation. The city kids would talk of going to even bigger cities in different countries or smaller faraway towns, summer camps, anywhere that was distant from our school district. When the teacher would point an intimidating finger my way, I knew I could rely on that one magical week in August. Without it, I’d be forced to weave together unbelievable events for my other classmates. One year, I boasted Mom and I had spent the summer months in Prague. Everyone believed it. I even believed it.

The two days before our departure were spent in a fury of packing and repacking, making sure we hadn’t forgot anything. Dad was always loud and excited on these occasions while Mom would retreat into her moments. I never knew if she enjoyed the camping trips. I often thought that one year she would simply decide not to come and it bothered me to think we might not really miss her. But she always came – complained about everything – but came. I don’t know if Dad would have ever gone with just Jeff and me.

The camping grounds were all alike. We’d pay at the main gate, get directions where to set up, buy some firewood, and make our way down the dirt roads, big enough for only one vehicle. Each site would be shaded by trees that offered little privacy. There would be a fire pit in the centre, surrounded by a circle of rocks and down the road the communal showers that we rarely used, except for Mom, who was sure to never break from her morning routine even while away from the house. We’d set up our tent, never without some sort of argument.

This year more than others it was obvious the tent was coming apart. Duct tape held together the torn sections and the poles seemed too weak to support the weight. But Dad got it up, threw our sleeping bags inside and yelled: “Let’s find the water”. Mom didn’t come. She stayed to set up the green Coleman stove, unpacking the food onto the picnic table and placing the cushiony inflatable mattress at the bottom of the tent for added comfort.

We hopped on the bikes we had brought along and raced down to the beach with our towels blowing in the wind behind us. Dad got there first, jumped off his bike while it was still in motion and made a dash to the water. There was very little seaweed so I wasn’t afraid to jump right in. Dad and Jeff swam out deep, pulling each other under water in some sort of survival game. I stayed where I could still touch bottom, thinking the loss of the sand under my feet would somehow mean danger. While Dad and Jeff goofed around I was distracted by the loud laughter of a group of kids. I couldn’t see them, but decided to find out what was going on. I walked along the beach until their laughter brought me to a small path that followed the shoreline. I didn’t want to be seen so I crept through in the bushes next to the path trying hard not to step on any branches. I was able to get close enough to see there were four boys and one girl. The five of them were huddled in a circle, poking something with sticks. I was too scared to get any closer, so I left, hearing Dad in the distance calling my name.

A few days later, after hours in the sun and biking all around the campground, we were at the beach again. Dad had run back up to the campground to get us a snack. Jeff and I were sitting on the sand waiting for his return. Again, I heard the familiar laughter from a few days earlier. I tried to start up a conversation with Jeff, worried that he had heard it too. But I was too late. He was up on his feet saying “Who’s that?” He followed the beach to the secret path and started to boldly walk down. I pursued, worried what he might do next. He stopped quickly, holding out his arm to stop me.

“What are they doing?” he asked. Without waiting for a response he said, “Let’s wait for them to leave and then scope the place out.”

We hid behind a nearby storage shack. It seemed like almost an hour later by the time we saw them emerging from the bushes. We hadn’t noticed, in our excitement, that Dad had never come back with our snacks. The four guys were older than Jeff and I. They had shaggy hair and bronzed skin. The girl looked to be my age. She had golden blonde hair and light, almost pasty skin. The boys were pushing her and laughing and I recognized something in her face – that fake, forced smile that comes only out of the most scarred pain.

Once the group was out of sight, Jeff and I ran down the path, stopping where they had been gathered. There were broken, bloodied sticks lying around. On the soil, there was a pile of dead and half-dead fish, clams partially torn out of their shells and even butterflies with their wings torn and ripped. Flies were gathered around something off to the side. As I moved closer I recognized the mutilated corpse of a robin. I stood paralyzed. A sudden urge to rescue the bird overpowered me and I leaned down to touch it. Jeff grabbed my arm and pulled me away.

“What are you doing? Do you want to get rabies or something?” That summer, we had been particularly worried about rabies. There had been a rumour that a rabid fox was seen running in the fields near our house. Mom had warned us that anything or anyone could have rabies. She frightened us so much that we believed there was some sort of rabies epidemic in the area.
I started to gather soil and bury the robin. I would not stand there and watch as swarms of flies claimed its lifeless body. As the flies began to recruit on to the piles of fish, I saw that the bird’s neck was broken, its legs had been cut off and its wings had been burned at the edges.

“We can’t stay here. Don’t do that, they’ll know it was us.” Jeff was frantic, pulling at my arm. But I wouldn’t move and so he left, running erratically down the path. I was almost mimicking his behaviour as I frantically dug into the earth to get more loose soil. The smell of the rotting flesh was nauseating. It was a mixture of animal feces, abandoned furniture and flat tires at the garbage dump and the backed up sewer that our neighbour had a few years before.

“What are you doing little girl?” I had been so focused on my task that I had not heard the four boys come back down the path. I stood up quickly. In front of me was the biggest of the boys. He was holding a large stick in his calloused, dirt stained hands. The look of disgust on his face was similar to Mom’s when she’d tell me how much I reminded her of “my father”.

“I’m…sorry…I…just…” I couldn’t get any words out. His eyes were burning through me. I thought I saw froth coming out the sides of his mouth. Mom had said that people could have rabies too. Perhaps I would have been safer touching the bird then standing here next to him.

“What’s that? Can you speak, freak?” He was yelling, spit flying out at me.

“The smell,” I started. “The flies, blood, I couldn’t stand it. I had to.” I wasn’t sure if I was making any sense. The boys started to laugh. I pictured them gathered around the helpless bird, torturing it and laughing the whole time. They had formed a circle around me and the half covered grave at my feet. I couldn’t look at them out of fear of what they might do to me. I worried they would cut off my feet, burn my hands, even break my neck. My eyes were fixed on the bird. The bright red chest indicated it was a male robin. Dad had taught me that when I was younger. He also told me that each spring you’re supposed to make a wish on the first robin you see. Their brown silk feathers and burnt orange-red chests gave me faith that I could have anything I wanted. As I stood next to its feeble body, I realized this bird was no more powerful than me and my wishes had been wasted. It wasn’t until I tasted salt on my lips that I realized I had been crying. Not just crying.  I was bawling. I kept my eyes closed tight out of embarrassment that I had let these boys see my so upset. They taunted me until we heard Dad’s voice calling my name. His footsteps crunched down the path in our direction. They laughed and ran in the opposite way. It wasn’t until I opened my eyes that I saw, standing in front of me, the blonde girl with that same, forced, clown-like smile. She reached down and held my hand. I learned later that her name was Heidi. She was the youngest and only girl in a family of boys. They weren’t camping, they actually lived close by.

“The fish were already dead, you know. My brothers like to poke at things and see them bleed. I just watch. I think the smell’s pretty gross too.” Didn’t she realize that I wasn’t upset about the fish? Hadn’t she seen the corpse of the innocent bird?
We began to meet everyday to go swimming, ride bikes or just talk and laugh on the beach. She asked me why she never saw my Mom and I told her it was because she didn’t like the sun or the water. I asked her where her Mom was and she told me she was dead. I looked up at her, expecting to see something broken on her face, in her eyes. But she was smiling, looking out over the water – just smiling.

The last night of our vacation, it began to rain. I was lying on top of my sleeping bag because the humidity hadn’t died down with the setting sun and the night air was thick. The door to the tent was unzipped a crack to let in air but all that did was invite the mosquitoes inside to find a place to rest out of the rain. The tent smelled like damp basements and rotting soil, and the rain seemed to last the entire night. Through the sound of water hitting the nylon tent, I could hear Mom crying. When I looked over at her, I saw water leaking from the roof of the tent onto her face. The rain water mingled with her tears leaving her face and hair soaking wet. She hadn’t bothered to move, she just lay there. As an adult, I would think back to this and realize this is why she hated camping. The rain always seemed to find her. But this year, I began to feel the drips on my forehead too. Dad and Jeff were asleep and dry. I reached out to hold Mom, but as soon as I touched her, she froze silent. Her skin was almost dead beneath my fingers and I imagined this is what it would have felt like to touch the robin. I lay like that for a few minutes before I realized that she wasn’t even breathing. Once I let her go, she gasped for breath like a fish out of water and rolled away from me. The two of us lay there the rest of the night damp and hot.

The next day Heidi came to find me as usual. The campsite was wet and the fire pit smoked from the damp ashes. I was busy packing my things and rolling up my sleeping bag. I heard her almost invisible footsteps before I saw her face. I looked up and saw that she had fresh scratches on her face layered bruises on her arms and legs that I had never taken the time to notice before. Dad stood up and spoke before I could.

“Jesus, what happened here?” he asked her, glaring as though he expected some sort of logical explanation. “Looks to me like you fell down a cliff or something. Too much rough housing for a girl if you ask me. I’d never let my Jujubee walk around in public looking like that”. I wanted to push him aside, rescue her from his unanswerable question, his unwanted comments, his large hands. I wanted to push him aside, rescue her from his unanswerable question, his large hands. I felt that she had been broken and only my small hands could piece her back together again. I stood up quickly and walked over to her.

Again, I was interrupted, but this time by Mom. She knelt down on the soil in front of Heidi and brushed the hair out of her face, examined her wounds. At first Heidi wouldn’t look at her, her eyes were focused on something off to the side. Her arms were glued to her torso and her chest exhaled in quick sharp movements. It wasn’t Heidi’s nervousness that shocked me; rather, it was Mom’s lack of it. She was delicate and sweet, her voice as calm and rhythmic as I had never heard before. She asked what had happened, who had done this. I knew that Heidi would never tell on her brothers because they were all she had. Mom wanted to know where Heidi’s Mom was, if Heidi needed something to eat. She told her that she would clean her wounds and make sure this never happened again. Heidi smiled as though Mom had glued her broken face back into that constant smile. But as Mom stood to lead her to the bathroom, the sides of her mouth began to drop, her eyes closed, and she collapsed, like a marionette into Mom’s arms. I stood motionless, watching these two, strangers to each other, protecting one another from someone or something. In a second, Heidi seemed to regain her strength and she was almost pushing Mom away from her. She ran over to me.

“I made this for you. See you next year, eh?” She handed me a folded piece of paper. I absent-mindedly put it in my pocket. I was struck by what she had said, “next year”? We hadn’t made plans to come back next year, and yet she spoke as if she knew we would.

Mom ran over to Dad and grabbed him by the arm. She was whispering, but there was a look of panic in her eyes.

“Listen, what do you want me to do? Go over there and question her parents? It’s just kids being kids, that’s all. Jeff gets bruises like that from playing soccer, it’s nothing to worry about.” Dad tried to reassure her, but she didn’t believe him and pushed him away, staring blankly into the direction where Heidi had run. Dad went back to packing up the tent, but Mom walked off and was gone for well over an hour. When she returned she wouldn’t tell us where she’d been and we never found out either.

It wasn’t until we were back at home that Mom found the folded paper in my laundry. I grabbed it from her before she could open it and took it to my room. I opened it slowly, worried I may rip the paper. Heidi had made a drawing for me. It was a picture of the beach with two girls talking on the sand. At the top she had written: “Friends Forever” and underneath: “Always, Heidi”. The one girl that was meant to be me seemed to be faceless, unrecognizable. The image of Heidi was perfect and smiling. I crumpled it up, ran frantically to the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet. Heidi had probably expected that I would put it on the fridge, maybe she thought Mom would look at it everyday and remember what a beautiful child she was. I couldn’t let myself hold onto it. I knew that in the days to come each time I looked at it I would smell rotting flesh and bruised skin, but I would never feel the warmth of Mom’s soft hands brushing away a smile.

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Hornet’s Nest

by Matthew Dexter

The black hornets were enormous, like her stomach, hovering just above the railing. One was more curious than the other. There only used to be one. Now a new one. Fluttering up and down, wings flapping, wondering whether to open the door and risk being stung. Whose house is this? Who lives here?

“You’re home.”

I knew there was a nest underneath the roof, but presumed it was old and besides the creatures preferred hiding in the hollow holes of the bamboo roofing. They would examine them all in a row, flapping wings, sometimes touching wood, then flying onto the next. This could continue for dozens of hollow minutes until the insect discovered the perfect place to enter, then silence and contentment and never any close encounters.

“We need to talk.”

“Go ahead.”

The curious one is in the center of the balcony watching me from where I stand inside the glass, safely behind the same window the other one often crashes into. Neither of them ever bothers me, so the decision is that I will never bother them either–unless I get stung. In that case I will unleash a toxic revenge the vile venomous extent of which will depend proportionally upon how much pain they inflicted.

The new one hovers directly above the sands of lover’s beach and land’s end at the southernmost tip of the Baja California peninsula. Drifting from mountaintop to the surface of the ocean, watching me and wondering why I am uncertain to get any closer.

This is its home, and I am nothing but an intrusion. An insignificant illegal immigrant living in a third world country.

“Bzzzzzzzzzzzzz,” he says.

“Bzzzzzzzz,” she answers.

I smile while they dance from parachutes of parasilers taunting me with aerial acrobatics like fairies, though much less cute and a little scary.

I wonder why I drove down this Baja California peninsula with nothing but the possessions in my car, without a care in the world, except falling in love and not getting arrested.

The one which scares me the least is busy examining the hollow cylinders. The mysterious one smashes into the other, who chases it away. This goes on for hours, as the time devours the Pacific and I can envision the reason why I am even here. There is magic where the wild winds blow and secrets in the hollow unknown prisms. We are a nation of insects and visions and vivid rhythms of sound expelled from black empty eyes as vast as the sea and time itself.

“Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”

Why be afraid of the unknown? God lives in the ocean and nature respects you if you let it. This is a country of patience and vagrants come in all shapes and sizes.

She’s pregnant and you’re going to have a baby.

Open the door slowly and sit with your friends in the sun. They won’t bite. If they sting it’s only because you finally let them inside your hollow little world.

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The Unfinished Painting

by Victoria Alford

A large expanse of canvas glares at me as I walk into my art studio every day. There is the outline of a grotesque face in black on the stark, white background. I wish I knew what my son was thinking when he drew this garish thing. I know part of the reason was for shock value. Gabriel did everything with gusto and bravado and he was a master. He was always in your face with his laugh and his quick wit and when he shot back with some hilarious response to something I said, there were a few times I almost wet my pants. I notice the bold statement this picture will make: how fitting for his style. He came into this world kicking and screaming and maintained a more subtle grasp of attention getting behavior throughout his life. He was such a gregarious child and he became a well-loved friend and companion to many as he grew into adulthood. I do have the finished rendition of this masterpiece he had planned. It is much smaller, but vividly colored inside his sketchbook on page five. I have stared and stared at it for months now, afraid to begin the task before me to complete the last artistic endeavor he began, but was unable to finish. You see, Gabriel died. His final work of art haunts me so that I feel compelled to complete it. The desire to make this dream a reality drives me, but I am afraid if I start working on it, I will ruin it. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Do something everyday that scares you.” This is the scare of a lifetime. Will he be able to see me painting and wish he could wrench the brush from my hand? He was only twenty-four years old and so impetuous. I want to bring life into this picture to replace a life lost. It needs the color he would have used. I need the color he brought to my life. Will he be with me and guide my hand as each brushstroke is placed, or will I feel his spirit fading as his last mark on earth is finished?

I want to remember every detail from beginning to end, of the birth and growth of my son. It is funny how you can remember snippets of occasions or dialogue or facial expressions, but the bigger picture seems to totter on the edge of your memory, falling in the opposite direction as you reach out to grab it. When Gabriel was born, he arrived quickly and angrily. I was up all night after his birth failing in every attempt to quiet his incessant crying. I delivered a screaming baby and I took home a screaming baby. My oldest son, Jordan, was a breeze from start to finish. His was a slow, determined arrival and he was quiet and cuddly from day one. The bond we developed was soft and cozy. Gabriel, on the other hand, was not to be ignored or taken for granted. Lacking the power of speech did not deter him from getting my attention, so screaming was the order of the day, every day. No one could look at him. From the moment he realized he wasn’t the only person in the room until he spoke his first word, he would verbalize his distaste with screams. All it took was a glance from my best friend, who wanted to baby sit desperately, or one of his grandparents, who just wanted to hold him for a moment. They weren’t vocalizations of terror or fear. They were statements that seemed to say, “Don’t even look at me, unless I invite you to.”

I never spoke to my children with anything other than adult diction. Baby talk always makes me wince and I believe it only serves to confuse a child who is just learning to speak. Jordan was a quick study in language and he, in turn, taught Gabriel everything he knew. I had read somewhere that mothers interact vocally less often with sons than with daughters. This was not going to happen in our household. When I breastfed Gabriel, I used the time to talk to him just as I had with Jordan. Occasionally, he would bite down hard and then look up slyly to register my reaction. I quickly learned to say certain things that would elicit a smile and make him unclench his jaw. It was a game and a test which he would engage me in most of his life.

The dark shadow of divorce shattered all of our lives when Gabriel was four. Jordan understood perfectly what was happening, but Gabriel was emotionless. I attributed it to his age though Jordan was only five and openly bereft. While they were close in age, at times it seemed as if they were living in different environments. As they matured, I came to realize that Gabriel was like a steamy cauldron that quietly held its turmoil below the surface. The anger broke through when fiery, passionate elements combined, fueled, for example, by strained visits with his father. Later, the volatility exploded when Gabriel started drinking.

The eyes that stare back at me from the face on the canvas are opposites of one another. The right eye has the heavy lid and wrinkled crease of one who has experienced sadness too many times and is the wiser for it. Disappointment turned to deep, pervading sorrow when Gabriel realized the relationship with his father would never be close. The distance grew with each passing year to the point that conversation between the two was stilted. Visits were limited to holiday obligations. The loss of a loving connection with his father was like a death for Gabriel, and he filled his life with drunken or drug induced stupors to shield his pain from the outside world. There is a definite cartoonist touch to the left eye. The design mirrors the child-like essence of my son. Gabriel’s world held no consequences for dangerous deeds that only daredevils would consider. He was the imp who could accept any challenge with impunity and come out on top. For all the potentially harmful activities he engaged in, there was not a broken bone or a broken spirit to betray the spine-chilling thing he might have just done. He believed that a twenty-four year old was invincible and made it his quest to prove that, twenty-four hours a day. Maybe those eyes represent his interpretation of what he was and what he lost.

I was a rebellious teenager and mistakenly thought my experience prepared me for that phase when the boys began junior high. I forgot about the big difference between girls and boys during puberty. Testosterone, the nemesis of many a pubescent boy, reared its ugly head and my children became evil barbarians. There was no man by my side with a big, booming voice to scare goodness into my sons. My hopeless attempts to persuade them into making good grades, developing a work ethic, and seeing the obvious difference between right and wrong elicited snide remarks and slammed doors.

There are gargantuan teeth in the mouth of the face and voluptuous lips barely hide the points on the ends of some of them. I saw sardonic evil the first time I looked upon them, but now I wonder. Could they be the representation of darkness that swept over Gabriel during this tumultuous time, as he struggled to deal with his impending move towards manhood and realizing he was gay? His anger became palpable. He was arrested for assaulting a schoolmate and spent time in the Juvenile Center. He dropped out of high school. Twice, I alerted the authorities he had gone missing after he walked out of the house so inebriated that I was certain the next time I would see him would be at the city morgue. After he violated his probation following the assault, I turned him in and gave the judge my blessing to send him to Boys School in Ft. Wayne, Indiana for three months. He was out of control. Something very black had swallowed him up and I had to accept my own inability to snatch him back. Yes, that ugly mouth could be a symbol for consumption without mercy.

The incarceration seemed to turn things around. Gabriel graduated from high school. He and I drove to Ball State University for orientation day and a look at the campus. The time together was a thrill for me because my son was actually excited about going to college. He drove like a maniac all the way there and all the way back. The risky behavior was not washed from his system as I had hoped, but his enthusiasm heralded a light at the end of the tunnel. The academic aspirations soon were daunted by the lack of financial aid he would need to attend school in a different city, so IUPUI became the alternative. Since his main goal was art, what could be more prestigious than Herron Art School? My brother had attended Herron and went on to become a successful jeweler. The first act of this reality show went off without a hitch, but the second act drew the curtain closed as the combination of job conflicts and a lack of self-discipline began to erode the time spent on school. He was openly gay now and making the most of it. He lost no friends after he divulged who he really was and soon gained bars full of gay ones.  His focus became acquiring a partner who was at least as old as his own father. It was a sadly disguised search for the male nurturing he desperately needed without the restrictions inherent in a father-son relationship. He was a charming, charismatic man-child with looks and personality to match. I don’t think he was ever without an admirer or two, no matter where he was. He would still have the occasional scrapes with the law, usually public intoxication, but there was no violence perpetrated during those times. Finally, he managed to return to school and was accepted into Herron. The smile on Gabriel’s face when he announced this accomplishment told everyone he was on his way.

The hair drawn on this figure is composed of a series of spikes. The lines have very sharp angles where they meet and have no symmetry.  If placed horizontally on a chart, they could be fluctuations demonstrating the highs and lows of Gabriel’s life. I see them as prickly barriers shielding the head that wears them. Are they the screams that kept everyone at a safe distance so long ago? Gabriel was an enigma with intelligence, creativity, talent, steadfast loyalty to those he loved, and above all, a reverence for laughter and fun. Keeping him from harm in his pursuit of pleasure was no longer within my jurisdiction, but as a mother I find it very difficult to accept my impotence on the night he died. Rounding the tips of hair on the painting will not make everything better. Trying to figure out how he was able to get his stepfather’s prescribed morphine out of our house that night brings me no peace. Knowing he died from an accidental overdose, not suicide, gives no comfort. The thought of his body laying there for three days before being found is a perpetual nightmare I will only escape with my own death.

This is my reality, the life I am not ready to leave, yet must endure. The artwork is Gabriel’s legacy and I must not let sorrow, despair or loneliness interfere with completing what he started. First I need to cry a bit more, dwell on my loss a bit more, remember his smile and his laughter a bit more. The painting will be finished, my beautiful boy, once the fear subsides and the first brushstroke begins to heal my broken heart.

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