Author: Post Road

Adult Education

Brandi Handley

After a good fifteen minutes, Hailey and I are still stuck on a volume problem. Find the volume of the cube. This should be an easy question—just plug the numbers into the formula. But the answer she and I keep coming up with does not match the answer in the back of the book. I immediately think: typo. The book is wrong; we are right.

             Hailey is a twenty-four-year-old student so close to taking the high school equivalency test that she’s made it to geometry. Frankly, she’s a lot better at math than I am. She’s figuring numbers in her head while I’m writing them out on paper.

             The Big Q Quik Trip cup, purse full of snacks, and extra pencils mean she’s in it for the long haul. And as I scan the classroom for the other teacher to help us, she keeps studying the volume problem.

             “Oh!” Hailey says. “That’s what it is.”

             “What,” I say, “what did we miss?”

             “The width is in feet, the length and height are in inches,” she says. “We have to convert the feet to inches.”

             I look at the cube in her math book. Sure enough, the width is in feet. How either of us missed such an obvious step seems incredible. One little bump and we’d been derailed.

Jim is in his sixties and hasn’t sat inside a classroom in more than forty years, having spent those years driving an eighteen-wheeler. He wants to drive school buses so he can spend more time at home with his family. Even with all of his experience, he cannot apply for a position without a high school equivalency certificate. Tonight is his first class with us and in preparation he has brought his own pencil and a pair of reading glasses that he keeps in a leather pouch in his breast pocket.

             Like Hailey, he has strong math skills—while we start most students on fractions, we start Jim on geometry. He and Hailey should pass the math portion of the high school equivalency test in a matter of weeks.

             He sips from a water bottle throughout the class period, making sure it lasts all three hours. At the end of class he says, “If I’d known it was this easy, I’d’ve done it a long time ago.”

While math comes relatively easy to Jim and Hailey, it is Kryptonite to a lot of students. Joanna enrolled in our program once before but quit amid a battle with fractions, a derailment that lasted several years. She’s returned with an infectious positive attitude and a package of Jesus pencils.

             Tonight she places the pencils on the table in front of her. They say things like, “I ♥ Jesus” and “Jesus makes it possible!” She says that she’s not only brought her Jesus pencils, she’s brought the man himself. “I got Jesus with me. He’s going to get me through this.”

Rebecca, like the other students, does not have a high school diploma, yet she’s a loan officer at a small bank. She dresses in button down shirts, slacks, and flats. Her hair is short and straight, and a brown barrette fastens it away from her face. She arranges her student folder, notebook paper, and pencils neatly on her desk. Her work is meticulous. She asks questions. She listens. And she has failed the math portion of the high school equivalency test five times.

             She’s tried high school equivalency classes before, years ago, and just recently online classes, which have helped her pass reading, science, social studies, and writing. Only math remains. She wonders why she can do algebra in class but not on the test.

           &nbsp ; This evening she sits tightly wound at her desk, her shoulders tensed up to her ears. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I fail again,” she says. She’s been with us five months already and has been one point away from passing, but on her latest attempt her score dropped severely, though she’d studied harder. She has one more attempt left for this calendar year.

             Next to Rebecca sits Laurie, who carries a Hello Kitty backpack and wears glittery barrettes in her spiral-curled bob. She’s 43—the same age as Rebecca. This is her first attempt at classes of any kind since she dropped out of school more than twenty-five years ago. She struggles with fractions, percents, and long division. But she’s decided to go ahead and take the math portion of the test, just to see what it’s like.

             We marvel when she passes on her first try.

             “Imma good guesser,” she says.

When I started at the adult education program, I’d never taught before and wasn’t sure I wanted to. But the program needed another teacher and I needed a part-time job while I pursued graduate school. At 5:45 in the evening, Debbie, a teacher in the program, gave me the grand tour of the facilities—the bathrooms, the water fountain, the classroom where students had started to arrive.

             They signed in on a small table, picked a yellow or Halloween-themed pencil from a basket, and pulled their student folders from a filing cabinet. I didn’t hear any greetings or excited chatter like one might hear in a high school classroom. Most of the students had come from a job or their children. A couple of younger students, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, appeared as if they’d just rolled out of bed, looking as tired as the others. The classroom got crowded and warm in a hurry.

             The first hour of class was independent study. Students worked on assignments that addressed their individual weaknesses, while two teachers went from student to student answering questions and explaining concepts one-on-one.

             I watched from beneath an array of educational posters diagramming a plant and animal cell, the parts of a flower, and the solar system; detailing decimals, fractions, and the multiplication table; and listing grammar rules and the writing process (pre-write, draft, proofread, share). A globe, a world map, and a map of the U. S. were all at least fifteen years out of date. There were books—textbooks of every school subject, dictionaries with faded red covers held together at the spine with masking tape, and exercise books with yellowed pages and 1970s copyright dates.

             An entire public education—kindergarten through twelfth grade—was crammed into that one classroom. The weight of it hung there, palpable. I went out into the lobby to get some air, afraid a student might ask me to explain photosynthesis or algebra. At that point, I wasn’t sure I could explain long division.

             As the first hour of class came to an end, so did my time as an observer. The second hour was a group lesson. “You can help me teach the lesson tonight,” said Debbie. “You were an English major, right?”

             I nodded. Maybe helping meant passing out worksheets.

             “You can do an essay lesson. You want to?”

             “Uh, sure,” I said. I followed her to the director’s office where she Googled five-paragraph essay graphic organizers.

             “How about this one?” she said, mousing over one shaped as a hamburger. The two buns symbolized the introduction and conclusion paragraphs; the lettuce, tomato, and hamburger patty symbolized the three body paragraphs in between (or the “meat” of the essay). “This one’s easy for people to remember,” she said. “We have to keep things simple for this crowd.”

             Then Debbie said, “If you could be a cartoon character or a super hero, who would you be?”

             I tensed up at the question. Betty Boop randomly came to mind and the Powerpuff Girls. Finally, I said, “Bugs Bunny?”

             “Why?”

             “I don’t know.”

             “Well, hurry and think of three reasons. That’s the essay question we’re going to give the class.” She handed me the stack of freshly printed hamburger graphic organizers. “You can show the class how to use these with your example.”

             I stood in front of the class, a roomful of adults—people I’d soon come to know as mothers, fathers, certified nursing assistants, managers, bank tellers, factory workers—and drew a giant hamburger on the board so I could explain why I wanted to be Bugs Bunny.

             The simplicity of my essay lesson seemed inappropriate in light of the high stakes these students were facing. “This crowd” and the experiences that brought them to our classroom were anything but simple. I found Debbie’s attitude to be common, equating adult education student with drop-out.

In our classroom, hands go up like smoke signals. They hang in the air silently betraying the urgency with which they were sent up. Most students in our program would rather do almost anything than ask a teacher for help. They’ve been in school before and were not successful. They’re skeptical of success now.

             But after a few classes, some of the students start to relax and trust us with their questions. On one particularly crowded evening, smoke signals have turned into flares. Hands shoot upward and an inexplicable anxiety shrouds the room.

             Steven’s forgotten how to find a common denominator; Nicole is trying to remember if the formula for figuring percents is IS over OF or OF over IS. Carlos needs a hand grading his practice test. Jeremy has been staring at a blank piece of notebook paper for twenty minutes trying to write an essay. Not knowing the multiplication table has stalled Keisha’s progress in fractions. I quickly show her the finger trick for remembering the multiples of nine and give her a handout for the rest.

             A few people working on fractions try to help each other until I can get back around to them. Meanwhile, the students at a table across the room are flagging me down to settle a dispute over comma use. I dread that table; I can’t even remember the rules for comma use. I ignore them for a moment to help Maria on sentence formation. I kneel next to her table to get a better view of the exercise. She says, “Honey, you’re too pretty to be on your knees.”

             By the time the first hour of class is over, I am almost relieved to be teaching the group lesson. I teach a short one on ratio and proportion. Most of the class is getting it. This is a major victory for both me and the students. The anxiety that has plagued us this evening begins to dissipate. We ease up on ourselves. We crack a smile. Small victories are what keep us coming back.

             I have less success teaching essay writing. We’ve whittled down the writing process to what’s listed on the poster stuck to the wall: pre-write, draft, proofread, share. I become a writing drill sergeant:

             “Write simple sentences. Don’t be fancy.”

             “Only use words that you know how to spell.”

             “The essay test is not the time to experiment with punctuation.”

             “Stop trying to use semicolons.”

             “Lie if you have to—just make sure you answer the question.”

             “They are only going to spend two minutes grading your essay, so get to the point.”

             I am trying to dispel the mystery of writing, give them rules that are easy to follow. In the process I feel I am dispelling any creativity they may have had, or worse, the desire to keep trying.

             More than half of our students stop showing up to class within a month. When each new month rolls around, twenty to thirty more people sign up for orientation. Hundreds of people in Blue Springs, Missouri live and work without a high school diploma.

             Blue Springs is a suburb twenty miles east of downtown Kansas City—drive past the business district, 18th and Vine, and Arrowhead and Kauffman stadiums, through Raytown and Independence, and you’re there. It’s a city of 50,000 middle-class Midwesterners. And it’s home to thirteen elementary schools, four middle schools, one freshman center, two high schools—and one alternative school, which houses the Blue Springs Adult Education and Literacy (AEL) program.

             The alternative school was formerly Hall-McCarter Middle School. My middle school. I can see the peak of the house I grew up in from the parking lot. The AEL program is in the part of the building that used to be the school library, the place where I once unsuccessfully tried out for the school musical. The square tables with the matching cushioned chairs serve as our students’ desks now, but everything else has changed. Most of the bookshelves are gone, walls divide the space into classrooms, and the book check-out station is now the AEL director’s office. The building has changed so much that sometimes I forget I was a student there. An enrollment session gives me a tangible reminder.

             Sitting behind the teacher’s desk, I spot a familiar face. I can just make out his profile between the heads of the other students: it is unquestionably the freckled face of my middle school nemesis, Matt. He’d already been held back one year in school before I met him, and he was big for his age. He threw his bulk around like a badge. He was loud and crude but on the whole harmless. I dreaded him not because I thought he would harm me but because I knew he would try to embarrass me.

             One afternoon in 7th grade math, I sat chewing a fingernail. He announced loudly, “She’s giving me the finger!” I was mortified because, yes, my middle finger was sticking straight up as I gnawed on it. This is the worst memory I have of him.

             At some point he’d broken his leg, and years later he still walked with a limp, the injured leg a lot skinnier than the other one. By high school his over-sized t-shirts had turned black and chains dangled from his cargo shorts. He wasn’t loud anymore but eerily quiet. I don’t remember seeing him past tenth grade.

             More than fifteen years later we are back in middle school, and now, I am the teacher.

             At the end of the day he comes up to my desk to hand me his paperwork. I say, quickly, “Hey, how are you?”

             He recognizes me immediately. “Whoa, how are you?”

             “I’m good,” I say. And then the encounter is over.

             I haven’t seen him since enrollment. Maybe another opportunity presented itself, a new job or a training program that didn’t require a high school equivalency certificate. Or maybe his plans were overturned by some unforeseen blow. Or was it me that kept him from coming back?

Some students are here by a judge’s order and because their parole officer will check up on them. Others need a high school equivalency certificate to keep their job or because they can’t find a good job without it.

             Jeff does not have to be here. It’s the middle of second semester and he could be out riding his motorcycle every Monday and Thursday night instead of learning slope intercepts. He could be at jousting practice (he now does that on Wednesdays) instead of reading about chemical reactions. He has a job and doesn’t need a new one.

             He works methodically writing in teeny tiny handwriting, carefully folding down the pages of his notebook after each page is full. For three hours he works, rarely taking breaks or needing help. He is here because he wants to graduate high school before his daughter, whom he has raised by himself. He made a deal with her that if she finished high school, so would he—they would race. When he takes the test in April, he passes, beating her by one month.

Vicki turned fifty years old last year. From a distance she looks like a teenager—tiny build, blond wiry hair, flared jeans, and tight tops. Up close you can see that stress and cigarettes have roughened her face and neck. She’s on medication for ADHD, bipolar, anxiety, and depression. Her hands often shake. Her essays are full of sentences that randomly stop and start.

             It’s March, and Vicki has been with us in the mornings since the previous August. She tells me she’s going to court today.

             “For your divorce?” I ask.

             “No, Robert and I are back together,” she says.

             “When did that happen?”

             “A few weeks ago,” she says. “I moved back in with him after my mom pulled a gun on me.”

             I can feel my face stretching with surprise. “What happened?” I ask.

             “I was living with my parents when me and Robert split up,” she begins, “and one night Mom and Dad had been drinking, and I don’t know, I came out of my room and Mom was at the end of the hall waving Dad’s gun around.”

             “So, she wasn’t, like, aiming at you?” I say. I feel an arbitrary sense of relief that this gun-wrangling may have been some kind of misunderstanding.

             “When she saw me she started screaming at me,” Vicki continues. “Things like, ‘Get the hell out of my house, you leech! You just can’t stop ruining people’s lives!’ And that’s when she started pointing the gun at me. I locked myself in my room and called Robert and then the police.”

             I try to imagine Vicki in high school, a petite girl dealing with undiagnosed ADHD and bipolar disease. I wonder if her mom was prone to waving weapons around then.

             Vicki tells me she loves me. She says it like best friends say it.

             “Love you, too, Vicki,” I say.

Like many students, Michelle feels the need to explain why she didn’t finish high school. Unlike Vicki, she seems to have had a comparatively normal upbringing.

             “I wasn’t planning on dropping out. I wasn’t stupid,” she says.

             Although she’d gotten pregnant her junior year, she planned to finish high school and then go to college to study nursing. Her friends and family supported her, and when she went to the counselor’s office to sign up for senior year classes, the plan was still intact.

             “I told the counselor I didn’t want to take gym until the spring because I was pregnant,” Michelle says. “‘You’re what?’ the counselor says. ‘I’m pregnant,’ I tell her. ‘I want to wait and take gym after I have my baby.’” Michelle has a deer-caught-in-headlights look about her as she tells me this. “She told me I couldn’t sign up for classes if I was pregnant and threw my schedule in the trash.”

             One balled-up schedule was a hard enough bump to derail Michelle’s plan. Would the plan have stuck if she’d known how to advocate for herself? Or known that another counselor may have had a different, more compassionate reaction?

             Michelle decided to give our program a try after fifteen years working as a certified nursing assistant for minimum wage. She earns her high school equivalency certificate in less than four months.

Ian brings his wife with him to school. He missed our last orientation, but we allow him to enroll because he’s desperate. His wife is pregnant with their second child and he needs a job.

             They are both young, but at twenty, he is clearly much younger. His wife hangs on him, arms tied around his waist. She points her face up at him for a kiss. And then another one.

             Ian meets her face halfway, but the rest of his body looks ready to spring from her. He hasn’t brought his wife with him, I realize: she has brought him. Tethered to her, he looks like a wild animal. His eyes dart around, and I can easily imagine his lanky limbs loping over fences and across fields.

             “You’ll need to go through the orientation process,” I say to Ian.

             The young wife reluctantly lets go of him. She leaves, and I take Ian to an empty classroom to take pre-tests and fill out paperwork.

             He cannot sit still. His heel pumps at the floor, his hands slap the table twice a second. His eyes dart from his reading test, to the window, to me, to the blank white board, back to his test. “This is easy for me,” he says.

             “Good,” I say, “keep going.”

             He speaks in a hurry. “I’m even better at math.”

             He fidgets through the remainder of the test but completes it in record time. I worry that he rushed through the test without trying, but when I get his scores back, he appears to be right—the test was easy for him. He could improve in a few areas in math, but he should be ready to take the high school equivalency test soon.

             Most students who hear this kind of news are visibly relieved. Relieved to know that they’re not as far behind as they thought. Relieved that their goals are within reach.

             When I give Ian his good news, it is hard to say how he feels. He stares past my right ear as I’m talking to him and pointing out his scores on the results page. The sudden stillness of his body is disconcerting after watching him in constant motion for several hours. Finally he says, “I don’t want to take the math test until I’m ready. Like really ready.”

             “There are a few areas you’ll need to brush up on,” I agree. “But it shouldn’t take you long.”

             To help Ian plan for his future, we set up a meeting for him with a representative from the Full Employment Council (FEC), a program that works closely with ours. The representative describes the opportunities waiting for Ian once he passes the high school equivalency test. Ian loves working on cars, so he gets information on a mechanic training program that the FEC will pay for.

             But after several months, Ian still doesn’t want to take the high school equivalency test, though he’s ready and our program has money to pay for it. Most students see a high school equivalency certificate as a key that unlocks opportunity. I wonder what a high school equivalency certificate looks like to Ian. A cage? One more tether?

             I’m not sure how to encourage him. He doesn’t need the usual help. He knows the multiplication tables; he’s figured out algebra on his own. His reading skills are strong. He doesn’t need me to tell him he’ll do great on the test or to give him test-taking strategies.

             I worry that what he needs is less responsibility, time to be a kid. But in the adult education program we specialize in steering students toward more responsibility.

             We coax him into signing up for the test. When the day of the test comes, he doesn’t show up to the testing center, and he doesn’t come back to class for a month. We call him. He says he doesn’t have gas money to get to school. We say next time you come, we’ll give you a gas card.

             Once he has the gas card, he disappears for another couple of weeks. We call him again, and after a few days his wife answers. She and Ian and their baby had an accident driving to Ohio to help a friend move. We assume he no longer has the gas card to get to school.

             A week later Ian comes to class smelling like weed. This is the one thing we, as teachers, are not allowed to overlook. He is told to leave. He does not come back.

The ideal adult education student is somewhere between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-two—people who are experienced enough to fully understand the opportunities a high school equivalency certificate offers but young enough to remember a few things from high school. If this demographic sticks with it, they’ll be done in a matter of months.

             But if they’re a single parent, it may take a little longer.

             If they have more than three kids, a little longer.

             If they work overtime, maybe a little longer.

             If their car breaks down and they can’t get a ride to school, longer.

             If they have test-taking anxiety, social anxiety, or general anxiety, longer.

             If they have to take out a restraining order on their partner, step-brother, cousin, or either parent, even longer.

             If they live with any drug users, longer.

             If they have ever been hard into drugs themselves, it will take quite a bit longer.

             If they relapse, much longer.

             If they suspect that their parents, teachers, or friends were right all along and they really aren’t smart, a lot longer.

             If they give up, it’ll take…

             Longer.

             Longer.

             Longer.

Tyson carries a skateboard with him to class, along with a large chip on his shoulder. The skateboard isn’t a hobby but his transportation. This is the suburbs: there are no trains or buses. He walks/skateboards from Planet Fitness, a twenty-four-hour gym where he sleeps, to school, a distance of over four miles.

             Tyson is a good-looking kid—tall, athletic, a neatly-shaped Afro. His sweatpants fit tightly and he wears his socks pulled up to meet the too-short bottoms of his pant legs. He wears a too-small sweatshirt and carries a too-small backpack. Somehow it works. He looks hip. He has a big white smile, straight teeth, and clear skin. He could have been one of the popular kids in high school.

             He doesn’t want help. When I ask him what he’s working on, he jabs at the paper with one finger before going back to scrolling on his phone. I ask if he has any questions, I’m unsure he’s heard me through the ear buds. “No,” he says. But I see that he’s looking up how to calculate percents.

             When I see him next class, he’s so desperate, he allows me to help him. He has his writing test in two days and the essay he has just written is one long sentence, the length of the page. I tell him he has the right idea. He has voiced an opinion somewhat related to the essay question. I tell him organization is key on this kind of test. Paragraphs. Periods. I tell him to give me three reasons why he believes his opinion is a strong one. I draw a graphic organizer on the board. I avoid the hamburger-shaped one in favor of one with simple boxes. Together we fill it in.

             “Okay, I get it,” he says. But soon he’s stuck trying to turn the three reasons into paragraphs.

             We write the essay together.

             I try to imagine where he sleeps at the gym. The locker room? The “abs” section? I don’t know what he eats. Powerade and protein bars? I only know he can’t go home. His parents kicked him out for some unknown reason—he doesn’t appear to be on drugs, he hasn’t shown any signs of violent behavior. At times I glimpse a certain attitude, the chip on his shoulder infecting his whole person. But there must have been something that prompted his parents to kick him out. Something more than a bad attitude.

             I don’t know what bump in his path landed him in adult education. I only know he is here, and he accepts the packets of worksheets I offer him after class.

             “Can I take this pencil?” he asks.

             “Yes, take it,” I say. “Take several pencils.”

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Brandi Handley earned an MFA degree in creative writing and media arts from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Currently, she teaches English at Park University, a small Liberal Arts college in Parkville, Missouri. Her work has been published in the Laurel Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, and the Wisconsin Review.

Hodads in Wonderland

Phillip Hurst

“OB,” read the sign at The Tilted Stick, “WHERE THE DEBRIS MEETS THE SEA.”

             The Stick was a dingy pool hall catty-corner from my new apartment, the sort of place where, come last call, drunk and lonely men fought like woebegone dogs, howling and bleeding in the spilt beer; while “OB” stood for Ocean Beach, the SoCal surfing community where I’d washed up at age twenty-seven, lost and alone and without the requisite surfboard.

             I’d been living in the Pacific Northwest prior to the move, and in the Midwest prior to that. There was a diploma in a cardboard tube in the trunk of my Honda which said I’d graduated from a law school accredited by the state of Illinois. Spooked by my looming future, I’d packed up the Honda and driven a few thousand miles west, thereby becoming not a barrister in the Land of Lincoln but a bartender in Portland, Oregon.

             All of it, the jettisoned career, the years of higher education, seemed utterly pointless—not a misstep or failure, but simply banal. And while the craft beer in Portland marked a definite improvement over the Bud Light in Illinois, I wasn’t particularly fond of the rain. So one day in late 2006, I packed up the Honda yet again, doped my cat with tranquilizers, and boogied south down I-5.

             A few days later, I followed an exit toward the Pacific, where the road petered-out near the San Diego River estuary amidst rotting kelp, empty beer cans, and a plethora of burrito shacks. I leased the first apartment I saw, filled it with a couple hundred bucks worth of Craigslist furniture (after delousing the upholstery), and bought a pair of sky-blue board shorts from the surf shop across the street.

             In many ways, OB seemed the prototypical beach community. The restaurants served fish tacos and oysters on the half-shell, and the low-slung bungalows and moldy sea-scoured apartment buildings were populated almost exclusively by young singles. Radio hits from Sublime and the Red Hot Chili Peppers blared from the open-air bars, Chargers flags hung from the streetside balconies, and there was absolutely nowhere to park. But unlike the rest of San Diego’s coastal haunts, OB had managed to retain a sense of its past.

             In the early twentieth century, the beach was home to a vast amusement park called Wonderland. In fact, my apartment sat at the very intersection which in 1913 had constituted the park’s entrance—and a spectacular entrance it was, framed by towering minarets and lit by thousands of Tungsten lights. Visitors to Wonderland were greeted by a skating rink and dancing pavilion, Japanese tea gardens, a carousel and waterslide, as well as the Blue Streak Racer, the largest rollercoaster on the Pacific seaboard. The park also contained a menagerie of exotic animals, including bears, lions, wolves, monkeys, and one presumably lonely hyena.

             The community I would come to know still felt part this carnival history. Feral parrots squawked in the palms just beyond my bedroom window, and festive but shady characters tromped up and down the stairs at all hours of the day and night, as my neighbors were well-known purveyors of weed and coke. Longhaired dudes shot down the street on their longboards, leash-towed by slobbery pit bulls, and there was a homeless woman with a voice like Tommy Lee Jones who crashed on my porch whenever it rained, only to leave behind a tidy pile of cigarette butts, a neat line of empty airplane-sized vodka shooters, and a single plucked tulip.

             I didn’t really mind the grunginess, though. Yes, the police helicopter (the “ghetto bird”) had a tendency to hover over my apartment building at three A.M., searchlight swinging from alleyway to alleyway; and, sure, there were dirty needles in the sand, but come sunset that same sand glowed with a heartbreaking palette of oranges and pinks and blues. In such lights and at such moments, beach and buildings seemed imbued with a doomed romanticism, as if about to slip off the edge of the continent and sink beneath the silvery waves, like a new Atlantis.

             The locals, too, had retained something of Wonderland’s aura. Everyone was on wheels—skateboards, rollerblades, banana-seat beach cruisers—an entire community of castoffs and layabouts zooming past my front porch, drunk on the golden sunshine and stoned on a beachy serenity. The older and raspier OBecians, refugees from the ’60s by and large, had a ghostly vibe, like they might’ve always been there rolling joints and squinting into the mist, while the younger ones ran the gamut from the merely eccentric to the downright bizarre.

             There were assorted street performers with their card tricks and handstands and llamas, and Steinbeckian homeless dudes jollily brown-sacking their liquor while strumming and drumming for change. Come the weekend, puffed-up jarheads from Camp Pendleton would roll through, looking to pound drinks and pound heads and get—if not laid—at least tattooed.

             Speaking of, a neighbor of mine could’ve rightly been confused with Bradbury’s Illustrated Man, as every inch of his flesh, from the crown of his shaven scalp down to his little white toes were covered in scrolling reds and greens and gray. The first time I endeavored to say hello to this individual, he paused on the sidewalk and blinked at me long and slow, revealing a pair of eerily realistic eyeballs inked on the backs of his lids. “I require nothing . . .” he said, in a robotic monotone, and so I took him at his word.

             Then there was Bagman Jehovah, a local keyboardist who sang lugubrious gospel dirges along the tourist thoroughfare. An ancient black man, tall and skinny and bent, he dressed in layers of flowing cloaks and skirts despite the never-ending summer. His gospels somehow captured the essence of sea and indigo sky, the laidback joie de vivre of my neighbors, the surfers who’d discovered a new religion at morning tide and the bevies of bikini-clad young women—all so fit and tan, so sexily Californian—doing pretty things with water and sunshine. Listening to Bagman testify while perched on a barstool overlooking the Pacific, a guy could almost believe in that god he so elegantly praised.

             Indeed, despite my being surely the most uncool character in all of Ocean Beach—my Irish skin freckled instead of tanned, my haircuts cost twelve bucks, and my wardrobe might’ve been best described as “Midwest-dork”—I found myself totally fascinated. OB seemed to exist outside the normal constraints of place and time, and thus many a day was lost at the rail of one bar or another, watching the froth and flotsam roll in while draining longnecks and allowing the hours to slide off my skin like a film of sweat. Only a decade later did I understand I wasn’t merely savoring a mid-twenties cocktail of vitamin D, booze, and lack of responsibility. Instead, for the first time I’d found a place where I might actually fit in, although this wasn’t necessarily apparent at first glance.

             Consider a day shortly after I’d moved to Ocean Beach. It wasn’t quite noon yet, but I’d posted up on the streetside patio of a bar called the Sunshine Company. I was delving into my second pint when I noticed a line forming outside a restaurant half a block down. The sign painted on the curbside wall read “Hodad’s” and featured a toucan-nosed little fellow astraddle the topside bun of a giant hamburger with humanoid arms and legs. This hamburgerman had just caught a wave on a bright red surfboard.

             I turned to the guy at the next table over, who was nursing a pint of his own. “Those burgers must be pretty good for the line to wrap around the block like that.”

             At first, he ignored me. His face was sunburned, the ridge of his nose peeling in white flakes like fish scales. He wore the standard OB uniform of reflective shades and a flat-billed cap, shin-length Dickies, and a black t-shirt. “Hodad’s is dank, bro,” he finally said.

             I squeezed a wedge of lime into my beer. “What is a hodad, anyway?”

             Then, after a dismissive smirk at the pale legs sticking out of my newly-purchased board shorts, he turned his weathered face once more to the Pacific swelling and breaking down at the blue and gull-hung end of Newport Avenue. “A hodad,” he explained, “is somebody who lives in a surfing community but doesn’t surf.”

A poseur, in other words. A wannabe. Or in my case, maybe just a misfit.

             Regardless, I had little interest in riding the waves. My left knee was wrecked from a youthful and lopsided love affair with basketball, and the water in Southern California is cold and rough. No, the pull I felt in Ocean Beach owed not so much to the tide, but to the sort of people the place attracted, as if the West Coast were a drain siphoning off refugees from mainstream America. An enclave. A home for oddballs and outcasts and exiles.

             Even a self-proclaimed exile needs a job, though, and I couldn’t seem to land one in OB. A week or two later, however, I scored an interview in Hillcrest, another San Diego neighborhood that might also be described as populated with outsiders—although on the day of my interview, I didn’t know Hillcrest from any other place.

             I sat talking with Casa de Agave’s owners, Jim and Juan Antonio, at a tiled azul table on the recessed patio. Hanging plants and tasteful brass lanterns cordoned off a bustling University Avenue. A young waiter with a golden tan and a skin-tight polo served us iced tea with lemon. Jim thanked the waiter, who then batted his handsome lashes and drifted away.

             Jim and Juan Antonio were partners, they said—business partners—and La Cantina, the renovated bar, opened in a week. They needed a bartender who knew tequila and felt comfortable serving upscale clientele.

             “Your résumé stood out,” Jim said, “because we saw you have a Juris Doctorate.”

             “Past life,” I said.

             “I was in law enforcement before becoming a restaurateur,” Jim said. “I’ve always admired the work of prosecuting attorneys.”

             Then I happened to glance down the block, where a dozen rainbow flags fluttered proudly outside a bar called Urban Mo’s. This bar overflowed with men in colorful tank-tops. One of these men, I was fairly certain, wore a cheetah costume. Another was a pink elephant with a conspicuously placed trunk. All seemed to be having a really good time. Music thumped and drinks flowed.

             Ah, I thought, I see.

             “So, please tell me, Phillip,” Juan Antonio said, speaking with the overly precise diction of one who conducts business in a foreign language, “why is it that you do not practice law?”

             Although I really shouldn’t have been caught off-guard by the question, I was. So I faced my prospective employers and mumbled something vague about writing a novel.

             “How interesting,” Jim said. “A lawyer and a writer.”

             Then he made a point of explaining that at least half of Casa de Agave’s clientele were gay and lesbian . . . with the silence to follow meant to assess whether I was comfortable with that—whether, that is, I wasn’t some sort of peripatetic bigot who’d wandered his way to San Diego only to ignorantly apply for work in the heart of the gay district.

             I can’t recall exactly how I answered Jim’s question, but whatever I said must’ve assuaged his concerns, because the next day he called to offer me the job. And so there I found myself, doubly the hodad: a guy living in a surf community who did not surf, and a bartender working in a gay community who was not gay.

Originally, Wonderland was envisioned as family-friendly (the dance floor allowed neither “turkey-trotting” nor “bunny-hugging”), but the OB I discovered fell a tad short of such moral sanitation. The Haight-Ashbury of San Diego, it’d traded lions and rollercoasters for tattoo parlors and head shops. In fact, instead of Wonderland, modern OB often seemed more like Neverland—except the Lost Boys were all in their mid-thirties and Tinker Bell sprinkled not pixie, but angel dust.

             This is not to say I was anything less than enchanted.

             California is named after an imaginary island in a long-lost Spanish romance, and OB felt similarly make-believe. Street kids wandered through the farmer’s market amidst the aromas of kettle corn and frying food, peacock feathers poking from their matted hair and books about LSD and the American Dream quivering in their unwashed hands, while adventuresome foreigners dangled from the steps of the local youth hostel, their dreadlocks as frayed as the rope circling the pilings down along the pier. People not so unlike myself, really, in search of whatever vestige of Wonderland’s uniqueness had survived the commodification of drug culture and skyrocketing rents, like the last sweet drops from a steamed agave.

             Growing up in rural Illinois, amidst conservative Christians and familial expectations and that practical and soul-molding geometry of corn and bean fields, I’d not even realized a place like OB could exist.

             And then there was Casa de Agave.

             A pair of regulars, Arturo and Bentley, showed up my very first night working the renovated cantina. Arturo was a lawyer, which provided us a common ground for commiseration (“You dodged a bullet, dude,” he’d often say). Rumor had it he’d begun frequenting the restaurant while dating the coquettish waiter who’d served iced tea during my interview. Even though that relationship hadn’t lasted, Arturo loved Casa de Agave unreservedly, and always treated the staff with great respect and deference, as if secretly afraid of being rejected.

             As for Bentley, he held a PhD in physics and was vice-president of a local software firm. He only drank red wine (despite being in a tequila bar), and drove a Porsche in spite of the fact that he and his siblings (Mercedes and Aston) were all named after luxury cars by their hardworking Chinese immigrant father.

             These two men sat opposite each other, Arturo slurping a dirty martini as Bentley nursed a glass of cabernet that he’d swirled, nosed, and subsequently declared middling at best.

             “I detect notes of wet stone,” I said, recalling a wine training I’d once attended, “and ripe custard.”

             “Do you now?” Bentley said. “Because I detect Safeway.”

             Although our wine list was a work-in-progress, Casa de Agave was busy owing to Hillcrest’s reputation as a foodie neighborhood and a glowing write-up in the Union-Tribune. Thirsty people streamed in faster than the hostess could seat them and the bar was swamped in drink tickets: Coronas, Dos Equis, caipirinhas, mojitos, pomegranate margaritas, sangrias, and chilled shots of Don Julio Blanco. I mixed more drinks over a single weekend than in a month at the bar I’d been working back in Portland.

             “Why did you move to California?” Bentley asked.

             I glanced up, my hands mechanically dancing: glass, scoop, ice, liquor, mixer, garnish, ticket, glass, scoop, ice, liquor . . . “Got sick of the rain.”

             “You live here in the gayborhood?”

             When I told him I lived in Ocean Beach, he wrinkled his nose and explained how San Diego’s beach communities—Pacific Beach, Mission Beach, and Ocean Beach—were known by their initials: PB, MB, and OB. “Partly Bums,” he said, “Mostly Bums, and Only Bums.”

             “OB is growing on me,” I said.

             “Like a genital wart?”

             “Oh, come on. It’s not that bad.”

             “Fine, I suppose Hillcrest and OB can get along. So you must be a surfer?”

             I recalled that conversation from the Sunshine Company. “Nope, never even tried it.”

             Then Bentley asked if I lived alone. After rimming two glasses with lime and salt, I necked tequila and triple sec between the fingers of each hand and upturned all four bottles at once. A dash of homemade sour and a harried server stabbed the ticket and disappeared with the fresh drinks. Finally, I told Bentley I had a roommate.

             He sipped his wine. “Roommate, or partner?” ;

             When I confessed that my roommate was actually a potbellied little tomcat, Bentley sucked his purple teeth and leaned over the bar. “Tell me,” he said, “are you in the family?”

             “The family?”

             “Don’t play dumb. You know what I mean.”

             I confessed then that I was not actually in the family, but assured him I was still a pretty good bartender, to which he replied that he’d seen better but would tip anyway. In the meantime, Arturo’s cocktail was empty yet again. His eyes were glassy, tie loose, suit wrinkled. “Good cocktails,” he said, “are they only thing that make this godawful planet bearable.”

             I mixed him another (very dirty, very watery) and placed it on a fresh napkin.

             “How can you drink those?” Bentley asked from across the bar.

             Arturo swayed on his stool. “Are you speaking to me?”

             “Dirty martinis?” Bentley pursed his lips. “Do you actually enjoy the taste of seawater?”

             “Dude,” Arturo said to me, “Jim and Juan Antonio tell me you’re a writer.”

             Bentley huffed and said he wanted to read it, whatever it was.

             Arturo drained his glass in a two gulps. “I just finished Laughter in the Dark,” he said. “It’s so real, so true. Nabokov understands, dude. He knows that life is a slog, that love always goes unrequited, and that we’re all fucked. He knows the bombs are gonna fall—”

             “I’ve always enjoyed Neil Gaiman,” Bentley said, pronouncing the author’s name with salty lewdness. “He’s a fantasy author, you know. The type who imagines the wildest things . . .”

             I faced Arturo. “I haven’t read much Nabokov, but—”

             “And Truman Capote—” Bentley swirled his wine, widened his purple grin. “—I heard he wrote while naked on a hotel bed with his tush in the air.”

             “Dude!” Arturo said, halfway up from his stool. He seemed to expect me to bounce Bentley from La Cantina, but I was too busy to mediate. Hunkered over the well, my knee howling, I washed down a few Advil with a botched margarita. Hours later, bone-tired and feet numb as stones, I jammed a lime down the neck of an icy Pacifico and settled the night’s receipts only to see that Bentley had tipped $20 on his $16 tab, while Arturo tipped $40 on $30.

I met Shane and Kelly at a Newport Avenue dive called Pacific Shores—a bar wherein I once witnessed a vodka-soaked exotic dancer with an arm like Nolan Ryan chuck a rocks glass at the face of a bartender who’d cut her off.

             The three of us had gotten to talking about whatever twentysomething strangers talk about at one A.M. in such places, and it was eventually determined a nightcap was in order. I suspect now this was more Kelly’s idea than Shane’s, but he was the type who just went with the flow. Sprawled on my ratty couches with a bottle of Hornitos on the coffee table, they told me how they’d come to live in OB.

             Shane had grown up in the Oklahoma Bible Belt where his father made a lot of money in natural gas. Then his father had a heart attack. His mother remarried a week or two after Shane graduated from high school. And so Shane found himself with a healthy trust fund, but with no real family and nowhere to go.

             “I wasted a decade drunk in Houston,” he said. He explained that college hadn’t worked out, neither had his various jobs, and his mother seemingly forgot all about him. With nothing much left to lose, he hit the road. After stops in New Orleans and Atlanta, Shane met a girl.

             “We got tats together,” he said, and then rolled up his pant leg to reveal Puff the Magic Dragon on his plump calf.

             Shane’s girlfriend was into the music scene, though, and so they’d eventually moved out to L.A., where Shane had quickly fallen into a depression and his girlfriend just as quickly fell for a fellow musician.

             “What a bitch,” Kelly said.

             I liked her curly brown hair, the mischievous way it bounced in her eyes.

             “Don’t say that, Kel,” Shane said. “She just got lonesome, you know? And if she hadn’t dumped my ass I never would’ve found OB.”

             Then Kelly told her story. Like me, she’d grown up in the Midwest, having graduated from the University of Wisconsin as a literature major. “At some point I realized I’d spent four years and thirty grand getting a degree in reading books,” she said. “I couldn’t see myself as a teacher, and no other job paid half as much as I made waiting tables in the same shitty bars where I’d hung out back in college.”

             From the corner of my eye, I noticed Shane inspecting the shadowy crevice between my Craigslist couches.

             “Eventually I got sick of my parents ragging on me for not using my degree. And of seeing that look on my friends’ faces—like they were embarrassed for me because I couldn’t hack a nine-to-five, like I was some sort of pariah.”

             Pariah? It was the exact right word. I was just about to fess up to my own deleterious love of books, when Shane pulled out the water bong I kept hidden between the couches. Without a word, he loaded it from his own sack. After offering it around (Kelly and I both declined), he charred the bowl and let the curling white smoke fill the green glass.

             Then he exhaled a tremendous plume, coughed, and said, “I’ll never leave OB, man. There’s nothing else out there. You ask me, the rest of country may as well not even exist.”

             While I couldn’t say I’d never leave Ocean Beach, I admitted that I’d found an unexpected peace, that all my life I’d felt like there was a part of me that was shameful and had to remain hidden. Somehow, OB took the edge off that feeling. Or maybe the community was just strange enough to distract me from myself?

             “I wanted to be a writer,” I said, and consciously avoided Kelly’s eyes, “but that hadn’t seemed possible in the small-town where I grew up. Let alone in the law school I drank my way through.”

             “Wait, you went to freaking law school?” Kelly said, and I remembered my interview with Jim and Juan Antonio, how they’d had more or less the same reaction.

             While I probably couldn’t ever fully escape the guy I’d tried to be—or pretended to be, or assumed I had to be, or was afraid of not being—maybe I could at least live in such a way that my past forays into conventionality would surprise the people I met. I explained how I’d felt like an imposter in my own skin, like I was living somebody else’s life, and how in the end it all got so disheartening and stressful that I just sort of went crazy and took off.

             Kelly touched my knee. “I know exactly what you mean—”

             “Man,” Shane said, still holding the leaking bong, “you got lucky by landing here. OB is a whole other country. A sovereign fuckin’ nation of beautiful weirdos way out here on the sunburned bottom lip of America.”

             With that, I poured us all another round of Hornitos.

             Later that night, Kelly snug in my bed with her warm thigh draped over my own and those lovely curls resting on our shared pillow, I heard the TV click on out in the living room. Then the rumble of Shane’s mellow laughter.

One slow night at Casa de Agave, Bentley took it upon himself to help me pass the time by explaining the tenets of Taoism and Confucianism in extraordinary detail. He must’ve spoken for two solid hours, highlighting philosophical and theological distinctions as I quartered limes, providing historical context while I mixed martinis, and explaining how these belief systems have influenced Eastern and Western thought as I rang in taco platters and restocked beer. Even now, after a decade of higher education, it remains the single most impressive monologue I’ve ever heard. After paying for his wine, Bentley rose from his stool, took a bow, and said, “Thanks for listening, friend.”

             Not to be outdone, Arturo began to bring me a succession of his favorite books to read, so that we might better wax philosophical about the meaninglessness of life. Nabokov and T. S. Eliot. Dostoevsky and García Márquez. Poppy Z. Brite and Cormac McCarthy. If it was dark or melancholy, Arturo adored it. As these book discussion unfolded, I came to understand that his disgust with the ignobility of human nature found relief in literature, although he continued to assure me the bombs really were about to fall at any moment.

             On busy nights, these men sat across the small horseshoe bar from each other and I’d feel their eyes on me, watching me pour, watching me sweat, but more so I felt the weight of our ongoing conversations. As the months passed, they told me about their lives, the details slipping out bit by bit, hour by hour, drink by drink.

             As a penniless student, Bentley had lived in a camper trailer up the coast in La Jolla, eating rice and beans and studying molecular physics by flashlight. “It was the happiest period of my life, before or since,” he said. “I learned everything I’ll ever need to know about myself in that little camper.”

             Around the same age, Arturo’s best friend stabbed him. They were at a beer party, cars parked in an arroyo, country music wailing in the sultry Texas night. No matter how intoxicated he became, no matter how morose, Arturo never would say exactly what led to the violence. One evening, brooding over his fifth or sixth cocktail, he said out of nowhere, “He stabbed me, dude. But he was my friend. He really was.” Then he pulled out a baggie of painkillers and washed down a handful. When he went to the restroom, I hid the baggie behind the cash register, a gesture for which he thanked me the following night.

             Bentley once shot a stellar round at Torrey Pines. He strutted in afterward and I bought him a congratulatory glass of merlot. Beaming, he said that even when free our wine still tasted like piss—but that he’d tip anyway, considering I was now an honorary member of the family.

             Arturo eventually convinced me to let him read my novel, a four-hundred page mess I’d written back in law school. He finished it in two days and had the heart to lie.

             Bentley bought a copy of Gaiman’s American Gods and slid it across the bar, like a tip.

             Arturo’s father chose not to visit him during the days and nights he lay in that Texas hospital with a near-fatal knife-wound in his back. He related this to me factually, dryly, maybe six months after we’d met, and with far less emotion in his voice than when he spoke of fiction.

Wonderland thrived for just two years, largely due to an unforeseen competitor—the California-Panama Exposition, which was located nearer the growing downtown—and the park soon fell into disuse and disrepair. The Tungsten lights darkened and the dancing pavilion went silent and still. The Blue Streak Racer was disassembled and shipped up to Santa Monica, and the girders eventually crumbled into the Pacific. Finally, the exotic animals were leased to the Exposition, with the entire menagerie being later sold to the newly-opened San Diego Zoo.

             As it turned out, I lived in Wonderland and worked at Casa de Agave for just two years as well. I ended up rekindling a romance with an ex-girlfriend—an ex from law school, no less—and we found ourselves with an opportunity to live and work in the Teton Range of Wyoming. But the effect of place, particularly on our younger selves, is inestimable, and I’ll never forget those years in Ocean Beach. Perhaps I’d understood this intuitively back when I lit out for the West Coast, sensing in that sunset landscape a chance to discover, or maybe just accept, the person I apparently was.

             Identity and geography are strange bedfellows, though. I’d felt like a hodad everywhere I’d ever been: as a boy, I lived in farming community but did not farm; in college, I lived in a fraternity house full of business majors but I felt no real fraternity and refused to study business, while in law school I was the distracted and melancholy student who spent his nights and weekends clandestinely writing fiction. In the end, however, I rallied my courage and said to hell with all of that, only to wash up in OB. While I never did learn to surf, I nonetheless felt at home with the other misfits out there on the continent’s lonely rim, at that place where there’s nowhere left to run and the exiles and castaways can just be.

             Of course, there’s a certain vanity in claiming outsider status. As if you were too pure or too sensitive for the social reality everyone else has to put up with. I won’t write off my feelings quite so glibly, though. Because naïve as they were, those feelings drove me away from home and across a continent, for better or worse. While I understand now that one doesn’t have to live in any certain place to be a writer, it seemed to my younger self that what our culture had to offer was lacking in some crucial way. I couldn’t have said how exactly—maybe I still can’t, not ultimately—but having spent that time in Wonderland, I know I’m not alone.

             So here’s to all the hodads out there. The outcasts and pariahs, the homeless who pick flowers and the dreamers and stoners and tenderhearted attorneys. The bibliophilic waitresses paying off student loans and the philosophy-loving, wine-quaffing physicists. Whenever I think of such people, I’m reminded of the day I moved into that ramshackle beach apartment. Before I’d even unpacked my laptop and books, I walked across the street and had an inaugural pint at The Tilted Stick.

             “OB,” read the sign, “WHERE THE DEBRIS MEETS THE SEA.”

             But such people are not debris. Not at all. And if they should flee certain places and gather in others, know that they’re really just trying to survive—to put the necessary distance, both earthly and psychic, between themselves and whomever else this life demands they be.

---

Phillip Hurst’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, Reed Magazine, Cimarron Review, and The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, among other publications. His book of nonfiction, The Land of Ale and Gloom: Discovering the Pacific Northwest, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press, and a novel, Regent’s of Paris, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing. “Hodads in Wonderland” is excerpted from his forthcoming essay collection, Whiskey Boys: And Other Meditations from the Abyss at the End of Youth, winner of the 2021 Monadnock Essay Collection Prize through Bauhan Publishing.

CHEAP NIGHT

by Garielle Lutz

I was eventually sent off to a number of different people, a second round of specialists, about everything else that was said to have still not been set right. One was a man with an office on a sliver of a street in what was left of the business district. He had me sit in an anteroom with him while he filled out the first of the forms without ever looking over at me. Then I followed him into the better room, where there was a desk. On a sheet of a tablet that had been printed to look like a prescription pad, he wrote down the name of a woman who he said cut hair in ways that helped people along.

            The appointment was for seven that evening.

            This was a tall, damp-looking woman in a smock. She asked no questions. She set my head backward into a narrow sink for a hurried, turbulent shampoo. Once her fingers got moving across my scalp, she barged a portion of her limited side-flesh informally against my shoulder bone. The result was maybe some useless, cradlesong warmth—nothing more, I am sorry to report. The next thing she did was seesaw a towel back and forth across my skull, then tug me toward the barber chair and wrap me in a sheet. It was a routine haircut after that, I guess, until she pressed her palm against my cheek. She kept the hand there, detained it professionally, as it were, until the skin heated up. Whether it was departing heat of mine or a transfer of hers I could not at the time decide, but here I had the handicap of a wall before me that was solid mirror, and in going wide of my own reflection, I could not help unpiecing the woman’s face into, first, a powdered-over replica of the large-pored, forthcoming nose of the specialist who had referred me there, and a chin of his own depthlessness (though here again given cosmeticized redefinition), and his wide-set, shittily brown eyes.

            I muttered something about nepotism, kickbacks, etc., tore myself free of the sheet, stormed out.

            At a pay phone, I called my only friend, a very good acquaintance of mine, someone I hardly knew enough to think of except at times like this. He said he had right that very instant finished ruining an hour in an adult-book store with an invalid video machine and a man suffering love-cramps of his own.

            This friend said he wasn’t up for getting together.

            On my way home, what the hell, I stopped off at my stepsister’s. I found her in the living room, her arms spired above her head in a shortcut rendition of an exercise some woman was enacting on the silenced TV.

            My stepsister was in trunks, baggy socks, an undershirt. She struck me as no more than an enlargement of her scowly daughter on the sofa. I compiled myself onto one of the baggier side chairs. From this privileged elevation I watched my stepsister, now down on the hardwood floor, bucking around on her stomach, raising her rear to a resultful summit—not a push-up exactly.

            It was the daughter’s idea that the three of us should go out for a bite to eat. “Unless you’d not rather,” she said to her mother. Her mother said she’d tag along. We drove in the daughter’s car to a below-stairs eating place she knew. Running the length of the wall facing the street was a band of windows that took detailed notice of the lower legs of passersby—skirts of coats, slow-going feet of people coping.

            The daughter called our attention to a blemish on her left cheek, a little pink difference. She kept her fingers on it, twiddling at it, kneading away at her cheek, until the disturbance itself seemed to vanish into the environing complexion. Then she took her hand away, and the blemish reappeared with a renewed sickliness.

            “But catch me up about you,” she said.

            I guess I was a kind of handy, convenient mystery to her, and every fact I gave her had an efficient way of instantly separating itself from any larger certitude. I have never liked feeling a point of view being trained on me too sharply.

            My stepsister motioned toward the arrowy sign that pointed to the restrooms, then got up, taking her handbag and jacket. The daughter mentioned having seen an old teacher of hers faking a vacation in a chaise longue one neighborhood over. She spoke of little shares of chocolate she had once arranged and rearranged until they were practically mush and had to be licked off her fingers by more than just one lonesome mouth but her boyfriend was nowhere to be found. She’d had to recruit a girl she knew from the public pool who kept perfecting more and more ways of looking marooned. And this daughter said she could no longer feel any connection to lengthier and lengthier spans of her life. They no longer seemed hers to have lived through. She claimed she did not so much crawl out of her bed in the morning as originate anew from it.

            I felt threats already piling up behind everything she said.

            “Blow into my life,” she said.

            My stepsister returned to our table, settled in.

            I was looking out of my face at the two of them. I could feel the holes I was looking out at them through. Everything looked rimmed and rounded around. My body must have been sitting behind me or just to the side. The two of me did not quite coincide.

            “You have this responsibility,” she said.

---

Garielle Lutz’s new short-story collection, Worsted, is forthcoming from Short Flight/Long Drive Books.

Continue to Live

by Oliver Zarandi

My entire family died over one weekend. Perished. There was mom, dad, my sisters, my brothers, my aunt, my uncle, my grandma on dad’s side, a great uncle who wasn’t so great and was, in fact, a parasite, and two dogs, both called “Barney” — the quote marks being a part of their names. 

So Tobias and I had plenty to be stressed about. The flesh-eating virus that had ravaged half the country was finally in our state.

He was loading the car up with the essentials.  His head looked like a lasagne. It always looks like some sort of pasta dish when he’s stressed. He was basically layers of egg, cheese and beef. 

I watched Tobias load blankets and clothes into the back of the car. Tobias loved me. His love was big and fat and always hard. His love made a mess and you’d have to clean it up with a rag. Jesus, I’m so sorry, he’d say, all sheepish. I gone got my love everywhere again! 

He loved me so much that he bought me flowers every day for the past five years. Sometimes before bed, he’d get down on his knees and serenade me to sleep. Other times he’d leave small love poems in my pockets that I’d unearth at work — Shelley, Byron, the Romantics — then follow up with a text: Did you get my note? 🙂 

He loved me with all his heart. 

But before we move on, I’d like to say this: There’s something wrong with me. 

I like to trace my wrongness in this little timeline of events, like the ones you get in history books. 1993, just says eating disorder. 1994, The Year Of Hiding Food Down The Back Of Radiators. 1995 — the year I fell in love with Val Kilmer’s lips. I’d dream of his lips in Tombstone and Batman Forever, floating around my room, smooching at the air. And then there was 2006, the year I had surgery. My mom, dead now, said my surgery was a gory one, reminiscent of something in a butcher’s shop. 

You were like a prized beef, Gilda, she said stroking my limp hair. Apparently they’d sliced and diced me, taken something out of me, put me back together again. 

Limp-haired Gilda, said my mom, like she was soothing her beloved basset hound. 

She visited me every day, and it wasn’t unpleasant, let’s put it that way. But just next to us was this porridge-skinned elderly man, arms like two limp dicks, hanging down the side of his bed. 

Mom, I said, is that man okay?

Who? This one? He’s fine. He’s had his heart replaced.

The wonders of modern medicine. I wondered whose heart it was. I wanted to grab the doctors by the lapels and in my finest Jack Nicholson impression ask them: Doc, who’d ya put inside the old man? Djoo plop a cow heart in him, sew him back up? Tell me!

For days, I watched the old man continue to live, all thanks to this alien heart. Maybe it was the heart of a dead kid. Maybe the kid was murdered and the old man would get a new lease of life, from the life that’d been ripped from this kid. Wow, I thought. Humanity!

But it didn’t last. One night the old man woke me up, coughing his guts out. His body was rejecting the heart. After around 15 minutes, he had completely jettisoned all life from his vessel. 

I thought about the old man for a while, about who he was, about his own heart, where that went, and the new heart, where that was from, and how unique he was. Not many of us get to have two hearts in one lifetime. But his body didn’t want that new heart. 

And this is the problem I have with Tobias—I don’t love him. 

In fact, I hate him.  

I find that my body rejects all good things in life. When Tobias touches me, I want to vomit. Or at least, I want to scour myself thoroughly with a metal pad.

I am incapable of enjoying beautiful places, too. I’m a hog for squalor and a shit time. 

Tobias loaded the last box into the crapped out station wagon and whistled for me to get in. I did. 

Apparently I was making a face because when Tobias got in and put his seatbelt on, he stared over at me, sighed, slapped both hands on the steering wheel, bracing himself for what he was about to say and turned to me. 

Look, it’s for a few weeks. Just until this blows over. 

It won’t blow over. It’s eaten half my family.

And I’m grieving. I really am. But we need to look out for number one.

Right.

Okay?

Yeah. Okay. But…

But?

But we should be with our fellow human beings during this. Why leave the inferno, Tobias?

It was true: a part of me wanted to stay, to fight it out. But then I thought of how the virus had got my Uncle Joseph, had infected his leg and started rotting his flesh down. We saw the pictures. His leg looked like wet bread. The skin came straight off like a condom. 

Tobias laughed at my comment. He shook his head, started the car, reversed out the driveway and drove into town. As we passed through, we could see people inside their homes. 

I rolled down the window and shouted, GOOD LUCK, GOOD LUCK! 

Hey, Tobias said, what the fuck?

I’m wishing the soon-to-be-dead good luck. 

Well, don’t. 

I folded my arms and slumped down into my seat. I didn’t want to reach our destination. I wanted to get to a gas station and ask somebody to kidnap me. Maybe they could take me to Las Vegas? Somewhere off Fremont Street with free HBO, free porn, drink tequila shots and shit myself, make friends with bums and junkies?

Rain started to hammer the car. Tobias leaned forward and tried to squint through the window.  

I might have to pull over, you know, he said.

Don’t. We’re nearly there. 

No we’re not. We’ve got another 15 hours. 

I turned on the radio and watched the spermy raindrops wriggle down the window. One of the slower raindrops reminded me of Tobias and how he didn’t come to the funeral, how he painted a huge family portrait for me instead. Funerals make me so damn sad, he said. But I’ll be there for you. In spirit. And hopefully this painting will remind you of all their beautiful faces.

In spirit. 

My eyes changed focus and just ahead there was a figure in the distance, standing in the rain, his thumb sticking out. 

Tobias, a hitchhiker. Can we? 

What? No. Who does that? 

We do. He’s out in the middle of nowhere. Come on.

I don’t know. 

Please. Please! 

Fine, fine. But you can keep them company. 

We pulled up to the side of the road. I rolled down the window and the man walked over to us. He was young and soggy. 

Where you headed, amigo? said Tobias. 

Why’d he say it this way? Like he was in a Western. I was humiliated. 

Anywhere north of here. I just need to get down the road some. As far as you can.

Tobias looked at me. I looked at Tobias. Tobias looked at the man and nodded his fat lasagne head. 

Take them clothes off first, pardner, he said.

What’s that? said the hitchhiker. 

Your clothes. We need to see if you got the markings. 

The hitchhiker stared at us both for a second. Then he took a breath and started peeling his clothes off. When he was completely naked, he covered his penis with his hands. His skin reminded me of a white plastic bag. Tobias told him to turn around so we could look for sores. That was one of the ways you knew early on—paisley-patterned sores that opened up all over your body.

You can put them clothes back on now, pardner! said Tobias. 

The young man got in the back, his wet clothes squelching on the leather seats. 

What’s your name? 

I’m Oates. 

Well, I’m Gilda. And this is Tobias. 

Thank you for, uh, stopping. 

It’s no bother, pardner, said Tobias. 

You’d be surprised how many people don’t stop. 

Not really, I said. There’s a virus. It’s natural people aren’t stopping. 

I turned around to try and engage. It’d be rude not to.

Oates nodded. He had red cheeks and yellow teeth and looked like somebody who was raised on Jesus and sex abuse. If I had to guess his occupation, it’d be fisherman. He wore a  too-big striped shirt, and kept his small and pale hands folded in his lap. He caught me looking and put his hands in his pockets.

You folks running from the virus? 

We’re just out getting some alone time, I said. Wait until everything blows over. 

It won’t blow over. 

Optimistic boy, ain’t you, Tobias said in his weird John Wayne accent. He was like this with people he thought were poor. A yokel accent or Western drawl, as if this would put them on a level playing field. 

Oates just smiled, didn’t blink. He brought his small, pale hands back out, put them out on his knees and gave me a quick, yellow smile. In my mind, I hoped that Oates would murder Tobias, or at least severely injure him, and kidnap me. I hoped, I wished! 

It was dark and the rain wouldn’t stop, so when Tobias saw the white cross, he pulled in. It was a “safe” motel and as we drove up, two men came out with their masks on and asked us to get out of the car. They waved guns at us and said it was all procedure, nothing to worry about. I loved it. I was about ready to come when they asked us to take our clothes off and show our bodies. Tobias looked like a sack of oranges. 

We got the okay and drove on up.

The motel was cheap and simple. Oates couldn’t afford his own room, so Tobias paid for one. Oates didn’t have much on him except for a backpack, which he put on his front. 

Why on your front? I asked him. 

He stared at me again without blinking. It was like my words didn’t register, that I was some distant star and Oates was earth, my light reaching him years later.

Uh, it’s very important to me, he said finally. Then he walked off towards his door, and we walked towards ours. I turned around and Oates was waiting for us to enter our room first. 

Tobias felt bad and called out to Oates: Say, pardner—would you like to have dinner with us? 

Oates looked down at his hands, like they were cue cards or something. He only focused on his hands, caressing them. Had I angered him? Was his insecurity about his hands so acute that even by me looking at them, I’d set something off in him? 

Sure, he said. Yeah, I could eat. 

Great, said Tobias. We’re just going to wash. See you here in a few minutes? 

Oates nodded. We came back out after thirty minutes or so and Oates looked like he hadn’t moved. The good nature of Tobias had frozen him into a statue.  

We walked over in silence to a small “family owned” restaurant. There weren’t that many people in there, just a few elderly people, slowly chewing their food, staring through time. We were ushered by a lardy waitress to a small booth where we scanned the menus without talking. For some reason all language had been sucked out of the cock of us and was just swilling around in the atmosphere’s mouth. 

It was only when the waitress returned that we blurted out some words. She nodded, repeated the order back to us and we nodded—yes, yes, yes, and that was that. 

We ate in silence too. Oates stared at his food and started organising it into different areas on the plate. He pushed the potatoes into the top left and created a sort of moat with the sauce around it. Clearly he didn’t want the potatoes escaping or the undercooked vegetables invading their space. He put a forkful of food into his mouth and chewed in a way that wasn’t like his jaw was chewing it at all, but his entire head—temples, scalp, and ears. Like he was chewing and swallowing his own cheeks. I couldn’t stop staring. 

We returned to the motel. Oates thanked us for the food and put his hand out. Were we meant to shake it? We didn’t know, and besides—he withdrew his hand within seconds. 

Thanks again, he said. Thank you very much. For everything. Then he tilted his head and stared at us for a second longer without blinking. 

You’re good, pardner, said Tobias, and tipped an invisible cowboy hat to him. 

Tobias and I went back to our room and got into bed. We were, as he would constantly say to friends, “bushed”. I lay on top of the covers like a slab of granite as Tobias tucked himself in beside me. I turned over and thought that if my life were a novel, it’d be by As I Lay Sighing by William Faulkner. Come back from the dead, William! Write my life the way it needs to be written. 

Tobias turned over and kissed my right cheek. 

God, I love your cheeks, he said. Do you know I thank god for your cheeks? 

That’s sweet. 

He pinched my cheek and chuckled ‘Tee hee!’

And I love your jugs. I thank god for your jugs. 

I know. 

They’re so big and motherly. He nestled his head up to my right breast and kissed it. Then his head retreated back and he turned his face upwards to the oily ceiling and went pale. He always looked like he was dying when he fell asleep.

I kept my eyes closed too. I tried focusing on my heart, its rhythm, its beating. All that blood going around my body. Doesn’t it get bored? I guess not. Blood doesn’t get bored, but it does get agitated. Like the old man with the murdered child’s heart, or the cow heart, whatever they put in him. I had the strangest image of the old man’s arteries filling with Lemmings, those little green mop-haired fucks from that computer game, and they were all wandering around going in different directions, bumping into piles of plaque. Imagine having that inside of you! I wondered if somebody would have to give me a new heart one day. What kind of heart would it be? 

My thoughts were interrupted by a small chiseling sound. Somebody is trying to break into the room, I thought. Yet I kept my eyes closed. I waited. Don’t open your eyes, I whispered. Why fight it? Why bother? 

Then the door creaked open and I opened my eyes enough to see that Oates had entered the room. 

He stood there in the darkness of our room, breathing in and out. It was like his lungs were horny for the air in the room. Then he took his shoes off and placed them delicately by the door. He walked around a little on the carpet to test if he was loud or not. I was ready to run, to get in the car and drive off from both of them. But I didn’t. I didn’t move. I wanted to see what Oates wanted. 

He shuffled over and sat on the end of our bed. I could hear him breathing harder now. And I felt his tiny child hand on my thigh. It was clammy. Then he moved it over to Tobias. I moved my head to see what was going on, taking care to make sure Oates didn’t know I was awake. Now his hand palmed Tobias’s face. He was stroking it. Tobias didn’t wake. Of course not. Oates could’ve fired off a gun into the ceiling if he wanted. I watched his pale, milky fingers stroking Tobias’s pale waxen face—back and forth, back and forth. 

Then Oates pulled his own trousers down. I couldn’t see his penis, but I could tell what he was holding. I could smell it. He was moved both hands in time, getting faster and faster.  It was a feat of coordination, like those people who can pat their heads and rub their belly in a circular motion. 

Oates shuddered. I shuddered too. That was his love leaving his body onto our carpet. And then he fell silent again, like he wasn’t alive at all, but just some ghoul hovering in our room. 

My eyes opened and Oates was staring directly into them. He pulled out a knife from his bag on the floor, held it to Tobias’s throat and raised his creamed-on finger to his lips so I wouldn’t say a word. 

I winked back at him. I felt like a new heart had been placed inside of me. It was filled with love and I wished him all the best. 

---

Durée

by Christopher Kang

Written distantly on a Wednesday while waiting for my bed sheets to dry, this poem intends alongside failure, confluent with a version of this world that’s all categories and comfort. I once told a friend, “I never feel like I’m done with a poem. Usually, it’s done with me.”  That having been said, a poem begins when my clarity about something abruptly splits, diverges, then gives itself beyond what I want. I scratch obsessively in my sleep, and wake up ashamed. Camouflaged in the loud morning light by my bed, I count how much of my own blood I have to remove.

When I was a child, I would stare stiffly at something long enough to send it to my future self. I was always more preoccupied by how well I could grasp a thing than by the thing I was grasping. I remember only one of these images. Lying in the back of my mother’s van at dusk, looking up at power lines organizing the sky into sharp shapes. A punch from an enormous fist leaving behind ominous fractures. It means nothing, and I worry that is why I remember it.

There are some things that look like they can be lit on fire but just melt. A photograph, for instance.

A friend asked if I would like to contribute text to an art exhibit. Sentences would be projected from a gallery window up into the night sky. I asked him how anyone would read any of it, and he said that was the point. A blinding light filled with a message that wouldn’t find a surface where it could say. I wrote, “Find it, love it, lose it, learn it, hide it, repeat.” I didn’t send it to him, and in fact haven’t called him back in months. I have a hard time distinguishing between giving something and giving it away. One time, at a party, while having a conversation with friends, he unknowingly pinned my wayward shoelace with his enormous leather boot. I couldn’t move until he finished talking about the death of god and how it changes the way we understand films.

An ex-girlfriend once told me a long story I barely listened to, then asked me what I thought she should do. Across the room, a pillow on the bed still dimpled by my sleeping head. Her parakeet perched on top of its own cage, chirping like a malfunctioning fire alarm as it stared right at us. Too embarrassed to ask her to repeat the story, I said she should sleep on it, all the while fearing that what she said was about something terrible someone did to me. She had a twin sister and often, when the three of us went out to dinner, the two of them would synchronize their exasperated sighs. Years later, I finally decipher the good reasons why she left me, embrace the blame that I could only hear myself in her voice and hear myself in my own. She said one time I turned abruptly to her in my sleep and said, “You’re getting in the way of my project.”

For years I was convinced someone was following me. The fear overruled the simple fact that I did not consider why they would do that. For some reason, it was paramount to never lose a store receipt. I burned them in a fireplace, along with any papers that I had written a single word on. Even grocery lists and doodles of endless spirals. I always started each spiral moving from the center and expanding further, endlessly out. Yesterday, I watched a movie about two men who go back into the past with a time machine only to find that it is, with each return, slowly killing them.

The first missile was created by using parts of a standard door knob, no, that’s not true.

A friend admitted to me one day that I was his best friend and I, not knowing what to say, replied, “Thank you.” Years later, I still linger on that reply, irked by the excessive accuracy of it. The last time I saw him, we both knew we would never see each other again. He took his eyes off the road and waved goodbye with an exaggerated frown as he drove his van away, a broken window patched with a flattened cardboard box, and I, terrified he would crash his car, realized how I missed him all along. Missed him, the way one misses a train.

Up until the age of thirteen, I woke up in the middle of the night, immobilized, staring at a spotlight on the wall that was spread out like fast growing moss. When it reached my feet, the bright, cold sensation was accompanied by a high pitched squeal. One night, I had a dream I was sleeping in my bed, just as I was sleeping in my bed in my waking life, except this time a man was staring blankly in my second floor window. He closed his eyes and, at the same time, opened his mouth from which big band jazz music came blaring out. Then he opened his eyes and, at the same time, closed his mouth from which muffled big band jazz music could be heard. The entire time my bedroom door was slowly, almost imperceptibly closing.

When someone holds open the door for me, I rush through and say, “Sorry.” My apologies emerge from somewhere uneven, desperate to vaccinate myself from any conflict I fear could erupt irrationally at any moment. Discomfort is more a gesture than a position, I think.

My favorite movies have almost no dialogue in them. “You would like that,” a friend said to me.

Certain oak trees weigh less in the morning than in the evening, again, this also is not true, but it could be. I could easily excavate the answer, but I have a hard time distinguishing between what is true and what is worth knowing. I remember climbing a desiccated tree by the public library and am bothered by the fact that I don’t remember ever climbing down. As if I’m still up there.

I wrote a long paper in high school about the feasibility of time machines, and concluded they are feasible but we wouldn’t ever be able to do it. One would have to move incredibly fast to revisit the past, but the faster one moves the heavier one gets. That I know is true.

---

Christopher Kang earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English from the University of California-Irvine. His first book of stories, When He Sprang From His Bed, Staggered Backward, And Fell Dead, We Clung Together With Faint Hearts, And Mutely Questioned Each Other, was selected by Sarah Manguso for the 2016 GMR Book Prize. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in LitHub, Epiphany, Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast, Verse Daily, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Open City, and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Wooster. www.christopherkang.com

The House

Guillermo Stitch

Raindrops spattered here and there as Will crossed the street on a diagonal, eyes on the house numbers but unable to read any till he’d reached the other side and found one within range of his short sight. A few leaves blew about in flurries as the street lamps came on. It had been a long tube ride and the carriage had been packed with Christmas shoppers, taking up more room than usual with their heavy coats, umbrellas and bags full of seasonal tat. The black windows had glittered with condensation from their bad-tempered breath.

            Forty-three. The rain more insistent now. Will needed number ninety-seven. He raised the hood of his duffle coat and walked on, keeping his head down against the wind—it was bitter, especially since his skin still felt clammy from the crammed train. Forty-three happened to be his age. He probably should have been somewhere else—anywhere else—doing something he got paid for. Severance pay had helped him scrape through the last couple of years, but it wasn’t going to last much longer.

            “Meet?” his agent had asked. “I suppose we could. I might have deduced from your treatment of falling action that you’d be unorthodox. My office?”

            He had to hand it to her—she’d gotten him the book deal after just a couple of months representing him. It hadn’t seemed possible, and yet here he was. A book deal. He couldn’t wait to wave it in Tony Miller’s face, the condescending little shit. The horrible, horrible tiny man. Tony had kept in touch since Will had walked out of the brokerage two years ago, and since Milly had walked out on Will a week later, he’d made a point of coming round to the flat once a week to check that his former employee was “doing OK”, pronouncing the words with a discernible Mid-Atlantic drawl despite being from Portsmouth. The flat was on the first floor of an old Georgian townhouse and Will supposed that Milly had given his ex-boss the front door key. The nasty goblin would bring a food parcel each time and when Will didn’t answer—which was often—he’d leave it on the stairs.

            Food parcels. The condescending little shit.

            Ninety-seven turned out to be commercial premises in a little row of them along the main street. The front window was enormous—much larger than would be required to meet the needs of a literary agent, he imagined—and dirty, and through the dirt revealed a charmless office, almost completely stripped except for two desks and a grubby looking, royal blue carpet. The bare walls bore marks where pictures and posters had hung.

            He would have liked a moment to steel himself before pressing the bell. To gird himself for this potentially life-changing encounter. These people could push you around if you let them. That’s what he’d read, anyway. He wasn’t having any of it. There was nowhere to hide though, on either side of that window, and he’d been spotted—she pulled the door open before he’d reached the button.

            “There you are. Almost late. Melanie Phillips.”

            He followed her inside to where the smells of damp and his agent’s perfume were fighting it out. She was wearing a business suit the same color as the carpet, if a little cleaner, heels that left divots with every step, and gestured now toward the desk nearest the window.

            “You could have this, I suppose, and we might look at getting you a phone line. You’d have to use your own laptop, obviously.”

            “Oh,” said Will, looking from the desk to Melanie Phillips and back again. “I didn’t imagine actually working here. Physically, I mean.”

            “Really? I just thought, since you were so keen to come along…” She sat down at the other desk, also bare apart from a laptop and a router.

            “Never mind. Although I’ll admit I was warming to the idea. So much more convenient for appraisals and so on. We do have to keep an eye on you people.”

            She flashed him a smile.

            “We’ve only just moved in. Very excited about having a high street presence now—should do oodles for our footfall.”

            Will was looking for a chair.

            “There isn’t one, I’m afraid,” said Melanie from hers, “but don’t be shy—why don’t you pop yourself on the edge of the desk there while I get this going?”

            She was at the laptop. Will tried to effect an acceptable stance on a corner of the desk but found his back was to her any way he tried it. He got up again and began to pace, fingernails digging into his palms. He felt alarmingly close to distraught just a minute or so into this meeting. He’d imagined dust and leather and perhaps a hard drink in a nearby hotel bar—a posh hotel, not perched on the corner of a desk in a derelict office. He sat on the other one in the end, concentrating hard to stop himself swinging his feet like a schoolboy.

            Melanie peered at him over the top of her machine while it emitted a ring tone.

            “We’re very excited about your book, Will.”

            “Oh, thank you very mu–”

            “No. Thank you so much for responding to the open call. I dread doing them—God, the guff I have to wade through—but once in a while I have the great thrill of uncovering a real gem.” Her long fingernails made an unnerving, chitinous noise as she tapped the desk and flashed him another smile. All her smiles were to be that way—deliberate, and very brief.

            “This time it’s you, Will.”

            “Oh, thank yo–”

            “Where is he? Wait, he’s come online. I’ll call again.”

            She’d kicked her shoes off under the desk.

            “I know that Rupert’s just as excited as I am, Will. He’s in New York this week but he’s made time for the call especially.”

            “Hello? Mel–”

            “Hello Rupert, can you see me?”

            “I can’t see you.”

            “Oh. Can you see me now?”

            “No.”

            “But you can hear me?”

            “I can hear you but I can’t see you. Can you hear me?”

            “I can hear you very well. Can you see me now?

            “No, there’s no…wait a minute…yes, I can see you now. Hello, Melanie.”

            “Hello, Rupert. How’s New York?”

            “You’re very quiet though.”

            “Am I? Just a minute. How about now?”

            “No, you’re still too quiet.”

            “Maybe you need to change something at your end, Rupert.”

            “What?”

            “I said maybe there’s a volume control at your end.”

            “Maybe I need to… wait a minute…OK, say something.”

            “How’s that?”

            “That’s better.”

            “And you’ll want to switch your video on, Rupert.”

            “It isn’t on? You can’t see me?”

            “No, I can’t see you, but I can hear you very well.”

            “Can you see me now?”

            “No.”

            “And now?”

            “No, I still can’t see you, Rupert. There should be a video button.”

            “Button? I don’t know…hang on, Julia’s arrived. Julia, can you get this bloody thing to work? They can hear me perfectly, apparently, but they can’t see a thing.”

            The sound of tapping on a keyboard.

            “That’s it, Rupert—it’s just come on.”

            It occurred to Will that some of the amiability had faded from his agent’s facial expression.

            “Hello, Julia.”

            “Hello, Melanie.”

            “Right, well here we all are,” said Melanie, taking a packet of cigarettes and an ashtray from a drawer in her desk and lighting up.

            “Thanks so much for making the time. I’ve been telling Mr Roper how excited we all are about his wonderful book.”

            “Very excited,” said Rupert.

            “Incredible book. Very excited,” said Julia.

            “Where is Mr Roper?” asked Rupert.

            “He’s here. He can hear you. Bit of a furniture drought at this end.”

            At the mention of his name, Will turned around. He’d been looking out of the window at the Café Apollo across the street—their americano was watery but they did do a very passable macchiato, and a warm muffin with little pockets of soft caramel.  No one had offered him a coffee.

            “Thank you for coming in, Mr Roper. We really are very, very excited to work with you on your wonderful book.”

            “Oh, well…that’s very…I mean, thank—”

            “What did he say?”

            “He said thank you,” said Melanie. “That’s Julia Funt, Will. We’ve asked her to join us as she’s the one who’ll be working her magic on your manuscript.”

            “Ah yes? Well I’m no prima donna, I can assure you. I do believe the final draft I sent you is very honed, but I assumed I’d be working with an editor. It’ll be—”

            “Julia’s actually our content strategist, Will. We would rather expect you to take care of the editing side of things. Mustn’t shirk our responsibilities, must we?” Her teeth were ice white. “Julia currently oversees all of our online content. No small feat I can tell you—we publish a large number of high quality articles on a daily basis. A whole team of writers. This’ll be her first foray into fiction and yours into publishing. Exciting, yes?”

            “OK. Eh—”

            “So, Julia, perhaps you’d like to kick off by clarifying for Mr Roper exactly what you’re going to need from him.”

            “Sure. First things first though—I’ve only had a plain text manuscript, Melanie. Actually it’s a PDF but it looks like scanned plain text to me—so I don’t really know what I’m dealing with here.  To be honest, I was surprised to be called in at this stage. Mr Roper’s story is so compelling, of course, but I don’t really give a tuppenny fuck about that. I need to see some optimization. Get an idea of how much work I have ahead of me.”

            “Yes of course. Fair point.”

            Melanie’s eyes flicked upwards to look over the edge of the laptop.

            “How quickly do you think you can get your optimised manuscript over to Julia, Will?”

            Will felt his skin flush and knew it was about to become blotchy.

            “How do you mean? The PDF I sent is definitely the final draft. I’ve been working on it for—”

            “The story is fine, Will. Really very good. I’m talking about the text itself. Julia’s role here is to guide you through the process of optimizing it. We would have expected you to have done a considerable part of that work yourself. I must say this is a little disappointing. Did you say scanned, Julia? Then there aren’t even any links yet?”

            “Yes it is scanned,” said Will. “I normally work with an old typewriter, you see.”

            Something slapped against the window, a piece of cardboard or a newspaper, before blowing away in the breeze.

            “Wow,” said Julia.

            “How wonderful, Mr Roper!” said Rupert. “An old typewriter! I quite understand. I think. I have a vinyl collection, you know. I like the crackle; it brings me back to…it is a craft after all, writing, isn’t it? Quite a tradition to it, really. Leather on willow, roaring log fire—that kind of thing?”

            Since Will could see neither Julia nor Rupert, it was difficult to gauge their tone.

            “Well…no, not really,” he said. “I mean, I wouldn’t like to think it was nostalgia…I’m quite, eh…I mean it is a work of science fiction after all…”

            He shifted a little.

            “I’m quite forward-looking, I think. No, it’s more of a technique. I find with an old machine and the old font that I can…that there’s a distancing effect. I find it easier somehow, to cold read my own work back to myself. Do you see? To be critical…”

            “I understand completely, Mr Roper,” said Rupert. “However we are going to need you to go ahead and make some changes to your work flow.”

            “I mean, just,” said Julia, “wow.”

            “Yes, a gentle reminder,” said Melanie, “that Mr Roper is actually here, Julia.” She shot Will an apologetic look.

            “Well he’s a big boy, isn’t he? How can he not have…? Turn me round, will you?”

            Melanie swivelled her laptop around. In the darkening office, inadequately lit by a single, stammering fluorescent strip over a fire exit at the rear, Will found himself bathed in a cone of cold blue light from the screen. Julia sat at a conference table next to Rupert and he could see, through the window behind them, some kind of industrial park. It certainly didn’t look like Manhattan. He’d been once, with Milly. He was used to wrestling with reality a little, but so far not even his most basic expectations of this encounter had been met. Something wasn’t right, and being able to see Julia didn’t help—despite her interjections, her smile was ludicrously cheerful, her face friendly almost to the point of menace. He felt an urge to scrawl the word “vivacious” all over it in permanent marker.

            “Well,” she said, “we really are beginning at the beginning here, aren’t we? Mr Roper, I wonder if you could talk to me a little about what you want from all of this. Hm? First principles. What’s your book for? What do you expect it to do for us? You, I mean. Let’s talk functionality. That’s really where I come in.”

            “Do? Hm..I hadn’t really…I suppose…”

            “I think it’s so important we be crystal clear about this from the outset, don’t you? Why did you write this book, Will?”

            She made a bridge of her hands and rested her chin on it.

            “I see,” said Will. “Yes. Well, I don’t know—I’ve always…since as long as I can remember really, I’ve wanted… for example, the Dickens volumes my father kept on a high shelf—perhaps that’s where it began. You know? Eh…and then of course the classics…the Bible…the Arabian Nights and so on…I just want to…I think it might be the only contribution, if you will, that I’m truly capable of. Do you see?  I mean, they’re repositories, aren’t they? Stories. What dreams are to waking life, so stories are to truth, or so I’ve always thought…”

            “Yes. I’m not quite following, Will. Let me put it to you in a different way. What good is this book of yours? Why should I be excited? I mean, I am excited of course, but why should I be?”

            “Right. Well, I suppose the hope is…that my work might be…well I’ve said it, haven’t I? A contribution. That it might be…good, you know? That it might, in some modest way, have some literary merit. There’s nothing else, really.”

            He thought of his self-administered pep talk and sat up a little straighter.

            “And actually, I do, to be honest. I do believe it has merit.”

            Julia Funt lowered her hands and, for just a moment, withheld eye contact, looking down at her fingernails.

            “Jesus,” she said in a low but perfectly audible whisper, before looking up again.

            “Literary merit,” she said. “Your book has literary merit.” She wasn’t smiling anymore. “So fucking what? You know what literary merit is? You know the little heart shape they draw on the foam of your cappuccino? That’s literary fucking merit, my friend. You know what the cappuccino is?”

            “I’m afraid I don’t much like capp–”

            “Traffic,” said Julia. “Sales.”

            She was tapping her desktop with long red nails and, even though it was happening on the other side of the Atlantic, the hairs bristled on the back of Will’s neck.

            “Cappuccino is traffic, Mr Roper,” she said. “And sales. Literary merit is the little heart shape they draw in the foam on top of the cappuccino. It isn’t even the foam. The foam is marketing.” She sat back in her chair and gave the screen a pitying look. “You’ve got it all ass-backwards.”

            The exchange hadn’t made much sense to Will and consequently he didn’t have anything to say, but it didn’t matter because nobody was listening to him.

            “Melanie, turn us around again, would you? Plan of action.”

            The stuttering gloom enveloped him again. Talk of cappuccino had reminded him of the coffee he didn’t have and, as the others conferred, his attention wandered back across the road to Café Apollo. It was dark outside now and the café was lit up, golden and cosy. He squinted a little. The window was misted but he could make out the young woman who had taken the table next to it. She had rubbed away a little circle on the glass and was looking right back at him and he suddenly felt very self-conscious, sitting on the desk in his coat and exposed in the enormous window.

            She was framed by the clearing she’d made, her red head backlit and radiant. Will couldn’t take his eyes away as the voices around him became muffled and the whole world contracted till there was only the clean circle on the glass and the girl inside it. She looked a bit like Milly, but then all girls seemed to look like Milly these days. God, he missed her. She’d been his muse. She’d gotten him started on the book and when she left he’d been afraid he wouldn’t be able to carry on. He had carried on, though. He’d finished the bloody thing.

            Still, he missed her. Tony brought him news of her now and then: her new job, little details about her new flat and so on. How cruel it was to hear about her from that supercilious gnome. And yet whenever Tony spoke of her it felt like a kindness—that she would have the odious fool in her home, knowing Will would get word of her that way.

            In the café, the girl’s hair tumbled in waves and framed a pretty face: grey-green eyes and full pink lips that curled upward in a smirk as she gazed haughtily out at the man in the empty office, not bothering to disguise her contempt. And then the strangest thing—the lips moved, and she knew his name. She shook her head slowly and repeated it. Oh Will, she whispered, and he could hear her. Will, Will…

            “Will?”

            He turned away from the window.

            “Do please let’s have your attention, Will. It’s you we’re here to help after all. Go ahead, Rupert.”

            Melanie turned her laptop around and Will found himself back in the blue glow. Julia had her eyes on something out of shot. Rupert looked earnest.

            “We’re going to get your manuscript up on our in-house system, Mr Roper,” he said. “We have the perfect system—you’re going to love it. Very powerful. And we’re particularly excited about it right now because we’re about to improve it.”

            “OK,” said Will.

            “Complete overhaul. I’ll take you through it, get you up and running. No shame in that—we all need our hand held once in a while, right? We’re going to need you to go over the manuscript, for starters, and google map all the place names. That’s going to be really key for the reader. After that we’ll look at outbound links; I’ll oversee that, if you don’t mind. We need them but they’re risky, and I’m best placed to make sure we aren’t just handing it to our competitors on a plate.” He winked. “After that it’s inbound. The real fairy dust, Mr Roper. We absolutely need you to push this with all your might through your social networks. Of course, we’ll do whatever we can. Let’s get those links coming in, eh?”

            “Wait,” said Will, one hand to his collar.  “You’re losing me. Why would we…I mean, what good is mapping? Why do I need links?”

            “For heaven’s sake, Mr Roper,” said Julia, “have you been listening to a word I’ve said? Traffic. We are here to drive traffic. That is our function.”

            “Yes, but…but…I suppose you think I’m awfully…I understand of course, with your articles. Share buttons and all that—I get it, really I do. I have a tweet account; I’d be glad to help out on that front. I will like anything you want me to. But with ebooks—”

            “Ebooks,” said the content strategist. “Where did you get this guy?”

            “The ebook is a dead format, Mr Roper,” said Rupert. “In as much as they can be read offline, we have no interest in them whatsoever. It would not be our intention, as your publisher, to make your work available for offline reading of any kind. Rather defeats the purpose, in our view.”

            “Right…well, this is…”

            “It might be helpful if you begin to think of it less as a book and more as a website, Will,” said Melanie. “You are at the forefront of a whole new archetype, actually. It’s something that you should be very excited about.”

            “We want reading your fiction to be a completely hooked up experience, Mr Roper.” Rupert had his hands clasped. “Totally integrated, in much the same way as online shopping has become, for example. You’re already aware of the kind of joined-up thinking I’m talking about—you just won’t have seen it applied in the same way. Think about it for a minute: readers who laughed at the drunk scene in David Copperfield also enjoyed the wooden horse chapter in Don Quixote. You see? We wouldn’t merely be mapping out purchasing behavior like online retailers do—this would be tapping right into the readers emotional reactions, page by page, word by word. The potential is mind-boggling.”

            “Of course!” said Will. “I see it now. Now I see what you mean by functionality. This could give the casual reader access to whole new worlds of —”

            Something about Julia’s glacial expression stopped him.

            “Jesus wept, Mr Roper. This isn’t about giving your readers access to anything. It’s about giving us access to your readers.”

            “I think it’s fair to say we’ve reached a critical stage in our little negotiation, Mr Roper,” said Rupert, “and I would simply ask that you keep an open mind.” He took a breath. “Will, we love the house.”

            “The house?”

            “The house. The house in the book.”

            “We adore it,” said Melanie.

            “Completely won us over,” said Julia.

            Will looked at each of them in turn before responding. “They do live in a house,” he said.

            “Absolutely. We’d like to call it ‘The House’,” said Julia.

            He should have taken his coat off first thing. He was too hot and the collar was itching him.

            “You’d like to call my story ‘The House’? But the house hardly features…”

            “Yes.” said Rupert. “About that…”

            Melanie leaned forward.

            “We’d like to see more of the house, Will. We’d like it to feature more.”

            Will became aware that both his hands had gone to his mouth.

            “Well that wouldn’t be difficult,” he said, removing them,“There’s just a brief mention of the stairs on page two.”

            “Exactly, Mr Roper,” said Rupert. “Precisely. I think you can appreciate we’re going to need a little more than that. Hm? For example, what color are the walls painted? You don’t tell us.”

            “Rookie mistake,” said Julia.

            “I think it should be a bright color,” said Melanie. “You pretty much always need that on a staircase and besides, we should take advantage of the skylight.”

            “Skylight?” asked Will. “I don’t understand. There is no skylight.”

            “We’re going to need to put a skylight in, Mr Roper. Shouldn’t be a problem, should it?”

            “OK, time out. Everybody just hold on a minute.” Will took a breath. He had the distinct impression that something was about to become very clear to him. But it hadn’t happened yet.

            “Are you people publishers?”

            Rupert and Julia exchanged a glance.

            “I suppose it depends on what you mean, Will,” said Rupert. “Insofar as we are offering to publish and sell your book then yes, we are publishers. You didn’t take a look at our site? I would have…”

            “No I didn’t. Ms Phillips didn’t tell me anything about you.” He looked at Melanie. “You’re not an agent, are you?”

            “No, I am, Will. I’m just not the type of agent you might have been looking for.”

            “She’s the type of agent that’s been looking for you,” said Rupert enthusiastically, jabbing his finger at the webcam.

            Melanie Phillips put her cigarette out and walked around to the front of her desk, so that Will faced all three of them.

            “Will, I’m an estate agent. Rupert, Julia and I run a property website that covers the UK and, as you can see, the eastern United States. We’re introducing a whole new ‘barter’ dynamic into the home acquisition equation. Cutting out the middle men. Replacing them with us. It’s the fastest growing website of its kind.”

            “Very exciting,” said Rupert. “Think about it, Will. It’s totally win-win. You want your book out there and we want to sell houses. It’s a perfect marriage: call it synchronicity if you—”

            “But my book isn’t about a house!”

            Julia was examining her manicurist’s handiwork.

            “About a house, not about a house. Aren’t we passed all this ‘about’ nonsense, Mr Roper? It is 2019, after all. Good grief.” She tutted. “It’s like Alain Robbe-Grillet never happened.”

            “Let’s not steamroll the man, Julia.” Rupert had his hand on her forearm. “He’s going to need a minute to process all of this. Tell us, Will, what do you think your book’s about? Maybe we can come at it from another angle.”

            It took Will a moment, in his stupefaction at the turn the conversation had taken, to register that he was being addressed.

            “Well…eh…well,” he said. At least he was now being asked to talk about his work, he thought. That’s what he’d come here to do, after all. If he could just get these people to appreciate his aesthetic, perhaps something could be salvaged from all of this. Folding his arms, he put a forefinger to his chin and addressed the ceiling.

            “What a question. Of course, on the surface of it…I mean, the events described concern… you know, an intergalactic…but really that’s a metaphor, I suppose. I think what I’m really trying to get at, as it were is…oh, I’m not sure how to put it…God what an awful question. Something about redemption? Christ, I sound so overblown, don’t I? Impossible to talk about these things without…you know, the power…the redemptive…” He sighed involuntarily, although it sounded more like a sob. “I suppose, in a way, my book is about the power of love.”

            Melanie was writing something on a piece of paper. The strip light at the back of the office blinked off completely for a second, and when it came back on emitted a high pitched whine. Unless that was his tinnitus.  Hard rain against the window. Julia was the first to speak.

            “Did he just say the power of love?”

            “Merciful Christ, Will,” said Melanie, looking up. “You’ve got to give us something to hang on to here.”

            “Apart from anything else,” said Rupert, “wasn’t that a song? We’ll never get it past the legal people.”

            Will waved his hand in the air impatiently. “No, no—I didn’t mean it should be called…not everything is a search term, you know. Anyway, isn’t it you that should give me something? A reason to go for this? I mean, we haven’t even spoken about royalties and so on.”

            Melanie was on her feet again and had handed him the note. “We don’t pay our writers royalties, Will—we pay salary. That’s a ball park figure.”

            Will unfolded it and read the number. “Oh. Well that’s…right.”

            In New York, Julia had perked up. “Wait a second, folks. Love is very popular. We get a lot of hits on articles tagged ‘love’. I think we should hear him out.”

            They all looked intently at Will. He shifted his weight on the desk.

            “I think that’s it really,” he said.  “Love. You know? What I want to do with my…is just cut right through all the extraneous, all the…stuff, you know? Get right to the heart of…I mean, on the face of it my premise is complex, I admit that. Incredibly complex, actually—the relentless temporal anomalies, the unreliable, alien narrator and the endless footnotes in her native language, the constantly shifting planetary alliances…but really, in the end, it’s just a story about a boy and a girl and—”

            “And their lovely house,” said Melanie.

            “…yes, OK…and about how their love for each other overcomes all the obstacles that they find in their way—the Solar War, the attack of the dark matter time-drones, the disgusting little troll and so on. In the end, that’s it, isn’t it? I mean, you can skip all of the spirituality and the philosophizing. In the end it all boils down to love. It’s the real, I suppose you could say, meaning of life, and that’s why—”

            “Ah, now that I like,” said Rupert. “The meaning of life. I mean, you’re obviously not the first to coin the phrase, and we do have to be careful about duplicate content,” he glanced at Julia, who nodded her assent, “but it is very strong.”

            “Meaning has been a really big one for us,” said Julia.

            “Absolutely,” said Melanie. “Meaningful travel, the real meaning of Christmas, that kind of thing.”

            “And life,” said Rupert. “Life is all over the place. It’s huge.”

            “Something like this, with the right finessing, could very well go viral,” said Julia.

            “Yes, people are drawn to this kind of authenticity, aren’t they?” said Rupert. “Especially at key moments in life, when emotions are running high. House moves…”

            “Exactly the type of thing we’re looking for,” said Melanie. “Quality is so important.”

            They were talking amongst themselves again and Will’s head turned, involuntarily, towards the other side of the street and Café Apollo. There she was, in the window, and here he was, caught in her brilliance. Once again the blackness bled in from every corner of his vision to frame her in a contracting circle of light, like the end of an old silent movie, and the office he was sitting in receded, the voices indistinct, a million miles further away from him than the girl in the warm glow of the café, behind the misty glass.

            She was beautiful. She was a flaming goddess. He felt himself pouring toward her like liquid. He could see now, through the heavy rain that warped her features a little, that his myopia had deceived him; she wasn’t smirking at all but smiling the most heavenly smile. She raised her arms toward him in an embrace, reaching out to take him to her, to hold him close and safe.

            He knew now he’d be going in a minute. As soon as there was a lull in the conversation and he could politely take his leave. He’d be better off over there, where he could take off his coat and sit in a comfortable chair, in the warmth with a passable macchiato and a banana caramel muffin, talking to her. He really ought to pay more attention. He should have looked at that website. If he had he’d have seen this coming, but he hadn’t; distraction had lead him astray, again, and into yet another trap. That’s what she’d come to tell him, this daughter of Mnemosyne. She’d come to get him.

            Will, Will, Will…

            Who was she?

            Calliope, Thalia, Melpomene…

            Oh no, wait a minute—it was a smirk. She was definitely smirking. And she’d been joined at the table by an intimidatingly handsome young man. He was smirking too. With his eyes on Will, he whispered something into that luscious hair while she sipped her coffee and she suddenly lurched forward, evidently trying hard not to spit it out. When she had recovered, they both smirked at him one last time before leaning into a long and lingering kiss.

            Not Café Apollo then. He wasn’t sure he had enough on him for the muffin anyway. They were extortionate. He might as well just go home. Back up those stairs with their apparently unforgivable lack of a skylight and walls of…

            He realized he didn’t even know what the color of the walls on the stairs was. How many years had he lived there? How could he not know that? He tried to visualise them. It must be a dark color—it was always gloomy on the stairs even when the lights were on. Melanie Phillips was right about that, in fairness to her.

            Maybe he shouldn’t go home either, not just yet. How good a writer could he be, anyway, if he wasn’t even observant enough to know the color of the walls in his own house? It wasn’t the kind of deal he’d been hoping for, what these people were suggesting, but it was a deal. His story would be out there. Not to drop with grace and hope into the fabric of a magical universe and create a ripple there, it turned out, but to google map and hyperlink properties for sale and rent. But it was a deal.

            Maybe it won’t matter why I’m doing it. The two in the café were kissing again. It was actually a bit much. He shook his head. Or maybe it—

            “Will?”

            He turned. They were all three looking at him expectantly.

            “Yes?”

            “Have you been listening?” said Melanie Phillips. “We think we can see a way forward here. You—”

            “Peacock!” The word escaped him without his permission, like the bark of a dreaming dog. Melanie jumped.

            “Sorry?” said Rupert. “Who—?”

            “Peacock,” said Will.  “Peacock. That’s the color. Of the walls. On the stairs.” He was taking long, deep lungfuls of air, as though he’d been holding his breath. He looked at each in turn. “You did ask.”

            “Right,” said Melanie. “Well—”

            “Although actually, it’s probably more of a cerulean blue, now that I think about it. It’s not a distinction I’ve ever felt I had a real command of. You know?”

            “Wow,” said Julia Funt. “Either way, it won’t do. The—”

            “Maybe something in a country linen?” said Melanie. “Or we could—”

            “—positive here, though, is,” said Julia Funt, whose displeasure at the interruption was evident in her slow enunciation and entirely absent from the features that continued to beam at Will and made him feel, if not quite comfortable, then at least, at last, not quite unwelcome, “it would seem we’ve made a start.”

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Guillermo Stitch is the author of the award-winning novella Literature™ and the acclaimed novel Lake of Urine, a New York Times Editor’s Choice recommendation. His work has appeared in Maudlin House, Entropy and 3:AM Magazine. He lives in Spain.