Author: Post Road

The Last Field

Colin Fleming

Of fields, my father had three.

            Right behind the house was an extended lawn that went on for about a football field and a half. This eased into a couple hundred yards of ground that had a small corn patch on the left side, with a rangy vegetable garden on the right, where an above ground pool had once been.

            Beyond that was the field where our parents had jokingly reminded me and my brother Cal never to go. This was the running gag in our family, that coyotes or whatever the predator du jour was roamed here, but then my mom would kiss my dad in this over-the-top way that was kind of cute because that had been their place. That spot where, to our thinking, they had done things with a really high “ick” factor.

            But the field became a lot less cute or funny after my mother died. My father was shot there. I was at school. He called it a hunting accident. The bullet went through his left foot. It happened again a couple years later, about a semester before my college teaching career came to a hiatus. His right thigh this time. He’d gone after a couple of coyotes that had taken out our dog Max. Tripped and fell, he said, with the gun going off when it hit a stump.

            I was teaching at the time at a small liberal arts school out in western Pennsylvania, about 100 miles from home. I was always on the verge of quitting, but you know how it is when you talk in your head about the bad choices you’ve made in life, taking on work that is not for you, how you’ll get out, get started anew. But resolve falters a lot, doesn’t it, once the moment of its inspiration fades? The decision you were going to make tends to cycle back into the latest restarting of what you were already doing, but with the hope that something else will come along.

            For me, that was a grad student named Kelsey with whom I’d sit up late at night discussing the overlooked output of someone like Frank Norris, before we’d tumble into each other, and then retumble the first moment a few rays of sunlight infiltrated the blinds in the morning. I thought I was on to something, whereas she just thought she was off to something else, because that’s how life is when you’re very young, and then the semester ended. There was a flowery Facebook private message from her end, followed by a defriending and a blocking. I tended my resignation later that day. I’d go home and regather, and it’s not like my dad didn’t need me.

             I had less reason to believe my dad’s hunting accident story than Cal did. “You can rest easy, Aid,” our father had said to me one night on the phone before I moved back home. He always called me Aid instead of Aiden when he was trying to put something past me. “It’s only a flesh wound.” You could practically feel him smiling his regular crinkly smile he’d make whenever he did his Monty Python imitation—I had gotten him a box set one year—like I was supposed to not think what he must have known I was thinking.

            Cal had long been out of the house by the time dad got shot, living in New Jersey with his wife. Close, but not there. Huge difference in life, close to being there and actually being there.

            Dad was getting around with a cane when I got home. “Mind the field,” he’d always offer by way of warning when I handed him his thermos of the Starbucks coffee I’d just brewed in the kitchen and he sat down for a marathon viewing of season two of Gunsmoke. Like there were woodland sprites out there waiting to trip me up. I told him I would, because that was what he wanted to hear, and it was what I wanted to hear myself say. My dad and I had a lot in common with things like that, around that time.

            That was on my mind as I started sitting in a café come the midday as I stared at a dog-eared edition of Frank Norris’s McTeague, which I’d only ever read once but talked about like I revisited it annually. At one point I was trying to impress Kelsey with that half-truth. Non-truth. But every day at the café there was a strawberry blonde who wasn’t Kelsey. She was probably ten or so years older, which made her older than I was, though she had one of those faces that could have passed for seventeen in the right context. I stared a lot, I guess, because one day between bites of a biscotti she gently pointed out that I was staring. I brilliantly asked at what, and she said her; I said, oh, sorry, and she said, don’t be. Her name was Mara, and I was scared of her at first. I told her my mother’s name had been Maura, like this mattered at all.

            For a few days I’d come in with my book, trying to look busier than the day before, like I was a man with important things to do. By day four, we were sitting together and I was telling her about my dad, and she revealed that she was a grad student working in town with a professor who was writing a book on Victorian architecture–how it had influenced the visual design of the northeastern cities of the US.

            “So it’s really about how a place and how it looks can change how you might otherwise think,” she offered.

            “Like in fairy tales.” I thought I was being smart.

            “Okay, like in fairy tales. Let’s say you’re Hansel, and you’re out on a stroll. That stroll is going to impact how you’re feeling, what you’re thinking, much more differently if you’re passing through the veldt or walking in Boston’s Back Bay. You probably walk with more purpose in the Back Bay, your mind might start to think more thoughts of industry, whereas, out in the sticks, maybe dreamier thoughts.”

            “Dreamier?”

            “You know what I mean. Biscotti?”

            “Thanks.”

            I told her about my dad and his accidents, and how they happened in that place where he and my mom had their place of places. I let it slip, too, that I had confided in Kelsey—which had been a mistake—that my mom’s death had an impact on me beyond maybe what someone would think, but I didn’t tell Kelsey why. I let it go at that. Kelsey being Kelsey had mustered up some tears and stroked my forearm, muttering something about “so brave, so brave.” We were having our little moment. I probably looked off into the distance all steely-eyed, playing my part, while I felt more like I was hiding something.

            “And did you have something to hide?” Mara asked after we left the coffee shop and kept taking turns around the small village green across the street where the public library and the police station were.

            “Well, we knew she was going to die. That was never not the way it was going to be after a certain point. She had late stage pancreatic cancer which had blanketed all of the surrounding organs. I didn’t want to go back to school. But I did.” Mara’s hands were in the pockets of her vest. You didn’t see a lot of women wearing vests. I’d ask if her arms didn’t get cold, and she’d push herself against me. I always liked that kind of answer from her, no matter what we were talking about.

            “But you still weren’t ready for it?”

            “You might say I was ready for certain things. The doctor said it was going to be like a King’s tide. I had to look that up. It’s a tide that goes higher than normal high tides by a lot, that comes on fast. You get up on a Tuesday, you figure out if you want to have coffee or tea with breakfast, and you go before the dishes are in the sink, maybe. Then you go before the sitcom you were watching is over. King’s tide. Anyway, she wanted me back in school. ‘How am I ever going to read what you write if you don’t write something that will last forever,’ is what she said. Big smile on her face. Like she’d have when the Sears catalog would first come each fall and she’d put it down in front of Cal and me and ask if there might be anything we wanted for Christmas that year. I guess her point—well, it was probably a joke, too—is that if you write something that will last, that maybe goes beyond just what people are supposed to read on the train and then throw away and forget about, it can stretch beyond whatever points these things normally get to and she’d be able to see it where she was. I don’t know. She was on a lot of medications, too.”

            My dad met Mara and liked her. Said she reminded him of my mother. That’s not really what you want to hear when you’d just started doing with someone the things we were doing. Still, I asked him how so, and he said that my mother had eyes like that. You would have thought you could give someone no better compliment when I told Mara that on one of our walks across the town. Some days we would go a clear ten miles. That was a day I wanted to just keep walking, not be bounded by the realities of it getting dark and colder outside and having to go to sleep and the alarm clock signaling the start of the next day.

            “My mother was a proud sort of person. You know how people talk about dying on their own terms? People mostly just say that. When the moment is looking straight back at them, I don’t really think they’re capable of thinking in any kind of decrees they might give out. They just don’t want to be in that spot. They’d rather be in any other. But my mother wasn’t like that. Later my dad lost sight of that idea, I think.”

            I didn’t tell her the rest of it just then. Sometimes you have to bail out the oceans that flood your heart in wine glasses rather than buckets. She was quiet for a few seconds. Probably more like a minute. We both were. But it was one of those moments where you both know what words will be sounded next. And we both knew they’d be her words.

            “And you did, too?”

            “Yeah. I did, too.”

            We let it go for that day. I put Mara in a cab, and walked all the way back to my dad’s. I cleared the brush around the yard over the next few days. Even though it was autumn, I liked taking my shirt off while working in the yard after I made my dad his coffee. He was getting more mobile and didn’t need the cane, though he still had a pronounced limp. I always worked with my back facing the house; it was just the way the morphology of my body went, I guess, like you walk a certain way, at a certain angle, because of your dominant leg.

            I’d take these long looks, that were like the breaths you take when you’re clearing your thoughts, with one to the left, towards town, thinking of Mara, whom I’d see later at the café where we’d usually meet up around dusk, which came on ever earlier; and then to the right, past the lawn I was now tending, past the stretch of land with the tiny corn patch and the now-harvested vegetable garden, my eye settling on the grove of cedars, trying to search back behind them to where my parents’ field was. Mara took to my dad, too. She came over some days to hang out with him when I got caught up in what I was writing, because I thought maybe I had a hand for that, and the last place I wanted to go was back to some university.

            I didn’t know why, exactly, but I liked the idea of them being alone, without me around. Sometimes Mara would come and find me at the café, after my yardwork, after she’d worked with her professor and made her way to the house to have coffee with my dad. One evening at this Italian place in town that had been there forever, so far as the locals believed—which meant since 1957—she came in with this look on her face that imparted she knew more about me than she had when we last saw each other.

            I had gotten there first and ordered a whiskey. Then I had had another. And a third. Because you know when these times are coming. If you’re doing something the right way with someone, you’re always heading towards these sorts of things. It’s how you bind to what you bind to. Like paint needs to bind to a surface or else it’s just liquid color that puddles on the ground.

            She held my hand as we looked at the menus. Waiters sometimes have an astonishing knack for knowing when to stay away, so we just sat like that, eventually giving up the pretense of mulling what we might wish to order.

            “Your father carried your mother out there, then?”

            “He did. He told you that?”

            She didn’t answer me with any words, which was answer enough for me to continue.

            “He didn’t tell Cal, right away, that she had died. The morning after, he phoned me. I came from school. My mother had told me a few weeks before that she wanted not to die in the house, or in a hospital, God forbid, but out in that field, with my dad, where they had started a part of their lives together. Like I said, I don’t think most people really stick with that whole death on their own terms thing. But my mother wasn’t most people. It had been wet the night before. Not pouring rain, but you know how it can be in autumn, when the moisture just circles the air, so that your clothes get damp, and the ground gets damp and soft, but you’re not really conscious of wetness. She had been getting so weak. Any time the phone rang I figured it would be for this. There was mud on the floor. My dad was in a chair. He was crying to himself. He sort of nodded towards their bedroom. I knew that he had carried her out there. I knew she had died the way she wanted to. The way he wanted her to, as well, because my dad would have been like that. I left him in the room, and I went into the bedroom. I sat by the bed. I felt like I couldn’t move, like I was bound in that moment, by the stillness. And I just sat there. My mother was not her normal color. More like the color of the bark of a beech tree. I was going to sit there until I could hear that my dad had stopped crying. Because I knew my dad well enough to know that he’d want that. And after about, I don’t know, twenty minutes, that’s when I heard it. The smallest, faintest, little breathing sound. I put my finger under my mother’s nostrils. Something was coming out. Barely. She was gone enough that I knew there was no coming back. I put my fingers over her nostrils, and when I released them, there was nothing else. When I was back in the sitting room, my dad had stopped crying. He said that we should call Cal.”

            I hadn’t even noticed she had come around the table and was sitting next to me on my side of the booth.

            “Yes,” she said. Nothing else. Maybe she didn’t even say it. But I’m pretty sure she did. Just the softest “yes,” almost entirely sibilance, and nothing more.

It was Mara who found my dad the third and final time he was shot in the field.

            This time it was his arm. He was on the ground when she came up to him. She told me he looked like a kid who lies on this back with his friends, with each of them saying what they most think the passing clouds above resemble. He was discharged from the hospital and sent to a mental health evaluation facility. The psychiatrist assigned to his case—who had the habit of calling it, to me, “our case”—called what had happened—been happening—not an outright suicide attempt, or a series of them, but an “event precursor.” I had no idea what that meant.

            “What it means, roughly speaking, is that your father doesn’t want to die and he doesn’t want to live, but a part of him wants to inflict some kind of punishment for being left behind. He told me he was responsible for your mother’s death. He took her out in the elements…”

            I explained that wasn’t it. The good thing about this doctor was that I didn’t have to go any further. He wasn’t impelling me, and so the words just came. I told him that there was a time when my dad never would have thought anything like that, would have known he was doing exactly what my mom wanted him to, what she probably said she was glad he was doing as he carried her out there. I told him about being in the room with my mother, on that morning when my father had thought she had died the night before. Mara had come from my father’s room by then, having checked on him, making sure he was all settled in. He was going to be there for a couple of days while he was evaluated and what was next for him—and best—was worked out before going forward. Where he’d live, what he needed so far as treatment went, what was best for his safety, health, and, hopefully, some semblance of happiness that would come back. We didn’t know just then that he’d move into an assisted living home, sell the house, make new friends. Everything was uncertain. I told the doctor what I had done. I asked him if I should tell my father that, if it would help him with what guilt he had.

            “Mr. Conklin,” he said, “we will keep what you’re saying here private between us. But it never does to throw guilt at guilt. Yours won’t help your father’s. Let it go. Or you’ll let go of things you don’t wish to let go of.” He gave Mara a quick look, before his eyes settled back on me.

            We said goodbye to my father for the night. I promised to be back before he woke up the next morning. Mara and I started walking, in that way again in which you don’t want your walk capped by any of the normal things that cap a walk—the cold, the lateness of the hour, the practicalities of life.

            We came once more to the village green we tended to stroll around. I asked her why she had walked back into the woods, anyway, to the field. Like I said, she was around the house a lot, and a gunshot is hard to miss. You walk in its direction when the person, or people, you’ve come to see aren’t there. But still—I felt like there’d be a little extra, you might say, to what she’d tell me.

             “I was looking for you, actually.”

            “Looking for me? What does that mean? I was at the café.”

            “Doing them words?”

            “Doing them words. You didn’t come in.”

            The truth was, I knew what she meant. I wouldn’t have known before, maybe. Not even two months before. It’s like travel. There are all kinds of ways to travel. More than just getting your passport stamped. Looking for someone was the same way. Didn’t mean you had to be seeking out their actual physical person.

            “Yeah. But I was looking for you all the same.”

            I said okay, fair enough. I was going to ask her what she found, but I also knew there were all kinds of ways to look for an answer, and all kinds of ways to give one, too.

            And we were busy walking, besides.

Colin Fleming’s fiction and nonfiction runs in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, The Daily Beast, TLS, The New York Times, and many other publications. He is the author of Meatheads Say the Realest Things: A Satirical (Short) Novel of the Last Bro (Tailwinds Press), and If You [ ]: Fantasy, Fabula, F*ckery, Hope (Dzanc). He is a regular guest on many radio programs and podcasts. His website is colinfleminglit.com.

Ideation

by Elle Nash

It began when she moved in below their apartment, or maybe it began a week after when the boyfriend came downstairs to ask for a cup of sugar for a cake, or maybe it began a week after that when the girlfriend knocked on the door and asked for a cigarette and she didn’t have any, so she said, “I’ll go get some,” when what she meant was: “Please come with me,” because the town was new and she liked the girlfriend’s long, dirt-colored hair. 

      The girlfriend twisted the ends of that hair, patchy like sod in a hot yard that didn’t take, the ends brittle from chlorine pools and heat straightening, bleached and ratty but silky at the roots where the natural color was a deeper, more luxurious dirt color. “I hope you like Kools,” she said to the girlfriend, and she walked with her up the street, past the drainage ditch wet with grass, the night empty, the way small towns desert themselves after dinner, not a bright, living city, but potholed and sanctioned nonetheless, not a place where marijuana was legal. She touched the girlfriend’s hand, the skin soft and young. “I meant Benson and Hedges,” she said, remembering herself at the girlfriend’s age. “I used to listen to punk music all the time.” 

       “Punk music?” the girlfriend said. She clutched her hand as they rounded the last corner to the liquor store, a cement-brick building with a neon American flag in the window. “You know, anarchy? Fuck the USA?” she said. The girlfriend remained quiet, pulling the ends of her twill jacket over her free hand, and glanced across an abandoned lot, where a strip mall used to be. Then she touched her thumb and index finger together and brought them to her mouth: “Why would you leave the place you came from?” 

“So, your secrets then,” the girlfriend said. She didn’t care if the girlfriend wanted her company for the free liquor or cigarettes since she wanted something from her, too. This was how friendship worked as an adult: an exchange of goods or services for other goods or services. “I don’t mind keeping secrets with you,” she said, deploying the same line she used three dates a week while unbuttoning the jeans of incompetent clients, most of them older, grainy-skinned and bitter, losing their wives to indifference. She was happy to share them so long as the girlfriend was interested. “But what about him?” she asked, itching for a cigarette now.

      The boyfriend was soft-faced and had long lashes and small, cherubic hands she’d noticed when she gave him the sugar. When he talked his voice cracked. There was the girlfriend’s mother, too, living with them—forty years old, curling tawny hair, drinking Natty Lights and always asking if she could take her top off at the parties. There were so many parties.

The girlfriend said he’d chased her once, the boyfriend stumbling through the apartment and then on to the balcony with a small frosting knife, and the girlfriend had yelled for someone to call the cops. “He’d taken my phone,” the girlfriend said. “My mom didn’t do anything.”

      “Have you called the cops before?” she asked.

      “Yeah, but he becomes docile and they leave.”

      “Why would you stay?” she asked, but the wind had picked up by then, and she saw the liquor store’s cashier stare at them from the window, his nose trimmed with the hard, buzzing red of the neon flag. She left the girlfriend at the side of the building and came back out with another handle of gin and another pack of smokes. A stiff, old lemon in her jacket pocket. 

“Tell me about your clients,” the girlfriend said. She told the girl about a man and woman who were in love with each other. They liked for her to teach them how to touch. Their touching was not clumsy or new but fearful, and she told the girl about the bright splotches of pink on the woman’s body, across her cheeks and nose and down her breast. “She had ulcers in her mouth,” she said. “Some chronic disease.” 

      Another couple, another town—she used to let them tie her up and feed her GHB from a trinket-like vial. “I wanted to obliterate,” she said, “They liked to pretend I was their daughter. I was sadder then, a lot like you,” then she said, “I’m sorry.”

At the girlfriend’s apartment, they were free to drink again and warming up. The girlfriend removed her jacket. The girlfriend’s mother asked, “Are you a Hot Topic girl?” She shook her head and flicked a clear blue lighter beneath a cigarette, and the girlfriend’s mother asked, “Are you a witch?” The girlfriend’s mother took off her blouse, danced some, and opened the closet looking at her daughter’s clothes. The girlfriend’s mother tried them on, one at a time, each shirt smaller than the next. 

      “There was a baby once,” she whispered to the girlfriend. Before the misoprostol, she could only think about death or some form of it in her life. The girlfriend leaned into her on the couch and checked the time on her phone. “I don’t want you go to work tonight,” the girlfriend said. 

      The girlfriend’s mother put a heavy arm around her and breathed into her ear. “I’m so glad my girl is here now, and not at the old house,” the girlfriend’s mother said, the old house with no plumbing or heating. “They kept shitting on the back deck, it just wasn’t right.” Torn linoleum, candled light. Shaking her head, she placed the shot glass over the top of the gin bottle.

The girlfriend’s phone thumped twice in her hands. “Don’t answer it,” the girlfriend’s mother said. “He’ll show up,” the girlfriend said. The mother changed her outfit again, putting on a pair of her daughter’s leggings and a crop top, the mother’s bra peeking from the hem. Then the mother picked up a box of remaining beer and the bottle of gin and looked at her. “Shall we?” the mother asked, and they went downstairs. 

In the apartment below, she locked the door and drew the blinds. She had no furniture, a blanket laid out on the floor, and a cardboard box for a table. She sat on the kitchen counter swinging her legs like a child. The girlfriend slipped off her moccasins and opened the kitchen window at the back, blowing pale clouds of cigarette smoke into the night. 

The mother unclasped her orthopedic bra. Bulbous, full breasts, which hung to the sides, areola as wide as her fist. She wanted to look; the girlfriend caught her trailing eye. “She is so fucking easy,” the girlfriend said. 

      She liked the girlfriend’s breasts, too. Her skinny ribcage, the way her sports bra compressed them close to her chest. Girls like that—their sharp chins pressing into her neck, the spidery way their fingers searched her body—it was how she wanted to be touched. Now she wasn’t afraid of death so much as she was scared of running out of time. She worried about giving birth to an already dead child, or one who was alive and going to die. What would it mean to spend so much time obsessing over resources? 

      The girlfriend looked bored, so she joked, “Sometimes the only thing in my stomach is cum, scrambled eggs, and coffee.” She said, “Blow jobs are Ambien for bad boys.” The girlfriend laughed, bright and soapy, and she liked the way her eyes ticked, gave way to surprise.

      They took shots and she asked about the boyfriend, asking again: why do you stay? Asking more, imagining the girlfriend plodding through the apartment, the boy with his weak chin and a dull kitchen knife. Why couldn’t the girlfriend leave? The girlfriend pressed a thumb into the skin stretched on her jaw. She was embarrassed by how beautiful the girlfriend was. Pink paint peeled from her fingernails. 

“One time, in another city,” she said, slowly caressing the metal lip of the vial in her pocket, “I might’ve gotten away with murder.” It’d been the last time, with a man that looked like her father, the filmy gray of his eyes. His beleaguered breath, erratic and wheezing as he lay on the creamy foreign sheets in a room that overlooked an entire skyline. She was tired of taking tiny capfuls of the drug to cope; it’s salty aftertaste like magnesium in her mouth. The man had downed his rum and Coke in a single sweep before collapsing. He convulsed once, then twice, rattling his teeth together, and then he threw up a rusty sludge. A wet, throttling sound came from his throat like he was choking. She’d panicked, pressing her hands into his doughy shoulders to roll him on his side. The girlfriend’s eyes grew curious and a question seemed to hover inside her mouth before a heavy rap came from the door, breaking through the pop music. All three of the women turned their heads, the flirty dream dissipating. It was the first time anyone had knocked on her door since she’d moved in. 

      An older man with slicked-back hair and straight teeth loomed through the crack at her. Behind him, the soft-faced boyfriend. “Leah needs to come home,” said the older man. “So what?” she said, but the mother had already slipped on her top and had taken the girlfriend by the hand, coaxing her back up the stairs before the girlfriend even had time to slip on her moccasins.

      The door shut, both the mother and girlfriend gone. She pulled the vial out of her pocket. It was enough to put a man in the dirt, but not a man and a boy. She didn’t feel like running again, couldn’t think of another town to move to. It wasn’t enough to change things, she thought. She wedged the murky vial inside the toe of one of the girlfriend’s moccasins, anyway. Death was a reminder that choice was a luxury. She tucked the shoes in her arms and opened the front door, into the cool night.

Elle Nash is the author of Animals Eat Each Other and Nudes, forthcoming from SF/LD Books in 2021. Her short stories and essays appear in Guernica, The Nervous Breakdown, Literary Hub, New York Tyrant and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and teaches a fiction workshop called Textures. You can find her on Twitter @saderotica. 

Some Manors

by Tom Laplaige

Our doormat used to be a dentist. That was before, in a country we’d never heard of. Our riches, invasive as ivy, needed little encouragement to keep prospering, but in the midst of all of this effortless accumulation, our souls ached with emptiness. When we married, Victoria was still writing checks to faraway causes, feeling distant from her impact, and deflated by extension. 

Some manors clamor through archness. Some manors roil with legacy’s intuited terminus. Ours was thick with my wife’s longing to be celebrated for her munificence. Longing is a thing that rots without containers and lids. Even the cats are driven mad by its presence.

Our new doormat turned Victoria’s days towards cheer. Finding an excuse to tromp through the mud, she would alight to the garden to whisper sweetly to a box hedge, or bring a horse a purple carrot. And when she’d return, he’d be splayn waiting. Those first weeks her wipes were gingerly ones—and gingerly was a manner I’d never seen from her velvet arsenal of airs.

With much of her generous carriage diverted to a back haunch, Victoria would softly skim her toe on his surface, and sensing her apprehension, the doormat might purr or go mmmm as though making effort to appreciate a meager stew. 

Blush returned to her cheeks. Before long she was tap dancing on his surface, digging in, thrashing her heels while he begged for more, more, more. And my darling, plump Victoria would actually giggle. 

A motherly wind swept my baroness, and for a sweet moment, there was nurture where mean nature had reigned. My agonizing efforts to climb the stairs were met with tenderness and encouragement, not goading and derision. Once, she even threw me over her shoulder and hoisted me up the marble ascension before my pride could protest. 

I’d awake from screamy guillotine dreams to find myself suckling at her wooly, mammoth teet. Eye contact, and a stroke of the cheek. Monday, Tuesday, happy days. 

But alas, finitude is the cruel melody of our time.

One dismal night, fecund with foreboding, the dinner gong screamed and then screamed again but Victoria did not appear. I dined alone, picking over every bone twice, rolling gelatin with my tongue until every nook of my mouth was coated, but still no wife for company.

I broadened the dinner gong’s protocols to include carrying, and bade her to ferry me around the manor. Past the suits of armor painted neons, and the alabaster busts of my forebears with prominent foreheads, through the hall of cloudy concave mirrors, under the clinking crystal of our rusting chandeliers. My heart knew where we were headed, but I stretched the search circuitous until finally I directed her to our front door.

There, like a poached egg strangling a toast point, was Victoria, nude and breathing heavy on the doormat. Her jaw jelly-rolled slowly through her chins to meet my distress, two soft blinks with batty lashes, then she began to snore. I looked down and the doormat smiled, mustache dripping into his lips, without a lick of penance. 

Shame! I screeched at them and whipped at the gong’s bottom to whisk me away, bawling into her apron like a Mewbury newling. 

Months passed and our gilded bed remained unshared. I powdered and painted my face with her makeup, buried myself under her dresses, and sniffled in her mattress imprint. I waxed murmurous in the loss cocoon, betrayed, pinken.  

Eventually, I moved into the dining room where my daily observations lingered without parry. Stoic tick of the grandfather clock. Impassive oblivion. My straw-sucking echoed off the ceiling and the slapback was sickening. Downward-facing dregs. 

Her overripe perfume haunted the habitat. I called her name with no answer. Victoria? Buttercup? So this is my private Pompeii, I thought.

I tried to recall everything I had learned about our doormat in his short tenure with us. He used to be a dentist. Ok. Never disagreed about the weather. Fine. Always faced east. Never talked to the doorbell. In his room I found few personal items. A frame with a creased picture of a young doormat and a sharp-nosed bride. A champagne cork. Some coins. A tattered book of poems by that simple sandsnake Rumi laying open on the nightstand. I picked it up and read: 

            Out beyond our ideas of wrongdoing

            And rightdoing there is a field.

            I’ll meet you there.

            When the soul lies down in that grass

            The world is too full to talk about.

My hole roared. Ever-glistening dewy field of fuckery. 

I remembered myself as a child, the gimp on the sidelines watching sisters canter their thoroughbreds. The sadness in father’s eyes as he assessed me, his runtish heir. My cleverness with calculus, my war with our rutting poodle, and my great plans to leave and see the burning world. 

All of my self-pity suddenly peeled, and I laughed at my life that had eaten me, imagining its indigestion. My revenge on its bowels. Freedom, at last.

Then one night, I heard sounds like I had never heard before. Like giant gears wrenching to wake some awful machine. The walls shook as though they were gagging on the sword of Damocles. I became nauseous with a sense of shifting gravity.

Dizzy, I clawed my way down the hallway to the source. Banged my head bloody on the door that withheld the circumstance. Let me in! Let me in! I cried. Please dear god, let me in!

And then a dawning splatter. 

And the door creaked open.

And the stink of life slank through the jamb. 

And the doormat bent down, kissed me on the forehead, and departed for who knows where with a knapsack full of silverware.

And there against the tufted headboard was Victoria, arms wet with the squirm of wriggly pups.

Broodish little dishrags three.

Say hello to your daddy, she said. 

Down there, it’s your daddy.

And I burst.

And the full world swam in a warm fountain.

Tom Laplaige writes from the basement of a house with blue shutters. He is at work on his debut collection of short fiction.

In a Sentimental Mood

By Vanessa Stone

There is a need to be of use. To be of service. To be of help. Otherwise, how would anything get fixed? This is what I told Maev. And while we are on the topic of fixing things, could you give me a hand here? Maev slid her chair next to me and organized my pills. Calcium, riluzole, vitamins A, B, C––I’ve been taking so many pills lately that I’ve begun to wonder if I will ever, ever properly shit again. Maev said she sees why not. I’m not particularly fond of Maev, but I find it much more manageable to say her name than the others. A year ago Care for Life assigned her to my case and so for a couple of hours, several days a week, she is of help to me. 

Maev is of greater use to me particularly in the mornings when I spend an hour or two searching on the internet. Last month I thought I could learn to knit. After several hours of watching YouTube videos I attempted to make a yellow knitted blanket. It wasn’t long though before my fingers started feeling aggravated and so I settled for a knitted coaster instead. Maev pointed out I should try MasterClass instead, but I’m a socialist at heart and really enjoy public goods like clean air, literacy, lighthouses and free YouTube courses. 

Despite her poor advice, Maev is a good listener. No one listens to anybody these days. We all just talk at each other. I suppose though listening skills come in handy if you are mothering six children. How Maev does it remains a mystery to me, of course. I have no children myself. Never had time. I posed this to Maev––why any woman in her right mind would allow a man to control her like that is beyond me. I do not think Maev understands the import of this statement because a) English is not her first language, and b) she never had a father nor a husband. Men, for all she’s concerned, are of no use to her.

“I understand,” Maev said.

“Really?”

“Of course I do.”

“I don’t think you do.”

Maev gave me the eye. The type of eye I imagined she must have used on her children perhaps when they were misbehaving. But I recognized it immediately as the type of eye I gave to my sister when she would call me about her divorce. An exhausted eye. 

“You don’t need a man. Like me! Men, tsk, useless,” she unlocked the breaks on my wheelchair.

She wheeled me to the door where a full-length mirror rested against a wall. We both glanced at ourselves. In a month or two Maev would need to take me to the salon to get my hair colored back to brown. She took out two hats from her tote bag that she had placed rather sloppily near a glass vase earlier that morning. I wondered if she knew how much I hated that. She could have easily broken the vase by accident. At noon, as usual, the sun cast its sharp light against my home. On the south side, English Ivy was spreading its tendrils on the walls. 

“Could you help me take this down please?” I asked Maev. 

“But why? They’re very charming,” she said.  

I do not think Maev has ever owned a home. 

“Behind the beauty lies insidious problems,” I explained. 

She did not answer. 

“Do you see these tendrils? They might look harmless but they can do serious damage to the wrong type of structure. Listen, Maev. My home was built in the 1930s so it has significantly weaker mortar.” Maev remained circumspect so I stopped explaining it further at which point we resumed our daily walk. 

With newly renovated homes cropping up in my area, I wanted to get acquainted with some of the new faces in my neighborhood. A young couple lived on one end and from what I gathered they are the kind of people socially engaged. According to Maev, whom I might have sent over to get details for me, Frank and Rachel just received their Gold Creator Award for the one-millionth person interested in watching them whisper while they cook. If you ask me there’s nothing impressive about whispering while cooking at all; most people don’t talk while they cook. And if you are screaming while cooking, then you are Gordon Ramsay––in which case, could you please not? 

On the other end of my block lived a middle-aged man named Robert. I met him on one of my morning walks with Maev when I tried shoo-ing his fat white cat lying on the sidewalk. Out came Robert apologizing with his hands swishing in the air like one of those giant inflatable blow-up tubes you see at a car dealership except wearing a mask. 

“Oh, you don’t need to do that,” I told him. He had only known the cat for a week. He adopted the poor thing shortly after he left his partner of fifteen years. Apparently it makes him feel selfless. And he was just starting to bond with Toby (the cat) when it decided it preferred to be an outsider rather than an insider. 

“I’m afraid he might be harboring some sort of resentment towards me,” he explained. 

“Why would you think that?” I asked. 

“I started dating again,” Robert said as he winked at the cat. 

“How do you feel about dating during a pandemic?” 

“It can be scary, yes, I suppose. But you know, I’m really trying to be careful and only date those with potential antibodies.”

“I see.”

“In my opinion, it’s much better than waiting for a vaccine that may or may not come and may or may not do what it was supposed to do. It’s difficult to trust public health officials these days now that everything has become so politicized, you know what I mean?” 

I can tell he wanted a visual agreement from me but after swallowing twenty-odd pills with my orange juice this morning to manage my amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, I physically could not. After a mouse captured Toby’s interest, the sidewalk was free for human use again. Maev wheeled me back home. 

*

Maev was visiting her family in Cambodia for the first time in twenty years. She planned to rekindle what had been lost, she declared. Can you really do that in fourteen days? I asked her. She never got around to answering my questions before she left the spare keys on the table. I am still wondering. Personally, I think it is a blessing to have such a considerable distance from your family. Too much of anything is dreadful for you. Too much water intake can lead to low blood sodium, too much socializing can lead to social fatigue, too much talking is a symptom of logorrhoea, and so on. Take it from me, I have found plenty of freedom and solitude since my mother and sister passed away in a car accident nine years ago. I specifically told them to take a cab instead, but as I mentioned, nobody listens to anybody these days. Anyhow, since Maev was on a vacation, I once again found myself with plenty of freedom and solitude. As a result, I have begun a new routine––watching my neighbors across from me. Stuck on my second floor, I found that my guest bedroom afforded me a better viewpoint. From here, I discovered a few interesting facts about my neighbors:

1. The wife worked remotely, usually engaged in a video conference call, and always dressed professionally from the waist up.
2. The husband was a health worker, based, of course, on the scrubs he wore every day to go to work.
3. They had a child (children, maybe) who might be off to college judging from the multiple collegiate signages splattered on a bedroom window.
4. They were a bit delusional. They turned TWO whole walls on their third-floor bedroom into an eclectic collection of mementos. At a certain point, keepsakes no longer stood for anything other than a representation of junk. 
5. A strange man appeared at their door on a Tuesday afternoon. 
6. They ate dinner separately. Usually the husband in the living room watching TV and the wife in the kitchen on her phone. I couldn’t help but think of Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher, when he said, “It is the saddest sight in the world,” upon seeing the vision of New Yorkers eating meals all by themselves. He continued to describe it as, “sadder than destitution.” He further went on to assert––and I love this––“He who eats alone is dead.” The French, as the old cliché suggests, approached the dining experience as something akin to the act of lovemaking. Baudrillard failed to realize two things: First, no one ever ate alone and thought, well this is the end of me. They just sat down, ate, and went on with their lives. Second, according to Robert, Americans do not love make, they fuck make. By this reasoning, my neighbors were certainly not French. 
7. I confirmed that they have not made fuck for the past week and that the only intimacy that had occurred between them was on Sunday when they brushed against each other in the staircase. 

*

Maev left my medication organized which I was grateful for because today my symptoms included twitchy legs and stiff arms. More importantly, my tongue felt like a dying seal. I knew this because I called to make a socially distanced date with Robert and he kept asking me why I was moaning. He hung up and followed up with a text:

If I were into women, that
would turn me on,
winky emoji, enjoy your day, love! 

My doctor explained it to me. It is sporadic, he said. This means that while I am slowly deteriorating there will be days I can move without a problem. He advised that on those problematic days I should keep myself intellectually engaged. I took his advice and finally signed up for the MasterClass courses, which the Gold Creator Award winners swore by. Apparently, anyone can become an insider these days. And since I can’t be an outsider, I might as well be an insider. I scrolled through the different courses, all documenting the artistry of the world’s biggest and brightest celebrities. For ninety US dollars I, too, can have a perfect backhand like Serena Williams, the ability to scout a film location like Werner Herzog, or possibly win an Oscar like Natalie Portman. I clicked on Natalie’s impeccable cheekbones, which launched me into the “Lesson Plan.” 

It was a series of twenty videos of varying lengths. In her burgundy dress and beachy-wave hairstyle, Natalie looked directly at the camera. In an equally laid back and pleasant tone she outlined her expectations, namely what I should take from her class and the basic principles of acting. After two hours and thirty-seven minutes I completed the course. Like a great actress, Natalie gave a great performance as an instructor. Each lesson provided various modes of Natalie. There was a reminiscent Natalie, who tells you a story about her past. There was a reverent Natalie, who talks about the fine actors and performances she admired. Finally there was a spiritual Natalie, who claims empathy is the root of her artistry. This was important because we all know that empathy is free but acting lessons are not. I am wounded at this realization. I was made to feel like I gained something. Oh yes, Natalie. I, too, can act. But the moment I tried it, I realized I was completely inferior and that yes I can see that you can do it, but I know that I cannot. I spent the rest of the evening feeling betrayed. 

The next morning, despite trying positivity, a key scene in Natalie’s course lingered in my mind. It was when she staged a room and pointed at a spot and said, “Here I find out I am being cheated on.” The strange man appeared at my neighbor’s house again. The door opened. He entered. I pinched my phone screen, zooming in on the house. In the kitchen was where they spoke. The man’s arm around the wife’s waist. In the living room, he looked at her from under his lashes and there she laughed, throwing her head back as if riding a rollercoaster. In the dining room was where they kissed. Up they went into the master bedroom where she glared through the blinds, abruptly, before closing them. That was where she would cheat. I closed my eyes.  

She was in her red slip with her bare feet, hair tied back so as not to disturb the vision of him now in front of her. And there he was–––as beautiful as ever, as strong as ever. She ran to him, jumped on his thighs, and stuck on him like glue. Her hands grasped his. 

“Oh but you are in my blood you’re my holy wine,” Joni Mitchell sang.

She climbed down his lengthy pole of a body, twisted, and pushed him to the ground. She stared at him until he sprung up like spring flowers. She lifted her leg, pointed her feet, and twirled like a dress. 

“Oh and you taste so bitter, bitter and so sweet,” Joni sang again. 

She leaped into his arms, folded her legs around him. There was nothing to do but for him to carry her in circles until he was exhausted. Until she was exhausted. Until there was nothing left of them. Only breath.

“Oh I could drink a case of you darling,” Joni sang for final time. 

*

I felt it all. There I was, once upon a time, on that stage, where my body moved and lived. My numbness returned. I knew I was in the wheelchair again, bound to it like a genie to its lamp. The room was hotter too. I tried opening my eyes but could not. I could not open my eyes. I could not open my eyes. I tried to yell but my tongue was as dry as a riverbed. If I were a genie now, I would make a wish to be able to open my eyes or scream or throw that damn vase by the door. If I could just move, or perhaps if Maev was here, or anyone at all, my mother, my father, my sister, or even Robert, I could tell them there was a very, very serious problem that needs to be fixed.

Vanessa Stone is a creative freelancer based in Brooklyn, New York.  Her stories have appeared in The Coil Magazine and Lumina Journal. She holds a BA from the University of Washington and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.  She is at work on a forthcoming novel, The Things We Did to God.