LISA PIAZZA | A SHADOW, A SNAKE

October 6, 2024

A Shadow, a Snake

It’s not every day you see a bald eagle at Serene Lakes, but I’ve seen a few before. Flying, perched in trees, their white feathers showing or skimming the lake to grab some trout, then speed off.

Today the one above me keeps its distance. Circling, circling.

The kayak I’m in belonged to my dad back when my parents owned the cabin together. After the divorce, my mom owned it, and now I share it with my sister, her husband, and their three kids. My sister’s already said she will pass her part on to her kids, and if I ever marry (and God forbid that person has a kid), the cabin should stay in the family. I’m told it’s cheating for someone else’s kid to end up with half of something that isn’t theirs.

My sister prefers my future loneliness.

My present sadness, too. Next to my life, hers is more than fine. Fully formed and growing.

The lake water is cold. In June, the mosquitoes take over, and there’s not much you can do to avoid them. Snow melts. Puddles form. Mosquitos breed. Even now, in June, there is more than a little snow left. Hiking yesterday, I lost the trail for a bit due to a pack of snow knee-deep. Next to it, clumps of wildflowers – purple, orange, pink.

If I knew the names, I’d name them.

Wild Iris is one.

Back at the cabin, a meadow mouse is gnawing on a crust of toast. Later it will chew through the box of Life cereal in the cupboard. Knowing this doesn’t mean I can stop it.

I forgot mosquito repellent, but the real mistake I made was calling my sister this morning to ask her to bring some up. It would have been easier to drive to Soda Springs and buy my own.

“You’ve been there how many days, and you’re just now calling about repellant? I mean, did you even check the master bathroom? I’m sure we left some there last summer.”

Sure enough, there it is.

“You must really want those bug bites; that’s all I can say!”

“Sure, yeah.” I always agree – even when she’s joking. Even when I am the joke. It’s an old habit.

“We’ll be up around 5. All three of my boys are coming, FYI. Hope your guy doesn’t mind! Can’t wait to meet him.”

One of the easiest ways to kill a mouse is to set out the sticky traps; that’s also the least humane. That and poison. The mice get too smart for the snap traps after the first kill. Up here, poisoning a mouse means poisoning everything. Maybe that’s everywhere. Being in the mountains, it’s easier to see the connections – tree roots, streams, rocks, run-off, branches, pinecones, mountain lions, bears. Mosquitos. Trout. Eagles. Mice.

That I know the mouse is here doesn’t mean I’m going to kill it.

From the kayak, the bald eagle takes its time circling. It could come my way. Or not. My sister’s been trying to see a bald eagle up here for years. She sees bats, hears frogs. But no eagle. She’s told her husband about the time I was a baby out on the grass by the water, and our mom swears an eagle dipped down, talons out, and almost carried me away.

I don’t remember it, but a story is true if someone tells it enough. 

I want the eagle to fly this way, glide down to the middle of this lake where I am now, dive, dig its ---

                    No.

                                     That’s an old thought.

                                                                                    The kind I am trying

                                                                                                                            to

                                                                                                  break.

There are other ways to escape.

When she arrives, my sister will see that my guy, Grey, isn’t here. Her boys will barrel in, unaware. If she told them to be on their best behavior to meet someone new, they’ll have forgotten all about it. They’ll get out the paddle board, root around in the garage for the fishing poles, ask about bait. Their dad will set up his work computer in the master bedroom where he and my sister always sleep, and we’ll see him for meals and the occasional card game.

This is his idea of a vacation! My sister will laugh.

The problem with Grey isn’t a problem. It’s just that he’s a good guy. We have known each other for seven months. That sounds like a long time, but we only make time to get together once a month, so over seven dinners, what I can tell is he’s a nice person – has a job, two kids, drives a Tesla, pays his taxes, likes art films and 80s punk.

I never invited him up to the cabin, so I wouldn’t have to bail at the last second. I know myself at least that well now. It’s progress. I didn’t want to end up lying to him, saying the cabin trip was off for all.

It’s the overlap I’m not ready for. One self meshing with another. Who I am alone, meeting who I am with my sister, meeting who I am with Grey.

Happiness is there somewhere in the middle, but I am not ready for it yet.

I can’t say why yet, and I don’t expect my sister to understand.

Now, I watch the eagle home in on something, dive down as I dip my paddle in the lake, and pull back. Dip and pull. Let the water make its own movement.

Later, when my sister asks how it’s been going all alone up here by myself, I’ll lie easily to her: she missed an eagle swooping down, pulling a rainbow trout from the lake right next to me in the kayak. Wings wider than you’ve ever seen. She’ll gasp, but only because the mouse is tiptoeing across the kitchen counter, half-hidden by the tile backsplash she put in when she decided to remodel the kitchen.

I liked my mother’s cracked sink, the wooden countertops. I liked the way my mother could stand on the deck and point to things in the distance. Rowton Peak, and that other one whose name I can’t remember. She would explain the different types of rocks: granite, volcanic, sedimentary. Metamorphic.

At dusk, my mother would water her potted flowers, and the water lines looked like snakes making their slow way across the patio. A shadow can be a snake, she would say. Now that she’s gone, a shadow is a shadow again. A snake, a snake. 

My sister will buy mouse traps in the morning. They’ll sell her the sticky ones, and she’ll cry when the poor thing is caught. One of her boys will put it in a bag and carry it out to the trash. She’ll throw her arms around her son, taller and stronger than she is now: “What would I do without you?” she’ll coo, and he’ll shrug.

About Grey, she’ll say, “We’ll have to meet him the next time.” And I’ll almost shrug, too. Old habit. A child again in her presence, believing the future to be a circle. Like it makes any sense to say you can have whatever you want as long as you’ve had it before. 

It doesn’t.

Lisa Piazza is a writer, educator, and mother from Oakland, Ca. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. She is an Assistant Poetry Editor for Porcupine Literary and a poetry reader for Lit Fox Books and The Los Angeles Review. She has recently finished writing a collection of linked stories.

NATHAN NICOLAU | RE: CANARIES

October 6, 2024

Re: Canaries
for Yasunari Kawabata

Dear sir, 

I have to confess that there are still things I do not know. My Japanese is not very good; please forgive me. I was told there was a word in your language with no English variant, which is strange because the word means “please treat me kindly.” I learned this word by reading about you killing your canaries in their tiny cage. What type were they? I do not know much about birds or animals or living things like us. I did not even know there were canaries in Japan. Are they still yellow? Did you bury them yet? I am asking because I want to write about them. I want to write about their soft little bodies as you gripped them in your hands, the way you buried them with the soil given by the sun. I need your help with my story. I am unsure if the main character should be you or the woman you killed them for. I cannot write from the canaries’ point of view because I must confess that I knew those birds dearly. The truth is that one day, those canaries landed their little feet on my window while I was reading, and I knew you were trying to reach me. I am writing to you now with those canaries in view (excuse my poor handwriting). Their heads twitch around so innocently, not knowing their fate or purpose. As I finished that last sentence, they flew away to you. So how it goes. I can never write about them again. Only you know their fate as much as I do—using their blood to fill your inkwell, their feathers as your brush.  

I am sorry for disturbing you. Please treat me kindly. Would you like me to bury this letter with them?

Nathan Nicolau is a writer based in Charlotte, NC. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous publications. His debut novel, TWO, is out now on Amazon. Find more about him at nathannicolau.com.

JULIAN GEORGE | SCREAMER

April 24, 2023

Screamer

Warren didn’t think of it at the time, but the idea of screaming in public was planted in his head in the boys’ room in high school (Marist). Lester "The Molester" Harris (nicknamed after his sort of lookalike, Oakland Raiders’ great Lester "The Molester" Hayes), who was standing next to him, told him of his habit of screaming into a pillow, loud as he could, till he could scream no more, dead to the world and all the pain in it (and all the pain it caused him). Lester was usually stoned.
Lester had picked up on this from a popular self-help book, The Primal Scream, which Warren had also read, except Warren "forgot" the pillow part and screamed his damn fool head off as if being attacked by wolves. His parents, serious professional people with all the right credentials, sent him to Dr. Mantis, a child psychiatrist, after that episode, which meant skipping the odd class or two, no sweat. Dr. Mantis, a Thirtysomething similarly credentialed but covered in corduroy, said it was a case of post-childhood, early-mid-late-adolescent hysteria, or perhaps a case of very early premature early-adulthood agoraphobia, fear of life, rare but nothing to be worried about unless it stemmed from an unconscious or semiconscious or fully conscious childhood or infancy trauma he was too ashamed to talk about or confess to, Catholics, (go figure), I’ll get to the bottom of his shame and trauma and expose it to the light of reason and hygienic scrutiny. Was he properly toilet trained? Was Warren a bed-wetter? Did he masturbate? If so, how often did he masturbate? Where and when? (Put that down!) Had he started seeing girls yet? Was he interested in girls or was he in a latency phase? Would he like to talk about this lack of interest in girls or was he perhaps interested or not interested in boys? And if he didn’t want to talk about this interest or lack of interest in boys or girls, why didn’t he want to talk about it? What was he hiding and where was he hiding it? Would he feel better talking to the hand, puppet-gloved, of course (blue dogs for boys, pink cats for girls), he didn’t want Warren to get the wrong idea or the right one. Spill! (Or words to that effect.) Warren smirked. What a --
He started to daydream about screaming "fire" in the cinema where he worked weekends, but thought better of it. The law took a dim view of such pranks and might put him in "The Cooler" (an expression picked up from Hogan’s Heroes) or, disregarding his status as an underage outpatient, in the "Laughing House" (from Kiss Me Deadly, a blast). Worse, his boss, whom he had a crush on, might give him the axe; she’d indulge Warren’s rudeness to customers ("the customer is always wrong," she’d chirp, "even when they’re right"), but wouldn’t indulge a catastrophic loss of turnover.
His chance came one slow frigid evening, a Woody Allen double-feature, Annie Hall and Manhattan (Woody wasn’t terribly big in Burt Smokey and the Bandit Reynolds country), as he worked the box office, a cubicle in front of a shabby art deco cinema from the silent era.

Rubbing his mitts and clearing his throat, he warmed up with a few mi-mi-mis, the Caruso of Camp Bowie Boulevard. Finally, a truck rumbled past; he let out a scream. Not a soul heard him.
The second time, however, his boss, who was poking around behind the candy case, wondering what she could scarf that wouldn’t add to her waist, did hear and rushed outside.
What was that?
Nothing.
Are you alright?
A nod.
It’s too cold for you out here, with your chest. Come inside to the candy case and let Stu take over. He won’t mind. (He drinks.)
Driving him home that night, she told him she knew what he was doing. She did the same herself, into a paisley cushion. Screaming was a fun – and liberating -- way of letting off steam. Then she sighed, the words of a song he was unfamiliar with, Angel Eyes, escaping her violet breath. Warren examined her face for a clue as to her feelings and reckoned he could steal a kiss, which, to his surprise, she welcomed with a warm, wet mouth.
A decade later, on a half-empty DC8 flying over the Big Nowhere, he fantasized about screaming, "We’re all going to die," and the ensuing pandemonium. He snickered, amused with the notion of this Surrealist act. OK, he wasn’t running down a street with a pistol, firing blindly into a crowd, but by gum Dali and Buñuel would be proud to claim this young provocateur as one of their own. A timid-looking, straw-faced man seated across the aisle winced. Was he a mind reader?
That Christmas, Warren and his ex-boss, now alcoholic and burdened with caring for her deteriorating father all on her lonesome, became lovers for a few overcast weeks, any port in a storm.
Years passed. Warren was ensconced in the City of London, gainfully employed in some financial chicanery or another, an insufferable ass in a nice English suit. He’d hear from home, happily in the form of cheques, bribes to buy his long-distance love. Thank you. (Keep ‘em coming.) One day, shutting the door on the moist chilly air, slitting open the latest missive, a clipping instead of a cheque fluttered out: his ex-boss, his sloshed, quick, back to my blue room far away upstairs playmate, had died after a long illness. Bam. He reeled back, bam, as if shot, bam, as in his favorite old gangster movies, Cagney, Bogie, Eddie Robinson, they died so well, crumpling into an uneasy easy chair, gasping, nothing coming up the pipes, a howling, blood-curdling scream, a catharsis that would leave him floored, would have done him a world of good but nothing, the stuffing knocked out of him, for real.

Julian George’s writing has appeared in Perfect Sound Forever, New World Writing, Slag Glass City, McSweeney’s, Panoplyzine, Ambit, The Journal of Music, Film Comment, and Cineaste. He’s been a wine merchant, a UN translator, an auctioneer, and a carer. His novel, Bebe (CB Editions), appears this autumn in the UK.

ASHLEIGH RAJALA | DO NOT RESUSCITATE

April 10, 2023

Do Not Resuscitate

It started with the cure for cancer. I didn’t believe it at first; no one did. It was impossible to think it was anything but fake news, and plus I was wary of getting my hopes up. We’d gone through everything you could think of with Sarah. Chemo. Experimental drugs. Naturopaths. Even positive fucking thinking.
She was more positive than I was by the end of it. I guess she had to be. It was her life on the line, not mine. I was just the husband. But it was there, all over Twitter. Facebook. Every TV channel. Texts and notifications were popping up on my phone. Is it real? Is it true? How is Sarah feeling?
Everyone says that now. “It started with the cure for cancer.” But it wasn’t really a cure.
Cancer just… stopped. Everywhere. All at once. I had my phone in my hand, staring down at the messages in disbelief. Even people I hadn’t heard from in months, those who avoided us under the pretext of “giving us space.” You know, those who are really just scared and don’t want to face it. They reached out now. Is Sarah’s cancer gone? Just like all the others?
I walked into the bedroom that I still thought of as ours, even though I hadn’t slept in there in months. Sarah had always wanted to die at home. Nothing was making sense; it all felt like a sick joke, but then I saw her, sitting up in bed, grinning.
“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” she said. I wanted to say it was the morphine, but I saw the drip dangling, useless. She’d ripped it out. I didn’t think she’d had the strength.
But it wasn’t just cancer. It was everything.
Well, almost everything. Nurses and doctors in hospices reported the terminally ill just suddenly feeling better. Emergency rooms had no more casualties. Heart attacks, car accidents, anything. They still happened, but everyone survived.
Even the very old clung to life.
For a while, any death made the news. People were still getting the hang of what was going on. No one quite knew “the rules” yet.
That is, until doctors, I guess, got cocky. With patients unable to die, what was the point of stressing out to save their life?
So this was the kicker, the thing no one saw coming: no one could die unless under someone’s express intent. Murder and suicide were still on the table. Someone jumping off a bridge with the intent to die would die. Someone with poison slipped into their wine would die.
And negligence, as it had all come to show, was equal to intent. A doctor not stepping in to save a life was effectively ending it. A paramedic dilly-dallying on their response. A parent leaving their baby in the woods.
That came like a second wave. First, no one dies. Then, too many die. Half were ruled accidents. The courts ate themselves alive with the question of culpability. If one didn’t believe their victim would actually die, how could one prove intent?
The news was too much for anyone to bear those days.
Not least of all Sarah.
And she had nothing to do but sit at home, watching the news.
She’d tried to get her job back but couldn’t. She’d quit when she’d got her diagnosis six months previous and when she was cured, they’d filled her position. There was no precedent for not dying when everyone thought you were going to. There was just a, “You quit. Sorry. New person is past their probationary period,” and a casual shrug.
At first, it was easy to say, “At least I’m alive,” but then, I suppose, the pain of living creeps back in. At least it did for her.
The rest of the world carried on. Now that we all knew “the rules,” that is.
Nurses had to keep nursing. Safety regulations had to stay in place. Food still had to be consumed.
I’d come home from work myself and find Sarah red-eyed on the sofa. She always had questions for me. “Why they’d stop calling?” I didn’t know how to answer that one. Whom did she mean? Those who stopped calling when she got sick or those who stopped calling now that she was all better?
Another day, she asked, “What will happen when we all get too old? Who will deal with us?”
And another: “Why is this happening?”
And then she couldn’t ask anything at all.
The inevitable catches up and we all act surprised though we should’ve seen it coming. But we all have to live on and live with each other.
Whatever that looks like. I can’t quite tell myself yet.
We can’t die, but that doesn’t mean we’re gonna make it out of this alive.

An award-winning fiction writer and indie role-playing game designer, Ashleigh Rajala lives and works in Surrey, BC, on the traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples.

LISA PIAZZA | TRICKLE BACK, SAD SACK

Trickle Back, Sad Sack

Late December, the end of another year. Time keeps Rae going. She turns the key. Drives and drives – four freeways, and a grey bridge. She watches the ruddy ducks circle the salt marshes. Follow the western gulls to each onramp: 580 to 280 to 880 to 101. The tires turn a rhyme in her mind: Black cat, Cadillac…Trickle back, sad sack… The words don’t matter. It isn’t a real song, anyway. Just like Rae isn’t headed to a real first date, a real person waiting at a trailhead for her. She has decided to keep a part of herself out of it – the main part. She will show up as a simpler version: part shadow, part shade. Unformed, an outline.

Rae agreed by text to meet her date at the marshes on the peninsula side of the bay. Halfway there she regrets her new pair of jeans from the bargain rack at Target. She feels like someone else wearing them. Come summer she will cut them into shorts and hate them still, then discard them at the curb, but tonight, she drives and watches herself watch herself – an old magic – a practiced art – to be both in the car and above it. Birdseye. Side eye. Goodbye.

She keeps her fingers tight on the wheel. Gray sky, gray gulls, gray road. She drives and lets the sound of the tires guide her: Black cat, Cadillac…Trickle back, sad sack… When Mona was little she sang her a song like this. To pass the time, to change the tone when P.’s rage took hold. Back then, she could still wrap Mona in her arms. She would whisper a made-up thing. A golden net. Always low, always smooth and conspiratorial. She made it sound like magic: an enchanted web that linked them together no matter what tried to pry them apart. It was the only form of protection Rae had as Mona climbed into P.’s black Acura three Saturdays a month as required by the court.

Rae was a gray woman then. Shadow-self. Seldom-felt. Gray night, gray sight. Out the window now she imagines the clouds form a window. A door. She could walk through it if she believed there was anything on the other side.

From the parking lot, Rae texts her date: I'm here. He is a decade younger, has three sons still in elementary school. I’m the tall one, by the lighthouse, he texts. Do you see me? She feels ridiculous walking toward him. Past due. Overdone in her Target jeans, limp brown hair. What will he notice first: the deep wrinkle between her eyes or the horizontal rows on her forehead like the empty lines on a piece of paper?

She walks the trail near the small Silicon Valley airport. As the sun sets, private jets line up. It is loud and windy, but not unpretty with a colorful sky of blinking lights. Still up for dinner? He asks. From a mile up, Rae sees herself nod. The night begs to unfurl into the future. It forces her forward.

Sure.

Rae follows his pale blue minivan from the trail to his house. When he speeds through a yellow light, she stops at a red sure he will drive on. But he pulls over on the other side of the intersection and waits. Rae considers being the one to ditch, to turn left onto the onramp, merge from 280 to 880 to 580 home.

But she doesn’t. He has a pot of soup on the stove and a warm loaf of bread. He asks Rae to toss the salad. His old black lab clumps along at his side, wary. Aloof. When Rae bends down to pet him, he cowers then growls. Emits a timid cry and her date rubs the dog’s ears. Leans in. Looks up at Rae like the stranger she is.

What? Are you some kind of witch?

From above, Rae sees her haggard self, her half-here, half-there heart. Her chin hair gray as bath water left too long. After a second, he laughs – a regretful chuckle. Rae laughs, too. A cackle. She almost says: It’s true, I know some magic. Watch me disappear right here, but she is already doing that - hiding her own mind, tucking a small silence under her tongue to savor on the drive back over the black bay.

This night will fade like the others. Rae will barely be changed by it. Still, the thought gives her an opening, a space. She understands a woman is allowed multiple lives. And a witch? Well, even more.

Lisa Piazza is a writer and educator from Oakland, California whose work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. socials: @lisampiazza

TANA BUOY | AVOCADOS

Avocados

“I still don’t understand why the forks don’t go in the same way as the knives,” I say while loading the dishwasher. Stabby ends down. Three prongs are just as sharp, just as painful on a careless palm reaching in blind for a spoon for sneaking late-night ice cream straight from the carton. You don’t answer, yet I hear your cheeky voice say, then stay out of the ice cream. In the living room, the television flickers with one of your favorite food shows. They’re all the same to me: renovated restaurants, mystery baskets, bad cooks, soggy bottoms, the pressure cooker. Is it cake or is it cancer?

I open the fridge, inhale cold air tasting of leftover egg salad, search the door for lime juice. The oat milk for your matcha lattes expired weeks ago. I’ve continued to push it further back on the shelf with the excuse the trash is already full. Next time. Always next time. I’m sorry I yelled when you hammered nails and pinholes into the wall without levelling, measuring, searching for studs. You always were trial and error—a little less of this, a little more of that—just go for it and try again as you put up the pictures I was always too busy to hang: Finny as a puppy, the grizzly in Glacier, honeymooning in Maine. Our wedding portrait. My god, we were babies then. I thought we had time.

I open the cupboard above the stove and fight through all your cookbooks for the Ziplock bag containing the recipe for your great-great gran’s guacamole. Set it on the counter safe inside the plastic. What started as oral tradition passed through your matrilineal ancestry is now on a notecard which you repeatedly told me was blasphemous as you wrote down the ingredients, stopping at every letter to rest your shaky hand. Scared the words wouldn’t be legible. Scared it would die with you—In case you meet someone new, you offered.

“Stop it,” I’d said. “You’re not dying. I won’t let you.” Pinky promises.

I want you to know I’m still finding your hair balled in my hoody pockets and stuck like Velcro to the back of my t-shirts and the bottoms of my socks. I’m pulling it out of my ass crack. I don’t know how it gets there, and I slap the long strands onto the shower tiles like you used to do and watch them slither down like thin snakes into the drain.

I’m already fucking this up, aren’t I? Not using the fresh limes, and I think I grabbed the wrong kind of onion. Trying to dice the tomato, but the cutting board quickly runs bloody with tomato guts. Try to stopper it with my hand from bleeding out onto the counter. Fail. These days and nights are an endless fog, thick and gray and void of sunlight, and Finny doesn’t sleep at the end of our bed anymore. Still waits by the door. How do I explain to the goddamn dog you’re never coming home and that I’m a liar? With the crook of my arm, I wipe away the tears burning my face. Definitely grabbed the wrong onion, and my cilantro cuts are atrocious. You once held this knife in your hand, rocking the blade in smooth even strokes. I should have been more present.

I remembered to cut the avocados last because you told me that once exposed to air, the fruit begins to lose its bright green color. Like a doctor performing life-saving surgery under duress, I tear the plastic baggy open from the side, pull out the three avocados one by one. At the grocery store, I’d selected them from the box labeled RIPE because I couldn’t remember how to tell the difference between a good avocado and a bad one. Something about squeezing and being too proud to ask for help. The blade presses against the first and the insides give way before the leather skin does. Same with the other two. My throat constricts. Shaking, I drop the knife onto the counter, pick up the avocados and press them between my hands, a non-bright green mush oozing from between my fingers, shedding their suits and seeds in my fists. You were in remission. RIPE is supposed to mean ready to go, and I can’t stop feeling cheated. We were coming home from dinner and a movie and rocking out to '90s ballads and finally planning that dream trip to Scotland when a black Nissan pickup jumped the median into our lane. I mix the ingredients together right there on the cutting board, bits of cilantro and onion and tomatoes all sticking to my palms. Pour on the lime juice and the salt and slap it into the bowl. I felt your soul leave, slip between my fingers. I wipe my hands, the counter, and load the cutting board and the knives into the dishwasher, press the quick cycle button. The machine groans and gurgles to life, and I swear I hear your giggle. That looks like diarrhea, Mikey. There’s a half bag of chips in the pantry.

I drop onto the couch just as Anne Burrell is coloring a contestant’s finger red with a marker for holding the knife incorrectly, and you’re laughing at the uncanniness of it all. I dip a chip into the bowl of guacarrhea, bring it to my lips. Surprisingly, it’s not as horrible as it looks. Finny walks out from the shadows of the entryway, shoves his muzzle into my crotch for pets. I glance at the wall where you’d hung the large canvas of my favorite sunrise from our last beach vacation, where crooked sunlight pours through the holes in the storm clouds moving across the Atlantic. Seagulls fly in form along the coastline and fishing boats are scattered across the dark blue ocean like mini marshmallows and the silhouette of the freighter teetering the edge of that burning horizon.

Tana Buoy received her MFA from the University of Nebraska Omaha in 2021 and is a micro/flash fiction editor for The Good Life Review. Twitter: @ThrowMeABuoy

KEVIN CLOUTHER | STRAWBERRIES

Strawberries

ANDREA knew it was a bad idea. That wasn’t the question. Sometimes you had to go through with an idea, not to confirm whether it was good or bad but to see what happened. That’s how you knew you were alive, she decided, watching the suitcases spit out of the wall and onto the conveyor belt.

Why had she checked her suitcase? She never checked her suitcase, preferring to haul it through the whole miserable process, so as to avoid the step she’d arrived at now. Maybe she was punishing herself. That made sense, given the circumstance. The circumstance was this: she was going to visit her ex-boyfriend Nick. They weren’t having an affair—she didn’t think so, not yet—but they weren’t exactly friends either. They hadn’t seen each other since high school.

“Excuse me,” a man said. “I just need to get my bag.”

Andrea looked at the man and then the conveyor belt, which was pushing a series of evenly spaced suitcases in her direction. She stepped aside, and he rushed into the space she vacated.

She checked her phone. Nick had offered to pick her up, but she declined, thinking the setting would lead to theatrics they would regret: a messy hug, hands left too long on shoulder blades, all the unfamiliar smells they’d acquired or learned to disguise. Better to rent a car, to be in charge of when she arrived and departed. That car felt a long way away now, which was okay. She wasn’t ready for whatever happened next.

Her suitcase was among the first to appear. She scooped it off the conveyor with one arm. With her other arm, she cut through the air, not realizing everyone had gotten out of her way. Was there something frightening about her here?

She’d taken out her phone to call her husband. It was an instinct. But also she wanted to talk to him. As always, he picked up right away.

“How’s Florida?” he asked.

“Is that where I am?”

“That’s what you said.”

She winced, not because it was an accusation but because it wasn’t. She heard at least one of her boys crying in the background. Or, if not crying, then asking for something in a way that was indistinguishable from crying.

“I’m in the airport,” she said. “I might just stay here.”

“Airports have bars.”

“How are the boys?”

He paused as he debated what to tell her. The longer he paused, the worse the boys’ crimes became in her mind. How much trouble could they have caused since she left? She knew the answer: a lot.

Plus, her husband was permissive. He permitted any number of things she wouldn’t, which made her the bad guy, which she resented. She tried to focus on her resentment as she made her way to the rental car counter.

“The boys are fine,” her husband decided.

“I’ll bring them back something stupid.”

“Bring me back something stupid too.”

Andrea nodded into the empty air. She hung up the phone and placed both hands on the empty rental car counter.

“Is anyone here,” she asked loudly.

Why was nobody else in line? She might have loudly asked that too.

She rubbed the handle of her suitcase and felt suddenly sheepish over its contents, including—humiliatingly—the bra she’d bought. She left on the tags. And there was—it was so stupid—the plastic bag of strawberries, already swimming in their own tawdry juices. She would throw out that bag before she got in the car, provided she got a car.

She unzipped her suitcase, and it was worse than she remembered. Not one but two bathing suits. Three floppy hats. Did she think that by flying back to Florida she would transform into a wearer of floppy hats? The sandals she didn’t regret. She was momentarily overcome with a desire to plunge both feet into hot sand. Then she allowed herself to imagine—just for one moment—the ocean washing over her feet. She felt the sudden cold, the scratch of salt. Already the sun was restoring something. Her skin? That would be good. She reached for the skin beneath her eyes, which was the skin she worried about most. She worried about a lot of skin.

“Sorry,” a woman said, rushing behind the counter.

“I have a reservation.”

“Of course.”

The woman got to work on a computer. Andrea took comfort in the speed of the woman’s typing. It felt good to be taken seriously. Few things bothered her more than being ignored. She consulted her phone to see if her husband had written. He hadn’t. Neither had Nick. Increasingly, she thought of them together, not as competitors but as different aspects of the same life. She shared some things with one and some things with the other. There were few things she shared with both.

Hideously, they had the same name.

“Okay,” the woman said, “I see the problem.”

“There’s a problem?”

The woman produced a look of professional pity. “When your flight is more than an hour late—”

“That wasn’t my fault.”

“No, but when a flight is more than one hour late, the computer—”

So the computer was going to take the heat. Andrea was familiar with—strangely comforted by—this strategy.

“When is the soonest I can get a car?” she asked.

“I might be able to help,” a man said.

The woman looked at him. So did Andrea. She thought she recognized him. Did they sit next to each other on the plane? Did they go to high school together twenty—God, more—years ago?

“You let me get my bag,” the man clarified. “From the thing. What’s it called?”

“Carousel,” the woman said.

Carousel! The whimsy was incongruous. Andrea thought, unwillingly, of her boys at home.

“I don’t need my reservation,” the man said.

“What’s your name?” The woman was already typing.

Good news: it was no problem to transfer the reservation.

“How come his car wasn’t given away?” Andrea asked.

The woman gestured toward the computer.

“Glad I could help,” the man said before disappearing forever.

“Do I get the keys from you?” Andrea asked.

“You’ll need to take the shuttle,” the woman said.

The shuttle arrived every fifteen minutes, except when it didn’t. The air outside was thick. Andrea hadn’t prepared herself for how different the air would feel. It seemed a harbinger of all the things she hadn’t considered, which, of course, there was no way to know about in advance. She began to worry about these things, not one by one but all at once.

She’d thought, many times, about seeing Nick for the first time. Or for the first time again. But she hadn’t thought, not really, about the next hour or the hour after that. Her flight back wasn’t until Sunday evening, and it was only Friday morning. The number of hours between now and then seemed larger than anything she’d accounted for at home, where the trip raced from idle flirtation to reality.

She tried, standing at the shuttle stop, to retrace her steps. The only other person waiting was a teenage girl. Andrea wondered why this girl was traveling alone. Where was she going? Andrea didn’t ask. The girl wore enormous black headphones. She moved her head steadily to whatever music moved through them. When Andrea was younger, boys always wanted her to listen to music with headphones. How eager those boys were to share their secrets! So many people told her then how hard it was being a teenager that she began to believe them.

Now she looked back at those years fondly as a time of colossal self-involvement. It was unimaginable to think of her concerns first without denial or compartmentalization. Indeed, denial and compartmentalization—especially that—had accompanied every aspect of this trip, starting with the purchase of plane tickets.

Are we sure this is a good idea, she’d written Nick.

Of course not, he wrote back, and her heart thrilled.

It was a problem. Because she was married. Because he also was married. Because, worse, she liked her husband. Did Nick like his wife? Andrea didn’t ask. They didn’t talk about their spouses. They talked, almost exclusively, about the past.

The shuttle arrived in a huff of exhaust. It made her tired just looking at the shuttle. The door opened loudly, and the girl got in first. She had no suitcases, only a backpack, which she wore with both straps, criminally uncool in Andrea’s day. Andrea sat across from the girl on the shuttle. They were the only two passengers. The driver was an enormous man squinting beneath a translucent green visor like the ones croupiers wear. At least, they wore those visors in movies. Andrea had never been to Las Vegas or any casino. She’d never been to most places. She could drive the rental car anywhere.

No way the girl was old enough to rent a car. Andrea was pretty sure you have to be at least twenty-five. What would she do to be twenty-five again? She thought about it, though doing so was more unpleasant than she’d expected.

At twenty-five, she had her pick. Men wanted to take her on dates. Friends wanted to meet her for drinks. People were always paying for things. She reached into her purse. She would give two dollars to the driver, one for her and one for the girl, who was really jamming out to the headphones now. Andrea smiled at the girl, which she ignored. Surely, it was good that this girl didn’t feel pressure to acknowledge a stranger’s curiosity.

Although it seemed a little rude.

The shuttle opened its door in the middle of an expansive parking lot. Andrea handed the driver two dollars, and he thanked her so profusely, she suspected—but couldn’t confirm—irony. At the edge of the parking lot was a little hut. Andrea followed the girl into this hut. Andrea worked her way to another empty counter. The girl sat in the only chair.

“Where is everybody?” Andrea asked.

The girl didn’t answer, of course.

“I’ll take whatever,” Andrea said. “Whatever color, whatever size.”

She spread her arms, resisting the temptation to put her hands on the empty counter again. There seemed a finality to that repetition. She might be tired, but she wasn’t giving up.

Because things stay the same for so long, it’s easy to forget how quickly—how often—they change. Like that, a woman was behind the counter, retrieving the reservation. Like that, Andrea was inside the sedan with all its comforting scents: fake leather, black rubber, disinfectant. All she had to do was tell the car where to go, and the computer pointed the way. The accent of the GPS was unplaceably—British-adjacent, robot-British?—elegant. The highway was wide open. She was at Nick’s house before she knew it.

Was his house what she expected? It turned out she hadn’t expected anything. You can only expect so much, and she’d directed her attention elsewhere: to his appearance, for one thing. She studied both the photos online and the few photos she’d kept from high school. He didn’t send her any pictures directly, and she didn’t send him any either—their exchanges were shy, even polite in this regard.

Nick’s house was neither big nor small. It was both nice and not, a single man’s house. But he wasn’t single. He had a wife. How hard Andrea had worked not to think about his wife! Andrea parked on the street, though the driveway was empty. Absurdly, she almost checked the mailbox.

What was she doing? The enormity of that question roared into her consciousness. She was sitting behind the steering wheel of a rental car. She was applying lip balm in the rearview mirror. She was depositing keys into her purse, but she wasn’t opening the door. First she needed to decide a few things, such as who she would be when she knocked on his door. It had been a long time since she made that decision.

She could be fun. Wasn’t she fun once upon a time? Didn’t she produce joints from her bra and light them in the passenger seat of cars going very fast? Didn’t the people in the backseat—beautiful people, men and women, all eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-years-old—bend their slender wrists to retrieve the joints from her? Not two years before she couldn’t hold one without burning her fingertips. She wished she had a joint now, or at least a lorazepam. She considered driving somewhere else, maybe a pharmacy.

She could drive to the apartment where she’d grown up with her mother. Like most people Andrea went to school with, Nick hadn’t moved far. She could get to the apartment, if it still existed, in ten minutes.

Andrea was tired of thinking. She was tired, period. She returned to the rearview mirror to confirm what she already knew, that she looked desperate. That was okay. There was no pretending anymore. Or there wouldn’t be as soon as she knocked.

But there would be no knocking because there Nick was, standing before his door. He was taller than she remembered. Or maybe just taller than her husband. Of course, Nick had been watching her. Everything she’d been worrying about, he’d been worrying about in his own unknowable way.

Andrea hurried out of the car. She smiled or attempted something approximating a smile. He attempted something similar. There were, between her car and his door, about twenty-five feet. At some point he would walk to her, or she would walk to him. Maybe they would walk to each other. Or maybe this was a dream, an entirely reasonable performance of the unconscious mind. She would think, upon waking, that was something.

But it wasn’t anything, not yet. She was still deciding who she would be, and he was deciding too. He couldn’t control how tall he was, but he could control what he said and didn’t. He wasn’t saying anything, and she wasn’t saying anything either. They remained frozen, almost smiling.

Then she realized she’d expected the seventeen-year-old version of him. No matter how many times they texted—they rarely spoke by phone—she carried the high school version of Nick in her mind. What did he see in his private dream? They still weren’t saying anything. Of course, she’d expected to become the seventeen-year-old version of herself, the Andrea who was more than fun, who possessed a brain full of ideas, who wasn’t about to spend the rest of her life circling the same half-empty parking lots. That Andrea was gone first chance she got. So what was she doing back?

“You want to come inside?” Nick finally asked.

Andrea locked the car doors with her keys, and the car produced a conclusive beep, triggering an unexpected panic over the girl from the rental car counter. Before leaving, Andrea had neglected to make sure this girl was okay. What if she were still sitting inside the little hut, waiting with her giant headphones? If nobody came to get her, would she try to rent a car, or would she start walking? When she got where she was going, would she stay, or would she go back to where she started?

“Let me grab this one thing,” Andrea said.

She unlocked the trunk. She hadn’t meant to get to this point. Things had gotten away from her. Everyone had flirtations. They were healthy insofar as they kept you from doing something worse. But here she was, on the precipice of something worse. Her husband was at home with the boys. Nick’s wife was out of town—girls weekend, Nick had said. All of this effort for what? She shook her head, which was inside the trunk. The rest of her body was outside the car. She was sweating more than seemed reasonable for one human body.

“Do you want help?” he called.

She grabbed her suitcase and thought with horror about the strawberries. There was nowhere to jettison them without Nick’s seeing.

“Do you think I could have a glass of water?” she asked. “I’m not used to the heat anymore.”

He disappeared into the house. She closed the trunk and moved quickly to the driver’s seat, where she inserted the keys into the ignition. She turned the radio loud, but only she could hear it. Only she could smell the strawberries. The windows were closed, and she was on her way back to the airport. She could go home, anywhere.

Or she could find the girl. They could get coffee and a donut. Andrea had a few things to say, but first she would listen. The girl had her own story to tell.

Please, take off your headphones. Tell me where you’re going. Tell me what you’re leaving. Maybe I can help. I’ve seen things—I’ve made mistakes! But I’ve fixed them too. Maybe we can help each other.

Read our feature on University of Nebraska at Omaha MFA Program Coordinator Kevin Clouther. ➔

MICHELLE QUICK | SONAR

Sonar

By the time April rolled around, Daddy and Uncle Johnny were still missing. It was already 100 degrees, the grass was fried, and the paint peeled up like Sunday ribbons from Mr. West’s Chevy. What little air there was to breathe boiled around us in waves.

Mr. West, Daddy’s friend, honked the horn outside Aunt Iris’s house. Momma waited a beat and then opened the car door.

Mr. West held up his hand. “We said 9:30. It’s 9:30.”

My baby brother crawled around in the front seat.

“Iris knows when Easter service starts.”

Momma closed the door.

I had spent the morning submerged. My fists pounded the sides of our metal tub, vibrations chasing circles around me before fading into nothing. I wondered if that was what sonar sounded like. Daddy said submarines had a special way of seeing, so even in the dark they could find their way.

I met Momma’s eyes in the rearview.

“Aunt Iris might need help with the food,” I said.

Mr. West positioned my brother on the seat beside him before responding. “Five minutes.”

Dandelion puffs hung like ghosts along the front porch. The house was silent. Seven peach pies cooled in the kitchen. Aunt Iris was out back, lying on the ground in front of Uncle Johnny’s shed, her blue dress darkened with sweat. Overalls lay neatly beside her. Her hand was in one of the pockets.

“Hey, Short Stack,” she said, her eyes closed.

“Mr. West gonna leave us if we don’t get. C’mon, we can sit together in the backseat.”

“Wanna sit together now.” She patted the dirt.

I brushed dust from the lace tops of my white socks as I reclined. The sun was smothered.

“Why’d you make all them pies?” I asked.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Momma put you down for potato salad.”

“Salad don’t keep.”

Clouds started to crisscross, headed straight for each other. I braced myself for collision.

Sonar was originally published in Don't Take Pictures Magazine.