

Copyright © 2020 S.L. Luck All rights reserved. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 9780463576175

Interlude:

A Collection of Short Stories by S.L. Luck

Contents

Together

Warm Welcome

The Three Ivanas

Interlude

Fieldwork

The Box

People Like Us

The Key

The Urge

Also by S.L. Luck

About the Author

Together

Elroy was uncomfortable. He bit the inside of his cheek until the twang of blood warned him to stop, at which point he let go and turned to the other side. Goddamn bitty boppers and their goddamn clumsy twirls and jumps, Elroy must have been bumped a hundred times. He got their sharp elbows in his back until he sat down, then he got their bare stomachs, sometimes their budding little nibs right on top of his head. Beside him, Cassy cooed in wide-eyed admiration at the gyrating starlet on stage. "Isn't she great, grandpa?" she yelled into his ear. Elroy shrugged his shoulders noncommittally. He looked hot. She tugged his sleeve. "You're the only one wearing flannel. I told you to wear a t-shirt."

"Not wearing what I don't have," he bellowed so she could hear him but her attention was already gone. Just like her mother, he thought.

Elroy suffered through at least twenty more minutes of candy bee bop, twenty thousand swaying tweens in Ali swag (he did the staggering math, revolted that the half naked, half talent must be mighty rich), when Ali finally slowed the tempo with "A Minute of You", thanking the crowd for making it the number one song on the Billboard Charts, whatever that was. The crowd settled, turning on their phones like a galaxy of waving electronic stars, and Elroy figured he might even settle in for a quick nap. Dog-tired farmers could sleep through anything. He leaned back, stretched out his legs, tipped the brim of his CFCW AM radio hat over his eyes and relaxed a little. Judy would have nagged him to stay awake, at the very least, but Judy was home with bad knees, so too bad. He was here, in this godforsaken circus, and he would do whatever he dam well pleased.

The arena dimmed and thousands of screaming kids nearly ruptured Elroy's ear drums. Ali had left the stage but the godforsaken concert wasn't over yet. Wild with anticipation, Cassy and her friend Peyton were nearly on top of him, trying to spy the stage through the dark. Elroy shoved the girls away and picked at something crusty in his belly button. Elroy had just located... what was it? A bug? Something from the thresher? Maybe a dried scab? ...when he was captured in a spotlight and a previously hidden stage began rising from the floor in front of him. Blinded, Elroy blinked, finding his face and exposed belly projected onto a massive screen at the front of the arena. He stood, confused. Beside him, Cassy and Peyton, so overwhelmed with excitement, began to cry. "Oh, girls!" Ali crowed down at them as she rose above in a glittering, plunging unitard. Fog swirled around her legs and poured down the ascending stage and onto their faces. "Don't cry, now! I'm just as happy to see you too!" Cassy's open-mouthed smile was so wide, her uvula was dangling, two feet long, beside Elroy on the screen. "What's your name girlfriend?" Ali lowered her microphone toward them.

"C-Cassy! I love you!"

"Well I love you too, hun! And you are?" Ali asked Peyton.

"Peyton!" she vibrated.

"Hi Peyton! Hi Cassy! Can everyone say hello to Peyton and Cassy?" The building reverberated with the sound of their names. Then Ali pointed the microphone at Elroy. "And who is this handsome fellow with you two?"

Elroy felt the singer's eyes on his skin and he blushed. Fuck. Elroy pretended not to hear the question or see the microphone in his face. He looked at his feet. "Oh come on now, sugar, don't be shy. We're all friends here." Ali crooned. She did not take the microphone away from his face.

"His name is Elroy!" Cassy shrieked.

"Why, hello there Elroy! Can everyone here say hello to my friend Elroy?" A spot at the base of his head started pulsing, drawing toward his temples, pressurizing his skull. Cassy patted his back, half jumping, half shaking. The crowd greeted Elroy, but Elroy still could not bring himself to look the singer in the face. Ali crouched to her knees. "So how are my new friends related?"

"She's my best friend and he's my grandfather," Cassy blurted. "Eeeeek!"

"Grandfather! Why, Elroy, you don't look old enough to be a grandfather. Am I right or am I right?" The camera zoomed in on Elroy. His tattered hat hung low over his eyes but even with that it was easy to see his wiry hair was almost purely gray. It seemed he had more wrinkles than skin and though his suspenders pressed his shirt tight against his body, they could not keep the bottom ends tucked into his jeans. He was just too fat. Ali knew it and the camera knew it. He reddened and his glasses fogged from the heat of his embarrassment. "What do you think, everyone? Should we have our friends join us on stage?" The crowd hooted and whistled for their luminary. Ali responded, "Well, alright then. Let's get you up here!" Fanatical cheers resounded. Cassy and Peyton scrambled up the makeshift steps and threw themselves into Ali's open arms. The trio hugged and jumped together, then Ali broke the hug and turned toward Elroy. "Whatcha doing down there, Elroy? We can't do this song without you. Get on up here, I won't bite." She held out her long jeweled fingers. Elroy crossed his arms and sat down, frowning.

"C'mon grandpa!" Cassy beckoned from the stage. Elroy shook his head, having none of it. Ali leapt off the stage and took Cassy's chair. "Let me tell you a story, Elroy. I want everyone to hear it. Settle with me a moment, will you? Hush now." She pumped her hand slowly downward, reeling in the crowd. "Shh. Shh. That's right, bring it back a step, just for a moment. Thank you. Now, it's no secret that I was raised by a single mother. My father left when I was just four and my brother was two. Shortly after that, my grandfather, my mother's father, died in a car accident. I didn't get to know my dad and I didn't get to know my grandfather but I sure wish I did. And seeing you here, Elroy, with your granddaughter in all this," she gave a wide wave over the audience, "well, it melts my heart. I wish I had that, you know? Someone who'll be there for you no matter what. Someone just like you, Elroy. I think there are a lot of us out there who wish for a little Elroy in our lives, too, am I right or am I right?" The crowd erupted with applause. "Help me show Elroy how much we love him! El-ROY! El-ROY! El-ROY!" Ali chanted and the crowd followed. Then she took Elroy's hand and led him on stage.

Questioned by Judy later that night, Elroy said he couldn't recall anything about the concert, only that Cassy and Peyton had fun but it was otherwise unremarkable. He was good at suppressing memories, even ones with semi-nude women in them.

Then Judy opened the paper the next morning.

"Local grandfather a hero to superstar Ali!" Judy shrieked and shoved the paper right under his nose, spilling his coffee. There he was, in all his red-faced glory, with Ali's arms wrapped around his neck and her lips pressed up against his cheek, his cap askew. He was smiling. Judy swatted him with the paper. "Nothing special, Elroy?" she asked incredulously. "You said there was nothing special about the concert. What the hell do you call this?"

"Nothing special," he blurted, to which he got another playful thwap on the back of his head.

"You're practically front page Elroy! Second page is as good as the first in my books and you got half of that! Look at you, all flirty with that girl." She proceeded to the junk drawer under the toaster, where she fished out a pair of scissors and set to cutting out the article for safe-keeping.

Elroy had never been a flirt. Where some men could navigate the seductive spurt of courtship, Elroy had always fizzled before he got going and he reckoned that Judy only married him out of pity. Still, the idea that Judy thought he had flirted with the popstar tickled him. "Jealous?" he asked.

She giggled. "No, hun, I know better than that, besides you could be her grandfather. She even called you her 'honorary grandfather' in the article. A chummy old man, in other words." Judy laughed again, puncturing the delicate bulge in his ego. "Like Santa," she squeezed his shoulders from behind and pecked him on the cheek. Like Santa? Elroy thought. Fuck Santa. "I just don't know why you didn't tell me about this, Elroy. Cassy must have been through the roof when that girl called you up. Just look at Cassy's face, if I didn't know better I'd think she'd have peed herself right then and there."

"Mind if I take a read, Jude?" She passed him the clipping and took his breakfast plate away while Elroy read.

Local grandfather Elroy Bends made a memorable impression on mega star Ali at the Scotiabank Arena in front of a roaring crowd last night. Following the popstar's number one hit, "A Minute of You", Bends caught the popstar's attention when he appeared onscreen beside his granddaughter, Cassy Bends and her best friend Peyton Illington, all of the small farming community, Scotch Block, about an hour west of Toronto. Over twenty thousand jealous fans swayed as Ali serenaded Bends with crowd favorite "Together", which the singer said was inspired by her hard-working, single mother. "Family is everything to me," the singer told the crowd. "Hang on to them and love them with all you've got. To all the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers out there, to all the grandmothers and especially to all the grandfathers like my honorary grandfather Elroy here, hold on tight and love, love, love with all your might." Extending an open invitation to Bends to her future performances, teary-eyed Ali encouraged fans to go home and hug their loved ones, then left us with her explosive hit, "Horrible", and we finally exited the coaster.

Elroy set the paper down and sniffed. Judy was watching him. "I'd say you made quite the impression on the girl, hun." Elroy shrugged, but he couldn't deny what was right in front of him, written out clear as day. He had made an impression on the girl. He hadn't meant to, of course, but there it was, in big, bold letters with his big mug squished up against her thin face. The girl liked him, admired him enough to give him an open invitation. A member of the closed-circle elite, Ali beckoned old Elroy Bends in. No, Elroy thought again. She begged me in.

Two days later, Elroy found himself in front of his bedroom mirror, smoothing his sparse wet hair over with his pocket comb. He hummed a little song, something not altogether unfamiliar, and patted Old Spice onto his cheeks and neck. His favorite pants had shrunk a little (or was he expanding a little?), and he couldn't quite get the zipper all the way up, but his shirt was long enough to cover the area this time. Judy hobbled in and pecked his cheek, "getting all fancy for this one, I see. Should I be worried?"

Elroy grunted, took his glasses off and wiped them with the hem of his shirt. "I'm like her grandfather, remember? Ain't nothing more than that."

"Has Cassy calmed down any?" she asked, smoothing the wrinkles from the back of his shirt.

"Girl's gone mad, I think. Her phone's been buzzing up a storm, can't even do her schoolwork, her mind's all fussed up with this nonsense." But Cassy wasn't the only one who'd gone mad. Elroy had, and Judy had, too. Their own phone had been rung by no less than twenty six people they hadn't heard from in years, some twice, and another dozen or so times by people Elroy and Judy had known intimately for decades. Big shot, his friend Frank had hooted at him over the phone, and Elroy liked the sound of it.

"Angela would have loved every minute of this," Judy said from behind him.

"Yeah," he said. "She would've been loony over this." Judy began to cry so he whirled around to fold her into his arms and let her leak onto his clean shirt.

Cassy called him from the living room. "Ready Grandpa?"

"Coming, hold your horses," he called back and released Judy, who was now crying harder than he'd seen her do in months, almost as hard as the day they'd found Angela, half buried in pink snow, near Minto, over an hour away. "You going to be okay Jude?" he rubbed her arms. She nodded.

"This is good for Cassy," he said. "All considered."

Judy sniffled. "I know. It's just..." she let the statement hang.

"I know," Elroy said, clamping his lips so tightly together he figured they might just bleed.

By the time they arrived in Ottawa six hours later, Elroy had sour sweat stains beneath both of his arms and another that spread from the crack of his ass upward half the length of his back. Already greasy, his hair stuck to his head as though he'd combed it with butter. Still, he and Cassy had no trouble retrieving their tickets from the Will Call booth. "You're the grandpa!" the jaundiced looking woman had said to him from behind the protective glass where she sat distributing tickets. Elroy nodded, offering nothing else to the woman. "You just call her up, just like that, and she get you tickets?" she asked.

Elroy nodded. It had been almost like that. Ali's people had given him a number for her assistant's assistant, some gum-popping screechy puerile twit that Elroy didn't much care for. The woman leaned in conspiratorially, "think you can get some for me?" She slipped her fingers under the glass that separated them and gave him a seedy smile that suggested if the glass weren't there, well, Judy just might have a reason to be jealous after all.

"Sorry," he said, and took the tickets and a tour pamphlet from between the woman's fingers. She let out a whoosh of air as he departed and Elroy couldn't help but smile a little.

They found their seats, much closer than they sat previously. Losing none of her earlier excitement, Cassy bounced for ninety five minutes while Elroy rested in his seat, fascinated by her energy. She reminded him of Angela. He sighed. Then he was entombed in light when a spotlight captured him. A camera immediately followed. There, front and center, Elroy Bends was back on the Jumbotron. He straightened and stood, pulling the back of his belt to get his jeans up under his belly, waiting. Cassy jumped all over him, screaming. Ali waved to him, and Elroy waved right back, giving her his very best grandfatherly smile. Elroy looked for stairs but there were none. He looked for a security guard to usher him toward Ali but they were all occupied with crowd control. Elroy searched for a secret stage where he was supposed to be, for any platform to do his thing, but he saw nothing of the sort. Soon, the light withdrew and illuminated other people in further areas of the stadium. Ali waved at them, too. Elroy slumped back into his chair and crossed his arms. Bitch, he thought.

Afterward, they waited for almost two hours in the autograph line when a man in uniform pointed to a woman with three young girls two places ahead of Elroy and Cassy and said, "sorry folks, but this will be Ali's last autograph of the evening. You can see Ali again in Montreal. Thanks for coming out."

A man grunted, pulling his daughter out of the line. A pack of women pleaded with the uniformed man and, when that didn't work, resorted to vocal but fragile threats until their embarrassed children towed them away. Cassy turned, pulling his arm along, but Elroy stayed put. "Come on, Grandpa," she said.

"We ain't going nowhere," Elroy said. "We stayed in that line and we're going to talk to her. "

"Grandpa—"

"She wants to see us, Cassy. Just you wait and see. Mark my words, when she sees us, she'll, well, I don't know what she'll do, but I can tell you she'll be damn happy." Elroy caught the attention of the uniformed man, who took little time to turn them away.

"Sorry sir," the man said.

Elroy stepped forward. "But she wants to see me." The man shook his head. Elroy pushed ahead and the man, not altogether harshly, pressed his hands to the fat lumps of Elroy's chest. "She's done today, sir. You can see her another time."

"But—" and then Elroy saw Ali finish her last autograph, standing to leave.

"Ali! Ali! It's me, Elroy! Grandpa Elroy!" he cried. Never before had his voice seemed so brittle, so pauperous, so strange to his own ears. The man held Elroy back while the singer blew the lingering crowd a kiss, waved at no one in particular and departed.

"This ain't right," Elroy said, his chest heaving, his breath coming to him in gulps, his body struggling with the union of his sudden excitement and decades of inactivity.

"It's okay Grandpa. We'll see her another time. Let's go home." The guard shook his head as Cassy took Elroy's hand and led him through the labyrinthine jumble of roped areas and concrete corridors, slowing outside for Elroy to catch his breath. She looked at him. He looked not quite tired, more like a kicked dog. "Maybe this wasn't a good idea Grandpa. I mean, isn't it a bit crazy to drive six hours for this when we were just at her show two days ago? I'm sorry I made you come."

At this, Elroy felt something tighten in his head, as though something had gripped his brain and was giving it a terrible squeeze. "Sorry? What you have to be sorry for? Don't you go being sorry for me. I ain't having none of your goddamned pity, Cassy. We came because we were invited. Just because she didn't see us standing in that line doesn't mean she didn't want to see us." But Elroy had saw Ali look at him when she blew that kiss to the crowd. He was sure of it. He was sure that in that second, that one infinitesimal slice of time, she'd seen him. But that fucking guard wouldn't let Ali come to him. It was that fucking guard's fault. Ali blew him a kiss because she couldn't come to him, and Elroy let her just walk away without getting what she really wanted. What Elroy wanted. Before they reached the car, Elroy jackknifed in the parking lot and turned back toward the building, keys dangling off his pinky finger. "Come with me."

"Grandpa! What are you doing?"

"Just getting what we came for." His pace quickened and Cassy had to jog to keep up to him. Elroy hadn't moved this fast in years and it felt good, really good.

Elroy skirted the building until he saw large black and silver tour bus towing a red trailer with Ali's face crawl away from the loading area. The singer was leaving.

Elroy ran. He pumped his arms and fanned his legs into the loading area, quick, quicker, until he reached a breakneck pace. His heart pummeled the inside of his chest cavity, rattling around like a rock in a coffee can, and Elroy felt the comings of an attack. Blackness shrouded him, threatened to overtake him in his stupor, take him and drown him until he did the thing that had to be done. Like before, only different. That he had survived. This he would, too. Elroy hit the bus with his hands and for a moment, the bus stopped. He had done it. He pressed his face to the black window from where Elroy was sure Ali was watching him. Might she even be impressed that a guy like him had the gumption to catch her attention like that? Most guys these days were pussies, sucking from mommy's tit so long they grew boobs, not balls. In Elroy's day, men were born, they weren't coddled into some delicate, inhibited existence. He smacked the window again. "I know you want to see me, Ali! It's okay. Grandpa Elroy's right here." He circled the glass with the tips of his fingers, like a lover, letting the whiskers on his cheek rest against his damp exhalation splotch on the window. "Grandpa's right here."

"Grandpa!" Cassy cried from behind him. "What the fuck are you doing?" The girl had never used such language in front of Elroy before but he barely registered the slip. The bus let out a high pssssssss sound. Elroy stepped back. Ali was coming to him.

Then the bus began to move again, faster than before, and Elroy was caught so surprised that he barely had enough time to jump back before the heavy tires rolled over his toes. He smacked the side of the bus, then Elroy ran, beating the steel with his fists and forearms, running alongside the vehicle until it was far out of his reach. "Stop!" he screamed. "Ali! Stop!" With a quick turn from the parking lot, the bus departed.

They didn't speak until they pulled into the driveway before dawn the next morning. Cassy had fallen asleep but Elroy was wired up, too agitated for even for a road trip coffee. He nudged the girl awake. "We're home."

Cassy gathered her jacket and backpack, leaving him without so much as a word. Elroy abandoned the warmth of the car for the chilly, unlit air. "Cassy—" he started but didn't quite know how to finish.

"Let's not talk about it, Grandpa."

"But—"

"It's over."

Elroy woke a few hours later to the smell of frying bacon and percolating coffee. He splashed some water on his face, treaded lightly down the steep farmhouse stairs to the kitchen and waited for Judy to do the talking. She wasted no time. "I looked for you in the paper this morning," she chuckled.

"We didn't meet her this time, just watched the show." He sat while Judy poured him a hot cup of coffee, adding a heavy dose of cream and stirring it before setting it near his empty plate.

"Well, it sounds like it was an exciting time." Was there something in Judy's eye? The way she looked at him, the way the droopier of the two twitched, made him wonder if she had spoken to the girl.

"Nothing but teeny boppers and bad music."

"Oh come now, Elroy. You must have enjoyed it at least a little?" she said, with a little hop in her tone that required an answer.

"Ah," he said with a dismissive swipe of his hand. "You know me, Jude. It's not my cup of tea."

Cassy bounced down the stairs in jeans and a sweater, eschewing the last step as she always did, nearly buckling a knee, as she always did. "Morning," she said, taking an apple from the bowl in the middle of the table. She snuck a piece of bacon straight from the sizzling pan, stole a piece of toast off Judy's plate, then kissed Judy on the cheek, which Judy warmly accepted. "I'm doing homework with Liv today." Cassy hoisted her heavy bag over her shoulder as if for evidence. She wouldn't look Elroy in the eye.

"On a Sunday?" Judy asked. She observed the dark circles under Cassy's eyes and knew the girl didn't catch enough sleep. "You must be exhausted, Cassy. Why don't you stay for breakfast, maybe have a quick nap, then I'll drive you to Liv's after lunch so you can rest?"

"I'm fine, Grandma. We've got a test tomorrow and I'm not ready for it." Judy tilted her head, raising her eyebrows. Cassy smiled. "I'm fine, Grandma. I promise. Just a few hours, okay? I won't be able to relax unless I study."

"Let Grandpa drive you, then. Elroy, be a dear a take Cassy to Liv's while I finish breakfast. It'll be ready by the time you get back."

Elroy didn't even have time to respond before Cassy said, "I'm good. I'm going to take my bike so Liv and I can ride the trail later on." She took her helmet from the porch, slipped her backpack over her other arm and said, "thanks though."

"Well, I suppose it's —" but Cassy was gone before Judy could finish her sentence.

In the quiet hours of the afternoon, Judy tended to her new garden under the late spring sun while Elroy brooded in the house. Fuck it all, he thought. If Cassy can't face him like a big girl, he'd treat her like a child. He and Judy had handled her with satin gloves over the last few months but no more. Mother's apron was gone, dead and buried, and Cassy didn't have anywhere to hide anymore. He'd ground her, that's what he'd do. But for what? For not chasing Ali's bus with him? No, that would definitely not fly with Judy. Cassy had cursed at him, he remembered now. How he managed to recall that, in the middle of his delirium, Elroy didn't know, but goddamn it, he remembered now, and he'd make damn sure to call Cassy on it. Now, if he could only force Ali to make amends...

Elroy studied the tour pamphlet the Will Call woman had given him. Ali had one more show in Canada before she headed south of the border for another thirty two. Busy girl. Elroy wondered. Maybe he'd give the girl another chance. Looking at the paper in his hands, he only now understood how busy the star was. He figured she must be exhausted, being in a new city every few days, prancing around in practically nothing, unable to retreat afterward until she had signed her quota of autographs for complete strangers who only wanted the proximity of her stardom. They didn't appreciate the girl like Elroy did. They didn't understand what it was like to live within a shell, emotionally and mentally confined, unable to share unmentionable secrets that sometimes needed daylight, sometimes the inky depth of the sea. If he really thought about it, and Elroy did, he knew that she needed him. And, perhaps, he needed her.

Later, when Judy entered the house with dirty knees and sweaty face, Elroy said, "I'm thinking of going to see Gary this week. Up for a road trip?"

Judy pulled the tips of her rubber gloves, removing them carefully so as not to dirty the floor. She took them into the hand still holding the muddy spade and said, "You know I don't care for him Elroy. The way he treats Nancy is just deplorable."

Elroy knew she'd say that. "He's just having a hard time, is all, Jude. Saw my picture in the paper and thought to call, so I figured maybe he could use a visit, you know."

"Well, I'm not going to let my knees go swelling in a car for fourteen hours just to see Gary. Besides, I never minded that city, Elroy. They drive like madmen over there."

"I'm sure Nancy would love to see you." Nancy, of course, would love to see Judy, if the glaucoma would let her, they both knew that, which tore at Judy's softest parts.

Judy sighed, shaking her head. "Send Nancy my love, Elroy. You go ahead. I have to watch Cassy anyway. Can't leave the girl alone that long, she's still a baby you know."

"Ain't no more a baby than I am a boy, Jude. The girl's getting a bit too smart for her britches, if you know what I mean. She damn well cussed at me!"

"No!" Judy was taken aback.

"What do you mean, no? Of course she did, Jude. You don't see the way she's getting too big for herself, wearing God knows what half the time, swearing like a baboon, running off to her little friends, disrespecting us. We got to start putting our foot down, Jude."

"But surely—"

"But nothing."

Then Judy hit him with one of her hard stares. "Elroy, after what that girl's been through, we will do damn well everything we can to help her through it and you putting your foot down, so to speak, isn't going to help anything. So help me God, if you so much as..." But Elroy left to pack.

Elroy settled into the spare bedroom that night, having received the cold shoulder from Judy until he could stand it no longer. Cassy, too, was silent with him when she returned from her afternoon with Liv. Elroy figured Judy and Cassy could fucking have each other, then. He'd go take his trip and let them to their sulking. He picked up the phone and dialed the number Ali's assistant had given him. Her concert in Montreal was just three days away and Elroy was determined to be there, to show Ali that no matter how she had rejected him, he was practically family and he would be there to support her no matter what.

Elroy gave his name to the woman on the phone and told her he was planning to attend Ali's show in Montreal. She paused, then said, "I'm sorry, sir. Your name's not on the list this time."

"There's got to be a mistake."

"No mistake, sir."

Elroy coughed. "I have an open invitation for all of her concerts. She said it at her show in Toronto, when I was on stage. Grandpa Elroy? I made the paper. You gotta know who I am. I'm sure she wants me there."

"Please don't call back." Then the woman hung up on him.

Elroy shook. From his fingers to the top of his head to his ankles, he pulsed with rage. His breath quickened and he could not get enough air. Pinholes of light dotted his vision and soon the darkness took over. Elroy slumped onto the bed and didn't wake until dawn.

He left before Judy and Cassy could catch and castigate him, packing only a change of underwear, a pair of jeans, a shirt and his toothbrush. It was enough for three days. Judy would expect he would do laundry at Gary's, like all the other times, but Gary wouldn't even know Elroy was in town. He didn't want to share the girl. This one was his. Plus, Judy wasn't the money manager in their marriage. It was Elroy who kept tight reigns on their finances. Judy got what she got and if Elroy wanted to spend money on a hotel room and concert ticket, it was his God-given right and, besides, Judy would never know,

He checked into the Auberge, a cheap hotel with free breakfast and onsite laundry a little after ten in Montreal that evening. Only a six minute walk from the Bell Center, it was affordable and reasonably close. Elroy pulled out Ali's tour brochure, which gave him a website where he could purchase tickets. A quick search on his phone showed none available but a pop up advertisement directed him to another site from secondary sellers. "A fucking grand?" Elroy said to himself when he scrolled over the prices. He had to sit close enough so Ali could see him but that kind of money hurt the bank, no matter which way Elroy considered it. He'd bought from scalpers when he was younger but there would be no guarantee of proximity to the stage. Hell, there'd be no guarantee even with the thousand dollar ticket. Hadn't people been fooled before? Elroy knew it to be true but he also knew it was his best chance to see Ali. If it turned out to be a fake, he'd have to settle for whatever the scalpers were selling. He pressed "purchase", then took the pad of hotel stationery from the desk drawer and began to write.

Dear Ali,

I didn't mean to scare you the other day. I just wanted to see you. I know it sounds crazy that an old man like me can care so much for someone like you, but it's true. You remind me of my daughter, Angela, I think that's why I did what I did. We found her in a snow bank in March and I miss her so damn much, you know? I was a father and I can be your father, too. Or grandfather, if you prefer, but I think I see you as my own. You can look up to me and I can help you with anything you need. I'll see you tomorrow.

Love,

Papa Elroy

Of course, Elroy didn't know where Ali was staying, so he did a quick search online, copied the letter two more times, sealed each in an envelope, and delivered them to the three most likely: the Ritz, Le St. James, and the Loews. Something about the uppity front desk woman at the Le St. James told Elroy he would find Ali there but Elroy didn't press the bitch. Not yet.

Elroy wrote five more letters that evening. Ali needed to know about him as much as he needed to know about her. He wrote that he didn't love his wife, that he hadn't in a long time, that they hadn't had sex in almost eleven years, that she looked at him funny since their daughter died, that maybe that look was always there and he hadn't previously noticed it until then. He wrote that farming was hard work, a lonely man's work, and it sure would be nice to have someone to talk to, to share his secrets with, to maybe love a little. Elroy penned another that described, in detail, the position of Angela's body, how it looked like she'd peacefully fallen asleep in the snow, how hard it was to clean the area when cold white and warm red made a slushy mess over everything. Judy knew, he scribbled, and that made her just as bad as him. Ali couldn't blame Elroy for not loving his wife, then, could she? How could you trust someone like that? Unable to sleep, he took all five letters back to the St. James just after three in the morning.

Two hours before show time, Elroy found his chair on the floor, two rows away from the front of the stage and five seats off center. Ali would see him for sure. He smelled his armpits. Semi-fresh. He waited while the arena filled. His girl would be on stage soon. The opening band was just beginning to pluck their instruments when a bald man with an Ali lanyard hanging from his neck approached Elroy. The man leaned over the front row between two eager fans and called, "you Elroy?"

Elroy stood straighter. "Yeah!" he yelled back to Ali's guy.

"Come with me." The man beckoned to the girls to move aside, sliding their aluminum chairs apart to help Elroy through.

"Awww! He's so lucky!" a girl gushed. Elroy beamed, even gotten a bit of a chubby. Ali had gotten his letters. She had understood him. Now they could be together.

Robed in his faded blue hospital gown, Elroy sat across from Dr. Lessnar for another one of their assessment sessions. "You can't keep doing this, Elroy. You have to talk to me." The doctor crossed his legs and leaned forward. "You can talk to me here or in prison, Elroy." But Elroy knew where he belonged. He hummed "Together" to Doctor Lessnar, and remembered everything.

(Back to top)

Warm Welcome

By the time Idmon had been pushed away from twenty three houses, he suffered a broken leg, four eye pokes, a burnt scalp and more scrapes and scratches than he cared to count. His back ached. "Get out!" they would shout at him, when they had words at all, but most often they simply screamed and struck out, trying to rid him from their spaces, even the planet. He knew their hospitality so he was usually prepared, but sometimes he wasn't quite quick enough. A warm space, that's all he wanted. Somewhere in from the wind, somewhere that wouldn't make him too tired to move and freeze his skeleton to the sidewalk. A little food, too. That would be nice.

He knew he was intimidating. For his size, he was stronger than anyone ought to be, and they didn't much like his cunning, either. They didn't see that he could be of great help, a vigilant night watchman, and keep order in the depths of their households. His very survival depended on watching, but here he was again, broken. His entire body throbbed and he had to drag himself onward after an old woman in hair rollers went after him with an umbrella all the way to the end of her driveway, where a man then tried to run him over with his car. Still, he never fought back. What was the point? So here he was, on the doorstep of house number twenty four. Idmon looked up, hopeful. Please have mercy on my soul. Take me in and let me be of service. I promise I will make you happy until I die.

Firelight glowed through the windowpanes and Idmon yearned to be within. He took a few painful steps, winced, and drug his broken body toward the front door when a small boy leapt out of the house, scarf and hat falling away as he chased a restless dog onto the lawn. "Help me. Please. Angel of heaven!" Idmon begged the child. The boy bent over to retrieve his hat and regarded Idmon for the first time, slumped there, spasming in pain. Like the others, the boy was wary, too, but little boys were good at seeing past ugly exteriors. They knew ugly could be useful.

The dog sniffed Idmon's face, but the boy held the dog away, patting its rump back up the stairs. "Go. Go in!" Then the boy reached out to Idmon, leading him with gentle hands into the safety of the house and away from the crippling cold. "Merciful God! Thank you for this boy!" Idmon cried with happiness as the boy smiled down upon him, carried him upstairs, and deposited him into a glass box. Then Idmon was quickly swallowed by a lizard. Spiders were useful after all.

(Back to top)

The Three Ivanas

I am everywhere. I wake to the spinning tangerine sunrise in Donglü, once the kaleidoscopic embodiment of the Virgin Mary, then drop scoops of hot rice into my children's bowls in Hanoi. I make my morning tea with water ladled from the terraced rice field south of Luang Pragbang, the one tourists visit with their tuk tuks, then I slit the bark of the pará tree in Trang and wait for its thick milk to fill my bucket. In Magway I weave cotton into a beautiful blanket, before accepting deposits and assisting with small withdrawals at the busiest bank in Chittagong. I carry the weight of grand expeditions on my shoulders in Kathmandu, placing my feet in the grooved imprints of men, unpack in Kangchenjunga and set our tents up in Karakoram. In Helmand, I score the seed pods of the immature papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, teasing the hallucinogenic latex out, then let my soulful voice carry my devotions to Allah at mosque in Takestan. I fill prescriptions in Bahrain, sit in parliament in Khartoum, gather firewood in Kisangani, give my body to paying men in Yaoundé then suture patients in Oran. All this before lunch.

I fly a Boeing 787 from Warsaw to London three times a week, slurp spätzle in Sankt Goar more than that. The children in Amsterdam call me  betoverend, magical, for my soft hands in their open, cavity-filled mouths. I hear the arguments of criminals in Turin, of taxpayers in Lyon, and of toddlers in Valencia. In Maine, I am a healer, Montreal a thief, Denver a farmer, Calgary a hockey player. I am Karen in Melbourne and Rose in Sydney. People call me Hina in Tokyo, Mia in Davos, Maria in Kiev and Ivana in all three. I am everywhere, you see.

At this moment, I am Jovana in Belgrade. Look past the bruise on my eye and the blood on my lip. I can cover it so no one will notice and there will be nothing to talk about. My role here is the unchanging one. The one that has always been and always will be. Whether I am a pilot or teacher or surgeon, it makes no difference. Whether I am single or married, have children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, or whether I am a child myself, and sometimes I am, my role is the same.

It's early morning and the hurt is fresh. Last night Miloš returned from the kafana reeking of rakija and cigarettes. I heard him stumble into the apartment and though I pretended to sleep and the baby was cuddled beside me, he was ready, so I had to be, too.

His tongue slackened by liquor, he drooled on the back of my neck as I moved the baby over, far out of the way. She had been hurt before so I knew his reach. I let him turn me around and stumble his way in, knowing that the slow start and awkward finish, more of alcohol than age, would infuriate him. I was right.

Midmorning and I leave Miloš sleeping, take the baby to Miloš' mother's. She says nothing about my face. I say nothing about hers. The train ride is slow. Women and men, we are boxed in together. The air is sour. Another Slava, the celebration of a family's patron saint. Last night was the glorification of Zlata, a Christian peasant seized to be a Muslim wife within the Turkish empire, venerated not just for her refusal to conform, but for suffering months of flogging and surviving flames intended to kill her. She was eventually cut into pieces.

The October sun is unusually hot and intensifies the sweat on the men and the resignation in the women. Some get off and others take their places but the smell is the same. Women check their images on their phones, the poorer ones look in cracked mirrors fished from purses. High cheeks and puffed lips, mouths stained red, resilient eyes. Four of us leave but I am the only one to go north when the train stops, walking another twenty-five minutes to work. That I have work at all, I am lucky, and I thank God every time I enter the building.

"Dobro jutro," good morning, I tell my colleagues. The factory is busy with clinking machines, chattering women and serious men. Around the corner is my office, a ruddy desk among a shoddy quartet across from the toilets. I set my things on a chair then turn the kettle on for coffee. Vera takes my cup and fills it with scoops of Nescafé then she fills her own. She does something with numbers, payroll, I think. Five years before that she cleaned the floors. Her husband and the floor manager, Goran, are close.

"She's late again," Vera says, tipping her chin toward Aleksandra's desk. Aleksandra is the youngest amongst us. Twenty-three and was almost successfully married once. Now she gets drunk and dances in splavs instead.

"Ah, to be young again," Maša pulls her face from her own computer, fidgets with her glasses and smiles. The recollection of her own youth far off, Maša is almost sixty and a grandmother. She'll be a great-grandmother in June. My baby is still in diapers.

The kettle boils and Vera fills our cups when Aleksandra rushes in with wild hair and latex pants. I can see her breasts through her shirt and Goran can, too, because he appears almost instantly. The rest of us are married, so our expiry dates have passed and we are souring, our husbands left with rotting fruit. "Ciao Lepa!" Hi beautiful. Goran embraces Aleksandra and she takes him in, lets his hands and eyes consume her as though she is perishable. "I was worried about you. Car trouble?" We know that he knows Aleksandra doesn't have a car because he insists on driving her home on Fridays when his wife takes their children to her mother's in Dobrinci, a small village near Ruma not far from Belgrade.

"You know," Aleksandra says and shrugs as though it's enough of an answer. He fondles her again, kisses the air beside her cheek and tells us it's going to be a busy day so we better get working. Then he leaves, pulling a cigarette from his breast pocket and lighting it as he is enveloped by envious men. They look back at us, at Aleksandra, with lupine eyes, slapping Goran on the back and rubbing his shoulders, having earned their recognition.

"Pigs," Vera says.

Aleksandra waves the comment away with a flick of her hand. "Ah, Vera. You say this now, but you'll be just as upset when the pigs stop grunting at you."

"They already have." She doesn't say what Maša and I already know. That their silence is even worse. It tells of louder things to come.

I wasn't always a designer. Before this I cleaned houses and baby bottoms and pet hair for several rich families and one cheap vet. Six days a week for just enough to keep me self-reliant. It was a good feeling. The work disappeared when I got married. People don't want their help to need help. It makes them feel obligated. One lady, a Canadian from Vancouver, took me to the police but they laughed at her and told her to stay out of it, that it was a family issue. Then they told me to go home and be a good wife. The Canadian cried on my shoulder and showed me some things on the computer. Eight months later she moved back to Canada but left me her laptop. It took me another five months to find a job. I wasn't pregnant yet so I had to be put to work.

My phone rings. Another number I don't recognize. "Go ahead," I say to the stranger. That's how I always answer. The caller hangs up. Maša looks at me. She knows.

For another two hours I open files, change or fix fonts, place text. It's a bit of an exaggeration to say I'm a designer when really all I do is adjust files that have already been created by someone else. Sometimes there is little work to be done but more often than not I repair their accidents or patch their missteps. I'm good at it.

I'm working on the cover for a box of bandages intended for young girls. There are pink princesses in yellow castles, wide-eyed cartoon cats, and unicorns on rainbows. Magic. Neither Goran nor his bosses seem to care much what I do. Bandages are a part of life. People don't stop buying them because the text is crooked or the colors don't match, but a pretty exterior is still necessary. Same thing with menstrual pads. Something has to stem the flow. The men in the office, the approvers, avoid looking at my designs when I have an image of a pad on screen, like it's something they're not supposed to see, some dirty impediment of womanhood they can't handle. Men at home react the same. I bring the image up often.

Even when the pad changes, when it is slimmer or wider, with wings or without, the paper liner is unchanging. This is my turn to reach out. Look close at the curvy lines and flowery shadows. Inside them, within their disguised loops and contoured feminine whorls is a message of hope. My phone number. The best kept secrets are in the crotch.

The world is full of Gorans. In Belgrade, as in New Delhi, Cairo, Jakarta or Morocco they might take any shape. They look like cousins and brothers and fathers and neighbors and bosses. In Edmonton and Paris and Orlando, they use disguises. Those Gorans have stricter rules.

My phone rings again. "Go ahead." Crying. "Hello?" The faintest whimper.

"Ladies, suppose we get some lunch?" Maša pulls off her headset, insisting Vera and Aleksandra accompany her to the pekara around the corner where the burek is fresh and the yogurt is cold. They go.

"Hello?"

Sniffling. "Ovde sam." I'm here.

"Are you safe?" I ask this question even though if the answer is negative I can't do anything about it. But I want to know.

"Da." Yes.

"Are you hurt?"

"Da."

"Do you need medical assistance? Are there children in the room? Are they safe?"

"Da." A blanket answer.

"What's your name?"

Sniffle. "Nevena." She almost chokes this out.

We engage but both of us know I'm not real, that I can do little, if anything, to help her. She tells me she is married, that she has two children, that her nose might be broken, and that she is a police officer. We both know, then, that she is not real either. Our influence goes no further than our conversation, especially in Belgrade. My gift is honesty. "It won't get better," I tell her. "You will not be heard, even when the world is quiet and your voice screams, when your blood is spilled and your children cry. A thousand nights behind closed doors, ten thousand days in the open, you will be reduced to less than nothing, but the scars those lashes bring are stronger than steel. They are molding you, the pain fortifying even the smallest cell of your being. Listen, Nevena. What they don't know is that they are making you supernatural. They are forging fire in your veins and grit in your soul. Remember it's the martyr that ascends." Silence.

"Nevena?"

"Ovde sam."

"I'm here, too."

"Are you a martyr?" she asks me.

"I'm a witness."

Seven more calls before the end of the day. Sometimes Maša or Vera answer for me. Aleksandra keeps Goran away. If they only knew what power we have. Thank God for periods.

Miloš is waiting at the table when I get home. The ashtray is full. He is brimming with nicotine and regret, but he'll soon piss this out with the rakjia. He touches me with tender hands. "I've been thinking." A dangerous thing.

"About?"

"You. Me. Us. This place." I let the silence build between us. "What if we get out of here, get out of the city for a while, maybe settle somewhere quiet."

The dishes need washing. I feed the baby and change her diaper. She is calm today, a giggling, inquisitive bundle of skin. Miloš bounces her on his knee while I prepare potatoes and ćevapi, both spicy the way Miloš likes it, neither of which agree with my stomach. The baby stops bouncing and starts fussing but Miloš holds her tightly, urging her to behave. His fingers settle deep in her skin and she reaches for me but Miloš spins her around and puts his face just inches from hers. "Ne!" he bellows. No. Ask anyone and they will tell you how much Serbians love children. But ours was born without its most important part. Me too, for that matter. I scoop up my unequal child. "Why move?" I ask. "Why now?"

"Because," he says and, like Aleksandra, it is enough of an answer because it is all I will ever get. I can expect no more, can dream of even less. That important part of Miloš, the one that entitles him, is also his greatest weakness. It fills him with undeserved pride. I don't press him for more. I know he has lost his job again so he wants to retreat to his grandfather's village, a settlement for the vanquished.

"What about my work?" I say it innocently but he reacts as if I've pounced on him like a tiger. He swings back.

"Quit."

I wonder who will take over for me, if someone will change the number on the pad. Maybe Vera or Maša. I wonder if anyone will still call the number I've left, if anyone will reach out to me, if there will be another witness out there for people like me. I wonder who will answer my call. Maybe my daughter. Maybe her daughter. I wonder who will answer their calls.

I am Ailith in Edinburgh and Olga in Moscow. Now I am Sister Dalisay in Manila.

(Back to top)

Interlude

The man wearing garbage bags approaches the bin. Coke. Fanta. Water. Bottles. Cans. Empty. With urine. Without urine. Spoiled milk. Rotting chicken. Green bread. Grease. A diaper. Another. Decaying cat. Blood. Not his. The garbage bag man knows his body as intimately as a surgeon knows his scalpel, more than the drunk knows his drink, and his body tells him to move on. He extricates himself from the handle he leans on for an inside view and shuffles onward. Long ago, when the bags he wore were new, he'd rustle and crinkle from bin to bin. Now, the bag on his chest is soft with age and weather but the bottles tied to his feet as shoes still make crackling sounds, a peremptory warning to other scavengers and a signal to non-invisibles to keep their distance. They always do.

The next bin is promising. Two half-loaves of day-old bread are tied to the handle. He checks them for color, turns them over his scabbed palms, digs a hole through the plastic and smells. Still good. He pulls them from the handle and sets them in his grocery bag then he lifts his heels and inspects the mound within the metal. More bottles. Oil-stained cardboard boxes. Brush rubbish. A half-eaten orange. A miniature toy soldier affixed to a small square of green plastic by one leg and the butt of a rifle. The soldier's other leg had been ripped off, a wisp of fictile web in its place. His breath sticks with memory and he looks up, searching for the crow. There are two on a tree and another on the bin beside him, none of which are his tormentor. Come black devil, come. Take my eyes in your beak, pull them until they are mine no longer and our partnership is done. You owe me that. The parching Serbian sun rises, the kind he used to shelter from but now he lets it burn his back, singe his lips, scorch his tongue. He moves on, thinking about Bujanovac.

***

Milica was a teacher, a fine one, at the grammar school in nearby Presevo. She made the children laugh. "Gather, little ones, we have another story." Squeals could be heard all the way in Kosovo, their invasion of innocence not altogether unwanted, held with sympathetic ears. "But first!" Laughter. Tender arms were up, reaching, pleading. Me! Me, teacher, pick me! She studied the group with one eye, always one eye, pretend patched like a pirate because the children thought it was funny and it made them more attentive. She picked Andjelka, far in the back, whose own left eye was closed with considerable determination, as evidenced by the peek of her pink tongue in the corner of her mouth. "Rise Andjelka! Captain Milica picks you, the bravest, most courageous hero our world has ever known!" The rest of the children dropped their hands , defeated, while Andjelka stood and fidgeted with the hem of her shirt. "Are you ready to be our hero today, Andjelka?" The child nodded. "Then make haste and let's have your wisdom!" The child moved to the cabinet behind her teacher, considered for a moment, then pulled from a small selection of old books, settling on One Thousand and One Nights. She fingered the pages until she reached her favorite, "The Story of The Three Sisters", the one she herself called, "The Talking Bird". Slowly, because the complicated words made chalk of her tongue, she spoke about Periezade and the talking bird and how the Persian princess outsmarted a clever trap and saved her brothers from an enchantment that turned them into stone. The children gasped. The storyteller liked it when they did that. It meant they were listening and, perhaps, hinted at the softening impediment of her tongue .

The man remembers this clearly. He had been observing quietly in the corner while he waited for Milica to be finished. Sometimes he would come early on purpose, just to catch the newest hero, sometimes to see the magic that was his wife. That day he needed a part for the tractor so an early trip from the village was necessary. School finished, the children rushed out, and they were accosted around their waists by Djuro, who giggled when they were caught surprised. "What took you so long?" the child asked.

"But we were here," his father replied. "Waiting for you." He ran his long fingers through Djuro's soft hair, kissed his head.

Djuro pondered this and squished up his face the way he did when he was trying to think of something smart to say. "When can you sit in my class?"

"When your teacher asks me."

"There'd be too many people if Papa came, Djuro. The other fathers would get jealous and would want to come, too, and then there'd be over a hundred people in a room built for ten. It would be so crowded you wouldn't even be able to see him and Ms. Garic wouldn't be able to teach and we'd have to put you back in the same grade to learn it all over again." Milica winked at him.

"There's thirty-seven in my class, Mama. If the other papas came there would only be," he calculated slowly, "not even eighty."

They smiled at their boy. "One day, Djuro, maybe when all the heroes in Mama's class are gone, I'll sneak into your room in a cape of my own and surprise you."

The boy giggled. "You'll have to wear a mask so no one recognizes you."

"Of course."

The ride home was slow, during which the boy regaled them with his own feats of heroism, something they pressed the importance of upon him since birth. "I gave Luka my cookies and helped Ana tie her shoes."

"Well done, Djuro."

"What else?" his father asked.

Milica turned to him. "Isn't that enough? He's only eight, my love."

"Sure, sure. It's enough. But are we asking our son to be a regular hero or a superhero?" He drove on, his foot barely touching the gas pedal, wanting to extend this time as long as possible. He looked in the rear view mirror, Djuro's pouty baby lips were pressed together, concentrating. "Well, my boy? Are you a regular guy or a superhero? Tell me, what have you done today that'll make you fly?"

Quickly, the words fell from his mouth. "I opened the door for Ms. Garic twice today and I read a book to Aleks. Oh! And I got a teacher to help Ivan. His leg was bleeding and he was crying."

From the driver's seat, eyebrows shot up. "What happened?"

Djuro shrugged. "He caught his leg on the slide." The man knew the slide the boy was talking about. Rusted, broken, sharp like a blade, the one he instructed Djuro to avoid. "Was it bad?"

The boy shrugged again. "I guess."

Silently, the parents cringed. "Good boy. You've definitely earned a hero's reward, then." The man nodded to Milica, who then passed the boy a small bag over the front seat.

***

A dog . The garbage bag man, with his own smells and smears and pheromones, lets the creature near and allows it to sniff until it huffs disinterestedly and trots away. Beasts like him, nature's own, never bother. It's the talking ones that are dangerous. Above him, a charcoal colored sky settles in so he moves on, down the hill toward home. The bilious rumble of his stomach tells him a bin was bad, that the meat from what he thought was a good bone had turned and was now rotting inside him. Take. Take. Take. Take. Take. That's all his godforsaken country had done to him, its kleptocratic fingers flensing every last bit off him like a starving vulture until his own bones were hollow and brittle and the marrow of his very own soul was void of anything nutritive or worthwhile. He reflects that he had been hollow for a long time but that even his emptiness is worth something, another badge of dominion in the nepotic system. Still, as long as he moves, breathes, as long as he continues, there is always more to take, which he would give willingly but the crow is patient, temporizing his end like a plaything for so long that the man anguishes over it. Be done with me! He begs and throws his brittle bones at the crow, but the crow won't have him yet. There is more to be picked from him.

***

At home, Milica prepared dinner while the man worked the field. Sugar beets and sunflowers. Djuro joined, alternately pulling weeds for the man and posturing his new toy soldier in the dirt, readying ambush for some unsuspecting spider or dragonfly. When he finally managed to catch a slow-moving, matte-black beetle, Djuro pressed the base of the soldier onto the insect's back and crushed it into the earth until its squirming legs stopped moving. He showed his father, proud of his kill. The man, dirty and sweating, set down his bucket and crouched beside his son. "Tell me, Djuro. Is your soldier a hero?"

The boy nodded. "Yes, Papa."

"Then tell me why he kills." Djuro couldn't answer, the enormity of the question evading him. "Do heroes kill for the sake of killing, Djuro?"

"No Papa. They save."

"Let me ask you again, then. Is your soldier a hero, Djuro?"

"No." The boy whispered, sullen until his face regained its spirit. "But he will be, Papa. I promise."

The man folded his son into his arms. "Good. Always remember, Djuro, that the world only needs one kind of hero. It has enough criminals already." Slowly, the pair worked the inner field toward the outer, where the apple trees and raspberry bushes budded along the perimeter, a little beyond which a different kind of fruit festered in the earth. Lethal iron relics waiting to be unleashed.

***

Rain. He shuffles quicker now, passing the nursery school and posta, away from the open market, past one café, another, two more, all busy with the comings and goings of oblivious life. They don't know the crow like the man does. They don't know the crow is watching, waiting for a stumble, a moment of weakness, just long enough for an opening to be had. Then they will be split and further wrenched apart bit by microscopic bit, the slow tearing creeping up on them like a pack of silent bandits until they are powerless to do anything but pray for a quick and total theft and all will be done. Even the air stings, though he feels it more acutely than the rest, the polluted aviary that is the Belgrade sky keeping the scavengers in, always in, always hungry for more.

Water soaks his skin, douses his matted hair, weights his beard, drips from his bags. He hasn't been clean in weeks, hasn't wanted to be clean, his skin a fecund plane for bacterial and fungal growth, yet he feels this downpour a tonic for his dying soul. When the man reaches the fence he slides through a steel seam and makes for the concrete pipe, peeling the plastic off his body, continuing naked, letting nature lash and drown and push him until he is inside.

***

Milica called them to dinner but the boy and the man were enjoying their time in the field so she carried plates out to them where they ate together and the evening was good. Here, far in the outer field where their small orchard was beginning a new season, where husband and wife were full and content, a boy yearned to be a hero. Djuro could not think of anything but that and it pulled his attention from the insects and the weeds near his parents toward the trees and the earth in the place where he must not go.

There. A crow.

A splayed wing rested where it shouldn't have, but the bird's spasms did not set off any of the iron fruit. A wide arc the bird raked into the broken grass suggested to the boy that the crow had been struggling quite a while, yet no ordnance had been activated. Maybe there were none, Djuro thought. Maybe the buffer was wider than his father told him. Seeing the bird and the area it unsettled made Djuro believe it so. He tested his theory by throwing a stick. It landed beside the bird without incident or sound, the soft earth and tall grass, long undisturbed, cushioned the object like a pillow. The boy gathered five sizeable rocks and tossed them where the shortest path to the bird would be. He threw a few more sticks. Nothing. He looked behind him, saw his parents' backs, their murmuring happiness, and decided to be a hero.

***

It is still dark when the man wakes in the early morning and he has little light by which to fetch his bags. Eventually, he finds them, rain-soaked, against the fence and puts them on. Like a thickened condiment, he squeezes out into the world and begins the trek back to his bins, knowing that the rain would have soaked everything and he might not eat today. Sometimes water is a good thing, cleansing, even, makes him believe that the discarded scraps he puts to his mouth have been washed and so better for him. On days like this, however, when the predawn heat steams water off the road and quenched trees are already sagging in thirst, water in the bin means a putrefied heap.

The heat intensifies by midmorning and after checking all of his bins, he knows he will have no luck today. He will have not a scrap of meat or even a speck of bread, everything ruined. The heat is so fierce by midday that his bags threaten to melt to his skin so he discards his plastic shirt and carries on, bare-chested, far into the area where people are much less tolerant of him, but where he might find something clean to drink. Soon his tongue gets heavy and weights his mouth so he lets it flop out and hang and he has to keep his jaw open to keep from biting it off. He talks to himself partly out of delirium, partly because he is afraid that if he doesn't, his throat will seize and dry shut and he will no longer be able to speak to the crow and beg it for mercy. The man walks on, clutching the one-legged soldier, mumbling to himself, searching for the crow.

***

Silently, so as not to disturb his parents, Djuro crept into the place where he must never, ever go. He had not thought of heroes as children. He thought of them as mature warriors and brave risk-takers. He could be brave, too, though. The bravest. He straightened his back, pulling his shoulder blades together, his chest high and heaving, when he took his first step into the bad place, the area behind the string perimeter his father made him know as soon as he took his first steps. Djuro. Don't go there, Djuro. It can kill you, Djuro. Yet the boy tiptoed past the string toward the crow. When he finally reached the bird, he was so happy he was not dead that he laughed loud, feeling a bit silly. Hearing this, his parents turned. Now cupped in the boy's hands, the crow shifted its head and regarded the man on the other side of the string barrier, where the earth was safe.

"No, Djuro! No! No! No!" Milica was on her feet, running toward the boy before the man could comprehend what was happening. "Don't move! DO! NOT! MOVE! Stay where you are, Djuro! I'm coming to get you!"

It was not until the bird released the man from its spell that the man was able to speed toward his son. "Milica!" he cried. "Don't go in there! Djuro, stay where you are! Everyone, just stay! Do not move!" He was in charge now, but Milica did not listen. She only saw and heard her son. "Milica!" he begged, almost upon them. "Don't..."

But she was already in the buffer zone and over the string enclosure. One step, two steps, and mother and son were reunited. She hoisted Djuro onto her hip, hugging him hard until he protested, clutching him more, crying into his hair and leaking snot onto his ear. When the boy showed his mother the crow, he realized that it was, in fact, dead, that it was past the point of salvation when he picked it up, and his mother had likely squeezed out whatever was left inside that kept it alive. Defeated, he let the bird drop from his fingers onto the explosive soil.

God. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. Please God, no. Please. Please God. No. No. God. No. Oh God. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. God. No!!!

***

Anyone close enough would hear the garbage bag man's whispers, his silent pleadings. The sun is high in the sky, sucking every last drop of moisture from him, drying him like one big meat snack. He slumps on the sidewalk outside a kafana, leans his failing body against a bin and lets the hot surface sear his shoulder, ribs and thigh. His skin blisters and swells and for a moment he suspects he might even be on fire. Believing that this is what they felt in that final moment sends him into a paroxysm of grief so deep he vomits on himself, lets the sour, half-digested meat and stomach acid run down his chest and through his splayed legs. His tears are dry, like puffs of air, as he grieves over Milica and Djuro and his goddamned penitent existence. He curses his birth, his slipping into a country whose congenital venality stole everything from him, whose endemic rapacity authorized the misdirection of resources intended for clearing the minefield and culled his wife and son without so much as a blink. He looks up, around, his clouded eyes searching for the crow. Take me already! Take me you leech! Fill your belly with my blood and be done with me!

A person. In his stupor, the man doesn't hear another approaching until he feels something cold against his calf. It startles him and he jerks up, half-blind with dry eyes, then reaches for the thing against his leg. Plastic. A bottle of water. The man screams. Why? Why keep me here when there is nothing left for me? He kicks it away but the movement is clumsy and the bottle rolls back to him. He lifts his face to the blazing sky. Please. No more. Please. I have no more to give. Take my rotting flesh and make it good again, where it may be reunited with Milica and Djuro. Please. He rolls onto his back, closes his eyes and relieves his bowels. The man cannot see the crow watching, he does not know that the crow is waiting, that his prolonged agony is the very thing the crow wanted from the very beginning. Since his birth.

Hours later, when his excrement has dried and baked onto his skin and fused him to the sidewalk, the man sees what he has so long waited for. The boy takes his hand, his wife takes the other, and when they lift his clean body up, feathers shed from his body onto the ground where they will wait another life.

Somewhere, in another field, in another Balkan village, in another hospital, a baby is born. Before the infant can meet his mother, before his first breath, his milky eyes regard a black thing.

The crow waits.

(Back to top)

Fieldwork

There is an obituary board that hangs beside the post office at the end of my street. I've visited it many times over my six plus decades. There, where we congregate evenings after late supper when the punishing Serbian sun finally retreats, I see faces of my friends, living and dead. I am always surprised when they go from one state to the other, finally presenting their past selves on rain rippled paper until another of us takes their place and our own papers are placed on top. Whether Vlach or not, our placement on this board is inescapable. I am not Vlach, a practitioner of black magic, as much of Zaječar is. I do not stand naked on riverfronts burning bats wings or red strings. I do not cast spells to make a boy like you or make his sex dysfunctional to all others but you. I wouldn't wear a wedding dress to a funeral, but I would respectfully mourn the groom. I am an Orthodox Christian like my Vlach friends, but that is where our similarities end.

"Terrible," says a voice behind me. Milena rests her hand on my shoulder, studying the new breed of dead. Every night she drifts in from her hut on the hill. She is older than I am so it takes her time. "So young, but that's what you get when you leave the window open." I nod. The silent mass murderer that can never be caught: promaja. Laugh if you will, but drafts can be deadly. We all know that.

"You getting on all right?" Milena asks me as we scan the board.

"I'm okay, moja draga, my dear," I say and settle on a picture of an old woman at the top of the far right corner of the board. She replaced my Nikola and I had to let her. I had no say in the matter and she had every right to be there. The crispy edges of Nikola's obituary are still visible beneath the woman's obituary so I kiss my finger and press it against them. Milena rubs my back. "But I need to find work. After rent, I have almost nothing left now." I've already rationed my blood pressure pills but they will have to spread even longer. The realities of death.

"I'll be right back," she says and returns after a while with a newspaper, folding my arm in hers, and we shuffle, elbow to elbow, to our favorite bench between the playground and the library. She opens the paper to the employment section. It's the most sparse part of the paper with just two entries. Someone always knows someone else looking for work so ads are almost never necessary. Softwear Developer, the title of one is in English.

"Softwear? They're missing a space, I can't work for someone who can't spell." I snort. Most of us know at least a little English and even I know where the spaces go.

"What is softwear anyway?" Milena asks, her nose scrunches so far up that her thick glasses slide and she has to push them back up her face with the tip of her finger.

"Fashion designer, I think."

"Maybe something with socks?"

"You're both wrong," Milena's son, Miroslav, surprises us from behind. He kisses our cheeks and spreads his arms wide to delicately embrace us old ladies as though we are fat and fragile birds. "Software has to do with computers. See?" He points to the advertisement we are puzzling over. "It's actually spelled wrong here. It's software, with the e over here." He points to the offending letter.

"Well then, that won't do, will it?" I shake my head and we laugh at how old we've become.

"You looking for work?" Miroslav asks. The question is shameful but coming from the man I've known since my own boy was in diapers, and that was over thirty years ago, but I take no offence. He is the son I wish I still had. I nod. "I'm sorry, aunty. Is there anything I can do?"

"Bring Vladimir back."

He hugs me and sighs. "I wish I could, aunty, I wish I could. But where he is...well...your guess is as good as mine. "

"Ungrateful, that's what he is," Milena grunts. "After all you've done for him, when plenty of other people would have given him to the government and let them deal with him."

"Mili —"

"No, Lidija. It's been too long, running off like that. Who does he think he is? I'll tell you, if Miroslav did that to me, I'd string him up and let the birds get him. That's what I'd do."

"Mama!" Miroslav chides.

"I love you, my boy, I love you more than God's green earth but to abandon your own mother?" She lets the rest of her statement hang.

Vladimir wasn't born properly. Not in the real sense. He came out with a foot as curled as a ring of sausage. The left was perfectly straight and normal but with the right, well, you could have taken his leg and spelled any number of words with it. Java. Coffee. Jabuka. Apple. Jaganjac. Lamb. Jadovan. Miserable. Jalovo. Hopeless. Jednostran. Uneven. They wanted me to put him in an institution, but I knew his brain was good. One look into his eyes, even from birth, and you knew he was assessing you, calculating your capabilities, your misdeeds. He was moral to a fault. Is. I should say is because, even after eleven years without a word from him, I feel he is still alive, in a better country somewhere still telling people what they should or should not be doing, protesting for the greater good. He was there when they rushed the streets, rallying against the steel smelter that choked people out of their homes in Smederevo. He hid in the bushes along the riverbank, filming a hospital dumping human waste into the water. Body parts and blood. Vladimir stood against bribery, thievery, intimidation, deception, the tenets on which the very brow of our government rests. Vladimir stood against it all.

There was a protest against the landmines in Preševo, the old ones and the new ones, in downtown Belgrade. Vladimir went. Four days later, he came back. They had taken two of his toes on his bad foot and he almost died from infection but that didn't stop him. He went again, and again. "I'm going to change the world, Mama," he told me with that sideways smile of his.

"If they don't kill you first." I warned him. Then he kissed me and I forgave his risks. That was back in 2008, when Nickola was still alive, almost ten years since we survived the war.

I look back to the paper, where the next ad is more promising. Day laborer required, call Čedomir. The number is not familiar, saving me from embarrassment.

"You don't want that one, aunty," Miroslav immediately says.

"Why not?" I ask.

"Laborers usually mean, forgive me for saying this aunty but it's true, it's man's work." It's not for an old lady like you, he respectfully keeps to himself.

"But maybe not. It doesn't say anything about the type of job it is, does it now?" I circle the advertisement with a pencil. Miroslav gives Milena a look. She frowns and shakes her head, almost imperceptibly. "What? Do you think I'm too old to work?"

"That's not it, aunty."

"Then what? You don't think I'm capable? Look, Miroslav, I don't have much choice. Opportunities are not exactly dropping from the clouds, now, are they? Especially for people my age. If I were in the city I could clean houses but no one here needs that kind of work."

Milena pats my wrist with her rough fingers, "I don't think this is the right job for you. Just wait a bit and something better will come along. Maybe you can watch Andje Petrovic's kids. I hear she's going back to work soon. You used to love that, remember? Weren't Sonja's sons a blessing?"

"When they weren't pissing on the carpet," I shush her.

"Come on, Mili, you know what I mean," she urges me, taking her glasses off. She uses the hem of her blouse to rub them clean, squinting with near blindness until she puts them back on.

"A call doesn't hurt anything."

"Please, aunty. Don't. Not this one. Wait a little, okay?"

I throw my hands up and stand to face my two closest friends in the world. "What? What is it? Will one of you please tell me what's going on?" I flatten the rough fabric of my skirt and wait.

Neither of them are quick to comment but then Milena sighs heavily, rubbing her stiff knees. She pulls at her scarf. "You told me to keep our superstitions to ourselves but this one, this one is no good for you, Lidjia. No good."

"How do you know?"

"It's not new, aunty," Miroslav says. "It's been there for months."

"Ahh!" I dismiss their concern with a wave of my hand. "You two and your superstitions. I can name at least a dozen people who sat at the corner of a table and still got married. Just because the ad's been there so long doesn't mean it's bad luck."

"Ten of those marriages ended in divorce, if I remember correctly," Milena says wisely. "And I hear the other two aren't far behind. Besides, it's not the ad that's bad luck. Tell her, Miro." She tips her chin to her son, who has taken my spot on the bench. I look down at him as he speaks.

"Aunty, don't you think everyone in town would have called that number? There had to have been at least twenty guys I know who checked it out but when they heard where it was, well, none of them took the job. I'm telling you, aunty, the land is cursed."

Men don't turn jobs down. Not here. Not ever. It's just not done. "Go on," I say.

"Zeljko Milošović".

"The developer?" I blink. A city employer.

"Only one of his many hats, "Miroslav says.

"Why would he need work here?"

"Ask yourself that question, aunty."

I call the number anyway. The man who belches into the phone identifies himself as the Čedomir and tells me he has a field that needs clearing, trash collected and other items disposed of. Maybe a week's worth of work. He seems unconcerned that I am a woman, a sign that he is desperate, but asks how old I am. Even over the phone I sound brittle.

I tell him. "Sixty-nine."

"Ha! Well! Even that is a bit seasoned for me. Tell me, woman, will I find you sleeping or even dead in the field? I can't have a corpse to move on top of everything else. What a circus that would be." He sighs heavily and coughs wetly into the phone.

"I am a widow and my son is gone so there is no one to collect on my behalf," I counter. "But I can assure you, I will survive it."

Čedomir lets out a long groan as though his bones are tired and he is lifting from a couch. "Come, let's see you tomorrow, then, woman. If you prove yourself, maybe you'll last the week." He gives me the address of a field along the highway toward the village Nickola grew up in, about forty minutes out of town. I will have to ride the bus to get there.

My strongest shoes are fastened tight to my feet when I meet Čedomir in an old farmhouse withering in a copse of rotting trees set far from the highway. He greets me on the porch beside an ailing dog. "Ah! Woman! There you are! Today is the day you become young again." He laughs and spits something thick onto the floorboard beside the dog.

"It's Lidjia," I tell him, extending my hand.

"Of course, of course. Hello Lidjia." He pulls my hand in an apparent test of strength, to appraise my pains but I do not give him the satisfaction. I squeeze back. "Well then, Lidjia, if you're ready, the bags and pails are over here..." he starts, stepping away from the house, pointing left, toward a crippled once-red shed, hunched so far over that the roof nearly touches the ground on one side.

"You want me to crawl in?"

"Don't let it fool you," Čedomir says. " It's much stronger than it looks. Totally safe." We duck inside the building. Dusty sunlight slices through cracks in the walls so we are able see what needs seeing. I take my supplies — rubber gloves, two pails, a roll of trash bags, a spade and short rake — then Čedomir points to my work area, nearly six acres of trash strewn land. He looks at me. "Better survive the day, woman, I don't want your ghost coming around here." He is superstitious like Milena and Miroslav. A Vlach, maybe, but there's no red string around his wrist.

I don't see Čedomir for hours, long after my muscles gave up and my bones had to lobby the rest of my body to continue the work. My ankles, swollen over the tops of my shoes, are now as thick as my calves and push against the cuff of my pants, which are now tight and unsightly. I am mottled gray all over, dry with dirt, and slimy brown under my arms. I pulled sixteen buckets of paper and buried twine and soda cans and cigarette packages and plastic wrap. All this near the house.

My aching knees lug my worn body up the stairs to the house. The dog hasn't moved. Just when I think that only one of us survived the day, he catches his breath and emits a long, low snore. We both have sleep apnea, then, poor mutt. The screen door screeches open and Čedomir exits with a bottle of beer in his hand, throwing his throat back and taking a long drink. "Still here, huh?" He scratches his stomach and slides a bill into my hand, the equivalent of ten dollars —worth a litre of milk, loaf of bread, a cabbage, a package of coffee and fourteen pills — telling me that I'll be on my own for the next two days but that he will leave money in a pail in the shed for me in his absence. His eyes bulge when he sees my inflated feet. Our sour smells percolate, my odor of hard work, his of negligence, rolling my stomach into a sea of nausea. Before I leave he says, "anyone know you're out here working like this, woman?"

He means, you shouldn't be doing this, old bird. Look at you.

I swipe the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand and stuff my empty lunch bag in my pocket. "Friends," I shrug.

"Some friends."

"Can I ask you a question?"

"It's not worth any more than what I gave you."

"Huh? Oh, no. That's not it. I'm just curious, well, I guess I'm wondering why an old lady like me? There's got to be a number of younger men who would be better suited for this type of thing, you know. And I heard your advertisement had been posted for months." Better yet, the sloven could have done it himself.

He takes another swallow of his beer and spits beside the dog as if to scare him awake. The dog extends his front paws and back legs, stretching long and lean, yawning into another position away from where the spit landed. Čedomir shrugs. "You know."

"My friends say the land is cursed."

"Maybe it is."

I have a red bracelet on my wrist when I return to the field, something Milena and Miroslav insist will ward off evil, but I wore another crucifix anyway. Čedomir doesn't scare me. Air raid sirens, those scare me. Things falling from the sky, that scares me. So it is with little reluctance that I greet the dog and take my things back into the field at dawn the next morning. Low clouds and hovering mist compress my view, forcing me further away from the farm house and down a slope toward the breezy highway, where the field is edged by wild grass and hip-high shrubs. In an hour, I collect soda cans and beer bottles and more than a few pornography magazines, a few which look too fresh to have been settled long. Vladimir would have liked them, I think, Nickola, too. I flip through a few ungodly pages, thinking of what my life has come to, when I spot something beneath a raised growth of weeds.

Something whitish and long.

The dead like to present themselves. Any Vlach will tell you this. My own Nickola came to me in a dream, telling me to do the dishes. Mirena's husband, Ostoja, appeared to her in Prerast. His soul is trapped there for seven years so she visits him when she can handle his bitching. I've never gone to visit him. It doesn't seem fair. The bone that reveals itself beneath the grass isn't fair either. It speaks of foul play or indifference. I'm not sure which is worse.

"What the hell is this?" I speak to the two Jesuses on my chest. They don't answer but they know. I know they know. Together, we brush dirt away, first with my spade, then with the delicate fatless pads of my fingers, smoothing the thing that used to be inside a human. Cars pass, uninterested in the shaking old woman crouched in the grassy field alongside the road. If I were a different person I would have taken the leg right out of the ground and thrown it at their windows, maybe shock them to attention, or sympathy at the very least.

There are at least three people buried where I sit. Two skulls, three spines and seven feet tell me this. In another life, I would be free to involve the police, but this is my life, with second-world sensibilities. My brethren, for that's what they are, whether Serbian, Albanian, Bosniak, Romanian, indebted, unconnected, vocal, or just plain poor, fell to the great kleptocratic trap, the sinews of their resistance at last snapping into eternal submission. They are indebted no more.

I take the buckets home with me, filling them high, tucking my lunch cloth and scarf tightly over their shameless jutting as the bus jerks us toward home. Even now, they want to be revealed, they've forgotten about the furloughed sympathies, the unrewarding allegiances. They haven't been dead long enough.

I say nothing to Milena and Miroslav because no magic, black or white, will make this any better. By the end of the week, I've collected twelve more buckets of resistors. Čedomir asks nothing so I offer nothing. Our silences have gotten longer, conversations shorter, meetings even more brief, whether because he knows or because he doesn't want to know or he wants deniability, though I cannot help but to look at him as a murderer. The pretense of ignorance only makes it worse. My buckets are full before lunch so I take some time to rearrange the cargo, fitting the caps and long bones into rib cages and skulls to make more room. A gentle rain begins to fall and my dead friends are made clean again. Fat puddles collect in divots and in muddy cavities along the field so I scoop my buckets in the crooks of my arms and hustle toward the farmhouse, carefully manoeuvring around the craterous slicks that threaten to pull me in. The clouds grow darker and soon a hard rain roils the turbulent earth, sucking at my feet, weighing down my buckets. Halfway to the house.

I run fast for an old lady. War has taught me that dawdling gets you dead. My feet move quickly but the flesh of the earth has opened on me, oozing over the tops of my shoes, into my socks and between my toes, making a filthy sucking sound as though the torrent is draining downward and I might cork the hemorrhage. I lose a shoe on my next step but when I fish through the muck to retrieve it, my fingers settle on something hard. A toe. Decency insists that I either leave the toe where it is or gather whatever adjoining parts I can. I cannot take half a man. Where would his soul rest? Nickola would tell me to carry on and leave the toe and my buckets, that I've tempted trouble too much. But Nickola is dead. He has no say in this, nor, I suppose, do I.

Two more toes reveal themselves, long, skinny things that once ventured and gripped and kicked. There is something about the shortest toe, though, its side is a bit flatter than the others, as if it had been worn down, the way old rocks smooth under running water. I dig some more. Only three toes. I do not want to search any more. I can't. Please God, save me. Be merciful for once and finally grant me a heart attack. Kill this old servant of yours. Please. My stomach sours, and then I am cradling my boy's club, his blessed J, in my arms.

Good and bad Vlachs alike will tell you that a crow doesn't scavenge its own. Common interests demand acquittal, no matter the fault. But I am no Vlach and Čedomir is not my brother. Milena could cast a spell for me, one of those spooky things, and maybe give Čedomir cancer or bad luck, but that is not enough. I am stronger than I look. Strong enough to drag warm flesh into the field of bones and bury it among the others. Strong enough to feed an old dog some new meat and carry my boy home.

(Back to top)

The Box

Afterward, when she heard its mewling, newborn cries, Anna helped her mother clean up the blood on the bathroom floor. They used the good towels, their only towels, to sop up the birth, carefully scrubbing the grout in between the tiles, the forgotten area behind the toilet, and the cracked and peeling linoleum that did not want to let their secret go easily, having sucked up the life that spilled onto it like a giant, chintzy leech.

"Does it have to cry so much?" Anna asked her mother, worried that the neighbours might hear and tell her father. Then there would be terrible trouble.

"That's what babies do, Anna," her mother said. "You cried when you were born and so did your sisters. It's a good thing, it means he's healthy." Anna doubted this part very much. His thing — she knew it was his thing because it was right between his legs where her thing was — was dark purple and withered and Anna wondered if it would eventually shrivel and fall off like what her mother told her would happen to the tube attached to his belly button. She watched as her mother brought the baby to her breast and let him take the full circle of its tip into his mouth. He quieted and drank, sounding like her big sister Abby wherever she had a Slurpee. But there was no Slurpee coming from her mother's breast, Anna was almost sure. Something milky yellow pooled around the baby's mouth and he seemed happy with it.

She saw water in her mother's eyes and Anna wondered if the baby was biting her, but then her mother wiped at her face, sniffed and let out a long breath. "Would be nice having a boy around here, don't you think?" Her mother asked.

Anna thought about this, about how what little there was to eat would be rationed and part of her already meagre portion would go to his mouth, how her hand-me-downs — so thin from wear that you could see her elbows and knees through almost everything that was supposed to cover them — would be mended and made not new but wearable and suitable for a boy. Then she pictured her father in his oil-stained overalls with his sour whisky breath creeping in on the baby when it was dark, taking the liberties of the damned. She shuddered. "No," Anna said, "we can't keep him."

"I know," said her mother, hugging the baby tightly, letting him get his fill. "I know, but in another life it would be a wonderful thing, a real blessing. Here, take the rags and put them in the tub and fill it with water and no more than half a cup of bleach. Can you do that for me?" Her mother removed the baby from her breast and swaddled it, naked, in her little sister's Dora the Explorer pillow case. The baby slept.

Anna filled the tub with water and bleach as instructed and swirled and mashed the bloodied towels together. Rusty pools of birth sloshed out of them and tinged the water a sickening, dying color that turned her stomach, but she was strong and so she scrubbed and ran new water until the towels were an unburdened white yet again. She put what looked like a thick white sponge onto her mother's panties and helped her bring them to her hips. Her mother reached for her, held her to her chest and kissed her head, sobbing into Anna's hair, kissing, hugging, and sobbing. "Sorry, Anna," her mother said. "It's just not a normal thing for a mother to give away her baby, it tears a little piece of your heart out and it will never beat the same again. And you, you're too young to have to see this, Anna. You're my baby, too, and it's not fair of me to rely on you like this. If you hadn't been sick from school today..." she stopped, not wanting the child to feel at fault, and kissed her again. "But I'm lucky you were with me, Anna. So lucky. You're my angel, baby."

They dressed into clean, unsoiled clothes and set the others to wash with the towels, again. Outside, the air was cold and their sole-flattened boots slid and skidded on the fresh dusting of frost, making the going slow and treacherous for the baby, who was bundled snugly inside his mother's coat. They walked toward the hospital, where her mother told of a baby box where they could secretly put him. "It's warm and lit up like a small little room with blankets and everything," her mother said.

"Will he live in the box?" Anna asked.

"For a little while, a few minutes maybe, but they'll know he's there almost as soon as we drop him off and they will pick him up and take good care of him until they can find him a nice home. He might even get to have sisters or brothers and a dog or cat and could even go to school with you one day, but you'd never know that he was your brother." A blaring, neon white hospital sign seemed to interrogate them as they walked past, but they continued beyond it, toward a nondescript jutting of brick near a side entrance. Behind the brick wall, a clear microwave-sized box was set into another wall. Dim light flooded a nest of blankets inside the box and overhead, engraved on a plaque just above the clear plastic read the words, Love is life, life is love...because you wanted the best for me, I will live in love.

Her mother shook with the great flood of tears, coming so hard and fast they created a small pool in the triangular hollow of her neck. Anna held her mother's leg, feeling helpless and sad, the kind of sad little girls should never be allowed to feel, but she felt it anyway. And she cried, too, cried because her mother was crying, cried because the baby was silent, cried because it would be a childhood-long struggle to conceal this day from her father, from her sisters. Mostly, though, Anna cried because she would be returning home, to her father, and her brother would be free.

Her mother unzipped her coat and removed the sleeping baby, hugged it and kissed it one last time, then held it out for Anna, who kissed the soft, fur-covered folds of his neck. They sang quietly to him, "I love you, you love me", a song Anna would never be able to sing again without remembering her brother, the loss of him. For a moment, Anna was jealous of him, knowing that he would go somewhere magical and safe and she and her sisters would be left to their father, again and again. She wondered why her mother didn't love her enough to put her or her sisters into the box but then thought of how hard it was for her mother to hide her pregnancy, even though she barely showed at all. Anna wondered if would have been different had she been born a boy.

As her mother laid her brother on the blankets, covering him and tucking him in, Anna felt she was still small enough to fit in the box, maybe with her knees tucked to her chest. She could make herself fit and then she would be taken somewhere magical, too, maybe even with her brother. The thought comforted her.

They walked away, empty handed, but for the knowledge of the box. Anna held her mother and her mother held her, but not for long. It wouldn't be long.

(Back to top)

People Like Us

I never had grey hair until my father died. Even in my fifties, I've been lucky enough to be able to forego the ritual most women put themselves through just to look a smidgen like their former selves. But here I am, three months after the funeral and Nicole is rubbing the black stuff onto my scalp, carefully wiping away any drips so I don't look end up looking like my ex whenever he had it done. He of the wandering hairline. She bends my head to get at the nape of my neck and says, "You know, Mom, I think you're really going to have fun with this. It's a new adventure for you."

My chin is touching my chest and I momentarily wonder if I should by a new bra for the puppies. Might have been twenty years since I last thought they were worth being back where they originated and got me one of those fancy push-ups. Howard didn't even notice. He was a guy who would notice anything, everything that wasn't attached to me. Tractor. Dog. Dirt. Our daughters got the most attention and that was good enough for me but occasionally I wouldn't have minded being considered with a tad more interest than a loose fence post or dip in the driveway. "It's a bit nerve-wracking, actually," I say into my boobs. "Haven't done this since I was younger than you are now, you know."

Nicole's face is suddenly beside my boobs, too, trying to reassure me, or, how do they say it now? Play me up? "I know, I know. Dad was the only guy you ever dated and you haven't been in the game for almost twenty-seven years and back then it was easy because as long as you were a nice girl you could find a nice boy to date you. But you shouldn't think about it like that, Mom." She takes the face cloth off the table and dabs at a drip near my ear and it reminds me that I should clean them or candle them or something. What if my date looks into my ear and sees a clump of wax or hairball? Howard didn't get waxy ears until he was far into his forties but by then everything else about him reminded me of our cows, too; stiff and lumpy and smelly and about as much conversation out of him. "I'm telling you, Mom," Nicole says, "it's still like that, really, but with the whole social media thing thrown into the mix. Don't even have to leave your house to meet a guy, you can do it from the comfort of your house right at your computer. Kinda like home-shopping in a way."

"Buying one would be easier," I say, to which I get a playful swipe on the shoulder. "Then I could get anyone I wanted, no questions asked." Damn those questions, I thought. I promised myself I was going to be honest for the first time in my life, but that is almost impossible to do when you have your daughters hovering over your shoulder, checking out everything you type. I could feel their breath on the back of my shoulders as they tittered amongst themselves each and every time I attempted to bare my soul to the virtual world. This is why I created two profiles. One of the me they all know and love and one of the me they have never known and I'm not sure they'd love as much. Or maybe they would, it could just be me being me and all but there's something fundamentally wrong with being dishonest to those closest to you. I've always thought that and it's always eaten me up, though never enough to be truthful about it. My father knew, and I know he knew that I knew he knew, but he never said anything to me about it. I think that's why I loved him so much. My one confidant, the one person who knew the real me and loved me no different, now dead underground with Nana's rosary curled around his rigoured fingers.

"They ask the same questions to everyone, Mom, and that's the only way they can find the perfect match for you. "

"So that's why that kid from Zimbabwe showed up. And the married guy from Oklahoma. Or that stripper in Vegas. Perfect matches for me."

Having finished getting at my roots, Nicole massages the goop over the rest of my hair. "It's because you weren't selective about it, Mom. You didn't set your perimeter tight enough because you were too nice when you answered the questions. You were never going to date anyone in another continent. "

"Maybe I would." I say.

"And you'd never date a Muslim or Buddhist."

"Maybe I would. I don't want to discriminate." I wag a disapproving finger into the air.

She shakes my head a little too roughly. "No, you wouldn't. I still go to church with you every Sunday, remember? Not the Muslim or Buddhist temple. You may say you can look past differences like that but that stuff is pretty major, Mom, and if you tried it and it didn't work out you'd take the failure as proof that the system doesn't work which only serves to justify your thoughts in the first place." She sounds so grown up, I think.

"I get it, but maybe something different would be good for me, you know?" Something totally different. Something more like the real me.

"Sure, I guess," satisfied that my hair is fully saturated, Nicole covers my head with a submarine- yellow grocery bag, Superstore, I believe, carefully tucking my ends in and seals it with a tight knot at the front of my forehead. "But not everybody is going to be right for you, and you shouldn't want them to be, either. Then you'd end up with another generic relationship and you wouldn't be happy."

"My marriage to your father was not generic," I say, even though the word generic sounds absolutely right on the button. Underwhelming, even more so. "We were perfect for each other at the time, really, but we were kids and when you're that young it's easy to make decisions at the snap of a finger. Nothing ties you down, not that you girls tied us down or anything, but the world was ours and we didn't have to care about anything but ourselves." I stand up to pour myself a coffee and the grocery bag crinkles in my ears. "But when you get older you have bills to think about and a mortgage and health issues and everything else that comes with being an adult. That's when you can see those little things in your partner that annoy you or trouble you, you know, the things you can do without. And that's what marriage is, a bunch of things you can do without and a wee bit of the good stuff."

"Don't be so cynical." She says and sets the timer on the stove to go off in twenty-five minutes. "Dad's not that bad."

I take a sip of my coffee. "Of course he isn't, dear. He's perfectly fine for someone else." Nicole bumps my foot. "Of course I loved him; still love him, honey, just not in a way that would make either of us happy. Does this make sense to you?"

She shrugs. "I guess." And in that moment, she is the girl I remember at sixteen, crestfallen and broken on hearing the news of our separation.

There is a knock on the door and Jamie comes whirling in as she usually does, all sparky and rambling as though in the middle of a conversation. "So, you are gonna be so surprised, Mom!" She kicks her shoes off and presents a glittering pink gift bag at my feet. "Okay, so I know it's not your usual good luck type of gift but you were due for it anyway, and I just love the color." She is vibrating, literally shaking with anticipation, as she has since she was a child whenever she was excited. Nicole pours and passes Jamie a coffee and they wait in front of me, sharing those Christmastime looks like they were children again.

I nudge the bag with my foot, eyeing it suspiciously. "Should I be scared?" I ask, knowing that with them the gift could be the most random thing that would never make sense to me but perfectly sane to them.

"C'mon, Mom! Open it, open it!" Jamie moves toward the bag because I am obviously not doing it fast enough so I snatch it up, take my seat, and place it on my lap. Not too heavy. I'm sure it's clothing of some type. They keep telling me how I need to update my look and though they haven't quite mentioned school marm yet, I'm sure they would have if it was in their vocabulary. I peek into the bag and part the pink tissue paper with a hand. The soft, flawless paper is a terrible contrast to my bulbous knuckles and rough, patchy skin. I make a mental note to get a manicure before my date and wonder if they can work any kind of miracle to make my hands look, well, not so worked. I eventually get past the morbidity of my farmer's wife's hands and pull out a creamy yellow sundress. The fabric feels like softened butter and as I rub it between my fingers, my skin catches and snags on it and I'm afraid I'll ruin it before I even get to try it on.

"Isn't it pretty?" Jamie asks.

"Lovely," I say because it is. It's soft and satiny and I know that it's cut to hide my hips, thin my waist and put all the focus on the puppies, which have grown so large over the years they are practically their own country. I imagine myself in the dress, the fabric settling in bumps over my butt and pulling, no, screaming, at the tension over my chest. A nice shawl could cover that up, I think.

"There's more," Nicole says, and prompts me to dig back into the bag.

This time, I pull out lace panties and a bra, one of those expensive ones from the specialty shop that I always liked and needed but couldn't quite afford. The cheaper, full support versions I typically settle for need replacing every year when the elastic breaks down and the puppies travel to my belly. They are like they're own timer, really, because with every inch they drop, they accurately tell me how much longer I have to purchase a replacement bra. Five inches above my belly button and I've got about a month, three and I'm past due. "This one should fit you properly, Mom," Jaime says. "You really should go in and get a fitting done, so it can be perfect for you, but we stole a couple of the Commanders and brought them into the store and they sized you from there so we could still surprise you."

"Still calling them that, huh?" I smile at the nickname they've given my bras. "It fits, given the job they have to do," Jamie says and hoists her own buds toward her chin, getting no farther than her armpit. "I said I'd give you some of mine if you ever want it," I told her. "I have enough for each of you and maybe we could just use the rest to help some breast cancer survivors or something." I say it in jest but have always secretly wished it were as easy as that. Then I'd only have back pain from working on the farm. And putting up with Howard's crap, of course, but that part is mercifully almost over.

"Mom," Nicole says, "the bra is going to make you look awesome. I'll bet you'll want to show 'em off to the world when you're wearing it."

I nearly spit out my coffee at this one, but I figure I'd let them have their excitement. I smile that mother's smile that tells them simultaneously I love them but I think they're crazy. This is when Jamie instructs me to try it on. I politely explain that I'm afraid my hair dye will ruin it and that I would try it on later. I don't tell them that I'm not sure I want to see what exists on that skin my breasts have taken liege upon. Could be a village of something under there, but knowing that would require actually seeing the area and none of the dollar-variety bras I've purchased since the girls were born have given me that benefit. I wonder, then, if this miracle sling they bought me has the word crane embroidered anywhere on its equipment.

It's when I'm in this mental tug-of-war with my long-lost underboob skin that my offspring exchange this look. A look that tells me there's more and that I might not like whatever the more is. "What?" I ask and eye them up. Nicole will crack first, I know, so I train my eyes on her.

"What?" Nicole's voice cracks, waivers like she knows she's been caught but she's not willing to admit it. Her eyes seek out her sister. Looking for backup, I suspect.

"Nicole?" I question like The Great Inquisitor, but I get nothing.

Jamie holds my shoulders, and I'm an arm's length away from her face when she says, "We have another surprise for you."

"Oh?" I say, and wonder if it's anything like the surprise of a spa day and complimentary Brazilian wax treatment by a not-so-gentle German woman, just last week. I am only now able to sit with comfort and without the desire to put an ice cube between my cheeks and let it melt into oblivion, cursing my children until I get that numbing relief, and then again when the freezing wears off.

"I told you this was a bad idea," Nicole says to Jamie.

"Tell me," I say and gently pry away the cup of coffee Nicole holds against her chest as though it might protect her. I've never been violent and never will be, but I give one hell of a grilling when needed. Already, and before my girls even begin to explain their latest scheme of which I am obviously the victim, I prepare myself to take whatever assault it is and return it with full force. Their eyes tell me it's a big one. I plant my face just inches from my baby girl's face. She is sweating and nervous. "What did you do?" I ask, each word the staccato thrum of a gavel.

"We, uh..."

"We did you a favor," Jamie says.

"Because we love you," Nicole adds.

"And that is?"

"We created you another profile on the dating site you're on. We used all of the same pictures and most of the same information that you have on the other one, but changed a few things that we thought were more like the real you so you could meet someone that might actually work for you," Jamie tells me. "We just don't think you're going to get the kind of people you really want with the way you answered your questions. "

I set my coffee down. "Excuse me? You did what?" I feel the hot flush of my father's temper rise in my cheeks. An accompanying headache at the base of my skull crawls toward my ears and pounds my temples. "Take it down."

"We will," says Jamie confidently, if even a little brazen. "After you try it our way, just once. Try it your way with, uh, what's his name again?"

"Willard," Nicole says, her eyes on the floor.

"Right, Willard. You go on your date with Willard tonight and then go out with Dale tomorrow and if you're unhappy with our pick, then we'll remove your profile and no harm done." She has rehearsed this, I can tell.

I say nothing because there is nothing to say. I've been betrayed by my own children, the ones I birthed for a combined forty agonizing hours, the ones who pledged their loyalty to me when Howard and I separated even though I never once asked for it. I toss the rest of my coffee in the sink, rinse the cup and quietly walk to the door. Jamie and Nicole watch me slip on my Crocs, something else they tell me to get rid of because the shoes apparently became unstylish when I first put them on. I slip my purse on my shoulder and the Superstore bag slips off my ear, so I tuck it back into the wet mess of a helmet and wipe the dark goo from my fingers onto my good pants.

"Mom —" Nicole starts but Jamie interrupts as she always does.

"We did it for you, Mom. It's because we love you, can't you see that? We just want you to be happy." Her voice falters a bit at the end and I know she's on the verge of tears, but I think that crying just might do her some good. See how it feels to be sad for a moment, like me all the time. I don't wish unhappiness on my daughters, just reality.

"Then you should have kept your nose out of my business," I say, and take my keys and leave my own house.

"Mom!" I hear them call me. "Mom! We need to rinse your hair out! Come back and just let me rinse your hair out!" Nicole calls to me in deep, choking sobs, but I don't look back

It takes nearly twenty minutes of driving to calm myself down and another ten to remember that I still had the damn bag on my head. I realize, then, that I've stormed out of my own house and that if I go back, even to wash the dye off my head, I will have surrendered yet again. I loop back to Connie's house and pray that Carl isn't home. The last thing I need is him meddling in my business and reporting back to his best friend Howard that I've gone off the deep end.

I pull into Carl's vacant spot on the driveway and knock on their door. My head is tingling a bit more than it should, so I ring the doorbell, hoping for a quick entry. Inside, steps like hoof beats clamor toward me and crash against the door, rattling the frame. Salvador, their Great Dane, yowls and brays and scratches the metal, awaiting a belly rub from whomever is unfortunate enough to twist the knob and open it. I decide against knocking again or giving Salvador any reason to break the barrier down. Knit and bitch, I remember then, Connie is at her Tuesday knit and bitch with her gaggle of hens. Never cared for that group much because all they do is talk about women like me. Connie, I know from thirty years of friendship, is the exception in that group.

"So what do I do now, Salvy?" I say to the dog on the other side of the door. He whines and I know that it would do me no good to whine back. No good at all. Instead, I creep around to the side of the house. Carl always did a better job of maintaining his bungalow than Howard ever did with ours and I'm pleased to see the garden hose, neatly coiled, ready for use. No thistle underfoot, no stinging nettle or poison ivy stealing it's way between the concrete foot pads, no Salvador poop to step on, just a neat little garden hose waiting for its ultimate purpose. I untwist the knot and pull the bag off my head, careful to bend over so the dye doesn't drip on my clothes. The water is icy but I know I'll have to give my hair a good rinse otherwise I could end up looking like my impatient ex usually does.

The pressure stings my scalp and I try to change the setting but it won't budge. Ten minutes goes by and the water runs clear, though it also froze my head about nine minutes ago so I'm not entirely sure the pressure hasn't completely scalped me. Old Yeller, Connie's mustard-coloured geriatric neighbor who feeds on prying, hacks, "can't afford a per-fessional, Maude? That stuff'll turn that head of yours greener than snot," she coughs and takes a long pull from her portable oxygen mask. She is walking across the street, barefoot, in an old nightgown that is so sheer from age her panties and accompanying day-time leak-proof pad is visible.

"I accidentally locked myself out of my house when I was watering the garden so I thought I'd get my spare key from Connie," I call to Old Yeller, who continues to advance with surprising speed.

"You want me t- to," Old Yeller coughs and sputters and nearly chokes on the liquid that is slowly drowning her lungs, "get you a towel or somethin'?" She takes more oxygen and turns her head and spits onto the driveway. Brown mucuousy spittle drips down her chin and she pinches the thin material on her breast, brings it to her chin and wipes the slime away. The result is a gooey splatter over her left breast that makes the material transparent and leaves the tip of her nipple exposed. It's grey and I find myself momentarily horrified at the prospect that I, too, may one day have grey, albeit much larger, nipples.

"I think I'll be fine," I say, "but thanks for the offer."

"You know," Old Yeller says as I ring out my hair," these days you don't really see a woman with her head on the ground. Usually up in the air with all her fancies and such. They're like clouds, you know, those fancies. All muddled together and they look like they're real, you know, like you could touch 'em." She coughs again and takes yet another chest full of oxygen, replaces the mask to its holder and turns the machine off. She pats the pocket of her nightgown and draws out a hand-rolled cigarette, which she lights and takes almost a dozen quick puffs, letting the smoke escape from her dry, parted lips, rather than blowing it away.

I laugh a little. "My head's attached the same way it was when I was born," I tell her. "Dad used to say it was screwed on good and tight so it didn't go floating away."

Old Yeller huffs something I can't quite hear, then says, "Your head doesn't have to be in the clouds to see them, deary. Nor do you have to touch them to know they are real. I think that I'll be somewhere there up in those clouds soon enough and you know what? When I'm in the clouds, I won't be thinking a damn thing about anything else. I'll be free." She says this with the cigarette tucked in the side of her lips "Free like a fucking bird, pardon my French." She finishes her cigarette and claps me on the shoulder. "Do what you need to do while you're here, Maude, or you just might die sooner than me." Old Yeller clears her throat, fights something up and swallows it back down.

"I'll try," I say and watch her scuffle back toward her house across the street. The day is warm, almost hot, so I let my hair dry in the sun and rub some lipstick onto my cheeks. I'm not exactly date-ready, but I'm determined to meet Willard on my own terms.

Willard turns out to be an older, fatter version of Howard, with waxier ears. (I checked when he wasn't looking.) He is condescending, the way he calls me "old girl" and "people like us" as though I'd naturally fall into the out of shape, used up, out-of-options category with himself. We eat Thai food because I insist on it (Howard never liked ethnic food), and I listen to him gabble about his antique restoration business. Willard pulls up his zipper frequently because his pants are too tight and his groin is puffy and lumpy like twined beef. He does this without realizing it and it makes me wonder how long he's had the lower gut, whether it crept up on him like my saddlebags or sprouted up on him one morning, like my grey hair. But I listen to his stories and allow him to call me "old girl" and say nothing about the food he unintentionally spews in my direction as he eats with his mouth open. I let him feel like the date is going well and he's on his game because, whether I like it or not, we are somewhat in the same category. We are past our prime and the skin that once tightly held our bodies together is growing tired, so we are lumpy and sagging and smell increasingly like medicine.

It's not my place to tell him he no longer has it, whether he ever had it or not. People my age need to stick together or we'll be overrun by bullheaded youth. Jamie and Nicole would poke fun at Willard and the thought just makes me more determined to stick it out and let him attempt to kiss me at the end of the night. Willard seems to talk more to my boobs than to my face but he is unapologetic about it, probably thinks I appreciate the attention, that an "old girl" like me would be grateful for the slimy eye-rape. I check my watch and know it's going to be a long night.

Willard does attempt to kiss me. We walk around the fountains in the park and under the bridge where all the bums sleep and the druggies defecate. Willard has chosen this spot, beside the concrete bridge pier that is tagged with a giant walking, talking penis from whose mouth splurts a leaky bubble that says "free hugs", to lean in for a kiss. I turn my cheek and offer a hug, to which he says, "That it, eh?" I smile politely but Willard does not return it. Rather, he zips his pants up one last time, nods curtly at me, turns on his heels and walks in the direction the hookers were trolling. Our town is a nice one, but every place has its own asshole, my father would say. Willard has taken me to, and deserted me in said asshole.

I share little detail with Jamie and Nicole the next morning and they know not to ask. Coffee is unusually quiet and I am feeling a tad guilty about my behavior, as they seem of theirs, but we don't speak of it. There's nothing alluring about me, really, but the yellow dress they've given me makes me feel different, somehow. Not even in the way it nips here or tucks there, but maybe in the way it also frees me, the dress feels like it's always been mine. It's bold and brave, like the me I've always wanted to be but hid to everyone but my father. It feels like, well, home.

The girls flatten my hair so I'm all sleek and shiny when the doorbell rings. "He better not be a dipshit," I say.

"We love you, Mom." Nicole says and both girls are biting at their lips nervously.

"What?" I say.

"Just, know that we did this for you. You deserve this, Mom," Jamie says and gives me a quick squeeze.

Before I can lecture them on whatever they've done to deserve lecturing, the bell rings again, followed by a friendly and melodic tap-tap-tap-tap-tap... tap-tap. I eye the girls wearily, smooth out the wrinkles on the front of my dress and open the door.

Dale is standing there, flowers in hand, with the most charming grin a person could have. "Hi," she says, "you must be Maude."

I, too, am biting my lip, unable to hold back tears.

Dale frowns, apologetic. "I'm sorry. Did I come at a bad time? I can come back later," she says as my daughters break into tears of their own, three of us crying in front of a confused stranger.

I wipe my face with the back of my hands and offer one to Dale, who readily accepts my invitation inside. "We were just having a moment, is all," I say. "But a good one, I guess, though you'd never think it buy watching us blithering like babies." Dale laughs. I laugh. Nicole and Jaimie laugh.

I laugh. For what seems like ages and since when seems like forever, I laugh.

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The Key

We live in the antechamber of something better. The key to that other place has long rotted away, pouring through our taps like tar, the sticky reminder of our past. We needed no prodding. We got here ourselves, pushing backward on oil slicked rivers, through choking particulate skies, over plastic wastelands, barrelling in with our excesses and excuses until the place could take no more and purged us from its corridors, forcing us inward and onto each other. In the water we have fish ill equipped to smoke cigarettes. Above, birds with six-ringed plastic nooses around their necks. Executed trees trap us in the place we have made and the only way out is to compost what's inside.

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The Urge

"Tell me about your urges," Barb says, but he doesn't believe she wants to hear about them. Not really. Seven weeks in the addictions group and Jack learned that she has a pile of scrap phrases she likes to use on them: Tell me about your urges. What do you feel when you do such and such or so and so? How do you feel afterward? Let's talk about your triggers. Focus on your self-worth. You're making progress. None of which has helped him much, but he lets her try because he likes to have a muse when he releases himself and she is good material for that. Slim. Not too pretty but not at all bad to look at. Past the clinical veneer, he believes there is something more to her. She's perfect inspiration for whenever the mood strikes him, though lately it strikes him more than he prefers. It interrupts his life. He can't sleep, can't eat, and is barely functioning as a human being —hence his presence in the basement of a drippy sixty-year-old church every Wednesday evening. Barb's tightly crossed legs hold his focus but she summons his attention back to the group, "Jack?"

"Still here." He looks at the clock high on the wall. Someone should dust that, he thinks. Twenty minutes left. He can make it. He promised himself he would.

"Want to talk to us, Jack? Maybe tell us something?" He stays silent as he usually does. "Jack, this is an open group. You are free to leave at any time but let me remind you that you are here because you are an addict. Everyone in this group is fighting an addiction but there is no judgment, Jack. None at all. We can't help you if you won't let us in. We can't help you if you don't tell us what the problem is."

"It's okay buddy," Lance pats him on the back. He is the group's rah-rah guy. Eight years of smoking crack and finding Jesus will do that to a person. "Whatever you gotta say can't be any worse than what you've heard from the rest of us." Lance gives him a too-wide, too-black grin. The truth is, Jack likes Lance. Sure, he is a degenerate, but a jovial one and he is just as much a muse for Jack as Barb. They all are. Jack liked to wonder what they did in their homes after the group let out. He has pictured them cooking dinner, visiting friends, having sex, living, even dying. He feels a bit creepy about it but that is why he is here.

"You can do it Jack," Barb takes and squeezes his hand, Lance gives him a decaying smile, the other five wait. Jack steels himself. His sweaty palms leave wet streaks on his jeans.

"I —," he says and the group leans in, waiting for the big reveal. He swallows. Coughs. Inhales deeply. "I'm a writer," he finally admits.

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Also by S.L. Luck

Popcorn & Politics

A Satire about Power, Drugs and the Canadian Government. Available August 1, 2020.

PRE-ORDER NOW!

Lonely popcorn salesman Jim Tennant hasn't had sex in decades. With no social life, Jim's self-loathing hits an all-time high when he is assaulted by a local drug dealer. During a routine delivery to Parliament Hill, Jim meets the Canadian Minister of Finance, John Gait. Gorgeous Gait to most Canadian women and Golden Gait to the Prime Minister himself, John Gait steers Jim into a drug-testing program designed to pay off the Canadian deficit. Eager for excitement, Jim enters the government's Dream Bank Initiative only to catch the attention of mafia heavyweight Marco Ricci. Ricci wants to commandeer Canada's Aerospace Control with a telemetric upgrade. Gait wants none of it. But Marco Ricci can be very persuasive. And deadly. Stuck between Gait's insistence of remaining in the program and Marco Ricci's threat of ruining Jim's quiet little life, Jim is in for a lot of excitement indeed.

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About the Author

S.L. Luck is a graduate of Middlesex University's Novel Writing program and has a bachelor's degree marketing. The author lives in Canada with a partner and two children.

Follow the author on Twitter @Author_SLuck and Instagram authorsluck.

Contact info@authorsluck.com

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