 ken*again is a quarterly, nonprofit e-zine presenting a hearty,eclectic mix of prose, poetry, art and photography: accessible, obscure, soothing, disturbing. Wrap your mind around a good read.
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ken*again is a quarterly, nonprofit e-zine presenting a hearty,eclectic mix of prose, poetry, art and photography: accessible, obscure, soothing, disturbing. Wrap your mind around a good read.
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Prose
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Embargo Richard Meyers |
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Front
Porch John Black |
Recluse in the Rockies Robin
Cole Sunbeam
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Embargo Richard Meyers
Crazy Janie Jack Goodstein
#2 Genuine Polar Bear Hair Muddler Fly Richard Jordan
The Bed Tent & the Prom Dress Boys & girls & suits of armor Barry Zinzer
L'Amourette or An Act of Folly Ryan Miller
On Fences of Never Chris Barnett
Embargo
by Richard Meyers
he sunsets in Southeast Africa were splendid. The general store was at the edge of town. Behind it was a small factory, and the smoke from the chimney released a strange smell. The owner was an Arab who spoke English well. His helper, a Somali, stood near the counter swatting flies. There were daily newspapers, an old scale and a pistol on the counter beside him. The orange sky slid along its arc over the slight building. On the radio was an old Western tango. It was a broadcast in English from Dar es Salaam up north. The walls around the house were embedded with broken bottles and ragged barbed wire to tear at the legs and hands of any robber or intruder.
The storeowner asked how many traveler's checks I wanted cashed. Then he asked how I had heard about doing business of this kind. I answered and the Arab laughed, saying, "I find that most amusing. You, an American, benefiting from our black market, while your country is strangling us with its embargo. Don't you find that funny?" There was a brief radio commercial in the local language for soap. A servant carried a bottle of Coca-Cola and some salted peanuts over to my table near the counter. A woman with hair swirled up into a turban offered me green bananas, slices of jackfruit and a stick of tamarind. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to survive with that imposed embargo. "These people have to resort to all kinds of unnatural ways to make a living," the owner said, as he took my signed checks and counted out my money, a very good exchange, in the local currency. The monkey tied to a post in the corner screeched a nervous sound and bared its jagged teeth. The store owner shouted at the monkey to shut up and looked at the clock on the wall and further at the dark black guard with a rifle near the front door.
I thanked the owner and told him that I would catch the night bus in town for the border. He smiled and said, "Of course, my American friend, there's nothing for you in this town, or in this country at all. What you are doing here only the God knows." I asked to use the outhouse and he nodded for the man with the rifle to escort me. Outside, the stars were coming out and the chimney on top of the corrugated tin-roofed factory was billowing swells of smoke. I squatted in the outhouse and I could see through the space under the thin, tin door the legs of the dark man who had accompanied me. There came a call from the store and the guard walked off to answer it. I left the outhouse and opened the door of the factory. I could see the machinery pounding beneath a blur of smoke. My curiosity took me through the steamy door and towards the sound of the factory machines. The shapes of a few men were bent over a furnace and others carried long trays of material to a floor area under canopies where rows of strange objects were set down. The men looked at me impassively, their smoky faces glistening with sweat.
I looked closer at the rows of objects. Before me there, arranged under the cloth awnings, were row after row of parts of animals, steaming and drying. The large mounds were easily recognized as severed elephant feet, the flesh hollowed out, leaving the clawed and tufted paws. I cringed and shivered at the sight. I remembered having seen these things in safari tourist's stores in Kenya. Huge elephant feet commercially sold as umbrella stands or containers for tropical plants. Startled, hearing the storeowner shout something into the night air, I started to walk out. Near the factory door was a long ledge holding the trophies of the cut-off hands of gorillas. An odorous mixture of what I assumed were preservatives and glues were being stirred in a cauldron by a crippled woman who smiled at me as I left. The storeowner appeared before me, hushing me and ushering me to leave by the side path along the store. "Hurry, my friend, I have important things to do. I am a businessman, you see. I am the seller. I am not the poacher. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people to fuck themselves and their embargo."
I walked hastily to the store entrance where the road to town curved along the dusty plain. The moon hung bright like a lantern in the clear night sky. Looking back, I could clearly see the long black car followed by two large vans stop at the general store entrance and the Arab owner coming out to meet the procession. Three white men emerged from the black car and shook hands with the Arab. The money exchange probably took place privately, inside.
As I hurried on into town, I thought to myself, I'd better go north. I don't belong in this country.
Crazy Janie
by Jack Goodstein
ere she still around today they might well call her a performance artist; thirty years ago they might have called her a busker or a street performer. Back in the late fifties when she haunted Washington Square Park from the arch on Fifth Avenue to the playground off Waverly, from the stone table chess boards to the waterless center fountain, they just, we all just called her crazy, Crazy Janie.
Every morning precisely at eight, in January slush, in muggy June, Janie would march briskly past students rushing into the main building at NYU hoping vainly to get there ahead of some sour-faced sociology instructor; indeed, were it not for the oddity of her attire, it would have been understandable if the casual observer mistook her for one of those students. Of course, costumed as she was, winter and summer, in a figure-hugging gray bodysuit, to which was appended an elegant twelve-inch cat tail, crowned with a cat-eared headdress that fastened under her chin, she would have been more likely mistaken for an escapee from the pages of a comic book. “Hey, Catwoman,” some sophomore who wasn’t due in class until nine o’clock might shout as he pushed his way into the Chock Full O' Nuts Coffee Shop, “meow.” Most often, however, as is the wont of city dwellers, even the migrants from Indiana and Texas, she was ignored.
She would enter the park from the northeast corner, head directly to her bench--rarely occupied at that hour of the morning--and mark her territory with a Gimbel's shopping bag that was her only accessory. From the bag would emerge a black eyebrow pencil and a mirror, and seating herself with her back to the concrete path, her legs threaded through the space between the wooden slats of the seat, she would prop the mirror up on another of the back’s slats which had warped out a bit over time and begin with meticulous care to draw fine lines of whiskers stretching out along her cheeks. Many of those used to passing while she was engaged in this painstaking ritual avow they could hear her softly purring, an avowal disputed by other regulars who maintain that there was merely the contented hum of intense concentration.
Sometimes, especially in the summer, a child holding tightly to a mother’s skirt would pass wide-eyed, demanding loudly what it was that lady was doing. Janie ignored children. Sometimes, usually later in the day, a leashed terrier or poodle would come over to sniff and visit. Janie ignored dogs. Sometimes, in the shine of the early afternoon sun, an elderly woman who'd come to feed the pigeons might sit and share her bench. Janie ignored elderly women and pigeons.
She even ignored the teenage boys on their way home from school with their hoots and catcalls and their simpering salacious cries: “Look at the pussy. Here, pussy, pussy.”
Those she did not ignore were the men. Not all men, but when certain men passed by her bench her back would arch and there would be no mistaking the guttural mewling that spewed from her. Then she would spring, fingers, extended claws, scratching into clothing as she clutched onto a shoulder or a waist or a leg stiffened in astonishment. She would screech and yowl and hang on to her prey with the tigerish fierceness of her striped cousins, hang on until they either roughly shook her off or as was most often the case in that time before the death of chivalry, cajoled gently to calm the storm. Janie liked to be petted. And more often than not, accompanying the petting and the cajoling was some loose change or even a dollar bill, which with purring satisfaction she would bury within the bowels of her shopping bag, and sit and await the next victim--beneficiary--of her feline instincts.
How she chose these men was a mystery to those of us who observed her activities for any length of time. There seemed to be nothing of a common thread in her choices: men tall or short, in suits of blue serge or Bermuda shorts, in leather bomber jackets or top coats of tweed, in gray felt fedoras, with hair or without. Whatever it was she sensed that triggered her, it was uncannily reliable, at least in one sense. The bruiser who might just as well black her eye as look at her she stayed away from. The prig who might just as well put her in the hands of New York’s finest she let pass without so much as a hiss. The acned letch that might see in the tightness of the costume an unintended invitation she gazed at with disinterest.
In March of fifty-eight when one of those late March snow storms surprised the city in the middle of the afternoon, engulfing it in that kind of white torrent that bites and claws without mercy, Janie, like the rest of us, was caught by the winds driving the pounding white flakes up from the Battery. Those of us with any sense sought the shelter of the buildings around the park, the bars, the cafes; Janie huddled shivering on her bench. Someone, one of the familiar faces in the park, suggested that it would be a good idea if she, dressed so inadequately for the storm, would find shelter as well. Janie growled and huddled deeper into her bench, as if sensing that cats such as she were not welcome in such places. “She’s used to the cold,” we said. We said: “She dresses that way in the dead of winter,” and, “She’s so nuts; she don’t even know it’s snowing.”
As the afternoon grew later, the storm grew heavier and we left early for the subways and the warmth of our homes. But wherever it was Janie came from when she made her daily entrance to the park, she was not yet ready to return. Pelting snow turned her gray to white, and she barely moved. “Someone ought to call someone,” someone said, but no one did. Who would someone call? Someone placed a container of steaming coffee on the bench next to her, but who knew if cats drink coffee.
The next morning when the magical white had turned to black slush, Janie, unbowed from the storm, appeared as usual at the northeast corner entrance of the park and, as always, took possession of her bench.
“After all,” someone said, “a cat does have nine lives.”
Like Gimbel's and Chock Full O' Nuts, Crazy Janie is gone. At some point, perhaps, her instincts failed her and she ended up on page three of the Post after pouncing on the wrong man. Perhaps, through the years, she amassed enough loose change and dollar bills in her shopping bag to be able to retire and chase the snowbirds to Miami. Or maybe, noting the success of her brethren, she moved uptown. Who knows, if you take a walk in Central Park you might run into a woman with an eyebrow pencil and a shopping bag and a gray cat suit sitting on a park bench waiting.
After all, a cat does have nine lives.
#2 Genuine Polar Bear Hair Muddler Fly
by
Richard Jordan
Now, I may have been only eight or nine at the time, but it didn't take me long to deduce that polar bears are scarce down here in Virginia, even in the winter.
I did see a mannequin polar bear once. It was the time we were driving from Lynchburg to Boston to visit some aunt or uncle or cousin. There it was, standing on the roof of a bottling company in a God-awful, redneck factory town called Worcester. It was bearing pointy, yellow fangs and grinning maniacally at passersby on the highway.
The only thing I really remember about the whole damn trip was that the phony bear scared the living shit out of my little sister. She peed her panties, and Daddy smacked her upside the head.
I've never gone back to Massachusetts, and it's just as well. It says in Lunker Aficionado Magazine that the bass are puny up there.
Once, while hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I saw a real pretty bald eagle. I watched it for about an hour with binoculars. While I was sitting there gawking, it dawned on me just how many Streamers one could fashion from such an eagle feather.
The Streamer is the most versatile of all flies. If you let it sink just below the surface of the water, it mimics a whole slew of aquatic organisms--minnows, shrimps, nymphs--you name it. If you drag it along the surface, hungry bass mistake it for a cricket or a grasshopper, or some other unfortunate, struggling insect that shouldn't be there.
I knew there was no way I would ever get close enough to that eagle to pluck one of its feathers. It takes no talent to fish a Streamer, anyway. Even a moron can get a strike or two with that fly.
So, I've had to make do all these years without a #2 genuine polar bear hair Muddler fly. I even quit fly-fishing for a spell, and took to spin casting. That doesn't require as much skill, but it sure can be fun.
After my boy Johnny was born, I picked up the fly rod again. If I'm patient and teach him well, one of these days, he'll land a record-setting largemouth or two to hang above the fireplace. Heck, he may even stumble across something worth kicking.
If my daddy was still around, Johnny could boot him in the ass.
The Bed Tent & the Prom Dress
Boys & girls & suits of armorby Barry Zinzer
bed tent is a toy. It's made of bright nylon that fits tightly over and around plastic, tubular ribs. The whole construction attaches to a single bed, anchored between the mattress and the box springs, the bottom edge of the nylon fabric tucked in like a sheet. Bed tents come in different shapes, colors and themes. Jack's was a gift from my friends Bill and Karen, both lawyers and, at the time, childless. They had always been generous with our kids--cute outfits brought back from Hawaiian vacations, commemorative baseballs autographed by the likes of Mickey Mantle and Dwight 'Doc' Gooden--but the bed tent seemed over the top. It was clear it gave them pleasure. I remember the smile on Bill's face when I showed it to him, fully assembled on Jack's bed.
Jack's bed tent was red and blue and shaped like a minivan. It rose above his bed with a beveled, clear plastic windshield on the pillow end. There was a zippered door that could be closed from the inside after entering. Womb-like, it was still roomy enough so that I could climb in with Jack to read or sing to him when it was time for bed. He was still a very little boy. Like a cat who regularly retreats under a chair, Jack seemed to feel that the bed tent offered the extra security of being at his scale. He loved it.
We kept it on his bed for several weeks, by which time it was badly in need of laundering. So down it came, only to go up again as soon as it came out of the dryer. But as kids do, Jack moved on and the bed tent eventually went under the bed rather than on it. Still, whenever his mom gathered piles of the accumulated out-grown objects of childhood to pass along to more appropriately-aged friends, Jack, in his quiet, deliberate manner, would rescue his bed tent from the pile with the possessiveness of Linus for his blanket.
Jack became an interesting teenager. More rebellious toward peer-pressure than parental authority, he seemed to set his own limits. I liked his differences--he was certainly a character. But I fretted about his toughness. Perhaps he needed a growth ritual, a walk-about, to emerge into manly self-sufficiency. Perhaps I was over-protective. Kids, I knew, needed to find their own suits of armor to encounter the world. I knew that because my own suit was so uncomfortable and ill-fitting. I was better at taking care of others than myself. That's why parenting came so easily to me, why I loved it so.
During spring vacation of his freshman year at college, Jack announced he was taking his bed tent with him when he returned to his dorm room. I thought it was a characteristic evocation of his quirkiness (it also hit me--with that boring, all-men-are-pigs consistency--that it might be a unique and successful approach to getting co-eds into bed). The two of us drove back to his school a day before the end of vacation. No one else in his suite had yet returned and he set up his top-bunk haven just the way he had envisioned it.
Several weeks later, we get a disconsolate call. Anne answers and looks grave--a crisis? Depends on one's point of view, I guess. She hands me the phone. "It's not good," she says. Jack tells me some fraternity boys--very drunk--had gone into his room and demolished his bed tent. They didn't know him. It wasn't personal. Random stupidity, hostility, destructiveness, humanity. I'm relieved. Jack is sad but okay. I offer to drive up and give him a hug. He laughs. I say, "You know I will." "Of course I know you will," he answers. We both know he needs his own armor. "Maybe you'll write a story about it," I suggest. "Maybe you will," he answers.
Later, I pick up his sister at her friend Michelle's. They've been shopping for dresses for the junior prom. Katie and Michelle both have boyfriends. Katie and Michelle hadn't been close for years. Katie had been much closer to Danielle, an emerging princess from a wealthy family. Danielle had been to Paris, Rome and fat-girl camps. She introduced Katie to Kate Spade bags, designer pasta and Tiffany's. Danielle had been a quiet, chubby, forgotten kid who spent a lot of time at our house. Now, like Katie, she had developed. She dyed her hair surfer-blond and when I dropped the two of them off at the high school--both now blond and very "done"--heads turned, cars swerved, jaws dropped. I'd like to say I was proud of Katie for her good grades, but I admit her beauty gave me a quiet pleasure as well. But I liked Danielle better when she was chubby.
Apparently Katie did, too, and she and Danielle drifted apart. Michelle, who had adapted a modified Goth sensibility, was far more casual. She and her single mother rented the carriage house apartment on the ground of a large house in a well-to-do neighborhood. The day of Jack's phone call, Katie and Michelle had been shopping at a less tony mall, where, amazingly, Katie had found a dress she liked at JCPenney.
That night, I picked her up at Michelle's at about 11. She walked to the car in jeans and a lacrosse sweatshirt with her hair combed straight down. I remembered brushing out her hair after giving her a bath when she was little. I'd always count a hundred strokes, like in a fairy tale. I loved brushing it all straight back off her forehead without a part.
Growing up, Katie and Jack had been alternatively antagonistic and oblivious to one another, but since adolescence had discovered a bond that drew them wonderfully close. I told her about the bed tent. When we got home, she called Jack immediately to commiserate. Then she tried on her new dress and shoes for Anne and me.
The dress was antique-looking, peek-a-boo black lace with a pale, flesh-tone lining. Above the revealing décolletage she wore a black necklace with a small turquoise and black feather. The back plunged. The shoes were black and backless. She looked grown-up--breath-taking, like a movie star. She was virginal and sexy, but if any of the deadly sins rose within me, it was pride, not lust. It hit me that armor can be lacy and elegant as well as torn and threadbare nylon.
L'Amourette or An Act of Folly
by Ryan Miller
h, don't answer it," he said to her.
The man was dark--onyx-eyed, a swarthy complexion, pitch-black hair, straight and cut short with a dash of gray here and there. A generation before his own, he would have been called distinguished looking.
She propped herself up on one elbow--it was a quick, almost perfunctory movement--and with her free hand she swept a lock of scarlet hair away from her pale, faintly freckled face and looped it behind her finely shaped ear. She reached for the telephone on the bedside table, stretching her long, lovely arm over him toward the receiver.
"No…" The vowel extended into a low, plaintive, pleading moan.
"It might be important," the girl said.
He made a light-hearted attempt to grasp her arm, to hold her back, trying to discourage her from picking up. But with a deft, playful feint, she eluded his grip and, laughing, answered before the fourth ring. She had to pull herself across his chest--she was careful to graze her nipples along his skin as she did so, careful also to make this seem uncalculated--and she rested her torso on top of his as she brought the handset to her ear. She felt her breasts squeezed in against him and she knew he could not fail to take notice of this and she anticipated how he would react.
"Hello."
He began to stroke her, first on her back, then the soft flesh between her hip and rib cage, his hand progressing faithfully upward toward the gibbous bulge of her flattened breast.
She waited a short while, then again said, "Hello?" She heard someone breathing on the other end of the line. "Who is this?" The breathing quickened, became just a little more audible, then the line went dead.
"What was that all about?" he asked after she had, somewhat peevishly, replaced the receiver on its cradle.
"I keep getting these calls." She slid off of him and repositioned herself so that she lay once again alongside his left flank. "That's the second one today."
He turned onto his side to look at her.
"He never says anything, but I can hear him breathing." She looked into his eyes, eyes so dark that the pupil and iris were practically indistinguishable, eyes that revealed nothing to her. "I know someone's there."
He moved closer, reaching around behind her--his warm hand flat against the small of her back--and he drew her toward him. He began to kiss her along her arm, across her shoulder and neck, then sedulously his hand bridged across the lobes of her supple buttocks and his tongue lassoed the blossom-pink areola of her left breast. She felt him pressed up against her--his desire had rebounded--and she closed her eyes and tried not to think about what she needed to tell him.
•
Lori had seen him for the first time the day classes began back in January. She attended a small women's college in Louisiana, not too far from New Orleans.
He taught the course she was taking that semester on the novels of Camus and Sartre.
He came into the tall-ceilinged classroom that first day a little late and dropped, with a walloping thump, an unwieldy stack of books and papers onto the wooden desk. On the blackboard he wrote his name--Jacques Fanon--along with the course number. With a hurried and inattentive glance across the room, he sat at the desk and began to read in a clear voice the students' names from a list.
He was a new faculty member that she did not recognize from her sophomore year. She had spent the fall semester in Paris working on her conversational skills and trying to polish her accent.
She did not take her eyes off of him as he made his way toward her name.
"Kitten Constant."
"Here," said the beautiful blond girl with incandescent cheeks in the front row who raised her hand.
He lifted his eyes in her direction and made a small, neat check on the sheet of paper.
"Lori Ellender," he called, looking up ever so briefly at first with only a nod in her direction.
He was about to call the next name on his list when Lori saw him turn back toward her. His second look was a long, lingering, smoldering stare that she recognized. Men had been looking at her that way since she was twelve, but this was somehow different. The consuming stares of those other men had merely irritated her. This one stirred her, excited her. He looked squarely into her eyes.
What she experienced was something new, something novel--it was an instantaneous sensation. She had never, before now, felt an attraction to any man so much, and so obviously, older than she. Her pulse raced.
Absentmindedly, he studied his roll sheet and it took him a second to find his place. "Ceci French," he called finally, a diffident catch in his voice, and he looked at Lori one last time.
After that, she observed, with quite some disappointment, that for the remainder of class he avoided looking her way.
Over the next few weeks, on those rare occasions when she glanced up to find his eyes upon her, he would quickly avert his gaze.
•
One unseasonably warm afternoon at the beginning of February, Lori had gone to his third-floor office to discuss with him some ideas she had concerning the paper she was going to write on Sartre's L'âge de raison, the first novel they had read that semester.
She had put on a cream-colored silk shirt and an elastic and flattering pair of black capri pants. With scrupulous insouciance she loosely knotted a pale ivory cashmere sweater about her waist.
She wore no brassiere and she knew that when she stood before him her lively breasts would point noticeably outward like fingertips through the flimsy fabric and that the collar of her shirt would gape pendulously whenever she leaned forward.
Before leaving her apartment she stood before a full-length mirror, turning one way, then the other, appraising one last time her hair, her makeup, her figure. With a resolute and confident nod back at her reflection--a nod which was intended to bolster her against the almost paralyzing anxiety and the nervous squeamishness that plagued her--she said aloud, but with a hint of lingering uncertainty, "How can he resist?"
She stood across from him as he sat at his desk and she spread sheets of paper with her notes written on them across the surface. She bent over from the waist, resting both forearms on the desktop, very much aware that he could see clearly all the way down her blouse.
Though hopeful he would find her charms irresistible, she was unsure of his reaction.
Would someone his age truly find her desirable? Or would her bid to seduce him meet with a patronizing dismissal, an utter lack of interest? Would he protest that their relationship as teacher and student proscribed a liaison between them?
She was far more apprehensive than she had ever imagined. She gestured and indicated notations on the papers with methodical efficiency while she talked--a bit too rapidly, she feared. Her hand movements, she prayed, would mask the fact that they were trembling.
From everywhere else his eyes returned to converge on the inviting sight she so generously offered him. He could see past the rousing curves described by her gently falling breasts with their hard, angular nipples to the just slightly plump plain of her abdomen beyond, upon which he made out the dark contours of her tightly curled navel.
The stifling air and his excitement were growing unendurable.
He rolled his chair away from his cluttered desk and stared out the window. No matter where his gaze fell on this drowsy, sun-drenched day, he saw nothing but young girls wearing skimpy clothing. He leaned forward and closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with the fingers of both hands.
A sudden, stultifying pang of doubt seized her--had she gone too far, done something wrong?--he couldn't even look at her.
She stepped around to where he was sitting and anxiously and eagerly stood next to him. On his left hand she noticed for the first time the slim gold band. "Are you all right?" She placed the tips of her fingers on his shoulder. He turned to look up at her and she made up her mind. She lowered her barely parted lips--full, glistening, and cherry-red--and pressed them oh so tenderly against his own.
He rose up and after only a short hesitation took her roughly into his embrace and without a word kissed her. And later she understood with certain clarity that it had been an unbearable torment for him to look at her precisely because he found her so alluring.
•
"A few weeks ago," she said in response to his question. " It started right after those two guys moved in next door."
"The homosexual couple?" He spoke scarcely accented English with meticulousness uncommon to native speakers. He had been born to French parents in Algiers in the year before independence had been granted, and his family had participated in the mass exodus of the European population out of Algeria in the spring of 1962. He had grown up in Nice and had studied linguistics at the Sorbonne. He attended graduate school in the United States. Curiously, Lori thought, he went by the name of Jack.
He had an American wife and two children.
She sighed lightly as he raked his fingers through her shining hair and stared into her pretty green eyes. He then began to rub her neck.
"I don't think they're gay, Jack," she said. "I'm always seeing girls over there."
He had shown more than a little concern about her new neighbors. They were young--about her age--and they dressed and acted like adolescents. They were attractive in a faddish way that corresponded to their age, a way that she had tried to convince him she did not find appealing. But he had remained uncertain about this, and this had caused him anxiety. Lori found encouragement in this small show of jealousy.
He asked again about the telephone calls.
"Not every day," she said. "But some days I'll get two or three."
Here the conversation lagged and she thought once again about what she needed to tell him. They both lay side by side staring at the ceiling and saying nothing. Her thoughts fidgeted, one idea swiftly followed another, but she could find no good way to begin.
After a while he said to her, "I think my wife suspects something."
Lori sat up in the bed, brought her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs.
She said in a faraway voice, "What makes you say that?"
His wife was a topic they had largely skirted. She knew he was married, but it was so much easier not to think about it. She didn't like to address what lay at the heart of their relationship. It was for him nothing but an affair, and an affair was, after all, principally about sex. This was something she did not like to admit to herself, something with which she had not come to terms, and since the beginning she had wordlessly yearned for something more.
"She seems different," he said. "I feel like she is always watching me, waiting for me to make a mistake."
"Is that all?" She turned her head toward him. "Has she said anything?"
"She doesn't need to say anything. I just have this feeling that she knows." When he spoke, he did not look at her.
Lori, her arms still wound around her legs, began to rock forward and back.
A breathless silence followed, then they spoke simultaneously.
He said, "This is not easy for me."
She said, "There is something I need to tell you."
•
Toward the beginning of May, Lori's period was late. She waited and waited. Everlasting days she waited.
When she could wait no more, she drove very late one night to the pharmacy at a giant supermarket near the interstate highway.
She followed the instructions and watched as the solution turned a dreadful and pallid pink. She stared at the small vial in disbelief. The next day she tried again. The outcome was the same.
At the student health center on campus, they took a sample of her blood. They told her to call back after four. "Ask for Nurse Pym."
When she phoned, she heard Nurse Pym's prim, crisp voice say, "The result is positive."
"Positive?" she asked, a little confused. "What does that mean? Positive?"
"The test was positive," a thoughtful pause, an unaccustomed note of concern. "It means you're pregnant."
Lori hung up. She felt as if she was being drained of herself, of her being, emptied of that which made her human. She was becoming one of those girls she had always felt sorry for.
•
"This is not easy for me," Jack repeated. "But I must say it." He waited a long time before going on.
Lori heard these words and waited.
"I can't see you any more."
In her chest a chasm had opened.
"The semester is almost over. In ten days I will be going back to France with my family for the summer." He seemed not to know how to continue, either because he had said everything he meant to say or he could find nothing more to say. Lori could not tell which.
After a moment, he put his hand on her thigh and squeezed, then he removed his hand. "It's not worth taking a chance. My wife can not find out."
Lori looked at him for an instant, then turned away.
He said to her, "Surely, you must have known this was coming."
"Surely," she said in a quiet, mocking tone, "I must have known this was coming." She cursed herself silently.
She had known the end was looming, but had chosen not to face the consequences of its arrival. She had not thought, when she had thought about it at all, what the ineluctable conclusion would be. She had held out the foolish hope that some enormous and felicitous change would occur at the last minute.
He put his hand on her leg once again and began to speak. "What was it you…" But he was cut short when she turned abruptly away from him, tearing her leg out from under his hand. She sat up on the edge of the bed, her back to him and her head hanging low. She did not want him to see her crying.
The phone rang once again and she got up to answer it.
"Hello," she said in a weak voice not at all her own.
No one responded.
"Hello," she said with a little more urgency. She waited. She heard only the audible breathing.
"Who the fuck is this?" she said with vehemence, venting her wrath on the faceless, voiceless someone who would not speak. "Why don't you leave me alone?" She was shouting. "What do you want?"
Jack took the receiver from her hand and said in his habitual, calm voice, "Who is this? What do you want?"
Lori watched the color fade from his face.
She angrily jerked the phone away from him. She brought it to her ear and was on the verge of screaming into it, "Why do you keep bothering me?" when she heard a woman's voice say, "Jack, that's you, isn't it?" A slow beat. "I knew it. Jack, you son of a bitch, I knew it."
With her whole body humming, her head ringing, Lori heard the line go dead.
Originally appeared in EWG Presents
by Chris Barnett
don’t know what to do with my eyes.
…at first you’re one in a million of the post-chic, donning what the magazines tell us… dodging your imaginary paparazzi… your lacerating tresses stealing me to a still… every eccentricity quieted behind corporate digs… the “New Yawk” babe intrepid and yummy… this is what you are… of course you’re just as capable of pizza chin as any pretty face….
Next, I detect your cataclysmal communication devices that seem to beep, vibrate, ring, and solve very important problems I soon realize you have that hushed kind of sugar found only in the lonely… the kind that leaves you bitter with subconscious smirks… to top off such allegations, I realize you were the one by the Chai café off Allen Street… most indeed of my memory you were… the one with the strawberry sandals… you were telling me to get a job and stop trying to commune with dead beats and other urban legends….
I understand, right there in my castle in the sky, that it’s you… Natasha Gurdin… Natalie Wood that is… or Wagner or Walken… it’s you and your baby browns and as they start into melted chocolate chips… I feel I should leave you to yourself… but I harbor this urge to help, to somehow run with gifting hands, I want to hug you, cook with you… but I just pick my nose instead… squawking claptrap parables about death….
For 389 shuffling steps… 20 feet behind and following… inconspicuously nosy through the Lower East 5th arrondissement and I’m suddenly converted into the kind who over-rationalizes about chance and the supernatural and the strangely bizarre whilst strangely comforted knowing the mystical has happened to me… twice... twice my eyes have convinced themselves of you, Natalie… did you really think you could get away with it?... fake your own death to come to New York and mosey around in Metallic Teal flip-flops, thinking we’re not always in control of our destiny?
I guess we’re not in control or even at the wheel but it feels real… and my right now is telling me you’re in it… it feels good to be alive, Natalie… .that the quintessence of divine virtue is inbuilt… that the timeless immediacy of “but it could happen” does indeed….
Jeepers.
A dangerous place to be… especially at this time of night when vibrant imagination elbows up with you in that wayward kinda way… but I find myself following you still in this dark ghoul of an hour… as is my birthright when it comes to miracles, Ms. Fudgy Eyes… aw, Natasha, downtown for boots and your prissy button rouge… step princess step… Natalie of limited range but of heart-tugging amenities… snivel Natalie snivel… you know you’re a star… but you need space… I understand… just like I am somebody’s Chris Barnett or Kevin Bacon and they’re behind me about 5 blocks and guessing, constructing, imagining my entire life story… I guess we’re all characters… characters for each other’s benign delusions… I’m just not sure if I should share you with the rest of the world… or if I should tuck you in my dreams.
From behind a fire hydrant, I watch you stop in at the Chinese butcher, browsing the marinated death of ducks teary-eyed and carnivorous; a gumball pops out, you arc it to plop in your mouth, teal tongue soon… and waving to a brash clerk, you leave humming Sondheim. We go on for blocks, almost whole neighborhoods of cultural joie de vivre and I see you chew the fat with bag ladies like you were made of bags and all things pure… next you’re kicking a rock in front of the picture parlor and you seem delighted the rock has kept up with you all these blocks… they miss you, Natalie. They are begging for you to re-surface… begging for one… just one more thrill….
At the cigarette shop, you ask the vendor if your husband has come and he licks his finger and holds it in the breeze… his eyes a quiz away from certainty.
Ms. Wood… I won’t tell a soul that you chew gum cow loud or that I saw you last night under the streetlights on Stanton, status electric under an active rain with your definition of suicide… but if you didn’t come back... you came this close… this close… but I wouldn’t blame you.
I can see it now... long after the artificial promises made during heartfelt cocktails… you just slipped but right before that you were on the railing, finding meaning in your own sailing expedition, and it felt good to yell, to even the score your way, finally yodeling up into that expansive nothing for a final lasting meaning… that metaphysical holiness we crave under the cape of our own sorrows… the kind of meaning we all lose the gist of until we finally define ourselves… you just slipped I know… now it’s just you and Sondheim rolling on like some anonymous parade… while the holidays and the fireworks and the affairs and the frugality and the conundrums and the news and the normalcy and the clockwork of an innocent New Yawk linger around the edges of your smallness.
At 2nd Avenue, your scruples get tied like a pretzel as some chance bum recognizes you and starts quoting “34th Street.” He’ll enter a bar. Everyone will think he is just a mad bum, but what his beautifully mucky head knows would turn the world upside down… he will drink until he cannot stand or speak and it will be just before puke when he ventures to tell the world who he saw, and upon hearing his zealous discourse the world will pass him off as a drunkard and he will plead, kick, flail, and stomp like an irate child until he passes out burped.…
Upon waking, all of his recollection blurred and disenfranchised… he’ll forget he ever saw the real Natalie… and having realized his head hurts, he will tend to that instead… and then he’ll cry a lot… not because he has forgotten… but because he cannot remember.
I don’t know what to with his eyes….
We all know them when we see them… Natasha… we all want a piece of them… those with that miracle in their stride… that numinous trait unexplained behind the eye… those folk where you just know… it’s something about them… they’ve “got it” or they’ve “found out.” They inspire the ordinary to become unordinary… the tame to get wild… the caved-in to resurface… the dead to rise… maybe we’re all like each other in our own ways, maybe… just maybe… we’re everyone in whispered waiting… or maybe we’re all just ghosts trying to get hired. Only God knows… and let’s pray that’s the gospel… either way this unemployed ghost is taking a seat… my ankles are swollen.
See you around, Natalie.…
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Front Porch John Black
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Begonias in Winter
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Women of the Mesa
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Aimea Saul
Two Become as One
Aimea Saul
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Derek McCrea
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Recluse in the Rockies
by Robin Cole Sunbeam
We had a ten-day break between summer
sessions, so I decided to take the opportunity to do a week retreat in a
mountain cave like the female hermits of Tibet.
My cousin Miles had told me about a cave he knew of and gave me complete
directions. I dressed in orange
sadhu robes which had been boiled in a cauldron of powdered red rock
while I lived at a yoga ashram in India. I
plaited my hair and set off to the mountains with my meditation rug, an alms
bowl and a small bag of triticale flakes. The cave was located at the edge of a
rock veranda through which a little stream had carved a series of whirlpool
tubs. The stream continued on to a
popular waterfall where many people went to bathe.
The cave itself was small and provided minimal protection from the
elements. It was sufficient for my
needs at the time. Each day I woke at dawn and alternated
hour-long sitting and walking meditations until ten. Then I would eat a handful of triticale flakes soaked in
water from the stream. For dessert,
I found an abundance of gooseberries and boletes which livened up my diet.
By midday, I would either bathe in the waterfall or the whirlpool tubs
which by that time were lit up by the sun.
Then I would resume my sitting and walking practice until long past dusk
when I would curl up onto my tiny meditation rug and cover myself with my raw
silk outer robe and pass into alert sleep.
Occasionally people passed me but only
muttered unknown comments among themselves in passing.
On the fifth day, a woman with a small child addressed me.
At that time I had the habit of meditating with my eyes open but
downcast, my vision focused on a spot on the ground a comfortable distance ahead
of me. It was difficult not to
avert my gaze but I managed to remain focused on the spot.
Even without a reply, she was undeterred.
She told me she lived in a teepee on the adjacent mountain and I was
welcome to come for something to eat. The next morning, I set off
with my alms bowl, eyes downcast, meditating step by step, along the route she
had described. Even fast walking
meditation is exceedingly slow; I probably took two hours to get there.
When I arrived, she was home. The
lower walls of her teepee were folded up and I could see her there with two
children. With eyes downcast, I held out my bowl.
She asked me if I wanted a sardine sandwich.
At that time I was a vegetarian and didn't eat fish.
A cascade of emotions passed through my mind but I remained
outwardly steady, eyes downcast with my arm extended holding the bowl.
I consoled myself with thoughts that beggars are not choosers and that
monks eat whatever is offered. I
ate the sandwich and slowly returned to my cave to continue my
silent retreat. Now, nearly twenty years later, I can
only imagine what she was thinking. Was
she just moved by human compassion? Or was she familiar with the tradition that
I strove to emanate? Did she think
I was tripped out on drugs? Was she
offended when I wouldn't even look at her or say thank-you? I'll probably never know.
The sixth night brought torrential
storms. My little cave dripped with
moisture. Only the farthest back
corner remained dry. I huddled in
the corner wrapped in my outer robe doing shivering meditation.
The night was very long. At
daybreak, I headed down to Boulder. In Boulder, I went straight to Joseph
Goldstein's apartment. At that time
I was still under the impression that he was a brother and a friend.
Joseph was shocked when he opened the door.
The mineral dye from my sadhu robes had rubbed off on my skin
and hair and I was covered in a subtle orange hue.
My hair was approaching dreadlocks and I still remained in the intensity
of my meditation. But after all his experience in India, I
still don't understand why he was so shocked. He let me use his bath.
Even several soapy baths couldn't get all the orange dye off my skin.
My hair took hours to comb out. I
emerged from his bathroom looking much like the woman he had known before.
Yet the shock at his door only served to alienate him further from
friendship in the years to come.
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