The Van                                                                

by CL Bledsoe

n the parking lot, Thomas noticed a van driving with its side door open.  The woman passed behind him before he could wave at her.  He was talking to his brother on his cell phone.

"Which side was the door on?" his brother asked.

"It's an older van," he said.  "It only has one side door."

His brother let out a chuckle and yelled the story back to his wife.  "Says there's a van—"

"Ratty looking, real beat up," Thomas added.

"Piece of shit van with its passenger side door open, driving—"

"Flying.  Here it comes again," Thomas said.

"Flying through the parking lot in a big circle."

Thomas waved and tried to catch the woman's eye as she came back through but she didn't even glance his way.  He could see her puffy face, stringy blond hair, almost white.  She looked sweaty, tired.

"Didn't see me," he said.

"Maybe her door's broke," his brother said.  "What make was it?"

"I don't know.  Older.  Dodge, maybe."

He could hear his brother laughing with his wife.

"I looked at a Dodge," his brother said.  "Not worth the trouble."

"Yeah. I better get off here," Thomas said.

"Well, I'm glad you're getting out, meeting people."

"They're just other grad students.  There are only a few of us here so far.  We met at orientation."

"Big move, what you did," his brother said.  "We're all proud of you."

Thomas watched the van reach the far end of the parking lot, by the road, and circle back.

"Call us some time.  Let us know how things are going."

"I will," Thomas said, stepping out of the car.  He went to the door of the Chinese restaurant, opened it and stepped inside, still holding the phone to his ear.  A waitress came up to him.

"How many?  Just one?"

"No, I'm waiting for, well, I'm not sure how many," he said, feeling like a fool.

"A young lady?" the waitress said.  She didn't smile but seemed to be just doing her job.

"No," Thomas said.  "Well maybe, but a group.  I'll just, I'll wait.  I'll be back."

He went back out to his car and got in.  His brother had been chatting through all of this and Thomas let him go for a while longer before cutting him off again.

"I think he's here," he said.

"All right.  Well take care."

"I will."

He pressed the end button.  The van passed behind him again.  He waved at the woman, but again, she didn't see.  The side door was wide open and he could see empty fast food wrappers inside.  She turned to her right and went for another loop.  He watched her circle around the outer edge of the parking lot, which was large because they were in a sort of cluster of stores, like an overgrown strip mall.  She passed on the far side of a jewelry store and he stepped out of his car to get a better look.  The van came around the edge of the jewelry store and circled back towards where he was parked.  It was easy to see, there weren't a lot of cars in the lot right then.

The van straightened out and started down the aisle Thomas was parked in.  He waited till she was close enough to see, and stepped out in front of her, waving.  She wasn't looking.  She kept coming.  He jogged backwards for a few steps and she finally looked ahead and saw him.  She screeched on her brakes.  She stared at him through the glass as he came around to her window, which was down.

"Your door is open," he said.

Her mouth was open, too.  She reached through the open window and slapped him hard, missing his face but connecting with his shoulder.

"You damn idiot," she said.

"Your door," he said, pointing with one hand and holding his face with the other.

"What's wrong with you?"

He stepped over to the open door and slid it closed.  As an after thought, he tugged on the handle.  It was closed securely.  He stepped back to the woman's side.  She was watching him with a look of intense scorn on her face, which was round and featureless.  Not an ugly face.  Sort of like a baby's, he thought.

"You looking for someone, or something?" he asked,

"No," she said.  "Don't step out in front of me again or I'll run you over."

She hit the accelerator and sped off, turning right at the end of the row, again, and starting another loop.

He watched her swing wide around the far edge of the parking lot, and didn't notice his friend Doug pull up beside him until he honked.  Inside, the waitress led them to a large table.

"Oh, I'm it," Doug said.  "Matt couldn't make it."

"Or Hoa?" Thomas asked, hoping he was pronouncing the name right though he'd heard it only once.

"Nope.  Just me."

"There's only two of us," Thomas told the waitress.  She smiled and led them to a smaller booth.

"Saw the damndest thing," Thomas said.  He told Doug about the van.

"It's an odd place," Doug said.

They went to the buffet and filled their plates.

"What are those little crunchy things with cream cheese?"  Doug asked.

"Crab Rangoon."

"Is there crab in them?"

"Not really."

They came back, sat and ate.  Through the window, Thomas saw the van pass again.

It was awkward and so they talked about upcoming classes and proposed get-togethers.  Thomas tried not to watch the van as it came around each time.  When they were finished, they went out to their cars.  Doug got in and drove away, waving.  Thomas stood, watching the van.

It came round again.  As the woman approached, he could see that her face looked dirtier than before.  She glared at him as she passed.  He held her gaze thoughtfully as a car further down the row pulled out.  She whipped her head around just as the van slammed into the rear end of the other car, pushing it sideways. The van stopped and sat there, one brake light on.  Thomas found his feet and ran around the side of the van to the rolled down window.

The woman's head was down on the steering wheel.  She raised it and turned angry eyes to him.  He realized she was crying.

"Hey," he said. "You all right?"

"You see?" she said. "You see what you did?"

Thomas didn't know how long he stared, the eyes of this stranger hating him completely and totally.

"What the fuck, lady?  Didn't you see me?" a voice said.  Thomas realized it was the man in the car she'd just hit.  Thomas glanced at him but didn't see him.

"It was his fault," she said, pointing at Thomas.

"I was nowhere near you," the man said, mishearing her.

"It was his fault," the woman said, again.  She screamed it, "his fault!"

Thomas turned and ran back to his car.  He was out of the parking lot before he even thought to look for traffic.  He drove straight back to his apartment and didn't come out again the next day.  He sat, watching TV, waiting for the police to knock on his door for fleeing the scene, but they never came.

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Jitters/Tics                                                                  

by Melanie Cotter

                                                                         
he air outside the diner is so humid the sky feels fat.  Gray clouds hover about, yawning and stretching in anticipation.  Stanley James sits in a vinyl booth at the diner, waiting for Lacy Morgan.  He has one leg, the right to be specific, that bouncesup&down, bouncesup&down involuntarily.  Stanley can’t kick the habit, but often wonders if he can stop.  It only happens when he is nervous about something:  team tryouts in high school, a test about Nero’s reign in college, or breeching a subject with Lacy that is not truly any of his business.  He idly flips through the pages of a newspaper and looks out the window as the sky burps thunder.  When he looks back to his newspaper he sees her, Lacy, sliding into his booth.  Drops of water cling to her eyelashes and doodle down her face.

It isn’t raining yet.

The most expressive body parts on Lacy Morgan are her hands.  A tell-tale furrowed brow often gives away her feelings of distaste or concern, but her hands have a special response for every attitude and emotion.  They aren’t particularly beautiful.  The nails are often dull and lack that appealing gloss that most people say looks respectable.  When Lacy does paint them, she chooses Eraser Pink to be classy or “Super Green Lime Queen” to be funny, but they begin to chip within a few hours.  Her small, dainty fingers relentlessly twist napkins, pick blades of grass, or seek out bits of lint on her clothes.  She is constantly tucking in the tag of other people’s shirts.  This always draws attention.

Staring Stanley in the face, one index finder rapidly circles the rim of her coffee cup.  She sees his eyes follow it around and around.  But Lacy can tell something is different about him; his leg rattles like a chain link fence in a strong wind.  Not both, just the right leg, and she wonders if he has something in his ears throwing his equilibrium off.

“You’re crying.”

“Perhaps.”

She is glad he doesn’t ask why because she has already forgotten the specifics. There don’t need to be reasons to cry after visiting Pop.

Lacy remembers an article she read once about spiders crawling into ears as people sleep.  Perhaps Stanley has an arachnid tucked away in his ear canal and he cannot hear.  The equilibrium shatters like a spoon, and the leg bounces faster.

Stanley looks at Lacy with a sense of expectation on his face, as if a timeless question has been posed, and he waits patiently for an answer from her.  Nothing comes, so he hands her a napkin to dab her eyes instead.  She blinks once, then again.  The finger reverses directions on the cup.

                                                                                                        
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Fast-food Love                                                                                                   

by William Gladys

t was attraction at first sight, upgraded in an instant to love after he heard her speak.  His name was Alain L’Escargot by the way, a captive snail, temporarily resident in one of the holding Gastropodariums at The Three Pineapples restaurant in Lyon, the busy bustling gastronomique centre of France.  Antoinette was just one of about thirty snails who landed on and around him the previous evening.  It was her intelligent face and vulnerable trembling that drew his attention first, but immediately after, it was the intense emerald greenness in her eyes that held him fast like a marine limpet to a rock.  And when she spoke, well that was it; he was well and truly smitten as any snail could hope to be.  Slithering up close to her astonishing, brightly striped shell he whispered, “we have to get out of here tonight babe”.  It was evident she possessed an innate tenderness that would appeal to the first snail eater who set eyes on her, and as the saying goes in the gastropod underworld “this babe had a price on her shell!”  “Now pay attention and learn fast” he said.  “Whatever you do don’t eat any parsley; it’s a management ploy, a deceit to put us at ease, although sometimes they starve us for a few days before we are dunked in a pod of brine like that one over there,” he swivelled slowly in the direction of the pod positioned next to the stove and shuddered.  “But remember,” he went on, “if someone comes near and points a finger, ignore it, and rule number one babe, never, never, never gaze into anyone’s eyes, or before you know it, you’ll either be in the brine pod or in the hot pot.  Eaters take eye contact as approval,” he added under his breath quietly but firmly.  He’d managed to survive ten days by refusing to eat; getting thinner by the day, and withdrawing way back into his shell, although he hated doing it, it wasn’t in his character, and as an anxious lump surged in his throat, he looked into her eyes and said dramatically, “Antoinette, I sense my time is nearly up!”  Indeed, as the spectacular sentence came to an end, a dozen of his colleagues were lifted out and placed in the brine filled pod, while another twelve, resisting frantically, were prised out and tossed without decorum into a black handled pot of furiously boiling water, by a man wearing blue and white check trousers, and a tall white hat.  On the preparation counter two small silver plated tureens containing sprigs of parsley, melted butter, garlic and spices waited to receive them.  “Right” he murmured under his breath, but not too loudly, “that’s it, we’re leaving tonight.”

The Man in the Moon                                                                                                   

 by Charles Langley

  stood across the street and looked up at the McGarry Building.  Beautifully designed to fit in  with the buildings around the block it stood on, it was a work of beauty.

On the fourteenth floor, I was greeted by a quiet man who led me into the office of the legendary McGarry.  The mogul lolled back in his chair, one leg up on a lower drawer pulled out from the desk.  The top button of his shirt was unbuttoned and his tie was slipped down.

“I’m Jim Young,” I said, “From the Journal-Advertiser.”

“I know who you are. I asked your editor to send you.”

He had a face of marble and a voice that commanded respect.

“The world knows me as a business titan and as a public servant.  There was another side to my personality that nobody knows.  I don’t want to die a hypocrite, so I’ll tell you that story.  If you let it out while I’m still around, I’ll deny it emphatically and your boss will no longer need your services.”

“It won’t get out.”

“When I was a young man I was foolish and ended up badly in debt.  Moneylenders were ready to break my legs or my head and I had nowhere to turn.  So I robbed a branch of the Little Bear grocery chain.  I hid in the store until the doors were locked and the safe was open before I presented myself with an army forty-five in my hand.”

“I consider this just a loan and will pay it back when I can,” I told the manager.  “Under these circumstances, it would be foolish for anyone to get hurt by this caper.”

The manager, not knowing there was no clip in the automatic, was level-headed and went along.  He put the money in the bag I had brought.

“I know you will signal the police as soon as I’m out of here, but don’t anyone try to be a hero and follow me.  Wait for them and then do your damndest.”

Outside, I doffed my mask and the cotton gloves I was wearing and made a dash for where I had left my car.  As I got in, I saw a boy, ten or twelve years old, standing at the curb looking intently at me.

Damn, I thought.  There goes the perfect crime.  Tomorrow the police sketch artist will have my face plastered over the front pages.  But it didn’t happen.  The detective assigned to interview had no faith in the witness.

“Anyone can see he’s not all there,” he complained.  “How will a jury see him?”

Still he asked the simple questions.

“Did you see a man come out of the grocery store with a big bag?”

Hesitation.  Then a slurred “Yes.”

“Do you know who he was?”

Hesitation again.  Then  “The man in the moon.”

“See, I told you he was daft,” the officer said.  Daft as a loon.”

“The detective didn’t know that even people with mental defects often have areas where they are lucent.  This young boy was like that.  He was a classic car buff, and knew the names and nameplates of every car on the road.  When he said “The man in the moon” he meant “the man driving a Moon automobile.” A check of automobile registrations for the area would have turned up half a dozen of these cars, but only one of them would have had an owner who was over his head in debt.”

“I used the money to straighten out my affairs and used the surplus to buy a heavy-duty truck, that I intended to rent out to the construction trade.  I had no problem getting work through the work season, but there were long periods of time when construction was closed down and I looked for other income.  Houses in those days were heated with coal, brought in by the railroads and sold at high prices, because of the lack of competition.  I began making runs into the Pennsylvania mine areas to buy coal from the small independent mines that were ignored by the railroads.  My delivered prices were much lower, so business boomed.  I used the money coming in to add trucks and drivers.  Since the business required much fuel, I began buying up service stations along my main route and adding mechanics to handle the repairs.  I rented space to barbers, so the truckers wouldn’t have to stop in town to freshen up, and made a deal with a chain of work clothes dealers.  I put in stores where drivers could pick up gifts and necessities to take home to their families.  Once the ball started to roll everything fell into place.  I built clusters of homes around the truck—stops for the people who worked there.  Built strip malls for them to shop.  Rival truckers found use for my facilities.”

“Somewhere along the line I found that the chain of stores I had robbed was on bad times.  Foreign owned chains had them ready to shut down.  I brought in money and specialists to change their operating methods and soon had them earning money again.”

“By the time I constructed this building, money was the last thing I needed.  But I still felt guilty.  I was a highly respected business tycoon, but I still felt guilty.  This will help clear my conscience.  It will show that the tallest statues have feet of clay.  And it will demonstrate that a man should be judged by his abilities, rather than be denigrated by his disabilities.”

“What happened to the eye-witness?” I asked.

“He was sent to a Swiss school that strengthened his needs and worked with his strengths. He supports himself with a full-time job now.”

“Is he still a car buff?”

“You bet.  Want to see a demonstration?”

He pressed a button on his desk.  The man who had brought me in entered.

McGarry held up the page of Classic Car magazine, his fingers covering the writing below the picture.

“What is this, John,” he asked.

Hesitation.  Then “Reo Speed Wagon.  Designed by R. E. Olds, who built the Oldsmobile.”

“And who is this,” McGarry asked, indicating a picture on the desk of himself as a young man behind the wheel of a classic car.

No hesitation this time. “The man in the Moon.”

I didn’t question the big man's story or his philosophy.  After all, who was I to argue with the man in the Moon

                                                                                                      
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Gregory                                                          

by Quentin Poulsen

ick moved me in with his new Hilux.  He was always prepared to help me out, even if I did have to listen to his big-brother lectures in return. I didn't have many things and might have carried them on the bus except for the mattress.  I would have felt ridiculous hauling a mattress around on public transport.  Rick, naturally, approved of my departure from Bruce's.  He had always considered my friends a bunch of losers.  He seemed to hit it off with Gregory too.  They stood there in the kitchen talking quietly together while I wrestled my mattress through the house to the bedroom.  Then Rick had to get back to inspect the plans for his new house.  He and Barbara were going to live in Seatoun Heights, overlooking the harbour. 

No sooner was I settled in my new room than Gregory called me through to the kitchen.  He was seated at the small table in the corner by the fridge, an empty vase and a bowl of plastic fruit beside him.  He gestured for me to sit down opposite him.  It seemed important.

"It's two weeks' in advance plus two weeks' bond."

"No problem," I said, taking out my wallet and piling the cash on the table.

Gregory swept up the notes and carefully counted them, one by one.  "I'll also need thirty dollars for food."

I placed three more notes on the table, and he counted them as well, though anyone could see there were three blue notes there.

"That's for the basics," he said.  "If you want things like coffee or biscuits, obviously you buy those yourself."

He twisted around to look up at the calendar on the wall behind him.  "Right, wot nights will you be cooking?"

I gazed stupidly back at him.  "Cooking?"

He blinked at me through his spectacles. "Yes, you'll be cooking three nights, I'll be cooking three nights, and Saturday's we'll provide for ourselves.  I often go out for dinner on Saturday evenings, and no doubt you'll have your own plans."

I had difficulty drawing my next breath.  The idea of cooking for this guy every other night held all the appeal of a prison sentence.  But I had to tell him something —until I could find a way out of it.  "I can cook Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays, I s'pose..."

Gregory shook his head slowly. "No, it's got to be alternate nights.  Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, for instance."

I stared in disbelief at him, sitting across the table from me in his charcoal grey suit.  "I've got rugby practise on Tuesdays and Thursdays."

"Then make it Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays."

"I work late on Fridays."

He blinked at me some more. "So give up one of your practise nights."

"But that won't work," I appealed to him, sounding like some desperate leper even in my own ears.  "It'll be both practises and I'll lose my place in the team."

His expression did not change, as though all this meant nothing to him and the only thing of consequence in his life was that I cooked on the specific nights he wanted me to cook on.  "Well, you'll just have to decide wot's more important to you, won't you?  I've never had anyone here who wasn't prepared to cook before."

I wondered in a moment of bitterness just how many people he had had there before, and what the average term of their stays had been.  I couldn't see myself lasting very long, and this was only the first day.  But I needed the place, at least until I had chance to find somewhere else.  I couldn't go crawling back to Bruce's now.  The boys would have a field day. 

My mind raced.  "I s'pose I could put something on before practises, then dish it up as soon as I get back."  He was frowning, so I quickly added, "I'll have it on the table by eight or so."

Gregory massaged his narrow jaw a while.  "Well, so long as it is on the table by eight.  No later."

I took a deep breath and slumped back in my chair.  I had meant closer to eight-thirty.  Practise didn't finish till eight so I was going to have to leave around twenty minutes early.  I would not be able to keep that up for very long.  But at least I had gained a temporary reprieve.  I hated to think how Rick would have carried on had I been forced to call him the same day he had moved me in to ask him to move me back out again.

Gregory, having settled the life and death issue of cooking nights to his satisfaction, then set about explaining the rules of the house to me.  They were numerous and mostly trivial.  He was still droning on when a light tap at the door interrupted him.  It was an old woman seeking donations for the Crippled Children's Society.  I had my wallet open and was approaching the door when Gregory apologised to her and closed it in her face.  He had just taken half a month's wages off me and was refusing to make a donation.

That evening I was sprawled out on the leather couch when Gregory entered the living room and asked me to remove my feet from the coffee table.  He sat down right next to me and used the remote control to switch on the television.  It was all a bit strange, if you asked me, and him wearing his suit and drinking coffee at twenty-to-nine.

I was not a fan of television either.  Most of it seemed like it was designed for mentally-handicapped toddlers.  But it would have been rude to get up and leave the moment Gregory sat down.  So I stayed and watched it with him.  He flicked back and forth between the two public stations and the tacky private one, before settling on a movie, 'Last of the Mohicans.'

That lasted about twenty minutes, at which point he declared it 'typical American rubbish' and switched channels again.  Now we were watching 'COPS' and some old white officer was being congratulated for shooting a black youth as he fled down an alley.  There were slow motion replays of the guy being killed, like a football game.  Gregory decided that was 'more American rubbish' and switched channels again.  So now we had the local version of Candid Camera on and some overweight aerobics instructor was baring his buttocks to a class full of women; a chorus of mechanical, screechy laughter in the background.  Gregory chuckled too and put the remote control down.

Then he got talking about his career.  He babbled on about that for quite a time, but he might have been speaking Greek for all the sense it made to me.  Next he explained how he was dealing in shares for himself nowadays as well as on behalf of his clients.  He even tried to talk me into investing some money, and it required a considerable effort on my part to persuade him I was not interested.  Next he enlightened me with his plans to go into property development.  There was a "cool fortune" to be made in that, he reckoned, gazing at me with bulging bespectacled eyes.  It was all I could do to prevent myself from yawning into his face.

When Gregory went into the kitchen to make another coffee, I seized the opportunity and escaped to my bedroom.  He returned a few minutes later and turned the television up.  I could hear it through my sliding door just as clearly as if I had still been sitting on the couch beside him.  He flicked through the channels again and finally settled on the movie he had earlier denounced as 'American rubbish.'  This presented me with a dilemma.  I was actually interested in the movie, but I didn't want to listen to Gregory, and what I discovered was this:  If I stood right by the wall with my door open a fraction, I could see all of the television screen apart from the bottom left corner which was obscured by Gregory's head.  So after that I watched television from inside my room, peering out through the gap between the wall and the sliding door, and I didn't have to listen to Gregory talking.

Coach was not accustomed to me running off twenty minutes before the end of practises, and he roundly abused me every time.  But it was mostly warm-downs, and I kept my place in the team regardless.  Probably it was too late in the season to disrupt things by changing players.

The boys, naturally, had their fun.  They were exceedingly witty, nicknaming me 'The Nanny,' and even presenting me with a frilly pink apron after one match.  I suppose I couldn't blame them.  I had become a pretty easy target, what, with this business of cooking for Gregory.  They never said anything about me moving out of Bruce's though.

It started raining one night so Coach sent us into the gym lest we chew up the field.  A game of touch was organised and I scored a couple of easy ones inside Pigsy.  He was only suited for scrummaging, with that big beer belly of his.  If you beat him once he would feign disinterest in the entire affair and call out ''bring the ball back when you're finished'' each time you glided by him, like you were just being being downright childish or something.  As tighthead prop he, naturally, regarded himself as the epicentre of the team.  So I liked to give him a cheeky wink along the way.

I was going by Pigsy for the third time when an electric current shot through my knee and my leg went out from under me.  I gazed up at the timber ceiling as the faces began to gather at the perimeters of my vision.  They gawked down at me, saying nothing, like I was at the bottom of a well and they were looking into it.  And it seemed to me, in my dazed state, that what I saw in their eyes was not concern but something closer to triumph.  Only Coach's face appeared genuinely perturbed when it joined the circle of starers.

"Haven't done your bluddy knee in, have ya?" he asked in his gruffest tone.

"I'll be okay," I assured him through clenched teeth.  The pain had hold of my knee like some demon bull terrier.

Coach turned to Wheels.  "Go an' fetch Mat.  He'll be out on the main ground with the seniors."


It seemed an eternity before Wheels returned with the physio straddling along behind him.  Even Pigsy looked like a titan next to Wee Mat.  The boys were chuckling into their sleeves at the sight of him, a chubby green elfin in a soaking wet tracksuit.

"Wotcha done to yourself there, son?" he enquired, squatting down beside me.

I pointed to my outstretched leg. "Just wrenched me knee.  I'll be right in a jiff."

He made a prolonged examination, entailing much painful prodding and bending of the knee, before agreeing with my assessment.  From his bulky sports bag he produced a tube of ointment.  "It'll ease the pain," he told me, massaging a little into my knee.  "But you're finished for the season, sorry to tell ya."

It took me a moment to comprehend what he was saying.  I was out for the last five games!  I was so disappointed I neglected to thank him as he straddled back out, an elfin with his bulky sports bag, and the guys pointing at his back and chuckling among themselves.

My despair turned to alarm when I realised it was seven-thirty.  It would take me half an hour to get home on this leg.  I'd be lucky to have dinner on the table by quarter-past-eight.

I was close with my estimation too.  By the time I got back it was already eight, Gregory's dinner deadline.  He was sitting at the small kitchen table in his charcoal grey suit (perhaps he had a collection of them), the electric light shining on his spectacles and frowning forehead.

"Wrenched me knee," I explained sheepishly.  "Got home as quick as I could."

Gregory removed his spectacles and laid them on the table beside the bowl of plastic fruit.  A lime-green apple tumbled out and he smartly replaced it.  The irritation was in his eyes but failed to prepare me for what was to come.

"Look, this isn't working out," he said flatly.  "I don't ask much, but if you can't make an effort to comply with the few simple rules that I do set down, then you'll need to find another place."

In that moment, as I stood there on my aching knee, having hobbled home through the rain at maximum speed just to serve him his dinner, I had a very strong impulse to pummel his narrow bland face in.  But stronger than this was my growing sense of desperation.  I had not got around to looking for anywhere else yet, and going back to Bruce's held about as much appeal as hauling my mattress out to the city dump and taking up lodgings there.  I had to be able to reason with this guy.

"My season's over anyway.  It's not gunna happen again."

Gregory replaced his glasses and rose from his chair, shaking his head with finality.  "No, it's not just the cooking.  There are other issues besides.  The way you disappear into your room every night, for instance.  It's insulting."

"You should a said something.  I'll watch television with you this evening, if you like."  It sounded pathetic even in my own ears.  But I was desperate. 

The head kept shaking, and for an instant I felt the way I had in the gym as my teammates had gazed down at me.  Gregory turned away, as though I no longer existed, and went through to the living room.

"My decision is final," he said over his shoulder.  "I'll give you a week to find another place."

I hobbled after him.  I wasn't about to grovel anymore.  He wasn't going to change his mind.  Though I still had to contain my anger, for I needed that week, I was prepared to be a little less pathetic now that it had come to this.  "Well, I'll need my bond back before I go."

Gregory sat down on his leather couch and shuffled through a few sheets of paper on the coffee table.  "You'll get your money the day you leave.  Don't worry yourself too much about that. We'll settle your bills first though."

I took them from him and immediately noticed they were dated the month before I had moved in.  It figured.  The bills for the current month couldn't have possibly arrived yet.

''Oh!''  He feigned surprise when I pointed this out to him, as though a guy who practically had dollar signs in his eyes didn't know what month's bills he was looking at.  "In that case I'll have to hold onto your bond till this month's bills arrive."

Perhaps it was the light on the lenses of his spectacles, but he seemed to be gloating as he looked up at me.  The urge to pummel his bland little face in was very strong in me then.  I wondered how long it would be before someone actually did, for it could only have been a matter of time.  But, as for me, I needed that week.   I made up my mind I would have it all out with him the final day, and if he didn't come up with my money then, I'd punch his teeth out, smash his spectacles and take his microwave or something.

Meanwhile, I had to find somewhere else to live.

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A Day of December In Catalina                                           

by Iolanda Scripca

he freeway was empty that time of morning.  We jumped in the car with an anticipated giddiness and headed towards Dana Point, California, at about 45 minutes distance from our house.  The sun was playing hide-n-seek along the Pacific ocean either  blinding us shortly and rhythmically from behind the vacation homes or elongating our shadows into abstract but childish  caricatures.  Santa Ana winds changed  their minds midway; probably exhausted of so much destruction  and fires fed by them few weeks ago in the San Diego area.

We boarded the modern Catalina Express, one of the speedboats available in the Southern California harbors such as: Dana Point, Long Beach, San Pedro, Newport Beach and Marina del Rey and said  "Good bye" to the so familiar coast which, now, was becoming smaller, faster and faster, in the deafening mixture of  sirens, engines, cumulus clouds and  the immense blue color of the Pacific in winter.   I felt I was  in the artistic world of Wyland, in which herds of white horses crash as waves against the rocky Californian coast, in which the beauty of this spherical planet was not only divided into two worlds  but also combined into a beautiful poem of  Earth and underwater life.

I jumped off my seat and went out of the cabin so I could "gallop" with playful dolphins and enigmatic whales and to wave to Saint Catherine who, in a blink of the eye, disappeared in a pirate  fog so she could get  her island ready for the new guests.

I was like in an adventure movie,  in the middle of the ocean, where you lose your sense of space and time, where echoes  die in frontal collision with the water—in all its physical forms.  The majority of the tourists stood up as if in fear of suffocating but, also, with the curiosity of a child, Catalina Island was revealing  itself in front of us, with a vulnerability of a virgin, like a Jurassic  Park of Southern California.

We landed in Avalon harbor, in a small gulf with a Mediterranean charm, with endless rows of personal yachts, with yellow submarines  in which tourists could visit the sea world through underwater glass windows, where kids of different nationalities fed the orange fish called Garibaldi and where heads of scuba divers startled you popping out in unexpected places.

Seventy-six square miles is the residence of only 3000 permanent inhabitants who use, as their main mean of transportation, the golf carts, one more sophisticated than the other, like bees continuously buzzing up and  down the narrow streets full of villas and hotels hooked on the rocky coast.  Each building has its own history, from the early 20th century Casino to the villa of the unfulfilled  love.

Every little street was full of appetizing aromas from the Californian-Mexican foods (a "friendly" combination of lobster tail and Thanksgiving turkey  with all its trimmings was surprisingly delicious), to a gourmet pizza, to the excellent Chinese food.

We climbed  in a special minivan next to six other people and headed up  the hill towards the airpark.  The winding road  was abruptly taking us away from the tourist center entering the  85% of the natural reservation  of the island.

All of a sudden we stopped in the middle of nowhere and one of the passengers, with a face of an adventurer, got down and disappeared  like an empty thought among the hills, carrying his backpack.  Although in December, the hot sun was patting the center of the island, now, full of black, moving dots. 

" These are buffalo, which were introduced on the island in 1924" , explained the driver.

" Fourteen buffalo were brought for the movie " The Vanishing American."   After the project was  completed it was decided the buffalo would stay and live on the island, " said the man at the wheel while punching the code at the gate of the airpark.

A silence of biblical beginnings dominated that natural platform.  I  was the first human being chiseled from wind and sun, with long, blond hair  created by feelings  of total freedom.

All the worries and pains of the past dissipated like the sand on the runway at the contact with the wheels of our friend's airplane.  I placed the  souvenirs  in the back seat next to me and closed my eyes.

Now I was floating between a tired, reddish sun and a pale, crescent moon, with sleepy seagulls at my feet and colorful Christmas lights reflected on my retina from the distance of the little town Avalon.  On the horizon a huge, white cruise ship was heading towards the island to stop for the night, on its way  to Mexico, carrying thousands of hearts and life stories like a mirage on a navy blue desert.

I got home accompanied  by the urban coyotes' choir, placed a couple of fire logs in the  fire place and sat in front of the two candles that burn continuously in my living room so I could tell them about another adventure of mine.

                                                                                                        
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Charnley and Leonard the Blind Man

by Tom Sheehan

Silence is the color
in a blind man’s eyes

eonard wondered if it was some kind of contest, if it smacked of more than what it seemed.  He had heard the poem a hundred times, Charnley always walking around with the book in his shirt pocket or back pocket suddenly reading it to him, again and again, and Leonard, the Blind Man of North Saugus, let the words sink in and become part of him, part of his sightless brain.  Just like Charnley had become part of him.  Charnley’s face he could not picture, nor eyes, nor beard, nor jut of chin, but settled on the imagination of Charnley’s hands and could only do so when he felt his own slim unworked hands, the thin fingers, the soft palms, the frail knuckles, how the fingers wanted to touch a piano but couldn’t, or a woman, but who wants a blind man?

Charnley, he noted early, walked with a heavy step, a plod on the earth or trod surface, so that the framework of the old building vibrated and made echoes of itself. Charnley’s hands must be robust and huge, Leonard thought, because he had been a farmer at one time, a tenant farmer, a milker of cows, a digger of land, a puller of weeds who just happened to read poems. Just think about that, he said to himself, think about the farmer, think about the distance between two men, how wide it can be, what narrows that distance, sound or silence? What kind of providence can a poem bring?

Silence is the color
in a blind man’s eyes,
sounded again.

Though Leonard initially could not begin to visualize the poem on the page (not with the sensitivity or capture of Braille or the impressions of an old copper etching he’d known), perhaps not ever he thought, the way the verses were built, the white space supporting the sounds.  This, even as Charnley repeatedly explained the structure, often testing Leonard’s patience to the darkest limits, the words building on a pad in his mind, a pad conjured up in an instant.  At first they collected in a bunch that he had time to separate and sound off on.  What the hell, if he had anything he had time, a whole ton of time.

Then the words, each one in turn, eventually assumed a hazy kind of identity and a place alongside another word or two.  Sense came of some of them finally, and then one night, alone, a clarity, as if a shell of awed proportions had gone off in his head, exploded its sound and meaning in a dazzling display of whiteness.  His brother Milward had once tried to explain the properties of a white phosphorous shell to him, the heat and the dazzling light and the rush of energy traversing a forward slope of a mountain in Korea.  The nearest thing to them Leonard had ever known, to both Milward’s description of white phosphorous and this final poem, was pain.  He used to tell Charnley his gall bladder attack was a poem because that had struck him awake on several nights at full alarm, fright leaping through his body, a stabbing in his guts, a poem of pain fully understood down to its root and rhythm.

Charnley had said, “I’ll stop at the end of each verse, each line, so you can see, can visualize, how the whole damn poem is made.”  As if a piece of punctuation or explanation, he added, “Don’t let my rambunctious choice of words upset you.  I am not very selective, not schooled.  I only mean by them what I’m trying to say.”  At that moment Charnley’s voice was heavy and anvil-like, canyon stuff, back-of-the-barn deep, not a classroom voice, not a poet’s voice, no obtuse edge to it, no carriage of partial mystery, no forecast of shadows.  It was the no-nonsense voice of a farmer who knows the land is an enemy of wild proportions or the friend of a lifetime in one swift reaping.  Patience, it could have said, all the rough stuff not withstanding.

“But your voice changes when you read the poem,” Leonard said, “the sound changes, you get cryptic, short-tempered, and don’t tell me I’m getting short or I’ll kick you the hell out of here!  You think I can’t see you, don’t you?  Well, I know when you’re standing in the doorway or in front of one of the windows.  One room, one door, seven windows, I could find you in a damn minute.”

And for his own punctuation said, “And don’t shrug your shoulders like that.  I know what you’re doing when you do it.  And your voice changes then, too.  I could call you an Octavarian.”  He tittered, less than a guffaw it was, half full of respect, measuring, playful, reaching.  “Hell, man, sometimes I can see better than you.”  His fingers tapped slowly on the tabletop, a radioman sending out his own code.

Charnley only smiled, yet standing in the doorway on this visit so Leonard could find him in that shadow of shadows, that deep shade of an eclipse of the whole man.  He’d been in the shadows his whole life; his dimensions raw and few but known.

One day a year earlier and there’s no one there, and then a voice says, coming off the front walk of the one-room house that used to be the old North Saugus School, “I’m a new neighbor now.  I’m Charnley.  I come to live with my daughter Marla in the old Corbett house.  I have a poem here about a blind man I’d like to share with you.  I like to read some poems.  Not all poems, just some of them.  I’ve watched you walk all the way to Lynn to see your brother Charlie and all the way up the Pike to see your brother Milward, some days your cane flashing like a saber, the sun giving respect to its duty.  This poem reminds me of you and I wonder what you might have to say about it.”

Leonard’s quick words leaped out of the darkness. “You followed me?”

 Charnley spoke as if he were plowing the land, trying to make the furrow straight, the endeavor simple.  “No, you were going my way, so I went along with you, some ways in the rear, but then I went past both times, to see Ma Corbett in the nursing home in Lynn and off to an old friend’s new home in Lynnfield, but not far from Milward’s place.”

Charnley read him the poem for the first time.

“That’s a damn love poem,” Leonard shouted, “and I don’t even have a girlfriend.  What the hell are you trying to do to me?  What are you saying?”  There was no way he could fathom Charnley’s face, what lurked in a half smile or the set of eyes, how his mouth was framed, the lips readable.  If he dipped one shoulder in a half shrug, was it a signal he could interpret?

“Everything is love, Leonard, or no love.  Everything.  You don’t need a girlfriend to have love.  I don’t have a girlfriend.  My wife’s been dead two-three years now.  I love this poem.  You made me see what it’s like, this poem.  I just want to know what it does for you.  If it does anything. I am never sure of things like this, such argument or reasoning.  You sow a seed, take care of its bed with tender care, it grows.  If it doesn’t, better find out why.”

“You’re like a damn busybody hen, popping in here, following me like I was a damn cripple or something, sticking this poem in my ear.  I never had a poem in my ear.”

“I’m trying to be a friend, Leonard.  I wanted to share something with you.  I’m just an old farmer who loves this poem.”

“Not outright pity, I take it.”

“None at all.  I don’t give a damn if you never see another shadow in your whole life, if that’s what you want to hear from me.”  Leonard knew he was blocking one of the windows, the idea of sunlight failing around him, a personage of shadow.

They had, with that declaration, become friends for one long year.  Charnley would come and read the poem, always reading it from the book, never having it memorized, saying he couldn’t do it.  Leonard never told him he had it memorized, had said it a thousand times a day it seemed for months on end, at first the words cluttered on the pad and then standing like singular statues.  There would be a pot of tea on the old kitchen range, converted to gas by his brother Milward, and the tea would hit the one room as if it had been sprayed with pekoe or oolong or something else Asian, a cutting swath of clear acid in the air, hitting the sinuses, clearing them, drawing Leonard and his friend to the stove on cold days or to the small porch on warm days, the late sun spilling on their feet, the poem following the way a shadow comes along or moves ahead of a body proper.

Leonard said one day, the wind bitter and cold outside, the windows rattling, “Why don’t you ever read one of the other poems?”

“It would only dilute this one, Leonard, cut right through it.  If I know one poem in my life, it’s worth it, and I know this poem because you know it.  It’s real for me.  It’s like my wife, my one woman forever.  I’ll not dilute her.  Not for one damn minute.  Not forever.  The same as having a best friend.  There’s only one of those.  Everyone else has to get in line.

Came the day eventually, in the sock of winter, they said the poem like a duet at work, the words falling in place with unerring accuracy, rhythmic, shared, together, almost one voice, the room expanding around them, a spring pasture coming to them, silence coming at them, one word and then another word hanging in space like they were parsing each one in the midst of the air, a letter at a time, a slight whoosh if need be, the rush of a consonant or its soft command on the lips, sibilant, syllabic.  The blind man and the sighted man said silence as if they stood in the middle of a mausoleum, and the word hung there for them and then died away and became itself.  All around them they felt the word become itself.  When they said color, some long minutes later, Charnley had his eyes closed and Leonard had his wide open, and they knew they were twinned in this sound, this nothingness.  Leonard was ferociously at ease.

The next day the knock at the door was timid, feminine, like feathers, Leonard thought, pigeon feathers in the eaves.  It was Charnley’s daughter Marla.  “I have news about my father.”  The tone of her voice abounded with that news, harbinger, omen.  “I found him this morning in his bed the way he wanted to go, peacefully, in the darkness.  That’s just what he said to me one night recently,  ‘Peacefully, in the darkness.’  He also said that when it comes on him he wanted you to have this book.”  She placed the book of poems in Leonard’s hand.  “He said you’d know what to do with it.”

She was a smaller shadow than her father standing in the open door, the wind rustling behind her, death hanging back there in the darkness of the day as if it were words ready to be spoken, dread highlights hunting the darkness.  The old schoolhouse had no echoes, no vibrations, the sills socked home tightly on the granite bases.  Half the size of her father, Leonard thought, yes, perhaps half the size.

Leonard motioned for her to close the door.  “Shut the death out,” he said, and his fingers found the page of the poem where that route was worn like a path.  Listening for her steps, seeking minor vibrations if there were any, he offered the open page to Charnley’s daughter, their hands touching.  An electrical movement passed through them and he remembered a static charge coming at him once from a metal file cabinet at Milward’s house.

Her voice was soft, hesitant.  It would take her time.  He had plenty of time.  Now Charnley had all of it.  Against one window she posed a smaller shadow, but a whiteness lurked in aura.  Leonard thought of the white phosphorous Milward had spoken about as Charnley’s daughter Marla sifted through the poem.  He tried to picture her small hands holding the book open.  There was something delicate he could almost reach, fragile, silken, but it was lost in the poem as she spoke it, her breath instead nearly touching him, cinnamon with it, and perhaps maple syrup, yet day and night all coming together in the one essence:

It was faint but indelible, he decided; discoverable, he assented; mild but ascendant, he owned up to; and Leonard the Blind Man knew how soft and delicious it was on her tongue, at her lips, coming from her mouth, the poem, the poem her father had found for him.

                                                                                                     
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Odd job                                                                          

by Saskia van der Linden

t was better than phoning people to ask if they’d buy double-glazing.  I had to speak to people face-to-face and find out more interesting facts than that:  what magazines they read, what they knew about the European Union, what political views they held.  Most of the time, a door would be slammed in my face.  I really preferred this to being invited into the house of someone I’d rather not visited.  Looking back, I’d say that exams weren’t the hardest part of being a student!

‘Do you subscribe to any TV guides?’ I asked a man in his early thirties who sported the “Spare any change, love?” look.

‘Oh yes!’ he replied.  ‘I love Playboy and Penthouse…I really enjoy looking at pretty ladies, you see.’

‘And are there any travel magazines that you read?’ I continued bravely.

‘Oh yes!’ he replied. ‘I love Playboy and Penthouse… I really enjoy looking at pretty ladies, you see.’

‘Is anyone in your household interested in computer guides?’ I asked, desperate now.

‘Oh yes!’ he replied.  ‘I love Playboy and Penthouse… I really enjoy looking at pretty ladies, you see.’ Then he sighed and asked, ‘Do you have any questions about Playboy and Penthouse?’

I was pleased to tell him I didn’t.

I was holding the most difficult questionnaire ever in my hand as I rang another doorbell.  This time I was to test people’s knowledge about the European Union.  Questions included:  ‘What are the main objectives of the Single European Act?’ and ‘Why is the Treaty of Maastricht considered a turning point in the European integration process?’  The door opened and I explained what the purpose of my visit was.  Upon which the woman with the particularly blank face asked, ‘What’s a survey?’

‘Can I ask you any questions about the next general elections, please?’  I asked the giant man who’d appeared in the doorway, accompanied by his many tattoos.

‘Fascist scum, all of them!’ he shouted.

‘So, have you made up your mind about who you’re going to vote for?’ I went on with a quivering voice.

‘Nazi dogs!’ he yelled, waving an enormous knife.

I couldn’t decide between screaming or bursting into tears when I noticed that in his other hand, he was holding a leek.

‘Enjoy your dinner!’ I squeaked, and ran away.