Table of Contents

poetry

(the passionate stuff)

performance art

9/25/18 “Life & Death & Everything Between”
show poetry at Chicago’s The Gallery Cabaret

performance art

9/26/18 “to the Bottom of the Earth and Back”
show poetry at Chicago’s In One Ear

prose poetry

(the best of both worlds)

prose

(the meat & potatoes stuff)

philosophy monthly

(justify your existence)

lunchtime poll topic

(commentaries on relevant issues)

Shades

Blinders
Prefer darkness
Hiding, hushed, downcast
Out of touch
Forlorn...

Collapse

I met her
downtown on the steps
of a church she refused to enter.

Her practiced smile
born of filth,
futility, and lies;
one staged
for all she’d greet.

Used & misunderstood
the crumbling woman
saw herself as
damaged goods;
Escape her wish- her only wish.

Most times she lay
daylong in bed;
her life oozing away.

Handled by daddy,
she was a collapsed star.
Her childhood extinguished
as though,
it had never existed at all.

Those fallen dreams,
led her neatly to the bottom,
where doubtless she,
felt more at home.

She died one day
by her own hands.

long excerpt from
Euclid Creek Book Four

May 4, 2018
for DPK

This year the date falls on a Friday,
and the temperatures are seasonable
as the day dawns,
though
it will be warmer than average later
Forty-eight years ago
the date fell on a frosty Monday,
my first day of sixth-grade camp
several miles southeast from where
we then lived in Lyndhurst
And
though we wouldn’t hear of them right away,
important events were taking place that day
on a college campus about
twenty-five miles away as the crow flies
I think about those events often;
I rarely think about sixth-grade camp,
except
to note it took place that week

After the morning reverie,
laundry
lunch
reading
a short nap
nothing
memorable in this stretch;
I’m in a holding pattern

The Haiku Society of America
is meeting in town over the weekend,
and
they’re having a dinner get-together
at a local restaurant tonight
I’m not a member of the society,
as haiku is not my primary mode
of poetic expression,
though
I did have a book of haiku
published last month,
but
locals who aren’t members
are welcome at the get-together
provided they let the organizer
know in advance they were coming

When I arrive at the restaurant,
the first person I meet there for the get-together
is a woman from San Francisco,
and
the second is a woman from southern California
who used to publish a journal of cinquains
I mention to her I submitted
some of my Cleveland Cinquains to her,
but
she never responded to my submission
(I will apologize profusely later)

When everyone has arrived,
there are too many to be seated together,
so we are split into two groups
of a dozen or so
I make sure to sit at one of the two corners
appropriate for left-handers

Dinner is uneventful:
the menu has the usual bar food,
though the service is excellent
The publisher of one of my other books
buys a copy of my haiku book,
and
one of the other poets asks me to read
one of the haiku he picked at random
I do so, and read another as well
They both get the big laughs they were intended to
Conversation is on a wide variety of topics:
among them, the local rocket scientist
taking about the Mars rover project
with which he’s involved

After dinner there is some picture-taking
I need to be shown how to use
the camera on the cell-phone,
and
the pictures don’t come out very well
You might think I was technologically-challenged,
but I was never very good
with any kind of camera
After the picture-taking
the rocket scientist and his wife
and the poet from southern California,
who are acquainted with each other
through their mutual interest in speculative poetry
(also an interest of mine)
decide to walk off some of the dinner
I’m allowed to tag along

First the four of us
walk down the hill to the Chagrin River
I step on the back of the SoCal poet’s shoe
during the walk, and apologize for my clumsiness
Once we are off the paved walks
there are some soft spots on the ground
from rain earlier in the day,
but
we are able to avoid them
(I will learn later she is a football fan;
had I known it then I would have told a story
about something that happened on the field we passed)
Standing on the river bank
we can hear the river rushing past
and see white water in the growing darkness
(this scene will inspire a later haiku)
We then trudge back up the hill

We walk next to what should have been the town square,
but for whatever reason it was a triangle, not a square
There is a war monument,
and
cannons from the Civil War and World War I
that we look at on the way to the gazebo,
where we stand and chat for quite a while
We see fireworks from a minor-league baseball game
off in the distance
Because it’s early May
the temperature drops quickly after sunset,
(because it’s after dark
the nearby cemetery is closed;
I will later tell her of a story that ended there)
and though it was over eighty earlier,
some are starting to get cold
and decide to head back
I’m wearing shorts and am asked if I’m cold
I say, No, I’m hot-blooded

The four of us walk from the town triangle
Our three cars are parked in three different places:
the rocket scientist and his wife
peel off to where they’re parked
I ask the SoCal poet
if I can walk her to her car,
and she says yes
When we get to her car we chat for a few minutes,
and she asks to buy my book
I autograph it for her,
and
ask her if she’d like to have a drink
She says yes, and we go back to restaurant
She glides gracefully onto the bench seat
and I take the table’s wooden chair

I had enough coffee with dinner,
so I order a snakebite on the rocks,
and she orders a glass of wine
And we’re off
Conversation
moves from topic to topic:
some background
(we’re both orphans),
some literary gossip
but more often styles and philosophies;
some secrets revealed

Her smile is dazzling:
she smiles often, and not just with her mouth;
the smile extends to her eyes,
which,
after a closer look turn out to be green
(I have always liked green eyes
as a physical feature,
probably
because they’re relatively rare)
Two-and-a-half hours go quickly by,
and we have barely scratched the surface
of what we have to say to one another,
but
it is time to call it a night
I walk her to her car,
and give her a goodnight kiss
(the kiss will inspire another haiku)
I tell her I am now sorry
that I sold her my book
rather than giving it to her,
but she scoffs at that notion
A second kiss and a hug,
and we part,
evening California time,
after midnight here

I hope this poem begins to pay her back

Blue Moon

Your blue moon
Has two faces
Your words don’t match your actions
Been that way from the start
Ying and Yang
The truth of who you are
Is now crystal clear
No going back
Disintegration;
Will occur
Now that the act is over

Hollow Light

Hollow Light.
Moon. Lost.

The Drama Things

The drama thing is
the glaze on the cake,
the wing on the plane,
the sun in the sky,
the scratched record that
just keeps on playing.

The drama thing is
the beak on the bird,
the rain pouring down,
the brain damaged soul
feeling lost, confused;
its eyes on the ground.

Heavy Sleep

Don’t come tonight.
Don’t stir things up.
I feel mournful
and half fatal.

In heavy sleep
remorse will creep.
Sleep will turn grief
to nothingness.

You are not mine.
You like me not.
I am destroyed.

The heart hangs on.
It is a stone.
I sleep alone.

A Genuine Refrain

I pity each long life
armchair centuries
my pejorative impaled on the TV set
the clouds
the precipitation falling from a neon husk
the now now now
before palpitating fingertips
clenched tight, arthritic grip

Wander down leased halls
Leashed from the tap
grocery aisles, the DMV,
the Americano,
the cellophane dinners.
A feast
before the gallows of security.

The sterile sympathy of envy:
the gutter is a suitable tomb
for the forgotten and free.

The scars, my bellows
meet the requirements
of form.

Modern English,
could it ever reach
such a desolate climate?

A silicon skiff
a perch for complacency,
routine

The oozing gaze at the drunkards
stumbling by my sill
plaque on enamel walls
the clipped wings of the Canary

The White Lines of a Parking Stall

I’ll paint my own fucking picture
Enough of their lines and corners
The control group in their impressionism
Another dull epiphany
I’ve grown callous to the best of it
Picking out arrowheads
Triangular conglomerates of stars
To find new direction

We tottered among the other
In this sour, aging dance
But with shadowed signal flares
We set our sights on satellite photos
Of kiddie pools
the enveloping yellowed grass
We mistook for the moon’s glow.

We held our revelations
with the mega mart’s
inauguration
And dreamed in the offspring
Of our parent’s coveted
Nuclear family

Bound within the tread of my past,
the parameters of our cage,
We alone know the nuisance in the definition
Of malice
Losing fingernails
Clawing out family from clay

And the sirens don’t sing
The termites remain
beside the husk of the muse
prostrate
Voyeuristic distance
With teeth like scalpels
And ridicule the steaming
Cud of your entrails.

John Sidney McCain

John Sidney McCain
Was
A Member of a Navy family
A Naval Academy Graduate
An aviator
A prisoner-of-war
An American Hero
A Representative
A Senator
A Candidate for President

But
We all know that

Since he died
Much has been written
About
His years in prison
His candidacy for President
His contentious relations
with the President

But
We’ve been all through that

What I see as even more
Important than those facts
Was how
After 5 ½ years of torture
He came back to
the United States
and, after obtaining office,
joined forces with another
Silver Star Winner
John Kerry
of an opposite party
who had come back
from Vietnam
opposing a war that
McCain still supported
To push for Normalization
of relations with Vietnam
the same country that
tortured him

Then, once the relations
were normalized,
he went with Kerry
to Vietnam
and met with his
captors and torturers
the same people
who crippled him
and even embraced them

Could you do that?
Could you forgive them?
I’m sure that I couldn’t
That’s why he was a hero
of mine
The rest of it is just nice.

bio

    John F. McMullen, “johnmac the bard” is the Poet Laureate of the Town of Yorktown, NY, the author of over 2,500 columns and articles and seven books, five of which are collections of poetry, and is the host of a weekly Internet Radio Show (with hundreds of shows to date). Links to the recordings of all radio shows as well as information on Poet Laureate activities and an event calendar are available at .

Sean and Sara

Sean
Was a devout
Roman Catholic
While
Sara
Was an observant
Orthodox Jew

They fell in love
And wanted to
Worship together
When they married

But neither wanted to
Belong to what they each
Saw as the other’s
Bizarre religion

So they each became
Unitarians
And are now
Equally miserable.

bio

    John F. McMullen, “johnmac the bard” is the Poet Laureate of the Town of Yorktown, NY, the author of over 2,500 columns and articles and seven books, five of which are collections of poetry, and is the host of a weekly Internet Radio Show (with hundreds of shows to date). Links to the recordings of all radio shows as well as information on Poet Laureate activities and an event calendar are available at .

A Poem? A Poet?

At a Poetry Workshop
One participant
Criticizing another’s poem
Said
“I like it but
I don’t think it’s a poem”

So a discussion ensued
What is a poem?

Well it doesn’t have to rhyme
And there are
Sonnets
Limericks
Haiku
Narrative
Epic
Free Verse
Acrostic
Cinquain
Concrete
Diamante
Tanka
Villanelle
And
On and on

We finally came to
A rather circular determination
(or copout)

Poets write poems
And
The people who write poems
Are poets

I am a poet and
I write poems

bio

    John F. McMullen, “johnmac the bard” is the Poet Laureate of the Town of Yorktown, NY, the author of over 2,500 columns and articles and seven books, five of which are collections of poetry, and is the host of a weekly Internet Radio Show (with hundreds of shows to date). Links to the recordings of all radio shows as well as information on Poet Laureate activities and an event calendar are available at .

Equal

Adapted to roles
and traveled far
but what for?

Tired of low wages,
while others look away
knowing of unfair pay.

Corporately powerless,
yet the glue of the workplace
flowing from an ability to nurture.

Capable of critical choices,
as done through the millennium,
women naturally multi-task.

Genuinely thankful for feedback,
women foster virtuous acts
in an atmosphere of teamwork.

More likely to delay rewards
and weigh all options,
women reach corporate goals.

Diversity recognizes erring ways,
while men with the same background
just backslap each other.

What to do when this inequity
does not make corporate,
academic or political agendas?

Let’s speak Up!
Power in factories,
corporations and legislatures
needs to be shared and
it is there for the taking.

Equally.

pure water

Ideals are great
Johnny Unitas was great
He had to retire
He grew old and eventually died;
Comic book peoples
Laugh their garlic lunch in your face
At the word, “Mint”,
Hold a comic, just printed
Breathe in, breathe out
It’s no longer “Mint”;
Johnny Unitas
Made footballs burn up in the
Atmosphere
There’s always just a moment in Time,
So, say “pure”, then accept
A little arsenic
A little antimony
A little bismuth
All of which, are deadly poisons
Then, say, “pure”, again
See how easy?

Oh, and the chloride content

As Long As I Wanted

My grandmother was a tiny woman
who had a dog named Blondie
and a row house in east Baltimore.
After granddad died, she rented out
the top floor to a woman we never saw,
an upstairs ghost flushing the toilet,
or closing the bedroom door.
Grandma still liked to sit out on the stoop
on summer nights with her pack
of Chesterfields and a transistor radio
even after the whole block was air-conditioned.

She took me once to a church carnival
around the corner on Highland Avenue.
Hello, Miss Catherine, people said to her,
and she put me on the carousel, told me
I could ride as long as I wanted. She waved
each time I went round, held my hand
all the way home.

She sent me five dollars for my birthday
one year in college. I spent it on the beer
I started with, ended up falling down
a flight of steps, getting my chin stitched
up in the emergency room. I never told her
about that, and now I’m not even sure
when was the last time I saw her, or when
she passed away. I remember my mom called
to tell me, or maybe it was my sister, all I know
now is that she died all alone.

We’ll All Be Baptized

He heard the rhythm of her steps
in the hallway, then the door unlock,
a purse dropped on the kitchen table.
Still, he didn’t take his eyes off the tv,
even when she sat down on the arm
of the sofa next to him. Hey, he said,
reaching down into the bag at his feet
for the last handful of Tostitos,
how’d it go tonight?

Pretty good, she answered
as he munched on the corn chips.
There’s only four of us in the class
and everybody is real friendly
The priest’s name is Father Michael,
he seems smart and nice, and he gave
each of us a pretty set of rosary beads.
If everything goes well, we’ll all be baptized
at a mass the last Sunday in February.
You will come to that, won’t you?
Well, that all sounds good, he replied,
pointing at the tv. Look, he said,
it’s a musical called Summer Stock
with Judy Garland and Gene Kelly.
They’re dancing up a storm.

She did not respond. He kept his eyes
on the movie, not even aware he was fishing
around in the empty bag of chips, busy
wondering how people could make dancing
together look so fucking easy. Suddenly,
he heard her hiss God Damn You,
felt something whistle past his face,
saw the black rosary shatter against the wall,
and fall in pieces to the floor.

Being God

I’m tired of taking this knife to my hands
over and over again giving myself the stigmata
the blood gets all over my clothes
and I can never get the stains out
and for what, for you to see how I suffer

I’m tired of being humble when I’m
supposed to be the one with the power
over and over again I become your servant
and never are you bowing to me
I don’t even get a thank you

I’m tired of preaching to the converted
when the converted aren’t even really listening
they’re snoring in the back rows while I
deliver my sermon and there’s not even air
conditioning in here and I’m sweating

I’m tired of coming to you and healing the sick
taking away the problems, over and over again
giving you something to look forward to
and all I have is an eternity of waiting for
someone to take my place and tend to my wounds

I’m tired of giving the earth up to you
watching the devil’s work be done, and you know,
he’s just sitting down there looking at me
and laughing, over and over again because it’s
so easy for him when he doesn’t have to work

I’m tired of being your salvation
over and over again you turn to me
and I have no one to turn to but myself
it’s a bitch, you know, being your own god
since no one can save me from me

I’m tired of being your teacher, handing you
what you need on a silver platter and waiting
for that damn collection plate and someone
is always stealing out of it from the back row
I know who you are, you who leave me nothing

I’m tired of wearing this crown of thorns
over and over again the needles prick my skin
and even gods bleed, at least this one does
and when I ask you to wipe the blood
out of my eyes, well, I can’t see you anywhere

I’m tired of being something for everybody
when everyone is nothing for me
maybe the devil has the right idea, you know
maybe I’ll sit back and wait for you to miss me
as you wonder who’s your messiah now

True Happiness
in the New Millennium
(2017 Dripping Springs edit)

“Sometimes it seems the more I ask for the less I receive
The only true freedom is freedom from the heart’s desires
And the only true happiness this way lies”
                                                                - Matt Johnson

I’m here to usher in a whole new millennium
and I’m here to tell you we’re starting anew
so fasten your seat belts      hang on to your hats
place your seat trays in their upright and locked position
for it’s a bumpy ride, and I’ll tell you why

well, you need a leader and I’m stepping up to the plate
you keep asking for a big brother and I’m here to set you straight
you want someone to wipe your noses for you
well, pick up the tissue and do it yourself
because when you give up your rights, you take away mine
and we’re not having any of that

I’m here to usher in a whole new millennium
I’m here to usher in a whole new generation
they say that Eve ate from the tree from knowledge
but you know, she shouldn’t have stopped just there
cause the loggers are raping the trees of knowledge
the loggers are raping the forests of talent
the forests of ability      the forests of reason
of skill        of logic        perseverance        and life
we’re letting them rape the forests of excellence
we’re letting them rape the forests of excellence
and you know it’s now time to take it all back
because I’m here to usher in a whole new millennium
and I’m here to tell you how it’s gonna be done

you’re looking for peace in all the wrong places
you’re asking your leaders to save you from yourself
but your leaders are losers and they’re worse off than you

it’s time to make choices and it’s time to lay claim
to everything we’ve been blindly giving away
because I’m here to usher in a whole new millennium
take charge of yourself, and I’ll take charge of me
I’m my leader, not yours, so wipe your own noses

take it in to your hands, people, mold your own tools
this is the new millennium, and this is your chance
because no one should be showing us how to fail
people mastered that feat a millennia ago
so set your own rules and do something fast
cause it’s time to take charge and it’s time to be alive

I’m here to tell you there’s a new sensation
and I’m here to tell you there’s a new salvation
and the only true happiness this way lies

Poem About This

A poet walks into a coffee shop
sees a Rabbi, a Father and an Imam

and the poet thinks
“I should write a poem about this”

Violations tested

Was driving to meet someone
who had so little time off for lunch.

Was running late, still a few miles
on a stretch of 120 to their office.

So although the sign said 30, I went 55,
following a cop speeding down the street.

So after about a mile, that copper
turned his lights on and signaled me over.

And he walked over to my Saturn,
asked me if I knew how fast I was going.

And I replied, saying, “I don’t know,
I was just following you sir.” And I waited.

If he wrote me a ticket, there’d be a record
that he was speeding while not in pursuit.

If he wrote me a ticket, his faults would be
found... and cops wanna think they’re invincible.

So the cop finally said to me,
after looking at me for more than a moment,

“Watch what you’re doing, and
watch your speed in the future.” That’s all he said.

And I nodded very subserviently, “Yes sir.”
And I, a little bit slower, went on my way.

Janet Kuypers Bio

    Janet Kuypers has a Communications degree in News/Editorial Journalism (starting in computer science engineering studies) from the UIUC. She had the equivalent of a minor in photography and specialized in creative writing. A portrait photographer for years in the early 1990s, she was also an acquaintance rape workshop facilitator, and she started her publishing career as an editor of two literary magazines. Later she was an art director, webmaster and photographer for a few magazines for a publishing company in Chicago, and this Journalism major was even the final featured poetry performer of 15 poets with a 10 minute feature at the 2006 Society of Professional Journalism Expo’s Chicago Poetry Showcase. This certified minister was even the officiant of a wedding in 2006.
    She sang with acoustic bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds and Flowers” and “the Second Axing”, and does music sampling. Kuypers is published in books, magazines and on the internet around 9,300 times for writing, and over 17,800 times for art work in her professional career, and has been profiled in such magazines as Nation and Discover U, won the award for a Poetry Ambassador and was nominated as Poet of the Year for 2006 by the International Society of Poets. She has also been highlighted on radio stations, including WEFT (90.1FM), WLUW (88.7FM), WSUM (91.7FM), WZRD (88.3FM), KOOP (91.7FM), WLS (8900AM), the internet radio stations ArtistFirst dot com, chicagopoetry.com’s Poetry World Radio and Scars Internet Radio (SIR), and was even shortly on Q101 FM radio. She has also appeared on television for poetry in Nashville (in 1997), Chicago (in 1997), and northern Illinois (in a few appearances on the show for the Lake County Poets Society in 2006). Kuypers was also interviewed on her art work on Urbana’s WCIA channel 3 10 o’clock news.
    She turned her writing into performance art on her own and with musical groups like Pointless Orchestra, 5D/5D, The DMJ Art Connection, Order From Chaos, Peter Bartels, Jake and Haystack, the Bastard Trio, and the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and starting in 2005 Kuypers ran a monthly iPodCast of her work, as well mixed JK Radio — an Internet radio station — into Scars Internet Radio (both radio stations on the Internet air 2005-2009). She even managed the Chaotic Radio show (an hour long Internet radio show 1.5 years, 2006-2007) through BZoO.org. She has performed spoken word and music across the country - in the spring of 1998 she embarked on her first national poetry tour, with featured performances, among other venues, at the Albuquerque Spoken Word Festival during the National Poetry Slam; her bands have had concerts in Chicago and in Alaska; in 2003 she hosted and performed at a weekly poetry and music open mike (called Sing Your Life), and from 2002 through 2005 was a featured performance artist, doing quarterly performance art shows with readings, music and images. Starting at this time Kuypers released a large number of CD releases currently available for sale at iTunes or amazon, including “Across the Pond”(a 3 CD set of poems by Oz Hardwick and Janet Kuypers with assorted vocals read to acoustic guitar of both Blues music and stylized Contemporary English Folk music), “Made Any Difference” (CD single of poem reading with multiple musicians), “Letting It All Out”, “What we Need in Life” (CD single by Janet Kuypers in Mom’s Favorite Vase of “What we Need in Life”, plus in guitarist Warren Peterson’s honor live recordings literally around the globe with guitarist John Yotko), “hmmm” (4 CD set), “Dobro Veče” (4 CD set), “the Stories of Women”, “Sexism and Other Stories”, “40”, “Live” (14 CD set), “an American Portrait” (Janet Kuypers/Kiki poetry to music from Jake & Haystack in Nashville), “Screeching to a Halt” (2008 CD EP of music from 5D/5D with Janet Kuypers poetry), “2 for the Price of 1” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from Peter Bartels), “the Evolution of Performance Art” (13 CD set), “Burn Through Me” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from The HA!Man of South Africa), “Seeing a Psychiatrist” (3 CD set), “The Things They Did To You” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from the DMJ Art Connection), “Hope Chest in the Attic” (audio CD set), “St. Paul’s” (3 CD set), “the 2009 Poetry Game Show” (3 CD set), “Fusion” (Janet Kuypers poetry in multi CD set with Madison, WI jazz music from the Bastard Trio, the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and Paul Baker), “Chaos In Motion” (tracks from Internet radio shows on Chaotic Radio), “Chaotic Elements” (audio CD set for the poetry collection book and supplemental chapbooks for The Elements), “etc.” audio CD set, “Manic Depressive or Something” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from the DMJ Art Connection), “Singular”, “Indian Flux” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from the DMJ Art Connection), “The Chaotic Collection #01-05”, “The DMJ Art Connection Disc 1” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from the DMJ Art Connection), “Oh.” audio CD, “Live At the Café” (3 CD set), “String Theory” (Janet Kuypers reading other people's poetry, with music from “the DMJ Art Connection), “Scars Presents WZRD radio” (2 CD set), “SIN - Scars Internet News”, “Questions in a World Without Answers”, “Conflict • Contact • Control”, “How Do I Get There?”, “Sing Your Life”, “Dreams”, “Changing Gears”, “The Other Side”, “Death Comes in Threes”, “the final”, “Moving Performances”, “Seeing Things Differently”, “Live At Cafe Aloha”, “the Demo Tapes” (Mom’s Favorite Vase), “Something Is Sweating” (the Second Axing), “Live In Alaska” EP (the Second Axing), “the Entropy Project”, “Tick Tock” (with 5D/5D), “Six Eleven” “Stop. Look. Listen.”, “Stop. Look. Listen to the Music” (a compilation CD from the three bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds & Flowers” and “The Second Axing”), and “Change Rearrange” (the performance art poetry CD with sampled music).
    From 2010 through 2015 Kuypers also hosted the Chicago poetry open mic the Café Gallery, while also broadcasting weekly feature and open mic podcasts that were also released as YouTube videos.
    In addition to being published with Bernadette Miller in the short story collection book Domestic Blisters, as well as in a book of poetry turned to prose with Eric Bonholtzer in the book Duality, Kuypers has had many books of her own published: Hope Chest in the Attic, The Window, Close Cover Before Striking, (woman.) (spiral bound), Autumn Reason (novel in letter form), the Average Guy’s Guide (to Feminism), Contents Under Pressure, etc., and eventually The Key To Believing (2002 650 page novel), Changing Gears (travel journals around the United States), The Other Side (European travel book), the three collection books from 2004: Oeuvre (poetry), Exaro Versus (prose) and L’arte (art), The Boss Lady’s Editorials, The Boss Lady’s Editorials (2005 Expanded Edition), Seeing Things Differently, Change/Rearrange, Death Comes in Threes, Moving Performances, Six Eleven, Live at Cafe Aloha, Dreams, Rough Mixes, The Entropy Project, The Other Side (2006 edition), Stop., Sing Your Life, the hardcover art book (with an editorial) in cc&d v165.25, the Kuypers edition of Writings to Honour & Cherish, The Kuypers Edition: Blister and Burn, S&M, cc&d v170.5, cc&d v171.5: Living in Chaos, Tick Tock, cc&d v1273.22: Silent Screams, Taking It All In, It All Comes Down, Rising to the Surface, Galapagos, Chapter 38 (v1 and volume 1), Chapter 38 (v2 and Volume 2), Chapter 38 v3, Finally: Literature for the Snotty and Elite (Volume 1, Volume 2 and part 1 of a 3 part set), A Wake-Up Call From Tradition (part 2 of a 3 part set), (recovery), Dark Matter: the mind of Janet Kuypers , Evolution, Adolph Hitler, O .J. Simpson and U.S. Politics, the one thing the government still has no control over, (tweet), Get Your Buzz On, Janet & Jean Together, po•em, Taking Poetry to the Streets, the Cana-Dixie Chi-town Union, the Written Word, Dual, Prepare Her for This, uncorrect, Living in a Big World (color interior book with art and with “Seeing a Psychiatrist”), Pulled the Trigger (part 3 of a 3 part set), Venture to the Unknown (select writings with extensive color NASA/Huubble Space Telescope images), Janet Kuypers: Enriched, She’s an Open Book, “40”, Sexism and Other Stories, the Stories of Women, Prominent Pen (Kuypers edition), Elemental, the paperback book of the 2012 Datebook (which was also released as a spiral-bound ISBN# ISSN# 2012 little spiral datebook, Prominent Tongue, Chaotic Elements, and Fusion, the (select) death poetry book Stabity Stabity Stab Stab Stab, the 2012 art book a Picture’s Worth 1,000 words (available with both b&w interior pages and full color interior pages, the shutterfly ISSN# ISBN# hardcover art book life, in color, Post-Apocalyptic, Burn Through Me, Under the Sea (photo book), the Periodic Table of Poetry (with poems written for every element in the Periodic Table), a year long Journey, Bon Voyage! (a journal and photography book with select poems on travel as an American female vegetarian in India), and the mini books Part of my Pain, Let me See you Stripped, Say Nothing, Give me the News, when you Dream tonight, Rape, Sexism, Life & Death (with some Slovak poetry translations), Twitterati, and 100 Haikus, that coincided with the June 2014 release of the two poetry collection books Partial Nudity and Revealed. 2017, after her October 2015 move to Austin Texas, also witnessed the release of 2 Janet Kuypers book of poetry written in Austin, “(pheromemes) 2015-2017 poems” and a book of poetry written for her poetry features and show, “(pheromemes) 2015-2017 show poems” (and both pheromemes books are available from two printers). In 2018, Scars Publications released “Antarctica: Earth’s Final Frontier” and “Antarctica: Wildlife” (2 Janet Kuypers full-color photography books from the first passenger ship to Antarctica in 2017), performance art books “Chapter 48 (v1)” (2009-2011) and “Chapter 48 (v2)” (2011-2018), the v5 cc&d poetry collection book “On the Edge”, and the interview/journal/poetry book “In Depth”.

Boxcars

    At 9th and I Manpower, I am the only white face in a room of fifty people.
    Someone starts looking at me pointedly and circling around towards me. As he gets near me, I ask if he had an extra cigarette.
    He replies that that if he did there would be 21 in in the pack.
    I tell him that I never thought about it that way. He smiles and claps me on the shoulder.
    For the next two weeks, he (Bill) and I are paired up unloading boxcars. We work and talk, work and talk.
    Bill has an appreciation for the ladies and calls out to and flatters each and every one he sees. He gets ignored a lot, especially by the uptown women of color who snagged government jobs.
    See, one of the benefits of civil service is forgetting where you came from.

Evidence

    Food was often scarce in the South Side Chicago tenement that Tony grew up in.
    When Tony was six, the local grocery store manager caught him shoplifting a package of pork chops.
    The manager was understanding, did not have Tony arrested, but said, “Son, you better quit doing things like this or get better at it.”
    Tony did listen to the man.
    Years later at a Northampton rooming house, we regularly ate the evidence.

Sure Thing

    Becky didn’t carry her keys with her: she always tossed them on top of the pop machine in the hall. “It’s a sure thing,” she would say.
    We had just finished the “lovemaking”, and I was lying beside her when the phone rang. She picked it up and told the caller she loved him, could not wait to see him, and talked about their future together.
    I cringed a bit, but kept a polite silence. When she was done, I ask her how she could tell her boyfriend such things when she is naked and sweaty beside me. She said she wasn’t sure why.
    “Aren’t you sure of your boyfriend? Aren’t you sure of your feelings for him?” I asked her.
    I told her she should be honest with her boyfriend. Though, I’m not sure she ever did.
    And I never looked to see if her keys were still on top of the pop machine.

Line of Sight

    After work, Jake and I were having a couple of beers, and he starts talking about his time in Nam.
    He liked the country, thought the landscapes were breathtaking. Spoke about the peaceful feeling he had nestled in the crook of a tree and how beautiful the sunlight looked as it shone patterns on the leaves.
    Then he always pulled the trigger and completed the mission.
    Both of us lived nearby, his place being closer to the bar than mine. As I said good-bye and started to walk to my place, I get this strange feeling like I was walking down an alley or through a tunnel.
    I turned and saw Jake standing there, still, silent, hands at his side, but sighting me down.
    Old habits are hard to break.

Leash

    Billy and I went to school together. He was always a bit impulsive, but not in a bad way. Usually it came off as charm. But I guess the police and prosecutor didn’t agree with that characterization, or else Bily would not have spent the last two years behind bars for breaking and entering his ex’s house to get back the ring he gave her.
    I ask Billy how he was enjoying his freedom. He said it was “just a longer leash”. As he spoke, he bent his head to the side just so, just so, and no further.

Monsters

    I didn’t know Janie had a sister or that she was an aunt, not until she asked me to accompany her to her sister’s to babysit her nephew. But she did, so we did.
    Her nephew was named Mark, and he was about 8 years old. He was affable and all, but I did not get much chance to get to know him, for Janie put him to bed exactly at the stroke of 9 P.M.
    Who knew she could be that strict and precise? Not me, for sure.
    Anyhow, Mark soon comes back down the stairs and says there is a monster under his bed. He looks concerned and confused, so I tell him to fight the pesky monster. And if he has any trouble defeating it, to give me a call and I’d help him wrestle it down.
    Janie scoffs at me and tells me not to fill his head with nonsense, that there are no such things as monsters. As her face began to turn as cold and sharp as her voice, I noticed her shadow on the wall.
    It might have been a trick of the fading light, but the shadow seemed to grow larger, larger, and more menacing. You might say it looked monstrous.

Useless Things

    It seemed I was engulfed by believers in those days. The Italians and the Irish were obsessed with church, religion, and the pope. I think part of it stemmed from their pride in having witnessed the first Catholic president.
    Nonna called and asked if I would accompany Mrs. Muldoon and her to a faith healer Mrs. Muldoon had heard about on the radio. The woman had allegedly cured a young girl whose cancerous tumors disappeared and an old arthritic man who later ran in the Boston Marathon.
    “Does Mrs. Muldoon have cancer?” I asked.
    “No. She said she wants to see the woman as a precautionary measure.”
    “That’s silly, Nonna.”
    “Of course it is. Mrs. Muldoon is crazy, but I can’t refuse to help her. That wouldn’t be nice.”
    “Why can’t she go on her own?”
    “Molly, she can barely find her way to Broadway to do her food shopping. How’s she gonna manage a trip to downtown Boston? That’s like asking her to travel to Africa.”
    I agreed, and one Saturday in May, Nonna and I drove in her Plymouth Fury to Mrs. Muldoon’s house. The day was brilliant. Not a cloud in the sky, bright sun, just a few clumps of dirty snow left over from a freak storm the previous week. There were puddles all over, and small streams ran in the gutters along the street. The temperature was in the low 50’s; water dripped everywhere. A chunk of icicles fell from the railing as we stepped onto the porch. I saw Mrs. Muldoon seated through the sheer curtain in her living room, back stiff and face frozen, expressionless. She reminded me of one of the fortune tellers behind some lacy fabric at Wonderland Amusement Park or a wax sculpture from a horror movie. When she saw us, she got up and opened the door.
    “Come in. Come in. But stomp your feet first. Don’t bring any of that wetness in here.”
    The house stunk like mold and sour milk. The living room had boxes with clothes and old shoes spilling out. The aluminum Christmas tree we had seen for the first time so many months ago was in parts before the fireplace, and ornaments sat in a pile on her dark brown couch.
    “Mary, it smells in here. And what is that mess?” Nonna pointed at the boxes.
    “I’m going to have a garage sale if I get inspired. Or maybe just donate the things to the Salvation Army. I hear they pick up stuff, don’t they?” She led us into the kitchen.
    “I don’t know. But what I do know is that the clothes in those boxes smell pretty musty. I’m not sure anyone would want them. Put them through the laundry.”
    On her grey Formica table were several plates with leftover food—bits of toast, old bacon, half-eaten sandwiches. The trash basket to the right of her white porcelain sink was overflowing. Dirty take-out boxes from a Chinese restaurant had fallen between the sink counter and the basket.
    “We gotta get you a maid. What’s going on with you, Mary? Why you let your house become such a pigsty?”
    “I’ve been busy, Agnella.”
    “Doing what?!” We were standing in front of the sink with hardened Comet in the basin.
    “This and that. Let me grab my coat from the back hall and we’ll get going. Molly, are you excited to be healed?” Her pretty blue eyes sparkled. I thought she must have been very attractive when she was younger. Such fair skin and perfect teeth, or were they dentures?
    “I don’t think I need to be healed. I’m healthy, Mrs. Muldoon.”
    “Darling, we all could use healing. Ya know it’s not just physical healing,” she said, putting her arms into the sleeves of her red coat. I liked the black fur collar. “It’s spiritual healing as well.”
    I was surprised by her peppiness, and frankly, how happy she seemed. She was usually such a bitch. She seemed as excited as my girlfriends before a date.
    I was about to say that I didn’t need spiritual healing, but Nonna, as if reading my mind, gave me a look that said, “Keep quiet.” She had spoken with me a few weeks back about perceptions and how important it was for me to develop good interpersonal skills. She said that my directness was admirable, but others might perceive it as rudeness. I was surprised when she quoted Emily Dickinson, a writer I had been reading for AP class: “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” She had picked up my poetry book from an armchair in her living room and opened to a dog-eared page.

    It took about 25 minutes to get to Tremont Street in Boston. The healer’s business was on the street floor of a six-story building with a variety of ornate architectural features. At the top was a mansard roof with dormer windows. The granite exterior was dirty with lines of black and green, formed when rain pools on the many outcroppings and ledges seeped down the face of the building. The parlor where “Lady Jane” cured people was underneath a printing company squeezed between a luggage store on the left and a jewelry store on the right.
    We parked across from the building, along the edge of the Boston Common. I could see a line of desperadoes that extended from the front of the building and around the corner to Court Street. Nonna’s parallel parking was awful and Mary kept screaming that we were going to hit the car behind us. At last we were parked. For a few moments we sat in silence, the three of us taking in the sights. Two skid-row men on a bench, wearing derby hats and unkempt mismatched suits, shared a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. One of them pointed to something at the top of the building. I followed his finger to a flock of large black crows perched on a ledge underneath an overhang.
    The people waiting in line looked pathetic. Mostly old ladies, a few men, some with canes or crutches; a young blonde girl in a wheelchair. It was a motley group, a range of ethnicities, all seemingly poor.
    “You sure you want to go, Mary? These people look pitiful. I think they need curing more than any of us.” It was true. We were wearing nice dresses and overcoats. I thought we would be out of place in that crowd.
    “Of course I want to go. Remember you can’t judge a book by its cover.” Mrs. Muldoon pushed her door open and pulled herself into a standing position.
    “This is one hell of a book,” Nonna answered. She and I followed Mrs. Muldoon’s lead, who told us to hold hands as we crossed the street.
    Nonna cut in front of an Indian couple, explaining to them that I had leukemia “very bad” and the doctors gave me three months at most. “It’s urgent that we see Lady Jane. You don’t want the poor girl to die, do you? She’s my granddaughter!”
    Mrs. Muldoon whispered irritably, “That wasn’t a nice thing to do.”
    The Indian woman was beautiful with large very dark eyes; it was hard to discern her pupils from the brownness that surrounded them. She had a red dot between her beautifully shaped arched brows, which I later learned in an Intro to Religion class was called a Bindi or Kumkum, marking a spiritual center or chakra, placed there out of respect for an inner Guru, all of which I thought was bullshit. She wore a purple sari and a pink head scarf. Her short bespectacled husband had a flat nose with large blackheads; tufts of hair sprouted from his nostrils and ears. He wore a blue navy suit.
    They spoke Hindi for a few moments, then stepped back and nodded for us to move in front of them. There were grumblings and complaints from those behind us.
    “Hey, go to the end of a line like the rest of us. What makes you so special, ladies?” an Irish-looking guy with a broad red face and a scally cap said.
    Nonna teared up. “My granddaughter is dying.”
    The man’s face blanched, and he looked at me with a sad expression. “Sorry, lady. Not a problem.”
    I tried to appear sick. I shook a little and drooled, not sure what a leukemia patient’s symptoms were. The Indian couple stepped further back. I managed to create a string of saliva that dropped like the thread of a spider’s web hanging off my chin.
    We turned forward and Nonna put her arm around me as if trying to keep me from fainting. Mrs. Muldoon looked upward at the gathering of crows, which had increased since I first noticed them.
    Nonna followed her gaze. “I hope they don’t shit on us,” she said.
    “Agnella, it’s good luck. Let them poop if they need to. I’ve got a handkerchief in my purse.” The idea of birds pooping on my head was vile, but I refrained from making a wiseass comment.
    Finally, we were inside. The healing room, or parlor, or whatever you call it, had metal fold-up chairs along the sidewalls. Some of the armrests were rusty. I thought we would need a tetanus shot if we used them.
    Lady Jane sat in a large throne-like chair on a platform at the back of the room. She couldn’t have been more than 27 years old, long bleach blond hair, a pixie face with deep-set shiny green eyes. She was petite. I was surprised that she wasn’t an older woman. She wore a tight-fitting black and white dress with a high hemline. She was busty with long satiny legs that ended in white ballerina slippers, a flower pattern of red gemstones near her toes. Her white string shoelaces were untied.
    “She’s not what I expected,” Mrs. Muldoon whispered and sighed. “She looks like a tart that’s trying to make a few extra bucks before she goes to her other job in the Zone tonight.”
    “What’s the Zone?” I said.
    “It’s where all the hookers hang out, just around the corner. Perverts, pimps, drug dealers, and dirty bookstores,” Nonna whispered.
    Lady Jane made circular motions with her hands over the head of an old man with a cragged face. Her eyes were closed and she mumbled.
    It was only a moment or two before he yelled “Hallelujah” and threw his crutches towards the chairs on the left side of the room.
    “Watchit!” an old blue-haired woman shouted. Her voice was low and she sounded like a man. “You almost hit me.”
    When it was our turn, Lady Jane said, “I take it you three are together.” She had a fake British accent with a hint of Georgia twang.
    “Yes, we are together.” Mrs. Muldoon sighed, clearly disappointed with Lady Jane.
    “What can I do for you?” She looked at each one of us, scrunching her face. I noticed a pimple on her nose.
    “Cure us. Do your mumbo-jumbo so we can get outta here. This place is a dump,” Nonna said, surveying the room. “I think we’re more likely to catch a disease here than be cured. Maybe the bubonic plague. So heal us quick before a rat bites one of our feet.”
    “I know you want to be cured, but first you must tell me what ails you.”
    “For Christ’s sake, at our age, everything ails us,” Nonna said. “Where do you want me to start? How ‘bout you make my breasts perky like yours?”
    Lady Jane pretended to be indignant, then said, “I can’t do anything to help your breasts, lady. I’m not a plastic surgeon.” Her Georgia twang was strong.
    “Agnella, you mustn’t talk to this woman like that,” Mrs. Muldoon said. “I would like to be cured spiritually, Lady Jane. Forget about my body. That’s too far gone. I want my soul to be cleansed.”
    Lady Jane put her hands in a crisscross on Mrs. Muldoon’s heart area, then closed her eyes, while she softly murmured an ostensibly sacred language. I thought I heard what sounded like ‘pussy’ in her gobbledygook. I think Nonna heard it, too, because she gave me a look and rolled her eyes.
    “The masters have told be you are spiritually cured for your trip.”
    “Cut the crap! Mary’s not going on any trip.”
    “That’s not true, Agnella. I am,” Mrs. Muldoon said excitedly, as if there might be some authenticity to Lady Jane after all.
    “Where the hell are you going?”
    “I’m going home.” Mrs. Muldoon was beaming.
    “To your family in Ireland?” Nonna asked.
    “To my family.”
    “And how can I cure you, young woman?” Lady Jane looked earnestly into my face.
    “I don’t know.”
    Again she did the crisscross thing with her hands. Again she murmured her sacred prayer. And again I heard a distinct “pussy.”
    When she opened her eyes, her face was pale. “What’s your name?”
    “Molly.”
    “Molly, I hate to tell people things like this.” Now she spoke completely in her Georgia twang. “I see gruesome deaths in your future.”
    “Let’s get outta here,” Nonna said, clearly upset. She started muttering in Italian.
    “You’re going to witness several deaths in your lifetime.”
    “Who doesn’t witness death? We all die.” Nonna said.
    “Molly’s situation is different,” Lady spoke to Nonna as if I weren’t there. “I take it you are the grandmother.”
    “That’s easy enough to tell. I couldn’t be her mother. Too old and dried up.”
    “You are very good to Molly. You mean more to her than her own mother.”
    It was eerie how this woman knew that. “Okay,” I said matter-of-factly. “Tell me about these deaths.”
    “You have the unlucky fortune of being someone who will either find dead people or be with them when they die, sometimes in violent situations. I guess you might say, ‘You’re an Angel of Death.’” Then she started giggling like a little girl. It seemed out of her control, and she curled up in her throne.
    The Indian woman behind us whispered something to her husband, and then they rushed out the door. I wonder if the woman’s inner Guru told her to get the hell out of there.
    “Angel of Death! Ffangul’!” Nonna said. She pulled Mary and me out of the line and we followed the couple. Before the door shut, I looked back and saw that Lady Jane was still laughing. She waved to me. I mouthed, “Fuck you,” echoing Nonna’s sentiment.
    During the ride home Mrs. Muldoon and Nonna argued over what “Angel of Death” might mean.
    “Maybe she’ll be a police officer?” Mrs. Muldoon said. “That’s a nice profession. Protecting citizens. All police officers witness death now and again, don’t you think?”
    “Are you crazy? No granddaughter of mine is going to be a police officer. I think that broad saw that Molly was gonna be a doctor.” She smiled at me in the rearview mirror. “What do you think she meant, Molly?”
    “I think she made things up to frighten us. Maybe she spotted someone further down the line who would actually pay, and she was in a hurry to get rid of us.”
    “The man on the radio said she doesn’t accept money. Believes she has a calling is what he said she said,” Mrs. Muldoon answered.
    “He said, she said? Do you know what Mary’s talking about?” The car swerved as Nonna turned to look at me.
    “Lady Jane I mean. . . Watch it, Agnella!”
    “I noticed people slipping her bills,” I said.
    Nonna zipped through a red light.
    “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. You’re going to get us arrested, or killed,” Mrs. Muldoon said.
    “Don’t worry. We have a cop in the back seat. She’ll use her connections and get us off the hook.”
    We all laughed.
    As we passed Logan Airport, Nonna asked Mrs. Muldoon, “When is your flight?”
    “What flight?”
    “The flight to Ireland. When will you go home?”
    “Oh . . .” She paused to think a bit. “The third week of August.” I thought it funny that her pronunciation sounded like “turd.”
    “I’ll be sad to see you go, Mary. At least we have you for a few more months though.” She patted Mrs. Muldoon’s shoulder. The car swerved again. “I’m gonna miss you, but I’m sure you’ll be happier. Everybody needs family. And you got nobody here, right?”
    “Nobody.”
    I leaned back in the seat and thought how Mrs. Muldoon and I shared something. Sure, I had Nonna, but I still felt very alone. But aren’t we all essentially alone? A psychiatrist told me years later that each human being is limited by his consciousness. All lived realities are filtered through our individual prisms. He said that we die alone as well, no matter how many people are around us at that time. His words reminded me of something the writer Hunter S. Thompson once said: “We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of company, we were alone the whole way.”

    I didn’t understand Mrs. Muldoon’s obsession with cures. She asked Nonna and I to take her to the ocean on August 15^th.
    “Why August 15^th?” I asked.
    “Something about a cure in the water. Evidently it is the Feast of the Assumption.”
    “What’s that?”
    “A day that celebrates the mother of Jesus going to heaven. Mrs. Muldoon claims the salt water is supposed to have a cure in it. I guess the ocean becomes one big tub of Epsom salts. I don’t really understand it all, but Mary is adamant about going, and she wants both you and I to take her.”
    “Are you sure she’s not sick, Nonna?”
    “Not that I know of.”
    “Why does she want another cure?”
    “Molly, I don’t know. All I know is that she’s a sad woman who never got over her husband dying. She’s been drinking herself to death ever since. Maybe she thinks it’s you that needs the cure.” She laughed.
    “Why would I need a cure?”
    “Because sometimes I think your head’s not screwed on right. Stop asking so many questions. How the hell am I supposed to know what goes on in Mary’s mind? Maybe she thinks we both have sick souls.”
    I laughed. “Nonna, I don’t have a sick soul, and neither do you.”
    “You can never be sure. Consider it insurance. If there is something to this whole cure thing, good will come of it. And if there isn’t, so be it. The point is that she asked us to take her. I refuse to deny an old friend a last request before she goes home.”

    I agreed to go, and on the appointed day, a Saturday, Nonna and I drove to Mrs. Muldoon’s house. Nonna parked her Blue Fury in front. Mrs. Muldoon was seated in a rusted orange chair on the front porch, one of her last pieces of furniture. Over the past several weeks she had donated most of her possessions to charity, except for a few pieces of furniture in her living room, kitchen, and bedroom.
    Her house was on the market, but she was lackadaisical about selling it, leaving it in the hands of a realtor downtown. She said she didn’t really care when or if it got sold, which I found strange. But what did I know about such things? I was a young girl excited about the start of college in a few weeks.
    Nonna stopped the engine and honked. Mrs. Muldoon was asleep. She wore what appeared to be a housedress, mostly white, with a spattering of blood-red dots and hideous black boots.
    “What the hell is she wearing?” Nonna got out of the car and walked precariously up the rotting wooden steps. I followed but waited at the bottom of the stairs. When she was beside Mrs. Muldoon, she shook her. For a moment, I thought she might be dead.
    “Mary! Wake up.”
    She woke, a confused look on her face. Her auburn hair was a sweaty mess. The sun highlighted a matted ring of locks that circled her head.
    Nonna said, “What’s the matter with you? Did you forget we were going to the beach?” She glanced at Mary’s feet, tsk-tsking at the pair of black rubber boots. “You look foolish in those things. How you gonna get the Blessed Mother’s cure if you don’t get wet?”
    “Agnella,” Mary said, rising at last, “there’s those awful rocks before you get to the sandy part of the beach, and my feet are sore enough. Don’t worry. I’ll take them off once we settle in a good spot. I may even strip naked. Wouldn’t that be a sight to behold?” She laughed. Nonna did, too.
    “And where is your bathing suit?”
    “Underneath my housedress. You certainly didn’t expect me to sit here like some tool in my swimsuit. What would the neighbors think?”
    Nonna helped her down the steps, which creaked and almost seemed to cave in, then guided her into the passenger seat. I got in the back.
    “I’m delighted you could come, Molly.” She turned around. “It’s a celebration for both of us, a baptism of sorts, as we begin our new lives.” I realized that the red spots on her gown were tiny roses. “You must be looking forward to your studies. You have always been such a smart one.”
    “Very smart,” Nonna interrupted. “Skipped a grade in school and tested genius on the I.Q. scale. Takes after me.” She laughed.
    “I’m happy to go to the beach with you, Mrs. Muldoon,” I said. I wasn’t. I hated the beach, still do. The hot sun and sand, crowds of people, radios blaring, the smell of baby oil, jellyfish in the water. I did admire the sharks because of their single-mindedness, the way they hunted for prey. In those days, I imagined one of the annoying boys from my high school getting bitten, but the chances of that happening were slim.
    We parked on the beach side across from the Renwod Dining Room, a place Nonna had taken me a few times. Mrs. Muldoon was right about the stones. They hurt your feet. The beach was packed with people, and it was hard to navigate through the crowd, especially because Mrs. Muldoon was a little tipsy. I realized she had been drinking on the drive over and had to roll the window down. She stunk of sweat and gin. Radios blared, children created sand castles, groups of ladies gossiped, and the sun was so damn hot.
    Finally, we found a spot close to the ocean to put our blanket and fold-up chairs. Most of the women wore full-piece swimsuits, and many had housedresses like Mary. Three girls about my age ran out of the water as their little brothers splashed them from behind. To our right, a man dressed in pants and a shirt, which I could never understand at the beach, fixed the chain on his overturned bicycle. I wished we had an umbrella. I had to use the palm of my hand to shade my eyes from the sun.
    When we were settled, I asked Mrs. Muldoon about the cure in the water. She sat between Nonna and me.
    “Darling, today is when we celebrate the Blessed Mother’s Assumption into heaven.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    Nonna rubbed baby oil on her arms, legs, and face, then lay down.
    “What don’t you understand?”
    “The Assumption part. What does that mean?”
    “Mary was raised into heaven three days after her death.”
    “What do you mean raised? She just flew up into the air?” I laughed.
    “I think so, Molly. Yes.”
    “How is that possible?”
    “Darling, you got to have faith.”
    “But it doesn’t make sense. How can somebody just fly into the sky? And what’s the connection to a cure in the water? Was she on a boat?”
    “I don’t know, Molly. Don’t think too much about it. Just believe it.”
    “I don’t believe it. It sounds ridiculous, and I can’t follow the logic.”
    Nonna sat up and gave me the eye, warning me not to press the issue. Mrs. Muldoon pulled off her boots, then stood and took off her housedress. Underneath was a stylish black-and-white full-piece swimsuit. I never noticed what a round hard belly she had. She almost looked pregnant. For a second, I imagined she was going to demonstrate the assumption and fly upward.
    “Logic has nothing to do with it, Molly. I don’t question these things.” She walked into the water. I watched her plod through the waves, then dive into the ocean and swim out a bit.
    “Molly, how many times do I have to tell you not to ask so many questions? It’s rude. Most people aren’t like you.” Her eyes followed Mary who was swimming far out. “Most people are lemmings and sheep. You have the good fortune, or maybe the bad fortune,” she smiled at me, “of being a lion in a world of lemmings. And a very smart lion at that.” She put her warm hand on my leg. “Who gives a damn if Mary flew into the sky or not? Maybe that’s what people did a few thousand years ago, though I doubt it.”
    She turned and looked at the man tending to his bike, then whispered to me, “I wish God would reach down and pull him off the beach. Can’t stand the sound of that spinning peddle and chain, and his hands are a greasy mess.” We both laughed. A woman wearing a white shawl and long white robe walked by. She reminded me of a bride.
    “Do you miss your husband, Nonna?”
    “Here we go again.” She laughed. “You ask the strangest things.”
    “Well, do you?”
    “Of course not. Men are a pain in the ass.”
    “What about Mr. Scarfone?”
    She waved her hand dismissively. “He’s just a good fuck.”
    “Nonna!”
    She whacked me playfully with the bag of fruit and rolls she had brought. “It’s true. And you should see the size of his cazzone.” She moved her palms apart.
    “His calzone?”
    “No.” She laughed. “Cazzone,” emphasizing the “z” sound. “Maybe that’s why they call a calzone a calzone. It looks like a penis.”
    She lay back down. “Look that up someday in one of your fancy college books.”
    “Nonna, I don’t think my college textbooks will have that information.”
    “Then what the hell good are they?”
    We both laughed. She closed her eyes and patted the blanket to straighten it out. After a while, she fell asleep. Mrs. Muldoon had stopped swimming and stood in the water, like so many of the people. But unlike the others, who were chatting with one another in pairs and groups, she looked towards the horizon. I wondered if she was thinking about her journey home. Seagulls cawed. Children laughed and screamed with delight.
    I was sweating, so I went for a walk towards the end of the beach, where it was less crowded. There was a fishing jetty and an area of large rocks. I explored the spaces in between the boulders, looking for a lonely starfish, a shiny stone, or a clam with a secreted pearl. I unearthed small crabs that scampered across the sand. At one point I startled a mourning dove that sped from its cleft into the bright sky. It made a whistling sound as it rose and flew off, then descended over the water where Nonna was now standing, alongside Mrs. Muldoon. The waves glimmered like sparks from an unquenchable fire. On the jetty, a father and his son cast fishing lines into the sea.
    Suddenly, Nonna and Mrs. Muldoon fell, surprised by a spirited breaker that razed them in its wake. I ran to help, but laughed, too, at the spectacle—Nonna and Mrs. Muldoon seated on their asses, just a few feet from where the waves trickled to their end. In an instant they were kneeling forward, laughing so hard that they cried. I helped lift them. They groaned in between guffaws, complaining that the soles of their feet were cramping from shells and stones beneath their feet. Every time I lifted one of them, another wave splashed over us, and they fell back down, laughing even harder.
    Mrs. Muldoon said, “My permanent is all ruined,” while she fussed with her hair.
    Nonna said, “Well, it didn’t look so good to begin with, Mary. Consider it a cure.”
    Mrs. Muldoon reached for me, “Pull me up quickly, before the next wave hits.”
    I did so, mesmerized by the wet silvery scalp that shown through her auburn hair. I resisted the urge to touch the crown of her head. At last she rose from the sea.
    “You’re an angel,” she said when she finally stood.
    “What about me?” A wave splashed over Nonna. “Maron! Pull me up, Molly. If I get hit by another wave, I’m gonna curse this water. Thought this was supposed to be a blessing. More like a tidal wave if you ask me.” With that, a wave sprayed all of us, but Mrs. Muldoon and I managed to lift her.
    Later, we moved towards the quiet end of the beach. We sat in the shade of a bony cliff, eating panettone, bananas, apples, and cherries drenched in brandy. Nonna took baby-sized jars of Grappa out of her purse. I draped a necklace of dried seaweed upon Mrs. Muldoon and told her it was my version of a Hawaiian lei, a wreath presented ceremoniously to people who were coming or going.
    “In that case, you need one, too,” Mrs. Muldoon said.
    “What about me? I could use a good lei,” Nonna said, smirking.
    I found two more pieces of seaweed and Mrs. Muldoon hung them on us. Her fingers were icy cold, like those of a cadaver. I shuddered as they touched my warm skin.
    The three of us made a toast to new beginnings, and we talked about the future until the sun began to set.
    When we left the beach later on, we were hungry again so we crossed the street and enjoyed a nice meal at the Renwood Diner. I had the seafood platter and Nonna and Mrs. Muldoon had sea scallops with pancetta, mushrooms, and fresh tomato.
    Mrs. Muldoon made a joke about this being our last supper. “It is in a way, don’t you think? I won’t be seeing either of you again after tonight.”
    “Of course you will. You’re not leaving until five days from now,” Nonna said, motioning for the check. “I’ll drop by before your flight on Thursday.” The waitress put the bill on the table.
    “Let me pay for that,” Mrs. Muldoon said. “I appreciate you girls bringing me to the ocean today. I feel refreshed and healed. You made me very happy.”
    “I’m glad that you feel good, Mary, but I insist on paying.” Nonna took cash out of her purse and placed it on the check. The waitress picked it up.
    “I’ll see you one more time, Mrs. Muldoon. Nonna’s driving me to Boston University to speak with a counselor on Thursday. On the way over, we can both say goodbye.”
    “That would be nice, Molly.” She smiled at me, then pointed at the faded beige and blue pattern of fish swimming above clamshells and starfish on the ocean floor. “I always loved the fish in this wallpaper. This one here looks like he’s coming right towards us.”
    “I wish there were some shark,” I said.
    Nonna laughed. “Of course you would.”
    “Did you know that a fish is the symbol of Christ?” Mrs. Muldoon said, sipping her last bit of wine.
    Nonna spoke while she chewed a roll. “No, I didn’t. Where’d you hear that, Mary?”
    “I don’t recall, Agnella.”
    After the waitress returned with the change, Nonna put it in her purse, snapped it shut, and stood. “I’m tired. I don’t know about the both of you. Let’s get outta here.”
    We dropped Mrs. Muldoon off and she waved from the front porch before she opened the door. I noticed several trash bags along the gray clapboard wall.
    “Wonder what’s in all those bags?” I said as we drove away.
    “Junk. When you get old, you accumulate a lot of useless things, Molly. And eventually you become one of them. So live while you can.”

    That night as I fell asleep I thought about “useless things” and living “while you can.” I dreamt of seagulls pecking someone’s eyes out, sharks in bloody water, and a singing red fish with white stripes along its sides. In the morning, I tried to remember the song of the fish, but I couldn’t recall the words. A feeling of emptiness lingered, an emotion I often felt.
    Nonna called Mary on Wednesday evening to find out the time of her flight, but the phone service had already been disconnected, so we drove over around 8:00 a.m. on Thursday morning.
    “She may have already left.” Nonna pulled the car into Mary’s driveway. “We might as well see if she’s still here. I forgot to tell you. When we were in the ladies’ room at the restaurant, Mary told me she had a present for you. She said she left it on the table just inside the archway to her living room.”
    We got out of the car and walked up the steps. Nonna held her nose. “Those bags smell God awful. Maybe she dumped the food from her refrigerator into one of them.”
    I rang the doorbell. We waited a few moments, then Nonna turned the door knob. When the door opened a horrible smell gushed at us—a combination of shit, vomit, body odor, and rotting fish. I noticed a small purple box on the table as we turned into the living room. Flies buzzed in the hot, humid air around our heads. Three standing lamps were lit. Nonna bent over and vomited.
    I walked towards Mrs. Muldoon’s body. She was seated in the purple chair that Nonna hated so much, eyes half open and bulging, swollen tongue protruding. There was an intricate pattern of blood vessels and blisters on her face. She wore the same housedress from our day at the beach. It was smeared with blood and a yellowish fluid that dripped from her nose and mouth. Her face, arms, and legs were bloated; her abdomen was distended. Her skin was green, red, purple, and black. White lines crisscrossed areas of deep red on her calves. There were two shimmering pools of urine on the mahogany floor at each side of the chair, as well as feces on the seat cushion.
    I kneeled down and pressed my finger against a dark purple spot above her right ankle; the skin was so cold. The flesh broke and blood trickled slowly down the side of her enlarged foot. I stood, then bent to stare into the thin slivers of her eyes. The pupils were fixed and dilated. The corners were filmy. I thought I saw wetness along the sides of her nose and cheeks. Were they tears or simply the body’s fluids seeping out? I touched her pretty red hair and some it fell to the floor in clumps. A bloody maggot writhed as it emerged from her flaking scalp and crawled towards my hand.
    Nonna still gagged behind me. She kept saying, “We gotta call the police.” Although I found the smell overpowering and coughed a bit, I couldn’t move away. I guess you could say I was mesmerized.
    “Molly! What are you doing? Call the cops! I’m too weak to get up.”
    I picked up the black-and-white photograph from the t.v. table and examined it: an attractive couple, the young Mrs. Muldoon and her husband, in their wedding attire. Both of them dressed completely in white. He wore a white tuxedo with a bow tie and a wing-tipped collar. On the top of her auburn hair sat a veil with a crest of small white flowers; there was a pearl necklace around her neck. Both smiled above a large bouquet of white roses that obscured parts of their chests. In the dark background, blurred white faces hovered like disembodied heads.
    “Molly!”
    I turned the photo over. In blue cursive, now faded, Mrs. Muldoon had written “August 15^th, 1937. The happiest day of my life.” Next to where the photograph had lain was an empty pill bottle. I pulled it close to read the label: “Diazepam, 5 mg. tab. Take one tablet twice a day as needed.”
    Nonna had reached the phone. I heard her talking to the police. “Hurry,” she said and hung up.
    “What the hell are you doing?” she screamed at me. “Get away from her.”
    I turned, accidentally stepping on one of Mrs. Muldoon’s bare feet. The skin cracked and a clear fluid oozed from her big toe. The nail ripped off, falling like an autumn leaf into a puddle.
    I walked over to the small purple box with my name on it. Inside was a gold necklace with an emerald and diamond cross.
    Nonna stared at me. “What is it, Molly?”
    “A useless thing.”

    “Useless Things” was originally published in Typehouse Literary Magazine (2015).

Drunk and Divine

    And Chris said unto Amy “Come drink with me,” and they did drink in many pubs until 2 a.m., when they were cast out upon the street, whence, after eating gluttonously of McDonald’s in many forms, Chris did conceive of an idea to prolong the night and took her back to his lab because there was a bottle of wine his professor had won and donated unto the lab, and they drank of the wine and Amy declared “Sippin’ stolen blue wine from plastic cups in the Comp. Sci. Department at two thirty in the morning... so classy!”
    Behold, Amy was a voluptuous and vulpine woman and, though Chris was a responsible post-doc and knew it was forbidden to interfere with the program by rule of lab and general dedication to the production of valid data, Amy used her feminine wiles to coerce him and he, being lustful, intoxicated and weak, did show it to her.
    A great fallen-monolith touchscreen acted as graphical user interface and interpreter to the program. It was an altar in the centre of the lab and did illuminate the lab with green and blue hues when Chris flicked the switch. “Behold! Earth!” Chris proclaimed, and then did hiccup and blush, and Amy was amused, but was confused and said “How come it’s got green trees? It looks weird,” and Chris expounded that Earth’s chlorophyll absorbed more long-wavelength light than did real leaves, and then he extended his two bony index fingers and laid the tips upon the screen and cast open his arms with prophetic passion to zoom in on the planet therein, and did repeat this, until the shivering leaves of a single tree could be individually divined. Then proudly Chris did say “I made this. Cool, innit?” And it was an exaggeration for he was just a member of the lab, not its head, though he did contribute.
    But Amy was less impressed and asked of Chris “What does it do?” and he replied “It simulates a whole world with unparalleled geological, climatological and biological detail; it allows life to evolve from initial conditions without subsequent interference; it models the progression of matter from abiotic components, as found in the early universe, to beautiful, complex life!” and Chris, frankly, was in awe of himself at this moment. But Amy responded “Right, but what can I do with it?” so Chris searched for the animals on this Earth, and lo! he did find two people, and Chris was much impressed because they had not been there at 7.30 p.m. when he knocked off, so he pulled down the control panel and reduced simulation speed to real time, and Amy was much surprised because the people were of their image, and so she wished to talk with them.
    Thus it came to pass that Chris did break the lab rules and deviate from general scientific protocol to allow Amy to interfere with the program, for he did fancy her something rotten, and he was a sad and lonely mathematically minded post-doc who envied those in the arts and social science departments that had no trouble taking themselves a woman for themselves. In such cases, you have to use the gifts you’re given.
    Amy said unto Chris “Give them a garden,” and Chris did program it thus, and Amy said “Give them a tree.” Once more Chris did program it thus, and each time Amy did enquire unto the people if they liked it and they said it was good. But lo! because it was good, they happily ate all the fruit on the tree and this did provoke Amy’s wrath, so she said “Give them a snake,” and Chris did program it thus and then increased the simulation speed and they watched as the snake chased the people and the garden overgrew.
    With casual swipes and flicks Amy did scour the vast green lands and saw the little people frantically multiplying, and so she winked at Chris and said “Let’s flood ‘em!” but Chris worried that killing all the people would be disastrous from a research perspective, so he roared “No!” But Amy did gently touch his hand and say “You’re such a sweetie,” then whispered in his ear “We can give them a boat so all the best ones survive,” and Chris reasoned that since these tiny souls had only evolved earlier that evening, the professor wouldn’t notice if their population diminished and bounced back, so he programmed a boat and, cleverly, made the inside bigger than the outside and put one copy of each sex of each animal inside then did unleash a flood that cleansed the Earth.
    After the flood the population of people, and that of animals, did indeed rebound, but within the simulation stories of powerful beings who wrought flippant destruction passed from grandfather to father, and from father to son, and from son to grandson, and then it did that again and again, and with each generation came greater embellishments so the stories grew in detail, and from these stories sprung new stories that also evolved with a life of their own, and the people aspired to confront the beings who had spoken from the sky, so they constructed a tower, but Chris and Amy did see, and again they slowed the simulation to real time and knocked down the tower. Now Chris feared his professor would communicate with the people and terminate his contract, and he already lived hand to mouth, so he did cluster the little people into seven groups and did add genetic algorithms to their Broca’s areas so their languages would drift apart, then he sped up the simulation once more.
    And now, the touch of Amy’s hand had roused in Chris a greedy desire for more, and he asked of her “What shall we do next?” but Amy looked at her phone and said “I’m as sleepy as Eutychus. I’m gonna go down to my room,” and thus she left, but at the door she stopped and winked and did say “You coming?” and they did interfere no more.

Bring Back a Baker

    “You look like something’s missing!” said a voice.
    Something was missing all right. The shop was missing. The little baker’s shop I’d travelled from America to this tiny village in Scotland to track down.
    Lana had started it all.
     “Bring back a baker is what I say!” she’d said as she unpacked the groceries from the brown paper bag and littered the kitchen work surface. “And I don’t mean that cheesy-smiling guy who hands you a loaf of bread from behind the bakery counter of the supermarket knowing full well it’s full of additives and preservatives! Whatever happened to real bread?” She paused, her attention totally devoted to a tin of soup she’d favoured to ferret away in a cupboard. “I guess it disappeared the same time as real men!”
    She sent a glance in my direction.
    I knew what she meant. Neither of us had had any luck with either of them. The latter I’d learned to do without. The former accosted my senses every morning when I went to put the bread in the toaster. Half awake, I’d study the wrapper on the loaf, to see what poisons I might be consuming before I popped the bread in the toaster. Then with an impending sense of doom, encouraged by the radio announcement that too burnt toast might cause cancer, I’d spread it thickly with butter, trying, vainly, to mask the tough and tasteless toast my teeth were trying to tear.
    That’s it! I’d thought. I’d buy some other kind of bread. But after six weeks of trying every bread on the supermarket shelves and finding they were all the same, some severely worse than others, I’d vowed to give up bread.
     I’d given up men. Bread should be even easier!
    “Do you remember that little baker’s shop in the village where our grandmother stayed in Scotland?” Lana said, fighting furiously and not winning the battle with the groceries that were enjoying their freedom from the cluttered confines of the carry bag.
    “Do I?” I said enthusiastically. “I can still smell the scent of freshly made bread that assailed my senses every time the door of the shop opened with the clang of the bell.”
    Lana and I could only have been about six and eight respectively when our Scottish great-grandmother had sent us along the road, through the close and up the main street to McReady’s Bakery. We’d linger at the small shop window crammed with culinary delights. Fresh baked loaves of every shape and colour. Some round, golden brown and fat. Others tall, white and crusty on top. And rolls. Deep, fluffy and sprinkled with a dusting of flour on top. Or round, golden and baked to perfection. And, though we didn’t know it, not an additive or preservative in sight. There was the thrill of the tinkle of the bell as we entered the shop, coins gripped tightly in our sweaty palms.
    “Bread, please,” we’d said. “And rolls.”
    The reply was a foreign language to us.
    “Plain or pan? Baps, softies or butteries?” said the suspicious woman behind the counter, who knew we were from somewhere else.
    It was like entering a coffee shop and being asked to choose from a barrage of confusing choices in my long-adopted homeland when all I really wanted was a plain coffee.
    “Yes, please,” we’d said, aware of suspicious glances all around us and anxious to depart the shop.
    With a sigh, destined to deter strangers and designate them as dumber than the natives, she stuffed a loaf and some rolls into two paper bags that rustled more respectfully and thrust them at us over the towering glass counter.
    We beat it out of the shop, the strong smell of fresh baking sticking to our clothes all the way back.
    After recriminations for getting the wrong kind of bread and rolls, there was forgiveness for tea. Plain fare served with thick slices of freshly cut bread favoured with thickly spread butter. White and fluffy heaven with a flavour of that future state.
    “Let’s go there for a holiday!” I said spontaneously.
    Lana stopped making more mess of the work surface and gazed at me like I was as loopy as a lemur.
    “Scotland? Why would you want to go back there?”
    It wasn’t as if I’d asked her to go to Madagascar.
    “It’s where we came from!” I said to justify my strange sentiment. And knowing that would not suffice, added quickly, “You brought it up in the first place!”
    “Yes, but the past is the past,” she said. “You can’t go back!”
    A wistful look crossed Lana’s face as if she wished she could. And right all the wrong things in her life.
    Her voice was hesitant. Unsure.
    “I’ve never contemplated going back!” she said.
    I seized the moment of indecision.
    “It could be fun! We could re-visit all our old haunts. Remember the burn?”
    Lana laughed to hear the strange, Scottish word for a small stream.
    “How could I forget it?” she said.
    I knew she was remembering us straddling the fast flowing stream of water, no thought for our safety, our summer dresses tucked into our underwear as we dropped our brown twig boats into the river to see whose would win. Then, with screams of delight, we would run downstream to the little wooden footbridge over the stream and watch to see which came out of the tunnel first.
    “It might be fun,” she said. “I could do with some fun.”
    We both could.
    “That’s settled!” I said. “I’ll book it today.”
    And I did.
    It was a few days before we were due to depart for our trip when Lana said, “I don’t feel so well.”
    “I told you not to try all those different breads in the supermarket,” I said. She’d made various trips there in the last few days. “God knows what crap you’ve been ingesting. I told you to wait till we get to Scotland. The bread is bound to be better there!”
    “Maybe,” Lana said, looking undecided.
    It was not like her.
    “I really don’t think I can go on a long-haul flight all the way to Scotland. Not just at this moment. I’m sorry,” she said.
    “It’s okay,” I said. “If you’re ill, you’re ill. Don’t worry about it. I’ll cancel the trip.”
    Lana looked guilty.
    “No, don’t do that. I’ll be fine. You go. You’ve been looking forward to it.”
    “I can’t leave you here all by yourself. Not when you’re ill,” I persisted.
    “Now, you know me when I’m ill. I just like some peace and quiet. And some early nights,” she insisted.
    “Well, if you’re sure,” I said.
    Though I wasn’t.
    “You’ll only be a phone call away, anyway,” she said.
    Which was true.
    So that’s how I came to be in Scotland alone. Of course, the first place I went to was my great-grandmother’s village. It hadn’t changed. Even though great-grandmother wasn’t there anymore. I stood outside her house and wondered who was living there now. I hoped they were as happy as Lana and I had been there. Then I walked along the road, through the close and up the main street. It looked exactly the same. Low-rise, grim, grey granite cottages lining both sides. With not a person in sight.
    Nothing had changed. It was incredible. And comforting on some level. McReady’s bakery had been at the furthest end of the long street, straddling the corner where the road to the burn led. I was almost there. It had to be there. Nothing else had changed.
    But of course it wasn’t.
    I stood at the corner of the two streets where the doorway to delights had been. The blue paint on the doorway was peeling and the windows either side were boarded up.
    Lana was right, I thought. You can’t go back. I was a fool to have come.
    I guess I must have stood there some minutes.
    “You look like something’s missing!” said a voice.
    I looked round.
    He was about my age with sandy, Scottish hair and a smile. I resented the smile.
    “It’s the shop,” I said sadly.
    “The shop?” he said.
    He wouldn’t understand so I don’t know why I went on.
    “The baker’s shop. McReady’s.”
    He lifted a quizzical eyebrow.
    “You remember that!” he said, like I was a stegosaur.
    Smart Alec, I thought, staring to see if there was anyone around to rescue me. The street was deserted.
    Where had he,/I> come from?
    “I used to go there as a child,” I said, annoyed at myself for justifying my age.
    “You don’t sound Scottish,” he said.
    He was a nosey native, I thought, remembering the ones of the past.
    “I’m not,” I said. “Not now,” I said. “I’m American now. But my great-grandmother lived here and my sister and I used to spend vacations here.”
    Then he said a strange thing.
    “Did you go down to the burn by any chance?”
    I looked at him astounded.
    “Why yes,” I said.
    “And did you float twig boats downstream?” his Scottish voice teased.
    How could he possibly know that? I thought. No one knew that.
    “I saw you,” he said.
    My mind raced back to those days. No one saw us. Or did they? Then I remembered. One particular day when my twig boat did not appear from under the bridge. Lana’s was there trundling happily downstream. I’d run down to the cavernous mouth of the tunnel and gazed inside just in time to see a scruffy boy, my twig held aloft disappear down the tunnel into the darkness.
    He put his hand in his pocket.
    “I’ve carried this around with me for years,” he said. “I felt guilty, found out where you were staying and took the twig to your great-grandmother but you’d gone home to America by that time and your grandmother wouldn’t take it. She said I should keep it if it was important to me and that one day I might be able to give it back. She was a wise lady.”
    I gazed at the twig in his hand.
    Why hadn’t great-grandmother taken the twig?
    He handed me the twig.
    “My name’s McReady,” he said. “John McReady. My great-grandfather owned the baker’s shop.”
    I gasped.
    “It was a wonderful shop,” I said.
    “I know,” he said. “You don’t get bread and rolls like that in a supermarket! That’s why I’m thinking of opening it up again after all these years. I’m a baker by trade too. There’s a renewed demand for the real thing these days.”
    My animosity was now arid.
    “That would be wonderful,” I said.
    “You think so?” he said.
    “Sure,” I said. More sure than I’d been about anything for a long time.
    “I don’t mean to be cheeky,” he said, “but would you like to come back to mine, have a cup of tea and a cake? I could tell you all my plans.”
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “A McReady’s cake,” he teased.
    I laughed.
    “I’ve got to head back to my car,” I said.
    “I’ll walk you back and tell you a bit more,” he said. “Don’t make your mind up yet. I’ll show you where I live.”
    We walked back up the main street, through the close and up my great-grandmotther’s road. The car was parked outside her house.
    “You don’t live here?” I said pointing to the whole street.
    He nodded and gave me the same cheeky grin he’d had on his face when he’d stolen my twig all those years ago. He pointed to my great-grandmother’s old house.
    “I bought it some years ago when it came on the market. It seemed meant,” he said, looking at me in a strange way.
    I should have been annoyed but I thought of great-grandmother’s words.
    It was the first time I’d ever had tea and cake in a stranger’s house. But then he wasn’t really a stranger. I think great-grandmother knew that. And I knew she would approve. My stay in Scotland was longer than I’d expected. I felt guilty so I phoned Lana.
    But she was the one who started to apologise.
    “I feel really guilty,” she said. “I was just feeling so confused. You see, on all those trips to the supermarket, I got talking to,” she laughed, “that cheesy-smiling guy behind the bakery counter. It turned out he wasn’t so cheesy after all. We got to discussing bread at first. He hates his job putting all those additives and preservatives in the bread. He’s thinking of leaving and starting up his own bakery.”
    “At first?” I laughed.
    “Well, I guess we progressed a little from there,” she said, laughing too. “But I’m so sorry I let you down. I should have come to Scotland with you. Did you have any luck tracking down McReady’s bakery and more to the point are you bringing back some bread?”
    I laughed.
    “I’m glad you didn’t come,” I said. “And yes, I did track down the shop. As to your last question. No, I’m not bringing back some bread. I’m doing better than that!”
    “What could that possibly be?” she said, surprised.
    I paused, an image of a sandy haired Scotsman with a seductive smile surfacing.
    “I’m bringing back a baker!” I said.

of his thirst

of my dead Scotsman,
they spoke of his drinking, but
never of his thirst.

Queen of the Kitchen

    Grammy’s house was decorated in the Victorian style, with hardwood floors accented by patterned rugs and rustic furniture. The alternating wood-paneled and floral-patterned rooms were dominated by curtained windows and French double-doors. The walls—hung with portraits and second-hand antiques—framed a reality that resembled a still-life of a former time, of some eclectic past, that seemed, somehow, to belong to this world also. Each room had its own unique personality and name—the parlor, the foyer, the mud room, the den—and each room served a functional purpose. Grammy was practical, and did not waste anything, especially not space.
    The two-story house was in the country on the outskirts of Cannifare, a five minute drive from the city, on a ten-acre plot of land. Three acres were rented out to a neighboring farmer for planting, four acres were covered by a neighboring wood, and the rest was an expanse of rolling lawns, through which a gravel tree-lined drive wound its way like a stream. She’d lived in Ohio all her life, and raised her children in that home, though her daughter had moved to Florida years ago, and her oldest son had moved to Chatham for graduate school soon after. Despite how much she loved the house, it felt emptier each passing year. She was a year away from an empty nest, and was worried what she would do, and who she would talk to once her youngest son finally left. Certainly not her husband—he was a wonderful man, but he was still a man, and he got on her nerves. There was always Stella, of course—she was much better at listening, and she appreciated intelligent conversation.
    To distract herself, Grammy decided to improve her greatest hobby and skill—cooking. The kitchen had always been her domain, but these past two years it had become her livelihood. She was constantly trying new recipes, perfecting old ones, and mimicking the recipes of the greats from which she’d learned so much. Along one wall was a shelf lined with recipe books authored by the likes of Betty Crocker, Beatrice George, and Julia Child—all queens of their respective kitchens, as she strived to be. And although she was empowered by the craft of cooking, there was still an emptiness, and Grammy knew the cause was the absence of her oldest children. She knew that she could not hold on to them forever, that they had their own lives, but it was a sad realization. She supposed she wanted to be a bigger part of their lives, as her mother had always been a big part of hers. It was a different time, and families scattered, but in an age where communication had never been easier, why did no one speak anymore?
    The Monday before Labor Day weekend, Grammy received a call that disrupted the banality of her post-employment life. She’d just returned from the grocery, and had no sooner set down her bags when she heard her ringtone chiming from somewhere in the cluttered depths of her purse. After digging through piles of change, paper, and make-up, she found her phone. To her great pleasure, she heard her daughter’s voice on the other end of the line.
    After catching up for a few minutes, her daughter told her that she was flying back to Ohio that weekend to visit. Grammy would’ve liked to see her grandson too, but her son-in-law’s mother was taking him to Sea World to celebrate his belated fifth birthday, so they would remain in Florida. Grammy was not too disappointed; she was filled with joy at the prospect of seeing her daughter. She immediately informed her parents and oldest son of the plans, and they agreed to meet for dinner on Saturday.
    As quickly as that, Grammy’s dinner party had gone from four to eight. It had been a long time since they’d all been together. Too long, Grammy thought, but she supposed that’s what happened as you aged. Needless to say, another visit to the grocery was in order. The problem was, each person in her family was pickier than the one before. It would be nearly impossible to please them all. Her youngest son didn’t like pork, her oldest son wouldn’t touch seafood, her daughter refused to eat red meat, and her husband seemed to always request one of the above. Her father was diabetic so he had to watch his sugar, and her mother had sprue so she couldn’t eat gluten. To top it off, her sons loved bread and sugar above all else. Grammy decided that she was the only normal one in their family—besides Stella, she thought.
    Grammy could never hope to synchronize the side dishes, but for the entrée she picked something simpler than she’d made in a long time, something everyone at the table would be able to enjoy—baked chicken. Early Saturday evening, Grammy retrieved the package of eight boneless skinless chicken breasts from the fridge—she’d transferred it earlier so that it could thaw—and eased through the steps of her routine prep. She preheated the oven to 400 degrees, rinsed the chicken, and sprayed the glass dish she frequently used, which fit all eight breasts perfectly like eight chicks to a nest. Four of the breasts were similar in size, and two were quite small. As she gathered the olive oil, sea salt, and Creole seasoning, internally she was already assigning which piece would go to each family member, as mothers sometimes do.
    Grammy would take the smallest, as she always did, and the other small piece would go to her mother, who did not care much for meat. The four breasts of average size would be divided between her two sons, her daughter, and her father. That left only two, one that was slightly bigger than the middle four, and the biggest piece of all—everyone in her family knew who got that one. She paused, considering. After covering the glass dish with aluminum foil and sliding it onto the warm oven grill, Grammy decided that she’d better call her husband and remind him to pick up Stella on his way back from the airport. He was a responsible man, but he was still a man, which meant he needed to be reminded of things as often as a child. And after speaking with him, she was glad she’d made sure, because she could tell by his tone that he’d completely forgotten. Honestly, she didn’t know how he’d be able to function without her.
    As soon as she ended the call, the oven timer went off. She peeled back the foil, turned over each perspiring breast, and added the necessary spices, inspecting the progress with a critical eye. Halfway done with the meat, and it was time to check the mashed potatoes. She paused only long enough to put in her Adele CD to give her inspiration, then set about mixing in the cheese, the bacon bits, and the butter. With practiced ease she stirred the green beans, inspected the gently bobbing cobs of corn, and checked on the rolls—gluten-free for her mom and regular for everyone else. She really had gone simple tonight, Grammy thought, but after spending all day getting the house ready for company, it was the most she could muster. Just in case, she threw together a cheese tray as her oldest son—who had arrived only an hour before—came into the kitchen.
    He was due for a haircut, a fact she found unnecessary to bring up at the moment, but which she would hint at as soon as she could politely do so. Almost thirty, and without a girlfriend—that hair was probably why. Grammy needed to take action if she wanted to be surrounded by grandchildren, which had always been her dream.
    “I don’t know how you live like this,” he said, adjusting an antique wall hanging he’d upset as he turned the corner. “Some of these things look like they’ll fall apart if I touch them.”
    “That’s what makes them special,” Grammy said.
    “Whatever. What time is dinner?” He helped himself to a few pieces of cheese. He’d only been in his hometown an hour, and he was already bored.
    “He just left the airport and is on his way to pick up Stella. He should be here soon—would you stop that?”
    Her son grinned around the cheese cube in his mouth.
    Grammy shooed him away from the platter. “At this rate, you won’t be hungry. Besides, that’s all the cheese I have. Why don’t you do something useful and wake up your brother?”
    He grimaced. As they both knew, it might be easier to wake a bear, especially since her youngest had gotten a job where he worked long, rotating shifts.
    After he’d gone, Grammy checked on the status of her many steaming pots and dishes, and replayed an Adele song she particularly liked. As soon as the song ended, the doorbell rang. She heard the entry door creak open, and her parents exchanging greetings with her sons, who had finally come downstairs. Grammy heard her mother laugh, and she heard her father utter the playful phrase he always did with the young ones—“You rascal.” Grammy smiled, wiping her hands on her apron as she went to meet them in the hall.
    Her father was stern, and although he wasn’t tall, he carried himself as if he was, and his deep voice had often intimidated men much larger than him. In truth, Grammy had always been a little intimidated of him herself, but when she saw him standing in the threshold, and how healthy he looked, she couldn’t resist throwing her arms around him. He had always been a dutiful father, but he was not the most affectionate man, and his wrinkle-framed eyes widened momentarily. He awkwardly placed his arms around his only daughter, a gentle smile came to his lips, and he repeated the salutation Grammy had offered. “I love you too, you rascal.”
    She pecked him on each whiskered cheek.
    After her father had joined the others, Grammy turned to her mother, whose perm highlighted the beauty time had been unable to diminish. She hugged her fiercely, because Grammy was a conscientious person, and knew every moment was precious, and that every moment with family was sacred, because you never knew when it would end. Grammy told her how much she loved her, and her mother said, “I love you, baby.” Her mother was watching her with those sharp intelligent eyes that had never lost their edge. She probably recognized Grammy’s need to be around family, now that her last baby would soon be gone. She had been through it also, and understood. Her mother would console her, when they were alone.
    Grammy had raised her children to respect their elders, and so the arrival of her mother and father was not, as one might think, an obligatory session of forced smiles or a test of patience. On the contrary, their arrival sparked life into her otherwise passive sons, and in a matter of minutes her youngest son was laughing out loud with her mother, and her oldest son was in deep conversation with her father. There was, Grammy thought, nothing so wonderful in the world as grandparents. She deeply hoped her own grandson would someday feel the same.
    Her cell phone disrupted the reunion, as phones often do, and after a brief conversation, Grammy announced, “He’s two minutes out. He wants us to go ahead and get our plates. That way there won’t be a mad rush when they get here.” Grammy pulled the dripping glass dish from the oven and peeked beneath the foil, at the eight succulent breasts bathing in broth and steam. She stirred the mashed potatoes, turned off the burners, and laid out the rolls and other dishes along the countertop. Her mother helped her while her sons set the table.
    When all was in order her family formed a line, holding plates in their hands. Grammy watched with amusement as her mom picked small portions of everything in order to be polite, though they both knew she wouldn’t touch half of it. For the most part, Grammy allowed free reign over the spread she had prepared—except of course, the chicken. That she guarded as a bird would her nest. When her mother arrived at the oven, Grammy asked her which breast she wanted, and, as she’d thought, she selected the smallest one. Grammy gave her the second smallest one even so. Though her father also asked for a small one, she gave him a medium breast instead.
    When her parents were through the line, Grammy surrendered the silver tongs, placing them on a ceramic plate beside the oven so that the others could help themselves. She kept a close eye to ensure no one would take the big piece of chicken. The next to approach was her youngest son, whose eyes—though sunken with fatigue after working so hard—were much bigger than his stomach. He wouldn’t dare though, she thought, despite how hard he’d worked. He wouldn’t dare to take—apparently, he would.
    “You know someone will be pretty upset if you take the big piece of chicken.”
    He smiled up at her, and decided to take a medium breast instead, before moving on.
    Her oldest son, who thought he was sly, pretended to consider a moment, hoping to get one by her when she wasn’t looking.
    “Don’t even think about it,” she whispered into his right ear.
    He jumped, and when he met her stare he grabbed his medium breast and moved quickly on to the rolls. Something, Grammy thought, would have to be done about that hair.
    By that time, her husband had arrived with her daughter, and with him, their English bulldog Stella, back from the vet. Stella was the first to enter, and pattered her big white belly across the stained wooden floors. Her wrinkled face was set in an almost human expression. Grammy stooped down and threw her arms around her, cooing as Stella panted and reached out her long tongue to taste the air. Stella’s eyes rolled beneath her wrinkled ridges, and her nose quivered as she registered the sweet aromas above her sight line.
    Grammy was still speaking in excited tones. “Hi Stelly! There’s my baby. I missed you so much!”
    “We dropped her off this morning,” her youngest said dryly, joining his brother at the table.
    The loud thud of footsteps echoed from the hall—the familiar sound of military boots striking the wooden floor, an announcement to all that the man of the house had finally arrived. A smiling mustached face appeared around the corner, and Grammy felt a wave of affection for the man she’d spent her life with.
    “You’re late,” she said.
    The scolding words she’d prepared quickly dissipated when Grammy’s daughter appeared in the kitchen behind him. This younger version of herself was lovely and vibrant and glowing with life. As they embraced, Grammy fought back the urge to cry. It had been too long since they had seen each other. It had been much too long. They had once been so close, but time and distance had come between them. Grammy desperately missed the relationship they’d once had. She hoped that now that she was retired, they could start to rebuild that relationship again.
    “Get your plate.” She turned abruptly to hide this sudden rush of emotion, though she knew she was unsuccessful in doing so.
    After a moment, her daughter asked, “Since I’m visiting, that means I get the big piece of chicken, right? After all, I’m a mom now too.”
    “Nice try.” Grammy appreciated her daughter’s attempt at trying to lighten the mood. “You might be a mom but in this house you’ll always be my daughter. And in this house, everyone knows who gets the big piece of chicken.”
    They shared a smile. After setting down her plate, her daughter helped her carry the bottles and spices to the table, where her sons and parents were waiting for them to join them. Though the entrée was the same, Grammy knew that in a few minutes each member of her family would tailor the meal to their preferred tastes. Her youngest son would dip the chicken in ketchup, while her oldest son covered it with so much tabasco sauce she wondered if he could taste the chicken underneath. Her daughter preferred Ranch; her husband, A1; her mother, Sweet ‘n Sour; and her father, Barbecue. She and Stella got on without relying on sauces; they weren’t needy like the rest.
    By this time her husband had reached the oven, and slowly reached for the largest breast.
    “You’re not funny,” Grammy said, though she admitted that he was, just a little. But she could never let him know that. Then there would be no end to his jokes. He smiled back at her, and took the second-largest breast instead. Grammy nodded in satisfaction. It had taken many years to train the man, but when he’d finally learned that she was always right, he had become a model student.
    “Are you ever going to get comfortable chairs?” Her youngest complained.
    “They’re Victorian.”
    “It creaks every time I move.”
    “Well don’t move,” said his brother, in the facetious manner he had.
    Her daughter rolled her eyes.
    Grammy was last through the line, and took samples of everything she’d made. She placed the big piece of chicken onto her plate—and the small piece too—before joining the others. Everyone watched with amused expressions when they saw her plate.
    Let them laugh.
    She loved them all, but in the end, there was only one big piece of chicken. In the end, there was only one queen.
    Stella trotted over to the side of her chair, where she sat most meals, and waited patiently for the family to give thanks. After the blessing, Grammy smiled as she gazed around the room. As she’d predicted, they each reached for a separate sauce, and while what they tasted was different, Grammy knew they were all enjoying the same thing—something very simple, and tender, and made with love.
    “This is really good, mom,” her daughter said, echoed by her sons. Her parents and husband chimed in—and Stella barked at her feet. Grammy smiled, completely content. Her whole family sat together around the old table, surrounded by hand-crafted knick-knacks and floral wallpaper, rippling curtains and antique décor. She took a moment to take it all in, to appreciate this moment and how blessed she was. This was here. This was now. They were together. If she froze this image in her mind, and this feeling in her heart, somehow she knew they would always be together, no matter how much time or distance came between them.
    After the blessing, there was a flurry of sound and conversation. Stella’s attention was focused on the big piece of chicken, which Grammy was carving into tiny pieces above her head. Throughout the meal, Stella was fed each and every piece.
    A queen was a queen, after all.

Bio

    Clarence Chapin teaches English Composition at the high school and college levels, and writes creatively on the side. He has been previously published in Vestal Review, Down in the Dirt, the Broke Bohemian, and Route 7 Review.

Brad Gointer: CIA Intern

    I read the credit card-sized advertisement on the back page of the TV Guide: “Are you looking for an exciting and challenging internship? Consider interning with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).”
    The ad showed a well-dressed, dark-haired girl smiling at the camera. She looked like Mark Wahlberg’s girlfriend in the Ted movie, and we all know Wahlberg is a rich actor and can have any woman he wants, so I thought why not apply? Maybe the CIA would send me to another country, and I could finally get out of my mom’s house. Of course, I’d tell them don’t bother sending me to Mexico or New Mexico because I didn’t speak Mexican. I was okay, however, with traveling to England because I could speak Britain thanks to watching Austin Powers’ movies.
    I filled out the on-line application and gave my name and birth date. It also asked about sex, and I wrote, “Hopefully with Mary Sue Allen or that girl in the Crest commercial.” Regarding the question about my weight, I wrote “How long?” I’m not making this up; the CIA really asked those questions.
    Three years out of high school and I was still working part-time at Subway waiting for Justin to quit so I could become the assistant manager. He kept saying he hated working there because the owner was a Republican, but he liked eating a free sandwich every day in the little office in the back. Actually, I ate free sandwiches too, but the job sucked. A hundred times a day: “Do you want cheese with that? . . . Do you want it toasted?” It got so annoying I stopped washing my hands after I used the bathroom.
     Two weeks later after submitting my application, two men in brown suits and striped ties stomped down the steps into my mom’s basement where I was watching television reruns – Rocky and Bullwinkle to be exact. I thought at first that Mom had stolen the neighbors’ lawn chairs again, and these guys had a search warrant. Instead, they showed me their CIA identification badges and glanced around the basement like they were looking for hidden cameras. I raised the volume on the set and pointed at the screen. “Tell me,” I challenged them, figuring worldly guys like them would know this. “Tell me that it’s not a dude doing the voice of Natasha Fatale. C’mon, what broad talks like that?”
    They exchanged a look, and then the taller one said, “Is your name Brad Gointer?” His voice sounded like a television news guy.
    I nodded.
    “Then pack a bag.”
    I stood up and clicked off the television. “Where am I going?” This was going to be awesome – I imagined shaking hands with the Vice-President, shooting a gun, and being given a cool spy name like Daxx Domino. Mom couldn’t complain anymore that I watched too much television or peed on the backyard lawn instead of using the upstairs bathroom. Like these guys who just walked into my house, I would be able to do anything.
    They glanced quickly at each other again and then back at me. “You’ll go with us now and then to a foreign country,” the shorter one said. “Your internship begins today, Brad.” Neither smiled.
    I knew they were serious. “It’s not Mexico, is it?”
    The shorter one – with his stocky frame and bruised ears, he looked like he used to wrestle – shook his head. “No, you’re not going to Mexico. By the way, how many pushups can you do?”
    I shrugged and got on hands and toes on the cold basement floor. I did about a hundred although the shorter one only counted out loud to fourteen. I kinda felt bad for him. He must have gone to a public high school like the one I attended.
    “Good enough,” he said and patted my back after I collapsed breathless on the floor. Next to him, the taller agent peered up the stairs, listening. Mom, however, was probably gone. Today was Tuesday. She had to meet with her parole officer.
    I sat up. “Do you want me to do anything else?”
    The taller dude turned his head back to me. “Just pack a bag and don’t leave any note.”
    So I did, and I didn’t.
    In the black Lincoln Navigator, the shorter agent sat next to me in the back while the taller one drove. The former wrestler reached into a small, navy blue gym bag that rested on a clipboard on the seat between us. He pulled out a pistol and showed it to me. “Do you know how to use one of these?”
    “I think so,” I said. I was confident because I’d seen 21 Jump Street, a documentary about police work, and last year I’d won a stuffed dog at the county fair shooting water into a clown’s mouth.
    He turned the pistol so the barrel was directed away from me and pointed at the trigger. “Well, it’s pretty simple. Just pull this with your finger.” Then he handed me the pistol.
    I held the gun and felt its weight – like maybe it weighed as much as can of soup, the chunky kind. I pointed it straight ahead. In the front seat, the taller guy ducked away, causing the car to swerve. “Don’t point that at me, you idiot.”
    As ordered, I lowered the pistol into my lap. “Then where should I point it?”
    The wrestler leaned into me, winked, and whispered. “At foreigners.”
    “Who?”
    He sighed. “Anyone who doesn’t look like an American.”
    I remembered 8th grade world history. “Even the Greeks?”
    The shorter one grimaced. “Well, yes, you . . . .” He paused to check a chart on the clipboard. “Wait, no.” His finger slid down a column of names. “The Greeks, they’re okay. Don’t shoot them.” He peered again at the chart to be sure and then glanced at me. “You do want to work for the CIA, don’t you, Brad?” He raised an eyebrow.
    My packed bag was in the trunk. I had a pistol. I was finally done working at Subway. “For sure.” But I wasn’t a fool. In fact, I was pretty certain I had some leverage here. “But do I still have to pay taxes? I’m thinking that now since I’m working for the government, it’s like I’m paying my own salary, right? That doesn’t make any sense.”
    “You have . . . We all have to. Wait . . . .” The wrestler reached into his pocket, pulled out a clipped paper – a paystub, I think – and studied it. He tapped the right shoulder of the tall guy driving. “How much federal tax do they take out of yours?”
    The tall guy turned a corner and accelerated. “What? I don’t know. My wife handles all of that.” He took one hand off the steering wheel and extended a pamphlet to me. “Maybe all of that is explained in here.”
    Inside it said, “In the CIA, you’ll find a supportive environment to help you grow and excel both professionally and personally. And a culture that expects you to do your personal best every day. Explore our world and imagine yourself working for the nation, in the center of intelligence.” But that was it.
    “I still don’t think I should have to pay any taxes,” I told them. I was still thinking leverage. “Plus, I want a CIA badge like what you guys have so I can show it to my old high school principal. You know what that turd told me at graduation?” I didn’t wait for them to respond. “He said that the next time he saw me, he expected the conversation to end with him telling me to add fries to his order. Then I told him the whole school knew he was having sex with that Croatian lunch lady in the cafeteria after school. That’s against the law isn’t it? I want to scare the shit out of him.”
    “Just keep the gun pointed down,” the wrestler said and zipped up the gym bag.
    I couldn’t let it go, the memories still strong in my mind. “All that bullshit we were told, like you can do anything you put your mind to. A science teacher told us we could grow up to be like Lance Armstrong and walk on the moon. My social studies teacher said that maybe one of us could be President and end the cold war between Alaska and Russia. I watch the news, you know, and neither Alaska nor Russia are any warmer.” I spent the rest of the trip staring out the passenger window.
    We reached a building they called HQ, and they led me inside to an empty room with a wrestling mat. When the shorter one with the banged up ears took off his coat and shirt, I saw a body resembling a fire hydrant plopped on top of two legs – yeah, he was a wrestler. He pointed at the navy-blue mat. “C’mon, Gointer. Let me show you some things.”
    The taller one left, and Mr. Fire Hydrant squeezed my head until I thought it would look like one big ear. Then he wrenched my shoulders so hard from now on I thought I would have to hear through my armpits. He showed me moves like the groin pull and barrel cruncher and lectured me, “Don’t ever let them barrel crunch you, or you won’t be able to shit for a week.”
    The rest of the training wasn’t that tough. I had to read the pamphlet again, do more pushups, swim laps in a pool, and interpret inkblots of insects, a woman’s vagina, and the Eiffel Tower. I said they made me think of potato salad and the time two years ago when an old girlfriend handed me a STD pamphlet as she broke up with me. Plus, they made me study pictures of about a couple hundred bad men and women, one of whom I think was my third-grade teacher Mrs. Anderson. Figures she was a communist, all the time talking about union rights with the other teachers in the hallway.
    A week later I was on my first mission to Istanbul. Alone. I still had the pistol.
    My assignment was to find out if the Turks were getting friendly with the Russians. Were the Turks our friends or our enemies? Plus, the CIA really wanted to know why the Turks sweated so much and if Noah’s Ark was on Mt. Ararat. We were a Christian nation and wanted it.
    I began right away. I asked people at the airport what they thought of Russia, but after eating dinner with a group of them I found out they weren’t Turks. They were Dutch! I had gotten confused because they didn’t wear wooden shoes and they had a lot of nose hair, even the women. When I asked, they told me they considered Russia to be a nation of pornographers.
    In Istanbul I did see a lot of sweaty men kissing each other on both cheeks, but I didn’t know for sure if one was Turkish and the other was Russian. I kept my gun inside my jacket and remained ready to shoot anyone who wasn’t a Greek. I did see a sailboat on a trailer but not the ark.
    My second day in Istanbul a Turkish woman who looked like Pee Wee Herman’s older sister approached me while I was smoking dope in a hookah tavern. “Are you an American?” she asked, smiling warmly.
    Finally! Someone who could tell me if the Turks liked the Russians. But then I thought for a moment. Maybe this was a trick, and she would try to seduce me into revealing classified secrets. Moreover, I didn’t want to blow my cover. I was travelling as Looney Ward, a volleyball and kneepads salesman. So I gave a half-smile and answered, “I’m not an American. I’m an Ohioan.”
    She gently squeezed the top of my hand. “Come with me.” She turned, and her long, black hair fell down the back of her red spandex top. I didn’t get up right away because I’d been warned during my training to remain cautious about women who were beautiful – they’d shown me almost all the James Bond movies. Not the George Lazenby one, however. According to the CIA, he was a pussy.
    Nevertheless, I was on a mission so I left the hookah bar with the woman and followed her down a narrow brick road into an alleyway. Mostly I followed her exotic scent, its warm fragrance a strong contrast to the fish gut incense my mother burned at home on Sundays so she could still get religion but not have to go to church. The Turkish woman looked back every few seconds to be sure I was following her, always giving me that same smile I saw in the hookah tavern.
    At a steel door she stopped abruptly, turned, and faced me. “You here for fun, yes?”
    I remembered my training: You ask the questions. Complete the mission. “I can’t tell you that. By the way, are you friendly with the Russians?”
    “If he’s a man, I am friendly with him.” Actually she said, “Ef heez man, I am frenly weeth hem.” Then she waved a slender arm, prompting me to follow her, and opened the door. I liked being a CIA intern, but I pondered if I should shoot her because she wasn’t an American. She sorta did speak American, however, so I remain conflicted and kept the gun inside my jacket.
    We walked into a room that had a weird purple light, and I stuck close to her because I could hardly see. In fact, I bumped into a chair without armrests, and she told me to sit.
    Then she hovered over me, her knees straddling one of my legs. “Do you have money?” Her perfume washed over me. She caressed my cheek.
    I had a hundred dollars in my jeans pocket, but I remembered my training: Spend wisely. Keep your receipts. “I only have ten dollars,” I answered.
    Her hand went from my cheek to my shoulder. She sighed. “That is only enough for mouth.”
    “I already have a mouth.”
    She knelt in front of me. “What are you talking about?”
     I remembered my training: Turn the tables whenever you can. “What are you talking about?”
    She began unzipping my pants. “Okay, ten dollars,” she groaned and lowered her face into my groin.
    I tried to get my bearings and recalled I represented the United States, the greatest nation on the planet. With my jeans at my ankles, I felt linked to other great American patriots like Clint Eastwood, Hulk Hogan, and James T. Kirk.
    She abruptly stopped. “Is something wrong?” Which sounded like, “Eeez sumtheenk wronk?”
    I took my hand off the top of her head. “Wrong?”
    “Is it okay?” She pointed at my groin.
    Then I understood. “No, it doesn’t get any bigger. That’s it.”
    She looked up and smiled sympathetically. “Like a peanut with two peas.”
    “At least it’s American,” I announced proudly and pushed her head down.
    When I got back to CIA headquarters at the end of the week I told them I still wasn’t sure if the Turks did or did not like the Russians. They liked Americans however. A lot! The CIA guys were pissed, though, that I didn’t have a receipt for the ten-dollar expenditure.

Call Me Chef

    For the second time this day and for the second day in a row, he looked out the window of the A&P Railroad Lines dining car kitchen in the middle of grass running for endless miles and saw the herd of cattle and the drovers dashing about on horseback, those gallant riders that had drawn him all the way from Italy, half a turn around the world.
    Salvatore “Sardi” Benevento, “the best cook on the whole damned railroad,” according to the big boss, felt the knot working in his gut. Out there in that mix is where he wanted to be, had wanted it from the day he left Italy with the dream locked up in his heart.
    He recalled the exact moment when he sold the horse, the wagon and the small farm on the same day his grandfather died. Once he arrived in Naples, after the funeral and after his beloved grandfather was placed down into the rocky ground, he purchased a ticket to America. A few months later, after an interminable wait, and a mad and dangerous crossing of the ocean among some thieves from his own village, he managed to maintain his inner direction, to keep his dream alive.
    Ashore but one week, exploring Boston’s North End on foot, he felt like a child away from home. But he glowed in the energy bouncing around him. Like a small piece of Italy that part of Boston came at him in its full swing. In the air were the known aromas of hours’ long food preparation, the sense of music from every corner and from every bistro, from open windows and closed doors, and finally the magnificent chatter of its people, dialect atop dialect, a grand mixture of Tuscany tongue and Calabrese and Milanese and Roman as old as the sages. He inhaled all of it, as if hunger worked all the parts of him.
    Then, fate itself on the move, in one breath, not marked right then but benchmarked later in the way life piles up with incidents, he heard a voice saying in a dialect near his own from the front of an open restaurant, “Ho, Luigi, perché una tale pesante, sguardo interrogativo sulla tua faccia? Si guarda sbalordito.” He had no trouble hearing it as, “Ho, Luigi, why do you have such a heavy, quizzical look on your face? You look dumbfounded.”
    The speaker was a heavy, well-set man of middle age, mustache-bearing, dark of skin, in a fashionable black suit with simple orange stripes behaving in the fabric like style was its master. The felt hat on his head seemed as new as Benevento knew the suit was, and somewhat costly even in the land of riches. The speaker’s hands flew in the air as he talked, approaching an obvious acquaintance at an outside table.
    The one he spoke to, Luigi as named, replied, “Ho bisogno di trovare un grande cuoco italiano, un cuoco supremo, un maestro del gusto, per la ferrovia.” (“I need to find a great Italian cook, a chef supreme, and a master of taste, for the railroad.”)
    Young Benevento, having been taught everything his grandfather knew about meats and vegetables in the kitchen, the best seasons of vegetables, the uses of condiments, the difference in minute mixtures, “the splash and dash” he might have called it, how soft the fruits could become in the mouth, in the throat, stepped in as quickly as he had sold the horse and wagon and the farm. He burst into Italian, went immediately to English to carry his argument, to show his versatility. “Call me Chef,” he cried out. “I am he whom you are looking for. This is the moment I have been waiting for. The Good Lord sent me down this street on this day to show how destiny works at His hands through these hands.” He pointed overhead and blessed himself.
    “I am the best cook, the best chef, ever to come out of the mountains in Tuscany. I sold my horse and wagon and farm to get here to America, to bring great Italian cooking to the new land of America. I am Salvatore Benevento at your service. Ask the proprietor to loan me his kitchen for an hour. I shall make your mouths water, make you think of home so that you will cry for your mother’s kitchen. Blessed be the image that comes upon you now from your childhood.” He made the sign of the cross over them as if he was the village padre.
    The two older Italian men, marveling at such precocity in the young man, tumbled before his onslaught. He told them how his grandfather had cooked for years for the two of them and for every celebration in their small village. He spelled out some of his own favorite recipes that moved both men to salivation, and to a few more times of their calling out to the proprietor, “another round of vino for us and the young man, Giovanni, if you please.” (“Un altro giro di vino per noi e il giovane, Giovanni, se non vi dispiace.”)
    The proprietor, after all the talk and Benevento being hired on the spot for the chef’s position on a train leaving the next day for the far western lands of America, finally asked him what he would have cooked if he had been given the run of the restaurant kitchen. The proprietor’s eyes were wide with anticipation.
    “Ah, I immediately thought of mushroom trifoliate,” Benevento said, “for a late afternoon delicacy for these men of taste, most tasty sautéed mushrooms.”
    The proprietor looked downcast as he said, “That would have been impossible, young man, as we do not have any mushrooms in the kitchen today.” He dropped his shoulders as he looked at the others, his hands flung out flat at the imagined loss.
    But they all brightened as the young chef looked overhead at a string of tall elm trees, and said, “That is no problem. The Garden in the Sky above us is filled with amanita colyptraderma the Good Lord has provided us. Look at the parade of those choice mushrooms along the upper branch in that large tree across the street. Do they not look delicious even from here?”
    Salvatore Benevento, the very next day, was chef No. 1 in the dining car of an A&P Railroad Lines passenger train heading west out of Boston, Tuscany fare on the move.
    Nobody yet in the new land realized his real dream was to be a cowboy.
    His number 2 cook, Giovanni Ciampa, said one day, as the train left one stop and started on its way again, “I do not poke my nose in your business, Sardi, but I notice you skip out at each stop to buy small things for yourself or perhaps for a lady friend. Can I help with anything? Romance for itinerants like us is a problem from the very beginning.”
    “Ah, Joe, you I trust to the utmost. I’ll ask you right up front to keep my secret always. I have taken this job to become, one day in my dreams, a cowboy. It has driven me since I first heard about them. The stories, the legends, the whole drama of the west as it changes the country feeding it. Yes, the things I buy, the things I keep in my personal bag, are things that I will need as a cowboy. I can’t make the change dressed like this.” He swept his hands down his cook’s attire, the floury sleeves, the apron already having its share of bright juices and liquids and sweeping stains where he wiped his wrists in a hurry. “Ah, no, never dressed like this. This is not a cowboy.” There was disgust in his voice that Giovanni understood.
    Seven trips Benevento made back and forth across the great country, across the great river, saw Chicago and St. Louis and burgeoning towns and settlements in Texas and along the Rocky Mountains. It was easy to keep his dream alive for continually he saw from the train windows the herds moving on the wide grasslands or finally corralled for rail movement and saw the cowboys at every drive’s end clearing their dry mouths, cutting the trail dust in their throats, relaxing as if relaxing was a brand-new thing for them. He was caught up in the excitement of their world, those simple successes after fraught perils only special men could survive.
    In the midst of his eighth trip on the railroad, in an overnight stop in Colorado, he planned to step off the train just after midnight, when the whole world seemed asleep, when deep dreams were at hand.
    On his way to the door, silence everywhere like a silken mist, he touched Giovanni on the cheek to waken him.
    “Joe,” he said in a whisper, and getting Joe’s attention. “This is where I get off. This is where I become a cowboy. Wish me luck, my friend. I have written a note to the owners saying that you are the best man for the job now. You know all that I have taught you, all that my grandfather taught me. Speak up when you want to make a point. Trust the taste on your lips. Don’t take a back seat for anybody on the train or in the big offices. You are a good chef. I hope to become as good a cowboy, but we’ll let time do the talking there. Be well, my friend. Buona fortuna. Arrivederci.”
    He swung his personal bag over his shoulder, heard the tinny rattle of its contents, and stepped into darkness and a new world. In the morning, from an old man at a livery stable with a crude sign saying “Horses for sale,” he bought a horse and a saddle and started to learn how to ride. Benevento was a good learner and handled the horse quickly. Two days later he sought employment from a trail boss whose herd was resting a few miles back on the prairie.
    “You look brand new. Is them duds you’re wearing that new they look like they wasn’t worn anyplace yet? Who’d you work for last? You ever drove herd?”
    “Well,” Benevento said, “I can ride that horse of mine all day.”
    “Who’d you work for afore this?” the trail boss said. “Can you rope, pull out a dogie for chow, run down a runaway and bring it back? You ain’t lookin’ the type.”
    “This will be my first job, but I have read everything about cowboys and I know I can do the job. I came all the way from Italy to be a cowboy.” The pain and the dream were both in his face.
    “Oh, boy,” the trail boss said, “I got a dreamer here on my hands.” He snorted and thought a bit and said, “The only thing I got right now is a sick cookie who’s ailin’ and abed in the chuck wagon. If you can heat beans and water and make the coffee, you got a job until he gets better. Then, when that’s scored up, we’ll see how good you done. You game for that? What’s your name?”
    “Sardi Benevento, and I can cook anything. I can make your mouth water from half a mile. All I want is a chance to be a cowboy when your cook gets better. You help me and I’ll help you.”
    “That’s a deal, Sardi. Follow me.” And he led him to his herd at a sit-down a few miles out on the grass.
    It took one meal and the whole crew of drovers knew they had a “chef” working the chuck wagon. He plain outdid himself and the sick cook in that first meal, his personal bag of supplies coming up as handy as a can opener. From then on, anytime a drover or ramrod or the trail boss went into town, Benevento made sure they had a list of condiments and vegetables that he’d put on a list for them. Every purchase made his cooking tasks much easier.
    The night the top wrangler came back with a half barrel of apples, Benevento promised them apple pie for a late snack. By darkness he had all hands drooling for the dessert. He surprised them at camp by unpacking his reflector oven, a shiny tin contraption, from his personal bag and erecting it in front of the open fire. Flames seemed to leap into its parts.
    He went to work at his fold down table at the rear of the wagon. Soon, cinnamon swimming in the air, sugar coming sweet as honey bread, he had his first apple pie in the oven and the aroma raced across the grass. Night riders on the far edges of the herd were afraid they’d be left out, but there was plenty of apple pie for all of them, the fire hot for hours, the oven soaking up the direct heat, night filling up with the absolute sweetness sitting in the air. In addition, as an extra part of his dessert, he prepared a special sauce to top the slabs of apple pie. The night was lustrous.
    Two days later the original cook was back on the job and Benevento had his first turn as a drover.
    The trail boss, Max Farmer, said, “Sardi, you’re one helluva cook. But a promise is a promise, so you get your shot at bein’ a cowpoke, not that I think there’s any more glory in it than bein’ a great cook. I gotta tell you to keep awake on the night rounds. Sing sweet and low, like one of your nice goodies, and don’t close your eyes. We got strange goin’s on in this territory. There’s always somethin’ goin’ on out here two ways if you was to look twice.”
    So, Benevento sang lightly, sweetly, a soft tenor; “Sleep little babies, sleep on my side. Sleep, little dogies, sleep as I ride.” It came out as, “Dormi bambino, dormi su un fianco. cani poco sonno, sonno come io giro.”
    He sang sweetly, soft as a nightingale in the shadows, and the small speck of light he spied at a distant point was minute, almost insignificant, like a firefly at work, but he had seen no fireflies yet, and decided to wander over that way.
    With his horse tied off on some brush, he slipped into a swale and made his way to where the light had been seen. There came the snicker of a horse and the covered cough of a man on a small hummock. The man, obviously, was watching the herd and any other activity. He coughed again and never heard Benevento sneak up behind him and stick the stiletto he’d carried forever against the other man’s throat.
    “Say nothing, Signore, or you are dead,” Benevento said. “Walk with me, walk quietly to your horse. You make one move and I will sink the blade into your throat. You will never make noise again. Never sing. Never say hello or goodbye to any loved one.” He nudged the knife point a bit tighter against the throat of the man.
    “You understand me?”
    “Yes. Don’t cut me. I won’t do anything.”
    Benevento led the man to his own horse, unhooked his lasso and tied the man up. Then he walked him to the man’s horse and had him climb into the saddle, still tied up. That is the way the night camp guard saw them coming into firelight and called Max Farmer, the trail boss. “Hey, Max, we got company coming in with the Sardi the cook.”
    Farmer asked the man many questions and got no answers. He repeated many of the questions, the firelight reflecting on the man’s face, and the fear showing in his eyes.
    From the edge of the firelight, from the edge of darkness, Benevento, the just replaced cook, walked to the chuck wagon and from his bag retrieved a small honing stone. At the campfire, in view of the captured lookout, whose hands were still bound, Benevento started sharpening his stiletto. The keen knife edge was slowly drawn across the stone, the whisper of the fine abrasion circulating in the air as thin as a bird’s wings. Slowly, again and again, he drew the blade and the shiny tip across the stone. He kept thinking about the whir of a hummingbird’s wings.
    “Perhaps, Boss, you might give me an opportunity to pose some questions to him.” He didn’t wait for an answer from Farmer but drew up a sitting box and sat directly in front of the captured lookout.
    “You and I have had a discussion, haven’t we, Signore?v We spoke of small things, didn’t we, Signore? Shall we start again with some more questions?”
    The trussed man, in the light of the fire, under the eyes of a dozen men, with Benevento and the stiletto yet making slight but serious sounds in the night like the mystical threat of a hummingbird, came loose at every seam. He told them everything he knew; how many men they had in their rustler’s gang, who the leader was, when and how they planned to kill as many men as quickly as they could and then to stampede the herd. Later on, they would have the forces to regroup the herd and make off with it.
    “Well,” Farmer said after he heard the whole story, “maybe we can do a little surprise on our own. We’ll just go over there and shoot up that whole camp of rustlers as fast as we can. Scatter them to the winds and all the hills.” He was not a big man but he had the big word.
    That is, until the former cook and cowboy, Sardi Benevento, said, “Why endanger any of our men with that effort, Mr. Farmer. Why don’t we get the herd as close as we can in the night, while they’re all sleeping and stampede the herd right through their hideout? That should soften things up for us. And we’ll do the regrouping.”
    “Why, Signore,” Farmer said, “you are no longer a cook in this here outfit. You are now lead scout and a full-blown cowboy. But if I was you, I wouldn’t throw away that shiny tin oven of yours.”

If There’s a Bustle in Your Hedgerow

    We were riding our bikes to Mark’s house after school. It was a Monday, the day we had “Chapel” at Freedom Christian Academy. Our guest had been a skinny, pock-marked, ex-tweaker and former junky named Billy Brownstone. He had a grievous manner and a genuine Southern accent that lent him an air of credibility as he told us all about the evils of rock ‘n’ roll, a message that was a little untimely since he mainly railed against bands whose time had already passed.
    “You ever hear of a band called ‘Led Zeppelin’?” Of course we had, but we were more into, say, The Vapors. “I wan’ play you sumpin’ from one o’ their albums. They made a song and they cawled it “Stairway to Heaven.” His voice, which was soft in the beginning, had grown much louder, his tone more urgent. His accent seemed to have grown stronger, too. His eyes were wild, and a little spit glistened from his lower lip. “Stair-way-to-Hea-ven!” he yelled, emphasizing each syllable, as if we might miss the point.
    He then nodded up to the sound room located behind us up on a second floor. The lights dimmed, and Billy’s voice grew soft again.
    “Ima play a little snippet of this song, this ee-vil song, from these ee-vil men...hell, I won’t even call ‘em men.” I glanced over at our principal, Mr. Jeffers, who was still seated on the stage, to see if he had caught the bad word—after all, you weren’t supposed to say “hell” unless you were really talking about the place. Jeffers was still seated up on the stage, but his face betrayed no emotion. “These...these...demons,” Billy continued, these demons that cawl themselves ‘Led Zeppelin.’ Here’s what the’r li’l’ song sounds like played backwards.
    He nodded again to the sound room, and a distorted, scratchy sound issued from the speakers. We sat breathless, and a voice finally came through. It said, “Eeghh booph flef gnoon chaour neium.”
    Billy surveyed the audience grimly. After a moment he said, “Play it once more, please.”
    Once more we heard, “Eeghh booph flef gnoon chaour neium.” What the hell?
    Billy looked around again. “D’ya hear it?” he asked. He put his slobbering mouth right against the microphone and in a low growl said, “Here’s to muh sweet Satan.” He stood back, indignant.
    “Did ya’ll hear it?” he asked once more.
    I looked around. I didn’t hear it. Did anybody else? Kids to the left and right were nodding their heads. There were looks of terror and confusion. An excited murmur filled the room. All I could think was, I don’t hear it! I don’t hear it!
    He had the faceless operator play the excerpt one more time now that we knew what to listen for. A couple of the girls looked as if they might hyperventilate. Mark turned around, looked at me and shrugged. Apparently he couldn’t hear it either.
    The congregation settled down, and Billy stood up there shaking his head in disgust. “Here’s to muh sweet Satan,” he repeated softly. “And from a song cawled “Stairway to Heaven.” He was incredulous. “You know what they ought to call that song? ‘Stairway Straight to Doggone Hell!’ ‘cause that’s exactly where they’re goin’!” He was shouting now, and spitting and shaking. Yes! This is what we came to see! We wanted more!
    From there he went on to other bands: Pink Floyd, Styx, ELO, Judas Priest and AC/DC, of course. “‘Givin’ the Dog a Bone’? That’s about havin’ sex with animals! You wan’ be on the ‘Highway to Hell’? Well, put the pedal to the metal brother, ‘cause that’s where yer all headed!” It seemed to me a little off message that he seemed to take so much glee in the eternal damnation of others.
    One of the more surprising revelations was that the Eagles’ “Hotel California” was really code for the Church of Satan, and if you looked very closely at the inside of the fold-out cover, you could see a picture of the church’s founder, Anton LaVey, standing on the balcony.
    Then he played a portion of “Another One Bites the Dust,” forward and backward.
    “Did y’all hear it?” He was quiet again, as if he had reached climax and was lying in bed smoking a cigarette. “Freddie Mercury is an agent of the devil. He’s tellin’ ya sublimin’ly through his ‘song’—he used air quotes here—“He’s telling y’all ‘It’s fun to smoke marijuana.’”
    He played it again, and I have to admit I think I sort of heard this one.
    So, we were headed to Mark’s house, still buzzing from Brownstone’s sermon. We couldn’t wait to get to Mark’s to try spinning some of his dad’s records backwards. And like I said, it was Monday, which was also Trash Day.
    The plastic ones were good in the wind; if you kicked them just right, you could get them to roll all the way down the street. But the metal ones made a great sound going over. A skilled practitioner could get three or four at a time. Of course, we only did it after the trash had been collected. We had a code of ethics.
    We usually rode together through the neighborhood like marauding Huns bent on destruction. Sometimes we worked opposite sides of the street. Every once in a while, we shared one bike, with the one on the handlebars doing most of the kicking.
    It was a nice, quiet suburban neighborhood where Mark lived in Fountain Valley, but it was kind of strange, too. There rarely seemed to be anyone about. Not that the presence of a homeowner ever tempered our behavior in any way. I once saw Mark kick a can out of a robed man’s hand as he was dragging it across the sidewalk up toward his driveway.
    Kicking over trash cans usually fills the kicker with a feeling of power and invincibility, except on this day, we were apprehended.
    It was one of those guys on their little road-racer ten speeds. We had left a swath of destruction from one end of Mark’s neighborhood to the next and we didn’t notice the bastard until he was almost upon us.
    “Hey! You two!” he yelled, cutting us off in the street. There was no point in our attempting to get away; our beach cruisers were no match for his bike. He wasn’t wearing a helmet or a colorful outfit or any of the gear usually associated with a bike of that sort. He must have spotted us from his house and took off in pursuit. He was a mousy little guy with big ears and beady little eyes, but extremely fit for his age. He appeared to be about fifty years old.
    Mark and I stood there straddling our bikes while the man rattled off a series of rhetorical questions: Do you think this is funny? Who do think is going to have to pick those up? How would you like it if someone kicked over your trashcans?
    “We don’t own any trashcans,” I told him. Mark laughed.
    “Oh, a little fucking smartass, are you? Tell you what, funny guy, we’ll see who’s laughing when I get the police out here, and you two idiots get charged with vandalism. That’ll be a real knee slapper won’t it?”
    I suddenly hated this little mouse, but he was right: The situation was losing its humor. I ran over our options in my head; I knew Mark would be doing the same. We could just ride off and hope he didn’t pursue us. We could apologize and pick up the trash cans. We could—
    “Go ahead, asshole,” Mark said. Call the cops. Mark didn’t very much like authority figures, but he had really limited our options with this remark. He was calling the man’s bluff, but the man wasn’t bluffing.
    Another homeowner had appeared the porch of house in front of which we had been stopped. He was an older man, fat and disheveled, his white hair standing straight up from his head. He was watching the scene with slack-jawed interest. Fortunately, we hadn’t made it to his cans, so they were still upright.
    “Sir, will you please phone the Fountain Valley Police Department,” Mouse Man requested of the resident. “Tell them I have placed two young men under citizen’s arrest for vandalism.” The man on the porch looked down the street at the evidence of our destruction and nodded his head in the manner of a good citizen.
    “Wait, wait, wait, wait!” I intervened. “Here...look!” I laid my bike down in the street and walked over to the prostrate cans of the neighbor’s house and began returning them to their original positions. “We’ll pick ‘em up. No big deal. We don’t need the police. It was stupid.”
    The man on the porch looked questioningly at Mouse Man. He seemed give the matter some consideration before finally announcing. “Okay, but you two dipshits are going to pick up every single trash can you knocked over and then you are going to apologize to my wife.”
    “Your wife?” I asked.
    As the man followed behind us on his bike, Mark and I walked our own bikes and retraced our route. We stopped at each house, righting and replacing the trash cans we had dislodged. As we did so, the man explained that his wife had been crouched over in her front yard tending to her rose bushes when a metal can came sailing over her head. I remembered Mark sending one into a yard; it was the very first house we hit, and it was a hell of a good shot. But I never saw the lady.
    “You scared my wife half to death. When we get there, you are going to explain your actions, then you are going to tell her how sorry you are. Got it?”
    We got it. And as the man paraded us like prisoners of war back over our path of destruction, he felt it necessary to explain to each curious onlooker how he had captured the neighborhood vandals.
    “I wondered who was doing that!” one lady shouted from a second-floor window.
    “Don’t worry,” Mouse Man promised valiantly from his saddle. “They won’t be pulling any more stunts like this for a long time.”
    We finally picked up the last of the trash cans which were located at the man’s house. Sure enough, his wife was out there in her garden, and I understood now how I hadn’t seen her before. Her rose bushes were huge and magnificent, and she was bent down among them. They had clearly been nurtured with much love and patience and skill. Roses of every variety encircled the front perimeter of the front lawn which was dominated by a medium-sized olive tree in a round, brick planter. The yard looked like something out of a magazine.
    The woman was all decked out in gardening attire and held a small hand trowel. She set down the trowel and removed her gloves as Mark and I were led up the driveway toward her. She took off her bonnet to reveal a homespun-looking face framed in a gray, Prince Valiant-type of hairdo. She was quite homely, and the expression she had on her face wasn’t helping matters.
    “Here they are,” said the hero. “I believe these two have something to say to you. Don’t you boys?”
    We stopped in front of her, looking at the ground. There was a giant rose bush with peach-colored blooms between us and the woman. I looked up at her. She had replaced her bonnet but I could see her withered face in the shadow. She looked extremely bitter. I guessed she had a right to be upset, but I thought the venom in her expression outweighed the details of the circumstances.
    “I’m sorry,” I offered, sounding as contrite as I could.
    She glared at me for a few seconds then over to Mark who still stood looking at the ground. The man tapped Mark’s leg with his foot.
    “Sorry,” Mark said finally. It was the least sincere apology I had ever heard.
    “Do you boys want to say anything else?” Mouse Man asked. “Maybe promise not to be so stupid in the future?”
    Mark had had enough. “Look,” he said. “We picked up all of the trash cans. We said we were sorry. That’s enough. Call the cops if you want to.” He stormed off back toward his bike.
    I was ready to go, too, when the woman addressed me. “You two are no good. The dregs of society.”
    “What? It was just a trash can, lady.” Now it was my turn to be pissed. Mark was already riding off as I headed to my own bike.
    “Bad breeding, if you ask me. Just plain white trash,” I heard her say as I rode off. I’m not sure if the old hag was directing this to me or to her husband. Mark was already at his house before I caught up to him.
    “Bad breeding?” he asked me when I told him the story. “What does that mean?” I wasn’t sure, but it sure sounded insulting. What the woman didn’t account for and where her husband had made a mistake was that we now knew where they lived.
    We tried playing some of Mark’s dad’s records backwards, but it was a clumsy operation; we had to do it by hand, and we couldn’t hear anything satanic. Maybe if he’d had anything other than Jim Reeves and The Ink Spots to work with, we might have had better luck.
    In any case, we were still stewing over being captured by Mark’s neighbor. I called my mom and told her Mark and I were working on a very important class project. She was so delighted at my taking an interest in school that she granted me permission to stay the night.
    When everyone in Mark’s house was asleep, we dressed in dark clothing, crept into the garage, and gathered some supplies. In the moonless early morning hours, we walked swiftly, stealthily to the other side of the neighborhood. We got to the house with the giant rose bushes at the end of the street, and we went to work.
    In the many years that have since passed, I’ve often thought about what we did that night. I never very much regretted cutting down all of the roses with garden shears. Maybe it was to relieve my own conscience, but I attributed these actions to the very words spoken by the lady of the house. She had labeled us as being the result of “bad breeding,” and one might argue that our subsequent behavior was merely what might be called self-fulfilling prophecy, since our behavior could be attributed to that of one who has been poorly bred.
    There are two things I regretted. One is that I should have gone with my first instinct, which was to paint a giant penis on the garage door. At the last second, inspired by some of the imagery of Billy Brownstone’s slideshow, I decided on a pentagram.
    But what I was really sorry for about that night is that we weren’t there to witness the olive tree fall. I wondered if our little mechanism had worked.
    It took a while, but we eventually were able to saw through the trunk of the tree with a hacksaw. It was a clean cut and as horizontal as we could possibly make it. We left just the slightest little bit of the trunk attached to its base. It appeared as if it would blow over at even the suggestion of a wind. We then tied a lower branch of the tree with fifty-pound test to the handle of the front door. The idea was that, when either Mouse Man or his wife opened the front door, they would not only see a barren landscape of decimated rose bushes, but they would witness—even cause—the felling of the olive tree.
    Of course we had to avoid that part of the neighborhood for a while. We didn’t even dare venture out much anywhere nearby for quite some time. It wasn’t until Mark’s brother Trip picked us up from school in his car weeks later, and we confessed to him our crime. He listened with great interest and drove us slowly past the scene. There was no one in the devastated yard. The house looked quiet.
    “Those people must have really pissed you off,” he said, admiringly. “Are they Jewish?”
    “Why?” we asked.
    “Why else would you paint a Star of David on their garage door?” It had been hastily painted over, but you could still make out the its shape.
    “It was supposed to be a pentagram,” I admitted from the back seat.
    Trip spit some chew into a cup in his lap and turned around to look at me as he drove on. “You two are seriously fucked up,” he said.
    Mark’s mom still lives in the same house in the old neighborhood. Not too long ago she threw a party there for the college graduation of one of Mark’s nieces. I was invited and, out of curiosity, I decided to take the long way there and go by Mouse Man’s house. I drove slowly past, and in the front yard there was a woman. She was tending to the most beautiful roses I had seen in more than thirty years. Could it possibly be her? I wondered. She carried herself in the manner of an old woman, but I couldn’t see her face—she was wearing a bonnet. In the center of the yard was the old brick planter; it was still the same. And in the middle of that sat a tree stump. I didn’t see Mouse Man around. Long dead, I thought. Guys like that don’t last long.
    Before I reached Mark’s house, I suddenly became struck with the idea that maybe I should go back and apologize after all these years. I pulled into the nearest driveway, turned the car around and headed back. When I got there I parked at the curb right in front of the house. The lady looked up from her roses.
    It was her, alright. I could see her face inside of the bonnet. She was much older, but looked at me with the same venom, with the same grim and angry eyes. Could she possibly recognize me? I put the car into “Drive,” made a three-point turn, and headed to Mark’s house.
    Maybe it was bad breeding after all.

Branded

    Tony Marcos had been up all night and he looked as exhausted as Tia felt. His eyes were bloodshot and the charcoal stubble sprouting from his cheeks accentuated his pallor. Tia knew she didn’t look much better. Responding to the urgency of the detective’s four a.m. call, she hadn’t bothered to shower or put her contacts in. Instead, after donning a pair of faded jeans and a bulky sweater, Tia threw on her glasses and pulled her sleep-frizzy hair into a ponytail. Out of necessity, she’d taken the time to drive through Starbucks, and she handed Marcos a Venti drip as she stepped up to the one-way mirror. After Marcos grunted his thanks and took a sip, Tia asked him what he knew about the girl who sat alone in the interrogation room.
    “According to her driver’s license, her name is Bambi Rose,” Marcos said. “That’s the name on her bank account, too, but other than that, there’s no record of her before 2015. No birth records, no school enrollment, nothing. Not even a traffic ticket. We’re not sure who she is. The name she uses in her pornos is Brandi Peach, but of course that’s not her real name, either. We can’t get her to talk. We’re hoping you’ll have better luck, Doc.”
    Through the one-way mirror, Tia studied the tight-lipped murder suspect. She was so small that the sleeves of her gray police-issue T-shirt covered her elbows. Her hair, yellowish blond with random, fiery streaks of red and orange, was still damp from a long-overdue shower, permitted only after the police had stripped Bambi/Brandi of her blood-soaked clothes, then picked over her naked body to collect microscopic evidence. Forensic fussbudgets, Tia thought, shaking her head at their pointless zeal. They already had a wealth of macroscopic evidence, plus the girl’s confession, without subjecting her to their persnickety combing and swabbing and tweezing. She sat motionless now, her face an impassive mask. Reaching child prostitutes was always tough: usually incest survivors, but more profoundly damaged than most victims, they often seemed stripped of all emotion. It was there, of course, just buried deep, where no pimp or john could touch them.
    Turning to Detective Marcos, Tia asked, “How old is she?”
    Marcos snorted. “Her license says she’s twenty-two, but look at her. She looks like my twins. They’re in eighth grade.” Marcos clenched and unclenched his jaw while he stared at the skinny young prostitute. She didn’t look strong enough to overpower any man, let alone a six-foot-three ex-con. “She doesn’t deny stabbing the guy, but she won’t tell us anything else. Hell, it could’ve been self-defense. Her john was a big guy, forty-three years old, and he had a record. Just got out of prison for killing his ex-wife. We need to know who this girl is and why she killed the guy. Do you think you can get her to talk?”
    “I’ll try,” Tia said. “Could we move her into the children’s room?”
    Marcos looked at Tia skeptically. “With the teddy bears and the dolls? Sure, Doc, if you think that’ll work.”
    In the room where Tia had interviewed more child abuse victims than she cared to recall, the young murder suspect sat still and silent at a low table. Sitting down across from her, Tia said, “Hello, Ms. Rose. I’m Dr. Lloyd.”
    Squinting speculatively at Tia, Bambi/Brandi asked snidely, “Are you a medical doctor, or just a PhD?”
    ‚Just’? thought Tia. Where did that come from? “I’m a psychiatrist. That means I went to medical school.”
    “I know what it means,” the suspect sneered. “I may be a homicidal whore, but I’m not stupid.”
    “No. No, of course not.”
    Bambi/Brandi laughed sardonically. “Really? Then why am I here? Stupid people wind up in prison. Stupid people who can’t control their impulses.”
    “Is that why you’re here?”
    “Obviously,” the girl said witheringly. “I didn’t have to kill him. It wasn’t self-defense.”
    “Wasn’t it?”
    “No. He didn’t hurt me.” Bambi/Brandi exhaled impatiently. “Why are you here, anyway? I confessed. Don’t we go to the lock-her-up phase now?”
    “The DA can’t charge you until we know what happened, and why you did it. We also need to know your real name.”
    Bambi/Brandi gazed at her lap for a moment, then looked up with an expression so lewd, Tia recoiled internally. “I guess you know me by my screen name,” said Brandi Peach seductively. “Which of my films was your favorite, Dr. Tyler? Burning Lust? Branded Bitches? Or maybe you like my first film, Bound and Branded. That’s a fan favorite. Made me a star. One of the most downloaded videos on PornHub.”
    “I’ve never seen any of your films,” Tia said calmly.
    “Why not?” asked Brandi, with a flirtatious pout. Then, her lips retracted in a bitter, twisted smile, Brandi asked acidly, “Aren’t you sex positive, Dr. Lloyd? No, I’ll bet you are. I’ll bet I’m just not your type.” Brandi looked at Tia speculatively, then asked lasciviously, “What do you like, Doctor? Do you like girls with a little more meat on their bones? Or maybe you like ‚em a little darker. Or maybe younger? Is that it? Am I too old, Dr. Lloyd?”
    Imperturbably, Tia asked, “How old were you when you started calling yourself Bambi?”
    “It’s funny, isn’t it? Bambi Rose is a perfectly good porn name, but Harley said I needed a new name. It’s a pun, you know, because of my specialty. I’m a special porn star.”
    “You didn’t answer my question. How old were you when you started calling yourself Bambi?”
    “What makes you think I named myself Bambi?”
    “Okay, who did name you?”
    Biting her lip suggestively, Bambi leaned across the table. “I’d rather talk about you. I’m still curious. You never told me what you like, but you didn’t deny that you like ‚em young. That would freak most people out, especially people with warm, dark, sticky secrets, but you didn’t flinch.” Leaning back in her chair, Bambi looked at Tia from beneath lowered eyelids and licked her lips. “You’re kind of hot, in a naughty social worker kind of way. Maybe you could rescue me from my terrible home life.” Bambi stood up to tie her oversized T-shirt into a knot under her ribcage and roll down the waistband of her baggy sweatpants, exposing her navel and her compact midriff. “That’s better, isn’t it?” Bambi asked, then sat back down and looked Tia in the eye. “I can be anything you want,” she whispered salaciously. “I have this schoolgirl uniform, little plaid, pleated skirt. I wear it with a white cotton blouse. Little Peter Pan collar. White knee socks and Mary Janes. I can leave my panties off, so you can just flip that itsy-bitsy skirt up to see the magnificent work of art underneath. Would you like that, Dr. Lloyd, or would you rather take my panties off yourself?”
    “Did your parents name you Bambi?”
    Leaning back in her chair, Bambi crossed her arms under her tiny breasts and sighed impatiently. “God, you’re boring! And a bit obsessive. Is that why you went into psychiatry, Dr. Lloyd? Do you have OCD? Were you a special needs child? Do you have special needs, Doctor?”
    Tia cocked her head, then asked, “Why don’t you want to tell me your name?”
    “My name depends on what I’m doing. When I go to the store or the library, I’m Bambi. When I work, I’m Brandi. When I killed that guy, I was Brandi. He paid to see this.” The girl stood up and turned around, then pushed her outsized sweatpants down to reveal scarred buttocks. Pointing to her right cheek, she said, “See? This one’s a big, hard, throbbing cock and the other one—” She pointed at her left cheek. “—totally unoriginal, just XXX, but it marks me as a porn star for life.”
    “Bambi, put your pants on!” Tia said sharply.
    Laughing, Brandi pulled her sweatpants up and sat back down. “There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Showing a little emotion? Not sure why you’re so pissed, though. Do you have any idea how much men pay just to see my brands, let alone touch them? You’d probably have to shell out two days’ pay just to see my ass, a week’s worth if you wanted to touch it, which I know you do. You’re lucky, Dr. Lloyd: I just gave you a freebie of one of the most famous asses in the world.”
    Tia felt like she was choking. It couldn’t be true, she thought. “Someone branded you?”
    “Yes,” Brandi said impatiently. “Haven’t you been listening?”
    “Why?”
    “Art, darling!” The child prostitute with the world-famous ass laughed wildly. “Sex, of course. Burning me, that was the sex. I get branded in every movie. That means I can’t do them too often, but I make a ton of money in between movies because, like I said, men will pay a lot just to see one of my brands up close. I charge by how much they see. You know, so much for the original brands, on my ass, then the price goes up if they want me to take off my blouse, or my bra, or my thong. Touching costs extra. It can get expensive, especially since I make them meet me in a nice hotel. If they won’t do that, they don’t get to see Brandi’s brands. Most of them want to brand me themselves until they find out it costs as much as I’d make from a movie. Sometimes they try to do it anyway—that’s one reason I carry a knife. So far, only Vince ponied up enough to leave his mark on me.” Brandi laughed abruptly. “He puked afterwards. Not so pretty when you smell the burning flesh and you see the blood and the pus up close. Once the scabs fell off, though, Vince kept coming back so he could fuck me while he fingered his own brand. It’s his initials: DVW. Here, I’ll show you,” Brandi said, untying the knot she’d just made in her T-shirt. When Tia ordered her to keep her clothes on, Brandi shrugged and let the shirt drop back into place.
    Her professional poise shredded, Tia asked urgently, “Is that what happened, Bambi? With the man you killed? Did he try to brand you?”
    Brandi laughed. “No! I told you: he didn’t hurt me. For a shrink, you don’t listen very well, do you?” Frowning, Brandi announced, “I need to pee, Dr. Lloyd. It’s been a couple of hours. What is this place, Guantanamo?”
    “Of course,” Tia said. “Are you hungry? Do you want something to eat?”
    “Yeah, I could eat. Maybe a burger and a Coke?”
     “No problem,” Tia said, then called Marcos to order Bambi’s food and tell him she needed an officer to escort the suspect to the women’s room.
    “Oh, no!” Bambi pouted. “I thought you’d take me. I thought we could slip into one of the stalls.”
    “Bambi, stop coming on to me. Whatever you’re trying to do, it’s not working.”
    “Are you sure about that?” Bambi asked drily.
    After a female officer led Bambi/Brandi down the hall, Detective Marcos walked into the children’s room holding a manila folder. “You need to see this,” he said. “This is the file on our murder victim, Chet Goodman. Dr. Goodman pled to manslaughter for killing his ex-wife, after she walked in on him having sex with their ten-year-old daughter. Here’s a picture of the daughter, Iris.”
    Tia peered at the smiling school photo of a sad-eyed, brown-haired Iris Goodman for a few seconds, then gasped, “My God!”
    “I don’t know if it matters,” Marcos said, “but Goodman was a psychiatrist.”
    “Seriously?” Tia asked. “Yeah, it matters. Jesus!”
    “Doc, I’m okay with self-defense, and I think the DA would be, too,” the detective said grimly. “Think you can make that happen?”
    Tia glanced at Marcos before asking, “So she’s sixteen now?”
    “Sixteen, yeah.”
    Tia shook her head as she stared at the picture of ten-year-old Iris, before she became Bambi/Brandi. “Tony, have you found out anything else about her, like how long she went to school?”
    “I’ll look into it, but why does that matter?”
    “She’s smart ... really smart. It’s hard to believe she dropped out of middle school, but she must have, right? I mean, how long ago did she start doing porn?”
    “We think about three years ago, maybe four. That’s when she ran away from foster care.”
    “Jesus,” Tia repeated. To Marcos, it sounded like a prayer. “Is somebody getting her her burger?”
    “Yeah, it should be here soon.”
    “Okay, I’m going to let her eat before I confront her with this. I just need a couple of minutes—I need to get something out of my car.”
    “Sure thing, Doc.”
    When Tia returned, carrying a cookie tin and a tray of drinks, Iris had finished her burger and was loudly slurping the last of her Coke through a straw. “Where’ve you been?” she demanded.
    “I went to Starbuck’s. I wasn’t sure what you’d like, so I got some coffee and some milk, and I have some tea bags, too, if you’d rather have tea.” Tia took the lid off the tin of cookies and slid it in front of Iris. “I made these for the detectives, but I thought you and I could have some before the cops eat them all.”
    Smiling delightedly, Iris breathed in the scent of fresh baked cookies. “You made these? Ooh, snickerdoodles ... and what’s this? Chocolate chip? I haven’t had homemade cookies in years and years. My mom used to make really good oatmeal-raisin cookies.” Iris held a chocolate chip cookie up to her nose and inhaled with her eyes closed, then set the cookie on a paper napkin and reached for the carton of milk. “Detective Marcos could stand to lose a few pounds.”
    Tia laughed. “Well, then, eat up!”
    Slowly Iris ate a chocolate chip cookie and then a snickerdoodle, remarking appreciatively, “Mmm, this is sooo good!” After swallowing the last of the milk, Iris smiled broadly at Tia. “Thank you!”
    “You’re welcome, Iris.”
    The blood drained so quickly from the girl’s face that Tia regretted not easing into it.
    “I’m sorry, Iris,” Tia said quickly, “but you must have known the police would figure it out. All they had to do was look through your father’s file.”
    Iris rose abruptly and walked across the room, then stood with her back to Tia. After a moment, she picked up a teddy bear, which she held at arm’s length while staring into its lifeless black eyes. “I am a patricide,” Iris pronounced, then drew her eyebrows together in puzzlement. Looking at Tia over her shoulder, Iris asked, “Or is he a patricide?”
    “You’re a patricide and your father is a victim of patricide.”
    Iris crinkled her nose. “It means both? Really?”
    Tia nodded, then waited until Iris walked back to the table and sat down with the teddy bear. Quietly, she said, “Iris, we need to talk about your father. Can you tell me why you went to your father’s hotel room?”
     Absently, Iris set the plush toy on her lap, facing Tia, then pulled it close to her body. With her arms wrapped around the bear, Iris said, “Daddy made an appointment, but he didn’t know it was with me. On the website, I’m not Iris, I’m Brandi, and there are no pictures of my face. Men don’t care about my face. There are a couple of teases, like a close-up of my ass where I’m lifting up my panties, just a little, you know, so you can just see the edge of one of my brands. There’s also an audio file you can click on to hear me moaning and panting, saying shit like, ‚Yes, yes, burn me, mark me, make me yours.’ I used to think that no one could be stupid enough to believe I was actually saying those things while they branded me, but now I’ve met them. Fucking idiots. When I’m being branded all I can do is scream until I pass out. They record me making noises like I’m coming and dub them in later, you know, during the parts of the movie where I’m actually unconscious. The first time, when I did Bound and Branded, I had a fever afterwards, and the brands got infected. I was on major antibiotics and taking so many painkillers that it was almost a week before I could do the voiceover or shoot the disclaimer.”
    Repulsed and horrified, Tia interrupted, “What do you mean, ‚the disclaimer’?”
    “You know, at the end, where they show the actress who was just raped, saying, ‚Don’t worry, I’m fine. It’s all fantasy, and I loved it.’ Don’t you watch porn?”
    “No, I . . . Why do they do that?”
    Iris grinned. “You really don’t watch porn?” When Tia said no, Iris laughed and said, “I don’t know—” Iris paused to marvel at Tia, then laughed again in disbelief. “It seems weird, I know, since guys who like my movies want to believe they’re real. Almost every new guy who makes an appointment asks how much it costs to brand me. They all want to do it. I guess the disclaimers are for the guys’ wives and girlfriends, so the guy can say, ‚See, she’s fine. She liked it. Don’t be such a prude.’ It’s the only thing that makes sense, except it doesn’t make sense, you know? You’d have to be the stupidest cunt in the world to fall for that. I knew this girl, Misty, who used to do farmgirl stuff, and the stuff they stuck in her—tools, corncobs, God knows what all—any woman who sees that has to know how much that hurts. I don’t give a shit what Misty said afterwards. Misty had to shoot up before every movie, just to get through it. She OD’d last year. Anyway, they wised up with me: since that first time, they always shoot the disclaimer before they do anything to me. That way they can film me without any painkillers so my screams will be authentic. It’s the main reason my movies are so popular. On the internet, men say they like how I scream. More than anything else, that’s what they say, how much they like hearing me scream and how they’d like to brand me themselves. They don’t care if the orgasms sound fake, as long as the screams are real.” Iris turned the teddy bear around to stare into its face again, then looked up at Tia and asked softly, “You really don’t use porn?” When Tia said no, Iris apologized, “I’m sorry for all those things I said to you earlier. That was nasty. I thought you were like everybody else. I always worry that people will recognize me from my movies, so I guess . . . I can be kind of a bitch sometimes.”
    “That’s okay, Iris. Don’t worry about it . . . Can you tell me what happened next, after your father made the appointment?”
    “Sure, okay,” Iris said, staring at the bear. “When Daddy made an appointment, I didn’t know it was him. He didn’t use his real name. He ordered full nudity and unlimited touching, which is expensive. Touching the brands costs more. A lot of guys, they just jerk off while they look at my ass, but Daddy wanted everything. He could afford it, you know. He even got a really nice suite at the Westin.” Iris hugged herself and rubbed her arms briskly. “Can I smoke in here?”
    “No, we’d have to go outside. You want a smoke?”
    “Yes, please, but they took my cigarettes. Can I get them back?”
    “Don’t worry. We’ll find you one.”
    Outside Iris lit up and sighed with satisfaction. Then she glanced at Madelyn Prescott, the uniformed officer who’d escorted them downstairs. “Isn’t this illegal?” she asked.
    Prescott shrugged. “Your driver’s license says you’re twenty-two.”
    Iris laughed happily, then commented, “There’s no smoking in prison, right? Helluva time to have to quit.” After taking a deep drag, Iris said, “My cats must be hungry. I mean, I always leave them dry food, but they get canned food every morning. They must wonder where I am.”
    “How many cats do you have, Iris?”
    Iris smiled and said, “Three,” then fondly described the strays who’d shown up on her doorstep: the demanding tabby, Lizzie, the sweet-tempered calico she called Fatso, and the one-eyed, nameless Siamese who was still too timid to come indoors. While she listened to Iris talk about her adopted family, Tia thought, everyone failed this girl. It had to be self-defense, didn’t it? If not, at least temporary insanity. Maybe that would be better. Iris could get treatment, go to school. Just not revenge, Tia pleaded. Please don’t let it be revenge.
    After Iris ground out her cigarette, the three women returned to the children’s room, where Iris wandered around, taking dolls off the shelves then putting them back, rearranging furniture in a wooden dollhouse, and paging through some of the children’s books. “Why do you have this room?” Iris asked. “Is it for kids who’re crime victims?”
    “Yes, or for children who witness crimes.”
    “Why’d you bring me in here? I’m not a kid, plus I’m a criminal. Why aren’t you grilling me in interrogation?”
    “I’m more comfortable in here. Aren’t you?”
    “I guess, but it’s not great preparation for prison, is it?”
    “You think you’re going to prison?”
    Iris snorted as she shelved a Dr. Seuss book and picked up a brown-haired doll. “Why wouldn’t I be going to prison? I killed my father.”
    “Let’s talk about that. Why don’t you sit down with me? You can bring the doll.”
    Red-faced, Iris glanced sharply at Tia, then roughly reshelved the doll. Sitting down heavily, she crossed her arms and asked, “Whaddaya wanna know?”
    “What happened when you went to your father’s room?”
    Biting her lip, Iris stared at her lap, then said quietly, “When he opened the door, I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know he was out of prison, and I was so happy to see him.”
    “Why were you happy?”
    Raising her chin defiantly, Iris said, “I hadn’t seen him in six years. Daddy was the only person left in this world who ever loved me.”
    “So what did you say to each other?”
    “He said hello when he opened the door, but he wasn’t really looking at my face. Like I said, that’s not why men hire me. Daddy had never seen my movies, either, because he’d been in prison. I mean, he didn’t say that was why, but when I asked him if he had a favorite movie, he said that wasn’t how he heard about me. He said some guy had told him about Brandi Peach and that’s why he looked me up online. I guess he’d heard so much about Brandi that it got in his head. Anyway, on the website, men can make special requests, you know, about what I wear or what they want to do to me. Daddy asked me to wear my schoolgirl uniform, and that’s what he noticed when he opened the door. After I went inside, Daddy asked me to spin around, so my skirt would flare out and he could see my panties. He was sitting on the couch, watching me, and I was laughing—I was starting to get dizzy—and I said, ‚Don’t you know who I am?’ I said it happy, you know? I was so excited to see him. But Daddy didn’t understand what I meant. He thought I was asking about Brandi Peach, not Iris Goodman.”
    Iris fell silent, then sat with her head in her hands. Finally, Tia asked, “Did you tell him who you were?”
    “No. I should have. I should’ve said, ‚I’m Iris. I’m your daughter,’ but I wanted him to recognize me. I wanted him to see me, you know? I was still spinning around when Daddy grabbed me and pulled my panties down. Then he starting touching the brands on my ass and he got really excited ...” Iris closed her eyes, put a hand to her chest, and breathed deeply before describing the last minutes of her father’s life. “He pushed me onto the floor, face down, and he started fucking me, really hard ... It hurt, so I said something, just ‚Ouch,’ something like that, and he said, ‚Shut up, bitch!’ ... He pushed my face into the carpet ... I could hardly breathe ... Then he put his arm on the back of my neck and pressed down, and I thought he might break it.” With unfocused eyes, breathing hard, Iris rubbed the back of her neck as she relived her father’s assault. “He was swearing, calling me cunt and whore, like men do when they fuck you ... It wasn’t how I remembered him.”
    For a minute or so, Tia waited for Iris to continue, then prompted, “How did you remember him?”
    Iris’s words tumbled out in a desperate rush: “He loved me, more than anything. I know you think what he did was wrong, and I guess it was, but he loved me. After Mommy went away, I was all he had. I was everything to him. When I first saw him at the hotel, I remembered what it was like, when I was little and he took care of me. When I was little, he used to say, ‚You’re my special girl, Iris.’ I wanted to hear him say it, and I would have forgiven him for hurting me, if he’d just said that he loved me, that I was still his girl, but he didn’t know who I was, even after he fucked me. After he got off me, Daddy told me to stand up. He wanted to see my other brands. I didn’t move right away. I was staring at my purse. I knew my knife was inside. I always carry it because sometimes I need it, when fans recognize me. I was staring at my purse, thinking, he took everything from me. When I was little, it was okay because he loved me so much, and maybe he couldn’t help himself, but he always loved me. In that hotel room, he didn’t even know who I was.” Iris angrily knuckled away a few stray tears, then shook her head, bewildered. “I don’t remember picking up the knife . . . I don’t remember stabbing him. I know I did, but I don’t remember . . . I just remember screaming, ‚I’m Iris, you motherfucker! I’m Iris!’ I don’t know if he knew who I was before he died. I think maybe he did, but I don’t know for sure.” Iris rubbed her hands roughly over her face, then looked across the table, her expression a perfect distillation of despair. “I thought he loved me. If he loved me, wouldn’t he know me?”
    It was a trap, getting tangled up in Iris’s need and longing, and Tia knew it, but she wanted to pick the girl up and carry her from the police station, to promise her that she’d never again be burned or bruised or abandoned. Quietly the doctor said, “I don’t know, Iris. Between ten and sixteen, people change a lot.”
    As quick as the flip of a coin, the cynical porn star reappeared, displacing the wounded orphan. “It doesn’t matter,” Brandi said. “Nobody really knows me. I mean, nobody really knows anybody, right?”

Why the Revolution of Modern Life is Intelligent, Moral and Beautiful

    It is an exciting and hopeful time to be alive. A revolution is sweeping the earth, increasing intelligence by allowing, enabling, inspiring ever more people to make more decisions in their lives. Modern systems that allow people to think more in daily life are well known. Democracies empower people to choose governments. Markets are people deciding what should be made and done. Systems of rules that apply to all help keep things open and honest. Support for ability to think comes from family and neighbors, schools, hospitals, books and internet. Enormous dividends result from getting it right. But decentralizing decision-making is never easy because it means ever greater complexity and the empowering of inconvenient people. The best path forward is illuminated by the idea that people thinking more is good, right and beautiful.
    Modern peace and prosperity has resulted from the ever closer alignment of social organization with ways people by nature maximize intelligence. Humans became the most powerful beings ever to exist by developing a new way of using information, the content of thoughts and feelings. The information system created as people mingle thoughts and feelings with those of others evolved to be the most intelligent entity ever to exist.
    Survival of the fittest individual was not the primary force that crafted human minds. Incompetence in a wide variety of forms is an essential part of what makes us human. Individual people today lack the full range of mental abilities necessary to survive alone in a wilderness. I couldn’t do it, nor could any of my neighbors. Instead natural selection resulted in something far more powerful, intelligent and beautiful.
    Many creatures, from ants to dogs, evolved to gain power over their environment by cooperating and communicating. All lost the ability to live and thrive alone as individuals. Over eons, humans gradually took the use of information to higher levels. As individuals they gave up the full range of faculties needed for survival because together they developed something far more potent. The unprecedented power this gave them at each step is what drove the evolutionary innovations that resulted in today’s world.
    Human intelligence is collective in nature, talents not concentrated but dispersed in individuals who are all different. A revolutionary kind of mind developed in groups of a few hundred in which everyone knew each other, every voice added to what was being thought about. In everyday life people have always shared ideas, songs, stories, styles and a myriad nuances of feeling, passing them down through generations, improving and innovating. The information that is the content of thoughts and feelings mixes together in their minds and among them. Because each person’s mind is different, enormous creative flexibility arises out of many sorts of thinking striving, sometimes clashing, always mingling. We spin thoughts out of the unknown and unexpected, finding depth and diversity with inauspicious people and rising generations breaking old patterns. So many things can be thought about. Human survival and success has always depended on the system of thoughts that all share and take part in. Our kind of intelligence is a category leap, rising far beyond what could ever evolve to be the smartest, most wily, most dominant individual beast. Every successful creature is over-endowed with the means it uses to survive, necessary to overcome extreme circumstances. Our primary means of survival blossomed into the wonder of the universe.
    The details of how individuals think were shaped by the enormous force of their effect on our primary tool and weapon, the human information system. Its intelligence could increase only as its component parts became more finely tuned to add to the thinking going on. Many of the talents that make people together so intelligent are useless in isolation, essential when combined with others. Kinds of thinking are scattered, each getting a little of this, a little of that. Impractical musicians, nonathletic priests, groveling politicians help bring disparate folks together. Mechanics fix things, clumsy scientists invent, cooks devise food, athletes run and hunt, shoppers gather, some who can memorize, memorialize the past. Fearless and timid, quick and slow, passive and aggressive, skillful and clumsy, female and male, serious and frivolous, analytical and intuitive, speculative and methodical, mathematical or musical or not, all are found in every group across the globe. This deep reservoir of possibilities is made more potent by the creativity inherent in the fresh perspectives of each individual and new generation. The mix found everywhere today exists because it is the combination that proved to be most intelligent.
    If individuality were not naturally configured to mesh with other minds, the results would be useless. An association of thinking animals with a purely random assortment of differences would produce the intelligence of a zoo. Mental individuality in humans has a purpose. All elements are finely tuned to create with others, each general type essential, every new addition a welcome extension of the ability of everyone to think. It is an inescapable truth of every person’s life that their most intimate impulses, those feelings that are most certainly theirs and theirs alone, are shaped and channeled in subtle, mysterious ways to augment the functioning of the human information system as a whole.
    The magic of the human information system lies in everyday life, the great generator and heartland of intelligence. When a good idea pops into existence there is no way to ever figure out exactly where it came from. Inside everyone the information that is the content of their thoughts and feelings connects and mingles. Music and sports mix with math, politics and sex. Interconnections multiply as thoughts and fragments spread out through friends and neighbors, reaching around the world. All ideas are composed of strands reaching far back in the past and over many lands, influenced by threads of rhythm, color and rhyme, outrageous mistakes and hallucinations. Even the loftiest, most abstract sophisticated concepts grow out of pieces rattling around coffee shops, nurseries and football fields, mixing with music, cooking and gardening. Every mind takes part, each one living in the thinking of the world. Together we create the mental output on which all depend.
    Morality evolved as an inseparable part of intelligence. In order to think together, people have to get along. This is not automatic. Our existence through the past has always been dependent on a balance of genetic and cultural supports for moral behavior that maximizes the creative intelligence of the human information system. We are genetically predisposed to empathize with others, fall in love and like things like music and sports that join people together. But we also need ongoing streams of new ideas in all areas of life, good and bad, to be dreamed up and tried out. Our collective creativity is generated by a diversity of individuals in all walks of life making different choices, going their own way. So a measure of wildness, especially by teenagers, is built in. The resulting instability requires a lot of work. We inherit culture as much as we do fingers. Moral concepts in multiple forms have been passed down and improved on from primordial times in the same way as technical ideas like the use of fire. Without morality, just as without fire, everyone dies. Embedded in every culture is a way of understanding the information realities of life, some picture of lives connected by invisible ties in a common endeavor and fate, the furtherance of which is everyone’s responsibility. This is contained in direct explanations as well as music and art, sports, humor and a thousand tales about others and the past. The enormous success of the human endeavor owes a lot to the efforts of so many through the ages searching for ever better ways to convince people to live together wholeheartedly.
    Though it can be hard to include those who are different, closing eyes to them shuts off communion with thought itself. To regard anyone at all as unworthy of recognition is to turn away from intelligence, which exists in pieces scattered everywhere. Every face is a unique shining facet of the most complex thinking entity ever to exist. The greatest impediments to human potential are institutional, philosophical and viscerally emotional objections to getting little voices raised and heard. It seems so easy to disregard the shy, odd, peculiar and strange, both rebellious and those that sound the same, voices small and lonely, the less talented and nonpolitical. But they are us and we are all there is.
    The revolution of modern life is vastly expanding intelligence by turning on its head traditional notions that the source of wealth and power is the best and brightest. What is emerging instead is a world in which every mind is acknowledged as an important contributor. Particular individuals are useful for any one task at hand, and when they manage to do something special it is a wonderful gift to themself and everyone else. But no matter how impressive, every success is the result of a limited, particular vision applied to resources drawn from the vast sea of human thought. Mental or character perfection is an attribute of people as a whole. Individuals are expressly designed not to be that way. Every individual can be described as ‘flawed’ or ‘not perfect’. This is a good, not bad thing. The largest are dependent, the smallest have something to add. The most striking thing an honest person sees in mirrors is the amazing ordinariness of uniqueness. So-called ordinary people exist only because we were over eons in the most severe circumstances in fact essential to the intelligence of the whole. The most important and potent attribute of human intelligence is not that some are all-encompassing geniuses but that none are.
    In the practical world of everyday life, people thinking is people making decisions. On a large scale decentralizing decision-making so more are thinking is difficult. As individuals choose who to marry, where to live and what to do for others they create ever greater complexity because they are all different. But only when they go in their own directions is the intelligence of society enriched by their diversity. For them to be allowed do so, they need to be trusted to make reasonably good decisions. Most people have to believe in doing the right thing. Their activities will at times need to be nudged or constrained in more positive directions. Growing a beautiful garden takes a lot of work.
    Individual initiative would look morally suspect if human minds evolved mainly to compete against each other. Then their inner being would be suffused with primordial impulses to do so at others expense. Even if not in fact stealing, their motivation would be tainted with it. From that perspective, morality would be an overlay designed to counteract human nature and attempts to achieve general fairness would struggle against the tide. Such concepts provide handy excuses to keep people from acting, to confine them in a static order that is supposedly more moral. But because human minds did not in fact evolve to oppose others, exactly the opposite is true. In the practical world, this distinction has a huge effect, changing the role of rules from constraining people’s base nature to facilitating greater activity with helpful guidelines and admonitions. Taking initiative is people thinking. Intelligence is the source of morality.
    A functioning system of separate and independent organizations has an inherent beauty and morality that is lacking in the only alternative. The appeal of centralized systems is the supposed comfort of enforced fairness. Their slogans through the ages can sound idealistic: a place for everyone and everyone in their place, and we think and you do and we’ll take care of you. This has been most attractive to those already privileged or who suppose themselves superior. It is just so hard to imagine what good could come from having stupid people think. But imposed absolute fairness is a state of standing still, bereft of creativity and initiative, missing the point of life. Visions of everyone nicely quiet and in order are nightmares not dreams, horror not paradise. Their imposition has resulted in police states and mass murder for they directly contravene the most fundamental human reality, that our destiny is to think. The great counter-revolution of modern times was communism, which sought to infuse old ideas with more effective means of control. Substitute a unitary bureaucracy for kings, emperors or caliphs and the concept is the same. In recent times it has been shown that more open systems are far more accountable, productive, able to experiment and vastly improve life. The reason it works better is because it is more intelligent. More people are thinking.
    Capitalism is the use of math for the purpose of decentralizing decision-making. Math is an impartial tool for opening activities to anyone who wants to take initiative. To measure whether they are doing something worthwhile it empowers the most dispersed, appropriate and severe critics, customers. Pricing includes the user in the decision-making process, enlisting their mind to help make systems more intelligent. When people pay the true costs of the things they use, it is then they, instead of someone else, who is deciding how much and when. They have most say when they can choose from the widest selection in the world. From single entrepreneurs to enormous organizations, the proper use of math makes possible the most active use of people’s minds. When capitalism strays too far from its decentralizing purpose it becomes dysfunctional and inefficient. When working well it is beautiful because it is intelligent.
    Essential to success in business is finding the right balance between making money and serving others. Actually doing something worthwhile is hard, failure a constant shadow. All kinds of people need to be made happy enough to voluntarily cooperate. Customers, workers, neighbors, a variety of government folks, competitors, suppliers, contractors, all must get along. Every day brings hard choices between scarce resources and quality of output. Everything takes longer and costs more, no one is paid as much as they think they should, and temptations abound to take shortcuts. Episodes of winning the lottery and successful cheating make fun stories, but that’s not where the real money is. Real business success is never only about maximizing profits. As human beings, business people connect with their world in many ways, have multiple interests and goals. Their job is to make an enterprise work as a whole, otherwise all is lost. Success requires doing and caring about two things at the same time. Many people’s desires need to be filled and it all has to add up. Serve to make money, make money to serve, chew gum and walk.
    An open democratic political system is a necessary component of an intelligent society. There will always be those tempted to recentralize decision-making in order to grab advantages for themselves or a select group. Democracy empowers the majority who are less interested in gaining power and dominance over others. However, their ability to make decisions in their own lives is very important to them. This can lead to wild cultural expressions because it is central to self worth and identity. Secondary objects like guns and cars can represent the rightness of individuals thinking for themselves. And in believing it is both moral and productive for them to live actively thinking, they are right. The greatest beneficiaries of a decentralized society are its less important members. Democracy puts the right hands on the tiller, those most directly and personally interested in greater intelligence.
    It is easy for initiatives to get out of hand, go in destructive directions. For capitalism to function it must have rules and guidance provided by an active democracy. All entrepreneurs, small to large, require ongoing adjustments to rules protecting their projects from theft and interference. They need an environment with sufficient infrastructure and healthy, educated citizens. They need the peaceful ways of solving problems that can thrive only in a functioning democratic political system with the good will of most of the people most of the time. Democratic capitalism is millions of people voluntarily cooperating and taking initiative to make life better for each other.
    Democracy is commonly slandered as the worst system of governing except for every other. It involves a great show of shouting and grandstanding, confusion, indecision, delay, some cheating and lots of inconsistency. But the mess and confusion of a functional democracy are exactly its great strength, more people thinking. All other political setups explicitly seek to stop thinking. That is why they sometimes appear clean and efficient. Intelligence is a state of motion, the opposite of keeping everything the same. Creativity always has an element of disorder, whether in one mind or that of many. Democracy is beautiful because it is active, alive and intelligent and deserves respect for it.
    A widespread improvement in moral behavior is a necessary part of the success of capitalism and democracy. This is a long, slow process, as individuals gain new freedoms and learn from them. Increasing morality means people thinking more, not less. Progress results in an increase in general activity and the pace of change. Humans are not designed to sit still but to be intelligent. Together our destiny is to wonder and speculate, create and explore, seek truth and solve the riddles of the universe.
    The image of humans as entities that exist separate, alone and inherently in conflict is an insidiously corrosive illusion. Its great attraction is support it lends for comparisons showing one worth more than another. As individual items, there is a scale handy to prove anyone better. Whether best mechanic, politician, musician, cook, mathematician or athlete, a soft cocoon of superiority beckons. Excellence then isolates instead of broadening life. Individual arrogance also decreases intelligence by working against the decentralizing tides of democracy and capitalism. People keep inventing ingenious ways of explaining why they should decide instead of others, why they are smarter and better and so more deserving of the perks and trinkets of life. But if theft is legitimate, then intelligence is not.
    The most fundamental fact of human life is that we evolved to maximize the intelligence of the human information system as a whole. We have never existed separate and alone but as intricately connected parts of that system, within which we live our lives. Individual intelligence was worthwhile and increased only in ways which complemented our source of power. People do not exist on a linear scale from stupid to smart. They live in many dimensions, their value to the whole being that they are different. Supermen and philosopher kings do not exist. If they did our world would be much less intelligent.
     Hatred is not about the victim, instead a category error in someone’s mind, a voluntary severing of connection, a denial of the fact that all humans are intrinsically interconnected. People invent all kinds of ways to cut themselves off. Walking around measuring, categorizing and belittling others may seem a purely private obsession. But the artificial separation it creates decreases intelligence, just like lying, cheating, hurting and stealing. Even when they feel justified by real injury, those who come to hate always lose. Severing connections isolates each of us when we make this mistake from the millions of ways we are naturally linked to others with intimacy, substance and meaning. It is a personal failure to grasp the largeness of life. All forms of hatred are self-banishments from the community of life, alienation from the essence of the greatest intelligence ever to arise.
    True intelligence is found not in any one person. It is the unexpected found in pieces everywhere, in every pair of eyes. Fulfillment in life is not a destination but a journey always in motion, mixing in with the world around. Love, the closest of connections, is the highest expression of intelligence, of our state of nature.
    For little round billiard balls, equality is being the same and freedom to roll around is increased by taking others off the table. Since humans are not little balls but information entities, the exact opposite is true. Equality is being different and freedom is radically reduced by taking others off the table. People are equal in that each one is an element of the larger thinking system and all are needed to maximize its intelligence. Acts hindering others from thinking detract from the intelligence of everyone. Condescension is always obvious, as the perpetrator very publically makes their own life smaller and cheaper. Their victims resent it, cooperate less, and close off in turn. Rising out of superiority to equality with all those lesser, acceptance to the core of humanity’s great gift, the smallness and particularity of self, is the critical door opening to the wider world of intelligence, dignity and beauty. Freedom is the ability to make choices and move around in the vast information landscape of minds and lives. This requires participation in making things work, more giving than receiving. It is because the equality and freedom of individuals as information entities are essential to intelligence that they are inherent in human existence.
    Because people are not objects but information entities, they are happiest not when cut off and alone but when their minds are best connected with the world. A drug induced blank smile is not at all what happiness is about. Whether it’s baseball, another person, a job or a song they like, as they find fulfillment in their various peculiarities they are happier and their minds are more engaged. As long as they avoid harming others, this raises the intelligence of the human information system. More thinking is going on. Their happiness is the summit of life, peak experience and function, the highest expression of their unique contribution. Individual happiness is the source of collective intelligence. Can’t have one without the other.
    Fairness within the human information system is much greater than any list of physical items. Because it consists of enabling everyone to think and contribute it is essential to intelligence. No one can do so if starving or sick, ignorant or in chains. Everyone needs help to grow and flourish. Efforts to increase fairness, to better people’s lives, are far more than feel good projects. They are for us, not simply for them.
    In the clear cold light of morning the choice to live fully and behave in a moral fashion is obvious. People have invented lots of ways to explain why they should be nice to each other. But at root they all come down to individual awakening, opening to the information realities of life. Human beings perceive directly, without any explanation, theory or religion, that they are connected with others and the world. It is obvious in moments when an individual finds themself suddenly enraptured by another person. The illusion of separateness might unconsciously dissolve when encountering a song or a wayward glance, an ingenious machine or a football pass. It is the recognition of informational connection which inspires the look in a lover’s eye, the visceral reaction to a baby’s cry, the giddy feeling of a moving world when some work of art gets under the skin. Most people do not need complicated reasons to see grossly immoral acts as just plain wrong. Who has not been overwhelmed by the utter cuteness of a little child? Morality becomes self-evident with the experience of recognizing the warmth and light in another’s eye, becoming much more than the right thing, the only thing to do.
    Within every person lies a field of life full of hidden places, fuzzy feelings, acres of happenings and kittens and food, every corner filled with vastness, fluid motion moment to moment. Each comes with a mix of warm childhood memories, present experience and dreams of the future, all dense with nuance and impressions. Their information field is an extension and enrichment of all others. For anyone, the experience of recognizing this in one person and then another, a friend, neighbor or passerby, expands the boundaries of life. Multiplied by all those in a town, a region, the world, and the human information landscape seems to go on forever. The furthest corners of every mind fuel the most powerful and intelligent entity ever to exist. Its beauty graces all our lives.
    Today awareness is spreading throughout the world of the myriad ways that participating in an actively intelligent society elevates every personal life. Individuals have ever more reasons to believe that their own peculiarities are good not bad, that it is alright for them to be more themselves. The variety of things they can do is expanding, with greater freedom, prosperity and people inventing new pursuits. Large organizations are recognized to be more successful when they enlist the minds of their employees instead of having them do only what they are told. The use of math to make it possible for everyone to make decisions is gaining acceptance. Ever more varieties of people are being allowed, enabled and inspired to participate. Democracy is spreading and theft by those who govern is receding. Even those with guns are slowly awakening to the fact that real power comes from intelligence, the secret to which is to be found in the sweetly innocent smile of a child. The modern flowering of the human information system is wonderful, moral and inherently beautiful.

The Name Game

    Donnie Hitler had been tormented and bullied since the fifth grade because of his name. It started then because his history class studied the man who had brought terror to the hearts of freedom-loving people everywhere. A man who seized power with only a handful of radicals taking the pledge and shouting at his scary rallies. He encouraged them to bully and intimidate any of “them” who happened to wander into the square, people he would later round up and disappear into internment camps. But it wasn’t until he had coalesced his power by purging the courts and intimidating the legislature that he could unleash his true cruelty onto the world.
    He remembered coming home that first day furious with his parents for saddling a baby with the moniker of a tyrant. He begged them to allow him to pick another name, but they impressed upon him that the family had a long tradition of it, it went back decades.
    When he reached the majority age of eighteen, he went to court and legally changed his name from Donald Hitler to George Hitler.

The Policeman
The lost story by Brad Blueberry

    It was a pleasure to deport.
    It was a special pleasure to see families rounded up, torn apart, and changed.
    Montage grinned the fierce grin of all the men whose grin was inspired by the flame.
    He recalled with pride the day he had graduated from The University, been given his brown shirt and recited the oath: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the Divided States of Amerika, and to the Republicans for which it stands, one nation UNDER GOD, divisible by ethnicity, with liberty and justice for all rich white men.”
    It had been a long day of reclamation and resettlement, having done his patriotic duty making Amerika white again. As he turned the corner he was certainly in no mood for the young girl loitering there as she had been every evening for a week now. She was as out of place as a liberal in politics, dressed from head to toe in a white beekeeper’s suit, just her face visible, identifying her as “one of them.”
    Like all of those her age she was tapping away on her Handphone, attached now shortly after birth, awkward but still more practical than the disastrous Eyephone. He noticed with a sneer that it had been misplaced onto her right hand.
    “Damned leftist,” he smirked as his own phone chirped. He deduced (although most were forbidden to do that now) from the timing and the odd salutation that it was her. He responded, “Of course, you’re the new jihadist who moved in next door.”
    “And you must be—-the policeman.”
    “How oddly you text that.”
    “Do you mind if I walk home with you?”
    “As long as you stay six paces behind me.”
    “My name is Shabada.”
    “Strange. You remind me of my wife Kellyanne. Except she’s older and taller and dresses better and she’s...”
    “What?”
    “White...And my name is Montage.”
    “Just Montage? Sounds French.”
    “It’s actually Guy Montage, but they started putting up posters that said ‘You can be happy but can you be Guy’ only they spelled it ‘G-A-Y,’ which is unfortunate given my line of work, so I just use the one name now.”
    “Like Cher and Madonna.”
    “Yes.”
    “Or Hitler.”
    “Sure.”
    “How long have you been a Policeman?”
    “Ten years, since I was twenty.”
    “Didn’t Policemen once help and protect people instead of prosecuting them?”
    “Not since the Mandatory Firearms Act, which pretty much resolved all disputes. ‘More Guns, More Safe,’ became our motto.”
    “Do you ever talk to those you round up?”
    “Of course not. One, it’s illegal and, two, most don’t have the Tongue anyway. It’s fine work. Monday deport Mexicans, Wednesday detain Muslims, Friday lock up LBGTQRS.”
    The rest of the way passed in silence, just as The Order dictated between them. When they got to her house she sent him one last message: “R U Happy?”

    It was such a strange meeting and such a weird conversation. He remembered nothing like it except when he met that toothless old man in the park and they had talked. Well, he had talked. He couldn’t understand anything the ancient mushmouth had said...except his name. What was it? Fuhrer? No...Faber? No...Furby? That’s it.

    The next day at the station Captain Beedy launched into yet another of his “lectures” no one really listed to anymore (but important here for exposition).
    “You ask: when did it start? This movement of ours? Some say it was back about the time of the Civil War when we lost the right of self-determination. Came close before World War II. Then that damn amendment gave the women the right to vote. That was the first mistake we were able to correct.
    “Once there were only a few who were different from us. We could afford to be generous. But then they bred and the world got full of them—-with their eyes and elbows and mouths and cars on blocks in their front yards. All those minorities with their children to be kept clean of our true history.
    “Then decent white men began to lose low-paying factory jobs and all the minor minorities got their piece of the pie, and suddenly we looked around and there was no more pie left—-just quiche.
    “School was shortened from five days to four, then one. All the kids were home-schooled online, only getting together when the teams needed to practice.
    “We got lost among all the nattering nabobs of negativism with only one cable network that dared to keep the truthiness for us.
    “So it was all there before the takeover. No dictum or order and certainly no Declaration. Just feminism, mass exploitation and minority privilege that set the stage for our resurgence.
    “Deport all! Deport everyone! Ignorance is bliss and stupidity supreme! That’s our motto.”
    “I thought it was More Guns, More Safe,” muttered Montage.

    Montage was confused. More confused than Montage normally was. Shabada had raised some uncomfortable points that made him question his core values. And Captain Beedy, as usual, made absolutely no sense. Thus his confusion. So he would seek out the only other person with whom he had ever had a serious conversation. He couldn’t remember his name...but he knew where he could find him.
    And there he was...sitting alone on a bench talking to his hand puppet, a ratty old sock he had named D. Duck. But there was something different about him. It took a while before he realized that he had found some teeth. This looked promising to Montage.
    “Furby, look at me. I’m not happy.”
    “Who is?”
    “But shouldn’t there be more? Nobody listens anymore. Talking heads blathering about nothing...the same nothing they were talking about last week...not an original thought. Every face melted into vanilla tapioca.”
    “It’s not ideas you need, it’s some of the people who had different ones. The magic is in what people say with their quirky accents, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Like my coat.
    “Do you know why people like that are important? Because they have pores and features and colors. The comfortable people want only wax moon white faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. Like Ann Coulter.”
    “Furby, I just can’t put up with this anymore. All those people gone because we were afraid of difference. My job, my wife, my Amazon Rewards—all gone.”
    “Montage, not all of those people are gone. If you take a right on Second and go straight on till morning, you’ll come to where the Good People are.”
    “The Book People?”
    “The Good People. Who the hell would want to become a book? ‘Hi! I’m Fifty Shades of Twilight.’”
    “Who are they?”
    “Those who were rounded up and vanished or released. People who look different, dress strangely, worship against The Order. The recruits to the New American Resistance Movement. And you will fit in perfectly. You have embraced your inner difference and can never go back. And when you get there they will give you a new motto to live by: We’re still here!”
    “Hot damn!”