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  BRIAN HINSHAW

  The Custodian

  The job would get boring if you didn’t mix it up a little. Like this woman in 14-A, the nurses called her the mockingbird, start any song and this old lady would sing it through. Couldn’t speak, couldn’t eat a lick of solid food, but she sang like a house on fire. So for a kick, I would go in there with my mop and such, prop the door open with a bucket, and set her going. She was best at songs you’d sing with a group—“Oh Susanna,” campfire stuff. Any kind of Christmas song worked good too, and it always cracked the nurses up if I could get her into “Let It Snow” during a heat spell. We’d try to make her take up a song from the radio or some of the old songs with cursing in them, but she would never go for those. Although once I had her do “How Dry I Am” while Nurse Winchell fussed with the catheter.

  Yesterday, her daughter or maybe granddaughter comes in while 14-A and I were partway into “Auld Lang Syne” and the daughter says “oh oh oh” like she had interrupted scintillating conversation and then she takes a long look at 14-A there in the gurney with her eyes shut and her curled-up hands, taking a cup of kindness yet and the daughter looks at me the way a girl does at the end of an old movie and she says, “my god,” says, “you’re an angel,” and now I can’t do it anymore, can hardly step into the room.

  SARAH FRELIGH

  Another Thing

  That year the heat started after Memorial Day and didn’t quit until Halloween. There was no rain to speak of. The corn shriveled up and slumped in the fields like old men who had run out of hope. A woman who claimed to be part Iroquois read the sky at night and told us all it was our last summer on earth.

  My mother said the world couldn’t end without a party. The first Saturday in August, my father strung Japanese lanterns between the trees in our back yard. My mother rolled her hair and put on stockings and a dress that showed her thighs when she danced. I walked around collecting dirty glasses on a cork-covered tray. The women pinched my cheek and told me how big I’d gotten, like they hadn’t seen me for years.

  The party got louder. The women left lipstick mouths on the rims of plastic glasses. The men rolled up their sleeves. I hid inside the willow tree behind the garage and ate the melting ice from two glasses of Scotch. I heard a sound like the rustle of grass before a storm, but it was only my mother’s dress as she moved closer to Mr. Cullen.

  “Marie,” he said, like there was something he had to say to her. There was the liquid clear sound of kissing and he didn’t say another thing.

  Late in the night, I watched father lead my mother onto the dance floor. She fit her body into his and smiled up at his eyes, her teeth bright against her dark lipstick. Their feet moved together in dangerous perfect time. When they turned, I could see her hand on his back, her nails like red holes in the white of his shirt.

  That was our last summer after all.

  SARAH FRELIGH

  We Smoke

  We smoke because the nuns say we shouldn’t—he-man Marlboros or Salems, slender and meadow fresh, over cups of thin coffee at the Bridge Diner. We fill an ashtray in an hour easy while Ruby the waitress marries ketchups and tells us horror stories about how her first labor went on for fifty-two hours until her boy was yanked out of her butt first and now she has this theory that kids who come out like that got their brains in their asses from Day One. She says we’re smart to give our babies away to some Barbie-and-Ken couple with a house and a yard with real grass and a swing set, and we nod like we agree with her and smoke some more.

  Nights we huddle up under the bathroom window in the Mercy Home for Unwed Mothers and blow smoke at the stained sky while we swap stories about our babies doing handstands on our bladders, playing volleyball with our hearts, how our sons will be presidents or astronauts, and our daughters will be beautiful and chaste, and because we know our babies are not ours at all, we talk about everything and nothing while we watch a moth bang up against the light and smoke some more.

  LORRAINE LÓPEZ

  The Night Aliens in a White Van Kidnapped My Teenage Son Near the Baptist Church Parking Lot

  He admits being peeved, my boy does. Not allowed to sleep over with a shady friend with no phone, only a beeper, my son settles, enough to go to bed, earlier than usual even. But he tosses, twists—then pops the screen and leaps out, scrambling for the damp lap of grass near the Baptist church parking lot across the street. In the muzzy mosquito haze funneling from the street light, he considers in-words, like “injustice” and “inalienable rights,” when extraterrestrials—two or twenty, he can’t be sure—careen in a white Dodge van—brakes shrieking, tires thumping speed bumps—onto the church lot.

  Laughing and scratching like their skins don’t fit, they ask for directions to Peanut’s Red Neck Bar-be-que, and my boy, ever helpful, points and starts to explain as they hurtle from the van, rushing him. They snatch him with long, spongy arms and slam him in the back. Then, tires wailing, they haul out to the street. Cramped between crates, he’s still keen to an idea. When the aliens brake for a red light, he yanks the latch, spills out the rear door, runs like fire for the back streets. In an alley, he pulls a mangled girl’s bike from a trash heap and wobbles home.

  Because I’d locked his window after finding his bed empty, the buzzing doorbell jolts me alert. Shaken, he can barely speak. Says if I call the police, they’ll never believe it. Shush, I say, hush. I run him a bubbling tub, press two baby aspirin into his palm, and finally tuck him to sleep. Now I twist and toss, pull the curtains apart to check for white vans, listen for the squeal of brakes, the awful laughter, something alien out there, ready to wrench my boy from me.

  JOY WILLIAMS

  Clean

  A child in the south side of town was killed in a drive-by shooting. He was not the intended victim, he was only seven. There really was no intended victim. The gunman just wanted to spook some folks, the folks in this specific house. It wasn’t even little Luis’s house. But he was there, visiting a friend who had a pet iguana, and the iguana was sort of sickly, no one knew why, more yellow than green, maybe someone had fed it spinach by mistake. Hearing a ruckus, the boys ran outside and Luis was shot in the chest and died.

  The family held a car wash to pay for the funeral expenses. This is not uncommon. It was announced in the newspaper and lots of people came, most of whom had nice waxed cars that didn’t need washing, and the family appreciated this.

  NANCY STOHLMAN

  Death Row Hugger

  For some reason it’s always at night. It’s always the same room, the light’s always jaundiced. The room smells musty, like wet clothes were shoved and left to die in all the corners.

  I guess I was destined for this job. My parents weren’t the hugging type, so I’ve always had a malnourished craving for arms around me. I started as a professional baby cuddler for preemies in the NICU; each night after visiting hours, I settled into a wooden rocking chair with these miniature babies and their ancient faces and whispered of a future when they’d be strong and full-sized.

  But nothing could prepare me for being a Volunteer Hugger on Death Row. You enter that holding room, and there they are, trying to enjoy their steaks or lobsters or Cuban cigars or whatever. My job is to hug them just before they take that long walk. It’s not a sexual hug, though I have felt a few erections, and a few have tried to kiss me, but I politely turn my cheek and squeeze them harder. Because there’s this moment in the hug, you see, where it goes from something awkward and obligatory to when they melt into my arms, weeping with their bodies. Every now and then I hear one whisper in my ear, and once one called me Mama.

  NANCY STOHLMAN

  I Found Your Voodoo Doll on the Dance Floor After Last Call

  It was squishy under my feet and at first I thought it was a wad of napkins. But as the crowds cleared, it became obvious. It looked just like me if I’d been made out of cornstalks and had button eyes. Is that really how you see me? I thought as I picked it up and smoothed the yarn hair.


  My first instinct was to toss it into the dumpster but I had doubts—what if it landed on its head? Was stabbed by sharp cardboard? What if I woke in the morning and found myself buried alive or impaled on a U-Haul box?

  The mantel was out of the question, too far to fall if the cat knocked it down. A cabinet wouldn’t work—there was suffocation, asphyxiation. Anything near a sink was out. Nothing near the fireplace, on the balcony, near a window.

  A bird cage seemed the best solution.

  One day I rushed home from work and the cage door was open, the voodoo doll missing. I stared a blank, button-eyed stare into its empty depths.

  When I saw you at the bar later, voodoo doll on a chain around your neck, I collapsed to my knees in front of you. Thank god, I said.

  I knew you’d be back, you said.

  STEVEN SHERRILL

  Alter Call

  When Reverend Smawley plucked his right eyeball out—the plastic one—to hold over the congregation, the church-honeys swooned. Half the backsliders, purse-lipped and guilt-washed, like they just eked out a church-poot. The others, whooping like no tomorrow. From the edge of the sagging stage, I heard everything clear as a bell. The tent went quiet. True reverence. Anticipation. Then a soft-wet thwack as the eyeball left the socket; that was all she wrote. Oh the weeping and wailing.

  Besides folding chairs and passing collection plates, I drove, and played the organ. But—self-taught—by that time in the sermon, all I could do was keep up. Smawley stomping, hollering how “Jesus come down, as a piece of baling wire, and took that eye.” When medical science filled up the hole with a worthless bauble, Jesus came back. Blessed him with special sight. “Come on! Look in this hole! See for yourself!”

  Every night, his good eye patched, he gave the call. Sinners spilled into the aisles ready for miracles, even meager ones. Grocery lists, government cards, testimonials and prayer requests, offered up to that empty socket. Smawley read them all. “Go home,” he’d say. “Take them little red panties off and burn them. B’leve on the Lord.” “Turn away from that bottle,” he’d say. “Towards Calvary.”

  I looked in the hole one time. We’d stopped for gas. I came out with two cans of beer. A bag of pork rinds. Set them on the roof of the Plymouth while I pumped. The Reverend, wore slap out from doing the Lord’s work, clutching his thick bible, slept. Head laid against the window. That eye—open—gaped heavenward. I knelt on the oil-stained pavement, pressed my nose to the glass. I looked into that hole. I seen it all. You better believe it.

  AMY HEMPEL

  The Man in Bogotá

  The police and emergency service people fail to make a dent. The voice of the pleading spouse does not have the hoped-for effect. The woman remains on the ledge—though not, she threatens, for long.

  I imagine that I am the one who must talk the woman down. I see it, and it happens like this.

  I tell the woman about a man in Bogotá. He was a wealthy man, an industrialist who was kidnapped and held for ransom. It was not a TV drama; his wife could not call the bank and, in twenty-four hours, have one million dollars. It took months. The man had a heart condition, and the kidnappers had to keep the man alive.

  Listen to this, I tell the woman on the ledge. His captors made him quit smoking. They changed his diet and made him exercise every day. They held him that way for three months.

  When the ransom was paid and the man was released, his doctor looked him over. He found the man to be in excellent health. I tell the woman what the doctor said then—that the kidnap was the best thing to happen to that man.

  Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogotá. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.

  TANIA HERSHMAN

  My Mother Was an Upright Piano

  My mother was an upright piano, spine erect, lid tightly closed, unplayable except by the maestro. My father was not the maestro. My father was the piano tuner; technically expert, he never made her sing. It was someone else’s husband who turned her into a baby grand.

  How did I know? She told me. During the last weeks, when she was bent, lid slightly open, ivories yellowed.

  “Every Tuesday,” she said. “Midday. A knock at the door.”

  The first time, I froze. A grown woman myself, I listened to my mother talk and was back playing with dolls and wasps’ nests. I cut my visit short. My mother didn’t notice. She’d already fallen asleep.

  The second time, I asked questions.

  “Mother,” I said. “He . . . came round. On Tuesdays. How many?”

  “We are fallen stars, he said to me,” whispered my mother, the formerly-upright piano. “You and me, he said. And then he would take my hand.” She closed her eyes, smiled.

  My father, the tuner, never took anyone’s hand. He was sharp, efficient. I searched my mother’s face for another hint or instruction. “Should I find myself one?” I wanted to ask. “A fallen star? A maestro? Am I like you?” But she had stopped talking and begun to snore gently. I sat with her, watching the rise and fall of her chest and the way her fingers fluttered in her lap, longing for arpeggios to dance across my stiffening keys.

  JENNIFER PIERONI

  Local Woman Gets a Jolt

  It wasn’t until lightning struck Michaela that she realized she married an idiot. She was running out in bare feet, to get the mail during a thunderstorm. August was full of storms in Porter County, but then again, so was Michaela. The rain and boom were terminal conditions, as were the flash and cracking of trees and Michaela’s knuckles as she sat at the kitchen table with her calculator, ledger, and checkbook.

  Her husband, Ron, wouldn’t be home from work for another hour, Michaela realized, as she lay flat but electrified on the front lawn, which needed a mow. Michaela saw that the lightning lit the evening the same way the spark of Ron’s cigarette lighters had briefly illuminated his face, after sex twenty years ago. She remembered Ron, in his prime, in his youth, with his flashy smile and wanted expression. With his bright girls, light girls, and twenty-eight positions out back of Mighter’s field.

  The pelting rain rinsed the thought from Michaela’s mind. It washed over the grass and soil and, in time, would flood the basement, Michaela knew. As well as she knew the sound of Ron, down there, with the sump pump and a beer, cursing the cracking foundation of their home and God, for the August storms.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

  Sleepover

  Ed and I were making out by candlelight on the couch. Pammy was in my bedroom with Ed’s brother; she wanted to be in the dark because her face was broke out.

  “We were wishing your head could be on Pammy’s body,” Ed said. “You two together would make the perfect girl.”

  I took it as a compliment—unlike Pammy, I was flat chested. Ed kissed my mouth, my throat, my collarbone; he pressed his pelvis into mine. The full moon over the driveway reminded me of a single headlamp or a giant eyeball. Ed’s tongue was in my ear when Mom’s car lights hit the picture window. Ed slid to the floor and whistled for his brother, who crawled from the bedroom on hands and knees. They scurried out the screen door into the back yard and hopped the fence. Pammy and I fixed our clothes and hurriedly dealt a hand of Michigan rummy by candlelight.

  “You girls are going to ruin your eyes,” Mom said, switching on the table lamp. When Mom went to change her clothes, Pammy whispered that she’d let Ed’s brother go into her pants. Her hair was messed up, so I smoothed it behind her ear.

  “Too bad this show isn’t in color,” Pammy said later, when we were watching Frankenstein. While the doctor was still cobbling together body parts, Pammy fell asleep with her small pretty feet on my lap. I stayed awake, though, and saw the men from the town band together to kill the monster.

  BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

  My Bliss

  First I married the breakfast cereal in its small cardboard chapel, wax-coate
d, into which I poured milk. Then I married a cigarette, for the gauzy way the air hung around us when we were together, then a stone, because I thought he was a brick or a block, something I could use to build a home. There was a bird, but flying away repeatedly is grounds for divorce. The shrub was a lost cause from the get-go and the TV gave me marital-tension headaches. The kidney was dull, the liver was slick, the car was exhausting, the monster in the woodshed scared the children (though I found his stink enticing). The teacup was all filling and emptying, emptying and filling. When I married the squirrel the wedding was woodland, the guests scampered, but all that foraging and rustling of sticks and leaves was too much. And the males sleep balled together in another tree all winter! How foolish, my marrying the truck, the shovel, the hair, the hope, the broom, the mail—oh, waiting and waiting for the mail to come! Marrying the cat was funny at first, and I luxuriated in his fur, until I heard his mating yowl, until the claws and the teeth, the penile spines, dear God. Forget the spider, the mask, the brittle bone. And then a slim-hipped quiet confidence leaned against the wall of the Lamplighter Lounge, chalking a pool cue, and I said, Lordy, this is for real. He ran the table, and I fanned myself with a coaster—this was going to last! I called home and divorced a plate of meatloaf. Confidence gave me a good couple of months. I learned aloof and not eating in public, but it did not last. He wasn’t from the Midwest, and besides, tied to a barstool across the room, some drunk’s seeing-eye dog was starting to chew the fishnet stockings off a lady’s artificial leg.