The distance from Tempe, Arizona to Newport Beach, California is 379 miles. At sixty miles an hour along the 10 freeway, it has taken Ted Asmund six hours and twenty minutes to get here. He has just crossed the bridge to the island and is parallel parking now. He checks his mirrors, cuts the wheel and inches back—all with a slow, deliberate precision that gives no hint as to the state of his heart, which is beating so fast it might be the heart of some much smaller animal.

Ted Asmund wears a Hawaiian shirt tucked into a pair of pleated khakis and cinched with a shiny belt. He is thirty, with short legs and a long torso combining into a medium height. He is not an ugly man exactly, but he gives off an awkward, unnatural quality that has prompted one of the students at Tempe Junior ...MORE]]> BY ADAM PRINCE

The distance from Tempe, Arizona to Newport Beach, California is 379 miles. At sixty miles an hour along the 10 freeway, it has taken Ted Asmund six hours and twenty minutes to get here. He has just crossed the bridge to the island and is parallel parking now. He checks his mirrors, cuts the wheel and inches back—all with a slow, deliberate precision that gives no hint as to the state of his heart, which is beating so fast it might be the heart of some much smaller animal.

Ted Asmund wears a Hawaiian shirt tucked into a pair of pleated khakis and cinched with a shiny belt. He is thirty, with short legs and a long torso combining into a medium height. He is not an ugly man exactly, but he gives off an awkward, unnatural quality that has prompted one of the students at Tempe Junior High School where Ted teaches math to call him Mr. Asimo or just Asimo after the robot built by Honda that can wave and get the newspaper. That student’s name is Casey Miller, and yesterday at detention, for reasons he does not entirely understand, Ted tried to kiss him on the mouth.

All last night and all this morning, Ted kept reassuring himself that Casey was not the sort of boy to tell, and thus, that the best thing would be to go into school and pretend nothing had happened. Ted got into his car at seven a.m. intending to do just that. But he found himself driving all the way out here to his mother’s house instead. He thought he’d call the school along the way with a madeup story about being sick, but was never quite able to do it. Seventy-five miles in, he shut his cell phone off.

It is Thursday, November 10. The housecleaners work on Thursdays, and Ted’s mother stays out doing errands until around two. But by the time Ted has himself suitably parked and out of the car, it is eighteen minutes after. He checks the garage for his mother’s BMW and experiences some measure of relief to find it isn’t there. He lets himself into the house. “Mom?” he calls out to the quiet, Pine-Soled air, “Mom?” just to be sure, before rushing upstairs to her bedroom.

The bedroom has just been remodeled for the third time since Ted moved out. The new carpet is beige shag. The bedside tables are shaped like hourglasses on which rest identical thin-screened clocks and identical vases each containing a single moist and suggestive orchid. The bed is canopied with red velvet curtains creating the effect of an altar or a stage. Variously sized mirrors crowd the walls, projecting images of the bed, orchids, vases, tables, carpet, and Ted Asmund himself infinitely in all directions.

Still, Ted doesn’t much notice the remodel, because he is staring in panic at the blinking light on his mother’s answering machine and thinking about the day he was hired, when he had written down her home phone number as an emergency contact. Eventually, he presses play, listens to a courtesy call from American Express, then to Max the jeweler reporting that the necklace Ted’s mother had commissioned is finished and lovely. That is all.

Ted lets out a breath. He checks his digital watch. He steps downstairs to the living room and takes a seat on the couch. Back straight. Hands folded. Polite though he is alone. The telephone doesn’t ring. Does not and still does not.

At two fifty-three Ted hears the garage door groan. His mother is home.

***

One midnight back when Ted was Teddy and Teddy was six, his beautiful young mother awakened him to announce that they were saved. An entrepreneur named Raymond Misterly was going to marry her and be his father and take them away from their one-bedroom apartment in Tempe, Arizona to his two-story waterfront house on an island in Southern California.

Teddy didn’t know what an entrepreneur was or much of what a father was, either. Still, he did know islands. Gilligan’s Island. Tom Sawyer’s Island. His mother started telling him something about her ring, but Teddy was already nearing sleep again, island-hopping his way there. Treasure Island. Fantasy Island. The Island of the Lost Boys.

Once a sandbar in a harbor, Newport Island was built up into a solid piece of land in the 1920’s, then paved over and reinforced with seawalls. It is a small cluster of wealthy, suburban blocks surrounded by a channel—a beautiful place certainly, but quite developed, and whatever resemblance it came to have to those islands that so captured Teddy’s imagination, whatever magic, had far less to do with the place itself than with the friend he met there.

Cannon appeared on the very first day the new family pulled up to the house. He was sitting on a red curb across the street without a shirt or shoes on, a boy all ready for summer.

***

“What is it?” Ted’s mother asks when she sees her son in the house. “Thanksgiving already? Cesar Chavez? Is that in the fall? National-Show-Up-and-Surprise-Your-Mother-without-Calling-First-Day? ”She smiles, flirtatious. “Hi, Teddy Bear.”

They hug. Ted would like to pull her close, to fall on his knees and cry into her lap, but he is careful. Hugs her lightly and pulls away.

“I just needed some time off,” he says, making a gesture toward the Hawaiian shirt. “You know how it can be.” He had bought the shirt at a gas station on the way here in an attempt at making himself appear an easygoing vacationer.

But Ted’s mother isn’t paying his shirt any attention; she is looking at his face, her eyes skipping all over it while Ted tries to arrange a suitable expression. He read in a magazine once that a happy expression is the most difficult to fake, so he thinks happy thoughts—thoughts of his childhood with Cannon. And maybe it works, because soon his mother breaks off the examination.

“Oh, Teddy,” she says, “of course I do. Now let me show you the remodel.”

Ted checks his watch again, sees that it is two fifty-five, the time the kids go home and the administration starts on the unfinished business of the day: absence slips mostly, and telephone calls. “All right,” he says. “I just need to get my luggage from the car,” and he is out the door.

Of course, there is no luggage to get, because Ted hadn’t planned to come here.

His car is a gray 2002 Toyota Echo—dependable, affordable, and fuel efficient. Ted gets in and drives away.

Restless and panicked, he tells himself to go back to Arizona, to leave right now before things get worse. Still, he can’t find the resolve to do it. So he just keeps driving around. Past the public library and the place he used to rent videos that has since become a sandwich shop. Down to the beach, back to the island, off the island and up Cliff Drive to the house where Cannon now lives with his family.

Cannon’s two young daughters run around a playhouse in the yard, yanking and slamming the front door, sing-songing mom-mee! daddee! bab-bee! while the mother herself looks on holding her baby boy. The father, Cannon, whom Ted has not seen for well over a decade, must still be at work. It is a big house, an expensive house but not at all gaudy. It is a house on a corner, and having forgotten himself, Ted has been at the stop sign for several minutes. The mother has turned to notice the car. Ted speeds away.

He drives a few more blocks before pulling over across the street from Bay Shores Junior High where he himself used to go. He is trying to catch his breath, regain his calm. The Bay Shores soccer team is just starting a scrimmage, shirts versus skins. The star of the skins’ team is an energetic, ball-hogging left forward with short, dark hair and a way of moving through the game that announces his obvious superiority. It is a nice day out, the grass bright green, and the sky wide open. And watching that game, those boys, the grace of coordinated movement, the health and physics at work, the simple, enforceable set of rules, Ted does regain his calm. For a little while, at least.

To read the rest of the story, order your copy of Issue 22.2-Summer/Fall 2010 today.

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A graduate of Vassar College and the University of Arkansas MFA program, ADAM PRINCE is currently a PhD candidate in English and creative writing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, Northwest Review, Mid-American Review, and LIT, among others. He won Narrative Magazine’s Winter 2010 Story Contest and serves as fiction editor at Grist: The Journal for Writers. “Island of the Lost Boys,” won Sycamore Review’s 2010 Wabash Prize for Fiction, judged by Peter Ho Davies.

ON THE FIFTH day of camp, once I’d memorized my bunkmates’ names and hometowns and written four letters home, our counselors, Lisa and Nancy, called a bunk meeting. We girls pulled beach towels from our cubbies and made a circle on the unpainted bunk floor. “We’re going to play a game,” Lisa said.

This was the summer I was eleven, the year my sister first got sick, and after begging my parents for months, I had been sent to sleep away camp for the first time. The camp was just east of the Berkshire Mountains, a Jewish oasis in central Massachusetts. Every morning we prayed before breakfast, and in the afternoons, after swimming in the lake and before going to electives in the art building or the radio hut, we broke up into groups according to our knowledge of Hebrew, and spent an hour playing vocabulary games with ...MORE]]> BY LILY RABINOFF-GOLDMAN

ON THE FIFTH day of camp, once I’d memorized my bunkmates’ names and hometowns and written four letters home, our counselors, Lisa and Nancy, called a bunk meeting. We girls pulled beach towels from our cubbies and made a circle on the unpainted bunk floor. “We’re going to play a game,” Lisa said.

This was the summer I was eleven, the year my sister first got sick, and after begging my parents for months, I had been sent to sleep away camp for the first time. The camp was just east of the Berkshire Mountains, a Jewish oasis in central Massachusetts. Every morning we prayed before breakfast, and in the afternoons, after swimming in the lake and before going to electives in the art building or the radio hut, we broke up into groups according to our knowledge of Hebrew, and spent an hour playing vocabulary games with Israeli emissaries. We walked along dusty camp roads in flip-flops and denim shorts, holding hands with our bunkmates or counselors, singing folk songs in Hebrew and pop songs in English. Maple and oak trees stood guard around the white bunks listening to us sing, but if you walked out past the dining hall into the woods, the world was completely silent.

I was assigned to bunk seven along with nine other girls, most of whom knew each other from the previous summer; a few had been at camp since they were eight or nine. Lisa and Nancy, who were responsible for us, were college students with long, curly hair. They were both glamorous and unquestionably adult, though I preferred Nancy to Lisa; she seemed more bookish.

Artwork: Brian Cooper

“The game is called ‘roses and thorns,’” Lisa said. She was chewing a piece of green gum, which peeked and poked out of the corner of her mouth as she spoke. “Each of you will say a ‘rose’ – something good that happened during the week, and a ‘thorn,’ something that you didn’t like. Okay?”

I panicked. What could I say? How truthful were we supposed to be? At eleven, I no longer wore the cloak of childhood shyness that had defined me at seven and eight, but neither was I an easy, sociable kid, used to making friends quickly. For five days I had walked through activities and meals observing my bunkmates and their friends with awe and fear. How could they laugh and smile and speak so freely with people they hardly knew? And now I was supposed to evaluate my week in front of them? Would I admit to how much I missed my mother and how the food in the dining hall made me feel sure at every meal that my guts were rotting out? Should I mention that just yesterday I had managed to go almost a whole day without worrying about my sister or that the highlight of my week was the moment in which Danielle Rosenthal, the most popular girl in bunk six had held my hand on the way to swimming and asked me where I was from? It all seemed so shamefully honest. Nervous, I twiddled with my ponytail.

Luckily, Lisa went first–her rose was getting to meet us girls, and her thorn was that she missed her boyfriend, who was still in Maryland for the summer. She passed the game on to my friend Ariella Gross, who was sitting to her right.

Ariella was in my class at school; she was the one who told me about camp, and she was the one to whom I clung tightly during the frightening first days of introductions, ice-breakers, and late-night, lights-out conversations. She had been to camp for two years already, and spent every lunch hour at school talking about how her friends from
camp were her best friends ever, and how I had to get my parents to let me go. I nagged my parents for weeks until, looking at each other sideways over the dinner table one night, they agreed.

In the days before they dropped me off in front of my bunk, I was thrilled to be away from home for a month. That January, my sister Carly had turned fifteen and in the past months, she had brought chaos to our house; I was plagued by the constant threat of seeing her smoking behind buildings with strangers, and of waking up long after midnight to find her in my bed, smelling dangerous, wanting to tell me about the boy who made her feel so good that she might run away with him. In spite of all this, I cried into my mother’s shirt for a few minutes after she had unpacked the station wagon. “Isabella Rose Lipson. You are a big girl. Go have fun. And don’t worry; you have Ariella here,” she said.

With few exceptions, Ariella had, in fact, been an excellent guide. Before we even left, she made sure that I packed enough pretty skirts and dresses for Shabbat, which, she explained, was something like a cross between a fashion show and a weekly attempt at spiritual bliss. Then, when we arrived, she introduced me to her friends from the previous summers as her “best friend from home,” which guaranteed me a nice smile, and she warned that I shouldn’t bring a bathing cap to the lake or I’d look like an idiot. The only thing I didn’t like was that Ariella spent an inordinate amount of time with one of our bunkmates, Rachel Adler, who, when she paid me any attention at all, was more likely to point out a stain in my
T-shirt or a bug bite on my cheek than to ask what music I liked or if I was enjoying camp so far.

“Can I have two roses?” Ariella asked. Lisa nodded and smiled. Everyone smiled at Ariella–she was tiny and sweet. “Okay, then my first rose is that my friend Izzie came to camp with me this summer.” Everyone looked at me and I blushed and grinned. “My second rose is that it’s so fun to see all my friends from last summer and to meet new people, too!”

“Do you have a thorn?” Lisa asked.

“Oh!” Ariella looked surprised and everyone laughed. “No,” she said. “I love camp! It’s your turn,” she added, gesturing towards Rachel Adler, who was sitting to her right. The back of my neck prickled. Rachel Adler set me on edge.

Rachel sat up, wriggled her hips on her towel, and pushed her hair behind her ears. “Well, my thorn is that even though I love being in the same bunk as my best friends,” Rachel listed the names of all the girls in the bunk except me and the other new girl, Jill, “my other best friends, Danielle and Sam, are in bunk six.” My heart sank, though no one else seemed to notice or even blink. “And my rose is,” Rachel began to giggle. “My rose is a secret that some of you know,” she said, but she didn’t elaborate.

I wanted so much to know Rachel’s secret. Even though she had just left me out of her thorn, even though I had a walnut of bitter dislike for her lodged in my throat already, it was clear to me that secrets were camp’s most valuable currency, and whatever nugget she had was worth hard social cash. The girls in my bunk spent hours each night discussing who had a crush on which boy from bunk twenty-one and imploring everyone else not to tell. Rachel was the most popular girl in our bunk, and in not knowing her secret, I would be left out of the market…

To read the rest of the story, order your copy of Issue 22.1-Winter/Spring 2010.

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LILY RABINOFF-GOLDMAN is an educator living in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and finishing her MFA in Fiction Writing at UMass Boston. She also holds degrees from Brown University and Bank Street College of Education. “Cubbyholes” is her first published short story.

Veronica saw it just before it happened, saw it and knew. She leaned across the sink and slapped the window with a soapy hand, smack, smack and scream. Her cry alerted the sisters and sisters-in-law who had been scraping plates and wrapping up the leftover tamales, the sticky-faced children eluding rough swipes of the washcloth and the men who had gathered in the family room in front of fútbol. Maybe her scream, her soggy palm flat against the window alerted Jose as much as the double bump under the van’s tires, which had felt like nothing at all. Like running over a gardening hose, or – as he would tell Ernesto later, on their way home from the hospital – maybe a sleeping bag. Something small and insignificant left on the driveway, forgotten in the general rush of coming home from church, the women cooking the ...MORE]]>

BY PAULA TREICK DeBOARD

Veronica saw it just before it happened, saw it and knew. She leaned across the sink and slapped the window with a soapy hand, smack, smack and scream. Her cry alerted the sisters and sisters-in-law who had been scraping plates and wrapping up the leftover tamales, the sticky-faced children eluding rough swipes of the washcloth and the men who had gathered in the family room in front of fútbol. Maybe her scream, her soggy palm flat against the window alerted Jose as much as the double bump under the van’s tires, which had felt like nothing at all. Like running over a gardening hose, or – as he would tell Ernesto later, on their way home from the hospital – maybe a sleeping bag. Something small and insignificant left on the driveway, forgotten in the general rush of coming home from church, the women cooking the meal and chasing around the children, the men cracking open a beer to feel its satisfying cool slide down their throats. That’s where Jose had been headed, for more beer, two twenties in his wallet. This one’s on me, he’d said.

The double bump was Jose’s almost two-year-old, Carlos, escaped from the general bustle in the kitchen to follow his father outside. They’d stripped him down to a diaper for lunch, so his tangled body now looked naked, vulnerable, his brown baby skin splotched with red, his head beneath a dark patch of hair concave, hollowed like the inside of a bowl.

People spilled out the front door instantly, the screen door smacking shut between them. Jose left the keys in the ignition and hopped out, squatting down over Carlos’s body. He covered Carlos with his chest and shoulders and bare arms, as if this could protect him now. Mijo! Mijo! he screamed.

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PAULA TREICK DeBOARD lives, teaches, and writes in Modesto, California. When not annoying her husband or pacifying her pets, she is hard at work on her first novel. ]]> http://www.sycamorereview.com/2009/07/casualties-an-excerpt/feed/ 0 http://www.sycamorereview.com/2009/07/birth-act-an-excerpt/ http://www.sycamorereview.com/2009/07/birth-act-an-excerpt/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:16:17 +0000 Sycamore http://www.sycamorereview.com/?p=840 RACHEL FUREY

In front of her sixth grade class, Riley acts out her own birth. Mother’s Day is this weekend and this is supposed to be a simple speech – something with pleasant platitudes about her mother’s kind acts. Things like baking cookies and making dresses and teaching her how to catch fireflies. But Riley isn’t a speech sort of a girl. She dreams of becoming an actress, preferably one like Sandra Bullock. She, too, wants to star in a movie called Miss Congeniality, wants to be transformed from her geekish self into a confident, beautiful girl capable of attracting men. She wants a scene like Sandra Bullock’s, one in which she gets to stand in front of an audience and demonstrate the SING (solar plexus, instep, nose, groin) pressure points on a merciless man standing on the stage beside her. She wants to hear him groan and watch ...MORE]]>

The week after I told my mother about my pregnancy, my best friend Emmy found out her dad was being sent to Iraq.  Like a lot of the dads in Morgantown, West Virginia, he enlisted as a reservist for drill pay, and that October, when their infantry unit was activated, over a hundred and fifty of our town’s men climbed onto an old beat up school bus and left for a place that, until then, existed for us only on televisions and in newspapers.  Now the war infected our families, and Emmy handled it like the rest of the reservist’s kids: with silent acceptance and a vacant shrug of the shoulders.  Like most important events that happen to you at the age of seventeen, her father’s absence felt like something she could not control.

And while Emmy’s home life became smaller and quieter, mine began to grow loud ...MORE]]> BY KRISTEN-PAIGE MADONIA

The week after I told my mother about my pregnancy, my best friend Emmy found out her dad was being sent to Iraq.  Like a lot of the dads in Morgantown, West Virginia, he enlisted as a reservist for drill pay, and that October, when their infantry unit was activated, over a hundred and fifty of our town’s men climbed onto an old beat up school bus and left for a place that, until then, existed for us only on televisions and in newspapers.  Now the war infected our families, and Emmy handled it like the rest of the reservist’s kids: with silent acceptance and a vacant shrug of the shoulders.  Like most important events that happen to you at the age of seventeen, her father’s absence felt like something she could not control.

And while Emmy’s home life became smaller and quieter, mine began to grow loud with anger and resentment as my mother Stella digested the reality of my pregnancy. She had always been a woman hungry for a buzz, but once she knew about the baby and my decision to keep the mistake Bobby Drinko and I made in the tattoo shop that summer in Virginia, her nightly happy hour started earlier and often lasted until sunup. 

“Get me a beer, Lemon,” she would say when she got home from work, as she shifted her eyes away from my stomach and tried to drink herself into denial.

She began spending more time with her boss Simon, the photographer, and though she never admitted when it began, I was certain they started screwing around just weeks after he got the call that his work would appear in National Geographic.  Simon grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado, a place that seemed as foreign and far away as Samarra, Iraq where Emmy’s dad had been relocated, and my mother claimed that because of his upbringing out west, he was more cultured and more interesting than the other men she met in West Virginia.  He liked all the same late night television that I did, and he was really good at explaining how Spanish conjugations worked, one of the subjects I had fallen behind in since the distraction of the pregnancy, so I liked him okay, better, at least, than Denny in Philadelphia or Rocco in New Jersey.  Except for the nights when the bottle of vodka seemed to last forever, he treated Stella and me pretty good. 

October turned the spillway a dark rusty color as the trees changed from green to orange and red, and Emmy and I celebrated the end of the summer heat by hanging out at the lake every day after school.  Sometimes we would do our homework and sometimes we wouldn’t, deciding instead to play cards or listen to music.  By then Emmy was kissing a boy from our Calculus class, an unlikely long-haired guitarist named Dylan who worked after school as the poetry editor for the Morgantown High literary magazine.  Dylan liked to listen to The Shins and he liked to smoke pot, but mostly he liked to drive me and Emmy around in her big blue truck since his parents never bought him a car and he usually had to ride to school on his dirt bike.  He was the kind of guy that would never outgrow his long hair, that would never hold a nine-to-five.   

“Do you think he’s too quiet or too artsy?”  Emmy would ask on the afternoons at the spillway before he showed up.  “Do you think he’s too nice?  Or too boring, maybe?”  She would say as she sucked on a cigarette and stared out at the water.

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Kristen-Paige Madonia’s fiction has appeared in The South Dakota Review, Inkwell, and Pearl; in addition, her collection of short stories was recently listed as a semifinalist for the University of Iowa Press Short Fiction Award and the Spokane Prize. She is the recipient of the James I. Murashige Jr. Memorial Scholarship for Fiction, the Ronald Foote Scholarship for Short Fiction, and the 2005 Literary Women Festival of Authors Fellowship. In 2008 she was invited to work as a resident artist with The Studios of Key West, and last year she received the Marianne Russo Fellowship to attend the Key West Literary Seminar and advanced fiction workshop. She received her MFA from California State University, Long Beach; upon graduation she was named a Graduate Dean’s List Exceptional Artist and Scholar and was awarded the Best Thesis Award for the College of Liberal Arts for her collection of short stories. She was the inaugural graduate student in the English Department to receive the award. Madonia currently resides in Charlottesville, Virginia where she teaches creative writing and is at work on her second novel; “Sandstorms” is an excerpt from that project.

My dad is standing in front of a line of life-sized, clay copies of my dear, dead mother. They are in the garage, standing at something like parade rest, tipped back on their ankles, stiff bodies against the wall. I’m hidden outside the door, and he’s choosing which one he is going to use next.

The family car has been parked on the lawn ever since he turned the garage into his private mother workshop.

My mom, she’ll be back soon—until one of us manages to upset her. This means she will once again be walking around from room to room in our house, silent except for the thud of her heavy, flat-footed steps. And she’ll sit with us at dinner, even though she won’t eat. And she’ll be in the kitchen, staring out the window when I get off work. She’ll be sitting on the couch in the ...MORE]]> BY MATTHEW SIMMONS

My dad is standing in front of a line of life-sized, clay copies of my dear, dead mother. They are in the garage, standing at something like parade rest, tipped back on their ankles, stiff bodies against the wall. I’m hidden outside the door, and he’s choosing which one he is going to use next.

The family car has been parked on the lawn ever since he turned the garage into his private mother workshop.

My mom, she’ll be back soon—until one of us manages to upset her. This means she will once again be walking around from room to room in our house, silent except for the thud of her heavy, flat-footed steps. And she’ll sit with us at dinner, even though she won’t eat. And she’ll be in the kitchen, staring out the window when I get off work. She’ll be sitting on the couch in the morning when we get up, and she’ll leave a little clay dust on the dark fabric cushion when she rises—a little imprint on the hand rest, a little silhouette behind her head. My dead mother back among the living—though certainly not living herself. Not living at all. Just close enough—apparently—for Dad.

He has picked out a comfortable pair of sweatpants, a collared shirt, and a blue cardigan for her to wear. The sweater has an ivory cameo above the breast. All the mothers are propped up against the wall, and he’s walking up and down the row, trying to choose.

I’ve never seen this part. I don’t know how he does it. I don’t know how he chooses, and I don’t how he animates these lumps of mud—stuffed beneath a layer of clay as they are with things, with objects that belonged to the living, real her—and makes them move around and act as a stand-in, because I’ve never wanted to see it. I’ve watched the mothers being built, but I’ve never seen them come to life.

Or come to whatever it is they come to. Not life, though. Certainly not life.

Sorry. I misspoke.

***

I’d made a promise to myself that I would try hard to no longer yell at Dad. So, instead, I had decided to yell at our lawyer. We were in his office for our annual visit, my dad and me, in two brown leather chairs; the lawyer was turned to the window, looking out through the slats of the open shades. “There has to be something you can do,” I said. “What good was the living will if Dad can just breach it like this? She said do not resuscitate. Her instructions were very clear.” Dad creaked against the leather of his chair.

“I don’t know if you can really say that your,” and our lawyer bit his nail and hesitated before he said, “mother has been resuscitated.”

“She breathes. Or, does something like breathing. Her chest seems to expand and contract. Isn’t that resuscitated? And she’s here. She’s out there. Look at her,” I said, pointing out the window at our car. The model I was calling Saxophone Lung—there are four models, and I have named each by the stuff Dad uses to fill their torsos—was sitting in the back seat, still belted in and moving very little. Our Pekapoo, Glory, was in the front passenger seat, her nose stuck out the cracked window, and she was straining up to catch scents on the air. She was clamoring, her paws slipping against the glass, as she struggled to force her muzzle farther out. “Just look at that. Look at Glory even trying to ignore her. You have to tell him to stop.”

“We go through this every year. I really don’t think—” said our lawyer.

“Dad, come on,” I said. “She wouldn’t have wanted this.” I stared at my father. He was wearing his old brown suit, and a deep burgundy tie. The suit he bought and wore to his retirement party a few years back. He always dressed up when I forced him to come with me to see the lawyer. He was stooped over in his chair and he was staring at his hands, which were draped between the knees of brown corduroys. He wouldn’t look at me, and wouldn’t look up. He smoothed the wales of his pant legs with the butt of his hand, pushing it forward like a snow shovel.

The lawyer stared out the window, ripped a bit of nail from his thumb, took it from his mouth, and pocketed it. “He won’t listen to me,” I told him. “You have to do it. She trusted you to do exactly what she wanted after she died. And she wanted to remain dead. No heroic measures. No feeding tubes or machines. Dead. Dead dead.”

“I don’t think I can do anything. I don’t think this is even my area.” Our lawyer pointed out the window, turned his back to us and away from his desk. We heard a quiet sniffle.

“Look at this. You’re making the lawyer cry, Dad,” I said.

“Hay fever,” our lawyer swore, turning back and grabbing a tissue from a box on his desk. “It’s just hay fever.”

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Matthew Simmons is the interviews editor at Hobart (hobartpulp.com). His work has appeared, most recently, in Sleepingfish, Juked, and The Believer. He is a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA program, and lives in Seattle with his cat, Emmett. He is also The Man Who Couldn’t Blog (themanwhocouldntblog.blogspot.com).

Wednesdays and Saturdays are my days off at the pharmacy, but Saturdays my wife is off too, so I do my flashing on Wednesday afternoons. In the mornings, I have my weekly rap session with Dr. Quince-Martin. She rents space on a corridor down by the waterfront—opposite a urologist named Littlecock—and, after a bad storm, the entire office suite smells of rotting fish. Dr. Quince-Martin makes a point of revealing nothing about her private life, but I’ve taken the liberty of looking her up on the Internet: Her husband is Dr. Martin-Quince, also a shrink, and she acted off-off-Broadway between college and medical school. Bit parts, mostly. Uncle Charley’s receptionist in Death of a Salesman . A servant girl in Hedda Gabler . I’m holding this knowledge in reserve. The reality is that I just see Dr. Quince-Martin to keep Dawn off my back. My wife ...MORE]]> BY JACOB M. APPEL

Wednesdays and Saturdays are my days off at the pharmacy, but Saturdays my wife is off too, so I do my flashing on Wednesday afternoons. In the mornings, I have my weekly rap session with Dr. Quince-Martin. She rents space on a corridor down by the waterfront—opposite a urologist named Littlecock—and, after a bad storm, the entire office suite smells of rotting fish. Dr. Quince-Martin makes a point of revealing nothing about her private life, but I’ve taken the liberty of looking her up on the Internet: Her husband is Dr. Martin-Quince, also a shrink, and she acted off-off-Broadway between college and medical school. Bit parts, mostly. Uncle Charley’s receptionist in Death of a Salesman . A servant girl in Hedda Gabler . I’m holding this knowledge in reserve. The reality is that I just see Dr. Quince-Martin to keep Dawn off my back. My wife is all into head-shrinking and pill-popping and talk therapy, says it “rewired her neural circuitry” after the miscarriage, though she doesn’t seem so different to me. Personally, I find Dr. Quince-Martin horrendously narrow. One time, when I tried to tell her about flashing, her back stiffened like a coffin lid and she advised me of the limits to physician-patient confidentiality in Connecticut. So now we chat about turning forty, and my step-father’s chemotherapy, and Dawn’s harebrained plan to build an outdoor deck onto the kitchen. I don’t mention anything about showing Mrs. Sproul my genitals.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Jacob M. Appel, a graduate of the MFA program in fiction at New York University and the Harvard Law School, has taught most recently at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York City. His fiction has appeared in Agni, Colorado Review, Missouri Review, StoryQuarterly, Southwest Review and elsewhere. Jacob lives in New York City and can be found on the Internet at jacobmappel.com.

On ...MORE]]> BY MEGAN HARLAN

The World’s Smallest Woman has her own stage. People pay two dollars to approach the elevated trailer, then peer over a chain-link fence into the impromptu living room where Thea spends every other summer week. Thea trades off with Charmaine, another World’s Smallest Woman who is, in fact, a half-inch shorter than Thea. Charmaine, originally from Quebec, speaks like Brigitte Bardot. The evening before she had called Thea and breathed into the phone, “I yam soo tiyerd. My booyfrehnd jest retehrnned from Montrreahl, end everr seence hee duss not leht me sleep.” Thea had agreed to cover for her with a curtness meant to deflect any more kittenish giggles. Charmaine, everyone at Coney Island who knows of such things agrees, is the fun Smallest Woman. Crazy, but fun. Like Thea’s daughter, Nikki, who sometimes works the Funnel Cake counter, but is usually on the boardwalk with her friends.

On this Tuesday morning, upon a jumble of pink and red pillows, Thea lounges like a world-weary pasha. Thea’s stage—really, more of a pen, she has complained to Johnny, the grey pony-tailed ticket-taker, bigger and of course neater but with the same basic set-up as the World’s Biggest Rat’s the next trailer over—is strewn with plastic Diet Coke liters and Triscuits boxes. All day Thea watches a 26-inch TV and snacks, and will talk to the paying public if they politely broach a conversation. They usually don’t. In which case, she stares at whoever is on television, currently the cast of Magnum P.I.

The paying public often behaves like this teenage couple, who trot quickly up the steps, their laughter as crisp as their sportswear. When they glimpse Thea, they emit a bashful, beseeching hello, then look down at their feet, well of course—Thea can almost hear them thinking disappointedly—she’s just a midget, and there they slink away, feeling bad but not so awful that they won’t try their luck next with the Rat. Such an uncomfortable experience, in Thea’s opinion, is hardly worth two dollars. Nikki once voiced loudly to Johnny that people just plain forget about midgets. Little people. They see the drawing of a tiny, willowy woman resembling a house-dressed Donna Reed under the “World’s Smallest” sign, Nikki had continued, and are misled to imagine some kind of living doll. Thea had silently agreed: people forget about the change in proportions.

Thea makes better money doing this than she did as a bank-teller. She munches on a low-salt Triscuit. It takes her five minutes by train to get to Coney Island. The job itself couldn’t be easier: she just sits around all day! And it’s not as if people don’t stare at her and make comments anyway; might as well make some money from it.

An endless loop of eighties dance songs blasts from the tilt-a-whirl’s speakers. Screams snake skyward from the rickety, whip-fast Cyclone. The scents of spicy sausage and cotton candy fluff intermingle as the wind catches and carries them. The ocean mutters to itself, mutters and hisses. Thea is not tall enough to ride the rides. Seated on her stage, she can’t see any of the amusement park, only a tin can-colored slip of sky. The Woman’s Smallest World, is more like it, she often thinks, until she counters: it could be worse. Lord knows it certainly has been worse.

Thea can hear Nikki say to Johnny, “Hi big man. My mama’s in today, right?” Here is Nikki: her long hair streaming in glossy waves. Her black cherry lipstick and gold hoop earrings
the size of fists. “Mama why’d you take over for Charmaine. You need a day off.”

“To do what, honey?”

“Well, get away from TV for one. You might fall in.”

“No lip from you.” In fact, there rarely is from Nikki. It is with Anthony that Thea has the problems. The last time she saw Anthony they had argued about his drugs and he had tried to pick her up. You do not ever, she had rasped like a woman possessed, pick me up. He knew that: family rule, ever since the kids were growing close to her size, surpassing her, up and up. She had thrown him out, a temporary throw-out, practically a monthly occurrence. He would stay with friends, clever boys with too much money from nontaxable sources.

Nikki snaps her gum; she does this, Thea knows, when she is nervous. “I brought you a cake,” announces Nikki, and hands down a coiling mass of crisp fried dough dusted with powdered sugar. “You don’t stop giving me those, I’ll be the World’s Fattest Woman,” Thea jokes, one of her standard lines. Nikki holds up a hand to Johnny.

“Mama, it’s Anthony.”

“Don’t want to see him.”

“He’s not here. He’s in the hospital. He partied too hard, and when he passed out he didn’t wake up. Somebody dropped him off at the hospital. The nurse said he’ll probably be okay. We can see him when he wakes up.”

Thea finishes swallowing a piece of funnel cake, so that she won’t choke. She asks, “You got the car?”

“Yeah. I’ll call Charmaine.”

“Shit,” says Thea definitively. She watches Nikki run off, car keys in hand. A panicky coolness unfurls from the back of Thea’s neck, over her head, down her spine.

“Will you suck me off? Don’t bother getting up,” cracks the sudden vision of one rough-looking kid, accompanied by his friends’ cutting laughter. T.C. whoops during a high-speed car chase up a volcano. Johnny is just outside if she needs him, but the rough kids shuffle off.

“That’s not a bad way to make a living, sitting there watching TV all day,” ventures the next one, a neat, pinkish young man. She ignores him too, thinking testily: I didn’t pay money to stare at you.

It’s not that Thea doesn’t understand what they want. She understands, better than anybody! Even her own expectations for the World’s Smallest Woman quicken something inside her, some hope to witness a mysterious
incarnation of humanity, right before her eyes.

But what she also primarily thinks is that people are just so bored with themselves. They want to know: is it really different to be Tom Selleck? Or the size, permanently, of a toddler? They want it to be the same; they want it to be different. They cannot decide.

Two teenage girls, one carrying a baby, take in Thea with generically startled expressions.
Thea meets the wide eyes of the girl with the baby, and states with aggressive precision: “You were once this small too, you know.” The girl gapes, blinklessly, at Thea. Then she glances at her baby’s pretty, nubby face, and back down at Thea. Have I just lost my job? thinks Thea. Will this girl complain, and will the Coney Island Side Show recruit another World’s Smallest Woman? Thea had answered an ad in the Post; would they put another ad in the Post? But then the girls exchange glances and burst out laughing. “Right, huh?” the young mother says, nudging her baby’s forehead with the tip of her nose. The other girl, gazing at the TV, mutters, “Magnum P.I.” The young mother watches for a second—it was the jokey wrapping-up scene on the estate, palm trees shading the Ferrari and Magnum’s brunette love-interest—and says conversationally, “I’d love to be in Hawaii right now.” They all three agree that they’d rather be in Hawaii right now. The girls make polite goodbyes.

Thea lies back and pictures them marveling over the World’s Biggest Rat next door. The rat isn’t really a rat, but some kind of semi-aquatic mammal from the Amazon about three feet long and as barrel-chested as a pig that has the distinct misfortune of resembling a rat. It barely moves. Thea believes it is dying of boredom, claustrophobia, zoo sickness. No one cleans its cage, and so everyone hates it for stinking. Thea can hear them calling it disgusting, a piece of shit, throughout the day.

But now Thea hears Nikki talking to Johnny. Nikki appears, her face flushed from running around in the morning air. “Charmaine’s coming right over. She feels bad ‘cause you weren’t even supposed to work today.”

“Charming Charmaine,” murmurs Thea. The woman can wrap her accent around any situation and squeeze something amusing from it, she worries not one bit about the Rat (“that smehlly theeng”), she can rise to any occasion.
But I, admits Thea, cannot. That fact seems to matter in a way that size—her own, the world’s—doesn’t. It seems to require from Thea a certain extra vigilance towards herself.

Nikki tilts her head. “Mama, you okay?”

“It’s gotten worse,” says Thea. “But I’m okay.” She grasps onto the metal fence, pulls herself up. “My Nikki,” she says, lifting her arms for the first time. “Help me out of here.”

Later, over a tray of cold spaghetti, I found myself the topic of conversation. A young man told me, “Speak louder.” After taking the pressure of my blood, a nurse passed me an appointment card, a vividly beige pill, and this sage ...MORE]]> BY SEAN ADEN LOVELACE

One time a snake fell into my canoe. Right out of a bush. This was on the Spring River, in central Arkansas. I believe the snake was an Eastern Kingsnake (Lampropeltis getula getula), or possibly a Queen Snake (Regina septemvittata), though I’m no professional herpetologist. Well, my fellow canoeist—also my little cousin—leapt right overboard. Talk about impulsive! Reflexively, I grabbed my paddle and struck the snake with a delirious vengeance, severing its head. My mother and father and aunt and uncle paddled up and asked why my cousin was in the water. I lifted the headless snake. My mother screamed. My uncle gasped. Overhead, crows crowed.

Later, over a tray of cold spaghetti, I found myself the topic of conversation. A young man told me, “Speak louder.” After taking the pressure of my blood, a nurse passed me an appointment card, a vividly beige pill, and this sage advice: “It’s good to talk about things.” My father said, “He doesn’t panic.” Mother shook her head and made a click-cluck sound with her tongue. I replied, “I just reacted.” Followed by, “Anyone have a napkin?”

*

Let’s get the facts straight: A snake has scaly skin, no limbs, no external ears, no eyelids, no warm blood, and swallows its prey whole. Inoffensive and shy, snakes have evolved no behavior to prey upon humans. In fact, they avoid humans. However, humans never “get to know” snakes. Instead they form irrational assumptions based on appearance and hearsay. Consequently, humans “just react,” typically attacking snakes with a delirious vengeance. The Spring River averages a temperature of 49 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s clearly too cold. Isn’t it?

*

Here’s a story for you. According to mythology, the Greek island of Tinos was once called “Ofioussa” because of the snakes that lived there (Ofis: snake). Poseidon, the island’s benevolent protector-god, sent a swarm of crows to send away the snakes. As a result, in the good old olden days, a great temple dedicated to Poseidon stood on the island. Eventually, the temple returned to the earth. Returned to earth, I say.

*

Do you want to know the second most troubling thing? Eventually, my Spring River story grew like an anaconda—the world’s largest snake, with the longest specimen on record at 37 feet, 3 inches—and is still today told and retold at family holidays, reunions, mall outings, picnics, and/or hospital waiting rooms.

*

Let’s look at it this way: People are senselessly frightened of sharks, often thinking of them while treading ocean water. Professional sports teams use sharks as intimidating mascots (The San Jose Sharks, for example). The movie Jaws grossed 471 million dollars worldwide and generally scared the hell out of people. Sharks have gills, humans do not. Lungs! Lungs! Waterlogged lungs! As we enter the water, we enter the shark’s world. The shark’s house. The shark’s bathroom. How would you react if a shark strolled into your bathroom? You would bite the shark, literally or metaphorically. Incidentally, last year sharks in the United States bit nine humans. Incidentally, last year humans in New York City bit 1,517 humans.

Replace the word shark with the word snake.

*

Try to follow this: One day at the dinner table—when I was still allowed at the dinner table—I asked my father, a professional herpetologist: “Is it true snakes can only strike the length of their body?” Silence. Silence layered on silence, like fermenting flotsam. “No,” my father said carefully, glancing at my mother. “That’s a myth. Like that holding your mouth right will make the fish strike. Or that lightning never strikes twice.” “Thank you for the compliment,” my mother added, spooning up another spoonful of fig pie. “No one has referred to me as striking for years.” My father frowned, and turned to me. “It strikes me as strange you’d ask. Why do you?” I didn’t answer, and my brother hopped up from the table. “Time for the Diamondbacks game! Ol’ strike-em-out Johnson is pitching.” “Baseball?” father said, striking a match to light his post-pie pipe. “Aren’t they on strike?” My brother scowled. “That was years ago, dad.”

“Johnson, Johnson,” my mother mumbled to the linoleum. “Didn’t he strike a reporter?” No one replied, and she turned to my sister. “Ah! You’ve not eaten your figs. What is this, a hunger strike?” Lost in her headphones, my sister didn’t answer (or even hear the question). My father jumped from his chair. “Golly, it’s league night at Gold Strike. I nearly forgot. Wish me luck.” “Strikes and spares,” I whispered. Sister followed father from the room. I sat and looked to mother. She tilted away, collected our paper plates, stepped outside, and hurled them off the balcony.

*

Medical symbols—two snakes wrapped around a staff, for instance—give hope, say on the side of an ambulance, but they are not in themselves medicine. It’s all about timing. Asclepius (the son of Apollo and Coronis) discovered medicine by watching one snake use herbs to bring another snake back to life. Back to life. Asclepius learned the trick (back-bringing life), once healing an enemy of Zeus. In response, Zeus thunderstruck Asclepius with a vengeance sufficiently delirious enough to place him among the constellations, as Ophinchus, the serpent-bearer. Gives one a hankering for a quality telescope, does it not?

*

One evening my younger brother came ambling and twirling into the room. I wasn’t happy to see him because I owed him 14 dollars and an apple pie for a story he promised to tell me, yet had shed all my funds for the month. To summarize my brother: He was wearing a torn black T-shirt with the word JENIUS on the front in six inch white letters. “What are you doing?” he asked me. “Typing.” “Well, I just shot dad.” “Really?” “Yes. We walked the railroad tracks down to the bottom to shoot migrating blackbirds with our shotguns and on the way back we were tired and hungry and somewhat hypnotized by the monotony of the railroad ties and we strolled right up on a Black-masked Racer sunning itself on the hot metal of the track.” “What did you do?” “I just reacted.” “And?” “And I blew it away it with a delirious vengeance and some of the shot from the shell—three to be exact—ricocheted around the metal track and I heard dad go ‘Umph’ and I had shot him.” “And?” “And he bent over then straightened up and picked out two of the shot from the skin of his belly but one of the shot was deep inside so he just left it.” “Will he live?” “Yes, he will live (implying Yes, he will live, implying . . .). In fact, he shrugged and said, ‘At least I got my iron today.’” “Shot is made of lead.” “Obviously, but you don’t comeuppance somebody you just shot.” Ambling and twirling, my brother made his exit.

*

insert your very own snake story here

*

Did you notice my brother wasn’t at the Spring River with my entire family? And what of my sister? It was the climacteric of my life and they were in Colorado, at the Durango Bluegrass Meltdown. They were probably stoned. Since adolescence, when the family “gets together,” they attend music festivals. So they don’t really know about that day.

Look, I was out of control coming off the rapids. As the captain of our little ship, and as an older responsible relative, I was negligent. I rammed the bush and knocked my cousin out of the canoe, and the snake in. And the snake was dead and decapitated when it landed. It had most likely been left in the bush by a predator, or a scavenger, perhaps a bird. I specifically recall crowing.

*

No doubt references abound—of adder & fowl, fowl & adder: And I quote from the New International Variation: “For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind: But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.”
Amen.

*

Gripping two dried gourds, my sister entered the “living” room. She had on a Sony Walkman, a coiling headphone wire, a tiny pair of sunglasses, and a see-through two-piece candy green cotton bathing suit. “Valleys are the metaphor,” she said, shaking the gourds like two oversized rattles. “Once, in a river valley, during a severe weather event, a pregnant rat snake attacked a pack of muskrats. While riding down a large muskrat, she was struck dead by lightning. One baby snake squirted out, and fell into the pack of muskrats. ‘Squeak, squeak,’ the muskrats said. ‘Squeak, squeak,’ the snake said and joined the muskrats in chewing delectable lily pad bulbs. The snake lived with the muskrats. Seasons later a rat snake attacked the muskrats, saw the young snake and rode it down. ‘You’re a snake,’ the snake hissed. ‘You don’t eat lily pad bulbs.’ ‘I do,’ the young snake squeaked. Exasperated, the snake caught a muskrat and stuffed it into the young snake’s fangs. The young snake gagged, then paused as his mouth filled with muskrat flavor. He did like the taste.” My sister shimmied to her hidden music. “And then what happened?” I yelled. “Huh?” she said and returned upstairs, to the sunning booth.

*

Sometimes, when I can’t quit hearing this gurgling sound in my ears and my bladder won’t empty, I don’t sleep. This usually lasts 48 hours. Then I swoon, falling into a dream hole. Friends, family, clergymen, counselors, cashiers—everyone I know or have ever known—are standing around a narrow, winding table, its surface shimmering blue. They stare at me, expectant. Eyes gleaming, they chant: “seven, seven, seven.” They cross fingers and hold breaths and whisper gods. I hold two dice. I toss them. Silence, then a groan. Venomous vibes, constricting glares. On one die is the number one. On one die is the number one. Snake eyes.

*

Talk about a tale. One evening at the dinner table my father finished grace and just as he was about to fork the leg of a light yet succulent Cornish hen I added this verbal addendum to his amen: “And I, like a second-comer, waiting.” The family paused and my father said, “You stole that line from D.H. Lawrence, and I hardly see thievery as a sign of progress. In fact,”—his voice hardened—“you-need-to-see-a-shrink!” I replied, “I don’t want to be shrunk.” At this my mother cried, crossed herself, and told me I was a murderous, blasphemous pagan. She said exactly, “As a pagan, you shall now eat in your room, a room of your own, away from this house, driven from this table and home as St. Patrick drove and drummed the snakes from Ireland and into the sea.” I pointed out that—if this tale were to be “true”—the Sierra Club would definitely frown on Maewyn Succat’s (Patrick’s actual name) complete disregard of the fragile symbiosis of predator/prey, and that fossil records clearly indicate Ireland never had snakes. Not even a green one. Mother huffed and salted, peppered and huffed. I slithered upstairs to pack my bags.

*

When people see a snake—or something resembling a snake, a loop of tubing, a curl of tire, a discarded noose—especially if they happen upon it suddenly, they get this feeling. Like when you’re home alone at night and sitting on the toilet with a loaded revolver and something falls off the bookshelf in the next room. A jolt, only exponentially so.

*

The first most troubling thing is this: There never was a snake. It was horseplay, trying to splash each other. It was giggles and a big smile. The paddles splashing, not steering. We came around the corner crazily, crazily, crazily, and rammed the bush. My cousin tumbled away, beneath the roots. The Spring River has a devious current, a serpentine undertow. My mother and father and aunt and uncle paddled up and asked where, not why. 49 degrees. Beneath the roots. My mother screamed. My uncle gasped. I dived and swam and surfaced. Swam-and-surfaced. Surfaced. Downstream, flailing. Overhead, crows crowed. I remember them filling the sky, coating the sky, gumming the sky, like snake oil.

The FBI man lurks in the corner waiting to see who will read To Kill a Mockingbird so he can arrest them; he is also sometimes the library’s public masturbator.  He puts a paper bag over his head when he unzips his pants but everyone knows who he is by his shoes.

The soccer moms are in the toilet snorting coke.  Their cell phones ring, and ring, and ring.  The senior citizens have been let loose from the old folks’ prison, and they shuffle around in the reference collection trying to get the teenagers having sex to listen to ...MORE]]> BY MARIE POTOCZNY

There are mice in the library, and the teenagers are having sex in the reference collection.  The junior high boys are expressing their constitutional rights to look at pornography, and the girls are shredding the magnetic strips out of back issues of Vogue and People to steal for their bedroom walls.

The FBI man lurks in the corner waiting to see who will read To Kill a Mockingbird so he can arrest them; he is also sometimes the library’s public masturbator.  He puts a paper bag over his head when he unzips his pants but everyone knows who he is by his shoes.

The soccer moms are in the toilet snorting coke.  Their cell phones ring, and ring, and ring.  The senior citizens have been let loose from the old folks’ prison, and they shuffle around in the reference collection trying to get the teenagers having sex to listen to their stories about the war and nylon rationing.

Someone calls on the telephone and asks, “Is there a Mr. Coholic there?  A Mr. Al Coholic?”  The librarian asks, and everyone laughs including the FBI man dusting for fingerprints near Leaves of Grass.

A man tries to sneak his book, “Carburetor Repair in 30 Minutes” into the overnight book drop.  The librarian says, “Hey, you can’t do that.  That’s the Overnight Book Drop.”

The man has a dirty shirt and fingernails.  His hair is slicked back with the same grease he uses on his Mustang.  The book, “Carburetor Repair in 30 Minutes” is also black and greasy, and the spine is broken.  The librarian pinches it with her library tongs and holds it out for the man to see—her shoe tapping on the floor like a schoolteacher’s.

The man does not like schoolteachers.  They remind him he did not do well in school.  And libraries make him nervous; someone might point a finger and laugh at him for not being smart.  But the man doesn’t really know this about himself, so he is getting mad at the librarian and getting ready to call her uptight and a bitch even though he sees she is pretty underneath her glasses and has shapely legs.

The librarian hates to be called uptight and a bitch—it’s jerks like him who don’t value books and who make her mad—even if he does smell wonderful and raw of lava soap and car grease.

They are getting ready to fight.  The library watches.  The teenagers having sex pause in mid-kiss, still pulling on each other’s lips.  The girls shredding magazines and the boys looking at porn, pause.  The FBI man and the old people watch.

A mouse runs across the floor between the librarian and the man.  She breathes.  He breathes.  They attract together like violent magnets.  He sweeps her up into his arms and carries her out.  They set off the metal detector.  The library cheers.