Delmarva Review

“Departures” by Bohdan Dowhaluk

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DEPARTURES was produced as a radio broadcast by Delmarva Radio Theatre, hosted by Hal Wilson. Check it out here.

Bohdan Dowhaluk

Departures

Excerpt from Delmarva Review Volume 13. Adapted for podcast production by Delmarva Radio Theatre. 

“THIS WILL RUIN MY LIFE,” said the recording. The red light on the answering machine had stopped blinking. “With the B you gave me, I will never get into graduate school now. I thought I would die when I saw the posting.” A tremor dominated the message.

The student failed to identify herself. Trying to guess the identity of the caller—there were many Bs in the class—he replayed the message, but the fidelity of the caller’s voice was poor since the machine was old, one of the last in the department if not one of the last on campus. He decided that any resolution to this problem could wait until he returned from his conference. For a paleontologist, appreciating time was an art. Life-and-death issues were evaluated from a different perspective.

Yet the complaint was not a surprise. He was honest enough about himself to realize that both his colleagues in the anthropology department and his students—he was the only true paleontologist teaching in a very small school that probably had no business offering an anthropology degree—had written him off as a has-been, hiding behind the fine print of his rights as a tenured professor. In a sense, they were right, and he was ready and happy to leave. This semester was to be his last before he finally retired. The occasional tremble in his hands and the slight stoop that he had developed of late—even he noticed it—made one part of him side with his detractors. He thought that a pain in his chest indicated that something also was wrong with his heart, but at other times the pain reminded him of a bruised rib. At one point, the pain was so severe and sudden that it pulled him to the ground onto all fours. The doctors were skeptical of his claims and assured him that he had not suffered a heart attack.

He came to feel that ghostly hyenas, academic, social, and medical, were pursuing him, waiting for any opportunity to laugh or to attack. Yet he insisted on attending one last professional conference in order to bring closure to his career. Listening to this gathering of experts might help him ascertain whether he still loved what he expended his life on—what if it was all a waste, after all—or whether he was expecting too much from love or from life. In preparing for the conference, he ignored the more recent and professionally fashionable controversies within his field. Of late, he had become preoccupied with one mind worm: did man first walk upright because he was fleeing predators or because he had discovered an ability to hunt something larger than berries and was surprised by a new ability to make death? Even though at times he thought that too many angels could fit on the head of this pin, he could not shake off the thought.

“ARNIE, DON’T FORGET TO TAKE OUT THE GARBAGE,” said his wife, matter of factly as she continued her knitting, with the tick-tick of the needles puncturing the silence of the room. “You don’t remember anything anymore. I have to keep reminding you.”

He mumbled to himself: “I remember so much, too much.”

She either did not hear or ignored what he said. “Ever since you lost your hair, you seemed to have lost your mind. Maybe you need to see a doctor.”

“I’m just tired. Very tired. And no, I’m not going to get a hair transplant.”

Since Alice’s second reminder earlier in the evening, he’d been thinking about the animals his granddaughter had drawn on the wall above the cans in the garage. Lucy was a sometime and current visitor who was bequeathed to them whenever her parents traveled the world by plane, by ship, and by bed. For him, either because of his forgetfulness or because he fooled himself repeatedly into the surprise of discovery, the creatures floating above the collection of garbage gave him pleasant pause every time he saw them. But after Alice offered her third reminder later in the evening, he dutifully pulled the cans to the curb, pausing to remember something that he had not witnessed in person but saw only in his imagination: how Lucy had made these marks years ago in a moment of childhood creativity, leaving a black rubbing where her wheelchair pressed against the wall. She was twelve now and drew on computers instead.

The next morning, Arnie was very ready to leave for the conference. At the airport, Alice asked him to call her if there were any changes in the return flight. She hated waiting for anything and anyone. He did not take it personally at this point. And Lucy, paying another visit to an airport and participating in another departure that was almost never hers, pulled him closer when he leaned down to kiss her in her wheelchair. She began, “I . . .”  But he rushed her with his desperation. “Create something that you will always remember,” he whispered to her. “Draw, create something more.”

And she looked at him as if one part of her understood and another did not.

AT THE CONFERENCE itself, he nodded off several times during one of the few presentations he attended and circled back to his own argument with himself over whether the first man—and what does one mean by “man”?—rose to walk on two legs because of the need to escape predators or to hunt on the African savanna. Everyone else in the room seemed to focus on some other topic. He had planned to submit an article for the conference and enter the current academic fray, but after the extended time his laptop sucked from him, he reread his work and discovered near-gibberish. But as he listened to the other conference attendees engaged in a heated discussion, he surmised that they suffered from the same writing and thinking problems he did. They just did not recognize it. With almost everyone around him either tapping away on laptops or picking at the screens of computer pads, he felt as if he were back in the classroom where students either contacted each other in a kind of conspiracy of inattention or surfed the net. A woman sitting near the front of the conference room hit her laptop keys with the hard impact of someone raised on manual typewriters. He felt that he could love her for what seemed to be her spite. Her hair was dyed an unnatural fiery red.

In the elevator on his way up to his hotel room after the last session for the day, he checked his voicemails because he had heard his phone vibrate repeatedly in his pocket during the late afternoon. Usually his wife did not call, so perhaps it was his granddaughter. Instead, it was the student who had contacted him earlier. She had discovered his cell number. She struggled with many aspects of paleontology, but she was good with computers and computer searches, even for plagiarizing parts of her paper. “I hope,” said the voice message, “you realize that you are ruining my life.” As he erased the message, he muttered to himself: “Probably not. A life is hard to ruin, I hope.”

And that night, being alone in his room, he lay on his bed and stared at the cobwebs in one corner of the ceiling as they gently waved back and forth to the hum of the ventilation unit under the window like the ghostly outlines of a belly dancer. Succumbing to temptation, he opened the small refrigerator and partook of the overpriced treats. Suddenly, he felt a need to get away from the room, to go somewhere, as long as it was out, as long as it was away.

And then, as if a genie had granted him his wish, he found himself squinting at the relative brightness of the hotel corridor. While looking for a former colleague who was now teaching at another college, he lost his way and walked into a room with an opened door—Herb from Penn State was always the welcoming kind; his house was a mecca for stray dogs and cats.  Arnold thought that he had found his old friend. The number on the door was right, or close to being right.

Instead, he found himself face-to-face with a woman who was more than slightly drunk. She was the red-headed typist from the conference, and the rest of her dress and demeanor somehow managed to challenge even the air around her to a fight.

“Surprise,” she said. “You and me. It’s our party. It’s all random. I like these kinds of surprises.” And she pulled him deeper into the room and quickly closed the door, leaning against it with a determined finality. He found himself standing confused in a space that, despite being a mirror copy of his room, seemed as large and threatening as an open field full of wild animals.

He remembered from a conference panel discussion that she supported the argument that hunger drove migrations across continents—or perhaps he was only imagining that his query was taken up by the entire gathering. Her hair must have been dyed because its fiery hue seemed to be an intentional cue that she was dangerous. With her quick words working on his dull and confused mind, she stoked his old embers and then brought into play the life-sized vinyl skeleton she had won as a door prize that day.

“I didn’t have a choice. It was the only thing left,” she said. As she blew up the doll again from its somewhat deflated state, she laughed as if she were inhaling nitrous oxide. At first he just stood there, confused, swaying slightly as she seemed to be giving the plastic skeleton CPR while both were standing upright.

“I have to go,” he said. “This is a mistake.”

“Oh, I know that,” she said, then grabbed him and gave him a generous kiss.

Up close, he could see her thick make-up more clearly. He could smell whatever it was the cosmetic makers mix into it: glues, he often thought. He had a very bad sense of smell his wife always told him, yet he felt that this was one of the many times she was wrong in her estimation of him. He tried not to think of her now. He did not want to hear her voice.

“Here, take this. It’s a fountain of youth.” And the woman gave him a red pill. He wondered if, upon ingesting it, he would sprout red hair in places where for most of the previous decade the fields were often barren. The hair would make them a matched couple.

“You are…younger…than I am,” he said. He looked at the pill in his hand and tried to decipher the map that was laid out in from of him in the creases of his palm.

“Who cares? We are not being scientific here. Forget data and all those details. Let’s have some time without any –ologies.  No anthro, paleo, or even oncologies. We are only the pure,” and she paused, “of heart,” but then she shook her head as if she needed to find another word. “But we still can try to be free.”

Then she peeled off his name tag. “Arnold?” she said. “You need something more up-to-date. No names here, anyway. Not at this conference of ours. We don’t want to tip off either the good angels or the bad in their journal keeping. I will never call you Arnold, Arnold.” And she burst out laughing for a reason he had difficulty following at first.

He rolled the pill around in his hand. “What is this?”

“Oh, don’t be such a stiff about it. Take a chance. It’s all chance, anyway.” She grabbed him and gave him another kiss. “If chance can kill you, it can also keep you from dying. Let’s not get too particular about things.” And for some reason, she laughed so hard, like a hyena, that he thought that the sound would travel through all the vents of the hotel and into the street and beyond, until the horns of the taxis on the street finally killed it.

And he swallowed the pill with a small sip of water she offered from a glass waiting on the night stand.

“It’s all just magic,” she said, “or maybe just an M & M, peanuts and chocolate. Whatever works. As long as the cure works.” The last phrase trailed off as if she herself was relying only on hope.

Afterward, one of the few things he remembered was the vague sense of her lying next to him in bed. Her wig—“it’s real hair, I promise, but not mine,” she said—that landed on the ventilation unit under the window seemed to seethe with each gush of air coming from the louvers.  With a cry inspired by a release of something primeval, she knelt next to him and began slapping his body as if to wake him. Even though her head was almost clean shaven, she was still very much a woman. Despite his trying to suppress his thinking, his overthinking, he could not help but struggle to understand what might be hiding behind her forced bravado, behind the desperation she seemed to cling to. In time, as whatever was or was not in the pill took its apparent effect, he too found that certain indecipherable something she was leading him to, and for at least one night, he clung to it for a few moments in that same confused need while they had animal sex. It hurt far less than love, it seemed, and was easier than he thought it would be.

On his way out of the room, after it seemed he had violated all parameters of time and space, he felt another vibration in his pocket. It was the student calling again. “You are ruining my life, Benedict,” she said, obviously drunk, and waiting for a response. His thinking remained blank for a while, and then he pressed “end." He wanted to keep his body feeling simply happy for a few more moments. He thought that if this student was forward enough to call him by his first name, she should have used the right one. And he thought about the final words the woman who was once a redhead said as she nudged him out of the room: “You know, for an older man, you have potential.” And she kissed him on his cheek almost tenderly. “Good luck. And when you find it, share some with me.” And she laughed but caught herself short because the hotel hallway, though empty, seemed to be alert and watching.

As he walked toward his room—he repeatedly checked his room key for the number as he almost staggered down the hall like a wounded animal—the sound of her laughter that he carried with him turned into a gurgle. In fact, he could not even be certain whether it was real, whether any of it was.

The light in the hallway seemed something alien. Someone had opened the window near the door to the emergency staircase. EXIT said the sign just to the right of it. A cold morning chill was just beginning to move in, a shiver time, when the world was still struggling to come alive and nothing yet mattered. He imagined that silent, ghostly creatures were gathering at the far end of the hallway, forming a pack and looking at each other while licking their chops.

THAT NIGHT BECAME A LINGERING MEMORY that haunted him as, back home now, he was taking out the garbage again after more prompts from Alice. Unfortunately, the headlights of a passing car brought his thinking back to his neighborhood and to the now. As he pushed the can as far back against the curb as possible, he listened to the hum of the AC units singing a benediction to the night. The houses were planted close to each other in order to be environmentally responsible said the developer of this neighborhood, but Arnold thought that argument was merely a ploy to sell houses on too-small lots. The geniuses who created the neighborhood had managed to include both “Olde” and “Village” in naming this herding of real estate deals. Arnold tried to imagine the moos of the cows that had roamed this land not too long ago.

Two houses down the street, the Palmers’ dog, loose again, was leisurely marking lamp posts as it worked its way toward Arnold along the gently curving road. The dog seemed to be spinning an invisible web connecting all things that he visited into a seemingly coherent whole.

After briefly looking up at the streetlight hanging over him, Arnold pushed down on the lid of the overstuffed can. A puff of odor escaped. He imagined living on the savanna, in the open fields, sniffing for danger or for food, with the tall grasses turned golden from the hot, blinding sun. Its dry light held dominion until the rains came and color blossomed across the fields. In the distance, he imagined several trees scattered across the African plain, as if patiently waiting for the haze to settle. The silhouette of a herd moved slowly across the horizon like a slow tide, but the indistinct shapes were too far and too small for him to decipher.

Then, suddenly, back on his own street, Arnold felt the dog that was wandering the neighborhood nuzzle him in the crotch. Startled, he shooed it away, but the dog looked back repeatedly, as if in disgust, while continuing its circuit of the street. Whenever Palmer from three houses down went on a drinking binge, his dog was always let loose, one of the few inadvertent kindnesses the animal experienced in a life otherwise spent mostly penned in a large kennel in a small yard. Invariably, when Palmer rediscovered his sobriety, he would angrily round up King, most often in the middle of the night after he would wake up from a day full of sleep and drag the dog hard on a leash back to its kennel.

After Arnold closed the garage door, made the downstairs dark, and walked up to the bedrooms, he stopped in the bathroom and began to disassemble himself for the night. Outside, the dog yelped in pleasure, it seemed, as if it had found something it liked.

Behind him in the mirror, and a little over his shoulder, Arnold thought he could see the woman again in her hotel room. He almost felt like saying “their” hotel room.

“What’s love got to do with it?” She seemed incredulous. He did not remember what his question was. She was laughing, making snow angels under the cool white sheets as she waited for him, while on a chair near the bed lay the deflated skeleton, doubled over as if it had been sick. Its slow leak could not be stopped. This was the second night. As she patted the bed, he sensed that time seemed to be of the essence.

Looking at the woman’s bald head, he remembered how, the first time she had discarded her wig with a Frisbee throw as her final act of disrobing, he had felt shock turn to pleasure. He had appreciated her honesty, but he felt that she had advanced to a place far ahead of him, that he had some catching up to do. Yet he hoped that this encounter would not really count against him in the ledger the gods kept.  He was very conscious of ledgers of late. Perhaps any intimacy between two nearly bald people might be considered a healing and would not be recorded as a transgression against any code. The losses on both sides were clearly being flagged.

And then, back in the bathroom of his own house and anchored in a reality of the mere present, he brushed his teeth and washed his face.

WHILE THE COMEDIAN ON TV was enjoying himself immensely during one of his late-night monologs, Alice put down the remote, smeared lotion on her hands, and added a layer of white on her face that made her look like a ghost or a shaman. Arnold was quickly falling asleep, his face buried in his pillow so deeply one might think he was looking for something hidden inside. He had already positioned his body at the edge of the bed so that it would take less effort to roll out when his wife nudged him if he began to snore or to kick in his dreams.

“Where are you running? Those feet are driving me crazy.” This was a question that she would ask often, but she and Arnold knew there was no real answer, though Arnold would at times entertain some possible responses.

There was an unusually large explosion of laughter from the small screen that brought Arnold to the surface after he had already drifted off. He rolled back and forth as if to rewind himself back to sleep.

“You know,” said Alice, “do you know what that student of yours called you?”

Arnold returned to her from somewhere in his driftings. “For a while, she must have been calling me almost every day,” he said. “Sounded desperate. I need to call campus security and see if they can do something about that.”

“I don’t think they deal with crazies if the crazies live off campus. But you know what she did to your office while you were gone?”

“My office?”

“Security called and said another teacher caught her scrawling cuss words on the walls around your door.”

“Desperate people do that,” he said. “It’s usually a dead end.”

“She used the F word. Said that’s what you were. The security people just wanted you to know.”

“When did this happen?”

“While you were at the conference.”

Arnold hesitated. “Why didn’t you tell me when I came back?”

“Well, by then it was old news, and you seemed so preoccupied with something¾you seemed to exist in another world¾that I didn’t want to bother you. Besides, security cleaned up all the markings on the wall and door almost immediately. So, it’s like it never happened.”

He rolled over on his side and said good night and thank you, and despite his agitated thoughts, he fell asleep almost despite himself until a nudge encouraged him to prepare for the journey to the extra bedroom, to the snoratorium, as they called it.

“And she said”—his wife was talking in her near sleep just as he planted both feet on the ground next to the bed—"love you.”

He stopped his leaving.

“Who?  Who said?”

His wife came closer to the surface and let out one final bubble.

“Lucy. She said she loved you.”

“When?”

“Today, yesterday. What does it matter when?” And his wife drifted off.

And he dragged his feet over to the guest bedroom.

AND HE THOUGHT HE DREAMT OF LUCY, but the line between dreaming and not was becoming less distinct of late. He thought he was sitting in her wheelchair, and she was the one standing.

“I am going,” she said.

“Where?”

“My parents are back, and they’re taking me on that hot-air balloon ride they promised and showing me the world.”

“They’re going to show you the world?”

“Yes.”

And suddenly she became so blurry he felt she was going to disappear.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I wanted to do that. To teach you.”

And at that moment he felt a pain in his back as he often did when he would lift her from her chair when she was younger and try to move her to a new place. But the pain was worth it, just to hold her close for a few moments and feel her arms around his neck, her intertwined fingers trusting and her face next to his, exuding hope.

“I need .  .  .” but the dream collapsed into an empty blankness before he could finish saying what he wanted to say.

HE WAS AWAKENED BY THE WOMAN’S BODY that at the point of contact with him seemed to be on fire. He was in the hotel room again. Then he realized that he was not dreaming but remembering. At his side, he could see in the half light of the bathroom door left slightly ajar that she was sweating profusely, beads rolling down her face as if she were running a fever. This change was a far cry from the moment much earlier in the evening when he had rolled over after he thought she might have broken one of his ribs, or perhaps stolen it for herself as a kind of cavewoman’s trophy. In the few words they exchanged after the deed, he saw that she did not share his sense of fall but, in fact, seemed happy, but in an uneasy way, as if happiness might not be enough. Now that she was wet with what seemed to be a fever, confusion swept over him for a few moments, but then he pulled up their bedsheet and wiped her face gently.

Even though he did not know her name, he felt that he had known her all his life. As he watched her lean away and take some pills together with a drink of water from a glass on the nightstand, he did not want her to disappear over the edge of the bed. He was afraid of that edge, though he did not know whether this fear was for her sake or for his.

And when she turned back to him after placing the pill bottle back on the nightstand, she said, “It’s nothing that you can catch, dearie. So, don’t worry. I don’t think you ever had what I lost. We’re not just talking about body parts here.”

And he remembered how she laughed awkwardly again at some joke he did not understand. It was not the animal laugh from earlier in the evening but something else, as if she were trying to cheer up someone in the room. He wondered who else it could be: certainly not the skeleton now lying flat on the floor, not himself, but then with the impact of almost a physical kick to his side, he was overcome with awe over how lonely she must be. For a moment, he wanted to do something to help her but did not know what he could do.

After he finished his business in the dark—the clock in his own guest bedroom where he was sleeping read 1:11 when he left the bed—he decided to just sit on the closed commode seat and think. But then a sound outside caused him to open the window shade. Everything in the yard was transformed by the silver-white light of the moon. And there was Palmer, pulling his dog across the lawn, the leash straining. King was offering a good but relatively quiet fight in return.

Once back in bed in the snoratorium, Arnold tried to lie on his back, but as he reached across the empty bed, he was distracted by a vulture he saw sitting in the corner of the room. Arnold closed his eyes, but the bird was still there. He was not sure whether he was dreaming or remembering. Past the vulture, Arnold saw the savanna, the expanse that seemed to end at the horizon but only because the eye or the mind could not deal with anything beyond. A small herd of something hovered in the distance like an unstable mirage and a dog, but not Palmer’s dog, moved about restlessly at his side. Arnold felt uncomfortable with this loyalty from a strange animal. This pairing might have reflected a reciprocal need, but then he realized he should not overthink the situation because he was on a hunt and events were unfolding quickly. He must pay attention and be alert.

Scattered bones covered the ground all around him. Some looked to be human and some seemed different. He wanted to stoop to examine these remains—perhaps they had answers—but a sense of urgency propelled him forward. The vulture, now clearly sitting in a tree, dipped its head lower to observe better.  As Arnold began to walk faster into the ever-deepening twilight, unbending his aching back, running now, almost losing touch with the ground, he soon reached the herd. They were buffalo. He was very hungry and felt that he could kill one of them and even eat it raw, but as he came closer, the horned beasts merely looked at him with bored curiosity. Arnold was distracted by a pack of hyenas gathering just beyond the edge of the herd. Despite the shock of severe pain he felt somewhere high in the ribs or near the heart—he was not sure which—he knew that he still needed to run past the herd and past the horizon. He was hunting for something beyond, something more. Now, as he moved effortlessly across the savanna, but with a deep hunger still gnawing at him, he believed that he had wings and that the stars were not that far away.

Pushcart-nominated “Prairie Fever” by Emily Rae Roberts

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Emily Rae Roberts

PRAIRIE FEVER

Excerpt from Delmarva Review Volume 11. Adapted for podcast production by Delmarva Public Radio, Writer's Edition. 

Mira had no choice but to be caught up in the moment of silence, sitting on the half-crumpled sheets in apartment 5D, neck craning uncomfortably to stare at the slow rotation of the off-white fan above her. The room, lit only by the late morning sunlight, shrank down to the steady circling of the blades. She had never noticed it before. A symptom of faulty wiring.

There came a sound like crashing from the other side of her bedroom wall, followed by the telltale snarling and snapping of her neighbors. They were wolves, she imagined, or stray and mangy dogs fighting over a scrap in a back alley, harsh barks and low growls muffled only by the thin layer of plaster between them. Her alarm began to beep, and she pulled herself to the edge of the mattress. Step one, turn it off. The beeping ceased but the wolves still scratched at the wall. “Stupid bitch!” Step two, get dressed. Mira stood before fumbling along the clutter of the floor to find a clean-enough pair of pants, a bra forgotten, a shirt that didn’t smell. She put them on methodically, treasonous eyes straying back to the ceiling fan.

Her living room had been overtaken by her research. Piles of books cluttered the floor, topped haphazardly with primary sources she’d scanned and printed for four cents a page. Copies of photographs of people with the smiles bleached from their faces by the unforgiving Western sun stared at her from where she had taped them to the wall.

This morning she remembered to brush her teeth, and she did it with the toothbrush hanging limply from her mouth, too busy scanning the diary of a doctor living in the 1840s describing in detail the medical maladies of the time: snake bites, dysentery, and, the worst of the lot, prairie fever.

At least snakes had the common decency to kill the victim quickly.

But prairie fever relied on the perceived fragility of the mind, striking those on their homesteads all alone, miles away from the nearest neighbor. It ate away at the hope for the future that drove them to the West. Prairie fever infected the very essence of yourself that spurred you to keep moving, living, and dreaming until it all rotted away. Kansas was a breeding ground for the fever. How could it not be? It’s a wasteland, where, in a good year, you eke out enough living to afford to clothe your family in something besides old flour sacks. It’s a place where, in the bad years, the fires tear through the dry grass. Your sod house floods with half a foot of stagnant water. Locusts descend to eat every growing life (you could try to cover your cabbages with cloth, but they’ll eat that too). A sudden blizzard rolls in to cull your herd of cattle. No wonder people went crazy. Bad years outnumbered the good.

Her phone chirped again. Mira placed the book upside down on the porcelain edge and leaned over to spit in the sink, watching with slight satisfaction as the splotch crawled toward the drain.

Five minutes later, with her Jansport backpack slung over her shoulder, she wheeled her old, worn bicycle to the waiting elevator.

When her mother and father had presented the obnoxiously pink, floral bicycle on her thirteenth birthday, she had been thrilled. In the meantime, after years of riding through the suburb’s paved cul-de-sacs and the occasional crash into innocent bushes, the paint had begun to chip and the front “T” attached to the handlebars was permanently bent slightly to the right, a quirk that caused her to gently veer toward the nearest brick wall. But because she loved the stupid thing, and she couldn’t afford a new backpack, much less a car, Mira dutifully climbed aboard and cycled to one of two destinations: school or Beijing Palace, the only good Chinese place within two miles that refused to deliver.

Today she turned north toward campus while her mind wandered to Western trails of 1842.

On the surface, the streets were desolate, except for the indifferent tumbling of litter, moving steadily along with the wind, like Mira, as if having an appointment to get to and no time for the others around them. But beneath the surface of calm, the city was alive, thriving as the prairie does, with life hidden beneath the careful shelter of the waving grasses and blooming flowers. Instead of prairie dogs and beetles, rats skittered in the shelter of alleyways and cockroaches traced hidden highways in the towering brick buildings, driven into apartment walls by the dropping temperatures.

But, much like the prairie, life was a tender thing, burning out as readily as it had sprung up blazing.

Without warning, two hissing, screeching tomcats tumbled out of a nearby alleyway, all puffed fur and bared fangs. Instinctively, Mira jerked her handlebars. By pure luck, she managed to avoid the pair. Skirting around the two, she turned her head to appraise the showdown happening at 11:42 a.m. It looked like the ginger was winning, but the black was scarred and scrappy.

She wondered idly, as she rounded the next corner, if she would ever see the loser again. Probably not. Such was the way of life, after all.

 

It still felt wrong to pass room 106, standing like a ghost town with its darkened windows and bolted door. Mira knew if she was to press her forehead against the cool glass she would see the familiar room and that old oak desk with most of its knickknacks standing guard as they gathered dust. Her current advisor’s office was nothing like it, cold and clinical with its burnished silver accents and the bookcases that stared down at Mira. She pulled herself away from the office, continuing her journey, which grew more tiring step after step as she dragged herself up the stairs that seemed like mountains.

Dr. Hymshaw was waiting, all crisp shirt and heavy brows, staring up at her as she hesitantly knocked on the doorframe. “Come in, Ms. Reed.”

Dr. Stanton never called her that. She would have stood up from her cluttered work space, face brightening as she dragged out “Mira” like it was taffy and offered her a cup of tea and her choice of chocolate from the George Washington bowl. Why don’t you pick George’s brain, Mira? Hymshaw could bludgeon her with the way he said Reed.

Mira sat down cautiously, swinging her backpack around and brandishing it like a torn fabric shield on her lap. He looked at her and she saw smoke on the horizon, the dangerous wisps that spoke of coming ruination. She could already feel the panic rising up in her throat. Her fingers itched to gather up the water-soaked flour sacks and beat it back, those flames that threatened everything she lived for. Instead, her hand reached back to stroke her auburn hair, and Mira realized, belatedly, that she had forgotten to brush her hair in the morning when she found a matted hunk near her neck.

“Have you decided your argument?” he asked. The movement of his folding hands caught her attention.

“No. I’m still reading. But I think I’m going to rely on prairie fever as a frontier epidemic. I’m thinking about how it’s not just the physical environment that makes people lose it.”

This was not true. She had decided her argument, but that was back with Stanton, who nodded her head energetically whenever Mira had let slide she was considering prairie fever as the subject of her thesis. A gentle prod to the right path might accompany it, but Stanton had always listened in a way that made Mira’s words feel worth something.

“What do you mean?”

“When you boil down the instances of prairie fever, it’s just psychotic breaks. But people have meltdowns in the modern era, in cities and suburbs and in clinical doctor’s offices. Depression can happen anywhere for any reason. It can’t be just the emptiness. It has to be something more. A human factor that the prairie taps into. Some phenomena that can be explained using the prairie.”

“Yes,” Dr. Hymshaw nods. “But Ms. Reed, this is history. It is not the social sciences or psychology. We don’t answer these questions. I understand your previous advisor encouraged you to go beyond the span of our field, but if you want to have a successful thesis review, you need to focus more on the time, on the primary sources. Do they support this?”

“Not yet.”

“Well,” the graying man said, thin lips disappearing into the set line of his mouth, “then you don’t really have an argument at all. I’m going to send a couple of essays to you. Maybe seeing what other historians are arguing could help you finalize your thesis. But, as a reminder, your deadline is in two weeks. After that, we will need to begin serious prepping for your review in May. You’re already very behind.”

She could see the flames now, in her mind, eating their way through the dry grasses toward the work she had carefully cultivated since she had graduated from undergrad two years back. “Yeah.”

 

Mira had missed six calls from her mother. Had it really been four days since they’d spoken? Her thumb hovered hesitantly over the green phone icon as she slowed her descent down the ornate front stairs of the history department. She tucked it to her side before venturing toward the place where she had chained her bike to a streetlamp. What was there even to talk about? Hello, yes, I didn’t kill a cat, so I think I had a good day.

Or maybe she was having a bad day. It was hard to tell. But there was only a wheel chained to the post.

Mira glanced up and down the street. No bicycle.

She didn’t want to talk to her mother, but her voice still played in her ears. Mira, you need to quit it with this thing. There’s a whole lotta history. Gotta be somethin’ less depressing. But it wasn’t just something, was it? No, like she had whined harshly five days ago. It was everything.

She kicked the wheel out of spite. Who even takes a bicycle with only one wheel? It isn’t even a bicycle at that point. Sighing, Mira bent to unchain the lonely wheel and instead looped it through the handle at the top of her backpack, leaving it to dangle there and anchor her more firmly to the ground with its insistent weight. It deserved a proper burial, that only piece left.

 

The temperature dropped steadily, the January skies harboring thick, gray clouds that threatened and menaced the people below. They were the kind of gray that warned you to buy milk and bread and peanut butter at the store, just in case.

Mira was reminded of a story she had read, years ago, as she drudged in the direction of home. Maybe it had started all of this. Maybe not. Like many of the things she read these days, it took place on the Kansas prairie. A young woman heard every night for weeks the howling of encircling wolves, driven by hunger to the promise of her little sod house. Her husband was gone somewhere. She was alone.

And one night, when she heard the wolves through the dirt walls, she left the gun on the table, flung open the doors, and walked out into the void of the dark flatlands where the beasts tore her into pieces. Another casualty of the fever.

Mira clenched her phone harder in her fist. How were they all so easily infected? Who would throw themselves to the mercy of hungry wolves?

But in a way she understood, and that understanding hit her with the force of a bullet. It left her floundering, tumbling until her mind was pinned to the ground by some stronger beast. A wolf, or maybe a feral cat.

Mira stopped in the center of the sidewalk, watching the people part around her seamlessly. Her cellphone threatened to fall to its death as her fingers went limp, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. The others stretched all around her, heads bobbing in an undulating wave of movement. There was no beginning, no end, just the endless stretch as far as she could see in front of her. She was choked by it.

This was her frontier, a barren prairie of concrete and glass.

The snow began falling, thick and heavy, dampening the sounds of the people and Mira’s slow footsteps as she lumbered, dazed and sluggish, toward home.

 

Mira took the stairs. The burn of her thighs and back, and the slapping of the one loose bicycle tire, felt good. There was the number 5, bold and shiny in cheap chipped copper plating. Pushing open the door, she entered her hallway, walking slowly and leaving in occasional intervals a drop of white from the snow. It had begun to melt when she started her ascent, and it soaked into what it could and sloughed off what it couldn’t.

Mindlessly she trudged past A, past B, but stilled when she heard the wolves growling and snapping in apartment C. She hardly registered her own raised hand, poised to knock. Dare she? No, no. Not now. Not with the cold wetness soaking into her bones.

There was 5D, waiting for her. And when she opened the door, she was greeted by the symptoms of her own fever. Papers strewn across every available surface. Black-and-white photos and her own scribbled notes taped to the wall.

Mira began to shake, the cold replaced with something warmer, a fire in her stomach. Her backpack slid to the floor, the metallic clang ringing empty in her ears. Her movements were staccato.

The winds howled. Somewhere a black tomcat shivered in the snow, scarred and bleeding, but alive.

The woman walked to the window, fiddling with the latch and tugging, straining, lifting until it opened with a pop, and a gust of wind and cold surged into the space. Papers fluttered on the walls, slid off coffee tables, and scattered across her floor. Trembling hands gathered the nearest pile and with a cry flung them out.

They floated, listless and lifeless on the winter wind, blending with the white so that it was all she could see out there. Nothing¾not a building, not a person, not a tree or a bird or a cat. Just the white. It was blinding, but the blindness brought no calm. Her fingers ached with cold from where she gripped the sill. She yanked the window down, body shaking from more than the damp. And when she left her apartment, wandered back outside to the streets, the fever still burned hot in her stomach and pricked at her eyes.

It took her an hour to salvage what she could.

Pushcart-nominated “Epithalmion” by Daisy Bassen

By

D Bassen
D Bassen

Daisy Bassen

EPITHALMION

Excerpt from Delmarva Review Volume 11. 

This will be easier than believing every appled fall
The bulbs we plant, without benefit of camphor

Or invocations against squirrels, will survive
Smothering and come the April muds

Turn a scarlet cheek to their betrayers. This will be
Simpler than knowing the low moon of winter

Isn’t butterfly-pinned in the cherry dark,
Stuffed in the line of bare maples near the seminary.

There is no Cadillac shark-finned enough for us
To get to it, and even our improved teeth

Are not so sharp to chew a skinny slice.
This is not so hard as moving one plastic rook

From his acre of cardboard light, the wrist-flick dunk
Of a tea bag, one breath in a long night of dreamless sleep.

Take one stop-action step, one footfall from dim
To stone-bleached glare, and we will make

A new earth around us, air leaping like a strong salmon,
The palm’s slap..! Then the sun will honey-suckle us,

Newborns going pink.

Pushcart-nominated “Autumn Sestina” by Adam Tamashasky

By

Adam Tamashasky
Adam Tamashasky

Adam Tamashasky

AUTUMN SESTINA

Excerpt from Delmarva Review Volume 11. 

In the minutes before bedtime, evening’s gathering
the last scraps of light to her orange
sky. My daughter runs to another tree and leaves
the last one to dim. We always end
our days here on this corner lot lost
behind a phalanx of trees, so it’s here shadows first fall.

Which is not to say this foreshadows her first fall,
even if in the dusk the portents are gathering.
I’m striving to be a parent on whom nothing is lost,
not even the way the dying sun fades her face to orange,
not even my desire to tell that there’s an end
for all of us as final as for her leaves

that dissolve to crackles beneath her as she leaves
for another tree. Yes, even that tree has a fall
in store, daughter. And that’s okaythat we end.
But now’s for laughing, for the smell of autumn grass, for gathering
the fallen tears of the trees in handfuls of orange
to see if holding on enough keeps things from getting lost.

You’ll be lost.
This leaves
me standing in orange
in the fall
gathering
for an end

that should follow my own end.
Remember, when mine comes, you’re not lost,
though, from time to time, in a gathering
dark you may hear a scuff of leaves
and turn, expecting the fall
to cast back your father in orange

light, orange such as you remember orange
from a childhood you see now doesn’t end,
the way that falling leaves always fall
in a memory.
— I’m sorry. I’m lost.
Carrying on this way, as I do, leaves
me overlooking the dark’s been gathering.

Let’s go, now. Leaves, stay lost.
The sky’s orange has fallen.
Our gathering’s at an end.

Pushcart-nominated “Responsibility ” by Holly Karapetkova

By

Holly Karapetkova
Holly Karapetkova

Holly Karapetkova

RESPONSIBILITY

Excerpt from Delmarva Review Volume 11. Adapted for podcast production by Delmarva Public Radio, Writer's Edition. 

“When the kitchen breakfast is over, and the cook has put all things in their proper places, the mistress should go in to give her orders… The mistress must tax her own memory with all this: we have no right to expect slaves or hired servants to be more attentive to our interest than we ourselves are.”
-Mary Randolph, Virginia Housewife;
Or, Methodical Cook, 1828

With one hand                                       I serve teacakes on
the blue                                                    India china,
with the other                                        I wipe mosquitoes
sweating                                                   from my neck.

With one voice                                       I order French
tureens from Calder’s                          & Co.,
with another                                           I order the cook
not to burn                                             the gravy.

The hush of                                            what is beneath the
damask                                                     tablecloth
at night                                                     grows knives.

With one mouth                                   I smile at
the good doctor with                           the other I grit
my teeth                                                  watching dark eyes
always                                                      watching me.

They know what moves                     in shadows
refuse to polish                                     the silver
for love of                                               tarnish. They know
the other names                                    for everything names
they flash                                                like knives
when no one is around                      looking.

Pushcart-nominated “Cantabile” by John McKeon

By

CANTABILE was produced as a radio broadcast by Delmarva Radio Theatre, hosted by Hal Wilson, and the lead character read by Anne Colwell. Check it out here.

John McKeon

John J. McKeon

CANTABILE

Excerpt from Delmarva Review Volume 11. Adapted for podcast production by Delmarva Radio Theatre. 

Schubert, it is said, had fat and awkward hands. Though his music sings, he never learned to play the piano really well. Contrast this with the plaster cast of Chopin’s hands, supposedly done immediately after his death. The fingers seem to me implausibly slender and long, but no matter. We impute magic to objects like an artist’s hands, just as we weighed and measured Einstein’s brain, looking for some simple fact of flesh and structure that would enable us to shrug and say, well, no wonder. We have no similar preoccupation with Beethoven’s hands. Rather, his hair, flying, unruly. He had Einstein’s hair, or perhaps Einstein had his.

Occasionally someone will remark on my own long, thin fingers, and if they know of my pianism, they will smile and nod in just that knowing way. Of course. How could Liszt or Rachmaninoff hold any terrors for a woman with such big hands? And I did launch my career on just this basis: the flirty ingénue, the merest wisp of a girl, rampaging through the alpha male repertory, all while showing more skin than might be expected.

It worked for a while. I did the global whirligig for a decade, until the bookings began to slow. I have read an account that states simply that Annie Molloy disappeared from public view after marrying a surgeon. Some truth there, I suppose. God knows I enjoyed my husband more than the umpteenth night of Prokofiev in Poughkeepsie.

Today I am no wisp of a girl, and if I am flirty it is in the manner of an elderly lady who thinks she can get away with something.

What saved me, and saves me still, is Cantabile, my immense and ramshackle house on the edge of the Choptank River near Cambridge, Maryland. I have no children, and my husband is gone, taken by a heart attack a decade ago. But the house endures, and I along with it.

It is, as I say, a big house, twenty-six rooms in all, and I have filled it with pianos: a showcase grand in the main parlor, and other uprights and grands tucked in everywhere. Eight times a year, I also fill the house with amateur pianists from all over the country, some of them coming year after year to spend two weeks living and breathing piano. I’ve recruited a staff of skilled and patient teachers. I teach myself, and I love it. We have an excellent cook, and my campers bring their own booze. I don’t take anyone under 21.

Philip was the exception, from the day his uncle’s Volvo dropped him at my door fully 30 years ago. A glorious day of early fall, the herons at the river’s edge holding their poses, the grass bright and the river like blue ice. Philip was sixteen, and I welcomed him because the chairman of the music department at New York University, an acquaintance who had once wanted to be my lover, said he had never heard anyone like Philip and two weeks with me would be just the thing.

Philip had the ideal pianist’s hands, I noticed from the kitchen window. It was arrival day, and the house was loud with laughter and greetings. Philip dropped his duffel bag on the gravel and clutched to his chest a thick canvas case in which, I guessed, he had brought along every scrap of sheet music he owned. He clutched the case like the floatable cushion from an airplane seat, hoping it would keep him alive but somehow doubting it. His fingers curled around the bottom of the case, the knuckles visible from a distance, the flesh very white. I forced myself to stop spying and hurried outside to greet him.

As I had feared, Philip never did fit in. He was decades younger than the others and sipped Dr Pepper during happy hour while the others whittled down their wine stocks. The older women embarrassed him with their attention, while the men ignored or visibly resented him. He couldn’t tell a joke, didn’t follow sports, and couldn’t answer a question with more than a syllable or two.

What he could do was play the piano.

That first morning, I found myself drawn upstairs by an unfamiliar sound: scales. When I say our campers all love the piano and want earnestly to play better, I do not mean to imply any enthusiasm for such tedium as scale practice. Yet there it was. In every key, major and minor, not just the easy keys with the standard fingerings but the variants and oddities as well, four octaves up and down, slowly and quickly, in four-four time, three-four, triplets, in parallel and contrary motion, even with the left hand offset by half a bar. And all played with perfect evenness and fluidity. I noted the room from which this marvel was emerging and checked the day’s schedule: Philip.

At our first lesson Philip told me he had been working on the Chopin Etudes. Not unusual: nearly every reasonably proficient amateur wants to tackle an etude or two to measure himself. Which etudes? I asked.

Philip sat at the piano in my studio with his legs crossed. Mine is the finest instrument in the house, and Philip had taken it in with his first glance on entering and now sat running his fingertips along the keys. “Well,” he said, “all of them, really.”

Over the next hour I discovered that he could, indeed, play all twenty-seven etudes well and from memory. In such a case, the teacher becomes more of a coach. There was nothing I could teach Philip, no technique he lacked, no errors to correct. So I tried to coach him on interpretive choices, to encourage him to listen to himself more closely, to show him the little energy-saving tricks that could help a performer get through such large swathes of difficult music without cramping or breaking down. When we were done, I said, “What are your plans, Philip? Juilliard? Curtis?”

“I’ll be starting at Johns Hopkins in September,” he said.

“So,” I nodded, smiling, “Peabody. I know a number of the faculty there. You’ll do well.”

“No, not the conservatory,” Philip said. “Engineering.”

“Engineering?” I realized as I said it that I sounded shocked and patronizing, and hastened to add, “Have you not considered a career in music?”

“I don’t want to be a professional musician,” he said.

“With your gift, you’d be...” I almost said “a natural” but stopped myself because I don’t believe such a thing exists and because I knew very well how much labor had gone into creating what I had just heard. “You could be extraordinary,” I said.

“Look, I just don’t want to,” he said. “I won’t be anyone’s performing seal. Okay?”

“Okay, sure,” I said. Philip was looking down and scratching the back of his hand. I suspected I had stepped into a long-running argument, and while Philip seemed uncomfortable telling me to mind my own business, that was just what he had done and would do again if pressed.

He stayed the two weeks, filled his practice shifts, warmed up only slightly in social settings, and, as his contribution to our informal concluding concert, played something relatively easy. I was sure I would never see him again, but the final day, after the last car had pulled out of the drive, as I walked through the hallway of the again-silent house, I took from the table the advance signup sheet for the following year, and there was Philip’s name, halfway down. He would be back. I chuckled, shook my head, and thought about practicing more myself.

Philip did come back the next year, and the next. I tried to guide him into new repertory and paired him with a couple of other accomplished campers for some duet work. When the fourth year began looming and he had not signed up, I dropped him a note to say that if he hadn’t decided yet, I could still hold a spot for him for several more weeks.

He wrote in reply to thank me and to say that he had enlisted in the Marine Corps.

 

A legend about Glenn Gould, one of the many, concerns the way he walked away from his public career at its peak. He was world famous, in enormous demand. One night, he was pacing backstage when a stagehand asked for an autograph. He signed the program, dated it, and wrote “my last concert” under the date.

I have built myself a similar legend. How I played an afternoon recital in San Diego. Hall half empty, mind elsewhere. Afterward, a dozen or so autographs, the usual smiles, all dinner invitations declined in favor of room service. The next morning, someone named Richard Salazar said in the newspaper that my Liszt Sonata had been “the longest 30 minutes in many a year.”

I tried to work up a robust hate for this man I did not know, but couldn’t. He was right.

Besides, plenty of seats had gone unsold before anyone knew what a snore my recital would be. Time for honesty, I thought on the return flight. I had met Charles and wanted no more Sundays anywhere but home. I had another half dozen commitments to fulfill, but I let my managers know that would be it for a while. I don’t recall any disappointed groans.

Charles was then finishing a clinical fellowship at Johns Hopkins Medical School. He owned a beautiful rowhouse in Baltimore, and that’s where we lived when we first married. I moved my small grand piano from my old apartment. I gave lessons to kids who didn’t want them, plus the occasional adult who lived for them. I found I loved my sessions with the grown-ups and, little by little, weeded the kids out of my garden. Then I read about an adult piano camp in Vermont and thought: I could make a go of that here. I had always lived frugally, and my savings were more than ample to buy Cantabile when I stumbled on it and to gather up a bunch of old but sound pianos. Charles toured the house once, declared that the plumbing and electric bills alone would break the bank, and let me know he would never want to live there. OK, I said, I don’t mean to live here, either, except during camps.

I painted the house myself. I sanded and refinished the floors. I hung my old concert posters, programs, photos, and framed reviews all over the halls. By way of cementing my commitment, I took one last big bite out of my savings and bought a big new grand piano. And one day, while waiting endlessly for a delivery of new kitchen appliances, I dragged out my thick book of the Beethoven Sonatas, Volume I, opened to Sonata Number One in F minor, and started again to learn.

The day years later when I got Philip’s note about joining the Marines, I went to my studio and found Volume III of the Sonatas, creased, stained and dog-eared, on the floor next to the piano. I opened to the last of the thirty-two in C minor, turned to the final movement. And when I was finished I sat on the bench and cried, thinking of Philip in fatigues, thinking of his beautiful hands adjusting the telescopic sight of a sniper’s rifle, thinking I would never see him again or hear him play, thinking this was a great pity, a great pity.

Then, one day about four years after Philip’s note, his name turned up in a monthly report from my CPA. He had paid a deposit to return to Cantabile that fall.

 

Students for that camp began arriving about two hours after Charles departed. My husband, the distinguished and now wealthy surgeon, had taken the better part of one of his valuable days to drive out from Baltimore because he felt he needed to tell me face to face that our marriage was, from his perspective, less than optimal; that he felt he owed himself the opportunity of a fresh start with someone who would be more…what was his word? Committed, yes, committed to him and only him. Charles also felt that he was still relatively young and that, statistically speaking, his field of choices was encouragingly large. He would be quite generous in terms of a settlement, anything I wanted, really, and since I clearly did not want the same stylish urban life that he did, this was really for the best.

I suspected he had already winnowed his encouraging large field of choices to one, a distinctly stylish and urban young yoga instructor with the right body and the right hair to be just the right ornament for his Mercedes convertible. But as he stood in the foyer making his oh-so-persuasive case, I found I didn’t care much, just wanted him gone before the campers arrived.

The Philip who was dropped off at my door that August was bigger than the boy I had last seen, and he had let his hair grow. He lugged a duffel bag of clothing and a slim portfolio case of music, and he walked with a slight limp. When I came to hug him, he pivoted toward me oddly, and it was only a minute later, as he made his way up the hall stairs, that I realized his right leg was prosthetic.

I had heard about the embassy bombing, of course, but I had not seen Philip’s name in the newspapers. Three of his fellow Marines had been killed, and a dozen injured, and committees in both houses of Congress wanted to know why this and why that and why some other thing.

“It was a dangerous place,” was all Philip would say, the first evening in our welcome reception.

A hot night, faint breeze through the big screened porch where we gathered. Philip had come downstairs in shorts, and his artificial leg was the unmentioned center of attention. He knew quite a few of his fellow campers and seemed at ease, though he still preferred Dr Pepper to wine. The conversation danced around more or less gracefully, until finally a fellow camper asked, “So, do you pedal with your left leg now?” Philip laughed. And then the subject vanished in laughter, drink, and music-chat. I realized, also, that I had blindly made a wise choice by rooming Philip with Bradley, a veteran of the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm. Bradley—never just Brad—walked with a slight limp and had, he said, a picturesque web of scars on his lower back as the result of an encounter with an amateur bomb in Kuwait. I saw him now, gazing benignly at Philip, and then his eyes shifted to meet mine and I thought he nodded, ever so slightly.

And I saw them in conversation, around dusk the next day, sitting on the low concrete wall that reinforced the riverbank. I noticed a tiny red glow passing between them and smiled, sniffing the air.

Any big old house makes noise, and if you sleep alone in such a house you come to terms with the noises. The porch screens hum in the breeze, and each time the refrigerator cycles on, the picture frames vibrate in the stairwell behind the kitchen. That night, or rather in the quietest hours of the morning, I found myself lying awake, thinking intermittently about my defunct marriage and empty future, staring up into the darkness and listening for a tiny sound that was not part of the usual. Once, when I had first moved into the house, a swarm of bees had somehow taken over the living room, and they had made just such a faint clamor by banging against the bay window in their effort to get out. But this was different, far too rhythmic, and it stopped altogether from time to time. I got out of bed and passed, barefoot and stealthy, through the short corridor linking my suite to the rest of the house.

Dim light rose through the stairwell, and I moved slowly halfway down the stairs. The noise came from the keys of the digital piano on the landing below, left there for silent practice during quiet hours. I had never realized the keys made any sound at all. Even now, only a few feet away, I had to listen acutely. More audible were Philip’s grunts, snorts, and occasional whispers as he stopped, clenched and unclenched his fists, and jumped back into whatever he was so furiously practicing. His leg lay on the floor beside the bench; he was practicing without pedal, working on accuracy and speed. And he was becoming increasingly frustrated. At any moment he might quit and turn around; not wanting to be caught spying, I crept back to my bed.

So it went for four days. In truth, I was frightened by the energy I sensed in Philip’s silent practice, by the way he lunged through every setback and seemed to want to tear gashes in the music and leave it panting. I crept to the stairwell each of three straight nights, lingering where I could retreat should he turn abruptly, watching his hands, those white, big-knuckled hands that had fascinated me on my first sight of him flying¾sometimes a foot above the keyboard, and sometimes sinking deeply into the keys to draw out a love song. I had first risen from bed because I could not sleep. Now I could not sleep because I wanted, every night, to sit here and listen to Philip’s stunning, exhausting silence.

When not enthralled by his hands I gazed at the stump of his leg. His prosthesis lay on the floor. The stump projected eight inches from his gym shorts, the crisscrossing surgical scars not yet faded. It embarrassed me. It seemed a shockingly intimate sight, the nudest thing I had ever seen. Yet I could not turn away.

I sought him out one afternoon as he sat on the porch and gazed across the river.

“Philip,” I said, “forgive me for prying, but what are you practicing at night?”

My question startled him. “Have I disturbed you? I was using the earphones.”

“Oh, no, no, I’m sure you aren’t bothering anyone. I simply stumbled on you the other night, when I had gotten up for some other reason entirely. Point is, you were going at it hammer and tongs.”

He smiled briefly. “Hammer and tongs,” he whispered. “It’s Liszt. The Don Juan Fantasy.”

“Wow,” I said, and meant it. “I can’t even play that.”

“I doubt you’d want to,” he said. “It’s junk.”

“Then why do you want to play it?”

He leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, falling into a series of small nods. “I have been meaning to ask your advice on something,” he said. “I have been invited to play at the White House, on Veterans Day.”

“Philip, that’s wonderful!”

“Is it?” he held my gaze for a moment. “Or is it a PR stunt? The Marine Band is pulling together a whole bunch of us wounded warriors, a bunch of guys who left pieces and parts in various shithole corners of the world but somehow manage to live rich and rewarding lives through music. It’s supposed to be inspirational.”

“Sounds like you doubt it.”

“My first impulse was to tell them to go fuck themselves.” Perhaps I still thought of Philip as a little boy, but the obscenity struck me hard.

“Then I thought,” he went on, “maybe if I do really well, somebody will hear and want to hire me for other stuff. Even accompanist gigs, piano bars, anything would be better than just sitting around my mom’s house.”

“It could happen,” I said. “Though I’d hate to think of you doing requests for a room full of drunks.”

“I’ve done it before. It ain’t that bad.”

“But.”

“But,” he said, and fell silent.

“What does Bradley say?”

“Bradley is strongly in favor of the go-fuck-yourself option,” Philip said. “In fact, he says I should accept, perform, knock them on their asses, and then tell the president to his face to go fuck himself.”

“And you? What do you think?”

Philip was silent a long time, or it seemed so. Finally: “When I first came back, I was in the hospital in Bethesda, and on Memorial Day they loaded us into buses and brought us down to the Mall for the concert. Got us nice seats, front row, so we’d all be on TV. There was some C-list actor who got famous playing a disabled vet, plus a bunch of Hollywood bimbos emoting about how much they appreciated us, what heroes we were. All the while I’m thinking, if I approached you in a bar, your bodyguards would beat me bloody. Then they loaded us back on the bus and brought us home. Hurray for the vets, now go away.”

“You said you wanted my advice,” I prodded. “I haven’t heard a question yet.”

“Should I do it?”

“Play at the White House, yes. Insult the president, no,” I said.

“That simple, is it?”

“To me. I’d also consider something shorter and less aggressive than the Liszt. It’s a social occasion, after all.”

Philip smiled, his gaze unfocused across the wide river. “Well, I guess I’ll think about it.”

I lumbered on: “Or, if you really must bring down the house, work with me on it. I would never program it myself, I meant it when I said I couldn’t play it. But I studied it with Alfred Brendel back in the day, and I know it, I know where the snakes are. Stay here for the next six weeks. You’ll have your room to yourself, all the privacy you want, and you can practice on the Steinway in the living room. We’ll work on it together every day. Put a fine edge on the piece before you ride it into battle.”

“I couldn’t afford that,” Philip said.

“No charge. Throw a little something into the grocery fund from time to time, is all.” I stood to leave, and at the door to the house I turned back. “You’re not a performing seal, Philip,” I said. “Seals do things for scraps of raw fish. I don’t know what payoff you’re after.”

That fall, as Philip practiced in the living room, I began work in my study. I would assemble a recital program, I thought, then call in whatever IOUs I might still have to see if I could stage a comeback. A small venue in DC or Baltimore would be best, affordable but still credible as a professional stage. Instead of my old pyrotechnic warhorses, I would play a thoughtful program, suitable for a mature artist, and we’d see what happened.

What happened, most immediately: On our fourth day of work, I had put my hand onto the Steinway keyboard to illustrate a fingering, and all at once Philip’s hand was on top of mine, softly enclosing, and he turned toward me on the bench.

“Philip, we have work to do,” I said.

“Yes,” he whispered.

“Not that kind of work,” I said. He let his hand linger a moment, looked into my eyes, and squeezed. He did not mean to alarm me, I don’t think, but the strength in his hands made me imagine bones crunching. “Philip, please,” I said. “I’m old enough to be your mother.”

“And I’m missing a leg, or hadn’t you noticed?” he said, not letting go.

“Please let go of my hand,” I said softly. He did not let go.

“I know I’m damaged. But everyone is damaged somehow,” he said, now turning and taking my other hand in his, though I tried to squirm away. “Philip,” I said more sternly, rising from the bench. He let my hands slip away and hung his head.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m flattered. But we’d never be good for each other.”

“We’d be great together, and you know it.”

“I don’t know it. And if this sort of thing happens again, you will have to leave.”

We went back to work. Philip did not try again. He certainly could have forced me, I realized. We were alone in the house, and he was very strong. Was I attracted to him? Of course I was; he was beautiful. Those hands! But I thought his ardor for me reflected deprivation and proximity more than anything else. He could have better than me, but I would do in a pinch. I was much older than he, and gravity had had its way with my body. Yet I was sure I could please him. I wanted to, and I knew how. And after all, my Charles had gotten himself a new toy¾why shouldn’t I? Then I thought: I won’t do it precisely because Charles has.

None of this kept the thought from my mind, often at the most unlikely moments. Finally, I made a pact with myself. Later, after the concert, after his triumph—our triumph—we would return to Cantabile that night, no matter how late, and we’d come back into the dark, welcoming house, and if he were still interested then, I would make love to him, all he wanted, and almost enough.

Sometimes in life, you have to wait for the punch line. In Charles’ case, he lived the life he wanted for another six years after he left me, with his box at the opera and his club seats at the football games, and he and his magnificent Celine blasting their megawatt smiles at the photographers at the Cancer Ball.

He eventually deceased himself, as they say, while in the act. I smirked to think of God tapping him on the shoulder right in the middle of that most pleasurable of moments. His quietus smacked him in the chest and he let out a gasp, and a gush, and then his lifeless face landed perfectly between Celine’s spectacular breasts. And she thought he was merely spent, and went on stroking his hair for several moments, until his unresponsiveness annoyed her and she poked him in the ribs. Surprise, Celine.

I didn’t know any of that when I made my pact, but I knew the long-term future was a sucker bet, and I started the next day content with my decision.

As Veterans Day approached Philip put me on his guest list for the White House concert and left off practicing three days beforehand. Enough, he said, he was ready. The concert would be recorded the afternoon before the holiday and broadcast the next night.

Of the event itself, I have minimal impressions. I was seated well to the back of the East Room, and the acoustics were awful. The president spoke without a microphone. A cellist played, and a blues guitarist, and a young woman did a good job on a tough aria, and then it was Philip’s turn, and he brought his volcanic piece off without a hitch. So much so that the East Room, a well of polite applause if ever one existed, erupted in a standing ovation that went on for three minutes.

Then the president stepped forward and held out his hand, and Philip put his hands behind his back. He said something I couldn’t hear. The president’s smile never faltered but his eyes darted and in a moment Philip had been whisked away. In the post-concert crush I made my way to his side and asked, “What happened?”

“Just what I intended from the beginning,” he said, staring at me and daring me to scold him. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

“No, Philip,” I said. “You go. I’ll stay in DC overnight. You take tomorrow to clear your things out of the house.”

“Annie? You’re throwing me out?”

“Music isn’t meant for spite, Philip. You can’t do what you did and be with me.”

At that, he pulled himself up straight and gave me an overstated, sarcastic salute, then walked away.

He was entirely excised from the broadcast, the twenty-minute gap made up with filler. It was as though he had never played, had never been there at all.

Was I wrong to think music could heal Philip? To think something as prosaic as playing the piano could untie so many knots? It was a faith of sorts. We hear the ecstasy in Beethoven’s late music and forget the wretched man. He wrote of kisses for all the world, but his own last gesture in life was a raised fist.

My faith had not even saved me, really. I was alone, in the quietly echoing house on the river. The sun was going down, the birds skimming across the water, diving to bring sudden death to tiny fish deceived to the surface by the dwindling light. So it went, I thought. We watch our weight and eat our veggies and get cancer anyway. We volunteer in soup kitchens and shelters only to be hit by a bus on our way home. We pull ourselves up, shake our fists at heaven, and still die.

I was so exhausted that night that I considered sleeping in my reading chair. But in the end I got up and went to the piano and played, and played through the night to the dawn, ending by playing Bach chorales and singing at the top of my lungs in my lousy German. And then the sun was up and the day had begun and Philip was gone and the fish in the river were doomed.

Well, I thought, there we are. Music doesn’t cure. It doesn’t save, nor redeem. But it’s the only thing I know that doesn’t make everything worse.

Pushcart-nominated “Words of My Father/ Palabras de Mi Padre ” by Alejandro Pérez

By

Alejandro Pérez
Alejandro Pérez

Alejandro Pérez

WORDS OF MY FATHER/
PALABRAS DE MI PADRE

Excerpt from Delmarva Review Volume 11. 

Always say hello, even if the others do not say hello back.
We are Latinos, and Latinos always say hello.

When you shake a hand, shake it firmly, and look a person in the eyes. Never look away. Character goes a long way in life. And we aren’t born with character. We build it.
Character is a house of hay that becomes sturdy with time.

Never try to eat a mango without getting your hands dirty. Let the juice ooze onto your fingers, let your fingers become sticky. When you’re finished eating it, you can wash your hands. Remember, any mess, no matter how big, can always be cleaned up.

When you play soccer, always be the best player on the field. And be a little selfish. You pass the ball too much to your teammates, and assists, they don’t get you anywhere in life. People will only remember you if you score all the goals.

Know when a dream is worth chasing forever and when it should be abandoned to go off in pursuit of another.
The same goes for women. When you love a woman, if your heart begs to see her whenever she is gone, never let her go.
If you’re only half sure of your love, then you should walk away.

If you ever have a problem, come to me and ask me for advice. But most likely, I won’t give you an answer. I’ll just sit down beside you and we’ll both close our eyes and pray to God for guidance because two prayers are better than one.

For anything good in life, you must wait. You cannot make guacamole with a green avocado because it will taste bitter.
You must wait for the avocado to ripen and turn black.

You need to remember all these things, mi’jo. You need to remember all these things. But the most important thing you should remember is that you are Latino. That means you should always say hello, even if the others do not say hello back,
because we are Latinos, and Latinos always say hello.

“Usherette” by Marcelle Thiebeaux

By

Marcelle Thiebeaux

Marcelle Thiébaux

USHERETTE

Excerpt from Delmarva Review Volume 8. Adapted for podcast production by Delmarva Radio Theatre. 

By four o’clock Gypsy set out each day for Loew’s Jersey Palace on Journal Square. Her usherette’s burgundy uniform with the marigold braid, her military cap, gilt shoes, and flashlight stayed in her basement locker. She wore her own clothes to work, shuffling through mounds of slushy snow. Up ahead the marquee flashed: More Stars Than There Are In Heaven. Five Cents.

Above the Square, Jersey City’s famous movie house floated like a great ocean liner laced with chains of light. Usherettes could be seen through the glass doors, gliding moody-eyed in their dancerly gold T-straps. They roved like sleepwalkers across the thick carpets or leaned with folded arms against the radiators and twisted gold pillars.

When patrons arrived, usherettes woke up and came to life. They tore tickets in half and with their slender torches pointed the moviegoers to their seats. Their lives seemed magically easy, and they made twelve dollars a week.

Gypsy had been at Loew’s only a few weeks since she’d run away from her grandmother’s house, a distance of two miles up the Hudson Boulevard. She was fifteen. She needed money and had no trouble getting hired. Even if 1932 felt like the worst year of the Slump, patrons were always glad to pay a buffalo nickel for a movie, and a pretty girl could always get a job at Loew’s.

Right away, Gypsy made a new friend. Thelma was a tall, bony sylph with a sepulchral voice who paraded in her uniform with the dash of a drum majorette. Thelma sewed fine lingerie in her spare time. She was taking a great interest in Gypsy.

Together they caught glimpses of all the movies from the lobby and the back row. They talked throughout, speculating on what would happen. Whether Blonde Venus Marlene Dietrich, with her big hat and straggling cigarette, would give up streetwalking. Whether Jean Harlow, the Saigon tramp in Red Dust, could win Clark Gable away from his socialite girlfriend.

On their breaks, Thelma and Gypsy ran over to the Ming Vase for chop suey and a pot of tea. They liked the atmosphere, the red lanterns and lacquer screens. One evening Thelma bit into an almond cookie and bent her melancholy, horsey face on Gypsy’s. “You don’t look good,” she said in her calamitous drone. “You’re pea green, and your eyes are watery.”

“All the movies we watch,” said Gypsy. “I might need glasses.”

“I don’t mean that. Something’s eating you.”

“Since you mention it,” Gypsy blurted, “I might be—you know.” Her heart pounded with this admission, but what she had to hide couldn’t be hidden forever. Soon she would have to let out the waist of her movie trousers with a safety pin. She prodded a kumquat with her chopstick.

Thelma nodded darkly. “I had an inkling.”

 

That night after work, the girls didn’t go straight home but eased down in the plush seats along the theater’s back row. They kicked off their golden slippers and toyed with their paper fans from the Ming Vase. Thelma lit up, but Gypsy didn’t want a ciggieboo. The organ that could play thunder, gunfire, and a stringed orchestra had fallen silent. While the colored girls vacuumed the theater, Thelma and Gypsy had things to talk about in low voices.

Thelma propped her long knee bones against the seat in front of her. Without her military cap to hold it down, her hair, the dullish brown of lentil soup, frizzed out as if she were in galvanic shock.

“Who’s the fellow did it?” Thelma asked, seamlessly taking up the topic they had left off in the Ming Vase.

Gypsy bent to massage first one foot, then the other, so she wouldn’t have to look at Thel. “He’s not around.”

“But who is he? You’d know, wouldn’t you? Who it is, I mean?” Thel bored her fateful insinuations into Gypsy’s ear, her warm breath ruffling Gypsy’s blonde curls.

“I do know,” said Gypsy, letting Thel browbeat her.

“I’m not trying to upset you,” Thel said quickly. “We have to find him. He’d come through and do right by you, wouldn’t he? Since he’s the only one it could be. Isn’t he?”

“I said he is. What kind of a person do you think I am!”

Thelma grabbed her hand. “Don’t get sore, Gypsy. I didn’t mean anything like that.”

Gypsy freed her hand to pick up her gold shoes and cradled them in her lap. Her apprehension mounted, seeing how she had become a special charitable cause for friendly Thel. “He doesn’t know. He’s traveling.”

Thel dropped her cigarette butt on the floor and swatted it out with a shoe. “Isn’t that always the way when they knock you up! We have to do something.”

She dug into her big pocketbook and pulled out a cellophane Wonder Bread bag of dried fruit, peanuts, and carrots sticks she brought from home. “Help yourself.” She offered Gypsy the bag with the red-yellow-blue polka dots. Gypsy selected one raisin and set it on her armrest. “It’s not what you might think,” she said. “He’s very nice.”

“Nice or not, it ends up being the same thing.” Thelma munched thoughtfully on a prune. “I can put you in touch with someone to help you get rid of it.”

A willful twinge nipped at Gypsy’s belly. “I don’t know, Thel, I really don’t. It’s a little soon.”

“It’s never soon. You have to act fast.” Thelma gnawed a carrot. “How far gone are you?”

“A couple of months, maybe,” Gypsy said in a faint voice. She knew exactly how long it was.

“Heavens above!” Thelma nibbled nuts from her palm like a pony eating sugar. She dusted her fingers. “I can put you in touch with someone to get rid of it. Let me look around.”

Thelma’s snoopy, good-hearted determination terrified Gypsy. The idea of going under the knife terrified her. She couldn’t say which was worse: dying in a mess of blood—she would surely die—or being chained for life to the small microbe rooted inside her.

“No, please don’t.” She brushed off a stray peanut that had fallen on her lap. “It’s probably nothing.”

“I’ll get on it right away,” said Thelma.

Gypsy felt a fresh battery of palpitations. She squinted up at the immense ceiling where spurious clouds wandered overhead and turned to mist. To Gypsy, the shutting-down of the star machine in the ceiling looked like the end of the world. When the house lights dimmed, the faraway stars winked like the eyes of a hovering cosmic malice. They died, but they would be back tomorrow night.

 

Most days Gypsy felt as if she’d swallowed a dozen gin fizzes, bourbons, and Scotches, though she never touched a drop, and she didn’t even know how to find a speakeasy. She was always drunk. There was no immediate cure for this hormone hangover without doing something desperate. The thing kept unfurling its fetal fumes throughout her body. She was a dream-walker plastered on baby-dew. She pictured herself as a shimmering cocktail cradling a cherry, giving temporary haven to a hapless olive. So brimful, the next breath of air would spill her.

When she showed the movie patrons to their seats in the three-thousand-seat theater—or was it four thousand—the beams of her flashlight dizzied her. She swayed like a drunkard in the cavelike lobby of Loew’s with its amber blaze of Moroccan lamps, naked statuary, and balconies dripping vines, pan-pipes, and mandolins.

One evening after the last show, she found a November Ladies Home Journal left on one of the velvet seats. Idly paging through it, she alighted upon a story called “Lovely Expectations.” She ran down to the girls’ locker room and sat alone on the scarred bench, reading with fearful fascination. The story warbled about “your precious bundle” and “your blessed gift from heaven.” Dry-eyed, Gypsy scanned the columns and found the damning lines: Some of you ladies may feel you have tippled a cocktail. There is no reason to worry. This is a natural symptom of the wonderful changes you are undergoing.

She ripped the pages from the magazine and tore them to shreds that she flushed in the toilet.

 

On Wednesday she arrived at work early and stood without removing her coat. In the lounge’s spotty glass, she examined her face, bloodless and moony as an opal left to perish in a cave. Mirrors remained coldly mute these days and gave no flattering messages. She didn’t care how cute she looked in her uniform or how the gold braid matched her hair. All she could think about was the unseen thing that had fastened itself in her body to sip at her, that would not let go, that would not give itself up to bleed.

Thel, gaunt as a pipe cleaner, hurried into the lounge to where Gypsy was standing by the mirror and the gray lockers. She was bursting with news.

“I found somebody for you,” she murmured in her secretive sinkhole voice. “I’ll go with you when you get it done. I’d like to see the place for myself.”

Gypsy panicked at how fast Thelma could move. “I don’t want to put you out, Thel.”

“No, I’d love to. You’ll need fifty dollars in cash.”

“Fifty!” That was more than four times her Loew’s weekly salary. She stood frozen. “I can’t. It’s too much,” she said.

“This is not a time to pinch pennies. Look what you’re getting for it. Value for money. I can loan you some, I have quite a bit set by, and for a case like yours, I am glad to help.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You can. Besides,” Thel reasoned, in syllables low and tragic, “it’s illegal, so they have to charge over the top. Some doctors charge a hundred or two.”

Gypsy pulled off her galoshes. In the mirror her face was yellow as old piano keys. She shed her coat, scarf, and cap, which crackled with static from the cold weather. She tossed them in her locker. “I can’t make up my mind.”

“You’re crazy!” Thel softly wailed. “You can’t do this to yourself, throw your whole life away. With that bun in the oven, your life is worthless.” She sat on the bench, took an emery board from her handbag, and filed at a thumbnail. “You can’t go looking to the phonies who advertise in the classifieds. This person is good. She’s not a doctor, she’s better than a doctor.” Thelma scoured her thumb in a fury.

“She’s a quack?” Gypsy got into her uniform piece by piece.

Thelma dropped the nail file in her purse and scrutinized Gypsy’s waistline. “Of course not!”

Gypsy cast another look in the mirror at the mouse’s belly under each eye. “I can let you know, can’t I?”

“You haven’t a minute to lose.”

“We’d better go up to our stations.”

“I did this for you, and all you can talk about is our stations?” Thelma gasped in a hollow tone, as if she’d been deprived of her rights to oxygen.

“But the movie opens in half an hour. Mr. Jago will wonder where we are, and I don’t want to be late.” She felt a wave of nausea at the thought of drawing the manager’s wrath.

Thelma gave Gypsy’s arm a hard squeeze of sisterly affection. “You’d be doing the right thing. I’m taking your problem very personally. Besides, she’s on Gifford Avenue. Near the park.”

“What do you mean, Gifford Avenue?”

“It’s a high-class neighborhood. It means she has an up-and-coming practice. She’s getting results.”

“I really have to think it over, Thel. I can’t decide all at once.”

“Think! Don’t waste time thinking. It’s a little pain and bother now, a few days, then you’re freed up for a life of fun.”

They went upstairs to the lobby. In a fog, Gypsy greeted the five o’clock moviegoers and guided them to their seats. She lit up the aisle with her flashlight for a man in a fur collar with his pregnant wife. She was draped in green brocade, big as a sofa.

 

With the movie playing, Gypsy stole a little time to sit in the theater’s back row alone. She tried to understand what was going on in the movie’s plot, but she paid fitful attention to Barbara Stanwyck’s entanglements with the bootleggers in Night Nurse.

She could think only about Axel, how they had twined their arms around each other, lying in the damp, late-autumn leaves and grass of Mosquito Park, under the monument of the Great War Soldier. Both of their fathers fighting on different sides of that war, Axel’s severe father an enemy leader, Gypsy’s father lost in battle in a French wood. The bronze Soldier, long dead, stood over the lovers, straddle-legged with his musette bag, ready to lob his grenade. He had all eternity to calculate his aim. Gypsy had little time, and time pressed her hard.

To think now about Axel afflicted her with an ache she thought would kill her. His black eyes, the trail of black hair running like an arrow from his navel downward, an arrow her fingers had traced with delight. If only that bodily ache would drive the blood from her insides, the way it drained the blood from her heart.

By Halloween she had reflected on the sucking pull of the autumnal moon on her body’s tides. Her grandmother’s wisdom was all she had, since both her parents were dead, her mother in the influenza epidemic. Her grandmother liked to say, “Girls are ruled by the moon.” Gypsy closed her eyes to concentrate on this dark dictum, but the blood would not be drawn. She pleaded for the cramping of her body that would mean she was okay. She saw her blood flowing, flowing in welcome rivulets, but the pregnant moon was not on her side. That secret blood she looked for each day remained hidden, and her spotless panties mocked her.

The embittering words of Thelma assailed her. Only a little pain now, and you’re freed up for a life of fun.

A fleeting superstition nagged her, that as long as she held on to Axel’s baby, she and Axel had a connection. The baby was a mightier charm than any, attached inside her by a slender string that tied her to Axel wherever he was, a string, a ball of twine that would draw him back to her. He was a high‑flying kite. If she held tight to her end, the wind might tug at him, but he wouldn’t disappear into an endless sky. She might hold on and be able to reel him in. If she cut the cord and let the baby go, that would be the end. She would surely never see him again.

 

Gypsy was glad when Thelma stayed home from work the following week with a sore throat. It was a throat so sore, a fever so high, she might be kept out for more than two or three days. So Mr. Jago reported. Gypsy felt relief at not having her friend around to advise and torture her. It was all decided, anyway. She was going along with the wisest thing to do, and she didn’t want to have to talk to Thelma about it anymore. She didn’t want Thelma coming along, either.

Instead of strolling over to the Ming Vase, she took her break walking along Vroom Street. She looked at the shops. She badly wanted to distract herself from the awful thing she planned to do, the fact that it was settled for tomorrow when she would carry out the most hurt she’d ever done to herself, but it had to be. Window shopping seemed a good idea. She might do something nice for herself, give herself a present.

She walked alone through the freezing streets. Her nostrils burned with the cold smell of icicles. Gypsy had her wool cap pulled down, her scarf tightly wrapped, but the bone-aching winter freeze bit into her gloved fingertips. In the gutter where dirty snow lay crusted, starved dogs pawed at rubbish barrels, desperate for food. Gypsy hugged the shop windows for warmth.

Stopping outside a parfumerie, she studied the banked clusters of Lucite bottles and artificial orchids. The poster of a girl kissing herself in the mirror. A caption read So soft, so clinging, so lovable, so French. Gypsy felt so cold she couldn’t unclench her jaw. She might have slipped into the shop just to get warm, but the door was locked and the shop looked empty.

She veered past Bond’s haberdasher, where headless mannequins stood clothed in rich wools, their virile wooden bodies stiff and perfectly formed. She imagined she saw Axel in the doorway, but it was a tall, bearded beggar with scorching eyes who asked for a dime.

She stumbled away, her snow-booted feet leading to a boutique called Baby Bunting. In the windows lacy shawls foamed and spilled from pastel garden baskets foretelling spring. The display left her cold. But that was the trouble. She was so cold she would stay cold forever, and she felt like going inside just to have a look. She loitered without deciding, but only for a moment. At least she could get warmed up, since the shop had nothing to do with her. All had been decided, the matter was settled, her mind made up, the appointment set.

She pushed the door to get her teeth to stop chattering. The overheated store smelled like Dr. Rose’s talcum powder. On a shelf teddy bears lounged, pretending to read books of washable cloth.

A dithery old saleslady waylaid her. She had fluffed white hair. Behind the rimless glasses, her periwinkle eyes shone hard as stones. Lavender flowers scattered her organdy-collared dress. She wore antique rings on every white, wrinkled finger and a cameo of a gold Cupid’s head on her chest.

“May I help you, dear?”

“I was just leaving,” said Gypsy, re-buttoning her coat.

The saleslady’s lenses flashed at Gypsy’s flat middle. “When are you due, dear?” Her sticky smile poured like pancake syrup around a question so blunt it was an accusation.

“I’m not.” She still shivered, although the shop was stuffy. Hurrying to the door, she said, to be polite for having soaked up a little warmth, “I have girlfriends who might be, but it’s too expensive for me.”

“How about these, for one dollar?” The saleswoman dangled a pair of yellow booties. “Remember, nothing in Baby Bunting is machine made.” Her tone was less sugary.

Gypsy smiled and brushed past, bumping into something close to the door that had nothing to do with her needs in this real world. It was a pair of red, soft leather shoes that would fit a kewpie doll. Silver buttons fastened the Mary Jane straps.

She didn’t dare to touch them. She couldn’t pass them by. “Would they walk in these?” She heard herself ask and was feeling afraid.

“Why, they’re more for dress-up and showing off. Not for a walking baby,” said the devious crone. “When your friend wants to dandle her little angel for Grampa. And they’re more for a wee girl. Isn’t it a little soon for these?”

Gypsy, feeling miserable, said nothing.

“They’re pricey. But the booties I could reduce to seventy-five cents. They would be perfect for your friend.”

“I don’t know,” Gypsy said. She doted on those shoes. They made her mouth water. She longed for a treat for herself.

“Well,” said the woman doubtfully. “These are all handcrafted in supple Italian leather. I can let you have them for four dollars.” She gave Gypsy a steely appraisal to see how the deal struck her.

“Could I have them gift-wrapped?” Gypsy pulled out her money before she could change her mind. The doll shoes were nearly half of her week’s salary at Loew’s, but she wanted them. They were all she wanted. “That silver tissue paper over there?”

“I’m sorry, we reserve the silver paper for gifts over ten dollars,” the hag demurred.

“I would like that paper, or I might almost faint,” said Gypsy. “I almost might faint.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. She wasn’t wholly lying. She was the only customer. “I don’t want anything like that to happen in your store.”

The woman’s tone turned biting. “I’ll make an exception in your case. These are so tiny they won’t need much paper.”

Gypsy ran all the way to the theater, the held-back tears now freezing on her reddened cheeks. She hugged the shoes to her chest. In the theater basement, she crammed the paper bag with the box inside into her locker before anyone could spy on her.

By the time she finished work and reached her room late that night, she hated everything in the world. She had fashioned a trap to ensnare her unwary footsteps. She opened the box and parted the crunchy silver paper that matched the silver rosette buttons. She held the baleful shoes, and yes, they made her mouth water. She pressed them to her face and sniffed the red tomato-raspberry fragrance of the cured leather. She forced herself to throw them back in the box. She couldn’t bear them. Not putting on a coat, she ran into the alley beside her boarding house and crushed them down into the metal garbage can. She never wanted to see them. She hated, hated, hated them. Let somebody find them.

That night she had to smother the sickness laid upon her by the lure of red shoes, and her brain burned with a bye-bye-baby song. She had to talk to it, explain things to it in its own language. “I got you started with mother-of-pearl knitting needles, belly-button to belly-button. I purled you a pair of ears, then I crocheted you a nose. Now we’re tied together with wires and nailed with spikes. I’m holding you, baby, I’ve still got hold of you, but baby, baby, I don’t think I can do it much longer. I’m not sure you and I will ever meet.

“You’re sailing by the stars, but there could be shipwrecks. Nine stars? Will two or three be enough, baby? Don’t be greedy, you don’t want that much living. Life isn’t a game, believe me. Being born is too hard, that choo-choo down a long, dark alley into the cold crying light; honestly, you don’t want that. Don’t ask for it; don’t ask for what I can’t give. You’re better off without me, so please don’t blame me.

“Can’t you stay wrapped up forever in your white sea-gown? Go sailing up and down the sky through cloudy caves in your wooden shoe, go fish for fishy stars with Wynken and Blynken and Nod. When the moon washes you clean with brine, you’ll roll over and over for a couple more millennia just waiting for me. I’ll see you out there, I promise you, baby, I’ll catch up with you. You’ll just have a head start on me and none of the grief. So can that be all bad?”

In the morning, Gypsy got up in her chilly basement room. She had already taken off Thursday and Friday from work. She said she had to visit her sick grandmother, agreeing to let Mr. Jago, the manager, dock her pay.

She padded across the room to boil water on the hotplate for tea. She moved, dragging her feet through heavy mud. She sat on the wicker chair with the faded cretonne cover to wait for the water to boil. Her grandmother said a watched pot never boils. It’s like saying a watched-for man never comes back. If only stories could have the endings she’d seen so often on the silver screen. If they’re in the movies, they must happen in life. At the last moment when all is lost, well, here he is at the door, pounding down the door. He’s been looking for her, and finally, after months of fruitless search, he gets her address somehow from an unknown well-wisher. He comes knocking, slamming her door down in a passion in the early chill of a midwinter morning, when frost flowers are diamonding the windows under the ceiling of her basement room. Sweeps her in his arms and carries her to his waiting limousine. He has passage reserved on the Normandie or the Europa, and they sail, the two of them, across the Atlantic.

Gypsy knows what it’s like to stand at the railing of an ocean liner, since she’s seen all the movies. Once on the far shore, they drive at breakneck speed in their private motorcar across the map to the old country estate. There at the altar, the fair-haired daughter-in-law, Gypsy, arrayed in pearl-hued bridal satin with a snowy veil….

Movies were so stupid, most of them. She could not be guided by them. Once she’d thought that being an usherette at Loew’s meant she’d watch the lives of the stars and would know what to do herself.

No, you had to make your own decisions. Gypsy dunked her teabag, and when it cooled, she drank her tea. She felt strong and confident, and she had made up her mind. She dressed carefully to bolster her nerve for the snuff movie she was about to make. She had to dress nicely for her baby’s farewell. Garter belt, stockings, teddy trimmed with real Val lace. She slipped her dress from its wood hanger, not the perfumed, satin, padded kind she once had at her grandmother’s. She buckled on a thin, red leather belt. Her waist was still twenty-two inches. Now it wouldn’t ever have to get any bigger. She had painted her toes deep red, for no blood must stain her feet. She kissed herself good-bye in her mirror.

She bundled on her old coat and scarf and cap and went out into the alley, heading for the Journal Square bus for Gifford Avenue. Passing the garbage cans, she took a last, over-the-shoulder look. Hungry dogs had overturned them, spilling trash, pawing at the foulness of the garbage, coffee grounds, banana peels, decaying bones. Rabid and starved, they were tearing apart the box she had stuffed there last night. Fighting over it, eating the red shoes.

“No,” she cried at them and ran to fight them. She kicked at them, swatted them with her purse, shouted at them to scat, get, shoo. They slunk away, yapping, protesting. She picked up the shoes. They were torn but wearable. She held them to her cheek, first one, then the other. She sniffed the soft flesh of the tomato-raspberry leather. They felt warm, vivid, filthy with the breath and slaver of dogs. They were too much alive. Small, malevolent creatures with open mouths. Mouths without tongues. They frightened her as if they could speak. No, not even speak but simply demand life, accusing and forlorn. She didn’t want to look at them ever again, but she did and pressed them to her cheek, to her mouth.

They had caught her unawares, and they opened their piteous red mouths to plead with her. “Let us stay, oh, let us stay, stay with you,” sang the red shoes to Gypsy’s innermost ear.

“Mrs. Morrisette” by Margaret Rodenberg

By

Margaret Rodenberg

Margaret Rodenberg

MRS. MORRISETTE

Excerpt from Delmarva Review Volume 4. Adapted for podcast production by Delmarva Radio Theatre. 

Used with permission, “Mrs. Morrisette” was first published in the 2010 San Francisco Writers Conference Anthology.

 

Mrs. Morrisette had taken to sunbathing in the nude.  Mr. Morrisette blamed it on those damn Frenchies. One vacation on St. Barts and suddenly Mrs. Morrisette was a nudist.

It all started the first day. After a hotel breakfast of croissants and lukewarm coffee, they had claimed two of the lounge chairs that dotted the narrow strip of sand between the modest Hotel Emeraude and the sparkling Baie de St. Jean.

“If you don’t get to the beach early,” Mr. Morrisette had said during breakfast and again as he hurried his wife down the sandy path, “all the good chairs are taken.”

Mr. Morrisette, glad though he was to be out of the January cold, would have preferred the direct flight to their usual condo in Miami over the twelve-hour three-flight marathon they’d endured to reach that insignificant speck in the French Antilles. Travel is hard enough on people our age without dragging us to some foreign place we’ve never been, he had said to Mrs. Morrisette in the weeks leading up to their winter vacation. Mrs. Morrisette, insisting the island was perfectly lovely and highly recommended, had bought nonrefundable tickets.

Now, stretched out on his lounge chair, marveling at a windsurfer’s scoot across the bay, listening to gulls gah-gah, Mr. Morrisette was inclined to agree: It was lovely. And since nearly everyone spoke English, and their tiny suite in the low-rise hotel was nicer than what they could afford in the States, he was ready to stop complaining. He took off his sandals and anklets and, pointing his toes toward the water, toasted his legs in the sun.

Down the beach was the end of the airport runway where propeller planes, bearing sunburned tourists, popped into the sky. Up the beach, the tony Hotel Eden Roc perched on a promontory, and in front of him, sunbathers promenaded, their feet washed in gentle waves. He pulled a sunglass flip-cover out of his shirt pocket and clipped it to his glasses.

Relishing the sight of women, young and old, slim and plump, strolling the narrow beach, breasts fully exposed to Caribbean sun (perhaps those Frenchies had it right after all), he turned to comment to Mrs. Morrisette on the variety of bosom shapes (“You could do a scientific study, my dear, something on the order of phrenology, using calipers . . .”), only to find his wife pulling down the straps of her navy blue, one-piece, skirted bathing suit. As he watched, his mouth corked with horror, she maneuvered her arms through the straps and folded down the top so that the fleshy rubber cups lay empty and open to the sky like offering bowls on the altar of her plump tummy. Her large white breasts, breasts he, her husband of forty-six years, rarely saw without a Maidenform, were dangling out en plein air.

“This is something I couldn’t do at home, isn’t it, dear?” she said, squirting out more suntan lotion.

“For God’s sake, Emma, cover up. You shouldn’t do it here, either,” he said.

“Lower your voice. Everyone is staring.”

“Of course, they’re staring—you look like something gone wrong out of National Geographic.”

“It’s a French island, dear.  Everyone is doing it.”

“My God, what if we run into someone we know?” He peered around the beach.

“Who do we know that would ever come here?” she said. “I can’t tell you how nice it feels.  Just lovely.”

Mr. Morrisette opened and shut his mouth.

“Really, dear, you look like a carp.” She lay back down

and shut her eyes.

His wife’s ample bosoms wobbled like poached eggs just delivered to the table. As they settled to rest, the nipples slid to opposite sides, giving her chest a wall-eyed look. Mr. Morrisette twisted away. His temples pulsed and his teeth ached. The ocean didn’t seem so remarkably turquoise and the beach wasn’t the pink the brochure promised. He pulled his golf hat down low.  His eyes patrolled the beach.

He squinted. “My God, that’s not the Farleys,” he said.

“Where?” asked Mrs. Morrisette, bolting upright.

“For God’s sake, Emma, lie back down. No, no, it’s not them. Never mind.”

Mrs. Morrisette lay down and fell asleep, her breasts lightly pinking. Mr. Morrisette retrieved binoculars from the basket and spent the morning scanning the beach for familiar faces.

That afternoon, he took a nap under the hum of the ceiling fan while Mrs. Morrisette walked to town. He awoke to the rustle of paper bags.

“Oh, my dear,” Mrs. Morrisette said. “I wish you had come with me. Rows of lovely shops—so continental.” She had bought him a St. Barts T-shirt and, for herself, a pink flowery muumuu and matching bikini.

“You’d never find one in my size at home,” she said.

The next day, Mr. Morrisette wondered aloud why she had paid for both pieces if she only planned to wear the bottom. That night, Mrs. Morrisette didn’t sleep well and in the morning, her breasts were strawberry red. She stood before the mirror, in her flowered bikini bottom, pouting.

“Better than Christmas—a double Rudolph,” Mr. Morrisette said, his hand over his mouth. “You’d better cover up.”

Mrs. Morrisette put on her muumuu, loaded up her basket, and led Mr. Morrisette to the beach. She found two lounge chairs under an umbrella.

“I’ll feel better in the breeze,” she said, unbuttoning

the muumuu.

Mr. Morrisette scanned the beach. He felt pressure from his morning coffee.

“I need to go to the room,” he said.

“Fine, dear. I’ll wait here,” Mrs. Morrisette said.

“For God’s sake, cover up while I’m gone. What if someone comes by?”

“Who’s going to bother an old lady? I’ll be fine.” She put her straw hat over her face.

Mr. Morrisette, staring down at the circle of her brim perched next to her round nipples above the ovals of her red breasts, felt his head spin. Below her breasts, his wife’s body spread out wider and wider until tapering in above her knees. It was soft and lumpy, an old couch you had to know to find comfortable. There was a mole above her navel— he’d forgotten that. Notwithstanding today’s standards, it was a perfectly acceptable body, but it didn’t need to be seen.

He moved his chair closer into the shade. His bladder swelled and tightened. He crossed his legs. Tossing aside his magazine, he rolled from one buttock to the other.

“It’s your prostate, dear,” said Mrs. Morrisette, lifting the hat. “Why don’t you pee in the ocean?”

“I hate to pee in the ocean,” he said. “I’d have to swim around so it’s not obvious what I’m doing. I hate to go in the ocean.”

“No one’s paying attention.  Don’t be shy.”

“Maybe I should pee against the umbrella pole, since we’re so busy making spectacles of ourselves,” he said.

“Whatever makes you happy, my dear,” said Mrs. Morrisette from under her hat.

Her skin had begun to peel from the tip of her pink nose to the arches of her salmon feet. She had dragged him to the far end of the island, to Colombier Beach where people don’t wear tops or bottoms, and where she had humiliated him by swimming completely naked. He had gotten sick eating shellfish flown in from Brittany and he would have given all the croissants on the island for a bowl of Shredded

Wheat.  She had paid $80 to have her hair cut by a man named Christophe who looked and smelled like an anarchist. It was time to go home.

Mr. Morrisette greeted the cold and the need for down jackets as a returning soldier greets his mother’s chicken soup and home-sewn quilts. He walked from room to room in their little house admiring the carpets, the bounce in their mattress, and the view of the house across the street. Mrs. Morrisette, quietly peeling, packed shorts, T-shirts, straw bag, bikini, and muumuu in a cedar box. She stored it under their bed next to boxes containing her bridal gown, her mother’s tablecloths and Mr. Morrisette’s love letters. She went back to grocery shopping, church duties and preparing three meals a day for Mr. Morrisette. On Mondays she did wash, on Tuesdays she dusted, and on Thursdays she vacuumed. Wednesday nights, they played gin rummy with the Delaneys.

Three weeks later, when their tans had turned as pasty as

the February sky and Mrs. Morrisette had stopped scratching

inside her bra, Mr. Morrisette began to rethink the vacation.

He cornered Reverend Chandler after Sunday services.

“St. Barts?” the reverend said. “No, I have never thought of visiting it.”

“It’s a French island, you know,” Mr. Morrisette said. “Quite sophisticated—David Letterman goes every winter.”

The reverend raised his eyebrows.

The ladies at the library, where he volunteered from nine to noon Tuesday through Friday, giggled over his lectures on nonchalant nudity and its effect on moral laxity (he carefully left out Mrs. Morrisette’s participation). Mrs. Buchanan, the head librarian, suggested he write an essay for The Herald. He toyed with headlines: “St. Barts, Rousseauean Paradise” or perhaps a more populist angle: “Island’s Titillations.”

“Travel to exotic locations broadens one’s outlook, wouldn’t you agree?” he commented to a stranger checking out a book on Morocco. “Just last month, the wife and I . . . .”

The first 80-degree day in May, when he came home from the library, lunch wasn’t on the kitchen table. He found his wife on the porch. Using broom handles and striped sheets,

she had rigged a privacy spot on their little deck.  She lay on

a lounge chair, wearing the flowered bikini bottom.

“Not here, not at home, Emma,” he pleaded. “What will people think?”

“No one needs to look,” she answered.

Two weeks later, when he caught the O’Donnell boys sneaking around, he knew the word was out. The postman blushed when encountered, and Mrs. Morrisette admitted to being caught when the gasman came to check the meter. One morning at the library filing books in Fiction G-to-J, Mr. Morrisette overheard Darlene Delaney and Mrs. Buchanan in Fiction D-to-F.

“. . . indecent exposure . . . .” Darlene whispered.

“ . . . moral laxity . . . .” Mrs. Buchanan replied.

He left the library early and drove to St. Matthew’s.

Mrs. Morrisette wasn’t pleased when he brought Reverend Chandler home, but at least she was dressed, which made it easier to talk in the kitchen while the reverend waited in the living room.

“How dare you?” she hissed, banging the coffee pot on the counter.  “As if I were some Mary Magdalene.”

“Talk with him, Emma,” he begged.

Good manners prevailed. She carried the coffee to the living room. Mr. Morrisette, marooned in the kitchen, re­arranged cleaning products.  He straightened newspapers in the recycling bin and glued down a loose wallpaper edge. When he heard the reverend leave, he peeked out in time to

see their bedroom door slam.

For three days, he made his own breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but the sheets and brooms came off the deck and each day when he returned home, Mrs. Morrisette was placidly cleaning the house or cooking.

The following week, Mrs. Morrisette presented him with a DVD she had ordered through the mail. Sex over Sixty, the label read above a photo of a lean silver-haired couple prancing through a meadow.

“Where did you get it?” he asked. “I suppose you’re reading dirty magazines now.”

“The Atlantic Monthly,” Mrs. Morrisette replied.

He tried, but it wasn’t going anywhere. He turned out the lights and shrank to his side of the bed. Mrs. Morrisette sighed.

“You must stop, Emma,” he whispered. “There’s no telling where it will lead.”

“There you have it, don’t you, my dear? We’re in agreement on that,” she said.

In June, Mrs. Morrisette suddenly began to lose weight. Mr. Morrisette brought home chopped liver with carrot cake for

dessert.

Early one Thursday in July, two young men drove up to the house in a red convertible and honked twice. Mrs. Morrisette, who had been fussing around the kitchen, said, “Oh, that’s for me. I’ll be home late, dear.”

Mr. Morrisette stared out the window. The driver was leaning against his car door, wearing tight blue shorts and a flowered shirt that revealed a weight-lifter’s chest. A blond ponytail hung down his back.

Mr. Morrisette trailed his wife into the front hall. When she took the straw bag out of the coat closet, Mr. Morrisette’s stomach turned.

“Where did you find them, Emma?” he asked.

“At church,” she said. “Samson—the blond one—does the flowers. There’s no need to snort. That’s what his mother named him.”

“And where are Samson and his friend taking you?”

“The Cape.”

“Any particular place on the Cape? I may need to send the police looking for you.”

“Really, dear, they are lovely boys, perfectly harmless. Reverend Chandler has known Samson’s family forever.”

“Where, Emma?”

“If you must know, Truro Beach.”

“The nudist beach! How can you . . . with these boys?”

“Not nudist, dear—naturalist. That’s what you call them—us—these days. If you get hungry, dinner is in the refrigerator.”

At the curb, Samson shook Mrs. Morrisette’s plump hand. Leaning over to catch something she was saying, he laughed like a horse with his mouth wide open, his face turned up to the sun. Mr. Morrisette’s cheeks flamed. While Samson put her bag and hat in the trunk, the other young man ushered Mrs. Morrisette into the backseat. She waved as they drove away.

Mr. Morrisette got the map and wrote directions for Truro Beach. He gunned his Chrysler and screeched out of the driveway. Two blocks before the turn onto the highway, he swerved into the library parking lot. When the tires came to rest, he laid his forehead against the steering wheel.

Later that morning, Mrs. Buchanan, the head librarian, asked him to stop talking to himself.

All summer Mrs. Morrisette lost weight. Dr. Martin, the young man who had taken over when Dr. Horne retired, stared at his

VOLUME 4 • THE DELMARVA REVIEW • 73

desk when he talked to them. He sent her downtown for more tests. Even Dr. Lipstein, the Harvard specialist, said it was too

late. Treatment would only make matters worse.

“Let it run its course?” Mr. Morrisette protested. “She’s not the Charles River, for God’s sake.” Mrs. Morrisette led him through the pea green corridors to the parking lot where he backed into another car and curses flooded out of his mouth.

From then on, every Wednesday evening after gin rummy with the Delaneys, she loaded up her straw bag. Every Thursday morning, Samson, sometimes with a carload of young men, sometimes alone, pulled up in front of the house. Mrs. Morrisette put on her straw hat and walked to the curb where Samson held the car door open. As the weeks went by, Samson met her closer and closer to the front door, and Mrs. Morrisette leaned on his arm, resting partway down the sidewalk.

In September, Mr. Morrisette stopped going to the library, and they didn’t visit the Delaneys anymore. When Samson rang the doorbell, Mr. Morrisette led him to the bedroom, where Mrs. Morrisette sat, propped up in bed, wearing her muumuu and straw hat. Giving her a white-toothed smile, Samson lifted Mrs. Morrisette and carried her to his car.

One Thursday after they left, Mr. Morrisette drove past the library, onto the highway, and took the Truro Beach road. He found the convertible in a nearly empty parking lot. Slinking behind the dunes he followed a path to wooden stairs leading to the beach. At the top, he crouched and peered down the beach through binoculars. Mrs. Morrisette was lying flat, shaded by an umbrella, a pillow under her head. Samson, his long blond hair blowing loose, stretched beside her reading aloud from a magazine. They were both naked.

Mr. Morrisette’s knees ached and his arms grew tired holding the binoculars. Sweat seeped under his collar and dribbled down his back.

Samson put down the magazine. He picked up Mrs.

74 • THE DELMARVA REVIEW • VOLUME 4

Morrisette in his arms and waded into the ocean. The water

lapped at his calves, up to his thighs, then covered his buttocks and narrow waist. When it reached to where Mrs. Morrisette’s shoulder rested against his chest, he walked through the water, parallel to the shore, past where Mr. Morrisette crouched at the top of the stairs. At last he emerged from the sea, water falling from his chiseled body, and he strode across the sand—he a Neptune, Mrs. Morrisette a waif in his arms. She clung to his chest, and through the binoculars, her breasts were indistinguishable from the loose folds that hung about her torso, its skin robbed of its lovely plumpness. Slowly she curled a feeble arm around the young man’s neck. Samson

bent his head and kissed her on the mouth. Mr. Morrisette dropped the binoculars and ducked his

head between his knees. Bit by bit, as he straightened up, his eyes traveled over his own spindly legs, lingered on his round belly, and settled on his narrow chest. He sprang to his feet and threw the binoculars as far as he could.

Everyone rose as the organ began to play.

The oak doors at the back of the church creaked open.

The congregation gasped.

Mr. Morrisette, standing by the aisle in the front pew, turned. Sun poured over the threshold. The entranceway filled with the pearl blue casket, borne high on the shoulders of six

matching golden steeds. Mr. Morrisette blinked.

No, not steeds, not horses—that was Samson at the left front and somehow he had come up with five sandy-maned friends, all his height. Their thick arms and broad shoulders rippled under gold jackets, their waists nipped in like girls’, and sinewy thighs strained against fabric. Silk shirts opened to show six bronze chests glistening with golden chains.

No one in the church breathed.

Down the aisle, Mrs. Buchanan the librarian looked as

though her head might pop.

As the young men advanced toward the altar, Samson’s lips spread into the most beautiful shining smile Mr. Morrisette had ever seen. Mr. Morrisette looked into the sea of disapproving faces and returned Samson’s smile with a grin so wholly inappropriate for a wife’s funeral that the entire congregation sucked in its breath and wives clutched their husbands.

As the procession passed, Mr. Morrisette’s fingers brushed

the blue casket.

“Perfectly lovely,” he whispered.  He reached for his wife’s hand but found only air in the

pew beside him.

“Dearly Beloved, . . .” Reverend Chandler began.

Henry Morrisette bowed his head and wept.

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