Issue 1
Table of Contents
Contest Winners and Finalists
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
Bios

Authors
Brady Rhoades
Shari Mastalski
Don Waters
Kathie Giorgio
Joe Benevento


Brady Rhoades
Goddamnit, that Hurts

__Mr. Gaynes sidesteps past me through the doorway. He doesn't stay in the kitchen long; as soon as I sit down at the table in the adjacent room he's standing next to me. My heart beats like a fist in my chest.
___“How you doin'?” I touch the ribs on my right side, by instinct. Tender, but better every day. He puts his hand on my shoulder. We haven't looked each other in the eye since I came home from Rutgers two weeks ago and we had the confrontation, but I look him in the eye and he looks back. He wants the best for me, like any father, no argument there.
___“Did you sign up?” Mother asks, setting three phone books on the chair at the head of the table.
___“Well . . .”
___ She picks up Mr. Gaynes and sets him in his customary place, chin above the table. Mr. Gaynes is 3-feet-6. He's still wearing a jumpsuit with “AHI” on the left breast – for American Home Inspection – and a tape measure, razor knife and six-way screwdriver on his belt.
___“All kinds of bleeding around the perimeter,” he says, “and that's the least of it. U-valve issues, and the jalousies . . . anything but waterproof. A sieve, more like it. A mess. A good looking number, but a mess. These postwar houses . . . I don't see much pride. If the product's flawed, the customer deserves to know. If they don't know, they're going to find out, and they don't want to find out $300,000 later. That's where I come in. My integrity, my credibility.”
___“That's why you're the No. 1 home inspection company in America ,” Mother says, bringing in the roast.
___“Imagine purchasing a home and finding out the pipes are screwy. One day you go to take a shower and splat, rust on your head.”
___“Yuk,” says Mother.
___“Or the roof leaks. Who do you blame?” He adjusts his belt. I get the feeling the sale got blown. He doesn't like doing that. It makes him fidgety, chatty, regretful. He wants everyone to make money, if possible, but he has to do what's right for AHI, for him, and for his customers. “You should be able to trust your home. If I tell you the plumbing is good, or the roof's got 20 years, that should mean something.”
___“It does mean something,” Mother points out.
___“Ah, heck.”
___“Father?” Mother asks.
___“Nature.”
___ Mother helps him off his seat. He speed-walks to the bathroom.
___“Use the step-up!” Mother tells him, then to me: “He forgets sometimes.”
___Mr. Gaynes returns to a roast, mashed potatoes, green beans, rolls, a pitcher of water, and Sis comes down from her room. Sis got a new chin for her 18 th birthday, a strong, jutting chin, like a middle linebacker, but no cleft, she was adamant about that.
___“Eleven days,” she says, looking at Mother.
___“You're going to be so beautiful,” Mother says “Even more beautiful than you are now.”
___“I'm nervous but excited.''
___“You'll be fine,” Mr. Gaynes says.
___“Atlantic City !” Mother says.
___Sis is headed to Baltimore for a beauty analysis, then one year at the School of Cosmetic Reconstruction , or SCR, around the corner from the Tropicana. We're all guessing they burn off that mole over her eye and get into the feet and ankles and turn them inward just so, instead of outward. Sis is pretty like Mother, that classic, virginal, milky look of Raphael, but she walks like Charlie Chaplin and they could suck about 15 pounds of fat off her back. You can really see it in a bathing suit. The chin was a gift from Mother and Mr. Gaynes. The rest gets paid with her settlement money. She was in a pretty bad accident.
___“It's gonna be so strange,” Sis says. “A 6-footer.”
___“Or close,” Mother says. “Depending on the risk. It's easier to make someone shorter as opposed to taller. That's what the doctor says.”
___“They told me 5-10 at the least,” Sis says.
___“The boys won't be able to take their eyes off you,” Mother says. “You'll be a beautiful bride, even more beautiful than you are now.”
___“Your mother was a beautiful bride,” Mr. Gaynes says.
___“Or they'll make me a showgirl,” Sis says. “They place a lot of girls.”
___The food makes the rounds; Mr. Gaynes is barely visible behind the mashed potatoes.
___“I can't get over it,” he says, feeling the texture of the table, like a blind man reading braille. It's a Dalton trestle with a hand-carved alder base with mortise and tenon joinery, he points out. Planked top. Panels on either side, which allow for drop-in leaves, extending the length to 110 inches, big enough to seat 10. A sun valley finish in mahogany stain. Mother bought it with her raise. It has to be one of the finest tables in all of Camden . Our house is one of the finest on the north side, Victorian, good-sized, a couple of rooms that get about as much foot traffic as a collection agency.
__“You bought the rest of everything,” Mother tells Mr. Gaynes. He gets jobs because home buyers like an inspector who can fit into scuttle holes, lofts, those kinds of places. Two more bone fusion procedures and he'll reach his goal of 3-feet-3. He gets the fusions done on his days off but it's worth it; he gets 30 percent more jobs than when he was 5-7.
___Mr. Gaynes arches his back and lets out a sigh. “Back problems,” he says. “Gone, gone.”
___He talks about his past, his follies, retiring to Cape May , on and on, circling back to his work at AHI, which we've all seen firsthand. The realtors respect him. They fear him. He finds things. A house keeps no secrets from Mr. Gaynes.
___“Marcus, answer your Mother's question. How did it go at AHI?”
___“Yeah, tell us,” Sis says.
___“Don't pester,” Mother says.
___“He can't do anything,” Sis says.
___Mother corrects her: “The pictures are very nice.”
___Mr. Gaynes tells the story of how he went into home inspection because real estate was booming. “That's capitalism,” he says. “If you pay attention and you're willing to sacrifice, you can do better than your parents did, see? Dad was a copy editor . . .”
___Baltimore Sun!” Sis says, like she's answering a question on a game show.
___“Your Mother's family lived on the south side. Ate donuts for dinner, because that's all they could afford.”
___“Atrocious,” Mother mutters, pouring a glass of red.
___“It's your turn,” he says to me. “But you have a problem.”
___Mr. Gaynes sees the soul as physical, like a heart or spleen, possibly doubling as a kidney or liver. He's pretty sure it's in the stomach area, which is all well and good as long as it's kept in its place, he says. But when it gets too big, when it expands beyond its place . . .
___“Mine swelled up in my 17 th and 18 th years and about ruined my future,” he says. “You have to get it early or it takes over your body, like a tumor.”
___Everyone knew early on about the problem. You know it when someone's got a large head or ears that stick out or buck teeth, and a sentimental soul marks you the same way. I sketched winter landscapes, dream sequences, caricatures of teachers. I talked to my family through handmade puppets, some of whom they came to like, like the dim-witted Carl Stegner. I read Chaucer and James and Dennis, which isn't too terrible except it came at the expense of schoolwork, housework, important stuff, caused me to lag, made me strange to those around me, then I'd lash out or weep or go to my room to draw or puppet.
___I'm 23 years old and feel soft and dreamy, like I haven't shed my baby fat, though all my friends have grown up to be lean and hungry, like cats prowling around the marketplace.
___The first time Mr. Gaynes worked my gut was when I came home with a bad report card from Mrs. Peterson's third grade class. He sensed the tumor eating away at ambition, gave me two sharp karate chops and he was right, I did better on my next report card. After that, he observed from afar until two years later when he caught me puppeting in the garage when I was supposed to be in class and he should have been at work.
___There were maybe a dozen whippings like that, and he had allies in family, teachers, pastors and coaches; they all seemed to be conspiring to shape me. They gave me a pretty good working over, but I'll say this about Mr. Gaynes: He always felt badly afterward, always explained why he did it.
___Now that I'm home for the summer, with useless degrees in philosophy and literature, and this AHI deadline coming up, I've noticed he's coming at my solar plexus more often, in a more concentrated way. The last one bruised ribs but didn't break them.
___“Time to make a choice,” Mr. Gaynes says. “You can go government or you can go business. Government is business without risk, business is government without restraint. You can make more in business, but government gives security. Take your pick.”
___“Your brother did well in government,” Mother says, pouring her second glass of wine.
___My eyes shift to a picture on the mantel, between the potpourri and a pewter cat. My brother is an urban planner in Boston . They reshaped his eyes so he could read maps easier, opened them up so they take up most of his face, like a badger's. He makes six figures at least.
___“Yeah, Jerry made it big in government,” Sis says, working the solar plexus, but more subtly than a fist or karate chop, which brings the puppet, an eloquent, obstinate bird named Condescending Jackass, out from underneath the table.
___“He's not contacted AHI. He's neither applied nor inquired about applying,” the bird says. “The idea of going under the knife frightens him.”
___Mr. Gaynes' fork clanks against his plate.
___“But the deadline,” Mother says.
___“Call him a coward . . . all those instruments, lights, doctors. They sweat above the eyes, you know, like they're concealing something.”
___“You're not a coward,” Mother says.
___“The cutting and slashing, my god, he dreamed he was a cake.”
___“That's ridiculous,” Sis says.
___“He's not a cake, not even close. A good case of the heebie jeebies, you could say.”
___“Aw.” Mother's sympathetic.
___“The scars. We haven't even talked about the scars. He's not a stone, you know, he has a mind, a heart . . .”
___Mr. Gaynes fixates on a place on the table, like he's trying to burn a whole in it with his eyes.
___“The whole thing upsets him. He won't do it, can't. There are choices in life, yes? One can choose for oneself. He's not a tree, is he? To be sawed into pieces. We can agree on that, can't we? That he's not a tree, but something different? That he's not a birthday cake?”
___“Why does he talk like that?” Sis wants to know, scowling at Condescending Jackass.
___“He's waiting word from the Philadelphia Sketch Club. He'll be an artist, maybe a welfare case. The former will hold and even thrive, the latter will give way in time. He's sorry it didn't turn out the way you planned.”
___“Sketching club?” Mother asks.
___“Stupid,” Sis says.
___“It's paid for through the first semester by his work at the Whitman House and several well-received puppet events, held in the garage.”
___“They're paying for that?” Sis says.
___“Capitalism! I thought you'd be proud!”
___“I'm disappointed in this,” says Mr. Gaynes. Mother pours her third glass of wine.
___“As for practical affairs, he'll find work at the Museum of Art, or Rodin, or watching over that diminutive bell.”
___“I can't tell you how disappointed I am,” Mr. Gaynes says.
___“He's been studying DeCosta, Desiderio, Bo Bartlett . . .”
___“I don't understand this,” Mr. Gaynes says.
___Sis points at either me or the puppet, I can't tell. “Why does he have to talk like that?” And Condescending Jackass, who is known for a violent temper, bites her hand.
___“I'll have you know that not only will he be famous but you'll be famous,” he tells her, touting my half-finished masterpiece, which depicts a shirtless boy with a muscular stomach suffering blows to the midsection, only to rise above the mob. The working title: “Goddamnit, that hurts.”
___“He'll be in the louvre and you'll be mired in Camden , the most dangerous city in the United States , more dangerous than Detroit , for god's sake. Who puts a prison in the middle of a city?”
___A pall settles over the table.
___“I'd be an ingrate if I didn't thank Mother, on behalf of the artist. Your work was his first inspiration. It's a shame you didn't stay with it. He loves you more than he can say.”
___“I think I can get to 100 words,” she says, placing her hands on the table and air-typing.
___Mother used to type 70 words a minute, but she peaked out. She wasn't going to type any faster with stubby hands, so she agreed to the procedure. Now she types 90 words a minute. She can reach the keys easier. She gets a 5 percent raise for every 10 extra words she types. She's self conscious about her hands, until she gets two glasses of wine in her, then she's not self conscious at all. One night she invaded a ballgame down the street, showed the boys how she can palm a basketball using her thumb and middle finger.
___“It helps with gardening,” she says. “I can dig deeper.”
___“On behalf of the artist . . .” Condescending Jackass raises a glass.
___“You should call him selfish jackass,” Sis says.
___“Thank you to Mother for his hand and his eye and the human leniency,” he continues, “and no thank you to everyone who is not Mother. That extends to city proper and society at large, which I refer to in the singular, a collective tyranny which seeks to smash to insignificance what exists in the human faculty that does not comply or consent.”
___Sis can't stand it any longer; she flees to her room. Mother pours another glass of wine; she's a half a glass away from not having to worry about crying. Mr. Gaynes, standing on his chair, holding a phone book overhead, tries to come down on the puppet with all of his force but feet and phone book slip from his grip – the book splays on the table, to an advertisement for shoes – and he starts talking about double glazing, cripples , balustrades, egress and standards of practice , but he's a phone book down, I can't see him anymore, just the hands feeling around for the meat.




Shari Mastalski
Jump

___“Grandma!” Alli's squeal broke into her grandma's thoughts. At the same moment, Grandma was jolted by the sudden absence of television.  “When is Mommy coming home?  My show is over and I'm hungry.”  
___While Alli absorbed the delights of Sesame Street , Grandma had just tidied up a bit.  Alli's room was painted strawberry milkshake, and the curtains were strawberry fields.  The room was filled with all the six-year-old stuff.  It was certainly too much stuff.  There were Cabbage Patch dolls, Care Bears and Rainbow Brites as well as a complete menagerie of stuffed animals and Beanie Babies.  Mixed in were games from Mouse Trap to Uncle Wiggly, Disney World paraphernalia, and, on the shelf, among the Super-heroes, were a few lovely books: Miss Rumphius,  When I was Young in the Mountains,  Little House on the Prairie,  Goodnight, Moon,  and The Child's Garden of Verses .  Grandma giggled to herself picturing Miss Rumphius making the world a better place by scattering those lupine seeds all over the countryside.  “I wonder what Alli will do to make the world a better place?  Does she ever get filled with wonder at things the way I did as a child?  Her world is so full of television and fast food and busy-ness and clutter.  Does she have any time to dream and to discover who she is?  Well, anyway, her mother is right; there's no time for nonsense if you're going to survive in this world.”
___“What are you doing with my toy box, Grandma?”
___“Look, Alli, under all these dolls and your paints and markers and coloring books, there are a pile of little things mixed in with the dust and the Cheerios.  What are these Cheerios doing here anyway, and where did you get all this junk?”
___“Oh at McDonalds and Burger King and Oh, look, Grandma, here is the motorcycle guy that was in my Kinderegg last Easter!”
___“What is a Kinderegg?”
     “It is wrapped in pretty paper and has a chocolate egg inside.  And inside of the egg is a yellow and orange thing and inside the yellow and orange thing is a toy.”
___“What do you do with them?”
     “Nothing.  I put them in the toy box.”
     “That reminds me of the beautiful egg I got one Easter when I was a little girl.  It was made of snow-white sugar with pink, green and yellow icing flowers.  There was a round opening at one end, and when you peeked inside, there was a world of little things.  Inside the egg was springtime and sunshine and bunnies and chicks and hills of green, sweet grass where everything was so happy and good. I felt like I was a tiny fairy flying into this magical world.”
___“What did you do with the egg?”
     “It broke.  I cried because the tiny world inside was so beautiful and I wanted to get inside and I believed I could get inside in a way.  Do you know what I mean, Alli?”
___“Grandma, let's go jump in the leaves!”
     “That will be fine.  You jump and I'll help make the pile.”  Hand in hand, they entered the vibrantly-colorful, blue-sky day.
___“Oh, Alli, aren't the leaves beautiful!  I don't believe there has ever been an autumn as lovely as this one.”
     “Grandma, let's see who can find the prettiest leaf.  Here's one!  Here's another!  Here's one even prettier!  I don't know which one is the prettiest.  They are all pretty.  Look how the sun comes through the tree.  It looks like the tree is on fire.”  Her eyes were bright and radiant as she looked with excitement and trust deep into her grandmother's eyes.  Her face lit up with a heavenly light.  “Grandma!  Do you feel it?  It's like being inside the sugar egg.  Now take my hand and let's jump together and we'll be in the magic place.  Ready!  One!  Two!  Three!  Jump!”



Don Waters
The Shivering of Leaves

___There's a resuscitation form, another for meds, lists of daily activities and nurses, a lot of nurses. I admit Mom to the nursing home on a Friday, return to our small lawn-dead house and, room-by-room, close all the drapes. A few beers in, I find an ice pick wedged in the back of the utensil drawer beneath a pile of receipts. With enough leverage I force the tip through and strike Formica, piercing a hole through my upturned palm. A dull throb drips to my elbow as I lift my hand, amazed.
___In the emergency room a doctor parts a pink curtain, reveal­ing a grin filled with thin teeth. “Someone slip at the party?” he says.
___As far back as I can remember I've never been in his sort of mood. My hand is blood-wet and heavy, and my pinkie twitches from a wad of ace bandage with a burgundy stain in the middle.
___“There are guns in the house,” I say.
___“Sorry?” The doctor's grin momentarily wilts. He's the ugly type; close-up, under florescent lighting, his pockmarked neck looks like magnified cake. He presses various points on the back of my hand, circling the small hole to gauge my response.
___“How's that feel?” he asks.
___As usual, I can barely feel a thing. “I can't feel anything,” I say.
___“Luckily, no nerve damage,” he says, tapping my hand.
___“Nothing severed,” he goes on. “The pick passed through without nicking a single bone. Looks like time will heal the wound.”
___I want to bounce from the table and call him a liar. I want to enlighten him by saying that damage sinks into the skin, it bur­rows into bone, and it lingers. But I don't know if he would understand.
___Instead, the doctor acts the part he's been cast and he scribbles me a love letter. He holds the script out of reach, dangling it as though it's a prize.
___“For when you do feel something,” he says.
___And as always, there's not an answer to the Jim question as I wait in the pharmacy, but something resembling a plan abuts a teetering wall in my mind. There's no easy way to put it: the past few years I've been cataloguing ways to torture my ex-step-father (electric shock, red ants, water-boarding, et cetera) and as a result I've developed the periodic habit of collecting objects in the kitchen and considering their usefulness in the chance it happens. Lost hours, lost wages—finally I lost my job at the site by attending to Mom twenty-four-seven. With the bone-crushing loneliness that now awaits me at home, it seems the right time.
___In the pharmacy, my number scrawls across a digital callboard. Inside the men's room I carry several pills away, and outside the summer's heat is strangulating. Each notch above ninety-eight in­tensifies the smell of the world. My car upholstery reeks of plastic. I merge onto a wide boulevard lined with sagebrush and float home on a chemical wave.
___Drapes, blinds, doors, I shut them all, sealing myself in. Dusk bruises the sky and shadows grow long down the hall. I turn on the TV, the stereo and the air-conditioning, and bury myself in bed.
___Mom's bedroom is across from mine. The single bathroom we shared until five weeks ago. Five weeks ago a cherry burst inside her skull. Mom's knees buckled in the kitchen, the rest of her tipped, and her forehead snapped violently against the counter. I rushed over and witnessed a dark mouth opening above her eyebrows.
___Three specialists dressed in hospital pajamas stood huddled like a team in the I.C.U.'s antiseptic corridor. Down the hall, I stared blankly at my last link to family through a small square window. White pillows unfurled like wings behind Mom's shoulders and stitched across her forehead was the path of a tiny bird.
___Eventually, the captain broke from her team to deliver the news.
___“Cerebral vascular accident,” she said, flipping a page on her clipboard. My stare must have said something. “In other words,” shesaid, “we're looking at a massive stroke.”
___At one point in history, Jim was a cop.
___“Forced by his department into early retirement,” Mom told me. “But he doesn't like talk about it.”
___Mom met him somehow, through someone, when I was ten years old. He lived in Las Vegas ; we were in Reno , and so weekends they'd rendezvous at a midpoint on the map. “Camping in To­nopah,” she'd call out, dragging a sleeping bag out the door.
___Sometime soon after, Jim bore down on us. He sank into the sofa with an ashtray fidgeting on his knee. He was a sad, pow­erful, broken man, and he acted toward those near him in that sad, powerful, broken way by pinning us under punishing thumbs, smearing dirty fingerprints across glasses, walls, our tongues.
___There's little use recalling the hearts Jim punched out of our chests, it's enough just to know that after the marriage, separation and re­straining order, he moved out and directly into a duplex a half-mile away, which remains his largest taunt of all. In his wake he left shat­tered heirloom teacups and a silence so loud it hummed.
___After their divorce, as if in penance, Jim claimed salvation in Jesus Christ. Christmastime he would place gift-wrapped bibles in our mailbox, the attached cards awash in false miracle. Then one season, as I noiselessly presumed, his presents stopped. Mom struggled to find beauty and love again, and in one small way she succeeded. She began to buy and sleep with guns. And around the house I made myself unimportant, quiet as a plant, mesmerized by Mom's wild laugh but terrified of her every decision.
___These days, I've learned to accept that Jim's relocation wasn't because he liked us but because Reno is desert, the town possesses the same amber tints as Las Vegas , and all along he knew deserts were a good place for endings.
___I work my fingers gently with a rubber racquetball but my hand remains useless. I fail, though I try, to make my fingers kiss.
Under the faucet, the skin around the wound quivers. A yel­low mucous scab has begun to ingest the bandage's gauzy fibers.
___I've never followed orders well, and I don't take the pain­killers as prescribed. By the end of the first week the orange pill bottle is empty. The itch begins under a fingernail and resurfaces as a vague ache in my palm. I swab the prescription bottle for residue and brush it into my tongue. I need a refill, but No Refills says the bottle.
___And, “No refills,” says the nurse behind the emergency room desk.
My ugly doctor passes through the floor. I call him over and hand him the hollow bottle.
___“I'm beginning to feel something,” I say, lifting my grotesque hand. “Something is there. I need more of what you gave.”
___“It's a schedule two narcotic,” he says. “I suggest non-habit-forming acetaminophen. I certainly don't want to encourage unsafe habits.”
___Walking through the nursing home it's impossible not to pass through air pockets that taste of gas station toilets, and in the paint­ed-white cinderblock dining room there's a dripping sound.
___Mom's hand, like mine, is deformed; hers is a frozen claw. But it's her face I don't know what to do with. Her drooping cheek looks like someone has laid a hand there, only to rip it down toward hell.
___I flip the feet supports on her chair and maneuver Mom into bed. The head nurse is always telling me I can't do this, help Mom, transfer Mom, that there are licensing and liability issues….
___One slur followed by another, Mom says, “Thanks, Pickle.

___This is her nickname for me.
___Even though Mom is younger than most of the residents, she isn't the saddest in the place. Bewildered eyes drift throughout the home and look shoved into faces accidentally. Spiders could crawl across noses without a twitch, and shaky hands reach out to me whenever I pass. Walls are posted with green construction paper street signs and on the backs of wheelchairs the activity lady has affixed laminated, hand-made State of Nevada license plates with every resident's name, age and room number stenciled into them. Traffic slinks.
___One visit, an old woman who I've seen speaking to door handles steers her wheelchair into my shin, blocking my exit.
___“Right of way,” I say to her.
___Her stringbean finger points to a potted fern next to the door. “Is that your father?” the woman asks.

___My violent daydreams sharpen with each visit. My fantasies find inspiration from toothless mouths but most of all from Mom's melted-wax face. Ruin is woven into her every gesture. She never remarried; happiness found a way to lock her out. Something delicate and expressive was stolen from her after those years with Jim, and now she's resigned to live among the living dead, unable to walk, trouble with swallowing, and pooling in urine. While, of course, Jim—older by a half-decade, overweight, a smoker—walks, breathes and exists.
___A half-mile from our home, Jim occupies a red brick du­plex mothered by a grouping of oaks, sharing leftovers with a rangy old black and white border collie. I don't know what consumes his mornings, afternoons or nights, but I disapprove of all of it. It's incredible, but it's true: parked in his driveway sits the same model Buick, down to the color, as Mom's. A short time after her purchase, his magically appeared in his driveway.
___Off east I-80, a few hours drive from Reno , an isolated dirt road spills onto a dried lakebed that fans out for miles. I visit in Mom's car, memorize the way in. It's a good place to feel empty. Steep cliffs feed the flat lake bottom with rocks that the wind has the power to move. Each carves a separate groove into the earth. From a distance, squatting on a bluff, I'm a lonely bystander to thousands of rocks with thousands of tails on a slow race toward the horizon.

___Mom's bed feels right and I relocate rooms. Nights, I raise her blinds for a clean shot of the eastern sky. It's an excellent view with limitless access to long stretches of nothing. Steeled against the headboard, lights off, I watch airplanes and satellites blink inside a blanket of black. I count seconds before the next blink happens but many times it never comes.

___In Mom's top bureau drawer, shrouded in underwear, there are two Browning nine millimeters, one .45, a small .22 with a blue finished barrel and a twelve inch Bowie knife, sheathed, with the price tag wrapped around its serrated grip.
___I'm brushing my teeth one morning with the drawer cinched open, absorbed by the guns and the visions they bring, when a sharp pain hits. My arm jolts and a dab of toothpaste lands on one of Mom's bras.

___The wound is red and weepy, like a cried-out eye, and it's hot to the touch. It doesn't help that I've been working in the garage and blackening the doctor's bandage with oil stains.
___“You're infected,” the doctor tells me. He doesn't look happy to see me. Pink streaks decorate his tired eyes and he appears to be in a rush. He writes orders for two more scripts—painkillers, antibiotics. And like before, he holds them from me.
___“Follow directions this time,” he says.

___On the kitchen counter, next to my toolbox, I gather pliers, duct tape, stereo wire, screwdrivers, a long coil of coaxial cable, a soldering iron, three-inch nails and a mallet. I rearrange their order but grow increasingly frustrated. The items refuse to fit into a gen­eral plan. The method lives outside me, blurrily present, buried in my blind spot.

___Jim likes Good Times.
___Good Times smells like plywood and ashtrays. It's located in a strip mall boxed in by a hair salon and a burrito joint. I've got­ten drunk there many desperate nights, and both Jim and I know the bartender, Terri. When you order from Terri, she places a bottle on the counter and next to it a tall glass, not a shot glass, and invites your pour.
___On more than one occasion, I've recognized Jim and Jim has recognized me. During these times we keep glued to our seats for the remainder of our drinks, or I'll pop up for a round of darts and across the room there will be a flinch, or vice versa. For me the re­sponse is out of fear and, I admit, a small measure of fascination. It's the same for him, too, I suppose. Everything since he last knew me has elongated, fattened with muscle, and grown tired of waiting for memory to fade.

***

___Vicodin draws out sparkles hidden on the corners of the china cabinet, and I'm drinking when I place the call. It's late, past midnight , I guess. I've been up thinking about a night with fists when the hazel drained from Mom's eyes and she slashed at Jim's throat with a shard of bathroom mirror he'd punched into hundreds of pieces.
___“Hello?”
___“Is this Jim?”
___“That's right. This is Jim.”
___“You were a son of a bitch,” I say, and I hang up.

___I can't recall, a few years ago perhaps, Mom phoned from the employee lounge at the Shop-N-Save.
___“What are you doing there?” I asked.
___“He's here,” she said in a low whisper. “Jim saw me from the other end of the aisle and he started walking. A nice girl let me use the phone in the back.” Her tense breathing came in bursts. I calculated the number of years since their divorce: nineteen. She was still afraid; Jim still prowled.
___“Just leave the store,” I said.

___“I can't, Pickle,” she said. “Listen, I want you to open the top drawer of my bureau. I want you to get in your car—”

___The line went silent. I cradled the phone and a tremor began in my knee. Hours later, Mom left the employee lounge under the supervision of the manager, who assured Mom he'd escort her to the Buick, make sure her tires found the road just fine.

***

___Four, five pills a night I begin to idle in front of Jim's house, lis­tening to the shivering leaves. Not long after Mom's transfer to the nursing home, I follow him to the dog park. With a slight limp Jim shuffles around his Buick, opens the back door, and his dog tumbles out. The pathway winks at me, crushed glass mixed in the cement, and I trail the worn-out pair as far as the fence line.
___Jim sits on a bench, crosses his legs, and wraps a black leash around his hands, binding them. I expect his hands are more like brittle twigs than the solid branches I remember from my childhood throat.
___Eventually, Jim looks over, and nods. It feels like betrayal, but I nod back and we share a moment of excruciating intimacy. In those brief few seconds I want to feel overcome, crushed by ten­derness, but instead I stand as always: dry, everything inside eroded to pebbles.
___For a while we watch his slow dog creep around the brush, sniffing. Jim's glasses have grown thicker and his midsection rounder, and he moves unrushed, as though wanting to consume as much time as possible. Still, he owns the same pinched face, the same acne pits at his temples, and his thinning white hair looks like a puffed dandelion before a storm. He's tall, and he walks like a tall man, stooped, stooping to pick up dog shit.

_________________________________________________***

___Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays I visit Mom, usu­ally weekends as well. Mom befriends the activity lady, Janice, and when Mom isn't busy wheeling after Janice we watch afternoon talk shows, play blackjack, sit.
___But there's boredom in her stare, a look of sterility. On one occasion, I sneak in her .45, laced into my belt, and I lift my T-shirt to show it off. I know immediately I've struck the right note because the side of her face that works hardens in surprise and her eye flashes to white.
___It's difficult to imagine how it must feel confined in her chair, seeing how it cuts her body into thirds. For safety reasons I don't understand, there's a raised hump near the entrance of her doorway, and wheeling from her room to the hall is a trial of will. One afternoon, I watch as she tries to propel herself over the hump. Her wheels rock back and forth, back and forth, until a breath of guilt enters as I see her wheels stop.
___Brushing a hand through my hair, I study Mom through a vivid opiate mist. A frayed purple bathrobe ends at her knees and warm sunlight cuts through the curtains, illuminating her dry scaly legs. Time and air and warmth unwrap her. Dead skin peels back and reveals dots of pink flesh, like a baby's, just underneath.
___I pull Mom's Buick into a free space at the strip mall. Jim's dog suffers in the rear of his car, struggling for breaths. I curl a fin­ger through the cracked window and stroke the dog's coarse nose. His eyes are milky, blinded by age, and for a moment I imagine that the poor thing probably misses gazing at clouds.
___Jim sits alone, hunched over a beer, inspecting himself in the mirror behind the bar. A fine line of smoke rises from his cigarette and then writhes as he exhales into its path.
___“Two glasses,” I say to Terri. She produces them along with a bottle. I drag over a stool.
___“I'm sitting next to you,” I say, and he knows.
___Whiskey bites the back of my throat, and before Jim has the chance to touch his glass I tip it over the lip of the bar. Liquor floods his lap. A little surprised, I guess, he looks down at his crotch as I unzip my jacket pocket, tickling Mom's Browning.
___Jim lifts his eyes from the gun and says, “Hold on. Let me finish my drink.”
___He walks bow-legged, pinching his wet jeans, and follows me outside. I ask if he'd like the dog along and Jim says, “Sure.”
___The dog hops from one Buick and into another and I ask Jim if he wants the wheel, since he knows this make of car so well.
___“No, that's okay,” he says.
___ It was that time in life, I guess, and I'd developed an obses­sion for obliterating my brain with drugs in the basement with friends. One particular winter night—we were maybe fourteen—Edgar, Ronnie and I sat cross-legged in the mildewed darkness, examining each other's pulsating faces, when a sound snapped at us. We watched a pair of snakeskin boots pass by a window high on the wall.
___After racing upstairs, we swung open the front door and discovered a memento left by Jim. Propped against the railing was a long-forgotten Sears portrait of our two-year-long fam­ily. Cold air bit into my lips and my friend's faces gave off the soft glow of streetlamp halos. In my state, Edgar's eyes melted down his cheeks in strings. Edgar lifted the gold-framed portrait and, in his state, howled at the razored-out faces. There were other times, of course—the slashed tires, the clipped phone lines. And once, on a high school raid of Mom's closet for spare cash, I uncovered shoe­boxes filled with clip-outs from Hustler exploding with genitalia and strange threats Jim had been mailing all along.

___“A match against a house.”
___“Scissors on a vein.” And so on.
___ We drive east into the desert on I-80. Finally, the wound has shown signs of healing. It's a tender mass of fluid and skin, and driv­ing with the hand is difficult. With my fingertip, I caress the soft pit in the middle. I'm surprised to find a heartbeat in it.
___ Jim's lungs, when he coughs, sound like sticks breaking.

___“Whatever happened to that case,” Jim says, “your case I read about in the newspaper?”
After all these years, after decades of silence, and of all things, Jim wants to know about Christie, a girl I once knew, and for Chris­tie I ended up in Sacramento, hot-wired an eighteen-wheeler, and drove it back to town and parked it in front of her apartment. The girl liked candy, it was Valentine's Day, and I delivered her forty feet of it.
___I keep it short. “Probation,” I tell him.

___We soon discover there aren't many more words between us out here, and the long drive eats away the afternoon. We hit dirt road, the toolbox rattles in the trunk, and at one point Jim pops the glove compartment and he sees Mom's .45 bouncing on the car's registration and insurance papers. He quickly closes it.
___The road dips into the dry lakebed, and I kill the engine. Jim opens the back door and lets his dog roam the hot dead earth. In the trunk, I find an alloy rim and fill it with water from a bottle. Jim gently scoots his dog toward it.
___“He's been a good friend,” Jim says, kicking his boot heel against a large rock. I follow its groove across the hard-crust basin. Its trail disappears at a cliff.
___“Dogs are nice for things like that,” I say.
___Together we survey the desolate terrain. I know what must be done.
___“You know all that, what happened years ago,” Jim says. “I don't want any more horror.”
___ “Well, now,” I say. Mom's Browning slips snugly into my pocket. I also know what I could never do.
___“Stand over there,” I say to Jim. When he's far enough from the car, I brace the door and slam it on my wrecked hand. It's not what I want: I hit wrist. And I can tell at once it's not enough for him to understand.
___ Jim's neck tenses to wire and his hands go up. “Wait,” he says.

___ I don't. With my hand bracing the hinge, I slam the door again and the sting shoots deep into my lungs.
___ The more intense the pain, the more astonishing everything becomes. Wind cries through my ears. Out of the corner of my wa­tering eye, I see a rock budge—I think it moves. Jim wraps his arms around his chest, crumbles into a ball, and for the first time I realize we are surrounded. On all sides, everywhere we look, mountains grind to dust.

Kathie Giorgio
So Now You're Dead

___ So now you're dead. I've often wondered how I would feel. I've seen those television ads for funeral parlors. There's one, with a daughter talking about her father, while an old home movie shows a grinning man standing in front of a classic convertible. He was the best father a little girl could have, the daughter says.
___I flinch whenever I see it.
___I used to imagine you dead, and I would picture the freedom. I would picture how I would suddenly become smart, and lovely, and how I would grow strong.
___You're dead now, but I'm still waiting.
___I remember loving you. Even after the whippings. You were my father, and you were large, and your voice rang in a baritone. I would listen to your voice, and it would make my back shiver.
___I was a naughty little girl. That's what you told me. I remember one of the first times that Mom was in the hospital. I knocked over a plant, her favorite. I was throwing a ball in the living room, just up and down, catching it in what I thought were steady hands. And then it bounced off my fingers, went into the plant and knocked it over. There was dirt on the floor, and Mom hated dirt. We both knew it. I began scooping it up, trying to put it back into the pot, and you came into the room. I remember crouching, huddling my body over my knees, and closing my grimy hands into fists. You talked to me in that voice and you removed your special belt. Everything goes dark after that. But I do remember how the sun coming in the window made your eyes and teeth shine, and I remember the way your hair fell forward as you leaned over me.
___I can remember loving you.
___I remember another time, when Mom was in the hospital again. You gave me a bath. Even though Mom was letting me take baths by myself, because I was eight, and I was old enough. You said you had to make sure I was really clean, or Mom would worry in the hospital. I stood up in the tub, and you took the washcloth. And you washed me. You cleaned me good. You touched me there, there, and there. I felt something, I didn't know what it was. It was sharp and clear, and it rocked my whole body. I grabbed your shoulders and spread my legs, and you cleaned me until I sank to my knees in the tub.
___We looked at each other then. You pressed your hand against me, and you smiled.
___Then you took a plastic cup and dumped water over me. The water had grown cold and I began to shiver. You told me to get out, to go straight to bed. I wanted my snack, the snack I had every night at nine o'clock . Three cookies and a glass of milk. But I toweled myself dry, and I went to my room.
___When I was in bed that night, I thought about that bath, and I thought about your hand and the washcloth, and how it had felt. I wondered if you would come into my room, if you would make me feel that way again.
___I hoped you would.
___Then I reached under my pajama bottoms and I felt there, to see if I could make that feeling all by myself. And I discovered that I could.
___I was only eight years old, Dad.
___It was so much better than the whippings.
___Later, you told me that you would never touch me again. You told me that no one would love me, that I would always be all alone, and that no man would ever want to touch me. You told me about how fathers sometimes touch their daughters, to teach them, to show them the right way to be with a husband. It was like getting a daughter ready for her first dance, you said. But then you told me that not even you, my father, could bring yourself to touch me. Not after that one time.
___And if you couldn't touch me, you said, then no one else would either.
___I wondered about that one time in the tub. I wondered what I'd done wrong. I was so alone. And I was so scared. At eight, being alone is a frightening thing. It's frightening now, too.
___I tried to get you to love me. You said you liked long hair, so I ran away the day Mom was taking me to get my summer pixie. You liked music, so I tried to sing, even though my voice was never as special as yours. And sometimes, on nights when you laughed and smiled, I would straddle myself on your lap, and try to give you a hug, while I pressed my body into your thighs.
___You would shove me off.
___Somewhere in there, I stopped loving you. Or I tried to.
___I guess I showed you, didn't I? Losing my virginity at thirteen. You found me reading those dirty books you kept in a paper bag by the kitty litter, in that cabinet where you also hid your magazines. You picked up the whole bag and dumped the books in my lap. Read them, you shouted at me. Then you'll learn what goes on between men and women. It's your only chance.
___My only chance.
___So I read those books, and I took that knowledge, and I went out and found a boy, and fucked him. He was seventeen.
___And it hurt.
___It wasn't like what went on in those books. I haven't found anything yet like what went on in those books. Though I've looked. Because you were wrong, Dad. Men do touch me. Whenever I want them to. It's not that hard.
___But you were right about my being alone. I am alone, and I don't like it much.
___Sometimes, at night, when I'm home from work and the news is over, I still reach under my pajamas, and I think, there's got to be more than this.
___And I think about being held. I think about being warm, and about being whispered to, and about fingers pushing my hair away from my forehead.
___It doesn't have to be like in those books, Dad. I don't want it to be.
___So now you're dead. Mom told me that you'd gone peacefully, sitting in your favorite orange chair, listening to music, with a crossword puzzle on your lap. Your hands were folded, and your pen was capped, and your head had fallen back. When Mom came in, she thought you were looking at the ceiling.
___You went without any pain, she said. And I thought, too bad.
___At your funeral, I thought about that night in the bathtub, spreading my legs for you, and that slow sink into the cold water. I thought, this is not what a daughter should be remembering about her father. And I thought about that television ad, where the daughter says, He was the best father a little girl could have.
___I shouldn't be thinking that either.
___So now you're dead.
___And even though I'm crying, I'm so glad.

Joe Benevento
Where Have You Been, Katerina Zoshchenko?

___York College, CUNY Adult Education Outreach Program, Fall 2005 "Writing the Self" Prof. Julia Addams Dept. of English

This month's "homework": do these four writing assignments in order, allowing yourself as much time and space as you think necessary:

A) Write a brief autobiographical sketch, emphasizing how you came to be the person you are today.

B) Write a character sketch, based on an actual person.

C) Describe a scene or site; try to evoke the five senses in your description.

D) Write a brief but complete fictional short story, with a conflict\resolution and a clear narrative voice.

A

___I was born Katerina Ana Zoshchenko on March 16, 1922 in the state of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil, on a cattle ranch twenty miles from the nearest town. My father had fled to Brazil from the Ukraine for "political reasons"; I never really found out what those were. He had been a young University student at Kiev when he had to leave; he came to Santa Catarina, not to find work or land, but for personal safety. He had cousins in Brazil and so that was where he fled. They found him work on the ranch, but he never liked life in Brazil, said it was "uncivilized," though that was where he met my mother, also Ukrainian but much longer in Brazil and more fluent in Portuguese. They had three children before me, two girls and a boy; I was the last child born in Brazil. At age four I left the ranch life forever when my father, yearning for a return to city life moved us all to Brooklyn, New York, USA. My mother lived long enough to have two more children, both boys, but she died when I was only ten, from cancer, they say, but I think as much from missing her family and life in Brazil. I know I spoke Portuguese as a little girl, and I remember my father telling me I used to love to go for walks around the ranch and to go to church on Sundays in an old buggy, but I myself cannot remember any part of the land of my birth or a word of my first native language.
___ I do remember Brooklyn, though. We grew up in East New York, a vibrant part of Brooklyn back then, though now it's a horrible slum. I remember being poor but always having enough to eat, and clean clothes; I remember how happy we were when we moved into a house with indoor plumbing. I remember enjoying the simple pleasures that we all enjoyed back then: a double feature at the movie house, for fifteen cents, an occasional show in Manhattan, trips to Coney Island or to Jones Beach. I remember my father, anxious to keep us aware of our heritage, driving us to the Ukrainian church in Willimantic, Connecticut to help make what seemed like tons of piroghi for the monthly fund raisers. Life was less complicated then; I mostly was a happy girl. Of course, I was very sad when my mother died, but mostly I enjoyed every part of my youth. Besides, I was out of the house by nineteen, when I married Sal Frangiapane; I've been Kitty Frangiapane ever since.
___ After high school I got work as a secretary at the Rheingold Brewery; my two best freinds, also secretaries (we had all gone to the same "Commercial" high school) were Italian girls, Maria Perazzo and Angie Tramontana, and since we liked to do everything together, I started going to church with them in their parish, Saint Fortunata. That's where I met Sal, twelve years older than me and already a widower with a young daughter. Sure, he was handsome, sturdy, with straight black hair and a well-groomed black mustache, but what got to me was the gentle way he handled little Teresa, his three year old. There was so much love in his eyes when he begged her not to cry during the Consecration, and gently walked her out of church when she couldn't be persuaded to quiet down. We wed less than a year after we met.
___ We had two children of our own, Sal Jr. and Nancy. Sal Jr. is an executive with the phone company and lives in Vermont with his wife and three children; Nancy is divorced but does well as a single parent. Nancy has two girls; the younger one, Sharon, is married two years and just made me a great grandmother last August. I see Nancy maybe once a month; she lives over in New Jersey. Sal Jr. has me over every Christmas in Vermont.
___ My husband is dead now almost twenty years. We had just bought a condo (when nobody knew what condos were) here in Howard Beach. The neighborhood in Brooklyn had started to go downhill, plus this place seemed like a good investment and the right size for us once the kids were out of the house. But Sal died suddenly and I had to come up with a life on my own. I'd always been active in church and done some volunteer work, but now I needed a real job. I was lucky enough to find work as a receptionist in a dentist's office only four bus stops from my home; I worked there more or less full time for seventeen years. The last several years I have spent much of my time alone, praying my good health will keep me out of a nursing home. I try to keep busy by going most days to our local Senior Center, where I go for lunch if I like what's on the menu (I'm on a low-salt diet) and to play cards. I go mostly for companionship, but I don't really feel that close to anyone I see day to day. When I stop to think about it, I spend my average day just trying to find ways to get through it: talking to acquaintances, playing cards, watching TV, reading a little, and before I know it I'm one day closer to seeing one of my children or grandchildren.
___ Thinking about life, I sometimes wonder where all the joy of simple pleasures has gone. My arthritis, my high blood pressure, my weakening vision, these things help keep me aware that I'm not young anymore, but, I'm not crazy; I know we have to age. But I wonder, when I look at old photographs, or now when I put words on paper, if I was really awake enough to appreciate all I once had, all of my remembered life, a happy dream, so much nicer than the life I am now living. If I were to write down every fond memory, I would fill more than one book, but if I try to sketch only where I seem to be now in my life, it can all fit too easily in a few short pages.

B

___Salvatore Giovanni Frangiapane was born and raised in Brooklyn, the fourth of nine children of immigrants from Naples. He never finished high school, but he made an excellent living in construction. When we would go for a drive somewhere Sal would point with pride to any number of buildings in New York or New Jersey that he had had a hand in building. Sometimes it seemed to the children that their daddy had raised all the buildings in Kennedy Airport singlehanded.
___ Sal had a wonderful sense of humor, a constant twinkle in his dark brown eyes. But he was also a religious man- an officer of the Knights of Columbus, later a lector at Sunday mass, and always a prominent part of the planning for the Feast of Saint Fortunata at our church. Sal was good at getting other people to work well together because he wasn't bossy. Whether as a foreman on a construction site or the person in charge of a Las Vegas night at Saint Fortunata's, he could joke and tease people into all doing their fair share.
___ He was always good to our children, only stern if he absolutely had to be. He was good with children in general. Every time he'd see one of his three godchildren he wouldn't say goodbye without giving them a dollar, which was a fortune to those boys back then. They also loved seeing him because he would tell them funny stories, laugh at their jokes that didn't make sense, or, as they got older, find out how they were doing in Boy Scouts or Little League; they couldn't help loving him.
___ Sal Frangiapane was a good husband. His first wife died of leukemia and left him with a beautiful daughter, Teresa. He married me, a naive girl of nineteen, and was always a gentle and sweetly considerate spouse. Unlike many of our friends, he never forgot a birthday, always took me out for our anniversary. He called me his "little Brazil nut"; he longed for retirement, so that we could spend more time together, do some traveling maybe, for the very first time in our marriage. But one day we were driving to visit one of his cousins back in Brooklyn; we were on the Belt Parkway, a busy and narrow highway near the water; he was pointing out a huge ocean liner, when he suddenly decided to pull over on the shoulder of the road. He said something was wrong. He died right there, in the car, from a coronary, before the ambulance could even get to us.
___ We didn't even have time to exchange an "I love you," but the last thing Sal did, realizing something was wrong and pulling over while he still had control, he did for me, to save me from harm. All these lonely years later, living here in Queens in the place that was to be for us alone, I often miss his deep-toned laugh, the sparkle of his eyes still so in love with our lives together, and, God forgive me, I sometimes wish we had gone together, wish that he hadn't had that last chance to be so considerate.

C

___Early in September, the feast of Saint Fortunata was celebrated by the mostly Italian-American congregation of Saint Fortunata's Roman Catholic church. Virtually all the parishoners had some role to play in the ceremonies in honor of their patron saint.
___ At the end of the 11:30 Mass, which was filled to overflowing, the various men honored with the assignment of carrying the gigantic statue of Saint Fortunata out of church, began to assemble in front of the statue. (She was more than twice as tall as any of the men, on a marble pedestal as wide as a kitchen table, a young dark-haired virgin, dressed in blue and light grey, which many outsiders mistook for a statue of our Blessed Mother.) Fifty men in alternating shifts of ten were needed to carry the huge statue; they would hoist her onto a platform, and carry the saint above their shoulders by means of long iron rails. As the men paraded through the streets with Saint Fortunata, from Linden Boulevard to Montauk Avenue and then back towards the church by way of Liberty Avenue, all the various church-related groups would follow with their banners: the Holy Name Society, the Rosary Society, the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic War Veterans. As the statue made its way past the people who watched from either sidewalk, some would come up to the men with paper money, which the men would take and pin to the long blue ribbons placed on the statue for that purpose.
___ When Saint Fortunata finally found herself once again before the doors of her church, the time for the final ceremony was at hand. Two young boys, dressed as angels, were elevated high in the air by means of ropes and pulleys, one from each sidewalk, to a meeting point above the parishioners in the middle of the street. The two would cry out: "Silenzio! Silenzio!" When all fell silent, the two would recite a prayer, also in Italian, in honor of Saint Fortunata. After this prayer the more secular festivities could begin. A large bag, also suspended in the air, was torn open and a flock of pigeons took off still higher into the heavens. Hordes of people, all dressed in their Sunday best, let out a cheer, hugged, shook hands and went on with the feast. To one side a greased pole competition took place, with a variety of men and boys entertaining the crowd with their attempts to make it to the top of the slippery pole to capture the many salamis, pepperonis and other delicacies awaiting the winner. Street vendors sold pungent Italian sausages, both "sweet" and "hot" in bakery-fresh Italian bread; fried dough "zeppole" with confectionary sugar crisped the air with their flavor. Local restaurants, especially along Liberty Avenue, sold pasta and pastries and beverages to suit any taste.
___ Each year any member of the parish would consider it an important honor to play any part in the feast day. Mothers would pray that their sons might become angels for a day; today men still brag about helping to carry their saint through the streets. But these mothers and fathers cannot pass these once living traditions on to their children. There are no Italians left in the parish of Saint Fortunata; they have all since moved on to other neighborhoods, both above and below the ground. The feast no longer fills the early September air with prayers and the laughter of young and old. The chipped and faded statue of a young girl is now grown old, and sits in a church where no one really knows or honors her or even speaks her language. But Fortunata waits with a saint's patience, for luckier days, for a time when she can once again be out in the late summer air and celebrate her day in the safe and happy streets.

D

___ I am in a bed that is not my own. I see to my left another bed and in it a woman I do not recognize, pale and forgotten. I try to call to her but no words come out. I begin to get my bearings and notice a buzzer on the side of the bed. I ring it over and over and just when I am about to give up a haggard and impatient woman appears:
___ "What is it now Mrs. Frangiapane?" she asks without compassion.
___ "I'm sorry, nurse," I say, "but where am I? I don't know where I am."
___ "Where are you? Where are you? When are you going to give it a rest?" she demands. "You're in the Sunshine Senior Home, where you've been since your children stuck you here three years ago, that's where you are!"
___ I start to scream, "No, no! It can't be!" and that's when I awake, drenched with sweat, to find myself disoriented, heart beating rapidly, in my bed, at home, alone.
___ I've been having this dream for over three years now. During the day I assure myself I'm being silly. My children love me and I am in pretty good health for a woman over eighty. But what if something were to happen? I keep frightening myself with that thought. Children these days, even good ones like mine, can't be expected to nurse their parents full time. If I can't take care of myself, they will have no choice but to put me somewhere, and then I'll almost never see them. And then I'll wish I were dead or that I were just still dreaming.

II

___ I was born on a cattle ranch in Brazil in 1922. We moved to New York when I was four; I do not remember a word of Portuguese. Today I had the strangest dream. I was standing in the doorway of a ranch house, shouting to someone outside, in words that sounded something like this:
___ "Onday voshe sta? Vemprar denthrow orah."
___ There I was shouting words in a language I did not understand, if it even was a language, to no one I could see.

III

___ Last night I saw my husband, dead now these twenty years. I asked him if he missed me as much as I missed him, and if he were waiting for me anxiously in heaven. He told me he had come to warn me not to expect to be reunited. I was his second wife; his first had died young. In heaven they had been reunited, as was proper. If there was a place for me, it could not be with him. "What about the children we had together?" I pleaded. "What about our lives together?" I implored. He could only smile sadly; he said nothing more.
___ When I awakened I realized quickly that it had been a dream, but wondered well into the afternoon whether the message itself might be real.

IV

___I am sitting in my recliner at home; it's my favorite chair because I can sit down without fear of not being able to get back up. But suddenly I find myself again at the ranch. This time the words I guessed might be Portuguese come from inside, but I am now outside, a little girl again, hearing my mother call:
___ "Onde voce esta, Katerina?
___ Vem p'ra dentro, ora."
___ And suddenly I understand the meaning of the words:
___ "Where are you, Katerina? Come inside now."
___ Just as suddenly I understand the significance of those words, words called out to me by my mother almost eighty years ago, locked in a language suddenly re-opened to me. I understand that soon it will be time to come inside, to come back home. Her words, her waiting, comfort me so much that when I awake from the phone ringing I am not overly disturbed to discover that it is my son, making his weekly call to me (which I know now must be one of his last) to the Sunshine Senior Nursing Home, where I have lived, dreamed and awakened for the past three years.