Issue 2
Table of Contents
Contest Winners and Finalists
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
Bios

Fiction

Authors
Craig Sanders
A.M. Heny
Mary McLaughlin Sletcha
Christina Kapp


Craig Sanders
Wagging Their Tails Behind Them

___Hold on. I wanna tell you what happened at the shelter but you gotta understand my uncle. He’s Uncle Ken and no matter what kinda shadiness goes down I have to trust him. He’s just smarter and I should listen better.
It started with that dog Matador. He was just one of a million dogs that have come through here all torn up and half dead. But he was cool anyway, all big and stupid and at least half pit if not purebred too. His fur was kinda red but he had jagged brown scars and scabs from fights I guess. Some bastard left him chained up to our front gate overnight. We found him that morning lying there whimpering and licking a broken dew claw, that’s the little thumb claw.
___Usually my uncle does the first aid but he wanted me to do this one. I dressed his wounds and some of them were pretty fresh. The poor dog would just lie there and cry, even through the muzzle I put on him. He stayed helpless on his back with his feet pawing the air. Uncle Ken stood off to the side and told me when I messed up.
___This was the kinda dog that Uncle Ken would put to sleep right away cause he was hurt real bad and who’s gonna adopt a hurt pit bull and better to just get it over with so I didn’t really understand why he gave him to me.
___“Don’t whine about it, Kat.” He said through bites of a peanut butter sandwich. He’s a vegetarian but its weird cause he’s a big fatty and most vegetarians are skinny guys with dreds that talk about how much it sucks that Phish broke up.
___“I don’t wanna. I just . . .”
___“You need the practice. I can’t have my second in command not being able to run the ship, can I?” Then he winks and I gag. I mean, how lame is that?
I shouldn’t be surprised cause I just end up doing all the shit work because no one else comes here except Donnie the Botard from Jawanio on Mondays and Wednesdays and anyone who has to do community service, you know, mostly high schoolers whose parents’ lawyers got them off if they got caught dealing.
___My uncle wants me to stay on with him and maybe take over some day. “You have a knack at this,” he’ll tell me a million times while I’m flea dipping a puppy or holding a kitten to be put to sleep with this pink liquid. I’ve been living with him for a year now and he’s kinda old and I think likes the company. My aunt left him a long time ago and took my cousins who I never see and probably took most of his money too cause his place looked like shit until I moved in and girlied it up for him. I know that he’s lonely cause he always asks why I never go out or bring any friends home but I don’t have any friends anymore so I stay home and watch TV. I hate it, but I’m over going out.
___I owe Uncle Ken a lot cause I was fucked up for a long time on E and meth and shit and was crashing on couches and futons until I found a job. I used to strip for a year or so at the Doll House, you know, that place off the Palisades. You can’t even imagine the cash. I mean, yeah I had to grind my cooch on lonely fat guys, but you don’t even realize they’re there after a while. They’re like ATMs in pleated pants. I’ve probably gotten a twenty from every man in Rockland County. And my boss hooked us all up with anything we needed so I was always high.
___He healed slow and was scared of everything at first, but once he got better and could go out Matador was too fun. I’d play fetch with him and when he’d see the ball his tongue would hang out and his back paw would start thumpin’ the ground. It reminded me of that old ass cartoon where the wolf is at a bar and sees like Red Riding Hood or Bo Peep all skanked out and freaks out. My Mom loves those old cartoons and used to watch ‘em with me on Cartoon Network.
___I really don’t talk much to my Mom anymore. She’s happy that I didn’t die I guess but in a way she’s embarrassed I didn’t too. Now she has to explain me, like I can see her talking to her friends at Weight Watchers, “Um . . . No, my daughter isn’t a junkie-stripper anymore.” “That’s FAB-ulous. What’s she doing now?” “Oh, um . . she cleans dog shit at a job my brother got her.” “Well, that’s . . . lovely. No really, wonderful. Would you like another low-carb-high-protein-sugar-free-fiber-flake?”
___I’d never tell my uncle or my mom but I miss stripping a lot. Not just the money or the drugs. It’s the music and the bass pounding you in the chest and the smell of lotion and the sweat and the glitter and knowing that all the guys there are gonna go home and jerk off to you. I ruled up there and it’s the only place where I could and I won’t ever again.
___We get back to the shelter and Uncle Ken is out front talking to a couple of Mexicans leaning against a pickup truck. There’s an old one with a potbelly and greasy hair who I’ve seen here every couple of months and one about my age in a striped shirt left open to show a wife beater underneath. The young one looked damn ass good.
___“Are you sure there’s nothing good here,” The kid said to the older one.
___Oldy pointed at Matador and me and mumbled something in Spanish.
___They walked over, Oldy in short puffy steps and the young one staying at his side and sometimes supporting him.
___Oldy kept brushing him away like a gnat or a yippy dog.
___“Kat, let them see the dog,” Uncle Ken said.
___Matador hid between my legs when I gave them the leash. They inspected the dog and checked his teeth, muscle tone, eyesight—it was like some kinda weird dog show.
___“Is he mean?” The kid asked me.
___“Um, no . . .”
___“S’ok.” Oldy handed me back the leash. “We’ll take him.”
___Uncle Ken stepped forward. “Not yet. He took a bad beating and isn’t ready yet.”
___“He’ll be fine with us,” the kid said.
___“C’mon kid.” Uncle Ken made a gesture with one of his hands.
___Oldy leaned in and grunted a number.
___“Better.” Uncle Ken turned to me, “Why don’t you take the dog inside, Kat,” and I did. Fuck them. I knew what they were. Haverstraw’s had a problem with pit fighting for years now. They’re like sick bastards who’ll sit around getting shitty on Coronas and blunts and watch dogs kill each other.
___I go back outside without the dog and they’re not there anymore. They’re all in his office cause I can see them through the plexiglass window. I’ve been around enough shady people in my day to know when something fucked up is happening and this was it.
___Sometimes you’re helpless and you can only watch so you have to think about something else. One time I was
Sandersat a party and had eaten too much E. I’m in the bathroom all puking and shit and pullin’ off my shirt cause it feels like my skin is like on fire. I can’t get off the floor and some guy I didn’t know comes in and he locks the door and pins me down and all I can think is how nice and cool the tile feels against my skin.
___The two Mexicans came out of the office. The hot one smiled at me but it was like a creepy smile as they crawled into the truck and pulled away.
___“What the hell was that about?” I said to my Uncle as I walked back inside.
___“Forget it, they’re good people.”
___“Bullshit.”
___He didn’t even look up at me. “You’re right, it is bullshit. But the shelter needs the money and dogs like that bring it in. Don’t look at me like that. No one’s gonna adopt that thing. You can’t save all of them. It’s taking up space for the dogs with a chance.” He picked up the phone in his office and dialed.
___I wanted to say how wrong I thought it was but how would I know anyway cause I’m not what most people would call moral so Uncle Ken is probably right and I’m just a stupid junkie whore who doesn’t even know that its ok to sell a dog for fighting if you can run your animal shelter with the money so I just walked away and cried.
That was the last I heard of it for a week or so. Then just yesterday I was at work and Donnie Botard had just sprayed down the hall with bleach and all the dogs were on the outer part. So I go outside and I’m looking at my beautiful Matador. He’s got his paws up on the fence barking at me and like waggin’ his tail in a little booty dance. I wondered if he used to bark at his old home or if he got beaten or was he a runaway and how he ended up with me.
___I heard gravel grinding behind me and that same truck from the other day rolled up on me. This time only the young one got out.
___He like shuffled up to the cages and then up to Matador. Looking at him this time I saw that he was younger than I thought, like a little bit younger than me. His skin was very light for a Spanish boy like chocolate milk without enough Hershey’s and he was very skinny in that dancey sort of way, like he spent a lot of nights at the club. No, probably not Mexican but I can’t really tell the difference.
___“He looks good,” the boy finally said. His voice was real soft and shaky. He was nervous and I felt kinda bad for him.
___“Thank you. I took care of him myself. When he came in here he was hurt really bad and I bandaged him and gave him all his shots and stuff. I’m the reason he’s still alive.”
___He smiled and shifted his feet. “That’s great . . . Kitty, right?”
___“No. I’m Katherine, Kat. Definitely not Kitty. How do you know my . . .”
___“But you were—I mean—you were, right?”
___“I really have to get back to work.”
___He looked back to the dog, then behind him, and scratched at the back of his neck. “You wouldn’t remember me.”
___“You came by with some old guy a couple weeks ago.”
___“No. No, before that. Way before that. “C’mon, SandersI know it was you. You used to dance at that place off the Parkway. I remember. You would do this . . .”
___“Ok, you can leave now.” I moved toward the office door to get Uncle Ken.
___“Wait!” He froze me. “Just tell me.” And he seemed so sad that I mumbled out a “yes.”
___“I knew it!” He shouted and then quickly lowered his voice into a hard whisper. “I knew you were. I used to watch you every week. Sometimes you’d talk to me. You were nice to me. I mean, I know it was cause I was giving you money, but even after I’d run out you’d still talk to me—like I was different—you could tell that I cared about you.”
___“I’m sorry.”
___His hands moved quickly as he talked and made me nervous. “I was really stupid back then. I wanted you so bad. I heard about what you strippers did after your shows, you know, for extra money,” we both blushed, “but I could never have enough. You know . . . I was poor and I knew you didn’t want me no matter how you acted. But my cousin . . . We started with the dogs. He said he knew a guy that ran a shelter and could get him dogs.
___“It was such easy money. And I walked into that club, sat you down on my lap, and said ‘how much to take you home, mami?’ And you were mine! For that one night, you were mine! Don’t you remember?”
___I shook my head. He could’ve been anybody.
___“Not even a little?” Shake. “Not even my name?” Shake.
___He frowned. “I wanted to pull you out of that place and take care of you forever. Everything I’ve done, it was all
for you. You didn’t know, but it was all you.” He straightened up and walked to his truck. “I’ll pick up the dog tomorrow,” and he drove off.
___I’m really not the smartest person and I don’t handle that sort of thing real well. I was just thinking about back when he knew me, how I’d let some guy put his dick in me or be sittin’ cross legged with some random junkie tapping each other’s arms till a vein popped up and how that’s the closest I was gonna come to love.
___I walked into the shelter and brought Matador into the exam room. The room was clean like it always is with all the drugs and syringes lined up in the cabinet. I helped my dog onto the table. The syringe went into the pink liquid. I pulled it out and then I killed him.



A.M. Heny
Delivered

___When I hear the truck’s wheels spin on the gravel, I jump for the screen door and press my face against it. I am hoping Dad has come for me himself, but Mark is the one climbing out of the driver’s seat. Mama hugs me too tight, too close: her sweater leaves red marks on my cheek and her breath braids tobacco smoke into my hair.
___“Come back soon, Aitch, girl. Come back and visit me, hear?”
___“Yes Mama.”
___“You sure you want to go?” Her hand presses the bones of my back. I nod into her body.
___“I can’t let go of you,” she says. The doorbell rings.
___“You got to, Mama,” I say, wiggling. “The truck’s here. Okay? Please?”
___As the pickup rattles me away down the driveway, I check in the rearview mirror: she’s standing there bawling, not even trying to hide it, wiping her nose on her dirty sleeve. I turn back around fast.
___“Dad!” I say when the Big House door swings open.
___My lion-colored Dad looks down at me.
___“I’m gonna be your daughter now,” I say.
___He keeps on staring for just a couple seconds more, his mouth tight in his beard and his eyes clear, watery blue. I get afraid he’s smelling Mama’s cigarette on me. But then his face wrinkles up in a smile.
___“Welcome,” he says. “Welcome home.”
___Here is who lives in our part of the Big House: Dad’s new wife Grace, Grace’s kids Mercy, Thankfulness, Simple and Light-of-God; also Dad, and me. My name used to be Aitch, which was short for Hannah, but now it’s Delivered.
___Here is who lives in the rest of the Big House: Joseph and his wife Esther and their kid Thomas; Mark and his wife Lucia and their kids Leah and Anne; Christian and his wife Beth; two women named Mary; an old granny named Orpah; a man named Sober.
___Here is what I do when I get up in the morning: I stand up on the bed and bounce quietly and secretly, one or two times.
___Back home I used to bounce on my bed whenever I got up. Mama yelled the time the headboard cracked, but mostly she didn’t care so long as I didn’t do it too hard.
___But I don’t want Dad to catch me bouncing.
___At seven o’clock, everybody has to go to breakfast. We eat oatmeal at a long wooden table; there are bowls of raisins if we want them, but no sugar or honey. I asked how come at my first breakfast, and Dad said “We try not to eat a lot of sugar here.”
___He is a deep-voiced, gentle talker. You hear in his voice how strong he is; you hear that if he wanted to, he could kill you; but you hear that gentleness, too; you hear that he isn’t going to hurt you after all. And then you love him forever.
___After breakfast I go back up to my white room to make the bed. This morning as I pass the Bible on the nightstand, I think of how my mama used to close her eyes, open her own Bible, jab her finger down onto the page and then read what it said out loud. She’d do this even though she didn’t generally believe in God: when I asked her why, she laughed and said she didn’t know.
___I shut my eyes and stab my finger down, but it don’t hit nothing interesting—just a lot of begats. First I think maybe it means I’m supposed to stay here and get married to Thomas, who is the only boy in the Big House that’s not kind of my brother, and that we’re supposed to have kids and start making another Chosen People. Then I remember Dad told me the Bible says not to tell fortunes or try to see the future. Only God’s allowed to know things. I get embarrassed—clap the book down on the table and pull the bed-covers up quick and tight.
From the window, I look out over the field at the men. They are all wearing brown pants, white shirts and suspenders. Today they’re walking to the end of the field, which stretches all the way to the edge of where I can see: all the way to where the sun sets. They are going there to cut down a rotted-out oak. They cradle axes and ropes in their arms. Dad figures God doesn’t like machines. He figures they’re loud and ugly and they don’t make you work hard enough.
___Whatever is growing in the field, maybe corn, is up to the men’s hips and is the bright green of grass after rain, so all you can see is their little white shirts bobbing up and down as they walk. They look like doves bobbing on a lawn.
___But when the men are working and you get up close, you can see how they can’t help the very dark dirt getting all over their white: it clings to their whole bodies and to their faces, and you can hear them grunt and sweat and moan so loud that it makes me blush. Dad is the only one of them who has ever been a real farmer. Joseph used to be a bus driver. Mark owned a store. Christian worked for a lawyer, and Sober was a drunk.
I go downstairs and say hello kind of shyly to Mama Grace, who is younger and prettier and also smarter than my mama. I am shy with her because although she wanted to be with Dad, she did not ask to have some extra half-grown daughter of his turn up on the doorstep. She don’t quite smile back: she’s ironing clothes, cradling Simple, who’s not even a year old, in a sling close against her breasts.
___“Good morning, Delivered,” she says, very polite. “I’m making a stew. Could I ask you to peel some carrots?”
___Grace’s oldest daughter Light-of-God is already in the kitchen, sitting on the floor with a big carrot-scraper abandoned next to her foot, a pot of carrots in front of her and a book spread out in her lap.
___“Hi,” I say. “Whatchou reading?”
___She jumps a mile and slams the book shut. “Little Red fucking Riding Hood,” she says.
___I don’t reckon she is very sanctified.
___Maybe it comes of being conceived in sin: she is Grace’s daughter from when Grace was not married yet.
___“We better peel these carrots,” I say.
___“Go for it,” says Light-of-God. She passes me the peeler and goes back under her hair, which is not braided the way hair is supposed to be in the Big House. It hangs into her face like a fake black witch wig. I can see both of her hair elastics stretched around her wrist.
___“You’re not gonna?” I ask.
___“Nope.”
___“Why not?”
___“Because I’m reading, God damn it,” says Light-of-God.
___“So what’s that book, really?”
___She shakes her head. In spite of myself, I start to get interested: I bend down and twist around, trying to see the cover. Light-of-God won’t lift it up and make things easier but she don’t exactly try to hide it either.
___“Her dress is coming off,” I observe. “Her boobs are sticking out.”
___“So what?” says Light-of-God.
___“So that’s . . . bad,” I say.
___“Right,” says Light-of-God. She ducks down again and looks like she forgets about me, so I pick up the carrot peeler and start peeling. It takes a very long time, because we will need enough soup for all of us: nineteen people if you don’t count Simple who is still too little to eat anything but milk. I peel carrots and peel carrots and peel carrots. My feet fall asleep where my crossed legs press down on them, and my hand starts aching from holding the peeler. In the Big House I have been trying to sit straight and upright the way Dad does, but now my back is starting to droop back into my old bad posture. I am so bored it hurts. I shoot a glare at Light-of-God, but she doesn’t notice, she’s still reading. I am longing to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, and I start to think that it’s no good, I am never going to be holy, not if I can get this much hate swirling around in my heart, so I might as well just go ahead and shake her. But then the light in the kitchen shifts as a cloud tumbles across the sun and I decide probably the Devil is tempting me, so I keep on peeling carrots.
___A man screams “Grace!” It scares me bad: I spring up. Light-of-God is right beside me, her book dropped face down in the peelings. We stare out the window.
___“What happened?”
___Her elbow is digging into my ribs. Everything seems peaceful in the back yard; the limbs of the willow tree bounce in the wind and in the bird feeder a squirrel cracks sunflower hulls. But it’s a tense kind of peaceful. My muscles are tight and my eyes are too wide open. It’s like we were dreaming and that sound has woken us up; it’s like everything has suddenly turned extra real and is crowding too close.
___Grace runs flat out into the kitchen.
___“What’s wrong? Ma, what’s happening?” asks Light-of-God. She seems young now, maybe even younger than me, her couple of extra years peeled off her like a coat.
___“Where’s the phone?” says Grace. “Don’t worry, girls. Stay here in the kitchen. Where’s the phone?” She runs out again.
___“What happened?” I ask the back of her. Sober is on his way in as she’s running out; he hears me, stops and puts a hand on my shoulder.
___“Don’t be scared, girls,” he says. “There was an accident. But don’t be scared.”
___“Who?” I ask, and at the same time Light-of-God sucks in her breath and says “Dad?”
I am holding my breath too. It seems like we wait a very long time for the answer.
___“Christian,” says Sober.
___Relief makes me cranky. “He ain’t your dad,” I tell Light-of-God. She just looks at me. Christian is a very big yellow-haired Swedish man, not very smart. Yellow hair even Henysprouts out of his nose: it’s like he’s partly a
man and partly a hayfield. I am trying to picture him and to pray for him while Sober explains that he needs to go back to the end of the field and he hopes we will be brave girls and look after Simple while the grownups do what they can for Christian, but my Lord, watch over our brother gets mixed up with the thought of his nose hairs: how they twirl down out of his nostrils and blend into his mustache.
After Sober leaves, Light-of-God plops Simple down on his belly on the floor. Simple blows a milky spit bubble that bursts and runs down his chin. “Bah,” he says. “Baaaaaa. Gub.” He lifts his arms off the floor, straining like he figures he’s an airplane. Light-of-God bends down to get her book.
___“Where are you going?” I ask.
___She opens the closet door and ducks inside. Little scuffling noises come from in there.
___“Hey! Light-of-God!”
___“Shut up, stupid,” comes the answer, very muffled.
___“Pup-pup-pup-pup,” drools Simple as he rocks on his stomach. He is not a crawling baby yet: he is still the kind of baby that just puddles on the ground.
___“You’re supposed to look after him!”
Silence from in the closet.
___I lean down and try to get ahold of Simple. I’m not used to picking up babies: it’s not like grabbing a sack of laundry, not unless you imagine the sack is full of frogs or mice, because you can’t just heave it around: you have to watch out for eyes and ribs and all those other parts.
___“I’m coming in!” I yell.
___Silence. Then, “You better not! I’ll slap you.”
___“Well, you just gonna have to slap me, then.” In the end I can’t pick the baby up so I grab him by his ankles and slide him backward over to the closet. He wiggles some. I bang the door open: it’s cosy in there. Light-of-God has a kind of little nest set up with a quilt I bet Grace made and a cheap little flashlight, which she isn’t supposed to have because it’s electric. She’s huddled into a ball.
She swings the flashlight up so it shines into my eyes.
___“Hey!”
___“You get that baby out of here!”
___“But Sober said—“
___“I am not getting stuck with him again! It’s not my fault!”
___“It ain’t nobody’s fault,” I say, to calm her down.
___“Isn’t anybody’s fault, you hillbilly dipshit.”
___“Well, anyhow, it ain’t the baby’s fault and it ain’t your mama’s.”
___“Not Mom’s fault?” She slams her book down shut beside her. “Ever since she moved in with That Man, she’s been acting like she doesn’t have a brain or a mouth!” She makes a noise like somebody hawking up a loogie. ___“Going out to cut down a tree with just axes! You think they ever cut down a tree before?”
___“Maybe Dad—“
___“Maybe Dad thought God was going to hold his hand? Maybe he thought God was going to swing down from the sky like Tarzan and chop it down Himself?”
___“He’s not your Dad!” I say. I am mad. It is not her business to be so critical. Dad has abundant faith and the Lord is with him. He’s all blazed-up with power; he’s half Daniel, half-Lion. When I am afraid of him it’s because I am the one who’s done something wrong. He left my mother because she was weak, and Light-of-God, who is so critical towards him, is also weak in belief like that Doubting Thomas: I want to be stronger and braver. I swell up with pride in my father’s Lion faith.
___“Oh, yes he is so my God damn Dad!” Light-of-God says. She leans forward out of her quilt and squints. “You didn’t know that?”
___“Know what?”
___“I’m his first daughter.”
___“But you ain’t…”
___“I,” she says, “was born three years after he got married.”
___“After my Dad and Grace got . . . ” I ask, confused: this is a dumb question because Light-of-God is older than me.
___“After my Dad . . . and your mom . . . got married,” Light-of-God explains, talking very slow like she thinks I’m retarded. “He had sex with my mom,” she adds. “While he was married to your mom. Got it?”
___I glare at her.
___“That’s a lie!”
___She shrugs. The shrug is what really gets me worried, because it means she don’t care if I believe her or not.
___Before I can say anything more the front door bangs open and Dad and Grace stomp inside in the middle of one hell of a yelling match. In the closet, Light-of-God and me freeze like a couple of possums with a car coming at them. I haul Simple into the closet and work him into my lap, and Light-of-God swings the door shut, but we can still hear them hollering, clear like they’re in the closet with us.
___“I’ve seen worse, Grace. I promise you, I’ve seen worse in this world. If I—“
___“He is bleeding like a knifed hog!”
___“Let me finish.”
___“Take him! Now!”
___“Grace. Let me finish.”
___“Let go of me! Let go!“
___“You’re hysterical. Grace. Calm down. Can you calm down?”
___“Nathan, either you are going to drive him or I am getting into that truck—“
___“You don’t know how to drive, my love.”
___“Screw you—“
___“Grace!” A slap. Then a big, sounding quiet.
___“Let me explain something to you,” says Dad reasonably after a little while. “Look at me. Can you look at me, angel? All right? Good. Let me remind you of something. Let me remind you of one little thing. The body is not important. The spirit is important. Christian has a very strong spirit.”
___She don’t say nothing. Maybe she nods.
___“Now, if I take him to a hospital you know what they’ll do, don’t you, angel? Tell me what they’ll do.”
___“They’ll help him,” hisses Grace. “Oh God Nathan we are wasting time. I am scared.”
___“It’s all right,” murmurs my father, sounding muffled like his mouth is pressed to her shirt, like he’s clutching her against him. “Hush now, Grace. Everything will be all right.”
___“How can you say that?” she asks. She asks like she really wants to know. Like she really wants to know how he can say that.
___“If he lives—and I bet you he’ll live, because Christian is a strong man—he’ll have more years on Earth in the service of the Almighty. And if he dies, it will mean he’s been accepted into God’s everlasting light—and he’ll go with his spirit and his body whole. If he dies, then it’s his time to die. You don’t want to be trying to tell God whether a man should live or die. You know that, don’t you?—you were just upset, angel. All right? Better now?”
___Grace is quiet.
___I listen hard.
___After a while there comes a sound of men murmuring, a sound of many boots; they must be bringing Christian in. Then that quiet again.
___A little while after that, Light-of-God leans forward and jabs me in the side. “Move,” she whispers. “I’m going.”
___“Huh?” I shift; the baby wiggles against my leg and sighs, but he don’t wake up.
___“You heard me. I’m taking Christian to the hospital.”
___I stare wide-eyed at the dark hulk of her. “Really?”
___“Yeah.”
___“You can drive?”
___“Uh-huh. Kind of. I taught myself. You going to help me?”
___I don’t say nothing.
___“You going to help me, or what?”
___I think about Christian. Then I think about what Dad told Grace. He named me Delivered. I was made new in God’s sight. If God means to take a man away . . .
___“I ain’t,” I say firmly. “I ain’t going.”
___“Suit yourself,” says Light-of-God, and she dives past me, bursts out the closet door and slams it behind herself. Then that dead quiet drops down all round again.
When I wake up, I can tell it’s a lot later. Simple is sucking on my finger, his gums working away; he must be awfully hungry. I run my other hand over his silky head. “Hey, baby boy,” I whisper. I stand up, joints clicking all over, and creak the door open; it’s dark, but light leaks through the doorway from the next room.
___“Dad? Daddy?”
___No answer. I leave Simple lying on the floor and creep towards the light. Dad’s in one of those hard wooden chairs in the front room -- just sitting. With his yellow-white beard and his stained white-and-tan clothing, he looks like a statue man, carved out of wood. For a second I want to touch him, but he’s like somebody from the Old Testament. You don’t touch him.
___“Is Christian okay?” I ask.
___“Come here, Delivered,” he says. “Come and sit on my knee.”
___I don’t want to. I shake my head. He’s all dry wood and white light: a white-burning fire.
___“Christian’s going to live,” he says.
___I bow my head. It looks like I’m giving thanks, but really I’m wondering if Light-of-God actually managed to drive that pickup. I don’t want to get her in trouble, but I am too full of the question to keep silent, too in awe of her Lucifer nerve.
___“Where’s Light-of-God?” I blurt out.
___My father shakes his head; his eyes are closed. In the other room, Simple begins fretting: “Eh, eh, eh,” working himself up to an all-out holler.
___“Light-of-God is gone,” he says.
___All his muscles are still as sleeping rattlers.
___“Gone?”
___“Her Father has called her home.”
___“What—Who is—?” I look at him, not understanding. “Aren’t you her—?”
___You can drive?
___Uh-huh. Kind of.
___“She’s at peace,” he explains. “God’s grace couldn’t touch her down here, so he’s reached his hand down and taken her up a little closer.”
___His eyes are still closed. A tiny muscle in his eyebrow twitches and jerks. My body starts shivering.
___Don’t ask me how, but I know, I know that he doesn’t believe what he’s saying right then. He’s saying it to seal a kind of hole shut: a hole about the size of a grave.
___And I just keep on shivering; I can’t stop. I’m too scared of God. God’s a nightmare, and I want to wake up on my own dirty sheets with the big, ugly, bunches of roses printed on them. I want Mama with her greasy hair and crooked twice-broke nose; I want her to light a cigarette and hold me in her spotty arms, and rock me until both of us feel better.





Mary McLaughlin Sletcha
The Chinese Baby

___“What’s wrong with saying ‘Chinese Baby’?” he asked for the second time. Shelley had been pouting since he’d made the unfortunate remark. Now they were seated on a loveseat in their neighbors’ den, removed from the dozen other guests who had carried plates and drinks onto the patio.
___“Forget it,” she said.
Jim had already had lots to drink. “Aren’t we waiting for a Chinese baby?” He took a long swallow from a beer bottle and hoped she was hurting. She had certainly made him look the fool. “Or am I not supposed to mention the only subject you ever think about?”
___“You’re an asshole,” she whispered, her voice hissing like a steam valve. Instinctively, he flinched. Despite its heated eruption, it was a tone that foretold weeks of icy cruelty built on small omissions. No warm, pulsing body spooned against his own under the covers. No clean, dry towel replacing the barely damp one. No sunny inquiries concerning his quality of sleep, his Achilles tendon after a jog, the digestion of his lunch, the status of his promotion, his mother.
___The Millers stopped by to ask how the adoption was coming. “Terrible bureaucracy,” Tod Miller intoned. “It took forever to get our Lily.” His petite wife, whose name they never remembered in time, fit perfectly under his armpit. So small were her eyes and breasts that not for the first time, Jim wondered if she weren’t Chinese herself. She smiled to show how happy they were together. How well everything had turned out.
___When they were alone again, Jim laughed out loud.
___“What?” she asked.
___“See!” He hated being goaded into stating the obvious. “People are interested.”
___“Then just say ‘baby,’” she said. “I’m sick of this Chinese Baby.”
___“Oh.” He thought he understood now. “So that’s the problem: China.”
Shelley drew her arms across her chest and fixed her attention on the blank television screen at the far end of the room.
___“Maybe it’s time to go home,” she said, but right then Kathy called her to help in the kitchen. She went there instead.
___Shelley carried stacks of cups and saucers to the dining room table. She fanned the silver forks and the white desert napkins. As always, she admired the orderliness of Kathy’s house. Through the spotless window, she assessed her own abandoned property with grass peeping over the tops of the gutters and the green paint peeling above the yellow. Although it had been an unusually warm spring, the garden beds on the other side of Kathy’s whitewashed fence still suffocated under their winter mat of brown leaves. Kathy’s line of lilac trees would soon tower over the pickets and be beautiful enough and large enough to adorn both yards.
___From the basement, she heard a sudden string of loud barking from one of the family pets, a friendly lab named Trigger. Like the children entertaining themselves upstairs, taking or fetching coats at proper intervals and making courteous chitchat about high grades and soccer teams, Trigger accepted the boundaries placed on his burly black self. With a quick word from Kathy, delivered with the fierceness Shelley found peculiar to dog owners, he immediately settled down.
___“Where’s Boots?” Shelley inquired as she rejoined Kathy in the kitchen.
Unless someone turned up allergic, the family cat was allowed to roam during parties, seeking out the lap or leg of the less socially adept guests. Boots worked as hard as Kathy and her husband to make everyone feel included and happy in their home. Outside in the yard, Boots visited Shelley by weaving in and out between her legs as she gardened.
___Kathy looked up from cutting the tarts and a light seemed to switch on in her eyes. “We haven’t talked in a while, have we?” Shelley thought of the countless e-mails and phone calls she’d made to China in the past week alone. April was nearly over and she hadn’t stepped foot in the back yard.
___“Even with shots, Kimmy can’t tolerate being in the same room with Boots anymore. We had to leave her on my aunt’s farm in Jersey. Two weeks ago.”
___“You didn’t!” Shelley put a hand against the sudden pounding in her head. She focused on a curio cabinet in the corner of the room and took deep, cleansing breaths. “We’d have taken him.”
___“But you’re so busy right now,” Kathy said tactfully. She carefully lifted slices of tart onto plates. By magic, Kimmy and her twin sister Chris appeared in the doorway. “Call the guests,” their mother told them without turning. “And then come back to help.” Trigger gave a lonely howl from behind the cellar door.
___“Misses Boots too, I imagine,” Kathy said. “We all do.”
Shelley was close to tears remembering Boot’s soft calico head pressing into the palm of her hand. “Jim and I could go down there and bring Boots back,” she told Kathy. “Couldn’t we do that? Then Boots would be living right next door.”
___“Well, it’s like this,” Kathy said quickly. The guests were coming in flushed from outdoors, stacking plates recklessly in the sink and depositing wine glasses and beer bottles on every available counter and tabletop. There were loud shouts of praise for the tarts and the coffee. Someone was clamoring for decaf, another for herbal tea, and the spoons had been forgotten. “My aunt’s grandchildren have become pretty attached.”
___“You don’t think we could pay them?” Shelley asked softly, but already Kathy was turning her attention to the others, pointing and reaching for things, marshalling the girls. Putting a sugar bowl in Shelley’s outstretched hands, she paused only long enough to say “I miss your pretty smile.” Shelley opened her mouth but whatever intended to be heard was taking entirely too long. If not for the firm, motherly hand nudging her towards the dining room, she would have held her ground and wailed like the deposed Trigger.
___“I won’t say it anymore,” Jim whispered when she brought him a slice of strawberry tart. He hadn’t moved from the couch but had turned the ballgame on mute. Except for someone’s abandoned old father, who could have used Boots’ therapeutic company, everyone had returned to the patio.
___She put her head on his shoulder and he wrapped her in his arm. “I hate those damn Chinese,” she burbled and as though on cue, the old man lifted a bony chin from its nest in his rumpled shirt. He turned his head like an owl. A Chinese owl, Jim instantly thought with guilt, and the louder Shelley complimented the tart, the more the man’s blank stare seemed to confirm he’d taken offense. The indifference with which he finally dismissed them, the flop of his sparsely feathered gray head, awakened Jim’s outrage at his own powerlessness.
___“But she’ll be Chinese,” he whispered in an even lower voice, certain this was what she needed to understand. ___“Yellow skin, black hair, dark slanted eyes.” He held Shelley to him even as she pulled away. “You can’t change that.”
___“She’ll be ours,” Shelley challenged. “Her own people don’t give a damn about her.” This time her eyes, still pooled with tears, flashed towards the slumbering man with a venomous rage.
___Jim knew then he had to stop. Had to set his plate and coffee mug on the coffee table, find Kathy and her husband among the variously reddened faces on the deck, endure the effusive flutter of nice to see you and good luck with the baby, and go home. He quickly checked the screen for a score and any reaction from other quarters. Their only company in the living room snored his complete and total lack of interest.
___Jim needn’t have worried about a total breakdown at home. Shelley was through with crying. She went into the predictable frozen stupor for a few weeks and then the craziness was over and forgotten with a single phone message. Two weeks later they were squashed together on the first leg of the trip home, trying to rouse an emotion from their very solemn, still daughter. Or at least he was trying, increasingly reminded of publicized accounts of Americans duped into adopting damaged children. Shelley was too busy telling everyone in earshot what a good, good baby she was. Every couple hours or so, to great excitement on Shelley’s part, her puffy, red eyelids would flicker and her rosebud lips purse into a soundless shape. Jim wished they’d come with the drinks already. He was sure his health care plan would cover most situations, but the daily strain of a disability terrified him. Didn’t he know that from his younger brother, thirty-five at home in diapers?
Grateful at last for a cool beer, he tried to repeat the sounds of her Chinese name for the pretty flight attendant. ___“We haven’t decided on an American name yet,” he explained.
Shelley’s face lit up. “Theresa,” she told the attendant.
___“Like Mother Teresa,” he said, half-questioning, and instantly worried the irony would disturb her. This unsmiling baby, now apparently named for a Carmelite nun, was already starting out life in a shabby blanket borrowed from his mother’s keepsakes. “Take good care of it,” she’d confided at their last meeting, “Maybe once Shelley relaxes, you’ll need it again, for one of your own.”
___The flight attendant looked confused. “Is your baby Indian?”
___“Chinese,” Shelley said indignantly. “It’s a family name.”
___“Hi, Terry,” the attendant said, wiggling her finger in front of stone features. Jim jiggled the blanket to prompt a reaction, which didn’t come. “Bye-bye,” she said, repeating the gesture, before she and the drink cart bumped along to the next passengers.
___“Terry,” Jim thought to himself. “Tod Miller’s wife.” The name they could never remember. He didn’t think it wise to mention this to Shelley. She had that dazzling, crooked smile when everything worked out according to plan.

* * *

Six months later the universe had comfortably shrunk to their cozy three-bedroom cape cod, further insulated by three days of heavy snow and canceled out-of-town obligations to Jim’s family. Inside and out, the house was decorated for Christmas. Theresa’s first Christmas. As Shelley’s Christmas letter to family and friends had cheerfully pointed out, this was “Jim, Shelley, and Theresa’s first Christmas as a family, but their last in a house love had quickly outgrown.”
___Theresa was splashing at a bar of soap in the tub, delighted at its reappearance each time she batted it under water, and Shelley was thinking how perfect life could be. How, despite the Chinese bureaucrats she resolved to face again for the sake of a sister, a single moment could emerge, as thoroughly pure as the little barge. “Soap can never be truly dirty,” she said aloud, startling herself with this revelation. Theresa, surprised too, paused and tilted her head to hear the wise, wise words of her mother.
___Cupping the tiny head in her hand like a certain calico cat she still mourned, Shelley stared into the dark pools of her daughter’s eyes. She was startled by the transient stillness of the flat features her mother-in-law had been overheard to describe as dumb. In the absence of language and in the presence of difference, it was easy to imagine almost anything. For one, that Theresa’s speech would emerge as unrecognizable as her face, or two, that she was as damaged as Jim sometimes hinted. Jim, who couldn’t stay five minutes in a room with his brother, now constantly hustled between work and household projects, with frequent excursions to the Home Depot. She would never admit it, but much as she fought them, he and his family had planted a seed of doubt that threatened the happy future she’d planned for Theresa.
___Uttering a sob at the dire possibilities, Shelley inspired not a commiserate wailing but a frenzy of splashing and a miniature likeness to her own crooked smile. Seeing its familiar confidence, stylized by the scalloped row of tiny teeth, she was very much relieved and more determined.




Christina Kapp
Old Friends

___Now: She is sitting on the floor of the Travel section. I see her from the mezzanine above and take two rocketing steps backwards, slamming one heel into a cat calendar display and nearly knocking it over. Slowly I inch back towards the edge, which seems infuriatingly precarious—the rail is a mere nod to safety in case of accidental misstep.

___Nothing if not a poor design choice.

___I reach out for it, reassured that it is iron and in fact quite solid. There, in the literary crevasse below, she is sitting on the floor browsing a travelogue. You couldn’t miss her, even from my lofty position of clumsy vertigo: the acute angle of her nose, the racing stripe of natural mud brown parting her blonde highlights, the impatient habit of rolling her rings around fingers with her thumb as she reads.

___I haven’t seen her in six years, but it is obvious that she hasn’t changed. She hunches and reads books from back to front. She sits on the floor with her legs sprawled across the aisle. When someone comes down the row, she looks disturbed and moves slowly, as if it were some monumental effort, stretching her limbs back across after the offending individual has passed. She would have claimed this was because she had a knee injury, but I never really believed that. I think she just likes showing off her long legs—legs that look thin in any pair of jeans. Legs that make her nearly two inches taller than I.

___She also has an engagement ring. I had heard about that. People tell you things like that.

___Before: Before there had been a time when we would not have hesitated to share a toothbrush. Not that we were lovers or anything, don’t get me wrong, we were just close. Really close. We forged one another’s handwriting on registration forms at school. We borrowed shoes without asking. We had pacts about how to handle various situations in bars or with men, promising to sacrifice ourselves to save one another. We told each other every last secret we had, overlooking the detail that we didn’t have secrets worth hiding.

___Then I lay in bed with Dave as he ringed the bones of my wrist with his fingers, marveling at the large gap between his bones and mine.

___“Tiny,” he said. “My tiny little girl. How do you walk around with bones so small?”

___There was something endearing about him, although I could not now say what. He wore a leather necklace with a bead that bobbed in the hollow of his throat like a lifeboat. When he kissed his lips felt like warm laundry, and when we slept he tucked the covers in around us like a cocoon.

___I think I thought I was in love, but it’s a difficult memory, like trying to remember if you’ve ever tried Vietnamese food, or whether you’ve seen an old movie or just heard the story. It’s only easy to remember that he had dated her first. She had broken it off.

___“He drinks too much,” she said.

___This was her opinion. I was more generous. I thought we all drank too much.

___Nevertheless Dave and I kept our secret from her, like a ring in a locket, for some time.

___Actually, it wasn’t that long.

___Dave drank too much.

___One night he drank too much and pushed me down a flight of steps. I broke my collarbone. The next day he came to the hospital to say he was sorry. He brought me a mix tape and a single red rose. She was there already, making lists and vowing to care for me for as long as it took for me to heal.

___Afterwards: After that triangulated moment we rocketed off in our distant directions like embers snapping in a fire. We lowered our black mortarboards down over our eyes as we processed past one another at graduation. Life went on. Mine in a monotonous heartbeat tracing of highs and lows not memorable enough to mention except for the fact that they brought me to the present moment.

___And now: Dave sells boats on the Outer Banks.

___She is reading about being somewhere else.