The Devil's Daughter

At first it was the horses that caught the disease and died. Fourteen black Friesian beauties that belonged to Herv L. Shermann, owner of the Shermann Lexus and Toyota dealerships in Appeline County. People had been alarmed by the news, mostly because nothing so tragic ever happened in the quiet, tree-lined suburbs of Vitruvia, which lay twenty-six miles northeast of the bigger city of Camden. Fourteen black horses for $10,000 apiece was a small fortune, but Sinthia’s grandmother, Mrs. Gertrude Bellevue, had dismissed it with a wave of her hand, “The Shermanns are up to their ears in money. $140,000 dollars down the drain is like a heartburn for Herv Shermann. He takes an antacid, goes to bed, and hardly remembers it the next morning.” Then the fourteen horses were cremated, to which Sinthia’s grandmother pronounced, “A complete waste of hard-earned cash, those Shermanns must be swimming in it.” A day after the ashes were buried, three of the five boys who worked at the stable grew extremely ill. They had high fevers, their brains swelled, and their bodies couldn’t seem to absorb any of the food they were eating. All of them died after just days in St. Mary’s. It was rumored that when they died, they bled from their eyes. Two days after the last boy died, a nurse at St. Mary’s was hospitalized for the same symptoms. The entire town of Vitruvia was thrown into a panic. Anyone who had the means to relocate did so immediately. Gertrude Bellevue and her fifteen-year-old granddaughter Sinthia Valentino were among those who fled the town.

When Sinthia Valentino was born, Hortense Bellevue realized that she was immensely unhappy with her marriage. Vincent Valentino, who had been so suave in their senior class with his blue suede fringe jacket and his father’s old ’77 BMW 733i, had lost his appeal just three years out of high school. Vince put on weight around his middle so that when he undressed at night, Hortense felt like her husband had brought home a big, rubber tire from his job at the Silver Stream Mechanics and wrapped it around his waist. He also always had oily black stains running down his shirt and the old blue suede jacket which had seemed so dashing no longer fit him and had been retired into a storage box at the bottom of the closet in their two bed, one bath home. When she’d married Vince, she’d known that he was not nearly as wealthy as her family was, but at eighteen years old, that had seemed romantic. Her mother had violently opposed the marriage, but Hortense never listened to the stonyhearted old hag anyway. She’d tossed her red curls and skipped off to the wedding chapel in the yellow and white cocktail dress she’d worn under her high school graduation gown with Vince in. True to her word, Gertrude Bellevue didn’t give her daughter a cent after her marriage. When the nurses had placed baby Sinthia in her mother’s arms, Hortense looked at the soft black curls on the baby’s head and the long, alluring black lashes that rested on the newborn’s cheek and saw that her child looked nothing like herself. She sniffed the baby gingerly and had thought that she smelled engine fluid. That was when she decided she was going to leave her husband.
Hortense left Vince when the baby was eleven weeks old. She packed her things the night before while Vince was asleep and had stashed it under the bed before he left for work in the morning. She nursed and changed the baby, staying with the infant for the entire day, leaving just fifteen minutes before she knew Vince was going to get home. When she left, she kissed the baby’s soft, slumbering figure and she felt a little pang of regret, but the baby looked too Italian and she needed to be off on her own. After all, she was just a girl herself as she tripped down the steps behind their two bedroom, one bath home and drove away from Vitruvia.
The next morning, the sound of pounding on her front doors and a stream of angry Italian audible from her upstairs bedroom awakened Gertrude Bellevue rudely from her sleep. Her unsuspecting maid, Suzette, opened the door while Gertrude, in her dressing gown, was coming down the stairs, still fastening her red hair into a bun atop her head.
“Excuse me,” she asked her daughter’s in-laws coldly as they stormed into her foyer. Vince was a guilty fat child standing behind his outraged mother and even more outraged grandmother, looking like Gertrude Bellevue’s foyer was the last place on earth where he wanted to be. “What is the meaning of this?”
“We don’t want this child!” Vince’s mother declared, holding up the still slumbering Sinthia.
“Well, unfortunately, the baby’s a Valentino, so this is no business of mine,” Gertrude yawned, turning as though she were going back to her bedroom.
“This is not our baby,” Vince’s mother hissed at Gertrude’s retreating back and Gertrude turned to look at her disdainfully. Vince’s mother pulled the blanket from the Sinthia’s face to reveal the black ringlets on the infant’s head which had mysteriously turned into red curls overnight. She then tossed the child onto the couch in a swift motion. The baby landed with a slight bounce and began to wail. “This belongs to you!”
As the Valentinos turned to leave, the old nonna spat at Gertrude, “Figlia del diavolo! Pah!”
The door slammed shut and Gertrude stood on the steps in stunned silence with only the sounds of Sinthia’s wailing echoing through the house.
“Ma’am, what would you like me to do with the baby?” Suzette asked timidly, picking up the crying child.
Gertrude looked closely at the red ringlets on baby Sinthia’s head. They were the exact shade of magnificent red that all the Bellevue women possessed. She’d seen the infant once before, right after her daughter had given birth at the maternity ward in St. Mary’s, but she distinctly remembered the child having black hair on her head. Gertrude had even recalled thinking that the child was a Valentino, and would therefore receive no part of the Bellevue fortune. Now, as the child quieted down in Suzette’s arms, Gertrude saw that the child looked like a Bellevue. She finally spoke, “Have Arthur help you set up Hortense’s old crib in the attic. The baby can sleep in Hortense’s room.”
And that was how Sinthia came to live with her grandmother.

Gertrude Bellevue was determined not to make the same mistakes with Sinthia as she had with her own daughter. Hortense had been horribly spoiled, her father had indulged her far too much, giving her anything she wanted that money could buy. As a result, Hortense grew up to be a pretty, self-indulgent thing. When she was fourteen, she refused to attend the Fillmont Girl’s School in Appeline, insisting on public school instead. There had been a huge fight the year before Hortense was to enroll in high school. Gertrude knew that her daughter didn’t want to go to the expensive private school because she just wanted to be around boys, the little slut. Hortense locked herself in her room for two weeks, refusing to eat or drink, screaming obscenities at her mother. Mr. Bellevue, whose health was already ailing at that time, relented to his daughter’s wishes and allowed her to enroll at Vitruvia High. When Mr. Bellevue died the summer of Hortense’s freshman year of high school, Gertrude knew she had no choice but to allow her daughter to go to public school.
But not with Sinthia, no. Sinthia was to attend Fillmont where there would be no stupid distractions like boys. Gertrude raised her granddaughter with a cold, iron fist. She never threw money at her granddaughter. Sinthia didn’t even receive an allowance. “What do you need money for anyway? I pay for all your expenses, clothing, food, and education. You don’t need money, you have everything you need,” Gertrude would explain herself. She made every decision about Sinthia’s life, what clothes she wore, who her friends were, and where she attended school. And so it was, when Sinthia turned fourteen, she was fitted for her Fillmont uniform with the green plaid skirt and white button up blouse and enrolled for freshman year.
Sinthia blossomed early. As she grew older her red hair darkened slightly, which Gertrude attributed to her Valentino roots. The mix of Valentino and Bellevue turned out to be very beautiful. Even at fourteen years old, she had grown breasts and her auburn hair was thick and lovely. When she walked through the town, men liked to stare at her as she walked by, she would feel their dirty gazes coating her like oil. But she couldn’t help it, she was the daughter of the once suave Vincent Valentino and his beautiful if not selfish high school sweetheart, Hortense Bellevue, she wore her sex on her hips. Vincent Valentino eventually moved away from Vitruvia, as though he wanted to escape the bad memories of Vitruvia and the young girl who lived there who carried on her face, his sad, deep brown Italian eyes. Consequently, young Sinthia never knew her father and saw her mother on rare occasions.
Hortense, who had made special appearances throughout Sinthia’s life, had moved to California, where she kept her boyfriends—who were always changing. When she heard her mother was caring for her daughter, she felt alleviated from the guilt of leaving her daughter behind. From her point of view, her mother was paying Hortense’s dues so that Hortense could carry on her life without shame. The first time she came home, she had been surprised to find the baby walking, but even more surprised that her daughter had suddenly shed her black hair and had grown red ringlets that resembled her own. After seeing baby Sinthia with her red hair, she felt a spark of motherhood in her heart. It wasn’t enough to keep her around, of course, and it wasn’t enough to make her take her child with her, but she did call once or twice a year, usually a few days after her daughter’s birthday because she never could remember the exact date. Sinthia didn’t really know her mother, but she idolized her. She imagined California to be a magical place where her beautiful, if flighty mother, resided in the years between the times where she would suddenly appear on Gertrude Bellevue’s doorstep to visit her daughter. As Sinthia grew older, Hortense, in her shallow heart, felt her love for her daughter grow. The less dependent Sinthia grew the more Hortense loved her. Whenever she visited her daughter, she would be carried away with emotions and make promises that she would take Sinthia with her someday to California, away from her hard-nosed grandmother. Of course, this sentiment never lasted long. Hortense, selfish as ever, would stop in to visit her mother and her daughter for a few days and disappear suddenly without notice again. She did this regularly, which made young Sinthia think, when she was three to eight years old, that her mother was a fairy.
The last time Sinthia’s mother had visited was when Sinthia had turned twelve years and had first begun filling out her training bras.
Suzette had opened the door to find Miss Hortense at the door, carrying a worn suitcase, and a wide smile. “Where’s my baby girl?”
Sinthia came bounding down the stairs, shrieking when she heard her mother’s voice. Gertrude’s tall, bony figure also appeared at the top of the stairs. Her hair was twisted up on her head as it always had been, but it was turning from red into a shade of steely gray. She sneered at her daughter with a pinched face, “I suspect we shouldn’t even bother changing the spare bedroom sheets for you. How long do you plan on staying this time, Hortense?”
Hortense ignored her mother and lay a spattering of kisses on her daughter’s face. Hortense enjoyed the feeling of Sinthia’s arms around her waist and decided that this visit would be the one where she would take her daughter back with her.
“Let me look at you,” she breathed, taking Sinthia’s adolescent face between her hands. She wrapped a strand of Sinthia’s glossy hair around her finger and saw that the hair was deepening from red into a chestnut color. She felt her heart lurch she as she gazed into Sinthia’s adoring face to find herself looking at Vincent’s sad, brown eyes. Sinthia’s smooth skin carried a hint of olive and none of the freckles that had plagued Hortense at twelve. Sinthia was lovely and just by looking at her, Hortense could tell Sinthia was going to grow only more beautiful. Her daughter’s doe eyes were fringed with thick, chestnut lashes and her lips were parted expectantly like a spring rosebud. No, this was not the trip where she could take Sinthia back with her. If anything, this convinced Hortense that her daughter could never come back with her.
“Mom, are you taking me with you when you leave?” Sinthia whispered excitedly, quietly enough so that Gertrude couldn’t hear. Her soft voice struck Hortense’s heart like bells.
Hortense, with her arms still wrapped around her daughter’s waist leaned her forehead against Sinthia’s and whispered back, conspiratorially, “Maybe.”
To this, Sinthia grinned, although it was the same answer she had heard a dozen times before. Hortense noticed the full firmness of Sinthia’s newly sprouted breasts pressed against her own smaller and wearier bosom and wondered if they came from her daughter’s Italian genes.
Hortense woke up at nine the next morning. She slept in the spare bedroom, but during the night, Sinthia had snuck into her bed to be close beside her. She looked at her slumbering daughter and tried to find a resemblance between herself and the young girl beside her. The nose was hers. It was a delicate, straight nose that Hortense had always been proud of. But it was a nose! That was all. Maybe the feminine curve of her jaw, but that was nothing! She got out of bed and made her way to her mother’s room.
Gertrude was in the sitting area of her bedroom drinking coffee and reading the paper. She glanced up at Hortense who sat down on the ottoman.
“What are you up to now, Hortense? Break up with you latest boyfriend, I suspect?” Gertrude spoke as she turned the page of her newspaper.
“I’m not going to dignify that question with an answer,” Hortense scowled, feeling the age-old dynamic between mother and daughter resume. “I want to know what your plans are with Sinthia.”
“Oh?” Gertrude cocked her head, her icy blue eyes focused their steely gaze through her reading glasses and onto her daughter’s face. Gertrude took a slow sip of her coffee and removed her glasses, hooking them on the collar of her cashmere sweater. “Did you want to take her with you? I have been waiting for you to take her off my hands.”
Hortense felt herself grow hot and she sputtered slightly as she spoke, “ No. Well, I don’t know. I just-just wanted to know what you were planning on doing. What your plans are with Sinthia.”
Gertrude smiled a little and Hortense burned. Her mother was only toying with her.
“I’m enrolling Sinthia at Fillmont when she completes middle school. I think that will be a good place for her,” Gertrude said as she picked up her cup again, and pronounced carefully, “without distractions.”
Hortense glared at her mother. “Fine. That sounds like a good idea. And when she’s finished with Fillmont?”
“She’ll be eighteen. She can be on her own.” Gertrude sipped her coffee. “I don’t see why I must continue putting my money into your daughter.”
This time Hortense knew that Gertrude was only trying to rile her up. “You always wanted to manipulate me. Now you actually have a poor girl under your claws. I hardly think you would be so willing to just set your little puppet free.”
Gertrude barked a laugh, “All right. You want to know my plans for Sinthia after high school? She’ll go to college. After that? She’ll get married. After that? At some point after I die, she will inherit part of my money. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
Hortense glowered at her mother, but deep down she felt satisfied. Her mother would take care of Sinthia so that she didn’t have to. Hortense stood up and as she was walking out of the room, Gertrude called after her, “Did you want me to tell her you were going to say goodbye, but you didn’t want to wake her up?”
“Sure, Mother, do whatever you want.”

The first day at Fillmont was awkward for Sinthia. Most of the girls who went to Fillmont were from Camden where they had attended private grade school together. They already had their formed cliques and Sinthia was not welcome. The school itself had perfectly manicured lawns. When she entered the administration building to pick up her class schedule, she had been surprised to find a large, bulbous pendulum made of brass hanging from the ceiling. It swung back and forth in a slowly, silent rhythm over a compass on the ground that was formed by inlaid onyx, brass, and white marble. There was a metal plaque tacked beneath the compass on the ground that read: This Pendulum was built courtesy of the Tallworth Family. Sinthia wondered why any school required a pendulum in the entryway of their administration building.
After she received her classes, she pushed the door of the building open, accidentally hitting a blonde girl in the face.
“Ow!” The girl yelped as she stumbled backwards. Her two friends beside her quickly steadied her. “Watch what you’re doing,” the blonde girl snarled.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t see you,” Sinthia apologized. The girl had corn silk colored hair and green eyes the color of jade. She was very tall and had delicate features, like a model. She looked Sinthia from head to toe, as though she were sizing her up. Sinthia felt uncomfortable as she felt the girl’s green eyes taking in her face, her hair, and her long legs.
“What’s your name?” the girl snapped.
“Sinthia Valentino.”
“Well, Sinthia Valentino,” the girl spat Sinthia’s name out as though it were dirty and leaned her face in, continuing, “if you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay out of the way of the upperclassmen. Especially me. I’m Tracy Tallworth, okay?”
Sinthia nodded and Tracy pushed her way past her. Sinthia sighed heavily, deeply unhappy with herself for having taken Tracy’s verbal beating lying down. She was burning inside, but years of biting her tongue when her grandmother lashed out at her had become a habit that wasn’t so easy to break.
“Are you okay?” she heard a voice ask to her left. It was male, which surprised her, and she turned to find a boy who looked about her age walking towards her. “I see you’ve met her royal highness.”
Sinthia giggled a little. “Who are you? I thought this was an all girl’s school?”
“I’m Kieran, my mom works here. She’s one of the cafeteria ladies. I’m working here too, but just temporarily,” the boy replied.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” Sinthia asked.
“I’m actually a high school graduate. Just kind of working odd jobs right now. Right now I’m helping out in the kitchen here.”
“Well, I should be nice to you then. You’re going to be handling my food,” Sinthia joked, and she blushed, wondering if she was flirting. Kieran smiled but didn’t laugh. Sinthia held up the paper in her hand lamely, “I should be getting to class.”
“Right,” Kieran nodded. “I’ll see you around maybe.”
“Yeah, you too,” Sinthia replied as she walked off. She felt Kieran’s eyes on her retreating figure, but it didn’t repulse her the way the gazes of other men did. Perhaps he wasn’t looking at her in the same way. If she had turned to see him, she would have seen that he wasn’t watching her with lust but rather, pity.
Fillmont named its buildings after the patrons who donated the building, so during lunchtime, Sinthia found herself standing in the cafeteria, called Baldwin Hall, with a plastic tray. The set-up of the cafeteria, which looked more like a full service restaurant than a high school cafeteria was buffet-style, complete with a salad bar and a fat, cafeteria worker in a white smock and a hairnet standing at the end of the line with a roast of beef on a wooden slab with a long, serrated knife and a fork. When Sinthia got her slice of roast beef, she peered curiously into the cafeteria lady’s broad, smiling face, wondering if this was Kieran’s mother. She didn’t think so.
Seating in the cafeteria was like seating in an actual restaurant, where one could choose patio or inside. There were circular tables for larger parties and by the window, there were small booths for two. Sinthia gazed at the gaggle of girls who were all eating and absorbed in conversation with their friends and thought about where to sit. Everyone, with their friends, seemed far too comfortable and Fillmont girls weren’t very friendly to strangers. She caught sight of Tracy Tallworth at a table surrounded by older looking girls. She decided to take her lunch out of the cafeteria.
When she walked outside, she found a shady spot on the evenly cut grass under a large willow oak with low sweeping branches beside the soccer field. The leaves of the tree were turning a shade of burnt orange and just one had dared fall from the branch and settle on the pristine lawn below. Sinthia picked up the leaf and twirled it between her fingers, admiring the way orange light streamed through it and illuminated the leaf’s veins. From the corner of her eye, she saw Kieran approach. He was carrying an apple in one hand and scrunched up in the other was a white apron, its loose strings flying behind him as he walked.
“Mind if I join you?” He asked as he sat down beside her and leaned his back behind the oak. He closed his eyes and sighed.
“I suppose,” Sinthia replied, looking at the boy who had already stretched out beside her.
“I’m sorry, just give me a minute. I’ve been working all morning, and I’m a bit tired,” Kieran apologized, his eyes still closed.
Sinthia shrugged, even though he couldn’t see, still watching him. He had closely cropped straight black hair, his features looked slightly Asiatic. He had a fine jaw line, masculine, but visibly, he was just a boy. He wasn’t much taller than Sinthia, so she estimated he was maybe 5’8” or 5’9” but his torso was long, which gave him the appearance of a long, lean body. His hands were cracked and slightly red, as though he had been scrubbing floors with water and lye. Whatever he did, he used his hands a lot. She looked at the fingers clutched around the smooth, roundness of the Cortland apple and saw that he was a cuticle-chewer like herself. It was a nervous habit. Whenever her grandmother admonished her, she would automatically bring her hand to her mouth as though chewing her cuticles helped her bite her tongue. When he opened his eyes, she saw that they were a pleasing shade of hazel, which complimented his pale skin and dark hair.
“Don’t let me keep you from eating your lunch,” Kieran said, bringing the apple to his lips.
“I thought you said you worked in the kitchen? Shouldn’t lunchtime be your busiest time?”
“I do, but I’m not one of the cooks. I just do the heavy lifting for the cafeteria ladies. All your fancy food in the kitchen doesn’t magically appear in the refrigerator, you know,” he said, chewing. Sinthia nodded and she turned her attention towards her slice of roast beef, side of organic mashed potatoes with organic chicken gravy (“no hormones”—as the sign beside the gravy dish had proclaimed.) She poked at the meat and watched how the red juices trickled through the crevices and mixed with the overflow of gravy on her plate. Kieran watched her thoughtfully, chewing his apple like cud. “I never got your name.”
“Oh, it’s Sinthia. With an ‘S,’” she responded.
“S-Y-N-T-H-I-A?”
“No, S-I-N-T-H-I-A.”
“That’s interesting,” Kieran laughed.
Sinthia pursed her lips, unsure if he was making fun of her. “How so?”
“Your name begins with ‘sin.’ That’s a little funny, don’t you think?”
She shook her head, “I don’t know. I guess.”
“It’s kind of condemning, isn’t it? Like naming your daughter ‘Temptress’ or ‘Jezebel’? ” Kieran asked. “Is your family religious?”
Sinthia shook her head, “No. I don’t think my family,” and she thought of how loosely the term applied to her makeshift family of her austere grandmother and herself, and occasionally her impetuous mother, “is religious at all.”
“Really?”
“What about you? Is your family religious?”
“Yeah, my mama, papa, and everyone blood related to me is devoutly Catholic.”
“What about you, are you devout?”
Kieran shrugged, biting off more of his apple, “I am, I suppose. I grew up in the faith, I pray every night and before every meal. I’ve been baptized and confirmed and I take the Eucharist every Sunday at Mass. I’m Catholic through and through.”
“Did you pray before that meal?” Sinthia teased, pointing at the apple.
“Your food’s getting cold,” Kieran replied pointedly.
So they sat in silence and Kieran chewed his apple like a cud and Sinthia ate her roast with mashed potatoes. Both of them were staring off at the row of pines the lined the back end of the field, like a spiny, natural barrier keeping the curious eyes of passerbys out of the privileged Eden of the school grounds. All of her peers were in the Baldwin hall eating their lunch and there was no one outside except Kieran and Sinthia sitting beneath the willow oak for those quiet minutes and for the first time during that day, Sinthia felt at ease.
Finally Sinthia spoke up, although it wasn’t simply to break the silence but rather because a thought had occurred to her, “My grandmother has a religion. Her religion is money.” Kieran watched her; his hazel eyes seemed to wait for her to continue her train of thought. She spoke again, “She doesn’t believe there is a God. She’s an atheist other than for money. But I don’t agree, actually. There must be a God. We are sentient beings, different from all the other animals. The very fact that the question about whether or not there is a higher authority exists, couldn’t that be proof that there is a God? Don’t you think maybe God planted that question there himself so that humans are always looking, always searching for Him?”
Kieran polished off his apple and tossed it behind the tree, the only piece of litter on the entire field, and said, “You know, you could be right. There’s no right or wrong answer. Not one we’ll know before we die, anyway.”
“Where are you from, Kieran?”
“Vitruvia. I grew up there.”
“Funny, I did too. I never met you though.”
“Well, the rich stay in their circles and the poor stay in ours.”
“I went to public middle school in Vitruvia.”
“You’re significantly younger than me, Sinthia.” Kieran laughed.
“I’m fourteen. How old are you?”
“Eighteen, I’m turning nineteen in a few months.”
“You’re not that much older,” Sinthia shook her head. She was feeling full.
“Oh, yes, I am. Older and wiser, so that means you have to listen to me,” Kieran joked.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, even if you are just a baby, it’s nice to have someone to talk to during lunch who isn’t old and wearing a hairnet. Meet me back here for lunch tomorrow. That’s an order,” he smiled charmingly as he stood up and brushed off the seat of his pants. “I have to get back to work. See you tomorrow.”
Sinthia felt her heart flutter slightly as she watched Kieran walked back towards the backdoor of Baldwin Hall. He unrolled his apron while he was walking and shook it out quickly before disappearing into the building.
Well, even if he was much, much older than herself, they could at least be friends, she figured.
They ate more lunches together and Sinthia quickly felt like her closest friend at Fillmont was a boy who worked in the kitchen. The first time they made plans to hang out outside of Fillmont, Kieran made it very clear, he said, “I just want you to know that this isn’t a date. You are way to young for me. We’re just friends, okay?” Then, he gave her his address and told her to come by when she could, there was a place he wanted to take her. Sinthia decided to lie to her grandmother to make it easier for her to get out of the house. She told her grandmother that she was helping to for a new chapter of Future Business Leaders of America at her school, which was going to require a lot of after school time, and Gertrude had dismissed her with a wave of her hand. Gertrude didn’t really care what Sinthia did with her time, so long as she wasn’t disruptive in the house and she wasn’t out spreading her legs for dirty, poor boys like her mother had. To Sinthia’s delight, Kieran only lived a few short blocks away from her home, although a few blocks made all difference in the world. She counted six blocks to get from September Avenue, where her grandmother’s stately home with its two large colonial beams framing the double French doors, seven bedroom, and nine baths was located to Arapaho Drive where Kieran’s small three bedroom, one story-house where both his parents, his grandmother, he, and his younger brother lived was located. With each block west from her home, the neighborhoods grew smaller, dirtier, with more empty soda bottles and cigarette butts lining the curbs. Wooden fences and metal gates that enclosed larger estates disappeared and Sinthia found more chain-link fences and bars on the windows of some houses. Children played in the street where Kieran lived. They ran about the cul-de-sac in their bare feet clutching soccer balls and sometimes Frisbees. This was foreign to Sinthia’s neighborhood where all the children, if they wished to play outdoors, they could swim in the pool in the backyard or go to the club to practice tennis with their friends. Kieran came to the screen door when he saw her walk up the street and went outside, a baby toddler following him into the front yard.
“And who are you?” Sinthia squatted down on her haunches and cooed to the toddler.
“This is Zachary. He’s my older sister Anna’s baby. She works as a nurse at St. Mary’s so he’s here every once in a while when she can’t find someone to take care of him.”
“You are adorable,” Sinthia cooed over the child. The boy raised his chubby fist and touched it to Sinthia’s cheek. The baby had large hazel eyes, similar to Kieran’s, and she figured they must run in the family as a lovely trait.
“Yeah, he is,” Kieran said as he picked up the baby and moved the child back into the house. “Mom, Zachary’s in the living room. I’m going out!”
Kieran’s mother came to the screen door. Zachary was at her knees. Even from behind the screen, Sinthia could see she was a slender woman with curly black hair. She looked Asian but Sinthia wasn’t sure. Kieran’s mother lifted hand as a gestured of farewell and Sinthia raised her hand in reply.
“Come on,” Kieran motioned for her while pulling up his jeans by a belt loop. In an act of impatience, he grabbed her wrist as though she was walking too slowly, but Sinthia noticed because it was the first time he’d ever touched her. “We have to get there before the sun sets or we’ll miss it.”
“Where? Miss what?” she asked him but to no avail. The trudged down a few blocks and slipped behind some houses. “Are we trespassing?” Sinthia murmured, loud enough for only Kieran to hear. Once again, he ignored her. There was a wall of tall bushes, and Kieran ducked between the spiky branches, pulling the bristles to the side to make a narrow entryway for Sinthia to pass through.
“Vitruvia is on a hill, as you know, I’m sure, but I wonder if you’ve ever come to this side of it?” Kieran asked after Sinthia finally made her way through. Sinthia found herself on the backside of a hill covered in long, unmowed wild grass could see clear across to Camden. Behind her were the suburbs of Vitruvia. “See down there? That’s the 157 freeway.” Sinthia glanced down the pregnant bump of the rolling hill and could see the motorway below. It seemed very far away.
“It’s so pretty here,” she breathed. The sun was setting and casting a soft blanket of orange light over the city and the breeze played with the tips of the grasses, which fluttered and bent. “I really like it. Do you come out here a lot?”
“Well, my brothers and sisters used to come up here to this hill all the time when we were kids. Now we’re all grown up. Even my younger brother, he’s sixteen. Got a girlfriend and everything. I don’t think anyone comes out here anymore except for me,” Kieran said, squinting his eyes at the sun and picking at the grasses with his hands.
Sinthia sat down and brushed back her chestnut curls, which the wind was now whipping up, “Tell me about them.”
Kieran sat down beside her and said, “Anna’s the oldest. She’s twenty-three. Zachary’s dad walked out on her just a few weeks after he was born and that was really hard for her. But now she’s an RN and she works in the medical ward at St. Mary’s. It’s good for her.” Sinthia could sense a tenderness Kieran had for his older sister. “Anna’s kind of like my third parent, you know? She’s just always taken care of me. Then, there’s Oscar who’s sixteen, like I told you. He’s just growing up to be a little asshole, but it’s all right. I keep him in check when I can.”
Kieran held up his fist to show Sinthia how he kept his brother in check, but he was smiling, so she knew he was just kidding. “And you? Siblings?”
‘No siblings that I know of,” Sinthia said dryly. “Maybe, I’ve never met my dad. Mom hates talking about him and my grandmother always just turns to me and says, ‘I don’t know anything about Vincent Valentino.’”
“That sucks,” Kieran said. “Do you ever want to look for him?”
Sinthia rolled onto her back and she saw Kieran try not to notice the way her T-shirt folded between her breasts. “No. He didn’t want me. I don’t want him.”
“That’s healthy,” Kieran replied, glancing at her face and then quickly away.
“How long do you plan on working at Fillmont?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“You said it was temporary. You’re pretty much the only person I talk to at Fillmont. I just want to know that you’ll stick around. I’ve heard it’s hard to make friends when you’re an upperclassman.”
“Maybe I should leave now. You should be making friends with other girls, not just with me,” Kieran responded, lying down beside her.
“I hate them,” Sinthia made a face, her clear forehead wrinkled and her pink lips puckered sourly, “Girls are so clique-y and mean.”
She was talking about the most recent incident involving Tracy Tallworth during gym. The freshmen were required to take physical education during sixth period, to which Sinthia had chosen swimming, and juniors had electives during that time and Tracy had elected to take dance. They were always in the locker room together afterwards and Tracy, who never liked Sinthia after that first day at school, raided Sinthia’s locker and stolen her clothes. Sinthia had to run to the administration building in her bathing suit to call her grandmother to bring another set of her uniform to school. Needless to say, Gertrude had not been pleased.
“If you’re talking about Tracy Tallworth,” Kieran said, turning his face to look at Sinthia. She was still lying on her back, gazing up at the clouds, “don’t worry about her. She’s just intimidated by you?”
“Me?” Sinthia choked. “She’s Tracy Tallworth. She’s tall, gorgeous. She’s got a ton of friends. Her dad donated half the school. I mean, I take Algebra in a building that has her last name! Why the hell would she be intimidated by me?”
“Because you’ve usurped her. You are a hundred times better looking than Tracy Tallworth. With her nasty attitude, you are a thousand, a million times better than Tracy Tallworth,” Kieran said emphatically to the sky.
Sinthia smiled at his passion. “That’s really kind of you, Kieran. I’d like to think I’m a nicer person, but Tracy Tallworth, she’s just—”
“A bitch,” Kieran supplied and Sinthia giggled. “Let’s not pollute any more of this nice sunset with talk of Tracy Tallworth.”
“Don’t you think it’s funny we can’t say ‘Tracy’ without saying her last name too?” Sinthia wondered aloud.
“Shut up.”

When the epidemic broke out in Vitruvia, Kieran had been one of the first to know because his sister worked in the ward where the three stable hands had been checked into. They were there for just a day but their conditions quickly worsened and they were moved to ICU. Kieran told her this while they were eating lunch side by side at Fillmont. By this time, Sinthia was a sophomore at Fillmont, everybody thought that Kieran was her boyfriend—a rumor that all whispered about disgustedly because it was just gross! He was so much older than her! But she always did look like a slut anyway—Tracy Tallworth was a senior, and Kieran was still helping out his mom in the kitchens of Baldwin Hall.
“They started bleeding from their eyes. That’s when they got transferred to intensive care,” Kieran said. “Anna’s all shook up at home and crying. It was really disturbing.”
Sinthia had heard about the horses from her grandmother. When the stable boys were also hospitalized, that had made Appeline County News, but to hear the details surrounding the illness gave her shivers.
“Anna saw them?” she asked, thinking of Kieran’s gentle older sister who had sad eyes, just like her own. Sinthia lost her appetite suddenly as she envisioned the sick boys.
“Yeah, she saw it with her own eyes. Trails of blood coming out of their eyes, like tears. She doesn’t think they’re going to survive.”
“Was it what the horses had?”
“They think it’s all correlated. Three boys and they all three worked at a stable where fourteen horses mysteriously just went toe up? It’s gotta be connected.”
“Then it must be really contagious,” Sinthia whispered and shivered.
“I don’t know about that.”
“I hope this all passes soon and they get better and this all goes away,” Sinthia whispered.
“Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen to you. I wouldn’t let that happen,” Kieran chucked her under the chin and took a bite of his ham and cheese sandwich.
Over the course of the next few days, each of the stable boys succumbed and passed away from the disease. The air in the Vitruvia grew thicker with the news. Everyone seemed to move about in caution. There were three deaths, but was the disease contagious? They didn’t know yet. The little bit of information anyone had about the disease was bottled up in the medical laboratories.
Then, one day Kieran called Sinthia to meet him out on the back hill where the two of them hung out regularly in the afternoons. He sounded unnatural on the phone and so she made up an excuse to her grandmother and ran out of the house. She found him scrunched up into a ball on the hill, his head clutched tightly between his knees. She couldn’t tell if he was crying or not but she rubbed his back gingerly, as though to ease him to talk.
“Anna’s sick,” Kieran choked out. “She’s showing all the same symptoms, high fever, she can’t keep any food down, her eyes are bloodshot. I think she’s got the disease. She was checked into ICU this afternoon and the press was just crawling the entire hospital it was disgusting.”
Sinthia pressed her lips against his temple and he didn’t protest. Instead, he turned towards her and wrapped his arms around her.
“If anything happens, I’ll be here. Don’t worry,” she whispered into his ear and he clung on to her even tighter.
That day, the wind did little to distract them. It pulled and whipped Sinthia’s long, auburn hair around them like a net, but neither of them noticed. It was March and the wild grasses were spotted with clusters of tiny wildflowers, which Kieran had told her were called Bird’s Foot Trefoil, which looked like yellow bonnets. They sat like this on the hillside till the orange sun grew large on the horizon and slowly dipped below the cityscape of Camden, the purple painted the canvas sky above their heads. Bright little stars began poking their way through the atmosphere and finally, Kieran released her.
“Do you remember our first conversation that day on the lawn by the soccer field? The one about God?” Kieran asked her.
Sinthia nodded.
“I pray every minute,” Kieran said. “There has to be a God. He has to listen.”
Sinthia rubbed his cheek and said, “Honestly, Kieran, with every day that passes, I believe there’s a God. I don’t care about the way I was raised, without God and without religion. Only money. I think there’s a God.”
Kieran turned to look at her, “I guess we aren’t all products of our environment. Your grandmother, she’s so foul and your mother is so selfish. But, you, you’re beautiful and pure.”
Sinthia glowed with his praise and she told him, “I will pray every minute of every day until Anna gets well again.”

When she got home, her grandmother summoned her to her bedroom.
“Whatever killed Herv’s horses is contagious. I don’t know if you’ve heard but a nurse at St. Mary’s is dying of the disease now and there are more people out there who’ve got it. We’re not staying in this town any longer.”
“What about school? Where are we going to go?” Sinthia implored, she felt distressed. Her grandmother had said the young nurse was dying?
“I’m calling Fillmont tomorrow to withdraw you for this school year. We’re going to California tomorrow. I’ve already arranged a place for us to stay. We’ll leave as soon as we get matters tied up here.”
Going to California had always been the place of her dreams. She’d be close to her mother at last! But in that instant, Sinthia desperately wanted to stay in Vitruvia. “But how long will we be gone?”
“Until the disease is good and gone. If it spreads all the way East, then we’re moving to Europe! In the meantime, you won’t be going to school or even out of the house. Can’t risk you contracting the disease.” Her grandmother sniffed, as though she could smell the virus brewing in the air. With a wiry finger, she waved Sinthia away, “Go pack your things.”
Sinthia went into her bedroom—Hortense’s old room—and shut the door. It had always been nice to know that the bed she slept on was the same one her mother had slept on when she was in high school. And the white painted desk that she sat at during evenings to do her homework was the same desk her mother had as a child. Sinthia ran her hands along the rungs of her slope of the headboard. Suzette was a very meticulous maid. There wasn’t a speck of dust.
She didn’t want to leave. The way Kieran had held on to her that evening, he hadn’t even seemed aware that she was only fifteen years old. He didn’t care, but the truth of it was, age didn’t really matter. He was her beautiful boy and he needed her. She decided then that there was no way she could pick up and move to California. She needed to stay with Kieran at this time, because he obviously needed her. He had said that evening that she was beautiful and she was pure.
Sinthia curled up on top of her covers and whispered his name. “Kieran…Kieran…Kieran…”
And then she fell asleep.

The next day, Suzette knocked on her door and woke her for breakfast. Sinthia glanced at the clocked and felt her body attempt to lurch out of her skin. It was already eight o’clock and she was late for school! But then she remembered that her grandmother was withdrawing her from Fillmont that day and she wouldn’t ever have to go back to the nasty school again. She didn’t really mind losing the school. She had hated the tasteful beige carpeted hallways, the Native American murals on the walls of Tallworth Hall that had been commissioned by Jessica Starblanket’s father, and that stupid pendulum that hung in the front hall of the administration building. She had decided that the pendulum had been placed there, right there in the entryway of the admin building at Fillmont, simply to impress those who wanted to be a Fillmont girl and intimidate those who knew they could never have enough money to be a Fillmont girl. The honest to God only good thing about Fillmont was lunchtimes with Kieran.
She sat up suddenly, she had to tell Kieran that her grandmother was taking her away but she wouldn’t leave him. She dressed quickly and went downstairs. Suzette had prepared a large breakfast of two sunny side up eggs, a stack of butter and jam toast, and pitched of freshly squeezed orange juice. In the pulp of the juice, Sinthia could see a couple of seeds floating along the top. Sinthia barely chewed, she just wanted to get out of the house and six blocks away.
“Miss Sinthia, you should eat more slowly,” Suzette warned. The old maid set about the kitchen putting dishes away. “I’ve been helping your grandmother pack up the house, miss. You’re both going to California tonight.”
Suzette’s wrinkled hands wiped a dish dry. Although she had been in Gertrude’s employ for over two decades, the old woman never grew comfortable around Gertrude the same way she was comfortable around Sinthia, a child she had seen grow up.
“You’re not coming with us, Suzette?” Sinthia asked, alarmed.
“No, miss, I’m going to go stay with my daughter in Florida until this thing passes and your grandmother comes back,” Suzette drawled. Sinthia felt like she was trapped in a snow globe and someone was turning her world upside down and shaking it so that everything looked different for a moment.
Sinthia turned her eyes on old Suzette’s face, which had the kindest blue eyes she’d ever seen. “I don’t want to leave Vitruvia.”
Suzette smiled slowly, “Well, now, miss, you know it’s not safe to be here.”
Sinthia realized that in her entire fifteen years, she had never seen Suzette wear anything but the ugly blue and white uniform Gertrude made her wear. Her eyes pooled and she turned away guiltily to hide her face.
“Your grandmother left this morning to go to the bank.”
“She’s not home?” Sinthia breathed. Suzette shook her gray head. Sinthia knew this was her opportunity to get out of the house. She flung her arms around the old maid, who had gray hair like her grandmother but it was a soft, feathery gray like the color found under the wings of doves. Suzette kissed the pretty girl on her forehead.
“I’m going out,” she declared and ran from the house.
She didn’t stop the entire six blocks to Kieran’s house. The whole, Sinthia prayed under her breath, “Please let Anna be okay, God. Please let Anna be okay.”
When she came to Kieran’s street, she stopped when his wooden-paneled, one-story, three bedroom home appeared in her line of sight. From a distance, all looked like it had looked before. Nothing had changed yet. The hoptree beside the large window of the house had scattered white flowers all across his front yard, something his mother always lamented about having to rake up. Everything was still the same. Panting heavily, Sinthia began to walk. As she walked, she heard the cooing of doves in a tree on the street but she noticed there was an absence of children laughing. The little boys and girls with the dirty brown feet were nowhere to be found. She glanced around and saw an abandoned Frisbee laying in someone’s front yard. It was as though everyone had disappeared into their houses, afraid to come out in case they caught the disease.
She knocked on his front door and waited. An absolute silence seemed to emanate from deep inside the house. Finally, she heard the soft scuffling of footsteps and she held her breath. Kieran’s mother opened the door, but left the screen door closed between them.
“Is Kieran home?” Sinthia asked breathlessly.
Kieran’s mother swallowed slowly before answering, “Sinthia, honey, Kieran got sick this morning. We took him to the hospital today around eleven a.m., he’s in ICU.”
“What about Anna? Is she okay?”
Kieran’s mother suddenly brought both hands up to her face and she sucked in a deep breath through the cracks of her fingers. “Anna’s not going to make it. She’s begun bleeding from her eyes. We’re not even allowed to be with them, they’re so contagious.”
It felt like a great wind blew her back, and away from his house. She stumbled backwards down his front step and turned and ran all the way back to her grandmother’s house.
Back home, the driver and Suzette were loading things into the car. Sinthia’s grandmother came storming down the steps when she head Sinthia come home.
“Didn’t I tell you not to leave the house?” her grandmother snapped at her and snatched her by the wrist. Gertrude pulled Sinthia into the spare bedroom and threw her on the bed. Sinthia lay there, as still as someone dead. “What’s wrong with you? We’re leaving in an hour to get to the airport. Get your stuff together or it’s being left behind.”
When Sinthia got onto the plane, she sat with her arms wrapped tightly around herself. She squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to thing about Kieran, lying in a hospital bed, trying to make herself stop imagining Kieran, crying blood. Her teeth began to chatter uncontrollably at the idea of it, and she wanted to curl up into a ball. Would she be next? Would she die? The questions swarmed in circles around her brain.

Suzette had once told Sinthia that when she was an infant, her hair had miraculously turned from raven black to burgundy red overnight. Suzette had told her it was the most incredible thing that she had ever seen. When Sinthia asked her grandmother about it, her grandmother had responded, “Yes, and Vince’s grandmother had called you a figlia del diavolo.”
“What does that mean?”
“The devil’s daughter.”
“Do you think that’s true, grandma?”
“I don’t believe in God. I don’t see why I would believe in Satan either,” Gertrude had replied dismissively with a wave of her hand.
Sinthia had wondered about it her whole life, why the shedding of black hair in favor of red hair would have caused her great-grandmother on her father’s side to call her such a thing. Sinthia had never wanted to think of herself like that. She had clung on to the idea that it had been a miracle, like Suzette had said. But now, sitting on the plane, flying far, far away from Vitruvia, abandoning Kieran to die, perhaps the Valentinos had known something about her that she couldn’t see herself. Whether an act of God or of Satan, something extraordinary had happened to her before, the baby had shed her dark hair and taken on red hair so that her grandmother would keep her, so that her mother would love her. It was as though that baby, so remote from the young woman sitting on the airplane now, had known what she needed to do to stay alive.
“God, please save us,” Sinthia prayed, uncertain if anyone would hear her.

Untitled as of yet *edit* Title: To You Who Waited At Home

I came home after two years abroad

and expected you to be different--I was.

But you are steady and patient

like stone and mortar, built piece by piece

and dried in the sun,

and I am always all aflutter 

like lacewings above petals or book pages

in the wind.

I hate time because it shapes me

like clay and so quickly I don't know

who I was two years ago.

It was a wrong I did to you,

but always I'll remember: you,

solid in the road, like a pillar of an old temple,

still standing after all the people have died

or gone away.

--Kimberly Wang 5/17/09

WR110 Story Two

Goddamnit. That Son of a Bitch is Really Gone.
In his sleep, Joel scratched his arm where the heat from the sunlight was making him itch. It didn’t go away and he scratched and scratched until he awoke. When he opened his eyes, he found himself focusing on the water stain the rain had made on his ceiling right above his bed. It was an uneven brown ring of a stain, about five inches in diameter. His thoughts turned to mold damage and the cost of repairs. He reminded himself yet again that he should call about that. He remembered faintly learning that mold grew from spores that traveled through the air, microscopic things that grew into horrifying, green spotted things. Joel’s face twitched slightly, he especially hated the sight of the fuzzy mold. For some reason, fuzzy mold made him want to crawl out of his skin. He coughed out and wondered briefly about how the ceiling would last through the next rainy season but quickly forgot his train of thought when he realized he was starving. The late afternoon sun seeped through the blinds and cast stripe-like beams of light across his bed. He reached for the Hanes wifebeater tucked under his pillow and pulled it over his head, down over his growing beer belly. He grunted as he fingered the little niggling hole that had appeared in the beater located just right of his belly button. Remy would’ve clucked her tongue at him if she were still around to see it.
He made his way through the narrow hallway—if you can even call it that—of his mobile home to the kitchenette located in the center of the trailer. He didn’t have the kind of trailer that had metal sides, prop up awnings, and was ready-latched to a truck—those were trailer homes. His was a mobile home. Albeit, his home did have wheels, it was the kind of house that had a roof, one of those convex roofs with actual shingles and wood siding. It was the kind of house that could be moved, if you wanted it to, or could be set up on cinderblocks, surrounded by a nice little garden, and parked for years and years.
And Joel had chosen to park. For the last thirteen years, he and his family had been residents of Valley Crest Mobile Home Park. Truthfully, it hadn’t really been his decision at all. His wife Remy had decided that it was better for their son Elliott to have some sort of semblance to a stabilized adolescence. They decided on Kiowa, Kansas, mostly because Remy’s high school friend, Alberta Levey, had married and settled here. Elliott had been thirteen when they finally laid down roots in Valley Crest and good thing too, because soon after his balls dropped and his voice changed. He also began acting out. He began coming home late or not at all. Remy would find Ziploc baggies with remnants of cannabis stems in his jean pockets when she did the laundry, and once, he was arrested for stealing from a GameStop in Alva, Oklahoma, which was a big mess because it was over state borders. Joel would say to Remy when she was crying in their bed at night, waiting to hear their son come through the door, though pretending to sleep, “We just have to get through high school. Then we’ll go to California.” Joel and Remy had always planned to pick up again after Elliott graduated high school and moved out. Their dream had been to make it to the west, live somewhere that was a stone’s throw away from the ocean. But then Remy got sick, and those dreams died.
When Joel got to the kitchen, he found his son’s live-in girlfriend, Cassidy, standing in front of the fridge with the door open, wearing a tank top and a pair of panties with purple and white stripes. She was gazing into the fridge with one leg propped against the other and an elbow restfully leaning against the open door. Joel wondered how long she’d been standing there like that and how long she’d been letting the cold air seep out of the fridge. Irritated, he said, “You’re wasting electricity.”
She didn’t look at him but acknowledged him by saying, “There’s nothing to eat.”
Her voice was thin and high-pitched. It always sounded a bit whiny but she was a good look. It embarrassed Joel a bit and he glanced out the window when Cassidy proceeded to bend over and rummage around on the bottom shelf. He knew why Elliott kept the girl around; she had legs longer than the length of her torso and shocking white-blond hair that she would peroxide every few weeks. She wore too much eye make-up and not enough clothing, but Elliott didn’t seem to mind. Joel didn’t feel any affection towards her. He did hope that Elliott didn’t have it in his mind to marry the girl. Spoiled and narcissistic, she wouldn’t make a very good mother.
Cassidy finally emerged with a Red Delicious and slammed the door shut with a kick of her foot. She retreated back into the smaller second bedroom she shared with Elliott and shut the door. The sound of the door shutting awoke Cognac, his ten-year-old Labrador Retriever. Her yellow head appeared over the backseat of the couch and she came quickly to his side. She generally stole her naps only when Joel took his and when he awoke, she was prepared to accompany him anywhere. Joel looked in the freezer and found nothing. He looked in the fridge and found with a growling stomach that Cassidy was right; there was nothing to eat. He picked his keys off the wooden key hooks that were nailed by the door and went out to his car. He whistled and Cognac came bounding into the passengers seat.
He after driving down Main, he decided to get dinner to go from Gambino’s Pizza because he didn’t want to eat at the restaurant by himself. When he got through the front door, he saw that Jenny Ewan, Ted Ewan’s daughter, had gotten herself a cashier’s job at the place. He didn’t know the girl all that well, but went fishing with her father often. Jenny’s brown hair was swept up into a chipper ponytail and she wore the green and red Gambino’s uniform with a wide smile.
“Hi Mr. Haven! You look hungry,” the perky teenager chirped.
“How did you guess?” Joel grunted, his thick fingers scratching his chin while he perused the menu behind her. “German pie. Large. And a Pepsi Cola. Large. Extra sauerkraut and onions. To go.”
“That’s a big order, Mr. Haven. Are you planning on eating that all by yourself or are you bringing it home for Elliott too?” Jenny teased, trying to be congenial, as she typed in the order.
“Why would I buy any for Elliott? Elliott’s twenty-five, lives at home, and doesn’t pay me any rent. He can buy his own pizzas,” Joel snorted, not glancing at her once, as he leafed through the mess of old receipts, business cards, and papers in his wallet to extract the cash.
Jenny smiled lamely, her pep seemed to have been beaten out of her. Immediately, Joel felt bad. While Jenny left the cash register to relay the order to the kitchen, Joel was uncertain if he should apologize for his brusqueness. He hesitated and the moment where an apology would’ve been appropriate passed. He took a seat at a booth to wait.
“Here you go, Mr. Haven!” Jenny sang, seeming to have recovered from his earlier rebuff. Joel thought about how Cognac, after getting yelled at for going through the trash, would tuck her tail between her legs one moment and slobbering everywhere and wagging her tail happily the next. Joel remembered that Cognac was still in the car, and sure enough, when he glanced to see, her head was sticking out the window of his truck. When she saw him look at her, her tail beat against the backrest of the passenger’s seat. Jenny placed the pizza box on the counter along with some packets of pepper flakes and Parmesan cheese.
“Have a great day!”
Joel took the box and thinking quickly, he said, “Thanks, Jenny. You look good in that uniform.”
Jenny blinked at him twice before smiling hesitantly. Joel, realizing how his comment could be misconstrued as a come on, left the restaurant in a hurry.
He ate his pizza on the couch while watching a rerun of Laverne and Shirley, which he would watch whenever he ate dinner. He personally didn’t like the show all that much, but it had been Remy’s favorite. It was always on when Remy was in the kitchen fixing dinner, and now Joel got hungry whenever he heard the theme song. It used to be one of his greatest pet peeves that Remy would bang around in the kitchen, opening and shutting drawers thoughtlessly, knocking her wooden spatula against rim of the saucepan loudly, while Joel was on the couch watching television. Now when he watched TV, it was unusually silent. Cassidy worked nights, Elliott would be in his room or out with friends. He was secretly glad that he could watch television in peace. He dressed his pizza slice with plenty of pepper flakes and cheese. Cognac sat patiently beside him, swiping her big tongue across her lips and nose.
“Good girl,” he said and tossed her a sausage, which she ducked her head down and gobbled immediately.
At this time, there was a rap on the screen door. Joel looked over his shoulder to see who it was.
“Hi, Joel,” the girl greeted him as she let herself in. She was wearing stove mitts and was carrying a Corningware baking dish.
“Adie,” he said, mouth full of pizza, but he got up and brushed off his pants. “It’s too bad, I already got dinner. Tell your mom thank you anyhow.
Adie, short for Adelaide, was Remy’s best friend Alberta’s daughter. She was the same age as Elliott and when Elliott had first settled at South Barber High School, Adie had been his only friend. Eventually, he made more friends but Adie remained his best friend. Adie had bright hazel eyes, fringed thickly with lashes, and a shock of curly hair that can only be described as tawny. She had a kind face and had recently returned to Kiowa with a teaching credential under her belt. She now taught the third graders at South Barber Elementary. She glanced at the pizza box lying open on the coffee table and frowned. “You really shouldn’t be eating that. Mom made you a broccoli cheese casserole.”
“I’ve already started.” Joel said, chewing, hearing Alberta’s words in Adie’s voice.
“Well then, keep this for now and eat it tomorrow.” Adie pointed at the dish sitting on the table.
“Have you eaten?” Joel asked her. She nodded and sat down.
“Yeah, I told Elliott I would be coming over. Cassidy’s working at Myle’s tonight so I brought over some movies.”
“Where’s my son anyway?”
“Dropping her off, I think.”
Joel shook his head. “I don’t know why he wastes his time with that girl. If he was really smart, he’d be dating you.”
Adie groaned, familiar with this remark. ”Give it up, Joel. It’s never going to happen. We’re just friends.”
Joel shrugged as he sat down beside her at the table. He placed his elbow on the table but pulled it back off when he felt that the surface was sticky. “You’re right. You’re too good for his lazy ass anyway.”
Adie gave him a very stern look, something she must have mastered in the classroom, and said, “Now, Joel. That’s not fair. He’s working really hard on that construction job he has now.”
“And he spends every penny he earns on gas driving around his worthless girlfriend. And she spends every penny she earns buying bleach for her hair.”
Adie laughed, “I’m sure they have something saved.”
“I doubt it,” Joel grunted. “Those two are never going to move out.”
Adie sighed. This was true, it seemed. Elliott was twenty-five and didn’t seem in the least bit of a hurry to find his own place. They sat in silence for a while; Laverne said something on the TV and the audience laughed.
Adie’s tone became soft and serious. “How are you doing though, really? Mom and I are both really worried about you. Dad says you haven’t been to work in weeks.”
Joel cocked his head and leaned back in his chair before answering, “Been thinking of retiring.”
Adie inspected his face closely and Joel self-consciously scraped the back of his hand against the bristle growing on his chin, which had been mostly grey but in recent years had taken on more and more strands of white. He’d once been handsome, but that was thirty-five years ago.
“Well, what do you plan on doing with all that time on your hands? You don’t do anything, Joel!” Adie said to him. Joel was silent. “It’s only been a year. They say the best thing to do is to keep busy. I hate to see you sink into a hole you can’t get out of. Look at you, I’m sure you’ve been wearing that same beater for several days and you haven’t shaved probably since you stopped showing up at work.”
“I would have a beard by now if that were true,” he said indignantly, but Adie put a hand on his and silenced him from saying any more.
“Don’t stay holed up in here all the time. Okay? Promise me that one day soon, you’re going to pick yourself up again and keep on living.”
At this time, they heard Elliott’s ’96 Taurus pull up in front of the house. Adie was still watching him expectantly, hoping that Joel would say something when Elliott’s boots crunching against the gravel became audible right outside the front door. Joel wanted to stop talking about the subject. He wanted to see one of Adie’s endearing smiles that always made him wish that he and Remy had a daughter. Adie sensed that the topic had reached a dead end and stood up. Elliott came in. He was tall; probably 6’2” tall, with curly blonde hair, which Remy used to say made him resemble a cherub. He also had startling green eyes which he’d inherited from Joel, though in Elliott, they were more brilliant and closer to emerald and on Joel, his green eyes were getting dusty around the edges. Elliott always had a look of smugness on his face that Joel couldn’t stand and had no idea from where he had adopted it. Remy could never see it; despite everything, Elliott was her only son, her darling. Sometimes Joel thought what Elliott really needed to fix that sideways smirk was a good sock in the jaw. Not that Joel felt like he ought to be the one to do it, but his son could certainly use one. Everything had come easily for Elliott. In high school, the girls had adored him, all of them except Adie, who had the good sense to see him only platonically. Joel wasn’t sure but at some point in life, Elliott stopped trying, thinking opportunities were simply going to fall into his lap. That’s how he ended up twenty-five and still living at home. Joel shook his head, What in God’s name does he think he’s doing?
“Hey, Pops. Adie,” Elliott greeted. “ I was gonna call you. What’d you bring?”
“I’ve got a selection. Mighty Joe Young, Training Day, and Say Anything. What would you like?” Adie asked, sifting through her purse. She turned to Joel. “Would you like to watch with us?”
“No thanks. You kids have fun. I’ll be in my room,” Joel took his pizza box and retreated into his bedroom, waited for Cognac to follow him in, and shut the door.
In his room, Joel glanced around and placed the box on the dresser, which Remy had fondly dubbed “The Hulk” because it took up a third of space in their tiny bedroom. The bed took up the other two-thirds. The pizza was cold now and his conversation with Adie had ruined his appetite. Joel sat down on Remy’s side of the bed, glancing towards her pillow as though if he looked there, he would find her face. When she had been near the end of her life, her skin had become so tender from the medications she was taking that he couldn’t touch his hand to his wife without her crying out in pain, the calluses on his palms from years of labor too rough. He would sit beside her bed, unable to touch her, watching her as she cried and cried. That was the side effect of Paclitaxel, which she had to begun taking after her second chemotherapy regimen had stopped working. He would always be indebted to Alberta and Adie for those times they cared for Remy, so closely and conscientiously. They would sleep at the hospital with her on nights when Joel needed to go home and shower, monitoring Remy’s every breath the way new mothers do for their newborns. When Remy’s eyes would roll back from the pain and she would beg for death, Alberta would smooth her soft fingertips against Remy’s hair, so lightly, and coo to her like she were a child.
Remy had sewn pink breast cancer ribbons onto all of her T-shirts shortly after she had gone into remission the first time.
“I’ve fought a battle and won,” she had told him, as she’d shown him her handiwork. He had kissed her on top of the head where her dirty blond hair was growing back slightly gray in short frizzy ringlets, resembling Elliott’s hairstyle. He was proud of her and only slightly embarrassed that she would be walking around everywhere with a pink ribbon on her chest. They resumed their lives all together for three more happy, cancer-free years, her sickness becoming a dark blot in the back corner of their memories. Joel was so happy during that time that he didn’t even mention to Elliott once that perhaps he should move out. He’d even said, “The more the merrier” when Elliott started dating Cassidy and she moved in. Then cancer came back into their lives. This time chemotherapy didn’t work and she was put on Paclitaxel, a medication more toxic than good. And she suffered so greatly, vomiting up everything she ate and on days would lie in bed moaning gutturally, it made Joel’s heart ache. Despite their efforts this time it was too late; the cancer spread to her liver and bones. After relapsing, it was just six short months before Remy died on a Saturday morning, a sunny day.
The day after Remy died, Joel didn’t go to church. He lay in bed with his eyes open, staring at the brown water stain on the ceiling, unable to breath. He forced himself to realize that Remy was dead, and a great knot formed in his throat, threatening to explode in a torrent of grief, but instead he just stared at that brown ring above his head. It looked like a dirty halo. All he could think about was the federal tax return he had mailed in the week before. On it, he had marked “Married, filing jointly.”
They cremated her, placing her in a porcelain urn, unconventional for the likes of Kiowa where they had land to spare for sprawling cemeteries. Everyone thought he was crazy for wanting to keep his wife bottled up in an urn, but Joel didn’t want to bury her here. They were not Kiowa people, having lived here for only thirteen years. The fifteen years they had been married before that, they had been nomads, traveling everywhere, always westward. Deep down, Joel felt like he would pick up his house off its cinderblocks someday and keep on moving. He couldn’t leave Remy behind if he did that.
His boss Les Levey, Alberta’s husband, gave him however much time off as he needed and after three months, Joel went back to work at Les’s Welding and Repair. Whenever she approached Les’ shop, Remy used to always wonder if anyone ever told Les that there was no need for the extra ‘s’ after the apostrophe on his sign. Joel had guessed no, and even if someone had, it wasn’t likely Les would remove it anyway. Joel went back and worked off and on for seven more months. Then, he stopped going altogether.
Joel’s thoughts turned back to what Adie had said just a while ago in the kitchen. She had touched her hand to his and told him to promise her one day soon, he would pick himself up out of this shithole of a place, and keep on living. He thought of California, the stacks and stacks of brochures he and Remy had swiped from every travel agency, AAA, and anywhere else with brochures that they had ever stepped foot in. All of these had laid untouched in the bedside table drawer on Remy’s side of the bed for the last year and a half. Now, he opened the drawer and saw a glossy orange one on the top with ‘Santa Monica’ written in curly white script. He touched his finger to the cover and traced over the picture of beachfront row of houses that had been selected to grace the cover. It would certainly be nice to go there still. Then he lay down on his side of the bed, and placed a hand on Remy’s pillow, imagining her there. Then, he turned towards the wall, and fell asleep.

The next day, Joel awoke with a feeling of anticipation simmering in his stomach. He decided that this was the day to officially thank Les for all his goodwill and resign. As he put on a fresh tee, the first in nearly a week, and went out into the kitchenette where he found Cassidy wearing a sports bra and a pair of booty shorts buttering toast by the sink and Elliott sitting at the kitchen table flipping through TV channels with the remote in his hand.
“Hey Cass, pour me a glass of milk, will ya?” Elliott asked his girlfriend, not taking his eyes off the screen.
“Pour your own, I’m busy,” she snapped back at him, butter knife poised in the air above her bread.
“Aw, honey, come on,” he wheedled slightly, his full attention still absorbed by the television.
She plunked the butter knife loudly into the sink and stomped loudly over to the refrigerator. After yanking the door open, she leaned over and looked inside. She grabbed the carton and went over to Elliott where she proceeded to drop it down heavily on the table.
“It’s expired,” she said and returned to the sink. Elliott opened the carton mouth and sniffed the milk. Then he turned the carton to look at the expiration date. Apparently he decided that it wasn’t too expired, and proceeded to drink straight from the carton.
“When are you gonna get ready, babe? I told Adie we’d meet them over at the Dairy Bar Drive-In in fifteen minutes,” Elliott called over his shoulder.
“Why do we have to hang out with Adie?” Cassidy whined. “Why doesn’t she fucking get a boyfriend?”
Elliott shrugged and said, “Guys don’t like her cause she’s like a guy. Plus she’s not hot.” To this, Cassidy nodded emphatically.
During this entire exchange, Joel stood in the frame of his bedroom, observing. Neither of the two greeted him or acknowledged him in any way though they couldn’t have possibly missed him in such a tiny space. Suddenly, Joel was fed up. The two were so childish; he couldn’t stand it. Elliott was lazy and Cassidy was rude and Joel was sick of it. They didn’t appreciate each other in any way and if what Adie said was true, if they really were in love, this wasn’t the type of love that Elliott grown up with, not the type of love that Joel had shared with Remy.
“You guys gotta move out,” Joel spoke up suddenly. “Today. I’m serious.”
“What?” Cassidy yelped.
Elliott laughed, “Don’t worry, Cass. He’s been threatening me about this for years. We’re not going anywhere.”
Joel looked at his son, who returned his the look with a steely gaze, and tried to find in the face some resemblance of himself. He found nothing for once, though people had always told him that Elliott was the spitting image of Joel when Joel was twenty-five. He saw Remy in the shape of Elliott’s cheekbones, and he saw her in the plumpness of Elliott’s lower lip. Elliott’s ears—small, curved seashells—were also from Remy. Elliott’s eyes however, the most obvious thing he had inherited from his father were cold in this moment, as though daring Joel to really kick him out, see what happens. Joel didn’t know this man. He looked away, sickened.
“I mean it this time.”
Elliott got angry and jumped out of his seat, “We’re not going anywhere.” Cassidy glared at Joel. She rolled her eyes and returned her attention to the half-eaten toast still in her hand.
Joel went out to his truck, followed closely behind by Cognac. In the kitchen, Elliott was still watching television, probably seething and Cassidy was still eating her toast over the sink. He didn’t care. He drove straight down to Les’ shop on Main St. The bell on the door jingled lightly, lifting his spirits somewhat. He found Les in the back office crouched over some papers. When he saw his old friend, Les lowered his glasses and greeted him warmly, “Hey, Joel, back to work?”
Joel sat down at one of the leather seats in front of Les’ desk. He’d always thought these chairs, with leather backing and mahogany legs were too handsome for a repair shop’s office. They belonged in an office of a lawyer in a big city, Wichita maybe. “No, not really.”
“What’s on your mind, chief?” Les asked.
“I’m thinking it’s time to move on.”
Les, thinking he was talking about Remy’s death nodded and said, “It’s about time you got back on your feet, buddy.”
“No, not that. I meant from this town. I’m done with Kiowa. I’m moving to California.”
“What are you gonna do in California?” Les asked, genuinely interested and not at all disbelieving. This was what Joel liked about Les, his good sense to know when to believe a man, it was why, despite the dilapidated exterior, Les’ business was thriving, a small empire.
“I’ll find something. I traveled the United States for fifteen years before Remy and I settled here to give Elliott a stable life. Now I see that there’s no point staying here for him anymore. He’s on his own, and so I’m going to pick up and keep going.”
Les nodded thoughtfully. Running his hands through his thinning hair, he leaned back in his chair and folded his handed across his belly, fingers interlocked. “Well,” he said after a while, “Good luck to you, Joel. You know if you ever need anything, we’ve been friends for thirteen years. And thirteen years, though not a lifetime, ain’t just nothing either.”
Joel nodded and stood up. The he reached out his hand which Les shook, probably the first time the two men had ever shaken hands in all the years they’d known each other.
“I just want to thank you for everything. Thank your wife and your daughter too. She’s a really great kid,” Joel said gruffly. Les nodded and replied, “I know she is. I’ll let them know you said goodbye.”
When Joel got home, he found it empty. Elliott’s Taurus was gone. He called up his neighbors, sixteen men altogether, six on each long side of the house and two on each short end of the house and they lifted the cinderblocks out from underneath the mobile home. Then he latched his house to his pickup. He left the empty casserole dish Adie had brought over the night before with one of the neighbors. Then he got into his truck, whistled for Cognac, who jumped into the seat beside him, and pulled out of the lot, his home for the last thirteen years. He would make a quick stop for gas and then he would get onto 4th Street, and then turn on Main, and then he’d get on the US-281 and drive west until he got to the ocean.

Elliott, Cassidy, and Adie pulled into the mobile home park. Cassidy began moaning, “Oh, no, no, no, no” as they pulled up closer to the empty spot where Joel’s mobile home had been. They all got out in a state of shock and disbelief.
Elliott turned towards the two girls and yelled, “Fuck!” He kicked up the dirt in anger, making a cloud of yellow dust, his two arms akimbo on his waist. “Fuck!” he repeated, this time a little less loudly. “That son of a bitch!”
Cassidy began to bawl, wailing loudly, “What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?” She wrung her hands helplessly and stamped her feet against the dirt like a child throwing a tantrum. “He took everything! All my clothes. Everything!”
“You didn’t even really have clothes anyway,” Elliott snarled at his girlfriend in frustration. Cassidy cried louder and kicked her feet harder at this. Then she turned towards her boyfriend and started beating her fists against him, screaming, “This is all your fault! You said he wasn’t really going to leave! You. Mother. Fucker!” Every word was accentuated by a blow she threw at Elliott.
Adie, still silent from the shock, stood there riveted looking at the empty spot. Slowly, like a rose blooming, her lips parted into a smile. She laughed quietly and shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it, but godamn, that son of a bitch is really gone.”

Old Family Pictures

Oh, the nostalgia of viewing these photos.

WR110 assignment titled "After Life"

When someone who cheated on you and completely trampled your world dies, does that mean you have to forgive him incontrovertibly? Does holding a grudge against a dead person allocate demerits against one’s soul in the afterlife? And what of the person he left you for? What do you do with her?
She didn’t spare me any gruesome details. She never did, sexual escapades described over brunch to the point of discomfort had been a common thing when we had been friends. He had been taking down the Christmas tree, a White Fir, when he fell from the ladder into the tree and was tangled by the lights. When his family and Natalie came walking in five minutes later, they found him hanging by the neck with busted blood vessels in his face. His tongue, slightly protruding from his mouth, had turned black. I managed to pull Kleenexes dutifully and listen to the entire story without gagging. Fifteen years of being best friends, I owed her that much.
The White Fir is the same kind his family always gets and always from the same farm, Fiegel’s Christmas Tree Farm and Nursery, in Santa Cruz. They have a grand Northern Californian mansion in the hills of Los Altos, complete with a foyer fit for the Hearst Castle. Every year, the family would clear away the center table with the Murano glass vase filled with seasonal flowers and erect the giant tree in the center of the foyer. I could envision Phillip and Natalie standing around the tree Christmas morning with their matching mugs, exchanging small talk and gifts with his parents, and smiling indulgingly while Josh’s kids tore open the presents. Josh would’ve been in the kitchen with his Thai wife, Nittaya, toasting English muffins for eggs benedict and brewing coffee for the adults, flipping strawberry waffles for the kids. Nittaya would’ve doubtlessly been whipping the cream fresh. Natalie with her face full of makeup at eight o’ clock in the morning and brand new pajamas would’ve been racking her brain for conversation and worrying about any tags she might’ve left on the gifts. I can imagine the number of pajamas she must’ve considered purchasing before settling on something adequately uppity and conservative enough for Christmas with Phil’s family and yet something that still made her feel desirable. I know at least that about her. Fifteen years of being best friends must give me some credit.
I had spent the last year of my life hating them both intensely for what they did. It used to be me who stood around the tree Christmas mornings. I had been certain of my future back then—Phil and I would’ve been married in due time, the reception would’ve been at the Club where his family were members, and we’d eventually buy a starter apartment in San Francisco, someplace that was an easy commute between our two workplaces. After the breakup, I had moved back home to my parents, struggling to get back on my feet after certainty had been torn out from under me.
Now what was there left to do? When the object of acute hatred suddenly ceases to exist, where does all that feeling go?

I had never wanted him to die. Never. I have wished before that he’d never been born. That at his conception, the sperm would’ve missed the egg maybe just by a moment, and his mother had never gotten pregnant. I have willed time to move backwards and envisioned the little light in the universe that was his life going out with a blip.
I had imagined a million times in my head how life would’ve been if I had just gone to the local public high school with Natalie rather than applying to that expensive private college prep where I’d met him. When Mom had initially placed the brochure for the academy on my desk, I wished I hadn’t been drawn in by the lush green lawns and perfectly modeled children and beautiful teenagers reading on a bench. I had had my heart set on going to Irvington High with Natalie, but those beautiful children, reading, it stirred me. Of all things to place on the cover, why did it have to be beautiful children reading? I caved so easily and peeked in the brochure.
I had missed the initial testing and application period for the year I entered. My aunt’s neighbor was on the Board of Directors. He pulled some strings and I found myself sitting in an empty office, taking an intelligence test alone. My parents were comfortable, they could spare the twenty grand for the yearly tuition. However, my comfortableness was nowhere near the wealth of some of my peers at Harker. It was not uncommon for kids to have gotten Porches and BMWs as their first cars. Phil was one of those spoiled rotten ones. His family was even richer, if that was possible, than the other families.
The first time he took me to his place, I saw the three cars parked out on his driveway and asked, “I thought you said your parents weren’t home?”
He grinned and replied, “They aren’t. Those are the extra cars.”
Between my mom and I, we shared one car. A Honda Accord. It would be a while before my parents would trust me with my own vehicle.
Then he gave me a tour of his house and it was the first time I’d seen a house that had more bathrooms than it had bedrooms.
“What’s the point?” I asked, “There’s never going to be seven people using the bathroom at the same time.”
Phil scratched his head and shrugged nonchalantly. “But it’s nice to have the option, right?”
“I suppose,” I tried to sound unimpressed, but my head was still reeling from the movie theater, complete with blackout blinds that would roll down with the flip of a button.
The he took me to the backyard. We stood on the bridge over the man-made koi pond and we could see over the low wall into the neighbor’s yard. It was a complete mess, not a shred of greenery anywhere, just ugly mounds of yellow dirt.
“Well, that’s ugly,” I commented, hands stuck in my pockets; grateful I’d found something to criticize.
“That’s because they use it for dirt biking.”
“Seriously?” I looked at Phil and towards the other backyard again. I could make out the tire tracks this time.
“Yeah, it’s pretty fun actually. Have you ever been?” He asked me as he turned and went down the other side of the bridge. He turned around and reached his hand for me, as though I were so delicate I needed him to help me down. I took his hand and happily forgot all about the neighbor’s yard.
Maybe it’s me. Maybe I allowed myself to become so reliant on him that when he and Natalie finally broke it to me that they were in love, I didn’t know how to take my next breath. My mom had to pick me up from the restaurant where we were all eating that D-Day (the term I picked up from the women-empowering-women online forums for the day they found out their significant others were cheating) because I couldn’t drive myself home. They had called her, panicked, because I had been reduced into a near catatonic state from the shock.
Later, curled up in a nightgown, I thought I would lie in bed till I perished. I wanted to slice my wrists for the way I handled the situation. I should’ve flown at them with my butter knife. I should have pulled the tablecloth and broken all the dishes and made a terrible scene so they would be able to see at least a fraction of the carnage they had wreaked inside me. They should’ve carried me out kicking and screaming. But instead, Phil had led me to my mom’s waiting silver Accord. Natalie had hugged me and whispered, “I hope we can still be friends. But I understand if you need time.”
“You selfish bitch,” I had managed to whisper into her ear before she released me, my one redeeming moment of the night. And that was how my relationship of eight years ended. I had lost my boyfriend to my best friend.

But now he was dead and Natalie was deep in grieving. Perhaps I should be grieving as well, but I still felt shell-shocked by the news. Morbid as it may be, I should’ve been the one to walk in with his family the morning after Christmas to find Phil hanging from the tree. Maybe because I wasn’t the one, it didn’t feel real to me. It felt more real that Phil was out there living his atrocious life somewhere away from me. But after the death, Natalie came back into my life. It was as though she was reverting by to her instincts to lead her, and her instincts led her to my doorstep.
I must be one of the few people who would recognize her without makeup. Natalie had been the one who taught me how to apply eyeliner so I didn’t look like a raccoon. She’d introduced me to the brow pencil, highlighter, and foundation. She is an ordinary girl, but gorgeous when made up. I would be the only one who could’ve identified her that day she came knocking on the door of my parent’s home. She looked as though she hadn’t showered since it happened. Her face was swollen up from crying and her clothes looked like she’d pulled on the thing that had fallen next to her bed the night before.
I let her in because I thought he had dumped her and I had been gleeful at the prospect.
We sat down in the living room. My mom poured us both tea and Natalie finally said, “Phil’s passed away, Kristen.”
She burst into tears once again and I mechanically picked up the tissue box from the end table and handed it to her. I never have the right reaction to traumatizing news. I should’ve started crying, but instead, I leaned back in the couch and pondered what I was feeling.
“Did you hear me?” She looked up from the tissue.
“I can’t believe Josh didn’t call,” I finally uttered.
“Well,” she hesitated, and said, “they’re devastated.”
“When did this happen?”
“Two days ago. Day after Christmas.”
“Oh god, Jim and Patricia must be heartbroken. How?”
“He was taking down the lights, you know, from the giant tree they always have in the foyer. He fell and got his neck caught by the lights.”
I wanted to say, Don’t tell me any more. But I couldn’t find my voice and so I sat there numbly taking in everything she said, my emotions were a mess inside. I didn’t know what stung more, that the details that made me want to fly to the bathroom and choke up everything I had eaten for breakfast or the fact that Natalie was talking about the Christmas tree I had spent my last eight Christmases around with uncomfortable familiarity.
At the end, she reached for my hand, and whispered, “Please, I’m not strong enough to go through this without you. Please.”
When she asked me to go to the funeral with her, I nodded. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Every day of the week leading up to the funeral, she stayed over like we were still friends. We would sit in front of the TV for hours, flipping through channels, not saying very much. New Years passed uneventfully. There was nothing worth celebrating. She needed me and I felt obligated to be there for her. I didn’t want to imagine Phil no longer being around, so I simply didn’t. I had, after all, had a year’s practice of having him gone from my life. It was easy to not think about it. For Natalie, however, Phil was the longest relationship she’d ever been in. Her other boyfriends were lucky to last five months. She had seen him everyday, she said. When she would remember things about him, like how he had the sweetest natural fragrance she’d ever encountered, I’d shut my eyes and allow myself to be flooded with the emotions I’d felt when the two of them broke up with me. He smelled like an infant, fresh from nursing. The smell permeated his clothes, his skin, and I had often wondered why Phil always smelled so damn good. Now and then, she would break down and cry. It would happen during random moments, like halfway through a rerun of Family Guy, or while chopping up apples for our dinner salad. Sometimes, she’d disappear into the bathroom to brush her teeth and not come out for thirty minutes. I would pass her the tissues from the end table, rub her hand while we were eating dinner, knock on the door lightly and ask, “Are you okay?” when she was in the bathroom for much too long.
I was secretly envious. She could cry for him. She was going through the grieving process naturally. Things weren’t so simple for me. I had loved Phil, deeply and truly loved every crease on his face when he smiled. For months after the breakup, I craved the feeling of sliding my arms around him. That used to resolve any fights we had. I would hold him and any feeling of distress would simply melt away. Holding him was like crack cocaine for me. After everything, how could I cry for him? There was still so much standing in the way. Was I even sad that he was gone? That he had suffered?
Then, the day of the funeral came. Natalie was downstairs in the guestroom bathroom showering and getting dressed. I was in my room, standing in from of the mirror and contemplating my black dress.
My mom slipped into the room and sat down on my bed. I saw her from the reflection of my full-length mirror. Her lips were pursed as though she was trying to keep her thoughts inside her mouth.
“What is it, Mom?”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.” I looked at her reflection. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s not fair that Natalie is here. She’s feeding off of your aloofness as though it were strength,” my mom said after some time. She glanced down and began picking at the white ruffle on my comforter.
“I know. But I don’t really know what I’m feeling. It’s much easier to just deal with what she’s feeling.”
“I just-” she hesitated. “I just can’t forgive her so easily for what she did to you. I remember you staying in bed for weeks.” Her voice broke slightly and she stood up. She brushed off the wrinkles on the bed and came to stand behind me. “When the dust has settled, I just keep praying that at the end of everything—the breakup, the losing your best friend, and now Phil’s dying—you won’t end up being broken by it all.” She brushed the hair back from my face. “That you’ll be okay.”
She peered into my face; her brown eyes were so worried. When I was little, I had thought that my eyes were black because they were so dark. I had insisted and insisted that they were. One day, my mom finally sat me down and said, “Look.” That’s when I saw in her face, my eyes. And they were a lovely shade of deep, deep brown. My nose stung sharply and an angry downpour of tears rushed to my eyes. And I finally cried.
She wrapped herself around me as I cried messily into her shoulder length hair, salt and pepper now with age.
“I love you, baby,” she said as she kissed me on the head. When my sobs had subsided a bit, she wiped my face with her soft palms and said, “Hug Patricia for me, please. Tell her to call if she needs anything.”
“I will, Mom.”

We pulled up to the Faith in Grace Chinese Bible Church in Los Altos Hills ten minutes before the service was to begin. I spotted Joshua out on the steps with his wife Nittaya and their two children, Theo and Eliza. They were greeting the people who were just arriving. Upon seeing them, Natalie clutched her bushel of flowers tighter and I knew why. Joshua and Phillip had always looked so much alike, even though Joshua’s face was slightly rounder and he broke into deep belly-rumbling laughter much more often than his slimmer, more composed younger brother did. They had the same beautifully creased eyes, the same long arched nose, and the same deep black hair.
We parked and walked towards the entrance. Josh saw me and looked surprised. He excused himself quickly and hurried down the steps towards us. Natalie saw him coming and was prepared to say hello, but instead Josh threw his arms around me and hugged my tightly.
“I didn’t think you would come, Kris,” he said, tearing up slightly.
I felt saddened that he and I, who had bantered back and forth like siblings for eight long years, hadn’t seen one another for such a long time and were only being brought together now by a great tragedy. “It’s been too long, Josh.”
“I know. You look good though.”
I smiled slightly, knowing full well that he was lying. “I won’t say the same for you, you ugly gorilla.”
Natalie’s mouth dropped open.
Somehow, amidst the somberness of the moment, Josh found it in him to give one of his deep belly laughs. “Oh, ever the same little Kristen. I’ve missed you so much.”
And I had missed him too. Despite everything that had happened, Phil’s family had been like my family. They had attended my college graduation, taken me out for my birthdays, and even given me red envelopes for Chinese New Year. Phil’s dad used to introduce me to people at their dinner parties as his “future daughter-in-law.” Losing his family had been just as painful as losing my relationship with Phillip.
Josh handed us both pamphlets and told us to head on inside. He gave Natalie a quick hug and that was the first time I noticed that she had been looking at me oddly during the whole exchange. She, who was so used to being center of attention everywhere she went, had stood aside like an outsider who could only observe the threads and inner workings of a brother-sister relationship.
I had been nervous about seeing Phil’s dead body, worried that when I saw it, it would’ve suddenly made his death much too real for me. I didn’t want to break down in the middle of the church, surrounded by Phil’s relatives. Fortunately, it was a closed casket ceremony. I wondered if it was because his face just looked too horrific to be made up for an open casket funeral. I decided that it was because his mother, a delicate little bird of a thing, wouldn’t have been able bear seeing her darling son embalmed and lying in a coffin. Thus, throughout the Bible readings and the prayers, I sat there staring at the brown oak that was supposed to contain him. Natalie cried dutifully and when people went up to place white roses by his casket, they squeezed her shoulder comfortingly because she was the girlfriend. When it was her turn, I supported her on the way up. She swayed like a willow branch in my grasp and suppressed a loud sob as she placed her rose beside the portrait sitting on his coffin.
After the service, we went out to pay our respects to his family members. Phil’s elegant mother, Patricia, was also glad to see me. She hugged me close and cried for ten straight minutes. I saw Natalie turn red and flip through her pamphlet awkwardly.
“I’m so sorry for what he did to you,” she murmured as she’d rubbed her thumb against my cheek.
“Oh, I’m all right, Mrs. Lin,” I waved her off sheepishly. Natalie shifted uncomfortably. Patricia turned and hugged her as well, though not as tightly, whispering to her, “Don’t cry, dear. If you love someone, he never really leaves you.”
Natalie nodded tearfully, basking in the attention. I understood that Phil’s family had always loved me, but Phil had fallen in love with someone else and they would always stand by Phil. He was their son.
When she let go of Natalie, Patricia turned towards me again, “I’m so glad we got to see you, Kristen. Promise you’ll come visit us. It won’t be awkward.”
She didn’t say that things would no longer be awkward because her adulterous son was no longer around, but we both knew that was the reason why.
I nodded anyhow and told her, “My mom misses you too. She wanted me to let you know what you can call her for anything. Maybe just to talk.”
Patricia smiled gratefully. Her smile bloomed slowly, parting the lips in a lovely way. I had always known where Phil had inherited his beautiful smile. “Tell her I will.”
Then, Natalie and I left.

For the first ten minutes in the car, we didn’t say a word to each other. I just counted the number of red lights we hit, going over the conversation with Phil’s mom in my head. Natalie was staring out the passenger window, her hot breath making fog on the glass.
Finally, I reached towards the radio and turned it on just to fill in the emptiness. Just as the sounds of Alicia Keys began pouring through my speakers, Natalie’s hand shot out and turned the radio off. I looked at her and she forced her face further away from me in the other direction. I reached out and turned the radio back on. Quicker this time, she flipped it off.
I hit the brakes. “What. You want to talk? What?”
She took a deep, stabilizing breath. “What the hell was all that?”
“The hell was all what?”
“You! Being all chummy with his parents like I didn’t exist! Like I didn’t just lose my boyfriend!”
I chuckled at the irony, “Oh my god.” I turned my attention back on the road and started driving again.
She was fuming. “You were waiting for the funeral, weren’t you? So you could rub it in my face that you had so much more time with him! With his family!”
“You really think that’s what I was hoping for?” I looked at her in disbelief. I felt like I had been a complete idiot once again. “I spent the last fucking week taking care of you, making sure you were okay! I agreed to attend my goddamn ex-boyfriend’s—whom you stole—funeral with you! Because I—like the idiot I am—felt like you needed me to be your best friend right now.”
“Right. I’m supposed to believe that that whole show you just put up at the funeral was done in my best interest. Like you weren’t trying to just make it clear that I will never know his family like you know them!” she screamed.
I felt like gouging her eyes out with my bare hands but I kept them wound tightly around the steering wheel.
“You are such a fucking bitch, you know that? You could’ve stayed at home and had your parents take care of the mess that you are but you decide to be a fucking parasite on me! You always feed off of me, Natalie. You always need to take everything that’s good in my life away from me. You want to leave me a broken little mess that can’t pick up a spoon to feed herself because she’s too sick from crying? Guess what! You’ve already succeeded. And now what? You want me to put you back together as well? I’m not gonna do it. It called karma. You made your bed, you lie in it.”
She looked at me, shocked that I had spoken for once so forcefully to her. In all the years that we had been friends, I had never spoken to her like that. Even after she and Phillip had gotten together, we’d never had a confrontation about what had happened. I stopped the car and we both looked at the house we were parked at. It was her house.
“Get out. You’ve already ruined my life and Phil’s. I hope you rot in hell,” I snarled.
Natalie tripped out of the car, no longer crying but looking bewildered at the cold metal edge in my voice. I pulled away from the curb at an alarming speed and, the whole way home, choked back tears.

We didn’t see or speak to each other for a month. My life had begun to resume normalcy. I helped out at my parent’s restaurant, balancing the register and taking phone orders. Twice a week, I went grocery shopping with my mother. We would walk down the aisles arm-in-arm like old chums. She never mentioned our conversation the morning of the funeral again. I guess she’s like me, she doesn’t like thinking about the unpleasant things.
My dad would bring dinner home from the restaurant in white paper boxes. I’d snap open the chopsticks each night to dig in. I was happy and my parents were happy I was around. I was so lucky that they didn’t ever feel the urge to kick out their twenty-three year old daughter. If anything, they’d figured, I would someday take over the restaurant.
I didn’t really think about Phil or Natalie anymore.
Of course it was only a matter of time before she showed up at my front door again.
The day she came, my mom had answered the door.
“Kristen, you have a guest!” she called upstairs to me. I had detected a note of wariness in her voice, subtle enough so that “the guest” wouldn’t have noticed. I knew right away who was at the door.
I came downstairs slowly, stopping halfway. She was standing in the foyer.
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
“Talk about what?” I played dumb.
“I need to tell you my side of the story.”
“And why would I want to subject myself to that?” I asked her dryly.
Tears suddenly sprung into her eyes, and she said, “Okay. I know that I am a self-centered bitch and a terrible, terrible best friend. I know that throughout our friendship, I was always an attention whore and you have always been the one to indulge me.”
I nodded, crossing my arms in front of me.
“I just can’t live with myself if I never at least try to explain myself to you. Please just indulge me one last time. We don’t ever need to speak again.”
I looked at her and even though I fought it, I couldn’t help seeing the confident and pretty little eight-year-old girl whom I had hero-worshipped as a child. She had taught me how to bat my eyelashes at boys and somehow sculpted and molded my fashion sense into something presentable today. She had entertained me for hours and hours on the phone for endless nights, regaling me with tales about all the boys who chased after her. I had felt so envious of her attractiveness up until high school. All along, she had wanted what I had. Now, she was literally begging at my feet.
“Okay,” I shrugged. “Go ahead.”
Her eyes darted furtively towards the kitchen where my mom had retreated. “Can we go to your room?”
“Sure.”
I sat down on my bed. She wisely chose to sit in the chair at my desk.
“You can hate me. Forever. I deserve it,” she spoke. “I never, ever should have fallen for your boyfriend. You were my best friend!”
I noted that she used the past tense ‘were,’ and knew that we would never be best friends again.
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to blame it on anyone else except for myself. I was always seeking attention from people. I saw how Phil had doted on you, and I-I wanted it for myself. No one had ever looked at me like the way Phil looked at you. Sure, I pulled out all the tricks to try and get his attention. I don’t know why I did it. I hated myself for being so terrible to you. Hated isn’t even strong enough of a word. Loathed. I loathed myself. I still do.”
“Shut up, Natalie. When have you ever cared about anyone other than yourself?”
“I didn’t. I was so into myself, I didn’t care about anyone else. It was just a game at first. But then I really fell for him, Kristen.” Her voice changed suddenly, becoming tender. “Not just because he was rich or good-looking. We really understood one another.” Her tone shifted again, as though she were weighing how to break something delicately to me.
“Remember how you once told me that Phil would shut you out sometimes and you couldn’t figure out what was going on in his head? I figured out everything that he didn’t say. He didn’t say the things that he knew were upsetting for you. But he really needed to. You might not have been able to handle it, but I could. Phil was depressed, you know that?”
I had suspected it, but he’d never confided in me.
“He showed me his suicide plan. It was a list of ten different ways he had contemplated on killing himself. He nicknamed it ‘Project Mushroom.’ How morbid is that? I know you hate me for taking him from you. It may hurt you to hear all this…unpleasantness, and even though he’s dead now, at least he didn’t take his own life. That would’ve really killed you.” she said the last part vehemently.
I felt ashamed for some reason, like a person who had always thought she was blind, though it was only because her eyes were closed. I shut my eyes hard and struggled to feel the emotions I had had that day in the restaurant. They didn’t come.
Natalie cleared her throat and wiped her cheeks clean.
“I’m sorry for what I did to you. But I’ll never regret my relationship with Phil. You weren’t the only one who loved him. I’m sorry.”
I was crying now. I really was an idiot. I had always been such a clueless idiot. I felt like my heart had been placed on a frying pan. Idiot. I was such an idiot. How could I not have known?
“It’s okay, Natalie. I forgive you,” I managed to murmur, pained. I shut my eyes, trying to banish the feeling that I had given up something precious. I didn’t like the sound of my own voice. It made me ill. She was selfish, self-absorbed, insecure, and immature, but she was human most all. When she had realized that she and Phil had a mutual attraction, she had been childishly delighted that she intrigued such a wonderful guy. She wasn’t thinking about me the first time they kissed. She wasn’t recalling the years and years of sprawling out on my bed reading Vogue magazines and eating Cheetos Puffs delicately to avoid ruining our freshly painted nails. She was thinking about the chemistry and the fireworks when they touched instead. It was never about me. It was never a conspiracy to ruin me. She was just thinking about her. That wasn’t forgivable either, but it wasn’t worth the effort to hate her for it. Moreover, she was right. If he had killed himself, that would’ve really killed me.
Did it mean that she had saved me somehow? No, that was going too far.
“We’re not going to be friends,” I continued decidedly. “Don’t envision that somewhere down the line, we’re ever going to be able to sit down and reminisce about Phil together. If it happens someday, then it happens and that’s great. But don’t count on it.”
She nodded tearfully. “Thank you, Kristen,” she whispered. She stood up from the desk and let herself out of my room.
I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to know that after eight long years, the love my life had a different soul mate. But I would make peace with her. I wouldn’t forgive her and I wouldn’t forget it, but I would turn my face away and look elsewhere for a while. I would need time to refocus and maybe someday she and I could still be acquaintances. I needed to reexamine everything first.

And I did. I ran into her recently at Noah’s Bagels, two shops down from my family’s restaurant. She was on a date. When I walked in, she came over and said hello and I even hugged her. She made me promise that we would catch up, but it was a half-hearted promise because we knew we never would. Her date looked like a nice Chinese boy, though not half as good-looking as Phil. He looked at me curiously and I looked straight back and smiled. It felt good afterwards knowing that I could forgive.
There was someone, however, I asked to forgive me every day. I didn’t know if he could hear me, but I suppose that if you love someone, he never really leaves you after all, right?

Short Story for WR91 titled "Parents"

Fiona

The vanity had been a gift from her husband. In the gilded frame, she had traced the outlines of her eyes with her hands smothered in cold cream countless times. With her fingertips, she had massaged away the crows’ feet around her eyes and then the wiry lines around her lips. Now, the deep wrinkles between her brows threaten to ungraciously blot out the last of her youthfulness. Her face had once been so lovely, resting on carved cheekbones. Her nose was the only feature that had not been exceptional. It is now spreading in either direction, becoming the most pronounced detail and causing her to be, in her middle age, profoundly unattractive. She is touching the spidery veins that have recently bloomed on her cheek. The veins replicate those that appeared on her mother’s cheek when her mother reached menopause. I know she’s been feeling the symptoms. I’ve seen her wake in the middle of the night, throwing back covers, panting and feeling panicked. In a few weeks, she will check the calendar and she will know.
Dan isn’t aware of it yet but likely, he wouldn’t care. She is long past the age for childbearing, though they had never even tried. He had brought up kids twice before, once during the second year of their marriage and another time during their eighth. Both times, she had shelved the idea, ashamed to tell him that she was afraid of motherhood. The idea of needing to turn an infant on its stomach when it slept so that it wouldn’t spit up and choke itself repulsed her. She couldn’t be needed so much by anyone. Gradually, the idea of children running through the house faded into the anatomy of their marriage and was forgotten.
They moved in loose-hinged circles, coming together every evening for dinner and parting ways at the breakfast table, her hands reaching out with a slice of toast or bagel. He never fought with her because they never reached any disagreements. He was a compliant husband. I know how fiery she can be, but the years have quelled the flames somewhat. Once in a while, they would reawaken and threaten to burn down the life she had constructed out of glass wire and matchsticks. She would grow irritated at every word he uttered and she would feel her anxiety threaten to lash out at him, but she never could. Regardless of his infuriating placidity, she loved him in a selfish way, and she tremored at the thought of his falling through her grasp and leaving her with loose, fluttering hands. Twenty-eight years, her hands have held him but the joints have grown rusty and the clasp stiff and unnatural. After all, the hands reveal their age first.

Dan

He had once walked like a very young man, light on the balls of his feet and rich with self-awareness. He was the son of two teachers. His father was a professor of philosophy at the University and his mother had been a schoolteacher before she had retired to domestic life. He was raised a student.
“Knowledge is what differentiates a great man from a good man,” his father had often quoted to him. “No one can take it away from you,” his mother would add. Then she would tap her temple and say, “You keep it all up here. If it’s gone, you might as well be dead.”
So he grew up with poems as his allies and books as his compatriots. When he finished school, the world was still exciting and new, just as he had found in his readings.
It was during his twenty-first year that he had felt the first inkling of the depression that he could not extricate himself from later in life. It had been during his third year at Cambridge he had traveled with a schoolmate to Edinburgh where they had encountered a homeless man. They were young men of progressive thinking, filled with idealism and compassion. They fed the man, cleaned him up, put him up for the night, and had given him some money. They parted ways with the man with promises of patronage and work echoing in their ears. Two days later, they discovered that the man had died, frozen to death on a bench.
He had never aspired to be a father, though the birth of a child would have awakened in him a love for fatherhood. His complacency—the trait his wife most detested in him—would not have existed had his daughter been born. He would have read her Frost.
The self-awareness of his youth became caution and now he when walks along the pavement outside the stretch of his home, he is focused on the uneven cracks where the roots of trees have broken through the surface. To fall would be his death sentence.

Fiona

She had had plans to take up a position at a large publishing firm in New York that fall but she never went to New York. Instead, she was married at twenty-two. Her mother’s fingers had torn a hole in her dress when she had ripped herself from the house. On the bus to the city hall, she’d brushed at the loose threads absently, her hands encircling the stiffness of her abdomen. The dress was taupe and her younger sister had sewn a matching jacket for her. That was left behind along with everything else. Dan was waiting for her in the lobby, waiting to do the right thing, and they were wed with a roomful of strangers as witnesses and her mother’s screaming in her ear, You’re throwing it away. Sixteen years of education. Throwing it all away.
Bubbles was coming tonight with her husband. Family dinners happened on occasion and Bubbles liked to come on nights when she had a babysitter for the kids. Otherwise, Dan and Fiona were often the ones who made the trip.
When they were first married, Bubbles would visit, whispering to Fiona that things with their mother would mend once there was a grandchild in her arms. I wasn’t aware of this at the time—I was clamped up inside, a small ball of rolled tissue at thirteen weeks—but you find these things out, you see, after it’s all over. With every passing week, I continued to grow and Fiona’s panic mounted.
People forget what life is like in utero after they are born. In the womb, we are more spirit than we are souls. We are not yet tied down to our physical bodies but dwell for a little while inside and sometimes outside of it. Tiny fingers clench but our bodies are immobile except where our mothers choose to lead us. Perhaps it was the umbilical cord or her blood that mingled and gave a letter to mine or that intrinsic bond that attaches the child to her mother until birth, but I knew that I was not wanted. At sixteen weeks, she paid a visit to a clinic, the kind where protestors will stand outside all day tirelessly. They were married a month before I was detached from the wall of her uterus and ordered to get out.
I retreated to the outskirts of her life, watching from ceiling corners and in her sleep, hovering very close to her mind. Sometimes she thinks about me and if anyone asks about me—though no one ever would—she can say that today I would have been five years older than herself when she married Dan.

Dan

When he was told about the miscarriage, he tried very hard to remember the other qualifications she had to be his wife. It wasn’t that he had altogether wanted the baby, but he had been preparing himself months for it. He knew that she hadn’t cared for herself properly during the pregnancy. She fought fatigue and lost her appetite. But he couldn’t very well abandon her simply because there was no more child. So he swallowed objections and decided that if he were to spend his life with anyone, she was as good as any other. So he planted his roots with her and decided not to walk away.
Tonight, he is to bring home some shallots, wild rice, and a whole chicken. The grocery store nearby is small and unimaginative but sometimes when walking through the aisles he forgets himself and loses track of everything. The sound of his shoes tapping against the tile leads him from one end of the aisle to the other and he finds that he has observed nothing along the way. Fiona’s sister and her husband were coming to dinner and he is grateful that on these occasions, they leave their children at home. While he loves his niece and nephew, they are young and inquisitive and inexhaustible. He’s nearing fifty-two and had begun to appreciate the silence of his household though he knows it’s only bearable because of the Zoloft.
His phone rings while he’s debating between the French-Italian shallots and the Welsh shallots. It’s Fiona asking him to bring home some juice for the children. It seems that the babysitter cancelled and Bubbles is bringing them along to dinner. He begins to figure that perhaps having the children around tonight will be kind enjoyable. Their curiosity towards everything is somewhat refreshing.
Karen has a smattering of freckles and the same delicate bone structure that runs in Fiona’s family. Nathan’s redheaded like his mom with red-blonde eyelashes and eyebrows so faint they make his blue eyes melt seamlessly into his pale skin. Bubbles had taught them to be well behaved and they rarely got underfoot.
Bubbles had been the one to call him at work to tell him that Fiona had lost the baby. Fiona had then gotten on the line to talk to him about the ordeal. She spared him the harrowing details. He had been concerned for her safety and had asked if she wanted him to go home to her. She had assured him that she was fine and then she had asked him to pick up dinner on the way home because she didn’t have the strength to cook that night. Then, before they hung up, she added, “Oh, and Dan? It was a girl.”
Now, he sometimes hates her for that conversation. There was a nonchalance he had struggled for years to write off as coping, but now twenty-eight years later, he accepts it for what it was.
He scarcely remembers the juice.

Fiona

She is up to her elbows in marinade when the phone rings. She feels the old flames of irritation flare up with the inconvenience when it cuts to the answering machine. It is her sister apologizing and asking if it would be too much trouble to set two more place settings at the dinner table. The babysitter cancelled and it’s too short notice to get anyone else. Her niece and nephew are coming to dinner, it seems.
Karen is eleven and Nathan is eight. They are normal, well-adjusted children and they like Uncle Dan better than they do Aunt Fiona. It seems that children can sense when an adult is lacking in parental ability and they will veer away from these adults like magnets of the same charge. Fiona sets the table, wondering if eight years old is old enough to handle china or if she should give the children paper plates instead. She decides against disposable dishware partly because Bubbles will call it discrimination and also because she doesn’t have any in the house. Does she have anything but water and wine? She calls Dan and asks him to pick up juice for the children.
She wrings her hands as she surveys the tablescape. Is it child-friendly enough? She rarely has the children over for dinner. They come occasionally with their mother to drop something off or pick something up, but when they are here, they are under strict instructions to not touch anything. I know they see this place as a mystery, the backrooms they have only glanced into maybe two or three times. The wallpaper is pristine and clean of children taking their pencils to the walls.
The children are both anticipating and dreading the evening sitting at the table with their aunt and uncle. Dan will probably give them the wrong answers to all their questions, though bless his heart, he tries. Fiona will spend the night worrying that someone is going to drop a glass.
And sometime after dinner, the children are hoping that while the adults settle in for some conversation, they will be free to explore the house. The childlessness of their aunt and uncle is a profound mystery to them. They aren’t old enough yet to put their finger on the strangeness of Aunt Fiona and Uncle Dan’s marriage.
Sometimes Nathan sees me, but he doesn’t know who I am.

Dan

Dan likes Bubbles. Like his wife, she has fine red hair but of the two, it’s easy to see that Fiona is more beautiful. Bubbles has the type of nature where she is always trying to reconcile and mend. Dan likes Bubbles but feels that sometimes she attempts to mend seams that are too great for her to handle.
“Daniel!” She greets him. “Oh, you grow more handsome with age. Damn you!”
He kisses her on both cheeks and shakes her husband’s hand.
“It’s not fair,” she continues as she pulls scarves and hats off her children. “Go put your coats on the rack,” she instructs them. “And don’t get the carpet wet.”
“How are you, Allison? Greg?”
“Oh,” she breathes, “Nathan’s starting violin in March. Karen’s having a poem published in the local paper. They’re doing a spotlight on the elementary school. I’ll send you guys a copy when it comes out.”
“That’s brilliant!” Dan turns to his niece. “Tell me about your poem.”
Karen is strawberry blonde and is not lacking in vivaciousness. She pipes up eagerly, “It’s about autumn and leaves changing and stuff.”
“Do you like to write about seasons?”
“I like Nature and like, orange and yellow leaves.”
“There’s another guy who’s really into Nature and writing about it. Have you heard of Robert Frost?”
“No. What’s he write about?”
“Well, his poems often deal with his love for the earth. Like yourself, huh? How about I show you a book?”
“Later,” Bubbles states as she herds her children to greet their aunt.
During dinner, Bubbles forks beans onto Nathan’s and Karen’s plates and Fiona struggles to retain her train of thought amidst the outcries of the children while she converses with Greg. Dan tells them that there’s ice cream in the freezer and if they eat their beans, he’s certain Aunt Fiona wouldn’t mind letting them have some. Fiona hears this and worries that they’ll drip ice cream on themselves and the carpet.
After they finish eating, Fiona serves up dessert and Dan retreats into his study to peruse the shelves for his collection of Robert Frost.
When the house was built fifteen years ago, Fiona had given Dan free reign to design his study. He had chosen floor to ceiling bookshelves to line one of the walls and a sturdy oak desk to be placed beside the bay window, the only source of natural light in the room. Fiona also purchased him a velvet chair for him to sit in and read. There was a library ladder tilted against the bookshelves that could slide across the length of the wall on wheels.
Dan climbs up on the ladder and begins going through his books. They are arranged alphabetically by author and the writers whose last names begin with ‘F’ are on the second shelf from the top. I try to say, Don’t reach over. There’s something there. But he can’t hear me and his hands feel its way between the books as he pulls The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged from the shelf.
I feel her flurry of movements when his skin brushes against her exterior and I feel her maternal instincts fearing for her nubby sac nearby. She sinks her fangs into the back his hand and Dan yelps, withdrawing quickly. He peers into the bookshelf and finds her suspended upside down from the hood of the shelf. She straggles her way back towards her web but not before she flashes her ominous red hourglass.
He panics and tries to take one step down, forgetting that he’s up four steps and falls backwards with a crack and lands in an ugly heap. He has an accelerated reaction to her venom.
“Uncle Dan?”
Karen has been sent to fetch him. His toffee ice cream is melting into a puddle and she is curious to explore the study. She shrieks and runs crying from the room.
“Dan?”
They are calling to him as they hurry through the house.

Fiona

Her heart constricts forcefully when she sees him lying on the floor, out cold. I overhear her think, My god, he’s slipping through my fingers. Her sister runs to the phone in the study and dials 911. Greg hurries the children out of the room and Fiona approaches Dan fearfully.
She touches her hand to his cheek and whispers, “Hang on, dear.”
The paramedics arrive just as his arm begins to cramp.
“Possibly a heart attack,” one of them concludes. Wrong.
I see it, but can’t they see the two puncture wounds on the back of his hand? The neurotoxins are spilling into his bloodstream. They strap him to a stretcher and proceed to administer an EKG to test his heart.
Little Nathan appears behind his father’s leg. We’ve watched each other before but have never exchanged words. He stares up into the ceiling corner and I know this both frightens and irks Fiona; she avoids ceiling corners for what might lurk there.
“Chrissakes! Greg! This isn’t the place where he should be right now!”
Greg begins to shoo the boy, but Nathan cries out, “He got bit! He got bit!”
Bubbles hurries over to shush her son and ushers him out of the room.
I’m screaming, He got bit! He got bit! But they can’t hear me and while they load Dan into the ambulance, I feel his soul stirring. They turn on the sirens and speed towards the hospital.
In the vehicle, Fiona is clutching his hand, clutching it hard as though the solidity of it will give her comfort. She’s praying though she hasn’t prayed since the day she found out she was pregnant. She wants him urgently to stay, but I can feel his soul coming loose. Like those plastic stickers that cling to windows without adhesive—that’s how the soul sticks to the body. If a corner is picked loose, is will gradually peel away and come off without leaving a mark on the glass. And try as they may, once the corner has been shaken loose, not even doctors can put the soul back on the body.
As he is dying, he passes seamlessly through the world. Death is subtle and when you reach the final brink, it feels like you’ve shifted yourself a little—perhaps for comfort—and you find yourself passed away. Souls and spirits don’t always end up in the same place. Souls can stay with us for a little while, but they have had more life and must go on to meet with their fate. Spirits, we dwell everywhere in corners, in back rooms, in the homes of our parents’. We have no obligation to stay or to go because there is no calling to face judgment.
She is holding on to him as tightly as she can, but my father flies from his body and joins me up by the window of the ambulance. He isn’t surprised to see me because, you see, these things you know once it’s all over. He shapeless and bears no resemblance to his human form. We are in death only the intangible things that characterized us in life.
We are watching her alongside one another and I feel his grief as he watches her mourn. Oh, Fiona, you couldn’t hold on tightly enough.
Then, he chuckles, Boy, won’t it be a surprise when the autopsy comes back.
Poor Nathan, I say, they didn’t believe him but after this they will start treating him differently.
He asks me if I’m going to continue my way up and I tell him that I’m not going with him. He wants to stay with me, though I can feel his being pulled. He asks me what I plan to do. I see Fiona touching his face, inconsolable. She feels her solitude acutely settling around her shoulders like a shroud. My father’s soul is billowing and winding, seeping out the corners of the ambulance.
Daughter, what will you do? He asks again, reaching to embrace me.
I’ve watched you both for years, I tell him, I think I’ll stay a while longer.

A Blog Re-Vamped V. 2.0

Hey Blog,

So now that I am back and settled from my EuroTrip, I don't have any more fascinating posts about my travels. Thus, I think it's time for my blog to get a bit of an update. Now, if only my camera didn't take forever to upload photos....

Stay tuned!

Kimi