David Lee Holcomb's Blog, page 2

Pirates

The visitor wore cargo shorts two sizes too big, a Dallas Cowboys t-shirt, grimy canvas deck shoes, and a blond ponytail.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t have a library card. I’m a pirate.”

Kellie Lovell didn’t bat an eyelash. Situations like this came with her job.

“In that case, you won’t be able to take any materials out of the building.”

The man smiled. He was missing a tooth on the left side, lower jaw.

“Yes, ma’am. I understand. Where I’m staying, I don’t have much room for books.”

The librarian nodded. She assumed that the visitor was living in one of two nearby facilities, a homeless shelter and an assisted-living center, which together provided a number of unusual library visitors every week.

“Tell me again the name of the ship?”

“It’s the Bountiful Bess,” the visitor said. “She was the Battling Bess, but me and my friends, we changed the name. We didn’t want to give the wrong impression.”

“And you want to know where the Bountiful Bess is at the moment?”

“Yes, ma’am. People I talked to, they all said that if you wanted to know something, this was the place to go.”

Kellie did a quick search for internet references to a seagoing vessel called Bountiful Bess but came up empty. Battling Bess yielded the same lack of results.

The visitor had given his name as Ezra Semple. He said he was a sailor—a ship’s captain, in fact—and that he had, due to circumstances beyond his control, become separated from his ship and crew. On impulse, Kellie searched for Ezra Semple.

Here, she had better luck. There was one Ezra Semple listed on an obscure history site. That Ezra Semple was, indeed, a pirate, sought by the UK authorities for having intercepted and appropriated a shipment of textiles headed for Jamaica. The warrant for his arrest was dated to 1807.

“I’m not seeing anything useful, Mr. Semple,” Kellie said.

Semple nodded, looking down at her fingers dancing on the keyboard.

“I don’t altogether understand what you’re doing,” he said, “but if you say you don’t have anything for me, then you don’t.”

Kellie looked up at him. He might have been handsome before life started kicking him around, a stocky little Viking with blue eyes and a gap-toothed charm. She guessed his age at about thirty-five, but the map of wrinkles drawn around his eyes added ten years to that, while his smile took away twenty.

“Wait right here a moment, Mr. Semple.”

Kellie got up and walked back to the “bullpen,” where the IT department explored mysteries beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.

“Willis?” A young-old man with heavy glasses and a haircut that could only have been self-inflicted looked up.

“S’up?”

“Do you still belong to that group that tracks celebrities’ private air travel?”

“Yup.”

“What about ships?”

Willis pushed his glasses up and frowned at her. “Ships?”

“Do you track ocean-going vessels?”

He looked surprised, then intrigued.

“Actually, we don’t, but I know somebody who does. Are you planning a cruise?”

“I’m looking for a ship. A specific ship. The ship’s captain is at the desk as we speak.”

Willis unfolded his praying mantis limbs from the chair. “Let’s get some more info.”

When the two librarians returned to the desk, Ezra Semple was gone.

“Damn,” Kellie said. “I really wanted to turn you two loose on each other. A man looking for a ship that probably doesn’t exist, and a man who delights in looking for information that may or may not be out there.”

“Maybe he’ll be back,” Willis offered. “You say he’s a ship’s captain?”

Kellie grinned. “In a manner of speaking.”

·

Kellie could hear the television from the driveway. She could also smell smoke. She rushed through the back door and into the kitchen.

The room reeked of burned food. On the stove, a two-quart copper-bottom Revere Ware saucepan, one that her mother had bought when Kellie was a child, was half-full of solid black char, and the outside of the pan was scorched. The handle had cracked where it attached to the body of the pan. On the floor in front of the stove were the shattered remains of a plate, a coffee cup, and a drinking glass.

Kellie stood in front of the stove without speaking, without tears. All the tears had long since been used up. She pulled a trash bag off the roll under the sink and collected the debris from the floor, then dropped the saucepan on top of it and tied off the bag. She carried the bag out to the trash can and stuffed it inside.

The sounds of Law & Order reruns reverberated off the privacy fencing, coming right through the walls of the house. She returned inside and looked into the living room where her father sat slumped in his chair, rage rippling off him like the heat from a burning coal mine. Old rage. Deep-rooted rage. Rage carved out of ancient strata of spite. She looked at the back of his head and sighed. He wanted her to confront him about the mess in the kitchen so he could bellow and curse at her about cheap stoves made in Communist hellholes, about her not being there to make his lunch, or about the pitiful excuse for a wife and mother who had the gall to drop dead just when he needed her most.

Kellie retreated to her bedroom and locked the door.

She wanted her father to hurry up and die, and she hated herself for feeling that way, which made her hate him even more for being the kind of person who could only improve the world by departing from it.

She took a Xanax and lay down on the bed.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, she thought.

·

A week and a half after his first visit, Ezra Semple returned to the library’s information desk. He was wearing the same shirt and shorts, but his shoes had been replaced by a pair of flip-flops that were a size too large. His feet were dirty, but his toenails were neatly trimmed.

“What happened to your shoes, Mr. Semple?”

He glanced down with a sheepish grin. “Somebody took ‘em,” he said.

“Did you tell someone on staff? They could probably track down who did it and get them back for you.”

“‘Staff’?”

“The people who work in the place where you’re staying.”

Semple laughed. “You mean like a butler and a cook and a maid and all o’ them? I ain’t nearly that fancy. I just got a little hut down on the beach.”

The nearest beach was …What? Five hundred miles away? There was something so plausible and guileless about Ezra Semple that Kellie was pulled up short when he hit her with nonsense like that.

“I’m sorry someone stole from you, Mr. Semple,” she said primly.

He shrugged. “I took enough of other people’s stuff when I had my ship under me,” he said. “It’d be foolish to complain.”

Kellie picked up the desk phone and called Willis.

“Our friend is here,” she said. “Yes, that friend.”

She hung up and smiled at Semple. “One of my co-workers knows someone who is an expert on finding ships,” she told him. “Maybe he’ll be able to help you.”

When Willis approached the desk, Semple extended a hand. “Captain Ezra Semple, at your service.”

“Willis Byrd, at yours.”

Willis looked at Kellie, and she smiled. “Captain Semple is looking for a ship.”

“I hope I can help,” Willis said. “Can you describe the ship to me, Captain?”

“I could just about paint you a picture,” he said.

“Let’s start with a verbal description.”

Semple smiled and nodded. Kellie was struck again by how strangely charming the man was, despite the smell of urine and sweat that clung to his clothes, the grime on his hands and feet, and his general air of someone who had been left out in the weather too long.

“She’s a sloop, not so big, but oh, so quick!”

Willis grabbed a scratch pad and started scribbling.

“Two-masted, Seventy foot keel, twenty foot beam, rigged fore-and-aft, Bermuda style. Twelve-foot bowsprit. Her hull’s painted black with two neat blue stripes. Twenty crew. Four guns—barely big enough to call ‘em guns—twelve-pounder carronades we took from a French merchantman off Marie-Galante. Almost more trouble than they’re worth on a little ship like the Bess, but one or two shots from a cannon—even a toy like ours—does a lot to let the other man know you mean business, so we keep the guns and use ‘em when we have to. We prefer—” He produced the word as though it were a prize of great value. “—to rely on speed and skill rather than guns to do our job.”

“What job is that, Captain Semple?”

“Privateering,” Semple replied.

Willis didn’t miss a beat. “What’s the name of the ship?”

“She’s Bountiful Bess. Used to be Battling Bess.”

Willis looked at his notes. “Where did you last see the ship?”

Semple smiled, his expression thoughtful. “Off the coast of Hispaniola, that was. About fifty miles north of Cap Haitien. We was on our way to the Caicos, to put in at the lagoon at Balfour Town. A storm came up, and everything went to the devil. I got knocked overboard, and I been looking for the Bess ever since.”

“Cap Haitien is just about a thousand miles from here, Captain Semple.”

Semple nodded. “I been at this a while,” he said.

Willis looked at Kellie, then extended his hand to Semple.

“Okay, Captain Semple. I’ll take this information and see what I can find out. Why don’t you check back with us in a day or two?”

The pirate shook Willis’s hand. Rather than a handshake, he offered Kellie a courtly bow.

“I’m sorry, ma’am; I don’t think I caught your name.”

“Kellie Lovell,” she said, tapping the ID card that hung on a lanyard around her neck.

“Mr. Byrd, Miz Lovell, I’m more obliged to you both than I can truly say. I’ve been trying to get back to my sweet lady for so long.”

·

Three days after Willis Byrd met Ezra Semple, Kellie came home to find her father lying on the floor outside her bedroom door in a daze, cursing and flailing but unable to pull himself up. Kellie rushed over to see to him, but when she bent down, he grabbed a handful of her hair, and she had to fight her way free.

“Bitch,” he hissed. “Locked me out! My house!”

“Dad, that’s my bedroom, not yours.” And strictly speaking, it wasn’t his house anymore, either, since he mortgaged it and gave all the money to a televangelist, leaving Kellie to take on the responsibility for sorting things out. Now, at forty-two, she was making mortgage payments on a house that had been paid off in full a decade ago.

“My house! All of it! Every fucking inch!” her father snarled.

While she waited for the ambulance to arrive, Kellie ascertained that her father had fallen while trying to bash down the door to her bedroom. He accused her of locking the remote for the television in her room. Kellie looked into the living room and saw that the remote was on the floor next to the entertainment center, where it always landed when he threw it at the television.

Three hours later, she was sitting on a bench in a remarkably depressing hallway, talking to an ER doctor whose stomach kept growling throughout the conversation.

“We have to do some tests, and the neurologist will need to see him, but my guess is that he has had either a TIA or a small stroke. Do you know what a TIA is?”

Kellie nodded. “Transient ischemic accident.” When the doctor looked surprised, she added, “I work in a library. You pick up all sorts of things.”

“I’m sure. Well, he may be back to normal in a day, or it could be longer. I have to tell you that there is also the risk of a more significant event in the future.”

“What kind of event?”

“A stroke. Is your father always so …?”

Mean? Hateful? Vicious? she thought. “Opinionated?” she said aloud. “Yes. He’s been like that ever since my mother died.”

“His general physical condition is good, but he has some circulatory issues—probably due to a sedentary lifestyle—and that very high-stress personality … There is a risk.”

Kellie nodded again. None of this was news to her.

“What do I do?”

“Are you the only caregiver?”

“Yes. My mother died eight years ago, and I’m an only child. He has a brother, but they haven’t spoken to each other in fifty years.”

“I’m sure that’s very difficult for you.” The doctor’s stomach made a noise, and he grimaced. “I’m sorry. Double shift. I missed lunch.”

“I understand. So what happens next?”

“We’d like to keep him overnight and let the neurologist look in on him in the morning. He may prescribe more tests, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“Can I see him?”

The doctor stood. “Of course. We gave him something to calm him down, so he might seem a bit woozy, but that’s natural.”

“I understand.”

The man in the bed looked up at her, and his face darkened. “Get me out of here.”

“Not until tomorrow,” she said. “They think you might have had a small stroke or something, and they want to be sure you’re going to be all right.”

“You ungrateful bitch.”

Even drugged and disoriented, his rage glowed like a beacon, burning Kellie’s face. She tried to say something, anything, but nothing came out. Words, like tears, had long been exhausted. She turned and walked out the door.

·

Kellie’s father ended up spending two more days in the hospital, after which the special-needs transit service brought him home while Kellie hurried ahead to make sure the television remote was where he would be expecting it to be.

A week later, Kellie came home from the library to find her father stiff and cold in his chair, his face more peaceful than she had ever seen it, his hand clenched so tightly on the remote control that the battery cover had popped off.

·

Kellie went back to work two weeks after her father’s death. She was, to all intents and purposes, her normal self. She had not so much processed her loss as simply set it aside, a box of awfulness that she would open and sort through when she felt the time was right. The people and habits and quiet, calm routines of her job gave her a sense of gravity, of orientation, and helped her keep the lid of that box securely fastened.

Willis Byrd came loping out to the information desk on a gray, wet, miserable Tuesday, grinning.

“What’s got you so effervescent on this crappy day?” Kellie asked.

“The Bountiful Bess—née Battling Bess—was a British sloop that began life as a military vessel but was taken by pirates off the Bahamas in 1798. It vanished in a storm in 1811.”

“Off the coast of Hispaniola, I presume.”

“You presume correctly.”

“Go on.”

“Ezra Semple was, at one time, mate on a completely different British sloop, until 1798, when he jumped ship.”

“In the Bahamas?”

“In the Bahamas. Next time we hear about him is 1807, when British authorities issue arrest warrants for one Ezra Hogue Semple, formerly of the Royal Navy, on charges of piracy. According to the warrants, Semple is the current master of the Battling Bess, which had—as we’ve just heard—been hijacked by pirates nine years previously.”

Kellie sat back in her chair, letting her head roll against the headrest.

“You okay?”

She nodded. “I’m fine. Our Ezra Semple seems to have researched his role very thoroughly.”

Willis pulled up another chair and folded himself into it.

“I got the info on the ship from an online friend in London who specializes in the histories of British ships from the age of sail. Does your pirate strike you as the sort of person who would have access to sources like that?”

“Obviously he is, because his story has been consistent with what you’ve learned all down the line.”

Willis grinned. “Or … ”

“Or what? Oh, no, you don’t! He’s not some two-hundred-year-old Flying Dutchman. Don’t even start.”

Willis slid a page of carefully organized notes along the desk and climbed out of the chair. “Keep me posted on what happens next,” he said. “I’m really digging your pirate.”

“He’s not my pirate,” Kellie snapped, but Willis had already gone back to his lair.

·

Kellie had always assumed that once her father was gone, she would be able to craft a life for herself based on her tastes, her comfort, her wishes. She called Central Thrift, and they came and took away the recliner and the television. She cleaned the house, top to bottom, and delivered a load to Goodwill: bags of clothes, bedding, an electric razor, a walker. Like turning a ship at sea, she slowly drew the house off her father’s course and onto one of her own choosing.

But she still couldn’t rest.

What should I have done differently? Was he right? Was it my fault he was such a terrible person? What does that make me? The questions came rushing at her every morning when she woke up and were waiting to greet her every evening when she came home.

Eight years ago, Kellie’s mother ate two bottles of hoarded painkillers and washed them down with tequila from a bottle shaped like a prickly-pear cactus. Kellie had been given no opportunity to grieve because her father immediately demanded that she give up her apartment and move back into her parents’ house to take care of him.

“I’m your goddamn father!” he told her. “You belong here!”

In a decision she questioned every day thereafter, Kellie did what he wanted—what she believed was the right thing to do.

·

A week before Thanksgiving, Kellie sat down to eat her lunch on the edge of one of the planters in front of the library doors. The air was chilly but not unbearable, and a thin, watery sunlight came and went with every breeze. From where she was sitting, she could see past the building across the street, all the way down the hill, the gentle slope marked off by four traffic lights playing through their cycles. Beyond the fourth intersection, the road curved away out of sight to merge with a bigger highway, after which it continued, now a mere tributary of a larger flow, into the east.

Across the street, she spotted a man in shorts, barefoot, strolling down the sidewalk. The weather wasn’t wintry, but it was far too cold for bare feet.

He stopped at the corner to look up and down the street, and Kellie saw that the barefoot man was, predictably, Ezra Semple.

“Mr. Semple! Where are your shoes?”

He looked up, surprised, then smiled and trotted across the street.

“Good afternoon, ma’am. Those little things I had just wore out, I’m afraid.”

Kellie stared at him. “Have you eaten?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Kellie thought for a moment, and then she handed her lunchbox to the pirate. “Will you be so kind as to watch this for me? I have to run inside for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

“Of course.”

Kellie had filled up a couple of bags with items that had belonged to her father: new clothes that he hadn’t worn, shoes he hadn’t liked, a quilt that was too small for his bed. She had distributed some of the contents to various co-workers who had use for the castoffs, leaving her with one bag. She pulled the bag out from under the desk and brought it outside.

She had half-expected Semple to have vanished again, but there he sat, holding her lunchbox as though it contained pirate treasure.

“Thank you, Mr. Semple.” She took the lunchbox from him and set it aside, then set the bag down next to his feet. “These are some things that belonged to my father. They’re new, or like new, and I have no use for any of this stuff. If you don’t mind wearing the clothes of a dead man, I would be grateful if you would take it off my hands.”

“Don’t you have sons or brothers or anyone who has a better claim than a stranger?”

“No, I don’t. Please accept it.”

Semple bent down and picked up the big brown bag, setting it on the wall next to him.

“Thank you, ma’am. It’ll be an honor to wear your father’s things.”

The giving of charity and the accepting of it created an awkwardness. Kellie chewed her sandwich as Semple sat gazing down the hill, his expression quiet, even serene.

“What made you decide to come here?” the librarian asked.

“Here, ma’am?”

“To this town.”

Semple narrowed his eyes, looking away into the distance. “Truth be told, ma’am, I don’t know. I just had a feelin’, I guess.”

A young woman with two small children in tow walked past, headed for the entrance. The younger of the children, a girl, waved and smiled at Kellie and Semple as she passed. Semple smiled back at her, and she giggled as her mother pulled her into the building.

“Sometimes,” Semple went on, “you hear a place calling out to you. It’s like the world sees you needing something, looking for something, and so it says your name, like a whisper. You have to be real quiet to hear it. I heard the whisper, so here I am.”

“Do you think you’ll find what you’re looking for?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s all in the Lord’s hands.” He smiled and glanced over at her almost shyly. “But, you know, I’ve met some good people, kind and wise, that I won’t be so bold as to call my friends. I never learned to read or write more than my name, but now I’ve seen more books in one place than I ever knew were in the world. The trip is worthwhile just for those things. And who knows? My Bess is out there somewhere. Sooner or later, she an’ me will end up in the same place at the same time. Just takes a little patience.”

“A little patience.”

“Yes, ma’am. A little patience.”

·

Kellie spent the holidays quietly, staying away from crowds and festivity. She treated herself to a fancy restaurant meal on the weekend before Christmas and wondered what Ezra Semple was doing and how he was celebrating the holidays. Presumably, whatever facility he was in would provide a holiday meal.

Willis and his online friend in London were unable to gather any more information about the Bountiful Bess. They assumed it had gone to the bottom during that storm in 1811, and the story ended there. Did the man calling himself Ezra Semple know that? Or did he believe that both he and the ship had survived the storm and were now wandering the earth looking for each other more than two hundred years later?

What did Kellie believe? She no longer knew.

Life without her father was both remarkably pleasant and remarkably empty. All the routines of life took less time than they had before, leaving empty spaces. She could clean the kitchen, and an hour later, it would still be clean. Only one bathroom had to be scrubbed. With the television and the piss-stained recliner out of the house, she had more room in the living room to spread things out, to make things nice and keep them neat. On Christmas Eve, she bought flowers and put them in a vase on the kitchen table. On Christmas morning, they were still there, not strewn across the floor, along with the shards of the vase.

Two days after Christmas, she went out to a deli for lunch, not simply ordering takeout, but sitting on a stool, being waited on, being smiled at.

Her gratitude and relief were almost as profound as the guilt she felt for having such feelings.

In the bottom drawer of her dresser, where she kept clothes that she never wore but didn’t want to get rid of, she had hidden a photograph in a silver frame. It was just a snapshot, but in it, a handsome young couple and a big-eyed little girl stood in front of a tree eating ice cream cones. The woman was reaching down with a napkin to catch a blob of ice cream that was about to slide off the child’s cone. Kellie had kept that photograph hidden away for such a long time that those three people were strangers to her. She put the picture on top of the dresser, moving other bric-a-brac out of the way to give it pride of place, and then she stepped back to look at it. After a few minutes, she picked the photo up and returned it to the drawer, pulling sweaters and never-worn lingerie over it. She closed the drawer and walked out of the room.

·

New Year’s Day dawned cold but bright, with a thin midwinter sun touching up the colors of knitted caps, leftover Christmas decorations, and the poinsettias just inside the Post Office’s plate glass windows. Kellie put on the new coat she had given herself for Christmas and went walking.

Ezra Semple had not been back since the day she gave him her father’s clothes. Some people, she knew, were offended by charity. Had she driven him away? Did she care?

She did care. Maybe Semple had been some sort of con man, perhaps merely a lunatic, but his was a noble madness. The world might be a better place, she thought, if more people were that crazy. She wondered how he had spent Christmas and with whom. Did he have friends? Fellow inmates in whatever place it was that gave him a bed?

She found herself walking down the long hill from the library, her surroundings so familiar that she no longer saw them.

Someday, he’ll find his ship, she thought as she waited for the first light to change. Someday, he and Bountiful Bess and their crew will head back out to terrorize the shipping and pillage the coastal towns. He would be a polite marauder, she knew, always thanking the people he robbed—assuming he hadn’t found it necessary to shoot them—and apologizing to the women hiding in basements and attics for any inconvenience they might be suffering. I’m sorry about all this fuss, ma’am. We’ll just take the gold and the jewels and be on our way.

The second and third lights were green when she came to them, so she sailed on without slacking her pace, lost in thought. She loved her job; she loved the people she worked with and the books that were their stock in trade. She had a comfortable home—

Here, she stumbled. Someday, her home would be comfortable, but not just yet. The walls were saturated with so much pain and anger. Only time would allow that stain to evaporate. She would have to have a little patience.

A little patience.

A car honked its horn, and she realized she was at the fourth traffic light. She stopped, her vision blurring. She stepped back away from the curb and steadied herself against the light pole.

Just have to have a little patience.

The traffic sailed by, left to right, right to left. Beside her, other cars queued up, waiting for their turn. From here, she had a view of the valley below. The hospital there, its upper floors protruding from the trees that surrounded it. Over there, the Target where she bought her new coat. Down there, the garage where she got her oil changed twice a year.

But—

The horizon was all wrong. Instead of suburbs rolling gently into the haze of distance, there was a line like the edge of a knife, slicing the world in two. Above the line was the winter sky. Below it was the subtle gray of—

No.

Where was the hospital? There was no hospital. Instead, a ramshackle clutter of docks and piers spilled out into the—

No.

To the south, a kind of slum covered the beach, makeshift huts thrown together from oddments of wood and fabric, hunkered low to the ground against the heaving gray bosom of the—

No. No. No.

Kellie wiped her eyes, only then realizing that she was crying. She took a deep breath, calming herself.

Behind her was the long slope of the hill, the main street with its shops and strip malls, and the library crowning the heights like a temple, her refuge, her home.

Before her—

Before her was the sea. One ship was out in the harbor, slowly turning into the wind, bringing its bow around to face the infinite, empty expanse that stretched to the horizon. One ship. It was a sloop; she knew that. It was a sloop because it had to be. It couldn’t possibly be anything else. Two masts. Probably rigged Bermuda-style, although she wasn’t an expert. It was hard to estimate size with nothing near it for comparison, but she figured … oh, maybe seventy feet along the keel, plus another twelve for the bowsprit, and twenty wide? She looked for guns, but the angle was wrong. Maybe they had gone overboard in the storm.

She was laughing and crying at the same time, and her vision kept doubling and redoubling: one ship, two ships, a whole fleet, then back to one.

The paint job was so dark it could only be black. Relieved by two thin stripes of heartbreaking sky blue.

The traffic light changed, and now the flow was down to the beach and up from the beach. Somehow.

The ship in the harbor finally completed its turn and began to diminish toward that terrifying horizon, a horizon so sharp and plain that it would cut your life in half if you tried to cross over it.

“Are you okay?”

Kellie started, shocked for a moment. A tiny, gray-haired woman in a Christmas sweater and a puffy pink coat touched her on the arm.

“Are you all right? Do you need help?”

“I’m fine. I must have looked like a crazy person. I was … I was thinking about someone.”

The stranger nodded, returning her smile. “It’s the season for that.” The light changed. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, thank you so much.”

The good Samaritan hurried across the street just as the light turned yellow.

Kellie looked out and saw the hospital among its trees, and the Target, and the Jiffy-Lube. She saw the road curving away into Suburbia, and the houses and shops and hotels and malls rolling away toward the far, far horizon.

Still smiling, she wiped her eyes and turned toward home.

# # #

“Volcano”

In the westernmost part of the African nation of Cameroon lies Lake Nyos.

As lakes go, Nyos is not all that large, a bit less than four hundred acres. It is an expanse of still water surrounded by fertile green hills, occupying a crater on the side of an inactive—mostly inactive—volcano, the water held in place by a natural dam of old lava. To all appearances, this is a peaceful, green place.

Far beneath Nyos, however, lies another lake, this one of molten rock, a survivor of the days when volcanoes reared fiery heads, and the region was racked by earthquakes and eruptions. Gases rising from that crucible gradually work their way up through fifty miles of solid rock to the surface, where they escape one prison only to be trapped again, this time by the weight of the lake on top of them. The carbon dioxide escaping from the magma below has accumulated for eons, with hundreds of thousands of tons of gas slowly becoming trapped in the cold waters of the deep lake bottom.

On the 21st of August, 1986, Lake Nyos undergoes something called a “lake overturn.” There is no warning. People are eating their evening meal, socializing, talking about the day just ended, the day to come. Children are being readied for bed. Cattle have been rounded up and penned in their corrals, safe for the night from predators or thieves. The routines of all the days up to this one have created an almost irresistible flow of normalcy, of repetition, of life.

As darkness falls, something happens out on the lake: a landslide, a minor tremor, or maybe simply rainwater washing off the hills on the other side … The initial trigger is insignificant, something perfectly trivial that will never be identified.

The effect is anything but trivial. A vast reservoir of CO2-saturated water, long trapped under tremendous pressure, explodes to the surface, erupting like the gas escaping a bottle of soda when the cap pops off. As thick and silent and deadly as a lava flow, the carbon dioxide gas billows outward from the lake, settling onto the surrounding countryside, burying the cattle dozing in their corrals, the mothers putting away the supper dishes, the children climbing into bed. More than 1,700 people die, having suffocated in moments. At least 3,500 cattle won’t see the next sunrise.

Survivors will report hallucinations, along with feelings of crushing, inhuman despair.

On the day Dolly Latham loses her mind, her daughters Annie, Lulie, and Theresa are thirteen, ten, and seven, respectively. Her husband Judah is at home enjoying a three-day lull between jobs with Lowry & Sons Construction, and he is babysitting the girls while their mother goes grocery shopping. He wants to keep Ronnie home with him, too, but Dolly balks. She knows that Judah loves his only son, but she also knows that his greatest desire is to mold the child in his own image, and Dolly is determined to prevent that. One Judah, she feels, is more than enough.

Dolly and the giggling two-year-old sail up and down the aisles of the Wayland Springs Piggly Wiggly, looking at this and that, dropping some items into the cart, putting others back on the shelf.

Breakfast cereal is getting to be so expensive! she thinks, picking up a box of store-brand cornflakes instead of the colorful frosted cereal the girls prefer. The cheaper peanut butter is nothing but sugar and salt—but it’s cheaper. She picks up a bag of apples marked down to half price, knowing that most of the apples will be bruised and browning. She’ll chop them up and use them in muffins or something, maybe make applesauce.

By the time she reaches the checkout line, she is exhausted and dispirited, and even Ronnie has slumped into a fitful doze, perched in his seat on the cart.

Money woes are not a new thing in the Latham household, but lately, they’ve become harder to ignore. Judah’s carpentry skills are in demand: he’s good at what he does; he makes a good living, always has, but Dolly’s household allowance is still what it was when Annie was a toddler, and expenses have just gone up and up. She would work, but even if she could find someone to take care of the kids, Judah would never allow it. In his eyes, a wife who works is telling the world about a husband who is failing in his responsibilities. Judah never seems to do without anything, but then, as he likes to remind her whenever the subject comes up, it’s his money. Do his other women have to struggle like this? she thinks bitterly.

As she and her child take their place in the checkout line, Ronnie wakes up with a tiny snort that makes her laugh. When their turn comes, the cashier, an older woman she has known for years, greets them with a smile.

“He just gets more precious every week,” the clerk says, making a funny face at Ronnie as she starts ringing up Dolly’s purchases.

“He just grows and grows,” Dolly says, touching his cheek.

The items pass over the scanner one by one, and Dolly grows apprehensive. “I have coupons,” she says after a minute, watching the running total climb. She glances over at the sacker, a pimply-faced boy, the son of one of her old schoolmates. He might as well be on another planet. He is not the least bit interested in Dolly’s financial problems.

“We’ll do those after we get everything checked,” the cashier says.

Even with the coupons, Dolly discovers that she is short. The woman in line behind her looks away as Dolly picks through her folder of coupons. Dolly detects the sweet, nauseating odor of pity, and her cheeks burn, red and blotchy.

“I have to have flour,” she says, her frustration starting to show in her voice. “The price has gone up, and you didn’t use the coupon.”

On the cart, Ronnie is picking up on the darkening mood. He sits with his thumb and forefinger in his mouth, his eyes wide, no longer laughing.

“That one’s expired, honey.” The clerk pushes aside half the brightly colored scraps. “Those are all out of date. They won’t let me take expired coupons.” She looks over the items that have been checked in. “Maybe if we put back the shampoo and the tuna fish.”

Even without those items, Dolly’s total is still more than she can pay. The woman in line behind her clears her throat. Dolly doesn’t know her name, but her face is familiar. They probably attend the same church; their kids go to the same schools.

“I’d be happy to pitch in for the shampoo and the tuna,” she offers. “I’ll bet that little boy loves his tuna sandwiches.”

Dolly could have dismissed rudeness, impatience—almost anything but kindness. Sympathy. Pity. She thanks the woman but refuses her offer. She turns and lifts a five-pound bag of flour, considers it gravely for a moment, then raises it over her head. With a grunt, she slams the fragile package down onto the conveyor belt. A tremendous cloud of white dust rises, and Dolly, like a goddess of the volcano, wreathed in the smoke of a great burning, begins picking up items one by one and smashing them onto the counter and onto the floor at her feet. Each crash elicits a grunt of satisfaction, and when a bottle of salad dressing shatters on the chrome edge of the counter, spraying oil and vinegar and garlic and “authentic Italian spices” all over her, her son, the rack of tabloids and soap opera magazines, the display of lip-balms and chewing gum, and the cash register, her laughter rings out, full and rich. Plastic containers merely bounce and roll away, but glass shatters and cardboard rips asunder, and soon, there is a swamp of mayonnaise and jelly and pickles and oatmeal and spaghetti sauce at her feet.

Ronnie stares, astonished and unafraid at first, but soon begins to cry. The cashier has slipped away and stands with a huddle of onlookers a few yards off, waving her hands and calling out soothing words like someone trying to calm a panicked steer. A muffled voice calls for a manager over the speaker system, but the rage and delight have swept Dolly away, and the manager would have to be a brave man indeed to confront her.

When Dolly has completely cleared the counter of items, she pauses, panting, her mouth black in the floury ghost-white mask of her face. She looks around, grinning, the blood of her ancestors surging in her veins, hot and relentless as lava, and then she reaches down and lifts Ronnie out of the cart. He is dusted with flour, sprayed with condiments and crumbs, and his tears have traced paths down his cheeks to his mouth, but he laughs when his mother smiles at him. Holding him in her arms, she steps over the mess and, with infinite dignity, she walks out the front door, head high, eyes blazing. Triumphant.

By the time Dolly pulls into the driveway at home, Judah has been informed of the incident and has gone to the supermarket to pay for the damage and collect his wife, not knowing that she has already left the scene. When he comes home, Ronnie is clean and pink in his little striped overalls, and he and Lulie are giggling over the cartoon animals in a picture book on the living room floor while Annie and Theresa play a card game of their own invention at the coffee table. Their mother, he is informed, has gone to the grocery store in White Mill and will be back in an hour.

For dinner, there is meatball soup and baked potatoes. Dolly is relaxed and gracious. She tells her husband that the prices are better at the White Mill A&P and that she will start going there regularly. Judah believes that’s a good idea.

Nothing more is said on the topic.

# # #

Fiction: “Volcano”

In the westernmost part of the African nation of Cameroon lies Lake Nyos.

As lakes go, Nyos is not all that large, a bit less than four hundred acres. It is an expanse of still water surrounded by fertile green hills, occupying a crater on the side of an inactive—mostly inactive—volcano, the water held in place by a natural dam of old lava. To all appearances, this is a peaceful, green place.

Far beneath Nyos, however, lies another lake, this one of molten rock, a survivor of the days when volcanoes reared fiery heads, and the region was racked by earthquakes and eruptions. Gases rising from that crucible gradually work their way up through fifty miles of solid rock to the surface, where they escape one prison only to be trapped again, this time by the weight of the lake on top of them. The carbon dioxide escaping from the magma below has accumulated for eons, with hundreds of thousands of tons of gas slowly becoming trapped in the cold waters of the deep lake bottom.

On the 21st of August, 1986, Lake Nyos undergoes something called a “lake overturn.” There is no warning. People are eating their evening meal, socializing, talking about the day just ended, the day to come. Children are being readied for bed. Cattle have been rounded up and penned in their corrals, safe for the night from predators or thieves. The routines of all the days up to this one have created an almost irresistible flow of normalcy, of repetition, of life.

As darkness falls, something happens out on the lake: a landslide, a minor tremor, or maybe simply rainwater washing off the hills on the other side … The initial trigger is insignificant, something perfectly trivial that will never be identified.

The effect is anything but trivial. A vast reservoir of CO2-saturated water, long trapped under tremendous pressure, explodes to the surface, erupting like the gas escaping a bottle of soda when the cap pops off. As thick and silent and deadly as a lava flow, the carbon dioxide gas billows outward from the lake, settling onto the surrounding countryside, burying the cattle dozing in their corrals, the mothers putting away the supper dishes, the children climbing into bed. More than 1,700 people die, having suffocated in moments. At least 3,500 cattle won’t see the next sunrise.

Survivors will report hallucinations, along with feelings of crushing, inhuman despair.

On the day Dolly Latham loses her mind, her daughters Annie, Lulie, and Theresa are thirteen, ten, and seven, respectively. Her husband Judah is at home enjoying a three-day lull between jobs with Lowry & Sons Construction, and he is babysitting the girls while their mother goes grocery shopping. He wants to keep Ronnie home with him, too, but Dolly balks. She knows that Judah loves his only son, but she also knows that his greatest desire is to mold the child in his own image, and Dolly is determined to prevent that. One Judah, she feels, is more than enough.

Dolly and the giggling two-year-old sail up and down the aisles of the Wayland Springs Piggly Wiggly, looking at this and that, dropping some items into the cart, putting others back on the shelf.

Breakfast cereal is getting to be so expensive! she thinks, picking up a box of store-brand cornflakes instead of the colorful frosted cereal the girls prefer. The cheaper peanut butter is nothing but sugar and salt—but it’s cheaper. She picks up a bag of apples marked down to half price, knowing that most of the apples will be bruised and browning. She’ll chop them up and use them in muffins or something, maybe make applesauce.

By the time she reaches the checkout line, she is exhausted and dispirited, and even Ronnie has slumped into a fitful doze, perched in his seat on the cart.

Money woes are not a new thing in the Latham household, but lately, they’ve become harder to ignore. Judah’s carpentry skills are in demand: he’s good at what he does; he makes a good living, always has, but Dolly’s household allowance is still what it was when Annie was a toddler, and expenses have just gone up and up. She would work, but even if she could find someone to take care of the kids, Judah would never allow it. In his eyes, a wife who works is telling the world about a husband who is failing in his responsibilities. Judah never seems to do without anything, but then, as he likes to remind her whenever the subject comes up, it’s his money. Do his other women have to struggle like this? she thinks bitterly.

As she and her child take their place in the checkout line, Ronnie wakes up with a tiny snort that makes her laugh. When their turn comes, the cashier, an older woman she has known for years, greets them with a smile.

“He just gets more precious every week,” the clerk says, making a funny face at Ronnie as she starts ringing up Dolly’s purchases.

“He just grows and grows,” Dolly says, touching his cheek.

The items pass over the scanner one by one, and Dolly grows apprehensive. “I have coupons,” she says after a minute, watching the running total climb. She glances over at the sacker, a pimply-faced boy, the son of one of her old schoolmates. He might as well be on another planet. He is not the least bit interested in Dolly’s financial problems.

“We’ll do those after we get everything checked,” the cashier says.

Even with the coupons, Dolly discovers that she is short. The woman in line behind her looks away as Dolly picks through her folder of coupons. Dolly detects the sweet, nauseating odor of pity, and her cheeks burn, red and blotchy.

“I have to have flour,” she says, her frustration starting to show in her voice. “The price has gone up, and you didn’t use the coupon.”

On the cart, Ronnie is picking up on the darkening mood. He sits with his thumb and forefinger in his mouth, his eyes wide, no longer laughing.

“That one’s expired, honey.” The clerk pushes aside half the brightly colored scraps. “Those are all out of date. They won’t let me take expired coupons.” She looks over the items that have been checked in. “Maybe if we put back the shampoo and the tuna fish.”

Even without those items, Dolly’s total is still more than she can pay. The woman in line behind her clears her throat. Dolly doesn’t know her name, but her face is familiar. They probably attend the same church; their kids go to the same schools.

“I’d be happy to pitch in for the shampoo and the tuna,” she offers. “I’ll bet that little boy loves his tuna sandwiches.”

Dolly could have dismissed rudeness, impatience—almost anything but kindness. Sympathy. Pity. She thanks the woman but refuses her offer. She turns and lifts a five-pound bag of flour, considers it gravely for a moment, then raises it over her head. With a grunt, she slams the fragile package down onto the conveyor belt. A tremendous cloud of white dust rises, and Dolly, like a goddess of the volcano, wreathed in the smoke of a great burning, begins picking up items one by one and smashing them onto the counter and onto the floor at her feet. Each crash elicits a grunt of satisfaction, and when a bottle of salad dressing shatters on the chrome edge of the counter, spraying oil and vinegar and garlic and “authentic Italian spices” all over her, her son, the rack of tabloids and soap opera magazines, the display of lip-balms and chewing gum, and the cash register, her laughter rings out, full and rich. Plastic containers merely bounce and roll away, but glass shatters and cardboard rips asunder, and soon, there is a swamp of mayonnaise and jelly and pickles and oatmeal and spaghetti sauce at her feet.

Ronnie stares, astonished and unafraid at first, but soon begins to cry. The cashier has slipped away and stands with a huddle of onlookers a few yards off, waving her hands and calling out soothing words like someone trying to calm a panicked steer. A muffled voice calls for a manager over the speaker system, but the rage and delight have swept Dolly away, and the manager would have to be a brave man indeed to confront her.

When Dolly has completely cleared the counter of items, she pauses, panting, her mouth black in the floury ghost-white mask of her face. She looks around, grinning, the blood of her ancestors surging in her veins, hot and relentless as lava, and then she reaches down and lifts Ronnie out of the cart. He is dusted with flour, sprayed with condiments and crumbs, and his tears have traced paths down his cheeks to his mouth, but he laughs when his mother smiles at him. Holding him in her arms, she steps over the mess and, with infinite dignity, she walks out the front door, head high, eyes blazing. Triumphant.

By the time Dolly pulls into the driveway at home, Judah has been informed of the incident and has gone to the supermarket to pay for the damage and collect his wife, not knowing that she has already left the scene. When he comes home, Ronnie is clean and pink in his little striped overalls, and he and Lulie are giggling over the cartoon animals in a picture book on the living room floor while Annie and Theresa play a card game of their own invention at the coffee table. Their mother, he is informed, has gone to the grocery store in White Mill and will be back in an hour.

For dinner, there is meatball soup and baked potatoes. Dolly is relaxed and gracious. She tells her husband that the prices are better at the White Mill A&P and that she will start going there regularly. Judah believes that’s a good idea.

Nothing more is said on the topic.

# # #

Volcano

In the westernmost part of the African nation of Cameroon lies Lake Nyos.

As lakes go, Nyos is not all that large, a bit less than four hundred acres. It is an expanse of still water surrounded by fertile green hills, occupying a crater on the side of an inactive—mostly inactive—volcano, the water held in place by a natural dam of old lava. To all appearances, this is a peaceful, green place.

Far beneath Nyos, however, lies another lake, this one of molten rock, a survivor of the days when volcanoes reared fiery heads, and the region was racked by earthquakes and eruptions. Gases rising from that crucible gradually work their way up through fifty miles of solid rock to the surface, where they escape one prison only to be trapped again, this time by the weight of the lake on top of them. The carbon dioxide escaping from the magma below has accumulated for eons, with hundreds of thousands of tons of gas slowly becoming trapped in the cold waters of the deep lake bottom.

On the 21st of August, 1986, Lake Nyos undergoes something called a “lake overturn.” There is no warning. People are eating their evening meal, socializing, talking about the day just ended, the day to come. Children are being readied for bed. Cattle have been rounded up and penned in their corrals, safe for the night from predators or thieves. The routines of all the days up to this one have created an almost irresistible flow of normalcy, of repetition, of life.

As darkness falls, something happens out on the lake: a landslide, a minor tremor, or maybe simply rainwater washing off the hills on the other side … The initial trigger is insignificant, something perfectly trivial that will never be identified.

The effect is anything but trivial. A vast reservoir of CO2-saturated water, long trapped under tremendous pressure, explodes to the surface, erupting like the gas escaping a bottle of soda when the cap pops off. As thick and silent and deadly as a lava flow, the carbon dioxide gas billows outward from the lake, settling onto the surrounding countryside, burying the cattle dozing in their corrals, the mothers putting away the supper dishes, the children climbing into bed. More than 1,700 people die, having suffocated in moments. At least 3,500 cattle won’t see the next sunrise.

Survivors will report hallucinations, along with feelings of crushing, inhuman despair.

On the day Dolly Latham loses her mind, her daughters Annie, Lulie, and Theresa are thirteen, ten, and seven, respectively. Her husband Judah is at home enjoying a three-day lull between jobs with Lowry & Sons Construction, and he is babysitting the girls while their mother goes grocery shopping. He wants to keep Ronnie home with him, too, but Dolly balks. She knows that Judah loves his only son, but she also knows that his greatest desire is to mold the child in his own image, and Dolly is determined to prevent that. One Judah, she feels, is more than enough.

Dolly and the giggling two-year-old sail up and down the aisles of the Wayland Springs Piggly Wiggly, looking at this and that, dropping some items into the cart, putting others back on the shelf.

Breakfast cereal is getting to be so expensive! she thinks, picking up a box of store-brand cornflakes instead of the colorful frosted cereal the girls prefer. The cheaper peanut butter is nothing but sugar and salt—but it’s cheaper. She picks up a bag of apples marked down to half price, knowing that most of the apples will be bruised and browning. She’ll chop them up and use them in muffins or something, maybe make applesauce.

By the time she reaches the checkout line, she is exhausted and dispirited, and even Ronnie has slumped into a fitful doze, perched in his seat on the cart.

Money woes are not a new thing in the Latham household, but lately, they’ve become harder to ignore. Judah’s carpentry skills are in demand: he’s good at what he does; he makes a good living, always has, but Dolly’s household allowance is still what it was when Annie was a toddler, and expenses have just gone up and up. She would work, but even if she could find someone to take care of the kids, Judah would never allow it. In his eyes, a wife who works is telling the world about a husband who is failing in his responsibilities. Judah never seems to do without anything, but then, as he likes to remind her whenever the subject comes up, it’s his money. Do his other women have to struggle like this? she thinks bitterly.

As she and her child take their place in the checkout line, Ronnie wakes up with a tiny snort that makes her laugh. When their turn comes, the cashier, an older woman she has known for years, greets them with a smile.

“He just gets more precious every week,” the clerk says, making a funny face at Ronnie as she starts ringing up Dolly’s purchases.

“He just grows and grows,” Dolly says, touching his cheek.

The items pass over the scanner one by one, and Dolly grows apprehensive. “I have coupons,” she says after a minute, watching the running total climb. She glances over at the sacker, a pimply-faced boy, the son of one of her old schoolmates. He might as well be on another planet. He is not the least bit interested in Dolly’s financial problems.

“We’ll do those after we get everything checked,” the cashier says.

Even with the coupons, Dolly discovers that she is short. The woman in line behind her looks away as Dolly picks through her folder of coupons. Dolly detects the sweet, nauseating odor of pity, and her cheeks burn, red and blotchy.

“I have to have flour,” she says, her frustration starting to show in her voice. “The price has gone up, and you didn’t use the coupon.”

On the cart, Ronnie is picking up on the darkening mood. He sits with his thumb and forefinger in his mouth, his eyes wide, no longer laughing.

“That one’s expired, honey.” The clerk pushes aside half the brightly colored scraps. “Those are all out of date. They won’t let me take expired coupons.” She looks over the items that have been checked in. “Maybe if we put back the shampoo and the tuna fish.”

Even without those items, Dolly’s total is still more than she can pay. The woman in line behind her clears her throat. Dolly doesn’t know her name, but her face is familiar. They probably attend the same church; their kids go to the same schools.

“I’d be happy to pitch in for the shampoo and the tuna,” she offers. “I’ll bet that little boy loves his tuna sandwiches.”

Dolly could have dismissed rudeness, impatience—almost anything but kindness. Sympathy. Pity. She thanks the woman but refuses her offer. She turns and lifts a five-pound bag of flour, considers it gravely for a moment, then raises it over her head. With a grunt, she slams the fragile package down onto the conveyor belt. A tremendous cloud of white dust rises, and Dolly, like a goddess of the volcano, wreathed in the smoke of a great burning, begins picking up items one by one and smashing them onto the counter and onto the floor at her feet. Each crash elicits a grunt of satisfaction, and when a bottle of salad dressing shatters on the chrome edge of the counter, spraying oil and vinegar and garlic and “authentic Italian spices” all over her, her son, the rack of tabloids and soap opera magazines, the display of lip-balms and chewing gum, and the cash register, her laughter rings out, full and rich. Plastic containers merely bounce and roll away, but glass shatters and cardboard rips asunder, and soon, there is a swamp of mayonnaise and jelly and pickles and oatmeal and spaghetti sauce at her feet.

Ronnie stares, astonished and unafraid at first, but soon begins to cry. The cashier has slipped away and stands with a huddle of onlookers a few yards off, waving her hands and calling out soothing words like someone trying to calm a panicked steer. A muffled voice calls for a manager over the speaker system, but the rage and delight have swept Dolly away, and the manager would have to be a brave man indeed to confront her.

When Dolly has completely cleared the counter of items, she pauses, panting, her mouth black in the floury ghost-white mask of her face. She looks around, grinning, the blood of her ancestors surging in her veins, hot and relentless as lava, and then she reaches down and lifts Ronnie out of the cart. He is dusted with flour, sprayed with condiments and crumbs, and his tears have traced paths down his cheeks to his mouth, but he laughs when his mother smiles at him. Holding him in her arms, she steps over the mess and, with infinite dignity, she walks out the front door, head high, eyes blazing. Triumphant.

By the time Dolly pulls into the driveway at home, Judah has been informed of the incident and has gone to the supermarket to pay for the damage and collect his wife, not knowing that she has already left the scene. When he comes home, Ronnie is clean and pink in his little striped overalls, and he and Lulie are giggling over the cartoon animals in a picture book on the living room floor while Annie and Theresa play a card game of their own invention at the coffee table. Their mother, he is informed, has gone to the grocery store in White Mill and will be back in an hour.

For dinner, there is meatball soup and baked potatoes. Dolly is relaxed and gracious. She tells her husband that the prices are better at the White Mill A&P and that she will start going there regularly. Judah believes that’s a good idea.

Nothing more is said on the topic.

# # #

“Rimbaud”

During the years I’ve lived in this city, the hotel at the corner of Centennial and Eleventh Avenue has been a Hyatt, a Marriott, and before both of those, something called the University Suites. Tonight, it is a Hilton. By Christmas, it will be a Best Western.

Someday, they’ll throw in the towel and tear the place down, but not until long after I’ve moved on. The old girl still has a couple of dances left in her; La Quinta and Holiday Inn have yet to take her out onto the floor.

It’s not a bad hotel, and its location is supremely visible, on one of the busiest intersections at that end of town, within walking distance of two hospitals. That said, it’s noisy, and the parking deck is impossible to get in and out of during rush hour.

The hotel has no restaurant, but there is a bar, a tiny place presided over on the weekends by a sixtyish woman with stiff blonde hair and an assortment of Qiana gowns in turquoise, spring green, pale apricot, and mauve. She calls herself Lady Tamara, and she plays the piano for two hours on Friday and Saturday and an hour on Sunday. Show tunes, pop songs arranged for baby grand, the occasional jazz standard. Guests sometimes get up and sing: lonely businessmen from Memphis or Detroit, or doctors traveling with their wives, convinced by a second-place trophy in the talent contest in high school that this is a good idea. Men get up to sing much more often than women.

It’s around nine o’clock, dark at this time of year, and I’m walking on the other side of the street, past a diner, a lawyer’s office, and a social services agency. A movement in a window on the seventh floor of the hotel catches my eye. Someone has knocked over a lamp, or they’ve taken the shade off. The bare bulb seems unnaturally bright, even at this distance.

A silhouette heaves against the harsh light. I am convinced that what I’m looking at is an animal of some kind, an antelope or a wildebeest, shaking its head and staring out at me. I stop dead in my tracks, gaping.

A moment later, the ears and horns give a mighty jerk, and the apparition resolves itself into a man struggling into a too-tight turtleneck sweater, the sleeves flapping over his head. I cross the street and enter the lobby.

I’m supposed to meet my friend Meg for a quiet drink, but when I walk into the bar, I find that half the people in the place are, to varying degrees, friends of mine. Meg shrugs helplessly and pats the empty chair to her left.

“Sorry about all this,” she says as I slip into my seat. The server, a young woman so unfailingly pleasant that she is almost certainly a serial killer in training, catches my eye, and I nod. The bartender puts a mug under the tap. They know me here.

“Quite the turnout. Somebody’s birthday?”

“Rehearsals,” a willowy redhead in black tells me. “We’re doing King Lear.” She grins. “I’m one of the bitch sisters.”

“You’ll be a natural,” I tell her.

An amateur theater group occupies what was once an auto-body repair shop a couple of blocks away. We all dabble, none of us seriously. I wave at the table. “You’re all in the play?”

A dark, stocky man with beautiful hair and a mustache that’s at least forty years out of date holds up his hands. “Not me. I just came down after work.”

Paolo. From Milan. A visiting resident at one of the hospitals. His clothes are impeccable, and his accent and his eyes are soft and seductive. Everyone wants him, no one has had him. Speculation is rife, but he just smiles.

I look around at the people sitting at the two tables, and I realize that I’ve been to bed with four of them. I even entered into ill-defined “relationships” with two of them for a few weeks each before drifting back out onto the buffet. Unlike Paolo, I have no secrets. I’m a dish that everyone samples sooner or later, but for real nutrition, they always order something else.

My drink arrives, and I take a sip as little Kenny, directly across the table from me, gives vent to a chirpy giggle. He is flirting with big, rangy Jim, an ex-marine attending the University on the G.I. Bill. Jim is an old-fashioned boy, native to Tulsa, repeatedly married and divorced, popular with women. The two men sit shoulder to shoulder, and Jim smiles at Kenny’s peculiar conversational gambits. I wonder what I’ve missed during the weeks I’ve been out of touch with everybody.

Meg looks puffy and hollow-eyed, and I wonder if she’s still having trouble with her boss.

“I feel as though I haven’t seen you in years,” she says, raising her voice over the noise in the crowded space.

“I know. I’m practically sleeping in the office these days.”

“The Project,” she says, and I nod. We all say it that way, capitalized. I work for a biotech firm called Paleogenetics. I have no idea what they’re actually doing. I’m a computer technician. From where I’m sitting, between Meg and Ken-doll-handsome Philip, who owns a boutique kitchenware shop just south of the flyover, I can look out the plate glass window and see the Paleogenetics sign on the roof of the building, all the way up at the top of the hill, mercury-argon tubing, vivid and dark, the blue of deep water in hot places. The office itself is very pleasant, with a few computers and a couple of impressive potted fig trees, but the real work goes on in a loft seven blocks south of here. That’s where I’ve been spending all my time, crawling around under desks and behind server racks.

“How’s life among the ambulance chasers?”

Meg grimaces. “Same old, same old, I guess. The client list is shrinking; the extravagant expense-account lunches are growing.”

“Your clients are taking their business elsewhere?”

“Dropping dead, actually. Looper inherited a lot of high-dollar clients from his dad, but they were old even then. We spend more time at funerals than in courtrooms.”

“Not much of a business model. Maybe it’s time to move on.”

She gives her head a quick shake, saying no, but then her mouth says, “Maybe.”

Somebody at another table says, very firmly, “In Atlanta. In Atlanta. No! In Atlanta!” Kenny sighs theatrically and burbles, “Oh, Hotlanta.”

Jim laughs into his drink, and I feel an inexplicable pang of jealousy. I’ve never slept with either of those two. Kenny’s out of the question, and my instincts tell me Jim is towing heavy baggage: those ex-wives maybe, or maybe a girlfriend who waits at home for him, angry and frustrated. Probably some kids.

“I went out with Looper weekend before last,” Meg says suddenly, in a low voice. I’m convinced I’ve heard wrong.

“You went out with who?”

“With whom. With Looper. He’s been so damned persistent. I figured maybe a good, hard look at the real me would shake him off.”

Meg has made her share of mistakes, but as a rule, she is clear-eyed and level-headed when it comes to men. Emotionally and socially, Looper is an accident waiting to happen.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“It is most certainly not a good idea.” She flares at me for an instant, then subsides; there’s a spark of anger but no fuel. “Every time I look around, Looper’s right there, a starved dog staring at me, begging for scraps. I go out for dinner or drinks or whatever with someone else, or even by myself, and when I get back to the car, there’s a text to remind me of a client meeting in three days or a voicemail asking if I’ve seen his briefcase.” She finishes the last sentence quickly and takes a slug of her cocktail. It’s something fruity, shades of yellow and orange; she has taken the umbrella out of the glass and picked it to bits, a neat pile of paper and delicate bamboo splinters next to her cell phone where it lies on the table, debris from a tiny Caribbean hurricane.

Once a race of big, bluff men known for their charisma and their thundering courtroom rhetoric, the Looper blood has thinned over the generations. The current scion is a handsome, helpless man of about forty-five, divorced, who has never presented a case before a jury. He’s a tweaker, a fiddler. Looper’s practice is rooted in minutiae, tiny laws and obscure usages that he knows nothing about but can rely on Meg to dig out and arrange for him like snacks on a plate.

An argument erupts between Cordelia and Goneril, egged on by the various Dukes and Earls, and conversation becomes impossible. Poor Paolo looks delectable, a lonely chocolate truffle tucked into a box of hard-shelled, brightly-colored Jordan almonds.

The server comes back with a fresh round of drinks, and as she leans past me, I catch a whiff of her scent: something lush and heavy, fecund and full. I turn in my chair and see that she is visibly pregnant. I start to say something to Meg, but the expression on her face kills my comment before it can leave my mouth.

Lady Tamara appears, as if from thin air, and gives us a dignified bow before settling in behind the piano and launching into a somewhat overwrought rendition of “La Vie en Rose.” She has tiny mirrors threaded into her hair, like rhinestones baked into a souffle, and they glitter and flash as she belabors the keys. Tonight’s dress is a remarkable shade of green, rich and dark, full of steamy shadows and satiny highlights, and she has a gloriosa lily pinned to her shoulder, a baroque splash of yellow and crimson.

Paolo starts a conversation with Meg, but she responds in distracted monosyllables, and by the time Lady Tamara has segued into “Eleanor Rigby,” the effort has withered and died.

As the song is ending, a short, stocky man with pepper-and-salt hair and a bewildered expression gets up and approaches the piano, bumping Meg’s chair as he passes. He consults briefly with Lady Tamara, and they launch into Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely.” The singer has a decent voice, but he stands unnaturally still as he sings: Nothing moves but his mouth and his round blue eyes, which follow the server everywhere.

“I have to get out of here,” Meg tells me, gripping my arm. “Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

We climb to our feet, ducking, muttering apologies, trying to be invisible as we sidle between the tables.

Outside, Meg stands on the sidewalk absorbing the humid warmth of the fading Indian Summer, her posture tense. “Sorry,” she tells me. “About ninety percent of her song list makes my ears bleed.”

We start walking up the hill toward the roundabout, and only after a couple of blocks does she suggest a destination. “I missed lunch today,” she says. “Do you mind if we go to Coyote and get some rice or something?”

“Good idea. I’m hungry, too.”

There’s a short line at Coyote, but after fifteen minutes or so, we establish ourselves out on the steps of the architectural firm across the alley, styrofoam trays of fried rice and chicken satay in our laps. The name of the takeout restaurant is not Coyote, but that’s as close as any of us can get to the actual name, a Vietnamese word for some sort of parasitic plant with showy flowers.

“I wish I could just give it all up,” Meg says after a time.

“Give what up?”

She gestures. “Everything. All this. Run away to some godforsaken place in Africa or South America or the Dutch East Indies, wherever that is. Stop bathing. Drink too much. Become a gunrunner or a pirate or the mistress of a warlord in a hellhole where the fighting never stops.” She chews, swallows, then continues, “I could run a bar, sleeping with the hired help, pretty brown boys whose language I don’t understand. Or I could start a religion. Invent guidelines and timetables for the end of the world and preach them to my flock, a new apocalypse every week.”

I have no idea what to say to any of this. I try to make a joke.

“Looper would starve to death without you to run his life for him.”

Meg turns to stare at me for a moment, a look of such bleak distaste that I feel as though she has struck me. I look away, poking at my rice, looking for fragments of meat, looking for nuggets of egg, looking for a place to hide.

“Looper,” she says, finally, and then, “Looper.”

She had spoken as though the most recent incident was a one-off event, but she has gone out with Looper before, to a dinner with clients on one occasion and to a Chamber of Commerce event on another. Those are just the outings I know about.

The old man who lives halfway up the next street comes down to the roundabout, leading his ugly little dog. They appear suddenly from behind the ligustrum hedge that runs along that side of the steps. The man comes from Guatemala or El Salvador or someplace like that. Rumor has it that he’s a retired dictator or the disgraced leader of a religious cult. He scowls at us while his dog takes a shit in the middle of the sidewalk, and then they turn to totter back the way they came.

I glance over at Meg, and she is staring into space, oblivious.

The unseasonable warmth has triggered an anomalous blooming among the ligustrum. The conical clusters of tiny white flowers glimmer in the dim light, and the scent hangs in the air, heavy and tropical, sweet and corrupt, like gardenias in a whorehouse.

Meg has finished her rice and chicken, leaving parallel grooves in the styrofoam where she has scraped up the last bits of rice with her plastic fork. I take the container out of her hands, startling her, and stuff all our litter into the bin next to the door of the restaurant, passing from the smell of ligustrum and dogshit to the smell of garlic and fryer oil, then back again.

“Are you almost done with the Project?” Meg asks when I return to my seat on the step next to her.

“Not quite,” I reply. “Another month or two, maybe. Whatever it is they’re doing, it evolves as we go along, so I keep having to adapt to the changes. Maybe it’ll never be finished, I don’t know.”

“Job security.”

“There is that. Maybe I should throw it over and come with you to help you set up your outpost in the jungle.”

“Not much call for IT people in the wilds of Borneo or the Ethiopian back country.”

“No, that’s true. I could be your Grand Vizier, deciding who gets to talk to you and who doesn’t. If any Loopers turn up, I can have them covered with honey and staked out on the ant mound.”

Meg chuckles, then sighs heavily, theatrically. “Speaking of Looper, I guess I should get home. I’ve got an early day tomorrow. Would you like a lift?”

“No, that’s okay. It’s only four blocks, and it’s a nice night.” At that moment, a distant rumble of thunder rolls across the sky. “Not for much longer, though. I guess the weather is going to change whether we like it or not.”

“That’s true of so many things,” she says.

Meg pulls me into a hug. She smells of tequila and desperation, overlaid with the hot, over-sweet smell of the ligustrum.

“Stay in touch,” she says as we separate.

“How will I reach you out in the jungle?”

“Poste restante,” she replies. “Once a week, I’ll have one of my pretty brown boys put on some pants and trot down to the village to check for mail.”

“I’ll remember not to say anything indiscreet in my letters, since they’ll almost certainly open them up and try to read them.”

“‘Indiscreet’. We don’t use that word enough,” Meg says. The Walk/Don’t Walk sign blinks green, and she gives me a quick peck on the cheek, then trots across the street and soon disappears from view.

She leaves behind the scent of flowers, beautiful and dangerous, the kinds of flowers that grow amid the mossy stones of crumbling temples, that bloom as red and white as last night’s virginity in ruined cities swamped by jungles, thriving only in those places where the rules no longer apply.

# # #

Fiction: “Rimbaud”

During the years I’ve lived in this city, the hotel at the corner of Centennial and Eleventh Avenue has been a Hyatt, a Marriott, and before both of those, something called the University Suites. Tonight, it is a Hilton. By Christmas, it will be a Best Western.

Someday, they’ll throw in the towel and tear the place down, but not until long after I’ve moved on. The old girl still has a couple of dances left in her; La Quinta and Holiday Inn have yet to take her out onto the floor.

It’s not a bad hotel, and its location is supremely visible, on one of the busiest intersections at that end of town, within walking distance of two hospitals. That said, it’s noisy, and the parking deck is impossible to get in and out of during rush hour.

The hotel has no restaurant, but there is a bar, a tiny place presided over on the weekends by a sixtyish woman with stiff blonde hair and an assortment of Qiana gowns in turquoise, spring green, pale apricot, and mauve. She calls herself Lady Tamara, and she plays the piano for two hours on Friday and Saturday and an hour on Sunday. Show tunes, pop songs arranged for baby grand, the occasional jazz standard. Guests sometimes get up and sing: lonely businessmen from Memphis or Detroit, or doctors traveling with their wives, convinced by a second-place trophy in the talent contest in high school that this is a good idea. Men get up to sing much more often than women.

It’s around nine o’clock, dark at this time of year, and I’m walking on the other side of the street, past a diner, a lawyer’s office, and a social services agency. A movement in a window on the seventh floor of the hotel catches my eye. Someone has knocked over a lamp, or they’ve taken the shade off. The bare bulb seems unnaturally bright, even at this distance.

A silhouette heaves against the harsh light. I am convinced that what I’m looking at is an animal of some kind, an antelope or a wildebeest, shaking its head and staring out at me. I stop dead in my tracks, gaping.

A moment later, the ears and horns give a mighty jerk, and the apparition resolves itself into a man struggling into a too-tight turtleneck sweater, the sleeves flapping over his head. I cross the street and enter the lobby.

I’m supposed to meet my friend Meg for a quiet drink, but when I walk into the bar, I find that half the people in the place are, to varying degrees, friends of mine. Meg shrugs helplessly and pats the empty chair to her left.

“Sorry about all this,” she says as I slip into my seat. The server, a young woman so unfailingly pleasant that she is almost certainly a serial killer in training, catches my eye, and I nod. The bartender puts a mug under the tap. They know me here.

“Quite the turnout. Somebody’s birthday?”

“Rehearsals,” a willowy redhead in black tells me. “We’re doing King Lear.” She grins. “I’m one of the bitch sisters.”

“You’ll be a natural,” I tell her.

An amateur theater group occupies what was once an auto-body repair shop a couple of blocks away. We all dabble, none of us seriously. I wave at the table. “You’re all in the play?”

A dark, stocky man with beautiful hair and a mustache that’s at least forty years out of date holds up his hands. “Not me. I just came down after work.”

Paolo. From Milan. A visiting resident at one of the hospitals. His clothes are impeccable, and his accent and his eyes are soft and seductive. Everyone wants him, no one has had him. Speculation is rife, but he just smiles.

I look around at the people sitting at the two tables, and I realize that I’ve been to bed with four of them. I even entered into ill-defined “relationships” with two of them for a few weeks each before drifting back out onto the buffet. Unlike Paolo, I have no secrets. I’m a dish that everyone samples sooner or later, but for real nutrition, they always order something else.

My drink arrives, and I take a sip as little Kenny, directly across the table from me, gives vent to a chirpy giggle. He is flirting with big, rangy Jim, an ex-marine attending the University on the G.I. Bill. Jim is an old-fashioned boy, native to Tulsa, repeatedly married and divorced, popular with women. The two men sit shoulder to shoulder, and Jim smiles at Kenny’s peculiar conversational gambits. I wonder what I’ve missed during the weeks I’ve been out of touch with everybody.

Meg looks puffy and hollow-eyed, and I wonder if she’s still having trouble with her boss.

“I feel as though I haven’t seen you in years,” she says, raising her voice over the noise in the crowded space.

“I know. I’m practically sleeping in the office these days.”

“The Project,” she says, and I nod. We all say it that way, capitalized. I work for a biotech firm called Paleogenetics. I have no idea what they’re actually doing. I’m a computer technician. From where I’m sitting, between Meg and Ken-doll-handsome Philip, who owns a boutique kitchenware shop just south of the flyover, I can look out the plate glass window and see the Paleogenetics sign on the roof of the building, all the way up at the top of the hill, mercury-argon tubing, vivid and dark, the blue of deep water in hot places. The office itself is very pleasant, with a few computers and a couple of impressive potted fig trees, but the real work goes on in a loft seven blocks south of here. That’s where I’ve been spending all my time, crawling around under desks and behind server racks.

“How’s life among the ambulance chasers?”

Meg grimaces. “Same old, same old, I guess. The client list is shrinking; the extravagant expense-account lunches are growing.”

“Your clients are taking their business elsewhere?”

“Dropping dead, actually. Looper inherited a lot of high-dollar clients from his dad, but they were old even then. We spend more time at funerals than in courtrooms.”

“Not much of a business model. Maybe it’s time to move on.”

She gives her head a quick shake, saying no, but then her mouth says, “Maybe.”

Somebody at another table says, very firmly, “In Atlanta. In Atlanta. No! In Atlanta!” Kenny sighs theatrically and burbles, “Oh, Hotlanta.”

Jim laughs into his drink, and I feel an inexplicable pang of jealousy. I’ve never slept with either of those two. Kenny’s out of the question, and my instincts tell me Jim is towing heavy baggage: those ex-wives maybe, or maybe a girlfriend who waits at home for him, angry and frustrated. Probably some kids.

“I went out with Looper weekend before last,” Meg says suddenly, in a low voice. I’m convinced I’ve heard wrong.

“You went out with who?”

“With whom. With Looper. He’s been so damned persistent. I figured maybe a good, hard look at the real me would shake him off.”

Meg has made her share of mistakes, but as a rule, she is clear-eyed and level-headed when it comes to men. Emotionally and socially, Looper is an accident waiting to happen.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“It is most certainly not a good idea.” She flares at me for an instant, then subsides; there’s a spark of anger but no fuel. “Every time I look around, Looper’s right there, a starved dog staring at me, begging for scraps. I go out for dinner or drinks or whatever with someone else, or even by myself, and when I get back to the car, there’s a text to remind me of a client meeting in three days or a voicemail asking if I’ve seen his briefcase.” She finishes the last sentence quickly and takes a slug of her cocktail. It’s something fruity, shades of yellow and orange; she has taken the umbrella out of the glass and picked it to bits, a neat pile of paper and delicate bamboo splinters next to her cell phone where it lies on the table, debris from a tiny Caribbean hurricane.

Once a race of big, bluff men known for their charisma and their thundering courtroom rhetoric, the Looper blood has thinned over the generations. The current scion is a handsome, helpless man of about forty-five, divorced, who has never presented a case before a jury. He’s a tweaker, a fiddler. Looper’s practice is rooted in minutiae, tiny laws and obscure usages that he knows nothing about but can rely on Meg to dig out and arrange for him like snacks on a plate.

An argument erupts between Cordelia and Goneril, egged on by the various Dukes and Earls, and conversation becomes impossible. Poor Paolo looks delectable, a lonely chocolate truffle tucked into a box of hard-shelled, brightly-colored Jordan almonds.

The server comes back with a fresh round of drinks, and as she leans past me, I catch a whiff of her scent: something lush and heavy, fecund and full. I turn in my chair and see that she is visibly pregnant. I start to say something to Meg, but the expression on her face kills my comment before it can leave my mouth.

Lady Tamara appears, as if from thin air, and gives us a dignified bow before settling in behind the piano and launching into a somewhat overwrought rendition of “La Vie en Rose.” She has tiny mirrors threaded into her hair, like rhinestones baked into a souffle, and they glitter and flash as she belabors the keys. Tonight’s dress is a remarkable shade of green, rich and dark, full of steamy shadows and satiny highlights, and she has a gloriosa lily pinned to her shoulder, a baroque splash of yellow and crimson.

Paolo starts a conversation with Meg, but she responds in distracted monosyllables, and by the time Lady Tamara has segued into “Eleanor Rigby,” the effort has withered and died.

As the song is ending, a short, stocky man with pepper-and-salt hair and a bewildered expression gets up and approaches the piano, bumping Meg’s chair as he passes. He consults briefly with Lady Tamara, and they launch into Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely.” The singer has a decent voice, but he stands unnaturally still as he sings: Nothing moves but his mouth and his round blue eyes, which follow the server everywhere.

“I have to get out of here,” Meg tells me, gripping my arm. “Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

We climb to our feet, ducking, muttering apologies, trying to be invisible as we sidle between the tables.

Outside, Meg stands on the sidewalk absorbing the humid warmth of the fading Indian Summer, her posture tense. “Sorry,” she tells me. “About ninety percent of her song list makes my ears bleed.”

We start walking up the hill toward the roundabout, and only after a couple of blocks does she suggest a destination. “I missed lunch today,” she says. “Do you mind if we go to Coyote and get some rice or something?”

“Good idea. I’m hungry, too.”

There’s a short line at Coyote, but after fifteen minutes or so, we establish ourselves out on the steps of the architectural firm across the alley, styrofoam trays of fried rice and chicken satay in our laps. The name of the takeout restaurant is not Coyote, but that’s as close as any of us can get to the actual name, a Vietnamese word for some sort of parasitic plant with showy flowers.

“I wish I could just give it all up,” Meg says after a time.

“Give what up?”

She gestures. “Everything. All this. Run away to some godforsaken place in Africa or South America or the Dutch East Indies, wherever that is. Stop bathing. Drink too much. Become a gunrunner or a pirate or the mistress of a warlord in a hellhole where the fighting never stops.” She chews, swallows, then continues, “I could run a bar, sleeping with the hired help, pretty brown boys whose language I don’t understand. Or I could start a religion. Invent guidelines and timetables for the end of the world and preach them to my flock, a new apocalypse every week.”

I have no idea what to say to any of this. I try to make a joke.

“Looper would starve to death without you to run his life for him.”

Meg turns to stare at me for a moment, a look of such bleak distaste that I feel as though she has struck me. I look away, poking at my rice, looking for fragments of meat, looking for nuggets of egg, looking for a place to hide.

“Looper,” she says, finally, and then, “Looper.”

She had spoken as though the most recent incident was a one-off event, but she has gone out with Looper before, to a dinner with clients on one occasion and to a Chamber of Commerce event on another. Those are just the outings I know about.

The old man who lives halfway up the next street comes down to the roundabout, leading his ugly little dog. They appear suddenly from behind the ligustrum hedge that runs along that side of the steps. The man comes from Guatemala or El Salvador or someplace like that. Rumor has it that he’s a retired dictator or the disgraced leader of a religious cult. He scowls at us while his dog takes a shit in the middle of the sidewalk, and then they turn to totter back the way they came.

I glance over at Meg, and she is staring into space, oblivious.

The unseasonable warmth has triggered an anomalous blooming among the ligustrum. The conical clusters of tiny white flowers glimmer in the dim light, and the scent hangs in the air, heavy and tropical, sweet and corrupt, like gardenias in a whorehouse.

Meg has finished her rice and chicken, leaving parallel grooves in the styrofoam where she has scraped up the last bits of rice with her plastic fork. I take the container out of her hands, startling her, and stuff all our litter into the bin next to the door of the restaurant, passing from the smell of ligustrum and dogshit to the smell of garlic and fryer oil, then back again.

“Are you almost done with the Project?” Meg asks when I return to my seat on the step next to her.

“Not quite,” I reply. “Another month or two, maybe. Whatever it is they’re doing, it evolves as we go along, so I keep having to adapt to the changes. Maybe it’ll never be finished, I don’t know.”

“Job security.”

“There is that. Maybe I should throw it over and come with you to help you set up your outpost in the jungle.”

“Not much call for IT people in the wilds of Borneo or the Ethiopian back country.”

“No, that’s true. I could be your Grand Vizier, deciding who gets to talk to you and who doesn’t. If any Loopers turn up, I can have them covered with honey and staked out on the ant mound.”

Meg chuckles, then sighs heavily, theatrically. “Speaking of Looper, I guess I should get home. I’ve got an early day tomorrow. Would you like a lift?”

“No, that’s okay. It’s only four blocks, and it’s a nice night.” At that moment, a distant rumble of thunder rolls across the sky. “Not for much longer, though. I guess the weather is going to change whether we like it or not.”

“That’s true of so many things,” she says.

Meg pulls me into a hug. She smells of tequila and desperation, overlaid with the hot, over-sweet smell of the ligustrum.

“Stay in touch,” she says as we separate.

“How will I reach you out in the jungle?”

“Poste restante,” she replies. “Once a week, I’ll have one of my pretty brown boys put on some pants and trot down to the village to check for mail.”

“I’ll remember not to say anything indiscreet in my letters, since they’ll almost certainly open them up and try to read them.”

“‘Indiscreet’. We don’t use that word enough,” Meg says. The Walk/Don’t Walk sign blinks green, and she gives me a quick peck on the cheek, then trots across the street and soon disappears from view.

She leaves behind the scent of flowers, beautiful and dangerous, the kinds of flowers that grow amid the mossy stones of crumbling temples, that bloom as red and white as last night’s virginity in ruined cities swamped by jungles, thriving only in those places where the rules no longer apply.

# # #

Rimbaud

A short story by David Lee Holcomb

During the years I’ve lived in this city, the hotel at the corner of Centennial and Eleventh Avenue has been a Hyatt, a Marriott, and before both of those, something called the University Suites. Tonight, it is a Hilton. By Christmas, it will be a Best Western.

Someday, they’ll throw in the towel and tear the place down, but not until long after I’ve moved on. The old girl still has a couple of dances left in her; La Quinta and Holiday Inn have yet to take her out onto the floor.

It’s not a bad hotel, and its location is supremely visible, on one of the busiest intersections at that end of town, within walking distance of two hospitals. That said, it’s noisy, and the parking deck is impossible to get in and out of during rush hour.

The hotel has no restaurant, but there is a bar, a tiny place presided over on the weekends by a sixtyish woman with stiff blonde hair and an assortment of Qiana gowns in turquoise, spring green, pale apricot, and mauve. She calls herself Lady Tamara, and she plays the piano for two hours on Friday and Saturday and an hour on Sunday. Show tunes, pop songs arranged for baby grand, the occasional jazz standard. Guests sometimes get up and sing: lonely businessmen from Memphis or Detroit, or doctors traveling with their wives, convinced by a second-place trophy in the talent contest in high school that this is a good idea. Men get up to sing much more often than women.

It’s around nine o’clock, dark at this time of year, and I’m walking on the other side of the street, past a diner, a lawyer’s office, and a social services agency. A movement in a window on the seventh floor of the hotel catches my eye. Someone has knocked over a lamp, or they’ve taken the shade off. The bare bulb seems unnaturally bright, even at this distance.

A silhouette heaves against the harsh light. I am convinced that what I’m looking at is an animal of some kind, an antelope or a wildebeest, shaking its head and staring out at me. I stop dead in my tracks, gaping.

A moment later, the ears and horns give a mighty jerk, and the apparition resolves itself into a man struggling into a too-tight turtleneck sweater, the sleeves flapping over his head. I cross the street and enter the lobby.

I’m supposed to meet my friend Meg for a quiet drink, but when I walk into the bar, I find that half the people in the place are, to varying degrees, friends of mine. Meg shrugs helplessly and pats the empty chair to her left.

“Sorry about all this,” she says as I slip into my seat. The server, a young woman so unfailingly pleasant that she is almost certainly a serial killer in training, catches my eye, and I nod. The bartender puts a mug under the tap. They know me here.

“Quite the turnout. Somebody’s birthday?”

“Rehearsals,” a willowy redhead in black tells me. “We’re doing King Lear.” She grins. “I’m one of the bitch sisters.”

“You’ll be a natural,” I tell her.

An amateur theater group occupies what was once an auto-body repair shop a couple of blocks away. We all dabble, none of us seriously. I wave at the table. “You’re all in the play?”

A dark, stocky man with beautiful hair and a mustache that’s at least forty years out of date holds up his hands. “Not me. I just came down after work.”

Paolo. From Milan. A visiting resident at one of the hospitals. His clothes are impeccable, and his accent and his eyes are soft and seductive. Everyone wants him, no one has had him. Speculation is rife, but he just smiles.

I look around at the people sitting at the two tables, and I realize that I’ve been to bed with four of them. I even entered into ill-defined “relationships” with two of them for a few weeks each before drifting back out onto the buffet. Unlike Paolo, I have no secrets. I’m a dish that everyone samples sooner or later, but for real nutrition, they always order something else.

My drink arrives, and I take a sip as little Kenny, directly across the table from me, gives vent to a chirpy giggle. He is flirting with big, rangy Jim, an ex-marine attending the University on the G.I. Bill. Jim is an old-fashioned boy, native to Tulsa, repeatedly married and divorced, popular with women. The two men sit shoulder to shoulder, and Jim smiles at Kenny’s peculiar conversational gambits. I wonder what I’ve missed during the weeks I’ve been out of touch with everybody.

Meg looks puffy and hollow-eyed, and I wonder if she’s still having trouble with her boss.

“I feel as though I haven’t seen you in years,” she says, raising her voice over the noise in the crowded space.

“I know. I’m practically sleeping in the office these days.”

“The Project,” she says, and I nod. We all say it that way, capitalized. I work for a biotech firm called Paleogenetics. I have no idea what they’re actually doing. I’m a computer technician. From where I’m sitting, between Meg and Ken-doll-handsome Philip, who owns a boutique kitchenware shop just south of the flyover, I can look out the plate glass window and see the Paleogenetics sign on the roof of the building, all the way up at the top of the hill, mercury-argon tubing, vivid and dark, the blue of deep water in hot places. The office itself is very pleasant, with a few computers and a couple of impressive potted fig trees, but the real work goes on in a loft seven blocks south of here. That’s where I’ve been spending all my time, crawling around under desks and behind server racks.

“How’s life among the ambulance chasers?”

Meg grimaces. “Same old, same old, I guess. The client list is shrinking; the extravagant expense-account lunches are growing.”

“Your clients are taking their business elsewhere?”

“Dropping dead, actually. Looper inherited a lot of high-dollar clients from his dad, but they were old even then. We spend more time at funerals than in courtrooms.”

“Not much of a business model. Maybe it’s time to move on.”

She gives her head a quick shake, saying no, but then her mouth says, “Maybe.”

Somebody at another table says, very firmly, “In Atlanta. In Atlanta. No! In Atlanta!” Kenny sighs theatrically and burbles, “Oh, Hotlanta.”

Jim laughs into his drink, and I feel an inexplicable pang of jealousy. I’ve never slept with either of those two. Kenny’s out of the question, and my instincts tell me Jim is towing heavy baggage: those ex-wives maybe, or maybe a girlfriend who waits at home for him, angry and frustrated. Probably some kids.

“I went out with Looper weekend before last,” Meg says suddenly, in a low voice. I’m convinced I’ve heard wrong.

“You went out with who?”

“With whom. With Looper. He’s been so damned persistent. I figured maybe a good, hard look at the real me would shake him off.”

Meg has made her share of mistakes, but as a rule, she is clear-eyed and level-headed when it comes to men. Emotionally and socially, Looper is an accident waiting to happen.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“It is most certainly not a good idea.” She flares at me for an instant, then subsides; there’s a spark of anger but no fuel. “Every time I look around, Looper’s right there, a starved dog staring at me, begging for scraps. I go out for dinner or drinks or whatever with someone else, or even by myself, and when I get back to the car, there’s a text to remind me of a client meeting in three days or a voicemail asking if I’ve seen his briefcase.” She finishes the last sentence quickly and takes a slug of her cocktail. It’s something fruity, shades of yellow and orange; she has taken the umbrella out of the glass and picked it to bits, a neat pile of paper and delicate bamboo splinters next to her cell phone where it lies on the table, debris from a tiny Caribbean hurricane.

Once a race of big, bluff men known for their charisma and their thundering courtroom rhetoric, the Looper blood has thinned over the generations. The current scion is a handsome, helpless man of about forty-five, divorced, who has never presented a case before a jury. He’s a tweaker, a fiddler. Looper’s practice is rooted in minutiae, tiny laws and obscure usages that he knows nothing about but can rely on Meg to dig out and arrange for him like snacks on a plate.

An argument erupts between Cordelia and Goneril, egged on by the various Dukes and Earls, and conversation becomes impossible. Poor Paolo looks delectable, a lonely chocolate truffle tucked into a box of hard-shelled, brightly-colored Jordan almonds.

The server comes back with a fresh round of drinks, and as she leans past me, I catch a whiff of her scent: something lush and heavy, fecund and full. I turn in my chair and see that she is visibly pregnant. I start to say something to Meg, but the expression on her face kills my comment before it can leave my mouth.

Lady Tamara appears, as if from thin air, and gives us a dignified bow before settling in behind the piano and launching into a somewhat overwrought rendition of “La Vie en Rose.” She has tiny mirrors threaded into her hair, like rhinestones baked into a souffle, and they glitter and flash as she belabors the keys. Tonight’s dress is a remarkable shade of green, rich and dark, full of steamy shadows and satiny highlights, and she has a gloriosa lily pinned to her shoulder, a baroque splash of yellow and crimson.

Paolo starts a conversation with Meg, but she responds in distracted monosyllables, and by the time Lady Tamara has segued into “Eleanor Rigby,” the effort has withered and died.

As the song is ending, a short, stocky man with pepper-and-salt hair and a bewildered expression gets up and approaches the piano, bumping Meg’s chair as he passes. He consults briefly with Lady Tamara, and they launch into Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely.” The singer has a decent voice, but he stands unnaturally still as he sings: Nothing moves but his mouth and his round blue eyes, which follow the server everywhere.

“I have to get out of here,” Meg tells me, gripping my arm. “Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

We climb to our feet, ducking, muttering apologies, trying to be invisible as we sidle between the tables.

Outside, Meg stands on the sidewalk absorbing the humid warmth of the fading Indian Summer, her posture tense. “Sorry,” she tells me. “About ninety percent of her song list makes my ears bleed.”

We start walking up the hill toward the roundabout, and only after a couple of blocks does she suggest a destination. “I missed lunch today,” she says. “Do you mind if we go to Coyote and get some rice or something?”

“Good idea. I’m hungry, too.”

There’s a short line at Coyote, but after fifteen minutes or so, we establish ourselves out on the steps of the architectural firm across the alley, styrofoam trays of fried rice and chicken satay in our laps. The name of the takeout restaurant is not Coyote, but that’s as close as any of us can get to the actual name, a Vietnamese word for some sort of parasitic plant with showy flowers.

“I wish I could just give it all up,” Meg says after a time.

“Give what up?”

She gestures. “Everything. All this. Run away to some godforsaken place in Africa or South America or the Dutch East Indies, wherever that is. Stop bathing. Drink too much. Become a gunrunner or a pirate or the mistress of a warlord in a hellhole where the fighting never stops.” She chews, swallows, then continues, “I could run a bar, sleeping with the hired help, pretty brown boys whose language I don’t understand. Or I could start a religion. Invent guidelines and timetables for the end of the world and preach them to my flock, a new apocalypse every week.”

I have no idea what to say to any of this. I try to make a joke.

“Looper would starve to death without you to run his life for him.”

Meg turns to stare at me for a moment, a look of such bleak distaste that I feel as though she has struck me. I look away, poking at my rice, looking for fragments of meat, looking for nuggets of egg, looking for a place to hide.

“Looper,” she says, finally, and then, “Looper.”

She had spoken as though the most recent incident was a one-off event, but she has gone out with Looper before, to a dinner with clients on one occasion and to a Chamber of Commerce event on another. Those are just the outings I know about.

The old man who lives halfway up the next street comes down to the roundabout, leading his ugly little dog. They appear suddenly from behind the ligustrum hedge that runs along that side of the steps. The man comes from Guatemala or El Salvador or someplace like that. Rumor has it that he’s a retired dictator or the disgraced leader of a religious cult. He scowls at us while his dog takes a shit in the middle of the sidewalk, and then they turn to totter back the way they came.

I glance over at Meg, and she is staring into space, oblivious.

The unseasonable warmth has triggered an anomalous blooming among the ligustrum. The conical clusters of tiny white flowers glimmer in the dim light, and the scent hangs in the air, heavy and tropical, sweet and corrupt, like gardenias in a whorehouse.

Meg has finished her rice and chicken, leaving parallel grooves in the styrofoam where she has scraped up the last bits of rice with her plastic fork. I take the container out of her hands, startling her, and stuff all our litter into the bin next to the door of the restaurant, passing from the smell of ligustrum and dogshit to the smell of garlic and fryer oil, then back again.

“Are you almost done with the Project?” Meg asks when I return to my seat on the step next to her.

“Not quite,” I reply. “Another month or two, maybe. Whatever it is they’re doing, it evolves as we go along, so I keep having to adapt to the changes. Maybe it’ll never be finished, I don’t know.”

“Job security.”

“There is that. Maybe I should throw it over and come with you to help you set up your outpost in the jungle.”

“Not much call for IT people in the wilds of Borneo or the Ethiopian back country.”

“No, that’s true. I could be your Grand Vizier, deciding who gets to talk to you and who doesn’t. If any Loopers turn up, I can have them covered with honey and staked out on the ant mound.”

Meg chuckles, then sighs heavily, theatrically. “Speaking of Looper, I guess I should get home. I’ve got an early day tomorrow. Would you like a lift?”

“No, that’s okay. It’s only four blocks, and it’s a nice night.” At that moment, a distant rumble of thunder rolls across the sky. “Not for much longer, though. I guess the weather is going to change whether we like it or not.”

“That’s true of so many things,” she says.

Meg pulls me into a hug. She smells of tequila and desperation, overlaid with the hot, over-sweet smell of the ligustrum.

“Stay in touch,” she says as we separate.

“How will I reach you out in the jungle?”

“Poste restante,” she replies. “Once a week, I’ll have one of my pretty brown boys put on some pants and trot down to the village to check for mail.”

“I’ll remember not to say anything indiscreet in my letters, since they’ll almost certainly open them up and try to read them.”

“‘Indiscreet’. We don’t use that word enough,” Meg says. The Walk/Don’t Walk sign blinks green, and she gives me a quick peck on the cheek, then trots across the street and soon disappears from view.

She leaves behind the scent of flowers, beautiful and dangerous, the kinds of flowers that grow amid the mossy stones of crumbling temples, that bloom as red and white as last night’s virginity in ruined cities swamped by jungles, thriving only in those places where the rules no longer apply.

# # #

“Prissy’s Mother”

Prissy sat at the kitchen table, leafing through a Betty Crocker cookbook; her mother stood behind her, braiding Prissy’s silky blond hair.

Prissy: the name defined her. No one called “Prissy” by friends and foes alike could possibly be anything other than a high-strung, imperious, bratty child. Prissy was all these things and more, and she ruled the household into which she had been born with a relentless, whiny arrogance. She was not reading the cookbook, merely looking at the pictures, occasionally holding up the book to demand that her mother prepare this dessert or that casserole for dinner tomorrow night.

“Not this week, honey. You know we have all that chicken in the freezer…” When Prissy’s mother talked, you could hear the origins of Prissy’s whine. Less affected, more heartfelt, plowed deep into a personality already heavy with grievance, but still recognizable.

Prissy’s hair was a beautiful ash blond in color but of a texture more like that of spider silk than human hair. Prissy’s mother always kept the precious wisps carefully braided, pulled back so tightly that here and there, the scalp showed through in longitudinal pink streaks. If left to itself, the hair would quickly become tangled and matted, sometimes to such an extent that the knots would have to be cut apart with scissors. Two or three nights a week, Prissy’s mother spent a couple of hours carefully sorting out the long pale strands, twisting them into a single braid the thickness of a pencil.

This tableau in the tiny kitchen at eight-thirty in the evening—the supper dishes done, the kitchen floor mopped—was in one important way typical of life in Prissy’s home: Her father was nowhere in evidence.

Unlike Prissy’s mother, Prissy’s father did not whine or protest. He bore the tribulations of his life with silent, inscrutable fatalism. The two most prominent of these tribulations were, of course, Prissy and Prissy’s mother, so he generally sought what melancholy solace he could in a place other than the kitchen, which was and always had been their unassailable preserve.

On a night like this—cool, quiet, with the sunset’s afterglow still almost bright enough to read by, even at half past eight—he would slip out the back door after dinner and sit at the edge of his lawn in a webbed aluminum-tubing lawn chair, watching the neighbors in their back yards.

There were no Prissys, no Prissy’s mothers, in any of those other yards. Voices were sometimes shrill, sometimes angry, often annoying, but they were never plaintive or pathetic, never wheedling, like a dentist’s drill veering into bone. He knew, on the other hand, that if by some miracle his wife or daughter were to come outside and speak loudly enough for their words to carry to someone else’s lawn, someone else’s lawn chair, the sound would travel on a breath of spiritual exhaustion so profound that birds would tumble from the air, and flowers would retreat into their buds in despair.

Prissy’s father, unlike her mother, still had a name. He was Michael, and he did not define himself by his relationship to his daughter—although even he thought of his wife as Prissy’s mother.

Michael worked as the business manager for a small corporate law firm, an undemanding job that he enjoyed. He spent his leisure hours puttering around in his yard, making small improvements in the house—any room but the kitchen—or working in his garage workshop on the architectural models that were his pride and joy. His wife, Prissy’s mother, called his models “dollhouses” and dismissed them with a roll of the eyes, but for him, they were the sole expression of a spirit that craved clean, sharp lines and precise definitions, the sweep and soar of buttresses, fine, tight angles.

Michael’s hobby was a fragile one, and another of his trials was the occasional intersection of his family with his true love. Prissy, although an undersized, delicate child, had destroyed more than one of her father’s fragile constructions with a careless gesture. The real damage, however, was usually inflicted by Prissy’s mother, whose weary regard could crush the charm of a plaster-and-balsa Italian villa as silently and inexorably as a layer of Vesuvian ash. Michael only worked in the garage when he knew his wife and child were out or occupied deeply enough in one of their joyless mother-daughter pursuits as to keep them out of his way.

Michael’s current project was his most ambitious yet. He had built a desert scene, four feet square, with real sand and tiny cactuses whittled from balsa wood and equipped with spines cut from a pig-bristle paintbrush and painstakingly glued into place. The cactus plants were correct in every detail, copied from photographs in the ancient Encyclopedia Britannica that occupied a shelf in the garage above his tools. He had sculpted the sand into shimmering scallops, cementing them into place with a quantity of Prissy’s mother’s White Rain hair spray.

Nestled into this setting was a hacienda, a main house and three outbuildings, constructed of balsa wood carefully coated with gesso, textured to resemble stucco. The house was square, with a tiled courtyard in the middle, and the outbuildings were clean stucco blocks grouped a short distance from the house. The courtyard featured a circular fountain, complete with a statue of the Virgin Mary. (The statue was just a cheap plastic figurine, but he had painted and distressed it to make it convincing.) This fountain was surrounded by beds of bougainvillea and chrysanthemums made of minute fragments of crepe paper or puffs of yarn glued to wire armatures. He had spent almost two weeks on the bougainvillea alone, arranging and rearranging the long, arching canes until no trace of artifice remained.

The house was two stories tall, both levels opening onto the courtyard through graceful galleries lined with hand-carved spiral pillars on each of the two floors, each pillar rising from a base shaped like a shallow bowl of fruit and surmounted by a capital composed of the feathers, heads, and feet of eagles.

The pillars, each carved from a length of doweling, had taken some fifty man-hours to create. He had been forced to discard nine pillars that had failed to live up to his standards, but those that remained were perfect in every detail. These were among his favorite features of the project so far.

The interiors of the rooms, all of which opened through the galleries onto the courtyard, were inaccessible, but Michael had cut tiny rectangles out of a remnant of Navajo-patterned fabric and laid the rugs just inside each door, ensuring that what little could be seen of each shadowed room was correctly detailed.

Prissy had come into the garage the previous week, against Michael’s standing orders, and waltzed a couple of her dolls around the courtyard, disturbing the flowerbeds and ripping up the tiles, which he had not yet glued into place. The few moments that he had been able to spend with his hobby in the days since had been fully occupied in simply repairing the damage, but tonight…

Tonight, he hoped to get on with the last phase of construction, to finish decorating one of the outbuildings, a chapel and its cemetery. He sat back in his chair, thinking ahead to the first steps of the evening’s work.

“Michael? Are you out there?” The voice of Prissy’s mother dragged itself through the kitchen window and out into the yard, a mangy, crippled thing. The feathery mimosas shuddered, and even the more robust four-o’clocks lost some of the gloss from their leaves.

“Yes, I’m here. What is it?”

“Will you try to remember to pick up some Woolite on your way home from work tomorrow?”

Michael sighed heavily, then shook himself, appalled at having given vent to a response more properly his wife’s.

“All right.”

“You won’t forget?” The tone suggested that of course he would forget, that he always forgot. Something would almost certainly prevent her rightful portion of Woolite from coming into her hands.

“I won’t forget.”

All the long, weary evening stretched ahead. There would have been any number of opportunities for Prissy’s mother to bring up the subject of Woolite without disturbing Michael’s quiet moment, but Woolite was merely the pretext; the point of the exercise was to allow Prissy’s mother to reassert the fact of her existence, to impose herself on what was dangerously close to being a Prissy’s-motherless interval in Michael’s evening.

The long, weary evening.

Still the long chapter led me on/Still the clock beside the bed/Heart-beat after heart-beat shed.

What was that? Oh, yes. Those were lines from a poem he had memorized so he could recite it to Maddalena Ponsati, frail and romantic, languid as a pre-Raphaelite princess. Maddalena was the only woman he could ever imagine moving, veiled and gentle, through one of his imaginary palaces, and he had courted her in slow, sedate stages.

From Miss Ponsati to Maddalena, from Maddalena to Maddie. Marriage, a house, a life together…

Then came the transition from Maddie to Prissy’s mother.

What had happened? Easy to blame Prissy, but hers was such a pinched, meager personality. Would she have had the presence, the emotional heft, to so completely transform another human being?

No. Prissy’s mother was simply a flame that had consumed all the oxygen available to it and then lingered on, pale and flickering, in the resulting bubble of vacuum.

Michael flung himself out of his chair. He was brooding, turning his comfortable suburban life into some operatic tragedy.

Prissy was Prissy, and Maddalena was … Prissy’s mother.

The garage was an orderly place, not spotless but organized and efficient. After turning on the lights, Michael paused in the doorway, inhaling the smells of glue and balsa-wood, paint and oil. Deep shelves along one wall held earlier projects: a mosque, a castle, a Tudor mansion, a Gothic cathedral, each centered in a bubble of clarity and peace.

The hacienda lay on his worktable, out in the middle of the floor, glowing pink and yellow in the overhead light.

The gravestones for the chapel cemetery had been completed, eight of them, and only awaited installation. The chapel itself still lacked the carved archway that would frame the door, and Michael still needed to hang the bells in the tiny belfry.

First, he would mount the chapel facade and place the monuments in the graveyard. Perhaps a few tiny flowers on the one grave that had not been covered by the yellow flocked fabric that so beautifully counterfeited dry turf.

As sometimes happened when he was deep into concentration, a slight headache began to develop behind Michael’s eyes as he worked. As always, he ignored it. The glittering pain had been with him for years, since Prissy was a baby, and he had come to accept it as he had learned to accept her. Something unpleasant that can’t be avoided, only eased to one side and ignored.

The work went well. In less than an hour he had placed the gravestones and gone on to mount the chapel facade. Covering the elaborate seams where the baroque facade met the flat structural face of the building was demanding work, and another hour passed before he felt it was time to move on and hang the tiny bells.

As he wiped plaster from his fingertips with an old flannel rag, Prissy’s mother opened the door that led from the house into the garage and announced that she was finished with Prissy’s hair and wouldn’t he like to come inside and watch some television with his wife and daughter?

“I’m right in the middle of something, honey. I’ll be in in just a bit.”

Prissy’s mother sighed, not her I’m-so-tired-and/or-unhappy-in-general sigh, but her I’m-so-tired-and/or-unhappy-with-you-specifically sigh.

“You know, we’ve hardly seen you all week. Your daughter is growing up thinking she has only one parent.”

She does have only one parent, Michael thought. He regretted his pettiness for a moment, but then reaction swept through him, so overwhelming that it bordered on panic.

“Please leave me alone,” he said, his tongue suddenly thick in his mouth.

S till the clock beside the bed/Heart-beat after heart-beat shed.

The headache had filled his skull and was rushing down into his chest and arms. “I’m very busy right now,” he said, struggling.

“Michael…”

He gasped, clutching at the edge of the table. The woman would not shut up; she would not go away. The sounds of surf suddenly overwhelmed his hearing, and a terrible and splendid brightness filled his eyes.

He blinked up at Prissy’s mother.

“The long chapter led me on!” he gasped, amazed.

Michael was buried on a Saturday, and on the Monday that followed, the man to whom Prissy’s mother had sold the contents of the garage would come to collect his prizes.

The intervening Sunday, however, was a long, quiet day, a heartbeat-after-heartbeat day. In the garage, no one had remembered to turn off the overhead light, and the warm yellow bulb shone down on the hacienda like the light of a perpetual noon.

The sun hardly seems to touch the woman as she emerges from the chapel swathed in rusty velvet and veiled with the black lace from behind which generations of women of her family have mourned the passing of their men. She walks across the dry grass of the yard to where one lone grave lies unclothed by the harsh yellow turf. She bends, graceful as a slender plant starved of water in this endless noontime, and deposits a bouquet of flowers on the grave: great bronze chrysanthemums and virulently pink bougainvillea from the courtyard. The thorns of the bougainvillea draw blood from her hand, darkening her gloves. One corner of her veil trails in the dust as she straightens and turns to consider the resting place next to this one, the merest suggestion of a mound, the grave of an infant.

She stands between the two graves, her head down, until a bell begins to ring in the chapel. As graceful and tragic as the sunset that never comes, she glides across the yard, across the courtyard, and into the dark, silent, empty rooms of the house.

# # #

[The poem Michael is remembering is “Chanel”, by Lawrence Durrell, From his Collected Poems, 1931-1974, edited by James A. Brigham, published by the Viking Press, 1980.]

Fiction: “Prissy’s Mother”

Prissy sat at the kitchen table, leafing through a Betty Crocker cookbook; her mother stood behind her, braiding Prissy’s silky blond hair.

Prissy: the name defined her. No one called “Prissy” by friends and foes alike could possibly be anything other than a high-strung, imperious, bratty child. Prissy was all these things and more, and she ruled the household into which she had been born with a relentless, whiny arrogance. She was not reading the cookbook, merely looking at the pictures, occasionally holding up the book to demand that her mother prepare this dessert or that casserole for dinner tomorrow night.

“Not this week, honey. You know we have all that chicken in the freezer…” When Prissy’s mother talked, you could hear the origins of Prissy’s whine. Less affected, more heartfelt, plowed deep into a personality already heavy with grievance, but still recognizable.

Prissy’s hair was a beautiful ash blond in color but of a texture more like that of spider silk than human hair. Prissy’s mother always kept the precious wisps carefully braided, pulled back so tightly that here and there, the scalp showed through in longitudinal pink streaks. If left to itself, the hair would quickly become tangled and matted, sometimes to such an extent that the knots would have to be cut apart with scissors. Two or three nights a week, Prissy’s mother spent a couple of hours carefully sorting out the long pale strands, twisting them into a single braid the thickness of a pencil.

This tableau in the tiny kitchen at eight-thirty in the evening—the supper dishes done, the kitchen floor mopped—was in one important way typical of life in Prissy’s home: Her father was nowhere in evidence.

Unlike Prissy’s mother, Prissy’s father did not whine or protest. He bore the tribulations of his life with silent, inscrutable fatalism. The two most prominent of these tribulations were, of course, Prissy and Prissy’s mother, so he generally sought what melancholy solace he could in a place other than the kitchen, which was and always had been their unassailable preserve.

On a night like this—cool, quiet, with the sunset’s afterglow still almost bright enough to read by, even at half past eight—he would slip out the back door after dinner and sit at the edge of his lawn in a webbed aluminum-tubing lawn chair, watching the neighbors in their back yards.

There were no Prissys, no Prissy’s mothers, in any of those other yards. Voices were sometimes shrill, sometimes angry, often annoying, but they were never plaintive or pathetic, never wheedling, like a dentist’s drill veering into bone. He knew, on the other hand, that if by some miracle his wife or daughter were to come outside and speak loudly enough for their words to carry to someone else’s lawn, someone else’s lawn chair, the sound would travel on a breath of spiritual exhaustion so profound that birds would tumble from the air, and flowers would retreat into their buds in despair.

Prissy’s father, unlike her mother, still had a name. He was Michael, and he did not define himself by his relationship to his daughter—although even he thought of his wife as Prissy’s mother.

Michael worked as the business manager for a small corporate law firm, an undemanding job that he enjoyed. He spent his leisure hours puttering around in his yard, making small improvements in the house—any room but the kitchen—or working in his garage workshop on the architectural models that were his pride and joy. His wife, Prissy’s mother, called his models “dollhouses” and dismissed them with a roll of the eyes, but for him, they were the sole expression of a spirit that craved clean, sharp lines and precise definitions, the sweep and soar of buttresses, fine, tight angles.

Michael’s hobby was a fragile one, and another of his trials was the occasional intersection of his family with his true love. Prissy, although an undersized, delicate child, had destroyed more than one of her father’s fragile constructions with a careless gesture. The real damage, however, was usually inflicted by Prissy’s mother, whose weary regard could crush the charm of a plaster-and-balsa Italian villa as silently and inexorably as a layer of Vesuvian ash. Michael only worked in the garage when he knew his wife and child were out or occupied deeply enough in one of their joyless mother-daughter pursuits as to keep them out of his way.

Michael’s current project was his most ambitious yet. He had built a desert scene, four feet square, with real sand and tiny cactuses whittled from balsa wood and equipped with spines cut from a pig-bristle paintbrush and painstakingly glued into place. The cactus plants were correct in every detail, copied from photographs in the ancient Encyclopedia Britannica that occupied a shelf in the garage above his tools. He had sculpted the sand into shimmering scallops, cementing them into place with a quantity of Prissy’s mother’s White Rain hair spray.

Nestled into this setting was a hacienda, a main house and three outbuildings, constructed of balsa wood carefully coated with gesso, textured to resemble stucco. The house was square, with a tiled courtyard in the middle, and the outbuildings were clean stucco blocks grouped a short distance from the house. The courtyard featured a circular fountain, complete with a statue of the Virgin Mary. (The statue was just a cheap plastic figurine, but he had painted and distressed it to make it convincing.) This fountain was surrounded by beds of bougainvillea and chrysanthemums made of minute fragments of crepe paper or puffs of yarn glued to wire armatures. He had spent almost two weeks on the bougainvillea alone, arranging and rearranging the long, arching canes until no trace of artifice remained.

The house was two stories tall, both levels opening onto the courtyard through graceful galleries lined with hand-carved spiral pillars on each of the two floors, each pillar rising from a base shaped like a shallow bowl of fruit and surmounted by a capital composed of the feathers, heads, and feet of eagles.

The pillars, each carved from a length of doweling, had taken some fifty man-hours to create. He had been forced to discard nine pillars that had failed to live up to his standards, but those that remained were perfect in every detail. These were among his favorite features of the project so far.

The interiors of the rooms, all of which opened through the galleries onto the courtyard, were inaccessible, but Michael had cut tiny rectangles out of a remnant of Navajo-patterned fabric and laid the rugs just inside each door, ensuring that what little could be seen of each shadowed room was correctly detailed.

Prissy had come into the garage the previous week, against Michael’s standing orders, and waltzed a couple of her dolls around the courtyard, disturbing the flowerbeds and ripping up the tiles, which he had not yet glued into place. The few moments that he had been able to spend with his hobby in the days since had been fully occupied in simply repairing the damage, but tonight…

Tonight, he hoped to get on with the last phase of construction, to finish decorating one of the outbuildings, a chapel and its cemetery. He sat back in his chair, thinking ahead to the first steps of the evening’s work.

“Michael? Are you out there?” The voice of Prissy’s mother dragged itself through the kitchen window and out into the yard, a mangy, crippled thing. The feathery mimosas shuddered, and even the more robust four-o’clocks lost some of the gloss from their leaves.

“Yes, I’m here. What is it?”

“Will you try to remember to pick up some Woolite on your way home from work tomorrow?”

Michael sighed heavily, then shook himself, appalled at having given vent to a response more properly his wife’s.

“All right.”

“You won’t forget?” The tone suggested that of course he would forget, that he always forgot. Something would almost certainly prevent her rightful portion of Woolite from coming into her hands.

“I won’t forget.”

All the long, weary evening stretched ahead. There would have been any number of opportunities for Prissy’s mother to bring up the subject of Woolite without disturbing Michael’s quiet moment, but Woolite was merely the pretext; the point of the exercise was to allow Prissy’s mother to reassert the fact of her existence, to impose herself on what was dangerously close to being a Prissy’s-motherless interval in Michael’s evening.

The long, weary evening.

Still the long chapter led me on/Still the clock beside the bed/Heart-beat after heart-beat shed.

What was that? Oh, yes. Those were lines from a poem he had memorized so he could recite it to Maddalena Ponsati, frail and romantic, languid as a pre-Raphaelite princess. Maddalena was the only woman he could ever imagine moving, veiled and gentle, through one of his imaginary palaces, and he had courted her in slow, sedate stages.

From Miss Ponsati to Maddalena, from Maddalena to Maddie. Marriage, a house, a life together…

Then came the transition from Maddie to Prissy’s mother.

What had happened? Easy to blame Prissy, but hers was such a pinched, meager personality. Would she have had the presence, the emotional heft, to so completely transform another human being?

No. Prissy’s mother was simply a flame that had consumed all the oxygen available to it and then lingered on, pale and flickering, in the resulting bubble of vacuum.

Michael flung himself out of his chair. He was brooding, turning his comfortable suburban life into some operatic tragedy.

Prissy was Prissy, and Maddalena was … Prissy’s mother.

The garage was an orderly place, not spotless but organized and efficient. After turning on the lights, Michael paused in the doorway, inhaling the smells of glue and balsa-wood, paint and oil. Deep shelves along one wall held earlier projects: a mosque, a castle, a Tudor mansion, a Gothic cathedral, each centered in a bubble of clarity and peace.

The hacienda lay on his worktable, out in the middle of the floor, glowing pink and yellow in the overhead light.

The gravestones for the chapel cemetery had been completed, eight of them, and only awaited installation. The chapel itself still lacked the carved archway that would frame the door, and Michael still needed to hang the bells in the tiny belfry.

First, he would mount the chapel facade and place the monuments in the graveyard. Perhaps a few tiny flowers on the one grave that had not been covered by the yellow flocked fabric that so beautifully counterfeited dry turf.

As sometimes happened when he was deep into concentration, a slight headache began to develop behind Michael’s eyes as he worked. As always, he ignored it. The glittering pain had been with him for years, since Prissy was a baby, and he had come to accept it as he had learned to accept her. Something unpleasant that can’t be avoided, only eased to one side and ignored.

The work went well. In less than an hour he had placed the gravestones and gone on to mount the chapel facade. Covering the elaborate seams where the baroque facade met the flat structural face of the building was demanding work, and another hour passed before he felt it was time to move on and hang the tiny bells.

As he wiped plaster from his fingertips with an old flannel rag, Prissy’s mother opened the door that led from the house into the garage and announced that she was finished with Prissy’s hair and wouldn’t he like to come inside and watch some television with his wife and daughter?

“I’m right in the middle of something, honey. I’ll be in in just a bit.”

Prissy’s mother sighed, not her I’m-so-tired-and/or-unhappy-in-general sigh, but her I’m-so-tired-and/or-unhappy-with-you-specifically sigh.

“You know, we’ve hardly seen you all week. Your daughter is growing up thinking she has only one parent.”

She does have only one parent, Michael thought. He regretted his pettiness for a moment, but then reaction swept through him, so overwhelming that it bordered on panic.

“Please leave me alone,” he said, his tongue suddenly thick in his mouth.

S till the clock beside the bed/Heart-beat after heart-beat shed.

The headache had filled his skull and was rushing down into his chest and arms. “I’m very busy right now,” he said, struggling.

“Michael…”

He gasped, clutching at the edge of the table. The woman would not shut up; she would not go away. The sounds of surf suddenly overwhelmed his hearing, and a terrible and splendid brightness filled his eyes.

He blinked up at Prissy’s mother.

“The long chapter led me on!” he gasped, amazed.

Michael was buried on a Saturday, and on the Monday that followed, the man to whom Prissy’s mother had sold the contents of the garage would come to collect his prizes.

The intervening Sunday, however, was a long, quiet day, a heartbeat-after-heartbeat day. In the garage, no one had remembered to turn off the overhead light, and the warm yellow bulb shone down on the hacienda like the light of a perpetual noon.

The sun hardly seems to touch the woman as she emerges from the chapel swathed in rusty velvet and veiled with the black lace from behind which generations of women of her family have mourned the passing of their men. She walks across the dry grass of the yard to where one lone grave lies unclothed by the harsh yellow turf. She bends, graceful as a slender plant starved of water in this endless noontime, and deposits a bouquet of flowers on the grave: great bronze chrysanthemums and virulently pink bougainvillea from the courtyard. The thorns of the bougainvillea draw blood from her hand, darkening her gloves. One corner of her veil trails in the dust as she straightens and turns to consider the resting place next to this one, the merest suggestion of a mound, the grave of an infant.

She stands between the two graves, her head down, until a bell begins to ring in the chapel. As graceful and tragic as the sunset that never comes, she glides across the yard, across the courtyard, and into the dark, silent, empty rooms of the house.

# # #

[The poem Michael is remembering is “Chanel”, by Lawrence Durrell, From his Collected Poems, 1931-1974, edited by James A. Brigham, published by the Viking Press, 1980.]

Prissy’s Mother

A short story by David Lee Holcomb

Prissy sat at the kitchen table, leafing through a Betty Crocker cookbook; her mother stood behind her, braiding Prissy’s silky blond hair.

Prissy: the name defined her. No one called “Prissy” by friends and foes alike could possibly be anything other than a high-strung, imperious, bratty child. Prissy was all these things and more, and she ruled the household into which she had been born with a relentless, whiny arrogance. She was not reading the cookbook, merely looking at the pictures, occasionally holding up the book to demand that her mother prepare this dessert or that casserole for dinner tomorrow night.

“Not this week, honey. You know we have all that chicken in the freezer…” When Prissy’s mother talked, you could hear the origins of Prissy’s whine. Less affected, more heartfelt, plowed deep into a personality already heavy with grievance, but still recognizable.

Prissy’s hair was a beautiful ash blond in color but of a texture more like that of spider silk than human hair. Prissy’s mother always kept the precious wisps carefully braided, pulled back so tightly that here and there, the scalp showed through in longitudinal pink streaks. If left to itself, the hair would quickly become tangled and matted, sometimes to such an extent that the knots would have to be cut apart with scissors. Two or three nights a week, Prissy’s mother spent a couple of hours carefully sorting out the long pale strands, twisting them into a single braid the thickness of a pencil.

This tableau in the tiny kitchen at eight-thirty in the evening—the supper dishes done, the kitchen floor mopped—was in one important way typical of life in Prissy’s home: Her father was nowhere in evidence.

Unlike Prissy’s mother, Prissy’s father did not whine or protest. He bore the tribulations of his life with silent, inscrutable fatalism. The two most prominent of these tribulations were, of course, Prissy and Prissy’s mother, so he generally sought what melancholy solace he could in a place other than the kitchen, which was and always had been their unassailable preserve.

On a night like this—cool, quiet, with the sunset’s afterglow still almost bright enough to read by, even at half past eight—he would slip out the back door after dinner and sit at the edge of his lawn in a webbed aluminum-tubing lawn chair, watching the neighbors in their back yards.

There were no Prissys, no Prissy’s mothers, in any of those other yards. Voices were sometimes shrill, sometimes angry, often annoying, but they were never plaintive or pathetic, never wheedling, like a dentist’s drill veering into bone. He knew, on the other hand, that if by some miracle his wife or daughter were to come outside and speak loudly enough for their words to carry to someone else’s lawn, someone else’s lawn chair, the sound would travel on a breath of spiritual exhaustion so profound that birds would tumble from the air, and flowers would retreat into their buds in despair.

Prissy’s father, unlike her mother, still had a name. He was Michael, and he did not define himself by his relationship to his daughter—although even he thought of his wife as Prissy’s mother.

Michael worked as the business manager for a small corporate law firm, an undemanding job that he enjoyed. He spent his leisure hours puttering around in his yard, making small improvements in the house—any room but the kitchen—or working in his garage workshop on the architectural models that were his pride and joy. His wife, Prissy’s mother, called his models “dollhouses” and dismissed them with a roll of the eyes, but for him, they were the sole expression of a spirit that craved clean, sharp lines and precise definitions, the sweep and soar of buttresses, fine, tight angles.

Michael’s hobby was a fragile one, and another of his trials was the occasional intersection of his family with his true love. Prissy, although an undersized, delicate child, had destroyed more than one of her father’s fragile constructions with a careless gesture. The real damage, however, was usually inflicted by Prissy’s mother, whose weary regard could crush the charm of a plaster-and-balsa Italian villa as silently and inexorably as a layer of Vesuvian ash. Michael only worked in the garage when he knew his wife and child were out or occupied deeply enough in one of their joyless mother-daughter pursuits as to keep them out of his way.

Michael’s current project was his most ambitious yet. He had built a desert scene, four feet square, with real sand and tiny cactuses whittled from balsa wood and equipped with spines cut from a pig-bristle paintbrush and painstakingly glued into place. The cactus plants were correct in every detail, copied from photographs in the ancient Encyclopedia Britannica that occupied a shelf in the garage above his tools. He had sculpted the sand into shimmering scallops, cementing them into place with a quantity of Prissy’s mother’s White Rain hair spray.

Nestled into this setting was a hacienda, a main house and three outbuildings, constructed of balsa wood carefully coated with gesso, textured to resemble stucco. The house was square, with a tiled courtyard in the middle, and the outbuildings were clean stucco blocks grouped a short distance from the house. The courtyard featured a circular fountain, complete with a statue of the Virgin Mary. (The statue was just a cheap plastic figurine, but he had painted and distressed it to make it convincing.) This fountain was surrounded by beds of bougainvillea and chrysanthemums made of minute fragments of crepe paper or puffs of yarn glued to wire armatures. He had spent almost two weeks on the bougainvillea alone, arranging and rearranging the long, arching canes until no trace of artifice remained.

The house was two stories tall, both levels opening onto the courtyard through graceful galleries lined with hand-carved spiral pillars on each of the two floors, each pillar rising from a base shaped like a shallow bowl of fruit and surmounted by a capital composed of the feathers, heads, and feet of eagles.

The pillars, each carved from a length of doweling, had taken some fifty man-hours to create. He had been forced to discard nine pillars that had failed to live up to his standards, but those that remained were perfect in every detail. These were among his favorite features of the project so far.

The interiors of the rooms, all of which opened through the galleries onto the courtyard, were inaccessible, but Michael had cut tiny rectangles out of a remnant of Navajo-patterned fabric and laid the rugs just inside each door, ensuring that what little could be seen of each shadowed room was correctly detailed.

Prissy had come into the garage the previous week, against Michael’s standing orders, and waltzed a couple of her dolls around the courtyard, disturbing the flowerbeds and ripping up the tiles, which he had not yet glued into place. The few moments that he had been able to spend with his hobby in the days since had been fully occupied in simply repairing the damage, but tonight…

Tonight, he hoped to get on with the last phase of construction, to finish decorating one of the outbuildings, a chapel and its cemetery. He sat back in his chair, thinking ahead to the first steps of the evening’s work.

“Michael? Are you out there?” The voice of Prissy’s mother dragged itself through the kitchen window and out into the yard, a mangy, crippled thing. The feathery mimosas shuddered, and even the more robust four-o’clocks lost some of the gloss from their leaves.

“Yes, I’m here. What is it?”

“Will you try to remember to pick up some Woolite on your way home from work tomorrow?”

Michael sighed heavily, then shook himself, appalled at having given vent to a response more properly his wife’s.

“All right.”

“You won’t forget?” The tone suggested that of course he would forget, that he always forgot. Something would almost certainly prevent her rightful portion of Woolite from coming into her hands.

“I won’t forget.”

All the long, weary evening stretched ahead. There would have been any number of opportunities for Prissy’s mother to bring up the subject of Woolite without disturbing Michael’s quiet moment, but Woolite was merely the pretext; the point of the exercise was to allow Prissy’s mother to reassert the fact of her existence, to impose herself on what was dangerously close to being a Prissy’s-motherless interval in Michael’s evening.

The long, weary evening.

Still the long chapter led me on/Still the clock beside the bed/Heart-beat after heart-beat shed.

What was that? Oh, yes. Those were lines from a poem he had memorized so he could recite it to Maddalena Ponsati, frail and romantic, languid as a pre-Raphaelite princess. Maddalena was the only woman he could ever imagine moving, veiled and gentle, through one of his imaginary palaces, and he had courted her in slow, sedate stages.

From Miss Ponsati to Maddalena, from Maddalena to Maddie. Marriage, a house, a life together…

Then came the transition from Maddie to Prissy’s mother.

What had happened? Easy to blame Prissy, but hers was such a pinched, meager personality. Would she have had the presence, the emotional heft, to so completely transform another human being?

No. Prissy’s mother was simply a flame that had consumed all the oxygen available to it and then lingered on, pale and flickering, in the resulting bubble of vacuum.

Michael flung himself out of his chair. He was brooding, turning his comfortable suburban life into some operatic tragedy.

Prissy was Prissy, and Maddalena was … Prissy’s mother.

The garage was an orderly place, not spotless but organized and efficient. After turning on the lights, Michael paused in the doorway, inhaling the smells of glue and balsa-wood, paint and oil. Deep shelves along one wall held earlier projects: a mosque, a castle, a Tudor mansion, a Gothic cathedral, each centered in a bubble of clarity and peace.

The hacienda lay on his worktable, out in the middle of the floor, glowing pink and yellow in the overhead light.

The gravestones for the chapel cemetery had been completed, eight of them, and only awaited installation. The chapel itself still lacked the carved archway that would frame the door, and Michael still needed to hang the bells in the tiny belfry.

First, he would mount the chapel facade and place the monuments in the graveyard. Perhaps a few tiny flowers on the one grave that had not been covered by the yellow flocked fabric that so beautifully counterfeited dry turf.

As sometimes happened when he was deep into concentration, a slight headache began to develop behind Michael’s eyes as he worked. As always, he ignored it. The glittering pain had been with him for years, since Prissy was a baby, and he had come to accept it as he had learned to accept her. Something unpleasant that can’t be avoided, only eased to one side and ignored.

The work went well. In less than an hour he had placed the gravestones and gone on to mount the chapel facade. Covering the elaborate seams where the baroque facade met the flat structural face of the building was demanding work, and another hour passed before he felt it was time to move on and hang the tiny bells.

As he wiped plaster from his fingertips with an old flannel rag, Prissy’s mother opened the door that led from the house into the garage and announced that she was finished with Prissy’s hair and wouldn’t he like to come inside and watch some television with his wife and daughter?

“I’m right in the middle of something, honey. I’ll be in in just a bit.”

Prissy’s mother sighed, not her I’m-so-tired-and/or-unhappy-in-general sigh, but her I’m-so-tired-and/or-unhappy-with-you-specifically sigh.

“You know, we’ve hardly seen you all week. Your daughter is growing up thinking she has only one parent.”

She does have only one parent, Michael thought. He regretted his pettiness for a moment, but then reaction swept through him, so overwhelming that it bordered on panic.

“Please leave me alone,” he said, his tongue suddenly thick in his mouth.

S till the clock beside the bed/Heart-beat after heart-beat shed.

The headache had filled his skull and was rushing down into his chest and arms. “I’m very busy right now,” he said, struggling.

“Michael…”

He gasped, clutching at the edge of the table. The woman would not shut up; she would not go away. The sounds of surf suddenly overwhelmed his hearing, and a terrible and splendid brightness filled his eyes.

He blinked up at Prissy’s mother.

“The long chapter led me on!” he gasped, amazed.

Michael was buried on a Saturday, and on the Monday that followed, the man to whom Prissy’s mother had sold the contents of the garage would come to collect his prizes.

The intervening Sunday, however, was a long, quiet day, a heartbeat-after-heartbeat day. In the garage, no one had remembered to turn off the overhead light, and the warm yellow bulb shone down on the hacienda like the light of a perpetual noon.

The sun hardly seems to touch the woman as she emerges from the chapel swathed in rusty velvet and veiled with the black lace from behind which generations of women of her family have mourned the passing of their men. She walks across the dry grass of the yard to where one lone grave lies unclothed by the harsh yellow turf. She bends, graceful as a slender plant starved of water in this endless noontime, and deposits a bouquet of flowers on the grave: great bronze chrysanthemums and virulently pink bougainvillea from the courtyard. The thorns of the bougainvillea draw blood from her hand, darkening her gloves. One corner of her veil trails in the dust as she straightens and turns to consider the resting place next to this one, the merest suggestion of a mound, the grave of an infant.

She stands between the two graves, her head down, until a bell begins to ring in the chapel. As graceful and tragic as the sunset that never comes, she glides across the yard, across the courtyard, and into the dark, silent, empty rooms of the house.

# # #

[The poem Michael is remembering is “Chanel”, by Lawrence Durrell, From his Collected Poems, 1931-1974, edited by James A. Brigham, published by the Viking Press, 1980.]