“Chasing Tales” by Lyndsay Michalik

He told me about how he’s a storyteller, about how he loves stories, as he drove me home.
I said I have some of those.

He pulled up to my building. 30 seconds of silence. Then I awkwardly stepped out of the car and made my way up the metal stairs to my second story apartment. I began a mental inventory of my stories. Because maybe I can tell them to him some other time.

1. That Time I Told Everyone My Dad Met John Wayne At A Gas Station When He Actually Hadn’t, It Was Just Something I Dreamt Up

2. The Night I Dreamt A T-Rex Bit Me And When I Woke Up My Knee Was Bleeding

3. I Sat Next To A Strange Box In The Backseat Of His Car As He Drove Me Home That Day.

Highway Coda

–Matt Mullins’ three-year old daughter just walked into the room wearing wire and nylon angel wings and told him to try harder. At what, she didn’t say. Matt lives in Muncie, Indiana, where he writes poetry, fiction, screenplays, makes experimental films, and builds interactive interfaces for his stories and poems. His writing has recently appeared in Pleiades, Hunger Mountain, Harpur Palate, Hobart, decomP, and kill author. He writes in what is essentially an attic with a single, cracked octagonal window through which he sees the world. He also reads too much into pointed yet ambiguous things said by children wearing wire and nylon angel wings. You can find pieces of him at mullmullingitover.blogspot.com.

–Michael Pounds holds degrees in composition from Ball State University, the University of Birmingham (England), and the University of Illinois. His awards include the ASCAP/SEAMUS Student Commission Award, a Residence Prize at the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony and I-Park. His music has been performed throughout the US and abroad. He was a co-host of the 2005 SEAMUS national conference. Michael is the Assistant Director of the Music Technology program at Ball State University.

Aimee Bender + 100

Editor’s Note: Aimee Bender wrote the first sentence. Then, 100 writers collaborated to write the next. The story that happened follows.

I.

She was startled by what she saw on the bridge; it did not seem to have a shape, and yet it was moving toward her, and she found herself inexplicably compelled to stay put. She counted things to calm herself. Streetlights almost hidden by fog: 3. Parked cars tipped sideways: 2. Fat shadows so close you could touch them and feel their breath: 1. but she pulled a Marlboro red from her pocket & lit it, giving her time to figure out this shape cutting closer. Holes in the fog where it pressed through, nothing but her cigarette to hold on to, watching ashes light the descent, or was it just her wanting to see light on the ash–anything familiar and glowing. She needed glowing tonight, she needed familiar. Because so far, things had not gone according to plan. It was madness to come here, she knew. Yet, she’d been compelled to answer the phone. To obey that seemingly familiar voice charred with static. To agree to this place and time.

Four Micros from VISITING WRITERS

Vladimir Nabokov bought my daughter a chess set, with pieces carved from sandalwood by hand. Every little girl should own a chess set, he said, and my daughter nodded in feigned agreement, eager to rejoin her friends. Late afternoon, once the guests had left, my wife sent me to collect the plates and glasses from the backyard. And there was Nabokov, crouched in the garden, his pant cuffs folded to his knees, following a caterpillar across his finger.

**

Italo Calvino stopped at the gas station to ask for directions to the aeronautical museum. I hadn’t been working at the gas station for long, and had only moved to the town a few months earlier. I offered to sell him a map, or I could call my landlord, who knew the town from top to bottom. No matter, he said. I’ll find my way… The day was breezy, warm. He would put his faith in the winds.

**

Jorge Luis Borges asked me to select a record at random. I picked one from the nearest milk crate. Laid it on the turntable, lowered the needle. Borges sat in his favorite red chair with his pipe, nodding along. When the symphony finished, he leaned back, like after a satisfying meal. Fine choice of music, he said approvingly, despite no such choice having been made.

“Billy Echo” by Sean Ferrell

We all forgave Billy his silences because, truth be told, understanding him was a few yards past impossible. His first words were “Gimme gimme,” not because he said it twice but because the echo was already there. At first no one noticed. Some thought it a stutter. His grandmother, the first to see his lips didn’t move with his words, said, “That boy’s not right.” She said that about most, so it was ignored. But by the time Billy and I had reached our double-digit years, by the time we noticed girls and their differences and how we might feel about them, the echo had gotten worse, words overlapping from the moment he started the first syllable. Billy gave up on talking much at all.

In all other ways he was there, pointing, grabbing, pushing, adding his laughs so deep and layered that a group of three or four plus Billy sounded like an audience of thirty or more, an overfull car-load of joy ripping from him. Once, on a dare, he’d gone into a restaurant’s drive-thru and ordered burgers for me and Cousin Jodi. The manager called the police who failed to understand our and Billy’s laughter, who failed to understand why they couldn’t find the source of the others laughing with us, who couldn’t fathom why Cousin Jodi wet herself when the officer asked Billy for his name.

“People Unlike Airplanes” by Jim Hanas

“This, or this?” the young woman asked, tapping her nails on two photographs arrayed on the fold-out tray between herself and the subject—a man who had been complaining since at least Kansas City that the blood-pressure cuff was irritating his eczema. He rolled his head and looked out the window, down on what must have been Denver.

“This,” he said, indicating one of the pictures with a nod.
“I’ll need a hand signal,” she said. “For the cameras.”

The man tapped an electrode-wrapped forefinger on one of the photos. The woman propped her glasses on her nose and recorded his response before arranging two more photographs on the tray.

“This, or this?” she repeated, tapping her nails to draw the man’s attention back from what must have been Boulder. The man was tired of answering questions and was glad it wouldn’t be much longer before they landed. The knot of his tie had slid to half-mast and moist stains bloomed where his arms met his torso. He wanted to change his shirt. How much longer, exactly, would it be?
“I’ll ask the questions,” the woman said, again tapping her nails on the tray.

The young woman’s lab coat was sexy, the man thought without considering the pictures. The hum of the engines was sexy and the woman’s incessantly tapping nails—these were sexy, too. He considered her knees, which were the color of carrot cake, as they appeared between her blue lab coat and her tall, tight boots, and he contemplated having sex with her—right then and there—in the aisle of the modified Airbus 320 in which he now found himself more or less imprisoned.

“It’s time for your taste test,” said another woman who appeared at his side with a serving cart. She placed two tiny paper cups of fizzy, brown liquid on the fold-out tray. Bill Hammerling took a sip from each cup before the woman opposite him tapped their rims with her nails.
“This, or this?”

He smiled but the young woman did not smile back.

Simmons had been in rooms like this before. Lots of times. As a teenager, he had groped at the breasts and buttoned flies of girls named Kat, and Kate, and Katie, and Katherine in rooms more or less exactly like this one. Such rooms—right inside the front door, just off the foyer—were never used, in his experience, except for such hapless late-night purposes. Children were forbidden from entering rooms like these, he remembered, and growing up he had witnessed many homes engulfed in jubilant chaos—littered with board games, piles of laundry, and slot-racing tracks—that somehow stopped at the threshold of this room. Looking through the doorway, then like now, was like staring into the soothing waters of an aquarium.

He had been shown in by a boy on the front lawn who was busy driving a softball deep into the freshly laid sod with a lacrosse stick. He was probably thirteen. His blonde hair was tangled and he smelled like stale hockey equipment. He grudgingly stomped up the stairs to get his stepmother, while Simmons braced for her arrival.

He had never met Bill Hammerling’s wife before, not this one, and he had not seen Bill himself in ten years, although his name had still jumped off the page. Bill had done well. The faux Queen Anne in which Simmons now stood was among the first to be completed in the surrounding development, and the home—elevated on a slight hillock—was plainly visible from the Tudor model home that marked the entrance to the neighborhood. Simmons had weaved his way toward it carefully, slaloming through the wooden stakes that marked the future placement of streets and driveways. The streets were not yet marked, but Bill’s circular driveway was clearly labeled—with both name and address—on a mailbox poised atop a length of anchor chain welded to maintain the posture of an angry cobra.

Kitty Hammerling was girlish, Simmons noted as she appeared at the top of the steps.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

Her blonde hair was pulled into a ponytail high on the back of her head, and she might have been mistaken for a college student—in her khaki Capri’s and oversized T-shirt tied to the side—if not for an enormous trio of diamonds that hung from her wedding ring.

Simmons’ paramilitary appearance no doubt took her by surprise. The company’s founders were Navy men, and they had imparted to FreeBird Airlines a martial structure. Everyone wore uniforms, although the one Simmons wore was barely distinguishable from those worn by pharmacists or busboys. It consisted of a crisp white shirt with basic cotton epaulets and an embossed crest positioned above his heart. The second Mrs. Hammerling (or was she the third?) might have easily mistaken him for the exterminator.

“There’s been an accident,” Simmons said. He held out an arm to suggest they might talk more comfortably in the forbidden room, the room that he had understood since childhood was for important matters only—the appearance of clergy, funerals and christenings, and matters like this.

Kitty Hammerling turned ashen as she understood that this was no good. She perched on the edge of the white couch while Simmons took one of the stiff chairs, his aluminum briefcase sandwiched between his ankles.

“Bill’s plane has gone down,” he said.

Kitty Hammerling started to cry.

Simmons didn’t know what to do. He had thought about it for the entire drive and had still failed to come up with an answer. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, like he might reach out and touch her if it became necessary, although he didn’t know when, exactly, that would be. He wondered what FreeBird’s legal department would recommend.

She covered her face and he could see that her fingers were unusually long and that the thin bones in the backs of her hands pulsed under her soft, tanned skin like gently throbbing veins. She had dark, fine hair on her forearms, he could now see, and also on her cheeks.

She got up and left the room. Simmons remained seated and wondered if he should leave. Maybe that’s what she expected—for him to leave. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the opening line of the prayer for the Can having gone down but could only remember the last: “People, unlike airplanes, look larger from farther away,” the unofficial motto of FreeBird Airlines.

Like most mottos, it meant different things to different people. To FreeBird’s clients, it meant that consumers’ cherished preferences might seem inscrutable from a distance, but never fear, they could be made clear by well-conceived batteries of tests administered to captive audiences of air travelers who agreed to submit to such scrutiny in exchange for free flights to demographically rich destinations like Indianapolis, Chicago, and (until this morning) Los Angeles. To FreeBird’s army of commission-starved account executives, it meant that a client might seem unapproachable—unsellable—from a distance, but close up, each was as vulnerable as the next to FreeBird’s ingenious sales pitch. And to FreeBird’s passengers? Great care was taken to ensure that FreeBird’s passengers never heard the unofficial motto.

Kitty Hammerling returned, clutching a wad of tissues.

“I brought Bill’s file,” Simmons offered as he eased it out of his briefcase. It was in a worn interoffice folder, its crimson string wound tightly around the two-ply fastening-disk. It had been carefully edited to preserve Bill’s preferences for salmon (the color) and Magneto (the font), and to redact his fascination with the tanning cream and tall black boots that had been indirectly tested (ambiently, as they say) on his ill-fated flight. (“Leering” was the word that appeared again and again in the qualitatives.)
“That’s nice,” his wife managed, although Simmons could tell it provided little comfort. While people often put great stock in their loved ones’ files, there was still this sting.
“Did you know him?” she asked quietly.
“We were in the Navy.”
“In the gulf?”
“And the straits, too. Persian. Tonkin. Gibraltar. Hormuz.”
“You were close?” she asked.
“As close as you can be and not talk in ten years,” Simmons said.
She smiled weakly.
“That’s his son?” Simmons asked.

She nodded, grinding back more tears. It was clear that the boy’s only link to his stepmother was through his father and without him, they might not get along so well.

Mrs. Hammerling suddenly wilted, like she was about to faint, and Simmons forgot all about FreeBird’s lawyers as he leaned forward and grabbed her elbows, hoping to steady her, as the front door slammed and the scent of hockey equipment leaked into the clean white room.

“You’ve got to help me tell him,” she whispered, and Simmons realized that the boy—slouching into view now, smirking—was at once the largest and smallest creature in the known universe. Smaller than the whale, smaller than the elephant, yet still larger than the lowly airplane.

–Jim Hanas is the author of the short story collection Why They Cried – forthcoming this month as a Joyland eBook from ECW Press – from which this excerpt was taken. He reads tonight at McNally Jackson Books in Manhattan with Joyland co-founder Emily Schultz, Zoe Whithall, and Amanda Stern.

Photo courtesy of http://www.aviationspectator.com/

FRAGMENTS by Joseph Cassara

Sappho of Lesbos began eating her own hair at age four.

Trichotillomania is defined as the irresistible urge to remove hair from one’s body. Some yank, some pull, some simply cry until it freezes off.

Dr. Doryphoros prescribed 60mg of Prozac per day to remedy the patchy bald spots. “Jesus Christ, Sap,” her mother said. “Would you look at what’s left of your hair? Do you want people to think you’re some kind of dyke?”

Federico García Lorca was in kindergarden when he began writing his first poemas about little turtles with souls. At parent-teacher conferences: “Señora Lorca, we’re a little concerned. Does he ever write about people with souls?”

Aurelia Plath worked two jobs to support Sylvia and her brother Warren.

By the time she was fourteen—living on her own—she discovered that hair al dente went well with marinara sauce and a side of raw chickpeas.

Mrs. Brecht craved swiss cheese for the duration of her pregnancy. When he finally popped, she observed a silent birth, gummed ice chips, and told the nurse to get her a fucking wheel of brie already.

Alexander Pushkin had an overwhelming fear that one day he would be shot in a duel by a blonde man taller than he.

Though Aeschylus was the first poet with a documented case of erectile dysfunction, he was said to be prone to random outbursts of trochaic orgasmic screams. Ai ai ai ai ai.

Because duels were forbidden in 19th century Russia, they were usually held at dawn.

“But Mama, people don’t have souls. And who will love the little turtles?”

This fear didn’t stop him from loving.

“You bought brie? I asked for a fucking cube of havarti. Is that so fucking hard to understand? Where’s my baby?”

In 1562, Bruegel completed his Triumph of Death, depicting fires, shipwreckings, armies of stoic skeletons, horses and dogs attacking and eating women and babies. Despite all this, in the right-hand corner, a woman is joyfully playing a lyre.

Susan Sontag never forgot about Irene.

In 1936, at Franco’s request, García Lorca was shot seven times in the face in a butterfly pasture somewhere in Andalucia. His body was never found.

Never, never, never.

At the 1888 Barcelona World’s Fair, Pau Audouard refused to photograph the façade of La Sagrada Familia, claiming it was too gaudy for his taste.

In most cultures, hair is often associated with beauty and vitality.

Warren Plath, a forgotten name.

Eugene Onegin is a novel-in-verse containging 389 stanzas of iambic tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of AbAbCCddEffEgg.

Goethe cried a lot, but lied about it.

As they say, don’t fill your well after the calf falls in.

The only stanza that does not follow the Pushkin Sonnet depicts Lensky’s death by duel. There is no word that rhymes with the Russian equivalent of despair.

On February 12, 1963, Mrs. Plath told reporters that she regretted giving her daughter an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas however many years ago. Like all mothers, she tried to find a reason. She tried to blame herself.

Human hair contains keratin, which smells of sulphur when burnt.

After divorcing and remarrying, Carson and Reeves McCullers were vacationing in Paris when he overdosed on sleeping pills. He left no note.

By the time she was 27, Sappho was nearly bald.

While walking on the streets of St. Petersburg, Pushkin saw Tatyana Petrovna and was so moved by the experience, he stepped into a telephone booth and penned a seven line poem called I Only Loved You For Your Hair.

He tried to convince her to join him. She did not.

Alexander Pushkin was shot by Georges-Charles de Heechkeren d’Anthés in 1837. He was tall and blonde. The dispute was over a woman.

When there was no more hair, she began to gnaw at her fingers. Until there was nothing left but enjambed nubs.

The only remaining fragments of her last poem read:

]
] lyre lyre lyre
]
] i might go
]
]
]
]
] celery
]

—END—

–Joseph Cassara is a writing student at Columbia University. His short stories, humor and nonfiction have been featured in Eclectica Magazine, Quarto, The Eye, and The Faster Times. He lives in New York City.

Paddy the Albino

A river hog in the mid 1800’s, Northern Michigan

I’ve been poked at plenty all my life, born hairless and white as a cloud, but let me tell you straight that when I was out there driving sticks with the lumberjacks it wasn’t the fact of my skin or even my first name—Paddy, sounding like a name for any other Irishman come north to cut out and get out—but the fact that I couldn’t help crossing myself every time I ambled onto those logs.

I had my wits and I had my pride so you can bet I’d be the first jack out there for the spring drive, rigging the flyboom and passing out peaveys. And once the key log had been tagged and all the others came tumbling off the rollway, ice popping like old bones, snow swallowed into the cold, brown river, there wasn’t a moment to hesitate.

Except that I did. Every time. And not for lack of enthusiasm but instead for the fact that I didn’t know how to swim. Big Duck Creek was wheelin’ for Lake Michigan by springtime and even with my real Chippewa boots I felt certain the creek wanted to sink me whole, send me down the chutes and into the wide open jaws of a sturgeon.

That’s when I started crossing myself. One foot on the sticks, another on dry land; the arms of God be ‘round my shoulders. Then two feet, side by each, moving in slick circles as the logs rolled beneath my boots, hungry water biting at my heels. Let it be known that I never once drowned my peavey on the open waters. That I never once lost footing, the arms of God be ‘round my shoulders. That though I crossed myself at every bend in the river, I kept two eyes on the current. That on my first drive, I saw a man clamped halfway underwater in a jam, the entire river pressing logs into his guts. He begged me to shoot him, the arms of God be ‘round my shoulders, Heaven’s company upon my lips. I rolled on by, the logs grabbing at him like teeth.

Let it also be known that when our work was done, there would be walking, always the walking. Sometimes eight to ten miles back to the wanagan for chuck. By then the ground felt foreign beneath my boots. I refused its steadiness; walked with a bobbing motion for want of something that floated.

In the bunkhouse, my body was given to sleep no matter the circumstance. I dreamt I was an all white fish, pure muscle and fin. The logs formed a floating roof above my head, their groaning finally muted into soft sloshing. The steel tips of peaveys jabbed into the water like rusted bolts of lightning. An occasional boot heel dipped beneath the water’s surface. I muscled against the current, unstoppable, glowing, until I saw that man with his legs trapped beneath the water. The way he moved as if in slow motion, a horrible, silent dance; I saw him. The way he died, running nowhere.

* * *

-Katey Schultz is Associate Editor of TRACHODON, a dinosaur of a little magazine. Her stories have appeared in Fiction Daily, Perigee, Driftwood, Writers’ Dojo, and more. Achievements include the Linda Flowers Literary Prize, Press 53 Open Award for Short Story, Whispering Prairie Press Prize for Flash Fiction, and 2nd place in the River Styx MicroFiction Contest. She will spend 2010-2012 attending writing residencies across the United States, working on a collection of short stories. Follow her travels here.

Image courtesy of http://ipoetry.us.

From “The Beaufort Diaries” by T Cooper

“Three waters on twenty-two, Beaufort!” the manager hollered. It was a constant refrain since I somehow managed to land the job at Nobu.

I filled up three glasses—one-quarter ice and three-quarters water—and carefully wiped the condensation off the glasses like they showed me, then raced over to table twenty-two without looking like I was in a hurry.

The three men at the table didn’t look up at me when I approached. I placed one glass in front of the curly-haired guy, then went around to the next one, but just before the glass reached the table, I felt something on the floor making me slip… It was one of those goddam Zen rocks that the customers rest the ends of their chopsticks on. The glass of water spilled all over the goateed guy’s lap.

“What the fuh—?!” he yelled, bolting up and brushing the water off his expensive-looking jeans.

“I’m so sorry, so sorry,” I said, but he just stood there staring at me like maybe we’d met somewhere before. His eyes were totally disarming, the hue of translucent, early-winter ice. I repeated, “I’m really sorry,” and headed toward the staging area to fetch a towel, again trying to appear calm and centered while crossing the dining room.
“Do you know who that is?” one of the waiters asked. It was the first time he’d ever spoken to me outside of barking demands in my direction.
“Who?”
“The guy you spilled on.”
“I don’t know. No.”
“You’re so fired. That’s Leo,” he spat.
I went back to offer Mr. Leo the towel, but by the time I got to the table he was already reseated and laughing riotously with his buddies about something. The other customers in the dining room looked over, trying to look like they weren’t looking.
“It’s okay, man. Chill out,” Mr. Leo said.
“Can you sit down for a sec?” the third, sleepy-eyed guy asked, pulling out a chair. “Let me pour you some sake.”
I glanced back toward the reception area where the manager was scowling at me. “I can’t, I really need to—”
“Dude, you’d be perfect for this film I’m doing,” Mr. Leo interrupted. “Are you green?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, sometimes my fur turns a little green when the algae content goes up in summer.”
All three of them laughed some more.
“This is Tobey, that’s Adrian. And I’m Leo.”
“My name’s Beaufort.” We shook hands and paws.
“Here’s my direct line.” Leo jotted a number on a chopsticks wrapper. “I’m serious. You and me, we could really make a difference.” I stared into his crystal eyes. They kind of killed me. “I gotta get back to work.”

I didn’t have a telephone connected at my place yet, so I didn’t try to call Leo. Everybody at Nobu said he was probably a phony anyhow, and that I shouldn’t feel special that he gave me his personal number. But a few days after the ice-water incident, Leo’s assistant phoned me at the restaurant while I was setting up for lunch.

When I came out to the front desk, the day manager hissed, “No personal calls!” as he tossed me the handset, and then as soon as I pressed the receiver to my ear, that mean waiter whisked by and whispered, “Fired,” while making a hand gesture that looked like he was slicing his own neck with a finger.
“Uh, he-hello?” I stuttered like a madman into the phone.
“Can you come in for a screen-test at four-thirty this afternoon?”

* * *

BOOK PARTY! July 7, 7PM @ Melville House Bookstore!

- T COOPER's most recent book is the graphic novel The Beaufort Diaries, the inspiring story of a polar bear who escapes extinction by going Hollywood. Cooper is also the author of two regular old novels, Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes and Some of the Parts, as well as co-editor of an anthology of short stories entitled A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing. Cooper's fiction and nonfiction writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, One Story, The Believer, Electric Literature, and some others. He lives in New York with his family. More info: www.t-cooper.com

Credit: Animation by Drew Jordan, art by Alex Petrowsky.

On The Vanguard

All fiction was about the same thing to Frank Wilder: the crime of his never having been published. Once a reader advanced beyond the great divide of 1945 to enter the furious stew of the modern moment, any novel, Frank felt, was fair game to be scorned. He thought often on the direction of American Literature in the last half century, the opposing poles represented by Mailer and Salinger; the slow death of the important American novel through the 70s and early 80s, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan as president and, across the Atlantic, the ascendancy of Martin Amis; the recognition of the Academy Awards Ceremony in Los Angeles as a forum of the greatest artistic seriousness; the recent onslaught of poseurs with their image-driven facsimiles of literary gravity, all of whom Frank took the liberty of referring to as “that guy,” regardless of gender: Kerouac (too vacuous), Percy (too Christian), Capote (too jaded), Pynchon (too cartoony), Wolfe (too bombastic), Updike (too flighty), DeLillo (too male), Roth (too Roth), Morrison (too praised), McInerney (too clipped), Rushdie (too shallow), Coover (too madcap), Oates (too morbid), Wideman (too fevered), Moody (too threadbare), Moore (too much), Franzen (too withering), Homes (too demented), Lethem (too ridiculous), Hempel (too elusive), Johnson (too tangled), Munro (too perfect), Chabon (too indulgent), Lahiri (too successful); the list went on—not one of them like him, not one of them just so. On more gracious days he could admit to the merit of a global contemporary like Arundhati Roy for having written one good novel, and then quit—and, when inclined to reach further back into the past, Fyodor Dostoevsky, for the sheer breadth of his comedy and rage. In the end, Frank’s unsteady feelings before a fictive page amounted to one certainty: there had to be a place for him.

“A writer of considerable talent”: the words that had brought Frank to Brooklyn. It seemed like decades ago that someone, a high school teacher, inscribed them on a story he had written, and only Frank had not forgotten. He took the praise to heart, held it there and, upon graduating from college, moved with his girlfriend to Park Slope.

In the back of their narrow studio, across the open entrance to the kitchen, hung a tattered American flag a Republican uncle had given him when he turned nine. The flag had touched the ground many times since the days when he raised it at his father’s behest—up the fifteen-foot pole next to the pool in the backyard that rang out when the rope snapped against it. The colors on the flag were faded, but, aesthetically, it pleased him. With the lights in the kitchen on, and those in the foyer out, red and blue prisms fell across the weathered couch and framed photographs on the wall.

Sometimes, Frank reclined on the couch alone in his favorite trousers, slate grey and orange plaid, with forest green suspenders, frayed and faded from nearly a century’s wear. The attire had belonged to Frank’s grandfather, Irving Wilder, himself once an aspiring novelist. Other times Frank shared the couch with Lena, his girlfriend—also his best reader—and admired the aleatoric way that the flag’s color scheme embraced her angular bangs.

Their Park Slope apartment was located in the southern outskirts of the neighborhood. Frank bought a queen-sized mattress and scarlet sheeting and laid it right on the floor. Outside, men and women in seemingly identical striped, sleeveless shirts pressed down the block. From a window, Frank watched them go by. It was what he did instead of smoking cigarettes. An Off Track Betting depot around the corner attracted low-talking clusters of wishful thinkers. Cats peeked out from under the chassis of parked cars.

“My boss is the plague in human form,” Lena said one day over lunch, at a sidewalk café, “She’s like the human dating virus. Literally everyday, the woman has a new adventure to embarrass herself with. It’s just so—ugh. Incessant. She doesn’t know how to stop! She can’t!”

Lena worked as an editorial assistant at a widely purchased fashion mag; she harbored serious respect for ripening trends. Her boss and her father were two favorite topics of conversation. Seeing Frank chafe under the weight of his modestly paying job, a visible discomfort in letting her settle the bill, she often mentioned her father.

In the mornings, she began more and more frequently to allude to the pigeons outside on their kitchen windowsill. They clustered there and cooed, as light emerged on the earth from some unseen source. Frank could hear them as he turned again to face his Santa-beard of shaving cream in the bathroom mirror. His expression was serious.

During the week Frank earned pay as the guy at the information desk of the local branch of Burns & Porter, a corporate super-bookstore whose name possessed such currency in the modern era that to invent a fictional alternative for it seemed hysterically futile. In the stories Frank wrote about someone working for Burns & Porter, the store was always Burns & Porter, never something else. Both in his stories and real-life, people arrived after having seen mention of a particular novel’s title on daytime TV and ordered one or two of those to go, maybe grabbing the famous face magazine Lena worked for off the rack while waiting in line for check-out. Modern fiction gone bad, image reigning supreme, nobody knew anything anymore, thought Frank, coolly returning the look of another customer whose unconscious gaze had affixed on his vintage suspenders.

Work, such as it was at Burns & Porter, consisted mainly of learning to obey managers and the older hands. Another important facet of the job was feigning solicitousness toward every sort of idiot customer. It drove Frank nearly mad; on the page his characters courted ever deepening darkness.

**

This morning they are at the breakfast table that Lena insisted be placed in one corner of the narrow kitchen. Granola crunches between Frank’s teeth, the slices of banana soft and sweet on his tongue. Before breakfasting with Lena, Frank had never been a guy to include banana in his breakfast bowl. Seemed somehow too dainty. But with her around, things are different.

Lena is peering at him, or maybe past him, toward the grated window immediately behind him. She flutters the open section of the Sunday Times, then closes it, letting it rest atop the others in her lap. She takes a two-handed sip from her coffee mug, lowering her head to its steaming mouth.

Then she looks at Frank and asks, “Do you love me?”

Frank sets the spoon back in his breakfast bowl. Her eyes hold his for a moment, desperate with the question, then she seems to recede into herself, gone vague in some interior space.

Frank imagines how he will describe her in the novel he is writing; how her type will become the type that all the young seekers emulate; how his novel will be a smash, resurrecting the pursuit of serious fiction across the nation, undoing years of shame and neglect; how the two of them will jump together into a fountain, like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald; how they will, in this manner, alter history’s irrevocable course; and how, finally, as figments on a page, be granted life eternal.

What Frank says to her now should resonate. He pictures the day awaiting him—the hours in the information booth, followed by a solitary lunch, then the evening before his keyboard, where he will catapult himself once more into empty space, beating back all doubt to bring home the future lives that he and Lena must share.

“Love is funny,” he listens to himself say, “Isn’t it? Just what two people make out of nothing.”

From the sill the pigeons coo.

- Jeff Price is a freelance writer and editor.