short story

Staying

We cling together like droplets of water, crawling up or down glass in order to fuse with similar molecules. We isolate ourselves and shut our eyes to what happens outside our safe haven. We are loyal to one another and to no one else.

When we climbed onto rooftops as children, we saw the reason behind our elders’ warnings not to go up there. The view beyond our narrow streets and teetering buildings was grim. If our own children’s expressions are anything like our own were, the world outside our walls has not improved.

When the rare outsider arrives, we celebrate. It is a low-key celebration, nothing like the City Holidays. We pour coffee and bring out the biscuits covered in chocolate, the ones we save for special occasions, and we ask the newcomer questions. We ask about faraway places, the names of which we often mispronounce. R-Kansas, we are told, is actually Ark-n’-Saw. Mehico, the outsider corrects, is Meksico. New York, he says, hasn’t been New for a dozen dozen years. And York, he adds, is not a place you want to know about. Whatever makes a person’s eyes alive dies when he says this, until we ask about Boss-town, and then he smiles and takes out a digigraph of his niece, who was born there, who is beautiful.

We all host the outsiders when they come. We take turns and try not to be greedy. We sometimes wonder whether the newcomers would prefer to settle in one place while they stay here, but the truth is that while we are all eager to talk to the people from outside, we also don’t trust them, not entirely. It is safer to keep them on their toes, keep them moving. We don’t want them getting too comfortable. It is the rare outsider who receives a permit to settle here, and we don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up. Not ours, not theirs.

City Holidays are magical. Fireworks are shot into the air and the power stays on all night and we break out the cosmetics and paint our faces as if we were Hollywood stars from the old 2D pictures, with lipstick and eyeshadow and cufflinks to match. We dance in the squares, in big circles, holding hands. We stay up until morning and then get together in big prearranged crews and clean up all the garbage our revelry generated.

There is a time for play and a time for order, and we teach our children to recognize the difference. When the thrice-yearly referendum on the state of our City come along, we show the children how to vote and explain why we choose the things we do and try to present a cheerful face even when the opposite result comes through, because that is what democracy is about, after all.

We remember our first votes, just after our fourteenth birthdays, coupled with our first apprenticeship placements and, for many of us, our first budding romances, kindled in the heat of the ironically called baby steps towards adulthood and the bittersweet flavor of responsibility. Our first votes were sweat-stained affairs. The decision, yae/nae for whichever proposition was our first, felt like a life-and-death one, even though no bullet-fueled weapon was being held to our heads, nor was there a threat to our beings should our vote ultimately be cast on the losing side.

There are rumors of people disappearing occasionally, but what society does not include conspiracy theories? We know our government, though. We are our government. And we aren’t thugs. We occasionally get into scraps when heavy drinking is involved, and of course we have a rotating schedule for guard duty and there are some nights when the more desperate among us attempt theft or assault, but murder is not a common crime. Similarly, kidnapping or “disappearing” criminals or, indeed, those who don’t agree with the more powerful among us – this is not a practice we condone. It is, besides, unnecessary. People know when they are not wanted, but it is more often by their family or their spurning lovers or, more tragically, by their resentful children. If people disappear from our City, it is because they have been active, have “disappeared” themselves, have, in short, left.

When the outsiders leave, though, few of us have the desire to go along with them. We remember our early days of rooftop adventures, and we remember the gray barrenness that lay outside our secure City. We’re safe here, and we’re staying.

Unexpected Royalty

“It was not cute,” my roommate said. “I’m not a screamer or anything, but eugh.”

That was the day the large rat made its entrance into our lives. It was an innocuous enough beginning. Nobody, not even my sturdy, stalwart roommate, likes to be faced with a rat as big as a tennis racket is long when going to the garbage room of the apartment building. Seeing them in the subway, running across the tracks and somehow always avoiding the third rail – that’s cute. But having one sit there and stare at you is an entirely different story.

I’m not the kind of guy who thinks of girls as wusses, but I was pretty surprised when my roommate wouldn’t let the subject of the rat go.

“Seriously, Mal, I’m telling you, it was so big, and it was just staring at me. You don’t understand. It had this look…”

“Yeah, okay, but you wipe the asses of old men all day for a living. How is a rat worse?”

She glared. “That’s not all I do and you know it. Look, I know that it’s not exactly sexy, going into geriatrics, but it’s important, okay, like how would you like it if you were eighty and in the hospital and all the nurses kept talking to you like you were four and–”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. You’re too easy to get, you know.”

She swatted me with the kitchen towel and threatened she wouldn’t share her food. The rat was forgotten at least then.

It was my turn to take the garbage out the next week. I pushed the responsibility off by shoving the yuck in the can down again and again with bits of cardboard from the recycling bin (which also needed clearing). When I couldn’t avoid it anymore, I made myself mouth-breathe, tied the bag, and took it down to the absolutely disgusting garbage room.

There are always flies hovering around it, a dark cloud of them buzzing and flying in geometric shapes, over and over again. One night, when I was really high, I speculated that maybe the shapes they made were runes, spells, and that it was flies that kept the earth twirling and going round the sun. The idea stuck with me, unlike most of my stoned babble, and it made me wary of swatting them.

I pushed the garbage room door open and swung the bag back in an arc so I could toss it all the way in without setting foot inside the room. Before I let the bag loose, though, a fat brown rat caught my eye. The bag swung back down and pendulumed a little in my upraised hand. I didn’t really notice. I suppose I kept my hold on it by sheer instinct.

I was mesmerized. This rat – it was positively majestic. It was the Cleopatra of rats. The Henry VIII of rats. The freaking Freddie Mercury of rats. It had a scar across its left eye and one of its protruding front teeth was chipped. Its grey fur was matted but it looked like a coat bought from the Salvation Army, like a vintage delicacy scrounged from the bargain bin. There should have been a soundtrack of a guitar solo going.

It – I have no idea how you tell rat gender – was also slouched sideways, kind of leaning towards one hip. If it had eyebrows, it would only have been raising one. This rat, this cool as a mofo rat, was basically asking me what the hell did I think I was doing, barging into its domain.

There was squeak, the only squeak I’ve ever heard that had a smoker’s rasp to it, and I could swear the intonation was the same as “get the hell out of here,” as spoken by any impatient bartender getting rid of a shoeless customer.

I took the garbage next door and tossed it in their garbage room.

When I got back upstairs, I asked my roommate if she’d thrown the garbage in there with the rat last week.

“What rat?”

“Oh come on. You know which rat.”

“…you’ve seen it?”

“Have I. Have I!”

“So you know,” she breathed.

“Why did you pretend to be disgusted by it?”

“What else could I do? Tell you that the King of All Rats is presiding over our very garbage room? You’d have told me I was insane.”

“I guess. But now I understand. I get it. We have royalty here.”

“Yes. And you know what makes us. Courtiers.”

That- that was just the beginning of our involvement with the rat.

New Publication!

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Watched

I’ve never known what constitutes a garden. It’s something cultivated. Something that needs pruning and sheering . Weeding and seeding and watering. I have always been under the impression that gardens need care but not constant supervision. That they’re planted for the enjoyment of people. Like the rose gardens that some really fancy hotels have. Or for practical use, like a vegetable garden. The kind of thing that hippies live off of.

I was surprised when Nora told me she was moving into her garden.

I hadn’t visited her yet. She’d moved upstate to somewhere with cheap houses and high taxes. The kind of loose collection of residencies that is called a village and that is nestled inside something called a township which is then part of a county. I’m pretty sure we don’t have hamlets in the US. I think that’s just an English thing. But if Nora could have moved to a hamlet, she would have.

She’d hated living in the city. Four years for college, then seven years for her MA and PhD. Until she gave up on her dissertation and moved away. I never understood it. How she could she abandon all that work. Seven years. All those hours in the library. All those late nights agonizing over data. She’d jumped up and down after year five, when the department agreed to fund her for two more years. That’s how much promise they saw in her.
Anyway, I hadn’t heard from Nora in a good six months, since she’d moved away in November. In May, while I was loading up the dishwasher that I’d finally started using, I got this call from her. Her voice was the same. Distracted. I asked her how she was, and she said she was moving out of her house for the summer.

“Coming back to the city, huh? Knew you couldn’t keep away.”

“No,” she said. I can never tell if she knows I’m making a dig at her or not. Probably not. But maybe. She did leave, after all. “No, not at all. I’m just moving outside. The garden needs watching.”

“Why does it need watching? Are your eyeballs going to make it grow faster?” I stood over the hot sink, and my face was still sweaty, and Nora sounded like she’d always sounded, like she was looking for a piece of paper to jot something down on.

“Yes, basically.”

“What, so you have a quantum garden?”

Her laughter had always been kind of horsey, at odds with her small teeth and wide jawline that betrayed nothing equine. She was more cat than anything. She started and stopped things abruptly.When she laughed, like she did then, it was a short neighing sequence followed by sudden silence.

She asked me how I was. I wanted to stop talking about her, so I said, “I’m using the dishwasher now. But you’ve ruined me, I’m still washing the dishes before putting them in there.”

Nora had always been very anti-dishwasher. She sounded less certain now. “Well,” she said. “That’s good. You always wanted to use it.”

I wasn’t going to ask her why she’d called. She would tell me or she wouldn’t, and if she didn’t, I’d be able to invent my own – better – reason.

Seventy Four and Human

Seventy-four years old, the old man preserves his memories. Laboriously, he types them into the computer. This is easier on his hands than a pen and notepaper, but his arthritic fingers still ache with every hard stab to the keyboard.

When the bell rings, he stops. He is only allowed to write for an hour a day. His doctor daughter has forbidden any more. He occasionally wonders whether her medical advice is sound. Maybe she just doesn’t want him to get very far. Scared of what she might find out about him.

The old man never thinks of himself as one. He hears that seventy is the new fifty, and he would agree if he had the full use of his hands. But he has been degenerating since his early sixties and has never felt more tired in his life. He feels ill, not old.

He thinks of what he has written today. He doesn’t have a method, a system of chronology. He writes the memories as they come. Sometimes they are of his wooden toys and childhood friends. Sometimes they are of his mother’s death when he was working as a guard on a train in his late twenties.

Today he wrote about Luba, his first love. They were twelve and shared a birthday. They met on the streets of Boston, where both their families had ended up after fleeing Europe. They liked the same flavor of ice cream and the same music. They had very different opinions on kissing. Luba wanted to. He didn’t. The last time he saw her was when he graduated high school and she came to the ceremony as a drop-out watching some boy she was dating get his diploma.

This is the sort of thing the old man’s daughter doesn’t want to know, he thinks. She doesn’t want to believe he has ever been anything but hers, first her father and now her charge. She takes care of him and is a good girl, but she has never entirely believed he is human.

He hopes she will read his memories when he dies. He hopes she will understand. He hopes she will remember.

The Lady With the Violet Hat

The moisturizer on Lynda’s desk at home is past its expiration date by several hundred months. She bought it thirty years ago and never used it. She discovered that moisturizer was not her cup of tea, but the bottle was pleasing to look at and so she kept it.

Lynda is not a hoarder. She is a collector. She collects various items and keeps them around her in lieu of family photos. Lynda has no family anymore.

The back of the medicine cabinet in Lynda’s apartment goes back deeper than expected. She keeps her safe there. With the family jewels, such as they are.

Kids in the neighborhood call her Lynda with a Y because that’s what she is. Lynda doesn’t begrudge them that. Linda is a popular name in her age bracket. She’s glad she sticks out somehow.

When the lady with the violet hat came to call, Lynda always pretended she was out. Except one time. This one time, Lynda lets her in (that time is in fact right now, this exact moment). It feels momentous, letting the lady with the violet hat in. She is beautiful, and Lynda has the strangest urge to kiss her forehead, but she restrains herself.

The woman in the violet hat has no name. She is as invented as Lynda is. She is a figment of Lynda’s imagination, as Lynda is a figment of mine. But she is important, just like Lynda is important. She is made, the lady with the violet hat, of the sentences that go through Lynda’s head and then disappear. She is the accumulation of all of Lynda’s castoffs.

Lynda makes the woman with the violet hat coffee and they sit together. Lynda waits patiently to hear the lady with the violet hat start talking. She wants to take notes when that happens, but fears it might be rude. She knows just what kind of voice the lady with the violet hat will have. It will be zesty, like an orange.

Goal Oriented

Rest when you’re dead. Carve up those calves, chisel those muscles. Make a sculptor of your will. Your body is the block of marble. The angel just needs to be freed.

Don’t mumble, stand up straight, wear suits. Make a good first impression. Crate your baggage upstairs on your own and leave it there to rot. Leave it in the attic, at the top of the house. Lock the door, swallow the key. Leave the skeletons to decompose. You have thousands of years at your disposal. You can afford to wait.

Sport a pair of sunglasses. Hide your eyes. Leave the sagging skin in bed with the rumpled sheets. Keep the smile in the corners of your mouth. The only acceptable wrinkles when you’re pushing thirty are laugh-lines.

Good Enough

The sponge lying on the floor of the tub is unattractive. It is still relatively new, but its shape is unappealingly squat and it has sooty stains on it, as if someone has been scrubbing rust crumbs off their body.

It is leftover, this sponge, from previous tenants. It is incredibly absorbing, I find, when I get in the shower and begin to use it. Some people would find this disgusting. My roommate would tell me off, like she does when I pee and don’t wash my hands. She is a neat freak, putting ever pin in its place and surrendering her body to the needle over and over again. There are knife scars on the inside of her wrist. She’s exchanged one habit with another when scratching the surface stopped being enough.

She and I have just moved into a new place. We’re getting actual furniture. We listen to music loudly and don’t care about the neighbors. There are children in the apartments all around us and they cry at night. It’s not exactly payback, blasting Led Zeppelin, but it’s close enough to be vindictive somehow.

The windfall that has allowed us to do this comes from my disgusting habits. My frugality knows no bounds. I scrimp and I save for a living. Companies pay me to do this. It’s a handicap that I stumbled through for years until someone told me it was a talent. I get paid nicely now, but I make my roommate pay me back exactly for half of everything. When we move out one day, each of us finding a new home, we will saw our things in half. I can see the gleam in her eyes at that suggestion. She likes playing with knives.

My room is bare of artwork, books, personality of any kind. Like me, it is unadorned. The only items of significance are hidden beneath my bed, in taped-up boxes. The cardboard is old and falling apart, but I wouldn’t let me roommate unpack and repack them when we moved. Their rotting edges remind me that they won’t always stay shut. It’s important to remember that things can burst from their seams.

One day, maybe I’ll open those boxes. And maybe I’ll buy a sponge of my own. But for now, I keep the boxes shut tight, reinforcing the tape and sweeping away the cardboard dust that accumulates under them. And for now, I use the leftover sponge to purify my pores. I shave my legs with my roommate’s old razor. I tie string around my pants instead of a belt. It’s a good enough way to live, for now.

Mayor

Greenlighting the project was easy. The mayor looked over the figures, read the reports, talked to a couple experts and figured that she could approve it. She failed to anticipate the backlash. Streams of letters flowed into her office over the next few weeks. She stopped opening them. Each had enough rancor in it to last a lifetime and she didn’t need to feel like someone other than her boyfriend  was slapping her around.

The boyfriend. He was another bit of uneaten dinner languishing on her plate. She wouldn’t get any dessert until she’d licked the whole thing clean. A lesson learned in early childhood, the mayor applied it to all aspects of her life with equal fervor and taught her children to do the same. The mayor’s boyfriend was a coal-miner, and proud of it. She’s gotten together with him partly for political gain. Nothing screamed one-of-the-people more than a widow and mother of four who also dated what most would call “a common man.” But now that he was leaving bruises on her a couple times a week, she needed to figure out a way to get out.

At least the children were gone for summer camp, up near one of the state’s beautiful lakes. The mayor spent the summer trying to handle the mess she’d made by approving the plans without backing out of them. That would be no good. She couldn’t be seen as weak, caving in at each bit of opposition. No. She would tough it out.

The mayor went to bed on July 23d, her birthday, with a black eye and a squad car guarding her house. She had received several death threats serious enough to worry the police. The morning was far away, she’d kicked her boyfriend out of her house, and she missed her children. She tried to picture them going to sleep in faraway bunk beds, whispering with their new friends, but another image kept intruding: her own body lying mangled in the kitchen, greeting the children when they got back.

Nowism

Sparks fly in a pathetic attempt at fireworks. Jared takes his fingers out of his ears and peers into the cardboard box. Faulty. The cylinders he got for cheap off of Old Man Bombay are all faulty. They’re sputtering quietly as their fuses go out. Jared kicks the box and one of the fireworks whistles and bursts horizontally. It hits a tree and releases a few pathetic bursts of color that melt into the dark ground.
Jared curses. He’s lucky nothing caught on fire or he’d be done for. Prime brush fire area this is. Stupid to try to light the fireworks here. Lucky they didn’t work, he figures. His forehead is damp with the panic of what could have happened. The damage that could have been done.
Jared’s biggest enemy is the subjunctive. Might have been, would have been, might and could be. Lethal expressions as far as Jared is concerned. Past and future are full of them. Only the present, the ever-occurring now, is free. Jared is a strong believer in the now. He tried to start a cult once, called Nowism. It didn’t go very well. None of the women he wanted to bone would join. And what’s the point of a cult if you don’t get to screw everyone’s women, Jared decided.
He occasionally pretends that it had worked out. Pesky imagination, fraternizing with the enemy. Nevertheless, he does this. Imagines that his tent under the overpass is his private domain, that the women and men who follow him have tents set up all around him. They would have chosen this spot because of the traffic noise, shifting and surprising in its rhythms, a perfect metaphor for Nowism. Something could come flipping off the overpass any second, a drunk driver crashing through the barrier. Or there may be a scream ripping through the night as a happy couple shout their joy out the windows on their wedding night. Anything could happen down under the overpass, but the only thing that matters is that it is happening now.
Jared scratches his ear and wonders whether it’s time to head home. Is it time for bed or is it time to go beat the crap out of Old Man Bombay, the skinny heroin addict who’d never set foot in India. Big thoughts for Jared’s big head. His ear is really itching. He takes a nail file out of his pocket and digs in his ear, trying to locate the source of the itch and pry it out. Maybe an insect crawled in there and died in his earwax. The nail file comes out waxy but insectless. A good sign.
It’s too dark to beat up the addict. Jared decides it is time to go home. His tent is always there. It IS, this solid ISness of it a comfort. Jared takes the cardboard box of fireworks to show Old Man Bombay as evidence tomorrow and begins to trudge home through the field.
When the police came to investigate who’d been shooting illegal fireworks in the middle of the Hellers’ field, they found a wide, bony, ravaged body missing a head. It seemed to have been blown off by something. When they found the head a little ways away, it was wearing an expression of surprise on its face, as if it was expecting something else that should have happened.