Robert L. Giron
- May 15, 2021

Issue 95 — Jim Elledge, Jane Hertenstein, Emory Jones, S. M. Parker, Elaine C. Ray, Karen Sagstetter

Jim Elledge

Almost a Parade

Buddy and his lover Adam arrived at 2 pm,

Buddy to set up, Adam for cocktails.

Lin Quinton climbed the stairs at 3:30.

A redhead, he helped out

during Sunday’s beer busts.

At 4:30, Richard Cross—“Mother Cross,”

they called him—traipsed in,

the brace on his leg never a hindrance.

At 6' tall he towered over his lover,

Dean Morris, in tow.

At 4:45, lovers Mike Scarborough

and Glenn Green arrived

followed by over a hundred others.

At Geno’s Hideaway a few blocks

over, Roger Nunez and Allen Guidry

vied for an older man’ cash. Allen won,

tricked with the gent, and though Nunez

made $20 off the man just for looking

hot, he was pissed and took off

for the UpStairs—primed for trouble.

The Cause of Death

Fire, that crazy bastard, left

bodies “fused together in a long

low pile against the windows

and outside walls.” Many burned

clean through to the bone,

finger tips and faces melted.

Firefighters brought bodies

down to the sidewalk

with a snorkel as three priests, who

appeared suddenly on the scene

like genii, gave the dead

“conditional absolution.”

EMTs gurneyed survivors

to ambulances that kept

coming and coming and coming

stirring the thick, noisy dark

with their screaming blue lights.

About the Author

Jim Elledge has two books forthcoming in 2017: Bonfire of the Sodomites, poems about the arson of the UpStairs Lounge, a gay bar in the French Quarter, and The Boys of Fairy Town, a history of gay life in Chicago, 1843-1943. He’s received two Lambda Literary Awards, one for his book-length poem A History of My Tattoo and the other for Who’ Yer Daddy? Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners, which he co-edited with David Groff. He lives in Middlesboro, KY and San Juan, PR.

Jane Hertenstein

Notes

Ordinary Time is a reference to the liturgical calendar. Basically, ordinary time is the period between Pentecost and Advent and the period after Advent through Ash Wednesday. As a child I understood this best because starting with Halloween until New Year’s there was one holiday after another and come January time seemed to slow down until Easter when we usually had a week off.

One other note: Arne-Dag is pronounced Ar-nah D-awg

He heard the whistle. The ferry was about to leave. He was waiting.

Ordinary Time

I. One day

He was waiting by the dock.

Several thoughts competed for his attention. The heavy clouds and thick shadows passing over the water. The ferry slogging through the choppy waves. The fact that spring was late and Easter was early this year. He felt impatient waiting. It was on its way, out there on the gray horizon.

Arne-Dag smiled. Always the pastor, always thinking in metaphors. It was hard to escape.

The hull of the ferry yawned before him as the ramp lowered and car engines started up. A stream of cars exited. Slowly the queue he was in moved forward toward the ship’s cavity. Again it felt like death or another biblical allusion: Jonah in the belly of the whale. He was trying to alight on just the right illustration for next week’s Palm Sunday sermon. Christ triumphant entering the city. He lined up his automobile and parked. A cold wind blew so he stayed inside while other drivers got out to smoke. Palm branches waving. Many in his small parish were somewhere warm this week. They were drenched in short sleeve-sunshine and triumph. The ferry pulled away from the dock.

He scrubbed his face with his hands in an attempt to wake up. It had been a long day and he was in a hurry to get back to the church before his confirmation class showed up in the basement where a pool table and foosball table had been installed. They used to keep colas in the fridge but some of the parents complained (rightly) when their kids began putting on pounds. So, gone were the sugar drinks. Not so good for anyone. He was constantly weighing what was good and not good for his flock.

The ferry’s whistle blew to announce their approach on the other side of the fjord. Darting swiftly, headlights zigzagged on the steep roadway down to the dock. He had a fleeting thought: That’s how accidents happen. He waited with the other drivers in a smog of cigarette smoke and diesel fumes, in a kind of dull twilight for the door to drop.

He followed taillights until they turned off. The leaden clouds were about to release rain and people were scattering. But Arne-Dag kept going. Late afternoon and he could almost hear the lightweight foosball dropping into the socket and the kids jamming on the rods animating the players. The one kid, Magnus, always the loudest. SCORE!!! Arne-Dag, it seemed, was constantly asking him to sit down, to think before speaking. Here he smiled again to himself. To think before screaming—

Arne-Dag screeched to a sudden stop. His breath came out in ragged bursts as he pulled up the parking brake. “Christ!”

Around the bend a man lay in the middle of the road. A woman bent over him sobbing.

Arne-Dag scrambled as best he could for a big man, sliding his belly against the steering wheel, leaving the door open to reach the couple.

“What’s going on here?”

The woman was Asian but answered him in Norwegian. “I don’t know.”

A motorcycle had obviously skidded and was piled up by a snow drift at the side of the roadway. Arne-Dag was fighting to find a connection between all the pieces and people before him. “What is his name?”

“I don’t know.”

He wondered for a second if she was all there. Her black hair billowed in the wind and stuck to her lips and lashes.

“I just got here,” she said.

Arne-Dag looked around. From where? He assumed she’d been with him on the bike, but of course, not; she was wearing only a wool coat with no hat nor gloves. “Where did you come from?” he asked.

“I was out walking, clearing my head. I was walking here beside the road smoking a cigarette.”

Arne-Dag nodded. It was easy enough to see how the accident happened. The cyclist must have rounded the corner and come upon her and swerved to miss her. He tried to think—had he been on the ferry? He quickly dialed for emergency medical services. He supposed the man was unconscious; his cracked helmet was still strapped to his chin.

“Yes. Yes,” he answered into his cell. “Yes. I’ll check.”

Arne-Dag bent down. He now noticed blood seeping out from beneath the rider’s head. He touched his throat and that’s when he realized the driver was dead. There was no pulse.

The woman stared up into his face as he relayed the information. With the words, she lost all control. Arne-Dag threw down the phone to catch her before she walked over the side of the road and tumbled down the ravine. He held her for a long time. He was going to be very late for the confirmation class.

Later, back at the house, after a supper, kept warm by Anna, he was trying to relate the story to her, but nothing made sense and the whole time his wife kept asking, “What if a car had barreled around the corner and taken both of you?”

It had been his thought too, but with so many other things happening it had been hard to prioritize. He had to get the woman to calm down. He had to move his car out of the way. He made her sit in the passenger seat while he scooted off the road and then set up flares. Apparently folks knew the ferry schedule and were not in a hurry to get to the docks just to wait, so it was a good fifteen minutes before another car showed up and then that driver also got out to help. By then Arne-Dag had covered the body with a blanket from the trunk of his car.

Anna gazed at him. He could tell she was scared and afraid to say what was on her mind.

“You could have been killed.”

“Yes. But this time it wasn’t me. It was that young man.”

He steepled his fingers and sighed, looking off into the distance. He suddenly realized his Sunday sermon had been miles from his mind. That for the past three hours he hadn’t thought of it once. He heaved himself up from the table and went into his study. He would be there all night long, until Anna came to retrieve him, sitting in a fog.

II. A few weeks later

There was a knock on the door.

She wasn’t expecting company and cautiously peeked through the curtain to ascertain the caller. It was the big man from a few weeks ago. She stepped back lest he see her.

In the space of her small kitchen her heart beat loudly. She was almost afraid he might hear her standing behind the door. Icicles dripped into a bank of snow beneath the eaves. Every once in a while one broke off and impaled itself into the hillock. How did he know where she lived?

Ester hesitated. Newspapers covered the couch and the ash tray on the low coffee table was overflowing with cigarette butts. She knew the air was stale as she hadn’t opened the door since she had run in after the accident. Quickly she lit a scented candle and then opened the door.

A rush of chilled air and sunshine poured into the room.

“Hallo,” he offered and Ester nodded in greeting, squinting in the slab of light like some kind of gnome used to living underground. “Hei,” she answered.

“I have driven past here many times and wondered— I’m sorry my name is Arne-Dag. I am a pastor and many times I have driven past here. You see I visit a gentleman from our congregation who is now bedridden. Every other Monday I come out and serve him Holy Communion.” Arne-Dag stopped, he realized he was rambling.

“How did you—”

“I thought since you were obviously on foot, out for a walk, that you must live nearby and this is the only house along that stretch of road.” He was careful not to mention the accident. It had been haunting him since that night.

“And I wondered how you were holding up.”

Ester opened the door wider. “Come in, please.” She pointed with her yellow-nicotine finger. “Would you like to sit down?”

“Thank you.” Arne-Dag moved a newspaper and folded it up. He laid it on the coffee table cluttered with empty glasses and sprinkled with ash.

“I have water or fruit juice, if you are interested,” the woman mentioned.

“No thank you.” Bits and pieces of sunlight wavered in between cracks in the curtains. Other than that the room was dim. “Very cozy.”

“It is just me.”

“I don’t want to take up too much of your time.” From a quick glance he fully understood that the lonely woman before him had nothing else but time. “So forgive me for stopping in without first calling.”

“I rarely have guests.” She sat across from Arne-Dag in a red upholstered chair that had been her father’s when he was alive. She sank into the cushion. “What is it you came here for?”

Actually he was unsure. After the accident, after emergency services had taken away the body and taken both his and the woman’s report, he had turned and she was gone. He’d never had a chance to get her full name.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“Your name?”

“My name is Ester Haug. My father was Oscar Haug.”

Arne-Dag sat up. “I’ve heard that name was he—”

“Yes, he was the pastor at Immanuel some years ago.”

“And you are his daughter.” He said it not as a question but rather as a statement. Still Ester seemed to take offense. He went on quickly, “I only mean I knew the man. Just after being ordained, the Bishop was in Stavanger, and Rev. Haug and I met at a conference. I believe he died not long after the meeting.”

“Perhaps. I’m not sure of what conference you are talking about. There were so many.”

“I’m sure.” Then he chuckled, thinking of course, altogether way too many.

“My parents adopted me when they were missionaries in Seoul.”

Outside a car passed, the tires making sizzle noises on the wet asphalt. Spring was coming and melting snow rivuleted, following gravity, down the hillside and eventually into the fjord below. “I’m surprised we never met,” Arne-Dag mused.

“As a teenager I wasn’t active. My father and mother were liberal and let me choose if I wished to participate in the church.” Ester now lifted her head. “I chose to go out with boyfriends and ride in their boats.”

For a split second Arne-Dag envisioned Magnus. It was discovered that he’d been hiding bottles of beer under the couch in the youth activities room, the place nicknamed The Cave because of the blacklights and posters on the walls. Magnus was required to complete twenty-five hours of service at the church, helping out cleaning and taking out the trash.

“Many of the youth begin their Christian life as renegades,” Arne-Dag spoke as if narrating a film, “but eventually they come back. Do you have children?” he asked Ester.

“A daughter, but she wants nothing to do with me.”

Arne-Dag nodded and waited.

He started up. “After the accident, you left and I didn’t get a chance to,” he paused, and Ester again seemed tense. Arne-Dag finished, “To speak with you.”

Ester looked down at her hands resting on her knees. “I was scared.”

He again scanned the room where they sat. He had a notion that Ester might be an alcoholic. The place had that look he’d come to recognize from visitations to the elderly and shut-ins, of quiet desperation, of terrible pain and secrets.

“Ester I will tell you why I’m here. I wanted to talk to you about the accident.”

Ester would not look at him. He waited.

“It should have been me dead on that road.”

“No, Ester. You are a child of God.”

“The Haugs were good people, but. . . .” She lapsed into silence.

Arne-Dag suspected it hadn’t been easy for her as a child, an obvious immigrant. Things were much different these days. Members of his church had adopted children from all over the world. Mali, places in South America. The Kreggs have the cutest daughter whom they adopted from Gabon.

“I dropped out of school at age fifteen. That’s when I had my daughter.”

The block of sunlight had moved, climbed the wall. The ferry would leave from the dock below in fifteen minutes. After that it would be one hour before the next boat. Arne-Dag got up, still wearing his coat, and went out to the car. He returned a moment later carrying a box. “The elements,” he said.

He unpacked the chalice and the wine. The bread was kept in a Zip-loc. He unfolded his stole, hand-embroidered by Anna when he was ordained. It was his travel vestment, and draped it around his neck. He laid out the bread on top of the newspaper and poured the wine into the cup. He handed her a piece of the bread.

“Ester, this is Christ’s body broken for you, do this in remembrance of me.”

She held the bread. The ferry was leaving if it hadn’t left already.

Ester raised the spongy square to her mouth and kept it there before parting her lips. Little by little she pushed it inside. It stayed on her tongue going nowhere until she tilted her head back as if to ingest a pill and swallowed. Tears caught in her throat.

“Ester this is Christ’s blood spilt for you.”

She took the cup by the stem. Her hand was shaking.

“Do this in remembrance of me,” Arne-Dag intoned.

She thought of her father and how he used to hold the chalice up with the sun behind him streaming in through the colored panes of glass, casting rainbows on the carpeted altar. This is how she remembered him, standing inside a ring of purple, gold, and reds.

Her voice quivered. “Thank you. I feel much better.” Then, after a few moments. “I’m afraid you’ve missed the ferry.”

“No problem. May I come again and offer you Holy Communion?”

Ester nodded. The room was completely shrouded, the sun extinguished behind the giant fir tree outside her door.

III. About a month after that

The next time he visited he brought along Jan-Magnus or Magnus as everyone called him. The teen was almost done with his extra hours at the church and after confirmation, scheduled for the last Sunday of the month, Arne-Dag expected to see way less of him. It seemed more and more that confirmation was something the youth did to please the parent.

“Where are we going?” Magnus broke into Arne-Dag’s thoughts.

“To visit old Mr. Haroldsson.”

Magnus rolled his eyes.

“Let’s just say you are my buddy today to run some errands.”

“I don’t want to be late for The Cave tonight. Is Ingrid coming?”

Ingrid was Arne-Dag’s youngest daughter. He hesitated before replying, “I believe she is planning on it.”

“Good.”

“Why?”

“Nothing. We’re all going out this weekend to the Skate Hall. Immanuel is bringing in an American skateboard master for an exhibition.”

“Yes, Ingrid told me about it this morning. I guess the whole bunch is going.”

“I don’t like the Skate Hall. I used to go all the time. Then they started making me wear a helmet.”

“I thought it was required.”

“Yeah, but only the one guy seemed to care and then all of a sudden, the staff, made a big deal. So I stopped going.”

“I heard you were very good.”

“Not so much anymore. I free skate sometimes down by the waterfront, along the wall.”

“The wall by the library.”

“No. I like the steps at the library. But I got kicked off of riding down those.”

“You get kicked out a lot.”

“So now I skate along the waterfront, along the breakwall.”

Arne-Dag by reflex was about to say be careful when he got to the bend in the road. As they passed he said, “Two months ago I drove by here and there was an accident. A motorcyclist was killed.”

“God!”

“He hit his head.”

“Was he wearing a helmet?”

“Yeah.” Arne-Dag got where this conversation was going.

Magnus turned to look out the window, as if to say he’d made his point.

Yet, what Arne-Dag took away was that bad things happen to good people. Theological books are full of such stuff. For Confirmation Sunday he was in fact devising a homily around this concept, to give the young members something to chew on. Sadly, he knew the lesson would be lost on this particular group of confirmees. Best to cast his net into other waters and come up with something else for them.

Magnus continued staring out the window. “My dad is coming into town for my confirmation.”

Arne-Dag waited. He suspected there was more.

“He’s bringing his Finnish girlfriend.”

“Do you have plans for the summer?” Arne-Dag asked.

“I guess so. Dad’s invited me to Oslo.”

“My wife has a cottage on the island where her mother grew up.”

“Yes, Ingrid told me. She says she goes every summer. That she likes to go out on the boat.”

Arne-Dag slowed as they passed Ester’s bungalow. Ester had been doing better. Twice a week she got picked up and brought down into Sandnes for AA meetings. She’d earned a month pin and showed it off to Arne-Dag the last time he’d been to her house to serve communion. It was enough. The best that could come from such a tragedy.

“I’d like to stop here on the way back. You will help me serve communion,” he said by way of an order.

“What a dump,” Magnus commented on Ester’s ramshackle house.

He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, on why he disliked the boy so much. Not really a boy, more a young man with the faint outline of a mustache above his upper lip.

“Not everyone has the good things you’ve grown accustomed to.”

Magnus screwed up his forehead. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that some people have it harder than others.”

“Yeah. So? I know that.”

“God forbid that someone try to tell you something,” Arne-Dag blurted. Then, in a way backtracking, “Good thing your head is so hard. Next time you fall, that is.”

“I’ve fallen plenty of times. On my head, too.” He crossed his arms, looking angry. “I don’t know why I’m always getting into trouble.”

Arne-Dag sighed. He had seriously been contemplating letting the junior pastor Tomas Kregg take over confirmation next fall. He was tired of the long Norwegian winter. At the coast it either snowed or rained eight months of the year and half of that time in near darkness. He hardly ever allowed himself to dwell on these bleak thoughts. He’d had a grandfather that had killed himself while in seminary. Though he suspected that mental as well as spiritual depression contributed to his grandfather’s rash action, and that nothing justified one taking his own life, yet he understood such desperation. The past couple of years he had seen the flitting edge of acedia lapping at his soul and at times he was overwhelmed by waves of despair, where he asked himself, What’s the use?

Like right now, with Jan Magnus. What would knock some sense into his thick skull?

“So you will go back with your father?”

Magnus, still with his arms shielding him. “I didn’t say that.”

Wearily. “Sorry—”

“Jesus!” Magnus just as well shouted.

“I said—”

“No one ever listens.”

Taking a deep breath. “What is it you want to say?”

Arne-Dag glanced over. Tears were trebling down the boy’s face, dripping into his lap. Arne-Dag pulled over. They were high up and on the east side of the zigzagging road, on the side constantly in shadow where the snow nearly covered the fir trees, where the snow stayed until the middle of July, until well after the solstice. It wasn’t really a good place to pull over.

They sat in the car for a long while before Arne-Dag spoke. “It’s shit, isn’t it?“ He looked about at the purpling shadows and blanketed landscape.

The boy sniffed and shrugged. “I guess.”

“The young man who died,” Arne-Dag began, referring to the motorcyclist. “Maybe only twenty-three, twenty-four. He was a student at the university. He had his whole life ahead of him, and in a moment it disappeared.”

Wind blew and swept a dusting of snow across the asphalt roadway.

Arne-Dag cleared his throat. “We have to get going.” He shifted back into drive, but still remained at the side of the road, with his foot on the brake. “But first I wanted to say, that if you want, you are welcome to join us in August at the cottage.”

Magnus nodded and Arne-Dag pulled out. He noticed as they neared old Mr. Haroldsson’s in the window box on the south wall of the house that a row of yellow daffodils swayed in the evening breeze. A harbinger of things to come.

IV. Then a few years later

They were having glorious weather. The summer before had been horrible and rainy, with temperatures rarely making it above 15̊ºC. So far only two of the kids had managed to make it to the cottage for their holiday as their oldest girl was in America studying and their son was in Madagascar, posted to his first foreign missions. Ingrid, after having graduated from high school, was finishing up her first year at nursing college. She’d been at the cottage for a whole month and Magnus was expected for the last two weeks, as was now his routine. He and Ingrid had settled on waiting until she was done with her training before getting married.

Sometimes Arne-Dag waxed wistful, wishing the kids could be around more. All those years of raising them, getting them confirmed and through high school and then—poof—time slips away.

On the island Arne-Dag laid out on top of the boulders warmed by the sun. He moved his mat this way and that in order to get comfortable. Even though he went to bed exhausted each night, he was having trouble sleeping. The first hour he waited for Anna to come to bed and when she climbed in beside him (the rickety bed creaking beneath their combined weight) he couldn’t fall asleep with her next to him. Her presence seemed intrusive, so he’d get up and move to the couch in the living room where he listened to the waves wash the shore in the distance. He’d lay there holding his stomach.

For the first time as an adult he was losing weight. Everyone said how good he looked. Finally he had cheek bones! But he wasn’t feeling the best. After every meal he was experiencing tummy trouble, severe gastritis.

Along around 5 a.m. when the sun was peeking over the horizon he’d get up and make some coffee. Ingrid and Magnus were due to drive out to the island using the new tunnel. New in the sense that it hadn’t been there when his mother was growing up or when he visited the island as a lad for holidays. The convenience made him happy and sad because all at once it reminded him that things change. People come and go.

That past spring Mr. Haroldsson had passed away. The church had hired Ester last fall to come in three days a week to clean. She drove perilously slow down the mountain, all the while cars behind her honking, in a hurry to make the ferry.

Arne-Dag gazed out the big living room window out at the sea. Already a flock of noisy gulls were squawking as they followed a trawler.

“Anna—they’re here!”

The kids pulled in right at dinnertime. Arne-Dag was at the grill ruining a cod fillet. He told Anna to bake it but she’d have none of his grousing. He better pull out some hot dogs just in case this whole thing turned into a debacle. “Hei!” He greeted Ingrid and Magnus as they climbed out of her rusty SAAB. She bounced over and planted a kiss on her father’s cheek. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but the gesture almost brought him to tears. He hugged both she and Magnus.

After dinner on the back patio, they sat around in pale sunlight with a bottle of wine made from berries grown on the island and fermented. The sweet liquor coated his lips, and even with the film of sleeplessness blunting the sensation, he felt flooded. Swept along by a current of goodness is the only way he could describe it.

Later all four of them took a walk along the pebble beach. He got caught up with what Elin was doing in the USA. Out on the island there was no WiFi so Ingrid brought the latest news. She was seeing a boy.

Arne-Dag’s stomach did a somersault. Nerves, he imagined, and not just the burnt fish. He didn’t know if he could manage having a child living so far away.

They returned to the cottage for ice cream; Arne-Dag didn’t feel up to any and said he was going to bed early.

The next day he didn’t feel any better. After a few more days of intense pain, Ingrid drove him into the mainland to a clinic. From there he was referred to a specialist for tests. A decision was made to cut the vacation short. At the hospital in Stavanger he Skypped Elin. Her pretty fresh face appeared on his screen. “Hei!”

“Dad are you alright?” she asked.

“We’ll know soon.” Concern riddled her brow. “I’m sure everything will be okay. What’s going on with you?”

“Ingrid told you, I guess. He’s really nice.”

The doctor came out to the waiting room and was signaling for him to follow. “I’ve got to go, but will write later. “Love you!”

Arne-Dag barely had time to sit down before the doctor said, “I’ve taken the liberty of calling Anna. She’ll be here momentarily.”

“I see,” said Arne-Dag soberly. He didn’t see. He didn’t understand. What was happening? Suddenly he felt as if he were still Skypping, the scope of his life the size of his tiny laptop screen. He didn’t want to see beyond the borders, only what was right before him. Anna walked into the room, flushed as if she’d been rushing about.

“Thank you for coming,” the doctor said, half-rising. “Have a seat.”

Arne-Dag drew in his breath loudly. Here it comes, he thought. Anna grasped Arne-Dag’s hand. “We will fight this,” is all he said.

V. A matter of months

Advent was approaching.

The treatments were going as good as could be expected. He felt like a fish on the grill, his skin and insides scorched by the radiation. After each session he threw up and went down a kilo. He lived in sweat pants now too big and felted house slippers. Some days he never left the parsonage. Ester would run over from the church with his mail. While she was there she’d tidy up around his bedside, where he liked everything handy.

“Tssk,” she muttered. “Like a rat’s nest.” She moved a stack of commentaries back onto the bookshelf.

“I was reading those.” She moved them back with a huff.

“You don’t have to do this.”

She glared at him, her hands on her hips, elbows akimbo. “Pastor! You cannot be reading three books at one time.”

“Did you see bookmarks in all three?”

“Yes.”

“Then I was indeed reading all of them at the same time. I’m trying to come up with just the right analogy for next week’s advent sermon.” The junior pastor had been stepping in until Arne-Dag felt better, but for the last Sunday in Advent, Arne-Dag had a homily in mind. He was searching, though, between the three texts for a certain image.

Truth be told he was losing words. A side-effect of the radiation he supposed, but it struck fear into his core. How could he minister without the appropriate word? He could see it; sometimes in the middle of a sentence he’d stop and slice his hand through the air. Or he’d drop his pen and clasp his hands together in an effort to squeeze a thought out.

The latest news from the doctor was both good and bad together, like a fallow field holding the promise of a new crop—if only it were planted and cultivated. He worked very hard to give the appearance that he’d be here next spring.

Again to Ester, “So please I need those books back. Right here.” He swept a pile of papers onto the floor. Damn! “Okay leave those there and bring me my lap table. I’ve got to get the sermon done.”

Ester backed away.

He wasn’t sure—had he barked at her? “I’m sorry,” he said anyway. He felt so confused and jumbled up inside. “Anything else?” he asked.

“Sir?”

“I’m going to have to be going.”

Her eyes narrowed.

Ester reached for her stocking cap and scarf, and handed him his ringing cell phone.

He took it; still not sure of what just happened. “Hello! Anna, fine, fine.” He nodded at Ester and whispered in her direction. “Thank you.”

Long after Ester had left he was flipping between the three volumes before him, spread out on the duvet. There was something out there on the horizon of his mind, like the colored curtains of the Northern Lights, eerily fluttering back and forth. Just as he would reach out to grasp the hem, it parted, flew away. He lay back in the bed. Yesterday—or was it the day before, possibly last week—he’d gone to the toilet and couldn’t get up. Anna had called Ester to come over. Picture it! These two women lifting him! He actually didn’t want to relive it. It frightened him. So since then he’d been holding his bladder and now his kidneys hurt. That whole area down there was painful to the touch. Again he batted his hand in front of his eyes.

Anna came into the room and sat on the side of the bed. “How’s it going?” she asked.

He sighed, letting silence creep in between them.

“What are you thinking?”

He didn’t know. There were so many things.

He remembered going out to his mother’s cottage as a boy. Riding at the front of the ferry, salt sea spray in his hair, stiffening it like a helmet. There was on the island a collection of rocks, old as the earth, and on these rocks ancient writing, runes. The state department of conservation had been out and discussed with the family how to preserve the features, but back when he was a boy he simply played around on them, imagining himself a Viking pirate come to pillage his mother’s larder, steal her berry wine. He laughed aloud and Anna held his hand.

She crawled into the bed beside him. The books poking into her side, her body bending back pages.

“Take care!” He screamed, but the words only came out in airy puffs.

He closed his eyes and rounded a curve in the road. It was familiar and yet he couldn’t place it. Damn his memory. This is exactly what he was talking about. There one minute and gone the next. Frustratingly out of reach. He took a calming breath. It would come to him.

He saw an Asian woman bending over a body in the middle of the road.

Arne-Dag sat up, startled. Anna placed her hand on his chest and he returned to his refuge of pillows.

The woman stood up, the most horrific look on her face, her coat smudged with blood. He knew she was guilty, had somehow been responsible. He cried out.

“My darling!”

Arne-Dag was overwhelmed and hid his tear-lined face behind his big hands. He had told the policeman that day, after the emergency medical team had arrived on the scene that he and the woman had come upon the body. Skid marks, the officials later determined, were consistent with a motorcycle going out of control, possibly at high speed. Arne-Dag didn’t know why he’d lied.

“We must hurry,” he whispered to Anna.

She cleared her throat. “Yes?”

“Church. Communion.” He parsed the words. “I have to serve.”

Always they sang—in his head he could hear the tune. When our hearts are wintry / grieving or in pain . . . Love is come again / like wheat arising green. It was an old song. They sang it while waiting for spring, during the time of Lent. At the old wooden kirke in the center of the island, where the wind and sand had scraped the land bare and there was only exposed rock. Where in the cracks long grass, green moss, and yellow bracken pushed up.

He heard the whistle blow. The teakettle in the kitchen.

Ingrid and Magnus were coming, Anna told him. Also Elin. Their son couldn’t make it from Madagascar. Sadly they’d have to celebrate Christmas without him.

The whistle continued to shriek.

The ferry was about to leave. He was waiting.

About the Author

Jane Hertenstein is the author of numerous short stories and flash. Her work has been

included in Hunger Mountain, Word Riot, Flashquake, and Rosebud as well as earning an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train. Her literary interests are eclectic, evident in the titles she has published: Beyond Paradise (YA), Orphan Girl (non-fiction), Home Is Where We Live (children—s picture book), and a recent ebook Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir. She lives in Chicago; she blogs at Memoirous (memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/).

Emory Jones

Campfire

It is done—

From hemlock shavings

Come wisps of white smoke,

A puff of orange,

Glowing,

Growing,

Curling

Around the kindling.

Sitting now

With our boots

To the woodsmoke,

We agree

Those little gas-fed backpacker stoves

May be ecologically correct,

But they cannot begin to match

The crackling ambiance

Of a good old-fashioned

Campfire.

What is it

That binds us so tightly

To woodsmoke?

The spark of some

Primordial memory,

The gene that reminds us

How dreadful it was

When the dark was never light enough

At the back

Of the cave?

Bones Die Hard

They killed them in the shower rooms,

Gassed them with Zyklon-B

Through a grate in the ceiling

At Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Treblinka—

When they opened the metal doors,

They found them in a naked pyramid.

Sonderkommando pulled them out,

Piled them up, and put them in ovens—

The crematoriums smoked night and day

With clouds of souls escaping toward heaven

Leaving their bones,

Skulls in the ashes.

The ash still floats down like ghosts,

Settles on our shoulders

As we remember

Bones die hard.

About the Author:

Dr. Emory D. Jones is a retired English teacher and past president of the Mississippi Poetry Society, Inc. He has over two hundred and thirty-five publishing credits including publication in such journals as Voices International, The White Rock Review, Free Xpressions Magazine, The Storyteller, Pasques Petals, The Pink Chameleon, and Encore: Journal of the NFSPS. He lives in Iuka, Mississippi, with his wife, Glenda.

S. M. Parker

Cuticles

My nails don’t break

they grow on an on

compiling the proteins

of my life story

into dull ovals

My loose left index

is from when it attempted

to rip off my hand as I reached

for the final touchdown

in my 6th grade gym class

but when I fumbled the catch

and watched the blood drip

on my maroon shorts

I realized mother was right

Girls can’t be on the football team

The putrid yellow tips

on my left hand reign

from when they clawed

down my throat to push

the emergency evacuation button

to empty myself into a smaller person

my mother could love

The divot on my right pinkie

is from all times it races across my canine

waiting for the moment

I will succumb

and reach for control of my life

in the back of my throat.

Seeds of Doubt

I heard that you are a mortar

and I am a pestle

at night we come together

make cardamom

cumin

chamomile

cinnamon

clove

dust it on the earth after fresh rain

and grow birds of paradise

I think we are broken;

We love either too hard

or too soft

Too fast

or too slow

Too often

or too seldom

We make ashes

and ashes

dust

and dust.

you spill your shame in me

the seed takes root

it oozes out of me when I can’t claw it out

a dying bird choking on placenta

its eyes white

throat gurgling for attention

with its feathers nonexistent

you tell me to throw it down the trash chute

throw it down the Winooski river

throw it down on the cracked tile

and grind it to dust with the palm I hold it in.

I Want To Stop Talking but My Father Taught Me English Through Metaphors

The need for silence to trample the room

is suffocating.

Elephants carry grudges

they destroyed a town because one of their trains

murdered one of their babies.

I am an elephant.

Not the one who tramples

but the one who had no concept

of looking both ways before crossing the railroad tracks.

Rotted Roots

My love made me sterile,

al pedo como teta de monja,

I hate my punani.

My womb is a cactus planted in a rainforest

it screams in desperation

I reach in and uproot it, leave it on the table.

Seabreeze will be salty, Seabreeze will stay bitter.

Soaking walls trap me here

under a dirty skylight:

Evolved like the dodo bird

cerrado como culo de muñeca.

I will pray that I get a job abroad

so I can leave him behind with no guilt.

I want to see the streets of Tokyo,

chords of black road

dotted with silver gecko tails.

The smoke from the burnt rubber

envelops you in thick cloud

that agitates the eyes

and fills the lungs.

Stank from the burnt rubber

dominates your nostrils

the taste of douchebag drifters

will never leave the tongue.

Vin Diesel would have done better in Tokyo.

Vin Diesel was terrible in Tokyo.

I’m doing terrible here

About the Author:

S. M. Parker studied creative media at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, which has allowed the study of poetry, fiction and art. Parker is currently working on fantasy novels, oil paintings, and applying to grad school.

Elaine C. Ray

Winner of the 2016 Gival Press Short Story Award

Nominations:

2017 Pushcart Prize

2017 Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers

2017 The O. Henry Prize

Praise for Pidgin:

“In fewer than twenty pages, Pidgin sketches a world of its narrator of color’s post-colonial migration, political activism, and imprisonment within the choices offered him by history. At the same time, it’s a narrative that seems shaped by mysteries that transcend and yet throw into sharp relief its political moment, the chief one being the brilliant voice of its narrator, who is at once mercilessly exposed and utterly enigmatic. Elaine Ray is a writer who plays by her own rules, and is a writer to watch.”

—Thomas H. McNeely, contest judge and author of Ghost Horse

Pidgin

Our youngest daughter, 10-year-old Desiree, comes into the bedroom, urinal in hand. “Good morning, Daddy!” She smiles and lands a kiss on my forehead. She is wearing a black leotard and pale pink tights. It must be Saturday.

I offer her no pleasantries. The occasion does not call for it. She helps me sit up; waits patiently while my shaky hands undo my fly. Then, without fanfare, she scoops my privates into the urinal. She’s oblivious to the fact that she has no business doing this. She’s oblivious to the fact that the metal is cold against my manhood. Her eyes are on the urinal, thus my penis, but she is not really looking, her mind is someplace far, with those imaginary friends she consorts with. She’s humming. Some lighthearted show tune.

I fix my eyes on the yard outside the bedroom window. Green leaves are beginning to poke out of the branches of the apple tree. Soon scoundrels will be jumping the fence to snag the fruit. Edith, my wife, will tell them to come to the front door; that she’ll give them as many apples as they want. That way no one gets hurt.

“If they break their necks, more pies for us,” I’ll say.

“You don’t mean that,” Edith will say.

I do, but then I’m not sure who would bake those pies if we had more apples. Edith is no cook. The only one of my daughters who has shown any interest in cooking is this one—Desiree. But interest is one thing; ability another.

I relieve my bladder.

“All done?” Desiree chirps. She pulls the urinal away, letting my privates flop unceremoniously.

“Where is your mother?” I ask, my voice raspy with sleep.

“Kitchen. She’s making waffles for Rita Jean and I before we go to ballet class,” she says, fidgeting excitedly. I worry that she is going to spill the contents of the urinal on me.

“‘Me,’ not ’I,’” I say.

“Rita Jean and me,” she says, dutifully, but with a slight roll of the eyes. My children are accustomed to me correcting their English.

“You should learn to make breakfast,” I say.

“Mommy says she will teach me once we get a new stove,” Desiree says as she takes her leave from the bedroom, the urinal sloshing. I hear the toilet flush and her stockinged feet bounding down the stairs. She is still humming.

I readjust myself into my pajamas.

I have asked Edith repeatedly not to send our daughters to do this.

“There’s no dignity in peeing your pants,” she says, reminding me that I am the one who fired the nurse who took care of this sort of thing.

Marsha, our eldest daughter, is 15. I assume she is still asleep. When Edith sends her to help me take care of my business, she knocks first. And only when I answer does she open the door. She asks if I need help walking to the bathroom. Then she waits patiently outside the closed bathroom door until I am finished or ask for assistance.

“Is there anything you need? The newspaper?” Marsha asks as she helps me back to the bed.

Twelve-year-old, Diane, the middle child, tells her mother she wants no part of this bathroom business.

“You do it,” she says. “He’s your husband.”

She is my favorite.

I can smell bacon burning. My stomach growls.

Edith, as I mentioned, is not a cook. She once got hired as a baker for a white family in Philadelphia, her hometown. It didn’t take long, however, for her lack of skill to become apparent. I can just picture her standing in the center of a huge, fancy kitchen, flour dusting her face, arms and hair, producing bread that wouldn’t rise, cakes that fell flat, and a pie overflowing with cherries that still had their pits.

To Edith, who tells this story often, it’s meant to demonstrate to the children the lengths she had to go to pay her way through college. The man of the household fired her, but gave her money for her school fees when he found out why she had taken a job she was not qualified for.

“It sounds like something Lucy would do,” Desiree says.

Lucy is Lucille Ball, my youngest daughter’s favorite TV character and also the name of her longstanding imaginary friend.

“Only my friend Luci spells hers with an ’i’ at the end,” Desiree informs anyone who will listen. It does not phase her that most people, including Edith and especially our other daughters, have judged her too old for pretend companions.

It is difficult not to be a superstitious man.

Lucille is the name of my first wife.

***

I grew up in Barbados. My mother spent every cent she had to send me to an Anglican school, where they flogged us for speaking any kind of slang or dialect.

Nevertheless, that formal education served me well. I scored high enough on my school examinations to earn a scholarship to secondary school. Still, the opportunities for someone poor and so purely black to attend university back then were slim to none. At 17, I got a job working as an apprentice to a printer and then took my skills to Bermuda, where I worked in the composing room for the Colonial Gazette.

I was happy to have a job, any job, but the workers there were not so grateful. They complained about everything: the noxious fumes, inadequate ventilation and the dangerous machinery. The newspaper’s owners were unsympathetic. If we didn’t like working for hours with no breaks, there were plenty of others who would. I didn’t want to be labeled a scab, but I was no rabble-rouser. I set my sights on America. It would have been an embarrassment to go back home.

I landed in New York from Bermuda in my mid 20s filled with the strong scent of the sea and an even stronger sense of myself. Speaking the King’s English set me apart from the average American Negro, and being from Barbados gave me an in with the West Indians in the city. No, the streets weren’t paved with gold, and I was still a black man in a white man’s land. But I had made a vow to my mother that I would make her proud, and I was determined to make good on that promise.

My plan was to land a job at one of those big Negro newspapers. But first I had to put in some time with Oliver and Olivia Burns, a couple with ties to the printer I had worked for back home. Mr. and Mrs. Burns owned an establishment that printed invitations, birth announcements and funeral programs. They had clients who fell into three categories: The well-heeled customers they received in the front parlor of their shop with the curtains open— most of them were white or Negroes who could pass for white, like the Burnses themselves. In the second tier were those who were welcomed in the shop, but with the curtains drawn. They were mostly prominent, but browner-skinned Negroes. At the bottom rung of the Burnses’ pecking order were those who brought in most of the money. They tended toward the darkest hues, were working class or poor, and were not welcomed in the shop at all. Those are the ones I was hired to call on.

That’s how I met Lucille Braithwaite, an enterprising Trinidadian who had worked her way into a comfortable living in the ten or so years that she’d been in New York. By night, she toiled in a government factory in Tarrytown. By day and on weekends, she made extra money doing hair, managing a rooming house and hosting gatherings — rent parties, recitals and receptions— in the upstairs parlor of her Harlem brownstone. She was known to pack a shotgun, lest anyone bring trouble or think about coming between her and her money. She was unmarried and had no children, but kept a parrot named Scarlet whose first language was Pidgin English.

Scarlet was a master of impersonation, picking up accents, inflections and languages with impressive precision.

“Who did you say sent, you?” Lucille asked the day I knocked on her door. At first glance it was hard to tell who was talking: the woman or the bird that stared from atop her head. Both gave me the once over.

“Mr. and Mrs. Burns. You wanted to order some leaflets?” I tipped my hat—a straw cross between a pith helmet and a fedora. The bird snatched it.

“Don’t be rude, Scarlet,” Lucille reprimanded, a touch of amusement around her eyes. She opened the door wider and handed my hat back.

Had it not been for Scarlet’s antics, Lucille, whose hair was wrapped in a brightly colored scarf, would have looked like she was wearing a p