Jean-Gérald Charbonneau
 

Simon was driving westward on Mack Avenue when in the vacant lot on the corner of Chene Street he saw a golden ring-necked pheasant.  Now, the greater metropolitan Detroit area was not without a thriving fauna: deer on Belle Isle, peacocks by the Fisher Mansion, brown rabbits in Grosse Pointe, packs of mangled wild dogs on the East side, transient Canada geese in the fall, and raccoons and squirrels and possums and rats in every neighborhood.  But golden ring-necked pheasants?  Simon turned the car around, parked, and hopped out with his camera.
    You come from somewhere on the continent and you’re lucky enough to attend a very good university in another part of the continent and then you’re blessed by the gods and fall in love with a woman who comes from, of all places on the entire continent, Detroit. The gods’ sense of irony is warped.
    The pheasant ran into a bush and remained there.
    The vacant lot, roughly half the size of a football field, was covered with tufts of tall grass and bushes, all of them strewn with scraps of paper, empty pop bottles, rusty beer cans, condoms, and whatnot.  A lone telephone pole stood in the middle of this no man’s land of detritus.  On the lot’s periphery were half-demolished, partly burnt-down buildings with windows long ago smashed, some with collapsed roofs, most with circles painted on them by the city authorities, brown, yellow, blue, gray, depending on the stage of their decrepitude, like scapegoats wearing an infamous mark.
    If Detroit were a human being, it would be a fifty-something man with a three-day beard in Salvation Army clothes, sitting on the steps of a derelict hotel, drinking from a can buried in a paper bag, smoking a cigarette bummed at the bus depot earlier in the day.
    I first saw her at a friend’s party.  She was sitting on a sofa in a corner of the living room with her jaw resting in the palm of her hand, her head tilted in an awkward way.  But she struck me as being most graceful, like an exotic bird perched on a branch.  She had auburn shoulder-length hair, eyes that slanted downward a bit, a small, pointy nose, and a lower lip slightly swelled up in a pout.  This composition gave her an air of indolence that proved to be misleading, as she turned out to be very dynamic.
    Simon was a freelance photographer, often selling the fruits of his work to the Free Press and the Detroit News and other publications, and always he carried at least one camera in his car. 
    It was impossible to shoot the pheasant in that bush, so he threw a chunk of brick near it, trying to scare the bird out of its hiding place.  It didn’t budge.
    “How ‘bout a little exchange of bodily fluids in exchange of a little cash?”
    The voice startled Simon.  He turned to see a woman with long legs, provocative breasts and a big round intelligent face.  She wore tight zebra pants and a matching plastic purse, and she smoked a cigarillo with a white tip that contrasted starkly with the too-bright rouge on her lips.
    “You’re not exactly the kind of bird I was looking for,” Simon said.
    Simon encountered prostitutes every day while driving around on his assignments.  Once in a while he’d cast a glance at one of them, and on the odd chance that their eyes met, if only for one second, he’d feel a mélange of excitement and shame.
    When she talked to me, she would often grab my wrist or my forearm or my elbow, as if the words alone weren’t enough.
    The prostitute scanned Simon from head to toe, and a crooked smile appeared on her face.
    He wore a dark suit, a charcoal tie and a beige overcoat.  It had rained overnight and mud was creeping above the soles of his shiny black shoes.  He’d shaven that morning, first time in four days.
    “You on your way to a funeral or something?” the prostitute asked.
    A car with tinted windows glided by, pulsating with rap music.
    I was so fantastically lonesome before I met her, and now that she’s gone, I’m terrified it’s going to be the same all over again.
    “What are you doing here if you didn’t stop for a date?” the prostitute asked.
    “I stopped because I wanted to photograph that pheasant.”
    Simon lifted his camera while saying this.
    She broke into the throaty, rhythmic laughter of a much older woman.
    “What pheasant?” she said.  “There ain’t no pheasants around here, babes.  Sure it wasn’t a crow?”
    Simon smiled and said, “I’m no Audubon, but I know the difference between a crow and a pheasant.”
    “Audubon, la-dee-dah,” mumbled the prostitute, and she flicked her cigarillo into the street and lit another one.
    She and I were playing pool.  The first game was close, but then I started to win.  The better I played, the worst she got.  After missing an easy shot she said, Fuck, I feel like a girl right now.  I hate feeling like a girl.  Then she laughed.
    The late October air was cold and the sky was the color of a sewer rat.  Even when it’s sunny it’s gray in Detroit.  The ugliness of this city was a source of daily astonishment for Simon, even after five years. 
    “What’s your name?” asked Simon.
    “Why?  You a cop?”
    “Do I look like a cop?”
    “The name’s Lucille.”
    “I like it.”
    Lucille’s face brightened.
    In a great flapping of wings, the pheasant flew out of its bush, past the telephone pole, all the way to the rear entrance of a rundown building at the end of the lot.  The door was opened.  On the porch, the bird looked left and right, and walked in like a tourist checking into a hotel.
    “I’ll be,” Lucille said.  “You were right.  That was no crow.”
    The house next door had collapsed from under itself; all that was left over the rubble was the roof.
    I was born and raised in Detroit, she said after graduation.  It’s home.  I have to go back.  My parents are getting old, you know, and I have to be around.  I’ve been away for too long.  Come with me.  Detroit isn’t as bad as people say.  We’ll be happy there.
    Simon checked his watch and took a step toward the building.
    “Where are you going?” asked Lucille.
    “I want to photograph that pheasant.”
    She cracked the little smile you give someone who isn’t all there.
    “Don’t know if I’d do that if I was you,” she said.
    “Why not?  Wouldn’t you?”
    “It’s a bit different.  For starters, I live there.”
    “Oh yeah?  Then come with me.  I need a guide.  And a guardian angel.”
    It was starting to rain again.  Lucille peered at the ceiling of nasty clouds and grabbed her collar.
    “Of course, I’ll pay for your escort service,” added Simon.
    She told him the price and he got his wallet out and gave her the right amount of bills.
    Lucille smiled and said, “Follow the guide.”
    I’ll go with you to Detroit, I said, only if you’ll marry me.  And I fished the ring out of my pocket.  Yes!  she said.  Yes!  Yes!  Yes!  Yes!
    The steps leading to the back porch were demolished.  Simon and Lucille had to go around the building and use the main entrance.  Most windows of the four-story structure were boarded up, especially on the first two levels.  Graffiti smeared the walls, gang hieroglyphs that Simon couldn’t decipher.
    “Here we are,” said Lucille, as she and Simon stood in front of the building.  “The No Loitering Hotel.”
    “The what?”
    “That’s what people call it.”
    A glimpse at the hotel’s façade made the reason obvious.  The main sign read simply “Hotel,” but on both sides of the door, as well on a window, hung weather-beaten “No Loitering” signs.
    I’ll miss her.  I already do.  I’ll miss her smile.  I’ll miss her soft face.  I’ll miss her voice.  I’ll miss her stupid purple hat in the form of a lampshade that she placed crookedly on her head in a coquettish display.   I’ll miss how at night before turning the light off she’d get up to shut the closet door, the reflex of a little girl afraid of night monsters.  I’ll miss—
    Placated on the No Loitering Hotel’s façade was yet another sign: a set of large eyes a la Big Brother surrounded with the warning: “This Building Is Being Watched By the Neighborhood.  Stop Halloween Arson.”  Every year, in the few days before Halloween, people in Detroit were nervous.  That’s because of Devil’s Night, when all the yahoos in town, and there were hordes of them, went out and tried to torch as many abandoned houses as possible.  And there were some ten thousand of them.  Every year the police arrested hundreds of arsonists during the three-day Halloween fury, and recorded almost as many fires.
    I can’t remember when we started to fight.  Almost never at first, in time it became more and more frequent.  Misunderstandings galore.  Mutual bad faith.  Bruised egos.  Detroit’s demoralizing effects.
    Someone was leaning on the wall at the top of the steps.  The man had the expressive face of a two-bit con artist, the kind that says, “Everything’s cool, dude,” while he’s trying to screw you over.  He held a pouch from which he extricated a sunflower seed.
    “That’s Mick,” Lucille said.  “The concierge.  He gave himself that title.  He thinks this is the Grand Hotel or something.”
    “Lucille,” Mick said.  “You usually don’t bring your dates here.”
    “This is such a classy joint, I thought I’d make an exception this time.”
    Mick smiled and examined Simon.
    “And who’s the gentleman?”
    “A friend.”
    “He don’t look like the friends you hang out with normal.”
    “What’re you, my pimp?  My father?”
    Mick shrugged and said, “You do what you want, dahlin’, I don’t give a flying fuck.”
    Another fight.  Another shouting match.  She made me so mad.
    Mick parted his lips, cracked open a sunflower shell between his front teeth, transferred the seed in the back of his mouth with the tip of his tongue, and spat the empty shell at his feet.  A slew of others were there already.
    “Sure your “friend” is no cop?” he asked.
    “Does he look like a cop?” said Lucille.
    “I’m a photographer,” said Simon.
    “Huh-hmm,” Mick said.  “I was eyeing that camera there around your neck.  Nice piece of equipment.
    Lucille said to Simon, “As you can see, Mick the Prick here has a hard time minding his own business.”
    Mick grimaced.  “Jesus Christ I hate it when you call me that,” he said.
“I know, dahlin’,” said Lucille, with the broadest, phoniest smile she could produce.  “So, you gonna open that door for us or what?  It’s raining.”
    Mick inserted another sunflower seed in his mouth and said, “It ain’t locked.”
    Simon checked the time and followed Lucille inside.
    My heart is pounding as she screams right at my face: I hate that I’m not happy with you.  I hate you!
    The floor cracked under Simon and Lucille’s feet as they entered the foyer.  Sunflower shells were sprinkled all over the hardwood surface.
    “That’s Mick’s doing,” explained Lucille, while lighting a cigarillo.  “He’s addicted to sunflower seeds.  Once in a while he sweeps everything out.”
    The spacious foyer contained an oak reception desk, a fireplace, many armchairs and sofas, and photographs of now forgotten celebrities on the walls—dancers, jazzmen, politicians, gangsters.  All this hinted at the splendor that this hotel surely had in the years before Detroit turned into some kind of agonizing Third-World city.  People residing here back then must have enjoyed gaudy, opulent lifestyles.  Everything now was buried under a powdery layer of dust.  The letter rack with pigeonholes was empty.  The only source of light was whatever the rainy sky could muster through the few windows that weren’t boarded up, and the narrow back door through which the pheasant had come in.  In the middle of the ceiling was a circle of torn plaster and dangling wires where an immense chandelier once had been.
    Lucille pointed at a huge orange cat that lay pasha-like on one of the couches.
“That’s Joseph.”
    The entire wall leading to the adjoining dining room was crammed with books.
    Her thirst for the written word was unquenchable.  She read everything: Marcel Proust, Alice Munro, Rick Moody, Jim Thompson, Ned Rorem’s Diaries.  That’s all she did, read.  That’s until she began to go out at night, with her “friends.”
    “You okay, honey?” said Lucille.
    “Sure.  Why?”
    “You look so sad.  Don’t know if I ever met a man sad-looking as you.  Not much comes out of your mouth, but your face says a lot.”
    Simon forced a smile.
    The foyer echoed with a cackle sound.
    “It’s upstairs,” Simon said.  “The pheasant.”
The wide staircase seemed at best shaky to Simon, but Lucille, light on her feet, attacked the first few steps.
    Simon followed her.
    As they climbed the stairs they heard a sharp “snap!”
    “What was that?” said Simon.
    “Sounded like a rat trap to me.  They have them all over the place.  Joseph the cat ain’t much of a hunter.”
    Simon squinted at Lucille.
Once they reached the second floor, a smell of burning coal came to them.  The corridor was narrow, long and dark.  Cracks crisscrossed the walls on both sides.
    “Where do you think the pheasant is?” asked Simon.
    “What am I,” Lucille said, “the birdwoman of Alcatraz?” and she chuckled.
Simon shrugged and followed Lucille to the first room.  The door wasn’t closed. 
    “Hey, Willie,” said Lucille.
    A man with a worn-out face sat in an armchair facing the door.  He wore a once-yellow-now-gray robe over his T-shirt and shorts.  He had an artificial leg.  It was pink.  It was a white man’s artificial leg, though Willie’s skin was a deep shade of brown.  The leg was made out of crude plastic, with some of the pink paint chipped off.  The man raised his hand, nodded, and coughed a chest-tearing cough that made Simon wince.
    “No trace of your pheasant here, Sherlock,” Lucille said to Simon.
    In a way, I would’ve preferred a long disease.  I could’ve taken care of her.  It would have given me time, maybe, to mend things.  Right…
    Lucille and Simon proceeded down the corridor, past a series of closed doors.
    “Maybe it went up to the third floor,” Simon said.
    “We’ll take the stairs on the other side of the corridor if we can’t find it on this floor.”  Lucille lit a cigarillo and said, “It also might’ve flown out of a window, you know.”
    They reached the next opened door to find woman and a girl.  The woman was small, with blood-shot eyes.  A scar split her left eyebrow in two.  She looked like a cat about to go for your face.  Her daughter, maybe ten years old, shielded herself behind her mom.  The kid’s mouth was contorted, as she kept chewing the inside of her cheeks.
    “What you want?” barked the woman at the sight of Lucille and her clean and well-dressed friend.  Clean and well-dressed people were suspicious to her.
From over Lucille’s shoulder, Simon peeked into the room.  The woman’s dresser was littered with empty vials, syringes, and other drug paraphernalia; everywhere in Detroit, one can see how the War on Drugs has been America’s Vietnam of the 1980s and 1990s.  There was a TV with a coat hanger for an antenna near the bed.  The side of the bed’s mattress was ripped longways, with chunks of foam escaping.  No pheasant, though.
    “We’re looking for something,” Lucille said to the junkie.
    “What?”
    Lucille hesitated, embarrassed.
    “A bird,” she mumbled.  “A pheasant.  You seen it?”
    The junkie erupted in a great laugh.
    “What?” asked Lucille.
    “I seen that bird,” the junkie shrieked.  “Walked by this very door a little while ago.  I thought I was hallucinatin’, but the shit I took ain’t that good.”  She fell into manic giggles.
    Simon and Lucille left her in that state, her daughter still there in the background, mute, mouth twitching this way and that.
    “Stupid bitch,” muttered Lucille.
    I came so close to hitting her.  If there was ever one time I was close to hitting someone, that was it.  Instead, I slammed the top of the living room dresser with my fist.  The lamp at the end of the dresser toppled and crashed to the floor.  She gasped and put her hand to her mouth, and began to laugh, uncontrollably, hysterically, as though she’d lost it.  I looked at her and I looked at the debris on the floor, and I stormed out of the house.
    In a room at the far end of the corridor, two old men were sitting on straight chairs by a cast iron stove.   The stovepipe wasn’t connected to anything; its end rested on the window ledge.  Once in a while the wind would shift and blow puffs of black smoke into the room.  The men were identical twins, indistinguishable as two mass-produced Buddha statuettes.  They were just as fat, too.  And both men had the hair of someone who’s just woken up at the end of a night filled with disturbing dreams.  The twin-on-the-left was plucking the pheasant with rapid movements, already a small pile of feathers forming at his feet.
    Lucille burst out laughing at the sight of this tableau, startling the two men.
    “What’s up, guys?” she said finally.
    The twin-on-the-right pointed at the overturned rat trap in a corner of the room.
    “We couldn’t believe when we found this here bird two minutes ago,” he said.  “Usually we hope to catch a squirrel.  But a bird like that?  Fucken amazin’, man.”
    Lucille tugged on Simon’s sleeve.
    “Why are you crying?” she asked him.
    “I’m not crying.”
    “Usually, if you ask me, when a tear comes down a guy’s face, he’s crying.”
    Simon didn’t say anything and ran a hand across his cheek.
    “It’s just a stupid bird,” Lucille said.
    “Nothing is just a stupid bird.”
    Lucille looked at Simon as if he’d lost his mind.
    That night, I didn’t come home.  I didn’t call either.  I bought a couple of magazines and a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and went to a hotel in Southfield.  I knew that she’d worry.  That was a shitty thing to do, but I couldn’t think straight I was so angry that night.  A first class hangover—that’s all I gained from my escapade.
     “What the hell’s going on here?”
     It was Mick the concierge, standing on the threshold, fists on hips.  Behind him were Willie, the junkie and her daughter.
     “Nothing,” said the twin-on-the-left.  He hid the pheasant behind his back, while at the same time trying to sweep the incriminating evidence under a rug by kicking the mount of feathers on the floor.
    “You know the rules,” said Mick.  You can’t be cooking in here.  Unless you give me half that bird.”
    “A quarter.”
    “A leg, a wing and some white meat.”
    “I don’t even know if a pheasant has white meat.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “Do I have a choice?”
    “You can go and cook it outside.”
    The twin-on-the-left began to pluck the pheasant again, mumbling under his breath.
    Simon looked out the window.  The rain was coming down in tremendous gushes.  Across the street was the carcass of what had once been an Oldsmobile Cutlass.  Everything that could be sold had been stripped: the tires, the hubcaps, the seats, the radio, the engine.
    Why was that bastard in the car with her, that bright red BMW she’d wanted so badly?  Who was he to her?  I’ve asked myself these questions one thousand times in the past four days.
    Simon wanted to leave now.
    Mick came in to inspect the bird.
“Just be careful when you cook it, will you?” he told the twins.  “It’s bad enough that we might get torched on Halloween by some neighborhood whacked out crackhead fucking loser kids with shit for brains.  I don’t want you to do it for them.”
    All the while, the transfer of feathers from the pheasant’s cadaver to the floor was progressing nicely, the fluffy pile growing in size by the minute.  The twin-on-the-left was now working on the neck.
    We have nothing left to fight about, she said to me.  And I said, I don’t understand what you mean by that.  You have to wake up to reality, she said.  Don’t blame me.  Don’t blame Detroit.  Blame yourself.
    Mick spat a sunflower shell and took a few more from his pouch and stuffed them in his mouth and turned to Simon.
    “That camera,” he said.  “How much it’s worth?”
    Lucille, the twins, Willie, the junkie and her daughter all stared at Simon.
    “Less than my life,” Simon said, and took a step backward.
    Lucille got between Mick and Simon.
    “You can keep the camera,” she said, “if you take a picture of us and promise to come back with a few prints.  We’re like a family here, and we need photos on these disgusting walls.”  She made a gesture toward the colorless grimy wall behind her, like some skidrow Vanna White wannabe.  “Deal?”
    Mick grunted and said, “Deal.”
    Simon exhaled loudly and said, “Deal.”
    I stopped home in the middle of the afternoon.  She was lying in bed with a bad cold.  I brought her a glass of orange juice.  We talked about the novel she was reading, about fading memories, about this red automobile she was thinking of buying.  Before I left I caressed her hair and then pressed my lips on her hot forehead.  Then we kissed briefly, softly, as if we were afraid to break something.  For once in a long time, things weren’t tense.  I slowly rose to my feet and waved goodbye on the threshold before closing the door.  It was a fine moment.  The last one between us that I can remember.
    Lucille, Mick, the twins, Willie, the junkie and her daughter squeezed together, posed and smiled.
    The twin-on-the-right said, “Wait,” and he licked three fingers and tried to flatten the blast of hair on top of his head.
    “Oh yeah,” said his brother, “you look just like Paul Newman now.”
    Everybody laughed, and Simon was about to press the camera’s shutter.
    When a phone rang.  The cell phone in Simon’s breast pocket.
    “Shit,” he muttered.  Then, in the phone, “Hello.”
    That damned car of hers.  She’d always drive it way too fast.
    “Simon, is that you?”
    It was his brother-in-law.
    “Simon.  What are you doing?  Are you okay?  We’re all here at the funeral home.  It’s time, and we’re waiting for you.”
    “Okay,” said Simon.
    He switched off the phone and told the group, who was still holding the pose, that he had to go now.

Chris Semansky

He is dating a girl who loves to die.
    Of being undone by the belt, by hands, by a razor. Of having the life choked out of her like a farmyard chicken. She tells him these things, blushing, as if she’s admitting to having a shoplifting habit, or fantasies of being with other girls. She’s pretty as a lily, has an I.Q. of 197, and once won the Annual Hawthorne Park Sadie Mae Bakeoff with her now famous gooseberry cobbler. After kissing on their second date, she tells him she likes her hair pulled, so he pulls it. A little at first, then harder.
    “Do you think I’m weird?” she asks.
    “Weird like Elvis? Weird like the pope? Like three-headed donkeys? What weird do you mean?” 
    She wears tee-shirts plastered with images of metal bands like Slayer and 28 Bitches on Mescal.  She has skulls and snakes tattooed in cyan and red up and down her left leg and arm. She cuddles with a loaded snub-nosed .38, and a sharpened Guatemelan machete hangs on her nightstand like an old brown promise. She owns 246 skull-related items: a skull-shaped doorknob, skull-shaped lamps, skull coffee cups, skull panties. On top of her piano sits a human brain soaking in formaldehyde.
    “It’s from Haiti,” she says. “Some poor slob who died of hunger.”
    During the day she writes grants for a non-profit begging food for the homeless. In the evening she listens to Mahler and Metallica, tends her cat, coaxes the tomatoes.
    “I can do the hair thing,” he tells her after two weeks, “but that’s where I draw the line.” She pouts, shuffles around the kitchen in her little skull slippers. “You think I’m weird, admit it,” she says, sounding like a bad trial lawyer on a bad television show.
    “Say it, say it.” She stands next to him now, petting his hand as if it were a lizard, offering up her alabaster face, her little skull earrings dangling. “Please,” she says, “just one slap. I like it, honest joe, I do.” She stands there a full minute, as if in some yoga pose, eyes closed, on the edge of a wince. When he turns his head and walks away, she shuffles off to the next room, yelling behind her: “You’re so fucking uptight, like some goddam fucking Republican accountant. I can’t believe it. It’s not like I’m asking you to buy an SUV or use chemical fertilizer on your precious squash. You’re sucked in like the rest of them, PC to the nutbag.”
    A minute later, he pokes his head into the room. “PC Republican?”
    She can’t hear him. She’s in her headphones watching porn on her computer. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a man with a long black whip straddling a woman who is bound and gagged. He wants to leave, but five minutes later is still standing there, watching.

After dinner, they hand feed each other tiny chocolate cakes shaped like kidneys, livers, hearts.
    “Who’s my favorite little Hannibal?” she says, placing a pair of lungs on his tongue. “Just tell me that. Who is he, huh, huh?”
    He shoves an eyeball into her mouth, and then a hand with a missing thumb. He kisses her hard, slipping off his loafers and climbing on top of her. They noodle up on the couch, their arms and legs intertwined, so much sinew and bone. He nuzzles her throat while she writhes, waiting for her to kiss him back, to do something other than slither and sigh. She doesn’t. He sits up and pulls her on top of him, until she is square in his lap, her head thrown back, blouse half off, left breast giving him the old malochio.
    He is thinking of Sasha, whom he had ditched three months ago, and then of Mira whom he had left a year before that. How much he loved them both. He is already calculating when he will stop dating this one. He is picturing his life as a chart with arrows pointing down, a vast bear market from birth. He is picturing his life as a coupon, as a fajita in white sauce, as a questionnaire. He bangs his forehead against hers, once, twice, three times, until she begins bleeding.
    “Who’s your Daddy?” he spits.
Her eyes light up like a jack-o-lantern, her cheeks flush. “You are, you are,“ she says, in a rush of breath, bouncing on his lap. “You’re my Daddy!”
    “Goddam right I am,” he growls, grabbing a hank of her black hair and pulling it slow. Squeals. Giggles. 
    While he’s pulling her hair, she’s wincing and grinding her pelvis into his. Their eyes lock on each other like a couple of boxers spoiling for blood. Images of his past loves pour into his brain as if it were a film festival for movies about dysfunction. He is sitting on a bench explaining to Sylvia that he’s not ready to live with her. He is weathering blows from Mona, who’s kicking him with her Mary Janes as he walks out the door. Dysfunction, he thinks, what a joke, what a jokey joke joke. The images explode in a fist of color and he’s thrown back into the present, as she grabs his hair and yanks it like a weed.
    “Bitch,” he screams, slapping her hard across the face. “You bitch!” With each slap, she grinds herself deeper, more forcefully into his leg. He can feel her wetness through his Dockers, can fell himself grow hard, harder. He’s holding her head in place with a fistful of her hair while slapping her repeatedly with his other hand. She’s making sounds he’s never heard before, and the harder he hits her the more she screams, moans, gurgles. Within minutes, they both come.

A week later they’re popping edamame, sucking on a couple of peach sakis at Yoshi’s Sushi Hut. She flicks the flaccid shells at his ear until he makes her stop by grabbing her hand.
    “Oooh, tough guy,” she says. “Can’t take a little bean, bud?”
    After dinner they walk downtown, past coffee shops and cafes full of twenty-somethings purring into their cell phones and drinking lattes. Neither of them says a word for blocks, but then she slips her hand in his and strokes his shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she says.
    “Worry what? Who’s worrying?”
    “I know it’s not who you are.”
    “Who’s got nothing to do with it,” he says.
    “I mean I know you don’t hate women, not really,” she says.
    “What a relief,” he mumbles. He’s watching a man in his 30s wheel a three-seated stroller up the street, stopping periodically to offer each of the tykes a treat, which he dangles just above their mouths like a worm. Two of the infants are laughing hysterically, and the other one is crying. The man is smiling widely, now placing a treat in one mouth, now in another. He’s whispering to his little sparrows in baby-talk code. “Look at that,” he says to her, pointing to the man. “Isn’t that amazing?”
    “What?” she says.
    “Such hunger.”
    “They’re just playing with him.” 
    “Not in the babies.” 
    “I know what you want,” she says.
    He looks down, careful to step over the crack in the sidewalk. 

From the third week, he could feel his interest in her wane, and he resolves to break off the relationship after one month. It isn’t any one thing in particular that disturbs him or that he finds missing. It’s a matter of principle. But now is as good a time as any, before the inevitable talks about commitment and co-habitation, plans for the future, the expectation for more, the sharing of skull broth. One month. In and out. No harm. 
    She’s warm and glowy when she answers the door, and taking his hand leads him upstairs.
    “You’ll love this,” she says. She’s wearing a black garter with fishnets, a silk-screened tee shirt featuring an image of a bloody head at the foot of a guillotine, and Chloe. Her bedroom’s pitch black, but when she lights a candle he makes out an over-sized coffin perched on top of the bed, with a white silk lining. She stands in front of it grinning, with her arms held just so, as if she’s offering him the top prize on a game show for trivia buffs of necrophilia. “Well, what do you think?’
    “Oy,” he says. “Hmmm.”
    “I’ve got this thing I want us to do.”
    “Don’t tell me.”
    “I won’t.”
    “Hello? Crypt to Death Gyrl. . . . Don’t tell me, as in tell me.”
    “Here,” she says, shoving a pair of handcuffs at him. “Pretend I’m dead. Make me your fuck doll.”
    “Goth Barbie?”
     “Master Ken.”
    She crawls inside the coffin on all fours, and he handcuffs her to the headboard, going at her like a hyena who’s cornered a wounded prey, like a reporter at a press conference on corporate malfeasance, like someone who has finally, finally been given permission to breathe after a lifetime underwater. When she squirms too much, he grabs the machete from the nightstand and says: “Move again and I’ll slit your throat.” Her entire body reddens, she drools, moans, quivers, her legs spasming like a guitar string plucked too hard. After he’s finished, he uncuffs her and she rolls over in the box. “Grrrrrrr,” she says, taking a nip out of his ankle. He blushes and pulls on his pants.

A week later, he’s in her kitchen shoveling eggplant dip into his mouth thinking how he’s going to break it off, which words he’ll use. She walks by, ignoring him. Her eyes are glassy, like they’re full of glue, and her steps small, deliberate. She sits on the edge of her giant skull throne and places her right arm on a small glass table, palm out. With her left hand she takes a razor blade and slices into the crook of her elbow about a half-inch above the vein, grunting pleasurably as she does. Her gluey eyes seem to fill with sand.  Blood pours over the arm and onto the glass creating rivulets of viscous red sludge. He can see her face in the glass’s reflection. White, distant, spectral. She never once looks up, but after a few minutes of staring at the blood she begins to lick it, slowly, with quick little flicks of her tongue, as if she were a rabbit or a cat. When she finishes, she wipes the blood off her arm and the glass and holds it under cold water, then swabs her wound with alcohol and bandages it.
    “You’re a freak,” he says to her as she’s dressing her wound.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Freak, as in nuts, neurotic, as in loopy, as in damaged beyond all possible repair, as in sicko, mindfucked, perverted, ridiculously brain-addled, moldy, scarred, corn mushed, fried, baked, hammered, boiled, toasted freak. Capital “F.” Freak. That’s what it means.”
    “You should try it sometimes,” she says, snipping the end off the bandage.
    “I’ll put it on my to-do list.”
    “Face it. You’re self-deluded and, as if you didn’t know, you’re a pussy. The only thing you’ll put on your to-do list is the same crap you’ve been putting on it all your life.” 
    “Bitch.”
    “Faggot.”
    “Cunt”
    “Bush lover.”
    “Whore.”
    “Schmuck, listen:  You belong with some cube girl having a nice cup of hot chocolate, grinding in bed in the dark during the news, and then falling asleep before the Late Show, while whispering endearments to each other like they were the fucking pledge of allegiance or some other prayer for sissies.”
    He slaps her across the face, and then backhands her harder. She falls against the counter picking up a spatula and swinging it at him, catching him flush across the cheek, cutting his lip. He tastes the blood with his tongue and howls, his eyes murderous, huge. He hits her again, knocking her to the ground, then pounces on her punching her head, pounding it into the floor. He rips the bandage from her arm and blood pours onto the cold linoleum, spatters the walls. Her blood’s all over his hands as well, mixed with the blood oozing from his lip. When he stops to wipe it from his eyes, she throws him off of her, flips herself over, and buries an uppercut fat on his chin. More blood begins to spurt from his face. He throws his head back yowling, blindly grabbing at her, gouging her eyes, putting the full heft of his weight into every punch. She continues to fight back, flailing away with both arms, and kicking him. He grabs her shirt and rips it off, scratching her the length of a laughing skull tattoo, and then her pants, which he pulls from the waist, the zipper catching against her skin, shredding it. She’s on her hands and knees as if crawling away, but she’s not crawling, and he rips off his own pants and enters her, all at once like a stab, and she screams, a hot stifled scream that peters out into something closer to a guttural coo, and he’s slamming her as hard and as fast as he can, not thinking of his past loves, or what he’s going to say to her, or his own pain, he’s just deep in his body slamming, slamming, slamming her with so much force he feels as if he might disintegrate into a squadron of butterflies. “You don’t know me,” he screams at her, shoving himself in her up to the hilt, while visciously slapping her head and ass. After he comes, in a furious yelp during which his throat quivers and his eyes roll back in his head, he slumps over and passes out, falling into a slick of blood. 

An hour later, he wakes to the sickly smell of blood, which is everywhere around him, and in his mouth. She is clean scrubbed, wearing a pleated skirt and black tank top sitting on the couch reading a paperback called Secrets of the Green River Killer, listening to Rachmaninoff, sipping white wine. One of his eyes is caked shut with blood, but through the other he can see her.
    “Jesus,” he says, “what . . . are you okay?”
     She holds a finger up signaling him to wait while she finishes a passage. He slops around in the blood, managing, finally to get to his knees. “What . . .?” he blurts out, holding his head as if he’s going to faint. “I . . . I’m really, really sorry,” he whispers.
     “No doubt,” she says, placing the book on her lap, and sipping her wine. Then: “The mop’s in the corner. You know where the door is. Try not to cry on your way out. It makes me sick.”
 

Roy Johnson

They picked on down the row ruffling through the hairy leaves and cracking tomatoes free from stems until their plastic shopping bags were full of lumps and they had to yank a new one from their belt loop and work on filling it up too. Mom was giving the tomatoes away at work. Ramona reached the end of the turned dirt and leaned back in the corner of the cedar privacy fence and peeled down her sock and slipped out a wrinkled cigarette and a lighter. She took a few drags and tapped the ash off to the side with her index finger like she was at a cocktail party.
    “Where are you?” Becky said.
    “How many bags do you have?” Ramona said.
    “Three. How many do you?” Becky said as she followed the voice through the staked plants. She popped out two rows down from Ramona.
    Ramona pointed her cigarette down at the two bags by her feet and pushed one of them with her toe. “I’m done.”
    “Mom’s gonna smell cigarettes on you.” Becky walked over to Ramona and crossed her legs and squatted and sat down indian-style by the fence. Ramona handed an empty bag to her and she reached up and took it.
    Seymour’s dog Junior came sniffing up at the fence and Becky caught his eye and knocked the cedar planks with her knuckles. He barked and clawed at the grass on the other side. She stuck a weed between the pickets and tickled his moist black nose, he slunk back and turned his head to the side and froze. She put her lips to the crack and blew on his face and he shifted the weight on his front paws and rotated his head and licked at the air in front of him.
    “She can’t smell it. People who smoke can’t smell the smell.”
    “She can’t?”
    “No.” Ramona exhaled.
    “Who’s a good boy?” Becky said through the crack.
    Junior wagged his tail and struck at the fence.
    “Who’s a good boy?”
    He barked and wagged so hard he lost his balance.
    “Who’s a good boy?”
    Junior dug up a clump of grass and pushed his snout against the bottom of the pickets and his pink tongue poked in through the brown dirt on the other side and Becky stroked it with her finger. He worked his head back out and barked.
    “Quit it. That goddamn dog’s a pain in the ass. Mom’s gonna look out here,” Ramona said and kicked at the fence.
    “That’s right. You’s the good boy.” Becky put her finger into the crack and Junior licked it and rolled his white eyeball up at Ramona.
    “Besides, we still have to get one more bag.” Ramona pointed at the empty bag she gave Becky.
    Becky got up with the bag and disappeared into the plants. The yellow blooms scattered across the green canopy shook this way and that way over her head as she worked down the row filling Ramona’s third bag.
    Ramona bit down on the cigarette with her front teeth as she picked at the fringe on her cutoffs. She held the cherry to the longer white threads and when she had them all scorched evenly she rolled the cuffs up into her crotch until half of her white cheeks showed out the backside. She swiveled her weight to her left foot and cocked her hip and slowly raised her right heel up and down a couple times and fluffed her red hair. She blew out and watched the gray cloud float over the fence until the breeze kicked up and turned it into nothing.
    “You think we should go get more bags? There’s still a bunch of red ones.” Becky yelled from somewhere deep inside the garden.
    Ramona looked across the plants and thought about it.
    “Mom’ll get mad if we don’t get them all,” Becky said.
    “Well she can kiss my ass too,” Ramona said.
    Becky traveled through the green tangles and when she came out on the path between the garden and the privacy fence the sun hit her eyes and she blinked. She hefted the loaded bag and swaggered back to the spot. She leaned halfway over and let the bag go and it plumped to the ground next to the other five. Tomatoes shifted between each other and the bag toppled over dumping the shiny red fruits out of its plastic opening like some poor man’s cornucopia.
    “Damn.” Ramona looked down at the sixth bag.
    Becky sat down next to the bags. She crossed her legs again and leaned back and forth trying to catch a glimpse of Junior through the cracks. She twirled her finger around a shoot of weeds and pulled it out of the dirt and stuck it through the fence.
    “Don’t look over there at him,” Ramona said.
    “What. He’s lonely.”
    Ramona stood on her tiptoes and looked past the garden beyond the faded yellow swing set with lonely rusted chains dangling from it. She scanned the dark screened porch on the back of the house for the shadowy image of Mom and reached down in her sock for another smoke.
    “We probably have to take some over to Seymour. Is he home yet?” Becky said.
    “How the hell would I know? You blind or something?”
    “You told me not to look over there.”
    “Don’t be a smart ass. Besides, he’s coming over for Thanksgiving.”
    “You know what I like about Thanksgiving? Only four more weeks til we get out for Christmas!”
    “Who cares. We still have to go back to school after that.”
    “Yeah.” Becky rocked back and forth in the dirt.
    “We never get what we want for Christmas anyway,” Ramona said.
    “What do you want?”
    “A computer, so I can meet somebody and get the hell out of this place.That’s how Karen met Al, the guy she’s living with now. He’s got his own house and everything. He lets her drive his car sometimes.”
    “She lives with him?”
    “Yeah. And Sharon met some guy that said he was blind on there too.” Ramona ran her fingers through her hair.
    “What’s her mom say?”
    “What’s wrong with blind guys?” Ramona rolled her eyes and shook her head.
    “No. The other guy.”
    “Karen’s mom’s not cool. That’s why she moved out anyway.”
    “I bet it’s fun to have a computer and stuff.”
    “You have to know what you’re doing. Guys would try to take advantage of you cause you’re so young and don’t know any better.”
    Seymour rattled an aluminum lawn chair across the splintered two by six planks on his back porch and called Junior. Ramona heard him and stepped over to where a picket was missing in the fence and gave him a shot of her half-naked ass. His eye briefly hung on the faded blue hem that curved around her hip and vanished between her legs, and as more of her exhale slipped over the fence he caught himself and got back to finding the right spot in the shade for some beer drinking. He cracked one open and mumbled something about how girls grow up a lot quicker than they used to.
    “Girls!” Mom yelled from inside the screen porch.
    Ramona dove for cover behind the plants. She jammed her cigarette in the dirt and panted in and out as hard as she could without making any noise to clear her breath. Becky pushed tomatoes into the rumpled plastic and slipped her hands through the handles of three bags and sat wide-eyed in the dirt waiting for Ramona to give the go ahead. Ramona pushed her palms on the hems of her cutoffs and unrolled them back down over her hips and butt and picked up the other three bags of tomatoes and stood back up.
    “We’re coming,” Ramona said.
    Becky heaved herself up with the tomatoes and headed down the fence line. The bags pulled her body crossways over her ankle and her Wal-Mart loafer gripped the dirt and the bone under her kneecap twisted and she fell and let out a single scream. Ramona turned around and shot her a pathetic grimace.
    “Get up already,” Ramona said.
    Becky grabbed at her shoe. Tears squirted out the corners of her tight eyelids and traveled the lines of her face. Her mouth stretched open in silence.
    “What?” Ramona said.
    Becky laid there.
    “Come on.”
    Junior barked at something.
    Ramona set her bags down and stood over Becky. “Are you okay?”
    “It hurts.”
    “What does?”
    “My ankle.”
    “Well get up, it’s time for dinner.”
    Ramon helped her up and she leaned against the fence. Becky stood there with her head bowed and tested her ankle against the ground, a clean thin path of skin shined through the dust on her cheek where tears ran down to her chin. Ramona waited.
    “Are you okay or what?”
    “Yeah.” She grabbed the three bags she was carrying and took a step and when she put weight on the ankle her synapses took control of her leg and bent her knee dropping her to the ground where she yelled again.
    “Damn Becky come on.”
    “It hurts too much.”
    So, she got up and put an arm around Ramona’s shoulder and the two of them hobbled back to the house. Mom gave her some aspirin after dinner and kissed her on the cheek and on the ankle and told her to get some good rest because she was going to need her help cooking turkey in the morning.
    “Sleep tight.” Mom tucked the comforter around Becky’s neck and got up and shut the door behind her.
    “Hokay,” Becky said into the dark. Her tiny head poked out from the cocoon of covers and her sore ankle was elevated on a plaid cushion Mom brought in from the couch.
    The two of them laid in their twin beds situated as far apart from each other as the little bedroom would permit. Becky studied different objects in the room as her eyes adjusted to the night.
    “You asleep?” Becky whispered.
    Ramona sighed. “How can I sleep when you’re breathing like that?”
    “Like what?”
    “Never mind.” Ramona popped her foot under the cover and it floated back down into a jagged hump at the end of her legs.
    “How did that blind guy talk on the computer?” Becky said.
    “What?”
    “That blind guy.”
    “What blind guy?”
    “The one you said Sharon met.”
    “She found out he wasn’t really blind so it doesn’t really matter anyway.”
    “Really?”
    Ramona ignored her.
    “How’d she find out?” Becky said after a minute.
    “They met at the rest-area on the bypass and every time she turned around she caught him staring at her ass over the tops of his blind-glasses when he thought she wasn’t looking,” Ramona said.
    “Oh.”
    Becky wasn’t tired so she couldn’t help tuning in to the occasional word she made out from the conversation Mom was having on the phone with apparently another woman. Something bumped up in the attic and her eyes widened and pivoted across the sheetrock ceiling. Ramona was almost asleep.
    “Ramona,” Becky whispered.
    Ramona ignored her.
    “Ramona,” she whispered again.
    “What?”
    “You wanna play Barbies?”
    “No. Shut up so I can go to sleep.”
    The next morning Mom had the girls peeling a mound of potatoes at the kitchen table as she sat next to them drinking a Coors and opening cans of cream-of-celery soup for the stuffing. The volume on the tv was turned down and the floats of the Macy’s Parade moved across the screen accompanied by the jangling duets of Waylon and Willie. Mom took the peeler from Becky’s hand and showed her how to dig the eye from the potato. Becky did it and Mom patted her on the back and took a swig from her Coors.
    “How’s your ankle feeling?” Mom said.
    “It’s okay,” Becky said. She held the potato right up to her eye.
    “Wimp,” Ramona said.
    “I want you two girls to get along today. It’s Thanksgiving, a time for families,” Mom said.
    Ramona sighed and shook her head.
    Mom’s lady-friends from work began showing up at about noon with their lawn chairs, ice chests of beer, assorted dishes and koozies. Becky and Ramona received the food and organized everything buffet-style on the kitchen table in between piles of plastic silverware and napkins with smiling orange turkeys on them. Once the grownups were out back Ramona snuck a beer from the fridge and Becky picked at the half dozen abandoned fruit salads on the kitchen table. Ramona stared out the front window and jumped up and got the door when she spotted Junior wagging his tail across the front yard dragging Seymour by a yellow stretch of nylon rope between all the cars.
    “Hi Seymour,” Ramona said when they reached the front door.
    “Hi.”
    “Wow. Junior’s sure getting big!” Ramona said and leaned over without bending her knees and scratched the dog’s bristly snout hairs.
    “Yep.” Seymour stood there in the doorway.
    Ramona looked up at Seymour and rubbed the confused dog between the ears. “How’s work?”
    “Work. . . it’s good. Is your Mom and everybody in the backyard?”
    “Yeah. I guess.”
    “Okay. Thanks.” He tugged at Junior’s collar and walked through the front room into the kitchen and handed the rope to Becky and exited out the back screen door.
    “Junior!” Becky said.
    Junior threw his paws up on her lap and whimpered and rubbed his nose around in her stomach and she laughed. His body waved in muscular lunges and Becky slid off the polished wooden chair and banged on the floor. Ramona retrieved her beer from behind the begonia next to the front door and put it to her lips as she walked through the house like she was paying the mortgage.
    “What an asshole,” Ramona said. She held the empty beer over the trashcan and crunched it and let it drop.
    “Who?” Becky said.
    “Nothing.”
    After a couple hours Ramona tipped side to side on one of the wooden chairs behind the mashed potatoes and patted her flushed cheeks with a cool washcloth. Cries of laughter from the grownups out back on the worn circle of carpet grass rivaled the loud country music coming out of the speakers on the back porch, and Junior laid on his side on the kitchen floor between the brown speaker wires running through the house. Becky yawned and told Ramona she was going to go lay down in her room. Ramona slipped out the front door and walked around the block smoking a cigarette.
    The snake had been living in the house for two years hushing the walls of rats and putting on ten pounds after shedding three times while giving no clue of its cohabitation with Mom and the girls other than the occasional thump it made overhead when it fell out of the attic rafters on to the ceiling joists when striking at vermin. Its tongue followed the thermal circuit around the corner of Becky’s dresser and to the foot of her bed and it raised its head up the side of the mattress and pulled its thick body right beside her through a gap in the scrolled wood of the footboard. It paused. It shot forward. It curled its body. It paused. It slipped forward and casually looped itself up for a nap as its scales slid against opposing layers of its scales until it laid there at Becky’s feet in clumps of black figure-eights on the Disney comforter. Becky’s little chest rose and fell and the chicken snake lowered its eyes at the plaid couch cushion that she still had her sore ankle propped on. They slept.
    Ramona stumbled through the front door and went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth and got herself another Coors. She went back to the bathroom with her beer and turned around in the mirror above the sink and decided to change shorts in case Seymour was looking. She strutted to the bedroom and dug through the top drawer of her dresser and held a pair of red shorts up in the air in front of her inspecting for frayed hems. She walked over to her bed and laid the shorts over the footboard and unbuttoned the cutoffs she was wearing and teetered on one foot and then the other as she slid them down her shaved legs. She turned around and threw the shorts overhand in the corner and her right arm locked in place above her head when her blue eyes doubled in size as they met the yellow slits of the inert chicken snake. The two stared at each other. Ramona moved sideways across the room in her underwear exchanging glares with the snake like some ancient tribal hunter communicating death to its quarry as a thousand rawhide drums beat in her ears and adrenaline coalesced with the alcohol pouring through her veins like a perverted electric current. She drew the plastic wiffle bat from behind the door and took one careful step after another until she got in striking range. She blacked out and whacked the bat squarely on to the crown of the snake.
    “Die! Die! DIE! SHIT. DIE YOU SUMBITCH!” she yelled as she confronted the snake.
    The pink mouth followed the plastic bat and poked tiny holes in it. The snake cinched two coils of its body around the bat that bent lazily from its ten pounds of newly added weight and Ramona swung the assembly of flesh and plastic across the room.
    “SHIT! SHIT!” she yelled, “DIE! SHIT!”
    She grabbed the ceramic Ronald McDonald piggy bank off Becky’s dresser and hurled it at the snake and it sunk deep into its brainbox. Red juice squirted out of its mouth. Coins ran across the room turning corners in different directions and when the last one clinked down on the hardwood floor Junior poked his head in the room to see what all the commotion was about. He looked up at Ramona and crept over to the snake and sniffed it three times and lapped it up into his jaws and trotted out of the room dragging it under his body between his legs. Outside the ladies screamed when he pushed open the screen door and set it down beside Seymour’s lawn chair.
    “Shit,” Ramona said. She staggered back and collapsed on the bed and her arms went weak.
    Becky rubbed her eyes and stared at the pile of change in the corner.
    “Shit. Are you okay?” Ramona turned to Becky and grabbed her on the shoulders.
    “My piggy bank.” Becky said.
    “Oh Becky.” Ramona hugged her around the neck.
    “How come you’re in your underwear?”
    “That,” Ramona huffed, “A, a snake.”
    Becky tilted her head to the side. “What?”
    “Oh my god Becky.” Ramona hugged Becky’s neck and bawled.
    “What’s wrong?” Becky said.
    “There was a huge snake on the bed with you.”
    “Here?” Becky reached up and gripped one of Ramona’s arms with her hand and looked around the room.
    Ramona pulled back from her and sniffled and wiped her nose. Mom came running in the room with Seymour right behind her.
    “What the hell happened in here?” Mom said.
    Becky sat up in bed with Ramona’s arms around her neck and started crying too as she listened to Ramona choke out the story of the snake. Mom kneeled down at the bed and put her arms around the girls and the three of them jiggled up and down as the mattress moved to the rhythm of the sobbing. Ramona realized she was still in her underwear and pulled the comforter around her waist while Seymour looked behind the dresser and under the beds for more snakes. Seymour finished up his inspection and headed back outside and hooked the snake with the tines of a garden rake and slung it into his backyard where he’d bury it later. Junior whined as the watched the black body flip end for end over the fence.
    “Okay.” Mom patted them both on the thighs and kissed them on the foreheads and got up and rejoined the group outside.
    “Thanks for getting that snake,” Becky said.
    “It’s okay.”
    Becky reached up and thumbed a tear from the corner of Ramona’s eye. They remained conjoined at the neck by each other’s arms on the Disney comforter.
    “Hey,” Ramona wiped Becky’s face.
    “Yeah?” Becky said.
    “Thanks for always picking all the tomatoes,” Ramona said.