After commission approval, my right hand is out flat and Sam is wrapping twelve yards of two-inch wide bandage through my fingers in a standard figure eight. After this, he tapes it up with twelve feet of inch-wide surgeon’s tape, and, with a commission representative watching, makes sure to stay an inch from the knuckles. He says to make a fist, then sticks a tube of nasal spray in each of my nostrils, squeezes, and tells me to breathe. He smears a wad of Vaseline over my cheekbones and around my eyes to keep punches from twisting skin and cutting. With me this is necessary, since I’ve become what fight analysts call a “bleeder.”
Three fights ago, I’m 38-0 with thirty-one knockouts. I’m IBF/WBA World Champion in three different weight classes, then I catch a head butt in the third round against Napoleon Forrest and score a draw on the cards. In the next two fights, I’m knocked out in under nine rounds by fighters I’d usually forget. I go from what the newspapers called the “best pound-for-pound fighter in the world” to what they now call “diminished.”
Before she moved out, my wife told me, “Those papers don’t know how right they are.”
The representative initials my taped fists and Sam slides on my ten-ounce gloves. I start to shadow box in front of the mirror, and after a few minutes, the Vaseline heats up and gets slimy. Sam walks up, his palms held out in front of him mime style, an arm’s length away.
“Jab, jab,” he says.
I throw two left taps at his right hand, jab, jab.
How I feel tonight is how I felt three fights ago. I shed the fifteen pounds I’d gained to fight in the Light Heavyweight division, back to one-sixty to qualify for the Middleweight class. Where my career started.
“Jab, right,” Sam says. “Jab, right.”
My wife Michelle, she left me six months ago, the day I signed for this fight with DeCorey Sims to get my title back. She took a few bags, the Navigator, and our daughter, Asia, to the cabin in North Carolina.
Why she left, it’s what we’ve been fighting about since the first loss. The standing eight count of my career.
“I had to tell our daughter her daddy wasn’t going to die,” she told me, after my last defeat. “Though, to be honest,” she said, “the way your head bounced off the mat, I wasn’t so sure myself.”
And since the scar tissue forming around my eye sockets, since I’ve started to open up every time a glove grazes my face, she told me anymore, I’m not so handsome.
“Your face,” she said at dinner one night, “it’s starting to look rough.”
I smiled and winked at Asia, her eyes barely reaching over the plate, and said, “That’s okay, real beauty’s on the inside.”
“Deep as those cuts are,” Michelle said, getting up, “they’re hitting inner beauty, too.”
Sam, starting to sweat, he says, “Jab, jab, right,” and I tap, tap, hook. Sam says, Duck, duck.
Since training started, I’ve heard from Michelle twice. The first time was a response to a letter I’d written her from the gym. What I said, I reminded her I was a Golden Gloves winner in ’86. A silver medalist in the ’88 Olympics. That, according to the HBO boxing commentators, I had the best right to the body in the last twenty years. I told her I came in at the bottom. I didn’t want to go out that way.
One afternoon during a sparring session, her reply came in the mail. On it was a crayon picture of our cabin with the lake stretched silver behind it. On the porch steps, three stick figures were smiling and holding stick figure hands. At the top were three questions:
What about what the doctor told us?
What about Post-Concussion Syndrome and brain damage?
What about going out a father and a husband?
The second time I heard from her was this morning, when her lawyer handed me a manila envelope at the front door and walked away.
Snap jabbing Sam’s hand, I stop and bounce, rolling my neck left to right. Outside the dressing room, the Fed Ex Forum grumbles deep and Sam grabs my gloves and says, “Are you ready?”
I’m ready.
“Are you ready?”
The papers, they said: Irreconcilable differences.
They said: Seeking custody of our daughter.
“Are you ready?” Sam is saying, and the dressing room door cracks open, the noise of the crowd rushing in. The cut man sticks his head through, looks at Sam, and says, “It’s time.”
***
Coming through the entrance tunnel, the booming roar swells around the black arena. The puddle of spotlight catches me and pulls me along, excited but scared shitless.
Childbirth from the baby’s point-of-view.
I bounce down the aisle and the faces in the spotlight are screaming and cursing at me. White spit webbing off their lips. Sam once said you can tell your career’s on the ropes when your fans scream at you instead of for you.
What used to be cheers, now I hear, “Paper champion!”
Now I hear, “Go home!”
Glass jaw. Has been.
Washed up.
Anymore, people don’t want heart, they want perfection.
Climbing the ring steps, I hear George Foreman telling the world I seem to be intimidated by the crowd’s response. Larry Merchant, he says, “Coming off two devastating knockouts, I’d be intimidated, too.”
In the ring, I bounce around to stay warm. Throw a few jabs. Roll my neck. DeCorey Sims’ music keys up and flashbulbs turn the Forum white. He won the title from the nobody that caught me with a left hook. Coming out of the tunnel, he’s dancing around the aisle and Sam nods toward him and says, “Looks good tonight.” He leans over and says, “Whatcha think?”
I slip my robe off and ask Sam exactly what is ‘irreconcilable differences?’ “In a dictionary sense, I mean.” Sims ducks into the ring, staring me down, and over the noise I yell in Sam’s ear, “Really, is it something I have a chance of working out?”
The ring announcer slides through the ropes with his note cards and catches the microphone spidering down from above. He yells something about the Middleweight Championship of the World and the walls vibrate around the roar. He introduces me as the former IBF/WBA champion etc., adding my record of thirty-eight wins, one draw, and two defeats.
“He just had,” I tell Sam, “to bring that up.”
Sims is introduced and his manager slips my old belt from around his waist and holds it above his head.
I look up at the Megatron above the ring and, on the angled screen, I can see the Vaseline streaking down my chest.
We’re called to the center. Sims and I are face to face, our eyes locked, with the ref between us giving us the rundown. Standing like this, it reminds me of the wedding ceremony. The priest between us. Michelle and me standing the exact same way, each looking deep into the other. Everything around us barricaded out. Just two people, sick with nerves and excitement, stepping into a bond no one else can be a part of.
We touch gloves and then we’re the only two in the ring, our trainers yelling out last-second instructions from outside the ropes.
Sam says to not go headhunting. He tells me to keep digging down low. “Kill the body,” he says, “the head’ll die.” He squeezes my shoulders. “Tonight, you get back what’s yours,” he yells. “You ready, baby?”
“I’m ready,” I tell him, and with the bell ringing I ask, “But you think Michelle will at least catch the fight on TV?”
|
|
In the center of the ring, with the glove-on-glove hissing sounds of the first punches, the last six months of sparring, the video clips, the fight strategies, it all fades away, leaving a combination of mechanics and instinct. I once told Michelle there’s no way to describe this feeling. This elevation. “How can something that feels this good possibly be a bad thing?” Without looking at me, she said to check alcoholicsanonymous.com. She said to call 1-800-SEX-HELP. “I’m sure they can tell you.”
I met Michelle on JAL Flight 1031 to Kyoto, Japan for a string of appearances that would take me to Tokyo. She was a flight attendant. I was 25-0.
It’s that simple. She gives me my in-flight meal and three months later we’re married. I knew I loved her when, on the plane, I told her I was a boxing champion. “I’m kind of a celebrity,” I said, and she smiled and said, “But that doesn’t tell me if you want the club sandwich or baked chicken.”
In the ring, the first few jabs that snap my head back are already giving me a headache. After two concussions and several physical exams, these headaches became Post-Concussion Syndrome. A slight brain injury.
Symptom(s) include: headache, dizziness, and poor memory. Tinnitus, arguing, and double vision. Also included but not limited to is: photophobia, a worried wife, and sensitivity to noise. There’s fatigue and divorce. Regret.
In the dark exam room, the doctor told me and Michelle PCS may eventually lead to brain damage. Looking at the x-rays of my skull glowing on the wall, Michelle said, “Great, Asia just learned to eat by herself, and now you’re gonna forget.”
I tried telling her I’m a fighter. “You knew that when you married me.” And she said, “My father was a factory worker. But when his back went out, he knew the gig was up.”
The crowd rises like a dark wave and in the center of the ring, Sims is on one knee. His head down, his mouthpiece half out. I look up at the Megatron and in slow motion, I’m knocking him down with a right to the solar plexus. From another angle, I do it again. A close-up of his face, twisting and knotting, his eyes clenched before he drops down.
Humiliation in High Definition.
After a few more slo-mos, Sims is on his feet, taking a standing eight count. Ten seconds later, the round’s over. Slipping my mouthpiece out, Sam says, “See how easy it is when your heart’s in it?” He squeezes a sponge of water over my head and I tell him, “Surely Michelle caught one of those replays.”
The bell sounds and I shuffle back into the ring. The pump inside me is through the roof, like the day Asia was born. Michelle’s hair black and wet and matted to the side of her face after six hours of labor. I picture them wrapped in blankets at the cabin, a large bowl of popcorn balanced on their laps. With the cameraman on the outside apron, I let Sims work me back in that direction. Dancing around, I turn my right shoulder toward the lens and imagine, over the crunch of popcorn, my ‘Michelle & Asia’ tattoo filling the TV screen.
***
In the corner, I look at the ring-girl circling the ring, all smiles and legs. According to her round card, we’re in the sixth. “I really can’t remember the last couple rounds,” I tell Sam, “but I’d like to think he’s in trouble.”
Sam wipes my face with a towel, pulls it back red, and says, “I do remember the last couple rounds.” He says, “Only thing he’s in trouble of is breaking his hand on your head.”
The assistant trainer squeezes up under my ribcage to help me breathe. The cut man’s packing a cotton swab soaked in adrenaline chloride above my left eye and I know I’m cut again. The cut man, he says, “If this gets any worse, we may have to stop the fight.”
Sam gives me water and I slosh it around in my mouth and spit red into the bucket. He presses a mouse under my right eye with a stop-swell and says, “With defense this bad, that might be something to think about.”
The cameraman hovers above us, filming into the huddle where the cut man’s jamming more coagulant into the cut. Pointing at the camera, I tell him to clean it good. “My little girl might be watching.”
Outside the ring, George Foreman says, “He’s gonna have heartburn with all the jabs he’s eating.”
Sam says, “Stay busy, now. Throw punches in bunches, baby. Drop this guy.”
The bell rings and my legs are jelly. I step toward the center and Sims fires a combination that backs me up, pinning me against the ropes. Looking up at the Megatron, my hands are blocking my head and he’s ripping off shots in flurries. By the look on my face, they must be hurting.
Sims throws a bomb and I see my wife driving away.
A left upper cut and Asia’s waving goodbye over her mother’s shoulder.
Trapped in the corner, Sims wails on my sides and shoulders, and I’m grunting with each pop. The ropes burn lines in my back. The crowd is deafening, on their feet, and at the HBO table, I hear George Foreman screaming, “He’s hurt! He’s hurt!” He’s yelling, “Ladies and Gentlemen, you are witnessing the end of an era!”
I brace myself against the turnbuckle and I’m suddenly holding Asia for the first time. I’m walking her to kindergarten.
The blows rock me back and forth, but behind my gloves I’m with Michelle, making love to her on our honeymoon. I’m proposing to her all over again.
On the Megatron, Sims feigns right, then unleashes another barrage of body shots. And on the screen, my hands are slowly dropping. Behind each shot, I’m losing my titles again, feeling the emptiness of having everything you’ve worked so hard for being taken from you before you ever wake up on the canvas. I’m hearing Michelle kiss my swollen eye after the first loss, saying, “Part of being a king is the fall.”
***
The crowd and referee, together they’re counting, “Six!”
I know how this works. It’s really a science. A fighter takes a shot on the point of the chin that causes the brain, floating in cerebral fluid, to smash against the skull wall. The cerebellum and medulla oblongata systems at the base of the skull catch the impact.
This is called putting a fighter to sleep.
It’s starting to be a regular thing for me.
The crowd and ref count “Nine!” and sound as if they’re two rooms away. Then, with a muffled bell ringing somewhere, I’m on a muddy road cut open by deep wheel ruts. Tall leafy oaks are bowed over the road, latching in the center.
My own unconscious entrance tunnel.
The road winds and circles, then I see the end starting to open out. Suddenly, a bright light hits my right eye, and all the arena noise rushes inside my head. The light is from the ring doctor squatting over me. Other faces hover beside him—DeCorey Sims, the cut man. Sam. They all float in a circle around me, talking in echoes.
The medic asks if I can hear him, and Sims says, “He’s gonna be alright. My man’s alright.”
“Can you hear me?” the medic asks, and then I’m fading again.
Sam, he shakes his head and says, “It’s over, son. We’re done.”
My eyes roll back and my tongue is thick and meaty on the top of my mouth. The voices are far off, and slipping out, I try to tell Sam it’s not over yet. I didn’t sign the papers.
Then, I’m back on the road, at the end of my tunnel, and it opens to a clearing with our cabin. The lake is flat and silver in the back, and the sunlight snaps off its surface like a flashbulb. On the porch step, Michelle and Asia are holding hands and smiling. I reach out and climb the steps. I take their hands and say, “I lost,” then I’m back in the ring again, on my back under the huddle of floating faces.
Sam snaps his fingers and, outside the ring, George Foreman is talking to me through the camera. He says, “Please, listen to me. It’s time to call it quits. Every great fighter has this fight.”
The medic sits me up and the applause rattles my mind.
“Do you know where you are?” he says, and I think of a small muddy road in North Carolina. I think of Interstate 40 East and tall leafy oaks. “Do you know where you’re at?” he says.
“No,” I tell him, “but I think I know where I’m going.”
Kevin Brown recently won the Permafrost Literary Journal's Midnight Sun Fiction Contest, and the Touchstone Fiction Competition. He was nominated for a 2007 Journey Award, and has published in Alligator Juniper, sub-TERRAIN, Rosebud, and New Delta Review.
Boxing Gloves Hanging on the Wall courtesy Art.com
Jumping Jack
by
Like the juice of a ripened fruit streaming over my lips, I spill into and engorge another skin. This displacement can't be caused by my daughter's knocking; she's always misplacing the very house key she begged for—the jagged articulation of her maturity and my trust.
Perhaps, then, my relapse is a result of her discarded schoolbag sliding across the tiled entry-hall floor, scraping a zebra print pattern across an otherwise austere wall. Collapsing against the doorframe as an animal wearied by the chase, the bag lies primed for a predator's uncompromising circle of jaw.
And I suppose I am that beast: frenzied creature ripping canvas flesh, tearing through notebook pages in search of the girl's grades as saliva flung from my teeth clings to my chin in yellowed beads.
It took me years to find this nectar palatable; my daughter can't be blamed for not appreciating its sweetness.
***The first hands that sought the mangoes were small. Soft knuckles surely lingered at my front door while fingertips traced the crisp edges of a serpentine motif of peeling paint.
Waiting for my response to their children's timid and intermittent knocks, mothers stood at a distance. The grocery bags they clenched were visible between fingers bloated by the Cuban sun.
The women shook the bags free from their fists as they stepped onto my lawn. Along with the moist creases of the plastic, their expectations of me as the newest military wife relaxed.
In the shade of a tree I hadn't yet noticed, the harvesting began: mothers plucked, scooped, and dropped mangoes into gaping-mouthed bags; while the children, with handles wrapped around their fragile wrists, bore the weight of the fruit.
But in the evenings, when the heat from kitchens stewing in Hamburger Helper forced them outside, these children stretched their t-shirts away from their bodies and swarmed the tree. With cotton-bellies balancing the fruit, they carried their spoils to places untouched by the tines of cheap forks dripping in ground beef and cheese.
Then they stopped knocking. Or I stopped answering. From behind the peephole, it appeared as if the wax from the tree's thick leaves had been stripped; the aroma of mangoes baking in a sweltering oven masked. After only a few months of living on the base, Guantanamo Bay's boundaries of wire—brandishing barbs that seared flesh uncovered by camouflage fabric—had reached my doorstep.
She was waiting for me one afternoon: the grid of sun slicing her body into neat sections of light and shadow. Cadence echoed from the hills in grunts of unison, as Marines pounded the day into a dusky ridgeline. Nevertheless, she was wearing a white robe—short only in the front, where it stretched across her swollen middle. She held a mango; with skin reddened by the sun, the fruit blushed up at her."Cravings," she offered with a shrug. Can you believe I'm still getting them?"
I could have believed anything as I stared, the loose knot of her robe's tie the only deterrent to expulsion.
And when next I saw her, she had indeed been pared. She sat cradling a tightly swathed bundle, balancing it in the meeting place of her crossed legs. I couldn't tell from a distance whether the newborn's breathing had quieted the wives' chatter. Perhaps, though, sharp fragments of their husbands' conversation found her as they had me by slicing through talk of drapes and bedspreads and coming to rest in the fabric enfolding her child.
Did she also make out, in the men's deep-toned susurrations that escaped the crashing of waves onto the pebbled shore, the name Jesús? Had she listened to how he guided defectors through dual landmine fields, over the fences of two countries with a recent history of cold, insidious conflict? Was her breath trapped for just a beat as she imagined the Cuban's nimble legs navigating his nation's reckless landmine-pattern: a dance he'd surely perfected every time he'd turned to expressionless faces and signaled forward with a flick of the wrist?
As she lifted the baby to her loosened center, could she perceive the unavoidable impact of the Jumping Jack lying in wait beneath the hard dirt? Could she hear the click of its metal prongs—depressed by a single misplaced foot—prior to the mine flying several feet into the air and ripping apart an abdomen?
Had she then scanned the fence line just yards from the barbeque pits for traces of Jesús: the miracle worker who could be handcuffed at that very moment, facing a Marine with a gun on his belt and a black MP band around his upper arm? Did she envision the man with long black hair and a thin moustache sitting in a windowless room painted a sick yellow, explaining how he would never stop leading people over the fence because the course plotting American lives wasn't sullied by indiscriminate metal hurdles?
Her baby went missing when the tree lay bare of fruit. I remember, because I crawled beneath its verdant umbrella of leaves in pursuit of a concealed baby boy. That the grass was lush and succumbed to my knees, despite seeding being months away, was a surprise.It was after flowering that the knock came. Singular and sharp, the sound was at odds with a child's fist and the sheet of paper that slipped down the door jamb. The tree was ready, but I knew no one was looking for mangoes.
Another search was planned. Any help would be appreciated.
Perhaps it was the stirring within that led me to the tree. With grocery-bag handles threaded between my bloated fingers, I picked the fruit. Twice I went into the house for additional bags, three globes dropping for each one plucked. I couldn't bear to leave the discarded yield exposed, the fruit liquefying until all that remained was a scattering of kernels as dry as bone.
As I drove to the beach, the mangoes tumbled inside a cardboard box I'd positioned on the back seat. Left behind by movers who'd packed our belongings into wooden crates, the box replaced the flimsy grocery bags. I caught a glimpse of the newest tract of khaki-hued land to be stripped of mines. The fruit seemed to bounce in time to the warning signs punctuating the wire fence, but the earth beyond was still and betrayed no clues of its latent, vicious intention.
The beach's pebbles felt like rocks beneath my swollen feet. She was again sitting at the barbeque pits, the wives quilting their conversation around her. Ahead, people followed one another in measured paces to the searchers' meeting point.
With a nod, a young Marine took the box from me, the mangoes shifting and rolling inside the cardboard as he pulled it toward his chest.
My steps trailed his.
I didn't notice the scraps of plastic beneath his boot. I didn't see his weight press down on the stones concealing the sun-worn grocery bag.
"Jesus!" I heard him yell. I saw him drop the box.
The mangoes erupted, I remember, before the container hit the ground; before he realized that the rotting flesh inside the bag belonged to a missing child, a boy he'd just pushed deeper into a barren grave.
***
For a body now plumped by middle age, my skin feels tight—its texture rough like the rind of a fruit drying in the sun. Nevertheless, I remain grateful for the once-resilient protection this peel offered, for the seed it preserved.
And she stands before me now, my daughter, tapping her fingers on the countertop as she holds out her history midterm for my review.
Instead of snatching the test booklet from her, gorging on the red ink that has seeped from a teacher's pen, I carry the pages over to her bag: my cowering prey. Dropping the creased sheets inside, my foot's nudging of the schoolbag signals its reprieve. Inside, the overlooked key ring lets out a faint jingle of gratitude.
"Hungry?" I ask, reentering the kitchen.
But the girl has found a bag of chips and is readying to wipe her crumb-covered lips with the back of a hand. I know that some granules of salt will cling, so I reach inside the refrigerator for the juice.
She will be thirsty.
Erin McKnight is a Scottish writer living in Dallas, and is an assistant editor for The Rose & Thorn. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in W.W. Norton's The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 3. Erin holds an MFA in creative writing with a specialization in fiction, and is currently at work on an MA in English Studies through the University of Nottingham.
Mangos and a Knife in a Dish courtesy Art.com
All That Remains
by
Father snapped my wand in two, but the magic remains. If we are to survive tonight, it has to.
Tonight, four Gestapo men enter our house. Under the table, Mother grasps my hand. One of the men identifies himself as "Hauptsturmführer Friedburg" and orders us to forget our dinner and follow him. Father sets down his pencil and stands, leaving behind the sheaf of papers from his next speech at the Temple. Mother and I stand with Father, but none of us move. We have no doubt where Friedburg intends to take us.
Weeks ago, Father's eyes red but his voice steady, he warned Mother that once the Gestapo learned of his speeches against their practices, they would no longer see us as insignificant. The next time they came, it would mean the end of our family.
"When the time comes," he had said, "do not be afraid. God rewards those who attempt great things. If they have faith."
With a sad glance at me, perhaps suspecting a girl my age wouldn't understand, he'd finally decided to simply embrace me and kiss me on the head.
Now I glance at the two split ends of my now-broken magic wand lying on the ground and hear the words he spoke hours ago.
The winds of aggression stir in our homeland, Father had shared with the Temple. I can still hear the crowd cheering him on. They wish to make us disappear, as though we will so easily be forgotten. But no man can erase what makes us Jews! No man can take our faith, the very thing that will remain long after we have gone!
Previously a scholar, Father speaks now almost exclusively about the war and what he fears is an impending devastation for our people, insisting that even in our darkest hour, God is still with us.
He wants me to follow in his footsteps as a scholar. But now on my way to becoming a woman, the only thing I have written are stories, nothing close to essays on philosophy and religion. Earlier, as I offered to use my magic to cook dinner so Mother would not have to slave in the kitchen, Father, fed up with my dreams of something he didn't understand, took my wand and snapped it in two.
All that remains is the decision to stand up, he had told the Temple. God rewards those who attempt great things. If we but remain faithful!
I hadn't understood earlier that evening what his speech meant. But tonight, when the guards burst into our home and demand we board a train with no destination, I know. The wand doesn't matter. All I need is a new wand and God will reward me for the courage to save us. The magic remains, and if I just have faith, so will our family.
"We leave," Friedburg says. "Now!"
Father smiles sadly at me. "Yallah, my daughter." Let's go.
"It's okay," I tell him.
He takes my mother's hand and reaches for mine. He doesn't understand that upstairs, the very pencil he gave me to write with will be our salvation. "Be strong," he says.
"I will, Poppa."
His fingers brush over mine.
God rewards those who do great things, Father had said. If they have faith.
If.
If.
If.
I pull my fingers from his and run for the stairs.
"Sarah," my mother shouts. "Don't—!"
A gunshot fires as I reach the first stair. Courage makes me quick. I dare a glance behind me, and know a hint of magic remains. A bullet has passed through me, leaving a smoking hole in the wall.
I reach the top of the stairs and run into my room. I lock the door.
On the table next to my still unmade bed rests the papers containing my next story and a fresh pencil, new because Father claimed it would help me write. I grab the pencil only to jump as the soldiers bang on the door.
I back up against the window and look out at the neighborhood, at the homes of friends that, God willing, we will see again. Across the street, my best friend, Beth, peeks out from behind the curtains. No doubt she and her family saw the Gestapo enter our house. They hide because they fear the same attention we've gained. They want to help, but don't know how.
The thought emboldens me. Once they see me drop to the ground, light as a feather, they'll know. God rewards those who attempt great things.
It's a steep drop, enough for Father to more than once have demanded I keep the windows shut. One fall would break my legs, he said. Or worse.
The Gestapo men slam against the door. It's too high. They won't be able to follow me. I open the window, step onto the ledge, and spread my arms.
Magic, God, whatever it is, has to be real. If we are to survive this night, it must be.
I pause. My finger passes through a small, burned hole where the bullet passed through the dress, not through me.
I shake off the thought. There can be no room for doubt. Only for faith. The magic is real.
The guards blow apart the lock and burst into the room. They train their guns on me but do not fire. That right is for Friedburg, and in he comes, gun raised, but he betrays himself at the sight of me standing on the edge of the window, about to jump.
"Don't be a fool," he says. "At least have some dignity." And cocks the gun.
Real.
It must be. It must be.
As I hear a gunshot, I wave the wand, close my eyes, and leap.
Stephen Morgan is a freelance writer living the dream. When he's not working on his latest piece of fiction, he and his wife are busy running their company, Quality Freelance, a ghostwriting service specializing in content creation, press releases, sales letters, and professional blogging. His publication credits include Skin-Deep (in the horror anthology Atrum Tempestas), Break These Chains (at The Monsters Next Door), The Next Big Whatever (at Abandoned Towers), and All That Remains (published right here at The Rose & Thorn). To keep up with him, visit Quality Freelance: www.qualityfreelance.net or check out his blog on how to become a freelance writer yourself at The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: www.goodbaduglyfreelancing.
blogspot.net/
Desert Dream courtesy Art.com
The Beekeeper's Wife
by
Ruth looked out at the fields: white boxes of hives in rows like tombstones, the dark specks of bees barely visible under a clear blue sky, the mountains west of Power shadowing the horizon. Behind her, the children asked questions that Naomi answered in her bright voice. Ruth heard the catch in it, though, and knew why. It should have been Mark there, teaching the children. Not her once-friend Naomi. Not his killer.
No, she told herself, that wasn't fair. Still, she couldn't entirely push aside the bitterness, and so she tried to think of other things. She remembered how Mark would dress up when kids came to see the beekeepers, making sure to wear his grimiest gear. He'd have a smoker in his hand and would "accidentally" puff himself in the face just to make the children laugh. He threw little rubber bees he kept in his pockets at them, and they would jump away in a playful mockery of fear.
Ruth smiled. She stood on tiptoe to see over the other people, brushing back a wisp of black hair.Naomi had not visibly changed: tall, strong features, wide shoulders, close-cropped and functional brown hair; a woman sturdy as a brick made flesh. But Naomi's eyes revealed the vulnerability, the innocence, Ruth had once known so well. Naomi's eyes were the same soft brown as a fawn's coat, guileless, the grief and guilt showing behind the limpid gaze.
Naomi pointed at her. "Yes, Mia?"
Naomi hadn't noticed Ruth, standing behind the teachers and parental escorts of schoolchildren come to visit the beekeepers. Or, if she had noticed, she'd done a masterful job of pretending not to. But, no, Naomi didn't pretend. Ruth was the one who had learned to conceal. Never Naomi.
Naomi pointed to a girl who had raised her hand.
"Where's the funny man?" The girl had brown hair and a smile, and could not have known the pain her words carried. "Last year, there was a funny man. He was nice."
A boy asked, "Was he the one the bees got killed?"
Ruth's stomach clenched. She closed her eyes. For a moment, the world stopped. A year of pain crept up her throat. She swallowed. The floor tilted beneath her and she slumped against the wall, facing toward the window. She took a breath. Then another.
Ruth heard Naomi say, "There was an accident last year, but it wasn't bee stings that killed the man." The words sounded distant and hollow, like a pronouncement, like a news statement, like a declaration without any emotion that ought not to have made Ruth feel so empty. "Just a bad accident."
It had been like this since Mark died. Most days she was fine, but then something unexpected would bring the loss roaring back. Today, of course, she had expected to be worse.
The lecture and talk with the children continued. Ruth concentrated on Naomi's voice. Gradually the world steadied itself and she blinked her eyes open, finding the same fields outside, the same bees coming and going, indifferent to human loss.
She turned from them, toward the children and their escorts and Naomi. One of the third graders' escorts watched her. The woman was older than Ruth, with a matronly look, someone's stuffed animal held loosely in one hand. Ruth felt uncomfortable, out of place in a room full of functionally dressed parents and teachers, imagining the escort would be wondering why the trim woman who looked so obviously un-motherly stood at the back of the class. Ruth forced a thin smile, as if to say, "I'm harmless." The woman smiled back, and looked away.
But Naomi had followed the woman's eyes and saw Ruth. For a moment, her educational patter halted and she simply stared. Other people looked back too, and brows furrowed.
Naomi's eyebrows twitched upward into a questioning look that asked, "Are you all right?" Or maybe it was, "Why are you here?"
Ruth's throat tightened and she swallowed. The air smelled sour. Burnt. She nodded.
Naomi's brown eyes revealed a flicker of emotion. Pain, maybe. Or fear. She winced and looked away, pointing behind her, at the special window built into the wall of the little field office, in which a bee hive lived. The hive went about its business, oblivious to the humans watching them. Bees moved on the combs, a constant bustle of movement and life.
Naomi asked, "Can anybody tell me what a bee family is like?"
A willowy Chinese girl, like a miniature version of Ruth, raised her hand.
Mia had a still face, and a quiet voice. Ruth had to strain to listen. "They have a queen who has all the children. They have workers, who are all women. They have drones, who are all men. The drones mate with the queen. At the end of the season, the drones go away."
Like Mark, Ruth thought.
Naomi said, "That's right. And did you know that bees have friends?"
The children shook their heads.
"Come closer." Naomi waited until the children huddled close to the glass.
Mark had loved when children came; he used to talk about it whenever it happened. He remembered all their names, and told her what each had been like. He'd been good like that, remembering people and personalities--so very different from Ruth. She had loved that difference; how he was something she clearly was not. She felt like half a person without him.
He used to laugh about how she described her job. "Project manager? No, Ruth, you're a worker bee in a Fortune 500 hive." He liked to joke about how the cubicles reminded him of honeycombs, the office building's revolving door entryways watched by guardian bees wary of intruders.
She'd emerge from her office each day to meet him back at home, and he'd wave his rangy arms, telling her if a class had come to visit. "Little Joey, Bertha's son? He was watching and said, 'Hey, look, the bee made a boom-boom!'" Or he'd talk about mites and diseases that threatened the hives. On weekends, he would show her the hive he kept out back. "Happy hive or sad?" he'd ask, and expect her to know. She remembered his laugh, the big sound of it. So alive. So full and complete in the joy of life.
Tears now. Dammit, no, she was not going to cry. Not here; not now. She tossed her hair and straightened her spine. She set her jaw and swallowed. She focused on Naomi's words.
"The workers are all sisters. And each has a special sister, a friend, with whom they stay all their lives. They sleep beside each other. When they forage, go out looking for food, they'll often go together."
"Like friends?" a blonde boy asked.
"Just like friends. Special friends." At Naomi's words, Ruth looked up, but Naomi was not looking at her. "They stay together all their lives. No matter what."
"And what do they do when their friend dies?" Ruth asked. The words came out before she could stop them. "What then?"
The children and parents and teachers looked back and forth like spectators surprised by some unusual play.
Naomi shook her head. "I don't know." After a long and quiet moment, Naomi went on, talking about bees.Ruth left. She walked out into the fields, to the hives, to where it had happened.
She knew the place where Mark had fallen, from the positions of the hives. She remembered going there that first time, after he'd already been taken to the hospital in an ambulance whose sirens had remained silent because Mark inside was already dead. The rogue hive had been cleared out. Naomi told her how Mark had saved a boy, and how the sheer number of stings had meant that Mark and the boy needed injections.
Ruth stood and remembered the flattened spot in the grass where his body had thrashed until the strength left.
The bees moved around her. Long ago, from the hive Mark had kept at home, she'd grown used to the sound, and the winging presence of bees. She supposed they tested for Africanized hives more thoroughly now. She supposed no one else would lose their life in these fields from a combination of stings and the sudden jolt of epinephrine intended to save. And it did save the boy. Just not her husband.
Ruth heard a footstep. She turned.
Naomi stood there, brown eyes sad and thoughtful. "I thought you might come. I know you've stayed away. From me. From here. But I thought. You know. Today."
The storm inside Ruth calmed at the sound of Naomi's voice. Ruth simply nodded. "I wanted to come." She looked around. "This is where he died."
Naomi looked down at her feet, then away to the hives. Her mouth tightened into a line, and when she spoke the words came out in a rush. "We test more thoroughly now. There hasn't been any more contamination. It's still a problem, but we're better at, you know, catching it." She rubbed her eyes. Dark circles of sweat showed under her arms, and a liquid bead glided down her forehead.
Ruth brushed hair from her eyes and stepped closer to Naomi. "That's good. I'm glad."
Naomi lifted her gaze to meet Ruth's. Naomi shook her head. Her mouth opened, but no words came. Tears gathered and fell without sound.
Ruth spoke the words she had come to say. "I didn't come for Mark, Naomi. I came for you. I came to tell you it wasn't your fault. You tried to save him."
Naomi shook her head again. Her mouth worked, as if trying to speak, but she remained silent.
Ruth stepped forward. She placed her hands on the taller woman's broad shoulders. "It wasn't your fault, Naomi. You saved that boy, and you tried to save Mark."
Naomi fell into her arms then. The sobs came, wracking shuddering sobs that shivered her entire body. She fell to her knees, and Ruth cradled Naomi's head against her belly."Do you know what I think, Naomi?"
Naomi wiped at her nose. She shook her head.
"I think the bees take care of each other when they lose their friends. I think they stay together."
Ruth held her and their tears mingled, their sobs fading into the whisper of wind through fields, and the hum of bees in flight.
J.F. Peterson lives in New Jersey with his wife and daughter. A former wildlife biologist, he now builds analytical tools for scientists. His story Catch Me is one of the Million Writers Award Notable Stories for 2007.
Sister by My Side courtesy Art.com
The Dancer
by
Maybe it was the glint of gold on her finger, or the fit of a borrowed suit, or the weight of the eyes upon him, that froze him in place, feet fixed fast in black leather shoes.
“You have to dance at a wedding,” Nina whispered. “Your own wedding.”
She tried to guide him, her hands on his shoulders, his on her hips. Three small steps and he pinned her hem, seized up again, his immobility raising silence louder than a summer waltz.
“Never mind,” she conceded, her disappointment drawn by the line of her lips.
***
His father had been a fisherman since before Jake was born. Ed Hughes, first mate on the Helena, a scallop boat that trawled Georges Bank long before they closed the beds so the cod and haddock could recover. He was at sea days at a time, sometimes better than a week. “Take care of your mother,” he told Jake each time he headed out.
His mother. Audrey. Her cousin had warned her about marrying a fisherman. The stretch of days and nights that turned longing to loneliness, the storms that brewed panic and fear, the arrival home that brought relief, the return to sea that bred resentment. And forever the stench that clung to clothes and skin no matter how many times you washed, how often you prayed you could just be done with it. But it took a while before it came to that. Their life had been romantic at first; time apart had fueled their passion. She kept a spotless house. Cooked her husband’s favorite meals. Gave birth to Jake a year past the date they wed. It was after that, marking time by the milestones of their toddler – first smile, first step, first word – she came to realize how often her husband was away. How the smell of shellfish overpowered the sweet scent of her baby’s hair whenever Ed came home.
An April morning when Jake was five, Audrey packed peanut butter and honey sandwiches, and they followed the old path from the far end of the orchard through a stand of hardwood. They walked a half hour before she turned from the trail, leading Jake around gray and brown tree trunks to the crest of a hill where a meadow spilled down the other side, dotted with daffodils. Hundreds. Too many to count, like a flock of canaries come to light, yellow as corn after it’s cooked. They carried home fat bunches, lanterns bobbing on long round stalks, and packed them into vases and jars, sunny beacons atop windowsills and tables.
“What’s all this?” Ed asked when he came home the next day.
“We picked them,” Jake said, his voice breathy with pride.
The following morning Ed set out to the lumberyard in need of cedar to repair the bulkhead door left buckled by the winter’s heavy snow. He returned with a glossy toy bulldozer and showed Jake how its metal blade could raze swells of gravel in the yard.
“That a boy,” Ed said when Jake took his turn.
The spring that Jake turned eight, Audrey took him into the garden. Showed him how to poke holes with a stick and drop in seed, tamp soil with the back of a trowel, spread straw to fool the crows. For weeks, they tended the patch, watched vines climb, shoots rise, squash bloom. Midsummer she set Jake to work pulling husks from cobs and served the sweet ears barely steamed. Cucumbers, sliced thick, on ice to keep the crunch. Peas still firm enough to pop.At dinner, Ed talked of days to come. When Jake, too, would trawl the ocean floor, shuck scallops from their shells. He mentioned that he liked his corn creamed, cucumbers pickled, peas made into soup. After that, Audrey filled Ed’s plate with vegetables harvested from the grocery shelves.
A summer evening when Jake was twelve, Ed shimmied under the old Dodge and taught his son to change the oil, cautious not to drop the drain plug in the pan, careful that the filter was snug enough to stem a leak. Jake poured in new oil, dipped the stick and wiped it clean. Audrey sorted shirts from jeans, bleached the cotton, scrubbed grease from denim weave.
He was fifteen the day Audrey asked him to meet her at the market when school let out. On the way home, she’d stop just out of town and let him drive. She’d make dinner after that, chicken with boiled potatoes, apple cobbler baked in the small iron skillet, just enough for two. Because Ed was still at sea, and she loved cooking best the times he wasn’t home.
She was unloading items from the cart when Jake walked in the store. Butter, eggs, brown sugar, a canister of oatmeal riding the conveyor to the till. It was when she got to the cans — corn and carrots, beans and peas — that she burst into tears.
“Mom, don’t cry,” Jake pleaded, averting his eyes from the startled cashier.
“They’re mush,” Audrey said. “Nothing but mush.”
“It’s okay, Mom. It’ll be okay.”
She was sobbing with abandon then, her eyes swollen, gasping for breath.
“Come on,” Jake said, picking up the bags and ushering Audrey to the door, his back blocking other shoppers’ stolen glances.
Soon after, Jake came home from school with a black eye; a few days later, a chipped front tooth; the next week, a broken nose.
“You’re away too much,” Audrey told Ed the next time he was in port.
And so he started work on the state road crew. Summers, he swept sand from the roads; winters, drove the truck that salted them. Audrey bought burger meat to fry in lieu of fish. And still Jake came home scraped and bruised.
“You’ve got to defend yourself, boy,” Ed told his son after supper one night. “Come here. Let me show you how to throw a punch.” His hands balled, dancing on his boot soles, he feigned a rapid bout of strikes before looking up and noticing Jake’s eyes, brimming with tears.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Ed said, dropping his arms. He turned on the television then and sank into the tattered chair.
At seventeen, Jake was five inches shy of his father’s six-two frame, his limbs lean and lithe. On a hunch, the high school coach put him to the test. Discovered he could sprint across the court faster and net the ball more often than any of the taller players. That’s when the fighting stopped.
And then Nina moved to town. She was a Sicilian girl. Her eyes cool blue, the hue of sky in spring. Hair thick and dark as night. She worked weekends at the diner. The first time she waited on Jake he ordered Coke and nursed it twenty minutes before fishing coins from his pocket to set beside the empty glass. Then he left, not once meeting Nina’s eyes, and that intrigued her. She wasn’t one to be ignored.
A week later, as Jake dialed the combination at his locker door, fixed on numbers, Nina stopped and asked if he would take her to the prom. He found her eyes, shook his head so slightly it took a moment for her to realize she’d been denied. She turned away, face flushed with shame.
“I can’t dance,” he said, and Nina turned back around.
“Your father should come to your games,” she told him once they started dating.
“It’s okay,” Jake said. “He’s busy.”
“Doing what?” she asked to call his bluff.
He shrugged and looked away, anxious to harbor the greater truth. That ever since Ed had stopped fishing, the two had failed to find common ground. All fall into winter, Jake had risen predawn and struck miles through brush, shivered in the blind. He’d watched his father fell rabbit, duck, and deer, but failed himself to squeeze off a single shot that found its mark. And on the sole occasion Jake suggested shooting hoops, Ed dismissed the overture with a waved arm, called the game child’s play. Even times without agenda, lingering at the table once the supper plates were cleared, the silence stretched so taut between them, they could hear the soft clink of metal as Audrey spooned up pudding in the pantry.
“I want to meet your mother,” Nina said then. “See where you live.”
The night Jake brought her home to supper, Audrey made beef stew and biscuits. “It’s Jake’s favorite,” she told Nina. “What’s yours?”
“Oh, I like lots of things,” Nina said with a laugh.
“Salt cod,” Ed said, pushing his dinner plate aside.
Audrey cleared the empty dishes, brought back saucers for dessert. “Pie?” she asked, slicing through lattice and blueberry filling.
“I tried to make pie dough once,” Nina admitted, “but it broke into pieces.”
“It takes practice,” Audrey confided.
“I start work at the concrete plant,” Jake said. “Day after we graduate.”
Ed packed tobacco in his pipe, struck a match to char the top.
“I can teach you how to make a piecrust if you like,” Audrey said.
***
Two months past graduation, Nina was serving eggs and bacon at the diner when the bile rose in her throat. They agreed to marry before she showed. Audrey made the cake. Nina chose a dance song for the bride and groom. Husband and wife, they rented a cape on the outskirts of town with yard enough for a garden to grow.
Sometimes, instead of coming straight home from the plant, Jake drove down to walk the dock where he and his mother used to pick up his father when the Helena steamed back into port, the hold heavy with scallops. Audrey would hold a handkerchief to her nose while they waited, but the stench of bait and diesel never bothered Jake. It was the piercing caws of the gulls circling above the stern, their desperate dives at the shucked shells the crew threw overboard, that cut his nerves.
The last time Jake stopped there he lingered, seized by a reluctance to leave he could not explain. An icy gust off the water finally sent him back to the car. Heading inland up the escape road, he kept his foot steady, cruising just below the limit, mindful of the trooper parked behind the stone piling. A quarter mile past, he punched the pedal to the floor, watched the speedometer climb out of sight, tasted freedom as he leaned into the curve. It was the spray of beach sand across the pavement that he hadn’t banked on that sent him barreling into the dune.
Blood streamed from his nostrils when his head hit the wheel. Like it had when he was fifteen and he’d gone after those kids in school who’d claimed only a crazy woman would cry over a can of peas.
A few days later it was Nina’s turn to bleed.
“It’ll be okay,” he said. Knowing that it wouldn’t, desperate not to watch her cry.
Weeks passed before she found her words. “I want to try again.”
The next morning, Jake pulled clothes from the dresser drawer, carried his bag to the car while Nina slept. He drove by the road to the pier, past the entrance to the plant, inland on the old state road eight hours, hundreds of miles. That night, while Nina shaped patties out of beef, he parked at a roadside bar and ordered a burger, drained a couple bottles of beer.
The bartender stepped out from behind the tap and dropped two quarters in the jukebox. “C’mon, ” she said, as strains of the Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black blared from the speakers. “I wanna dance.”
Maybe it was the Heineken, or the anonymity of the road, or the silver gleam of moonbeam through the glass, that kept him from refusing, prompted him to follow her onto the floor. She turned to face him, swaying her arms and hips while he stood, awkward seconds ticking, before he felt the dance rise in his feet, his worn leather boots slide over the wooden boards. Slowly, smoothly, at first, then striking like lightning. Pounding so hard that everyone around him backed away to give room.
Cindy A. Littlefield is a former senior editor for Disney Publishing Worldwide and the author of several children's activity books. Her nonfiction work has appeared in Yankee and New England Watershed, and she was a finalist in the Glimmer Train 2007 Short Story Award for New Writers.
Street Dance courtesy Art.com
