SEPTEMBER 2023

I think now what?

“Nowwwwwhhaaaaaaaaattttttt.” The alien echoes what I’m thinking. Then it turns upside down to twirl on its lightbulb head. Dust rises. “HeeeerrrrrreeeIIIIIIIaammmmmm.”

It just said “Here I am.” To me. Me!

“Ttttoooooooommmmmeeeeeeeeeeee. Mmmmmeeeeee.” Twirling.

“You do know I’m only ten,” I say.

How can an upside-down lightbulb look surprised? Onnnnnnnllllyyyyy teeeeennnnnn?”

“Does it matter?” I say. It must matter, because in a twinkle, the alien is right side up and gone.

---

EXTINCT
By Sharon A. Pruchnik (with a nudge from Franz Kafka)

Mercy Anne woke one morning and found that she’d turned into a dinosaur. Her thick, yellow nails snagged the rug when she put her feet on the floor; she scratched at her grey, scaly skin as she walked into the bathroom, where deep-red eyes looked out at her from the vanity mirror.

“Groar,” she said. It meant, “What the hell happened?” but it came out as “Groar.”

None of the clothes in her closet fit her anymore, so she pulled the daisy-covered sheet from the bed and wrapped it around the hulk of her new body. Every part of her body rubbed against every other part. Things were raw. It was hard enough lumbering down the steep stairs without worrying about the tail.

Mercy Anne’s husband, Edgar, sat at the kitchen table. He had between two weeks and two months left to live according to Dr. Webster, but at least he was still human. “What happened to you?” Edgar said through the runny yolk of a poached egg. A smudge of bright yellow oozed from the corner of his mouth.

“Gree … oar,” Mercy Anne said. She used to have such a beautiful singing voice.

“I thought you got pills for that,” Edgar said. He never turned on his hearing aids until the noon news.

Mercy Anne took a leftover chicken leg from the refrigerator and gnawed at it with her sharp, spaced teeth. Meat had been giving her heartburn for years, but now she could eat it with no noticeable effect. She tossed the meatless bone in the garbage and decided to have one more.

Edgar spent the afternoon in front of the TV—from the news to Golden Girls to Judge Judy.

Something about the television’s flickering screen caused Mercy Anne pain. The points of light felt like needles penetrating her now-tough skin. “Groar!” she said to Edgar as she made her way out the front door.

“Bring me back some toothpicks,” Edgar called after her.

Mercy Anne followed two chatty girls down the sidewalk in front of her house. They smelled like something far away and everything about them was smooth. But Mercy Anne’s feet began to hurt and she couldn’t keep up. She left an upended-earth trail as her claws dug into the neighbors’ manicured lawns. She ended up following a stray cat behind a row of houses on the hillside at the edge of town and into the woods. At least things smelled green here; at least the light was pure.

Mercy Anne could feel her heart work its thickened pump as she trod up the hill. Before the light fell, before Edgar would be asleep in front of the six o’clock news, Mercy Anne would be gone from this earth. When she’d studied her elongated nose and deep-set eyes in the mirror that morning, she’d understood she was already quite extinct. Soon she’d be nothing more than a dusty museum piece, as easy to gawk at as to ignore. It was okay, though, she decided. Things never truly end. Dr. Webster would come to look after Edgar, trying to keep him alive, but from some ancient edge of the universe, among the whispery remnants of life, the creature once known as Mercy Anne would begin to stir, remembering her voice, and sing through the cage of her bones.

---

Glimmer in Mist
By V.A. Bettencourt

The stench of stale sweat swirled with a cocktail of vodkabeercheapwine sent my stomach surfing. The regular knocking back his fifth shot by five reminded me of my aborted attempts to quench the fist that took up permanent residence in my gut. He ordered as if shots were slot machines and the next one might finally hit the jackpot on the road to oblivion. I didn’t mind—pouring shots was easier than making cocktails. He hit the halfway house to hell by 6 and started belting country songs like a beached whale whistling anguish on a desolate shore. “They spotted fireflies dancing in mist,” he said after another patron rescued the karaoke mic from his fist. “Haven’t seen ’em since I was a kid.”

I’d read about them in the local paper, or what was left of it. Mrs. Dire had spotted them at twilight i​​n the meadow that bordered our town. An improbable and tenuous comeback, said the scientists, after decades of near starvation as industrial pesticides decimated the snails and slugs on which they fed. Casualties of an Ozian enterprise that dazzles and drains most for the sham benefit of select charlatans.

The patron and I were both bewitched by the glittering beetles, even though we both knew we could never grasp the luminescence we each craved. He kept their crumpled newspaper photo in his pocket, a talisman in a vacant patch of a life undone.

“Thought you were leaving this place,” he said.

“Soon.”

“That’s what you said last week.”

A week ago I mentioned leaving town as he sipped cheap Tequila to numb the stench of methane and cow piss from the industrial farms down the road. City folks rolled up their windows as they drove by Central Valley herds standing in their own shit and sardined shoulder-to-shoulder. Slaughter was salvation. We didn’t have that option.

I went into the backroom, which had a box-fan-duct-taped-filter contraption to try to wrestle valley fever fungus out of the air we breathed. I spent my work break running lines to memorize a script. Ran ’em in the car the next day too, as I chugged through two hours of country roads and mountain passes before descending on the City of Angels for an audition with a gaggle of bleary-eyed servers and despondent tech workers looking for a ticket outta Zombieland. Whoever nicknamed this city had a salty dose of sarcasm. My imaginary money is on a New Yorker. 

I paced backstage as preparation, visualizing a fictional world to wring the nerves out of my core. The casting director looked bored as I stepped on stage. In the glare of the spotlight, I felt more bovine than firefly. Tried not to look too dumb as I stumbled through my lines. She arched an eyebrow and scribbled notes on my fate. I searched her face for fragments of approval and found a blank slate. Pressurized and inscrutable. I wondered if she saw through my friable cracks. Learned that word from a script. Didn’t get the part.

As I drove home that night, I saw faint flickers of light piercing mist. Little flames bouncing off air in a meadow bordering a freeway. Kernels of life hanging onto stale air. Whispered glows that persist through toxicity. Fragile and fierce.

---

Adult Cruiser Bike, Pink, Steel Step-Through Frame, 7-Speed Twist Shifters
By Oumaima H.

You don’t know how to ride bicycles, but you buy one with your first cheque. I’m watching you go over your Amazon order for the second time, rereading the details, buzzing, eyes giggling. You shed your phone on the other side of the sofa when I nudge you. We’re submerged in the dark, except for the dim light streaming from the TV—you muted the dating show when we started arguing. You still have time to cancel the order, I try to convince you, you don’t even have insurance so it’s like throwing your life away. Or gambling with it, at least. I give up because you’re stupid and stubborn and it’s 11 pm. We soak up the silence for a few minutes before you turn to me with a grin—we’ve been roommates for 3 years but your excitement still scares me. The bike has a picnic basket, and you’re already planning out future trips to the park. You stuff your pointer fingers inside your ears when I tell you taking the bus is $400 cheaper. You reject my words when they don’t suit you. If you’d listened to me back when you booked that Prague trip, you’d have stayed in a decent hostel, not a noisy sixteen-bed suite where you couldn’t sleep. You can’t even ride a bike, so you’ll be the one falling. “It’s okay,” you tell me.“You’ll teach me.” And I have to laugh at that because, really, do you ever listen to me?

---

Bear Spray Rental Kiosk
By Lillian Lowenthal

Here’s the premise: man, age 36, employed by the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Drive-Over Service (an organization which drives fearful patrons across the bridge in their own cars), is driving woman, age 27, across the Maryland Bay Bridge.

The man inquires whether this is the first time the woman has used the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Drive-Over Service. He is driving the woman’s car with one hand and his window is rolled halfway down.

“Yes,” she replies, her face white. Her eyes are closed, and her breathing is labored.

“You’d be surprised how many people use our service,” the man says. “It’s really nothing to be ashamed about. I usually make about ten trips back and forth every day. Some regulars, people who have to commute across the bridge for work. And some first-timers. It’s a nice job, quiet. And I don’t mind the feeling of being over the water. You always been afraid of bridges?”

“No,” the woman says, “Not really. I used to be able to drive over them, but then last fall I read somewhere that some people are afraid of driving over bridges, and ever since then, I’ve been afraid of driving over bridges.” She pinches the skin between her eyebrows and lets out a low sound, an exhalation.

The man likes the density of this moan, the robustness of it. He asks her where she is heading.

“Maine,” she says, “I’m starting a new job.”

“And what is it?” (The man might be asking because he cares).

“I’m working in a nature center,” she replies.

“And what’ll you be doing there? Trail guide or something?”

“Manning the bear spray rental kiosk.”

“The what?”

“The bear spray rental kiosk.”

“Yeah, what is that?”

“We rent out bear spray to hikers. It’s similar to pepper spray, just stronger. You need a license to sell it, though. Are we almost over the bridge yet?”

“No,” the man replies, “we’re about halfway. Still over the water.”

`The woman nods minutely. Her hands are folded in her lap, like she might be holding something.

The man wants to ask her why she is going out of her way to work such an obscure job, but he worries she will return the question. He knows, on some level, why he drives, but he has never strung his thoughts together in any complete way. There is something meditative, he feels, about being in such close proximity to another human being that is completely overwhelmed by terror. Something erotic, even, about the discrepancy between the steady, internal calmness that he experiences, and the fear his passengers radiate. But the man is a moral person—he knows this about himself, and he takes pride in the fact that he is not filthy with his pleasure.

At the conclusion of the ride, the woman wordlessly presses a cool, cylindrical metal can into his palm. He looks down at the can, at the picture of a grizzly bear plastered on the front, and the block letter yellow words:

COUNTER ASSAULT (BEAR DETERRENT).

---

you fucked your ex boyfriend all summer
By Madeline Monroe

In May, you’re lucky enough to get a job teaching right out of grad school, at the community college down the block from your apartment. The gig doesn’t start until September, so you decide to sublet your apartment, and live at home with your parents for the summer, hoping to save a little money. 

In June, you run into him at the grocery store, in front of the bananas. He tells you he’s been back here for a couple years, working as a CNA at the hospital. You mean to ask him what happened to his law school plans, but you realize your dreams have faded since you were eighteen, too. He tells you that he’ll be at the bar you used to try and sneak into tomorrow, with a few of the same friends you used to hang out with in high school. You know you probably shouldn’t, because sometimes he still pops into your memory and makes your heart drop. You go anyway.

His hair is much longer now, and yours is shorter. He orders a Kamikaze. You drink one too many gin & tonics. You talk about how you used to drink Fireball straight from the bottle in his basement. 

You fuck in the bar’s bathroom. It feels inevitable, in a way. It’s disgusting being pressed up against a bathroom wall, but it beats having sex on his basement couch or the backseat of your Subaru, like you did in high school. He’s gotten way better. Hopefully you have too. 

In July, you keep fucking. He shows you his new apartment. You christen every room: the kitchen, the bathroom, the walk-in closet. You try not to stay long after things are finished because conversation feels just like it used to. It feels like grabbing coffee, like brushing teeth side by side, like taking a job at the local high school instead, like selling your apartment, like trying again. You’re still driving that same Subaru, and you guys do it in there too. 

In August, you’re in that same bar, but only for an hour before you go back to his place. In his bed, before either of you have taken any articles of clothing off, he pulls away, places a hand on your cheek, and tells you that you’re beautiful. The problem is that your hair is greasy, and you’ve sweat all your makeup off, and you’re breaking out, and you’re bloated. The problem is that you’re a mess and he’s a mess. The problem is that he’s beautiful too. 

You don’t know what to say, so you take your shirt off instead. It’s the best sex you’ve ever had. For once, you agree to stay the night when he asks. 

But, in the morning, you call the girl who’s subletting your apartment and tell her something’s come up, you have to come back, and she’s got to leave.

---

A Trip to the Shore
By Carla Lancken

I wake up stranded on a lonely island with seaweed in my mouth. The island turns out to be my studio apartment and the seaweed are strands of my hair. One PM pops up on the cable box. 

My penguin pjs are soft and warm and the best thing about winter is you can go places in bedclothes. I shove my toes into my ten year old Uggs and wrap myself in the full length black puffer parka I bought for warmth and certainly not for picking up men in bars although you’d be surprised what a puffer coat can get attached to. 

I walk down the block to the bodega.

Hey Miss Carmen how you are today?  No work?

Ha, no, on vacation. 

No way I’m telling Alexandro I’m a loser and got canned two weeks ago from my highly coveted clerical position. I grab a ten pack box of Ring Dings, slip them inside my coat and walk to the counter with a carton of full fat milk.   

The wind is cruel and cold but at least it’s not snowing. The Honda starts right up. It’s a good car. I have only 25,000 miles on it and it’s nearly 15 years old. I bought it new but I walk to work. (Used to).

I drive east because I know the Atlantic is in that direction and not too far. I can go to the beach if I want to. I can do whatever and whenever I want. 

Once I get to Scarsdale I pull over to the side of the road. I’m in the burbs in front of a stone and glass mansion with a circular driveway made of tiles. I like ritzy neighborhoods, it’s the only way to travel. I sit back and pretend I’m waiting in the car for my handsome rich husband. A police car rolls by, slow and steady till it’s even with my Honda. A dark window creeps down and a stern looking officer asks me if I need assistance. Probably the three dents that look like a shark bite and the I brake for schizoids sticker gave me away. 

When I get to the shore it starts to snow. Shit. I hate snow. I sit in the car with the motor running and the heat on. I put on the classical music station hoping for some Vivaldi’s Spring. I open the box of ring dings and eat every last one. I swallow them like stolen diamonds at the border. I drink my milk downed with the last of my Ambien, Prozac, and Ativan. I pretend it’s June. 

Some old man finds me passed out with the motor running. He bangs on my window then opens the door and shakes me like a sack of pomegranates. 

Lady wake up! You ok?

Yeah I guess, thanks. 

I turn the Honda around, drive home and walk over to the bodega. Hey Alexandro, I forgot to pay for the box of Ring Dings. 

I give him some bills. 

No problem Carmen, you always pay up. After a while. 

I trudge back in the snow to my studio apartment and lie down on the bed with my whale coat still on, my Ugg feet hanging off the edge. As much as I don’t care about anything I do care about getting my comforter dirty. 

I’m drifting off thinking about my next move in life. How to pay the rent. How to keep up my supply of pills without a shrink and money. When I wake up, the moon is pointing through my window like an ice pick.  

I get up and walk to the window. I open it wide and stick my head out looking down into the courtyard below which looks a lot smaller than it is because it’s twenty stories down. I can do this. No problem. I lean forward. 

Hey Carmen! says my neighbor next door who is also looking out her window. 

Can’t sleep.  You too?

Oh hi Lea, yeah. 

By the way…did you find a job yet? Cause we need someone down at the office asap. 

And I would have had that job if I hadn’t slipped on some dirty laundry, propelling me forward into the night air, then sinking me like a mini Titanic to the brick courtyard below. 

---

The Bridge Keeper
By Katie Baker

The night air is full of that seething summer chorus; that high whine in the tall grass presages the season’s death.

Gary stops at the verge, where the crossroad cuts the fields. To his right, the road shoots out over a bridge that spans a deep, wide gorge, and the late summer grass drops into darkness at the edge of the fields. A lone pole lights the bridge at its far end; its twin on the nearer side blew its bulb long ago and is shrouded in darkness. By the distant glow of this one yellow, land-bound star, Gary sees the silhouette of two legs dangling in the emptiness beneath the bridge.

He lingers at the crossroads for a moment, unsure. It isn’t the first time he’s found someone out on the bridge during his nightly walks, and it isn’t even the first time he’s discovered them sitting on the outside edge of the trusses.

Some punk probably taking a graffiti break.

But the longer Gary pauses, the heavier the feeling grows in his legs. If he turns left, he’ll come to the back of his barn in five minutes. If he goes right, some punk will tell him to fuck off. No sense in angering the kids. It seems like they’ve been stealing from everyone but him lately. Wouldn’t want to tempt fate.

Gary rubs the calluses of his hand along the back of his neck and takes a step to his right. The sound of his footsteps rings hollow on the old bridge. The vast void of sky and gorge open around him, and he senses it by an uplift in the air. He leans out over the chest-high steel girders and collapses his hands together, almost like he’s come to pray.

Gary senses rather than sees the figure six feet to his left, legs hanging free. The yellow light from the land-bound star reveals two scuffed and dirty oversized basketball shoes.

A whisper of fabric tells Gary the boy has looked up. Gary nods. “How are ya?” he says.

Silence. The wind whispers in the rusty girders of the old suspension bridge. Below them, the void yawns— bottomless in the dark.

“Nice night,” Gary says.

Again silence.

Gary looks out over the gorge. Far to the west, the dim lights of downtown twinkle; they sit in the valley that opens off the canyon’s end.

“What are you up to, son?”

A shift of fabric. Those scuffed, white shoes twitch. “Nothing.” The voice is young and tight, undergirded by the roughness of its changing nature.

Gary nods. “Good night for nothing.”

Out at the crossroads, a car speeds by in a plume of dust and a slice of headlights.

“You got anywhere you need to be?”

A long pause. Gary, used to silence, can hear the boy’s thoughts turning. “No.”

Gary nods again. His calluses make an audible rasp as he adjusts his hands. “Well, I’d feel a lot better knowing you wasn’t sittin up here on top a this gorge.”

The boy scoffs at this—a small snort. “Whadda you care? You own the bridge?”

Gary shakes his head. “County bridge.”

Another puff of sarcasm.

“You know how this gorge got its nickname?” Gary feels the boy’s eyes turn up to him. Everybody knows how this gorge got its nickname.

“My brother,” Gary says without looking down.

Again, silence from the trusses. Stillness from the sneakers.

“If you ain’t got any place to go, I got a bed for ya.”

“I don’t need your fucking bed.”

Gary nods again. He looks over toward the amber-glow of town. Thoughts of his bed trickle through the back of his mind. Summer’s waning chorus is now full-throated in the deepening night. The yellow light at the end of the bridge flickers for a moment, a disruption in the line like lightning fifty miles away.

“You harass every kid who sits up here?” the boy asks.

Gary shakes his head. “Nope.”

“You only pick certain ones, huh?” The belligerence in his tone sizzles like fat dripped into a fire. It’s a tone pregnant with implications.

Gary shakes his head. “Only the ones who remind me of my brother.”

“I ain’t your brother. And I ain’t your ‘son.’ And this ain’t your bridge. And I don’t believe a fuckin word you say. So piss off. I don’t need your helpin-hand-to-help-yourself bullshit, and I ain’t here to steal your side-by-side.”

Gary lets his silence settle. He looks over at the scuffed white sneakers and wonders if, for once, his intuition led him astray. The vision of his warm bed beckons him, followed by the friendly black and white faces and the long-lashed eyes of his cows ready to milk.

Exhaustion creeps over him. He settles his callused hands against the cold steel guardrails, the rust flaking against his palms.

“All right then … You have a good night.”

His footsteps ring even more hollow than before. The fields greet him with their wild cricket chirp; one strong insect voice near and then far calls shrilly above the rest and just a beat off the rhythm. Gary listens to the crunch of dirt beneath his shoes and feels the heaviness grow in his legs.

Maybe.

Maybe …

At the crossroads, he turns around to go back. The heaviness in his legs has blossomed into a wide open pit in his gut. But when he looks out toward the bridge, he sees the boy is gone. The trusses sit empty.

The wind stirs through the tall grass, and the yellow land-bound star flickers again.

---

The Houdini Séance 
By Charles Rammelkamp

“I know the story,” I interrupted Jeff, who was trying to enlist me for his Halloween scheme. “A guy named Gordon Whitehead sucker-punched him in the gut in his dressing room at the Princess Theater in Montreal, and he died ten days later in Detroit, on Halloween.”

“Yeah, but —”

“And he didn’t believe you could actually talk to the dead, anyway, had a big fallout with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about mediums and spirits and such.”

“Yeah, but —”

“His wife Bess kept trying to contact him on Halloween for the next ten years before she gave up, too. Tossed in the towel. So what makes you think we’re going to talk to Harry Houdini on Halloween? I’d rather go out to a bar in Kenmore Square. The Landsdowne or maybe The Bullpen.”

“That’s just it, Ben. It was here, right here in the Charlesgate, before it became an Emerson College dorm, almost a century ago, when it was all private apartments, before there even was a ‘Kenmore Square.’ It was still called Governor’s Square then! Houdini actually attended séances right here, trying to expose that Beacon Hill woman for The Scientific American. If we hold a séance here, I mean, what are the chances?”

“Not enough to persuade me to change my Halloween plans, Jeff.”

“But Madame Griselda. She’s the real thing! Warren ran into her in a place on Hanover Street. And what’s more in the spirit of the holiday than a séance? Come on! It’ll be fun! I don’t believe in that shit either, but it’ll be fun.”

In the end, Jeff and Warren twisted my arm and I agreed to attend the Halloween séance in their room that night—candles, incense, everybody holding hands and closing our eyes. The whole nine yards. Besides, with its turrets and towers, the Charlesgate looked “haunted,” and it was a cold, windy autumn evening, the perfect ambiance.

They’d invited three of our coed classmates, too, Shelley, Brenda and Alison, the three of them as skeptical as we were, but just as game.

“Woo-woo!” Shelley mocked when they arrived, wiggling her fingers, thumbs in her ears. We all laughed. But when the medium arrived, we were all on our best behavior—polite, respectful.

Madame Griselda sure looked the part, lots of makeup, caked all over her cheeks like a clown, gypsy earrings and bright red headscarf, dark, oily Medusa curls. Her accent could have been straight out of the Carpathians—via Hollywood or Hanover Street, anyway.

“Are we really going to speak with Houdini?” I asked, as we all sat down.

“I am not in control,” Madame Griselda advised. “I am only a channel for the spirits.”  Alison rolled her eyes.

We took our seats around the table, a round low-set coffee table Warren had taken from the sidewalk on Beacon Street. Somebody had discarded it from one of the brownstone apartments. Mainly it was used to roll joints and stack textbooks. All that had been cleared for the candles and incense holder, a little Buddha with a plate on his lap where the cones of incense went. The sandalwood fumes were making me want to sneeze. I was twitching my nose to suppress it, when Madame Griselda started to snarl and meow like a cat. We’d all had our eyes closed, of course, to summon the spirits—Madame Griselda had cautioned us to do so—but now I raised a lid and looked at Brenda, whose eyes had become wide as full moons.

“I see a black cat,” Madame Griselda announced, and now Brenda rolled her eyes. Then she closed them again.

“Who. Who. Who,” Madame Griselda chanted, and I wondered if this were supposed to be an owl, if she were summoning her familiar, like something out of Macbeth, maybe.

Only, that’s when I remembered my family’s black cat, Houdini, from when I was a kid.  A black cat!  I’d named him. I’d just learned about Harry Houdini, his famous escape tricks—from straitjackets, handcuffs, jail cells, bound up in boxes sunk beneath the sea, and I’d asked my parents if we couldn’t name our cat Houdini. They of course said yes.

Houdini was not allowed to go outside. My mother didn’t want him chasing the birds. My father said it wasn’t safe and that he might run away. People had it in for black cats, he warned, especially on Halloween. But Houdini used to gaze longingly at the birds and the squirrels outside the living room window, his ears perking up with a hunter’s alertness, his tail wagging. It was always a joke in the house, when the front door opened, if one of us was just coming in, and Houdini made a mad dash for the door.

One day when my parents weren’t home, I took pity on Houdini and let him out.  The predictable happened. He was struck by a car.

I was sobbing when my parents finally got home, though I made up a story how Houdini had escaped while I had the door open and was fetching the mail. How guilty I felt.

Meanwhile, Madame Griselda had started to purr, I swear.

“He say, ‘You not responsible,’ ” she said, looking around at all of us.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Warren asked. “Who’s not responsible? For what?”

Madame Griselda shook her head. “He say, ‘You not responsible. Not your fault.’ ”

“Maybe she means Gordon Whitehead,” Jeff speculated. “Not responsible for Houdini’s death.”

“Ah! The spell is broken!” Madame Griselda declared, staring at Jeff, clearly blaming him, and she began to gather her paraphernalia.

“That’s it?” Warren cried.  He seemed about to argue, until Alison stood up and thanked her profusely, and then Brenda and Shelley chimed in with their thanks, too, and the séance was over.

“You need money for a cab?”

After Madame Griselda had left, we decided to go to a pub. “A black cat!” Jeff exclaimed. “What a ripoff.”

But I knew.

---

Dark White
By Mike Lee

I am lounging, legs stretched out, in a cream-colored 1965 Lincoln Continental suicide door convertible, sitting passenger side with Alix driving. She holds the all-knowing smirk in her dark white lipstick mouth and Mamaw’s gold snake cat-eye sunglasses. The same pair a famous Hollywood actress—I can never remember her name—wore in a photograph. I found the picture while reading a book upstairs at The Strand bookstore when I lived in New York.

Mamaw has money. Lives in the High Desert, in a tacky peach mid-century with a rotunda facing the end of a cul-de-sac in Palm Springs.

We are on our way over. First, we shopped at Shag’s for prints and stopped for a round in a faux Tiki bar.

Mamaw is nice. She is an Appalachian from Eastern Tennessee, from, as she calls it, the ‘barefoot side of the ridge.’ She started in Nashville as a personal assistant at the Grand Ole Opry, where she met her music producer and songwriter husband. They had one child, Alix’s mother. Shortly afterward, the father overdosed in wealthy junky fashion in his office bathroom at Capitol Records.

I admit it’s a fantastic building to die in, a mid-century skyscraper interpretation of a stack of records and funkier than Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia. That architect built a space-age city with expectations for a never-arrived future.

I always wanted to visit.

According to Alix, Mamaw was also an addict. Alix told me she kept her rig in an ornate ivory box beside the bed. With that admission, my skin crawled like a centipede had decided to conquer my world. Something about addiction always bothered me.

Mamaw finally kicked heroin when she was 70. She’s 85 now. Junk has a way of keeping you alive longer, Alix explained. Look at how long William Burroughs lived, she said. I just nodded with a tinge of anxiety.

The one child—Alix’s mother—hooked up with a Topanga Canyon hanger-on, who had a minor connection to the Manson family, but as Alix repeatedly told me, who didn’t? So after a brief courtship, during a rare thunderstorm, they left LA, headed to Colorado, and missed all that nasty shit that happened with Manson afterward.

Amid incense and peyote, a hippy midwife in a commune near Carbondale brought Alix to existence.

Alix is young for her age, though she dyes her Bettie Page bangs and doesn’t have the hardness life gave to others. Yet, while 52, Alix still has that impulse to go go go. Money pays for all that, and there’s plenty from Mamaw. I’m told the royalty checks are extensive. You can hear a song the grandfather wrote or owned the rights to playing on the radio at least once daily.

We drive through the neighborhood, heading for the ugly house at the cul de sac. Finally, we pulled up to the curb and got out.

“This is strange,” Alix said. “Her attendant must have gone shopping, and she went with her. Let’s make sure.”

Alix unlocked the door and shouted, “Mamaw, We’re here.”

There was no answer. After several moments, Alix visibly shuddered.

“Mamaw?” Alix walked through the living room and turned.

She gasped.

Mamaw lay on the couch in front of the picture windows facing the cul de sac. Her head leaned back, skin gray as dust. Her eyes and mouth open. She was dead.

I saw them first. The works were on the Scandinavian coffee table. A vintage gold-plated Zippo was on the carpet at her feet.

Alix stared. Nodding, she said, “There are no words for this.”

She turns to me. “Don’t touch anything. Can you please make the call?”

I pull out my phone and press the emergency contact.

I held Alix until the paramedics arrived. Her body is cold. Alix gets that way when she’s scared. She should be. Mamaw found Alix’s gear.

She presses her face against my jacket, smearing the dark white lipstick on the leather while I stare at an aging black and white photo portrait of her grandmother from when she was young.

Smiling, jet black hair in bangs, looking just like her granddaughter.

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Shared Taxi
By Robert Walton

Monica and I must never arrive at the gates of heaven together! We would be holding hands and that would be too much for St. Peter. Separately, it’s possible that we have a chance of getting in, even me.

When we were younger? La! Two figs for St. Peter! Now, I insist that we take separate taxis anywhere we go. With these Istanbul taxi drivers, who knows?

But when we were younger, there was Paris, the Rue de L’Abrevoir.

We met in the shadows of a certain place where dusk gathered blossoms’ fragrance for us alone. We were safe there—from nosey friends and nosey enemies, from parents with the agendas parents always have, from lovers past, present, and future—safe to share each other. Beneath glowing streetlights, we kissed. Our every minute was an hour.

But such endless hours are numbered. I remember her lavender satin gloves, her fingers on my wrist when we parted.

Ah, we parted for months, for years, and then for decades. There was a war—but there’s always a war. There were marriages—at least three, but never between us. There was her music, her violin—the concerts, the lights, the flowers. There was prison (for me)—a misunderstanding with Credit Lyonnais about some checks, some very large checks. We met when we could—in London, in Singapore, in Yosemite (at the improbable Ahwahnee!), and in places both humble and obscure—to rediscover our passion. And did.

Now, Istanbul—she called this afternoon and I’m hastening to her on a ferry over the Bosporus. East to west, Asia to Europe, the ride always engenders a feeling of diminishment in me, sadness that even the Blue Mosque’s minarets—crowned by golden tiaras of light—cannot assuage. Ships menace, as always, looming like mythical sea monsters as I sip my Efes, savoring the beer while thumbing my nose at the blind behemoths.

I take a taxi to Ortakoy, stopping at a building comfortably distant from the market’s bustle. Monica’s flat is on the ground floor, and she exits her front door before I can get up the steps to open it for her. Always determined to make her own way in the world, she descends one step at a time, gripping the rail with her right hand and balancing with her cane in her left.

Upon reaching the sidewalk, she pronounces, “There!”

I offer my arm gallantly, hopefully. “What will it be tonight, Cherie? Ruby, Babylon Bomonti, or a jazz club along the Bosporus?”

“The Amerikan Hastanesi, as you very well know.”

The American Hospital—their machines, their needles, their poisons. For in the end, there is cancer.

Her fingers rest once again upon my wrist. “Please help me to the cab.”

I do, grasping her right arm, supporting her labored steps. She is a hummingbird in my hand and that terrifies me.

She sighs as she sits in the back seat. “Thank you. They’re expecting me at the hospital.”

“Slide over.”

She glances up at me in surprise. “But Henri, St. Peter?”

“Slide over.”

“Two figs?”

“Two figs!”

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