"ENDLESS VACATION" by Paul D. Marks: 2010 Honorable Mention

I used to dream I could fly.

And I'm not really afraid of dying. Not in the normal sense. That sense of the unknown. Heaven. Hell. Maggot food. One's as good as the other.

I had a girlfriend once who slept through a terrorist bomb attack, of course one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. But I don't think she cared about that. And I don't know if her thinking in that moment got as far as heaven-hell-maggot food. I'm sure she was just trying to get the hell out of Dodge before Chrysler imploded.
* * *
I used to want to be a hero.

Doesn't everyone at one time or another? A hero in the movie of your life.
Sometimes a hero in the movie of someone else's life.

It's not like I just got off the bus at the Hollywood Greyhound station like those kids over there. Did they come here to get away from their parents? To become movie stars? Both? Don't they know that the same tether that ties them to home will sink them in this town?

"I'm cold," she says.

I slide a filthy blanket over her. She shivers, pulling it tight around her neck. She leans against the cold stone. A chill shakes her from head to toe. A quivering hand grasps a shock of stringy blonde hair, wraps it over her face; anything to keep the raw wind at bay. Blue veins criss-cross the top of her hand, so many blue highways to the backroads of her soul. But her eyes, windows to that soul, are empty. Devoid of feeling. Devoid of fear. Well, maybe not, but at least that's all hidden behind a wall of street-girl bravado.

"I had to come here," she says.

I'm not sure which here she's referring to. Here, as in here and now, leaning against this cold stone. Or here, as in coming to Hollywood eighteen months ago with stars in her eyes. One of a million, thinking she could be one in a million. A trite, clichéd story to be sure. Unless she's your daughter. Your sister. Your girlfriend.

What is she to me? She's not really any of those things. I'm old enough to be her father, but I'm not. She's not my sister or my girlfriend, though we've had sex on several occasions. She calls it "making love." I call it recreational sex, friends with benefits, but not to her face. Every time we finish she says, "I love you." I mumble something which I assume she takes to be the same. We never talk about it. We often hit Oki Dog afterwards. She cadges money, though she claims never to have turned a trick. I always manage to have a few bucks. Between us we eat okay. Though she spends most of her coin on other things.

"I didn't come here looking for the streets to be paved with gold," she says, her eyelids fluttering. I know she didn't because she'd never heard that expression till I told it to her. But she knew there were palm trees and sunshine, movie stars and Hollywood. And that's where we were now, right in the heart of Hollywood, Paramount Studios only a few yards away.

She may not have known that the streets were supposedly paved with gold; she did know that she might be able to get a job in the movies. Or at least on television. I knew that too, when I came out more than a decade before her. When I came out I was as naïve as her, as everyone else who comes with high hopes and great expectations. I had a script under my arm, a smile on my face and confidence busting out all over. I thought that's all it would take. I won't bore you with how wrong I was. But I did take a meeting with Steven Spielberg once. A friend of a friend knew his assistant and set it up. The meeting–

"They're moving," she giggles.

"What? What's moving?"

"The vampire bites. They're crawling up my arm."

I look at the trail of splotchy welts on her thin arm. "Yeah, they're doing a jig."
"A jig? What's that?"

"A dance."

"Yeah, they're dancing. You're so funny. You always make me laugh."

I make her laugh and she makes me cry. A tear nearly escapes the corner of my eye. I stifle it with a finger that hasn't hit a keyboard in two years. Or is it four?

Her head flops back against the stone. She's okay. I lean back against the hard leg of the bench I'm using as a back support. I watch the vampire bites creep up her arm.

"I could've gone to New York, you know."

I know. I've heard the story a thousand times, but I don't really mind hearing it again. You know how when you know someone well, when you're a good fit, they – and you – start repeating the same stories over and over again as if you've never heard them. When I'm doing it I always wonder if the person remembers the story or are they hearing it yet again for the first time? When I tell them what the first record I bought was. The first movie I saw in a theatre. The first time I ditched school. The first girl I kissed. The lore that makes up our lives. So I knew she could have gone to New York. And I knew why she didn't.

"It was either New York or Hollywood," she says. "The Big Apple or the Big Orange. I like oranges better. Someday I want to hit New York – CBGB's."

"It's not there anymore," I say.

"I know." She stretches out 'know' as if it has three syllables, like a little girl might. "It's a gallery or something now."

"Right."

I never wanted to rain on her parade of vampire bites, but someone had to tell her that CBGB's, the renowned club where punk rock is said to have started in the 70s with Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell, the Talking Heads and the Ramones, ain't what it used to be, so to speak. Not to burst her bubble, but so she wouldn't make a wasted trip to NYC like the one to LA. CB's is no more. What good does it do to live in the past?

When she came out here she was wafer thin, or is it waif thin? Same difference. Pale white skin, skinny arms, skinny all over and that long, lank blonde hair that, at least then, all of a year and a half ago, looked natural. These days it comes out of a bottle, but she does a good job and you can hardly tell. Back then, what do they say, back in the day – I hate that fucking expression – she affected that heroin chic look, though she'd never done heroin. Today she lives it. I can see it on her face – the tombstones in her eyes. I can see it on her arms, the tracks running up and down – vampire bites she calls them.

She wants to make a pilgrimage to CB's, but there ain't no CB's anymore and even if there was that whole scene was before she was born. Before she was that gleam in her papa's eye, that bulge in her mommy's tummy. That scene was dead long ago. She wants to go back to something she's nostalgic for – something that barely existed in her lifetime.

Who the hell am I to talk? I came to LA looking for a Hollywood that died before I was born. A glamorous town of movie stars and studios and backlots. A studio system that nurtured talent, whatever you say about how it also might have stifled it with the other hand. A town that made movies in black and white but whose streets were, indeed, paved with gold. Yeah, I bought it – hook, line and clapboard.

And so we met, a scared and lonely girl and a tired and lonely man verging on middle age. Oh hell, middle aged – but that, of course, depends on when you start the clock on that one. I'm not ready for AARP, not for a while anyway.

Two dreamers whose dreams went bust on the prickly pyre of reality. So we have each other and we give each other warmth and someone to talk to on the endless days of our endless vacation. Someone to share dreams with. Someone to share food and shelter with. And watch TV with – we always manage be in front of a TV to watch The Amazing Race. To watch other people living life even as we don't live ours. Someone to share needles and H with and know – with fairly good certainty – that you aren't going to get Hepatitis or Aids from. Now that's reality.

She slides down Dee Dee Ramone's unyielding tombstone, here in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. If she can't make it to CB's she can at least come to where Dee Dee's buried – burned by a heroin overdose. Yards away is a statue of Johnny Ramone. Founders of the Ramones, godfathers of punk. Who gives a damn? She does.

"Dee Dee wrote a song about skag," she says, slurring her words. "Chinese Rock."

Yeah, I know. It's one of those things we talk about over and over, like a broken record. I wonder if she knows that expression.

–My meeting with Spielberg went fine. He loved the pitch. "Leave me pages," he said. I left pages. Never heard back. Called a week later. Too soon. Three weeks later. "He's in pre-production." Eight weeks later. "He's in production." Twenty weeks later – who are you and what do you want? My flirtation with fame and fortune.

I sold my Gibson Les Paul Goldtop a couple weeks ago, the only hold out from my former life. Got pretty good money for it too. We've been staying in a cheap motel, eating pretty well and buying decent dope. Life is good.

I hear voices. For real? In my head? Look down the lane – people stream in.

"Hey, it's Saturday night," I say.

"I forgot."

"They show movies here on Saturdays – against the mausoleum wall."

It's true. Where else but in Hollywood – right here in the heart of Hollywood – would people come to watch movies on a big silver screen – the mausoleum wall – sitting on graves, munching on picnic dinners with their expensive wines and waters, only a few yards from the back of Paramount Studios?

"Do you want to go see the movie?"

She shakes her head. "I like it here."

She slides farther down Dee Dee's stone.

"But I'm cold."

I wrap the blanket tighter around her.

Sometimes-sometimes when we're doing it – having sex – I hope she'll get pregnant. I want to leave something behind. I wanted to leave behind the Great American Screenplay, but that ain't gonna happen. So maybe a kid. But that wouldn't be fair to the kid. Of course, if we have one, maybe I'll straighten up, get a job – yeah. Get an apartment. Call my folks. All that good stuff. Maybe. We don't use protection and we don't get pregnant, so it's a big maybe.

I'm afraid of leaving nothing behind. I'll be gone and no one will even know I was here. I don't live on MySpace or Facebook or Twitter or any of those. I don't exist. No checking account. No driver's license. Hell, no ATM card. No one knows where to find me. No one who knows me knows who I am. Sometimes I barely remember.

Where did I come from? I know. I could tell you, but what's the point? It was another world. Another life. Another me.

I watch her face go calm and peaceful. Slack. Her whole body goes limp.

I want to do something.

I try. But can't.

There's nothing worse than watching someone OD in front of you. You watch them die. You want to help, to call the cops, an ambulance – do something – but you can't because you're smacked out too.

She gave herself a hotshot. Making it in LA wasn't just harder than she expected. It was impossible. When she got off that bus she thought she was tough – she wasn't as tough as she thought. She doesn't care if anyone remembers her. She just wants peace.

Yeah, I used to want to be a hero. And maybe I've even done some heroic things. But no one remembers. No one cares that I chased a city bus for two blocks because the driver wouldn't wait for an old man to get to the stop. I felt like a hero then. But I wanted to save a girl and I couldn't or didn't or maybe even wouldn't. I don't know. Hell, I can't even save myself.

I used to have dreams. I used to dream I could fly.



Paul D. Marks is a former "script doctor," who's now focusing
on fiction, both short and long. His story "Netiquette" won first
place in the Futures Short Story Contest. "Poison Heart" was a
finalist in the Deadly Ink short story competition. "Dem Bones"
was a finalist in the Southern Writers Association contest. His
novel White Heat took second place in the mystery-thriller category
of the South West Writers contest. His story "Terminal Island" appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of Weber: The Contemporary West. He has
also published non-fiction articles in various newspapers and magazines
and has lectured on writing at UCLA, Cal State San Bernardino, Learning
Tree, as well as writers' organizations. He is currently working on a
novel set on the L.A. homefront during World War II and a satirical novel
about the joyous and joyful Hollywood experience.

“Me, Myself, Still Un-cool” by M. Esther Sherman

M. Esther Sherman received an Honorable Mention in our 2010 competition

I’m a poetic soul and always have been, against my better judgment and the beatings of my classmates. My seventeen years of upper middle class life have caused me to be precisely as tough as paper mache and as daring as a monk on sedatives. I have no curfew because even my parents want me to get a life. I drive a 1996 Mustang Cobra, which is still cool because it’s 1997, but I’m afraid of ruining it so I put a cover over it every time I stop somewhere, which is apparently incredibly un-cool. I don’t play sports because they don’t let you carry a copy of Pride and Prejudice beneath your football jersey.

Yes, I am a man and yes, I love Jane Austen.

Most days, and nights, I sit around doing exactly what I am doing right now. I sit on the floor of my bedroom, perfectly decorated with original Star Wars posters, and debate the meaning of life with my witless best friend, Brian Aliander. Oh, and I believe remaking Star Wars will go down as being the only attempt at meaningful contribution for this generation, which since it was a photo copy of a masterpiece will also define us as the stupid little pot-smokers we really are.

It’s the last night before senior year and I am, rather obviously, a virgin…and a band geek who fiddles with the violin.

“Thoughts are fluid and stormy,” I begin with sincere emotion and depth. “They drift between the crevices of our minds as if to suggest there must be something more than this, but what if there isn’t? What if the thoughts we hold and the dreams we cling to are nothing more than the anxious fears of a hopeless heart? Maybe the brokenness, the agony, the hate this world produces in mass is all there really is. Maybe the blood, bruises, and scars we bear are the only truths we will ever find. Thoughts are worthless without the elements that have the potential to make them true. There is a distinct possibility there is nothing more than this.”

I stop and allow my profoundly brilliant realization to be absorbed into the air. Brian’s pudgy form looks back at me with utter amazement. I know I have reached him on a personal level. He swallows his last bite of pizza and chases it with a swig of soda. I sit, in complete anticipation of the affirmation sure to be thrown my way, as he draws in a deep breath before speaking.

“Dude, that’s f’d up,” he finally says, takes another gulp of soda and belches loudly. “You need to sort out your shit or stuff like that’s going to keep coming out of your mouth and you’re going to get the crap beat out of you.”

I shake my head in complete disbelief, which turns out to not be enough to keep him from continuing his unwanted response.

“Not to mention,” Brian continues. “You’re never going to get laid with a mouth that has more practice at quoting dead chicks than with making out with live ones.”

“But I…” I stammer in disbelief.

“I know,” he says after finishing off his drink and tossing the can to the side. “This is our tradition and it’s what we’ve always done. You sit there and say something brilliant and I sit here and applaud you for it. I just can’t do it anymore. I think I finally grew a pair and you should probably do the same.”

With that, and nothing else, my best friend of eleven years gets up, walks out, and disappears from my life.

“How f’d up is that?” I ask my stuffed bear, resting against the bed where he’s been listening to the entire thing. He too looks appalled, though I am uncertain whether Brian or I put that look there.

I know Brian is right. I have reached the point in my life where all my philosophical studies, my nights of lengthy reviews of the newest enlightened compilation of thoughts, and my tiresome habit of thinking before acting mean only one thing: I am un-cool.

The next two weeks prove to be nothing more than the endless cycle guilt accomplishes on every soul stupid enough to listen. One day, I am convinced everything is my fault and I must apologize to Brian. By the next day, I’m convinced I don’t deserve his friendship and he’s better off without me. I’m pretty much a woman like that. I go back and forth until I give up and wait for him to come to me, something I know full well a dimwit like Brian is never going to do because he doesn’t know what he had. The thought alone solidifies the fact I am totally a chick.

I step into Mr. Winter’s advanced calculus class and pull an oversized textbook from my bag before sitting down next to Margerie Swangster, the most beautiful girl on the face of the earth. I could spend days on end, without food or water, completely satisfied just staring at her perfect smile and bouncing blonde hair. If I were slightly cooler, not much but enough, I would comment on her gorgeous rack and hips that move with a mind of their own. I don’t possess the amount of cool necessary to think such things without blushing enough to send me into fever.

“Can I borrow a pencil for the quiz?” Margerie’s angelic voice slips into the air like vapor and vanishes in an instant.

I stare at her dumbly and wonder what a pencil is. I don’t blink.

“Danny?” her voice again.

Danny? That’s my name. Somewhere inside of me I know she is talking to me. The incredible, brilliantly beautiful, sensuously delicate Margerie is talking to me. I can’t breathe and my face begins to pulse red from thinking the word “sensuously”. Alex Bernstein, built like a bear, reaches across my desk to hand her one of my pencils.

“Thank you, Alex,” she hums softly, almost a purr. “You’re a life saver.”

Damn it. Damn it all to hell, me and my inability to function around anything in a skirt. Not that woman have to wear skirts, it’s not the fifties and I’m not that guy. Damn it. I must look angry. I must look angry enough to kill someone because when I regain composure, everyone is looking at me.

“Danny?”

This time it is Mr. Winters’ voice punching me in the face.

“Yes, sir.”

I wanted it to sound calm but I know it didn’t.

“You all right, son?”

I burst into flames, metaphorically speaking. It is this moment, the one in which I realize I am no longer un-cool but am now officially a loser, when I start thinking about everything else in the world; beer, belly dancers, bratwurst, caramel apples, catapults, crash scenes. Even my rebellious thoughts appear in alphabetical order.

This was my entire high school experience. I could go on about my freshman year when I showed up to the prom in a bright blue suit because I thought, when this lovely senior girl leaned within inches of me and asked if I’d go with her, she was talking to me and not the senior football star sitting at the desk to my left.

I could tell you about my sophomore year when I thought I made the football team only to realize they thought I was a girl and they were being accommodating in order to not get sued by an irate father who wanted his daughter to play football with the boys.

I could tell you about my junior year when I set the curve on the senior English final and the entire class beat my ass after school. I could tell you a lot of things that have already been summarized by my one minute too long of staring at Margerie Swangster.

I now, two years later and none the wiser, attend a prestigious university, drive a slightly beaten up 1996 Mustang Cobra, and am still a Star Wars loving virgin who plays the violin. My psychology book is cracked open on my desk and my eyes are endlessly searching for answers I can’t find. Professor Grubik’s classes are notorious for answers you can’t find because no one is certain what the question is. I rub my eyes and hear the shower turn off. I hadn’t realized the shower was running.

It is only two a.m. and my roommate, Kevin, usually doesn’t venture in until the sun rises and another day begins. I think that’s actually his motto. He’s one of those guys who are popular enough to have their own motto.

I had stepped out for a minute or two earlier to ask a classmate a question but I hadn’t seen Kevin. It doesn’t matter. I shake my head and convince myself it doesn’t matter, even though what it means is that he is going to step into the main room, brag about his conquests, and remind me of exactly why he’s him and I’m me. Now, I really have no idea where to find the answers and I slam the book shut. The door to the bathroom slides open slowly, not in Kevin’s normally boisterous style, and I turn to comment on exactly that.

There, in my room, completely naked and dripping wet is Margerie Swangster. She’s immediately angry, in the quiet way a girl gets angry even when it’s her fault, and I can’t stop staring. Her body is more perfect than I ever imagined and I certainly did spend many days and nights imagining. She has marble skin, smooth as water and curving perfectly to cover her sensuous hips that still move as if they have a mind of their own. Her immediate anger moves into a smiling state of intrigue as she realizes how much pleasure I’m getting from this. I’m not subtle and I can’t stop staring.

She fixates on my eyes as I settle on her breasts, circling around her nipples until I unconsciously lick my lips with the feel of her skin against them. She stands still but I still feel every inch of her. I throb and I burn with a passion I am unable to satisfy. I take her with a strong but firm hand and she removes my shirt and begins to unbutton my pants. I lay her down on Kevin’s bed and begin to move over her, my tongue pleasing her flesh. She moans and I feel the satisfaction as she grows louder and I dig deeper within her. My fingers are inside of her and my lips taste every inch of her hips as she squirms in ecstasy beneath my strength.

She laughs.

I’m still staring.

Damn it.

“You have a towel, Danny?”

Her voice is precisely as delicious as I remember but I have changed enough to move when she asks. I toss her a towel hanging over my bed and she wraps it around herself. It doesn’t remove the images. I can shake my head a thousand times but it won’t remove the images.

“Thanks,” she says.

I have changed in the last two years. I realize I have changed enough to do something. She pulls one of Kevin’s shirts over her head and as her head reappears, I am there. I touch her hips gently and the towel falls. I’m against her, my hands touching her bare flesh and I kiss her.

The kiss is timid at first, then lingering as an act of rebellion. I allow my lips to part more deeply and she presses herself against me. I don’t know why she’s kissing me back. Maybe she’s curious or maybe she is the sort who gives to charity in more ways than soup kitchens and fundraisers. Her lips are sweet and her skin is warm, the feeling will never leave me. The door opens, of course, and Kevin appears in a sudden movement of panic and disbelief.

“Margie,” he half yells.

She pulls away from me with a giggle and I know she’s smooth enough to live through this.

“Hi, sweetie,” she wraps the towel around her waist, leaving her breasts bouncing beneath his shirt to distract him, and moves toward him, kissing his cheek. “You were late so I thought I’d have a bit of fun with your roommate.”

Her smile melts him, toward her anyway. He turns to me and I make a mistake. Every once in a while, my obscenely high I.Q. gets me into trees I can’t climb out of.

“I thought she needed a little passion in her life,” I smile sharply, like a man who can fly until he’s thrown out a window. “You know, someone who knows what they’re doing.”

Turns out, that was the last thing I would say for over a month since he broke my jaw and I spent twelve hours in a coma. Twelve hours in a coma for kissing Margerie Swangster. Well worth it if you ask me.

That is the basic summary of my college experience. I graduated top of my class, teacher’s favorite, and still a virgin, though I did see a girl naked, rarely picked up a violin, and only put up two Star Wars posters in four years.

Two years after the perfect kiss, I stand in front of the entire university in my long black gown, waiting to give a speech of some limited significance. I have it all written out, all the things I know I should say. Things like “the world is ours” and “these lessons will carry you through the rest of your life”. I know exactly what should come out but when I stand up to the podium, the words disappear. I stand up, in front of everyone and say absolutely nothing. I say nothing because this is exactly what I want to say…

“I am incredibly un-cool and always have been but I know what happens next,” I want to say. “In three years, I will have been working for one of the highest rated companies in the world when I decide to quit in favor of starting my own Internet Company and making several million dollars a month doing almost no actual work whatsoever. I will be on my way to a conference in San Francisco, teaching young kids how to be as amazing as me, when I run into Margerie Swangster who decides it is high time we catch up. I’ll take her back to my penthouse suite, lay her down in all the ways a man does a woman, and realize she was never really that good.

“I will get to wake up the next morning and move on with my life without the fantasy no one can live up to and let her return to her passionless life with some hack she married for money while I realize it was Kevin I always had a thing for,” at this point, if I was speaking, I could watch Kevin squirm. “Turns out his violent overreaction in college was nothing more than a mask to hide his secret love for all things Jane Austen and his dark fetish for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the homosexual movie theatre on Fifth and Elm. I’ll look him up in the Pink Pages and take him out to a nice meal and an Elvis wedding. We will buy a house by the bay, adopt one of the Jolie-Pitt children as soon as the divorce is finalized, and settle into a comfortable routine consisting of Star Wars novels and violin lessons. I’ll be happy and I will still be un-cool because about twenty years from now, I’m going to realize un-cool is the new cool and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

I stare out at the audience staring back at me and my eyes fall heaviest on Kevin, sitting sternly in the third row from the back. We lock eyes for a moment and I realize it doesn’t matter what I say. I regain my composure and say exactly what I should say, all the clichés that rest on the page in front of me. The crowd applauds politely and I take my seat behind the podium, staring at Kevin’s firm features, content with the fact I already know how it ends.

M. Esther Sherman is the product of Newberg, Oregon, currently resides in SoCal, has the gift of sarcasm, a need to write, is the mother of the most amazing kid on the planet, and still can’t believe Jake was dumb enough to choose Vienna over Tenley (who’s also from Newberg, fyi). She graduated top of her class with a degree in sociology in ’06 and uses her knowledge of human behavior and social norms to craft characters with internal and external controversy with a splash of political animosity. Esther loves to write novels, screenplays, short stories, poetry, and the occasional thank you note and would love nothing more than to have a long happy career in fiction. Some have already said she is, “sure to be one of the most dynamic and masterfully original authors of our time. The witty complexities of her humor and the manner in which she brings her characters to life are nothing short of genius.” Of course, so far, the only people to say those things have also been fictional.

The Cloud Creature by Kate Zahnleiter

The Cloud Creature by Kate Zahnleiter: 2010 Second-Place Winner

I like to walk to clear my head, when it gets heavy and full, and so I slip out the front door while he's in the shower. I should leave a note to save him from worry and rage, but I doubt I'll be gone long and either way I cannot bring myself to go back into the house. Henry has made an appointment for Thursday, 11.30. He has printed off an information sheet, complete with carpark diagram, and left a pre-procedure checklist on top of the kitchen bench. I learn something new each time I pass. No food or drink for two hours prior to the scheduled time. Patients will be given medication for the pain. Should infection occur, a course of antibiotics will be prescribed and all discomfort should be cleared within a few days. Bold type at the bottom of the page tells me I will not be permitted to leave the clinic unless accompanied by a family member or friend, but Henry hasn't offered to come with me. He hasn't offered anything other than the money, but then I don't really have any of my own.

I push my way up the hill, enjoying the way my muscles tighten and release, trying to trust the soundness of them and believe that they will not give way and leave me the victim of gravity and the ground below. Lately, I have been thinking often of my body. As a constant. As something other than a vessel which carries me from place to place, a vessel from which I can disembark at any moment. I suppose I have you to thank for that. You've been focusing on your own body, I know. First with the rapid division of cells and now, millimetre by millimetre, every day you are growing yourself. I push my way up the hill and try to ignore the sharp pain in my side which could be your handiwork or could be Henry's, or could simply be a symptom of my general lack of fitness. Exercise is good for foetal development, I know, though I suppose that won't make much difference.

'Get rid of it,' Henry had said, and he had pushed his fingers into my stomach so hard I thought you'd be able to feel them, so hard I thought he was trying to rip you out of there himself. Get rid of it, he'd said, as if he was referring to a stain on a bed sheet or some sort of blood-sucking parasite. He'd spoken that way about a couple of church group leaders, once. They had climbed our front steps and asked if I wanted to be saved, and I did, oh God I did, but he slammed the door in their faces and slid the lock into place.

Get rid of it, he'd said of you, even though I hadn't breathed a word. I hadn't even thought about you while in his presence, just in case he had broken through the final barrier and had learnt to read my mind. I had been careful not to let my hand rest on my stomach more than usual. I had been careful not to let my eyes glaze over when he spoke, since Henry liked to clear my head by cracking it against the nearest hard surface. Instead, I kept you buried until the private daylight hours, until I heard the front door click shut and felt the house clear of him. Then I would sit at our kitchen table in silence and let my mind grow fat with thoughts of you, while I stared at the clock and tracked its movements. I'd heard that time slows down that way, and I wanted to savour each solitary tick. Thursday, 11.30. That's a little over 24 hours, and I wonder if my legs could hold out for that long and keep my head clear. I doubt it, since already I need a rest.

The door to the coffee shop chimes happily as I enter, the bell's enthusiasm not matched by that of the waitress, who sighs when she sees me. I pick a corner booth next to the window, and slide across the seat so I am huddled against the wall. The air conditioning has been turned up too high, and my flesh rises in tiny bumps as it often does when I need an extra layer of insulation, when I need to seem intimidating and larger to my enemy. I rub my body to warm it, careful of all the tender places. There are four fading purple circles on my forearm and I try to line my fingers up with them, the same way I have seen people try to fit their palms into other people's handprints hardened into concrete. Mine aren't a match, though that's no surprise; if my body could be dusted and lighted forensically, every inch would glow with Henry's arches, loops and whorls. I have read that by the seventh week of gestation a foetus has already developed an individual set of fingerprints. You are already unique.

'Can I help you?'

Oh please, yes, could you?

'I'll have a camomile tea, thanks.'

Research shows that light to moderate caffeine consumption is safe during pregnancy, but I'm unclear on the widely accepted definition of 'moderate' and know a lot of the data comes from studies involving pregnant rats. The process differs from creature to creature. From rat to human, from human to human, the process is different for everyone. I think that animal testing is cruel, on a whole, but an argument could be made that there are some things people need to know. For the greater good.

Growing up, I knew two things about my mother. The first was that she had long black hair, like mine. The second was that I had killed her. There was no information at all about my father, and my Child Safety Officer told me not to think on any of these things too much. Unfortunately, there was little else I wanted to think on, between the endless rotation of foster families and government homes and faces, large and twisted, familiar and unfamiliar at once. When I was eight I asked Mrs McTeague, the school librarian at the time, if she knew how to find out more. She had always been so supportive with class projects.

'I can't help you, Cal,' she had said, ducking her head so I couldn't see her eyes. She gave me a book on African wildlife instead and let me sit in her office while I read it. She knew I hated the communal reading room, with the low murmuring of other children and the erratic flipping of pages. She knew even such small sounds bothered me when I was trying to concentrate. She knew how I needed my solitude.

Sometimes I wonder what it's like in there for you, in your own little world. No day or night. No hot or cold. No food or water or air, other than that which I pass on. The ultrasound gave nothing away but a strange rushing, pulsing noise that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. I hope it doesn't overwhelm and confuse you, in there. I hope you don't get lonely. Sometimes I try to remember what it was like for me, when I was in your position, but it does no good. The human brain and memory can only stretch so far; some things need to be pushed out to make room for others.

Towards the end of my schooling I stayed with a family called the Clarksons. They had three children of their own and the eldest, Miranda, taught me to revise for exams by standing in front of a mirror and saying facts aloud until they stuck in my head. I liked the Clarksons, and I would have liked to have stayed with them for longer than the six months, had Mrs Clarkson not developed multiple sclerosis.

During this time, I met my grandmother. She was much younger than I imagined grandmothers to be, with a raspy voice and a smell of stale scotch and talc. We caught the train to Pelican Bay so she could show me where my mother had grown up. We climbed to the top of Break-Neck Cliff and sat with our legs dangling over the edge. I sucked in sea air and she sucked in nicotine while she spoke, carefully, about my mother.

'She liked to swim to clear her head. She loved the sea. She named you for it.'

I trembled with the effort of restraining myself and tried not to rush her for more. I could already see myself saying these facts aloud to the mirror. I could already see myself moving to Pelican Bay and settling down with my grandmother, with the memory of my mother. I could already see my life changing.

'She never went anywhere else. This was where we laid her to rest. She's still down there, you know. She's still swimming.'

I trembled again, but this time mostly in fear. I imagined my mother as some sort of interminable sea monster; her tired body wrapped in seaweed, her long black hair threaded with salt. I imagined her climbing out of the whitewash and up the side of the cliff towards us, her aching arms outstretched to claim me, to pull me down with her.

'If things had been different...' my grandmother said, but she let the rest of her words fall over the edge of the cliff, so I wasn’t sure what would happen if things had been different.

I sat by the phone for three weeks before I realised she wasn't going to call. I knew I should have spoken more, tried to appear more interesting. I shouldn't have complained when I stumbled and cut my leg as I tried to keep up with her, her footing as steady and sure as a mountain goat's. I shouldn't have told her I didn't know how to swim. I thought about catching the train to Pelican Bay by myself to surprise her, but instead Miranda and I rode into town and I looked up my name in the encyclopaedia. Calypso was a sea goddess. Her mother covered the world while her father was a giant who held the whole thing up. She kept a man prisoner for seven years. She wouldn't let him free.

My tea arrives; tiny flowers floating in hot water.

'Don't burn yourself,' the waitress says, but she doesn't sound as if she cares one way or the other. She looks worn out, and I wonder if she spends her whole day praying not to hear that door chime.

I stare into the pot and try to see shapes in the bobbing yellow clumps. When I was 18, I met a young man with green eyes and a slow, deliberate smile. He could find pictures in the clouds; a swan, a boat, two lovers in the grass. He could put words to the pictures as well, plucking stories from the heavens with such skill that by the end of the day those stories were more real than we were. He told me he saw me playing the piano. He told me he saw me learning to paint. He told me these things while he held my hand gently, stroking the back of it with his thumb. I try to read my tea, now, but it is only the past I see.

'I want to marry you, Cal,' he said to me once, and my heart had beaten right out of my chest and landed in the sky, where it became white and fluffy and read as a single, simple Yes.

Three weeks later, he rolled his car while telling me the story of a cloud creature that grew so large it became everything. I was trapped inside with his lifeless body for two hours, but he didn't suffer. Not as I did. They cut me out and told me I was lucky. They told me I would lose my limp, over time. I still had it when I met Henry, though that didn’t seem to bother him. I still have a scar down the left side of my face, too, which I don't want to lose. That seems to bother him a little.

I told Henry I wanted to study, and to work with victims of trauma and sufferers of chronic pain. I told him I wanted to teach them to play the piano. I told him I wanted to teach them to paint. He nodded, he encouraged me, until one day he changed his mind and broke each of my fingers. But he was sorry for it.

'I just want you here with me, Cal. I just want to take care of you.’

I had considered telling him I could take care of myself, but the truth was I wasn't so sure of it.

'I just love you so much. See?'

His eyes had been full and wet, his intact fingers vice-like on my waist, and I thought that I could see. If I looked at it a certain way. If I tilted my head and squinted.

I didn't want to see you, at first. The nurse offered to hold my hand but I gripped the sheets instead until my knuckles turned white, begging for a misunderstanding, hoping that you had disappeared through my silence and neglect. I didn't want you. You wouldn't want me, with my sallow skin and lank hair, with my swollen gums and concave chest. When I break and bruise I am slow to heal. These are all signs of malnourishment.

The doctor had pointed to a beautiful, floating blur, and I had tried to make a picture out of you. I had tried to build you a story, but I had no talent for it. Practice makes perfect, though, and the doctor had printed out a copy for me to carry home in my back pocket. In my head, I carried home memorised paragraphs from the waiting room brochures. Pregnancy should be a special time. There are many factors to consider when making a decision. A woman has a right to control her body. A woman has a right to choose. Say those lines in front of a mirror and repeat them until they stick. I would say them now, in front of the reflective coffee shop window, but the glass is dusty and streaked with grease, and my likeness is mottled and unformed. I don't think she'd understand. She rarely does.

'Do you know what you've done?' Henry had said. 'Do you know what will happen?'

I knew I had created life out of chaos. I can’t know the future, but I'd done some research. I'd read about crack babies that come out screaming for their next fix. I'd read about foetuses choking themselves before they are even fully grown. I'd read about young eating each other inside the womb. Intra-uterine cannibalism, they call it. Though that article had been about grey nurse sharks.

'Is the thing even mine?'

His voice had been harsh, and I had closed my eyes against it in case he could see how strongly I prayed. For an immaculate conception. For a severe case of sleepwalking. For a gestation period that would break the records. At altitudes of 1,400 to 1,700 metres, the pregnancy of an Alpine Salamander can last for up to three years, though the process differs from creature to creature. I am still not entirely sure what sort of creature I am. Part human, part titan, part sea. I'm still not sure what sort you are, either.

If things had been different. If I could build you a story.

It takes two hours to get to Pelican Bay by train. It takes 20 minutes to walk to the train station from the coffee shop. I could go there now. I could buy a ticket and board the train, take a seat next to a nice elderly woman and her knitting or else across from a couple of teenagers with their headphone speakers turned up too loud. I could find a house with a room to rent. I could find a job. In high school I could type 52 words per minute, and I wouldn't mind scrubbing toilets. I could let my belly grow fat with love of you. I could already see my life changing.

My bag sits open on the seat beside me and I try not to tremble as I rifle through it, try to keep my breathing even so you don't have to fend for yourself. In its depths I find travel tissues, a pen, a packet of gum with three pieces missing. I find my phone with the crack down the middle; a crack along its face which tells me I have five missed calls, though I don't know how I could have missed the shrill, shrieking sound of them. I continue to rake my hands through the debris at the bottom of the bag, even though I know, in my stomach, that I have left my wallet at home. I can see it on the kitchen bench, right next to that appointment slip. I can't even pay for the tea.

I like to walk to clear my head, when it gets heavy and full, but now I don't trust my shaking legs to hold me up. Instead, I fold my arms into a pillow on the tabletop and let them take the weight of it, though I do my best avoid the tender places. I press my ear into the cavern created between the old wood and my body. It echoes, there; a strange rushing, pulsing noise that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. It confuses and overwhelms me. It sounds like the sea.

Kate Zahnleiter was born and raised in South East Queensland, Australia. In 2005 she graduated with a Bachelor of Psychology (Honours), and has since been involved in community care and rehabilitation, working with individuals with mental illness and victims of violence and abuse. Her current goal is to make writing a larger part of her life, and to travel the world as widely as she can for inspiration.

LONELY by Joanne Bentley

It was a cold November day the first time she saw him.

Snow had fallen the night before, covering the arbutus and oaks in strange but beautiful Christmas-like attire. Having grown up near the Rockies, she hadn’t expected this rare and lovely visitation of white on an Island of constant rain, nor the pang – the memory of snow – skies heavy with the smell of it; the bite of Northern wind. Swans in pairs often drifted into the little cove in springtime, but this one, swimming apart from a paddling of pintails, was alone. Somehow she knew – sensed – something was not right.

‘Where is your mate?’ she’d wondered…

~

The courtship that spring had been a thing of magic, their dark bills dipping together into the welcoming waters of the marshes under the pale, quiet light of a gibbous moon. Had any been near to witness their dance, it would have seemed she had been cast of pink pearls, and he of quicksilver. Soon, in the nest they’d rebuilt from the previous year, its moat plucked clean to ensure no danger would take them unaware, she laid five perfect eggs, and under his careful vigilance, set herself down to keep them warm.

Dew shone upon the reeds the morning he and his mate heard the frail piping of their young through the shells of their eggs. In a turning of daylight, perhaps two, the little ones would slip with them into the warming waters of the nearby marsh and feast upon the bounty of small crustaceans and water beetles waiting there to give them nourishment.

Anticipation brought him nearer the nest, and she had dipped her head at his approach.

Both had piped gentle encouragement at the still intact shells.

Days passed. All but one of their clutch hatched, and when after several more days it became clear the last one would not, she gently rolled it into the water, watching with liquid eyes as it softly bobbed and bumped away in the retreating tide.

Their young were hale and full of life. Between the lush reeds and bulrushes, and along the branches of the lazy river the two led them, sometimes joining up loosely with other families, but most often alone together. Once a young hawk tried for one of the signets as they rested together on a sandbar, but as the little one scrambled to his mother’s side, the swan had at once thrown wide his perfect wings and rushed the interloper, delivering a frightening blow that knocked the red-tail from the air, sending him spinning and sliding upon the seaweed-caked sand. A second time he rushed the hawk, but it leapt quickly into the air and made off, the Trumpeter lifting his chin crisply at the diminishing foe, shaking his feathers and bugling a warning in his wake.

Weeks passed, and the signets, their first feathers almost fully down, were able to feed themselves on the deeper vegetation their kind favoured. They were growing rapidly now, putting on weight and thickness which would serve them well in a few months' time.

Ever vigilant, their sire watched over them, and no harm came nigh them. Summer was gentle. Eagles routinely hunted the smaller mallards and pintails, spiraling high up onto the updrafts that they might bear their prizes to the ravenous eaglets waiting impatiently in strong, ancient nests. But for all their strength and power, they seldom eyed the swans.

The tides came in, and went. Food was plentiful, and now the four were testing their wings, beating them strongly against the playful breezes blowing in from the sea. Clad in soft grey-brown feathers, these were a credit to the pair who had bred them; three daughters and a son.

The signets now gathered in large troupes when they followed their parents from the nurseries in the marshes to the hay fields a short distance away. Here, they enjoyed the sweet, determined shoots growing even after a third harvest, sunning and preening in the late-summer warmth as the adults looked on.

~

Slowly, Fall began to have its way. Summer colours in the leaves now hinted at the amber, bronze, copper and auburn that would soon enfold green in the promise of rest. The Cob became restless with the need to be moving; gunfire had punctuated the early morning skies these last few days as hunters came to take a share of the bounty of ducks and geese.

It was a sound even those not hunted understood, and he often led his family to a nearby sheltering cove for safety. He knew others of their kind had already answered the call of warmer climes, and he felt his disquietude increasing; they would rise the following morning.

~

Mist hung low in the estuary. The air was cold and still.

The farmer had left a small stand of cow-corn in the middle of the field as part of his agreement with the local hunting association. A natural ‘hide’, the ducks were unable to pick out the shapes of men crouching there, and past years had seen consistent numbers fall to become seasonal delicacies on the menu of more than one of the finer restaurants in town.

When the light was sufficient, the swans and two other families had floated into the hay field for an early graze. A strange tension lay in the air: there was a sense among the mallards, wood-ducks and geese – a need not to fly.

Having arrived when it was still dark, the hunters now rubbed their hands against the cold as the dull morning light crept in. One or two whispered this maybe wasn’t a good day for it, then fell mute. A silent agreement – ‘wait and see’, passed between them, and so hands were tucked into armpits, legs awkwardly stretched, coughs stifled.

A short time later, a puff of wind tested the mist. It moved, sluggishly. Again the breeze rose, this time more persistent, and like a herd of sleepy cattle, the low clouds ambled forward.

His mate and young still grazing under his watchful care, the swan sensed the moving air and stretched his wings to powerfully greet it, eager to be aloft. One or two of the other adults bugled in agreement, and a wave of preparatory wing-beats passed among them. The signets sensed their parent’s anticipation and called excitedly between themselves as the ducks and geese around them squawked in protest.

Their heavier bodies required the swans to take a long take-off run, beating their wings with tremendous effort in order to get clear of the ground. As they rose, the nervous energy coiled around them was unleashed. Flocks of smaller birds seemed to explode into the air with the Trumpeters as if drawn helplessly in their wake.

Seeing this, the men lifted their rifles, leading the path of the game curving gently away from them.

They had begun to form a wide arrowhead, bugling encouragement to each other as the layers of mist fell away below them. Cracks like lightning shattered the air.

His mate fell first without a cry; her breast torn wide. He turned his head and called to her, hesitating in mid-beat as agony poured through his right wing.

He spiraled clumsily – too fast – toward the ground, the shape of what had been her perfection crumpled in a heap below him in the deep, dying reeds not far from their nursery. Somehow, he controlled his fall well enough to crash into the water near her, or he surely would have died from the shock of impact.

His existence was now a blinding woe of pain, made worse as he flapped to pull himself out of the water; where the end of his wing should have been was only shattered bone and torn flesh. It was gone from the elbow.

He called out to her as he approached, called again with a soft crooning urgency; trying to reassure. But she too, was gone from him.

Distantly, their young flew on with the others.

~

The men came shortly afterward. A half-suppressed sneeze had strayed the hunter’s aim just enough to cause this tragedy.

Not one given to weeping, he wept.

When they saw the male yet lived, and not fully grasping the extent of his injury, they tried to approach him thinking to take him to hands better able to help, but here was a creature strong enough to shatter a man’s arm with his wings, and he charged, hissing at them, driving them away from the wreckage of the stolen beauty tangled hideously in the reeds behind him. So deep was his bond with her he could not yet sense she was dead, and so he defended her as though she might rise again as if from slumber.

They stood awkwardly, then, some distance from him. One dug out his phone. Perhaps Conservation would know what to do. They mused about the fine – for there would surely be one, as the one on whose conscience this lay stood apart from them, deaf to their ruminations.

“I’m sorry, shit I’m sorry…” he whispered at the glaring Cob and the ruination of his shattered wing, his tears cold against his skin.

Hours passed. The stand off continued. Some nearby residents, drawn by the unusual sight of hunters gathered so near the homes along the shoreline joined them. A single mother and her daughter struggled their way across the treacherous mudflats then stopped – somehow impossibly close to the swan. They’d enjoyed many visits from the little family throughout the summer, but now as they watched him panting from the dizzying stress of his pain, their faces were pale and sad. They held onto each other tightly, and cried.

Finally, the Conservation officer arrived.

“Had some trouble figuring out where you were,” he said gruffly as he slogged through the sucking mud, “You might want to step back away from him, there,” this to the mother and child, but it fell on deaf ears.

The men drew into a semicircle around him, the few remaining residents who’d braved the chill clustered just close enough to witness the exchange. There was a resignation in the air, a sense there was but one humane outcome to this sad occurrence as they listened to the uniformed officer’s terse questions; watched him take notes.

“’Fraid there’s gonna be a penalty out of this, sir, you know that though.”

The hunter nodded numbly.

The officer turned toward the swan, flipping his notebook closed and tucking it into a pocket on the front of his pant-leg. He shook his head and spit, an unpleasant metallic taste building in the back of his mouth. He hated this part of his job. Hated it. He made his way toward the Cob who in turn rose unsteadily to his feet, his head pushed forward in a posture of warning as the man unclipped his pistol’s holster.

“Don’t you hurt him!”

So focused had he been on this grim task, the officer had all but forgotten about the mother and child.

“Don’t you hurt him – don’t!” the girl shouted, jumping free of her mother’s arms and into the path of the swan.

The officer stopped. Having no children of his own, he blinked at the girl, unsure of what to say.

“Honey I’m sorry, but you see…you see how he’s panting like that – ?”

“Don’t you hurt him – I won’t let you!” the child shrieked, her voice rising as she put her hands out in front of her.

The officer looked to the mother for help, but found none in the lifting chin, the tearfilled eyes.

‘You do this yourself. You’ll get no help from me.’ Her expression said clearly.

He shifted his cap awkwardly, and – stumblingly – continued.

“Honey, he’ll…he’ll never fly again with that wing, do you understand? If I don’t put him out of his misery, well, he’ll be alone. That’s if he lives. But he,” the officer cleared his throat, looking for words a youngster might grasp, “he’ll take a long time to die, honey. It’ll be painful, and the eagles will probably –“

“No they won’t, I won’t let them – mum and I won’t let them!”

He looked pleadingly toward the mother, and was about to speak again when the hunter who’d caused this misery interrupted.

“I’ll stick around. I’ll help. Let ‘im be, officer. Maybe you’re right and…” he looked at the Cob, his voice trailing off. The lump in his throat returned.

“Maybe he will die, but it won’t be no eagle that does it. He could live…have something of a life here. I’ll stick around and help. It’s the least I can do…” he said, his voice growing thick.

Everything in him – all of his training – told him he should do what had to be done. He swore under his breath, and looked toward the swan. There was a fierceness in his eyes, perhaps enough to keep him alive. The weather here was pleasant enough, even in winter. Maybe he’d make it.

The officer sighed, shaking his head.

‘I shouldn’t even be thinking this way,’ he thought.

“I can’t take responsibility for this, but okay. If he really starts suffering –“

“I will.” The hunter said hoarsely.

~

A strange and mostly silent vigil followed. Taking it in turns, the three kept watch as the swan lay in the reeds near his mate’s body. For days he hissed at and threatened anything that came near. One seagull, thinking it had found an opportunity, was nearly beaten to death before it escaped, but the effort of attacking it renewed the bleeding from the swan’s elbow, and that night he fell into an exhausted slumber haunted by the sensation of falling.

Nature though, in Her tender, gentle way, came to his aid. Under brooding clouds that swallowed the moonlight, the high tide reached the dark reeds where the body lay. Lifting it in gentle, lapping waves, the briny water softly carried her away as the Cob slept. In the morning, he awoke with a start, a jab of pain rising through his maimed wing. He looked round, and found himself alone.

The healing began.

~

Fall arrived gently. For the first time in his life, the swan witnessed the bounty of Nature’s treasure – leaves of gold and copper, floating upon the wind, dancing and pirouetting and at last coming to rest upon the tidal flats where eventually the sea claimed them.

His youth and strength served him well, and the amputation closed quickly. He fed in the rich beds of vegetation largely unaffected by the turning of the seasons, and found comfort in the company of the little pintails who stayed the year-round.

Often, he drifted up and down the branches of the river flowing between the sandbars of the estuary, finding his way inevitably to the little cove where the child would sometimes fling a handful of soaked bread into the water for him. He did not always eat, but drawing near, would watch her as closely as she did him.

His first winter was a blessedly mild one, and he adjusted – haltingly, to his inability to fly. Sometimes the sun would warm the tidal flats, and he would stretch and beat his wings against the inviting breeze, running and flapping hard, expecting to rise.

In the early Spring, when the others returned, he trumpeted his welcome and strained for the sound of her. He swam among them as they reclaimed their nesting sites, sometimes calling expectantly, other times, just seeking.

But she was gone from him.

Several nights later, he was drifting in the warm waters under a sky of perfect stars, listening to the courtship song of a newly bonded pair nearby. A pang so like loss poured through him; from some deep place like memory.

He let sound then a long trumpeting cry that echoed across the water and into the sheltering cove.

It was the last time, so far as any knew, that he uttered a sound.

~

That summer, the mother and child moved away.

When the tide was in, some expectation in him brought him near what had been their rocky beach, but the cottage stood quiet and empty; none greeted him upon the shore.

The months passed. He watched the pairs and their little signets, watched the young ones grow into their grey-brown feathers, followed this family or that from a tolerated distance. He could no longer join them when they flew to the fields to graze, so his joy was increased when they returned in the evenings. The weather became colder, crueler. Soon, they were leaving him again.

Sometimes he would forget, and running upon the surface of the water with one of the families, would beat his wings hard, expecting to join them.

October brought driving, biting rain. Many days, his only shelter was in the little cove.

There was enough food. Only a few of the pintails remained with him as winter set in.

It was a cold, crisp November day. The sun brought cheer to the estuary, and lay bright upon the snow that had fallen the night before.

Out of habit, the swan came into the sheltering curve of the beach below the little cottage.

He had almost reached the shore, when the familiar sound of a door closing floated down toward him. He looked up.

He did not recognize the woman making her way to the little stairway, and he hesitated, swimming some distance from where the retreating tide lapped the stones. He studied her carefully as she tentatively made her way down the ancient steps, and watched as she scattered food into the water between them, listening to the sounds she made as she crouched down. He sensed her patience; there was no threat here.

Cautiously, he drifted in, and fed.

***********************************************************************************

LONELY earned an Honorable Mention in the 2008 Competition.

***********************************************************************************

Joanne Bentley’s life-journey to this point has included learning to fly small aircraft (something she very much intends to return to), joining initial-attack forest fire fighters on the front-lines as the crew first-aid attendant, and lately, working and communing with birds-of-prey under the hat labeled “Professional Falconer”.

The short story “Lonely” is based entirely on her observations of a living Trumpeter swan near her home in North Cowichan Bay, and comes from her meditations on how he could have received such a life-lesson as the one he endures. Joanne’s current works-in-progress include several short stories, and a series of fantasy-fiction novels.

###

LATIN FOR PONDER by Gregg Cusick

I am ersatz, a word I’ve wanted to use for the longest time. Can I say that I’m an ersatz? I’m an inferior substitute, a sad excuse you might say. I may be false or dishonest, in terms of society’s rules, although not unto myself—I’m a thief, a simple burglar really. And I’m something of an anomaly, a paradox, if you will, will allow me to use two more words I’ve wanted to for some time now. I’m a moral, ethical sort of thief. I adhere to a strict code of conduct.

And I’m also wealthy, at least relatively speaking, which is another irony since I’ve been working in the prison wood-shop for the past nineteen months, twenty-two days earning about a dollar and seventy-three cents per day, not the kind of fortune one salts away for an early retirement. Still, I’m fond of the traditional-values feel of the term, which also appeals to my sense of irony, since isn’t salt about the most abundant thing on the planet?

But I mentioned my wealth, so I can afford to ponder the linguistics—Christ, it’s a whole degree-bearing course of study at the state university not seven miles from here, though of course I can’t go there—and like I said, I’ve also got the time to ponder. In fact sometimes I imagine myself a professor of Philosophy or Linguistics or Ethics, in a state-funded think-tank, where I’m fed and clothed and fully supported, a place where the charter mission statement, perhaps on a bronze plaque beneath a statue, is the Latin infinitive to ponder, whatever that word might be.

That whole vision is not far from the truth, really, since right here in Central I’ve got three squares and a reasonably comfortable cot, a hands-on and not mentally taxing, satisfying employ (I operate a lathe), and a small living space that, while not the ivory tower of academia, is certainly simple and sparse enough to fit well as the milieu of a creative type, an artist perhaps. (Forgive me that, another word I’ve been trying to work into everyday conversation; and of the type, like the others, not so much appreciated by those around here.)

Forgive my digressions. As my high school English teacher, Mr. Frey, used to scratch in the margins of my essays, and as the court-appointed head-shrinker used to tell me here, months ago before I grew impatient and clammed up, Excuse me, but what’s your point? Precisely, doctor, I wish to discuss my code (and some of its implicit ironies), to explain my aforementioned wealth (its source, its meaning to other relevant parties), and then, quite frankly, having said my piece, to be left the fuck alone. Pardon my language.

A possible side benefit I’d hope would be some sort of personal epiphany if that’s not too strong a word (and if such understanding can result from casual pondering). Some realization for myself of what in my case has so many local folks, many of whom I know or know of or know their brothers and cousins (this being a small town and many of us have worked together, gone to school together, even church), what has so many locals so up in arms. This is no Unabomber treatise, and I’d hardly like it printed in the New York Times, but I sure wouldn’t mind, after I get out of here, to find some place like Ted did, Idaho or the Dakotas someplace, where people pretty much have their own codes, too. And where folks leave each other pretty much well enough alone.

The prison officials tell me, and it’s right here on page 3 of the News-Dispatch, that there’s at least a dozen picketers outside even now, protesting my release. Protesting, too or moreso, the transfer of funds that should be taking place some time this morning, the twenty-five grand (less, of course, taxes and lawyer’s fees, so that I’ll have in the end a deposit slip for about seven thousand and change, this my aforementioned wealth). The simple and legal, but also ethical, payment for service I provided, namely the “information leading to the arrest of the person responsible” for the “slaying” (this of course the media’s word, and one I was in no hurry to use), let’s just say the killing of a gas station convenience store clerk, January 26 of this year. At the Key-Mart, one of eighteen such establishments owned but not operated by Harrison Keymore III of Stone Mountain; the attempted robbery and murder taking place at the Store #17, corner of Woodstock and Cousins Streets, Bynum, Georgia.

Now I don’t know Harrison Keymore from Adam, but I went to high school with Candy, the deceased, and I had a pretty good idea who was responsible when I first heard about it here in the clink. A guy my brother’s age, three years ahead of Candy and me in school, a sociopath—a term I picked up from the therapist here—with no code at all and a mean streak clear through, name of Pinkerton (like the famous detective, ha!) whom everybody called Pinky. (And note the object-case pronoun usage, Mr. Frey.)

Anyway, when my brother paid me a visit here back in February, we talked about the incident, and he mentions casually how Pinky surprisingly paid off his annual Super Bowl debts that next week. (Perhaps Pinky’s only redeeming quality, his thread of a code: for years he bet on the Bills, and then anyone who played Dallas.) My brother tells me of the shooting, how there were no known witnesses, and how the owner of the chain of stores had put up this reward. This Keymore III, who was running for state congress and probably had insurance covering all of it anyway. So the slick businessman gets some good public image points whether the killer is found or not, but still the tightwad in him (and this how he got rich in the first place, taking good care of the family fortune) would hate to have to pay up.

So while most in town suspected Pinky, no witnesses and no murder weapon meant no crime. But that’s when I started pondering this, in the time I had here, spinning my lathe grinding chair and table-legs at a rate that astonished even myself, trying to get in the head of this code-less Pinky. I even ran the whole thing past the shrink here—a man himself, admittedly “fascinated by the criminal mind,” who no doubt has tax shelters and undeclared earnings well in excess of the reward pittance I should by now have in my account. To this doc I related Pinky’s penchant for firearms, his collection the local police had confiscated and fired every one, looking for a match for the bullet that killed our high school almost-friend Candy. I asked the shrink if such a character, a sociopath, I reminded the doctor, would be likely to dispose of the gun used in the robbery. He agreed that it was possible that such a character might have difficulty throwing a sentimental item such as that off a bridge into murky waters. Might he not hide it, instead, I offered, to the widening eyes of my therapist.

I continued pondering the case for several weeks, until an article in the “police blotter” section of the Dispatch caught my eye. Deer hunting season ended January 1st, and yet some brazen local youths had ignored their calendars and continued shooting Bambis well past the legal date. I guessed—and what did I have to lose?—that Pinky was of this ilk, that he’d be hunting perhaps even still. And that a favorite gun might be safely stashed in a deer-stand on his family’s seventy acres west of town. I hatched a deal with the D.A. and prison officials which would greatly reduce my own prison time if my hunches (of course I described them as certainties) turned out to be accurate. Which in fact they were, nearly exactly, to the degree that had I not been incarcerated at the time of the murder I’d have been brought up on charges myself, as at least an accomplice, or how else could I know so much?

Now I contend that I’d have done the moral thing and supplied the information no matter about the reward, and no matter whether it could help my own situation as it did, in reducing my 36 months to slightly more than twenty. I contend this, but I’m honest, and I of course can’t know this for certain. The local columnist who wrote the article I’m looking at now, the one condemning me more even than Pinky himself, invokes the term “honor among thieves,” wondering to her loyal readers if I should have perhaps protected my “fellow ne’er-do-well,” my high school “partner in crime,” protected him with my silence. Clumping criminals like an inferior race. Give me a fucking break.

Which gets me around, though, to my code and the code-less around me. Now Dr. Freud in his penthouse office here (overlooking the chain-link, razor-wired grandeur), a suite full of taxpayer-endowed plants and numbered-lithograph Rorschachs on the walls, he tells me that I shouldn’t be concerned with what other people think. Which to a large degree I’m not, if those others would just let me alone. But they won’t. Not him, not the lawyers, not the picketers outside, not the newspaper writers with their screaming headlines of indignation, “Crime Pays in Bynum.” Nor does my own family, nor Candy’s. Nobody seems to have the tiniest understanding of my situation, yet they won’t just let me take my few bucks and hopes for a new life and head to Idaho. So I’m appealing, I guess, for a little understanding. What’s so funny?

In the interest of fairness (one of the prime values in my code, along with trueness to oneself), let me to the best of my knowledge present a few of my detractors—

The judge: Hating his job the day he had to rule in my favor, that there was nothing in the reward offer that prevented me, a criminal, from getting paid. (Law enforcement officers pay off informants every day, my lawyer pointed out.)

My lawyer: Who told that columnist he rued the day he passed the Bar, that he’d one day be defending the likes of me, but adding that he was defending the Constitution, “even when it protects the rights of vermin”; such a crock, from a guy who snorts coke, slugs his kids, and has to weasle himself out of a drunk driving arrest once a year.

The columnist: Who champions the just cause, condemns, say, animal testing, pays a grand for a purebred-AKC-registered, when they put down a dozen a week at the pound; who condemns alcoholics and addicts but couldn’t live without her sleep aids and back spasm medications (sore, no doubt, from the crosses she bears).

And all the rest of them, who condemn me while they fill out the insurance claims for their stuff, calling that Cracker Jack broach a priceless heirloom and that handsaw a $200 Makita. Those who take two newspapers from the box for only one quarter, who pitch their beer cans and cigarette butts, not to mention their washers and stoves, by the roadside, who pass their grudges on like chain letters (while maintaining a crisp copy for themselves).

And forgotten in all this: this lynch-mob after me has forgotten Pinky. Pitiful, unchangeable Pinky, who blew away an old friend and probably laughed. Who will get thirty years and serve maybe six, who will be out before you’ve gotten your own shoplifting kids out of the fifth grade. Who’s got a mean streak wide as I-95. But who won’t be in Idaho, I bet.

In grade school, we used to call our town “Buy-none,” and the group of us—my brother and me, Candy, Pinky, Jerry (who later became a cop, ha!), and Cal who moved away before high school—had a pact to pay for as little as possible. Candy (his real name was George Herman, named for the Babe himself, and like him in some ways) used to steal mostly sweets, chocolate bars usually, gum, little stuff. It’s amazing he ever got the job at Key-mart, where when he died he was standing behind the counter munching peanut M&Ms and reading the letters in Penthouse. (My brother, who wasn’t there of course—there were no witnesses—told me this, and said he heard it from Jerry, who heard it from a cop friend who was first to the scene. Blood and M&Ms and Candy slumped over the counter, a hand on a glossy page that began, “I never thought I’d be writing your magazine, but . . .”) Candy used to lift stuff from the Key-mart all the time, magazines and beers and motor oil, would sell it at discount prices around town, and then tell his manager about young shoplifters, whom he could describe quite well from his own experience. “Shrinkage,” that was the retail term for the loss; Candy was responsible for a great deal of shrinkage in his twenty-seven years.

My brother and Cal and Pinky used to go for bigger stuff, for baseball gloves from the big discount store at the shopping center, chicken and burgers from the cafeteria-style diner at the mall, things they stuffed in their jackets. I was very selective even back then, taking only from those I had some score to settle with. I worked at a dry cleaner’s for a time—when I was thirteen and fourteen. I’ve always worked. And people used to come in demanding service, pounding the counter bell, pointing to spots and wrinkles, demanding one-hour service in their busier, more-important-than-others’ lives. Telling me, “Kid, let me talk to your boss,” when I was doing most of the work while he played golf.

People put their addresses on the cleaning receipts, and I’d go to their houses later and grab a lawn chair or a couple of their pink flamingos, never keeping the stuff but arranging it neatly, like the ensembles in furniture showrooms, in the woods at the dead end of our street. If the people worked in stores, I’d go there and take something. Sometimes I’d enter their houses through an open window or a screened porch door, walk around in their cool, dark homes while they were working. I’d assess their belongings and then grab something small but meaningful. Something they’d later ask their wives, “Hey, did you do something with my fountain pen?” And later on, when I started taking stuff I’d sell or pawn, I’d only lift stuff I knew was insured. TVs and stereos were easy, computers sometimes (I’d always leave the disks), golf clubs and power tools from garages. It was remarkably easy, really.

In later years, sometimes I’d follow people home, someone who cut me off in traffic, thoughtless folks I saw pitch litter out their car windows. When I worked in restaurants, I’d note the names from credit cards of patrons who stiffed me or treated me like a servant, so superior were they. I could usually find their addresses in the phone book. Simple. Maybe when their stuff turned up missing, they might have pondered the possible connection, the one I’d made.

The shrink here tells me my emotional growth was stunted about the time I left off working at the dry cleaner’s all those years ago. Dr. Freud tells me that when my friends grew up, and grew out of the thieving stage a lot of kids go through, that I graduated to higher-ticket items while they moved on to the adult world of responsibility. I ask him about Candy, a petty thief who’s dead, about Jerry who can’t pay his mortgage, who gets a few bucks a month to let gambling go on all over town, whose wife cheats with one of his neighbors. About Pinky, or his dad, a tax attorney who finds every client a loophole. He says I’m incapable of real friendship or a serious relationship, because I never learned how to take responsibility, and that I don’t know my identity. I tell him that’s what I’m doing here, is taking responsibility, and pondering who I am. And as for emotional growth, I feel things. I feel plenty, I tell him.

One of my last days here, maybe my last spinning the lathe. Maybe I’ll buy myself one with the reward money, and set it up in my shack in Idaho, and make the most beautiful furniture you ever saw. Tables of oak and elm and ash—I must’ve told you, I believe in wood; it’s absolutely true to itself—cabinets of knotty pine and cedar, rockers maybe of birch, something you don’t see around here. What I hate is that particle-board furniture that I see in everybody’s houses. The bookshelves and cabinets and tables with the plastic wood-grain veneer, it’s everywhere. Get it wet and it bubbles and peels like sunburned skin. So goddamned phony. We all are, I tell the shrink. I am ersatz. And you can print that in your column.


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LATIN FOR PONDER earned Second Place in the 2008 Competition.

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Gregg Cusick wrote his first real story, about “Nag, the Horse,” when he was nine. Some years later, in 1990, he received an MA in English-Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. His stories have appeared in Chelsea, The Crescent Review, Alligator Juniper, the Raleigh News & Observer, The Mochila Review, and elsewhere. He tutors literacy and tends bar in Durham, NC.