Scareship_Issue8

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Tonight is crazy as always: lots of drinks, lots of drunks, lots of smiles, lots of tips, and a pass or two she dodges with familiarity and grace. Can’t aggravate the money—and she likes people anyway, for all their foolishness and blather. It’s a good job for her, exhausting but enjoyable, and the money is enough to keep her in credit card debt for a long time. When she gets home, she realizes, groaning, that this is laundry night—or laundry early morning. She forces herself to drag out the washer/dryer combo and fill it and turn it on, and relaxes—or collapses, same thing some nights—on the sofa. She sorts through the mail—no bills, hurrah—and listens idly to late night rerun comedy, canned laughs and exaggerated looks. What life is like, according to somebody who got paid to write this crap. It passes the time till the laundry is washed and she can set it to dry, push the button, brush her teeth and melt into bed like butter on toast. A pre-dawn rain taps softly on the window, washing her gently into sleep. Traffic noises jab her awake at ten—she really needs to sleep until noon, and that may happen some day. The shower is warm and tries to seduce her back to bed, but Cheri is virtuous, or at least running late on her term paper, so she resists the impulse and gets dress and heads out to the library. Cheri is an art major, and her term paper is on Mary Cassat. Impressionists have been her love in art for as long as she can remember, although she can regurgitate the necessary praise for the modern non-representational which-end-of-the-brush artists on which most of her grade will depend. The teacher had frowned and reluctantly agreed to her choice of subject, and she thought she might have been forced to bring up the reason she knows underlies, in part, her deep reaction to this artist. In so many Cassat paintings there is the shimmer of the lost mother, dead with the would-havebeen younger brother, who seems like she might at some moment, soon, be willing to look at her left-behind daughter and smile. (Cheri’s father remarried, a pleasant innocuous woman whom 92
Cheri hated for years, but with whom she gets along well now over the phone, a thousand miles away.) Back home, she heats and eats the last of the chicken cacciatore she cooked and froze two weeks ago. Time and money saved, so she can build a nest egg and maybe just work part-time that last year, or maybe even just study. Ah dreams. Ah sleep. She wishes she could, but it’s time to go to work, drinks and drunks ahead of her—why did she switch shifts with Margie? Oh, boyfriend problems, Margie had to sort things out with Tony, since she couldn’t shoot him. The man was a mistake, but she could understand a bit. Mistakes should never have dimples. She’s not even behind the bar ten minutes when he appears, just as she turns to give Mal his Manhattan—and is gone in a second, so that she steps back, then forward again as Mal turns and takes the drink and, oblivious to her shock, says, “Thanks.” It must have been somebody in the mirror, she decides, but she can’t see who it could have been. Whoever it was, was messy, sweaty... and shocked. And then gone. Several of the customers ask her, over the next half hour, if she is OK, and she laughs and says she’s just a bit tired, and Jen, the other barmaid, and even Toby, all talking to her in that overly jovial, casual how’s-it-going way, with their heads tilted like curious birds till she’s ready to explode, and oddly enough it’s Ted the bouncer who asks to speak to her in the back and, when they get into the alley, tells her to take five or ten minutes, he’ll tell Toby she’s a bit sick, and she surprises herself by saying OK, and stays there for several minutes, until she starts looking around the alley, there’s nobody there, but that’s no guarantee tonight. She resists the impulse to whisper, “Hello?”—and hurries back into the bar. Ted doesn’t look at her but that’s OK. He’s not only human, it turns out, but he can be nice. The small tasks and items of her job get her through the evening. She cleans a lot of glasses. By the time she is done she is considerably calmer. 93
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Spain held a lifelong fascination f
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which lay about four gunshots from
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“You will get nothing worse,” p
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about before me, some loading their
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a ghost. I picture you listening at
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* * * Someday, soon it must be, the
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At the Center of the Controversy by
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“The Edge” copyright © 2012 by
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shimmer across the horizon, camoufl
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“You don’t see,” says the sna
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a Chinese elm. I push my eyes with
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“Mad Gilly & the Were-Bear” cop
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“For what? Killin’ ya? Ya ain
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maternality of the local whores and
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But Newt and Izzie surely made an u
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ut put it on nonetheless. She told
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uilt a fire and started in on seari
Page 41 and 42: his hand at wrangling and rustling,
Page 43 and 44: The Were-Bear Strikes Gilly may hav
Page 45 and 46: Inky smiled and pointed at the ston
Page 47 and 48: “It’s a long story. Just do it,
Page 49 and 50: Uhry at the bar. Their eyes locked.
Page 51 and 52: swear to you, on that night the Bul
Page 53 and 54: loody result, which Gilly stumbled
Page 55 and 56: “So what happened to my boy, then
Page 57 and 58: Inky Dugan Goes Home Gilly and Hors
Page 59 and 60: Well, that’s mah story anyway, an
Page 61 and 62: Surprisingly, his newly acquired F
Page 63 and 64: Year’s End by Kay Chronister “Y
Page 65 and 66: Em says she can see the moon and sh
Page 67 and 68: She frowns too, thoughtful. She mak
Page 69 and 70: “What if they don’t?” “They
Page 71: “Last night?” “No, the rest.
Page 74 and 75: Park. City sounds drown out their h
Page 76 and 77: huh? Come out, come out.” No resp
Page 78 and 79: a light on in a building, many floo
Page 80 and 81: he’s not likely to need—a lawn
Page 82 and 83: vegetables and salad. Fresh fruit:
Page 84 and 85: coworkers are occasional, and he ha
Page 86 and 87: Outside, he arranges the ear phones
Page 88 and 89: Probably a waste of energy but he d
Page 90 and 91: of chocolate milk, and is on his wa
Page 94 and 95: The streets, the subway, the street
Page 96 and 97: within. She associates all of them
Page 98 and 99: and relieved. When she finds out it
Page 100 and 101: “But it was strong enough a feeli
Page 102 and 103: stands behind her. He means her no
Page 104 and 105: aloneness and stabbed him deeply. H
Page 106 and 107: Contributors Kay Chronister (“Yea
Page 108: found online at http://www.brittany
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