Fiction Fix Seventeen

FICTION FIX
Issue Seventeen

fictionfix.net
editor@fictionfix.net
Artwork
Dimelza Broche
Staff
Editorial Advisor
Mark Ari
Editor-in-Chief
April Gray Wilder
Associate Editor
Blair Romain
Managing Editors
Alex Pucher, Kelsi Hasden
Front
Cette Vie
Back
Samsara
assistant editors
Sarah Cotchaleovich, Kristen Pickrell, Lori Sefick, Hurley Winkler
Readers
Cai Doran, Josh Horst, Jason Howard, Angie Johns, Abby
Nehring, Jacqueline Partridge, Shannon Pulusan, Georgie Salzer,
Kelsie Sandage, Rick Sell, Kristina Smith, Joey Tufano
Editors Emeriti
Sarah Cotchaleovich, Melissa Milburn, Alex Pucher, Thelma Young
Copyright © 2016 Fiction Fix. All rights reserved by this journal and the authors and artists included herein.
ISBN: 978-0-9971139-2-1
Colophon Typset in Futura and Baskerville by April Gray Wilder.

Contents
1
Firefly Night
Elizabeth Genovise
41
Sourceless,
Timeless, Gone
Eric Barnes
15
Your Eternity
Victor Robert Lee
43 Dimelza Broche artwork
23
35
Would You Still Love Me
If I Chewed the Cud?
Melissa Hammond
The Opposite of Blooming
Dianne Nelson Oberhansly

49 Gut Feelings
89 Karen
Penny Perkins
Ben Shaberman
63
In That Heartless Valley
Carter Schwonke
97
Dancing with Daddy
B. P. Greenbaum
75
Sir
Rory Meagher
99
Gypsy Sachet Awards in
Letters & Autobiography
79
The Princess and
the Dragon
Alice Thomsen
101
Contributors

viii
Fiction Fix
Dear Readers,
These stories have me thinking
about what is eternal. Perhaps for
as long as we are merely mortal this
question is beyond our reach. But
then again, any singular sliver of
time in which we live is contained
by eternity. Whether we’re watching
fireflies, eavesdropping, failing
at dating, recovering from surgery,
dancing, or truly seeing another

Contents
ix
human being with the gaze of
our eyes—these moments make
up all that is everlasting. Moments
like now (and now). As for me, if
in this (and this) non-renewable
moment I find myself overtaken
by stories like those contained in
these pages—I consider myself
lucky, my fraction (of a fraction)
of eternity as time well-spent.
Love, April

Firefly
Night
Elizabeth
Genovise
1

It happens only once a year. Millions of fireflies gather
along the Little River in the Smoky Mountains to flash
in perfect synchronization, each little winged body in
search of its mate, each tiny note a part of this grand
opus of affection. If Nature exists in a state of entropy, the
fireflies defy the very structure of the universe, demanding a
reversal of what most of us know to be true. People understand
this on some innate level, and so they come in the thousands
to see it. They want to believe in it. They board shuttle buses
with their blankets and coolers in tow, and they search out a
soft place in the grass where they can peer unhindered into
the glimmering woods. They sit like that, sometimes utterly
still, for hours.
This family of four—Gail and Norwood, and their teenage
son Connor and daughter Hallie—sits on a faded quilt that is
like a banner left over from last year’s parade, its seams split
in several places and the once-scarlet stitched roses now the
color of rust. They are sandwiched between a much larger
2

3
Fiction Fix
family to the right and a lone man to the left.
To Gail, who has become a shameless
voyeur in the presence of other people’s
families, this group on the right looks messy,
haphazardly sewn. By the looks of the children’s
ages, it’s obvious that at least one of the
parents is on marriage number two. And yet
they seem happy, the kids tearing into bags of
fudge-striped cookies and the parents nudging
shoulders. Gail watches them until the
mother notices and returns her stare. Gail
quickly looks away.
The man on their left is probably in his
seventies. He wears a ball cap that says Great
Smoky Mountains National Park and a spotless
white shirt. He sits on what Gail thinks is a
tablecloth. His demeanor is one of absolute
patience, and he seems unbothered by his
aloneness. They are all here early; it will be a
few minutes yet before it is dark enough to see
the fireflies. Gail thinks about offering the old
man a bottle of water, but the impulse drops
away. She has less and less energy these days
for generosity, for these small extensions of
self. There was a time when she would pay for
the stranger behind her at the McDonald’s
drive-through or bring homemade desserts
to her elderly neighbor, Louisa. Then one
day, some day she couldn’t pick out on a calendar
if asked, she felt she didn’t have it in
her anymore.
She and Norwood plan to tell their children
tomorrow morning that they are separating.
“Divorce” is too much, too horrible a word,
not just for the kids but for Gail and Norwood.
They are as shell-shocked by their own
collapse as they would have been if it had
happened three days after their honeymoon.
Neither can discern exactly what went wrong;
they only know that it can’t go on, that
happiness is so far out of reach now as to be
almost celestial, a blazing bright-tailed thing
that comes careening through the skies just
once a year, something they can see only if
they’re on the roof at exactly the right time
in exactly the right weather.
As she has every night for the last six
months, Gail tries to untangle it all in her
mind. There was no affair, no bankruptcy,
no tragedy. No serious problems with the
kids—that was what had destroyed Gail’s
parents’ marriage: her younger brother’s

Firefly Night 4
drug problem. No differences of religion—
that had brought about Gail’s best friend’s
divorce: her husband turning Catholic overnight.
But there were Norwood’s flirtations,
his endless need for validation from every
waitress and receptionist who breathed. And
his way of withholding affection behind a
stone wall of silence when he disliked himself.
There was Gail’s ever-deepening resentment
and ever-hardening pride, each a leviathan,
scaly and terrifying in the depths beneath
the surface of their daily exchanges. Even
now, sitting next to Norwood but not touching
him, Gail has the ageless urge to hold his
hand. But she is bone-weary of making the
first move and exhausted from pretending
that his indifference can’t hurt her.
Norwood is quiet now, staring off into
the slowly-darkening trees across the river.
Connor is sullen as always, leaning back on
his hands, giving his sister one-word answers
when she speaks to him. Hallie, fifteen years
old, is so different—animated, always vocalizing
this dogged fascination with all things,
where Connor is withdrawn, somehow at
seventeen already too bitter to engage with
the world. She suspects he is not at ease with
himself, maybe never has been. This is something
Gail recognizes as having come from
Norwood, and it scares her.
As the sky darkens and a thrill of anticipation
trembles through the growing crowd,
Gail strains hard for her first sighting. When
Norwood suggested bringing the family here,
she was surprised. Now she’s struck by the
audacious thought that he might be doing
this for the same reason she agreed to come:
because the sight of these lights might rekindle
something in them. It seems possible to
Gail. She has never seen the synchronized
fireflies before but already has an idea of
what they might remind her and Norwood
of: the snowstorm they were caught in during
a road trip in their twenties—bright spinning
crystals caught in a violet sky above their
ice-dappled windshield. The stars above
Gregory Bald, where they camped in summer
among newly-bloomed rhododendron and
flame azalea, whose reds and pinks darkened
to velvety violet in the night. Or the day they
made love in the field behind Gail’s childhood
home, stirring up the silver skeins of

5
Fiction Fix
old dandelions and sending them aloft like
tiny flocks of birds.
She clings to this hope as she reaches for
Norwood’s hand. In the near-dark, he is unresponsive,
not taking his hand away but not
returning the pressure. Gail fights the familiar
anger. She is afraid of what is coming.
Living like a woman on the run, staying with
her sister, installing her children in a spare
bedroom. Feeling her heart turn over at the
absence of Norwood’s sounds and smells—
the gentle hum of his desktop computer, the
crinkle of his newspaper pages, the peculiar
scent of his shirts that has not changed since
their twenties, a thing which seems magical to
Gail, since she has used a half-dozen different
detergents on those clothes since they first
moved in together.
Too prideful to say them, too frightened to
pretend them away, Gail holds the words in
her mouth: I don’t care if happiness has gone and
left us a suicide note. I don’t want to do this.
And then drifting from the woods around
the river, silent and elegant as jellyfish, come
the lights.
❧
When the fireflies begin their dance and
everyone falls into their collective hush,
Norwood remembers the lights his younger
sister used to string across her dollhouse
during the holidays—tiny colored bulbs
that blinked on and off in unison. As a boy
he pretended to find it irritating but secretly
loved it, feeling that the energy of those
lights set the room quivering the way he
would quiver just before a baseball game.
He is pleased with the memory. His hope in
bringing his son and daughter here was that
he could give them one final and beautiful
experience while their family was still whole.
He imagined them remembering this years
from now and saying to each other, Dad wanted
to give us that.
He has convinced himself that they will forgive
him for leaving them with their mother.
He will see them on weekends, as often as
he can; he will take them on trips. He has
this speech carefully prepared for tomorrow
morning. But Norwood is a man who understands
the importance of history, and he is
determined to expose them to a phenomenon
they will remember for the rest of their lives.

Firefly Night 6
He has been a professor of European history
at the local university for twelve years,
and he means never to return. This he has not
told Gail or anyone else: that boredom has
been descending on him over the years like
a plague, a heavy dread of the books on his
shelves and the papers he reads, even of the
conferences he used to relish. As a young man
there were always periods of doubt, but there
were also the timeless gambits he employed
to pull himself back out. Bits of history
and art that ignited him from within. The
Impressionists—there was a time when just
opening a book to a Renoir plate was enough
to resuscitate him. The great cathedrals. The
first daguerreotype, the idea of drawing with
pencils of light. But the old gambits haven’t
been working. He feels corpulent in his desk
chair, his feet leaden. He senses that the students
find him ridiculous. He finds himself
desperately flirting with twenty-year-olds with
the conscious need to prove that he is still
desirable and interesting. And at the end of
each academic semester, his thoughts mirror
that of his former fourth-grade self: God, I
hope there’s a fire. Or a flood. Complete institutional
shutdown. The day he knew he had to quit was
the day his students were discussing a recent
campus shooting, and he nearly blurted out,
“Christ, if that happened here we’d at least
get a week off.”
He’ll leave, forget the first two-thirds of his
life and all the ways he’s disappointed himself.
Himself and Gail, who never looks at him the
way she used to, like he was as precious and
rare as a prophet’s robe in a reliquary. He’ll
go to his older brother in South Carolina
and learn the house-flipping business. Use
his hands. Thinking this, he looks down and
is surprised to find Gail’s hand covering his.
It’s almost too dark to see her expression, and
so when he pulls away he isn’t sure if she
notices. Then, in the next flare of light, he
sees her eyes, very green and wet. His throat
tightens. As a kind of apology he reaches into
their cooler with the same hand and fishes
around for an apple, as though this was his
intention. But when he bites into the fruit, his
teeth sink into a sour mush, and he tosses it
away with startled disgust.
“The apples are spoiled,” he says, but Gail
shakes her head.

7
Fiction Fix
“Just watch,” she whispers. “You’re missing it.”
Anger rises in Norwood and is quickly followed
by panic. A colleague and friend said to
him last week, “You can still be friends. You’d
be surprised how many people do it. Live in
the same town, see each other at Food City.”
He’d said it so breezily. He’d never been married.
Norwood can’t imagine this, the road
from married to “still friends.” He thinks of
great warriors returning from battle to find
their cities in ruins. Nobody could live in the
ruins. Nobody camped out among the bones
and pottery shards. There was a reason most
of those ancient cities were left behind in a
jumble of dust and broken walls.
Hallie, from her end of the blanket, says
softly, “You can almost see words. In the
lights.”
Norwood glances at his daughter; she is
enraptured. And then, unbidden, comes a
story he learned all the way back in college,
a story he’d since forgotten. It was something
that happened in London, after a tremendous
fire destroyed the city. They were trying
to rebuild Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and the
architect in charge commanded a laborer to
bring him a stone from the city’s rubble to be
used as a marker. The laborer rushed out and
came back with a shard of a tombstone. It
was chosen at random, perhaps the first piece
of debris he laid eyes on. When the architect
turned it over, he found etched there a single
word, a fragment of someone’s Latin epitaph:
RESURGAM. Reborn.
Resurgam. The architect could have walked
away at any time, taking the stone with him as
a memento of what London had lost. But he
stayed, and the cathedral was reborn, rising
out of the ashes into inviolable glory.
Norwood breathes deeply. He tilts his head
back, trying to see the lights from a new angle.
Searching for a word.
Connor feels hateful, his skin crawling with
it. The muscles of his legs feel tight and coiled
like something waiting to spring, and his nails
have left half-moon marks in his palms from
the reflexive clenching of his fists. It has
been a bad week. He and his girlfriend of
five months are finished; she found out from
somebody at school that Connor had been

Firefly Night 8
taking another girl out on the sly. Instead of
waiting for his girlfriend, Marissa, to hunt
him down, Connor called her to say he was
through with her. But she beat him to it, permitting
him neither the first word nor the
last. He was fuming. In his wounded pride
he forgot completely that he was the one to
cheat; it seemed to him that she was vicious,
critical, judgmental. He used these words over
the phone, kept using them until Marissa’s
voice faltered a little, and he could almost
believe he made her question herself. It was
what he always did when someone pointed
out he was in the wrong—turn it around so
that the other person felt guilty.
He hates himself for doing this, though he
can’t seem to stop. It is the reason his little
sister despises him. (He is sure of it; she is
always trying to placate him, or else she is
sidestepping him, putting him aside with
some flattering remark that in Connor’s mind
always sounds like I’m only saying this because
I know it’s what you want to hear). His parents
do it as well, and it nauseates him even as
he understands why they do it. “Your coldness
is ugly,” his mother once told him after
she’d had wine. “Ugly enough that you make
people believe you’ll just cut them out of your
life with scissors if they dare to criticize you.
What happens to people like that is that no
one ever tells them the truth.”
Connor suspects this to be true with his
family, girlfriends, and friends. But what has
shaken him recently is the belief that he has
a similarly diseased relationship with the natural
world, the place he claims to love and
commune with. A hiker and camper, he has
been abusing the trails of this national park
in the same fashion he abuses the people in
his life. He doesn’t listen to the rivers or drink
in the stars at night. He makes conquests. He
crosses off sections of his map the way his
mother checks off items on her to-do lists
on the refrigerator. Miles in the wilderness
go into his bank, never into his heart. He
brings out his currency and spends it when he
needs an ego boost, something to kindle awe
or admiration in others. In these moments,
even his voice changes, growing deeper, rawer,
feigning a gravity he knows he has not earned.
It is a truth he can’t evade now, sitting
on this blanket under a million tiny lights.

9
Fiction Fix
Because as hard as he tries, Connor can’t feel
anything for the fireflies themselves. He can’t
appreciate their beauty or the matchlessness
of their harmony. He can only see this experience
as something to put on his resume. But
he doesn’t want it to be this way. He glances
at Hallie, whose eyes are enormous, and envy
slices through him like a hot wire. He wants
to see what she sees. But he can’t.
What is wrong with me? He imagines himself
wrenching his father’s arm and shouting the
question. His father has been so adrift, often
staring into space for hours while seated at
his desk in the study. His mother has been
even worse, giving all her attention to Hallie
over the last few months, as though she can’t
spare the energy or the patience for Connor.
He wants to yank on her fluttering sleeve right
now and say, The guidance counselor told me I’m
the perfect type for a business degree. Tell me what the
hell that means. Tell me why it hurt to hear her say it.
Or tell his parents that the Little River Trail,
right here, is one of those places he’s violated.
That story I told you guys, about fording the river and
losing my supplies? I made it up. And I hated the
campsite, way out there. I was scared, and I wished
I’d never gone. He is a little sick now, remembering
the way he came home that Sunday—a
dramatic arrival with his clothes filthy and his
hat askew. He deepened his voice to tell them
what a close call it’d been but how incredible
the night sky was over his campground at the
trail’s terminus, miles and miles from civilization.
All show, all smoke and mirrors.
Panic taps its cold fingers down his spine
and climbs around his ribs. He feels it clutching
him, a cold ghost riding his back. He
shakes himself and vows to experience the
fireflies only for what they are, not as something
he needs, not as insurance against
something. This thought is new—that he
is stocking up for something like an animal
anticipating a bitter winter. Protecting himself
against the way people get crushed by the
world, flattened into paper dolls. He’s seen it
happen. He can see it now in both his parents.
His mother has been dropping weight, and
she looks frail and shadowy. His father holds
himself tightly as though afraid he’ll shatter.
Seeing the two of them makes Connor want
to shellac his spirit with his experiences rather
than let them tap the fragile tissue of soul

Firefly Night 10
beneath. And yet he knows that to do this is
to miss out on something vital.
“And I am not going to miss out.” He says this
under his breath. Only Hallie hears him, and
she shoots him a worried look before returning
her gaze to the woods. Her pity for him is
enraging. The inexplicable hate and something
like hopelessness start to work their way up his
neck like fever. He stares hard into the night
and wills himself to feel something true. He
could be looking at the Northern Lights, the
glow is so fluid and ethereal. And yet he feels
nothing. The universe is a dead-bolted door.
There are keys, he’s sure of it. But God, he
fears, dispenses only a certain number of them,
and he was not selected to receive one.
Hallie has turned back to him, gesturing
at him in the dark. She wants him to open
his hand. Surprised curiosity makes Connor
bend over and hold out his palm. Hallie drops
a firefly into it. It crawls across the lines of
Connor’s skin, its beam pulsing like a minute
fire tower from the ridge that is his lifeline.
He can almost feel its wonderment at being
there. It explores the routes of his bones. It
takes its time.
❧
Hallie takes photographs with her eyes,
letting the images sear into her so that they
will be there forever. Once, when her father
dropped his camera on the back patio, the
film within was exposed, and he let out a cry
that startled her. The pictures, he told her,
were destroyed. Hallie worries about this, the
loss of things, but she trusts her mind. When
she sees something beautiful like the fireflies,
she promises herself that she will paint it later.
Making something from nothing is impossible.
Recreation is the highest art.
Her freshman art teacher is a woman in her
sixties with snowy hair and penetrating blue
eyes. She takes Hallie seriously, something
Hallie has earned with her many hours spent
in the art lab long past three o’clock. Once
she told Hallie that art is a form of resuscitation,
as real and urgent as channeling air into
a drowning man’s lungs on an ocean beach.
Hallie saw herself bent over the prone form
of the boy she has quietly loved since the first
day of high school. He is a baseball player
whose pitching makes her want to protect
him, the way she longs to protect the blue

11
Fiction Fix
heron who lives among the river rocks behind
the school. Both are delicate in their rarity
and unconscious beauty. Standing there in
the art lab, Hallie had the powerful conviction
that she would die to protect either one of
them. She said to her teacher, “Yes, I know,”
but the old woman shook her head.
“No,” she said firmly. “You don’t understand
it, not yet. Art, any form of true art, is
a desperate act.” She was a glassblower, and
she went on, “Inside those glass shells, there’s
heartache and regret and things you can’t
guess at. In a painting, watch the way the
brushstrokes are moving. Where the light is
and where it isn’t. If you look closely enough,
you’ll see what the artist was trying to save.
Or whom.”
Even after the vision of her baseball player
lying on the sand, it was hard for Hallie to
grasp what the woman was saying. Art was
to her still only a matter of transcription.
Taking what she saw and giving it alternative
form. She was trying it all, watercolors
and photography and sculpture, each mode a
knobby handhold on a climbing wall that presented
mere physical challenge. It hadn’t yet
occurred to her what might be at the summit.
But as she watches the fireflies, Hallie
is blindsided by two realizations. The first
is that it will be a year before the fireflies
return. Most of the creatures she is seeing
now, igniting the sky, will have died. The
second is that when this time comes around
again, her brother might be gone. He will be
eighteen. Gone to college or maybe just gone.
He is such an angry person, so impervious to
delight. It is a phrase she’s heard her father
say about Connor. Imagining them sitting
here a year from now without Connor opens
a hollow ache in Hallie that expands as she
studies her brother’s profile. Will he remember
her, ever think of her?
As a child, Hallie had a routine of lying
awake after going to bed and not allowing
herself to fall asleep until she had confronted
any fears or concerns she happened to be
carrying around that day. Anxiety about
an upcoming piano recital. Worry over a
fight she’d had with Connor. Fear of starting
middle school, of high school. Usually
she could talk herself through the problem
and then fall asleep with ease. She would not

Firefly Night 12
actually speak but would mouth words into
the dark, afraid Connor would hear her from
the other side of the wall. But some nights,
the problem wouldn’t be talked out. It gnawed
at the foot of her bed like some goblin and
seemed to promise her that it would never be
finished with her. On nights like this, Hallie
would whisper away away away, and then she
would tell herself it would be okay to ignore
it for one night. She would just get one night’s
sleep, one night’s worth of good dreams, and
deal with the problem later.
Only now, watching her family in the pulsating
light, does it occur to Hallie that not all
problems can be slept away. People can’t just
postpone their sorrows for a day when they
feel strong and refreshed, just as they can’t go
back and take photographs or paint pictures
of what they love once it’s gone. The infinite
leap between having and losing is beyond
Hallie’s comprehension, beyond anything her
physics teacher has tried to explain to her.
And yet she knows that it happens. She has
friends whose parents have divorced. A boy
at her school was killed in a drunk driving
accident after Homecoming, and there was
the vacant seat in her speech class, a space
everyone orbited for months. And like a much
older woman, Hallie knows exactly where
her love for the baseball player is headed:
she’ll keep going to his games and going to
dances in hopes of stealing a few minutes
with him while his beautiful date is in the
restroom, and then one day he’ll leave on a
scholarship, and so will she. And in the history
of her life he’ll be a few lines scrawled in her
yearbook—Thanks for all the help with English
class!—a man oblivious to the fact that she has
given him four years of her love. More time
than she’ll give any man until she meets the
one she’ll marry.
The pinpoints of light burn her eyes
because her eyes are already stinging. She
tries to memorize their patterns as she has
memorized piano notes and the constellations
of stars. She tries to project Connor’s name
into what she sees. I will paint this, she promises
herself. No matter how much it hurts.
She looks again at her brother, who is
still watching the firefly she has given him.
Silently she prays that he will say something
to her before he lets it go. Just one thing she

13
Fiction Fix
can remember for herself when those lonely
nights come.
“There he goes,” Connor says, exhaling as
the firefly wings away. “Back to his family.” It
flickers once and is gone.
The fireflies will continue their dance until
dawn. But it is late, and at some unspoken
signal, the family of four begins gathering
their things. The mother folds the quilt, and
the daughter picks up the cooler. The old man
seated to the left of them stays where he is.
He can’t make out their faces in the intermittent
light, and he hopes they can’t see his. He
worries that his face registers what he feels:
ardent yearning. The wish to go back and be
any one of them, to live again in that time
where every happiness was a light trembling
in the trees, lingering just long enough that
anyone who wanted it could catch it.

Firefly Night 14

Your
Eternity
Victor Robert Lee
15

“So you think you’ve got immortality wired,” said Sasha,
always the skeptic except when she was in bed. “And
you don’t even believe in souls.”
“Not that kind,” said Justin. “I’ve got more practical ideas,
more ambitious. I just wish I’d figured it out sooner, how to
capture me for eternity before now. I mean, my soul will be
missing its first 24 years.”
This wasn’t the first time Justin had sounded grandiose,
thought Sasha, and she let it slide. After four tempestuous
months together, she grudgingly admitted to herself that one
of the attractions of this relationship was Justin’s techno-mysticism;
his detailed plan slightly aroused her.
“The gear’s all there—the temple-mounted Minicams, the
micro audio samplers, the giga storage that’ll fit on my thumbnail,”
said Justin. “And of course you can edit the hell out of
it over beers, and we’ll even shoot that, too, the editing.”
“We? Who is we?”
“I can’t run the cameras only by myself. I mean, like, my
16

17
Fiction Fix
arm’s only so long. So I gotta have a technician,
a handy-grip, otherwise eternity won’t
see me, my face, my expressions, my mannerisms…
my soul. Got it, princess?”
She got it, but her mind was spinning forward.
Sasha didn’t want to share him. She
had developed a mild jealousy on their second
night together, when she’d named him Justin-Time
Justin because of the synchrony of
their lovemaking. “So, maybe you want me
to be your handy-grip.”
“Whoa. What about when we’re locked in
mouth-to-mouth and going for it? There’s
gotta be a third party, otherwise we lose that
vignette privée—that tender piece of my
propagated soul.” Justin grinned.
“You mean you want someone else to tape
us in the sack?” The thought intrigued her.
“Yep, gotta get it all, minute by minute.
That’s the point. For eternity’s sake. But
you and me in bed is such a small part of it.
There’s my thoughts, too. I’ll talk about them
into the mike as I navigate,” said Justin.
Sasha raised her brown caterpillar eyebrows.
“Navigate what?”
“Navigate life—my life. And then outload
it all. It’s gotta be formatted in every digital
standard out there. We might even backtrack
to analog, in case extraterrestrials are still
fudging with that. It’s gotta be fully dispersible,
and the archival’s gotta be durable as
gold. Do you know if there’s anything other
than analog and digital? I’ve gotta cover all
the bases. It’s immortality we’re talking about.
You don’t want to mess it up.”
“But you can’t capture all of it,” said Sasha.
“Come on. The technology’s here! I’ll get
every second. I’m even going to record my
dreams when I wake up in the morning.”
“And who’s going to bother to look at the
minutiae of your life? I mean, it could be
worse than reading an encyclopedia… or a
dictionary… or the yellow pages… or Proust.”
Justin liked Sasha’s piercing comments, but
he generally tried to ignore them.
“I’ve gotta find someone to help with the
editing, too,” he continued. “Then I’ll send
it all out—I mean various edited versions of
it—on commercial multi-spectrum transmitters
to the far reaches of the universe,
maybe beyond. And once those deep-space
radio signals go out, it’s forever, baby; it just

Your Eternit y 18
keeps going. Light years and light years of
immortality. Do you know you can rent satellite
channel time to far space for a pittance
now?”
“For you it’s a pittance, thanks to your
parents.”
“But that’s the natural generational result,
for the far-minded,” said Justin. “Take John
Adams—he dedicated himself to politics and
war so his sons could learn navigation and
commerce, so their sons could dibble-dabble
in poetry and music. He left out the next
phase—the sons who would transmit their
souls to the universe. Daughters, too. And
about your yellow pages complaint: hell, way
out there they’ll be starved for this kind of
stuff. First contact—they’ll lap it up, like those
home confinement shows on TV down here.
But, baby, this is between you and me. If word
gets out, there’ll be a race, and then all the
clutter would…”
“Drown out your immortality?” Sasha’s
expression seemed slightly wicked.
“It’s not like that exactly. There’s space for
everybody. But first carries a premium. Like
Plato—now there’s a guy who knew how to
transmit over time and space. Get the message
recorded, and get it out. And besides,
some souls are more immortal than others.
It’s like those plant species imported to foreign
continents where they have no natural
competitors and take over. That’s why I’ve
gotta send it out in as many formats as possible—you
never know the niche in which your
soul will best propagate. I want pollen, spores,
seeds of me spread everywhere.”
“Well, Plato, if it doesn’t have any big ideas
attached, won’t the at-home series fizzle out
after a while, like all one-shot wonders do?”
She arched her eyebrows. Checkmate.
“I’m ahead of you, my smooch.” Justin
winked. “Here’s the fix: The digital composites
of my soul will have subprograms
attached, like viruses. Call them my gifted
replicons. You’ve seen those programs that
generate poems or plots with a few keystrokes?
The replicons will generate new permutations
based upon my soul data set. As for big new
ideas—that’s just a matter of semi-random
associations subjected to selective pressures.
The viruses will spew their stuff out and some
will stick, with my name and personality

19
Fiction Fix
attached. Haven’t you heard about all the garbage
even the greatest thinkers have pumped
out? Dustbin ideas. Only the precious leftovers
made them great minds in retrospect.
So yeah, a lot of the ether spume fails, but
the good little leftover soul-frags survive and
propagate. Call it soulful universal evolution.”
Justin was pleased with his phraseology, and
it showed.
“Why not just concentrate on Earth, where
at least you know you have listeners? Like in
places without media saturation?”
“Oh gawd, Sasha. I could focus on all those
humans in no-man’s-land with nothing
to watch except a satellite feed and send
my soul data train out to them, which of
course I’d have translated into the native
tongue—that’s a super-trivial software deal
now: Greek in, Pashto out, any combination.
Yeah, I could do all that. The problem, my
little sushi Sasha, is that the earth is not the
future. The future is out there! In Sagittarius
or Scorpio or Orion or… you pick your
favorite patch of sky. My soul is for them! I
live for them, out there!”
“I suppose having children doesn’t get you
your immortality? Earth children?” Sasha was
on firm, unbiased ground here, since she’d
said innumerable times that she had no interest
in having any kids herself.
“Children, nah. Not that kind of seed. I’m
not a control freak. Children fly away, and
they should. Even the genetics argument is
a waste—after two generations, the DNA
mixing dilutes me to nothing. I know where
you’re headed, Sasha.” Justin rocked on the
rear legs of his chair, catching himself as he
almost tumbled backwards. “Of course I’ve
thought about clones. And I’m sure you’ve
seen those stories about identical twins separated
at birth who are shocked when they
reunite at age fifty, and they have the same
beer bellies and are both firemen. The press
selects for those examples; the fact is, even
with the same DNA, my clones would grow
up different from me. For all I know, my
clones would become con artists or chemical
engineers, and where would that leave
my soul? Clones are too dicey. I’d rather bet
on several eager viruses that have my data
strapped on like jetpacks, ready to permute
my posterity.”

Your Eternit y 20
Sasha wouldn’t acknowledge to herself that
she was, in fact, attracted to his pomposity.
But immortality… that she could admit was
alluring, though she had her doubts about
intelligent beings way out there.
“And what happens to the other… factors…
in what gets transmitted?” she asked.
“You mean the people I meet? You mean
you? Yeah, you mean you.” Justin started to
roll his eyes.
“For example,” said Sasha.
“Look, you’re part of me. You’re in there—
in my soul for the ether. And gawd, we spend
a lot of time together.”
“And all that editing you talked about?”
Sasha tried to keep her voice detached and
clinical, but it was beginning to buckle.
“There’ll be zillions of bytes of you in
there. The universe will know me, and so it
will know you. You’re in there. You will be
in there.”
“And the replicons? Will they take me
along…?”
“For the ride? Wow! I hadn’t thought about
that. Huh. Hmm.”
There was a long silence between them.
Justin looked up toward the ceiling. Sasha
examined his face.
“I guess it’s like a will,” he said. “You can
change it up to the end.”
“You mean you’re going to start transmitting
only at the end, when you’re dying?”
“Sasha, you’re ahead of me here, you
wizard. I’m not a control freak, you know.
But I guess, hmm… I guess I’d want revision
rights up to the end.”
“And so we… you… you lose all that lead
time the longer you live. Time for the clutter
to spread across the universe, time for someone
else to be first. You’re young. That’s a lot
of lead time to give up,” said Sasha.
“Um, yeah, the lead time. Tick tock. I’d
better gear up quick and start beaming. You
never know when a bus will flatten me or
some jerk will beat me to the punch. So I…
I suppose your soul is along for the ride, too.”
He kissed her, Sasha kissed him back, and the
two grappled their way to the couch, where
they joined themselves amid tender thoughts
a thousand years in the future, when they
would long be dead, maybe.
❧

21
Fiction Fix
In the morning, Justin groaned and pulled
a pillow over his face to block out the light.
He had a hard-on and groped his hand across
the bed. The other side was empty.
“Sasha. Sasha! Are you in the toilet?”
There was no answer. He lugged himself
out of bed and walked to the living room,
his organ pointing the way. He barely saw
her silhouette against the glaring sunshine
streaming through the unwashed windows.
“What are you doing?” Justin wanted to sound
imperious, but it came out as a whimpering
complaint. He rubbed the night’s mucous
from his eyes and blinked.
Sasha was seated at the foldout table, wearing
a Japanese robe. She was writing in a
leather-bound book.
“Sasha?”
“I’m busy. Why don’t you make us some tea?
Pear and vanilla would be fine.” Her pen kept
moving, and she didn’t look up.
“What are you doing?” Justin tumbled onto
the couch and buried his face between the
cushions.
“Waiting for tea.”
He raised his head and looked over the
arm of the couch. Sasha’s long brown hair
was draped across her cheek and swayed with
the motion of her hand. “All right, all right.”
Justin cracked his knee against the coffee table
on his way to the kitchen but refused to yelp.
As he heated the water, his aggravation rose
in proportion to the retreat of his organ.
“Here’s the tea for thee, my queen. Now
what is that?” The cup clicked against the
table top and spilled a little next to the book.
Sasha snapped it shut and pulled it away from
the puddle.
“It’s my journal. Sort of a diary, sort of not.”
Sasha smiled. Justin thought she looked like
a Cheshire cat as he hovered over her. He
pulled up a chair and sat down.
“And, and, what’s in there?”
“This and that. And whatsits and whosits.”
“I’ve never seen it before,” said Justin.
“No need to wave it in your face.”
“So… do you write in it a lot?”
“Every day.”
“Rain or shine?”
“Rain or shine.”
“How long?”
“Since I was twelve.”

Your Eternit y 22
“All the details?”
“All the important ones.”
“Since you were twelve?”
“Since I was twelve.”
“You’ve been keeping a journal since you
were a little girl, and you never told me?”
Justin felt completely naked; and he was,
except for the pen, which had rolled strategically
onto his lap when his agitated legs
bumped the table. “And what do you do with
it—or with them? You must have a bookcase
full.”
“I read them. Add a few details now and
then.” Sasha tugged the book toward her as
Justin eyed it. “And edit.”
“Everything that happens to you is in there?”
“Yup. Thoughts, too.”
Justin put the pen back on the table and
slowly rubbed his face. “Am I in there?”
“Maybe. A little bit.”
Justin scratched his thighs and reached for
the shirt he had shed on the floor the night
before. He put it on. “Can I read it?”
“No.” Sasha planted her elbow on the book.
“So who’s read them? Who’s going to read
them?”
“No one. No one but me.”
She resumed her writing and purred. At
least it sounded like a purr to Justin. He kissed
her on the neck. “Please, Sasha. I promise—
yours can ride along.”
“Okay, maybe, sometime. Just a peek.”

Would You
Still Love Me If I
Chewed the Cud?
Melissa Hammond
23

I’m on a diet, Barbara keeps telling me, which means
no fatty foods like hot dogs and chocolate and Snickers
and way too much ketchup on my mashed potatoes.
Some foods are okay sometimes, like bread, which can
be a fruit or a vegetable—no one really knows for sure. Diets
also mean you have to play outside for thirty minutes every
single day, and it’s okay in this neighborhood because it has
big, green yards and not too many cars or rapists.
But today is Sunday, which means Special Breakfast, and I
am allowed to have one piece of bacon. When I lived with my
vagina-mamma, I liked it really drippy and soggy, but Barbara
cooks it crispy because of bacteria. So I like it her way now.
Barbara is the kind of lady who sits up really straight all
the time and carries around a big purse with tiny Kleenex
packets inside. She has hair so short in the back it’s like you’re
petting a puppy. And Travis’s hair is just as short, but I have
not petted it. He’s not that kind of dad.
One food I’m still not allowed to eat on Sunday is communion
24

25
Fiction Fix
bread and grape juice, but that’s not because
I’m too fat for my age. It’s because Barbara
and Travis say I don’t know what it means.
I loud-whisper to Barbara in church, I
know what it means now. We always sit on
the left side, ten rows back. She’s wearing
a hideous flower dress, and I’m wearing an
overall dress with a big pocket on the front.
One of the teenager girls from church used
to wear it, and now it’s mine.
She says, Not this time, Tommi. I’m not
convinced you’re ready.
And I tell her how Simon got to do communion
as soon as he turned seven, and I
have been seven for a whole year and eight
for quite a while, and fair is fair.
But she says that she isn’t Simon’s parents
and that I am not Simon. Good thing I’m
not Simon, too, that Stupid Face Penis Head.
Now, Jesus never said anything about eightyear-olds
not being allowed to do communion,
which I know because I’ve read almost the
whole Bible now (just the second half to go).
But Barbara doesn’t see it that way. So I try
to think of the most convincing words.
I say, I want to eat it to remember how
Jesus washed away all our sins with his blood.
I hope I didn’t mess it up. I always forget if
the blood washed the sins or the sins washed
the blood. It’s hard because blood is the messy
thing, not the cleaning-up thing. Barbara
looks at my eyes real hard like she does when
she asks, Are you sure you don’t miss your
mother or Where did you learn about that?
But finally she says, Okay, if you’re going
to take it seriously.
Then Travis brings the communion plate
to our pew, and Barbara squeezes his hand
with her red-nail fingers. He’s Usher Travis
right now, not Dad Travis, which means no
talking or dilly-dallying. Barbara holds the
big, round, golden plate for me.
The communion breads feel all chalky, and
they bend like stale gum just out of the wrapper.
I pick the two biggest ones.
Just one, Tommi, Barbara says. So I drop
the smaller one back into the pile. But then
she whisper-yells again, Well, now you’ve
touched it! Pick it back up. And Travis is
looking at me with his wrinkly forehead and
his giant, frowning mouth.
So I pick it back up but accidently touch

Would You Still Love Me If I Chewed the Cud? 26
another one on the way, so I pick that one
up, too. The old man on the other side of me
takes the plate.
Then Barbara says, Wait until after the
prayer to eat them.
Prayers are the best part of church services
because everyone closes their eyes, and even
if someone notices that your eyes aren’t closed,
they can’t tattle on you because then everyone
knows that their eyes weren’t closed either. So
this is the perfect opportunity to eat my spare
bacon, which I stored in my front pocket after
breakfast. I fold it five times until it’s communion-bread-sized,
and I squish it between two
communion breads to make a sandwich. I
take a tiny nibble, and it’s so delicious I decide
to ask for it for my next birthday dinner. I
might not make it with Barbara and Travis
till then because I yell at people and hit them
sometimes, and they would probably rather
have a white foster daughter anyway.
Tommi, what in the world? Barbara whisper-yells.
And I know I’m in trouble but not
a million percent sure for what, so I uncross
my legs and put my feet back on the floor
where they belong.
She says, Not your legs, and yanks my
delicious bacon sandwich out of my hands.
Where did you get raw bacon?
Now, this is a tricky question because I
took it out of the pack of bacon Barbara
was cooking that morning, even though I was
only allowed to have one piece. And if I get
in trouble too many times, I will get a new
foster mom and dad, and they might not have
a PlayStation 3 in the basement. And I won’t
get a next birthday dinner. So I do this thing
I do sometimes, where I pretend that I’m a
very stupid person to get out of trouble.
I say, Because Jesus died for our sins? which
makes absolutely no sense.
What are you saying? I can’t understand
you, she says.
That’s right, no talking with your mouth
full, I remember. So I spit out my delicious
bite of bacon sandwich and say, Jesus died for
our sins! in a loud, clear voice, even though
Barbara isn’t so old that her ears have stopped
working. I mean she is old, like maybe a lot
older than my vagina-mamma, but not old
old like one hundred and five.
Barbara shushes me because the prayer is

27
Fiction Fix
still going. Then she takes a penguin Kleenex
out of her purse and scoops the chewed-up
bacon sandwich off of my overall dress.
Because I’m acting like a child, Barbara
makes me go to the children’s story and children’s
church. So I walk up to the steps with
the all the three- and four- and five- and sixand
seven-year-olds, and they all sit together
like tiny clementines in a row. Everyone
except me. I sit up there like a big fat bowling
ball pretending I match all the cute baby
clementines rolling around like good friends,
but no one falls for it. I don’t like sitting up
there for the children’s story because bowling
is the most boring sport, except to old people,
which might be why only old people like me.
They tell me I’m good at talking loud into
their tired ears.
Clementines. I am hungry. The pastor is
talking about caterpillars and cocoons and
Jesus loves you. My stomach is talking back.
Luckily, the pastor never talks for very long
because the three- and four-year-olds will
start wiggling around and talking about
turtles together. They don’t have very much
knowledge yet.
We’re supposed to follow Miss Esther down
the aisle to the Sunday school room. She’s the
most nice person to us kids. Like, sometimes
she’ll even color part of your picture for you
if you’re having trouble.
But today I break the rules. I walk slow,
so everyone goes in front of me, and then I
sneak into the kitchen instead of going down
the Sunday school hallway. I have to go to
the kitchen because Simon pinched my butt
during the children’s story, and if I go to children’s
church I will probably kick him in his
stomach.
The church kitchen is humongous, and
the sink has one of those long shower spray
things, in case you need a shower while you
wash the dishes. There’s also two big ovens,
one on top of the other. Really that’s a waste
of an oven, because you might as well get
one monster oven so you can fit a giant pizza
inside. Did you know that the biggest pizza
in the world is seventeen miles long? I think
you can go see it in Alabama because it was
too big for anyone to finish.

Would You Still Love Me If I Chewed the Cud? 28
Speaking of humongous food, guess what’s
on top of the countertop? Six golden plates
full of leftover communion bread. I reach
my arms up and pull one plate to the edge
of the counter. It feels cold and smooth, so
I’m pretty sure it’s real gold. My old foster
family used to have a big, warty gnome statue
in their living room with real gold buttons
on his jacket. One time I punched him in
the face and knocked it over, but he didn’t
break. A chip just came off of his butt. I hid
it inside one of my foster dad’s plants, and
he never found it, but my hand hurt for like
a whole month.
Anyway, I reach my hand into the gold
plate and swirl it around in the pile of tiny
breads. I grab as many as I can, until they’re
bursting out.
When I hear a giggling noise from the
hallway, I drop my handful all over the floor.
The piece I’m chewing on goes crummy in
my mouth. I scoop up as many of the pieces
as I can like Barrel o’ Monkeys and slide them
into my overalls pocket. Some dusty hairs get
on my hands and on the breads, too, but I
don’t have time to blow them off and follow
the five second rule. Then I look around for a
hiding spot. I yank open some doors, but the
cupboards are full to the brim with dishes and
pots, and there’s no way in a zillion years I
could fit in there. So I pull open the oven door
and peek inside. It is a big oven for big meals.
Like, you could fit a giant turkey in there, or
maybe even five. I mean, not a seventeenmile
pizza, but still. So I squeeze in, just like
a turkey. And by the way — this is a side note
— but I love eating the skin off the turkey. It’s
my favorite part. Like, some of it gets crispy,
but some of it is still squishy and drippy. I
just love that. I might eat Thanksgiving with
Barbara and Travis this year.
I climb in the oven, and the metal rack
pokes into my legs and knees and hands,
but I wrap my hand around the edge of the
door and yank it. I’m smart enough to get
my fingers out of the way before the door
slams shut so hard the whole oven shakes.
The oven rack is digging into my legs, and
my head is pressed up against the ceiling so
I can’t move at all.
The oven window is a little brown and
greasy, but I can still see Mrs. Lorraine

29
Fiction Fix
come in with her long, black braid and her
giant pillow bangs that poof over her entire
forehead. Mrs. Lorraine is in charge of the
kitchen on big meal days, but usually she sings
up in the choir next to Miss Esther. She and
Esther are mother and daughter, I’m pretty
sure. And by that I mean Esther is her vagina-baby.
Anyway, she starts dumping all
the communion bread out of the big round
golden plates into one big plastic bowl. She
eats a couple of them. I try to eat one of the
hairy ones from my pocket, but I don’t have
enough room to move my hands.
Usually Mrs. Lorraine talks in a big, loud,
time-for-dinner voice, but this time she whispers.
She says, Not here. And I wonder who
she’s talking to, but then I see him—Travis.
He walks up behind her and pinches her
butt through her yellow dress. And then he
moves his hands to her shoulders, and he
rubs them like Barbara rubs his shoulders
after he does the dishes. And Mrs. Lorraine
says, Ohhhh, ooooh. And I feel the sharp
lines of the oven rack slicing into my knees
and legs and hands like angry coat hangers.
And something scary in my stomach, not
hungry anymore, but something slippery like
very old lettuce from a hamburger someone
left on the bus.
And then Travis turns Mrs. Lorraine
around, and it’s hard to see because of the
brown, splotchy window. But I do see their
faces move together, and I hear a kiss noise
and a giggle.
I start to get nervous because ovens only
have so much air in them for breathing. And
then Mrs. Lorraine says, I’d better start cooking.
It’s almost time for the big feast.
And Travis says, No way. I want you to
stay here, so I can mwah mwah mwah you
some more.
No, she says, I need to preheat the oven to
one million degrees.
And to my window grease stain I say, No
no no no!
And I feel very afraid, and is the oven
getting hotter and hotter? Sometimes metal
things are so hot they feel cold, like the robot
jungle gym you climb in at the park near
Barbara and Travis’s house. What if this
whole time I thought the rack was cold when
really it is melting and burning my hands

Would You Still Love Me If I Chewed the Cud? 30
into goo? I look down. Are they squishy and
gooey? Not yet.
And Mrs. Lorraine keeps bustling around
left and right, and it’s hard to tell exactly
through the grease, but every time she gets
close, I feel scared that she is coming to fire
up the oven and cook me. I mean, I can stick
my hand in a candle, which is fun because
then you can rub the wax around on your
fingers, but this isn’t the same.
And I keep thinking of how hard it’ll be to
live life with my face melted off. It’s harder
to find a mom and a dad if you are ugly or
have glasses or smash plates when somebody
takes the PlayStation controller away, so how
hard would it be with your nose melted off?
And so I start knocking on the greasy glass
and saying, Let me out! But they go on kissing
kissing squeezing giggling. So I push on the
oven door, and it opens a tiny bit, but then
slams right back shut.
Travis yells, What the! and they turn
around.
What in the world? Mrs. Lorraine says
when she opens up the oven and sees me here.
And Travis starts screaming, What do you
think you’re doing in there? How the hell—
Get out!
And Mrs. Lorraine just says, Oh my god
oh my god.
Travis uses his angry eyes on me and says,
Where are you supposed to be right now?
Children’s church, I say.
What were you doing in the oven?
But I don’t answer because there’s grease
on my arm that I have to taste, and a little bit
of blood is running down my knee to my sock.
Travis takes a wet paper towel and wipes it off,
and Lorraine gets a Band-Aid from a drawer.
Get your ass to children’s church, he says.
And if you ever tell Barbara you went inside
an oven and could have died, she will be so
upset I just don’t know…
You don’t know what? I ask.
I just don’t know if it will be too much
to handle. If you’d be too much to handle
anymore.
I’ve had about infinity families. I think my
first one was with my vagina-mamma, who
was my only family that was black. But then
on the day after she bought me all new clothes
and filled up the fridge with lunch meat and

31
Fiction Fix
bread, the pointy-nose lady came and said,
How many people sleep in this bed? How
often do you eat food? What’s that all over
your face? And then she smelled my brand
new clothes and frowned and took me away.
My vagina-mamma didn’t have a PS3, but
she did have hippopotamus boobs that I could
lay my head in between and feel warm and
comfortable.
So I run out of the kitchen and down the
hall and down the stairs and down the hall
again until I burst into the Sunday school
classroom.
Miss Esther turns and says, Tommi! She is
sitting at the head of the table, and kids are all
around her coloring. She’s coloring, too. Her
legs are way too long to fit under the table, so
she just scrunches them up beside her. She is
not like the other teacher who comes in with a
grown-up chair and looks at his phone all day.
I want to tell her, Your mamma was kissing
Travis—what do we do? But I don’t say that
because it is a spiky secret that I have to keep
inside my rib cage like a cockroach in a jar.
Instead, I just sit down and color.
I rock my too-small chair onto its back legs,
back to all fours, back to two legs and on and
on. Simon Fart-Nose is sitting next to me, but
he doesn’t look at me. He colors with his face
real close to the page and presses so hard he
turns the crayons to stubby fingers. I’m more
of a light colorer myself. One time he told
me that every time your crayon went outside
the line you had to go to hell for one minute
before God let you into heaven, and that’s
probably true. His dad is the pastor.
So I color really careful, even though I’m
far behind everybody else since I came so late.
It’s a Joseph and the Rainbow Coat picture,
which means I have to use every single color.
I dig through the big plastic crayon tub, but
I can’t find green. I say to Simon, Can I use
that green? He has it by his elbow.
And he says, No thank you, Goliath. That’s
one of his names for me because I’m the
tallest and fattest person in the second grade.
And I say, Please?
And he says, I’m using it. Then he picks it
up to color Joseph’s hair green.
What a butt-hole licker, I say quietly to the
table.
And then Rachel, who is sitting on the other

Would You Still Love Me If I Chewed the Cud? 32
side of me says, Awwwwwww, you said a bad
word.
And Esther looks at me and says, Tommi,
don’t say that word. But that’s all the trouble I
get in because Esther is not a mean grown up
lady yet. She doesn’t even wear high heel shoes.
So I color the tree in my picture blue, which
makes no sense, but it’s better than having to
use Simon’s stupid green crayon, which most
likely has salmonella and lice all over it. And
then suddenly I notice a delicious smell. A
little bit like turkey skin and a little bit like fire.
I peek under my left arm and find a big black
sooty splotch from the oven that I missed.
Oven grease tastes like salty potato chips that
only got a tiny bit burnt.
Tommi, what are you doing? Miss Esther
asks.
The other first and second graders stop
coloring to stare my burnt potato chip stain.
They’re most likely jealous.
Miss Esther goes to the supplies cabinet
and gets out a big cylinder of wet wipes. She
pats my arm with one, and it feels like wet,
chilly kisses. She holds my arm at the top by
the shoulder with her long fingers. I wonder
if my fingers will grow that long. Maybe if I
stay on my diet.
Then she looks at my legs and my dress
and my hands, which are also all covered in
sooty grease. She says, What on Earth did
you get into?
And I lie and say, I fell on the floor.
And Esther says, But where did this grease
come from?
And I tell her again that it was from the
floor.
And she purses her lips like Travis about to
kiss Esther’s mom, but Esther does not kiss
me. She is pondering, like a wise owl.
Then Simon interrupts by saying, Miss
Esther, it’s time for choir. He says this in a
loud voice without looking at me, which
means he’s saying it just to rub in the fact
that I was kicked out of children’s choir, and
he was not.
What happened was that he was calling me
Three Nipples Bipples because of that mole I
have that looks like a nipple, and then he was
poking it with his finger, and I knew I was not
supposed to lift my shirt up anymore because
I will have boobies soon. So later that night

33
Fiction Fix
I cut his rattail off with the high school craft
closet’s sharpest pair of scissors. That was the
night Barbara got so mad her hands started
shaking. So anyway, I’m not in choir anymore.
Esther says, Okay let’s put the crayons away.
And we all do and walk back to the sanctuary
together. The other kids go right up to the
stage to sing their songs—don’t ask me which
songs because I’m not going to listen—and
me and Esther head to the bathroom.
You’re all dirty, she tells me.
The bathroom is more of a living room
with two toilets in it than a regular bathroom.
Really! There’s a flowery couch and a chair
with fat, squishy arms, and a fake tree. So
Esther tells me to sit on the couch and then
she comes over with wet paper towels and
rubs them all over my overall dress and my
arms and my face and my hair.
Really, sweetie, what did you get into? she
says.
She doesn’t believe my first lie. So I try to
think of something more interesting.
Toilet, I say, which makes no more sense,
but I am looking at the toilet in the open stall,
and that’s all I can think of.
Tommi, look at me, she says. And I look at
her. Her nose has freckles on it, and it’s very
cute, which I tell her.
But then, when she’s trying to be stern, I
start giggling because someone in the closed
stall wearing black boots is farting and farting
and farting.
Esther says, This is serious. I could get in
trouble.
I say, No way! And I think to myself that I
would be the one to get in trouble for crawling
into the oven and watching Travis and Mrs.
Lorraine kiss.
But Esther says that she will get in trouble
for losing track of me and for me ruining my
overall dress. And I wonder if she will get in
so much trouble that a pointy-nosed lady will
come and take her to a new family. Maybe
she could come live with me and Barbara
and Travis, but then I remember that living
there isn’t for sure anymore.
But before Esther says anything, the farty
lady in the stall comes out, and guess who it
is! Mrs. Lorraine!
Mom, Esther says.
Esther, Mrs. Lorraine says. What are you

Would You Still Love Me If I Chewed the Cud? 34
doing? And then she stares me down with
her angry eyes.
She got into something, Esther said.
Then Lorraine says, Looks like you
crawled under a car. And at first I am confused
because she saw me crawl out of that
greasy oven. But I realize she’s giving me an
excuse that will keep me out of trouble.
Esther says, Did you crawl under a car?
And I say Yes, yes, and I start crying.
Why in the world would you crawl under a
car? Barbara says when Mrs. Lorraine brings
me to her.
And I do that thing where I am stupid again
so she won’t be mad at me. I say, I was looking
for my vagina-mamma, which makes no
sense because why would she be under a car?
And Barbara says, How many times do I
have to tell you to stop calling her that?
And Travis comes out to the couch we’re
sitting on and rubs Barbara’s shoulders.
What happened, honey? he asks Barbara,
and she tells him about the car.
And I say, I think I’m all repented now.
❧
We go home and eat soup with not too
many potatoes or cheese in it because of my
health. But Travis plops one of his potatoes
into my bowl when Barbara is not looking,
and I wonder if he is trying to sabotage my
diet or say he’s sorry for kissing Mrs. Lorraine.
Barbara doesn’t notice because she is scrubbing
my dress in the laundry room.
Do you still love me? I ask, but what I really
want to say is, Please don’t kick me out.
But Barbara says, Of course, of course,
and she gives me a hug.
Barbara, would you still love me if I
chewed the cud? I ask.
If you what? she says.
If I chewed the cud, I say again.
But she has no idea what I’m talking about,
even though it’s in the Bible. Like I said, I’ve
read pretty much the whole thing, so I know
how terrible it is to chew the cud. I bet Simon
chews the cud in his spare time, and I bet
he never even gets in trouble for it. I get in
trouble for everything, but at least I have a
PS3. For a while, anyway.

The Opposite of
Blooming
Dianne Nelson Oberhansly
35

1
She arrived at his front door—a stunning army of
one: long dark hair, hazel eyes, sweet smile that tilted
slightly left. The paper napkin with the map on it he’d
drawn for her still clutched in her hand. It was just a
few minutes after six, and he liked that she didn’t need to be
fashionably late. He had said six o’clock, and so there she was,
confident in real time.
“Hi.” Such a simple greeting, but when she said it, the word
expanded, grew shades of intimacy.
She: Bree Noffsinger.
“Brie, as in the cheese?” he’d asked when they first met
almost two months ago.
She had rolled her eyes. “No. Bree as in Breeze.”
She worked the counter at Joy of Java, where he stopped
every morning for a large Americano on his way to teach
at Saguaro Junior High. His students called him Mr. Mitch,
36

37
Fiction Fix
short for his first name, Mitchell. He taught
band, though at this beginning stage of music,
they formed more of a pubescent pack with
continually dragging tempo.
Truthfully, Mitchell had been afflicted
almost instantly by Bree as he waited daily for
the Americanos. Morning after morning, he
could feel the sticky, honeyed amber of infatuation
spread through him, newly wonderful as
spring and, simultaneously, debilitating as flu.
He felt like an oversized fifth grader secretly
mooning over some girl.
It had taken some time and nerve to get to
this dinner invitation. Sort of like building a
slow bridge with snippets of conversation and
coffee and warm soy milk as the girders. The
small, wiry self-revelations they shared over
the coffee counter seemed odd individually,
but gradually accumulated into wispy, rather
pleasing pictures of each other.
“I’m not gay,” he had told her one morning
while he waited for his order.
She grew up in Indiana, she said. “Weird,
but I always feel like I need to apologize for
that fact.”
He was allergic to eggs.
She was enrolled in Cortiva Massage
School and would begin next quarter.
This was his second year of teaching. Call
him crazy, but he still believed in public
schools.
She was pet sitting her brother’s two
show-winning Corgis for two weeks, and they
were a pain in the butt. She, herself, was a
cat woman.
One morning, after the coffee rush ended
and she came from behind the counter to
wipe tables, they’d had more time to talk. He
watched how lightly she moved, as if shed
of blood and bone and, instead, filled with
packing foam. At one point, he heard himself
ask if she wanted to come to his house for
dinner, and he heard her answer, Yeah, and
by the time he’d located a clean paper napkin,
his hand was shaking slightly as he drew her
a map and wrote out his address, then on
whim, crossed out the of Java so the bottom
of the napkin simply read Joy.
Standing in the threshold of his doorway,
Bree tucked her hair behind an ear. She
inhaled for effect. “Smells great. Somebody
must have shown you around a kitchen or two.”

The Opposite of Blooming 38
Garlic: proof of existence. Olive oil: god
in liquid form. Butter: dense, cream-laden
sunlight. A skillet on Mitchell’s stove low-simmered
with these ingredients, sending the
husky aroma of love throughout his small
house.
Point of fact: he was an expert cook at
only one thing: roasted garlic shrimp on linguine.
Actually, the recipe read Roasted Garlic
Prawns on a Bed of Linguine, but he thought
the bed part was a little over the top. And
prawns were ridiculously expensive, so he’d
wound up with a pound of raw shrimp—big,
meaty, gray-white commas that now rested
in a bowl on his counter, awaiting their final
transformation.
This was his seduction meal, and Mitchell
had found success with it before. If the way
to a man’s heart was directly through his
stomach, then certainly the way to a woman’s
was much more puzzling and circuitous.
It involved her brain, her eyes, the fourth or
fifth chakra of the spine (he couldn’t remember
which); there was the long journey down
2
to her sensitive feet and the ticklish path
around her navel. And yes, the stomach was
an eventual side trip, and if all went well,
her heart was finally arrived at, and if the
gods were still smiling down on them at that
point—Bingo.
But it was all quite a large production. In
addition to an impressive dish, there were
other required elements. Candles, of course,
which he could thank his mother for. She’d
sent a couple of nice pillars to him in last
year’s Christmas box, “to add some cheer,”
her card said, though he’d carefully excised
the Santa Clauses from the front of each
candle with a paring knife for this occasion.
He had decided against a bouquet of flowers,
but cut a long, feathery branch from a
backyard shrub and propped it between the
candles, creating, he thought, a dramatic
statement, somewhere between native and
artsy. And over his left shoulder, he folded
a clean white dish towel, which showed
his seriousness, his work ethic. Not that he
intended to use the towel; it was to be kept
clean and neat, worn like a super-sexy flag
of domesticity.

39
Fiction Fix
Actually, Mitchell was encouraged by how
easy the first fifteen minutes with Bree went.
He poured two glasses of wine, gave her a
short tour of the house. She loved the black
and white photos hanging in his living room.
She was wearing a sleeveless cotton dress,
vintage-looking in faded yellow and green,
its scooped neckline revealing her collarbone,
delicately arced, Mitchell noticed, like the
little handlebars on a tricycle. They sat on
his blanket-covered sofa. She slipped off her
shoes, then pushed them under the coffee
table using her feet—an elegant, dextrous
move. Shortly thereafter, the trouble began.
Don’t, he wanted to whisper to her, Oh don’t.
There was an ancient method and logic
to all of this, a reason why four followed
three. Bree had barely sipped her wine, so
she couldn’t be blotto. Yet with hardly any
ado, she had embraced him, was sucking
the breath right out of him like some hot
meteor. She had skipped all of the operating
3
instructions, including steps 3 through 6,
including linguine, and had fast-forwarded
to a place of electric nerve endings and chaos.
Two or three minutes of it—hell, he couldn’t
tell passing time—and then he backed away
from their entangled nest and pointed to the
kitchen.
He stood, attempted to smile. “Hey you,”
he said, trying to sound playful, not knowing
at all what he meant. “Gotta attend to dinner,
but hold that thought.”
He retreated to the privacy of his kitchen
and stood there, confused. Yes, he had invited
her here hoping for this very kind of encounter,
but there was the whole evening ahead.
Wasn’t there? He glanced at the bowl of
shrimp on the counter, moved to the stove
to settle himself, turned on the right front
burner, set the sautéed garlic to rewarm.
He’d heard nothing behind him, and then
Bree’s pale arms were there, wrapping his
waist. He could feel her face push firmly into
his back like something trying to imprint its
meager outline.
Mitchell reached for the shrimp and
poured them into the hot skillet, the resulting

sizzle big, fragrant, instantaneous. A cloud of
smoke and oil rose, then cleared. He felt the
moist heat on his face, felt it collect on his
scalp and cling to his hair.
In the skillet, the shrimp turned pink, then
darkened to coral, and curled inward until
they were almost closed—the opposite of
blooming. The rich sauce bubbled around
them. Flecks of garlic lit the way.
Bree, behind him still, was nuzzling his
neck, bumping and joyriding.
It was a ridiculous question, but Mitchell,
staring blankly into his creation, had to ask
it anyway. “Hungry?”
The Opposite of Blooming 40

Sourceless,
Timeless, Gone
Eric Barnes
41

Lately, the kids have been breaking
into cockney accents, either of
them entering the kitchen with an
offhand, “’Owdy, guvnuh!”
I find the use of English accents deeply
uncomfortable.
But, of course, I am forced to endure.
It’s hard for me not to fear a disease. Something
unknown and undefined that invades
them and our lives.
The thoughts are fleeting. But I have them.
Visions of a thing beyond my control, a thing
evil and awful and sad.
“’Owdy, guvnah!” they declare. And I laugh,
and I cringe, and I want once more to hold
them closer than I can.
42

Dimelza
Broche
Works
on
paper
Faceless | Ballpoint pen on paper
43

Left: Stare
Top: My soul
44

Pollution
45

Life
46

47
Fiction Fix
Dreamer

The Illusion
Dimelza Broche 48

Gut Feelings
Penny Perkins
49

I
had been feeling the pain, and ignoring it, for months.
Maybe years. I really don’t know. The pain had become a
part of me, tugging on the coattails of my consciousness
for so long that I barely noticed it anymore. It’s hard
to remember how long it had gone on like that. But then
suddenly, without warning, it went from Dull and Chronic to
Sharp and Acute, and then the needle on the dial careened
all the way to Utterly Insufferable. The pain blinded me with
searing aches and sharp stabs; it stood up in the middle of the
room, grabbed me by the shirt, and announced with utmost
authority and power, “I will not be ignored any longer.”
So I went to my doctor and she ordered some tests.
I like my doctor, Dr. Livingston; she’s older than me, maybe
in her early sixties (I’ve always been a bad judge of age), a
transplant from some Celtic island culture that left a pleasing
lilt in her voice. She’s tall and thin and looks good in a white
coat. But more importantly: she’s kind and straight-talking. I
liked that most of all.
50

51
Fiction Fix
A few weeks after the tests, I went back for
the results.
She was flipping through my chart and
shaking her head. “These tests don’t make
any sense.”
That’s not something you want to hear
from your doctor.
“How so?”
She looked up and closed my chart.
“Some are inconclusive and others are
contradictory. And the notes from the lab
technician indicate vellumoid flange loads on
several samples.”
I stared at her blankly.
“What does that mean?”
“It means we’re going to have to do more
tests.”
For several months I went to various
labs and got poked and prodded in sundry
unmentionable places. Barium contrast and
non-contrast CT scan of the abdomen. A
colonoscopy. Blood tests. The results were
seldom within normal ranges, but no one
could explain why.
The reports were nothing but a barrage of
confusion to me:
“We’re seeing significant derivation in your
lexemes and syntactical structures.”
“If we don’t get to the root of your
morpheme issues, we’re going to have significant
risk of toxicity from cacographic
decomposition.”
“Your CBC indicates that someone in
your immediate bloodline may have been
an English major. We’re waiting to get the
culture back to confirm this.”
I had a nagging suspicion of what was
going on, and I thought about saying something.
But I figured that, if I was correct, the
tests would flag it soon enough.
Except they didn’t.
It took another six months to pinpoint the
problem. And by then it was almost too late.
I got the phone call on a Saturday. It was
the on-call doctor from Dr. Livingston’s
practice.
“We have your latest lab results.”
“Yes?”

Gut Feelings 52
“You need to get to the hospital.”
“What do you mean? When? After the
weekend? On Tuesday?”
It was Memorial Day weekend. I couldn’t
imagine there would be much doctoring
going on during a major holiday. Plus, I
had plans. Plans that involved picnics and
coleslaw. You don’t just throw coleslaw plans
to the wind at the first sign of a little health
issue.
“If I were you, I’d pack a thesaurus and get
to the ER as soon as possible.”
“No disrespect, doctor, but I’ve been
undergoing tests for six months, with no real
urgency. What’s the big rush all of a sudden?”
“I can’t speak to what’s happened before,
but the results that I have in my hand right
now indicate multiple complications—including
impending collapse of the kidneys and
maladaptive swelling of the adipose tissues—
due to systemic toxic shock syndrome with
indicators of Streptococcus epistolary.” Pause.
“Time is of the essence.”
I tossed the coleslaw and packed an overnight
bag.
❧
In hindsight, I should have told Dr. Livingston
my suspicions right from the start.
But the fact was: I was ashamed. I was paralyzed
by the thought that I might be wrong.
Oh, sure, lots of people were certain there
was a book inside of them and went running
to the hospital at the first sign of a paper
cut. They’d spend thousands of dollars on
expensive, exploratory surgery, only to come
up empty-handed—or worse, with just a few
pages of a poetry chapbook.
The doctors would declare, “We’ve looked
everywhere, but I’m sorry to inform you,
there’s no book inside of you. The pain must
be caused by something else. A piece of flash
fiction perhaps? A blog entry?”
Some people refused to believe it. They’d
sue their doctors for theft and plagiarism,
claiming that there had been a book inside
of them, but that the material had been purloined
by the surgical staff; then the insurance
companies would, in turn, sue the patients for
linguistic or lexiconal hoax. It was all a big
medico-literary mess.
I didn’t want to be a part of all that. Better
to leave a possible book inside of me to rot

53
Fiction Fix
away than to disgrace myself (and my HMO)
with a fruitless search for a pregnant pause
that turned out to be hysterical in nature and
reported with mocking hilarity in the trades.
Sadly, however, I had not chosen the prudent
path. And now my shame of not wanting
to tell the doctors what I suspected had possibly
put my life in danger. I had learned a
valuable life lesson to speak up—now if only
the doctors could extend my life so that I
would have more days ahead of me to put
that lesson into practice.
Preparing for surgery is nerve-wracking.
But being in surgery is even more
nerve-wracking.
Literally.
I took each of my nerves and put them
on the rack. And then I turned the wheel
and made them squeal until they told the
truth about believing in Mythological Creatures
Who Lived in The Sky and made the
heavens go “Boom!” Then we (my racked
nerves and I) had a good long talk about the
tendency to believe in Supreme Beings when
the possibility of demise is in the air. We discussed
Richard Dawkins and flying spaghetti
monsters, Egyptian gods and Middle Eastern
goddesses, that badass original Goth girl Lilith
(there’s always a first wife no one wants to talk
about), and Pandora of the box fame. Poor
entrepreneurial Pandora. She (sadly) didn’t
go to Harvard Business School so didn’t get
praised for all she let outside of the box.
Ouch! Where was that pain coming from?
Wasn’t I supposed to be under?
By the way, sorry about the stream of consciousness
ramblings; it must be the aesthetic.
I mean the amnesia. I mean the anesthetic.
Is this real life? No, but it’s a gas.
“My mind is racing,” I said out loud. “I can
see the checkered flag.”
The anesthesiologist just looked at me, staring
at me with the dead eyes of a bored shark.
“Just keep counting backwards.”
So I did: 37, 38—whoops—36, 35, 34, 32...
And then...
And then a plank in reason broke, and the
bottom dropped out of Bottom’s dream, and
I slipped into some place that was no place at
all… except that it looked like a steel-framed,

Gut Feelings 54
U-Haul pay-in-advance-by-the-month storage
locker that housed nothing but the dank
blankness of the inside of the belly of the
whale. So, like Jonah before me, I lit a match
to brighten my way. As my eyes grew accustomed
to the glooming, I saw that I was
standing on a dry, concrete floor, which held
wooden pallets stacked with moldy cardboard
boxes towering to the ceiling, which in turn
held broken memories of days gone by. I held
my match up to the side of one of the boxes; it
was labeled “THIS END UP” and then next
to it “YOUR UNCONSCIOUS.” Then the
flame singed my finger, I dropped my match,
and that was the last thing I remember before
going completely under.
I woke up in the middle of surgery.
It was a vague waking up, more like a
slight bobbing to the surface of consciousness.
My eyelids were unbearably heavy—nearly
impossible to open—but I could clearly hear
the clinks and clanks of the procedure, as well
as the murmurings of the surgeons and staff
huddled around my draped body.
“There’s another piece wrapped around
the duodenum.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Just tug it.”
“And risk more diffuse vascular leakage?”
“Watch out. You’ve got systemic Ang-1 and
Ang-2 dysregulation.”
“Great. Now we have widespread endothelial
activation.”
“You’re tearing the celiac ganglia.”
“I have to—to get to this frontispiece.”
“Don’t worry about the frontispiece—that’s
tertiary.”
“Ancillary.”
“Arbitrary.”
Self-congratulatory laughter here at their
own cleverness.
“Cooper. What are you doing?”
“I was just trying to make out what it says
here on the…”
At this point, my curiosity overcame being
held hostage by my intractable eyelids. I managed
to crack open a slit in one eye to get a
peek.
Between the pointed ends of his shiny
instrument, Dr. Cooper was holding up a

55
Fiction Fix
moist and rotting fragment—part parchment,
part papyrus—dripping with enzymes and
soy-based ink.
Another doctor, Dr. Lybrand, I believe,
grabbed it with his gloved hand and threw it
in the medical collection bin.
“Just extract it, Cooper. Don’t review it.”
More savvy doctor laughter.
Then I felt what seemed like a 30-inch
needle piercing my stomach; my eyes shot
wide open, and I screamed for all I was worth.
Behind his mask, I saw the lead surgeon,
Dr. Price, staring at me in shock.
“Why is she awake?!” he barked at the
anesthesiologist.
This seemed like a reasonable question,
and I repeated it like a panic-stricken parrot,
“Why am I awake?!”
The dead shark eyes of the anesthesiologist
sprang to life, and she gritted through
her teeth, “I’ve already given her enough to
knock out a horse!”
“Give her more!” ordered the surgeon.
“Give me more!” I squawked.
The last thing I remembered was the
maniacal look of the anesthesiologist as she
cranked up the dial on my drip. If it had
been a cartoon, her motion would have been
accompanied by a slider-sloop sound effect.
Hours later, I awoke in the recovery room
on the same gurney that I had been on during
surgery. At first, I didn’t realize where I was
or how I had gotten there.
As I was sorting things out, a nurse ambled
over and asked how I was feeling.
“Okay,” I lied.
Truth was, I was in a full-blown panic. I
was sweating and shaking.
She didn’t seem to notice.
“Would you like a sandwich? We have egg
salad or tuna salad.”
Neither had ever sounded less appetizing.
I looked around, trying to understand why
a rising wave of anxiety threatened to capsize
me. Intellectually, I knew the surgery was over
and that I had come out alive, if not perfectly
fine. But emotionally, it was as if I was still
waiting to go into surgery—and I was drowning
in uncontrollable anxiety.
“Actually,” I said, “I’m feeling a little spooky.

Gut Feelings 56
Can I get some Valium or something?”
The nurse just smiled as she walked away.
“Sorry, sweetie. We only hand that out
before the procedure. Post-operative sedatives
are not covered in your plan.”
I felt the fear rise in my throat like a bad
review.
I learned later that the doctors had to
save what was left of my book by ripping
out the bulk of it from my intestinal lining.
The good news is that they were able to stitch
the perforations, so I will not have to wear
this colostomy bag the rest of my life—just
until I finish healing from the surgery. There
was a preface under the diaphragm that they
weren’t able to save, but at least they were
able to remove it. (Apparently, it had been
the cause of the fiendish heartburn and reflux
I’d been suffering from.) Sadly, they couldn’t
even find the epilogue—some of the surgical
team thought it had long ago been absorbed
into the reproductive system and flushed out
through menses. And, in cases such as mine—
where the book had festered inside too long
and started to wither and decompose—they
didn’t even bother looking for a table of
contents (which was probably the section I
needed the most, since so much of what was
retrieved was fragmentary and deteriorated).
After extracting what was left of my book
from my torso, the doctors then packed the
resulting intestinal cavity with emergency
supplies of stem-cell-created regenerative
membranes, which were wrapped in a long,
dissolvable cotton coil. They left the end of
this cotton wick sticking out of a slit in my
anterior abdominal wall and gave me instructions
to pull out an inch of it every day. That
is, as the internal cavity healed and filled itself
up, I would pull out the cotton coil to give the
membrane room to heal further.
This was disgusting to me—the very
thought of pulling something out from my
body reminded me of a bad sci-fi horror
movie and made me almost faint. And it was
also very painful. I finally discovered, while
taking a shower, that getting the area around
the wound very wet helped to diminish considerably
the pain of pulling out the cord—that
way I wasn’t breaking the scab-like crust that

57
Fiction Fix
had formed overnight. I thought that this was
a simple pain management technique that the
hospital could have told me about and not left
me to my own devices to discover. It made
me wonder if they had been as careless with
my manuscript extraction surgery as they had
been with my post-op instructions.
In fact, I’d like to formerly go on the record
to note that my post-op instructions were
completely underwhelming. For all the big
urgency and supposed life-threatening conditions
I was under, there wasn’t much advice
dispensed in terms of how to accelerate my
recovery or, more importantly, how to prevent
a relapse. Going forward, what should I do
to keep another book from getting trapped
inside of me? Where was my ounce of prevention?
No one even pretended to give me
answers about this.
Actually, now that I’ve broached the
subject, part of me feared that the whole
“we-got-your-book-out-and-its-removal-lefta-big-cavity-in-you-so-pull-this-cord-out-ofyour-body-while-it-heals”
routine was just
an elaborate cover up against the truth that
they had not found a book inside me at all.
If that were the case, putting a cotton coil
inside of me was literally just “dressing the
wound”—a wound allegedly left by festering
pages of Jabberwocky reduced to a slushy pile
of post-meaning (and which might never be
deciphered).
But why would they lie about such a thing?
Well, the doctors would have to justify the
procedure to the adjusters. They would want
to get paid for their efforts. Everyone knew—
especially the hospital’s accountants—that I
couldn’t afford such an expensive procedure
as an elective. The doctors might have found
only a few scraps—or maybe they retrieved
just notes for a book instead of a book itself—
and then decided to stage an elaborate ruse
for the sake of getting paid by insurance. And,
hey, who can blame them? Everybody has a
mortgage to pay, right?
I kept trying to push aside this nightmare
thought, trying to rid myself of it until my
first post-operative appointment with Dr.
Livingston. That’s when I would finally see
my book with my own eyes and hold it in
my hands.
❧

Gut Feelings 58
Two weeks later, I was waiting for my
doctor in examining room number three.
Since the battery on my smart phone was
dead, I passed the time by reading a poster
on the wall about the ingredients of this year’s
flu vaccine (it had been engineered especially
to help prevent against a virulent strain of
Codex Dresdensis); I also read a flyer about how
a diet heavy in hydrogenated detective novels
and polyunsaturated murder mysteries could
lead to serial diabetes.
When she finally came in, Dr. Livingston
examined my stitches without any small talk.
“These look good,” she said. “Healing nicely.”
I was scheduled to get my manuscript, but I
didn’t know what the protocol was for asking
for it.
She sat down and nodded toward a cardboard
box on the counter by the sink.
There it was—my book. I felt a rush of
excitement. But before I could say anything,
she broke the news.
“You’re going to have to work with a medical
editor.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“The pages that were extracted are…
mostly... deficient in quality.”
This was difficult to hear. My stitches
throbbed.
“The physical condition of the pages… or
the writing on them?”
“Well, that’s not my expertise. I just collate
them. I don’t appraise them.” Pause. “But
from what I’ve seen over the years, I suspect
both.”
This was devastating. I’d had the ache for
years. I’d had an extensive and painful surgery
and was currently undergoing a significant
post-operative healing period, and now there
was—still!—an apparently long road ahead
of me with a medical editor to get it all into
shape. I couldn’t believe I had been naive
enough to think that this was the end of the
process... not the beginning!
Dr. Livingston knew what I was thinking.
She’d probably seen it a thousand times.
“Don’t be surprised or get down on yourself.
Very rarely do they come out fully formed, in
perfect shape for the marketplace.”
I couldn’t bring myself to answer. I was
afraid I would start crying.
But she was a highly-trained professional

59
Fiction Fix
and continued without waiting for me to
respond. “Look, most people don’t even have
a book inside of them, and even for those
who do, most of them never get it out. You’re
one of the lucky ones. You had a book in you,
and we got it out—at least, what was left of it.
Granted, it’s fragmentary and full of palimpsest,
not to mention being caked with purple
adhesions due to its prolonged, impacted state.
But at least you have something to work with.
Some folks wait even longer than you did and
still have to go through the pain of the surgery,
just to extract a jarful of viscous pulp. Not a
legible word to be found.”
She paused to let it sink in.
“The need for a medical editor is a good
sign. Really.”
At that point, I did start to cry.
Without missing a beat, she handed me a
box of tissues.
“You could have died from decompositional
toxic shock syndrome or even No. 2 lead poisoning.
The good news is, you’re going to
be fine.”
I wiped my eyes and looked at her. “But
what about my book?”
She was already writing on her pad. “As
I said, I’m referring you to a very talented
medical editor. She specializes in impacted
cases like yours.”
I managed to take the prescription slip and
thank her. I started to leave. She stopped me.
“Don’t forget your manuscript.”
She handed me the corrugated box that
contained what was left of the book. It felt
much lighter than I expected—and suddenly
I had the terrifying thought that it might be
a novella, the maligned homunculus of the
literary world. And then (worse yet!) I noticed
the box had a terrible odor. My book stank.
Dejected, I walked down the hall to settle
my co-pay. Would my insurance cover a medical
editor, and if so, could I afford the 20%
of fees not covered? And if not, how would I
ever get this foul-smelling offal into shape? If I
couldn’t get authorization for a medial editor,
would I be able to revise the manuscript on
my own? Was that even legal? Should I even
try, or would that simply relegate me to the
slippery slope of vanity publishing?
I paid the receptionist, and she handed me
the receipt. As I started to walk away, she

Gut Feelings 60
said, “Oh, don’t forget this,” and handed me
my manuscript. I felt embarrassed that I had
almost left it. Again.
Walking to my car, I wondered if I would
be able to wait until I got home to take a
look at it—but as soon as I slid in behind
the wheel, I knew that I could not. I would
not be able to stand the ride home with the
mysterious box unopened beside me. At the
same time, I didn’t feel exactly right opening
it here in the medical center parking lot.
The location felt too inauspicious for such a
momentous occasion. And besides, what if
somebody saw me? How embarrassing to be
that rookie author so excited about the book
extracted from her gut that she couldn’t even
wait to get home to read it.
As I stared at the brown manuscript box, I
suddenly imagined myself as Pandora. Was
this how she felt? Trying to summon her
courage for a life-changing event? Or did
she harbor no trepidation, casting aside the
box top with bravura and abandon?
As I sat there, spellbound, the hot summer
heat bounced off the asphalt of the parking
lot and poured in through my windows,
drenching me in sweat and making the smell
in the box even worse.
And then it hit me: an epiphany which was
the first and only moment of clarity I ever
had.
I realized that I could choose not to open
the book here outside the doctor’s office, and
I could choose not to open it at home, either.
I could not open it anywhere.
I knew that whatever was inside—fragmented,
foul, and underwhelming in
heft—would never fully satisfy me. Even with
help, trying to resuscitate a book that had
already asphyxiated inside me—well, it would
just never be gratifying. No matter how hard
I tried to mend it, I would always pine for
the passages that had been lost, ascribing to
them some power and perfection that I would
never be able to attain or resurrect in reality.
Whatever was inside this box—be it strips
and scraps of fragments, be it notes or bullets
points of something never materialized, be
it an on-the-nose autobiographical account
of family troubles—it was bound to always
disappoint me. Never perfect enough. The
Frankenstein-cobbled book ripped from my

61
Fiction Fix
intestines would never match the book in my
head that I imagined the book in my gut to be.
That’s when the insight hit me, pulverized
me, and rearranged me into the person I
needed to be: the person who got out of her
car and marched the manuscript box over
to the huge biohazard dumpster behind the
medical center. With a newfound conviction
of my literary destiny, I threw my box, and
whatever book or pale shadow of a book it
may or may not have contained, into the
irretrievable guts of the steel trash receptacle.
If there was ever going to be a book assembled
from the fiber of my being, it was going
to start, and end, on the outside of me where
it belonged.

Gut Feelings 62

In That
Heartless
Valley
Carter Schwonke
63

The clatter of a vending machine operator’s keys
and a custodian dragging trash bags down the hall
made it impossible for Bill to overhear executives
scheming in the conference room. His better plan
was to go through Silicon World, department by department,
and systematically scour for layoff clues. The critical factor
though, the thing to remember, was to watch out for Sylvia
in Human Resources. Danger! Sylvia held lives in her hands.
Finance always heard about layoffs first, so Bill started there.
Time passed pleasantly enough, and he shared an early lunch,
but he had no luck. So he pushed Sylvia purposefully to the
back of his mind and moved along to Hardware Engineering
where he ate birthday cake and got less than nothing, a pattern
that repeated until four-thirty, when he finally conceded. Only
Sylvia had the layoff information he needed.
First, he smoothed his hair in the men’s room, centered his
glasses, and washed his hands several times. He couldn’t do
it. One month she’d negotiate a hiring bonus for a guy, the
64

65
Fiction Fix
next month she’d show him the door. No, he
couldn’t hear the truth from Sylvia, because
after two layoffs in six months, his resume
sucked. Besides, if he felt nervous and weak,
he risked falling into Sylvia’s celestial eyes.
Better wait until morning. Yeah, he’d feel
fresher in the morning.
Sylvia, Sylvia, Sylvia, will morning ever come? Bill
tossed and scolded himself for delaying when
he knew damn well he’d never sleep with so
much on his mind. He sat up, scrunched his
pillow repeatedly, and stared at the clock. Not
even his mother knew how he struggled at
night. In half-dream-states he used to prance
around his parent’s house wearing a cape and
old funky medals on his PJs. Why couldn’t
people see? Bill was a hero.
He tangled himself in sweaty sheets and
tried to forget Sylvia: the HR lady, the hatchet
wielder, the girl with silver blue eyes. No surprise
that by morning, he’d talked himself out
of visiting her. But encouraging glimpses of
sky along his bike route reminded him of the
magic, push-pull of her eyes. So he switched
gears, ate a power breakfast at the vending
machines, and proceeded to her office,
pumped and ready.
As he walked, bright lighting turned walls
a nauseating, swirling green. He concentrated
on the sounds his flip-flops made and
reviewed data he’d collected for weeks. With
a mix of intrigue and dread, he’d stared at
her oval face in the lunchroom and analyzed
her conduct in company meetings. If Bill’s
assessment was correct, they were both short
on small talk, so communicating would be
easy. He’d simply fire questions at Sylvia and
stare until she poured out the truth.
When he entered the Human Resources
Department, he waved at Sylvia’s staff. What
were their names? They were both married,
so he didn’t know.
“Is Sylvia here?”
“You have an appointment?”
Bill pretended not to hear. He felt drymouthed
and intimidated, even though he
had no respect for their intellects. Who could
tell with these human resources types—were
they even human? They said they were all
about happy people, yet they planned layoffs
every day.
“Hi, Sylvia,” he said with one jaunty arm

In That Hear tless Valley 66
placed high on her doorframe. “Are we having
layoffs?”
When Bill’s head popped in, she slammed
her bottom drawer. No doubt, she was cute,
people liked her, but that wasn’t the point.
She had information Bill needed.
“You know I can’t talk about layoffs,” she
said.
Even in Bill’s wildest fantasies, Sylvia was
too small to wield an actual hatchet. The guys
upstairs made firing decisions; her part in the
process was to prepare the list. Then she called
each person to her office, crushed their lives,
and handed over a check for two weeks of pay.
“Sylvia, look, I gotta know. Pull out your
list and give me a heads up. How can it hurt?”
“Bill, I have work to do. Talk to your boss.”
“Larry’s in a meeting with the shades
down, Sylvia. I’m not blind.”
Indeed, Bill had all of his senses, and something
in Sylvia’s office put them on high alert.
Not her uncharacteristically messy hair or her
trashed desk; it was a smell.
She sighed. “If you’re at risk, shouldn’t
you be working?” She tapped the face of
her watch. “I heard your project is behind
schedule again.”
In Sylvia’s left iris, he saw trouble. In fact,
both eyes were working hard to hide a truth, a
truth he hadn’t prepared for. And though Bill
wasn’t a guy for nuance, he saw her glance
furtively at her bottom drawer. Sylvia had a
bottle in there! He could smell it.
She continued: “Remember the training
session I did? Highly ranked performers are
unlikely to be downsized, while continued
employment is harder to justify for poorer
performers.”
“What?” Not only had he entirely lost his
focus, but he was incensed she’d used that
line of bullshit on him.
“Well, do you remember the meeting, Bill?”
Bill turned abruptly to see if anyone was
around. He couldn’t believe what he’d walked
into. Obviously, he’d keep pretending he
didn’t notice the smell, though his preference
was to notice absolutely everything about her.
Even if circumstances weren’t exactly ideal,
he’d never be alone with her again.
“You stayed long enough to eat four sandwiches,”
she said. “You must have heard
something I said.”

67
Fiction Fix
Sylvia counted my sandwiches? Of course he
remembered her training meeting. He didn’t
know how to cook, and those avocado sandwiches
were the healthiest food he’d had in
days.
“I heard you,” he said, remembering something
else about that meeting day. During the
Q & A, Sylvia took off her suit jacket. She’d
never shown him her arms before or her
shoulders or… Anyway, he was impressed.
Suddenly, Sylvia stood up, and Bill felt pressured
to leave. It was as though she’d risen
from her chair on purpose to threaten him
with her skirt, loose hair, and bottom-drawer-secret.
He’d known ahead of time she’d
make him feel shy, inadequate, and withered,
like an unworthy cog in a wheel, a brain on
a stick, a man in cargo shorts longing to be
human but unsure of the tradeoffs. He was
immune to all that. But he couldn’t dismiss
her bottom-drawer situation so easily.
Sylvia seemed to drift as Bill decided
whether he was there to rescue her or
protect his own paycheck. Her surprising
persona, more human than corporate, had
temporarily thrown him off balance. Then
Bill remembered their roles. He was (Salary
Level 12) Sr. Developer extraordinaire, and
she was (Salary Level 9) Human Resources
Manager. In the valley, what else was there
to say? He was the real player with real rights
to job security.
In an attempt to stall, he squeezed the
doorframe with his right hand. If he could
extend their meeting, she’d eventually cave.
Invite me in, he thought, ask me to sit, let’s
talk about layoffs or your drawer or the light
fading in your eyes. In fact, his need to sit
and examine an unexpected darkness in her
left eye burned.
Instead, Sylvia shifted her weight. “Bill,
we hired you because you’re the one person
in the valley who can do what you do, so go
do it.”
She was right; when Bill unlocked a magic
solution, it was deceptively simple and elegant,
so why wasn’t she impressed? Because
his heroic designs were always late.
Anyway, mastering a delicate, interpersonal
situation with Sylvia was a futile
exercise. Despite companies up and down
the valley closing, despite rumors, pulled

In That Hear tless Valley 68
shades, and revenue numbers probably in
the tank, there’d be no sharing of resources,
no shortcuts, no helping hand from Sylvia.
Valley people play their cards close to the vest.
They are heartless.
“Have a great day,” Sylvia told him.
In four years, Bill still hadn’t adjusted to
California speak, fierce sun, an ocean too blue
or fields burned out by May. The youngest
of three boys, he got out of Pottsville, where
nobody said phony stuff like, “Have a great
day.”
As Bill tried to leave her office, the depth
of his concern slowed him. This was business,
so why did he feel an overpowering need to
stay? He tried to go, but his flip-flops stuck
to the floor. She needed his help—so he’d
circle back later.
As he retreated, he ran into his cube partner
in the hall. “Stopping to see Sylvia,”
Danny told him.
Danny was a second rate programmer;
even Danny knew it, of course he knew. This
had to be a fatality. Danny was Sylvia’s first
hatchet job. Would she actually fire him under
the influence of alcohol?
Bill stepped back to watch through Sylvia’s
glass door. He saw heads nod, no hatchet,
and she went way past the HR time limit.
He assumed her lapse was a symptom of
inebriation because from Bill’s previous
experiences, he knew HR ladies delivered
good-bye speeches in less than three minutes.
Short firings helped to avoid crying and rage;
best to lower the hatchet, bring in the next
victim, and defer panic and wrist slitting for
the parking lot.
Bill waited ten minutes with a monster
headache. It hurt to ignore Sylvia’s bottom
drawer secret when she was so damned
cute. Danny kept smiling, though, and they
both looked pretty okay. It must have been
an innocent dental plan discussion or 401k
beneficiary form change. Whatever it was,
they were getting flirty.
“What’re you doing in the hall, Bill?” It
was Rita from accounting.
Bill spun around. “Hey. You here to see
Sylvia too?”
“Briefly.”
Bill found this disturbing. While his
smarts could make or break a company,

69
Fiction Fix
administrators possessed no intellectual
property value; their layoff risk was high.
On the other hand, it was a good bet Rita
had been summoned to start calculating
final paychecks. As she took her turn in the
chair, Danny exited via the back hall, and
Bill walked to his cube. He’d have to conduct
interviews with Danny and Rita later. Interesting,
he thought. Tomorrow is Wednesday
and layoffs are on Fridays. HR ladies lived
in fear of people showing up “the day after”
to argue their cases, so weekends gave axed
employees a few days to cool off—should have
remembered.
On Wednesday, when Danny and Rita were
at their desks looking normal, Bill decided to
worry less. He’d play computer games until
lunch, skateboard behind the building, and
forget that he was responsible for prodigious
knowledge and undoable delivery dates.
Then, casually, he’d circle back to Sylvia.
Skateboarding began as usual. Bill carved
lines, marveled at the play and trickery of
the sky, and roared into space in search of
black holes, but the line between freedom
and loneliness seemed blurred. He tried to
imagine Sylvia’s corporate hair messed up
on his pillow. Sweet. He dropped his board
again, lifted his heels, and wondered if his
interest in Sylvia was real or desperate. Corporate
or human?
Easy to wonder. The pool of girls in his
college engineering classes was zero. Just as
well because maintaining a 4.0 grade point
average was his only priority. He figured later,
at work, there’d be girls galore, but work pools
were zero too. Really, it got down to HR and
the cafeteria lady. How do you even meet girls
in California?
Skateboarding often did that, zeroed in
and mirrored life. Space is empty, and life is
empty, but a date with Sylvia? No way, not
only was she out of his league, but she had
issues. And who could ignore that other small
detail—sleeping with the enemy?
On Thursday, no drama, but on Friday at
10:00 a.m., executives met in the main conference
room with the shades pulled again. Not
good. At noon, when they hadn’t emerged
for a bio break, he panicked. It was time to
interview Rita before checking on Sylvia.
Rita spoke with a Spanish accent. She was

In That Hear tless Valley 70
thirtyish with bushy, blonde hair and black
roots. Bill walked to her cube. It would be
hard to talk without alarming rows of bean
counters.
“Bill? What’s up? You got your expense
report?”
Bill shook his head. He was too preoccupied.
“Any big news?” he whispered. “Did we
take another loss this month?”
“The numbers aren’t out yet, Bill.” She
didn’t bother to whisper.
“How was your meeting with Sylvia?”
Rita took off her glasses and gave him
a concerned stare. She sat inches from his
face next to her computer. A company mug
rimmed with lipstick and several family photos
cluttered the small space between them.
“You look pale,” she said.
Without glasses, Rita’s eyes were black and
deep set. He flushed and cleared his throat as
his basic, normal, delayed, and differed need
for a girl overwhelmed him, once again. “Layoffs,
Rita? Are you crunching our run rate?
Cutting salaries to cover operating costs?”
“My meeting with Sylvia was about the
company picnic. Okay? Quit being such a
head case, Bill.” She rolled her eyes. “Why
are you genius types so crazy?”
Poor Rita, (Salary Level 4) Accounting Administrator.
“Crazy?” Bill asked between clenched
teeth. Did he really need to remind her how
truly brilliant he was? Well, she’d left him no
choice. It was time for his famous prick-routine;
it stopped people every time.
“Hello, Rita, I was nineteen when I graduated
from college.”
“Have a great day,” she said.
His recent, infantile handling of two female
encounters and a sense of impending doom
left Bill shaken. Why, suddenly, is it so critical to
pretend it’s a great day? He should take her good
news and move on. Failing companies don’t
plan picnics; they cancel them. Besides, the
dark lipstick on Rita’s cup had ceased to stir
his blood. So he said her hair looked good
and left to find Danny.
He ran into Danny in the stockroom, a
place Bill visited frequently when the crew
was gone. He liked to think and recharge
behind supply shelves.
“Hey, Bill. What’re you doing back here?”
Danny’s arms, face, and legs were covered

71
Fiction Fix
with freckles. His cargo shorts hit below the
knee. As far as Bill could tell, Danny’s wardrobe
was much like his own: a winter pair of
shorts and a summer pair.
“I was looking for you,” Bill said.
Danny gave Bill a big brother’s pat on the
shoulder. “I need an extension cord. Hey,
you look thin, bro, you okay? I was noticing
yesterday.”
“Just working too hard.”
“I heard your design is delayed again.”
Danny coiled the cord into a loop around
his elbow and thumb.
“Only a month late.”
“I can’t do my part until yours is done.
Come on, share the wealth.”
Bill sensed Danny’s ego wrestling for space.
Jealous, prying eyes, like Danny’s (Salary
Level 7) Programmer eyes were a constant
problem. It was a fact, not Bill’s paranoia.
Valley people expected to cash in big on
somebody else’s patentable innovation. So
the very idea of sharing, caring, or coming
to someone’s rescue—ha!
“I saw you with Sylvia,” Bill said.
“No big deal. Personal.”
“Personal?” Bill flailed his arms. “Talk to
me.”
Danny had never held out before, but rather
than fire up his prick routine, Bill drew on
skills previous HR ladies had forced on him.
From courses like: Join the Team and Avoid
Self-Sabotage. There were others too, dozens
of time management seminars, oh, and total
time-sucks like: Quick Confidence and Face
Your Fears Today. But this was personal, and
corporate bull wasn’t going to work.
Bill should have been pleased Danny was
safe. Instead, he raged with jealousy. Danny
had something going with Sylvia, trumping
his fear of layoffs. God, if Bill was jealous of
Danny, he was desperate. Desperate for what?
He wondered. Job security or the girl? I’m not
even worthy of the girl; forget the girl. She’s trouble.
Danny made lame excuses, but Bill couldn’t
hear. His head hammered with the thought
of interviewing and networking while Danny
made time with the ladies. Suddenly he was
alone in the stockroom. He was thinking out
loud, not able to stop himself from projecting
inside out as he recalculated the cost of
supporting his mother and two dead-beat

In That Hear tless Valley 72
brothers back in Pottsville.
Mom, where do your prescription drugs rank?
Randy, where does a paint job for your truck rank?
Hey, I wanna help my family, but I’m deep in college
loans. Do I look like a money machine? Bill had
learned that in life, as in skateboarding, it
was a good idea to analyze one’s motives and
intentions, but not then, not in the middle of
another freaking layoff.
He heard time passing, the stockroom
breathing, and his life crashing under the
pressures of deadlines and debt. How could
he have forgotten his expense report when
every penny counted? Then he heard a door,
footsteps, and the rustle of her suit. She was
coming after him with her hatchet. It seemed
decisions were made, and empty space was
just empty space.
“Danny said you were back here.” Sylvia
studied him. “Why are you sitting on that
box?”
When he smelled her, he knew this was
not a fantastic nightmare. She was there,
she’d been drinking, and he couldn’t pretend
otherwise. She wasn’t the ruthless, callous,
detached person he’d imagined her to be, nor
a conniver born with a hunger to control people’s
lives. She was a girl who needed help.
As she squatted awkwardly, to be closer,
a strange look of understanding came over
her, and he wondered if this was a corporate
intervention or a personal one. Would she let
the hatchet fall or not? Was she intervening
in Bill’s pathetic life, or was he intervening
in hers?
“Bill, we can work this out. You don’t need
to interview people or spy at conference room
doors. Let me help.”
“Help?” He thought he shouted. But
beyond that, Bill was speechless. He wondered
if she knew how much her hand, resting on
his wide hairy knee had helped already. He lit
up. He felt an unfamiliar throb in his gut, not
like he was jealous of Danny, more like he was
suddenly human, and he was reminded how
interacting with people affects a guy. Was he
glimpsing the heart of a Hatchet Lady, or was
she just doing her job? Did she possess normal,
delayed, and deterred feelings too? Did each
layoff leave purple marks on her arms, hidden
like bruises under corporate suit jackets? Had
constant layoffs driven her to drink?

73
Fiction Fix
As words poured from Sylvia’s sweet lips,
she became brilliant to Bill, like the California
sun. Then laughter in the hallway—5:00
p.m.—he’d avoided the hatchet another
Friday. But should she fear the hatchet?
If he walked to his desk, ground out code
until Sunday, and slept on the floor, he might
meet his deadlines. Though he was exhausted,
pale, thin, and paranoid, software heroics
might save his job. Bill’s other choice was to
rescue the girl with silver eyes.
His glasses fogged as he weighed his
options, but he could still see all the way back
to Pottsville Elementary School, where he’d
learned to separate his head from his heart.
With no help, only his cape and medals, he’d
accomplished superhuman things. So with
his Pottsville revenge bubbling, his isolationist
angst and layoff fever storming, Bill decided to
run away and hide. Yes, then from behind the
scenes, he’d find an algorithm, some elegant
solution to save them both.
“Don’t tell anyone what you saw in my desk
drawer,” she whispered. “Promise me.”
“What?” He was shaking. “Will that help?”
“For now.” She scanned his face as if her
wonderful eyes had never seen him before.
“Thanks,” she said.
Overwhelmed, Bill released a breath he’d
held for hours. Sylvia was a drunk, he was
a punk, and they were alone in the storage
room, where he’d bumbled into something
only his heart understood: a once-in-a-lifetime
chance to ask for the light in Sylvia’s
eyes to shine only on him.
“Wait,” he said with a sweaty palm on her
shoulder. “I won’t breathe a word, but I have
a condition.”
“I’m listening.”
Her plight gave him power. His spirits rose;
insecurities no longer broke his stride. Screw
his heart! Bill’s head was back, and he teed
up his prick attitude to demand job security.
She had to comply.
“I… I’m pretty smart,” he said, unable to
summon his defenses. “I want to help.”
“Thanks, Bill.” She sighed. “But I’m not
ready.”
“I know about solving…” he cleared his
throat, “problems.”
“Yeah, but I’ll just find another problem.”
“We talked about this. I’m the best problem

solver in the valley; that’s my final offer.”
When she smiled, her faint acceptance
of his terms made his arm hairs tingle. And
unlike dozens of other extraordinary (Salary
Level 12), Sr. Developers up and down that
heartless valley, looking over their shoulders,
sizing up the competition, arrogantly refusing
to help or share resources with anyone at any
time, only Bill was an actual hero.
In That Hear tless Valley 74

Sir
Rory Meagher
75

—They do not like cages, sir. They do not like walls.
Give them windows.
—I have tried that, sir. It’s better at first, but they gradually
learn that these are only walls that trick you. Walls that show
you what you can’t have.
This is futile.
—Perhaps we could use mirrors, sir.
No. They hate mirrors.
—Really? Why is that?
I suppose I can’t take them with me if they refuse to depart from their
environment. If they refuse to be caged.
—The cages make them crazy, sir. They were killing themselves…
killing each other…
Such a foolish breed. They scare too easily, and they take great shame
in their fear. It turns them violent.
—They can be quite clever, sir. You made them smart. I
found the strangest thing today. After I couldn’t cage them, I
set them free again, and there was a pair that stuck together
76

77
Fiction Fix
through the whole process. Afterwards they
retreated together. And then they… Well,
they were mating, but… but they found a
way to avoid the fertilization of an egg. They
had no intentions of reproducing, sir. It was
purely for pleasure.
I have seen it before.
—I didn’t know that. Is it documented?
No, I—I’m sorry—I don’t take notes as diligently
as I used to. I don’t… I just don’t like this anymore.
—Sir?
Did you document it?
—I did, sir. I thought it showed great cunning.
They’ve learned to manipulate nature.
They use their intelligence for all the wrong reasons.
—But, sir. Why do you want to take them
with you?
I can’t take them with me.
—But why did you want to?
It’s not important why.
—Of course it is. That’s the first thing
you told me, sir. Always ask why, always ask
questions, always—
Shut up! Shut up!
—Sir. I don’t understand…
You want to know why? You want to know why I
wanted to take them with me? I was going to exterminate
them.
—What? No—sir, how could you?
Ugly creatures that do ugly things. I’ll rid us both
of them and wash my hands. I’m going to start over
somewhere else—start from scratch—better results,
better behavior.
—Sir, I won’t let you hurt them. Why… why
would you ever want to do that?
They make the same mistakes every day—I’m tired
of watching. I’m tired of waiting. That puzzle was
the last straw. I spent all my strength on that puzzle,
devising something that I hoped would inspire their
mental faculties. I couldn’t wait to watch them work
on it. And it was beautiful! I gave them something
beautiful, and what did they do with it? They… they
tore it to pieces.
—Sir, they didn’t understand what it was.
That puzzle was difficult.
It was perfect! You can’t tell me that it was anything
other than perfect.
—I know. It was. It was perfect, sir, but…
but perfection is a hard thing to look at. It’s
like a blinding light to them.
They are blind to everything. They can only see
their immediate needs and desires.

Sir 78
—Sir, that’s not true. Why are you saying
these things?
I can’t keep on with this anymore. Every aspect,
every little piece of this life, seems to shine with less
light than it used to. I simply must leave. I simply
must leave.
—But… But… Why do you intend on leaving
without me, sir?
I don’t understand.
—I’ve been with you since the beginning, sir.
Since your beginning.
—But, sir…
You must stay here and start over. You must not
inherit my mistakes.
—But, sir…
We cannot both leave.
—But, sir…
I am going to exterminate them, and then I am
going to leave.
—May I keep them, sir? Please. It would
be my honor to inherit your work.
You shouldn’t. They are utterly flawed.
—Yes, but I can learn from them. Watching
them enlightens me. And I’ve seen them
do noble things, protecting each other, dying
for each other—they are capable of so much
more. I’ve never told you this, sir, but I often
dream about them. I can’t explain it… I just
feel attached.
I suppose… I was once like you… If you so desire,
you may keep them. Perhaps you can correct them. Perhaps
you will be much better for them than I ever was.
—Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. I
won’t let you down.
I wish you well, but I must leave now. I cannot
be here any longer.
—Please, wait, sir. I have more questions.
And you always will. It’s the nature of the job.
—Wait. Just one more question, sir. Please.
All right. One last question. And then I’ll go.
—You didn’t answer me before. Why do
they hate the mirrors, sir?
It’s... because they don’t know what they look like.
They don’t know what they look like, so they create
their own vision in their mind, a beautiful vision, a
beautiful deception. You see, they lie to themselves.
And why wouldn’t they? Hope, after all, is a survival
instinct. And so, they presume to be beautiful, elegant
creatures. They begin to think they’re angels. And
then they look in the mirror, and then they see what
they really are.

The Princess and
the Dragon
Alice Thomsen
79

So here we are. It’s dusk, and over the ledge, down the
hill, a train calls out like a dog missing its pack. He
peels back the cellophane, taps out a cigarette, offers
me one, but I shake my head. I’m not trying to quit
anymore, but sometimes I pretend. The way we still tell our
Others I love you after all these nights.
I am sitting on the low brick wall where he rests his elbows
and takes a long drag. He pinches his lips and exhales the
smoke like a cherub fountain.
“I’m a dragon,” he says, and I laugh a little.
“I’m the princess.”
It was spring when we met. The ground smelled wet—earth
thawing, bulbs splitting open and thrusting free—and I left
my car behind when I headed downtown so I could show my
body that the cold was gone and it was safe to leave the house
with bare skin and everything would be okay.
“I’m sorry,” he said when he opened the door. “You’re
Lauren’s friend, right? I forgot your name.”
80

81
Fiction Fix
“Emily,” I said. “And you’re …?” Mark, I
remembered, but I didn’t want him to feel
bad for having forgotten.
“Marcus,” he said. “Lauren should be back
soon. Come in.”
Lauren: my best friend from high school,
back from New York with an art history degree,
a jackpot of student debt, and a fiancé.
He’s an anthropology major, she’d told me in
an email. He likes authentic Cantonese food and
tolerates Fuzzy Wuzzy.
Something’s wrong with him, I replied. Nobody
should tolerate Fuzzy Wuzzy.
Fuzzy Wuzzy: a Mexican red leg tarantula
with a lifespan up to three-and-a-half times
that of the average marriage.
The terrarium sat on a shelf by the couch,
one of the few things not still boxed up from
the move.
“I missed Lauren,” I said anyway, “but I
didn’t miss that thing.” The truth of it was,
although every email closed with, I miss you!,
I stopped missing her after a while. It’s how
going away works.
Marcus shrugged. “Wuzzy’s not so bad,
once you get used to her.”
“And then you realize one day that you’re
used to a giant spider, which is just as bad.”
Lauren arrived, pleased we were getting
along. “Emily can be kind of prickly sometimes,”
she told Marcus, “but she can play
nice, too.”
We all did. Lauren, Marcus, Rick, and I
would meet for dinner sometimes, maybe
watch a game or movie we could all find some
investment in. This, I remember thinking as
Rick asserted his masculinity by picking up
the check, must be what it’s like to have couple
friends: awkward, a little forced, because none
of us is certain why we’re there. Are we good
company, or are we just tagging along? If not
for me, would Lauren and Rick ever talk?
What does it mean that they wouldn’t?
Rick: a vet tech who specializes in the pets
his coworkers don’t want to deal with, the
ones with CAUTION: BITES and HANDLE
WITH CARE warnings in their files. It would
be a nice story if that’s how we’d met—if he’d
been patient while my foul-tempered cat got
her rabies booster. But I don’t have a cat, just
a cat allergy, and we met in the waiting room
of the walk-in clinic, preparing for flu season.

The Princess and the Dragon 82
I was fumbling for my insurance card, head
gone foggy because I’ve never been good with
needles; he was stuck in line behind me, and
when I spilled my wallet, he helped me gather
the bills and receipts and frequency cards.
“You’re at Central,” he said when he
returned my student ID. “I graduated two
years ago. What are you studying?”
“I don’t know,” I said, because I was
between majors, having abandoned biology
for philosophy but not yet found sociology, but
it sounded like the answer someone would
give dazed.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You’re really
pale.”
“Fine,” I said. “Yeah. Just don’t like shots.”
“Flu shot, eh?” When I nodded, he said,
“Yeah, me too. There’s a Wendy’s down the
block. Maybe you should eat something.”
It was just self-induced wooziness from the
needle, but when I told Lauren—this when
I was still telling Lauren things—she said,
“Yeah, right. You were swooning, weren’t you?”
Even now, I don’t know if Rick lived up
to whatever expectations she had in her
mind. The only reaction she gave came in
a whispered aside when he and Marcus had
fallen into conversation about Fuzzy Wuzzy:
“I always imagined he’d have glasses.”
Her sister was the maid of honor at their
end-of-summer wedding. The next month,
Rick invited me to join him for a round of
flu shots, except when we got to the clinic
he said, “Hold on,” and went to one knee.
Women talk about a surprise proposal like it
isn’t terrifying. It is magic, but not the good
type. It is dark, dangerous magic, the sort that
makes your marrow go rancid.
In my head, I said, Oh fuck. Please let some
car crash into that fire hydrant and save me. Oh fuck.
Out loud, I said, “Yes.”
And that’s how it started. I asked Lauren
why she chose the Hilton banquet hall for
the reception. She said, “Ask Mark.” So I did,
and then asked him more.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I think everyone’s supposed
to be scared.”
“Lauren wasn’t,” I said.
He lifted his shoulders, flagged down the
waitress for another round. “Lauren’s not
scared of a lot. I don’t know if that’s always
a good thing.”

83
Fiction Fix
I’ve always been a scared person. I used to
envy Lauren for her fearlessness; sometimes I
still do, although for different reasons. I once
wanted to be like her, ready to bite into the
Big Bad Apple. Now I wish I had her courage
to leave our hometown.
Maybe the difference between the two is in
my head. Maybe bravery is a mythic tapestry
I’ve constructed for myself and we’re all
cowards, just sometimes better at hiding it,
weaving in a few gold threads to distract from
the faded beiges that all blur together into
a monochromatic depiction of knights who
stay in playing checkers and steeds put out to
pasture and an evil queen who minds her own
business. Everything is pleasant; everything
makes a plain sort of sense.
“I’m scared of a lot. More than I should be.”
“Fear”—Marcus nodded thanks when the
waitress replaced our drinks—“seems important.
Like pain. We do everything we can to
avoid paper cuts and bruised shins, but then
you look at the people who are born without
the ability to feel pain, biting off their own
tongues without even realizing it. Pain’s a
survival mechanism. So is fear. It’s the thing
that tells you not to jump off a cliff just to see
what happens.”
I got too drunk that night, didn’t realize
it until I stood to look for the restroom and
the world went liquid around me. I laughed
and rested a hand faux-casually on the high
table, and Marcus tilted his head to the side
and raised an eyebrow, and I laughed harder
and said, “Sorry. I’ll be back in a sec.”
The ladies’ room in Sly Dog Brewery has
a mirror that’s angled a few degrees forward,
just enough to rekindle the flare of vertigo I’d
had as I plotted a course through the clotted
tables and stools and patrons cackling and
chittering like the inmates of an aviary. I
turned on the faucet, got distracted staring
myself down, trying to decide if blinking
would make me the contest’s winner or loser,
realized only after I cheated by winking each
eye independently that the water was too hot.
“I think I’m drunk,” I told Marcus when I
returned to the table.
“Me, too,” he said. “Feel like a walk to work
through some of this beer?”
And so it went, like when Jack fell down
and Jill went tumbling after.

The Princess and the Dragon 84
I kissed him first, two weeks later. Rick was
visiting his brother a day’s drive away. Lauren
and Marcus were coming at seven for pizza
and a movie of their choosing, but she sent
me a message at six: Ugh migraine. Im spending
the night with my face buried in ice sorry. Marks still
good for the pizza though.
He took the opportunity to replace the
standard half-cheese-half-mushroom with a
Meat Lover’s Special, and after I stashed the
uneaten wedges in the fridge and returned
to the couch, I said, “Hey,” and he looked at
me and I touched his forearm and said, “I
kind of want to kiss you,” even though kind
of didn’t belong.
He said, “Okay.”
And if Rick’s Will you marry me? felt like
being too drunk to walk straight, Marcus’s
mouth against mine felt like a running jump
off a cliff to see what would happen.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Really?” he asked, and I stared.
“I don’t know.” On TV, Godzilla reared his
scaly head. “No. Not really, I guess.”
“Me either,” he said.
“Okay.”
Okay seemed like a stupid thing to end with,
but I couldn’t find anything wiser, so instead I
kissed him more deeply, and when he brushed
my hair back from my face, his fingertips
traced over my cheekbone and around the
crest of my ear, back along my jaw, down
my throat, settling over my heart as it beat
like a crazed woman on the padded walls
surrounding her.
Which should have been a sign—which was
a sign, and in my fantasies of the Big Day, he
didn’t hold his peace even though I was too
scared to not hold mine. Fantasy is fantasy,
though, and at man and wife, Rick kissed me,
and I cried and tried to believe it was for the
right reasons.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, and Rick smiled,
and his eyes were so soft that moment that I
thought about going to sleep forever.
“It’s okay,” he said, and he touched the
unnatural curls in my hair, and I wanted to
say, No, you don’t understand, but I closed my
eyes and nodded and held my peace.
Two-and-a-half years later, when he said
divorce, I was the one who wanted to start
counseling. I wanted to clear my conscience

85
Fiction Fix
by pretending I tried. I hate that he agreed.
I hate that we found a good therapist. I hate
that she saved our marriage, to whatever
extent it can be called saved. Saved in the
manner of a clergyman gone astray, maybe,
or a woman with a tumor and three months
to live whose airbag works exactly as intended
when she’s T-boned by a drunk at a four-way
stop.
Well-meaning people on internet forums
will tell you that this sort of situation—Lauren
and Marcus and Rick and me with our signals
crossed and our roles confused as if we’re
Shakespearean actors who’ve accidentally
shown up for Cats—is unsustainable, unfair,
unwise, unethical, and perhaps—if you ask
the more cynical—unavoidable.
K80GR80 says, Communication! Talk to your
spouse about your needs. They won’t know what
you’re missing if you don’t tell them.
I thought about this, decided to make a list
in the small but expensive notebook Rick’s
mother had sent me for Christmas. I delayed
the writing by searching for an instrument
worthy of the leather-bound book, finally
plucking a black pen with a bold tip out of
the cup on the desk. Then I sat, opened to the
first page, stared, flipped to one in the middle.
I’m never sure what goes on the first page of a
new notebook, but this seemed inappropriate,
something that ought to be tucked away.
NEEDS, I wrote at the top of the page.
I drew a bullet point.
Made it bigger.
And bigger.
Turned it into a black hole doodle that consumed
the title, then kept going until the page
was filled and scored with concentric circles.
The question—what needs aren’t being met?—
felt as answerable as What does ultraviolet light
look like? or How has the capital of the Maldives
changed since 1972? A question that hinged on
information I didn’t have, a sensation I had
never experienced. The nightmarish test for
which one is not prepared.
“What do you need from me?” I asked
Marcus two nights later when we were walking
along the tracks downtown.
He glanced at me, hands tucked in his
pockets against the leeching chill. “What do
I need?”
“That you don’t get from Lauren, I mean.”

The Princess and the Dragon 86
Angling his gaze toward the point where
the steel lines fused into oblivion, he exhaled,
breath hanging in the air. I mirrored him,
more to watch the condensation like smoke
than out of exasperation, but he said, “Sorry.
It’s a tough question, that’s all. I’m not sure.”
“There must be something,” I said. “Otherwise
why would you be doing this? Why
would we?”
“Why do you think?” Actual curiosity, not
sarcasm.
This was the rebound I had hoped to dodge.
I said again, “There must be something.”
“There must be something.” He let out
another puff of pseudo-smoke. “Yeah.”
Now here we are. It is dusk. Marcus tells
me he’s the dragon, and I don’t know what
this means for me. How many roles can I
really play? The prince who finds the right
angle to plunge his sword through the dragon’s
layered scales, I think not; the queen who
loses her daughter to the creature, no; the
peasants or the jesters or the magician. I am
none of these things.
“I’m the princess,” I say.
He frowns a little, sighs cigarette smoke,
and stares at the distant lights of the train.
He says, “I don’t know what to do
sometimes.”
I lift my shoulders a little and let them drop
like sandbags. “I changed my mind,” I say. “I
want one,” and for a beat, Marcus is confused,
but then he hands me the cigarette he’s been
working on.
“I’m supposed to be quitting anyway.”
I draw a bit of smoke in, let it out again.
“Me too.”
I read once that the moon drifts 1.6 inches
farther from us every year. Eventually I guess
it will fly away entirely; all the Earth’s gravity
won’t be able to pull it back. Sometimes I am
like that, inching away without meaning to.
Sometimes gravity fails. Sometimes, though,
everything in the sky feels aligned with this,
and I can see the moon, rising behind me,
light reflected in his pupils so that there is
something just a little eerie in his gaze.
The billboards say, Kissing a smoker is like
licking an ashtray, only I am realizing now that
it’s not true—or else maybe it is, and I just
don’t notice because his mouth tastes like
mine, because we breathe the same smoke,

87
Fiction Fix
because we’re supposed to be quitting but
there’s no patch for this, no gum to make the
tremors go away. So we steal evenings like
shoplifting teenagers. Snag moments where
we can. Grope in the dark for those wispy,
elusive needs. Search desperately, as fast as
we can, because you just never know when
someone will come looking to save you.

The Princess and the Dragon 88

Karen
Ben Shaberman
89

Jerry felt like an amateur psychotherapist. Within
ten minutes of meeting Karen Quinlan, he had
heard about her sexual harassment lawsuit with her
former employer, the complications with her father’s
colostomy, and her beloved mutt Roger. Jerry tried to keep
the conversation on Roger because the dog appeared to have
no gastrointestinal issues or sexual deviancies. Regardless of
Jerry’s questions—How old is Roger? Where did you get him?
Does he know good tricks?—Karen kept replying, “He’s a
mix, you know. He’s a little bit of everything.”
Jerry was amused by the fact that this woman sitting next
to him at the vegetarian meet-up dinner, Karen Quinlan, had
almost the same name as the woman from the well-known
1970s right-to-die case, Karen Ann Quinlan. There was Karen
Quinlan the vegetarian and Karen Ann Quinlan the vegetable.
He tried to remember what happened to Karen Ann.
Did they ever pull the plug? Was there a plug to vegetarian
Karen’s mouth that could be yanked?
90

91
Fiction Fix
Vegetarian Karen wore thick-framed
glasses way too big for her face. Her medium-length
brown hair was matted down,
and her bangs were unevenly cut as if an
untrained relative had commandeered the
shears—perhaps her gastrointestinally challenged
father.
Despite all of vegetarian Karen’s shortcomings,
her petite figure was punctuated by
large, well-formed breasts, which were made
very apparent by her low-cut, button-down
blouse. Jerry thought if he got close enough at
the correct angle, he’d get a nice peek at her
curvy tits. It had been more than two years
since he’d been intimate with a woman, so it
wasn’t taking much to get him going. At the
moment, he wanted nothing else from the
woman—just a glimpse of her bosom.
But vegetarian Karen had bad breath, so
every time Jerry moved closer to get a better
look at her cleavage, she blasted him in the
face with a warm, putrid burst of air, which
made him quickly back away. And though
Jerry was persistent and kept moving toward
her, he couldn’t hold the position for long
because of her malodorous wind. He was
like Muhammad Ali, who during his “ropea-dope”
years, achieved victory by backing
away from his opponents’ punches at just
the right moment. Eventually, the opponent
would tire, and Ali would go in for the kill.
But Jerry was the one who tired in this sparring
of the vegetarians; he decided to go to
the bathroom to break up the conversation.
Maybe Karen would engage the socially awkward
guy named Willie across from them who
did nothing but nod yes, continually bobbing
his head up and down. He reminded Jerry of
a toy from his childhood—an upright wooden
bird that, based on some quirk of physics,
would keep bending forward, seemingly in
perpetuity, to stick its beak in a glass of water.
As Jerry guided a steady stream of pee
into the urinal, he stared blankly into the
automatic flushing sensor directly in front
of him, lamenting the fact that he was at yet
another vegetarian meet-up dinner, and the
prospects for meeting a reasonably normal
and attractive woman were slim. The ratios
at these events were always good; women consistently
outnumbered men by at least two to
one. There had to be another woman, who

Karen 92
like him, had strong compassion for animals,
but otherwise, had relatively normal habits
and interests. Invariably, though, the women
were either too young, harbored small colonies
of animals which he was allergic to, or
were into weird, new-age stuff like crystals
and chakras. Couldn’t there be someone who
just wanted to go to a movie and dinner and
have a little romance?
A few months earlier, things had been looking
up for Jerry when he met a stunningly
attractive vegan nurse named Beth while
perusing an online dating site. Jerry considered
her out of his league, even before they
met. But he gave it a shot—after all, pickings
for vegan men were awfully slim—and sent
her a message. As luck would have it, she
took a liking to him. On their third date, she
invited him back to her place after dinner.
While they walked back to the car from the
restaurant, they held hands, which instantly
aroused Jerry—an arousal stronger than he’d
felt in several months and which lasted all
the way back to her apartment. Finally, I am
going to get some action, he had thought to
himself.
Inside her apartment, while they sat comfortably
on her couch, chatting and nibbling
on chewy, homemade vegan chocolate-chip
cookies—she could bake, too!—three enormous,
long-haired cats strolled into the room.
Jerry had never seen cats so big and with so
much fur; they looked like feline versions of
Sasquatch. He wondered if they were on
the same steroid regimen as Barry Bonds.
Or were they genetically engineered to torture
and kill people like him, the allergically
challenged?
“You never told me about your cats,” he
said with a hesitant smile.
“Oh, yes, they’re Maine Coons. Aren’t they
beautiful?” she replied.
Beautiful like a Nazi death camp, Jerry
thought. But he was feeling rather lucky—and
rather horny—so he decided to try and stick
it out as long as he could. Maybe his allergies
would hold off for a couple hours.
But after just twenty minutes of making out
with Beth—as the three seemingly mutant
creatures looked on ambivalently from various
perches in the living room—Jerry began
to sneeze. His eyes swelled. Then came the

93
Fiction Fix
wheezing. At that point, there was no point
in hiding the allergic truth. His mucous production
and gasps for air were starting to take
the fun out of the evening. He had no choice
but to evacuate and make a break for the
emergency inhaler stashed in the glove box
of his car. He quickly found the device, but it
was not the same familiar navy-blue inhaler
like the one in his medicine cabinet. It was
orange, which meant it was circa two or three
years ago. Clearly, he hadn’t used it in quite
a long time. Would it be clogged? Surely, it
had aged beyond its expiration date. But he
didn’t even bother checking exactly how old
it was. He just shook it a few times, put the
mouthpiece up to his lips, and pushed on the
canister. But not a hint of therapeutic mist
was emitted. He repeated the process twice,
but nothing came out. The inhaler was dead.
“Fuck!” he shouted to himself in the car. Next
stop: the ER.
Jerry figured it would be advantageous to
have Beth, a bona fide health care professional,
accompany him to the ER, but all
she did was complain about the nurse and
assistants: “She should have gotten more of
your medical history.” But Jerry was thankful
they had put him on a nebulizer so quickly;
he was beginning to breathe normally again.
Beth continued to bitch about the ER
staff and at one point asked the nurse why
they hadn’t given Jerry a chest x-ray or taken
blood. Before the nurse could respond, Jerry
pulled off the nebulizer mask and told her to
lay off, that it was just asthma, and he was
doing much better. He thanked the nurse and
put the mask back on without saying a word
to Beth. He came to the realization that Beth
was probably more detrimental to his health
than the Maine Coons. It was time to move
on once again.
Dinner was being served as Jerry returned
from his bathroom break, and Karen and the
rest of the guests quieted down, devouring the
vegan feast from the newest neighborhood
Thai restaurant. Even Willie the Yes Man
had stopped nodding.
The food was wonderfully flavorful and
included spring rolls, lemon grass soup, Pad
Thai, green curry, and a dish pronounced
something like “gang bang.” The motley
group of twenty munched away until after ten

Karen 94
o’clock because there were so many courses.
After finishing dessert and saying his goodbyes,
Jerry headed out into the parking lot
to discover that his car was missing. As he
walked closer to the spot where he had left
his beloved white 1989 Volvo 240GL with
243,000 heroic miles, he saw that it had
been parked in a place reserved for a different
restaurant in the same shopping center.
“Violators Will Be Towed,” the sign read.
“Fuck,” Jerry muttered to himself, stamping
a foot on the ground. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Karen noticed him looking helplessly at
the towing company’s sign on the wall. As
she walked toward him, Jerry turned to her
and groaned. “I can’t believe they fucking
towed me.”
She told him not to worry, that she would
take care of him. “I won’t leave you stranded.
Everything will be just fine.”
Back at Karen’s place, Jerry rode her from
behind as if she was a broken rocking horse
that wouldn’t rock. This must be what necrophilia
is like, he imagined. She zonked out
because he had spent the previous half hour
pleasuring her with his fingers, rubbing her
bulging clitoris, sending her into wild, pulsating
orgasms. He gave special attention to her
prized breasts, caressing and licking them,
twisting her nipples hard, but not too hard.
No man had ever sexually pleased Karen
Quinlan like Jerry. The few men she had had
were real losers—overweight, lumpy, selfish,
and most discouragingly, premature ejaculators.
So Jerry was a real treat. He seemed to
know what he was doing.
Jerry’s M.O. was always to make sure a
woman was satiated with pleasure. It was
what turned him on more than anything. No
matter who he was shtooping, he felt it was his
obligation as a man. But more often than not,
his partners were sapped by the time he was
ready for intercourse; they had nothing left
to give him except their nearly lifeless bodies
and tuckered out vaginas.
On this particular late night, Jerry had very
little energy left himself. With every hump,
the possibility of climaxing seemed more and
more remote. And to make matters worse, he
was distracted by Roger’s whimpering on the

95
Fiction Fix
other side of the bedroom door. That poor
mutt. And he was a mutt. He looked liked
a hasty attempt at a quilt, with patches of
brown, beige, white, and black. He probably
had some collie in him, but his face and nose
were round, and his tail was long. Not exactly
a short-haired dog, he wasn’t long-haired like
a collie, either. And he had been remarkably
obedient, not jumping as Karen had commanded,
when they entered her apartment.
But while the humans were screwing, the dog
was lonely and wanted to be part of the fun.
Though Roger’s crying and snorting were
distracting to Jerry, making it even harder for
him to orgasm, he considered the fact that he
hadn’t had an allergic outbreak to be a major
victory. Once every so often, Jerry got lucky
and didn’t react to somebody’s animal. There
was no rhyme or reason. When Karen invited
him back to her place, he decided to take the
risk. He had replaced the outdated inhaler,
and finding a pet-free vegan woman was like
going to the library and finding the Catholic’s
Guide to Sodomy, third edition. And Jerry
knew that Karen wanted him, given the way
she came to his rescue in the parking lot. After
he figured out that the towing lot was closed,
she immediately invited him back to her place.
“You can meet Roger; we’ll have some wine.
It’ll be great!” Clearly, this woman wanted
some nookie, and Jerry just couldn’t pass up
the chance to be with a real living, breathing
woman, even if she wasn’t exactly his type.
Jerry continued to go at it as his mind wandered
from Willie the Yes Man to his Volvo on
the back of a tow truck and then to Beth. He
fantasized about Beth’s tight little ass and big
blue eyes. The image gave him a resurgence
of excitement. How badly he had wanted her,
and how badly it had turned out. But at the
moment, his imagination was working remarkably
well, and he felt a new wave of stimulation
move into the head of his cock as he thought
about her in her nurse’s uniform, pulling her
pants and underwear down to her knees, offering
him her luscious behind. How tight and
moist it would feel inside of her. Maybe, just
maybe, the fantasy could carry him to climax.
But then Karen turned around, looked
back, and asked, “Are you almost done?”
Jerry stopped, let out a big sigh of exasperation,
and said, “I am now. Yep. I am now.”

Karen 96

Dancing with
Daddy
B. P. Greenbaum
97

I
stand barefoot on his toes, the top of my head not
reaching his hip, his black shoes laced and slick, as
spit-polished as he wanted our lives, his hands holding
mine so I can fall back and around, my body weightless
and weaving to the sounds of the big band, the trumpets
blowing as if ready to knock down all the walls, someone
named Benny Goodman wailing, my father’s barrel-shaped
body hoisting me around the floor to the rhythm of a waltz
that plays only in his head while the jazz rolls through us, the
bass beats my chest, the clarinets lick my ears, and I giggle
when he throws me up to the ceiling and catches me on the
way down, the sandpaper skin scraping my cheeks, the smell
of his Old Spice stirred with martini, his whoop so loud I
press my ear to his, I put my arms around his neck and hold
on for dear life, because I know, somewhere in my little frame,
that this will be the only dance we’ll get.
98

Gypsy Sachet
Awards in Letters
& Autobiography
Recognizing creative cover letters & bios
99

Corey Farrenkopf
I am a graduate of UMASS Amherst M.Ed
program. I also received my B.A. in English
from the same school with a concentration
in creative writing. I have worked as a
groundskeeper in cemeteries, as a teacher in
mental hospitals, as a janitor for the public
bathrooms at the beaches along Cape Cod’s
shore. Currently I am a stove technician
who writes during the evenings… so if you
don’t like my story, maybe I can interest
you in a quality gas stove in its place? Let
me know.
Jim Finney
Raised in California, lives in NYC, and
always believed a fortune cookie that said
“All your hard work will soon pay off.”
Mathew Serback can moonwalk on ice.
That’s a story to tell all your children. You
can find his work in On the Rusk, Scissors
& Spackle, Timber Journal, and Repurposed
Magazine. He wants you to know you are
from the future and you are good.
Alice Thomsen has B.A.s in creative writing
and psychology, a weakness for black
cats, and a crush on Carl Sagan. With the
exception of a Michigan winter spent on
sonnets about serial killers, she writes fiction,
with a particular interest in the ways that
people go wrong.
Karen Loeb
My story for you— “A Gift of Swallows”
old cake, a wind-up toy,
grave stones,
Japan referenced
and the Hale-Bopp comet.
A father appears—
he’s been there before
in “The Walk to Makino”
and “Cantaloupe”
both in Japan.
Google me while you can.
100

Contributors
Eric Barnes is author of the novels Something
Pretty, Something Beautiful and Shimmer, plus short
stories in publications including The Literary
Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best American
Mystery Stories. By day, he is publisher of three
newspapers covering business and politics in
Memphis and Nashville.
Dimelza Broche is a 25-year-old
Jacksonville-based Cuban artist. She attended
the Leopoldo Romanach Academy of Art
in Santa Clara, Cuba. She studied for two
years at Florida State College of Jacksonville
before transferring to the University of
North Florida, where she graduated with a
Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting, drawing,
and printmaking. Dimelza has exhibited her
work at R. Roberts Gallery, the Women’s
Center of Jacksonville, the Wilson Center
Gallery, The Cummer Museum of Arts &
Gardens, and at the S. Dillon Ripley Center,
in Washington, DC. Four years ago, she was
the Grand Prize recipient of Momentum:
a National Juried Exhibition for emerging
artists with disabilities.
Elizabeth Genovise is a graduate of the
M.F.A. program at McNeese State University.
Her stories have been published in The
Southern Review, Cimarron Review, Southern
Indiana Review, Pembroke Magazine, and many
other journals. Her first collection of short
stories, A Different Harbor, was published in
2014, and her second, Where There Are Two
or More, in 2015.
Barbara P. Greenbaum is a fiction writer
and creative writing teacher at a magnet arts
high school in Willimantic, Connecticut. She
has a B.A. in English from the University of
Hartford, an M.A. in secondary education
from St. Joseph College, and an M.F.A.
from the University of Southern Maine.
She has studied with Michael White,
101

Suzanne Strempek Shea, Brad Barkley,
and Jack Driscoll. In addition to teaching,
she is also involved in land conservation. In
2012, the Surdna Foundation awarded her a
teaching artist fellowship. She lives in eastern
Connecticut with her husband, three dogs
and often returning children.
Her poetry and short stories have been
published or are forthcoming in Eclectica,
Hawaii Pacific Review, The Alembic, Forge, Hog
River Review, Inscape, Verdad, Pearl, Willow
Review, Underwood Review, The Dos Passos
Review, Prick of the Spindle, MacGuffin, Noctua
Review, Penmen Review, Massachusetts Review and
Louisville Review.
Currently working on her first novel, she
writes using the pen name B.P. Greenbaum.
Melissa Hammond lives in Madison,
Wisconsin, where she writes about the
software surgeons use when they cut out
your appendix or amputate your leg. She likes
strawberry jam on her pizza and doesn’t know
how to whistle. If you like her story, you can
read more of her short fiction in New South
and Crack the Spine.
Victor Robert Lee has lived and traveled
extensively in East Asia, South America, and
the former Soviet states—territories that serve
as settings for his fiction. His current reporting
from the Asia-Pacific region can be found in
The Diplomat and elsewhere. He is the author
of the literary espionage novel Performance
Anomalies, described by The Japan Times as
“a thoroughly original work of fiction.”
Rory Meagher earned his B.A. in Creative
Writing at Susquehanna University, class of
2012. He has also studied writing at The
Second City in Chicago and The Peoples
Improv Theater in Manhattan. His short stories
have appeared in Cigale Literary, Oatmeal
Magazine, and The Blue Route. He currently
lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where he works in the
culinary arts and spends his free time writing,
reading, and dreaming.
Dianne Nelson Oberhansly’s book of
short stories, A Brief History of Male Nudes in
America, won the Flannery O’Connor Award
and her co-written novel, Downwinders: An
Atomic Tale, was chosen as a Utah Book of
102

103
Fiction Fix
the Year. Her fiction has appeared widely
in journals, including the Iowa Review,
Ploughshares, New England Review, The Quarterly,
Sundog, and in a number of anthologies. Her
poems have been published in Paper Nautilus,
Canary, Eclectica, and Third Wednesday, among
others. She lives in Boulder, Utah where she
is a hiker, slow food enthusiast, and an Arts
supporter/educator.
Penny Perkins holds an M.F.A. in creative
writing from the Institute of American Indian
Arts in Santa Fe, NM. Her short story “Car
Ride Through Corn Fields (1975)” was
chosen by Manuel Muñoz as the winner of
Beecher’s Magazine 2014 Fiction Contest.
Her short story “Gut Feelings” was a finalist
for the Reynolds Price Prize in Fiction as
a part of the 2015 International Literary
Awards sponsored by the Center for Women
Writers; it was also a semi-finalist in the SLS-
Disquiet Literary Contest for 2015. Recent
fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction have
appeared or are forthcoming in Waxwing,
Rocky Mountain Revival, On the Veranda, Perversion
Magazine, The Pine Hills Review, The New Verse
News, Entropy/Enclave, Beecher’s, and HOAX,
as well as Memoirs of the Feminine Divine. She
currently lives in northeast Florida and
teaches writing at the University of North
Florida in Jacksonville.
Carter Schwonke’s stories have appeared
in Blueline, Pif Magazine, Snake Nation, Stirring,
Calliope, the Underground Voices 2013 print
anthology, Bird’s Thumb, Evening Street Review,
and Potluck. She is a graduate of Syracuse
University and University College London.
She worked in Silicon Valley for many years.
Ben Shaberman’s first book, The Vegan
Monologues, is a collection of humorous and
reflective essays and commentaries that
were carried by a variety of prominent
media including: The Washington Post,
Chicago Tribune, VegNews, Vegetarian
Times, and NPR. The book was published
in 2009 by Apprentice House at Loyola
University of Maryland. Ben’s essays have
also been published in several literary journals
including: Split Infinitive, Opium, Clean Sheets
Erotica Magazine, and Crunchable. “Karen” is

Contributors 104
from Jerry’s Vegan Women, a fun, poignant, and
occasionally steamy collection of short stories
that follows the adventures of everyman Jerry
Zuckerman as he makes his way through the
shelters, sanctuaries, and bedrooms of an
eclectic assortment of vegan women.
By day, Ben is a science writer for the
Foundation Fighting Blindness, reporting
on research for inherited retinal diseases. He
has a master of arts in writing from Johns
Hopkins University.
Visit www.benshaberman.com to learn
more about Ben’s writing.
Alice Thomsen’s bio received our Gypsy
Sachet Award and can be read on page 100.

Contributors
Eric Barnes
Elizabeth Genovise
B.P. Greenbaum
Melissa Hammond
Victor Robert Lee
Rory Meagher
Dianne Nelson
Oberhansly
Penny Perkins
Carter Schwonke
Ben Shaberman
Alice Thomsen