Hair Trigger 2.0 Issue Two

Author

Hair Trigger 2.0, Creative Writing Department, Columbia College Chicago, 600 South
Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60605-1996.
Established in 2016, Hair Trigger 2.0 is an annually published literary
magazine affiliated with the Creative Writing Department at Columbia
College Chicago that welcomes a broad spectrum of fiction and nonfiction.
Submissions
Hair Trigger 2.0 is currently accepting fiction, creative nonfiction and visual art
submissions on a rolling basis for our second annual issue. We are specifically
looking for stories with an engaging, nontraditional voice that goes beyond that of a
blanket overall storyteller.
Please visit our Submit page at: http://ht20.colum.edu/submit
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Tony Trigilio, Interim Chair of the Creative Writing Department;
Steven Corey, Interim Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Stanley Wearden,
Provost; and Dr. Kwang Wu Kim, President of Columbia College Chicago.
“We are thinking of you” by Patty Enrado, first appeared in Serpentine ezine in
2002.
“Unapologetic Vision: Miles Davis and the Lesson of ‘Sid’s Ahead’” by Aaron
Gilbreath, first appeared in Brick, no. 90, Winter 2013.
Cover Photo: Diana Chrisman, Photographs: Laundry Series, 2016 and Architecture
Series, 2016. http://dianachrisman.zenfolio.com
Cover & Interior Design: Jay Goebel
Copyright ©2017 by Columbia College Chicago.
i

Editor-in-Chief
T. Daniel Frost
Managing Editor
Bethany Bendtsen
Faculty Advisor
Cora Jacobs
Fiction/Nonfiction Editors
Malaya Harris
Travis Thurmond
Reviews Editor
Cody Lee
Interviews Editor
Claire Martin
Social Media Manager
Davis R. Blackwell
Art Editor
William Grant
Contributing Editors
Amber Burnett
Will Haryanto
William Horner
Emma LaSaine
Lukas O’Hara
Marygrace Schumann
Columnist
Emma LaSaine
Graphic Designer
Jay Goebel
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Tina L. Jens
Newsflash! Frog and Toad: Gay Lovers!
James Renner
Googleplex
Diana Chrisman
Laundry Series, Part I (2016)
Patty Enrado
We are thinking of you
Laura Citino
Vanishing Point
Diana Chrisman
Architecture Series, 2016
Aaron Gilbreath
Unapologetic Vision: Miles Davis and the Lesson of “Sid’s Ahead”
(excerpt from This Is: Essays on Jazz)
Chelsea Harris
The Tale of Poor Ol’, Good Ol’ Chuckie Hamburg
Jeanine Marie Vaughn
Lobster Girl
Diana Chrisman
Laundry Series, Part II (2016)
Jaimee Wriston Colbert
This is a Success Story (excerpt from Wild Things)
Patricia Ann McNair
Good Men and Bad
1
7
17
21
32
35
39
47
54
65
69
81
CONTENTS
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LETTER OF INTRODUCTION
Hair Trigger began as a literary magazine that inspired students to
take the risk of submitting in hopes of publication. After nearly four decades
of success and many Gold Circle Awards from the Columbia Scholastic Press
Association, it was decided that it was time to expand the platform of Hair
Trigger.
Hair Trigger 2.0 offers the opportunity for both new and established
voices from all over the world to coincide and reach new demographics.
Special thanks to each of our contributing authors: Tina L. Jens, James
Renner, Patty Enrado, Laura Citino, Aaron Gilbreath, Chelsea Harris, Jeanine
Marie Vaughn, Jaimee Wriston Colbert, and Patricia Ann McNair. And to the
contributing photographer: Diana Chrisman. More thanks to Tony Trigilio and
Cora Jacobs for backing us, making all of this possible, and helping in so
many different ways. And finally, a huge thank you to our readers for giving
us a reason to share our stories. Without you there is no magazine; we hope
you enjoy!
—T. Daniel Frost, Editor-in-Chief
v

Newsflash! Frog and Toad: Gay Lovers!
Will Parents Boycott The Odd Couple of the Toddlers’ World?
Familiar archetypes may save a beloved children’s series
from the Tinky Winky Culture Wars treatment.
Tina L. Jens
I fear we are on the verge of another firestorm from “The Homosexual Agenda is
Being Promoted by America’s Liberal Media!” front. Less than two years after the
Supreme Court made marriage equality for all the law of the land; we’re already
seeing a social and legislative backlash against LGBTQIA+ rights encouraged and
supported by the federal administration.
Conservative Christians (and the folks who want to influence them) have
learned the hard lesson that attacking Ellen DeGeneres, America’s dancing
sweetheart; or that sweetly funny sitcom Will and Grace—the first prime-time,
major network show to feature an openly gay character—just didn’t work. They were
too loveable and unthreatening. But the notion that homosexuality is not a threat
to our national moral fiber goes right out the window when it comes to protecting
our “vulnerable youth.” We seem to think “the gay” is like cooties: kids can catch it.
The Rev. Jerry Falwell and his ilk tried to get the Teletubbies banned
because Tinky Winky was “obviously gay.” For those of you who don’t remember or
never knew, Teletubbies was a BBC-produced show for toddlers that featured
four multi-colored adult-height toddlers of an alien species, bopping about the
British countryside, speaking gibberish that’s supposed to sound like human
toddler-speak. With an anthropomorphic blue vacuum cleaner and a psychedelic
spaceship-like home base, the “Tubbytronic Superdome,” I can see an argument
that claims it promotes drug use... until you remember the show’s aimed at one- to
four-year-olds who won’t be making any tough choices about drugs anytime soon.
The assertion that Tinky Winky was gay actually began in the British media
in 1997, but the claim quickly followed the show across the ocean as it debuted
in the U.S. one year later, just in time to stir up conservative voters before the
Republican-dominated midterm elections.
Falwell put out an article in the conservative National Liberty Journal that
began: “PARENT ALERT... PARENT ALERT” and claimed “[Tinky Winky’s] role
modelling of the gay lifestyle is damaging to the moral lives of children.”
His claims gained traction when NBC’s TODAY show invited Falwell and
Teletubbies’ producer Kenn Viselman on to debate the issue.
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It’s not like we ever saw Tinky Winky shagging Laa-Laa or Po. But he carried
a magic bag that some thought looked suspiciously like a woman’s purse. (This
was before the omnipresent backpack became the must-have accessory for all
genders, ages, and professions.) If that wasn’t enough to convince conservative
parents, Falwell claimed Tinky’s purple coloring and the triangle-shaped antenna
on his head were further proof of the gay-coded identity.
Just how these pre-speech kids were supposed to have learned these subtle
gender-codes, and recognize them for what they were, was unexplained. Thanks
in large part to Falwell, the gay community embraced Tinky Winky with open arms,
turning him into the gay icon Falwell feared he was.
It was bemusing to American kids who had grown up watching
Sesame Street. The show debuted in 1969. When I was a preschooler and in early
elementary school, I was a devoted Sesame Street viewer. I was much too busy
learning basic reading and math skills, singing along with Cookie Monster about
the joys of cookies, and dramatically counting with Count von Count, to think
about any nefarious sexual message that might have been embedded in the fact
that two of the most recognizable and beloved male Muppets lived together. Bert
and Ernie even shared a bedroom (though not a bed), so why that didn’t twig the
conservative Christian leaders, when Tinky Winky’s much more nebulous identity
clues did, I can’t understand.
While I’ve occasionally heard people my own age or younger talk about
how Bert and Ernie must have been gay, I never saw the conservative Christian
movement get their feathers ruffled over it. Maybe the show had been around too
long before they noticed. Maybe the realization broke between election cycles and
it just felt too old by the time they needed something to fire up their voting base.
Or maybe it’s because Bert and Ernie felt familiar to our parents and
grandparents. They’re the Muppet version of The Odd Couple; a play, movie, and
sitcom the parents and grandparents all loved, no matter what their personal
politics. It featured uptight neat-freak Felix Unger and happy-go-lucky,
girl-chasing slob Oscar Madison. Sure, it was about two guys who lived together.
But both were divorced, the voice-over narrator was careful to point out during the
opening credits of each show.
The network was seriously worried people might think they were gay,
which amused the writers and actors, who proceeded to toy with that fear. If the
networks could have had the announcer add, “Really, it’s just two guys who fell into a
convenient housing situation: stop thinking there’s a gay agenda here!” they would
have.

...Of course, many viewers assumed actor Tony Randall, who played the
role of Felix in the 1970s sitcom, was gay, despite his two heterosexual marriages.
In the sitcom, and his other roles throughout his career, he coyly toyed with the
question. Both onscreen and in his personal life, he would bounce back and forth
across the line, then smile and say, “Nunnyabizness,” when someone asked if he
was gay or straight.
He may very well have created what became the stereotypical “wink, wink,
passing for straight” gay TV persona that allowed gays to recognize themselves on
TV without scaring the straights.
The play that kicked off the long-running The Odd Couple TV/film/play/
play-revival franchise was written by Neil Simon, who frequently wrote about gay
characters who were closeted or in sham marriages.
“Not everything has to be about sex!” I can hear grandmothers across
America say. “If the announcer said they were two divorced men sharing an
apartment to save money, well, he should know!”
Well, okay, yes, we really don’t need to know their sexual preferences, if it
isn’t part of the storyline. So, what was that whole hubbub earlier, then? What
have you got against Tinky Winky?
The Teletubbies controversy has died down, but in this new “Hate is Great”
Trump era, I’m holding my breath over whether a new firestorm is building over a
beloved series of books for ages four and up.
The New Yorker recently published an article called “‘Frog and Toad’: An
Amphibious Celebration of Same-Sex Love.” The article is more gentle and genteel
than the headline might suggest. Half of the piece recounts some of the events
that occur in one or another Frog and Toad story (which have been in continuous
print since their debut); the other half talks a bit about the biography of Arnold
Lobel, the author and illustrator of these lovely children’s stories. That bio details
him marrying, having a family, finally coming out to his family as gay in 1974 (four
years after the first Frog and Toad books were published) and dying in 1987, “an
early victim of the AIDS crisis,” at age fifty-four.
I had several of the Frog and Toad books. I was an early teenager when I first
discovered them, but I was charmed by the art and the gentle animals, and they
reminded me enough of The Wind in the Willows, a book I adored, that I bought
some of them, anyway. (I was doing a lot of baby-sitting at the time, and considered
them a work-related purchase.)
Looking at them now, I’m amazed that it didn’t occur to the parents,
reading the books over and over again to their children, that Frog and Toad were
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a gay couple. Of course, they didn’t live in the same house, much less share a
bedroom. (Though they did fall asleep together outside a couple times.) But I think
parents were comfortable with them because their character archetypes line up
rather comfortably with Bert and Ernie and Felix and Oscar.
Frog is a happy, adventure-seeking, cheerful friend to the stick-in-the-mud,
the sky-is-falling, everything-is-ruined Toad. Frog finds a way to gently get Toad to
enjoy life. Sometimes it’s by playing a simple trick: tearing calendar pages off to
convince the sleepy hibernating Toad that it is May, rather than April, and so he
must come out and enjoy spring, rather than going back to sleep for six weeks,
in the story simply named “Spring” in the Frog and Toad are Friends collection.
In “The Letter,” Frog discovers that Toad gets very sad every day at mail time,
because he’s never, ever gotten a letter. So, Frog goes home and writes him one.
He gives it to the first creature he comes across to deliver it, who happens to be a
snail. He dashes off to wait with his friend. Toad has given up waiting, because it’s
just no use. In the four days it takes to arrive, Frog winds up telling Toad that he has
written him, and what was in the letter. Rather than spoiling the surprise, Toad is
cheered both by the telling and the receiving.
Do not think that Toad is always needy and Frog is always the caregiver who
receives no appreciation or friendship in return. In “A Lost Button” we see the
familiar pattern with a twist. The two have just returned home from a long walk
across the meadow, through the woods and along the river, when Toad realizes
he’s lost a button from his jacket. That depresses him terribly, but Frog says, let us
retrace our steps until we find it. Many of the woodland animals help in the search,
and all sorts of buttons are discovered, all except the right one. Toad pockets them
all, though he is not appeased. Finally, he returns home distraught, to discover his
lost button on his own floor. He realizes he caused a great deal of trouble for his
friend, and he had been very grumpy and unpleasant to be around. He sews all the
buttons he and his friends found onto his coat, giving it a jaunty air, and makes a
present of it to his friend the next day. Frog puts on the coat and jumps for joy at its
beauty.
There is nothing overtly stated or shown to suggest that either
character is gay. The only clue we have is their very devoted friendship. The stories
never touch on the notion of either of them dating other species or genders. The
“proof” is in the absence, in the thing that isn’t there. Perhaps that’s because the
characters are already in a committed relationship. Perhaps it’s because, at the
time they were written, gay couples often needed to be very discreet about their
relationships. They learned to both speak and hear very careful clues that were

often more telling in what wasn’t shown or said than what was. Straight people had
no need to learn that skill or think about such things.
What people don’t think about doesn’t have to bother them. It’s willful
selective perception.
As an adult, I was at my mom and dad’s house for the clan Christmas
gathering. Two of my older cousins, my mom, two aunts, and I were sitting at a
table and Liberace came up. It was probably 1987, the year after he’d died. The
moms and aunts were discussing what a wonderful piano player he was, and how
they’d enjoyed his show and his many guest appearances on the variety shows of
the day. And they were shocked, seriously shocked, by the stories that said he was
gay. They did not believe it.
My cousins and I could not believe that they could not believe it. “What about
the way he dressed?” we asked.
“He was an entertainer; entertainers have to dress flamboyantly,” they
answered.
My cousins and I waited for the irony stemming from the use of the word
“flamboyantly” to set in... to no avail.
We argued, half-heartedly, about the obvious clues that shouted he was gay,
then let it go. Our matriarchs were getting more and more depressed. It was sad to
see their innocence falling away.
They felt betrayed, somehow. That generation of women had felt a
similar betrayal a few years earlier when heartthrob Rock Hudson had died, and
the rumors were confirmed that he was gay. This was a man they had swooned
over and mooned over as they watched the string of hit romantic comedies
starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day. Perhaps they felt they’d been tricked.
They were of a generation that had never needed to learn that it was okay
to be sexually attracted to someone who lusts after the same boys you do.
One of the aunts had five kids, the youngest the same age as me. The girl
who lived next door to them was also our age. Sometime, in her late teens or early
twenties, I think, she came out as gay. It was a frequent topic of discussion in our
clan for years. My aunt was the one who generally brought the subject up, and had
hosted the girl at her own kitchen table many times, she would say only two things.
She always said both of them in a whisper: “She was... funny that way.” And:
“I just feel for her poor mother, having to endure that.”
My parents were not as socially conservative as my aunt, but my mom, to
this day, is still in the phase of acceptance that says: “I just wish they wouldn’t
shove it in everyone’s face that way. What they do in their own bedroom is their
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own business, and they should be allowed to marry whoever they want, but they
shouldn’t be doing all that in public!” When I ask her if she means holding hands
and kissing, she agrees. When I ask her if straight people holding hands and
kissing in public bothers her, she generally harrumphs and changes the subject.
She is not alone. I’ve heard other women her age, not related to me, say the same
thing.
I’ve thought often about that sense of betrayal that the matriarchs felt; why
it would matter to them that someone they admired (and had perhaps lusted over)
was gay.
I think, ultimately, the most enlightened social position will be returning to
the coy smile and the “Nunnyabizness” response that Tony Randall perfected.
But I think our society needs to go full circle, passing first through the exuberant
stage of “It’s fine and lovely that you’re gay, and I hope you find the love of your
life, and will I be invited to the wedding?” acceptance of gay people, so that the
“Nunnyabizness” is just a social nicety and not a calculated dodge.
That’s going to take time, and some generations and demographics may
make progress, but not make it all the way to the goal in their lifetime. Maybe
Falwell and his ilk were partially right. I don’t know that Tinky Winky ever taught
kids an acceptance of the gay community. But maybe seeing Bert and Ernie and
Frog and Toad quietly living in devoted relationships and being portrayed as people,
(well, people stand-ins) has quietly taught more-recent generations of kids that two
nice guys living together is okay, and we don’t even need to talk about the bedroom
aspects of their relationship, any more than we need to talk about the bedroom
aspects of a straight couple. People are far more than their sexual preferences.
I hope Frog and Toad and Arnold Lobel’s recent “outing” doesn’t ruin their
reputation. The charming stories have strong moral lessons about friendship,
kindness, and loyalty. Those are themes all kids can relate to, especially when they
come wrapped in a gay, interspecies, monogamous relationship between a green
frog and a brown toad.

Googleplex
James Renner
Alan’s father told him there was something wrong with the house. He warned them
that the price was too low. Even in the post-bubble Akron economy, it just didn’t
make any sense. Not for its size. Not for the location—drop-center inside the tony
Merriman Hills subdivision. A four-bedroom Tudor with original windows and a
refinished bathroom for $85,000?
“Something’s got to be wrong with it,” his father insisted.
Alan waved off his warnings as paternal paranoia. Nothing he ever did was
quite up to his old man’s specs. But this wasn’t the same world his father had
known at thirty. Men today frequently changed jobs, changed careers, moved
from Cleveland to Akron to work for a competing dealership. Adapt to survive.
Companies didn’t reward loyalty anymore. This wasn’t TTR Steel. TTR Steel
didn’t even exist anymore. That was his point. In this world, this new real world,
people sometimes unloaded a home for pennies on the dollar just to chase an
opportunity.
Trish at least considered his old man knew something they didn’t. “What if
he’s right?” she asked, bending down to peer under the kitchen sink, again. “What
if there is something wrong, like a leak we can’t see or a foundation issue and they
don’t want to tell us and then we buy it and it’s too late and we’re stuck?” When
Trish didn’t pause for punctuation it prickled the backs of Alan’s eyeballs and gave
him headaches. For a teacher, Trish talked an awful lot like a kid sometimes.
“There’s nothing wrong with the house,” Alan said for the twenty-fifth time.
If there was anything that did give Alan pause, it was the lengths to which the
seller maintained a distance from them during closing. Alan and Trish only knew
the man by a name on the deed: Gregory Heslop. When they asked for a tour, and
then a second-look, they had to give forty-eight-hour notice through the realtor so
that Heslop wouldn’t be there. When it came time to sign the papers, Heslop used
a lawyer as an intermediary even though there was no haggling over the price. The
keys were left in the mailbox. All signs of Gregory and the Heslop family, if there
had ever been more Heslops than Gregory, had been erased from the property
long before Alan and Trish peeked through the windows one winter afternoon after
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spotting the “For Sale” sign in the front yard.
But Alan didn’t really believe there was anything wrong with the house. Not
for a while.
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The house was not without a few problems. For one, the house did not have
central air. It was too hot in the summer, even with ceiling fans spinning. It was
too cold in the winter, even with the radiators chirping and a boiler growling away
in the basement. It was drafty—the windows seemed to suck heat from rooms like
angry ghosts. And after heavy rains, the house shifted, floor boards popping as if
beneath little feet, especially in their bedroom.
Also, the living room had been designed in a time before television, and so
there was really no decent place to hang the plasma TV. The best the Nerd Squad
from Best Buy could do was to mount it on a swivel in the corner by the mantel.
But something about that spot tended to make the picture staticy at the most
inopportune times.
One of the things Trish loved about the house was the woods that wrapped
around the backyard. Giant trees. Bigger than any he’d seen elsewhere in
Akron. Almost old-growth big. But that couldn’t be. There were no old-growth
forests in Ohio anymore, right? The woods were beautiful, especially in the fall,
when they came alive in brilliant reds and burnt oranges. There was an owl that lived
somewhere back there. Late at night it screamed at the house and it sounded like
a girl crying.
Occasionally something knocked loudly from behind the wall in Alan and
Trish’s bedroom, from the place where the wall abutted the bathroom. Somewhere
behind that wall was an old pipe that called out for attention.
There was nothing wrong with the house but there was definitely something wrong
with the neighbors.
A pair of doctors, Brooke and Erin Seiberling, lived in the colonial to one
side, a great white thing with red awnings. Brooke and Erin worked odd hours at
Akron General and drove matching Mini Coopers. Two months after moving into
the neighborhood, Trish had baked an ironic bundt cake and they had walked it
over to the Seiberlings’ one day when both the Minis were in the driveway. Brooke
and Erin had invited them in, sure. They had cut up the cake and served it with
coffee. But neither Brooke nor Erin would make eye contact with them and they
sat on the edge of the sofa as if ready to jump up and run out of the room. When
Alan thought to ask after Gregory Heslop and whether he’d had any family, Erin

had choked on a piece of cake. Then Brooke had remembered a supper they were
supposed to have with his folks that evening, so they’d said goodbye and gone
home. A half-hour later both Mini Coopers pulled out of the driveway next door and
they did not return for four days.
On the other side were the Kormuschoffs. Barb and Tony. When Alan and
Trish had walked over one evening with a bottle of wine and knocked loudly on
the front door, no one answered, even though they could clearly hear a television
somewhere inside, the sound drifting through the mail slot.
On Halloween they put out a bowl of candy bars. Not those mini Snickers,
but full-sized Musketeers and Baby Ruths. But most parents wouldn’t let their kids
stop. They waved awkwardly from the street or simply ignored Alan and Trish as
they escorted their little vampires and cheerleaders from the Seiberlings’ to the
Kormuschoffs’.
Trish and Alan still had friends from Kent where they’d lived near the
university for a number of years, and so, in order to feel less lonely in their home,
they began to host frequent dinners and game nights with their old chums. It
was during one of these social dinners, over a game of Scrabble, that somebody
suggested they look up their house on Google Earth.
“Fucking Google,” hissed Sara DeLaine, a nervously thin woman who’d roomed
with Trish freshman year. Her interjection was in response to Trish’s big score,
won by snaking “Googolplex” off the top of “Grist.” “They monitor everything now.
Medical records. Criminal history. Your email. Our house is on Google Earth for
anyone to see. It’s Big Brother.”
“Yeah, but it’s not the government,” said Alan.
“Google is a C.I.A. front, dummy.”
“I don’t know why they’d care about me, though. I guess I’m just not
worried.”
Sara rolled her eyes. She was sitting on the sofa, her legs tucked up under
her like a goddamn cat, nursing one of the six Red Stripes she and her common-law
husband had brought with them. “No one ever cares about their civil liberties
being taken away until it affects them directly.”
Trish leaned forward in her chair. “So what happened?” she asked. “What
happened when you looked up your house?”
“Right,” said Sara’s partner, a round fellow named Henry who worked for a
PNC mortgage loan office in Cleveland. “It was creepy. Wasn’t it, Sara?”
“I wouldn’t say creepy, Henry. It felt like being violated. It was a kind of rape.
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Really. I mean, you pull up your address on Google Earth and, boom, there’s a
picture of your house taken from the street when you didn’t know they were even
there. Nobody asked our permission. I mean anyone could pull up that picture.
Thieves. Rapists. Scouting for victims. I mean what if I had been standing at the
window, naked, just out of the shower?”
Alan, who knew Sara would never stand near a window naked unless the
shades were drawn and the lights were out, laughed quietly. Trish shot him a look.
“It’s not funny,” said Sara.
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“See what you think. Get your laptop out. You might feel differently if you pull
up the picture of your house and there you are in the front yard pulling weeds with
your ass-crack hanging out the back of your jeans.”
Alan shrugged and went to look for his Macbook.
Sara’s neck was turning red. It did that a lot when she got overheated about
an idea. “I mean when does it stop? You know that right here in Akron, at that
Goodyear hangar, they’re building a new kind of blimp that flies into the stratosphere
and takes high-resolution video that can read license plates on the ground?”
“I haven’t heard that,” offered Trish, who was making fast work of the
chardonnay in her deep glass.
“It’s true. They want to film us 24/7. Know our every move.”
“But Sara,” said Trish. “You work at the Olive Garden.”
Just then Alan returned with the laptop. He placed it on the coffee table and
sat on his knees to work it. He typed their address into Google. A small orange
street map appeared. He clicked on a green man to the left of the map and dragged
it over to his road. The window changed, became a photograph of a beautiful
colonial with a wide flowerbed full of petunias and heather outlining an English
lawn. They all craned their heads around Alan to see the screen.
“Okay,” he said. “What am I looking at?”
“That’s the Carneys’ house, up the street,” said Trish.
“Ah. Right.”
Alan clicked on an arrow and the view swiveled. Their house came into the
shot, a brown Tudor with the paint peeling from under the eaves where the winters
gnawed at it.
“Get closer,” Sara insisted.
Alan clicked on another arrow that scooted the image further down the
road until the view was directly in front of their home. Some months ago, that
Google van, with its 360-degree camera array sticking out of its roof like a periscope,

must have driven by quietly snapping pictures. Trish’s Saturn was parked in the
driveway. Judging by the blooms on the apple tree these photographs had been
taken sometime in May. Five months ago?
“See,” he said. “No ass-crack. No naked Trish at the win....”
He stopped short when he saw it. A second later Trish let out a surprised
hiccup.
“What the hell?” she said.
“What?” asked Henry.
Trish pointed at the window. It was maybe a foot square, above the front
door, on the second floor where the roof climbed to a peak. There were a couple
problems with this window. First of all, it didn’t exist. But more alarming was what
was standing just inside the window.
“Who’s that?” asked Sara.
“I have no idea,” said Alan.
It was a girl’s upper torso and face, that much was obvious. A young girl,
maybe eight years old, in a red jumper with blonde hair hanging to her shoulders.
Her mouth was open as if she were laughing. Laughing or....
“Jesus, Alan,” said Trish. “Is that girl screaming?”
“Wait,” he said. “I know what happened. I mean, the Google truck or
whatever must’ve come by when the Heslops still lived here. There must’ve been a
window there and they covered over it before they put it on the market. I bet that’s
George Heslop’s kid.”
“That’s my car in the driveway, Alan.”
“Heslop must’ve had a Saturn, too. It’s obviously his car if the window is still
there.”
“But Alan,” said Trish. “That’s my Obama 2012 bumper sticker on the back
of the Saturn. And there, in the Florida room, you can see your poster through the
window. That Lord of the Rings poster you hung on the wall.”
Alan creased his brow, thinking.
“So there’s no window?” asked Henry.
“No,” said Trish. “It’s just siding.”
“But, I mean, what’s there? What’s there where the window is? What’s there
now?”
“It’s a linen closet.”
11
James Renner
They climbed the creaky old stairs to the second floor, various drinks in hand.
Across the landing from the topmost step was a wall with two doors that

12
Hair Trigger 2.0
opened out. Trish crossed to it and with a look back to her audience opened the
doors with a flourish, half-expecting some hysterical little girl to come tumbling out.
But inside there were only towels and toilet paper, various over-the-counter
remedies for cough and cold, and a box of Tampax.
“You know,” said Henry, sipping his beer, “it is a rather thin closet.”
In fact there was only enough room for the towels if you double-folded them
before placing them inside. Yes, it was a thin closet. A very thin closet, come to
think of it. And that really didn’t make any sense considering how the adjacent
bedrooms extended all the way to the front eaves of the old house.
Without explaining, Alan walked into their bedroom. Everyone followed a few
steps behind.
“Give me hand,” Alan said to Henry. The two men pushed a low dresser away
from the wall. Behind it was a little wooden door, the kind of handmade door one
might find in a playhouse or in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
“Where does that go?” asked Sara.
“Plumbing access for the bathroom,” said Alan. “That’s what I thought,
anyway. But if that window was ever here, it would have to be on the other side.”
“What do you mean, ‘if it was ever here?’” said Sara. “It was in the photo.
Clear as anything.”
Alan sighed. He’d never liked Sara. She was a very black-and-white type of
person, the sort of person who missed the subtle beauty of the world because she
was always too busy browsing Facebook on her iPhone while she drove to work.
She never thought to question what she knew to be true.
“You know what Google Earth is?” he asked her. “It’s just a collection of
pictures taken from that truck that goes by. It looks like one seamless kind of
reality because they have a computer that takes the photos and lays them on top
of each other and then polishes out the seams.”
“I don’t get it,” said Sara.
“Well, like with any computer program, sometimes there are glitches.
Sometimes the seams don’t get polished right and you get a picture of a man
walking down the street without a head. The part of the photo where his head
should be was taken a few seconds later and so it doesn’t match up right. And
sometimes a glitch might cause a photograph from one area to overlap on a scene
somewhere else if the coding isn’t right.”
“Henry,” said Sara, “do you understand what he’s saying?”
“I’m saying,” said Alan, his voice beginning to take on a hard edge that
caused Trish to shake her head at him, “that perhaps the picture of that girl at the
window was misplaced from a series of pictures of another home and mistakenly

overlaid on top of our house.”
Sara crinkled her eyebrows. She didn’t have to say anything. Clearly, she
would not consider the possibility that Google, of all things, was fallible. Not when
being afraid of it was the foundation of half her life.
“Open the door,” said Trish.
But suddenly Alan didn’t want to. Sara was part of it, sure. Some part of him
really felt that whatever was behind the door, and probably it was just a bunch of
pipes and mouse turds, whatever was back there, she didn’t deserve to see it.
Also it was cold in here, again, even though it was at least sixty-eight outside in
the sun. It felt like fifty in here all of a sudden. The air grazed its fingers over his
exposed neck and made him want to go back downstairs where it was always warm.
Anywhere but here. Anywhere but with these people.
In the end, Henry was the one who knelt down and opened the wooden door.
It held for a second, then popped open, sending a puff of plaster into the air. Henry
coughed dramatically and patted the dust away with one hand. On the other side of
the door was a brick wall. And on the wall was written: NEVER OPEN.
“What do you think it means?” asked Sara.
“I think its meaning is fairly clear,” said Alan.
“Yes, well,” said Henry, setting down his glass and crossing his thick arms.
“It’s an odd thing to write.”
“And why did they seal it off in the first place? I mean if it is an access to the
bathroom or whatever.”
Alan stood and raked his fingers through his hair.
“I don’t like it at all,” said Trish. “Your father he warned us there might be
something wrong with the house and obviously whatever made the Heslops drop
the price so low is behind that wall and we really should have known before we
bought the place and they shouldn’t have closed it off just to forget about the
problem, which is probably a leaky pipe, a pipe that has been leaking ever since....”
Alan raised his hand and extended his first finger to quiet her. “I’ll be back,”
he said.
Trish called after him as he descended the stairs, “Alan, where are you
going?”
He didn’t respond but she could hear him clunking down the stairs to the
basement and then after another minute he returned. In his right hand was a
sledgehammer, the kind with the thick red metal grip. He wielded it like Mjolnir.
“Alan....”
“Now, are you sure you want to make a mess?” asked Henry.
“Jesus, Alan,” said Sara.
13
James Renner

But Alan had known them all long enough to understand a few things.
Firstly, if he didn’t do this, if he didn’t find out what was in there and why it should
never be opened, it would be all they talked about for the rest of the night. The
conversation would never end. It would be another one of Sara’s pointless and
banal debates. Also, he knew his wife. Eventually her curiosity would get the
better of her. She would convince herself that something, some leak or fire hazard
or mold, was slowly destroying the house from inside that little room, and they
would have to do this anyway.
“Excuse me, Henry,” he said. And the facile mortgage broker backed away as
he brought the hammer around in an arc, like a little-league slugger chasing a ball
that was too low.
14
Hair Trigger 2.0
Linda Collier, insurance agent for Hilow Realty, pulled the pictures up on her
computer. Two story Tudor. Original windows. Nice backyard. Plus, it was right
smack in the middle of Merriman Hills, probably the best place to raise a family
within Akron city limits. She could sell this house. Great Recession be damned.
One by one she uploaded the photographs she’d taken on her digital camera to
HilowRealty.com.
It was another one of Randy Richter’s flips. Half her homes were Richter
properties. Ten years ago Richter had been a History teacher at John Kennedy
High School in Franklin Mills. Now he snatched up cheap homes he could rehab
quickly and turn for profit. This was his best find so far. Richter said he’d picked the
Tudor up at auction for $68,000. He was probably exaggerating a bit. Linda figured
she could sell this house for around $148,000, as long as he wasn’t in a hurry.
He hadn’t even put that much sweat equity into fixing it up for sale. Just patched a
hole in one of the bedrooms.
Then again, the story about the previous homeowners was a bit... well, it
was strange. And it didn’t take much to scare away prospective buyers, Linda had
learned. She once had to sell a home in Kenmore where a murder/suicide had
gone down. Guy shot up his ex and then put the Colt 45 to his temple. Lots of work,
there. The history of the house slashed the price by fifty percent. This one, though.
It wasn’t that bad. Not much of a story actually. So the previous homeowners, the
Murphys, had disappeared. So what? Walking away wasn’t a crime. People did all
sorts of crazy things in this economy. Still, it was just creepy enough to frighten off
some of the more superstitious clients.
The neighborhood made up for its odd history. Merriman Hills was nestled

into a crook of the Ohio Valley foothills and commanded a stunning view of the
Cuyahoga River in the fall, after the leaves turned. Richter claimed the area was
once the center of civilization for the Shawnee Indians who believed the valley was
a “thin spot” between this world and the next, a good place to communicate with
God. She had asked him not to broadcast that bit of trivia.
As she reviewed the pictures one more time before publishing the listing,
Linda paused at one in particular. This photograph showed the house from the
street, head-on. Strange. She hadn’t noticed the window above the front door
before. In her mind, she could only recall smooth siding there.
A second later, she saw the faces.
A red flush came over her. She looked around the office. General Hilow was
sitting back there in his office, watching a rerun of Top Gear. Other than that, she
was alone.
She had gone all through the house, every room, just to make sure it was
ready to sell. Of course, there’d been nobody in there.
Linda used the mouse to zoom in a bit.
Five faces were scrunched around the oblong window, looking out. Two men.
Two women. And a young girl in a red jumper.
Some weird camera glitch, she told herself. Some digital bleed-through from
some long-deleted photograph.
Quickly, Linda used the paint tool to smooth the siding pixels over the
window. In a moment, it was gone, along with the pale faces behind the glass, the
pale faces that seemed to be calling out to her as if they had watched her standing
in the yard taking the pictures.
Once it was gone, she found it easier to believe it had been a hiccup in the
digital code, some random transposition of old frames. Without allowing herself
time to hesitate, Linda clicked on the “publish” icon, and the listing appeared on
the realty website.
Tomorrow she would send the link to her contact list. Someone would want
this house. After all, at $145,000, it was quite a steal.
15
James Renner

Diana Chrisman
from Laundry Series, 2016
Author

Hair Trigger 2.0

Author

Hair Trigger 2.0

We are thinking of you
Patty Enrado
They say he is going to send me back to the Philippines.
I have become useless to my husband after forty years of marriage and
thirty years of work packing oranges. Since I suffered my stroke months ago, I’ve
become just a voice to Bonafe, one that scolds him; I tell him he must either spend
more time with me, or risk having me forget what he looks like—the black freckles
on his chocolate-colored skin, the sea green of his eyes like the color of the salty
sea off San Esteban—or not recognize the way he rolls his R’s when he calls my
name, Cora. I laugh, so he knows I’m only joking. I’ve stopped asking him about his
fever; Bonafe likes to gamble a little, but it isn’t a sickness, as everyone in Terra
Bella would like to think. I’ve never minded him betting on horses, playing rummy
on weekends, or going on overnight trips to Las Vegas with our townmates. These
three make up his world of gambling. “It’s my hobby,” he explained to me, when we
first got married, and I have come to see it as his pastime, just as my flower garden
and my crochet work had once been hobbies of mine before my fingers lost their
movement, their touch.
Lately, I’ve been spending time watching my arms and legs wither like tree
branches that get no rain deep down in their roots, only I imagine my limbs have the
weight of driftwood. If I could lift them, surely they would have that lightness.
The other night Manang Elsie came to feed me dinner when Bonafe went to
Las Vegas with Manong Orlino. She whispered that all our townmates were afraid
for me. Manang Elsie would have spent the weekend in our house, if I hadn’t told
her it was unnecessary. She said she would come over at least every few hours to
check up on me. When she came the first evening, she expected to find suitcases
and balikbayan boxes lining the entryway.
I laughed. “I can save Bon the money for the plane fare. He can throw me in
the ocean, and I’ll float back to San Esteban, God willing and with a strong wind.”
Manang Elsie’s face reflected horror. I pointed toward my feet with my chin. “Lift up
my leg. I must weigh nothing.”
But Manang Elsie didn’t touch me. She clicked her tongue. “This isn’t a joke,
Cora. Have you asked Manong Bonafe where your social security checks have
21
Patty Enrado

gone? Does he show you the bank statements every month?”
“Why should he? My goodness, Bon has taken care of me for more than forty
years. The house is paid for. We have no other wants. He hired that pinay nurse to
come every other day, even when I told him I don’t need her.”
“There is talk,” Manang Elsie began, lowering her voice. “There is talk Manong
Bonafe has sold your car.”
This was news to me, but I tried to keep my smile even. “What would I do with
a car? If Bon wants to sell it, why can’t he? We don’t need two.”
Manang Elsie brushed the gray wisps of hair away from my eyes. “Why did he
go to Las Vegas? He should be taking care of you. We are worried for you, Cora.”
“Don’t worry over a useless thing. If you must worry, think of Bon.”
Manang Elsie’s eyes were moist. “We are only thinking of you,” she said.
In my mind, I reached out to pat her hand. I could almost feel the coolness of
her skin. It looked like aged onion paper, the kind on which I used to write letters to
my sister in San Esteban. I could see the faint blue veins in her arm, and imagining
my hand on her wrist, I could almost feel her quickening pulse, its liveliness, and
thought it was mine.
22
Hair Trigger 2.0
It doesn’t bother me that Bonafe sold my car, if it’s really true in the first
place. He must have forgotten to tell me. He just turned sixty-nine. Once he
forgot to turn off the stove burners. I didn’t smell the leaking gas, and if Manang
Miriam hadn’t come to check up on me, she claims I would have died. I made her
promise not to tell Bonafe. Even I have forgotten things. Where I misplaced my
clipping shears or my watering wand. I can close my eyes and think for hours,
but I still can’t remember how many loops my crochet hook stitched to make the
star-shaped doilies that decorate the living room tables and sofas. I try to remind
myself to ask Bonafe to bring me one of the doilies.
There are some things I don’t forget. My silver Impala. Bonafe could
have sold the other car, the one he used to drive to work. It has no meaning for
him. It’s an ugly yellow, like that of the half-formed chick inside the shell of the
balut. But my silver Impala, the color of champagne, as long as Manong Orlino’s
motorboat, but more graceful. It was the first new car we had ever bought in the
States. When I returned from San Esteban for my mother’s funeral, Bonafe greeted
me with the new car. We couldn’t afford it at the time, especially with the sudden trip
to the Philippines, but he said, “Cora, we’ve been in the States for over ten years.
We don’t have many things. Always buying what Orlino throws out when he gets
something new—his small house, his old car. I’m tired of it. Okay, I splurge. Fancy

thing. I say, every ten years we splurge.”
The first few months, we spent our Saturdays driving around the countryside
in the new Impala. We pretended we were buying one of the ranch-style houses
with the bigger, more colorful gardens in front and a grove of orange trees fanning
out on a slope behind it. I packed chicken adobo and rice in Tupperware, and when
we found a house we liked, we stopped across the street and ate our lunch in the
car. I used to cook a bucketful of chicken, for Bonafe liked to eat. I made sure we
had plenty of napkins, for chicken adobo is slippery, greasy, and I didn’t want any
stains on the cloth seats. Bonafe isn’t a tidy person, but on our picnic trips he was
very good.
I tried to make our driving trips pleasant, but there were times when
Bonafe grew melancholy. When we looked at the big farmhouses, he would say it
was useless to save for a house with many bedrooms since we couldn’t have
children. I never told him what the doctor told me, that he was infertile. I explained
to him I was too frail to carry a baby to term. During a game of rummy, Manong Leo
questioned the results, and although I scolded him for bringing it up, Bonafe’s
thoughts and words reflected Manong Leo’s doubts. We stopped looking at
houses after a while. I convinced him we were fine, the two of us together. He
nodded and patted my hand when I told him we can treat ourselves, like he did by
getting the silver Impala.
Sometimes he let me drive the car to the packing house. Most of the Filipinas
in Terra Bella packed oranges at Grand View Citrus Heights at the edge of town,
and many of us living on the same street carpooled. We were at work by seven in
the morning, standing up all day, our hands flying back and forth to fill up crates
with oranges. In the summers, we rolled up our pant legs to our knees and draped
wet washcloths straight from the lunchroom Frigidaire on our heads. In the winters,
we kept our coats on to ward off the unforgiving cold of the Central Valley. It was
always like that, every season, every year. But then we got the silver Impala, and
I insisted on driving my neighborhood co-workers to Grand View. When I warmed
up the car and checked all the needles and numbers on the dashboard while the
others stared in awe, Bonafe watched from the kitchen window, smiling at me
sitting in the driver’s seat of our “fancy thing.”
So our fancy car is old now. Maybe it’s in a junkyard, maybe in somebody
else’s garage. I wonder how much it sold for. I try not to think where the money
has gone. I keep hearing Manang Elsie’s words. What does it matter if he used
the money to go to Las Vegas, or to place a bet on a horse he’s never seen before,
hundreds of miles away—a young horse with swift brown legs that knows the secret
23
Patty Enrado

24
Hair Trigger 2.0
of the wind? We didn’t get a fancy thing every decade. Manang Elsie, nor anyone
else in Terra Bella, doesn’t know about this agreement between Bonafe and me.
Why, he’s just making up for the past twenty years.
Then I think, what if it’s true? That Bonafe is saving money to send me
back to San Esteban for good? But why? There is no reason, nothing in the air to
suggest discontent. If he were going to get rid of me, why not turn the stove burner
on, so just the blue flames are extinguished, but not the invisible gas? Manang
Miriam would remember the last time, and everyone would think it was an
accident. Bonafe has forgotten to check the stove burners again, they would
murmur to one another. Poor Cora!
It’s foolishness. Lying on this bed for hours at a time, alone, can do this to a
person, make her think thoughts that make no sense. How could I imagine Bonafe
killing me? He isn’t even here to defend himself. What is he doing now? Feeding
coins into slot machines? Closing his eyes and muttering incantations silently like
the mammadto when she tells you your fortunes?
He’s only been gone a day, I think, but it seems like weeks. I miss him. True,
it seems as if when he’s here his eyes are watching something else. But after forty
years, you become used to your mate. You become used to things that would have
irritated you years before. The loud television set I can hear all the way from my
room. The bland food he serves like tomato soup from a can. The last few weeks,
he’s been feeding me rice soaked in soy sauce. He promised he would fill the
cupboards before he left. “They’re empty,” he said. I wouldn’t have known, except
when Manang Elsie had said, “I’ll bring some lumpia I just wrapped. Why, there’s
nothing in the cupboards but a sack with only a cup of rice left!”
I grow hungry at times, during the night, but ever since I returned from the
hospital after my stroke, Bonafe has slept in the guest bedroom. I can’t yell out
in the middle of the night that I’m hungry, and could he please fix me something
to eat? To cry out, when it’s so dark and empty, anyway, to disturb him, seems all
foolishness. I called him once, and the only answer was his snoring—agitated, like
the sound of an injured stray dog out in the fields. But it doesn’t frighten me, the
sound of his sleep quiets me.
The day I woke up in the hospital, Bonafe couldn’t look me in the eye. There
was no reason he should have felt responsible. He went to Delano that Sunday. I
brought my crocheting with me and spent the afternoon watching the others play
rummy at Manong Leo’s house. I didn’t play. There is no sense trusting chance.
Manang Seping plays long enough to break even; if she wins early, she tries to
double it but often fails, and if she loses early, she spends the rest of the day,

sometimes into the night, trying to make up. Manong Bert only wagers in small
amounts. Manong Truelino always takes home a tidy profit.
For Bonafe it’s different. It isn’t a matter of money. It’s true, although not very
many of our townmates would agree. He sees gambling as a skill, an opportunity
to make the right choices. “Never play games where luck is your only guide. That is
blindness,” he would always tell me. “You must think and think. It’s like preparing
for a test. What is the best answer? What is the right thing to do?” His eyes would
glint like polished silver dollars. Through the years, Bonafe has either broken even
or lost a little. It has never been much.
That afternoon I left the rummy game early. I felt tired. I wasn’t able to make
the neat, spidery stitches with my crochet hook. Everything I looked at was blurry.
So I went home. I remembered looking at all the spent roses on our bushes and
thinking I had better snip them off. The dahlias in our yard were exploding with
buds, making the blooms smaller, less showy, and the stems shorter. It had been
hot all week, too hot to garden, but that’s a poor excuse. I told myself I’m feeling like
my drooping daylilies, in need of water. When I wake up from my nap, I promised, I’ll
pinch back the dahlia buds and water the yard. But when I walked into the house,
all at once my blood pounded and roared inside my veins, as if in a typhoon. My
arms stuck straight out in front of me, pushed up by imaginary waves. My legs were
swept away, so that I lost my balance. Then nothing, nothing.
Bonafe was at my bedside when I awakened. He wept into my shoulder. Ah, but I
wasn’t able to feel him there. I couldn’t feel the warmth or the wetness of his tears.
“If I had been at the rummy game, you wouldn’t be like this.”
“Nonsense,” I told him. “Nobody could have foreseen or stopped it.”
He shook his head. “I would have gone home with you, if you weren’t
feeling well. The doctor said you lost too much oxygen while you were unconscious.
If someone had found you earlier, you would still be able to move.”
“But you had to see Manong Domingo. You were going to help him buy some
chickens in Delano for his farm.”
“No,” he said.
“No?”
“Domingo and I went to the cock fights.”
I imagined seeing the angry, yellow beads for eyes, sharpened beaks wet with
blood, and claws scratching the hard ground. But it was worse imagining Bonafe
stamping his feet and raising the dust, along with the rest of the men, whistling,
provoking these roosters to kill their own kind.
“You have never bet on them before. It’s against the law.”
25
Patty Enrado

26
Hair Trigger 2.0
He nodded his head like a penitent boy. “It’s all my fault.”
“To hell with my body! I still have my soul, thank God. I can still feel with my
heart, if not with my hands. My goodness, that’s enough. But to hear you confess.
That’s unspeakable. It’s different, isn’t it, if you were playing rummy or in Las
Vegas? But to place bets on animals killing each other. . . .” I stopped, unable to
finish.
“I’ll never gamble again, as long as I live.”
“Do you think it’s your gambling that sickens me? You lied to me. Are they
one and the same?”
He couldn’t answer me, and I banished him from my hospital room.
Bonafe moved his things into the guest bedroom. I refused to talk to him
when I first returned home. I wanted to teach him a lesson. But I couldn’t stay
angry. Everyone in Terra Bella found out he had gone to the cock fights in Delano
the day I suffered my stroke. They were unkind in their words, but I couldn’t make
them take back what they said. I was the only one who understood him. After all
these years, I learned you cannot change a man. If you do, he’ll look weak to you. I
had no use for weakness, no use for power. I knew only one thing: he needed me.
Together, we would battle against their words, even as they kept telling me, “But
Manang Cora, we are thinking of you!”
So they are thinking of me. I am thinking of Bonafe. The worry is divided in
half.
The pinay nurse is trying to trick me. As she pulls the sheets from my bed,
she asks me, weaving in and out of Ilocano and English, if I don’t think she should
come every day. She holds up a glass of water from my nightstand and breaks
apart the layer of dust with a swish of her finger. She dumps out my full bedpan into
a plastic-lined bag, pinching her nose for effect. The pinay nurse watches me as I fill
my lungs with air. I refuse to acknowledge the stench. I know she just wants more
money from us. I tell her I don’t need her, but Bon insists she stays. I tell her I could
dismiss her at my whim. The pinay nurse shakes her head, although she doesn’t
have the nerve to look me in the eye. She smoothes out the wrinkles on the clean
sheets on my bed, and leaves the room with my dirty laundry and bedpan.
Manang Elsie asks me the next day if I don’t think Bonafe has lost weight. It
never occurs to me. At first I think it’s another trick. So I answer that he must not
like his own cooking now, if he’s gotten thin. Manang Elsie remains silent. Inside, I
am shouting. What is she trying to tell me? That he is using the grocery money on
gambling? Or better still, that he is hoarding money for my plane fare? If he has lost
weight, I’m to blame. Seeing the pity in her eyes makes me want to carve them out

with my fingernails. Like gamecocks.
“It’s useless, Cora. Why are you defending him when his sickness is harming
you? Manong Bonafe needs help. Now his sickness is affecting his health. When
you protect him, all you do is allow him to go on. It’s no good.”
She waits for me to talk, but I am a stone wall.
“Forgive me, Cora. We felt we should tell you. Something must be done. By
and by, something bad will happen.”
She leaves because I still refuse to talk. I pretend sometimes that it’s too
painful to move my mouth. She says she’ll come back later in the evening, and
then she’s gone. Good. I like to listen to the house creak all by myself. Soon, I’ll fall
asleep. Soon Bonafe will come back, and I’ll talk to him about these foolish rumors,
Manang Elsie’s poisonous threats.
I think I’m still talking to myself, but I have fallen asleep and am dreaming. It’s been
over a week, and Bonafe hasn’t come home. When he appears and I scold him, he
laughs and says he’s been home for days. “Are you going blind, too?” he wants to
know. He brings me a dusty box of crackers and feeds me. They are soft, almost
soggy. Salt and crumbs scatter on the bed sheets and blankets. He pokes cracker
after cracker into my parched mouth, although I tell him I’m not hungry. His face,
now sunken, his double chin missing, grins in my face. “No one can say I don’t
take care of you, Cora,” he says. There’s a knock at the front door, and he drops
the crackers on the bed and disappears. I don’t recognize the voice; it belongs to
another man. I hear the word “Delano,” and then the door shuts so hard a wind
comes hurtling down the hallway, into my room. There is silence. I call out his name.
Bonafe. Nothing. I want to call out again, but I’m afraid he won’t answer. I don’t
know how long it’s been since he left with the stranger, but night comes again and
again. One morning, I find a trail of ants coming up the side of my bed. They march
toward the crackers and carry crumbs away. The little red ants inch closer to my
face, for there are still crumbs on my chin and cheeks. I shut my eyes, and I can feel
them, like little pin pricks, across my face. I press my lips together, afraid they will
pry their way into my mouth, and yet, I can’t scream.
It’s just a nightmare. That’s all. Manang Elsie’s words have taken shape. I’m
awake, but it’s still dark outside. Then I see shadows, and I think I’m asleep again.
I see the silhouette of a man, but he’s too thin to be Bonafe.
He moves again, and I call out, “Bonafe?”
Nothing.
“Bonafe? Is it you?”
27
Patty Enrado

28
Hair Trigger 2.0
He turns the light on, and I blink in the harshness. He stands before me.
“Yes. I forgot the time. Will you forgive me?”
“Thank goodness Manang Elsie was here to look after me.”
“That’s what I thought when I was feeling bad about leaving you longer than
I had intended,” he says.
“Why should I mind? Manang Elsie and the pinay nurse babysit me. I can’t
stop them. They come out of concern. They tell me things you can’t bring yourself
to tell.”
“Are you listening to their foolish talk?”
“Who said I believe what they say? I’ll believe what you tell me.”
He opens his mouth, as if he will refute everything they have told me. “You
make me feel ashamed,” he finally says.
“That’s all?”
I can tell he’s trying hard to think of something.
“Bonafe, do you love me?”
He scrambles to the edge of my bed. I watch him take my hand.
“Why do you ask such foolishness? Yes, of course.”
“But do you love money more?” I ask, and my voice breaks, as if the weight
of the words in coins comes crashing down on me.
“No. It’s not the money. I told you that before.”
I watch him squeeze my hand, his thumb pressing into the middle of my
palm. I can only close my eyes, but still he mumbles, “It’s not the money at all. It’s
not what you think.”
His hand travels up my arm. It touches the collar of my nightgown. His fingers
stop at my throat, then slide to the corner of the bed. I can’t find my breath. Bonafe
lowers his head and a sigh escapes from his slackened lips. With a slow heave, he
fills out his chest. His eyes meet mine.
“Have I ever struck you? Have I ever been with another woman? We’ve been
married for more than forty years, and I‘ve been good, I’ve been faithful. Has my
gambling ever put us in debt? If it ever does, I swear, I’ll quit,” Bonafe says. He
raises his fist midair.
I’m so tired, I almost believe that his words are all for show. “Don’t swear,” I
say. I would have dismissed him, but I hear Manang Elsie’s voice in my head.
“Are you going to send me back to San Esteban?” I blurt out.
Bonafe gives me a startled look, as if it has never occurred to him. “Of course
not. That’s abominable. I would never do that to you, Cora. Who’s been telling you
these things? I’ll kill them.” He stands up, and brandishes his fists.

“Sit down,” I say, but my voice is light, buoyant, for I know he’s telling the
truth. I’ll tell Manang Elsie what he said. I’ll make her broadcast his announcement
to our townmates. No more rumors. No more lies.
“Do you believe me?” he says, and comes close to my face. There is wonder
in his voice, wonder in his sea green eyes.
“Yes, yes, I believe you. Because you say so.”
Since our talk, Bonafe hasn’t gone to Las Vegas in weeks. He dismissed the pinay
nurse, without me telling him to get rid of her. Bonafe bathes me now. He lifts me
from my bed, hugging me close to his chest, and lowers me into the bathtub. He
dips the washcloth in the water and moistens my face to let me know the water
is warm. Then he soaps my body, sliding the washcloth back and forth across my
arms and legs. Before, I would look away from my body, from its bed sores I can’t
feel, the pools of slackened skin, the places where the hard lines of my bones stick
out. But Bonafe makes me feel as if I’m in my twenties again, when we had just
been married, and my whole body was fresh and tingled when he touched me. He
talks about moving his things back into our bedroom.
He stays home now, except when he goes to town to get groceries. For days,
the air is full of the tangy smell of chicken adobo simmering in vinegar, garlic,
whole black peppers, dried bay leaves. He brings me platters full of pansit, bits of
carrot and celery adding color and texture to the long, clear noodles. He offers me
bowls of my favorite dish, kalding. I can smell the goat roasting in the backyard pit,
outside the bedroom window. I can hear the skin sizzle, the fire crackle. It makes
my mouth water. When he feeds me, he apologies, “The meat is dry. I overcooked.
But you eat. If you get grease on your chin, I’ll wipe.”
I let the grease dribble down the corner of my lip. If I could only capture the
look of concern as he tries to wipe my face before the grease spots the sheets. I
can feel the nervousness in his hands. It’s age. We’re growing old together. This is
what I imagined us to be like—of course, not with me in my condition. If someone
should ask me, “Cora, if you could choose, which life would you pick: one in which
you are healthy again, but without Bonafe, or one in which you are still paralyzed,
but being taken care of by Bonafe?” I would look that person in the eye, and say,
“Come, watch Bon feed me adobo.”
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Patty Enrado
For the longest time, I avoid bringing up gambling to Bonafe. It’s as if I’m afraid the
spoken word will drive him back to the cock fights in Delano, the card games in Las
Vegas, or the slick racing horses in Santa Ana. He never said he has given it up for

good. I would like to think of it as something we have agreed upon in silence.
When he says Manang Elsie wants to visit me, I tell him I don’t want to see
her. “Why? Apay?” he wants to know, his voice pricking my ears with its urgency.
“I have you to keep me company.”
“You can’t always depend on me, Cora. I’m not so strong. Like an egg over
a burner. Ready to crack, right into a hot skillet.”
His hands tremble on his lap.
“What are you saying? Look at me,” I say, but he will not. “Is there trouble?
Is it money?”
“If you should no longer love or trust me again, I’ll lose you for good.”
“I’m right here.”
He looks at me, but his eyes waver, the beautiful sea green of his eyes are
oceans away. “I don’t want you to see me like this.”
“Like what?” I say. “As long as I have eyesight, God willing, I’ll see whatever
I like.”
“No,” Bonafe says.
He doesn’t shake his head. We are completely still. Even I know not to ask,
“Why not? Apay?”
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I’m not used to the mosquito nets. It’s been a few months; I couldn’t say how
many. The morning after I returned to San Esteban, I woke up and felt my whole
body give a start. A white shroud surrounded me. It hung in stillness, even when
a rare breeze escaped past the capiz-shell windows. I couldn’t see beyond the
cloudiness. I told my nieces the mosquitoes can bite my arms and legs for all I
cared, for I could not feel a thing, not a thing. They fussed over changing the ratty
woven mat that stretched across the hard bed. I stopped reminding them it didn’t
matter.
Each month, my nieces and nephews wait for the mail, the money Bonafe
promises to send. I worry he’ll forget, and they’ll get angry. My nephew Chering
brings me downstairs in the afternoons when the heat rises and it’s too hot for me
to stay in my room. He props me up in a wooden chair by the window, facing the
dirt street. Outside, it’s a dusty, brown world, even with the sky choked with palm
trees.
“There’s a letter,” Chering begins.
“From Bon?”
“No.” In his bare feet, he drags a stool to sit beside me.
I turn my head away.
“Do you want me to read to you or hold the letter up for you?”

“Read,” I command. Or go away and leave me to rot.
“It’s from Elsie Gunabe in Terra Bella. She writes,” he says, but it’s Manang
Elsie’s voice I hear.
“Dear Manang Cora, how are you? You’re lucky to be back in San Esteban.
We understand it’s warm there. Here, it’s been raining hard. The big palm tree in
front of Orlino’s house fell down, the rain and the wind were so strong. I went to see
how Manong Bonafe is doing. He talks to me, although we never see him unless
we watch for him. He’s looking better. Perhaps putting a little weight on. He keeps
telling me he’ll join you soon. We offered him our spare bedroom once your house
is taken away, but he said he’s found a trailer at the edge of town, near Porterville.
“Cora, when he speaks of you, he’s full of sorrow. We understand it was a
difficult time for him. We all thought you made the right decision to go back home.
When I think of our last conversation, I’m ashamed. How strong and brave you
were, knowing what to do all along. If there’s anything we can do to help, please let
us know. We are all thinking of you. Love, Manang Elsie.”
Chering asks me if I want him to read it again. I shake my head. It’s the same
thing she’s been writing since I got here. Some things she writes are new, such as
the trailer Bonafe has found.
“When do you think Uncle will come?”
I don’t hear him at first. I’m watching the lazy carabao swat flies from its
muddy back with its tail. I look straight up at the colorless sky and wonder when
it will relieve the thickness of heat that prickles my scalp. How cruel fate is to
leave me with feeling in certain parts of my body and not take everything away.
Sometimes my mind will wander, and I’ll think of our happy yellow house,
the gleaming silver Impala, my garden—who will take care of my roses and
dahlias?—the white doilies in the living room, starched, rooted on backrests and
armrests of sofas, collecting dust. I scold myself and stare hard at the houses, like
old, wooden building blocks, before me.
Chering clears his throat. “When do you think Uncle will join you?”
Stupid, how he can’t see I’ve heard and choose to ignore him. But I must be
polite. They are taking care of me. Perhaps they would like to throw me into the
ocean, and then we can all see if I’ll float like driftwood. The thought excites me.
The salty sea, where once, long ago in my childhood, it used to make my smooth,
dark skin itch and turn white. Bonafe taught me how to swim right off the shores
of San Esteban. The hard sun. The cooling breeze. Blow me away, away, I entreat
the wind I imagine is somewhere out there. But where? In which direction would I
float? I am already at my destination.
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Patty Enrado

Vanishing Point
Laura Citino
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My mother threatens to turn into stone if we don’t pick a direction and stick with it.
She is old for the first time and sorry for my ignorance, for how without a thought
to crooked knees, age before beauty, I asked her to help me find the world’s oldest
living tree. The last to hold that title was cut down decades before by some idiot with
a chainsaw who wanted to see how old the oldest really was, wouldn’t trust fickle
appearances that trick the eye, how the sun-dipped light can take off a century just
like that.
To be both Oldest and Still Living is a singular feat that names the tree
Methuselah, after the oldest man in the Hebrew Bible. There is no name for the
oldest living female, because women have daughters and thus no need to live
forever, to live beyond usefulness. We are just one in a line in a line that
staggers around the block, hips slanted sideways, elbows askew because there are
no straight lines in nature. No way to make the math work. My mother didn’t want
to leave the house before the scars on her back had healed, before the doctor told
the fate of spots he called pre-cancerous; as in, there is an order to these things and
you take it step by step, one at a time, the pre- then the post-. She came with me
anyway. She says, we’ll get there when we get there. Ancient wisdom becomes her
own sudden thought, centuries collapse in her mouth. She is sixty for the first time,
has been sixty forever, stately, a singular sixty, sorry for every year she says she will
stop dying her hair. Maybe, she regrets.
First, Nevada. We share the map where the friendly park rangers tipped
their hats and marked a vague spot. They told us, you’ll know it when you see it.
Leading lines of rock disappear toward a vanishing point I’m supposed to erase when
we’re done so no man can follow. I want to be sure, want to get there sooner. They
warned us of vandals, men so angry at longevity out of their reach they’ll cut down
a tree, spray it with slurs, carve their initials into bark so their names too become
Methuselah. My mother says, everything in moderation. According to the map,
Methuselah is straight ahead—call it as the crow flies, but I think I know better.
My mother sees nothing appealing in age for age’s sake, has never
understood a daughter’s desire for vintage, almost threw away her wedding dress

until we tugged the tangled lace from her hands. She says, you know what I always
say. I do because every year she says it, one in a line in a line.
We hike, our bodies smeared transparent in the distance, like how I learned
to paint mountains with a thumbprint of newspaper ink pressed here, then there,
then gone. Methuselah indulges in the privilege of his unchanging view, twisted
white branches snapshot-settled against the sky, those mountains that will never
move for him. Age is an extremity not everyone deserves, but we are the ones the
desert was made for. Through pebbles and sticky pinecones stomps my mother
beyond, my mother behind. We trust in the angle that goes cockeyed, no need for
parallel structure. All such things will eventually meet. My mother only wants to live
to be one hundred years old. Then, she says, I’ll be satisfied.
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Laura Citino

Diana Chrisman
from Architecture Series, 2016
Author

Hair Trigger 2.0

Author

Hair Trigger 2.0

Unapologetic Vision: Miles Davis and the
Lesson of “Sid’s Ahead”
excerpted from This Is: Essays on Jazz
Aaron Gilbreath
On March 4, 1958, Miles Davis’ sextet entered Columbia Records’ 30th Street
Studio in Manhattan. It was their second session for what became the album
Milestones. The first, in February, had gone smoothly, yielding the bulk of the
albums’ tracks, including one of John Coltrane’s best speeding solos—on “Straight,
No Chaser”—and Davis’ first modal composition, “Milestones,” a song which
foreshadowed his album Kind of Blue the following year, one of the best-selling
albums in jazz history. This second session proved fruitful, yet unbeknownst to
them, its turbulence signaled the demise of the band’s famous rhythm section,
and another major shift in Davis’ perpetually evolving musical sensibility.
On that day, the musicians stood by their respective microphones. Red
Garland sat at his piano. Before the engineer rolled tape on the song “Sid’s
Ahead,” Davis leaned over Garland’s shoulder and fingered the keys to show him
something. Nobody knows what exactly was said. Maybe Davis told Red how to
play a particular part. Maybe he criticized his approach to the song. Or maybe he
insulted his playing in general. Whatever the specifics, Garland didn’t like the
critique. Furious, he stood up and stormed out of the studio, leaving Davis with
booked session time and no pianist.
It’s easy to imagine Davis’ possible reactions. You can picture him
hurling insults at Red’s turned back: “You baby!” You can picture him
glancing at his remaining musicians and, in the new silence of Garland’s
absence, saying, “Oh well, let’s play,” in that gravely, low voice of his. Or
maybe his response was more indifferent, a distant, unaffected call to the
engineer—“You ready?”—after which he took his place at the microphone, counted
off with four snaps of his fingers, then blew his horn. Davis had a legendary temper
compounded by shyness, insecurity, cockiness and sensitivity. It’s not
unreasonable to imagine him saying something to the effect of “Fuck him, then,”
and shrugging rather than laughing off Garland’s insubordination. After all, it
was Miles’ band. To save face, he needed to at least maintain the appearance of
control.
Whatever Davis’ reaction, we know his next move. When the tape started
rolling on “Sid’s Ahead,” he raised the trumpet to his lips and played the song’s
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theme with his two saxophonists. Then he played piano behind their solos. It’s an
arrangement like no other in his forty-six-year catalog. If you listen closely, you can
hear it: there’s no piano during the first fifty seconds of the song; there’s nothing
behind Miles’ solo except bass and drums; and there’s no piano accompaniment
during the first eight or so seconds of Coltrane’s sax solo. That eight second pause
was likely the time it took Davis to walk from his microphone over to the piano and
find his place on the keys.
Spare, haunting in its austerity, Davis’ piano playing is competent, his chords
effectively maintaining the song’s dark mood while giving the soloists propulsion
and room to improvise. But the overall result is somehow lacking in what our ears
recognize as depth, the song neither on par with the rest from this period, nor
second-rate. It’s mixed. Yet the band never recorded another full take. Was Davis
satisfied with the outcome? Or was he so fed up that he wanted to be done with
it? Impossible to say. Even in a career that includes nonets and jazz-rock fusion,
the thirteen-minute-long “Sid’s Ahead” stands out as an anomaly, because it offers
an inimitable window into Davis’ disposition as a band leader, a role he filled with
an erratic, demanding mixture of bellicose pride and determination, foresight and
adaptability, and a willingness to change not only with the times, but according to
the shifting conditions of his immediate surroundings.
Not long after this session, Davis replaced Garland and drummer Philly Joe
Jones with other musicians, and he moved in an entirely new stylistic direction,
turning away from the chords that defined Bop and post-Bop jazz—and his and
Garland’s playing at the time—in favor of the modes and scales immortalized on
Kind of Blue.
This shift is important historically, but it isn’t surprising. Musically,
Davis was always changing. “I have to change,” he once said. “It’s like a curse.”
It also seemed an extension of his personality. He had a reputation for being
mercurial. Novelist James Baldwin captured the trumpeter’s essential duality
when he characterized him as a “miraculously tough and tender man.” The phrase
more often used to describe Davis is “Jekyll and Hyde.” It illustrates the way his
temperament, like his playing, swung between extremes. Cold and heat. Strength
and vulnerability. Loud and lyrical. Tenderness and irritability. Bravado and
sensitivity. Destruction and creativity. Performance and isolation. His son
Gregory even used this convention as the title of a book, Dark Magus: The
Jekyll and Hyde Life of Miles Davis. In addition to his mercurial nature,
Davis had a temper. He yelled at journalists, threatened a few club
owners and record executives, hit a concert promoter and also his first wife,
Frances Davis. On at least one occasion, he even punched John Coltrane and

assist Paul Chambers. Yet he was as prone to outbursts as he was long silences.
Already shy by nature, complications from a 1955 operation for polyps
damaged Davis’ vocal chords, producing his signature rasp. Not only did he speak
less after the surgery, he became more self-conscious and, according to John
Szwed’s biography So What, “When he did speak, he often was not heard and had
to whistle to get attention.” This mixture of silence, brooding and unpredictability
made him an intimidating presence; it was also part of the reason he was able to
direct his band with few if any words.
Accounts vary, but depending on who he was playing with, Davis could be
both a reactive and a proactive band leader whose involvement ranged from
hands-off to heavy-handed. In a 1979 radio interview, Garland’s replacement,
pianist Bill Evans, described recording with Davis’ new, post-Milestones band:
“Miles occasionally might say, ‘Right here, I want this sound,’ and it turns out to be
a very key thing that changes the whole character of the [song]. For instance, on
‘On Green Dolphin Street,’ [on the ’58 Sessions album,] the original changes of the
chorus aren’t the way [we recorded it]: the vamp changes being a major seventh
up a minor third, down a half tone. That was [one when] he leaned over and said,
‘I want this here.’”
Drummer Jimmy Cobb, who played with Evans in the new band,
remembered Davis being more involved with pianists than with other musicians:
“...and piano players, when they first got with the band they were always confused
because he [Davis] would tell them when to play and when not to play, so they got
so they wouldn’t know when to play.”
There’s a famous story about Davis and Thelonious Monk butting heads
during the 1954 session that yielded the albums Modern Jazz Giants and Bags’
Groove. It wasn’t Davis or Monk’s idea to play together on this date. Prestige Records
label owner Bob Weinstock assembled them and others as an “all-star” group. The
results were tense. Rumors about the session circulated afterwards: Davis had
argued, cursed and threatened Monk in the studio; he’d insulted Weinstock,
asked why, in the words of bassist Charles Mingus, “he had hired such a
non-musician” as Monk. One rumor even had Davis punching Monk in the face.
The misinformation irritated the trumpeter. In Miles: The Autobiography, Davis
said, “When I heard stories later saying that me and him was almost about to
fight after I had him lay out while I was playing on ‘Bags’ Groove,’ I was shocked,
because Monk and I were, first, very close, and second, he was too big and strong
for me to even be thinking about fighting [...] All I did was tell him to lay out when
I was playing. My asking him to lay out had something to do with music, not
friendship. He used to tell cats to lay out himself.” As usual, the truth was complex.
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First off, Monk screwed up the first take of “The Man I Love.” When
vibraphonist Milt Jackson played the intro, Monk started in prematurely and
asked, “When am I supposed to come in?” You can hear it on Modern Jazz Giants.
Jackson quits playing. The studio fills with the sound of musicians talking over each
other. Irritated, Davis tells studio engineer Rudy Van Gelder, “Hey Rudy, put this on
the record, man, all of it.” Later, while the band rehearsed “Bags’ Groove,” Davis
told Monk, “During my solo, lay out,” meaning, don’t play piano behind him, or
“comp” as it’s called. Davis liked Monk’s inventive playing and songwriting; that’s
why he covered numerous Monk tunes. In the early 1940s, Thelonious had even
given Davis lessons about harmony and songwriting, but Davis now had trouble
soloing over him. The pianist’s comping screwed him up. “I love the way Monk
plays and writes,” Miles told Nat Hentoff in 1958, “but I can’t stand him behind
me. He doesn’t give you any support.” The reason, in Miles’ words, was that unlike
Red Garland, Herbie Hancock and Bill Evans, Monk didn’t play to suit your solo, he
“played what he wanted.” So Davis told him to lay out.
During “Bags’ Groove,” Miles sat in a chair, as he normally did, and aimed
the bell of the trumpet at the floor. When he started soloing, Monk not only
stopped playing, he stood right next to Davis, towering over him. When Miles later
asked why he did that, Monk said, “I don’t have to sit down to lay out.” It seems a
passive-aggressive move, a Monkish way to voice his displeasure about being told
what to do. Back then, jazz musicians also called laying out “strolling,” meaning,
taking a break or a figurative walk in the interim. According to journalist Ira Gitler,
when Monk quit playing during Davis’ solo on an earlier take of “Bags’ Groove,”
he ruined the song by asking Van Gelder, “Rudy, where’s the bathroom?” If the
sources of these snafus sound benign, their subtext was not: Monk didn’t like
Davis telling him how to play anymore than Davis liked playing over Monk. But as
much as it irritated Monk to be directed in this way, in order to play with Monk on
this date, Davis had to direct him.
He and Monk quarreled again. After performing at the 1955 Newport Jazz
Festival together, the band was riding back to New York from Rhode Island in a
limousine, and Monk criticized Miles’ playing. He said he played his song “’Round
Midnight” incorrectly. “So what?” said Davis. He didn’t like the way Monk had
comped behind him, and he claimed that Monk was only complaining because
he was jealous of the enthusiastic reception Davis received at the festival. Monk,
infuriated, flung the door open and stepped out of the car, walking to the ferry and
riding home by himself.
Bassist Percy Heath recorded with Davis during numerous 1950s dates and
was there to witness the tension with Monk in both the studio and at Newport.

“Miles liked to accompany people on the piano,” Heath said. “He told all his piano
players to stroll (not just Monk) and it was Miles’ record date. Miles always bragged
about showing piano players things—he knew how he wanted things to sound.” Alto
saxophonist Cannonball Adderley had a different experience.
Adderley played with Coltrane, Cobb and Evans on Kind of Blue, and also
with Garland on Milestones. He was in the studio when Red stormed out. Although
he seems to agree that Davis “knew how he wanted things to sound,” Adderley’s
impression of Davis’ leadership was more nuanced than that of Evans or Heath.
“He never told anyone what to play,” Adderley said in 1972, “but would say ‘Man,
you don’t need to do that.’ Miles really told everybody what NOT to do. I heard him
and dug it.” In what little studio chatter exists on the Kind of Blue master tapes,
you can hear what Adderley is talking about. While the band runs through the intro
theme for the song “Freddie Freeloader,” trying to get it right, Davis stops the take
with a whistle and tells pianist Wynton Kelly, “Hey look Wynton, don’t play no chord
going into the A flat....” Meaning, in this case, Davis was corrective rather than
prescriptive, reactive rather than preemptive.
At the beginning of “You’re My Everything” on Relaxin’, you can hear Davis
micro-managing in this way. The tape is rolling. Miles starts running through scales
on his trumpet. Chambers hits a few notes on his bass. Then Davis tells the band,
“When you see a red light on, everybody’s supposed to be quiet.” The studio falls
silent. Seconds pass. Garland plays the lead to this melancholic ballad in a stream
of light, trilling, single notes that resemble his intro to “My Funny Valentine.” Then
Davis stops him with a snap of the fingers and a piercing whistle. “Play some block
chords, Red,” Miles says. To the engineer, “Alright Rudy,” followed by one more
admonishment: “Block chords, Red.” Garland begins again, this time leading with
a thudding fistful of block chords whose dense edges thicken with sustain, before
Davis drizzles his slow, sweet trumpet over them. This exchange took place two
years prior to “Sid’s Ahead.” If it irritated Garland, the tape presents no evidence
of it. More importantly, the second, block chord version is more complex and
engaging than the preceding intro. Which is to say, Davis’ firm direction yielded
superior results.
This approach had worked well with other pianists, too, and not everyone
minded. About recording “In Your Own Sweet Way” with Davis in 1956, pianist
Tommy Flanagan said, “I remember him telling me how to voice the intro. He
always knows exactly what he wants. It makes him easy to work with. If you don’t
play what he wants, he tells you... ‘Play block chords, but not like Milt Buckner. In
the style of Ahmad Jamal.’” Again, the results are profound.
In his book So What, John Szwed further complicates the portrait of
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Davis the band leader when he describes how Miles retooled drummer Philly Joe
Jones’ sense of rhythm and timing. “Though Miles seldom told his musicians how
to play,” says Szwed, “drummers were the exception. He involved himself directly
in Jones’ playing, telling him not to play a rhythmic figure with him but after him, or
changing the way he played the ride cymbal, the device that carried the basic beat.”
So What is widely considered the authoritative Davis biography, but judging from
the above musicians’ impressions, Szwed’s assertions that “Miles seldom told his
musicians how to play” and that “drummers were the exception” ring false. Davis
clearly did tell numerous musicians how to play, not just drummers, but pianists,
many of them seasoned pros. Davis seems to have had no system or consistent
method for how he directed who and why; his reactions to different musicians and
compositions appear as unpredictable as his varying reactions to fans, promoters,
beautiful women and sidemen off the bandstand. About his direction of Jones,
Szwed quotes Davis as saying: “And I listen to the top cymbal to hear whether he
plays it even or not. He may not play it like I want him to play it, but he can be taught
how to play it if he plays even. I changed Joe’s top cymbal beat. He was kind of
reluctant at first, but I changed it so it could sound more ad lib than straight dangdi-di-dang-di-di-dang:
I changed it to dang-di-di-dang-di-di-di-di-dang, and you can
play off that with your snare drum.” Szwed speculates, “Philly Joe would put up with
him messing with the rhythm because Davis himself was such an exceptionally
rhythmic player.” In a move keeping with the extremes of his personality, Davis
took the opposite tact with his tenor player John Coltrane.
During Coltrane’s first stint with Miles between 1955 and ’56, the two had
a tense relationship. Coltrane was still drinking and using heroin. He was nervous
on stage and in the studio, often arrived to shows disheveled, and he was still
developing what would forever be known as his sound. During this apprentice
period of experimentation and self-doubt, he kept asking Miles for direction. Miles
gave him none. In place of answers to what to play and what not to play, Miles gave
the opposite of direct guidance: he gave Coltrane so much creative latitude that it
put an unspoken pressure on the saxophonist to not only advance musically, but
to always be at his best. During live performances, Miles routinely left the stage
while Coltrane soloed. And there, alone on stage, as the audience’s sole focus, the
saxophonist had no choice but to, in the words of jazz critic Ben Ratliff,
“strengthen his language.” As Ratliff recalls in his book Coltrane: The Story of a
Sound, a reporter once asked Coltrane if Davis demanded he “play as far out as
he could,” and Trane replied, “Miles? Tell me something? That’s a good one!” That
might summarize Davis’ entire approach with Coltrane.

As Coltrane said of his experience playing with Davis: “Miles is a strange
guy; he doesn’t talk much and he rarely discusses music. You always have the
impression that he’s in a bad mood, and that what concerns others doesn’t
interest him or move him. It’s very difficult, under those conditions, to know exactly
what to do, and maybe that’s the reason I just ended up doing what I wanted....
Miles’ reactions are completely unpredictable [on the bandstand]: he’ll play with
us for a few measures, then—you never know when—he’ll leave us on our own. And
if you ask him something about music, you never know how he’s going to take it.
You always have to listen carefully to stay in the same mood as he!”
Davis later acknowledged his laissez-faire approach with the tenor, and, in
the process, articulated the contradictions between his ideas of leadership and his
uneven direction. “I think the reason we didn’t get along at first,” Miles said, “was
because Trane liked to ask all these motherfucking questions back then about
what he should or shouldn’t play. Man, fuck that shit; to me he was a professional
musician and I have always wanted whoever played with me to find their own place
in the music. So my silence and evil looks probably turned him off.” What it boiled
down to was this: Davis had high expectations of his band members, and as willing
as he was to tinker, he didn’t want his band composed of musicians who needed
much guidance.
As drummer Jimmy Cobb speculated, Davis specifically gave Coltrane
unusual autonomy because he “sensed that [Coltrane] was working on
something.” Meaning, he was working on his sound. Davis was drawn to Coltrane’s
inventive playing from the first time he heard it on a private recording the tenor made
when he was nineteen, and he went out of his way to keep him in the band despite
Coltrane’s initial problems. Because Miles learned to play Bop under the
tutelage of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, the architects of the form, Miles
clearly understood the value of apprenticeship, too.
Whatever the reason for the leeway, the way Davis dealt with Trane was
noticeably different than how he dealt with other band members. In retrospect, the
differences resemble the well-tailored methodology of the best teachers, where
the teacher recognizes that what one student needs at a certain point in their
development is different than what another student needs, and that sometimes,
as in Coltrane’s case, what that student needs aren’t guidelines or parameters at
all, but freedom, a safe place to explore—as well as the impetus to improve, sober
up, and behave professionally.
Davis had an ear for talent. In much the same way that drummer Art Blakey’s
Jazz Messengers functioned as a de facto incubator for budding, young players, so
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too did some of jazz’s best musicians go on to legendary careers after spending
time with Miles: Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, Chick
Corea, and of course, Red Garland, Cannonball Adderley, Philly Joe, and Coltrane.
But being a teacher and providing a proving ground weren’t Davis’ objectives,
making music was, and giving Trane room probably wasn’t benevolence on
Davis’ part. The freedom that Coltrane needed to push stylistic boundaries and
develop new ideas also happened to propagate the same fiery, innovative
playing that made Davis’ music irresistible, and so Davis modified his direction
accordingly. The five albums Davis recorded with Coltrane in 1956 inarguably
endure as some of jazz’s greatest, proof of the effectiveness of his leadership.
That, in the end, is the legacy of “Sid’s Ahead.” That beneath the Jekyll and Hyde
persona, the man so “tough and tender,” was an intuitive, impulsive reactionary
who, when he wanted a song to sound a certain way, sometimes did as Heath,
Cobb, Flanagan, and Evans remember and told his musicians what to play, and
who, when he wanted a certain sound in other situations, did as Coltrane and
Adderley remember and gave his musicians little to no direction at all. He didn’t
seem to care if his leadership insulted them. He didn’t care if they felt neither
coddled nor appreciated, smothered or vulnerable. In his mind, he heard the
music in a very particular way, and he was determined to bring it to life. As
Percy Heath said, it was Miles’ session after all, and like any good conductor, he
conducted his orchestra with few words and numerous gestures.
Despite the contradictory experiences of his sidemen, the portrait of Miles
that emerges is one of unapologetic vision. Davis’ varying levels of direction was
part of his brilliance. It was the force that sculpted what now stands as one of
the world’s greatest bodies of work. And if it was part of what ultimately ran off
Garland, it was also what produced moving results with him and his
replacement, Bill Evans, music that millions of people still listen to today, and always
will. Even with its skeletal accompaniment and relative flatness, “Sid’s Ahead” is
a testament to Davis’ unwavering devotion to doing things his way and
doing them well. It’s a way that’s hard to take umbrage with when
listening to Milestones and the rest of his mid- to late-’50s albums, even if in
making them Miles could be, in Coltrane’s words, “a bit of a prick.”

The Tale of Poor Ol’, Good Ol’ Chuckie Hamburg
Chelsea Harris
Chuckie Hamburg was always a real sweet guy. Real sweet. He had a big, round,
red face and a big, round, white belly and he was always real kind with the animals.
The way he cut them up. Always said, “Wouldn’t want anybody just sticking a knife
into my organs all willy-nilly, so why would I do that to them?” That good ol’ Chuckie
Hamburg was always helping everyone out. Good ol’ Chuckie. Always making sure
everyone was doing the best they could do.
Wasn’t until that day he went home after a shift and found his wife dead
in the kitchen did he ever have any problems. Brain aneurysm, I guess. One in a
million chances, really. His daughter, Patsy, was out at the food court, slurping
down a mound of General Tso’s, mall-style. Guess ol’ Chuckie tried to dial 911, but
he had a heart attack before he got the chance. He never ate no salads or nothing,
so it wasn’t much of a shock really. Like I said, he was a real big guy. Real big.
Then, when Patsy showed up about fifteen minutes later, her belly all busting,
and she found them both, Chuckie pancaked out across her momma, the crack
of his rump hanging out like an arm out the car window, well, that girl screamed.
Screamed so loud some guy who was on the street walked straight in, I guess.
Guess he picked up the phone from where Chuckie had dropped it on his way down
and he dialed up the hospital and told them to hurry up, and they say Patsy just
kept on screaming until the cops showed up and brought her into the other room to
quiet her down. A lot of people around here say sometimes when they hear a siren
they think it’s ol’ Patsy’s howl.
So Chuckie took a leave of absence from the ol’ meat department after that
and poor baby Patsy ate and ate and ate until her bones were buried so deep you
couldn’t even tell she had them anymore. They had the funeral. Some of us went.
Some of us didn’t. Had to keep the department running after all. We all felt so bad,
ya know? Mostly because see, while Chuckie was gone, the store manager hired
this new guy. This real tall fella with some real big arms. Not the kind of big arms
Chuckie had either. Strong big. And this guy, he had a different way of doing things.
This guy was all about efficiency, he called it. All about “getting shit done.” That’s
what he told us on his first day, he said, “I’m here to get shit done, boys.” And
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he did. We started chip-chopping away. We had more t-bones nestled into them
Styrofoam plates everyday than I even knew was possible. More than ol’ Chuckie
ever had ready. And they noticed.
The store manager gave away Chuckie’s job like he never even had it in
the first place. Made this guy head of the meat department. Just wanted the
store to do better. That’s all the store managers ever care about really. They don’t
have a care in the world for the people they hire. We’re all just living, breathing
machines, ya know? And so when Chuckie came back, his wife buried
deeper than his daughter’s bones were, and his daughter, little Patsy, all
self-conscious and ugly and red just like him, he didn’t know what to do. And he
slowed down. Way down. Took ol’ Chuck ten times longer to finish a piece than
it ever had before. And this new guy, this tall, early-thirties giant by the name of
Mister. Well, he gave Chuckie a run for his money. He really did.
For a while things just felt tense. Felt like all of us were on some kind of
string and ol’ Chuckie was on one side with his mashed-up life and his kindness
and that scrunched-up, red face of his, and then there was Mister on the other
side, and nobody wanted to mess with ol’ Mister, so we started giving in to his side
of the string a little more. Chuckie tried his hardest to keep up. Started chopping
faster. So fast sometimes the slabs would be seasoned in his sweat. But he fell
short, poor Chuckie. He was always falling short.
One time, Johnny, one of the younger kids in the department, told Mister he
couldn’t stay late on account of having some kind of little kid recital he had to go to
and Mister got real close to him and said, “You stay late or I’ll plate up your fucking
ribs and I’ll put them right out on display with a fucking SALE sign and this whole
damn town can have a piece of you.”
Ol’ Mister couldn’t do no wrong. Got away with that kinda stuff all the time.
Got away with all sorts of stuff. One time he told me to give him my smock ’cause
he forgot his and I had to work in my good jeans all day, bloodied ’em right up and
the wife was real mad. We all used to go out for a drink on Sundays ’cause of the
grocery store closing early due to the Lord and what not, and Mister invited himself
right along. Told us we had to go to Duke’s on the other side of town instead of the
Pub which was real close ’cause he liked Duke’s better, and when we got there,
before he let any of us get a drink, he made each of us take turns standing with our
backs turned in front of the dart board so he could practice. Said he was real good
and “not to worry, boys.” Said it wouldn’t hurt too much if he got us anyways. Said
if it did then we were all pansies. Said this is what would make us men. He got me
right in the middle of my angel wings and it hurt like a son-of-a, but I bit back them

tears cause I knew what would happen if I didn’t. I saw what was happening to poor
ol’ Chuckie and I didn’t know what I would do if that started happening to me.
So one day we were all working away and Mister swings through the doors
and he’s got this big grin on his face, which he never has, and he’s whistling,
which he never does, and he slaps ol’ Chuckie on the back real hard, knocks
his poor glasses straight off into a heap of stew meat, and then he yelps out,
“Wooooheeee!” Then, he settles into his new chair, Chuckie’s old chair, in his new
office. We all shrug at each other like it’s some kind of cartoon. ’Cause really, it
kind of is. We’ve all got aprons on and they’re smeared in hues of red and pink like
we’re wearing some painting by that Picasso guy. And we’re all holding identical
knives and we’ve got little butcher caps on, and in the middle of all of us is old
Chuckie who’s probably thinking about some vacation he had with his wife where
he told her she was all he ever needed, or something like that, and Mister is posted
up in his office chair just whistling away.
A few minutes later, Mister comes out of his office and says he scored with
some real young chick last night. He says he likes them pudgy. He says he likes the
way their rolls fall across his chest when they’re on top. Likes the way their rumps
shake when he’s behind them. And he says he found this one in the food court of
the mall, slurping down a box from Fuji Chen. That she had real nice love handles,
and a real sweet face, and that her name was Patsy and that he was going to fuck
her again and again and again. That he was going to fuck her so hard he was going
to rip her big, nasty body right in half, let all that pudge drool right out of her. And
that Mister, well, he said all this right in front of poor ol’ Chuckie and I’m telling ya,
I didn’t know Chuckie’s face could get redder than it already was. ’Cause he knew
and we knew and Mister certainly knew.
And at that moment we all turned to Chuckie cause we thought he’d throw
the knife straight at him, thought he’d maybe throw it at himself at least. But he
didn’t do anything. He turned around and he went back to hacking and we all knew
he was probably pretending that slab was Mister’s face. He must of been. He just
must of.
That wasn’t the only time though. Mister talked about her nonstop.
Sometimes he’d even grab a piece of meat and plunge his fingers into it and he’d
say, “She likes it like this,” and then he’d twist his fingers around and he’d pull
them out and lick them up, lick up all that mucky, snotty goop, and then he’d slam
his hand down on the counter and he’d sing out “Woooooheeee!” like he was
breathing for the first time or something. A lot of the guys loved it. The horny dogs.
A lot of them would say, does she like it from behind? Or, does she like it in the ass?
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Or, what does she sound like, that little cow?
Patsy was in her early twenties but looked younger. Still lived at home. She
was in community college for a bit but she failed out, I guess. On account of her
mother dying. I don’t really know. Alls I know is that ol’ Chuckie used to keep a
picture of her pinned to the bulletin board in front of his desk, right next to the
order list and a sign that read, “Employees must wash hands before returning to
work.” Like nobody knew that. Like Chuckie needed to be reminded to remind us
or something. It was all yellowed and the corners were crusted over and it seemed
like it had just been there for a real long time and nobody had ever thought to
take it down. People didn’t think to do a lot of things. The picture of Patsy was a
picture of Patsy when she was younger, maybe thirteen or so. And she was in a
cheerleader uniform. Her tummy was peeking out through the red and yellow
sequins. And we all thought she was cute. And I’m sure a few of us thought about
sticking it in her. All guys think that, ya know? Nobody ever acted on it though,
never even said anything out loud, at least not till that guy Mister came around.
We didn’t see Chuckie for a little while. We thought maybe he scooped Patsy
right up and moved her on out of town. But Mister kept on talking. Kept plunging
those fingers into lumps of rib roast and tenderloins and chuck beef, and he kept
on saying “Wooooheeee!” and he kept slamming his hands down and sniffing his
fingers after, and calling us pussies ’cause we didn’t know what it was like to love
one of them what he called “meaty women.” Patsy was too old for her daddy to tell
her what to do anyway. So then we thought that maybe ol’ Chuck had offed himself
or something because little Patsy wouldn’t listen to him on account of her mom
being gone and her being depressed, and he just thought welp then that’s the end
for me.
It gets boring around the meat department, I’ll tell ya. You’ll let your mind
go anywhere. You’re just hacking away all day. Hacking and wiping and sliding the
meat into their plushy little Styrofoam beds, and you’ll sit there and think about
your former boss and how he might do it, how he might off himself. You can’t help
it really. You think about what you would do if you were him. Play that ol’ swapping
game. It makes you appreciate your life a little more I think.
But then, finally, one plain ol’ day, good ol’ Chuckie strolled right on in. His
smock was clean too, cleaner than I’d ever seen it. All them stains had been
scrubbed right out. He looked like a new man, and when he started washing his
hands and making his way to the cutting board, I think we all knew something real
bad was about to happen. Mister was taking his time in the break room having his
morning cup, and it was almost like Chuckie knew that or something. Like he had

studied him. Because ol’ Chuckie had the biggest smile on his face. I’m talking
ear-to-ear. He was the happiest I’d ever seen him. We all said our hellos and he
nodded and then some guy by the name of Carl said, “Hey Chuck, where ya been?
Ya been hiding that sweet daughter of yours?” but Chuck didn’t answer because
he didn’t have to. We just didn’t know that yet.
When Mister came back Chuckie was gone again. We thought maybe he
just went to the bathroom or something. We thought maybe he was just avoiding
Mister. It made sense. Mister walked in and said, “Come on boys, you can
work faster than that” before closing himself in his office. We all knew he was
probably beating it. Every time he came out of that office he looked like he had
beaten it. His face was always red and shiny and his hair was mussed and all
his veins looked like they were going to burst. And so we kept on chopping and
slashing and whacking away and finally it was almost lunchtime and there was
no sign of Chuckie still, so we thought maybe he’d just gone home or something.
Realized he couldn’t handle it anymore. Or maybe he left to off himself for real this
time. We didn’t know. We were just guessing. And so everyone started for lunch
and that’s when it happened. Except we didn’t know it had happened until we got
back. It was real gruesome though, and we all bet that it was a real show. Would
have been a heck of a lot better than whatever we all ate for lunch that day. That’s
one thing I know for sure.
I guess once we were all gone Mister came out of his office, surely looking
like he’d just beaten it real good, and Chuckie was there. Standing there right in
front of him. But he wasn’t the same ol’ Chuckie Hamburg that he’d always been.
He was different this time. Real different. And Mister was real surprised, I guess
he peed himself right there in front of Chuckie too on account of he’d never seen
something like this before.
Chuckie Hamburg, that sweet ol’ rose-cheeked heck of a guy was standing
there all lathered up in different cuts of meat. I’m not kidding you. Head-to-toe
covered. He had sausage-links wrapped around his arms, a whole spiral of them
on each one, curving their way down to his wrists. He had two sirloin steaks
strapped to his chest with butcher’s twine like some kind of breastplate and ol’
Chuckie had all kinds of steak cuts harnessed to his big ol’ belly. There were round
steaks and porterhouse steaks and rib roast and flank steaks and chunks of
hamburg, all of it weaved together like some kind of quilt that shook when he
walked, when he talked, when he laughed. Ol’ Chuckie was some kind of
animal-killing, meat-wearing Santa Claus with his ho ho ho’s, his knees and his
feet dressed up with cuts of sirloin and his face a big ol’ t-bone with holes cut out
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for his eyes and his nose and his mouth. Ol’ Chuckie was wearing some kind of
meat-beard. He was holding a butcher’s knife and he had sharpened and cleaned
up real nice. And ol’ Chuckie knew he had gone off the deep end, he knew it, but
he went for it anyway and I’ll tell ya, that Mister, boy did he scream like a little bitch.
We heard it all the way in the break room, down by the freezers. Mister’s voice like
some kind of siren. Some of the guys thought it was a fire drill or something.
By the time we all made it down there 911 had been called, they wouldn’t
let us see nothing. Mister was taken away and they had ol’ Chuckie all done up
in handcuffs, still wearing the meat-suit in case they needed it for evidence or
something. We always pictured Chuckie’s face behind a t-bone after that. Ol’
Chuckie smiling like he just won a million dollars. We watched the police guys put
plastic down in the back seat of the cruiser before they shoved Chuckie in there
with that bloody slab of meat still strapped to his face, and I looked him right in
his big, sad, wet eyes, and he looked straight into mine and we had a moment, me
and ol’ Chuck, a moment that I sure as shit won’t ever forget. It wasn’t until some
odd weeks later that we found out Chuckie was going to be in the slammer at least
twenty years or so. At that point he might just get a shot at parole, but we didn’t
know what would happen.
A couple of months later we see Patsy in aisle four, the aisle straight in front
of the meat counter, and she’s fiddling with her hair and she’s looking at some
kind of whole grain rice or something, and we all figure that maybe she’s trying to
get healthy now. Tragedy does that kind of stuff to you. She’s looking a little thinner
around the waist. We think maybe she lost a pound or two, and I want to call out to
her, see how ol’ Chuck is holding up in the clink, but I don’t want to depress her or
anything, and that could be a real depressing subject for a girl like her. She looks
up at me and I nod my head at her and she brings her eyes back to the floor and I
figure that that’s probably good enough.
There were times I thought about maybe swinging down and paying ol’
Chuckie a visit. We all knew why he’d done it. There was no question about it,
really. It was pretty obvious. The meat suit was a different story. But it gave him
courage, which is a real hard thing to get for a guy like that. We don’t really talk
about Chuck anymore. Sometimes the guys will joke and pretend to slice the meat
up real nice, real soft, the way Chuckie did. They’ll say, “Wouldn’t want to just stick
my knife in all willy-nilly!” and they’ll laugh like it’s all some big joke or something. I
think I’m the only one who ever really thinks about him though, about how he might
be doing in there. Couldn’t picture a guy like ol’ Chuck in the clink, I’ll tell ya. He’s
just not that kind of guy. And sometimes, when I’m alone, away from the guys, away

from everyone, I’ll put a slab of meat on my arm and I’ll close my eyes and I’ll feel
the weight sink into my skin, right straight down to my bones, and I’ll try to think of
what Chuckie was thinking then. Of what he was thinking when he started suiting
up. I’ll try to steal that courage from wherever it’s hiding in these thick ol’ slabs of
meat. Poor ol’ good ol’ Chuckie. I should really pay him a visit sometime.
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Lobster Girl
Jeanine Marie Vaughn
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Hair Trigger 2.0
“A-a-and we go to the g-g-gross-ary sssssstore every week so I c-c-can see my
lobster friends!” Charlotta had her small hands on the back of the chair that was
a bit taller than she was. She had always been so tiny. Even at seven, she was
the smallest child in her class. She tapped the toe of her shiny black shoe on the
checkered kitchen floor. Her wide, gap-toothed grin showed off the deep dimples
in her caramel cheeks as she danced in place. Her thick cloud of brown hair was
bobbing, held by a blue band.
Michael’s spoon hovered halfway between the bowl of cereal and his mouth,
dripping milk. His dark eyes were bleary under a thick brow, his groggy morning
mind trying to figure out what his daughter was telling him. He took the bite and
chewed longer than he really needed to.
“D-d-did you know that a g-group of lobsters is caaaaalled a pod? Wo-wo-one
is named Ca-Ca-Clara. That’s what Ma-Mama said.”
“Who?” Michael asked, rubbing his coffee-colored cheeks, his hand
scraping against the salt-and-pepper stubble. He really needed to shave before he
took Charlotta back to her mom’s. He was finally getting along with Gretchen, so
he didn’t want his scruffy appearance messing things up.
“Daaaaaad! The llllllllobster!” Her smile had fallen and she was now
fidgeting with the lace on her dress.
Michael took a deep breath. It was tough being a night owl who usually
worked the graveyard shift with a daughter who was an early riser. She’d dressed
herself, eaten her breakfast, and even set the table, so when he stumbled into the
kitchen all he had to do was make coffee. He smiled and gently took her hand off
the back of the chair, turning her to face him.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. Daddy’s still waking up. So you have a friend named
Claire?”
“Clara.” Charlotta said slowly and clearly. “Her name is Clara and she has a
pu-pu-pu-pink band.”
“In her hair?” he asked, swinging her hands.
Charlotta giggled. “No, Daddy! Shhhhhhhe’s a lobster! She doesn’t

hhhhhhhhhave hair!” Her face squinched up with laughter.
Michael smiled. “Oh! Now I understand! Well, she sounds lovely! You’ll have
to tell me all about her on our drive over to your mom’s. Okay?”
She nodded.
“Why don’t you feed Freddy?” He pointed to the goldfish bowl. “Just a
pinch, remember? Then, you can watch your favorite Dora while Daddy finishes
his breakfast and gets ready. Okay?”
She nodded again and hugged him.
He squeezed her back. “You are the best little girl ever, Charlotta. Daddy
loves you very much.”
“I love you, Daddy.” She pecked his cheek, then rubbed her mouth. “Ow!”
He laughed. “I’ll shave.”
She giggled and skipped over to the fishbowl.
The air was muggy and oppressive that evening. While he made the rounds
at his security job, Michael kept himself alert by going over the conversation
he’d had in the car with Charlotta. According to Charlotta, while Gretchen went
shopping, she would let Charlotta sit on the pots in front of the lobster tank and
watch the lobsters. Charlotta confided in him that when nobody was around, she
told the lobsters stories.
“One time,” Charlotta had told him excitedly, “Ma-Ma-Mama sat with me
and w-we named them. Clara’s my favorite.”
He just listened, making the appropriate appreciative sounds, not saying
anything during their drive. When she had quieted for a moment, he stole a glance
and saw that she had her face scrunched up.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Well, Mama bought one a-and she didn’t get Clara. She said it was
because it was for work a-and I wouldn’t get to see it. B-but I wished that she did
get C-Ca-Ca-Clara for me!”
Michael nodded, but he couldn’t quite shake the wrongness of what his
wife, ex-wife, was doing to his baby girl. She probably hadn’t even considered
the fact that Charlotta would be crushed when she found out what was going to
happen to her lobster friends. Plus, the fact that Gretchen was a chef somehow
made it worse.
Shining his flashlight behind a clump of bushes, he decided he would talk
to Gretchen. He would have to be careful with the approach since Gretch had a
history of being spiteful whenever he criticized her parenting. As he reached the
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front of the building, he realized he had a lot more thinking to do. Michael stared
out at the small parking lot, noticing the way the land sloped down to the road in
front and how the beach was just beyond the strip of grass. Thunder cracked in the
distance, promising rain. The clouds were moving in, but the moon was still bright
enough for him to see past the empty road to the high waves rising off the ocean.
Tony, the curly-haired, cocky college kid who shared the graveyard shift
protecting the Robusutā Corporation, was sitting behind the reception desk. His
waifish frame was stretched like taffy as he leaned back in the brown leather
chair, his large Doc Martens crossed at the ankles and propped on the lower half
of the gigantic desk. Somehow, he made the gray uniforms they wore look cool.
Michael’s always looked wrinkled and faded. He was watching the three
monitors concealed just beneath the top portion of the desk and looked up
smiling as Michael strolled through the front door.
“Diggin’ the ringtone, man! I never figured you for a B-52 fan. Retro, truly
retro.”
Michael eyed him suspiciously as he came around the desk. “What’re you
talkin’ about?”
Tony held up a phone in a blue case with a beach scene. “‘Rock Lobster,’
man! Someone keeps callin’.” His pale, freckled lips quirked into a half smile.
“Good thing I like that song ‘cause hearing the chorus fifteen times might drive
someone else to smash your phone, dude.”
Michael shoved Tony’s boots, making him almost fall out of the chair, and
sat on the edge of the desk. He held up his hand and popped out a finger for each
point he made, starting with his thumb.
“One, I don’t have ‘Rock Lobster’ as my ringtone. Two, do I look like the kind
of guy who would have a beach cover for my phone? Three, not my phone. It was
sitting on the desk when I got here. Four, you know the rules, when you’re running
late, you owe me a coffee. And five, you’re sitting in my chair.”
He leaned forward with his open palm and patted Tony on the cheek until
the kid got out of his chair.
Shrugging, Tony set the phone on the desk as he stood up. “So just black
coffee, huh?”
Taking his seat, Michael nodded. He leaned back and closed his eyes.
Tony sighed. “I kinda liked the irony of it all.”
Michael cracked his left eye partially open. “What irony?”
Tony stared off into space, pulling at the thin goatee he had recently started
sprouting. “I guess irony’s not the right word. Synchronicity? My boyfriend would

know, he’s like an English major. But, you know, since this building is like the
lobster building?”
Michael closed his eye again and settled back into his seat. “Yeah, I really
don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Tony snorted. “Robusutā, it means lobster in Japanese. Huh, can’t believe
you didn’t know that, dude! It’s like, in the brochure.” He laughed, shaking his
head as he walked to the door.
It took a few minutes for Tony’s words to sink into his brain. Once they did,
Michael sat up straight and stared at the phone. He’d never been one for signs or
omens, but all these references to lobsters were just too weird.
The phone rang, “Aaaaah-ahhhh-aaaah-ah! Rock Lobster!”
Without even thinking about what he was doing, Michael answered the
phone. “Hello?”
“D-D-Daddy? Is that you?”
Michael almost dropped the phone.
“D-Daddy! I-I-I’mmmmmm ssssssscared! Ca-Ca-Clara wasn’t there and
Mmmmmmama said the lobsters get eated. She’s not here and they’re mad at
me!”
“Where are you, Charlotta? Who’s mad at you?”
“I’m with m-m-my lobster f-f-friends.”
“What? What do you mean?”
He heard a blub-blub sound like someone trying to breathe underwater.
Michael inhaled sharply and tossed the phone. It skittered across the floor,
spinning until it hit the side of a red wedge heel. His eyes rode up the smooth,
mocha leg attached to the boot, taking in a sequined red dress and angular, sweet
face behind some of the biggest red sunglasses he’d ever seen.
“My phone!”
The woman had a high-pitched voice. She clasped her manicured
red-painted fingernails at her chest, leaned over slowly, and picked up her phone.
“It slipped out of my hand.”
Michael didn’t know why he said that.
In her squeak of a voice, she giggled. “Oh, I know that, silly!” She flashed a
brilliant smile. “You were just keeping it safe ‘cause you found it on the desk and you
knew it would belong to someone special. Then it slipped out of your hands and....”
Her voice dropped. “Dude.” Her voice got deeper. “Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude!”
Then deeper. “Hey man, wake up!”
Michael turned his gaze to see Tony setting a styrofoam cup in front of him.
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Jeanine Marie Vaughn

He rubbed his eyes and looked at the desk then the floor, but there was no phone
and no woman.
Tony laughed. Taking a sip of his coffee, he shook his head. “Man, you were
like way out of it.”
“The phone. Where is it?” Michael asked.
Tony shifted uncomfortably. “I took it to the lost and found.” He squinted at
Michael. “Dude, you told me to.”
Michael rubbed his face. “Yeah, of course. Sorry. I’m just overtired. My
daughter was with me last night and she’s like this incredibly chipper morning
person so. . . .” He waved his hand in the air. “Never mind, you don’t want to hear
all that. Thank you.”
Tony smiled wide. “No problem, man. My boyfriend, Drake, he’s like that
too.” He settled in the smaller chair off to the side of the desk. “I’ll like, stay up
all night gamin’ on my night off and when he gets up, he like wants to go for
breakfast. But I’m like, no man, I gotta go to bed and....”
Tony prattled on as Michael thought about the meaning of his dream.
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Charlotta scooched her butt back on the pot where she sat, then leaned
her elbows on her knees, her chin resting in her palms. She stared into the
lobster tank and sighed. No matter how long she sat there and watched the
lobsters swimming in the tank, she couldn’t find Clara.
A tall, wide woman stepped between Charlotta and the tank. She was talking
to the man in the white coat behind the counter. She bent over, her butt inches
from Charlotta’s face. Charlotta leaned back as she slid off her perch.
“I’d like two of those lobsters too. That one with the blue band and,” the
woman paused, shuffling her feet as she slid a finger along the glass, “the one
with the purple band.”
Excited, Charlotta forgot to be shy about her stutter. “Y-you’re taking home
F-Fred and G-Ginger? They’ll make such good pets!”
The woman was standing up again, her greenish gray eyes focused on
Charlotta. “Pets? No, dear. That’s dinner.”
She took the container of lobsters from the man and strode off. Charlotta
stood frozen, staring after the woman, and began to cry.
Nobody really paid attention to her, just a little girl quietly crying. After about
a minute, she started forming a plan. First, she needed to find out if her parents
knew about this horrible thing. If they didn’t, maybe they could help her. If they
did. . . . She shook her head. She couldn’t believe that they knew this and just let

her sit there talking with the lobsters! Second, she needed to save the lobsters.
It was too late for Fred and Ginger and probably Clara, a single tear sliding down
Charlotta’s cheek at the thought, but that didn’t mean the other lobsters needed
to suffer. She wasn’t sure how she was going to do it, but she had to do something.
“Charlotta.” The voice came from inside the tank.
“Yes?” Charlotta crept closer until her face was pressed against the glass.
“It’s me, Clara!” From under the pile of lobsters that had settled at the
bottom, Clara rose up.
“Oh Clara, I thought you were gone!”
“Charlotta, I would never leave you. I know how you can save us.” Her
eyestalks swiveled to the upper right corner of the tank. Charlotta looked where
she was looking and saw a latch that held the top of the tank in place. “Come
back here tomorrow before the store opens, with scissors. When we were brought
here, I overheard one of the humans say that the door by the loading dock doesn’t
always lock. You can come in that way.”
“What’s a loading dog?”
Clara laughed. “Dock, dear. It’s the place where the store gets deliveries.
If you go to the back of the building, you’ll see a place where trucks pull up and
something that looks like a...” She searched her mind for the right image, “a
garage door. Next to that will be a regular door. That door will be unlocked. Well,
it’ll seem locked, but if you pull it hard enough, it’ll open.” Charlotta nodded, biting
her lip. “When you get in, pull the latch on our tank and push it over. The scissors
are to cut our shackles.” She held up her pincers with the pink bands.
Charlotta nodded, pretty certain she could do all of this.
By the time her mom found her, Charlotta had stopped crying. She stood up
straight and looked her mother in her pale blue eyes. “What haaaappens to m-my
lobster friends?”
Gretchen sighed. She had hoped to avoid this line of questioning for
a few years at least. She knelt down on one knee in front of her daughter. Her
knee-length tweed skirt slid up her thigh exposing pale skin peeking through a run
in her beige stockings. “Oh Char. They’re somebody’s dinner. Just like the meat
we eat comes from cows and pigs and chickens, people eat the meat out of the
lobsters, but after they die.” Charlotta’s eyes were wide as Gretchen stroked her
daughter’s dark cheeks with a well-manicured hand. “Dearest, they don’t feel a
thing!”
That night, Charlotta refused to eat any meat.
59
Jeanine Marie Vaughn

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Hair Trigger 2.0
Michael’s phone rang as he was just about to punch out and go home. “Hello?”
“Hi, Daddy.” His little girl’s voice was soft. She sniffled.
“What’s wrong sweetie?”
“I-I have wo-wo-one question. Do you know ‘bout the loooobsters?”
He sighed. “Yes, honey.”
The phone went dead. He shook his head. He had hoped he’d have a chance
to at least talk to Gretchen before this happened, but no such luck. He finished
punching out and put the timecard into its slot on the wall. The rain had happily
stopped, leaving the ground wet and slick.
“See ya later, dude!” Tony waved as he headed to his car. Michael waved
back.
His phone rang again. “Hello?”
“Mike, Char’s gone.” Gretchen’s voice was shaking. “I let her sleep in for a
little bit while I made pancakes, but when I went into her room to wake her, her bed
was cold! I don’t know how long she’s been gone. We had a little fight, but nothing
major....”
“About the lobsters?” Michael asked. Gretchen was silent, but he could hear
her breathing. “Gretch? Hello?”
“How did you know?”
“She told me about her lobster friends and she just called me, a couple of
minutes before you did to ask about what happens to them.”
“She called you? Maybe we can use her phone’s GPS to figure out where she
is. I hope....”
He could hear her swallowing.
“Should I come over?”
“Please? She can’t be far, right? She’s such a little girl.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Michael ended the call and got in his car. Before starting it, he took three
deep breaths. It was gonna be all right.
Michael knocked on the door when he got to the house. Nothing happened.
After three more knocks, he let himself in. Gretchen was sitting at the kitchen
table, still in her robe, with her laptop open in front of her. She was yelling into her
cell phone.
“My seven-year-old daughter is missing! This couldn’t happen at a worse
time!” She breathed heavily, her eyes were closed and her face was red and
splotchy. She blinked back tears. With an effort, she lowered her voice. “I don’t

care that this is being recorded. I understand that this is just a job for you, but I
don’t know where my child is. I hope to God you never have to experience this, but
if you do, you will understand why I want to crawl through the phone and strangle
you.”
Her hand shook as she ended the call. With a howl, she threw the phone
across the room. Michael walked over and wrapped his arms around her. She sunk
into his embrace before remembering herself and pushed him away.
“I have to get dressed.” Her words were clipped and her jaw was tight as she
took off up the stairs.
He sighed, sinking into the chair she’d vacated. The hug had been a familiar
cushion he’d hoped he could fall into, but that was not going to happen.
“The GPS isn’t working!” She shouted through the house as she came down
the stairs, dressed in a yellow tracksuit. Michael didn’t know she owned such
a suit, since she usually dressed business casual even on her days off, but he
said nothing. She hurried through the kitchen and the living room gathering her
purse and keys. “That imbecile from the phone company tried to blame it on me,
saying I hadn’t turned it on. But then his supervisor knew it should have come on
automatically.” She stopped moving and looked at him. “I’ve been thinking about
it and I think I know where she went.”
Michael was surprised. He watched her rummage for her shoes and coat
in the closet, waiting for her to continue. When she didn’t, he took a deep breath.
“Where?”
“Oh!” She sat on the couch putting on her running shoes. “The store. We’ve
walked there several times, it’s not that far. I’m mostly worried that she had to
cross that busy road and she’s out in the cold ‘cause she thought to rescue those
lobsters, but there’s no way she could’ve gotten in. It was just so cold last night....”
A huge sob shook her body.
Michael clenched his hands. He wanted to go to her, but knew that would be
the wrong thing to do. He stood watching her, holding his own tears in.
“Okay.” She slapped her hands down on her knees and stood up. “Let’s go.”
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Jeanine Marie Vaughn
Charlotta had lain in bed for a few hours listening to the distant
murmur of the television and her mom clicking on the computer in the living
room. Eventually, the television went silent and she heard her mom go to her
room. She waited until she heard soft snoring then got out of bed.
Sliding her socked feet across the carpeted floor to where she’d left her bag, she
put it on her back, moving turtle-slow so it wouldn’t rattle. Sneaking to the stairs,

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Hair Trigger 2.0
she took her time going down and held her breath as she opened the front door. It
squeaked. She stood very still until she was sure her mom hadn’t heard. As quiet
as a bunny, she crept out, locking the door behind her.
The sky was the blackest she’d ever seen, but the street lamps lit everything
up. The air was crisp in her nostrils when she breathed in, shivering. There was
no traffic along her street, but when she reached the corner, she realized she was
going to have to cross the three-lane, busy road to get to the supermarket. She
watched the lights as she stood at the crosswalk.
“I’m seven,” she whispered out loud, pulling her bookbag tight. Looking left
and right, she saw no cars. With a deep inhale, she stepped off the curb and
scurried to the other side of the road.
A loud squawk caused her to stumble over the far curb. A racoon dashed
across her path, chittering. Her hand to her chest, she panted until her rabbiting
heart settled.
“Goodness me!” Her voice was louder than she wanted it to be.
She hurried through the brightly lit parking lot and ran to the store closest to
her. Creeping around in the shadow of its exterior wall, she worked her way to the
back of the row of buildings that made up the strip mall. She thought she’d have
trouble finding the door, but as she drew closer she could hear Clara.
“Charlotta,” her lobster friend called, “you’re almost here. See the door at
the top of those stairs? Yes, that one. That’s the one you go through.”
Once she was through the door, it swung shut behind her and everything
was in darkness. Dropping to her knees, Charlotta flipped the bag around to her
front and got it open. She clicked her flashlight on and made her way through the
stockroom, guided by Clara’s voice. She pushed the heavy swinging door wide and
looked at the store in the dark. Everything looked weird and foreign, but with her
flashlight, she was able to find the seafood section easily.
“There you are, pretty girl.” Clara tapped one of her pincers against the
glass.
Charlotta smiled and kissed the glass. She took her bag off her back again
and pulled out a pillow. Laying it on the floor in front of the lobster tank, she stood
on her toes and reached up to grasp the edge of the tank. With all her strength,
she pulled down. As the tank toppled onto the pillow, the lid popped open, water
went everywhere, and Charlotta fell backward, hitting her head.
The lobsters crept out and surrounded her. Sitting up, Charlotta smiled.
“Hello, friends!” They all held their pincers out to her. She rummaged in her bag
until she found the scissors. Then snip, snip, snip, they were all free.

“Thank you, Charlotta!” The chorus of throaty voices made Charlotta giggle.
Clara, who had tucked one of her pink bands behind her left eyestalk,
stepped forward. “For freeing us, we will give you the best gift any human has ever
received.”
The surrounding lobsters looked bigger somehow as they crowded even
tighter around her. Each of them reached out a claw and pinched her.
“Ow!” But even as Charlotta cried out, a curious thing happened. Instead
of hurting, the places where she had been pinched grew warm, and the warmth
spread through the rest of her body. She felt like she was shrinking even as the
lobsters around her were growing. Her sight became sharp, with an intense focus.
She felt like she could almost see through things. She looked down at her hands
and saw that she had pincers instead of hands.
Mom’s gonna be so upset, she thought. Curiously, the thought had no
feeling behind it.
“Come with us, Charlotta,” the lobsters chorused as they scuttled away.
She followed.
As Michael and Gretchen got to the corner, they saw several police cars with their
lights on in the parking lot of the strip mall. The manager of Barny’s Supermarket
was standing in front of his store shouting, “They stole my lobsters! Someone
broke in and stole my lobsters!”
He was waving something over his head that looked familiar. Gretchen
grasped the fabric on Michael’s sleeve as soon as they were across the street. He
turned to look into her wide-eyed stare. She pointed with a shaking finger.
“That’s Charlotta’s pillow!”
He looked at the My Little Pony pillow sham waving over the round man’s
head.
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Jeanine Marie Vaughn
Meanwhile, down by the ocean, a pod of fifteen lobsters crawled toward the surf.
The last one, the smallest, swiveled an eye to look back at the human world
she was leaving behind. A single tear spiraled down the stalk. Charlotta would
never see her parents again.

Diana Chrisman
from Laundry Series, 2016
Author

Hair Trigger 2.0

Author

Hair Trigger 2.0

This Is A Success Story
excerpted from WILD THINGS
Jaimee Wriston Colbert
There are over five hundred diseases that list headaches as a symptom, from
hangovers to brain tumors to the bubonic plague. There’s Encephalitis, which
could kill you or leave you with brain damage, or Mucormycosis, caused by fungi
in the soil, which will severely disfigure you and on top of that there’s an eighty
percent chance it’ll kill you too. If your face is flushed along with the headache
you could have Yellow Fever. If your face is twitching you might have Parkinson’s,
which could eventually kill you, or Tourette’s, which won’t kill you but won’t win
you any friends either. I obsess over diseases the way some pursue celebrities,
with a kind of appalled reverence. Ginger tells me she doesn’t appreciate my input
on her headache, that she suspects it’s a result of too much time in the walk-in
freezer where we work, and not enough in some hot-blooded, barrel-chested, Homo
erectus (she likes the second word) male of the species’ arms, and that when all
is said and done she’ll probably get hit by a bus anyway.
Ginger’s had over a hundred lovers and with all of them, she says, she tried
to convince herself she didn’t want to see them, that they weren’t worth seeing,
but she’d wear herself down and go back for more every bloody time. It was all
about appetite, she said. Abstinence may lead you to God, but in the end hunger
will feed you.
It’s Freddy who’s leading me to God, Frederick Jameson Heinz Jr., not the
catsup Heinz, who I think was part of the John Birch society, right-wing fanatics,
but this might be close. I’m Freddy Jr.’s art teacher at the Community Center’s
After-School Program for teens. He’s the son of a revival preacher, what they’re
calling a prosperity preacher of the prosperity gospel, the ones who preach how
to come to Jesus and make your fortune doing it; we’re talking private airplanes,
yachts, Harleys sent by anonymous supporters, vacations in Hawaii, New Zealand,
Costa Rica, Paris, designer handbags, Prada this and that, and this preacher,
his dad, wears a pinkie ring plastered in emeralds and diamonds—someone is
prospering all right. God knows where the money is, and he knows how to get the
money to you, praise Jesus! the revivalists shout, and I’m ready to commit about
the worst sin you can, around here anyway, which is to say the preacher’s son,
sixteen years old.
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Jaimee Wriston Colbert

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Hair Trigger 2.0
I’m going to fry for this, I tell Ginger.
Be like that Smart chick, she says, was it Pamela Smart? Goes to prison for
having sex with one of her students, gets out and she’s right back at it. Wasn’t
she the one that ended up having a kid with him? Ginger stubs out her cigarette,
stabbing it with the spiked black heel of her boot. We’re on our break at the Bagel
Palace, outside in the alley behind, rain flogging the tin roof of the shed we huddle
under, drops whizzing over our heads.
You’re confusing your Jezebel educators, I tell her. Pamela Smart’s in prison
for plotting the murder of her husband, which she persuaded her teenage lover to
pull off. You’re thinking of Mary Kay LaTourneau, who did it with a twelve year old.
Whatever, he was big for his age, Ginger sniffs. Look at it this way, that she
could do it, do him, well hell, you got to give it to her. She shrugs and straightens
her eyebrows with a licked finger. They have those hard young bodies, Ginger sighs,
and they’ll never be as handsome again.
My father told me about the handsomest man he knew, part
Cherokee, his friend who helped him after my mother died, a generous man. Then
Alzheimer’s struck and the last time my father went to visit him, this handsome
man had climbed up on a cabinet and was howling like a wolf. Just one month
later, my father said, he was gone.
After a careful study of diseases that can kill you I have come to believe
that people have sex to stave off death. Death is in the driver’s seat, the fear of it,
mourning what it’s taken, the embrace of it for some, its inevitability for the rest of
us. Sex stalls things, the physical weave of two bodies, two lives, however long it
lasts means for those minutes anyway death can’t snuff you because you’re part
of someone else. And if it tries to, the old climactic heart attack, you’ll live on in the
other, particularly when he tries to have sex with anyone else.
While not up to Ginger’s stats of a hundred lovers, I do have a history.
There was the baseball player who was actually a minister, but he wore his
Red Sox uniform good and tight around the butt and those well-packed thighs
the way they do, shoulders too. Should be a sin to build a minister with muscles
like his. I figured this minister would rather have been a baseball player, which is
why he and his almost-as-hot friend played dress-up in these uniforms, tossing a
baseball back and forth on the wide green lawn of the United Church of Christ.
When he invited me inside the Parish, the little house they kept their ministers
in, I didn’t have my diaphragm and worried about that, but as it turned out this
muscular minister couldn’t get it up and we didn’t need the thing. Though he sure
seemed to have a good time trying.

It started when I was in kindergarten and used to jingle my necklace with its
silver bells during naptime, and when the teacher made me pull my pallet in the
corner I’d open my legs so Dougie Dorfman, who always got in trouble too, could
see my underpants. There was the cute mute who used to smoke dope on the
rock wall that separated our yard from his, and one day he knocked on my door
when my father was out; I’m in my bra and panties and I let him in. He placed his
hand on my chest and pushed me down on the bed like toppling a tree. Didn’t
even slide my underpants off just twisted them to one side. Which is good time
economy, because he was coming to the sound of my Dad’s Chevy truck roaring up
the driveway and he wriggled out the window, still buckling his pants right
before the key clicked in the lock. The street kid with the waist-length dreads
outside my dorm at art school, townies the rich kids called him, who banged
out a rhythm on whatever he could get his hands on—garbage can lids, old
coffee cans, wailed on a mouth harp too—peering up at my window, that
beguiling grin. When I invited him in I said here, slide down the zipper so I can
change out of this dress; his hand lingering as I knew it would, the dip in my back,
my hips, my butt—he who probably didn’t own a second pair of pants to change
into. Driving home with the rock-and-roll junkie and his car slides off the road
into a Mill Valley stream. Instead of asking if I’m all right, him on top of me and
both of us in the black freezing water, he goes, My guitar! Where’s my guitar!
But I showed him. I spent the night with the baby-faced cop who investigated the
accident.
It wasn’t always this much fun.
There’s getting sandwiched between two greasers on a packed bus in
the city, one thrusting one way the other behind. Another who will forever be
faceless, the salty smell of him like raw shrimp, his breath hungering on my neck,
his hand swimming around inside the waistband of my pants, pressing behind
me in a crowded malasada line at the old Halawa Stadium those years after my
mother was gone and my dad said Why not try Honolulu for a while? This after
we lived in Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles; he just kept heading west. What
could I do, eleven years old, but buy my malasada and Coke? The one in the
Chicalet-yellow Corvette who promised dinner but instead takes me to his house
in Manoa, breaks a popper under my nose and dives down on top of me on the
kitchen floor; we never even made it to his bed. In a van at Sunset Beach, God was
he all of thirteen? Sun like a dragon’s breath and his hand, a little brown snake
wriggling into the open window, stuck inside my bikini bottom, latched on like a
leech. The Panther’s paws squeezing my neck so hard the bruises looked like I’d
71
Jaimee Wriston Colbert

survived a strangling and the dorm R.A. said You have to tell..., his teeth at my
throat, roaring me down into a cave so deep and black it would be another decade
before I could begin to crawl out. Maybe the worst was Mick Knowlton, my surfer
boyfriend, after we moved back to California, San Diego this time, his hurting sex
that made me cry, and how he would comfort me when it was done. He liked to
remind me that his father looked like Kirk Douglas, like this was supposed to make
any difference at all. Shhh, he’d take me in his arms, rock me against his suntan
chest; it’s over now. As if this too, just another thing we are born to endure.
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Hair Trigger 2.0
If you have blurred vision and a sudden, severe headache you might have a
Cerebral Hemorrhage, which means you will probably bleed to death in your brain.
Though you could be a hemophiliac and bleed to death from any orifice. Or maybe
you have Stokes-Adams syndrome, which could stop your pulse due to a heart
blockage—now there’s a way not to bleed to death.
I used to have nightmares about my mother abandoning me, particularly
the years when we lived in Hawaii, a recurring one on Kailua Beach. At least I
think it was my mother, a woman who looked like the photograph on my father’s
dresser, the one in the koa frame with her long black hair flying out, like a hard
wind was blowing and she’s just trying to hold on. In the dream it’s stormy,
pounding surf, its whipped grey froth like a bubbled-over gravy, and the churning
clouds overhead. My mother and I sitting cross-legged on the sand at the
water’s edge, and suddenly a big wave swoops over us, tugging me out. I stretch my
child-arm toward her, still close enough she could grab my hand and hold on, but
she doesn’t. Sits there as my mouth fills up with seawater and I am being dragged
out into those deeper, darker places.
We lived in Kawela, a three-room cottage in the Norfolk Pines. At night
geckos chirped and the trade winds whispering through the open screens, and
I pretended she was there too. Would she have made my clothes? Made us all
manner of delectable food, instead of the nightly Spaghettios, my dad’s signature
dish? I imagined watching her get ready to go out, the tangy scent of her—my
father would keep her well stocked in French perfumes. Her small, rounded
shoulders in a sleeveless shift, her tiny waist in the fit of it, the matching heels.
Then my father would go out and I’d feel a small terror that he wouldn’t return and
hunker down in his closet, inhaling the Old Spice fragrance of his shirts.
On my wedding night, room service at the Kahala Hilton sent up the customary
champagne, and right beside it in a decorative crystal decanter the milk my new

husband ordered for his pregnant wife and fetus. The next day we flew to where I
live now, fourteen hours later and my history unmade.
After viewing the Bodies exhibit in New York, with its jars of fetuses at various
stages of development, Ginger tells me as we’re trying to flag down a taxi, about
the illegal abortion she had back in the sixties when they poked something metal
up you to dislodge it, only she was a dancer in those days with tight musculature
and nothing happens. So she goes home, and later that night she’s doubled over
in the bathroom, cramping, bleeding, and she catches the little twelve-week-old
fetus as it slides out of her, holding this thumb-sized, curled-up sea monkey, her
mother calling from downstairs, Everything OK up there? For the rest of her life,
Ginger tells me as we climb into the cab, she will have recurring nightmares about
what happened next: flushing it down the toilet.
When I gave birth to Pet I hyperventilated and passed out. I had read that
in 1940 hyperventilation was used to alter a woman’s perception of pain during
labor, forever after known as Lamaze. I figured, why bother with the classes? Scared
the bejesus out of my OB, whom when I explained about this later said, Well sure,
and once upon a time they punched you in the jaw to knock you out before surgery.
You can bleed to death from a childbirth hemorrhage, or a botched abortion
for that matter.
73
Freddy Jr. said to come to the revival service because he has to be there, his
parents said so, and maybe we could sneak out, he said, there’s an old
abandoned building next door and there’s bats in it. His eyes shone, pupils small
and black as pepper. He grinned but I wasn’t sure at what, me or the bats? We
haven’t done anything yet, at least nothing I could be arrested for. A tentative kiss
in the playground tunnel as we walked through the park behind the Community
Center, and it was him yanking me in there, one of those frothy canvas things
painted to look like something that flies. I thought maybe he’d smell like bubble
gum or puberty sweat, but there was no scent, just the push of his chapped lips
against mine, the tenderness of his tongue licking my palate. Monty! he sighed,
blushing. I had told him to say my name, that whispering Ms. Trent while he kissed
me didn’t do much for the libido.
Working with clay at the Center it was Freddy’s hands, running up and down
the wheel’s spinning, sloppy movement, attempting to shape something or other
and I put mine over his and felt that sixteen-year-old fire. You have great hands, I
said, and he thought I meant his potential as a sculptor or someone who makes
clay pots, which I think showed a kind of maturity.
Jaimee Wriston Colbert

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Hair Trigger 2.0
When the thousands of migrating birds soar through the night over New
York, you can watch them from the Empire State Building’s observation deck,
eighty-six floors up. With the city lights illuminating them from below they look
like little shooting stars. Peregrine Falcons, once on the brink of extinction but
who have now adapted to life on the skyscrapers, pick off a good hundred or so
every season. This is a success story. They must think they’ve died and gone to
heaven, the skies raining goodies, the ultimate piñata. They hover up in the clouds,
waiting to swoop down on the migrants like bats on a mosquito. I read in a poem
that bats can’t fly up, as in they can’t lift off; they have to swoop down to glide.
Figuring poems aren’t necessarily a source for facts I looked this up on the
Internet and never found it. What I did find was a report from some classroom
where the kids studied bats, and one little budding CEO proposed that the reason
bats hang from their feet is because it’s easier than hanging from their thumbs.
What the poem was really about was the coroner’s report from the poet’s brother’s
death: heroin, cocaine, marijuana, unresponsive.... When my dad found my mother
unconscious in their bed it was already too late, but he called 911 and told them
she was unresponsive. Not cocaine or heroin, the old fashioned way, her wrists
sliced open with a razor. Probably he had to throw away the mattress and definitely
the bedding, though I never asked and he never said. I was in the next room, three
years old and she put me to bed first, as I picture it, kissed me and tucked me in,
told me she loved me. Sometimes I think I can still catch a whiff of her, a mingling
of cinnamon and defeat. Maybe my father was supposed to come home before
he did. Stopped for gas, groceries, traffic sluggish, a meeting that ended too late.
Maybe if I had cried for her, the sound dragging her out of her perpetual sleep,
back into her life as my mother.
The poem began with a bat and ended with one, falling to glide; gliding to
rise.
Here’s what I know about bats. The deadly White Nose Syndrome is a new disease
and its affecting bats throughout the Northeast. Thousands of them have died
from New Hampshire to Virginia. A bat colony right here someplace in upstate New
York has had a catastrophic level of deaths in young bats, this article said, which
means not a lot of old bats down the line. They call them maternity colonies, where
female bats gather under the roof of a barn or attic, maybe even Freddy’s old
building, where whatever heat there is rises to the ceiling—they like it hot—to bear
and raise their pups. If they have this disease they get a white fungus on their
muzzles, wings and tails, become emaciated and die. The females give birth to

just one baby and many of these babies have disappeared. Reports are that the
mothers are abandoning their babies.
I read about stuff like this to avoid doing other things, such as my
paintings. I’ve got enough talent, whatever that is, to teach it to kids. Why would the
world need one more mediocre painting that says nothing about diseased bats,
disappearing pups, the things that are here then gone?
Of course there’s also Histoplasmosis, a fungal infection contracted by
inhaling dirt or dust where the fungus has grown in soil enriched by bat guano.
Or how about rabies, the majority of recent cases having been spread by infected
bats? Viciousness, rage, excitability; after this comes paralysis then death.
What I’m afraid of is if I go to that revival Freddy Sr. will see it in me, the bad,
and drag me down front to try and save me. I’ve been to one of these before, with
my husband when we still thought there was a chance, and nothing excites them
like finding the worst person in there, waving their fleshy arms in the air, belting
out their hymns while somebody leads you down all blazing hot and airless under
the lights in front, then Freddy Sr. will put his hand on your forehead and you fall
back with the spirit, or because you’re so stifling you’re about to faint, and start
babbling in tongues or some such thing. Then you’re supposed to be healed, sins
washed clean, good to go. Except with this one, the prosperity gospel, for the rest
of your remaining days as a reborn prosperous Christian you’re supposed to give
all your money to their church, then pray for more. God knows where the money is,
Freddy’s father was quoted in the newspaper, and he knows how to get the money
to you.
I ask Ginger to come with me but she says no, that so many Jesus freaks
under one tent gives her the willies. She shimmies her head, her shoulders,
her hair the dyed color of a mango. We’re working our shift at the Bagel Palace,
rubbing our gloved hands up and down the rumps of bologna, hunks of roast beef,
slicing deli turkey, shredding the ham for the Palace’s famous ham and egg bagel
sandwich. We’re the meat ladies. I come here before or after teaching because
part-time at the Center doesn’t give me near enough money to pay child support
to my ex-husband, who does nothing all day while Pet is at kindergarten but lie
around what used to be my house too, toking cigarettes, chugging beer, eyeballing
ESPN, you name it and it’s not getting a job. But because I’m the bad seed who left
our son alone one day while he napped, for a dalliance with another man, Jody’s
lawyer called it, I get to pay the piper—that was my husband’s way of putting it. You
screwed the pooch, Monty! Another of his witticisms. Jody boinked his skanks at
night while Pet and I slept, which by rule of the court makes him the model parent.
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Jaimee Wriston Colbert

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Hair Trigger 2.0
The town I live in, Jody’s hometown, is on the Susquehanna, cited as
one of America’s most endangered rivers—we’re talking raw sewage, animal
carcasses, fertilizer run-off, industrial chemicals, human sludge and waste of all
things mechanical to old barns fallen in, anything heavy enough to sink, and even
not, judging by the prevalence of plastic tampon applicators whizzing by on the
current. Eventually it empties into the Chesapeake, at a place ironically enough
called Havre de Grace. On the night a man dove into all of this, I slept, waking
to what sounded like a trainwreck, a tornado, the growl of engines battling flood
stage currents, the sound that something inside me knew even before the news
told it, was death.
Last time I called my father he was trying to get my grandmother up. Home
for him now is St. Louis, his mother’s house. Am I dead yet? she asked. I pictured
her hunched into a sitting position at the edge of her bed, her blunt shoulder
blades, soft doughy skin of her back as he removed her wet nightgown, slipping a
dry one over her head. On the days when she is unable to get up at all (and there
are more and more of these) he changes the wet sheets right out from under her,
sliding fresh ones on. Am I dead? I heard her ask again.
Here’s another thing about bats: they fly at night around the bridge
he jumped from into the roiling river water below. They look like little black
firecrackers shooting up into those bridge lights, then soaring down, winking out. I
guess the lights attract mosquitoes, which attract the bats, but what attracted the
man?
How hopeless was he, the man who jumped? What is the line for this, where
on one side of it we hold forth, soldier on; step over it and we slit our wrists. Earlier
in the week I went back on antidepressants. A partial list of things that made me
miserable:
Squirrels huddled in the rain.
Rain.
Stop-Loss and the exhausted soldiers—kids, eighteen, nineteen, whose only
hope for college, for a life was to sign-up, sent back to war again and again.
Manhattanites who live in designer high-rises, and in our little upstate town
half of Main Street is boarded-up, its black and empty storefronts.
Birds dropping like wet leaves onto the feeder in the dark fist of a spring that
may as well be winter, for all its rain, rain, rain.
The chiming of my phone that day when before I picked it up life was one
way—I had just returned from buying a steaming mug of Green Mountain coffee,
chocolate milk and peanut butter crackers for Pet from the Quickstop, both of

us settling in to watch Animal Planet, Pet’s favorite—and after I hung up it was
something else, the lawyer’s call that my son would no longer be allowed to live
with me. My insatiable appetite, they called it. They weren’t talking about food.
The rain has finally stopped and the late afternoon sky is the color of
dishwater when I get to the revival, figuring I can sneak in at the back of the
tent, lift up one of the flaps and if Freddy is looking for me he’ll see me, and if he’s
not, well, I’ll consider it a sign. Maybe from Jesus himself, who knows? Suffer the
little children... only I don’t think he meant Freddy. Who I see right away as I slip
inside and head up the bleacher stairs, two by two to the top. He’s in the front row
beside a jowly woman with pink hair. His back is to me and his head is down, and
I can see the outline of those diamond-hard shoulders through his white shirt,
that perfect triangular shape of a teenaged boy. My heart is beating too hard, my
breath in my throat.
So the worst has already happened, my son living with Jody who sued for
custody to punish me, locking me into a financial obligation that’ll keep me rubbing
bologna rumps and trying to convince yawning teens that art matters for the rest
of my attractive years—by the time Pet’s finished college I figure I’ll be dried up.
What’s at stake? I think, listening to them belt out some hymn then another, hands
pulsing upwards, and Freddy Sr., who isn’t too bad looking himself, though with
the well-fed middle-aged man’s gut bubbling over his belt, its giant silver buckle
that I can see from here has a cross on it (I’m betting it’s real silver), howling about
the wages of sin and being saved from the bad we do in the name of the devil to
do good in the name of Jesus (he pronounces it Jay-suss). The air inside the tent
is stagnant, the dankness of our sodden spring compounded by however many
sweaty bodies, arms waving madly. Wages of sin, I’m thinking, these prosperity
gospels give that a whole new meaning. Maybe he’s saying you can buy yourself
out of the bad you’ve done, for a price and you’re home free. What would it cost
me, how many decades of beefy contributions in the offering plate to purchase my
soul back after I lost it, snorting a line with the bouncer at the 8th Street Bar then
blowing him in the storage closet while my two year old napped in his crib, a mile
away.
Freddy Jr. as if on cue twists his neck around, stares up at me and grins,
makes a motion with a jerk of his heart-breakingly blond head toward the flap of
the tent that leads out. He whispers something to the pink-haired woman who
nods, then gets up, that lanky, jangly body with its adorable teenaged butt and
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Jaimee Wriston Colbert

moves toward the exit, with me lingering just long enough for him to step outside
before I’m there too.
I asked my father once if it was because of me, a kind of prolonged
post-partum depression, and he shook his head. She was just a lost person, he
said; I thought I could save her.
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Hair Trigger 2.0
Bats are warm-blooded animals that bear their young live and nurse
them, leaving them with the other babies while they fly off in search of food.
Bats eat about six hundred mosquitoes an hour, one bat, six hundred biting,
blood-sucking bugs. Bats are good, Freddy tells me and I nod, though stare up at
the rafters where they hang like bunches of bananas, with a little trepidation, the
building old and decayed and smelling of some sort of rot—just another structure
that once housed some failed business long since abandoned when hard times
struck. Hard times have been going on in upstate New York for Freddy’s entire
lifetime. It’s called torpor, Freddy explains with an impressive authority—what did
I know about when I was sixteen beyond smoking pot and inviting some boy or
another inside my pants. When they rest their temperature drops, he tells me, to
whatever the temperature is around them. So on a rainy day they’d feel pretty cold,
he says.
Freddy’s eyes are glowing in the sunset dark of the room, or what I imagine
to be near sunset, who knows with the thatch of grey sky outside thick as a shag
carpet. Did you know, he says, that during their mating season males will do it with
a female just coming out of torpor where she’s all sluggish, and when that’s done
they’ll go after another female, even other males. They’re promiscuous, he tells
me, flashing that grin. I know that word, he says.
Huh, I grunt, and grab his hand that’s been nervously fiddling with the
buttons on my shirt cuff as if opening these will expose something. I
consider a strategic placement on my inner thigh but feel instead its smoothness,
its newness. Slender long fingers, already formed, not like Pet’s that are encased
in baby fat, the dimples where one day his knuckles will protrude, grow hairy, and
then he’ll become a man. How much of that growing up, I wonder, will I be there for?
A weekend here and there, take him to a ball game like the non-custodial dads do,
a hotdog then home to Jody and his skank of the week? Though maybe that’s not
entirely fair. After all it was my father who stayed with me, my dad who didn’t give up.
The wreck of the building is drafty and I shiver, watching the bats start to
stir, a wiggle of an oversized ear here, a sketchy wing there. Bats are not pretty

animals. Freddy slips his arm around my waist, not with the sureness of a man,
rather the boy trying to figure out what the next step should be. Let’s sit, I tell him,
thinking I’ll help him along, as we collapse onto the cold concrete floor. I run my
fingers through his hair, his scalp warm and a little oily—amazing how teenage
boys can feel hot even during these damp spring days, their inner furnace fueled
by raging hormones. A memory of a night when we lived in Hawaii, on the beach
with one of them, sneaking out after my dad was asleep, snuggling up with this
hot-blooded boy in a sleeping bag on the sand, trade winds blowing the palms
above us, rattling their fronds, the moon coating everything with a milky, stippled
white. I barely knew him but let him do what he wanted; what did I have to lose?
Freddy’s hand has made it to my breast and I can feel his fingers trembling.
My heart thrums in my chest and there’s that familiar ache, that physical yearning,
but something else too, more empty, a longing, but for what I’m just not sure. I take
his hand in mine and kiss his fingers. Do your parents do things with you? I ask
him.
He shrugs, What do you mean?
I don’t know, ball games? I stare at him, his funny, distant look that won me
over his first day in my art class. A look like he’s with you, but not. Like maybe he
has another, more essential life somewhere else.
They’re pretty busy, he says. We have a lot of stuff though. I nod, remember
Ginger telling me I should do the preacher instead of his son. People think the Holy
Spirit has commanded them to write checks to those guys, she said. That’s got to
beat the Bagel Palace.
The bats are randomly flying about, a chaos of flapping wings above us, then
gliding out through a hole in the wall near the ceiling, one after the other. They’re
going to look for food, Freddy tells me. It’s sunset. He points to a weak orange light
shining through a cracked window; some of the clouds must have finally cleared. I
gaze at Freddy, his golden arm hairs in the pale light, the perfect line of his spine,
his expensive haircut purchased by the grace of the prosperity gospel. They’ll find
their food by echolocation, he says, where they make these little noises, clicks
and purrs, and bat mothers find their babies that way too, making sounds that the
babies recognize. But they’re not blind. People think bats are but they’re not.
I have a sudden image of my father making clicking sounds to my
grandmother as he brushes her hair, my grandmother who has macular
degeneration and can no longer see. She was once an impeccably dressed
woman, her cashmere jackets, sensible pumps, the best bridge player in her
neighborhood; a former librarian who taught my dad to treasure books, my dad who
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Jaimee Wriston Colbert

ead to me every night for years, even after I no longer wanted him to he insisted on
that half hour, the two of us. How must she feel now, or maybe she doesn’t, can’t
think it, remember it long enough to know, that all of it is gone? The most intimate of
one’s grooming, using a toilet, is beyond her. In a glimmer of her former droll humor
she said to me when I visited them six months ago: Not a problem, I just wet. She
keeps losing weight, dissolving away. Is my father afraid of her dying? Or perhaps
he’s afraid of her not dying and losing more and more of her every day. Does he
worry that one day he’ll wake up and the woman that was his mother won’t be
there?
I think about cluing Freddy in on the White Nose disease, about how a
number of those bats he’s watching fly into the night may not return. Do you know,
Freddy. ...I picture myself saying to him, staring straight into his earnest eyes,
the eyes of a child still filled with something like hope. But why spoil it for him.
Besides, maybe enough will survive and eventually become like the Peregrine
Falcons, hanging out in the clouds, under the stars, hovering over a world filled with
migrants, theirs for the taking. A success story.
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Good Men and Bad
Patricia Ann McNair
I met a man on the road, one of many. I was twenty.
“Where to?” he asked, as most did.
He drove a station wagon. In the rear of it—I know this because I always looked
closely at the insides of cars before I got in, clues could be found there: good man
or bad? Groceries, good. Filthy magazines, bad. I was usually right—he had blankets
and a pillow and a large portrait of Jesus. Blond Jesus, blue-eyed Jesus. In a gold
frame, like something you would put over a couch, maybe, or a fireplace. Good man,
I thought, although I didn’t know for certain. The clues were complicated.
“Next state,” I said, hopeful. I leaned in through the passenger side window. I
smelled burnt tobacco and sweat and chocolate.
“Git in,” he said. “Let’s see how far we can git ya.” (Git, I noticed, he said it like
that: “git.”)
“Bill,” he said, and nodded some. I could see his eyes in the rearview mirror.
He could see mine. His were dull, yellowed and gray.
“Steve,” I said.
“Smoke?” Bill said and pulled a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket. The
red on the box was greasy with fingerprints.
“No thanks,” I said. “Don’t smoke.”
He turned and looked at me for a second. His eyebrow, the right one, had a
scar through it, a white, bald line. Sometimes I asked the men I met on the road to
tell me the stories of their scars, but that usually came later, once we had known
each other some. I looked Bill over. He wore suit pants and a white shirt, good
clothes, church clothes, possibly (it may have been a Sunday; I don’t fully recall) but
they were threadbare at the spots of most wear. Knees. Cuffs. Bill was not an old
man, I could tell, his hair was the color of the dirt along the banks of the river where
I’d slept the night before, brown and rich.
“Yeah,” he looked at the road and slid the pack back into his shirt. “Me
neither.”
Whose cigarettes then, I wondered. Whose smoky smell? I felt a prickle of
something on the back of my neck. It felt cold and blue. (I can feel colors. I’ve felt
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them since I was a child in the pitch black of my bedroom: my father’s voice felt
red, my mother’s a watery pink, the sighs between them were silver.) I put my
hands on the top of my pack on the floorboard between my feet. Beneath the flap
I kept the Bible I’d found on a park bench, and protection. Nothing much, small
caliber. Enough though, I’d discovered along the way.
We exchanged small talk. The weather (warm for autumn), the price of gas
(high).
“I can pay my share,” I said, in case that was something he wanted.
“No, not necessary. Keep your money,” Bill said. He waved a hand between
us. There was black in the lines of his palm, dark circles left from old blisters.
“If you’re sure,” I said. He didn’t answer. We rode quiet for a while.
“Been on the road long?” Bill asked after a bit. He eyed me in the rearview.
“Some,” I said. “You know,” I said. “Just trying to find my way. My place.”
“Where’d you come from?”
There was no easy answer to this question for me. Just now, most recently,
Missouri. I’d worked the door at a bar in St. Louis, but there’d been some trouble.
A few fights. I could have told Bill that.
“Out West,” I said, though. Because I thought it was a better answer for what
he was asking. “My people are still there. Family.” We passed a cemetery, with
modest stones in rows up a rise of browning grass. Plastic flowers in bundles all
over them. A sign at the cemetery’s edge was one of those anti-abortion kind. With
a baby ten feet high looking over the highway and smiling, shining pink gums and
no teeth. “Choose life, Baby,” the sign said.
Bill snorted. “Yeah,” he said, almost too quiet for me. “Like life’s so damn
great.”
“Got something on your mind, Bill?” I turned to him and he looked at me.
He gnawed on the inside of his cheek; the muscles in his temple worked. He
wanted to say something, I could tell. People—men—on the road mostly do talk, I’d
noticed. They would say things to a stranger in the front seat of their car they never
did before, they would tell things no one else knew. I can’t say why for sure, but it
happens all the time. It’s a phenomenon I mean to study closer someday.
“Nah,” Bill said after a bit. He looked back at the road. We drove on without
speaking. It was autumn and this was the Midwest and I was glad for it. I loved the
gentleness around us, the amber slopes, the long charcoal stripes of highway that
split the harvested cornfields, the grassy ditches that trilled with small life sounds.
There was not a mountain in sight. I was glad for that, too. I was a long, long way
from home.

I didn’t realize I was asleep until I wasn’t anymore. Bill’s hand was on me, my
knee, and he pressed his fingers hard in.
“Shit,” I said before thought came. I struck his hand away. We were driving
still, the cornfields had given way to trees, tall and going gold and red. They were
fiery streaks through the window and I knew we were going too fast.
“Bill,” I said. “Sorry,” I said. “You frightened me.”
When I looked, he was crying. Tears and snot were smeared down his face.
His mouth was open like he might scream; I could see the grayed fillings in his teeth.
“Oh,” he said. More like a moan than a word. “Oh.”
And he drove faster yet.
There was no one there but us. Not just in his station wagon, but on the
highway and the nearby woods. Just two men. I learned as a child how to find
animals in the forest by looking for horizontal lines among the vertical ones. Trees
rise up, animals run across. I thought I saw a deer in the trees, a long stretch of
something tawny. But we were going too fast. It might have been a downed log.
“Bill,” I said again. I put my hand on his shoulder, gently, tenderly. I’d done this
before. An overture, usually, one of the ways I made money to keep on.
He leaned his face against my fingers, my knuckles. He kissed them, and I
let him. He eased his foot off the accelerator some. I turned toward him in my seat,
readying myself. I saw Jesus over my shoulder, looking away from us, held in place
by gold borders.
When I put my other hand on Bill’s thigh, I felt the heat of him, and the sticks
of his bones.
“No,” he said, and put his hand on mine. “Not that,” he said. “That’s not what
I need.” And he hiccoughed a little, a bit of his crying caught in his narrow chest.
“Listen,” he said, “that’s what I want. Just listen.” As I have said, men on the road
like to talk.
Bill told me. About his niece, whom he’d loved, only unnaturally so. About
when he lived with his brother and his brother’s family. About the nights he’d enter
the little girl’s room, hold her when she cried. She was five, six. God, he loved her.
“She lit me,” he said. Perhaps he meant that she had let him, but it sounded
like lit and that was most likely true, too.
All the while he talked he stroked my hand on his stick thigh. I felt my skin
grow raw under his palm. It hurt to sit there. It hurt to listen.
Did it matter that the girl loved him, too? Bill asked me that. The question
sounded well worn, like he’d asked it dozens of times. To himself, at least. Perhaps
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Hair Trigger 2.0
to others. I don’t think I was his first. No reason for that, but I just don’t think so. Did
it matter, he wanted to know. Because she did, he said. She did love him. She made
room for him in her bed. She liked to wash his hair in the bathtub.
And that’s when I thought I might be sick. I told Bill so and he looked at me in
the rearview mirror, eyes on eyes. “Car sick,” I said. But he knew that wasn’t it.
“Soul sick, you mean,” he said, and wiped a hand across the slobber on his
face. He pulled the car over. I opened the door and grabbed my pack and made it to
the weeds in the ditch just as I started to gag. Nothing came up. Bill eased the car
back onto the highway and hit the gas. The passenger door slammed as he drove
away.
A doe leapt across the highway in front of him; I watched. The station wagon
screeched and swerved and missed and then a fawn, small and spotted, was there
in the road and Bill hit her. The impact threw her over the hood of his car, then the
roof of it, and she (I thought it must be a she, I can only imagine why) tumbled over
the blacktop and onto the shoulder. She stood, and I ran toward her, hopeful, ever
hopeful (there is so much resilience in the young, after all) but she ran away, her
legs buckling until she fell in the grass at the edge of the trees where the station
wagon had come to rest too, its front end broken nearly in two against the solid,
broad trunk of a maple.
There was silence and then sound. I can never forget that. It comes to me
in dreams sometimes, in the glow of my nightlight. It feels thick and purple. I don’t
know who or what made the sound. It was a keening, I think, that is the closest word
to describe it. The fawn’s mother stood among the trees, I ran, the fawn stilled in the
ditch, Bill bled over his steering wheel. The spreading purple noise could have come
from any one of us.
I pulled the gun from my pack just in case, but I could see when I was close
enough that the fawn was already dead, and mercifully so. I held the gun in my
hand and moved toward the car. Bill was alive. Also a small mercy to my mind.
Because it seemed to me that there must be suffering in Bill. In suffering he might
find forgiveness, I thought. (I was so young, remember, I had not yet
finished reading the whole of the Bible I’d found, I didn’t know yet how things
worked.) In suffering, he might find peace. God. He might find God.
I passed the car and saw that there was blood on the face of Jesus. The gold
frame had split apart. I walked on up the road, the keening still purple in my ears.

Diana Chrisman is a fine art photographer who regularly exhibits both
nationally and locally and many of her images have won awards. She is
a member of several photographic groups in the Chicagoland area. Her
image, “Life Begins” exhibited at the Oak Park Art League, was published
in the Hemingway Review. Her work can be seen online at
www.dianachrisman.zenfolio.com.
Laura Citino is a fiction writer and essayist from southeastern Michigan. In 2013,
she received her MFA in Fiction from Eastern Washington University. Her work
has appeared in numerous journals in print and online, including cream city
review, Gigantic Sequins, Blue Earth Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and others.
She currently teaches in a program for academically talented youth and serves
as Managing Editor for Sundog Lit. Find her online at www.lauracitino.com.
CONTRIBUTORS
Jaimee Wriston Colbert is the author of five books: a new linked story
collection, Wild Things; the novel Shark Girls, finalist for the Foreword
Magazine Book of the Year; a linked stories collection, Dream Lives of
Butterflies, gold medalist in the 2008 Independent Publisher Awards; a
novel, Climbing the God Tree, winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Prize;
and the story collection Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile, winner of the
Zephyr Prize. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals,
including The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and New Letters,
broadcast on “Selected Shorts” and archived in New Letters on the Air. Recent
stories have won the Jane’s Stories National Story Award; the Isotope Editors’
Fiction Prize; a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and the Ian MacMillan Fiction
Prize. Her new novel Vanishing Acts, is forthcoming in 2018. Originally from
Hawai’i, she is Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY, Binghamton University.
Patty Enrado’s debut novel, A Village in the Fields, was shortlisted for the
Seventh William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, Fiction 2016. She holds
an MA from Syracuse University’s Creative Writing Program and lives in the San
Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two children.
Aaron Gilbreath is an essayist and journalist whose stories have appeared in
Harper’s, Kenyon, The New York Times, and Paris Review. An editor at Longreads,
his personal essay collection Everything We Don’t Know came in November,
and This Is: Essays on Jazz comes out in August. He’s working on a book about
California’s San Joaquin Valley. You can find him @AaronGilbreath.

Chelsea Harris has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, So to Speak, The Fem,
Quaint Magazine, pamplemousse, and Your Impossible Voice, among others.
Chelsea received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago and serves as the
event coordinator for Fifth Wednesday Journal.
Tina L. Jens is an adjunct instructor in the Fiction program at Columbia
College Chicago where she teaches fantasy writing. She’s a recent recipient
of the Rubin Family Fellowship for an artist residency at Ragdale. She’s
had nonfiction published in numerous newspapers and magazines and
short fiction in more than seventy publications. Her first novel was a final
nominee for the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild Awards. One
of her short plays is receiving its second production this summer, in Florida.
She blogs about writing at Blackgate.com, and runs the Gumbo Fiction Salon
reading series in Chicago. Though her website is still under reconstruction, you
can find her at TinaLJens.com.
Patricia Ann McNair’s collection of short stories, The Temple of Air, has
received a number of honors, among them the Chicago Writers Association
Book of the Year Award in Fiction, Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen
Reading Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Finalist Award. McNair’s
fiction and creative nonfiction have been widely published in journals and
textbooks such as RiverTeeth, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, and
others; her work has received a number of awards from the Illinois Arts Council.
McNair is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department, and the
recipient of Columbia College Chicago’s Excellence in Teaching Award. Her essay
collection, And These Are The Good Times will be released in September 2017.
CONTRIBUTORS
James Renner is the author of the novels The Man from Primrose Lane and The
Great Forgetting. His most recent book is True Crime Addict, a nonfiction thriller.
He lives with his wife and children in a house in Akron with an odd little door in
the corner of one room.
Jeanine Marie Vaughn lives in a town with more dead people than living just
outside of Chicago. She runs the webzine cemeteryguardians.com and a
library-based open mic called the No Shush Salon (noshushsalon.blogspot.
com). She works in two libraries and will soon be going back to school to
become a librarian.