BIRTHDAY by Lauren Hilger
On a stone wall, no one around I stole my mom’s mink stole
I stare the doe in the face self-reflection in a lap pool
March, my month, cold I want this to be the last awful
cake white on white of winter
my mother sends daffodils in an open courtyard
that are chives unblooming I wait for Jane Kenyon—
thunder over the meadow we hide how much we love
will you allow yourself this so as to appear merely happy
Old Style Russian, March 19, 1805 I am like a railroad tycoon
Lise dies, Prince Nikolay is born with a stack in my hands
How you felt in 6 PM sun— my hood
somewhere makes the view a circle
how remarkable the green isn’t lurid it’s just
if she and her dog were near mossy
would I ever, if not now, be ready for her visit
Issue 6 Contents NEXT: Two Poems by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Reprise by Kathleen Hellen
Reflex. Automatic. My son with that look when I slapped him.
Something in the genes, the violence of pathways reenacting:
biologies of caterwaul of bottle-fights of fists into the wall.
I saw Mother with her twin colossals jug-drunk dancing jigs. Her laugh,
big or bigger, her three sheets to the wind—My Father’s hands like blackened mitts.
I wanted none of it—that phonograph. The crankpin, that turntable
that played the groove over and over. I put the toys away. A ball,
a holstered gun. Things to tell me I was having fun.
Issue 6 Contents NEXT: Birthday by Lauren Hilger
PERSISTENT DESIGN by Nate Pritts
Wasps keep circling
the shutters, long stalks
of grass dangling
from thin back legs,
and when they crawl between the slats
into the small dark,
they bring their greeny materials
with them.
There is nothing here
you can’t leave. Despite
all your kind diligence,
the actual time, the slow
and loving duration of our attentions,
there is nothing in this world
we can’t abandon.
We are human.
The movements of wasps
are terrible, hovering
sometimes, sometimes
jabbing through the air.
I watch them at their task—
how they build
and build again
calmly.
Issue 6 Contents NEXT: Two Poems by Joy Ladin
FIRST WINTER by Hala Alyan
Our bodies are urns full of rain,
spilling during the harvest. The elders
speak of clemency. The army marches on.
We watch them across the ocean,
speak their undead name in our sleep.
Some of the sisters still make mosques
in abandoned lots. They auction their gold
for Allah’s ninety-nine names, while
the neighborhood boys hawk the spires
for cocaine. In the hour of the blizzard,
the devout speak of owls rising from
fossil. When they bathe, they hear
children’s voices in the pipes, open their
mouths wide to catch that scalding
song. Their wombs are empty now.
They name the trees in the projects for
Hagar. Snow fills the minaret and they wait
to arrive, finally, shaking, to god.
Issue 6 Contents NEXT: Two Poems by Patrick Rosal
TWO POEMS by Lee Sharkey
CIVILIZATION
Even in the most inhospitable circumstances there is always time for a cup of tea.
Say you live in a cup with a hole blasted in its side in a blasted landscape, by a blasted tree
and an empty barrel. You can still park your worn down shoes side by side
at the door and steep your questions in hot water. Since you are a man of letters
I imagine you have many. As steam brushes your cheeks you may read the leaves.
Take your time. The wind is aroused and the clouds are either massing or clearing.
You have lost everything but not what makes you human. I don’t mean your coat and tie.
SHELTER
The forebears have gathered. The clocks have split open. Clock hands lie on the ground
like bent utensils. The forebears emerged through the rock. They are ruins. Dissevered.
Parallel faces frozen in profile. The forebears are listening. And there you stand
(I almost missed you), memory’s king, an ant among giants, hands tucked in your
pockets, downcast, with a stone for a shadow, waiting for whispers, husbanding
wisdom, at home at last in an old stone Eden. Whose face does the rock face bear
and repeat, each and every — your face, God face, Jew face, membranous blessing.
Issue 6 Contents NEXT: Trees by David Lawrence
STACK OF BRIGHTNESS by Rosalynde Vas Dias
What do you know
of the former
beloved/still beloved?
He lives in another
city or speaks
infrequently.
He appears
in the guise
of an owl, he appears
in the guise of a scrawl.
In a series of paintings—
peasant villages,
festive skies—
your two selves
are fractured
and played by
a bunch of characters.
You are close and you
are friends and you recede
endlessly from one
another.
It means you,
singular, string beads.
You make a lot
of bracelets. They grow
up your arm,
a stack
of brightness,
static of the
rainbow. You
(plural) used to make
omelets together
or something.
Issue 6 Contents NEXT: The Smallest Man by Julie Brooks Barbour
Three Poems by Benjamin Miller
IN THE PLACE OF BEST INTENTIONS
As this is not the land of ice packs
and regenerations, of spent glue guns
or antiseptic counters—since shy
reminders filter through the streets all night
(mountain streams that city fountains sip)
absconding with old disappointments—
because the powerlines are wet with flames
that spill their music into shallow halls
devoid of short-term motives, I am lost
and cannot say what may have led me here
to watch the girls unwrapping fiberboard
from miles of burlap while the waitresses
tattoo their angry daisies on my arms.
What is this place that leaves me so unmoved?
A hat I’d never worn or wanted worn
is now my prized possession; tissues packed
into abandoned zipper pockets breed—
I had forgotten that the small glass cups
were hidden in my socks and that my hands
were laced with fine red scratches
long before the advent of arrival. Now I feel
the heat of my illusion dim to tremble,
a dull intrusion into some romantic
basement of unknowable books. And so
forgive me if the water left for tea
is steeped in silt and valentines; forgive
the unexpected token undisclosed.
Last night I thought I wanted tragedy,
a chance to wick away the morning’s
donut, bagel, muffin, scorn. But to span
the gap from night to night, from night
to some hello, is more than I can yet
achieve: a phone that rings without response
and without end or empathy.
Belief is a raft tossed out on a thirsty plain.
Were I that lonesome, I’d never have left.
ON THE MARGINS OF THE PORTABLE COUNTRY
The making of ideology, of how stories learn,
ends in bone. Thus, facts without lives are trouble.
Even squall, the art of, must learn to scramble hours
as the scribblers do; and so some argument electric
in its innocence arrives to silver fictions
out of mauve and maudlin discipline.
All worthy hearts embark. But who returns
from such a journey—who could tent beneath
that zoo and cairn with time’s fool law
and still press on unscathed? (The lathe, the nick,
the cutting tree remembering the cutting.)
On the margins of the portable country,
a stranger compendium lands its craft
of pleasure and scorn, a balloon
in love with a wood, a turtle fallen
from the subjunctive into the academy.
I’ve started marking up a manual of dangers.
You have not all been selected.
IN THE WAKE OF AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY
What little remains is clear: it is over.
The first and the last having gone
and returned, come and returned,
we have learned to welcome those
who make the place feel welcoming.
A guitar in the corner hoards the light,
says: you, in a collapsing world,
your eyes such sharp, undarkened things.
From Without Compass (c) 2014 by Benjamin Miller.
Reprinted with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
“In the Wake of Avoidable Tragedy” was first published in The Greensboro Review.
- Published in Featured Poetry, home, Poetry, Series
Three Poems by Brian Komei Dempster
CROSSING
No turning back. Deep in the Utah desert now, having left one home
to return to the temple of my grandfather. I press the pedal
hard. Long behind me, civilization’s last sign—a bent post
and a wooden board: No food or gas for 200 miles. The tank
needling below half-full, I smoke Camels to soothe
my worry. Is this where it happened? What’s left out there of Topaz
in the simmering heat? On quartzed asphalt I rush
past salt beds, squint at the horizon for the desert’s edge: a lone
tower, a flattened barrack, some sign of Topaz—the camp
where my mother, her family, were imprisoned. As I speed
by shrub cactus, the thought of it feels too near,
too close. The engine steams. The radiator
hisses. Gusts gather, wind pushes my Civic side
to side, and I grip the steering wheel, strain to see
through a windshield smeared with yellow jacket wings, blood
of mosquitoes. If I can find it, how much can
I really know? Were sandstorms soft as dreams or stinging
like nettles? Who held my mother when the wind whipped
beige handfuls at her baby cheeks? Was the sand tinged
with beige or orange from oxidized mesas? I don’t remember
my mother’s answer to everything. High on coffee
and nicotine, I half-dream in waves of heat: summon ghosts
from the canyon beyond thin lines of barbed wire. Our name
Ishida. Ishi means stone, da the field. We were gemstones
strewn in the wasteland. Only three days
and one thousand miles to go before I reach
San Francisco, the church where my mother was born
and torn away. Maybe Topaz in the desert was long
gone, but it lingered in letters, photos, fragments
of stories. My mother’s room now mine, the bed pulled blank
with ironed sheets, a desk set with pen and paper. Here
I would come to understand.
TEMPLE BELL LESSON
Son, I am weighted.
You are light.
Our ancestors imprisoned,
outcast
in sand, swinging
between scorching air
and the insult
of blizzards.
Their skin bronzed
and chilled
like brass,
listen
to their sorrow
ringing.
GATEKEEPER
Any noise alerts me. My wife Grace shifts beneath our comforter.
Respecting my uncles long dead, I climb from bed, grab
the bat, climb stairs, walk halls with a thousand sutras shelved
high, my grandparents’ moonlit ink floating on pages sheer
as veils, the word Love rescued from censors. In the nursery
I check window-locks, sense my son Brendan falling in and out
of seizures and sleep. Backed by the altar, its purple chrysanthemum
curtains, gold-leafed lily pads, corroded rice paper, I crouch
then stand at the window to watch silhouettes fleeing
past streetlamps, the gate unmoored from its deadbolt, unhinged
from ill-fitted screws and rusted nails. The front door cottoned
with fog shakes in night wind. Backyard bushes rustle. For now
I let the mendicants crack open our prickly crowns of aloe, soothe
their faces with gel, drop bottle-shards and cigarette butts that slash
and burn our stairs. Inside, we fit apart and together.
Grace and Brendan sleeping, me standing guard.
From my grandfather’s scrolls moths fly out, and I grab at air
to repel the strangeness of other lives circling toward us.
From Topaz (c) 2013 by Brian Komei Dempster.
Reprinted with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
An earlier version of “Gatekeeper” was first published in Parthenon West Review.
Topaz, Brian Komei Dempster’s debut poetry collection, examines the experiences of a Japanese American family separated and incarcerated in American World War II prison camps. This volume delves into the lasting intergenerational impact of imprisonment and breaks a cultural legacy of silence. Through the fractured lenses of past and present, personal and collective, the speaker seeks to piece together the facets of his own identity and to shed light on a buried history. |
- Published in Featured Poetry, home, Poetry, Series
IOWA
by Stephen Berg
In honor of poet, teacher, editor, and Four Way Books author Stephen Berg, who passed away last week, we’re proud to re-print one of his prose poems, which first appeared in his collection, Shaving.
__________
IOWA
When I think of it now I still see just how ugly and dirty the place was, what a bare unprotected monk-like life it was that year, living first in the old tire warehouse on the outskirts of town, no toilet or sink, no furniture, nothing except two ratty mattresses, fruit crates, blankets from home, unfinished splintery lath walls, gobs of hard gray mortar squeezed between bricks, and everywhere the acrid stink of tire rubber, dirt and dust, everywhere in high black stacks truck tires, car tires, hundreds, except for one small room, probably an office once, where we slept and read. The teeth–like treads gleamed in the dark. Some nights I’d choke with asthma from the filth, from rage, from how far away home was. Some nights we’d lie in our room reading by the sallow light of the small bulbs of the bed lamps we got at a junk shop and nailed up on our walls. Outside the fields of Iowa went on forever, a ditch of yellow mud bordered the north wall. Some nights Bob and I would bundle up in everything we owned and go out and stare at the shoals of stars, pale surfy swarms pulsing slightly, stand half-drunk in the lampless cityless darkness rambling about poetry, family, sex, loneliness. Once, I remember, I took out an old silver Bach cornet I picked up in a pawnshop for 15 bucks and tried to play the thing, stood on the edge of the ditch leaning back, pointing the horn straight at the sky, but all that came were squawking mewing fartlike tuneless wails, jagged held notes. At one point—the horn against my lips—I took a wrong step into the ice-crusted watery slough and stumbled and fell and almost broke off my front teeth. For months I carried the mouthpiece in my pocket, fondling it, taking it out to heft, practicing on it to build my lip, fweeting a few raw notes whenever I felt like it—walking across campus, on the street. I kept myself company like that, I became somebody else, mostly Bix because I envied his sweet pure tone, the steadiness and range, his strict, condensed phrasing, the direct brevity of his style, a miraculously articulated, triumphant sadness. Before long we took an apartment in the heart of town—bought new mattresses, desks, two chairs, built bookcases with cinderblocks and boards—two rooms, high doors between, where we’d write, often at the same time early in the morning or late at night. It was wonderful being serious about writing, believing oneself able to hear someone hearing your voice, to hold a human gaze, wonderful feeling haunted, if you were lucky, by lines, impulses, hot formless combinations of phrases that led your hands over the keys at a speed beyond understanding, beyond experience. Then out would come the paper with words on it and you’d begin again—chop, change, shift, hack, put something back or stick it somewhere else, anything seemed possible in that mood—to hear the necessary mind of the poem. Otherwise it was classes and the usual college shit: football games, parties, gossip, worry about grades. Then the snow came and everything was lost under it, everything slowed. Sometimes it fell neck-deep. People wallowing through would shovel paths on the sidewalks. You’d see heads floating along the top of the snow walls. The quads and fields were cratered and scarred with ruts like a moon map glowing blue-white. Hard to describe the mood of Iowa City after one of those big snows, but I was happier than I knew then, trapped there, purified of choice by isolation, schedules breaking down, the roads out of town impassable. We’d stay up till three or four in the morning, playing pinball machines in an all-night diner a few blocks away, or reading, trying to write. The vividness of words on a page in a book, the sound of the human on a printed page, was never more compelling and intense than on those long nights of immense calm while the snow under the street lamps lay there, consolingly white and quiet, going on for miles. The Workshop quonsets looked like sleeping animals, down by the Iowa River. You could walk across it and not break through; you could see the wide brown road of water underneath roiling past. The uncountable rows of footprints crossing and recrossing, the snowy lid of ice, made my scalp prickle. It looked eerie, too meaningful—why, I still can’t figure out—that bright, pocked, luminous crust scored by those shadowy holes. And nothing came there, not at night in the bleak Midwestern cold, unless an animal happened by. At night if you drove out of town (after the roads were plowed, snow mounded ten feet high on either side), where it seems nothing exists but fields, endless open fields, if you looked across the glowing sugary land, you might say that the silence and peace you were at one with had always been and always would be.
“. . .Stephen Berg’s Shaving is the first book of prose poems I have read that has made me re-examine the function and power of that branch of our poetry. It is a book of strenuous and often dangerous self-witness; an astounding overview of American urban life at the apex and turning point of a major civilization. . .most importantly, it is brilliantly written. . .In reading Berg you will be reading the master of the prose poem. – Jorie Graham |
- Published in Featured Poetry, home, Series
Three Poems by Sam Sax
I.35
i watch him touch him self over a screen
and pretend it is with my hands
how you pull a quiver from an arrow.
he moans and i grow jealous of the satellites.
their capacity for translation, to code his sound
in numbers unbraiding in my speakers
lucky metal audience of cables.
i know the wireless signal is all around me,
that i’m drowning in his unrendered noise.
how from a thousand miles away i can dam
myself with the light spilling from his hands.
what magic is this? distance collapsed
into the length of a human breath. what witchcraft?
six years ago a bridge between us collapsed
the interstate ate thirteen people alive
asphalt spilling like amputated hands
into the dark below. what is love but a river
that exists to eat all your excess concrete
appendages? what is a voice but how it lands
wet in the body? what is distance
but a place that can be reshaped through language?
how i emulate and pull a keyboard from the ashes.
how i gave him a river and he became it’s king.
how any thing collapsed can be rebuilt.
take our two heaving torsos take them
how they fall like a bridge into the water
how they rise up alone from the sweat.
BILDUNGSROMAN (SAY: PYOO-BUR-TEE).
i never wanted to grow up to be anything horrible
as a man. my biggest fear was the hair they said
would burst from my chest, swamp trees
breathing as i ran. i prayed for a different kind
of puberty: skin transforming into floor boards,
muscle into cobwebs, growing pains sounding
like an attic groaning under the weight of old
photo albums. as a kid i knew that there was
a car burning above water before this life,
that i woke here to find fire scorched my
hair clean off until i shined like glass – my eyes,
two acetylene headlamps. in my family we have
a story for this. my brother holding me
in his hairless arms. says, dad it will be a monster
we should bury it.
MONSTER COUNTRY
god bless all policemen & their splintering night sticks splintering & lord
have mercy on their souls. god bless judges in their empty robes who send
young men off to prisons with a stain from their antiquated pens. god bless
all the king’s monsters & all the kings men. god bless the sentence
& its inevitable conclusion. god bless the predators, curators of small
sufferings. god bless the carpet that ate one hundred dollars of chris’s
cocaine. god bless cocaine & the colophon of severed hands it takes
to get to your nostrils. god bless petroleum & coffee beans & sugar cane
& rare earth minerals used to manufacture music boxes. god bless the gas
chamber & the gas that makes the shower head sing. god bless the closet
i trapped a terrified girl in with my two good hands. god bless the night
those good boys held my face to a brick wall & god bless those boys
& good god bless the strange heat that pressed back.
you cannot beg
for forgiveness
with a mouth
A Guide to Undressing Your MonstersComing soon from “Sam Sax’s poems are ravenous, intimate, and brutal. God is ‘a man with a dozen bleeding mouths’ and ‘a boy drags his dead dog across the night sky’ and ‘shadows sing.’ Tongued and loved, a butthole becomes a trumpet, a second mouth. His poems reject the given. His poems seek out new encounters between flesh and world, between language and memory. Bristling with stunning images and formally astute, his poems nurture and bruise.” ~ Eduardo Corral |
- Published in Featured Poetry, home, Poetry, Series
Maps by Patrick Lawler
“Who was it who decided on where Tallahassee should be?” Toby asks questions, and we laugh a lot. Stupid things really. But it makes you think, and it helps to pass the time. He takes the money when people pump their gas, and I do most of the other things, like brake jobs, tires, and shocks. Mostly minor repairs, quick jobs that get a good price for the boss. Mr. Cutter keeps things under control and drives the tow truck when somebody breaks down on the highway. That’s how he makes his big money. He says when you break down on the interstate, you become desperate. “The main thing we give them is a sense of security,” says Mr. Cutter. I call him Mr. Cutter, but everybody else calls him Harry because the name of the business is Harry’s Gas Station. “If we didn’t charge ’em a lot, they’d think we did a half-assed job,” he tells me and Toby. And later Toby says to me, “Using that logic, we should charge Harry a whole lot more for what we do.” Toby mostly takes care of the cash register and points out the restrooms and gives people change for the cigarette machine. And he sells candy and soda to the sweaty little kids and tells the traveling salesmen where the phone is. And he hands out maps when the customers want them.
You can’t say anything to Toby. He’s always changing it around and making it funny. Mr. Cutter’s always saying Toby’s nothing but a smart-ass college kid. But I don’t find anything wrong with having a little fun. Toby graduated from a community college and is going to a four-year. Though he’s smarter in a lot of ways, I’ve been here sixteen years, and I know a lot more about cars. But, boy, Toby knows more about everything else. I could tell Betty kind of liked Toby, but I didn’t pay much attention to it.
Like I said, Mr. Cutter owns the station, but he isn’t around much because of driving the tow truck, and he owns another station, where the town people go for gas. I’ve worked for him for sixteen years. I know he doesn’t like Betty coming around because he thinks she distracts me. We get a lot of business in the summer. There are always cars boiling over and people always need gas. Most of our customers come off the interstate. Toby started working after college let out for the summer. Mr. Cutter told him right away to call him Harry, but he never said that to me. We don’t get many locals because we’re a little overpriced. Toby lives up north, but he has an uncle who lives here so he asked Mr. Cutter for a job. And he started calling him Harry right away.
Just to make things more interesting, Toby decided that we should do something with the maps, so we uncreased them and laid them out on the desk in the office. People are always asking for maps because people are always going places. Toby told them not to trust those GPS things, and he told the customers, “There’s nothing like a map to get you to where you’re going.” Toby took some scissors and began snapping them. When he was finished, there were a whole bunch of cities lying on top of the desk. Peoria, Orlando, Savannah, Nashville, Columbus. He told me to refold the maps and put them back in the racks. Toby said, “Think about it. A couple driving along, looking for Tallahassee. The husband turns to his wife and asks her to check the map. She pulls it out and says Tallahassee’s not there. And he says, ‘What do you mean, it’s not there?’ And she says, ‘Look, there’s a hole where Tallahassee should be.’” Toby has a real imagination. When we were finished, the desk looked like a battlefield with all these fallen cities. Every state had at least one city gone. So no matter where anybody was going there’d be something missing. At least, that’s the way Toby saw it.
Betty and I have always known for the last three years we are going to be married. She works in the local diner as a waitress. We’ve been saving our money because we think by the beginning of next year we can afford a trailer. I’m ten years older than she is, but her parents like that. Mr. Dodd says that I’m a “maturing influence.” I knew she kind of liked Toby because she’d laugh at things he’d say even if they weren’t funny. That’s one thing you learn about women. Most of the time Toby is funny, so I didn’t much notice. Betty is twenty-two, which I think is a perfect age.
Toby decided that we weren’t finished with the maps, so on another day he pulls out this little white bottle from the desk drawer. In the office we have an old Royal typewriter that keeps breaking down. Mr. Cutter says we got to get a computer, but he says that every time the typewriter’s not working, and what he says doesn’t amount to much when it comes to spending money. The typewriter has so much grease on the keys, you can’t really make out any of the letters. And that’s why I didn’t know we had any Wite-Out and didn’t know what it was. Toby found it. He likes to rummage through Mr. Cutter’s stuff. I tell him he better be careful, but guys like Toby don’t have to be as careful as guys like me. I found that out most of my life. So Toby takes the Wite-Out and asks me to get the maps off the rack. Then he begins dabbing the little white brush like he’s painting with shoe polish. When he’s finished, he takes a black pen from his shirt pocket and very carefully writes something. He has real small handwriting anyway—but this was ridiculously small and perfect. He dabbed away the word Tuscaloosa and wrote in Vacancy. “How do you like that?” he said, and he held up the map for me to see. “Vacancy, Alabama.” He dabbed out Pearl, Mississippi, and wrote in Ruby. He replaced Hopkins Hollow, Connecticut, with Hopkins Hole. Sometimes he’d write in something that was a little off-color, like Beaver Shot, Oklahoma, or Pussy, Oregon, or Cock, Wisconsin. “Some old maid,” he said, “will be asking directions for Cock. Or some minister will be seeking Pussy.” I have to admit it was pretty funny.
We get all the license plates through here. At one time or another, I’ve seen the license plates of every single state, and that includes Hawaii and Alaska. I may not have been many places, I tell people, but a lot of places have been to see me. You got to see something after sixteen years. After I’d seen the license plates of all fifty states, I got to admit the job became kind of routine. I know Toby is young, even insensitive at times, but he makes the job enjoyable. He’s always got something going on. And sometimes he gets me thinking, like when he asks me if I believe in something and I say yes, and he shows me I didn’t really mean to say yes. That kind of thing. Then Toby has these crazy questions, like puzzles, that can keep you going crazy for days.
I have to tell you something else he thought of that was pretty good—though some might not understand. We had this little hole we drilled in the side of the ladies’ restroom. We hid it behind boxes and oil cans. After we drilled, he had me chisel out some so we could see at a better angle. It made me feel a little uncomfortable, but Toby said, “Hey, there’s no harm in just looking.” I felt bad in a way and only pretended to look. Toby said that the New York State license had the best pair of legs he’d ever seen, and I agreed though I had no reason to.
Toby wasn’t finished with the maps either. He got real tricky. Sometimes with green, red, and blue Magic Markers we’d put in other highways. Where we thought it might be nice to have a highway, we put it in. Without any inconvenience, without any cost, without any dusty detours, wham, we made you a highway. Just like that. We had an interstate going from Charlotte to Fayetteville to Lynchburg to Charleston to Knoxville. Some of our state highways climbed out of lakes and other times they’d drift off to nowhere. Sometimes we’d put roads where they seemed to be needed, and at times they were just useless and pretty. Some states seemed to have so many roads they didn’t know what to do with them, but we’d add more until the whole map was choked with them.
We got so good at altering the maps that we moved some cities from one state to another. We’d put Spokane where New Bedford should be, and Little Rock where Spokane should be, and Topeka where Little Rock should be. I tell you we got good at it. Toby’d say, “We’re doing the country a favor.”
About two weeks ago, Toby came into work real upset, like I’d never seen him before. I don’t know if he had an argument with Mr. Cutter or his uncle. But something was wrong, so I told him I’d take care of the pump if he’d work at fixing the air hose that seemed to be clogged. Betty came over during her break. She bought me some metric wrenches from the Ace Hardware. I told her she shouldn’t have done it because we’re trying to save money to buy a trailer and we’re going to get married, probably in February. It was a sunny day and that made the oil stains next to the gas pumps sparkle in a greasy sort of way. Nothing’s prettier than a gas station on a sunny day. It was a real scorcher. There was a haze around the car hoods. Betty said she had to get back to the restaurant, but she had to use the ladies’ room first. I got her the keys which were attached to a flat piece of wood that said “restroom.” I was about to take the lug nuts off a Ford truck when I thought about the peephole. I was hoping no cars would pull up because Toby was fixing the air hose and I was going to the back room. I pushed aside a couple of smudgy oil cans and pressed my eye to the hole. There was Betty with her back leaning on the wall over the sink, her dress up around her waist and Toby there. The weather and the cramped dark room made me feel real uncomfortable. I thought about the box of metric wrenches. Then a horn started to blow. Later, when I saw Betty, she handed me the key. Her eyes looked crushed. They had the color of one of those oil stains. Her body seemed to hum. Before she left, I thanked her for the wrenches.
Toby’s going back north in a couple of days. I found out that Betty put a picture of herself in his glove compartment. I can’t be mad at Betty. Toby is sure better looking, and he certainly is smarter and funnier. I say I saw the license plates of all fifty states, but that’s not the truth. I don’t think of buying the trailer anymore, but that will probably change. I decided not to say anything to her or Toby. Toby would only turn it around and get me laughing. And if I said anything to Betty, I’d feel really hollow inside. I went to Toby’s car and opened up the glove compartment.
I don’t laugh as much at Toby’s jokes. He’s always thinking up something new, but I don’t pay as much attention. He asks me what is wrong, but I don’t say much. “Nothing,” I say and that’s usually the end of it. In a way, I’m not looking forward to the day when Toby’s gone. But I know one thing. I’ll keep handing out our maps to the customers. I’ll give them maps with a couple of things missing, a border here and there, a capital or two, a city or a town, some river misplaced. But they’ll also contain some amazing new things. Highways that never before existed. New cities or old cities in new places. And wherever these people are going, they’ll always be surprised at how we got them there, even if it’s not where they want to be. Still, they’ll always be surprised, and that’s not so bad. They could wind up anywhere and that would be worth it, I suppose.
I’d kind of like to be there when Toby opens up the glove compartment. I know he’ll see Betty’s picture, and that will probably make him feel good. And then he’ll see the road map, and I know he’ll open it because he’ll guess something is up. It took me a long time to do it, and he’ll appreciate that. I’d like to see his face when he sees every town and highway and everything with its new name. “Betty” written everywhere. Betty mountains. Cities named Betty. Betty rivers. Betty highways. Who knows? Maybe his car will break down. And he won’t know where to tell anybody where he is if something bad happens. It will make him feel kind of weird. Being so smart and all. Except about cars and things that can happen. He’ll think somebody knows something. It won’t really matter, but it will give him something to think about.
“You just have to admire all the possibilities,” says one character in Patrick Lawler’s short story collection, The Meaning of If—a sentence that encapsulates the myriad of “if’s” explored in these pages. At times surreal and yet so realistic, we hear each “muffled whisper,” we see each “muddy photograph,” we know each “secret life,” as if it were our own. These are familial stories of transition and transformation—both mental and physical—that consider the question “What if?” |
- Published in Featured Fiction, Fiction, home, Series