In every issue of Prime Number Magazine we feature two poets and two short story writers from Press 53, our publisher. Our goal is to introduce readers to some of the remarkable voices in the Press 53 catalog. If you like these poems and stories and wish to buy a book, use discount code P53D20 for a twenty percent discount on your entire order (discount does not apply to our already highly discounted Five-Book Bundle—five softcovers for $53).

Tyson vs. Green

May 20, 1986

Madison Square Garden, New York City, New York, U.S.

# # #

Andrew Rihn is the author of Revelation: An Apocalypse in Fifty-Eight Fights, a collection of fifty-eight one-hundred-word prose poems about Mike Tyson’s professional fights. From 2019-2021, he wrote The Pugilist, a monthly boxing column for Into the Void magazine, where he was also a poetry editor. He currently writes for The Fight City, a premier boxing website. Andrew lives in Canton, Ohio.

# # #

Cheryl Wilder is the author of Anything That Happens (Press 53, 2021) and What Binds Us (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her work appears in Barely South Review, Prime Number Magazine, Verse Daily, Cream City Review, Literary Mama, and Architects + Artisans, among other publications. Cheryl has served as writer-in-residence at SistaWRITE and was granted residency at Sundress Academy for the Arts. A founder and editor of Waterwheel Review, she earned her BFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Cheryl lives near the Haw River in North Carolina, where she chairs the Burlington Writers Club student contest and owns a small web development company.

Mule Collector

The new mule pushed his way in among the others and pressed his muzzle tentatively against the sparkling walls of Glen L. Hanshaw’s glassed-in patio. Glen L. stood for a moment in the kitchen doorway, iced tea in hand, admiring the scene around him. All six of his mules were out there, spaced irregularly around the patio’s three exposed sides, running their lips and tongues along the sticky surface, sometimes clacking their big teeth against the shatter-resistant glass. Even through the smeared slobber that partly clouded his view, he could see the inner workings of the mouths, the jaws moving in a chorus of silent conversation, telling him things that only mules could know.

He moved methodically across the flagstone floor and eased himself into the webbing of his lounge chair, careful not to spill too much of his tea. He’d overextended himself today, first on the golf course and then with the mules, and now even the mild strain of steadying his full glass brought tremors from some fault line in his legs or back or brain. He set the tea on the floor beside him and closed his eyes to rest.

The tournament had taken more out of him than he’d expected. He’d ridden in a cart, of course, but, even so, a full eighteen holes was more than he was used to these days. He’d fallen into the habit of playing only abbreviated rounds—starting at the fourth hole, which ran parallel to his mule field, and finishing on the seventh green just across the fairway from his house. Maybe a two-day tournament was more than he could handle. Already he felt the muscles along the backs of his legs and arms stiffening like old leather, and the thought of having to play another full round tomorrow gave him a sudden chill.

Or was that the air-conditioning? The blistering heat on the course today had baked him like a clay pot, so as soon as he’d made it back to the house, even before tending to the mules, he’d cranked the thermostat into the blue arctic range. Now goosebumps rose from his raw patches of sunburn. That was all right, though. He enjoyed being uncomfortably cold on the hottest day of the year. That’s what being rich was all about.

For their part, the mules seemed perfectly content, the half dozen of them ranged in the long shade of the house, pressing their gums against the cool, sweet glass. They knew how to tolerate the heat, how to pace themselves against the mercury, moving only when they had a better place to go. Glen L. hadn’t understood that as a boy. He remembered walking the plow behind his father’s big pair of drays, breaking sod for a late-summer crop. On hot days the mules worked more slowly, keeping him longer in the fields, and he had hated them for that. But now he understood their stubbornness: a bad sun called for a slower pace, plain and simple. Why hadn’t he known that back then?

“Hey, Dad! Are you home?” The voice startled him, and Glen L. suddenly remembered that he wasn’t alone in the house this weekend. One of his sons had come to visit, and they were partners in the member-guest. But what the hell was his name?

“I’m out here,” Glen L. called. “On the patio.”

“I got us a couple of steaks, and all the fixings,” the boy announced from the kitchen. Glen L. heard the papery rattle of grocery sacks being dumped on the counter.

Harold, that was it: the boy’s name was Harold. Bill was the one who was dead.

“I thought you’d be going to the tournament clambake,” Glen L. called. “It’s already paid for.”

“I’m not much on clams,” Harold said. He stepped out onto the patio. “I thought maybe we’d get out the grill. . .”

Glen L. looked up at his son: not a boy anymore, but a fat, bald fifty-year-old with broken blood vessels mapping his cheeks and nose, his mouth now hanging open like a clubbed fish. But Harold wasn’t a fish. He was something more lamentable, more obsolete. A 1966 Chevy Corvair barreling flat-out for the scrap heap. But how could that be? How could a son of his be such an old man already? And where did that leave Glen L.?

“Jesus Christ,” Harold muttered. “What the hell’s going on out here?”

“I’m watching my mules.”

“But, I mean—” he gestured toward the smeared walls, “what the hell are they doing?”

“They’re licking the glass,” Glen L. told him. He pointed to the small plastic bucket and broad-bristled paint brush stationed by the patio door. “I coat the walls with wet sugar every afternoon. It’s their special treat.”

Harold sat down heavily in the Barcalounger. “But it’s grotesque.” He scanned the row of mules uneasily, his blue eyes bright and watery like his mother’s.

“The mules seem to like it,” Glen L. said, reaching down for his tea. “Especially the new one. I think the group activity helps him fit in.”

“New one?” Harold scowled through a quick count, then shook his head. “Christ, Dad, you can’t keep doing this.”

Glen L. smiled. “I found an old sugar mule over in Able County. Got a great deal. Sugar mules are pretty rare around here. The farmer didn’t even know what he had—thought it was a cotton mule. Can you imagine that?”

Harold sighed and reached over to steady the cut-crystal glass in Glen L.’s hand. “Here, let me help you,” he said, lifting it away, and Glen L. realized he’d sloshed some tea across the front of his shirt. He wiped at it clumsily with his fingers, pressing the cold spill against his stomach. When he looked up, Harold was standing by him with a roll of paper towels.

“Now I’m in the market for a couple of good pack mules,” he said, dabbing a wad of towels along the stain. “But this is the wrong part of the country, so I might have to wait a while.”

Harold cleared his throat and stared at the mule directly in front of him, a male Missouri with crooked, blackened teeth. “Six mules is a pretty big responsibility.”

Glen L. snorted. “Six? Six is nothing. You know what my inventory is down at the car lot? I can show you sixty brand new Cadillacs any goddam day of the year.”

“I know, Dad. But running the dealership isn’t the same thing as filling up your yard with mules. I don’t think you can equate the two.”

Glen L. felt a flare of anger. What the hell way was that for a son to talk to his father? I don’t think you can equate the two. Like some schoolteacher talking to a backward kid. If Glen L. had ever said anything like that to his own father, he’d have felt a leather strap across his backside. “I can equate anything I want,” he said, though he knew that was a lie.

He could never equate Harold and Bill, for example. Bill had been a born salesman, like his father, and could have done anything—run his own company, maybe, or had his own TV show, or even gone into politics. But Harold had become—what was it again?—some kind of accountant. An actuarial accountant, that was it, working in a sunless office up at the state capitol. Gray rooms and long numbers and cold marble floors. True, Glen L. had never actually seen the place; but he’d been there in his mind, and it felt just like a morgue.

Harold stepped over to the glass wall and drummed his fingers lightly above the Missouri mule’s head, but the animal didn’t seem to notice.

“Don’t get them started,” Glen L. warned.

Harold stopped tapping the glass. “What do you mean?”

“I mean they’re quiet now, but if you spook one he’ll start to bray. And if one starts, the others are liable to join in. That’ll make one hell of a racket.” He smiled at the thought. The truth was, he loved it when his mules got rowdy. Of course, from time to time a few upstarts from the Country Club complained about the noise, but that didn’t worry him. It was his club, after all. He’d helped found it back in ’48, and had written most of the bylaws himself. For the last twenty years, he’d even been club president. Let the new members grouse all they wanted—he knew the board would never dare take him on.

“Sorta like a zoo, isn’t it,” Glen L. said. “Except we’re the ones inside. That makes it better, I think.”

“Sure,” said Harold, but from the way he chewed his lower lip Glen L. could see he wasn’t sure at all. Lip-chewing was a giveaway Harold had inherited from his mother—a skittish woman, really, overly polite, who almost never spoke her mind. For thirty-eight years she’d kept her conversations with Glen L. on a sort of cruise control set below the speed limit, and he had learned to look for meanings in her face, rather than her words. “How are you feeling?” he would ask, and she’d always say, “Fine,” even in the end, when her body made it clear she was dying.

Glen L. reached again for his glass of tea, and with a concentrated effort lifted it smoothly to the armrest of his chair. “Remember the time I took you boys to the Washington Zoo?” he asked. “Nineteen-fifty-six. We saw the real Smokey the Bear. I bet you forgot about that.”

Harold smiled. “No, I remember,” he said easing himself back into the Barcalounger. “We fed him a bag of peanuts.”

“That’s right. You boys fed peanuts to Smokey the Bear. That’s something to be proud of. It’s like being part of American history.”

“Well, I guess. . .”

“Then we went to Mount Vernon. Drove out there in the snow. Had just about the whole damn place to ourselves.”

“And froze our butts off,” Harold said.

Glen L. frowned and waved the notion away as if it were a puff of smoke. “That part doesn’t matter.” He leaned over sideways and took a careful sip of tea. “You know, this instant mix is pretty good stuff. It’s got the sugar and the lemon already in it. You don’t have to do a thing but add water.”

“Uh, yeah, I think I’ve had it before.”

“The thing I hate about regular iced tea is you can’t ever get the sweetness right. No matter how hard you stir, the sugar won’t ever dissolve, it just swirls around a while and then sinks to the bottom.” He lifted the glass briefly between them. “But this stuff is great,” he said, and for a long moment they both stared at the sweating half-glass of tea, almost as if they expected it to do something.

“Maybe I’ll have some later,” Harold said, finally.

Glen L. suddenly remembered why he’d brought up Mount Vernon. “George Washington was the first commercial mule breeder in America,” he announced. “I bet you didn’t know that.”

Harold looked at him suspiciously. “I didn’t think you could breed mules,” he said. “I thought mules were all sterile.”

Glen L. shook his head. “Christ, Harold, did you just fall off the turnip truck? What I mean is he imported jackasses to crossbreed with his mares.” He sighed and wiped the back of his wrist across his lips. “Anyway, only the males are guaranteed sterile. Your grandfather had a female hinny once that turned out to be fertile.” He paused. “But I guess you don’t even know what a hinny is.”

Harold shrugged. “Some kind of mule, I guess.”

A slow smile smoothed the wrinkles from Glen L.’s lips. “It’s exactly like a mule. In fact, you probably couldn’t tell the difference in a million years. But,” he said, widening his eyes to emphasize the mystery, “it’s not really a mule at all. Not in the least.” He settled his head back against the chair webbing, satisfied that he’d just given Harold the clue he needed to make his way properly through life.

Harold didn’t appear to notice. “You seem to know a lot about mules,” he said.

“More than I ever knew about cars.” Harold wouldn’t believe him, of course, but it was true. After forty years of owning the local Cadillac franchise, he still couldn’t explain the difference between one car and another. Oh, he could sell them, all right—but that didn’t mean much. He supposed that was the secret most salesmen lived with—that the talent to sell was a thing in itself and could live, even thrive, with no real connection to the product. In Glen L.’s case, he had memorized the options lists and the names of all the technical features that complicated each new model’s engine, but rarely had he comprehended even the simplest mechanical workings behind the words.  In his own driving, the most basic forms of car maintenance had remained alien to him—things other people might consider routine, like changing an oil filter, or tightening a fan belt, or replacing a wiper blade. In fact, it had always been a point of pride with him that whenever the slightest thing went wrong with whatever car he was driving, he’d just turn it over to his mechanics and pick another demo from his endless stock of cars. And he never used the self-serve gas pumps.

But mules were something he had studied all his life—or at least it seemed that way to him now.

  “Pretty soon you won’t see any mules at all except in zoos,” Glen L. said, pushing himself up from his chair. “There’s just no call for them anymore. It’s all tractors now.”

Harold rose quickly and steadied Glen L. by the elbow, then caught the glass of tea as it slid from the aluminum armrest. Glen L. looked at the rescued drink in Harold’s hand, then up at his son’s sad eyes, and felt things going wrong inside. The stepstones in his mind seemed suddenly too far apart, and he couldn’t make the leaps. “Too fast,” he said, meaning he had stood up quicker than he should and had been swamped in a blood-rush of dizziness. This had happened to him frequently, he knew that much. Brief spells of confusion, always worse when he was tired. Hardening of the arteries, that what they used to call it when a mind slowed down enough to lose its way. These days they probably had a dozen labels for troubles in the brain—names as specific as Oldsmobile and Chrysler, each with its own set of options. In the end, he imagined, they were all more or less interchangeable. Besides, it hardly mattered what name his problems went by—medical terms were just as meaningless to him as the numbers on an engine.

“That’s progress, I guess,” said Harold, offering a weak smile, and Glen L. saw that whatever he’d just said to his son must have been misunderstood. He tried to speak again, concentrating hard to keep the words from turning into strangers, from unforming themselves on the tip of his tongue and stalling him in silence. But the dizziness came again like a cool, damp cloth behind the eyes, wiping his thoughts clean. He cleared his throat and tried again, certain he had to say something, even if it made no sense. Awkward pauses made customers uneasy, and that was bad for business.

“What is it you’re here for?” he heard himself asking. What is it you’re here for? Glen L. turned the sound of it over in his mind. Yes, it was a good, sincere question. He knew Harold had come to stay with him for a couple of days, but the reason had momentarily escaped him. Asking about it seemed only logical, a simple step to steady him with a frame of reference. But Harold only blinked and turned his gaze toward the floor. It was his guilty look, and even though Glen L. couldn’t immediately sort out the language to say so, he could see that the boy felt stung, as if the question had gone deeper than he’d intended.

“Let’s talk about it later,” Harold said.

“No such thing,” Glen L. snapped. Hadn’t this boy learned anything from his old man’s four decades in sales? There was no later; later was a sham, a sidestep, a customer’s excuse, a pitch gone wrong. It meant no deal, no dice, no chance in hell.

“I just thought it might be better to talk some other time.” Harold waved a chubby finger toward the line of mules. “You know—when there aren’t so many distractions. What I want to say is kinda serious.”

“Everything’s serious,” Glen L. said. “Rebates, dealer prep, destination charges, factory incentives. Everything.” He wasn’t sure that was quite what he meant to say, but it was close enough.

Harold raised his head and looked steadily at him. Glen L. tried to meet his gaze, but suddenly shivered, recalling an expression in his own father’s eyes, that same look of—what? What was it he saw there? Weariness? Disappointment? Or maybe something else, something Glen L. couldn’t remember the word for. Maybe there was no word. But it was a dark look, and it had always made him feel small and troublesome, a boy who somehow didn’t measure up. What right did Harold have to wear that look? It wasn’t a son’s look at all.

“Well, I’m just a little worried, is all,” Harold said.

Glen L. nodded. “My mules,” he said, and stepped away from his chair to the streaked patio wall. The animals had finished licking away the sugar coating, and stood now staring sleepily ahead into the cool blue tint of the glass. Beyond the mules, Glen L. could see a late foursome trudging up the fourth fairway through the now-broken afternoon heat, and he felt a wave of contentment. He loved living by the Country Club. It gave him a view greener than his own father’s farm. So quiet and picturesque—like a postcard of some foreign land.

Emily had been happy enough here, he felt sure of that. Happy as she could have been, anyway. Some people were born to be alcoholics and some people weren’t, that was the way Glen L. saw it. Maybe it was genetics or maybe it was some other stroke of fate, but whatever the case, there was nothing anybody could do about it. There was certainly nothing Glen L. could have done about it. Emily had just been one of the unlucky ones. That wasn’t Glen L.’s fault.

It wasn’t even Bill’s fault, though that would have been an easy place to put the blame, with his killing himself like that. Killing himself. That was the one thing Emily never could get past. Of course, Bill hadn’t done it on purpose. He’d slipped, that was all. Glen L. was sure of that. All kids played on water towers, and sometimes accidents happened. There was no reason in the world for Bill to have jumped.

And the boys, too, they’d loved living here and having the room to romp as far and wild as they pleased. The yard had been unfenced in those days—no mules to keep in. Though there might have been a dog.

“It’s not only the mules, Dad. I’m just not sure you can keep on living by yourself like this. You’re not—well, you’re not as sharp as you used to be. You need somebody to look after you.”

Harold stopped talking then, and in the space that opened between them, Glen L. gradually assembled Harold’s meaning. It crystallized slowly, like a ball of ice, growing clear and hard in his mind. The more he thought, the more he understood; and the more he understood, the colder he got. Harold wanted him put away, that was the gist of it. After all he had done for this boy, Harold wanted him hauled off to the dump like some rusted-out junker. Well, by God, he wouldn’t have it. Glen L. had never needed anybody, his family included, and he’d be damned if he’d let a son of his tell him what to do with his life. Maybe Emily would have put up with that kind of disrespect, letting her precious boys say and do whatever the hell they wanted—but not him. No, by God, no son could talk that way and get away with it—that was the one thing he’d learned from his own father. He’d teach this boy who ought to be put away. He’d whip the sonofabitch until he bled. Glen L. could still do that, he still had the right. He’d show this little shit which one of them was boss.

He groped along the top of his trousers for his belt, but couldn’t find it. Someone had taken it from him, and he hadn’t even noticed. What the hell was happening to him? He began to panic.

“What is it, Dad?” Harold asked, putting his hand lightly on the side of Glen L.’s arm. Glen L. flinched at the touch. Snake. Harold was a goddamn snake. “What’s wrong?”

“Need my belt,” Glen L. stammered. “Need—” He patted desperately at his stomach and hips, but it was no use. His belt was gone, and his words were failing. He couldn’t argue, and he couldn’t punish. The rage rose up in him, huge and spiteful, but found nowhere to go. A gulping sob broke from his throat, and he closed his eyes tight, fighting for control.

“It’s all right,” Harold told him. “You didn’t wear a belt today. These pants have an elastic waist, see?” Harold hooked a finger in the top of Glen L.’s pants and tugged. The waistline stretched like a rubber band, then snapped back smartly into place.

As Glen L. stared down at the front of his plaid, elastic pants, he felt the blood surging in his head, and the instant he felt it, he knew his thoughts were scattering again, that some unfathomable tide had swept over him, dragging his mind away from whatever he’d been struggling with. His anger, unmoored from its source, flaked apart like old sheet metal, and he felt suddenly calm again, pleasantly lightheaded, with no particular need to sort through the fragments that remained. He had asked a question about his belt, he remembered, and Harold had answered him; Glen L. had no belt, and it was all right. Why had he worried about his belt, he wondered? It had something to do with Harold—Harold had said something wrong. But what did the belt have to do with it? Harold had teased him about his pants. That was probably it—they really were pretty silly-looking off the golf course. Well, no matter. No harm done. Harold was always putting his foot in his mouth. He never had the gift of gab like his brother Bill. That Bill was a born salesman. Poor Harold couldn’t make a pitch if his life depended on it. But they were both good boys.

Funny that he couldn’t call to mind how Bill had died. It might have had something to do with cars—an accident of some kind. But maybe not; maybe he was only mixing up parts of the past.  Anyway, it would come back to him sooner or later. The important things always drifted back, sometimes even after he’d stopped expecting them.

Looking out across the golf course now, he remembered why Harold had come home to visit. They were partners in the member-guest, just like last year and the year before. Just like every year since the tournament began. They’d actually won it a couple of times, back in their salad days. Harold had once been a pretty fair golfer. Better even than Bill.

“These tournaments are rough on an old man,” he said cheerily. “How about you pick us up some steaks, and we’ll bring out the grill tonight.”

“Sounds pretty good,” Harold told him.

“Did you get a chance to check the leaderboard before you left the club?”

“Yeah, I checked it.”

“How’re we doing?”

“We’re doing fine, Dad.”

“Within striking distance?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, don’t stay out too late tonight. Tomorrow we’ll make our move.”

The shadows were lengthening now, and Harold switched on the floor lamp by the patio table. A shiver of movement passed among the mules, and as Glen L. turned again to watch them, he saw his own faint outline hovering in the glass. Then his eyes focused on the gently swaying mules, and for a moment he forgot why they were there.

This wasn’t the view he’d expected his life to come to. He’d expected to pass his days sitting on the patio with Emily, the two of them watching their grandkids tear across the neatly trimmed lawn. He’d even imagined putting in a pool for days like this. But now he was an old man with brittle bones, and the lawn was a ruin, cut to pieces by the sharp trampling of hooves. There was no pool, there were no grandkids, there was no Bill, there was no Emily. Harold was his only remnant.  Glen L. might as well have been a mule himself, for all he’d leave behind him in the world.

Glen L. took his iced tea from Harold’s hand and gulped down the last few sugary swallows. His dizziness had passed for now, and he felt clearheaded, more like his old self. But the spells weren’t over, he knew that. If anything, they’d come more often now, stealing treasures from his mind like so many pickpockets, each theft so smooth he might not ever know what he had lost.

Was that a good thing, or a bad?

He looked at Harold, who stood in the kitchen doorway now with his fingers laced beneath his belly as if he were holding himself up. “You need to take better care of yourself, Harold,” he said. “You look like death on a shingle.” Harold smiled, almost like a boy again, and for a moment Glen L. felt younger, too. “Let’s kick up our heels,” he said, and before Harold could even ask what he meant, Glen L. turned toward the mules and banged the heavy iced tea glass sharply against the patio wall, rattling the panel in its frame. The new sugar mule jerked its head violently to the side, knocking the bad-tempered Missouri in the teeth. The startled Missouri let out a bray and shoved itself sideways against the line of mules to give itself more room to fight. The still-panicked sugar mule drew its head upright and tried to retreat from the wall, but stepped into the fetlock of the dray on its other side. The dray nipped the sugar mule viciously on the shoulder, and now all three mules began to slam back and forth against the line. In a matter of moments nearly all the mules were stumbling sideways in confusion, stepping all over one another, snapping and kicking, braying angrily at the disruption in their lives.

Glen L. leaned forward against the cool plate glass. It was a thrilling spectacle, better than Mount Vernon or the Washington Zoo, better than anything he could ever remember seeing. “It’s like a piece of American history,” he said happily as his son pulled him back from the glass.

They were all singing now, all six of them, and they’d never been in finer form. Their clamor echoed through the porch, raw-edged and harsh, but still oddly tuneful, a sassy chorus crowding out the air. It was the most complicated sound Glen L. could imagine—far more complicated than the chugging of an engine; more complicated even than the salvaging of lost words.

In some ways it was ugly, like a hopeless pain worming between the ribs.

But that wasn’t all of it, not by a long shot. It was a good sound, too—solid and strong, with a wild streak flashing crazily through its heart. If he closed his eyes and listened without thinking, it lodged in his bones like something native, something inborn, something older than his father’s oldest mule.

In those ways, it sounded like laughter.

# # #

Clint McCown is the author of Music For Hard Time: New & Selected Stories (Press 53) and is the only two-time recipient of the American Fiction Prize. He has published four novels (The Member-Guest; War Memorials; The Weatherman; and Haints), and six volumes of poems (Labyrinthiad; Sidetracks; Wind Over Water; Dead Languages; Total Balance Farm; and The Dictionary of Unspellable Noises: New & Selected Poems 1975-2018). He has also received the Midwest Book Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the S. Mariella Gable Prize, the Germaine Breé Book Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers designation, and a Distinction in Literature citation from the Wisconsin Library Association. In journalism, he received an Associated Press Award for Documentary Excellence for his investigations of organized crime. He has worked as a screenwriter for Warner Bros. and a Creative Consultant for HBO television. He is a former principal actor with the National Shakespeare Company, and several of his plays have been produced. He has edited a number of literary journals, including the Beloit Fiction Journal, which he founded in 1984. He teaches in the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

As You Can Imagine, This Makes Dating Difficult

The burlap sack wasn’t the first thing he noticed. It covered her head completely, but she stood in the shadows, and he’d had a few before he came in. He settled on a stool with his back to the bar, his eyes skimming the dance floor. Music pounded the brick walls, the low-slung ceiling, but her voice sliced through the din like piano wire through a windpipe.

“How may I serve you?”

It wasn’t the words but the way her tongue cradled them and thrust them through her teeth. Though she stood on the business side of the bar—though they were separated by three feet of battered teak—he could have sworn she’d spoken directly into his ear.

“Beer,” he said. “Whatever’s on tap.”

He didn’t bring up the writhing burlap sack, and neither did she. He sat on the stool until night was washed away by dawn, until the overheads blazed and the barback finished mopping. By then, he knew she’d grown up far away, a place she described as the edge of the world. She had two sisters, both younger. Her parents were monsters. She’d been in town less than a year. “My band is performing tonight,” she said, scrubbing pint glasses in the metal bar sink. “Perhaps you would like to come?”

He smiled. That sounded like fun.

She stooped over the sink, and the sack’s surface twitched and bubbled. He wondered what had happened to her face. Car accident? Jealous boyfriend? Acid or box cutter or lye? What he could see of her body—draped in fabric tied over one shoulder and cinched with rope at the waist—was extraordinary. Slender arms, angular shoulders, pearly expanse of skin interrupted by wing-shaped clavicle. He studied the perfectly formed breasts nestled beneath cream-colored cloth, tried to discern which of his colleagues might have done them. Dr. Lovejoy, he decided, or possibly Dr. Rubenstein.

“That is that,” she said, emerging from behind the bar with a messenger bag and a bottle of water. He saw now that her garment fell to the floor, covering her feet entirely. As she moved toward him, seeming to glide rather than step, he finally noticed that the burlap sack had no eyeholes. “Let us go.”

Outside, a yellow rim of sun glanced over the horizon. He hailed a cab and helped her inside. He pressed a crumpled wad of bills into the driver’s hand and instructed the man to take her wherever she wanted to go.

“I hope to see you tonight,” she said, thrusting the sack through the open window. “It is next to impossible to meet someone in this town.”

Strengthening light poured across streets, spilled over grass, splashed up buildings, soaked filthy sidewalks, pooled on corners. In the cloudless blue sky, he saw the wing-shaped clavicle nestled between her throat and chest, imagined it taking flight.

~ ~ ~

That morning, he did a brow lift and a tummy tuck. He vacuumed belly and thigh fat out of three different women. In the afternoon, he sat on the brown couch of Dr. Lana Radcliff, who perched opposite him on a blue chair. Her office was located three floors below his, and he’d been seeing her weekly for almost a year.

“Are you sleeping?”

He shook his head.

She turned, reaching across the desk behind her for a prescription pad. “I know you don’t like pills, but sometimes knowing they’re there can help.” She tore the paper free and passed it across the void. She blinked. She smiled. “How’s the other thing?”

The other thing was the reason he’d started seeing Lana—his compulsion to critique every woman he encountered and, with a mental scalpel, modify the parts of her he deemed less than ideal. Though this made him very good at his job, his inability to turn it off bothered him. Faces and bodies were weighed and dissected. Dotted lines only he could see materialized on skin, marks indicating what should be tucked, sucked, or lifted. The woman behind the deli counter. The woman who delivered his mail. Dr. Lana Radcliff.

“Things haven’t really improved,” he said.

“Have you been doing the exercise?”

The exercise involved looking in the mirror nightly and telling himself that people were just as the divine power of the universe made them, that he was merely a man, that he had no right to judge others. In time, Lana believed this recitation would open his chakras and unblock his qi flow, freeing him from negative obsessions.

“I have,” he said, and dotted lines appeared on Lana’s face. His mind made the incisions: thinned her cheeks, built up her chin, streamlined her nose, plumped her lips. Her long, graying hair was colored and styled, her breasts inflated, her glasses replaced by contacts, the shapeless sweater and slacks that wrapped her thin figure torn away. He wondered if, as they sat chatting on Thursday afternoons, she ever considered the ways in which he amended her. “But it doesn’t seem to be helping.”

Lana nodded. “Keep trying, Mitchell. Transformation takes time. And effort. You have to really want to change.”

He studied his long, tapered fingers. “I met someone.”

Lana blinked. She smiled.

“I told her I’d come see her band tonight.”

“Good!”

“I also told her I sell insurance.”

Lana propped her chin on a fist. “Why lie?”

“She was wearing a burlap sack over her head. I thought my profession might bother her.”

“Why was she wearing the sack?”

“I assume something happened to her face.”

Lana leaned forward. “What’s the attraction?”

“She’s got a great voice. And a great body. She’s easy to talk to.”

Lana blinked. She smiled.

“And there’s the sack.”

“Eventually you’ll have to come to terms with what’s under the sack, Mitchell.”

~ ~ ~

They were called The Gorgons, and when he walked into the cramped, dingy club, they’d just taken the stage. She wore the same draping garment she’d had on when he met her, or maybe she had one for every day of the week. He ordered a beer and stood at the back of the room. Studying the kids who packed the place, he wondered about her age. The night before, he’d gotten the strange sense that she’d been around since long before his birth. Ridiculous, of course.

She still wore the burlap sack, and shifting, multicolored lights played over it, exaggerating its movement. Two backup singers wearing similar sacks and dresses flanked her, and when he realized the sack was a gimmick—part of the show—he felt slightly crushed. The rest of the band stood in shadow toward the back of the stage. The droning, weaving music that spilled from their instruments seemed to project patterns into the smoky air. Her voice—ethereal, otherworldly—slid between notes. It twined around chords. The audience stood body to body, but he thought she sang for him alone. When the set ended, she left the stage and snaked through the crowd.

“Mitchell.” She was out of breath. “I am so glad you came.”

The backup singers turned out to be her sisters, and after introducing them, she led him to a booth across the room from the stage. They settled opposite one another on cracked turquoise vinyl. “So,” she said, “what did you think?”

“It was great.” He reached across the table to touch her folded hands. “You were great.”

“I appreciate the compliment.”

He studied the sack’s movements. Parts of it roiled like a storm-tossed sea. Others convulsed spasmodically.

“You are wondering about the sack.”

“No,” he said. “Not in the least.”

“Of course you are. And I cannot blame you.” 

Another band had taken the stage—a drum and guitar duo made up of twin girls with stringy white-blonde hair. Their melodies reminded him of amusement parks and surf movies.

“Years ago,” she said, “my beauty was transformed into something terrible. Now any man who gazes upon me forfeits his life.”

Hope glimmered within him. “It’s not a gimmick then.”

She shook the sack, which rustled softly. “If I did not cover my face, the members of our audience would turn to stone.”

He knew he should feel cheated, swindled, as though the world were diminishing. Instead, he sensed a thousand doors opening.

“I understand if you want to leave. This is the point at which most men do.”

The white-blonde twins were in the middle of a slow number. He stood and extended a hand. Later, when the tempo of the music increased, they continued dancing cheek to burlap. The churning and rippling of the rough sack against his face and neck felt like a hundred simultaneous caresses.

~ ~ ~

The sack made it easier for him to hack and slice through his day, to clip and tuck and suck, to scrape and abrade, to flatter and wheedle and assure. When he caught sight of her waiting outside his building after work, or standing in the doorframe of the apartment she shared with her sisters, or lying naked beside him on his king-sized bed or her futon in the light of dawn, he was confronted not with a chin or a cheek or an eyebrow but with the blank, unmarked surface of the sack, and this pleased him endlessly.

He missed three sessions with Dr. Lana Radcliff. He gave up the exercise; he stopped telling himself that people were as the divine power of the universe made them, that he had no right to judge others, that he was just a man. He took on new patients and packed his day with procedures. In the streets, in restaurants, he mentally rearranged women and handed them his card. Because she was waiting for him at the end of the day—featureless and obscure, impossible to correct—his compulsion no longer bothered him.

Then he saw her without the sack.

One morning after he’d left her apartment, he discovered that he’d forgotten his wallet. He found her standing naked and sackless in front of the cracked mirror over her dresser. In the glass, a slithering mass of serpents encircled her head. Some hissed and struck with lightning speed at empty air; others undulated slowly, forked tongues flicking. Scales glinted and sparked in the rays of the morning sun—a hypnotic melding of hues. He was no expert, but he felt certain that no two of the snakes were alike.

The serpentine cloud framed a face—one he never could have imagined. It was the most well-proportioned face he’d ever seen, and it projected shock and horror. The symmetry of its features convinced him that it had been measured and laid out by the divine power of the universe. Gazing upon it, he was flooded with the same giddy elation that had coursed through him as a boy when, after losing his mother in a crowded department store, he’d found himself back in her arms.

But in the mirror, the smooth forehead creased; the straight nose wrinkled; the plump lips pouted. Two pools of clear cerulean blinked in frustration. “I thought you had gone!” Her voice was anguished.

“You’re divine.”

He moved forward, and in the mirror, she lifted a hand. “You must not come closer!”

“Why not?”

“If I turn around, you will die.”

She plucked the burlap sack from the cluttered dresser and maneuvered it over the hissing serpents until the face in the mirror was veiled once more.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

She pulled on a robe, sat on the bed, and sighed. “I did not tell you it is possible to gaze upon my reflection because I know what it has done to men in the past. You seemed content with the sack, and I hoped we could go on this way indefinitely. It was foolish, but I could not help myself. I like you very much.”

He studied the rough, swelling surface of the sack, once a canvas onto which he could paint any image or, as he preferred, no image at all. Now he saw only the face he’d glimpsed in the mirror.

“I must be honest with you, Mitchell. I am not proud of this, but for many years, I took my anger out on others. I did not cover my face; I directed its terrible power at people intentionally. In this way I hoped to take revenge for my cursed existence.”

Dazed, he sat down beside her, and she took his hand.

“Eventually I grew weary of that life. No matter what had been done to me, I did not have to live at the edge of the world. I did not have to hurt others because I’d been hurt. My sisters and I left our dark, dreary home, and I found music, the thing about which I am most passionate.”

He had a full day of procedures scheduled. Rhinoplasty, brow lift, cheek implants, mentoplasty, facelift. Now that he’d seen her face, however, he couldn’t go through with any of them. He could never approximate the beauty to which he’d borne witness.

“Is there a way to reverse what was done to you?”

She shook the sack, which swished and crinkled.   

“Have you consulted a cosmetic surgeon?”

“There is nothing wrong with the surface of my face. It is something deeper. One cannot access it with knives.”

“We could try.”

“We?”

He dropped to his knees before her. “I don’t sell insurance. I’m a plastic surgeon. Maybe there’s something I can do.”

“Why did you lie, Mitchell?” Anguish crept back into her voice.

“I thought you might be put off by my profession.”

She stood and walked to the window. When she turned, sunshine coursed around the twitching sack, edging it with light. “This is why I hoped you would never see my reflection. It changes things. You will always yearn to display my face. But I will wear the sack for as long as I live. I have come to terms with that.”

“Surely something can be done . . .”

This time, as she shook it, the sack trilled loudly. “There is no fixing me. In this situation, you are powerless.”

“But . . .”

“No.” She pointed to the door. “I think you should go.”

~ ~ ~

He shut down his practice and spent eight months backpacking through Brazil and Ecuador. With a group of native scientists and volunteers, he catalogued flora and fauna, studying mankind’s impact on the rainforests, surrounding himself with examples of rare beauty—macaws and emerald tree frogs and plants that produce a single, exquisite bloom only once in a human lifetime. Upon his return, he made an appointment with Dr. Lana Radcliff, and when he entered her office, he was dumbfounded by her metamorphosis. She’d had her nose, lips, cheeks, and chin done. She’d replaced her glasses with jade contact lenses. Her hair had been darkened and cut into flattering layers. She wore a short skirt, strappy heels, and a sweater that hugged her new breasts. “Well?” she said. “What do you think?”

 He didn’t know how to respond. The sight of her—hacked and molded into one surgeon’s notion of beauty —brought everything back. The face he’d gone away to forget. The abject hopelessness that had swept over him after he’d glimpsed it, a feeling in which he’d very nearly drowned.

“I’ve been saving up for years.” Though her mouth was unfamiliar, though her eyes were all wrong, Lana still blinked. Still smiled. “It’s changed my life.”

“Good.” His gaze skipped around the office, alighting on things then winging away. The lamp, her nose, the desk, her chin, the framed portrait of galloping wild horses, her breasts. “I’m happy for you.”

“How was your trip? Were you able to get things into perspective?”

After he’d seen the face in the cracked mirror, Mitchell had lost his touch for cosmetic surgery. The guiding lines had vanished. Unable to determine what to tuck and what to lift, he’d had no idea where to make the first cut. He’d hoped his sojourn in the jungle would refresh him. That the beauty of the natural world would seep into him, giving him a new perspective on the modification of women. When he was confronted with the remodeled Lana Radcliff, however, he knew he would never perform another procedure.

“Mitchell?” Lana blinked. She smiled. “What’s on your mind?”

“I don’t think I can reopen my practice.”

She tented her manicured fingers. “Is this about what was under the sack?”

He nodded.

“What if I give you an exercise? Something to recite in the mirror each night? Something like, ‘Beauty is subjective. There is no ideal form. The face I saw was an illusion. Whether she’s as the divine power of the universe made her or surgically enhanced, every woman is beautiful in her own way’?”

“Maybe.” He let his eyes linger on Lana’s new face. “Do you believe that?”

She uncrossed her legs. She leaned forward and embraced her pert breasts. She smiled. She blinked. “It’s not about what I believe, Mitchell. It’s about what works for you.”

~ ~ ~

For nearly a month, he recited the words. When he woke in the night, he took long jaunts through empty streets—streets that bore no resemblance to their daytime counterparts. He chanted the words while walking and in the shower and at the gym. They became a mantra, one that flowed into and out of his consciousness steadily, and he achieved a state of mind in which he could almost believe them.

He was considering reopening his practice when he spied her on the street. Her cinched garment brushed the cement as she floated ahead of him. The back of the burlap sack swelled and trembled. He shut his eyes, but when he looked again, she was still there. Compelled to catch her, he quickened his pace. Once he was close enough to discern the rustling of the sack, he touched her shoulder.

“Mitchell!” She sounded genuinely pleased. “How are you?”

They sat at a sidewalk cafe drinking coffee. Sunlight spilled everywhere, drenching them, but he basked only in her presence. The undulations of the burlap sack cheered him; he was soothed by its swish and ripple. He didn’t mention his troubles, only that he’d gone to South America and was taking a break from cosmetic surgery. She said that an independent label had offered The Gorgons a contract and they were preparing to record their first album.

“We are playing a show tonight. Perhaps you would like to come?”

He smiled. That sounded like fun.

In a larger, cleaner club, The Gorgons’ music erected structures in the ether, hypnotizing the crowd. He stood at attention toward the back of the room, unable to shift his gaze away from the seething, churning sack. The night slid away, they both drank too much, and he ended up back at her place. Once she’d fallen asleep, her naked body prone on the futon, he rose and walked down the hall to the bathroom. He studied himself in the mirror, tried to recite his mantra, but the words had fled his mind like a canary whose cage has been torn open.

Before him, his features throbbed and shifted. Parts were cut away, others enhanced. His face became the face he’d glimpsed in the cracked mirror—the face he knew was no illusion.

In the bedroom, he knelt beside her futon. As lightly as he’d once scored flesh with a scalpel, he drew up the edge of the burlap sack. Carefully, tugging first one side and then the other, he worked the cloth up, sliding it in minute increments out from under her cheek. The glowing red face of the clock beside the bed marked his progress—the removal of the sack took two hours.

When the last bit of burlap gave way, his heart ballooned. It roiled and rippled. On the other side of the window, the sun slathered its light across the sky. He felt like the boy who’d lost his mother in a department store, and his eyes sought the one thing that could bring him comfort. Viewed straight-on, the face was far more arresting than it had been in reflection, and as breaking day illuminated it clearly—entirely—he cried out. Cerulean eyes flew open, and pink lips, but he couldn’t hear what they shouted. A droning, crackling sound deafened him. Sensation started to solidify. As she scrambled for the burlap sack, he watched the multitude of serpents twist and slither around her, and he understood how they felt—ecstatic, giddy, and free. Grinning, he gaped until he could breathe no longer, until pressure squeezed him from all sides, until the world hardened and was no more.

# # #

Jen Fawkes won the 2020 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction for Tales the Devil Told Me, which will be published on October 5, 2021, a year late due to COVID-19. Her debut book, Mannequin and Wife (LSU Press) won two 2020 Foreword INDIE Awards (Gold in Short Stories/ Honorable Mention in Literary Fiction), was nominated for a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award, and was named one of Largehearted Boy’s Favorite Short Story Collections of 2020. Jen’s work has appeared in One Story, Lit Hub, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, Best Small Fictions 2020, and many other venues. Her fiction has won numerous prizes, from The Pinch, Salamander, Washington Square Review, and others. The recipient of the 2021 Porter Fund Literary Prize, Jen lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with her husband and several imaginary friends.