Editor Selections for Issue 271
Poetry & Short Fiction

Poetry

DOG DAY AUGUST

Beside the road to the trash-laden stream
there are rabbit bones caught in the blackberry
brambles, pecked to pieces. Sun-bleached bones
now home to bees making honey in the spaces between ribs.
There was a time I was sure I had to make
a name for myself. Buy big things with all
my big ideas. That was then—when hubris
was mistaken for hope. Now, I lower my head
pushing my son in the stroller.
Birds sing harmony to the one squeaking wheel.
Trash all over the place. Everything else green
and growing. Late summer dog days now, they say.
All’s litter with life in between the spaces.
We pass the shitty apartments where families
live but landlords don’t.
Things fall apart but the sun
makes all things new after clouds pass.
I carry my son to the water’s edge,
skip stones toward the cutbank.
Nothing sings, so I sing. The world’s
been good to us—daylights come and go,
stars nailed to nightsky and pried up again
like clockwork we did nothing to deserve. A child
screams nearby, a truck’s bad heart stutters
along the road beside the stream. Everything now sings
misericordia, even the mildewed sofa
beached by the roots and rocks.
I wonder how many summers are left.
How many heartbeats until hearts cease.
How many walks until I fix the stroller wheel.
My son climbs across the beech tree roots
spread like skeleton fingers over the bank.
He climbs and follows them to where
they’re rooted and grip down to water.
Barefoot, I step into the water, my soles sink.
There in the silt, rooted, I grip down and begin to awake.

~ ~ ~

Spencer K.M. Brown is an award-winning poet and novelist from the foothills of North Carolina, where he lives with his wife and three sons. A finalist for the 2023 CMA National Book Awards, his fiction and poems have appeared in numerous publications. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast, and the poetry chapbook Cicada Rex. 

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Tess Congo is an award-winning poet. Her writing has appeared in Publisher's Weekly, The Tusculum Review, the anthology Ripe, and elsewhere. She has studied writing at the University of New Hampshire, the University of New Orleans, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Harvard University, and Hunter College (where she earned her MFA in poetry). Discover more of her work at www.TessCongo.com

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A.J. Frantz is from Detroit and currently studies urban planning at Oberlin College. Her work has been featured in Touchstone, Waymark, Inlandia and elsewhere.

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Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998. His poems have been featured in The Potomac Review, Museum of Americana, Ink Sac, Welter Journal, The Cafe Review, The Madrigal, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, Roi Faineant Press, and many others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999, and a finalist for the Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize in 2022. He is the author of God Said Fire and Snowfire and Home.

Short Fiction

Soul Man

When Brad got the call from Rabbi Shem Tov, he was eating treyf Mexican in his office and watching soft-core porn. With most of his company away on a three-day training retreat, he’d been sure, when he set up his tablet, that he was in the clear. That a rabbi should call at this moment—just as the intro sequence began—only confirmed his worst theological suspicion: Namely, that while God may not exist, He still made you feel guilty as sin.

“I’m a friend of your grandfather Norman,” the rabbi said warmly, his lopped-off final “r” belying a New York provenance. “He’s a wonderful, wonderful man.”

This was news. Hastily powering off his device and removing his feet from his desk, Brad thought of his father’s father, currently dying in a nursing home in the San Fernando Valley. He featured as a gruff and impatient presence in Brad’s childhood memories: expressing bewildered disapproval when Brad struck out in his Little League games; admonishing Brad’s tears when the top scoop of ice cream fell off his cone at the pier. Barking out words as Brad struggled with the archaic English of the Passover Haggadah, back when they went to Brad’s cousin’s seder for their yearly dose of religion. Even the upward trajectory of Brad’s young adulthood—his graduation from college and then business school, the repudiation of his awkward, patsy self through obsessive weightlifting, and now, his job at what he called a “high-tech firm” but was really an online-gambling company—had merely elicited a succession of grunts, as though Norman were but partially placated.

The rabbi explained that he visited the Jewish residents of his grandpa’s nursing home each week. “We’ve had some meaningful talks,” he said, his tone suggesting that at the moment, he was recalling a few wistfully. Then he abruptly lowered his voice, striking a solemn note. “Recently, he told me that your father plans to cremate him after he dies.”

“Okay,” Brad answered uncertainly.

“This is a problem, obviously,” said Rabbi Shem Tov. “Big, huge problem. Massive no-no in Jewish law.”

Brad looked down at his foil-wrapped burrito. Shreds of cheddar poked up like meerkats in a desert of grilled beef strips.

“You know why we Jews don’t cremate, right?” the rabbi asked. 

“The Holocaust?” Brad ventured.

“That, too! The Holocaust, absolutely,” the rabbi said. For reasons he couldn’t explain, Brad felt a mixture of pride and relief. “But the prohibition actually goes much farther back. It has deep roots in Judaism.”

Now Rabbi Shem Tov began to explain the biblical commandment to bury the dead. He mentioned the Talmudic decree against destroying the body by fire. Then he described the Kabbalistic belief that the soul takes it time after death, leaving the body that housed it slowly to get used to its heavenly home. Cremation, finished the rabbi, is jarring, a sudden and painful jolt. Brad shuddered, picturing a sweet young soul in too-tight swimming trunks, tossed at a family party into the deep end of a freezing pool.

“Which is why,” the rabbi concluded with a flourish, “you must talk with your dad about giving Norman a proper burial. And fast, before it’s too late.”

“But—why me?” Brad asked. “Why don’t you speak to my dad yourself, or tell my grandpa to talk to him?”

“Ah,” said the rabbi, his drawn-out vowel implying that Brad had asked a brilliant question. “Norman says that it’s hard for him to talk religion with your dad. He also thinks your dad wouldn’t take too well to a rabbi getting in touch. He suggested I speak with you instead. He says you have influence.”

Brad thought of the rabbi’s directive the rest of that day and while driving home, the stop-start traffic on the 10 freeway an apt metaphor for his mental state. On the one hand, Grandpa had asked for his help, though Brad was hardly a model grandson. He’d visited him but a handful of times since Thanksgiving two years before, when Brad’s father had transported him from his nursing home in a collapsible wheelchair. It had been a complex operation—Brad’s parents’ home in the Encino hills was fifteen steps up from the street—and afterwards, his father had declared it too exhausting to repeat. The least he could do for Grandpa, thought Brad, was make a call on his soul’s behalf.

On the other hand, that meant dealing with his father. And Brad was loath to do that.

A celebrated cardiac surgeon, Brad’s father was a tall, trim man who’d reached sixty-five without a hint of a paunch. Like Norman, he was scornful of weakness, of both the physical and intellectual kinds. Brad suspected his father saw everyone like the muscle that went under his knife: a system to be made stronger, flawed material he could fix. “Occupational hazard,” his mother would say when a teenaged Brad had dared to vent. “Holding lives in your hands every day inevitably goes to your head.”

After eating a teriyaki bowl in his one-bedroom in Silver Lake—the mortgage more than he could strictly afford, but the neighborhood too hip to pass up—Brad decided to bite the bullet and dialed his father’s cell phone. Answering on the sixth ring, Brad’s father sounded mildly upset. Perhaps Grandpa’s decline was weighing on him after all.

“My shorts are still in the hamper,” his father complained. “I need them for tonight’s doubles game.”

After asking him how Grandpa was doing (“Getting worse by the day”) and insisting he planned to visit him soon (“Don’t wait for the stars to align,” said his father, “if you know what I mean”), Brad wondered in what he hoped was a casual tone if he’d purchased a burial plot.

“We’re not burying him,” said Brad’s father. “We’re cremating him, like Grandma.” Brad’s grandmother had been a round, pillowy woman who’d died of cancer when he was in the fourth grade. He vaguely recalled her in a state of constant bustle, out of which plates of Stella D’oro cookies appeared at regular intervals. “Cremation’s much better for the planet. Cemeteries are a waste of land.” As if to emphasize the subject’s finality, Brad heard the sound of a tennis bag being zipped definitively closed.

“For sure,” Brad said quickly. Deference was key. “But—isn’t burying customary for Jews?”

“For the Orthodox, maybe, but not for us. We live in modernity, remember? We’re enlightened Jews. We’re Reform.”

Brad envisioned an unsuspecting soul in his bedwetting pull-up, walking to the kitchen for water and stumbling into a dinner party.

“It’s just, there’s this concept in Kabbalah—”

“In what?” Brad’s father sounded distant, as though the phone were pressed to his chest. After a moment, he announced that “your mother wants to talk,” and unceremoniously handed Brad off.

Three days later, Brad had nearly forgotten their talk when the rabbi called again. Brad made a mental note to save the number, so he could screen his calls from now on.

“What’s the low-down on your grandfather’s burial?” the rabbi asked him. “No pun intended, of course!”

“Um, I can’t really do this on the phone,” Brad replied. He glanced at his officemate from Sales, presently absorbed in a video game.

“No problem,” said the rabbi. “I’ll be there in a few.”

Brad stared in horror at his phone, praying that he’d heard wrong. Surely the rabbi wouldn’t actually come to Brad’s office, though the address, he confirmed miserably, was listed on the company’s website, together with a terrible portrait taken the day he’d suffered pink eye. He tried in vain to focus on his computer screen, stealing glances every few moments through the glass walls that divided the floor. A half-hour later, just as he’d persuaded himself it was all an absurd mistake, he looked up to see the big-breasted secretary—could her blouse be any lower cut?—speaking to a ruddy-faced man in a black yarmulke and white dress shirt. As she pointed a long red fingernail in the direction where he sat, Brad ran out to hustle the rabbi into an empty conference room.

“Rabbi, you didn’t need to come,” Brad said breathlessly.

“I was in the area. Kosher bakery on Pico Boulevard,” he responded, as if that explained it all. “I needed cookies for tonight’s lesson at shul. It’s ‘Torah for Beginners.’ Maybe you’ll give it a try.” He handed Brad a flyer with an image of dense lines of Hebrew letters, a silver pointer resting on top. Then he sat down and pulled a white bakery box out of a plastic bag. Dark gray circles dotted the cardboard where oil from its contents had soaked through.

“Take one, go ahead,” the rabbi urged, reaching in himself.

Brad peered inside at an assortment of thick black-and-white cookies. The last time he’d had one had been at his cousin’s bar mitzvah; some kind of soccer theme had carried through the dessert buffet. He’d refused to have a bar mitzvah himself, terrified at the thought of chanting in front of a whole synagogue. His dad had said that was fine with him, it being “hogwash belief.” Now he wondered what the rabbi would say if he knew that Brad had forgone the milestone. Did it mean he wasn’t a kosher Jew, like being uncircumcised? Perhaps cosmic bouncers would block his entrance to heaven, since his name wasn’t on the guest list.

“Listen, rabbi,” Brad began. “I tried to talk my dad, but he’s really set on cremation. Anyway, we’re Reform. Maybe burial doesn’t apply to us.”

His mouth full of cookie, the rabbi waved his arms back and forth as if dispersing a cloud of flies.

“No, no, no,” he insisted. “Burial’s not a denominational thing. It applies to every Jew.”

Brad sighed. He’d feared as much. “Okay, fine, let’s say you’re right. The fact is, my dad’s set on cremation, and he’s the one who gets to decide.”

The rabbi smiled at Brad tenderly. “No, Brad, it’s for your grandfather to decide. And he has: He wants to be buried after his death according to Jewish tradition.”

Now Rabbi Shem Tov sat back in his chair, brushing the crumbs from where they’d gathered on the ledge above his belly. “You know, once Norman told me about how he moved your family out West. Can you believe, he drove through the Rockies in a rainstorm, with your dad in a car seat in back. He said it was the scariest night of his life. And the most exhilarating.” He clapped his hands on his kneecaps, looking Brad straight in the eyes. “My dad, may his memory be a blessing, also loved to drive. Put him behind a wheel, and you saw that man come alive. I wish you could have known Norman the way I knew my dad.”

Brad envisioned a younger, though still glowering Grandpa gripping the steering wheel, his car shaking in the whipping wind, his gaze locked on his foggy windshield, hurtling toward—what, exactly? Better weather, for sure. A duplex with its own front lawn. A dedicated parking spot. But as to whether he’d also found happiness, Brad had no idea.

“If your dad doesn’t understand how important this is,” the rabbi said, “we’ll have to make clear to him that this is Norman’s wish.”

“But how, if my grandpa won’t raise the subject?”

“You’ll write out his wishes yourself and have Norman sign the paper. If I write them, or even type them up, your dad can say that I forced his hand. But if the writing is yours, and the letter is in Norman’s possession, your dad will have to accept that it’s what your grandfather (grandfathuh) wants.”

Brad rubbed his eye with his palm. He’d lost, unsurprisingly. “Fine, I’ll do it. But I don’t understand why this matters to you so much. I mean, it’s not like you’re family. Why do you care what happens to him?”

Now the rabbi threw out his arms, exposing dark stains in both armpits. “But I am family, Brad! We Jews are all one family, because we all have a Jewish soul.” Satisfied, he took another bite of cookie, his point beyond dispute.

And so, Brad found himself that Sunday sitting by his sleeping grandpa’s bedside, staring at hands crisscrossed with blue and pink veins like one of those topographic maps. Lying there small and shrunken, wrapped in the nursing home’s sheets, he looked like a hot dog whose casing had shriveled from steam. He woke up when a nurse in a colorful turban came in to check his oxygen.

“Hi, Grandpa,” Brad said loudly. “I came to visit you.”

“I,” Norman croaked. “Can see.” There followed similarly labored answers to how he felt and spent his days, after which, Brad realized with a sense of shame, he’d run out of things to say. He thought of Rabbi Shem Tov, sitting in this very chair, finding the energy to engage in a largely one-sided schmooze each week.

“Grandpa,” Brad said at last, “I wanted to speak about your wishes for, you know, after you pass away. Is it true you want a Jewish burial?” When he didn’t answer, Brad moved closer and whispered conspiratorially, “I spoke with the rabbi, Grandpa. He said you don’t want to be cremated.”

“That’s. Right,” Grandpa replied, staring ahead expressionlessly.

“But you’ve never shown any interest in religion. Why does it matter now?”

“I didn’t live. Like a Jew,” rasped Norman. “But I don’t want. To die. Like a goy.”

“But you had Grandma cremated,” Brad pointed out.

“I did,” Norman answered, closing his eyes. “And I’ve felt guilty. For twenty years.”

So Brad explained—was Grandpa even listening?—that he’d written a detailed note. All Norman had to do was sign it and put it with his things. Brad looked around the room. The only personal item he saw was a photo from his college graduation. His grandpa, he knew, hadn’t gone to college. He’d worked at an uncle’s laundromat right after high school instead. Did Brad know, the rabbi had asked him, that Norman was sent to America at the delicate age of thirteen, to live with distant relations until his parents could leave their country? Embarrassed, Brad admitted he did not. The experience must have been jarring. A sudden and painful jolt.

“You can put it in your nightstand,” Brad said, then patted his pocket for a pen. By the time he found one at the nurse’s station, Norman had fallen asleep.

While driving back to the city, Brad called the rabbi’s cell. He fancied himself like a detective from that ’80’s police show he’d watched on rerun, cruising on business throughout the city, albeit in grittier neighborhoods. Rabbi Shem Tov, in this analogy, was the harried chief back at the station. The vision made Brad feel cozy, as if he were part of a team. He explained that he’d left the paper on the nightstand with instructions for his grandpa to sign. He’d even left a pen, he added, and told a nurse with a colorful turban to remind him. And also to steady his hand.

“That sounds like Shalanda,” said the rabbi. He knew all the nurses’ names? “She’s pretty good with these things. But either way, I’ll make sure she took care of it when I visit Norman on Wednesday.”

But on Tuesday, Brad’s mother called him at work to say that Grandpa had died. “He passed away in his sleep last night,” she said. “All in all, not a bad way to go. Your father’s back at the hospital now, but you can call him after five.” Panicked, Brad looked at the time: It was nearly three o’clock. Could his dad have already made the arrangements? He asked his mother if they’d seen a note from Grandpa, requesting a Jewish burial. His mother said that she didn’t think so. Didn’t he want to be cremated?

He hung up and tried his father, but the call went straight to voice mail. What if, at this very moment, his grandfather’s body was in the furnace? He saw a pure soul sleeping soundly straight through its morning alarm, then abruptly awakened mid-dream, his blankets yanked cruelly off.

Frantic, he decided to go and find his grandpa’s note himself. He drove ten miles above the speed limit: a detective on urgent business. The freeway, for once, was miraculously clear, traffic flowing in both directions. On the side streets, too, the lights were all green, making Brad feel that God, though He did not exist, was nonetheless rooting for him. At the nursing home, he sprinted to Norman’s room and threw himself at the nightstand. But the drawers were completely empty; all traces of Grandpa were gone. He looked up as Shalanda came rushing in, a worried look on her face.

“We had to remove Norman’s things,” she said. “Someone needs his place—”

“The note! Did you show my dad the note Grandpa signed? Saying he wanted to be buried?”

“He didn’t have the chance to sign it,” Shalanda said gently. “He was never awake long enough.” Brad sank down, deflated, onto the newly stripped bed. He should have stayed and cinched the deal. Why hadn’t he seen the task through?

“Then what’s happening with, you know—the body?”

As Shalanda started to answer, the doorway was suddenly filled with the wide form of Rabbi Shem Tov, sweating from his run down the hall and the heavy black jacket of his suit. “Baruch Dayan Emet,” he wheezed. “I came as soon as I heard. I realized I couldn’t make it tomorrow, so I called to ask about Norman’s note. Shalanda said he didn’t sign it,” he said, bowing slightly to Shalanda to absolve her of responsibility. “But I’m sure there’s still time. These things take a day at least. Worst case, we take a ride to Costanso Street, make a fuss at the crematorium. We can’t give up the fight yet,” he said, plucking an inhaler from his pocket and taking a long, deep puff. “We can still save a Jewish soul.”

But Brad was staring at the rabbi, barely listening to a word, this crazy rabbi, who’d set off his asthma on behalf of some old man who’d died. This rabbi, who wasn’t family, who stood to gain nothing in the end, but who was willing to fight a lost cause, all on account of some hogwash belief.

Clear as day, Brad saw a soul led gently by a pointer across a line, like the big, warm hand that held his small one on his first day of kindergarten. Then the door swung open, and all the letters looked up and smiled, saying, here, come in, have a cookie.

~ ~ ~

Marla Braverman is a writer in Jerusalem, Israel. Her essays have been featured in First Things, Mosaic, and Azure, and her humor in McSweeney’s. This is her first work of fiction.

Midget Wrestling Thursday Nights

The wrestling doesn’t start until 10:30, but one of the midgets, a man with a rattlesnake tattooed on his shoulder, says he needs to be on the road by eleven.

“Get that asshole here, and let’s do this. I got a long drive back up mountain. Everyone’s drunk enough to have fun, right?” He bumps the woman next to him, spilling her drink.

“Give Jimmy a minute, pal,” I say filling a shot of Fireball for the woman. Jimmy’s been wrestling here for two years. He’s the only wrestler whose real name I remember.

I want to push this guy off the stool, but he’s half the talent, and I gotta have the tips tonight. Trout fishing is a little more than a month away, and I need new waders if I’m going to reach the big fish.

“Oh, I’m gonna fuck him up.” The snake ripples as he slams his hands on the bar.

“What’s your wrestling name again?”

“The fucking Jersey Devil, man! I’ve been here four times!” He disappears into the crowd waving hands and arms all waiting for bottles of Yuengling and pitchers of Budweiser.

To pay the wrestlers, Kevin, the owner, slips two envelops behind the snarling taxidermied bear head hanging above the liquor when he leaves at six. One enveloped scrawled with the word Winner, the other, Chump.

I’ve looked. They’re both cash. The winner gets twenty more bucks.

I don’t like the midgets beating each other up so bad. They break bones and get stitches every week. The pay isn’t that good. But in this county, most construction bosses won’t hire a midget to break down a shed. Jimmy says wrestling at the bar is better than working at the mall. The kids are the worst at the mall.

We didn’t used to have midget wrestling. Kevin said that they approached him. We have women’s mud wrestling in the summer that brings a good crowd. Thursday nights in February are slow, but the midgets are popular. There’s about six wrestlers that rotate every week. I think they found each other on Facebook.

I make vodka Red Bulls for two coeds with enough foundation on their cheeks to lay bricks. They keep their faces still as if they’re afraid their makeup will crack like dry dirt. They don’t tip.

The first piano chords of “Free Bird” comes on over the speakers, and the talking in the room quiets. People hold their phones and lighters above their heads while they sway like their parents did in this bar forty years ago. Besides the phones, most things haven’t changed.

As “Free Bird” fades out, Ted Nugent’s “Dog Eat Dog” blares from the speakers nailed to the rafters. Static falls like rain on the trucker caps and bleached hair.

“I heard Mike wanted to go early,” Jimmy says as he pulls himself up on the bar. His left eyebrow is segmented like a millipede from stitches he needed after last week’s fight.

“The Jersey Devil? Yeah, he’s pissy. Shaking all over.”

The first time Jimmy came into the bar I asked him what his wrestling name was.

“The Flying Forehead.” He pointed at the shiny plain of his receding hairline and winked. “Alliteration. Like in a poem.”

Jimmy wins most of his fights. When he lost one last year, he asked me to take a picture of him with the ‘Chump’ envelop. Jimmy stuck up his thumb and jutted out his bottom jaw while I snapped a few on his phone.

“I’ll print one out, and you can hang it up there with the bear,” he said.

I hung the photo that next week. Kevin’s never said anything about it.

As Jimmy jumps off the stool to go change in the bathroom, his stitches make me think of Allen, my best friend, and how many bits of thread he has in his face. I really cut Allen up. My knuckles are still purple, but the swelling has gone down.

We played high school football together. He was tailback and I was fullback. I opened a lot of holes for him to run through. I liked laying people out and watching him run for a touchdown.

I always thought that if I caught Mary cheating on me, I’d be coming home late.

Last Friday, I came home early.

Because I can’t find a full-time teaching job in the county, I tutor kids in math after school before I bartend. The last kid didn’t show, and I raced to Sheetz to order a burrito and fried pickles for Mary and me to share.

She works all day at the sauce factory, and by the time I get home after last call she’s usually asleep. The blue light of the TV carving shadows on the blanket’s folds.

Allen’s truck was in the side yard, which wasn’t strange because that’s where he parks when he hunts the state land behind our place, and to watch Penn State with me on Saturdays, the Steelers on Sundays.

I heard them in the living room as I climbed the steps of the trailer.

He was on top, facing away when I entered.

Mary’s eyes were wide, and she tried to push Allen off her, but he just laid there. Face pressed against the couch cushions.

When we were in high school, Allen could stay so still that turkey vultures would think he was dead. He’d lay in a field for an hour, two, three, and wait until they landed. He’d catch one and take a picture on his flip phone to prove it.

He let them all go.

But there on the couch, he wasn’t dead.

Because I wouldn’t hit Mary, I tried to kill Allen.

He was wet where he pulled out of her, and the condom was shriveled around his penis. I pushed Mary off the couch, grabbed her clay ash tray, and smashed it across Allen’s face. Blood ran between his fingers as he covered the cuts. I punched him in the gut so he’d moved his hands. He doubled over and I grabbed his hair. My knuckles found the slits in his face and opened them wider.

I wondered if his skin was like the layers of an onion. That if I punched him enough, would I see all the different muscles down to the bone?

She’d called him handsome twice in the past year. Once at the farm show when the mechanical bull threw him off and he climbed out of the pit with straw in his hair. The other when we went drinking in State College and he wore a collared shirt. The top two buttons undone. She didn’t say I was more handsome either time. She didn’t call me handsome most of the time.

Mary grabbed my shoulders, and I let her pull me back. Allen stopped struggling. My hands hurt.

* * *

Three weeks ago, Jimmy had to stay after closing to get his hand looked at. The elbow of the other wrestler smashed the thumb joint, and the meat was already turning blue. Dr. Norris, the veterinarian we call to fix up the wrestlers, was driving slow because of the roads. We use Dr. Norris because a vet knows enough about bodies to help and won’t charge much.

Jimmy and I sat at a table by the door and waited. Over the past few months, we’d talked about the Steelers, Eagles, and Springsteen enough to know where we both stood on the niceties. He’d told me about growing up outside of Philly before moving to Altoona. I told him about hunting and fishing, and how school was closed the first day of deer season. Jimmy said he loved playing basketball at the courts lit all night outside his school. Bats as big as ducks swooping low towards the ball as it arched to the hoop.

“I could never get basketball. Thought it was a beautiful game, but could never play it,” I said, finishing off a beer.

“It is beautiful, man.”

I could see him chewing a question around like a cow chews cud. The getting knocked in the head a couple times, four beers, and the late hour was reason enough for him to ask. “You ever think a little woman was sexy?”

“Like below five foot?” I laughed into my empty bottle, but Jimmy didn’t crack.

“No, like a midget. Like a midget woman.”

“No, man.” And because I was buzzed and it was late, I gave my truth more than I should’ve. “The arms and legs get me.”

Jimmy set down his bottle and said, “That’s kinda fucked to say that.”

“I’m sorry. You asked me a question, pal.”

“But like not only the saying but believing it. You could never have sex with a little person? You could never find beauty in one?”

Dr. Norris opened the door, and snow blew onto the brown floor before melting.

“Let’s get your hand fixed. I gotta get back to my wife.”

* * *

While I wait for Jimmy to come out of the bathroom to announce the match, I study how the only light reaching the booths along the wall is the dull, green hum of neon signs. In the electric shade, the flat, pasty faces look sickly. Women with lipstick leaking onto the tainted slats of their teeth sit on laps as men playing under their short skirts.

When I see Jimmy’s blue spandex along the far wall, I plug the mic into the amp. The music shuts off, and groans and shouts roll in from the half dark. I flip on the spotting lights above the stage. A twenty-by-twenty plywood-supported platform with rope strung around the four locust posts Kevin brought from his grandfather’s farm. The rope doesn’t give when the wrestlers swing against it, and the burns are rough enough to bleed.

“Attention! Attention!” I’m no Rick Flare, and the talking continues. “All the way from Curwensville…The Jersey Devil!”

Mike climbs into the ring, finishes his beer, and yells at the crowd. They yell back while he flexes.

“And from just down the valley…The Flying Forehead!” Jimmy’s mullet flows off the back of his head like an otter sliding down a riverbank.

He clasps his hands together, swinging them back and forth calling, “Hurrah! Hurrah!”

The crowd laughs.

Drunk men swear around me and pass dollar bets back and forth. I unplug the mic and play the song list for fifteen minutes. Everything from the Rocky theme to Eminem. The fight usually only lasts ten.

I haven’t heard if Allen is going to press charges. I hope he’s a good enough friend to let this slide after breaking up my marriage. Mary let me pick up my things the next day. She asked if it could be a no-fault divorce. I said there was plenty of fault to go around. Most of it fell on the old carpet. It probably tripped Allen right into her vagina. She didn’t laugh. I cried all the way to my father’s.

The bouncer stands between Jimmy and Mike who are covered in vegetable oil from the kitchen. He claps his hands and the two collide. Their triceps flex in the bright lamps. Red marks grow fast as trumpet vine on their shoulders each time one breaks free of the other. Their faces glisten with sweat, teeth bared in anger as they struggle. Every blow sounds like a bag of potatoes thrown into a pickup’s bed.

I’ve been sleeping on my dad’s couch. The space next to me that Mary used to fill is now empty and a drop off. Twice in just six nights I’ve fallen because I was turning to put my arm around her. My nose bled for twenty minutes on Tuesday after I hit the floor.

A man moves, pelvis first, toward a woman at the left end of the bar. Most everyone is focused on the fight, and I shuffle down, wiping spills, and handing a beer across the wood as I go.

She tries to get off her stool, but he pins her there. A cheer goes up from the crowd. Mike’s calling for fries while Jimmy sits on a stool drinking water.

“Can I get you anything?” I ask the woman. The man takes a staggered step back.

“She don’t want nothin’,” he says, leaning on the bar.

“I can see that, but I don’t think you do, pal.” I set my hands palm side down so he can see my bruised knuckles. “Try and find someone who wants to sleep with you. I’m sure there’s a cougar out there in the woods.” I motion to the ring of people around the stage.

There are three baseball bats under the bar. One on every side. I reach my right hand under and grip the handle.

“Mind your own fuckin’ business.” He takes a step towards me, and I bring the bat down on the bar close to his hands.

“Get the fuck out.”

He bounces on the balls of his feet for a moment then slinks between two men, and out of sight.

“Thanks,” the woman says. She’s mountain pretty. Like Mary. She probably came off the Buckhorn to see what the valley boys could offer. I want to tell her she’s better off on the mountain.

The mountains around here are shorter than they were a hundred years ago. The coal companies strip-mined them, pulled back the tops like turtle shells. They left before I was born, but my grandpa told me about the big machines. I drive by the orange streams, and the brown scars that linger on the ridges where trees haven’t grown back. I’m glad I can’t see the marks from the valley when the light is slanted purple in the evening.

Allen never had a girlfriend. Just women who he’d sleep with. I was surprised he could get away with that in a town as small as ours. I wonder how many times he’d laid still enough so other boyfriends and husbands hadn’t seen him?

Even over the music and voices, I can hear teeth meeting flesh.

The rattlesnake tattoo is flayed in two, and Mike slouches on the ropes, hand over his bleeding shoulder. Jimmy holds his mouth and checks his front teeth to see if they’re loose. The bouncer stands in a corner looking back and forth.

A man with a horseshoe mustache stands across the ring and screams for someone to finish it. Jimmy spits and rushes Mike.

They pile onto the floor, arms and legs flexing and straining; grunts so loud the bass of the speakers is muffled.

Men and women whoop and holler, spilling drinks and crushing fries and bits of chicken wings onto the floor.

The playlist ends, but the energy of the crowd doesn’t sag. Human sound fills the space. Noises of the body: hands clapping, voices yelling. No other instruments.

Jimmy stands while Mike shakes his head. Jimmy’s mullet is slick against his neck as he climbs the ropes. Whistles, cheers, and a bra are thrown at his chest, which is covered with blood thinned by oil.

Mike is up, advancing toward him. People scream in worry. I find myself screaming too.

Jimmy leaps off the ropes, and lands legs-first in Mike’s arms, who for a moment holds him, then collapses, tapping Jimmy’s thigh until he rolls off.

We all cheer, caught in the tumbling of our own sound.

Allen shot an eight-point buck on the ridge to the east of the trailer in October and called me to help follow the blood trail. He’d patterned the deer all summer and fall with trail cameras. When we found the crumpled body on an incline, caught by the antlers in a moosewood snag, we grabbed each other, and yelled like we did on the football field after a win.

Jimmy scales a post, flecked red in the bright glare, light catching him on all the places shadows would typically be, and calls out a line I remember from college. No alliteration, but still poetry. Still pretty.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever!”

And because it’s been such a long time since any of us have seen anything beautiful, and all we’ve known forever are the mountains and their scars, no one gasps when a bottle is thrown and shatters on the back of Jimmy’s head.

The bouncer jumps out of the ring, racing through the door, and tackles a man scrambling for his truck.

The crowd follows them out into the parking lot, snow-covered and icy, excited to see a face sink into the snow like a horse’s print in mud.

 I dial Dr. Norris and tell him to bring all the thread in his office.

Both wrestlers lean against the ropes, eyes closed, waiting for their envelopes.

The wind outside makes the door groan as it shuts behind the last person. I don’t know which envelope to give Jimmy. I feel like I’m the only chump in the room.

 ~ ~ ~

Noah Davis’s second poetry collection, The Last Beast We Revel In, was published in April by CavanKerry Press. Davis’s first collection, Of This River, won the Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry, and his poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Orion, Best New Poets, The Year’s Best Sports Writing, Southern Humanities Review, and North American Review among others.

Show Me Your Bear Face

With dabs of spirit gum, I glue patches of fur to Jason’s back and shoulders while he pouts. I growl into the dressing room mirror, hoping for my husband’s smile, but he just sits and scowls.

“C’mon,” I say, “show me your bear face.”

When we were in college, I found Jason this ridiculous Gatlinburg t-shirt at a thrift store with a roaring grizzly bear. If he noticed someone admiring it, like at parties, he’d make this big, dumb bear face, so he’d be mimicking the grizzly when they looked back up. I thought it was hilarious, funnier than they did.

“I look stupid,” he says.

“You look hot,” I say.

He raises a paw and gives me the finger.

This year, I convinced him to join our cast of The Winter’s Tale, reasoning it would be nice to spend these summer evenings together.

(Okay, I begged him.)

There are no lines to memorize; he just has to chase our friend—well, my friend—Brian Clark off stage, growling. And he doesn’t have to sit in the audience, bored shitless for three hours.

And he doesn’t have to watch me pretend to fawn over someone else, or God forbid, kiss somebody. Here’s Jason’s revenge for fifteen years ago, our senior year, when we broke up and Brian Clark was my three-week (offstage) Romeo.

Jason still holds a grudge.

Lynn, the director, wanders by the dressing room and shouts, “Tres sexy, boys.” She’s at least twice our age and taught my drama class in high school. Jason perks up.

“See,” I say.

I think he’s blushing, though it’s hard to tell under all the hair and makeup. They were going to order a bear suit, but Jason’s so big and bulging from the gym that I said we should save money and let him do it this way. It’s funnier, too.

He looks more like a werebear than a bear, honestly. You can still see his Marine Corps tattoos. There are too many to cover. Thankfully, the goddamn Punisher logo is right…here…on his neck, where the bondage collar that anchors his ear-helmet clasps.

His mom is driving up from Birmingham for opening night, and he’s nervous, which is adorable. I’ve never seen him nervous. Maybe on our wedding night when he had to give a speech.

“Alright, what’s your cue,” I say, squeezing his tree trunk bicep.

He scratches his cinder block chin, wrinkles his black-penciled nose. “Huh? Oh. ‘I am gone forever.’”

 I kiss the top of his head.

He takes my hand in his big paw. “Mikey? You’ll be backstage, too, right?”

“Correct,” I say. “I’m still not in that scene.”

He hasn’t read the entire play.

“Okay. Good,” he says. He’s sweating. I’m glad I’m nearly finished. The rest of the fur won’t stick. At least he’s only onstage for five seconds.

I’m fastening the tail to the waistband of his bear thong (“Hold still!”) when Kylee, who’s one of my drama seniors, pokes her head in, saying, “Ten until—oh shit,” and vanishes.

I pat his shoulder. “Alright. Once more into the breach.”

He’s started to turn around, but freezes, his furry bulk filling the dressing room like a statue of a minotaur, some bestial demigod.

I nudge him.“Babe?”

He looks confused. “What did you say? The breach?”

“Once more into the breach. That’s Shakespeare.”

He shakes his head with a jerk. “Bad luck.”

“No, that’s … the Scottish play. What’s wrong?”

He rolls his shoulders and clenches his fists like before a deadlift. “Nothing. There’s a guy who’d say that on patrol. Nevermind.” He pounds a paw against his chest, thud, and says, “Hoo-ah.” Then, again, harder, thud, and shouts, “Hoo-ah!”

“No,” I say. “What guy?”

He’s hitting himself hard enough to bruise. His hoo-ahs echo down the hall. He’s grown this huge, toothy grin.

“A dead guy,” he says. “Let’s go.” Lowering his head, he’s out the door and marching down the hall for the green room, where everyone's circling to put hands together for “good show.” Actors laugh when they see him, but Jason shoulders into the circle’s center. He points a claw at Brian Clark, then Mendy Kline, then Brayden Walsh—they look happily terrified—and he roars, “Once more into the fucking breach, alright? Now you show me your fucking bear face.”

 ~ ~ ~

Travis Flatt (he/him) is a teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear in Fractured Lit, JMWW, Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, HAD, New Flash Fiction Review, and other places. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs, often with his wife and son.