Winners of the 2024
Prime Number Magazine Award for
Poetry & Short Fiction

Our Judges

Poetry

Flowers from the Mouth

  —Hanoi, Vietnam

In the school courtyard, eyes registering bird prattle
face eyes that know all the textures of silence—
perhaps now, the touch of a succulent’s

soft petal on a windowsill or the sinking
of hands into a bowl of cool, dry rice.
I watch as the orphans from the center

for the hearing impaired begin a game of charades
while our students, who with imaginary keys,
locked their mouths in a vow of silence

for the next 30 minutes, guess the names
of countries they sign. A girl with shoulder-length
hair curls her hands into paws and produces

a bounce. “Australia!” our students shout,
everyone laughs. Then comes America,
two hands drawing bold circles in front of the belly,

Canada, a proud fist to the heart, India
an index finger above the head
followed by a little shoulder shimmy.

It makes sense, I tell me friend, also my colleague,
Language should be the thing it is.
We list our linguistic failures:

The guinea pig is neither a pig nor from Guinea.
A starfish is not a fish, a Traveler’s Palm
is not a palm at all but related to the bird of paradise.

What about the counterfeit, “I’m fine,” to “How are you?”
when I want to say,
“My heart is that bird’s wing but nailed to the floor.”

If everyone lived in silence, there would be no misnomers;
surprise and joy would scrawl itself out onto faces,
bodies would become the shapes of the animals

that lumber in our minds. I know this to be true
when Mr. Thai, director of the orphanage,
concludes the lesson by reaching into his mouth

to pull out what could have been, even in its invisibility,
a long-stemmed lotus. “Thank you,” he says,
“Flowers from the mouth.” He points to his lips

then makes petals from his fingers bloom form his palms.
“Thank you very much,” this time out comes a bouquet
of pale pink orchids, purple hydrangea, and white calla lilies.

I turn to my friend, the space between us,
a bed of fragrant violets. Suddenly, I want to call
my mother, fill her ear with bleeding hearts,

then find my husband and children and proffer
them all mouthfuls of peonies.
What if we all stopped the street sweepers

from their sweeping to present them with red azaleas
blooming off our tongues so that they could
arrange them into warm fires in their kitchens,

then do the same for every person who smiles at us
in passing? And why stop there when we could surprise
those who called us names that broke our tiny child bones

by giving them mouthfuls of sunflowers
to fill the dark lacuna of their own childhoods with a bit of gold,
for gratitude is often another word for forgiveness.

We could cover this city with flowers— motorcades
mimicking fields of lavender, petals from the mouths
of singing school children carpeting streets, even chrysanthemums

sprouting from the mouths of the dead
push through graves so that their children
can grieve in hushed beauty.

Isn’t this the theory of biomimicry? The principle of emergence?
When a typhoon causes a landslide in the mountains
of Sapa, weeds move in, soften the soil so that berries,

shrubs and small flowers can grow, and seedlings fly off
like a murmuration of starlings
to land on the next wound in need of healing.

There’s a whole chaperoning and parenting
that happens while we sleep—
the same shrubs shield the seedlings,

who then put down roots.
Before we know it, we have an understory,
and the old man who lost his home and wife

to that mountain is able for the first time in months
look out at the life emerging from the earth, and quietly
let go from his tongue a purple spray of forget-me-nots—

grief makes the purest peat for beatitude.
The world is pulsing with the imminence of blossom.
Windowpanes fog with florets,

latrines ready to sprout arabesques of flower and foliage,
seagulls circle landfills waiting
for the bombastic explosion of petals.

Who will wake with me when dawn cracks its first indigo
so we can nod our heads with horses
as wildflowers inch towards our stoops?

Who will marvel with me—now that Mr. Thai
and his silent children have returned to their village in Ba Vi—
at the beauty of what blooms from us,

these long-stemmed roses,
the petals we press between the pages of our bodies,
this lesson, this thank you, these flowers from the mouth.

~ ~ ~

Jennifer Louvet holds an MFA from Florida International University. She has been a finalist for the 2023 and 2024 Cider Press Review Book Award, the 2022 New American Poetry Prize, the 2020 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and the 2019 Ruminate Broadside Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in publications such as Portland Review, Cider Press Review, The International Literary Quarterly, and more. Jenny teaches literature at an international school in Hanoi, Vietnam, where she has been living for the past eleven years with her husband and two daughters.

~ ~ ~

Deig Sullivan is a writer based in New York City who also works in the field of cultural strategy. Her poetry has been featured in Pensive, Main Street Rag and Naugatuck River Review. She has won prizes or been shortlisted/long listed for the Winchester, Morecambe, Plaza, American Literary Review and Gloucestershire Poetry Prizes. Deig is a graduate of Brown University.

~ ~ ~

Sara “Renee” Whitmore is a poet and English professor who lives in Vass, North Carolina. Much of her work draws from personal experiences with addiction recovery, and her writing has appeared in PineStraw Magazine and recovery websites worldwide. She is a multiple-time award recipient in the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities’ annual writing competitions for fiction and poetry. She holds an MAT in English from the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and teaches at Sandhills Community College. She lives with her husband, son, and their dog, an Australian cattle mix named Samantha Bean Freckles.

Short Fiction

Ghost Weather

It’s Day Two of the rainfall that never ends and the sound of it on our flat trailer roof this Saturday morning reminds me of the static that takes over our television on weekend nights when my dad lets me stay up to watch our shows and then crashes in the beanbag chair before eleven. Even when I plug my fingers in my ears, I can still hear the drumming rain behind the sound of my own blood humming in my head. There’s no escaping it.

My babysitter, Leona, tugs on my pajama sleeve and points out our window toward old Mr. Croswell’s run-down trailer next door. He died two summers ago, but park management hasn’t moved his trailer so now my parents complain about how it just sits there, its roof caving in, God knows what kind of vermin crawling through its innards, an eyesore getting worse and worse until neglect turns it into an even bigger problem. It’s one of the few things they agree on these days.

Leona takes away my cereal bowl, purple milk with a few swollen stars and moons at the bottom, and tells me to keep an eye on the thin, half-opened curtains in Croswell’s living room.

“Did you see them move?” she asks.

I shake my head no.

“Keep watching, little bug,” she says, “and you’ll see it.”

* * *

My parents left yesterday for a three-night trip down to the Keys without me, a cruelty for which I have decided never to forgive them.

“We have a lot of big things to figure out and need to spend some time working on us,” my mom said. “We can’t do that with you around.”

Well, guess what, I wanted to say. I don’t have anywhere else to go and I’ll still be here when you get back, so while you’re down there eating ice cream and looking through binoculars at Cuba, I hope one of the big things you figure out is how to get along with me around.

Instead, I asked them to bring me back a giant conch shell, even though Rabbit told me how rare it is to find those anymore and Rabbit knows pretty much everything. They promised they would do their best.

Mr. Croswell’s living room curtains are motionless but I’m staring at them so hard, trying not to blink, that my eyes begin to water. Rabbit has told me that some of the older kids in the park like to sneak into Croswell’s trailer late at night.

“And do what?” I’d asked.

“Just hang out,” he’d said. “That’s all.”

It seemed an awful place to hang out to me. When Croswell was alive, he’d been a pack-a-day smoker and the few times I’d been near the door of his trailer, the sour smell coming from inside was like a yellow-brown ooze that would soak right through you. No matter how much you spit afterwards, you could taste that sourness the rest of the day.

I dig at my eyes and blink until they feel normal again, then shift my attention to the collapsing roof of Croswell’s trailer. My mother has always warned me against self-pity, but in that moment I feel like I too am sinking under the weight of all this rain, the sky the color of smudged silverfish pressing down.

* * *

Leona is the prized babysitter in our park. She has feathered hair like Farrah Fawcett and painted fingernails and the kids love her because she knows the best games, tells the creepiest stories, and has seen all the horror movies we’ve been banned from watching. She makes us promise not to tell our parents before she huddles us close and whispers the plots of Friday the 13th and The Shining, scene by gory scene.

Her family has lived in this part of South Florida for three generations, which I guess is saying something, and she knows a lot of our park’s history, which means she knows everyone who has died here and where they died, which trailers and nearby businesses are haunted, which stretches of paved road in our park have the bones of a lost hitchhiker buried underneath.

Rabbit says that Leona makes all these things up, that she must have “something off upstairs” to want to freak out a bunch of kids all the time. He says the bones they found under the road when they were paving belonged to a cat, not a hitchhiker. Her story about the escaped convict on Row B, who murdered his wife and kept her chopped-up remains in the closet? Rabbit says she made it all up, that it’s based on that asshole they arrested a few years back, the guy who locked his girlfriend in their tiny bathroom while he went to his job cleaning the arcade across the street.

Rabbit is thirteen, four years older than me, so he can say words like asshole without looking around afterward and hoping no adults were close enough to hear.

“That’s still pretty awful,” I’d told Rabbit.

“Agreed. But it’s not chop-up murder awful,” he’d said.

* * *

Whenever Leona babysat someone in the park, all the other kids would beg their parents to let them hang out there, and soon there would be a group of us gathered on that kid’s patio slab. Terror and fright were big draws for us, and Leona taught us Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, warned us never to call on Bloody Mary in our bathroom mirrors, and told us the scariest scenes from The Amityville Horror. We’d stay until dark and then we’d be afraid to pedal home alone on our bikes, afraid to turn the lights out after our parents told us to go to bed.

Once I got past the sting of my parents going to the Keys without me, there was a part of me that was excited about Leona watching me. Nobody in the park had ever had her as a sitter for such a long time before. Three whole nights. I spent all Friday in school, picturing myself at the center of a circle of trailer park kids and felt lucky.

But then: silverfish sky, endless rain.

“Mmm-hmm,” Leona said last night, just a few hours after my parents left. “Ghost weather.”

* * *

I had just cleared my schoolbooks from the table and tucked them beneath my bed for the long weekend. Monday was a teacher workday at school. My parents were supposed to come home Monday evening.

Leona spooned a giant heap of macaroni and cheese onto my plate and told me that ghost weather occurred when all the conditions were ripe for the spirits of the dead to revisit the world of the living.

“Sometimes, they just want to look around and see what they’ve missed since they’ve been gone. But other times,” she reached one hand around my back and started crawling her fingers up my spine, “they’re very hungry and want nothing more than to open their mouths around this world and take a BITE.”

On that last word, she pinched the back of my neck and I screamed, then laughed, macaroni falling out of my mouth and goosebumps rising along my arms. Leona was the high priestess of goosebumps.

She told me that she herself had experienced Ghost Weather twice. The first time was when her German Shepard came back two years after he died and pressed into her side, panting. She could smell his damp fur and said it was comforting to feel his weight against her again. The second time, she was thirteen and practicing putting on lipstick late at night while her parents slept. She heard someone call her name and thought she’d been busted. She dragged a tissue across her red mouth and opened her bedroom door but no one was there. Then she heard the voice again, coming from outside. Through the blinds, she could see her grandmother, who had died when Leona was seven, standing in the street in the rain. Nanny Gwen was wearing a housedress with an apron over top. She seemed unaffected by the weather.

Leona opened the front door and called out to her, but Nanny Gwen looked right at her and seemed confused. “Have you seen my granddaughter?” her grandmother asked, “I can’t find her.”

Leona began to walk toward her and saw that the woman’s eyes were different than they’d been in real life. Her Nanny Gwen had been joyful and never had a bad word to say about anybody. “We used to bake cookies together,” Leona said, “and she would let me sprinkle sugar on the tops.” But the version of Nanny Gwen that Leona saw that rainy night was changed. She had a lost, worried look in her eyes. 

“Nanny? Are you okay?” Leona asked.

There was a gust of wind at that moment that caused the rain to fall sideways like little slicing knives. Leona hugged her arms around herself and tilted her head down to shield her eyes. When the wind faded, she looked up and the street was empty.

 * * *

In bed last night, after hearing Leona’s story, I wished Rabbit were there to tell me she was making things up like she always did. With the park kids staying indoors because of the weather, I was starting to realize Leona’s stories were not as much fun when other people weren’t around to help soak up some of their horror. The stories also weren’t as easy to put behind me without my parents there to tell me to brush my teeth and comb my hair and otherwise make things normal again afterward.

Normal with my parents sometimes means silence and sometimes means yelling so loud it could crack open the barrier between the living and the dead. It might sound awful, but it’s a form of awfulness I’m familiar with, at least. I know that most of their fights will end with crying and hugs and one of them making coffee for the other and then asking me to take a bike ride for a while. The bike ride requests have dropped off lately, but I still wake up every day and get breakfast from my mom, who shuffles around the kitchen in her loose, jam-stained robe, and my dad still sits next to me while I eat my cereal, staring at the morning crossword with a sharpened pencil in his hand. There’s comfort for me in that too.

* * *

With my parents in the Keys, and without my friends to share in Leona’s stories, there’s a feeling like I’m absorbing a concentrated form of them. Like eating frozen orange juice that comes from a can with a spoon, the acid slush shredding my throat, or like aiming a magnifying glass at my skin on the beach. Neither of which, I can report, is as much fun as it sounds like it should be.

After a few more minutes of staring at the curtains of Mr. Croswell’s soggy trailer on Saturday morning while Leona flips through the pages of a Teen Beat magazine, I tell her I haven’t seen anything move at all. The curtains haven’t so much as swayed an inch.

She looks at me over the top of her magazine and says, “Sometimes ghosts hide when they can tell they’re being watched.” She pauses and tilts her head at me. “They really don’t like being watched, you know.”

I spend the rest of the morning planted in front of the television set, watching cartoons, trying not to worry that I have annoyed Mr. Croswell’s ghost, and filling up several pages in a coloring book I haven’t touched since I was little. On each page, I draw a bright orange sun in the corner. I think of it as my own quiet way of casting a spell, of summoning the sunshine back to the trailer park.

At dinner, Leona cuts up a hotdog and stirs it into the macaroni and cheese for me. She pours us each a tall glass of grape Kool-Aid and sits next to me at the kitchen table, picking at her plate and telling me about the shower scene in the movie Psycho.

She describes the blood and how it was even scarier to see it swirl down the drain in black and white, and she tells me about the sound of the shower curtain popping off its rings one by one, clutched in the dying woman’s hand.

Afterward, I’m so scared that I ask her to stand outside the bathroom door while I pee. It takes me a while because first I have to drag the shower curtain wide open to make sure no one is hiding behind it, and then I can’t stop imagining the bathtub in the Bates Hotel.

Leona starts tap-dragging her fingernails across the surface of the door, chanting, “Little pig, little pig, let me in.”

“I’m done!” I yell, even though I’m not, even though I have no idea how I’ll hold it in.

I luck out a few minutes later when Leona puts the television on. Every channel is talking about the weather and she seems really into it, so I slip down our hallway and head to the bathroom, my heart racing the entire time. I avoid even glancing at the window, where the shadows of branches look too much like giant hands rattling in the wind, trying to reach inside.

When I come racing back out, Leona lifts an arm and points at the swirling circle on the meteorologist’s map.

“Looks like your parents are really in for it,” she says.

I look at the radar map on the screen, the Florida Keys like a kite string dangling between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico with Tropical Storm Oliver hiccupping closer, and I envision my perfect souvenir conch shell getting sucked up into the sky, my parents along with it. Oliver was supposed to swerve north and miss Florida entirely, but apparently that has not happened.

When my parents left on Friday evening, I’d watched from the window as they tucked their suitcases into the car, then turned to wave goodbye. My dad had his arm around my mom’s shoulders. She leaned into him. I remember thinking I hadn’t seen them that happy together in a long time. They were both waving and smiling, even though it had already started to rain, and fat drops were darkening their clothes.

“Gee,” Leona says when the meteorologist cuts to my favorite margarine commercial. “I hope what happened to my Aunt Edith doesn’t happen to them.”

On the television behind Leona, Mother Nature is annoyed that she has been tricked into believing the margarine was butter. I don’t want to ask, know I’ll regret asking, but I can’t help myself.

“Hurricane Charley is what happened to her, little bug,” Leona says. “They were picking pieces of her out of trees miles from where she lived.” She turns the television off.

“Pieces?” I ask.

“Arms,” Leona says. “Legs. One piece ended up in a neighbor’s chicken feed bin. Turned her chickens into bloodthirsty carnivores who went after the owners until someone grabbed a shotgun. But the worst of it? The worst of it was Aunt Edith’s heart. Do you know what happened to her heart?”

I shake my head no, but even the little part of me that continues to protest the telling of this story quiets and unclasps its hands from my ears to hear what happened to poor Aunt Edith’s heart.

“It was found on top of the high school flagpole,” she says. “No one knew how to get it down without desecrating the flag flying beneath it. They had to get the fire department to wrap it in a towel and tug it off.”

My own heart snags on the next beat at the thought of it.

“And the creepy thing is that one of my classmates saw my Aunt Edith last year during ghost weather. She was circling the flagpole calling for her heart.”

Something about this part of the story sounds familiar to me. I remember a few months ago when Leona told a group of us about a dead second cousin who had a prosthetic arm. Someone stole her arm from the grave and the cousin came back to look for it.

Rabbit told me afterward that he’d heard the same story at his Science Club Camp-Out a while back, except it was a golden arm. Which actually made more sense. Because why would anyone want to dig up a fake arm unless it was worth something?

“That story’s been around forever,” he said. “She says it happened to her second cousin to make it feel more real, understand?”

And I sort of did.

It’s one thing to hear a ghost story about unknown people in some faraway place like Maine or London. It was scarier to hear one about someone you knew, someone you’ve eaten lunch with or who you’ve seen brushing their teeth.

But there is something else that bothers me about Leona’s Aunt Edith story too.

“How did she do it?” I ask, “How did she walk around the flagpole without legs?” For a moment, I feel like I have unglued her story. It doesn’t make sense, not really, and I’ve pinpointed why. Rabbit would be proud of me, I think.

But then Leona looks at me as if she wishes for all the world I hadn’t questioned her because this is the last thing she ever wanted to have to explain to me. She reaches out and tucks a few strands of my hair behind my ear and her fingers are ice cold.

“Oh, little bug,” she says, “that’s where the Grave Stitchers come in.” She tells me about the needles they carry that have been shaved from children’s bones, the thread spun from tiny sinews.

I don’t sleep at all that night.

* * *

By Sunday, Day Three of the endless rain, my diet of macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, cereal, fried bologna, and Kool-Aid, combined with my lack of sleep is doing me no favors. I feel headachy and tired and my bladder constantly feels like it is going to burst. The meteorologist says the Keys will be hit by Oliver the hardest, but the storm is vast and more rain is forecast for our part of South Florida as well.

The phone on the wall between the kitchen and living room cuts in and out of service. When it works, Leona drags the cord across the carpet and sinks into the beanbag chair to talk to her friends.

She gives me things to keep busy while she talks, since I have no blank pages left in my coloring book. First, I map the path of Oliver on the back of a paper shopping bag. Later, I tape eight sheets of notebook paper together to draw a map of our trailer park. I draw a red circle around Rabbit’s trailer, toward the back of the trailer park, and a dotted line connecting it to my trailer, in the middle of the park. I draw the trailers of all the other kids I know, along with the manager’s office, the mailboxes at the front of the park, and the laundromat, not far from my front door. I get lost in my work because it makes me feel better to remember that I am surrounded by people I know, that I am somewhere familiar even if the weather makes that hard to keep in mind, even if my parents’ absence and Leona’s presence makes me feel like I am in strange, unknown territory. I draw a simple dark rectangle for Mr. Croswell’s trailer and try to not think about how it looks like a coffin.

The day drags on, but I’m determined to keep busy, so Leona doesn’t feel like she has to share any more scary stories with me. I keep telling myself that my parents will be home tomorrow, and I move the paper shopping bag with Tropical Storm Oliver mapped on it next to my giant drawing of the trailer park. I think about asking my parents to let Rabbit babysit me next time.

Rabbit has only been allowed to watch me once. It was this past summer, when my parents had an appointment.

I told him off the bat that I hated the word babysitting and he agreed that I wasn’t a baby and said I could call it whatever I liked, then asked if I wanted to look at things under his microscope. He had these little glass slides and some of them had things already on them. Fruit fly wing, honeybee leg, fish scale, shrimp egg. I told him it sounded like ingredients in a witch’s brew and he laughed and told me I’d been spending too much time with Leona.

He let me spit on one slide and then draw a picture of what I saw under the magnification lens. He told me I was doing what scientists do, and so we spent the whole time that way, zooming in on grains of sugar and salt, a black hair he plucked from his head, part of a dead silverfish I’d killed in my closet.

When my parents came back from their appointment, my mom had a headache and said she’d have to hear about the microscope later. I imagined it must have been a pretty bad headache since she looked like she’d been crying. My dad paid Rabbit and went out onto our patio and just stared at Mr. Croswell’s trailer.

I started making my Christmas list early and put microscope right at the top of it.

My dad says it’s inappropriate for a boy babysitter to watch a girl overnight, but I can’t see how it could be worse than staying awake all night thinking about Norman Bates and ghosts and people-eating chickens and Grave Stitchers coming for my bones and sinew.

I flip back and forth between wanting to convince my dad to let Rabbit watch me in the future and just hoping my parents will figure out all their big things and never leave for such a long time again. I draw my mom and dad next to each other on my map of the park, then draw Rabbit with his microscope and slides, and a few of the other kids. I draw them outside riding bikes and playing ball or throwing lawn darts and I draw a sun in the right-hand corner and color it with a mix of fiery red and orange crayons. I puff out a few fat clouds to float across the top of everything, and then I draw myself next to my parents and remind myself again that they’ll be home tomorrow evening.

* * *

At bedtime that last night, Leona tells me the story of an old boyfriend whose grandparents died while he was on a date with her. She and her boyfriend were leaving a movie theater and in the crowd he saw his grandmother and grandfather walking together.

“He knew right away that they were dead,” she says.

“What?” I say. “But how?” I need to understand why her boyfriend decided that death was what had happened and not, for instance, his grandparents just deciding to go to the movies. It seems like such an ordinary thing, so not ghostlike. There were lots of people around, it wasn’t midnight. “How did he know they were ghosts? How did he know they weren’t his regular old grandparents?”

“I’ve already told you, little bug,” she says. “When you know someone well, it’s easy to tell. His grandparents were so changed, so different from who they were in life. They were sad and lost, like they didn’t understand where they were or how they’d ended up there.”

I nod my head, but I’m thinking about the time Leona babysat me after school let out last June. All the trailer park kids had come over, including Rabbit. Someone brought a giant bag of Doritos and Leona had stretched out our Kool-Aid so everyone would have a cup. We sat around, sipping pale lavender water and licking nacho cheese from our fingers while Leona told one of her stories. It was about visiting St. Augustine and seeing her aunt and uncle walking in the rain one evening and realizing that they were dead and she was seeing their ghosts.

The story about her boyfriend’s grandparents outside the movie theater is similar to the St. Augustine one, but I’m too scared to mention that to her. I don’t want a repeat of last night’s Grave Stitchers, and I’ve come to see that every time I think I’ve figured my way out of a Leona story, put the story on a slide and zoomed in on the truth of it, she finds a way to smash the whole microscope.

* * *

In bed that night, I stay awake and watch my line-up of stuffed animals along the wall. In the dark, they look like they’re talking to each other, whispering secrets. I will myself to get up and turn on the desk lamp, but then I’m afraid Leona will notice, so I set it beneath the desk and push the chair in front of it, draping one of my nightgowns over top. The light in the room looks like it did on the airplane the time my family took a redeye flight to and from Michigan to visit family. It was a bad visit. My parents fought the whole time, and on the way back, my dad changed seats with someone two rows away. But I remember the lighting on those flights was soft and strange.

I stare at the shadows on my ceiling. Every time my eyes start to close, I convince myself the shadows are moving and my eyes fly open again. I finally nod off just after dawn starts crawling in and then I smell bologna frying in the kitchen. When I open my eyes, Leona is standing over me holding a shiny spatula.

“Time to wake up, little bug,” she says. She is close enough that I can tell she hasn’t brushed her teeth yet. I stretch and yawn and she moves toward the desk.

“Someone was a naughty girl last night,” she says, putting the lamp back in place.

“I was scared,” I say.

She points the spatula in my direction.

“Maybe you should be scared,” she says. “All this ghost weather. I saw old Mr. Croswell again this morning, out by his trailer.” She scratches her chin with the spatula and stares at me. “It looked like he was trying to push a mower through his grass.”

Croswell had been meticulous about lawn care when he was alive. He’d been known to edge his lawn with a pair of scissors.

“Did he say anything?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “But I got the feeling he wasn’t looking for me. Probably came back to go after whoever has been littering in his yard.”

I swallow hard. Just last week, I’d hurled a broken dart into the side of his trailer. My parents were inside, fighting, and I had gotten the idea that throwing something might feel good. I wasn’t wrong. The dart bounced off the siding and fell in the overgrown grass and I didn’t see the point in retrieving it but did see the point in throwing a few other things at the trailer as well. A deflated soccer ball, a plastic shovel from when I was little, the balled-up crossword page from the newspaper where my dad had drawn a spiral so hard that the pencil had ripped through the paper. Leona can’t possibly know about any of that.

“He went into his trailer and I think he’s still there,” she says.

* * *

I can’t eat the glistening round of fried bologna that slides out of the pan onto my plate. The smell alone makes me queasy. I curl up on the sofa, yawning and trying not to stare at old Mr. Croswell’s still immobile living room curtains, while Leona spirals the telephone cord around her leg and chats with someone named Darren. Her voice on the phone with him is totally different than it has been with me these past days, than it was even on the phone with her girlfriends. Gone is the slithery, sing-song voice, the words low in her throat. With Darren, her voice is high-pitched and she giggles a lot. I close my eyes and imagine I’m in the living room with Marcia Brady.

I continue to clutch my stomach and stare through the rain, knowing I won’t see anything happen next door but too tired to do anything else, when I see my parents’ car rounding the corner. They aren’t due until this evening, and I whisper a silent thank you to Tropical Storm Oliver, even though I think that by now the storm is supposed to be over the Gulf. I start to bounce on the couch.

“They’re back!” I say.

Leona tells Darren she needs to get going and hangs up.

The car sloshes through the rain and pulls up along the side of our trailer. I start to make a run for the front door, but Leona places her hand on my shoulder and pulls me back. I grumble and return to my spot by the window, watching through the fogged glass as their two shapes emerge from the car and make their way toward our trailer. They’re lugging their suitcases and their heads are tilted down against the rain and something in my stomach flips over.  

It doesn’t take someone as clever as Rabbit to recognize that these are not the same parents who waved goodbye to me three days ago. There are no arms around shoulders, no walking close to one another, no smiles despite the rain. Something has changed. The rain is a silvery noise around them, and then, when they’re close enough for me to see their faces, everything becomes as sharp and clear as a honeybee leg on a slide, as true as the cat bones beneath the pavement. These are not the same parents who left me three days ago. It’s obvious to anyone who really loves them that they themselves have no idea who they are or how they’ve ended up here. 

I pull away from the window and head toward my room, ignoring Leona’s calls. I manage to crack open the back door to our trailer just as the couple at the front door moves inside out of the rain. I dart across our small yard as fast as I can, a blur in this stupid downpour. By the time I race around to the front of Mr. Croswell’s trailer and duck inside the damp darkness, my nightshirt is soaked through. The floor creaks beneath my bare feet and the air around me smells of mildew and rot and the faint sour smell of smoke. I cross the living room and hunker down next to the decaying sofa near one of the windows. Up close, I can see the individual threads of the curtain fabric, the frayed edges, how they seem like they’ll disintegrate at my touch. I press myself against the wall, out of sight, then nudge the material slowly aside and stare into the windows of my own living room across the way, where I see Leona raise an arm and point in my direction. I can almost see her mouth forming the words “ghost weather” as the strangers she’s with turn their heads toward me.

~ ~ ~

Theresa Boyar’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Florida Review, Lost Balloon, Poet Lore, Juked, Smokelong Quarterly, and Tar River Poetry. Her essay “Peaches” was selected as a Notable Essay of 2000 by the editors of the Best American Essays series and her chapbook Kitchen Witch was published by Dancing Girl Press. She lives in Missoula, Montana.

Billy’s Paradox

Husband? Asleep. Baby? Thankfully, still asleep. Zoo? Thumping her tail as I pee, telling me she really needs to get outside and do the same. I need to get outside myself, stretch my legs, gather my thoughts. But, unlike Zoo, I don’t want to face anyone—certainly not my baby, and especially not my husband—in this state of mind. Whatever this state is. Maybe it has a name. Maybe it’s seasonal affective disorder. Maybe it’s postpartum depression. Maybe it’s homesickness. Whatever it is, I hope I lose it somewhere out on the frozen lake.

I pull on my winter garb—all seven-hundred-dollar’s-worth of high-tech nylon and thermal fleece, with hand-knit woolen mittens thrown in as an homage to simplicity. As I fly out the cabin door, Zoo bounds past me, sliding into a crouch to pee. Steam rises into the subzero air like a genie from a bottle, and I try to think of something to wish for. Nothing in particular comes to mind, nothing except getting home from the cabin, getting back to work, back to whatever it is our life is going to be from here on out as two newlywed doctors in this post-pandemic, climate-uncertain, AI-doomsday-looming world.

Wasting no time, Zoo starts tracking toward the nearest ice fishing house, about half a mile from shore by my reckoning. Lots of these shacks are surrounded by fish guts, and Zoo loves nothing more than chomping on frozen fish guts. When we get close enough, Zoo discovers something that clearly isn’t walleye chum, but I don’t know what it is. She gnaws into the snow and gets the thing in her mouth, at which point I realize what it is: a hot dog.

This particular icehouse, judging from the steady stream of smoke emanating from a galvanized steel stovepipe, is clearly occupied. It’s clad in particle board painted robin’s-egg blue, a homemade job that looks right at home surrounded by crushed beer cans, chunks of frozen hot dogs, and other less identifiable detritus. The words “Millie’s Billies” are haphazardly spray-painted on the side of the icehouse in hot pink. I wonder who Millie is. I wonder who the Billies are.

The door flies open. A shirtless, pale-skinned man emerges, a can of beer in each hand. He’s wearing sunglasses, Bermuda shorts, and giant green snow boots. His chest and face are bright red. He looks me up and down.

“Those hot dogs are for Billy,” he says, almost barking. “Meaning Billy the dog, not Billy the man. He likes them frozen so he can gnaw on them like a ham bone.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t see any other dogs around.”

He gives me another once-over, his face softening a bit this time. “No problem,” he says, gesturing around like a tour guide. “Welcome to Millie’s Billies. We’re calling this home at the moment.” Right on cue, an almost comically overweight golden retriever emerges from the icehouse so languorously that he appears to be sleepwalking.

I look back toward our cabin. I suppose I could similarly gesture toward my sleeping husband, our sleeping baby, our charging iPads, our charging Tesla. I might note my husband’s snoring, my stack of unread medical journals, my bloodshot eyes from lack of sleep. But I refrain.

“Care for a beer?” he asks.

“Uh, not right now,” I say. “But thanks.”

I bend down and try to get the hot dog from Zoo’s mouth, but she won’t give it up. I snap Zoo’s leash onto her collar, just in case. “So…your name is Billy and your dog’s name is also Billy?”

“That was his name when I got him from the pound,” Billy the man answers.

I look at Billy the dog cautiously. “My dog doesn’t do so well with other dogs. Maybe we should get moving.”

“Not to worry. Billy’s super friendly, like me.” He glances toward his pickup truck, parked a few yards away. It’s a newer but rough-looking silver Toyota with a camo topper. The tailgate is open. “That’s my girlfriend’s truck. She’s dead, so I have it now.” He sets the cans of beer, both unopened, in the snow at his feet. His red beard is so burly it looks cartoonish, but it suits him, giving him enough in common with Billy the dog that the single name between them is all that’s needed.

“Okay, dead girlfriend. Anything else I should know?” I’m not sure why I ask that. I don’t want to seem rude. Or maybe I do.

“Yeah, I’ve been up all night so I’m a little…hey, wait a second.” He takes a few steps toward us. Zoo lowers her head and wags her tail. “Are you Claire? From West St. Paul? Two Rivers High?”

I look at him more closely. “Bill?”

“Billy. But I just told you that.” He cracks open a beer can and takes a swig. “Do you really remember me?”

My god. My god. I feel the blood rush through my cheeks. Of course I remember him. How could I forget? One night my freshman year, Billy–sans beard, but with beer–was at the same Two River’s football game I had reluctantly decided to attend. The team was so terrible not even the player’s parents were at that game. Just a few of us kids, some lonely old folks, and the coaches. I think the final score was around fifty to nothing. Billy had come up to me during halftime and asked if I’d ever had a beer. I told him I had, which was a lie. He said he had a stash under the bleachers, and if I wanted one to follow him down there. I did. We spent the entire second half down there and had three beers each. I had to pee so badly I could hardly stand it, but Billy kept cracking jokes and every time I laughed he moved a little closer. I wasn’t sure what was happening at first. I remember him reaching around behind my head and feeding his fingers into my hair. No one had ever done that to me before. It felt intrusive, but also somehow telepathic, as if he were reading my mind. Then he kissed me, and I dropped a bottle of beer on my foot. Or was it his foot? Then the kiss ended, the game ended, and the night ended. We went our separate ways, and it never came up again. After that year, he was entirely absent from my life, and as the years went by was mostly absent from my memory, until now.

“You were a senior when I was a freshman,” I say.

“So you do remember.”

“Of course.”

“So what brings you all the way out here?” he asks, picking up a few of the frozen hot dogs. Billy the dog’s tongue pops out. He feeds him one of the hot dogs as gently as a mother feeding her baby.

“I’ve been asking myself the same thing.”

“Do you have any weed?”

I had forgotten this aspect about him. “Not on me,” I say.

“So, like at home?”

“Like at home what?”

“Like at home you have some weed?”

“No, I also don’t have weed at home. I mean at the cabin. We don’t have weed at the cabin.”

“We?”

“My husband and I. Our cabin is that way.” I point, just generally behind me, but Billy looks intently, as if he were seeing the shore for the first time. Billy the dog has begun circling us, which Zoo finds mildly threatening.

“A man came out here the other day from that direction. Tall, good looking. Said he was a doctor. That your husband?”

“Yes. I mean probably. He’s tall, and a doctor, and good looking I guess. He did come out here the other day. Did you talk to him long?”

“Yeah, and he gave me his coat. He was really nice about it when he found out I didn’t have a decent coat. I’ll show you.”

Billy enters his icehouse and I wait. My mind is racing. To the extent possible, I had long suppressed the memory of kissing Billy, but now I’m questioning the memory entirely. Did I really make out with this man under the bleachers at a meaningless high school football game? It isn’t something I’m going to ask him about now, and the thought of him bringing it up makes me want to run away screaming. But somehow, even in his current state of intoxication, I don’t believe he will. If not for my sake, then for his own.

The air blowing across the lake is impossibly cold. I hate it, but my husband lives for this kind of weather. He and his whole family are all about ice and snow. That’s why they bought this cabin on Rainy Lake, as far north as they could possibly go while still being able to drive to a convenience store in thirty minutes. Or maybe they did it to show off how much being emotionally frozen means to them. Hard to say.

 Billy returns with the goose down coat I gave my husband for Christmas just days earlier. He’s also holding what appears to be a shot of whiskey.

“Super nice coat to just give away like that. I think he was worried about me.”

“He’s a doctor,” I say. “Like me. Worrying about people is basically our entire job description.”

“Holy shit, two doctors married to each other.” He takes the shot and tosses the glass over his shoulder. “Now there’s a paradox!”

I laugh out loud, and instantly realize it was something I hadn’t done in months. It comes as a relief, but also makes me sad. “Nice pun,” I say. “Maybe you should put that coat on, though. It’s like twenty below.”

“Good call.” He slips into the sleeves, but doesn’t zip up. He reaches into the coat pocket and pulls out another can of beer. He offers it to me, but I wave it off.

“I just gave that coat to my husband for Christmas,” I say, instantly realizing it was something I should not have said.

Billy looks down at the coat. “OMG, Christmas? This year? Do you want it back?”

“No, no. You keep it.” I don’t want to make it sound like the coat is ruined now, but it is. I never want to see my husband in that coat again. “So, have you been ice fishing out here or what?” I ask.

“Not really. I got laid off and didn’t have anywhere to go, so I just came out here.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a motorcycle mechanic. But there isn’t much work in winter.”

“Can’t you work on snowmobiles?”

“I hate snowmobiles.”

“Me too,” I say. “But I also hate motorcycles.”

“Why?

“I work in an E.R. Everyone in the E.R. hates motorcycles.”

Billy nods. “Understood. Well, I don’t ride anymore. I only repair.”

I can imagine someone like Billy showing up to the E.R. in the middle of the night, maybe with some random injury from an accident while drinking or with some mysterious wound, maybe from a fight, or even self-inflicted. My husband is always better with these types of patients than I am. He never pries. He only wants to help. I want to help, too, but that's never all I want.

Zoo starts pulling hard on the leash and it slips through my mitten. She charges at Billy the dog, who turns and runs in arc around the icehouse and truck. I yell Zoo’s name once to no effect and quickly realize this will simply have to play itself out. Not unlike the situation I’m currently in.

“Do you do surgery and all that?” Billy asks.

“My husband does. I'm an intake psychiatrist, so I usually just try to get patients stabilized, adjust meds, help with immediate needs, stuff like that. I'd be in the way in the O.R.”

“Hey, do you want to know something?” Billy asks, as if he hadn’t even heard me.

 “I’m not sure,” I say. This could not be more true.

“No, you’ll love this.”

“Okay, tell me.” The dogs are already on their second loop around the icehouse.

“I still have my Two Rivers senior yearbook. It’s here, in the icehouse.”

“You have it out here on the lake?”

“My girlfriend kicked me out and threw all my stuff in the street, so everything I own is in this icehouse or in her truck, which I took. She’s probably called the cops on me by now.”

“I thought she was dead?”

“She’s dead to me. Anyway, hold on, I’ll get the yearbook.” He turns to go inside. “Wait,” he says, turning back. “Why don’t you just come in?”

I hesitate, of course. I can’t imagine going inside that little box with him. Not out here. Not now.

“Come on,” he says, “I don’t bite.”

“Maybe I do,” I say. It sounded funny in my head.

“Just come on,” he says, and goes inside.

Despite my misgivings, I follow Billy into the icehouse but leave the door open behind me. Somehow it looks bigger on the inside. I’m not sure how he got all this stuff in here. There’s a futon, a card table, a woodburning stove roaring away, and a pretty big flatscreen TV displaying a frozen image from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The floor is covered with red indoor-outdoor carpeting. On the wall behind the TV is a Woody Woodpecker sconce and some cool-looking loudspeakers. In the corner there’s a little fridge, and on top of that is an aquarium with what are likely minnows churning about. On the card table there’s a hotplate full of something simmering. It smells fantastic.

“What’s cooking?” I ask.

“Mom’s recipe chili. Best chili ever. You have to simmer it for at least eight hours, but I always do twelve. I add lake ice every hour or so. The longer you cook it, the better it gets.”

“If it tastes as good as it smells, I might need the recipe.”

“You want to try some?”

I glance out the door, wondering where Zoo is. “Uh, okay. Why not?”

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“No, I’m sure. I’m starving.”

He grabs a ladle from the wall, dishes up a bowlful, and hands it to me.

“I need to wash a spoon, hold on.” He plucks a dirty spoon from a plastic bucket and opens a lid on the floor revealing a hole in the ice. He dunks the spoon into the lake water and swishes it around. Satisfied, he shakes it off and hands it to me.

I dip it in the chili and take a taste. It’s stunning. So much better than the over-engineered foodie crap I’ve become accustomed to. I can’t find the words to express myself.

“Right?” he says, grinning and revealing a chipped tooth. “It's nice to have someone appreciate the chili. Tammy never gave a shit.”

“Tammy?”

“My girlfriend.”

“Well, maybe she did. Maybe she just never said anything. That’s how my husband Delmer is.”

“She's a vegetarian. She never even tried it.”

It occurs to me that the hotplate obviously requires a steady stream of electricity, the source of which is not obvious. “Wait, you have an aquarium and a hotplate and a TV in the middle of a frozen lake? How are you powering all this stuff?”

“Tammy’s truck is a hybrid.” He tips back onto his heels. “I’m sucking the batteries dry.”

“Ingenious.” I realize he has the yearbook in his hands. I gesture toward it and he cracks it open. “Been a while since I’ve seen one of those,” I say.

“Fifteen years since graduation. Mine, anyway. Can you believe it?” The yearbook looks well-worn, as if he’s flipped through it thousands of times over those fifteen years.

“Here,” he says, pointing, “you signed it.” He shows me the page where I had written to him, right near my picture, which I cannot bear to look at. I keep shoveling in the chili.

He reads the inscription aloud. “Dear Billy, Sorry I didn’t get to know you better. XO, Claire.”

“I wrote that?”

“Yeah, you did.” He claps the yearbook closed. “Were you really sorry?”

“Well, if I took the time to write it, I’m sure I meant it.”

“What about now?” he asks.

“Now?” I ask. I’m nearly done with the chili and would really like to get back outside.

“Yeah, now. Are you sorry now?”

“Yes,” I say. “I’m sorry now.” I’m unsure what I mean by this. I want to lick the bowl, but resist.

Billy walks over to the woodburning stove and opens the door. “I burned all the love letters I wrote to my girlfriend in this stove.”

“Really?” I’m shocked. “Why?”

“Why? Fuck, if you don’t know, then you haven’t been through a serious breakup. You’re lucky.”

“I have,” I assure him. “I have been through a serious breakup. Believe me. I just wouldn’t have thought to do something like that. To burn it all up. You can’t get those letters back.”

“I don’t want them back.” Billy holds up the yearbook again. “Maybe I should burn this, too. Put the past behind me.”

I take a step forward, as if I might snatch the yearbook from him. “Don’t do that.”

He looks almost innocent in his incredulousness. “Why do you care? No one cares.”

“If nothing else, give the yearbook to me. I lost track of mine somehow.”

“See what I mean? At least I cared enough to keep mine around.”

“All the more reason not to burn it,” I say, with more conviction than I realized was coming. “Did your girlfriend go to Two Rivers?”

“No, she’s from up here. But still. Burning this will help.” Billy kneels in front of the woodstove. He sets the yearbook on the floor and adds another log to the fire. “Wait a second,” he says, looking back at me like an ogre from a fairy tale, a hint of malice in his eyes.

“What?” I ask, looking toward the door, involuntarily planning my escape.

“Are you going to tell your husband about this?”

“About what?”

“About this.” He swirls his finger in a circle, then points to himself. “About me.”

“I might,” I say. “But I might not. I have to think about it.” I try to hand him the bowl. He gestures toward the table. I set the bowl down with a thud.

“You might? What’s the sticking point? The coat?”

“Mostly the coat. He’ll be embarrassed.”

“I’d offer it back again, but that probably won’t help,” he says, rightly. He stands and twists the toe of his boot into the cover of the yearbook as if he’s squashing the butt of a cigarette.

“So, you want the recipe or what?” He crosses his eyes. I am not entirely sure if it’s voluntary, but I assume so.

“For sure. It’s phenomenal.”

“Just kidding.” His eyes uncross. “There’s no recipe. I make it up every time.”

Now I’m even more impressed. “There must be some basic recipe.”

“Well, sure, but it’s weird.”

“I'm all about weird recipes.”

“Okay, fine.” He assumes the role of a genial host again. “You take two cans of stewed tomatoes and half a bottle of Mr. and Mrs. T’s Bloody Mary mix and get it boiling. Then you drop in a pound of ground beef. Wagyu if you can get it. Just kidding. I only use the cheap stuff. But don’t chop it up or brown it first. Just throw it in and leave it alone. It slowly sloughs off into the tomato sauce and basically that’s the secret. Then you just add any old chili mix, some beans if you want, and water every once in a while. Remember, it takes all day.”

“I can’t wait to try it.”

“I bet your husband will like it.” Billy kicks the over door closed.

“I think you’re right,” I say. I feel like I owe Billy something in exchange for his hospitality. For the recipe. For not mentioning the kiss. And, even after all these years, maybe for this kiss itself. It was my first. Though I sincerely doubt it was his.

“Do you…need anything else?” I ask, immediately wishing I had just said nothing. “I mean, anything else besides the coat?”

“You mean like money, or a job, or a life?”

“I don’t mean it like that.”

“Then how do you mean it?”

“Like a place to stay? We don’t use the cabin that much.”

“Nah.” Billy brushes this off.

“Are you sure? We’re leaving tomorrow for the cities.”

“Your husband,” Billy says, the pitch of his voice a little higher now. “He probably can’t cook. Like at all. Correct?”

He’s right. Delmer has the hands of a great surgeon, indistinguishable from the hands of a great chef, that is until those hands are tasked with chopping an onion, mincing garlic, or braising a flank steak. Delmer can’t even fry an egg. “Neither of us really cook. But, yeah, Delmer truly can’t.”

Without prompting, Billy hands me an unopened can of beer. This time I don’t decline. I haven’t had a beer in nearly two years. I slip the can into my coat pocket. “I should head back soon. Terry is probably hungry.”

“Terry?”

“That’s our son. Our baby. He’s three months old.”

“Got it,” Billy says, a mischievous glint in his eye. “Not gonna lie. You always seemed like a mom.”

“I guess so,” I say. Which of course is bullshit, because I don’t guess so. In fact, it’s really the opposite. I’ve never felt like a mom, and am worried I never will. And in fifteen minutes I’ll be right back where I was five hours ago, nursing Terry with nothing new to show for this moment except chapped lips and frozen fingertips.

“And you always seemed like you’d be successful. Me, not so much.”

I don’t know what to say to that. I never thought of Billy as someone so self-reflective. He was always too far out there, dancing on the edge, living in the moment.

“Hey, do you remember that time we snuck into the school after hours and went up on the roof?” he asks. “It was you, me, Charlie Ione, and Bobbie Pelham. Remember?”

I shake my head, laughing. I recall none of this, not even the names. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Billy chuckles. “Maybe that never happened. But, we did see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the theater together.” He points to the TV screen. “It would be pretty hard to forget that, right?”

I have no recollection of seeing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with Billy, but I’ve seen the movie so many times, I can’t really remember the first time anymore. “I remember seeing the movie, but I don’t remember seeing it with you. I’m sorry.”

“We were in the same theater at the same time, but not together.”

“Oh. Well, it’s a great movie,” I say. Which of course it is, but that wasn’t really Billy’s point.

There’s a long silence, like the silence before the countdown from ten to one on New Year's Eve. But in this case the actual countdown never starts. It’s as though neither of us is willing to let this encounter end. When I can no longer tolerate him staring at me, I say, “Terry is probably waking up. I should get going.”

He steps closer. My toes tingle inside my boots, my embarrassingly expensive thermal socks failing to insulate me from the reality of a sub-zero winter. Inside my even more expensive woolen mittens my fingertips also tingle. The sensation reminds me of how my lips felt after kissing Billy that night.

“Yeah, you better get going.” Billy gestures to the door. “Don’t forget about the beer in your pocket. You wouldn’t want your husband finding that in there.”

“Right,” I say, patting the pocket. I shiver and pull my scarf tight around my neck. “You sure about the yearbook? I can take it. I hate to think of it going up in flames.”

“I promise I won’t burn it. As long as you promise me something.”

“What’s that?” I feel a sense of impending doom.

“Don’t tell your husband about any of this. Let’s just have it be ours.” He seems to have sobered up a bit. “Deal?”

This somehow triggers a spell of déjà vu. Did I make this same deal with Billy once before? I can’t be sure, and don’t want to ask. He extends a fist, which I bump.

We both step out the door and onto the ice, where the sunlight is somehow twice as bright as before. Zoo and Billy the dog are sitting about ten feet from each other, staring in opposite directions. It appears a truce has been reached.

Looking toward our cabin, I contemplate telling my husband about Billy, even though I just promised not to. Then something occurs to me. Delmer will need to make up a story about the coat at some point. Either that or simply tell me what happened. If he lies, I’ll be mad at him for lying. If he tells the truth–that he gave away my Christmas present–I’ll be mad at him for not lying. All this makes me want to ask Billy one final question, but I’m worried I’ll regret hearing the answer. Maybe there isn’t a good answer. Maybe the answer doesn’t really matter.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Billy says.

Damn this fucker is perceptive. I take a deep breath and blurt out, “What did you think of him?”

“Think of who?”

“My husband.”

Billy grimaces. It looks like screws are tightening somewhere inside his jaw, behind his temples, on each side of his neck.

“You mean, like, as a man?” he asks.

“Yes, as a man.”

“Well, he gave me his coat. That’s more than I would have done.”

“So?” I want to be sure I know what he means.

“So, he seems like a good guy overall, from what I could tell. A little full of himself maybe, if that’s what you're asking. But a good guy. If you’re having issues, you could try the chili on him. The way to a man’s heart, and all.”

“Good idea,” I say.

“Yes,” Billy says. “Yes it is.”

“Well, this was fun,” I say.

“Fun?”

“I mean it was good to see you. And, yes, fun. I feel like I haven't had fun in a long time. Too long.”

“Thank you,” Billy says.

“For what?” I ask, startled by his reaction.

“For having fun. With me. And for stopping me from burning my yearbook. And for, well, you know.”

I look down at the snow. It’s as white as sugar.

“And for the coat.”

“That was Delmer’s doing,” I say, looking up. “But you’re welcome.”

Billy the man turns around and enters his icehouse. Billy the dog follows suit. The door slams shut, and I hear an echo from the shore. Zoo sniffs my pocket. I pull out the beer can, a Grain Belt Premium. A bit off-brand for me, not to mention morning drinking isn’t really my thing, but why not? I’m a doctor. I know one beer can’t hurt me. Can’t hurt my milk production. Can’t hurt much of anything. I crack it open and take a swig. The memory of kissing Billy rushes through me like the memory of an old song, one I thought I’d long since outgrown.

The sun, higher now of course, makes the snow look like a trillion shards of broken glass, shards so small they can’t really cut you, but over time they could wear you down. As I start back toward the cabin, Zoo leading the way, I wonder how I could have forgotten that kiss for so long. The memory is so intense now I can almost smell him, taste his tongue in my mouth. It makes me wonder why Billy never really acknowledged me after that kiss, at least not until today.

I think about my husband, probably still asleep inside the cabin. I love Delmer, which is why I decided to marry him, why I wanted to have a baby with him, why I hope to spend the rest of my life with him. I don’t regret these decisions. I don’t plan to ever regret them. But I never thought I’d end up questioning all of it, while also questioning every other conceivable alternative. Not that someone like Billy was a real alternative, but on the other hand I know I’m never going to forget that kiss again.

As I approach the shore, I’m determined not to look back, but I can’t help myself. I take a final swig of beer, crush the can, and turn around. Billy the man is standing outside his icehouse again, coatless again, and again with a can of beer in each hand. He raises them both in a toast to whatever this moment is.

~ ~ ~

Steven Lang is a writer and artist from Minnesota. He received his B.F.A. from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His fiction has appeared in CutBank, Chestnut Review, Slush Pile Magazine, Catamaran, and Stonecoast Review, and has been anthologized in Fiction on a Stick (Milkweed Editions) and The Art of Wonder (University of Minnesota Press).

Summer Always Leaves in a Song

He’s wondering what’s so special about prose? Everybody exists in prose. They think in prose, they talk in prose, they text in prose (sometimes in pictograms, sure) but everything’s always: prose, prose, prose. When he writes, he wants it to be less ordinary and that’s why he’s a poet. And to be a poet you have to sit and think a long, long time about words, certain words, and then replace certain words with other words and then if you do that, you have to change more words after all those replaced words. There’s kind of a law to it. A law you have to discover inside all the words. And it takes a lot of thinking, this business about words and laws and then here is his wife, sitting here in his office, going on and on about pictures. It is getting increasingly more difficult to tune her out.

“He wants a picture. Should I send him a picture?” she asks scrolling through the photos on her phone. “What about this one?” she asks her husband who’s hunched over his laptop on the sofa. He just can’t look up right now because he’s thinking about words.

“Should I send him this one?” she asks while holding up her phone. But the husband just purses his lips and types a few hesitant words and then he looks at them like he’s looking at a picture, but they’re just words. Are they the right words?

The sun shifts and a gold line dashes from the crack in the drapes over the husband’s face. A gold stripe. Ormolu. A Matisse nose. He moves over to another cushion, squinting. Focused. “Merdre!” he says.

“It’s merde with an E after the D. French major, you remember,” she says. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to curse in French.”

The husband sighs. It is a wonderful thing to sigh in a room like this, his study. It’s a beautiful room and just right for sighing. Sumptuous. Wainscotting. Crown molding. Egg and dart. He decorated the study himself, but she said it’s like living inside of a Victorian humidor. Baroque, she calls it. Disdainful and smirking. Sombre.

She decorated the plain parlor with its white sectionals and oversized urns of porcelain dogwoods. Ecru and white pillows everywhere. He thinks it’s like living in a fucking cloud. But it was her father’s house. A doctor’s house and the whiteness felt pure. Inherited. Sterile. Behind every clean, flat surface, there is continuity. Tradition, clinically unseen.

She’s sitting on a big maroon poof in the middle of his study. Hideous, those tassels, she’s told him. So boudoir, she’s said. But she’s no autocrat even though it’s her house. Not his. Not his wordy house. She let him pick it all out: the brown velvet drapes and gold cords and more tassels. Swags. Medallions. Whorish, perhaps. Beside her is the imported fireplace, swirling with marble and photographs. It’s the poof that makes her slump as she continues to scroll through her phone. “God. I have big teeth. Look how big my teeth are,” she says holding up her phone again.

The husband mumbles something about how he just wanted to pronounce “merdre” the way the French symbolist, Alfred Jarry, spelled it. It was Jarry who spelled it that way, not he. Sometimes poets and writers change words around, for emphasis. There’s an extra R in merdre just to give it a shuttering finish. A kind of purr. A sass. Like Rrose Selavy.

The husband feels like writing something really sassy. And poetic. And totalitarian. It was time. The time was just right for Ubu Roi, the absurd little dictator. He felt the idea growing inside of him all through the last election and it made him feel more alive the more he thought about it. And younger. Rebellious. He just needs to find the right words. The right kingdom.

Over the fireplace hangs an oil portrait of a Canadian ancestor who dominates the room with his elbow on a stack of books and his hand hanging down and a large intaglio ring on his index finger. The portrait gazes lovingly at the opposite wall lined with antique books. Heirlooms. Leather. The Canadian smiles slightly. But smug. Like a scholar. A forgotten clock tries to remind them about the time. Is it two? Three?

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. Why would a distinguished general of the United States Army want a picture of me? Look at all that chest candy,” she says holding up her phone again.

Her husband looks up.

“Wait a minute. Who’s this now?” he asks.

“This general. Don’t you listen to me when I’m talking to you? Like I said. This general from the U.S. Army wants my picture.”

“Why on earth?”

“Don’t you think I’m worth looking at anymore?”

“Well, of course you are,” he says with another sigh.

“You sure don’t act like it. This whole time I been talking to you, you haven’t looked up once. Not once. Not at me.”

“I’m working on a little something. Besides, you’re one to talk. You can’t see past your phone. You stay on that goddam thing. Recharge. And then get right back on it.”

“Well, look at him.”

“I’m looking.”

“So, what do you think?”

“He’s very nice looking.”

“I can see THAT. I’m asking if you think I should send him my picture.”

“Well, what for?”

“I mean, a woman shouldn’t send a picture over the internet to just anyone. But then he’s not just anyone. Is he? He’s an army general.”

“Well, send him my picture then.”

“Ha! I should. I should send him your picture.”

“How did he get your email?”

“I gave it to him! I already told you that. I asked you if I should give it to him and you said uh-huh. That’s what you said. Uh-huh. So I sent it to him and now he wants my picture. I mean he sent me his.”

“Okay. Wait a minute. Back up. How did you meet him?”

“I haven’t met him! For God’s sake. I’m not meeting strange men.”

“I mean, how did he ask for your email?”

“On Insta. I told you. He messaged me on Insta. We kind of had a virtual lunch together. He was eating a hamburger and texting me. And I was eating a salad and texting him. It was like a script. A movie.”

“Wait. What? I thought you said you haven’t posted anything on Insta.”

“I haven’t! Maybe he just saw what I wrote to other people and thought: Now there’s a clever woman. Maybe I should write to her.”

Their young son, David, runs into the middle of the room and says with his arms angled out like an airplane landing, “Where are the binoculars? I need the binoculars!” He jiggles his hands for emphasis.

They both ignore him. The father looks around David and says, “I could guarantee you that if he thought you were intelligent, he wouldn’t write you. This is obviously a hoax.”

“Oh yeah, right. Like a three-star general couldn’t be interested in me. Is that what you’re saying? Nice.”

“Of course not. I’m just saying it’s probably some kid in JD prison trying to goad you on for spurious reasons.”

“Why would some JD send me a song then?”

“I need the binoculars!” David says desperately with his hands splayed out like little fins. He starts rummaging through a bureau drawer. His mother has to move closer to his father just to be heard over all of David’s rummaging. Now she’s glaring at the father from the sofa. The gold stripe of light across her hands. Her nail polish looks orange in the light. Her knuckles like tangerine slices.

“He sent you a song?” asks the father.

“Yes! ‘Bring back that Loving Feeling’ by the Righteous Brothers. Now what kind of JD would know about the Righteous Brothers? I mean I barely know about the Righteous Brothers.”

“You didn’t click on it, did you?”

“David, what on earth are you looking for?” asks the mother.

“The binoculars! I said! Don’t you listen to me?”

“I haven’t seen them. I think you had the binoculars last, didn’t you?” asks the mother to the father.

“Maybe I did. Try downstairs in that little cabinet by the armchair.”

David dashes from the room.

“So did you?” he asks.

“Did I what?”

“Click.”

“What about it?”

“Did you click on the Righteous Brothers?”

“Oh lord, no. You must think I’m stupid. I know he just did that to get me to send a picture. Like I owe him. The internet equivalent of buying a gal dinner, I guess.”

“But why would he want your picture?”

“Because I haven’t posted anything on Insta. I told you. My god!”

David hollers from downstairs, “They’re not here!”

“You’re not even the slightest bit jealous that such an important man would write to your wife,” she says with her eyebrows circumflexed. Gothic arches.

“I guess I am a little jealous that he didn’t write to me,” he says turning back to his laptop.

“MOM!”

“Oh, you’re such a dick sometimes. Why are you such a dick?”

“Whatever you do, don’t click on the Righteous Brothers,” he says.

“I think I will. I think I’ll click on it. Talk about little dictators! My mother loved that song.”

“Don’t you dare!”

“MOM!!”

“If you click on it, they will have access to all our online accounts. That’s what they do.”

“Oh, right. The Righteous Brothers will have access to all our accounts. You keep voting the way you do and we’re going to lose everything anyway.”

David runs back into the living room. He’s red in the face and shouts too loudly, “DAD!”

“For god’s sake David, what is it?

“Oh, never mind! They’re probably done peeing now,” David says with his brows knit together. He crosses his arms and squeezes his elbows orange.

“What are you talking about? Who’s done peeing?”

“I just wanted to watch them pee and now it’s over. Just forget it.” David looks serious. Flushed. Pissed.

“Whose pee, son?”

“He likes to watch the birds. I mean, do you even live here?” she asks her husband with one side of her lip curled up. 

“Do birds even pee? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bird pee before,” says David. Peeved.

“Well, of course, birds pee, son,” she says.

“My god,” says the father and slaps his laptop closed. “You wanted the binoculars to watch birds pee?”

“Not the birds! Those two men.”

“What two men?” asks the father with his eyebrows raised. Suddenly baroque. His silhouette twisting back into the light.

“Out there. They were peeing out there by the privet hedge. I saw them unzip. But it’s over now. Thanks a lot.”

The father reaches under the sofa and grabs the binoculars.

“Are they gone?” he asks as he turns to the picture window.

The picture window overlooks the long front lawn where there is a wide expanse of meadow and unruly hedges, and then a shady glade of Southern Crabapples. Spider lilies bloom along the periphery of the grove, red and ornate like the netting oranges come in. After the glade, the yard drops off steeply where the road cuts through. The roots from an old elm that no longer exists provide a natural stairway down to the road.

“Naw,” says David pointing. “They’re still out there. Looks like they’re having a picnic. They’ve spread a blanket over the grass. Say, they got a kid. Maybe my age.”

“A picnic?” asks the father.

“On our lawn?” asks the mother.

“Down there in the shade. On the grass.”

Now the father’s at the window looking through the binoculars. “Yep, he’s right. There’s two men and a boy down there. They’ve spread out a blanket and they have a picnic basket. An ice chest. A bottle of wine.”

“On our lawn?!” The mother looks pale with astonishment.

“Yes, down there by the grove,” the father answers. He hands the binoculars to his son.

“What are they doing?” the mother asks.

David twists the binoculars into focus and says, “They’re just lying on the blanket. One man has his head on the tummy of the other man. And the other man is laughing and making his head wobble. They’re just laughing and wobbling. And the kid is dancing around in the grove like a crazy person. So, to answer your question: it looks like they’re having fun. It is Labor Day, you know.”

The mother and the father just look at one another for a minute.

“But this is private property! They can’t do that!” she says moving to the window.

“Mom, they’re just lying there. Where is there a law about lying in the grass? I lie down there all the time.”

“I’ve never seen you down there. Why do you go all the way down there lie down?” asks the mother, but David just smirks at her with one eyebrow raised. An apostrophe. “Well, it’s one thing for you to go down there, but entirely another thing for perfect strangers to do it. This is private property. You can’t just have a picnic on private property. They could twist their ankles off and sue us. What then?”

“Calm down. I’ll go down there,” says the father.

“I’m coming too,” says David. He hands his mother the binoculars.

She says, “You stay right here, young man.” But David’s the first one out the door.

“David!” she yells.

“David, wait for me,” says the father and he lets the door slam on his way out. That always makes her cringe.

The walk down the meadow is somewhat steep, and it makes you walk more quickly than you care to. Sometimes you even have to run a step or two just to let your body catch up with your legs.

“David!” shouts the father, “David, wait up.”

But David’s already down there talking to the boy and the two men look up and see the father stomping through the meadow. When the father is within shouting distance, he says, “My boy wanted to meet—” and he doesn’t know how to finish; he wanted to say, ‘your son,’ but he doesn’t know to whom the boy belongs.

“Our son, ja,” one of the fathers says and they rise to greet David’s father. The stranger extends his arm just as the father falls neatly into his grasp. David’s father shakes hands with first one father and then the other. The three fathers just stand there and look at one another. And smile.

“I’m Erik, and this is Per. We are very pleased to meet you,” says the father with a goatee and bright, wide teeth. The other has a clean face and little pearly teeth.

“Beautiful day. Vacker dag! Verkligt,” says Per. He has warm blue eyes framed by dark spectacles. Rectangular. Reflecting landscapes. Then skyscapes. He winks. Eclipsing the sun.

“We saw you from our home,” says the father.

“Oh, ja? Up there? You live there?”

The father nods. And Erik says “Beautiful” and then Per nods and says, “Vackert hus, ja.”

“Big,” says the first one again. Smiling. And then the other one looks at him and smiles and squeezes his shoulder. Looking up the hill, the house sparkles in the sun, bright as a box of sugar cubes. The whole sky looks smaller over it, but more intensely blue.

“You have Labor Day now. In Sweden, we have Crayfish Day at summer’s end,” says Eric shyly.

“Ja. We have crayfish holiday in Sweden. Kräftskiva,” says Per.

And the father glances at the picnic basket.

“We don’t know crayfish in Carolina, so we brought smörgåstorte. Very big.” And he points to a large ice chest. Then he points to the blanket and says, “You eat with us. Here, sit. Let’s sit. Beautiful day.”

The father sits hesitantly on the blanket. It is woolen. Thick. Green and blue and black like a beetle. The boys are further off in the grove climbing crabapple trees and laughing. The father smiles. Erik is handing the father a glass of wine so cold the glass is already sweating and drips over his fingers. The wine looks like summer. Yellow like the pale grass underneath the green grass. Erik smiles at the father. He smooths down his goatee where it got ruffled when he smiled.

“Skål,” says Per and taps the father’s glass. The wine is so bright that it makes Per’s eyes seem bluer.

“Skål,” says the one with the goatee. They tap each other’s glasses and look in each other’s eyes.

“You are both from Sweden?” asks the father.

“Ja, we come from Gothenburg. Volvo.”

“Oh, Volvo transferred you to North Carolina,” says the father in a genuinely interested way. As if everything now made sense.

“Ja, I job for Volvo. Per jobbed for dancing.”

“Dancing?”

“Show him your extension, Per. Benförlängning.” And so, while lounging on the blanket, Per kicks one leg high into the air and holds it there for a considerable amount of time as the fathers’ eyes are allowed to linger over his body and the chinks from the trees bedazzle Per with gold spandrels of light. Per takes a sip of his wine with his leg still in the air. The toes are pointed way up. Straight as a sunflower. His leg. Sculptural. Vackert.

“Very nice,” says David’s father and he puts down his wineglass and applauds. “Bravo,” he says, “Bravo.”

“You have no ballet company here then,” Per says, except he pronounces it more like ballot.

“No. No ballot company. But there’s a very good art school the next town over. Ballot school. The dancers go everywhere. In fact, a neighbor’s child went there and is now performing for a company somewhere in Europe.  Brussels maybe.”

“Hmm. But that is very interesting. You can put your leg down now, Per.” Erik laughs, “He can keep his leg up forever,” he says and smiles proudly.

Per laughs and says, “Only for you, bara för dig.”

And the one with the goatee laughs and takes his husband’s shoe off and rubs his foot. “Look at this foot. You can see the training, nej? Dancers have ugly feet. See? But once they put shoes on. Magic. Beautiful feet. Prince. Solar. Siegfried. Oberon. All magical feet. Madness.” And Eric turns Per’s foot so that the father can see all the red toes like split plums. Bruised. A little green joint here, a twisted toe there. Scabs big as scarabs. Perhaps it was only the reflection of the leaves overhead, battering, that gave them such a peculiar hue.

“What kind of feet do you have?” asks the dancer.

“Me? Ha! Pentameter. I’m a poet. A teacher. Mostly.”

The one with the goatee says, “Han är poesiprofessor.”

This makes Per’s blue eyes light up and he sticks his leg in the air again. “Ahh,” he says.

There’s a fragrant breeze and the limbs of the apple trees arabesque. The father looks about him and sees how beautiful it really is. He has not really looked from down here.

“How long have you been in North Carolina?” he asks.

The one with the goatee smooths his beard and says, “First Labor Day. First one.” And he refills their glasses. “Skål!” he says. And “Skål,” says Per and they look into each other’s eyes, and it looks like the two Swedish fathers want to kiss, but they don’t, and it makes the American father smile and inhale the fresh air deep into his lungs. A huge cloud floats by.

“Clipperskep!” says the dancer and he points to the cloud, nestling back into his husband’s recumbent arm. His husband looks up admiringly at the cloud and rustles his fingers through the dancer’s hair.

“A vackert ship!”

And because David’s father feels good, he says too, “Vackert ship! Skål!” And they all say skål and laugh and sip. The boys are still climbing trees and laughing in the distance. Their shadows like spiders.

“You write books?” asks Erik.

“Yes. Small books. I’m working on a bit of verse drama now. A crazy French-inspired thing. Kind of Trump as Ubu Roi. Creating a nationalist identity and…” He let his prose trail off into hesitant breezes.

“Ah, Ubu! We love Ubu. Bonne idée!”

“You know Ubu!” says the father. “Not many people know Ubu. Jarry.” Now the poet feels suddenly lighthearted, and he notices the fragrant airs of sweet grasses and sharp apples.

“Ah! Jarry!” says Per.

A cicada cranks up into spirals like an old toy.

“How old is your son?” asks the poet.

“Liam is nine. And yours?”

“David’s ten. He goes to Oakleaf Academy.”

“Liam goes to Swedish school. They have Swedish school here for Volvo kids, so they keep up with school in Sweden.”

“How nice,” says the poet.

“You live there alone?” asks Per.

The question jars the poet, and he says, “No. My wife is up there. I should probably head back.”

“No. No. No. You must have smörgåstårtan. Wait until you see. Per made. Very beautiful. You’ll see. Per, servera smörgåstårtan.” And Per shimmies on his knees over to the ice chest where he pulls out a large plastic cake bin and dries it off with an edge of the blanket.

“Have you ever had a smörgåstårte before?”

The poet shakes his head no, but starts to rise, “I really shouldn’t intrude,” he says.

“No. No. You must stay. Here look at this. Just look.”

And the dancer uncovers what looks like a frosted cake, ornately decorated with swags and bright ornaments. As pretty as the doctor’s house at the top of the meadow with its ancient swooping wisteria.

“Oh, what a beautiful cake,” says the poet sinking onto the blanket again. “Chocolate?”

“Nej! This is a sandwich cake. Layers of sandwiches. Shrimp salad. Egg salad. Ham salad. Covered with cream cheese. See the tiny tomatoes on top. Radish flowers. Curls of carrot. Per is master smörgåstårtebakera.”

“A sandwich cake?”

And Erik takes a finger of icing from the cake and sticks it in the poet’s mouth. And they laugh at how the father’s lips envelop Erik’s finger like a little kitten over a teat. The poet’s eyes are very large, and he just says, “Mmmm.” He blushes.

The one with the goatee stands up and whistles, “Boys, smörgåstårte. Lunch!”

“Per has family in Chicago. They all love Per’s smörgåstårte. Let’s take for them a picture.”

“Oh yes, photo, please,” says Per. And they lean in around the cake.

“You too,” they motion to the poet. “Come.”

“Oh, no,” he says.

“Here,” they say and push the cake in front of him and then lean in around him. Per rests his chin over the poet’s shoulder and says, “For Insta.”

“Ja, for Insta,” says Erik.

The father hears a door slam up at the house and his back stiffens. The leafy wisteria scatters. The tableau is broken. They move apart and start cutting the cake. Per settles each slice on their plates. His lips purse purely out of concentration.

The boys come running and perch at the end of the blanket. Erik pours some apple juice for the boys and Per hands them plates of sandwich cake.

Liam says, “David saw you peeing.” He giggles.

The dancer keeps slicing cake and says, “Oh yes? Who was bigger then? Me or him?” He purses his lips again.

David says, “I was far away. Up there. You were small!”

“Nej,” says the dancer, “Then you saw him. You did not see me.” And everyone laughs.

“This is very good! I’ve never had anything like this before,” says the poet. But they hear a scream as the mother trips on her walk down to the picnic. David’s father immediately rises and starts his assent to the top of the hill. He takes large steps, resting a hand on each knee to hoist himself forward.

“Are you okay?” he shouts.

“What the fuck? What the hell are you doing?” she spits out at him.

“Wait,” he says, “I’ll help you. Wait.”

When he arrives, she is madly brushing burrs from her slacks and pulls a burr from her hair. “Just what the fuck are you doing down there?”

He offers his hand to help hoist her up. “You’ve got to see this. A sandwich cake!”

“A what?”

“A sandwich cake.” He’s patting the burrs from her rear.

“Stop it,” she says angrily. “You’re supposed to get rid of them, not join them.”

“I like them.”

“This is OUR property.”

“So what? It’s THEIR cake. It’s THEIR wine.”

“I don’t care. You can’t just go into someone’s yard and have a picnic anywhere you please. What is it with these people?”

“They’re from Sweden.”

“Then they need to go back.”

“Just come meet them.”

“If you’re not going to tell them to leave, I’ll will.”

“Wait. Come back here. Don’t be ridiculous.”

She turns angrily. The sunlight is burning into her skin and making little spider veins spread from her nose across her cheeks. Craquelure. “Look, I saw him stick his finger in you. I saw through the binoculars. I watched you.”

“He didn’t stick his finger in me. For god sake, you make it sound like he’s a proctologist.” He blushes.

“I saw. I saw you lick his finger like it was—”

“What? Like it was what?”

“The long shadow of suspicion!” she quotes. All sarcasm.

“Oh! So you have read my work,” he says.

“Of course I have.”

“You never told me that. You never said anything about it at all. Ever!”

“Would it have made a difference? Really?”

“Probably.”

“Have you ever read anything to me? Anything at all?” She laughs bitterly. And spits. A burr? She says, “I’m the one you’ve never read. You’ve never read me. What do you care?”

He looks at her blankly.

“Don’t look at me like that. Everyone writes. Some people just say it all out loud.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“There are books. And then there are books on tape. They can exist without the other, you know.”

“I’m not sure what we’re talking about. You’re not making any sense.”

And she just stands there waiting. Her face is wet with sweat or tears. Varnish. The husband just looks at her. His hands supine.

“That’s what I figured,” she says. She turns and starts marching toward the Swedes.

Suddenly he’s running after her. Stumbling. She’s model-walking now. High-stepping. Over the grasses and flowers. Grasshoppers propel between her legs. Green torpedoes.

“You can’t be here,” she tells the Swedes. “You have to go.” And she starts picking up their plates and throwing them in the basket. “This is private property.”

The man with the goatee says, “In Sweden, we have allemansrächten.”

She straightens herself and puts her hands on her hips. “What the hell is that?”

David says slowly, “All men’s right.”

“Ja,” says Erik and points a finger at David, “Exactly.”

She slaps his finger away from her son, “David, you don’t know that. You don’t know Swedish.”

“But he’s right,” Erik says.

“That’s what it sounds like,” David says. He seems happy.

“You don’t understand them.”

“But I do!”

“I’m telling you: you have no idea what they mean.”

Erik says, “In Sweden, we are free to move across land because nature belongs to everyone. No one owns beauty.”

David cocks a leg and puts a hand on his hip.

“In this country, I can shoot you for trespassing,” she says calmly. “That’s all men’s right[KW1]  here. I want you to leave or I’m going to call the police.”

“Come on,” says David, pulling on Liam’s shirt. “I have to pee.”

“You stay right here,” she orders David and grabs him by the shoulder. And then to the intruders, “Now either you’re going to leave or I’m going to call the police.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says David’s father.

“This is our property. This is our land.” And she turns toward her husband. Sweating. She’s very upset. Very red. Spider-lily red.

David shrugs his shoulder so forcefully he frees himself from his mother’s grasp. He shouts, “How come you two get to do everything you want to do, and I don’t?”

“David, you’re just a child,” says the mother.

“You do everything you want like children and then you make me be the adult. I’m sick of it. I never get to do what I really want. You always do what you want. Always. Even though you know it’s wrong.”

“David, what did your school say about these tantrums?” says the father.

“They said you shouldn’t embarrass me. At least I know you can’t help it. You can’t help embarrassing me.”

“David, you’re embarrassing us,” says the mother.

“You’re embarrassing yourself, David,” says the father.

“You say whatever you want. Whenever you want. You argue all the time. Politics. Boyfriends. Food. Pillows. All of it. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

He’s crying so hard now that his nose is running. The birds have stopped singing. The cicada has wound down. There is no breeze. Per is picking up the blanket and folding it into a neat rectangle, brushing off grasses.

“You’re awful. I don’t want to be with you. I want to be with them,” cries David.

“What on earth are you saying?”

“I want to be Swedish!” he screams.

“But David, you’re Southern!” says the mother. “You can’t be Swedish.”

“Please take me with you,” David cries, turning to the Swedes. Liam peers at David from behind Erik. “Don’t you see? Don’t you see how they are? I’m not an American. I’m not. I want All Man’s Rights. I want. I.” He’s sobbing so hard he can’t finish. Everyone is just looking sideways at each other. Then the Swedes start walking down to their car. Only their car roof can be seen shining over the edge of the meadow like a setting sun. The Swedes are linked together by their basket and ice chest, hand to handle to hand. They step nimbly down the old elm’s [KW2] roots to the road. Their jagged shadows dance like marionettes over the latent summer flowers. Primrose, bright as ballerinas. The lone cicada whorls back up.

David is on his knees and sobbing, “Wait. Please wait.”

The father is already walking back up the hill to the house. He leaves his wife to console his son. He has to think about his poem now. About the kingdom of summer. About the kingdom of words. About how people exist in words more than they exist in blood. The father hears the Swedes’ Volvo drive back down the hill. He hears his son’s sobs more distant now, and he can hear his wife call out David-David-David, and a titmouse sings, Peter-Peter-Peter. He hears her tell David that Swedes are not family. That families say words everyone can understand. Only places with kings and queens and poets say things nobody can make sense of. The father keeps scrunching up the hill and patting his leg, and suddenly it is easy for him to imagine the winter that would come like poetry, stabbing him with wild words, loud words like quartervois [KW3] and quarterback, elosy [KW4] and Eloïse. And he can feel himself forgetting David’s sobs, even though he’s moved on to softer words like chinook and chinoiserie. For absolutely no reason at all the poet tries to think of the word for a plastic slipcover, but all he can think of is the word antimacassar. So he cries standing there at the top of the hill. Over all his wordy thoughts, he can hear his wife’s phone low and forlorn going: Gone. Gone. Gone. Whoah-whoah-whoah.

~ ~ ~

Steph Rantz (he/him) lives in North Carolina and works for a municipal library in its local history room. He has been published in Miracle Monocle and O.Henry Festival Stories. A short story will be released this fall as a solo chapbook by Appalachia Book Company. Two of his one-act plays were performed in a Raleigh theatre. He is currently an ALM candidate in Harvard Extension School's Creative Writing and Literature program.