Archive for: Fiction

Eileen Stelter
Holiday Cover

His work-life balance had gone out the window since that damned poker game a week ago. He was so sure about his hand until the Grim Reaper had pulled not only aces but clubs too.
       The stakes: cover for the Grim Reaper while he went off on a holiday to the Western Cape of the galaxy. The perks: he could winnow anywhere he wanted to—temporarily. The downside (besides all the death, the itchy cloak and constantly being called away on a whim): that awfully impractical scythe. He never knew where to put it or what to do with it.
      Halfway through another poker game with a bunch of Drivvoid, his pager went off: Soul in need of collection at the antique store, district 24. He sighed in annoyance and excused himself from the table, earning a few disapproving looks from the Drivvoid. Called away on a whim, indeed. He barely had time to gather himself, before the shadows summoned him and he walked right through the front door of the antique store, a little bell announcing his presence.
      Maybe the dramatic entrances cloaked in shadows could be counted as a perk, he thought, as he saw the human woman hunched over a lifeless, green-skinned Ethelian, startled by his sudden appearance. When her head whipped around to face him, he almost dropped the scythe.
      ‘Lilith?!’
      ‘Aidas?!’ The shadows whirled around him, reminding him to close his fist around the wooden shaft of the scythe.
      ‘You’re the Grim Reaper?!’
      ‘You killed somebody?!’
      Lilith shied away from the body. ‘It was an accident with one of the old crossbows. I knew I should have never bought those.’
      Aidas looked down at the body, green blood oozing out of it in several places.
      ‘Look at her blood, that’s not normal.’ Lilith nervously raked through her hair. “We need to call the guards.”
      ‘Are you nuts? They’ll take one look at this and arrest you on the spot.’ Lilith let out a sob and her hand flew to her mouth. ‘What am I going to do?’
      ‘Don’t you have a “good friend” who’s a detective?’ His words flew at her like glass shards.
      ‘Really, Aidas?’ Lilith looked up at him, anger now shining in her silver lined eyes. ‘Now’s the time? Newsflash: Memory lane’s closed right now.’
      Aidas held up his hands in defence. ‘Look, Lilith. I’m just here to collect the soul, that’s all.’
      ‘You can’t’, she screeched, ‘the soul is the only witness.’
The Ethelian appeared next to him as a milky version of herself, her four black eyes as wide as saucers.
‘You’re’ , she gulped, ‘the Grim Reaper?’
      Aidas awkwardly adjusted the scythe on his hip. ‘I’m the holiday cover. But don’t worry, he gave me a good rundown of things.’ He winked at her. ‘Now please follow me, I have a poker game to finish.’
      ‘You’re unbelievable.’ Lilith muttered and shook her head. ‘Let’s call the guards, give her time to adjust’, she pointed at the Ethelian, ‘and think this through.’
      ‘Alright’, Aidas hissed at her, ‘Call the guards. See if they believe your accident story. Your fingerprints are all over her body, there’s no witnesses, the place of murder is your private property. You’re going to have some convincing to do. But you’re very good at that, aren’t you?’
      Lilith’s nostrils flared. ‘Why are you being such an asshole, Aidas?’
      Aidas came face to face with her. ‘You took the dog.’
      Lilith held his gaze and spat, ‘You never remembered to feed him anyways.’
      The Ethelian jumped. ‘My… body?!’ Her gaze went down to where she lay lifelessly on the floor, an arrow through her chest and she gasped. ‘No, no, no, no.’
      ‘Miss, no need to panic. I will help you cross over.’ Aidas awkwardly grabbed her shoulder. ‘But we need to leave now, before it’s too late.’
      ‘Too late?’, the Ethelian sobbed. ‘How much time do I have?’
      ‘Every soul has a few minutes, but after that, they might not be able to pass at all.’ A white lie to get back to his game of poker. They did have a bit more time than that but to what use anyhow. Why drag out the inevitable?
      The Ethelian grabbed the reaper’s cloak in an iron grasp, as she kept staring at her body, then Lilith, then her body once more. ‘Oh my god’, she sobbed again and her grip on Aidas tightened.
      The Ethelian grabbing him didn’t help in his continuous struggle to wave the scythe. The scythe didn’t really do much except initiate the passing over the Thin Place to the River Styx. Which wasn’t a river technically speaking, as Aidas found out on his first day on the job. It was a city. And the Thin Place was a wormhole between this galaxy and the next. A shortcut to the underworld, if you will.
      He eventually managed to do something that vaguely resembled a cutting motion. The shadows that had brought Aidas here, enveloped himself and the Ethelian. From the corner of his eye, he could see Lilith still staring at them, as he kept cutting or rather clumsily ploughing through the time space continuum.
      ‘No!’ erupted a scream from Lilith at his next movement and she escaped her shock trance. Before Aidas could make his last and defining movement undone, he felt Lilith’s arm loop through his. He only had time for his head to whip around to face her in shock, before the shadows swirled around them and he felt himself being sucked through the wormhole, Lilith and the Ethelian holding onto him for dear life. Or death, he guessed.
 
‘Lilith!’, he exclaimed as they landed and he shook off both her and the Ethelian’s hands. ‘Are you out of your mind?!’ Lilith bent over, breathing heavily. Aidas blinked.
      ‘That was one hell of a ride.’ Lilith murmured, her hands braced on her knees. She looked up at Aidas.
      ‘You just died, Lilith.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘And you took your body with you.’ He inhaled shakily. ‘And you weren’t supposed to be collected, so there’s no place for you here. Oh my God.’ Now Aidas bent over, the hood of the reaper cloak falling over his face, as he tried to calm his breathing.
      ‘You left me alone with a dead body!’ Lilith yelled. ‘And took the only witness to my innocence in a potential murder case! I panicked!’ The Ethelian sat down on the bed, staring off into the distance—or rather at the beige apartment wall across from her.
      ‘Surely there’s some way to reverse this, isn’t there?’ Lilith grabbed Aidas’ shoulders. ‘You can send me back once we have sorted this and spoken to the guards, right?’ When he didn’t answer, she shook him. ‘Aidas!’
      ‘Only the Grim Reaper knows. I’m gonna have to call him.’ Aidas sighed and closed his eyes. ‘Lilith, you’re impulsive as shit, do you know that? Do you ever think before you do anything?’
      Lilith huffed. ‘You know I don’t. Otherwise you and I would’ve never gotten married.’ Aidas snarled at her, then walked over to a phone mounted to the wall on the far side of the apartment. Lilith looked around.
      ‘Where are we anyway?’ The studio apartment was rank. The furniture looked like it barely kept its shape and the wallpaper came off in all four corners. Lilith sniffed at the take out boxes on the coffee table, and grimaced. ‘Your place?’
      ‘It’s Grim’s apartment.’
      ‘The Grim Reaper lives in a studio apartment?’
      Aidas rolled his eyes and took the phone from the cradle. ‘He only makes two pence per person. And the cost of living on this side of Styx is insane.’ He started dialling the number he had been given for absolute emergencies only: 111. Emergencies not including regular death, the Grim Reaper had specified.
      ‘Hey Aidas, what’s cooking?’ Aidas nearly dropped the phone, when the Grim Reaper picked up before it had even started ringing.
      ‘Grim Reaper, we have a bit of a problem here.’
      ‘Oh I know, you got two for one, didn’t you.’
      ‘Yes.’ Aidas, looked over his shoulder toward where Lilith sat down on the bed next to the Ethelian.
      ‘I thought I felt a little something extra when y’all crossed over.’
      ‘What do I do?’
      ‘Change your mindset first of all. That’s not a problem, that’s a success. Keep the lady here. Show her a good time.’
      ‘No, she really can’t stay. She was not supposed to be here.’
      ‘Not forever, just until I’m back to fix it. Make yourselves at home, as a thank you for covering for me.’
      ‘You want me to stay with her here?’ Aidas glanced at the bed again. At Lilith, carefully rubbing the Ethelian’s back to soothe her. Lilith and him hadn’t slept in the same bed since way before he had filed for divorce.
It was then that the background noise on the other end of the line brought him back to the conversation with the Reaper. ‘Grim, are you in a bar?’
      ‘They serve something called a “coco loco” inside a pineapple, Aidas. I never knew what I was missing out on.’
      ‘Grim, can you focus please? This is serious!’
      Grim clicked his tongue. ‘You can’t leave a living soul unattended in Styx.’
      ‘Why can I not leave her unattended?’
      ‘They always see this light they want to go towards. But that’s the wormhole. You can’t let her go anywhere near that, you understand? Humans can’t cross over without proper guidance. They will be torn apart by the pressure.’
      ‘Grim, I need to take her back. She’s not dead and I have a life to get back to.’
      ‘Oh, your life? You mean playing poker in dive bars and getting ripped off every time?’ Aidas ignored his pointed words.
      ‘It’s too much of a hassle to describe over the phone. Just stay with her and keep an eye on her, I’ll sort it out when I’m back.’
      Someone on the other end shouted ‘Last orders, folks!’
      ‘I gotta go. You’ll manage. Just wait for me at the house.’
      ‘Grim!’
      ‘Sorry, brother. That’s all I can do from here.’
      Aidas growled and went to hang up, but Grim called out his name.
      ‘Wait, one more thing.’
      Aidas snapped, ‘What?’
      ‘There’s only one bed.’
      ‘I am aware.’ The line went dead. And Aidas just stared at the phone.
      ‘So’, Lilith raised an eyebrow at him, ‘what’s the sitch?’
      ‘Oh you’re going to hate this as much as I do, Lilith.’   AQ

Susan E. Lloy
She

She’s uncertain when she left her country as the entire process has been a blur. There had been too much unquenchable sorrow, stress, and unknowns, still they were fortunate compared to others. Others who had never set foot on dry land again wishing for something better. It was in the summer when the winds were strong and currents manic, but the precise date has now escaped her. They straddled the high seas against the wind and wild currents, which tossed their craft around like a cork in a swimming pool. Her child was one of a clutch of frightened children. A girl of six with wide open eyes and long, dark hair. A sweet and prepared face for such a young thing with all the dangers that greeted them with hungry open arms.
      Now she is in a camp, and the shelters that house her and her neighbours touch each other like a parade of soldiers, arm to arm. Her child went missing within a month of their arrival. No one saw a thing. Snatched up and taken by a gang or traffickers like so many others here. Three went missing that day while kicking a ball or playing some child’s game. The UN are interviewing with the help of the police, probing the disappearance of these three children as well as countless others in scattered camps across the country. And each time they visit they provide the same answer. No updates at this time.
      The opportunists, that plague these camps, prey on the unsuspecting. Rana waits and cries and, on occasion, has to be apprehended by others when she attempts to drown herself in the sea that is blue and inviting and constantly calling her name. And, if she just swam until she no longer could, then it would be done. But Rana can’t give in. She must be here if her daughter returns, so this exit is something she can’t consider, at least for now.
      She looks at every one with suspicion, save for her neighbours on either side. A tattered doll lies on the cot of her missing child. It stares back at her, forlorn and distant. Its round, blue eyes seem to be frozen in a shock-like state. Very much like herself. Every breath is already an accomplishment considering the misfortune and misery that has a strangle hold on her, which is unrelenting and merciless. Every day she, and the other parents whose children are also missing, get together and discuss their heartache and what can be done. They must rely on the police as they’re not permitted to walk around outside the camp. Feet and souls are confined to this place. This that has become home, yet has nothing of familiarity or comfort.
      She tries to imagine her child eating nutritious food and playing in the open air, the sun smiling down while she eats an ice cream under the shade of a tree. She wears a pretty, patterned dress with cute animals, or watches a cartoon series on television. But Rana knows this isn’t true. She’s heard the stories and whispers from people who have known such tragedies and realizes the darkness that awaits outside this enclosure. Yet couldn’t this end differently?
 
 
      She’s here now. After decades of living in another space. Territory that inhabited her every pore and memory. Her home of what seemed a thousand years. Her children said she can call this home now. Mavis looks around the single, solitary room with a bathroom off to one side and recognizes some familiar items. Her favourite recliner, framed photographs of loved ones. Some confined within squares she doesn’t quite know anymore, but they look at her with smiles and reassurances. There isn’t a stove to cook on. Just a bare counter with dying flowers in a vase and some snacks. Someone she doesn’t know asked her if she would like her to throw them away, but she replied–no leave them.
      She does remember when she was a young girl moving from one base to another. Never staying in one place long enough to plant roots, make good friends or have any degree of nostalgia to hitch a ride with the next. Yet, the flowers, she does remember. From one country to another all the lovely flowers that grew on the outskirts of the bases. How she loved to bring them home to her mother who always acted surprised and arranged them in a prominent place in different windows for everyone to see.
      There aren’t fields of flowers outside her windows. Just concrete and a parking lot. It wasn’t her children’s choice when they placed her here, but it was the only available spot. They try to make light of it when she asks why she is here. Oh, Mom, it’s nice here. Don’t you think? You don’t have to do anything. Everything is done for you here. Don’t you deserve this after all your years of doing for us?
      She stares off to unknown horizons imagining herself as a young girl again. How time has sped. Now she is here in a space she doesn’t like or understand why exactly. Everything aches and is increasingly more difficult. They won’t even let her out the front door on her own. This prison. This cage that is now hers. How life has become so small. She can’t even make a cup of tea. If she could only move around a bit. Pick flowers, go for a coffee, enjoy a glass of good wine after the cinema. Meet a man.
 
 
      It will take time to adjust to this space, but Lizzy expected this. How else could it be after so many years of cohabitation? She let him keep the house as she was the one who wanted a fresh start. Every crevice in that dwelling reminded her of him. Her new homestead is compact, but what more does she need? Lizzy won’t be inviting another in. Storing his socks and hobbies in her closets. Her friends say she can’t possibly know this at this juncture, yet she does. That part of her life is over and a singular one has begun.
      She looks out at the expanse of the sea where it all began for her, her childhood turf. It’s limitless horizon and soothing rhythm. This is something she will never leave again. Her migration days are over. She must stay anchored to this place on this shore for the remainder of her days. Even though the fog layers this stretch of land with force and a relentless grip. Footsteps must be taken with care. But Lizzy feels safe here with the cold Atlantic winds and hard, blue water. All familiar markers of her youth. Especially when she reads about the misfortunes of others. The migrants who take such peril-filled escape routes on waters such as this and the hard realities of the ones who make it. Homes where no hats are hung and lives that become absorbed into the unknown.
 
 
      Rana looks out from the refugee camp and sees a flock of gulls flying overhead and wants to leave with them. To where, she doesn’t care. Still, she is imprisoned here indefinitely with no freedom but a hope. Perhaps she will have news of her daughter soon and this keeps her feet solid on this foreign soil. A land where one is not easily welcomed. She looks out across the stretch of land that borders the east side of the camp. A grove of olive trees stands quietly in the field. She imagines picking olives and preparing simple fresh cooked meals. It’s so close she can imagine plucking one from a tree. Yet her feet are bound here. To this place that’s home now, but grasps none of its liberty. At this moment she knows it’s a good thing, for one step in any direction and her child is farther from her too.   AQ

Monique van Maare
Engulfed

I built a shelter on the island’s highest point. It’s not much for comfort, but it keeps me dry. When I moved up here, I could still see the reefs and the other atolls in the distance. Gulls would screech and brace against the strong East winds, swooping in to forage in the scattered bays. Now, there’s just water everywhere.
           I am the last one here. When the tourists stayed away, the young and adventurous among us packed their bags and sought out the cities. Then, when the first terraces flooded with sand and seashells, families gathered up their young and headed for the mainland, too. Slowly, the frothing white web lines connecting our little islets faded, as one by one the fishing boats and water taxis were left behind at their wooden docks.
           I stayed, out of a deep love for the turquoise of our waters, and the giant sea turtles that stop here every year on their long journeys to nest. Perhaps, too, out of love for the wind-beaten shape of her palms, the long empty stretches of her windswept dunes.
           She was always our provider. Pine, coconut and figs featured richly on our plates, and hollow coves protected the crops of hatching fish. Even now, there are hibiscus flowers growing up here that I can braid into wreaths, like we used to do on festive days. We’d dance on the stony beaches, and honour all her winged, leafed and finned species. I made one yesterday, but it unraveled from my head with my first sway, translucent yellow petals raining softly on my leathered skin. I can sense the day getting closer. I must remember to collect those nervine herbs I saved.
           The day the water reached the old graveyard, I cried until the purple dawn. I thought of the bones of our great-grandfathers and -mothers, our uncles and nieces and the little ones that died too young, roused roughly by the incoming waves, their spirits roaming the outstretched peninsulas and lifting angrily into the sky. Will they find peace again? Will the wind remember their stories, and strew them to our scattered hearths?
           Soon, porpoises and dolphins will nibble in her valleys. Sharks will mate in the shallow hollows of her ponds, which will no longer fill with lilies. The waters will get darker and wider, and the fierce pull of the currents will be deeply foreign to her soil. The nereids, with their bleached coral crowns and white silk robes, will swarm in and laugh at her discomfort, and at our hubris, our folly, our devastation.
I feel I owe her this, to be with her as she is consumed by the waves. When the time comes, and my last sanctuary here disappears in the waves, I will grind my feet into the shifting sand of her last dune, and hold on to her with my curled-in toes as long as I can.
           When the cold water reaches my knees, and the gales pick up, the bones of our ancestors will call my name, tell me it is time to let go. I will remember how Perseus came for his sweet Andromeda, perched on her rock in the sea, but I know that he never held such promise here. My body will be thrown off the sand by the bashing current, and she and I will become one. Even if, against all odds, the wind guides his winged Pegasus to these waters, what else will he see but an endless blue-grey expanse of deeply heaving sea?     AQ

Katherine Gustafson
Gold, with a Cross

Jesus had been weighing the decision for days, sawing his tongue in and out of the gap, considering the possibilities. He had finally decided what he wanted: gold, with a cross. The cross would be on the front, carved in lightly so you might have to look twice.
      He had knocked the tooth out against the grainy bottom of a swimming pool two weeks before, diving deeper than he meant, losing himself in the moment of cool, chemical blue. Slamming into the concrete felt like being punched in the face. He came up yelling, the thick, iron taste of blood in his mouth.
      The gold had been his brother Edgar’s idea, since Edgar was the kind of guy who wore three gold necklaces at a time. But the idea of having the cross was all Jesus’s own. It had come to him, of course, at church. Ever since the accident, Jesus had developed a habit of inspecting people’s teeth when they spoke, of imagining the shape of them hiding behind closed lips. When Father Gutierez took the sip of the blood, Jesus pictured his teeth—crooked, overlapping like shacks leaning on a hillside, deep black grooves between them.
 

***

 
Dr Hibart’s first thought when he saw the kid in the doorway was that he looked like a young hooligan. The slicked hair and thin beginnings of a moustache reminded Dr Hibart of the groups of teenagers who loitered at the bus stop near the garage where he parked his clunker Toyota every morning. In baggy jeans and sports jerseys, they yelled into cell phones, their arms around girlfriends in tight skirts, wearing shirts that looked like they were made of fishing nets.
      Dr Hibart thought these kids spent too much of their time on the street corner, looked too much like they were waiting for something to happen. This particular kid in the doorway looked too young for that group, though, surely no older than thirteen. And despite his longish hair shining with gel and his oversize t-shirt with a graffiti-style logo, he had a nice way about him. The missing tooth gave him a loopy look that Dr Hibart found endearing. He remembered his own young self, talking back to his parents for the first exhilarating time when he was eleven, not caring that his father would beat him with a belt for saying the word ‘bullshit.’ He had wanted the beating, actually, perhaps had even provoked it, so that his brother couldn’t call him a sissy anymore. So he could finally be a man, a guy who gets hit with a hard strip of leather and doesn’t cry, not even once.
 

***

 
Jesus looked at the dentist looming over the chair, his teeth small and straight, his eyebrows raised in alarm when Jesus pronounced the word ‘gold.’ The gold front tooth with a cross in it would be the exact opposite of what the dentist would want, which was partly why Jesus wanted it. The dentist surely thought it should be white and plain like every other tooth. The dentist was white and plain, too, and had a paunchy belly and flying snatches of balding hair above his ears. Jesus suspected the dentist did not approve of gold, that he bought his wife only fussy, silver things studded with diamonds.
      Jesus thought it best not to mention the cross to the dentist, since he knew this guy named Suarez, one of Edgar’s friends, who could carve it in for him later, after the tooth was in his mouth. Jesus imagined that the dentist did not approve of putting religious symbols on front teeth, gold or otherwise.
      But being religious wasn’t necessarily the point. The cross would be more of a symbol of the faith that held his family together than it would be of God himself. The family of eight attended mass every week at Iglesia de la Virgen on Route 15, where Jesus had been baptized in the fancy font and taken his first communion just last year. He was glad of that now, despite his wavering sense of God, because he wanted to know how people lived life where he had come from, where he was born. He had no memory of his native country, but his parents still lived immersed in a squeezing nostalgia for the valleys and cities in which they had grown up. The cross in the tooth would say: El Salvador.
      And the cross would describe in the merest glimmer the rhythms of his current home, a poor, gang-addled neighborhood on the outskirts of this brutal and dirty American city, an area where his little sister Irma could only play safely inside, allowing her dolls on pretend picnics to run through imaginary grass. The people of his neighborhood were bonded together by their burning dedication to God and Jesus and the Virgin Mary, able to bear up under the pressure of continual violence and crushing poverty because they were buoyed by the certainty of a divine and perfect love. Their ability to endure was just as inspiring as any God that Jesus could have found in the wide, blue sky.
      The dentist said, of course, that he did not work with gold. ‘I do replacement teeth in white only,’ he pronounced slowly, as if Jesus would not understand his English. ‘I don’t do gold teeth.’ Gold teeth seemed to him, no doubt, to be related to mobsters and gang members. ‘Low-lifes,’ he would call them, alone in his parlor with his needle-nosed wife.
      ‘I guess I’ll go somewhere else, then,’ said Jesus casually, waiting with a thrilling sense of anticipation for the shock on the dentist’s face.
      ‘Honestly,’ said the dentist. ‘You don’t really want a gold tooth in the front of your mouth. No one will take you seriously. I’ll put in a white one. You’ll be on your way in no time.’ He rapidly clipped an aquamarine paper bib around Jesus’s neck and swung the light on its hydraulic arm into place above the chair.
      ‘Gold or nothing,’ said Jesus, allowing a note of challenge to creep into his voice. ‘Quiero solo oro.’ He almost hated himself for provoking the poor man that way, allowing the statement to slip out in Spanish, to become some kind of taunt. It was the same way he heard Edgar talk to the teachers at school. The dentist blinked in what Jesus took to be a dense and uncomprehending way.
 

***

 
Dr Hibart felt he was losing stamina. He didn’t know how many more times he could calmly examine mouths studded with cavities, lance the abscesses of poor oral hygiene, put up with the attitudes of burgeoning gang members. It was all so noble, but it was exhausting. When he had set up his storefront twenty years ago, bursting with the charitable spirit, he had never imagined that the people he was trying to help would resent him, find him suspicious, demand discounts on services that should rightly be twice as expensive as the prices he was asking. The people of this forgotten corner of the city seemed to feel entitled to what he was so generously offering. Inexplicable, he thought, how people didn’t realize he was doing them a favour.
      And now here was this kid, asking for a gold front tooth, like Dr Hibart was some kind of ghetto jewellery store. He thought about his wife Clara, just last night, insisting over dinner that he move his practice to the suburbs.
      ‘Just think,’ she had said, ‘we could go on another cruise next winter. With the money you’d make.’
      And to be honest, it didn’t sound half bad. He could picture himself on the deck of an ocean liner, a gin and tonic balanced on the arm of his chair, the great blue iron of sea and sky pressing the wrinkles out of him.
      But, even so, he didn’t know if he could. He had spent so many years being the good guy, giving back to the world, fulfilling his responsibility as a son of privilege. It was what he was supposed to do, the role he had always played, and the people here depended on him. He was needed in a way other people weren’t.
      Even if at times the need did overwhelm him. It got exhausting, always coming to their rescue. Old Mr Santos, with his twelve teeth, five poodles, and one pair of shoes. Mrs Palmero, whose son was a crooked cop taking bribes from the gangs to neglect patrolling his own mother’s block. Little Ricky Lindo, with the biggest smile around and teeth so prone to cavities he was in the office every other week. At times he desperately wanted to close his office door and leave them all to fend for themselves. He could be on a cruise ship while they went on living their miserable lives, which he was never going to be able to fix anyway. But there were only two other dentists in the area, neither of whom properly sterilized his instruments, and Dr Hibart knew he would never forgive himself for selling out.
      ‘I know you feel an obligation, dear,’ Clara had said. ‘But honestly, how many more years? It was really a youthful fling, wasn’t it? And what about us? I was thinking it would be nice to go to Venice again.’
      Listening to this punk kid talk about putting a gold tooth in his mouth, Dr Hibart suddenly felt an incredible fatigue. Venice, he thought. Canals and gondolas and cobbled alleyways. Pasta and wine and cannoli. Venice would be very nice.
 

***

 
‘No oro,’ the dentist said, picking up a sharp instrument as if to threaten with it. ‘Blanco o nada.’
      Jesus blinked. He could feel his mouth fall open. The dentist had spoken in Spanish, the foreign words lurching through his pallid lips. They sounded almost unrecognizable, floating in the air over Jesus’s head, waiting for him to grasp them. Blanco o nada. White or nothing.
      ‘Dios,’ Jesus finally said, staring hard at the dentist, wondering if perhaps he had heard wrong. The man’s pale blue eyes did not look like the kind that would open up onto a lush foliage of foreign language.
      ‘Blanco o nada,’ said the dentist again, brandishing his gleaming tool, a pointed hook.
      ‘¿Conoce Español?’ Jesus asked. Maybe the dentist only knew a few words. Perhaps this same argument had occurred before with someone else.
      ‘Todo sobre dientes,’ responded the dentist, picking up the small mirror on its silver stick. Tooth-Spanish was what he knew. He had learned it during a semester as a guest lecturer at the Escuela de Odontología in Buenos Aires. Sitting there with Jesus staring up at him, he thought fleetingly about the joys of dancing Tango with beautiful dentistry students in the sultry Argentinian air. Those were younger days, when Clara had been willing to learn the steps from handsome men after three margaritas, exchanging seductive glances with Dr Hibart as they wheeled by each other on the dance floor in the arms of strangers, gorgeous and coordinated partners who laughed with affection at their gawky, North American ways.
      Jesus didn’t know the words for the different teeth; was unfamiliar with language in Spanish for things like fluoride, cavity, root canal. The dentist, it seemed, knew things in Jesus’s own language that he himself did not. He looked away from the dentist, toward the slat-blinded window.
      Blanco o nada. He turned the question over. He had set his heart on the tooth with the cross carved into it. But he knew that in neighbourhoods other than his own, people did not have gold front teeth. White kids, the ones at he sometimes saw from afar who wore striped polo shirts and played baseball after school, did not have such teeth. Would he be making a fool of himself? Not that he wanted to be like them. He wanted to be him, Jesus, Salvadoreño. But he didn’t want those kids to laugh at him either. He thought for a moment about how the boys on the all-city soccer team he had qualified for that year called him ‘Holy Ghost,’ joking that he should go crucify himself when he missed a shot. ‘Hang it up, Jesus,’ they said, laughing. ‘Don’t you know how to cross the ball?’
      ‘But the thing is,’ Jesus told the dentist. ‘The thing is, I wanted to get something carved in the tooth. With gold, you can carve it.’ The gold he could forgo—after all, that wasn’t even his idea. But the cross, no way. He needed to have the cross.
      ‘Carve it?’ asked Dr Hibart, not sure the boy had spoken correctly. ‘What do you mean, carve it?’
      ‘Well, actually, a cross,’ said Jesus, tracing it with the tip of his finger on the space where the tooth used to be. ‘Católico,’ he said, touching the graffiti logo on his chest.
      ‘A cross on your tooth?’ The dentist considered for a moment, studying his own face in the mini tooth-mirror he held. ‘Ah, because you’re Jesus,’ he said finally, nodding as if he had figured out a riddle. The name sounded awkward in the dentist’s mouth, Hey-Zeus, the syllables distinct and separated, like two different words.
      Jesus, in fact, hadn’t even thought of that connection, hadn’t realized that the cross on the tooth would be a symbol of who he was in a more literal way than he had imagined. Like a nametag. For a moment he felt that the dentist understood, that he might tell the dentist that his grandfather’s name had also been Jesus. His grandfather, who had grown coffee beans in El Salvador for thirty years until he was killed by a guerilla during the fighting in 1984.
      ‘Oh, well, yeah,’ Jesus said. ‘And just, you know, because my family’s Catholic and all.’ He couldn’t express to the dentist that he wanted the cross because he was afraid of losing himself in the battering bustle of life in the United States. The cross would create an invisible golden thread that could tie together his two cleaving halves.
      The dentist nodded, pursing his lips and looking curiously at the space where Jesus’s front tooth used to be. He imagined the ridiculous look of this child with a gold tooth gleaming in his mouth, the unfortunate error to be regretted ever afterwards. But the boy had looked at him with such an earnest expression, laying bare on his face his desire to do something special, to impress the meaning of his life on his body. Perhaps it was something like the desire for a tattoo, Dr Hibart thought, which was an idea he had toyed with back in Argentina. The desire to change oneself to show the inside on the outside, to bear a small piece of your identity to the world.
      ‘Well,’ said Dr Hibart slowly, pausing, not quite sure he wanted to follow his own trail of reasoning. This reasoning might lead him places he didn’t want to go. But why not? A cross, so pious. A statement of this boy’s own true self, so honest. ‘If we do a white one, I can leave a cross-shaped indent.’ He paused again, reconsidering if in fact this was a good idea. What would Clara say about this new adventure?
      Jesus did not want to hurt the dentist’s feelings, but he was not quite sure this scheme would be good enough. How would anybody see the cross carved into a white tooth? He needed to be bold. This tooth could not be a namby-pamby, white-man tooth.
      ‘Well, you see,’ continued the dentist quietly, as if he were telling Jesus a secret he was afraid his dental assistants would overhear. ‘If there’s a groove in the tooth, someone who works with gold can fill up the groove with gold. You could have a gold cross in a white tooth. Would be very good-looking, I imagine. Of course, you’d have to find someone else to do it. As I said, I don’t work in gold.’
      The dentist ducked his head after he had finished speaking, shocked at what he was proposing to this kid. Was this a dentist’s office or a carnival? He could see Clara’s face in his mind, that shrewd look of hers over the tops of her half-glasses burning the inside of his stomach. But he could just imagine it, could see the process by which he’d shape the tooth, could picture the subtle shine of the finished product. Inside of Dr Hibart somewhere an artist was hidden, covered over by years of enamel. His wife did not know this part of him.
      Jesus also had not suspected the depths of this dentist. The guy looked like every other white guy with a bad comb-over, but here he was, envisioning the exact tooth that was destined to fit into Jesus’s mouth. Like the dentist, Jesus could picture the beautiful finished product. He could see the way the tooth would look normal if glanced momentarily. But there would be a glint, a special gleaming, that would cause people to pause and look again. Then they would see it: a simple, gold cross, a statement of himself, Jesus.
      ‘Bueno,’ he said to the dentist, grinning, the gap with no tooth making him look lopsided and silly. ‘Diente blanco, cruz oro. Gracias.’
      Dr Hibart smiled as he pressed the button to lean Jesus’s chair back. The boy looked like a young child with the tooth missing from the front, much less like the surly ruffian who had appeared half an hour before. Briefly, the dentist thought of his own son Charlie, estranged, living halfway across the country, he and his efficient wife in their house with the pleated draperies.
      ‘De nada,’ Dr Hibart said to Jesus, poising his mirror and his pointy hook as the kid opened wide for his inspection.  AQ

V. J. Hamilton
Flightless Bird

Abigail’s fingernails dig into the armrests as the van pulls into her parents’ driveway, and she turns to the driver, her brother Ethan, and says, ‘You did bring the turkey, right?’
      His man-child face fills with soft bewilderment. The air in the van is thick with the aromas of candied yams, bacon drippings, broccoli au gratin, and kabocha squash casserole. ‘Let’s see,’ he says, pulling on the parking brake. ‘The roasting pan was so hot I took it out to cool… I went to pack… you came over…’ His face grows blanker and blanker.
      Her voice rises. ‘Do you mean to say we drove all this way and you never once thought: “Did I actually put that giant pan with the forty-pound turkey in the van?”’
      He shrinks against the driver’s seat and turns off the ignition.
      ‘All this way—blocked for an hour by the G-D Thanksgiving marathon,’ she emphasizes. She says ‘G-D’ rather than ‘goddamned’ because they are in their parents’ driveway, and their parents are deacons in the church. Might as well get right back in the habit that served her throughout her teens.
      The Grand Plan threatens to crumble. This year, with Mama’s recent heart trouble, the three young adult siblings had insisted: ‘We’ll divvy up the feast and cook things separately and bring everything to you.’ The siblings live on the east side of the city; their parents live on the west. Ethan had insisted that he would roast the starring dish—the turkey—and Abigail and Ruth co-ordinated the side dishes.
      His thumbs are already dancing madly over his phone. ‘I’ll text Ruth. She can swing by and pick it up.’ Ruth is the eldest child of the family, ten years older than Abigail, who is the youngest.
      ‘Ruth has three kids and four pies and you think she’s got room for that giant turkey in her hatchback?’ Abigail pulls at her hair, staring at her parents’ neatly kept bungalow with the long wooden wheelchair ramp, now unused. ‘Besides, I bet she left ages ago.’
      Abigail and Ethan are already two hours later than planned, which means they are missing the Thanksgiving church service the parents usually drag them out to attend—but she refuses to share this silver lining with Ethan. She wants him to twist in the wind over yet another stupidity.
      She exits the van, his lovingly refurbished two-tone vintage VW camper van, slamming the door harder than necessary, and tries to unlock the bungalow door. The 4-digit number code does not work. She tries several codes, punching harder and harder at the keypad. She returns to the van, muttering, ‘They changed the G-D code!’
      Ethan looks up from this phone and grins. ‘Good news: the baby is projectile vomiting, so Ruth hasn’t left yet.’
      Abigail puts her hand over her mouth. Her nieces are darling, but whatever germs they carry, she usually falls ill from them, too. Just the thought of a crowded noisy table makes her woozy.
      He checks the phone. ‘She’ll pick up the T-bird.’ He grins. ‘Problem solved, Miss Fussbudget.’
      ‘But can she get into your place?’
      ‘Don’t worry,’ he says, ‘There’s likely someone there.’ He shares a house with four other undergrads a couple blocks away from Abigail’s funky little apartment. He pats her arm and clucks. ‘I see your stress-o-meter is ratcheting higher, Sis. Tell you what, I’ve got some edibles to help you chill out.’ He smiles his goofy gap-toothed smile.
      ‘What! Why’d you bring those? With Papa’s radar? And the kids around? Oh Ethan, you know how worried Ruth gets!’
      ‘I’ll keep the candies out of sight.’
      ‘Yeah, that’s what you said about the tabs last time.’ Abigail pulls harder at her hair, remembering the frenzied call to the Poison Control line.
      Ethan rummages vigorously in his duffel bag. ‘Oh crap, these are my floor hockey things. Guess I brought the wrong bag.’
      Of course, she thinks bitterly. Now she wishes she could gnash her teeth on defenceless little gummi bears, and absorb some of the calming CBD, THC, or whatever it is, to cope with another day of Ethan.

* * *

A day earlier, Abigail had dropped by her brother’s house and discovered he was ‘short on funds’ so had not done a speck of shopping. ‘But you said you’d do the meat,’ she scolded him. ‘We can’t show up empty-handed!’
      Looking stunned, as if a pet dog had bit him, Ethan said, ‘I thought Thanksgiving was, like, next week.’
      Too disgusted to speak, she stomped off to her local butcher and begged for his very last bird, a forty-pound behemoth. Meanwhile, Ethan played a round of Blade & Soul with his posse, then searched the cupboards for pans, tested the oven, and inadvertently tested the smoke detector. He was just turning off the screeching alarm as she returned, breathless from hauling the bird. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I bet there’s tons of roasting pans at the thrift store.’
      They trekked to the thrift store to buy their largest pan, and to the bakery to buy day-old bread.       Ethan tried to win back her good graces and even charmed her into buying a flat of day-old sprinkled doughnuts.
      Back at the shared house, she silenced her inner nag and helped him cut up a mound of bread and mushrooms. Together, they wrestled the raw carcass open to rinse it and rub it with garlic. She couldn’t help but laugh as the turkey slipped and slid around the sink. The truce continued while they crammed the bird’s cavern with Ethan’s bread mixture. The loaded tinfoil-covered pan was so big it took over most of the shared-house refrigerator, displacing his housemates’ food. But their grumbles were soothed by the flat of doughnuts. Karma seems to go in Ethan’s favour, she thought.
      She left at sundown, after extracting a promise from him to start roasting the turkey at 8 AM so it would be done by the time they had to drive across the city, dodging the path of the city-wide marathon.
      But this morning, she made repeated unanswered calls to him. Finally she’d gone to his house, banged on the door until he opened, sheepishly saying, ‘Incredible as it sounds, I overslept.’

* * *

Now Abigail sits in the van, glaring at the family bungalow, as squat and imperturbable as a toad statue. There’s peeling paint on the highest trim, where Papa can’t reach any more; there’s a warp to the plastic siding where the family once had the barbecue set up too close; and every time she visits, the front steps look more rickety. How did her parents raise all their children in this tiny place? Routinely they’d have twenty people enjoying turkey and fixins every Thanksgiving.
      A joke about a turkey, the flightless bird being unable to travel, occurs to her but she refuses to share it with Ethan. That goofball needs to learn a lesson.
      A triple-rap on her window startles her. Mrs Persimmon, the next-door neighbour, steadies herself with a rake. Abigail lowers her window. The woman leans in. Her dentures are too big and a nimbus of white hair surrounds her face. ‘Oh, it is you! How are you doing, Abigail and Ethan? How lovely. The family for Thanksgiving. Your parents are the luckiest.’ She crackles with good cheer. ‘Mm, smells delicious.’
      ‘Hello Mrs P, how’ve you been?’ Ethan says. Their family occupies a unique and unwanted prominence in the neighbourhood: a decade ago, one child, Susannah, was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer. Mrs Persimmon’s late husband had built the wheelchair ramp and for a time it was Abigail’s favourite thing because they could wheel Susannah in and out of the house so she could still be part of the games, a faint-voiced cheerleader. ‘That ramp is still holding strong,’ Ethan says.
      ‘It is, isn’t it?’ Mrs Persimmon says wistfully.
      ‘I loved racing my skateboard on it.’ He smiles. ‘Hey, maybe my board’s still in the—’
      ‘Don’t even think of it,’ Abigail says irritably. ‘You’ll break your arm and then I’ll have to drive this G-D van.’
      The old woman laughs uncomfortably, like someone seeing static disrupt a favourite TV show. She excuses herself to continue raking.
      ‘We’re sitting ducks now,’ Abigail says, half-dreading the coming barrage of well-wishers. They’re like the Royal Family, she supposes. Minus the jewels.
      ‘I have an idea,’ Ethan says. ‘Why don’t I run and get some cola? Ruth never lets the kids have it. I gotta be the uncle who spoils them.’ He leaves the VW, giving a jaunty wave.
      Go ahead, rot their teeth, she thinks. Another stone upon Ruth’s load.
      Thuds rain upon her window. It’s their neighbour Frank, former chairman of the fundraising committee for Susannah’s experimental treatments.
‘      ‘Well, hello, Abigail! You are looking beautiful, as usual. How wonderful, you kids coming home to see your ma and pa.’ Frank, a retired barber, is carrying leaf bags and a copy of Community Courier under his arm. She admires his fedora and mustard-yellow tailored jacket. His dapper moustache is trimmed so sharp you could cut your thumb on it.
      ‘Yes, it’ll be fantastic to see them,’ she says with bombast. They chat briefly about her parents being at church and how they (the kids) concocted a Grand Plan of bringing the Thanksgiving feast. ‘What with Mama’s heart, you know.’ No mention of the turkey fuck-up.
      ‘What treasures you are.’ He pulls out his phone and shares a picture of his newest grandchild, born last month.
      Frank leaves, and Abigail frowns as the memory of Ethan’s stupidity washes back on her like acid reflux. The turkey, the heart of the meal. Missing. Honestly, what a sieve-brain. What a chucklehead.       She adjusts the mirror, checking her scarecrow hair, then checking in the rear-view to see if Ethan is on the way back. But no. He’s a dawdler, too.
      She rummages in her bag for a comb and spies the Bible, today’s passage still book-marked. She’s secretly glad she didn’t have to go make nice with dozens of church folk. The reading was about Abel and Cain. What were they fighting over, anyway? Was it some screw-up by an idiot brother? She reads:
Now Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Let’s go out to the field.’ While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. Then the LORD said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’
      ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’
      She feels a frisson of recognition as she reads the words ‘my brother’s keeper.’ That sly old Cain, ducking the question by answering with another question.
      ‘Boo!’ Ethan leans in the window and Abigail jumps. He drops a box of Nerds Candy on the page. ‘Reading the Good Book, are you?’
      ‘Cause I feel like murdering you,’ she says.
      He gets in the van and puts the two-litre bottle of cola between them. ‘Everything will be okay.’
      ‘How can you say that?’ She scowls. ‘Again, Ruth has to rescue us.’
      ‘Hey, I should be the angry one—I roasted the damn beast.’
      ‘Which makes you all the stupider for forgetting it!’
      ‘You could’ve asked me, “Hey, did you pack the T-bird?”’
      ‘You could’ve asked yourself: Duh, what’s the one thing I’m s’posed to remember?’ She mimics a beefcake voice.
      ‘I had so much going on, Abby! Laundry, phone calls, grocery shopping…’
      ‘That is normal, everyday life! Can’t you handle it?’ She pulls at her hair; the scalp is quite tender. ‘It’s the damn gaming. Taking over your life. Tell me, when’s the last time you went to class?’
      ‘Aw, Sis.’ He smiles winningly. ‘You have the checklist. You have the menu. Why didn’t you say 1-2-3 like you always do?’
      ‘Because I’m sick of always being your memory device!’ She thumps the armrests. She digs in her nails until white crescents show. ‘How are you ever going to manage? And find a girlfriend and settle down and—and—’ She waves at the family bungalow, its aura of homey comfort, and drops her voice to a whisper. ‘Haven’t you ever wondered why no girl sticks around past the second date?’
      Ethan’s face crumples. ‘Is this what she said to you?’ he asks quietly.
      ‘What? Who?’
      ‘Melissa.’
      Abigail is briefly immobilized: Melissa and Ethan? Beautiful, talented, intelligent Melissa? She is stratospherically out of her brother’s league. Melissa had sung at Susannah’s funeral. Abigail recalls the crystalline moment: Melissa’s voice soaring ever higher in the nave. Abigail had ached with grief over losing the sister she was closest to, but somehow, that perfectly sung note of the requiem acted as a lighthouse: shining, guiding, showing that the land of hope was within reach. As the notes swelled, Abigail’s heart had stopped hurting. Yes, Susannah was gone, but there were still the others. The three musketeers. She had sworn she would never, ever let her siblings down.
      ‘I was just so happy thinking of driving over here with you,’ Ethan says, lit with innocence, his longish side-hair looking like floppy dog-ears.
      She blinks rapidly.
      ‘Oh hey, Abby. I wanted to share my new song with you…’ He fishes in his pocket and pulls out a turtle-shaped flash-drive. ‘Oops, I forgot. My van player is busted.’
      ‘This is … cool. Your song-writing.’ She does not ask what the song is about. All his songs are, in one way or another, about Susannah. Good times with Susannah. Losing Susannah. Wishing Susannah was here. Of course, he disguises them as ordinary romantic ballads or (on occasion, for Mama) Christian hymns. Abigail accepts his flash-drive and tucks it in her bag. Her eye lights on her notepad. She pulls it out, chuckling. ‘Look at this. How did you know I had a checklist with me? You really should try making lists, too, Ethan. Lists keep you focused.’
      ‘Thanks! I’ll try that,’ he says. He takes the notepad from her and peruses it, then pulls a stubby pencil from the junk tray of the van. He makes a mark and jots a note, item 17.5, in between items 17 and 18. It says, Review checklist with Ethan.‘There,’ he says, handing it back. ‘It’s more efficient to add one little thing to your list, isn’t it? Instead of starting a whole new list for me.’
      Abigail’s face falls. ‘You’re mocking me.’ Her eyes sting.
      Honk honk! As if to emphasize the cruel joke, a horn toots. Ruth pulls up in her hatchback with enclosed roof carrier attached. As the car doors fly open she yells, ‘Everybody, take your knapsacks and pillows.’ Three children pour out, doing as told, and Ruth bustles around, unloading cooler, boxes, and bags—and the giant roaster. The children are locked out from the bungalow and Ruth says, ‘I guess Papa forgot to tell us the new code.’
      ‘Forgetfulness runs in the family,’ Abigail says icily.
      ‘Thank God for that,’ Ruth says. ‘With all the suffering in the world, forgetting is a mercy.’
      ‘Not if you’re responsible for a flightless bird.’
      Soon the six of them are surrounding the pan Ruth has placed on the cooler. ‘Well, Ethan, I picked up your giant pan here but I didn’t look inside… are you sure there’s a roast turkey?’ Ruth teases, ignoring the evident tension. She pulls off the lid and six heads incline. ‘Ahhhh.’
      ‘So beautiful, so brown!’
      ‘Smells amazing!’
      ‘Mommy, can I try a lil piece?’
      Abigail’s mouth is already watering, longing to taste Ethan’s new stuffing.
      ‘The centrepiece,’ Ruth proclaims. ‘Good job, kiddo.’
      Ethan shuffles. ‘I was starting to wonder if I’d remembered to roast anything at all,’ he says defensively. ‘The stupid incompetent ass that I am.’ His eyes dart to Abigail.
      Ruth pats him and says, ‘You’re a turkey genius, lil bro.’
      ‘Oh, I thought I heard voices,’ chortles Mrs Daguerre, the west-side neighbour. In her house-dress and wispy chignon, she totters toward them. ‘Let me take your picture—you are the perfect ensemble—say cheese.’ The neighbourhood shutterbug, she snaps three photos before they can object. She was the self-appointed photographer for the fundraising efforts to bankroll Susannah’s treatments. Her photos often ran alongside articles in the community newspaper. But her best photos, to Abigail, were the ones shown at Susannah’s memorial service. ‘How splendid… you are home to celebrate with your parents. Were you held up by the marathon?’
      ‘It’s open,’ calls the oldest niece, running to the adults. ‘I tried 4321 and it worked!’
      Ruth continues chatting with Mrs Daguerre and Ethan, who is making them laugh. Abigail picks up her kabocha casserole and heads inside. Soon her parents will arrive, and a new kind of madness will descend.    AQ