Issue Seventeen
-Autumn 2023-
Abby Manzella | Nora Maynard | Pete Prokesch
Quinn Gancedo | DJ Hills | Bonnie Meekums
Paul Smith | Tylyn K. Johnson | Lisa Thornton
Intervals on the Beach at Dusk
Abby Manzella is the author of Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements (Ohio State University Press), winner of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award. She has published with Lit Hub, Catapult, Colorado Review, HAD, and The Threepenny Review. Find her on Twitter @abbymanzella and @abbymanzella.bsky.social.
“I’ll hum and you repeat it back,” Teddy said, from his reclining position on our college’s manufactured beach, a softened shoreline for the lake that grew each spring from snow runoff. Night was falling, so we were alone with the evening’s chill, lying on our backpacks as pillows.
Teddy hummed with resonance, and I watched the vibrations from his lips down into his chest. I echoed the notes just as easily an octave higher. There was an intimacy in such simple musicmaking.
“No problems, see?” I let my hands rest on my diaphragm.
“OK, try to sing the 2nd inversion of a minor seventh.”
I took a deep breath and imagined the notes in my head. They sat pleasantly on a staff in root position, and I could float the two bottom notes to the top to create the requested inversion. I felt the pitch of that centered G, and I opened my mouth. The first note came out fine, and in my mind, I reached up a shaky minor third—Lullaby and goodnight—but then I felt the vertigo set in, even though I was lying down. I felt my ears go silent, like I was about to pass out, but with it came the pressure of diving into a lake’s depths. I pushed out a tentative squeak, but I knew it wasn’t to the expected third pitch, and I knew I couldn’t even muster the final note. I quickly sucked in a new breath.
I didn’t look over at Teddy, but I felt his fingers lace with mine.
I failed to find a whole step. A whole step. What could be simpler? Do, Ra, Mi. Three blind mice. Up, then down. But I knew it wasn’t about the step. For all my security in my skills as a musician, I panicked during every test performed in front of classmates, and now we’d proven that even one other pair of ears caused a swamping in my head.
“See,” was all I could muster.
Teddy didn’t say anything. He looked into the dimming sky, and so I looked up too and tried not to feel the hardness of the compacted sand against my back. Yesterday there had been a hard rain.
“Do you see that, Cass?” he asked, extending his pointing finger toward the shoreline where the darkness of the lake and sky faded into each other.
“What?”
He kept his arm raised but let his fingers pull into a fist and then release, pulsing like the yellow stoplight blinking at the slow intersection near the town’s sandwich shop.
Then I saw the flash he was mimicking. And then another one just to its right. The fireflies were making their music even if I couldn’t, even if my failure at harmonic training probably meant I was going to drop my music major after only two semesters. I’d already had a one-on-one with the professor who had suggested exercises and said I shouldn’t worry because lots of people had trouble with ear training. I worried. More and more fireflies joined the dance.
I hated the disturbing quiet that descended on me when I needed to produce three perfect intervals. The notes became meaningless and eventually I became unable to produce a single tone. For someone who had faced years of applause for my violin playing, such silent shame overwhelmed.
But worse than my lack of inner ear under pressure was my growing awareness of this fading moment with Teddy. If I was no longer in music courses, I knew that we would drift apart. As a cellist he didn’t sit in my section in orchestra, but he’d found me in classes. I didn’t want to let go.
I saw his extended blinking hand as the warning that it was. The blue-black of night was falling; new things would certainly emerge from the change ahead of me. My parents wouldn’t mind; they thought music was frivolous anyway. Become a lawyer, they said. They wanted certainty and security for me. But I didn’t want to work with arguments. I loved the way notes intertwined to build beauty and then disappear. Still their words echoed in my head when my own thoughts fell silent.
I knew I’d build something new—that wasn’t the issue—but so much would also be lost. I said nothing; there was nothing left to say. We lay there while the fireflies momentarily illuminated the sky.
Bury Me
Nora Maynard's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in HAD, Pangyrus, Atticus Review, Drunken Boat, Necessary Fiction, Salon, The Millions, and others. She’s received fiction fellowships from the Millay Colony, Ragdale, Ucross, Blue Mountain Center, and The Artists' Enclave at I-Park. She was born in Canada and lives in NYC. She's currently at work on a novel. www.noramaynard.com
Bury me, you say.
Now?
You jut your chin and squint against the sun. C’mon, do it!
You fold your arms across your chest, close your eyes, and push your thighs together. I can look at you, now you don’t see me. The hair on your legs tinged with copper, the mole below your nipple. I scoop my fingers in the sand and trickle some over your toes.
Your face doesn’t look like the face I first saw last month on my phone, in the coffee shop last week, or in the dim bar two nights ago. There are pinpricks from shaving, a few short hairs you missed. Your nose seems thinner from this angle. There’s a tiny scar at the edge of your lip.
It’s heavy. You smile, eyes still closed. Like one of those blankets. I’m using a child’s pail now. Green plastic. I bring the sand in wet and tip it over your knees. You wince as I pour more over your arms, your stomach. I clear flecks of it from your neck.
I pull a popsicle stick from the weeds, lay it on your chest, and cross it with a twig. Your eyes open before I can make my face the face you’re supposed to see.
Your arms reach through the sand and I tumble down beside you.
I’m dead, you say.
Me too.
My First Boat
Pete Prokesch is a writer from the Boston area. His fiction has appeared in Four Way Review, Evergreen Review, Soundings East, and TINGE Magazine, among others. He has received support from the Mass Cultural Council, reads for Epiphany, and is working on an MFA in fiction at Indiana University. He previously worked as a carpenter and taught green-building construction courses. You can read his stories at peteprokesch.com.
Boat for Cash the craigslist ad said. Then a price and an address. Dad took the boat when he left and I’d been saving up for one ever since. I was eighteen now. A boat was the only thing keeping me from becoming a man. So I locked my trailer door and got in my rusted Honda Civic and drove into the night.
The house was near the Borne Bridge on the inland side of the Cape Cod Canal. The lights were out and all I saw was a cigarette ember glow then vanish in the dark. I parked my car in the driveway and got out.
“Over here kid,” a man said in a gravelly voice. “The boat’s around back.” Then he broke into a whooping cough.
My feet crunched on the dry grass as we walked around back, where he flicked on a camping lantern and illuminated the ten-foot Jon boat, turned over in the yard. A few more dents than I noticed from the picture. But for my purposes it was perfect.
“Any rust I should know about?” I asked.
“Aluminum don’t rust, kid.”
I crossed my arms and nodded and he held out his pack of smokes.
“Just quit,” I said.
He kept the pack extended, so I reached out and plucked one. I didn’t want to be rude.
Then the side door slammed, and a pretty girl roughly my age ran towards the driveway with her head down like a running back ready to bulldoze through the line. We followed her to the driveway and she clicked the keys and the car beeped twice and blinked its lights.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“Out.”
“Not with that car you’re not.”
“You can’t control me!” she screamed.
“I told you, no more dope with the Rothman kid!”
Sobbing, she slammed the car door and ripped into reverse and peeled out, spewing a wake of gravel dust.
“Teenagers,” he said and forced a laugh.
We walked back to the boat and he unscrewed a bulb from a dead lamp mounted on the house.
“What do you do for work?” he said.
“I’m in service.” I’d been renting a trailer by the beach and working the morning shift at Dunkin since I dropped out. Dad said school was for a bunch of pen pushers.
“Army or Navy?”
“Food service,” I said. “Fast food actually.”
He rubbed his scruffy chin and considered the moon.
“Look,” he said. He crossed his arms and faced me. “I’ve been a roofer for forty years. To get anywhere in life you need a good job.”
His tan and wiry arms shone in the lantern’s light and I couldn’t tell if his hair was bleached white from age or the sun.
“Are you in the union?” I asked. It seemed like a smart thing to say.
“Fuck unions, kid. You hear me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Fuck unions.”
He thought for a moment.
“Now what do you need most to live. Water, fire, or light?”
“Definitely water,” I said. “I bent down and stroked the aluminum hull like I was scratching a dog behind the ears. I thought of all the bass I would catch between shifts.
“Great. You’ll be a plumber, kid. It’s settled.”
A plumber. I liked the sound of that. Mom told me Dad ran sewer lines for the city.
“Can I still fish?” I asked.
“Kid,” he said. “You’re the man. You can do whatever the fuck you want.”
He cocked his arm back and rocketed the dead bulb towards the woods. It shattered in the dark against the trunk of a tree. Then he crouched down and sighed and rested a hand on the hull.
“She didn’t always talk to me like that. My daughter, I mean.”
I crouched too, and he extended his pack and I took a second smoke.
“She caught her first bass on this boat,” he said.
He flicked his lighter and held out the flame and cupped it with his dry and swollen hands. I leaned in and lit my smoke and looked up as the light hit his eyes—tired and blue. His skin smelled like old leather.
“If you don’t want to sell it. I mean—I can find another boat.”
“Not another word, kid.” He closed his eyes and murmured to himself and rested his arm on my shoulder. Then we dragged the boat across the dead grass to the driveway. We were quiet while we lifted in unison and strapped the boat to the roof of my car.
“You’ll be alright kid,” he said as he patted my shoulder. He pulled out his phone and called someone and let it ring until it went to voicemail. Meanwhile I got in the car and he patted me on the shoulder one more time through the open window, and walked away toward the yard. I reversed out of the driveway and my tires creaked over the gravel. I looked up and his orange ember glowed and then vanished in the night.
When I got home I tucked my boat in a nest of tall grass behind my trailer. I took out my phone, snapped a picture, and sent it to my father.
Bedwetters & Yips
Quinn Gancedo is the author of The Nouns (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2022). His other work has appeared in Fence, Diagram, Tammy, New Delta Review, 3:AM, and Potluck Mag. He is a co-founder of Elbow Room, a non-profit arts organization focused on providing material support, mentorship, and community for artists experiencing intellectual and developmental disabilities in the Pacific Northwest. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Bedwetters
We finish each other’s sentences until we don’t. Last night we had our quarterly brush with the prospect of leaving. She used the word “submarine” to evoke confinement, claustrophobia, and atmospheric pressure. I suggested that “diving bell” might be more suitable. She wouldn’t stand anywhere near me. It’s true that we are taking on water, by which I mean that our clothes are commingled everywhere in heaps and we can no longer tell whose socks are whose. We wrestled awhile and she hurt my tooth, which settled it. We drank beer until we rolled over and into each other and collapsed into the familiar arrangement. Now it’s morning and we are washing our sheets and asking ourselves, again, which one of us it was that wet the bed.
The Yips
The Yips taunt the neighborhood indiscriminately. When a person, let’s call him “Benedict,” is possessed by the Yips, he will forget entirely how to act like “Benedict” and clutch desperately onto anything and everything within reach to patch together a makeshift performance of “Benedict.” Perhaps you have observed some of the signs in your own house: wooden smiles, unbecoming and sudden gravitas, sexual dysfunction, the wearing of sunglasses indoors, inappropriate flirting, mandatory appointments with guidance counselors and the human resources division, gossip, impulsive political posturing, compulsive masturbation, tantrums, indecent exposure, facial misrecognition, misguided experiments with hair and face paint. The Yips are why you find suburban mothers sometimes stringing together sentences from the language of medical dramas and snippets of obscene slang, or teen goths stealing the credit card to order dumbbells and guidebooks entitled “Secrets of the Squat Snatch” and “Kazakhstan Weightlifting System for Elite Athletes” online. They can be blamed for the reports of Louisiana drawls emerging suddenly in the voices of teenage girls from disparate counties in the Tri-State Area, as well as any and all sales of Maserati automobiles in the years following the attacks on the World Trade Center. If and when you find your own “Benedict” trying on new hats, adopting alien vernaculars, talking about tribal tattoos, testing out colognes and body sprays, or confessing to eccentric career aspirations; lock him in a familiar room, open the photo albums, queue up the home movies, and lull him to sleep by singing the facts of his biography. We subsist on the strength of our sincerity. That Columbus, Ohio and Hollywood, California are not the same place is an important American fact.
Waiting Game
DJ Hills is a writer and theatre artist. They are the author of the poetry chapbook 'Leaving Earth' (Split Rock Press). Other writing appears most recently in wigleaf, Poetry Online, and SmokeLong Quarterly. Find them online at www.dj-hills.com.
They’d sent us home to wait. There were no rapid response tests at the doctor’s office so they’d had to take a blood sample. They said they’d only call if there was news; otherwise, expect an e-mail. But there’s been no e-mail and we have decades of strangers’ voices in our head telling us the news is bad.
#
A used condom rests in an oily puddle of itself in the alley below. Someone had the right idea. He came inside us despite our twisting, pulling, scrambling. His chest slid, sweaty, across our back as he pumped his hips. I can’t I can’t I can’t stop, he’d said. We didn’t believe him but at the time we thought we did.
#
Generally, we are doing okay. The traps we set for the mouse living under our stove are cruelty free. We spend too much money on vitamins our mother prescribes over the phone; every Saturday a new thing. We use shampoo with all-natural ingredients. Our hair is still thin but our conscience is light.
It will just come back if you release it, our mother warns us about the mouse. She wants us to take more biotin and to buy traps that kill.
#
The neighbor next door, who never closes their blinds, sits down to pee. They have seen us naked, too, countless times. We forget things: blinds, keys, protection.
#
He loved our hair. The night we met him, whenever we woke up, his hands were tangled in it. He palmed our forehead. He pressed our head into his chest. After he finished, he pulled out and wiped our ass with a warm washcloth, like a child.
#
We are a community of waiting. It’s inherited. From the moment we’re born, it starts to grow. Fear is the anticipation of the unknown. By sixteen, we could open our mouths and spit fear into someone’s waiting hand.
#
There are things we can do: cut our hair, kill the mouse, have a conversation.
Us: “What you did wasn’t cool.” And then him: I don’t know who you are.
#
We met someone who was positive at a club in the county. We went home with him and his partner. We were fine then. We will be all right now.
#
When we were fourteen, and closeted, and afraid of everything, our mother shaved the side of our head in the bathroom, while we sat on the edge of the tub, willing ourselves to look older.
Half the fun is the waiting, our mother said, dragging the razor along our scalp, as if our life was a pot of water preparing to boil and not a timer, ticking, on the stove.
If I Could Freeze This Moment
Bonnie Meekums is a British writer whose flash fictions have appeared in several literary magazines and anthologies, including those by Reflex Press, Ad Hoc Fiction, Briefly Zine, and The Dribble Drabble Review. Bonnie shares a house in Greater Manchester with an unpredictable number of family members, grows disobedient vegetables, and finds inspiration in the hills near her home. She also travels alarming distances to see loved ones in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Website: https://bonniemeekums.weebly.com/
The wind barges through seven layers of clothing. Still, I want to be here. This is where he wrote, away from our busy life. I want to walk where he walked, hear the voices in his head that became characters held lovingly in pages.
I stop by the lake, its frozen surface a vast, steel floor. It’s hard to tell where lake ends and sky begins, so grey is the light. A strong scent of pine; a perfume he carried to our bed. Did he skate here? I never asked, never knew he owned a pair of skates until I saw them hanging behind his sturdy cabin door.
Seeing the reflection on the ice, I touch my chin. My breath catches, fingers register sharp stubble-spikes, the strong angle of my jaw. I see and feel his skates on my shoulder. I don’t recall bringing them with me. I swing them down, sit on a nearby log. The insides are warm, the fit snug.
As I move onto the lake, a flock of birds scatter and squawk their displeasure. I’ve never skated before, yet I glide easily away from the shore. I turn, spin, jump, then skate backwards in an elegant arabesque. I feel a joy I’ve never before experienced, out here alone, relishing the mastery in my movement.
I don’t know how many hours pass before I return to where I left my winter coat. I come to an expert halt. Ice shavings shoot like vapour trails behind my boots. His boots. I sit on the log, slip my feet out. When I hang the boots over my shoulder they weigh me down. On the ice, I notice my reflection. My now-smooth-again chin. A lone tear tumbles down my cheek.
Later, in the cabin, I find a virgin notebook, still wrapped. I light a candle, place his photograph before me, and take up the pen I bought him. Inside the notebook, there’s an inscription in his favourite green ink. Signed and dated today.
The Sun Rises, Too & Hard-Boiled
Paul Smith writes poetry & fiction. He lives in Skokie, Illinois with his wife Flavia. Sometimes he performs poetry at an open mic in Chicago. He believes that brevity is the soul of something he read about once, and whatever that something is or was, it should be cut in half immediately.
The Sun Rises, Too
Lo que es del sesamo es del sesamo y nadie se lo quita – Honduras
Every day the sun comes up and every night it goes down. But why?
There is an old proverb: ‘A day without sun is like night.’ But why?
Ask a rooster and he will tell you that the sun rises every day because the rooster wakes him up with his call. If not for the rooster crowing, the lazy old sun would stay hidden in the East all day long, snoozing. It was natural for people to stay asleep unless something made them get up. And that was true for the sun as well.
So one day the sun did not rise. Everyone in Trujillo was puzzled. Led by a little girl, they went to see the rooster, to find out why he wouldn’t make the sun get up and shine. They all climbed the hill behind Iscoa’s Hardware Store to call on Arrevalo, the rooster’s owner, who was, of course, asleep.
“What do you want?” he asked them, rubbing his eyes.
“Why hasn’t your rooster crowed yet?” they said.
“I don’t know. Let’s ask.” They went to Arrevalo’s yard where the rooster sat in a tree. He was awake, with a sour look on his face. “Hey, Rooster,” Arrevalo called out, “Why are you so quiet today?”
“I don’t know.”
“You angry or something?”
“I don’t know.”
“You sad?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did we do something to provoke this terrible black mood you’re in?”
The rooster flapped his wings once and stood up straight on the branch. “I get this feeling,” he said, “That you all just take me for granted. You never talk to me. You don’t smile when you pass by. You don’t appreciate me.”
“We appreciate you, Rooster.”
“Hah! Talk is cheap.”
So everyone there, from Arrevalo to Crespo to the profa Flavia Diaz-Sarmiento, all stood around in the dark wondering what might get him to crow like he used to so the sun would rise. Below them, the Bay gleamed in the moonlight. It, too, seemed to hold its breath for the gradual change from dark to the thin silver light of dawn and then full sunlight. Something was necessary to get the rooster going, something that eluded them all. They needed a spark, a chispa or something. Who would provide that? They all stood around thinking hard and looking at each other. Human nature told them that someone else would do something.
Then Arrevalo said to them all, “Hey, how come you all got up and came here – with no rooster crowing?”
“She got us up,” they said.
“Who?”
“Her,” they pointed to a little girl.
“And how come you got up?” Arrevalo asked.
The little girl stepped forward with an alarm clock. “With this,” she said, hitting the alarm button and startling them all. “Aunt Leila sent it to me from Miami.”
“This is the wave of the future,” she said.
With that, the rooster started crowing and wouldn’t stop, till Arrevalo finally took him to the yard gate and sent him into exile. He was last seen walking the dusty road to Tocoa. The little girl turned to the East. “Hey, Mister Sun, you ignored this once already when it got me up today. Don’t do it again. When you hear this,” she pressed the alarm button again, “You better get up or I’ll let you sleep all day and we’ll get used to life without you. Things change. So should you.”
The Sun heard her words and jumped up over the horizon. The sky brightened behind the twin peaks Capiro and Calentura, starting out orange where it met the mountains, thinning out to a lighter orange the color of unripe guava and then gradually to light blue interrupted by gray and scrupulous clouds. The Sun did not want to become obsolete like the rooster. Or shot. The faces of the villagers bore smiles. And that is how the sun in Honduras comes up every day and goes down again each night.
Hard-boiled
They call me Hard-boiled. ‘Cause that’s my name. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?
Good.
I have a couple of friends. Scrambled and Sunnyside-Up. Nice guys, I guess. A little myopic. Pie in the sky. Real bleeding hearts. Scrambled will do anything to make you smile. Break his shell over a frying pan and throw him in it. If you’re pleased, so is he. Sunnyside-Up is even worse. Crack his shell, and, hey, listen, about that shell – you need a tough one to get by, understand? And he doesn’t. Doesn’t have a tough hide, I mean. You split him open, throw him in the grease. What does he do? Looks back at you with that one yellow eye of his. Reminds me of Cyclops. Usually he shows up in pairs, so there’s two eyes staring at you from that sizzling frying pan. Staring with a foolish grin, happy to be getting his brains fried so you can dine.
Like I said, pathetic.
And you think I’m no different, right? I mean, I came out of a chicken’s ass just like those two, huh? Well, I am.
Skeptical, are you? Here’s a little incident that illustrates my point.
The three of us were waiting for a bus. Along comes a pig. He wants to know what time it is. I have a watch. Those two don’t. So Sunnyside-Up looks up at the sky, to see the sun and guess what time it is, all eager to please. He’s got this thing with the sun and all, it speaks to him in some foreign language, Sunny Jim or something. But no sun today, so he’s lost. Old Scrambled scrambles around, making like he had a wristwatch once but lost it, so he nudges me to help the pig with the time of day.
Now the three of them are all looking at me. So, without blinking, and without looking at my wrist, I say, “Ten a.m., sharp.”
And the pig says, “You didn’t look at your watch.”
“I don’t have to.”
“How do you know?”
I shrugged. “I just do.”
“You can’t.”
“You’re worried about the time. If the next bus to the diner is at eight a.m. you’re on the menu for breakfast. Well, relax. That was two hours ago.”
“Yeah, but how do you know?”
I decided to sidetrack him. “It’s all about perspective. Take breakfast – bacon and eggs. For a chicken, it’s just another day at the office. For a pig, it’s his life’s work.” I looked around, “And, for some of us, too.” Life is precious. Life is beautiful. It can be over in a split-second. All we have is our wits to prolong it – the beauty of sunshine, the beauty of a hearty breakfast, the beauty of living another day. Some of us have this gumption thing going for us, moxie, whatever you call it. Some of us don’t. I just want to survive.
“So hop on that bus, boys. Nobody’s thinking about breakfast until tomorrow.”
And off they went to the diner. Little did they know.
Then I looked at my wrist. Eight a.m. Or was it? I shook my hand. I couldn’t tell if it was running or not. But it felt like eight. You just have to trust your gut. I’ll kinda miss Scrambled. He was a good egg.
I had a funny feeling. You know, the kind you get when you come in a room full of people, or eggs, and suddenly no one talks and you realize it’s your house and what are all these people doing here? That kind of feeling. I checked my watch. Dead as a doornail.
Either my watch had stopped, or someone just had bacon and eggs for breakfast.
Inner Child
Tylyn K. Johnson (he/they) is a floating writer from Naptown, IN. He writes to reflect his heritage of storytelling and love through the framed lenses of Black Queer artistry. Their language appears in Toyon Literary Magazine, just femme and dandy, The Indianapolis Review, and the lickety~split, among other spaces. Tylyn performed readings and obtained writing awards while earning his BSW at the University of Indianapolis. They are also the creator of "Communal Creativity: A Game of Poetry" on itch.io.
Linktree (Projects/Social Media): https://linktr.ee/tykywrites
A crooked man stood six feet, eight inches, bearing a face his own mother never found a reason to love. His buggish eyes neared the repulsiveness of the rotten fish swimming his each and every breath, his being reeked of a burning dumpster. This here was the kind of person we wanted our kids to imagine when we taught them “Stranger Danger.”
Nine sixteen at night. The man carefully raised the window of a single, sometimes lonely, mother. He floated over the ledge and prowled into a room filled with toys, stuffed animals, and a snoozing baby. His gaze never left his target, his soft steps well-practiced in this space.
He crept up to the starboard of a green-and-pink striped crib and dipped a hand in, grasping for a lollipop by the infant’s face. He placed it upon his tongue, lavishing the confectionery. It tasted just like he remembered it had, mango faded beneath swirling layers of pure sugar. At least, before things changed and a miasma would come to bury him. Even after all these years, he made sure to never look at the baby’s face.
Lisa Thornton is a writer and nurse living in the Midwest. She has work in SmokeLong Quarterly, Bending Genres, Ellipsis Zine, Cowboy Jamboree and more. She was a finalist for the 2022 SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction and shortlisted for the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize and Bath Flash Fiction Award in 2023. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. She can be found on Twitter and Bluesky @thorntonforreal.
Dinner For Two
He could see the TV from his seat. That guy from Happy Days pointed his finger at the camera and explained why he should sell his house back to the bank before he died. Little by little. Or was that Magnum PI?
He separated the salmon from the broccoli. The wild rice sat in its own pile on the edge of the oval plate. He liked the oval ones better. The round ones made him feel uncomfortable, like he was pretending to be someone he was not.
He cut the fish into bite sized pieces. Twenty dollars used to buy a pair of cheeseburgers and a movie ticket for him and her. These days ten ninety-nine for the salmon alone. You had to be careful. They’d charge you for sneezing.
It was the playoffs, and he could hear the crowd cheering through the set mounted to the wall. If he ate slow enough, it would be the third quarter by the time he cleaned his plate.
He watched a young couple with a baby seated in a booth. It started crying and the man tickled its lips. It cried louder and the woman picked it up and walked to the restroom, patting its back.
He used the last roll to sop up the moisture from the rice, sliding it along the plate to catch the flaked fish and broccoli.
Three ninety-nine for the sundae. He saved his spoon, sliding it under a napkin when the kid came to take the plate away. He gave her the long handled one they brought with the ice cream. Her favorite was always Neapolitan with the chocolate, vanilla and strawberry all lined up. They’d get a carton at the Hy-Vee and sit on a bench and eat the whole thing.
He set the cherry on a napkin and pushed it across the table with her spoon. They’d leave him alone now. The kid would bring the bill and stop asking if he wanted more water. Like they did in the hospital. He’d watched her hair and skin stay the same, but her eyes went empty. Just like that, a light left them. Softly slipped away like it had something to do in another room. Then they stopped coming in and out, checking. It was just him and her for a long time with the TV playing Bonanza.
Fourteen ninety-eight before tax. He slid four fives under the saltshaker and wiped his mouth. The kid waiter and a red-haired waitress stood by the computer where they put the orders in. The kid’s hand was on the girl’s bottom, then tucked up under her skirt. He couldn’t see their faces. He placed the napkin in the basket the rolls came in.
The light filtering through the cracked blinds was the pink of late winter afternoon and he saw it had snowed and his windshield would need scraping. He stood up and snapped his jacket starting from the bottom. He looked toward the computer again. The kids were gone. He ran his hand along the back of her chair.
