Not everything is a metaphor.

Jack Ruby beatified himself with a revolver. Lee Harvey Oswald did it with a bolt-action rifle. The cat ate the canary. There are saints everywhere.

I am cooking scrambled eggs. At first it was an omelet but then I experienced failure. Then I decided that I did not like the color so I added salsa. I am feeling proud of myself for being adventurous as a cook. But I also now remember that it is ten in the morning and I am eating eggs and nothing about that is bold or courageous.

om·e·let /ˈäm(ə)lit/

Noun: A pile of scrambled eggs that has its act together.

On the television there is a war. We are at war in Iraq. They keep replaying the video of the statue of Saddam Hussein being torn down over and over. They are telling us that they are average Iraqis. Occasionally they speak of looting and riots elsewhere.

I am eating my eggs. I am done eating my eggs. I am taking a shower and getting dressed. As I slide my shoes on I realize that I have nowhere to go and slip them off.

The television is still on.

My parents are dead. I stare outside looking for a skyline and see nothing. I am in the middle of rural Missouri. I am going to go drunk driving, I think.

It was the first plane that killed my parents. Now there is a war. They are vaguely related in the fact that the people who killed my parents were brown and the people in Iraq are brown and if you are white and they are brown that it is good enough in a metaphorical sense.

Everything in my apartment was bought by their death and when I look around I see pretty little gravestones from Apple and Sony.

I had a dream that my parents were still alive. There was nothing remarkable about the dream other than dead people were alive in it. I was having dinner with my family and I was eating a pot roast and they were sitting across from me smiling. There was no reference to them being alive again. I think I forgot they were dead. My sister was eating some kind of weird Mexican style lasagna, filled with black beans and rice.

I watch a war on television and remember that they are dead. They. My parents. There are not towers where there once were towers. The statue of Saddam is coming down on television again. Everything is falling down so I stand up. It is a metaphor. But also I am standing now and walking towards my car.

I am driving to the grocery store, I am deciding. I am going to buy groceries.

I walk back into my apartment and put on my shoes and then I leave my apartment for the second time.

All of my actions are framed within the idea that my parents are dead from nine eleven. My sister is now a fundamentalist. She used to drink a lot and then they died and she drank a lot and went to rehab and found God. God was not hiding. Now she is married to some guy and she takes painkillers because my parents’ ghosts are swirling around in her brain. She likes that we are in two wars and she has a bumper sticker on her ninety nine Pontiac that says she supports the troops.

I was in junior high and they pulled me out of class to tell me that some guys flew a plane into my parent’s job. I sat in the principal’s office watching cable news and the billows of smoke bleeding from the towers and the men in dusty suits struggling through everything solid turning into air. I watched the images and said nothing. I did not object when the principal turned off the television.

Everything that was solid was turning into air and my head felt dense and strange and my feet seemed like I was gliding along the ground and that my weight was repositioning itself inside of me to make room for something foreign.

I am in my car driving to the grocery store. I am in the grocery store. I am buying tortillas. I am buying a lot of eggs. I am buying milk and peanut butter. I am buying whiskey. I am looking at scotch. I am thinking about scotch.

Scotch /skäCH/

Noun: Arrogant whiskey.

They brought my sister to school to pick me up and we sat in our empty house and waited for anything to happen.

We don’t know anything, my sister told me. She was crying and I was crying but we weren’t crying. I did not know if they were dead but I did not think that they were alive.

They are still digging people out, my sister told me.

We lived with aunts and uncles.

I am driving home. I am home. My home is an apartment. I am sitting on my couch in my apartment. I feel satisfied with myself for being occupied for an hour. I think wistfully about going to bed and sleeping until I have something to do. I realize that I have nothing to do tomorrow or on most days. Sleeping would not accomplish anything so I do not do it.

I am thinking about going back to college.

My sister calls my phone and I do not answer it. She does not leave a voicemail.

My sister delved headfirst into nationalism. She began to put American flags in places she had not put American flags before. She hugged troops and I went into my room and read conspiracy literature. I got tired of nine eleven conspiracies and started researching the JFK assassination.

Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald were the same man. Metaphorically. Not really. They were not a singular person. They were both lonely men craving positive affirmation. Oswald filled this void in his life with communism. Ruby did it with dancing women.

Oswald did it alone.

I watched the video of JFK being shot over and over. I was fifteen years old. My sister called me morbid. She cooked and cleaned as I sat in front of my computer. The bullet was not magic and JFK was not King Arthur.

I am cooking my second meal of the day. It is the same as the first meal. It is an omelet. I am cooking the eggs and flipping it very carefully.

It falls apart.

I turn it into scrambled eggs.

Thought of hanging yourself as you dried yourself after getting out the shower that morning. You go in the kitchen and get some ibuprofen. Looking in the cabinet, looking at the pills, you think how an overdose of this wouldn’t kill you, but would just destroy your kidneys or liver. You decide to get tea, hoping some caffeine may improve your mood.

Copy a foot-and-half tall bond transcript when Fedex calls from the elevator. You deliver the Fedexes, saying with a mechanical voice, “Here’s your Fedex.” “Here’s your Fedex.” “Here’s your Fedex.” You compliment a secretary on her new dress, “Nice dress.” And walk away with anxiety, the compliment just jumping out your mouth, and you had no real reason to worry, as you two are friends, it wasn’t flirtatious, it was the proper way to pay a compliment. You continue copying the transcript and start entering a story in the second-person about being depressed and thinking dark things.

Enter the fourth paragraph while copies run, stopping to collate sections and start more copies, writing a few sentences before starting new copies and collating more papers. You think of your friend who sent you a hand written letter full of love and inspiration. When you read it you teared up a little bit. You desire to sit in peace and write back a letter. You don’t have nice stationary. You make more copies, you enter more sentences and the copier runs out of toner.

Replace the toner. You go down a floor to the Information Technology office, also in the core of the building. The I.T. guy asks how you are, as you are work friends. You say, “Just another day of pressing buttons.”

Come upstairs and legal secretaries bring you small jobs, a small transcript to scan and a litigation file to clone. This work doesn’t afford you the thirty seconds to a minute to enter the last sentences, so you save, you copy and scan. You eat the sushi you bought at Whole Foods last night after you and the girlfriend had fought because you were depressed and kind of volatile and didn’t have time to cook, and were too upset to eat so only ate the cream of broccoli soup, which kind of hurt her stomach because it was too rich. She wants a trial break up, and you take lunch.

After coffee I go out to the backyard to smoke a cigarette and dig a small hole. Lay the hamster in the hole and go to work.

I wake up. It is morning and I look over toward the cage and remember that the hamster is dead. It is Saturday. Roll over to continue sleep.

I wake up after two hours. I look over toward the hamster cage and I see the caramel fluff twitch. I think, I remember burying him yesterday. I go over to the cage and he is sniffing pellets. Leave him be.

In the backyard there is a small mound of dirt but no marker. I cannot remember whether I placed a marker on his grave. It seems the sort of silly thing I would do. Have a cigarette and go back inside.

As I near the cage the hamster is limp in the wheel. I look around the room. I look back at the cage. I look around the room. I take the hamster to the kitchen, say words with him in my hand, and drop him into the waste disposal. Listen to his body mash to pieces and wash my tiny hands.

I wake up. It is morning and I do not look over toward the hamster cage for I know the hamster is dead. I turn on my side to face the pillow beside me and there he is, lying motionless in the middle. I leave the room. I return. Still a ball of brown velvet in a spread of white cotton. I lift the pillow with the hamster on it and dump him over the garbage can and tie the bag. Place the bag out by the curb.

I wake up but I do not open my eyes. Hear the hamster wheel turning.

I wake up. I look toward the cage. I expect to see a hamster either dead or alive in the cage. In my head, the hamster is white. I find the fresh expired body of a brown hamster in the cage. Decide to leave him there.

Three months pass. His body is intact. It does not decompose. I have hung a calendar next to the cage to mark the days. On the last day of the third month, I pick up the hamster and take it outside and build a small fire and toss him into it. Go back inside and take the cage to the curb.

I wake up and stare at the ceiling. On the ceiling there are seventy-five brown and white marbled hamsters crawling about near the light fixture. Close my eyes and feel their tiny hamster feet soft on my skin.

I wake up. I am covered in soft white fur. Light a cigarette and think of going for a run.

I wake up nauseated. Go outside and build a bonfire and toss myself into it.

I wake up. I run to every corner of the house slamming into walls and screeching something in a language unknown. Go out to the hamster cage by the curb and try to climb in it but I do not fit.

The elderly who did not leave these one-tavern towns ask questions. This tattoo? Aw, it says Huckleberry. After the boy. A life on the M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i. Worm catches fish. Right? They don’t see the cherries. Keep wholesome. Fit in just long enough. On the outskirts, I will not check my email one hundred times a day. I do not bite the hand that feeds me. Sheets hanging on a line make me weep and I’ll wear decent underwear for once—for a prairie dress and a Forest Ranger.

Should I map out all cities called Home? Pick one out of a straw hat and tie a red bandana on a stick, walk kicking gravel in the boots the storyteller gave that the deep-country women and Mexicans compliment without fail.

I drive. I find a Forest Ranger who tells me where I can find pie and ice cream homemade. Yes, but where, my darling, could I find Home? Did they name Handsome Lake after you? Do those pink socks with the black bear paw prints come in women’s Large? Smokey doesn’t give a damn about preventing forest fires, so won’t you show me where to find the mushroom that makes me small in your hands?

Don’t distract the Ranger, the bus driver, or lifeguards.

In the rearview, the Forest Service flag flaps in high wind. I should have fucked that man. I used to be able to make anything happen. Instead, I will eat cold ice cream on hot berry pie with my dog just past the batting cages For Sale. Slo-pitch. I could really go for an upside down m right now.

“The boys ‘round here don’t play ball,” say the full hips of a half-dozen pregnant fourteen-year olds strolling past a church sign reading:

Keep the faith, baby
Not: Keep the baby faith

I hit the brakes, add a comma to the second line, and capitalize the F. The girls turn slow. They would rip your hair out.

“Kids these days,” and I’m the one saying it, but young in this town, I’d too be pregnant, cutting rainbows in my thighs, chucking stones at doll hospital windows,
spreading my legs in front of my cell phone. Fuck you, Forest Ranger, I’d shout, lighting underbrush on fire near the ATV trail where the boys that would never get me rode.

A voice talks to me from the gas pump: “Try your PIN again please, ma’am.” “Jesus,” I say, “Can you hear me out here cussing?” “I hear everything, ma’am.”

Burn rubber. Wind blow. Philly, I’m outta here take me back! The Lucy-Desi Museum could not have been built in a less-funny town. Revved it right by an axe murderer at a red light. Don’t stop at Music and More—Banjos, Knives. Don’t spend the night at Camp Nut n Fancy.

U-turn and for kicks, fuck the Forest Ranger on his maps and I love maps that smell like wood.

Sure enough, the boys on ATVs come. They can smell us. Being animals. I say, “Shoot ‘em. They breed. One day these woods will be overtaken the sound like bees in hate will never go away and their seed catch on the high wind the whole county the nation overtaken so’s churches cain’t even stop it.”

“Cain’t” I said “cain’t.”

My Ranger puts a hand over my mouth ‘cause I’m talking crazy naked. He multitasks, which means, he moves his body harder into mine with every “Bam! Bam! Bam!” the sound makes me come. The vultures circle thirty seconds (I count ‘em all) before spiraling toward the eyes of noisy boys who did not see nature as anything but theirs to plow over.

Go quickly, my Ranger says, get lost. But he doesn’t mean the second part. With his large hands, he irons out the map we crinkled. Drive past the batting cages, about sixteen miles. Meet me on Honey Hollow Road at midnight, here, right smack dab in the center of Dewitville. Do It Ville, there’s a place we could call Home.

We do.

Years deep, my Ranger tells me three hotels have gone up since the new prison went in. The road crew packs heat under their hunter’s orange safety vests.
Gary Spit says, “Chester Fraley says the man who shot his boys had a ponytail and I says—” A seventeen-year old girl says, “My old man was just out riding—” Her old man was eighteen.

A crack whore runs into a pool hall and the locals think it’s a joke. But as her eyes adjust to the dark she claims her sight. She seen us. At the forgotten one-room schoolhouse on the far edges past the mineshaft where they party—the boys who stick firecrackers up cats’ asses and the girls who won’t appreciate the keenness of vultures for silence—for years.

What comes is what more than I could tower. Holding run a left, another left. I help water across a lawn. All my mornings have been spent. What I know is nothing more than glass, malleable desire blown into a tortoise. Left, another left. I know of several men who hold me—let that be a lesson, in thaumaturgy, in etiquette. A hawk could stain this shirt. A hare is only made delicious when bent. A salmon should never be spoken about publicly unless wanting arrest. I am nowhere nearer to what I wanted to abandon. There, in the streets, I am known as charred, aluminum, rust without a barrier, martyrdom, or beveling. What is clearer boxed in. A hole, of sorts. I have several of them—none of which produces a sound, or sterling. Jettison, a thought or several. A cyst still emerges. I have mouthfuls, I trade them for my grinder—my gender, oh, my gender. A tongue to set aside, a lip to stop singing. What I’d cull to be left alone, perpendicular on a pier, of sorts, of things. This way sent me to the mountains. That way is no way out. One to one I am only so many people at once. Let me chide the back of your hand, a good fist, a blunder, a wound made ready. Venison under the dinner table. A pocket.

– PRATHNA LOR

[ FOOD ]

Eating-Cloth

This is the worst of it. In grade school we drew ice cream, pizza, and ate the drawings. Paper melts practically. Cheese-yellow crayon wax slides on the tongue and coats the throat. Not felt not wool–

Nor even silk. Silk is tricky we compare the best chocolate to silk. Burn victims know, an abandoned masochist knows for sure. Former kidnappees know if they haven’t forgotten what it’s like willfully typically.

We were told if we had longer hair we would suck it too. We flipped our eyelids. We wished our hair would grow.

Eating-Metal

The soft mixed kind. Paperclips taste like new blood. Money tastes like some fresh water. We taste like true gastronomes.

Eating-Wood

A splinter dream. A cultural experience. An acclimation slash accommodation. The salty taste of a sturdy home breaking our mouths.

– AMY McDANIEL

Butter in a jam jar ajar like a door knob still shiny maple over butter over buttermilk waffles brown as burnished gold not so yellow not so buttery an effect buttering up milkman postman both trucks stuck in mud ugly mud on face on arms neck knees legs butcher boots.

But butter is grace is utterance is warm fire mother’s warm hands but for dad in a bunker.

Big summer bumper crop of honeycomb and languor like a bath lathering.

Ice cream in mouth in open chuckle but take the memory in float down.

But button down the soapy memory she said button down the blue house and luggage walks and good fairground fun because the times are slipping down on knees like the old warring years.

But for the buckeye butterflies over marigold flutter flutter aflutter.

– DESMOND KON

[ ROOMS ]

The first breath is a main entrance, the last thought before breaking in. The only thing I’ve ever been good at is practicing. Dreams were a talent I developed out of an early hobby of sleeping. Since then, I’ve learned insomniacs count missiles like sperm rather than sheep. Sometimes, I’m never even sure there is a target until I crack its eggshell.

Unlike me, pharmacies are bright, really clear until I walk out of them. Sheep follow each other down my throat, and I always lose count. I know when one arrives, the journey may never have existed. To those in the waiting room, the approach matters only to the disease being cured.

But there’s a traffic jam on the road to recovery, and I take baby steps towards nowhere.

– ERIC BEENEY

Gertrude Stein walked through her bedroom door and sat on the bed. She stared at the wall for a few minutes. The door opened and Pablo Picasso walked through it. Gertrude did not turn to look at him. He lifted one eyebrow, turned about face to close the door, and climbed it, the door, up the wall, to the ceiling, to the center of the room. Standing upside down with his arms held out, Pablo Picasso impersonated a ceiling fan, glaring down at Gertrude Stein.

She stared at the wall for a few minutes, refusing to look up at him. Picasso glared down at her. They were like wax sculptures of themselves. Gertrude Stein lifted both her legs and began jumping on the bed. As she jumped on the bed, higher and higher, nearly reaching the ceiling, where Picasso was still glaring down at her, her eyeballs left their sockets and fell to the floor like marbles.

Ceiling Fan Picasso said, Gertrude, pick up your eyeglasses. We are expecting guests any moment. It is almost party time. Looking up, she told the ceiling fan, Writing is my thing. You are a painter. I don’t paint ceilings in Venice and you don’t write all over my face while I’m sleeping — caprice? Ceiling Fan Picasso closed his eyes. Crossing his arms, he said, I’ve never been to Venice — you know that. Gertrude began jumping on the bed again.

Ceiling Fan Picasso opened his eyes and spun his arms in little circles. His body spun around clockwise. His arms blended into his body and his body blended into the ceiling, spinning loose hair on the eyeballs, on the floor, rolling about the room in circles becoming squares becoming hexagons becoming sunbeams ripping through Gertrude’s tender anus, trapping her in a prison cell constructed not of piss nor vinegar nor fecal matter, but tiny pieces of coffee cake with missed connections posted abstractly by glassy-eyed shoestring potatoes leaping out of coffee cans with the velocity at which unused business cards plagued by poor graphic design find their way into dumpsters hidden behind empty lofts in the gourmet ghetto.

Someone knocked at the front door.

Gertrude rolled down the stairs wrapped in her faux fox-skin coat. She peeped just in time to see a vacuum hose placed to the other side of the hole. The vacuum grabbed her eyeball and sucked her through to the other side.

On the other side Gertrude Stein was 64 feet tall. But her feet were normal size. So she had to sort of knee-walk toward the bay in order to avoid crushing her peanut brittle heels beneath the weight of her massive fox-skin.

Flossing with her toes, Gertrude Stein bathed her 20-foot foxtail in the bay, where she was easily mistaken for a sea creature. A group of jets rolled in from the clouds, peppering her arms with missiles the size of pellets to Gertrude Stein. Ouch, she cried, that stings! With one of her huge hands, she swatted the jets. They crashed into the bay the way confused pelicans plunge into a birdbath sometimes. Silly pelicans.

Gertrude Stein leaned her head down into the water, into her tender button, where she rolled into herself, into a ball of dough. The ball of dough sunk to the bottom of the bay. A submarine slipped past in search of sea monsters. Giggling, a few stray bubbles escaped the flesh folds for the surface, preceding the rise of the dough ball that once was Gertrude Stein, as it floated up, breached the surface, and fell into outer space.

– REYNARD SEIFERT

Not in some sacrilegious way, like thinking I was as good or perfect as Jesus, but a simple awakening of eyes to my true identity, an understanding of why I never made it as a carpenter, and why I’d always been so comfortable around prostitutes who were getting stoned.

In fact, my eyes burned like lakes of fire, calling to mind the many times I’d been pepper-sprayed. But thankfully, I’d just figured out I was the Son of God. So I spit in the dirt, rubbed the mud on my eyes and cleared that right up.

Next step: rustle up some disciples like the good old days. Every Messiah needs an entourage. So I stood on a fire hydrant and tried to dust off the old “Consider the lilies” sermon, but what came out instead was mostly gibberish. An inconvenient time to speak in tongues, I admit, but I was rusty. A few heads turned. Nobody bit. Things have changed in the last two thousand years, and I suppose people have grown weary of longhaired, bearded strangers approaching them on the street, begging to be followed.

Before I did anything else I decided to turn some water into wine for Chester, the guy I let watch my stuff. I said a few words over an oily puddle under the overpass and we both drank of the blood. He told me it wasn’t very boozy. I reminded him I was still getting my stroke back. We both felt pretty dizzy by the time the puddle was out.

I felt good about myself right then, for the first time in so long, and I was practically walking on water when I made it to the 7-11. Maybe I was too aggressive with the clerk when I wanted her to wash my feet with her hair. Maybe splitting open a bottle of canola oil to anoint her wasn’t such a good idea. But she didn’t have to call the cops.

When it comes to arrests, I got off light, really. Released without a single puncture wound, Chester was snoring me to sleep before I knew it.

Of course I got to thinking on that 7-11 clerk, how she’d denied me three times. But it’s fine, really. I forgive her. After all, I’m Jesus Fucking Christ.

We were in this dumb room full of swans. One with skinny windows and oak trees and no one could find us there. This room was tucked away in a big old Victorian at the edge of the woods, done up with French doors and pink paint and a sunroof and a bunch of gardens and of course Saint Francis of Assisi was watching.

She hiked her skirt above her knees and started pissing on all the windows and the oak trees and the roses and the lilies and the gilded mirror and the marble vanity and the mahogany desk set and the hundreds and hundreds of paintings of girls in white dresses.

Then she started pissing on the swans so they would flutter toward the ceiling where their skulls would shatter against the glass.

The swans were really getting on my nerves. I never said I liked swans. I never said I liked this house. Both gave me the creeps, I have to admit that.

She doesn’t have much time left and there’s only so much you can piss on in a day. But then it’s just one dumb room in a huge house no one really knows about, what harm is there in that.

Besides, I would probably follow her just about anywhere.

No, you didn’t say it in those words. You don’t use words like artifice, I use words like artifice. We had a long talk on the way home as he slept in the backseat and you told me that you believed I believed it when I told you I loved you, but that you don’t love me and I don’t love you. You felt sorry for me and the bad things that happened to me that make me who I am. You conceded that I am a good mother. You said that you cared for me, for my well being. Your hands were on the steering wheel but you weren’t driving and your eyes were fixed straight ahead. We talked some about loneliness. You said you wanted to do your own laundry, now. Then there was more discussion, about the sleeping arrangements. I said I don’t want to send him mixed messages, I want to know, where are you sleeping? You agreed, you said it is ill defined. And then you used the words “you and I” in a sentence incorrectly, the I should have been me because we were in the objective case which wouldn’t usually annoy me but your words seemed formal, carefully chosen, and still, you messed that part up. I slept in our bed, you slept in his room, but he got up and crawled into bed with me. He said the nightmare stays in his room. He called our room Mommy’s room. The sheets smelled of Gain, Joyful Expressions. I am a careful mother and sometimes, a careful wife.

The next morning, I was in the Walgreens, buying fruit snacks and antibiotics, and a song from the 70s came on, and the words included I love you too much to ever start liking you and I sang it in the car, on the way home, and I started to cry but then I stopped at the stoplight.

I found the easy listening station, and sang to songs about flying in balloons, women with stormy eyes, unrequited love. I didn’t stop to think about the carefully selected moments and real details I often stop to think about to remind myself. Maybe it is what you say, a trick, when I do that. You told me that I always make the stories sound more real than the truth. What’s the word for that? You asked me.

Verisimilitude, I told you. Yes, you said.

You used to be thin, your eyes sweet. Mine were too. I know this to be true. Or maybe it is all a trick I do, see, I’m thinking your same thoughts.

I was still wearing the stinky Star Wars shirt. When I came home, I noticed the glitter, little smudges of silver on the fridge and on his Peter Pan table. You were both asleep under the air conditioning unit. Jacob’s bottom was in the air, his head close to your head. I wanted to lie down with you. I thought, my boys. I called you my boys. I didn’t want to say goodbye to him in the morning, a school day. I wondered if you’d brushed his teeth. I peeled off the dirty jeans, the old shirt, and stepped into the shower, thinking that my naked body was just a naked body, thinking you can’t make somebody love you if they don’t. You can’t make a heart feel something it won’t. Or something like that.

I go to the marble sinks and punch the soap dispenser. A short milky stream of soap squirts past my outstretched hand and onto your bag. You stop plucking your eyebrows and stand there, staring at me. You stand really thinly, you stand like the letter S.

“I am sorry,” I mouth, feeling that if I actually said I was sorry out loud, the sound of my voice would go through all of your bones and shatter them, simultaneously. I briefly imagine you in a pile on the floor in the girl’s bathroom, in this institution, in this small congested town, on the floor in a puddle with just your tiny face looking up at me, your small mouth opening and closing like a carp. I imagine me staring at myself in the mirror where your face had been. I take out a tweezers from my bag and start to pluck my eyebrows too.

You are pretty. You are like a Goth version of myself. I like you but I can’t say anything. I mean, you know, because of your bones.

“Nice day today,” I tell you from inside my mind.

You don’t answer.

I follow you home, and when we get inside your room I can see that you are much better than me. I can see polaroids on your wall, tiny scenes of all the people who know you and who love you and I want to take them off of the wall and stuff them into my mouth and chew and chew and chew until they are not yours anymore but until they are mine. Instead, you take off all of your clothes and stand in front of a full-length mirror. I take off all my clothes too, but you don’t notice. You have bad posture, you look like someone stuck a needle under your skin and siphoned out all of your fat. You are real pretty, did I say that already? I look at myself. I secretly wish someone would siphon all my fat. I actually feel hopeful seeing you like this, because now I feel like it’s possible. I look in the mirror and stiffen my arms, trying to point my hands toward the ground. My body gets in the way. That’s how much body I have.

I decide I’m hungry and so are you so I rummage around in my bag for the stuff I’ve packed for us in case we were in this situation.

“You fat cunt,” you say, “What the hell is that?”

I hold up a plate of fresh Fettuccine alfredo. I also have some organic beer and an assortment of imported chocolates. Your eyes flicker, black and shiny as boots.

“Those are my favorite ones.” You suddenly become tender. Then it passes.

“No,” you say. You stomp over to the mirror and throw a temper tantrum and you start to scrape your right arm with a safety pin until it bleeds.

“Hey, “I say, out loud. “Hey, you’re a real pretty thing.”

I take you in my arms and we lay on your bed and I rock you back and forth, and listen to you sob. And your sobbing and both of our stomachs grumbling serenade us to sleep.

Frank? we asked.

The gentleman from Indiana chuckled kindly. We could tell he was hoping he wouldn’t cause us to feel we’d transgressed by suggesting the nickname.

It was closing time. We were following people who were crossing the street to crash a party whose crowd could be seen on an enclosed balcony in a brick fourplex. Franklin, the gentleman from Indiana, was following us.

Are there parades in Indiana on the Fourth of July? I asked him.

The gentleman from Indiana gave this some thought. Then he told us about a parade on the Fourth of July in which he and his sister had ridden bicycles. The wheel spokes had been threaded with crepe paper, he said. Red and blue rings in alternation.

Do brass bands play in the shelter on the main square? Do grandmothers take lawn chairs and tap their toes?

The gentleman from Indiana gave this some thought too.

You don’t need to answer that, Mara said. She introduced me. That’s Miles. He’s a dick wipe.

I don’t know if he knows what a dick wipe is, I told her. Do you know what a dick wipe is, Franklin?

But the gentleman from Indiana was spared because we had arrived and begun climbing the stairs in a slow line of strangers and now on the landing at the top a drunk woman appeared and began screaming.

Who are you? Do I know you? If I don’t know you, go away. If I know you, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Do I know you? Who are you? I’m sorry. Please listen everyone. Please listen. Go away.

The woman disappeared. We resumed climbing the stairs.

Does anyone know her? the gentleman from Indiana asked.

I do, said Lars, who was taller than the gentleman from Indiana, the tallest one on the stairs at that time. I know her. I’ve been here before.

When we were almost to the top, the woman reappeared on the landing and again filled the stairwell with screaming. I studied her nearby features, which seemed separate and erratic. They seemed misarranged.

Which one of you assholes burned my toothbrush? My fucking TOOTHBRUSH! Which one of you did it?

The gentleman from Indiana looked at me and others.

Did you do it? I asked. Did you burn her toothbrush?

What?

Don’t talk to him, said Mara. Don’t bother.

Inside we found that the keg was down to the foam so I went to the refrigerator. I dug out a bottle of pricey ale, which I opened with the butt of my lighter, and a can of light beer, which I took to Mara, who was shouting conversation with the gentleman from Indiana.

I was ready for a new experience, he yelled.

Mara nodded.

He said, Something new.

I asked him, Do you ever at times like these think to yourself, I’m alone, she’s alone, nothing’s keeping us from—you know—getting together and fucking?

I reached for Mara’s coat sleeve. She jerked her arm and ripped free of my fist. She walked away.

I’m sorry, the gentleman from Indiana said. Have I done something to make you not like me?

I studied him. Come on, I said to him. I lay my arm over his shoulders.

In the back corner of a built-in china cabinet flanking the portal to the dining room was what I suspected—correctly, I would find—to be a bottle of single-malt Scotch.

I’ve got a nose for this sort of thing, I said.

Should we be drinking it?

You see, this is the kind of response that people dislike—that might make them, potentially, dislike you. FYI.

For a while the gentleman from Indiana and I drank without speaking. We passed the bottle back and forth.

To Mara, I said eventually. I hoisted the bottle in a jaunty way, too quickly. Whiskey slicked my neck.

This is good, said the gentleman from Indiana.

I said, This is good.

I think I need air, he said, and turned away. He pushed out towards the balcony.

Mara was there but she was talking to somebody else, a guy with black glasses and wildflower hair. I took my place at the balcony rail beside the gentleman from Indiana. We leaned out towards the street.

I don’t like this music, he said about the music, which someone had changed.

I nodded, though I liked it myself.

A little ways down the empty street the traffic lights went to stop-sign mode. The gentleman from Indiana spoke with petulant resolve.

This is not the music I like.

I still had the neck of the bottle of Scotch in my grip and was thinking about the sidewalk below. I looked down at it. I opened my hand.