Dobie’s Stories

All right. There are six stories on this page, but you gotta scroll about to see all of ‘em. So for your consideration…

1) Something Bad: A creepy little ditty about a skinny guy at the gym.

2) Never, Ever Bring This Up Again: The Steelers won the Super Bowl; a man lost a bet. Now, drunk as a skunk, he has to get his balls waxed as penance. Comedy.

3) I See Monsters:  A vamp chick hunts a man and his dog in Charleston from outside his bedroom window. Horror/romance/drama.

4) All the Crawling Beetles: Why would you want to climb a magnolia tree? It’s not for the view. Comedy/romance/introspection.

5) Burning Booth: A dude burns to death in a tanning booth. And repurcussions follow a young man who saw it all on the news. Dark comedy.

6) Stuck in a Bad Place: She’s trapped in BFE, Ohio, with the man she loves…who’s not the boyfriend waiting for her at home. Romance/comedy.

So scroll around for what you like. And READ! You gotta READ!

Something Bad

There was a guy who brought his laptop to our apartment complex gym. He brought coffee and his newspaper. He answered his cell phone, too, and talked to his mother about her doctor’s appointment and how he was going to take her at eleven. He walked really slowly on the treadmill, and he sat on weight machines without using them. He just, you know, sat on them. I had never said two words to this guy, and yet, I wanted something bad to happen to him.

It took three weeks for me to really get sick of his behavior. I was in the community gym every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from about 7 to 8 AM, and I was usually alone. Then, this guy showed up, and it all went to hell. I couldn’t focus when someone was talking on a cell phone right next to me. The sound of typing belonged nowhere near a stationary bike. So what the hell was this dude doing in my freakin’ gym?

“I’m going with you tomorrow,” my roommate said the other day.

“You don’t work out,” I replied, emptying groceries onto our kitchen counter—bananas, yogurt, sliced smoked turkey breast.

“I wanna see this guy.”

“Why?” I said, brandishing an artichoke.

“I bet he’s cute. That’s why you can’t stop talking about him.”

“He’s not cute,” I said.

In fact, the offender was middle-aged with dark brown hair and a tall, shiny forehead, over dark eyes and bushy eyebrows. He had skinny chicken legs that were blindingly white beneath the fluorescent lights in the community gym, and the skin on his upper arms flapped like poultry fat. He was not “cute,” and I imagined he wore tiny, wire-rim glasses when he wasn’t spending his time annoying me.

The day after the conversation in the kitchen, my roommate did, in fact, accompany me to the gym. From what I knew of Nicole, she’d only seen the inside of a gym via her television. She was a trim girl, but it was because of her diet—not her effort. She ate like a bird. She drank diet soda and red wine. She did not jog around the block, and she’d only taken the garbage to the dumpster once.

I was surprised that the stranger had beaten us there, because it was only 6:55 AM, and he didn’t usually show up until the first commercial break of The Today Show. He was on the stationary bike, and he had that God-forsaken cell phone to his ear.

“I know, Mother,” he said, and Nicole froze in the gym entrance.

She glanced over at me, and I nodded. The moment felt serious—like we were some hot chicks in a James Bond flick. Nicole nodded back, and we climbed on adjacent treadmills.

“I know you like Audrey Hepburn,” he continued, and I barely noticed that Nicole didn’t know how to start the treadmill. She had to poke me in the shoulder before I turned to her machine and pressed Start. I listened to that man I hated, ten feet from me, and I heard every word. I realized his mother must have been hard of hearing, as he raised his voice. “Dad always liked Doris Day!”

Nicole looked at me. She reminded me of my five-year-old cousin the time I tried to explain football at Thanksgiving. Nicole didn’t know what he was talking about. She had once confused Jim Henson with Jimi Hendrix. For years, she assumed “Purple Haze” was just another Muppet.

“Mom, I have to go. I’m at the gymnasium.” He hung up, and for the first time since I’d seen the guy, he turned to me and said, “Sorry. It’s my mother. She’s very sick.”

“Oh. Sorry!” Nicole said. She lost her footing, and I had to hold onto her elbow to keep her from doing a face plant.

Which was when I felt guilty, because for three weeks, I’d wanted something bad to happen to the man with the skinny chicken legs.

We all have those homicidal moments, don’t we?

Picture it: you’re on your personal treadmill. The guy next to you is running, eight or nine miles per hour. You can smell his sweat on sticky skin. The doomp-doomp-doomp of his sneakers rattles your brain, and for a second, you think, What if I just pushed? You can see it in your brain, too—the guy falls backwards. Maybe his feet go out from under him, his face falls first, and that eight MPH treadmill grates the side of his face off.

I’d been wishing such a fate on the poor innocent guy with a sick mother!

I was a monster!

Nicole felt the same way that day, because that night, we didn’t talk much at home. She ate cheese and crackers, and I considered nice things I could do for chicken legs. Maybe I could bake cookies? Offer to bring dinner to his mother one night? Something.

When the cops showed up a couple days later, we were confused. We lived in a nice neighborhood in a nice community with a nice gymnasium. What were the cops doing there? It happened when I got home from work. Nicole was already standing outside, hovering over the yellow “Caution” tape, surrounded by a dozen of our neighbors.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

She had her arms wrapped around herself, like she was cold, even though it was seventy degrees. She looked up at me, and I knew something was wrong. “You know that guy from the gym? They think he murdered his mother.”

“What?”

“Yeah, like, a month ago. The neighbors called the cops because of the smell.”

“So that’s why he was hanging out in the gym…”

“Okay, but who was he talking to? On his phone all the time?”

I shrugged. “He did look kind of like Norman Bates.”

“Who?” Nicole asked. I didn’t feel guilty anymore.

Never, Ever Bring This Up Again

Max and I made a bet that if the Steelers won the Super Bowl, he would get his balls waxed. Well. The Steelers won the Super Bowl. Now, it’s the day after my victory. Max and I stand in a salon two blocks from my sports bar, and this chick with fake blonde hair stares at me like this is all my fault. I guess it is my fault; I’m the girl who initially joked about the bet the day before. Max merely agreed, and even then only after I’d fed him beers—the high gravity kind that’ll mess you up faster than a bull at Pamplona.

“So you’re telling me you won’t do it,” Max says, and the chick chews her green gum and holds it in the side of her mouth. She chews a couple times then uses her pink tongue to swoosh it to the other side. It’s a green gum dance, and I’m drunk enough from the day, night, and morning to be entertained.

I blink when Max groans, because it reminds me of a sound he made during our unexpected make out session a week before.

“Max,” I say, and I take hold of his arm, “let’s go back to the bar.”

“No, they should be able to do this. If they can wax a woman down there, why not a dude?”

It occurs to me that it’s strange Max is the one fighting to have his balls waxed. I’d suggested the bet, and my team had won the Super Bowl the night before. I should be angry that these salon wenches won’t do it. Instead, my eyes dart back and forth from the green chewing gum and Max’s Atlanta Falcons jersey.

“I’m sorry, sir,” says gum girl, rolling her eyes. “We don’t perform those services.”

“Well, who does?”

“I don’t know, sir,” she replies, and I get lost as her tongue does another loop over the tops of her bottom teeth. It’s about then I notice we’re making a scene. I’d been distracted by Max and bubble gum, but as I look around the sunlit foyer of the posh salon, I realize there are a number of raised eyebrows and headshakes.

I glance at Max. He isn’t talking loudly. The attention is fully based—I think—on the fact that we are two people wearing football jerseys who have been drinking since noon the day before. Oops. My bad.

* * *

“Well, that was a bust,” he says after we leave, but I’m not listening. I’m checking out the scene on King Street—working folk dressed in business casual bustling about in front of retail stores and palmetto trees. I can’t remember the last time I woke up this early. We get a few strange looks as we walk aimlessly north, and then this one dude in a tie and khakis lifts a fist.

“Go Steelers,” he says, and I hear Max cuss at my side.

I nod at the khakis man and throw a fist up, too. Yeah, I’m a chick, but when you own a sports bar, you adapt.

“I hate you,” Max says.

“No, you don’t,” I reply, “you want to shave your balls for me.” But I understand his frustration. I hate it when my team loses, too.

I glance over at Max, and he doesn’t look as tired as he should after staying up all night. He still looks eighteen years old, even though he’s twenty-six. He’s short—my height in flats—and he’s blond with blue eyes. More than that, he’s funny. He doesn’t take anything seriously, which was why I figured letting him kiss me last Sunday didn’t matter.

“I guess we can’t fulfill your bet,” he says, putting his hands in his jean pockets and glancing left to right as we jaywalk across Calhoun Street.

Next to us is Marion Square—a block-size grass park that houses the Charleston Farmer’s Market every Saturday afternoon and sunbathing college girls throughout the spring. On this Monday, I see a few ladies wearing their Sunday best. I wonder if they’ve been drinking since yesterday, too.

“I was gonna do it, you know,” Max continues. “But that crazy chick wouldn’t let me.”

I glance at Max again, and I realize he’s smiling. That’s when I understand. His ambitious bargaining with the gum chewer was a front. He knew she was going to say no when we’d asked about waxing his balls. I grabbed his shoulder, “Oh, hell no.”

“What?”

“I’m sure someone in town waxes balls.”

“She said no.”

“That was one salon. I’m looking it up online at the bar,” I say, walking now with the purpose of a drunk chick.

Max grabs my wrist and spins me around. It’s moments like this when I remember he’s stronger than me, despite his stature. I felt as much when he pushed me against a brick wall to kiss me only a week before. “Nolan, she said no.”

“Well, I’m sure we can find someone who will say yes.”

“Damn it.”

“You agreed to the bet, dude.”

“I didn’t think you were serious.”

“I’m always serious,” I say, and his blue eyes crinkle around the edges. For the first time since I’ve known him, Max shuts the hell up.

* * *

A block later we’re back at my bar. It doesn’t have a sign, but there’s my damn dog, sitting with his tongue hanging out, tied to a parking meter out front. I didn’t do this to my dog; my business partner, James, did this to my dog, because he doesn’t like cutting limes with a dog at his feet.

“Guess James is here,” Max says.

Joby looks like he’s about to get laid when he sees me. His brown, doggy eyes shine, and he’s smiling. “Hey, dude,” I say, patting his head. He’s half Irish Wolfhound, so he has a huge skull. No one messes with my dog; I guess we have that in common.

I turn to head inside, and Joby barks when I open the door to my bar.

“Joby, no,” Max says.

Joby sits down, resuming his tongue-flapping posture. I hate that my dog listens to Max.

Inside, it’s dark. We don’t open until four, so the place is empty. There’s one TV tuned to ESPN, rehashing the well-deserved Steelers victory from the night before. My sandals stick to the decimated hardwood floor, and I almost fall forward after wading through what looks like a spilled Jager-bomb.

“Hey, grace,” announces James’ voice from the dark.

“Hey, man,” Max says, and he brushes past me. One of the bar stools does a shimmy when he walks by; Max isn’t walking straight anymore.

After dislodging my shoe from the sap-like spill, I walk toward the back of the bar—toward my office. “Have you morons slept?” James asks.

I pause and glance at the TV. It’s Hines Ward, flying through the air to catch a Ben Roethlisberger pass in the end zone. I almost drool, so I close my mouth.

“Hello? Nolan?” James says.

“No, we never slept.”

James is a big guy. I’ve seen him bounce men Max’s size like skipped rocks across King Street. Funny, because he looks cuddly. He has this tight, curly brown afro, and at the right angle, it glows like a halo under the Charleston streetlights.

“You get his balls waxed?” James says, nodding toward Max, who’s fiddling around with something behind the bar.

“I’m working on it,” I reply, and I stomp to my office.

James and I met as seniors at the College of Charleston. We smoked a lot of weed together and wallowed in our shared lack of career aspirations. It had been James’ idea to take over his dad’s bar on King Street. It had also been his idea to make me co-owner. I think he was in love with me once, but he never said anything so I wasn’t sure.

The fluorescent light is already on when I reach the office. It’s the size of a bathroom stall with 1970s wood paneling on the walls. The floor is as sticky as the rest of the place, and it smells like smoke. The only office-appropriate deco is the computer and telephone.

I click on the Yellow Pages website that I bookmarked for taxis and pizza delivery joints. I start typing “bikini wax” into the search box just as Max arrives in the doorway wearing silver shades and carrying two glasses of Red Bull. For some reason, I think, Never trust a man in aviators.

I take the iced energy drink without saying a word.

“My mouth tastes like Bigfoot’s ass right now,” Max says.

I stop typing, hands floating a half inch above the dusty keyboard. I look up at Max, and his tongue is moving inside his mouth like Joby’s when he’s trying to eat peanut butter. “Jesus,” I mutter, and I dial the first number that pops up on my screen.

I hold the receiver in my right hand and pick up my Red Bull as the phone rings. I take a sip, and it ain’t Red Bull. It’s Red Bull and vodka, and I’d say the ratio is about fifty-fifty. “Max!” I spit the concoction on my desk just as a high-pitched female voice says, “Hello, it’s a beautiful day at Stella Salon.”

“Hey,” I say, wiping booze from my chin. “Hey, I was wondering, do you wax balls?”

Max sounds like he sucked water into his lungs, and the high-pitched voice on the phone sounds like she’s the one choking on liquor. I hang up when she says no, but I’m ready with a follow-up phone number. I dial, and Max grabs my hand.

“Come on, I was kidding about the bet.”

“I wasn’t,” I reply, pulling my wrist out of his grasp, but he doesn’t let go. His hands are strong from years of spinning bottle caps off beer bottles.

When Max interviewed for a bartending job, he admitted he wasn’t a big guy. He explained he’d spent his life staying out of fights by being funny, and James and I agreed; we liked that trait. We had enough big dudes around; why not hire a funny guy? Plus, women liked Max, even if he was what I called a “short narcissist.” On top of that, I liked Max from the start, and well, that never happened.

“Nolan, come on, give it up,” he says, and he lets go of my hand as an answering machine beep echoes in my ear.

“Hey, my name is Nolan, and I need someone to wax my buddy’s balls. If your salon offers this service, please call me back,” I say, and I leave the bar number and repeat my name before hanging up and glaring at Max. I see myself reflected in his aviators, and I resemble a Charleston homeless person. My dingy brown hair is in a frizz-ball on one side, and there’s old mascara smeared under my blue, bloodshot eyes. “You made the bet, and the Steelers won. The guys will think you’re a wuss if you don’t go through with it.”

“They won’t think I’m a wuss when I tell them I kissed you last week.”

“Moron.” I yank Max into my office, slamming the door behind him. “You won’t say a damn word.”

“Of course I won’t,” Max says, looking like I kicked him in the nuts. “I was just messing around. Speaking of…” he says, and he puts his drink down long enough to kiss me again. I let it happen, and it’s not messy or drunk, even though we’re both messy and drunk.

I remember the time he found me a cab on my birthday because I was about to be sick at the bar. He ran a block down King Street and shoved some chick in platforms out of his way to do it. Another time, a man resembling an ex-basketball player grabbed my ass, and Max got the crap kicked out of himself trying to defend me.

He pulls away. “You taste like stale cigarettes,” he says, but he’s smiling like the Cheshire Cat if he’d eaten Alice.

“Whatever,” I say, tumbling back into my vintage desk chair with the broken front wheel and sagging left armrest. “Regardless of your kissing me, there’s still the note on the chalkboard.”

“What note on the chalkboard?”

“The one that says, ‘Ask Max about his balls.’”

“Bull.”

“You don’t believe me? Go see for yourself.”

He turns around, knocking me and my chair into the wall with the side of his knee. I hiss like a pissed off mammal, and Max goes running back into mid-day bar dark. I wait for it. Wait for it. Then, “Hey! Who wrote that?”

He’s back yelling at me. The aviators are in his right hand, his morning cocktail in his left, and Max is pissed. I’ve seen it before—the way his brow wrinkles in the middle and his mouth hangs half-open. He juts out his chin, curving his upper spine like an old woman with osteoporosis, and his posturing reminds me that the Steelers won the Super Bowl.

“Who wrote that?”

“James.”

“James? When?”

“Last night after the game.”

“So people saw that?”

“The whole bar saw that. Can you say…wuss?”

“Aw, hell,” Max says, and he puts his aviators back on. For a moment, his “Aw, hell” reminds me that Max is a Southern boy—something he tries to hide because he thinks the accent makes him sound dumb. Max never went to college, and I think he resents that I know this.

There’s rustling down the hall from my office, and sunlight reflects off Max’s sunglasses and into my face. “Jessica, you gotta help me,” Max says, and he disappears from view.

I take a sip of my Red Bull, vodka. I hear Max talking to our waitress, Jessica, and I take another sip. James appears in the door and says, “What’s going on with you two?”

“What?”

“Nolan,” James says, because James knows me better than anyone.

“Nothing’s going on. Just tired. And drunk.”

“Go home,” he says, and I think it’s funny that when James is sad, his afro seems to shrink.

“No. I have to find a salon. Max is not getting away with this shit.”

“I agree, but it can wait until you both get some sleep.”

I won’t be able to sleep.

“Nolan!” I hear Jessica yell my name. “Somebody’s messing with your dog!”

“It’s probably Byron,” I say and shove past James.

The smell of stale beer almost makes me vomit. The sight of Max hitting on Jessica makes it worse. My skinny bitch employee is fishing for her cell phone in her purse on the bar. Max leans next to her, and he’s doing his move where he acts interested and makes you laugh and it’s all just disgusting, isn’t it?

Outside the open front door, my dog, with jaws that could crush a teenager’s head, nuzzles against King Street’s token homeless celebrity, Byron. I walk past Jessica and Max and into the sunlight.

“Whoa,” I mutter as the sun hits me like a tack hammer between the eyes.

“Byron—” I can smell him. Weed, his normal musk, and I suspect he washes his makeshift dreads in tequila every morning.

“What up, girl?” he says, like we’re old friends when, in fact, he stole my dog a couple weeks before and didn’t return for two days.

“What the hell are you doing?” I say, and Max steps up behind me.

“Byron, dude, I told you to stay away from Nolan’s dog.”

“Chill brother, I was just talking to the old boy.”

“He’s not old. He’s two,” I say, not knowing why this ticks me off.

“Byron, just get the hell out of here, man,” Max says, pushing me out of the way like I’m a distressed madam in a western flick.

“Max, I can take care of this.”

“I’m just trying to help,” he says, and I try standing on my tiptoes to be taller.

“I don’t want your help,” I say, when what I mean is I don’t want to believe I’ve fallen in love with you, you stupid little prick. Don’t you realize, I like being alone? Don’t you understand I don’t date? Don’t you know I don’t put myself out there because men are jerks and I’ll just get hurt again, you stupid, short fool? Why the hell did you ruin my life?

Max ignores my assertions, both stated and imagined, and says, “Byron, get the hell away from her dog.”

Byron shrugs. “I get lonely is all,” he says. He walks off down the street, whistling a tune with dreadlocks snake-dancing down his back.

Max turns to me with his hands on his hips and aviators in full force.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Huh?” he asks, because I’ve never thanked him for anything.

“Nolan!” James is in the doorway. There are smudged fingerprints up and down the tinted glass door, and I think about Windex before James says, grinning, “The phone’s for you. Something about a salon?”

“Aw, hell,” Max says, diving for the portable phone in James’ pudgy hand.

It’s easy for me to shove Max in the shoulder and send him tumbling, feet-over-head, onto the pile of discarded cigarette butts outside the bar. Once the man is down, I claw at the phone in James’ hand and run past a confused Jessica, back to my office.

“Yes? Hello?”

“Hello, is this Nolan?” says a voice that is clearly not of this country.

“Yes, this is Nolan.”

“You want his balls waxed?”

I say, “Yes,” and somehow, I feel like this woman knows Max—like we have some shared intention to cause him pain.

“It costs sixty-dollar,” she says, and I can picture her. She’s probably five-foot-two. She has close-cropped black hair. She’s Asian. Has to be. She sounds too sweet to be American.

“Yes, that’s fine,” I say. “Can I get an appointment for today?”

“We have opening at…two?”

“Yes, perfect.” I get the directions, and the salon is in walking distance, albeit in the ghetto. I hang up the phone, and when I turn around, James and Max are both giving me the stink eye.

“Well?” James asks, and I think Max has stopped breathing.

“The appointment’s in a half hour.”

“James, a little help here?”

But James shakes his head, and for that moment, I think James hates Max. “Nope, a bet is a bet,” he says. “Where is this place?”

“Upper King. Off Huger.”

“Oh, yeah, I know that place. Owned by Philippine chicks.” He glances at Max.

“Don’t be a smart ass, dude. Nothing worse than a bitchy foreign chick, especially when she’s messin’ with your balls.”

* * *

Max is flat on his back on a worn leather chair that looks more like a recliner than something you’d see in a salon. The place doesn’t feel like a salon, but it does feel like a place providing cheap Happy Endings.

When we walked in, the lobby looked a lot like a dentist’s office, with faded off-white linoleum tile and uncomfortable brown chairs with metal armrests. Our fellow patrons were out of a mid-eighties horror flick, and the place smelled like the days when smoking wasn’t prohibited indoors. They didn’t flinch over our Steelers/Falcons jerseys.

And the chick with the wax doesn’t seem to mind that we reek of liquor.

Max lays there in his stupid Atlanta jersey; thankfully he left the aviators at my bar. His blond hair sticks up on one side, and he looks like the alcoholic, adult Dennis the Menace. He’s in his boxers, because the little Philippine chick asked him to take off his jeans. Now, she is standing by the counter near the door of this private room, and she’s stirring a tiny cauldron of wax with a tongue depressor.

“I need you to please remove your boxers,” she says, and Max glances up at me.

“Nolan!”

“A bet’s a bet, dude,” I say.

Max isn’t nervous to take off his boxers in front of me. He is nervous to have his balls waxed. So here we are: I’m fully clothed, tired, and drunk. Max is wearing nothing but his jersey, and I can’t help but look down as the Philippine chick sticks a towel between Max’s legs. I think to myself, “Amazing a guy so short is carrying THAT around.”

This is all old news to the wax chick, who’s no bigger than a junior high kid and wearing the pigtails to match. All of a sudden, as she reaches for the wax-soaked tongue depressor, Max looks up at me. “Nolan, hold my hand,” he says.

“What?”

“Hold my hand.”

“No.”

“Nolan, I need you right now. Please hold my hand.”

I sigh, but I reach out and clasp hands. He’s squeezing so hard, I think a finger might fall off, but I’m too busy watching her spread hot, orange wax on Max’s balls to care.

“Jesus,” he mutters, and when she puts the first piece of linen over that thin layer of wax, Max closes his eyes.

I watch as the Philippine chick unceremoniously tears the linen away from Max’s skin. I’m too entranced by the way the fabric dances over her skinny right shoulder to notice Max is whimpering.

I look down at him—my best friend, with sweat on his forehead and tears in his eyes—and I ask myself, where did this bet come from? We were watching the Super Bowl. The Steelers had been behind in the first quarter, and I’d said, “Hey. Max. Wanna make a bet?” And it had happened. But why this bet? Why waxing his balls?

As he reaches for my wrist with his other hand, the woman puts more wax on Max. I realize I’m enjoying his pain. I realize I’ve wanted something bad to happen to Max since he kissed me last week.

Before Max, I hadn’t been kissed in two years. I hadn’t dated, and I hadn’t flirted. I’d been content with my asexuality, and he’d screwed it up by making me like him, making me want to risk my stability on a relationship. And I couldn’t let that happen. Been there, done that, and there’s no time for it. It isn’t worth the pain.

So I’d made a bet. I’d won, and now, Max is paying. Maybe I’m a masochist. Maybe I’m obsessed with self-preservation. Or maybe I made the bet because I could never seriously date a man who would let me have him by the balls.

The Philippine chick rips off another strip, and by now, Max is biting his lower lip and staring at the buzzing overhead lights. He looks at me. “Never, ever bring this up again,” he says, and I don’t know if we’re talking about his bare nuts or the fact that I love the dumb bastard.

* * *

THE END.

I See Monsters

Fall in Charleston reminded me of a time I slept underground in a pinch—sticky, wet, and warm, like a sponge you should have thrown out a week ago. The sun had been coming up that morning months before, and I’d been nowhere near home. I’d been having too much fun with young fraternity blood. Time had slid away like the century mark I would hit in ten years. When the sky had turned pink along the edges, my high security apartment and onyx casket had been down by the harbor—three blocks from the College of Charleston. I had made do in a cemetery, digging into loose ground in a fresh grave. I’d survived the live burial; my black leather bomber jacket had not, and I’d stolen a new one the following night from a tourist who hadn’t known better than to walk the streets alone.

Of course, most humans didn’t know better. Charleston felt like a safe place. They didn’t want to believe otherwise. Residents heard about the shootings in North Charleston. They watched the news and saw tragedy strike in the Middle East, in Asia, and in far off Africa, but they didn’t believe it could exist in beautiful, historic Charleston. It was “too pretty” to be bad. The same had once been said of me. However, wide-sweeping generalizations are never true. There is no such thing as guaranteed safety in pretty places. There is no such thing as guaranteed safety with a pretty person, either. We could hurt you just as much as your neighborhood gang banger with gold caps on his teeth and bullet wound scars. I didn’t have any scars. I had been turned in the summer of 1920 at the age of nineteen, and back then, wealthy girls did not acquire scars. We acquired nothing at all, in fact, beyond suitors.

That particular evening, I headed up Church Street from Battery Park, where I spent many a night wandering and watching beneath the Angel Oaks and Spanish Moss. It was what I did—watch. It was why I’d been happy living alone for the past ninety years, traveling from city to city, as far away as Egypt to England, back to America and finally, on the coaxing of an old, old friend, I had returned to Charleston, where I had been made into a vampire all those years ago. That night, the weather was humid but cool. Not a breeze stirred the air, and the only sound was that of my heavy, black boots over curved cobblestones. A variety of floral odors enveloped me, but none so sweet as that of human blood, which I caught hints of through front doors and open windows of houses I passed. Flickering, gold light from the street lamps cast my slim shadow out in several directions, as if splitting me into several different but equally ghostly people. I ran my sharp fingernails against stucco siding and hummed a quiet tune I’d heard when my clock radio alarm had started playing at sunset in my light-tight apartment hours before.

I was headed to East Bay Street, where I would meet my old friend Donovan at a bar we frequented called The Griffon. The Griffon was an ideal location for vampires. It was dank and dark. The overhead lights at Griffon bled orange and cast our pale skin in a light that was half-living. It was easy to be anonymous there, partially because by eleven, the human patrons were too drunk to remember they’d met you in the first place. Anonymity was a necessary part of my life. It was why I never stayed in a city too long. It was why I never made human connections. It was why I was always alone, because if anyone got too close, they would begin to notice I never aged. I still looked nineteen, although I tried to dress the part of twenty-five, and no one had ever heard of humans who didn’t age. Because they didn’t exist.

I passed a tightly spaced row of plantation homes mid-way up Church Street. I shook off the familiarity, knowing I’d walked those streets before as a young mortal woman—knowing I’d walked them with my gentleman. But times had been different then. I had been different then. Gardens were still blooming to my right, so I stepped up onto the sidewalk for a better look. It was mid-October. Soon, the flowers would wilt and close. The leaves would dry and curl light brown on the edges. It would become “jacket weather,” and humans would put on coats and matching hats to walk the streets. I always wore a jacket—my black bomber—so that when I ran into people in bars, they wouldn’t turn and stare. So they would not turn and think to themselves, “My goodness, that stunning woman has no blood running through her veins. And my, isn’t she pale?” I lost myself in the gardens and wrought iron on Church Street and extended my hand down until my open palm hit each wrung in the fence as I walked past, humming my little song.

I heard the growl before I saw the dog, and I pulled my hand back from the fence. Dogs didn’t like vampires. I’d been tussled and bit by one before—a Wolfhound with gaping jaws that tore at my flesh and pulled skin loose. I had been healed within moments by my preternatural blood, but the inconvenience had been troubling. Never one to lose a fight, though, I took a step toward the fence and growled back, down into the face of a mid-size white Labrador. Its shoulders tensed around its skull, but it didn’t back down. It showed me fangs, so I returned the favor, until there was a voice, raining down from the second story balcony. “Caleb!” it said, commanding and masculine.

I ducked down against the fence, embarrassed to be seen fighting with a mortal’s animal. There was movement up there on that wooden balcony with the off-white banisters, and a light went on, illuminating the green grass and overwhelming early fall foliage. I glanced up as the dog—Caleb—scurried toward the voice. Someone was coming down the fire escape, hitched up to the side of the three-story home that was even older than me. That someone stepped into the spilled bit of light at the edge of the yard and kneeled down to put wide palms on the sides of Caleb’s face. “What is it, boy?” I could hear from where I stood.

I stepped forward, pushing my slim face between two rungs in the wrought iron fence because I knew this man. This man was Nathan, and I would recognize him for eternity. He had short, straight hair the color of caramel right before it melts. I couldn’t see his eyes in the early evening light, but I knew they were brown—a dark brown that my mother had never trusted. But how could she have known what he had intended? Nathan was taller than a man of his lacking grace should have been, carrying around his two-left-feet that gave him an oddly attractive tendency to curl his slim shoulders forward and walk with an awkward bounce in his step. Even with this awkwardness, he had a smile that he saved for only me—straight white teeth that would peek out over a half smirk on the right side of his mouth. That smile could have gotten me to say “Yes” to anything.

I leaned my chest against the wrought iron and took hold of the fence to my left and right. As if trying to pull myself through—just to touch Nathan for a moment—I pressed harder. Caleb looked back at my shadow and barked twice, and I closed my eyes because I knew Nathan was dead. Nathan had been dead for eighty years.

“Come on, boy,” said this strange man’s voice across the garden. “Let’s get you food.”

I opened my eyes, because I heard Nathan in his voice. In those few words, I could hear my Nathan. With my eyes open, I could see my Nathan. But my Nathan was dead, so who was this imposter? I hissed low enough so that only Caleb could hear the sound, and the dog ran back toward the fence at my feet. By the time the imposter arrived, putting a harsh hand on Caleb’s collar, I had slipped around the corner of the next plantation house over. It didn’t mean I could not smell the imposter. I smelled his blood, and I knew he was young—perhaps no more than my mortal age. He was the age I hunted as an immortal, before the blood had begun to sour with smoke and drink. He smelled fresh, as an expensive steak mid-rare would smell to a human. This imposter was healthy and vibrant, and he had no right to look and move like Nathan. He had no right to exist in the city of my birth and mortal death. And at the same time, how I wanted to touch his skin. As I stood, hiding in the darkness, I could hear the imposter’s heart. I could feel the warmth of him like heat from an open oven. I wanted that warmth in my mouth, but I put a hand to my lips when I realized—what if the imposter tasted like Nathan, as well?

“Caleb, come on,” I heard him say, not three feet from me. His voice wasn’t commanding anymore. There was trepidation—hesitation, as if he feared turning his back on the dark to face into the light from his balcony. As if he could smell me, too, but what did I smell like? Dirty water and moss? Rotting flesh? Death?

I knew the imposter had left, because I no longer felt his heat. I no longer heard his heart. I stepped away from the cold, antique siding and reached for the wrought iron once again. I pulled myself up on my toes and took a deep breath, as if scent could satiate a thirst for blood. I could have killed him right there, but I hadn’t been prepared. His resemblance to Nathan had thrown me off, I told myself. I would come back the following night and kill the imposter. Nathan was long dead, and even a resemblance was no longer allowed to walk the earth.

* * *
As soon as I awoke the next evening, I dressed and left my apartment on the Battery. The thrill of the hunt had taken full control, so much that I almost forgot to lock my incriminating abode. I doubted the neighbors liked the idea of a vampire next door, and the casket in the bedroom would give me away. After locking up and checking it twice, I clunked loudly in heavy black boots down the three stories to the street. The night was familiar, like so many nights before when I was prepared to feed. The normal thrill was increased by the thought of the Nathan imposter. How dare he exist? How dare he live in the city of my childhood as if nothing had ever happened? As if Nathan had never taken that childhood away.

I knew the back allies of Charleston, much as humans remember locations in dreams. Being back in the French Quarter still seemed strange at times, when I looked around with undead eyes on corners and lampposts I had known as a teenager. Too old to reminisce, I continued up Church Street. I touched the cold stucco of plantation houses, much as I had the evening prior. I snuck around corners, peeking into windows uninvited. Families roamed full foyers, and mothers made dinners in quiet kitchens. I walked on until I felt the chill of wrought iron between my fingers.

The light from the balcony was turned off, but I could make out the soon to be dead leaves and flowers suffocating the back yard. No dog barked, so I assumed the odious creature known as Caleb was inside. Was the imposter inside, too? I looked toward the second floor, and warm light fell from unshielded windowpanes. With no hesitation, I climbed the wrought iron fence. Silent as the mortal grave, I made my way toward the back of the imposter’s home, pulling the leather collar of my jacket up around my pale cheeks. I paused long enough to listen, and even from a floor below, I heard a heart beating upstairs.

To one side of the house was the rusty fire escape. On the opposite end was a tree—an ancient, spindly creature with barely a leaf to its name. However, I could see the glow of lamplight on the dry bark, directly across from the second story of the imposter’s home. I could also make out a comfortable seat.

It was not difficult for me to put myself in that comfortable seat. No, I could not read minds. I could not “glamour” people into aligning to my will. But I could move. I could move fast, and my eldest brother had taught me tree-climbing as a small child in the days of innocent weekends at Beaufort. When I arrived in my tree seat, I felt like a spectator at the Roman Coliseum, waiting for the Christians to be fed to lions. There, only five feet from me, stood the imposter in his kitchen—there was my long dead Nathan, stirring steaming vegetables in a silver skillet.

And it was still Nathan. The night light had not played tricks the evening before. The imposter had the same dark hair and eyes. He had the same slim shoulders and long legs. He had the same wide palms and lengthy fingers. He was a disturbance to my immortal life—a reminder of things past. He was no longer merely an imposter; he was my imposter, and therefore he was mine to do with as I saw fit. I saw fit to tear into his throat above the Adam’s apple and feel his warm blood between my clenched fists.

Then, there was the white Labrador, Caleb, rushing to the imposter’s side. I wondered if Caleb could sense me, even from my perch in the Angel Oak. When I stared at the dog, the dog barked, and I imagined yes, he could feel me out in the tree. He could sense something bad by his master’s home, and he would defend that home to his detriment. It was then I decided I would have to kill the dog, because Caleb would never let me get close enough to the imposter to cause harm. And harm I would.

I watched the imposter set a spatula down on the clean countertop and turn down the heat beneath the wilted stir fry. The imposter wiped his hands on a nearby towel, pet Caleb on the nose, and disappeared further into the house with the dog in toe. I stooped to see into the darkened hallway leading away from the stove, but it was not long before another light came on to the right of the lit kitchen window. Like a tennis fan, my head ping-ponged to the right, and I was looking into the imposter’s bedroom. It was messy. Clothes covered the end of an unmade bed. A couple jackets and a pair of pants hung over the back of a battered, wooden desk chair in front of an equally battered wooden desk. Books and loose leaf paper scattered across the floor like rose petals at a wedding, and yet in the midst of it all, a spotless, expensive computer sat like a beacon of hope on an antique dresser against the back wall. The imposter scooped the laptop into able hands and leaned across the edge of his bed, belly-first.

He began to type, and my conjectures of the imposter’s age proved correct with no inquiry. The imposter had to be in college. I based this on the piles of clothes, the cheap furniture, and the abundance of reading material. No man outside of college kept so many books piled in his bedroom. No man outside of college had loose leaf strewn about. No man outside of college could appear so carefree, comfortable, and unaware of evil outside his door. However, perhaps the imposter’s age would be of assistance that night. Perhaps, the imposter would receive a late night call—a summons to an afterhours soiree—and perhaps, I would taste his blood before the morning light. I had to face it. Facts were facts, and the fact was, I could not enter the imposter’s home uninvited.

The imposter and I were living in the time of movies like Twilight and television programs like True Blood. Vampires were all the rage in that era. People wanted to dress like vampires. People wanted to pretend to drink blood and sleep all day, party all night. People found it dangerous and sexy, and it made my kind sick to the point of truly coming out of the closet, as they say. It made us want to finally and honestly show ourselves for the monsters and murderers we really were and see if the goth kids could deal with the reality of our horror. It was better than the slop they were serving the masses, after all.

Twilight was one thing. Twilight was a blatant fabrication. It spoke of so-called “vegetarians”—vampires who only hunted animals and left humans alone. Vampires who glittered in the sunlight. Vampires who had love and compassion. Hogwash. It made people feel safe about the whole thing, as if maybe society could accept vampires with open arms. And society could give its best effort, but we knew once that happened, we would take those open arms, rip them off, and sip from the veins like barbarians with their goblets of ale. Fabrication. False. A lie.

True Blood was different, because True Blood was the creation of one of our own. When the Sookie Stackhouse books had hit shelves, the vampire community had been in uproar. How dare a fellow immortal tell the mortals about us? How dare a fellow immortal give away our secrets? But of course our uproar had been superfluous. No one believed the books, because vampires did not exist. They were attractive on screen. The idea of living forever was pleasant enough, but none of it was true. None of it was possible. At least, that was what the mortals said. The books received good enough reviews, but it wasn’t until the TV series True Blood that our fellow immortal author went underground, passing on the penname of Charlaine Harris to a mortal who could do book signings during the day without bursting into flames.

But because of this reckless immortal, True Blood had become a revelation—a show about what would happen if vampires admitted to their existence and assimilated into the mortal coil. The goth movement had reawakened, and every Sunday, throngs of young adults and lonely housewives would crowd around their televisions to see how Sookie and Vampire Bill would get out of another relationship crisis. It wasn’t that I hated True Blood. I had watched it, and I found it to be entertaining. Good actors. Good dialogue. A pleasant romp through the fields of the walking dead.

What concerned me about True Blood was its factuality. Thanks to my damned immortal compatriot, our secrets were on the streets. For instance, as I mentioned, we cannot enter a mortal’s home uninvited. When we cry, we cry thick streams of crimson blood. We will burst into flames in the sunlight, and our blood will bring a half-dead Sookie back to life. Secrets revealed. Secrets that had been secret for centuries, being mass ingested by clueless youth who think vampires are oh so sexy.

Of course, on the flip side, putting our secrets out there made it much harder to believe they were true. Seeing vampires on TV made it much harder to believe there were vampires in life. I doubted the imposter ever thought about death. I doubted he had ever considered his end to come at the hands of an immortal. I watched him, from my perch, as he pushed himself up from his bed. He grabbed a navy blue sweatshirt from under his pillow and pulled it over his head, messing up his hair with one hand as he returned to the kitchen. I watched him grab a plate from the cupboard above his sink and toss some rice and vegetables in a heaping pile on the platter. Using his fingers, he scooped a bite into his mouth. Caleb watched from his side, waiting for a stray piece of broccoli or carrot.

No, the imposter was clueless. The imposter was just like the rest of them—living under the delusion that they were safe. That monsters were trapped behind TV screens, instead of hanging from tree limbs outside kitchen windows.

* * *
I could feel the leftover heat from the day’s sun on the floorboards as I sat on the imposter’s porch the following night. In the darkness, I leaned back, brave enough to sit at the base of his front door. Somehow I knew he would not soon leave his abode, as if I knew the imposter as I had once known Nathan. So there I sat, comfortable, wishing the imposter smoked cigarettes or some other silly human habit that required contact with the outdoors. Instead, the imposter lingered inside, typing on his precious laptop in his living room.

By that night—night three—Caleb knew me well. I could sense the animal in the front foyer, behind my back, as much as I could sense the imposter’s heart, beating in a slow bass drum ten feet from my touch. Caleb stood by the door, staring at nothing but hardwood, knowing something terrible was inches away. And harmless, because I could not enter the imposter’s home. I could not enter without an invite, and Caleb would give me away before those words could be uttered. “Come in,” was all I needed, but I knew Caleb’s terrible bark would shake the imposter. The imposter trusted Caleb, and despite my mysterious black hair and attractive dark eyes, the imposter had no reason to trust me. So there I lingered, sitting on a porch warmed by light I would never see. Light I would never see without severe repercussions, at least.

Music played inside. I played with the frayed edge of my black jeans and listened to clear, clean guitar strings and a soft, quiet male voice. Was that violin lofting above the empty spots in the guitar chords? Was that, perhaps, Ryan Adams? I leaned my head back against the front door and closed my eyes. I suspected I knew the song, but it was difficult with a wall between us. I blocked out the sounds of cars on East Bay. I blocked out the far off noise of ocean waves breaking onto the rocks of Charleston harbor. I even blocked out the imposter’s blood, and I could hear it. Yes, Ryan Adams—the calm, quiet sound of Love Is Hell. I would be certain when…yes, the next song, which sounded mysteriously like a Janis Joplin tune: “English Girls Approximately.” I smiled, despite my hunger, because at least the imposter had good taste. I smiled again, because I imagined the imposter did have good taste. In the two occasions when I had seen him eat, there had been no meat—solely vegetables. There was no fast food restaurant garbage in the imposter’s home, and as I mentioned, it was a shame he didn’t even smoke. How easy it would have been if the man had just come outside for a cigarette once in awhile.

As I sat and enjoyed the sound of Ryan Adams, seconded only by the imposter’s healthy heartbeat, my Zen was interrupted by the abrasive sound of a cellular telephone. I sighed and rolled my eyes to the heavens. How I hated modern technology. The horrible devastation of social media. Sites like Facebook and the god-awful Twitter. The world kept getting smaller, and if the world continued getting smaller, how would we hide? How would vampires exist in safe, dusty corners, when photograph “tagging” had become a drunken modern equivalent to Salem’s witch trials? How long would it be before we, too, were “tagged,” but we would be “tagged” as “random undead chick at the bar” or “immortal I kissed last night.” Awful.

Ryan Adams went silent, and the imposter’s voice filled the unfortunate emptiness. “Hey,” said the imposter’s voice. “How is she?” He sounded panicked, and it made me lean away from the front door, as if his panic was a poison that could invade my system like an outdoor allergen.

There was a long pause—silent, beyond the incessant breathing of the imposter’s dog—and then, “Well, what the hell do you want me to do about it? I’m not up there.”

Not yet, but you’ll see the pearly gates soon enough.

“I can’t just leave school, Susan.”

Yes, a college student.

“They don’t know that. They haven’t—”

A pause that felt long as immortality.

“They don’t know if she’s going to die.”

I wondered who he spoke of—who he was speaking to. The imposter seemed too young to have death on the brain.

“Tell me what you want me to do.”

Then, there he was. No, he did not sneak out for a late night smoke. He did not stick his head out the front window. Instead, he shifted Caleb away from the front door. The imposter sat down, and we were back to back, separated by no more than a tired piece of wood. His heat roared through my spine. I lost my breath, and my head rolled back and leaned against him. It would have been no more intimate if we’d been touching palms.

Then: “Fuck you,” he said.

The animosity drew me away. I pushed forward and hugged my knees against my cold chest. For the first time in my many hunts, I felt disturbed. And it had taken but two words from the Nathan imposter to do so.

“Yeah,” he said, and I wouldn’t have heard it if I had been mortal.

Another long pause stretched into my existence of timelessness.

Then, the imposter was back, and the animosity was gone. The animosity was replaced by a tired love that could be explained as nothing less than futile fondness for a body and soul on the brim of extermination. “Hey, Mom,” he said. “It’s Joshua.”

There was a name for the imposter and his vegetables and his dog. Joshua.

“Caleb’s good,” he said, and he chuckled. “How are you feeling?”

Something told me she was not feeling well.

“Good? That’s great. Susan says they might let you out. Right?”

Desperate. Wasted.

“I wish I was there.”

A lie.

“School’s perfect. Classes are picking up. I have exams this week.”

I wished I could tell him not to worry.

“I’ll see you soon, though.” He choked on the words. “Yeah, no, I’ll come home right after. I’ll be with you soon. Okay? So just hang in there, and, um, I’ll be back on, um, Saturday.”

The sudden sound of laughter made me lean back again, hoping to suck some warmth.

“That’s what Susan told me. She said your doctor’s really cute. Just don’t harass him too much, okay, Mom?”

I smiled because the imposer—Joshua—felt warm again.

“I love you, too. I miss you.”

I missed a lot of people.

“Okay. Well, I’ll call you in the morning.”

Unless you step outside to give Caleb a break.

“I don’t need to talk to Susan. It’s okay. I just want you to know, I love you so much.”

Love. Just another four-letter word.

“Bye, Mom,” he said, and I heard the discreet beep of an off button.

Joshua leaned back against me again. The hardwood door felt soft beneath his warmth and his pain. I’d had a family once, too. Parents. Grandparents. A big brother who protected me from monsters. We had been well-off, living in the Charleston French Quarter with nary a care on earth. My biggest fear had been singlehood at twenty, so when I had met Nathan at nineteen, it had seemed my fears had been misplaced. My father had approved of a boy so wealthy and respected. My brother had gone hunting with Nathan, and even he had felt something akin to friendship. Only my mother had known better. Only my mother had seen the darkness in Nathan, and I had only realized the truth too late, when the blood had been on his hands.

The levels of human goodness were limitless, as were the levels of human indecency. I remembered, as a youth, thinking I could read people—thinking I could look at a man and know who he was and what he wanted. It had seemed so simple, and I had prided myself on my judgment of character. It was only long after Nathan that I’d realized my judgments had always been off. I had assumed the best in people, and there was no safety or sensibility in doing so. My assumptions had cost me my mortality. My assumptions had tossed me into immortality, where I lingered alone. I had friends. I had Donovan, who I enjoyed the presence of when in the vicinity of the deep American south. I had a few dear companions in Italy and France. Yet, they were merely friends. There would never again be love for me. Love lowered boundaries. Love cast aside doubt. Love was not blind; love was blinding.

When I heard him leave the living room and move to the bedroom, I left my porch. I lingered at a college fraternity party until well after hours. With my feminine wiles, I baited two sophomores. I took them back to my place, certain no one had watched us leave. I gave them liquor and weed, until they could barely move. We took our clothes off, and I fed on them naked, knowing I murdered them. Just like I murdered my Nathan.

* * *
By the following night, the imposter was my addiction. I rolled free from the casket and stretched my cold hands to the sky, knowing that tonight might be the night—the night when I would kill him and put him out of the misery of exams and a dying mother. Our unknown intimacy was comforting in the way a pleasant portrait was comforting. You never touched it, but you knew it was there, hanging above your mantle for only you to admire. You also knew that if you wanted, you could tear the masterpiece down and toss it into a fireplace, because it was your masterpiece. This was how I felt about Joshua. He was my masterpiece of frail humanity, and tearing him down would eventually be the best part of my admiration.

When I arrived in his back yard, the balcony spotlight focused down into the garden below. I snuck around to the front of the house to deter detection, and my bomber jacket got caught on the head of a marble cherub by the front doorstep. I pulled the black leather free and pet the pleasant statue on the head, as if to say, “You have no place here, my friend.” My palms felt the cold, dead edge of the Angel Oak on the side of the house, and as I began to climb, I heard a sound utterly unfamiliar at the Church Street address. I heard the sound of laughter, but it was not from the pleasant baritone throat of Joshua. It was a female voice, and the sound made me climb the withering tree with irritable fascination.

From my view straight into the kitchen, I realized she had just arrived. The front door was still cracked, and the young woman had a camel coat on her shoulders. To my dismay, I saw Joshua had only recently arrived, as well. He wore a black dress coat over a black dress shirt with jeans, and there were brown paper bags on the counter to his back. If I had woken but fifteen minutes earlier, I thought, I may have caught him outside. In hindsight, the woman would have arrived in the midst of my enjoyment. She would have ruined my moment with Joshua, and that made my missed opportunity less of a regret—more of a relief.

“Hey,” said this unwelcome female, and the volume of her voice made me notice his kitchen window was cracked. I imagined, as a college gentleman, Joshua was trying to lessen the smell of old beer and perhaps stale pizza. I had nothing to base this on. I had never seen Joshua open a beer or eat a pizza. However, my mind was developing a personality for the young man I knew but through a pane of glass.

“Hey,” he said, and his voice sounded different. The night before, I had become familiar with the voice of the lonely imposter Joshua. On that night, I did not need to become familiar—I was already familiar with that voice. It was the voice of my Nathan, and I assumed the difference in lilt and delivery was due to none other than the female in his presence. “You brought a bottle.”

“Yeah. I know what you like,” she said, holding up a paper bag.

“Thank you.” Slowly, he leaned in and kissed her. It was a hesitant motion, for both of them, as if this was an intimate gesture once practiced but lost over distances of time.

She pulled away first, handing him the bottle of wine like a piece of garlic or a cross. “How are you doing?”

“I’m happy you’re here.”

“I know. Me, too,” she said, and I realized she was beautiful. This girl was not beautiful in the way magazines told you women were beautiful. She was not skinny. She was not blond. She was soft and curvy with dark red hair, pulled up into an artful bun on the back of her head. She wore heavy eye makeup that suited her skin and pale lips that Joshua had wanted to kiss. She was older than Joshua but by only a few years; I could tell in the way she carried herself around this man who would have been considered a heartthrob in teen circles. “Wine?”

“Yes.” He smiled at her, and I realized he had just appraised her in the same silent way I had from my tree. “Come in. I just got back from shopping, so nothing is cooking yet.” He laughed, and I watched her trepidation turn into admiration.

“Same old Josh,” she said. She took the bottle back. “I’ll open the wine. You get the food going. I miss your cooking.”

As Joshua took off his suit coat and the woman threw her camel jacket onto furniture in a living room I could not see, I saw the white blur of Caleb overtake this young woman’s legs.

“Caleb!” she shouted, reaching down to rub the bothersome mutt on the head. “He’s so big!” She laughed, and I was not sure who loved her more—Joshua or the dog. The woman stood up and walked past a busy Joshua in the kitchen. He was pulling mounds of colorful vegetables, pasta, and freshly prepared tofu from the plethora of Whole Foods bags on his counter. The woman reached around him and opened a drawer, pulling a corkscrew from the depths of silver and black utensils. So she knew her way around his home.

“Tell me stories,” she said, freeing a bottle of red wine from its paper sack.

“We need music first.” He turned away from my window to look at her, and even from behind, the look of him was gentle. The look of him was harmless. The look of him was happy.

“Fine. Jesus.” She rolled her eyes and disappeared near her coat. But I saw him smile when she wasn’t looking, down into a colander overflowing with basil, onion, and red pepper. I watched his hands move. I watched the tap water flow over his skin and onto the vegetables in the sink. He dried his hands on a towel and thoughtlessly threw the fabric over his shoulder, then shook the excess hydration from the veggies. By the time he moved to open the bottle of wine for his female companion, there was music from the living room. She stepped back into my view and put her hands on her hips. “Well?”

“Little bit of Ray-Ray. Nice,” he said.

Ray Lamontagne, a young vocalist who sounded as if he’d spent thirty years smoking cigars with a jazz band in New Orleans. He was akin to Ryan Adams, so I already had an idea of what Joshua’s music collection looked like—acoustic guitar-heavy blues with a sad, soft touch that only previous heartbreak could inspire. The song she’d chosen seemed misplaced, almost too sentimental for the unexplained tension in her shoulders: “Let It Be Me.”

“Hey, come here, you have something…” Joshua said over the music, pointing at her face.

“What?” She stepped forward, and he again tasted her mouth. She pulled away much faster this time.

“Josh. You said dinner.”

“I know.” He turned back to the tofu. “I’m making dinner.”

“Yeah.” And she watched him like she knew what he was thinking. Like she knew his bedroom was covered in old laundry. Like she knew his mother was dying. Like she knew him intimately, or at least had before they had somehow gone wrong. “Wine?”

“Over there. You mind pouring me a glass?”

“Of course not. You are cooking me dinner.” She smiled, and she glowed in an immaculately damaged light. The woman poured two glasses, setting one to the right of the colander. She took a step back, dodging the dog that hovered beneath her dress. She leaned against the windowsill facing the porch. “So do I have to ask?”

“About what?”

“Josh.”

He looked back at her, and I wished I could see his eyes.

“Your mom’s dying, isn’t she?”

He looked down at the vegetables and slowly cut through the bare basil leaves. “Yeah.”

“Is that why I’m here?”

“No. That’s not why you’re here.”

“Okay. Then, why am I here?”

“Look. Jen.” He put the knife down and turned toward her. “You’re here because I want you here. Not for sex. I just—you always make things better. And today I need things to be better. So I don’t want to talk about my mom. Or my fucking sister. I want to pretend things are okay. If only for…a bottle of wine.” He chuckled and looked down at the floor. “Is that okay?”

“Yeah.” Jen nodded. “Just don’t wreck me.”

“Only in the bedroom.”

She laughed. “Cut your vegetables, ass. I can’t believe you’re still on this vegetarian kick.”

“If I gave up you, I can give up meat.” He turned around, and even from my tree, I knew the tension had lessened. Something in this odd human honesty had put them both at ease.

In the tree, my body needed to move. I went from a half slouch to sitting in a cozy nook over a thick tree limb with my spine against the tree trunk. I took a moment to smell the air, tinged with the sweet scent of mortal blood. I could smell the sea, even from a block away. I could hear a party a block down. I could feel the harsh tree bark against my lower back, beneath my jacket, and the dry edges of leaves crushed beneath my boots. But in the depths of all this, there was really only him—Joshua—as he poured oil into a skillet and tossed the crimson peppers in first.

I watched Jen sip red wine. Joshua became more animated after his second glass, and the woman appeared to lose the tension in her upper back and shoulders. On many occasions, she made inane kissing noises at Caleb, and Joshua would watch her with idiot fascination. What was that feeling? I’d felt it once, had I not? Had I not lost my soul over similar fascination? So why could I do nothing, trapped in my tree, to recall even an inkling of that emotion—the emotion of terrible, painful, wonderful love?

Steam billowed up from the pot of boiling water on the stove as Joshua poured pasta inside. I had no concept of time. I felt I had been watching them for moments and for hours, all at once. They watched the pasta boil and laughed together. Joshua opened a second bottle of wine from his fridge and stirred a bubbling sauté with a battered wooden spoon. The basil reminded me of Italy; the tofu, of San Francisco.

The more time passed, the closer they came. Jen tried to sneak a sprig of greenery from the steaming stove, and Joshua grabbed her wrist and pulled her back against his chest. The two of them faced the stove, wrapped in an embrace, and the woman leaned her head back on his shoulder. He kissed the side of her neck, and it all looked so safe and uncomplicated.

Once they filled their plates, they disappeared from me into the living room. I could have found a way to follow, but I did not want to see them. It was not seeing them; it was seeing them happy. I lingered alone in my tree—alone, as always. But Ray Lamontagne sang to me. He told me he still cared for me.

When Jen returned with a half-empty plate, things were different. She threw the plate into the sink, and I heard glass break. Joshua was behind her, empty handed but with open arms.

“I can’t do this again,” she said, but even the neighbors could have heard.

“Why not? Why?”

“Because it’ll be the same shit, different day, Josh!” Her back was to me, but I could read her expression on Joshua’s face. “We’ll sleep together, and it’ll be great, and I’ll wake up tomorrow and be crazy about you all over again. And then I’ll realize that you will never be able to love me as much as I love you. And I will be ruined. Again.” She moved past him to get her coat, and he grabbed her upper arm.

“Please, just stay.”

She pulled away from him, and I was surprised flesh did not tear. “No. No.” She shook her head and pulled fabric over her bare arms. “No. I love you, but I can’t.” She shoved past him and into the night air. Watching her run across the garden and out the back gate, I smelled salt, and I knew she was crying.

Joshua stood by the open front door. Caleb stared up at his master as if to say, “Why did she leave? What did you do? I love her.”

Joshua closed the front door. Without looking into the kitchen—covered in dishes and leftover pasta—he turned off the light. Moments later, light erupted from his bedroom. I shifted in my tree and practically hung from a branch to look inside.

He took off his clothes. He did not expend energy on buttons. He pulled the black dress shirt over his head and crumpled the fabric into a ball in his hands. He stared at it, as if the shirt had done something deserving punishment. Then, he threw the shirt amidst the laundry covering his bedroom floor. Wearing nothing but jeans, he sat down on the edge of his bed, leaned his elbows on his knees, and buried his head in his hands. Motionless.

Joshua was not the boy I had initially suspected. His bare upper torso had nothing boy about it. Joshua was a full-grown adult. Perhaps he was a student at College of Charleston, but he was a graduate student. That first night, I had placed him near the age of my mortal turning—nineteen, perhaps twenty. I had been mistaken. What nineteen-year-old man cooks dinner for the woman he loves? And what nineteen-year-old man knows himself well enough to know he is no good for the woman he loves? No, Joshua was at least twenty-three, maybe even twenty-five. There was no baby fat on his stomach, no acne on his face. His chest was full and developed. His stooped shoulders were stooped because of his height—not because of some not-yet-grown-into youthful confidence. And Jen. The conversations I had been privy to were not of a youthful nature. Those were conversations between adults who had been there, seen that, in the past and who had no time for it anymore.

He lifted his head from his hands and stood up. By then, Caleb was sitting on the floor near the desk, wondering what was wrong with his master. I was an afterthought, and yet, the animal knew. The creature knew I was in my tree, and I sensed it in the tense way those black eyes would momentarily glance outside and twitch around the edges.

Joshua took off his jeans. I had to duck behind the tree trunk and claw into the bark when he moved to the bedroom window and looked up into the black of night sky. Light lit his body from behind, and I wondered if he resembled Nathan in this state of undress, as well. I had never had intercourse as a mortal; I had never seen Nathan without formal attire. I had been nineteen and unmarried in the early 1920s; it would have been a scandal in Charleston high society. It meant I had only had sex long after my mortal life, and that had only been with other vampires. I had never thought to have sex with a human. I suspected it would give me away. The power to toss a full-grown mortal man would not go overlooked in the darkness of the boudoir. I would have explaining to do. I would have to kill said mortal, and it just seemed like too much work, when it was just as simple to kill a homeless person on the street and be just as satisfied.

It was something else—not just the suspicion. I was afraid of the warmth. The warmth of human blood was one thing, because when I felt that warmth, I knew the warmth would soon be absent. The mortal would soon be dead. The same goes for touching human skin, which I often craved as much as my next meal. There, too, though—if I was close enough to touch a mortal man’s chest or balmy neck, I was close to killing him. The warmth would again be gone. Outside of these circumstances, I feared warmth. It was why I had never slept with a mortal. I feared the warmth would awaken some part of me that had long been dead—the part of me that mourned the loss of my mortal life and despised that of an immortal. I would recall the touch of my mother when she used to braid my long, black hair. I would recall my father and the nights I would fall asleep in his lap as he read long segments of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Though I hated myself for it, I feared I would even miss the remembered heat of Nathan when he had once helped me off a horse with the touch of his hand.

So why did I not fear Joshua? He stood but four feet from my hand. I felt the heat from his bare skin like the sweltering weather I recalled from long gone summer days. Yet, I did not fear his warmth. Instead, I wanted to wrap myself in it and never wake up. He turned away from the window. He did not bother to clean the kitchen or even clean himself. He turned off the bedroom light, and I listened as the bed shifted beneath his weight. Through the darkness, I could make sense of his outline. I could see him roll onto his side, facing my tree. With an open palm, he reached for a pillow and shoved the side of his head into white, down depths. He pulled another pillow to him and wrapped long arms at each pillow end. There was an audible sigh, and I jumped from my tree onto the edge of his windowsill. My boots landed silently on thick, antique wood, and my long fingers latched onto the glass like suction cups. I wanted to be in his bed.

I fell when Caleb appeared below me, barking as if to say, “I know what you are. You will not hurt Joshua. I won’t let you.” I landed in the bushes below, and I brushed the leaves free of my clothing just as I heard Joshua yell, “Caleb!”

I made my way through the front yard and entered East Bay Street. I glanced over my shoulder, and I felt Joshua standing in his window again. He was looking in my direction, but there was no way for him to tell I had come from his yard. I could have been walking up East Bay, all the way from the Battery. There was just no way to tell.

So why, even as I continued up the block, crossing Broad, could I still feel a singular emotion from the house back on Church? Why could I still tell that Joshua had been momentarily afraid of something in the night, and that perhaps, the something had been me?

* * *
That day, I had a dream. It was not really a dream, because it had happened before—in a far off time, when living blood had still coursed through my veins. It was the day Nathan was set to join my family for a feast at our plantation. My mother suspected Nathan planned to propose, and she played with her crucifix as I set my hair in braids and curled the braids into buns on the back of my head. I remember thinking how out of style I looked. All the other girls had bobs, and yet, my mother insisted I keep my hair long. She said bobs were sinful—the sinful signature of a morally decrepit generation. Since Nathan seemed to like my hair long, I never fought her.

I remember: “Will you say yes?”

“Mother, he has never mentioned marriage before.”

“He wants you, Angela. He won’t wait much longer. There’s something wrong with him. Something dark. He’s up to something. I don’t approve.”

“I know, Mother.” I did not see darkness in Nathan. No one did, except for my hyper-religious middle-aged mother. In Nathan, I saw a tall, handsome, well-off gentleman, who had never been anything but kind. What made me trust him the most was that my father loved Nathan. If my father approved, I could disregard my mother’s warnings with a clear conscience.

A bell rang downstairs, and it took my breath away.

“God save us all,” my mother said, crossing her thin, pale chest.

“Oh, Mother,” I said, but I was already heading down the hall and toward the first story.

“There’s my beautiful girl,” I heard, and there stood my father in his favorite brown three-piece suit, unconsciously pulling on the edges of his mustache out of time-tested habit. When I reached his side, he kissed me on the side of the head. “I’m so proud of you,” he said, and I blushed. My father often fed his children unnecessary compliments, but I had never gotten used to the attention. “You ready?”

“Yes.” I was nervous. Honestly, my mother was not the only person who suspected Nathan would soon propose.

My father opened the front door, and Nathan stood beneath the kerosene porch lamp. The night was black behind him, and the Charleston streets were dark at his back. I looked at Nathan. I looked at my father to see his reaction, but he did not see it. Was I even seeing it? I looked back at my Nathan and realized my mother was right. He was up to something. He was dark. The brown eyes that usually warmed me caused a chill. The charming smirk on his lips was no longer playful but sinister. His skin was pale, tinged a sickly blue. And the way he stood, not as a human would, but like a black angel, wings hidden beneath his suit coat—as if Nathan was floating inches above the earth.

“Angela,” he said, and I dared not invite him in.

“Nathan, my boy! Come in, come in,” my father announced, and Nathan never took his eyes off me. He stepped across the threshold of my family home. Within an hour, my family was dead, and I was a vampire.

None of this came as shocking, even as I started awake in my casket with an empty pain where a living heart would have been. The shock came when I realized I was not sure if Nathan had been the one in my dream. Had the man in my dream actually been Joshua? Could I tell them apart anymore? I awoke as the sun set and ran cold water over my skin, trying to make sense of what I had seen. Nathan—my Nathan—had taken my family from me. So why did I feel like Joshua was taking something from me, too?

I had never spent this much time on the hunt. I had never given a mortal this much of my time. I knew it was because of the Nathan resemblance. I knew any relics of my family’s killer had to be erased, and as I dressed and left my apartment, I told myself that was all it was—this strange fixation with a damned mortal, who would be dead in sixty years with or without my help. I did not care for Joshua. I had no feeling for his dying mother or his ruined Jen. He was merely the imposter, and he had to be killed.

So why, as I climbed the wrought iron fence in his dark back garden, did I abruptly feel as though I had been hit in the chest? A choke escaped my parted lips, and I closed my eyes as I bent forward and wrapped myself in an embrace. I could feel his pain, and his mortal despair took away my capacity to move. I tried to focus on the grass. I looked down at the ferns and moss along the edges of the flowerbeds, and I regained something of my cold composure. I could at least return to standing straight, which I did, as I looked up towards the second story. Light came from the living room; the rest of the house was dark. My hands shook, and I could not bring myself to climb my tree. Instead, I took the fire escape. I ducked beneath the lit living room window—too close—and moved to the kitchen, where I could see into the living room without giving my presence away.

I once again closed my eyes against his despair before looking inside, cheek and palm touching glass. “No,” I whispered when I saw Joshua.

He sat in the middle of his couch. Caleb was at his feet, heavy head rested on crossed white paws, but Joshua did not seem to see the dog anymore. Joshua was staring with unseeing eyes straight into the darkness of his kitchen. He resembled a man who had not slept in days, yet I knew Joshua had been sleeping. I’d been privy to the occasion several times. He wore the same jeans and black shirt from the night before, and he held a glass of what, from my place on his porch, smelled like Kentucky bourbon. I remembered the way he had been the night before with Jen. I could picture the smile he had given her when he had made jokes. I could picture the way brown eyes had turned gold when the woman had been around. But that man was gone. Like Nathan’s transformation from man to monster, Joshua had gone from intact to in pieces. And I knew why. I had felt a similar tearing of self when I had watched my own mother perish.

A cellular phone rang, and Joshua did not move. I doubted he even heard the sound, but on the third ring, he reached out a heavy hand. “I’m sorry I hung up,” he said. “I wasn’t ready.”

I could hear who I assumed was his sister, and she was screaming. Without the luxury of discernible words, I could not tell if she was screaming at Joshua or in mourning.

“I wish I’d been there.”

More screaming, but Joshua did not have a “Fuck you” in his repertoire. Through my fingertips, I could feel he had nothing left but regret and resignation.

“I’m sorry, Susan.”

The voice was momentarily silenced.

“I’ll book my flight. I have an exam tomorrow afternoon, and I will fly out tomorrow night. I’ll be with you. Soon.”

Quiet muttering on the line.

“I love you, too, sis,” he said, and he barely had a chance to end the call before his face contracted into unrecognizable wrinkles. He covered his eyes before I saw the tears, but there was that smell again—the saltwater smell, not of ocean but of humanity.

I could not be so far from him. Blindly, I stumbled closer to the living room. I leaned my hands against his front door and listened to the sound of his pain. I could feel his pain. I did not dare move, for fear of losing this emotion. How long since I’d felt pain? How long since I’d felt anything beyond hunger? Who was this man? And how had he made me feel human?

Caleb spun on me. He felt me on the front porch, and he started growling through the door. “Caleb!”Joshua shouted, but the barking did not cease, and I could not move. “Caleb, what the hell?” I sensed Joshua. He stood up. He moved to Caleb. “Who’s out there?” he said, and then, sweet success. He was coming towards me. He had his hand on the door knob, and I heard the ancient metal creak. I leapt from the balcony. The entrance opened wide, and light akin to sun dripped down through the floorboards, where I stood below. Above me, Joshua stepped outside the safety of his home. “Hello?” he said. He took three steps forward and put his hands on the balcony as he looked into the darkness of his yard. “Is someone there?”

He was outside. I stood there, cowering against the wall below his balcony, and why? Had I not been waiting for this moment? The man who did not take smoke breaks. The man who never went outside with his dog. The man whose blood I thirsted for and whose home I could not enter without an invitation. And I had him. I could have had him, so what was the matter with me? Why was I frozen when the opportunity for immaculate warmth stood above my head?

I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed because I had blood on my hands. I was crying, and with each blood tear that escaped my blue eyes, I grew angrier with Joshua. Because in my ninety years undead, I had never cried.

It would happen the following night, I decided, as Joshua backed into his home and locked the front door. He had to get to the airport, and I would make sure he never reached his mother’s funeral. He would die. Like my family. Like my Nathan. Blood on my hands, but the following night, it would not be from my shameful tears.

* * *
Sometimes I still heard my mother’s scream. The sound would sneak into the part of my brain I kept tucked away, never to return. Yet, the sound of her screams somehow snuck through, usually in the early hours of evening before the sun had set—before I could lose myself in the living and their blood. Her scream would wake me, and I would be back in the midst of that night.

“Nathan, my boy. Come in, come in,” my father had said, and it might as well have been engraved on his tomb.

Nathan had taken my brother first. The boys had gone to the back of the house to smoke the cigars my brother had purchased at the market that morning. I had suspected nothing when Nathan had returned, saying something about my brother being sick from his expensive cigar. We had laughed at that. We had all laughed, even though my brother had been dead and face down in the dark.

The rest of it blurs around the edges. Nathan did not take time with Father. As we laughed, Nathan took a steak knife and ran it across my father’s throat. My mother had started to scream, but I had yet to understand that my father was dying—that the ruby covering his three-piece suit was not spilled wine but blood. My poor mother, still cradling her crucifix, had tried to run to me, to save me, but she had only gone a couple steps before Nathan had scooped her into his immortal arms. Then, he’d smiled at me. He’d sunk fangs into her throat, and she had screamed and screamed. When the screaming had stopped, she had been dead, and I’d had yet to move from my seat.

When Nathan had touched me, he had been cold. Perhaps, I had been in shock, because I never tried to run. I never screamed like my poor mother. I had allowed my Nathan to take me into his arms. “Now, you’ll be with me forever,” he had said, and I do not recall pain. I remember waking up with Nathan in an underground tomb, knowing things were different. I was different. And when I had asked about my family, Nathan had laughed.

Joshua was upstairs. Caleb was nowhere nearby, surely dropped off with a friend while Joshua traveled home to bury mommy in the ground. So I would not have to kill the animal after all. I sat in the wet grass in the backyard, pulling at pieces that itched my ankles, between the boot line and my jeans. There was no need for my tree or the porch. Joshua would come to me; I waited for my meal. I could sense a flurry of motion upstairs. He scrambled about, from the closet to the bed to the bathroom, packing last minute items into what I concluded was an open suitcase. I heard the sound of a printer—probably preparing his boarding passes. I plucked green grass until I felt him nearing the front door. When I felt him set foot into the cool evening air, I returned to my site of paralysis from the night before. Poetic justice, I thought—a second chance following my failure.

He dropped his keys and cursed once before locking the front door. Heavy feet hit the metal fire escape, and when he rounded the corner, his arms were full. In one hand, he held his suitcase. In the other, he held a to-go mug of coffee, and it smelled like a smoky roast I had once smelled in the villages of Africa. He looked nineteen again, wearing a dark Polo shirt, brown jacket, jeans, and a crooked baseball cap. In the dim light, he was more my Nathan than he ever had been, because he was my Nathan before Nathan had become a monster. He was my Nathan before that vampire woman had turned him at a prohibition party. And in that dim light, I loved him for it.

I stepped away from the house, and Joshua dropped his coffee. “Shit,” he said, looking down at the pool of black on pavement. Then, he looked up. For the first time, his eyes took in the sight of me. “You,” he said, as if he recognized me. Had he known I’d been watching? Had he been aware of me, just like Caleb? Had he known something bad had been outside his window, and had that been why he was so careful to not leave the house at night?

When I moved closer, Joshua dropped the suitcase, too. Yes, he knew I was something bad, but I could see—even in the darkness—that his brown eyes did not recognize the truth. Humans do not want to believe in vampires, even when they stare one in the face. It was true of my previous victims; it was true of my Joshua.

I latched onto him by the fabric of his shirt and pushed him back against a thick, white column that supported the balcony above. I stared up into his face, mere inches away, and although he was afraid, he was also resigned. Nothing about his expression made me believe he would cry out. His hands did not push me away; he did not struggle or cower beneath my immortal strength. He stared at me, and I would swear on my mother’s grave that this young man had seen me coming. He’d been waiting for me as the elderly await an angel of death. Maybe I had waited for Nathan, too.

I sunk my teeth into the skin above his collarbone, and his hands clung to my shoulders. His blood was sweet and clean, and I took my time. Joshua sucked in a coarse breath of air, and the despair was back—not his despair but mine.

I went back eighty years.

“Why would you kill your maker?” Nathan said, but it was a question with no necessary answer. He was already almost dead, in a pool of his own dark, dead blood with me above him, knife in hand.

“Because you took everything away from me,” I said in a room I did not know in a city I had never seen. I was only there for him. I was only there for murder.

“I gave you eternal life,” he sputtered, and blood bubbled over the side of a smirk. “I loved you.”

“There’s no such thing as love,” I said, and I ended it, cutting his head off. For hours, I sat soaked in his blood. I burned his head in the fireplace, and I stuck a steak in his heart to be certain he would not come back.

Yet, he had come back. I had him in my arms, and I could feel a human heart struggling to survive. I found myself back on Church Street. Joshua’s full weight was against me, because he no longer had the strength to stand. Up close, he was so much more than the scent of blood—he was eucalyptus shampoo and Old Spice deodorant and spearmint toothpaste. He was so warm, and my preternatural mind picked up images of Jen and a middle-aged woman with brown hair who I assumed was his mother. His mother was smiling, and in her smile, I saw my own mother.

I dropped him, and he fell like his suitcase beside the spreading pool of spilled coffee. I looked down at a young face that could have been asleep if I hadn’t known better. But he was not dead. I crouched at his side and rolled him onto his back. My cold hand touched his face, and this woke him enough to look up at me. A sound like a question mark escaped the back of his throat, and his high brow furrowed above dark eyebrows.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and what was I sorry for? Sorry about Jen? Sorry about his dead mother? Sorry that I had just tried to take his life?

I took off my leather coat, rolled it into a ball, and pressed the inside lining against the wound in his neck. I looked around for his cellular phone and found it in the pocket of his jacket. I dialed 911.

“Church Street.” I gave the disembodied voice an address. “Back porch. Something’s happened,” I said, and I hung up before she could ask questions.

I stayed with him until I heard the ambulance. I held his hand and hummed an old song as blood mixed with coffee and dying moss. When the paramedics arrived, I watched from my tree. They moved fast; he had lost a lot of blood, and it tasted like a rusted fork in my mouth. Soon, his image was gone from me, closed behind swinging, white ambulance doors that rushed him to the hospital.

I thought my heart had been dead since the day my mother had died. Then, my heart had been tossed to hell the night I had killed my Nathan. Then, Joshua had reminded me what it felt to have a human heart, and immortality gave me no time for the weakness of humanity. I would leave Charleston, as I had in my youth. I would stay away, knowing an imposter walked the streets. I could not afford to love Joshua. I could afford to love no one.

Beside my tree, his house was dark, and I stared at the blackness as I would an old friend. Alone again, I said to the empty windows, as it will always be.

All the Crawling Beetles

Despite the angry woman, I had to climb the magnolia tree.

I’d wanted to do it since “the break up,” although it’s funny—I’d never wanted to do it until then, and I’d walked by the magnolia tree every morning before work for eight months.

          “Get down from there!” the angry old woman screams up at me, holding one of my discarded spike heels in her wrinkled palm.

          I can hear her, but I’m up too high to care. It’s not as if she’s about to come up after me with her white hair, curved spine, and sour disposition. She’s grounded, and I’m flying.

          “Hey! Come down, I said!”

          I lift my leg and plant my bare foot on another rough, dry branch. I lift my hand up and take firm grasp of a thin limb to the right of my head, and I pull myself higher. The pant leg of my business suit gets caught on tree bark, but I’m considering the smell of the off-white magnolia blossom instead of tailor fees.

          “Why, you crazy little bitch!” There it is—the anger and profanity I knew the grumpy grandma had been swallowing since her husband’s death a week ago.

I glance down at her, and I smile because I’m making her let go. I’m making her feel something other than the burn I noticed on the inside of her wrist—probably from the edge of a cooked casserole plate at the after-funeral party.

          “I’m going to call the police!” she says, and she throws my expensive, designer shoe on the ground before stomping toward her front door.

          Go ahead, call them. Just a few more rungs, and I’ll reach the top.

          I hear the screen door of her house slam below me. I bend my knee and use my toes to push myself higher. I stretch toward a branch just out of reach and give a leap to get my hand in place. I’m sweating through my cotton shirt, and my hair is sticking to my forehead in the heavy South Carolina heat. Another rung higher, and I can see the Smurf-blue summer sky. I put my palm against one of the rubbery magnolia leaves, and I’m surprised to find it cool. I push my cheek against the foliage, but there is no time to cool down.

          Because I’m at the top of the tree. I’m holding on to the trunk with one arm, and my other hand is stretched toward the single puff of white in the upper right-hand corner of the early morning sky. I look out and over the city block where families live and kids ride bikes, only about a half mile away from my desk and my responsibilities.

Maybe the old woman called the police; maybe she didn’t. Maybe she’s alone in her living room, crying because the house is empty—crying because her husband is dead. And here I am at the top of a magnolia tree, mid-summer, Charleston, all because of “the break up.”

  – - -

          A week before the magnolia tree, I walked into Tequila Burrito downtown on Wentworth at seven o’clock. As I walked inside, I realized the mistake I’d made. It was, after all, Cinco de Mayo.

          “Shit,” I muttered. To think, I’d only wanted some chips and salsa.

          The place was packed, and it didn’t even feel big when it was empty. It was a locally owned chain; there were three other locations spread around Charleston and over onto the islands along the Atlantic coast. You ordered food at the counter, and happy hippy waiters and waitresses brought completed orders to your table. My favorite part about the place was the bottomless chip baskets and salsa bar. And the margaritas. Which were all I wanted, but with a glance toward where the bar should have been, I had a funny feeling that was impossible. I couldn’t even see the bar. People were in front of it, behind it, and on the side of it. If monkeys had been swinging from the rafters, I wouldn’t have been surprised. There went my hope for an early evening buzz.

          People were everywhere as I slid into the crowd. A girl in a strapless dress and a huge Mexican hat stepped on my toe and didn’t apologize. I shoved past her, noting the colorful streamers hung in strips across the high ceilings. Mexican flags were on the walls, and their similarity in color reminded me of the Italian flag that hung in my parents’ home up north. I could smell burritos, although that night, I would never actually eat anything.

          My phone vibrated in my purse, so I paused within the madness. I glanced at the new text message from Emma: “Where are you? Tommy is here. Hope that’s okay.”

          I sighed. Of course, that was okay. Tommy was Emma’s best friend, regardless of my history with the guy.

          “Hey!”

          I glanced up, because the sound of her voice was better than the silence of a text.

          “Hey,” I replied, and glory of glories, she had a table. I leaned forward and gave her a hug. I didn’t need to bend over, because Emma had grabbed one of the high tops, complete with three bar stools. She was dressed up, in a sense. Often when I saw Emma, it was after she’d been running. She loved to run, and she had the calf muscles to prove it. That night, she was wearing a sleeveless sun dress and sandals. Her light red hair was swept into a high ponytail above her freckled forehead, and her petit fingers wrapped around a watered-down margarita.

          “How are you?” she asked, but her light blue eyes were sweeping the room.

          “I’m good,” I said, nodding, because that was the polite answer in a social scenario. I could not say, Well, I actually had a terrible day at the office, I miss my ex-boyfriend, and I kind of want to curl into fetal position and cry. No, I couldn’t very well say that. “I’m going to get a beer.”

          “Good luck. It’s like a battle zone over there.”

          “Great,” I whispered.

          She smiled at me, because she knew it had been a rough couple weeks. Emma did her best to be positive around me since “the break up,” but it made me feel guilty. After all, how good were things for Emma? She had recently lost her job, and there was no new job in sight. Her family was in the midst of a fight over her father’s drinking, and her huge, orange tabby cat was ill. Yet, there she was at Tequila Burrito, smiling for Sara, God bless her.

          I had to do something of a tiptoe jig to get past a group of dancers near the bar. They were moving to the quiet cover band in the front corner of the restaurant. The acoustic guitar and bongos barely rose about the mêlée, yet the drunken wavelength sensed rhythm like dolphins with sonar waves.

          Emma had been right about the war zone comment; there wasn’t an empty space at the bar, and that included elbow room. It was hopeless, and I cursed myself for not having worn taller shoes to get my shoulders above average height.

          Of course, then there was Tommy. I saw him before he saw me, because he was busy staring at the bartender. I used a similar technique—reach deep for Jedi mind control and use psychic power to get beer. It rarely worked. I sighed and stepped to his side.

          “Hey, Tom,” I said, touching his upper arm. Around Charleston, people called him “Tommy.” Emma called him “Tommy.” I was the only person on earth who called him “Tom,” and that was only because it was what I’d called him in bed, because no one has great sex with a “Tommy.”

          He replied with a nod, and we didn’t hug. We never hugged, but it wasn’t because we didn’t like each other. We were just friends, despite his occasional drunk text, asking me to come over at 2 AM and perform sexual favors.

          “Get me a beer,” I said, holding a ten-dollar bill under his nose.

          He glanced down at me, and those huge brown eyes were tractor beams.

          When I’d met Tom the summer before, the first words he’d said were, “You’re not going to like me.” At the time, I’d laughed at the comment, but once I’d gotten to know him, I’d realized the statement was true. I hadn’t liked him after we’d slept together. Then, I had sort of liked him, once we’d decided to be friends.

          That being said, Tom was hard to have as a friend. The only long-term female friend of his was Emma, and that was because she had a serious boyfriend. Being a single woman around Tom made friendship difficult. Looking up at his six-three surfer body at Tequila Burrito, I was reminded why.

          Even with that day’s lazy facial hair and t-shirt fashion statement, Tom still managed magnetism. He had been a server at one of Charleston’s swanky downtown eateries for three years until two Saturdays prior, when he’d quit to prepare for a sudden and unexpected move to California. At the restaurant, he had been the king of up-sell, and he had a rolodex of business cards from female patrons, half of whom he’d bedded before their food had fully digested.

          “What do you want?” he asked.

          “Whatever’s cheap,” I replied. “And get three of them.” All for me.

          He turned around, and the Jedi mind trick must have worked, because we had the beers in seconds. I held two wet Pacifico bottles in one hand and started to chug the third. It was cold and not really that good. However, it was beer, and right then, I needed beer. I didn’t wait for Tom. I headed back to the table and plopped down across from Emma.

          “Jesus, that took forever,” she said.

          I kept chugging. I finished my first beer before Tom had settled into his seat at my side. “That’s why I got three,” I said.

          “Smart girl,” she replied, and she nibbled on her fingernails.

          “Hungry?” I asked.

          “I’m starving,” she said.

          “Do you want to order food?”

          “No,” she said. “Trying to save money.”

          I shrugged. Liquid diet, it was. “How’s the job search?”

          “Hasn’t started. I’ve been too busy babysitting.”

          After losing her job, Emma had agreed to baby sit for a friend of a friend. The friend of a friend was a single mom with a two-year-old girl. The pay was terrible, and it wouldn’t have gone on long if it hadn’t been for the creepy neighbor who had previously cared for the kid. The two-year-old had said something about “He touched me in a funny place,” and that had been it. The single mom had taken days off work to care for the little creature, but that meant no income for Mommy. Emma had come along—friend of a friend—and offered to help. The pay really was awful, but Emma considered it a “good cause.” I considered it Emma’s “volunteer work.”

          “I don’t know what I’m going to do yet,” she continued. “I may have found a part-time bookkeeping gig at this coffee shop by my house, which includes taking care of the owner’s little boy while I do the bookkeeping.”

          “That sounds good,” I said, because any income was good income.

          “Yeah.” She shrugged. “I don’t want to talk about me anymore. Tell me more about San Francisco,” she said, turning toward Tom. He shifted in his seat to face her. Sometimes when he sat with one leg crossed over his knee, he reminded me of a giraffe.

          “It’s awesome,” he said, looking first at Emma, then at me. He was drunker than I’d realized; I could see it in the way his eyelashes pointed straight out instead of up, over his half-mast eyes. “It’s the most beautiful city in the world.”

          “Hey, Charleston is the most beautiful city in the world.” I meant it.

          “I love it out there,” he said. I wondered how much drunken Tom ever listened to other people or if it was just me that he ignored. “I can’t wait to move.”

          “I can’t believe you’re leaving,” Emma pouted.

          He didn’t reply. He glanced toward the door to watch three new female arrivals presumably search for their party.

          “Tommy has a hickey,” Emma said.

          “Oh, my God.” I rolled my eyes.

          “Look right, so Sara can see it,” she said, poking a finger into his shoulder.

          “No,” he replied, glancing at me. “Where have you been anyway?” he said. “The last time I saw you was at the restaurant. You were with that guy. Is he cool?”

          “What?”

          “Aidan, right? He seems like a cool guy.”

          “We broke up last week. And yes, he was a really cool guy.”

          “What do you mean, you broke up? How long were you seeing the guy?”

          “Three months.”

          Tom leaned back in his seat. His hand closed around his beer, and he nodded. “That’s a long time.”

          Was it, I wondered?

          “I’m sorry.”

          “That’s okay.” I lifted my second beer. “I’m drinking it away.”

          “That’s what I usually do, too.”

          “Doesn’t everybody?”

          Tom nodded, but his demeanor had shifted. Instead of leaning back in his seat with one leg crossed, he was leaning forward with his elbows on the edge of the table. His head was tilted toward Emma, but his eyes were toward me. His full lips were pressed together, but the outsides of his mouth were turned up in a soft smile.

          Christ, I knew this look. I knew this look from before we’d slept together. I knew this look from the year before when I’d broken up with a boyfriend. Tom had been there that night; we had been in Tom’s bed, and it had all happened because of “that last break up.”

          “Sara,” Emma yelled.

          I instinctively hunched over in my chair, looking away from Tom. Instead, I was certain Aidan had just walked through the door of Tequila Burrito, wearing his Miami Dolphins hat and wire-rims. I was certain I was about to be crushed.

          “Why don’t we get some chips?” Emma said.

          “I thought we were saving money,” I replied, still hunched forward.

          “But I’m hungry. Go get chips.”

          I didn’t ask any questions. Tom’s look was forgotten, and I was just relieved that my initial conclusion had been incorrect. I got up and headed to the counter to get us some chips. The chalkboards with hand-written Daily Specials were smudged and illegible. Thanks to Cinco de Mayo, it appeared that half the specials were sold out. The food specials had been replaced by beer specials, but I had faith that chips were still available. I ordered our bottomless basket of warm, salty tortillas. When I returned to our table, Tom was gone, and Emma was back to biting her nails.

          “No more finger chewing,” I said.

          She grabbed my wrist from across the table. “Don’t let Tommy hurt you again.”

          I wasn’t upset by this. I wasn’t angry. I said, “I won’t,” knowing that after we’d had that one night of meaningless sex, Tom had ended up hurting me. He hadn’t meant to; I don’t suppose they ever do.

 - – -

          Aidan’s bedroom smelled like sandalwood. I sometimes had trouble falling asleep because of the blinking light on the bottom right-hand corner of his computer monitor. His scanner made noises at night, too. He called all of his photography equipment his robots. We would joke about them coming alive while we slept, scanning our brains and stealing our memories.

          The Wednesday before we broke up, I woke at 6:15 with my head on his chest. We often slept that way—me half-sprawled across Aidan’s muscular swimmer body with his right arm around my upper back. Over the three-months of sleeping over, I had learned his sleeping habits. For instance, I knew when he was waking up, because his open palm would slide to the base of my spine and tickle my bare skin.

          At 6:16, he made his morning noise. It was a low but somehow playful growl that he always made when he knew his girlfriend was in his bed. His hand moved down my spine; his hand stopped at the curve of my lower back. I sighed and kissed his neck, and in the light of his digital alarm clock, I could see the stray gray chest hairs he tried to pluck before I would notice. Aidan was, after all, thirteen years my senior.

          “Good morning,” I said, knowing I had to leave in fourteen minutes to get home, take a shower, and be to work on time.

          “Morning,” he said. He always sounded sick in the morning, thanks to his allergies and occasional cigarette habit. He used the hand on my lower back to pull me closer and kiss my left eyebrow.

          I put my hand against the scar on his chest from when he’d almost drowned off the coast of Folly Beach the summer before. I thought about the stories of his childhood in Miami, Florida—all the drugs and all the guns—and the miracle that he had survived it all. I thought about how happy I was to have him in my life. How had I gotten so lucky? And he said, “What are you thinking about?”

          “Coffee,” I replied.

          “Coffee, it is,” he said, even though his eyes were barely open. He rolled me off his chest and sat up. Before heading to the kitchen, down the hall from his robot-infested room, he rubbed his eyes that were so dark, they looked black in the dim restaurants we frequented. “Did you sleep all right?”

          “Yes,” I said. “The robots only stole a few of my memories.”

          “The robots or the red wine at dinner?”

          “Uh-oh. Maybe both.”

          “Caffeine,” Aidan said. This time, he stood up, and wearing nothing but his skin, he headed to the kitchen to brew the coffee he’d brought back on his last photo shoot in the African bush.

          That happy Wednesday morning, I fell back against the wall of Aidan’s green flannel pillows and listened to the water run in the kitchen sink.

          I met Aidan at a sports bar—my sports bar—on upper King Street in downtown Charleston. It was the place where I watched football every Sunday, the entire football season, from approximately 1 to 6:30 PM. If my team was pissing me off, I took a cigarette break. Aidan was the same way, and since his team was the Miami Dolphins, he was outside a lot.

          I didn’t notice him immediately. I didn’t notice him until he called me “Bettis,” in homage to the antique Jerome Bettis jersey I wore every week.

          He said, “Hey, Bettis! You’re not on your stool!”

          This comment was in reference to my usual position at the bar—up on my knees, balancing on a bar stool, and screaming at the TV screen.

          For the first time since football season had begun three months prior, Aidan had made contact. I don’t remember being wowed. I don’t remember thinking, “Damn, that’s a fine looking man!” I remember thinking he was funny. I remember Emma commenting that he must be funny, because whenever I went outside to meet him for a smoke, I would be laughing.

          He didn’t ask for my number until the Superbowl.

          “Can I get your number? I’m not going to see you every week anymore.”

          So I gave him my number.

          For our first date, he took me to his favorite French restaurant. It was a tiny place, hidden from tourists, and owned by a wine importer who was also one of Aidan’s good friends. When I walked in, there were jokes all around from the bartenders.

          “Oh, you’re meeting Aidan?”

          “You’re too pretty for Aidan.”

          “Aidan is here with a girl!”

          It endeared me to him. It made me laugh, because it was obvious these people were his friends. They gave him shit because they cared about him. They gave him shit because he was a good guy, and they were happy to see him with a good woman.

          That first night, my initial perceptions of Aidan were shattered. From the sports bar, I remembered a tall, skinny dude in a baseball cap and dorky Buddy Holly glasses. At the French restaurant, I was met by a tall, slightly older gentleman with unkempt black hair, sexy spectacles, broad shoulders, and arms that could have easily tossed me over his shoulder and carried me home.

          I learned he was a photographer full time. His work had appeared across the country, as well as overseas. He had grown up in Miami, where he had spent his summers surfing and fighting with local gang thugs in his backyard. He had to spend at least a half hour a day doing laps at the gym just to decompress. Soon, he would disappear to Africa for two weeks to shoot brain surgery in the jungle. And I loved every bit of it.

          For three months, Aidan and I never stopped talking. We never stopped making each other laugh. We never stopped spending intimate nights on his porch, in his kitchen, in his bed, in the hallway outside his apartment, in the elevator; yet, I kept my head. Aidan didn’t make me feel crazy. He didn’t make me nervous or insecure. I never had reason to doubt his affections. He was older than I was. He didn’t play games. He never hid from me. We never hid from each other.

          Back in his bedroom that Wednesday morning, Aidan returned to my side. I could hear the coffee maker whirring in the kitchen; I could smell fresh grounds on his fingertips. I rolled away from him, and he put his arms around me from behind. He kissed my neck, and his hand slid across my rib cage and down my stomach. With a start, I realized I was in love with him.

          With a start, I realized I was afraid.

 - – -

          I’m back in my magnolia tree, and I can see the outlines in the old lady’s yard from the cars that parked there for the after-funeral brunch last weekend. It rained last week, so the ground was soft when the family arrived with their casseroles and jell-o molds to say goodbye to dad, grandpa, uncle—whatever the old guy had been to whomever. It damaged the yard, and no husband was around to do yard work.

          The police haven’t shown up, so I don’t think the old woman called them. I glance down at the shoe she tossed away before slamming her screen door. It’s in the street, and I hope a car doesn’t roll it over. I look back up into the blue sky and wonder if my boss has called my cell phone, wondering where I am. Maybe he’s even called my mother to see if she heard from me. Maybe Mom booked a plane ticket in a panic. Maybe they’ve sent out the National Guard.

          I think about Emma. If my boss called my mom, my mom probably called Emma. And poor Emma is freaking out. She has probably called Tom to see if I’m in his bed. She probably called Aidan, even, as awkward as that call would be, to see if we were back together. Shit, Emma is better than the National Guard. She probably rented a helicopter and a megaphone. She’s probably flying over Charleston Harbor right now, screaming my name.

          But I’m not in Charleston Harbor. I’m not downtown. I’m not at my office or my apartment. I’m at the top of a magnolia tree, and who would think to look for me here?

 - – -

          That last night, I knew it was over when we hugged.

          Aidan had been busy with a big project for the local hospital. He was trying to edit and compile the Africa photos on a Friday deadline. I met him for a drink that Wednesday, and he was way behind.

          We met at the sports bar—our sports bar—for a quick beer before he headed back to the studio to pull an all-nighter. I felt beautiful. I was wearing a red dress and black heels. My dark hair was free and falling in soft curls across my shoulders. I felt like I did when I woke up in Aidan’s arms every day, but for the first time in our relationship, I felt sad.

          Our bar looked strange that day. It was dirty and dark—nothing new. It was full of mixed clientele of mixed ages, professions, and drinks of choice. The TV screens were cued up, and I had arrived just in time to catch the end credits of Pardon the Interruption on ESPN. And although these things were same as always, it looked cloudy inside. It felt unfamiliar, and for a moment, I couldn’t find him. I didn’t recognize Aidan, even though he was standing in our usual meeting place, at the end of the bar to the left of the entrance.

          I was relieved when I saw him, because I was afraid to be alone within the mysterious cloud of unfamiliarity that had descended upon this familiar place. Then, Aidan hugged me, and I knew. I knew he knew he couldn’t keep this up.

          We sat down at our table, and our bartender brought us a round of Coast IPA. “You’ve been busy,” I said.

          “I know. I’m so sorry. This editor I’m working with is a moron. The whole project is taking longer than it should.” He shook his head; he looked tired. For the first time since I’d met him, he looked his age.

          “Are you sick of me? Or is this really about work?”

          “No, I’m not sick of you. I haven’t been avoiding you. It’s just work.”

          “What are we doing, Aidan? You and me. Where do you see this going?”

          “I don’t think I can do anything serious right now.”

          “I think it’s a little late for you to be saying that.”

          “I know,” he said. He wasn’t nervous. I didn’t feel nervous either. I felt a cold calm that would scare me later. It reminded me of the cold calm you hear serial killers talk about when they’re hiding bodies. “What do we do?”

          I shrugged. “I don’t think I can see you anymore,” I said. “I think I’m in love with you, and I can’t just be your girl on the side. I’m out on a limb, and you may never be out here with me. If we keep this up, I’ll just end up getting hurt more in the end. That’s not fair to me, Aidan.”

          He looked at me, his dark eyes protected beneath panes of glass. “You really just put it out there, don’t you?”

          I smiled at him and nodded. He smiled back. We both chuckled a little because we knew how much the whole thing plain sucked. We were great together. We were so very happy together. And we would never be what I wanted.

          “Are you ever going to settle down?” I asked.

          “I keep trying,” he replied, shaking his head. “Sara, you are one of the most beautiful, smart, and amazing women I have ever met.”

          “And you’re old, so that’s saying something.”

          “Ha,” he said. He was still smiling, but his eyes were sad. I had never seen his eyes sad before. His eyes were usually laughing or fogged over in the bedroom—never sad. “Well, can I still…call you?”

          “I don’t know,” I said. I knew I wanted to say yes. I wanted to hear his voice the next day and the day after that and the day after that, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. “I feel awkward,” I said. “I think I should go.”

          “You didn’t finish your beer.” I always finished my beer.

          “I know.” I got out of my seat, because I knew tears were on deck. The back of my eyes burned like matchsticks. “I just feel awkward.”

          “I’m sorry,” he said, standing up.

          “It’s okay. It’s nobody’s fault.”

          “I’m sorry.”

          He reached out and crushed me into a hug. My cheek was against his chest, and his arms threatened to collapse my lungs. I pulled away out of self-preservation. I turned to leave our sports bar—my sports bar—but he pulled me into a second embrace.

          “I’m sorry,” he said.

          This time, I shoved away. I shoved him backward and ran for the door. Once on the street, the burning lava behind my eyes poured out onto King Street, downtown Charleston.

          I remember thinking that I hadn’t planned this when I’d woken up that morning. I hadn’t planned on saying goodbye to someone I loved.

 - – -

          When it rains in South Carolina, it’s not like the rain used to be in Ohio. In Ohio, when it rained, it rained for days. It would start as this slow descent into gray. One morning, strips of heavy stratus clouds would slide on the scene and take over. Then, those same strips would merge to form one, huge circus tent above our heads. It wouldn’t actually rain for another three days, and then, the rain would be this lasting, dreary drizzle. It never took breaks, but there were never exciting downpours, either. The rain would last and last and last, and just when you started thinking about moving to Tahiti (not a bad idea), the rain would finally stop. The skies would clear, and you’d see business people kicking off their shoes, throwing their hands in the air, and dancing down soaked sidewalks.  

          In South Carolina, however, rain caught you. It could be clear and sunny one moment, dark and disturbing the next. Was it something about the humidity? Or was it being by the sea? Hell if I knew; I practically failed the meteorology course I forced myself to take one summer in college. Plus, I didn’t need science to tell me when I was about to get soaked. I’d been trapped in Charleston downpours before, so I knew what they looked like—fat, heavy, black clouds that grew like the mysterious mole you never got checked out. Those storm clouds would give you the bum rush, then, bang, you’re stuck in the middle of a storm that would’ve stunned even Spidey Sense.

          And I’m at the top of a magnolia tree. The pads of my bare feet are balanced above a thin tree limb. My movements have already brushed some dry bark away, and it’s smooth where I stand. My back is against the thick tree trunk, and my left hand is clutching to a bunch of dark green leaves. There’s the thick, sweet smell of magnolia blossoms, but there’s also the smell of wet pavement from somewhere down the block, where the rain has already hit.

          A storm is coming, I’m at the top of a tree, and now, I’m crying—wrenching, terrible sobs that force me to bend over below my ribcage. I’m holding onto my stomach with the hand not holding onto the tree, because I think this will keep me from throwing up. I’m trying not to fall out of the tree, and I’m wondering what I’m crying about. It’s been two weeks without Aidan, and the only time I cried about that was the night after and on and off through the next day. I haven’t cried since then, so why I am crying now?

          Why had I cried in the first place?

          I knew it wouldn’t work. I knew Aidan and I wouldn’t have made it. Friends told me his age didn’t matter. They told me the way I felt about him mattered. That’s all well and good, but there were still moments when we would look at each other—Aidan and me—and know we were different, and that it would eventually be the end of us. It wasn’t the small stuff that bothered me. I didn’t care that Aidan hated to dance. I didn’t care that he kept his hair shaggy to hide the receding hairline. He didn’t seem to care when I asked dumb questions about world geography before he left on photography trips. He didn’t seem to care when I took him to clubs with my friends, and he would make fun of the music. It was more than that.

          It was the way I loved; it was the way he didn’t. He was a loner—had been his whole life. His parents were dead, and he didn’t have any brothers or sisters. He didn’t have close relationships with people, and yet, I still held close relationships with people I’d known in kindergarten. Different.

           In the end, it wasn’t about his relationships with other people. It was about his relationship with me. It was about how he didn’t love me and probably never could have. That had been the end, and I’d been waiting for it all along.

          Thunder shakes the tree, and my eyes shoot up to the sky. Damn it, the storm is here.  The wind is picking up around me, and an early-evening dimness has replaced what should be late-morning sun. I have to get out of the magnolia tree, because I know I’ll be the first thing struck. I force myself to take a slow, deep breath to try subduing the sobs. I move my hand away from my stomach and reach out to take hold of another tree limb at hip-level. As I reach for it, there’s motion. The leather leaves shimmy, and beady black eyes look up at me.  

          I look at the mangy squirrel, and the poor bastard just stares at me. He’s still in action pose, with his right front paw extended forward and parallel to the tree limb at his feet. His little eyeballs are sweeping left to right, and back again. His baby mouth full of tiny teeth is open, and I start screaming. Why am I screaming? Well, why was I crying? Why was I in a magnolia tree?

            The squirrel starts making these freaky “chirp” noises, as if saying, “What-the-fuck-are-you-doing-in-my-tree-you-crazy-human-bitch-ahhhhhh!”

            The cacophony was enough to get the old lady back in the front yard. I hear her screen door slam, and now, she’s at the foot of the tree. I glance down at her long enough to see she’s holding a phone in her hand. “You see?” she says, waving the black cordless 1980s monstrosity in the air. “You see? I’m calling the police!”

            No, she isn’t, and the sane side of my brain knows it. If she was going to call them, she would have done it already.

            The squirrel is long gone. He’s in his squirrel tree apartment, packing his luggage, and calling his landlord. He’ll never climb this magnolia tree again. I decide to start crying again. What else am I going to do, alone at the top of a tree?

            “You see! I’m calling,” she says, and she’s practically singing the words. She’s right below me now—straight down about twenty feet. Her open palm smacks against the tree bark, and she hums as she pretends to dial. “Calling. The. Police,” she says, and I look up at the clouds, waiting for the lightning. “So you better come down now before I—”

            She’s silent, and I wonder if the pissed off squirrel got her.

            I glance down at the ground, and the old woman is staring up at me. No longer is she the angry, white-haired woman who called me names. Instead, she’s shape-shifted, and she reminds me of my five-foot-two, apple-shaped Italian grandma. She makes a noise like an extended “O.” I blink, and a tear falls off the edge of my chin. The drop of saltwater seems frozen between us as it falls the height of the tree. I swear it hits her in the forehead, but I imagine that’s creative license.

            “Are you—” she starts. “Are you…crying?”

 - – -

          The Saturday before the magnolia tree, I shook Emma by the shoulders, but she didn’t budge. “Emma!” I hissed, because I didn’t want the whole party to know I was leaving. I was trying to be sneaky about it, but of course, Emma was unconscious, and I couldn’t leave her. Plus she was sitting straight up, passed out, beer in hand, and I was afraid she was going to mess up the new dress she’d bought for Tom’s going away party.

          I could hear things escalating out on Tom’s front porch. Things had been civil at first, but that had been six hours ago. Our group had agreed to dinner down the street at Basil—a Thai restaurant with twenty tables too few where there was always a wait and always stupendous Pad Thai.  Then, we’d taken the party across the street to the downtown dive. In the crowds of college students and dirty old men who love them, our group had separated a half-dozen times. Each time we separated and met again, the drunken level would increase. I knew things were going downhill when Tom started putting his arm around my shoulders. I knew I was on a slippery slope when I realized I didn’t mind.

          So when it was suggested we traverse two blocks to Tom’s house for after-hours, I should have gone home. Then, there had been Emma, and Emma didn’t want me to go home. She wanted me to stay and play.

          Of course, by 3 AM, she was passed out, and I was her ride home.

          “Emma,” I said, pulling the beer from her limp palm and setting it on the sticky table next to Tom’s dusty leather couch. “Damn it.”

          “Sara.”

          My head popped up, and I looked toward the front door. “Hey,” I said.

          “What are you doing in here?” Tom asked. He stepped inside and closed the front door behind him. The floor in the old plantation home creaked beneath his weight, and for a moment, I felt ghosts of Victorian women in gowns floating between us.

          “I’m trying to wake Emma,” I said, looking down at her frowning face.

          “I don’t think she’s moving,” he said. He put his hand on my lower back, and even though I was drunk, my shoulders tensed. “Come back outside.”

          “I want to go home.”

          “You’re not going home. It’s my going away party.”

          “I’ve been drinking all night.”

          “Then, you shouldn’t be driving.”

          “Well, I’m not staying here.”

          “Why not?” he asked.

          The look was back—the I’m-trying-to-sleep-with-you look I’d recognized on Cinco de Mayo and seen before when we’d first had sex. He looked as he had when I’d first met him and he’d told me I wasn’t going to like him—with a clean shave, wearing a button down that made him resemble a frat boy from the College of Charleston. He smelled the same, too, like weed, beer, and aftershave.

          I watched my hand reach out and take hold of the fabric of his shirt, right above his bellybutton. We didn’t move closer for a moment. I was trying to make a decision, but the Van Gogh vodka shots from earlier were making it difficult. Tom had already made his decision, but he was hesitant—as he had been for our first kiss on the same couch where our unconscious friend snored.

          He put his beer down, and I didn’t dare look up into his brown eyes. He put his palm on my cheek, and his long fingers took hold of the hair that had been stylish and curly earlier—limp now, thanks to the dancing and drinking at the bars. My mouth opened to him when he kissed me, and it felt familiar, even though our lips hadn’t touched in months.

          It felt good—warm and wet—but it also felt wrong. It felt wrong. I pushed him away.

          “No,” I said, shaking my head and taking a step back. I almost fell over Emma’s discarded shoe.

          “What? What does it matter? I’m leaving soon. It’s not like we haven’t had sex before.”

          I felt sick, but it wasn’t the booze. “Jesus, Tom.” I shook my head. “What am I doing here?” I looked around, but I couldn’t find my damn purse.

          “Why are you freaking out?” He was following me around the room, and I wanted to touch him again. I kept moving, desperate to find my keys. “Sara. Stop.”

          “What?” I stopped and faced him.

          “Just stay the night. We like each other. Why not?”

          I had more than liked Tom once upon a time. Once upon a time, while in the haze of our one night stand, I’d almost loved him. Even recently, it still hurt to look at him and remember the way he had once made me feel—wonderful and then terrible. He’d made me feel worthless, just another girl on his list of so many girls. And there we were, in that same stupid living room, and he was making me feel terrible all over again.

          “No, I can’t stay. It’s wrong for me to stay.”

          “Why? No strings. Don’t you want to get laid?”

          Of course I wanted to get laid. I was drunk, and Tom was the best looking man I’d ever slept with. I wanted to sleep with him again, but I knew what would happen if I did. I would wake up in his arms, and I would feel like I had with Aidan in those last precious weeks before “the break up.” I would delude myself into thinking that sex meant love—that all the wrong could be made right. But wrong can never be made right, no matter how many times I may have tried.

          “You have to move to San Francisco, Tom. And I have to go home. And not be your friend anymore.”

          “Jesus,” he said, reaching for his beer. “Fine. Whatever.”

          “Where’s my beer?” Emma sat up suddenly on the couch, and Tom’s beverage fell out of his hand.

          “Whoa. Emma,” he said, moving past me and toward the paper towels in his kitchen. “We thought you were dead.”

          “Where’s my beer?” she asked again, blue eyes at half-mast.

          “It’s gone,” I said, as Tom started sopping up the spilled beer on his hardwood floors.

          “Just like Tommy,” Emma sputtered and burst into tears.

          I took a seat next to her on the couch, and I chuckled despite her sobs. “Just like Tommy,” I said, and he looked up from his puddle on the floor.

          They all go away someday.

 - – -

          The old woman’s house smells like rain and yesterday’s eggs.

          Once she managed to get me down from her tree, the storm arrived in earnest. It’s pouring outside, and lightning strikes like camera flashes on her dining room floor. Her house is filled with plants. It’s like a damn jungle in there, and I keep eyeing this one vicious thing in the corner, à la Little Shop of Horrors.

          I’m sipping tea out of china that probably costs more than my salary. It isn’t good tea. It tastes old and stale, like she’s been saving it since her wedding day.

          I take another sip and nod at her. I’ve plastered a polite smile on my face, but I can feel mascara caked on my cheeks from the bawl fest I had a half hour before.

          “Is it good?” she asks.

          “Yes, thank you.”

          There are photos all over her house of two people—young, attractive, and dressed like characters in Casablanca. I assume it is the old woman and her dead husband, but I can’t tell with her wrinkles and white hair. Sometimes it’s so easy to forget that old people were once young, and young people will one day be old.

          “So,” she says from across the dining room table. She puts her wrists on the white, lace tablecloth and smiles at me. “Are you all right, honey?”

          I’m surprised she calls me “honey,” considering she called me “bitch” earlier. “Not really,” I say, and I wonder why I’m telling her.

          “What’s the matter, dear?”

          “Bad break up.” Then, I add a hissing sound at the end when I realize breakup should have been plural.

          “I’m sorry. What did he do?”

          “I don’t think they did anything,” I say. “I think I did it to myself.”

          “Sounds like they weren’t right for you.”

          I don’t want to answer, so I look at one of the many pictures on her wall. “How did you meet your husband?”

          This makes her smile. Her eyes glaze over, and I can see her going back in time. “We met at a picnic, in Battery Park. He was here on leave from the Navy. We had one month together before he was sent out to sea. I waited for him to return. I would have waited forever.”

          “Why?”

          “Pardon?”

          “Why would you have waited?”

          She smiled, and her old-lady eyes crinkled to invisibility. “I knew.”

          “How did you know?”

          Her boney shoulders hopped. “When it’s right, it’s right. It’s not forced. It’s not complicated.”

          “He was at sea. How is that not complicated?”

          “Those are simple complications.”

          “Oh.” She was right.

          “Why were you in my magnolia tree?”

          “I don’t know.”

          “I think you do know.”

          “Well, do you know?”

          “No.” She smiled. “Why were you in my magnolia tree?”

          “I didn’t want to be on the ground anymore,” I said. “It was starting to hurt.”

          The old lady pursed her thin lips together. Her eyebrows came together in the middle as she watched me sip my tea. “Do you know what I do for a living?” she asked, lifting her personal frailty from the table.

          “Save women in trees?”

          “No,” she said, and she touched the scary plant in the corner. “I’m a horticulturalist. I study how plants behave—how they survive. Did you know there is fossilized evidence of magnolia blossoms dating back 20 million years?”

          “No.”

          “The magnolia tree evolved before bees,” she said, petting the plant that could have bitten off a hand. “Instead, pollination occurred by beetles.”

          “Oh. Kay.”

          “The magnolia carpel—or female reproductive part of the flower—developed strength to protect itself from the beetles. It made itself strong to survive the damage from the crawling. Twenty million years of surviving is a long time,” she said, looking out into her flooded front yard. “Don’t you think?”

          “Yeah,” I said.

          Slowly, carefully, she shuffled back to the dining room table. She sat down across from me and folded her hands. “I’d say we can survive just a little bit longer. Wouldn’t you?”

          The outsides of my mouth turned up at the corners. I nodded and looked down at my tea. It was bitter and lukewarm, but I finished the cup.

 - – -

Booth Burning

            On the news the other day, I heard someone died in a tanning booth.

            He was burned alive.

            Not because he stayed in the booth too long; it was because the building was burning down. I could see it in my head. Orange flames and black smoke. I could smell burnt Thanksgiving turkey, and it made the hairs in my nose twitch. I could see HIM, realizing that it was hotter than usual in the tanning booth that day. Had they bought new bulbs? he must have wondered. He was probably listening to an IPOD. Maybe he was even looking down at his nice six-pack abs and bludgeoning bronze skin when he saw the first flames licking the backs of his calves. What panic then, he must have felt. And what was worse? The fact that he was about to die? Or the fact that he was about to die while—gulp—tanning? What would the girls think? He probably had three or four of them at his beckon call. Now, they would know that he had faked it: faked the skin tone, faked the white, capped teeth, faked eating organic foods because he “cared so much about his health.” They would know. The whole world would know. Because that vain son of a bitch had died in a tanning booth, burnt alive before melanoma and chemotherapy. Died. Dead. Gone.

            This happened right around the time when Anna Nicole Smith dropped dead, mind you. A woman who, in her heyday, was in Playboy Magazine, often. A woman who had put on about sixty pounds. Who had become a laughing stock. Who had married a dying man in a wheelchair in the name of love—or money. Who had lost her son to an antidepressant / pain killer cocktail. Who had dropped dead after losing all the weight by using some diet pill that advertised on late night television. She had been alive; she had been dead.

            Just like the tan guy in the booth.

            I had gone tanning once before, prior to a trip to Florida. I’m Irish. Therefore I’m pale. I would have been laughed off the beach if I hadn’t gone tanning. So I understood how one could be burnt to death in a tanning booth. My first time there, I walked up to the front counter. There was a girl, brain capacity of a bird too dumb to fly south for the winter. She looked like a carrot. There was a single wrinkle between her plucked eyebrows. She didn’t pop her gum, but that was only because she didn’t have any gum. In my mind, though, she popped her damn gum. She looked up at me, and you would have thought I was a Cancer patient.

            “Oh,” she said. “First time? You won’t want to go in long. You’ll burn.”

            I could smell tanning oil. I could smell frying flesh—the way a public swimming pool smells on a Saturday afternoon in August. Sweat and Cancer. Yum-eee. But I paid anyway: five dollars a session. We are a country paying for disease. We are a country paying to cure disease. We are an infinity sign, constantly moving back to where we came from. We will wake up cavemen someday and wonder what the hell happened. Wonder how we had reverted. The infinity sign, I’ll say…..∞

            I was shown to a room in the tanning salon—my own private space. I locked the door behind me, unsure of what I feared might come in. A murderer? A clown? What did I expect? Ah, yes, the human fear of being caught naked in public.

            I peeled off my clothes, so as to avoid any unsightly tan lines on the Florida beaches. As if the natives wouldn’t know I was a tourist. The way I walked would tell them as much. The way my calves shook and buckled on wet sand. The way I was a touch pudgy in the middle—oh, they would know.  I stepped into the booth, and the floor to ceiling lights started to hum. They glowed blue. I imagined I was in an alien spaceship. Get ready for the probe…..

            I was horrified to admit that the blue lights felt good. They felt so. So. Warm. And in the middle of a New York winter, WARM was a sensation long forgotten. In the middle of a New York winter, you forgot that warmth existed. You didn’t miss it because you couldn’t remember what it felt like. But the blue lights made me remember. I found myself thinking about the ocean: something I never thought about, since I hated water. I despised open water. I refused to swim. Boats made me sick. I pictured creatures circling me and chewing off my ankles. And the blue lights made me want to be in the middle of it—on a boat, maybe, drinking tequila out of a clear bottle with a dead worm at the bottom. The blue lights made me want to have bronze skin. They made me want to stay there forever. Get TAN. Bronze. Golden. Like a golden GOD. The blue lights told me it could happen. The dream could come true. I could be one of the beautiful people.

            But the blue lights left. They clicked off, and I almost fell backwards out of the booth. Like I really had felt a probe in my ass. The blue lights were not so beautiful in the dark. Motionless, metal snakes, they were. The beaches were gone. I didn’t want to be on a boat. What the hell had I been thinking? Me, on a boat? I got scared in the bathtub.

            That newscast, though. I understood the newscast. I understood how that guy had been burned alive. The blue lights had told him to stay. Stay with us. We’ll keep you safe. We’ll make all your dreams come true.

            They interviewed the guy who owned the tanning establishment. He felt terrible, he said. He wanted to apologize to the family. However, “we have yet to discover the cause or source of the fire.” It took all I had to not pick up the phone and dial, dial, dial—911. Operator? Yes, I know what caused that fire. Yes, operator, it was the blue lights. Yes, they burnt him alive. They had lost their patience. They didn’t want to watch someone slowly waste away in a hospital bed, with wrinkles and badly shaped moles. They wanted something more immediate—something they could laugh about. So they killed him. He was punished, like all those smokers who say the Surgeon General is a bunch of shit. He was punished for doing what he knew could kill him. And loving every second.

 

            The night after the newscast, I had a dream. I saw the poor bastard, before he was burnt alive. Before melted skin was all that was left. He was standing outside the tanning salon. He was talking on a cell phone—brain tumor—and smoking a cigarette—lung Cancer—whining about being hung-over from too much tequila—liver failure—and bragging about the sex he’d had the night before—HIV, AIDS, hepatitis, gonorrhea,  crabs. Living the life. Probably had a great job. Owned a great car. When he had woken up that morning, had he known he was going to die?

            I’ve often wondered that about people who bite it in freak accidents. Did they wake up that morning, knowing there was something? ….something? ….they couldn’t figure it out. Did the coffee taste better or worse? Was there anything different about the day it happened? I wondered about the dead guy from the tanning booth: did you know it was coming? Watching him in my dream, in front of that tanning salon, I doubted it. He thought he was going to live forever, just like the rest of us. Everyone else will die, but I’ll figure it out. I’ll live forever.            Not the guy standing in front of that tanning salon. No, seeing him was but a dream. He was faceless in the dream, even, because I had never met the guy. His picture hadn’t been shown on the news, because the news was too late. The news had gotten there in time to report but not in time to see his face before it had melted and dripped down his kneecaps. Had they found it on the floor, like a discarded rubber mask from a kid’s Halloween costume? I hoped so. I hoped it had said something when they’d found it. “I didn’t know I was going to die today,” maybe, or “How’s my tan?”

 

            I was seeing this girl from out of state a few weeks back. She was a student at the university—NYU, right in the heart of Manhattan. I should have known better than to start seeing her. I’d met her at a club. You should never date someone you’ve met at a club. But I remembered thinking she was hot, so I’d programmed her number into my phone. I’d called her two days later and taken her to dinner. Things went fine for awhile until that whole thing about Anna Nicole Smith.           

            The girl’s name was Amy. She was beautiful: more attractive than most of the girls I hung around. I don’t know what she had seen in me. I wasn’t handsome; wasn’t rich. I didn’t even own an auto, since I’d spent my entire life in the city. I had a couple years on her—maybe she wanted to use me to rent a car.

            “So what do you do?” She’d leaned forward across the checkerboard-tablecloth and blinked her big blue eyes.

            “Computers,” I’d said. “I work from home.”

            “That must be nice.” She had smiled. “Working from home, you never have to get dressed. You could wear pajamas all day long.”

            It should have struck me that the first thing she thought of was “pajamas all day long.” I should have known that her astounding idiocy would one day be the end of us.

            But it went on like this for weeks. We had almost made it to a month.

            Then, Anna Nicole, RIP.

            We’d gone to dinner that night, after the newscasters had spent the afternoon calling Anna Nicole a “no-talent,” a “laughing stock,” after Neil Cavuto on Fox News had asked Clint Eastwood what he thought of the whole thing as if cowboys care when people die.

            The topic had come up in our conversation.

            “It’s just so sad, isn’t it?” Amy had asked.

            I had shrugged. “I don’t know.”

            “I mean, it’s just like Marilyn Monroe.”

            I wanted to smack her. I had never wanted to hit a woman so much in my life.  

            “She died under mysterious circumstances, too. And they were both beautiful blonds…”

            Yes, that was as far as the similarities went. Monroe was an icon. Anna Nicole had been happy nude, and America considerd this “celebrity.” Much as Paris Hilton is “celebrity.” “Celebrity” is dictated by the dumbest people in the US of A. And, unbeknownst to me, my girlfriend was one of them.

            “But isn’t it sad?” she had asked me again.

            “No,” I had replied. “I think it’s hilarious.”

 

            When I was a kid, there was this bully. He lived two blocks down from me, in the middle of Brooklyn. I’d been a scrawny kid: an Irish outcast in a sea of Italian beefcakes. I had been an easy target. Tommy Fatone had decided to make me his bull’s-eye of choice. He used to wait for me, after school. I never tried to run. There had never been a point. Like I said, he lived two blocks away. He knew where to find me, if he wanted. My mother had never stopped boys fighting. She had always told me, “Son, it makes you into a man.” She’d said those sorts of things because I hadn’t had a father. He had died. Run off. Been abducted by aliens. Who knew? I didn’t, and I never wanted to know. My mother had died before she’d told me, and that was a-okay.

            So she’d let Tommy Fatone beat the shit out of me twice a week. Just when the bruises would start to fade, the bloody lip would start to heal, I would just be able to eat again. Then Tommy would wait for me after school, and do it all over again. I was no social outcast. I had friends. But my friends were Irish, too, and since we were just kids, my friends were still small. Irish guys don’t grow until their teens. This was bad, and this was good. It was bad because you got the shit kicked out of you as a kid. It was good because once you started to grow, you ended up bigger than the bullies. Then, you spent your time after school washing the blood from your knuckles.

            I never got the chance to bloody Tommy Fatone, though. On the day of my tenth birthday, he was hit by a taxi. It happened in front of my house, so he’d probably been on his way over to sock me a few. But he was hit by a taxi that day instead. I’d run outside to see—I’d wanted to see, but there had been nothing good to look at. There had been no blood spatter. No eyeballs popping out of sockets. No, he had just been hit by the taxi and thrown onto the pavement. They told me he hit his head. I’d said something about “he deserved it,” and I’d been sent to the school counselor for a month before they’d cleared me of so-called psychological problems.

            I wanted to ask them about Tommy. Did he have those psycho problems? Did he have a father? Had he been beaten as a kid?  At the time, I guess I had thought people had to be made bad. Years later, I would realize people were actually just born that way.

 

            On a rainy New York afternoon, I made my way to the burned out shell of that tanning salon. I had to get there fast, before they tore it down. That was the thing about New York: always moving, moving, never looking back. The tanning salon: it was far away from where I lived, since I didn’t live in the sort of neighborhood where you would see too many tanning salons. It took three subways to get me there. I kept thinking about the faceless head I’d seen in my dream, wondering why I wanted to see the tanning salon. WHY did I care about the tanning salon?

            It looked skeletal—like bones painted black. The sign out front had already been torn down. I pictured a family member—sister, mother—tearing down that sign to dishonor the place that had killed her brother, son. In homage to him—torn the face off the murdering monster.

            Or had it been drunk kids? The university was close, after all. Drunk kids, maybe.   Because you had to wonder: what if the burnt bastard didn’t have a sister/mother? What if he had been all alone? Like me. Living in the big city. Flowing in and out of people’s lives. Never making a difference. Never making a foothold. Maybe he had been like that, too, and no one was mourning the death of a man who nobody knew. It made me glance over my shoulder, thinking these thoughts, like the grim reaper was creeping up.

            Because I knew it. Maybe the burnt bastard had known it, too.

            When the time came. When I wake up some morning and never go to sleep that night. When I am dead. Maybe I won’t make it into the news. Maybe I’ll just fall away into oblivion, all by myself, in my shitty apartment. And no one will miss me. There will be no one to put flowers on my grave. No one to cry at my funeral. Someday, I will die, and there will be no one to pick a preacher.

            I was careful to not make eye contact with the tanning salon that day, because I knew it was better than me. With its broken blue lights and burnt floors and carpets, it had killed a man. In so doing, it had made a man into a legend. People would talk about him for years: remember the guy who burnt to death in the tanning booth? Wasn’t that hilarious? They would talk about Anna Nicole, too, since she had BEEN SOMEONE once. People would know they had died, and they would remember something about them. Because they had died in horrible, memorable ways. Tragic deaths. Burning flesh and a broken heart.

            And someday I’ll die, too.

            And there will be no one to remember. 

Stuck in a Bad Place

The day after I didn’t get into grad school, my car broke down in Upper Amberville.

I’m crammed in the front seat of Bob’s tow truck. Bob is an old guy—mid-seventies—”been doing this gig for forty years,” so he says. He has a huge wart on his face that I suspect will start talking to me at any moment, and I can’t stop staring at it.

I’m wedged next to Bob and his wart because, when my car broke down, I was driving with two of my coworkers: Jim and Alex. I’m sitting next to Bob because neither of my two male coworkers wanted to sit next to Bob. So here I am, with good old Bob shifting gears between my black-slacks-covered knees. I’m hung-over and trapped in Upper Amberville with my obnoxious boss and my coworker, Alex—the only man I have ever considered cheating on my boyfriend with. I’m stuck staring at the crumpled soft pack of Kools on Bob’s dashboard, wondering why the hell I didn’t bring my cigarettes on this damn business trip to Columbus, Ohio.

* * *

I’m in the wine industry. I don’t want to be in the wine industry. The wine industry (in general) is a business of greedy swine, and I do not think I am a greedy swine. I don’t fit into the wine industry, beyond my bludgeoning alcoholism. That trait makes me successful, because I can drink more than most people can drink. Which in turn means I can be sober when other people are drunk. Which in turn means I can make people do things they may not want to do sober. Which is what makes me a high demand sales person in the wine business. As I said, though, I don’t want to be in the damn wine industry. I’m very happy with my soul, and I don’t want to sell it to the company when I retire.

So about eight months ago, I decided I wanted out for good. I decided I wanted to go to grad school and do the thing I had always been meant to do—be a writer, but a teacher on the side. That way, I could work on my writing while teaching others to write, while getting a steady paycheck. Makes sense, right? So I spent months preparing, continuing to work this dumb-ass job that I hate. I studied my butt off for the GRE. I researched schools while studying my butt off for the GRE. I scoured the country to find old college professors who could write my recommendations. I spent seven-hundred dollars on application fees, applying to seven different schools. And I waited. I waited eight months until that final letter came—the letter that made me want to start shooting postal workers in their beds at night.

It was unexpected, certainly, to not get accepted anywhere, especially considering my undergraduate performance. I had graduated from Ohio University Magna Cum Laude. That means 3.84. Who, in God’s name, graduates from a party school with a 3.84? Well, I did, and not a bit of it mattered when it came to my future. Because I didn’t really use the things I’d learned. I had been a creative writing major. How did that equate to almighty Wine Sales? Quite frankly, it didn’t. And no one in the job market cared about my grades in college. Nobody asked about my extracurricular involvement or volunteer service at the Humane Society. Waste of time, waste of time—that was all I could think about as I stared at that final rejection letter from Brighton State University. Brighton freaking State, for crying out loud! Even my girlfriend who didn’t know who was president during the Civil War had gotten into BSU. But, not me. No, I had gotten in nowhere, and that meant, I had no clue what I was supposed to do.

* * *

We’re standing in an auto shop on Hick Avenue. No, really, it’s on Hick Avenue, in Upper Amberville, Ohio. We’re talking to the guy who owns the place: Al. Al has got to be a Vietnam veteran. He’s mid-sixties, wearing a camouflage jacket, and he has the most accomplished mustache I have ever seen close up. It stretches across his lip and down either side of his mouth, hanging limply like a balloon that’s run out of air. It belongs in the circus or at least in a traveling carnival sideshow.

Al looks at the three of us. His head bobs, and I realize he’s laughing. It sounds more like choking. “You folks aren’t from around here,” he says.

“No,” Jim replies.

It’s obvious. We’re all in business suits, and we smell like something other than fried food and dirt.

“Well, I’ll get someone to look at your car, but it could be awhile.”

“How long is awhile?” I ask.

“A couple hours, maybe. It just depends on what we find.” He starts scribbling on a piece of yellow paper.

Al’s is a place where you can still smoke inside. The stereotypical conventions of modern society haven’t reached Upper Amberville. They don’t know it’s a faux pas to smoke in a professional setting, and this is a relief to me—me, who thinks we’re slowly turning into Orwell’s 1984. Soon, we won’t be able to drink beer in public, either. Then, they’ll move on to meat—no more steakhouses, and Tony Paco’s up in Toledo would have to stop selling hotdogs.

Al rips off the piece of yellow paper. “Here. I wrote our number down. Why don’t you call us every hour or so and see if your car’s done?”

“Why don’t I give you my cell number?” Alex says. “Then, you can call us when the car is done.” He looks at his phone. “Shit, I’m roaming.”

“He can have my number,” Jim says, stepping forward.

Al looks at him kind of funny before nodding his head and writing Jim’s phone number on the palm of his dirty hand. It makes me uncomfortable. I wouldn’t want my phone number on Al’s hand. It would make me feel like taking a shower.

“Is there anyplace to get something to eat around here?” Jim asks. Ah, yes, fat Jim: always in the mood for something to eat. You could see it in his gut, hanging over the waist of his belt and dress pants.

“Yeah,” Bob says. Oh, yeah, Bob the tow-truck driver is still with us, too. He’s waiting for his eighty-five dollars—an increase in tow-truck price because of the rise in diesel fuel costs. “I can take you down the block. There’s a nice family joint. It’s where I eat my breakfast every day.”

I don’t want to go where Bob eats his breakfast every day. I don’t technically want to eat at all. I’m still nauseous from the four—was it five?—shots of tequila I’d had before bed the night prior, after the final rejection letter and after my cat had bit me and made me bleed.

“Fine. Sounds fine,” Jim says, though, and we tromp back outside into the rain. Did I mention it’s raining? I mean big drops, too, freezing cold and on the verge of becoming snow. It just had to be raining. I just had to forget my smokes. I just had to be in Upper Amberville, when my car broke down, the day after I didn’t get into grad school.

* * *

I’d been with my boyfriend, Mark, for two years. We’d been friends for six before we’d dated, so it had seemed like a perfect idea. Technically, it was a perfect idea, for awhile. There were fights, but every couple has fights. The couples that don’t fight are couples I don’t know because they’re obviously boring, and who wants to hang out with boring, happy couples anyway? So, we fought at times. We were two very different people with very different ideas on life, but it had always worked out eventually.

But lately, we’d been fighting a lot more. I’d been a lot more unhappy—unfulfilled and unsure. Mark, of course, didn’t see this. He surely knew we were fighting more, but I still seemed to be the girl he wanted to be with. That was fine, because I was pretty sure I still wanted to be with him, too.

So that was why Alex was such a huge problem.

Alex was everything my boyfriend wasn’t.

He was extremely tall—a basketball player back in college. He was the kind of guy girls called “hot” at bars. He was very, very outgoing, because you have to be in sales. He was driven and successful. He had a Master’s degree in business. He knew how to manage money. He didn’t smoke weed. He didn’t live with his parents. See, these were all things that my boyfriend was not. It drove me nuts, because I had to spend so much time with Alex, and Alex liked me.

No, he really liked me. He wanted me to break up with my boyfriend and date him instead. He had not said this in so many words, but he had implied it. He had implied it, all over Ohio and up into Michigan, to people I didn’t even know. Strangers would come up to me at company functions and say, “Is this her?” Alex would say, “Yes.” It gnawed at me. It made me chug my drinks, and it kept me up at night. Because I knew damn well that Alex was the kind of guy I was “supposed” to be with, as opposed to Mark, who was the kind of guy who would never be able to “provide.” I use quotation marks because I hate this bullshit talk—all of the “supposed to” talk. I was “supposed to” be working a job I enjoyed. I was “supposed to” be going to grad school. In the long run, “supposed to” doesn’t mean a thing.

* * *

“I don’t know why I ordered this. I’m not even hungry.”

“You should eat,” Jim says, digging into his bacon, eggs, and hash browns.

“No, I don’t think so. It looks….unnatural.”

“It’s eggs,” Alex says at my side. “How can eggs be unnatural?”

“I don’t know. They don’t look right.”

“They look fine,” Jim says, mouth full of food.

“They don’t look fine. Nothing in this place looks fine. It’s all….unnatural.”

“Technically, we’re what looks unnatural.”

Alex is right. When we walked into Ken’s Family Diner about twenty minutes prior, we’d been stared at like the villains in an old Clint Eastwood Western. Alex, in his perfectly pressed navy blue suit. Jim in his wrinkled dress shirt, gaudy green tie, and slacks. Me in my modern-woman business attire. Unnatural for Upper Amberville.

“Just eat it, Sara,” Jim says again, halfway done with his meal.

“No,” I say into my scrambled eggs and whole wheat toast. “They look like rubber. I’m not eating them.”

“I’ll eat them,” Alex says, picking up my plate and pouring my greasy, fluorescent yellow eggs onto his toast. He’s doing it as a favor, and I feel bad for him. He’d only ordered toast. He had probably known about the rubber eggs and decided against it. Now, I’m forcing him to eat mine so as to avoid a riot in the world of Ken’s Family Diner. He takes a bite and chews. He swallows, and I half expect him to start glowing green from radioactivity. Instead, he sets his fork down. “I’m done.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Jim asks, spitting fragments of potato onto his plate.

“Nothing,” Alex says. “I’m just not hungry anymore.”

Jim shrugs. “Fine. I think it’s good.”

“You’d eat shit if it had the right garnish,” I say. The hostility in my voice shocks even me, and I suddenly fear the prospect of losing this job I despise.

Alex saves me, though, because he starts laughing. “Damn,” he says, shaking his head.

Jim starts laughing, too, and I’m saved for the time being. I am still worried, though. If I had the gall to say something like that to my boss, what else was likely to bubble up?

“How long does it usually take to fix a car?” I ask.

“Dunno,” Jim replies. “It could take all day.”

“I can’t believe it,” Alex says, staring over Jim’s shoulder. “They have a Velvet Elvis.”

I look in the direction of his gaze. Yep, they’ve got a Velvet Elvis. Why should this be surprising, considering the circumstances? They also have a cushioned toilet seat and holes in the bathroom walls.

“I’ve never seen an actual Velvet Elvis,” Alex says, mystified.

“I could have lived my whole life without seeing one and been just fine,” I say, sipping my coffee. Coffee in a greasy spoon, I can handle. Plus, I’m so hung-over, I think I might throw up if I don’t put something in my stomach.

“What time is the wine tasting again?” Jim asks, as if he isn’t the one in charge.

Alex glances at his watch. “It’s at two. We can make it. We’re halfway there, and it’s only eleven. I have faith in Al.”

Why the hell did he have faith in Al? I felt like we were characters in Deliverance. As we spoke, Al was probably dumping our car somewhere. Our food was probably poisoned. The grumpy bitch of a waitress was probably just waiting to call Al and tell him we’d passed out. Then, they’d bring out The Gimp, and we’d be screwed, literally.

“What are we going to do until then?” Jim asks, slurping at his tall glass of orange juice as if he’s just as hung-over as I am.

Alex shrugs. I don’t see it, but I feel his arm rub against mine as his shoulders go up. “There’s got to be something to do in Upper Amberville.”

“I find that hard to believe,” I mutter.

* * *

When the final graduate school rejection letter arrived in the mail the day before, I didn’t start to cry immediately. I started to cry when I told my father. And it wasn’t your usual, everyday bit of a cry. It was painful, wrenching sobs that hurt my stomach and chest. My father hugged me, and then, he cried, too. That made things even worse, because my father never cried. The only time I’d seen my dad cry had been when his father had died, and that had been when I was a little kid. So this came as a hell of a shock.

I then called Mark, who said, “I’m sorry,” but nothing else.

Because what else was there to say? Mark was not a man of many words. He wasn’t the kind of guy to give a pep talk, as in, “It’ll all be okay, Sara. God has a plan. You’re going to figure it all out. Yes, honey, it’ll all be okay.” No. That was not my Mark, and I didn’t expect it from him. Talk about Twilight Zone. If my father cried and my boyfriend gave emotional support all on the same day, time would start moving backwards or some other sci-fi shit.

Mark came over to my house twenty minutes later, though, bearing a bouquet of wildflowers. Also highly out of character for a man who knew I treasured a good martini over a red rose any day. I was barely able to speak. I handed the flowers to my mom and left my house.

Once in the car, Mark suggested coffee. I refused.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

It sounded completely juvenile, but I wanted to get drunk. Really drunk—puffy, red face and all.

He chuckled. “Drunk? Okay. Where?”

Someplace where I can forget about grad school. Someplace where I can forget about our stagnant relationship. Someplace where I don’t know anyone.

This was a Paul Bunyan of an order. I knew everyone in town. I knew all the bar owners. I knew the bartenders. I had friends in low places; I had friends in high places. Trying to be a stranger was not going to be easy.

But Mark had an idea: “Dave’s?”

Yes, Dave’s. Dave’s was a Maumee dive. I didn’t know many Maumee people. I never drank on that side of the river, and I didn’t even like the bar that much. But it was definitely a place where I wouldn’t know anyone. So we went to Dave’s.

I knew what I needed: tequila. Tequila never failed to heal what ailed me. When Mark and I had been fighting on Valentine’s Day, tequila had brought us together. When I’d made the gargantuan mistake of hanging out with Alex outside of work, and when we’d text-messaged each other across the room so that no one would notice, tequila had been the panacea.

(U miss me?

No. Am I torturing you?

U may think you torture me, but I think I entice you. Am I wrong?

No, but I’m with Mark right now.

And I respect that, but you do think about me sometimes, don’t you?

Yes, but I love Mark.)

I’d run out of that place without saying goodbye to Alex. I’d gone to another bar and started shooting shots of tequila, and no one could figure out why I was crying in the bathroom. Tequila, me and you forever, even more so than wine.

But that night after the rejection letter—shot after shot, and things started to get fuzzy. I don’t remember the drive home. I don’t remember what I did when I got back. I do know that I woke up with scratches all over my arm, so I must have fought with my cat. Other than that, I could have ridden home in a spaceship, and I wouldn’t have known the difference.

* * *

I feel like a giant, ready to stomp on an entire village the size of one of my shoes. I scare the little people with my magical flashing light. Ha hahaha. Run in fear, little people, hide from my tyranny!

Really, I’m looking at a train set and taking pictures with my digital camera because the train set is cool. So I sometimes let my imagination get the best of me. Standing there, in Upper Amberville, my imagination is all I have.

It’s been an hour and a half. We’ve been wandering the so-called “uptown” village. I’ve seen a Scottish store with kilts, a Christian book store doubling as a florist, and a shitty, little coffee shop—more cave than cove. Now, I’m in a general store, with everything from books to candy, model trains to kites. It’s a very general, general store.

Alex comes up behind me. “Cool,” he says.

“Yeah. Right?” I take another picture—a house lit up for Christmas, even though it’s April.

“My grandpa used to collect these things,” he says, bending his tall self over and poking his dark head of hair between buildings. “We inherited them after he died. I remember, when I was a kid, we used to put them up around the Christmas tree.”

I think this is strange, because his story sounds like my story. Only, it was my grandpa who used to collect model trains, and it was my mom who used to put them up at Christmas time. I don’t say this, though. Alex and I don’t need to have anything more in common.

He straightens up and looks at me. “I can’t believe we’re missing out on Schafer.”

Oh, right, Schafer wine: the reason I’m standing in a dark corner in a general-general store, staring at a guy I’ve had sex with in my dreams. “Worse things have happened,” I reply. Like not getting into grad school. Like maybe, sort of, cheating on my boyfriend in my head.

Alex nods. “True. And I could think of worse people to be trapped with.”

He’s talking about me. No one would say that about Jim. My phone starts to vibrate in my purse. I pull it out and flip it open. “Hey, Mark,” I say loudly, and Alex gets away from me as fast as humanly possible. Alex doesn’t talk about Mark. He doesn’t ask about Mark. He wants to pretend Mark doesn’t exist, so he always leaves when Mark calls.

“Hey, how are you?” my boyfriend asks.

“Hung-over. You?”

“Not bad. I have to go to class.”

“You’re not going to believe what happened.”

“What?”

“Our car broke down on the way to Columbus, and I’m trapped in Upper Amberville.”

He starts laughing. “No way.”

“Yes. Can you believe this shit?”

“Who are you there with?”

“Jim and Alex.” I don’t fear telling him this, because these names mean nothing to him. Mark never asks about my job. Mark doesn’t know the people I work with, and I like to keep it that way. “It’s not too bad, I guess, although a glass of wine would probably make my head feel better.”

“Yeah,” Mark says. “Well, good luck. I have to run.”

“Okay.”

“I love you,” he says.

“I love you, too,” I reply out of habit. We always say I love you when we hang up the phone, even when we’re pissed at each other. So I hang up and turn around to find myself alone with all the trains and tiny people. I tuck my phone into my purse and my camera into my pocket. I step back into the light of the general-general store main arena, and catch sight of Alex. He’s frozen, staring into another aisle much like that of the miniature trains.

“Sara,” he hisses.

This makes me uncomfortable, because it means he caught me watching.

“Come here,” he says, still staring into the aisle ahead.

“Where’s Jim?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I don’t care. You have got to see this shit.”

“What is it?” I step up to his side. “Holy shit,” I spit. “What the….?”

It’s an aisle of sex toys. In the middle of a general store in uptown Upper Amberville. What the hell are sex toys doing in the same place as miniature trains? I step into the aisle, shoving Alex out of the way.

“What the….?” It’s like saying it makes me feel better, makes it make sense.

There’s a row of blow-up dolls to my left. There’s a huge, purple dildo on the right. On an upper shelf, there are multi-colored gels and lubricants in a variety of flavors: grape, sour apple, tangerine, all promising extended orgasm and increased sensitivity. Not to be outdone are a barrel-full of fluorescent condoms, and I wonder how long they’ve been there. Should they be in some sort of museum displayed as antiques, because let’s be honest, how often do people go to their neighborhood general store to buy birth control? And how often do people in Upper Amberville get laid?

I’m considering all this when I realize Alex has picked up one of the blow-up dolls.
He pushes her in my face. “Take me home. Love me.” When I don’t respond, he turns her to face him. “She must be an old model. The one I have at home vibrates.”

“Oh, shut the hell up,” I mutter, shoving past him. “You don’t need a blow-up doll.”

“I haven’t gotten laid in eight months.”

“Huh?” I turn around. “What?”

“Seriously.”

“Wow.”

“Thanks.”

“Really, where is Jim?”

“There’s a bar across the street. He went to get a beer.”

I nod. “Yeah, I think that’s a good idea at this point.”

“I have a better one.”

* * *

For your consideration: what am I doing? This feels like one of those moments in life when you suddenly realize you are truly, truly at rock bottom. I’m sitting on a damp curb, in my super-nice business-woman attire, smoking a cigarette and drinking whiskey straight from a paper-bag-wrapped bottle. It’s stopped raining, so I’m not getting wet, but I’m still sitting on a curb getting drunk. Yes, folks, this is what the gutter looks like.

“Eight months?”

“Yeah.”

“Eight months.”

“Yeah.”

“How the hell did that happen?”

Alex shrugs and takes the bottle back. “Don’t know. Haven’t met a good girl. They’re all taken,” he says pointedly.

I suck my cigarette like a thirsty kid with a popsicle. “I never would have guessed.”

“It’s true.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t get in to grad school.”

“You applied to grad school?’

I nod. “Mm-hmm. Seven.”

“You didn’t get into any?”

“Nope.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Hmm. Well. This day sucks.”

“Like you said, it could be worse.”

“I’m not so sure anymore. I mean, I haven’t been laid in eight months. You didn’t get into seven different grad schools, and you have a boyfriend who I refuse to ever meet. We’re trapped in Upper Amberville, getting drunk on a curb in business suits. Plus Jim’s here, which puts a damper on any situation, even when really expensive wine is involved.”

“Well, when you put it that way…”

“So you don’t want to be in wine sales?”

“No.” I shake my head and notice a woman staring at us from across the road. Sure, we’re drinking whiskey at noon on a sidewalk, but at least I’m not wearing tapered, white-washed jeans, bitch. “No,” I repeat. “I don’t want to be in wine sales.”

“Why? You’re good at it.”

“I’m good at a lot of things. Doesn’t mean I like them. I just do them because I can.”

“What were you going to go to grad school for?”

“Writing,” I say and throw my dead cigarette butt into the middle of the street.

“Writing? What kind of writing?”

“Books. Short stories. Fiction.”

“I can’t write.”

“Half of America can’t write. Have you seen the memos that come out of our office?”

He chuckles, and I love the sound. I love when I make him laugh. “Everyone’s good at something, I guess.”

“And you’re good at sales.”

“I am good at sales.” He nods. “I think it’s my calling.”

“Me, too.”

“I like your hair, by the way.”

He’s talking about the color. I was depressed Monday, so I dyed it dark red. I had needed a change, and dying my hair seemed better than committing suicide.

“You just did that this week, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“It looks cool.”

“Thanks.”

He hands me the bottle of whiskey, and I sip away happily. “I’m sorry,” he says. “About the Bronze Boar.”

Oh, right, the Bronze Boar. That was the night of the text-messages. The forward flirtation. The night when Alex went from playful to aggressive. I nod. “Me, too. I was…misbehaving.”

“You were just reacting to me. I should have been…” He shook his head. “Anyway….”

I look at him, and I want to kiss him. I always want to kiss him. It makes my stomach ache the way old chicken in a Mexican restaurant might. “You know, I am so tired of trying to make decisions. It’s like, my mind won’t focus anymore. I’m never clear.”

Alex nods toward the whiskey bottle in my hand. “Well, you are drinking whiskey in the middle of the day.”

“It’s not that,” I say, shaking my head. “It’s like, I’m so overburdened with bull shit—I can barely make sense of it.”

“Is this about grad school?”

“And you,” I say. “I think about you more than I think about my boyfriend, and that can’t be good.”

“What? Where did that come from?”

I shrug, and all of a sudden, I can’t look at him. Really, where the hell did that come from? Shit. Why did I say that? What was I thinking? Not only was my professional career in serious uproar, I had just stepped headlong into a relationship catastrophe.

Alex stands up. “Sara. I know I flirt, but I’m not asking you to cheat on your boyfriend.”

I don’t stand up. I don’t want to get near his cologne. “I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from.” I feel tears welling up behind my eyes. I feel a pain in my side that can only be my liver finally giving in. I feel like everything, everywhere is falling down on my skull and splashing my brains on the sidewalk. “I’m sorry,” I say again. “I’m screwed up today.”

Alex shakes his head. He has his hands on his hips. He is towering over me, because he’s six-five and I’m sitting on a sidewalk. He looks pissed. “You’re not screwed up. You just can’t say things like that to me when you know I care about you.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying you’re sorry.”

I was going to say “I’m sorry,” but instead, I’m silent.

“Do you mean it when you say things like that or are you just…” He shakes his head and looks away.

“I do mean it. It’s….” I shake my head, too. “I don’t know what to do, and now, we’re trapped in this hell hole together…”

“My mom grew up here,” he says.

“No way,” I reply.

He looks down at me, and I know he’s serious. So before I even realize it, we’re laughing. We’re laughing so hard, more people stop to stare. Alex returns to his seat on the sidewalk next to me and reaches for the bottle of whiskey. “Shit, Sara,” he says and takes a swig. “What are we going to do about each other?”

“I don’t know,” I say. The smell of his cologne is back, and I wish it was edible like a gigantic ice cream sundae at the parlor in my home town. “I don’t feel like making any decisions, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.” Then, for no apparent reason, he leans forward, and he kisses me.

You know, it’s funny, because it isn’t that good of a kiss. It’s kind of awkward, nothing like you see in the movies. It’s because he has a big bottom lip. It’s because I haven’t kissed anyone except my boyfriend—and the occasional girlfriend—in the past two years. It’s because we really like each other, and even though we’re adults, we’re both nervous as hell. For the life of me, I want to kiss that big bottom lip, but I’m just hovering on his top. Plus, he’s a slow, tender kisser, and I’m loopy-passionate, all over the place. He tastes good, though. Wait, he tastes like whiskey, so of course, he tastes good.

As all this registers, he pulls away. I finally look at him, and I realize that I’ve just kissed someone, and that someone is not my boyfriend. “Shit…” I mutter, and once again, Alex stands up.

“Yeah,” he says, wiping his hands on his slacks as if he’s just touched something dirty. “Now, I’m really sorry,” he says.

I’m not feeling anything. I don’t feel passionate; I don’t feel guilty. I feel like I’ve just finished a rerun of CSI on Spike TV: content but unfulfilled, because I knew how the episode was going to end anyway. “Sit down,” I say.

“I don’t think I should.”

“I don’t give a shit. Sit down.”

He sits down, albeit hesitantly. He expects me to speak, but I don’t, so he says: “Why’d you ask me to sit down?”

“Because I don’t want to be alone drinking on a curb.” I push the bottle toward him, but he doesn’t take it.

“What are you going to do?” he asks.

I look over at him, and I don’t know what he’s asking. I don’t even know what we’re talking about anymore, so I just shake my head. “I don’t know.”

Now, he takes the whiskey from me. He takes a sip and sets the bottle on the pavement by his side. “Well, that’s exciting, right?”

I laugh, because I have no other option. “Yeah,” I mutter. “Yeah. You know, I have made one decision today.”

“I thought you didn’t want to make any decisions at all.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve decided I will never move to Upper Amberville.”

He chuckles. “Agreed.”

A door comes crashing open across the street, but it’s not from a bar brawl. It’s just Jim, stumbling out into the midday sun. He’s got his arm around someone: a guy with fewer teeth than a newborn infant. They’re whispering back and forth like old chums, but I think it’s only because they’re keeping each other from taking a dive. Jim’s doing his patented drunk-Jim walk—wide and wary, as if spreading his legs far apart makes him feel more secure.

He pushes the drunk guy away. “Nice to meet you, buddy,” he says, slurring his speech, and it’s not even noon. I’m surprised when he spots us sitting on the curb. “Hey,” he says, yelling this monosyllable across the street. “Hey, the car is ready. We can make it to Columbus!”

Great, just what Jim needs—more alcohol.

And just what I need—more time with Alex.

* * *

I wake up on a bed of coarse, brown chest hair, and I actually don’t mind. I even move my cheek a little, just to feel the full effect. I glance at the clock and realize there is no clock because I’m not in my bedroom. I’m in my living room on a bed that pulls out of my sofa. You see, we can’t fit on my bed, because Alex is too tall, and his feet hit the baseboard.

I’m careful not to wake him. He snores just a little, so I know when he’s asleep. When he’s asleep, I breathe through my mouth in the morning, because I don’t have to worry about my stinky morning-breath. When he isn’t asleep, though, I breathe only through my nose. Ah, yes, the strange behaviors that ensue within the confines of a “new” relationship. Yes, I’m using quotation marks again, because this isn’t really a “new” relationship. It is simply a relationship that has been redefined.

I often wonder if Alex has any mysterious new-relationship idiosyncrasies. Is that why his showers take about three times as long as mine? Is that why he never finishes his entire meal in restaurants, even though he’s six-five and is probably still hungry? And is that why he sometimes seems awkward and nervous when he’s saying goodbye?

I lift my cheek from his chest and take a look at him. He looks cute when he sleeps. Shit, he looks cute all the time to me, I guess. But who in the hell knew I would end up here? Like this? With him?

I slide out from under his tan, muscular arm that seems to perpetually be around me when we’re in bed together. I tip-toe toward my bathroom, because like I said, I don’t want to wake him. Alex—as I have come to realize over the past month—is a mover, so once he’s awake, he’s awake. And once he’s awake, he usually starts working, or running, or golfing, or some other random task that he has assigned for the day. That means I hate waking him, because it means he’ll leave, and I usually miss him as soon as he’s gone.

I step into my bathroom and close the door quietly. Oops. I look in the mirror and realize I don’t have on a shirt. What can I say? My personal relationship with Alex rarely involves clothing. Think about all the sexual tension that has amassed between us over the course of the last year, and there’s your explanation.

I take a piss and again, look at myself in the mirror. I have makeup all over my face. I probably smell like the bar from last night. And I don’t even care, because he thinks I’m beautiful anyway.

I step back out into my living room after washing my hands. I do this because Alex does this. Every time he goes to the bathroom—anywhere—he washes his hands. I guess, it’s a courtesy. Or maybe he’s just anal. Either could quite possibly be true, based on what I’ve learned of him as of late, from a relationship standpoint.

I slip into bed, and he immediately reaches for me. He doesn’t speak, but I know he’s awake now. He just sort of rolls over and pulls me in. He puts his cheek against my chest and wraps his arms around me. This is our normal why-did-you-leave-me-alone posture in bed, which is funny, because he’s so much taller than me and yet, he likes it when I hold him, as opposed to vice-versa. I run my fingers through his hair. It feels soft, and it still smells good. I kiss his forehead and wonder how the hell we made it this far unscathed?

I haven’t thought about Mark since the break-up. It was horrible, as you may imagine. I cried for three days—precisely—and then, I called Alex and told him I’d broken up with my boyfriend. Alex had been at my house an hour later. We’d been playing relationship games ever since. Who would call who first? What’s the next sexy, drunk text-message going to say? You know, that kind of thing.

Oh, and did I mention I quit my job? Talk about horrible….it was partly my fault. I’d walked into Jim’s office the day after the wine tasting in Columbus. I’d told him, “I quit,” and walked out. From people I’d worked with, I’ve heard stories. The company hates me. My bosses hate me. I would never work in the wine industry again. Damn, I’m so sad….

Yeah.

Right.

Regardless, it was messy, just like Mark and me. It had taken two hours for our damn breakup to happen. It had come down to a question: “Is there someone else?”

I’d danced around it for awhile, but finally: “Yes, there’s someone else,” because it was true, wasn’t it, and didn’t Mark deserve as much after two years of dating? That had been the end, then, and he’d walked out never to return.

“Hey.” Alex’s eyes are open. I can see them, shining up at me.

“Hey,” I reply, pulling him closer.

“Happy birthday. Your real birthday,” he says, and he leans in and kisses me. We’d gone out the night before, with all of my friends. They’d loved Alex, of course, and he’d been quite taken with them, as well.

“Thanks,” I say in return. “You’re an awfully sexy present to wake up to on my real birthday.”

“Mmm, so are you.” He kisses me again, and that noise lingers in my ear canal. That noise: what is it even? Kind of a purr? A growl? It’s the sound someone makes when they’re eating a really good steak, that’s what it is, and he makes that noise at me all the time.

“I have to go to work,” he says.

“I know.”

“I had fun last night, though.”

“Me, too. Thanks for coming out for my birthday dinner.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it.” He kisses me again. He pulls me to him one more time, burying his face in my collarbone. Then, he’s rolling away from me. I watch him stand up, because he’s only in boxer-briefs, and I’ve never seen someone look so good in boxer-briefs. He’s looking around the room, because quite honestly, who knows where all of our clothes wound up last night? This morning? Whatever….

He finds his jeans.

“When do I get to see you again?” I ask, not even putting forth the effort involved in sitting up. I’m comfortable, and from where I am, I have a perfect view of a body seriously lacking in body fat.

He starts talking, standing up, getting dressed. I’m not really listening. I know he’s involved in, say, EVERYTHING, so I know he’s busy. He’s listing off too many activities, and I’m too busy checking him out.

Finally, I just say, “Come here while you’re talking.”

He sits down next to me on the bed. He leans forward, and he wraps his long arms around my shoulders as he continues to list all the shit he has to do in the coming week. I listen, but I touch his neck while he’s talking because I like to feel his skin.

“Okay.” I kind of cut him off, but he’s used to it because he’s known me for over a year. “How about Thursday?”

“This week?”

“Yeah,” I nod. “Can I see you Thursday?”

“Well…yeah, let’s hang out Thursday.”

“Okay.”

He leans forward, and he kisses me. Our kisses are better now—better than that first one on the curb in Upper Amberville. We’ve figured each other out. We’re not nervous anymore, and our mouths are quite well-acquainted. I put my fingers in his hair again, because it’s a feeling that feels good. It feels natural. After a moment, he pulls away. He adjusts his clothes and puts on his watch. I watch him walk toward my front door.

“I’ll see you,” he says, and then, he smiles. It’s not like he’s smiled at me before. It’s a different kind of smile, like a little kid upon hearing the first note of the ice cream truck song. When he closes my front door, I start to giggle, because I’m beginning to realize that this is something good.

I roll over and push my face into the pillow he used last night. It still smells like him. I roll back over and stare at my ceiling, thinking about all the things in my head: you need a job, you need to stop drinking so much, you need direction, direction, direction.

Screw you, voice in my head.

I have direction. I have forward direction. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know where I’ll end up, but I’m moving forward. I’m not stuck in a bad place anymore. I’m changing things, and so far, the changes are good, so screw you, voice in my head.

To think, I just needed clarity. I just needed a day trapped in Upper Amberville to realize that everything was going to be all right. To realize that things were going to be better than I ever could have imagined. I suppose that’s how things always work: you got to walk through the horse shit to get to the green pasture.

* * *