Two thirds of the time, meaningful events in your life won’t happen on a single digit date. The next time it’s the first, or second, or third of a month, remember that chances are, nothing exciting is going to happen to you. It will eventually become the tenth, then the eleventh, then the twelfth, and you won’t even remember the first anymore. Six out of seven times, meaningful events in your life won’t happen on a Wednesday. The next Wednesday you experience, remember that the odds of anything significant happening are against you. That Wednesday will eventually fall into the pile of meaningless Wednesdays you’ve got stored in your subconscious. Eleven out of twelve times, meaningful events in your life won’t happen in the month of May. April will come, you’ll be anticipating May, then, before you know it, it’ll be June. May will have been a silent passerby. By the numbers, your life is boring. This hypothetical day, this Wednesday, the first of May, will probably be meaningless. On this hypothetical morning, I want you to think about how many people in this world are exactly like you. Whose Wednesday, May first, is nearly guaranteed to be forgotten by Thursday, May second. Now think of how many people to whom this day will be unforgettable. Think of the number of people getting married, feeling pain, receiving good news, being diagnosed with cancer, crying at a funeral, having a child, being proposed to, getting into a car accident, getting a job, having their home robbed, and meeting someone they love. These people have defied the odds and will forever remember this Wednesday, May first. So the next time you wake up and you find it to be Wednesday, May first, remember that the odds don’t matter; in a moment you could be anyone.

They who float about the day seamlessly

lazing down a river where their comatose

minds cook the vegetables within their

Ralph Lauren cotton polo t-shirts and their

grinning eyes water as they take another hit

from the cheap shit they bought two months ago.

Hoot and holler, romp and round they fling their

dicks against each other in the twilight.

Grunting and heaving the table is set as

chalices are ceremoniously placed upon its top

in a pyramid at either end they

stand and chug the gauntlet through

their already corpulent masses, high-fives all around

my boys daddy’s home to buy away your troubles

as you pile up SUV after SUV for some acronym

of a reason. You have a mental disorder that

inhibits your abilities so pill after pill is prescribed

and you sell pill after pill to some ignorant

sufferer of false dreams and reality.

The night is old, but Dawn is young

and waits to be fucked in eight different ways.

There is a background hum

to this Kodak moment,

the push-pull we all feel

at the gate of a Maryland cemetery.

Close on a coffee mug—

    World’s Best Dad,

    it might have read—

we interred in a low stone wall

to fade out with the seasons.

Wide on my first cathedral,

my eyes cut face to face,

whole mass of strangers

I never knew I had.

Grip the pew to keep from floating

up to where they say Dick—

    that’s what they called him—

is now, up with Jesus Allah Buddha,

seventy virgins and every cat he ever owned.

They would splice me into holiness,

drag me out to this great exposure,

open up my skeptic’s mouth to

twenty-five disgusting millimeters of God’s love,

a tiny aperture to absolution.

The shutter snaps,

the man in black behind the tripod

says we can go,

new celluloid solemnity

for our mantelpieces.

Image by Brian Cipolla

By Simi Landau

Lindisfarne

We call it Lindisfarne because we are the only ones who still know what that means.

We are like them, the monks copying manuscripts of old, or anyway we try to be. None of us are monks, of course—this time, like the last, some of the clergy were even in on it, the shredding and the bonfires, but they have the nerve to call us Vikings, as if by copying out what’s left we’re pillaging culture or raping the future. Or they would call us Vikings, if they hadn’t excised the worst pieces of history right out of the official History. A comparable analog, anyway. Considerably ruder, though.

Christopher Marlowe stands behind my chair and watches as, letter by letter in a thick felt-tip pen, I copy out Edward II. The edition I am copying is far more modern than he, and every so often he leans down and with a ghostly finger points to a word that modernization mistook and ruined. I wish he wouldn’t. It leaches the ink right off the brittle page, leaving thin outlines of letters behind. I wonder, if he stole enough letters, would he have a voice again, and would it matter, since he’d only be howling his own tragedies to people ignorant of their meanings. At least my way the copy survives.

But he bothers me, standing there, the dust motes of old paper filtering through him. “Go away,” I say, and he nods morosely, turning away from me with a knife in his hand. As he walks off he plunges the knife into his eye and instantly starts to fade away, back to where he came from. He’ll be back. It’s our thing.

Ours is a thankless job. No one outside cares. The ghosts of dead authors don’t help. They watch, silently, these writers whose words have been burned before and will be burned again. We forget Ben Jonson, add letters where they don’t belong, but we never forget fire.

I could have it worse than Kit Marlowe. He died instantly, as reported. Down the row from me, the last few weeks, have been Plato and Socrates. Every time they are banished Socrates sighs and downs a vial of hemlock. We go on our lunch then, as he seizes and thrashes and paralyzes and fades away. It takes some time.

Virginia Woolf keeps trying to steal our things to weigh her pockets down, but even when we succeed in stopping that she drowns again. Small favors: they are all silent. The world has declared they are to be voiceless.

Someone several rows away goes the Hemingway. We hope it is just Ernest again.

Until our ink runs out we’ll continue, because the words, even fragmentary and few as they are, will not run out. The ghosts certainly never will.

Moonwhite Tides

On their walk to work every morning, Bethany made Jackie stop at the gap in the boardwalk so she could stand on the beach. Some mornings they’d be a minute or three late, and the horn in the lighthouse would have already sounded, but Jackie had to wait for a few heartbeats while Bethany looked out at the lighthouse. Other mornings they’d wait, Bethany shifting uneasily on the soft sand until the horn had sounded and moaned away. They did not stop as they walked home. The horn didn’t sound then.

This morning Jackie waited as always, in the grey afterdawn gloom. Last night’s clouds were still heavy, but beginning to scud away. The long guttural complaint of the horn died away and the gulls could be heard again.

“Who’s up there, anyway?” Jackie said, casting a backwards glance at the lighthouse as Bethany rejoined her and they started off. “You know? Who do they get to be the, the keeper, or whatever he is?” It was a point of pride in the town that the lighthouse was nearly fully original, hardly electrified, not automated at all.

Bethany didn’t look back, and shrugged lightly. “I can’t imagine.”

Bethany leaned her forehead against Jackie’s door, hammering slowly with her balled fist. “Jackiiiiie,” she groaned, her eyes shut against the morning. “It’s too early to be this late. Come on.”

There was scuffling, and Jackie opened the door in her bathrobe and the pink hippopotamus slippers Bethany had given her her last birthday. “Well,” Bethany said. “You look like the hot death.”

“Callin’ in sick,” Jackie grumbled. “Hanging out by my toilet this AM.”

“Oh gag, stop breathing on me,” Bethany said.

“All right. Hydrate or something. I’ll try again tomorrow.”

“Yrrr,” Jackie said, and shut the door.

Bethany made the walk to the hotel alone. She arrived at the beach just as the horn in the lighthouse started to sound. She stood and listened, waiting for the sound to die away. Her eyes were fixed absently on the middle distance until a brief movement caught her eye. The lighthouse keeper? she wondered, scouring the smooth sides and small windows of the thing for the interloper. A seagull, she concluded as the cries of the birds clashed over the fading horn.
It took another moment, after the sound was completely washed away by the morning, for Bethany to realize that she had to go. Without Jackie’s presence behind her, without eyes pulling on her, the lighthouse seemed more important than the hotel today. But they were already a woman down, Bethany knew. Looking up to the windows one more time, Bethany pulled herself away, back onto the boardwalk, away from the lighthouse.

The next morning Bethany walked alone again. Jackie had the flu and would not be out of bed for the better part of the week, and again, today, Bethany could not feel a pull to walk away from the lighthouse. It was as if, without someone watching her, her behavior in the real world, the world where you have a job and you go to work so you can get paid and buy shoes, did not matter. The next morning it was worse. More than simply feeling no reason to leave the lighthouse, Bethany felt herself wanting to go closer. To walk down to where the water lapped the sand. Absolutely not, she told herself, I’ll track sand all over the hotel, and who cleans that up but me?

By the next morning, it was more than an idle desire. Something inside her was more than pulling—it was keening within her, crying out for a closer glimpse of the lighthouse. How else can you know who’s inside? it begged of her. She walked into the wet sand at the line of the tide, and only by running and the good nature of her supervisor was she not late that morning. And now, on Friday, Bethany stood, up to her knees in the cold waves, the white froth splashing up her blouse, into her eyes and mouth like tears.

There was a keening within her.

Not a thought even crossed her mind to look back. She waded as far as she could, and, just before her toes lost their hold on the shore, threw herself in. She was a fine swimmer, not exceptional, and her clothes weighed her down somewhat. She gasped at each swell, but like the job and the apartment behind her, it was as if her lungs had ceased to matter.

At least until she answered the question. Who is up there—who is the lighthouse keeper—who sounds the horn?

Weak-limbed and trembling, she eventually managed to pull herself onto the rocky beach of the lighthouse. Stumbling over herself and coughing up water, she climbed the winding stairs until she reached the top room, where the lighthouse keeper sounded the horn every morning. She opened the door, and no one was there. Bethany shut the door behind her and took note of the control for the light, and the long chain that would sound the horn. There was a clock, ticking lightly, the only indication of what had to happen when.

She sat down in front of the horn, and waited, and understood.

By the time Jackie returned to work, Bethany had been missing for four days. They asked her, of course, since the two had been very close. Jackie told them Bethany had not mentioned anything to her. No, the last times they’d been together, Bethany’s routine had not changed.

After all, Jackie reasoned to herself later, they always stopped to look at the lighthouse. She suspected she knew exactly where Bethany was, even when the bloated body washed ashore, and every morning, on her way to work, she stopped to look at the lighthouse, sure of who was looking back.

50 Words on Hell

What is hell, I asked.

He said, I believe the Crusader kings stands outside the gates of Jerusalem forever, never going in, never able to make peace for what they did.

When we die, he said, when all our sins are counted, we will stand outside the gates of Srebrenica.

Image by Bryan Cipolla

By Bart Comegys

Charlie tried explaining, but the infant weight on his shoulders and the tiny sneakers beating rhythmically against his chest mixed things up. The gravel and crushed asphalt crunched under his feet as he walked, and he held the kid’s knees to keep him steady up top.

“So she said I take things too seriously,” Charlie said. “And then she left.”

Jon walked next to Charlie, balanced on the white line that separated the shoulder from the road. They walked together in the dusty heat like weary soldiers, lost insects. “Uh-huh,” he said.

“Just left,” said Charlie. “Like that. Walked right out, you know?” He let the road swallow up some of his thoughts before he went on. It was hot out and the kid didn’t help. The kid just sat on Charlie’s shoulders and enjoyed the ride, pulling now and then on his hair, watching the heat shift down the road. “Do you think I take things too seriously?” Charlie asked.

“Mmn,” said Jon. He stared down at the line before him, one foot in front of the other.

“Are you even listening?”

“Sure,” said Jon. “Sure. You were talking about something.”

“Something,” said Charlie. “Well yeah, I guess I—hey, stop that, I can’t see.” He pushed the kid’s hands off of his eyes and stepped out of the dark and back into the hard light of a backwater road in late July. “I’ve been talking about Ebee.”

“Screw her.”

“No, I mean I—I don’t know.” They walked on, past patches of low, green blueberry bushes, where the specks of dark juicy sweetness were few yet and far between. The berries weren’t in season, but just a week or two more would find the three of them—Jon, Charlie, and the kid in tow—walking the same sad stretch of road trying to fill a plastic pail with the tart fruits of a long summer. Charlie thought of Ebee again. “What I mean is,” he said, “I can’t just let her—hey, really, cut that out.” He pushed the kid’s hands away from his eyes and forgot again.

“Just hit the little bitch,” said Jon.

“Ebee?”

“No, the kid. Just wail him a good one.” Jon turned to look at the kid on Charlie’s shoulders for the first time in a long time.

“I’m not gonna hit him,” Charlie said. “He’s not even doing anything, really.” A few more steps. “But I can’t get Ebee off my mind, you know? Do I take things too seriously?”

“Jesus, Charlie, it’s too goddam hot out to talk about this.” Jon kicked a pebble and watched it skip across the road and into the underbrush on the other side. Charlie adjusted the kid on his shoulders so he’d stop slipping down.

“This is pretty tough,” Charlie said. “I don’t see why you aren’t carrying him; he’s your brother, not mine.”

Jon looked up and smiled, eyes shut, into the hazy blue sky. “Yeah,” he said, and came back down, “but I hate the little shit.”

“You probably shouldn’t curse in front of him.”

“Fucker isn’t even old enough to talk yet. Probably doesn’t understand a word we’re saying.” He leaned over from the white line and poked the kid on Charlie’s shoulders. “Do you, shithead?” The kid looked at his older brother and smiled. He might have been sorry.

“What I don’t understand,” Jon went on, his feet never straying from the white line tight-wire, “is what the hell possessed my mom to have this thing. I mean it’s not like she needs another fucking kid. She already says I’m disappointing enough for three failure children. Fuck.”

Charlie didn’t know what to say. “Yeah,” he mumbled, and tried to untangle the kid’s hand from a knot in his hair. “I guess you’ve got a point.”

“A point? I’ve got the debate fucking won, Charlie. Hands down.”

“Yeah.” Charlie wanted to say something encouraging, something just to fill the space. He thought of Ebee though, and of the night before on the rusted old merry-go-round behind the elementary school. He thought of the spinning feeling when they stopped going around and the awful lurch when she left him there. The way he lay back and watched the stars all get eaten by the sickly orange glow creeping up from the horizon. The way he took things.

“Jon?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you believe in God?”

Jon stopped, stepped off the line, stared at Charlie. Charlie turned to look at him and felt the kid swaying on his shoulders. The road buzzed then with the summer, like a broken light fixture that flashes on and off, flooding and draining a room. Jon looked his friend in the eye.

“How am I supposed to—Charlie, man, why the shit are you so serious?” He stepped back onto the white line that pulled him forward and kept walking home. Charlie stayed and watched as he stooped in a smooth motion and picked up a chunk of asphalt. The kid started to fidget and Charlie held his knees to keep him steady. Jon threw the asphalt across the road, following through on the motion to turn and face Charlie. “So,” he said, walking backwards, “you gonna fuck this Ebee chick or what?”

Careful
You lift her
fertile weight
delicate
in your palm

Your fingers trace
her smooth skin
youthfully pallid
untouched
under scarlet rouge

Sun ripened
her thick hide is
unweathered
lustrous in its
naked form

She sounds hollow
so you tear
her open
just to
make sure

She smells acrid
her curving belly
unfolded exposes
red jewels glistening
in her womb

Hungrily
you taste her
bitter juice and wonder
if she tastes as sweet now
as you imagined
she would.

My home is drowning in the warm flood of a summer night—I am preserved in my room, at my desk. I can see the night sky through the windows from where I sit in my chair, but it remains a distant background, an untouchable inky ocean that eats the world outside but has no form itself. It carries feelings of sleepiness, romance, and danger. I long to be consumed by its strangeness.

My lamp, which is brass and obscene and lacks a shade, emits a bright light. It is an obnoxious light that announces to anyone who sees its shrill brilliance shooting out from my windows: Here is Shaun, awake and alone in a bubble of untimely alertness. It protects me from the night to which I belong at this time. I turn it off, and the flood enters my room, carrying with it all the perils and excitement of the unseen.

I let the night bathe me. I breathe in her silky darkness; it enters my body gladly, slinks down my throat and pulses through my arteries, delivering her splendors to every cell. In my stillness I can no longer sense a difference between myself and the wind, which is her lips, the sky, which is her face, and the shadows, which are her breasts. I close my eyes and the hair on my neck stands erect; the night continues to carress me while I join it in the anonymity of darkness and fall into semi-conscious bliss.

The night wraps me in her erotic pleasures. I indulge in the sounds of rustling branches brushing one another to produce waves of private whispers. I am overcome by the grasshoppers’ tingling symphony, twinkles and chirps with strange rhythms that seem coherent but undulate before I can comprehend their pattern. The insects’ song has no ending, of course, no release. It merely plays and, like the night, consumes. Never can it come to any conclusion, for always, just before climax, day announces itself with the blare of sunlight—and the evening wonders vanish, discontented. That is why we sleep: We cannot bear to experience the night only to know that it will be taken from us before we have felt its whole.

Such agony is it that night cannot be captured! Such torture is it that as soon as I turn on my lamp, making it possible to record the beauty of the night, to scribble with my pen of her majesty, does the lamp’s garish luminosity cause me to forget all but her simplest wonders and my most basic emotions.

I turn my lamp off and run to my window, engaging my muse in a silent dialogue. I feel her and I try to carry her with me. I try to put her in my pen, and I do so, but by the moment I clumsily turn on my lamp to write she has already slipped from my grasp.

Once more I turn off my lamp and hurry to grab all I can of the night. Why won’t she stay with me? She tickles me and taunts me now, tugging at me from all sides, mocking me with her freedom and her power.
Why can I gaze into your eyes, that mysterious infinite, only sometimes? Let me capture you, Night. Live forever with me.

I sigh and slouch in my chair, enjoying what I can of the night but knowing that she will always evade me and always refuse to be known completely. I love her touches and embraces; it is with stabbing pain that I see the first glint of sunlight.

Image by Mike Grippi

Image by Jake Forney

By C.R. Willsie

There is a doughnut weight to things in my days:
Heavier globes come back around after so many years;
I find myself baking the same gray cakes,
Waking up with the same groggy mouth.

Heavier things, him, are here
Ruining my every birthday dinner
Making me go off in some black hood rage,
Burning everything I put in the oven.

I hated him during main courses
But then he drew funny cake drawings
All over my sugar face!
Like the smiley bastard he can be at dessert.

Cake without frosting. Some things can trick me:
Legs, a touch on the back, any number of whispers
And even the shape of a man’s soft, yeasty skull.
Raw eggs this year.

Ultimately, I have an attraction to lingering globes:
His head, his head, his eyeballs and knees,
A man’s two great elbows and toes!
The Sundays of my past years. Cupcake things.

And though his tongue is more oval,
That lingers, too. I follow devil balls everywhere.
My mind’s ability to love
Circles and cake tins is, actually, that magnificent.

Just a Monday night, but the Sideline Bar and Grill was lively. Not jumping by any means—half the tables were empty and the average age of a patron that night had to be at least 40—but lively it was, in its own sort of way. I’d always thought that about the Line; I’d tried to pin down that air of intangibility that seems to seep from every crevice, but I never could, and I usually got bored trying. But tonight that feeling was especially potent, almost insistent upon itself, and impossible to ignore. This wasn’t a liveliness borne of liquor, lowered inhibitions, and shallow, sexy music like the clubs in the city. It wasn’t an atmosphere of luck, or possibility, or excitement, or SoCo, or Captain’s, or Jaggermeister, or Smirnoff. No, the line was different. Its life was driven by despair: by the janitors from the high school, gathering at the same table nearly every night to discuss the woes of cleaning up after “four hundred barn animals” as Manny would say. By Mr. Roberts, who sat alone at the end of the bar and only talked to Sal. By Mrs. Klinger, who was famous for trying to get with Sal after she was seven shots deep, and then crying after eight when he refused. By a nameless couple who only drank diet sodas and spoke to each other in depressed Russian. By the stereotypical Nam vets, and even Korea vets, of whom there was an absurdly high ratio for such a small town. By the Genesee and Bud and Barton’s that Sal rationalized buying in his typical fashion: “Ok, smartass. I’ll buy the expensive shit, then you make these people buy it. Sound fair?” By the dim, erratic lighting no amount of electricians seemed to be able to fix.

And by me, I thought. And it was true. Most nights I couldn’t pin down my place at the Line. I felt like some rich Brit in the African savannah being driven around by a tour guide in a Land Rover. I was safe in my little metal box, taking notes, and sipping on a strong drink. But the world was open to me, and if the engine stalled a lion could jump into the car at any time. That was most nights. Tonight was different. Tonight, I was one of the lions. Maybe even a hyena. Either way, I could feel a part of my life force slipping into my bar stool, adding to that reservoir of insomniac despair.

“God, you’re talking like a writer again Sam! Leave it in the pages for once! Explain how you feel like a normal person might. If you say one more word about lions, I’m leaving,” Nadine moaned. She had sat at the stool next to mine, trying to flip her short brown hair in an exasperated gesture and failing. “And stop playing around with that damn switchblade while you’re talking, I don’t want to get cut.”

“What do you want me to do, lie? You asked for this, remember? ‘Tell me what’s on your mind. How you really feel, no more bullshit,’ you said. Ring a bell?” I caught my breath, pocketing the knife.

Nadine dropped her eyes to her beer guiltily. I seized her hands.

“I am a writer—”

“A drunk writer.”

“I am a writer, and this is the way I feel, babe. I’m opening up to you here. My own mom doesn’t know about the Africa metaphor. Or the dreams.”

She sighed, and took her hands back, still analyzing her beer.

“I know, I know. But it’s a little too much for me, Sam, and I wish you’d told me a month ago. It would have explained a lot.”

“A month ago, yeah, that would have been grand. ‘Nadine, was it? I’m Sam! I’m a writer, college senior, all around good guy. But I think you should know, I feel disconnected with reality most of the time. Oh, yeah, and by the way, I dreamt the deaths of my two best friends. Before they happened, and on the same day, too. What are the odds? Haunts me every day. But no, please come out with me again. Saturday good? You know, you really do have beautiful eyes.’ ”

Nadine shot me a look. I just grinned back. What was I at, six beers? Yeah. That was when the boldness usually kicked in.

“Maybe you should have told me then. At least I would have known what I was getting into. You know, maybe you should see someone about this, you’re worrying me.”

“Yup, you’re right. It’s working out great for me now isn’t it? Explaining my problems. Fuck it. You know, I’ll just write an article about it! After all, why should you be the only one to know? Shit, let me just worry the whole world! Sal! Hey, Sal! Wanna know who I really am? Wanna be nice and worried tonight? I got some shit that will rock your fucking world.”

Sal was busy taking Mrs. Klinger off of his shoulder and hadn’t heard me. No one had heard me, in fact. Except for Nadine, who was sliding off her stool.

“Found out a lot tonight I guess. And I can’t believe I drove four hours into this hole to—”

“Hear that, Sal? The lady’s got a point! Maybe we should re-name this place. The Hole! Waddaya think?”

Sal still wasn’t listening. Years of tending a noisy bar had taken half of his hearing, and whatever was left was purely selective.

“Ok, Sam. I’m going back. Be damned if I’m going to stay here tonight. And don’t call me. Call a fucking shrink.” With that she had walked towards the door, turning her back on me and almost slipping in a puddle of beer or urine.

“Don’t call you? But it’s been such a nice chat, really!”

She stopped at hearing this, but didn’t turn around, and was shortly on her way again. I could feel the anger coming.

“No, you get the fuck back here! You wanted t’ know bout me, and you got it!”

She shook her head and struggled with the door. The reflection told me she was crying. Good.

“Yeah, fucking leave! Better hope I don’t dream about you, bitch!”

I did. I felt like a lion—drinking from the watering hole of despair like all the others, or maybe pissing in it. Ten beers now and the wheels were turning like never before. I was thinking, yes, that was an understatement. I thought of Nadine, of course. I’d liked her, but how much? Liked her enough to bring her up here to my town, but not enough to take her to see my mother. Liked her enough to open up to her, but not enough to go after her. Why the hell was that? If the mind is a weird thing, mine should be on exhibit somewhere, mom had told me once. I couldn’t disagree.

As usual, I couldn’t tell how I felt. Was I glad it was over? That I would never have to hide the troubled, thoughtful look from her anymore? That I would never have to sneak to the bathroom to write on a napkin the thoughts I didn’t dare say out loud? But I would, and I knew it, probably even then, as the beer soaked into my brain. I would have to hide it again, just not from her. I would have to hide it from everyone—from my mom, my professors, my friends, my co-workers. It was better to keep some things in. Like the way I hadn’t cried at Tom’s funeral. At least I had written to him. Sent my letter all the way to Baghdad. A simple letter, and nothing to let him know he was doomed. Just a “Hi, how are you, be careful out there, we miss you.” But I had signed it “goodbye.” It just seemed right. But I hadn’t cried at Tom’s funeral. I like to tell myself that it was out of respect of his family, that I would stay strong for them. But I knew it was because of my lack of guilt. I couldn’t do anything about war. But I had cried at Keith’s funeral. I cried rivers. But not for everyone else’s reasons: Not for the shock of it all, and not over the tragedy of a wasted life. I cried because I had literally seen it coming, and hadn’t done a thing about it. I continuously saw the GTO slam into the tree, saw Keith get out, saw the look in his eyes when he pulled the pistol out, saw the look in the officer’s eyes when he gunned Keith down, and heard Keith’s head hit the street. Yeah, I’d seen it. So why hadn’t I done anything? Because no man should have to know about his own death, I’d always told myself. Wasn’t it bad enough that I knew? But the truth of the matter was that doing something about it hadn’t even crossed my mind, like it had been out of the question the whole time. And why was that? Why? All I had were question marks, enough to make the Riddler a new suit.

My glass was empty, I realized, and trying to fill it up with thoughts wouldn’t work. Thick as the air was with despair, that watering hole was only in my head. I would have to drink beer.

“Sal, ’nother beer!”

Sal waddled over, and his bulldog jowls said it even before he did.

“No chance, Sam. Never seen you drink like this, and I don’ like it. I ain’t gonna give you no speech, I ain’t much for that. But I will tell you I lost plenty of girlfriends, but here I am. I’ll also say I lost two good pals on July 15th, just like you did, and I ain’t gonna lose one on November 15.”

The statement struck me somehow. Sal certainly wasn’t much at speeches, but he didn’t have to be. The date rang in my mind like a church bell.

“It can’t already be the 15th Sal, can it? Holy shit.”

“Yes it is, and I’m callin you a cab.”

“Thank ya, Sal. I’m sorry.”

Sal picked up the phone and dialed. He put his hand over the receiver.

“Don’t be sorry, just get home safe.”

I stood up to go to the bathroom, and the room was spinning. All for the best, I suppose. Miss the marry-go-rounds anyway I thought. The Line had emptied out considerably: as far as I could tell, only me and the depressed Russians remained.

I ambled into the men’s room and realized Mr. Roberts had beaten me to the good urinal. Grumpily, I walked over to the shitty one and unzipped. At least it would be a quiet piss, me not being Sal, and Mr. Roberts being a practical mute.

“Dreamt about you the other night.” His voice was high and slightly raspy, but careful and deliberate.

Thank God I’m already pissing.

“Is…that right?”

“Yup, it is. And you’re one of us, Sam.”

I looked cautiously over to the man next to me. He smiled, his whiskers seeming to crawl up his face as he did.

“One of…who?” I trembled. I can remember no feeling akin to this one—having been figured out down to a freckle by the most non-descript regular at the Line.

Roberts laughed.

“You know what I mean Sam. Your colors are giving it away. You’re a Firefly.”

I’m a man taking a piss in a bar, I told myself. Roberts gave me a look and chuckled deeply.

“Oh , don’t kid yourself, pal. You’re a Firefly, as we call them. You illuminate the night—just a flash here and there, like all men. Only difference is with you” he pointed a bent finger over the divider “those flashes mean something.”

I zipped my pants and took a deep breath. “Mean what?”

“You’re a Firefly and you know it.” Roberts’ tone turned serious and he avoided my question.

“Alright, man listen. So I dream once in a while. Fine. But I have more pressing issues at the moment. Namely, how to—”

“How to get Nadine back?” His smile widened, revealing stained teeth. “She moved on a long time ago. You can’t see that, but it’s ok. That’s something we can help with. The seeing.”

“God damn it, how—”

Take this, a deep voice exploded into my head. I searched frantically for the speaker – twisted my head around so fast it nearly came off – only to find Roberts holding out a business card.

I snatched it, and retreated to the damp tiled wall behind me. When I was sure Roberts wasn’t going to advance, I stole a glance down at the card. “FIREFLIES” it boasted in bright red and yellow raised letters. There was a firefly directly below, glowing ass and all. I turned the card over. On the back, written neatly in ink, was “We’ll be in contact”.

Suddenly, the bathroom door slammed, sending memories of gunshots wailing through my head. And echoing off the walls.

“No, you lift from the bottom and I’ll pull it up.”

“Wait, what if we lay it down on its side and then I push it up?”

“Make sure nothing falls out. I want these books the same way dad had them.”

The whirr of a vacuum punctuates the conversation as the brother and sister assess their predicament. There is a small patch of tan remnant carpeting between the door and the short flight of stairs leading up to the landing—a small but god-awfully awkward place to move a bookshelf filled to bursting.

At the top of the stairs sit three bedrooms and a bath. As though ticking the redecorating off a checklist, the room that curves to the left sits in stark brightness, freshly painted and steam-cleaned, housing little but two naked mattresses, a standing lamp and a window AC unit pumping out cold artificial gusts.

Back on the staircase the two have finally found an acceptable strategy with which to move the sagging plywood shelf. Barefoot and lacking in moving expertise (beyond that learned in a basic high school physics classroom, anyway) the oldest sister lifts the front end and carefully avoids smashing her toes beneath its weight.

“TLA? What does that mean?” The voice comes from the middle sister, gangly with teenaged youth and curious as a cat as she peers onto the top of the bookshelf where the letters are scribbled in stale but shimmering nail polish. It comes at her like an uncertain battering ram as her elder siblings heave it up the carpeted stairs. She’s crammed into the doorway of her own bedroom, which butts almost directly against that of her only brother.

“True love always. Must have been mom; dad never would have written that.” With a final shove from the oldest sister, the shelf sits horizontal once more. The brother, as though undeterred by the effort, begins at once an attempt to pull the shelf upright into its natural position.

“That corner there,” says the older sister, her breathing labored as she pulls her light hair into an effective, albeit chaotic, bun on the top of her head. Her arms dance with her sun-streaked hair and pull at the straps of her tank top, one of which is held together precariously with a gold safety pin. “It will fit there perfectly.”

The shelf is set upright with caution, yet bargain-bin books spill from it like stones to a stream, falling haphazardly to the ground. With the push-me-pull-you fashion of a two-man saw, the shelf finally finds its new home in a wash of cool celery green and a nest of burgundy shag rug.

With multiple trips down the stairs come knickknacks of all varieties. The oldest sister’s fingers dance across the shelves as she places each item just so, replicating their home on the shelf as she sees fit from memory: a black and white photo of buttons framed by a fake stalk of pinecones; Regal cinema ticket stubs laying haphazardly flat on their backs staring up at the shelf above; an old harmonica.

Each with a thousand meanings—or no meaning at all. They act merely as all memories do, bringing life to what has now passed from the present.

A fourth party enters the room in the form of the youngest sister—seven and persistent as Chinese water torture (in a loving way, of course).

“Can I play the harmonica?”

“No.”

It is difficult to say from whose mouth the negative response comes; the eldest two continue their replication of the shelf as though uninterrupted.

“Why not?” Persistent as ever.

“Because it’s sacred.” There is at once both humor and complete sobriety in the words that echo through the still-bare walls.

“It is not sac-red,” responds the young girl with an air of someone not to be trifled with.

“Yes it is.” End of discussion. They all know this, and the little one flounces over to one of the bare mattresses and begins to jump.

A trip back down to the old bedroom reveals another quest, one at once both trivial, yet far more significant than moving books—the search for the mysterious gun. Previously unknown to the children, their father had owned a pistol—an old Western-style pistol which he occasionally untucked from its hidey hole and polished with a soft sheet (probably a washed-out tie-dye, a fad from which his eldest daughter had yet to outgrow). Yet it was never used for anything but a novel glance and feel, a secret returned each time to its secret home.

The oldest brother and sister had convinced themselves that the gun would reveal itself in the form of a hollowed-out, dusty old tome whose presence in the house seemed misplaced; yet the ever-varied collection of books made deciphering this mystery almost impossible. From volumes on human physiology and the mysteries of the English language, all the way to the comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare, their father’s seemingly never-ending stacks of books only increased the possibilities for the location of a hidden firearm.

At this point the move is only partially complete; three shelves remain to be transported upstairs. To move the shelves is to move a life—not away, but back once more into plain sight after a year of gathering dust, to be reborn into adolescence that which has grown dusty with disuse.

A second, smaller shelf is transferred—this one sturdier than the first, upon which it is stacked. The brother stands and stares at his handiwork—a lifetime’s worth of reading stands before him waiting to be discovered anew, acting at once as both memorial and torch to his father’s eccentric collection habits, keeping all memories alight and paving the way toward an easier future.

The older sister returns to the bedroom after dragging yet another shelf from its previous home. It snags softly and almost unnoticed on the rug, as did the others—and as do their hearts—as piece by piece the room is filled and the celery walls covered.

A return trip to the old room yields a maze through life’s current state, not pretty or dainty but completely lived. A chaos of love and comfort radiates from the tangled sheets of a king-sized waterbed; a nightstand elongated with the aid of a wooden plank houses the youngest daughter’s latest affinity for pretty pussy willow that sits dry in empty glass vases.

Two more shelves remain, one on top of the other, shoved neatly into a corner. An awkward struggle ensues to remove one from the other, connected from years of gravity’s grateful push. The brother and sister again take opposite ends, leaving the two youngest girls to themselves who, having followed them back downstairs, now float idly in a sea of blankets while the cable flickers in the dim room, a soft murmur of advertisements distracting them from the moving.

“Grab the top and I’ll take the bottom.”

A muffled hysterical laugh and squawk of desperation comes from the plywood backing of the moving shelf. The sister struggles to gain a firm grasp on the shelf as her face is currently plastered to its backing. The shelf tips precariously until her desperate need for help with its weight is granted as the brother takes hold of the bottom and releases her from the complete burden.

They clear a path to the door, zigzagging between a pile of clean yet wrinkled laundry and a shockingly teal thrift store table lamp residing unlit upon the floor. With a start and a soft inhalation, the sister knows almost preternaturally what is going to happen; the plywood backing, upon which the entirety of the shelf’s books lie, begins to give, and with a sagging sigh releases onto the floor in a mysterious heap of mismatched literature and letters.

“God, I knew that would happen,” comes the sister’s own sigh with a small chuckle curling the edges of her lips.

“Do you think the pistol’s loaded?”

The abrupt change in topic (though really there was hardly a conversation to begin with) comes with no surprise or confusion.

Dear Lord, let’s hope not, she thinks, but only responds with an uncontrollable silent shutter of laughter that leaves her abdomen aching and her face contorted.

The bout of hysteria ends and she reaches toward the fallen books, not even attempting to sort them into anything resembling order. With a small ache of regret and an overwhelming sense of loss, she cradles a pile to her chest, filled with both books and a handful of letters, mixed into the stack like feathers placed in an eccentric flower arrangement. Yet she knows for whom they were written—addressed to her father two Marches ago with return addresses ranging from Maryland to Michigan.

The fallen shelf is eventually carried up the stairs and placed with the others in hopes of finding a home among them; yet its tilted parallelogram shape leaves it broken and without purpose, cast aside to watch its former inhabitants take residence atop the other, more reliable shelves. As shelf space becomes limited, paperback towers form on the floor, their bases cradled by burgundy carpet fibers.

The youngest sisters, having been recruited for book carrying assistance, sit once more upon the bare mattresses as the beloved books find new homes in the crevices of an old life. Again the brother stands and takes in the sight of his new room, filled now with life and the lingering memories of times gone by. His eyes trace over each shelf, meandering down and around, taking in what is now his.

“I like it.” With a blink of his eyes and accompanied nods from his sisters, the brother smiles, satisfied for the moment.

In the now-quiet house lies a pregnant pause, broken only by the soft sound of country music floating from the kitchen radio and a low murmur as the mother sings along. The youngest daughter hops up and leaves the bedroom, sensing something the others have missed in their distraction. Tromping down the stairs and along the hallway, she runs her hands upon the walls tacked with maps, hitting slight speed bumps where places have been marked—their home along the state border and the oldest daughter’s college.

The silence is slowly ripped from the house: first only slightly by the low rumble of a car engine and the low growl of tires over gravel; then by a howl from the dog—a tiny white Shih Tzu who goes running toward the front door.

The storm door’s knob turns and opens from the outside, letting the soft summer breeze make its way down the hall and up the stairs, ghosting into the bedroom and swirling with the cold air conditioning, sending a collective warm chill down the children’s spines and settling in their chests.