A Tale of Two Bicyclists

I headed toward Central Park West and 75th Street after leaving Dr. Zimmermann’s office. As usual, I pretended my mood was improved in order to avoid prolonging any conversation about adjusting my antidepressants. But honestly my mood wasn’t all that bad. It was my favorite kind of fall day: the wind gusted fitfully, and it was just cool enough for a light jacket. I like to cover up as much as possible. With nowhere to go immediately and a long, lonely train ride ahead of me back to my lonely apartment in Poughkeepsie, I decided to idle along the park side of the street. As I crossed 75th, I sensed someone looking at me. Waiting at the light, a dramatically handsome man—wavy blond hair, early forties, square shoulders, soap opera good looks—smiled at me as if I was his long-lost best friend. Propped on his bicycle seat, he hunched forward slightly, right foot on the sidewalk to steady himself. He wore a flannel shirt over a white tee and faded jeans, and, like me, seemed in no rush to get anywhere. Or maybe he was just that kind of confident person who gives the impression of being exactly where he needs to be at all times. He smiled even more broadly, perhaps amused by my obvious shyness and the confusion on my face. It was an unexpected flirtation. A rare flirtation for someone like me.

“Isn’t it a beautiful day?” he asked.

Disarmed by the easy intimacy of his warmth, I returned his smile in my own timorous way. Just at that moment another cyclist nearly ran me down, screaming as he passed, “Get out of the way, FAT ASS!”

I was so startled I barely knew what was happening. I turned and saw the second cyclist riding away, decked out in his expensive jersey, cycling shorts and shoes, and an aerodynamic helmet. Slowing down only momentarily, he glanced back as my beautiful friend screamed after him: “He has the light, asshole!”

For a moment I stood frozen in the street, shamed and a bit disoriented. All I could think was “…but I had the light.” Strangely, I didn’t feel even a little angry. I dropped my head to avoid eye contact with my soap opera hero and continued on my way. We exchanged no more words. Certainly, I’ve known greater injuries. Of course I have. Yet frequently I find myself compelled to reopen this lesser wound, reckoning with the abjection of that lovely fall day. Maybe it is the strange and disorienting coincidence of kindness and cruelty knotted inside of me. The arrested moment of an entirely unexpected intimacy and a very public abasement

 

Hiram Perez

Hiram Perez teaches in the English Department at Vassar College, where he also directs the Women’s Studies Program. Presently on a hiatus from academic prose, he is at work on a memoir that contemplates the relationships between racial embodiment, sexuality, and shame. His first book, A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire (NYU Press), was awarded the Lambda Literary prize (or “Lammy”) for LGBT Studies in 2016. He has published essays in a variety of journals, including Social Text, Camera Obscura, The Margins, and Scholar & Feminist Online.

Paul Rabinowitz

Limited Light

Limited Light

Limited Light

Limited Light

Limited Light

Limited Light

 

Paul Rabinowitz

 

Paul Rabinowitz is an author, photographer, and founder of ARTS By The People, a non-profit arts organization, based in New Jersey. Through all mediums of art, Paul aims to capture real people, flaws, and all. He focuses on details that reveal the true essence of a subject, whether they be an artist he’s photographing or a fictional character he’s bringing to life on the page. Paul’s photography, short fiction, and poetry have appeared in many magazines and journals, including Long Exposure, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Pif, Burningword, The Metalworker, and others. Paul is the author of Limited Light, a book of prose and portrait photography, and a novella, The Clay Urn, (Main Street Rag, 2020). Paul is currently at work on his first novel, Confluence, and Grand Street, Revisited, a collection of prose poems. www.paulrabinowitz.com

 

Stop a Second

It wasn’t a very good time at all, not good.  Edward Whitley stood in the corner like an old floor lamp.  He wasn’t looking at anything.  His beady little eyes just sat there like the last two peas on a plate, lost in some thought, away from everything around him.  Winnie Spencer was passing out homemade peanut butter cookies, a good thing to do, but there weren’t many takers.  It wasn’t that out of place.  This was peanut country.  Everybody loved a peanut.  It’s what made Southampton County tick.

Why is it that the more miserable a time you’re having the slower it seems to move?  It sounds reasonable, even true, but why, really?  Emma Pattersoll’s little girl was sitting on the floor in her best Sunday dress, petticoat and all, playing jacks   The ball bounced and she’d grab one. Then she’d do it again.  George Spencer chewed Beechnut.  He had a sort of slow rhythm to it. The last thing anybody needed was a clock.

Wade and Wayland Bennett were identical twins.  It wasn’t until Wade died that anyone could tell them apart.  “So, that was Wade,” someone said looking down into the open casket.

“Wade was the silly one.  He had a mole.”

The funeral home man said, “I was expecting a bigger crowd.”

“Yes,” said Rosalie Bennett Poole, “I can’t understand it.  Wade was such a good man.  There weren’t no other man like him.”

“People just don’t pay respect the way they used to.  They don’t come out.”

“I know.  I know.”

“I always figured Wade Bennett to be queer,” said Charlie Ingram.

“For land sakes Charlie, don’t say that. Don’t say it so loud.”

“Hell, I thought that was Wayland.”

“Well, it don’t matter now.”

“Cookie?” said Winnie Spencer cheerfully.

 

James William Gardner

James William Gardner writes extensively about the contemporary American south. The writer explores aspects of southern culture often overlooked: the downtrodden, the impoverished and those marginalized by society. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

 

 

The Obedient Daughter

There once was a girl who lived with her parents in a clapboard house in the Bible Belt. One day, her mother died just as she was pulling a weed from the garden, as if the root had been attached to her heart. When the girl’s father found his wife, bent sidelong in the garden, he pulled out his hair and burned the bedsheets in the yard. Oh dear god, I am cursed, he cried. First my son and now my wife?! He watched his daughter as she watched him, her hair like coal- stained cattails, dents in her cheeks and chin, a Kodachrome of her mother when she was young, and he took her into his bed as his new wife.

After several years, the girl passed her exams on the sly and left the town to attend a school near the sea. She learned how to cook and paint and drove a cab for a living; she did not return to her child-home for a long, long time. One day, she received a letter from her father’s hired man, who had tracked her to the city to tell her about an accident in the woods behind the house. Her father had been paralyzed from his neck to his toes. The next day, the daughter flew to her old town and saw her old enemy, laid out in his old bed.

Oh my daughter, he said, I cannot hold you but please make me something to eat for eating is the only pleasure I have left. So the daughter went outside and slaughtered his hound and sliced it into a stew and served it to him. I can only wonder how you made this, her father said and he ate and ate. The servant, a canny Scot, watching from the window, laughed and said, he ets the screps of the welp he fed his screps to. Then he took from the pantry and the barn in measures equal the pay owed him, left the house, and didn’t return.

The father was still hungry so he asked his daughter to bring him another bowl of the stew. When she told him there was no more, he fell into a hard sleep and dreamt about fleas. As he whimpered in sleep, the daughter lopped off his feet and steeped them in a soup, which she fed him in the morning. This is even better than the last, he said. So that night, she trimmed him a bit more, up to his knees, and served him his shins, smothered in mushrooms she found in the forest. Your cooking makes me young again, he said. I feel like I could stand up and run.

So the daughter kept feeding him his chops. She popped off his knees and served them like halved apples, still sizzling from a buttered skillet over the fire. She cut up to his hip and tossed it with his schmocks in a broth and he gobbled it up. His belly removed, she put together a roux and when he ate, it shot down his throat and onto the sheets. Please tell me there’s more, her father said. I can’t seem to fill myself up.

The last night, she sawed off what remained below his neck, smoking his arms over the fire in the hollow of his ribs. He ate greedily when he woke, his au jus running down his chin. She lifted the sheet to wipe his mouth and when he looked down and saw no body underneath, he gave one final gasp and died of fright. The daughter tossed the head into the fireplace and sold the house, taking the money back to the bay, where she bought a brownstone on Balboa. She wrote poems and died many years later, alone and at ease.

Joel Wayne

Joel Wayne is a writer and producer from Boise, Idaho. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, The Moth, Burningword, and Salon, among other places. He was an MFA candidate at Boise State University and has won the Silver Creek Writer’s Residency, the Lamar York Prize, and is a Pushcart nominee. Wayne produces the podcast “You Know The Place” for public radio, serves as a judge for the annual Scholastic Writing Awards, and can be visited at JoelWayne.com.

Flight

When I’d walked away

from my beloved house

the new owner called: to say

she’d found a ring

and a feather

stuck into the beam

above the bedroom:

had I forgotten?

 

She’d saved the ring

but she’d lost the feather

I told her to keep it the ring

part of the house

I had its mate

broken in three pieces

in a little tin box

one broken circle enough

 

I brought her a new feather

left it in her mailbox

a long brown feather with

a blue tip and white edges

I’d let her decide

the name of the bird

 

Kelley Jean White

Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in inner city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her recent books are TOXIC ENVIRONMENT (Boston Poet Press) and TWO BIRDS IN FLAME (Beech River Books.) She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.

Figs and Snaps

Karen Carpenter was emblazoned into my retinas in the mid-1970s. I see her as the delicate, elfin creature who tiptoed into the spotlight inside the Hersheypark Arena and simply said “hello.”

That night, Karen wore a bell-bottomed, lace pantsuit and a metallic gold belt. Pantsuits were the rage then. Everyone was wearing them from Gloria Steinman to Charlie’s Angels. But this pantsuit! Fashioned entirely of beige lace. I imagined an elderly, nimble-fingered woman from Bruges, pins pressed tightly between her lips, toiling under weak candlelight with her loyal, calico cat by her side. The lace maker had read the measurements sent by the famous American pop star to a tee. That pantsuit fit like an elegant glove.

As soon as I sat down in my seat eight rows from the stage’s lip, I pretended my concert companion wasn’t there. I vanished the form of her body inside a navy pea coat perched loosely around shoulders into thin air. I blockaded her Shalimar perfume scenting our section like an old flower delivery inside a closed room and concentrated instead on the hopefully intoxicating qualities of second hand pot smoke.

I have no idea how or why my mother and I came to be sitting at that concert together. It was out of our ordinary. We never transcended. We never became more than what we were by blood. We almost never did “friend things.” It wasn’t meant to be. We were too different, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Even with the attendant mystery of why my mother and I attended a concert together once, I remember what a good performance it was. In addition to Karen Carpenter’s outfit, I have a permanent recording of her unique and beautiful voice inside my head: deeply resonant, pure, strong. But when she sang of being on top of the world, her smile was staged, a Cheshire grin on a thin face. Her brother Richard, seated at the piano, had the opposite problem. He was too consistently perky, bobbing his head every second note even during the sad songs like the one about rainy days and Mondays and having the blues.

It’s raining on a Monday. My mother forgets what day it is now. Her short-term memory has gone missing and the other parts of her, her distant memories, her sense of humor, are frequently on the fritz.

Today, she has forgotten more than usual. The index card standing at attention in the middle of her kitchen table is waiting in vain to learn: “TODAY’S DATE IS…” The Lilliputian billboard offering a daily reality check has taken the place of traditional, cheerful seasonal centerpieces and candleholders. I pick up the nearby red pencil and print: “Monday, October 7, 2019.”

“Here is your tea, Mom. No sugar, right?”

“I don’t want that milk.”

“Tea requires a drop of milk, remember?  To protect teeth enamel. How about a cookie?”

“What kind?”

I open the “sweets cabinet” underneath the toaster oven, noting the blackened toast crumbs and frozen pizza cheese coating the bottom tray like an ugly scab. Some changes about this kitchen of my childhood I will never get used to.

My mother’s sweets cabinet never harbored much promise while I was growing up in that house. Not today either.

“Fig newton or a gingersnap. Unless you want a Saltine or a box of golden raisins.”

“No chocolate chip?”

“No chocolate chip.”

“Forget it then.”

I give her one of each kind of cookie. She bites and chews.

“These cookies are stale. I can’t believe your father hasn’t inhaled them yet. Still good though. These are the classics, figs and snaps. Stick with the classics, Virginia. You’ll never be sorry.”

My mother stands. Limps. Retrieves both cookie boxes. Leaves the cabinet door open in a wide yawn. Takes one more of each variety for he paper plate. I put up my hand in protest when she reaches in for more. She hands over two fig newtons anyway.

“Speaking of the classics, Mom, how about pea coats. Remember those? People still wear pea coats.”

“Those were smart. Nice, big buttons with embossed ship anchors I think. Sailor coats.”

“Remember when you and I saw The Carpenters at the Arena? Remember the lace pantsuit Karen Carpenter wore?” I ask.

“I don’t really like pantsuits on women. Pantsuits make them look like astronauts.”

“What’s wrong with women being astronauts?’

“Nothing, I guess. If you want to fly to the moon, go ahead.” A rare laugh erupts from my mother, but it doesn’t succeed in changing the flat expression that has come to reside on her face.

“Do you remember that, though, Mom, when you and I went to the Hersheypark Arena and we saw The Carpenters? We sat really, really close to the stage?”

Outside, the rain intensifies. In the street, drops dart earthward, bounce off the standing, trampoline puddles. A red bird waits under a grey shrub, twitching nervously. Down the cement sidewalk, across the street, and up an identical walk, Mrs. Milhimes’ has arranged her customary, autumnal display of rust and yellow mums. The straw-hatted scarecrow stuck in one of the pots doesn’t like cold rain on his face. He’s slouched forward. He’s waiting it out.

My mother blinks, smiles weakly, swallows cookie.

“Yes, I do. I surely do,” she responds. “Didn’t we have a lot of fun together.”

I open my mouth and close it. Outside, the red bird decides she can’t wait huddled underneath shelter forever. She leaps, lifts her wings and flaps silently away.

 

 

Virginia Watts

 

Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found or upcoming in Illuminations, The Florida Review, The Moon City Review, Palooka Magazine, Streetlight Magazine, Burningwood Literary Journal, Ginosko Literary Journal among others. Nominee for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net 2019 in nonfiction, Virginia resides near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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