A Straight Arrow
By Nathan Leslie


Kevin is the only one who doesn’t sit.  The others are pleated, tan and olive-drab and gray, sitting in arm chairs, discussing the latest film version of Wuthering Heights.
 
His shoulders slump forward, not out of any lack of confidence, mind-you.  His body is hunched on the edge of the hearth, gargoyle-like.  He is wearing a Bill Belichick-style ripped sweatshirt (Kevin’s features ARMY, however) and his jeans are spotted with oil or grease blotches.  He wears his VT baseball cap backwards.  I wonder if college sports fans would find his dual-allegiances disturbingly contradictory—I’m in the dark on such matters.
 
I’m standing in the doorway at the edge of enlightened conversation.  Kevin glances at me and offers me a snappy one-fingered salute—back to his temple and then forward.  As usual he’s listening.  I watch his eyes dart back and forth from speaker to speaker.  He doesn’t look bored at all, even when the conversation turns to which actor made a better Heathcliff.  And so forth.
 
My sister, who sits next to him in a wingback, pats his knee in sympathy.  To me this gesture communicates something essential about their relationship.  She understands his outsider stance.  He never ushers a complaint or seek to change subjects to something more closely akin to one of his interests.
 
Kevin nods and briefly tips the side edge of his maroon Tech cap upwards.
 
“Out of all the literary characters, which one do you find the most compelling?’
 
The lists—Kevin loves rankings, pecking orders.
 
“Well, Hamlet of course.  Lear and Othello,” my father says.  “Most of the Shakespearean tragedies and histories feature extremely compelling heroes.”
 
“Bloom and Daedalus,” my mother chimes in.  She sips gently from her slender champagne flute.  “Mrs. Dalloway.  Emma.”
 
“Jason from The Sound and the Fury,” my sister says.  The fire crackles and hisses behind Kevin.
He half-turns his head.  He nods, takes it all in.
 
“Nothing surprising here,” I say.
 
“I don’t know, we could blabber on and on,” my mother says.   “What do you think?”
 
“Daffy Duck.  Followed by Elmer Fudd,” Kevin says, flashing a sly smile.
 
“Can never be serious, even in answering his own question.”
 
Kevin officially entered into the family proper, of course, on the day he wed my sister some years back.  However, his unofficial entrance into our circle occurred several years before, during the stage in Claire’s relationship which was at one time called courtship.
 
Kevin comes from a rougher family (to use my mother’s terminology).  His father owns a cinder block business and Kevin grew up believing in the potential of the cinder block.  He ate cinder block food, slept under cinder block walls—not literally, of course, but this is the general idea.  One balmy night (moths pinging against the exterior sunroom lighting) Kevin confided in me that when he grew up he knew he would eventually fill his father’s footsteps, even if he didn’t want to.  He did not utter the word “trapped,” and perhaps I am reading too much into it.  On the other hand…
 
Kevin’s mindset strikes me as simultaneously medieval and fatalistic, but also refreshingly devoid of pretense and East Coast intellectual striving (what is left of it).  As a counterpoint, I told Kevin that I grew up not knowing if I would be a doctor or a lawyer or an investment banker or an academic of some stripe (one must have a contingency).  That I chose the latter path was perhaps as much a matter of slap dash luck as anything.  Fate for Kevin; luck for me.
 
However, Kevin went to college anyway.  When I asked him for what purpose (and implicitly if he felt predetermined to take over the cinder block business) he admitted he didn’t know:  that’s just what people my age did after high school.
 
“I didn’t make it.  Three semesters in and I found myself distracted for lack of a better word.  I partied too hard—that’s a definite.”
 
Unlike many other people I know, Kevin thinks about what he says before he says it.  He’s never knee-jerk.
 
In college he played rugby (he went on scholarship).  In high school he played football, but competition being what it was he found an entry point into rugby much easier (and profitable).
 
Kevin looks like a rugby player.  He’s six feet four and two forty three; muscles upon muscles;   head like a buffalo.  But his eyes are alert and penetrating and his face sharp and defined by a rather muted intelligence:  I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but Kevin is a lot smarter than he seems upon first glance.
 
Initially I thought he would find himself overwhelmed intellectually by “the family.”  In a sense, he’s marginalized by topics which are too bookish for his educational background, but then when the topic shifts closer to Kevin’s comfort point he’s as insightful as anyone else in the room, if not moreso.

I am aware that I sound like a condescending prick.
 
 
All of this is to say that initially we thought Claire and Kevin’s union was a mismatch, at least socially.

I’d see Kevin surrounded by our modern and Asian art, seated at our antique Arts and Crafts table—our house is very Lloyd Wright, late period—and I’d think “fish out of water.”

But he never embarrassed himself early on.

Then about three months into his relationship with Claire he arrived at dinner with a nicely bound edition of Edmund Wilson.  We were all ve-ry impressed—believing he couldn’t possibly know who Edmund Wilson was (college drop-out and all).  But he did.  He gave the book to my parents as a gesture of my gratitude, he said.
 
“Be still my beating heart,” my mother said.
 
“Sting?  Really mother?” Claire said, jibbing.
 
“No, he got that from Shakespeare, I think,” I said.
 
My father nodded.
 
“A very nice touch, Kevin,” my father said.  Kevin doffed an invisible cap, a sign of humor and humility. 
This was a turning point for me.
 
Then we ate.  I’m sure it was an oyster stew, plus chicken fricassee, and three grain bread.
I can’t at this remove recall the topic of mealtime conversation exactly, but I do remember that after dinner, father drank his Martell and Kevin asked about the art.
 
“I never really took an art history class in school,” he said.
 
“It’s okay,” Claire said—my mother was in the kitchen arranging the mouse and preparing espresso.  She pointed around the room with a self-pleased sashay.
 
“That is a Picasso print.  That’s a late Matisse rip-off.  But that little one over there that’s an original Modigliani.  It’s no big deal though:  who doesn’t own a Modigliani?”
 
Kevin formed a querying facial expression.  He didn’t say anything.
 
I felt for him; at this moment we became brothers.
               
Kevin’s ability to rise above the fray of pithy conversation and superficial witticisms made him, in fact, superbly suited to entry into our family.  He became a kind of voyeur to our pseudo-intellectual blather.   If he was not able to either (a) participate or (b) ignore, Kevin’s entire union with Claire would collapse.  In fact, though my family remains dear to me, Kevin was the one who first opened my eyes to the rather artificial nature of our traditions.
 
All of this is to say that Kevin and I began spending time together apart from family gatherings.  Kevin’s idea initially, but one which I quickly embraced.
 
Though I was indoctrinated into the belief that sports were the bastion of the ignorant—Kevin asked if I wouldn’t just like to go “shoot some hoops.”  I realized after a minute or two that this had nothing to do with actual shooting—it referred to basketball, and after a lull I understood it to be common parlance.
“Sure,” I said.  I had played basketball a total of maybe six or seven times in my life, but I did always find it enjoyable.  Diversions—and sports are, if nothing else a kind of mindless diversion—are part of human nature, also.  Why not experience this?  Why not live?
 
So I sat in Kevin’s dusty Jeep and we rolled along to a park with two courts side-by-side and Kevin pulled out two tall water bottles and the basketball.  The courts—from what I knew at the time—were rough:  weeds sticking out from cracks; the nets were down.  As an uncoordinated, not-particularly-competitive guy I didn’t really know what to do out there.  I couldn’t dribble the ball.  I could barely shoot.  I ran lethargically and stumbled or tripped half the time (Kevin graciously blamed my shoddy footwear).  Despite his girth, Kevin moved beautifully.  He would jump up and shoot the ball in one smooth motion, the ball rising and falling and sinking right through the chain.
 
I have never had so much fun in my life.
 
Our sweaty clothes heavy on our backs, we sat on the hot asphalt and talked.
 
“There’s no reason to judge you,” I said. 
 
“Glad you’re in the family.  Gives me some hope.”
 
“What do you mean?”
 
“You’re different than Claire and especially my parents.  But it’s working anyway.”
 
“Is it?  I’m not sure.  I mean your folks are good people.  It’s just not knowing where I stand sometimes.”
 
“They are subtle, you know.”
 
“That’s a good word for it,” he said.  “Do me a favor, tell me if I’m ever headed on the wrong track.  I
don’t want to do that.”
 
“You got it,” I said.
 
We drank water and dripped with sweat.
               
I would have days like this with Kevin frequently.  But when he and Claire had children, I saw him less, and then more later on when he needed a few hours to unwind.
 
Inevitably he’d destroy me at basketball (or some such) and then we’d talk.  Sometimes if it was too cold or two hot or rainy—we’d go shoot pool instead (he always won at that, also).
 
“The children,” he said once.  “They’re changing everything.  I mean….”
 
“In a positive manner, correct?”
 
“Well…you know how it goes.”
 
“No, not at all,” I said.  And I didn’t.  A lifelong bachelor, I had no idea how it goes.
 
“I mean sex,” he said.  “It’s not…”
 
“Different than before?”
 
“You could say that.”
 
“Sorry.”
 
“This isn’t something you want to discuss, I’m sure.”
 
“No, but…”
 
“There are other things as well.  Your sister—well, you know her better than me.”
 
“Not anymore,” I said.
 
He said the children made him feel like an orphan somehow.  He was secondary, all of a sudden, to his own progeny.  Kevin’s crisis was that he felt forced to compete for time and space.  Often he felt shut out, at a loss.  His feelings, he said, were taking over his own best instincts.  I’m paraphrasing.
 
Often I’d change the subject.  In those days Kevin particularly enjoyed discussing speculative historical theories (if he had completed college, I wonder if these wouldn’t have withered).  I patiently listened to his latest explanation for the emergence of the Easter Island statues, the Sphinx and so forth.  He believed Neanderthals walked the Earth in the late 1600’s.  At the end of his conjectures he’d admit: “These are just theories though.” 
 
At family gatherings Kevin loved to ask sweeping questions, point blank.  He was especially fond of rankings.

--Who do you think is the best musician of all time?
--What is the best movie ever made?
--Who was the greatest football player ever to play the game?
--What is the most delicious type of cheese?
--What is the tastiest beer you’ve ever had?

Part of me thinks his questions were designed not to promote discussion so much as to provoke it.  Or—put another way—Kevin excelled at steering the conversation into his comfort zone with these simple (simplistic?) queries.  To me they were and are also indicative of some key aspect of Kevin.  He’s a straight arrow.  He wanted all cards laid on the table.  They rarely ever were.  I hemmed and hawed and I was trying to appease him.  My father often demurred and my mother shrugged and said “it’s not a contest, is it?”
 
Five years and change after the birth of their second child, my mother called me to relay the news:  Claire was leaving Kevin.  She presumed it was her decision, and that such a decision was based on her desire for a more “like-minded” match.  It had to do with compatibility, she related; this was not an issue of high drama.
 
My mother was and is, I’m sure, torn.  On the one hand she detested the idea of divorce and believed that couples who entered that level of commitment should not break it.  On the other hand, my parents looked down upon Kevin, despite his attempts otherwise.
 
“This is a man who traffics in cinder blocks,” she said.  “That’s who he is.”
 
“Traffics—you make them sound like narcotics.”
 
“He’s not exactly an intellect, as you well know.”
 
“I know nothing of the sort.  I could feel my grip on the telephone tightening.  He’s a smart guy.  He’s just not in your mold, that’s all.  He’s not a doctor or a lawyer.”
 
“I’m not arguing with you, Daniel,” she said.  “Don’t shoot the messenger.”
 
“Sorry, isn’t there some quote from Shakespeare you can pull out of your hat to illustrate that particular point?”
               
I still meet up with Kevin maybe once a month or so for basketball.  Perhaps it’s his best means of communicating with Claire.  He has visiting rights with their children twice a month, which he explains as a strange circumstance.
 
Claire has—in my view—turned into a different kind of person.  I love my sister of course, but the divorce has diluted her.  She has an edge now—and a wicked cackle she never displayed prior.  She has a new husband—a pediatrician (“only a pediatrician,” my mother says), who is okay though I find him overly distant and of course tainted by the adulterous courtship.  I play nice.
 
I’ve told Kevin, however, that he is still a brother to me and that if he ever needs anything I’m at his everlasting disposal.  He must have, in his sincere way, taken me at my word.
 
“I need a place to stay,” he admitted.

He’s sleeping in my guest room indefinitely.  My honored guest.
 
Often I will lurk outside the room after I’m certain he has fallen asleep.  If I listen closely I can hear the soft whistle of air through his nostrils.  It calms me somehow.  We all endure in ways strange and unusual.
                 
 Nathan Leslie’s nine books of fiction include Root and Shoot, Sibs, and Drivers. He is also the author of The Tall Tale of Tommy Twice, a novel, and Night Sweat, a poetry collection. His work has appeared in hundreds of literary magazines including Boulevard, Shenandoah, North American Review, and Cimarron Review. Nathan was series editor for The Best of the Web anthology 2008 and 2009 (Dzanc Books) and edited fiction for Pedestal Magazine for many years. He is currently interviews editor at Prick of the Spindle and writes a monthly music column for Atticus Review. His work appears in Best Small Fictions 2016. Check him out on Twitter and Facebook as well as here.
               

* * *

Asal
By Shannon Lowe


In the three years I knew Asal, I had never seen her face. It remained hidden behind the black fabric of her niqab with only her blue-green eyes visible. Every Tuesday and Thursday, Asal arrived at our house for English lessons with Mom, always waving at me as I worked on my homework in the living room, before she disappeared into the study where her and Mom’s muffled voices would fill the air for the next two hours.
 
We shared very few words. Of course, that could be because she was in her late-seventies and I was only ten years old. I didn’t find most “old people” interesting. So what I did learn about Asal was from overheard conversations she had with Mom: she had three children, all living in Seattle, and eight grandchildren; she had emigrated from Saudi Arabia a few years after her youngest did; and she prayed several times a week, especially on Fridays.
 
When I met Asal, it was the summer after first grade. The sun blazed for three months in a row, with the average temperature in the mid-80s, and I spent most of my time cannon balling into the nearby YMCA pool. So, when I saw her wearing her face veil and boysenberry, long-sleeve dress, I thought--boy, she must be hot!
 
She hobbled up the driveway to our two-story A-frame, as I dribbled a basketball in the carport, and she asked in a thick, unfamiliar accent where Mom was. I directed her to the study without much thought. After all, Mom always had strange people coming to our house for English lessons. I didn’t find Asal any different than the Spanish speakers or the Thai speakers or the Korean speakers.
 
It was after six months or so that she joined us for dinner. Platters of mostly noodle and vegetable dishes squished together in the center of the kitchen table, and a piping-hot pot of freshly brewed coffee sat between Mom’s and Asal’s spots. There was no meat except for in a long but shallow ceramic bowl, shaped like a boat, that Asal brought. Steam rose from blackened chicken on a bed of yellow-brown rice, dotted with red and green peppers and cashews.
 
“What’s that?” I pointed to the dish.
 
“Kabsa,” Asal said. “Traditional dish in my country.”
 
“Mmmm,” I licked my lips with anticipation.
 
She continued to have dinner with us, once a month, and brought other exotic foods: kleichat tamur, cookies filled with dates; murtabak, minced meat and eggs stuffed inside a folded pancake; muhallabia, rice pudding topped with crushed nuts; and dozens of others with names I couldn’t remember. Trying whatever Asal cooked became something that I looked forward to.
 
That changed soon enough.
 
After school one day, my best friend, Mac, and I walked to the town’s Shell station and spent ten dollars on Pepsi sodas, Nerd Ropes, and Big League Chew. Then we headed to a nearby park, kicking rocks at cars along the way, and climbed onto one of the slide’s roofs before seeing who could spit sugary saliva the farthest as we chomped on our gum. The overcast sky sprinkled rain but soon drenched us with fat, icy drops. Goosebumps formed on my bare arms, and I asked Mac if he wanted to play Xbox, maybe watch a movie or two, at my house.
 
“I’m not allowed to go to your house,” he said.
 
“Why?” I asked. I couldn’t recall doing anything that would warrant a ban from my house. Was it the time we got caught looking at nude photos? Those belonged to Mac’s brother. If anything, Mr. and Mrs. Conley should be mad at him for having them, not at us for finding them.
 
“Dude, the girl your mom’s teaching—she’s Muslim.”
 
I blinked, confused.
 
“What does that have to do with anything?”
 
“Don’t you watch the news?” Mac asked.
 
So we went to his house on a mission. It was only a couple blocks from mine and a similar A-frame style but tan instead of deep blue. While Mr. Conley worked-out in the basement and Mrs. Conley chatted theatrically over the phone, we snuck to his older brother’s bedroom and hopped onto his laptop. For the next hour, Mac showed me video after video, article after article, of the most gruesome, terrifying, and downright inhumane acts involving people who looked just like Asal. Stomach churning, I could feel bile rise in my throat, the burning bitterness nearly causing me to gag. I begged Mac to stop.
 
Making sure our browsing history was deleted, Mac guided me to his brother’s futon, and we watched TV for the rest of the afternoon. Yet, my thoughts lingered on the videos. The violence ingrained so deeply in my mind. At any moment, it felt like we’d be attacked. Like I would be one of those lifeless faces staring into the sympathetic lens of a journalist or news broadcaster.
 
I had to get out.
 
Pretending Mom had texted me to come home, I left his house. Rain still plunged from the darkening, gray sky. My tennis shoes slipped on the roads, slick with putrid car oil and grime, and I couldn’t care less when my jeans soaked up to my knees with water. All I wanted was to get to my house, my room, my bed.
 
On Tuesday, ten minutes before Asal’s next lesson, light taps on the front door alerted me that she was here. I snatched up my homework that sprawled the glass coffee table in the living room and stuffed it into my bookbag. I wasn’t fast enough, though. Asal let herself into the house, and her eyes locked onto mine.
 
Asal looked just like them.
 
Spinning around, I abandoned my bookbag and raced upstairs to my room. My chest heaved as I dove into bed and covered my head with a pillow. There was no way I could face her or listen to her practice English—not after … .
 
I avoided her from that day on.
 
During her lessons, I stayed in my room; during our monthly dinners, I snuck off to Mac’s house. On the rare occasions that I came face-to-face with Asal, I kept my gaze to the floor and hid behind Mom. I pretended that her delicious meals didn’t fill the house’s air with spices. And as December approached, I looked forward to the three weeks that Mom designated for “winter break.”
 
One evening, deep into the final month of year, pots clattered and sizzled in the kitchen, and I could taste the garlic even from my room. Thundering down the stairs, I found Mom hovering over the gas stove of our checkered floor, wood panel kitchen, stirring pasta in her mini wok. Her heart-shaped face pinched together, and sweat dotted her forehead. A floral headband pushed back her chin-length, sandy hair. She grinned at me before pointing to the table.
 
It was set for three.
 
“I invited Asal,” Mom said.
 
My heart dropped.
 
“We’ll have pasta with pesto, garlic shrimp, boiled baby potatoes, a salad, and a fruit bowl,” she said.
 
“I-I’m not really hungry.” It was the truth. I lost my appetite.
 
“Are you feeling sick?” Mom asked.
 
Puckering out my lower lip, I nodded and wrapped my arm around my stomach. I don’t know if Mom actually bought my act, but she grabbed a popcorn bowl from on top of the refrigerator. Handing it to me, she pointed to the living room.
 
“At least say goodnight to Asal before you head up to bed.”
 
“She’s here right now?” I must’ve walked right past her.
 
“Yep,” said Mom. “No TV, no computer. If you’re sick, you stay in bed.”
 
I hesitated. Did I really want to spend the rest of the night bored in bed? It was just after six o’clock, several hours until I normally went to bed. Before I could negotiate, Mom disappeared to the basement, saying something about needing to find the tea kettle. My breaths came out short and fast at the idea that I was alone with Asal. Peeking through the archway that led to the living room, I saw the top of her head over the tall backrest of an oatmeal recliner. I bit my lip to bottle the panic that bubbled inside of me.
 
She looked just like them.
 
Holding my breath, I tiptoed along the wall and behind the chair she sat in. If I was extra quiet, I could get to the stairs without any confrontation.
 
“I know you are afraid of me,” Asal said.
 
I froze and cursed for being caught.
 
“Because of this, most people are,” she stroked her niqab. “They act like I have something to hide—like I am a monster, strapped with bombs and guns under my skirt.”
 
My tongue felt too heavy to offer some lame excuse for my behavior. For a moment, I considered ignoring her and retreating to my room, pretending that she hadn’t spoken to me. Yet, an inkling of guilt kept me from cowering. A voice in my head whispered, I know who this woman is. I’ve known her for years.
 
“It would be easier to just take this off, but I refuse to silence my beliefs,” she said. “To express one’s self—isn’t that what everyone wants? To let the world know ‘this is who I am.’”
 
“Sensationalism often hides the truth,” Asal said.
 
Clutching her niqab, she slowly pulled it down.
 
Her face was like the tawny-beige surface of a mountain cliff, jagged and riddled with thousands of cracks—striking and beautiful—and illuminated by her wiry, gray hair. Her blue-green eyes which had always seemed expressionless twinkled with bemusement as I leaned forward with mouth-dropping awe, and her cheeks protruded as her thin lips tugged into a wide smile.
 
“Now tell me, do you see a monster?” Asal asked.
 
Shanna P. Lowe is an ESL tutor for Thai speakers, living in the Pacific Northwest. Her fiction has appeared in Teen Ink printed magazine, and her poetry has won an award from Scholastic’s Alliance of Young Artists & Writers.
 

* * *

​

The Sand Colored Subject
By A. A. Relnecke

It was cold in the room and seven o’clock at night. There were chestnuts in the pewter tray in the toaster oven. From the lip of the fireplace Keats said ‘Who dares call down my will from its high purpose?’ A girl, in black equestrian pants and a black cotton sweater and black quilted vest and brown equestrian boots, laid beside the book from which he spoke. An eiderdown separated the vertebrae of her back from the hardwood.

A voice called from the kitchen.

“What?” The girl was in the process of kicking her left foot against her riding crop, a habit she often divulged in.

“They’re burning,” said the voice, “The chestnuts—you’re burning them.”

She stood. “I’m not burning anything.” She pulled one calve to her leg as she stood. “The oven’s burning them if they’re burning.” She set her crop beside the Copperfield Millbury ash brush set, and walked past the sunroom.
The sunroom was a simple room for its size and contained a considerably small sum of objects. It wore three windows arranged like a flattened coat, with the large one a rectangle and the other two slanted triangles like connected arms. They were done in yellow, geometric pattern glass. In afternoons they cast an amber hue that made people aged photograph subjects. They were dark, then, with night and made no film of the man in the chair.

The chair was one of a 1930 gray Deco set, bought with the house. Between them was a chest of drawers that might have, in another life, belonged to an Indian general. Parsons, the man in the chair, had a leather writing set and a packet of cigarettes atop the chest.

Eyde cut the chestnuts in halves. They were mahogany inside. She brought them in with milk to follow them with and thought they must taste like lead.

“Thanks.” Parsons took the plate.

“Thanks for the coal?” this to her equestrian toes.

“Just thanks.”

Eyde sat and pulled one of her calves up on the seat with her. “Any good?”

Parsons bit into one. “Good.”

“You would say that.”

“I can stand them.” He leaned back in the chair, shifting a little the soft cover book he had tucked in the chair side. “Used to use newspapers for sheets.”

“France’s hardship,” said Eyde, pulling her calves tighter to her on the chair, “Tale of Alsatian boy turned New York poet. A story of depth and dejection—”

“The lost equestrian,” said Parsons, comfortably, “Failure on the New Hampshire circuit. Tale of long legs and a wall of unused helmets—”

“Mr. Atkinson,” she said, enveloped in talk, “The poet. A man of letters. A man of deficiency.”

“The lost equestrian,” said Parsons, “belongs to a rare breed of incapable liar.” He spoke fluidly. He was familiar with this activity, this habit they had of whittling the other’s Ego like birch or pine or oak. “She is unable to conceal emotion and carries a crop as means of defense against those whose murders she has let on about.”

“It is of the general opinion,” said Eyde, speaking more to the right sleeve window than anywhere else, “that the Poet would write clearer verse if he were to ease his use of stimulant.”

Parsons coughed. “Don’t you have to be up early?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

“Maybe you should get to bed. And actually try and sleep some?” He stood and pulled his sweater, a light blue colored cotton sweater, over his head. “Try not and just stare up at the ceiling for an hour?”

“Maybe,” said Eyde. “You want the cards?” She was looking at the white line down from his shoulder, the scar from when he’d fractured his collarbone as a boy and had it reset.

“Any decent ones?”

“Yeah. Interesting one from Thursday.”

“You bring them up?”

“Yeah.”

Parsons went up to his office. It had two windows, one facing the lawn and one facing the driveway, the former giving the better view, but the latter interesting to watch guests through, guests adjusting coats and pant legs and limbs as people do upon sitting and standing. Through the other he could see the Hudson, blue, and gray sometimes in the fog.  

His writing desk was one he was allowed when his father died après-guerre, darkened with years of water marks and a burn in one place where his brother had held a lighter. He felt the words as he sat, the French his brother kept like a pocket knife, sharpened always, used only in martial effort. Voulez-vous l'enfer, Parsons? Voulez-vous aller en enfer? Do you want hell, Parsons? Do you want to go to hell?

There was a silver framed photograph on the right; an image of he and his father and brother standing, stiff and formal before the Minnesota house which they called always ‘small house’ in wool coats and boots. The room was white and had bare walls. Although he’d used the address three years, the house belonged to Eyde’s family, and Parsons felt hanging anything invasive.

There was a knocking.

“Come in.” He was flipping through the index cards.

The knocking again.

“Should be open,” he said, not looking up.

“It’s locked.”

Parsons stood and undid the latch and allowed Eyde into the well-lit room.

She handed him a new stack of cards, then folded her arms over her chest. Against her black equestrian pants and a black cotton sweater and black quilted vest, her skin looked stark white.

“Thanks.” He felt the white scar on his collarbone with his hand. His skin was cold to the writing. He’d done two lines. “Getting to bed?”

“In a minute.” She turned to go and took three strides before turning back. “Almost forgot.” She stepped into the office, crossing past the book case. She took from the pocket of her black quilted vest a large handful of almost ripe blueberries. “Gene brought them yesterday from Hebert’s.”

She put the blueberries on the worn, gray wood of the desk. Parsons was writing something and didn’t look up. The radiator was on and his hands cracked, as they always were in the winters, from the heat.

“I’m going to bed.”

“And don’t just and stare at the ceiling.”

“I’ll try and sleep.” When she went out she closed the door softly behind her and thought how she’d known his hands eight winters.

                                                                                            * * *

Parsons woke in the morning at his desk. He went downstairs, made himself an English muffin with apricot jam and sat in a chair in the living room. He saw the eiderdown beside the fireplace and loved Eyde for having left it. He loved her for strange things, and she him; for the manner their physical selves filled cotton sweaters and for the very dark brown hair they both had and for the small choler and sin each saw mirrored in the other’s cheekbones.

He sat quietly while she finished her session.

She had started the practice five years before, after the first miscarriage, when she decided if she couldn’t succeed in piecing life together, she might succeed in dismantling it, in analyzing it, in breaking it into bite sized, digestible pieces. She’d used her Wellesley degree to put up a “Psychiatric Services” sign. It was almost lunch time. She and the patient sat in the gray chairs.

“I mean a commodity,” she was saying. “Anything, I mean. Don’t you believe anything a commodity?”

“I don’t know,” said the boy. He was very thin and sand colored all over. His hair was a dull brown and his eyes a dull brown and his nose an equine one, small in size. He looked in every way what one would expect an English equestrian’s diminutive son to look like.

“What about sleep?” said Eyde, “Don’t you like sleep?”

“I guess so.” The boy pulled his legs onto the chair.

“And food? Don’t you like cold chicken and rice with butter melted in and granola squares? The granola squares with chocolate chips.”

“I guess,” this to the red lacquer chest.

“What I mean is, why don’t you try and get more of those things?” she said, standing, “Why don’t you try and focus yourself in on those things?”

“Focus myself?”

“On granola bars and sleep and things. Simplicities.”

The boy took his sand colored legs down from the chair. “Why?”

“Some people find comfort in that, Wade. Solace. Solace in hot shower and sleep and cold milk and things like it. Some people find it takes away the grief. The heaviness of everything,” this she said tiredly, and though her practice was largely a distraction from herself and not an intended service, with the integrity of advice tried.

“Hot shower and sleep,” said Wade, also tiredly. “Okay.”

When the gold box clock on the counter said eleven o’clock Wade’s mother came. She was also largely sand colored and thin and it would be more correct to say she gathered him, because she completed life’s tasks by gathering instead of executing. This was a new appendage to herself, this gathering, and she’d been a decent equestrian, a person, before she succumbed to tending lawn basil and participating in the Westchester Botanical Society and following other idiosyncratic attempts at resurrecting her late husband.

“We’ve a lesson at twelve,” she said to Wade, rushing him, the neck of her beige wool coat like the ruffle close of a suet dumpling.

“At Mr. Schroeder’s?” said Wade.

“Yes. To learn some concerto today. Your cousins are coming for the weekend from Hanover and you’re to play some things.” She took a checkbook from her wallet, and a pen from her coat. “One-twenty?”

“What?” said Eyde, who’d been looking at Parsons.

“One-twenty? For the session.”  
       
“One-twenty?” she adjusted her attention. “Right. Yes. One-twenty.”

The checkbook was blue with the names and lines in black. The sum was written and slid across the table.

There were toasted crumbs on it from Parsons’ English muffin and a coffee cup filled halfway and cold. “We’ll see you next week, then?”

Eyde nodded. “You wouldn’t want any tea? I was going to put a pan on for black tea.”

“That’s alright,” said Wade’s mother. “Wade’s a piano lesson.” She stepped her thin, sand colored body so more was outside than inside the glass door. “You have a good day now. You and Parsons.”

“See you Tuesday.”

“See you Tuesday.” She nodded out the door.

Parsons joined Eyde in the kitchen. He took out the leather box of index cards. “You have today’s?”

“In on the seat of the chair. I filled two.”

“With anything decent?”

“Yes.”

Parsons went to the chair. The card heavy with words more or less the same, more or less expounding on fear and exhaustion and “thirty chews before swallowing” and insomnia. Eyde hadn’t thought of the cards, it was Parson’s idea, but she hadn’t thought against it either.

The sessions were a distraction and she’d always been thorough in her distractions. She was so thorough in them they become concrete by her attention. And so, like any mistake or like any deliberate action, things pulled in the sessions, from the depths of the boy’s sand colored mind—she’d taken to viewing it as a grain field, his mind—were set down, clear and exact. This same practice was followed with other patients, but the sand colored Wade was the most analyzed subject. He had been for three months, since his father had killed himself by hanging.

“You say you were making tea?” said Parsons.

“Yeah. Black. Unless you want green. I can make both.”

“Black’s fine. Can you call me when the water’s ready?”

“Yeah,” said Eyde, “I’ll call you.”

Parsons went with the cards to his office. Eyde went to the back lawn and he watched her from the window. They had a little over an acre, most of it on the hill, and she went to the bottom part of it, where there was a granite bit and where snow came down the rock face in streams. She packed snow into the pan and returned inside, thinking how pure each color was in their acre, the snow very white and the slate very gray and the trees hunter and solid.

She turned the stove on and let out the smell of gas through the valve and let flames into the air, blue and white and orange waving like silk scraps in unnatural wind. She brought the tea and set the cup down beside his radiator abused hands. 

“Thanks,” said Parsons to the cup.

“Tell me if it tastes like lambskin. I used lambskin gloves this time.”

He took a pen from the face of his butternut wood desk and stirred the tea, to let some of the heat off. “I talked to Ian yesterday,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. They’re good people, he and Emily.”

“Yeah, they are.”

“They asked again why we weren’t there Sunday. How we weren’t at church and how we haven’t been a while.”

Eyde coughed. “We’ll go sometime,” she said, looking down at her feet, “Yeah. Tell them that we’ll go sometime. We will.”

“Okay we will. I’ll tell Ian we will.” He said it with his face lowered over the writing set. He would. He’d tell Ian but he wouldn’t mean it.

They didn’t go to church. They’d been before, though, and the pastor liked them. When they had a child three years later the pastor came to the house to look in the crib, came also in sickness one time to bless him. He knew Parsons would die without a religion and that he’d exist in his stanza when he passed. He knew Eyde too would die Godless but that she’d be featured in a series of photographs at the Smithsonian. He knew the child would become a known radio debater. They were not a family concerned with morals.

The child one time would bury his father and do a radio show the same day. The pastor would listen.
Parsons and Eyde and the child, Francis, yet unborn, were, of course, unaware of such things. Eyde knew little beyond that she lived by simplicity, that she lived by the way the snow in the pan died slowly from mountain to lake. Parsons knew a lot and he lived by a lot; by more than what five men’s minds put together might live by. He was writing a new chapbook, a revolutionary thing of many forms—tanka and senryu and haiku and ode—about the sand colored Wade and his father, the equestrian dead and hanged.

The reviews called it full of torment and truth. There was something human in his work, they said, something raw others couldn’t get down on paper. 
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​Alexandra A. Reinecke is a writer and journalist who uses writing as a tool to encourage empathy and affect positive change. ​
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