Foliate Oak November 2015

Fiction

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
By Jennifer Juneau

I returned downstairs to the living room to find four-year-old Charlotte standing in front of the open face of a humungous dollhouse, a foot taller than herself, with her head peering inside an upstairs bedroom. Her father Jean Pierre was fast asleep on the living room couch having just driven us ten hours, counting stoppage time for Charlotte, from Montreux, Switzerland to his holiday house in the south of France. Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” was playing on Jean Pierre’s old record player. This was Charlotte’s favorite composition, its haunting melody was part of the atmosphere in which she thrived. During the car ride, she bounced up and down in her seat, “Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune! Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune!” I desperately needed a drink. I plucked a Bordeaux off the wine rack. Jean Pierre rolled over and continued slumbering as deeply as I left my mother upstairs in the guest bed. Charlotte gave me a terrified look.
“Where’s Sylvia?” she asked.
“Don’t worry, Charlotte, she’s sleeping.” I popped the cork. “She nodded off about ten minutes ago and I think she’ll sleep into the night.”
 
She turned back around and said, “Sylvia est une sorcière!” In her hand was a six-inch piece of pink yarn.
“What’s that for?” I said.
 
She looked at the yarn, as if she forgot she was holding it. Then she furrowed her brow and said, as if I were stupid, “It’s for a noose.” She turned back to the dollhouse. “Cindy is going to hang herself.”
“Who is Cindy?” I asked.
“Lilly’s sister.”
“Who is Lilly?”
“Kristina’s daughter.”
“Who is Kristina?”
 
She gave me a condescending glance. “The mother of Cindy and Lilly,” she said.
I forgot why I cared who these dolls were so I shut up and poured myself a glass of wine. I stumbled over to the couch and sat at the end by Jean Pierre’s feet and tucked my legs underneath me. Charlotte dropped the yarn and went over to the bathroom where she washed her hands with hot water and soap. She remained scrubbing at the sink for five minutes. She did this almost every fifteen or twenty minutes and by nightfall she will have washed her hands approximately fifty times.
 
“Isabel, could you help me tie the noose?”
“Sure,” I said. “Give it to me.” I placed my wine on the coffee table. Charlotte handed me the yarn and she sat on the floor watching as I carefully constructed a small knot and--voila!—the noose was complete. She swiped strands of hair from her face in one kick jerk and gently took the noose. “Merci.”
 
At that moment I wished she were my child. I was fascinated by her beauty, which was quite ugly, I could have observed her forever. She had prominent features that didn’t quite fit her face. Hair parted on the side, it fell in dirty blond waves to her shoulders. Sand-colored face with freckles, deep brown eyes that could stop any sea from rolling. She looked familiar to no one. I wondered what Jean Pierre’s late wife looked like. As for me. Well. You could use your imagination. I looked familiar to everyone.
 
The words “Prélude”—“à l'après-midi”—“d'un faune!” still chanted in my head.
 
Charlotte took one of her dolls, a Barbie doll, and put the noose around its neck. She stood in front of the dollhouse searching for a place to hang her. She poked her head into each room then stood back. She was perplexed. I could have suggested objects, like the dining room chandelier, or the tiny plant hanger that jutted out from the side of the dollhouse, but I thought it best that the little girl’s creative process develop on its own. She turned to me, frustrated. Then turned back and studied each room. I opened my mouth but it was her voice that happened: “The chandelier.”
 
“Good choice, Charlotte.” I took a sip of wine. She attempted to tie a knot around the metal neck of the chandelier with fierce concentration, but the noose kept slipping off the doll’s head.
“It’s too big,” she said. “The loop is too big.”
 
As I examined the intensity on her face, I asked, “Why does Cindy want to die?” She ignored me.
 
“There,” she said. She taped the loop to the Barbie doll’s neck and taped it all to the dollhouse’s kitchen wall. Barbie was standing. Her feet touched the ground.
 
“Cindy is dead,” she announced proudly.
“Not dead,” I said. I swallowed my wine in one gulp. “Cindy’s still standing.” I poured another glass. “What you could do, Charlotte, is bend her legs at the knees. This way she won’t touch the floor.” Charlotte examined the situation with careful precision. She cocked her head one way. Then the other.
 
“Her knees don’t bend,” she said.
 
I hadn’t noticed. Did Ken’s knees bend? I wondered. “Do Ken’s knees bend?” I asked.
 
“Who’s Ken?” she said.
“Never mind.” I glanced out the picture window. The rain stopped and a rainbow spread herself over the Mediterranean like a woman in heat.
“Hey, Charlotte, I know,” I was about to score points with my new lover’s wunderkind, “since Cindy is in the kitchen, why not stick her head in the oven? She could gas herself instead.” She gave me an expression that told me, once again, I was stupid. “It’s electric,” she said in a you-don’t-know-shit tone that made me want to slap her.
 
“What?”
“The oven,” she said. “The oven is electric. Not gas.”
“It’s a toy, Charlotte. It could be anything you want it to be.”
 
She smirked. As I was about to suggest that the doll swallow an overdose of pills, I remembered that the doll’s mouth was painted over in plastic and spared myself the humiliation of a new label. I lit a cigarette and wondered if Jean Pierre kept a gun in the house. Charlotte rose to her ritual.
 
Charlotte was the most fucked up four-year-old I ever met. Jean Pierre had told me that she was obsessed by death. She didn’t want friends. She was smitten with suicide and anyone who committed it. She ate nothing but vegetables and coffee. What is Charlotte but for a character in a story? If I were to write a review on Charlotte, it might look like this: “An Exhilarating ride through childhood. A Psychological thriller.” – Isabel X, Charlotte’s father’s latest lover.
 
Meanwhile, Prelude rolled softly in the background.
End flute. Enter oboe.
 
Charlotte wanted to be an artist and paint for a living just like her father when she grew up. She reveled in a new artist each month. This month it was van Gogh. Jean Pierre read to her each night from a book about his life, she knew everything there was to know about him and could identify most of his work. Expressionism was a relief, as last summer Charlotte was a Dadaist and blasted a hideous recording she copped off the internet again and again.
 
She sat on my lap and flung her arms around my neck, holding her stuffed rabbit, who had half its left ear lobbed off. She smelled of violet soap. “Let’s go upstairs and spy on Sylvia,” she whispered. Her father was out cold and didn’t stir. It was going to be one hell of a week, I thought.
 
Back again to flute.
 
“Not a good idea,” I said.
“Why not?” she said.
“Because Sylvia hasn’t been well, Charlotte. She needs to rest, this is why we took her on vacation here.” I thought this was a good opportunity to bond with the girl. “You see, Charlotte…” But she shot off my lap and was halfway up the stairs before I finished my sentence. I chased after her, shouting softly, “Charlotte, stop! Charlotte, don’t! Charlotte--!” Sylvia thinks my brother Trey hanged himself a year ago. Sylvia hadn’t been mentally stable since. But how could I expect Charlotte to sympathize with that? On the car ride down, Charlotte insisted they play hangman in the backseat, where they sat side by side, to pass the time. Charlotte wins no trophy for tact, at the same time she cannot be accused of insensitivity, not because of her age, but because this precocious sea vegetable never met my brother. As it was, Sylvia went wild with rage at Charlotte’s suggestion. Spitting and shouting. She told the child exactly why she wouldn’t play and now Charlotte thought Sylvia was going to hang her too.
 
Charlotte was quick and she was waiting for me at the guest room door, her hand on the knob. She wanted to catch Sylvia in the midst of the ultimate form of human vulnerability: sleep. She gave me a sinister smile.
 
“Go ahead, Charlotte. See what Sylvia has to say.” I stood arms akimbo and challenged her.
“If Sylvia is the noise I want to hear,” she said.
“What Sylvia isn’t,” I said, “is the piece spinning calm on the turntable downstairs. So let’s go.” I headed down the stairs certain that she was trailing behind me. I went over to the couch and poured more wine. I sat a moment or two, savoring the music. Charlotte wasn’t with me. I went back up. She was still standing with her hand on the knob. I lit another cigarette and as smoke flowed from my mouth I said, “I thought you were afraid of her, Charlotte.”
“Why should I be afraid of an old woman?” she said.
“Because you talk too much.”
 
She peeped through the keyhole. “She looks dusty,” she said.
“Let me see.” I pushed her out of the way. There was Sylvia, recumbent on the mattress, still as water and just as deep. A grey hue shrouded her and hung independently from the lingering lamplight that cast a yellow tinge in the room from a corner we couldn’t see. I had given her a tranquilizer when we arrived, what with her outburst in the car. Charlotte, her back against the wall, slid down slowly and took a seat on the hallway floor. She looked distressed.
 
Large raindrops splashed, widely dispersed, on the skylights. I sat down on the floor next to her and lit up again.
 
“How will Cindy die?” she said.
Drop, drop, drop.
“She won’t,” I said, staring straight ahead at a burgundy painted wall, flicking cigarette ashes on the floor.
“Why not?” she said.
“Because she’s dumb.” I took a long drag. “Only intellects—really smart people—commit suicide Charlotte.”
“Why?” she said.
“Because they live in a world that’s too small for them.”
“So if I’m an intellect, will I commit suicide?”
“Ambitious, aren’t you?—but no. Not all intellects commit suicide. Only most people who commit suicide happen to be intellectual.”
She considered this.
 
Downstairs the music stopped. “The music stopped,” I said. “Shall I replay the record?”
 
“No,” she said, “it replays itself, haven’t you been listening?”
Un. Deux. Trois.
 
The melody began and Charlotte was lost in its maze of musical cells. A harmonic fluidity that conducted her world. I was lost in the maze of Charlotte. I grew fond of her fast. Charlotte wasn’t ill. I’d miswritten her. Charlotte’s behavior was the repercussion of a grandiose instance.
 
A series of clouds moved in on the eight p.m. sun.
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.
 
The record played over again and over again. My head rested on my shoulder and the next thing I knew I woke to a smell that I can only describe as wicked. My cigarette had been smoldering and cast a black hole in the carpet. Charlotte hadn’t noticed. Charlotte wasn’t there. Or maybe I was someplace else. I heard running water. Charlotte was back.
          
“Charlotte, how long have I been asleep?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“Tell me this then. How many times have you washed your hands since I’d been asleep?”
“I don’t know.” I calculated that she must have washed her hands more than once, or she would have known. Therefore, I’d been sleeping for at least thirty minutes.
“But you’ve slept through five Preludes,” she said. This was how Charlotte measured time.
“Are you hungry?” I knew she’d decline but it was my nurturing instinct to ask anyway. “Would you like me to heat up the duck cassoulet we took home from the restaurant?”
“I don’t like meat,” she said. “Je voudrais une tasse de café.” She sat back down. I could tell she was tired.
 
I made her instant coffee with no milk, no sugar, while her mind swam in the music that told her she was significant. Our luggage was splayed by the front door. I gathered Charlotte’s nightgown and toothbrush. We’d unpack the rest in the morning.
          
“Here you go.” She was about to take a sip of coffee then with a sudden bolt of energy, sprang up, having forgotten my mother and peered through the keyhole.
“She’s still there,” she said.
“I know,” I said. I was tired too.
“Come, Charlotte. It’s getting late.” I handed her her nightgown and took her by the hand.
“I’m too tired to sleep,” she said. Charlotte, I might add, does not know how to sleep. She is a diehard insomniac. What I mean is, she falls asleep, but she does not stay asleep.
 
To step into Charlotte’s room was to strike strange. A merriment of colors exploded about the room’s expand. Stimulating yet depressing. The walls were painted in shocking pink with lemon yellow molding. A poster of Das Kotsbild hung over her bed from her Dada days. Wall to wall carpet, a field of peridot. A throw rug in midnight blue. Tubes of pastels were strewn about. Caps missing, paint oozing. Watercolors. Oils. A half-emptied jar of linseed oil. Oiled cloth. Piles of books askew in one corner. From the works of Cézanne to Warhol. Rimbaud, Goethe, Shakespeare, Donne.
 
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune!
 
She changed into her white nightgown with yellow flowers on it and moved to the bathroom to exercise her ritual one last time before bed. I tiptoed downstairs, past the couch that cradled Jean Pierre for the night and gathered the turntable and record. When I returned, Charlotte was tucked into her four-poster bed. I set up the turntable and its speakers on a small table meant to entertain elegant dolls with tea parties that would never be. I carefully placed the needle on the album.
 
“Did you brush your teeth?”
“Oui.”
 
A flute solo intruded whatever it was I was to say next and I sat on the edge of the bed savoring the passage with her. My attention was drawn to an easel in one corner of the room with a half painted canvas, upstrokes feverishly wincing, light blue and violet oils. A swirl of green. A smear of orange. It might have been a wheat field. It might have been the sea.
 
“What were you painting?” I said. She looked confused. Or maybe she was concentrating.
“It’s finished,” she said.
“What’s finished?”
 
She turned her head in the painting’s direction, but she didn’t focus on it. Her eyes were fixed on nothing. “The painting,” she said. “It’s finished.”
 
I followed her gaze slowly, my eyes from her eyes and focused on nothing with her. The rain fell in sheets, drowning out the flute.
 
“What is it?” I asked her, staring in the same direction as she.
“My mother’s death,” she said.
I turned to her. “The painting?”
“Oui.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” I said.
“No,” she said, “I just want to look at it.” Her eyes moved up toward the canvas and rested there.
“No, I meant your mother. What happened to your mother?”
“She died,” she said. She rolled over and shut her eyes.
“Daddy and I went to the beach one day last summer,” she said.
“What happened at the beach?”
“Nothing. My mother stayed home and when we got back she was dead.”
 
Enter oboe.
 
“Had she been sick?” I said.
“No,” she said. “She had been sad.”
 
I didn’t press her. If she wanted to talk, she would talk.
The rain tapered off and I cracked a window to let the metallic scent in.
 
“Charlotte? Can I read you a story?” She reached over, not opening her eyes and grabbed a book off her nightstand and handed it to the air. While other children her age around the world were listening to their parents read Dr. Seuss, she opted for Keats. The sound of waves hit the shore in the distance.
Darkling, I listen.
And back to flute. Clarinet.
…and, for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful death.
Violas. Violins. I read:
 
“ ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,/Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains…’ ”
 
Charlotte’s breathing became deep, in sync with the melody. As sleep closed in on her, the melody was exhausting itself to its end.
 
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,/Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep/In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/ Fled is that music:-Do I wake or sleep?

Jennifer Juneau has been published in numerous journals such as Cincinnati Review, Evergreen Review, Fairy Tale Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Pank, Passages North, Seattle Review, and elsewhere.  Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for Fiction and The Million Writer's Award.

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Median
By Albert McManus 

Stephen glared out the window of the car as it rushed down the interstate. He watched the pine trees become dark green blurs then he glanced at the painted lines on the road stretching for what seemed like infinity, moving forwards or backwards. He couldn’t tell which way. The lines seemed to be one endless stream of bleak white paint that faded a little more every day. After acknowledging this, he turned his attention back to his wife in the driver’s seat. Her brown hair looked thin and sickly, her skin was pale. It almost looked grey from the dull overcast hue thrown down from the sky. She looked at him with her piercing blue-grey eyes and frowned at him. He couldn’t think of anything to say, he was speechless.

“I fucking hate you,” Jessica spat bitterly.

“I…I fucked up. I’m sorry,” Stephen mumbled sheepishly.

“You’ll pay for it,” her icy voice croaked.

Stephen felt wretched. He felt like a maggot, squirming his way into the piece of rotting flesh he now called life. He deserved to be stepped on, crushed into oblivion and he knew it. These feelings of guilt chained themselves to his heart, or what was left of it. He stewed in regret and shame for a moment that felt like an eternity.

Stephen’s mind reeled back to earlier that evening, where his life collapsed and shattered like a house of glass cards. He was sitting in his favorite diner, sipping whiskey with diet cola and nibbling at an overpriced rack of ribs slathered in smoky barbeque sauce. His mind wandered from one empty daydream to another, stumbling aimlessly like a vagabond with no place to rest his tired heavy head. Half way through his fourth drink his mistress sat down in the chair front of him. She was eager to ease his troubled mind; more eager than the seven-hundred dollar hooker he bought out the night before. He sat up in his chair and gazed in at her body, his eyes were gleaming with lust. His thirty year old body was frail and weaker than it should have been, but she didn’t seem to mind. She gazed into his eyes, peering into his dark vacant soul. Her smoky brown eyes uncoiled something inside him. Something he thought he lost forever, but he found it once again. He found something he could only call hope. She gave him a better life, one that was lively and passionate; or at least that’s what he thought. She twirled her long blonde hair with her blood red fingernails as she winked at him. Stephen pulled out a black leather checkbook and a sleek silver pen. Just after he finished writing the check for his lunch he wrote one for her, Ashley stood and adjusted the two masses of  silicone that were bulging out of her low cut shirt.

“I’m ready when you are.” She whispered as she playfully grabbed his collar with one hand and led him out the restaurant. His checkbook was on the table one moment and in her pocket the next. Stephen didn’t even see her take it; she just looked at him and smiled as they made their way to his car. They were barely in the back seat of his plush luxury car before her bra came off. Stephen had just reached for breasts as he heard his wife screaming behind him.

“You fucking pig, how could you? You piece of worthless shit,” she yelled.

Stephen was in shock, he felt a cold sinking feeling rattle its way deep into his core. His cheeks burned with shame and guilt. Stephen tried to open his mouth and speak, but he couldn’t find the right words, if there were any. Ashley didn’t look Jessica in the eyes; she just cast her gaze downward at the black leather interior of the car. 

“Well, bitch, get the hell outta my goddamn car,” Jessica spat venomously.

Ashley put her top back on and slithered out of the car, being careful not to look at or brush against Jessica. Ashley traipsed over to her car, smothering a devilish smirk with her hand as she drove out of the parking lot.

Jessica stared at Stephen, her eyes were gushing over with tears from the fury and pain. He thought for a moment that she might drown herself in the tears if she cried much longer. Then something inside her shifted. Her face became hardened by the pain. She looked ghastly, drained of all life and color. It was as though a colony of leeches had been attached to her hollow soul and sucked away any life she had left.

“Listen, Jessica baby I’m so sorry,” Stephen cried out, hoping those were the magic words.

He was digging his grave deeper with every syllable. Jessica stared at him with her cold dead eyes as she crawled into the driver’s seat of the car and peeled out of the parking lot, burning black tire tracks into the pavement. She began to yell over the sound of the squealing tires.

"You heartless bastard. You left your fucking phone on the kitchen counter. I took a cab here to come see your sorry ass when that whore you were about to fuck texted your goddamned cellphone. The bitch said she would be waiting here, and then she sent a picture of her tits. I hoped she had just had the wrong number, but a part of me knew better. All you ever did was lie to me. Honesty never was and hope ran away from me five years ago after my AIDS test came back positive. At first I thought it was from a bad needle, now I see it was just your prick.” Her voice was tense and cold like a corpse with rigor mortis.

It was all true, it may have been the only thing in his life that was.

Stephen grabbed his thoughts and began to drag them back into the present. He snapped back into reality when he felt the car lurch forward and heard the engine whine under the stress.

“Jessie, what are you doing?“ Stephen asked anxiously.

The speedometer was edging towards the 130 mile per hour mark.

“Something I should have done a long time ago,” she said as she crashed the car into a concrete median in the center of the interstate.

Albert McManus is a college student as well as an up and coming author. He has a passion for writing dark short stories with sharp plot twists.

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Wind Chill Factor
By Jeffrey Miller

​We buried Paul today.
 
He picked a lousy time to take his life—the middle of winter with the temperature and wind chill factor right around fifty or sixty below. It was so cold at St. Hyacinth’s Cemetery only the pallbearers, immediate family, and a few friends braved the cold, wind and steadily falling temperatures for the graveside services. Everyone else stayed in their cars, motors running, heaters blasting.
 
I swore that when Paul’s wife wept over the silver casket her tears turned to ice as soon as they hit the cold surface. In a black Lincoln, myself and the other pallbearers stamped our feet and blew on our hands. It didn’t do any good, but it gave us something to do before we headed back into town. I’ve never felt cold like I did today. Sure, there was that time I went ice fishing with my old man and we sat in a freezing ice shanty on the slough south of town and I cried until he had enough and we hiked back to the car. I thought that was cold until today.
 
Paul would have never taken his life in the summer. He would have been too busy playing softball for Flo’s Tap in the tavern league, water skiing on the Illinois River, or fishing along the shores of Lake Senachawine. And he would have never sat in the car in his garage with the motor running in spring because he would be out working in his parent’s garden every chance he got. And fall. Forget it. If it wasn’t spending his weekends watching college and NFL football he was heading off to places like Galena and St. Charles for antiquing.
 
At least he waited until after the holidays. With Paul, timing was everything. Something he picked up as lead guitarist of our band Shippingsport Blues. In all the years, I knew him, he never was late for anything. Except, he had to pick the worst cold snap in one hundred years to die.
 
His wife called with the news. I calmed her down as best I could. She wasn’t the one who discovered his body. She was spared that twist of fate; when Paul didn’t come home, she called her father. The first place he looked was in the garage. Found him inside the car. His family requested that I would be one of his pallbearers along with the other guys who had been in our band. He was your friend, she reminded me. The phone dropped out of my hands. Yeah, I told her when I finally regained my composure. Talk about your irony.
 
That was one word I could never wrap my mind around: pallbearer. The origin of the word is from a pall—a heavy white cloth—which is linked symbolically to the white garments worn at a baptism. The introductory rites of a funeral ceremony are done so to signify the death and rebirth of a person during a baptism, symbolically linking these two events in a person’s life. In some funeral ceremonies, the pall is draped over the coffin, reminding one that in death and before God, one was equal. Put it all together and the term “pallbearer” is used to signify someone who “bears” the coffin which the pall covers.
 
There was another meaning to the word—to cast a pall over something—which pretty much summed up my mood when I agreed to carry Paul to his final resting place.
 
The last time I talked to him was a week ago when he found me at Vinnie’s, a decrepit hole-in-the-wall haunt on the east end of town where I sometimes ended up when I wanted to be alone. I thought for sure he had found out and was going to cold cock me; instead, he just wanted to talk. He talked about how he was going to go back to school and how happy he was with Missy. And I believed him. After all, he was still my friend.
 
“You are one lucky dude,” I had said, choosing my words carefully. “You got it all.”
 
Three days later, he was dead.
 
At the funeral home last night, everyone talked about how great a guy Paul was in hushed voices. He wasn’t that great of a guy. He had his faults just like the rest of us. Friends who hadn’t seen him in years, even though we all lived in the same town, talked about how much they were going to miss him. When he was alive, these same people didn’t have the time of the day for him. But there they were, swapping memories, punching in digits on their phones, and promising they would stay in touch.
Not everyone was so kind. Someone mentioned how his wife was stepping out on him again; said how he had bumped into Paul at JoJo’s the night he died.
 
“He looked awful,” the person said. “Said he had a fight with Missy about something and went out for a drink. It was so awful cold that night. I probably should have given him a ride.”
 
“His father-in-law found him slumped over in the front seat with the motor running, the garage door closed, and the windows rolled up,” another hushed voice said.
 
“Coldest winter in fifty years,” another person said. “If you’re out in that kind of weather for any length of time, there’s not much hope.”
 
“I don’t understand,” one of Paul’s friends from high school said. “He had a lovely, caring wife, a good job and a good home. Did you know his wife was a former Mendota Sweet Corn Festival Queen?”
 
In the other room, Missy sat by herself on one side of the room; Paul’s family sat on the other side.
 
“I never knew what Paul saw in her,” another hushed voice said.
 
That was enough for me. I left the room in search of a drink.
 
I hurried out into the freezing night and quickly slipped into a bar just down the street for a shot and a beer. I was no better. Paul and I had a falling out a while back. I accused him of sleeping with my girlfriend while I was away at college. Of course he denied it but I had a hunch he was lying. We ended up not talking to each other for almost a year.
 
We all have our own crosses to bear; right now, mine was heavier than others.
 
After the graveside services, most of the mourners went to a reception at his house, but I didn’t want to go. It would have been too awkward. Instead, I met up with a few friends who I hadn’t seen in ages for dinner at the Uptown, this swank eatery on First Street. A few continued those hushed conversations we had at the funeral home the night before. Some even cracked a few jokes about some stuff Paul did, like the time we all did some acid and sat on the dry bridge east of town and waved to people going to work. When I was in college, one of my favorite films was The Big Chill about a group of friends who get together after the funeral of their friend. Paul and I loved that movie. He would have approved of tonight, though if he were here, he would have been pissed that grilled swordfish was no longer on the menu.
 
Then someone had to bring up his wife again. This person knew she slept around; heard it from her hairdresser. Paul did too when he proposed to her. He had hoped that once she met the right person, she would quit her running around and settle down. Boy, was he ever wrong about that. I motioned for another drink and was glad when someone started talking about something else besides Paul and the weather.
 
After everyone had gone home, promising to stay in touch for the umpteenth time, I drove down First Street to Volk’s Tap. Famous for its pork tenderloin sandwiches, it was one of my favorite watering holes. It was also the only place open. There were only two other patrons inside and they sat at the far end of the bar watching a rerun of M*A*S*H. Outside the wind howled. Forecasters predicted the temperature would drop even further and that coupled with the wind chill factor, it would be seventy-below. A cold weather advisory had been issued; State Police advised motorists to stay home.
 
I ordered a shot of Jack Daniels and stared at my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. I looked like shit but felt even worse. I quickly drank the shot and felt the whiskey coursing through my body, but I just couldn’t seem to warm up. Maybe if I finally drank enough on this three-day drunk of mine, it would eventually numb me. I motioned for another. Damn, it was cold today. Coldest day in my life. Ever.

Jeffrey Miller has spent over two decades in Asia as a university lecturer and writer, including a six-year stint as a feature writer for The Korea Times, South Korea's oldest English-language newspaper. Originally from LaSalle, Illinois, he relocated to South Korea in 1990 where he nurtured a love for spicy Korean food, Buddhist temples, and East Asian History.

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