Slippery Slope
By Matthew Kolbet

Joan seemed to be working her way through the alphabet. She was currently a Carruthers, but born Joan Aster, formerly Joan Butler, and hoping to be Joan Devlin. Her parents had died after she’d wed the first time, not staying around long enough to see Mr. Butler shed her. His waxing fortunes made him outgrow what he called her country simplicity. Having been born in Iowa, she made minimal objection, either to explain the size and unappreciated culture trappings of a city like Des Moines, or to deny how simple her feelings were. She was tired of him. She turned him loose. She was happy for a time.
 
Malcolm Carruthers was everything Ben Butler was not. Where Ben had been cheap, a trait he deemed frugality—playfully at first, then cynically—and became cheaper the richer he became, Malcolm was as free with his money as he was with his time. In Palm Beach the hotel did not have to be three stars or less. Nor did the evening meal have to be in the middle of the afternoon, straddling the distance between lunch and dinner and therefore substituting for both. When hunger struck, they ate. When they were thirsty, they drank. It was true that Malcolm drank more than Joan liked, but it was easy to excuse. He worked hard, needed to relax. And there were compensations in extended vacations, and passionate nights. Ben had made love like he was driving to the airport, and already tardy. Malcolm never seemed to put himself first. His generosity appeared boundless, so when Joan discovered he was having an affair she found she was more disappointed than surprised.
 
The divorce papers were signed. In a few days she would be free. For more than a month, she and Malcolm had only communicated through lawyers. It was in the office of her lawyer, Mr. Yates, that Joan had met Reed Devlin, who worked as a clerk. And if it doesn’t work out when I become Mrs. Devlin, Joan thought, eventually I’ll arrive at Mr. Yates. The lawyer was old, and she doubted he would be alive if she ever made it toward the end of the alphabet. She would be older then as well, far more than her thirty six years.
 
“And I have no intention of leaving Reed,” Joan muttered to herself, tightening her grip on her purse. Still, experience had taught her how flimsy intentions could be. Unless circumstances enforced a promise, neither carrot nor stick offered a guarantee.
 
It was two weeks before their wedding when they decided to drive to Tampa for the weekend.
 
“Maybe cross the bay, go over to Pinellas Park,” Reed was saying as they pulled on to Highway 75 from Gainesville. They’d stopped for coffee and to use the restroom. Despite the break, Joan knew the second cup would settle on top of the first, forcing her to look for relief again soon. “They’ve got horseback riding.” He tried to entice her. “I remember going as a kid.”
 
The thought of bouncing up and down on an animal made Joan’s bladder ache. “You don’t think we’re going too fast, do you? Rushing things?”
 
Reed put a hand on her leg. “Of course not.”  She looked at him and he chucked her gently on the chin, making sure her eyes stayed on the road. Traffic was light at present, but you could never tell what you’d see on the side of the road, especially when the land melted into grass or swamps. True, there were few hitchhikers. More likely, motorists would pass a curious alligator, wearing inscrutable grins, always looking like they’d just eaten. The question of persistent hunger remained. And did the beasts account for so few hitchhikers? It was a grisly conclusion.
 
“Love is love, that’s all,” insisted Reed.
 
Joan felt grim. Contemplating a satiated alligator, she snorted. She wasn’t sure she agreed with Reed either, not with two marriages behind her. “Horses would be alright.” At least on a horse it would be harder for an alligator to catch you. Or to grab you if it did.
 
Suddenly she wanted nothing more than to reach Tampa, not just because her bladder would soon be threatening to explode. Whatever happened on their weekend, or with each other, felt less important than the certainty of arriving. Unfortunately, they still had over an hour on the road. She pressed her foot down on the gas. As the car jumped, her smile returned, a rictus of glee and resignation.
 
The car overtook other drivers: truckers counting miles and mentally setting their paycheck against the weight of their load and the distance remaining; families with fathers who practically lived in the slow lane; several of the state’s elderly, who might be lost or looking for a way off the planet. Joan weaved between them all. Her beat-up Corolla, which had outlasted each of her marriages, was probably one small part of why Ben had left her—who would stay with someone driving that?
 
Like her second divorce, the crash was not wholly unexpected. Both came from excess. As Joan sped down the highway, Reed began yelling, though it was difficult to discern what he was saying while the wind screamed and shook the careening car. The vehicle slid off the side of the highway and hit a stump, which surprised her by holding fast. Either the wood was stubborn, or it had somehow found bedrock, something solid in this land of bogs.
 
“Reed among the reeds,” Joan croaked. She tugged at her seatbelt and loosened it. With the airbag, it had saved her, but they needed to leave the car. Staying meant being stuck. Without proof of life, the car would be ignored, one more piece of detritus left on the side of the highway.
 
Reed hadn’t responded to her joke, so she tried a new tact. “I’m sorry.”
 
“S’kay,” he mumbled.
 
“Come on.” Her head cleared, she pushed at the door. “We’ll get help.” The door did not budge. The metal had its own roots.
 
“Wait.”
 
“Why?” Joan kicked at the door. Her leg hurt, though not as much as her head. They needed to get out.
 
“Horse,” whispered Reed. His breath was shallow. “Iron horse. Keep us safe.” She did not know  what he meant. A moment later she heard the scrape on the side of the car. The paint job was one more unsalvageable part of the car. Pushing herself up, she rested her head against the window. Outside she saw two alligators. They scratched at the car, a familiar gesture, and Joan speculated they often found abandoned vehicles. While she watched, the animals quit scratching and nipped at each other. They might be kissing. They might be married.
 
“Listen,” Reed murmured. Joan could tell he was forcing him to speak more loudly, to slur his speech less. Maybe he had hit his head harder than she had. She listened. The alligators were scoring the car.
 
“Listen. I wanted your money.”
 
“My money?”
 
“Don’t waste time. Don’t repeat.” He slumped down. She wondered if exhaustion had made him collapse, but did not want to interrupt his silence.
 
“I knew you’d gotten money, from your divorces,” he said when he could speak once more. Joan nodded. Paid for time served, she supposed. “Lawyers get to see things like that.” Reed quieted.
 
So he’d peeked at her finances? It wasn’t as dirty as it sounded. She reminded herself to scratch Mr. Yates off her list, both as lawyer and imagined suitor.
Reed raised his head, evidently worried she would not hear, that his words would fall and be lost. “I was going to marry you for money,” he confessed. “Fraud. Not love.” Having said it, he sank again. Only his mouth seemed lighter. He wore a peaceful smile. She knew he was not dead, heard him breathing.
 
If it was time for confession, Joan thought, she’d carry her portion.
 
“I never loved you either.” He did not respond, having no energy for jumping, no air for shouting. Perhaps he had not heard her. She had spoken languidly, not wanting to injure him. Still, his lack of reaction bothered her.
 
“Pay attention!” she snapped. He strained, furrowing his brown and screwing his eyes open. She gazed at him and tried to ignore the cost of his efforts. “I knew we weren’t suited to each other.” Her laughter descended into gasps and wheezes. She understood how Reed was suffering. “That didn’t matter. I’ve always wanted to order my life and thought it necessary to settle down to have calm. Someone else to help make sense. No scraping by on my own.” Was Reed nodding, or did she merely imagine it? At least he made no objection. She soldiered on. “I hoped for a year with you. Maybe two. We’d find out soon enough it couldn’t last. Probably I wouldn’t be any wiser. I never am.”
 
She’d spoken. He’d listened. His ears remained open, even as his eyes closed. That was all.
 
A minute later Reed gave a death rattle. Joan was so surprised by the sound she kicked out. Reed’s ghost, so recently given up, would not menace her. Alive, he had been a temporary acquisition, another waystation as she traveled, never a threat.
 
The power of her unexpected kick had freed the door. It opened a crack at first. Then she noticed an inquisitive green snout, the visible top teeth hiding the bottom rows. The long smile pushed the door open a few inches more. There was no escape, nowhere to run. Besides, her legs were too tired, as if she’d been running instead of driving. Only my whole life, Joan thought.
 
She soiled herself. It was the start of happiness, to be reminded of the morning’s cup of coffee and the vexations of routine. The moisture made her think of diapers, years past, seeing her parents again. Joan did not need to wonder how long the relationship would last this time. Forever would be long enough to tell tales of her marriages, as well as those that never happened. She was content, not just momentarily glad.
 
Truth was a balm. Confession occurred before Reed died, so his rest began in peace. His body lay motionless against the passenger door. Joan felt pinned beneath the steering wheel and her own need to quit spinning—through men and marriages and money. That was the strangest part, becoming inert in a universe that never stopped moving.
 
As the alligator hoisted itself up on the car’s aluminum base, she felt surreal, like a cartoon frozen in a frame, a bubble drawn above its head pouring forth zee after zee.
​
Matt Kolbet teaches and writes in Oregon. His second novel is Lunar Year.

* * * 

The Times and the Winstons
By Robert Lamon

There was a playground in the subdivision, just a small green square with swings, a slide, and bars for climbing. Mothers often, fathers sometimes, brought their preschoolers there for an hour or so of joyful exercise. The playground sat between two houses with their broad lawns. One house had recently been restored after a fire. The other was vacant and marked by a For Sale sign near the street. Many such signs had bloomed in the subdivision, and most signaled the loss of a job by a family breadwinner.
        
On this particular afternoon, Amy Winston sat in the gazebo centered in the playground. She was in her early thirties and dressed in slacks and a floppy sweatshirt. She had dark hair, carefully cut, for she dealt with the public at the bank. Her part-time job was, at the moment, crucial to her family’s survival. She was speaking seriously to another woman, her contemporary, who lived just across the street. As she spoke, she would glance at her two children playing on the slide.
 
“I think it was the big-screen TV that got him. I mean when they took it away. Tom and the children would watch it together. And he would try to explain how it worked and what they were watching—football games, baseball games. When they hauled it away, he had tears in his eyes.”
​

The woman sitting near her, Karen Elliot, nearly cried herself. “Did you ever think you’d be in such a situation?”
 
“Well—we knew we were over-extended. But we hadn’t figured on the crunch—and the loss of the company.”
        
What a time she and Tom had—the auction, the repossessions, including one of their two cars. For all she knew, the other one might have to go, if she lost her job or the kids got sick.
 
“It’s nice you can still come here,” Karen said.
 
“Yes—but I avoid coming here when it’s crowded. Some people are just—well, unkind.”
 
Amy wondered whether she should be here at all, considering her decline in status. They had moved into a semi-detached house on the edge of the subdivision, filling it with used furniture and used appliances, some of the items bought at the Salvation Army store or at yard sales, others found in the classifieds.
 
Karen got up to leave. “Bill’s coming home soon. He’s been out selling insurance in the neighborhood.”
 
“It’s wonderful that he’s in business for himself.”
 
“He’s been selling fewer policies and even fewer mutual funds. But I think we’ll be all right.”
 
“Can you sit my children this Friday,” Amy asked, Friday being one of her workdays.
 
“Of course—as usual.”
 
“Good—thank you.”
 
Karen called to her child, a toddler in his tiny Rugby shirt and jeans. “Come on, Billy. Let’s go home.”
 
Billy came running and they both strolled toward home. Amy was now alone with her two children. She sank into a feeling of profound isolation, as though her family had been abandoned by the world. She stood up and walked toward the slide.
 
“Tommy, Melanie,” she called out. “time to go home.”
 
Tommy was five, Melanie almost four, and they were already growing out of their clothes. As the three of them walked along Patriot’s Way toward home, an old friend, Marjorie Gaston, came along. She was walking her dog and looked startled when she saw Amy. When Amy and the children greeted her, she said nothing and gave her retriever a firm tug on its leash.
 
“Aha—status conscious” Amy mumbled, not caring much whether Marjorie heard her or not. She was especially annoyed at the insult to the children—Marjorie wouldn’t let them pet her dog.
        
She met one other person on the way home. He had just got out of his car, which sat in the driveway of one of the more expensive homes in the subdivision. He taught at the local university and was the neighborhood philanderer, having already had two wives and several mistresses.
 
“Well—hello, Amy. How are things going?”
 
“We’ll survive.”
        
“Let me know if I can assist you—in some way.”


She knew what he was thinking and wasn’t having any of his help. Even his proximity annoyed her and made her want to take the children away.
 
“Thanks,” she said as a mere formality.
        
“You’re welcome, I’m sure,” he purred.
        
She and Tommy and Melanie continued their walk, on this pretty, yet cool day in early April. The first touch of green was on the trees and the redbuds were flowering. The family still had its bird feeder, which would make the spring even more interesting. She was, of course, counting her blessings, as she always did when she was unhappy. Approaching her newly rented home, she noticed the remaining family car in the driveway. Tom was home from his job hunting. He had already mailed out a dozen resumes and was out looking for something to provide immediate income.
        
“Tom,” she called out, as she came inside.
        
The house and its walls were now quiet. Three quarrelsome students lived next door, and their weekend parties were protracted and noisy.
        
“I’m here,” was the reply from the bedroom. Tom’s desk was there, and he was sitting and reading a book on physiology. He had worked as a group leader in research at a small pharmaceutical company. The economic slowdown had encouraged mergers, and his company was absorbed by a much bigger one. And the big company had replaced him with a group leader of its own.
        
The children greeted their father happily and drifted away to their puzzles and games.
       
“Well—I just got snubbed by Marjorie Gaston.”
        
“Well—what are friends for?” Tom said in disgust, as he got up from his chair. He was tall and still trim in his mid-thirties.
        
“But never fear—our university friend has offered to help.”
        
“How touching.”
        
“Don’t hit him.”
       
“I’ll resist the urge—anyway, I found a job.”
        
“Really?”
        
“I signed up with a temporary outfit. Tomorrow morning, I have to go to Bedford and unload a train.”
        
“Unload a train?”
        
“Yes—it’s honest work. And it pays.”
        
“A research biochemist unloading a train?”
        
“Why not?—I could use the exercise. I intend to be the best train-unloader you ever saw. If I perform well, I may get hired as a permanent train-unloader.”
        
“I take it you’re kidding.”
        
“Well—sort of.”
        
He hugged her, and she hugged back.
       
“Don’t get me pregnant again,” she said, laughing.
         
“We’ll postpone that—for now.”
        
“Think we’ll get out of this mess?”
        
“I sure do—I must be good for something.”
       
“Sure you are.”
        
“Can you make a train-unloader a sandwich?”
        
“Of course—and I’d better feed the children.”
        
Away she went to the kitchen. Tom smiled, shook his head, and told himself for the millionth time how lucky he was to have such a wife.
        
He was up at five the next morning. He showered, shaved, and put on jeans, Nikes, and an old sweatshirt. Amy made breakfast for him, and after the meal he sped away in the Explorer, feeling downright respectable. After all, he was on his way to work. He drove the twenty miles to Bedford, and, once off the Interstate, rode to a long factory-like building of well-aged bricks. A railroad spur ran from the main line along one side of the building. It was now occupied by a string of boxcars, all of them filled with cartons of copy paper, the kind used in computer printers and copy machines. The cartons weren’t accessible to forklifts and hence had to be carried to wooden palettes—or “skids”—on the long platform.
        
That was the task of the fifteen men assembled on the platform. They were men of various skin colors and all dressed for toil. A gruff company supervisor explained what had to be done and removed the seals from the boxcars. The men rolled the doors open and set to work. The cartons weighed fifty to sixty pounds each, but Tom actually found himself enjoying the activity. When one palette was piled high, the forklift operator would engage it and haul it through the broad doorway into what was a vast warehouse. Then someone pulled another skid from a stack near the wall, and it, too, was piled high with boxes to await the forklift.
        
Tom’s fellow workers were friendly and glad to be working. Some looked underfed, some smoked, and some looked hung over. Still, one by one, the boxcars were emptied, their cargoes transferred inside, and by twelve noon, the job was done. Tom went to the supervisor to get his timecard signed, prior to leaving, but the latter man had decided to keep Tom and some of the others there to help fill orders in the warehouse. In addition to copy paper, the company sold computer printers and other hardware. Tom was familiar with many of the items and helped the other temporaries in the work. This impressed the supervisor, who praised him to the temporary agency. The good report got Tom more work for the week.
        
“You know what?” he said that evening, as he hugged Amy. “I didn’t mind the work at all. It was—well, kind of refreshing.”
        
But later that week, he discovered an odd corner in the workaday world. He was sent to bag mail at the local university’s bulk-mailing operation. He later described it as a screwball nest. The administration had come to value “employee input.” Thus
encouraged, the employees made suggestion after suggestion—until suggestions became part of the background noise. Tom could picture a supervisor going nuts and shooting people who made suggestions. This vision he kept to himself, except when he and Amy laughed over it. Then there were the productivity meetings—so many that nobody could do their best work. Then came the sexual harassment complaint—a buxom young woman in a tight sweater wanted men to stop looking at her. By that time, Tom had enough influence at the temporary-company’s office to get a transfer to a sensible workplace. And so, his next assignment involved delivering the latest edition of the telephone directory. It was another simple task, yet made interesting by the required travel.
        
When he began his trips to professional job interviews, it was with a kind of sadness. He was bound to return to the complicated world of science and responsibility—a world where a surprising amount of chaff had to be separated from the truly important work—a difficult thing. He might have to deal with people who thought they had been hired as consultants, rather than experimentalists. He had little patience with such people, and even less for administrators who always wanted reports, reports, reports. He had wasted hours preparing them.
        
Returning from a trip to the Northeast, he said to Amy, “Why do so many people in scientific research act as though they don’t know what they’re doing?”
        
This particular trip led to a job offer, which he declined. Why leave a beautiful place for a colder, uglier place and the likelihood of professional frustration? And so, when a call came from a Dutch company in a nearby Industrial Park, Tom drove there with elevated hopes. His interview went reasonably well, but the job would mean working under a Teutonic drill sergeant that he already knew and often found annoying. But as he was passing through the Park, he happened past a much smaller firm that did research on a contract basis. It was a new and uncertain enterprise, but Tom thought it was at least worth an application. He had met its president at a professional gathering and admired his ideas.  
         
Well—from the moment he entered the firm’s offices, he felt at home. The president hired him on the spot. He was to start the very next day—overseeing the development of new methods of drug synthesis and the search for new cures. Once confident in his position, he and Amy bought a home not far from the one they had previously owned. They bought another big-screen television, which delighted the children. By then, both Tommy and Melanie were attending school—a private day school, a few miles away.
         
But where should we end this story? Tom and Amy would grow old and eventually die, as people do. Their children would mature and marry and, somewhere along the way, bury their parents, as was appropriate in solid families. But there was one incident that was especially revealing. It occurred on a Saturday not long after Amy and Tom had acquired their new home. Amy was in the front yard, watching the two children kicking a soccer ball, when Marjorie Gaston came along with her retriever. She greeted Amy as an old friend.
      
“Nice to see you,” she said. “How have you been?”
        
“I’m fine, thank you,” Amy replied. “The Winstons are a going concern.”
        
“How nice.”
        
They had a pleasant exchange, and before Marjorie left, the children petted her dog. Why hadn’t Amy cut her off at the knees? She had considered doing so for a fraction of a second. But that, she decided, wasn’t the way of the Winstons.
        
Back in the house, she found Tom in his study.
        
“Well, Marjorie Gaston is speaking to me again,” she announced.
       
“You didn’t ignore her?”
        
“No—I thought about it, but I couldn’t.”
        
“Good for you.”
        
“The children were laughing and happy.”
        
Tom hugged her. “Want another one?”
        
“Ready when you are.”
        
And so, life went on—for their years on this earth.

Robert Watts Lamon lives in Durham, North Carolina. His fiction has appeared in print and online magazines, including Foliate Oak, Straylight, Toasted Cheese, Wild Violet, Deep South, Liberty Island, Main Street Rag, Xavier Review, and The MacGuffin. He's also contributed essays and book reviews to Liberty.

* * * 
​
Automated Tell(h)er
By Chad W. Lutz

She needed thirty-five bucks to remove the boot. That’s it. Thirty-five measly dollars. Jessica ran to me that night holding her face and sobbing. I don’t know what to do, she kept telling me over and over. I don’t know what to do. I did, but I wasn’t going to. I’d already made up my mind.
 
I’d been living at College Towers Apartments in Kent, Ohio, while studying English as an undergrad. I wasn’t poor, but I wasn’t making much working at an environmental firm washing lab dishes twice a week, either. What money I did have went toward three things: food, booze, and drugs.
 
Following high school, I’d had a steady penchant for drugs, a lust really, one that mostly stemmed mostly from my parents and society telling me I shouldn’t. Telling me not to do something makes me want to do whatever it is I’ve been told to abstain from all the more. Turning twenty-one earlier in the semester only fueled my chemically adventurous behavior further. Jessica, on the other hand, was dying a very long and pronounced death.
 
At the age of seven, Jessica was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis, which carries a terminal sentence. The world for me at twenty-one was as wide and expansive as a great river valley. For her, it was a narrowing gap made smaller every day she survived. She was majoring in business, and would sometimes come over to my place for dinner on Thursdays after class. Because of her illness, her father, who was actually a great guy but could be a little on the over-protective side, never allowed her stay the night. His big thing was having all of his assets accounted for at the end of the evening whenever it was he decided to go to bed. Both Jessica and her car, which her father owned one way or another, fell directly into that category as Assets No. 1 and No. 2. The jury is still out on which is which.
 
Jessica and I had been dating over two years the night I lied to her. It was April. The trees were beginning to shake off the frigid Midwest touch of winter and were already showing signs of white and yellow and pink buds popping out of their lushing green pistols. Students and faculty sneezed through hay fever, girls’ outfits shrank, guys’ clothing disappeared. Those graduating or moving on in their careers couldn’t be bothered to even care about that. For everyone else, Jessica and myself included, finals were looming and pressing down on the general student populous like an added layer of gravity.
 
For people like me, the end of April signals something else: the 420 holiday; something I’d been looking forward to ever since moving out of my parents’ house for the first time that prior fall. Jessica, being vehemently opposed to my drug taking, was never made the wiser.
          
She came over that Thursday, like any other Thursday, but forgot to get a parking permit from the administrative office downstairs. Management were sticklers about that sort of thing — parking in their shitty, beat up parking lot —  and weren’t shy about calling the impound to have vehicles towed. She never needed reminders, and we never had issues.

One night, Jessica forgets, and blissfully walks her way up to the door to bid me hello. She’s dancing around and squealing with glee in her usual, signature way, before we eventually make our way to the balcony for celebratory wine as supper cooks.
          
We were celebrating ourselves. Not a very admirable milestone, but ourselves nonetheless. Jessica had recently found out I cheated on her the summer before with a girl she’s suspected all along an accusation I continuously and repeatedly lied about. Jessica intercepted text messages and phones calls and emails, and still, I denied everything. I think the main reason I denied everything was because, at that point, this girl, Salma, who Jessica had dubbed, “The Bitch,” she and I hadn’t done anything physical together. In my mind, that was somehow still OK, even though a lot of the things Jessica was intercepting were naked photos of my erections and pictures of Salma’s fingers spreading her pussy, with captions like, “I can’t wait for you to feel how warm and wet I am right now,” followed by another photo of her licking her fingers, face propped in a coy, sexy smile.

​The guilt and shame eventually caught up to me, and on a day as random as the Tow Truck Tuesday, I spilled the beans to her in the turnaround of my driveway, while my family idled in their car behind us, waiting for Jessica and me to lead the way to the restaurant for my younger brother’s nineteenth birthday celebration. We never made it to dinner. I never left the driveway. She ended up leaving. I ended up with several well-deserved bruises on my face.
          
It was on the balcony, a week later, drinking a brand of wine neither of us knew — the smell of grapes and cinnamon and pine nuts rising from our mugs — staring into each other’s eyes as shades of the black eye she’d given me announced our recent troubles like a neat little memento of another time, a signal of what we’d been through; it was right in the middle of this magic moment when the sound of a rusting hydraulic lift echoed across the back parking lot. Curious, we both look over the railing to find a tow truck, and even more so, its sprightly driver hopping from the front passenger tire of Jessica’s silver Pontiac Aztec to the driver side tire with a yellow, metal box in his hand.
          
A boot.
          
“Wait!” she yells, as she realizes what’s happening. “Stop!”
          
The tow truck driver looks up at the balcony and considers the two of us standing there with mugs of wine in our hands. The guy flips a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue and very little interest, and proceeds to initiate the hydraulic lift. He looks right at us as he does it. And even though we’re at a distance, to this day, I’m almost certain he was smiling.
          
Jessica bolts downstairs. “I have to go!” she shouts. She doesn’t have to, but I know what she means. Moments later the back door of the apartment complex leading to the lobby bursts open and Jessica shoots across the parking lot like she’s been jettisoned from a cannon.
 
“Stop!” she yells again. “Stop, stop, stop, stop!”
          
To my complete surprise, the tow truck driver stops. He takes his hand off the boot and turns toward Jessica. Adjusts his belt. What happens next, I’ll never know because of how soft they were speaking and how far the balcony sat from the rear of the parking lot. Five minutes of nodding and grimacing; the tow truck driver rambling on and on and on about what the score was between he and her car. When those five minutes end, Jessica turns, head hung low, and walks toward me on the balcony. Whatever control she’d had over her emotions disappeared the instant we made eye contact.
 
“Brendan,” she says in a raspy voice, eyes two saline rivers as she looks up, “I need your help.”

“Ok,” I say, ready for just about anything to fall out of her mouth.

“He says he needs thirty-five dollars or he’s going to tow my car.”
 
I go for my wallet, but she shakes her head.
 
“No card. He says I need cash.”

“Alright, I’ll just go to the…”

“No,” she says sharply, and by the way her face is twisted I can tell she’s about to lose it…
 
Any normal boyfriend would have immediately opened their wallet and tossed down the greenbacks without hesitation, especially as lovers of multiple years. But I’d already made up my mind.
          
The week before I’d put some feelers out for psychedelic mushrooms. 420 was a big deal to me, and seeing as how this was going to be my first 420-proper on my own; no RAs, no parents, no authorities save the dick-lick rent-a-cops that patrolled the apartment complex once every blue moon, I had nothing to worry about and the sky as my only limit. This was it. The culmination of a life pestered by people who didn’t understand the drug culture, who, in turn, didn’t understand me. The feelers came back positive, and I was able to snag a half ounce of mushrooms at an amazing price: eighty-five dollars. You can barely snag a quarter for that price. So, I pounced. The only problem was I had to wait a few days for the order to come through. So, the hookup and I came up with a plan for me to leave my apartment door unlocked and the money in an agreed upon place, and when the order finally came in, the hookup would leave the shrooms in exchange for the money and that would be that.
 
Hello, Psychedelia.
 
However, the last three years of my life leading up to Jessica’s run-in with the Tow Truck Man had been marred by not one or two but four trips to jail for drug-related offenses, and a single, not-so-minor incident involving a fire at a college dormitory. My whiteness allowed me to duck and tumble down the cracks allowed for little shits like me to slip through, and so nothing serious ever came of the transgressions. I never once had to carry out a sentence longer than a few days in jail — mostly overnights waiting for the sheriff to approve bail — some court costs and fines, and a handful of hours of community service. In most cases, the sentencing was scrubbed from the record books; however, thanks to a little administrative apathy, and the fact that all of my crimes were committed and tried in different counties, my breaking probation never registered as even a blip on the official radar. To this day, I still owe Wood and Franklin and Portage Counties about thirty days in an orange jumpsuit each. I go to bed with the possibility, and wake with it every morning, that I’ll receive a phone call from a clerk of courts representative asking about case files, or a knock on the door to find police officers with hands on their weapons procedurally asking for me to comply.
 
The most recent of those crimes, Possession of a Schedule I Narcotic (Marijuana), had been committed and tried just a year and a month beforehand, in March of 2006. Jessica, her parents, my parents, my friends, my neighbors, my neighbors’ neighbors; everyone knew who this big bad Renegade was that kept running into the brick wall called The Law and losing and apparently not giving a single fuck about it. I was barred from hanging out with certain people, but did anyway. I wasn’t allowed a key to my own home. I had my cellphone, which my parents paid for, taken away. My car was taken away. I was allowed to go to class, go to work, and go home, and that was about it. But even those dire restraints couldn’t stop my penchant for drugs, and Jessica became one of the biggest casualties in that futile and ongoing war.
 
After several hard conversations spanning several equally hard days, Jessica and I agreed that we would stay together, despite the hole I’d dug us into, but on one condition: no more smoking. Even the slightest infraction and she’d walk. The same went for my parents and pretty much everyone but the group of drug dealers I ran around with. I had one chance, and that was it.
 
Unfortunately, I never cared. When faced with a choice between drugs or people, even those that meant the most to me, I always chose the drugs.
​
The same eighty-five dollars I had set aside for the felony I was trying to acquire was sitting in the top drawer of my bedroom dresser the night Jessica plead for her car’s life on the grassy lawn below my second-story balcony. Hot, smoky tears clouded up the eyes I always found so beautiful and arresting, and the skin around them, usually so vibrant and full of life, despite her terminal illness, was pulled, puffy, and red, taut from the stress and anxiety.
 
I thought about nothing but the party I’d spent months planning, the two other friends that had thrown down on the half ounce with me, how disappointed they’d be if the deal didn’t go through, or, at least, how disappointed I thought they’d be if it didn’t. I looked down at Jessica, someone I’d shared such beautiful intimate moments with — nights spent naked and in each other’s arms, watching cartoons and massaging one another; taking her virginity at our shared age of nineteen; helping her remember her medications; encouraging her to work out and develop healthier eating habits — and with a sorry-excuse for a lump clawing its way into my mouth, one that I’d learned to suppress with a youthful, foul-mouthed rage, I somehow managed to tell her, “I don’t have any cash.”

I looked her right in the eye as I said it.

The rest of the story is simple. The Tow Truck Man hoisted the jack, engaged the lift, and towed the Pontiac Aztec to the local impound, where it cost Jessica two hundred and eighty-five dollars to process and reclaim. Tears gushed down her face as we walked the two miles from my apartment to the impound lot, all the while coughing from the walk. Eventually, the tears streaming from her eyes looked less the product of an obvious sadness, but something that looked more automatic, as if that’s the way things always had been for her. The way they no doubt had.
​
It’s hard to know why people do the things they do. Sometimes we say we love someone, but complain about them day and night, and then trade private, personal information about them with outside parties, information that was sworn to absolute secrecy and sealed with a kiss or round of love making. If faced with the same decision, knowing what I know about myself in situations that require gut reactions, I’d more than likely sell Jessica out all over again. Drugs are easier to understand than people, which is why they’re so appealing. Drugs don’t change their minds on you, don’t yell at you for minor behavioral digressions. They’re easy to love. But, drugs can never love you back.
 
The relationship only lasted a handful of months following that evening, punctuated by an emotional distance that grew like a canyon between us. Eventually, we took separate paths, instigated by my increased drug use and her health becoming an even greater factor. Like so many other things in life, I couldn’t handle the pressures of adult responsibility, especially toward other people, ones I loved, and fell deeper and deeper down a tiny hole inside myself, like a slick drain pipe, impossible to climb back out of.
 
Instead of confessing my crime, I stood silently by, chewing on the lump in my throat that, as it turns out, was a huge, steaming pile of guilt. There was no way I could reveal to Jessica I’d lied about not having any money. The wounds from The Bitch were still too fresh. It was because I knew I’d lose her; not later, not in a few days, but right then and there, and forever. It happened anyway; I’m pretty sure I knew that much, too. I was selfish, but I did it anyway, and to this day, Jessica has no idea the extent of which I’d let her down. That’s why I’m writing this, even if it is just a routine exercise in too little too late.

​Chad W. Lutz is an herbivore born in Akron, Ohio, in 1986 and raised in the neighboring suburb of Stow. They graduated from Kent State University’s English program in 2008 and attend Mills College in Oakland, California, in pursuit of their MFA in Creative Writing. They also run.

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Wildfire Season
By E.M. Paulsen
​
In the late afternoon, when the worst of the day’s heat has been reduced to a vague shimmer on the asphalt, Beth likes to walk to the playground. The doctor tells her she needs exercise every day, but the four blocks to the park are all she can manage on days like this, days when the horizon runs muddy with smog, when her body swells like an overfilled balloon and sags like the weight of a wet wool sweater. On these days, when her tongue burns with the acid taste of pollution in the hot air, Beth jams her bloated feet into sandals and puffs her way to the park bench. The cool metal of the bench is glorious, if a bit rigid. The tree above her spreads its foliage over her like angels’ wings. Here, Beth is temporarily relieved of the heat and of the burden of her newly cumbersome body. Here, she can rest and watch.
 
The children are unaffected by the heat—they seem to revel in it, in fact. She marvels at their doll-sized shorts, their bucket hats bobbing like tiny mushroom caps as they swing across the monkey bars. She studies them as if she has never seen their clumsy knees, their sticky fingers and popsicle-dripped chins, as if children are altogether new to her. She watches them soar on the swings and tumble after one another down the slide. And she watches them particularly carefully when, as they inevitably do, they skitter back to their mothers…she sees how the mothers lean in attentively when their children are speaking, how they seem, at one moment, to be lost in the glossy pages of their magazines and at the next are shouting at the children not to leap off the swings. How do they always know? Beth clutches the strange, taut melon of her belly in anxiety. When the baby comes, will she know what to do?
 
The walk home is slower still and filled with curses because eight months ago Beth was eight pounds underweight, just the way she liked, and her hair was just the right shade of blonde. Now her roots have grown out and she has the silhouette of an obese old man, and if she doesn’t lose the extra weight fast after the baby comes there’ll be no work and she’ll be back to working double shifts at Denny’s to pay the rent and finance her shoe habit.
 
California hasn’t been what she expected. California, the Golden State, the Promised Land, where she was going to get famous. She thought things would have to be good here, because here everyone was beautiful and the sun was always shining on the pristine white sand beaches. Here you had to be happy, because you couldn’t run further west. But instead of angels there are agents who talk a lot and don’t get you much work except that one McDonald’s commercial. The white sand beaches are crowded with tourists and littered with beer bottles, and the highways are crowded with cars and littered with debris. And in California there is Eddie, who looks like James Dean but who left her with this mountainous belly, two months short on rent, while he followed some other girl north to Santa Barbara.
 
Here, Indian summer can last well past Thanksgiving, and it is always either mudslide season or wildfire season. Strange, hot winds blow through the high desert, whipping sand through the chaparral, whining in her ears like restless ghosts. At night, the coyotes come down from the mountains to sing their eerie yelping song, and they too sound like ghosts. Beth lies in her empty bed and listens to them, thinking about the stories she’s read about coyotes snatching babies. She holds her belly as if to keep the baby inside her. On nights like these she’s glad when the couple downstairs starts fighting and breaking glass because they drown out the eeriness and the thoughts that rage like wildfire through her mind since Eddie left her.
 
When she first moved in, Beth liked that the apartment was on the fourth floor and that there wasn’t an elevator. She used to sprint the stairs as a workout. Now, with every step she curses Eddie’s name. She hopes the baby is a boy, because then he will never be left broke and pregnant. If it’s a boy he'll be able to support her someday, carry heavy bags for her at the airport, unscrew jam jars when her hands become too weak. Girls are too much trouble, too much emotion.
 
When she finally turns the key in the lock and shoves the door open (the wood is warped and has to be pushed hard) Beth is sweating like she's finished a marathon and breathing like she’s in labor already. She waddles through the dark living room, squinting at the late afternoon sunlight still streaming through the blinds, and pours herself a glass of ice water from the fridge. Eight months ago, Eddie would have been mixing margaritas right now. Now, she can only drown her sorrows with ice water.
 
Beth sinks into the sagging couch, flicks on the TV. The news is on—more about the two girls who disappeared in Calabasas yesterday, more wildfires sweeping through the mountains. Lindsay Lohan involved in another scandal; yet another study about global warming. Nothing new, ever. Beth worries about raising a child in a world like this. She turns on the DVD player, smiling slightly. Eddie left her one pleasure—a box of classic Looney Tunes. She thinks it must be the pregnancy hormones, because she can watch them for hours, laughing like a child. Her favorite is the roadrunner--meep!meep!—and Wile E. Coyote. She loves it when the coyote runs off a cliff but doesn’t fall until he realizes to look down…
 
Her phone wakens her with a jolt. She’s so disoriented that she thinks for a moment she’s at home in North Carolina, but then she takes a breath of dry heat and remembers. She must have fallen asleep in front of the TV, because it’s dark outside now and Bugs Bunny is on. She tries to rush to the phone but it takes her a few pushes to get the momentum to stand up, and by the time she gets there it’s on the last ring.
 
“Hello?” Her voice is croaky with sleep, but it doesn’t matter. It’s an automated message. The fire she saw on the news today is sweeping down this side of the canyon now, and all residents are advised to evacuate. Beth hangs up. She’s had this warning call three times since she’s lived here, and all three times the fire has come nowhere near her apartment complex. She looks at the clock blinking green above the stove—7:35—and wearily flicks on the light in her little kitchenette. She should probably make some dinner. But she doesn’t feel like turning on the stove. The heat is a prickly, uncomfortable rash on her skin. So she pours herself more water, eats cold lasagna and then ice cream out of the tub. She doesn’t bother with the dishes. She has no patience anymore. Instead, she flicks off the light and makes her way in the dark into her stuffy bedroom, crawls on top of the sheets, and sleeps. She has fitful dreams about wandering through the desert while it burns around her, about her baby leaving her one day.
 
When the phone wakes her again, it’s 5:40 am and Beth is drenched in sweat. Another evacuation warning. She takes a cold shower even though what she really wants is a bath. Then she stands at the window and sees that the horizon is on fire—over the dark haze that is the top of the mountains, the sun is a blazing ball of flames. Or maybe it’s just the wildfire, and there is no sun—there is no way to tell. From the door to the balcony, she can see that the street is deserted—everyone seems to have left stealthily and quietly while she slept. When she slides the door open, the sound of it splits the silence and Beth breathes in a gulp of the thick nightmare air. Suddenly, she’s not sure how, the inferno is closer, and she can see the rapacious fingers of the fire closing around the rooftops five or six streets over. The sky is gone. There is only a curtain of smoke above the fire, but somewhere above her she can hear the slicing of helicopter rotors and the muffled sound of sirens. Beth thinks about the playground, about the plastic of the play structure melting into the ground.
 
This is California, where any morning you can wake up and see the world consumed by fire, where illusion is more real than reality. When the fire and the red trucks come furiously down her street together, Beth holds her baby close inside her with both hands, breathing in the heat swirling around her. When the firemen with their hoses and their ladders see her there on the balcony, they stop in their tracks at the sight of her. She smiles at them. Beth’s heart is cold dark slate against the bright heat. Without looking down, chin held high, she steps off the ledge and into the burning air.

E.M. Paulsen lives and teaches in Austin, TX. She grew up on the coast of California, a setting that influences much of her work, including the novel-in-stories she is currently revising. Most recently, she lived in Roanoke, Virginia, where she completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Hollins University.

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