September 2026

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From PHILADELPHIA, the WORDSHOP of the WORLD

Cover and Events Images: Droll Stories, Honoré de Balzac, illustrated by Gustave Doré, Bell Publishing Company, 1977

Selene Sezer
“Milk White”

You didn't finish your milk that day. The lab mice did.You found the first rule of the universe on the same day, in the same weather: a blizzard surged in and alarmed the three territories, turning the world blank white. It was late in the season; sparrows froze on the electric wire.You folded up your half-rested theories about the carrying capacity of supposed-to-bes, a half-written manual for surviving when the floor was slippery. You stirred sugar into the snow, then milk with a bit of salt, until the difference almost vanished. Mistakenly sublime, but better yours than anyone else's.Make it crystalline: the first rule of harvesting salt from saltwater. You were close enough to scorch the pan, but too impatient to boil it down to the end. You would call it a fear of being wrong; others already named it timidity.You still kept confusing salt and sugar, kept confusing a good hand on your shoulder with someone's face you barely knew. You chose unrushed decisions over the expiration dates, but life was made of momentary hesitations and sudden whiteouts. It was, and is, one big, fat jar of unconditional what-ifs.You sobbed that night. Curdled and small. Misnaming the shades of white was your pitfall, and you knew now what the lab mice must've known before. You held the warm milk left on your nightstand like your sweet, sweet snow.

Robert Hill Cox
“I Haven't Drunk Champagne In So Long”

This year will bring several changes to the casting. Marvin, the veteran stage-right corpse, had a brain embolism and has taken to his role full-time. The flower girl who collapsed during the market scene is now in a nursing home. James should be, too, after his loud on-stage fall during the tomb scene last year, but he remains on the loose. He is rumored to stalk the backstage reception area, insisting he has a performance in half an hour. A stagehand who's an old friend kindly escorts him to the bus stop and puts him on a bus in the general direction of home.So the audition has some open spots -- they can't just go with returning veterans. And after James' tumble they have introduced a test for the monks. They have built some free-standing stairs the same pitch as the stairs on the set. Anyone auditioning for monk has to take a candlestick and climb them, as they will have to do in the show, although the test is a bit of a cheat: you don't have do it in a heavy burlap robe with a hem that lurks by your toes, eager to trip you. Living on the top floor of a five-story walk-up proves good for something; I sail through. One older gentleman, Herb, looks unsteady. They say his monk days are over, but he gets the consolation prize of replacing Marvin as the stage-right corpse. As for me, I am very pleased the young actor with whom I shared my elegant gentleman role last year has moved back to California, so I get to be an elegant gentleman every performance. And they make me the lead stage-right monk again. I know that's a matter of being the tallest, so the monk procession looks right, but I also know they wouldn't let me do it again if I had screwed up last year. And stage right is the place to be if you're a lead monk -- the last monk of the six who follows you in, of course, is Romeo. If you blow your entrance, Romeo blows his entrance, which must not be.Normally I would rush home to tell Howard everything, and Howard would prepare a festive meal, and we might open a bottle of champagne. I even consider going back to the hospital to tell him, but I have my reasons not to break my rule of just one visit a day. So I consider treating myself to a quick meal at John's Luncheonette, but decide I have too much work to do at home. As soon as the audition ends, I go to the backstage cafeteria to grab a sandwich. The place is empty -- Swan Lake is starting -- which leads me to realize I can eat my sandwich watching the performance. I sneak into the small theater where they seat latecomers and project the show. I'm as happy listening to Tchaikovsky as the next guy, but am reminded why ballet leaves me cold, current assignment notwithstanding. All that leaping and posturing -- it's another sad reminder of how few interesting positions there are for the human body. One act is plenty, and besides, I really need to clean up the apartment in case, God forbid, Howard comes home. Of course, as soon as I do get home I'm too exhausted to lift a dish and collapse into bed, a jam jar of shooting sherry resting on my sternum between sips.In the morning, I discover Howard's hospital social worker has been leaving me messages, wanting me to come in so we can discuss "his discharge." What? He's picked up Ebola and is shitting blood? I am also a little annoyed there is no message from Howard, asking how my audition went. I make the appointment. To get back at Howard I decide that my visit with the social worker will count as my one hospital visit for the day, and I won't go see him."I've been assuming his dischargewill be to his sister in Queens," I tell the social worker at the hospital. She has a small cubbyhole office and is quite busy on her laptop computer, but I can tell by the reflection on her glasses all she's doing is playing solitaire. I would too if I could, having this conversation."But Mr. Marsh considers Jane Street his legal residence. I also note you are his most regular visitor."Good deed never goes unpunished, I think but do not say."How would you describe the relationship between you and Mr. Marsh?" she asks."Pragmatic. I cover the rent. Howard buys the food and does the cooking. We go Dutch on the drinks. We're roommates…."I glance towards the papers on her desk. She had introduced herself as Beth, but I very much want to use her last name. However, I can't see it written anywhere. I resume."Mr. Marsh is just what the cat I brought in from the rain one night, and seventeen years later that cat still knows a good thing when he finds it so hasn't left."What I am thinking is I don't do diapers."Besides, I live up four flights of very steep stairs. He'll never make it up them alive.""We can get aides to carry him up.""And I don't do diapers," I finally say.Beth -- that apparently is her entire name, like Madonna or Sting -- assures me she'll arrange adequate help.

"My apartment does not have a revolving door," I say. "I am a very private person. I don't want an army of healthcare workings marching through my home."She sits more erect at her desk, shuffles her mouse around and clicks on something to close it."Listen, Mr. Sterling."She pauses because she expects me to suggest that she use Russell, my Christian name, but I do not yield. She resumes."Listen, Mr. Sterling. You may feel Mr. Marsh has been imposing on you for the last seventeen years -- although I really don't think so -- but I would think at this point you would take a little pity on the man and realize this is not the time to throw him onto the street. He may be a cat you took in from the rain, but he's very much a cat that's at the end of his nine lives. Trust me, Mr. Sterling, Mr. Marsh will be leaving you soon enough. I've spoken to his sister, I've spoken to his social worker at the Actor's Fund, I've spoken to Mr. Marsh himself at length. The only person who suggests he should not return to your apartment is you. I promise -- you won't be doing diapers."And so I really have no choice -- a position that so angers me that after I sign some papers I leave the hospital indeed without going to see Howard. I walk straight down Ninth Avenue the fifty blocks to home. The hospital would be so convenient -- just three blocks from my workplace for the next nine days. He would have been thrilled, my popping in between performances.Really, I resent all the work I must do if Howard is indeed coming back to the apartment -- I feel like I've been asked to host the bar mitzvah or engagement party of a relative I do not like. My apartment is way too small for parties. Stepping into its clutter, I am happily reminded that there is absolutely no space for a hospital bed; if Howard does come back here he'll be on the couch, as always. Maybe he'll be bringing a walker or a wheelchair -- that will require unobstructed pathways at least to the bathroom and also the kitchenette. So I do decide I better clean up -- it's been years. First to go, of course, are the empty bottles: three loads. Then I tackle some piles -- the New York Posts I couldn't throw out because Howard so loves Page Six, the Varieties and the Hollywood Reporters he's been keeping. I am up and down the stairs to the trash at least eleven times. At one point I rest a pile of magazines on the coffee table, which collapses, so that must be taken out, too. A blessing, in a way, because I get to see a little more of the apartment's most positive feature -- it's antique parquet floor. Then I must do a load of sheets and duvet covers, all with way more than fifty shades of gray. When he first moved in I did lay down a few rules, all of which Howard has broken over the years: only Heinz ketchup and Hellmann's mayonnaise, no sodomy or masturbation on the couch, and he had to wash his ghastly sheets at least twice a year. He assured me his last erection had been in Cherry Grove in the early morning of July 5th, 2003, while watching a blue heron gulp down a fish. That coincided, roughly, with my last feeble attempt at having a steady girlfriend.I am not sure what I can do about the bathroom. Any self-respecting home health aide will flee when she sees it. The problem is it doesn't have a toilet. That cracked in two the day Howard dropped his bowling ball on it, when ill-advisedly trying to give that a shower. So our necessary room is de facto Asian style, a hole in the floor, very good for the hamstrings. There is a faucet for a shower. You want to wear your shower clogs, though, since there's no clear delineation, as Howard has been known to say, between where we dump and where we douche. Or, as I like to put it, between where we shit and spritz.Against all odds, the bathroom does have a medicine cabinet, and as I cull the vials and canisters inside -- uncompleted regimens of antibiotics, cough medicines, some leftovers from Howard's disastrous experiments with erectile dysfunction drugs -- I come across what I immediately suspect is the reason he wants to come back here.It's the Nembutal. Over the years, Howard and I came to realize we were not compatible -- not that it really mattered, since at best we were only companions -- but we discovered we did share one great fear: dying alone in an apartment and remaining undiscovered until the stench becomes your calling card. Becoming a body that hangs around so long even the blow flies get sick of you. Leaving a corpse so puffy it gets shoveled into garbage bags, with the final bits needing a putty knife.One day Howard got some comp tickets to see Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Seagull. It was a special night: I goaded Howard into taking me backstage afterwards, since he had, after all, once understudied Philip in an obscure way-off Broadway play called Shopping and Fucking. That night, Philip became probably my most famous man-hug. Afterwards, as we walked back to my apartment, I mentioned that Chekov's last words had been "I haven't drunk champagne in so long," the best last words I could imagine. That led to a discussion about what we would like our last words to be and how we would like to die. So we came up with a plan. We asked a friend who was headed to Cozumel to bring back several servings of Nembutal, a poison that has the Hemlock Society's highest, five-star rating. Apparently, it hits you so fast that there's no turning back once it's on your tongue -- the black communion wafer, they call it. We agreed if one of us found the other dead in the apartment, he'd call the police. But before they arrived he'd take the Nembutal, downing it with some champagne and saying "I haven't drunk champagne in so long" just before keeling over. We keep a split of Moet in the refrigerator, just in case.Going through the medicine cabinet, I worry some well-meaning, very nosy health aide will come across the Nembutal and flush it down the sink, killing every striped bass left swimming in the Hudson River. But if I hide it Howard won't be able to find it when the time comes. I find some masking tape. On the tape I draw a little picture of a champagne bottle with the cork flying out and a shower of wiggly little streamers. This becomes the canister's new label. Howard will figure out what's inside, and no health aide would dare throw it out without asking permission -- I'll say no and explain it's Howard's last, pretty harmless party drug.

The next day I drop in on Howard on my way to rehearsal. His famous eyebrows are still, as are his cascading double chins. He pretends my arrival is the most boring event of his life. I ask how he's feeling and he tells me exhausted, which is clearly the case, since he has trouble keeping awake. It's a bit of a relief, to be honest -- I don't see how he'll ever leave the hospital. Raw liver, he says. The doc just told him his heart muscle is softening into a sort of pinkish mousse that has the texture of raw liver. It was as if someone was dousing all his heart cells with a very potent meat tenderizer, dissolving their membranes and making one big jelly.I tell him about the audition. I don't even think he's listening until he interrupts to ask who I thought I'd get a crush on this year -- he mumbles, so for a moment I think he asks who I thought I'd get a hard on with this year. Last year I got a terrible crush on the beautiful arm candy I had playing a courtier in Aurora's Wedding, a role that required me standing in the back of the stage for half an hour in a periwig and gold frock. That splendid costume, made at La Scalla, was rumored to have cost five digits, or more than what Howard and I typically bring home in a year. As parts go it couldn't have been more splendid. First I got pretty ladies fingering my hair backstage as they attached my wig, sliding bobby pins into my real hair to hold the wig in place. There was an uncomfortable tension there, as if the wig wanted to scrunch up like a too-small bathing cap; I worried if I moved suddenly the wig would just pop off my head, bobby pins pulling. On stage I was so close to the action I could feel a cold rush of wind when the mazurka dancers twirled by. And, best of all, on my arm was young Holly, who radiated beauty despite her tall beehive, Marie Antoinette wig and quarter-size paper beauty spot on her cheek---I'd fantasize what that would look like on a cheek far below. I assumed Holly was kindly disposed towards me, after one afternoon I found her lost, wandering among some backstage scenery -- parts of a navy destroyer used in a production of Tristan und Isolde -- and I led her to the rehearsal space several floors below. After the rehearsal I did ask if she wanted to join me for a bite in the cafeteria, but she pointedly said her boyfriend was waiting at the stage door. I did once walk her to the subway. She let me buy her a single rose from a Mexican street vendor.I assure Howard I will not be making a fool of myself again this year. As an elegant gentleman I'll be standing among the elegant ladies, for the most part octogenarians who are usually at the senior center playing mahjong. His eyes are half closed, but he lifts an eyebrow just a bit -- all he needs to convey a skeptical "we shall see." And then both eyelids do slink down, as if Howard is terribly bored, but soon I hear the deep sighing of his sleep.I hunt down one-name Beth. I tell her I get the feeling Howard is in no shape to handle any discharge. She tells me that is a medical decision, and the doctors will be looking for "a window of stability" during which they can send him home."If he's getting worse they'll just send him home sooner, while they still can," she says.Howard's doctor happens to stride by and Beth grabs him. The doctor says there really is no reason to keep him any longer, so while I am standing there they discuss a plan for sending him home the next morning.I am appalled. I tell them that tomorrow is impossible: I have a dress rehearsal, followed by our first performance in the evening.Cell phones are tapped and placed against ears. Office phones are put on conference mode. The medics will be dropping Howard off by ten in the morning. He will be carried up the stairs, I envision bobbing on meaty shoulders like a conquering hero. A visiting nurse will follow. Perhaps his sister could come look in on him in the evening."For all intents and purposes Howard is estranged from his family," I declare. "If his sister suddenly appeared in my apartment he'd expire immediately, certain he was seeing the angel of death."The doctor shrugs. Beth shakes her head a bit, showing she knows how naughty I've been urging them to send Howard to his sister's."Okay. So we'll get him comfortable and he'll snooze through the evening and be just fine," the doctor says.

I had been desperate to leave the hospital, but once outside I realize I have more than enough time to go through the calming routines I like to go through before any rehearsal or performance. I stop at my favorite coffee bar for a double expresso. I do a little window shopping. Exactly ten minutes before the call I go down the same flight of stairs I always do that takes me to the subterranean, parking level. I always avoid the fountain and the plaza -- seeing tourists and potential audience members is bad for the nerves. I always stop at the same public restroom on the parking level -- one less thing to worry about before I get caught up with everything backstage. And then I walk past the lower entrance to the theatre, the one with the automatic doors that swish open as you pass even though you're just walking down the sidewalk, which feels like a salute. I turn a corner, pass the sawhorses they keep for crowd control for when Misty is dancing, and finally step into a better world.Our rehearsal is in the lowest sub-basement of the building. I delight in taking the short flight of stairs that leads down to the orchestra lounges and locker-rooms. I dip my head to enter the low narrow passage that takes you from stage left to stage right; it threads its way between the orchestra pit and first row of seats. I reach a hallway with several large angular trunks leaning against the cinderblock walls, objects that are a cross between Egyptian sarcophagi and World War One military tanks. They are actually the shipping cases for the double-bases. Across the way is a huge lounge with showers and bathrooms and a large sign that reads "Stagehands Only" -- you know who is driving the bus. And then I reach another flight of stairs that takes me lower. Two cavernous rehearsal spaces lurk so deep you think they must have been designed by NORAD to survive a nuclear attack. It's a nice thought -- singers and dancers and musicians cavorting below. Brimstone raining down above.Strewn outside the door of the room are most of the other supernumeraries -- meaty Bill and John, who play the two butchers who walk across the stage early in the market scene, carrying fiberglass slabs of beef, Edith the extent flower lady, whose face is inflamed with rouge and she's bent with terrible osteoporosis. My elegant ladies. The door is closed, but you can hear the piano banging out the strident chords of Tybalt and Mercutio's fight scene. The assistant stage manager comes out and says the company rehearsal scheduled before ours is running late; it will be at least another fifteen minutes. So I wander. I hear music in the corridors, follow it to the second rehearsal space. Its door is open. Inside the orchestra is practicing Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings." I stand in the doorway. I feel like it is the most beautiful music I've ever heard. The ladies room happens to be right behind me, and someone goes and uses it, and I can hear that, too -- all the sounds, especially the flush. The woman comes out and stops to listen with me. It's Mihoko--the young understudy for the elegant ladies; she'll be lucky if she gets on stage once. She is weeping, the music is so lovely. And it feels extraordinarily intimate, being the only two observers of the music, as if the entire orchestra were playing just for us.I am reminded of the great moment I had as an understudy Egyptian soldier in Aida. I never got on stage, but I did get to watch a rehearsal of the second act from third row orchestra, center seat, no one around me. Anna Netrobka was in powerful voice. To pinch from Hemingway, the earth moved that day.When we get inside our rehearsal space -- dancers pulling on leg warmers, some of the ladies slipping off silly taffeta tutus that seem to be as insubstantial as banana leaves, everybody reaching down for knapsacks and water bottles -- our assistant stage manager makes an announcement. One of the octogenarian elegant ladies is in the hospital. Mihoko will be taking on her role.Well, I think, won't Howard have something to live for now. It's obvious who my crush will be.

It takes four surly medics to deliver Howard to my doorstep. He gets carried up in a very striking red aluminum chair, stopping along the way for gulps of bottled oxygen like a Himalayan climber -- overwrought not from the minimal exertion but the excitement. When they reach the top they barely peek through the door, and no one asks to use the bathroom. They dump Howard onto the couch with no more thought than if they were delivering the groceries. They certainly don't look around, probably scared they'd find such a horror show they'd feel morally obliged to take him back. I position a small side table in reaching distance and on it put a glass of water and a small tray of McVitie digestives, which Howard has always said are worth dying for. Maybe he can see if he's right. I'm not even sure if Howard is awake as I touch his shoulder and say goodbye, slipping a key under the doormat on the way out for the aide who will be coming in half an hour.It is the usual bedlam in the dressing room as we prepare for dress rehearsal. I learn once again nothing is more unsightly than flabby old men lounging about in tights. Mick and Mike -- an elderly couple who fly up from Boca every year to be in the show -- complain they can't find the right boots. Mr. Beard -- he just celebrated his 500th performance in La Boheme, a fixture of the Parisian street scene -- is standing in white briefs and a leather jerkin as he waggles his kickboard of whiskers at the naval of Mr. Weightlifter, telling him he has no business going around handing out business cards about his personal training business. Mr. Beard plays an elfin villager, while Mr. Weightlifter earns his keep as the front half of the Montague sedan chair. I notice I actually have a stage left costume, even though I'll be appearing stage right. I try on the huge golden velvet onion-shaped hat with trailing, scarf-like runner I can wrap around my neck and chin so I look like a Tuareg. I can have the hat either teeter on my head uncertainly or shove it down so it squeezes my temples and gives me a terrible headache. I know I'll play it safe and shove it down. What we do for art!The dressers want us ready a good ten minutes early, so they can go downstairs and set up their little quick-change booths behind the stage. Suddenly it's call to stage and I'm left nearly alone, sitting in my costume on a foam couch, with nothing to do but watch the video monitor of the stage, which is above the dresser's desk. I do not go on for another thirty minutes, and I know it's best not to be yet another person in the wings during the busy market scene that's early in the show.But, of course, I get too nervous just sitting, and do go downstairs. In the stage right wing Juliet is doing warm-ups for her nursery scene. She rosins her feet in a small pan, kicking exactly like a cat does in a litter box. She flops up onto her toes, then down again. What I do is stay clear. I catch the very end of the market scene and dancers and extras pour off stage, most heading into the quick-change booths to get ready for the ballroom scene -- my first scene -- that starts in a few minutes. One by one the other elegants join me at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to our riser. Bossy Mindy leads the way up them during the blackout before our scene. Bossy Mindy assumes she's our leader because she went to Smith and once studied with Martha Graham. She even indicates where she thinks I should stand. I nod I agree, then shuffle towards Mihoko, freezing right before the bright lights flash on and bathe us with the power of a million suns.The music explodes. Below us the core dips and sways like underwater plants as the gorgeous "Dance of the Knights" surges over them.I notice immediately I have something special going on with Mihoko. She is leaning back a bit like Mr. Natural and holding her chin up high, the way she's meant to, and she interacts with me by giving me sideway glances, gestures that guide where I should look. I watch the dancers, turn slightly towards her and nod with emphatic slowness. Then bossy Mindy shuffles over and basically cuts in and we do similar nods and glances. I know she likes me because I don't mind standing at the edge of the riser, peering out like a sailor looking for land. Mick and Mike tend to stand in the back, both pleading touches of acrophobia.My head has screaming ice cream burn and we can't shuffle down the stairs fast enough when "Knights" is over. It feels like sweat is pooling in my boots. We are happy there are no notes -- no one noticed, for example, that I actually had on a stage-left costume, and we'll keep it that way. After putting my civilian clothes back on I go down and have a coffee in the cafeteria, with absolutely nothing to do for the next two hours but feel like I am about to be shot.It's the most exciting twenty seconds in theater. As high strings screech, dim lights come up on the shadowy Capulet tomb. Then the music gets really scary: horns crash in. Finally to the rhythm of short, little bursts of a drumroll, two rows of monks step out from each side of stage, faces lost in the shadows of their forward-leaning hoods. They walk around a pair of dead bodies, each on a bier, then exit up two flights of stairs, one stage right, one stage left. Thirteen steps, the stairs are shallow, steep and railing-less, a terror, in other words. Monks have peeled off. Monks have tripped. One year a sliding monk managed to dislodge three other monks on the way down, as if a string of climbers on the Matterhorn. Last year as James neared the top he simply keeled over, falling a good eight feet hard onto the stage, making a loud, reverberating thud. Misty was not pleased. Of course the stagehands -- who drive the bus -- just let him lie there until Romeo and Juliet had finished dying and the curtain came down. The doctor in the house attended to him as the dancers took their bows in front of the big gold curtain. James was taken off the stage on a stretcher, went to the hospital in an ambulance, but nothing was broken. Of course he got axed, but you'd see him at the backstage door during the rest of the run, pleading to be let in because he felt well enough to go on.A new assistant stage manager positions me incorrectly for the entrance, so we stage right monks are out of sync with the stage left monks by a good five feet and look atrocious. Somehow we all do manage to clamber up the stairs, the youngsters who have never done it before shocked by the steepness and saying audible "fucks" and "oh shits" as they go. They want us to do it again, but the stagehands -- the stagehands drive the bus, remember -- say there isn't time. I explain to the ballet mistress what went wrong and keep my fingers crossed for the performance in only a few short hours.Mihoko and me are electric that evening before the paying crowd, but I'm so exhausted I joke with Herb -- who is also tall -- that he better lead the monks tonight and let me rest and be the corpse. But I drink espresso down in the cafeteria -- the best espresso in New York because it's only a dollar -- and meet with the stage-left lead monk to discuss how can we improve our timing -- he comes up with a complicated scheme for dipping our candles one beat before our first step out, which I only half pay attention to -- I know it will never work and he just needs to talk out his nerves. But a big crowd focuses the mind and it's often true what they say about a poor rehearsal -- we nail it that night, the monks marching out in two synchronized lines worthy of the Rockettes or Madeline.Our perfection is such a thrill I know I'll never sleep. In the old days when I got like this I'd go to a bar and try to pick up a girl, give up and perhaps go home via the warehouses and mini-storage palaces on the far westside and have a quick one on a loading dock. When Howard learned of my habit he said he didn't believe me when I said I had no homosexual experiences -- I probably had and didn't even know it. But I always insisted on sort of chick check -- a feel and a squeeze, before she'd answer my needs with welcome alacrity. I always knew it was a terrible habit and gave it up about twenty years ago, about when the hookers left the area anyway as it gentrified.Howard doesn't move as I come into the apartment after the show. His head is cocked sideways and his tongue strays past the top of his lower lip, looking huge and thick, like a swollen third lip, and the only life in him is a shallow irregular breathing -- a bubbling sort of wheezing like he's gargling in his sleep. I move into my room, sit at the window at the foot of the bed, where there is just enough space to squeeze in a desk. Here I decide I will work on my libretto -- about the Haitian Revolution and an ancient ancestor of mine, a Boston merchant, who barely escaped the revolution with his life -- -but find myself looking out my window as the lights in the apartment buildings across the way go out one by one. Since I also grew up in this apartment, I have been watching my neighbors for a very long time, although when I was young clotheslines across the alleys hindered sightlines. Henry tells me watching my neighbors must be how "I get my rocks off," as he puts it, but he is wrong. Think about it the next time you're on a subway -- how many of those people would you really like to see naked? What skin I do see is almost always desperately depressing so usually I just lower my shade.I suppose I'm crashing after the rush of being on stage. It's also hard not to panic as I hear Harry through the door, rasping and snorting as his breathing jumps around. I am in so bleak a mood I need to take measures I resort to only in emergencies, since they won't work if use them all the time. I have an old cassette player. I rummage through my desk drawer and find my tape of Callas's La Scalla Tosca. I need to rewind it only for a moment, because I know I need to move back just one song. In fact, when I press play there is at most a second of anticipatory silence before that beautiful long first note. It is "Vissi d'Arte" ("I lived for art, I lived for love, I never did harm a living soul!"). It doesn't get any better, and I worry my sobs might wake Howard in the next room.When I finally get my misery out, I wash up knowing I'll now be able to sleep. How much better "Vissi d'Arte!" works than does a prostitute! A good runner could probably do a half mile in the amount of time I have actually spent inside a woman, and my response to that act has always been a melancholic "So this is what all the fuss is about?" The spell, and, more importantly, the memory, of "Viss d'Arte" lasts much longer.I wake up a bit confused as I hear a woman with a distinct southern twang in the next room. It takes me a few moments to piece together what's going on -- the hospice nurse has arrived. What gets me out of bed are the words: "What do you mean there's no toilet? And why the hell have you never put in no air-conditioner? I may have grown up in Georgia, but this is insane." I find my bathrobe and slippers and shuffle out. The nurse greets me with a huff and a sharp, questioning look."This is my apartment," I say. "I grew up here with my mother. It's rent controlled. The landlord has been trying to get us out for forty years. No new toilet. No new wiring. An air-conditioner would blow every fuse in the building and probably spark a fire."The nurse doesn't say anything. I know she's thinking, something like Oh you crazy white people -- always making problems for yourselves. As if life wasn't hard enough.

That afternoon, propped up by pillows, Howard feels good enough to have some green tea before I depart. He says he is feeling sentimental. Howard, bless him, can get very sentimental; in the winter we splurged and got front row balcony seats for what I knew would be his last La Boheme; he started sobbing so during the love duet at the end of the first act the usher came down and said he had to leave. He wasn't up for anymore anyway. So I'll be repeating the stories he likes to hear, a bit like Lenny wanting to hear about the rabbits -- entirely appropriate, I suppose, because he did play Lenny in a fine summer-stock production of Of Mice and Men at Williamstown in 1992."Who was that mailroom clerk who got you to appreciate opera?" he asks."Leon DaVito," I say."And what did he say opera was like?""The taste of a woman's private parts -- once you got used to it you never can have enough.""But that's not what he really said. You're being polite.""Oh course it's not exactly how he put it.""I just love that -- given how you're the only opera fan I know who's straight, God damn you.""Leon DaVito couldn't have been straighter. He and Mel Smith would sit at a card table and stuff envelopes together while they talked dirty with Marty, the mailroom supervisor who held the keys to postal meter and hence also to the kingdom and the universe.""Where did Marty sit?""At his metal desk in the corner. Instead of 'from the desk of' his personal notepaper read 'Dear Fuck Face.'""And he had some little mirror?""On his desk was a little mirror that had written on it 'See Who Is Important to Us'.""It really should be 'whom', shouldn't it?""Marty was not a grammarian.""And this crude, disgusting straight man, this Leon DaVito -- he is the one who introduced you to opera?""In his own way, yes."I was broke and hoping to act. Clueless. I was starting at the bottom -- in the mailroom. But I worked in a doomed industry -- the company sold mailing lists, which of course promoted itself through using mailing lists. So there were a lot of envelopes to stuff. The radio played all day --- mostly the Black rhythm and blues station, which I liked -- until it was exactly five o'clock when Leon Davito would get up and switch it off. He'd move over to the small record player next to the radio. "Hey baby, it's time for the fat lady!" he'd say. "Can't leave until the fat lady sings!" He'd play Callas singing "O mio babbino caro" as he put on his coat.Then he'd say he was going off to Time Square to see "some big fat naked titties," while Mel would say he'd might go home via the zoo to watch the monkeys playing with themselves since he had nothing else to do now that his wife had stopped putting out.I had no ear for trained voices. Sopranos I thought sounded like cats being tortured. But I fell in love with "O mio babbino caro."I found out "O mio babbino caro" was in Puccini's three-opera Il Trittico. I got a balcony seat. Teresa Stratas was singing. I was completely unprepared for the power of Soeur Angelica -- at the end the man behind me was sobbing. Art that could move so deeply, I believed, must be vital to the world.I picked one dying industry after another -- direct marketing, word processing, newsletter publishing -- and eventually found good work as a desktop publishing supervisor. I supported the arts by going as often as I could and helping with any amateur or semi-pro theatrics that would have me,. When I got laid off, I heard about the ballet looking for supernumeraries -- that is extras (in England we're called "atmospherics") -- so I auditioned and got lucky.And letting Howard live on my sofa was supporting the arts, too. I had met Howard several years earlier at a cast party for his Notes From Underground. I of course knew he had starred in an experimental Uncle Vanya at La Mama, where much of the dialogue was in ancient Greek, and had earned an Obie nomination. I think he had been told I came from an old New England family so perhaps had some money, because he called me several days later to say he had a business proposition and we should meet. I certainly didn't have the kind of money he was looking for to underwrite the all-deaf, all-signed production of A Streetcar Named Desire he wanted to do. But we had a good time chatting and after that dined together regularly. Still it never occurred to me that Howard Marsh, the great Howard Marsh with the best eyebrows in the business (Frank Rich once called them "like a pair of praying mantises ready to take flight") if also the worst double chins, would end up on my couch. When he called saying he was being evicted and needed a place to sleep I asked no questions -- all real actors will have their cashflow problems. He said it would be a week or so until he straightened everything out. You do not say no to a man who understudied Philip Seymour Hoffman."The opera," Howard says. "You must see if you can go back to being in the opera. Tell me again why you got kicked out?""I had a wardrobe malfunction wearing a loin cloth during the dress rehearsal of Aida. I was not a very convincing Egyptian soldier in any event, despite the nappy wig they made me wear. Only a faux leather shin guard fell off, but that was enough."I check the clock. I tell him I need to get going."Break a leg," he says, smiling."It won't be the same if you're not here to hear about it afterwards," I say."Oh, you'll get over it," he says. "Vissi d'arte!""Vissi d'arte!" I say as I gather my things.

Howard rallies. Most of the mornings he sits on the commode -- the grown-up potty seat they have put in the bathroom over what we call the cloaca. Then he joins me for lunch at the table -- he only feels up to tomato soup and crackers. I tell him he's having too much salt, but he gestures that's the least of his problems. His eyes might be closed when he returns to the couch, but there is lively flutter to his eyebrows when I tell him about the previous night's performance -- it is almost like old times, and I am reminded why we sometimes actually like having each other 'round. Huge Hank right after me on the stairs in the monk scene has always made it up them so far, but he huffs and puffs and cheats by using his candle as sort of walking stick or ice ax for balance, banging it on the steps as he climbs. I'm surprised he hasn't gotten a note on that. Mihoko and I are dazzling, but she knows very little English, so our communication is mostly smiles. I am already falling out of love with her. As we stand close to cheek to cheek and eye the dancers below, I have had whiffs of her breathe, and let's just say she eats too much wasabi. Bossy Mindy is a pro; she uses sideway glances to direct you to good places to stand. At the end of each scene Mindy and I like to slap high fives and tell each other job well done.As I gather my things before heading to a performance, Howard puts on his huge, noise-cancelling headphones. He looks like he's either going to shoot skeet or park an airplane. He rubs and spins the old I-pod he has, one of those with a whirling hard drive. Before I leave I always ask what he will be listening to. One day it's Oklahoma! Then Carousel. But as I near the end of my run he tells me he's on to Parsifal, and the next day its Bach's Saint Matthew's Passion. Finally, it's Dialogue of the Carmelites.

It's the final day of the show -- there's an afternoon and evening performance. Howard spends all morning on the commode. Judith the nurse arrives and tidies up, but then leaves quickly. I get the feeling she's on to something she doesn't want to share. In any event I am much too preoccupied to chat, making progress on my libretto despite Howard's moans coming from the commode. I check my watch and decide it's time to get Howard's digestive biscuits -- all he eats now. As I come back from the kitchenette Howard lurches out of the bathroom and can't get onto the couch soon enough, tumbling into it, leaning his head way back with his mouth wide open as he suddenly stares at the ceiling. It looks like his whole being is concentrated on something hanging there. I suspect he's having a vision -- like Soeur Angelica seeing her dead son. And right at that moment a certain opacity enters his eyes. His skin immediately goes pasty. If there's any doubt about what's going on that ends when he emits a long drawn out gargling noise like his vocal cords are being dragged across a cheese grate.I grab his wrist. No pulse. I reach up his nightgown and check his femoral artery. Flat. I feel his chest, and the skin is clammy, immediately cooler to the touch."You self-centered little shit, Howard," I say out loud. "My call is in twenty minutes."And then I think, God is merciful. At least he wasn't still on the commode.What I really want is to smoke one of those cigarettes he was always pretending he didn't have, although I haven't smoked in twenty years. I even get up to search through his coat pockets. But as I glance back at him, feeling nothing in his pockets, I become suddenly relaxed. It hits me. The great thing about the dead is that there is no rush.If I were smart, I'd call the assistant stage manager and say I have a fresh dead body he can use in the show today. The corpse would be honored. Two performances! One with Misty!I go into the bathroom and check the Nembutal -- it was so quick I wonder if Howard didn't get a little boost. Sealed.Really it's a bit like Schrodinger's cat -- Howard isn't really dead until other people find out that he's dead.I put the Nembutal in my pocket. I take out the forty dollars in emergency money I keep in my Constant Garnett War and Peace, towards the back where Prince Andrea dies. From the fridge I grab the champagne. I give Howard one last glance. His eyebrows are magnificent -- as proud as preening cockatoos.I lock the door. I go downstairs and hail a cab, because the first rule of being an extra is never be late.The assistant stage manager knows my roommate isn't well, and asks how he's doing. I say he's just fine thank you very much. And I mean it. Howard is fine. His only problem is he's also dead.The matinee goes quickly. After I finish with Mindy and Mihoko I lean over and say to Mihihoko, "Did you know I have a dead body in my apartment?" She smiles at me and nods, not understanding a word, and I feel slightly bad for teasing her. Then as a monk I miss a step coming down off the stage and land on the side of my foot, twisting it. Between shows the house doctor looks at it, tells me it's a mild sprain, but my monk days, at least for this year, have ended. And it suddenly feels right -- I'll be switching places with Herb for the final performance.And I know what I will do. I will drink the bottle of champagne that is now in my locker. As the scary music comes up and I'm about to lay down on the slab, have a sheet thrown over me, I'll tell my stagehand supervisor I need a little pain killer. I'll down the Nembutal. I'll tell him the pain killer works best with champagne, but I haven't drunk champagne in so long.I'll be their best dead body ever.The scary music starts and the lights darken for the tomb scene. I fiddle with the child-guard cap. Suddenly it pops loose and all the pills spill out around my feet. But it's my cue. The stagehand shoves me down onto my slab, throws the sheet over me, and tells me not to move, stupid, because I'm dead.Remember -- it's the stagehands who drive the bus.

Keith Miller
“A Nairobi Christmas”

The first thing Uncle Josiah did after they arrived was take Jeremy aside and ask if he was born again. Aunt Edna was with Jeremy's mom in the upstairs bedroom, getting unpacked. Simeon was already high up in the mugumu tree and Jeremy's dad was trying to get him to come down because the mugumu was sacred to the Kikuyu and you weren't allowed to climb it. Ruth was sitting on the sofa with her bony knees scrunched up to her chest.Uncle Josiah grabbed Jeremy's arm above the elbow and pulled him over to the "Christmas tree" and crouched in front of him."Are you born again, son?" he asked. Up close, his face was bulbous, as if he had extra slices of meat inserted here and there under the skin, and his breath smelled like a healthy bowel movement."Yeah," said Jeremy, tugging at the hair on the side of his head.Uncle Josiah seemed taken aback. "Well, that's good, son," he said. "That's good. Sometimes I worry your parents aren't raising you in the way of the Lord.""Oh, they are," Jeremy said. He couldn't look at Uncle Josiah's eyes, so he looked at his nose. Tiny black hairs spiked up through some of the pores."Well, good, son. I just wanted to make sure that you were right with the Lord." And he gave Jeremy's butt cheek a pinch to send him on his way.Jeremy was born again because the year before, on the school bus, April Dodge had asked him if he was born again and he said he didn't know. He saw her whispering to her friends at recess and during lunch she knelt beside him in the jacaranda flowers and asked if he'd like to accept Jesus as his personal savior. Jeremy, dazzled by her braces and rainbow bobby socks and odor of American toothpaste, had shrugged and mumbled, "Okay, I guess.""Okay, then say this after me," said April, so bright-eyed and earnest that he really had no choice: "Dear Jesus, I just accept you into my heart as my personal savior." Jeremy, looking down at his kohlrabi sandwich, mumbled the words, and April said, "Yess!" and touched his arm with one pink-varnished fingernail. She returned to her brightly colored friends and they looked at him and one of them smiled.In recalling this incident, Jeremy felt shame and had to mutter aloud, "No, no," to chase it away. Because he was ashamed of so many things, he often muttered aloud to chase away memories. Recently, in order to stop himself from muttering aloud -- because one morning his mother had asked, at the breakfast table, what he was saying -- he had taken to holding a cocked forefinger to his temple and releasing his breath in a whispered "Pow!" He did this surreptitiously, disguising the motion as if he was merely scratching his head, but he could not encounter these shameful memories without verbally or manually erasing them. At any rate, despite having to mime blowing his head off each time he recalled the occasion, he was grateful that April made him be born again, because now if anyone asked if he was born again he could answer, with some confidence, in the affirmative.

Uncle Josiah went outside and, with threats of a spanking, got Simeon down from the mugumu tree and sent him up to Jeremy's room to "cool off" for a few minutes. Then Uncle Josiah and Jeremy's dad got into one of their incessant low-key arguments about the future of the Kenya Mennonite Church. Jeremy went into the kitchen to get a guava. While he was washing it, something dropped past the kitchen window and landed in the yard with a thump. Leaving the guava in the sink, Jeremy ran outside. Simeon was grinning at him in the kohlrabi patch. He'd climbed through Jeremy's bedroom window and jumped down from the roof into the backyard."Come on!" he said. "That was cool!"So Jeremy had to climb out the bedroom window and go onto the roof with him. The roof was covered with a tarry substance coated with something like gravel. Jeremy clung to the window frame. Then he shuffled down crabwise to the gutter and peered over the edge. The kohlrabi plants were green stars in the red soil."I can't," he said."Scaredy-cat.""No, it's just my shoes." Jeremy's shoes were size-thirteen Nikes, which he preferred to wear instead of his locally bought, snug-fitting khaki Batas because the gigantic shoes were from America and had the special purple peaked curl on each side, that symbol of mystery and power and foreignness that Jeremy craved. They had been purchased, at Jeremy's request, by Aunt Edna the summer before, when Jeremy's father had taken a trip to America. She'd asked his father what size Jeremy wore, and, upon learning that he was "very tall for his age," decided to err on the side of gigantism."Take them off," Simeon said. "Watch." And he pried off his size-nine Reeboks and kicked them over the edge, then followed with a gargled yell. Luckily, this time he landed on something sharp buried in the soil. He sat among the kohlrabi leaves and propped his foot on his knee and tugged off his sock so he could examine the gash on his sole. Jeremy wriggled back through the window. When he got downstairs, Simeon had his shoe on again. "Don't tell my dad," he said."Don't tell him what?""That I got a cut.""Why?""He doesn't like it when I get cuts and stuff."

Ruth had disappeared. Jeremy walked around the whole house before he found her outside by the kitchen door, in the little alcove intended for servants. Ruth had thick eyebrows and a knobbly body and black hair on her forearms. She was a year younger than Jeremy but seemed much older, perhaps because she never smiled. She held her head down and looked at people though her dark eyebrows. She always had an arm across her breasts, or her knees hugged against them, though her breasts were meager prickles in her button-down shirt. When she saw Jeremy, she quickly shoved something behind her back."What's that?" Jeremy asked."Nothing.""It's a book.""So?""Why're you hiding it?""I'm not.""Well, what is it?"She pulled it out as abruptly as she'd hidden it, and brandished the cover at him: A Wrinkle in Time."Hey, I like that one," Jeremy said. "When Meg and Charles Wallace go and find the three Mrs and stuff. And how Charles Wallace knows all those words.""Well, you can't say anything.""Why not?""My dad says it's Satanic, sort of.""Like what part?""Not just a part. All the . . . 'cause it's not in the Bible.""You mean like Camazotz?""Not just that. All kids' books, unless they're about the Bible or like Heidi or Treasures of the Snow or something.""I like Treasures of the Snow."". . . yeah.""What would your dad do if he saw?""I'd get a spanking."Jeremy imagined Uncle Josiah's thick purplish palm on Ruth's spiky butt cheeks. "Do you get lots of spankings?" he asked.She bent her eyebrows over her eyes. "Not as many as Simeon.""What's he get spanked for?""He's disobedient.""Like how?""Like if Dad says memorize your scripture he won't do it.""Do you?""Yeah.""Why won't Simeon do it?""He gets disobedient sometimes."

Ruth seemed pretty nice, but that evening -- Christmas Eve -- something happened. Jeremy's mom had made eggplants stuffed with rice and macadamia nuts, and scorched pumpkin with the skin still on, and sukuma wiki. The pumpkin wasn't bad if you cut off the scorched parts, and Jeremy ate some of the macadamia nuts and rice. Simeon ate three helpings of everything, but Ruth chewed a bit of her pumpkin and then said she was full."There won't be any dessert unless that plate is clean, Ruth," Uncle Josiah said."I don't care.""What did you say, young lady?""I said I don't care."And suddenly Uncle Josiah reached across the table and plucked up a bit of the flesh at her neck and was twisting it, and twisting her down to her plate. "You will clean that plate, Ruth," he said.From that moment until they left three days later, Ruth said nothing more. She would not eat the stuffed eggplant and scorched pumpkin, and Uncle Josiah finally escorted her to the living room by twisting a piece of her back and forcing her into a chair, where she stayed in the crumpled position he had thrown her, hair concealing her face.At the table, no one said anything, but there was a sudden tap. Everyone looked over at Aunt Edna. There was another tap. The taps were her tears falling onto the edge of the plate. After four tears had gathered, they joined and slid down to dilute the pale-green juices of the sukuma wiki."Stop crying, Edna," said Uncle Josiah. So she stopped crying and everyone went on eating. "Ruth gets in these moods," he said."She's twelve, Josiah," said Jeremy's mom."Don't you start with my children," said Uncle Josiah.

It had been Jeremy's mom's idea to have a "Kenya clan" Christmas after Grandma died. Aunt Leah was supposed to come down from Belgium and Uncle Timothy, who lived with a male clarinet player, and whom Jeremy had never met, was supposed to come from San Francisco. But Aunt Leah had to accompany her husband to Stockholm, and when Uncle Timothy heard she wasn't coming, he made some excuse as well. So in the end it was just Jeremy's family and Uncle Josiah's.Uncle Josiah's had lived in western Kenya when Jeremy was younger, and Simeon and Ruth had both been born in Nairobi, but Aunt Edna hadn't been able to take it ("She just cried all the time," was Jeremy's mom's explanation), so they'd moved back to Lancaster County. Uncle Josiah was a pastor there, but every few years he'd come back to Kenya to argue with Jeremy's dad and go do some ministry in Western Province.

Christmas Day was almost unbearable, with silent Ruth sitting in the living room or spending an hour in the bathroom till her mother went and knocked on the door. Simeon had discovered Jeremy's tin-can car and raced it up and down the yard. They heard it rattling past the window, then banging into the fence at the far end, then rattling past again, over and over. When Jeremy went out that afternoon, he found the car in the middle of the yard, with only one flip-flop wheel still on, the frame rucked and folded over. Simeon had been dragging this wad of metal back and forth for two hours.Midmorning, they gathered in the living room. In lieu of a Christmas tree, Jeremy's father had lopped a branch of a whistling-thorn acacia. Whistling thorns had fat hollow nodes at intervals along the branches, within which ants lived, streaming in and out through tiny holes. On the savanna, the wind blowing across the holes made a thin treble wailing. Jeremy's mom had stuck the branch in a plastic bucket, then painted the nodes red and gold. The tree looked pretty from a distance, but the ants within the nodes had swarmed out after the paint was applied, then got stuck in the paint. Many were still alive, and Jeremy spent most of the Christmas celebrations watching them try to get their feet free. One actually managed to get loose, though it had clumps of gold like outsized sneakers on three feet. It staggered across the bell of the node, then toppled onto Aunt Edna and Uncle Josiah's present from Jeremy: a clay pot that, at his mother's behest, he'd decorated with acrylic paints. The decorations included a rudimentary airplane, his personal ninja symbol, and a portrait of Michael Jackson (though when Aunt Edna inquired "Is this you, Jeremy?" he nodded).Jeremy received from his parents a second-hand T-shirt that his mother proudly noted she'd bought for three shillings from the used-clothes piles in the market. "Hold it up, Jeremy," she said, so he held it against his chest, and she said, "It really suits your coloring." The shirt was light pink and of Chinese provenance. On the front, in glittering silver letters, was the slogan: "No One Know the True Meaning of Project Shiny." Jeremy was afraid of the shirt, for a number of reasons: (a) It was pink; (b) the slogan, while Jeremy instinctively liked it, was weird, and might spawn a nickname or playing-field catcalls; and (c) Project Shiny might be a bona fide homo organization or feminine sportswear house, familiar to anyone who had spent a year in the States or had a television, but not to a culturally and technologically deprived second-generation Mennonite missionary kid.Jeremy's other present from his parents was a plastic bag full of tomatoes that his mother had imbued with Christmas spirit by placing a Santa Claus sticker on each tomato and then tying a red ribbon around the neck of the bag. Which Jeremy was unable to unknot, and so had to claw open the bag like a cat. One of the tomatoes, overly ripe, had squashed and rotted overnight, so the rent in the plastic released a fetid odor, overwhelming the Christmassy candle-wax scent.Jeremy thanked his mother. He put on his new shirt and bit into a tomato, immediately spilling a gout of wet seeds across the pink.From Uncle Josiah and Aunt Edna he received a Holy Bible with Concordance and Maps of the Holy Land. Simeon and Ruth each received the same Bible. Uncle Josiah proudly explained that they got a new version each year. Ruth received from Jeremy's mother a set of Famous Fives, which Jeremy coveted and Uncle Josiah immediately confiscated, saying he had to review them first. Simeon got a wire airplane made by a street boy. He broke the plane in forty-five seconds (this time noted by Uncle Josiah, half approvingly) and then dismantled it into five pieces while Jeremy's mom, watching him, tapped her upper and lower incisors together slowly.Of the eight presents his mother had wrapped, four were ensconced in plastic bags. The other two, being larger (a Turkana basket from Lokichoggio for Aunt Edna and a long beaded gourd for Uncle Josiah), were wrapped in newspaper. While his father read the nativity story, Jeremy read with fascination the exposed portion of an article about a woman in a matatu who had her arm swiped off by a passing vehicle. "Minutes later," said the article, "she realized her appendage was absent." The accompanying photograph showed the woman in a hospital bed, holding up a bandaged stump while a smiling doctor pointed at it. Looking closely, Jeremy saw that the bandage had four flies on it.

The next day was Sunday. They all walked across Jogoo Road to the church. Simeon had his hair parted on the side and slicked down with water and he wore a button-down shirt and ironed pants. He looked pale, his freckles like pencil marks on his skin, and he limped slightly, but when Jeremy's mom asked if he'd sprained his ankle, he shook his head and quit limping. Ruth wore a black and white dress that didn't seem to quite fit. Jeremy was wearing his usual fraying shorts and his Project Shiny T-shirt. The tomato stain, after some scrubbing, was now just a darker swatch of pink. All three children carried their new Bibles.Jeremy and his parents were usually the only wazungu who went to the church, which was a long, tin-roofed shed. The ceiling was starred where the roof had rusted through, and dust motes swarmed in the stems of light that dangled to the floor. They sat on benches, feet on the dirt floor, for three or four hours, droning hymns in Swahili. The hymns seemed to get slower every Sunday, especially the Kenyan Mennonite anthem, which was a Swahili rendition of "Holy, Holy, Holy": "Baba, Mwana, Roho, Mungu wa mapenzi . . ." The preceding line took about half a minute to sing. There were forty lines in the hymn, which meant the entire hymn, which they sang every Sunday, took about twenty minutes to complete. The sermon usually went on for an hour, unless there were other mzungu guests who didn't speak Swahili and they had to translate, in which case it took two hours.During the sermon, one of the elders came back to the mzungu bench and asked Uncle Josiah if he'd give a "message." Uncle Josiah nodded eagerly. So, following the two-hour sermon, he got up and spoke for twenty minutes about hell.Jeremy had a clear vision of hell, which was an amalgam of a painting in a book he'd read at his grandparents' house and the volcanic landscape around Mount Longonot in the Rift Valley. At one place on the rim of the volcano, smelly steam hissed from a gash in the rock and the surrounding savannah was bubbled and fissured by ancient lava flows. The excursion to Longonot with his father was one of his treasured memories, so he could not think of hell without summoning the taste of hardboiled eggs dipped in salt and tangerine juice licked off dusty fingers, though he knew he had to be wrong about this.When Jeremy's father preached, once or twice a year, his convoluted mutterings about the connections between the rituals of the northern Gabbra tribe and the biblical Jubilee were greeted with silence, but Uncle Josiah's sermon roused little murmurs almost from the start, and Jeremy was proud to be his nephew.Gripping the edge of the pulpit, Josiah would start a soliloquy almost in a whisper, leaning forward, eyes closed. Gradually, as the metaphors piled up, he leaned back, face reddening, the pouches of meat swelling, eyes open now, straining up at the specks of light in the ceiling. Letting go of the pulpit, he grappled at the dust motes with his thick fingers, voice rising, till he ended almost at a shout, releasing the sighed echo of agreement from the congregation: "Eeeh." He dropped his head again, looking down at the pulpit and breathing hard, while the translator, mimicking Josiah's tone and gestures, offered his version.At the end of the message, Josiah invited anyone who wanted to rededicate his life to Jesus Christ to come to the front. And Jeremy was shocked and delighted when four people went forward and made short, mumbling speeches. Then they stood in a line and allowed their heads to be patted and their faces spat upon by Uncle Josiah as he shouted a prayer at them.As he was dealing with the last of the penitents, a middle-aged Kikuyu woman whose husband, Jeremy knew, had recently left her because she hadn't gotten pregnant, Jeremy heard snuffling and felt someone fumbling at his knees. It was Simeon, and he wanted to get past. His face wasn't pale any longer -- it was as pink as Jeremy's shirt. He squeezed past and limped up the aisle."Son?" said Uncle Josiah uncertainly, his hand still on the woman's kerchief."Dad," said Simeon. "Dad, I need it." His eyes glittered weirdly, as though they were full of tears that couldn't get loose."You're saved, son," Uncle Josiah said, his face softening."No, I got a demon, Dad," Simeon said. "I can feel it. I got a demon. It's inside, right here." He went up and held on to the pulpit with one hand and put a fist against his stomach. "Get it out, Dad," he said.The translator, in ecstasy, delivered this to the congregation, and they sighed and wailed."You're all right, son," Josiah said gently. "We'll talk about it at home." He took his hand off the woman's kerchief and moved toward Simeon, who watched him, swaying. Then he suddenly vomited all over his father's shoes and fell with his arms around the stem of the pulpit.Three of the elders from the front bench crouched around Simeon's body. Two put their hands on his spasming back and one laid a hand on his head. The one with his hand on Simeon's head began to pray, a long, gibbering prayer that started out in Swahili but twisted into Kikuyu after a couple sentences. A woman staggered into the aisle and clutched her kerchief, ululating. Others moaned. Jeremy looked over at Aunt Edna. She was sitting straight up on the bench, staring at Simeon. Her lips were moving and her cheeks were completely wet.And suddenly Uncle Josiah was shouting. "Get your hands off my boy!" he cried, pulling at the old men. "Get away!" Grabbing their shoulders and thrusting them aside, he pried Simeon's hands free of the pulpit, picked him up, cradling him like a huge baby, and walked down the aisle, through the cords of light, and out of the church, without even a glance back at the half-blessed penitent who still stood, looking confused, by the pulpit.

Back at the house, Uncle Josiah laid Simeon on the sofa and they all stood around peering at him. His eyes were splinters of white between parted lids and he shivered now and then."They got to him," Josiah said. "That place was just full of . . . just full of them. I could feel them. Lord Jesus, Lord, now . . ."Aunt Edna knelt beside Simeon and put her hand on his forehead. "He's burning up," she said. She unlaced the beautiful Reeboks and tugged them off. She peeled off the left sock first. When she tried to take off the right sock, it stuck, and she tipped her head to look at the sole of his foot. On the bottom of the sock was a wide yellowish-brown oval. Frowning, she eased the sock off and sat back, holding it up and staring at Simeon's foot, which looked as though it had been blown up with a bicycle pump. It was pale violet, and the wound on the sole, which Jeremy could see clearly from his position at the end of the sofa, looked like a mandazi that had puffed open in the oil, with rough, raw edges rimming a crusty amber interior."Simeon!" Aunt Edna called. She took his hand and rubbed it. "Simeon!" she called again, frantic. Simeon shivered on the sofa and said, "I promise," but his eyes were still closed."How did this happen?" Uncle Josiah said. He looked at Jeremy, who nibbled on the flesh at the edge of his thumb and stared at the foot.Jeremy's dad stepped forward. "He has blood poisoning," he said, and pointed to a faint red line up the inside of Simeon's ankle."I knew something would happen," said Aunt Edna. "Oh my lands!" And she started whimpering -- little jagged sounds she tried to keep in by holding both hands against her lips."We'll take him to Kenyatta Hospital," said Jeremy's dad."I'm not letting any of those blacks near my son," Josiah said.Jeremy's dad just looked at him. Then he stepped forward. With a soft grunt, he picked up Simeon and turned toward the door. Josiah grabbed Simeon's knee."Did you hear what I said, Albert?" he said.Jeremy's dad looked at him. "If we don't get him to the hospital, he'll die," he said blandly.Aunt Edna began to moan. She was still kneeling before the sofa, and now she half-turned toward Josiah and Jeremy's dad. She began to shuffle toward them on her knees, moaning the terrible, gibbering moans, a string of spit swinging from her chin. She reached out to Simeon's foot. Before she could touch him, Jeremy's dad turned and walked out to the orange VW Fastback. Everyone watched as he awkwardly propped a knee against the side of the car to support Simeon while he opened the back door, then laid him in the back seat. Uncle Josiah helped Aunt Edna up and they went out to the car. Ruth followed. Aunt Edna and Ruth sat in back with Simeon, and Uncle Josiah sat up front.

Jeremy saw them once more before they left, in Kenyatta Hospital, where women crouched in the stairwells paddling ugali on jikos. In the room, Simeon was sitting up. His face looked normal again. He grinned at Jeremy and displayed his bandaged foot. "I got blood poisoning," he said. "I coulda died." The new Bible lay on his bedside table.There weren't enough chairs, so Jeremy leaned against the wall while his parents sat and listened to Uncle Josiah. Aunt Edna sat by Simeon's head, and kept one hand on the sheet, not quite touching him. Ruth leaned on the windowsill, looking out at the lawn, which was strewn with plastic bags and milk cartons. By her elbow was a little plastic Christmas tree."First thing I did," Uncle Josiah told them. "First thing I did, before the doctor even saw him, was call the folks back home. We had five congregations praying for this boy. Five congregations. And we prayed all night, Edna and me, sitting right here. The doctor says he's never seen anyone respond so well. It's a miracle. You're going to dispute that, I know, Albert, but it's a miracle."Jeremy's mom and dad nodded, and his mom looked around the room. "You found a Christmas tree!" she said.Aunt Edna looked up. There were bruises beneath her eyes, as if someone had pressed his thumbs against her lower lids. She nodded. "I'd brought it along. I wasn't sure if there would -- " she said, and faltered. "It's still Christmas," she mumbled, trying to keep control of her face."We should sing a carol or two," Jeremy's mom said brightly. "Would you enjoy that, Simeon?"Simeon shrugged. "Sure," he said.So Jeremy's mom gave them their notes and they sang "O Come, All Ye Faithful." Uncle Josiah shouted out the bass and Jeremy's dad contributed his tenor. Jeremy's mom started off singing alto, but switched to soprano when Aunt Edna started crying too hard to keep singing. Simeon sang pretty loudly, and even Ruth murmured something from the windowsill. Jeremy didn't know all the words, but he hummed along.

Josh Schneyer
Two Prose Poems

“Luchadores Doing Good In The Public Library”

When I was a kid, we used to fight in the library all the time. We weren't professional, and it definitely wasn't for a good cause. We were just young and disrespectful. Now Luchadores in leather masks and brilliant spandex suits are hurling each other willy nilly through the once silent rooms, smashing shelves and splintering tables. It's for a good cause, they say, and who am I to say it isn't? I'm sitting by myself at what seems a safe distance when a short, heavily muscled man in a red and white mask crashes through the table. He shakes his head and, looking up at me from the wreckage at my feet, asks "What're you reading?" "Keats," I say, showing him the cover. "A biography." He gets up on one knee and brushes a splinter from his shoulder. "Any good?" "Not bad," I say. "A little dry." "Cool," he says, and climbs on the table next to mine, leaping from it in a perfectly executed diving elbow drop, made popular years ago by Randy "Macho Man" Savage.

“Possum Or Present Is Future Past”

Caught in the headlights' beams
like an escaping convict
it froze and turned its pointed faceto me, eyes flared red in the glare.
It seemed to stare
from a million years away,Cenozoic visitor somehow
transported to my oak-lined street.
We watched each other acrossthe anachronistic distance, each
so improbable to the other.
In defiance of the present, it baredall fifty of its needle teeth, hissed,
then trundled under a parked car,
across a lawn, pausing once to glance backas if to assure itself of its escape,
slipped beneath a bush
and was gone.I watched the spot
where it had disappeared,
the time portal closing behind it,leaving me alone, stranded in the now,
then turned back to the still street
with its canopy of bare branches,the whole scene spinning darkly
through the universe.
In the dash-light's orange glow,I strained to catch a rustle, an echo,
hearing nothing but the idling engine,
the wind in the trees,the headlights' beams noiselessly
tunneling their relentless way
into the future.

Kat St.Claire
Two Flash Fictions

“The Valise”

Danny Binto carries the worn valise to work every day. Taking the long route from the waterfront jetty, he heads up the hill to McGuire Street, where seagulls swoop for food among the litter. The valise tucked under his arm, Danny makes the loop around the Financial District and through the park to fortify his resolve. Then, he heads back down the hill, walks past his own door at the rear of the building, to the tavern in front. Before he puts the key in the lock, Danny gazes out to the jetty's tip, where it meets the ocean enveloped in fog. One more breath; one more day of breathing.Danny sets the valise behind the bar, on the shelf below the cash register. When he's not working, he keeps it in the empty closet in the back room where Nori and the girl lived with him. He's the only one living there now. If you can call it living, up half the night nursing the drunken egos of his customers, a rough bunch of dockworkers. He falls into fitful sleep in the early hours, only to wake a few hours later to prepare for the lunch crowd that descends from the office high-rises.Sometimes they bring their out-of-town clients to give them a taste of local color. The old tavern, with its weathered clapboard siding, is a historic landmark built on that strip jutting out across the water like an accusing finger. The locals call it The Walk. They call the tavern The Waiting Room, even though the old sign just says, PUB.They call Danny, Councilor. They come to him to settle things, even though he mostly listens. He didn't used to be so quiet, back when Nori was taking care of things, and the girl.The suits who come down at noon ask how the place got its nickname, and how Danny got his. Danny doesn't say. Neither do those who know. And nobody mentions the valise. It's all Danny has of Nori. He longs for her -- and longs to be free of the legacy she's left him.One night, when he's closing up, the valise sitting on the bar, Zeek storms in, spewing profanities about how union and management aren't cooperating, and he doesn't see how in the hell they'll ever come to terms to sign by morning. He wants Danny to arbitrate again. "Councilor, please, the men, they look up to you. They'll listen to you."Listen… An ironic smile curls the edges of Danny's mouth. He remembers Nori listening to him, her lips bowed as she worked paper squares into origami birds. And the girl, Lily, dancing around, her fluttering fingers imitating wings. These details haunt him.Nori and those birds. "Never waste, never want," she whispered when he chided her. Drink receipts, cocktail napkins folded into origami birds. But the words penned within the folds -- Danny hadn't known about the words. In kanji and in letters, pen marks on those folded bits of paper piling up like walls of defense against his churlish manner. All his shouting, his rage against injustice -- not hearing, the thrum beneath the roar, as she wrote, the emptiness."Danny. This is serious." Zeek waves the latest dockers' contract.Danny blinks away birds fluttering beneath his lids. He takes the contract, sets it atop the valise, and looks down as if he's giving it his undivided attention. Paper words: pretty things. That's how Nori put it. Marks of no meaning, except by agreement. Danny slowly turns each page."Danny, please," Zeek says, "you just being there…in the box." That's what Zeek calls the backroom closet.Danny picks up the valise and the contract, heads for the back room, Zeek hot on his heels. Poor Zeek. Poor all of them, just like Nori wrote, sucked into life's maelstrom. Danny sits in the closet empty of Nori's clothes, the girl's playthings. Empty of everything but him and the battered valise. Nori carried it when she came to him. Like an apparition stepping out of his murky past. In one hand, the valise, in the other, the girl. His? He never pressed her; Nori didn't offer explanation. Better to leave the past behind. There was enough to deal with in the present. He made up for lost years; loved her, and the girl, in his way.Nori kept the place clean, the customers -- and him -- content. But always that hint of sadness, reservation. And him with his union business, flying here and there, and off the handle. He should have listened.Danny sets the valise on his lap, the way Zeek found him the night Danny discovered the empty closet, and the valise -- the night Nori's words flew out at him. He'd sat for hours, shaking as he unfolded each tiny paper bird, reading Nori's wing-tipped words. Like a path of breadcrumbs to the witch's oven, she wrote, love that should have been.It's three in the morning when the men storm the tavern. They fill the back room, standing along the walls, sitting on the floor between the rumpled bed and the dresser. From the open closet, Danny looks out at their familiar faces. Their accusing words fly at him, at one another, as they shout their anger, their expectations. Fire smolders beneath pain's threshold, inflames the bellows. Wasn't that how Nori put it?He'll do his best, listen for Nori in their voices -- the thrum beneath the ocean roar. Soon they'll calm, talk in quieter tones, work things out. Then, they'll be gone, leaving him, as Nori wrote, where grief finds solace in solitude.But these men will be back again -- and again -- their anger spilling over. Having lost the peace they gain in this moment, they'll swoop down on the tavern, expecting Danny to feed their ravenous need. And Danny will look out at them, just as he's doing now, and see Nori and the girl…vanishing, as they did that night, through the portal where mist meets sea.

“Dream House”

Two sisters, Francine and Betty, dreamed themselves a house, a kind of duplex. Francine's half in Silicon Valley, California, and Betty's in Portland, Oregon. But inside their dream home, there would be no state boundaries, just family, friends.The planning and building were coming along, until just before the project was complete and the building inspector showed up at Francine's end, pounding on her door, demanding to see her permits -- and what in the heck was she building anyway?"It's hard to explain," she tried to tell him as he barged in, charging from room to room, clipboard in hand. "Keep to the left," Francine warned when he headed down the hall. She hurried behind him, but she was not fast enough for this determined man on a mission. At the end of the hall, he thumped on what he thought was a wall. It turned out to be a revolving door. And he found himself on the other side, in a different hall. Turning toward the right, which was his inclination, he looked out a window and saw the deepening puddles the rain was making. Rain? When he'd come in, the sun had been shining.He had wandered into Betty's half, of course. Betty was taking a nap at the time, so she couldn't catch him before he stepped through that unfinished right-side exit. It was a long fall, and the puddle was deep, on the right side of the road. To make matters worse, just about then, that nosy guy in the pickup truck with the Corbett license that sometimes lurked on the edge of the property, determined to figure out what was going on, almost ran over the inspector. But he managed to fish the befuddled guy out of the puddle, and they drove off, into a long and confused conversation.Francine shook her head. "I told him, keep to the left.""Men," Betty said. "They never listen."That wasn't completely true. They both knew that. Hadn't their sons gotten together to build the place according to the dream plans the two sisters had long ago whispered in their boys' ears? Those boys, grown men now, had listened to their mothers. They wanted to make their mothers happy.And, in time, a lot of time, for boys will be boys, they got around to finishing the house, more or less, except for a few details, like that right side exit on the Portland end. But all in all, just as their mothers had instructed, well, suggested. After a sufficient amount of fishing trips and pacing and fuming, and placating girlfriends and wives while they figured out the plans and did the building on weekends. And even that far away son in Bend had called a few times to ask how things were going, because hadn't he built a few places of his own?Building something out of nothing was in their blood. The sister's father and family patriarch had done it. Back when homesteading was what you did when you had the will but no cash. Back when twigs became forks and melon rinds bowls.And now the sisters' well-intentioned daughters -- Betty has one, Francine two -- have been visiting a lot, a break from their busy careers, sunbathing in Silicon Valley, shopping tax free in Oregon, and carrying fresh vegetables, baked dishes, and old photograph albums back and forth through the turn-around door, each chanting the same mantra to the sisters: "You need to get out more.""Yes, dear," these experienced mothers answer. Smiling, they wink at one another. Because, lately, the sisters have been dreaming again. This time of turning their Mexican timeshares into an addition. On the south end of Francine's half. "Wouldn't it be nice," they agree. As soon as they come up with a time zone solution.But first there's the garden. Tricky, choosing just the right plants to adapt to the varying climates. But their girls are eager to get started. That's why they're here. And the boys. All of them this time, not to mention their significant others, and the burgeoning litters of grandkids. Where will the two sisters put them all, and what about the sisters' privacy?"Guest houses. Little cottages." Francine closes her eyes. "Can't you just see them?"Betty certainly can. "And linked to ours by Monet-style bridges.""Bridges over ponds full of coy," Francine says. "Don't forget the coy.""Coy, absolutely," Betty agrees. "But not too many. We need to leave room in the ponds for the building inspectors."

Ashley Mangtani
“Fully Dimensional”

One Second

A rod of rain stands suspended in the air.It runs from above the streetlight down to the tarmac, thicker at the bottom than at the top. It has already landed, and it is still up there.Danny Rook closes a hand round it. His fingers meet his palm with the rain inside. The rod keeps its place.He does it again with the other hand.He has a word for this.The Long Room.It's the title of his book. It's also on the lanyards and on the shirts they sell at the back of the hall after he comes off stage. He put the Attendants on a mug, six of them round the side, and they are still in his garage on a pallet with the shrink-wrap on.The Long Room has trestle tables down both sides under black stretch covers, and laid out on them are school shoes and house keys and dead phones, hundreds of each, sorted by size, with the chairs stacked against the wall.The walk starts at the door and runs the length of the tables, and an Attendant comes down the aisle alongside, close enough to take an arm.A woman in Wigan answers Danny's emails and sends refunds out with an apology under his signature. She has never met him. Two moderators sit on the forum overnight because a man from the retreat keeps posting the photograph of Danny's gate. They take it down before he is awake.He does the edit himself. Kitchen island, Premiere open, the razor on the waveform at the peak. The thumbnail is his face, mouth open, and he makes a new one every time.Danny is standing on Halden Road.The shutter on the Costa is down to knee height, and the light is on behind it. Rain hangs in the gutter without settling. Across the road, a wheelie bin has a traffic cone on top. It casts no shadow because there is nothing above the lamps to cast one from.The light over the crossing is red, and the filament inside it is lit from every side at once. The wiring runs down the pole, into the concrete at the foot and on into the clay.The wheelie bin has no far side. A tear runs down one seam of the liner, and both edges of the tear are turned toward him.A cup with coffee left in it. A carrier bag knotted twice, and the nappy inside the knots.Behind the shutter, a woman lifts a tray of pastry. Danny is looking at the palms of her hands and the backs of them at once. The wall behind her is no thicker to him than a sheet of paper, and the stockroom is on the other side.Sacks of beans stacked head high. A mop in a bucket, and the water in it is grey to the bottom.He sets off for the corner. Twenty strides, thirty, the effort in his thighs and the gap under the shutter is the same width when he stops as it was when he set off.The coat moves against his knees, and the corner keeps its distance. Every shopfront does. He turns on the spot and pushes off in a direction that has no name, and something takes him under the arms and sets him down further along.A Range Rover is stopped at his left shoulder, an arm's length off.A second one behind it with its nose against the boot. A third behind that, and the row running the length of Halden Road to the give-way.A man at every wheel with his hands at ten and two. The same coat. The same face.A white Micra sits across the mouth of the road. The nearest Range Rover has gone into the driver's door as far as the wing mirror.The launderette is at the head of the road, and the Micra is at his knee. The same car fills every yard between them. He puts his palm flat on the bonnet, and the metal under it is warm from an engine that has been running for no time at all.The rain will not reach the gutter. The cone will not come off the bin. Under the Costa shutter, a tray of pastry is on its way to a counter, and it will not get there.Danny Rook is the only thing on Halden Road that moves.Someone hit him.Which makes this the other side. The other side is a road with double yellow lines and a drain at the kerb, a crisp packet caught over the grate.No tables. No aisle. No one at his arm.He wrote the script for the Long Room video in one night. His heart had stopped for ninety seconds, and he has been selling that ever since. No living person has been in a position to check. He can write another one tonight.He heads for the launderette, past his own car, and his own car, and his own car.Ninety seconds. Nobody alive has more.

Four Hundred Milliseconds

The rain over Halden Road is standing up. Glass rods run from the lamps to the pavement, packed close enough that Danny turns his shoulders to get between.They all lean east, and the wind that put them there is not going to change again. The rods pass through his coat and out the far side. The wool stays dry.Under the bus shelter there is no rain. A block of dry air stands in its place, flat on top and leaning at the sides, its edges cut clean where the glass starts. Danny walks in at one end and out at the far one.The shelter has no inside. Each rivet in the frame stands open along its own shaft, and the gum under the bench shows through the plastic, the older pieces pressed closest to the wall.Every pigeon that crossed here is still crossing, from one end of the flight to the other at the same time. They come off the Costa roof in grey curves, tail at the parapet, head out over the road at the height of his chest. Every feather points the same way along the curve. A chip travels the whole curve in one of the beaks.The road has no inside either. Tarmac, then hardcore, then clay. A brick sewer runs through it with the arch complete and the flow going nowhere. The roots of a tree are down there too, with the tarmac poured over the top.He crosses the side road. The arch is under his boots and at his eyeline together, and there is only the one.At the kerb, the crisp packet lies over the grate, and the shaft drops past leaf mulch and standing water. Somebody's keys are on the silt at the bottom, the fob still readable.The rods end level with the lamp heads, all of them on one line, forming a flat ceiling of cut-off water.Above that ceiling there is no cloud, no colour, and no more rain waiting to fall.Nothing here makes a sound. The only noise on the road is the noise he brings. His boots, his breath and the wool moving against his knees.He says his own name aloud. It drops at his feet and stays there.He says it again on the way down the road, and again, and it stays where he leaves it every time.The rain stops dead at the roofs of the cars. Every rod is cut through at that height, the bottom gone and the top half left hanging where it was.The Micra sits at the give-way with the rods at its flank, whole from top to bottom, tight to the door.L plates front and back.The girl at the wheel is nineteen. Both her arms are out straight, and both wrists are broken at the same point. The instructor beside her has her foot down on a second set of pedals bolted into the floor, and hers is down on the first.Danny goes through the car. Sandwiches. Jackets. Two handbags with the linings turned toward him, a nail file and a fifty-pence piece.A lesson plan on a clipboard between the seats. Third lesson, junctions.Out past the Micra, a rider on a bike has a bag on his back and a box inside it, rice and a sauce under a clipped lid. His phone is on the handlebars with a route on the screen, running to an address that is not on this road.The pram is halfway over the crossing.Danny walks the line of cars from the launderette end, each a pace on from the last. They show him the engine and the block it sits in, the fuel line and the fuel.He is in the driver's seat down the whole row. In every one of them, his teeth show through the cheek. He gives himself less than he gave the chewing gum.Copies of The Long Room are stacked face up in the boot, the black covers catching what light there is. Beside them, a packet of magnesium has split open, the tablets loose in the corner.A parking ticket is folded into the door pocket. His lanyard hangs over the passenger headrest, the badge turned against the seat. A charger lies coiled beside a receipt curled at the edges. A blister pack in the tray by the gearstick, half of it punched through and half whole.Level with the bus shelter, the cars cross the broken white line down the centre and stay over it as far as the Micra.Danny stands over the paint. He crossed the line to get clear of the car coming at him, and his own tyres wrote it down. It runs under every car in the row, all the way to the Micra, and there is nobody here who can take it down.The phones sit in their cradles all the way down the row. He walks the outside of the cars and does not put his head through a windscreen.What he does not have is the other car, the plate, the face at the wheel.Danny walks out into the rain to find the man who tried to kill him.

Ninety Milliseconds

A garage at the top of the side road, oil pooled at the foot of the door and no vehicle standing over it. Nothing with an engine in it. Nobody at a wheel.The road runs past the shelter and the launderette to where the shopfronts stop at a low brick wall.At the wall the rain ends corner to corner in one flat face. Past it the air is empty, and the brick carries on, losing its joints as it goes.He puts his arm through. The sleeve goes past the edge, and the hand comes back.He is inside it. So is everything that hit him.He paces it out. Two hundred and eleven, wall to Micra. He does it again and gets a smaller number. Then smaller again the time after. He is not measuring the road. He is counting it away.The road has started to close.The wall comes in at his back, and the Micra comes nearer from the far end. Rain goes out where the two of them reach it, a handful of rods at a time.The launderette drops out while Danny is out in the road, the whole building at once, and there is rain standing where the shopfront was.He keeps a hand on the roof of the nearest Range Rover and the road closes around it.The pigeons are shorter than they were. Where each one ends there is a grey circle of meat and bone.Something is in the rain by the wheelie bin.A hand. Blue, fingers half closed, and nothing above the forearm. The fingers close a little, open, and close again.Another is at the driver's door of the Micra, white powder settled in the creases of the knuckles.Debris. Torn off something in the impact and thrown clear.A clear tube comes down beside the second hand and trails along the kerb, its end cut clean.The bus shelter empties, and the block of dry air inside it empties too. The Micra is where it was.He goes in the back, through the parcel shelf and the seat, and stops in the middle of the car. Both women are open around him.He puts his hands on the girl's shoulder and pushes. They go through the coat, the arm and the seat behind her.The wheel does not turn. The handbrake does not move. He braces a boot on the sill and puts his whole weight behind the door, and it stays shut.Nothing here gives under his hands.He gets out through the windscreen.The wheelie bin follows. The cone holds a moment with nothing under it, then drops out of the world.The Costa after it, with the light on under the shutter.The Micra is at the centre of what remains. The furrow in the rain behind it, the give-way line under it, the crossing past its wing.He goes back along the cars. The phones are lit, and he has walked their whole length without looking in.One thing in the junction he has not opened.His own face.

Eleven Milliseconds

The road runs from his heels to the white Micra.He gets into the car at that end, the one with its nose in her door.In through the tailgate, past the stacks and the magnesium, over the back seat and into the footwell behind his own body, both hands on the headrest.The body has its hands at ten and two. The jaw is open.The phone sits in the cradle high on the windscreen, the screen lit.His own face fills it, lit from below, the mouth open on a word. A red dot glows in the corner. The clock beside it reads fourteen minutes and nine seconds.He gets his head down level with the cradle and reads the mouth off the screen.The tongue comes off the roof of his mouth behind his top teeth. The lips draw back. It is a d, and after the d the jaw is already dropping.Dead.They want me dead. He said it to a full hall in Leeds. He said it to the kitchen island at four in the morning with the ring light on his face and the house asleep upstairs. He was saying it here.His eyes in the recording are down on the phone. So are the eyes of the body in front of him.He puts his face where the body's face has been holding all the way down the road, and from there the phone fills everything below the glass.In the windscreen is Halden Road.The give-way at the side road. The white Micra at the line with the rain unbroken down its flank. The rider out on the crossing. The pram.Every one of them has been in the glass since the bus shelter, and his eyes have not left the phone.Shame comes up through his scalp.He gets out through the windscreen and stands at the bonnet, facing down the furrow.Straight the whole way, with no swerve anywhere along it.The centre line crossed level with the bus shelter and never came back over.The rods at the Micra's flank unbroken, top to bottom. Both sets of brake pedals flat to their stops.Her wrists broken at the same point on each arm.The rider on the crossing with the light in his favour.One vehicle moved on Halden Road. His.

Nine Hundred Microseconds

The blue hands are at the driver's door of the Micra.One has the girl's forearm. Another holds the clear tube where it enters below her elbow. A third closes round the cannula and tapes it down, and they start on her other arm.They are the one thing on Halden Road besides him that moves.He waits his turn.They are not for him.The road is down to the width of a car. The white line under it, the girl at the wheel with her wrists out, the crossing past her shoulder.He came for a name.He puts his foot out, and there is nowhere to put it. The road is gone from both ends. He tries the one that has no name in it, and that has shut too.His breath goes up once and does not come again.Then he is flat with everything else. A seam opens him from head to heel, and there is no part of him turned away from her.Coat, sternum, jaw, watch, the crowns at the back of the teeth. A man saying they want me dead into a phone under the glass.His own book face up in stacks in the boot. The blister pack with the foil torn off on one side. Six Attendants in grey, still shrink-wrapped in the garage. A woman in Wigan putting his name at the bottom of an apology. A script written in one night with the blinds down.Trestle tables under black stretch covers, and somebody close enough to take your arm.All of it out at once, held up for anybody.The pram is halfway over the crossing.

Nicole Spiegel‐Gotsch
“La Soñadora De Parque Ochenta”

“The Dreamer Of 80th Street Park”

Frankie placed her palm on the sacred eye and waited. Standing in silent communion with the scarred stump, she lost track of time. The park, brimming with activity -- families barbecuing, kids on their bikes, volleyball and basketball games in full swing on the courts -- shimmered and faded away. This time a sensation came over her, like a low level signal coming up from the roots buried deep in the layers of sparse grass, earth, and concrete.Was this finally it? Would this be the moment she had been waiting for? One beat, then another, then . . . nothing happened. Just the scratchy, rough-cut texture where the Sycamore tree had been severed. Three trunks split at the base -- triplets of a sort. Now only two of them soared skyward, while the stump lay exposed, or as Frankie thought of it, dormant. The dark, inky-looking rings at the stump's center drew her to it, a Rorschach test only she recognized.Traffic blared on Main Drive, the road alongside the path where Frankie stood, startling her out of her ritual. She tensed and turned as a sudden gust of wind whipped her lank, dark hair into her face. Her legs, bare in black cut‐off Levi shorts, prickled against the sudden chill. It crossed her mind that at forty-seven she was probably too old to be sporting cut‐offs anyway. C'est la vie, who's going to stop me? she thought.A quick glance upward showed clear, sun-dappled skies overhead with earnest gray clouds pushing in at the edges. It was cool for a summer day, especially in the more shaded spots of what was officially called James Braddock Park, named for the boxer in the movie Cinderella Man and the site of numerous UFO reports. Locally, it was known only as parque ochenta."Maybe next time," Frankie said, in a voice that strained to be upbeat as she traced the deep circles of the stump gently one more time. Bored, her dog Bogie yawned languidly, shook, and tugged towards home. Frankie stayed fixed in place. Despite the non-event, Frankie wasn't disappointed. There had been other attempts, other objects even. But they had all fallen short. None of the moments lasted or seemed to be within her control. Like the time she clasped a shiny new gold Sacagawea coin in her hand as she boarded the city bus home from high school. In a blink, the viejita in the senior seats behind the driver vanished. There in her place sat Frankie's abuela, dark glasses and kerchief firmly in place as she rummaged in her little black worn coin purse to make the rest of the fare. "Here, abuela, Frankie said, extending the coin, "aquí lo tengo." Just as the coin left Frankie's hand, her abuela was gone. Only the viejita remained, softly smiling as though all worldly wisdom flowed through her veins. "Gracias nena," the viejita said with a sly smile about her lips.Waking dreams. That was how Frankie thought of them. Triggered by touching the most mundane objects, she would walk through them. Flashes of the past, glimpses of the future, or alterations of the present. Like layers of gauzy fabric, they stretched over the length of her life all the way back to the one-bedroom apartment of her childhood. Even then Frankie was out of step with time. Which may have explained her inability to sleep. By all accounts, Frankie had been a quiet baby -- who slept through the night and smiled often. But by the time she was about five or six years old, her power started to emerge. Frankie wasn't scared. It was just like a hiccup or a cough, nothing a toddler couldn't shake. But her insomnia became so profound that her parents gave up on the idea of bedtime altogether.Frankie's inability to sleep wasn't out of stubbornness or for lack of trying. Quite the opposite, in fact. It was just that she could never seem to get settled. Struggling to get comfortable in her narrow bed, she shifted like a contortionist, walking her legs up her bedside wall or hanging half off the edge of the bed so that her hands trailed along the yarny wisps of the old shag carpet. Then there were still her pajamas to contend with. Like straight jackets, the collars creeping around her throat, stifling, suffocating. Only her father's cotton, v-neck, Fruit of the Loom t-shirts hanging loosely around her legs were vaguely tolerable. Blankets painstakingly tucked in were wildly thrown off. Often when her parents checked in on her, they'd find Frankie staring up at the ceiling in the darkness or sitting cross-legged in the hallway listening to them watching Hill Street Blues in the living room and soothed by the piano of the closing credits.

This time Frankie was sure. Of all the trees in the 167 acre park, this was the one. She just had to figure out how to activate it, how to unlock the magic of the sacred eye and get the portal to open to reveal her true destiny and just where she'd gone wrong.To Frankie's mind, late love and early menopause had conspired against her. The "spare room" that was to have been a nursery was now superfluous -- an unnecessary appendage, like tonsils or an appendix. Was it that she'd gone against all practicality and common sense in marrying her husband, Lee? How could it be? They were kindred. A lack of confidence at some critical juncture? Could she have climbed the corporate ladder faster? Or perhaps the answer was easier than she dared to admit. It was a punishment for not having the child she'd been given too early on.That summer Frankie visited the stump almost daily, with Bogie in tow. It had become their lunchtime loop. Starting on the Bergenline Avenue side of the park gave him plenty of time to do his dog business before they took the turn at the bocce court to arrive at the stump. Now it was fall. The trees were draped in orange and gold. Crisp leaves floated down, crunched underfoot, or stood in tall piles for Bogie to jump and roll in. It was a Tuesday and, despite her devotion, Frankie's hope was waning. Tears slid down her face as she pressed her palm gently to the stump's center. "Please open," she whispered softly to the stump. "Please, tell me the answer."A light pitter-patter of rain began to fall. Bogie whined impatiently. A kid shouted, "Watch out!" as he and his friends whizzed by on their scooters."Ok, big dog," Frankie said, sniffling with resignation, "you win, let's go." Just as she was about to pull her hand away she felt it. A rumble and shift traveled from her fingertips up the length of her arm and deep into her chest. The world pulsed with her heartbeat.Thump. Thump. Thump.She had arrived.With a feeling of nausea and euphoria, Frankie felt herself flickering in space/time as she watched the forgotten yet familiar scene unfold. It was her and Lee just a few years after they married, newlyweds on a sunny day. They held hands and talked as they walked down Frank Sinatra Drive in Hoboken. Lee was saying something about old friends, an old flame, they were all starting families. Newlywed Frankie stopped short under the part of the road that passed under Elysian Park and turned to him sharply. "Sure," she said sarcastically, "with what money? Do you even know how much it costs to keep a baby in diapers?" Both Frankies watched the light leave Lee's face, they reached for his hand, but it was too late.Frankie was swept away again.Now a metal stairwell in the grungy concrete hallway of a building in Tribeca. Twenty-year-old Frankie sat a few steps below the older woman, who was talking to her like a mother. "It's what's best for you, it will be okay,"' the woman said. "There'll be a next time." Twenty-year-old Frankie buried her head in the woman's lap. "But I wanted the baby," she sobbed hoarsely. There was a ringing in Frankie's ears that grew louder as the scene dissolved and faded to white.Next wasn't a memory she recognized at all. It was a different place, a different her completely. Clad in a loose-fitting robe tied at the waist, her head wrapped in a turban, this Frankie was a warrior, grizzled and sunbaked like clay. A barren desert stretched into the horizon. Warrior Frankie rode on horseback, galloping at high speed. Three babes were strapped to her chest, swaddled against her in white, red, and black. She was running, but from what? And to where? Warrior Frankie cast a look behind her, and for an instant Frankie swore their eyes locked.Then she was back in the park.Frankie lay on the ground against the stump. One hand was tangled in Bogie's leash, the other had slipped down beside her. She propped herself up on one elbow and looked around to see if anyone had noticed her trip. As far as she could tell, no one had. Unsurprising, given the rotating cast of characters who regularly passed out or slept in the park. Frankie's mouth had a metallic taste and her head throbbed. Slowly, she got to her feet."It worked," she said to Bogie, who licked his lips and rolled his eyes nervously in response. "But I don't understand, what does it mean?"There was a vibration in her pocket. The spell was broken. It was her phone. Lee had been texting her. He was worried.Still slightly dazed, Frankie brushed loose dirt and stray pieces of grass from the backs of her legs as she reoriented herself. She looked at her phone again.Where are you? Lee's text read. Panic radiated from behind the letters. He didn't like it when she disappeared. On my way, Frankie texted back. She looked back at the stump reluctantly before turning towards home."C'mon Bogie," she said, "we better get back before he really starts to worry. Bogie wagged his tail eagerly in agreement.

The door flew open before Frankie could even get her key fully in the lock. Lee was not happy. His face wore an expression of anxiety mixed with restrained impatience."I was just about to call the police," he said tersely. "What happened to you?" Somehow irritated by his indignation, wordlessly, Frankie handed Lee Bogie's leash then drifted past him to sit on their couch where she sat silently staring at her hands laying palms up in her lap. She was looking for a sign or a mark, any indication however slight, of what had happened. But all that remained of her experience in the park were a few thin splinters of wood stuck to a grimey bit of sap on her right hand. As she struggled for an explanation Issue #129 of The Uncanny X-Men from the Chris Claremont era (Frankie's favorite), flashed across her mind. It was the one where Kitty Pryde's powers reveal themselves. Frankie was at a loss. She held out her sap covered hand to Lee who now stood in front of her expectantly. At 6 foot 4, Lee's lanky frame towered over her."Look," she said, "I did it." was all she could manage. Summoning all his patience, Lee let out a long breath before crouching down and gently taking Frankie's hands in his. He looked into Frankie's eyes. Lee's American Gothic upbringing had imbued him with an overwhelming quiet stoicism that was meant to preclude intuition, emotion and most definitely this, whatever this was. And yet, there he waited, eyes brimming with curiosity even as his face lay still and patient. "Did what?" he asked. "What's going on Frankie?""Let's go to Andes and I'll tell you all about it," Frankie said.Andes was the Peruvian bakery around the corner from their building. Equally known for its excruciatingly slow service as for their café con leche, it was one of a sea of panaderías that lined Bergeline Avenue from Union City to Cliffside Park. The suggestion wasn't arbitrary, Frankie was buying time. "We can share a slice of cake," she added, sweetening the deal. "Just let me wash my hands."From sudsing her hands at the bathroom sink to the moment their coffees arrived Frankie's mind struggled to piece together an explanation Lee would understand and then gave up. There was no making sense of it in the normal way of things. She had to just dive in and tell him everything from the beginning.For someone so consumed with stories, Frankie had never been a good storyteller. Even delivering a good joke eluded her. She wasn't a linear thinker. In her head, words and images collided, intertwined, disembodied, and rejoined in a swirl. They had grabbed a table against the wall across from the counter. The door opened with a tinkling of bells as people came in and out, lining up at the counter between the glass cases that held the many comforts of baked goods. Andes was a long, narrow space filled with the smell of fresh bread and strong, hot coffee. On the counter, three kinds of empanadas, beef, chicken and cheese, all still warm from the oven, nestled together on an orange plastic tray lined with wax paper. Below that, rows of traditional Peruvian cookies flanked either side. Frankie watched the sugar dissolve into Lee's coffee as he stirred and waited.Haltingly, Frankie put words into place. "Do you remember the stump?""Mmhmm," Lee responded, sipping from his cup expectantly. "You mean the one across from the dog park?" he asked. "What about it?""Well," Frankie faltered, floundering for a way in, "I was there.""Okayyy," Lee said. "What am I missing, why were you gone so long?""No," Frankie interrupted. She leaned forward towards Lee, hands flat against the formica table, and lowered her voice to a hushed whisper. "You don't understand, I was THERE… the other side, time, place, whatever… it happened, I… opened it." Frankie straightened with an aura of satisfaction and relief. The words were out, there was no taking them back. Lee's eyebrows raised skeptically, but he didn't interrupt. She pressed on, "At first I thought they might just be memories, but they weren't Lee, not at all... they were… shifts."When she and Lee had come in, the bakery had been pleasantly busy. But, now Frankie noticed that the bakery had become quiet. The patrons were gone. There were no more distractions, only the muffled sounds of the hostess wiping down tables and tidying up.The entirety of their marriage, Lee had a habit of interrupting Frankie mid-sentence, mid-thought, cutting her off. His mind tended to latch onto tangents. This time Frankie had his full attention, but after her initial outburst, she was straining to make sense of her experience to him. Sure, she had told Lee about her dreams and visions before, but only in a semi-serious, self deprecating sort of way. And, although he had never dismissed her or expressed outright doubt, he had remained noncommittal."Lee, don't you see?" Frankie said, "All this time I've been trying to figure it out, go back, change things.""Change what, Frankie?" Lee said gently."Everything we missed, lost, what we could have had," Frankie said in a choked voice. "And now, maybe I can. Today when I touched the stump it triggered something. First I saw us, like in a movie except everything was so real I could almost touch it. Then, I saw me, but not me. More like, versions of me… in the past, the future. Each time blended and blurred before I could do anything, but maybe if I go back and try again, I can learn how it works, control it.""Oh Frankie," Lee said. "We've been through this. I know things aren't perfect, but they're pretty good, aren't they? Why are you doing this to yourself?""You don't believe me," Frankie said flatly, dejected."No, that's not it. I believe you. I just wish… I wish you were happy with what we have. With me."Frankie perked up. Her ears had seized on the part she wanted to hear. "Then you believe me?""Yes, no, I guess so, Frankie. Sure, I believe you. But, even if what you're saying is true. What now?"Frankie skipped straight to the point. "We try again."

That night, for once, Frankie slept. Instead, it was Lee who stared up at the ceiling, wide awake trying to make sense of it all and wondering what the next day would bring. Just as the large, glowing, digital numbers of the bedside clock read six a.m., Frankie shot upright in bed as though she were on a spring."Come on, Lee, it's time. We have to go," she said, rushing around the room getting dressed and tugging him out of bed -- then as they were halfway out the door -- "Sorry Bogie, you'll have to wait here this time."Yesterday's events and a night of no sleep had left Lee feeling rumpled and ill prepared for what lay ahead, but for Frankie's sake he would try.When they crossed the street towards the park a growling sound broke the silence -- chainsaws. Frankie looked at Lee and started running towards the stump. She was a few feet ahead of him but even from a distance he could see that the stump was gone. Frankie fell to her knees in the grass, choked with horror. Her body seized and her eyes went milky white. Though he stood beside her, she called out to him as though he were at a great distance, "Lee, Lee," she repeated, chanting like a prayer until she was finally able to get the rest out. "How do I shift now that the stump is gone?"Lee's mind raced. The revelation about the stump had nearly overloaded his circuits and now this. Thoughts ping-ponged, logic collided with instinct until inexplicably he landed on a recurring argument he and Frankie had had. The details changed but the theme was always the same -- he had let her down, he wasn't there for her in the way she needed, she was disappointed in him. Not this time, he thought. Lee reached down and did the only thing he could think of to do. He took Frankie's hand and squeezed.And it happened.Thump. Thump. Thump.They arrived.Frankie and Lee stood hand-in-hand as they watched scenes unfold. Memories and alternate realities formed and faded before them. Lee crying on their wedding day. A divorce that almost was, and the baby that never was. Frankie held Lee's hand tighter against the onslaught of could have beens and could still bes, until finally they saw themselves older, together, happy. Frankie looked at Lee in the whirl of images. She saw him how she first saw him, caring, quiet, and true."Let's go back," Frankie said.Lee nodded in agreement.Back home Bogie greeted them at the door with barks and tail wags. Lee turned to Frankie. "You chose us.""Yes," Frankie said.

Author's Notes:Parque Ochenta: 80th Street Park
Abuela: Grandma
Viejita: Little old woman
Aquí lo tengo: Here, I have it
Gracias nena: Thank you child
Cafe con leche: Coffee with milk
Panaderías: Bakeries

Frank Sherlock
Four Poems

“Aries Season”

“Human Beings as Natural Things”

“Now That the Year or World is Over”

“Eris Season”

C. Inanen
“The Bravest Thing”

Excerpted from the unpublished novel Just Call Me Jones, on the exploits of a Depression era bank robber

I've been poor all my life. I just didn't realize it until I was 14 years old, or so, maybe 15. I don't offer that as an excuse for becoming a criminal. It's just a what-do-you-call-it, an explanation. My ma tried to teach me right from wrong. Maybe she didn't teach me hard enough or maybe I didn't learn well enough. Take your pick.I'll tell you this; you look at such things differently when you're hungry. When your belly is pressin' up against your backbone right and wrong don't seem so important.My first look at Sunset Mountain prison outside of Birmingham, Alabama came through the front window of a U. S. Marshall Service paddy wagon. "There's your new home, boys," the driver told us when it came into view. Two other prisoners and I craned our necks to see it. The fourth man in the back with us was slumped over, sleeping. A few minutes later I stepped down out of the truck in handcuffs and ankle shackles.My ma just couldn't hold onto the farm after Pa left. Dry land farming is hard enough in western Oklahoma. Trying to do it if you're a single woman with just a boy to help is even harder. The cows got sold off one at a time. Then it was acreage and finally it came down to things like the plow and the wagon, then the horse. The chickens were about the last to go. When the bank told her it was going to take the house she explained to me I was going to have to strike out on my own. She was going to Kansas City with a railroad conductor who didn't want a 16 year old boy around.The iron-barred door clanged shut behind me and I looked around at my new home for the next two years. There wasn't much to see. I spread my blanket out on the top bunk and sat down on the floor. I knew better than to sit on the lower bunk, which obviously belonged to my new cellmate. He must be working.At 16 I went to work for a neighbor at $15 a month plus room and board. That was about half what a ranch hand normally got but I didn't know it then. The practical education I received there was thrown in for free. I went from there to the stockyards in Tulsa, tried my hand unsuccessfully at being a rodeo rider for a while after that and finally hired on as a roughneck and laborer for the Raymond Oil Company. By then I had a lot in common with those longhorns which were fast disappearing from the range, I was lean, rawboned, lanky, and I kept my head down most of the time. They did it to survive on the sparse grazing. I did it to hold onto my job.My new cellmate was marched to the door a couple of hours later. He was an old man, bent over and slight. He eyed me as the guard locked him in the cell and he smelled like turpentine. I didn't say anything, I just looked right back at him. There isn't a man alive I'm afraid to look in the eye."Johnson's my name," he finally said as he sat down on his bunk. "Herschel Johnson but you can call me "Railroad." Most everybody does.""Jones," I told him."You new?" he asked."Yes sir just arrived today.""I figured as much. You aren't dirty enough to be a coal miner.""I will be tomorrow. That's what I picked when they offered it." You could work in the Flat Top Mine as leased convict labor to the Sloss-Sheffield Coal Company. They paid the Alabama Department of Corrections $9 a month for your labor but you didn't see any of that. Some of it went toward your court costs, which you owed, until they were paid off. You had the opportunity to earn a little bit of money if you worked overtime or exceeded your quota."Son," Railroad said, "You picked a hard way to go. I did that for 9 years. Now I work in the furniture shop, putting varnish and paint on furniture. Good job.""I'm in for 2 years.""A man who's strong and healthy and careful can probably do it for 2 years if he's lucky. I've got 5 years to go myself." He said that as if he was almost proud of the length of time he had left to serve."Lucky?""That Flat Top Mine is a death trap in more ways than one. You've got dangerous gas, explosives, falling rocks, faulty elevators, high water levels and unreliable pumps on top of all the coal dust. That gets in your lungs as well as your skin and your clothes. You can't get it out." They hadn't mentioned any of those things when I'd been given my choice. That and the furniture shop were the only jobs that let you accumulate a little bit of money in your prison account. I'd picked the mine because it paid more, a matter of cents."What did you do to get such a long sentence?" I asked him.He didn't answer right away. Instead he told me, "You don't want to be asking men what they did to get here. Some men, they're ashamed of what they done, others, well you don't want to know. Me, I was convicted of stealing and trying to sell a railroad car load of those new-fangled radios. They were the coming thing at the time, everybody wanted one.""Seems like a long time, for that.""Well, I'm not sayin' I did it but I'd been caught for similar things before. That makes a difference, four years in state prison, and some shorter times in county jails. They don't call me "Railroad" because I work on 'em, although I have." He laughed. I did too. I was getting the impression I had lucked out when it came time to being matched up with a cellmate.It didn't seem like long before a guard came down the hallway, dragging his Billy club so it clanged on the bars, monotonously calling, "Lights out in five minutes. Five minutes, lights out."The rules said no talking after lights out. Like a lot of prison rules that was only enforced when the guards wanted to enforce it. I soon learned it was never truly quiet at Sunset Mountain prison. With that many men you're bound to have noise. Farting, belching, crying, random screams, singing and noises you would really rather not hear were all shared with the rest of the prison population. There was a fella a few cells down I was pretty sure was crazy, the things he shouted during the night.In the darkness I explained to Railroad I'd stolen a 1926 Hupmobile up in Atlanta, Georgia in 1928 and drove it to Montgomery, Alabama where I sold it for $1000. Five days later I'd been arrested by two men in suits who worked for the Bureau of Investigation. The purchaser turned out to be a Federal Judge for the United States District Court for the District of Northern Alabama. The Honorable Clarence S. Grant felt the price was too good to be true. Maybe if I'd charged him a little more I would have gotten away with it. Railroad could understand the irony in that.Guards calling throughout the cell blocks, "Rise and shine, rise and shine. Sun's comin' up and so are you, rise and shine, rise and shine," woke me up the next morning accompanied by the rattle of the batons on the steel bars.Railroad was already awake. "Got to be standing with your feet on the floor the next time the guard comes by," he warned me. "If not they'll warn you once and then make you stand whether you want or not." I was standing with my feet on the floor when the guard came by for the morning count. They wouldn't unlock any cells until they had done the morning count and matched it against how many prisoners were supposed to be incarcerated. "Sometimes it takes them two or three counts," Railroad told me. "Man dies in the night, can't get out of bed with his feet on the floor, he don't get counted. Then the count's off." He was taking the time to explain to me how things worked. I really appreciated that. "You die during the night with your feet on the floor, propped up against the wall, they might count you." He laughed. Prison humor is different than that out in the free world.Hard doesn't begin to say how my first day down in the Flat Top Mine was. I survived it. By the end of the day I had all I could do to march back to my cell but I was standing on the floor there when they did the evening count. The walk down to the dining hall took a Herculean effort. The food was terrible and there wasn't much of it. One man shouted and glowered at me when I sat down at the table he occupied without permission. When I got back to the cell I climbed up into my bunk and fell asleep immediately. I did it again the next day.When I'd been working for Raymond Oil I learned to drive a truck. The work in the oil fields was often physically demanding so I was no stranger to hard work. There was danger, too. Swinging heavy pipes and drill casings, all that isn't for the careless or the weak. For that matter you can lose a finger in a heartbeat working cattle with ropes. The Flat Top Mine was all of that compounded by the dangerous conditions you did it under.I was assigned to a work crew and worked with them each day. The straw boss was Bear. He was a big burly man who maintained discipline and production when we were underground. He was responsible for us and for our output. After a week or so I began to think that Bear was all right to work for. In fact the whole crew was decent. We were integrated although the dining hall back in the prison was mostly segregated by prisoner's choice. Whites ate with whites, Blacks with Blacks, and Indians with Indians. Down in the mine they brought us our lunch and we all ate together. Two of the men, one white man with a Polish name, we called him "The Pole" or "Big Dan," and a Black man named Isaiah were the best at wielding the heavy pickaxes we used. They were good friends and competed with one another to see who could do more tonnage and footage each day. They were about equally matched. An older man, Joe Bako, was recognized as the most experienced and knowledgeable underground miner. He had a heavy accent and spoke slowly as if not accustomed to English. He was the one who Bear turned to when technical questions came up. Butcher was another member of the crew. I don't know if "Butcher" was actually his name, something that he'd done, or a job he had previously held but it was what everyone called him. I never asked, he never said. He didn't say much. Vinnie and Cabell rounded out the crew. Vinnie was a free man. He had been a prisoner before and when his release date came up he took Sloss-Sheffield's offer to keep doing the same work at an hourly wage. He lived in a company owned boarding house and got treated like everybody else. He even wore the same uniform. I was replacing a man called "Gooch" who had gotten hurt a few weeks ago. They had been working short-handed during the interim and were glad to see me as a consequence. Glad to see me but naturally watchful and suspicious until they knew more about me.I kept my head down, did my work, doing what Bear told me to do and listening to Joe Bako when he sometimes told me something. I appreciated those instances. I listened to Railroad Johnson in the evenings. He was a canny old crook. He knew how the prison system worked too. It was an education hearing him spin out one tale after another. He was married and owned a home in Birmingham. He'd had a big score in 1917, just before the United States declared war on Germany, when he'd stolen an entire railcar's contents of mink, ermine, and fox furs and coats. That had paid for the house and then some.Mr. Bowman was the shift foreman in the mine and Mr. Tutweiler was the superintendent. I didn't see Mr. Bowman at all although Bear talked with him every day. I didn't see Mr. Tutweiler for the first six months I was there. Then one morning on the hoist, just before we went down Cabell tapped me on the arm and told me, "That right there is the big boss, Mr. Tutweiler. Somethin's up."He was right, too. The next day we were moved down to the 4th level. After the sickening drop down Bear told us, "Rest easy, boys, Joe Bako and I are gonna look this over before we start."They were gone a long time, into the recesses of the excavation into the seam. Isaiah and his buddy grumbled. They weren't making footage or tonnage while we were sitting on our keisters and they were in competition with the other crews as well as each other. Finally Bear and Joe Bako returned."Cabell," Bear said, "Ring for a lift and go up. Tell Mr. Bowman we need more shoring before we do any blasting down here. The walls are gettin' thin." He told the rest of us, "We're gonna hog out this morning until we get it shored up." We set to picking previously mined and blasted ore from the adit. The further we got into the mine, the softer and spongier the footing underneath became. The air we were breathing was heavy with humidity and there was moisture on the walls. When we finally got to the face there was standing water. "Damn," Bear said. "We need some pumps down here. Vinnie, take a trip up and tell Mr. Bowman an' try and see where Cabell's at with that shoring."Vinnie started the trip up the inclined shaft on that errand. They might listen to Vinnie, he'd worked in the mine a long time. Before he got back Cabell returned with some shoring. Joe Bako looked it over. "Pine," he pronounced. "Is not good." He and Bear held a hushed conversation. I looked it over myself. I'm no expert on shoring but I saw warped boards and plenty of knot holes."That all they got?" Bear asked Cabell."That's it.""I think we're comin' on to an underground spring," Bear finally told us. "Get to shoring." Cabell, Big Dan, Isaiah, Butcher and I started dragging the ten foot planks through the mud up to the face where Bear and Joe Bako worked. An hour later he had us start in on the face. "Where's them pumps?" he asked no one in particular. Nobody answered. Nobody knew.I was standing ankle deep in water, bent over, swinging my pick when Big Dan called out, "Bear! I hit water!" We all stared at the stream of water that gushed from a hole in the wall in front of Big Dan."Start packin' it in!" Bear told us. He didn't have to tell us twice. Picks were dropped and shovels were picked up. The oozing mud underfoot was thrown against the leaking wall. Bear and Joe Bako dragged more planks toward the face."Two foot wall," Joe Bako said as he began placing the fresh planks.Bear did likewise on the opposite side. He ordered us "Dig a drain trench." Big Dan and Isaiah started digging. Cabell, Butcher and I kept shoveling the wet, greasy mud onto the void being created behind the new timbers. You ever work as hard as you can as fast as you can for an hour? That's exactly what it was like.I'm as willing to go to it as the next man. The only thing that kept me from turning tail and running back up the inclined shaft, as I saw that water stream out and the level rise, was the men around me. They weren't running. Maybe that's what kept all of us there, working feverishly. Finally Bear signaled us up the incline. We all dropped to the floor in exhaustion. "Still rising," Big Dan remarked, watching the water level creep up slowly.Bear agreed. "That's it boys, as far as we can go until we get some pumps down here. Let's head up top." We trooped to the hoist and Bear rang for the elevator. It seemed to take forever to arrive. This was the first time I'd seen the crew quit early. We crowded into the lift and were slowly raised to the top. Emerging into the sunlight I blinked my eyes, the way you do.Mr. Bowman was waiting there. He asked Bear "What's it like down there?""Wet," Bear told him. "Where's my pumps? I sent a man up two hours ago for pumps.""We don't have any," Mr. Bowman told him. "Two in the shop being worked on right now.""That's it then," Bear told him. "We're done until we get it pumped out. We made zero footage, today. Zero. The only tonnage was from hoggin' out.""You quit early we're going to have to dock the whole crew," Mr. Bowman said."So be it," Bear replied. "My men can't mine coal under water."The bravest thing I ever did was go back down into that mine the next morning. Everybody went.

GM Foy
“The Situationist”

Sandro lived in a street to the south of the Champs Élysées, a neighborhood that even then -- this was in the late eighties -- seemed to sag under the weight of the fashionistas and trust-fund brats inhabiting it; people whose belief in the alkahest of credit, in the pretense associated with it, seemed to have soaked into the smug, Haussmanian facades of each street, shop and café. I was in Paris on my way to Algeria for research on a novel. The novel was about two brothers, one of whom made a living selling arms to rebels opposing regimes of which he disapproved. In my narrative he flogged anti-tank weapons to Sahrawi guerrillas, based in Algeria, fighting the Moroccan army. The Moroccans had invaded the Sahrawi homeland of Western Sahara a decade earlier. ... I'd lived in Paris before, and wished to visit friends there. Also -- and in this archeological dig of motives I was of course excavating myself -- I wanted time away from coastal New England, from a relationship that had acquired almost as much tare, albeit of a different sort, as the Eighth Arrondissement.

I counted Sandro as a friend, even if he'd been my brother's friend first; even if he was a trust-fund kid; even if pretense, in the sense of straining to appear valuable to others, took up most of the pistons in the engine of his personality, a characteristic he shared with my brother. Which sounds unfair since it's a deeply human trait to seek appreciation, for a slew of reasons; and Sandro, like Louis, was a good guy, kind and funny and generous. Still, despite his redline levels of energy, he seemed to hold few gears grinding within him besides this need to to be appear valuable, whereas my brother had chosen to become a photographer for motives beyond the Bohemian cachet this might confer.Of course I too sought approval in my life, though I fancied I had less superficial aims: to evoke some sort of cross-genre harmony in notebook sketches; to describe in words the harm post-colonialism visited on the innocent. These aims sound just as pretentious now but in those days I believed in them. My work had not made me rich, to say the least, and to save money while I waited for the Algerian consulate in Paris to grant me a press pass to Tindouf -- the town, deep in the Sahara Desert, where the Sahrawi rebels were based and to which access was restricted -- I took up Sandro's offer to stay in his flat.It was a one-bedroom, and for the first few nights I slept comfortably enough on a mattress in the sitting-room-cum-kitchen. Sandro was out much of the day, working for a Swedish inventor named Lars who had promised to pay him a percentage of the profits if Sandro marketed his ideas to good effect (Lars had already made bank with a bespoke plastic dispenser for Post-It notes). Another motive, at least as compelling, was the inventor's two twenty-something daughters, Nana and Eva*, who Sandro claimed were both easygoing and cute. On my third day we all had lunch together in a café in Auteuil, where the Swedes lived. I was immediately taken with Nana, the older sister. She was attractive in an almost clichéd Scandinavian way: hair the color of winter wheat, eyes blue as an Arctic pond, her face a perfect V that might contain like a Georg Jensen vase all my forsythia fantasies of romance, of escape.This felt confusing, if not badly so, in the same way a released prisoner might feel both joyous and frightened at his ability to move outside a cell. I still loved the woman I lived with in New England; I loved, without qualifications, her twelve-year-old daughter; in a curious if thoroughly patriarchical and self-indulgent way, the knowledge that I had a family waiting at home made a potential fling with Nana attractive but not life-altering. Given that I planned to accompany a bunch of tribal guerrillas assaulting military positions somewhere in the world's biggest desert, a fling in Paris seemed as much risk as I could deal with at the time.

I asked Nana out for drinks once, twice. She was happy enough to meet, though she never asked me out in return.Every day I called the number for the Front Polisario, the Sahrawis' liaison office in Paris. All I ever got was a recorded message promising to call back if I left a message.They never returned my calls. Their address was unlisted.Every few days I visited my contact at the Algerian consulate. The consulate occupied a brown, 19th-century building on rue Bouret, not far from the Arab neighborhoods of the 18th Arrondissement; and Nabil was a brown, 19th-century man -- not old in terms of age, nor brown in skin color (he was quite pale), but presenting the mauve, old-files aridity of the lifelong apparatchik. He was always courteous and encouraging; my application was still with the foreign ministry in Algiers, he was sure it was being processed, it would be approved any day now, these things took time, I must be patient.So it turned out that I was still in Sandro's flat at the end of my second week in Paris, waiting for the Algerians -- waiting for Nana: sitting at the tiny kitchen table drinking coffee and listening to Rolling Stones records with Sandro when my friend said, through a rictus-like grin, "I just heard from my father, he's coming to stay a few nights. You'll like him," he added hastily, gulping down a groan with his café au lait. "He's an artist -- political, like you."I was surprised. Sandro never talked about his dad, or about his mom for that matter, though I knew from somewhere that Ralph was British and had raised Sandro for part of his childhood. Sandro did have half-brothers from his mother's first marriage with whom he sometimes hung out. My friend was lean, packed with nerves. His face, in its long, handsome stretch of irony, seemed very English to me, though he'd been brought up in Venice and Paris, descended through his mom from a family of American collectors who'd cashed in the fortune they made mining Colorado silver to buy art. I knew Sandro's mother had jumped out a window when he was a kid, while still married to Sandro's father, a fact I reckoned had a lot to do with the son's firm interest in earning the approval and affection of others, even at the expense of loftier notions. "Great, I'd like to meet him," I said. Apparently he was due that morning.But Ralph did not show up until late the same evening, hewing to a pattern of unpredictability that I soon learned was symptomatic of how he navigated life in general. He rang the interphone as Sandro and I were drinking wine at the kitchen table; lean and nervous like his son, if not as well dressed -- Sandro was into Yves St. Laurent. Ralph had a face I figured was how Sandro's might look after thirty years playing rugger in English rain. And Sandro was right, I liked Ralph immediately; he had the same nervous energy as his son, but leavened with a febrile curiosity and an openness to whatever might roll down the pike; an openness I thought was tightly lashed to his unreliability. If you expected Ralph to be late for a rendezvous, or not show up at all, it left him free to chase some woman he met in a café, or stay up all night painting, or get blind drunk, or take a train to Cadiz if it struck his fancy and without worrying about how this might affect anyone else. Free to join street protests, as well, of which there were no shortage in Paris; it was what he'd been doing earlier that day. "I'm an anarchist," he announced soon after we met, through his usual troika of laugh hooked to outbreath of smoke linked to the deep, bad-plumbing cough of the tobacco addict -- almost doubling over to grab wineglass, flick ash, and convey to me in the same instant how fucking deep his convictions were.

Ralph and I talked till late that night: about what I was planning, and the military cabal that ruled Algeria, and how the murderous Hassan, king of Morocco, had annexed the Spanish Sahara, forcing indigenous Sahrawis into camps over the Algerian border. We talked about America's tendency to sabotage democracy, murder its proponents, and support pro-business juntas behind the fig-leaf of fighting communism; of the need to build grassroots resistance to Brobdinagian bureaucracies which, no matter what ideological banner they flew, were genetically programmed to control. I learned that Ralph had been one of the founders of a movement called the Situationist International. "Just the seven of us," Ralph told me (Sandro had hit the sack by then), opening another bottle of rouge, "in an old chalet in the mountains, in Italy -- near Cosia di Arroscia. Me, Guy Debord, Asger Jorn and Michelle Bernstein, a few others."Ralph's words echo in my head as I write this, his Geordie accent thickened by wine: he drank the six-franc variety of Cotes d'Yvelines one bought at the corner "Arabe" (what Parisians, in softly racist fashion, called the local corner stores, which in those days were run mostly by North Africans). My memories are drenched in smoke as well; Ralph chain-smoked the cheapest cigs you could find in France, they were called "Boyars," tubes of yellow paper containing rough, barely cured tobacco that cooked off thick black fumes when lit. I wondered if "Boyar," which was a Russian term for minor aristocracy, was meant to evoke papiroszi, the cigarettes rolled in newsprint that were their equivalent in Russia. I didn't mind the wine, I liked drinking and talking deep into the night almost as much as Ralph did. But the smoke started getting to me that first evening. Finally I retreated to my mattress in the corner of the sitting room while Ralph lit yet another Boyar and poured himself his umpteenth glass at the kitchen table.I don't know when he turned in. When I awoke, shortly after dawn, coughing so hard from the poisoned atmosphere it felt as if my lungs were yanking themselves inside out, Ralph was already up. I heard the suck-pop of a cork being drawn, the fizz of a match; and the gray haze left from the night before thickened again into fog.

I kept asking Nana out. We were both, it seemed, a bit stuck at this stage of our lives. She had recently broken up with a guy in Stockholm, and left a decent job in a design firm to come to Paris; she wanted to stay here, for now at least, and I was quick to tell her I was thinking the same thing, which I was, although not seriously. We drank a far better wine than Ralph's as I wondered what lay beneath the surface of her eyes, blue and inscrutable as the Finnmark sky; searching, as we met and parted for the fourth time, for those tiny increments: in pressure of touch, in angle of cheek-kiss (was it more, or less, toward my lips?); in extra milliseconds of hug that might indicate she was as attracted to me as I was to her -- finding nothing there but my Olympian capacity for wishful thinking.Wishful thinking was getting me nowhere with Nabil, either. No, he'd still heard nothing from Algiers about my press pass, nor for travel to Tindouf, he told me during my fifth visit to the consulate; and no, he had no idea when, or even if, they might come through. But it's been almost three weeks, I whined. Patience, he counseled yet again, buzzing his secretary to have me shown out, these things take time.

That same evening I met Ralph at the Flore, on Saint Germain. It was, and remains, a classic Left Bank tourist café: famous because Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Picasso and other Left Bank glitterati used to meet there when it was less well-known; retaining nonetheless some scraps of authenticity since the décor -- solid brass hat rails, oak-trimmed seats, antedeluvian waiters, a glowering 'Madame Pipi" demanding tribute to enter the toilets -- had not changed since 1914. Famous, also, because a few older Parisians still hobbled there of a weekday morning, out of habit; as did Ralph, summoning his debates with Debord at a table in back. "We really had something then, the Situationists I mean," he insisted through the Boyar fumes (you could smoke inside cafés in those days). The Situationists, he went on, believed in turning each moment of life into a work of art, whatever art you practiced; into an act of liberation as well, from a capitalist web that entangled people in the false if glittering skeins of entertainment and advertising."We were all dead keen on 'psychogeography'," Ralph said. This meant challenging the assigned routes, the pathways of control in a city, through the practice of "la dérive," aka "the drift." Getting lost, essentially; going wherever fancy led as you observed and sought to understand the social, political, and aesthetic landscape, which eventually you would work into your paintings, books, or political action. I thought then, and still think, that la dérive perfectly described what Ralph did with his own life, although he confessed later that Debord threw him out of the movement only a few months after its inception because Ralph couldn't be arsed to draw a psychogeographic map of Venice as he'd once promised. ("He could be a bit of a cunt, Debord," was Ralph's assessment of Situationism's top prophet.) As we sat, drank, and smoked -- I'd taken to smoking the odd Gauloise outside the flat, in self-defense I told Nana, who disapproved of cigarettes -- I figured Ralph had probably "drifted" right out of his promise to Debord while he followed his own crush or obsession of the moment.I also thought that doing a "drift' through Venice, where he had lived with his son and wife before she committed suicide, was probably too fraught for anyone, let alone for a vagabond of the heart like Ralph.

It took me over three weeks after arriving in Paris to give up on Nabil, and his empty, ochre, promises of acceptance. I suppose I was naïve but it required all that time to finally get that the military junta ruling Algeria, like juntas everywhere, weren't keen on anyone looking into what they were doing, especially given the gulf between their public stance of supporting the liberation struggle of the glorious Sahrawi people, and their steel-fisted smack-down of dissidents, like the Kabyle independence movement, at home. But I still needed to drift around a Saharan environment as background for my novel. Therefore, in the absence of official support, I decided to visit Algeria as a tourist -- being a French national, I didn't need a visa -- and booked a flight on Air Algérie, via the capital, to Tamanrasset, which was as deep into the Sahara as the airline flew; two hundred miles north of the border with Niger. This was also as close to Tindouf as I could legally travel.I was still living in Sandro's flat, though I had by now developed a rasping, chronic cough from the permanent smog created by Ralph's Boyars. The cough was so bad that I'd given up sleeping in the living room and taken refuge inside the hallway closet, which was large enough to accommodate my mattress under the rack of Yves St. Laurent. With its sliding doors closed the closet's atmosphere was stale but relatively smoke-free.I had given up on Nana, as well. Sandro had an old Rolling Stones album, "Beggars Banquet," that included a song which seemed the perfect soundtrack to what I was going through with her: So take me to the airport, one of the lines went, and put me on a plane, I got no expectations to pass through here again. The night before I left I invited Nana for dinner at La Coupole: it was my dad's favorite refuge in Paris. Her emotional temperature seemed the same as always, not cold, but not warming into something more intimate either. And yet, when after a couple of glasses of Cahors I blurted out for the first time that I had harbored romantic feelings for her, she looked at me levelly -- Arctic pond, Nordic sky -- and said, "It's funny, it wasn't until I found out you were leaving that I started to feel something for you. Something more than friendship, I mean." I wasn't sure how to take that; I'm still not sure. (Months later Sandro told me he started sleeping with Nana around then.) I walked back to the flat in a fug of Cahors and emotional confusion, all hardening into something more solid: relief that I was leaving, acquiring direction and momentum independent of brown apparatchiki, of cool Scandinavians, of my own capacity for limerence. When I opened the door to the flat Sandro, almost trembling with concern, told me "Ralph has been calling non-stop, you have to ring him back, it's urgent." Ralph wouldn't tell him what it was about, but Sandro said his father sounded serious.When I rang the number he'd left Ralph picked up immediately. "Meet me at the Flore in forty-five minutes," he said, "it's really important." 'What's important?' I asked. Saint Germain was half an hour away by métro, and I was tired, and half-drunk.I heard the usual crack of a match on the other end, a pause as he inhaled. "I just met with an Algerian army bloke, Colonel Esslime I think? Plus a friend from the American embassy, they told me the DRS -- that's the Direction de Renseignement et Sécurité, the fucking Algerian secret police -- they're watching you. I can't tell you more over the phone. But listen to me, mate: you cannot go to Algeria."I got to the Flore on time. I downed a glass of Cahors, and another. I didn't smoke, though I was tempted, despite my cough. I paid the Madame Pipi. I waited one hour, and considered leaving, but what Ralph had said made me nervous so I stayed. After two hours had passed I called Sandro from the Flore's payphone. Ralph hadn't returned, nor had he called again.I wondered what the hell I'd gotten myself into with this Algeria trip. I wanted to call Ann, I wanted to hear her daughter's voice. I'd sent them a couple of postcards, neither had replied.Finally I returned to the flat, thinking Ralph would eventually come home and explain, but he never showed up. Which wasn't unusual since by then he had found a woman in the 13th with whom he occasionally spent the night.I slept badly in my closet, wondering -- fretting, really -- about whether I should postpone my trip; but in the Payne's Grey of a Parisian dawn I found, amid the silence and mysteries of others, the arms dealer in my novel was beginning to feel like the only person to whom I owed allegiance; the unwritten book, my last true vector left. So I packed my rucksack, wrote a note for the sleeping Sandro and his drifting dad, and took a bus to the airport.

Our love is like our music, it's here and then it's gone
(Rolling Stones, "No Expectations")

Algiers seemed quiet after the bustle of Paris. I spent an afternoon walking by the Mediterranean, down a seaside boulevard called, inevitably, the "Corniche"; watching men, always men, drinking coffee in bright columned cafés; climbing through the narrow alleys of the Kasbah -- tunnels drilled in chalk, where FLN freedom fighters battled French troops in vicious confrontations, wynde by blood-soaked wynde. A barber in a tiny shop lined with glass jars full of red and green liniments shaved his client, lovingly, with a straight-edge razor. Two beautiful Kabyle faces watched me from a lamplit doorway in a cul de sac. I kept an eye out as I walked in case the secret police, or the Army, were following me, but spotted no one, and eventually stopped worrying about it. I liked being in Algiers, even if this wasn't exactly the trip I'd planned, I liked the feeling that I was at last getting started on my novel. For the first time in weeks I took out a notebook and scrawled something, a description of the Kasbah, a sketch of a café: at the time I was doing freelance cartoons and illustrations for a Greenwich Village weekly and while traveling always brought along a small box of water-based paints with which to color the sketches I made.

My hotel was a cheap five-story place just off the Corniche, full of dust, tired furniture, the smoke of failed assignations. I wondered if my dad, who'd lived in a hotel when he was stationed in Algiers as part of the Free French army, had stayed here; family legend had it that when my uncle, whose subchaser had just docked in the port, came to meet his brother-in-law late one night my father pulled a .45 on him and almost shot Fred -- which, my mother used to say (not really meaning it) would have avoided a lot of future problems within the family.

The plane to Tamanrasset left early the next morning. It was a battered 737 with a steel cable fastening tail to fuselage to ensure, or so it seemed to me, that everything would hold together in flight: worn, discolored seats, sandblasted portholes, no booze on offer. The jet groaned and screamed as it took off, but I came to respect its pigheaded commitment to staying aloft as we flew south, almost all day, over the Sahara -- near-endless leagues of terrain that looked like pinched tan skin, then shallow escarpments, mesas, dried riverbeds which I knew were called wadis; remembering that six-thousand years ago this desert had been a flowering savanna. Dunes in north/south orientation gave way to reddish-gray gravel, and more dunes, then wind-carved mountains and rock-strewn plains next to which the moon's backside would look like an English garden -- landing at one oasis after another for five minutes before taking off southward once more.

At one of the oases, a place called Djanet, I took out my camera when I wasn't supposed to, and snapped a picture of the two camouflaged trailers that served as army outpost and airline terminal. Although I'd kept the camera concealed as I used it someone saw me. Three minutes later two soldiers escorted me off the plane. I wondered then if the DRS had me flagged; if I was now going to be hauled off to one of those desert prisons where the Algerian Pouvoir disappeared its opponents and anyone else they deemed suspicious. But the officer in charge, an unshaven fellow with a high voice, a monkeyjacket bearing captain's stripes, and an air of intergalactic ennui, simply asked me to surrender my film. I made a show of dropping the film roll on the floor and while picking it up swapped it for an unused Tri-X; after which I was escorted back to the plane. Still childishly annoyed at being ordered around by soldiers, I sketched the oasis airfield from memory after we took off. I even added color, priming my paints with water from the bottles Air Algérie handed out.We landed at Tamanrasset just before evening. The town looked bigger than the oases I'd seen so far but not by a hell of a lot: smear of mudbrick buildings, a handful more than three stories tall, planted amid a tangle of paved streets and multiple sandy roads, huddled in the curve of a wadi in turn dominated by high, mean-looking, brick- and sand-colored mountains to the north and east. Everything in town was sand- or brick-colored, tamped down by the heat which thankfully had lessened by the time we landed.

I had only the cash I'd changed into dinars in Algiers, about 100 francs or 20 dollars worth, and I used a quarter of it to hire a taxi into town, to a hotel the driver -- a thirtyish man with a thick curly hair, poor French, and a clear fondness for ratty prayer rugs which he had cut up and glued to every level surface in his cab -- swore was cheap, had "charm," and was popular with "les hippies." And the hotel, a nondescript single-story place built of sandy bricks, with gravely ill palm trees in the courtyard, certainly looked cheap; but the guy at the desk would not take my bank card, and what he charged for a night in his least expensive room would burn up most of my remaining cash.The taxi had left by then. I found my way to the main drag of Tamanrasset, or "Tam" as my driver had called it, looking for a more upscale hotel of the sort that would accept credit cards -- not the kind of joint I normally chose but I would only be only staying a couple of nights. I hoped the high-end hotel would have a pool ... This kind of quick-in, quick-out reportage was something I normally shunned on principle but since I couldn't get to Tindouf I was only here to soak up Saharan vibes, so two nights would suffice. The biggest, fanciest looking place looked like a French colonial nightmare baked in bricks that were turning the same hue, peach mixed with arterial blood, as the nearby peaks: all now caked in sunset. Palm trees, these healthy and gravid with dates, flanked the entrance. But the desk clerk there, who spoke good French, told me the same thing: no credit cards, no bank cards. When I asked directions to an ATM or a bank where I might buy dirhans on credit he smiled pityingly and said no one in Tam took bank cards because the phone link to the coast was poor and there was no reliable way to check if the card was stolen. "You are in the Sahara," he said. "Cash only." 'But I have almost no cash," I protested, no doubt sounding as worried as I felt, and he shrugged. "Cash only, here."On the way out I snagged a brochure advertising a tour of "L'ermitage du Père de Foucauld" at Assekrem, somewhere in the neighboring mountains. De Foucauld was a French missionary, the brochure claimed, now canonized for his work among the local tribes, which hadn't stopped him being shot by "bandits" in 1915. The one, blurry, picture of his "hermitage" looked like a shepherd's croft airdropped into a disused quarry.I walked down Tam Main Street. It was getting chilly; the desert, I remembered, could be cold once the sun set. Most of the buildings were built of adobe or the usual sand-colored brick. Some of the older ones had fort-like crenellations. Trees resembling enormous dill plants with deeply scored trunks lined the main roads. Robed women avoided my path. The inevitable taped, amplified calls of muezzim echoed through the alleys. Exhaust from four-by-fours, all sporting a raised air-intake pipe for desert driving, added to the darkness. Kids scampered up, shrilly demanded a stylo-bille -- a ballpoint pen -- scampered away. A camel, led by a teen, hump-walked by, shitting profusely. A second, a third hotel confirmed what the desk clerk at the fancy hotel had said.I was hungry, tired from the long flight. At least I had a return ticket to Algiers, albeit without a reservation, but what was I going to do in the meantime? Sleep in the streets? It hit me then that despite all the hip, neo-Situationist, anti-capitalist ideals Ralph had gone on about, and which I basically shared; despite all the marches I'd joined to protest apartheid, or America's colonial wars; all those clenched fists, chants of Death to Globalism! Stop Apartheid! Free Palestine! Freedom for the Oppressed of the Third World! -- today I had slotted straight back into my Western, post-colonial Dasein. Now that I was actually walking their streets, living in their desert, I still expected the oppressed to conform to Western norms of finance and convenience; to honor my bank card, provide clean linens, serve drinkable beverages, get me a flight out. It was exactly the mindset Situationists railed against. The irony embedded in such thoughts did not lighten my mood.

A half mile or so later, the paved road I was walking became a hard-sand track that eventually petered out beside a radio tower and a tributary of the main wadi. Beyond the riverbed, a clutch of camels stood tethered between an adobe-looking house and a couple of large blue tents. My Western appetite for the exotic, I thought bitterly, should be satisfied with the scene, but I found little pleasure in it.Across the road was an area surrounded by a tall wire fence with an open gate and a sign that read CAMPING DU AHOGGAR. Inside a rough shelter, like a lean-to that did not lean and was covered with corrugated tin, sat an old man tending a campfire on which steamed a copper pot. A couple of actual lean-tos, these versions roofed with tarps, stood inside the fenced-in area; otherwise the campsite was empty.I went through the gate. "Combien," I asked the old man, pointing at the lean-to's. He stared at me for a few seconds, then held up three fingers. Three dirhans -- roughly three francs, or 75 cents. At last, a place I could afford.When I stooped inside the nearest lean-to I found a clot of ancient, not very clean blankets; two of them would serve as mattress, a third would keep me warm enough. I hoped they didn't harbor fleas.I was hungry, but I figured even my meager budget would buy me a couple of nights here along with some basic food and bottled water, enough to keep me going till I flew back to France. I had passed a market with a row of tiny stores (did they call them "Français" here, I wondered idly, in mirror terminology of the Parisian Arabe?) that displayed tinned foods and plastic bottles marked "Eau Saida." For tonight I had the remains of a pack of biscuits I'd bought for the flight, and most of a bottle of Évian.I laid out the blankets, ate a few biscuits, drank some water. I went outside. It was almost full night by then. The town behind me gave off little light. The mountains rose ahead, vast and dark; cool, cruel, inscrutable as Swedish lust. A star I thought might be Antares was just visible in a gap between the peaks and crags, which were more and more strongly drawn against a background of other stars beginning to prick out of the indigo sky; a few at first, then more and more -- they didn't stop coming. It was as if a village, then a city, then a whole country of stars were flooding the black vault overhead -- big, tiny, gold, silver, light-sapphire, cadmium yellow -- a continent of glinting refugees rising up against an empire of night. So many, it felt as if their pull, their massed gravity, must lift me from this campground in the desert into some other plane of being where the practicalities of human survival had no relevance, and the worries I'd been obsessing over had as much weight as one grain of sand against all the empty wastelands of the Sahara.

The next morning I bought two bottles of Saida water, another pack of biscuits, and four cans of sardines from the market Français, then walked around town: doing the "drift," I reflected, though Tamanrasset was so much smaller than Paris or Venice that a true psychogeographical dérive, drifting to unexpected places capable of eliciting surprise and discovery in the drifter, might be tough to maintain for more than a half hour.

Tam wasn't Tindouf, either, but the dust-stoned alleys, the garages and warehouses on its outskirts, the track trickling into a desert beyond, would be the kind of place a regiment of guerrillas -- the Sahrawi fighters at the time were only a few hundred in number -- might well be billeted to organize weapons, four-by-fours, supplies.In one neighborhood on the western edge of town a sign in Arabic and French announced the government had generously provided Algeria's Tuareg population with subsidized housing, and here the housing stood: a compound of shiny new two-story buildings separated by those ubiquitous dill-like trees. The Tuareg, like the Sahrawis, were a nomadic Saharan tribe. The French called them "les hommes bleus" because they dyed their clothes in indigo that rubbed off on their faces when they covered them against sun and sand. I wondered if the Tuareg were related to the Sahrawis, for whom the Moroccan government had also built subsidized housing. The subtext, in both cases, was that these backward ethnicities were going to be dragged into modern sedentary life whether they liked it or not; their days of desert drifting were over. A group of men in blue or white robes, all wearing mirror sunglasses, stood talking next to parked four-by-fours. They fell silent as I approached. Goats wandered freely in and out of the compound.I did my own semi-drift till mid-morning. As the heat started to build I found my way back to the campground, thinking I would rest there and in the afternoon go to the airport; there was no airline office in town. At the airfield I'd make a reservation on the flight back to Algiers for the following day. I already knew there was only one flight, on the 737 that came in the day before, and it left early in the morning. As I reached the campsite entrance I heard shouts, whoops, and an eerie, high-pitched ululation; looking past the house and tent I'd noticed yesterday, I saw a pair of camels gallop fast and ungainly from a cloud of sandy dust with two turbaned riders, their deep blue robes flapping in the slipstream, whipping them to shift yet faster toward the mountains. Almost immediately the riders pulled their mounts to a stop, to be engulfed at once in the cloud they had raised.

A wedding was being celebrated, I saw as I walked closer. Women, most unveiled, were crowding around one of their number who wore a complicated dress and fancy shawls. Her face bore reddish stripes and patterns I assumed were drawn with henna. More camels were hobbled next to three large-ish tents that hadn't been there yesterday. In the entrance of one I saw trays crowded with tea glasses, and bowls holding a porridge-like substance. A fire smoked in a circle of rocks and as I got closer -- the breeze was at my back -- I became aware of a smell of hot fat and spices that made my stomach sit up and beg like a beagle.No one paid me much attention. A couple of men nodded; everyone else, after a preliminary glance, ignored me. Enough Europeans came here, I supposed, tourists and maybe aid workers en route to the Sahel, that they must be used to the gawk and insolence, the prurient lenses of Westerners. I walked around the hobbled camels, trying to be discreet, and shot a few frames of the riders as they came back. I found out later that sand from the film roll I'd "dropped" in Djanet had snuck into my camera and damaged the shutter -- the camel-rider frames were the last I'd shoot this trip. The unshaven captain, I would reflect somewhat ruefully, had won in the end.

Later that afternoon I walked to the airfield. It took an hour but occasional, convoluted clouds blocked the sun and enough of a breeze blew to keep my internal radiator from overheating. The terminal was a low building built of the usual red-sand bricks, with crenellations on top. The airline's ticket office occupied one corner and was mostly empty. The Algiers flight had not yet arrived. I waited behind a soldier and a chubby man in a yellow suit and when I got to the counter handed over my return ticket and asked the official -- another chubby fellow, this one with fairly dark skin, prominent cheekbones, and thick eyebrows, one of them sliced by a wide scar -- for a reservation on tomorrow's flight. He glanced at my ticket without looking at me. A large accounts-style book lay open in front of him. He didn't look at that either."Non," he said.I felt suddenly, unaccountably, worried. It was logical that the next day's flight should be booked but for some reason; more unconscious, post-colonial prejudice, I supposed; I had reckoned an oasis in the depths of the Sahara would not generate large crowds vying for airline tickets. Not enough to fill a 737 anyway. My flight had only been half full when it got to Tam, it had never been completely full at the other oases either. "Bon," I said, trying to press worry out of my voice, "alors le lendemain," the day after tomorrow. He shook his head, still not looking at me."The day after?""Come back tomorrow, before the departure, maybe there will be a seat."

I stared at him. He stared over my head, just as Nabil used to do. The scar through his eyebrow seemed more livid now, maybe it swelled from contact with Westerners. I had enough cash left for maybe three more nights at the campground if I stuck to my diet of sardines and water. Fissures of worry opened in my voice."I don't understand," I croaked, still in French, "why I can't even make a reservation?""Revenez demain," he repeated, "come back tomorrow," and looked ostentatiously at the next customer in a queue that did not exist. "Le prochain?"

I slept poorly on my blankets, though I had found, to my relief, they harbored neither fleas or bedbugs. Perhaps the Sahara was too harsh an environment for domestic insects. Not long after dawn had torched the nearby peaks I ate two biscuits, drank some water and walked back to the airport. It was a long walk while half asleep; past the market, through town and then its flat, badly littered outskirts; but easy in the cool hangover of night. The Algiers flight left at 8:15, an hour from the time I got there, and the airline office was already half full. A handful of men, some of them army officers, were waved through a door behind the ticket counter to a boarding area. Everyone else, it seemed, was either on standby like me, or hanging for other reasons -- were they seeing off family? Sending freight? Plane-spotting? At eight o'clock I figured now was the time standby seats would be assigned and eeled my way through a dwindling crowd to the counter.The ticket guy was different from yesterday. This one was in his early thirties, gaunt face, pencil-thin moustache, hands that never stopped moving to stroke his chin, play with a pen, shuffle papers; but when I asked him if there was space on the flight his response was the same as his colleague's. And when I asked him whether I could make a reservation for the next available flight he, too, did not even pretend to consult his book. "Revenez demain," he said, and stroked his chin. Come back tomorrow. Then he turned, walked through the door to the boarding area, and slid it shut behind him, leaving me to stare at the Algerians still hanging around the terminal who all, I thought (though this was probably due to my nascent paranoia), looked indifferent to, or downright happy about, my plight.

I have always hated waiting, even for something I want in a place I choose. I'm not sure if it's the same thing but it must be linked to a phobia about being trapped: I'd make a lousy prisoner. The idea of being held anywhere, unable to move let alone escape, feels irrationally terrifying to me.And terrified, however irrationally, was how I felt when I got back from the airport. It was my third day, my second full day, in Tamanrasset. The terror must have been compounded by hunger: a diet of three tins of sardines and six biscuits per day (I'd bought four more tins of sardines and another package of biscuits from the français on my way home) was not going to sustain me forever. At this rate, taking into account my daily campsite bill, I'd be skint in another three days.Ralph's words kept coming back to me. The fucking Algerian secret police are watching you, you cannot go to Algeria. But in that case, I asked the high, red-gullied mountains I could see shimmering in heat through the opening of my lean-to, why let me into Algeria at all? The customs people had inked my passport with an entry stamp, but was that because the government thought I was still pestering the Paris consulate, and my showing up in Algiers took them by surprise? Had the army captain at the oasis base I'd photographed told Algiers what I had done? Were they now debating what to do with me, where to lock me up? And yet -- if the secret police didn't want me in the country, why hold me here at all? Why not just let me leave?After half an hour of seething, useless, internal kvetch -- after exiting my lean-to, pacing, kicking at rocks while my caretaker stared, bemused, from his shade -- I ran dry of energy. Inside my own shelter, to try to keep from worrying, I opened my notebook, which I hadn't used since Djanet, and scratched out a few sketches of the Tuareg wedding. I colored them in, wrote a quick description. Finally I jotted down what had happened at the airport that morning. I had a weird feeling that if I didn't keep taking notes, within the imposed isolation of my stay here I might start to lose track -- of events first, then of time, and finally of my own identity. I tried not to think I was also leaving a record in case I should be disappeared by the DRS: that truly was paranoia, I told myself firmly. But the words of Captain Scott, found in his notebook after he died of cold and hunger in the Antarctic, kept looping in my head: "For God's sake look after our people."Our people ... My people were in New England. Nana had been an aberration: a typically male, and cowardly, dream of escape from the chores of commitment. The ones I loved, apart from my birth family, were Ann and Skye. I missed them, all of a sudden, with a force that closed my throat.To keep from whimpering I read through the brochure on "Père de Foucauld." Apparently he'd been a dissolute, aristocratic cavalry officer who had "found God" while fighting "natives" in North Africa in the 1920s. He ended up becoming a hermit, the brochure said, "in the peace and solitude of the Ahoggar Range." The words "peace and solitude" made me cringe.Later, I decided to go for a walk. Maybe exercise would upstage, or even force into the wings, my circular, useless panic. I emptied my rucksack of everything but notebook, pen, camera (useless now, but I didn't want it stolen -- for all my social-justice, anti-colonial beliefs, my Western prejudices about Third World countries remained intact). I tossed in passport, Air Algérie ticket, a tube of sun cream. I packed one of my two Saidas: the only good thing about Tamanrasset Airport was, it provided filtered water in a bubbler from which I'd refilled my bottles. Then I did the only thing I seemed to be good at, the only thing denied me: I left.

Past Tuareg tents, a shed w/ a few goats, campsite track disappears in last gasp of camel hoofprints, random litter. Walking buckled terrain, gravel-rock w/ a few stubborn, tiny plants thrusting an arsenal of thorns to protect a garrison of even tinier flowersI wrote this in my notebook an hour into the trek, while resting in the shade of a sandstone boulder; probably because of what I'd been feeling earlier, that I had to leave a record just in case, but also because of that yet stranger sense that I was starting to lose my identity. It was important to write, in ink, on paper, to fight against such desubstantation. Maybe I'd use the notes for my novel, if I ever got out of here.I stashed notebook and pen, set off again. My gear would work for a hike in the desert: light slacks, long-sleeved t-shirt, hiking boots which were the only footwear I'd brought. Dark glasses, a Red Sox cap. It was mid-afternoon by then, hot as all analogies of stove and fire, but I sweated very little. The mountains ahead were having long, serious thoughts about shade on their right-hand escarpments. I kept on. It took me another hour before they appeared closer but all at once the ground rose before me and I was craning my neck upward to observe the sand-gray crags I'd seen from the campsite, and these looked scarily tall, impossible to climb except for a gap between two crags linked by a reddish ridge. I was tempted then to climb further up the one route of travel that seemed open to me, but I knew it would be dumb to climb alone, near day's end to boot.

When I returned, the campsite caretaker, who never seemed to leave his shelter, beckoned me toward his shade. I fished the shrinking wad of dirhan from my pocket and peeled off three, which he took without comment. He jerked his chin at the hearth and the copper pot that always sat on top; then, insistently, toward a small rug beside him.I sat down. He dug two small glasses out of some invisible space, filled them with hot liquid from the pot, and gave me one, from which arose a strong waft of mint. "Shukran," I said. It was one of the few Arabic words I knew, and he smiled, probably because of my accent. He had ochre teeth. The wrinkles around his eyes looked deep as the gullies I'd spotted earlier in the mountains. For the second time that day I felt a powerful urge to sob.

Entry in notebook: Day 4 in Tamanrasset. Went to airport early. Getting used to the walk. Funny how sense of time changes when u r forced to wait.Same chubby guy with scarred eyebrow at counter. Still didn't look at me. This time I went straight into queue -- less of a queue, more a mob centrifuged by force of travel. Insisted to him, politely, I HAVE to leave. Same fuckin answer, nothin today, come back tomorrow. Money probly only for 2 more days total here no more the end broke finis I tell him. Still doesn't look at me, shrugs, not his problem. Wonder if Air Algérie takes orders from DRS.I like the market, little open-air shops
I am sick to goddam DEATH of sardines and biscuitsHot but not as much as yday. Slope to ridge between two peaks definitely climbable. I want to get that far. Enough time today, leave around 2:40.
...Made it 2/3 of the way. Shd have taken more water. Shade of mini-crag Im sitting under feels like difference between staying alive and drying out like a mummy. Tired -- don't want to start walking down but need to get back before darkThere's a line in Eliot -- Wasteland? 'Here is no water but only rock, no water and the sandy road' -- something like thatZero life up here, not even the thorny plant...Back. Thirsty as fuck. My new buddy the caretaker offered me mint tea again. He must be lonely. I drank two glassesOn my way down from the ridge came x an old campfire. Charred roots, empty can of sardines, same brand as mine. For a few seconds had this weird feeling I must have been here before, don't mean yday I mean last year, five yrs ago, different trip I forgot about -- different me. Doppelgänger.Someone who never leftI think the sun has got to me a little

Clouds thinning. Stars brighter than last night, to call them each a thermonuclear furnace a billion miles away TOTALLY misses the point. They seem to flame a searing electric path into eyes / chest of whoever truly watches them. ... 'We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars' -- Wilde???

Friday: really want to make that ridge. Have to take two bottles. A least I'll have gotten SOMEWHERE in this fucking desert!Yet somehow I don't hate Tam. Maybe it's my buddy the caretaker. We're on first-name terms now, introduced ourselves w/ sign language. Name 'Amostan' (???) He calls me 'Jaj.' The lady in the français smiles at me as she hands over sardines and biscuits w/o me even pointing.No luck at the airport. Same counter guy. Same shrug. Asked again why he can't even make me a reservation and he said "Ça marche pas comme ça." It's the fucking Algerian national airline and "it doesn't work that way"?.Five army officers went through to the plane at the last minute
WHY DON'T THEY LET ME ON??? AM I STUCK HERE FOREVER?Dunno what I'm going to do. On way back from airport remembered a film I saw years ago. J Nicholson as journalist researching something, Sahel somewhere. Mali? Niger? If I remember right he takes on the ID of an arms dealer, falls in love with Maria Schneider, leaves his wife, ends up in some hot dead-end desert town like this one. Wonder did I subconsciously have that plot in mind when I planned my novel? Was it my arms-dealer self who made a campfire up the mountain? My Maria Schneider = Nana (except Maria loved Jack, whereas Nana ... nuff said.) ...Am I going nuts? I NEED to walk

[Paper torn here:]Took too long but made it to the ridge!!! On the other side, way way below, perfect bowl of sand surrounded by high crags, cliffs, ridges, all different colors -- mostly cream, reddish sandstone, plugs of dark rock. Lava?No way down this side.Everything in that perfect bowl 100% empty, pure, utterly silent. Zero wind. No lifeKinda scared to be honest but also there's some weird part of me that longs to just -- stay here? Die? Great place for it. I HAVE TO GOOnly 1/4 bottle left[Words smeared by stain, possibly from blood]scramble tore my pants scraped up shins and handseagle making perfect circles in the sky, far overheadBreak a leg up here I will never get back no one will ever find meI get why de Foucauld chose to live in Ahoggar, u want t get cozy with eternity nothing to stop u / nothing in betweenrunning out / paperMaybe it's a vulture

The chubby clerk was not at the ticket counter the morning after I returned from the ridge; he'd been replaced by pencil-thin-moustache, who looked even colder, more indifferent than the last time I'd seen him. He snapped at people in Arabic, which is a good language to snap in, and a couple of people, one a tribesman in blue robes and mirror shades, snapped right back. When an army officer showed up, though, Pencil-thin did not snap at him, but smiled and waved the officer through the boarding door behind.I stood in the usual amorphous crawl of people who might or might not be boarding the 8:15. I was tired from the day before; hungry as always, and I could not seem to quench the thirst I'd developed climbing the ridge. I had drunk all my water yesterday before I got back to the campsite and when Amostan served me tea I gestured for a second cup and then a third and he looked at me weirdly but emptied the pot into my glass.This morning I refilled my bottles, delighting in the gurgle and gulps of the bubbler; drank, refilled them once more, drank again. I must buy a third bottle of Saida to carry with me, I thought, though I had only enough dirhan left to keep me in sardines and biscuits for one more day, and then only if I stiffed Amostan, which I did not want to do.The woman in front of me also had a gripe with Air Algérie and she whined in one unending high-pitched tone, waving a slip of paper until Pencil-thin snapped at her more loudly and she turned away, muttering. Then he looked at me, or rather at some space near my face. "Pas de place," he said immediately, "no space," and gestured to someone behind me. I started to turn away but my body responded sluggishly, in fact after the first three degrees of arc it did not respond at all and just stood there, in front of the ticket counter."Pas de place!"To fill the void my dearth of movement created I had to say something. "Ne pouvez vous pas," I said, and gestured over the counter at the accounts book, "can't you just look in your book, to check?""Prochain!" he snapped, "Next!" and pointed at someone behind me.But my body was still not cooperating, though part of my brain instinctively wished to obey this man who for some unfathomable reason held power over my life; and perhaps, or so it feels, I might still be standing there if at that moment three army officers hadn't entered the office. Pencil-thin at once waved them on and they skirted the remaining customers and walked through that door to the boarding zone. A halitosis of heat and jetfuel riding a glare of light wafted from the door, and I caught a glimpse of the 737's fuselage fractaling argent in the sun, which was burning full-furnace even at this hour without taking any guff from clouds at all.And I began to yell. I'm not even sure what I yelled. Something like "Qu'est ce que vous avez, vous mentez" and so forth, "you're keeping me here on purpose, lying to me, what's the matter with you, there's plenty of space on that plane, you just let those soldiers on!" ... The words seemed to have built up over the last few days of frustration, worry, fear, and now they could break out they would not stop. I don't yell much ordinarily and my vocal chords took the opportunity to let rip for once and I roared and shouted at Pencil-thin and the crowd and the Algerian Army and DRS, and everyone in the ticket office stared at me in a mixture of astonishment and contempt.And one of officers came back in. He snapped his fingers at Pencil-thin, who turned. The officer jerked his chin at me.Pencil-thin turned back in my direction. Still without looking at me directly, he waved one hand toward the boarding door."Allez."I stared at him. My body, it seemed, still did not want to move."Go!" He actually brought his gaze to my face. His eyes were chestnut colored and what light their pupils gathered shone out a hundred times brighter than it had going in.I jerked my body, yanked it into motion so harshly I almost fell sideways. Snagged my rucksack off the floor where I'd deposited it while waiting. People melted out of my path as I walked then strode, faster and faster, around the ticket counter, toward the boarding door. Breath short, ventricles gushing like culverts in a flash flood; listening for the inevitable "Non!", the "Pas de place!", the "We were just fuckin' wit ya" in French or Arabic I felt sure must be coming.But no one stopped me. The sound of turbines winding up increased tenfold as I stepped into the braze of sunlight. The plane looming before me, though clearly a 737, looked huge. An Air Algérie guy at the boarding steps gestured, unsmiling, for my ticket.I climbed the stairs two at a time. Same jet as before, near as I could tell: pitted portholes, that cable holding tail to fuselage, worn seats inside -- I was inside! Smell of heated kerosene, stale coffee. Cigarette smoke, too: I got a weird, brief, hallucination of Ralph, sitting in one of the empty seats down-fuselage.Still no one came after me to announce there'd been a mistake, I had to stay in Tam forever. The flight attendant on duty was young and hadn't read the no-smile memo, or maybe she'd forgotten about it; the corners of her lips lifted a couple of millimeters even as she took in my filthy, greasy hair, my torn and bloodstained slacks, my sand-fouled boots. Apart from the old lady in the français, this was the first interaction I'd had with a woman since I'd left Paris.The army was clustered in seats up front, talking.Now was when soldiers would stop me, as at the oasis further north, to escort me off the plane to meet their captain.The officers looked through me as if I were smoke.I felt, briefly, ashamed. Once again, just minutes ago this time, I had snapped straight back into white man's behavior, screaming and demanding the "natives" grant his wish. Stress, worry, paranoia were no excuse: in this land where my French countrymen had killed half a million Algerians for the crime of fighting for their freedom, what right had I to insist on anything, let alone demand it as arrogantly as I had just done? Why shouldn't Algerians ignore this roumi asshole who expected his bank card to be honored, his reservations made, his seat on a flight guaranteed in this wasted land that was no longer, nor ever had been, his?But the shame, though real, was light as a mirage compared to the overwhelming relief I felt, that I might actually be getting out of Tam.No more than a dozen people total on the jet. I took a seat toward the rear. Instinctively I hunched down by the window, like a boy who thinks if no one sees him, no one will remember he must be punished.Engine noise faded as the door closed. Rush of vents. Turbines whined, the plane started to tremble; through my porthole, apron, terminal, desert began to slide sideways; and in less than a minute the 737 threw itself down the runway and took off, banking almost immediately so I could see Tamanrasset below in all its confusion of sand, alleys, rust-colored mudbricks. I looked for my campsite but already we were so high up I couldn't find it.It felt surreal, seeing a place where I'd felt so trapped, so lost, within thirty seconds or fifty reduced to a smudge of brown-gray I could erase with the palm of one hand against the porthole.I wished I'd said goodbye to Amostan. I wished I hadn't stiffed him.The 737, leveling now, gained more altitude over the Ahoggar: crags and peaks, ravines and cliffs that had seemed so huge to me just hours before became mere models of topography, laid out so clearly no drift would ever be possible there.The plane altered course again, ever so slightly, to the north.

# # #

Wouldn't it be better if we could just forget old places. Forget everything that happens.
Just throw it all away, day by day. ...
(Jack Nicholson, as journalist "David Hyde," in Antonioni's
The Passenger

The first Situationists, date unknown, Debord third from right
(Wikipedia)

The Passenger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFuwHdj1Od0
"No Expectations": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj4nE9QWnEw

* I have changed a couple of minor characters' names to protect both guilty and innocent

Contributors

ASHLEY MANGTANI is a slipstream writer whose work explores ecological and social collapse and the roles people inhabit in moments of crisis. His work appears or is forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Strange Horizons, Litro, Washington Square Review, Boudin, Heavy Feather Review, BULL, Expat Press, Thin Skin, HAWKEYE, Mobius, Third Wednesday, Rock Salt, Neon Dystopia, Apocalypse Confidential, and others. Read more at ashleymangtani.com.C. INANEN lives in the Midwest USA surrounded by thousands of acres of corn. His work has been published in Exquisite Death and other fine magazines. It will also be featured in the Black Hare Press Year Eight Anthology and Antimatter Dreams: 20 Original Tales of Fantasy, Science, and Mystery!FRANK SHERLOCK is the author of five books and fifteen chapbooks. Poems beyond the page have found their forms in installations, workshops, and exhibitions that have engaged with at-risk youth, immigrant communities, and restorative justice practices. The 2014-15 Philadelphia Poet Laureat continues to live and work in the City of Otherly Love.GM FOY is a French-American novelist, poet and essayist. He has published fifteen novels (recently The Winterpoor, Sea Crow Press, and The Last Green Light, Guernica Editions); non-fiction books, creative non-fiction in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, and The New York Times; short fiction and poetry in Interim Journal, Notre Dame Review, Ep;phany, Washington Square, MonkeyBicycle, and American Literary Review. Foy attended the Sorbonne, London School of Economics, and Bennington College. He teaches creative writing at NYU. He has received an NEA fiction fellowship and other awards.JOSH SCHNEYER quit high school and worked as cabinetmaker, chef, opera singer, soldier, boxer, and teacher; he currently makes his living as a boxing coach. He has a BA in literature and earned his MA in creative writing from Boston University. He has recently published poetry in Orchards Poetry, Invisible City, October Hill, Inscape, Blue Lake Review, 2River View, and Poetry Superhighway, among others. These days, when he isn't coaching, he's reading, writing, or, best of all, spending time with his wife.KAT ST. CLAIRE lives and writes on an island in San Francisco Bay. Her work has appeared in Convergence, The MacGuffin, The Persimmon Tree, and other publications. It has garnered awards from the Kay Snow Awards, Gateways 2000, Soul-Making Literary Awards, Foster City International Writing Competition, and Writer’s Digest Annual Writer’s Competition.KEITH MILLER was born in Tanzania, has spent most of his life in East and North Africa, and is currently a US resident and citizen. He is the author of four novels – The Book of Flying, The Book on Fire, The Sins of Angels, and The Witch's Journey – as well as translations of Rimbaud's The Illuminations and Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil. His fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in many venues, including Interfictions, Arabesques, Egypt Today, Rhubarb, Masque & Spectacle, and NPR.NICOLE SPIEGEL-GOTSCH is a Nuyorican writer transmitting from upstate New York. Her stories and poems have appeared in Chronogram Magazine, The Catskiller, Decolonial Passage, and The Palisades Review. She’s a member of the Catskill Writers Guild and Yarnslingers, a group “dedicated to the art and performance of storytelling.” Nicole has an M.A. from New York University and a B.A. in English Literature from Purchase College.ROBERT HILL COX has been a travel writer (Let’s Go:), a science writer (Scientific American), a national-class marathon runner, and the head of editorial of a big financial services company (Moody’s). He has been a Bread Loaf fiction contributor and Faulkner-Wisdom prize finalist (novella). His work has recently appeared in Glass Mountain, Bewildering Stories, Marrow, and SORTES 24. He has also worked as a supernumerary (extra) for the American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York City.SELENE SEZER is a writer from Oslo, Norway. Drawing on her background in behavioural genetics, she explores identity through an introspective lens, often in atmospheric settings. Her recent work has appeared in Suddenly and Without Warning, The McNeese’s Boudin, The Airgonaut, and The Orange & Bee, as well as a forthcoming piece in the Oslo Writers League Anthology 2026.

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"ArtWell was founded in 2000 to respond to the chronic community violence in Philadelphia by introducing a preventive, educational, arts-oriented approach to reach underserved communities and youth facing discrimination, poverty, violence, and the everyday challenges of growing up. Our mission is to support young people and their communities through multidisciplinary arts expression, education, and creative reflection to celebrate their strengths, thrive while facing complex challenges, and awaken their dreams."Charity NavigatorThe people who have worked on this publication support this cause and we urge you to as well.

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Submission & Contact

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Find us here and there:

To submit contributions, comments, questions, or suggestions, please email

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Join our debonair mailing list for news about upcoming issues, in-person events, performances, and whatever else we dream up to make all our lives more complicated and exquisite:

SORTES is?

SORTES is a spinning collection of stories, poems, songs, and illustrations to help while away the wintery June nights. It’s an oddball grabbag wunderkammer mixtape offering distraction and refreshment.We have neither theme nor scene. Each issue is its own creature. We publish both the sufficiently strange and insufficiently boring: swart stories, hoity poetry, magical surrealism, beatnik travelogues, hard modern haiku, pulp, fantasia, antibiography, crooning balladeering, experimental sentimentalism, and grainy sideways photography.We also host online readings, old time radio performances, and other beloved gimmicks as they occur to us. Previous issues are available via the site’s Archive link.

Submitting

SORTES considers unsolicited submissions of poetry, prose, illustration, music, videos, and anything else you think may fit our format. Feel free to poke us; we’d love to find a way to publish dance, sculpture, puzzles, and other un-literary modalities.SORTES is published quarterly. Each issue includes approximately ten works of lit, visual, or performance art. We like a small number of works per issue: artists and readers should have a chance to get to know each other.SORTES, you’ll notice, is primarily a black-and-white publication, and we like to play with that (by featuring monochrome videos and photography, for example), but we’ll happily consider your polychrome submission.Submissions are ongoing throughout the year. We consider artists with both extensive and limited publishing experience. We accept simultaneous submissions but please inform us if your work has been accepted elsewhere. We publish translations and reprints on a case-by-case basis; please send us a note describing your interest. And while there's no restriction on the number of pieces you can submit, please have a heart.There’s no need for an extensive cover letter or publication history but please tell us who you are, what kind of writing or art you do, and a bit about what you’re sending us. There are no formatting requirements for text submissions. There is no fee to submit. Please send submissions as email attachments whenever possible; multimedia submissions may be sent as links.

Rights

You asked and we provide: what's up with publication rights and ownership?Simple: When you publish with us, you give SORTES one-time publication rights for your work. You retain all rights to your work after publication. Work published with SORTES will remain available via our online Archive.While SORTES retains the right to link to or excerpt your published work, we do not have the right to publish your work in new formats (including print). If we would like to pursue publication of your work in new formats, we'll ask you and hopefully agree to terms.

Mahoffs

SORTES was created by founding editor Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum and emeritus editor Kevin Travers. Current editors are listed in our masthead, Many of us live in Philadelphia, some luckily do not, but we invite writers and artists everywhere to live the SORTES fantasia.

Events

SORTES regularly offers readings and performances. For upcoming events, please check here and our Facebook page.

Coming Soon Enough

SORTES 27 Live

Sunday, October 4, 2026
7pm

September is the season of the salty succubus, the inky incubus, the confounding calculus. So seek shelter with SORTES 27 Live featuring some or all of our current issue’s delicious demons:Ashley Mangtani • C. Inanen • Frank Sherlock • GM Foy • Josh Schneyer • Kat St.Claire • Keith Miller • Nicole Spiegel-Gotsch • Robert Hill Cox • Selene SezerSORTES 27 Live will be beamed free into your eyeballs via hypnotic Zoom. Your host will be Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, three Satanic imps in thrift-store tweed.

Zoom Link

Meeting ID: 827 2832 8118
Passcode: 126869

Facebook Event

Radio SORTES

SORTES Expeditions

EXCITEMENT, ADVENTURE, AND REALLY MILD THINGS

SORTES Expeditions discovers places that are already there! We organize small teams to explore city streets, village squares, shopping malls, bus stations, downtowns, and byways with the mission of freshly seeing places we’re bored of seeing.And after the expedition, each team member produces field notes and one work of art in any medium for SORTES to publish.

Please select an Expedition listed below.

#1: Philadelphia, Passyunk Avenue

JOIN AN EXPEDITION OR MOUNT YOUR OWN EXPEDITION

If you live in the Philadelphia region or would pilgrimage to Philadelphia, consider joining us for a future Expedition. Ideal candidates include social scientists, public introverts, people who own reasonable walking shoes, and anyone who devotes the most passion to the least important. Please let us know if you're interested.Or maybe you're interested but live in a lesser non-Philadelphia location? Organize your own Expedition! SORTES would be delighted to collaborate with you. We would lend organizational expertise, templates for field reports, and other guidance -- and you can publish your field notes and art on SORTES. Please let us know if this sounds foxy.

RETURN TO EXPEDITIONS LIST

#1: Philadelphia, Passyunk Avenue

Overview

The SORTES expedition team undertook a inaugural pedestrian exploration in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between October 25, 2025 11:00 am ET and October 25, 2025 5:00 pm ET. Our primary territory spanned East Passyunk Avenue between South Street and Broad Street. This territory, while for generations known to cartographers and inhabited by populations both indigenous and nonnative, had never been systematically chartered and documented. Team members ranged from experienced to novice pedestrians. Activities included individual notation, photographic and videographic documentation, paper rubbings, pastry sampling, and participation in the East Passyunk Avenue Business Improvement District’s East Passyunk Fall Fest, coincidentally occurring during our travel. While not all team members accomplished the summit, each voyager returned home safely.This expedition was made possible through the generous donations of our individual team members.Team field notes and media documentation follow.

Territory
Passyunk Avenue, South Street to Broad Street
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Date and Time
Saturday, October 25th, 2025
11:00 am to 5:00 pm ET (appx)

Team
Jeremy Tenenbaum: Chief
Kelly Ralabate: Archivist of Records / Cartographer
Alyssa Shea: Archivist of Media
Ellie Miller: Navigator / Sherpa and Medic
Daniel DiFranco: Camp and Equipage Manager
Len Davidson: Historian / Researcher
Judy Davidson: Communicator

Scheduled Itinerary
11:00am Assemble at base camp
11:15am Orientation, acclimatization, travel, operations
11:36am Mid-ascent camp: Triangle Tavern, Passyunk Avenue and 10th Street
12:23pm Summit camp: Passyunk Avenue and Broad Street
12:30pm Begin return trip
12:50pm Mid-descent camp: To be determined
1:15pm Famous Deli
1:45pm Base camp return / post-expedition debriefing: Tattooed Mom, 530 South Street
Post-expedition activities

Art

Jeremy Tenenbaum, Expedition Chief

"Mount Passyunk"

This sculpture represents the expedition course, mounting Philadelphia’s Passyunk Avenue from South Street to Broad Street. It's a simplified abstracted grid; in reality Passyunk, a noted diagonal, strikes Broad at a brazen angle and cross-streets intersect at angles as well. It also reorients the intuitive perception of the street, flipping north and south, and suggests a “climb” (despite the actual flat elevation).The sculpture is formed on a metal sheet, bent at the ends, encased in clay sheets. Due to my inexperience working with clay, the sculpture cracked as it dried. I considered repairing the cracks with fresh clay but worried this might cause additional harm. I also considered Photoshopping the cracks and lying to the world, as I usually do, but others convinced me to be true to the work and myself.

Kelly Ralabate: Archivist of Records / Cartographer

"The Ballad of Passyunk Ave"

A musical tribute to singing cowboy Marty Robbins

The day was bright and promising for seven traveling souls
On a journey through South Philly and the mysteries it holds
Typewriters and hardware, fresh cherry cheesecake,
Downing drinks outside of The Triangle for a break...But round Passyunk & 8th, we grinded to a halt,
Victims of a local man and his verbal assaultTurns out you cannot walk down Passyunk Avenue
without a Deadpool lifeguard stranger ranting at youWe had found ourselves outside of his family’s auto store,
His initial approach was jovial, but underneath lurked something more,
Deadpool mask pulled down with lifeguard shorts around his waist
As his tone turned sinister, the wary travelers braced.Talk of simulations and grand conspiracy,
Of how beings in the Matrix can never be truly free...The ranting and the raving was the opposite of brief
And to prove his final point he unplugged our chief.Over time the lecturing lost any sense of fun,
From a man with a rubber chicken holstered instead of a gun.
Eventually we all broke free and continued our hike,
Escaped conversation hostages from a man who’s not quite right.All the way to Broad Street our caravan pushed on,
Documenting wildlife and culture with abandon.But beware -- you cannot walk down Passyunk Avenue
without a Deadpool lifeguard stranger ranting at you.

Alyssa Shea: Archivist of Media

Alyssa Shea - soft coercion of highly constructed environments

"soft coercion of highly constructed environments: east passyunk ave"

Inspired by not only the act of walking down Passyunk Avenue, I also turned to my library to process the experience and to frame the construction of my video: Rebecca Solnit's Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas ("...any significant place is in some sense infinite, because its stories are inexhaustible...a place is only an intersection between forces converging from various distances..."). A 1984 pamphlet from Schuylkill Valley Nature Center that was tucked inside an old book of Philadelphia walking tours, picked up from a Free Little Library on one of my daily walks about the city ("abiotic factors / adaptations / communities / energy flow / material cycling / populations"). Dolores Hayden's The Power of Place (where James Rojas is quoted, "...the central core of the enacted environment is motion."). And lastly, Chris Kraus's introduction to Jane Dickson in Times Square ("...a fascination with how human beings navigate the soft coercion of highly constructed environments."), from which my video derives its title. The audio is a breakbeat mélange of didgeridoo, flute, autoharp, and field recordings from the expedition to channel the intersection of forces at play along Passyunk.

Daniel DiFranco: Camp and Equipage Manager

"nowsitrightbackandhereataleofawalkingfourhourmile"

Passyunk, I learned, is a Lenape word for "in the valley." Now it's all concrete, blacktop, and signs. This earth shitten landscape wants to be dirt again. Everything seems to be in its last bloom, screaming to exist. Wouldn't it be nice if we, friends, could go hand in hand and fall into the sky already shadowbound on a perfect October day?

Judy Davidson: Communicator and Len Davidson: Historian / Researcher

I was inspired by our Day on Passyunk to go back and find some quotes I had saved while on a long journey with Lenny [Davidson] 20-some years ago.

Author	Source	Quotation
Miles Morland	A Walk Across France	"There is a great peace at the start of a long journey. The end is so far away that all you see is the journey itself. You think of nothing else."
Tim Parks	Italian Neighbors	"As so often in Italy, the picturesque is combined with a sharp edge of danger."
Sign on a hotel room door	Levanto, Italy	"Dear Sirs we inform you that the room is to be vacated before 10 AM. On the contrary the room will be debit."
Frances Mayes	Under the Tuscan Sun	"Most trips have an underlying quest. We're looking for something. What? Fun, escape, adventure--but then what? ... Once in a place, that journey to the far interior of the psyche begins or it doesn't. Something must make it yours, that ineffable something no book can capture."
Cheryl Strayed	Wild	"I had arrived. I'd done it. It seemed like such a small thing and such a tremendous thing at once, like a secret I'd always tell myself, though I didn't know the meaning of it just yet."
Judy Davidson	Sabbatical Travels (unpublished notes)	"It's sunny up here over the North Atlantic. The trip was long enough that I got past the need to go home a while ago, but by yesterday we were tired... We couldn't enjoy another restaurant meal. Wonderful, wonderful as it is, Paris, too, is in the real world and I'll now return to mine."
Gertrude Stein	As seen in a daily cryptoquote puzzle	"You look ridiculous if you dance. You look ridiculous if you don't dance. So you might as well dance."

As Roy Rogers and Dale Evans sang so long ago, happy trails to you.

Field Notes

Jeremy Tenenbaum, Expedition Chief

Time	Location	Notes
11:17am	Passyunk Ave and Bainbridge St	Planter with LEGO interpolation. 6 bags of cedar chips. 2 Zagars within view.
[Untimed]	Philadelphia AIDS Thrift, Passyunk Ave & 5th St	[Cat Hanson Box] [notebook writing unclear]
[Untimed]	Passyunk Ave & Bainbridge St (appx)	742 mural
[Untimed]	Passyunk Ave & Christian St	PoMo brick shutters.
[Untimed]	Passyunk Ave & 8th St	“Deadpool Lifeguard” encounter: L. Davidson engages, Shea engages, "Deadpool" "unplugs me" [from The Matrix].
12:37pm	Mid-ascent camp: Triangle Tavern, Passyunk Ave & 10th St	Note: 1 hour later than projected itinerary
[Untimed]	Lost sight of DiFranco and Miller
[Untimed]	Statue of Joey Giardello (Legendary Philadelphia Boxer), Passyunk Ave & 13th St & Mifflin St	L. and J. Davidson diverged from team. Passerby asks Tenenbaum for location of “benches.”
[Untimed]	Passyunk Ave & Mifflin St.	Edit: K. Ralabate, Archivist: Mouse incident: Shea and Tenenbaum, kneeling to record crayon rubbing of local manhole cover, unintentionally trip human-sized Mickey Mouse afflicted with misfortune of being unable to look down.
[Untimed]	Summit camp: Passyunk Ave & Broad St	Team reduced to Tenenbaum, Ralabate, Shea. Note for posterity indicating team members and course buried in planter
[Untimed]	Statue of Joey Giardello (Legendary Philadelphia Boxer), Passyunk Ave & 13th St & Mifflin St	Rejoined L. and J. Davidson
[Untimed]	Fall Festival shop tables, Passyunk Ave	Rejoined DiFranco and Miller
3:16pm	Philly Typewriter, 1735 E Passyunk Ave	Davidsons diverged from team. Stated intention to reach Broad Street, taxi home.
3:35pm	ACME parking lot, Passyunk Ave & Dickenson St	Brief camp at corner. Team reduced to Tenenbaum, Ralabate, Shea. Note spiky seedpod [empty] and blackened bananas
[Untimed]	Shot Tower Coffee, 542 Christian St	Diverged course to briefly camp. Communication from DiFranco and Miller to meet “in 10 minutes” at Base Camp.
[Untimed]	Base camp: Passyunk Ave & South St	Rejoined DiFranco and Miller
Post-expedition: [Untimed]	Taco & Ramen, 615 South St	Dinner. Team minus Davidsons
Post-expedition: [Untimed]	Cry Baby, 627 S 3rd St	Drinks. Team minus Davidsons
Post-expedition: [Untimed]	Various	DiFranco and Miller stated intention to “get a nightcap” elsewhere nearby. Shea stated intention to meet husband at The Last Drop Coffeehouse. Tenenbaum and Ralabate return home.

Kelly Ralabate: Archivist of Records / Cartographer

Fig 1. Expedition Points of Interest
Fig 2. Expedition Findings

Alyssa Shea: Archivist of Media

Photos

Videos

Rubbings

Sketches

Found

Ellie Miller: Navigator / Sherpa and Medic

Len Davidson: Historian / Researcher and Judy Davidson: Communicator

Odd Lots

A Proper Mast-Lashing

Philosophies and Phrases for Debased Phases

or Aphorisms for Schisms or Epigrams for Pigs and Rams

The first lie we're taught is existence of sin. The second is we shouldn't have it..
Drinking, like religion and suspicion, is only dangerous in excess or less.Sex and love are each admirable but together inconceivable.The problem with good taste is that there's too much of it. A surfeit of quality is the tedium of heaven.From birth I easily succeeded. Only through great effort have I failed, albeit not very well.Sobriety is the only impediment to intoxication.Poetry lies to make truth seem plausible.Don't deny yourself a fantasy because reality is flawed. Fiction is a valid form of fact.I derive from a long line of the dead. In fact, everyone I know comes from dead stock. All living people have survivor's guilt.I assume all interactions are loving and flirtatious except those that are.The body makes us human but adornment is denial of the body and denial of the body is civilization and civilization makes us human..
It's later than you drink.I'd like to die while I'm young enough to appreciate it. I may not have traveled much in life but I expect to travel reasonably far in death.La petit morte is more manageable and repeatable than la morte grande.Intellectual property fences in the ocean. Wit belongs to any qualified thief.A friend is just a stranger you've met.Morality says A is right and B is wrong. Ethics asks you to choose between C and D.A nickname given for not drinking is a soberquet.Marry the myopic and live beautiful forever.Decency is the most popular hypocrisy.Religion revealing the historic is a useful mooring. Religion revealing the mystic is abusively boring. Religion is only useful when unbelieved..
My only regret is having been born a man instead of a book.An epicurean, voluptuary, and hedonist walk into a baroque...My mistakes are my best and only qualities.It's best to be hated by the wrong people.We always knew the world was round. Through vast effort we taught ourselves it was flat. Then through much more effort we taught ourselves it was round. And we've never learned our lesson.Fear is not, and the only, convincing theological argument.Life exists to create life but death exists to create thought.I'm queer in every sense except the homosexual.I'm an atheist because I'm too moral not to be.Great minds kink alike..
All evil is caused by children or what they become.
.
.
.
Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum
Editor
June 13, 2025

Correspondence

SORTES invites readers and contributors to fight amongst themselves. Please talk with us! Comment on stories and poems, letters, and the SORTES demimonde in general by emailing

sortesmagazine@gmail.com

Title

“Text.”

Name, Date

SORTES Riposte

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SORTES is a mostly online journal, as you know, but every so often we can't resist existing.

Spectral Annual 2024

Here are four ghastly cards celebrating the tradition of sharing ghost stories at the end of the year. Each card features original eerie illustrations and newly-commissioned horror stories:-- Irina Tall's illustrations
-- Kailey Tedesco's poetry
-- Luke Condzal's historical existential story
-- Nick Perilli's familial ghost warmer, and
-- Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum's fraternal horror.Keep them, mail them, trade them, resell them once supplies inevitably exhaust.

Annual 2023

The SORTES Spectral Winter Annual 2023 revives the tradition of haunted holiday fiction. This beautifully crafted 44-page paperback anthology features ghastly short stories showcasing a dead man’s special deliveries, a judgmental seaside specter, the pains of an aging table-rapper, the heartwarming war on the poor, and the electrifying end of the year / world, as well as poems celebrating the Jersey Devil's unsung siblings. Authors include Daniel DiFranco, Jean Zurbach, Kailey Tedesco, Max D. Stanton, Mordecai Martin, and Nick Perilli. The Annual makes an ideal holiday present for any dear friend or family member who loathes the living.

SORTES Sampler 2

A SORTES Sampler 2 is a slender tasty book collecting weird fiction by Max D. Stanton, surrealist collage art by Danielle Gatto Hirano, and a poetry cycle by Uri Rosenshine. It’s a handsomely designed but affordable little snack of a book. We have incredibly limited copies on hand, and every day they become incredibly more limited, so leap today.

SORTES Sampler 1

SOLD OUT

A SORTES Sampler 1 was our first attempt to make the ephemeral real. It contains a dystopian farmstead fantasy by Iris Johnston, paper cutout art by Abi Whitehead, and a Coney Island noir by Mordecai Martin.

Or delay your delicious fulfillment and

Buy In Person

When in Philadelphia, please gobble up your copies from:Brickbat Books, Head & Hand Books, A Novel Idea on PassyunkPlease note that not every publication is sold in each location. If these fine stores are sold out, march to the counter and sweetly demand more SORTES.

Selene Sezer “Milk White”

Robert Hill Cox “I Haven't Drunk Champagne In So Long”

Keith Miller “A Nairobi Christmas”

Josh Schneyer Two Prose Poems

Kat St.Claire Two Flash Fictions

Ashley Mangtani “Fully Dimensional”

Nicole Spiegel‐Gotsch “La Soñadora De Parque Ochenta”

Frank Sherlock Four Poems

C. Inanen “The Bravest Thing”

GM Foy “The Situationist”

Contributors

Support ArtWell

Submission & Contact

Events

SORTES 27 Live

Radio SORTES

SORTES Expeditions

Please select an Expedition listed below.

Team Jeremy Tenenbaum: Chief Kelly Ralabate: Archivist of Records / Cartographer Alyssa Shea: Archivist of Media Ellie Miller: Navigator / Sherpa and Medic Daniel DiFranco: Camp and Equipage Manager Len Davidson: Historian / Researcher Judy Davidson: Communicator

Jeremy Tenenbaum, Expedition Chief

"Mount Passyunk"

Kelly Ralabate: Archivist of Records / Cartographer

"The Ballad of Passyunk Ave"

A musical tribute to singing cowboy Marty Robbins

Alyssa Shea: Archivist of Media

"soft coercion of highly constructed environments: east passyunk ave"

Daniel DiFranco: Camp and Equipage Manager

"nowsitrightbackandhereataleofawalkingfourhourmile"

Judy Davidson: Communicator and Len Davidson: Historian / Researcher

I was inspired by our Day on Passyunk to go back and find some quotes I had saved while on a long journey with Lenny [Davidson] 20-some years ago.

As Roy Rogers and Dale Evans sang so long ago, happy trails to you.

Jeremy Tenenbaum, Expedition Chief

Kelly Ralabate: Archivist of Records / Cartographer

Alyssa Shea: Archivist of Media

Photos

Videos

Rubbings

Sketches

Found

Ellie Miller: Navigator / Sherpa and Medic

Len Davidson: Historian / Researcher and Judy Davidson: Communicator

Odd Lots

Archive

Shop

Subscribe

Patreon

Selene Sezer
“Milk White”

Robert Hill Cox
“I Haven't Drunk Champagne In So Long”

Keith Miller
“A Nairobi Christmas”

Josh Schneyer
Two Prose Poems

Kat St.Claire
Two Flash Fictions

Ashley Mangtani
“Fully Dimensional”

Nicole Spiegel‐Gotsch
“La Soñadora De Parque Ochenta”

Frank Sherlock
Four Poems

C. Inanen
“The Bravest Thing”

GM Foy
“The Situationist”

Team
Jeremy Tenenbaum: Chief
Kelly Ralabate: Archivist of Records / Cartographer
Alyssa Shea: Archivist of Media
Ellie Miller: Navigator / Sherpa and Medic
Daniel DiFranco: Camp and Equipage Manager
Len Davidson: Historian / Researcher
Judy Davidson: Communicator