Midway through the fall semester, an unremarkable girl in Professor Woody’s Advanced Fiction workshop dyed her hair an unnatural shade of dark, changed her name to Tasmina, and turned in a story filled with made-up words.  She handed out the story to her classmates to be work shopped the following week, and in it, the main character “rebusively” studied her face in a bathroom mirror as the “perlifitous” water filled the bathtub.

Some students were dumbstruck, unsure of a particular word’s existence and not wanting to sound ignorant in class if they questioned the author’s use of an adjective that everyone else understood.  Others were outraged.  Words like “hiccombed” and “apluish” were a smack in the face to all their years of training in the proper use of language.  Some were even a little jealous, although they would never let on.  They hadn’t thought to break the rules, and here this girl was broadcasting her rebellion to all her classmates and the professor.

The students filtered into class that day, taking their usual seats.  Tasmina was the last to arrive, head down and eyes averted, mere moments before Professor Woody entered, his hair and clothes characteristically rumpled, taking up his perch on the desk at the front of the room.

Woody had worked at the university for nearly twenty years.  He always tried to remain a helpful, objective teacher, resisting the urge to let his personal feelings about his students and their writing abilities influence his treatment of them.  In such a subjective field, this was difficult to do.  He held a professional distance from his students.  He politely declined invitations to graduation parties and wrote generous yet restrained recommendation letters whenever he was asked, no matter the student.  Through the years, of course he favored some students over others, but he would never reveal such personal biases.

“All right, class,” he began.  “We’re discussing Tasmina’s story today, is that correct?”  He knew damn well whose story they were work shopping.  The truth was, he had loved Tasmina’s story, was floored by it, and he couldn’t remember the last time a student’s work had evoked such a strong feeling in him.  But his question, the same opener he used every week, was his attempt to keep the playing field level and dispel any suspicions his students had about preferential treatment.

The students shifted in their chairs, pulling their heavily marked copies of “Elephant Summer” from backpacks and binders.  Tasmina sat hunched over her desk, flicking absently at the eggplant-colored polish on her fingernails, pen and paper ready for the notes she might take as she was forced to sit silently through her classmates’ remarks.

No one spoke.  The students flipped through pages, pretending to go over their notes or scribble new ones.

“Who wants to start?” Woody prompted, and when the students continued to shuffle and avoid his gaze, he said, “Mary, how about you?”

Mary was a safe bet to start things off.  Always trying to say something nice about a classmate’s work, vague in her criticisms, she had nearly burst into tears three weeks prior when the class work shopped her contribution, a story about a dying grandmother whose last wish to be reunited with her childhood love is fulfilled by her grandson the day before she dies.  Granny’s dying words, as she holds her grandson’s hand in her left and her sweetheart’s in her right are, “Now my life is complete and my memory will live on in the love we have shared.”  Woody did everything but physically intervene as Mary’s classmates ripped her story apart as “formulaic,” “too sappy to be believable” and “Hollywood-influenced schlock.”

Now Mary smiled hesitantly in Tasmina’s direction and began, “I really liked it?  The main character is really relatable and I understand what she’s going through?  The descriptions are really vivid?  Like the stuff with the dumpster in the alley?”

Mary turned to look at Woody, begging him with her eyes to let her off the hook.

“Okay Mary, thank you,” he nodded, and her body visibly unclenched.  “Who’s next?”

Stefan, the blonde Canadian whose stories always consisted of poorly disguised metaphors about his one and only homosexual encounter, cleared his throat.  “I really liked the title.  I mean, initially, when I first picked it up, I was like, ‘Hey, this will be interesting.’  But then, well, I guess I was expecting to see an actual elephant somewhere in the story.  I was like, waiting for it, you know?  So that was kind of disappointing,”

Woody blinked.  “So…your suggestion for Tasmina is to place an elephant in the text of the story?”

Stefan tapped the butt of his pen against his cheek.  “Well, no…not necessarily.  I guess it’s more about setting up expectations for the reader.  I mean, titles are important, you know?  There has to be a payoff.  I guess that’s what I’m saying.”

Woody had his good days and bad days.  This one, it seemed, was shaping up to be a bad one.  He tried to give his students the benefit of the doubt.  They were, after all, still young and inexperienced, oblivious to the harsh world beyond the safety of their parents’ homes and sheltered college campus.  Whenever he felt the urge to laugh in their faces or physically shake them out of their idealistic reveries, he had to remember himself as he was at their age.  Idealistic for sure, and cocky, bordering on conceited, certain that whatever some crusty, burnout professor had to say was just a result of his own bitterness and personal failures.

He eyed the clock.  Soon he’d have to drive into town to meet his wife at Dr. Helbert’s office for their weekly therapy session.  Three months ago, Tracy had packed a small suitcase and moved out of their house.  Woody stood useless by the kitchen table as she washed and dried the dishes from the previous night’s dinner, her last wifely duty before leaving.

He remembered feeling blocked, stripped of the words and inflections that had flowed so freely to him for the better part of his life.  He remembered thinking that if only he could find the right words, the perfect symbols to convey with absolute clarity his feelings, he could stop her from leaving.  But the only words that came to him seemed artificial and vague.  Still, he had to say something.

“Don’t go,” he blurted.  “Things can be better.”

Tracy turned off the faucet and faced him, her graying but still luminous auburn hair flowing wildly around her shoulders.

“Better,” she repeated blankly.  “What does that word even mean?”

So for the past several weeks, the only time he spent with Tracy was in the presence of another man, a shrink who showcased all his framed diplomas like trophies on the walls of his Scandinavian-furnished office.  Woody and Tracy sat on the same hard leather couch, the length of a sports car separating their bodies.  Dr. Helbert sat before them in his designer chair, a slim, silver laptop poised and ready to receive notes on the state of the deteriorating couple.

Woody had grown angry that the only time he was allowed to see his wife was in these previously scheduled allotments of time, these “sessions” where a stranger with a half a million dollar education was supposed to know how to fix them.  A couple weeks ago, after one of their doctor visits, Woody casually asked Tracy if she wanted to grab a cup of coffee.

“I don’t think I’m ready for that yet,” she said.  “Let’s just stick to our therapy for now.”

Woody couldn’t contain his frustration.  “How the fuck is anything going to change if the only time we spend together is in a goddamned fish bowl?”

Tracy barely flinched.  “It’s going to take time.”

Time, Woody thought.  What does that word even mean?

He snapped back to the present to see Jenny, one of the class’s best writers save for the unfortunately large chip on her shoulder, shoot her hand into the air.  Even before she spoke, Woody could tell she meant to do some damage.

“Yes Jenny?”

She lowered her arm, took her time folding her hands on her desk.  “Well, since no one else is gonna say it…”  Her voice was clipped, and she paused dramatically.  “This story is just a bunch of made-up words strung together!  I mean, ‘figgish’?  ‘Barnification’?  ‘MAGALANT’?!”

She flipped rapidly through the pages, her voice growing more shrill with each word she spoke.

The students collectively squirmed and Woody stole a glance at Tasmina, who was the only one sitting perfectly still, eyes forward on her manuscript, pen held steady between her fingers.  Woody could swear he saw the smallest smile curling at the edges of her mouth.

“I mean, what the fuck is this?!” Jenny shrieked.  “Does she think we’re stupid or something?”

Well, at least she refrained from addressing the author directly, Woody reasoned.

“I have to agree with Jenny,” Clint, the quiet country boy, chimed in.  “I didn’t feel insulted, exactly, but the, uh, made-up words were a little distracting.”

“Okay, Clint.  Could you say more about that?”  Woody had to make at least one student back up his criticism with concrete evidence, before the whole class got whipped into a frenzy.

Clint sat thoughtfully for a moment.  “Well, the made-up words, like the ones Jenny mentioned, when I came across them in the story, I got sort of stuck.  I would have to stop reading for a second and think, ‘Hey, that’s not a real word.’  I guess it just didn’t make sense to me.  Why not use words we all know and understand?”

The classroom was deflated.  Clint had voiced everyone’s disapproval without a hint of venom.  If anyone carried on, drew out the matter to the point of redundancy, it would be useless if not cruel.

“All right,” Woody stepped in.  “Does anyone else have comments for Tasmina’s story?”

The week before Tracy left, a couple of mourning doves had claimed one of the light fixtures on their porch, setting to work building a nest.  The male dove retrieved all the supplies: twigs, dry leaves, downy moss, and brought them back to the female who piled them together, slowly turning her small, round body, making a spot for her eggs to fall.

Woody would never have noticed the birds’ activities had it not been for Tracy’s attention to such things.  She was shocked by his obliviousness.

“How could you not notice?” she asked.  “Haven’t you heard them singing to each other?”

Woody was embarrassed, and reminded himself to try and be more observant, but only a few days later he had forgotten again, and as he went to flip on the porch light before they went to bed one night, Tracy screamed.

“You’re going to scare them away!”

It took him a few moments to realize what she was talking about.

After Tracy left, Woody taped the porch’s light switch into the OFF position and covered it with a neon yellow Post-It note reading: LEAVE OFF DOVES.  This way, even if he forgot again, he would be reminded before he could do any damage.

The students who had yet to speak avoided Woody’s eyes.

“Okay,” he said after a few moments.  “Tasmina? Would you like to say anything?”

Woody always dreaded this part of the workshop.  He felt terrible for the student whose work had been ripped to shreds by his classmates, whose face always registered a kind of shell-shock, who would rather melt into a puddle and slide under the door than have to address the room, thank his classmates for their “helpful suggestions” and tell them he “had a feeling” the story’s ending was crap.

Or there was the student whose story had been praised and fawned over, the only criticism being that there was hardly anything to criticize.  Woody would find himself loathing this student once he was allowed to talk, addressing his classmates like a visiting professional, a pimply-faced teenager regarding the “craft” of writing, the skillful execution of foreshadowing and complex metaphors.

But as Tasmina put down her pen and made eye contact with him for the first time, Woody hoped she would be as unpredictable as her story and fall into neither category.

“I appreciate everyone taking the time to read my story,” she said, her voice plain, her face unreadable.  “I didn’t expect everyone to like it.”

The students waited, hanging, expecting Tasmina to offer explanation, more effusive gratitude, some kind of apology.  But instead, she began to quietly pack her things.  Slowly, the students followed her lead, some of them grumbling under their breath, others scurrying out of the room before Woody could ask them about missing assignments.

Tasmina was the last student left, leisurely reaching down to tie the laces on her left sneaker.

Woody didn’t understand the meaning of the word depressed.  If he thought about it, he would picture ceaseless crying, a carpeted floor strewn with crumpled tissues, late night infomercials, a ratty bathrobe and slippers, Chinese takeout boxes filled with spoiling food, unreturned phone calls, a trash can full of empty wine bottles.  If he thought about it, he would never picture a monotonous life with a decent salary, benefits and a summer vacation, too many leftovers in the fridge because the cook only knows how to prepare meals for two, a friendly relationship with the campus security night guard, a weekend spent repainting the guest bedroom a unisex color of Celery Green, a preoccupation with researching the mating habits and life span of mourning doves on the internet late at night, the persistent habit of washing the left-side pillowcase with the rest of the bedding even though it had gone unused for weeks.

If he thought about it, Woody would realize he didn’t understand the meaning of a lot of words anymore, if he ever really did.  Better.  Time.  Love.  Husband.  Wife.  Teacher.  Student.

Tasmina slung her backpack over her shoulder and headed for the door.

“Tasmina, may I speak to you for a moment?”

She turned and approached Woody at his desk.  He wanted to tell her something, and he wracked his brain, once again finding himself blocked, stripped.  He thought if only he could find the right words, the perfect symbols, he could tell this girl something good, something she deserved to hear.

“I’m sorry about my story,” she said, giving him the apology she had reserved from her classmates.  “I understand if you’re upset.  It’s just, I hear people use the same words over and over again, and I start to forget what any of them mean, what any of them should mean.  So, yeah, I made up some words, and maybe that’s cheating, but at least I know what they mean.”  She blinked, her eyes pointing squarely at Woody’s face.

“You don’t need to apologize,” he said.  “It’s not cheating.  I just have a suggestion for you.  For your next story.”

Tasmina waited patiently for him to continue.

“Use deraveled in a sentence,” he said finally.

She looked at him strangely.  It wasn’t exactly a made-up word, but it was the only thing he could come up with.  She nodded, gave a small smile, and left the room.

The next week, Tasmina was not in Woody’s class.  He thought perhaps she was sick, but she was absent again the week after that and the week after that.  Woody went to the administration office and was told that Tasmina, or Rachel Smith as the school records knew her, had withdrawn from school, giving no forwarding address.

For weeks thereafter, Woody worried that he was somehow to blame for her decision.  He wondered what he could have done differently, how he could have been a better teacher, mentor, friend.

Better.  What does that word even mean?

One day late in the spring, Woody returned to his office after class to find a manila envelope inscribed with his name sitting atop his desk.  There was no postage; the envelope must have been hand-delivered.  Woody opened it and pulled out a manuscript, a short story entitled “Daffodil Speaks.”  The author’s name was nowhere to be found.

Woody took a seat behind his desk and started to read.  He knew immediately that it was Tasmina’s story.

The first sentence read, “The green and gold lights from the city deraveled over the hills, a trail of purpulascence setting every blade of grass oblase.”

First published in Two Hawks Quarterly

remember verb 1 I remember everything you said to me. Can you? RECALL, call to mind, recollect, think of; reminisce about, look back on. ANTONYM forget. 2 I knew what you’d feel like before we ever touched MEMORIZE, commit to memory, retain; learn by heart. ANTONYM forget.

hand noun 1 your hand guided mine palm, fist, instrument, claw; informal paw, mitt, duke, hook, meathook.2 Is that my hand or yours? POINTER, indicator, needle, arrow, marker.

loose adjective 1 “Don’t hold me so close.” NOT FIXED IN PLACE, not secure, unsecured, unattached; detached, unfastened, untied; wobbly, unsteady, movable. ANTONYMS secure, tight. 2 I never expect you to love me as much in return HYSTERICAL, undone, forgotten, insubstantial.

spin verb 1 I used to be a ballerina. “You still have a dancer’s body.” BEWITCH, pirouette, twist, tease, entice, go round, whirl, gyrate, circle.2 thinking of you turns my stomach CHURN, burn, rage, smear, twitch, scratch, bleed, infect.

roar noun 1 love is depleting BOOM, crash, rumble, roll, thundering. 2 swallow it all SHOUT, bellow, yell cry, howl.

lift verb 1 “I’m sorry. I should have never let this happen.” RAISE, hoist, heave, haul up, raise up/aloft, elevate, hold high; pick up, grab, take up, scoop up, snatch up; literary upheave. ANTONYMS drop, put down, break away, shatter. 2 taking yourself back, taking something of me BOOST, raise, buoy up, elevate, cheer up, perk up, uplift, brighten up, gladden, encourage, stimulate, revive. ANTONYM subdue, forget, cheat, use up, diminish, undo.

after “The Act” by William Carlos Williams

Cut it down
tongue clean the blade
of caught-off-guard
the sudden beauty
of never-lasting

Chop it off
preserve the ineffable
wilting improbability
petals browned
by fingers’ oily mar

Hack away
and hermetically seal
the exhale
visible only
to the naked eye

Scrape your tines
against the bark
so new foliage will have
no choice but to form
around your mark

They plant gardens in flattened patches
–where you used to lay like a handmade quilt–
and send you sweating sacks of overripe fruit

They attend the funerals of strangers
and weep openly against dark wool shoulders
of other lovers, all of them lost or losing

They learn inertia in seven languages
and play their voices back on tape
until interpretation wears to static

They build intricate tangles
just so they can practice at unknotting

They seek like missiles toward the heat
of your present happiness
snub nosed and bullet straight

They can’t leave well enough alone
They have so much to talk about
Finally, they have so much they want to say

When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them. They would carry on as if changing the locks was a game all parents played with their oldest child, to trick them into resiliency. They let my little sister have my bedroom one day while I was at school, to make room for the new baby that was on the way. “This house is only big enough for two daughters,” my father told me with a shrug. At night I would sneak in and hide under my old bed, and when my parents would come to tuck my sister in for the night, I’d mouth along the words as they read her my favorite bedtime story. My father tells everyone he has two daughters, their names are Pride and Joy. Occasionally I’ll bump into him in the supermarket, both of us perusing the citrus aisle, and though he can’t remember me, his eyes will linger on my face just long enough to make us both uncomfortable.

My body is an ever-changing clock—
spastic springs and gears never settling,
never keeping proper time.
Bodies carry bodies in pockets, on chains
like skin-scented heirlooms. When my grandmother
died, she left me her first kiss, the ticking sound
of summer asphalt and peach fuzzed legs.
I see my mother’s handwriting on the chart beside
my bed: Sarita has always been a dramatic child.
Her face gathers humidity like tears trapped behind glass.
Dr. Winnicki advises me to rest, but never to fall asleep,
while he looks for cures in different time zones.
His clock is all bent and rusty snow, melting into
creeks where salmon spawn alcoholic fishermen.
Clocks line up on barstools in Wuuhstah,
“Ayuh yoos, haws abouwda beeah?”
Nicotine-stained vowels, romancing beers like wives.
Before becoming wives, girls sway to the music,
twirl their skirts like love. Their pink and red fingernails
tap out the seconds between handsome wristbands.
Tell me what you’re really thinking…I don’t want to know.
Nurse Alma sees too many words in my future, where she says
nuts chase the squirrels, and clocks are ever-changing bodies.

My therapist says she’s detected a pattern–a predictable reoccurrence of breakdowns in communication. “We have to uncover the source,” she tells me, “or you will carry the pattern with you for the rest of your life.”

As she continues to talk, I wink at the floral wallpaper and consider the tragedy of a broken zipper. The way things work as they’re meant to until, one day, they don’t. People are easier to replace than repair. We pick out new partners and build new houses on broken zipper burial sites, and have nightmares of being chewed to death by metal teeth.

Last month, my therapist’s wallpaper was different. She thinks I don’t remember; but nothing’s more permanent than the memory of plaid.

I do not love you–except because I love you,
I’ve never loved another before you.
A verb–to love–subject with no object:
I loved my love not knowing how to love.

Love is modified by what isn’t known
and dangles, suspended in the lack like
silence distributing its weight over
miles between driver and passenger seats.

You don’t know how to love, object tells subject.
How many times can a heart bear the words
before relinquishing its grammar?

Lov-ing, Lov-ed, improperly assigned
muddles significance like question marks–
tentatively asking, “Do you love me?”

(first line borrowed from one of Neruda’s love sonnets)

The lights in the small room are too bright. I close my eyes and inside my head stays lit up like a supermarket. They remove everything from the room—a small table, a chair, my sweater which was hung on the back of the chair—everything except me and the examination bed-slash-table I’m laying on. There is a small, glass and chicken wire window in the door to the room. I lift my head to see the doctors and nurses walking by, some of them pausing to look in at me. Only three people come into the room, their visits staggered and synchronized.

There’s the doctor who’s been assigned to my cuts. He is cocky, a surgeon. He pokes and squeezes the cuts, wipes them with liquid and gauze. He doesn’t look at my face. Just as I’m able to adjust to the pain, absorb it until the numbness returns, he comes back into the room and rips the old gauze away, more poking and squeezing and wiping. I imagine him as a child, pumping his air gun until his arm burned, then taking aim at the family dog, chained up and oblivious in the backyard.

Now why would you want to go and do a thing like this? Why’d you want to hurt yourself, huh? What happened, some boy break your heart? There’s other fish in the sea, you know. A pretty girl like you…What would your daddy say? It hurts now, doesn’t it? Not much we can do about that…

There’s the psychiatrist who comes down from the second floor, a thin, humorless man whom I distrust immediately. The feeling appears to be mutual. To him, there is no difference between a self-inflicted injury and a suicide attempt. He carries a pen and a notepad. When I cry, he writes “hysterical.” When I am calm and quiet he writes, “unresponsive” or “lacks affect.”

Were you trying to commit suicide? Did you harm yourself on purpose? I’ve spoken to your mother. She’s aware of the situation. We both agree that it would be best to transport you directly from here to the Belmont psychiatric hospital, as an inpatient. They will take excellent care of you there. We need you to agree to what’s best, to getting you better. Do you agree?

There’s the baby-faced nurse with a thick Southie accent. He smiles and calls me “Sweethaht” without condescension. He tells me the psychiatrist wants to have me put in restraints, but he assured the doctor that it was unnecessary, ridiculous. He’s so kind to me that I weep quietly, gratefully, every time he comes into the room.

So they’re not gonna strap you down, but I need you to stay calm for me, okay? I told ‘em you’re not gonna run, that I’d keep my eye on you. I’m sorry I can’t turn the lights out for you, but just try and get some rest. I know it’s hard. Don’t cry, Sweethaht. Yeah, it sucks right now, but it’s gonna be all right. I promise you, everything’s gonna be all right.

Time passes slowly or quickly, I’m not sure. Every time I manage to soothe myself to the edge of sleep, the door opens and someone enters the room.

Your friend, the girl you came in with, she’s gone home. She wanted me to tell you.

Jackie, my roommate. She found me in the bathroom. She walked with me six blocks from our apartment to the emergency room. She told me I should lie about what happened, save myself some trouble. But I didn’t want to, or I couldn’t. And now she’s gone home. She’s taken my purse with my wallet and cigarettes and cell phone. The only number I am able to recall from memory is the first one I ever learned, corresponding to the house I lived in for the first 13 years of my life, now inhabited by a different family or possibly torn down. 974-9327. Useless.

This smaller cut here shouldn’t leave much of a scar, but this bigger one—I’m gonna stitch it up now, temporarily, but they’ll have to reopen it to do the surgery in a couple weeks. That’ll scar up pretty good, I’m guessing. I know how girls don’t like scars, but think of it this way—it’ll make you look tough.

I keep the pain at bay as long as I don’t look at my hand. But even without looking directly, the fresh, wiry stitches are visible on the left side of my periphery.

You know, I have a daughter around your age. If she ever did a thing like this, it would break my heart. You don’t want to break your daddy’s heart, do you? Did you ever stop to think about that?

When the surgeon leaves the room, I keep my eyes fixed on the ceiling until the light draws more tears to form, rolling down and out the corners of my eyes. My pinky finger flinches involuntarily and pain shoots through my hand, up my arm, nerves fire miscommunications at both ends of the severed tendon. I babble a quiet mantra, a single word whispered over and over as an attempt at self-soothing. Through tears and phlegm and chattering teeth I repeat, “Please, please, please, please…”

I want to go over the details of the situation one more time as we prepare your transfer arrangements. The injuries you’ve sustained were self-inflicted, correct? You made the smaller cut first and then went on to slash the backside of your left hand, wherein you managed to sever your flexor tendon, yes? But as you say, it was not your intention to cause yourself fatal harm. And you had been drinking, is that right? You were mildly intoxicated.  And you came to the hospital of your own accord. Okay. I think we’ve got it.

Please go away. Please stop asking questions. Please stop touching me. Please just leave me alone.

All right, sweethaht. You’ll be outta here soon. They’re not gonna let you go home just yet, but they’re gonna take you somewhere you can get some rest and have some help sorting everything out. Take care of yourself, okay? You’re gonna be just fine, you’ll see.

I just want a bed, a real bed. I need to sleep. And when I wake up tomorrow, they’ll see that I’m fine. They’ll let me go home. This was all just a stupid mistake.

And it seemed that, just a little more—and the solution would be found, and then a new, beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning.

Anton Chekhov
The Lady with the Little Dog

“What are you looking at?”

Her eyes were off across the room, focused on something stationary that was, or maybe wasn’t, there.

“Why haven’t you ever kissed me?”  She blurted it out fast, as if it was a shocking question she had worked herself up to.

“I don’t know.  I’m scared.”

“Why are you scared?”

“Because I care about you, and I don’t want to ruin things. I’m scared because the last woman I really cared about and kissed eventually stopped kissing me back.  I’m scared because I don’t want to miss you more than I already do.”

He took a sip of his wine and wiped his thumb up and down against the stem of the glass.  “Do you want me to keep going?”

“No, no.  I get it.  You have reasons.”

“Good reasons.”

“Yes, good reasons.”  She leaned over and undid the straps on her fancy, uncomfortable work shoes.  “But you don’t have to be scared.  We could kiss, you know, just to try it.  Just to see what it’s like.  Then, if you want, we can pretend like it never happened.  I won’t tell anyone, you won’t tell anyone, and after a while, without anyone reminding us that it happened, we’ll just forget.”

“Are you trying to talk me into kissing you?”

They laughed, and she fell back against the couch beside him.

“That’s weird.  Like you’re trying to sell me a vacuum or something.”

“Sorry.  I think the wine is making me spunky.”

“Spunkier than usual?”

“Yes, spunkier than usual.  I’m sorry, I’ll stop.”

“NO.  I mean, don’t feel like you shouldn’t say…whatever it is you want to say.”

“Okay.  I won’t.”  Her face fell serious and she looked away from him.  “I’m gonna get a refill,” she said, standing from the couch.  “You want some?”

“Sure,” he said and handed her his glass as she stood from the couch.  She stopped just before heading into the kitchen and said, “I’m really glad you’re here.”

“Yeah, me too.”

*            *            *            *               *

Though it was technically a party held in his honor—a sort of going-away celebration—Alex recognized only about half of the people in the backyard of one of his coworker’s Beacon Hill brownstone.  Sally showed up alone around nine, about an hour or so after the party officially began.  Alex saw her walk down the brick steps into the yard, and watched her stand at the edge of the already half-drunk crowd.  She pinched at the strap of her shoulder bag and chewed the inside of her cheek as she scanned the faces.  Her eyes finally found Alex and she smiled affectionately.  He extracted himself from the conversation going on around him and made his way over to her.

“You came!” he said, sounding more excited than he had intended.

“Of course,” she said, wrapping him in a hug, and then whispering half-jokingly in his ear, “although I can’t say that I condone the circumstances behind this party.  If you ask me, your leaving us is hardly something to celebrate.”

They separated, and she looked at him in that way she always did—her face tilted to the side, her eyes wide open and full of warmth.

“You want a drink?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

Beers in hand, Alex led Sally around the backyard, introducing her to the people he knew: coworkers from the tutoring center, and friends he had made while married to Anne who stuck by him through the split.    “

How’s Bryan?” Alex asked at one point when he found himself standing alone with Sally against the fence strung with ivy and twinkling Christmas lights.

Sally made a face and nearly rolled her eyes, but stopped herself.  “He’s all right,” she said flatly, taking a sip of her beer.  Alex watched her avoid his eyes.

“You know what, Sally?  You should be with someone you’re actually excited about.  Someone who you want to talk about all the time, and with enthusiasm, to the point that people start asking you to shut up about him.  You should be with someone who makes you really happy.  Because that’s what you deserve.”

Sally looked up at him, her eyes wide.  She opened her mouth to say something, but couldn’t.  Alex thought she might start to cry.

“I’m sorry,” he blurted.  “I don’t know why I said that.”

But that wasn’t true.  He knew exactly why he said it. Over the past year, as he had really gotten to know Sally, he had begun to pick up on the incompatibilities between her and Bryan. He saw how she was when he wasn’t around—she was alive and vibrant, and spoke with passion about the things she really cared about.  But whenever Bryan was within earshot, she acted as if she were being monitored by some disapproving authority, completely unsure of herself and unwilling to speak with conviction about anything that could be challenged.  And so Alex grew to dislike Bryan, not because he was a despicable human being, but because of what Sally became—or what she wouldn’t become—when he was around.

“Well, I’m glad you said it,” Sally said, smiling.  “No one else wants to say it.” She wiped at her eyes.

Alex watched her, could see her grappling for the next thing to say.  Her posture was vulnerable yet defiant, as it always was with her, with any girl who has no idea that she looks most beautiful in the moments when she’s most delicate.

“What do you do,” she began, “when you feel like you’re happy—you’re comfortable, anyway—but know you could be happier?  It’s not an easy thing.  It would be much simpler if the circumstances were dire, if there was only one possible option to choose.  But…”

Just then, one of Alex’s old buddies sauntered up, well into his second six-pack.  “Dude!” he shouted at Alex.  “You gotta come over here!  We’re gonna form like a love circle around you and do bon voyage toasts and shit.”

Alex looked to Sally who smiled and nodded calmly.  “Bon voyage toasts,” she said.  “Don’t want to miss those.”

*            *            *            *               *

“Ah, I love this song,” he said as she settled back on the couch, handing him his refilled glass.

“Me too.  It reminds me of sixth grade, those awkward school dances in the cafeteria or the gymnasium, with the boys and the girls huddled against opposite walls.”

He took a sip of his wine.  “I was living in San Francisco when this song came out.  Once a week I would read at an open mic night at this little café called Jitters.  I was completely in love with this waitress, Cindy, who worked there.  She looked like Natalie Wood.  She thought I was a loser, that my poems were cheesy and lame.”

“Doesn’t sound that much different from the sixth grade.”

He smiled.  “No, I guess not.”

She hunched her shoulders and narrowed her eyes secretively.  “You know, I’m not like other 20-something girls.  I’m weathered.  Hardened.”

“You forgot jaded.”

“Right.  That too.”

“No.  You’re none of those things.  And I wouldn’t want you to be.  But you’re right.  You are different from all the other young girls.”

“Thank you very much.”

*            *            *            *               *

Alex moved to the new city on a Thursday, and on Friday he left his apartment after a day spent staring at sealed boxes and bulging duffel bags, the obligation of unpacking an overwhelming task he wasn’t quite ready to tackle.  He walked around his new neighborhood and found a small bar where he settled in among a few other early evening patrons.

He exchanged pleasantries with the bartender, a man who bore a striking resemblance to Tom Waits.  After each time he poured Alex a fresh whiskey, the bartender would return to his spot in the corner where he absently wiped at drinking glasses with a natty towel and glanced back and forth between the muted television and the front door.

Alex didn’t mind being alone; in fact, he preferred it most of the time.  But on this particular occasion, he felt intensely anxious, the same way he had felt as a teenager whenever he was required to make any sort of semi-permanent decision regarding what it was he wanted to do with his life.  It was a feeling similar to loneliness: something he had grown well acquainted with but never got quite used to.

He looked up from his glass and was surprised to find the bar full of people.  He couldn’t remember how long he had been sitting there or how many times the bartender had refilled his glass.   A blonde girl bumped into his elbow as she climbed onto the barstool beside him.  She smiled at him and brushed her bangs out of her eyes.

“Hi,” she said.  “Is it okay if I sit here?”

“Sure,” he said.

“You all by yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too.  Well, just for a little while.  One of my girlfriends is meeting me.”

He nodded.

“I’m Callie.”

“Alex,” he said, facing her to shake her hand.  He noticed she had tiny, silver earrings all the way up her left earlobe, like the spiral of a notebook.

“Are you new to the neighborhood?”

“Yeah.  How’d you know?”

“It’s a neighborhood bar.  Pretty much everyone here’s a regular, so you learn faces.”

“Oh.  So you live nearby too?”

“Yep.  Just one street over, on Spaulding.”

“Oh.  I’m on Griffin.  I just got in yesterday.”

“You just moved here?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.  Where from?”

“Boston.”

“Wow!  What are you doing here?”

Alex hesitated; the question brought a smile to his face. “Umm.  I got a job, teaching at the university.”

“No way!  I start my senior year in August.  What are you teaching?”

“Literature.”

“Seriously?  Oh my god, I love to read.  I’m a drama major, but I take a bunch of lit courses.  I was thinking about minoring, but…” She cocked her head and smiled.  Alex thought he caught a glint of a tongue ring before her teeth clamped together.  “Maybe I’ll be in one of your classes.  I’ve always wanted a cute professor.”

She swiveled on her stool, her knee grazing his hip.  Suddenly, a raven-haired girl with earlobes like the blonde’s walked up and playfully punched the blonde on the shoulder.

“Bitch!” the dark-haired girl said with a grin.  Her eyes were heavily lined with silvery powder, and she smelled of clove cigarettes.  “I knew you’d be here!  Jonny and Steven got a booth over in the corner.  Let’s go.”

“Oh my god, Erica, wait.  This guy’s a professor.  Can you believe it?”

Erica looked Alex over, then nodded approvingly.  “You’re cute,” she said.  “I would totally take your class.”

The blonde and the brunette continued chatting, eventually turning their backs on Alex, and then headed over to the corner booth where two boys in backwards ball caps and ironic t-shirts were waiting for them with a pitcher of beer.

Alex motioned to the bartender, having to shout a couple times over the crowd to pull him from his trance.  He finally set down the glass and towel and came over with the whiskey bottle.

“This one’s on me,” he said as he filled Alex’s glass.  Then he poured himself one and raised it in a toast.  “To the college girls,” he said.  “They’re not much for conversation, but fun to watch.”

Alex clinked glasses with the bartender.

*            *            *            *               *
“Why do you like me?” he asked her.

“You mean, why have I graced you with the gift of my friendship?”

“No.  Umm.  Why do you like me?”  He set his wine glass on the coffee table and brushed at a piece of lint on his knee.  “I never understand why anyone likes me, but you, you’re young and…hopeful.  You’re not supposed to like someone like me.”

“Someone like you?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.” She took a swig from her glass then set it down next to his.  “You know, I still remember the first day of the first class we ever took together.  What was it, like two years ago?”

“That sounds about right.  I loved that class.  Even though I was by far the oldest person there…  Even older than the professor, I think. ”

“I know, and you were also the smartest, but listen.  That’s not why I remember, well, not the main reason.  I remember walking in and seeing you sitting there, pulling your books and papers out of your bag.  You were sort of…charmingly rumpled.  I had been there for nearly three and a half years and had never seen you before, so I figured you must have been new.  There was something about you I liked immediately.  And I watched you out of the corner of my eye through the entire class.

“It’s something that probably only happens two or three times in a person’s life—you see someone one day, a total stranger up to that point, and think, ‘I have to know this person.  He has to be in my life.’  That’s how I felt about you.  And even though we became friends right away, I sort of avoided you for a while.”

“What?”

“Yeah.  I mean, when there weren’t other friends around.  I couldn’t be alone with you.  Not because I thought I might do something stupid, but because I was afraid of finding out what it would feel like, just you and me, standing in front of each other.

“You were with Anne, I was with Bryan, before any signs of trouble on the horizon.  And it’s one thing to lay eyes on a stranger and be immediately attracted, but the more I got to know you, the more I liked you.  But I wasn’t expecting anything, and I didn’t want to give the impression that I was.  I just wanted to know you, to have you in my life, however you might fit.”  She leaned forward and retrieved her wine glass.  “Does that answer your question?”

He watched her take a sip.  “Wow.  No.  But I wish I had asked whatever question you were answering.”

“And that’s another thing,” she continued.  “You ask a question like, ‘Why do you like me?’ and you have no idea how wonderful and warm and smart and funny you are.  Or maybe you do know, but you’re just not sure.  And I like being given the opportunity to tell you.”

*            *            *            *               *

After Anne kicked him out for the last time, Alex spent a month letting his friends take him out to bars and nightclubs—loud, flashy places they had never visited when he was married—places that lived up to their names: Trance, Blackout, Alcatraz, Inferno.

He found it strange how no one assumed that the split had been his fault.  It hadn’t been—Anne had grown impatient with his desire to find fulfilling work instead of just settling for some steady desk job like all the other husbands, and although they had both talked about wanting a family in the past, her desire to have a baby grew more persistent as his remained a distant aspiration—it was something they didn’t talk about, but the weight of it managed to permeate every aspect of their relationship, hanging in the air like an overdue bill.  While Alex was the same person he had been when they got married, Anne had become someone else—influenced by friends’ baby showers and expensive family vacations and padded bank accounts, she changed her mind about the kind of man she wanted to be married to.

She had been the one to end things, standing unrecognizable in the doorway with her arms crossed as he packed the few shared items she would allow him to take, but still, he was surprised, and maybe even a little disappointed, when no one accused him of any wrongdoing, but instead pitied him—looked at him with furrowed eyebrows and pouted lower lips, patting him on the back as they ordered more rounds of drinks.

He was lost.  He wasn’t heartbroken because of Anne; he had loved her, still did, but had to agree with her that their time together had reached its end. He was devastated in the same way that anyone is when they’ve settled on a path, even a loosely mapped one, and find themselves abruptly cast off course, unprepared and ill-equipped for change.

He agreed to take the job at the university in the Midwest the day after he signed the divorce papers Anne had messengered over.  Teaching had always appealed to him—he liked the idea of spending his life learning and sharing what he learned with others.  Plus, he had never wanted to give up on the idea of summer vacations.  He didn’t tell anyone for a couple weeks, and stopped answering the phone when his buddies called to invite him out to the bars and nightclubs.

After he moved, most of his Boston friends seemed to lose track of him virtually overnight.  There were only a couple people he kept in regular contact with—only a couple people he wanted to talk to.

Sally wrote Alex emails several times a week—thoughtful, detailed emails in which she would respond to the last email he had sent her: “I’m glad you have a neighborhood bar.  Everyone needs a bar within walking distance where they can go get buzzed in the company of inebriated strangers.”  Or, “You’re rereading Lolita?  God, I feel like I lost my literary virginity to Nabokov.  How is it the second time around?”

She would even respond to the things he hadn’t written, but must have been apparent to her between the lines of his emails: “I know you’re probably out there, hitting up the cafes and acoustic shows, keeping yourself busy, but it’ll all just make the loneliness worse unless you really talk to people, and really listen when they talk to you.  Besides, it would be a real shame if the people inhabiting that new city of yours didn’t get a chance to find out how lucky they are to have you living in their midst.”

And always, she would throw in a few sentences about what she was up to, favoring the peculiar details over the mundane: “I went to a ridiculous house party on Mission Hill last night.  On my way out, I tripped down the steps and broke the heel off of my boot.  I walked all the way back down that goddamn hill, left foot on tippy-toe, and when I woke up this morning it took me about twenty minutes of serious consideration before I could figure out why my left leg was so sore.” Or, “I decided to paint one wall in my new apartment a really intense shade of red.  Maybe it’s just an act of defiance—I don’t even particularly like the color.  In fact, every time I come down the hall and see it, it sort of frightens me.  But Bryan never let me paint the walls in our house, so now that I can, I chose one of the most startling colors possible.”

He saved all her emails in a folder on his computer called “Sally,” and even when he wanted to, he prevented himself from responding to her messages right away.  He would carry her words around in his head all day, thinking up the most adequate response—something witty and intelligent, like a miniature novel, without giving too much away; he feared sending pieces of himself out across a space where he couldn’t retrieve them, couldn’t call them back at will.
He grew dependent on the regularity of her emails, and was practically crestfallen on the days she didn’t write, even if her last message had arrived only the day before.  He checked his inbox with growing frequency; the days he found her there were good days, and the days he didn’t were ambiguous, if not dismal.  Increasingly fixated, the gaps between the good days and the rest widened in his mind, and he grew impatient, overly expectant, irritated.  He blamed her for all of it.

Then she called him one evening just before sunset.  Their phone conversations were far less frequent than their emails.  The false starts and pauses he allowed himself when he wrote her emails couldn’t disguise him over the phone.  She would hear everything in his voice, and this made him nervous, so nervous that no matter how badly he wanted to hear her voice some nights, he never called her.  When they did speak on the phone, it was always she who called him.

“Hey you,” she said.

“Hi.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine.  Good.  Just getting ready to go out.”  He felt the need to be going somewhere, to seem busy yet carefree, as if constantly moving around came naturally to him.

“Oh, okay.  Well, do you need to go?”

“What?”

“I mean, do you need to get off the phone?  Are you in a hurry?’

“Oh, no.  It’s fine.  What’s up?”  He tried to sound relaxed, but the harder he tried to control the tone and level of his voice, the more on edge he sounded.

“Umm.  Nothing, really.  I just wanted to see how you were doing.  You haven’t written in like, over a week, so I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Yeah, I’m fine.  I’ve just been really busy.”

“Oh.  You’re not upset with me, are you?”

“No, why would I be upset with you?” He snorted a little.

“I don’t know.  I just thought I’d ask.”  Her voice sounded flimsy and faraway.

“Well, I’m not.  I just have a lot of stuff going on, and I don’t always get a chance to sit down and write some long email.  So, it’s nothing personal.”

“Okay.  All right.”  She was quiet for a moment, and Alex could hear the sound of cars in the background.  He wondered where she was.  “Well, I’ll let you go.  I just wanted to say hello.”

“Cool.  I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”

“Okay.  Bye.”

Alex hung up the phone and stood in the middle of his apartment, the fading daylight outside his window giving the whole room a bluish glow, eliciting in him the feeling he always got in those anonymous hours when the time of day is not immediately evident.

He stood motionless for a while, then forced himself into the bathroom and climbed into the shower under the hot pelting water, not wanting to do anything or go anywhere at all.

*            *            *            *               *

She could see how tired he was after flying all day, so after they finished off the bottle of wine, she fetched some pillows and blankets and together they unfolded the futon for him to sleep on.  She let him have the bathroom first, and when he was finished washing up, she emerged from her bedroom and went in to remove her contact lenses and brush her teeth in front of the sink.  When she came out of the bathroom, he was already under the covers on the futon.  She went into the kitchen and switched off the light.

From the hallway between her bedroom and the living room, she said, “Good night, Alex.”

“Good night, Sally,” he responded.

She turned to head off to bed then stopped, turning back toward the living room.

“I’m gonna say something, and I need you to not interrupt me as I’m saying it, or else I’ll lose my train of thought and end up dumbing it down and stopping short of what I mean to tell you.” She leaned against the doorframe in her blue cotton nightgown.

He stayed quiet and still, and he wondered if she could see him looking at her.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m completely, utterly, ridiculously in love with you.  Since you moved away, I miss you so much my lungs ache.  Whenever you send me an email, it’s like I’m reading my favorite book for the first time, and when I get to the end, I reread it and I have that feeling all over again.

“On the nights when we talk on the phone, I go to bed and have the most vivid dreams—not about you, necessarily—but dreams in which I can hear and taste everything, and I wake up and realize that that’s what I’m trying to do when I write to you, or talk to you on the phone— and although I could never write or say as well or as much as I feel for you, I’m trying through typing and through clutching the phone against my ear to grab for exactly what it’s like to have you right in front of me—because that’s what I want more than anything else in the world.  That’s all I want.”

He said nothing, and he watched the outline of her body slump a little against the doorframe then grow smaller as she moved back down the hall where she disappeared into her bedroom.

*            *            *            *               *

It had been weeks since their last phone conversation, and Sally’s emails had tapered off to once a week, at the most.  Alex figured that after their last conversation, she had assumed that he was asking her to back off: allow him time to separate from the life he had lived in Boston, and space to create a new one out in the Midwest.  As was often the case when he harnessed every scrap of energy in his being toward disguising how he truly felt, he had managed to cast her out, away from him, instead of drawing her closer.

The start of the school year did nothing to subdue his loneliness.  If anything, the sense of isolation he felt—as if he had misplaced something precious through some clumsy error—only heightened when he was in the classroom, assigning readings by his beloved authors, all the young students blinking up at him without a shred of familiarity.

As Labor Day approached, he tried to think up reasons that would take him to Boston for the long weekend: rational, justifiable reasons besides his true motivation for wanting to go.  But even though nothing else came to mind, he bought a plane ticket anyway, and he called Sally the night before his flight.

“Hello?”

“Hi.  Were you sleeping?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.  I can call you later—“

“No.  It’s okay.  It’s nice to hear your voice.”

“It’s nice to hear your voice, too.”

They were both quiet for a moment, and Alex could hear her bed sheets ruffling against the mouthpiece of her phone.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Sleepy,” she said.

Alex chuckled.  “Yeah, sorry about that.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine.  Okay, I guess.”

“How are classes?”

“They’re good.  No one knows what the hell I’m talking about half the time, but I’m working on it.”

“Shaping young minds?”

“Trying to.  Half of them think Virginia Woolf is just a character Nicole Kidman played in a movie. ”

Sally laughed sleepily.  “Well, are you making any friends?  Got any pretty young coeds coming to visit you during office hours?”

“No.  I mean, there are tons of pretty coeds.  All these pretty, young girls like you.  But I don’t want to talk to any of them.  I don’t even want to be in the same room with any of them for longer than the university’s paying me to be.”

“Well that’s the spirit,” she said.

“I keep having this feeling, this really uneasy feeling that I shouldn’t have come here.  Anne kicked me out, and I felt like I had to do something big, I had to make some sort of drastic life change and get my shit together and be productive and settle on some kind of career that didn’t seem completely horrible.  I didn’t think I had any choice.  But ever since I got here, it’s like I can see all the other things I could have done, that I should have done, and it’s like some sort of cruel joke.”

He looked out his window, across the rooftop of the neighboring apartment building, over the small town streets, toward the dim, twinkling lights of the homes in the distance.

“I miss you,” he said.

There was only the soft rustling of sheets for a second, and then she said, “I miss you too.”  She sounded relieved.

“That’s good,” he said, and she laughed.  “I mean, it’s not good that you miss me, but, well, it’s kind of the reason I’m calling.”  He could feel his entire body smile.  “I have a surprise for you.”

“Tell me.  I can’t stand surprises.”

“Okay.  When you come home from work tomorrow, you’re going to find me waiting for you, sitting on your doorstep.”

*            *            *            *               *

Alex lay on his back and stared up at the ceiling fan as it slowly pushed the air around the room.  He held out his arm and spread his fingers as wide as they would go, then brought his hand down like a mask against his face.  It was something he used to do when he was a child when his body was heavy with exhaustion, but his mind remained alert, not allowing rest.  Like a security blanket, his hand blocked out sight and sound, eventually lulling him to sleep.

And even though he knew his little trick wouldn’t work tonight, he lay there like that for a bit longer, willing his breath and heartbeat to slow.  Then he sat up and pressed his feet to the floor, turning his back on all the insecurities and doubts and reasons-why-not that had been a constant presence in him for so long.  He left them all there, under the blankets and pillows, and walked down the hall toward Sally’s bedroom door.

He walked in without knocking and saw her lying on the far side of the bed, her back facing him.  He said nothing as he climbed in beside her, wrapping his arms and legs around her from behind, finding the warm curve of her neck with his nose and lips.  Without a sound, she threaded her bare legs through his, held one of his hands against her stomach and the other near her cheek where he could feel her breath, all of it having a tender familiarity as if it were merely one night among thousands of other nights they had lied together just like this, their side-by-side bodies holding up against the forceful undertow of the world just beyond their bed.

*This story first appeared in Two Hawks Quarterly under a pseudonym.