While we were away, we began an experiment. We asked local writers and storytellers of all kinds to join us for a live reading at a little bar on MacDougal Street in New York City’s West Village. The space itself has its own story. It was once the Gaslight Cafe. Noted luminaries that performed on the tiny cabaret stage were Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Odetta, and Bill Cosby.  We wanted to explore the way we tell stories. We did this for a few months; poets, fiction writers, bloggers, photographers, actors, and old-fashioned storytellers shared stories with us on stage and online. We called our series, ‘What Had Happened Was…’ Funny, huh? But here’s the thing; we all say it when tell our little stories, what had happened was… We are all storytellers. Our personal and imagined narratives move and connect us to each other. We begin our stories rooted in a sequence of events, and as the real time unfolding these narratives continue, we throw out the interrupter, an enjambment. We lean in, encourage our listener to come a tiny bit closer, we pause, then we say, ‘well, what happened was this…’ The heart and necessity of why we tell any story emerges, clumsily sometimes. We are in search of a hidden truth in every attempt. Story is what helps us shape our reality into meaning. It is through story that we are able to reflect on all that we’ve learned with everyday living.

Or, perhaps more elegantly stated by Joan Didion, ‘We all tell ourselves stories in order to live.’

Stories emerge from conversation, and in this installment of the Conversation, Jon Sands talks with Willie Perdomo, a natural storyteller, gifted poet and writer, and legendary voice in the New York area. Poet Saeed Jones joins us again, this time with a story of his own, grappling with grief. Zehra Khan takes us on a journey of remembrance, a kind of joy inside of reflections of lost love.

With the fantastic eye of our new Visual Arts Editor, Paula Bollers, we are thrilled to present to you two photo essays by emerging photographers Alexander Mendelevich and Magali Duzant.  Desiree Dighton, Shira Erlichman, Megan Falley, Toni Todd, and Amos Jasper Wright also join us in this issue with new fiction.

We were gone a little too long, but we’re happy to bring you these stories. Welcome to Issue nO.5 of Union Station!

Syreeta McFadden

Managing Editor

My mother-in-law called me down from my bedroom to sit with her in the lounge. I was her American daughter-in-law in Pakistan, a match that my aunt had arranged. She reclined on the sofa and cataloged all the women my husband could have married. Aunts who promised their (very young) girls to him, lovelorn cousins with whom he refused to dance at weddings, government officials at whose houses my mother-in-law accepted tea and cookies but rejected daughters–the list of heartbroken women was endless. I sat upright, sweating in the lounge, wearing jewelry and a silk dress frosted with sequins and beadwork, per the customary yet uncomfortable dress code for new brides in Pakistan. What had I done, I wondered, to have to hear such a lecture? I didn’t feel proud for marrying the man everyone wanted. Instead, I took my mother-in-law’s words as a warning for me to keep the family happy, because her son deserved more than I could offer.

“There was one girl from Kabul,” my mother-in-law said, spitting into her fist the seeds of a tangerine, then in season. “She was beautiful. He wanted to marry her, but I didn’t like her. If you want I can show you her picture.”

A girl from Kabul, in a photograph I hope never to see. But the mind paints imaginary portraits in the absence of real ones, and writes fictions that are more magnificent or horrendous than the truth. A girl from Kabul, I suppose, with arched brows and a shawl draped carelessly over her hair. She sits with her arms wrapped around her knees, a smile on her half-parted coral mouth, an orange blush gracing her heart-shaped face, the Hindu Kush in full splendor in the distance.

Pashtun lore is based on hallucinations about fairy women in diaphanous robes with shining eyes who come down from the mountains to meddle in human affairs. This legend extends to real women: ask any Pakistani and he or she will tell you with a shake of the fist and a wrinkle of the brow that Pashtun women are white as milk and more beautiful than any other women in the world. Extreme beauty comes with an extremely protective father or husband, so the story goes; hence, not many people have ever seen one of these beauties. They usually stay home, out of sight, or wear the burqa in public. To some men, we unveiled women are cheap displays, like gems in a showcase, but these veiled creatures are like the diamond the jeweler keeps behind the counter, the rare, unseen jewel. For my husband at twenty-two the mountains trembled with the beating of his heart for this girl from Kabul, bewitching as the summer rain, who veils herself from me forever. My impulse, then, is to imagine her, and to allow her to seduce me.

She was from Kabul, which could mean one of three things: either she traced her family lineage to a single male who was born in Kabul, or her parents were from Kabul, or, maybe, she herself had left the Afghan capital and spent the interim of her life in Pakistan. I don’t know what made her (or her single male progenitor) leave the highlands of Afghanistan for the seaport city of Pakistan–whether war, or, quite simply, economics, I can’t imagine. I only know that she made her presence felt through wires and waves when my husband was still in engineering school, when he picked up his ringing cell phone, though he did not recognize the number, one day several years before our wedding.

“Hello, As salaam-u-alaikum?”

A female voice on the other end murmured the name of her friend into the receiver.

“I’m sorry. You have the wrong number.”

A few seconds later, the number flashed on the cell phone screen and my husband answered again.

“Hello? Wrong number still. No problem. Allah hafiz.”

A minute passed. My husband closed the door softly (his mother was completing the afternoon prayers in the lounge outside his bedroom) before he picked up the ringing phone.

“Call it destiny, my dear. I could be the one you’re looking for.”

My husband began sneaking away from college and taking her out for lunch, the both of them exchanging sideways glances over cups of fresh orange juice. He loved the way her hands fell like flowers into her lap when she sat next to him in his car, or how she covered her head immediately when she heard the call to prayer. He talked mostly, so she didn’t have to say much. He loved the orange flush of her cheeks and the sticky coral imprint her lip gloss left on the inside of a spoon, as much as I love the sound his teeth make when he bites into a hard-boiled egg.

Eight months later, my husband’s father carried a basket of confectionaries and Pakistani tangerines to a house in another part of Karachi. He came back home an hour later, setting the basket of confectionaries and Pakistani tangerines on the coffee table in the lounge with a thud. My husband bolted upright on the sofa, all of his nails bitten to the quick. He began to chew on the skin on the tips of his fingers.

“What did they say?”

“There will be a wedding, but not yours. She’s been promised to a cousin since childhood. I can’t believe she never told you a thing like that.”

My husband lay back down on the sofa. “Peel me a tangerine, Ammi,” he said, grabbing one from the basket and handing it to his mother, who had been reading the Quran next to him. He laid his head on her knee, sucking on the flesh of the fruit. He repeated her name in his head. Kulsum. A name that sounded too much like kissing or bussing to be forgotten easily, though he’d try. A month later took an engineering position in a town in the east of Pakistan, throwing himself into his work and staying out late at night. Six years later, when his closest friends started getting married, he called his mother and asked her to find him a girl to marry, a good, pure girl, so he could be a dutiful husband to the woman of his mother’s choosing.

*

Darkness is another form of the veil, not allowing us to see. At night, a few months after our wedding, I checked my husband’s forehead with my palm, and kissed the back of his neck. He had been cycling in and out of a fever all night. “What are you doing?” my husband yelled. “Your hands are cold.”

My husband had asked his friend to bring him a crate of Pakistani tangerines, the only food he craved. In the middle of the night, I peeled the segments from the heart of the fruit, separated the seeds from the flesh with my fingers, and fed them to him, learning to be patient with a man who was selfish in his sickness. I thought about having an affair with one of the Lebanese men I met through work, or filing for divorce and going back home to my parents in America.

“Go to sleep,” he said, after the fever subsided. “I love you.”

“Why do you love me?”

“Because you’re not demanding and you take care of me.”

“Is that reason enough?”

He turned his back to me and fell silent.

In the morning, my hair spread upon my pillow like a bird’s wings. I did not come down from a mountain, and my origins were well defined, but that didn’t make me any less desirable.

“Get up,” my husband said. “Come on, get up.” He called me first his sister’s name, then his sister-in-law’s, then his sister’s again. What other name would he call out, I wondered, before finally saying mine? “Come on, now, dear, you’ll be late for work.”

I replayed in my mind all the faces, arms, and bodies of the men I had loved in America before I met my husband, the ones I’ll never tell him about. I am like a fruit held too tightly but not eaten, the juices breaking through the cells to leak on the inside without bruising the rind. I had loved many men before, but now I loved anew. The list was not endless but poignant.

ZEHRA KHAN is from the U.S. After completing a Master’s Degree in Aerospace Engineering, she served as a civilian engineer in the U.S. Air Force. While taking a break from her chosen profession, she worked as an editor for an English-language magazine in the Middle East. Her work has been featured in Two Review, Windmill, and World Literature Today 2 in the U.S. and CityPages and Bazaar in Kuwait. She lives in Kuwait with her husband.

The photographic series Ardara and On feeds into an American stereotype; the West as a place of possibility and new beginning coupled with a feeling of disillusionment in that idea; a feeling of loss, all placed within a storied and cinematic setting.

These images illustrate the ways in which a new place is seen and felt on ones’ own – viewed through the prism of combined personal experience and cinematic tropes. There is an underlying loneliness and a deep feel for the last light of the day. California is depicted as the proverbial film set that it so often manifests itself into. It carries an aspect of tension as well as one of fantasy; where fears and uncertainties lurk below the surface; the face of which plays into popular imagination – California as the pliable new.

MAGALI DUZANT is a photographer and illustrator based in San Francisco, CA. Born and raised in New York, she received a Bachelor of Humanities and Arts in Fine Art and Visual Culture at Carnegie Mellon University. She formerly worked as the Exhibition Coordinator at Silver Eye Center for Photography and was the Director of Photography for the interdisciplinary firm PoiNT Projects. She has exhibited nationally and was named one of Philadelphia based Project Basho’s Onward  Emerging Photographers of 2010. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA where she is  working on a photographic book entitled, Ardara and On. She runs an illustration site and zine, Notes On A Coast, devoted to editorial observations on life in the Bay Area. Her photographs have appeared in Relay Arts Magazine, the sustainability journal Verdure, and the Parsons Paris look-book among other publications. She can be reached via email at magali@magaliduzant.com

The thermometer is moving to chill mode. Leaves are doing their two-step off the trees. Perfect time to sit cross legged at the base of Willie’s recliner, and put the volume knob on high.

- Jon Sands

JS: There is a folklore in New York City around the Nuyorican Poets Café, and the now generations that comprise its history. Can you talk about how you first found the club and tell us what an ordinary night was like?

WP: I first found the café through the original anthology of Nuyorican poetry that was edited by Miguel Algarin and Miguel Piñero, and I found the anthology at a used bookstore in Ithaca, NY. The anthology was called Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings and Algarin had developed a blueprint for the Nuyorican aesthetic in his introduction. Much of it was connected to poetry being a survival tool and in a lot of ways that still holds true today. Later, when I left school to become a poet, I went back to East Harlem and I remember reading an article in the Village Voice about how the Nuyorican Poet’s Café had just reopened and they were doing these things called “slams”. It had to be around 90, 91, I think. Back then the Nuyorican was still a place where a young poet could hang out with his smuggled forty-ounce brew and get real insight on the human condition from Julio the Bouncer. For me, it was exciting to see some of the originals—it was almost like seeing your favorite collectibles come to life—poets like Pedro Pietri and Bimbo Rivas would be in the house. After the last open mic, we used to clear the floor so people could dance and hang out and talk, share poems and fall in love. The scene was far from becoming the marketing phenomenon that it turned out to be. It was still underground, still a whisper in the old Village Voice.

JS: What were you studying in school before you left?

WP: I was what they called an “English 7-12” major, which meant that I was on track to become a high-school English teacher. By my sophomore year of college, I had been introduced to a number of literary and oral traditions of poetry and they were informing my young attempts at poems. The plan has always been the same: teach and write.

JS: I’ve heard you say, roughly, that if you’re going to write, then you should have something to say. At what point in your process do you generally discover that something needs to be said?

WP: The more we are told to shut the fuck up, the more we have something to say. The more we seek modes of spiritual transportation, the more we have something to say. I would imagine that when you’re standing at the edge of your grave, you might have something to say as well. I think that’s what William Carlos Williams might have meant when he wrote: “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.” Dope verse.

JS: How does what you have to say change throughout the creation of a piece of writing?

WP: I think it changes as you change. You ever start a poem on Monday and not pick it up for a season of Mondays and after experiencing moments of heartbreak, intense reading, love, isolation, laughter, insight, and epiphany, you come back to that Monday poem totally transformed, and you enter it right away, knowing exactly where and why you reached an impasse? It’s important to sustain the note of a poem and that can prove to be the most difficult part of writing a poem.

JS: There’s an incredible amount of community being written through your work. What drives that as a muse? The poem Crazy Bunch Barbecue at Jefferson Park Comes to Mind (when Phil says “Yo, go find something to do / write a poem / write something / do something / I got this / I’m the chef / you the poet”). In what ways has your role as documentarian influenced your relationship to your community?

WP: It’s not so much that I was a witness as much as I was there to cosign a feeling or a moment of sublimity. Without a community, my identification markers would fade away and this is coming from the ultimate cave dweller who sometimes has a hard time reconciling the concept of community with the fact that some of our greatest poets die broke and uninsured. The nastiest poets I ever heard have never been published and writing poetry was a way to honor that community as well. It’s cool when you can invite your friends to the jam session that a poem can be.

JS: When you write, do you ever feel like you are speaking to or for other people?

WP: For other people, no, never. I would be running for some sort of office right now if that were the case. But it helps to have someone or something specific in mind, I think. I always believed that you could find the answers to the universe by standing on a street corner. In other words, if you zoom in on a detail close enough, you’ll find all the universality that you’re looking for. That’s why I love that Robert Hayden poem, “Those Winter Sundays”, where we see the boy’s father rise early on Sundays, in the “blueblack cold”, warming the house and polishing his son’s shoes, then the poet asks, “What did I know, what did I know/of love’s austere and lonely offices?” It’s heartbreaking and inspiring in the same breath, and it’s pretty specific. As a father, I have been inside those offices. It’s possible to sample a broad truth from a detailed, individual glance.

JS: You have an extensive record as an arts educator, having worked with a wide spectrum of young writers. In what ways does the role of teacher influence your own creative process?

WP: What’s that line from Whitman? I think it goes, “I teach straying from me.” I hear of too many creative writing instructors leaving their imprimaturs on younger writers and that’s just wack. I try not to write too much when I teach and if I do, it’s usually in a different genre. So if I’m teaching a poetry workshop, I’ll try to work on a play or some narrative prose so that I come to my student’s work as if I was the blank page that they’re writing on. On occasion, I might be so motivated by a poem that a student submitted that I’m compelled to respond with a poem. The most important part of teaching, I think, is to understand the symbiotic nature of writing—there is no writing without reading. It’s the ultimate dialogue.

JS: What’s a poem from another author you feel like you needed to read/hear?

WP: Man, I wish I would’ve been turned on to Postwar Polish poetry earlier–talk about putting it all on the line. The poems are deceptively inornate and stray away from any unnecessary icing, which for me implies a direct confrontation with guilt, death, and silence. I could’ve definitely used some Syzmborska during what I like to call my Lost Age. Check out her poem “Under One Small Star.”

JS: As a writer who has now moved through many different phases, can you describe a specific moment (or series of moments) where you feel like your writing shifted and why/how that happened?

WP: Well, I took my dumb ass back to school after twenty years and can only say that it challenged my process. For the past three years, I have been digging into texts whose range is far and wide, like from Laclos to Defoe, from Eulalie Spence to Tiffany Yanique, and that can only expand your range as a writer, let alone a human being. Took me a while to remember and re-acknowledge that my writing is an extension—an expression even—of my reading.

JS: What is your relationship with bad poems? Do you ever write them? How are those treated?

WP: At this point in my writing life, the place for bad poems is called a trash bin.

JS: Ha. Fair enough.

WP: For real, I’ve written many a bad poem and would go so far (and you’re going to hate me for this, Jon) as to say that my first two collections were hampered by unmediated, uninterrupted mistakes, i.e., bad poems. I can say that now with a certain amount of healthy embarrassment.

JS: We’re gonna have to agree to disagree on this first-two-books theory.

WP: Fortunately, you, Urayoan Noel, Rich Villar, and Tara Betts are the only people I know who have read Smoking Lovely from front to back. I couldn’t ask for better readers.

JS: Can you pick one artist you feel most like family/community with and tell us the story of how you met and took to each other?

WP: When I first started reading poems in New York City, the dude who I connected with on the artist and camaraderie set was Paul Beatty, who also happens to be godfather to my son, Neruda. Before Neruda was born I told Paul that to be a godfather he had to denounce the devil and he just laughed at me. Paul was killing it at the Nuyorican. We first met on the page in the early 90s. We both had poems published in a literary supplement to a now-defunct Black newspaper called The City Sun. Then we met in person shortly after the publication and became instant homies. It was Paul that suggested I come down to the Nuyorican to read and I curse him every chance I get for that suggestion. When I hang out with Paul and the conversation turns to writing, he’s always there to tell me that I worry about too much shit that has absolutely nothing to do with the writing.

JS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received (either as a writer or not)?

WP: About three years ago, during National Poetry Month, my son, who was 6 at the time, was working on a poetry project in school and he came home one day and said, “Dad, I write the poems that bite back.” Since that day it’s been my mission to write the poems that bite back.

WILLIE PERDOMO is the author Where a Nickel Costs a Dime and Smoking Lovely, which received a PEN America Beyond Margins Award. He has also been published in The New York Times Magazine, Bomb, Poems of New York and The Harlem Reader. His first children’s book, Visiting Langston, received a Coretta Scott King Honor and his follow-up, Clemente! was recently named a Booklist Top 10 Sports Book for Youth in 2010 and 2011 Américas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Woolrich Fellow in Creative Writing at Columbia University and is a three-time Fellow in Poetry and Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has been on the faculty of the VONA Writing Workshops, National Endowment for Humanities Summer Seminar and currently teaches at Fordham University. He is founder/publisher of Cypher Books. www.willieperdomo.com

JON SANDS’ first full collection of poems, The New Clean, was released in 2011 from Write Bloody Publishing. Jon has performed and facilitated workshops extensively with university and arts organizations nationally and internationally, and is Director of Poetry Education at the Positive Health Project (a syringe exchange center located in Midtown Manhattan), an adjunct with the City University of New York, as well as a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC. He delivered the 2010 commencement address at the Bronx Academy of Letters, and starred in the 2011 web-series “Verse: A Murder Mystery” from Rattapallax Films. He lives in Brooklyn, where he makes better tuna salad than anyone you know. Say yes to www.jonsands.com

Just outside Amarillo, we were a sorry pair of crispy hippies, tailbones aching, balanced on lumpy backpacks in the emergency lane of the freeway, thumbs outstretched, pointed east.  At that moment, I’d have signed over my trust fund for a sandwich and a cushioned seat on an air conditioned bus.

The day began with a lofty ride in a long-haul truck out of Sparks. Next came two hundred miles with a kid from Santa Fe, squeezed into the back seat of his over-stuffed Echo.  Finally, the Phish fry, a ride that had us mashed into the nether regions of a dilapidated Subaru with five, jam-band groupies en-route to their next gig.  This was a shower averse group, but by then we didn’t smell much better, so who was I to complain?  They dropped us in Amarillo.

“It’ll be our signature sojourn, Danny, our last frontier.”  Jazz had decided, and I had agreed against all reason, that we should hitchhike to Miami from California after graduation.  It would be the last time we’d spend together before moving on to the next phases of our lives.  Once in Florida, Jazz would hop a puddle-jumper for Haiti, where he had signed on to work a summer internship with a rural medical clinic.  I would catch the train to Boston to start work in my uncle’s CPA firm.  Jazz would attend the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in the fall, while I would take a flaccid stab at the CPA exam.

“Why Haiti?” I had asked.

“It’s in the Caribbean,” he said.

“It’s not St. Bart’s, Jazz.  Why be so extreme?”

” That’s always been your problem, Danny.  You’re risk averse, always playing it safe.”

“I like safe,” I said.

Jazz had a shock of black, sweeping bangs that had gone uncombed for days.  His threadbare purple t-shirt read, “Envision whirled peas” in green with a spiral below the letters that looked like a target on his abdomen.  His armpits were dark with sweat.  I was channeling Bob Marley with a two-year cultivation of flaxen dreadlocks. They were short, so Jazz said they looked like shit, and he meant that literally, like turds, sticking out all over my head.  I planned to cut them when I got to Boston.

“What ever happened to that girl you dated, the one who dumped you for the Italian Instructor?”  I was accustomed to Jazz’s chiding, but this jab caught me by surprise.  We’d been sitting there, squinting in the glare and scratching our sunburns and bug bites for hours, staring at the shimmering mirage that looked like puddles across the pavement.  An occasional breeze was kicked up by a speeding car, but the hot blast provided no relief.

“Last I heard, she was married to the guy, living in Florence, and popping out little bambinos.  It was a long time ago, Jazzy.  I really don’t care anymore.”

“I was just making conversation.”

“Why don’t we converse about walking back to town, getting a room, taking a shower, grabbing a burger, and buying a plane ticket?”

“Can’t.”

“Yes, we can.”

“No, we can’t.  We agreed, no creature comforts.  Just us and our wits.  I thought you were tougher, Danny.  I thought you could handle a little adversity.”

“This is self inflicted adversity, which makes it stupid.”

Stupid, but I didn’t leave.  I might have hoisted my pack and hiked back to town on my own, but I didn’t, and he knew I wouldn’t.  I was always more afraid of disappointing Jazz than anything, least of all perishing from boredom and a sore ass on a roadside in Amarillo.

“Buck up, Danny.  People hitch across the country every day.”

“So what about you?  Heard from Sara Smile?”  Women flocked to Jazz like geese to Canada.  She was the first woman ever to dump him.

“Not a word, but I hope she’s miserable.”

“Does it help that I’m miserable right now?”

“A little.”  He grinned, then leaned to punch me in the shoulder.  You’d think we were eight years old.

The sun hung low in the sky but refused to go down.  I looked at my sandaled feet to lament the dirt imbedded in my toenails.   An enormous Chevy 4×4 rumbled by.  The truck slowed and lurched across the fog line, laying black rubber on pavement as it screeched to a halt.  We grabbed our bags and ran.  Back fenders stuck out like bulging muscles over knobby, dual rear tires.  There was a Texas state flag decal on the bumper.  A spray of fake bullet-hole stickers peppered the tailgate.  The truck was jacked so high you could see the suspension underneath.  It quivered, all shine and chrome in the twilight.  There was a shotgun in the rack, mounted inside the cab’s back window.  Two large, young men with thick necks and tight t-shirts sat on the bench seat.  A freshly tattooed arm poked out the passenger window and waived toward the open bed.  “Hop in,” he said.  It reminded me of that corny joke I used to tell my parents as a kid: What do say to a one legged hitch hiker?

I hesitated.  “I don’t think this one’s….”  But before I could finish, Jazz tossed his gear into the back.  He hooked his thumbs into his pits and flapped pretend chicken wings.  I chucked my pack over the side and climbed in.

The truck engine revved and we whipped back onto the freeway, then shot into the fast lane.  Inside the cab, the men were laughing, their faces reflected in the rearview mirror.  Country music blared from the radio.

Within minutes, the truck veered back across the lanes and caught an exit.

“Where are we going?”  I shouted.

“Detour,” said the driver.  “It won’t take long.”  The driver leaned to punch his pal square on the shoulder, not so hard it seemed, as Jazz had punched mine.

We were jolted by a sudden, right-angle turn onto dirt from the frontage road.  The truck flew, bumping through the bleakest of landscapes, dust billowing behind us.

“Jesus, Jazz.  Where the hell do you think we’re going?”  He didn’t answer.  His eyes were like dinner plates, his mouth contorted.

We hit washboard.   My teeth rattled like an anatomy class skeleton in an earthquake.

“Oh shit!” I couldn’t hear him, but I could read Jazzy’s lips.

“Maybe we should jump,” I yelled, but not loud enough to overcome the whir of tires, the clamor of metal, the boom of the radio.  Sage and cactus whizzed past in a blur of brush and earth.  Even if we survived the leap, we had no idea where we were, or which way to go.

The truck ground to a halt.  The passenger flung opened his door, stepped out, leaned back into the cab and grabbed the shotgun from the rack.

“Shit!” Jazz whispered.

“Get out,” said the driver, then slammed his door shut on the other side.  He was standing next to the cab.

We jumped over the sides to the ground.

“What about our stuff?”  I said.

“Leave it,” he said. “Follow us.”

The driver’s t-shirt was red and said, “Don’t mess with Texas” in bright white.  His head was shaved bald, stained by a shadow where his hair had grown, his round face smeared with an auburn goatee.  The passenger’s shirt showed the black silhouette of a wild boar – a razorback  – on dingy yellow.  His hair was brown and military cut.  Long sideburns striped his cheeks.

The pair of them walked a few steps ahead, the shotgun slung over the passenger’s shoulder.

“Maybe we should make a break for it,” I said.

No answer.  We walked on in silence, the only sound our footfalls thumping the dirt.

Suddenly, Jazz dropped to his knees.

‘Please don’t hurt us.  Please!  Oh my God! I don’t want to die! He dropped his face into his dusty hands and sobbed.  The men turned.

“Come on, Jazzy.  You’re OK.” I spoke softly as I tugged him up by the elbow.

The driver stepped toward us.  He looked down at Jazz. “Get up,” he said.

Jazz wobbled to his feet.  We stumbled along in the twilight.  Every few minutes, the passenger would pivot on one boot in the dust, swing the gun across his torso, walk backward a few steps, then spin back around.  The men walked close together, leaned toward one another and whispered.

We entered a stand of cottonwoods along a dry creek bed.  Stumps were arranged around a fire circle.  A pile of kindling was stacked and ready to light in the center of the stones.  It was dark.  The driver drew a pen light from his jeans.

“Have a seat,” he said, shining the beam like a laser on the stumps.  We sat.  The passenger sat too, knees splayed, facing us from the opposite side of the circle.  The shotgun rested across his lap.  I could see the tattoo on his forearm.  It was an intricate inking of a rattle snake, mouth open, menacing, fangs dripping, coiled and ready to strike.  The driver knelt to build a fire, then sat on a stump.  Pitch crackled and sparks flew like kamikaze  fireflies around the flames.  He turned to his partner.

“Gimme the gun, Zeb.”

Zeb passed the firearm.  My hands shook.  I slipped them under my ass, palms flat against the rough-hewn wood.  I looked at Jazz.  Perspiration streamed from his temples, despite the cooling air.  Tears boiled over the corners of his eyes and slid down his cheeks, leaving salty trails.

“We have cash,” I said, still sitting on my hands.  “It’s in our packs, back in the truck.  You can have it all.  We just want to be on our way.”  It made no sense, I know.  I was terrified, yet somehow my voice was steady, calm, like a negotiator in a police drama, the one who persuades the kidnapper to free the hostages.

The driver cocked the gun.  I jerked.   Jazz whimpered like a wounded puppy.

“Danny, I’m so sorry,”  Words sprayed out of him like champagne from a shaken bottle.  “It didn’t mean anything.  I swear.  It was only once, and she came on to me.  I need you to believe that.”  He shook his head back and forth, eyes wide, his gaze set hard on the ground.  The driver and Zeb gaped, eyeballs shifting from Jazz to me back to Jazz.  “I’m just so sorry.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“It was just once, Danny.  She said she had already broken it off with you.  It was right before she left for Italy.  I swear man, I didn’t know until after.”

The driver lifted the stalk of the weapon. He squeezed the black rubber butt between his fingers and twisted.  Digits like tweezers, he reached into the hollow stock and pulled out a plastic baggy filled with weed.  He looked straight at me, and grinned.

“You look like you could use a smoke.”

Zeb had since risen from his stump and returned from the woods with a cooler.  I stared at the driver and Zeb thrust a Bud-laden mitt in front of my face.

“Brew?” he asked.

The two men exploded with laughter.  The driver smacked his own knee, then came over and slugged me in the shoulder.

“C’mon, hippy boy.  Did you really think you were going to get plugged by a couple of Texas rednecks?”

Jazz began to giggle like a little girl.  I grabbed the sweaty can from Zeb and drained it.

“I think we had ‘em a little nervous, Toby,” Zeb said.

“Toby, huh?  Were you born a complete asshole or did you have to work at becoming the asshole you are today?”

“Well hippy boy, I believe I was born this way.  It’s Danny, right?  Danny, you oughta meet my Daddy.”

Jazz howled like a rabid coyote, kicking his feet on the dirt.

“Do you know what ya’all look like?”  Toby asked.  “Do you know where you are?”  I’d just taken a long, deep pull on the joint he’d rolled.

“You don’t have hippies in Texas?” I asked.

“Sure we do,” he said.  “But they aren’t dumb enough to hitch.”

Higher and drunker, the mood lighted.  We ate strips of jerky, bags of chips, Hostess Snowballs washed down with what seemed an endless supply of The King of Beers.  Satiated on all fronts, we staggered to the truck by pen light under a fingernail moon.  Toby and Zeb drove us to the bus station in Amarillo where we caught a Greyhound red-eye, headed east.

Jazz passed out in his seat.  I remained conscious long enough to feel the brain fog thin.  I pictured Jazz, all of it, the begging, the sobbing, the forced laughter.

I woke to the glare and warmth of the sun, mellowed through the tinted glass.  Jazz was awake, flipping through the pages of a crumpled copy of The Onion.  The diesel growled, low and steady.

“I’m not going to Haiti.”

“What?”

“I’m not going.”

“Why not?”

“Call them for me, Danny.  Here’s the number.”  He handed me a torn corner from the paper.  “Make up a good reason.  I’ll catch a flight north and get a head start on finding an apartment near campus, get to know the city, maybe work for a few months before school starts.”

I stuffed the slip into my pocket, slumped into my seat and dove, nose-first into a paperback.  Jazz dozed.  We parted with little sentiment in Atlanta.

“Good luck,” I said.  No handshake.  No hug.  It was the best I could do and he knew better than to try.  I watch as he walked through the station.  When he got to the door, Jazz turned, and waved.  I re-boarded the bus and continued on to Miami, which had been our goal, after all.  I’d clear my head there, enjoy a few mindless days on the beach before settling into the real world.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said the woman when I phoned to tell her that Jazz had chickened out.  Again, it was the best I could do.

“What about you?” she asked.

“I’m an accountant,” I told her.

“Medical knowledge is helpful,” she said, “but there’s plenty you can do.  Won’t you consider it?”

“OK,” I said.  “I’ll do it.”  There it was again, that negotiator’s tone, measured, confident.  The next thing I knew, I was staring down at the Atlantic, the azure Caribbean Sea, through the tiny, scratched window of a shimmying Piper.  My hands shook, so I slid them under my ass, palms flat on the warm leather.

I cannot see them from the window of my hotel room, but wildfires are flaring out of control at the edge of Austin. Walking away from what I cannot see and slipping back into bed, I pull the newspaper off of the nightstand. “The Bastrop Wildfire has claimed 800 homes.” Attempting to match what is being reported to what I am seeing, I turn back to the window.

The only cloud in the sky looks like Monet himself put it there. An airplane draws a thin white line as it flies from one corner of the window to the other. Some of the plane’s passengers are likely looking at the fires right now. A few days ago, while flying into Austin myself, I looked out of my window to see walls of white smoke rising up from the edges of burning fields. Places where the fires had already been snuffed out were marked by acre-wide patches of charred grass. Staring at the scorched terrain, I thought wounds and what it takes for wounds to become scars.

In my hotel room now though, the fires are just something I read about. The flames are only as real as the words in the newspaper describing them. As if to make the fires vanish, all we have to do is turn away. This avoidance, this make-shift erasure, is how I have answered (or refused to answer) the reality of my mother’s recent death. The fires aren’t burning if I can’t see them. And, surely, my mother is alive – somewhere. The problem is that in spite of my efforts, as I stare at the city stretching out toward the hills, the visual absence of the fires becomes a presence.

*

My mother told me once, years before she died, that she had almost named me Omar. It means “king” in a language neither of us know how to speak. I wrinkled my nose then at the thought of that name and said something about what a name like that would have “done to my life.” I have always felt that names act upon the named.

She didn’t tell me why she changed her mind about Omar, but I would like to think that she felt me inside of her, shaking my barely formed head in disapproval. Eventually she decided to name me Saeed which means “happy and fortunate” in Arabic. I would like to think that this name has laid out a life for me, or at least a direction. It is not just a body that has been named, but perhaps a purpose as well.

Bastrop is a town just outside of Austin, Texas. It now has a wildfire named after it. The wildfire has been named for the place of its birth which, of course, is also the place of its violent life.  “The woman sitting next to me,” writes poet Rigoberto Gonzalez, “is the place of my birth.”

And here I think: The Bastrop Wildfire is killing its mother.

*

As I sit down for lunch with my friends Angelica and Ralph, the waitress hands us menus and then pauses expectantly. This is usually the point at which she would offer us water, or take our drink orders. Ralph speaks up and says “Can we have some water?” And the waitress nods and heads off, satisfied.

My friends explain that the drought has become so severe that restaurants are under strict orders to only offer water to patrons when explicitly asked.

“You know how police departments will do stings to see if bars consistently ID people when they order alcohol? Well, apparently they’re doing that with the water now, “ explains Angelica.

When the waitress places my glass of water on the table, I stare at it for a moment like it’s an alien artifact. With a drawl that always appears when I’m back in my native state for longer than 24 hours, I say “Well damn” and take a grateful drink.

*

See? Even as I write this essay, I am telling one story in order to avoid telling you the one that keeps me up at night. Let me try again.

*

The Saturday evening before Mother’s Day, I’m in bed, streaming Netflix on my computer. Around 8:00 pm, my phone rings and I see that I have a call from my uncle. We speak once or twice a year, usually on holidays, so I assume that he’s calling to remind me that tomorrow is Mother’s Day and to get in touch with all of the women in my family. My mother is in Memphis, where he and most of our family lives, to celebrate with my grandmother. I don’t answer; I will call everyone tomorrow. I go back to my computer.

Without leaving a message, he calls again. “Saeed,” he says when I finally answer. “Your mother is the Emergency Room. After having dinner tonight, she had trouble breathing and went to the hospital.”

“Okay,” I say in a voice I don’t recognize.

“I will call you back as soon I as I know more.”

“Okay.” And I hang up the phone.

My mother has had a history of heart problems and three years ago ended up in the Emergency Room due to congestive heart failure. She was sitting in the audience at my high school graduation a week later, cheering and taking pictures. I’m telling you this because  of what I did after I put down the phone.

I went to my Buddhist altar, chanted for less than five minutes and went back to watching Netflix. I did not cry or pace the floors of my apartment. I got back into bed and stared at the images flickering across the screen of my laptop. I even slept well that night. The fires aren’t burning if I can’t see them.

But, of course, they are. A week later, standing in my mother’s ICU room, I learned happened while I had been busy turning away from the possibility of my mother’s death: Minutes after being admitted into the Emergency Room, she went into cardiac arrest for in excess of twenty minutes before doctors were able to shock her back into a regular pulse. She went into a coma and was pronounced brain dead a few days later.

I am writing this essay as an attempt to say that I cannot yet forgive myself for turning away that night after the phone call.  The fact that my reaction was probably due to shock does nothing to assuage my guilt. When a wildfire seizes upon your home while you stand helpless across the street, knowing that the fire is not your fault is of little comfort.

*

 My second day in Austin I decide to visit the city’s botanical garden. Late afternoon in the middle of a drought, it turns out, is an awful time to visit a botanical garden. There is not a single rose in the Rose Garden. The lone coy fish in the Japanese lily pond looks like it is the sole survivor of some epidemic. The fish doesn’t seem to mind, but I mind. I mind everything: the shrubs that have not been labeled, the peeling paint on the gazebo, the dried out water fountains, the sound of grass cracking under my shoes whenever I veer from the path.

Exhausted with minding, I sit down on a bench and start crying before I even know why. It is terribly hot and I haven’t been drinking enough water and the last thing I want to do right now is cry, but I do anyway. I cry and realize that I still cannot believe that, a few months ago, I picked out my mother’s coffin.

The sobs build; it hurts to cry so forcefully but I can’t stop myself. Memories of the last few months swarm me. I remember calling a florist and telling her how much my mother loved—had loved—sunflowers.

“I know this is short notice and you’re about to close for the day,” I said on the phone while the funeral director stood a few feet away from me, trying to look busy. “But she loved them. Could you put some sunflowers on her casket? Could you do that for me?” Even now, it physically hurts to remember those sentences leaving my mouth.

As I cry, a blue jay in the tree behind me begins to squawk incessantly. “I know,” I answer, too tired to lift my head from my hands. “I know.”

*

The wind must have changed direction this morning. Smoke from the Bastrop Wildfire has covered the entire city in a haze. The sky is perfectly clear, but the smoke makes it look like clouds are walking through the streets.

When my mother was still in a coma, I walked into her room in the ICU and, without meaning to, thought to myself “We will not all be saved.” Unannounced and unwelcome, the sentence burned its way into me. I have been saying it to myself ever sense. Maybe it was the fact of being in a hospital full of sick people and knowing that inevitably everyone would not survive their stay. My mother would be saved, of course. But not everyone. It is just one of those facts of life. That is what I thought, at least.

Maybe this is why we are human, because we will feel the thousand degree heat and say to ourselves “Yes, but this is not my fire.”

As smoke drifts through Austin and into my lungs, I think again about that sentence. Actually, I hear it as if someone is standing right behind me and whispering “We will not all be saved” into my ear. With my suitcase packed, I get in my rental car and head for the airport, thinking to myself “I know. I know.”

A 2011 Pushcart Prize Nominee, SAEED JONES received his MFA in Creative Writing at Rutgers University – Newark. His poetry has appeared in publications like Hayden’s Ferry Review, StorySouth,  Jubilat, West Branch & The Collagist.  His chapbook When the Only Light is Fire is available from Sibling Rivalry Press. His blog is For Southern Boys Who Consider Poetry.

Shark is smoking cigarette after cigarette in the phone booth we’re sharing.

My car broke down way outside of town, and hers too, and here we are.

She can’t wait till I’m done, so she comes right in. My lungs are so distracted I can’t remember who I should dial. Shark’s teeth are thin and hundred, like matchsticks.

I wish it would rain. She shoves a wrench through an old slot on the door, locking us in. “What the hell did you do that for?” I’m losing it, whatever I have, or had most of the time, I’m losing it. She’s curling her lips back like a dog, showing her teeth, her magenta-shit lipstick smudged around the corners of her mouth. Her bleach blonde hair is up in a tangled ponytail. Her roots are anything but root-like, makes me forget I love trees. “What the fuck, what the fuck,” I say to my blacked-out sight, palm over my eyes. I wish it would rain. I wish it would wet matchstick.

She pushes her back against the wall, slinks all the way down the foggy  plastic to the floor. Lights another, like this is vacation. “So what now?” I’m shouting. I’m not a shouter. I wasn’t. The nearest town is at least thirty miles out. No gas-station I can recall. She’s picking the black from under her nails, humming a show-tune. I don’t know which one. It’s all the same.  People singing about taking out the garbage or loving a Montague, a Jet,  a poorer person, whatever. Shark could be thirty, she could be fifteen,  she could be close to seventy, like a snake in the pipes I can’t pin her.

I grapple with the wrench for ten minutes. I cuss. I slink down too.  I’m so tired of wishing it would rain. So I ask her, this thing-woman I can’t stomach the stench of, radioactive over-the-counter perfume,a factory of lilacs, I ask: “Why are you doing this to me?” She looks up at me the way my mother looked up at me when I told her I was gay. Tired. She eases a slice of bubble gum into her mouth. It’s not that Shark doesn’t care, it’s that she cares so much it has worn her out. Her whole life she has been finding the arsonist. It used to be worth something. Now she looks me in the eye like Fire, Fire, Fire, and sighs. “I’m your best worst friend, baby.” Pop. Inhales bubble-gum against her teeth. “Or  maybe, I’m your worst best friend,” she ponders. “Yeah, I like that better.”

It’s settled now. I’m not getting out of here till morning. Apparently, she belongs. Like a whip in a crib. Like a doorknob in a house on fire.

“So worst best friend,” I spit, I’m about to let loose, if I’m gonna lose my mind I’m going to get some prize out of it, “Why is love a burning onion?”

She laughs, says, “You should write things. You should be a poet or something.” She doesn’t say anything else.

I don’t say, “I am a poet. Except for right now. Right now I’m locked in a fucking phone booth with a walking Shark whose nails are longer than my patience.” Pop.

An hour passes. She graffitis the fuzzy glass with a toxic marker.

Bubbly heart after bubbly heart after bubbly heart. Smells up the entire zone. She’s humming my least favorite song from Grease, the one where Sandra Dee is on the swing or something. “Hopelessly Devoted” that’s it. Shark is full-on singing it, eyes moony and juicy. Just a blonde girl wandering the streets in her (fully covering) nightie and the melody makes me want to skin a cat for fun. Then she sees John Travolta in a kiddie pool! Of all the songs in Grease, Shark is belting this one.

“Why can’t I flow?” I ask. “What stops me and makes me criticize and analyze myself? Huh?” Shark stops twisting the gum in her mouth around her finger in stretchy spirals. Looks up at me like she was just born. Empty.

“Oh, I don’t know honey. Because.” I look out the smudgy door, past the wrench, into the black. I think: that’s it, that’s all she’s got, here we are.  But, she keeps talking. “When it rains, you think everything looks imperfect. You’ve always loved it. People coming in from outside all messed up, taking off their soggy jackets and pushing around matted-down hair, smelling like concrete and the dirt all at once. You like it all messed up, sugar.”

Her mascara is running. From the song, I think.

It’s not that it stops being bad to be in there with her. It doesn’t.  It’s just bad isn’t a word anymore, really. I’m looking at her teeth. How’d they get so sharp. Who does she have to protect to warrant such ugliness?

“Fuck the what, more like, fuck the what,” she trails off, pop. Scratches gunk off the glass with her thumb nail, painted aqua with a tiny neon yellow palm tree.

Born in Israel, SHIRA ERLICHMAN moved to the United States when she was 6. She remembers the sun setting as her family boarded the plane. She has read her poems in nearly every state in the US and sung on stages with Ani Difranco, TuNe-YaRdS and Coco Rosie. She has had her poetry set to motion by a dance company as well as animated for a pro-choice campaign. She currently resides in Brooklyn, NY where she teaches poetry and lives in her indoor treehouse. Her poems can be found in The Massachusetts Review, The Reader, and more. Check out www.shiraerlichman.com for goodies.

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It’s seems that in now reality all of our feelings are being repressed into one superficial facade. In this facade there is only one type of beauty that implies perfection. There is a different existence though, in which all of our immediate needs and desires are being shown, an existence in which imperfection is in fact a perfection. It’s a kind of space where everything that sums us as human beings is intensively put together. In these photographic scenes, our pain, our vulnerability, our desires and fears are shown through distorted bodies and absurd situations. A play implying the contact with object functions as a search, a test and discovery of various thresholds of the sensuous and an exploration of relations with one’s self and the environment.  I am looking for a different perfection in humanity. It is interesting for me to expose it through drama, the drama of being. I am trying to find these moments in ordinary things that fill our lives, like our emotions, events at work or with the family, happiness or unhappiness in relationships, good food with the man you love or lonely supper on a holiday and various combinations of local and general history in our life. Thousands of things in our every day existence,  things which make us sensual. To look for existence, a story in everything, to transform some moments that I saw, I thought, I felt and I dreamt into visual representation. It is kind of speech, dialog with myself and with the whole world, the reflection of my thoughts and experience, my reaction and position toward different events. Staged photography gives me more control to make the occurring more sharp, to build a reality on the set like a sculptor, when you can feel every detail, where 1/60 sec. of exposure is transformed to something permanent. It’s like trying to compress life to one regular situation and to turn emotion and feeling into an object.

ALEXANDER MENDELEVICH was born in Pyatigorsk, in the Northern Caucasus region of Russia in 1979. After high school and three years at an institute of economy and management, he moved to Israel in 2000. He served in the army from 2002 to 2004, and from 2004 to 2008, and completed his B.F.A. study at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem (Photography department). He participated in several exhibitions in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Tirana and in Moscow, took part in Japan Media Arts Festival (Excellence Prize) and in festival of staged  photography at Aktives Museum Spiegelgase, Wiesbaden, Germany. There are two publications in Burn Magazine ( Finalist of Emerging Photographer Fund 2010 by Burn Magazine). He now lives in Tel Aviv. Website:  www.wix.com/mendelevich/alexander

Little known fact: Tulum is the yoga capital of Mexico. Alistair told me this, because his is a world of facts, of black and white, but I knew almost nothing when I decided to go there, only what I’d read on VisitMexico.com and once when I clicked on the live web cam,  mile after mile of beach and rather gray skies, a snag in my view of paradise, but an anomaly I chalked up to the camera lens and not the elements. A lone woman strolled along the expanse of gray, so alone she might have been on the moon, her face turned away from the camera towards the sea. Tulum had plenty of empty space where you could fill in your own happiness or romance. The closest big city is Cancun, but the two couldn’t be more different. I didn’t want to party in Cancun, but I wasn’t going to Tulum for the yoga either. I might have had I known. No, I was going for the whale sharks.

Tulum is one of the few places where whale sharks mate. These white, polka-dotted behemoths converge in the shadow soaked depths and clasp together. After this momentary embrace, the males go off to wherever they go. Phuket, Thailand would be my guess, and the females stay behind, growing miraculously larger for fifteen months. If you are lucky enough to find them, you can hop overboard and swim along. They’re harmless, even though they’re sharks. Even though, considering whale sharks only mate every three to five years, there’s a lot at stake. You might think a little privacy would be called for. But despite our ogling, goggled eyes, whale sharks don’t get defensive. They don’t throw their six-ton weight around. They see you swimming there next to them, this pathetic little creature pestering them with your underwater camera, and they remain stoic and determined. Maybe their gigantic brains allow for more tolerance. Maybe they know their significance dwarfs us to near nothingness. Or maybe they’re simply focused, single-minded. Their eyes, and what passes for a nose, even their ears, every shiny inch is honed for the one whale shark they’ll see fit to mate with. They’re simply love-blind to everything else.

When I decided to go to Tulum, I’d been dating my boyfriend Alistair for three months. After finishing the research internship that had brought us together at a PR firm, we spent the week waiting to hear if we’d be offered permanent positions. We spent evenings at my house, since it was slightly larger and homier than Alistair’s and had a nice view of the woods from my back porch. I’d sit with a cup of tea, while Alistair paced, and we both pondered our future. Neither of us were even sure we liked PR, but we didn’t know what else to do with ourselves either. One night, Alistair said, “Let’s go somewhere, anywhere you like.”

“Anywhere?” I asked, and blew steam from the skin of my hot tea. I loved to travel, and because Alistair didn’t, I decided it was love, or at least infatuation, that caused him to take hold of the balcony banister behind my house and say, “Anywhere.”

I took him at his word, and by the end of the week, I had booked two flights to Tulum on his credit card. A word about Alistair: you might say he’s bookish. Some people have gone so far as to called him reclusive, the term has a nice literary ring, and a few of my girlfriends, advocating a breakup and my returned devotion to them, knowing a good pathology is worth a thousand limp put-downs, have even called him certifiably anti-social.

I preferred to call him a scholar. I chose to believe he had higher pursuits than our occasional 4 A.M. tavern sessions, scholarly, with a splash of recluse. But if you think this dulled the attraction, you’d be wrong. In my mind, his solitude was a rejection of the superficiality and cruelty of the social world. His self-isolation made him intense, even edgy, in an intellectual, un-tattooed way. To me, Alistair was a lone wolf. A kind of visionary, like Che Guevara or Bob Dylan. I knew, even then, he wasn’t likely to lead any revolution, but a passionate conversation on my apartment floor, his arms gesticulating, lips moist, and a large pile of books between my legs was more than enough to make me swoon.

A few weeks before we left for Tulum, I made phone calls to Tulum and typed up an itinerary to share with my family. I didn’t, however, book us a room or a whaling excursion. This wasn’t an oversight. I didn’t make the arrangements on purpose. I didn’t want to stay at the Radisson or the Marriott, and I didn’t want to go looking for whale sharks with fifty other tourists in a boat captained by college students. I wanted the real deal. Alistair would say I was obsessed by the “authentic.”

I knew Alistair wouldn’t be comfortable with my faith in spontaneity, so I waited to explain we didn’t have a place to stay until we’d arrived in Mexico. We had taken a cab from the Cancun airport to Tulum, consulted a map, frowned at the foreign pay phone and started off on foot down a seven-mile road, something like a hotel district, although the roads were made of dirt and boulders and all the cabs were going the wrong way.

We stopped when we came to what we suspected were inns, and I abandoned the luggage I’d borrowed from Alistair’s mother, a pink set that rolled uncertainly behind me, while he lugged two oversized duffle bags and my carry-on over his shoulder.I left my luggage propped against a palm tree near the road or leaning against Alistair’s leg while I trekked down lane after lane to inquire about a room. Each time I returned to Alistair’s silence, his erratic eyebrows the only indication of hope, or irritation. By the seventh or eighth try I returned to his back.

“Can we walk a little farther?” I asked.

Perhaps you’ve been here before. Vacations can turn the best of lovers into a pair of squabbling children, and the viability of the relationship seems to hang tenuously to every minor decision. This was like that, only Alistair had never been angry with me before, and his face, in anger, was a different man’s. It’s hard to describe, other than to say that looking at his eyes and his shoulders, I worried that the girlfriends who called him pathological had been right.

He would not accept my apology. We had been walking for a couple of hours, and it was somewhere around a hundred degrees, and the bags probably weighed nearly fifty pounds. Maybe it would have been all right to make a hotel reservation, but I had been on other trips, ones where I had made reservations, and then stumbled upon the perfect spot, one that would never have had a website.

I attempted to take Alistair’s hand, but he jerked away from me, like he would rather smack me than have me touch him. I was trying my best, but I couldn’t find any place for us to stay. There wasn’t anything I could do. If I chose something, just to choose, it would be a disaster. I could feel it. We had had to wait so long that it had to be perfect.

Alistair picked his bags out of the dirt and began to walk.

“I can carry those if you want.” I reached for the bag around his shoulder, his T-shirt sweaty underneath the strap.

He sniffed in disgust.

“Are you crying?” I asked

“No, I’m not crying. I’m sick.”

“Give me those bags,” I said, and dropped the handle of my luggage and reached out my hand. Alistair hiked the bags on his back like a pack animal and began to walk on.

I found a room that was nearly $700 a night, one that was a yoga retreat with all vegetarian food and classes every morning, but, as far as I could see, not a single man on the premises. I took one look at Alistair sweating through his T-shirt, his arms through the straps of his duffel bag, like a backpack, and knew he could not handle bunking with a bunch of women. The next sign led us to some shanty-like cabanas next to trailers and a few tents where drunk American hippies were stumbling around, making lunch over an open fire. We didn’t speak, or make eye contact. The two of us turned around and walked on, panting, red dirt covering Alistair’s mother’s suitcase and half way up my sweat-streaked legs. Nailed to a wooden gate, mostly hidden by red, blooming bougainvillea, in hand-painted letters, the next sign read “Shambala.”

We made it to Shambala. That was truly the name of the cabana hotel. Maybe you’ve never heard the song by Three Dog Night, or read much Tibetan Buddhism. Shambala is a place like heaven, except people really go looking for it, or at least they used to, but it’s so well hidden, a place that’s no place, a town no one’s who’s ever found has ever made it back from. Maybe it exists behind the clouds of the Himalayas, and people who live there are enlightened, at peace with each other. Alistair rolled his eyes, and started to rub his shoulders where the straps were surely pressing down like the weight of the world.

Without a word we dropped our bags and turned into the gate, both of us this time, leaving our luggage near the road, where, as far as we were concerned, anyone who wanted it could have it. We headed toward a pavilion where we heard voices, clinking of glass, laughter, and some Sting song piped through outdoor speakers. Under the pavilion, in a kind of breakfast nook, flower petals were scattered on a buffet table set with chafing dishes, and guests, a few young American tourists like us, and a chic European couple, sipped herbal tea and munched on fiber-rich cereal or whole pieces of fruit. We peered in at them, and they looked up, smiling sublimely at Alistair and me, hunching our heads under the awning with dirt-smeared faces.

“Are you serious?” Alistair whispered.

“What?” I said, although I knew what he was referring to, a slight cult-like vibe.

“It’s perfect.” I said.

“I’m not staying here,” he said, and gestured behind us to the two rows of cabanas, maybe ten total that faced each other. An aisle of sand divided them, rising slightly up a hill that I knew, although I couldn’t see, must open to the Gulf of Mexico.

“Let’s just see,” I said.

By the furious look in Alistair’s eyes, I knew he’d rather strip naked and jump into the ocean. Imagining what another seven-mile walk would do to us, I stepped forward and cleared my throat.

“Excuse me?” I said, and a dark-skinned man in a white shirt looked up from his laptop.

“Yes?” said a man I’d later learn was called Roberto. Roberto’s English was nearly flawless, with a charming accent that was hard to place, maybe because he also spoke Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and French. He gave us a tour of Shambala. He sauntered a few steps ahead, his white shirt flapping open in the breeze. When he explained the rooms and rates, he touched my arm. On both sides of the path, burgundy silk hammocks were strung from palm trees. Paper lanterns glowed warm and orange even in the daytime. Beach beds were tucked in bamboo-screen alcoves, strewn with orange pillows and covered in sheets that were bright yellow against the muted sand.

“Wakka chikka, wakka chikka,” Alistair sang, his attempt at porn music, and shook his head, rolling his eyes at the decor.

“Don’t,” I said. “This could be it.”

Outside of the second cabana from the beach, Roberto paused, removed his flip-flops from his elegant brown feet, and languidly rinsed them in the tile basin in front of the door before walking into the dim interior.

“Cool,” I said, and kicked off my own flip-flops.

Alistair looked horrified at the thought of dipping his flesh into the lukewarm tub of water that had washed other people’s feet, little flecks of plant-life and dead insects surfing a small wave.

I had only seen suspended beds in pictures from Travel +Leisure, pictures of places I never thought I’d go. But inside the cabana there was a full-sized bed covered with burgundy silk sheets floating supernaturally above the sand floor. Though it must have been tied somehow to the ceiling, I never looked. It seemed to levitate under an canopy of mosquito netting. The walls of the cabana were made of cherry-stained bamboo, bound together with some kind of rope, and there was a tiny bathroom with hot and cold running water. The bathroom door was more like an “idea”, another strip of white fabric rather than a solid barrier of sticks.

“Did the three little pigs build this?” Alistair said.

“Isn’t it terrific?” I said, and turned away from the bathroom

Alistair was trying to keep up appearances of disgust, but he couldn’t deny how beautiful this place was. I looked in his eyes.

“Find out how much,” he said.

“How much?” I asked.

Roberto asked us what we wanted to pay. This was our place.

*

Whale shark love is a mystery, but I felt I understood. Apparently, you could find guides in Tulum to take you to the whale sharks, but no one has ever seen them mate. Later, you could find pregnant females, and then the huge babies, but no one had ever seen a whale shark give birth, or knew whether they hung those strange embryonic pods to grasses like other sharks do, or gave birth to slippery, live young, like whales. New whale sharks just seemed to appear every four or five years. They thought they were mating in Tulum because it was one of the few places whale sharks could be found together. Normally, they are solitary fish, lone swimmers.

That was what I told Alistair the morning after we arrived in Shambala, because I knew if he had something to study, I just might get him interested in whale sharks, and in me again.

After I gave him my speech, he nodded: He’d consider it. He was reclined on the bed under the mosquito net, reading, while I was unpacking the travel candles I had brought along, lining them up on the dresser in front of the mirror. I could see him behind me, licking his finger and turning the page.

I wanted him to understand this trip was important. I didn’t tell him that I thought seeing whale sharks would be an experience I hoped would marry us, in a way. I wanted us to go through something together that was both frightening and spectacular, something that would bind us together, irrevocably, the way trauma sometimes can.

I didn’t say this, but instead said, “You know there’s Salsa dancing at a restaurant in town tonight.” I wore a red tank top with spaghetti straps, and in the mirror I could see the skin on my chest, damp and glowing in the candlelight. I lit the last candle and wound my hair with my fingers, twisting it into a topknot. I tried to look like one of those bathers in an oil painting. Alistair didn’t look up from his book. I knew he must be able to sense my movements, my bare shoulder blades, and the floating bed we’d yet to use for anything other than reading.

“Hmm?” he said, not looking up.

“Dancing. I think we should go dancing after dinner,” I said and dropped my hair.

“Whatever you want,” he said.

At dinner, I ordered the strangest item I could find just to get a rise out of him. We were sitting at a table on a patio. In front of us sprawled the ocean and in the foreground a band played music. A woman sang melodious, passionate songs entirely in Spanish, while three men accompanied her with guitars and drums. The patio was filled, every seat taken. Our waitress wasn’t friendly and took a long time coming to our table.

“I get you a drink?” she said, no greeting, no “Hola,” like the Mexican waiters back home. She didn’t smile either. I was on my second margarita by the time our dinner arrived. The waitress slid Alistair’s plate in front of him, a skillet enveloped in a steamy cloud of cumin. My dinner was an entire fish, scales and all. One gelatinous blue eyeball peered up at me over an under-bite with a full set of teeth.

“What did you order, piranha?” Alistair said. He looked skeptically at my plate. “I don’t think I can eat next to that.”

I considered defending myself. I pulled back the fish skin and picked small morsels of flesh from the bones, occasionally stealing bites of avocado and rice from Alistair’s plate.

On stage, a few people were beginning to dance. A man with a mustache circled his arm around a woman with dyed blonde hair, the slick, polyester material of her red dress wrinkled under his hand as their bodies slid back and forth, their steps finding the slightly off-beat rhythm of Salsa music. I always had to say cha-cha cha in my head to find the beat, even though it wasn’t the cha-cha, it helped. I’d never been very good. I found the dance difficult, foreign, whether at a club, or the gym, or a coffee shop, but I kept trying, dragging my friends out or going it alone. I was determined to be good one day.

Alistair also followed the dancers’ movements with his eyes.

“Dance with me?” I asked.

He looked at the ten or so people on the dance floor, shuffling around in various stages of Salsa fluency. The instructors were dressed slightly fancier than everyone else. The man wore tight black pants and a bandelero tie. The woman had on one of those silky dresses like in Saturday Night Fever and a pair of black high heeled shoes. They placed their hands on other people’s hips, orchestrating them into two lines, one for boys, and one for girls. I knew Alistair was afraid to get out there in front of everyone, and I was pretty sure he’d never had a lesson.

“I’m going,” I said.

On the dance floor, I smiled as a stranger put his arm around my waist. He seemed to be a local, or at least he didn’t speak much English, so we just looked into each other’s eyes. He stepped forward, I step backed, cha-cha cha.

It took a full song-length for us to find our rhythm, but when we got it we are swimming across the dance floor, weaving in and out of couples, bumping shoulders, laughing, stumbling only a little. We didn’t communicate well, but he led well and understood how to move my body. His brown eyes looked directly into mine. His Salsa was much more assured and natural than mine, but I knew by the way he met my eyes, nodding and smiling encouragement, and the soft way he held my hand, that I was catching on. I felt loose and happy, like I was finally on vacation in Mexico.

I searched through the sea of tables to find Alistair. He was watching me, leaning back in his chair.

Take my picture, I mouthed.

He crinkled his eyes, not understanding. “Take my picture,” I yelled this time. Alistair picked up the camera.  My partner pressed on my back, let go, and I flew away from him, smacking my hip against the stage. The music stopped and the camera flashed. Alistair gave me a thumb’s up.

Back at the table, I sat down, sweating and fanning my face with my hand. He had ordered coffee while I was dancing. He was shuffling the sugar packets and artificial sweeteners around in the caddy, ordering the blues with the blue, the pinks with the pink.

“What?” I said.

“You just could’ve relaxed a little more.”

“Relaxed?” I said. “Me? Relax more?”

“Yeah,” he said, holding out his arms round like a rib cage. “You were just a little,” and he rocked from side to side, “stiff.”

“Stiff?”

“Excuse me, you want something more?” Our waitress looked down at the bill she held in her hand. Alistair shook his head.

“All right then, you go,” she said, handing Alistair the bill and picking up my half-full drink.

“Don’t worry,” Alistair said and patted my hand. “You were great.”

“You just said I was stiff, I’m not stiff.”

“It’s okay,” he patted. “Really, you did great. It was you’re first time.”

“It was not my first time.”

“Well, that’s okay. That’s not what I meant.”

I reached across and grabbed the bill, slapped the pesos on the table under the peppershaker, and hoped the busboy would steal them.

The next morning, Roberto arranged a whaling excursion, but first he was giving me a massage. Free massage was one of the perks of Shambala. Not only were we privy to beach beds and pillows instead of towels on the hard sand, even yoga lessons on the beach if you were willing to trot down there at sunrise, but our cabana also came with a complimentary message.

The next morning, I slid out from under Alistair’s arm and riffled through my suitcase for an outfit to wear across the sand, one that would be easy to take off again. I was still pissed at Alistair and dressed as if I was going off to meet another man.

“Sure you don’t want to come with? He said he’d give you one too.” I said, and pulled a sundress over my head.

“Tell him you’ll take my massage too,” Alistair had his arm over his eyes.

“Okay, then,” I said, and opened the door a crack.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“Nothing. I’ll be back,” I said. “And then we’ll find the whales.”

Even though the sun was bright already, inside the message cabana it was dim. Roberto had his back to me, lighting candles. In the middle of the room was a massage table, same as you would find back home, with a white sheet, a few folded towels.

“Buenos dias,” Roberto said. Sensing me behind him, he turned and one of his small, gentle smiles spread over his face. “How are you this morning?”

“Good,” I answered, fidgeting in my flip-flops. I wasn’t sure where I should be. Should I sit on the table like at the doctor’s office, grab the sheet and disrobe like a pro, or stay standing and unabashedly shed my dress?

“Did you sleep well?” he asked, and unfolded one of the towels, draping it over his arm.

“Very,” I’d had massages before, and I’m always a little nervous at the beginning, the awkwardness of taking off your clothes in front of a perfect stranger, but Roberto wasn’t exactly a stranger. I had seen him every morning and every evening for the past three days. I was also very aware that he would see me naked, and I’d have to see him every day for the rest of our trip.

“Take everything off, and I’ll be back,” he handed me the sheet and opened the cabana door.

The oil Roberto used smelled like fruit. He didn’t have one of those ambient CD’s in the background, but I could hear the crash of the surf a few yards away, the voices outside, saying hello with that mix of morning quietness and optimism. My face was pressed into the doughnut-shaped headrest. When I opened my eyes I could see the sand floor of the cabana, and occasionally Roberto’s brown toes, his toenails glossy as shells. I could feel the weight of his hands, motionless and warm like a blanket. His hands rose and fell with my breath.

It usually takes me nearly the entire sixty minutes to relax, forget I’m having a massage and actually lose myself to it. But with Roberto, within moments saliva dripped from my mouth to the sand floor, and I wasn’t embarrassed. My body lost its solidity. I rippled. That ninety percent of me that was water had overthrown the ten percent that had ruled for so long, and I felt like liquid, like a vast rolling sea rippling under his hands.

I nearly lost consciousness all together until with one fin-like movement, his hand plunged between my legs, once and then again, to parts of my body that had never before been included in a professional massage. There wasn’t anything sexual about his touch, not quite, but it did cross some boundary, at least in my mind, although I couldn’t deny that the sensation put me into an altered state, almost transcendental.

“And now you can roll over,” he said. He didn’t say please. No “if you’re comfortable.” He took for granted that I was, and I wasn’t uncomfortable, exactly. I stopped worrying about whether what he was doing was sexual or not, and simply surrendered, like I’d done to my first real kiss, to the first time I read Wuthering Heights, to sleep, to that place that’s no place at all.

Roberto filled his hands with warm oil, circled my navel in concentric motion, like the moon orbiting the earth.

“You should use more moisturizer,” he said, “you’re skin is so thirsty, it gulps.”

*

Later in the afternoon, Alistair and I searched for whales. We bounded along next to each other to the boat, looking froggish in our fins and goggles, Alistair’s eyes bulging from his mask being sealed so tight. I pushed mine against my face, rubber sucking my skin, but the mask fell off again and drooped forward on my nose.

“Here,” Alistair said, and pulled it over my head, taking a few hairs with it. He licked the rim of my goggled and stretched the mask back over my face, pressing it sealed. “There,” he said, and it stuck.

We whizzed by the shoreline, the hotels and houses, on our way to deeper water where the whale sharks returned every year, supposedly to mate. Four other people clung to the side of our small, mostly open skipper, which looked remarkably like the boat from Jaws. The captain slowed, and the boat glided to a stop. The water was calm and deep blue, the white rim of our wake clapping against the sides of the boat.

Our guide brought his hands together around his mouth, like a makeshift bullhorn. “While you’re underwater, remember, don’t touch anything. You might see a school of fish swimming so close, you think, I could touch them, but don’t. You never know, they might be barracuda, or have poison ink or sometimes quills. These fish have to keep from being eaten, you know? And do not swim over there,” he pointed to an amorphous area behind us, gesturing somewhere into the blue.

“There are some shallow spots with big rocks over there, and the current can push you against them, and we won’t be able to get you out, understand? The water is warm and calm today, but if you have trouble breathing, come to the top and wave your arms, don’t panic. Take your oxygen out and breathe, all right? I’ll come and get you. Our radar is empty, but the other boat radioed. The pods are moving south, which means in our direction.” He looked at his watch, “They should be here in about fifteen minutes. When you see the whales, just let yourself glide, don’t try to touch them or grab onto them for a ride. They weigh five tons and you don’t want to get too close, yeah? Okay, have fun.”

The other divers made their way to the bottom of the boat, where a door opened to a metal staircase leading down into the sea. One by one the divers put their oxygen in their mouths and lowered themselves into the water, becoming shrimp-like and disappearing beneath the boat.

I looked at Alistair, black rubber flippers on his feet, a tube hanging from his mouth like an emaciated elephant. The pink vulnerability of his bare chest made me want to cry. I imagined spiny fish and poisonous coral piercing his skin.

“I’m scared,” I said.

“I’ll go first,” Alistair said.

He placed one finned foot on the second step, one fin in the water.

“Chilly,” he said. He brought the oxygen to his face, closed his teeth around the mouthpiece and continued to climb down the steps. I wanted to stop him, to tell him we didn’t have to do this, that he had been right: This wasn’t a good idea. It was horrible and dangerous. My stomach cramped. I thought I might vomit into my mask. Alistair’s head slipped under.

The moment of choice had passed. I had to go down after him. My head went underwater, and I began to hyperventilate. I couldn’t breathe. We had no business being underwater, like we were trying, ignorantly, at being fish.

Amid the bubbles, I made out a squirming black sliver of a person: Alistair, his hair standing up around his face, treading water, looking from side to side, searching for me. He motioned for me to come on, and I swam to him and grabbed his stiff fingers. In front of us, the other divers were swimming ahead, disappearing into the black depths of the sea, in the direction the captain said the whales would be.

We could have stayed there, hovering and waiting for the others to return, or I could have just as easily pulled him toward the metal staircase, the safety of the boat deck, and we could have stretched out in the sun for an hour. Instead I leaned forward, my body becoming pointedly horizontal. This was my chance, maybe not a very good one, but if I’d really been one to weigh risks I would never have put on flippers, or wandered down the road in Tulum. I held tight to Alistair’s hand and kicked as hard as I could into the darkness, where somewhere whale sharks tangled.

DESIREE DIGHTON has been a contest finalist with Glimmer Train Magazine and American Short Fiction. Her work has appeared recently in Prime Mincer, and she is assistant editor at Narrative Magazine. She received her MFA from Southern Illinois University, and currently teaches writing in Raleigh, NC, where she’s been known to eat far too many biscuits.

Picture me now, my name is Jim Crow, as set down in this here report, in a orange yellow safety vest reflective of all lights and baggy blue jeans falling loose up around my waist, rake in hand. I am repaving your roads and streets, the highways and byways you career upon murderously. Do I write loud enough for you?

The paving crew calls me Crow because another paver’s named Jim and that’s one too many Jims per crew, Chief said. Chief said Chief’s word is law. I took the job because there was no other. Then the job became my life. Head to toe to head I am a dark road, dead end. Your dear Lord and Savior spent but forty days and nights in the desert, but I have eaten the stones all my life.

Jim alone is a plain enough name. Crow by its crowself is a fine name, but sandwich the two together on one man and you might as well have yourself a bank account fulled up with worthless confederate dollars. I was near licked within a centimeter of my life and kicked out of Alabama for a name like that. No one likes a walking reminder. Pa was the blackest jackwagon in Ensley, though I had an uncle wore Union blue every day of his life which was long and ended in a gully.

Asphalt is a slow crawling liquid, rather like boy time and life all ahead and beyond you. The roads we pave from nowhere to the middle of nowhere are not a solid or law abiding substance you can count on not to move while your back is turned. If the road was a man, I don’t doubt that it would knife me soon as he had the opportunity. But I’ve watched the asphalt hours at a time for its flux and it does flow.

Every Monday morn Sett, a grisly freak from Prichard, come to work for torment looking hangdog like he been stood up or out womaned both Friday and Saturday nights and got real extra drunk under it. Most of them probably plug ugly, barely women at all men returning from a hundred apocalyptic tours of Iraq wouldn’t take a hand job from, just gibbering mouths and legs wide enough to park a sport utility vehicle.

I am curator of a collection of female store mannequins in a weedy lot behind the house. Not what you might call a house, but four walls and a ceiling that keep nature out of my doings. Mostly a parts supply yard – an arm, a magnificent pale torso, entangled heaps of legs and a mountain of heads – the full bodies are fashioned with women’s underthings salvaged from dumpsters and the whorehouse sidewalks in East Lake. On Saturday, maybe Sett comes by, and we split a suitcase of cold ones and fire off some rounds at a female torso. Crudely arranged in positions, our harem of mannequins polaroided in blue jean cut-offs and skirts only a hardened whore would wear.

I reproduce these particulars of my privacy for the reading public so that they will know what kind of man lives among them. I am a product of your dropout factories, I’ve heard them called, but your lives ruined in comfort and air-conditioning will not amount to even a paragraph of this paper opinion piece.

God have mercy upon the fool who ever tried to separate Sett from his bottle of Wild Irish. It was a task for Sett to work through the week without murdering a crewman. Chief, who had the perpetual expression of a man adjusting himself in public, and had a drunk driving record longer than the State’s constitution, didn’t care if Sett paved the streets with gold drunk as a casino Indian long as he could lay down some asphalt, Chief’s black gold.

Paving season is in full swing. This morning I seen Sett frying his breakfast egg on the balls hot blacktop. Three for him, two for me. I think Sett learned English in the adult cinemas on first avenue east, and his cooking skills at a correctional facility in West Jefferson. Climax was impossible for Sett without Dueling Banjoes picking and twanging from a stolen stereo in a cockroach motel. I think me and Sett’s moms was spermed in one of them motels you drive by on first avenue east. I’ve paved it twice.

If a summer storm kicks up, we shelter under a big magnolia or in the cab of the dump truck where we have stashed bud light limes in a Styrofoam cooler.

Day before the day of which I speak we were on the milling crew grinding down the old roads, moon grey and alligator cracked with sun. The road upheaved and rutted, a wrinkly epidermis like an old woman’s. The downtown streets at least are straight and gridded. When we got the road good and chewed up, the ancient streetcar lines in the Ensley and Oxford brick remind me of my name.

Average road lasts about, I don’t know, six, seven years, depending on such influences as climate and weather, subgrade soil and truck axle loads. I am a methodist, not the religious kind, but a believer in methods to get the job done right the first time. There’s no other way, and I am the evangelist of that way.

Sett is a veteran paver, and has worked jobs repaving the banked racing surface out at Talladega and the runway tarmac at Fred Shuttlesworth International. Sett liked to haw much about horsepower and machinery. I heard it from Sett that the future’s got machines can do our work cheaper and faster than a crew of twenty. For a man with a horrible past, Sett talks much of the future. The driving public complains in angry calls to the traffic department and letters to the editor that we’re too slow and take too many breaks. Lunch breaks, smoke breaks, piss breaks, beer breaks, self-abuse breaks, jail breaks. Nothing else for the news to report on except a five-year roundtable on potholes.

But road making is tortoise work, not the running of the hare. You’re up against every kind of wind and the weeping August humidity of Alabama’s air. You pick up on things. A little bit of geology here, some politics there. I like rocks more than people.

In this heat we had well over an hour to work the asphalt, day of the day of which I speak. The road is the only space left to the public. The public buys himself a car to put on the road, to assure himself of his existence, his right to run you over. I’ve obviously been blowharding through life, but behind your perceptions is a me and Sett you cannot make out.

Now, I was fine with all this – the heat, the barking letters to the editor – until you asked me to pave over my ancestors.

This I couldn’t abide.

-You sissy boys ready to serve your country, the Chief rallied the troops as Sett and I were dining on the last of the eggs.

We were always pussies, sissies, or pansies to the Chief, who would’ve been a great little league coach if he could be trusted around small children, or perhaps a warden in one of our county’s many fine prisons, where most of my dropout buddies ended up without even a G.E.D.

Chief said we’d been contracted to asphalt a parking lot for a car dealer while we waited for the milling crew to catch up. This car lot was to be paved on top of the cemetery where my uncle was inearthed. Drunk before noon the day of the funeral, my family of fourteen and still growing shouldered the weightless coffin into a dark rectangle in the earth. But not me. I was sober as seven judges, knowing the coffin was empty. Now, the tombstones were hilled up against a fence, grass mowed down to a close crewcut.

-This ain’t a right thing to do, Sett said.

I didn’t know Sett owned or was deeded the awful burden of a conscience, but he had a speck of egg white on his chin.

-Sett, Chief said, -You got any idea how asphalt is spelled?

Sett considered. I saw muscles contorting in his forehead.

-A.s.s.f.a.u.l.t. Ass fault.

Any sensible member of our century could see that Crow wasn’t about to pave over his beloved forbears. One fine day I’m going to build something like The Great Wall of Japan around me and there ain’t no way I’m coming out dead or dead. Why not just bring back the ill forgotten name of Scratch Ankle for the nigger business district? Separate drinking fountains, the whole nine yards.

We had about two miles of road behind us rolled and cooling when Sett stopped cold and said Crow come looky here. Sett was critical of the odd roadway leavings we swept up in the layby and the road’s narrow shoulders. Sett’s walls were trophied with Botts’ dots and bollards, smashed guard rails and stuffed roadkill. He had a warm romantic attachment to an armadillo we found at a railroad crossing. In the carport was a smashed bicycle built for two, wheels bent, the riders relieved of duty.

I caught Sett hoarding shattered accident glass in his pockets. He was fond of circling the crew around a front bumper, a game in which we guessed manufacturer and model. I thought Sett might’ve found another roadside object of interest to add to his museum when he waved me over. If Sett had been white, he’d of been white trash, positively.

Sett stank of sun and tar mixed with locker room. We all did. Though I’m no longer a paver, I still smell that ripe stink even after three-hundred and sixty five showers. When the water runs. Then it mingles with strange deodorant whiffs of highway honeysuckle, and I’m good and bad happy.

Before us was no highway artifact, but a sinkhole deep as a man’s thoughts before he dies and big a round as an oil depot tank. Sett edged up to the sinkhole’s lip and looked down.

My uncle committed his soul to the powers that be when he was swallowed up by a sinkhole in the West End just fourteen years to the day after I was popped out of momma by daddy’s sister. Long after the Tuskegee syphilis experimentations, our family didn’t trust no doctors. I’ll go to Tuskegee one day, make the crew proud, a graduate of syphilis university.

Pavement makes us commute, work, commute, sleep. Follow the white and yellow dashed lines. I refused to be whorehoused into that life, coat-and-tied, diplomaed, licensed, napoleoned, inventoried or highrised. The roads I pave are flatter than piss on a plate.

-Sett, you come away from that thing, I hollered at his big back. I’d seen a sinkhole or three in the valley before. Sett’s sinkhole was perfectly circular and pitch dark down round the bottom. It looked almost painted. Sett unzipped his fly and handled his member out to take a long leak in the sinkhole mouth.

The sun brightened and stroked me. The sticky weather seemed in agreement with all that I felt inside my head. Light above, dark below. Sett might jump into the hole, he had tendencies. I hadn’t drunk water since the beginning of the shift. Then I felt a silver spoon in my eyes as if one of my plastic gals had bucketed Lysol in my face, blinded by a brilliant inner light without source.

I saw the roads of Birmingham paved with a skin of flailed human flesh. You start Saul and end up Paul, my uncle said to me. A blue schoolbus with the back end sawed off, the city streets chewed up and spat out, our paving work undid. Sett’s and my mannequin ladies on bicycles, their skirts breezing up their thighs. A tank rolled by and an old crony in a Klan getup turned circles in a wheelchair on streets paved with a pure white tar.

When I woke and saw Sett hovering above me I knew I wasn’t dead. They wouldn’t want Sett in hell. The sinkhole had closed up like an eye. Sett slapped my face harder than he should’ve, enjoyment rippling across his face.

-Where’s the crew? Where’s Chief? I asked him.

Chief was weighted with marriage fat and despite his constant sweating never dropped a pound. You couldn’t miss him in an angry mob of lookalikes.

-They done felled into the hole and the hole…

-The hole what, Sett?

-It done closed up on’em.

Sett looked shook.

-Horse shit, Sett.

-I never seen anything like it.

Our fair yellowhammer state is run by frat boys who become four star generals and dentists in their bass pro lodges and weaseling quarterback clubs. I suggested to Sett we dig up every negro in the cemetery and publicly display them so all could watch them spinning and spinning, rolling in their graves. A pure white tar I saw behind my lids.

I thought about my mannequin girls. They required names, their population tripling every few weeks, my lovely plastic candy girlies. Veronica, Juliet, Mary. We had in our sorority an entire race of black mannequins, but Sett and I favored the white ones. I was partial to miss Mary. My gentle squaw. I come home to her after a hard day’s paving. Sett, who had an extra sixth digit, never touched her. I thought about her milky skin, cold in the evenings before I warmed her up, and about how she would never die. Does plastic die?

I’ve seen some terrible things. My cousin who lived by some philosophy of muscle gunned by the police. A dropout amigo who died in the doors of Wal-Mart, another victim of highrise prosperity. I was phoned to identify the body, which I didn’t mind. Markus would’ve done the same for me. That’s him, I confirmed, in that basement morgue, glass stuck in his jellied face. Had there been a window, I might’ve looked out it. So, you might think, because of all that, I wouldn’t of done what I done, but I never claimed membership among the sensible of our century, cited above. But as a Dixie deathman mine is a new thinking.

This coal and iron valley is wrought all over with sinkholes and assholes. They’re common as fleas. There must be one pocked beneath the streets with my name on it: Jimmy Crow.

-We have to pave that parking lot, I turned to Sett whose safety vest flashed at me like an orange shot from a flare gun.

-But your uncle.

-He’d want me to do this, I said.

The amount of asphalt will be staggering, new numbers will be invented for it. This is my letter to the editor, a letter of resignation, and the things I saw are written herein so that those who follow after may not lose heart. When this cemetery lot’s paved under with your tax dollars at work, I’m not paving no more. But that don’t mean I’m a quitter. Remember my uncle, his name was Tom, may he rest in peace under your ass fault.

AMOS JASPER WRIGHT is native to the dirt of Birmingham, Alabama. He holds a graduate degree in English/creative writing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and is currently undertaking a second graduate degree in urban planning at Tufts University. His fiction and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Arcadia, Zouch, Salamander and Yes, Poetry. He is also co-editor of theWhite Whale Review, an electronic literary journal. His author website can be found at www.amosjasperwright.com.