Blood on the Stoop--Four Tales

by Evelyn Martinez

I

Fat maroon spatters cascaded from the second-story entrance of the Victorian house where I lived on 15th Street to the sidewalk, coalescing into a splashy blob at the front curb, almost dry and shockingly vivid against the grungy cement.

We lived one block from Notre Dame Grammar School. My guardian, Antonia, did not trust me to travel to and from school on my own. Class dismissed at 2:45 pm, and I’d shoot out the door, out the gate, and into the beige 1953 Mercury double-parked out front. While the other girls sauntered out in chatty clumps, I’d be tripping over Antonia’s sharp knees to slither into the back seat behind a grumpy Arturo Hill, her current husband. They were old. I was ashamed of them and of myself.

On that afternoon I skidded to a stop outside the school entrance, confused. Where were they?

I waited and waited. Something was wrong and I had no clue how to respond. Daring to walk home was risking Antonia’s rage.

3:30 pm. The last straggling student had rounded the corner. What should I do? Home was just a block away. I took off running. Running like Antonia’s friend Satan was after me. Panicked, almost sobbing, I arrived home to the maroon stain at the curb, more stains on the sidewalk, on the front steps, on the doorknob … there was blood everywhere. The house silent, forbidding, desolate, I banged on the door. I cried. I yelled, “Mama! Arturo!”

I rang the first-floor tenants. No answer. I shuddered on the bloody stoop sensing a brutal assault, a death, my abandonment. I was thirteen years old, but I had lived a regimented life Antonia controlled and had no decision-making skills. Who could help me?

Sister Catherine Dolores, our principal—she’d know what to do. I ran back to school, tore into her office, and blurted out my frantic story. She took my hand and listened. Alarm flickered in her gray eyes.

My emergency contact list contained one name, Dr. Jorge Arguelles, a dentist in San Francisco. Antonia claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of a prominent Nicaraguan politician, the father of Dr. Arguelles. She called Jorge her brother. “Not true,” he had once whispered to me. “Antonia is mistaken.” Nevertheless he “went along” with her story.

Dr. Arguelles and his wife appeared within the hour. We swung by the house—empty, its bloodstains blurred by darkness. They took me to their fancy home in Forest Hill and fed me a snack.

I had experienced their generosity previously, their gifts of beautiful books and art materials. On this evening they conversed quietly but nervously in the kitchen. I cringed under their curious pitying stare.

We knew what Antonia was capable of. I envisioned Arturo slashed to pieces in a knife attack and Antonia behind bars. The Arguelles’ first call was to SFPD. They tracked her to SF General Emergency where she had been treated for severe cuts to the hands. She’d lost considerable blood but refused admission. Once they’d stitched her up, she’d ordered her husband to take her home.

We got back to the old Victorian just as Arturo was easing a wobbly, shrunken Antonia out of the Mercury. His face was pinched and sad. His hands shook. The tale that emerged was grisly, but true to Antonia form. The two had been battling. As usual she grabbed her always-handy butcher knife and went after him. Fleeing Antonia’s crazed fury Arturo stumbled down the narrow stairwell to the front stoop. She caught him and attacked, jabbing at his face and chest—a scenario I was familiar with. But then he did something astonishing—he snatched the big knife out of her hand. Outraged, reckless, she seized it back with both hands, blade up. Antonia and Arturo grappled. She would not surrender her knife even as it sliced deep into both upper palms, nearly severing the fingers. Arturo let go, horrified as blood spurted over the two of them.

From that day on Antonia and Arturo shared a quiet truce. He nursed her with a tenderness that astounded me and made me jealous. Antonia never regained full arrogant control of the household.

Her hands lost the strength to grasp a knife. Her desire to clutch me tight slipped away and she even allowed me to walk to and from school by myself.

II

Two years prior it had been my blood splattering the front stoop, my ride to the ER. Once I was past docile childhood and capable of both talking back and running fast, the fights between Antonia and me turned vicious, loud, and physical. That evening Antonia locked everyone in for the night. As usual, Arturo was confined to his tiny room, while she and I were secured within the front rooms of the flat. Our area consisted of a living room and bedroom separated by French-style glass doors.

The fight was a typical exchange of threats and demeaning insults. She’d yelled something about my being “la hija de la puta mas grande” and “una maldita, una ingrata.” Storming out of the bedroom, she threw open the multi-paned door. I was at her heel cussing furiously back when she slammed it. Caught in the threshold I reared back, my left arm shielding my face. My arm shattered a glass pane and was slashed to the bone from wrist to mid forearm. I swooned at the gaping cut, the geyser of blood. Antonia grabbed a towel, wrapped my arm, and rousted Arturo out of bed.

The closest ER was at Mary’s Help Hospital a few blocks away.

Terrified, in shock, I barely heard Antonia concoct a story of innocent youthful rambunctiousness on my part. I did not contradict.

The stitching would be done under local anesthetic. As the masked and gowned surgeon approached, I started thrashing and yowling. Angrily he called out, “Hold her down!” They tried and I fought them. Then, gentle hands on my shoulders, a soft soothing male voice. It was a young doctor—an angel, I thought. He cradled my head and stroked my greasy hair. My body stilled and the testy surgeon finished his job. I spent the night at Mary’s Help. It was nice to be in a clean gown in a clean bed in a peaceful place.

III

Knife fights were routine occurrences during my grammar school years. Antonia kept a rough assortment of men in the house—generally either on their way to prison or just released. I confess the distinction of having visited every state prison in California by the age of nine.

Antonia’s men hung around the rear of the house drinking and smoking. They carried weapons, as did Antonia. She had a stash of knives, hatchets, lead pipes and at least one gun. She shared her arsenal with her male associates. The cops were frequent callers to our home—generally stomping through the front door while one or two of her friends climbed over the back fence and escaped via the neighbors’ yard.

16th Street in the Mission—especially the blocks between Guerrero and South Van Ness were notorious drug- and alcohol-fueled sites of gang and personal warfare amidst a string of sleazy bars and liquor stores. Families and decent folks stayed away after sunset.

We once had a young guy staying at the house—late teens, early twenties. He’d scandalously become involved with the mother of the downstairs tenant. The tenant and his wife were professionals working long hours and the tenant’s grandmother had come to help with their kids. But she spent more time canoodling in Antonia’s kitchen with our young guest—was she in her forties, fifties? One night this young guy succumbed to the temptations of 16th Street, left the house and Grandmother’s arms.

Late that night piercing cries for help from the sidewalk yanked us out of our sleep.

Antonia and I ran to the front window. The boy was crawling up the stoop, one hand pressed to his left side, a stream of blood in his wake. Antonia flung our door open. I crept down the steps and found Grandmother in her nightgown kneeling on the cement, embracing the boy. Perhaps she had tried to drag him up the stairs. I crouched alongside not offering much help.

Meanwhile, Antonia flap-flapped down to the street in her ratty “chanclas” and surveyed it right and left. Assured that no one had followed the boy, she dashed back up to call an ambulance. She forgot about me. I watched, fascinated as Grandmother/lover tried to comfort the whimpering boy.

Something thick and ropy slid out of a jagged hole under his ribs. Grandmother squealed, “Que es eso?” Que te metieron?” She pulled on what looked like puffy rolled cotton trimmed in bright red, and he screamed. Peering closer, “Hay—tus intestinos, mijo!” She quickly started shoving it back in.

Finally, the distant wail of a siren. Then a chorus of sirens. As the ambulance screeched around the corner, she kissed and soothed the boy now passed out in her arms. Antonia tromped downstairs briskly pushing men out her door, grabbed me by the arm, hauled me inside, and turned the bolt.

Stealing one last glance, I saw Grandmother clutching at the boy while her son pulled her towards their flat.

Cops were everywhere. The son—his English clear, precise: “We know nothing, officers. I have seen the young man in the neighborhood on occasion. Never talked to him.”

Antonia in broken, but highly indignant English: “Just a boy I helped out one time. He said his name was Juan. No, he doesn’t live here.”

He was taken to SF General Emergency. Grandmother visited him in the hospital. We heard he survived and was deported. Grandmother’s son sent her back to Nicaragua. The tenants divorced and moved out after a series of nasty scenes. I watched their two small kids being packed off somewhere. They looked lost and miserable, a feeling I knew too well.

IV

The bland faced Victorian on 15th Street thrived as a gang-related war bunker while Antonia lived and maintained health and cash. We who survived there were all battle-scarred, without mercy in our hearts. The most notorious incident—earning a shocking front page headline along with mention of our address—occurred on a Friday night in winter, on my ninth birthday.

Antonia and Arturo picked me up after school and we headed for Victoria Bakery in North Beach to buy my “special” birthday cake (actually Antonia’s favorite), rum with thick white icing. Pink green swirls and pastel rosettes wished me, “Happy Birthday, Abelina.”

Then we rushed home to tidy up the living room. Antonia had invited some of the neighborhood kids and their moms. I was dreading the whole thing and the crinkly too-big dress she’d bought me for the party.

The house, as always, was full of her men friends drinking and carousing in the kitchen and on the back porch. She ordered them to settle down and shut the kitchen door. Then she locked Arturo in his room. The party was a mild disaster. The few invited kids and I stared at one another. Nobody enjoyed the cake except Antonia. Loud rude laughter burst out of the kitchen. The parents looked at one another and hustled their kids home.

There we sat with most of a melting lopsided cake. I wrestled out of the hated dress and jumped under the covers with a book, grateful to be alone and confined to the front rooms. Antonia joined her men in the kitchen in the back of the house. I must have fallen asleep. Sirens wove through my dreams—an odd but familiar lullaby. My lullaby got wildly insistent and I jarred awake. The strident wails were converging on our street. Yet again, cops bashing open the front door. Followed by yelling, stomping up the stairs, the back porch door slamming open and shut. More thumping down the back stairs. Heavy boots running down the hall and out the back.

“Stop, you are under arrest. Stop or we’ll shoot.” I heard a crash in the backyard. Peeping out the side bedroom window overlooking the neighbors’ yard, I saw a man straddling the fence. He was quickly dragged down by half a dozen uniformed cops with drawn guns. The walls shook as they wrestled him down the hall, down the stairs, and out the entryway. I ran to the front window and recognized one of Antonia’s men, handcuffed and flung into the back seat of a squad car. Other cops stuck around talking to Antonia. There was no sign of the other men. Her English was extra poor that night, her voice deferential. “I know nothing.” “No se nada.” She shook her head. She shrugged dramatically.

It made the headlines on all three newspapers—Chronicle, Examiner, and Call-Bulletin. “Man Shoots and Kills Wife in Front of Six Children.” And the crime-scene photo—shocking, lurid. A small flat on Capp Street. A bleak, narrow, untidy room, a door framing tunnel-like darkness beyond. Two tousled beds on each side of the room. Five or six dark-haired children caught by the camera lens—a wide-eyed toddler in draggy diapers, small half-dressed bodies huddling on the cots, clinging to the walls. By the far door a girl about my age pressed against the threshold, eyes downward. On the linoleum floor, from behind the right bed frame sprawled two bare legs, one foot in a “chancla.” The edge of a flowered skirt peeked out. The rest vanished into the shadows.

The body on the floor was the mother of the children, shot to death by her estranged husband who gave his current address as our flat. After a night of drinking he had decided to “have a talk” with his wife, stopping to pick up a gun along the way. The wife became “unreasonable.” Enraged, he shot her to death in front of their children and fled back to our house. Back to 15th Street where he and Antonia were working out a plan when the cops showed up.

I was mortified—and still stunned—at school on Monday. The nuns were extra kind and patient with me that week. Antonia admitted without remorse that she had lent him her revolver: “Didn't think he would do something crazy. But that wife of his was a whore, and probably had it coming to her. Too bad about the kids.” That’s all she had to say.

Arturo, for once, expressed concerns about how his pension funds were being spent. Antonia may have listened. Fewer men came round the house. The murderer was sent to San Quentin. Antonia and I went to see him once or twice. He was released after a few years and headed to our house, but didn’t stick around. I don’t know what became of those orphaned children.

The rest of the blood stains on the plain-faced 15th Street Victorian—a victim in its own right—fell in drabs, dribbles, and smears. The house witnessed suffering—bludgeoned mice, impaled canaries, tortured chameleons, neglected dogs, cats, bunnies and turtles, aborted fetuses, abused humans. Much of it simply categorized as collateral damage in the ongoing war that was Antonia.

I have been drawn back to the house periodically. One day I encountered a young woman coming down the front stairs as I gaped at the dingy shingled facade. I blurted, “I grew up in that house” and joked about it being haunted. Neither of us laughed. She lived on the second floor—where the worst mayhem was enacted. Certain rooms felt oppressive, indeed haunted, she said. People refused to share the flat for more than a few months. She and her new roommate were trying to exorcise these brooding restless spirits, but they were tenacious. The young woman invited me up. I had last been inside that house thirty-three years previously. It could not hurt me. My body grew heavy and my gut twisted as she led me up those familiar grim stairs into the old bedroom, and to the closet that opens up into the attic. Malevolence and its unleashed anguish slammed into me. I knew that what the young women sensed was real. But I was useless to help and wished them luck as I fled down the steps and into the sun-washed street.

Epilogue

The house I grew up in was a two-story dour Victorian with faded tan shingles in San Francisco’s Mission District. My current home is a Hollywood-style bungalow painted a delectable orange sherbet with raspberry trim. It is a half a block from Ocean Beach in San Francisco. I was a helpless prisoner within the walls of my childhood house. I am a free individual within my home. I leave and return as I please.

The Victorian on 15th Street had seven rooms—high-ceilinged, narrow, with stained enamel walls. Its dusty, cluttered rooms had sharp, shadowy corners and lined a bleak hallway. The door to each room had two locks—a latch and a deadbolt. Doors remained shut and locked at all times.

Shabby nylon curtains drooped over the few tall, dirt-streaked windows. Delightfully, the back porch boasted the one large west-facing window in the house. I savored rare moments on that porch soaking in late afternoon sun and sky. My childhood house was bordered by cement cracked, chipped, and devoid of the tiniest green weed.

My home by the ocean is one wide, flowing, light-infused space with no staircases. The only locked doors lead to the outside world, to be opened at my discretion. My back wall is no wall but a series of windows that gaze upon and open into my garden. My front and back yards are lush with blooming succulents and flowering bushes.

Wood, shingles, and plaster do not utter words, but they remember. And if walls could talk? Might not the battered old Victorian groan and splinter into shivery fragments of misdeed and sorrow? My home by the ocean speaks softly, openly of peaceful things.

Evelyn Martinez holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of San Francisco and a Master of Nursing degree from the University of California, San Francisco. She has been a corrections officer, a theater usher, a quilt conservator for the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and a family nurse practitioner. She has traveled extensively, and her favorite place in the world is Antarctica. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Charles Carter, Entropy, Rougarou, and Your Impossible Voice. Her essay “If” has been nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize.

Heartworm

by Devorah Uriel

          

A shrill whistle cuts through the warm summer air and I spin to follow the sound, my mouth suddenly dry. Fear takes up residence in the heart like a writhing thing. The mother of all worms, it grows plump and comfortable. Some people believe the heart is the place where love resides. I’m not so sure. The sharp snap of a twig, and my worm begins to thrash. 

          A brindle hound leaps through the tall tow-colored grass responding to the call of its owner. Releasing a gust of air, I bend to kiss the head of my own four-legged companion, who is sniffing the ground near my feet. The off-leash dog park is spacious, an open place where the breeze can flow between sounds, where internal alarms can quiet, where panic can be more easily soothed.

            Countless things can activate my fear. Car brakes screeching. A child screaming. Fireworks. My partner’s angry scowl. Someone, anyone running. Thunder. Arguments. Light coming from under a door into a dark room. Shadows. Men with large hands. Not having correct change. Baths. The dark. Closets. Rope. Women with straight, black hair. Anything sharp. 

            There was no singular event. My fear was nurtured day-to-day, in tedious, predicable moments. I survived being locked in a closet and being bound by twine to my bedposts. I survived the rhythmic lashings of the belt, and the creeping touch of my grandfather’s hands. I didn’t survive the scorn and disapproval in my mother’s eyes. She continues to influence my thoughts. I know how to not believe everything I think; I don’t know how not to feel everything I feel. And I feel too much.

            I feel my clammy hands, my pounding heart, and the urge to run. I feel unable to breathe, and the dull pain from pinching myself. I feel my lips stuttering and unresponsive, the cold sweat dripping down my spine, and the need to pee. I feel bound to the knots in my stomach. I feel disoriented and angry. I feel alert, watchful, and exhausted. I feel crazy. Mostly, I feel afraid.

            It turns out fear is fertile ground for worms. I’ve learned to confine mine to my left ventricle, to refuse it room to spread. When it’s sleeping there where I have confined it, I get a taste of another life: my skin can warm to my lover’s touch, my heart to the affection of friends. But the worm will awaken, and I can’t know if it will be in the middle of the night or in the middle of the grocery aisle. 

            Every spring I take my dog to be tested for Heartworm, then we go to the dog park. Bounding across the fields and jumping to kiss me when he returns, I know that his heart is clear. I take comfort in giving him the preventative, understanding that my worm is a lifelong companion, that my fear has burrowed too deep.

          My life depends on vigilance and a kind of perverse caretaking. When my body clamors in distress, my mind must counter with calm denial. I must acknowledge fear’s power but deny it control. I must simultaneously soothe it and starve it. I must not let it own me. The worm is resilient, but I am strong. I will fight for my life.

          I startle at a cracked twig. “Shhhh, it’s not real.” I coo to myself. “Nothing is going to hurt you anymore.”

Devorah Uriel is a retired family therapist and teacher. She’s worked with families at risk of losing custody of their children and with young children with attachment disorders. She now lives and writes in Denver, Colorado. Her stories have been published in Write Denver and Dime Show Review. She recently completed her memoir, Mama Dama Doozy, about growing up in a crazy house.

Step Over

by John McCaffrey

The best year of Allen Iverson’s life was my worst. Determined to shed a “me-first” image, AI had bought into a team concept under new coach Larry Brown and propelled the underdog 76ers into the 2001 NBA Championship series against the star-powered Los Angeles Lakers. On the way, he had won the All-Star and League MVP trophies, dazzling fans and fellow players with his mercurial quickness and relentless offensive attack. He was relentless and fearless going to the basket against much larger foes, flinging his tat-laden, skinny body into thick seven-footers, finding a sliver of an angle to arch the ball up and under massive arms, taking the invariable hit, and falling, his cornrows glinting in the arena light, like a spent bottle-rocket. The miracle was never that the ball went in, which it almost always did that year, but that he got up off the floor after such a beating. But he did, every time.

For a while that year, I wasn’t sure I’d get up. Not literally, but emotionally. The hit I took was my wife leaving me, and while it might not have been as breathtaking as an AI swoop to the hoop, it had still been a six-year journey together as a married couple, and it hurt to have it end. Basketball helped to relieve the pain: watching, as well as playing. Like AI, I was a guard, and while I held none of his absurd athleticism, I could move well, dribble well, and shoot, I must admit, very well. I excelled in pick-up games, or at least held my own, and while I had never stopped playing once I got married, my forays to the court multiplied, and intensified, after my separation. I literally wore sneakers out, and nearly my knees and feet, but the game, the competition, the sweating and striving, helped me let go of tension, ease depression, and forget my troubles for a while.

Nights were spent scouring the television for games, and, as I had gone to school in Philadelphia (Villanova University) I gravitated toward the Sixers, and, naturally, AI. He was an underdog and so was the team that year, overachieving and winning games in bunches. I identified with them and felt inspired by them—if they could beat the odds and make a run for a championship, I could surely overcome my grief and feel good again. But like an NBA season, it was a long haul—feeling good again, that is. There were times when the grief was overwhelming, and with it came doubt and insecurity. Bouts of sadness led to fits of anger, tears produced clenched fists. I hardly ever felt comfortable, or at peace. I had trouble enjoying things I always enjoyed: reading, writing, even day-dreaming. About the last thing I wanted to do was spend time in my head, but that’s the only place I seemed to dwell, deep inside, a dark place. It was like a self-inflicted prison sentence, and my pain was the warden. Break time from this metaphorical cell came from hoops. The basketball court was “my yard,” a place where I could breathe fresh air, even if it smelled of sweat, where I could loosen my limbs, release anxiety and let go of aggression, where I could feel like myself again, or at least as long as I held “winners.”

---

About the same time the Sixers made it to the NBA championship that year, I was taking steps forward, small, incremental movements of progress, moments when my shoulders would release tension and I would take a whole breath in, rather than just an anxious sip. The growing sense of ease encouraged me to take chances, to be less isolated, to think again about a life lived and not hidden from. To this end, my family had a vacation house out in the Hamptons, in the bucolic town of Wainscott, just a mile from a beautiful beach and the Atlantic Ocean. It was just after Memorial Day, the start of the summer season, and I had a hankering to go there and spend the weekend away from City life. I also was looking forward to playing basketball.

Wainscott, at that time, contained in its small confines one of the few remaining one-room school houses in the country (it since has added a separate building to accommodate an increase in students), and on the grounds was a sun-bleached (and cracked) concrete basketball court. It was here that an evening hoops game was played every evening during the summer. There were no lights on the court, but from early June to late August games would last until darkness, or until the players gave up from exhaustion. I was a habituate of the game, considered it my home court, and must have launched thousands and thousands of jump shots (during contests and alone) at those two rusted rims over the years. There were others who were regulars, but none as regular as me. I lived for the game throughout my high school and college years, never too tired from a summer job or from having too much fun the night before to be first on the court. Graduation from college, moving to Hoboken, getting a full-time job, and, eventually, getting married, limited my time in the Hamptons. But I still put in enough weekends to maintain a presence at the evening game, gaining comfort in its continuance and my place in its history.

---

That Memorial Day weekend, 2001, I left New York City on a Friday afternoon, taking as a mode of transportation the Hampton Jitney, a bus by any name, but one jazzed up, perhaps, by its destination, the haughtiness of the mostly wealthy riders, and the provision of free orange juice and peanuts for the just-over-reasonable fee. The Jitney was good for me because it dropped me in Wainscott, and I could walk to my house. It was something my ex-wife and I liked to do, that walk, easing the transition from the cacophony of the City, the long bus ride (always traffic on the Long Island Expressway), enjoying, finally, the quiet calm of passing under a tree-lined, non-lighted street and, when conditions were right, the distant sound of ocean waves finding the shore. This was the first time in years I had done the trip solo, and, truthfully, the first time I would be at the house alone for such a long weekend. It was a bit daunting, but I comforted myself that it would be good for me, give me time to reflect, and, mostly, play lots of basketball.

Unfortunately, for the first part of the evening, time alone was not good for me. I paced the house as the sun dipped in the sky, starting to feel sorry for myself, thinking about my ex-wife, feeling sad and lonely. I finally called my parents, not wanting to worry them about my state, but to connect and let them know I was safe. Of course, I worried them. I wept openly to my mom and dad, telling them all my struggles. They showed their support  for me, let me know they loved me and that I would be okay, and my mother, in infinite maternal wisdom, told me there was a casserole dish of baked ziti in the freezer. I hung up and felt better. It was enough to give me an urge to take a jog. I laced on sneaks, shorts, T, and with headset on, took off.

I had never run so hard and for so long in my life, not before, and not after. Sweat and fury poured out of me, and when that was extinguished, out came all the other emotions I was holding. By the time I made it back to the house, more than an hour later, covering at least ten miles, what was left inside me, what I felt, was one thing: relief.

I was also starving. Remembering my mother’s suggestion, I took out the ziti and popped it into the microwave. Then I turned on the TV. About the time the ziti was ready to eat, Game One of the Lakers vs. 76ers was starting. According to the announcers, and just about anyone who followed the game, it was going to be rout. So dominant were the Lakers that season (they had won twenty games in a row), and so stellar was the play of their two stars, Shaq and Kobe, and so steady their coach, the renowned Zen-Master, Phil Jackson, that few, if any, gave the 76’ers a chance to win even one game. A sweep, it seemed, was inevitable.

Which was what the LA faithful, including Jack Nicholson and other Hollywood glitterati, were standing and chanting in unison before the opening tip that night at the newly-opened Staples Center: “Sweep, Sweep, Sweep!” The sound of their chanting reverberated throughout the arena, like a Roman Coliseum crowd calling for a fallen gladiator’s head. But as I gorged on ziti, still clad in my sweat-drenched shorts and shirt, it was clear the 76’ers had not gotten the message, were not defeated yet, at least not that night.

And it was all because of AI. Basically, he played out-of-his-mind, doing everything he did all season and more, taking it to the rack with fearlessness, ball-hawking on defense, breaking down defenders and causing uncontrolled chaos on offense. His brilliance willed them to overtime, where he hit the shot that has been since called the “Step Over,” a far-right baseline corner juke of a “j” over a fallen, “ankle-broke” Tyron Lue, the then back-up point guard for the Lakers, and now head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers. They were just two of the forty-eight points AI scored that night, butthe most memorable. Sportsmanlike or not, what AI had done, after hitting the j, was take a giant monster-truck stomp over Lue’s prostate body. I saw it not as bravado, but defiance, an unwillingness to concede to a more powerful enemy, a David vs. Goliath triumph (even though Lue was shorter). I stood, and with ziti sauce caked to my mouth, cheered like a maniac. Then I cried. I cried and cried and cried. And at the end, just like my run, what I felt was one thing: relief.

---

I finally did clean up that night: showered, went to bed, and set my alarm. There was supposed to be a special game the next morning, at nine am, and I planned to get there early, to warm up and be ready. But when I got there, and waited and waited, no one showed up. My information had been wrong. There was no game that morning. Rather than go back home and risk feeling depressed again, I ventured to the far right baseline corner and started to shoot jumpers, and, whenever one hit the mark, I emulated AI, lifting my leg up and stomping over my imaginary, but very real foe, feeling, at least for that moment, defiant and in control.

John A. McCaffrey grew up in Rochester, New York, attended Villanova University in Philadelphia, and received his MA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York. His stories, essays and book reviews have appeared regularly in literary journals, newspapers and anthologies. His debut novel, The Book of Ash, was released in 2013. His collection of short stories, Two Syllable Men, was published by Vine Leaves Press in 2016. John is also a Development Director for a non-profit organization in New York City, and teaches creative writing at the College of New Rochelle's Rosa Parks Campus in Harlem. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey. Find him @jamccaffrey.

Almost

by Annie Dawid

        By that time, I’d broken almost every rule I would break. The smart girl from the “good” family,” I’d slept with men of every race, creed, and color. Most every drug had entered my lungs, my nose—though not my veins. I’d attempted suicide—“unsuccessfully”—more than once, and I’d learned the art of trichotillomania, though I had no name at that time for such transgressions of the body. “You use yourself as an experiment,” said my psychiatrist, years later. But he didn’t know the depth of the experimentation undertaken preceding my arrival in his office.

Almost. In my twenties, grad student by night, with a boring day job to pay the bills, the damage I had yet to do remained unfathomed. So when Victoria said, "Want to try heroin,” at first I thought she was kidding, because all I’d ever known her to do was drink. A sister-student in my Shakespeare class, we partied together on weekends, our entertainment consisting of binge drinking at bars, sometimes followed by crazy eating if we found ourselves without men by night’s end. More than once, we concluded the party at Clown Alley at two in the morning, scarfing tuna melts with fries, smearing them into our hungry, gaping maws, so drunk and messy the owner threatened to kick us out.

Victoria was heavy, buxom, blond, innately savvy about how to catch and hold men's attention. She wore short black dresses with black heels, her shapely legs exposed. At the same time, she remained phenomenally insecure: born into a family of drunks, both terrified and certain she was heading the same way. By the time we met, she'd had three or four abortions, all of which she agonized over profoundly, all originating in drunken one-nighters with strangers, hoping for connection, love, affection—everything every one of us needs. Guilt over abortion drove her to the bottle, and the pattern continued.

I possessed my own coping mechanisms, coming from a family of crazy people. We are crazy all on our own, without recourse to any genre of mind-altering substance, legal or otherwise. We're Jews, not known for drinking as a culture, though of course Jewish drunks exist, including my sister, though I did not know of her drinking then. Though I drank, fish-like, with Victoria, I remembered reading in the poet John Berryman's unfinished memoir, Recovery (unfinished because he threw himself off a bridge in the frozen heart of a Minneapolis winter while composing it), “Jews don’t drink.” He hoped to make lots of Jewish friends in the asylum because he believed they never became alcoholics; perhaps he thought they were genetically incapable of it. I must have believed it too. In my family, my mother, my brother, myself—all of us managed to get ourselves committed to psych wards—voluntarily or otherwise—without benefit of any substance at all. Even pot propelled my brain to scary precipices of heightened realities: the congenial park down the street metamorphosed midday into a labyrinthine forest, the two blocks between my best friend’s house and mine transformed themselves into a terrorizing odyssey, rapists waiting under every tree. I always told people, when they asked me to share a joint or drop acid, “My mind is a scary enough place all by itself, but thanks anyway.”

“Heroin can’t be compared to any other drug,” Victoria insisted. We'd just snort it—nothing more. In fact, she said the high was softer and gentler than any drug I had experienced. A bit like the best drunk, only it didn't make you want to eat. In fact, you didn’t think about food on heroin. For heavy women, this aspect held much appeal.

The night she introduced the idea of heroin to me, Victoria brought along her ex-boyfriend, conveniently accompanied by a friend for me as well, so there were four of us, neatly coupled. Her ex, Bill, now just a friend, had become a dealer, too deep in his habit to be sexual.

It made sense that Victoria would be attracted to heroin, alone among other drugs, for it shed an otherworldly light, associated in her mind with literati in London’s fin-de-siecle opium dens, formally dressed for their dreamy reach into oblivion. I, too, was drawn by that vision, summoned by The Picture of Dorian Gray we’d read in class together. Did I say no? I did not. I was curious. If she had suggested using needles, my refusal would have been automatic. But snorting? What harm could that do?       

Bill brought the heroin along to our meeting at the Savoy Café in North Beach. Each of us paid him twenty dollars. Stan, his friend, was broke after our first glass of wine, so I ended up paying for “my date” and I to drink several rounds.

Victoria had snorted heroin before, though Bill had advanced to the needle. After hours at the Savoy, drinking red wine, Bill said we should go out back. The rain had cleared, and we could see stars in the San Francisco sky, not a common occurrence, these shivers of unexpected light. I sat on a damp curb, waiting passively for the event to unfold, a spectator at my own life.       

Stan unfolded a rectangle of aluminum foil, Bill provided the heroin and the lighter, and we began. The longer we sat there, the brighter the constellations glowed. Doubtless my ass was damp and stiff from the wet cement, but I remember none of those details. Apparently, it never crossed my mind that we could get caught, sitting on the curb snorting heroin. I remember laughing, though, delighted by whatever delights one in a state beyond drunkenness, Victoria and I all over giggles, while the men remained quiet.

I only managed a few snorts before I said I’d had enough. “More for me,” said Stan. He was bland, a man whose sole outstanding descriptor was his position as a gardener at a golf course, which meant he had to be on the greens at six a.m. the next day. I didn’t care about him. Would I spend the night with him? I didn’t think about it. The moments there on the curb, observing the stars where they didn’t usually exist, constituted an isolated envelope of bliss. At once, I understood the allure of the drug: the idea that one needed nothing else in the world.

Victoria never told me how sick I would get.

A purposeful evasion, a convenient elision of truth? That night, in the gardener’s basement apartment, I woke in the darkness and needed to vomit, but I didn’t know where I was or who he was or where a bathroom might be. He was yelling some sort of direction to a toilet, but I couldn’t understand his words. I threw up on the floor, the carpet, and finally in the kitchen sink. Stan was furious. At five, when the alarm went off, he told me I had to leave; a key was required to lock the apartment door, and he had no extra. Somehow, I called for a taxi, still dry heaving, my brain now recoiling from what I had done to it.

The cab driver surveyed me, assessed the damage, and said nothing all the way to my apartment, me with my head out the window in case I got sick again. The sun shone, and I saw people waiting for buses on corners, though the sight of life going on hurt my eyes. It took days to recover, my head ringing with pain, whoever I was more disordered and directionless than ever before.       

Was that night the nadir of my existence? Drunk, stoned on heroin, in bed with a stranger and puking all over the floor? How deeply I descended in that man’s apartment, my body beyond my control, my soul atomized into particles. I had sunk, evidently, to my intended destination.

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” wrote Eliot in “The Wasteland.” I remembered the Hebrew injunction: “Tikkun olam,” to heal and restore the world by finding the pieces of holiness god had dispersed all over the world. Slowly, I gathered my fragments, harvesting bits of self scattered like shards of light everywhere.

Annie Dawid teaches creative writing at Arapahoe Community College in Denver. She has taught workshops at the Taos Summer Writers Conference and at the Castle Rock Writers Conference. She retired as Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Lewis & Clark College. Recent awards include the Orlando Flash Fiction Prize, the Dana Award in the Essay, the Northern Colorado Award in Creative Non-Fiction and the New Rocky Mountain Voices Award in Drama. She has published three books of fiction: York Ferry: A Novel, Lily in the Desert: Stories, And Darkness Was Under His Feet: Stories of a Family.

Goldenrods

by Annalise Mabe

  

Poppy showed us where the safety was. How to hold real still while your finger pulled the trigger. We shot at the wall of slate across the river that rose high, shouldering trees that reached the sky. And then into the muddy bank on our side, tracking the bullets through their tunnels. My sister and I ran to pick up the flattened bullets, mined gold—a Kentucky rush.

---

Nana told me how they met:

Poppy was Cecil then, at twenty-five. 5’7” in a white polo shirt and khaki pants he had cut off as makeshift shorts, leaning up against the rust-metal chain-link fence outside the local pool. Nana was Sylvia at eighteen with brown-baked freckle arms. In white and red nylon she watched water for days in hot-as-hell Elizabethtown. As the lifeguard on duty, she taught the kids how to swim. Cecil wanted to check her out. This was after their phone call, but before their blind coffee date at the Dairy Queen.

            Nana told me how cool she thought he looked. I can hear her eighteen-year-old thoughts seeing him for the first time.

“You looked like a drowned rat” he said later over quarter coffee.

---

No one tells you what they’re really thinking, or what they really remember. I would tell you that when he died, I thought of the words “hard working,” and “loving.” I would tell you that I remembered the Thanksgiving when he baked the bread rolls on the same cooking sheet that he used to dry jalapenos. That when we bit into them, our mouths were on fire; that we laughed once we figured out why.

I wouldn’t tell you that when he died, I didn’t cry right away. That the first memory my mind could procure was when I begged for a Frosty from the backseat, how he said your tastebuds’ll freeze; what’s the point. 

Or that I was instantly small again, looking up at the glass thermometer on the bookshelf with its lovely red inside that he said not to touch because you’ll break it. The one that I touched anyway, and broke, making the glass and mercury glitter on the floor.

---

When he was twenty-one, Cecil worked the pumps at a gas station that stacked cans of oil into a promotional pyramid. It was 1957. Before Sylvia, before my Dad, before my Uncle, before my sister and me, before any of us.

His cousin, Walter Barnes, came in piss drunk at 6 PM as the sky was just melting into pools of florescent soft-serve. Walter was giving everyone a hard time and stumbled into the oil cans that crashed down and rolled until stopped by some inevitable corner shelf of instant soup. Cecil had a temper and didn’t put up with shit. He took his hot coffee, tossing it on Walter, who, offended, left but only to return, swinging the glass doors open with a 38 caliber pistol.

---

Their backyard in Florida was a forest for young grandkids.

It was my sister’s turn to seek. I ran, her Mississippis calling out behind me. I saw the evergreen-painted shed with its white trim. I grinned. It was the best hiding spot, so long as she wouldn’t hear the metal door screech open.

There was a ramp to the entrance, so I teetered up. I opened the door to the spider dwelling dark, the smell of gasoline from the lawn mower that enveloped my body. It was just like the smell of their garage where all the wrenches, screws, and hammers hung.

---

The front of the newspaper read:

“1957. YOUTH SHOT WITH PISTOL IN CRITICAL CONDITION”

Cecil was twenty-one, his cousin Walter Barnes—22. Walter was already on probation on a safe-breaking charge when he thought it wise to blow a bullet through Cecil’s side. Cecil lay on the gas station floor holding his stomach, waiting for the ambulance that threw fits, stuck behind a train on the tracks that blocked its way into town.

Finally, at the hospital, the doctor reported: the bullet missed your vital organs.

The paper concluded: “Barnes is being held as a probation violator. No charge has been placed.”

---

I had a recurring nightmare as a child. Nana and Poppy’s evergreen shed in the backyard was a growing monster with trim, white teeth. It didn’t move, but it loomed in the corner of my eye, silent and watching. I always have nightmares and I always remember.

---

In 2008, Poppy was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at seventy-four. Meanwhile, at eighteen, migraines led me to a doctor who suggested an MRI. He called Mom and I back to the clinic after the brain scan to go over the results:

“We found something, but we don’t know what it is. It’s a suprasellar lesion, or a mass. We’ll have to do more scans.” Mom didn’t say a word for almost a minute.

---

           

“What did you all do for fun when you were dating?” I asked Nana one night.

“Well,” she said, “Cecil liked to hunt for groundhogs and drive us through the rural roads on his motorcycle. He’d take out his rifle and kill them—the farmers wanted them killed! Those groundhogs would eat up the vegetables and dig holes the perfect size for a horse or cow to put its foot into ... anyway, we’d swim in the quarry. I’d collect goldenrods. The summers were beautiful. Just beautiful.”

“And later, when you had Dad and Uncle Gary?”

“Oh, we travelled. Poppy saved so that we could see every state and the provinces in Canada, too. Since he was a math teacher, he made a modest salary but he was frugal. He said to spend your money on experiences. Not things.”

I wondered what it was like, driving around the country every summer.

“He had wanderlust. He wanted to see all these different places.” Nana said. “I was content with my immediate boundaries, but he, here’s this guy who was raised in Podunk Kentucky who was driven to drive everywhere. That was him. That wasn’t me. I was just along for the ride.”

---

Memorial Day, 2009, the end of my senior year in high school. My mysterious brain lesion remained under watch while I distracted myself with beach days with my best friend.

Driving back with the windows down, my phone vibrated in the cup holder. Dad’s name scrolled across the screen.

“Hello?” I said, rolling the windows up.

“Hey, Anna,” Dad said softly. He couldn’t say it, almost. “Poppy passed.”

“What? How?” I asked. I regretted it, instantly.

“He took his life,” Dad said. Then he was quiet. I saw him standing somewhere, probably at Nana’s, crying quietly, trying not to let me hear.

---

In college, I started working at a bakery, frosting red velvet cupcakes, our best seller, with cream cheese frosting. We had rows and rows of jarred, dyed sugars for sprinkling and decorating.

One day, I scraped the sides of a mixing bowl with a rubber spatula, slow to let the batter fold over itself, dripping like syrupy paint. I got lost thinking of the quick, spiraling events that had happened just three years ago. Of what he said to Nana the night before, “things he never told anybody.” How Nana told me that one night, he steadied his weak arms on the kitchen counter and said: “I didn’t think it would be like this.” Of the glass thermometer with its mercury inside, like the red on his chair, like the batter I made while I worked and forgot where I was.

---

I was told the details later. Poppy sent Nana to the store to buy flour, or flowers. I can’t remember.

I imagined, in the empty house, he shuffled his sandaled feet, his chemoed body to the utility closet. I don’t know if that’s where the gun was, but this is what I pictured. I didn’t want to picture it, but I did.

I saw him outside, alone, sitting in a lawn chair on the grass, the evergreen gasoline shed looming in the back. I wondered how many minutes he let pass. I wondered if he was scared or if he couldn’t wait.

---

Six years later, I will tell you the truth.

I’ll tell you that Poppy was a quiet man. That I don’t remember him being sentimental, or talking much at all. That when he did, it was useful. A teaching moment so that I’d remember the algebra equation and the balance on each side of the equal sign, or how to set a fish hook. That I’m proud of him for taking control of his life, even if that’s a thing I’m not supposed to say.

Annalise Mabe is completing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of South Florida where she writes nonfiction and poetry. Her work has been featured in The Offing, Animal, Proximity Magazine, and is forthcoming in Hobart. She reads for Sweet: A Literary Confection and is a poetry editor at Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art. She also teaches English composition and creative writing at USF.