I.

Juan Manuel Ortega Alfonso Rodolfo Guererra rolled into town during the driest weeks of August, the dog days, when even children stayed indoors because it was too hot to play outside. He had traveled for weeks across the desert, stopping at whatever villages he encountered, but no place had given him reason to stay. Most of his life had transpired that way. His horse, Prudence, who had carried him faithfully for some time, was a breath away from the glue factory. The evening before he arrived, as he sat on a hilltop overlooking the town, the old mare knelt down and refused to get up. The next morning he left her carcass lying beneath the juniper tree and walked into town, hat pulled high away from his face to show he didn’t mean any trouble.

The streets were empty; the morning sun baked everything into a hard-packed crust. A barber sat in the shade outside his shop, one leg crossed over the other. “Well,” he said as the stranger walked by, “you look like you could use a shave and a haircut. What’s your name, traveler?”

“I am Juan Manuel Ortega Alfonso Rodolfo Guererra.” He wiped sweat from his brow. “You can call me Rodolfo.” His family had a tradition of long names, and he felt a duty to uphold the custom. One of his names had been his grandfather’s, another his father’s, but since he’d never met either of them, he didn’t know which ones were theirs. Manuel, he suspected, was some kind of religious label, given to him as a small child. In fact he guessed that his first four names were all tributes of one kind or another, and that only “Rodolfo” belonged to him and him alone. The barber eyed him as he stood in the street.

“Well, Rodolfo, a shave might cool you off.”

“No, sir, I am calling you dirty. You need a bath. Come into my shop and get a good washing.”

‟I’ve no need of a shave,” Rodolfo said. “What I need is help with my horse. She died last night, and I want to dispose of her properly. I can’t bear the thought of her rotting in the sun.”

“Normally you would talk to the sheriff about it,” the barber said. “But he’s away chasing some outlaw. I doubt anyone would help you in this heat. You might as well come inside and let me trim that mop.”

Rodolfo smiled, tipped his hat, and continued.

He found a shopkeeper willing to loan him a shovel and spent most of the afternoon digging a grave for poor old Prudence. Finally, with the sun low in the sky, he found himself trudging back through town, the shovel hung over his shoulder like a bindle. Dogs emerged from under the porches where they slept all day, and now slunk around Rodolfo’s feet.

“They recognize one of their own,” the barber called as Rodolfo passed. The man sat in the same spot as before. He pinched a cigar between thumb and forefinger.

Rodolfo narrowed his eyes. “Are you calling me a dog?”

“No, sir, I am calling you dirty. You need a bath. Come into my shop and get a good washing.”

Rodolfo had to admit that, after weeks of travel, he gave off a rather unpleasant smell. He climbed the steps, leaned his shovel against the porch railing, and went inside. The shop had only one chair, and a shelf with several pairs of scissors, straight razors, and tonic bottles of all sizes. The barber led Rodolfo straight to the backyard. He filled a tub with water and tossed Rodolfo a bar of soap and a scrub brush.

“That water is cold, but it will do the job. I have an old smock you can wear, instead of those filthy clothes.”

“I have no money,” Rodolfo said.

“You can sweep hair in my shop to make up for it. That way I can relax on the porch and watch the chickens peck the dust.”

Rodolfo saw how things would go. He would enjoy the cool of the barber’s shop for a few days, push a broom around the floor, maybe even earn more than what he owed for the bath. By the end of the week he could get an old horse, or maybe a mule if no one had anything else, and be on his way. He missed Prudence, but it seemed her death wouldn’t actually slow him down.

The barber had three customers the next day, ranch hands who eyed Rodolfo warily but didn’t ask any questions. He was used to such treatment. Men who led settled lives, who had jobs and wives and children, held no faith in the itinerant. Rodolfo swept their shorn hair while the barber sat on the porch smoking his cigars.

Late in the afternoon, a beautiful girl entered the shop. Rodolfo had never seen anyone like her. Black hair shimmered over her shoulders; her skin was brown and smooth, her eyes large and intelligent. The barber grinned as though he knew her—Rodolfo could do nothing but stare.

“Dulzura, what brings you into my shop? Surely you don’t want me to cut off that lovely hair.”

“A message from my father,” the girl said. “To remind you of the card game tonight. You wiped him out last week, and he wants to make sure you’re there so he can get revenge.”

The barber cackled. “Tell that old blowhard I plan on wiping him out again!”

Rodolfo stepped forward. “I am Juan Manuel Ortega Alfonso Rodolfo Guererra.”

The girl looked down quickly—but he had seen something in her eyes. A faint blush colored her face.

A few workers passed him, and he wanted to ask for a swig from their bottle, but knew how he appeared: a skinny, unshorn man in dirty pants and a second-hand smock.

The barber looked back and forth between them. “Tell your old man I’ll be there. Now you better leave my shop before I take the scissors to your hair and make a wig out of it!” The girl ran out into the street, leaving Rodolfo feeling as though he’d seen a miracle.

The barber didn’t waste any time. He pointed his shears at Rodolfo and said, “You’d better watch yourself. That’s the sheriff’s sister, and neither he nor anyone else in this town would take kindly to you bothering her.”

“It’s a free country, isn’t it?” Rodolfo said.

“Not for a wayfarer like you,” the barber said. “Besides, don’t you meet lots of women on your travels?”

“Not like her,” Rodolfo said.

That evening he carried the shovel over to the shopkeeper’s in hopes of returning it, but the store had closed for the night. The dogs came out again and followed Rodolfo through the town. A few workers passed him, and he wanted to ask for a swig from their bottle, but knew how he appeared: a skinny, unshorn man in dirty pants and a second-hand smock. He would do well to head for the coast as soon as possible.

Rounding a corner, he saw the girl walking ahead of him. She carried a bucket of water and her hips twitched from side to side. Pink and purple clouds stretched overhead as Rodolfo ran to catch up with her. The girl stiffened as she heard his footsteps, as though she already knew who it was, and when he reached her, she smiled up at him with the same blush she’d had earlier that day.

“I never got your name,” Rodolfo panted, though he had heard the barber say it.

“Dulzura.” The word was like music on her tongue.

“Dulzura,” Rodolfo said. “Meet me tonight.”

“I can’t,” the girl said. “Tonight is my father’s card game. I serve the men their whiskey.”

“Surely you can find some way,” Rodolfo said.

The girl scrunched up her face, thinking. Rodolfo fought the urge to wrap her in his arms, smother her with kisses.

“All right,” she said finally. “By the fifth or sixth hand, the men are drunk enough to forget about me. They start joking and arguing. I’ll slip away then. Meet me by the riverbank, beneath the willow.”

Rodolfo nodded and, still toting the shovel, went straight to the river, even though Dulzura wouldn’t arrive for hours. He sat on the hard clay banks and watched the water roll slowly past. Cracks split the earth high on both sides where the river used to flow. Rodolfo imagined it as it once was: a crisp, rushing torrent. It hadn’t rained in the desert in a long time.

A sliver of moon, thin as a hangnail, rose in the east and Rodolfo lay back to watch the stars—but a group of low-hanging clouds rolled in to obscure them. The moon shimmered in and out of sight. Rodolfo chewed on a stalk of grass and waited.

The first ominous rumbles had begun when Dulzura crept beside him, silent as a cat, in her white shift. Rodolfo felt a hand on his arm and there she was, her face wide and brown before his. Moonlight rendered her hair a dark shade of blue. “We can’t stay here,” Rodolfo said. “We’ll get wet.”

“I don’t care,” she breathed, and covered his mouth with hers. A throb shot through him, stronger than anything he’d ever felt. He crushed her to his chest, tore the white cloth away to reveal her young breasts, while her lips pulled and sucked at his own, her breath redolent of whiskey. He realized she was drunk but he didn’t care.

He was clutching her backside, moving her into position, when something kicked him in the head. Dulzura screamed. At first Rodolfo thought something had fallen from the tree, a branch or maybe a rock—but then he saw it again, coming at him, and he reached out and grabbed the thing: a boot.

Dulzura scrambled to her feet. “Father, no!” she cried, and Rodolfo knew exactly what had happened. He twisted the boot to one side, hoping to trip the old man, but it came off in his hand and the bare foot smashed into his face. Rodolfo tasted blood. Then a set of wiry fingers closed around his throat. He heard Dulzura screaming faintly, as though from far away, and wondered why her father hadn’t just shot him. He pried the fingers loose but they came back again. He clawed desperately at the old man’s eyes. The man made a guttural noise like an animal, and in the moonlight something flashed at his waist: a knife. Rodolfo looked around for something to fight with: the shovel.

He swung the broad end as hard as he could. The old man ran right into it, was lifted off his feet, and landed on the cracked earth. He did not move. In the distance, thunder rumbled.

Rodolfo stood wheezing. Blood dripped down his chin. Dulzura knelt beside her father and shook his shoulders. Then she turned to Rodolfo and said, “He’s dead, you bastard, you son of a bitch, he’s dead!”

Rodolfo looked into the man’s face. A red hole had replaced his left eye: Rodolfo had scratched his eye out. The shovel hadn’t left any marks, but the old man lay at an awkward angle and his one good eye did not blink. “How could that have killed him?” he said. “Just one hit….”

Dulzura covered herself with the white shift. “Murderer! I’ll see you pay for this!” She ran up the bank, away from the river, wailing “Murderer!” over and over.

“What was I supposed to do?” Rodolfo said. “Let him kill me?”

“He’s an old man!” Dulzura called over her shoulder. “You could have subdued him….” And then she was gone.

Rodolfo turned in circles. He didn’t have much time. Dulzura would sprint into town, gather all the men—the barber, the shopkeeper, the ranch hands—and they would hang poor Rodolfo before the sun rose. Well, he wouldn’t just give up. He had gotten out of scrapes before. He slid down the embankment, into the slow-moving water, and waded across. By the time he climbed up the other side, the heavens had opened up. The river became a churning, frothing monster, unrecognizable and uncrossable. He ran blindly through the rain. Lightning blasted the ground around him. The storm moved forward, washing away his tracks, and Rodolfo didn’t look back.

II.

From the precipice, the valley resembled a long green knife wedged into the earth. Broad leaves waved from stalks. Flowering plants abounded. Such a place could not be uninhabited. Rodolfo descended without knowing what to expect.

As he made his way down the path, he eyed clumps of bananas, nectarines, and other, unrecognizable fruits—but resisted the urge to pluck them. He didn’t yet know whose land he was on.

“Names are arbitrary,” the boy said. “Didn’t you know?” He gave Rodolfo an incredulous look. “You should have known that by now.”

A naked boy, dark as a plum, appeared in front of him. Rodolfo stopped. The boy was about ten years old, and quite unashamed of his nudity—so much so that Rodolfo’s own clothes felt onerous and cumbersome upon him. He looked Rodolfo up and down. “Who are you?”

“I am Juan Manuel Ortega Alfonso Rodolfo Guererra.”

“What a name!”

“Well,” Rodolfo said, “what is your name?”

“Patch,” the boy said.

“And how did you earn this name? You’re not wearing any patch that I can see.”

“Names are arbitrary,” the boy said. “Didn’t you know?” He gave Rodolfo an incredulous look. “You should have known that by now.”

“Listen, Patch,” Rodolfo said. “I’ve traveled a long way and I’m hungry. Whose bananas are these? I don’t want to be accused of theft if I take one.”

“You’re a strange one! The bananas are nobody’s.” With that, the boy ran away down the path. But his answer made Rodolfo uneasy and, despite his hunger, he left the fruit untouched.

As he walked he became aware of a steady noise, like a faraway train, that had been there the whole time. It grew louder and louder, until Rodolfo turned a corner and saw, a hundred feet below, a waterfall cascading into a clear pool, and people everywhere—naked, swimming, basking on the flat rocks. The little boy had already scampered down the path and dived into the water. He splashed around with some other children and seemed to have no intention, as Rodolfo had feared, of alerting the others to his presence.

By the time Rodolfo climbed down, the people had seen him and gathered around to ask questions. Their eyes were bright and quick. No one, from the infants to the elderly, wore a stitch of clothing. Rodolfo addressed them all: “I am Juan Manuel Ortega Alfonso Rodolfo Guererra. You may call me Rodolfo. I am a traveler, without money—without anything.”

A man clasped his hand. “You must be hungry. Take whatever fruit you like. It grows faster than we can pluck it.”

“Where do you come from?” a woman asked.

“I don’t come from anywhere.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Everyone comes from somewhere.”

“Not me,” Rodolfo said.

The little boy, Patch, reappeared. “Why do you wear those old clothes? Aren’t you hot?”

Rodolfo ignored him, turning to the fellow who had taken his hand. “How is it that such a place exists in the desert? Have I stumbled into the realm of fairies?”

The man laughed. “We are men and women, I assure you. Come rest in the shade. And young Patch is right—unburden yourself of those useless clothes. There is no modesty here.”

The people began turning away, bored already by the newcomer. Rodolfo reluctantly stripped off his pants and smock, but wasn’t sure where to put them. Their mere presence seemed to sully this green place. Finally he placed them under a palm tree and walked to the water’s edge. The pool was frightfully deep but clear all the way to the bottom: children sat down there, blowing bubbles. Rodolfo hadn’t bathed in weeks, since the barber’s tub in that dusty town, and found the water exhilarating. He swam for nearly an hour before climbing out and sunning himself on a grassy spot. He ate fruit until his belly hurt. Then he watched the people as they frolicked like birds.

One of the females approached him. Like Patch, she was plum-dark; her wet hair fell over her breasts; her limbs were long and lean, her eyes almond-shaped and unknowable. Rodolfo tried to hide his body’s reaction by rolling onto his side. But such a thing, in these circumstances, couldn’t be hidden.

“Why are you hiding over here?” the girl said. “You’re the new stranger, aren’t you?”

“I’m not hiding. I’m tired from my travels, that’s all.”

The girl squatted before him. “I know what you need.” Grabbing his hips, she rolled him onto his back and, with the help of a guiding hand, lowered herself onto him. Rodolfo gasped. Every encounter he’d ever had with a woman had been clandestine: rolling around in a hayloft somewhere, meeting by night, whispering in an absent husband’s bed. And they always clung to him, closed their eyes, cried out as though they were being taken away to another planet. But this woman kept her eyes open. “Do you like this?” she asked, as Rodolfo blinked up at her.

Towards the end, the girl gasped and said, “Mmmm,” but otherwise showed no reaction. She sat on Rodolfo until he slid out of her on his own. Then she lay beside him, reached for a branch overhead, and pulled down some engorged purple fruit Rodolfo had never seen before. She tore it in half and offered him a slice, which he devoured whole.

He knew that he could wake up at any moment, back in the desert, belly grumbling, dawn cracking its glaring eye over the horizon to start a new day of sweat and thirst and wondering if he’d find shelter before the vultures began circling. He fell asleep with those thoughts. But when he woke, he was still on the cool grass. Stars twinkled overhead. Someone was beating a drum.

“Come on,” the girl said. She took his hands and led him to a clearing, where everyone sat around a fire. An old man with a long beard pounded a drum. They were holding some kind of ceremony. The girl whispered, “We almost missed Lurid.”

“Lurid?”

“The storyteller,” the girl said.

The old man let one final drumbeat hang in the air before he started to talk. His voice was sonorous, mesmerizing. His hands moved as he spoke. “Once upon a time,” he said. “Once upon a time, there was a man….”

…a wanderer who roamed from town to town, village to village, forever seeking something he couldn’t name. He ate what he could find and slept where he fell. And then one day, in a desert town, he happened upon a girl named Sweetness. When the traveler saw her, something inside him changed. He knew it was time to stop—time to settle down. But the girl’s father was a jealous old hound, and didn’t want anyone to possess his daughter—least of all some wayfarer whom no one knew and no one trusted. The traveler burned for her badly—and you know how such feelings can drive a person crazy, how awful it is to have to suppress them. That’s why we live in freedom here in the valley: so things like this won’t happen. For what happened to our traveling hero can be blamed neither on him nor on his beloved Sweetness, but only on the trickeries of the universe—only on that unjust and capricious arbiter, Fate. One summer night, these two lovers, unable to contain their passions any longer, met by the riverbank. But the girl’s father lay in wait. What were his motives? How did he know of his daughter’s secret rendezvous? That is not for us to know. What matters, dear friends, is that the father attacked, and our hero fought back, and in his passion he killed the old man. The girl, poor Sweetness, ran terrified from the scene, leaving our hero to flee once more into the desert. His troubles, sadly, had only just begun….

The old man pounded the drum once, a signal that the story was over, and people began rustling. The girl yawned and stretched, ready to bed down for the night. But Rodolfo was terrified.

He approached the old man. “Where did you learn that story?”

The man’s shrugged. “From nowhere. From the sky. From my heart.”

“Tell me the end of it,” Rodolfo said. “I have to know what happens.”

“I don’t know, myself,” the old man said. “When I sit down tomorrow, the rest of it will arrive. You’ll have to wait until then. You’re new here, aren’t you?”

“I think I’m leaving soon,” Rodolfo said.

A woman tugged on his arm and asked if he would stay with her for the night. His body gave a sharp, visceral response, but the old man’s story had spooked him. He couldn’t stay here. He had to move on.

III.

When Rodolfo emerged from the valley into the red desert dawn, they were already waiting for him. A dozen men on horses, with shotguns. He recognized the barber, the shopkeeper, the ranch hands. In front sat a man with slits for eyes and shiny black hair, worn proud like an Indian’s. A sheriff’s star glittered over his breast. Rodolfo knew he was cornered.

He was silent, intelligent, the sort of man who frightened Rodolfo the most, because he managed to straddle the lives of the itinerant and the domestic.

As the horses circled him, he considered his options. He could run back down the valley and try to hide. But that would only delay the inevitable—and it would bring these gun-toting manhunters into direct contact with the paradise below. The people down there had no weapons. If they tried to defend Rodolfo, the posse would wipe them out. His conscience wouldn’t allow it.

Running across the open desert would be futile. He’d be shot down before he ran ten paces. As for fighting his way out—well, he’d never been a fighter. And he was unarmed.

He considered lying, insisting the sheriff had tracked the wrong man—but then the barber spoke up: “Yes, that’s him. He’s wearing my old smock.” At this, a sort of pride spiked up in Rodolfo. If asked, he could never deny his own name.

He stood with raised arms in the ring of horses. An air of authority pulsated from Dulzura’s brother, the sheriff. Rodolfo knew him immediately as a man of action. The ranch hands, on the contrary, were ignorant, uncomplicated men. Rodolfo had seen their type countless times. They held jobs and wives and they did not ask questions. But this sheriff was a different sort. He was silent, intelligent, the sort of man who frightened Rodolfo the most, because he managed to straddle the lives of the itinerant and the domestic. He used the town as his base, and he defended it with his life, but those very acts of defense led him to journey far from it, and learn about the world, and contemplate things during his lonely hours on horseback, just as Rodolfo had done all these years. Rodolfo saw all of this in a moment. They were alike in many ways, and Rodolfo clung desperately to this idea of solidarity—perhaps it could save his life.

“It is you, then?” the sheriff said, his voice scarcely more than a whisper, the noise of an eagle’s wings flapping far above the cracked earth. “Make your last action honorable, and own up to your name.”

Rodolfo lowered his arms and raised his chin. “I am Juan Manuel Ortega Alfonso Rodolfo Guererra.”

“You raped my sister,” the sheriff said. “You murdered my father.”

“No, sir,” Rodolfo said. “I have never taken a woman by force. Your sister came to me, breathless, in the night. Your father I killed in self-defense.”

The sheriff held his shotgun loosely across his saddle. His face was windswept, inscrutable. For the briefest of moments, Rodolfo felt a connection. He knew the man believed him.

“He was an old man,” the sheriff said finally. “You might have subdued him.”

“It was an accident,” Rodolfo said. “I swung with the shovel—I didn’t mean to kill him.”

“With my stolen shovel,” the shopkeeper said.

Rodolfo didn’t bother to reply. The time for arguments had passed.

The sheriff sighed. “The problem with you wayfarers is you have no responsibility. You drift through life seeking only pleasure. Life is not pleasure. Life is task.” He leveled his shotgun with one hand.

The barber looked uneasy. “Wait,” he said. “Is it right to just execute him here? We should bind him, carry him until we find a tree, do things the proper way. He swept hair in my shop for a day, after all.”

“They say unburied souls are doomed to drift through eternity,” the sheriff said. “But this man craves such a fate. To give him a proper execution, a proper burial, would be the worst kind of punishment. He rejected domesticity at every turn. He abandoned it, decidedly, in favor of a wandering existence. If we bury him, we confine him.” The sheriff spat. “I sympathize with you, stranger. Which rules the universe—order or caprice? Your death here may represent both. May you wander forever, without consequence.”

A loud bang roared forth from the shotgun, and at the same moment Rodolfo found himself lifted off his feet, hurled onto his back, just as Dulzura’s father had been. He tried to sit up but couldn’t. He spat blood into the sand. The horses clopped away, and Rodolfo looked up at the rising sun, the clear white sky, as the life drained out of him. He felt on the verge of something, some revelation, but his thoughts mingled, bled into one another, so that he couldn’t distinguish anything. And then he was walking, walking steadily across the desert, across the plains, away from this valley, away from any place, walking forever.

N. T. Brown lives in Orlando, FL, with his dog, Seven, and his cat, Mrs. Mia Wallace.

 

The first thing that anyone would notice was the sign. It was supposed to be a tourist trap, but nobody seemed to have put much effort into attracting visitors. The sign was just a rotted out piece of wood lying flat in the grass, a broken off stump planted in the ground next to it. The only way to tell where you were was the mailbox, which was strangely large and a bit rusted. It said “Leg Farm” on the side of it, which was the name of the place. There was no address that I could see.

I like farms. There’s something nice about places that are dirty, but where you’re totally unafraid of germs. I parked my car outside the front of the house. I got out, stumbled a little, and stretched vainly at a knot in my shoulder.

The house was a log cabin style place, the tractor shed was right next door but I couldn’t see the field. The friend who’d told me about this place said you could just go up to the door and ask the farmer if you could see the hay bale legs, and he would take you out back and show you, say something about them or not. So, I went up to the door; the knocker was shaped like a woman’s leg, rounded and smooth, even the toes were detailed. I pulled back the leg and let it kick the door. After a few seconds the farmer came out, he was wearing a wool shirt with no pattern on it and jeans. He had a deep tan and he was very thin and a little bit shorter than me.

“You must have come to see the legs.”

“Yes, I have… is that ok?”

He angled his head to the side, considered all of his words: “Oh yes you may, not too many people come to see those legs anymore.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand, towards the inside of his house, and then he put the hand into a pocket. “In the realm of agri-tourism, I am a bit of a one-hit wonder.”

He drank from his mug, looked at me, and said we should get to looking at the legs. He walked me out the back of his house.

The house had cavernous ceilings, a big open kitchen, and a giant window facing the road.

He walked towards the kitchen and asked me if I wanted coffee; I said no.

“Myself, I go through, seven, eight, nine cups a day, thirty years of farming and you start waking up at three in the morning all the time, and I never could get myself to bed at eight p.m.”

“This is a really nice house.”

“Thank you. My favourite part is how the upstairs is only half a floor, leaves you the living room ceiling way high, a bit like you’re in a cathedral.”

He looked up at the ceiling, and then used his French press to make a pot of coffee, poured some into a mug that didn’t have a picture or writing on it. He took a deep gulp, and didn’t make any of the various sounds people tend to make when they finish drinking.

“One thing about these wooden houses is they catch dust like you would never believe. Once when my wife was still around, we had this dog died, so I buried it in the yard over there. It was winter and the ground was really hard, so I only got the dog buried a little ways in. Well, come spring, I’m up early, I’m taking a leak and out the window I see a god damned bear digging up my dog. So, I go get my gun and I just lean out the bathroom window, because I have a clear shot there, I shoot the bear. The noise of that shot, the vibrations shook about… I’d say ten odd years of dust off every surface in the house. So, it’s a fucking sandstorm. My wife she was sleeping, she explodes out the bedroom, bursts through this dust storm in her own house, she takes a running leap right into my chest, knees out, kicked my ass good.”

We both laughed, he continued: “I got the bear though, perfect shooting. Mind you, Kathleen was not exactly impressed by that portion of it.” He moved his mouth around the word “portion” like it was a piece of wood.

He drank from his mug, looked at me, and said we should get to looking at the legs. He walked me out the back of his house. Outside he had a white plastic table on his porch and dirty white plastic chairs all around it.

I just had to lift my eyes a little bit to see the field. It was littered with hay bales. The rounded hay bale parts were smaller because he’d used the rest of the hay to make legs coming out the top. They weren’t at all what you’d expect a leg coming out of a hay bale to look like. They were all rounded and somehow almost looked smooth, more like rock than hay. The only thing that was inaccurate about them was that the toes were farther apart than a person’s toes. The feet maybe a bit wider, but still feminine, volleyball center feet. You could tell it was supposed to be a tall woman’s feet, and through their strange and painstaking details you could tell that they were all supposed to be one specific tall woman’s left leg.

All the way to the back of the field, these bales with perfect women’s legs coming out of the top. I couldn’t count how many there were and I didn’t really want to. All of a sudden it felt like something was crowding into my eyeball and it was hard to see. I kept trying to look at the field but all I kept catching were fractured, blackening pictures, disappearing. My legs were weak, and there wasn’t a cloud within miles, and sometimes unadulterated sky crept into my vision. The leg farmer eased me into one of the chairs asked if he could bring me a water. He came back with two mugs, his full of coffee, mine water.  He put the cup down next to me. I said thanks.

He sat in a chair across from me, leaned his chair onto its back two legs. I didn’t know what was going on with me. Nothing unexpected had happened, I knew about the legs in advance, but they’d still managed to overwhelm me somehow, just the visual fact of them had. I decided to try to at least be social. I pointed at the space under his chair.

“My grade five teacher told me I’d crack my head open if I did that.”

He nodded. “You were probably sitting near a bookcase, and in case you haven’t noticed there isn’t an edge for miles.”

I remember thinking that he was right, and trying to look at the legs, losing them even as I did it. He said: “I got another gun story for you. Kind of funny that I’d tell you both because they really are my only gun stories. My kid, he dances ballet now, out in Europe. When he was about twelve I took him to the skeet shooting tournament some of my friends hold every year. Well, my kid he’d never touched a gun in his life, I just took him because his Mom was out of the house and I wanted to go. So, anyways he starts shooting, and the kid is a prodigy. They fire one up and he nails it. They fire two up, he hits ‘em both. They fire three and bang, bang, bang. He ends up winning the whole tournament, first time he ever touched a gun. Afterwards we’re all walking up to the house and my buddy Dale. I’ll say that if you think I’m a redneck farmer… well you get the idea. He’s lived around here his whole life. And he sort of hates kids, so, when we’re all walking back he kind of starts walking with my boy and tells him he shoots well, and my kid says thanks. Then Dale asks: ‘So how often do you shoot?’ My kid says never, this was my first time. Dale is pretty stunned, so he asks what does the kid do? My boy he looks right up at him and says ‘I dance ballet.’ We just left Dale standing there looking after us, mouth all hung open.”

And I sat there quietly with him, as he chewed on what was either his lip or just air for a while. Then he rocked forward in his chair and said one perfect piece of nothing.

Andrew Battershill recently completed his M.A in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto under the mentorship of Pasha Malla. He is the Fiction Editor of Dragnet Magazine.  

Minny Glorious was well aware that many fervent readers of her client, Billy Benson, would probably apply the term “recluse” to the author’s public persona. While the term wasn’t used explicitly (perhaps out of politeness) in the letter that currently sat on the edge of her dark mahogany desk, she nevertheless read the official fan club’s letter as a sign of growing frustration among the author’s most dedicated admirers. The letter nearly pleaded with the PR woman to convince the reclusive Billy into eschewing his ways and making an appearance at one of their official readings of his work.  Though Minny imagined the small club to be a sad group of bored housewives, all in their early forties, who used the nausea-inducing erotica of Mr. Benson to get their kicks, she also recognized that such opinions should not and could not interfere with her reputation as a smart, talented businesswoman.

Minny didn’t understand recluses. She had come to believe through the forging of her own career that showing strength of character and forming a respected reputation was how one succeeded in life. She prided herself in her job as a PR woman, a determined, persuasive person who could use her talent to promote others and deliver the product that people wanted to see. Billy, however, was on a different wavelength. He never made public appearances, refused to have a Twitter account, Facebook, or personal website. There wasn’t even a photograph on the back of any of his books. Billy had made it increasingly more frustrating for Minny to do her job, the thing that she felt probably most defined her.

And there was a new wrench being thrown by Billy into the otherwise smoothly-running machine of Minny’s career. The author had recently shocked his agent, editors, and the rest of the staff at Snodgrass Press by presenting his next work as a children’s book. But what Minny found even more shocking than the bizarre twist of a lowly author of erotica writing a book for children was that it was good. The editors in the office were thrilled, already proclaiming Billy as the next Robert Munsch. It was that good. The marketing staff were caught up in the hype too, floating around some crazy idea of selling Billy’s books as a two-for-one deal for mothers—the erotic fiction novel for the mom and a picture book she could give her kid.

The book, titled Salmon Ella, was a cautionary tale for children about properly preparing food, and due to the protagonist being a young salmon named Ella, was garnering comparisons to the movie Finding Nemo. If it really was going to be as big as everyone was saying, Minny was going to have the problem of denying even more requests for appearances by the recluse behind the tale, not to mention the problems she’d have controlling the wildfire of rumours that would start about a man that released no information about his life. No doubt, the little fan club had heard about the new release and their frantic letter was reflecting anxiousness to meet the author before he became even bigger in the eyes of the public.

The editor just shrugged, now fiddling with a horrible mustard coloured tie. “Like I said, he just comes to us.”

Minny crossed one high-heeled foot gracefully over the other as she sat at her desk in the office building on Clancy Street that consisted of the headquarters for Snodgrass Press. She wore bright red lipstick and her dark brown hair was pulled up elegantly. She puffed thoughtfully on a menthol cigarette. Like all the other office buildings in the city, this was a non-smoking one, but Minny guessed correctly that none of the male editors who had desks in the nearby vicinity were of the kind bold enough to challenge the confident PR woman. So she sat there puffing idly, musing to herself about the Billy Benson problem. She slid a thumb over Billy’s fan club letter, feeling the paper as she thought. Then suddenly in one quick jerk, she crumpled it under her fingers. She’d had an idea.

Quickly, she stalked over to Bruce Therrien’s desk, surprising the stocky man.

“H-hey, Minny. What’s up?” he said putting down a sandwich of peanut butter and pickle.

Minny looked disgustedly down at his lunch. “I need to contact Billy Benson,” she said. Having tried to reach Billy in the past, Minny knew the phone number the publishers had for him would no longer be in service. He had no email. Friends who might know where he was? Forget it. She knew he mostly communicated by letter, but that would take too long this time. However, she assumed that one of those letters would have an address at which he could be found, and if anyone had a copy of one, it would be Billy’s editor of six years, Bruce Therrien.

From behind thick glasses, Bruce looked her up and down curiously. “Good luck with that… You know we only hear from him when he wants to talk to us.”

“Well, I need to talk to him now. I can’t wait around.”

“Okay, I’ve got the address where you can send your letter.” He started to dig around in his desk but Minny cut him off.

“Thanks. I’m not sending him a letter, but I’ll need the address to find him anyways.”

“Oh, you won’t find him at that address. Sure, he writes his letters from there,” said Bruce, scratching his goatee. “But it’s just a cover. I think one of his relatives lives there. A little old lady answered the door last time I tried it. Probably his grandmother or something.”

“So where does he live, Bruce?” She was getting impatient. Who did Billy think he was?

The editor just shrugged, now fiddling with a horrible mustard coloured tie. “Like I said, he just comes to us.”

Minny was aware of this too. For a moment she remembered the last time he’d come into the office. He was always wearing some dopey clothing, probably as a disguise. He was afraid of being recognized by “the masses,” and when asked why would mumble something like “Look at the way John Lennon went.” It was like he was a bad undercover cop, one who was completely oblivious to the fact that his camouflage just made him look more conspicuous. She remembered once he’d come into the office to see Bruce and had been wearing a hat with the largest brim she’d ever seen. The thing flopped messily in every direction. It looked like he’d bought it in a costume store, and he’d kept batting it around and shifting it this way and that on his head so that he could see. On top of that, Bruce had once told her that Billy mentioned he often did his shopping dressed as a woman.

Shaking her head at the ridiculous memory, Minny suddenly snatched the letter, which Bruce had produced from one of his desk drawers. She was going to find Billy, and at the very least this letter would provide a start.

Forty-five minutes later, Minny found herself in the dark, musty hallway of an old apartment building on Park Street. The door to 734 was faded, patches of dark green paint peeling off onto the grimy orange carpeting beneath. She could see Billy being here after all. Wouldn’t a reclusive author like to stay in a place like this where normal people would think twice about stepping inside? Well, whether he lived here or not, as Bruce believed he didn’t, this place had some connection to Billy if he was sending and receiving his mail here.

Minny straightened herself up, wishing, as always, to appear as professional as possible, and knocked firmly on the door.

Sounds arose from within, like that of a small dog or maybe mice scurrying around on laminate floors. She heard fumbling with a chain and suddenly the door swung open in one swift motion. There stood a very short elderly woman. Her eyes were slits and she was stooped in a way that craned her head towards the floor. Minny wasn’t even sure that the woman had looked at her.

“Come in, come in,” she mumbled.

“Uh… Alright.” Surprised, Minny took a cautious step into the doorway.

“Can I make you some tea?” the dry voice crowed at her. The face rose now to meet hers, but it was covered in such thick layers of wrinkles, Minny was apt to think there was no face there at all.

“Actually, I’m just here on a quick bit of business, you see.” The apartment inside was sparse; a green sofa with that plastic covering that old people kept on, scratched floors, no T.V., the smell of boiled vegetables.

Some of the wrinkles seemed to drop and widen. “Business?”

Minny suddenly realized how strange this meeting was. “I’m so sorry, I haven’t even introduced myself. My name is Minny Glorious.” She wondered why she’d been let in without even being asked that. Maybe the old woman was senile and thought she was someone else, or maybe just lonely and overanxious to have some form of company. “I work for Snodgrass Press, a publishing company. Do you happen to know Billy Benson?”

The old woman stood perfectly still for a moment, long enough that the fear she had had some sort of stroke began to fill Minny until she finally spoke.

“Billy? Are-are you his wife?”

“Oh-uh. No, no,” Minny stuttered, trying to stay clear of the mental picture that would conjure up. Minny wasn’t inclined to ever try to marry, though she could find men easily enough. Any husband would threaten her focus on her career, let alone Billy Benson. “Not his wife. I’m … just on business, like I said. So you know Billy?”

“Humph … He wouldn’t tell me if he was married anyway,” her voice came out low, like a strange growl. “I’m his grandmother and he won’t tell me anything.”

Taken a little off guard by the dawning accuracy of Bruce’s hunch, Minny pressed on.

“Well! You must be very proud of your grandson’s successes as a writer.”

“Humph … successes. Dirty … dirty. Back when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, that kinda trash wouldn’t get published,” mumbled the old woman.

“Do you see him often?”

“Comes here now and then,” she picked up a broom and began sweeping idly, though it was in a haphazard way that merely resulted in pushing a few existing piles of dust back and forth aimlessly.

“Picks up some mail. Never has any groceries for his old grandmother though. Won’t come and sit with me. Not an old bat like me. Doesn’t want to hear old Granny’s stories, just wants to write his dirty porn stories. Don’t know what’s wrong with the young people these days …” she lifted her face again, and Minny felt as though she were being stared at accusingly. She fought off the urge to appease the old woman and take a cup of tea. She wanted to get out of here as soon as possible.

Then suddenly Billy’s grandmother said, “Don’t know why he can’t pick up his damn mail at the hotel …”

Minny leaned forward anxiously. “Sorry, where’s that?”

The old woman’s small peepers seemed to close more tightly now as she scrutinized her guest. “Well … he don’t want visitors you see …”

“Oh, ma’am, I assure you Billy’s privacy will be respected. But I am on urgent business from his publishers and need to see him immediately. Would you mind telling me where I can find him?”

“Hmm … well what do I care, after all? No good grandson,” she mumbled again, continuing her sweeping. “Billy lives in a hotel on Solitaire Boulevard. Only child. Inherited some good money when his dad passed, see. His father was a tycoon in the board game business. He was such a schmuck …”

She continued to babble some inaudible nonsense about the father when Minny interrupted. “A hotel? What room? Can you tell me?”

“Huh? Oh, don’t know honey, don’t know. You’ll have to ask the manager. Billy says he’s the only one who’s in the know.”

The glow of the flashlight caught it all, slowly. Broken bottles, furniture piled upon furniture, trash, dirty clothes, books. It was like a war-torn battlefield littered with corpses.

In another twenty minutes, Minny was outside Hotel Solitaire. She had haggled only for a moment with the manager, who initially pretended not to know who Billy was. But once Minny flashed her business card, explaining that the situation was of dire importance, and using her God-given charisma on him, the manager decided promptly that it was his duty to help this damsel in distress and show her to Mr. Benson’s quarters.

Minny was led down the brightly lit hallway of the eleventh floor, passing a few identical heavy-looking blue doors with gold trim until they reached another emblazoned with the number 1103. The manager seemed to hesitate for a moment with the key in his hand. Was he questioning his loyalty to the author that resided inside? But what respect did he owe to a man who wouldn’t even share his life with his grandmother? He was probably just afraid of losing business, Minny decided.

“Maybe we should knock first?” Minny suggested.

“No,” said the manager, seemingly distracted by thought. “He won’t answer if you knock.”

Finally, the manager sighed, seemingly resigned to the action he was about to take and plunged the key into the lock, turning the handle at the same time. The door opened just a crack, but no light was emitted from the room behind.

“I almost forgot,” said the manager quietly, casting a nervous eye towards the crack. “You’ll need this.”

Out of the pocket of his jacket he pulled a small flashlight and placed it in Minny’s hands. Then quickly, he withdrew the key again, winked to Minny and skipped off down the hall.

Minny watched him go and then took a breath. With one hand, she slowly pushed the door further in. What emerged was only more blackness, and Minny began to understand the manager’s insistence on the flashlight. But no, wasn’t this nonsense? Billy was probably taking a nap and would turn on a light when he realized he had company.

“Mr. Benson!” she called. “Billy!”

Not wishing to intrude by venturing further, she knocked on the doorframe.

“What’s going on here?” a voice suddenly bellowed. “I thought we had an agreement, Kostopolous? Kostopolous?”

A great crash sounded next and Minny hastily fumbled for the switch on the flashlight. The sound of bare feet slapping and something being kicked accompanied the sudden appearance of light.

There were heaps upon the floor. Heaps and heaps. The glow of the flashlight caught it all, slowly. Broken bottles, furniture piled upon furniture, trash, dirty clothes, books. It was like a war-torn battlefield littered with corpses. She realized this was the home of someone who rarely left. A terrible smell assaulted Minny’s nose and she now found herself running her hands up and down the walls, frantically looking for a light switch.

She found one, finally, and the great mess of the room suddenly became altogether more real. She stumbled back a pace towards the door, which she’d let close behind her. There stood, among the mounds of rubbish, like the ruler of some decrepit kingdom, Billy Benson holding a blanket in front of what was his otherwise naked body, his skin white as a ghost against the black curtains that kept out any intrusion of daylight.

Minny screamed, throwing her hands over her mouth.

Billy looked at her, eyes bugged out. A long, mangy beard shot out tufts in wild directions, and his hair appeared to function by the same code.

“Who are you? Where’s Kostopolous?”

“Wh-who?”

“The manager. He’s the only one who could have let you in!”

“I-I told him I had to speak to you. I’m Minny Glorious, I do PR for authors with the company who publishes your work, Snodgrass Press. We’ve met before, once or twice maybe.”

Billy narrowed his eyes. “We’ve never met. I’m going to have to have a good chat with Kostopolous …”

“Right, uh… okay,” Minny shook her head clear and straightened up. What way was this to conduct business? “Mr. Benson, would you put some clothes on please? We need to discuss your career.”

“I told them I only discuss business by letter.”

“This needs to be taken care of now.”

Minny’s tone made Billy freeze, look at her, bushy eyebrows raised. There was silence for a moment and then he said, “Fine,” and took a seat on the couch behind him, indicating for her to find a piece of furniture to do the same.

Minny moved further into the room now, stepping carefully around the rubbish that lay around. She went through a stack of old chairs which were piled close to Billy’s couch, looking for one that had all four legs fully functional. Finally she found one and pulled it out, seating herself across from Billy, who looked particularly ridiculous, watching her with his hands folded over his lap, which was in turn covered by the raggedy yellow blanket he held.

Minny tried to smile but the ridiculousness of the situation, her incredulousness at the person who sat across from her, not to mention the smell, made it impossible to do so.

“So,” Minny began, taking a breath, trying to focus. “Mr. Benson, you’ve delivered us a new book. A children’s book… They say it’s going to be big.” She gestured with her hands. Every word, every movement felt silly right now. She couldn’t take it.

“How,” she tried to stop herself. “How can you live like this?” she suddenly blurted. “How do you expect this new book to be a success when you live like a disgusting, filthy—do you not care what they think about you? What anyone thinks about you? This new book is going to garner you a whole new fan base, there are fans already who are nearly pleading with me to meet you. But I can’t—” she gestured towards him. “I can’t show them this. Hell, they don’t even need to meet you. They just need something. Give them something. Give me something.”

A slight smile was forming in the corners of Billy’s mouth. It was hard to tell under the beard, but it was there.

“Let me explain something to you,” his voice was quiet, low. He looked deep into Minny’s big dark eyes, heavy with eyeliner and shadow. His own eyes were puffy, red around the edges, crusted with sleep in the pockets that were carved close to the bridge of his nose. “We all exist in the world as two people: the person who we know ourselves to be and the person who others think we are. It is my belief,” and he held up a finger scientifically, “that if you let the latter dictate who you are, ‘you’ actually cease to exist.”

“Now,” he continued calmly, and Minny stared at his grimy blanket disgustedly. “There are those who spend a lot of time wishing to have their identity validated by others, who feel the need to live the way others do…” He gestured around him at the dilapidated den, indicating that he was the opposite of such people. “Who feel the need to share everything about themselves ‘out there,’ as if their thoughts and feelings aren’t real unless somebody notices them. These are the people that want a Facebook page, or a Twitter account. What those people really need,” he leaned forward and his grin became broader, more apparent beneath the scruff, “is a fucking diary.”

He settled back, satisfied it seemed, crossing a leg across the other one and opening the blanket just a tad too much for Minny’s comfort. “So the answer to what you’ve come here to ask me, to plead with me to do some sort of publicity for my latest work, is no. I’m quite satisfied to remain an anomaly. People can think what they want about me. But I have no need to feed them facts about my life. For what purpose? For them to distort those facts? For them to dig so deep into their conception of my life, that I end up heeding them and losing my own conception of myself? Absolutely not. It’s not worth it.”

There was a stack of ratty-looking books amid a tower of old take-out containers next to Minny, and she picked one of the books out with two fingers, trying not to touch it too much.

“Well Mr. Benson, if that’s your choice, then all right. I have another idea that perhaps you’ll be okay with. The other choice is that you publish this new book, Salmon Ella, under a pen name. Then you let me control that name. I’ll create the person behind it, make up their likes and dislikes, make them a website, offer some fan trivia. Of course, that man won’t make any appearances either, but at least this way there’ll be some control to what I can do with their public image and it won’t be your life being put out there. It’ll be some imaginary figure. You don’t have to be involved. Just give me your consent, and you’ll have your book published and get your royalties without having to deal with any fame, since that’s not what you want. Right?”

Billy looked at her for a moment. “If that’ll make your life easy, ma’am, then do it. I couldn’t care less.”

Minny got up, anxious to leave the stench and filth of the room. She held the book in her hands still, a copy of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. She had one more thing to say before she left this cuckoo’s nest.

“Thank you for accepting, Mr. Benson. I’d like to say, also, that your philosophy is very interesting, but don’t you too feel the need to live like others? I mean all this,” she gestured around the room, “All this is just to look the part so to speak isn’t it? To look like the mad artist, the reclusive author? Like Salinger, or Proust, or Pynchon? I think you do care about what people think. I think that you want them to think of your reclusiveness as some romantic mystery, as some sign of genius.” She threw the book down onto the pile she had pulled it from, and the whole thing toppled over.

“Goodbye, Billy.”

*     *     *

The pseudonym plan began well at first. Billy had written to the publishers that he wished for Salmon Ella to be published under the name “Eric Yahtzee,” and Minny went to work creating a website and short biography for the “new” author. No one in the office suspected Minny had anything to do with Billy’s choice to publish the story under a different name. It made sense considering the marked contrast between the nature of this new work and his previous books.

After some time, however, Minny found herself exhausted at trying to form the character of Eric Yahtzee. She had Twitter accounts, social networking pages, and she was finding it difficult to come up with new things for Yahtzee to say. She became aware of inconsistencies with the types of attitudes he displayed. She began to liken herself to an author writing a character sketch and finding it impossible to make the person rounded, interesting, or real. It was more work than she’d bargained for. She tried to get into the history of her author, thinking of what kind of family he might have grown up with, when she suddenly began thinking about Billy’s poor old grandmother. And she had a new idea.

It was then that she began visiting the old lady at her cramped little apartment in downtown, pretending to be paying friendly visits, saying how she felt bad for her that Billy never visited and that she was so lonesome. And while she was there, she would ask about Billy, what his life was like growing up. From these visits, she built the biography, the character of Eric Yahtzee. Granny was feeding her the material the whole time, and Eric Yahtzee truly did start to become Billy Benson.

Minny was feeling good, the promotion for the new book was doing well and her pride in her cunningness and in her career was refreshed. She smoked happily at her desk on Friday afternoon, congratulating herself on a job well done. Stretching her shoulders and neck satisfactorily, she settled back in her chair, planning to take it easy until 5’o clock, a gift to herself.

Suddenly there was the sound of frantic feet rushing behind her, and, springing up to fix her posture, Minny quickly swiveled around on her chair. It was Bruce Therrien, sweaty, mouth quivering. “You’ve got to fix this!”

“What? What?”

He looked at her, eyes big. He began pacing. “No, no … This was supposed to be a big one. A big seller. You haven’t heard?” He stared.

A knot formed in Minny’s stomach. “Heard what?”

“Billy tried to publish a short story with a men’s magazine…”

“Right. So? He’s writes erotic fiction.”

Bruce started pacing again, glanced at her nervously now and then. “You didn’t hear? Well, it looks like Billy sort of combined his talents for erotica and children’s tales into one story … the magazine was outraged. Called it a monstrosity of nonsense and pedophilia. And the worst part … he tried to publish it under Eric Yahtzee …”

Whatever had formed itself in Minny’s stomach now plummeted to the bottom.

“They recognized him as the author of the much-hyped Salmon Ella, and they’re badmouthing him in the press. For a children’s author, this is devastating.”

Minny stared. She felt defeated.

“Billy wrote. Probably trying to explain. It’s for you.” Bruce handed over a thin piece of lined paper filled with Billy’s spidery handwriting.

She read it over. Billy had a reason for his blunder, but Minny was sure it wasn’t the ridiculous one she saw in front of her now. Billy claimed to have mixed two stories he was working on, sending them to the magazine one late night after ingesting LSD because “that’s something Ken Kesey would have done.”

The book she’d thrown at him. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was a clue. She’d been sabotaged. He probably didn’t like her using the bits about his own life for Eric Yahtzee’s character. And how had he known? Paid poor Granny a visit finally? Or had he been keeping tabs on what she was writing?

It didn’t matter. She had damage control to do.

Tristen Matthew Fournier grew up in the frigid environment of Yellowknife in Canada’s far North. Finding that typing warmed his numb and frost bitten fingers, Fournier set out to be a writer of prose fiction and poetry, exploring human nature while blending humour and philosophy. This led him to study at Concordia University in Montreal where he has completed a degree in creative writing. He has previously published with Buttontapper Press.

 

The thing about Danny MacIsaac was that he was average. Average weight,  average height, average brown hair. He played hockey and baseball but he was never captain of the team or Most Valuable Player or anything. At school he half-slumped in the middle of the middle row, as if to mirror the position of his grades on the bell curve: most teachers (hell, most people) forgot about him as soon as he left their field of vision.

Danny’s family was also considered average. He had a younger brother named Ian. His father Billy D. was lazy and he liked his beer, but not more than most men, and his mother Willena was a regular mom: she worked, cleaned the house, cooked dinner and played bingo.

Danny liked being average. Some people wanted to stand out but not him. When you stood out, people talked about you and gave you stupid nicknames. He knew. It had happened to him once.

 * * *

A spring evening just like summer near the end of Lent. Danny and his mom were walking home from his grandmother’s place at the units, where he had tried to sell some tickets for a cellophane dinner for his hockey team. They stopped in at Footsie’s for a loaf of bread and a treat. Danny looked longingly at a bag of ketchup chips (he’d given them up for Lent) until he spotted the pink plastic ice-cream cone leaning behind the counter. But as Footsie’s didn’t have any ice-cream yet he settled for one of the two root beer popsicles left over from last summer.

They walked in the just-like-summer evening, he and his mom, past houses whose windows were still propped open with bottles and sticks and whatever else was handy. Which is why they heard this as they arrived at the door of their company duplex:

“I made the friggin’ thing; you eat it.”

“You know I hate fuckin’ onions.”

“I’m not askin you to fuck ’em, just to eat ’em.”

She had a voice like the horn on an eighteen-wheeler and if she wasn’t going up one side of Donnie Pepsi and down the other, she was hollering on the phone or at her kids.

Donnie Pepsi and his wife, Joleen. Now there was a pair. Donnie was a liar and a crook but Joleen was the real entertainment. She had a voice like the horn on an eighteen-wheeler and if she wasn’t going up one side of Donnie Pepsi and down the other, she was hollering on the phone or at her kids. In the summer, people knew exactly how many times a week the Pepsis did it because you could hear Joleen clear across the street. They were as good as Days of our Lives. And Danny’s mother could not get enough of them.  She watched all their comings and goings and analyzed every twisty turn of their complicated existence.

‟There was a woman over there today with a briefcase” she’d say to Billy D. over the shake and bake chicken. ‟Looked like Tony Cameron’s sister, the one works for the welfare. Three o’clock in the afternoon and Herself  still in her nightgown. Josephine is staying with them again. The old man must be on a toot.”

After dark Willena often took her knitting upstairs and sat on a chair beside her bedroom window. With the lights in the room turned off she could see right into the Pepsis’ kitchen and living room (they never closed the curtains or washed them that she could tell) and during the warm months she could sometimes even hear what they were saying. So when Danny came home with his root beer popsicle that night, he gave its twin to Ian, dropped the bread on the counter and went straight upstairs.

“Don’t be drippin’ that all over the couch,” Billy D. said to Danny, not taking his eyes from the television screen. And after a few minutes‚ “Where’s your mother at?”

“I dunno.” Danny said.

When the next commercial came on, Billy D. pushed down the lever on the La-Z-Boy, hoisted his big belly out of the chair and made his way up the stairs. Danny heard the toilet flushing, the creak of footsteps in the hallway and down the carpeted treads, the refrigerator door opening and closing.

“Tell you what, Bud,” his father said when he returned to the living room. He was twisting the cap off a bottle of Keith’s. “How would you like to make a loonie?”

By suppertime the next day it was all over town how Danny had gone up the stairs quiet like, pushed open his parents’ bedroom door, stuck in his hand and flicked on the light switch. Hard to say who was more surprised Joleen or Willena or the kid himself. He must be some stupid, I guess. Willena’s mad. Don’t think Billy D’ll be getting any for a while, ha ha ha.

The name Danny Lightswitch was floated for a day or two but then someone set fire to the canteen at the arena and both the incident and the nickname were forgotten. Since that time, Danny did everything he could to stay under the radar.

So here he was, eight uneventful years later, so normal, so unremarkable, so friggin’ average that he was practically invisible as he stood on the crumbling sidewalk  in front of Cornell’s Insurance after school. He was with Jonathan MacDonnell and Corey Deveau, smoking, hawking gobs of spit and talking about the semi-finals and horses and stuff. It was bright and sunny and warm and the whole town was outside. Cars and pick-ups and the same two motorcycles went up and down Central Avenue and parked in front of the liquor store and the Co-op. Pairs of girls paraded by in sandals and shorts and summer tops.

Danny was coming down with a cold, so in between Export A’s he sucked on some cherry cough drops. He had just popped one in his mouth when three things happened: Collie MacMaster stopped to bum a smoke, a pulp truck went by in a blast of dust and flying bark, and Joleen Pepsi appeared at the end of the street.

Even from a distance Danny could tell it was Joleen. Years of hanging out on the corner had taught him that everyone in town had a gait and posture that were as recognizable as the features on their faces. With Joleen there was also her distinctive shape. Today her round middle was packed into tight white jeans and her stiff bleached hair was pouffed high on her head. Joleen and Danny were no longer neighbours. She had  moved into a low-rental after Donnie was sent to Dorchester for bank machine fraud. Now that he was back, they maintained what was known as a back-door relationship; living apart so they could both get welfare. So nothing linked Danny and Joleen anymore except that long-ago incident, now a blip in the collective memory of the town.

“I can get John L. to get the booze, but it’ll cost,” Corey was saying. Danny was about to answer, had just opened his mouth in fact, when, slick as a smelt in your hand, the cherry cough drop slid down his windpipe.

Corey said later that his eyes were googling out of his head like Colonel MacKinnon’s and that his face was as red as a lobster.

At first he didn’t understand why he couldn’t breathe. And when he did, he realized that, having also been rendered mute, he was alone with the awful knowledge. His friends just kept laughing and horsing around: he could croak right there in front of friggin’ Cornell’s and none of the bastards would notice. Gasping, he gave Corey a shove and  pointed to his throat. Corey said later that his eyes were googling out of his head like Colonel MacKinnon’s and that his face was as red as a lobster. But still he did nothing, just stood there like the dense friggin’ idiot he was until Danny pulled the package of Vicks from the pocket of his hoodie and grabbed his throat.

“Holy fuck!”Corey said. “He’s chokin’ on a candy.”

Behind Corey, like something slow-motion on TV, Joleen’s potent white thighs pumped against the cindery duff of the sidewalk. The turquoise globes of her breasts bobbed up and down like lobster boats on their way back to the wharf. She drew up beside them, took one look at  Danny (Elsie Rankin was just walking out of Cornell’s, she saw everything with her own eyes) stuck her big jugs up against his back, put her meaty arms around his middle and lifted him clear off the sidewalk. The candy blasted out of Danny’s mouth like a slapshot across the ice.

His life was ruined.

* * *

At first the focus of the story was on the Heimlich manoeuver. That it actually worked was judged to be remarkable. That Joleen Pepsi knew how to perform it was nothing short of astonishing.

“Where in hell did she learn that?”

“Beats me.”

“Must have been at one of them job-finding clubs.”

Then people began to dwell on how lucky young Danny had been. On what a tragedy this could have been for the family. For the whole town, in fact. (The latter not being entirely true because nothing bonded the townspeople as much as the untimely demise of one of their own. But anyway.) On how you never knew when your time was up.  Imagine, just sucking on a candy.

The next day, the teachers and students and janitors all seemed to be looking at Danny for one or two more seconds than necessary. There was interest and curiosity in their eyes. But most of all there was amusement.

So instead of chilling with the guys as he usually did after school, he went home, ate three hot dogs with ketchup and plugged in the Nintendo. He was after beating the second level of Golden Eye when he became aware of his mother’s presence in the doorway.

“Phone, Danny,” she said. ‟It’s a woman.”

Now this was unusual. But as James Bond was 110% occupied freeing hostages just then, Danny just said:

“I’ll call ‘em back.”

Returning a few seconds later, his mother leaned in the doorway and said:

“It was Joleen Dennison.” Danny had never heard her use Joleen’s real name before. “She said she just wanted to know how you were.”

He looked at his mother’s face and she looked at his and then they both looked away. On the television screen a curtain of blood signalled that he had lost the game.

* * *

He had to stop hanging out on the corner with the guys because if anyone spotted Joleen they said:

“Hey, it’s Danny’s lifesaver.”

“I’ll bet she wouldn’t choke on nuttin’.”

“It would have to be a lot bigger’n Danny’s little candy anyway.” Or something like that. And then one night he was pissed at his brother for eating all the Rocky Road ice-cream and putting the empty container back in the freezer and he had him pinned to the floor good, he was really owning him when Ian said:

“Let me go, Heimlich.”

“Wha?” Danny said.

“That’s what they call you now. Know what that makes me, fucker? Know what that makes me? Thanks a fucking lot.”

He was thinking about this the next day as he stood at the kitchen sink shovelling milk and Fruit Loops into his mouth. Rotten fucking luck he’d had choking on that cough drop. And now the name. He’d be stuck with it for the rest of his life.

The telephone rang.

“Danny?”

It was a woman. The voice was smoker-rough, sexy.

“Yipper,” he said.

“It’s me, Joleen.”

He remembered her breath on his nape, the softness of her big breasts against his back, the sweet release in her arms. His heart began to knock against his chest.

* * *

Late on a Sunday night. Danny is slowly pedalling his bicycle on the dark quiet streets of the town. He is smoking a cigarette. The bike makes long lazy arcs on the damp pavement. He almost feels like a character in a movie. Older. Mysterious. Someone who has his own apartment.

It is his fate, his karma, what he was born to be. Darth Vader’s voice, deep in the cavern of his mask: “Luke, it is your Destiny …”

He turns onto Campbell Street. Joleen had told him her house was yellow with a white door. He sees it. The light is on in one of the windows. Frilly yellow curtains, must be the kitchen. Rosie said all she had to was call the welfare and she got all new curtains. Maybe she is putting the kettle on, making herself a cup of tea. (But Joleen never drinks tea, she drinks Pepsi, what else? With ketchup chips.)

It is his fate, his karma, what he was born to be. Darth Vader’s voice, deep in the cavern of his mask: “Luke, it is your Destiny …”

* * *

Danny was not a virgin when he leaned his bicycle against the back of Joleen’s house. But only technically. The girl was completely wasted, it had lasted maybe three and a half minutes, and the next time he saw her she had looked at him as blandly as she ever had.

But Joleen.

In her silky embrace—he had watched her from the bathtub, floating a pink lotion, then a scented powder over her breasts and belly and arms—or next to the fragrant satiny insides of her thighs, he felt as he did when he left his friends on the beach and swam out into the ocean alone, far far out, the deep water holding him up like the hand of God.

He’d been after swimming like this for almost a month when a car drew up beside him on the highway as he walked home from Corey’s place late one night. The front doors opened and Donnie Pepsi and Mild Bill MacInnis got out. Danny began to run.

“Come here you little cocksucker,” Donnie said.

Danny ran up and up the bridge hill he was huffing and puffing it was the smoking he had to quit smoking and those Colt 45’s he just had didn’t help that Mild Bill was way too fat to run this fast he was one scary fuck as big as a truck he wished someone would drive up just now even the Mounties that would give those dicks a scare they sure must look funny all three of them running to beat the band—

They broke his nose and one of his ribs.

“I hope you learned your lesson,” his mother said as she drove him home from Outpatients. His father said:

“Time to move on, Buddy. Lots of good-lookin’ girls in town.” He winked: “If I was twenty years younger …”

His application for community college stayed at the bottom of his locker with Romeo and Juliet and a blue baloney sandwich. When asked about his plans for the future, he said he was taking a year off.

But Danny didn’t listen. He didn’t even hear. He was living in a kind of dream, where things he had once thought important, like taking Lila Murray to the Grand March and maybe getting into her pants afterwards; or seeing a Habs game on home ice; or riding a motorcycle up and down Central Avenue with Lila Murray’s boobs against his back, well, they meant little or nothing now. His application for community college stayed at the bottom of his locker with Romeo and Juliet and a blue baloney sandwich. When asked about his plans for the future, he said he was taking a year off. Lots of people were taking a year off because everyone knew that if you got your stamps the unemployment would pay you to take a trade.

In June, his uncle Lauchie got him on a grant at the nursery. All he had to do was drive a ride-on mower so he still had tons of energy when he came home. The grade-twelve parties were still going strong, in rec rooms and garages and on the beach. On the way home he’d stop in at Joleen’s. He was getting laid almost every night.

* * *

And then one damp evening at the end of August. Danny was sitting in a booth at the Grill with Corey and his cousin Kayla. They had just smoked a couple of fat ones at the bandstand and everything around him was coming into sweet sharp focus: the clink of a fork on a plate, the bass line of a song on the radio above the pie cabinet;  the smell of frying meat and hot salty gravy and ketchup, of cigarette smoke and wet sneakers. He noticed things. The way Corey looked at Kayla’s boobs when she got up to get the ketchup. A sad expression on a woman’s face. He felt  insightful and wise.

He was after wrapping his hands around a double-cheeseburger-with-the-works when the door opened and Joleen walked in. Alone.

There was a ripple in the air. A kind of disturbance in the Force. People seemed to sit up a little, pay attention. This could be good.

Joleen didn’t stand at the entrance and look around the way most people did when they entered the restaurant. She marched up to the cash and started talking with Lynn Ann. This meant she was getting take-out. She leaned on the counter as she waited for her order. She was wearing a baby-blue sweatshirt on account of the rain and a pair of tight cut-offs that dug into her butt crack. A gold chain twinkled on her ankle as she shifted her weight from one tanned, shapely leg to another.

Danny felt the eyes of the room. Going from him to Joleen and back. As if they were waiting for something to happen. He realized that he was holding his breath. That he was waiting, too. He looked at his burger. A mustardy slice of onion had slithered out between the meat patties. (He had specifically asked Lynn-Ann for no onions.) He raised it to his mouth anyway.

Joleen spotted him just as the first mouthful of soggy bread and meat went down his throat.

“Hey Danny,” she said. Looking surprised and pleased.

All over the room, chicken fingers and slices of pepperoni pizza and forkfuls of poutine paused on their way to open mouths. The waitress and the cashier stood still. The only sound in the place was the spit and sizzle of a basket of frozen french fries sinking into the deep-fryer in the kitchen. And, from the pie cabinet, Don Henley singing ‟… swear I’m gonna find you / one of these nights …”

A bark exploded into the stillness. With a shock, Danny realized that it had erupted from his mouth. He tried to stop the second one but he couldn’t. It tore through his body like it had to make way for all the others coming right behind it. He coughed and coughed and coughed. And coughed some more. Finally, in a daze of pain and embarrassment, he swung his legs over the side of the bench, gripped the edge of the table with his ketchupy hands, stood up and walked to the can. There he put both hands on the washbasin and leaned in. He was probably going to die.

Corey came in then, closing the door behind him quick like some bad guys were about to bust in and said: “Hey man, you okay?” Danny nodded to him in the mirror above the basin. He caught a scary glimpse of his own face: purplish red, his nose running, his eyes pissing water.

“Did you choke on something?” Corey said.

“No!” Danny coughed, and Corey left as fast as he had entered.

When it was over he felt weak but grateful. Like that moment at the end of a stomach flu when you realize that you’re done throwing up. He blew his nose, splashed water over his face and bloodshot eyes. Had a piss. Held his hands under the tap again. When they stopped shaking, he pulled hard on the bathroom door (the hinges were loose and it dragged on the sill) stepped onto the mudwet floor of the Grill and walked out. He didn’t pay for his double-cheeseburger-with-the-works and his Pepsi.

And no one said a goddamn thing.

“Well, thanks for the memories.” Joleen smiled.

She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in a red-and-black slip, lighting a cigarette. Danny had to laugh. He had known she’d be all right. There would be others. And Donnie Pepsi still wanted her.

His parents drove him to the bus depot in Hawkesbury. His father offered to take him all the way to Halifax but Danny refused.

“Make sure you do the dishes at Wendell and Joann’s,” his mother said for the third time. “And pick up after yourself.”

But when she came back from the counter with his bus ticket she began to cry.

“Come on, Ma.” he said. He squeezed her in his arms. It was something he had not wanted to do for years. But today it felt good.

It made him feel like a man.

Anne Lévesque’s fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry have been published in Canadian and international journals. She lives on Cape Breton Island.

Listen kid, I know it’s your birthday and all, that you only turn ten once, and that this is your special day, but, come on, you’re crying over your balloon animal because you wanted a giraffe and you got an Irish Wolfhound, which you say looks retarded, and that I’m retarded; please, give me some respect here—even though I go by Bozo the Clown, I’m no bozo, just part of the franchise—this is my career, my profession; sure, I studied English literature in college, discovering a love for Dante and Milton, and upon graduation I couldn’t find a job anywhere, even in my local strip mall Barnes and Noble or in any of the dozen coffee shops run by the evil empire, Starbucks, and yes, I went a little crazy snorting coke in dive bar restrooms and drinking rail whiskey in the mornings, and my mom kicked me out of the house and I lived with this hooker, kind of acting as her john until she overdosed on Methadone and her dad took her away, placing her in some upscale treatment center, and yes, I continued to squat in that shit-box apartment for a little longer, waking up in my own vomit and just existing for the hit, for the adrenalin pop of making a score, but I cleaned myself up, kid, and my mom eventually agreed to take me back in, though in the basement this time and I had a curfew and I had to promise to stop the drinking and the drugs, and so you have to believe me when I tell you I’ve been to that dark void, that negative space where rock bottom fights back, slaps you over the head, and tells you to get a grip, and kid, really, you should take my advice and stop bugging your mom about wanting a giraffe because she was the one who hired me and I only charge seventy-five bucks for the entire afternoon, which includes entertaining you and your little snot-nosed friends with magic tricks, miming man-trapped-in-a-box, and singing the entire Justin Bieber back catalogue; I have a feeling you don’t know what it takes to make it in this industry: it’s competitive as hell, and I have rivals who undercut on price (but also quality) and sport junk-ass names like Melvin the Magnificent and Chachi the Womanizer and one of these jerks I even mentored for a while, teaching the punk things like the necessary clown poise to juggle flaming torches and how to throw custard pies without blinding the victim, but I didn’t teach him everything—I had to keep something in reserve, like that unusual balloon animal (I mean who else can make a recognizable Irish Wolfhound?), which is one of my specialties, my calling card, if you will, but actually I have to give credit to this street performer, Gregor the Great, or something alliterative like that, who was a world-class twister, and seeing him model that air-filled rubber into all those wondrous taxonomies led to an epiphany that I could shape my own future, and, in fact, Gregor’s the one, even more so than my mom, who helped me pull through the DTs and the projectile vomiting, who called me when I was low—close to breaking—and told me it would be hard and I tell you it was hard for a couple of weeks, but I got my shit together and enrolled in night classes—method acting, circus skills, and contemporary dance—to reinvent myself, to give me a shot at something new, perhaps even take the clichéd route and be an artist and emigrate to Paris, and yes, kid, it took a while and I financed school with a part-time job stacking shelves at Walmart and also a life model gig at the nearby community college, letting those old folks sketch my thin wretched body for $8.50 an hour, and then later on stare at me oddly when they see me stacking incontinence pads in the aisle, but I found a girl, a real blue-eyed blonde named Val, who was a cashier and had a pierced conch, and we dated, the way I always saw couples do in movies: romantic encounters brimming with candle-lit dinners, French waiters, and fancy red wine, which I could never pronounce and never drink (for fear of reverting to my old habits), but would tell her to finish her glass, and then, by midnight, after we kissed and I left her by the bus stop, I could smell only her cherry-red lip gloss, and I went out of my mind and proposed and we got married at the town hall the next year and my mom even came and cried all the way through the ceremony, and though the marriage was annulled, as Val hooked up with Randy in Electronics, I carried on, eventually met someone else … what I’m trying to say, kid, is that it’s all right things didn’t turn out the way I hoped, or expected, as, in many ways, my life’s better and I have a son of my own now, around your age, and he’s nerdy, into board games, particularly he enjoys thrashing me at Hungry Hungry Hippos, but I still love him, apart from the crying, that’s why you should stop, celebrate life, because you have it all in front of you, even though I know you’ve been through some shit, like your mom told me on the phone she was worried about you, that your dad left a year ago, that he moved in with a slut redhead named Babs, and this is your first birthday without him, and I know that’s tough—I never met my father: he ran off after mom told him she was pregnant with me, which led to zero alimony or child support, no visiting me on Sundays, or him in the stands watching my Little League games—but you’ll survive and attend college, like I did, snag a job where you can make ends meet and make good with your mom, maybe even move across town to the suburbs, which, by the way, aren’t that bad, but are a great place to think, even read some of those college books you’re going to skip; so, come on kid—what’s your name anyhow: Tom? Bill? Phil?—your mom’s here with the cake and it looks kind of tasty, chocolate sponge, I bet, smothered in white vanilla frosting; you should get closer, yeah and I’ll sing “Happy Birthday” and cheer you on; there you go you’re almost there, the big ten-o and now, for God’s sake, blow out those fucking candles.

Christopher Linforth has fiction published in Southern Humanities Review, Gargoyle, Denver Quarterly, and other magazines.  christopherlinforth.wordpress.com