The first online issue of The Summerset Review was released September 11, 2002—exactly one year after this country's great tragedy. I had spent much time in 2000 in one of the towers of the World Trade Center, working for an electronic equities trading company called Instinet. On my first day of work there, having a meeting at 9am, I thought to give myself ample time, and arrived in the lobby at 8:30.

I was late for the meeting. Unbeknownst to me, new employees in the financial center had to undergo a one-time screening and security process, ultimately resulting in a laminated badge with photo identification, required to be worn at all times. It was more time-consuming than the check-in process at an airport when traveling internationally.

At one point, I asked a security officer why all the fuss. The country was at its back edge of the Internet boom, and the Information Technology sector was at the cusp of a significant downturn; people could have put their jobs in jeopardy if they were late for, or missed, an important meeting.

I was told the policies and processes were put in place in reaction to the 1993 incident, where a bomb was detonated in a parking garage below. All the fuss was not only designed to deter another such incident from occurring, but also infuse confidence in those who worked there, and curtail a trend of companies vacating the World Trade Center and moving to the Newport Financial Center, across the Hudson River in New Jersey.

A year later, on September 11, 2001, I had been working for Instinet's parent company, Reuters, as part of a small team managing the popular news web site. I was no longer in Downtown Manhattan, but still felt the effects of that morning. They are trivial in comparison to those who witnessed first-hand events and survived, those affected by loved ones who perished, and the victims themselves. Nonetheless, I thought I'd share them.

Reuters.com reported the air strikes that morning, of course, and many of the eyes of the world were on our web site. This is what the front page looked like at 9:43am:

Shortly thereafter, the web site went down, and some of us on the team thought, Now, they've knocked out the media, too. But we soon realized our site was not being attacked; it simply could not handle the traffic. Too many people were trying to go to Reuters.com on their computers, to read the latest news.

We scrambled frantically to get the site up, and after several hours we were able to reconfigure all computers at our disposal and simply serve a page containing the single top news story. The page included no links and had minimal graphics. It was the only thing we could do to handle the amount of incoming requests from readers.

As the days and weeks unfolded after September 11, 2001, epic stories were told by relatives, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances of mine, too many to list here, and some of which too sensitive for me to recall, capture in words, and publish.

I remember the story of my brother-in-law, though, who escaped the disaster, wandering over to the East Side, trying to get a ride back home on Long Island. A police officer stopped a van approaching the Midtown Tunnel and told the driver, while pointing to my brother-in-law, "Take this man to Queens, by order of The City of New York." The driver obliged without hesitation.

I remember looking up in the sky that afternoon, seeing no planes, no helicopters, hearing only a ghostly silence.

I remember seeing cars in the parking lot of my Long Island train station at night, long after working hours were over—cars of victims, cars which would remain in their exact spots until retrieved days and weeks later by loved ones or friends.

I remember asking myself, What good is there in any of this? What can we do to make a difference, shed any light in view of what has happened?

And this was when the original idea for The Summerset Review was conceived.

Exactly one year after September 11, 2001, our literary magazine was launched. Through our publishing of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry since then, we put before you an element of hope in the world. - J Levens

September 11, 2001, is a day filled with visions of fire and rubble—complete and utter hell on earth—etched in the memories of New Yorkers. After 9/11, the world waited, wondering if the city that never slept would wake up from its nightmare. There was doubt—would it ever be the same? I had my misgivings. But the city has grown back. The 9/11 Memorial, its construction fraught with peril and delays, will open this year, ten years later. The buildings are back. But will the people ever be the same?

The answer is, like in most cases, not simple. We have rebuilt, absolutely, but every day there is a little fear, a little doubt. Take for instance the recent earthquake tremors felt in New York City. Though its epicenter was some hundreds of miles away in Virginia, the first thought through most New Yorkers' minds did not match their Californian counterparts. Instead of Another earthquake? thoughts were Is this happening again?

Passing by the former site of the World Trade Center and the new site of the 9/11 Memorial, it is impossible to ignore what used to be. I was only a freshman in high school in 2001, silly and in the beginning of my teenage years. I lived the pain and loss of 9/11 through my father, a now retired NYPD Emergency Service officer. He was home when the attacks occurred and left the house immediately, traveling to Queens to meet his unit: a group of men who had pushed me on swings during police picnics, who had tiled my roof two summers before. All of the men—some retired, some not; some young, some old—converged, and were diligently on their way to the scene.

I didn't see my father for two weeks after that. When he returned, he was covered in dust, his eyes bloodshot, his feet sore, his spirit broken. In the weeks following, he attended the funerals of thirteen men who hadn't been as lucky, who left behind children and parents and families. Never before had I seen my father in his dress uniform. Never before had I seen my father, a man who to me had always been made of steel, cry. To see my favorite city in the world crushed was unimaginable. To see my favorite man in the world broken was more than I could bear. It was as if we shared an entire nervous system, and every twist, every piece of rubble he moved hurt me as much as it hurt him.

New York, as well as my father, had difficulties for a long time. The men who survived along with him are bonded together by years of camaraderie, hallmarked by one excruciating experience. But we acknowledge it, and we acknowledge it together. It's safe to say that some of these men will be at my wedding. Ten years later, 9/11 has moved into an official date on the calendar—Patriot's Day—and it may soon become a fleeting thought in the heads of many Americans.

On the anniversary of the event each year, my father and I check up on each other with a card, a note, a phone call, with a voice breaking on one end. It doesn't get easier, but time, as we all hate to admit, heals all wounds. Think what you must about the 9/11 Memorial, about the bureaucracy and politicians surrounding every moment of this year's observances, but the truth is that these ceremonies are a testament to people like my father and to New York. To show that it's a necessity to mourn, but it's also a necessity to rebuild. Life will go on. It must, and it has.
- L Denninger

Theme graphics this issue - "In Honor"
Copyright © The Summerset Review, Inc. 2011.

Buds loosen on a dark branch
The sound of the lawn's silence
The end of a month is beginning
and this is what I do with it
At the window staring for
something to hove into view
Content for a moment with
nothing filling the hours
With a pen I salute the night
The blue defile of the moon
shouldering stalwart overhead
bearing up the ages dutifully
hallowed narrow procession

The end of a month begins
summer at last
ringing away

Another draws into view
October's first moon
already slipping

into the last afternoons
of September
a buff imprint

An old song rattles
"Woke up this morning
this bone in my head"

The words flutter
and then run out
like an abacus

A single curled leaf
is a message
one afternoon

a tiny scroll
falling open
"Watch the stone"

Late sun makes an
assignment stone
is October's clock

after two weeks
lift one stone and find
its thumbprint

simpler than September
faintened
worn like coin

The stars go to and fro
like punctuation
periods

They add up to
great totals
but are no answer

drifting all October
across and down
the sky

Below children play
with death
gaudy ornaments

little riddles
"Why does the skull smile
Why shouldn't he"

candy teeth
that make a rosary
too late

October commemorates
the seasons
by December

snow will have covered
the year
as though forever

It is the beginning
of white
for two months

One morning fall here
in a single night
a wreath of damp

chill on windshields
quiet in driveways
before the traffic

Eggs in a carton
a strand of soft pearl
on a porch step

a little moisture
polishing them
in the open air

"I like to think of Acapulco as a diva—a little past her prime, perhaps overly made up, but still capable of captivating an audience," reports Frommer's guidebook on the city.

She sheds her false eyelashes and gaudy jewelry for me at Playa Caleta. Mostly Mexican tourists and locals make up the crowd here. I'm amazed at how small this popular stretch of beach is; it's really just a bay between two rocky walls. Several boats of varying sizes are tied off in rows.

Vendors sell just about anything, walking through the crowds or displaying their merchandise on narrow wooden canoes in the sand. I'm offered mango slices on a stick, artwork made from seashells, handbags, inner tubes, doughnuts, and fresh lobsters. Children splash in the shore, laughing and screaming. A baby no older than a year walks at an uneasy but rapid stride straight for the water, clad only in a diaper. His smile looks too big for his face as he greets the surf with chubby fingers and flapping arms.

I see a skinny, nervous-looking dog trot between the beach umbrellas. He sniffs around the chairs and sand. I can't tell if he's feral or not, but as I feel the sun beating down on me at a temperature in the high eighties, I decide he needs a drink of water more than anything. I head to a concession stand at the edge of the beach and buy a bottled water with a plastic cup (the closest thing to a bowl I can find). Instinctively, I click my tongue and make kissing noises as I approach the timid animal. He keeps his head down and watches me uneasily. As I come closer, I see he has a short scar on his back where no fur will grow again.

I set the water cup down. He takes a step backward, prompting me to do the same. He sniffs it, backs away again. Laps once and then spills the whole thing. I refill it with what's left in the bottle and set it down. He takes a few licks (fewer than I thought he would) and heads in the opposite direction. I sigh, leave the cup in case he returns later, and walk back to the street. A Mexican family has been watching this entire ordeal and giggling. I don't understand much Spanish, but I don't need to imagine very hard what they're saying. "Stupid American girl trying to feed the dog. What a fool."

Likely the dog thought the same thing.

I take a taxi back to my hotel near Puerto Marques. We drive through the central tourist area of Costera Hotel Zone. High-rise hotels on the beach stretch skyward across the street from American franchises. KFC, Pizza Hut, McDonald's, Hard Rock Café, Costco, Wal-Mart, and Office Depot are just some that taunt me on the ride.

Acapulco has hardly any American tourists these days, but it has all of our chains.

"Yes, we have them all here," says Frederico, my driver. He speaks excellent English. "But there is one you will not see—Taco Bell."

The night before, I had stayed up late listening to a Mexican wedding reception outside my balcony. I'd seen the hotel staff setting up for it all day, arranging enough speakers and sound equipment for a heavy metal concert. I was shocked by the low number of wedding guests in comparison—only about thirty or so in total. But every single one of them leapt from their chairs and danced when the band started. The band would move from playing Mexican songs I didn't recognize to popular American songs. I couldn't help but tap my feet a little against the linoleum floor of my room as the band busted out a heavily-accented version of "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You," complete with accordion.

I stopped when I heard something slide under my door. I saw a single white sheet lying on the floor. A short note was typed on the top half in Spanish, with the English translation below. It read:

Dear Guest:
Next Sunday January 30th Mexico will hold Government Elections. Due to this important event, Mexico's Government prohibits all alcoholic beverages sales before, during and after the election process.
This command will take place from zero hours from saturday 29th to 24 hours of sunday 30th.
We are thankful of your understanding of the interruption in the sales alcoholic beverages in our Restaurants and Bars.
Sincerely
General Manager

I was intrigued for several reasons. "Next Sunday January 30th " was tomorrow—less than an hour away to be exact. I wondered if the American, Canadian or European tourists here would silently entertain thoughts of, "How can I be expected to do without a margarita or seven while lounging poolside tomorrow?"

Mexico's election process got me wondering. I realized I knew little to nothing about their system. There were some deviations from ours right off the bat: elections on Sundays instead of Tuesdays (which surprised me since Mexico is a predominantly Catholic country) and the prohibition of alcohol sales that day. I imagined this had to stem from the goal to have voters' judgment unimpaired. Clearly, they took their voting seriously. I looked over the Spanish paragraph and attempted to match it up with the English translation.

There were a few phrases not translated, including "Elecciones para Gobernador del Estado de Guerrero" and the term "Ley Seca" in quotation marks. Governor of the state of Guerrero—easy enough to translate—but what was "Ley Seca?" An Internet search informed me that it literally meant "prohibition." Not the American nineteen-twenties-speakeasy-bathtub-gin mentality of the word, but a nationally recognized day.

My taxi ride the next day from Playa Caleta back to the hotel showcased, besides the plethora of fast food restaurants and consumer franchises, outdoor lines of (presumably sober) voters. Spread out along the sidewalks in the main part of town were a few two-manned tables with lines of citizens stretching from hundreds of yards away. I wasn't sure if their voting procedures included secret ballots, but I didn't see any booths around. Just people bent down over the table, writing on paper.

Frederico apologizes for not knowing more English words, when I'm the one who should be speaking Spanish. All I know, though, is whatever resembles the high school French that I remember. Which is to say, I'm hopeless. On one occasion in a restaurant here, I asked for a Coke and realized my mistake when the waiter returned moments later with an enormous green coconut. I felt like kicking myself; knowing that I should have said "Cola." Determined to be polite and not let my mistake create more work for him, I consumed the room-temperature coconut juice, all the while craving something icy and refreshing.

"You like Acapulco?" Frederico asks me several times.

"I love it," I tell him. "It's beautiful here."

"Ah, good. Maybe you come back again. We no get enough tourists here."

I look back out the window. Wild flowers seem to poke through everywhere, even in the run-down neighborhoods. Garbage may be streaming down the curb and sidewalk, broken windows and bottles scattered about, but almost every block has some bright pink or purple flowers sprouting from stone walls or through metal fences. Flowers that could put to shame the merchandise in florist shops back home.

Acapulco, whose name translates to "at the broken reeds" in English, continues to overwhelm me. I knew enough about it beforehand not to view it as an ideal vacation spot. The drug rings, the corruption, the tourist kidnappings, and the poverty. Not to mention the fifteen decapitated bodies and their corresponding severed heads recently found near a shopping center, courtesy of a notorious local cartel. But the entire idea of getting away this week was to escape the Northeast's winter, and Acapulco has the perfect weather. Its role as jilted lover of the resort world intrigues me. Long-adored mistress of 1950's Hollywood, it's now been traded in for younger ladies like Cabo and Cancun.

In this way, I can't help but think that, despite some discrepancies to the analogy, Acapulco is to Mexico what Atlantic City is to the United States. Both cities were playgrounds for the wealthy many decades ago, and are now reduced to second-class tourism destination status. The poverty of many of their residents is what most people can't ignore when hearing the name of either mentioned.

And yet, regardless of the fact that both destinations are well past their better days, they still possess undeniable charms, conjuring the ghosts of their "it" days. Just as allure and nostalgia can be found while strolling the Atlantic City Boardwalk, sampling saltwater taffy and dipping one's toes into the chilly New Jersey waters, Acapulco's natural beauty and eternally sunny skies peek through the haze of its vacant hotels and crime-riddled headlines.

I get the chance to see Acapulco's site of former glory when Frederico drives me to the Hotel Los Flamingos, a bright pink, slightly run-down resort high atop a cliff. Its claim to fame: former playground of the likes of Sinatra, Weissmuller, Wayne and Flynn. From the 450-foot cliff, there is a completely unobstructed view of the ocean and its horizon. Nothing but blue stretching into infinity. A single pink-red flower rises up against the fence; the perfect contrast to the serene backdrop. I can see how this was considered paradise in the Fifties as I glance upward at the green palm leaves and hot pink hotel façade with its thatched roof against the cloudless sky overhead. I try to channel the vibe from so long ago of the "boys' club" and their glitter, their millions, their hedonism.

I'm driven past Playa Caleta again the next day on the way to a snorkeling excursion. The company's driver offers bottled water to me and the other tourists. Some of us accept, thinking he has them in the van somewhere. Instead, he pulls in front of what appears to be a convenience store and hops out.

"Right back!" he says.

We've parked right behind an open-bed Policia truck. All of the officers in it hold large assault rifles and stare directly at me. I remain as still as possible until the driver returns. If I'd known he had to get out and buy water, not to mention place me in full view of at least ten gun-toting cops, I would have passed.

My guilt over touring a city with such severe criminal problems isn't assuaged when we arrive at the water activity center's parking lot. It lies down the stairs from a grand old building by the water. I'm told the building used to be a luxury hotel. It appears to currently serve as a converted police headquarters. Their marked vehicles fill the parking lot. Hoards of Mexican police walk around the grounds, armed to the teeth. Each one cannot help but give sidelong glances to us tourists. I keep my hands still and in plain sight until we've descended the shining white steps.

I start to really feel it now. This irrefutable sense of an American who thinks the world is her oyster. Should I really be in a city that is experiencing such crime and corruption? Should I allow myself to visit such places and have a good time being waited on by people who work harder than I ever have? I think of Jamaica Kincaid's words about Antigua in A Small Place:

"The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being ... Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor ... to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go—so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself."

Of course, no one I've met here seems angry or envious at all, much less to the degree Ms. Kincaid describes. They are friendlier than we, the tourists, deserve. But perhaps that's just what I can see.

On the other hand, part of me wants to encourage more people to tour Acapulco. In this gorgeous place, most of the locals depend of tourism (which has been pretty scarce) for their living. I'm embarrassed about the relatively low costs I've had on this trip compared to the accommodations and flawless service I've received. These people should be making more money than they do.

I am distracted from these thoughts when we begin our snorkeling tour. I meet Boris, a nickname for our gregarious Puerto Rican instructor; his real name is Juan. He takes us to our boat. The steps leading down to it are under construction, so we're tasked with shimmying down a steep concrete slope alongside them, perched a good ten to fifteen feet over the water. As we move along, we have to hold the widely spaced vertical beams that line the sides of the torn-up staircase, avoid stepping in the wet cement or tripping over a bent nail, and finally leap from the edge of the makeshift dock to the stern. Accomplishing the task is actually easier than it appears to be, even the older patrons manage to get aboard, but I suspect that companies wouldn't be allowed to operate under such conditions in the States.

We head out of the marina and around the bay. The boat driver is a tall young man who can't be more than seventeen years old. Boris points out various sites, such as the honeymoon villa of John F. Kennedy and Jackie, and Isla la Roqueta, a small isle reserved for nature and people who want to explore it. I can see a few hikers in the distance, emerging from the green forest back on to the beach.

The water we snorkel in is murkier under the surface than the waters of the South Pacific I've previously explored, but full of an abundance of tropical fish and bottom-dwelling stingrays. Boris playfully threatens a fish with his fist as it tries to nip his hand. Before the excursion is over, I hold in my hand a tiny, wriggling sea star and a spiky, visibly breathing sea urchin.

Once we finish in the water, the boat takes us further out to sea in the hope of glimpsing a whale or dolphin. I look at the city from afar, and at the mountain near its outskirts that seems to ascend into the clouds. Boris tells me the mountain provides excellent views, that one can drive a few hours to the top and actually "look down on the moon."

How I wish I had the time and arrangements to do just that.

Far ahead, I see the silhouette of a dolphin breach into mid-air beyond the sun-glittering water. Then another. Then three more, closer to the boat. We head a little closer, more and more dolphins becoming visible by the second. I can't tell if they're several small groups or one big pod, but they sprout up everywhere, from as far as the horizon to twenty feet from the boat.

"Never seen anything like this," murmurs Boris. Our young driver concurs.

We pick up speed. Tens of dolphins follow us, breaching and leaping their slippery bodies unbelievably high into the air. They are pure joy as they race each other, race our boat. The driver picks up more and more speed, grinning widely at his racing companions, until we simply rocket through the water. Our new friends keep up in fluid motion. I steady myself on the narrow bow and grip the railings beside me so I can see the ones near the front. The dolphins take turns speedily soaring beneath the surface and thrusting themselves into acrobatic jumps. Small babies, huge full-grown adults, and all sizes in between. They're clearly showing off, and reveling in the attention. Between the dolphins swimming beside the boat and those in every direction from here to the edge of what we can see, there must be at least one hundred. We remain in this newfound Dolphin City as long as our guides are allowed, then reluctantly make our return.

A little piece of me stays with the dolphins. Their unadulterated beauty, graceful, poetic motion, their speed, celebration and pleasure. But above all, their spirituality. I would have loved to dive into the water with them, if only for a brief moment.

As we head back toward the bay, we pass a small rocky island only a few yards in diameter. A nearly life-size shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe is fixed there. She is sleek and gold, and wears a crown. Her hands folded in prayer, she is surrounded by a giant turquoise and gold seashell. Boris draws my attention to a reflecting light beneath the water just in front of it, and tells me an identical statue lies several feet below. The Underwater Virgin, she's called. A sanctuary for scuba divers. I lament that our boat is taking us back to the dock. I wish I could throw on my snorkel and flippers and swim below to see her sparkle under the surface.

I fly back home two days later.

"Of all places in Mexico, I can't believe you went there," people tell me when I return. "You should go to Puerto Vallarta or Riviera Maya or someplace like that next time. Don't go back to that city, it's too dangerous."

But I'm going back. I'm not sure when yet, but I will return to Acapulco.

I want to bone up on my Spanish and communicate with the locals in their language. I want to get lost again in a mob of blissful soaring dolphins. I want to hike through the nature of Isla la Roqueta. I want to see the Underwater Virgin from beneath the water's surface. I want to drive to the top of the mountain and look down upon the moon.

Title graphic: "Yesterday and Today"
Copyright © The Summerset Review 2011.

On the top deck of a Fifth Avenue Bus,
on a morning like this
years ago,

I heard a whistle blow,
a siren wail,
a bell toll.
It was 11 o'clock. New York

City stopped for three minutes.
Now we do not stop.

Fandy sat in Uncle Mayes' puppet room while he set the stage for her. His house was dark and thoughtful, and his shows made her feel like she was missing some great thing from herself, which was why she liked them. 'What shall we do today, Fance?' he said. When she was younger he called her Fands, and then it changed to Fans, then Fancy.

'I want the one with Jumping Jack,' she said.

'I should have known,' he said. She always wanted the one with Jumping Jack, a glove puppet with a giant smile. The way Uncle Mayes moved him and made him talk, though, you could tell that the smile was fake and that all Jumping Jack wanted to do was sit down and be left alone to cry. It made her feel quiet and sad to watch him, and she liked that.

His stage sat in the center of the room. As a backdrop, he fixed a screen of orange dusk, the moon and sun on opposite corners of the same sky. He'd gone to school to be a puppeteer. The only school that offered a degree in what he called a 'tragic trade.' Slumped on cabinets along the walls sat his puppets, each of which he'd made himself.

'Jumping Jack?' he said.

She wriggled into a comfortable position. 'Yes. Make him real sad.'

'You always like him sad,' he said.

'People should be sad,' she said. Her mother wouldn't have let such a comment go. She would have pestered Fandy about what it meant. Sometimes she felt like her parents were afraid of her because they didn't know what to do with her. Her mother was a nurse, her father a police officer. There was something straight and plain about them, while she thought of herself as curving and meandering. She saw her uncle as curving, too, but even more so, with number signs and swirls, and here and there an exclamation point. She had drawn it once, and then crumpled the picture knowing that she had not gotten it right.

Her uncle tilted his head and nodded. 'Maybe,' he said.

She thought it was exactly what needed to be said.

'Who else?' he said.

'Make it real,' she said.

'The real one?'

'I like the real one.'

The real one was the play that had earned him his degree. It was about Jumping Jack falling for Bethel, a beautiful but cruel rabbit who strings him along until he faces the audience and cries in despair that he is nothing.

He preferred glove puppets, but he also had marionettes, stick puppets, and sock puppets, and he could make any shadow puppet that Fandy asked him to. They were so real that she'd had nightmares about the spiders and ogres.

'How's the light?' he said.

'Darker.'

He adjusted a dial on the wall. 'Better?'

She nodded, imagining what he saw of her: a dark, mysterious figure sitting on his chair. Sometimes she thought it would be nice if he was her father. Other times, when she was alone, she thought he could be her husband, too.

He turned on his iPod and played with the volume, and Tchaikovsky's First Concerto bloomed onto speakers around the room—a story for the ears, she thought, of love and then loss, and then love again. Uncle Mayes' musical choices contrasted sharply with the story. He called it an irony of the bitter variety.

Milton, the narrator and Jumping Jack's best friend, leapt onto the stage. He was an old man with a cane and a monocle.

'Friends,' he said, eyeing Fandy. 'I have lived long, and longed in living, and seen. But never have I seen a tragedy such as that of my closest friend, Jumping Jack, now many decades gone.' He shook his head. 'To live,' he said, raising an arm, 'is the greatest tragedy, for one who has not known encompassing sadness,' he turned his back to the audience and watched the moon, 'must but wait a little longer.'

Fandy ate a peanut butter sandwich on a single piece of bread folded in half. She liked the first bite best, at the center where the bread curved on itself—the part that she thought of as the belly. Her mother sat across from her with her own sandwich. She ate with a napkin in the other hand, and a glass of water.

'So,' her mother said. 'What'd you do at Uncle Mayes' today?'

Fandy shrugged.

Uncle Mayes was her father's brother, and her mother didn't like him very much.

'Well,' her mother said sarcastically. 'That sounds fun.'

'I guess.'

'What's so special about your uncle that you go to his house every day? Is it the puppets?'

'No,' Fandy said.

'I don't see what else it could be. The man holes himself in his house. He doesn't get out. He doesn't have a girlfriend. It's not normal.'

Exactly, Fandy almost said. Instead she looked away. 'I don't know.'

'I swear,' her mother said, getting up to wash the dishes and put away the peanut butter and bread. 'Sometimes I think you like him better than you like us.' Her mother half smiled, half joked. Fandy smiled back.

They sat in his basement on the old couch where they made up stories about the moose head on the wall. It had been there when Uncle Mayes bought the house. Fandy said its name was Otter. Uncle Mayes said it looked like a Travis. Therefore they called him Ottis, and he had been a farmer in Delaware before the unfortunate accident that landed him on the wall. He had worn overalls and collected jellyfish.

'I have something to tell you,' Uncle Mayes said.

'Is it bad?' Fandy said.

'You're always looking for bad,' he said.

'It's real life.'

'You're ten.'

'I know real life,' she said, feeling adult and smart.

'It's good,' he said. 'Mostly.'

'Nothing is all good.'

'You're a philosopher.'

As much as she tried to hide it, Fandy liked hearing news. She hadn't yet gotten over her youthful yearning for things new.

'So?' she said.

'I'm moving to Japan,' he said.

Her neck tightened and she stared at him for a long time, wanting him to ask her to come and knowing that he wouldn't.

'A friend from school sold a script to a production company. He wants me to come along to help make puppets and oversee the technical things. They're filming in Japan.'

'Why Japan?' Her jaw went slack and her hands felt numb. She bunched and unbunched them.

'I don't know,' he said. 'I didn't ask.'

She watched his face and his expression became forever etched in her mind as the correlate of betrayal. She saw that she could not alter what would be, and she hated him for it.

'Aren't you happy?' he said.

'I want to go home now,' she said.

He nodded sadly and said, 'If I had a daughter, I'd want her to be like you. Nothing different.' It was exactly what needed to be said.

After he left, Fandy became obsessed with trees. She spent some time with the girl down the street who had hair to her knees, but the girl was interested only in horses and drawing horses and talking about horses.

'What happened with Tiffany?' her mother said one day after Fandy hadn't gone to her house in a week.

'She's a freak,' Fandy said.

'She's not a freak. She's a nice girl, and you should be spending time with nice girls, like other girls do.'

'You spend time with her, then.'

Her father sat in his chair. He'd long since given up trying to communicate with Fandy. He was stubborn and plain, and he liked to smile about stubborn and plain things, like the foolishness of global warming and the economy.

'Well,' he said, looking up from his morning paper. 'It's the weekend. Don't you want to go outside?'

'No.'

'You don't want to go outside?'

'No,' she said.

'Go outside,' he said.

'Honey,' her mother said.

'She needs to get out and do things,' he said.

Her mother watched her, and her father watched her, and she felt uncomfortable under their gaze so she left.

In the backyard there was an elm, a friendly, fat tree with a knotted trunk and low branches. It almost looked like a hand when she glanced at it quickly, and so she climbed it and sat in a crook between the trunk and a long branch. She pretended the crook was her mother, never looking at her but only existing and waiting for her to sit inside of her.

She took to climbing the tree every day. Her mother's face appeared in the kitchen window now and then, watching her and judging with her straight-line judgment. The thought that her uncle would understand shimmered in her consciousness, but she pushed it away before it became coherent language. She brought a notepad with her and drew pictures of trees, and the trees became more and more strange until they were trees only in her mind. A series of lines and dark shadings and faces peering out from the lined paper. A secret language between her mother, the elm, and herself.

One day her father sat in the kitchen waiting for her. She closed the door and saw him at the table with a gallon of milk by his hand, and she knew he was going to say something.

'What are you doing?' he said. He never beat around the bush, and he never spoke to her unless there was a reason.

'Coming inside,' she said.

'What are you doing in the tree all day?'

'Sitting.'

'I know you're sitting. What are you doing?' She imagined that this was how he talked to people he pulled over, or to suspects before he beat them into admission.

'Drawing,' she said.

He held out his hand. 'Let me see.'

She handed him the notebook and he appraised her latest picture before turning to an older one, and then another. 'Doesn't look like anything.'

'It's a tree,' she said, feeling mildly embarrassed to reveal a thing that had become so personal.

'Doesn't look like a tree.' He flipped to the oldest pictures. 'This looks like a tree. So does this.'

'They're all trees,' she said. 'You don't know how to look at them.'

He turned the notebook sideways. 'Like this?' he said. He cocked his head at a picture and squinted. 'Like this?'

'It's abstract,' she said, remembering the way her uncle had once described one of his performances. She wasn't sure if she used the word right, but she glared into her father's eyes, daring him to challenge her.

He grunted. 'The point is, it's weird for you to sit in that tree all day.'

'You were the one who told me to go out.'

'Well, you didn't understand me.'

'I went out,' she said. 'What's not to understand?'

'Don't backtalk me, Fand. Tomorrow, you go outside. And I mean further than the backyard.' He got up to put his milk away. 'And do something with that girl, Tiffany. Or Beth. For Christ's sake.' He tossed her notebook on the table and walked out.

An oak stood along a worn trail far in the woods behind her house. The oak was famous with neighborhood children because of a knob that protruded four feet high from its trunk, two knots that peered out like wrinkled eyes just above the knob, and an old scar below the knob that looked like a sly grin. She grasped the bulbous nose and hugged the trunk and shimmied into its branches, which she pretended was a shock of hair. She became a flea, which she didn't like, and then she became a sparrow with a nest, and the tree an old, smiling man. Because her uncle, at twenty-seven, was an old man, the tree became her uncle.

She sat in its branches and drew pictures of trees, and eventually the trees took on the shape of people, and the people began talking amongst themselves about balloons and tiger sharks and, sometimes, unicorns.

When she went home her mother smiled and asked how her day was.

Fandy returned her smile. 'Good,' she said.

'What did you do?'

'Exactly what you asked,' she said, and she went to her room, her mother staring after her.

When she was used to climbing the uncle tree, she tried a new one, its branches a bit higher and thinner. She worked at it for a half hour before she got purchase on the bottom branch, and she pulled herself up and sat and thought that this tree was aloof, like a cat. And so the tree became a cat, purring in her notebook beside her uncle and her mother. She named it Surry because it didn't remind her of anything. The next day she climbed an even more difficult tree, this one an octopus named Morgan. And the next day she climbed a guitar-playing rainbow that she named Jesse, which was a name she liked.

Pretty soon her notebook was full of trees, each with its own personality. Sitting amidst the leaves of a big elm named Kaybee one day, Fandy heard a voice from below. Her first thought was of her father, and she looked below with a touch of dread that she would have to climb down and play with Tiffany.

Instead, a girl her age stared up at her.

'What?' Fandy said.

The girl had long blond hair and eyes so blue that Fandy couldn't stop staring at them.

'I said, what are you doing up there?' the girl said.

'Sitting,' Fandy said.

'How'd you get so high?'

'I climbed.'

'I know that,' the girl said.

Because her eyes were so blue, Fandy elaborated. 'I hugged the tree and pulled myself up. You have to hug it with your knees, too.'

'Oh,' the girl said. 'My name's Olive.'

'Mine, too,' Fandy said.

'Really?'

'No. Do you want to come up here with me?' Once the words were out she realized what she'd done, and yet she didn't feel the distaste that normally came with being around others. 'I like your eyes,' she said.

'My mom tells me that all the time,' Olive said. 'I don't know if I can get up.'

'Hug it with your knees. It's easy.'

Olive tried and slipped, and she stood below the tree and looked up at Fandy.

'Kaybee isn't very friendly,' Fandy said. 'Maybe we can try my uncle.'

'Where's he?' she said.

Fandy swung over, gripped a branch and hung, then dropped. 'Come with me,' she said.

In ten minutes, they sat in the crook of Fandy's uncle tree.

'What do you do up here?' Olive said.

Fandy felt a little defensive, but she said, 'I draw pictures.'

Olive looked at her notebook. 'Can I see?'

Fandy hesitated.

'I don't like to draw,' Olive said. 'But I have a gerbil that I talk to.'

'What's his name?' Fandy said cautiously.

'Her name. Chocolate. I named her. We call her Chocky sometimes.'

'My uncle calls me Fancy sometimes.'

'I have an uncle, too.'

Fandy almost asked if he was a puppeteer but realized that would be stupid. Instead she said, 'Do you like puppets?'

Olive shrugged. She kicked off her shoes and they fell to the ground, and she swung her bare feet. 'They're okay.'

'I like puppets,' Fandy said.

'Are you going to show me what's in your notebook?' Olive said. She looked at Fandy with her blue eyes.

'Okay,' Fandy said, handing the notebook over. It felt good to have someone look at her pictures who she didn't feel was judging her. 'They're trees,' she said, 'but they're really not trees, in a way.'

'What do they do?' Olive said.

'Do?' Fandy said.

They set her uncle's stage with a nighttime backdrop, a moon on the far corner smiling down on rolling hills and a single, forlorn tree.

'Are we supposed to be here?' Olive said.

Fandy shrugged. Uncle Mayes had given her a key in case she wanted to visit. Olive turned the light on and stared at the puppets surrounding the walls.

'You can't turn it on,' Fandy said, flipping the switch off.

'Why not?' Olive said.

'Some rooms are meant to be dark.' Fandy adjusted the dimmer to allow just enough light to see. When she was satisfied she stood beside the stage. Olive sat in Fandy's chair, and Fandy felt grown up, like her uncle, as though he had moved on to something greater and she had filled his space.

Fandy opened her notebook. The first picture was of the mother. She went behind the stage, feeling nervous, and thinking of nothing else to do, she raised the notebook to the stage and said, 'This is the mother. She doesn't talk.' She flipped a page. 'This is Surry. He's a cat. He likes ham and grass, and he sleeps with the television on because it makes him less lonely.'

'I sleep with the television on, too,' Olive said.

'Surry likes my uncle.' Fandy flipped to a series of squiggly lines and number signs and exclamation points, and she raised it to the stage and said, 'This is my uncle. He's a puppeteer and he's in Japan because he's stupid.'

'What do they do together?' Olive said.

Fandy flipped to further pages, where the trees had taken on personalities and faces, and she found one of the uncle, the mother, and Surry. 'This is them riding a bull. The mother doesn't ride bulls; she just watches. And Surry doesn't ride bulls, either. He pretends to be a bull.'

'But your uncle rides bulls?'

'My uncle rides the biggest, meanest bull ever. It breathes fire.'

'Bulls don't breathe fire.'

'This one does. And it killed eleven people that rode it before. But my uncle had a magic saddle that made the bull like it, and they became friends and lived together, and the bull didn't kill anyone, anymore.'

'That's nice,' Olive said. 'Tell me another one.'

When her mother told her that Uncle Mayes was on the phone, Fandy resisted running to talk to him. Instead she walked from her room with her hands in her pockets, and she took the phone like she didn't care.

'Hello?'

'Fance,' her uncle said. His voice was deeper than she remembered.

'Hi.'

'Hi,' he said. 'So, d'you miss me?'

'I guess,' she said.

'I'll take that as a yes.'

She sat at the kitchen table.

'So what have you been up to?'

'Just stuff,' she said.

'Stuff, huh? You sound like Polly.' Polly was a surfing witch that he'd made in puppet school. She wore sunglasses and a witch's hat.

'No, I don't.'

'That's exactly what Polly would say.'

'No, it isn't.'

'Aren't you curious about Japan?'

She pressed her fingers into her palm. 'Sure,' she said.

'Oh, come on. Are you mad at me?'

Yes.

'No.'

'Then ask me about Japan.'

'How is Japan?'

'Great,' he said. 'Josh's show is awesome, and we have some great computer guys working with us that will make his puppets really come to life. You're going to love it.'

'I don't care,' she said. The words were out before she realized what she had said, and she regretted them, but they felt good, so she said them again.

'Come on, Fance. You don't mean that.'

'The show's stupid,' she said. 'And I don't want to talk to you now.' Fandy knew how much it meant to him to finally be a part of something, but she'd gone too far to not say the worst thing she could think of. 'And I'm not watching the movie, or any of your stupid puppet shows, anymore. They're for kids.'

He didn't speak for a long time. She wanted him to fall over himself apologizing. She wanted him to ask her to come to Japan and be with him, and she wanted to refuse him at first and then, only after he spent a long time convincing her, to agree to go.

'Oh,' he finally said. 'I'm sorry about that.'

'Okay,' she said.

'Okay, then.' He paused. 'Can I speak to your father?'

She brought the phone to her father and went to her room to get her notebook, and then she went out back and climbed the mother tree.

'Once the mother was sad because her daughter ran away.'

'Make her daughter's name Olive.'

'Olive ran away. The mother cried. She cried for a long time.'

'But Olive was only hiding.'

'No she wasn't. Olive ran away to China, which is better than Japan, and she played with all the bears there.'

'China has panda bears.'

'But these pandas were magical panda bears. One of them was named Tiki, and he was bigger than all the other pandas, and when the pandas wanted to kill Olive, Tiki protected her. Then Olive and all the pandas were friends, and they were happy. But the mother cried and cried.'

'Is that it?' Olive said. She leaned forward in the chair.

'That's it,' Fandy said. 'Except that the mother was so sad that she died.'

'That's sad.'

'Everything is sad.'

Her mother held out the phone. 'Fand, it's your uncle.'

'I don't want to talk to him,' she said.

'He's calling long distance.'

'I don't feel like talking.'

'Fand.'

Fandy turned away and her mother returned to the phone. When she was done she said, 'That was rude. Uncle Mayes is going to be staying in Japan for a lot longer than he thought. He might sell his house.'

'Okay,' Fandy said. She walked out of the kitchen, her legs feeling brittle.

'Terry walks with a little limp,' Fandy said. Her uncle's puppet room was dim, and the stage was set with a surreal sky of purples and orange hues. 'Because he fought in a war against Nazis and bulldogs. He had a machine gun, but he gave it away.' She eyed Olive. 'He could probably beat your dad up.'

'I don't think so,' Olive said. 'I went shopping with my mom, and when we got back she called my dad and he took in all the bags at once.'

'Still,' Fandy said. 'He could probably beat your dad to a bloody pulp.'

'He could beat your dad to a bloody pulp,' Olive said, fidgeting in her seat.

Fandy cocked an eyebrow. 'Probably,' she said. 'And my dad's a policeman.' When Olive looked sufficiently impressed, Fandy went on. 'Terry likes Jesse, but Jesse likes Surry, and Surry's mean to Jesse.'

'That's weird.'

'Yeah, but it's true. Most things that are true are weird.' She flipped in her notebook to her uncle, and turned to the next page. 'Surry's mother died in a train wreck while Terry was in the war. Surry has a pet iguana.'

'I don't like lizards.'

'Surry does. He feeds it cow poo and eyeballs.'

'That's gross.'

'But it's real.'

'It's still gross,' Olive said.

Fandy felt mean. 'Surry can beat your dad up, too, but he can't beat mine up.'

'That's not true,' Olive said.

'My dad can probably beat your dad up, too.'

'Why are you saying that?'

'Because it's true.'

The puppets seemed to stare at Fandy. She hated them and she had to take it out on something. 'You're dumb,' Fandy said. 'You sit in that chair and don't do anything except watch me, and you expect me to do everything all the time like you don't even have a brain.'

Olive got up and clenched her fists and blew a puff of air. She looked at Fandy with her blue eyes once more, and then she stalked out. Fandy smiled, feeling terrible and relieved and empty. She turned the lights off and sat in the dark. She thought about her uncle for a long time, and she thought that being Olive is a thing that nobody can escape. And in the blackness, before the dead, estimating eyes of puppets, the trees lay on her lap like a great weight, their whispers like wind through their limbs.

Title graphic: "Actors in Waiting" Copyright © The Summerset Review 2011.

God and I share a small bed and I am dead
tired. In the silence, I think

of something funny
and can't hold a laugh
back. Nothing, but

I must try
to explain.

This is how we talk.

There are other beds, you know. I know.

My mother lights another Winston and, eying me closely, blows the smoke out the side of her mouth. She is circling, looking for a way into my confidence.

"So she's moving out?"

"Tomorrow." I am watching the frantic maneuvers of a hummingbird confused by the red plastic flowers.

She tilts her head; I can feel her frowning. "Did something happen, Jenny? Did you have a fight?"

I shake my head no.

She leans forward, lowers her voice. "Another woman?"

I look at the black windows of her sunglasses. Cosmetic surgery has pulled out most of her wrinkles and her face, shiny and taut, is straining with anticipation. Her glossy red lips are parted. Even her hair is shimmering, waiting.

I know she blames me for losing Antonia. I don't fix myself up, she contends, don't pay enough attention to my clothes and my nails.

She cannot imagine how hard I tried—first my methods and then some of hers. How can I explain that it wasn't my fault, that I was up against an octopus and never stood a chance.

It started, of course, at the aquarium. Everything was fine until Antonia got a job at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Not two weeks later I brought some oysters home and when I put them on the table she blanched, nearly knocked the chair over getting to her feet. That was the beginning of the end.

Which is pretty ironic considering how we met. Imagine a lovely dark-haired woman sitting alone in a restaurant. She is watching the sun melt into the Pacific. Her wine glass blazes in the orange light as she raises it to her lips. On the table is a plate of oysters, her second.

It was only by chance that I saw her. I came out of the kitchen for a club soda and there she was, stunning as a coral reef.

From behind a vase of forsythia I watched her lift each shivering oyster from its icy bed and even then I could feel the undertow, could see the water rising. There was nothing I could do but flip my apron to the clean side and head straight for her table.

Striking up a conversation was easy enough. There were the oysters, all twelve of which I had pried open, not to mention the mixed greens I had tossed for her, the focaccia I had made. Everything she put in her mouth had first been in my hands.

And so I asked how she liked the oysters and told her they were Quilcenes, fresh from Tomales Bay, and then I mentioned the Olympias I was getting in and had she ever tried them. She had the most provocative lips I'd ever seen. She smiled a lot and nodded here and there, and if she thought my presence in the dining room was odd (and it was) she didn't let on; maybe she was flirting too. In any case she came back for my bivalves every Friday afternoon. The waiters, who caught on quickly, would let me know the minute she arrived, and each time I saw her, backlit in that window, my stomach would start to do flip flops. Sometimes I had trouble with her oysters because my hands would be shaking so much. I must have opened over a hundred of them before I finally got the nerve to ask her out.

Things fell into place, as they generally do in the beginning. Antonia was thirty-one and I was just a couple of years older. We were both a bit love weary, having been down that road more than once, and while we didn't exactly hold back, we didn't rush headlong either. It took us four months to get those three little words out of the way and another two months went by before she moved in with me. This last step was probably the easiest as she was living in a thin-walled overpriced apartment in Salinas and I had a house near the beach to offer, one of those whimsical cottages with a sloping rooftop and small arched doorways. From the street it looks fine but if you come up the walk you can see the moss in the cedar shingles and the mildew under the eaves, and if you aren't careful you can twist your ankle on one of the long yellow slugs that slide through the calla lilies. There isn't one thing my mother likes about this house and I think she hates the lilies most of all. Funeral flowers, she calls them. Big leaky funnels. Bees fly in, she says, and never come out.

Antonia, on the other hand, loved this place. On her first visit here she sank into the frayed green sofa and looked at the clutter of books and driftwood and said it felt like camp. Time after time I would find her running a hand over the smooth dents in the mahogany table or opening the linen closet just to smell the sheets and towels. From my bedroom window the ocean is a blue rectangle a half-mile away, but the briny scent lives in every crack and corner of the house. I was brought up on this air and would probably languish without it.

Antonia was a craftswoman when I met her. She'd gather up sea debris—lustrous bits of abalone, gleaming shark's teeth—and fashion them into jewelry which she sold to the tourist shops. I cleared out the small bedroom my mother once used for sewing and that's where Antonia set up shop. I liked the fact that she worked at home; I suppose it bolstered my sense of security. The truth is, I never had much influence over Antonia and I knew it.

She was beautiful, for one thing, heart-stopping, jaw-dropping, told-you-so beautiful, and that alone should have kept me at bay. Even her name caused me worry—who can possess a woman called Antonia? And then there was her silence, her way of leaving a question unanswered, a quirk that began to unhinge me.

I might have shown better judgment, might have been able to save myself if it hadn't been for our sex life. I have known bedroom Olympians, women who could write manuals on the subject. Antonia wasn't one of them. Indifferent to performance, she would lose herself on a single spot. Her hand would stroke some part of me, over and over, until the world fell away and I was held aloft and breathless. Or locking her gaze on mine, she would move against me, so slowly, so deliberately, that my body would tremble in preparation. Whatever she did carried me away, always to the same astonishing region. Sex with Antonia was a place.

And our meals—oh how we feasted! Blinis for breakfast. Mussels at midnight. Artichokes in bed at high noon. Antonia was an avid eater. About the only thing she shunned was meat, which was fine with me: I'd seen enough bloody aprons in my time and was ready to give up mammals myself.

So there we were, loving and feasting, happy as clams, until the day Antonia came out of her shop and said she'd like to do some volunteer work at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. They needed people to help monitor the crowds and make sure the children didn't leap into the bat ray pool or grab something they weren't supposed to. I thought it was a great idea. After tinkering with broken shells and body parts she could spend some time with living creatures.

Antonia was probably the most dedicated volunteer the aquarium ever had. In her zeal to learn she must have logged fifty hours a week, moving beyond the touch tanks and gaining access to the research labs. At first I was happy for her, delighted to see her so enthralled, but I began to miss our time together, and then came the trouble with food. It wasn't just oysters; she gave up all sea life, everything that clung, scuttled, drifted or swam. Which didn't mean I had to, of course, but after sharing shellfish in the moonlight, eating them by myself seemed somehow pathetic. And naturally I didn't want to offend, didn't want the smell of steaming mollusks wafting through the house. It was much simpler to brush up on my vegetarian cooking and eat my seafood at the restaurant.

With all that diligence and, let's face it, the passport of her looks, Antonia got on the payroll in no time. They even enrolled her in a scuba diving class so that she could help feed and care for the fish, a position not typically available to business majors. When coaxed she would offer up snippets of her workday: the baby otter that refused to swim on its back, the jellyfish that glowed in the dark like small floating airports. But what she found most beguiling, what she mentioned most often, were the octopuses. The way they watched you, she explained, with those big yellow eyes moving on stalks. You could see, in the black rectangle of their pupils, a spark of intelligence, a hint of something canny and unfathomable. If they trusted you, she said, they would pull themselves out of the bottles they lived in and, extending a tentative arm, they would start to touch you, all over, their suckers tasting and smelling at once. My first thought was, how horrible, and then I became alarmed: I didn't want anyone tasting and smelling Antonia. They liked to be stroked in return, she went on, and they were especially fond of eating out of her hand. "What do you feed them?" I asked. She shrugged. "Lobsters, crab, shrimp." All my favorites.

Mornings used to be the best part of the day. Cappuccinos and Bach and plenty of time before I had to be at the restaurant. We woke up leisurely, making love while the fog-soaked pines dripped outside the window. Now there was barely time for coffee before Antonia was up and out the door. Mute with longing, I would watch her get dressed: those long legs, the supple back, the soft brown sweep of her hair.

She wasn't interested in making jewelry anymore and had packed up all her silver and solder and baby sand dollars. Now the shelves of that room were lined with books, dozens of them, all about the sea. After she left each morning I would go into her marine library, select a volume and take it back to bed with me. I wanted to learn the habits of my rival.

I could see why she admired them so. There isn't much octopuses can't do. If an arm is lost, they can grow another; in less than a second they can change their color; they can pull twenty times their own weight, and they can ooze through openings no bigger than their eyeballs.

For a while I thought my humanness would hold her, that an octopus, however spectacular, could not usurp me. But then I started thinking about Jane Goodall, enraptured for a quarter-century by a gang of chimpanzees, and I realized I might be in trouble.

Most of my friends worked in the mornings and without Antonia I found myself adrift. About once a week I began to visit my mother. After my father's death several years ago, she signed the house over to me and moved to a sunny condo in the valley, well beyond the reach of rust and slugs. Between insurance policies and inheritances she didn't have to work, and invariably I would find her reading the paper on her deck, happily surrounded by her vinyl geraniums.

I always wondered why I came. It wasn't as if she offered any comfort, although I know she tried, in her fashion. "Antonia's a very feminine girl," she would say, and then, by way of help: "Why don't you grow out your hair? It's been short for years." Or, "Why don't you wear a skirt once in a while? You have nice legs." It was no use trying to explain that the rules she applied to her own life might not be relevant to mine. "Love is love," she'd say, and for that I suppose she deserves some credit.

The octopuses at the aquarium live in mayonnaise jars and clay pots. For some reason they like to decorate the area around their homes, and so the divers supply them with shells and bricks, cheap jewelry and old boots—they are not fussy about the nature of the paraphernalia.

You can't fool an octopus. It can sense the mood of a diver by his chemical emanations, and if the diver is nervous or aggressive, the creature will not budge from its nook. Antonia could always entice them. As soon as she appeared they shot out of their niches and floated over to her. She was so good at calming the new arrivals that the aquarium put her in charge of them, made her the octopus ambassador.

I noticed that Antonia had lost some weight. This no-kill diet wasn't giving her enough calories and when I cautioned her about it, she looked right through me, her mind on other things. She kept drifting away from my questions and comments, not outright rudeness, I think, but because she was losing the need for speech, forgetting she was on dry land.

I tried to fatten her up with roasted vegetable pastas and wild mushroom risotto, but cooking for her wasn't much fun anymore. One day I made a nice tarragon mayonnaise and steamed up a couple of those colossal Castroville artichokes. Antonia's face turned mournful when I set them on the table.

"What's wrong?" I said, trying to keep the impatience out of my voice.

"Did you know," she murmured, "that if you let these things grow they turn into huge purple flowers?"

I slapped down my oven mitt. "People have to eat, Tonia. Something has to die."

She did eventually start eating the damn thing but it brought her no pleasure, and regarding her from across the table all I could think about was the way we used to lie in bed, naked and insatiable, and strip those meaty globes petal by petal.

Antonia never came to the restaurant anymore and I don't know why it took me so long to see the implications of this, to understand that she didn't want to share in the carnage that was my career. I should have seen right away that a woman devoted to protecting fish cannot live with a woman who filets them.

Harder still, she was turning away in bed. "Sweet dreams," she'd murmur, patting my shoulder and offering me her back. Marooned in the dark I would moor myself to her, find solace in the perfume of her hair.

The aquarium was a place I rarely visited—too many hard feelings stood between me and the entrance. And then there were the swarms of children to contend with, the constant campaign of noise. But I was ready to brave all that. I needed to observe Antonia with her eight-armed admirers, to witness what went on in those underwater chambers.

Like everyone else I lingered in front of the kelp forest, eerily beautiful in the morning light, and as I watched the leathery brown ribbons swaying in the currents, the chains of bubbles and the silver fish, I could imagine the relief a diver must feel: a single plunge and all history is banished, blame lifted, anguish ended.

I pressed on, unnerved by the coupling of elements, the terrible subjection of Plexiglas. Seven inches from my face a grouper the size of a sofa appeared, and then an ocean sunfish, stately as an airship. On another wall a regiment of barracuda streamed past, followed by a shark, restless and desolate. There was so much sea life vying for attention that I had to look at the floor, rest my eyes on something that wasn't alive.

The octopus exhibit was drawing the biggest crowds and I had no trouble finding it. I am five-foot-eight and not frail, quite an advantage in a roomful of spectators. There were children packed in front, breathing and whispering. I could smell baby shampoo and the candy on their breath, and the colognes and hair sprays of the adults behind me. I didn't like being jammed in with these people, so close to their pores and whiskers and cigarette smoke. But all that faded when I saw Antonia, just a few feet away, immune in her world of water.

Slim and lithesome in her black and yellow wetsuit, she looked more fish than human. Evidently she had just served up dinner. Three octopuses were busy eating, delicately plucking their lobster shells clean. A fourth octopus, apparently more interested in Antonia than a meal, had anchored itself to her. An audio tape was playing, informing us as we watched: "An octopus will take up to four hours to eat a lobster, leaving the shell perfectly intact." Great, I thought, another talent. The octopus attached to Antonia was running the tip of an arm across her face and neck. And she, in some weird communion, was likewise stroking the creature's lolling head. "Each arm is covered with more than two hundred extremely sensitive sucker discs, and each disc may have ten thousand neurons to handle both taste and touch." What sort of stimulation was that animal getting?

The octopus with Antonia was the largest of the group, about four feet across, with a mottled brown hide and white spots down each arm. I couldn't take my eyes off its hideous head, just skin around a brain. "...the most complex of all the invertebrates, capable of gauging its surroundings and transforming its body shape, pattern, color and texture in a fraction of a second."

I watched for as long as I could. Antonia never once acknowledged the crowd; she was too engrossed in her aquatic Romeo. I don't know how a biologist would classify their behavior, but it was clear to me that she was making love to that beast, touching it in a way she hadn't touched me in a very long time.

Driving home I started thinking about the others. Did Jane Goodall break someone's heart when she loaded up her rucksack and flew to Africa? I knew now that it could happen, that a woman could find some higher truth in the wet brown eyes of a chimp. I could see them, side by side in a tree, quietly sharing a sunset. Diane Fossey was seduced by gorillas, Joy Adamson by a pride of lions. And men too were swept away, stunned by the might of grizzly bears, bewitched by the cry of wolves.

There was no retrieving Antonia; I was way out of my depth. Lying against her back that night, I took a deep breath and asked her when she was leaving. She shrank a little in my arms, and I passed through millenniums, through bottomless black oceans until she finally answered: "Soon."

Packing took no time at all: some clothes, some books, her scuba gear. Antonia had done nothing, I realized, to suggest any permanence here, never pruned or planted, never hung a picture or bought a dish towel. She was simply fastened to this place, like a starfish to a pier, and now that her evolution is complete, she is casting off. Leaving this house is hard for her, probably harder than leaving me. What a pleasing harbor it must have been: the soggy shingles, the slippery lilies, the braided rugs embedded with sand, the smell of old canvas in the cupboards and closets.

She is moving to Seattle, where the octopuses grow to fifteen feet. So pure is her love for these animals, how can I hold a grudge? To console myself I think about food, of all the dishes I'm going to make again, in my own kitchen. Sushi. Thai squid. Glazed salmon. Sometimes I even conjure up meat: the thinnest slice of prosciutto wrapped around a wedge of peach.

Warm sweet air from the laundry vent blows up to the deck. The hummingbird, frustrated, has made a beeline for the horizon. My mother is waiting for an answer.

"No," I tell her, "it wasn't another woman. It was," I flounder a moment, "her work."

My mother's mouth tightens slightly and I notice the tiny vertical lines crowding her upper lip, no doubt the next target for her plastic surgeon. She is not buying this. Either she doesn't believe I am being honest with her or she thinks I've been duped and is sorry for me.

"You know," she begins, "I never much cared for that girl. So quiet, and that food thing."

I shake my head. "Mom, no."

We are quiet then, having reached yet another dead end. I look at the pearly pink lacquer on her toenails and the expensive leather sandals she is wearing and contrast them with my own neglected toes, my worn out dime-store thongs, and it seems to me that we are like most mothers and daughters: not quite what the other had in mind. Still, of all the places I could be this morning, I am here.

"Well, kiddo," my mother says, falling back on the safety of her favorite adage, "there are plenty of other fish in the sea."

I smile at this, which she misinterprets as a wave of optimism, and encouragingly she beams back at me.

Title graphic: "Underworld" Copyright © The Summerset Review 2011. A slightly different form of this story originally appeared in Lynx Eye, 1998.

Compound-eyed constellations of Michigan crickets
shake like sleigh bells in the dry straw next door,
their mesothoracic rhapsody of wings,
their antennae calibrating moonlight

as the two of us sail the front porch step,
our knees chest-bent, chins at rest on bony joints
while breath bellows from our ciliated nostrils,
the gears and springs and interlocking teeth,

the flapping sails inside us, furious.
A single cricket somewhere close by clicks
like the plastic teeth of a thumbed comb,
like the slurring parade of days in late summer.

The crickets have cranked up a vehement glockenspiel
to the wet smell of lawn, the moonlit cows
across the street rearranging without having moved,
your hand on mine for so long I can't feel it there.

Through the door behind us and up the dark stairs
Sofia finds the orbit of sleep—she fires the jets to the first
place we can't follow, while I'm sometimes desperate to be so alone
to pull the collar of my shirt up over my head

and breathe my own rich breath,
and flush my face on the heat of my body,
fully contained in my soft cotton shell
as Sofia must have been when she

water-bugged the world of your expanding belly,
breathing in her dinner, entirely free
of association and language
so that our voices must've tangled

with the barking dog, the plucked notes of a guitar,
the electric hum of appliances
until they scribbled her aspiring ears
like a swamp-full of peepers and redwing blackbirds

and I think, Here, on this porch, your hand knowing mine,
the rapturous cricket-song ratcheting down,
and slowing now into low croaked waves,
we almost speak the language of listening.

And we're tired, I know, we're so fucking tired,
but why shouldn't we unfold our bent legs
and let out our wings and play games with gravity,
our tympanic membranes rippling with translation?

Why shouldn't we be proud to listen life into a field,
into the rocketing capsule of a crib,
into the dimly humming
spheres above?

Cool ones, too, I thought, though
I took the saleswoman's word
On that, the frames
Black and small—two orbits forming
An optimistic ellipse, crisping
Leaves from trees, buildings
Into bricks, as I neck
Around to fix the target, the margins
Vague as memory – is that
What I'd been living with? – like I've pressed
A stethoscope to dumb chests and sprung
From each an unexpected aria.

~

The pebbled street falls and swells, walls
Brush startled sleeves in hallways
I'd know better, darkened.

~

Friends were shocked, before, that I seemed
To choose fewer details to inhabit. One said, "Don't live
In an impressionist painting," and I wondered
Which one he meant, closed my eyes and tried
To catch the exquisite wink of wine glasses,
The belle-époque chatting itself to a long afternoon
Nap, tried to feel the rhythm of lattice shadows
Lacing the dance floor.

~

The back of a dry hand—a snow scratched
Pattern of hills, picked out from an airplane.

~

At the bathroom mirror, twenty years
Excavate my face, twenty years since I left
My last pair on a table at The Heartland Café,
Twenty years since I folded the temples gently
And walked out toward the life I expected.

A young woman stands on the quad, barely visible in the night. We hear a snap of flint on metal. Lighted lamp oil reveals a grapefruit-sized sphere. The girl swings the flame ball on a flexible string. We see body parts in rotation, one sculpted shoulder, one sleek hip.

The dancer scribes a circle round her feet. Naphtha, squirted in advance on the close-mown lawn, flares up. You cannot reach me, is the message. Walled off by fire, she is free and alone.

The sound system blares, distorting a sweet voice. It's that indie singer with the gamine face, the one who's popular on the Web. She's doing a cover of a Beyoncé tune. Shoulda putaringonit. A sassy babe has gotten away. Back when you might have reserved her for yourself.

Flames gutter. The circle vanishes. A second ball lights. The dancer appears in outline, lithe and slender. Lifting a foot, turning it outward, she holds the pose of an Indian woman from an erotic miniature.

I do wish I had claims on her. I desire, and I have erred. Never mind. I'm here now. I let my consciousness narrow until only the splotches of light exist, they and the half-revealed agent who makes them trace their arcs.

"You can't possibly have a child in the troupe?"

How pleasant it is to have someone address me spontaneously. Like the poi dancer, the woman at my side is tall and thin. I ask whether the performer is her daughter.

As it happens, she is. The mother has an affected voice of the sort you hear often on this campus. We are at Vassar, that island of privilege in down-and-out Poughkeepsie.

It is Family Weekend. All the same, it occurs to me that the mother may have preferred that I imagine her too young to have a child of college age. By way of apology, I add, "You have her athletic look."

She shakes her head. "Those days are long gone."

"Complicated family," I explain in response to the initial question. "I'm here for my older stepsister's son."

In truth, I'm here for the co-eds, the mother's daughter and her graceful companions. If I'd managed to keep my head screwed on straight, I could have hooked up with the lovelies. Finally, I cannot see why I should not attract one now. I am strong and agile and familiar with pop music. I can juggle odd-shaped objects, can-openers and saucepans and one-portion cereal boxes.

"Amanda," the mother says. Before I can give my name, Amanda asks, "Which is your nephew?"

Rows of guys are waiting their turn in the background, against the plantings alongside Rockefeller Hall. I point toward the center and say, "The stocky one." There are four. I can't imagine they are all Asian. (If they are, might not my nephew be adopted, or my stepsister or brother-in-law Chinese?) "Sam," I say, to cover the cross-racial possibility. I introduce myself as Alex.

"How long does this routine last?" Amanda asks. She touches my shoulder to gain my full attention. Speaking over the music requires her to put her lips close to my ear. There's smoke-smell on her clothes and liquor on her breath.

Evidently, Amanda has not attended a rehearsal or heard phone accounts of run-throughs. I gather that assiduous parenting is not her priority. She has needs of her own.

I should go for drinks with Amanda, to practice my social skills. I prefer the comfort of anonymity in the crowd. A second performer appears, and a third. Tall-drink legs emerge and vanish. The bodies I construct are entrancing, as is the dancers' sinuous motion. The performers are twenty years old to my not-yet-thirty and Amanda's fifty-odd. The array of ages makes me feel clean and moral. If Amanda thinks it proper to flirt with me, how dirty, how pathetic am I, when I dream of her daughter?

Besides, I belong here. Not long ago, I was an undergrad. It took me all of freshman year to get rusticated.

Later, I did a stint at the Culinary Institute, just up the Hudson. I could not tolerate the cost or the regimentation. An Institute teacher runs an upscale restaurant here. The city can support just the one. When I dropped out of the program, André (his nom de guerre—old friends call him Shep) took me on as a sous-chef and managerial assistant, at busboy wages. I am content to be a bargain, pleased to put my mind to use. But my allegiance is to Vassar, to the life I should have led.

Mind you, I am not like my friend Libby. She is on a list. The campus cops know her by sight and escort her to the gate. "But you invited me!" she protests, meaning when she was admitted to the school. Sometimes, a cop slips her a twenty and (even when medicine's made her overweight) tells her to get a good meal. "Will you dine with me?" she asks. She has money. What she wants is connections to the school.

Watching the jugglers, I see that Libby is right. She was born to shimmy amidst flames. She is justified in her grief for opportunity missed.

I have what Libby lacks: control. I do not haunt the place. I show up for two weekends, Freshman Parents' in the fall and Family in the spring. I take in the art exhibits. I stand in the back for the student musical. The parents love me. I am a booster for the program. "My nephew struggled freshman year," I say. "But think how well he's doing now!"

In recent years, I've added move-in and move-out weekends. I'm half-recognized, a face seen before. I help carry armchairs and refrigerators. I may pocket the occasional small object, a watch or iPod, if it's been set down on a desk. As a rule, it's a kid down the hall I rob, not the student whose family lets me pitch in. I do need to break even for the unpaid leave I take from the restaurant. The point, I am saying, is not profit but camaraderie. The chance to dress in Friday casual. The chance to walk alongside the young women, to laugh with them.

The music changes. Sexual teasing gives way to mock aggression. To the strain of violin swells from an old swashbuckler, the young women thrust and parry with fiery sabers. The extra light reveals the fencers' faces. Amanda's daughter has a tight, bony death's head look, which I don't at all mind.

"Not to be a bad mother," Amanda says, "but this noise is enough to give anyone a migraine." She looks about and lights a cigarette. As an afterthought, she angles the pack my way, in case I want to join her.

I recognize Amanda's daughter now. She performed last spring. She was clumsy then, a beginner. I liked her as I might like any shapely member of the supporting cast, which is to say vaguely.

I say that I can't leave until Sam has had his moment. I offer to approach the daughter on Amanda's behalf, to convey the excuse, to say a headache got the best of her. "Your daughter's much improved," I say. "If I'm thinking of the same kid."

"Jen," Amanda says, so that I know whom to address.

I propose brunch the next morning. The school gives a nice one in the brick building up the green, the All-Campus Dining Center. Amanda is noncommittal, which I take to mean that she'll be drinking tonight, and who knows at what hour she'll reappear.

When she's gone, I feel regret. Amanda is a woman I could relate to.

Jen disappoints. Not in her appearance. True, her face is oddly put together. She has taut and sallow skin, a narrow nose, and close-set eyes, mismatched with bee-sting lips. I am fond of that combination, youthful homeliness staring out above a fetching figure. It makes me hopeful. Such a girl should be within reach. No, it's Jen's response that's off-putting. What did I say I was there for? She has a popular kid's easy command.

Jen absorbs my message. Evidently, I am one in a line of adults who have filled in for Amanda—the neighbor who fed Jen dinner when Amanda was off on a bender, the teacher who helped Jen complete her applications when Amanda proved unreliable. I am thanked in friendly fashion, but when I suggest brunch, Jen turns dismissive: "Don't kid yourself." I should know better than to build plans around Amanda.

I pass out of the quad. Toward the edge of campus, families linger, reluctant to head for the SUVs. Fat girls hug their mothers. Plain girls look purposeful. The stunners stand in clusters. There are innocent fresh faces and soignée compositions, cheekbones emphasized. A petite Mediterranean type draws attention with guffaws that last many beats too long. I don't kid myself.

I head from the campus through the dying streets with their particulate haze—asbestos, lead, toxic urban dust. Home is a ground-floor apartment carved out of what was once a pawnshop. In Poughkeepsie, the businesses are bars and cell phone stores and quickie marts, and even those fail. The neighborhood is safer than it looks. Everyone knows there's nothing to steal.

We do have a flat-screen TV, a guilt offering from Libby's mom, who also pays for cable and WiFi. Libby's set to stay up and watch predictable romantic comedies she's TiVoed. She hates that I want to head to bed.

"Did Shep-André throw a fit?"

Libby is wrapped in a bath towel. She sprawls on the couch. I can see the butterfly on her right tit and the snake on her ass. I'll tell Dr. Gush that I'm worried she's revving up. En route to bad times, Libby turns provocative. I decline her offers. That's my distinction.

Libby says I needn't cling to it. I should save her from herself by sopping up sexual energy when she's manic. Her argument is that since I'm in the club myself, I needn't feel guilt over taking advantage of the mentally ill. She says that she only likes sex when she's off her medicine. If she didn't get laid then, she'd have no fun at all.

Libby's mom, Erica, thinks that I temper Libby's moods. Erica pays the rent, all of it. She joins in the fantasy that Libby and I are almost in college, that soon we'll be back. The set-up is like having her daughter in the usual mixed-gender Vassar dorm.

Someone should do a microeconomics study of our living arrangements. Erica takes care of the basics. Then André can underpay me for work. What I save, I spend on my therapy with Dr. Gush who is also Libby's therapist, only Libby, which is to say Erica, pays full freight. Libby and I both came to Dr. Gush, whom we call Henry, through health services. That's college town finance. Everything's tied to the school. Discounts can be cadged. All the money flows from the mom.

Erica hints that I might court her daughter. It's the coeds who interest me, with their worry over course selection and their indecision about dropping gymnastics even as a hobby and their devotion to mythical boyfriends in California. Libby and I are in roomie mode. In her calmer moods, Libby wants to marry an Ivy League grad and move to the suburbs to raise his vaguely hippie children. I want what I missed out on. A bout of depression or two shouldn't disqualify a guy from all he's worked for, even if he turns obstreperous when he's down. I took honors physics. I wrestled all-city, in Providence, Rhode Island. I served free dinners to winos and wiped noses at the MLK day care.

I tell Libby that Shep-André will be fine. On college visiting days, he has to be in the restaurant anyway, making sure that every dish is top-flight. The rest of the year, he can stay home and smoke dope while I run the kitchen.

Libby's disappointed. She'd hoped for a dust-up—or romance. "You didn't meet a sweetie?"

I tell Libby that I've got a prospect—brunch tomorrow.

"Shall we snatch her?"

Libby's fantasy is kidnapping a Vassar boy and acting out The Collector, with the genders reversed. She would reward the guy for showing devotion. If he refused to play-act, she'd withhold desiderata, like home video access.

The idea is a response to Henry's theory that Libby needs the experience of success in a conventional relationship. Since she didn't seem headed there by straightforward means, Libby guessed it would make sense to script a love affair. She wrote lines and stage directions. While murmuring sweet nothings, the "trainee" should reach out shyly and tenderly.

The plan was for me to act as a confederate, a witness who would say, "He was besotted. He wasn't a prisoner of anything, except love." That's Libby's writing as well.

Now that Libby's on the nut-case watch list, her plan has needed updating. She says that I should get myself adored by a kidnapped coed. With my newfound confidence, I will win the heart of a real girlfriend, another undergrad, not the one we've nabbed. I'll enter the bourgeoisie and invite Libby to tea parties. She'll return to mainstream life by that route.

Libby's plot is highly elaborated. She'll use the captive student's cell phone to text-message classmates: "I've met the most divine townie!" Libby will stand in for the girl on Facebook, making entries that speak darkly of love. Libby's sure I'd be safe. "If they nab you, I'll testify: 'She was like a woman possessed!'" Often, I've thought Libby should go on the stage.

"Emotional Justice!" That's Libby's cry. The notion of disability rights is too limited, is her point. Healthy undergrads have dozens of liaisons. Where's equality? The made-to-order lover is a matter of fairness.

If Libby's schemes are wrong-headed, still I can see her point. We have been denied much: time in Eden, degrees, jobs, and now intimacy, caring, and support—we who need them the most. Henry's assurances notwithstanding, I can't see how Libby and I will gain access to life's goods. It's for that reason, because without rash plans there are no grounds for optimism, that I conceal Libby's ambitions from Henry.

Apropos, he offers me the same advice that he gives her. Henry wants me to pursue normal intimacy with someone who has a job or a commitment to grad school. Henry sees Libby and me as a miniature therapy group. I must venture beyond.

"I'll join you," Libby suggests, meaning for brunch. She has a thing about eating free at Vassar. She's the prodigal daughter, returned. The deans should kill the fatted calf. "Or the slender eggplant," she says. Libby's a vegetarian.

For tomorrow, she proposes a disguise that will get her past the security team. The description goes on too long. I make a mental note to check the medicine cabinet, although once Libby starts skipping doses, she turns sly, and there's no catching her.

"The plan's not firm," I say.

"All the same you're heading to bed," she notes, "so that you can get up early." As if it were a matter of letting me off the hook for concealing my intentions, she adds, "On your important weekend."

That phrase is with me the next morning. I shave with care.

Actually, every day I shave with care. In therapy Henry said I needed to loosen up. "When you shave, why don't you do it a different way each time?"

Henry's suggestions are disastrous. All the same, I like following them. They make my progress or lack of it a collaborative effort.

When I discussed the session with Libby, she suggested that we develop an iRaze App. You enter your usual shaving pattern. The program assumes that there are sixty scrapes in the average shave. For the first two months, iRaze has you vary the first stroke. Then the App assigns a new first stroke and has you switch up the second stroke for two months. Libby sketched out mockups with a Mario figure pointing out the shaving path.

I did the math for the project. Reordering only the first two strokes, the program takes you through nine-plus years with certainty of no repeats. Continuing from there is no problem, but, as Libby pointed out, in a decade, surely shaving will be obsolete. There will be a pill for it, or full beards will return to fashion.

Libby got enthused about the possibilities. Instead of varying the first stroke, each day you could leave a new sector for last, letting the final blob of shave cream wander about your face. Online, she located a Molloy Society, fans of a Samuel Beckett book whose hero takes a systematic approach to stone sucking, rotating sixteen smooth pebbles in and out of his coat and pants pockets. Once Molloy partisans got hold of the iRaze, it would get traction. Men would love the guarantee that they'd begin each morning doing something they'd never do again. "It's a sure thing!" Libby insisted. "We'll get Schick and Gillette in a bidding war!"

Leaving the App fantasy aside, I filled Henry in on my progress—each shave unique. To my surprise, he was disheartened. "It sounds obsessive-compulsive."

I exploded. That's a shortcoming that got me in trouble at college. When my good intentions are interpreted as illness, I protest too vigorously.

"How it's compulsive," I asked, "to do what your therapist suggests?" If anything, I felt impelled to shave the old way. Each morning, I had to catch myself, before blade hit skin, and remember to consult the schedule. I could switch back to my former habit, should Henry ask. "How is it compulsive when I'm resisting my instincts?"

As for obsession, the algorithm allowed me to proceed mindlessly. I shaved, free of rumination but with the mild pleasure that comes from taking a novel approach to a mundane task.

Henry wondered whether I intended sabotage. He considered (aloud) how obedience morphs into stubbornness. The phrase passive-aggressive entered the argument. My open anger in the office was evidence of covert anger expressed in my response to Henry's proposal.

I read the Beckett novel. Actually, I found the relevant paragraphs online, about the sucking stones. I glanced at papers posted by kids who had read the book for school. (Really, I would make a very good undergraduate.) "What do you make of Molloy?" I asked Henry, who fancies himself a literary type. "Isn't he meant to be an Everyman?"

Henry's capable of backing off. It's why Libby and I stick with him. Henry's only slow, not hidebound. Eventually, he declared his initiative (the shaving shake-up) a success. We had learned more about my tendencies, the very ones that had annoyed certain deans during my sojourn at Vassar.

On the morning of my brunch date, I shave and shower. (I've been varying my scrub-up patterns as well.) With no particular hopes, I don my preppy best. Libby is still on the couch, dead to the world. I slip past her. Outside, in scuffed Topsiders, I walk through blocks of tossed beer bottles and condoms. When I make it to the ACDC, there on the steps is Amanda.

Her hair is down. The low cut of her blouse, a flesh-toned shell, is well warranted. Her face is more natural than I had remembered it to be. And she recognizes me.

"Where can I find a Sunday Times in this backwater?"

Nowhere, I know. But as per Henry's instructions, I am in socializing mode.

"I remember a coffeehouse on the corner," I say, as if I were an infrequent visitor.

Amanda could use a walk to clear her head. And so we're off, I and the middle-class paragon I am meant to marry, give or take a few years and (here I am guessing) a few bad habits.

The city's metallic smell comes from the IBM plant, I have always believed, but it's a Sunday, factories shut, and still an off odor reaches the green. Amanda grabs my arm, as if to steady herself. The morning is unseasonably warm. Her palm becomes sweaty. I place my hand over hers, to secure it.

"How reminiscent," she says. Like me, I am guessing, Amanda wishes to return to college days.

I guide Amanda though the line of cars returning to campus from the chain hotels on Route 9. In front of the café, she taps a cigarette from her pack. I step inside and exchange customer stories with Gary, the owner. Visiting parents are edging out the regulars. Why are the rich so cheap, and the fussy ones especially? Gary comps me a cappuccino to go—the customer who ordered it will have to wait. I hand Amanda the cup, she murmurs gratitude. I report: no paper. "The fellow says there may be at a convenience store, one block up Raymond, or else at the Gulf Station back on Hooker."

We are still in the Town of Poughkeepsie, a crescent-shaped zone of relative prosperity that wraps around the desperate City of Poughkeepsie. The town is pathetic enough. After a succession of cheap ethnic restaurants, the street descends into second-hand shops with meager selections of goods.

Amanda pauses at a window. "Plus ça change."

The display features children's books: Winnie-the-Pooh, Babar, Where the Wild Things Are, Curious George, and Madeleine. Around them are use-worn stuffed animals representing characters, a Disney Tigger, a home-sewn Queen Celeste from a kit, a pillow needlepointed with the image of the Man with the Yellow Hat. What awful story clings to these objects I can only imagine. Perhaps a child has died. But then, the collection may represent only spring cleaning or a move to smaller quarters.

"So much is made," Amanda observes, "of novelty." She explains: blogging, email, Kindle, recycling, micro greens, space travel. What impresses her is the stasis. Her parents did not read children's literature, not per se. They grew up with Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. "But my generation read Sendak. The books date to the Fifties. We read Milne and Bemelmens."

I ask whether continuity isn't comfortable.

"Comfortable or nauseating. These kids find themselves and discover—what?—the same old thing. I mean, after Cornell, I studied circus in Europe. Now it's a group activity, every girl a juggler and all BFFs." She says that there's a boast in the kids' frivolity, in their devoting time to it—a tired claim about the liberated self.

In my freshman year, when a teacher drew arbitrary conclusions, I argued forcefully in response. It was the illness, of course, but my nature, too. I dislike being told how the world works. With the help of time and, yes, prescriptions, I came to accept Henry's lesson, that firm, if poorly buttressed declarations are crucial in social interactions. Someone says how things are now, and despite the fact that the reverse claim is equally true (here, that change has been rapid), the strong assertion confers value on the speaker. I have this insight. I have substance and worth.

"These students," Amanda is saying, "are us, only without even the veneer of originality." She includes me in her generation. "We carried transistor radios tuned to FM rock album stations. We wrote academic papers on Dylan. We revived romantic rebellion. Everyone alienated. Angst as charm. The handmade. Beat rants: Ginsburg, Ferlinghetti. The planet, the natural. Dramatic hair. Odd jewelry. Nonconformity you could play at while applying to professional schools. These kids are living our lives."

We have left the second-hand shop zone and are heading past a shuttered hair salon. I tell Amanda that I see what she means. "I went to a wedding in TriBeCa," I say. "It was in a vast ballroom, done in concrete, steel, and glass, high above the City. The band played Beatles and Stones and novelty numbers, like Herman's Hermits. The kids getting married were my age. The bride was close to her mother and wanted to showcase tastes they held in common."

I am following Henry's stricture, to respond with a parallel example from my own experience—to show that I have listened and respect the argument and the speaker.

Amanda looks at me strangely, as if I were making the story up, to humor her. She's not wrong. I heard about the "events site" from a classmate, during my Vassar year. She'd been to a wedding there. A fashionable guy was marrying a bride whose relatives were hayseeds. The account featured a predatory uncle on the groom's side who pressed himself up against ill-dressed girls from out of town. I used the setup as the basis for a short story, in freshman composition. I didn't realize that my classmate was doing the same. That's why the wedding was on her mind, because she was outlining her paragraphs. The "salient details" were identical, hers and mine. My trouble started there, in my insistence that the best fiction comes from stolen vignettes. As I was more distant from the events, it was more virtuous that I should draw on them. My version was, take my word for it, the inventive one.

I continue to echo Amanda's themes, nothing new since the Sixties. "And when the bride stood up to toast her parents, she went all Virginia Woolf—how they'd given her a room of her own, how they told her that Shakespeare's sister was as creative maybe as Shakespeare."

The convenience store rack holds the Poughkeepsie Journal and one fat copy, its front page torn, of the New York Daily News. Amanda asks for the Times. "No call for it, my good lady." The owner looks to be just off the boat from Pakistan. Once he wises up, he'll head for Brooklyn, leaving the storefront vacant.

"This one horse town!" Amanda complains. Still in equine mode, she adds, "Shall we make it a trifecta?"

She's parked on the edge of campus. On the walk, she touches and squeezes, to emphasize her observations. "What is that, wintergreen?" It's a flat-to-the-ground weed with red berries.

Upping the ante, she faces me full on and grabs both upper arms. "Aren't you grateful we only have to visit one weekend in the year?" I've mentioned Providence, as if I still lived there. She gives my muscles a feel. "Do you work out?"

She's won me over—a woman who appreciates my efforts. I keep weights in my bedroom. I jog in all seasons. Henry puts great stock in jogging.

"We all do," I tell Amanda. "Your generation invented exercise as well. Alienated exercise. Rebellious exercise. 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.'"

Amanda's miffed that I have put distance between us. To apologize, I correct myself: "Our generation."

It's mid-morning. The students will be rolling out of bed, wanting to squeeze in one last family activity, a tête-à-tête with a favored instructor or a walkthrough of the handicraft sale to benefit Haiti. Amanda is violating the weekend's rhythm.

Her car is a small Jaguar, the cheap kind they don't make anymore, with parts from Ford in Europe. She asks if I drive standard. She's not sure her headache isn't coming back, and she wants to text Jen.

The gas station on Hooker has no Times. It occurs to Amanda that her hotel may do better—she had asked them to try. Do I mind if we head there? Though I know a quicker route, I follow Amanda's directions.

It is not the Week In Review that Amanda wants this time of day. In her room at the Hampton Inn and Suites, Amanda has turned a desk into a working bar. Cubes floating in the slurry suggest that she refilled the ice bucket this morning. "It's not all weed for you, is it, Alex?"

I am no morning drinker, but a plan seems to be in motion. The display suggests that Amanda's a scotch lady. She has two bottles going at once. I fix her a J&B, which she describes as "light."

Amanda's nightclothes, gauzy items, are spread over one queen-sized bed. Setting aside Libby's sisterly squalor, this gift is one that has been withheld from me, views of the scattered peignoir.

Amanda pats the unused bed, inviting me to sit alongside. Our shoes are off. In a gesture that reminds me of Jen's dance, Amanda turns her left knee outward, in order to run the heel of the foot against the outer side of my leg. She inserts the foot between my thighs now, rubbing, as if to ease an itch on her sole.

"I'm inclined to skip the next hour of the visit," Amanda offers. Presently, we begin.

Amanda is fit in the manner of middle-aged women who exercise. But her breasts are formless, and the skin between them is turning papery. I see that she's had "work." The whole is a mosaic of firmness from exercise, tightness from surgery, and the natural effects of age.

The patchwork inspires me. I decide that the right path to desire is to take Amanda on segmentally. I think of Jen revealed in parts. Since that approach seems perverse, I think of a shave.

I kiss Amanda's firm right shoulder. I proceed to her flat belly and the inner aspect of her right thigh. I am moved. Amanda echoes in response. I aim to respect all the elements, those that inspire admiration and those that elicit pity.

"Oh, Jesus," Amanda says, "You give a girl time."

Now it is Amanda who alludes to the age gap. She has forgotten, she says, how young men are dedicated to the task. Later, she falls silent. I smell her coming into ripeness.

As I nuzzle, I cry in mourning for what I have lost. I suck and sniffle. Amanda responds with exertion, as if we were attuned, working together toward a crescendo.

Although the warm-up was mechanical, the climax is compelling. Amanda's hunger and gratitude—would a college coed offer as much? I gain faith in my method, analysis that leads to grand synthesis. We put too much stock in immediacy, in the real thing. There's a case to be made for the constructed and the imagined.

Amanda thanks me. Transcendent is a word she uses, as if sex with me were a New Age experience.

"Ever get up to Buffalo?" Amanda runs a clothing boutique there, imported skirts and blouses. The recession has hurt.

I am not unaffected. I have held a woman's attention. She's not fleeing. She imagines me in her life.

Amanda pours herself a Glenlivet and heads for the shower.

My cell phone shows a stack of calls from Libby.

"Are you okay?" I ask.

Libby's just curious about my day. "Details, please!" She has a way of wheedling.

"You must volunteer," Libby says, when I've sketched out the events, "to move Jen out this spring." She's got Amanda pegged as a woman who hates the routine tasks of parenthood.

Libby spins a tale. I can say I'm a specialty foods distributor who handles wine on the side, from small vineyards, for small restaurants. Shep-André does, in fact, deal with growers in the Finger Lakes region. I can borrow his van. I should offer to bring Jen home as part of a trip I have slated anyway.

Libby's account is rich in detail. When I pack Jen up, I'll see to it that her music gear gets mislaid. "Your iPhone?" I'll say. "Didn't you set it in the bottom of the trunk?" Without earbuds to wall her off, Jen will converse. She'll discuss career dreams, summer plans, juggler friends.

I'll complain of a back spasm from the lifting. I'll detour into a state park for a walk, to get the kinks out. What will prevent us from stopping at Cornell and trying out a suspension bridge across a gorge? We'll sup at a scenic bistro. Driving a kid with all her possessions, you have the last word. A normal level of coercion, Libby says. Who has not been forced into small talk with a helpful stranger?

Under Libby's influence, I imagine Jen's mismatched face beside me for hours at a stretch.

Libby's on to another scenario: I'll put Vassar behind me, move to Buffalo, take courses at the state college, set Amanda's home in order, steer her to AA.

Only when she hangs up do I think to worry about Libby, her fluency, her ability to make me dream.

Who does not melt at the sight of an older woman with at towel wrapped around her? "All yours," Amanda offers, and I see she means the shower.

What say we spend the afternoon in the hotel room, is her suggestion when I emerge. I invoke Sam's name and the closing ceremonies.

I have a fondness for the Dean's address to families. It has a hypnotic quality. The kids are made to forget that the curriculum's contracting in the face of tight budgets. They forget that the food is bad, that the library's cutting its hours. The theme is reassuring: a liberal education and good fellowship shield us from what blows the future brings.

"Let's hear that talk," I say. "Let's hear it with Jen."

On the drive back to campus, I get the full biography. The ex, Ted, is in Asia this year with the second wife, Petra. In high school, Jen mostly stayed with Ted. Amanda's revived parental duties are onerous. Jen despises her.

I say, "It's endemic, young daughters hating mothers."

Amanda's fixed on filling me in. Petra's a skilled homemaker.

I say, "We never know the good we do." Amanda serves as a model of a woman going it alone.

Then, as if scripted by Libby, Amanda bemoans the long drive back to Buffalo, with more to come in June when Jen must be fetched.

I offer to help with packing, when the time comes; I'll show up for Sam, but he's quite independent.

Amanda wonders whether I could take on the whole task, moving Jen out. She knows it's a lot to ask. She puts her hand inside my thigh to suggest the reunion we might have.

"Maybe I could arrange that," I say. Amanda plays with my shirt buttons. "I'm sure I can."

Amanda suggests that we not fill Jen in yet. With kids, last minute is best—the fait accompli.

Next session, I will tell Henry how right he is. Efforts in shaving morph into facility in love. Success in one relationship leads to opportunity in another.

We find seats up close.

Sure enough, a dean invokes Greek names, and then it's a quick leap to the Renaissance. Soon, we set aside considerations of scholarship for talk about people. What you'll recall about Vassar. Friends. Professors, so available. Not to be crass about it, but contacts for life—the broad Vassar community, across generations.

It isn't the knack for originality that moves a woman from research to administration.

Covertly, Amanda touches my left forearm. She's still a drink shy of level. I try my trick, breaking her face into pixels, caressing each one with my gaze, the crows' feet at the left eye's edge, the spider red spot on the nose, the blurring boundary between lip and skin.

Jen, sitting beyond Amanda, offers a kind glance. It conveys apology, I believe, for my involvement the night before, for the need to cover for Amanda. I am free to linger on Jen's Funny Valentine features. She's just the gal for me.

Not only accord, the dean is saying, but also confrontation, clashes of perspective, stimuli to maturation.

From the end of the row, I hear insistent whispers. I turn, and it's Libby in dramatic matron attire, red hair, orange muumuu, big sunglasses, and broad-brimmed floppy hat. She has bracelets up both arms. In response to her demands, there is a shifting of seats. She squeezes toward me. Her perfume precedes her.

"Poor Sam!" she hisses. "He ate something that didn't agree." Libby says she's been nursing Sam—a trip to the infirmary and then forced fluids. Libby points back and forth from herself to me. "The step-sister-in-law."

Amanda seems to have nodded off.

I give Libby the calm and quiet sign, palms pushing downward: piano, piano.

Libby speaks past Amanda to Jen, extolling my virtues. "A prince!"

The dean enters her peroration, thanking the families for entrusting their children, saying how the students have found a safe base and shown courage in venturing away.

The campus police have spotted Libby. They gesture but hold off. I shift in my chair, denying Libby, implying I'm with Amanda.

Because I have turned away, I miss the moment Libby leaps to her feet. She waves a hand, as if she were in class and the dean an inattentive teacher.

Libby speaks for the crowd. "We thank you! We admire you! We offer you our first-born!" A security officer moves down the row. He puts his hand on Libby's shoulder. "But, oh, Dean Florian, will you embrace us when we've strayed?" Libby's hat falls off, revealing a dirty blond tonsure fringed by the rufous halo. She did a bathroom sink job, leaning over, dying the ends of the hair, the part that would show. The cops are dragging Libby toward a side exit near the dais.

The ruckus has wakened Amanda. She gives me her doubting look.

It has been a glorious weekend, one it will please me to recall. I throw Amanda and Jen a nod and hustle up the aisle. Libby is howling now, her entreaties barely comprehensible. "What will become of us? Are we not worthy? Must you shun us? Do you love us at all?"

Title graphic: "Ring of Fire" Copyright © The Summerset Review 2011.

The thud in the forehead.

The long black gap from the runway
to the city where the tops of the Empire

State Building and Chrysler burn like trees,
tall trees, small

controlled burns,
markers of loss, of constancy,

like friends, old friends.

How does it happen?
They stay. I go

over the brooches of East Coast cities
nestled in sweaters, earth, night,
water shaping everything

with its merciless curves.

The trees lean toward verdigris
and copper, guarding the white breath

we breathe into our gloves.
A flock of school kids

crossing the rocks,
then the envelope closing,

the return: the strange,
sealed privacy of midday.

The woods surround us
like a mistake, an act of mercy.

We could be children here,
we could be brother and sister.

Inches from my bungalow, the hedge goes wildly
sprawling past the shape some gardener's put it in.
The new shoots look deformed, not separating stem
from leaf. You cannot call them anything
but urgent. As you leave—as you press
your hand against mine with its gift
of pruning shears and say Go in,
the way you'd cut a tumor out
and point me towards the center of the yard
where I'm to interfere with summer,
not because we don't want it but
because it must not take over everything—
I see you in the inches of the doorway
as the gate closes and the latch
clasps itself together. Night won't come.
Rubber leaves blow darkly in a liquor
breeze. It is the season of the crab

It was always a girl. And in each case study, she was between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Just as her body would begin the changes of womanhood, the girl would turn to stone.

It began in the extremities. A coarsening of the skin. A stiffness of the joints. And then it spread through the veins and capillaries. Over a period of weeks, the disease would take its course, and the young girl would end up a statue. A beautiful statue. Flesh, once rosy with beating blood, was hardened, cold and white, shot through with blue marbled veins. Eyes blind and unseeing, gazing into eternity. And somehow, when the process was complete, the statues would end up in poses that seemed to pantomime carefree, joyous acts. Running. Dancing. Laying belly down with feet curled in the air as though sunning herself in a flower field.

There had been five official cases in Japan, one in Australia, two in France, and seven in the United States. But the numbers were growing every day.

Every culture seemed to deal with the crisis differently. Some families kept the statues tucked into their girlhood beds as though nothing happened. Some erected them in favorite parks or town squares, with a plaque bearing her name and an inspiring quote. Some in Scandinavia put their girls on the prows of ships. In Japan, they were placed in a shrine, where people could come to visit and leave flowers; it was believed that if one kissed their stone feet it was a cure for heartache.

Parents of pubescent girls all over the world were terrified. They kept their daughters isolated, locked up, thinking it was something contagious. The media went into a frenzy, with special reports and maps and graphs and tabulations of the spread of the phenomenon.

Teenage boys tended to keep fearfully quiet about the whole thing. It was best undiscussed, because then it seemed less real.

But the young girls were breathlessly fascinated. They whispered about it among themselves. They formed groups and clubs to watch the twenty-four hour news cycle. The statue girls became tragic heroes to them. Like rock stars.

Some seemed to have developed a private joke; a girl would stop what she was saying mid-sentence, look into the eyes of another, then freeze into a statue pose, an unreadable smile upon her face.

Everyone was shocked when it happened to her. Daphne, the late bloomer who had never kissed a boy. Daphne, a small, wiry, frenetic girl of fifteen with gaunt intensity to her face that tended to make people uncomfortable.

She was the only child of psychologists. She spent her Saturday nights alone in her room on the top floor of their shambling Victorian at the end of a dead-end street.

When she was at school, she still had an aura of aloneness. She said either nothing, or blurted out something embarrassingly blunt and inappropriate. Her eyes were huge and unblinking behind round wire rim glasses. Her head seemed large on her tiny stick-like body. She wasn't harassed by the other children; her quiet strangeness caused them to simply leave her alone.

So of course no one could believe when, one day at band practice, she could not follow the notes on her clarinet. Her fingers could not move quickly enough. The pep rally tune blared on around her, but she didn't hear it; she lifted one hand to her face and stared at her own fingertips, hardened and stiffened, the swirled prints embossed ineffably in stone.

Compared to the chaos and the frenzy which followed—clarinet clattering to the floor, swarms of faces pressing in to look at her, the school nurse's shaking hands, the local news van waiting in the parking lot—the days in the hospital felt utterly still. Timeless and seasonless. The air was always dry and too cool, giving her a constant sniffle. And all that she could see from the fourth floor window was a patch of sky. It would shift from pale silver to blue to black of night, and then the moon appeared. When she slept, she dreamt the moon was a presence, a round, puff-feathered white winter bird, sitting on the windowsill and watching her.

She slept and slept. Or else stared into space, her mind feeling blank and stunned, unable to process what was happening. She could not concentrate on books. And she was not allowed to watch TV, for fear she would see upsetting news stories of girls like herself. Her parents came every afternoon to sit with her. When they spoke, they were carefully nonchalant about her condition. You'll be home before you know it. They are this close to a cure! But the strain of their forced optimism made Daphne feel incredibly anxious. She could hear the tightness in their voices, see their expressions when they thought she wasn't looking.

It was almost better when no one was there at all.

One afternoon when the hallway was quiet with a shift change, and the setting sun was burning bright and low, Daphne woke to find a youngish man sitting on the chair beside her, just watching. At first she thought she had hallucinated him out of boredom, he was so brightly intense against the sterile white background: his skin fair and tender, with flushed cheeks. His eyes were wide and startled looking, with a slightly fanatical look. The hair was fine, ashy blonde, and thinning at the top. The suit and dress shirt he wore looked old and too large in the shoulders.

"How are you feeling?" His voice was high and reedy.

"Fine." He had jolted her out of her stupor; his presence changed the quiet of the room so much. The air seemed to vibrate with electrical energy.

"Does it hurt you? The changing, I mean."

She thought. "Not particularly." She turned her left profile to him; her jaw was firm and chiseled, edged in a stone as fine and radiantly white as alabaster. " It's a little harder to move than it used to be. Like I have arthritis. But I have nowhere to go, anyway, so..."

The man looked at her with an expression full of... pity? Admiration? She couldn't tell. She wondered how she looked to him. She had been told by a girl at school that she appeared at once both old and young. Like a child prematurely aged and wizened. A monitor beeped quietly in the background, displaying her vital signs in squiggly lines on the screen.

He cleared his throat nervously and said, "I am the Blue Mountain Seventh Son. God has sent me here to help you. I have the gift of healing. I predict the future from the past. All good things will come to you."

"Excuse me?"

"The Bible reads, 'Behold, I come like a thief in the night. And I stand at the door and knock...'"

"Speaking of doors, how did you get in here, anyway?"

He looked down at his feet. "It doesn't matter how I got here. It just matters that I am here now. I am a friend. I will heal you." He looked like a prototypical country boy. All he needed was a straw hat. She smiled to herself. At last, something interesting to break up her day.

From the hallway, the sound of an elevator opening. A rolling and clattering of something being pushed: the woman with the dinner trays. The man stood up quickly. He looked nervous. But there was also an awkward, lumbering joy to his face. He smiled a trembling smile as he hurried for the door and whispered, "I'll be back."

With the cases of stone girls increasing, there was spreading fear and confusion. Scientists claimed environmental toxins were to blame. Certain churches thought it was a sign of the apocalypse. Some politicians implied that it was an act of terrorism and that no one was safe anymore.

Along with fear, there was an increase in sentimentalism. There were "tributes" to the girl statues: sad ballads, fictionalized first person accounts written in the teen girl magazines, video montages watched widely on the Internet of these girls and the photographed moments of their short lives. The girls were all known by their first names only. Until there became too many of them.

"Daphne, we brought you some things. We have your assignments from class... we have some yarn and knitting needles, if you want to start learning again... we brought your books..."

"What books?"

Her father handed her a tote bag. "We brought Nancy Drew, we brought..."

"I don't read those anymore."

"Well, what do you read now?" So carefully casual. So afraid of excitation, emotion. It made her want to scream. But instead she looked at him for a long moment, and said,

"I like reading your books. You should have brought me some Philip Roth."

Her father smirked at her. "Oh, really? You think you're ready for that type of thing?"

"I'm fifteen. I'm not a child."

Her mother frowned. "What your father means is that the themes are a little mature for you. You can't read Philip Roth; you're a little young to understand it. You don't know what it is to be an adult. Most of his books are about grown men. They're... complicated."

"I like complicated." Daphne rooted around in the bag. "Did you bring the one thing I asked for?"

Her mother sighed. "I don't think that you really ought to have it."

"Oh, come on! It's all that I wanted!"

Her mother sighed. "Relax. I brought it anyway, against my better judgment." She pulled a mirror compact from her purse and handed it over. "What are you going to do with this, anyway?"

"Look at myself, duh."

"I think it would be unhealthy, laying here and staring at yourself all day. What you need is distraction. Concentrate on other things. Like your school friends. All of your friends have been calling to check on you."

Daphne's face grew red. "They are not my friends! They're just being nosy! They don't even talk to me in real life. Hang up on them!"

She looked at the wall and didn't say anything else. When the parents were finally gone, she took out the little mirror. She looked at her skin, fascinated by the way flesh blended into the spreading patches of stone. When she tapped the patches with her nail, it went click.

I don't have long, I don't have long. She spent the afternoon looking into the mirror, practicing facial expressions. Genuine happiness. Genuine concern. Genuine self-amusement. Genuine fear. She was going to practice until she could convince anyone of anything.

A group of teenage girls had begun holding vigil in front of the hospital. First it was a small group of three, but then it grew to five and then ten. Girls who dressed in black, with pale powdered faces and dark smudged eyes, as though in extravagant mourning. They held signs that said, "WE LOVE YOU, DAPHNE" and "PLEASE LOOK AT US!" When hospital security asked what they wanted, one of them explained, "We are Daphne's fans. We just want to see her. To touch her."

Every day they gathered, a mournfully hopeful little group. Every day they were sent away.

Daphne could hear the Seventh Son enter her room. Her eyes were closed, but she could tell it was him by his quiet, hesitant movements.

"Are you awake?"

"Yes. But if you don't mind, I'd prefer to keep my eyes closed. Are you back to heal me?"

"Yes, I am. May I begin?"

"I guess so."

"You can just... lay still. No need to open your eyes. You can even go back to sleep..."

"I'm not tired." She felt him draw near, heard his heavy breathing as though he were afraid. He had an interesting smell, a panicky scent of geraniums that seemed to seep hotly from his pores.

Trembling fingers began to stroke her cheek, her stony jaw line. At first she tensed up. But soon, she gave in and relaxed into his touches. It was something she wasn't used to.

Every day since her admission her body felt smaller, compacting in on itself as it calcified. Now, with her eyes closed, in this deep silence of soundless prayer and touch, she began to feel warm and expansive. Generous and alive.

"Have you healed a lot of people, or what?"

"I believe that I have."

Her relaxed mind began to drift. "My parents will kill me if they find out that you're here. They don't like it when I talk to men."

"Why is that?"

"I don't know. I had a friend once, who was a man. I went to visit him sometimes at his house. My parents freaked out big time over it." Tom. Their neighbor from up the block. He had started chatting with her while she was waiting for the school bus one morning, and he was walking his dog. He had doleful blue eyes, stubble on his chin.

It wasn't often that Daphne found someone she could talk to. Kids her own age were so difficult to understand. She preferred the company of mute animals.

Tom was different. He spoke to her in a direct way, as though she were an equal. About music, books. His ex-wife. She began to slip over to his house on stuffy summer evenings. He would play music, growling guitar music. She told him how she hated school and felt so different. And they were just talking.

When her parents found out, they forbade her to return. They said that it was wrong. That she didn't "understand boundaries." That she had no intuition to protect herself, as a mature woman would. How Daphne had slammed her door and howled, how she hated them.

Recalling those days while lying in this white room, in her hospital bed, she felt a great rush of nostalgia. As though she could see her little life clearly, for the first time, now that she was cut off from it. Tom's murmuring voice and the glow of his cigarette. The feeling of running home barefoot in the humid dark. The sweetness of her anguish. It all seemed so rich and strange and beautiful now. But she said nothing of this, and kept her eyes shut.

The Seventh Son was stroking her shoulder now. The shoulder had progressed faster than the rest of her; it was like pure polished quartz, translucent and glowing. And yet she could still feel the heat from his fingers, warming her. Maybe what her mother said was true. That she possessed no intuition. Maybe that's the thing that separated her from the other girls. They could smell it on her. It was like having no shadow, no reflection in the mirror. It was a call with no echo.

She bit her lip, forced back tears of confusion until she was calm. She arranged her face into an expression she had been practicing: playful seduction. She opened her eyes, the lids feeling more stiffened and heavy than yesterday, and tried to meet the gaze of the Seventh Son. But it was hard. His eyes shifted nervously, glinting like silver fish in a murky stream, struck by the sun.

"I... think I may be feeling better already." She raised herself up and stretched her arms, then flexed them back and forth. "I can tell a difference. Can you?"

He blushed, but finally forced himself to look into Daphne's smiling young face.

"I want to walk today."

"Where would you be going?"

"Around the hallways. I can do it. I feel fine."

The nurse sighed, then came over and unhooked the wires from the monitor. "You want me to get you a wheelchair? Just in case you need it?"

"I don't." She was a little lightheaded when she stood up. And her joints were resisting a little more this day. It made her young hips ache to move. But at least she was getting out of that room.

It was a pediatric ward. There were borders of teddy bears on the walls. There were glass cases containing children's drawings and clay creations. Inset in one wall was an aquarium of bright neon guppies. Daphne stopped to examine their movement.

"Don't tap on that glass, dear." The nurse had been following her three steps behind. Daphne walked away, annoyed at being spied on.

There was an arts and crafts room, full of low tables and tiny chairs. Some children sat painting with watercolors. They wore pale blue gowns like Daphne's and all had stints in their hands.

The nurse leaned to speak low into her ear. "There's one girl in there that has the same condition you do. She was just admitted yesterday. Maybe you could go in? Tell her hello?"

Indeed, there was a girl older than the rest. She looked about thirteen. She was tall, sitting hunched in a little chair, mindlessly painting flaming streaks of orange and yellow and red with one arm. The other arm was solid stone, and projected lightly from her body, her hand gesturing with gracefully spread fingers.

"Come on, it would do her good. I'm sure you two have a lot to talk about."

The girl felt herself being watched, and looked up. She and Daphne locked eyes for a long, shocked moment of recognition. There was no camaraderie, no welcome between them. Just wariness, guardedness as each considered the other, and the girl looked away first, coming to some sort of private conclusion. She painted a long, low streak of murky purple into her picture, with a grave, focused finality.

"Honey, your father and I have decided that we will try to get you moved."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, there are some hospitals doing research with stem cells." She handed Daphne some pages. "They think they can cure what you have. There are trials going on right now."

"Stem cells? Mother, don't get your hopes up."

"What do you mean? Why can't I get my hopes up?"

"What if this is something that science can't cure?"

"Oh, Daphne. The technology these days, it's just incredible what they can do."

"Did you ever think that this thing that is happening to all these girls, is, like, some kind of judgment?" She said this with a dreamy smile.

"What pray tell do you mean?"

"It's a punishment. By God. Or the universe. A judgment on the ills of society. And the young girls pay the price..."

"Did you read that rubbish?"

"No. I thought it up in my very own head!"

"You know what? Do me a favor and shut your mouth. I can't take it anymore. Do you know how crazy I am? Everyone's gone mad. People are scared and it keeps getting worse. They say it's the end of humanity. People are becoming desperate. And some of these parents are selling their stone daughters to the highest bidder! Little girls becoming status symbols in the private collections of sick perverts! You should be thankful that we're doing everything we can."

"Mom, calm down. I'm just saying that maybe you can't control everything. Because you don't understand it. Nobody does."

"You! You have this horrible disorder and you don't even comprehend..."

"Just leave me alone. I don't want to talk about this. There are no more words to say." She covered her head with her blanket.

A day and a night passed, but Daphne was oblivious. She either slept or stared into space, listening to the air vent that made a sound as lonely to her as a gust of wind on a distant planet.

In the morning, a girl came with a breakfast tray. She was one of the younger ones, merry looking with gaudy rings on her fingers and long, brightly painted nails.

"Did you hear?" she whispered before she left. "It was in the news. There was a girl like you, but in some country in Africa. One of the first ones. She had been completely mineralized. A statue. And they say she reversed! She turned back into a living girl! Her parents had set her up in a shrine in their hut. They were praying to her and all of a sudden..." the girl fluttered her fingers, turned her head from side to side. "It's just a report, so who knows. But that's great, huh?" The girl gave Daphne's hand a little squeeze, and then she was gone.

There were more stories being told of stone girls turning back to flesh. But no one could verify them, yet. They happened in remote, rural areas of the world. There was no testing. No documentation. It was all word of mouth. It could have been fraud or wishful thinking. But still, the stories were multiplying.

When he came back the next time, she was waiting for him. His posture was stooped, his eyes downcast, as though he were trying to render himself invisible. When he raised his eyes to her, there again was that tremulous, hopeful smile.

She got out of the bed, drawing herself up as tall as she could. She felt the life in her spreading hips. Her new young breasts.

She looked at the man that stood before her. He was different than other adults. He was pure and uncorrupted, a deserving soul. And what she felt in the confines of the small white room was power. The power to make this man happy. Or not. It made her feel bold and brave. She looked at him, considering.

At the same time, there was still that undercurrent of lonely wind from the air vents. A noise that was empty and relentless.

"I was thinking," she finally said. "Maybe this time we could go for a walk in the hall."

"I don't know. I mean... What if...?

I will tell them you are my uncle. There is no reason you can't be here. We are friends now. You are my official visitor."

They walked past the display case, the fish tank, the arts and crafts room. The Seventh Son's eyes darted back and forth. He seemed uncomfortable, but still kept one hand out, cupping Daphne's elbow protectively.

"So. You're really a seventh son?"

He nodded.

"Where did you come from again?"

"I came down from a mountain," he all but whispered.

"But why?"

He looked at her with his startled eyes. "To help you. It's my mission. I saw you on the television. They showed your yearbook photo on the screen. I saw your eyes. Your smile. I knew that you were special. I felt a connection. God compelled me to make my way to you."

This he said in his shy, stammering way. His cheeks burned as if they had been slapped. And she felt that he did see something in her that others couldn't. Some ineffable quality. It filled her with joy. The joy of being really seen. The joy of being, for once, known.

She gripped and squeezed his arm. "I'm tired of this floor! Let's go downstairs."

"Oh, I don't know."

"Here. We'll take the stairs. No one will bother us."

She found the exit sign and led him into the stairwell, the heavy door swinging shut behind them. It was cool, damp smelling and dark. "Hold on," she said, "I need to go back and get my socks."

But she was startled to find that the door wouldn't open. She pulled and pulled at the handle. She banged on the door and shouted. At last she threw her arms in the air and laughed. "Can you believe this? What the hell?" She turned to the Seventh Son.

He was standing, staring at her. Something about him seemed odd. Different. He didn't look shrinking or shy anymore. He was looking at her in a way that seemed greedy and bold. He gripped her stony shoulder with his fingers, and Daphne flinched away from him.

"I'm sorry. I can't get over it," he said. "Watching a girl turn, this way. It's just... an astonishing thing." He smiled, as though in a trance. As though he couldn't help himself, he ran a finger along her chin.

"Stop it!" She began to feel a prickling of fear. No one knew where they were. And though she thought she knew him, maybe she didn't. That lack of protective intuition, leaving her defenseless. Maybe he was one of those perverts who wanted to steal her, keep her statue in his closet, do sick things to her.

"You're not really who you said you were, are you?" she asked in a small, bright, brittle voice.

The man said nothing. But the smile left his face. He looked stricken.

She ran down to the next landing, so full of adrenalin that her joints did not ache as they usually did. There was nothing to slow her down. She tried another door, and this one, too, was locked. She banged it with her fist and yelled, "Help!"

The Seventh Son followed behind her. "I... am a seventh son," he said, sheepishly, "but if I have any powers they are unknown to me."

"Then why do you keep coming here? Do you get some kind of sick thrill out of seeing me like this?"

"I..." He couldn't seem to find his voice. He followed her down another flight of stairs. "I... used to be a man of God. I was a preacher. But I had no church. I preached on street corners. I roamed around. I had no home. I would sleep in an empty house, or a barn, or even in the woods. God's power was so strong. I needed nothing else but to spread His word. I trusted in the world, and it provided for me.

"Well, I got older. I started to get tired more easily. It was a hard life. People wouldn't listen to my sermons. I started to have my doubts, and it brought me down. I lost my drive. I started living in one of those motel rooms that they give to the homeless, and tried to figure what to do next.

"That's when I started watching a lot of television for the first time in my life. I needed the color and noise to keep me company. And it seemed like there was nothing on but stories of the stone girls. Over and over and over again. The pictures of the girls as babies and in kindergarten. Playing soccer, singing in choir. My mind began to just fill with these girls. Their eyes were following me everywhere. I saw them when I went to sleep at night."

"You should have stopped watching."

His voice began to rise higher, quavering and breaking. "But even if I stopped, there was an echo in my mind. An endless refrain. And it wasn't just the TV. It was in every magazine and newspaper. And the songs were all over the radio. " Now he tried the next door. It was locked. He pounded feebly. "The songs came from hidden speakers in parking lots! I couldn't escape. This kind of feeling was forced on me. Even though I never knew any of the girls. A false grief was forced on me. It brought me to my knees. I had to do something. I was obsessed."

"So you used me. You lied to me."

Now he had his hands pressed to either side of his head, and his face was clenched in an expression of despair. Then, all at once, his features seemed to fly apart, all cockeyed like the angles of a Picasso painting. She knew she was seeing down into his real self. She knew she was seeing naked desperation and loneliness. Like a curtain had been lifted and she'd caught a glimpse of something unintended for her. You don't know what it is to be an adult.

"It's true. I'm a sinner, I guess. When I saw your picture on the TV, I crawled to the screen and put my hands on it, thinking you could heal me." He came to her, his arms lifted beseechingly. "Could you, now? Heal me?" he whispered.

When he tried to lay a hand on her she pushed him away, hard, so that he stumbled backward.

She ran down the next flight and saw two doors. One was locked. One wasn't. This door led outside, onto a fire escape.

The bright light almost blinded her. The cold, hard metal rungs pressed painfully into her bare feet. The steps led down into a courtyard with a pretty little garden. She hadn't known it was there. It was right behind the hospital cafeteria. Behind tall glass windows, she could see all of the people eating their lunch. Doctors and custodians and tired-looking family members, sitting at the tables under a mural of the rain forest. No one noticed her.

Grass on her feet. Sun on her face. She had never appreciated such things before. But she was fifteen years old now. She felt strong. Pushing the man away had given her a surge of strength, and her anger was exhilarating. She felt that she could push back against it all. The burden of her parents' hopes and dreams. The whispers and prying eyes of her classmates. Lonely men spying on her through TV screens. Everyone who had looked at her young body and projected what they wanted onto it. They had all turned her to stone.

I will not resign myself, she thought. I refuse.

There was a tingling in her fingers. She held one hand up in front of her face. The flesh was living and pink. She took herself in, astonished. Every part of her was becoming soft and free.

The last she ever heard from the Seventh Son was his high, reedy voice sadly singing the first line of one of the most famous of the Stone Girl ballads. They say she had stars in her fingers, moonglow in her eyes... It was a eulogy carried away on the wind.

Daphne paid no heed. Her freedom was too intoxicating. The freedom of movement, freedom to feel. A blooming of sensation in her body that expanded like a universe. She looked around her in wonder at the garden she had found. Flaming red tulips stood tall in rows like soldiers. She knelt down and touched one, peering down into its center; a white pistil rose from a black-spotted base, dusted with pollen. It took her breath away to see it through reborn eyes.

Title graphic: "Stone Cold" Copyright © The Summerset Review 2011.

His were the best parties.
Handmade origami invitations,
scalloped edges, purple calligraphy.
Fragrance from gardenias
wafted across his yard, dragonflies shimmered
above the pond. Strings of tiny white lights
encircled tree branches, twinkled
in the summer night. After everyone left
I would perch on a stool, offer sound bites
of gossip, Kenny dumped Aaron,
Sally got fired, while he hand washed
crystal wine glasses.

He sold the town house two years after
his lover died, moved to a small
apartment with a kitchen counter
barely large enough to line up
his bottles of medicine. Now
I sit on a cracked vinyl chair
in the clinic waiting room
while he sees the doctor. He exits
the exam room, doesn't meet my gaze,
doesn't schedule another appointment,
heads to the parking lot. Before I start
the car he hands me a prescription,
folded like his party invitations.
Scrawled in black ballpoint,
one word. Hospice.

Nina Bennett is the author of Forgotten Tears: A Grandmother's Journey Through Grief. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including Pulse, Alehouse, Panache, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, The Broadkill Review, and anthologies such as Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose and Art on HIV/AIDS. Nina is a contributing author to the Open to Hope Foundation. ninabde@aol.com

Leah Erickson has work most recently published in Saint Ann's Review, Stickman Review, Menda City Review, Forge Journal, Absent Willow Review, and Prick of the Spindle. Her work appears in the print anthology, Unlikely Stories of the Third Kind. She has work upcoming in Battered Suitcase and Membra Disjecta. ericksonleah@hotmail.com

Joseph Gross has appeared recently in Alaska Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, Mid-American Review, Salamander, and other places. He teaches and writes in Kalamazoo, MI. joe.kalamazoo@yahoo.com

Caroline Horwitz is currently pursuing her MFA in creative nonfiction through Chatham University's low-residency program. She lives in Spokane, Washington with her husband. This is her first publication in a national magazine. caroline.horwitz@gmail.com

Dustin Junkert grew up in Oregon and Washington, went to George Fox University, and now works at a coffee shop in Newberg, OR. He and a friend started a journal called Cartographer: A Literary Review. He recently had an essay published in The New York Times. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Weber: The Contemporary West, Willow Review, Chaffey Review, Georgetown Review and Barbaric Yawp. djunkert@gmail.com

Adam King has recently been published in Best New Writing 2011, Crossed Genres, A Cappella Zoo, and A Thousand Faces. He is the 2010 recipient of the Eric Hoffer Award for Short Prose. He received an MFA from Western CT State University. majestak@hotmail.com

Peter D. Kramer is the author of six books, including the novels Spectacular Happiness (Scribner) and the international bestseller Listening to Prozac (Viking/Penguin). His most recent books are Against Depression (Viking/Penguin) and the brief biography Freud (HarperCollins/Atlas Books). His short story, "After Alice Left," was the lead item in one of the final print issues of TriQuarterly, 2010. pdk@brown.edu

The three poems in this issue by Sarah Maclay appear in her recently released poetry collection, Music for the Black Room. She has published two previous collections, Whore, and The White Bride. All are from the University of Tampa Press. Her poetry and critical prose appears in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present, The Writers' Chronicle, VerseDaily, Poetry International, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing and literature at Loyola Marymount University. uncorsage@verizon.net

Jean Ryan, a native Vermonter, now lives in Napa, California. Her stories and essays have appeared in a variety of journals, including Other Voices, Pleiades and the Massachusetts Review. Another story of hers appeared in our Winter 2010 issue. She has also published a novel, Lost Sister. lena1000@sbcglobal.net

Dennis Saleh has published books of poetry, prose, and artwork, and contributes widely to publications in the U.S. and abroad. He has ten pages of poetry in Little Star 2, and is in the Hotel Amerika "Aphorisms" issue. He will be featured in an upcoming issue of Psychological Perspectives (C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles), with poetry and excerpts from a novel-in-progress as well as commentary on his work. msaleh4243@yahoo.com

Mary Wood lives and writes on Maryland's Eastern Shore. She is the author of three plays which have been produced at local theatres. A children's book, The Magic Mystery Swan, first published in the 70s, is being reissued in a new format in September. Her first book of poetry, The Balanced Moment, was published by the Literary House Press of Washington College in 1997. A second book, First Ice, is due out in September. woodenbook@verizon.net

Table of Contents

Cover

editors' notes

two poems

defilade

spell

At the Broken Reeds

November 11th

Fandy on Strings

The State of My Heart

A Sea Change

Two Poems

Everything at Rest Is Waiting to Move

Getting Glasses

Permutations

Three Poems

Souvenir

The Park

Cancer

Blue Mountain Seventh Son

RSVP

Contributors' Notes