Editor's Notes

Two Poems - by Sherman Alexie

Drinking the Zambezi - nonfiction by Laurie McClellan

* - poetry by Simon Perchick

Pots - Fiction by Zane Kotker

Goldfish with the Faces of Old Men - Poetry by Al Ortolani

Spinning the Record - fiction by Robert Hyers

Two Poems - by John Harris

Jimmy's Secret - short fiction by Scott Akalis

Contributor's Notes

Since our Winter 2005 issue, we've been giving reading suggestions on pieces appearing in recent literary magazines, and, well, why should we stop now? This quarter we'd like to suggest an essay, one which briefly covers the photographic artist Francesca Woodman, whose work and tragic suicide at the age of twenty-two stirred the world. The essay appears in the Fall 2010 issue of The Missouri Review, complete with some black and white prints of the artist's work, all of which contain her very self as the subject. It is titled, "Clues to a Lost Woman," by Kris Somerville. Here is an except -

Artists are seldom the best judges of their own work. This is indeed true of Woodman. At the time of her death she was still experimenting with technique and composition and did not view herself as a fully realised artist. Yet her body of work has made her one of the most original artists of the 1970s and among the most influential photographers of the late twentieth century. Despite a career of less than a decade, Francesca left behind a considerable body of work infused with the emotions of loss and longing.

We'd like to thank The Review Review (www.thereviewreview.net) for the nice words they wrote on our Winter 2011 issue, and our journal in general. It's really a very special connection when writers and editors find that readers and reviewers have spotted precise aspects of material which were hoped to have been recognized and appreciated. As an example, much of the fiction here has a layering quality about it, where a lot of meaning and association might be packed together in such a way as to go unnoticed in a first read. Jess Huckins writes in her review that the pieces "...should be read carefully, to ensure that all of their layers are internalized and understood. They are not difficult to read, but it is easy to miss small details when stories are so interesting and complex." We couldn't agree more.

We'd also like to thank all those who submitted work that was considered for this issue. Among them were a considerable number of very distinguished writers, as well as those who had previously appeared in The Summerset Review. We are honored to have such wonderful and dedicated "admirers," who take it upon themselves to send us unsolicited submissions. We are happy to welcome back Zane Kotker, John Harris, and Simon Perchik, all who have seen their names in previous issues, as well as the distinguished writer, Sherman Alexie.

And, last but never least, warm thanks goes to all those readers the world over who find the time in their busy days to read our journal. You people are a quiet bunch, as we rarely hear from you, but we know you're out there. You are our true heroines and heroes.

Does anyone know the location at which our cover graphic was taken? Identify the place and we'll tell you if you are correct. Email your answer to editor (at) summersetreview.org. A hint is in its title, stated below. Click here to go back to the cover.

Theme graphics this issue - "Monster Mesh"
Copyright © The Summerset Review, Inc. 2011.

1. Okay, if you've ever felt immortal, please raise your hand. 2. As Indian boys, we turned the reservation into a test of our immortality. 3. For instance, we climbed to the treetops, stood on the thinnest branches that threatened to snap under our weight, and leapt from one pine to another. 4. Nobody ever fell. 5. Not quite true. One kid fell, slashing against bark and cone for fifteen or twenty feet, before he grabbed a branch and saved himself. 6. The Indian Health Service doctor removed over one hundred slivers from that kid's skin. 7. For some reason, the tribe had dumped a pile of huge and unused sewer pipes down a sand hill behind the school. And we Indian boys turned it into a playground. 8. Once, I crawled to the top of a pipe, propped high into the air by other pipes, and hung off the edge by my fingertips. I was twenty feet off the ground. 9. Nothing is immortal, but some things live for a long-ass time. There's a fungal colony in Oregon that's been alive for 2,400 years. 10. Yeah, those fungi were toddlers when Jesus Christ was rambling around with his twelve buddies. 11. Here's a curse: "I don't want to live forever; I just want to live longer than you." 12. I knew an Indian who leapt from a thirty-foot cliff and dove toward a shallow pool only three feet in diameter. 13. I wasn't there when he crashed into the rocks and died. Why didn't any of the other Indians try to stop him? Because they thought he'd survive. 14. I'm not afraid of death; I'm afraid of Indians who aren't afraid of death.

1. My teenage niece, after listening to my Motown's Greatest Hits CD during a six-hour road trip, asked, "Why do they keep calling every woman baby?" 2. Good question. 3. In this slightly more enlightened era, what are the acceptable terms of romantic endearment that men can say to women? 4. "Baby" is way down on the list. 5. And yet, "Nobody puts Baby in the corner," from Dirty Dancing is one of the more romantic movie lines of my generation. 6. But I saw Dirty Dancing soon after a female electrical worker disappeared from a rural power station near my reservation. 7. "Signs of a struggle," read the newspaper story. 8. Nearly twenty-five years later, it's a cold case. I search for the latest news. Nobody knows what happened. Her husband and co-workers are still mourning. 9. But the husband has also remarried and had children. His says his new wife has helped him grieve and recover. 10. Good for him. Good for her. 11. The world is equal parts magic and loss. 12. I have this recurring nightmare where huge men break into our house. While defending my wife and children, I tear the invaders into pieces and eat them. 13. Jungians would suggest that I am metaphorically eating myself. 14. Even though some of us believe otherwise, men love violently.

"Class V: Expert. Extremely long, obstructed or very violent rapids which expose a paddler to above average endangerment... swims are dangerous, and rescue is difficult, even for experts." - International Scale of River Difficulty

In the language of the Tongan people, its name simply means "Great River." The Zambezi begins at a spring in Zambia. Halfway through its course, it hits a gaping basalt chasm and conjures up Victoria Falls, a mile-wide sheet of thundering water that's twice as tall as Niagara Falls. Then the river quickly pulls off a second magic trick, squeezing its entire turbulent self into a 210-foot-wide gorge. At the base of this gorge, a quarter-mile below the falls and just over the border of Zimbabwe, there's a stretch of water flat enough to launch a whitewater raft.

I didn't know any of this when I stood in that spot myself one August day, three years ago. Sheer black walls soared overhead. Through the canyon's slit, I could see one thin slice of Victoria Falls tumbling 322 feet to the river. The water below me boiled green, and it was cold—cold enough for each of us tourists to be issued a black neoprene wet suit, the same kind that scuba divers wear. I thought I'd signed up for a rafting trip that any adventurous person would enjoy. I was wrong. This was strange, because I'm usually the sort of person who reads the warnings first. Now that it's over, I've been reading them in reverse, trying to figure out exactly what happened that day.

It was my first trip to Africa. I'd wanted to bounce around the bush in a Land Rover since I was four years old and fell in love with the movie Born Free on TV. And just thirty-eight years later, miraculously, my husband and I scored two spots on a budget camping safari to Botswana and Zimbabwe. I called a friend of a friend who'd traveled there, and she had one piece of advice: Go whitewater rafting below Victoria Falls. It was the highlight of her visit to southern Africa.

Patrick and I had been rafting before—once on the Green River in Utah, once on the Athasbasca in Canada. Running those rivers was like swooping along on little roller coasters, only with better scenery. In my imagination, I could already see the headline for my obituary, written in some distant future, beginning to take shape: Local Woman Rafted the Zambezi. That sounded so much better than She Always Paid Her Bills on Time, or as my parents sometimes put it when discussing my childhood, She Never Gave Us Any Trouble. I'd stuck with that script long enough. It was time to raft the Zambezi!

Patrick looked skeptical as he flipped through the pages I'd printed out from a Zambezi rafting Web site. "It says these are Class IV and V rapids. Haven't we just been on Class III before?" he asked.

I rolled my eyes at his killjoy attitude. I was pretty sure I remembered a IV on the Green. Besides, the brochure said that no experience or swimming ability was necessary, and that dozens of people went every day. So how hard could it be? And if a Class III rapid wasn't scary, mathematically a class V was just one and half times bigger, right?

When we got to Botswana, our trip's guide, Tim, agreed with me.

"Rafting is awesome, man. We flipped our boat three times," he said.

Flipping boats? Once again, I missed a warning. There were ample signs that no one should take Tim's advice. In fact, a truly wise person would probably do the opposite of anything he suggested. Tim was the ultimate safari guide for people on a budget. He had a shaved head and permanent pins in his ankle from a skydiving accident. He'd grown up hunting Cape buffalo with an uncle, and still thought anything risky was a terrific idea. While we slept in our tents at night, Tim crawled into a sleeping bag on top of our twenty-foot-high monster safari truck. I figured he either kept a rifle up there in case of animal attacks, choosing a high place from which to take aim, or he just considered the roof a safer place to sleep. Either way, I didn't want to know.

For two weeks, Tim sat behind the wheel as we bounced over rutted dirt roads in the national parks of Botswana. He pointed out giraffes stalking elegantly among the thorn trees, hippos yawning their snaggletoothed grins in the rivers and then vanishing under an explosion of water. By the time we crossed the border of Zimbabwe and drove into Victoria Falls, I was exhilarated with adventure and hell-bent on rafting.

The town had a lawless feeling straight out of the Wild West, but I didn't reconsider. Why question the judgment of local rafting guides, just because they live in a country where a collapsing economy is turning the currency into Monopoly money? At the bank, we saw a line labeled "Bulk Transactions" where people stuffed wads of Zimbabwe bills into boxes the size of washtubs. But when would we ever get to Victoria Falls again? This was the Zambezi—and tomorrow could be our only chance to raft it.

The next day, Patrick and I sat under some trees on wooden benches, listening to a rafting guide give the safety briefing.

"If you fall out of the raft, float on your back with your feet in front of you," he said. We'd already paid. We'd already signed a legal waiver, and been bused across town to the lip of Batoka Gorge.

"Now, this is what we call a worst-case scenario," the guide said in lilting, African-accented English. "If you are trapped under the raft, count to twenty. None of the rapids are longer than twenty seconds. If you get to twenty and you're still underwater, count again—you went too fast." He paused to laugh at his little joke. "The important thing is to play a part in your own rescue. Now, everybody find a helmet."

We climbed down decaying iron steps bolted into the cliff, deeper and deeper into the gorge. I started to sweat into my neoprene. The metal creaked underfoot like the doors of a haunted house. I could see empty air beneath my feet.

Ten minutes later, I stepped off the last rung and onto the riverbank. Seven slick-bottomed inflatable rafts waited there, already pitching on the river's low boil. Patrick and I stumbled into the last one and took the two back seats next to the guide, a tall, elegant man in his twenties named George. Our boat filled up with two couples in their sixties, including some Germans who couldn't quite understand George's accent. During the practice time, when he called "back paddle," they paddled forward. When he barked, "left!" they looked to see what everyone else was doing. The wife looked scared. Patrick looked worried.

The first rapid was named Against the Wall, a Class IV. The instant we hit it, I knew I'd never run one before. The raft tilted into a hole at a 45-degree angle, then dropped out from beneath us like the floor of an elevator. We smacked through a standing wave that shot up higher than my head. The hype is actually true, I thought. I had never seen a river like this one.

We ran an easy III, another big IV. George announced each new rapid by name, and told us which side of the river to swim for if we fell out.

"Our next rapid… Morning Glory, our first Class V rapid of the day. Its nickname is 'The Wake-Up Call.'"

A faint bell of irony rang in my head. I was getting a wake-up call?

"Right paddle!" screamed George. We hit the rapid, and then, inexplicably, I was spinning around inside a washing machine. It was puzzling.

When I'm not on vacation, I work as a video editor. This has given me an unusually good feeling for time, in all its minute fractions. Every second of television you see is actually made up of thirty individual photos, or frames. When thirty photos zip past the human eye in one second, it creates something poetic-sounding called "persistence of vision"—the optical illusion of movement. When I'm editing, sometimes I inch through my timeline one frame at a time, one-thirtieth of a second going by with each click of the mouse. I know, to a certainty, how far a runner's legs will pump in that fraction of an instant, how far a grizzly bear's head can lift to catch a jumping salmon. I don't know how long it took for our raft to flip over, but it happened so fast, I never even felt it. Later, George told us that a wave flung everyone on the right side of the boat over to the left, and our combined weight then flipped the boat over like a book slamming shut.

Freezing water spun me like a twig through complete darkness. Tremendous force pinned my arms to my body. I didn't bob to the surface like I should have in my sports-quality life jacket. There was no possibility of floating down the river, feet first, like the guides had advised. Was I in a whirlpool? I started counting. The flip happened without a warning, so I hadn't taken a breath first. By ten, my throat ached for air. At twenty-two, a triangle of sunlight flashed overhead, and I recognized the edge of the boat before it crashed down and extinguished the light again. Finally, I knew where I was: trapped underneath the capsized raft. I heard the guide's voice inside my head like a rewound tape, saying "Play an active part in your own rescue."

I kicked deeper, and out from under the raft, my head popped above water. The light felt as good as the air. The raft swept along the river upside down, about forty feet downstream. Just as I reached it, George dragged himself over the far edge and waved me off. By the time he muscled it upright, it bobbed forty feet downstream again. I swam through the churning green water and grabbed the safety line. Patrick materialized next to me. When he shook the wet hair out of his eyes, his face shone white.

George grabbed my vest in one hand and Patrick's in the other, and hauled us, gasping like fish, over the edge. The raft, now steered by no one, careened downstream. I turned to see a woman swimming up behind us. I crawled toward her, but my rubbery legs buckled underneath me.

"Help her," screamed George, pulling in another swimmer. Patrick and I grabbed the woman's vest and heaved, but we couldn't do it. George had to yank her in. The five of us clung to the sides of the raft, zigzagging down the river with no other people in sight.

"Where are the other two?" I shouted.

"Downstream," yelled George, grabbing his oar. "Paddle!"

We rounded a bend, and the rapid spit us out onto flat water. One of our lost team members waited for us on the bank, dripping wet.

"Are you okay?" I whispered to Patrick.

"No," he shook his head.

My stomach turned over. Patrick does not complain. He once broke a rib and didn't go to the doctor for a week.

"Something slammed into my foot. When it hit, I breathed in, so I was swallowing water the whole time we were under. I thought I was drowning."

We had capsized on the day's fourth rapid. That meant we had another half-dozen ahead of us—including three more Class Vs.

An hour later, we jumped out of the raft to walk around the Zambezi's one Class VI rapid, Commercial Suicide. Ten-foot high boulders crowded the riverbank. For another fifteen minutes I leaped from one giant chunk of stone to another in slick sandals, trying to keep up with the group even as the gap between us widened. By the time I got to the launch point, my legs were shaking even when I stood still, and George had already left with Patrick and our team. A different raft was sitting on the bank, waiting to pick me up.

"Hey, weren't you in the boat that flipped?" a woman asked in an awed voice as I climbed in. "We were watching. You guys really wiped out."

When we hit the next rapid, I leaned low over the boat's edge, dragging my paddle through the water with every muscle in my back, trying to personally shoot the raft straight through the whitewater so it wouldn't capsize. I must have leaned too far, because the next instant I was outside the boat again, clinging to the safety cord. I bounced through the rapid like a line of tin cans behind a honeymoon car. When the guide hauled me in afterward, the curious woman shook her head with sympathy. "You're really not having any luck today, are you?"

After two swims and a bout of boulder hopping, my arms and legs felt like Silly Putty. A dark thought formed in my head: If I fell out again, I would be too tired to swim.

The last rapid of the day was a Class IV—the Gnashing Jaws of Death. As the churning whitewater came into view, I heard someone pleading: "No, God, not again, please." That's when I discovered how eerie it is to hear your own voice when you're not aware you're speaking. I threw down my paddle and cowered on the bottom of the boat, eyes shut tight, gripping the safety line with both white hands.

And then it was over. The river smoothed itself out as flat as a kiddie pool. We paddled toward the bank for lunch.

"Can I go swimming here?" the man in front of me asked George. "I want to get wet again."

"Eh, this is not such a good place. The water is calm here, so it attracts the crocodiles. Yesterday I saw some that were three meters." Gee, that was something else the brochure had failed to mention. So if we'd flipped over in the Gnashing Jaws of Death, and I was swimming downstream again, I'd be dodging the gnashing jaws of crocodiles? I had edited some crocodile documentaries at work. They always led to discussions of Talmudic complexity with my boss. For example, was it okay to show the prey's entrails if you first cut out the moment of disembowelment? I was haunted by one shot in particular, of a crocodile munching on a severed antelope leg. It stuck out of his grinning teeth at a jaunty angle, with the pointy hoof at the end looking exactly like the tip of a toothpick.

"But I don't see those crocs today," George laughed, and pushed the man overboard.

After lunch, we climbed a near-vertical trail to the rim of the gorge. The guides at the top waited for us with a cooler full of Cokes in glass bottles. Soda bottles get refilled over and over again in Zimbabwe, and the worn glass felt soft in my hands, like beach glass. Apparently, I was not going to die today after all. I popped off the metal cap and drank it straight down, sweet and cold in my throat. It was the most delicious thing I'd ever tasted.

As George gave us a lift back to town, I asked him if Patrick's bruised and swollen foot was unusual.

"Oh no, this is nothing," he said. "We get a lot of broken legs, dislocated shoulders. People get so scared when the raft flips, they just keep holding on. Then the current pulls your arm out of its socket."

George's bluntness shocked me, even if it was just the three of us in his truck. In a place where people can be killed for speaking out against the government, telling visitors scary truths has got to be against the rules. So a few days later, we posed the same question to a taxi driver who held a graduate degree in tourism. He said that rafting the Zambezi was extremely safe because the local companies take every precaution: multiple rafts, safety kayakers, a helicopter to pick up the seriously injured. Was this just the party line, or the truth? By the time I got home, I was curious. How close had I really come to dying on the Zambezi?

There are several ways to drown in a river, and I found out about all of them while reading the American Whitewater Affiliation's grimly fascinating accident reports. The reports list a sobering variety of accidents under "causes of death," including head injury, suction pin, tree pin, keeper hole, and natural strainer (getting entangled in an underwater tree). Yet each of these accidents, I learned, is highly unlikely on the Zambezi. The river churns up the biggest rapids on Earth. But paradoxically, you can afford to run the Zambezi recklessly, because it's tough to get killed there. It's a river engineered by nature to be unusually forgiving.

Just three things create all the whitewater on the planet—constriction, gradient, and underwater features. A mile-wide waterfall that funnels into a 210-foot-wide gorge pretty much defines the gold standard for constriction. The Zambezi also sports a respectably steep gradient, dropping 400 feet during the one-day rafting trip. But the river's underwater features—such as boulders and ledges—lurk much deeper than usual, as much as 200 feet underwater. That leaves few places to hit your head or get pinned. And the river's V-shaped gorge cuts so steeply, nothing larger than a bush grows on its sides. This removes the danger of tree snags.

Although Zambezi rafters don't have to worry about these hazards, they still face the danger of taking a swim. In the parlance of whitewater rafting, a person who falls out of the raft, but manages to hang onto the boat, is called a short swimmer. A person who's separated from the raft is called a long swimmer. Putting this name to my accident in the Wake-Up Call made me feel queasy, especially when I read that "long swim" is the leading cause of death for rafters. But my research also revealed a counter-intuitive truth. The real gauge of a river's danger is not the size of the whitewater, or how easy it is to flip a raft or take a swim. The real test is whether you can recover from your mistakes. On the Zambezi, some of the world's biggest rapids are followed by calm stretches where rafts can pick up their long swimmers. In North America, Class V rivers aren't built that way.

In a much-publicized 1987 accident, a group of eleven advertising executives on a business trip went rafting on the Chilko River in British Columbia. Their boat hit a boulder near an infamous stretch of the river called The White Mile, spilling all but one man into the water. Its name to the contrary, the White Mile is actually three miles of solid rapids, all of them powerful enough to prevent a swimmer from getting his head above water. The result is called a flush drowning. On the Chilko, six of the men managed to rescue themselves, one by grabbing a tree branch as it passed overhead. The other five died.

All rafting involves risk. But when I added all the data up, I could only conclude that I was never anywhere near death—just on the best river in the world to get scared witless. Yet despite the power of rivers, the odds of dying while whitewater rafting turn out to be pretty small. In 1998, for example, 1.1 rafters died per 100,000 days spent rafting. That's compared to 1.6 people who suffered fatal accidents while riding their bikes, 3.5 people felled by scuba diving, and 15.2 people who met their fate doing something truly dangerous—driving a car. Does that make zipping over to the 7-Eleven for a banana Slurpy an unnecessary risk? It's a question every person has to answer for himself.

For me, I'd rather experience nature than challenge it to a duel—not least, because people who challenge nature often lose. I don't go backpacking to measure myself against the wilderness, or to prove something. I go because the words of John Muir resonate inside me: "Climb the mountains, and get their good tidings." I need to hear those good tidings, to melt away the honking horns and alarm clocks that fill my city life.

I don't want to fear nature, because it's hard to love something you're afraid of. I looked back at the Zambezi once before we drove away. The Great River roared blue and white through its winding canyon, its leaping whitewater hushed to a whisper by distance. I was shocked to see how beautiful it was. Because of that one glance, I'd like to go back and see the Zambezi again—but this time, without the hazy scrim of fear floating between us.

Title graphic: "Flipped" Copyright © The Summerset Review, Inc. 2011.

You water this box
the way flowers take up the slack
are circling down to reach the corners

who have lost everything, torn
from the rot all wood scrapes against
so you can hear over and over

how dirt is fed, half with grieving faces
half from wanderlust and the need
to walk—you know all about

how step by step a certain river
is poured back, closes in, taking along
the small sea once inside your legs

and now as arms and the wet grass
trembling slowly around your kisses
—you water and why not cover the dead

with shipwrecks, flood this floor
and the flowers one by one
carry it off, down to the bone.

Valeria placed her fingers on the receiver. A docent, connected by ten feet of insulated wire, tapped out a message. As the current jumped the spark gap, dots and dashes appeared in a pattern on the paper tape. Valeria began to decipher, checking the embossments against a code key on the wall. It was slow going, and she could hear the rest of the youth group shifting behind her, their tennis shoes squeaking against the linoleum.

Father Murphy reached for his cigarettes, then remembered he couldn't smoke inside.

Valeria completed the first word.

"What," she said.

"This message is identical to the first sent by Samuel Morse," the docent explained to the group.

"Hath," Valeria said, already onto the next string of symbols. Today was Tuesday; she was six weeks late.

"God," she said.

Her breasts had been tender for days, which she thought meant the blood would come, but as she transcribed the last word, she knew differently.

"Wrought?"

Valeria was born in Ruby Valley, Nevada's first westbound station on the transcontinental telegraph. Where Highway 80 runs now, the telegraph line, which traced the routes of the fur trappers, then the stage, then the Pony Express, took a dive through Deep Creek, Egan Canyon and passed just south of Ruby Lake.

When the wireless and the telephone made the telegraph obsolete, the stone stations and wooden poles were abandoned. The few inhabitants of the valley took what was left behind as their own; Valeria's childhood swing hung between two poles of stunted pine. A wreath of the rusting line hung in their barn; Valeria's father used it to mend fences. By the time her mother died and they lost their land, the coil was gone, woven into the boundaries of a farm that was no longer theirs.

Valeria was nine when her mother died, twelve when she started having the visions. Once when she lay on the valley floor, her mother's shawl pressed to her cheek, The Guadalupe appeared in the noon sky eclipsing the sun: dark skinned, surrounded by white light. Valeria squeezed her eyes tight with fear, prayed for the image to go away, but the Holy Mother appeared on the inside of her eyelids. Valeria began to shake. A wind blew through the tall grasses around her, soothing and gentle. The shawl, which until this moment had lost the last hint of her mother's scent, became infused with sagebrush and soap in such concentration that Valeria felt her mother all around her. Valeria inhaled and her fear dissolved: the lady in the sky didn't mean to hurt her.

Soon after, Valeria began to see the girl saints. Barbara swung her feet out the hay mow in the barn; Philomena, just her age, loved to lift and lower the red metal flag on the mailbox; Catherine of Alexandria would often sit beside her as she fell asleep and guard her in her dreams. She recognized them from her mother's illustrated The Lives of the Saints. What each girl held made them easy to identify: Philomena had two golden arrows, Catherine—her wheel, and Barbara—a small stone tower in her palm.

Valeria's father had been a shepherd, but once all of the small farms had been bought up by cattlemen whose shepherds were electric fences, he worked less and less until the bank foreclosed and they moved to a county trailer twenty yards from the interstate near Elko. After Valeria left the stillness of Ruby Valley, she kept seeing Mary and the other saints, but at night they disappeared, replaced in her dreams by swarms of bees that chased and stung her without mercy. In the morning, she'd have trails of itchy redness and swelling along the inside of her arms, and another set of lines radiating toward her breasts like a starburst across her stomach. She thought about telling her father, but the little time he was home he swatted at her if she got too close, yelled at her for asking questions. Instead, Valeria resolved the swarming sound was the buzz of 80, the nearness of the interstate vibrating against her skin.

In the fall of 1982, Elko's mines were exhausted. Valeria's father found some work running cyanide through slag heaps, pulling out the last bits of gold. The tailings collected in poisonous red lakes that stood sentinel to the dwindling city. Gaming, which saved Reno and grew Las Vegas, never did much for Elko. By the time travelers reached eastern Nevada, they were in a big hurry to get somewhere, anywhere else.

In this withering town, Father Murphy was parish priest of St. Joseph's church. He delivered sacraments, taught catechism and ran the youth group; he functioned as an occasional social worker, sometime medic and the only available groundskeeper for the church and rectory. His was the only parish in the state where the priest was expected to cook and keep for himself. But despite his thinning white hair and shrinking spine, God gave him the strength to do it.

The priest was old enough to remember Valeria's mother when she'd been a little girl. He had blessed her marriage to a Basque shepherd who lived on the other side of Ruby Ridge on old Shoshone land and baptized her baby girl, welcoming her to the church.

After Valeria and her father moved back to town and started attending St. Joseph's on Sundays, Father Murphy encouraged her to join the youth group and study her catechism. Everyone else her age had taken first communion years ago, and Valeria was embarrassed to be so far behind, but Father Murphy had explained that the Eucharist conferred grace and grace would be necessary to bring her, one day, to her mother's side in heaven. But, instead of making Valeria take her catechism with the second graders, Father Murphy taught her at the Formica dining table in the rectory during confessional hours, the door propped open in case anyone needed to drop by.

The rectory bookshelves had a newer edition of The Lives of the Saints. No matter how carefully she searched, Valeria couldn't find any of her companions except Mary, Queen of them all. Barbara, Catherine and Philomena were missing.

"Where are they?" Valeria asked Father Murphy.

He found his glasses and studied the book.

"The Vatican decided they lacked historical data, were more legend than real, and the veneration of them would be heretical. They've been removed."

Valeria felt the blood drain from her face. Just that day she'd seen the trio of non-saints with Mary, Mother of Jesus, strolling across the football field at Elko High, arm-in-arm like sisters.

Valeria asked Father Murphy to hear her confession.

"I'm seeing things I shouldn't. Some of the saints, some of those that were removed. They're friendly to me, they appear at the side of Mary."

"How long has this been happening?" asked Father Murphy.

"Since I lived in Ruby Valley," Valeria said leaning her cheek against the mesh screen of the confessional. "Help me, Father. I don't want to have a false heart."

Father Murphy thought of Valeria as a bright spot in his youth ministry. While the other girls rolled up their skirts and drank behind the abandoned middle school, Valeria finished all her confirmation worksheets and helped Father Murphy clean the rectory. "Your heart is pure, my dear," he said.

"The Bible says I should be stoned to death."

"I don't believe the Bible says that."

"'A bewitched female is not allowed to live', false prophecy is a mortal sin." Valeria said, trying to calm herself, rocking against the cool, solid wall of the confessional.

Father Murphy exhaled. He was a decent counselor, but an ill-trained psychiatrist. "Do you have any visions that aren't of saints?" he asked.

"At night bees sting me; they leave marks." Valeria said and continued to rock against the wood with a rhythm that made Father Murphy anxious. He came to Valeria's side of the confessional and examined her arms, which she always kept covered, scarred like an addict's from her itching and picking.

"You've committed no sin," Father Murphy said, trying to swallow his disgust at the state of her skin, "but I would like to take you to the doctor. He can help ease your mind, help you relax, have an easier time adjusting to life here in Elko."

The only doctor at the clinic was a young man from Boston, reducing his student loans by working a few years in northeastern Nevada. He was sick of this cow-ville, being the only doctor to do everything, and had eight months left to go before his debt was repaid, crossing the months off his wall calendar one by one. After a twenty-minute appointment, he diagnosed Valeria as borderline psychotic and prescribed Haldol. The little blue pills made her mouth dry, her legs and hands trembled, but the girl saints went away, the bees stopped their stinging, and Valeria was alone again. Sometimes she would think she saw the edges of their skirts behind a pillar at St. Joseph's, or turning the hallway corner at school, but when she ran to look there was nobody there.

At the telegraph museum, in an alcove off the main room, there was an exhibit on lady telegraphers. Because of the need for Union soldiers, miners and buckaroos, the Nevada telegraph had been operated mostly by women. They learned Morse like any other language—halting at first, but with fluency the dots and dashes flowed from their fingers without the need for conscious thought. Within seconds they could translate and amplify messages that flowed between New York and San Francisco, cities none of them would ever likely see. When the telegraph died out and the women lost their vocation, they found themselves searching the clatter of dinner plates, thudding feet at a grange dance, the clap of their baby's hands for a message they could decode.

After leaving the museum, instead of heading home, Valeria returned to the front of the red brick church, praying to God for guidance, for some hint of what to do, as the chill mist turned to rain. She got no answer. Father Murphy found her there before Matins and after her confession, took her to the clinic for a pregnancy test. After, Valeria slept in one of the clinic's rooms, sedated.

Itzal Beleren, Valeria's father, was only a generation removed from life in the Pyrenees. He'd been a shepherd like his father and a dozen Belerens before that. Taking him off the land had done damage. Father Murphy heard alcohol pushing rage over the line.

"Who is responsible?" Itzal demanded.

"Either she doesn't know or she isn't telling," Father Murphy said.

"A monster she is," Itzal spat. "Dead to me."

In the morning, Father Murphy called Casa San Gabriel in Reno, the diocese's home for unwed mothers. Located in the basement of a dilapidated Victorian in downtown Reno, Casa, as its residents called it, had six rooms for twelve girls, although they were never full. There was a main room with a couch and a television. Upstairs was a kitchen, an office for the director, and storage rooms filled with the girls' belongings. In the winter months, Casa smelled of mildew; in the summer, it reeked of dust.

As soon as Valeria arrived at Casa, the director took her Haldol away.

At every meal each girl received twenty-five grams of protein, a quarter cup of canned vegetables and a glass of milk. A bowl of mealy red apples, untouched, sat on the counter for snacks. On the director's desk was a thick three-ring binder with laminated letters and photos from families who wanted babies.

"Because you took anti-psychotics during your first trimester, there are a limited number of families for you to choose as your sponsor," the director said and gave Valeria three sheets. Sponsor was the euphemism used at Casa for those who would take the babies home from the hospital. Two of them were from Las Vegas; their white teeth tremendous in the glossy photos. Valeria put them aside. The third was a single woman from Carson City. She was not beautiful—this was often the reason the other girls gave for picking their sponsor, the beauty of the mother—in the picture she stood smiling with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, holding a camera forward in her palm.

"Her," Valeria said pointing to the sheet.

"She's been in our system for years," said the director, looking over the application. "She's single; nearly fifty. Your baby will not have a father."

"Her," Valeria said.

To build the telegraph line, the Overland Telegraph Company's representative James Street, made a treaty with the Shoshone Indians who roamed the Great Basin.

Sho-Kup wanted to tell his people about the telegraph and Street translated it as talking wire. Sho-Kup thought the talking wire was an animal, long and skinny. An animal that stretched so far must need a lot to eat.

"What do you feed it?" Sho-Kup asked.

"Lightening," Street told him.

Valeria stayed in the same room her entire time at Casa. No one else wanted it because of the closet. It wasn't a real closet, but more a hole cut low in the wall, not tall enough to hang even a shirt in. None of the other girls liked the door into the earthen space; the director even offered to move her when another room became vacant, but Valeria didn't mind and stayed. On hot nights, cool, sweet air flowed from the dark warren and Valeria would crawl inside, lay her blanket on the hard-packed dirt and read her Bible until she drifted away. Outside, thunder cracked without the relief of rain.

One night, Valeria woke in the closet, her cheek pressed into the thin pages of her Bible, and heard a voice. It was Philomena. She spoke words Valeria could not understand, but transcribing them phonetically was easy enough, her hand running like current across the page. She wrote until it was light and then moved to her desk. When someone knocked, Philomena went silent.

"You've missed two meals," the director said, poking her head in the door.

It was one in the afternoon. Valeria was still in her nightgown.

"Are you sick?" the director asked, noticing a nasty, bleeding rash creeping up from underneath the neckline of Valeria's gown.

"No." Valeria said. She wrote Philomena Veritas across the top and tucked forty sheets of Latin verse into a drawer.

Father Murphy came to visit. He gave Valeria a purple rosary.

"Have you seen your father?" he asked.

Valeria shook her head.

"I believe he's left Elko. When I went to visit the trailer, it was abandoned."

They sat together for several minutes in silence.

"Without the pills, have your disturbances come back?" Father Murphy asked.

Valeria wanted to tell him that Philomena had dictated something long, something important, that her rashes had returned as painful as ever, but Mary stood in the corner of the room counseling silence, her finger to her lips. She'd never spoken to Valeria, but of all the visions Mary reminded her the most of her mother, and Valeria was as good as mute.

The residents at Casa had aches and pains: leg cramps, false contractions, sciatica, and the like. Although there was little she could do to soothe her own skin, Valeria found she had a talent for massage. Her lithe fingers found their way between the muscles and joints of the girls, pushing injuries out from their hiding places, letting them evaporate and rise. She worked on the girls each afternoon while they watched One Life to Live or General Hospital. After Valeria finished, the girls slept, the bad spots eased, the pain taken away.

When she woke after the birth, her daughter's sponsor sat in a chair beside the bed.

"I had to see you, to thank you. I need to know where you are going after you leave here," she said.

Barbara, Catherine and Mary ringed the room; Philomena stood at the side of Valeria's bed. They were silent, watching, and among them, Valeria thought, her sponsor looked in place.

"I'm sixteen," Valeria said. The morphine was wearing off and she could feel the itchy bits under her chin, on her wrists, and the pain and soreness from the birth. "I'm going to stay in Reno and get a job; I'd like to have a regular life."

"Are you sure I can't buy you a ticket home?"

"No, thank you."

Valeria slept again, and when she woke only Philomena stood watch. On the table there was a little paper cup with the pills. One of them was a familiar blue.

After, Valeria worked at the Shiloh Inn as a housekeeper. The other housekeepers were older, and their arms and backs ached from making the beds, pushing the heavy carts, and scrubbing forty toilets each day. Valeria wanted to help them, to give them her fixing massages, but the medication had brought her tremors back worse than before and her hands could barely tuck in sheets or wipe a counter; they did little that could be considered amazing anymore. When she was cleaning rooms and she heard the clock-radio alarm of a previous guest going off through the thin walls, she'd go to the noise, kneel on the floor, and place her fingers on the dial listening for the rhythmic hum, the space between frequencies, before she slid the switch to off.

In the fall of 1861, when the telegraph was completed, James Street offered to bring Sho-Kup to San Francisco. Sho-Kup agreed and they set out by stage. When they stopped near Reno, Sho-Kup wanted to go no further. One of his wives was ill and he felt he was getting too far from home.

"Once we get to San Francisco, you can talk to your wife over the telegraph. You can ask her questions and she can answer back."

The idea of such communication was incomprehensible. Sho-Kup got nervous when the white men talked nonsense. Although he promised to honor the treaty, he turned around and went home. His wife recovered, but before the end of Sho-Kup's life he saw his tribe dwindle from war and sickness, his people pushed onto smaller and smaller pieces of land, and his language disappear.

It was so hot in the summertime, Valeria took to riding Reno transit when she was not at church or work. The busses were cooled to a bearable temperature and she used them as a place to read. All lines returned in the end to Virginia Street, the main drag of The Biggest Little City in the World, where Valeria could stretch her legs, looking into the gambling halls and slot palaces until the next bus came. She'd been in Reno a year now, and still had no friends. She had acquaintances at church and work, but something about Valeria made people keep their distance. The trembling and fidgeting didn't help. Her clothes were mismatched, frayed. The room she could afford was an uninsulated tack-on to the garage of someone who was never home. The loneliness was soul-crushing.

Father Murphy called Valeria to invite her home for Thanksgiving. Valeria declined.

"Christmas, then?"

"I won't be coming back," Valeria said over the wire.

That night, she cut her dose in half.

Lack of proper heat kept Valeria on the busses in winter, too. As she took smaller and smaller slices of the blue pills, the saints returned. Now that she'd thrown the Haldol in the trash, they were with her almost constantly. She'd look up to see Philomena across the aisle or Mary waiting up when she came home. The others had started whispering their stories to Valeria in pieces and bits. She typed Philomena Veritas at the public library and not knowing what else to do, mailed it to her sponsor with no return address.

The bees returned too. Valeria prayed to the saints to take them away. She tried hydrocortisone and Calamine to dull the pain and itch of the outbreaks that slowly gained on her body, creeping on to her face, over her palms, down the insides of her legs. She hated the rash, but she hated being alone more.

One night, Valeria's bus wound down toward the lights on Virginia, slipping in and out of shadow, ending up in front of the Gold Digger Casino where a neon blond in a tan sheath knelt to dip her pan in the river, exposing a peek of her breasts and bottom each time. Across the street at The Garden of Eden, the gaseous body of the serpent cusped an apple in its fangs. Eve, tilting to the side to hide her nakedness, with the apple in her hand, faced front, and took a bite. Then the sign went dark and started anew, trapped in an infinite loop while the crowds milled below.

The coil of the snake came alive again and the voices of the banished saints descended upon Valeria. They came all at once, and their sound was deafening.

Valeria ran down the block to a convenience store. A slight man with dark skin stood behind the counter feeding lotto tickets into a machine like tinder to a fire.

The voices were so loud in her head she could barely contain them, barely keep them from spilling out of her mouth.

"Do you have paper?" she asked, both hands gripping the edge of the counter.

"Paper?" he asked, his accent British, his eyes on her hands which she noticed itched bloody again.

"Yes, a pad of paper and a pen... I need them." Valeria scrambled through her pockets collecting all her pennies and dimes for an offering.

"No, no writing paper here. Beer, lotto, condoms. That's what we sell."

"Please, something to write on," she begged.

An older woman, his mother perhaps, sitting behind the counter in a white plastic lawn chair, stood and offered a stack of lottery marking sheets and a sharp yellow pencil. The older lady nodded, smiling, a bright ruby nestled in the crease of her brow.

Valeria grabbed the pencil and the lottery sheets and went back to the filthy sidewalk, her feet in the gutter, and wrote as fast as she could. Junk food wrappers whipped around her ankles as the next bus slowed, then passed. She was kicked, cursed, stepped on, but immovable. The saints surrounded Valeria as their voices came across the line.

Title graphic: "Visage" Copyright © The Summerset Review 2011.

You get dumped after four years and you look around to find that everything has shut down while you were out. Not only is this boring but it's also lonely, and you sit there in the neon chill of your cubicle at Weisman, Sellers, and Frank way up in Burlington thinking I'm alone, all all alone, not to mention practically in Canada. Or that—here's the thing—you're edging out of your natural childbirth years and moving on toward frozen sperm. You don't cry because forty-three and counting is too old to cry. You call your best friend, the one you don't see much anymore because she's done it all already—house down in Silver Springs, great job, great kids, her own Mr. Right. Well, her own Mr. Okay.

Just thought I'd say hello.

You don't sound like yourself.

I'm fine.

You ought to get out of that apartment of yours.

I am. I'm at work.

You know what I mean, Em. Your hermit tendencies. I bet you're holing up again. Get out, meet some people. Maybe you ought to join something?

Like what?

Oh, how about the Buddhists? Or a class of some kind. Isn't there something you'd like to learn?

Sure, scuba diving. But in Lake Champlain? In the winter?

Maybe there's an indoor tank.

Get real.

Pottery? You liked that back at school.

Well. Maybe.

You might meet people there.

Nope. Pottery is women.

What's wrong with women?

They're not men.

You hang up. Actually, messing around with clay at night might be better than sitting home in your digs over a dry cleaning store in the trendy part of town, checking the window now and then to see if your own particular He might be below. After all, he does live here. You moved up here to be near him. He's sure to be out on the streets once in a while, isn't he?

But it seems you never spot him. To increase your chances, you allow yourself more time in the public sphere. For instance, when walking home from work, you stop in front of an art store on the corner. There's a posting of workshops about to start up: Pottery: Hand Building, Larger Cookware and Vessels. Larger cookware? It's been years since you've rustled up anything that couldn't fit into Tiny cookware. You open the door, a bell jingles, you walk into the store, sign up, charge one hundred eighty dollars to your Visa, and walk out. Holding your breath against the chemicals from the dry cleaner's, you climb the stairs. You open your mail—a snapshot of your mother's dog. You stand at your window. Is that Him below?

You eat left over saag paneer and sit down to wait for Grey's Anatomy. Maybe Derek will leave Meredith.

On Thursday evening you show up at pottery class, one among a half-dozen nondescript women with no more to do at night than you. The instructor, Marya, demonstrates how to roll a snake, then how to coil a lot of snakes around and build them up higher and higher. You make a sort of prehistoric-looking pot. Marya says it might be useful as a planter. So much for cookware. You've got yourself a planter.

Then it's back to your place where you stand at the window until your mother calls. She suggests Match.com. Again.

A few more lessons and you're hooked. You love pots. You roll more coils and jam them together and smooth them into a wall and take your wooden-handled tool—the one with the circle of metal on one end—and dig out a little hole. You make holes all over the pot. You make deep lines around the rim and it's ready to bisque. You set it on the kiln shelf.

That night you don't think about Him when you're watching TV. You think about your pot. You wonder how it's doing.

The women in the class are younger, older, fatter, thinner, darker, lighter, smarter, dumber, and you're painting something called slip on your new bowl. You don't look at the women. They don't look at you. You look at each other's pots. And in one glance, you know who's really good and where you stand as a potter. Toward the bottom, but you don't care. A pot that's better than yours becomes an idea for next time. It's not like getting dumped. It's like getting a handle on who you are. And speaking of handles, they're coming up next.

On the way home, you see Him walking into Starbucks. He isn't alone.

Now it's sheets of clay. You take a big ball of clay and flatten it in the press and cut out the right amount, lift it up, make the edges meet and you've got a mug, or the start of a pitcher. The handle—a small, fat snake—goes on the side, thumbed in at top and bottom. Styles develop, or rather get revealed, from inside these heads around you. The plump woman who teaches fifth grade makes extenuated shapes. The thin woman who's a pediatrician turns out short, sturdy shapes. You make Chinese shapes. You don't know why. Your great grands were from Glasgow, not Guangzhou.

In the middle of Grey's, your mother calls. A dog isn't enough. She herself has joined Match.com.

You drape a clay sheet over a wooden bowl and the following week it peels right off the wood and you've got yourself a clay bowl. You join in with the others as they talk about jobs, men. Cutbacks in state funding have put the social worker out on the street. The architect just got her first big commission, an H-shaped house with a lake view. The day trader, that's you, confesses that she broke up with her boyfriend. They believe you. The teacher met a guy while standing in line at the video store. The therapist's boyfriend has breast cancer. Her boyfriend? Yes. That stops everybody. The boyfriend. It's rare. It happens. Whatever.

The pots on the shelf have finally been bisqued and they come out of the kiln the same tan color they were when they went in. It's time to glaze! Glaze is a liquid glass and it's a murky tan in color, just like the pots. The metal containers are labeled yellow or green or red but the liquid in each is tan. So, see? If you paint some yellow zigzag lines for lightning on one of your pots, they vanish. And if you add some yellow dots for rain, they fade out as fast. How can I see where I've painted? you ask Marya. Call it a leap of faith, she says.

At home, you press a button on the remote whenever people kiss.

Next week, the social worker is still waiting for unemployment while the architect is having trouble with her prize client and your boyfriend has been spotted with a twenty-two-year-old. But would you believe it? Your pot is still clay-colored while the zigzags and the rain are a glorious sunshine yellow. The women compliment you on your yellow raindrops. Thanks. You smile.

You so much don't want this class to end. But of course it's graduation night and everything that's come out of the kiln the last few weeks sits on the long table to be viewed together—round, wrapped cauldrons on three legs, squared-off wrapped boxes on four legs, black and white slab pots with indented waists, others bulging out. Chinese-looking serving plates on pedestals. There are teapots with spouts and handles and lids that settle in where they're supposed to, and one pot sitting on four round extensions shaped like breasts, nipples down; in fact, the nipples are what the vessel rests on. You laugh at that, all of you.

And then it's over.

Back at your place, you stand by the window. Far off you can see the great black void that is Lake Champlain on a winter night. You sit down and stare at the picture of a tall bride and an almost as tall groom: Cressa and George, the letters announce in calligraphy. And there you are, Emily, not even named in the caption, popping out from behind your mother's skirt holding your flower girl basket. Your own father lives in a mansion in Rhode Island and has not inquired after you since the day you were born.

It's too late for Grey's so you turn on the TV for the local news. The university will be shut down on Presidents' Weekend and that happens to be the anniversary of when you met Him. You've got to get out of here.

On the next channel, they're showing tropical colors, warm places, Belize, Guatemala. You call your friend.

My pottery class is over.

What next?

I don't know.

How about some travel? Think adventure. There's a world out there.

Yeah—you glance at the glowing TV screen—I'm thinking.

Where to?

Maybe... Guatemala.

My god, why Guatemala?

It's sunny.

You can get killed there! You don't even speak Spanish!

Too late. I'm going.

Expedia opens its arms and in a couple of weeks you emerge from an airplane in total darkness onto an actual land mass. Next morning, in the city of Antigua, you watch women hawking their fabrics and small impressive girls beside them dazzling you with how instantaneously they can multiply and divide by the exchange rate of 7.5 in three languages at once. At Lake Atitlan, you watch an old woman walking barefoot with a basket on her head. She covers the cobblestones quickly, her toes spread as wide as you can spread your fingers. These women can do anything. These women could raise babies from frozen sperm all by themselves. Their men are mostly drinking beer.

In Chichicastenango, you rise before dawn and find the men hard at work, mountain men bent at the waist, carrying huge poles or blue plastic baskets heaped with goods on their backs. They reach the street below your window, unshoulder their poles, assemble a market stall, unpack the baskets, hang up the fabrics. Right outside your hotel women are unfolding the legs of shallow steel boxes that—ta dah!—turn out to be portable stoves. They make fires in the boxes with bits of wood or—what's this?—charcoal briquettes from a plastic bag you could get at your local Agway. They search among the ever-present fabrics they've been knotting into bags for millennia and bring out turquoise-colored aluminum pans you've actually spotted at Wal-Mart. They set these on the burners and pour cooking oil into them from used plastic milk jugs.

Time to get out there, mix and mingle.

But wait. Danger, the guidebook reminds you as you eat breakfast. Chichi is where most tourists get robbed. You stuff your cards and money into your pockets before you head out into the wildly colorful market, all the makeshift stalls jammed together and roofed with fabrics in brilliant blues and reds and greens. You pass stalls offering food and kitchenware, down-at-the-heel pre-worn shoes and a selection of bicycle parts, wooden animals in bright coats of paint, the wonderful woven fabrics, pocketbooks, flowers. Stall after stall. Little girls bargain with you. People bump against you. When they do, you check the pockets of your pants, the pockets of your vest, the secret pocket inside your jacket. Remember, you're alone, alone among strangers. Maybe even pickpockets. Your plane ticket, your passport, your credit cards—you could lose your identity before you even find it!

You could be disappeared.

At the far side of the market you spot the church that the guidebook tells you is part Christian, part Mayan. You go there to calm yourself with familiar images, to take a break from alien bustle. Inside, at the north wall—that's the direction of eternity for the Maya, says the guidebook—old men pray aloud in a language that doesn't sound like Spanish. One of them prays in front of a framed picture of Jesus. When he's done praying, he bends at the waist, pulls a bottle of booze from his hip pocket, and pours a bit of it into the bottle cap. He straightens up, prays again, and hurls what's in the bottle cap at Jesus. It runs down the glass like blood from the crown of thorns. You stiffen at the assault. In long swigs the old man finishes off the bottle, and when you walk away and stumble over a rope that's marking off a number of pews, he laughs at you.

You could be rolled into a ditch.

Outside, you slip into a building marked MUSEO and find yourself in an entry hall where a man sits at a table. You give him some coins and he gets up to open the door into a room and turns on a light. You step in to find revealed a whole lot of glass cases filled with Mayan pottery fired some two thousand years ago. And guess what's here—the same shapes as those from your pottery class! Look, a cauldron with three legs like the one made by the woman whose boyfriend has breast cancer. And here's a whole case of black bowls with red stripes, some bulging in, some bulging out. Hey! Here are bowls that go in at the top and bowls that go out at the top. And what about those half-dozen footed Chinese serving plates rather like your own? You start to smile. Wait till you tell them back home, your friends from pottery. Anything is possible. It's not too late. What's that? Over there? A pot with breasts for legs and it's resting on—yes, it is—four nipples! A placard explains that the ancient potters put dried seeds in the breasts to make a pleasant rustling sound whenever such a vessel was to be set upon a table. Of course they did. Why not? To a baby it might sound like the coming in of milk.

Title graphic: "Constructing the Vessel" Copyright © The Summerset Review 2011.

The carp in the Chinese restaurant
wear the faces of old men. They swim
entire lifetimes behind glass, circling
above colored rocks, wiggling below

a porcelain bridge that leads
to a plastic clam shell. There is also
a per with a helmet, his hand is raised
as if signaling discovery.

He has dropped from a boat on the surface
where three red faced seaman
check for kinks in the air hose,
watching the rattling air compressor

with dutiful eye. One man is the leader;
he wears a stained skipper's cap
and leans out over the sun-bright sea.
He is aware of the strain of leadership.

He cautions the others to feed
the hose more slowly, having seen
the bottom before, the odd faces,
the strange stones, the bridge

that connects the slow moving fish
to his boat on an invisible sea.

I'm late again and this time it's a big deal. The new manager will wait until after closing time to scold me. He'll first address me by my full name, Matthew, in a condescending tone. Then his young face will burn red and his thin body will shake with rage inside his cheap suit, and he'll threaten to fire me again. But this time I'm actually scared because he has good reason to. I'm spinning at The Island, like I have for almost ten years now, but tonight isn't like any other night. Tonight is the party after Pride 2006 and I was supposed to start an hour ago. I sneak in through the lobby of the attached hotel, slither my way through the crowd along the outside of the stage, and climb into the adjacent DJ booth.

I quickly throw a few switches and electronic devices at waist level and they light up in greens and yellows and reds. The two wafer-thin monitors take too long to boot up, and I double click on the DJ program. I don't look through the Plexiglas above the controls and out at the crowd; I imagine a sea of moisturized faces, some more intoxicated than others, staring down their DJ, upset that it's taking so long to start the soundtrack to their party. Finally, the program loads and I begin the clicking, letting the program match the next song's beat to the last for a seamless transition. There are no records or turntables in this DJ booth. An old CDJ that I used to be able to manipulate now sits in a corner waiting for repairs, wrapped in its own red and white RCA jacks. It's the reason I've become habitually late in the past year or so. Without the records, or at least the CDs, there's nothing to come into the booth for. After ten years, this job finally feels like a job.

I especially miss spinning the record. I miss the feel of the label moving beneath my fingertips. I miss walking the record up to speed or holding the spindle to slow it down. I miss losing myself in the music, and having to read the record's groove to remember where I am. Now there's no more vinyl. It's all abstract zeros and ones, intangible information, that a computer beat matches to the zeros and ones already playing and starts in perfect time when you hit the lighted button. Spinning no longer involves spinning. All its character, all its gut, all its audacity and rebellion, has been stripped and melted in the name of improving profit margins. It's no longer an occupation that needs specialized skills; anyone who can press a few buttons and has an ear for a hit can do this job now.

Finally I look out at the crowd. The club is packed with dancers holding their teetering drinks carefully above their heads, standing and sweating from the heat created by so many bodies packed together. The transformation still amazes me. It was eleven or twelve years ago, I was in my early twenties, when I first stumbled on The Island. It, like most of downtown Asbury, was a dump. The Island consisted of one tiny room with wood paneling, an empty dance floor, one bar and a bartender with not much to do; the hotel was an unusable eyesore with dirt-caked chairs upturned on its rotting balconies. But now, after the state released the private developers on downtown Asbury like a pack of wolves on raw meat, the club has expanded to two rooms and an outside pool area, and during the summer the rich fags pack their Speedos and skin tight jeans, ride the train from their Upper East Side apartments, and pay a small fortune for the luxury of soaking in the view of Asbury's black rocks jutting up from the rolling ocean, all while seated on those once-rotting balconies.

I spot the manager snaking his way through the crowd, but I can't see his face, so I'm not sure if he's angry with me. I focus on the crowd again; there are three types of fags that come to The Island. First there are the older men, most in jeans and solid button down shirts, a few in cargo shorts, at least one wearing one of those obnoxious Hawaiian shirts spotted with white flowers. These are the records you find in beat-up boxes in your parents' basement, warped and dusty with dated graphics and bands you've never heard of, and you know you'll find one or two in mint condition if you just put in the time to search. These records have been placed on an untold number of platters, read by an infinite amount of needles, handled by innumerable foreign fingertips.

Second are the newbies. These are usually the younger ones, though not always. They walk in without the beneficial knowledge of overpriced hair care products or facials or men's nail salons, in frumpy solid shirts and ill-fitting jeans or jean shorts. They're still test presses at this stage, checking that the volume levels are just right, checking for defects in the record before they commit to the genre.

Finally there are the more experienced twinks, normally my favorite kind of fag. They show up last because they went home between the parade and the scheduled club to nap, to shower, to stare in front of their parents' bathroom mirrors and search for pops and scratches in the contours of their faces, then bury the defects in dabs of cover-up. They wear the latest trends: ridiculously tight jeans, tight polo shirts with the collars stuck straight up, pink and purple and rainbow belts with outrageous diamond-studded belt buckles. They have four goals: look good, dance, get high, and get laid. Which is fine by me. I like to take one home whenever I can. It's not just the sex, which sometimes is mind-blowing and other times awkward; it's their attitude. I love to circle it, to orbit it, sometimes enter it and touch it, then exit back into the orbit again. It's the reason I started spinning in the first place.

You see, one thing I haven't told you is that I'm ugly. My skin is a pasty white and looks like its sweating even when it's not; my nose looks like it was once broken even though it never was; my teeth have grown in at strange angles, overlapping here and there. After coming out it seemed a cruel irony that these physical traits made me eternally uncomfortable in spaces amidst house music and gorgeous boys and overpriced alcohol, spaces where I was supposed to belong. I realized early on that I was destined to loneliness unless I found a gimmick. Then I befriended a local DJ in the area named Parker. He was gay but never embraced the club scene he was supposed to adore; he hated fashion and wore the same grey T-shirt and camouflage pants for weeks at a stretch; he wore his matted black hair however it looked when he woke and refused to tweeze or wax any part of his hairy body. He thought that spinning the latest house remix of a top ten hit for a bunch of cruising drunks was beneath him and instead became a turntablist, traveling the country, making his money by winning spin-offs.

We met at a rave at The Oceanfront Hotel when I first moved to Asbury. Although there's a waiting list for the hotel's rooms now every summer, back then, like so much else in downtown Asbury, it had been neglected; left to unceremoniously fade from its glorious post-WWII past. The rave took place in a ballroom rotting from the inside out, spots of paint peeling, floor to ceiling cracks up the corners. Parker, along with three other DJs, stood over their turntables set on the rotting wooden stage, scratching and cutting and dropping songs harmoniously, letting the needle settle into the groove for only a few seconds before pulling out another record with one hand, checking the label at its center, flipping it over, pulling up the needle with his other hand, then replacing the old record with the new, and restarting the process.

After the set he started our first conversation and eventually invited me to his run down one bedroom apartment on the boardwalk. Standing across the room from the thin ragged couch he had found on a curb, surrounded by piles of dirty stained underwear and socks and towers of stolen milk crates filled with records, he effortlessly beat-matched the upcoming song to the one presently spinning. His penetrating blue eyes locked on the records spinning below as he scratched beats and samples at will. His muscles pulsed beneath his white skin decorated with tattoos of spider webs and skulls and multi-colored stars as he rhythmically pressed into the record and released.

Eventually I moved in and we became a couple. I finally felt I had a partner, something I thought I'd never find as a gay man looking the way I do. I had resigned to the belief that my growing library of porn would be my only lasting intimate relationship. And more importantly, I found my place, the two of us belonging because we didn't belong; united against a subculture that valued the superficial, that judged you on your hair and teeth and skin and choice of outfits, that didn't dare dig past your imperfections to something beautiful and eternal because then the subculture might have to face the ugliness inside itself. Parker taught me everything I know on the decks, first showing me what to do, then standing behind me and guiding my hand with his stubby rough one when I had trouble. Then he'd let me take over the decks completely, while he either crashed on the stained mattress lying crooked on his bedroom floor, or chopped up and inhaled more crystal, in which case he'd return to release the new energy bubbling up beneath his skin. He'd jump around the decks and me, giving me more instruction.

And he taught me that everyone wants to sleep with the DJ. No matter what he looks like. "It's the power," he told me, as his fat red lips, which always looked like they were about to burst with juice, moved above his silver labret piercing. Of course, that was a long time ago. Long before I found Parker dead that morning, sprawled out on the living room floor in piss-soaked boxers, his pale body twisted at the torso, distorting the Aztec sun tattoo whose center was his right nipple. His heart had torn itself open from a crystal overdose and he died of a heart attack while I spun one of my first sets at The Island.

Tonight The Island is filled with a lot of Jersey twinks to choose from. Blondes. Brunettes. One or two redheads. Light skin. Light skin that's been turned a perfect golden by a suburban tanning booth. A few shades of brown skin. One looks Indian or Pakistani or whatever—from that region—and the other two look like some kind of Latin. And a few black ones. While I'm waiting to press the blinking play button, I look back and forth from one to the next and back again. I'm sure I could have any one. But I don't know. They're all long past the test press stage; the vinyl has been pressed from a master whose father was created long before any of us in this room, and we're all just waiting for the wax to dry. And soon the background noise will creep in from the pressure of countless needles. I'm looking at songs that, technically, are different, but are only off a few beats per minute from each other, and all contain the same phrasing, the same buildups and breakdowns, the same breaks for lyrics, the same verse-bridge-chorus structures. I don't think I'll be taking any home tonight, even if Parker's ghost appears and picks one for me. Yes, you heard me right, Parker's ghost.

Most nights Parker appears in the crowd in his signature shirt and camouflage pants, and points to the twink I should take home. At first I thought it was actually him, and I purposely cued up a ten minute remix so that I could leave the booth and search for him. I shoved my way through the thick crowd to the bar where he was leaning, his mouth open and about to order a drink, most likely his favorite, Rum and Coke. I tried to hug him but he disappeared as my hands and arms sliced through his image and I almost lost my balance. I knew I looked ridiculous but I didn't care. I reasoned that I must've been hallucinating from the crystal-induced sleep deprivation I'd been suffering for about a week after his death. But even after I had sobered up and caught up on my sleep, he still kept appearing. I thought maybe I was going crazy until one summer night a twink in a pink shirt and whitewashed jean shorts two sizes too small came up to me after a set and described somebody fitting Parker's description, who instructed the twink to come find me if he wanted me to take him home. That's when I knew it was Parker's ghost. We were a team again, us against this superficial scene, executing the ultimate revenge, using the power Parker had passed onto me to help the ugly guy get the cutest ass in the club. But like I said, I'm just not interested tonight. I'll just play the music they want to hear until closing and go up to the after-party. And it looks like I might have bigger problems. The manager is coming toward the DJ booth.

To my surprise there was no yelling from the manager. Once the lights had gone up and the crowd left, he was elated at the night's profits, and all he did was tell me in passing to buy a watch. So I left the club for the hotel after-party. For every Pride there are multiple after-parties in the hotel, but the after-party of after-parties is held on the last floor, paid for by this gross old rich man who uses the money from his years as a lawyer to keep a steady flow of twinks coming to him.

The old man lets me in. He's dressed in a windowpane shirt and blue tie and I'm forced to smile and thank him and kiss his leathery thin cheek. All the hotel rooms have the bathroom to the right as you walk in, two double beds, a large dresser with a television sitting on it, a large mirror hanging above, and a balcony overlooking the pool. A laptop connected to a stereo blasts some big black diva demanding everyone leave her alone and let her live her own life. The song came out a few years ago; I know I played it sometime earlier in the night and it's just come out on one of those frightening gay party compilations, filled with mantras that rationalize the scene's superficiality, every song anchored by the same tribal beat, using the same synthesizers because they're all remixed by the same half-dozen producers. In their tight black outfits and cropped haircuts, the usual Island fixtures flutter around the room. One or two clank glasses on the far side of the dresser.

The TV sits on the floor beneath the window, and a line of handheld mirrors have been placed on the large dresser. Some faghag with a pretty intricate rainbow painted on her chubby cheek is setting up the lines as another faghag and a few queens come up behind her and snort them with cut straws. I'm sure they're all pretending they're Andy Warhol at Studio 54, thinking about the good old disco days none of us are old enough to remember and have constructed using bad movies that rerun on VH1, the days before AIDS, the days when cocaine was a recreational drug and any sexual misadventure could be cured with a visit to your local pharmacist. Although I don't mind coke I just don't feel like any tonight. And even if I did, I'm sure as hell not waiting for this queer trash to suck up all the good powder and leave me with residue.

I push past a wall of Island fixtures, slide open the glass door, and enter the balcony. A pair of twinks stand at one corner, smoking. One looks like all the other Island queens. The other stands out and sparks my interest. He's wearing some kind of punk rock outfit, a tight black shirt with some band's name scribbled on it, those red pants with plaid designs and all the belts, and big black boots. He's thin and his hair is buzzed short and dyed purple. His long lashes fan out and frame his blue eyes. His skin is pale with a few freckles and I can see some scratches in various stages of healing around his chin and right cheekbone. He reminds me of one of those straightbait guys in some gay porn; guys who are straight but experiment just that one time it's filmed, and you know the whole time they're actually flaming fags beneath those scratched and rough exteriors, but no one dares say it out loud for fear of ending the fantasy for the viewer. I approach them.

"I'm not intruding am I?" I say with my hand flat against my chest, my eyes staring at my purple-haired target.

"Oh no, not at all," the queen says. I move past him to my target and names are exchanged. His is Mikey. The queen places his smooth fingers on Mikey's shoulder. "I'm gonna see what's going on in the other rooms," he says to Mikey. "I'll take my time getting back."

"So what are you doing here?" I ask him.

"I was brought here for a purpose. I might be letting down my friends, though."

"I don't mean that. Shit, almost everyone is here for that. What I really meant..." I begin, "well, it's not like," I survey the room, then fix on his blue eyes, "you don't fit in very well around here."

Mikey laughs, opening his mouth wide. His teeth are straight and white. Probably the result of painful and regular orthodontist visits, a sign of a good suburban upbringing. "I know. Some friends from college thought it might be fun to take me to my first Pride."

"How do you like it so far?"

"Eh. Not really my thing. We did the parade this afternoon, then went home to nap and shower and stuff, then came back. We didn't get in until the club almost closed. Then one of my friends met this old guy who invited us all up here."

"Did you hear any of the music in the club?"

He nods indifferently.

"How did you like it?"

He shrugs. His bony shoulders rise and pull up his tight shirt. For a moment I imagine his pale lower back, the start of his spine, the rubber waistband of his briefs.

"I'm the DJ," I say.

Normally these three words cause the young eyes to light up, all of the attention focuses, and the boy asks me what it's like to be a DJ. You can see the wheels turning in his head, strategizing how to get me into bed. But not this one; this one looks unfazed.

No one speaks and I'm scared now. The DJ thing didn't work, didn't cloak me in a mystique that hides my jagged teeth and pasty skin. I assume our conversation is over. But then he speaks.

"Do you spin records?"

"Of course. Real DJs only spin records."

Now his eyes light up. His hands become animated. He's wearing a black leather bracelet with metal spikes on his left wrist. He loves records and we talk about vinyl and needles and outrageous prices we've paid, and analog versus digital, and counterweights and gauges and cartridges. Finally he asks me if I want to see his record collection.

"Of course."

Before we leave we have to find his friends. We re-enter and he spots them across the room and says he'll be right back. I see him talk to two white queens, both blondes in tight polo shirts, one pink and the other bright orange.

"So you're going home with one after all," I hear beside me. I immediately recognize the voice.

"Yeah," I respond and turn to Parker. He stands on the balcony right outside the open glass door. The ocean breeze kicks up, whipping a few chunks of his greasy hair as it moves past. I look around. As usual, no one seems to notice me talking to a ghost.

"What made you change your mind?"

"He's different from the other boys you've brought me."

"I didn't bring you this one. And why is he different?"

"Look at him. He's not some sex-crazed, catty narcissist. He's one of us."

"You don't know that for sure."

"I know it."

"Just be careful. At least the sex-crazed narcissists know what they want."

Parker disappears and I see the pink and bright orange queens dragging Mikey back to me. They stand at either side of him. I don't know what Parker's problem is. The contrast between Mikey and these other two is obvious.

"Finally," the pink one says, his tanned profile locked on Mikey and manicured hand resting on Mikey's shoulder, "our little bi punk rocker is becoming a faggot."

"I remember the straight days," the bright orange queen says, his tanned profile locked on Mikey as well, one hand resting on his square hip and the other hanging freely. "Where did the time go? They grow up so fast."

The queens laugh and Mikey smiles like an embarrassed little kid. I smile reactively, making sure to keep my mouth closed.

Between semesters Mikey lives with his parents in the new condo complex at the three-point intersection behind The Island's back parking lot, so we walk. The salt air moves through us and the sun rises out of the ocean horizon, giving everything a dull, orange glow. There's no sign of Pride now, except for a few little rainbow flags and some pink triangle stickers in wire mesh trash cans. While we walk we talk. Well, he talks. He tells me that he's just started college, he thinks he wants to be some kind of artist, he wishes he lived back in the sixties and seventies because he loves all those old album covers, like that Rolling Stones tongue one or the Velvet Underground banana one. He's living in the guest rooms of his parents' new condo, the condo they bought after retirement and want to die in, the condo they made clear to Mikey is only a temporary space for him until college is done and he can live on his own.

When we reach the complex standing at Cookman, Ocean, and Kingsley, a complex where the buyer needs at least a quarter of a million, I remember the rotting landmark that stood in its place for over a century before. Palace Amusements occupied one block and overlooked Wesley Lake, the man-made lake that separates the hedonistic Asbury Park from its religious neighbor, Ocean Grove. At Palace Amusements' height at the turn of the twentieth century, masses of children and fathers in top hats and mothers twirling umbrellas would enter the building, perhaps get lost in the maze of mirrors or ride ornate and lavishly painted wooden horses on the largest carousel of its time.

But by the twenty-first century the horses had been sold and shipped far away. The paintings on the exterior wall of Tillie, the head of a Victorian boy, and the multi colored letters spelling FUNHOUSE and TUNNEL OF LOVE were left to be eaten by the ravenous salt air. The empty building was occupied by junkies until 2004 when a private developer rolled noisily onto the three-point corner with a crane. It stretched its neck over the building then dove, its metal teeth ripping until the building finally collapsed. I imagined the gaunt junkies, now skeletons of their former selves, pricking their fingers as they scooped up needles and little black globs of heroine, some escaping through passages created earlier by breaking down the rotting wood and plaster, and others getting lost in the maze of mirrors, the alarm growing on their gaunt faces as the mirrors came down around them, shards slicing into their stretched and pale skin, their bones pulverized into white dust. Watching this, my heart fell; the crane ripped out the last guts of the Asbury I knew. That was around the same time The Island permanently retired its vinyl and CDs.

The new complex consists of circular courtyards, parking spaces, and half-moon-shaped balconies holding small glass tables and lounge chairs and pots spilling over with foliage. Mikey unlocks the door and lets us in. We have to take off our shoes in the tiled foyer. The paint on the walls still smells like chemicals and the wall-to-wall carpeting covers the living room and runs up the steps. Mikey says the condo was built for the modern homeowner, with a big open kitchen that flows into a dining room on the first floor and large walk-in closets for the two bedrooms upstairs and a separate bath for the master bedroom. He offers me a drink which I politely decline and we go up to his bedroom.

At one side sits his unmade bed, a dresser, and his walk-in closet. Next to this stands his Technics turntable, an amplifier, and two little speakers on a wooden structure with a few black milk crates of records besides it. At the other side of the room sit piles of boxes. Everywhere in between are dirty clothes, a few pairs of those strange red pants with the plaid designs and all those belts, some tight black T-shirts with band names, lots of socks, and a few boxers. The room smells of musk and dirt and sweat and boys, a wonderful oasis in this desert of the vacuumed and Febrezed.

He looks down at the dirty piles and up at me and seems embarrassed. He cups his hands together and starts scooping up the stained underwear and socks, a sock or two fall back down through the gap between his arms, and he turns his head back and forth, as if unsure where to put what he's left holding.

"Please don't worry about that," I say.

"Are you sure?"

"Definitely. My place looks just like this." My place doesn't look just like this; I've become more frequent about my house cleaning as I've gotten older. But I don't mind it—I even enjoy it—because it reminds me of Parker and the first apartment we had together. I had gotten some shitty retail job in the day and sold pot at night to help Parker pay the bills. We lived in a dilapidated apartment building next to Palace Amusements; our neighbors consisted of small time drug dealers, pimps, and prostitutes.

Mikey smiles softly, nods once, and drops the clothing. "Do you wanna see my records now?"

"Of course."

I sit on the bed and he stands over the turntable and amplifier, switches them on, removes the dustcover, and starts going through the milk crates. He pulls out mostly black sleeves, with band names like Buzzcocks and Circle Jerks and Discharge, some written in slime or blood that slides down. He holds up an album depicting uniform lines of gray bonfires and red block letters that read Stiff Little Fingers Flammable Material.

"This is one of my favorites," he says, his blue eyes penetrating mine. "It's their debut album, first pressed in 1979." He slips the record from the sleeve. "It's near mint and didn't cost that much, but it's one of my favorites. Well you know that, I just said it." He smiles quickly, nervous and embarrassed, and turns his back to me. Now his ass is eye-level, his skin tight pants pressing his thick buttocks together, and I fight the impulse to touch them. "This song is amazing," he says, placing the needle midway through the record, "It changed my life."

A fat guitar rips through the speakers and then a beat starts. Mikey turns back to me and nods his head to the beat. A voice rough like gravel, and at moments swallowed by the surrounding and obnoxious drums and guitar, screams about refusing to becoming a soldier and wasting his life. Even if the song is literal, its use as a metaphor is obvious. I imagine it's the metaphor that changed Mikey's life.

He bends down. "You like it?" he asks, his breath caressing my ear.

"Yes," I say. I don't tell him that the immature lyrics remind me of my own stereotypically rebellious teenage years and make me cringe inside. But at the same time they reinforce my original thoughts on Mikey. He's an individual, like me and Parker. And unlike those superficial twinks. While the record continues, I look through the milk crates. One by one I feel the cardboard sleeves and plastic protectors. Each record clicks and slaps after it's pulled halfway up for inspection, dropped back down, and pushed forward. The process reminds me of my hours spent in dirty little record shops tucked away in alleys, or mainstream record stores that pretended to be unique, poring through thousands of dance and pop and rock and jazz and spoken word records. Looking through Mikey's records makes me miss that, makes me miss buying old vinyl for pennies on the dollar, and taking them home to clean with special record cloth.

"What's this?" I ask Mikey after the song ends. I slip a record with a white cover from the milk crate. Pink lettering says, "If you were a transformer you'd be…" and then in a cartoon-like font and colored in rainbows it reads FAGATRON.

"They're an amazing queercore band," he says.

I nod like I know what queercore is.

"But they're broken up now."

"Play it."

As I hand him the record he almost drops it, perhaps out of nervousness, which I find endearing and makes me want him more.

"Tell me what you think of it," he says.

He carefully places the needle on the last song and the speaker pops. The same kind of obnoxious crash of guitars and drums and bass explode from the vinyl, the lead singer screaming out the vocals to Madonna's "Like a Prayer."

"So?" he says once the song's over.

"I think it's…interesting."

His blue eyes widen. "I think I have a double." He goes through another milk crate and pulls out another of the same white album with pink and rainbow lettering.

"Do you want it?"

I'm not sure what to say. I'm not sure if I want it. "Of course," I tell him.

He hands it to me and smiles like a little kid offering a school drawing to his parent, and I smile back, so comfortable I don't realize I've shown my teeth.

"So show me something," he says, pointing the turntable.

"Show you something?"

"Yeah. Like some scratching or something." His young eyes light up and his attention focuses.

I move over to the turntable, count a steady beat in my head, and start with a baby scratch. It's pretty simple; I just pull the first sound of the record forward and backward on the upbeat. I look down at the record and then at Mikey. He's nodding his purple head. He moves closer and I smell him; I smell his musk, his dirt, his sweat.

I turn the baby scratch into a chirp scratch and use the volume control on the amplifier to move it in and out, and end with a scribble scratch. He's right on top of me. His breath brushes against my neck. His cheek's peach fuzz touches my face. He's going to kiss me.

I wake up spooning Mikey. The salt air floats in through the open window and it looks to be early evening. My arm is draped over his sleeping skin and his soft fingers are interlocked with mine. He lies naked in a fetal position, his body smooth except for bushes of untamed hair surrounding his penis and escaping from where his ass cheeks meet. I managed to slip into boxers and a T-shirt after he first fell asleep. I softly slide my hands along his smooth, inexperienced skin, and trace the fleshy contours of his body. It reminds me of the time when life was new and desirable, when invincibility was as natural as the night and the future burned with powders and parades and colored lights, when Parker was still alive.

The image of Palace Amusements returns and I wonder where this specific condo would be, where Mikey's bed would be and where we would be lying, perhaps in the maze of mirrors, where multiple images of Mikey would surround me and I could take them in, but at the same time I'd have to systematically ignore the duplicate images of my ugly, pasty self.

The touching slowly rouses Mikey. He squints for a moment, his long lashes crashing into one another. He turns on his back and my arm now rests right below his tiny nipples. He breathes heavily through his nose once and smiles, cups his hand behind my head, pushes it toward him, and kisses me. In his kisses the future burns again, whiting out my crooked teeth and nose and shiny skin.

"You know what's always fascinated me about records?" he asks, his naïve face poised like I always imagined professors looked when about to lecture, as if something profound was perched at the tip of his tongue.

"What?"

"When you spin a record, when the needle hits the wax, the weight of the needle slowly destroys the record. And there's nothing you can do about it. Yeah you can use the counterweights to slow the wearing down, but eventually, as the needle cuts deeper and deeper into each groove, you're going to get white noise and pops, until finally the record is ruined. So, really, in order to listen to it, you have to be willing to destroy it."

I nod and tell him I didn't know that, even though I do; Parker told me the same thing once, but he elaborated. One night after we'd been drinking cocaine dissolved in Rum and Coke, he sitting on the stained couch, his legs splayed with bushes of black hair escaping from his boxers, he said, "Spinning a record is like our life, you know?"

"How so?" I said, looking over the turntables at him.

"All the drinking, the drugs, staying out all night. Living like this means you have to be willing to slowly kill yourself."

"Why don't we stop then?"

"Because you're never really living until you're almost dying."

I think about our apartment again, and that crane coming down on Palace Amusements again, and I find myself angry. In the name of revitalization the private developers were brought in and let loose. In devouring the abandoned buildings and spitting out high end restaurants and trendy bars and nightclubs, they've pushed out the people Parker and I always held dear, the prostitutes and drug dealers and addicts, pushed them half a mile west past the train tracks, to make room for more desirable populations like domesticated gay couples walking their bulldogs down the boardwalk, or trust-fund kids in tight jeans and logo T-shirts who think they're artists, or aging baby boomers like Mikey's parents who want to retire and die and have their ashes sprinkled at the Jersey Shore. And anyone who might know these seedier things once existed now pretends they never did.

But what these people don't understand—don't want to understand—is that the people they don't want to acknowledge, the hookers and pimps and junkies and drug dealers, are the true ones. The newcomers occupying downtown are constantly running from themselves on trains to and from Manhattan, running in and out of gallery openings, hiding from themselves inside dimly lit bars that sell over-priced specialty drinks. But the ones pushed out have faced themselves, have come to terms with and own their flawed selves. They know exactly what they want and you know exactly what they want from you; there is no addressing you as "dear" or "darling" after a peck on the cheek, no kind words to your face and then catty remarks to friends once you've disappeared. The ones pushed out own their addictions, own the lines and cracks running through their weathered faces, the cycles of ecstasy and withdrawal that dictate their existence. They want to be forgotten by the newcomers because it's easier to forget than to have to stare at yourself in the mirror without the benefit of hair care products or cover-up, and lay yourself bare in front of yourself, to accept the person you wish you weren't.

Mikey's smooth face wrinkles with alarm. "I hate to ask you this," he says and pauses, "but my parents will be home tomorrow morning. Do you think you could be out of the house by then?"

"You're not out to them?"

"Nope."

"No problem," I say, smiling.

He slides out from beneath me, and kisses me once quickly. He stands for a moment to compose himself, his young body falling naturally into the perfect proportions. "I'll be right back," he says, "I have to take a leak." He smiles again and leaves the room.

So he's not out to his parents. I can respect that. I can wait. We can see each other at least once a week at the club until he leaves; maybe we can go out for something to eat now and then, talk some more. Maybe we can do it tonight. There are a lot of nice restaurants around here now. We'll figure out how to manage college when we get to it. It's only late June; the summer's just begun. I lie on my back and soak in the salt air for a moment.

"Hey Mikey! We're comin' up!" I hear from the window.

I hear the toilet flush and Mikey's clumsy footsteps approaching. His naked body re-enters the room.

"You might want to put some clothes on," I say smiling. "Somebody outside said they're coming up here."

He rushes over to the window, examines the situation, and turns back to me. "Fuck!"

"What?"

"It's Tony and Kate."

"So."

"They can't see you here." His nude form bends down, picks up the pile of my clothes sitting next to the bed, and throws them toward me.

"Why?"

"I'm not out to them." He scoops up a pair of briefs and clumsily pulls them up his legs. Then he puts those pants with all the belts on again.

I look at him puzzled.

"You met my college friends; these are my high school friends." He pulls a tight black T-shirt above his head and I see bushes of armpit hair. He curses as he tries to get the shirt over his head. By now I'm dressed.

"I can leave now if you like."

"No. They'll see you and wonder what's up."

I hear them taking off their shoes downstairs. "I think they're in the house."

"Fuck! I always forget to lock that fucking door!"

"I could go into your parent's room, then leave when they're in here." I hear them coming up the steps.

"No, it's too late for that. Hide in the closet."

"What?"

"Come on, please." He walks across the room and opens the closet door.

"You've got to be kidding."

"Just for a few minutes—I'll get them out fast."

The footsteps are coming down the hall.

"No way in hell!"

His face stretches with alarm and he pushes his hand downward, signaling me to keep my voice down.

"I've worked very hard for what I have," I say in a softer, calmer tone. "I'm not going back."

"Please," he says. His blue eyes lock on mine, melting my anger. "Just for a minute."

I imagine our future together again and reason this is a small sacrifice to make. I walk into the closet and he closes the door behind me.

The smell of musk and dirt and sweat and boys is more intense in here and makes me nauseous. My back is to the dusty light filtering through the door's slats. I'm standing on piles of clothes and a few pairs of boots. How much goddamn clothing does this kid have? I hear his friends walk in.

Kate asks him about the strange shoes downstairs.

"I don't know," he tells them. "They were here when I got home last night."

I keep still and listen to the conversation, afraid that if I move I might lose my balance. There's gossip about people I don't know, discussion about hair dye, concert tickets, a possible run to the mall. And no mention from Mikey of the man he just slept with now perched on a pile of mildew-stained laundry in the walk-in closet.

Listening to this mindless, immature chatter angers me. This is ridiculous. I wanted to experience a whole different genre of music with different instruments and rules and lyrical content and I got it in Mikey. The punk Mikey, that wax has dried and hardened, the grooves have been somewhat worn, and the record is familiar. But the gay Mikey, that vinyl isn't even in the test press stage yet. And what if after listening to it he decides he doesn't like the new song, doesn't like the phrasing, the buildups and breakdowns, the breaks for lyrics, the zeroes and ones? What if he decides he doesn't want the vinyl, doesn't want to branch out into new genres, and stays with the familiar master? Where will that leave me?

"What the fuck are you talking about?" I hear behind me. A cycle of adrenaline runs through me and I jump and turn. I hit my head on the shelf directly above and almost twist my ankle as I lose my footing on a boot lying sideways on top of an uneven layer of laundry.

"What was that?" I hear Kate say.

"It's nothing," Mikey says, his voice shaking slightly; the space between his words stretched out. "My parents stuffed so much crap in that closet. It's not all stable."

"Uh huh," she responds, sounding unconvinced.

My heart slows inside my chest. Through the shafts of light, Parker sits in front of me.

"Will you keep your voice down?" I whisper.

"Nobody can hear us, Matt."

His presence makes me uncomfortable and I can't stand to make eye contact, so I drop my eyes like a scolded child and stare into the dirty darkness below me. His rough hand takes a hold of my chin and gently guides my stare back to his blue eyes.

"What the fuck do you see in this kid anyway?"

I don't answer because Parker already knows the answer.

"This kid isn't me."

"I know."

"And even though we had a lot of good times together, neither of us can go back."

"I know."

Parker disappears. I brace myself. Feeling another injection of adrenaline, I open the door and enter the room.

The conversation stops. Kate, with red spiky hair and a diamond in her nose, says hello.

"Hello," I say. The other two stay silent, their eyes directed toward the floor.

Kate, wearing a smirk, turns to Mikey. "Mikey, you didn't tell us you were hiding a man in your closet."

Mikey stares blankly.

I move past the bed they're sitting on to the turntable. I pull the record off the platter and put it back in its sleeve. "Thanks for the record," I tell Mikey.

I make my way downstairs and into the tiled foyer. Mikey never leaves his room in pursuit. It only stings for a moment. I slip on my shoes that are waiting in a line with the others next to the front door and exit. It's dusk now; a sliver of sun melts into the ocean horizon.

I'll return to my apartment on the other side of the tracks. I'll pass the female and tranny hookers starting their work day in my parking lot, wearing constricting jean short skirts, pouting their lips to ready them for pink and cherry lipsticks pulled from tiny metallic handbags. Once inside, beneath a ceiling buckling from leaky pipes, I'll switch on the turntables and see what samples I can get out of this Fagatron record. I'll analyze the milk crates of records I've been ignoring for so long and pull out some of the collection inherited from Parker. And who knows; maybe I'll even ask around, see if any club owners are still looking for a DJ who spins records.

Title graphic: "Stylus" Copyright © The Summerset Review, Inc. 2011. "Spinning the Record" was originally published by Battered Suitcase in substantially different form.

The baby-faced sexpot
interests me
not at all.

No, my thoughts recur
to the later Lana:

expensively dressed,
perfectly coiffed,
suffering, suffering,
in swell surroundings.

In films as in life,
her specialty
was taking the stand.

Though she often broke down,
sobbing, her woman's heart
unable to bear any more,
she was oddly blank:
a lacquered mask, lovingly lit
by expert technicians,
and sometimes wearing a turban.

What was it like to be Lana?
I think I know, a little.

I too have had to navigate my way
through messy divorces, the vagaries
of a career, the chaos
of underfinanced productions—
maintaining my composure
on take after take, the pro
who hits her marks, even as
she's falling to pieces—
I too have taken that deep, deep breath,
ready to testify, to confess,
to give my all, my everything—

which, when viewed in the dailies,
as the camera comes in for its closeup,
isn't that much.

Great tawny ruin,
presided over by your rotting seigneur,
bless you for these days and things—
the cavernous kitchen,
holding its secrets;
the beams in the bedroom
still supporting the weight
of the seventeenth century;
the tall windows, gazing out
and peering in at their memories;
the mantel with its plastic travel clock
and chinoiserie;
the front door which—as a point of pride—
is never locked, opening onto
lichenous stone and flowers;
the ancient, valuable, unlooked-at, dusty furniture;
the one-eyed dancing dog, with his three-note bark.

Old, character-ridden houses are hard to traverse quietly, but Jimmy did his best to skulk up the stairs and tiptoe down the hallway. He closed his bedroom door with the same stealth—retracting the bolt until the door shut, then slowly untwisting the brass knob. He crept across the wood floor to the side of his bed, where he lifted his mattress and removed the magazine. The bed had squeaky springs, so he mounted it gingerly.

The remaining shine on the magazine's once glossy cover terminated at its straight creases and rounded corners. The pages that were not falling apart stuck together. Even so, the very feel of the paper, like the firing of a blank, jerked his pulse into a sprint. After a few minutes, sweat surfaced above his forehead, under his arms, and even on his palms.

The stairs creaked. Jimmy threw the comforter over the magazine and himself. The discontented, thudding steps had to be those of his father, Harold.1 Terrified, Jimmy listened to the crescendo as Harold lumbered down the hallway. He heard a knock, and before he could respond, the door opened.

"James, dinner will be in twenty minutes."

"Okay."

"Where is your homework?"

"Already finished."

"Why are you in bed?"

"Just taking a nap. Kind of tired."

Harold gave him a suspicious look and closed the door. Jimmy waited until the stairs bent with his father's descent. He retrieved the magazine and flipped to the page where he had left off. His pulse accelerated again. Guilt and paranoia haunted him as he neared a climax.

What was that noise? Jimmy set the magazine face down. By the short, light strides, his mother had arrived home. He pulled the comforter up to his chest again, burying the magazine below. The sound of the steps in the hallway ceased. He held his breath and, had he not been indoctrinated with Atheism from an early age, might have prayed.

The door swung wide without the pretense of a knock. "What's this? Taking a nap?" asked Jimmy's mother.

"Yeah, I'm tired."

"Did you get your essay back today?"

"Yeah. A minus."2

"I told you it was too equivocal."

Jimmy gave a repentant nod.

"Well, dinner is in a few minutes. Come on. You can go to bed afterward if you want."

Jimmy fumbled underneath the sheets for a moment and then slid his feet out of bed, both of which planted without a problem. He attempted to extract his upper body next, putting one hand on the nightstand and the other on the comforter to keep it in place. The maneuver failed, and the magazine flopped to the floor.3

His pupils dilated to his eyelids. Only the magazine's facedown-and-closed landing had delayed Armageddon.

"What is that you were reading?" she asked, taking a step forward.

"Nothing, just some obscure lit mag." Jimmy knew he had chosen a risky tactic. His mother would certainly approve of such material, but she might also ask to read it.

"May I take a look?"

By the time Jimmy's shudder had traveled all the way down his body and back up again, he had decided to surrender the magazine. Jimmy believed he could increase his chances for clemency if he cooperated swiftly. He picked up the periodical and handed it, still facedown, to his mother.

She turned it over and screamed, dropping it from her hands, which had stiffened in shock. "Harold, get up here!"

Jimmy and his mother stared at the well-worn magazine lying on the hardwood between them. An issue of genre stories—thrillers, no less.

Title graphic: "Undercover" Copyright © The Summerset Review, Inc. 2011.

1 No one mistook Harold for a gallant knight, or his wife Gwen for a princess, but the stories behind their union were the stuffa of legends. That is, they met after Gwen gave Harold's debut, a sloppy and indulgent collection of postmodern fairy tales, what no other critic had: an ambivalent review. A year later, Harold returned the favor by giving Gwen, a woman with a scabrous complexion and a spiky personality, what no other man had: a proposal. She accepted the offer but recused herself from assessing Harold's next collection and the two novels that followed, all three of which suffered universal excoriation without her. The marriage would have likewise reached an unhappy ending had it not been for their joint commitment to raise a literary genius.

a A commentator valuing accuracy over appropriateness would have chosen a cruder s-word here.

2 The highest mark in his class; Jimmy's teacher always graded harshly in the beginning of the semester as a way to motivate her students and ensure that she could demonstrate improvement by the time parent-teacher conferences came around.

3 Jimmy's parents, worried that he might lose interest in literature or hit his head, discouraged him from cultivating what pittance of physical coordination he had inherited. The result was a thin and clumsy kid with a massive yet nimble vocabulary.

Scott Akalis' stories have appeared in Camera Obscura, Stymie Magazine, and Hawai'i Review. Although Scott has not studied the mind or eaten deep dish pizza lately, he has a Ph.D. in psychology and lives in Chicago. scottakalis.com

Sherman Alexie is the author of, most recently, Face, poetry from Hanging Loose Press, and War Dances, poems and stories from Grove Press. He lives with his family in Seattle. fallsapart.com

John Harris is a former Senior Editor at Getty Publications in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in the Cafe Review, Bark, Gay & Lesbian Review, Cairn, and Exquisite Corpse. This is his second appearance in the journal. He lives in Santa Monica. john0753@live.com

Robert Hyers has been published in 3:AM Magazine, The Q Review, and Battered Suitcase, among others. He received his MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. roberthyers.wordpress.com

Zane Kotker lives in Massachusetts and at www.zanekotker.com. Her novels include Bodies in Motion, A Certain Man, White Rising (Knopf) and Try to Remember (Random House). In the last few years she has published a dozen stories, beginning happily with one in this magazine (Fall 2006), to which she was drawn because its Recommended Reading page listed Salinger’s "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor." Other stories of hers have appeared in The Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Sun.

Laurie McClellan's essays have previously been published in The South Dakota Review, Battered Suitcase, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Washington Post. She's a 2008 graduate of the Johns Hopkins writing program. lauriemcclellan@hotmail.com

Al Ortolani is a secondary English teacher in the Kansas City area. His poetry has appeared in New York Quarterly, Laurel Review, Midwest Quarterly, The English Journal and other places. His next volume of poetry, Finding the Edge, is due for publication from Woodley Press at Washburn University this spring. Presently, he is a co-editor for The Little Balkans Review, a small regional journal in southeast Kansas. alortolani@gmail.com

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. This is his second appearance in the journal. For more information, including his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at simonperchik.com

Born in San Francisco, Rayme Waters grew up in Northern California and the city of Linköping, Sweden. Her work has appeared on The Rumpus, The Orange Coast Review and The Meadowland Review. rayme@stanfordalumni.org

Table of Contents

Editors' Notes

Two Poems

Sonnet, without Stuntmen

Sonnet, with Tainted Love

Drinking the Zambezi

*

The Causes of Saints

Pots

Goldfish with the Faces of Old Men

Spinning the Record

Two Poems

The Later Lana

The Later Lana

Contributors' Notes