Internal Affairs © Greggory Moore

I think it be thine indeed, for thou liest in't.

                     —Shakespeare, from Hamlet (V, i, 124)

            I told him to go and pick up the money at the bus station.  And I guess he got shot.  Hell, how would I know what happened?  I don't have the faintest idea.  Sure, I feel bad.  But I don't feel guilty.  I didn't do anything.  I didn't have anything to do with it.  I was at the restaurant having dinner.  A lot of people saw me there.  You can check it out.

You lie out on't, sir, therefore 'tis not

yours.  For my part, I do not lie in't, yet it is mine.

                      —Shakespeare, from Hamlet (V, i, 125–126)

            Yeah, she was here.  I waited on her.  I remember 'cause she was this pretty girl alone, just sitting there, reading some book.  And she gave me a pretty good tip.  I dunno.  What else do you want me to say?  I don't remember what she ordered.

See you now—

To lie:  'tis true that this is being untrue;

But sometimes to believe a lie can be

divine.

                     —Shakespeare, from Hamlet (II, i, 63–66)

            It wasn't hard to figure out.  She did eat there, but her check was cashed out about 30 minutes before the murder.  Not only that, but the guy who waited on her got off work three minutes after he cashed out her check.  But the thing that really gave it away was what she ordered:  coffee.  She'd told me that she was eating dinner; and the waiter remembered that she was pretty, alone, and reading, but told me he didn't remember what she ordered—especially odd, considering he said she'd tipped him well.  But this was all circumstantial.  So I told her what I knew and threatened to book her and her pal, figuring that she didn't know much about the law.  She offered me a third of the money.  I asked for half, but she told me she'd go off with me.  I wanted to believe her.  She and the waiter disappeared two days later.

____________________________________________________

Pill Bugs © Christa Westaway

He imagines his mother before the bruises, the crying, the shouting, the way she must have been as a girl.  Like him, she found pill bugs underneath stones and loose bricks in the neighbor’s abandoned yard. She rolled them into balls with her mud-crusted fingers.

A bug waits rolled up like that, feelers hidden from her gaze, from her intentions to crush it.  It waits like that still, patient.

She waits too.

Still. 

And when it thinks her merciful, it opens, rotating on its shelled back, legs flailing, shiny underside exposed. She giggles. Moving down to her knees, she puts the bug back into the dirt. Curious, she presses her foot down, twisting until she hears the crunch. She doesn’t feel a thing.

The boy imagines.

___________________

What You See in Hawaii When Married to a Hawaiian

© Christian Hanz Lozada

 

We go to the constitutional convention at the community center a block from the Hawaiian Rez.  Turns out it’s a petition drive begging Native Hawaiians, before they’re bred out, to work towards a nation within a nation, sovereignty, or just organization.  It starts two hours late.

We skip the hula and the pitches for funny t-shirts, sign the petition, and walk away, following the futile fliers, caught in the kona winds, toward the beach, as if the ocean can wash away the impotency of our signatures.

“You think he signed,” I ask my wife, motioning toward a kanaka on his stomach at the waterline with his dog.

She shakes her head.  “He had a late night.”

The kanaka waves at us, gets up, and leads the dog into the ocean.  His legs are short and muscular, but his torso is long.  His stomach is round and loose, but his chest and arms are cut and solid.  The dog, a black and white mutt, bounces around him.  They stop when they are chest deep.  The dog claws the water, wanting to get back to shore.  Its neck stretches out.  Its head held at an acute angle above the water.  A wave crashes.  The dog gains some space.  The kanaka yanks the leash.  The dog’s head disappears and reappears.  It circles around, creating slack, and bites its restraint, snatching the strap from its owner and again facing inland.  A wave crashes.  The dog loses space.  The kanaka slides his fingers along its neck and around the collar and keeps the beast swimming in place.  The dog’s front legs stab at the sky and sink, stab and sink, and kick only for breath.

“What do you think they’re doing?” I ask, wanting to laugh.

My wife says, “Training.”

Both crawl back onto shore.  The kanaka drops to his knees, pats the dog, collapses on the wet sand.  The dog shakes off the water.

My wife says, “It won last night.”

I see blurring dashes and dots arching across its skin.  “How do you know?”

“That’s uncle Kalani,” she says.  “He called this morning, inviting us to dinner.”  She nods in the dog’s direction.  Its face, its legs, its throat decorated like bleeding punctuation on wet paper.  She says, “That’s the only way.”

________________________________________________

The Other Daughter © Werner Low

Unlike when he’d dyed his hair, just one week earlier, and pretty much everyone had the same reaction, almost everyone seemed to have a different reaction when Clement began talking about his other daughter.  Of course the people closest to him – his wife, two sons, and daughter – already knew he’d given a child up for adoption back when he was a sophomore in college.  A few close friends also knew.  But it was not widely known, and had never come up in casual conversation the way it did that holiday season, when he mentioned to a neighbor at a cocktail party that he had a daughter who was about to turn forty, then told someone else, at another event, and within a day or two everyone seemed to know about it.

            Betty said she didn’t mind him “going public” with it – in general, she believed it was best to hide as little as possible – but she wished he’d forewarned her and the kids, so they wouldn't be taken aback when people began referring to this child.  She also wondered why he’d chosen this particular time to come out with it, and kind of suggested, by bringing it up in the same conversation, that it might be somehow connected to his suddenly using that “stuff” on his hair.

            Their two sons, both home from college for the holidays, didn’t seem concerned, though Ned, the youngest, did ask if this meant that it was no longer a family secret.  When Clement said that was right, that it was OK to talk about it to anyone now, the boy said “fine,” but said he didn’t think he would, in any case.  Thomas said it didn’t make any difference to him, either.  Betty said that didn’t mean the boys weren't affected – it was just that they never talked about their feelings.  On the other hand, both of them had clearly expressed – with thumbs down gestures, exaggerated grimaces, and the comment that it would have been cooler if he’d shaved his head – their feelings about their father’s suddenly darker hair.

            Nancy, the woman he’d had the child with all those years ago, lived two time zones away and he hadn't seen her in at least ten years.  When he phoned her, as Betty suggested, to let her know what was up, she said that she herself had been very open about it for years.  Then she asked him if he thought he’d begun speaking in the hope that their child, who was now a mature woman, perhaps with teen-age children of her own, would contact him – as if she was in the wings somewhere, waiting for a sign from him that it was OK to step forward.  Clement said that he would be fine if she contacted him, and he hoped she would if she wanted to, but he didn’t think that was why he’d done it, not that he really had any explanation for why he had.  Then he mentioned that he’d recently started dying his hair and asked her what she thought about that.  Nancy said it was hard to tell on the phone, but she of all people would probably find it less shocking because, if anything, it probably made him look more like the way she remembered him from so many years ago.

            His daughter had had a similar reaction.  Of all the people close to Clement, Ginny had been the only one to react very favorably when he dyed his hair.  Whereas the consensus seemed to be that a man should not try to look younger than he was, especially right before he turned sixty, Ginny said that she liked the darker hair because it reminded her of the old days, when she was Daddy’s little girl, that his dark hair took her right back to that time, the way listening to an old song will do.  And it was, perhaps, for a related reason that she was so bitterly hurt, a week later, by her father’s announcement that it was now OK for them to talk about his other daughter, even though Ginny had known about her for about ten years – since she was seven or eight – and this other daughter didn’t have a picture, or a name, and was almost old enough to be her mother. 

____________________________________________________________________________

Someone I used to Know © Brad Bisio

My father held her hand as they strapped her wrists and ankles to the gurney so she wouldn’t thrash during the procedure. A nurse gave her oxygen, injected a sedative into her I.V. – she was hyper-ventilating – and wiped beads of sweat off her forehead with a cool, damp cloth. Told her that the voices that made her want to hurt herself would stop. Told her it would all be over soon.

He brought me to the psychiatric ward two days after they shot white lightning through her brain, because I begged him. On the ride up, the elevator smelled like disinfectant and unseasoned hospital food. That is until a new smell from a lost patient filled the space. He stood there in his gown, in the puddle, like he didn’t know what he had done. The surgical staff on her floor dressed in faded hospital greens, and slippers over shoes that swished on waxed floors and grated my skin like fingernails running down a chalkboard.

            She was smiling when we walked into the room. “Who’s that young man standing next to you?” she asked my father.

“That’s Will, mom. You remember Will.”

Puzzled, she said, “He looks just like Bobby.” Bobby was her youngest son.

The three of us sat in silence under fluorescents – she upright in her bed grinning, staring right through us. I had never seen my grandmother smile before. She was always busy canning tomatoes for sauce, making gnocchi, or fresh bread that I could eat all day and never feel like I had had enough, even when it felt like my stomach would burst. We didn’t need to smile to enjoy each other’s company. Her saying kindly, “Come help grandma with the meatballs Will,” was good enough for me.

She moved into an assisted-living apartment complex a month later. Had her own one-bedroom with a small kitchen, no room for a table. The main floor was set up for arts and crafts, the Bridge club, movie nights and a cafeteria down the hall.

The drill was the same each weekend visit. She’d answer the door in her house dress. I’d follow my dad inside. He’d say, “Mom, why haven’t you done the dishes again?” She’d shrug her shoulders, smiling and say, “There’re more important things than dishes.” Then my dad washed and I dried while she played solitaire on a card table. She’d look our way and say, “Why don’t you two leave those for later and come over here and play gin rummy with me?” I’d look at my dad and he’d say, “We’ll play when were done.”

I remember four course dinners at her house every Sunday. I remember the basket of homemade bread that she would keep filling up. I remember her showing me how to pick tomatoes at their peak. “Give that one another day, Will. Maybe tomorrow night. Look here. This one’s perfect.” That was my grandmother, who looked just like someone I used to know.  

_____