Dragons

DRAGONS

By Michael Kroetch

Esmeralda waits. She’s not sitting on her hands, but could be. She could also be chewing her fingernails. She won’t look out the window. Better to do other things. Like check the food. Is it getting overdone? The meat is funny tasting if it gets too soggy.

She lifts the lid on the pot.

A puff of steam clouds her thick glasses and for a minute makes her a bit dizzy. But only for a moment. The briefest of moments -- like a curled snail of a moment between all the rest of the moments in her day. But enough. Long enough to make her think her heart is having a problem. Again.

She looks at the phone, then puts her hand on her heart. It’s beating too fast. The more she thinks about how fast it beats, the faster it beats. She feels the room spin a little and a weakness flap down over her shoulders like a big wet cardboard box. She sits in one of the kitchen chairs. Then she looks at the stove again.

Her daughter will be home soon. Any minute. She can’t let the meat get soggy. She can’t call the doctor again, she has to get up and take care of the pot with the meat in it. The pot of rice is fine, no problem, but the meat? She knows how her daughter’s face gets when tasting soggy meat.

Again Esmeralda feels her heart. She can feel it going faster and faster like it is going to explode — something in a jewelry shop wound too much and too often that now may damage all the other beautiful things nearby.

Her daughter is going away soon. Far away. So far that the country is not even on the map her daughter keeps tacked to the wall on the stairway. A job. A good one. Good pay. Good benefits. But a job so far away it isn’t even on the map? How can such a job be good? If it was on the map, yes, that would be a good job. But the job is off the edge of the planet where the dragons are.

She holds her hand again to her heart. There is so much love in there for her daughter. She wishes she could just pull it all out like some webbed thing and throw it over her daughter to keep her safe from the job and the dragons. She wants this so much. Her eyes become ringed with charcoal at the pain she feels because she can’t pull out this love like that.

No, all she can do now is pull herself up and make sure the meat is not soggy. And this is the way her love greets her daughter tonight when she finally arrives. It is hiding in the meat and Esmeralda’s painful silence when again her daughter’s words light up the whole kitchen and even the courtyard outside with excitement about the job and all its opportunities.

Swimming With Tongues

SWIMMING WITH TONGUES
by Michael Kroetch

He dove on Sundays. The rest of the week, every day except that day of Sunday, he was on the subway. Its fat rubber steering wheel in his hand like a donut a blind person might sell for beer money. But him, he wasn’t a drinker of beer. Couldn’t. The Lord said so. And he listened to the Lord even though he didn’t believe in Him. It’s the whole reason why he dove on Sundays. To get away from that sound, that chatter, that whispering of the Lord.

Beneath the water’s surface among the wrecked cars and shopping carts covered with rust, mollusks, and shimmering thin red slips of underwater weeds – down there he was free from the Word. His subway job offered some protection, but the layering of earth was nothing compared to what water did to insulate him from the Sacred. And that’s what he wanted. Peace from God. Five fathoms down usually did it. On holidays he had to go deeper. Easter for example. Last Easter he went down so far that his divers’ watch built in Switzerland, the result of five generations worth of diligent craftsmanship, didn’t last. It burst like a phosphorescent flower into petals of glass that drifted and drifted. But not in silence like he hoped. No. They drifted to the bleeding rhythm of a thousand saints in his ears.

All he could do was go further down into the darkness.

Saying he didn’t believe was a joke. Might as well try and stop his East Side express during the rush hour by tossing a dime on the track. Had the same effect. God didn’t care. God was after him like a man with a hatchet. And that Easter he thought the Holy Hatchet would surely burst his tanks if he stopped swimming down… Till he came to the school bus.

With his watch broke he had no idea how far down he was or how long he’d been down there. All he knew for sure was it was perhaps the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his whole life -- above or beneath the ground. From the style and shape of the bus he knew it was old. Real old. Maybe forty or so years old. Perhaps more. Wasn’t much left to see on the outside, so much had the sea already hidden. Inside though, yes, he could see a lot. They were all girls. Young ones. Uniforms. Rosaries. A prayer book. It was amazing how much remained among the skeletonized ruins of their bodies. Lockets even. He opened one, and with his flashlight found it contained a love note. Little of the writing remained. A few words among the smudges and decay. “Love.” “Always,” and “Jennifer.” He had known a Jennifer once. But this could not be her. She did not believe in God, did not even believe in the Bible, and laughed at him when he tried to get her to go to church. And yet… And yet, here she was. He took her hand in his and kissed it. Or what remained. For it came free in the translucent water like a whisper softly lipped against your furthest lobe. Small it was. Her hand. This hand. His beloved’s hand. And perfect in its youth and promise. It seemed wrong to leave it there. He couldn’t. Not for selfish reasons, but because its beauty shouldn’t be so trapped in darkness and mire.

At home he put it in a lovely blue vase on his table and while he ate dinner he would sometimes talk to it about his day. It never spoke back, but while he was with it neither did the other voices. And this is how he came to carry it with him everywhere in a thermos that looked like it might hold coffee.

Driftwood (another story from the cobwebbed closet)

DRIFTWOOD
by Michael Kroetch

There, on the side of the bridge, is an old man made of string. If you go over to him and try and talk, he won’t talk. It’s like he’s forgot how. It’s like it’s something he did in some other place that he doesn’t do here. Anymore at least. Anymore he doesn’t do much of anything. He sings. Sometimes. When he’s alone. Maybe making himself some beans. A song will come out of him. Some old song that nobody else can remember. Something he sang in church as a child. A piece of the past flopping about in his head like some chunk of driftwood. But it doesn’t mean anything. Could just as easy be the words of a TV commercial as far as he’s concerned. He’s past all that. He’s had too much happen to him. You can see it in his face. He doesn’t let himself feel much anymore. Maybe he’s forgot how. Feelings not really happening, just drifting along in the sand. Pieces of wood softened by the wind, softened by the pounding waves so they’re smooth and dry and light as air.

You look at his old body and you wonder if it’s still alive. And how it keeps going. Or why. Surely the time of use has passed for this man. What can he possibly hope for when the sun comes up on his bridge? He has had the same beans so many years now that they have no more flavor than a pot full of stones. Yet near as he is to being a stone himself, when the sun does come up through the trees, and if he’s there, you’ll see him smile. Just a little.

With (another old one from the vault)

WITH
by Michael Kroetch

It isn't dawn yet. Almost all of her face is covered by the cat. The slow drum of its purr whirls through her. Out the window are crickets and the lonesome sound of a latenight car headed for the freeway. From the small window in her closet she could see the car. It would be a silhouette. Someone alone. Leaving. Maybe a few clothes would be laying in the backseat with a map, but maybe not. The person might not need such things. Or have had time. A fight. Yelling. The slamming of a screen door. Keys hot in the ignition. Spraying rocks. Skidding away. Off away down the road. Not stopping at the stop signs. Almost hitting an opossum. Breathing hard, short hot hard. Eyes ahead. Forgetting to turn on the lights. Then turning them on, remembering. The cool air whisking past the fingers, the smell of freshly cut hay slowing it all down to a constant. Every direction open and empty. Road.

She touches the cat between the ears where it likes most to be touched and it curls in tighter around her head. She is glad to have the cat, even if it is somewhat blind. When it drinks milk it makes a noise that pleases her more than anything else in the world. One very close to with.

Sinners (another relic from the cobwebbed closet)

SINNERS
By Michael Kroetch

She is mad at her doll so she turns its face to the wall. She’s my niece. I’ve come to take her for ice cream. She says she doesn’t want to. Her mother says she has to.
We go through the farmland past cows and fences, she asks if she can turn on my radio.
I say whatever she wants to do, she can do.
She says I sound like a game show guy.
Which one?
She says she doesn’t remember.
The station she picks is a Bible station. The preacher is thunking something against the microphone and saying we’re all going to hell.
Did you hear that? she says. She has the window rolled down and her head out with her mouth open. Her cheeks are all red.
The preacher thunks the microphone and says the devil is alive in this land and that he has lots of money.
I have a hundred dollars, my niece says. That’s a lot of money, isn’t it?
Yeah.
Do you think the devil has a hundred dollars?
I don’t know, I say and look at her. She’s unwrapping some gum. She stuffs the wrapper into the seat where the fabric’s torn.
Do you go to church? I say.
Heck, yes! Mom would have a fit if she heard you. She says you’re irreligious. She says other things, too. Are you irreligious?
I tell her she’s pretty little to be using words like that.
She says, ha, blows a bubble and pops it. She says she’s got God to protect her. Who do I have? She says God watches her. She says she’s seen him. Who’ve I got?
I tell her I’ve got my cat.
She says the cat probably doesn’t like me.
I say it does so.
She says I probably have it roped up or locked in my house so it can’t get away.
I ask her why she’s not a nicer person.
She says she’s nice. She has lots of friends, she says. Tons of friends.
I say I do, too.
She looks at me.
I do, I say.
What are their names?
Why you want to know that?
I got my reasons.
Ha, I say.
We don’t talk for awhile. We listen to the preacher. He’s telling us the number we can call to tell him how much money we’re going to give him.
I give God money, she says.
You do?
In envelopes. At church. I put them in on Sunday. I like licking the envelopes. The men who hold the baskets always smile at me when I put the money in the baskets.
Where do you get the money?
Mom.
The city jumps out at us as we come around the next bend. A dump truck is ahead of us. Little clumps of dirt fall from it, making a trail on the pavement.
Do you sin? she asks.
Why?
My doll sins. I heard her lie to me. I don’t know what I should do about it. She can’t go to a priest. She’s a doll.
What do you do about it?
I put her face against the wall.
Oh.
We come to the ice cream store and I park in front beside a station wagon with a dog in it. It’s a little dog and barks a lot.
What do you think about heaven? she says.
Heaven?
You think they have dogs in heaven? Will they let you keep your cat in heaven?
I say I don’t think about heaven too much.
She says she does. All the time. She says she thinks it has a big swingset. A swingset so big you can swing up into where the stars are, up into the milkystuff.
I ask if she wants ice cream.
No.
It’s a while before either of us say anything. The dog isn’t barking anymore. It’s just looking at us.
We should get out, I say.
You’re going to go to hell, she says.
I tell her she needs to have some ice cream.
She gets out of the car.
That’s a big girl, I say.
She just stares at me.
We get our ice creams. She gets chocolate mint. I get chocolate. When we’re done eating, she asks me what my cat’s name is.
George, I say.
She laughs.
That’s a dumb name for a cat, she says.
Well, he looks like a George.
She laughs. She says can she come see him some time?
I say sure. She can come over any time she feels like it.
She says she wishes I wasn’t irreligious.
I say nothing.
She touches my hand and says God’s not a mean guy.
I tell her not to worry about me.
She says she’ll put my name on some of her Sunday envelopes.
I say thanks.
She says it’s nothing. She says it’s the least she can do for a sinner like me.

For Now

FOR NOW
by Michael Kroetch

The man is immaculate. Everything, every single thing about him. He has a look that tells you in a snap he’s not from here. Which is correct, because he isn’t. His jacket, his pants, his tie—they are all perfect. The right fabric, the right style, the right colors. He walks around watching the people watch him and he knows anew how horrible they are. Such pathetic lives. But, sadly, necessary. They are his public after all. And in a roundabout way he needs them as much as they need him—not that he would ever admit this. But then, neither would they admit to needing him. Although they enjoy his life’s work, would they ever claim to need it? Not likely. That’s because they are as ignorant as dirt. Or so he would say if anyone asked. Without my work they are doomed, he would say. Doomed to yet further repetition of their slovenly and exploited lives.

At his exhibition’s opening a young girl asks him to stand in front of one of his large photographs of ice cubes so that she can get picture of him for her school paper. He doesn’t want to. He’d much rather step outside and be away from everyone. He knows how his face will look in this light. Bad. And look at the camera she has, it’s pathetic. Plus which, she’s holding it like it’s a liverwurst sandwich. How did she get in here? She’s only a child, not more than ten. And her clothes—they’re so ill-fitting it’s almost as if she’s trying to be a circus clown! But a group of people have heard her ask for permission, so he feels compelled to go along with it. And for that she thanks him.

What she doesn’t tell him is that his show has changed her life. She doesn’t know exactly what the ice is supposed to mean. She knows it must mean something and knows it is so completely gorgeous hanging on the wall. Lovely beyond words. She only came tonight so she could meet him, this man from Paris. Every day on her way to school she has peeked in here at these photographs, felt an immense sense of joy well up inside her that she doesn’t really understand—except that afterward, on the school bus again with the other kids screaming and taunting each other, there remains inside her a peace that is somehow connected to the ice cubes. At home she took ice cubes out and set them in the sun to look at them up close and continued looking at them even though her mother said what the hell was she doing, was she feeling sick, did she have a temperature?

Those ice cubes from her family’s freezer and his ice cubes had been so completely different it shocked her. His ice had life, stories, a wild array of colors—despite the fact they were in all black and white. In his ice, she’d heard music. Symphonies. Her whole world became different the longer she stood before them.

She had told him the photo she was taking was for her school paper. And this was sort of true. She was a photographer for her paper, but she would never put his photo in that stupid paper beside the smeary images of acne-faced jocks catching whatever-shaped ball they were catching, or hitting, or kicking. She would put this photo beside her bed. Where it would be safe from her family’s prying eyes and constant questions. She did not have much in that house that was hers, but that spot on the wall beside her bedpost where no one else looked—that’s where she would put this man in his perfect clothes and his ice. It was the best she could do. For now.

beginning of nowhere

beginning of nowhere

it's christmas. it's christmas again. she knows it's christmas. she knows which house is the house where her christmas will be. it's the one on the corner with the green light in the window. it's not home. it's where she's going, but it's not home. it's nowhere. her future. her past. the place she goes where the family is. the place where the green window means forgetting, means remembering, means too much music, too much food, too many broken dreams and forgotten embraces. winter sucks out all the warmth of her body with its wind but she won't let go of her umbrella. she can't, she needs it. she wishes when she got in there to that christmas that she could keep the umbrella open and twirling at her shoulder. it would make things better. safer. she doesn't know where she picked the umbrella up, but it's the perfect thing tonight. for now. for christmas. it shields her. they are her family, true, but she doesn't really even know them. not really. she wishes she did. she wishes she could. she has tried, but what can you do? they are not from the same part of the calendar as she is. her eyes are winter eyes. her eyes see color in the pure form -- if there is any. and there rarely is. she knows her clothes are not right for the occasion. this red is like something you would find on a present beneath a tree. then she thinks about this. maybe that is what she should do, lay under the damned christmas tree. plant herself there on top of all of those horribly shiny boxes of junk. would her family even notice? most of the time they act like she is invisible. under the tree in her dress and torn fishnet stockings, would they even notice? or would they just keep watching television. that same program they watch every year with their eyes shut and their ears throbbing like little drums to the sounds coming from the actors mouths about how christmas is supposed to be so bloody redemptive. she has nowhere to go. nowhere else. that door waits. the wind blows at her fabulous umbrella. she cannot stay out here. she has tromped all the way across the city to get here. she must go in. she must. she just wishes there were someone here, someone who could stand in the way, and, for once, stop her! but there isn't. it is christmas. it is the end of winter's heart and the beinning of nowhere. she keeps walking through the wind and the grey and can already here the sounds from the television of the actors singing, their voices rising pure and translucent, like some kind glass that is in perfect harmony with its surroundings and will only break if the right person screams at the right pitch. and she cannot scream. all she can do is twirl the umbrella. so she does. it makes her feel better. for awhile, at least.

THE ACCIDENT

The Accident
by Michael Kroetch

The doctor tells me I should eat a dried flying lizard for my virility. He doesn’t seem to know how absurd this sounds. Or maybe he just doesn’t care. Either way, he slaps me hard on the back like I’m one of the baby spider monkeys at my sister’s zoo and sends me on my way.
Before going home, I stop in and see my sister. She’s still at the zoo. I know because her purple Vespa is parked where she always parks the scooter right beside the lion cage. She thinks it’s safer there, and I suppose she’s right. Who’d want to swipe a Vespa from a lion? I give the cage (held shut with a frayed bungy cord) a berth of a good twenty feet to make sure the beast doesn’t think I’m the least bit interested in its purple trophy. But even at that distance, its eyes follow me and I can hear its soft growl.
When I tell my sister why I’m there, she just laughs. She laughs so hard I think she’s going to fall out of the chair. Then the bagel she’d been nibbling as I walked in catches in her throat and she starts to choke, seriously. It’s like she could die right there wearing the blue shirt that proudly states “I kissed a chimp today, have you?” Watching her turn the same color as her shirt is awful, but it’s even worse because nobody else is anywhere near her office. This means I have to touch her, which I haven’t done since she was eight years old—a fact we’ve both been happy enough about since we very much DO NOT come from a family of huggers. But I must hug her now, and from the back, and very hard if I’m to do the Heimlich thingy on her. To be honest (and I’m not proud of this) I never did learn how to do the maneuver, at least not the official way (where to put your hands and such). I learned it by watching Bill Cosby do it on a TV show to one of his TV neighbors who’d accidentally swallowed a bullfrog.
“Stop. STOP! You’re going to kill me!”
That’s what my sister moans when she’s finally able to get enough air to push me away.
I lean against the wall near where she has her collection of antique spectacles. The eyewear ranges from different decades over the last hundred years and is rather fragile. I notice my sister seeing me so near them makes her nervous, so I step forward a bit.
“You shouldn’t have those here,” I say, pointing to the rack of spectacles.
“I don’t see what concern they are to you.” She’s still panting for air. Then she smiles again. “Is this true about you needing the corpse of a flying lizard? Why can’t you just take the blue pill like every other normal freak on the street?”
“Shhh.”
“There’s nobody here.”
“Still, I didn’t come here just so you could laugh at me.”

***

That my sister doesn’t like men much is a given. She hasn’t had luck with them and often says animals are not only smarter and more trustworthy, they’re also, in general, more physically appealing. Which would certainly explain why she has her current profession, but not her hobby: the writing of romance novels.
“What I do in my spare time is none of your affair” is her most common response to any and all questions about these prolific writings and the publishing of them under a pseudonym—a name I’m not allowed to disclose here upon punishment of immediate and permanent exile from all future Christmas joy among my siblings.
But right now, as we’re walking out of her office, what she says is, “You look terrible in those pants.” She grabs the middle-most belt loop at the back of my trousers and hefts them up as if feebly attempting to give me a middle-aged wedgy. “You should see them, the way they droop off you. It’s like you got a little boy butt on a big man’s body.”
That it was a mistake coming here in my quest for some dried flying lizard is now apparent not only to me, but also to the smirking llama in the hallway. The animal is tethered to an unmanned 400-pound floor waxing machine with so much dust on it that it doesn’t look like it’s waxed a floor in over ten years. The llama, it appears, has been waiting for my sister for over an hour. They are friends. I find this out when I’m introduced to the creature.
“This is my brother,” she tells it. “He has a problem with his wiener and we’re gonna try and fix it for him.”

***

Although I’m not at liberty to reveal the names of any of my sister’s romance novels or (as I said before) the foofy-sounding name she goes by on their covers, I can tell you this, they’ve been popular—enough so that you might have heard of them. A few years back somebody even made one into a pretty dismal movie on one of the bigger cable networks, starring somebody from a soap commercial (he was popular for awhile but I don’t remember his name now). All this being so, it’s a mystery to me why my sister keeps her work at this rattletrap zoo as her life’s primary focus. But I guess, like much of the rest of our clan, she’s a bit of an oddball. Which means eventually she will want to be buried beside the gleaming body of her one true love, the purple Vespa, just like our great grandmother Bess who was laid to rest alongside her baby grand piano. Happily, other than currently needing a dried flying lizard, I’m a fairly normal and well-adjusted individual. True, at the moment I do not have a job, wife, 2.5 children, any eggs, cheese, meat, baking soda, or raw vegetables in my refrigerator, but by the end of the week I’m hoping to have all of that worked out. That is, if I can get this dried flying lizard to do what it’s supposed to.

***

“But she’s dead,” my sister says.
“You don’t have to keep saying that.”
“A letter in her writing doesn’t mean she’s NOT dead.”
We have this conversation after I tell her what happened yesterday—me receiving the message from my old girlfriend, Peg.
“Anyway,” my sister says, “it can’t really be Peg’s handwriting. You should check again. Probably one of those creepy friends of hers.”
“I looked at its lettering carefully against others she’d sent. You know, before…”
“Before the accident?”
This is my sister’s preferred way of describing what happened to Peg. I think calling it this makes it seem as if it were but a small gap in the routine path of events, something that could have been avoided. I don’t tell my sister how fresh the letter’s ink still smelled when I opened the envelope. I don’t want her to think I’m obsessing about Peg. Besides which, I didn’t come here to tell my sister about the letter and never intended to. I’m not here for a metaphysical discussion on the impossibility of the dead to have pen pals, or for even yet more advice about my need to get a better haircut and stop slumping my shoulders if I want women to notice me. I’m only here to get my prescription filled.

***

The llama needs a breath mint. I want to tell my sister this, but she’s busy
re-locking the cheetah cage, which apparently was blown open by the wind. My sister says it’s the third time it’s happened today and if it happens again it could lead to trouble. But I don’t see how. The zoo’s two cheetahs are so old and lazy-looking, they don’t seem like much of a threat. I’d say the llama’s foul breath would more readily be classified as a health hazard—at least from where I now stand, feeding it the postage stamp-sized packs of Sweet-N-Low which my sister routinely steals from coffee shops for this beast. Rotted teeth and rotten breath in animals are of much less concern to her than excessive girth. “The big problem with most zoos,” she so often tells me, “is the residents are all freaking couch potatoes. The animals get fat and die—and why? No exercise.” This is the reason why she’s so often seen around town leading deadly animals down the city’s sidewalks on a leash, puttering along as a chaperone beside them on her purple Vespa.
Obviously several city ordinances prohibit such behavior, but my sister used a sizable hunk of the money from her romance novels to hire a big lawyer she’d seen on a TV talkshow, who was somehow able to get the city council to make a special provision for my sister’s anti-flab campaign. For awhile there was an uproar by local neighborhood groups and various news media against my sister’s antics; but either she paid them all off handsomely enough with her romance novel dollars, or else they just grew accustomed to the daily sight of haggard lions jogging past their playgrounds; because now, as long as my sister cordially scoops up after her aerobic beasts, the neighbors have, for the most part, stopped their scowling and taken down the angry forest of handmade signs that used to fill their yards.
Only one of these angry signs remains.
It’s in the yard of my sister’s nemesis, Henry Stick. Many years ago Mr. Stick played football for one of the region’s football teams and later taught gym at one of the local elementary schools. He and my sister dated for awhile until she found why he’d been fired from the school and the tiny spy cameras he had set up all over his bedroom and in his bathroom.
I ask her now how she and Mr. Stick are getting along.
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she gives me a withering glare and stiffens her shoulders. Then, from out of nowhere, says, “You have to stop obsessing about Peg.”
“I’m not. And I don’t know what gives you the idea that I am.”
“She’s dead, right? What, two years now?”
“Nineteen months.”
“Whatever. Point is, if she’s ‘X’ months gone, you’ve got to get on with your life, stop eating so many meat pot pies, and quit wearing black.”
“I like black.”
“Nobody likes black like you like black,” she says. “It’s not healthy.”
“It’s just a color.”
“That’s what Stick said about his thing for little girls.”
“I’m not Stick.”
“Then tell me this, how is Peg still writing you letters? And if she’s not—which is probably the case and which almost any red-blooded, sober-minded, gum-chewing citizen of the planet I like to call ‘reality’ would probably and emphatically agree that she is not doing—then what is Christ’s name are you doing if not obsessing about her?”
“There was only one letter.”
“If Peg’s dead, there can’t be any letters. Can there?”
“Look, I only came for the dried flying lizard.”
“You only came for the lizard…”
As my sister mumbles these last words, she looks away from me. Her face gets an expression of such disgust that I want to leave right now without so much as even saying goodbye. But I don’t. Instead, I gag on another mouthful of llama-breath and feed the creature one more stolen packet of Sweet-N-Low.

***

Before being buried with her fabulous piano, my great grandmother Bess went to China in search of a doctor she’d read about who she was sure could cure her of her troublesome epilepsy. Remarkably, despite the fact that when she got over there she couldn’t remember his name, she was able to track the man down. All she remembered was that he had a rather elaborate butterfly tattooed onto the back of his neck which he would sometimes stroke gently as part of his healing rituals. And although the doctor spoke no English and my great grandmother spoke not even a speck of Chinese, the two apparently got along quite smashingly. So much so, in fact, that old Bess was about to marry the man when she was inadvertently carried out of this world upside down by a world class stallion belonging to her doctor’s affluent neighbor and which my great grandmother, at her advanced age, had absolutely no business riding. In her lengthy and elaborately detailed will she made sure all of her kith and kin (that’s what she called us in the document) were amply provided for. What this meant varied from individual to individual, with some of us getting portions of her vast real estate holdings and some receiving important pieces of her prestigious art collection or a selection of the antique treasures she’d tucked away during her many whirlwind flittings round the globe.
What her gifts indicated was not how much the grand dame cared about the one on whom she bestowed the benevolence, but rather how much she worried about them and their various abilities (or lack thereof) to “make do in the world.” It was obvious to all at the reading of the will how little my great grandmother worried about my sister and me, because to my sister, Old Bess bequeathed a tiny collection (3) of domino-sized bamboo brothel tags purportedly to have originated in the Hunan Province during the Ming Dynasty (estimated value: $200)—and to me she endowed a delicately bound satchel of preserved millipedes (estimated value: ?). When I opened the parcel I had absolutely no idea at all what the millipedes were. At first I thought they might be thin strips of petrified bacon, the bark of a tree, or some kind weird candy the Eskimos might make. In a brief note from Bess I found wound among the rigid insects were words wishing me well and instructions on how to prepare the millipedes for consumption. They were, apparently, a central part of her doctor’s remedy for epilepsy which she’d put aside for me in the off chance that I, too, might be stricken with the affliction. That I hadn’t been by the time the will was read made me feel strange. It seemed I was letting my great grandmother down.
After she was buried I would sometimes visit her and the piano to let them know I was still okay. While I was there, I always made sure to assure them I was on constant watch for the onset of my epilepsy. When visiting the gravesite I also made sure to bring along not only a bottle of Stoli Vodka for Bess and the piano (which I poured gingerly over their grave), but, in addition, the packet of stiff millipedes. I brought the millipedes as a kind of visible proof, I suppose, to show how vigilant I was about waiting for my predicted seizures. However, because the seizures never arrived (or were, at best, tardy in the extreme) as the years passed I didn’t know what to do with these heirloom millipedes. In truth, I grew increasingly anxious about them. There seemed no way to free myself from them. I certainly couldn’t just throw them away. I thought about burying them in my neighbor’s rose bushes, but was afraid I might get caught. At one point I even considered giving them away to a local church when one of their bucktoothed young flock came by asking for donations of canned food. In the end, however, I kept my millipedes—kept them and kept and kept them through many different housing situations, presidents, and several girlfriends, up until my last one, Peg, found them and mistakenly consumed them on top of a frozen pizza, assuming, I suppose, that they were dried anchovies.

***

My sister may call the occurrence an accident, but I cannot. Odd and cataclysmic, yes, in a heartbeat I will admit this much. But an accident? There’s something about the whole business that has too much of an air of pre-ordained fate and maybe worse, the ominous possibility Old Bess may have been planning all along to keep me a bachelor.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I look over. My sister and the llama are both eyeballing me in disdain. “You’re crazier than a teapot.”
“What ’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s just an expression,” she says.
“No, it isn’t. I’ve never heard anybody else say it.”
“I think it’s from Alice in Wonderland.”
“No, it isn’t. Teapots are not--”
“What difference does it make?!?”
After my sister says this, there’s a silence. It’s interrupted by the llama, which makes a low glottal noise that’s a cross between the sound a dog makes when barking and a human belch. My sister responds by tenderly patting the llama on the back of its head and glaring at me again.
“You actually think Granny Bess plotted from the grave to kill Peg with your inherited millipedes?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“What did you say?”

***

The virility problem is what Peg’s strange letter from yesterday addressed directly. The letter urged me to confront the issue by seeing a doctor. It said it was time to bite the bullet. However it did not then bother to explain what it meant by this phrase or exactly how it fit into my virility issue. I was not sure biting the bullet was such a good idea, especially considering the source of this medical advice was already dead. Nonetheless, I relented and went and bit down. But I can’t tell any of this to my sister. She has a way of making everything that comes out of my mouth sound like it’s coming from a crazy person.
“Here we are,” she says suddenly as she creaks open a green steel door.
“Where?” I look at her. She has no expression, but her llama’s lips are stretched wide in an ear-to-ear grin.
“It’s the flying lizard cage. Go on, go in there and kill one.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“You didn’t think I had a dead one here waiting for you, drying over the central heating system, did you?”
She pushes me in through the door and shuts it, locking it. This is when I realize there’s no walkway or hallway, that I’m actually already inside the cage of the flying lizards. It’s very hot and moist and reeks of urine. Every motion seems amplified by a thunder of dull echoes.
“Wait. Wait. This isn’t what I wanted.”
No response from outside. All I hear is the crunch of distant gravel, receding footsteps, muffled laughter.
“WAIT! How am I going to kill one of these things? I don’t have a weapon!”
“Guess you’ll have to use your hands.”
These words come from as far away as a romance novel. After they fade, I look upward and see the residents of the cage, the greenish yellow reptiles I’ve come for. There’s three. Each is about a foot long. They perch on dead tree limbs up near the thickly barred ceiling and their lungs billow softly. Their oddly slitted oval eyes look down at me. It’s as if they know why I’m here, but in their eyes there isn’t any fear of execution. Instead, it’s rather a sense of gratefulness—as if they’ve been waiting for me for a long while and I’m here to perform a favor.

INTERLOCUTOR

THE INTERLOCUTOR
by Michael Kroetch

My sister moves through the world with a toaster bundled under her arm. Always the toaster is there with her; attentive, cordial, and decent in a way not often seen in mechanisms of its ilk. My family was at first, of course, quite put out by the matter. Us being from the upstanding East Hampton side of the clan lineage and such, this was not behavior that could be taken lightly. Of our lot, my mother was particularly voiciferous in her verbal blandishments against the “interlocutor.” This was her ill-chosen euphemism for the toaster. Clearly she intended a different term (possibly “interloper”). However, once she’d said the word, that was it. End of story. She’s not the sort who can back down from anything.
“Don’t you dare try and tell me how to talk, young man! If I want vocabulary lessons, I’ll go and visit the governor.” To understand this statement you must know that many years ago the governor and my mother had once been on the same airplane, and that, ever since, my mother has staunchly clung to the unfounded belief that she and the governor are somehow the best of friends. Such being the case, she will often and quite randomly invoke his title to substantiate one or more of her viewpoints. “Shall I call the governor? Shall I trouble him about this issue? I could. Give me the phone.”
That’s how my mother’s misnomer became as irrefutable and ordinary a part of our lives as the toaster itself. Not that my mother was ever happy about the interlocutor’s presence. Far from it. In fact, if ever my sister left the room without taking the toaster along, my mother would stare over at it with her eyebrows squinched tight together and her knitting needles held up sharp and glinting from where she sat on the couch, ready to stab the toaster’s soft underbelly if it made even the slightest move toward her.
We never did learn why my sister started in with the interlocutor. Before their relationship began, she’d had other boyfriends. A couple of these even seemed like they might be husband material. But for one reason or another, none had displayed the same fortitude and staying power as the toaster. I suspect, in part, my mother’s vibrant and unrelenting hatred of the device was itself a large part of what kept it such a shining apple in my sister’s eye. But whatever the case, she was devout about including it in every aspect of her life. At even our most formal of events, my sister did not neglect her tin friend. I teased her once at our cousin Nancy’s wedding in saying that my sister should possibly consider getting the interlocutor a black tie. Unfortunately, she did not laugh like I expected. Instead, a tear came to her eye. Not a big one; it didn’t even leave its perch there at the edge of her iris, yet, nonetheless, it was a clear and visible testament to how much my irreverence had affected her. After that, I did not jest again about her new lover.
“Well,” said my mother, “I don’t care if she does love the damn thing! It’s an interlocutor, that’s all there is to it. And I’m damn tired of everyone ogling her and us like we’re Swedish cheeseballs. Besides which, this interlocutor does not have the best intentions at heart. If it really cared about Sally—if it saw the shame it’s bringing on my girl—it would find the strength and courage of conviction to break things off. And pronto. Cold turkey. You know it’s true. You know I’m right. Matter of fact, I have half a mind to bring the governor in on this. And if he weren’t such a busy man, I would!”
But she doesn’t.
Instead she goes back to knitting and doesn’t even look up when my sister comes in the front door with the toaster and a box of chocolates.
“They’re for you,” she says to my mother.
My mother’s needles keep moving, but her eyes don’t. She will not look up.
“He wants you to have them, Mom.”
The knitting needles increase their speed.
“Try one,” Sally says to my mother.
Because nothing’s happening, I decide to reach for the box. But my sister quickly yanks it back.
“Not you!”
“Oh.”
“Don’t say ‘oh’ like that. You know they’re for Mom. Don’t pretend you don’t.”
The knitting needles continue clacking away at their amazing pace.
“Mom,” Sally says, “Please. He picked them out special.”
The needles stop at this. After a long pause my mother speaks, her voice low and thick as a ladle full of gravy. “Sally, it’s an ‘it.’ Do you understand this? It’s not a ‘he.’ It can’t be. It’s a hunk of metal.”
Then my mother looks up. It seems like she expects my sister to respond, but Sally isn’t. My sister is stepping backwards and shivering. Then the box of chocolates tumbles out from between her fingers, hits the edge of the coffee table, breaking open while also continuing to fall to the floor and spilling out its carefully swaddled contents.
I stand up at this point and step toward my sister with my arms out, saying over and over that Mom didn’t mean what she said. But it’s too late because my sister is already turning toward the door and saying how she hates us. That we’re just like everybody else, and that when the interlocutor and her are married we will see what true love is. We will see then. We will all see.

JOB (...another old story)

JOB
by Michael Kroetch

Because she has to, she gets a job. She has to because there’s no money left. Her boyfriend took it with him up to Alaska and beyond. She didn’t give him the money or tell him he could have it. He took it. She won’t let herself say he stole it, but that’s what it comes down to. He’s going to go photograph pieces of ice. To hear him talk about it, you’d think it was romantic and full of drama. But to her, especially since he took the money, all she can see is him with his camera snapping it at some tray of ice cubes. Click. Okay, so they aren’t ice cubes, they’re icebergs. Big deal. She knows what they are. And she knows it’s because of them that she has to get the job and she hates to work. Every job she’s ever had has sucked. Big time. And this one is no exception. It sounds great, being in a movie. But what does she get to do? Nothing. Her eyes are going to explode with boredom. She can’t even move. Dead people don’t, so she can’t. Don’t see many dancing corpses, do you? They pay her by the hour. The longer that she’s dead, the more money she makes. In some ways she hopes to be dead for days, it’s good money. But it is so utterly numbingly dumb to have to lay there while they say their stupid lines. They can’t act. Her dog could do a better job. And who came up with these lines? It’s like they’re from a different planet. Nobody talks like this. To stop herself from screaming at them that they are idiots, she imagines she’s laying on an iceberg in a vast expanse of nothingness. The actors aren’t there. The director with his stupid dinosaur tattoo isn’t there. The cue card girl with her blueberry bubble gum isn’t either. And neither are the set guys who drag the cables to the microphones around. Not even her boyfriend who is supposed to be there is there. Where is he anyway? Ice cubes, my ass, she tells herself. He’s not photographing ice cubes. He’s with some bitch somewhere spending the money he took.

Her breath gets going hard and quick at this. So she stops herself. People in the cast are staring at her. She shuts her eyes again. Goes back to the iceberg and the soothing polar breeze with nothing on the horizon in any direction for days. It’s peaceful there. A good place to be dead. Or to be dying, which is what she feels is really happening. Everything left behind, abandoned, burned. Nothing now left but her body here on this ice, slowly becoming solid.

String People

THE STRING PEOPLE
by Michael Kroetch

It wasn’t quite light when they first arrived. We heard their many engines while still in our sleep. So in a way we weren’t sure if we were awake yet. Or still dreaming. At least not until we saw them. By the time they entered our vicinity, the majority of the neighbors on our block were already in their front yards: Slippers on the grass getting stained green by the dew. Mouths open. Hands limp at their sides like pieces of plywood. We had never seen anything like this. Never is a long time and it was long time before anyone said anything. Mostly it was just eyes staring straight as steel—straight ahead at the arriving vehicles. And the occupants.

To occupy space is to fill it—which is a strange way to have to describe these new arrivals to our neighborhood because they didn’t. Not in the usual sense anyway. Theirs was a nebulous realm and they had a nebulous way of filling it. At the time they drove up, no one but my uncle Fritz even knew what that word nebulous was. But we were all searching for a word like it, as our gaping jaws dragged across the dew-speckled grass.

Our new neighbors, all twenty-three of them, were made of string. Entirely of string.

You no doubt will think I’m speaking in a loose sense here. This is not the case. My father brings gifts to the cemetery – not for my dead mother as you might expect, but for her parrot. He says “That was a most wonderful bird when it was alive, so why the hell not offer him toys in the beyond?” To me, this is having a very loose sense of how things should be. And this is very much not how the string people were. They were nebulous, certainly. When you were talking to them, the place where their face was would change in a radical way from one sentence to the next – no doubt about it. But at the very same time such things were true, their family had amazing and singularly determined ways of giving order to the old Blanchet place they moved into. Every morning its grass got cut, every afternoon all eight of the string family’s cars were washed, and every night at exactly seven P.M. you could hear their prayers volley out the window and sail over the lake to that place beyond the hills where the string people came from…

My parents were nervous types to begin with. Having the string people across the street certainly didn’t help matters. Much to my step-mother’s displeasure I became friends with one of their kids, Billy. He didn’t seem to mind her lack of hospitality or that she would hide all the food whenever he was in the house. Billy apparently had become used to such behavior. My father would always have several sets of scissors out on the arm of his Laz-E-Boy recliner “Just in case,” as my father said, “Cause you just never know…” I never did know what he was talking about. But Billy wasn’t bothered by such eccentricity. Maybe Billy’s family would have done the same if I’d ever visited his house. But I didn’t, couldn’t, wasn’t allowed -- and if I even thought about it for an instant I might as well just take out a shotgun and blast my father’s head off. At least that’s what he said. And he was the kind of man with such things as this that it was best just not to argue. I had tried before on things he felt much less passionate about and found he always ended up shouting until he was hoarse and then would jump into his pickup and drive like a madman up to the graveyard to talk to my dead mother’s parrot.

My mother died a year before the parrot and put a clear and unbreakable clause in her will that the parrot was to be buried beside her when it died. And it was – but only after a long and protracted court battle pitched by my father, which he lost... Obviously. He wanted the parrot buried separately in a completely different part of town from my mother’s resting place. But in death, as in life, my mother always got her way.

And so it was that when the family parrot’s grave was found “ruffled” and the remains missing – there could be only one suspect in my father’s eyes. Yes, poor Billy.

With all of the town’s people out hunting for him -- scissors in hand – it was like a nightmare. Or a carnival. Or maybe both. His family was gone at the world’s fair in Spokane and he was staying with us. So when he ran away I had no idea where he would go. I tried all our usual haunts but could not find him anywhere. Last place I looked was where I probably should have looked first – the bowling alley – as it was his favorite place to be. But Sid with his teeth tattoos, vending machines full of Bibles, and tiny liquor bottles said nope, he’d not seen Billy all week.

My father was going around door to door with his backpack full of gleaming sharp scissors telling each door that opened to him to take a scissors, “Just in case.” My father said string, if you let it, could only lead to one thing… more string. And you know what that means! Pretty soon you won’t be able to go anywhere. Be so much string everywhere you won’t be able to walk down the street. Total chaos and ruin is what it’ll be. The end of civilization and TV dinners. My father was a big fan of TV dinners. It was his favorite thing besides plastic shiny toys to bring to my mother’s parrot. He would open up the foil at the corner and set it on the bird’s gravestone and say yum-yum-yum several dozen times very quietly like it was a secret prayer or military code.

The sad thing to me was finding Billy in our basement freezer among those TV dinners. It was months later. His family had already moved away, all twenty two of them – horrified by our town’s behavior and also by their own inability to find solid, lasting employment after the fruit harvesting season ended. They assumed, I’m sure, that my father had killed their son. And in most ways I guess they were right. Finding Billy’s sad form finally solid beside the Swanson Salisbury Steaks, it made me suspect my father’s hand pushed the freezer lid – although he insisted and swore on the missing corpse of his favorite bird that he was innocent.

And maybe he was of actually shutting the lid on Billy, but he certainly was the one who goaded the boy in there. I don’t care what he tells me. I know he did it. And I will never be able to forgive him. Especially since late that night, while I was sleeping, he burnt up Billy’s body in our fireplace and tried to tell me the next morning such was the custom of the string people.