Chance Traveler
by Haruki Murakami
Harper’s issue 311, July 2005

The “I” here, you should know, means me, Haruki , the author of the story. Mostly this is a third-person narrative, but here at the beginning the narrator does make an appearance. Just like in an old-fashioned play in which the narrator stands before the curtain, delivers a prologue, then bows out. I appreciate your patience and promise I won’t keep you long.

The reason I’ve turned up here is I thought it best to relate directly several so-called strange events that have happened to me. Actually, events of this kind happen quite often. Some of them are significant and have affected my life in one way or another. Others are insignificant incidents that have no impact at all. At least I think so.

Whenever I bring up these incidents, say, in a group discussion, I never get much of a reaction. Most people just make some noncommittal comment, and it never goes anywhere. It never jump-starts the conversation, never spurs someone else to bring up something similar that’s happened to him. The topic is like so much water flowing down the wrong channel and being sucked up in a nameless stretch of sand. No one says anything for a while, then invariably someone changes the subject.

At first I thought I was telling the story wrong, so one time I tried writing it down as an essay. I figured if I did that maybe people would take it more seriously. But no one seemed to believe what I’d written. “You’ve made it all up, right?” I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that. Because I’m a novelist, people assume that anything I say or write must have a touch of make-believe. Granted, my fiction contains more than its share of invention, but when I’m not writing fiction I don’t go out of my way to make up meaningless stories.

As a kind of preface to a tale, then, I’d like briefly to relate some strange experiences I’ve had. I’ll stick to the trifling, insignificant ones. If I started in on the life-changing experience’s, I’d use up most of my allotted space.

From 1993 to 1995, I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was a sort of writer-in-residence at a college and was working on a novel entitled The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In the Charles Hotel there was a jazz club called the Regattabar Jazz Club, where they had lots of live performances. It was a comfortable, relaxed, cozy place. Famous jazz musicians played there, and the cover charge was reasonable.

One evening the pianist Tommy Flanagan appeared with his trio. My wife had something else to do so I went by myself. Tommy Flanagan is one of my favorite jazz musicians. Usually appearing as an accompanist, his performances are invariably warm and deep and marvelously steady. His solos are fantastic. Full of anticipation, then, I sat down at a table near the stage and enjoyed a glass of California merlot. To tell the truth, his performance was a bit of a letdown. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. Or else it was still too early for him to get in the swing of things. The performance wasn’t bad, it was just missing that extra element that sends us flying to another world. It lacked that special magical glow, I guess you could say. Tommy Flanagan is better than this, I thought as I listened–just wait till he gets up to speed.
But time didn’t improve things. As the set was drawing to a close I started to get almost panicky, hoping it wouldn’t end like this. I wanted something to remember his performance by. If things ended like this, all I’d take home would be lukewarm memories. Or maybe no memories at all. And I may never have a chance to see Tommy Flanagan play live again. (In fact I never did.) Suddenly a thought struck me: What if I were given a chance to request two songs by him right now? Which ones would I choose? I mulled it over for a while before picking “Barbados” and “Star-Crossed Lovers.”

The first piece is by Charlie Parker, the second a Duke Ellington tune. I add this for people who aren’t into jazz, but neither one is very popular or performed much. You might occasionally hear “Barbados,” though it’s one of the less flashy numbers Charlie Parker wrote, and I bet most people have never heard “Star-Crossed Lovers” even once. My point being, these weren’t typical choices.

I had my reasons, of course, for choosing these unlikely pieces for my fantasy requests–namely, that Tommy Flanagan had made memorable recordings of both. “Barbados” appeared on the 1957 album Dial J.J.5 when he was pianist with the J. J. Johnson Quintet, and he recorded “Star-Crossed Lovers” on the 1968 album Encounter! with Pepper Adams and Zoot Sims. Over his long career Tommy Flanagan played and recorded countless pieces as a sideman in various groups, but it was his crisp, smart solos, short though they were, in these two particular pieces that I’ve always loved. That’s why I was thinking if only he would play those two numbers right now it’d be perfect. I was watching him closely, picturing him coming over to my table and saying, “Hey, I’ve had my eye on you. Do you have any requests? Why don’t you give me the titles of two numbers you’d like me to play?” Knowing all the time, of course, that the chances of that happening were nil.

And then, without a word, without as much as a glance in my direction, Tommy Flanagan launched into the last two numbers of his set–the very ones I’d been thinking of. He started off with the ballad “Star-Crossed Lovers,” then went into an up-tempo version of “Barbados.” I sat there, wineglass in hand, speechless. Jazz fans will understand that the chance of his picking these two pieces from out of the millions of jazz numbers out there was astronomical. And also–and this is the main point here–his performances of both numbers were amazing.

The second incident took place around the same time and also had to do with jazz. I was in a used-record store near the Berkeley School of Music one afternoon, checking out the records. Rummaging around in old shelves of LPs is one of few things that makes life worth living, as far as I’m concerned. On that particular day I’d located a used copy of Pepper Adams’s recording for Riverside called 10 to 4 at the 5 Spot. It was a live recording of the Pepper Adams Quintet, with Donald Byrd on trumpet, recorded in New York at The Five Spot jazz club. “10 to 4,” of course, meant ten minutes till four o’clock, meaning that they played such a hot set they went on till dawn. This copy of the album was a first pressing, in mint condition, and was going for only seven or eight dollars. I owned the Japanese version of the record and had listened to it so much it was all scratched. Finding an original recording in this good shape and at this price, to exaggerate a little, was like a minor miracle. I was overjoyed as I bought the record, and just as I was exiting the shop a young man passed me and asked, “Hey, do you have the time?” I glanced at my watch and automatically answered, “Yeah, it’s ten to four.”

After I said this I noticed the coincidence and gulped. What in the world is going on? I wondered. Was the god of jazz hovering in the sky above Boston, giving me a wink and a smile and saying, “Yo, you dig it?”

Neither one of these incidents was anything special. It wasn’t like my life turned in a new direction. I was simply struck by strange coincidences–that things like this actually do happen.

Don’t misunderstand me–I’m not the sort of person who’s into occult phenomena. Fortune-telling doesn’t do a thing for me. Instead of going to the trouble of having a fortune-teller read my palm, I think I’m better off trying to rack my brain for a solution to whatever problem I have. Not that I have a brilliant mind or anything, just that this seems a quicker way to find a solution. I’m not into paranormal powers either. Transmigration, the soul, premonitions, telepathy, the end times–I’ll pass. I’m not saying I don’t believe in any of these. No problem with me if they really do exist. I’m just personally not interested. Still, a significant number of strange, out-of-left-field kinds of things have colored my otherwise humdrum life.

The story I’m about to tell is one a friend of mine told me. I happened to tell him once about my own two episodes, and afterward he sat there for a time with a serious look on his face and finally said, “You know, something like that happened to me too. Something that coincidence led me to. It wasn’t something totally weird, but I can’t really explain it. At any rate, a series of coincidences took me somewhere I never expected to be.”

I’ve changed some of the facts to protect people’s identities, but other than that the story is just as he related it.

My friend works as a piano tuner. He lives in the western part of Tokyo, near the Tama River. He’s forty-one, and gay. He doesn’t especially hide the fact that he’s gay. He has a boyfriend three years younger than he is. The boyfriend works in real estate and because of his job isn’t able to come out, so they live apart. My friend might be a lowly piano tuner, but he graduated from the piano department of a music college and is an impressive pianist himself. His forte is modern French composers–Debussy, Ravel, and Eric Satie–and he plays them with a deep expressiveness. But Francis Poulenc is his favorite.

“Poulenc was gay,” he explained to me one day. “And he made no attempt to hide it. Which was a pretty hard thing to do in those days. He said this once: ‘If you took away my being homosexual my music never would have come about.’ I know exactly what he means. He had to be as true to his homosexuality as he was to his music. That’s music, and that’s life.”

I’ve always liked Poulenc’s music, too. When my friend comes over to tune my old piano I sometimes have him run through a few short Poulenc pieces when he’s finished. “The French Suite,” “The Pastoral,” and so on.

He “discovered” he was gay after entering music college. Before then he never once considered the possibility. He was handsome, well brought up, had a calm demeanor, and was popular with the girls in his high school. He never had a steady girlfriend, but he did go out on dates. He loved walking with a girl, gazing at her hairdo close up, the fragrance of her neck, holding her delicate hand in his. But he never experienced sex. After several dates with a girl he’d start to sense that she was hoping he’d take the initiative and do something, but he never was able to take the next step. He never felt anything inside driving him to do so. Without exception the other guys around him wrestled with their own sexual demons, some of them plunging ahead and giving in, but he never felt the same kind of urges. Maybe I’m just a late bloomer, he figured. Or maybe I just haven’t met the right girl yet.

In college he went out with a girl in the percussion department. They enjoyed talking, and whenever they were together they felt close. Not long after they met they had sex in her room. She was the one who started it. They’d had a few drinks. The sex went off smoothly, though it wasn’t as thrilling and satisfying as everybody said. In fact he found the act rough, grotesque even. And the faint odor the girl gave off when she got sexually aroused turned him off. He much preferred just talking with her, playing music together, sharing a meal. As time passed, having sex with her became a burden.

Still, he just thought he was indifferent to sex. But one day … no, I think I’ll skip this part. It’ll take too long, and it really isn’t connected to the story I want to tell. At any rate, something took place and he discovered that he was, unmistakably, gay. He didn’t want to make up some excuse, so he came right out and told her. Within a week the news had spread to all his friends. He lost a few of them, and things grew difficult between him and his parents, but in the final analysis it was good it all came out. He wasn’t the type who could have hid who he really was.

What hurt the most, though, was , how this affected his relationship with the person he was closest to in his family, his sister, who was two years older. When her fiancé’s family heard about her brother’s coming out it looked like the marriage might be canceled, and though they were able to persuade the man’s parents and finally get married, the whole thing nearly gave his sister a nervous breakdown, and she got incensed at him. Why did you have to pick this time in my life to make waves? she yelled at him. Her brother naturally defended himself, but after this they grew apart, and he even passed on attending her wedding.

He mostly enjoyed his life as a gay man living alone. Other than those who had a physical revulsion to gays, most people liked him–he was, after all, always well dressed, kind and courteous, with a nice sense of humor and a winning smile. He was good at his job, so he had a large list of clients and a steady income. Several famous pianists insisted on having him tune their instruments. He purchased a two-bedroom apartment near a university and had nearly paid off the mortgage. He owned an expensive stereo system, was a skilled organic chef, and kept himself in shape by working out five days a week at a gym. After going out with a number of men, he had met his present partner and had been enjoying a settled sexual relationship with him for nearly a decade.

On Tuesdays he’d cross over the Tama River in his green, stick-shift Honda convertible sports car and go to an outlet mall in Kanagawa Prefecture. The mall had all the typical big box stores–The Gap, Toys-R-Us, The Body Shop. On weekends the place was packed and you could barely find a parking spot, but on weekday mornings the mall was nearly deserted. He’d head to a large bookstore at the mall, buy a book that caught his eye, then spend a pleasant few hours sipping coffee and reading in a café. That was the way he spent his Tuesdays.

“The mall’s hideous,” he told me, “but that café is the exception–a very comfortable little place. I just happened to run across it. They don’t play any music, it’s all non-smoking, and the chairs are perfect for reading. Not too hard, not too soft. And there’s never anybody there. I don’t imagine on a Tuesday morning you’d find many people heading for a café. Even if they were, they’d probably go to the nearby Starbuck’s.”

So Tuesday mornings find him in that café, lost in a book, from just past ten until one. At one he heads to a nearby restaurant, has a lunch of tuna salad and Perrier, then goes to the gym to work out. That’s a typical Tuesday.

On that particular Tuesday morning he was reading, as usual, in the nearly empty café. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. He’d read it many years ago, and when he spied it on a bookshelf decided to try it again. He had a clear memory of it as an interesting read, though he couldn’t for the life of him remember the plot. Dickens had always been one of his favorite writers. Reading Dickens made the world fade away. From the first page he found himself completely absorbed by the story.

After an hour’s concentrated reading, though, he felt tired. He closed his book, put it on his table, signaled the waitress for a refill, and went to the rest room outside the café. When he returned to his seat, a woman at the next table, who was also reading, spoke to him.

“I’m sorry, but do you mind if I ask you a question?” she said.

A somewhat ambiguous smile came to him as he returned her gaze. She was about the same age as he was. “Of course,” he replied.

“I know it’s forward of me to speak like this, but there’s something I’ve been wondering about,” she said, blushing slightly.

“It’s fine. I’m in no hurry, go right ahead.”

“By any chance is that book you’re reading by Dickens?”

“It is,” he said, picking up the book and showing it to her. “Bleak House.”

“I thought so,” she said, clearly relieved. “I glanced at the cover and thought it might be that book.”

“Are you a fan of Bleak House, too?”

“I am. What I mean is, I’ve been reading the same book. Right next to you, just by coincidence.” She took the plain paper wrapping off the book, the kind bookstores put on if you liked, and showed him the cover.
It was definitely a surprising coincidence. Imagine–on a weekday morning, in a deserted café in a deserted shopping mall, two people happen to be sitting right next to each other reading the same exact book. And this wasn’t some current bestseller but Charles Dickens. And not even one of his better-known works. This strange and startling chance meeting took both of them by surprise, but it also let them overcome the awkwardness of a first encounter.

The woman lived in a new housing development not far from the mall. She’d purchased Bleak House five days ago at this very bookstore, and when she first sat down in the café to order a cup of tea and opened the book she found she couldn’t stop reading. Before she knew it two hours had passed. She hadn’t been so absorbed in reading since she was in college.

She was kind of petite and, although not overweight, was starting to put on a bit of extra flesh in all the typical places. She had a large bust and an attractive face. Her clothes were tasteful and looked to be a little on the expensive side. The two of them chatted for a while. The woman was in a book club, and their book of the month happened to be Bleak House. One of the women in the club was a great fan of Dickens and had suggested the novel. The woman in the café had two children (two girls, a third grader and a first grader) and normally found very little time to read, though sometimes she was able to get out of the house like this and carve out some time. Most of the people she dealt with every day were the mothers of her children’s classmates, and their topics of conversation were limited to TV dramas and gossip about their children’s teachers, so she joined a local book club. Her husband used to be quite a reader himself, though now work kept him so busy he was lucky to have time to glance through a few business books now and then.

He told her a little about himself. That he worked as a piano tuner, lived across the Tama River, and was single. He liked this little café so much he drove all the way here once a week just to sit and read. He didn’t mention being gay. He didn’t intentionally hide it, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you tell just anybody.
They had lunch together in a restaurant in the mall. The woman was a very open, honest sort of person. Once she relaxed she laughed a lot–a natural, quiet laugh. Without her putting it into words, he could well imagine the kind of life she’d led till then. She was a pampered daughter of a well-to-do family in Setagaya, attended a decent college, where she got good grades and was popular (more with other girls than with boys, perhaps), married a man three years older ho was pulling in a good salary, and had two daughters. The girls were attending private school. Her twelve years of marriage weren’t exactly all roses, but she had no particular complaints. The two of them had a light lunch and talked about books they’d read recently, music they liked. They talked for about an hour.

“I really enjoyed this,” the woman said after they’d finished, and she blushed. “I don’t have anybody I can really talk to.”

“I enjoyed it, too,” he said. And that was the truth.

The next Tuesday, as he sat in the café reading, she showed up again. They greeted each other with a smile and sat at separate tables, both silently delving into their copies of Bleak House. Just before noon she came over to his table and spoke to him, and like the week before they went off to have lunch. I know a cozy little French place nearby, she said, and I was wondering if you’d like to go. There aren’t any decent restaurants in the mall. Sounds good, he agreed, let’s go. They drove to the restaurant in her blue, automatic Peugeot 306, and had watercress salad and grilled sea bass, a glass of white wine. And discussed Dickens’s novel as they ate.

After lunch, as they were driving back to the mall, she stopped the car in a park and took his hand in hers. She wanted to go someplace nice and quiet with him, she said. He was a little surprised at how fast things had developed.

“I never did this kind of thing after I got married. Not even once,” she explained. “It’s true. But you’re all I’ve thought about this past week. I promise I won’t make any demands or cause you any trouble. Of course, if you don’t find me attractive…”

He gently squeezed her hand and explained things. If I were an ordinary guy, he said, I’m sure I’d be happy to go with you to someplace nice and quiet. You’re an attractive woman, and I know spending time like that with you would be wonderful. But the thing is, I’m gay. So I can’t manage sex with women. Some gay men are able to, but not me. I hope you’ll understand. I can be your friend but not your lover, I’m afraid.

It took quite a while for her to comprehend what he was trying to convey (he was the first homosexual she’d ever met), and after she finally grasped it, she began to cry. Pressing her face against the piano tuner’s shoulder, she cried for a long time. It must have been a shock for her. The poor woman, he thought, then he put his arms around her and caressed her hair.

“Forgive me,” she finally said. “I made you talk about Something you didn’t want to talk about.”

“That’s all right. I’m not trying to hide who I am. I guess I should have picked up on where we were headed so there wouldn’t be any misunderstanding. I’m afraid I’m the one who made you feel bad.”

His long, slim fingers touched her hair for a long time, and that gradually had a calming effect. There was a single mole, he noticed, on her right earlobe. The mole called up a childhood memory. His older sister had a mole about the same size in the same spot. When he was little, he used to playfully rub his sister’s mole when she was asleep, trying to rub it off. His sister would wake up, angry.

“I’ve been excited every day since I met you,” she said. “I haven’t felt this way in a long time. It was great–I felt like a teenager again. So I don’t mind. I went to the beauty salon, went on a quick diet, bought some Italian lingerie…”

“Sounds like I made you waste your money.” He laughed.

“But I think I needed that right now.”

“Needed what?”

“I had to do something to express what I’m feeling.”

“By buying sexy Italian lingerie?”

She blushed to her ears. “It wasn’t sexy. Not at all. Just very beautiful.”

He beamed and looked in her eyes. He indicated he’d just been joking, and that broke the tension. She smiled back, and for a time they gazed deep into each other’s eyes.

He took out his handkerchief and wiped away her tears. She sat up and redid her makeup, checking herself in the sun visor’s mirror.

“The day after tomorrow I have to go to a hospital in town to get a second examination for breast cancer.” She’d just pulled into the parking lot at the mall and had set the parking brake. “They found a suspicious shadow on my annual X ray and told me to come in so they can run some more tests. If it really turns out to be, cancer I might have to have an operation right away. Maybe that’s why I acted the way I did today. What I mean is…”

She didn’t say anything for a while, then shook her head vigorously.

“I don’t understand it myself.”

The piano tuner measured her silence for a time, listening carefully, as if to pick up a faint sound within.
“Almost every Tuesday morning I’ll be here,” he said. “Right here, reading. There’s not much I can do to help, but I’m here if you need somebody to talk to. If you don’t mind talking to somebody like me, that is.”
“I haven’t told anybody about this. Not even my husband.”

He rested his hand on top of hers, on top of the parking brake.

“I’m scared,” she said. “Sometimes so scared I can’t think.”

A blue minivan pulled into the space beside them, an unhappy middle-aged couple emerging. They were arguing about something pointless. Once they had gone, silence returned. Her eyes were closed.

“I’m in no position to hand down any advice,” he said, “but there’s a rule I always follow when I don’t know what to do.”

“A rule?”

“If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn’t, go for the one without form. That’s my rule. Whenever I run into a wall I follow that rule, and it always works. Even if it’s hard going at the time.”

“You made up that rule yourself?”

“I did,” he replied, looking at the Peugeot’s odometer. “From my own experience.”

“If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn’t, choose the one without form,” she repeated.

“That’s right.”

She considered this. “But if I had to do that right now I don’t know if I could tell the difference. Between what has form and what doesn’t.”

“Maybe not, but somewhere down the line I’m sure you’ll have to make that kind of choice.”

“How do you know that?”

He nodded quietly. “An experienced gay guy like me has all kinds of special powers.”

She laughed. “Thank you.”

A long silence followed. But it wasn’t as thick and stifling as before.

“Goodbye,” the woman said. “I really want to thank you. I’m happy I could meet you and talk. I feel a little more able to face up to things now.”

He smiled and shook her hand. “Take care of yourself.”

He stood there watching as her blue Peugeot drove away. He gave a final wave toward her rearview mirror, and then slowly walked back to where his Honda was parked.

The next Tuesday it was raining and the woman didn’t show up at the café. He silently read until one and then left.

On this day the piano tuner decided not to go to the gym. He just didn’t feel like exercising. Instead he went straight home without stopping for lunch and lay there on his couch, listening to Arthur Rubenstein playing Chopin ballads. Eyes closed, he could picture the woman’s face, the touch of her hair. The shape of the mole on her earlobe came back clearly to him. After a while her face and the Peugeot faded from his mind, but that mole remained. Whether he kept his eyes open or closed, that small black dot remained, like a forgotten period.

Around two-thirty in the afternoon he decided to phone his sister. It had been a long time since they’d spoken. How long? he wondered. Ten years? They were that estranged from each other. One reason was that back when her engagement got messed up, the two of them had gotten worked up and said some things they shouldn’t have. Another reason was that he didn’t like her husband. He was arrogant and crude and treated the piano tuner’s sexual orientation like it was a contagious disease. Unless he absolutely had to, the piano tuner didn’t want to come within a hundred yards of the guy.

He hesitated several times before picking up the phone but finally punched in the number. The phone rang more than ten times, and he was about to give up–with a certain sense of relief, actually–when his sister picked up. Her familiar voice. When she realized it was him, there was a deep silence for a moment on the other end of the line.

“Why are you calling me?” she said, in a flat tone.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just thought I’d better call you. I was worried about you.”

Silence once more. A long silence. Maybe she’s still mad at me, he thought.

“There’s no particular reason I called. I just wanted to check that everything’s okay.”

“Hold on a second,” his sister said. He could tell that she had been weeping. “I’m sorry, but could you give me a moment?”

Silence continued for a time. He kept the receiver, to his ear the whole time. He couldn’t hear anything or sense anything. “Are you busy now?” she finally asked.

“No, I’m free,” he replied.

“Can I come over to see you?”

“Of course. I’ll pick you up at the station.”

An hour later he picked up his sister at the train station and took her back to his apartment. They had to admit that they’d each aged somewhat. They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves. His sister was still slim and stylish and looked five years younger than her real age. Still, her hollow cheeks had a severity to them he’d never seen before, and her impressive dark eyes had lost their usual luster. He himself looked younger than his years, too, though it was hard to hide the fact that his hair was thinning out. In the car they, hesitantly talked about typical things: work, her children, news about mutual friends, the state of their parents’ health.

Inside his apartment he went into the kitchen to boil some water.

“Are you still playing the piano?” she asked as she eyed the upright in his living room.

“Just for my own amusement. And only simple pieces. I can’t get my hands around the harder ones anymore.”

His sister opened the lid of the piano and rested her fingers on the yellowed, well-used keys. “I was sure you were going to be a famous-concert pianist one day.”

“The music world is where child prodigies go to die,” he said as he ground some coffee beans. “Having to give up the idea of being a professional pianist was a major disappointment. It was like everything I’d done up till then was a complete waste. I just wanted to disappear. But it turned out my ears are superior to my hands. There are a lot of people more talented than I am, but nobody has as good an ear. I realized that not long after I started college. And that being a first-class piano tuner was a lot better than being a second-rate pianist.”

He took out a container of cream from the refrigerator and poured it into a ceramic pitcher.

“It’s funny, but after I switched to a major in piano tuning I began to enjoy playing the piano much more. Ever since I was little I’d practiced like crazy. It was fun to see myself improve, but I never once enjoyed playing. Playing piano was just a way of solving certain problems. Trying to avoid fingering mistakes or letting my fingers get all tangled up–all just to impress people. It wasn’t until I gave up the idea of becoming a pianist that I finally understood how enjoyable playing the piano can be. And how wonderful music really is. It was like a weight was lifted off my shoulders, a weight I never realized I was lugging around until I got rid of it.”

“You never told me about this.”

“I didn’t?”

His sister shook her head.

“It was the same when I realized I’m gay,” he went on. “Issues I could never understand were suddenly resolved. Life was much easier after that, like the clouds had parted and things were now visible. When I gave up being a pianist, and came out as a homosexual, I’m sure it upset a lot of people. But I want you to understand that that’s the only way I could get back to who I really am. The real me.”

He placed a coffee cup down in front of his sister, then took his own mug and sat down next to her on the sofa.

“I probably should have made more of an effort to understand you,” his sister said. “But before you took those steps you should have explained things to us. Told us what was on your mind, let us in on what you were thinking and–”

“I didn’t want to explain things,” he said, cutting her off. “I wanted people to understand me, without having to put it into words. You especially.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Back then I just couldn’t consider others’ feelings. I couldn’t afford to think about that.”

His voice shook a little as he recalled that time of his life. He felt like bursting out crying but somehow held himself in check and went on.

“My life completely changed back then, in a short space of time. It was all I could do to hang on and not get thrown off. I was so scared, so very frightened. At the time, I couldn’t explain things to anybody. I felt like I was about to slip off the face of the earth. I just wanted you to understand me. And hold me. Without any logic or explanations. But nobody ever–”

His sister covered her face with her hands. Her shoulders shook as she wept. He gently laid his hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s all right,” he replied. He poured some cream into his coffee, stirred it, and took a slow sip, trying to calm himself. “No need to cry about it. It was my fault, too.”

“Tell me,” she said, raising her face to look straight at him, “why today of all days did you call me?”

“Today?”

“You haven’t called for ten years, and I just wanted to know why you picked–today?”

“Something happened,” he said, “and it made me think of you. I just wondered how you’re doing. I wanted to hear your voice. That’s all.”

“No one told you anything?”

There was something different about her voice, and he tensed up. “No, I haven’t heard anything from anybody. Did something happen?”

His sister was silent for a while, gathering her feelings. He waited patiently for her to explain.

“I’m going into the hospital tomorrow,” she said.

“The hospital?”

“I’m having an operation for breast cancer tomorrow. They’re going to remove my right breast. The whole thing. Nobody knows, though, if that will stop the cancer from spreading. They won’t know till they’ve taken it off.”

He couldn’t say a thing for a while. His hand still on her shoulder, he gazed around meaninglessly from one object to another in the room. The clock, an ornament, the calendar, the remote control for the stereo. Familiar objects in a familiar room, but he somehow couldn’t grasp the distance that separated one object from another.

“For the longest time I wondered whether I should get in touch with you,” his sister said. “I ended up thinking I shouldn’t, so I never said anything. But I wanted to see you so much. I thought we should have at least one good talk. There were things I had to apologize for. But… I didn’t want to see you like this. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“I do,” her brother said.

“If we were going to meet, I wanted it to be under happier circumstances, where I could be more optimistic about things. So I decided not to get in touch with you. Right when I’d made up my mind, though, you called me–”

Wordlessly, he put both arms around her and drew her close. He could feel her breasts pressing against his chest. His sister rested her face on his shoulder and cried. Brother and sister stayed that way for a long while.

Finally she spoke up. “You said something happened and you thought of me. What was it? If you don’t mind telling me.”

“I don’t know how to put it. It’s hard to explain. It was just something that took place. A series of coincidences. One coincidence after another, and then I–”

He shook his head. The sense of distance was still off. Several light-years separated the ornament from the remote control.
“I just can’t explain it,” he said.

“That’s okay,” she said. “But I’m glad it happened. Very glad.”

He touched her right earlobe and lightly rubbed the mole. And then, like sending a wordless whisper into some very special place, he leaned forward and kissed it.
“My sister’s right breast was removed in the operation, but fortunately the cancer hadn’t spread and she was able to get by with some mild chemotherapy. Her hair didn’t even fall out. She’s completely fine now. I went almost every day to see her in the hospital. It must be awful for a woman to lose a breast that way. After she went home, I started to visit them pretty often. I’ve grown close to my nephew and niece. I’ve even been teaching my niece piano. Not to brag or anything, but there’s a lot of promise there. And my brother-in-law’s not as bad as I thought, now that I’ve gotten to know him. Sure, he’s still arrogant and a bit crude, but he works hard and he’s good to my sister. And he’s finally gotten it through his head that being gay isn’t a contagious disease I’m going to give his children. A small but significant step.”

He laughed. “Getting back together with my sister, I feel like I’ve moved on in life. Like I can live the way I’m supposed to now, more than ever before. It was something I had to face up to. I think deep down I was always hoping my sister and I would make up and be able to hug each other one , more time.”

“But something had to happen before you could?” I asked.

“That’s right,” he said, and nodded several times. “That’s the key. And you know, this thought crossed my mind at the time: maybe chance is a pretty common thing after all. Those kinds of coincidences are happening all around us, all the time, but most of them don’t catch our attention and we just let them go by. It’s like fireworks in the daytime. You might hear a faint sound, but even if you look up at the sky you can’t see a thing. But if we’re really hoping something may come true, it may become visible, like a message rising to the surface. Then we’re able to make it out clearly, decipher what it means. And seeing it before us, we’re surprised and wonder at how strange things like this can happen. Even though there’s nothing strange about it. I just can’t help thinking that. What do you think? Is this forcing things?”

I thought about what he’d said. “You know, you may be right,” I managed to reply. But I wasn’t at all sure that things could be neatly wrapped up like that.
“I’d rather believe in something simpler, like in a god of jazz,” I said.

He laughed. “I like that. It’d be nice if there was a god of gays too.”

I have no idea what ever happened to that petite woman he met in the bookstore café. I haven’t had my piano tuned for over half a year, and haven’t had a chance to talk with him. But I imagine on Tuesdays he’s still driving across the Tama River and going to that café. Who knows–maybe he ran into her again. But I haven’t heard anything, which means that this is where the story ends.

I don’t care if it’s the god of jazz, the god of gays, or some other type of god, but I hope that, somewhere, unobtrusively, as if it were all some coincidence, someone up there is watching over that woman. I hope this from the bottom of my heart. A very simple hope.

Haruki Murakami’s most recent novels are Kafka on the Shore and After Dark. A new collection of stories will appear next year.
Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel
Illustration by Shonagh Rae

I made sugar on snow this past weekend. Trader Joe’s sells a 25 oz. bottle of grade B, dark amber syrup for eight dollars. It looks like a bottle of wine. I used half a cup, which boiled down into a generous serving of candy for one. I found eating it with a fork was best. It was very sweet. I find that although I like those heavy dark syrups like maltose and molasses, I can only have a little maple syrup at a time.

Some reading notes:

• Laura is four or five here, which makes Pa thirty-five, Ma thirty-two, Grandpa fifty-nine, and Grandma sixty-one.
• Patty-pans are small dishes, sometimes with a frilled rim, that is used for making patties or pasties. Look up “patty-pan squash” for an interesting-looking vegetable.
• Maple sugar is twice as sweet as regular sugar.
• Initially I thought that the paternal grandparents were up in Burnett County, WI, which is too far for Pa to go there and back in a day. However, they also live in Pepin County, about thirteen miles north of Laura’s immediate family.

Excepts from:
Little House in the Big Woods
By Laura Ingalls Wilder

Christmas
One morning she boiled molasses and sugar together until they made a thick syrup, and Pa brought in two pans of clean, white snow from outdoors. Laura and Mary each had a pan, and Pa and Ma showed them how to pour the dark syrup into little streams onto the snow.

They made circles, and curlicues, and squiddledy things and these hardened at once and were candy. Laura and Mary might eat one piece each, but the rest was saved for Christmas day.

The Sugar Snow
For days the sun shone and the weather was warm. There was no frost on the windows in the mornings. All day the icicles fell one by one from the eaves with soft smashing and crackling sounds in the snowbanks beneath. The trees shook their wet, black branches, and chunks of snow fell down.

When Mary and Laura pressed their noses against the cold window pane they could see the drip of water from the eaves and the bare branches of the trees. The snow did not glitter; it looked soft and tired. Under the trees it was pitted where the chunks of snow had fallen, and the banks beside the path were shrinking and settling.

The one day Laura say a patch of bare ground in the yard. All day it grew bigger, and before night the whole yard was
bare mud. Only the icy path was left, and the snowbanks along the path and the fence and beside the woodpile.

“Can’t I go outside to play, Ma?” Laura asked, and Ma said:

“‘May,’ Laura.”

“May I go out to play?” she asked.

“You may tomorrow,” Ma promised.

That night Laura woke up, shivering. The bed-covers felt thin, and her nose was icy cold. Ma was tucking another quilt over her.

“Snuggle close to Mary,” Ma said, “and you’ll get warm.”

In the morning the house was warm from the stove, but when Laura looked out of the window she saw that the ground was covered with soft, thick snow. All along the branches of the trees the snow was piled like feathers, and it lay in mounds along the top of the rail fence, and stood up in great, white balls on top of the gate-posts.

Pa came in, shaking the soft snow from his shoulders and stamping it from his boots.

“It’s a sugar snow,” he said.

Laura put her tongue quickly to a little bit of the white snow that lay in a fold of his sleeve. It was nothing but wet snow on her tongue. She was glad that nobody had seen her taste it.

“Why is it a sugar snow, Pa?” she asked him, but he didn’t have time to explain now. He must hurry away, he was going to Grandpa’s. Grandpa lived far away in the Big Woods, where the trees were closer together and larger.

Laura stood at the window and watched Pa, big and swift and strong, walking away over the snow. His gun was on his shoulder, his hatchet and powder horn hung at his side, and his tall boots made great tracks in the soft snow. Laura watched him till he was out of sight in the woods.

It was late before he came home that night. Ma had already lighted the lamp when he came in. Under one arm he carried a large package, and in the other hand was a big, covered, wooden bucket.

“Here, Caroline,” he said, handing the package and the bucket to Ma, and then he put the gun on its hooks over the door.
“If I’d met a bear,” he said, “I couldn’t have shot him without dropping my load.” Then he laughed. “And if I’d dropped that bucket and bundle, I wouldn’t have had to shoot him. I could have stood and watched him eat what’s in there and lick his chops.”

Ma unwrapped the package, and there were two hard brown cakes, each as large as a milk pan. She uncovered the bucket, and it was full of dark brown syrup.

“Here, Laura and Mary,” Pa said, and he gave them each a little round package out of his pocket.

They took off the paper wrappings, and each had a little, hard brown cake, with beautifully crinkled edges.

“Bite it,” said Pa, and his blue eyes twinkled.

Each bit off one little crinkle, and it was sweet. It was better even than their Christmas candy.

“Maple sugar,” said Pa.

Supper was ready, and Laura and Mary laid the little maple sugar cakes beside their plates, while they ate the maple syrup on their bread.

After supper, Pa took them on his knees as he sat before the fire, and told them about his day at Grandpa’s and the sugar snow.

“All winter,” said Pa, “Grandpa has been making wooden buckets and little troughs. He made them of cedar and white ash, for those woods won’t give a bad taste to the maple syrup.”

“To make the troughs, he split out little sticks as long as my hand and as big as my two fingers. Near one end, Grandpa cut the stick half through, and split one half off. This left him a flat stick, with a square piece at one end. Then with a bit he bored a hole length-wise through the square part, and with his knife he whittled the wood till it was only a thing shell around the round hole. The flat part of the stick he hallowed out with his knife till it was a little trough.

“He made dozens of them, and he made ten new wooden buckets. He had them all ready when the first warm weather came an the sap began to move in the trees.

“Then he went into the maple woods and with the bit he bored a hole in each maple tree, and he hammered the round end of the little trough into the hole, and he set a cedar bucket on the ground under the flat end.”

“The sap, you know, is the blood of a tree. It comes up from the roots, and when warm weather begins in the spring, and it goes to the very tip of each branch and twig, to make the green leaves grow.

“Well, when the maple sap came to the hole in the tree, it ran out of the tree, down the little trough and into the bucket.”

“Oh, didn’t it hurt the poor tree?” Laura asked.

“No more than it hurts you when you prick your finger and it bleeds,” said Pa.

“Every day Grandpa puts on his boots and his warm coat and his fur cap and he goes out into the snowy woods and gathers the sap. With a barrel on a sled, he drives from tree to tree and empties the sap from the buckets into the barrel. Then he hauls it to a big iron kettle that hangs by a chain from a cross-timber between two trees.

“He empties the sap into the iron kettle. There is a big bonfire under the kettle, and the sap boils, and Grandpa watches it carefully. The fire must be hot enough to keep the sap boiling, but not hot enough to make it boil over.

“Every few minutes the sap must be skimmed. Grandpa skims it with a big, long-handled, wooden ladle that he made of basswood. When the sap gets too hot, Grandpa lifts ladlefuls of it high in the air and pours it back slowly. This cools the sap a little and keeps it from boiling too fast.

“When the sap has boiled down just enough, he fills the buckets with the syrup. After that, he boils the sap until it grains when he cools it in a saucer.

“The instant the sap is graining, Grandpa jumps to the fire and rakes it all out from beneath the kettle. Then as fast as he can, he ladles the thick syrup into the milk pans that are standing ready. In the pans the syrup turns to cakes of hard, brown maple sugar.”

“So that’s why it’s a sugar snow, because Grandpa is making sugar?” Laura asked.

“No,” Pa said. “It’s called a sugar snow, because a snow this time of year means that men can make more sugar. You see, this little cold spell and the snow will hold back the leafing of the trees, and that makes a longer run of sap.

“When there’s a long run of sap, it means that Grandpa can make enough maple sugar to last all the year, for common every day. When he takes his furs to town, he will not need to trade for much store sugar. He will get only a little store sugar, to have on the table when company comes.”

“Grandpa must be glad there’s a sugar snow,” said Laura.

“Yes,” said Pa, “he’s very glad. He’s going to sugar off again next Monday, and he says we must all come.”

Pa’s blue eyes twinkled; he had been saving the best for the last, and he said to Ma:
“Hey, Caroline! There’ll be a dance!”

Dance at Grandpa’s
Laura loved Grandma’s house. It was much larger than their house at home. There was one great big room, and then there was a little room that belonged to Uncle George, and there was another room for the aunts, Aunt Docia and Aunt Ruby. And then there was the kitchen, with a big cookstove.

It was fun to run the whole length of the big room, from the large fireplace at one end all the way to Grandma’s bed, under the window in the other end. The floor was made of wide, thick slabs that Grandpa has hewed from the logs with his ax. The floor was smoothed all over, and scrubbed clean and white, and the big bed under the window was soft with feathers.

The day seemed very short while Laura and Mary played in the big room and Ma helped Grandma and the aunts in the kitchen. The men had taken their dinners to the maple woods, so for dinner they did not set the table, but ate cold venison sandwiches and drank milk. But for supper Grandma made hasty pudding.

She stood by the stove, sifting the yellow corn meal from her fingers into a kettle of boiling, salted water. She stirred the water all the time with a big wooden spoon, and sifted the meal until the kettle was full of a thick, yellow, bubbling mass. Then she set it on the back of the stove where it would cook slowly.

It smelled good. The whole house smelled good, with the sweet and spicy smells from the kitchen, the smell of a clove-apple beside Grandma’s mending basket on the table. The sunshine came in through the sparkling window panes, and everything was large and spacious and clean.

At supper time Pa and Grandpa came from the woods. Each had on his shoulders a wooden yoke that Grandpa had made. It was cut to fit around their necks in the back, and hallowed out to fit over their shoulders. From each end hung a chain with a hook, and on each hook hung a big wooden bucket full of hot maple syrup.

Pa and Grandpa had brought the syrup from the big kettle in the woods. They steadied the buckets with their hands, but the weight hung from the yokes on their shoulders.

Grandma made room for a huge brass kettle on the stove. Pa and Grandpa poured the syrup into the brass kettle, and it was so large that it held all the syrup from the four big buckets.

Then Uncle George came in with a small bucket of syrup, and everyone ate the hot hasty pudding with maple syrup for supper.

Uncle George was home from the army. He wore his blue army coat with the brass buttons, and he had bold, merry blue eyes. He was big and broad and he walked with a swagger.

Laura looked at him all the time she was eating her hasty pudding, because she had heard Pa say to Ma that he was wild.

“George is wild, since he came back from the war,” Pa had said, shaking his head as if he were sorry, but it couldn’t be helped. Uncle George had run away to be a drummer boy in the army, when he was fourteen years old.

In the kitchen Grandma was all by herself, stirring the boiling syrup in the big brass kettle. She stirred in time to the music. By the back door was a pail of clean snow, and sometimes Grandma took a spoonful of syrup from the kettle and poured it on some of the snow in a saucer.

Laura watched the dancers again. Pa was playing “The Irish Washerwoman” now. He called:
“Doe see, ladies, doe see doe,
Come down heavy on your heel and toe!”

Laura could not keep her feet still. Uncle George looked at her and laughed. Then he caught he by the hand and did a little dance with her, in the corner. She like Uncle George.

Everyone was laughing, over by the kitchen door. They were dragging Grandma in from the kitchen. Grandma’s dress was beautiful. Too; a dark blue calico with autumn-colored leaves scattered over it. Her cheeks were pink from laughing, and she was shaking her head. The wooden spoon was in her hand.

“I can’t leave the syrup,” she said.

But Pa began to play “The Arkansas Traveler,” and everybody began to clap in time to the music. So Grandma bowed to them all and did a few steps by herself. She could dance as prettily as any of them. The clapping almost drowned the music of Pa’s fiddle.

Suddenly Uncle George did a pigeon wing, and bowing low before Grandma he began to jig. Grandma tossed her spoon to somebody. She put her hands on her hips and faced Uncle George, and everybody shouted. Grandma was jigging.

Laura clapped with her hands in time to the music, with all the other clapping hands. The fiddle sang as it had never sung before. Grandma’s eyes were snapping and her cheeks were red, and underneath her skirts her heels were clicking as fast as the thumping of Uncle George’s boots.

Everybody was excited. Uncle George kept on jigging and Grandma kept on facing him, jigging too. The fiddle did not stop. Uncle George began to breathe loudly, and he wiped sweat off his forehead. Grandma’s eyes twinkled.

“You can’t beat her, George!” somebody shouted.

Uncle George jigged faster. He jigged twice as fast as he had been jigging. So did Grandma. Everybody cheered again. All the women were laughing and clapping their hands, and all the men were teasing George. George did not care, but he did not have breath enough to laugh. He was jigging.

Pa’s blue eyes were snapping and sparkling. He was standing up, watching George and Grandma, and the bow danced over the fiddle strings. Laura jumped up and down and squealed and clapped her hands.

Grandma kept on jigging. Her hands were on her hips and her chin was up and she was smiling. George kept on jigging but his boots did not thump as loudly as they had thumped at first. Grandma’s heels kept on clickety-clacking gaily. A drop of sweat dripped off George’s forehead and shone on his cheek.

All at once he threw up both arms and gasped, “I’m beat!” He stopped jigging.

Everybody made a terrific noise, shouting and yelling and stamping, cheering Grandma. Grandma jigged just a little minute more, then she stopped. She laughed in gasps. Her eyes sparkled just like Pa’s when he laughed, too and wiping his forehead on his sleeve.

Suddenly Grandma stopped laughing. She turned and ran as fast as she could into the kitchen. The fiddle had stopped playing. All the women were talking at once and the men were teasing George, but everybody was still for a minute, when Grandma looked like that.

Then she came to the door between the kitchen and the big room, and said:
“The syrup is waxing. Come and help yourselves.”

Then everybody began to talk and laugh again. They all hurried to the kitchen for plates, and outdoors to fill the plates with snow. The kitchen door was open and the cold air came in.

Outdoors the stars were frosty in the sky and the air nipped Laura’s cheeks and nose. Her breath was like smoke.
She and the other Laura, and all the other children, scooped up clean snow with their plates. Then they went back into the crowded kitchen.

Grandma stood by the brass kettle and with the big wooden spoon she poured hot syrup on each plate of snow. It cooled into soft candy, and as fast as it cooled they ate it.

They could eat all they wanted, for maple sugar never hurt anybody. There was plenty of syrup in the kettle, and plenty of snow outdoors. As soon as they ate one plateful, they filled their plates with snow gain, and Grandma poured more syrup on it.

When they had eaten the soft maple candy until they could eat no more of it, the they helped themselves from the long table loaded with pumpkin pies and dried berry pies and cookies and cakes. There was salt-rising bread, too and cold boiled pork, and pickles. Oo, how sour the pickles were!

They all ate till they could hold no more, and then they began o dance again. But Grandma watched the syrup in the kettle. Many times she took a little of it out into a saucer and stirred it round and round. Then she shook her head and poured the syrup back into the kettle.

The other room was loud and merry with the music of the fiddle and the noise of the dancing.

At last, as Grandma stirred, the syrup turned into little grains like sand, and Grandma called:
“Quick, girls! It’s graining!”

Aunt Ruby and Aunt Docia and Ma left the dance and came running. They set out pans, big pans and little pans, and as fast as Grandma filled them with syrup they set out more. They set the filled ones away, to cool into maple sugar.

Then Grandma said:
“Now bring the patty-pans for the children.”

There was a patty-pan, or at least a broken cup or a saucer, for every little girl and boy.

They all watched anxiously while Grandma ladled out the syrup. Perhaps there would not be enough. Then someone would have to be unselfish and polite.

There was just enough syrup to go round. The last scrapings of the brass kettle exactly filled the very last patty-pan. Nobody was left out.

The fiddling and the dancing went on and on. Laura and the other Laura stood and watched the dancers. Then they sat down on the floor in a corner, and watched. The dancing was so pretty and the music so gay that Laura knew she could never get tired of it. All the beautiful skirts went swirling by, and the boots went stamping, and the fiddle kept on singing gaily.

Then Laura woke up, and she was lying across the foot of Grandma’s bed. It was morning. Ma and Grandma and Baby Carrie were in the bed. Pa and Grandpa were sleeping rolled up in blankets on the floor by the fireplace. Mary was nowhere in sight; she was sleeping with Aunt Docia and Aunt Ruby in their bed.

Soon everybody was getting up. There were pancakes and maple syrup for breakfast, and then Pa brought the horses and sled to the door.

He helped Ma and Carrie in, while Grandpa picked up Mary and Uncle George picked up Laura and they tossed them over the edge of the sled into the straw. Pa tucked the robes around them, and Grandpa and Grandma and Uncle George stood calling, “Good-by! Good-by!” as they rode away into the Big Woods, going home.

The sun was warm, and the trotting horses threw up bits of muddy snow with their hoofs. Behind the sled Laura could see their footprints, and every footprint had gone through the thin snow into the mud.

“Before night,” Pa said, “we’ll see the last of the sugar snow.”

What I like about this story is the concept of displaced acumen. The main character, Billy, lives alone with his father in the woods trapping rabbits for pocket money and exploring the land. Billy has a great love for nature, particularly the gum trees, or eucalypyus trees. He also narrates this stort from his point of view you can tell that he is good at what he does. You also understand that Billy is regarded as mentally challenged by his peers and his new neighbors.

Interestingly enough, the insults and sneers mostly roll off Billy’s back. A lot of this has to do with the small network of people who care about him, those being his father and a town local.

However, Billy’s personal issues are not the crux of the story. Rather, they serve to build up what essentially is a tale of Billy’s sense of justice. A great short story; I hope to read more of her work soon.

* * *

Black Ice
By Cate Kennedy
New Yorker, issue of 2006-09-11

When I went up to check my traps, I saw that the porch lights at the lady’s place were still on, even though it was morning. “That’s an atrocious waste of power,” my dad said when I told him. His breath huffed in the air like he was smoking a cigar. The rabbit carcasses steamed when we ripped the skin off, and it came away like a glove.

Skin the rabbit—that’s what my mum used to say when she pulled off my shirt and singlet for a bath. Mr. Bailey gives me three dollars for every rabbit, to feed his dogs. I take them down to him in the wooden box with a picture of an apple on it. At the butcher’s, rabbits are only two-fifty but Mr. Bailey says he likes mine better. I’ve got fifty-eight dollars saved. I want to get a bike.

Dad thinks it’s good to save up your money. The tourists who stand around the real-estate agent’s window pointing and touching each other on the arm—he reckons they’re loonies. When the lady up the road bought that house, my dad went over after the “Sold” sign got stuck on and everybody had gone. He took one of the clapboards off the side of the house and looked under at the rotting pilings, and made a noise like he was holding back a sneeze. “That lady’s a bloody wacker,” he said. “Those pilings are bloody atrocious.”

He stood there looking at the house and rolled a cigarette. “Throwing good money after bad,” he said, and kicked the clapboard. I kicked it, too.

After she moved in I didn’t set no more snares up there on the hill. I walked in the state forest on the tracks round the lake, the tracks the rabbits make. I made myself small as a rabbit and moved through them on my soft scrabbly claws. I saw everything differently then. Saw the places where they sat and rested, the spots where they reached up with their noses and ate tiny strips of bark from the bottoms of the river willows.

You’ve got to set a trap so that it kills the rabbit straight off. On the leg is no good. All night the rabbit will cry and twist, then you’ll have to kill it in the morning with its eyes looking at you, wondering why you did it. Mr. Bailey, he said he can’t believe that I can catch them so near town. I told him that you just have to watch things and work out where to put the trap, that’s all. He nodded so small you could only just see his chin moving up and down. “You’ve got it there, Billy,” he said.

After he paid me we looked at the dogs and had a cup of tea. His dogs know me and why I come. Their eyes get different when they see me.

Lately, in the morning, everything is frozen. All up the hill are the gum trees and every time I look at them I think of that day in school when I was right and Mr. Fry was wrong. Mr. Fry showed us a picture and told us that trees lose their leaves in autumn, and the other kids started writing it down, but I felt the words come up, and I said no they don’t lose their leaves, they lose their bark. Mr. Fry said how typical it was that the one time I opened my mouth in class I’d come up with the wrong answer. Now I look at the trees standing bare in the mist and think about how I kept shaking my head when he told me to say I was wrong, and how the other kids sat smiling, staring down at their hands, waiting for after school like the dogs wait for the rabbits.

When you smell the leaves, they’re like cough lollies, and the bark goes all colors when it’s wet. One day I was looking at the leaves and my eyes went funny and I flew up high and looked down at the tops of the trees all bunched together and they were like the bumpy green material on the armchairs at my Aunty Lorna’s place. I never told no one about that, not even my dad. The trees talk loud when it’s windy and soft when it’s quiet. I don’t know what they talk about—rain, probably. When they get new gum tips, they’re so full of sap they shiver in the air. Maybe they’re excited. Or frightened.

But now that it’s winter the trees just look dark and shrunken, as if they’re hanging on by shutting off their minds, like my grandpop when he had the stroke and Dad said that his body was closing down slowly. On the track there’s ice crystals in the clay, and when you look real close you can see that the crystals are long, growing into lines, and the more mushy the clay the tighter the crystals pack in. They do it in the night, in a cold snap. You can put your foot at the edge of a puddle and just press real gently, and all these little cracks run through it, rushing outward like tiny creeks.

Sometimes there’s frost on the rabbits’ fur. I brush it off with my hand. Rabbit fur smells nice, like lichen or dry moss. My mum left behind some leather gloves with rabbit fur inside and when I put them on once I pulled my hot hands out and smelled her smell. “What are you bawling for?” my dad said. I hid the gloves under my mattress. When I touch them they feel like green leaves, soft and dry and bendy, not knowing autumn’s coming.

The morning I saw the lady’s porch lights my dad gave me a new hat for my chilblains. He made it for me from rabbit skins. He rubbed my ears hard with his sweater till my mouth ached from holding it shut, then he pulled the rabbit-fur flaps down and tied them. “See you back here with the bunnies,” he said, squeezing his hands under his arms before he stoked up the chip furnace.

One day a boy at my school who works at the feed supply told the other kids that we were so backward we didn’t even have hot and cold running water at our place. He said, “It’s like deliverance down there with you-know-who.” I asked Dad what deliverance meant and he rolled a cigarette and said why. The next time he wanted chicken pellets he asked for them to be delivered that day and then he stoked the chip furnace up so high that a spray of boiling water gushed up and hit the roof like rain and it sounded like the fancy coffee machine at the milk bar. When this boy came around with the pellets, Dad told him to empty them into the bin and then asked would he like to wash the dust off his hands in the kitchen. The boy went in. I stood looking at the hens and made myself small like them and felt the straw under my claws as I scratched around, and felt how the wheat powdered as I cracked it in my beak, and then there was a scream and the boy came running out holding his hands in front of him. They were bright pink, like plastic. As the boy ran past, my dad called, “Don’t forget to tell your friends.”

I pushed the rabbits into a hessian bag and heard music coming out of the house with the lights on. It was violin stuff. I saw the lady who bought the house come out onto her porch as I cut across the ridge. She was wearing new overalls and you could still see the fold marks in them. She had hair the color of a fox. When she saw me her face went all bright and excited even though she didn’t know me—like the lady doctor who did all those stupid tests on me at school, just saying stupid words and expecting me to make up more words and say them straightaway and not giving me any time to think it over.

She said, “Well, hello there, has the cat got your tongue?” She had lipstick on. I thought maybe she was on her way to church.

I said I didn’t have a cat and her eyebrows went up.

“You’re up very early on this wintry morning. What’s that you’ve got in your bag?” she said, like we were going to play a joke on someone. I showed her the top rabbit’s head and her mouth went funny and she said, “Oh dear, oh the poor little things. What did you want to kill them for?”

I said for Mr. Bailey. I said they died very quickly and always got the traps right around their necks. She hugged herself with her arms and shook her head and said, “Goodness me,” looking at my rabbit-skin hat. I turned my head slowly round so she could see it better.

She asked me suddenly if I lived in the house down the hill and I said yes. Then she said what a marvellous location and what a shame that it would cost an arm and a leg to put the power through, otherwise she would have made an offer, but this little place she’d picked up was such fun and a gold mine. She said all her friends from the city thought she was quite mad but she’d be the one laughing when property values went up and she’d done all the extensions. I was waiting for her to finish talking so I could go. I could feel the rabbits stiffening up inside the bag—I could smell them.

“What’s your name?” she asked me finally, and I said Billy.

“And do you go to school, Billy?”

I looked at her and said you have to. Her eyes went all crinkly and happy again.

“And is it a special school, just for special children?”

I couldn’t work her out. Maybe she didn’t understand about school. I said not really, then my mouth blurted out, “You got hair like a fox.”

She laughed like someone in a movie. “Good heavens,” she said. “You are a character, aren’t you?”

A man in a red dressing gown came out onto the veranda and the lady said, “Look, darling, some local color.”

“Love the hat,” the man said to me. I waited for them to tell me their names, but the man just complained that it was bloody freezing, and thank Christ they’d got the central heating in. The lady said yes, the whole place was shaping up well, then she looked out down the track and said, “The only problem is there’s no bloody view of the lake.” Then she said, “Billy, show Roger your bunnies, darling,” and I pulled one out and Roger said, “Good God.”

They both laughed and laughed, and Roger said, “Well, it looks like the light’s on but there’s no one home.” Which was wrong. They were both home and they’d turned the lights off by then.

When I walked down the track past the sharp turn and through the cutting, my boots cracked on the black ice. You’ve got to be careful you don’t go for a sixer on that. People say it’s invisible but it’s not really—you just have to get down real close to see where the water froze then melted a bit, then froze again, all through the night, till it’s like a piece of glass from an old bottle.

Dad had had his shower by the time I got home. The rabbits were harder to skin because so much time had passed. The skins ripped off with the sound of one of those Band-Aids they put on your knees in the school sickroom. “Get them off,” my dad said when I came home with the Band-Aids on the time someone tripped me at school and I banged my knees on the concrete. Dad was watching me, so I pulled both of them off fast and my knees bled again. “Call that first aid? That’s bloody atrocious,” my dad said. “Get some air onto them.” I looked at my knees. They felt like the hinges inside had got stiff and rusty, like the oil in them had leaked out.

Every day for the next few weeks, people drove up the hill to fix things in the lady’s house. You could hear banging and machines, and then a pointy bit of new roof pushed up over the trees. The lady’s friends, the ones who thought she was quite mad, came up a lot at first but then it got colder and they stopped. The lake froze over at the edges. One day I crept up and saw the lady on a new veranda, which was covered in pink paint, standing with her arms folded, just staring out at the trees. She didn’t look so happy now, with everything half finished and mud instead of a garden. There were big piles of rocks around, like she was waiting for someone to move them, and I saw a duck standing still as anything under a tree. I went closer and she saw me.

“Well, Billy!” she called, and I went over and saw that the duck was a pretend one.

“Look at all these bloody trees,” she said, sighing. “I’m sick of the sight of them.”

She had the overalls on again but they didn’t look so new anymore.

“What are those trees, anyway, Billy?” she said, and I said that they were gum trees, and she laughed and said she might have guessed that would be my answer, even though I hadn’t finished talking and was only sorting out what I was going to say next.

I said there was going to be another cold snap that night and more hard weather. And she asked how did I know and I started explaining but she wasn’t really listening—she was still looking down the state-forest gully toward the lake, turning her head like the ladies in the shop when they’re buying dresses and looking at themselves in the mirror, deciding.

Three weeks later I was up in the trees, just listening to them and looking for good spots for snares, when I found the first sick one. When I touched its leaves I knew it was dying. It was a big old tree and it used to have a big voice but now it was just breathing out. And it was bleeding. All around the trunk somebody had cut a circle, and sap was dripping out, which is the tree’s blood, my dad says. The person had used a little saw, then a hatchet, and I could see that whoever it was didn’t know how to use the saw properly and had scratched all up and down around the cut. There was nothing I could do for that tree. I wanted to kill it properly so that it wouldn’t just stand there looking at me, trying its hardest to stay alive.

The next week I found another tree that was the same and then it just kept on happening: seven of the biggest trees got cut. When I looked real hard I flew up in the air again and saw them from the top and the dying ones made a kind of line down to the lake all the way from the lady’s house on the hill to the shore. Then I came back down onto the ground, and I saw how it was.

“You’ve done it again, Billy,” Mr. Bailey said when I came by. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. Two big fat ones today.”

I got my money and walked up the hill toward the lady’s house and I saw her through the trees, planting something in the garden. Dad said she kept the whole nursery in business.

This time I got quite close to her and the pretend duck before she saw me, and she jumped backward.

“Jesus, kid, just give it a break, will you?” she said, all shaky. She had a scarf that had slipped a bit off her hair and you could see where the red color stopped and the hair underneath was dark brown and silver, which was funny because sometimes it’s exactly the same on a fox’s tail, striped like that.

“God, this place,” she said like a hiss, and threw down her trowel. “Isn’t the collective cold shoulder enough without you creeping around like . . .” Then she stopped and said, “Forget it, forget it.” I saw that she had a special little cushion for kneeling on and I was looking at that cushion when she said in a different voice, “Where did you get that box, Billy?”

I said, “Out of the shed.” She laughed. I looked down at the box with the picture of the apple on it.

“Out of your shed? That’s a finger-joint Colonial box, Billy. Do you know how much some of them are worth?”

Her voice was all excited.

“What about selling it to me?” she said.

I said that it was my rabbit box and she asked did I have any others in the shed. I said I would have a look. She was a loony. My dad sometimes split up the old boxes for the chip furnace. He kept nails and bolts in them.

“I know where there’ll be a lot,” I said. “At the Franklin garage sale.”

Her eyes looked a little bit like Mr. Bailey’s dogs’ eyes inside the netting.

“When is it?” she asked.

“On Sunday. They got lots of stuff.”

“Like what?” she asked, and then said a whole list of things—fire pokers? ironwork? cupboards?—and I just kept nodding.

“Lots of that kind of thing,” I said. “Lots of these little boxes with writing and maps of Australia and animals like emus.”

She folded her arms and looked at me harder. “Boxes with emus and kangaroos on them? With joints like this one?”

“Yep,” I said. “But you got to get there real early in the morning. Like six-thirty or something. ’Cause other people come up from the city.”

She asked me where Franklin’s was, and I told her.

“I can get there earlier than the dealers,” she said, looking down the hill at the trees all secretly dying in a row to the lake.

On Saturday I set a snare just inside a little tunnel of grass by the lake. Dad says that it’s bad to kill something without a good reason but I knew the rabbit wouldn’t mind. The trees were very quiet now. It was going to be a black frost. When the moon came up there was a yellow ring around it like around a Tilley lamp when you take it out on a frosty night.

I couldn’t hardly get to sleep with thinking. I thought of her going out there with her new saw from the hardware shop in the night, cutting open the trees’ skin while the rabbits nosed around with their soft whiskery mouths and Mr. Bailey’s dogs cried and choked on their chains over and over.

When I got up it was still dark, as dark as the steel on the monkey bars at school, cold metal that hurts your chest. I found a still, stiff rabbit in the trap and I felt sorry for it. I knew she would, too. Because in the lady’s head you can feel sorry and worried for rabbits but not for trees.

The crystals had grown in the night and now the black ice was smooth as glass all around that sharp turn. I was careful with the rabbit, as careful as when I set a snare. It looked like it was alive all right, sitting up there by itself in the middle of the track.

I got back into bed when I was finished. I felt my mum’s gloves.

My dad knew I’d got up early when he came to wake me up again. I don’t know how.

“You’d better go out and check your traps,” he said as he split the kindling.

Up the road Farrelly’s tractor was pulling her car out of the ditch. It had crumpled into one of the big gums, and leaves and sticks had been shaken all over it. Mr. Farrelly said that the ambulance blokes themselves had nearly skidded on the bloody ice, trying to get in to help. “What’s a sheila like her doing getting up in the bloody dark on a Sunday morning, anyway?” Mr. Farrelly said as he put the hooks on. “Bloody loonies.”

Under her front wheel I saw white fur, turned inside out like a glove, like my hat. I went down through the trees, touching the sick ones. On the way I stepped in a big patch of nettles. No use crying if you weren’t looking out for yourself, my dad says. I looked around and found some dock and rubbed it on and it stopped hurting like magic. For everything poisonous there’s something else nearby to cure it, if you just look around. My dad says that, too.

I made a little fire and smoked my traps. Five more weeks and I can get a mountain bike

Appalachian Snapshot is one of my favorites. Writing in a second-person narrative is difficult because it often sounds pompous or fails to create a sense of intimacy with the reader. Ayers does a nice job here, using the intimacy to imitate a deep meditation of a bittersweet past.

While typing this out - I don’t have a scanner at my disposal, so please alert me to any typographic errors you may find - I realized that my perspective of this story had changed. What I liked about Appalachian Snapshot as a teenager was the general feeling of nostalgia I took away. At that time, I associated nostalgia with longing, wistfulness and a small degree of angst. While typing the story out, I changed my thinking; while the narrator/I suffered loss, who we were then is not the same person we are now. Consequently, how can we really feel the same type of feelings as someone while being separated by time and, actually, another life?

* * *

Appalachian Snapshot
by Alice Ayers
Published in Other Voices, Fall/Winter 1999

There are two snapshots tucked into your diary. The first is of your husband in the bedroom you now share, taken moments after he and the Native American midwife pulled your second-born from you. He stands, grinning broadly in a blood-spattered white T-shirt, holding your son who is wrapped in a stained cloth and, with only the top of his raw pink head showing, looks like a bundle of meat in the arms of a butcher. You are present in this photograph too, your naked leg fuzzily visible in the background, and next to your thigh is the corner of the black Rorschach your blood made on the bed.

The other snapshot is of your boyfriend, taken on the last day of his life.

You drove the Rambler because, after all, it was your car. You paid for it, bought it from an old woman who said, “I can’t drive anymore, I can’t even turn the key,” and behind her screen door help up hand that had become twisted with arthritis. You also drove because your boyfriend like to smoke on the interstate—something about the intersection of highway and horizon put him in the “zone” as he called it. Once, when he offered to take the wheel, you explained you no longer felt safe with a smoker behind the wheel. “Hey, I’m old,” you said, only half-facetiously. “I’ve outgrown my immortality.”

He laughed. “That being the case…” he said, and lit up. You smiled at him. He was years younger than you, and, you had always though, beautiful. His lips were full, his hair dark brown. His arms were long and graceful and corded, almost accidentally, with muscle. Veins popped in his forearms, his deltoids fit into your palms like hard apples.

After a while he carefully ground out and stowed his roach in the little tin box in which his grandmother once kept pills. He swiveled and fished up one of the old Reader’s Digest magazines out of the mess on the back seat. Then with his feet on the dash, the magazine in one hand and your thick braid in the other, he began to read.

As Tennessee countryside slipped by, you listened to him read. You drove and her read Drama in Real Life, punctuating his sentences with gentle tugs on your braid. The Tennessee countryside swept by, and you hear “One Handhold from Death!,” the story of Jim Tobin, a pilot who was hurled by a freak accident from the cargo door of his twin-engine Beechcraft. As it turned out, Tobin had incredibly quick hands and managed to seize a nylon cable attached to his plane, nine thousand feet over rural New Jersey. Fortunately for Tobin, his co-pilot, Bob Pierce, noticed his predicament and brought the plane to the ground so gently that Robin escaped with injuries that could only be described as minor: lacerated skin, torn rib cartilage, fingers that had been broken by the force of his grip on the cable.

Your boyfriend clapped the Reader’s Digest shut and announced, “The end.” He put his head in your lap and his feet out the window. You heard him tearing a page out of the magazine, saw his hands working busily. “It pays to enrich your word power, oh yes it does,” he murmured, and you knew he was pleasantly stoned. After a moment, his hand came up level with your chin, presenting you an origami swan.

By late afternoon, you had traveled over the North Carolina border and into the Pisgah National Forest. Your boyfriend read the gazetteer, which along with auto-mechanics, needlepoint and bowling, was one of the odd things he did so well. He directed you to a trailhead where you parked the car. You took your canteens and daypacks from the backseat and started up a steep incline into the trees.

After about an hour on a winding path, you came to an opening in the trees and a meadow leading to a rock bald that jutted over the valley floor. Your boyfriend walked right to the lip of the bald and sat with his legs dangling over the edge. You hesitated. In those days, you were not so good with heights, with ledges, with sudden drop-offs. You were always seized by what-if fears. What I if I lost control and pitched myself over? What if I gave my boyfriend a running shove? Now you could pogo-stick to the rim of the Grand Canyon confident in your ability to veer away before the moment of no return, but then, then you looked at the edge and just couldn’t go any further than the middle of the rock. You thought about Tobin holding on to that cable, New Jersey miles beneath his feet—did he really fall or was he seized by some dark and rapturous impulse?

You sat down in the middle of the rock, your legs crossed. For awhile you occupied yourself with maintenance tasks: drinking water, eating granola, wiping the perspiration from your eyeglasses. Your boyfriend sat in front of you. Beyond him was the panorama of the valley floor, the bright buttercup, the wild strawberry and the fluorescent green of a deciduous forest in summer.

These days, as you spin your wheel, this is the image so often in your mind. You spin your wheel and the clay climbs to form vessel walls and you see yourself on the rock bald. You see yourself stand to stretch your calves, see your braid tumble from your back and sweep the ground. Back the, your hair was so long that when you loosed your braid, it curved below your ribs. You remember your boyfriend teasing you, calling your hair your pet, your spaniel, your lhaso apso, watching you put it up, take it down, brush it in the bathroom mirror, you remember how you toyed with your hair, twirling it on your finger, rubbing the smooth strands against your sensitive upper lip.

You spin your wheel and also see your boyfriend on the rock, now standing, now leaning against a sturdy mountain laurel. He wears a blue flannel shirt with the sleeves torn off, jean shorts cut almost to his crotch, his father’s cast-off hunting boots. His brown hair curls on his collar, picks up red highlights in the sun. he looks down into the valley below. And under the toes of his boots, a short incline starts; it descends sharply before giving way to a fall of three hundred feet or more.

You met your boyfriend in a Ketchum, Idaho restaurant in the summer of seventy-five. You were twenty-five, he was eighteen. You chopped vegetables, wore sandals and flowing skirts of Indian print, your fingers smelling always of garlic. He waited tables, wore hip-huggers, jerked his head constantly to the right to toss his bangs away from his face.

In between customers, he sprinted to the kitchen. You julienned the carrots and watched him from the corners of your eyes. He talked manically, demonstrated his telemarking technique for the head chef. He did push-ups in the walk-way, chinned himself on the molding of the kitchen door. When he came over to watch you work your knife, you told hi you were an artist. He informed you that he was an excellent artist’s model.

Though your principal medium was clay, you decided to give charcoal a try.

In your apartment, his spine stood out like a tiny staircase. He sat with knees drawn up and head bent. Hours later he unfolded at your touch. No, he wasn’t a virgin. Of course not, he told you.

He left his mother’s house to live with you.

Your rooms were in an old house that had been divided into apartments. A bead curtain hung between the bathroom and the living room; on the floor, you threw pillow to sit on while you ate leftovers from the restaurant. He bought some clothes, a guitar he never played and two black-light posters. He also brought a home-movie projector and, inexplicably, a sewing machine his mother no longer used.

At night, sometimes, he set the projector up in the living room, watched black and white films of himself as a child. You sat at the kitchen table, drawing, the over-bright images flickering in the corner of your eye. A child’s face, a spikey crew-cut. Saddle oxfords running over a neatly trimmed lawn. Your hand moved surely over the paper. Your boyfriend sat quietly on the floor. The projector hummed, threw a wedge of light.

In the fall, you left the restaurant together and rode a series of buses southwest, to Tucson, Albuquerque and Santa Fe. You are your meals out of convenience stores, slept in motels with stains on the carpet and did dramatic reading from the Gideon Bible. Your boyfriend stood on the bed and parted the Red Sea, a sheet flung over his naked shoulder and a Traveler’s Rent towel draped on his head.

On the bus to El Paso, you decided to fall in love with him. He slept with his head against the window and you pictured yourself as a diver about to swan from a cliff, to fall breast-first into glassy blue waters. No longer would you be two people sharing time, bodies, and resources. You would be lovers. Now when you opened the Gideon Bible, it would be to read from the Psalms. As soon as he awoke, you would tell him of your decision. You touched his hand, marveling suddenly at the fine hairs on his forearm. Beyond his head, the landscape suddenly grew more arid.

You returned to Idaho in the early winter. You enrolled into the Sun Valley Center for the Arts. Your boyfriend got on as a ski instructor. At school, you spun your wheel. The clay bloomed like a flower and you knew your hands were solving the problems they were meant to solve.

In the Pisgah National Forest, your boyfriend stood in the edge of a rock bald, a mountain laurel on his right and just under the toes of his boots a drop of three-hundred feet or more. You had gone to pee in the woods on the other side of the trail. You rose from your squat and felt light-headed. Your boyfriend was so close to the edge it made your stomach cold. You imagined him swanning off the cliff and soaring across the air like Tobin from “One Handhold from Death!”

“And where did you get all these old Reader’s Digests?” one of your instructors has asked when pages from “Humor in Uniform” and “Life in these United States” began to appear in your collage work.

“They came with the car I bought,” you said.

And it was true. You had owned the Ramble for a week before you thought to check for a spare tire. When you opened to trunk you found the Reader’s Digests, a collection complete from May 1953 to December 1976, packed neatly in grocery bags. Your boyfriend was delighted. He said, “This is exactly what should come with a Rambler Americana. You should get Rolling Stone with a Mustang, People with a sporty Mazda.” You always meant to return the magazines to the woman from whom you’d bought the car. Surely she didn’t mean to give away this lovingly packed, chronologically organized collection with her car. But you never did. The magazines soon broke out of their bags and slid from one side of the trunk to the other. They provided ballast when the road was icy, and reading material on long trips.

The Rambler deteriorated gently over the years. It was, after all, a ’66. The seats and dash cracked and, after a break-in, the driver’s side door opened only from the inside. Then the gas gauge broke and your boyfriend kept track of the level with a stick he stuck in the tank. To keep the hood from springing open on the highway, he tied it with twine he cut whenever he wanted to check on the oil or look at the engine, which continued to tick like a stubborn good heart.

Most of the Reader’s Digests remained in the trunk or in the backseat, though you lost a few to attrition. You remember one magazine disappearing sideways into a hole in the backseat floor board like an animal slipping into a burrow. Since it was on one of the rare occasions your boyfriend was driving, you turned to watch the magazine cartwheel on the blacktop until the highway bore it away. You had to wonder what month and what year you lost—July ’59, April ’68, September ’73? You remember with regret that when you found the magazines, the issues from the fifties were just as crisp as the ones from the seventies.

The trusty Rambler made it down to Mexico in August of ’79 when you went to stay at a particular hotel you had heard about from friends. The hotel was on a each and you spent a whole month carving the wet sand. You sculpted castles, animals, and reclining nudes with heavy, cratered buttocks. Afterwards you took off your T-shirt and swam in just your bikini bottoms. Your boyfriend sat on the empty beach, watching, you imagined, your arms rise and fall and break the bright water like the surface of a mirror. When you walked from the water, you saw him reclined next to one of your reclining sand nudes. His head was flung back to the sky, his chest burning brown in the sun, his hair going red on the ends and the peace symbol he wore on a string flashing between his nipples.

The hotel your friends has told you about was once a gathering spot for a thirties Hollywood crowd and had since declined into a semi-ruin. The white stucco exterior was crumbling and the boardwalk to the beach overtaken by high beach grasses. The family you rented from lived in a clapboard house behind the hotel and stabled their livestock in its east wing, when you left your room in the early light, you threaded your way past the back of indifferent beasts intent on pecking or grazing their morning meal from the grass. When you returned in the heat of the day, you could see their quiet shadows in the lobby. Goats knelt on the worn carpet, chickens roosted in the foyer. Once, walking back from the beach, you saw a pig’s face staring placidly from a second story window.

Most of the rooms on the west wing were habitable, though in varying states of dereliction. You took a room on the first floor and slept on twin bed pushed together. After a while, you annexed the adjacent room, which was unoccupied. In that room, you remember, the door was two-thirds unhinged and leaning into the hall. A box spring lay on the floor and its mildewed mattress against the wall. You sketched your boyfriend I this room. That drawing, now lost, had shown broken bottles, crushed cigarettes on the floor, and slumped against one wall, your boyfriend with a relaxed and vacant face, hands crumpled like paper in his lap.

On the rock bald in Pisgah, your boyfriend was too close to the edge. He held his camera a 35 millimeter single reflex you had given him on his twenty-sixth birthday. He pointed it down toward the valley floor and his arms lifted from the torn sleeves of his flannel shirt almost like wings. You rose lightheaded from your squat, imagining Tobin soaring the air, and stumbled back to the rock.

“Hey,” you called, “I think we should go now. We’re going to lose the light.”

He didn’t speak, but turned slowly to face you. You remember a noise like a car backfiring at a distance, and your boyfriend’s hair lifting up on one side. For just a moment, you seemed to see a red leaf trembling in the dark strands. Then he stiffened and held the hand with the camera out formally as if he were a butler offering a tray of drinks. Thinking he wanted you to take his picture against the backdrop of the valley floor, you stepped forward to take the camera. But as you moved, he moved as well. His shoulders sagged, his knees bent, he gave a soft toss and the camera rolled from his hand. As you bent to catch it, you saw him folding in on himself so gracefully that, for a moment, you thought he would reverse his downward motion and lift in to the sky.

You cupped your hands under the camera, and watched him back swiftly down the incline. The camera grazed your fingertips, then struck the rock. A sheet of white unfolded from the flash.

He favored black and white Tri-Pan X and could roll bulk film in the dark faster than anyone you knew. All those years of covert joint-rolling in cars, bars and movie theaters, in restroom stalls and under restaurant tables, had made his fingers speedy and sure. He also loved the camera’s flash. Sometimes at night, he wandered the apartment, triggering the flash over and over. It made him feel as though he’d suddenly had a brilliant idea. He said, “A lightbulb going on in the head, see?” He began to use the flash for daylight photographs, taking his camera to the ski lodge and shooting flash shots in full sun with the snow glaring off the slopes. He presented the film to you and you developed it in the dark room at the Art School.

“Any good?” he asked over your shoulder as you watched the images emerge in the developing bath.

“Oh yes,” you said.

And they were. The prints were brilliant white, the figure on them as faint and ghostly as images dreamed or remembered from decades ago.

“Can I have these?” you asked. He nodded and said, “Consider them yours.”

These photographs became part of your oeuvre. You remember them, mounted on pastel-colored mats and housed by thin black frames, hung for a retrospective of your work at the Art School, and below the photographs, your clay vessels exhibited on wooden stands. Over the years, you gave away or sold most of the photographs, but two remain with you, now on display in your living room. In one of them, three lift poles travel up a slope, each one smaller and fainter than the other. To you it is a crucifixion scene in space, with the tiny skiers threading among the poles like black stars in a white sky. In the other, two children swim in a pool, the shadows of their white faces afloat in light, their bodies distorted by unseen water. Now when you look at these photographs, you realize something you now attribute to your genders or the differences in your ages; while you had an interest in the archiving of images, your boyfriend only had interest in their making.

There are two snapshots in your diary. The color image is of your husband with your second-born and the black Rorschach your blood made on the white sheets of your bed. The blackness of blood, after all, is what disguised your boyfriend’s injury.

When you tell the story now, you understand how Tobin must have felt, telling a story that no one could really believe. You must have had incredibly gifted hands, Tobin must have had incredibly gifted hands to be able to seize a cable in the middle of a headlong tumble from an open cargo. You must have had incredibly gifted hands, for your boyfriend did not fall of the rock. You flung yourself forward and seized the front of his flannel shirt and the two of you went down hard on the rock bald. He hung from your arm for nearly three days and you never saw the blood for the darkness of his hair. And because your glasses lay broken on the rock off to your left. In the hospital, you learned he’d been struck in the side of the head by a bullet from and unknown gun. Poachers, the state trooper told you, were not unheard of in the National Forest.

Your boyfriend hung from your right arm and you hung from your left arm which was wrapped around the trunk of a mountain laurel. You remember almost nothing of the time you spent together on the rock, you would like to remember more but you only have a handful of images. Night coming for the second time and the sky voluptuous in darkness. The stars pouring down shafts of light on your boyfriend’s face which burns like a pale hearth. His eyes opening and closing as he faces you from the other side of the rock like a person who has gone into deep still water and holds onto a raft while floating languorously.

The hikers who found you pulled you away from the drop-off by your legs. Your boyfriend’s body, still attached to your fist, bumped over the rock like a heavy net coming out the water. The hikers cut the flannel shirt from your hand with a knife and walked you, semi-conscious and buckling like a marionette down the trail. Your boyfriend remained on the ridge wrapped in a sleeping bag and tucked into the bushes.

Your parents came to North Carolina to collect you and your father donated the Rambler and the Reader’s Digests to a women’s shelter. You flew with them to their home in Colorado with your ribs taped, your face stitched, holding your arms like two broken wings.

As time went on, your father helped you learn to drive again using the heels and palms of your damaged hands. He offered to buy you a car in return, he said, for having dumped your Rambler so hurriedly in North Carolina. You let him chose a second-hand Chevrolet. An automatic with power steering, you could only do so much with your hands. But you missed the way the rambler shifted, three on a tree.

Eventually you left your parent’s home and drove alone to Sun Valley and discovered along the way you still liked driving. From Sun Valley, you drove to Jackson and from Jackson to Billings and you found yourself believing you had seen your boyfriend once of twice going the other way on Highway 25, in a mini-van or Mustang.

In the grief workshop in Seattle, you sat on the floor in the center of a circle of women and showed them your hands. They rubbed your shoulders, passed you crumpled tissues and stoked your crooked fingers. You told them how you had cried when the doctor had said your hands were dead. You told them how you had cried when you realized the Rambler was gone forever. And you told them the story of Tobin who had hung on so fiercely in the sky that once returned to the ground, he could no longer remember how to open his hand.

Your doctor told you this hand is dead, these hands are dead, the hands that held your lover have died and will not move. Your strong right hand which once threw the clay on your wheel can only curl and reach like a fish that is landed and no longer understands how to breathe. The doctor told you your hands would not heal and you believed him. You thought that as you proceeded down the years, your eyes fixed on the horizon behind, you would look back and see this moment as the horizon behind, the moment your life broke forever into before and after.

The doctor told you your hands would not heal but the hands have healed and the face you expected to see for the rest of your life long ago finished its drop over the edge. You see that face now in the pages of your photo albums and can’t imagine it wearing the passage ten more years. Your hands have healed, and your boyfriend’s death has disappeared into the mosaic of your memories until it is no more clear or remarkable I your mind than the moment you found the Reader’s Digests in the back of the Rambler.

Your hands now work the clay on your wheel. They knead your husband’s shoulders. Your husband’s arm in his flannel shirt goes to and fro; he plays the violin while you throw the vessels that bear your name into the avant-garde art world. Your hands cup the faces of your children, Jasmine the girl and Max the boy, born after your fortieth birthday, after you had unspoiled the ‘80s out West in Helena, Spokane, Seattle and Eugene, after you had cut your hair, traded your John Lennon glasses for contacts, left the commune in the Klamath mountains and met the logger who grieved for old growth forests, the logger who would leave Oregon and follow you to that desert heaven, Tucson.

You remember your boyfriend only when a distinct period piece pops out of the cultural fabric, a peace symbol on a jean jacket, Billy Jack on cable, the acrid smoke of marijuana, so infrequent these days, brings his face, or sometimes the smell of gasoline and you see him returning from the men’s room, over his head the red balloon reads Esso instead of Exxon. It’s all part of a crumbling past; Mary Tyler Moor and Son of Sam bring the same sweet sting of nostalgia, and you could believe it never really happened, that it just slipped from the late show into your dreams, if it wasn’t for the other snapshot, taken the moment the camera bounced on the rock between your tumbling bodies. It is over-exposed, a flashbulb blown in daylight, but in the white light you can see the image of dark-haired boy in a sleeveless shirt. At the bottom of the frame, your fingers reach up, but the boy is leaning back, already weightless. He flings his arms wide and rises into the wind like a kite riding the sky on the best day of your life.

Contributor’s Notes:

Alice Ayers lives in Seattle. She received an MFA in writing from the University of Washington.

“The story started with the idea that given enough distance you can develop nostalgia for the terrible as well as the sweet. About twelve years ago, I lived in New York City. My roommate’s brother came to stay with us and got so sick his hand literally died. His doctor said his body was working so hard to fight an infection it had to abandon less critical functions like circulation to extremities. Over the year, I watched gangrene eat the flesh of his fingers until he finally had to have them amputated at the second knuckle. I’ve never lost the image—it blends rather pungently with my gentler memories of the city.”

After reading it for the first time, I thought about how it started out as an adventurous Boy’s Life piece. Through the middle it seemed to become a historical short story with a wretched tone that was quite dispiriting to read, even as fiction. Towards the end, I imagined it was a fictionalized biography of someone famous. However, once I was finished I had an entirely different interpretation.

I enjoyed reading this because it was a combination of different story elements. While we know what will happen to Bobby, his future is not important. A story for all those short-changed mentors in fiction - Mr. Miyagi, Splinter…can’t think of anyone else at the moment - this focuses the mentor and why s/he is such a powerful influence.

Mr. D’Arcy who transforms an intensely painful past into something Bobby can understand and take away from: a story. Although the story-within-a-story device softens its tone, Mr. D’Arcy’s passion changes Bobby. This is still a game and a story, but Bobby plays along less and less for false drama and more as a microsm of real life.

The ending can feel a little too neat, but overall this story is excellent.

* * *

Harbinger Hall
By Bill Roorbach

Bobby Mullendore was sick of fifth grade, especially without his best friend, Jack B., plus it was spring. Painstakingly, key by key, jabbing hard with each of his index fingers, he typed a missive in the exact language of a certain carbon copy Jack had given him as a good-bye treasure just this past fall.
Dear Mrs. Applegate:

Due to a career emergency we are
moving as of 15 April, 1963. Robert
will attend his last class this Friday,
April 12. He will start school in North
Carolina a week hence. Please accept
my apologies for this short notice. It
could not be helped, and we regret it.

After twenty focused, difficult minutes, after typing the “Sincerely yours” one letter at a time, Bobby pulled the curled paper from the Royal Standard, flattened it carefully, and signed his mother’s name.

That afternoon, at two-fifteen, moving against the tide of the other kids leaving class, Bobby made his way to Mrs. Applegate’s desk. She was searching through a low drawer, sat up straight when he made a noise, looked surprised. And just started talking, as she could do: “Robert! Well. Your homework is better the last few weeks. Your hands are much cleaner too!”

Bobby made no response, merely presented the letter.

“Oh, my!” Mrs. Applegate said.

“Yip,” Bobby said.

The next day, Good Friday, Mrs. Applegate sprang a surprise, just as she had for Jack’s departure: “Bobby Mullendore,” she announced, “is moving.”

On Monday Bobby wore the same old clothes, but with the addition of one Sears Roebuck watch, a reviled Christmas present, strapped self-consciously to his wrist. Mom saw it and smiled inwardly but still visibly, knowing in her Mom way not to say anything. Bobby walked to the bus stop clutching his lunch, stood there a minute in case Mom should look down the road, and then leaped into the woods. Ancient Mr. Green stopped the old yellow beast, maybe even would have honked (he didn’t like to miss a kid), but a couple of Bobby’s former classmates yelled out, “Moved! Moved!”

Bobby could hear Mr. Green croak, “Bobby moved?”

“Moved!” the kids cried.

Mr. Green said a merry “Well, okay, then,” and the bus roared off. It wouldn’t stop here again.

Bobby crossed Wahackme Road, trotted to Dogwood Lane, ducked past Mrs. Smith’s, trotted past the PRIVATE LANE sign, remembered to breathe, trotted along the high stone wall in front of the Schraeders’ house and into the pine forest along the needle-soft path that would take him to the old stone stable where he and Jack B. had found wondrous things: cigarette butts, beer bottles, a big girl’s bra, a pair of tighty-whities with Brent Lovelace’s camp tag sewn in.

All this was on the D’Arcy estate, the centerpiece of which was a stone mansion five full minutes on foot from the stable through well-kept forest on a wide bridle path. “From another era,” as Bobby’s dad phrased it. Jack B. and Bobby had often slipped up to the house at dusk to look in the windows; they’d seen only a maid in uniform once and, another time, a small party–old people having dinner on the great stone patio. Jack B. had had the tuff idea of blowing squeals through long blades of grass, which they did. On the patio the old people went silent in the night, and then they rose. “Now, what’s that?” one said. Another said, “That’s some sort of crane,” and another, “Rare, I should think.” Pretty soon they’d left their desserts and come tottering across the lawn to investigate.

Bobby and Jack B. giggled their way back into the woods, blowing parting calls all the way down the bridle path and luring the old folks on. Then silent: the birds had flown. “Scared them off,” the first voice said. “Quite sure those are cranes,” the second said. Nine or ten old folks huddled in a little knot there in the woods, where any ogre might get them. “A harbinger, I should think,” the third voice said.

For months and months Bobby and Jack B. whispered those phrases under Mrs. Applegate’s nose: “Rare, I should think!” Har har har! “A harbinger, I should think!” Gales of laughter. The “I should think” became part of the comedy repertoire of the whole fifth grade: “Sloppy Joes for lunch, I should think!” The boys didn’t know what a harbinger was, and didn’t look it up, but Jack B. used the word to name the estate.

Bobby spent his first day of freedom in the abandoned stables of Harbinger Hall, inspecting every corner of the place, looking out every bubbled window, finding things to discuss in a possible letter to Jack B.: six old horseshoes, a 1903 penny, a pair of girl’s underpants with two curled red hairs more or less pasted inside (Lovelace’s girl, Jenny Oswest, had red hair), rotting tack, the skeleton of a cat. He ate his lunch at 12:15 exactly on a desklike shelf in the groom’s quarters, under no awful pressure to trade his Ring Dings for egg salad.

“Funniest thing,” his mom said at dinner (fish sticks and tartar sauce). “I saw Mrs. Crawford at the A&P, and she said she’d heard we’d move!”

“Empty-headed woman,” Bobby’s dad said.

Bobby hadn’t thought till now that his plan had a possible flaw. But the train of conversation chugged quickly away from Mrs. Crawford to a “communication” problem at Dad’s company in New York, and then to a similar problem at Mom’s garden club. Bobby felt the safety of his plan settle in around him.

He stepped off the bridle path where he’d stepped off each day last week, and trotted into the forest on his recon trail until the mansion came in view. Now it was tree to tree, the Nazis in there holding Jack B., dark day, about to storm, and the microfilm in Bobby’s pocket in direst danger of getting wet in the rain and fizzing to deadly acid. He had to make the grand stone entryway, where he’d brazenly hidden his GI poncho on Friday’s mission, a note to Jack B. folded inside it. Was Jack dead? Had Jack been able to decipher the encrypted message? The line of azaleas was a machine-gun emplacement.

Bobby crawled on his belly along a stone-lined drainage ditch and then to the driveway portico and the entryway, breathing hard. His carbine, a polished stick, turned into a stolen Luger. This he tucked into his pants for the climb, chink to chink, up the stone wall of the entryway, twelve feet high. Bobby put his face in the void where the poncho should have been. He held on to the rock crevices, muscles quivering with the effort. No poncho.

He climbed back down, pulled the heavy Luger from his pants, and let it turn into a machine gun, to be held with two hands. Who could have taken his poncho? The game had turned forty-five degrees toward the real, and his fear turned with it. He flopped to his belly in the fine gravel of the drive and crawled the width of the great entryway, hidden only by the lip of the single marble step. At the next corner of the house he peered around, peered into a study, saw the back of an old man writing at a desk. Writing orders to send Jack B. to the firing squad! Bobby stood and aimed his machine gun.

Exactly then he heard two sudden steps in the gravel. One enormous hand grabbed his collar, another the belt of his pants, and someone lifted him off the ground. A heavy foreign accent, very like that of the Nazis on TV, said, “Vat does this mean?”

“I’m just a neighbor kid!”

“You are spyink!”

“I live over there!” Bobby tried to point.

The man pulled Bobby up the step by the collar and belt, across the marble, through a set of massive oaken doors, and then through a second set and into an expansive marble foyer. Bobby’s heart fluttered in his chest. He began to thrash, but the man just yanked him off his feet by his belt and let him kick in the air.

A maid–the very one he’d seen with Jack–appeared on the great marble stairway that rose straight ahead. She said, “Oh, is this the person who’s been …?”

“The same,” Bobby’s captor said.

“I’ll get Hilyard.”

Soon a door opened, and a butler came into the great foyer, an unmistakable butler in actual tails, carrying the poncho in front of him. He said, “This is … yours?”

“It’s just my raincoat,” Bobby said.

The butler produced the note to Jack B. and read, “Attack-way 0900 hours-way, ill-kay all-way?” Then, translating, he read, “Free you through back wall-stand clear for dynamite?

“It’s just a game.”

“Use acid on maid’s face?”

“I’m sorry,” Bobby Mullendore said. He would not cry.

“What do you think, Dort? Shall we bother Mr. D’Arcy?” Hilyard said the master’s name in three distinct syllables, like letters: D-R-C. He turned on his heel. The hand at Bobby’s neck squeezed harder, urging him to follow. Prisoner and guards walked about a mile down a corridor of heavy doors to an elaborately arched stone doorway. The butler gave the gentlest knock. After a long, silent wait the thick door opened.

“My,” Mr. D’Arcy said. He was the man Bobby had seen at his desk, the one Bobby had been about to machine-gun through the great windows. He was much older than Bobby’s grandfather, and frailer. He did not look harmless.

“A game, he says,” the butler said.

“And what game was this?” Mr. D’Arcy said.

“War?” Bobby said helpfully. “World War Two?”

“Do you call that a war?” Mr. D’Arcy said.

As the old man slowly smiled, Dort let go of Bobby’s neck and retreated silently down the hall. The butler lingered, but at a subtle nod from his master sighed and padded off.

“Your name?” Mr. D’Arcy said.

“Bobby.”

“Come in, then, Robert,” Mr. D’Arcy said. “I’ve been expecting you.” And the old man shuffled into the room, impatiently waving for Bobby to keep up, as if the boy were having a problem sustaining the old man’s tortoise pace. Bobby performed covert reconnaissance on the surroundings; the room was all dark wood. Books in dark bindings reached to the ceiling. The tall windows were filled with plants–some of them trees, really, growing in enormous earthen pots and pushing the dark, heavy curtains aside, starved for light. The floor was flagstone–blue and red and black. A dozen tall floor lamps lit the whole warmly. The fireplace, set with handsome birch logs, was as tall as Mrs. Applegate–she could put her whole desk in there and stand behind it, and her head wouldn’t even be up the chimney! The brightest spot in the room was Mr. D’Arcy’s desk, piled with books and papers and rubber stamps and a heavy old phone, all of it lit by two golden lamps. A tall accounting book lay open, a fountain pen uncapped upon it, work interrupted. Mr. D’Arcy straight-away recapped the pen and placed it in a golden holder. Bobby wasn’t at all scared, he told himself–something about all the books and lamps.

Mr. D’Arcy smelled of cologne