Treehouse

Ben Hoffman

Luckily, the Indians see them coming. They see the sails. They are picnicking, the Indians. They have spread their blankets up on the rocks, where there is a sea breeze that goes well with their Pinot Blanc. From up there, they see the sails, and then the ships bouncing in the waves.

So: They put away the good stuff. They hide their iPods. They haul their TVs up trees, bind them to the highest branches. They bury their DVD collections deep in the dirt. They sink their SUVS in the lake (they have to roll up their sleeves, lean out of their canoes, and hold the vehicles down until they stay down). They eat all the junk food, gorge themselves on fruit snacks and chocolate chip cookies until they feel they will burst and their chins are stained (wild berry juice, they will tell the strangers). They burn all the receipts. They disguise their lawnmowers as deer. They send their most beautiful women west. Don’t ever turn back, they tell them. Take the Xboxes. Take the Xanax.

When the strangers land, when they come sick and tired off the ships, the Indians offer them their very best: gourds, pumpkins, spoiled corn. The strangers have no manners. They could use some sunscreen. They could use some floss. Their belt buckles remind the Indians of their fine silverware, packed safely away.

What are you about, the strangers ask. They point and wave their arms in giant circles so the Indians will understand. The Indians tell them (tell them with straight faces, no less – only a few children giggle: what a great joke this is!) that they worship the sun and the moon. Also the rain and the trees. The wolf. The earth, which glistens, as if packed with jewels.

Ben Hoffman’s fiction is forthcoming in REAL: Regarding Arts and Letters, Dogwood, and Revolution House, where he won third place in the 2012 Flash Fiction contest. He is a contributing writer for Construction Literary Magazine. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina and Ann Arbor, Michigan, and he tweets @benrhoffman.

See Ben’s list of 5 Things You Should Read in our ongoing contributors’ series.

♦

Nicola DeRobertis-Theye

They first rolled out the plan at certain Ivy League universities with unusually high suicide rates. The students, they theorized, could go away for six months and pick up where they left off the following semester. Then they branched into fast-paced Asian capitals, renting entire wings of hotels at discount rates. At the next phase of the plan they installed call boxes at choice sites—the Brooklyn Bridge, certain skyscrapers, math buildings on the campuses of the Universities of California. Clock towers.

Soon it was a number that could be called from any cell phone. Usually the pickup took twenty minutes; in more remote locations, up to two hours. The driver of the white van, always partnered with a paramedic in the front seat, was instructed not to talk to you. If at any point you said, “no,” or, “I’ve changed my mind,” they dropped you off at your point of pickup or a reasonable destination along the way.

Once you woke up you had a week to decide what to do. They would discuss with you strategies for dealing with friends and family, reentering the work force or reregistering for classes. There was an extensive library of movies. Wine and beer were available at every meal, but only up to a second glass.

It was originally the doctor’s daughter’s idea. And it wasn’t that she wanted to kill herself, really, but while on a long walk through San Francisco in the wrong shoes, she found herself on the pedestrian path of the Golden Gate Bridge thinking not that she wanted to die, but that the water looked inviting. Her feet hurt and it was a long walk home. Her father, to whom she was close, gave her a glass of scotch which, he could tell, she did not appreciate. It was a mundane reason—the end of a five-year relationship—and, though she was sure she would get over it and would go on living, she didn’t want to deal with living right now. She hadn’t slept in a month unless she went to bed very drunk, and even then she would wake up by three or four, heart beating so quickly she was sure it wouldn’t be able to take it much longer—that she was burning through her allotted number of beats, beats she wanted to save for the future.

The doctor’s grant proposal talked of societal costs and benefits. The IV drips could be bought in bulk; patients had no need for private rooms. Upon exiting the program, patients were expected to enjoy an eighty percent success rate. If successful, the remaining twenty percent were advised about methods; the program aimed to neutralize the disruptive capabilities of cathedral towers and subways tracks.

When the doctor’s daughter woke up she ate her first meal in the cafeteria like all the others. She poured herself a large glass of Malbec, a cheap bottle, as the program’s budget was not unlimited. She had hoped to have vivid memories of dreams and visits. But she just felt tired. Still, unimaginably, tired. She remembered, a long time ago, bicycling through vineyards in Mendoza. On the way home her back wheel went half-flat, not enough to run the rim on the pavement, but she could feel the drag, the pull from behind for the rest of her miles home. She thought of her feet on the pedals. She thought of her boyfriend. She sipped her wine.

Nicola DeRobertis-Theye is an MFA student at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, where she is a coordinator of the Young Writers Workshop and the fiction editor of Ecotone.

See Nicola’s list of 5 Things You Should Read tomorrow in our ongoing contributors’ series.

♦

by Mira Mattar

Perhaps it was sentimental – I can’t be sure. In any case, she was on the sofa and her eyes were welling up. Again. This girl could cry. I mean really cry. This time she was recounting the tale of a lion and a gazelle she once saw on a wildlife documentary. By some miracle of nature they had formed an alliance, a friendship – she went as far as to call it love. Anyway, this unlikely friendship continued despite biology, despite the differences between the violent beast and the delicate fawn, despite the camera crew looking on with disbelieving eyes, thinking both of the extreme profundity of what was before them and the immense ratings they would receive once this went on TV. But, and here’s where her eyes almost spilled over, eventually, she said, nature took its course. A single tear drop rolled down her cheek and the lion devoured the gazelle. She wiped the tear away and told me how much she had cried when she saw it on TV and how much she was holding back now, in this simple retelling. Part of me wanted to laugh at her. She wanted so much for the gazelle to survive, for the lion to transcend its nature, for love to preside over violence in some tiny way.

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Mira Mattar is a writer, contributing editor at Mute and 3:AM, and one third of Monster Emporium Press. Her work has appeared in The Literateur, Metazen, Two Serious Ladies and other places. She blogs at http://hermouth.blogspot.com/ Follow her at @miramattar.

See Mira’s 5 Things You Should Read in our ongoing contributors’ series.

♦

Michael Chaney

They rode out star shine early, a flashing yellow fist of power trucks, taking the fight to a warming planet. No batteries in the store, no gas at the station, and downed lines snapping the dance electric on flooded roads.

“They say the rain’s going to sleet up,” said Ray rubbing his hands like a fly.

Mailboxes up to their chins in water spied on them as Timothy shifted into third. This was supposed to be his dream job, what Charlotte demanded for the mouths they had and the one on the way. Coffee seared his lip styrofoam stiff. Charlotte’s scowl from that morning strobed in the lemony afterglow of the hazards. He had nagged her about fumes from the genny.

“We’re gonna be popsicles by the time we get there,” Ray shouted over the engine. Ray’s breath was smoke from a muzzle in the cold, dark cab, driving the main road, searching the horizon for overloads. This was the dream job he kept waking up for beside Charlotte’s dawn-cracking scowl—due penalty for the hope that shimmered his soul to mote the eye of every passing storm.

The world was weather weary and dazed. Tsunamis had tossed the Ohio Valley’s frozen leaves and served them up with stewed tornadoes on the side. Things could not have looked more dire from the cab of a power truck, but all that devastation was going to get what for from Timothy yet on the line, still listening for god’s whisper in those arcing wires and waiting for the sun.

The target repair lay smack in the middle of the red circle of the supervisor’s map—a country road alive with rippers. When they pulled up and saw the electric mayhem with their own eyes, Ray whistled long and slow. Timothy thought of Medusa’s hair. The line cursed them for the halftree that split it, making it flash whip the road. More cursing came from a gaunt man in front of a slanted porch spilling trash.

“You assholes gonna fix it or just fucking stand there making time and a half?”

Ray stepped forward, but Timothy intercepted. “We’ll secure it, sir. Please remain thirty feet away at least for your own safety.”

The man vented more. In the back of the truck by the lift, Ray filled a belt with tools. “Two words,” he muttered to Timothy: “Ram shackle.”

Timothy put on the belt and his rubber gloves. The bucket raised him as slowly as the wizard left Oz. With hot gloves on the line and the pole purring, he could see the flooded banks of the Tuscarawas beyond the bluff, women and children tripping over defeated sandbags risking their crowns to fetch a pail of water.

Ray worked the comms with another crew at the power station. By the time they had exorcised the demon snake out of the line, a woman with an orange five-gallon bucket on her head and four dirt-faced children at her hip had made her way up the bluff. The bucket lift whirred Timothy down to greet her.

“I see you got rid a’that hotwire,” she said.

Timothy nodded. “You folks should be safe now.”

A lanky girl with dyed black hair and a pout to match came for her mother’s bucket of water.

The gaunt man spat on the road near Timothy’s rubber boot. “Power back on?”

“No sir,” said Ray, taking his turn to intercept. “Two kinds a crews out this morning. One for emergencies and one for repairs. We’re the emergency crew.”

“Fuck that. You’re gonna turn my lights back on.”

“Easy does it,” said Timothy. “The repair crew will be here soon.”

“You wanna leave in one piece, you’re gonna turn my goddamn lights back on!”

“Get in the house before you get arrested,” chided the woman.

“This is bullshit,” he growled.

“We’re only following procedures,” Timothy told the woman, her eyes familiar. “We’ll restore power as soon as possible, ma’am.”

The man kicked the dirt. “Procedures, my ass. High and mighty with your jobs. I got procedures, too. Wanna see my procedures?”

Children gathered on the porch.

“I wanna see’em!” Ray barked.

“No we don’t sir, now I suggest you get back in your house. We will restore the power. Please try to remain calm until we do.”

“Let’s get outta here,” said Ray boarding the driver’s side of the cab.

The woman fingered the plaits of her hair. “I can’t stand that man,” she said to Timothy, pausing to let her eyes say something more. “I wish I had—”

Ray tapped the horn.

“I know,” Timothy said to her. “I promise you’ll get power soon.”

Her smile was pretty. He lingered long enough to think so openly, in front of her, and then mounted the cab. In the sentimental projection screen of the side mirror, the happily ever after of their gaze became smaller than frozen orbules of silver rain.

“Serves him right,” Ray said. “These fuckers are so far downgrid they won’t get power for days.”

Timothy sipped cold coffee, picturing Charlotte checking the genny for fumes. The image blurred into the woman back there in the slanted house looking for him sometimes up in the line.

Michael Chaney teaches in the English department at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Fugitive Vision (Indiana Univ. Press, 2008) and the editor of Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (Wisconsin, 2010). His writings have appeared in Molotov Cocktail, Hobo Pancakes, Not One of Us, Gone Lawn and elsewhere. He is currently working on a novel about the absurdities of the pharmaceutical industry.

See Michael’s list of 5 Things You Should Read in our ongoing contributors’ series.

William Cordeiro

On a day like any other, the young man stared into the hourglass until he saw his own reflection. The grains had finished their pyramid. It was time he traveled to the navel of the earth. He passed through the city. He gazed at the ground where ants built their towers. Wind scoured the sands and the citizens scattered inside. Their eyes fixed on unraveling clouds; the horizon was lost behind the edges of buildings. He moved on, crossing a river. The water moved, too, with the sound of its loss. Over other bridges and onward, he climbed up a rise to a vista overlooking the wilderness. The sun blazed a ridge down dunes it stunned white. Across scrubland and scruff, he surveyed a cave. A black curtain of bats emerged from its mouth. Inside, over years, the cave’s tears had turned to pillars of stone. He found the graves of the fathers, bones at the verge where the survivors or slaves had burrowed a pit. The ribs ritually dumped in its womb. The remains were laid round in a chain, anchored in shadow, whittled to points, up-thrust like canines. Their array formed a fence, beyond which he heard the deep echo of nothing. His eyes had fallen into a galling abyss darker than ink. He made his return, across mountains solid with fog. All through the valley, lush tendrils and leaves discomposed his momentum; he ate speckled eggs from the flocks of huge birds, which swooped through the air, each nib of their quills lofting loops. He knifed through the brush. The rain was incessant, like the small eyes of thieves. Then, he rode over the sea, a turbulent mirror below which self-illuminating fish trawled an unfathomed waste. Finally, he arrived at his home, an old man, on a day like any other. In every direction, he could only look back. His memory as obscure now as the journal he kept. The path itself had been trampled into grains of fine dust.

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William Cordeiro lives in Tucson, Arizona and is a currently a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell completing his dissertation on 18th century British literature. His creative work appears in many literary journals, including Crab Orchard Review, Fourteen Hills, Copper Nickel, and Harpur Palate. He is grateful for residencies from Risley Residential College, Provincetown Community Compact, Ora Lerman Trust, ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, and Petrified Forest National Park.

See William’s list of 5 Things You Should Read tomorrow in our ongoing contributors’ series.

♦

Meg O’Brien

I went to Yellowfins tonight; it was Local Talent Night. You should have been there. But you’ve crossed the bridge—literally—to the mainland, which consists of this entire United States all the way to California.

I fell in love with the first girl and her neon personality and her raps about her truck. It sounds lame and cliché, but it wasn’t. It was fantastic. Her singing voice was nice and fit her personality like Robert Frost’s poetry does not fit his. He’s an ass, but she—she deserves a name, so let’s call her Claire—is smart and kind and insightful. Her words, rhymes, claps, and snaps shoved my body through a wall. Now there’s a giant hole in the shape of me in the back of Yellowfins. They better not make me pay for it. I’ll blame it on Claire.

The typical guy-and-his-guitar duo showed up, except the guitar was a piano and he left his typical back at his loft apartment with his long hair and love songs. He sang and he spoke and he played his piano like Ben Folds did a few years ago in Blacksburg, only he didn’t break it.

He told me he could save me. Not the Jesus kind of save me. He sang he could save me “from the I’m-so-hard-to-get-but-you’ve-got-something-special unoriginal predators.” I would quote him but I can’t remember his name; it wasn’t as catchy as his lyrics. Jack—maybe? I can’t remember, but I do remember that one of his songs was sad.

He warned us, though. He said some type of warning statement followed by, “We remember—we forget. We remember—we forget. We remember—we forget.” Then the noise from the piano rose from keys and came at me like a psychedelic tidal wave of feelings. I’m not sure what feelings swirled in that wave, but there were lots.

My therapist, Sandra, and I are working on that through gestalt therapy. I’m learning to be aware of my body language because it tells me what my emotions are. It’s hard to do. Every time I realize I’m doing something with my hands or feet or anything I stop. I need to be on a reality TV show so a camera crew can follow me around. Then I can watch my body language and know what I really want.

Like what to do about my car. To break up with it or not to break up with it? That is the question. Would no one say that if it were not for Shakespeare? There’s not that much to it. It’s not like Claire’s truck raps. It’s not like Piano Guy’s lyrics.

Before he began playing this woman sat at a table in front of me and her crack was showing. I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t want to create an awkward situation. Maybe I should have said something because I’d want someone to tell me if my crack were showing.

I’m no good in those situations. You would have handled it marvelously—like a quickie. Fast and mess-free. Not that I’d know because I’ve never had a quickie, but I imagine it to be that.

You’re not my type, you know. I hate opposites, but that is what you are—the opposite of my type. You wear slightly skinny jeans and shirts that are either behind or ahead of current fashion. I’ve never been cool enough to differentiate between the two. But you leave cool beneath every footstep—like specks of glitter you can’t wash away.

You also surf and skate—on a board. Last time I tried to skateboard this kid stepped on the back of it and I fell and broke my elbow. I haven’t surfed since I was fourteen because a jellyfish stung my arm and it hurt so bad I thought it was a shark until I realized that my arm was still stinging. In my defense, I swelled and scarred from that jellyfish.

Back to the show, though. I think it made me miss my father.

I don’t like thinking about him because he is this abstract being that I don’t understand. He’s like the internet—existing somewhere and nowhere at the same time. My only memory of him is the same as the first time I saw a dead body. We were in Annapolis for his funeral. It was my first funeral. I didn’t know that you are not supposed to poke the body, but I was four. There are a lot of things you don’t know about when you’re four.

I didn’t know that you existed when I was four, but I am happy that I know about you now—I think. My body isn’t doing anything but living right now, so I’ll have to ask Sandra what that means.

But my point to all of this is that you should be here, but you’re in California. I’ve texted you twice and you responded both times, but I don’t want to be a nuisance. And, I’m sure you regret our drinks date from two Tuesdays ago because now you think I’m in love with you—and I am in love with you. That’s the worst part. But I can’t tell you that because it would seriously freak you out. If it didn’t life would be scripted and all emotions would be empty. Gestalt therapy wouldn’t exist. And I’d rather feel love for you than have you act like you love me back for the sake of an audience.

Meg O’Brien studies creative writing at UNC Wilmington; she will graduate in December. She is addicted to triple-grande-nonfat-no-whip-white mochas from Starbucks. Her favorite part of election season is Saturday Night Live.

See Meg’s 5 Things You Should Read in our ongoing contributors’ series.

♦

Christine Hennessey

Be grateful you never had kids, but wonder who will get the dog. Wonder who the dog would choose, then realize the answer is neither. Dogs are simple creatures but they give what they get and your dog was the first in the family to go on antidepressants. Just living in your house, it turns out, is a form of animal cruelty.

You should have gotten a cat.

Speak in subtext only. Argue about small things – semantics, siblings, supper – and remain silent about all else. Complain to your friends but never your parents. Go to bed late, wake up early, fight over the blankets and, even in sleep, monitor your bodies so they never graze.

You should have gotten a bigger bed.

Your therapist says the problem is communication. That you need to talk to one another, to say what you feel and open your hearts. But your therapist doesn’t know that your chest is a cavity, cavernous and black. Instead, check out all the self-help books in the library, but read none of them. A bookstore is a commitment you cannot make.

You should have gotten a different therapist.

Remember, over a bottle of cheap red wine, how it started. The first dates, the coy smiles, the sex. Remember the time you went bowling and stole the shoes, the anniversary dinner you burned and ate anyway, the day you adopted the dog, a rescue that had been neglected and abused. Pause over that word – rescue.

Remember when your parents staged an intervention during Thanksgiving dinner and made you sit outside in the freezing weather, told you to act like adults and asked why you insisted on ruining everything for everyone? Remember how you stared at each other, refused to speak, until your hands got so cold you lost feeling in your fingers.

Wonder what happened. How something so good could get so bad, how years of not paying attention can turn someone into a stranger. Finish the wine. Pet the dog. Go to bed late, wake up early.

Christine Hennessey is a teaching assistant at UNCW and her fiction has appeared in LIT, Forge, and The Molotov Cocktail.