Billy has the flu

After a Nyquil-assisted nap, maybe I'll blog. Or maybe I'll have another nap.

In the meantime, enjoy my quote of the day:

"There's no room for personal feelings in Science, Judith!"

Way to go, Ed

For monkey 0 and for the real-life Ed.

Ed felt it right as the ball left his fingers, a perfect throw, rolling straight as the path to God down the lane, lights shining off its surface. He closed his eyes to hear the sweet clatter as the ball hit true, ten pins down.

"You ever hear anything so pretty?" asked Ed, turning back to his boys.

Cecil shook his head, slurping suds from his moustache, "You're on fire tonight, Ed."

"Throwing with the angels," agreed Johnny, angling up to the ball return, his long fingers slotting into his own ball.

Throwing with the angels. Ed nodded, in a state of grace, something special tonight. He knew he had that magic 300 in his fingers, he just had to step aside almost, a simple perfection speaking through him.

"Whatever happened to that Sherry?" asked Ed. He could still remember the feel of her lips on his cheek last year, after his second 300 game, always thought it was her nominated him for the Hall of Fame in Kalamazoo. The way she looked at him sideways from behind the counter, shiny red lips in a little smile like they had a private joke, just the two of them.

"She married that Kosanke fellow," Cecil slumping back from a sorry throw, "From last year's All Star's?"

"Moved out to...Illinois, was it?" Dick rolled his head against the back of the bench, Ed guessed his shoulder was acting up again.

"That girl had real class," Ed nodded his way back to the lane, last throw of the game, head full of Sherry and her long brown hair. Even under the alley uniform you could tell she was built like one of those girls on the mud flaps, tiny little waist, hips rolling under the edge of the shirt. Too young for him, he knew, but she let him dream. Ed held his hand over the air, thought again of her breath on his cheek, her gentle voice in his ear: "Way to go, Ed."

His fingers slid into the holes like home, the ball warm and alive in his hand.

This is a good night, he thought, letting go, rolling true as the word of the Lord, the boys jumping up almost before it hit, he could hear them yelling his name, a perfect 300, stars shooting behind his eyelids, his heart swelling up, he turned around to see their faces once before tilting to the floor, Sherry's voice in his ear, calling him softly home.

"Way to go, Ed."

Paradise

This is my very late post for monkey 0's topic.

Stanley dropped the cherry from his cig down between the couch cushions. Bad scene, man. He stuck his hand down after it, quick, moved it back and forth. Nothing. Shit.

Stanley dragged himself up and yanked the cushion off the couch. No smoldering kernel, no ash, no nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing, man. Not even crumbs. The bare couch was as clean as the day the plastic came off, however many damn years ago that was. Fifty or something. Crappy old flowered couch, and he'd been eating and drinking and smoking, playing cards and getting drunk and farting and even had a chick once or twice on the thing, and there's nothing there. Clean as a baby's bottom.

That shit's fucked up, thought Stanley.

He was standing anyway, so he lifted off the other two cushions, knocking his dead cig off the coffee table, and rocking his beer where it stood. Stanley lunged for the beer, caught it off balance, spilled some on the cushionless couch, but managed to save most of it. He was about ready to take a pull when the puddle of beer on the bare seat started moving. Not like running like spilled beer should, man, but like gathering itself together and looping, brown and shiny, toward the crack, that long crack at the back of the couch.

Stanley put down the beer. How many had he had? Damn, not that many, only four or so, just a regular weekday, but damn him if that puddle wasn't slipping right into that crack, leaving the couch as clean as Sunday morning.

Stanley sat down on the coffee table, and looked at the couch. It sat there, not saying a word back to him. It was just a couch, just a raggedy-ass old couch. Maybe it was just curved funny so that everything that landed on it slid to the back. That was it. Stanley nodded once, then knelt on the couch and reached into the crack.

And he kept reaching, pushing his arm in all the way up to his shoulder, his hand waving around in fucking empty air. He yanked his arm back, fast, and pulled the couch away from the wall, knocking it against the coffee table. The beer went over again, but Stanley didn't even stop to see the liquid foaming out of the can, sliding quietly into the crack. He was busy running his hand over the back of the couch. Nothing, just the back of the couch. Wall on the other side.

Stanley stood up. He looked at his right hand, the one he'd stuck into the crack. It was warm. Warmer than his other hand. Shit, it wasn't 40 degrees out and his heat hadn't worked for a month. He was used to the cold. He held his two hands next to each other, and the right one was radiating heat.

Stanley went back around to the front of the couch and laid down on it. He pried open the crack. It was just dark down there, but something, a warm breath and a scent.

Fuck, was that flowers?

Stanley scrabbled in closer. No, it wasn't just dark, there was a glow down there, far off, like sunshine from another room, and...he pried it open just a little further...he heard a breeze, wind through palm leaves. And the scent of flowers. And...Stanley pushed his head as close as he could...ocean waves, lapping against the beach.

The far-off cry of a seagull.

Billy gets a camera

While I can never hope to be the thing of the moment, nor am I always watching, I do now (thanks to the stupendous Mr. Billy) have a camera.

I am therefore dangerous.

The father of the girl in the pink boots, for example, was - rightly, as it happens - suspicious.

I promise, this is not about to become a photoblog. I just had to show off my new toy. I'll throw in a picture now & then, but if I find it growing into an obsession (a distinct possibility), I'll find another home for the pics.

Want to see more from my day at the beach? Trundle on over to Flickr.

Billy unplugged

To my highly attractive and obviously brilliant readers: I will be away for a few days. No cell phone access, no T.V., no internet. On my return, I will repent of my lazy blogging and everything else I've neglected. Or, at least, have a few days of furious activity followed by weeks of torpor and sloth before the guilt piles up again.

I know, you can hardly wait.

Promiscuous Billy (90.18%)

I've been a bad blogger. I haven't been posting, haven't been leaving comments on the brilliant blogs of brilliant bloggers who leave comments on mine. I haven't written about things found between couch cushions yet, either.

And today I find out I'm also 90.18% slutty, thanks to the Slut-o-Meter.

For all the other things, I will mend my ways, I will.

But the sluttiness, well, I don't think I can help that.

Fake leg

"...but you know she has a fake leg."

"Fake leg? She don't have no fake leg, she lyin to you."

Some mornings, I like sharing the bus with teenagers. These two were having their conversation around me, like I wasn't even there. The boy was the one telling about the girl with the fake leg. He was small, deep black, sitting with a pudgy white boy. The skeptical girl was little, too, but you could see she was already almost a woman. She held herself very still, her dark hair carefully combed back from her face.

"No, I'm tellin you, she have a fake leg. She got run over, it got run over, and it broke."

"Psh."

"Yeah. It got run over an now it's fake."

"She lyin. You don't get no fake leg from havin your leg broke. You just get a cast, like I had last year?"

"No, it was broke, an it healed, an then it got run over."

"An I'm tellin you she lyin."

"I see her today, I'm gonna kick her in the leg."

Old Ranch Dies

Mom grew up on a ranch.

At home she held court in the bedroom, propped against pillows on the king size bed, Dad's abstract-expressionist canvas spreading across the wall above her; a wingless angel in yellows and oranges looking down. I see her most often there, in a flowered caftan, my brothers strewn around the bed talking, Mom's legs crossed neatly at the ankles. I would lie at her feet, my fingers tracing the scar that curved around her ankle bone where they put the screws in.

Summers we went to the ranch. Grandma and Grandpa kept it going well into their eighties. Mom was different there, in jeans, riding a horse, in the garden with me and my sister, picking strawberries. We'd sneak a few into our mouths along the way, heavy with summer juice.

The ranch was alive to me then, games of Marco Polo with my brothers and cousins in the yard. A nest with robin's eggs just out the window of the upstairs bunkhouse. Shucking corn in the dooryard. A hand slipped under the fluff of a hen for warm eggs. Grandma bustling around the kitchen, apron over her faded flowered dress, Grandpa chewing on a piece of hay, pulling off his work gloves before sitting down.

The ranch is gone now, lost. Sold after Grandma & Grandpa's deaths, fallen into mud and neglect. But Mom saw its death long before. She knew a different time, when the bunkhouses were full of ranch hands, Mom as a girl, with her sisters, carrying pots of food to a tableful of men. When Grandpa called her Tommy, and she pitched hay at his side.

I wish I could bring it all back - Mom and the ranch, the poplar trees and Grandpa's hands around a cow's teat, ringing milk against the metal wall of a bucket - I try, with words, but it's never enough.

Mom, maybe, was more successful.

Old Ranch Dies
Uncle Tone played Bonies with us
in the dooryard dirt, between
the poplar trees; heifers,
horses, mares in stick corrals;
collected from their disconnected
skeletons, sun dried, bird cleansed
for our farms and barns.

Uncle Tone lived that summer
in one of a row of cowhand cabins
made of wood so old it held inside
the cool and ancient light.

We watched him shave
from an enameled basin, chip-pocked,
filled with soap scum on the water, cold.

He worked the leather razor strop,
lathered up. I thought saddle soap
would serve better on his tooled face,
than the floating bloated stuff.

He applied the edge and grated
upwards, laying swath by swath;
made a map like hayfields mowed,
with only fringes top and bottom
left, for a sidewise scythe.

His face wavered in the mirror
and he turned and flung the basin
empty to the dooryard,
water arcing a continuum
where poplars stood in rows
armed against the wind--

And made a sheltering place
for owl, pivoting his face
as he spoke--

Of how the pigs got out that day,
left us clinging to the screen door
while aunties grabbed their brooms,
sweeping courage in stampeding clouds
doubling the other way--

Of how we three rode sandwiched
flank by flank upon Old Ruth,
among the cottonwoods--

How, in the grainery we slithered
in within the bins of wheat--

And how we stood inhaling leather
hanging smooth inside the saddle house,
soothed in the gloom of the light.

Uncle Tone could swing a lariat
while headlong galloping the hills,
could bounce it, bellied out against
the wind, that spoke of white-eyed
panic from the day that Golden Racket
kicked his stall apart, reared
and neighed his way out,
splintering the fence.

Uncle Tone played Bonies with us
in the dooryard dirt. Now he's moving on.
His skeleton is in its mound--white bones
are disconnecting, making
bonies, underground.

"We'll be home soon"

"...a relief." Rico was talking out loud, but he didn't think anyone heard him, their feet moving around his head, shouting somewhere far above him, Rico couldn't understand what, but it didn't matter, what Marie had said was right, everything was going to be okay.

Marie had been talking him through the whole thing, getting on the plane and the drink service, all of it, "We're starting to land," she'd said, "just twenty minutes and we'll be on the ground," she seemed to think he was nervous, but it was Marie who was scared when she found out he'd missed his dose this morning. Rico was just rolling back, away from all the noise and colors and realness, like a camera dollying back from the action, and it was turning into a movie, a dream, Rico just sitting back where it was safe and quiet, watching himself bouncing his knees, bumping them up against the tray table, watching his shoulders twitch inside his new blue shirt.

"We just have to get through customs ... We're going to be home soon, and everything will be all right," Marie had her hand over his while they stood, stooping, at their seat, watching the other passengers bunch up in the aisle.

From his far-off spot, Rico saw one of the passengers - the guy with wet strings of hair pulled over the top of his head - look hard at Rico, he was looking at him and thinking Terrorist, Rico could smell it, he smelled what the bald guy was thinking, he looked at Rico and saw a terrorist.

Rico moved his backpack around to his front, it made him feel safer from the man who saw a terrorist, it made him feel strong, he could lift his arms out to the side and look down at it, it looked good, it looked powerful. It looked like it could be real, could be dangerous, could be a bomb.

The man moved his head, jerking it to the side. Rico watched himself flinch back, watched himself break for the aisle, he could see a panic on his face, the Rico he saw had to get out, Marie left behind, he just had to get out out fast.

He didn't see the man in the Hawaiian shirt, though, not until after the shots yanked him right back inside his head, the man standing over him. Did he hear me thinking? wondered Rico. Did he hear me thinking about my backpack, how it could be a bomb?

It didn't really matter, thought Rico, blood slipping from between his lips. Everything was okay, just like Marie said. We'll be home soon.

"I should blog,"

...she said, reaching for the Spiegel catalog.

Our Lady of the Triple T

The Triple T truckstop in Tucson is Our Place, where I meet Mother Mary when I'm in the area. Mary has been a friend for twenty-five years, and though she is fully occupied with mothering now, I still see her, at eighteen, playing Joan of Arc with fire and virtue. For me, there is Jean Seberg, there is Mary, and no-one else.

The people in the Triple T belong out here. Waitress stretched thin by desert wind, wrinkles cut in deep by the sun. Most of them just as happy to be alone as with other people, odd in a private way, peculiar to the desert. A woman not much older than me with flamboyantly rumpled hair and missing teeth. A bony man curved over the counter, moustache dropping down either side of his mouth, running under his chin like chocolate milk, eyes bulging out of his head, following every little movement in the place.

It’s a truck stop that sells massages for truckers, tarantula paperweights, porcelain horses. Girl behind the counter with dyed black hair and fierce black eyeliner might provide other services, as might another girl walking through the restaurant, fried blond hair jacked up tight into a ponytail on top of her head.

A mother with a special, cultivated roll of fat right around her middle, like a careful tire bulked beneath her tight black dress, holding the hand of a girl – more than chubby, her skin filled tight as a sausage all over – cheeks pink with the effort of walking from one end of the restaurant to the other.

Later, Mr. Billy's parents take us into the hills, where Our Lady of the Sierras and a thirty-foot cross overlooks the wide, white desert, Arizona to the left, Mexico to the right.

We follow the stations of the cross up the hill to a shrine at the top. Christ hanging on a cross constructed of those white rocks popular for edging suburban driveways in the seventies.

The waterfall is half-frozen, icicles hanging from the rocks. A cactus beside the fall starts green at the base, shading up to a vibrating violet, “livid” I say, “Yosemite Sam purple,” says Mr. Billy.

There's a small nod to the locals, Our Lady of Guadalupe mural hiding a propane tank. But it is a monstrous, white, blue-eyed Virgin Mary who simpers beside the cross, obscene pink toes the size of golf balls poking out from under her dress.

I can't help thinking my own Mary, of the Triple T, would have made a better model.

Publishment

A new story of mine, "Raimondo the King," is being published in issue four of Things That Are True.

The theme of the issue was Hills, which sent me deep into a sort of sick-nostalgia centering around the Hemingway story, "Hills Like White Elephants" and that moment in my past when I first read it and how it blew my mind and made me say, "yeah, man, that's just how it is," when I really had little idea how it is.

But then I pulled my head out of my ass and wrote "Raimondo..." which has nothing to do with anything except itself.

"When you have finished screaming, place the oxygen mask over your nose and mouth and breathe normally"

A late-night hop from Tucson to Phoenix, the captain is feeling frisky. "And, finally - the aircraft's best feature - the seat cushions may be removed and used as a flotation device in the event of a water landing. Remove the cushion and place your arms through the straps as indicated. You may keep the cushion with our compliments."

The voice trickles into my consciousness like a dream, the attendant at the front moving through her ballet: oxygen mask, seatbelt, seat cushion; her glossed lips breaking open, teeth shining, I'm full of sleepy tenderness for her. She passes me, trembling with silent laughter, her shoes sinking soundlessly into the carpet.

Two rows ahead, a Mennonite woman in white net cap and long dress sits beside a college girl, tight t-shirt framing overflowing breasts, decorated with a fading drawing of a beer mug and the legend, "One more for the road." I catch them studiously looking away from each other, mutual curiosity lighting up the air between them.

The attendant announces that the front is too heavy, four people volunteer to move to the back of the plane.

I take Mr. Billy's hand as we accelerate down the runway and lift off. It's too soon, too smooth, I'm certain we can't hang in the air and take my last look at Mr. Billy's clean, calm eyes before the crash.

Somehow, we stay in flight, dragging the tail upward, it must have been the collective will, all of us brought together in this bright capsule, shooting deep into the night.

"Parade Shrugs Off Weather, Marches On"

As hard as it is to tear myself away from such gripping headlines, I am off for the weekend to the broad vistas and dusty byways of Arizona. I won't be far from Tombstone, where actors slaughter each other daily in the OK Corral, where living in the past is a way of life for a whole town. And where I may not have internet access.

Reluctantly I turn off the television, fetchingly booted, high-stepping majorettes and bloated balloons consigned to oblivion; I shoulder my bags for the journey ahead.

Scratch fiction in 10 steps

Scratch fiction can be a heady antidote to writerly malaise, lack of inspiration, or not enough time to write. If you're despairing at the pile of rewrites on your desk, you can head down to the bar for a Bukowskian binge, or you can write some scratch fiction. I'm not advocating either, necessarily, but scratch fiction won't give you a hangover, and it's not likely to make that doughy guy at the end of the bar with the greasy hair and spittle-glazed lips look charming.

Step 1: Sit in front of computer.

Step 2: Get up and pour a drink. Sit down again.

Step 3: Get up and yell to spouse (or partner, or roommate, or call a friend). Ask for a topic. If you don't want to speak to anyone, pick up a random book, open to a random page, and drop your finger on the page. The word you land on is your topic.
If you don't like the first topic given, you can ask for another.

Step 4: Type a title. This can be the topic you've been given. Or it can be something completely unrelated that the topic makes you think of. Or that the person you asked makes you think of. Maybe the way his glasses reflect the light while he is thinking of a topic makes you think of a shiny beach ball your best friend had when you were three, that you wanted more than anything in the world, so much you got into a fight with your friend and one of you ended up with a bloody nose, which makes you think about how far people will go for stuff they want, so you decide to write a thrilling short piece about a thief, or a junkie, or a concubine. Or maybe you write about two three-year-olds who get into a fight over a beach ball.

Step 5: Type for 15 minutes or so, until the piece is finished. Nope, don't go back and revise - keep typing.

Step 6: I said, keep typing.

Step 7: Stop. Take a drink. What the hell, finish your drink. You've earned it.

Step 8: Read the piece. Fix typos and/or egregious errors, if you must, but do not revise.

Step 9: Hit "publish".

Step 10: Have another drink.

Wait, I did say this wouldn't give you a hangover, right? Then make the drink fruit juice.

Mechanical difficulties

Boris' hands didn't work. No, no, this wasn't happening. He whacked his right hand against the edge of the counter to wake it up. Three people were waiting out front, the store was packed. Everyone was getting meat today, lamb cut into stew-size cubes, a good ribeye steak, a pound of lean hamburger, what was wrong with turkey? Boris wanted to know, for Thanksgiving, you were supposed to have turkey, not hamburger, what were these people thinking?

He butted his hand against the knife, but nothing, he couldn't even feel it. Was he having a heart attack? That would be just the left hand, right? And he'd feel it all down his arm, wouldn't he? This was something else, like his arms ended at the wrists, or, or like his hands were stuffed into giant mittens.

Giant mittens, he was thinking about giant mittens and the blond guy with the lamb shank was looking at his watch. You don't have to do it so dramatically, Kiddo, thought Boris, I know you're impatient, at least you have your hands.

The store was even crazier than last year, Boris could see a baby screaming over by the paté, hanging on the mother's hip, the mother serenely, obscenely oblivious, tossing paté in her cart like there was a shortage. The rich are different than you and me, Boris said to his wife almost every night as he climbed into bed smelling of a thousand slaughters, Maria yawning and turning over, They're just people, she'd say, but she didn't see them, visibly annoyed at having to do their own shopping, it all came down on Boris' head, one of the last of the live butchers, they all thought of him as their private servant.

The worst were the over-polite ones.

"Um, excuse me?" Blondie was actually tapping his toes. "Um, I don't mean to be difficult, but, um, I do have an appointment?"

Like making it a question made it all right, meant he wasn't being ordered around, wasn't a servant who belonged to anyone with the bank account to shop here.

Boris brought his hand down hard against the counter. Nothing. He looked at the growing line out front, all of them in their Ferragamos and Armani, Prada handbags and matching little dogs to stuff into them. He should climb over this counter and show them what a man was, he would roar like a bear and smash the glass into glittering bits, he could see it, could see himself standing a head above every one of these little faded people, they would scream at the sight of his massive fists...

But no. Boris let his arms hang dead at his sides. He couldn't even make a fist.

Blessed

A Tibetan Lama came to my office last week to perform a blessing.

We gathered around the long table. Lama Kunga sat at one end; in front of him were peacock feathers in an ornate holder, a censer of incense, a bell, cards that were printed with Tibetan prayers, a Play-Doh container. The Play-Doh didn't look all that out of place, sporting the same saturated colors the Lama wore, clean and bright.

He gave us a little background about the ceremony, instructed us to hold "happy family thoughts" during the prayer. He put on his glasses, held the cards so he could read them, and began to chant. He would run out of breath as he reached the end of a card, drawing in while he flipped the cards over. He is an old man, but his voice is strong, thousands of lines appearing and disappearing on his face as he squints at the cards, wrinkles up his nose to adjust his glasses. The chant continued, and his breaths became heavier, he would draw in through his teeth, noisily; the hands holding the cards were the hands of a much younger man, small, unlined, smooth. He lifted a bell, ringing it at intervals, the chant winding down the table, out onto the street, into the afternoon.

The chant finished, he stood and handed one of my colleagues the censer, telling him to swing it back and forth, handing the peacock feathers to another. He led us like ducks through the office. The holder for the peacock feathers also held water, and he would pull out the feathers and splash a drop of water in each room, on each desk.

It was much like the blessing ceremonies led by Kumus in Hawai'i, the chant, the water, the duckling procession from room to room.

Afterward, he showed me the charcoal held in the Play-Doh can. For purification? I asked. He nodded, eyes wrinkling up with his smile.

I told him my ancestors, Native Americans, would burn sage for the same purpose. He nodded and pulled a stick of incense from a small box.

"Smell," he said.

It smelled like sage. He smiled again, gently, and told me to keep it.

Early dark

It was already night outside when I rolled down the stairs to the street. My office is above an overpriced furniture store, and one passerby was unprepared for the spectacle. As he walked past the glowing window, he spoke, in a conversational tone to no-one:

"It's all white," like it was pulled out of him involuntarily. "Everything is white in there," he went on to explain, disappearing down the street.

I checked for evidence of a cell phone. Not even an ear bud.

But he had a point.

Gentle city, confirmed

Quigley was in town for the weekend again. More cabs. We rode like royalty through the streets, Laotian cabbie laughing amiably at everything we said. He was 20 minutes from the end of his shift and dropping us off in the posh section of town; his day was winding up neatly.

We took Q on a stairway walk, peering into people's backyards, dizzy views on both sides. To the left, rows of houses leading out to the ocean; surf's up, Mr. Billy's wishing we were out there, watching the surfers. To the right, the rows are jumbled and lost entirely, the park a vast green pelt below us, downtown further to the right, the pyramid, the Bay Bridge.

We're climbing down some new tile steps, on the first landing we pause and direct Quigley to look up. The risers make a mosaic, a sun, brilliant yellows, oranges, reds, mirrored shards sparkling along its rays.

At the next landing, we look up again. A moon against a deep lapis blue. A little girl hops up the steps to the top, hangs on the handrail. "It makes a picture," she says, "it has names on it!"

Names of the people who contributed, in one way or another. Chuck and Celia. Gomes. Hu. Jackson. Painted inside the stars. A doctor's name on a bat, flying across the bottom of the sky.

At the next landing, the blue narrows between two mountains. Sky and earth. Birds and animals carrying names. The landing below that, a river; below that, the river empties into the ocean.

At the bottom, we would like to stand and admire, but there are three women gathered there, two elderly and one middle-aged. The first, and youngest, in a loud voice: "I mean, sure, the stairs are great, but the traffic, people slowing down to look, and the bus. I told them, sure, they could do it, but just paint a red curb here, but did they listen? I mean, this is a narrow street, and you can't believe how noisy the bus is..."

We move away from her, a bus going by.

Quigley has a way of drawing out strangers, asking questions in a completely open manner, irresistible. Our Pakistani cabbie at the end of the night has been in San Francisco for three years, driving a cab since he arrived. Q wants to know about his worst experiences, the scariest. Our cabbie shows his eyes in the rearview mirror. "Nothing all that scary," he says. We press him, Really? we want to know, "No, really. Some interesting people, yes, at Castro & Market, but this is a friendly city." He goes on to tell us that he married a woman from here. You see, Quigley, it isn't just us, just a visitor's experience. It's the city.

Cat food

Say something clever, Marjorie. Say something clever and maybe the nice man with the clean fingernails and the suit that looks like it might have been pressed this morning will buy you a drink.

Marjorie shifted on her barstool and opened her mouth, then closed it.

You're never clever when you need to be, are you? In three hours the perfect line will come to you, it'll wake you up when you're sleeping - alone - when you're fast asleep it'll wake you up, and it'll be too late then. This guy's already looking at his watch, could be a nice watch, hard to tell from over here, he's going to finish his drink and leave, and you'll go home alone tonight and every other night for the rest of your miserable life, you'll be wearing brown skirts and orthopedic shoes in just a few years, opening cans of food for your million and two cats, one of Those, old women in cardigans with hand-crocheted TV cozies and giant doilies for the kitchen table, house smelling of cat pee and Whiskas.

No, there's something else out there, and it's not this little man, there's something else, maybe if I just put down my drink and get up, it's right on the other side of the door. Just once, Marjorie, put down the drink, and step outside.

Marjorie set the drink carefully on the bar. More than half of it was left, and it was good gin. She spread her hand on the padded edge of the bar, red nails shining wet, chipped on the second finger, she couldn't remember when she'd done that. She lifted herself from the stool, slowly, like the floor might shift under her, stood, smoothing the front of her dress before walking for the door.

The man in the suit looked up as she passed, wondering if she said something, sure he'd missed something important, what did she say? but she was already at the door, already pulling it open.

Here it is, Marjorie, you're doing it, there's something different already, it isn't daytime, is it? but daylight is pushing out from behind the door, she could almost feel it, leaning on the door, it's Day out there, not the evening of the day she left, but Day somewhere else, the light like a nuclear blast, like the face of God, step out into the day, Marjorie, you were right, this is it, she could feel the heat all the way in to her bones, and she stepped outside.