Checking for Measles

Stephen Poleskie

a short story

I

t was the winter almost everybody in our third grade class got the measles. While this disease was constantly of concern to my young mind, I must admit that at the time I had no idea what measles looked like. Those unfortunate enough to catch it were fortunate to be allowed to stay home from school until it was gone. My mother told me that measles were hot, scratchy red sores that you got from other people. I couldn’t understand how you could catch them if the people who were sick with measles didn’t come to school—yet every day another one or two of my classmates disappeared from our homeroom.

            That was also the winter it snowed and snowed, with thick flakes that froze on my eyelids as I crunched along on my way to school. As this was before school busses were popular, and everyone had to walk, there were no days off for deep snow, even though in some places it came up to my waist.        

As it was Saturday, my best friend Beebus and I had decided to spend the day making an igloo out of the snow. I can’t remember why he was called Beebus when his name was actually Robert, but that was his nickname. It wasn’t going to be a real igloo like I had read about in my geography book. We weren’t going to carve out ice blocks and stack them on top of each other like Eskimos did. Instead, using borrowed coal shovels, we had piled up a small mountain of snow in the corner of our backyard. I call it our yard because Beebus and I lived in the same building. We shared a two story house in a rundown neighborhood, where the space between the aging structures was only wide enough for a walkway. We were on the top floor, while Beebus’ family had the apartment below. The small, fenced-off area behind the house and between the alley and a garage was common to both families. As there was a war going on, our fathers had planted Victory Gardens in a corner of the space last spring, but both of them had been called away before the beans and tomatoes were ready to be picked.

            Our first idea had been to make a snow castle. However, after struggling for most of the morning Beebus and I discovered we lacked the skills necessary to create the towers and turrets we envisioned our castle having. Besides the pile didn’t look like a castle at all, but was a natural igloo. We carved out an entrance, and then began hollowing out the inside. This was when I got into trouble.

            The problem was my mother had a clear view of the backyard from our kitchen, which was why I seldom strayed from my own small corner of the world. I heard her window rattle up, and then her voice rattled down:

            “Johnny! What are you two up to? ”

            “Just playing, Mom. . . .”

            “And what are you going to do with that pile of snow?”

            “We’re making an igloo, Mrs. Starzinski. . . .” Beebus shouted up. Being a year older than me, he was in the habit of always answering for me.

            “You’re not planning to go inside that thing . . . are you Johnny?”

            “It’s gonna be our camp,” was my unwise reply. I imagined the two of us sitting inside in the semi-darkness making up stories, and planning and scheming all sorts of things.

            “Now you listen to me . . . don’t you dare go in there. It might collapse on you, and then you’ll suffocate.”

            “Awh, Mom. . . .”

            “Don’t you awh, Mom me, Johnny. You come back in here just this minute.”

            “Awh, Mom,”I repeated in a more pleading tone.

            “Can Johnny come inside to my place to play instead?” Beebus asked, rushing to intercede on my behalf.

            “Well, okay . . . but just for a little while,” my mother compromised. Then she gave me her usual warning: “But Johnny, you’d better come when I call . . . it’s going to be getting dark soon.”

            This was how I happened to end up downstairs in Beebus’ apartment on this gray, winter late afternoon. His older sister Lilly was home alone as, besides her regular job in a sewing factory, their mother worked on Saturdays at a five and dime store in town. Their father was presently hunkered down in a damp woods in Belgium awaiting a German counterattack. According to a pin stuck in a map hung up in our kitchen, my father was more fortunate. He was at an air base in Mississippi training tail-gunners. 

            Lilly had pulled a kitchen chair up to the enameled coal stove and was warming herself in front of the open oven. The stove was kept constantly lighted, being used as a source of heat as well as for cooking. In those days we all used coal—the mine was just across the street, its dark colliery towering above our house as the slack pile towered above that.

            Lilly was in the fifth grade. I remember her now as being rather comely, although the word was not then in my vocabulary, and the word has since fallen into disuse, at least when speaking about young girls. Not that one might suffer disapprobation for using the word today, which one surely would; however, the teeny rock princesses who nowadays parade their bejeweled navels and tattooed arms up and down Main Street in the summer could hardly be referred to as comely.

            “Mommy said I should check you for measles when you got home,” Lilly announced to her brother as soon as we came inside.

            We had both taken off our boots at the door, and then our heavy coats, which we hung over the backs of chairs. I sat down. But Beebus, who had moved closer to the stove, was continuing to remove the rest of his clothes. He was already down to his long johns, which I didn’t know he wore, when he looked over at me. He gave me a self-conscious grin and then removed that last covering also.

            “Stand still!” Lilly commanded her naked brother.

            She began running her hands over Beebus’ skin, starting at the back of his neck, checking behind his ears, under his chin, working her way down his body.

            I felt out of place just sitting there observing what was going on. Lilly kept glancing over at me to see if I was watching. I looked around the room, at the calendar, the clock, the crucifix hanging on the wall, but my eyes kept returning to the activity going on between the brother and sister.

            As strange as their theater was I must admit that my main curiosity was still about the measles. If Lilly found them on Beebus I would finally see what measles looked like. But then it would be too late for me because I probably would have them too, having surely gotten them from Beebus.

            Lilly shuffled her hand around her brother’s stomach, her index finger probing his belly button. Beebus’ penis seemed to be standing up straight, and was much longer, not like the time I saw it when we peed together in the woods. Lilly took hold of the knobby thing, bending it back, checking the underside, running her other hand around his testicles. Lifting up the whole set, she bent her head down low to give each item a closer inspection, her fingers smoothing the pale skin. The examination of Beebus’ privates was taking much longer than that of his other parts. I was sure she must have discovered something.

            Suddenly I felt very hot in my own crotch. Oh my God, I thought, Lilly’s found the measles, that’s where they are, there between your legs, hot, itchy—I must have them too. But her hand abruptly moved away from her brother’s penis. She gave a perfunctory scan to the rest of his body, which apparently was not that susceptible to measles. His feet were ignored completely.

            “You’re okay,” Lilly announced decisively. “I found no sign of measles.”

            I was relieved. Beebus started to get dressed. Lilly turned to me:

            “What about you, Johnny . . . want me to check you for measles?”

            I didn’t know what to say. I though about the hot spot between my legs, but by now it seemed to have gone away.

            “My mother checked me this morning,” I lied.

            “Okay,” Lilly said. “But I think now you boys had better check me.”

            That said she began unfastening the front of her dress. It was the kind of frock that no young girl would wear these days, and not too popular back then either, brightly printed cotton with a floral pattern, loose, with buttons down the front. It had probably been handed down to Lilly from her mother.

            Now I must admit until Beebus had taken off his clothes in front of me, I had never seen anyone naked but myself. And I had not actually even seen myself as the only mirror in the bathroom, where I got undressed, was high over the sink.

            Lilly finished draping her clothes over the chair by the stove and then turned around to us—completely naked.

            “Come over here, Johnny, and examine me,” she commanded.

            As I approached her bare body, I could feel the heat growing between my legs again. Or was it just the warmth from the coal stove?

            My eyes were immediately drawn to that place where girls were supposed to be different. I blinked in confusion. There was nothing there. Where Lilly’s penis and testicles should be was only a fleshy slot that kind of looked like where you put the money in a soda machine. I just stared.

            “Well don’t just stand there . . . come on, examine me.”

            “Johnnnyyy!!!”

            I heard the cry thrown outside from the kitchen upstairs. It echoed off the garage, and then rattled on Beebus’s window.

            “Johnnnnnyyyy!!!!!” The cry repeated, louder, longer. I knew there would be one more.

            Back then we didn’t have cell phones. We didn’t even have any telephone in our apartment, nor did Beebus. When my mother wanted to call the doctor she had to go to the grocery store on the corner and use the pay phone in the back by the boxes, where the butcher didn’t sprinkle sawdust on the floor.

            All the mother’s shouted out the window for their children. I still remember the different sound of the calls. Grant, was a loud bark; Billy, a shrill note that went down on the end; Leon, a kind of bubbly noise; and the two syllables of Beebus sailed out like insects escaping a hive.

            By some unwritten agreement there were always three calls, no more, no less. If you didn’t respond by the third call you were in big trouble, and usually caught it when you finally did come home. If you were too far away to hear, which you shouldn’t have been, someone often responded for you, or “told on you” as in: “I think I seen him with some of the other boys down by the colliery, Mrs. S. . . .”

            “JJJOOOOOHHHHHNNNNNYYYY!!!!!!”

            It was my third call.

            “Coming, Ma!!!!!!!” I yelled up at the ceiling. “I gotta go now. . . .” I said to Beebus and Lilly.

            “Hurry on home, momma’s boy,” the naked Lilly mocked as I headed out the door. “Beebus will examine me.”

            As I slowly climbed the steep stairs to our apartment, my young mind pondered the muddled events of the past hour. I suspected Lilly imagined her fun to be perfectly harmless. What did I know then of the pleasures of the flesh and carnal life. The whole business seemed blurred, as cloudy as the gray afternoon. Lilly’s strange and suggestive maneuvering had offered me no meaning. While it was true that a great mystery had been revealed to my eyes, my first vision of the opposite sex, something that I would never forget, I still didn’t know what measles looked like.

*  *  * 

Stephen Poleskie’s writing has appeared in journals in Australia, Czech Republic, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, the Philippines, and the UK, as well as in the USA, and in the anthologies The Book of Love, (W.W. Norton) and Being Human, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  He has published seven novels. Poleskie has taught at a number of schools, including: The School of Visual Arts, NYC, the University of California/Berkeley and Cornell University, and been a resident at the American Academy in Rome. He currently lives in Ithaca, NY, with his wife the novelist Jeanne Mackin.

Website: www.StephenPoleskie.com

*   *   *

Debra Dolinski, artist

The artist with one of her digital artworks
photo by Ottavio Sosio

Thoughts On My Work
Debra Dolinski

I

 remember a wall, it was morning; I can’t have been more than 5 or 6. The white surface was scattered with a pattern in cobalt and purple, reflected shadows from the dogwood in bloom outside my bedroom window.  Walls, walls coming together, corners of the room. Crying for hours in the corner at nursery school. Out and in.

Those were my obsessions then, my themes now. Out: the sky: endless, limitless, freedom.  In: shadows, neither dark nor light - ambiguous; doubts.

When I was angry as a child I’d paint flowers. When I finally had a room of my own (my last year at Cornell, summer session) I found light. I’d set objects on a windowsill and paint them. The object didn’t matter: an egg crate; an onion, slightly dented and with the green sprout pointing, it was the sculpted light, carving things up. In fact, later a friend would say your work that year was like a salami, just cutting up slices. I had a show at Cornell of that work and a painting was bought by a collector - a trustee’s wife. It seemed like success.

Later, much later I was already living in Italy - eternal travels. As my daughter was born I was always looking at the sky, the abstract of the clouds, the breathtaking beauty that seemed to mirror the miracle that had occurred in my life. I started “sky diary”, a daily record of the sky, marking the compass direction and the time and location. As my second daughter was born this became my hedge against not working. I would do a sky each day, as necessary in those years as a prayer.

In winter my gaze would turn inward. I would stare at white walls, fixate until they became color. I would paint the subtle mutations of dark and light, thin layers of color one over the other like petals. Later still, when stretching canvases and working 60‘s big no longer seemed my scale, I started photography. I would record the subtle changes on white walls from one hour to the next, the same crack, the same corner of existence. Like Robert Smithson wrote “look closely at a crack in the wall and it might as well be the Grand Canyon”. (Robert Smithson; The Collected Writings). I’m still there and I’m still outside: in and out, light and dark with all the mystery.

*   *   *

Debra Dolinski, born in Boston 1950, started her artistic studies at the Boston Museum School

when she was still in elementary school. A summer stage at Columbia University with Steven Greene and Alan Kaprow was seminal in enrolling in the school of Art and Architecture at Cornell University where she studied with Steve Poleskie, graduating in 1972. In the same year she moved to Europe, initially for art related travels (which she has not finished) and continues to travel from her base in Italy. In her first years abroad she became a member of the Swiss artistic group “Movimento  22” joining in many group shows held in prominent Swiss museums. She continued her education at the Brera Academy, Milan under the guidance of Luigi Veronesi  spending several years concentrating on color theory. Numerous one person shows ranging from New York to Lugano, Como, Monza, Cantù and Milano. Paul Guidicelli, Franco Passoni, Elena di Raddo, and Stefania Carrozzini have reviewed her work. Debra lives in Como where she has her studio and continues creative art laboratories for children both in public schools and privately.

You can learn more about Debra's digital artworks on her web site:  www.debradolinski.it

 *   *   *

The Art of Dennis Hopper

Mike Foldes

I see Dennis Hopper's art collection is scheduled for auction at Christie’s.

I wonder if anyone dressed in blue velvet will ride in on a Harley,

and if she does, will she also wear a clear plastic mask hooked up

to a canister of nitrous oxide slung over her shoulder, and will she also have

a bandoleer of poppers to snap under the noses of climaxing bidders?

Dennis, old man, you were indeed the bad boy, you and James,

and Sal and Peter and Jack. Will there ever be another your equal

for suburban anarchist youths to model themselves after – even as they,

like you, become aging hipsters?  One by one the old guard

is replaced by the new, but not all will be survivors, as you were,

to finally find yourself hawking financially sound Ameriprise investments 

to septuagenarian peers, an irony sharp enough to cut through Rothko,

Rivers, Rauschenberg and other radical contemporaries you lived with

in your head and on your walls. So, Hopper’s collection is up for grabs.
That’s what happens, you know, the great works, the enduring ones,

just go shuffling about, house to house, room to room, wall to wall

at the will of the money changers. But at this stage of the game,

where hangs the art of Dennis Hopper is not in the living room,

but in that room for living -- not to be traded off for anything.

*   *   *

Mike Foldes is the founder and managing editor of Ragazine, an online literary magazine.

editor@ ragazine.cc 
http://ragazine.cc
ragazinecc/Twitter
ragazineccblogging@blogspot.com
Join Mike on MySpace & Facebook
Mike is also the author of Sleeping Dogs, A true story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping
Download at www.Smashwords.Com and www.Amazon.Com
Purchase the paperback at www.splitoakpress.com

*   *   *

Review: A Lady of Good Family

A novel by Jeanne Mackin
NAL/Penguin 2 June 2015

A Lady of Good Family is a magical novel about the power of place and how one American woman of the gilded age, Beatrix Farrand, devoted her life to gardens that can inspire,  restore and renew.  A wealthy and privileged woman, niece of Edith Wharton and connected to some of the most powerful people in 19th and early 20th century America, Beatrix turned her back on convention and other people's expectations of what and how ladies should live, to became our first female professional landscape designer. But what did she give up in the process? Mackin's novel is playful and romantic, full of insights about human relationships and the importance of creation.  It's a fun read, and a thoughtful one.

*   *   *

available online: http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Good-Family-Novel-ebook/dp/B00OQRL57U/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1&qid=1433293389

Naked Sunset

Sreemanti Sengupta

T

hat morning was different. My eyes felt locked in a cage of dreams. And the bed was floating in ill smelling semen. I tried to remember last night. In Paris, I was with San Tiago the street artist who was travelling with me from motel to motel. My life came back to me in bits and pieces of flesh that I feed the stray dogs on the beaches of Orissa. I remembered the lady who stared hard through her party mask and said how inappropriate it was for a late Hippie to turn up for a book launch. The laugh I laughed walked back to my senses, like a dancer in the Middle East, teasing me to massage her backside. Or was it the front? I cannot recall. The backs and fronts and ins and outs collide and converge and push up like a ball of vomit that’s uneasily trapped in me for centuries. Very soon a laugh escapes as the vision of a Punjabi wedding hall, the one I sneaked into one hungry night in Ludhiana. The mountains of food were hallucinogenic..and soon they were nothing more than tits and asses and buttholes that people lined up to eat.

San Tiago, like many other men looking for exotic flowers that bloom in dangerous swathes of forests, asked me for marriage. The joint almost burnt into my fingers when I told him off. I told him I was getting fat and I was squinted, I was too vain and too beautiful, too free and too much of everything. That he was a street painter, and that all his work was trampled over by cars and feet and pissed on by dogs. He told me about Beauty and Art. About the inky black roads that lead everywhere and his Madonnas emerging aka thrusting out like pelvic bones from the cosmopolitan consciousness. “It is not about how many people stop and look, it is how much they are disturbed by a nonsensical burst of colour out of the corner of their eyes. It is like the fly that you cannot kill.”

My throat was parched for the want of Darjeeling tea. I rolled over and Darjeeling appeared as I had first seen it, emerging like a comely bride from the windows of a chugging train. The explosion of green at my window had probably inebriated the little me. I could hear Ma coaxing me to eat the bread and hard boiled egg. I simply watched, a sandwich uncouthly stuffed in my mouth. Darjeeling emerged in intolerably green tea estates past my window. I even waved to some Kanchis but no one waved back. Later in Geography, I learnt they were intent on plucking two-leaves-and-a-bud.

.

As a child and often afterwards, I have been confused about vacations. I had a strong urge to jump and run in the green fields that the train was carelessly cutting through, towards the horrible definitude of a vacation. I watched the lapis lazuli sky over the fields and wondered where colours came from, I almost stretched out my hand to catch the wings of the flying stork. Soon I would be itching to take a vacation from vacations.

Teetering on the thin railings of a balcony somewhere in Mumbai, my drunk mind sang a poem to me. Rosa was clasping my hand, equally drunk. We had decided minutes back that we would commit a grand suicide, for we were pained by the terrorist bombings in Mumbai, that the little boys who were playing with red balloons on the beach, now had their brains spattered on the sands. Rosa didn’t know much, understood less. It was a blessing I told her. She had told me not to die. I took breaks from puking out stale chicken kebab and demanded an answer. “Don’t you see green fields that rush by a chugging train? Don’t you see white sea gulls floating over the blue foaming ocean? Don’t you see wild creepers shooting out of old walls like little rebellions? Don’t you see babies being born out of nowhere, growing up, marrying and producing more babies?”

I sneer when I think about Rosa. Rosa was the widow of a man twice her age whom she married when she was sixteen.

--“But why?”

--“Because he was the only one who did not demand a dowry.”

-Why did you conceive so early?

-Because people started saying I was late.

I remember people looking at me queerly when I hung around with Rosa. They thought it weird that girl from a respectable family to be spending so much time with a brown uneducated widow from a remote Maharashtrian village. I gave a damn of course and suffered secretly. I suffered when there wasn’t a single soul to pass me a glass of water when my body was burning at one hundred and four degrees.

Rosa often told me of her village.

-My husband never beat me.

-Hmm

-There are homes where the man just walks off one morning and returns with a wife. A man lives with as many as five wives in our village and beats them all.

-Uh Huh

- Our neighborhood is too noisy, with children and women squabbling. The men mostly snore after a bout of country liquor.

I adore the ocean. I can sit at its fringes and think about Rosa’s village, about how children are produced like steel billets. How women are forced to behave like conveyor belts of babies spilling over on soiled sheets in soiled hospitals. How my grandmother had dropped one of her fifteen siblings accidentally. She was little and excited when she heard the hawker calling out wares. In her rush, she had placed the new born too near the edge of the bed. It had rolled over, fallen and died after breaking a hip bone. Nobody cared, there were fourteen others, and soon the mother would bring more.

San Tiago tells me I am too vain for my ideals. I am as common as the strip dancers at the streetside dance bars and as exotic as Caribbean folk music

.

I get up naked and strut around the dingy room. It seems that for years I have been travelling from dream to dream, where one opens gates to the next. I cannot find my way back. I push my head outside the window and immediately the eve-teasers start cheering from below. I turn and look down at my cleavage and spare them a smile. Poor, Poor desires!

It is the lull before great storm. The sun is about to set on a breathless landscape. I smell the tense air, anticipating, hoping against hope. The horizon turns crimson in minutes, a beautiful calm drapes over the high-rises beyond.

In moments, the storm will arrive.

When I was in school in that village of mine, in the poverty that sucked away dreams like an octopus wrapping tentacles around his victim, I sat near the window, and suddenly the mathematical tables etched with white powdery chalk on the black slate grown old and weary with overuse, the sensation of the straw mat tickling me under the skirt Ma had patched up in several torn places, my hair, grown a straggly length just touching the shoulders, beating lightly with the wind, the heat and the salt of teenage skins all repeating after the teacher like tightly railed tracks. I sensed a remote storm building up somewhere, a storm that resembled hundred years of pent up desires of a squadron of soldiers sent to fight some war in Siberia. Back when I wasn’t sure what desire meant. Back when I didn’t know what any of this meant. This, me, here, sensing everything letting go, melting, dissolving, into a force beyond. Another time I had lost consciousness, staring into the village pond, feeding the giant fishes and watching the ripples. The village doctor pronounced that the spirits had possessed me. I was a cursed child. I felt a giggle escape me when I saw Ma crying about how am doomed to be an old unmarried maid. Who is going to take the hands of a poor dark mad girl?

San Tiago and Rosa do not believe me when I say I was born in a village. That I made my way to the world.

-Your skin is too bright. You don’t smell of the earth.

One of my early lovers complained that my body smelt of endings and death. I had smiled and pulled him close and switched off the glaring light that seemed to peel off layers of my epidermis and distribute a disturbing fragrance everywhere. I could not of course tell him the truth. I am free because I keep running away. Each escape piling up a like small death in me, like deceased embryos bursting at the pores of my skin.

When I tell San Tiago of my lovers, he merely turns his face and plays the flute. He says one day he shall make a portrait of me at Times Square and then I’ll have no way of escaping him! “The magic is in spontaneity. Streets and Traffic do not give you preparation..time is as scant as in the preparation of a Revolution. A revolution can begin with a baby’s cry in some remote, inaccessible corner of this planet..it gathers mass like a skeleton gathering flesh..it is the virility of a single voice that strings together an entire generation..”

It is one of those days when the bed is unmade and the room stinks of cheap wine. It is humid enough to trace beads of silvery sweat that balance themselves like ballerinas on my eyelashes. The sun is down and the darkness is screeching with crickets. Outside, the ice cream vendor puts me in a daze..

I screaam..I screaam....I screaam

*   *   * 

Sreemanti Sengupta enjoys a world of divided minds. She is an advertising copywriter from Kolkata, India, a poet, a struggling author, an e-mag editor, an elocutionist, previously published in various online journals such as Mad Swirl, Paragraph Planet, Certain Circuits, Bare Hands Poetry, Ppigpen and more including print anthologies in both English and her vernacular Bangla. She founded and runs The Odd Magazine celebrating alternate creativity herewww.theoddmagazine.wix.com/thisisodd and blogs atwww.weareideating.wordpress.com




*   *   *

A Paul West Excerpt

from
Red in Tooth and Claw
a novel by Paul West
published by Onager Editions, 2015

Yet what he had hoped, finally, to register with tender completeness, and then to set it up before his mind’s eye as a Polish Palladium—an improvised sacred object having the power to preserve a city or a country like the famous statue of Pallas Athene that protected Troy—was still there in his head, frozen among the engrams along with the classical learning he had brought into play at Embassy cocktail parties, with a Latin tag for this, a Greek one for that. Major Epigram, as they nicknamed him, had wished to see, and, having seen, had convinced himself that the seen was never lost. Let someone witness a thing, he’d taught himself, and it endures: there is no time, no loss, no waste. So, just the same as two weeks earlier, people still trudged from farm to farm, bartering honey for apples, balls of whitewash for birch-bark strips from which to make sandals. Stranded at the tilt like outsize palm-leaf crosses from an ancient Easter, the windmills had no motion. Sagging at their long middles, the milk wagons had nowhere to go, and they sagged from long use, from being overloaded in days gone by, not in any way from the weight of empty churns. Like propped-up coffins with little roofs, the beehives seemed to invite new tenants in. Go anywhere, get out of the way, were the messages everyone was whispering, but no one knew what to do first, and so clusters of farmers and farmhands dawdled about in the landscape, guessing and arguing, and only in Kazimierz-like places were the prudent busily pasting brown paper over their windows to save the glass from blast, the occupants from splinters. The banks and schools were closed, but the stores were open, though with little to sell: no sugar or liquor, no canned goods, just the pots, pans, files, vises, pincers, choppers, and shovels pictured outside on a placard for the benefit of the illiterate, whose visual abstractions had more flesh and blood, or at least more shovelly shovels, than the verbal ones of their betters did. WODA SODOWA read the sign on the soda water stand on the edge of the closed market, but there was none to sell. The pharmacies were out of bandages and iodine. Repaired clocks went uncollected while time dilated or shrank. And those impulsive ones who had fled, moving so as to be on the go at any rate rather than knowing exactly where to go, trundled with them barrels of salt herrings, heirloom pictures of Christ gazing blankly at some conifers (a standard icon), and chickens in improvised wire coops. The departing trains, all headed east or southeast, toward ghoulish Mother Russia, would never return, and folks who stayed behind slur-chanted the shallow hair-split last-ditch litany "With the Germans we may lose our freedom, but with the Russians we shall lose our souls." The Germans were everywhere, the rumor said, but they had not yet reached that disk of magical ocher and russet landscape, or were hovering at its perimeter, joking harshly and goose-stepping in circles, as if loath to interfere. It looked so German anyway.

        Nourished by a mind’s eye full of this drawn-out idyll, Major Czimanski, after irritably hunting through the drawers and walk-in closets of the rented town-house on Pulawy Street, hung his suits in heavy parcels, done up with cord, on the crossbar of the bicycle he had found out back, unoiled and dusty and upside-down as if ready for conversion to another purpose such as spinning or water-pumping. "Perhaps," he said, "they’re not all mine, but no one will ever come back, not for their suits. I’m sure the owners wouldn’t mind."

        "They won’t even know," his wife told him distantly, as if accomplishing hard mental arithmetic. "Ever. If it doesn’t work, bring them back. We’ll find a use. Oh for a car. Will you just look at all this stuff they left behind." She motioned at an untidy array on the couch of books, silverware, cut glass, gramophone records, trumpets and clarinets. As if a high-living musical quintet had left in a hurry. "Remember, Ludwik, he has the gold already." She twanged the bell for him as, rather like someone leaving a funeral or a hospital waiting room, he wheeled the bicycle away, a display frame with wheels, the strung-up parcels like dun-plumaged headless birds. Minus his tunic and cap, he looked to her rather ordinary, a well-groomed repairman removing his equipment from the premises after fixing the elephantine trumpeting noise the bathroom pipes made when the faucets were turned full on. "What?" he called behind him, thinking she had spoken, and almost collided at the gate with two Jews walking backward in front of a spinning wheel on a small cart and tugging hemp from their waist bags, twisting it deftly into strands and feeding it to the wheel run by a third man in a cloth cap too big for any skull. At these three he stared, amazed by the somnambulism of their toil, three of the doomed anxious to earn their keep even while backing into the inferno. Spinning the thread of destiny, he noted with a classical smile: Now which of these three Fates is the one who snips? The bicycle fell into line behind the spinning wheel on the cart as if not he but some more appropriate force were moving it along, shoddy bargain with an even shoddier destiny, and his mother’s disdainful shade hectoring him with "Is this you?" and his father’s cannonade: "Servants do our wheeling for us, and that is not an exhortation to ride the foolish thing."

        Ludwik Czimanski advanced with his mind shut off, reaching the edge of town after ten minutes, glad that the trio of hemp spinners had provided him with a rhythm to walk by, but gladder still they had gone the other way. Now he stared, pausing, at rye-thatched haystack covers, like the roofs of an African kraal. This year of years they will stay empty. Farther along, hemp was soaking in the ditch along the roadside, and bundles of it lay unattended on the bank. Overtaking him with smothered gurgles, half a dozen sprightly men in cloth caps that might have come from the same box on the same day (uniform buff twill) forged on ahead with bundles of coat hangers slung over their backs and half a dozen in each hand as if in search of an army eager to strip naked and air their battle clothes. It’s all half-dozens, he told himself sardonically, and looked at their hands, half-expecting each to have a sixth finger. Or did they take six steps and then halt, as if walking to bars in music?

         What sharpened his deep-buried, deliberately minified distress, after he turned into a lane flanked with crude houses for sale, perched on diagonal brackets built into the walls halfway between the ground and the roof. Bigger coffins, arranged on carefully folded sacking spread over pairs of trestles, he just blinked at heartlessly, but the little ones dismayed him, tugging at his mind with a pertinence too keen to bear. He no sooner passed one set of them than he saw another, planed and sanded but still the post-mortem minimum, just enough in the shade from the eaves not to reflect sunlight. Prophetic greed, his mind told the lane. They might need them for firewood before the week is out. Cold always by the end of this month.

        Fifteen minutes later, in a black sheepskin hat and a holed plaid shirt encrusted with a complete range of droppings from egg and mustard to whitewash and manure, Gnonka the pig-farmer untied the cords and began to finger the five suits, one with satin lapels, one of a tweed perfumed with Baltic heather, a third with two vests of which one was velvet with maroon pearl buttons, while the other two were ordinary and a bit worn at the cuffs and elbows: these two culled from the house, not his own at all, and certainly not his taste, which did not run to tree-bark brown.

*   *   *

PAUL WEST is the author of 50 books. He has received awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Lannan Prize for Fiction and the Halperin-Kaminsky Prize. He was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government. He has also been a runner-up for the National Book Circle Award and the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

*   *   *

Neighborly

Sasha Thurmond

S

unday morning, my horse Tigere', and my dog Tuxedo began snorting and barking at some monster in the woods. Clad in my pajamas, I dashed outside looking like a toothless, wreck of the Hesperas.Two men were marking off boundary lines with neon pink, plastic tape that flapped ferociously in the high winds.

The befuddled men looked up quizzically when I queried "Whad up ?" Recognizing the younger one, I blurted out "I know you, you're the one who cost me $1,000 when I first moved here!"

"Oh, Yea,  you're the one who backed your truck into my SUV !"

Silently I thought to myself that this was still debatable. It transpired eleven years ago on a moonless evening at the dimly lit parking lot of our local variety store. While I was in the store, my new neighbor parked perpendicular to the rear of my battered old farm truck .As I backed up eagerly to return home, I heard the old familiar and sickening CRUNCH!! "Ugh......not THAT” ...dollar signs flashing in my stressed out head and flying out of my pockets. The thought hit me that maybe I shouldn't have moved here after all. I was determined to make it on my own, but I always got miserably lost attempting to find my way home, and my whole world was discombobulated. Enough of that thought....I should have fought it. I decided to go the whole nine yards, and barraged them with questions. 

"Are you getting ready to build? Where are you placing your house? Are you developing all ten acres? Do you have horses?"

The father suddenly began speaking in Spanish as if he didn't understand me anymore.so I say, “Cuando empieza?" or something like that.

He flailed his arms and shouted,"Pronto!"

I smiled and slowly did a pirouette, followed by a peacock strut back home to finish my Sunday morning brunch, smugly hoping that my mission was accomplished. No way in Hell would my neighbor ever want to build his house close to mine.

*   *   *

Sasha Thurmond is a graduate of the Cornell University MFA program where she majored in Printmaking. She lives on a farm in South Carolina with her horse and other animals, and sometimes finds time to make art or write stories.

*   *   *

photo by Sasha Thurmond