Walk In The Dark

By Alison Baker

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

–  Tom Stoppard

“Shock and awe!” Richard shouts. He whacks the chicken breast with the rolling pin again and again, until the breast is as thin as a fat crepe, as thin as the brim of a baseball cap, as flat and thin as the one comic book he ever owned, The Twelve Dancing Princesses.

The shouting is just for effect. He wants to know what it feels like. But the chicken will be excellent.

“I want a useful pet,” Richard says, standing in front of the wood stove, his hands in the front pockets of his pale jeans. “Not one of these fawning things.” He gazes at the hopeful retriever stretched on the rug in front of him. “Raise it on my own grass, get it professionally whacked and butchered, and keep its parts in my own freezer, to last me through the winter.”

“Blue ribbon at the county fair?” Wendell asks.

“Absodamnlutely,” Richard says, and his glasses rise slightly on the bridge of his nose.

Watching him strut in front of the stove, Annis thinks He’s no spring chicken. Richard’s fair skin wrinkled years ago, dried up and began to fall off in small patches that leave raw wounds on his face and arms. He is one of those whose youthful freckles spread and flowed into each other, becoming one mottled mass of brown in the background of his blushes.

Richard moves slowly through the vegetables. He eyes each bin of onions, every box of artichokes shrewdly, his upper lip set ready to sneer. It is not for nothing that he worked the law for thirty years;  he has dealt with so many criminals, so many petty thieves and armed liars, that he is well aware of what percentage of humanity is out for blood. No one is going to put anything over on him in the vegetable department. He is looking for broccolini, and no one can tell him that immature broccoli is just as good.

He talks big. Sometimes he imagines that he is the most violent of men, a thick-muscled wrestler, a Green Beret, a vindictive judge with a lifetime seat on the appellate court. He imagines himself into desires and beliefs that, in reality, would never cross the threshold of his brain.  Here he is, far, far into his sixties, and still he is pretending to be what he never will be. Unsure of what he is.

Richard is walking on the logging road with Annis when her retriever comes down out of the woods holding something tucked into his mouth.  “Drop it!” Annis says sternly. The good dog lowers his head and works his muzzle, and out falls a furry gray ball, which wiggles and stretches itself back into the shape of a mole and begins to snuffle its way across the gravel.

Richard puts on his mitten and bends to pick it up. He stands with it in his hand, and it turns its pointed pink nose toward his fuzzy blue thumb. It buzzes in alarm, or perhaps to threaten, and he feels its struggling body vibrate through the leather palm of the mitten like a rapscallion nephew’s trick handshake. He steps off the side of the road and puts the mole on the ground. It moves head first into the earth, flat pink gloves swimming it into the mud, and in a few seconds it has disappeared. Richard and Annis watch the surface of the mud break and ripple as the mole tunnels its way below.

“Good rescue,” Annis says.

Richard designed the kitchen of the house where he and Eileen live. It’s an old farmhouse, but they had the kitchen gutted and rebuilt with high-quality materials and appliances. To plan it Richard spent hours in the empty barn, moving cardboard boxes around a chalked outline on the dirt floor.  He would arrange the boxes in one way and roast an imaginary wild goose, plucking and eviscerating it at a cardboard work counter, rinsing it in a cardboard sink, stuffing and trussing it on a platter he remembered from his mother’s pantry, and finally bending to place the heavy-bottomed roasting pan laden with oyster-stuffed goose into an oversized gas cardboard oven.

First he placed the false oven at waist height behind an imaginary door in the make-believe wall;  then he tried a regulation oven in a traditional stove at standard height. Finally he selected the traditional gas stove, though with an oversized oven that would accommodate two roasting pans, and therefore two wild geese, at once. Along with his talent for gourmet cooking, Richard is a man with great affection for tradition. He will bend at the waist to place his future geese in his oven just as his mother bent to place cookies and chickens and macaroni and cheese in the ovens of his youth.

Richard owns the Bible that was given to his father when he was eight. Richard is an atheist, but now and then he reads a Biblical passage or two:  he’s an educated man. Whenever he reads the Bible, though, his mind wanders;  he can’t follow the lesson, he loses track of the narrative of begats. Instead of small print on an ecru page he sees a hot October day under a clear heartbreaking sky, the hot wind wrapping the skirts of the several women around their knees, them pressing the skirts down with purse- and program-stuffed hands. The words that the minister beside the open grave speaks are whipped away in the hot wind, out of the cemetery and onto the highway into the path of a SYSCO delivery truck.

The words were about Richard’s own father, dead in that hole in the ground. The minister was a close friend of the dead father;  for more than twenty years, any Thursday night might find them in the dead man’s study, playing poker. The minister knew Richard’s father as well as anyone on God’s green earth ever knew him; Richard might have learned a lot about his father that hot October day if he only could have heard the minister’s words. The minister was weeping as he spoke, but his tears didn’t weigh down the words enough to keep the wind from sweeping them up over the split rail fence and across the asphalt to meet their own doom on the chrome grill of a trailer truck delivering prepared food.

“Richard,” Annis says. “Come on out. We’ve got a calf on the way.”

Richard drives out to Annis and Wendell’s ranch, which is eighteen miles upstream and five hundred feet higher in elevation than his place. From their living room window they can see the entire valley spread out like a diorama before them. Standing outside, waiting for Annis, Richard imagines he can see tiny Lewises and Clarks in coonskin caps paddling along the stretch of river that glistens between miniature fields of alfalfa and stands of toy ponderosa pines.

They drive a couple of miles farther up the road and park beside the pasture where the cow selected for Richard lies. Annis rolls the window down. A plume of cold mist billows in, and right behind it the sound of the cow’s screams. She closes the window again. They sit in the truck and watch the cow through binoculars. Even though Annis keeps the engine running and has the heater on full blast, Richard’s feet go numb, then begin to hurt. It rained in the night and the grass is gray with rainwater, except for the patch of flat bright green grass where the cow has been straining. Except for that flat patch, the grass stands straight up, sharp little sentinels watching the cow suffer.

“We’re going to have to pull that calf,” Annis mutters. She puts the truck in gear, but just as she starts to pull into the road the calf suddenly slides right out of the mom’s rear end, a black slithy tove in a mass of silver phlegm.

“Oh!” Richard says. It’s such a surprise and a relief.

Annis smiles at him and puts the truck back in park.

The mom cow licks and licks and licks the calf, and after another very long time – too long, Annis mutters, too long – the calf starts trying to stand up. Again and again it gets to its knees, raises one end or the other, and topples. The mother cow licks the toppled end and shoves at the reluctant end with her nose, but the calf can’t stand up.

A feeling of doom starts easing into Richard’s heart, and after a while of watching the mother try too long to lick the calf upright, he doesn’t want to watch any more.

“Annis,” he says,  “I’ve got to go.”

“It’s too big,” she says. “We’ll have to bring it in.” She puts the truck in gear again and they drive back to Richard’s car.

He gets out and watches her drive on down to the lower field where Wendell and the hired man are spreading feed for a crowd of cows with healthy calves in attendance. Then he drives home with numb feet.

Richard practiced law in a small town in northern California for more than thirty years. His practice ran the gamut from divorce to theft, extortion to murder, abandonment to wife abuse to child support and, more than once, to traffic violations. Over the course of those thirty years he raised four children, divorced his first wife, fell in love with three other women, buried his parents and his only brother, and never traveled outside of the United States. He has never even gone to Vancouver, British Columbia. He knows he’s a thin, meaningless failure of a man, forever the bantamweight he was in high school, dancing around the ring on knobbly little legs and talking too much.  He fell hard for Eileen, who left her then husband for him. They’re happy together. He has only money to offer her, though he thinks she doesn’t really understand that yet.

He can’t stop thinking about Annis.

Richard’s father was an attorney for forty-seven years. Retirement was not so fashionable, nor so affordable, in his father’s day as it is in his own. Also, his father never got tired of work. His father stayed late at the office, took on many a pro bono case, far more often than he had any moral obligation to do. He was a mild man with the same strawberry hair and speckled skin that Richard has. He had different hobbies, though:  he liked hunting for all manner of creature, birds and deer and bears. He liked swimming. In the summer, when Richard’s mother moved to their lake cabin, he would drive up there on Friday night and arrive in the dark.  When Richard was small he waited just inside the front door and heard the car turn onto the road a quarter mile away, grind up the rutted road and stop. Richard, his heart beating, heard the car door squeak, and he knew his father was getting out of the car. The door slammed, and Richard could hear his father bend to untie his wingtips. He really could hear his father’s belt being unbuckled, the buckle clinking as he stepped out of his trousers. The whisper of a shirt dropping to the ground; then silence as his father walked naked down to the lake, and maybe Richard heard the splash, felt the shock, saw the smooth ripples as his father dove into the cold black water.

Richard could hardly contain himself as he waited for his father to finish swimming. Looking back, he isn’t sure why he was so filled with excitement: every week for three months, every year for fifteen years, his father came out on summer weekends and swam before coming inside for a late supper. Maybe it was hunger:  Richard and his brother had to wait for their father before they could eat supper. It was dark, and summertime: it must have been nine o’clock at night. It was hunger that made a boy’s heart pound, made the boy shiver and hug himself and shift from foot to foot as he waited beside the closed door of the cottage.

And then his father was dripping on the porch, carrying his clothes and his weekend suitcase as he opened the door and said in his mild voice, “Naked I come among you,” just in case there was a visiting sister-in-law, or, in later years, a girlfriend of one of the boys, inside setting the table. Whoever she was, she would have been forewarned and would duck into the kitchen while Richard’s naked father, looming bright in the kerosene light, left footprints through the great room and up the stairs. He would reappear in the washed-out pants and loose undershirt that was his costume until he left again before dawn on Monday. He came downstairs in those old clothes and everyone sat down at the table and Richard could have his supper at last.

Annis and Wendell lived for a long time in the city and then when they were ready they moved to the valley. Annis used to be a nun and Wendell was a priest. The usual story. If they hadn’t told him – they manage to work it into the conversation within seven minutes of meeting any new person – Richard would never have guessed.

He’d said, “So where you from?” and she said not St. Louis but a convent in St. Louis. It’s like saying I was in prison for seven years or I am a Mormon or I was morbidly obese until I had my stomach stapled or I’m legally blind or I eat meat. No matter what the condition, a certain percentage of potential friends will take themselves out of the running when they discover a certain thing about you. I smoke will relieve you of certain friends, while I smoke dope will take care of others.

“It’s a conscious policy,” Annis told him when he’d known her long enough to ask about it. “Tell me, wouldn’t you be pissed if you’d known me for a month or a year and then suddenly I popped out with by the way, my ex-husband is God?”

Wendell tends to joke about it. “In my celibate days,” he’ll begin, and those who just met him will get ready for a funny story. Those who know him better will look at him respectfully, waiting for the nugget of truth he’s about to reveal about himself. Those who’ve known him for a long time will suppress a yawn and sneak a look at the clock on the wall.

People love Wendell, though. Richard loves him. He’s a wonderful man in many ways. He loves those cows, even though he plans their deaths before they’re even conceived. “The children he never had,” Eileen once muttered when they were watching Wendell do something to a cow, feed or brand or impregnate. But Richard didn’t think that was quite it.

On Sunday the sixteenth of March Richard and Eileen go to the corned beef supper at the Grange. They stand in line at the window and three women behind the counter heap their plates with corned beef and cabbage and potatoes and plenty of yellowish juice. “Want an onion?” Margaret Aspinall asks Richard, and he says he does.

Eileen carries her food across the room to sit with her friends from the book club and Richard sits down beside Wendell, across from Annis. Rona Barta, beside Annis, is telling everyone within earshot and beyond about her new marble counter tops.

“Deep green, marbled with silver and these absolutely gorgeous streaks of ruby red.” She might be describing what Richard, sitting across from her, sees when he looks at her, since she talks without first swallowing her bites of corned beef and cabbage. “Glossy. I’m telling you, when the sun comes in there of a morning I can’t hardly keep my eyes open. I have to wear my Ray-Bans in my own new kitchen!”  She bellows like a calving cow.

It’s so loud in the Grange Hall you have to, to let people know you’re laughing hard.

The Grange always hypes the home-made nature of their dinners, but it’s not the kind of home-made Richard grew up with. Though he suspects they do use the same potato flakes to make their mashed potatoes. But the cake is probably purchased from SYSCO. Light and melts in your mouth, as if it’s hardly there. His mother’s cakes – now those were cakes. Dense and moist and dripping with frosting, you’d eat a few bites and they would settle into some cranny at the bottom of your stomach next to the entrance to the intestine and rest there for hours afterwards. That was cake.

Rona’s husband Lloyd is the current Grand Poobah of the Grange. Richard can’t keep track of these things. There’s Grangers and Masons and Elks and the Klan and the Christian Fellowship down at the intersection, and each one has a Grand Poobah. Over time he’s learned that even egalitarian groups, like the Wymmin’s Coven and the Forest Partnership, though they purport to be all for one and one for all, they have Poobahs too. They bow to the east, bow to the west, they do the hootchy-kootchy and they hope for the best, and God, or a spirit in a fir tree, smiles down on them.

Annis is leaning across the table, telling him something. As he looks at her earnest face the light catches on the thick edges of her spectacles and suddenly he sees her as an alien creature, someone come down from a distant planet to dwell among them for a spell.

“What?” he says.

“After we fetched that calf in the truck I could hear her mom for hours,” she says.

He can hear her now, bawling in animal grief as the calf is taken away.

“It didn’t ever thrive,” Annis says. “It was too big.”

I thought his eyes were piercing, but now, close up, I see that they are pale and milky. When he first looks at something he blinks several times in rapid succession. His eyes are tucked under red-rimmed lids with sparse pink lashes, and the lids themselves are topped off with hoods, little pouches of flesh that hang from the top of his eye sockets. And at the corner of each eye are a thousand wrinkles. And in the wrinkles lies the dust of many years.

Down in town at the Manor Richard’s old mom, still alive, hands Richard a newspaper clipping headlined Pancreatic Cancer Has No Symptoms.

Dear Dr. Dan, it reads, My husband has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The doctor says he has two months to live. Why didn’t we have any warning?

“Doesn’t this sound just like me?” she says.

He looks at her over the tops of his glasses. “You have lost weight in the last year or so.”

“I can’t eat a thing,” she says.

“You always seem to have a good appetite when I take you out somewhere,” he says.

“Well, Dickie, think about it. Could it have something to do with the food? The stuff they serve here – no one wants to eat it. Great plateloads go back to the kitchen.”

“Well,” he says.  “So what do you want to do about the pancreatic cancer?”

“Nothing,” she says. “I’m ready to go.”

Eileen is a mystery to Richard. She has no idiosyncracies. No stray hairs straggle over her temples, she has almost never lost her temper in his presence, they’ve been together for years.  He’ll be out in the pasture and look down the fenceline and see her trudging along the ditch in her black Wellingtons, head down, staring at the brown dead grass that he sprayed out (against the rules) two weeks ago and seeing – how could he know what she sees? He doesn’t know.

She does have passions. Once a year she travels with her sister to shrines, retreats, birthplaces of sacred individual. They’ve gone to Jerusalem, to Tibet, to Sedona. She describes the rituals they’ve watched and joined:  baptisms, purifications, sweat lodges, exorcisms, healing ceremonies. The photographs she brings back show her and her sister drinking in bars with pilgrims and supplicants and priests.

Richard might have gone with her, if she’d asked.

Annis and Wendell don’t raise cows for a living, they just like having them, much the way some people like throwing pots. They like growing cows for other people to kill later. Really, it’s beyond Richard’s comprehension.

The year of his dead calf there is also a dwarf one, born all hunch-backed with its four legs too close together, as if it’s folded up in the middle. It sort of skips when it walks, a little hunchy black calf skipping through the straw. It doesn’t last long. There are also some giant twins that are so big they kill their mother as they get born. And once when Richard goes out to the ranch there’s a uterus hanging out the back of a cow, and though it had been funny on the TV show to see James Herriott with his entire arm thrust into a cow’s female region, making faces as her muscles heaved and rippled, Richard finds it less hilarious to see a red sac dangling from the rear end of a frightened black cow running heavily across a frosty field.

Disease, too. Always the fear of hoof and mouth. Always the specter of mad cow.

The local feds and some local critics of the federal departments that employ them – among them Lloyd Barta, the current Grand Poobah of the Grange – have spent several years planning and executing The Perfect Cut, and on a spring Saturday they invite the Community to a Demonstration Pre-Commercial Thin. With a dozen other people, Richard and Annis climb aboard a decommissioned school bus that’s been painted green and are driven past the Grange, past Annis and Wendell’s ranch, up into the mountains to the end of the paved road, then over kidney-rattling gravel for a couple of miles. The bus pulls up in front of a barn, and with much adult laughter the passengers step out.

“God what a day,” Lloyd says.

It’s clear, and the very air is blue and crisp with thin spring light. Annis and Richard follow Lloyd and the rest of the people across a damp pasture and up a path between stands of pine. Shooting stars, Dodecatheon meadia, grow beneath the pines, and here and there they’re so thick the wave of sunlit magenta hurts the eyes.

A federal employee points them out.  “Among other benefits,” she says, “the thinning has resulted in increased sunlight on the forest floor, which has produced a bumper crop of shooting stars.”

But Richard can’t be bothered to comment today. The consistency of the air, the shouting of the jays and warblers in the trees, the magenta carpet and even the motley clutch of people traipsing through the woods; everything strikes him as miraculous this morning. Walking through the woods on a spring day with a friend and a crowd of strangers, hoping that someone has found a way to save the world!  Everyone hoping that! What more could you want?  The buzz of a Pacific mole in the palm. A free-range chicken roasting in high heat. Twelve princesses emerging at midnight from under the ground to dance with twelve princes till dawn. The promise of that every night! The hope every year for a soft cool spring!

“Chee-rist,” Lloyd Barta says, falling back to walk on Annis’s left side.  “Day like this makes anyone believe in God.”

Shock and awe. The perfect cut.

– end –

Alison Baker is the author of two short story collections, Loving Wanda Beaver and How I Came West, and Why I Stayed; each was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has received several O. Henry Awards, including First Prize, and her story “Happy Hour,” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award.
Her fiction, essays and poetry also have appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, New Letters, Orion Nature Quarterly, Shenandoah, Threepenny Review, Gettysburg Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others, and in a number of anthologies. Her stories have been featured on Selected Shorts at New York’s Symphony Space and dramatized for stage in Seattle, San Francisco, and Takoma Park, Maryland.

Best Fiction is pleased to introduce her newest work, which may be her best work.

By Susan Levi Wallach

William had slept through the grinding of tires on gravel and the splash that followed, had thought the house pleasantly quiet when he woke. It was June, just before the solstice, before the pleasing warmth of morning turns into unrelenting heat and the chirping of crickets becomes a sound both insistent and dark. A lecturer in linguistic etymology, he had the summer off — his department head having omitted his courses from the summer schedule. He’d spend the time re-reading Heidegger and Curtis, maybe get back to his research on anaphoric expressions in Latin, write a proposal for an advanced seminar and present it at the next department meeting. He’d sleep late, avoid the cloying green of early day, and work into the night, enjoy the deep solitude that comes from looking out his window at the dark houses opposite, their occupants unaware. He and his wife could live for three months on her earnings, advertising agencies a better source of income than colleges anyway.

He hadn’t bothered to look for her, figured she already left for the day. She often did, earlier than he believed she had to. At first it made him feel like an intruder, the newness of his presence forcing her into a different routine. Until a few weeks ago, he’d been the one out the door, hurrying off to the drive-through and his 7:45 class. Now he was just there, thinking, as he did every morning, that he should get a fix on the day. He pulled on a pair of loose linen pants, brushed his teeth, and went into the kitchen to start the coffee. If he’d sat at the table and glanced at the backyard, he might have seen her — not her, exactly, but seen that something wasn’t right.

As it was, the pool man found her an hour later. The man started shouting; William came out to find him hopping from foot to foot on the pool deck, plucking at his hair. At first, William thought the man had seen it happen — the man was Filipino and in his excitement had reverted to what sounded like highly idiomatic and incomprehensible speech. William couldn’t understand why the man hadn’t jumped in to save her. Surely, a man who made his living cleaning pools could swim. He remembered these thoughts later, after he dove in, after he saw her underwater, her hair streaming out behind her, her hands suspended just above the steering wheel. Her mouth hung open, a fish mouth, her eyes were clouded. There was nothing to save, and it took all his control to propel himself to the surface, where he gasped and wailed, howling out his sorrow between gulps of air as the pool man held out a pole, yelled for him to grab, then pulled him up to the deck.

People and trucks cluttered the driveway and backyard the rest of the day. The fire department had to borrow a heavy-duty winch from a department three towns over. “You might want to stay inside, Mr. Mason,” one of the police officers said. “She’ll be in the car when we pull it out. Safer than trying to get her out first.” William went into the kitchen and stood by the table to watch the EMTs remove his wife’s body and put it into a black body bag. By that time, her garden border had been trampled into the mulch and there were deep muddy ruts in the lawn. Not that he’d really cared for the lawn, which was more a strip of weedy grass between the gravel parking area and the pool.

He wanted a private service, which he thought meant just him, but her family figured that “private” included them, and they assured him they all would be there. The police officer explained the need under law for an autopsy, questioned him about her state of mind, the happiness or unhappiness of their marriage, the fact that he had heard nothing, noticed nothing amiss, the coincidence of the pool man’s arrival just then, while he was at the kitchen counter drinking coffee and could run outside at the first shout. “Just protocol,” the officer told him. “I expect they’ll release the body by the end of the week.” It was Monday.

Two days later, her parents and brother arrived. “We’ll drive. Louise, Ben, and me,” Sy had said. “It will be easier that way” — though William couldn’t see how two days in a Volvo would be easier than a direct flight. The funeral would be on Friday. She would be cremated, an option William chose after he skimmed through his wife’s book of Shakespeare sonnets to find a reading for the service and found one that began, promisingly:

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell

Give warning to the world that I am fled

But continued:

From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell

William thought of her dwelling with the vilest of worms, thought of himself distracted for months over the state of her decomposition, thought of the often-boggy ground in the town’s one cemetery and how, if the university did not renew his contract next year, he would almost definitely leave and what would happen to her then? The fact that none of his courses had made it onto the summer schedule was a bad sign, and he had only two courses to teach in the fall. The department chair, Annabella Brown (a name that to him paired the fanciful with the mundane), would not keep him on out of pity. A university position is as much about marketing as it is about teaching, his wife had warned him. “I’m not going to worry about it,” he’d replied, though now he wished he had.

“Is there anything you need me to do?” Louise kept asking, her hands rough from the washing up and scrubbing she’d already done, the meals she’d prepared and frozen. “To see you through this,” she said when he objected. She shook her head when he offered her a Valium — more for him than for her, really, to relieve him from the frenzy of her unrelenting motion. Still, he invited her to go with him after lunch to choose the urn, just as six years earlier she’d joined him and Claire when they went to Saks to register for a china pattern before their wedding. Louise explained the difference between porcelain and bone, the impracticality of an ornate pattern that they might tire of. “Don’t you agree?” she said, nodding at William until he nodded back. It had evolved into a raucous outing: they ended up at the Drake Hotel, where they drank martinis in the Palm Court and William surprised Claire with a Limoges trinket box he’d bought while the women debated a platinum border versus gold. They lived in Chicago then, a half-hour from Lake Forest, where Claire’s parents lived. William met his wife there while finishing his doctorate; she was an undergraduate with a major in Comparative Literature, taking the introductory semantics course he taught.

Louise changed her mind about the Valium before they headed out. “You’re her husband, William,” she said. “You’re sure this is what she wants?” He nodded, hoping to avoid a discussion of burial practices and a numbing defense of his choice. This time, they would not be stopping for martinis on the way back. Still, he felt a similar flash of anticipation, that sense of being on the verge of a life-altering experience, but this one the opposite of the other — one he wanted to put behind him as quickly and neatly as possible.

The owner of the funeral home was settled on the veranda in a blue polo and khakis when they pulled up in the Volvo. There were three glasses and a pitcher of iced tea on a low table, as if this was a social call. Louise pursed her lips in disapproval. In Chicago funeral directors wore dark suits regardless of the season and had a somber assistant show you into a mahogany-paneled office. William put his hand on her arm, ready with an explanation, but he felt her stiffen and quickly withdrew it, saying nothing.

When they stepped onto the veranda, she ignored the funeral director’s outstretched hand and turning to William, said, “Something in porcelain — don’t you think, William?” Inside, he chose a white one, a classic shape ringed with playful platinum swirls, nothing too complicated.

Though William hoped for an early dinner, Louise and Sy went upstairs to nap — “I guess we’ll be having casserole and casserole with a side of casserole,” Sy had said, eying the kitchen counter with its offering of bereavement meals. “No hurry for that.”

William was sitting on the deck, staring at the pool, as he often did in the early evening while waiting for his wife to get home. The house had the same expectant silence. He could close his eyes and make the last week disappear. Then he heard the sliding door from the kitchen open, became aware that someone was somewhere behind him, maybe just letting in the breeze, the house in the past days having become stifling, airless. He opened his eyes to find Ben leaning against the railing

“Why don’t we pack up her things?” he heard Ben say.

Ben waited a few seconds, then added, “I’d like to help you with that. With the packing up.”

The packing, William thought. In that instant, he understood the finality of these days and how they were sweeping him along in their undertow. “Thank you, but it’s all right,” he said.

“I’d really like to,” Ben said, his still-soft face furrowing.

“How about you pick out something of hers to keep,” William said. The boy nodded, a hurried motion that made William think it was what he wanted all along.

Her clothes were still as she’d left them, mostly folded in the bureau or hanging from padded hangers. A pair of sandals lay side by side under the chair. The hamper was empty except for the shirt he’d worn over the past days — the same shirt every day until Louise had put her hands on his shoulders, whispered that he should go on and change before the minister arrived to discuss the eulogy.

“Bet you haven’t even thought what you would do with all this stuff,” Ben said, his fingers tracing the pale blue stripes on cashmere scarf. “I have a friend who lost his mother last year. It would have been easier on them if they hadn’t waited. You know what I mean?”

To his relief William did. “Actually, you’re talking about Heidegger’s concept of death as inevitable but unknowable,” he said. It was, after all, what he’d been studying, Being and Time. “They had to come to terms with her death and by extension the inevitability of their own. In their case, twice.”

When Ben just stared at him, he added, “Is that what you were saying?”

Ben gave a nervous laugh. “You’re the professor. I was just saying that it can become like a fetish, like you can’t touch anything because you keep believing she might come back. That’s what it was like for my friend’s dad.”

By 10 a.m. the next day it was over. His in-laws said their good-byes at the funeral home. “We can get almost a full day’s drive in this way,” Sy had said, slipping off his tie. “It will be your friends here this afternoon. They don’t know us.” He patted William on the shoulder, then placed the urn on the floor of the backseat. They would have it buried at the cemetery near their home, where they’d already paid for their own plots. Earlier, William had the funeral director fill one of Claire’s Limoges boxes — maybe the one he’d given her that afternoon in Chicago, though he wasn’t sure. He’d wrapped carefully in his handkerchief and tucked into his jacket pocket. It was the funeral director who drove William home. “Friends are invited to call at the Mason house from four to six on Friday,” the obituary read, the funeral director’s suggestion. “Otherwise,” he said, “you’ll have people dropping in at all hours for days.”

Most of the day stretched out before him. He used to relish days like this, days when, morning obligations out of the way, he had hours of uncommitted time left.

He walked through the house, thinking that suddenly it had too much air, that he might choke on all the air, and stopped at the bookcase to compose himself, to count out each breath until the room stopped trembling. His eyes swept over the books, to a photograph taken right after they became engaged. In the picture they were talking to each other, their faces close together, angled so that the tops of their foreheads almost touched. They were probably whispering — he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember what he was saying — it’s his mouth that was open, hers was closed but she is smiling. It was a happy moment, one of the last they’d have before stepping off into the landscape of shared hurts and regrets that is the geography of marriage.

He’d drained the pool already. The pool man would be coming by tomorrow to clean and refill it. “It’s better you keep water in it,” the man explained. “Otherwise the liner dries, cracks. Big expense to fix.” He needed to think about getting a car, just as soon as the check from the insurance company arrived. The ruling had been accidental death. A leak in the power steering system might have caused the steering wheel to freeze. In her panic, his wife might have pushed hard on the accelerator instead of the brake pedal. The car hit the rim of the pool with enough force to go airborne, so it came to rest in the deep end. The windows had been open and the car had sunk quickly. His wife had not even tried to free herself from her seatbelt, had apparently just sat there and waited till she had to inhale, to take that last deep cool breath.

These were his thoughts as he stood in the backyard at the edge of the empty pool, waiting for his neighbors and colleagues to stop by to offer condolences. He turned to go back inside the house. There he was, already awash with casseroles, salads, and bundt cakes — a single man now, with too much food and so many people to greet, so many murmurings of sympathy to acknowledge. People he barely knew reached for him. He felt hands on his arms and shoulders, saw moues of concern meld into hesitant smiles, grateful they’d been spared the howls his next-door neighbor described hearing as the pool man pulled him from the water. He nodded to each, looked as many in the eye as he could. “I’m sorry,” they all said. “So sorry.”

If he were giving a lecture, he might discuss the connection between sorry and sorrow, how in fact they had separate derivations in Old English, the former from sarig, the latter from sorg. He might play with the idea that someone can be sorry for someone else’s sorrow, but explain how sorrow describes a palpable feeling, how you can say that you are sorry and in fact feel nothing. In that sense, he would say, saying you are sorry is a means to relieve the guilt of not sharing in the sorrow of the person in front of you. One lets you off the hook, the other embeds the hook as deep as it will go. Depending on the age and erudition of his students, the discussion might include references to “Stabat Mater” or Old French (sufrir) or Latin (sufferre), a language he’d been pleased to read was making a comeback in the nation’s high schools.

Across the room, Annabella Brown was talking to one of the department’s graduate students, the one she especially wanted to stay on for his doctorate. William watched them, wondering how long would it take for the rawness of sorrow to numb into memory. Wishing there were a way to lift his brain out of his skull and set it out somewhere, where the thoughts now whirling through it could dissipate into air and leave him again with the pleasure of idle and meaningless reflection.

He glanced their way again, in time to see her turn away from her student and begin striding toward him. She was in a grey dress with one of those short jackets over it, the ones that always looked too small, like something stolen from a child’s closet. It surprised him — she always wore pants and fitted jackets, as if she were running for election. In the dress, she looked slighter, vulnerable. He felt tears in his eyes and hoped she wouldn’t notice, hoped he could blink them away unobtrusively. He stopped just within reach of what he saw now were her muscular arms. She pulled him to her, patting his back tentatively, then immediately released him and took a step back.

“Where do you keep the plastic wrap?” she asked. When he hesitated, she added, “To wrap up the food. It needs to be put away.”

“Under the counter, to the left of the sink.”

She nodded. “All right, then. I’ll start clearing things. People will get the idea.” She smiled at him, a small conspirative smile. “It’s almost six. Not long now.” She turned toward the kitchen, stopped, turned back, for a moment hesitant.

“Your wife was lovely. We knew each other from the fitness center, you know.”

He must have looked puzzled.

“She swam there. Same time as I did, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at eight.”

He already would be mid-discourse in his freshman seminar.  “We have a pool,” he said, waving his hand in the direction of the backyard.

“I think she liked the companionship, a buddy in the water. She was a strong swimmer. It was a struggle to keep up with her. Kind of ironic, isn’t it?” Annabella made a sound like a laugh, then stopped with a small gasp. “Oh, William, oh how careless of me.”

What was ironic, thought William, was that a week ago it would have been just another a small detail amid the many trivialities that made up most people’s days. Now he found himself wishing to know everything she’d done. He wanted the memory of the conversations in which they’d discussed this and that. He didn’t want to be one of those people who only get to know the person closest to them through stories told by others. Claire should have said if she wanted someone to swim with her. He was sure he would have done it, could almost picture the two of them, hair slicked off their faces.

But what Williams said was, “Everything is confusing right now.” He stepped to the side, but Annabella moved with him. In another setting he might have offered his hand and put his arm around her back, sweeping her onto the floor in a waltz or two-step. Annabella, with her swimmer’s shoulders and her ability to replace him with a doctoral student or two. He put his hand on her shoulder to hold her in place as he eased around her, nodding — “So much to think about now” — and excused himself — “I think I hear the phone.” Her hand grasped his, and he saw in her face the fierceness of impending confession.

“Annabella, please, whatever it is, let it keep till next week.”

To William’s relief, she patted his hand. Perhaps, he thought, all she wanted was to say how sorry she was.

And then the telephone did ring. The voice on the other end was his mother-in-law’s.

“I have to ask you something,” his mother-in-law said, her voice catching. “Sy says so. About the diamond.”

William had thought about giving a piece of his wife’s jewelry to Louise, not that there was much. And no diamond, not that he could recall. “I’m a pearl girl,” Claire had told him when a proposal seemed certain; the engagement ring, an antique, was a pearl surrounded by rubies that looked like tiny pricks of blood, not a diamond. It was upstairs, in the box with his cufflinks. He’d put it there himself, though of course his mother-in-law could have taken it.

“The ring is ruby and pearl,” William said patiently. “Do you have it? It’s all right if you do.”

Louise ignored the question. “It’s something I read about,” she said. “Making the ashes into a diamond. I want to do that. I want to keep her with me. It’s all right, isn’t it? We could even make two diamonds — one for you — though they’d be small.”

How easily she always made him complicit. At the university, one of the professors had a ceramic jar with a fat cork stopper, the words “Ashes of Problem Students” confronting whoever sat across the desk from him. William laughed the first time he saw it, but then it began to gnaw at him: what turned a student into a problem? If he asked too many questions or didn’t ask enough? If he argued with an assertion instead of just writing it in his notebook? It was aggressive, a preemptive strike, a line in the sand: keep your distance, respect my boundaries, or I’ll finish you off.

William thought about that jar, about putting one on his own desk, where anyone who stepped through the door — a student for a conference or a colleague with words of solace — would see it and wonder what exactly it held. He thought about the photograph and hoped that Claire was smiling because of what he’d said to her, that it was something true and tender.

“William?” his mother-in-law said, her voice fainter now. “Are you still there? Is this a bad time?”

Photograph by Christopher Aluka Berry

       Best Fiction has published Pool by Susan Levi Wallach.

Susan Levi Wallach completed an MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2011. Her short stories have appeared in Fogged Clarity, Stone’s Throw, and Monarch Review; her articles in a number of theatre, technology, and military publications; her poems in emails to her children. She won the Keith D. Ware Journalism Award from the Department of Defense in 2003; her novel-in-progress was short listed in last year’s Faulkner-Wisdom Competition. She is a freelance copyeditor.

Best Fiction is pleased to showcase the work of Susan Levi Wallach. “Pool” is an example of perfect short fiction.

Rosellen Brown

“Rosellen Brown’s characters move me to tears.”

–Annie Dillard

Best Fiction is blessed by the presence of Rosellen Brown. She is interviewing with us, and her exclusive interview will be published by Best Fiction in April. She is the author of Tender Mercies, Before and After, Civil Wars, the Cora Fry series, and many prized short stories.

Rosellen Brown is an American author, and has been an instructor of English and creative writing at several universities, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Houston. She has won several grants and awards for her work, and her novel Before and After was adapted into a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson.

                                                     By K.

Grateful audience, what story shall I sing?

We griots talk true. This is not merely a story; this is truth.

Listen.

Do not quarrel over where to sit. This old man does not care if a woman finds her place on the men’s side or a man on the women’s side, for, it is so, I shall transport you all from this room, back to a time before cement floors.

Look.

Do you know what this is? A child’s toy, we tell these invaders. The ones who call themselves artists, historians, journalists, anthropologists, scholars, students, professors, occultists, spiritual seekers, vagabonds. The ones who arrive in the bus asking, “How much?” The ones who, when they wave enough money, we inform, “This is no child’s toy but a great work of art!” The ones who know more about us than we know ourselves. But we know something about them. We know their true name, and it is “tourists.”

We know this statue, hewed from the branch of a baobab. We know it for what it is: a vessel for the nyama of the vegeu. You may say it resembles the statues we carve now, those that will stand but never serve. And so we have learned to carve not merely for the nyama but for our survival. Or rather I should say, both are ways of surviving. Or do we lose something when we carve for their coins? Do we lose ourselves?

We need only look to this statue to remember. This one dictated its purpose to a masterful carver. It spoke to him, and he received. He saw within the wood the shape he would free. And once the nyama entered, how could it be sold? It can only be stolen, as many were. We must be thankful it is still with us. To remind us. Look closer, and you will see that beneath this crust of millet and blood, oil and seed, the forms of those who might have been forgotten exist as they once were carved. By whose hands? We do not know.

But we can see the shape of man and woman, equal in height, balanced in form. Thin but well-nourished. See this hump? Surely the quiver upon his back. The sign of a provider. And above her buttocks? Twins! The most sacred of beings. So alike, they are joined.

Who are they, this couple? Not the strange beings of certain stories but our flesh and blood ancestors who lived and died as each of us must. What do they have to say to us now? What can they tell us that we do not already know? We know their story well, though we often seem to forget.

Have we forgotten? We never forget; their story sleeps within us, as it does inside this vessel. It is the story of each of us. The changes we witness now are not the same as those experienced then, yet something is familiar. Do you see? Look closer. Look, and they shall take us back to their time, a time which is no different from our own.

I shall now become silent and allow them to speak, in their way. Listen, and you shall hear truth.

                                                       IN A BEGINNING…

Who takes the lead, unafraid of eyes!
—Yagul, Dogon chant

The breast is second only to god.
—Dogon proverb

 Take nothing for granted. This is not the law of the people but the law of life. Take nothing—not one object, one thought, one dream—for granted. Not the copper sun that rises each day, despite prayers for rain. Not the ochre-rocked terrain that toughens the soles. Not even this escarpment, far enough from the river that prayers for water are as common as the calls to prayer heard from the opposite bank, though the cliff shelters equally from invaders and sun alike. In this life take nothing for granted, for the people have not always lived beside the cliff; others lived here before, and where are they now? Vanished. Only their vessels and spirits remain; we still find the former in the caves, the latter in the night.

Some say the hogon communicates with them. Perhaps he does so now inside this single-chambered shrine that stands upon the cliff-base scree. Millet and blood still seem to trickle as if from unsealed wounds, painting white rivulets down the shrine’s face from the spaces between nine ostrich eggs, each resting like a world inside a nest, each perched atop its roofline mound, while the sacrificial flow below waits dormant, as sun-baked as the dust-hued mud that formed this shrine of contours that conjures the curves of bodies and bones.

From the doorway emerges the hogon—oldest man in the village, closest to the spirits. To the secrets. He squints his eyes, glances downhill. Sees the pair standing like twins.

The pair shuffle shy feet, angle eager bodies, tense, uncertain as children at the first awareness of the judgment of older eyes. Never have they stood so close. Never have they felt such distance.

She offers him a wooden bowl. Its contents: clear water scintillating as it ripples from the center to the brim, sparkling as if shards of midday sun float upon its swaying surface. He raises the bowl to his lips, drinks, eyes refusing to stray from hers.

She inhales, her breast pressing tight to her indigo dress. Water spills from his lips. Translucent drops roll down his chest, wind a path to the white cloth of his pants. The sweat and earth of his body discovers her, caresses her tongue in red-orange, cracks like the nut of the doum palm. His arm slides across his lips, masking a smile. She exhales, remembering her breath.

Heat rises in waves. The horizon shimmers.

“The men gossip like women.” she says. “They say you do not behave like a man. This is not a matter for us to decide. The elders you shall one day sing truth of discuss your fate in the toguna. A silent griot is as useful as a barren woman. Do not punish the village. Destiny decided we should not be born into the same caste. If you cannot respect my husband, at least respect the village.”

He responds: “Why should I care if that man claims you or not? If you are anyone’s property, you belong to the gods. If I should play the thief, I play my role at their command. I am willing to accept their punishment. Life is a spiral. Tradition exists to remind us. To guide us. But so does change. When tradition cannot change, it denies the ways of the gods. Destiny does not fate us to castes; a rigid tradition decides this. But whoever upholds such tradition can only do so by waging battle with the gods.

“Beautiful, you are still childless. You may spend the night with your husband, but you return home to your father each morning. How can I speak the praises of our ancestors, who followed their destinies, when the village refuses to listen to our own? My silence speaks, because, like the heaviest millet, it does not bend to rustle in the wind. One must listen closely to hear what I say. And the closer one listens, the more one hears. Until this wind blows past, I shall speak to none but you.”

“It would be disrespectful of me to return here,” she answers, and at once the man and woman turn their eyes to the hogon on the hillside. Her voice drops with her eyes; sound and sight slip down her body. “But for your sake…I will.”

White-robed and spectral within the eye of a thermal, the hogon nods, the round of his blood red hat angling toward the pair like a half-swallowed sun on the horizon. The dust swirls around him. The hogon tilts his head to the sky—as if searching for stars invisible in daylight—and steps forward, a single step, into the shade of the shrine.

Like the woman, the man bows his head, and the pair stare into the earth.

“I will see you

again,” he whispers.

“I will see you,” she whispers.

And she turns from him without another glance as she walks back to the village.

*

Humans are like seeds, seeds like the universe. The shape of the village: a human lying on its back, gazing up into dimensions beyond. The shape of the residence: the shape of the village. Woman below, man atop. Earth and sky. And beyond.

In the beginning is Amma, whose first creation fails. Only the elements are saved. Amma attempts again and creates the egg. The egg arrives from a star, and, like a twin to the star, becomes what it is. Inside the egg, two placentas form: one encloses a pair of male twins, the other a pair of female twins. The eight are Nommo, who, when born, will mate with each other to create the emanations of Amma.

But as with humans, so with gods. Like a rebellious youth, Yorugu forces open his egg, desperate to reproduce. The universe tilts, wobbles in its spiral. Finding no mate, Yorugu creates earth from the pieces of his placenta and copulates with his creation. For this, Amma transforms Yorugu into a speechless pale fox, though, in this form, Yorugu is still capable of divinination. Once again, the universe is balanced.

Nommo descends to earth. Creates the cycles. Day to night. Life to death. Like Yorugu, pieces of Nommo scatter like seeds in the whirling of wind, planting the Binu shrines below the escarpment where…

Cross-legged in the moment, the hogon meditates upon the pair, who, like twins sharing a common destiny, spiral about each other as certain stars, shifting each other’s orbit while the universe strives to uphold order—to keep the stars in place.

What is right for a woman? For a man? Is the way of the heart the way of the community? The men crouch in the toguna, propose such questions, respond with words that mask true feelings, that oppose the unspoken. If any recall the passion of a manhood first freed from its youthful, androgynous form, none expose it. Meanwhile, the women

gossip as if they, too, never felt a pang for another, other than the one who chose them—or was chosen for them.

In the beginning are two children. One is a girl; the other a boy. Each is born to a pair of parents. Each plays at life, imitating sounds, movements. When they begin to understand the rules of sound and movement, they play at imitating more complex tasks. From a single word, sprouts a phrase; from a single step, a harvest or a hunt. At play on the scree, they learn to control their imaginations. The girl draws from what she hears and witnesses of the women, the boy from what he hears and witnesses of the men. They disdain each other—this girl, this boy—for they have yet to hear of the actions of men and women when no one is watching. Then the day arrives when each becomes what each will: the girl, a woman; the boy, a man.

A hand holds in her screams. Her male part: cut from her body. The sweet rice the women offer does not alleviate her bitterness when she learns from an aunt of the man she must marry. The pain between her legs numbs.

The man, too, is betrothed: to a girl who dismisses the ways of the village as ignorant, superstitious. Eventually, she leaves to marry an important so-and-so in Djenné who prostrates himself several times daily, like a woman before her husband. Though the man travels to Djenné to bring the girl back, he finds this man to have powers he never knew men to carry. But it is not the man who drives him away from the city and his search but the confusion of the city itself. People do not live together in such places; those obedient to the law crave to cut off the hand of the thief who steals to feed his family, while the obedient prove their adherence to the law by starving their families.

But starvation wears other masks. Both woman and man develop a hunger different from the one that agonizes an empty belly. Their senses transition beyond what they hear and see of the other. A new sense arises, one which dwells deeper inside, its source mysterious, although they begin to understand how it must manifest. It rules over their other senses, altering them, as if this feeling were a great leader and all other feelings its subjects. The world becomes the other and the other alone.

For the man this other is the woman, whom he passes one afternoon as she crushes millet, lifting and slamming the \ stone pestle into the mortar. He knows her as everyone knows everyone in the village, but not in the way one is familiar with family or a childhood friend. Nor is it the scandalous conclusions one creates of one’s neighbors, based on bits of information collected. Rather, this knowing is one that seems to stretch back before his birth. He’s known her all his life; of this he is certain. But he’s known her before this life and the life before that, as he will know her after this life and beyond. Yet it does not occur to him they once played together as children; if it had, he would have been surprised to realize the slender girl had grown into the curved body of the woman who lifted and pressed her form into his mind long after he’d walked past her that afternoon. It is as if instead of crushing millet she crushed herself into his thoughts, scattering seeds of herself in every corner so that no matter what he now thinks, the thought becomes that image: her, crushing millet.

Likewise, she saw him walking past her, his eyes widening, his lips curling up and parting, the sun angling towards him, casting his shadow over the earth, over the mortar. She crushes his head with the pestle, and, once he passes, she sets the pestle down, runs her fingers through the millet, sifting for shards of his shadow. In the days that follow, she watches him walk by, again and again, not realizing what she longs for is him to actually walk by again, not realizing that what she sees, she sees only in her mind. Not once does the thought of her future husband intrude. When it finally does, she cries. She doesn’t know why.

Some say life is sacrifice. One is told to surrender this or that, and he obeys; she does as she’s told. But who has stopped to ask why?

The man, she learns, is a griot—a man of another caste. She must forget him.

The woman, he learns, is betrothed. He tries to forget her.

And so the woman marries.

Easier to follow the plan of the village than the call of destiny. To diverge, even at destiny’s calling, is to expose the plan’s great fault—that it is a sacrifice to no one for nothing.

And so the man leaves. Waits.

Something has changed. Something has shifted. The single, wispy cloud dissipating overhead? The furrow of her brow? The angle of the sun? The slouch of his shoulders? Or perhaps nothing. Perhaps it is only that something unnoticed before is now seen. Now felt.

If time has passed, if tomorrow has arrived, who can truly say? We trust the sun to set each night, to rise at morning, carry in the new day. But if the gods were to decide the moon should rise and set twice before a tomorrow, would we be aware? Would they inform us or amuse themselves, allowing us to interpret time as we always have. Take nothing for granted.

“It is good to see you,” he says, though the image of her form has not faded from his mind from the moment she left until this, the moment of her return, if it is indeed a return.

“It is good to see you,” she replies. “Have you come to your senses?”

“Come to them? How can I come to them when they refuse to let me leave? I am like a woman who has just given birth; is it not so that a mother returns to the womb as soon as her child is born?”

“Now you have truly taken leave of your senses.”

“But a woman must shut herself inside once her child is born. Each is reborn when they emerge into the light.

“You speak as freely about women as if you were one.”

“But I was. And you were a man.”

“One moment your words are like muddy water, the next like clear drops of rain. Say what you mean.”

“Were we not both male and female? From the moment of birth until initiation we were—and we were neither. We may be called man or woman now, but has our other half truly been severed? A complete man is half woman; a complete woman, half man. No being is whole without embodying both, no matter what has been cut from us, no matter whether our body bears the bar or the latch. But we forgot. We die and are reborn on how many occasions in a single life? And with each birth we lose more of what we were as we grow into what we must become. For better or worse.”

“So?”

“So, your form reminds me of what I feel was lost. Seeing you, I remember who I am. Without you, I forget, though I search myself for some trace. And if you are half of me, I am half of you. Without each other, how can we be whole?”

“What you say is not new. You merely repeat what the wisest of our village have stated so often before.”

“I do not claim to be wise nor to know anything that hasn’t already been passed on to us. All I can say is what I feel. And no one knows this, not even you. No one knows the intensity of this feeling inside me. Even the gods can only guess.”

“And what feeling is this?”

He stands in silence, eyes moist, lips curled down, his breathing heaving like a man who knows he must finally confront a passion that has, for so long, stagnated inside him.

Realizing the role the gods have forced her to accept, she knows what she must say.

“I am married,” she declares. Then, offering him the bowl of water, “But it is true—I have no child.”

His hands brush against hers as he accepts, her fingers encircling the space the bowl once held.

Eyes over the brim, his gaze meets hers.

His eyes penetrate.

Her eyes hold.

And her eyes roll back as she drops to the earth.

The bowl drops and shatters upon the rock-strewn soil, splashing water upon their feet, as if this is how they will drink: like earth-gouging roots. He kneels at her side, hands shaking, easing between the earth and her body, feeling the weight of her form, while from the rocks the hogon watches.

Do not believe your eyes. They do not see all; much remains unrevealed. The gods see beyond the horizon. Beyond the stars. This is how they know our destinies.

The hogon does not choose his position; it is chosen for him. One day, the hogon—before he became the hogon—went to the river and fell in. Like most, the hogon could not swim, and his body drowned. But at that moment—what fortune!—a water snake glided across the water, slipped beneath the hogon, and held the body afloat, while the hogon’s double rose into the sky. The double looked down upon the inanimate body, the snake undulating beneath it, a raft to rescue it from drowning. At this moment the hogon’s double returned to his body, and he awoke. But the snake had vanished; the bank of the river sloped against his spine as an old man—the hogon’s predecessor—swayed above him. So it was the old man died not soon after this event, and the one chosen by the water snake became the hogon.

Outside and above—it is in this way the woman’s double sees her body now, floating belly up. The snake parts the waters, slithers beneath her, pulls her to the shoreline where the water laps the earth. Where the earth enters the water.

Where is this water? There is no river near the cliffside yet she sees it all the same. A mirage? Or has she entered another realm?

She hears the echo of a muffled voice—someone calling from a cave. A thump like a heartbeat. With a gasp, she rises!

The water evaporates. The snake slithers away in silence. The earth holds her. Then he.

In the shade of the doum, they embrace.

Skin sticks to skin. Sweat drips into single drops. Chest, breast press together, pull way. Skin pulls taught, reluctant to part. It snaps.

She holds her body upright. His hands encircle her wrists, hold her down, fearful she may float away. But he releases, and she leans back against the palm trunk rising from a single base. The trunk splits into four, rises, splits again.

Neither notices the hogon has vanished. Neither looks at the other. What is it they see in the distance?

“I have to go,” she mutters.

“I cannot let you go. You were possessed.”

“They say the same of you. I have to go.”

“You must rest.”

“I have to go.”

She braces against the tree and rises. The world wobbles. She steps to one side, steps to the other, stumbles forward. He grabs her, holds her tight, presses her against him.

Heat, water, breath, earth. Skin, body, spirit, desire. Hips gripped by hands, he pulls her to him. His eyes pierce hers; her eyes grasp his, draw him in. Hands find heartbeats. Lips unite, hips dance, breath harmonizes.

The egg hears their cry.

And soon it shall split. Split.

Split.

Ah! But there is danger in the hunt; fate is never so simple a path to follow. Head to the ground, those mud-pressed tracks are all one sees; one forgets what creeps behind, what lurks above, stalking the hunter. Tonight, two men approach each other, two men who have never known each other so well that they could jest about the faults of the other—and certainly not his mother. One is a husband, the other a stubborn man.

As women often do, the woman finds herself between these men, eyes cast down to earth. The moon shines in half crescent, casts its pale glow like a spirit’s shadow upon her face, as if at any moment the night might strike at this remaining light, swallow her in darkness.

He emerges from the dim, continues greeting her approaching husband. He asks this man the final questions, knowing already the response. Whether it is true or not, all is well. All is always well.

“How are your animals?” he asks.

“They are well. And yours?” asks the husband.

“They are well. How is your house?”

“It is well. And yours?”

“It is well. How is your work?”

“It is well. How is—“

From a nearby granary, an unseen donkey brays.

The greeting remains unfinished.

Night stirs: an insect disquiet.

The man cannot bring his eyes to meet those of the husband, though he feels the unflinching burn of the other’s stare. Nor can he find the track of the woman’s gaze. Watching between them, beyond them, into the distance, a distance that glows with darkness and only darkness, he descries a light. It spirals overhead, flutters away into a black darker than skin. What is this creature in flight? Bat? Bird? An ancestor in the night? A spirit? A piece of himself, perhaps. Perhaps himself.

“Thank you,” he says, pretending as though neither he nor the husband notice the incompletion of the greeting.

“Thank you as well,” says the husband. “An exchange of words sounds better to the ear than silence. Like the rustle of light grain bending in the wind.”

The husband raises a hand to the woman’s face, and she turns away. He laughs.

“This one,” says the husband, “this one you have to keep your eyes on.”

His palm encircles her head, pushes it down. He walks past her, walks past the man. The husband’s face: fixed as a mask turning back to spy the figures behind him. The woman hesitates no longer, follows his form into the night. A single star shines bright above her, its spiraling twin invisible to the griot’s sorrow-singing eyes.

Women, the diviner insists, take no part in an evening’s divining ceremony. She must leave. Her unprecedented act is unwelcome. The men will not stand for it. But the woman waits, stomach now bulging like the distended belly of a snake that has swallowed an ostrich’s egg. The men quarrel, knowing their complaints cannot become the actions they propose, the woman being in the shape she is. They storm off to find her husband.

Gnarled branch of the baobab in his left hand, the diviner traces six joined squares in the sand. Inside each square he scrawls symbols, each representing a potentiality. Family, village, region, beyond. Life, peace, death. God’s patience, god’s desire. The diviner places sticks—god and family—in each of the squares, raising peaks of sand like miniature termite mounds, dotting them with craters.

As the diviner draws these designs, he invokes a chant to the sacred fox, seeking the path of prophecy:

“Fox, tell me please

is there something?

Will there be shame next year?

Fox, speak clearly.

Let the people coming to the field

stand eye to eye.

Throw your traces.

Give me your nails to mark the sand.

Be clear. Whatever you see, tell me.

Give me your footprints.”

He places an offering for the fox, informs the woman to meet him at morning.

Dawn: how it resembles dusk. If the sun stood still on the horizon, if the moon hovered ghostly, neither filling nor fading, one would not know the difference. But the sun rises from its submersion, rippling its doum nut colors as the diviner interprets the oracle’s prophecy for the woman. Usually he deciphers in solitude, but as he’s already made one

exception for the woman—and knowing her situation in the way only the aware can—he understands the importance of her inclusion in the ritual and allows her to listen. But what the diviner reads from the pressed-sand tracks neither concerns nor reassures him; life will continue in the way it does: out of balance, balanced.

Both the hogon and the diviner agree: the moment approaches when all shall collapse. Balance shall restore itself; this is certain. But in what way? In what form? These are no questions of good or evil, right or wrong. What shall occur is destined. And destiny is not the plan of humans but of gods.

Upon the altar of the hogon’s offering, the millet beer awaits, murky as the clouded sky outside. Unusual, this weather on the first day of the Lébé festival. During this drought one can only pray the clouds carry a cleansing rain. An appropriate addition to the celebration in honor of the first mortal human, transformed into snake. Tonight, the snake shall visit the hogon, shall cleanse him as it must each night. But in this moment he watches the men circle the altar inside this structure, like snakes coiling, tighter, tighter. It is not until the third and final cycle that the man notices the hogon watching him. But how does he know? The hogon’s eyes are sealed. It is the hogon’s mind which envisions what the eyes cannot.

The hogon offers the man the millet beer; in its warmth the man tastes a convergence of elements: earth, water. Fire upon the earth, air bearing water. And blood, blood of a woman.

A series of kicks, a pummeling from within. As if she were the egg, ostrich chicks cracking the shell of her belly. Seeking the next realm of experience. A dying into life. Into a dim light.

Imbalance cries out for birth.

From the damp womb of clouded night, she emerges, belly ripe, skin radiating a luminescent blue reflected from the moonglow diffused through the grey obscure. The griot waits on these outskirts where he once stood in silence, recalling the smooth texture of her thighs, cool like the flat mud roof of a home on a warm and rainless night, a night unlike tonight, though he cannot be sure now whether it is the first drop of a fruitful rain that slides down his face or the trickle of sweat—like that moisture between her legs: water from a well. He yearns to drink from it once more.

The rain falls. The world tilts.

She carries the weight of an unknown word within her, the word that shall manifest all. All is abstraction now, all beyond definition. Like a snake that sheds its skin, she is no longer what she was. Like a river that parts the earth…

The split.

Falling from her center, breaking upon the earth, the water ripples in waves beneath her body. Vibrations ring her ears. She stumbles, begins to fall. His hand grips hers, holds her up with a pull equal to the strength of her own, hanging, tugging downward. They step in slow circle, rising, falling, swaying, orbiting until they meet halfway between standing and lying, kneeling like a hogon in meditation, collapsed in embrace, her indigo loosened, twisted to one side, dangling from the shoulder, baring her breasts, nipples erect like twin stars burning blue, penetrating the spirited night. He places a hand to her distended belly, round and taught as the snake’s who has swallowed the universe.

This is how the twins and the twins, the twins and the twins, announce their arrival into this dimension. With a splash, a rippling, a wave of water—a flood from thedepths of her body.

A snake twines its coiling body over the damp earth; it’s tongue licks the air, tastes the puddle.

A fox paw marks the earth. In this moment, a future.

A donkey’s bray splits the night.

How clear, how iridescent, this center. This center from which all is born.

What’s that? The bus has arrived? Dear audience, thank you for your attention. Now gather up your vessels, the ones that hold nothing—neither vegeu nor stories. Solid wood for the white folks. Art for their elders, toys for their young. Give special attention to those who speak these sacred words: “artifact,” “museum.” Act as if you’ve never seen a camera before—as if you fear it may steal your soul.

K.

Best Fiction will publish new fiction by K.

“Yorugu” is a lyrical tale set in West Africa, opening and closing in present-day Mali with the main story set around the time of the Songhai Empire. It was written as one of seven stories for a collection that includes one story per continent.

K., who writes under various names, is an internationally published author of fiction and poetry. Recently published work appears in Ozone Park, New Plains Review, The 2river View, Willows Wept Review, Barnwood, 3:AM Magazine, Jabberwocky, decomP, PANK, and The Collagist. Currently a Ph.D. student and rhetoric instructor at UT-Dallas, K. holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University in Pittsburgh. K. is married to the poet Angela Marie Kaiser.

Best Fiction is pleased to introduce K. and his spellbinding story, “Yorugu,” to readers everywhere.

Contributing Editor Spenser W. Santos

Best Fiction is pleased to welcome Spenser W. Santos as contributing editor. He brings youth, talent, and energy to the journal.

Best Fiction is grappling with unusual early success as an online journal, and Mr. Santos will play a major role in keeping the journal on track. He has a record of academic success and organizational talent.

Reading Spot in Autumn

Thanks to Elizabeth Oness, Shan Xiaoming, Zdravka Evtimova, Matthew Dexter, Evan James Roskos, Michael Goddard, Miguel Gardel, and Margaret Elysia Garcia for the stories they provided for our successful summer reading. Thanks to the excellent artists who have submitted their work as well.

By Evan James Roskos

It may look like he has pale, pale hands—especially because he’s wearing a green army jacket and green work pants—but his hands aren’t pale; he’s wearing rubber gloves. He has an oblong head and a semi-indented lower lip because his lower teeth were taken years ago.

This morning, it takes him five minutes to open the classroom door because interrupting the professor is exactly not the thing he wants. But he needs someone in the classroom to confirm if the noise that needs to be fixed is finally fixed.

As Ranko walks, he keeps tight to the wall and tries to get the professor to look at him. His hands sweat. He pulls at the rubber palm of his left glove, snapping it twice. Water spits around inside the glove.

The professor keeps teaching and doesn’t look at him, which disappoints Ranko. The professor needs to help him erase the noise from the roof, and he needs to make sure that the students don’t disrespect Ranko. The complaint about the noise came in last semester, but other men did not take care of the issue. Ranko found the problem and the part to fix it. He cannot rely on the men he works with to help, so he hopes the professor will be a second pair of ears.

Confirm: silence or sound—an easy job for a professor.

As Ranko reaches the front of the room, he hears the professor talk about metaphor and symbols. Ranko feels happy that he has found a literature professor. This makes erasing the noise more important than ever. More important than just closing the work order. The professor will understand the need to make space for words.

Ranko leans close to the professor and the professor—sitting at a table at the front of the room—stops talking, crooks his neck, and finally makes eye contact. Ranko worries about his voice being too loud and worries that his words will not be easy to understand because of his accent.

“Excuse me, Professor,” Ranko whispers, “I am sorry to come into your classroom.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I need to fix the noise that is heard in this room. Have you heard the noise?”

“What kind of noise?” The professor closes his book on his index finger, then looks at the time on his phone.

Ranko reads from his work order, though he knows the description: “A high-pitched squeak when the air conditioning runs.”

“I haven’t really noticed that.” The professor quickly glances at his students. “So….”

Ranko knows that the sound exists.

“I need to replace a part. On the roof. Then I will turn on the air conditioning and then I will come back and ask if you hear anything.”

“Can’t you do this once my class is done?”

Ranko holds his hand up in a pardoning gesture.

“I need you to be in here to tell me if you hear it.”

“Right now? Really?”

“I need you to be in here to tell me if you hear it.”

“Whatever. Let’s get it over with.”

“Good.” Ranko moves much quicker to leave the room. The professor disappoints him, unable to appreciate that Ranko wants to make space for words in the air of the classroom.

As he walks upstairs to get to the roof access, he thinks that the students probably think he is a strange man. Worse, the students likely laughed at him once the door closed. It will be like when he got in trouble this winter.

The winter got cold, as cold as Ranko remembered some winters back home. The cold back home came from the air and the ground. He had lived without heat and had hid outside in the cold, shivering; the cold came from everywhere.

The university sent him to investigate broken heat in the campus apartment of four girls. The girls had called at midnight; when they let him in, he felt their looks. He knew they would laugh at him later. They asked him to repeat himself. Ranko knows his accent is tough, but his English is good; what can he say to people who speak their own language poorly?

“I want you to stay in the kitchen while I look for issue.”

Two of the girls made faces that did not need to be translated. He had seen this look on young Americans before. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his first two fingers, something he had done for a long time. Lacking his bottom front teeth (five of them rest somewhere in the very earth of his homeland), he often rubbed his mouth when people’s eyes lingered there.

After his investigations in the three rooms, Ranko knew the problem couldn’t be fixed that night.

“Bigger problem,” he said. “I will have heaters when I come back.”

“Are you going to fix the heat?” one girl asked.

“I cannot fix the heat tonight. I will bring heaters—small ones—to keep your home warm.”

Ranko started to explain the problem, but the looks they gave him felt cold. They wanted to go to sleep. They stood there, in the kitchen just as he’d asked, in sweatpants and sweatshirts and socks, their hair in ponytails. He wanted to tell them they looked like beautiful sisters, but instead he said, again, that he would come back with heaters.

“You must promise me that you will lock the door as soon as you close it,” he implored them. He worried very much that the unlocked door would welcome terrible things.

“Sure thing,” the one girl said, leading him to the door.

“It is important that you promise and you do it.”

“I swear!”

The girl smiled at him and he thought she might be respecting him, but when the door closed behind him he didn’t hear the lock click.

He walked a few steps away so they couldn’t see him through the peephole in the door. Then he moved back to the door and opened it.

“I told you to lock this!” he said, angrily. “You promised you would lock this!”

“Mister, what is your problem?”

The girls were not happy with him.

“Where I come from girls need to lock doors and windows.”

“Why don’t you go back there, then?”

Ranko’s heart hurt from pounding. The girls did not want him to protect them. Even though he felt their disrespect, he apologized and promised to bring heaters and left.

Once he got back to the maintenance office, the dispatcher told him someone else would bring the heaters.

“The girls complained about you. Said you were creepy. What did you do?”

The night dispatcher was an old black man that Ranko had only talked to once before.

“I asked them to lock their door when I left.”

“They said you came back in after that.”

“They didn’t lock the door.”

“They said you scared them.”

“They wouldn’t have been scared if the door kept me out.”

Neither said anything until the dispatcher repeated that he’d send someone else to bring the heaters. Ranko didn’t get sent to many more late night calls on his own.

As he fixes the air conditioning, Ranko thinks about those girls and wonders if the ones in the classroom below called him a creepy man when he left. Will the professor be like the dispatcher and agree with them?

Ranko replaces the part. A simple wheel. He holds the old one and sees where the old belt hugged against the metal the wrong way. In his mind, Ranko can see the wheel and belt moving—the whole machine can work in his head and he can move around it to see how it’s supposed to work. This is how he figured out why the wheel squeaked. The belt had hugged the wheel off-center, just slightly; that pushed the rod constantly on one side more than the other. The bent rod kept the belt off center more and more.

So, new wheel, new rod, new belt, and grease.

Ranko knows the men he works with would not know to replace all the parts. They simply replaced the belt and said the people still complaining of the sound were liars.

He starts the air conditioner. He can’t hear a squeak, but downstairs will be the key. He picks up his toolbag and climbs down the ladder back into the building. He locks the hatch that leads to the roof and then locks the gate that covers the ladder because students will try to get hurt.

When Ranko opens the classroom door, the room is empty. The clock on the wall reads 9:15. Ranko doesn’t know when the class ended and he didn’t get the name of the professor. He listens to the air conditioner and doesn’t hear anything; that’s a good sign. But who will sign his work order? If he hands it in without some kind of signature, the order will remain open and only he will know that it is not open. The men he works with are too lazy to investigate if someone already fixed the air conditioner; they might break the unit thinking they are fixing it.

Ranko heads downstairs to the office of Financial Aid. A plump woman sits at a window and asks if he needs help.

“I need to know who taught upstairs. Eight o’clock. Room 206.”

The woman hesitates. She looks at Ranko, but not because his face alarms her. She’s thinking—he can see this.

It reminds him of his wife when she would think. She always thought, hard, and it etched her face with lines. Even when thinking about whether she liked something. “This should be an easy thing,” he would say, “to say what you feel.” His wife claimed not to be so quick with her feelings. Because she loved him, Ranko never held her slow thinking against her.

As if pinched, the woman realizes she can access the information he needs. As she types and clicks, she describes why she has access to the class schedule for her job. Ranko tries to listen, but much of what the nice woman says dissolves in his ears just after he hears it. He needs to see things work to understand. Words, alone in the air, can mean things but only when they mean things in and of themselves. Ranko can read things aloud and hear them. Poetry, plays. Those things can make sense when the words are alone in the air. But most of his life is defined by processes or the manipulation of devices and objects.

Of course, there are some words that were alone in the air that remain. The words his wife said the last time she could speak. They are alone in the air of his brain and will never dissolve.

Swift and triumphant, the woman hands Ranko a printout.

“Looks like the professor’s name is Foals.”

“Thank you,” Ranko says.

“Your welcome!”

Ranko will try to remember the nice woman’s name because she did not stare at his lower lip and she didn’t need him to repeat himself and she seemed so happy doing her work.

She knows the importance of listening.

Reading the printout, Ranko sees that Professor Foals’s class ended at 9:30 and that he doesn’t teach in the building again. He does, however, have a class at 2:00, but Ranko cannot wait until that time to get the professor’s signature. Ranko decides to walk to the English department to see if the man is in his office.

The walk takes Ranko across campus on a slight incline. He doesn’t mind the walk because the morning sun makes the air taste warm. Ranko thinks back but cannot remember the nice days from when he was young. They existed, but most of his memories contain redactions. Still, walking in a place called New Jersey, across a university campus, on a warm day, free to do his work and then go home and read Shakespeare aloud—it helps make up for lost memories.

The building with the English department has three floors. Ranko walks up the stairs and feels a little tired. The secretary asks if he needs anything. He pauses to let his breath catch up, then says he needs to speak with Professor Foals.

“Dr. Black!” the secretary yells into an office. “When are Professor Foals’s office hours?”

Ranko finds this yelling unnecessary and so does Dr. Black, since she actually gets up and walks out of her office to answer the question.

Ranko knows Dr. Black, though he wonders if she will remember him. The look on her face says that she does remember and her sweet voice makes Ranko feel less like an intruder.

“Hello, Ranko!” Dr. Black says with great honesty. “How are you doing?”

“I am good. Are you?”

“Busy but good. I haven’t seen you up here in a while.”

Ranko says he stopped by to see her last month but she was not around.

“I was probably teaching. I’m sorry I missed you!”

“You should not apologize for working. You have many things to do.” He explains that he needs to get Professor Foals to sign his work order.

“I believe he actually has his office hours in the student center. In the Pit.”

“Around all the students?”

“He says it’s lonely in his office.”

Ranko rubs his mouth, this time because he wonders why anyone would choose to be around all that noise and distraction, in a place called The Pit. To hide from people—when you have all sorts of time to spend with them otherwise—seems like it would not be lonely. It would be rest.

“Does he read there?” Ranko asks.

“I think he plans for class.” Dr. Black shrugs. “I wouldn’t be able to concentrate. Plus, I need all my filing cabinets.”

Ranko smiles.

“Do you like my army coat?” he asks, holding out his arms. “Army green. I wore green pants. I feel like a soldier.”

“I was going to say that you look very official today.”

Ranko hides his hands and thinks he should have taken off his rubber gloves, but he didn’t want to lose the notes he’d written on them. Measurements, times, things he needed to complete the work order. Writing on his skin proved too difficult—dealing with sweat or dirt, pens will not always respond. But on rubber gloves, words and figures remain.

“Have you been reading any Shakespeare lately?” Dr. Black asks.

“Every night, before I sleep.”

“Wonderful!”

“It gives me big dreams.”

“I imagine so.”

A phone rings behind Dr. Black; she excuses herself. Dr. Black is a good person because she gave him a book of Shakespeare. Ranko thinks that Dr. Black might be his only friend in America; things like gifts matter that much.

He makes his way down the steps and back outside, a bit less thrilled by the warm air now because of all the walking. When the office texts him on his phone, he says he’s finishing the paperwork on the morning’s project. His thumbs do not move quickly for the purpose of texting, so it takes him a bit, but this is the easy way to tell his supervisor to go away.

The student center sounds like a whirlwind, on some days the noise level whirs loud like plane engines. Boys and girls grab coffee on their way to class. Also, there are kids that hang out, complain, sleep, listen to music. Some of them read, but they do not seem to enjoy the books they read. The sizes and shapes of the books remind Ranko of his own time in college, learning physics, calculus. Ranko once knew how to build bridges and buildings and roads. He probably still knows but doesn’t get to ever do it. Something about this makes him sad. Perhaps because he only remembers dead buildings against gray skies, black smoke, fires. The ruin of what he once knew.

Ranko sees Dr. Foals sitting in The Pit—essentially a large, open area with tables and chairs people enter by descending stairs. Ranko rarely has to walk through The Pit. He can circle around it, avoiding people, getting to the various offices that line the outer, elevated ring. But today he must descend like the students, and he feels that with all the noise around him it will be difficult to explain his devotion to this job to the man who thinks being alone makes for loneliness.

Ranko walks up to the table. “Professor. I have found you.”

“Oh.Yes.” The professor has a surprised look.

“I came back to the classroom; you were not there.”

“Class was over.”

“I know that you were supposed to teach until 9:30.” Ranko wants to sit down but does not want to be rude.

“Well, I let them out a little early. Which I’m allowed to do when they can’t concentrate on the story because someone interrupted my lecture.”

“I came to the room at 9:15 to confirm that the sound had been removed.”

“We heard the air conditioning go on, but no squeals or squeaks.”

“Good.” Ranko removes two of the pieces of paper from a pocket inside his jacket. He puts the first one on the table. “I would like you to sign this paper, this work order, to say the sound is gone.”

Foals picks up the paper to read it, but his eyes linger on Ranko’s gloved hands.

“It says here that a professor from the school of Business reported the issue.”

“Yes.”

“Why doesn’t he sign?”

“I will find him to sign.”

“I’m not interested in signing this. I didn’t actually report this problem.”

Ranko pushes his heels firm into the floor of The Pit. This refusal seems unwarranted. The professor should be relieved that Ranko destroyed the sound and made room for words in the air.

“I will tell you why I tracked you today.”

“I’m interested how.” Foals looks at Ranko’s mouth.

Ranko explains his morning journey. The professor snaps his laptop closed. He checks the clock on his phone. Unable to relax, Ranko winds up his story quickly.

“I did not want to disturb your class,” he says, “but I want to be sure to finish this job.”

“And all you need is for me to sign this?” Foals holds up the paper.

“Yes. But also understand.”

“If you can get this guy—Professor Goss—to sign, then I’ll sign. I’m not sure why you need me to, but I’ll do it if he does.”

Ranko takes the paper and says nothing. Professor Foals has no respect for him. A sad fact; he teaches literature and should have interest in Ranko, where he’s from, why he’s so diligent in his job. Instead, the professor opens his laptop again.

“I will be back quickly.”

The Business department building is one floor below the English department. More walking, but Ranko is not be discouraged.

No one answers when Ranko knocks on Goss’s office door. At first, he fears this job will not get closed today, but then he finds the office of the department head. Hovering at the door, Ranko frets about having to interrupt yet another person in an effort to complete his first job of the day.

It’s getting close to lunchtime.

His stomach begins to protest emptiness.

“Can I help you?” the head of the department asks without looking away from his computer.

“Sir, excuse me, but I have completed a work order in Smee Hall and must get a signature from the Professor Goss that confirms the work is complete. But he is not here —”

“I’ll sign it.”

Ranko doesn’t move. The head of the department looks at Ranko, but it’s not a stare or a glare or anything. The man just wants Ranko to hand the paper over.

“I did fix it,” Ranko assures him, “with parts I ordered.”

“I trust you. Dr. Goss won’t be in this week, and I know it’s easier to put these things to bed with some kind of signature.”

The man signs the paper. Ranko likes the phrase “put these things to bed.” He repeats it: “Thanks. I will put this to bed.”

Then he’s back outside before he thinks that maybe this signature will not be enough for Professor Foals.

When Ranko gets back to the student center, he does not wait to sit down. He fears that this man Foals will be annoyed that he’s returned so quickly and will outright refuse to do something simple.

“Professor. I have the signature of the head of the Business Department. Dr. Goss will be away until next week. Will this be acceptable to you? Will you sign?”

Foals looks up from his computer but doesn’t answer. He just takes his pen and starts to sign the paper, which is still facing Ranko. Thus, the signature is upside down.

Ranko rubs his lower lip with the back of his first two fingers.

“Is that alright?” Foals asks.

Ranko turns the sheet around but keeps a hand on it.

“I want you to know, Professor, that I did not track you down just because I think you will sign my work order. I need it signed but I do not need you to particularly sign it. The person who complained of the noise teaches in a department that does not think the same as English professors.”

“Well, I don’t know if we’re much different from most departments about things like this.”

“No. The sound to him is just a nuisance. I want to fix it for him, but I know that the sound in the classroom is more important to you because you teach literature.”

“Why’s that different? Doesn’t his department have plenty of students that deserve to hear him?”

“You must teach in a perfect room. The words are the most important things.”

The professor is quiet. Ranko waits.

“Students must be able to understand what you are saying, but it is difficult to see the words in the air when the air is polluted.”

The professor will not admit he understands. Ranko does not want a thank you, he just wants a signal that Professor Foals understands.

No words come forth.

“There are men I work with,” Ranko says, “the men are lazy. They let that sound go all year. They say there is no sound or the sound cannot be fixed. I fixed it. I found the problem and the parts. The men I work with do not care. They complain. They do one job a day and when there are days with no work, they talk of being bored.”

“Seems like a problem in lots of jobs,” the professor says.

“Back in my home, people had problems. But people here, they would be trouble in my home.” Ranko stares at the professor, hard in the face. He wants the professor to feel a little awkward. The professor looks at Ranko’s mouth, but Ranko only rubs his mouth once.

“In my home they would have to pick up guns, lock their doors, protect people. Not just themselves.”

“You don’t think people are capable of that here?”

“People here would make terrible soldiers.”

The professor unfolds his arms and leans forward.

Ranko wants to hear what he has to say. What does a man say when he thinks he’s being insulted? What does a man say when he should know better, but cannot make eye contact?

“Is that how you judge people?” Professor Foals asks.

“A man knocked out my teeth.” Ranko pulls his lower lip down. “I had to let it happen. I pulled the broken pieces out myself with pliers.”

The professor clears his throat. His eyes dart to Ranko’s mouth and then aim at some noisy group of kids behind him.

Ranko does not think about where his teeth might be or the remains of his wife, daughters, friends. Ranko tries not to judge people, but what else can he do when surrounded by the weak?

“What is your name?” the professor asks.

Ranko picks up the pen, stands, and then leans down to print his name in block letters:

R A N K O

He puts the pen down and says his name “Ranko. Ranko.” Twice to affirm his name for the professor of literature who has trouble with kindness.

“Is that Russian?”

“No. People didn’t know my country until many of us died or were chased away.”

“One of the Russian states, though, right?” The professor wants Ranko to be Russian, for some reason.

“Most people don’t know on the map where I am from when I say where I am from. Even the people who live there have problems and fight. The lines change.”

“Were you part of the whole Serbian thing?”

Ranko hears the word and feels a chill.

“The best way to know where you are is by the people around you. I am Bosniak in America, now. But most people here think I am still from somewhere else. Like I wake up in my old home and take boat and train to come to work every day.”

“You have family here?”

Ranko presses the back of his first two fingers against his mouth. He does not respond. The story of his family deserves to be kept out of the air, especially since this man took too long to be kind.

“Ranko. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was gruff. Thank you for going through all this to fix the air conditioning.”

“Do not thank me. It is my job, so I do it.”

“No, thank you. Because you care about it.”

“I care about the words.”

“Well, my students don’t. I can’t get them to care about the way things are said.”

“Because you don’t care. They watch you, they see you here, distracted. In The Pit. Words cannot live here.”

“I do care.”

Ranko smiles, nods, and walks out of the Pit. Ranko heard no conviction in the man. Saw none. Smelled none. Just bitter coffee breath, rolling out of a mouth that taints the words, because it’s a mouth that has never begged for life or mercy or anything.