Cloudbursts
Cloudbursts by Scott Dorsch You are special. Right now, you are in the middle of the living room with your hands out in front of you like a conjurer. Just above your brow is a cloud about the size of a rabbit, raining miniature rain onto a potted lemon tree. A black sheet hangs from the ceiling behind you and scrolls under your feet. It is coarse and sodden with rain. Your feet, too. Holding this pose is painful, but you do it anyway for your father. Your neck and shoulders ache and that familiar sharp bloom of sparks, of a hand gone numb, is back. But you must stay focused. Be still. You are your father’s favorite subject. You were a subject before you could walk. The uncanny prints of a child producing miniature clouds sell like hot cakes at fairs and gas stations all over the Midwest and make your father just enough money to afford the oils and canvas and printing fees. But it is the commercial jobs that earn him a living. Spray guns, ventilators and satin-finish eggshell are Monday through Friday. This latest portrait could change all of that. It could be a showstopper. The sun radiates over your father’s shoulder onto the easel like a spotlight, illuminating ancient dust above, waves of hair that could be your mother’s. It’s a dramatic illumination: the deep, crow-black shadows in the background, contrasted by the bright, angelic subject summoning rain onto lemons in the foreground. The raindrops clinging to the rinds are bright and phosphoric. The cloud, a near-black. The subject, bored. So baroque yet so surreal, critics would say. Perhaps they will comment on the inspiring use of light, the emphatic, no, deft chiaroscuro. But your father’s aim is more specific than that. His vision is more tenebrous, more Caravaggio, more dramatic than just simple deep shading for the sake of depth of field. He thinks this portrait could make him into something more than just a sideshow amongst the beer-can artist at the fairs. He may be hailed as the surrealist Rembrandt of Michigan. Perhaps he could sell more than just postcards and 10x12s, earn an honorary degree from Western or be invited to shows in high-rise New York or the Tate Modern. It could wretch him out of the gaff tape scrum and suffocating fumes of another credit union. Out of this sad cabin, north of town. Perhaps even your mother will come back. Perhaps. It has been ten days and oil has yet to touch more than just swatches and thumbnails. A house is only as strong as its foundation. His eyes dart from subject—you—to the parchment laid in his lap. He crosshatches your cheeks with charcoal in rough, staccato strokes, lifting the portrait to the light every so often to check his work. Satin-finish eggshell forever ornaments his curly black hair (it’s where you get your curls). Satin-finish eggshell hazes his jeans and even his bare feet. Satin-finish eggshell is his scent, his aura. You can’t remember a time when he wasn’t pocked with paint. He works in near silence. Never speaks. Music is distracting. Kids are distracting. You find his new mustache distracting. It seems to be an extension of his wispy nose hairs. Look away. Don’t laugh. Don’t look him in the eye. He hates that. You don’t want to agitate him. He moves like the weather in November. Mercurial, cold. Warm when you don’t expect it. You never know what father you will get. Producing clouds—controlling clouds—requires deep focus. Keep watching the dust dance in the light like krill. Imagine you’re at the bottom of the ocean, the cloud a turtle. Ignore the pain in your shoulders and feet. The feeling has always been ineffable, this making of clouds. You tried to explain it to your mother when you were eight. She was looking out the window when she asked about it. You told her that you could sense the clouds in the room like fish tugging at a line, and you just need to pull them into view. Like this, you said, lifting your hands overhead. A small loaf of a cloud appeared. She smiled. It kind of itches. Stings sometimes. Like static, you said. You’re losing the cloud. Concentrate. There’s a meaty scar on your lower lip from biting it. Tongue the scar tissue and stay grounded. Listen deeply to what’s around you. You can’t lose this rabbit-sized cloud. Your father is so happy with this one. He said it is perfect. Focus on the pencil strokes, the ticks of rain on the lemon leaves. On the texture of the black sheet below you. Your feet. The fan whirring in the other room. The clicks of juncos outside. The brawl of grackles and blue jays. The crying of gulls overhead. The gulls are inland. Storm is coming. Or is it you? Sometimes you can’t tell the difference. The birds make you restless. Behind your ear is a tickle, an itch. You swear it’s a spider. A thick one, like the ones that splay your windowsill at night. Wait for a break in the glances from your father before moving to check. You don’t want to upset him. Minutes pass before your father finally huffs, looks away, and bends to swap his charcoal pencil for a tortillon. He pushes up his glasses and tugs at his mustache. As he rubs his eyes, reach to inspect your nape. “Don’t,” he says without looking. You stop. Shudder. The rabbit-sized cloud expands by an inch, as if it were shocked, hair now standing on end. The rain tightens into a finer mist. Your father raises a brow. Deep breath. Focus. The grackles in the yard. The rain expands. It’s audible once again on the floor, the
On the Other Side of the Wall
On the Other Side of the Wall by Andrea Bianchi When I hear the girl’s scream pierce the cracked plaster between the new guy’s apartment and mine, I do nothing. My eyes widen, waiting toward the wall in the 1:00 a.m. dark. My back tenses against the mattress. My legs stiffen beneath the covers in the center of the bed. My breath halts. the way it froze in the grip of Rod’s icy fingers on that night two winters ago when his elbows pinned my breasts to our bed and his hands compressed the tissue of my throat, his thumbs collapsing my airway. Flattening my larynx. So when I opened my mouth to try to scream, it did not make a sound Silence now. And then a thud. Perhaps a faint scream. Perhaps I am imagining. I unclench my fingers and pull apart the heavy covers. Test my feet on the floor. My knees wobble. I tiptoe barefoot to the bedroom wall and press my ear against its smooth cool. Maybe thudding with the bass of the new guy’s stereo. But just the ticking of a pipe swishes within. I tip-toe across my apartment, to the opposite wall, maybe echoing with the shrieking laughter of the old woman’s favorite late-night talk show. But against my palm, the plaster flattens, as lifeless as a blank TV screen. Then a thump. A far-off wail. Maybe out on the city streets below. I tip-toe to the balcony and peer down to the sidewalk, where teenage girls used to squeal beside the boys they liked as they pedaled toward the last suburban train. Back before the sidewalks emptied, eerie, silent, save for the wailing sirens of police cars, flashing their blue rays into vacant storefronts as if with some kind of ultraviolent cleansing agent, some cure for the strange new virus that has come to hover above the whole earth, to choke the air, strangling the lungs of the rare masked pedestrians who dare to sneak down the downtown sidewalks beneath my balcony. But tonight, far below, no one is wandering. The only wailing is the wind. I clutch the railing. Inhale to slow the palpitations in my throat—a heart condition that the doctors in disheveled white coats on TV have warned might turn deadly, even in young people like me, if I were to breathe a contaminated stream of air down there, beyond the safety—and the isolation—of my apartment walls. A crash against the plaster. A rattle of the dishes on my kitchen shelves. I march across the floorboards to the wall that separates me from the new guy’s fist. But as I raise mine in response, to pound my reprimand, shout my threat to summon the police, I hear Rod’s long-ago curse, spat out after my hands grasped at our old apartment’s doorframe, after my feeble cry for help bounced and slid down the outside hallway’s walls. “Now you’ve done it,” he declared as he slammed the door against my fingertips. “Now the police are going to come, and now I’m going to get my gun.” I know that if the blue beams of police flashlights were to sweep up tonight from the streets and pierce through the new guy’s door, he too might flash a revolver in response to the police pistols, and then bullets might rip apart the plaster. My hand drops. My palm opens, empty. The silence stretches out the length of the wall. As the blue-lit numbers of the clock on the stove flash past one by one, cleansing the last echoes of the girl’s screams from the quiet darkness of my apartment, I imagine a corresponding blue glow in the room next door. Perhaps a football game replaying on the TV screen. Or maybe a more scripted sort of gore, flashing through some slasher plotline, perhaps prompting the girl’s frightened screams. Perhaps that crash was simply the slamming of a cabinet as the new guy retrieved snacks to accompany the horror film. Perhaps any actual horror was only my imagining. ***** I started imagining the details of the new guy’s life the night he emerged, mysterious behind his mask, from our building’s elevator. As the doors slid open, his frame blocked the entrance with the bruising bulk of a football player, perhaps an offensive tackle a few years ago on his college team, his torso wider than the pizza box in his big-knuckled grip, ready for the game later. The bill of his back-turned cap, which bore Rod’s favorite team logo, tried to suppress the tufts of brown hair punching out in all directions from his head. The edge framed his blue eyes, steady above the blue edge of his mask, as his eyes pierced the hem of my miniskirt and scraped down my bare legs to my heels. I stepped toward the elevator to slide down to the mailboxes—to the packages of stilettos and party dresses I had begun ordering in my isolation, in anticipation of far-off, imaginary parties—when the girl materialized. In the shadows behind him, she wore no mask. Only a kind of grimace, her lower lip twisting. Her eyebrows arched, as if trying to form a protective canopy above her body. She shuffled off toward his new apartment behind the stubborn wall of his back. Then the elevator doors closed into a barrier again between me and them. Through the wall later, though, I heard him yell. “Football, baby!” he said. “Let’s pound some skin!” His bare feet no doubt thumping one after the other up onto the coffee table, his hand stretching out with a beer bolted to one knee. On the other knee, perhaps the girl’s palm was
In Eternal
In Eternal by Lauren O’Donoghue Mary stands by the window, her fingers making cat’s cradles in the air. It is a winter afternoon, and the light is pale. It rimes the floral-patterned bedlinen, the hem of her long camel coat. There are water spots on the mirror. She would like to give the place a good going-over, to scrub the dust from the skirting boards and brush the cobwebs from the light fixture. Not that the room is dirty—not really. Only cheap. Only a little grubby at the edges. The hotel is a nondescript new-build on the outskirts of the city, near to the train station. Mary walked quickly through the lobby when she arrived, fearing questions, but the girl behind the reception desk didn’t even look up from the magazine she was reading. Perhaps this sort of thing is common here. The man Mary has come here to meet is in the en-suite bathroom. She can hear running water through the walls. Making himself ready. Her pulse chatters in her throat, rapid as a baby bird’s. She should take her coat off, she thinks. It seems like the thing to do. But every time her hands move to her lapels they flutter away again, coming back to rest in a spot just above her navel. Her stomach turns, the lurching of it somehow not unpleasant. Under her coat she is wearing a dress of green rayon, the one with the rosette at the collar, and underneath a plain slip that is fraying at the seams. Below that she has on a peach-coloured brassiere and knickers of a similar colour, the closest thing she has to a matching set. Her nylons are new, purchased that morning with money she took from Bridget’s piggy bank. Mary hopes their perfect sheen will distract him; from the weight of her breasts, the soft flesh of her thighs, the lightning tracery of stretch marks across her hips and belly. He has already told her that she is beautiful, but she fears he will shrink from the fullness of her. The pipes give a sudden, high shriek as a tap is turned off. Three heartbeats of silence pass, and then the door to the en-suite bathroom opens. The man Mary is here to see is not particularly handsome. His hair is thinning at the crown, and there are dark spots on the backs of his hands. But he smiles when he sees her, a broad and honest smile that deepens the creases around his eyes, and after years of not being seen at all, that is more than enough. Where and how they met is immaterial. She is here now. Mary removes her long camel coat, folds it over her right arm, and lays it neatly on the chair by the window. The coat had been John’s gift to her a week after she first stepped foot on English soil. Her good tweed overcoat, inherited from her mother, was ruined on the crossing from Dublin to Liverpool. A summer squall had bruised the sky not long after the ferry came out of port, and the vessel was bobbing queasily on the choppy water. Christopher had picked that inauspicious moment to make himself known, two weeks ahead of schedule. Mary’s waters broke as she was clinging to the guardrail on the ferry’s top deck and were sluiced away by the rain within moments. A woman called Agnes, a navvy’s widow from Kildare, acted as midwife. She’d six children of her own and knew the workings of it. It was her who folded up the tweed overcoat and propped it, businesslike, under Mary’s hips, to be spoiled beyond salvation in a rush of amniotic fluid. Mary’s screams, she was told later, had the lads in the engine room crossing themselves. Later she would hardly remember screaming at all. Only Agnes placing the squirming, wailing infant in her arms, his body red and wet as a skinned rabbit, and the way she couldn’t keep herself from laughing. She called him Christopher, the name she and John had agreed when he left to work the beet harvest. One of the crewmen opened a bottle of sherry to wet the baby’s head. By the time the ferry came into port an hour later, Christopher was asleep at Mary’s breast, and the sky was so cloudless you’d never know it had rained at all. Her fourth child will be born in a hospital room, a modern phenomenon that her mother would never have approved of. Mary will be brought in on the advice of her doctor because of the high levels of protein in her urine, and she will be grateful for it. It will not feel right, somehow, to birth this child at home, in the same bed where Declan and Bridget filled their tiny lungs for the first time. Mrs McKee will mind the children when Mary is admitted, albeit reluctantly. She will have heard the backyard gossip, same as everyone else. Mary will not require Mrs McKee’s approval. All Mrs McKee needs to do is keep the children fed until Mary returns home and to keep her cat’s arse of a mouth closed while they’re in earshot. It will be a difficult birth. There will be moments where Mary will be certain that she will die in that room, with its bare lightbulb and walls so white it hurts to look at them. She will tell the doctor that she needs her rites, and he will pretend not to hear her. The maternity unit will have opened its doors for the first time less than a month before. It will smell like paint and antiseptic. Mary will be sick into a metal dish that a nurse will hold beneath her chin, again and again until there is nothing to bring up but bile. When it is over, the midwife will ask Mary if she wants to hold the child, and Mary will say no. She will ask
Message in a Romance Novel
Message In a Romance Novel by Anuradha Kumar The day Mother was not waiting for us when we returned from school at our usual time, I knew she had gone to meet the man. He had written to her only two days ago, and I knew from the expression on her face. She looked dreamy and distracted, the face of someone making plans of her own. So, taking my younger sister by the hand, the two of us went to the house of a family friend. The auntie there knew my parents. I told her about our parents being away, that no one had come to pick us up from school. That got us sympathy and we stayed for lunch—a bit of rice with ghee, and a potato and pea curry. After that, I got my sister home safely. I admit I did that to impress my sister. To show her I could manage things when Mother let us down. She trusted me, even when we had to cross the dangerous main road that lay between our school and home. Many a time, I’d drag her across the moment a gap appeared in the traffic. Sometimes, there came a sudden squeal of brakes, an impatient horn somewhere, and then my sister’s frightened sob as I pulled her up onto the sidewalk. This was rare, though my sister thinks differently now. We never argue about it much; we know we must never reach a point where we get too judgmental about our mother. Once we were safely over, my sister always looked up at me scared, even angry. That afternoon when Mother wasn’t around, I felt a deep satisfaction as I bent down to hiss: “Today, she isn’t there to listen to you. Complain all you want.” In those days long ago, when we never felt the heat of summer nor the sharp sting of winter, crossing a road never seemed a big danger, not to me, as a fifteen-year-old. Also, stories were easy to find, make up, and tell; and, in the pre-television days, stories seemed to be everywhere, especially where my mother was concerned. My mother’s lover was a pilot. He flew old planes at a secret air base where my mother first met him. At that time, we did not live in Delhi, but somewhere in the east of the country. The air base had come up during the time of India’s war with China in the early 1960s. Set up with American help, the air base was two hours from the sea and located in a dry part of the country. Tall eucalyptus trees girded one side, looking over the curved steel hangars that glinted like daggers in the afternoon. The soil’s red underlayer was clearly visible amidst clumps of dry grass. On quiet days, we could hear the airplanes from a long way off, watch them land like beetles before vanishing into the clump of trees. Our house was on the edge with the eucalyptus trees, the last in a row of houses that faced an empty expanse of drying grass and tall yellow weeds. The weeds and the tall grass against the yellow and blue sky gave a strange shimmer to things. Sometimes I had a sense of things subtly moving, perhaps swaying—the trees, the tall grass, even the pebbles on the narrow muddy lane seemed to skitter, jump, and move away. The airstrip, as I discovered when I took my sister out on my new bicycle, was a straight gray aisle of concrete that ran from the hangars at one end to the four-storied, white-walled administrative edifices on the other. The planes, after landing, would zoom to that end, turn around, and then decelerating ever so slowly, would glide toward the hangar, rocking and shaking as if shrugging off the long journey it had just made. I don’t know when I first noticed that look of longing on my mother’s face. Did she look a little too long at the landing planes, or was it that one plane that did a series of stunts in the air as it filled up the sky one late afternoon? Its loops, its zigzags through the billowing white clouds? My mother lifted a hand to her mouth as the plane rose and fell, and then she looked at us, the quickest of glances to see if we had noticed. But I was the only one who knew about the pilot and what he meant to her. When he first came to the airbase, the pilot made the customary formal call to my parents. He came with his wife and son. I heard them that first evening as I peered through the loose pink curtain that fell like a waterfall, wavy in its thick folds, separating the drawing room from the rest of the house. As children we could wrap ourselves in it and twirl in its folds, and the grown-ups never noticed. Still, I saw things I never should have. The pilot was a short, trim man, a high forehead with twin just-developing bald spots, and eyes that twinkled and had a unique shine to them. The glow on his face was clearly visible, for he never once looked away from my mother. His smile never faltered either. I was surprised no one noticed. This, and the way our mother began mysteriously vanishing some afternoons. For my sister, it wasn’t really a mystery, but I was then a teenager, more observant, more judgmental, and critical of my mother. When she said she had to go to the bigger town, an hour away, to get supplies for the women’s club or for some charity work, I knew she was planning to meet the pilot somewhere. At the small airbase, we didn’t have to worry about crossing a big road—that would happen a year or so later after our father’s transfer to Delhi—or that someone had to be there when we came home from school. A big school bus,
Fiction_V16-1
Fiction Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Cloudbursts by Scott Dorsch FictionVolume 16.1 On The Other Side of the Wall by Andrea Bianchi FictionVolume 16.1 In Eternal by Lauren O’Donoghue FictionVolume 16.1 Message In a Romance Novel by Anuradha Kumar FictionVolume 16.1