Published in the Fall 1999 Issue of Ploughshares

WHY WAS IT, Janice thought, that everything took longer than you wanted?–like life. It was the last day of summer, their last day together, and all the way upstate her mother went on about Cornell–the boys she dated, the friends she made–going “oh,” and “oh!” over the radio until Janice’s head went completely blank, buzzed emptily like when she skipped her Mellaril. They’d eaten at the travel plaza Roy’s (her mother ridiculously ordering a salad), and Janice could still taste her onion rings. Outside the world ran by, bright and hot and sharp as a paper cut.

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HE’S BEEN SEEN standing in a vineyard in Westfield, beside the Thruway, waving to truckers, and then the same day in Conneaut, wandering the docks. A surveillance camera places him in Geneva; a carny operator sold him a doughnut in Geneva On The Lake. The police have received calls from Canton, Akron, as far west as you taped your homemade flyers on the sides of tollbooths, pinned them to rest stop corkboards. At this point you don’t know what to believe, how much hope you need to keep nested away like the cache of half dollars and keno tokens in his dresser.

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THE NOVEL OF THE HOLOCAUST is coming!  Yessiree–alive, alive, alive!  SEE the freak of the twentieth century, the soul-searching survivor of the ultimate battle of good and evil!  HEAR his pitiful story of torture and degradation!  THRILL to the savage, inhuman acts of his captors!  Yes, he’s coming, one command performance only, the sideshow setting up its tent in the meadow by the river.  All day children have been racing their bikes across the bridge, fighting to peek under the canvas.  Come one, come all!

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Published in Ascent

SHE HAD NOT WANTED TO GO to Ho Chi Minh City–or anywhere else with Roland. Even on the plane, on the way down, Gayle clung to this as if it absolved her in advance, though it was no secret.  He was good at indulging her. Her grief, her anger, her unproductive moods.  It was what she’d feared, marrying a man so much older; even her father had never coddled her. It seemed Roland never tired of saving her from herself, then expected credit.

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IT HAS CURED ME of my irrational terror of helicopters, that is one thing I can say. Now all my nightmares take place in airports, racing down endless corridors for flights I’ve missed. Heathrow, D’Orly, JFK. He only trusts a few. I wait as he waits, board as he boards, thrill to the same in-flight film.

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