“Alone Together Alone” by Peter Groesbeck

Now he works in public administration, planning department—hospitals. After his tour in the Stan he got the degree and the job. A very good looking wife and a house not too far from bars appropriate to a certain level of presentation, a certain image projection. That’s all fine. Yet before this finer period there was the clinic at Bagram air base.

Porn and liquor smuggled through in Listerine bottles killed the off time. You just drill out that little nipple on the base of the bottle, leave the cap sealed and then you rinse and fill. Hot glue gun to replace the nipple. Those were the days. The nights were real work.

Over there the stars are overwhelming and so he’d go out early to the gate calls and stand around stamping his feet, look at the ridgelines far off. They’d call in from the perimeter and he’d watch the headlights and the dust trailing in the dark. The guards would clear the Afghanis before any medical personnel made contact. So in general the only issues in the contact were logistical.

Their trucks were old Toyotas that will run until the end of time. Rusted and patched with linens and 100mph tape and pocked with AK rounds. They looked like they’d already seen the end of time and returned. In the dark the native men acted like children. Turning over their dead in the US supplied rubber bags made no sense to anyone involved, but it was a regular occurrence.

It was the real work.

We’re 90 percent liquid. If you don’t let air get to a body the liquid doesn’t return to the atmosphere as it decomposes. The liquid should have its own name. Phrases such as body fluids just don’t cover the necessities of description. The smell is concentrated in the bag also. Our ancestors evolved instincts to be overcome by this smell, to run from it wafting on the breeze. The Afghanis got a few trinkets, a little swag bag of candy and transistor radios for turning the corpses over.

The real work is to haul awkward bags of fluid and bones that were once a body.

Get them in the Humvees somehow. Five or ten at a time and prop them on each other with the two ends secured so that shit doesn’t go spewing all over everything on the drive from the gate shack to the morgue complex. Accidents happen.

He’d ride in the passenger seat and think about the eyes of the men. Where were they going now but back into the desert and the mountains with their bags of candy and their bugged radios? They had no porn. They had hashish though didn’t they? Their eyes in the headlights of the vehicles were like those of goats somehow, passive only to a point.

As they make the mile back to the compound that smell coming off the bags is remarkable, but it’s the texture of the affair that seals it up so he’ll always, always remember it all. The way the fluid slops inside as they haul it at the ends. The way the long bones fold together in the middle like toothpicks in a ziplock.

He wanted to go Special Forces. To make the bodies rather than catalog them. To be special.

The real work is in storing bags of liquefied bodies in a room saucy with them. The masks don’t provide much relief. It comes through the vents into the admin office. It’s on your clothes until they go to the launders. And even then sometimes–somehow–it’s in the folds.

The bags are thick and black and the zippers are rated to 700 pounds of force. Bill me. Only, the rubber material, for reasons of olfactory chemistry and governmental finance seem to absorb, take on and seem to retain the smell forever. One Time Use, is stenciled on the exterior.

No shit.

Walking to the bar sometimes that smell is on his fingers, even though he just showered and changed into clothing befitting a well-employed young, urban man with acceptable tastes in propaganda and inebriants. It’s there and then it’s gone.

He thinks maybe it’s the sewer, but Portland sewers are deeply contained and serviced at regular intervals exceeding industry standards. It’s a good city. Even in the rain, the bars are very warm. He knows it can’t be the sewers and he knows it cannot be real.

No the real work is over. Isn’t it?

Andy Edwards is a writer and tracking instructor. He lives at the end of the Applegate Trail in southern Oregon.

Read an interview with Andy here.

“Helpless” by Peter Groesbeck

On the day Ivy Auntie went missing, Sriya Polgoda wished, once again, for more help. Her husband, Dharmapala, was already doing much more than facility maintenance. In addition to shopping for the week’s supplies of rice, fruit and vegetables, he fed Joseph Uncle his morning rice broth spoon by spoon, mollified Miriam Auntie during her shouting spells, and coaxed Jit Uncle to use the bathroom regularly so he would not soil himself.

And of course, he kept an eye on Ivy Auntie. When she disappeared, Dharmapala tore down the lane in the Polgodas’ rusted motor scooter, teetering around the corner garbage dump with the tires screeching so loudly that Miriam Auntie ran into her room. He knew Ivy Auntie could have wandered onto the main road and been hit by a bus in the rush hour traffic. But he found her in the vegetable stall at the top of the lane, trying to pin a ripe tomato into her hair and asking to buy a wedding sari. Dharmapala settled her in a three-wheeler hailed from the main road, and followed the three-wheeler back to the house.

While Sriya was guiding Ivy Auntie into the house and toweling tomato juice from her hair, Dharmapala bathed three lotus flowers in filtered water and placed them before the Buddha statue in the foyer. He knelt in gratitude, chanting the five precepts. What motivated him was not the money they would have lost if Ivy Auntie had got lost or injured, or worse, killed. For Sriya, running a home for the aged was a way to make a living, but Dharmapala cared for Ivy Auntie and the other three mentally infirm patients as if they were his own family. When Miriam Auntie splattered her brinjal curry on the wall, or Joseph Uncle clamped his mouth shut during his feedings, Sriya sometimes had to retreat to keep her patience. But Dharmapala’s compassion never flagged.

After Ivy Auntie wandered off, Sriya cajoled Ivy Auntie’s brother, Mr. Peiris, into paying extra for a helper. She said they needed someone to watch Ivy Auntie in the daytime when the garden gate stood unlocked. Mr. Peiris found Sriya a helper. The helper was his cook’s cousin, a young woman named Anandhi. When Anandhi arrived two days later, Sriya noticed that her hands were broad and callused, that her neck was sturdy, and that she bore herself with confidence. She knew Anandhi would be capable. She did not pay much attention to the luxuriance of Anandhi’s hair, which fell to the bulge of her rump, or wonder why she left it untied. Anandhi’s eyes, which had whites as flawless as the inside of a coconut, looked sideways, but Sriya only noticed the determination in them. She was satisfied that Anandhi could handle Ivy Auntie’s recurrent tirades, and the tantrums Miriam Auntie threw when told to keep her feet off the dining table.

“We have been blessed,” Dharmapala said to Sriya at the end of Anandhi’s first week. Sriya, who was oiling her wiry hair after her bath, agreed, but she remembered what he’d said when she first mentioned wanting a helper.

“Craving ease is only going to get us in trouble, you said,” she reminded him, tying her petticoat strings around her stout waist.

“It is true, as the Buddha said, that craving leads to suffering,” Dharmapala said. “But our need was great. And now our burden is less.” He smiled at her in the mirror as he buttoned a clean shirt over his sarong. His teeth were still white in middle age.

Sriya secured the pleats of her cotton sari with a safety pin so they would not loosen when she lifted Jit Uncle’s feeble body off the toilet. “Take Anandhi to the market with you,” she said. “She can carry another basket.”

When she heard the scooter revving, she went to the front door. “Bring back a good hand of bananas and two papaws,” she called to Anandhi. She knew Anandhi could gauge when the papaws were ripe.

Anandhi closed the gate before looping the baskets over her arms and mounting the precarious passenger seat. She had to clasp Dharmapala’s waist to keep from falling. Her hair was still loose, a silk veil down her back. The wind would tangle it terribly, Sriya thought. She wanted to warn Anandhi to tie it up, but then the scooter burst away, scattering pebbles like confetti. Sriya pulled Ivy Auntie, grumbling, back into the house.

Soon, Anandhi offered to take the patients for a daily stroll down the lane. They could walk away from the main road, she said, to the temple at the Palwatte junction. They needed stimulation and fresh air. Dharmapala agreed. He would go along to help. Walking would strengthen Jit Uncle’s legs, he said. And Sriya would have a little time to herself, to rest.

The stillness in the house when they left each afternoon was bliss. One hour was all it took for them to wander, stroll and stumble to the temple and back. Sriya stood at the kitchen sink and watched the monkeys playing in the trees. There was no need to listen for crashes or shouts or falling bodies in the patients’ rooms. She took the vanilla bean from the tea tin, kept there to flavor the patients’ morning tea, and held it to her nostrils. She watered the crotons that were starving for the attention the patients sucked out of her. She listened to the breeze rustling the bougainvillea bushes. She rubbed coconut oil on her cracked skin. She stood outside in the failing light and admired the orange streaks in the clouds. One day, she looked for the American Godiva chocolates that Joseph Uncle’s nephew had brought when he visited Sri Lanka. Sriya unwrapped the silver foil on each and ate them all.

Then came the day when she noticed the flowers before the Buddha statue in the foyer. The edges of the araliya petals were brown, their sanctity spoiled. There was no moisture left on the pewter tray that bore them. It was Dharmapala’s task to wash fresh flowers every morning and proffer them on the tray. That had been his practice for two decades, since their marriage. Sriya threw the dead flowers away, leaving the tray empty.

That night, after the patients had been fed and put to bed, Sriya beckoned Anandhi. She noted the luster of Anandhi’s skin and the roundness of her hips. Anandhi’s hair gleamed. The daily strolls and weekly motorcycle rides had done her good. “We cannot keep you here any longer,” Sriya said. “You must leave in the morning.” Anandhi claimed innocence, but Sriya had nothing more to say.

In the Polgodas’ darkened bedroom, Dharmapala sat slumped on his side of the bed, his head in his hands. Sriya removed her sari and laid her head on the pillow. She hoped they would not lie awake too long; she knew Miriam Auntie’s shouts would wake them before dawn. Then there would be bodies to wash and heave and wrap in clean clothes, curries to concoct and tempers to soothe. There would be no time for rest.

Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer has fiction published or forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Quiddity, The Summerset Review, Notre Dame Review, Stand, Literary Mama, Epiphany: A Literary Journal, and other venues. In 2004, she won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for a story that was subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She has a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago, and teaches at Felician College in New Jersey. Her website is www.ruvaneeevilhauer.com.

Read an interview with Ruvanee here.

“Second Temptation” by Peter Groesbeck

You folded the photo of your husband into the inside of your left boot, the edges crimped and frayed, wet with mud and sweat. The last thing you wanted was Thomas finding it, ending the expedition early, leaving the Sumatra Island behind you on one of those tight, jostling planes, your shoulder bumping his with each turbulent shift.

“How much farther do we have to go?” you ask, the Nikon D300 and its various lenses inside the airtight case, tugging against your collarbones.

“Not much. We can’t,” he says. He turns to look at you, droplets swinging from his tight braid, glasses misted with condensation. You asked about the braid the first time you met him and he said it was a tradition from an Indonesian tribe. It showed virility. Then you attempted to say the tribe’s name, perfecting it, repeating it after him until it felt like he had prodded into the pockets of your mouth.

You had sex with him for the first time on a hammock outside the hostel, the palm fronds quivering from your movements. It had been seventeen days since you touched your husband. Then again on a cot beneath a mosquito net while a moth with the wingspan of your hipbones beat against the fabric. It frightened you—how easy it was the second time. That night a beetle squirmed into your ear and, with a thin twig, Thomas fished it out, digging so deep that you became dizzy, like when you pull your eye away from the viewfinder after you’ve been focusing too long. You held his thigh as he poked the paint splotch, abstract tattoo beneath your right breast. Your early twenties, you said, a phase, intellectual rebellion.

The machete swings from his hip and you can see how much the blade has dulled from the vines he’s sliced through. You realize that maybe there is no way back, that you’ve come so far the only thing left to do is trail his sweat-stained shirt until you emerge on the other side, in a land where no one speaks your language and no one has cheekbones as sharp as yours.

You smell it first, and you’re expecting a dead animal. This is the one thing you’ll remember years later—the rotting stench of the flower clogging your throat before you see it, the white splatters on its thick, meat-red leaves; the entire flower resting on the dirt, so big that it frightens you, that you feel like you’ll fall into the floral opening and Thomas won’t be able to pull you out. You’ll remember standing next to him, your breath caught somewhere in your esophagus.

Before your photographs are even published you will lose both men, so you’ll celebrate alone in a silent apartment with an eight-dollar bottle of wine. But here, you sweat so much you can feel it beneath your fingernails. Here, vegetation tugs at your elbows and your ankles and never lets you go.

Garrett Quinn is an MFA candidate at Wichita State University and is the fiction editor for mojo. His work has been published or is forthcoming in The Adirondack Review, Barely South Review, Used Furniture Review, and various other journals.

“Missed Connection” by Peter Groesbeck

Strawberry-scented lotion. It cost $10.83 at Sephora — money that could have bought steak, a bag of shrimp, or a box of chocolate. I knew better, yet here I was in the bedroom, slathering lotion on my legs. It felt like cold kisses. My skin became softer. I scolded myself for breaking my budget.

What would my husband say?

As the late-autumn sun lowered into the horizon, my husband came home. He entered the kitchen, his gas-station uniform smelling strong. He kissed me on my cheek, his lips raw, and he held my hips.

“You smell like a strawberry tart,” he said. “Making anything special?”

I pulled away and I stated that I was serving chicken stir-fry tonight. The kitchen’s light contrasted with the darkness of the living room. Since we had no TV, the house remained quiet — except for a car rolling down the street.

“Nope,” I replied. “Just homemade Chinese. Takeout is bad for you.” I laughed. “How was your day?”

“Pumping gas into car after car,” my husband said. “Forgetting that I want to be a writer.”

“Everybody wants to write,” I replied as I tossed cut-up chicken and veggies in the wok. “Publishers like to be choosy.” I looked at my husband’s blue eyes. They were so brilliant when I first met him, but tears and crow’s feet had overtaken their beauty. I urged him to get an MFA. However, my husband knew college friends who earned MFAs and worked at Starbucks and Target. He decided to write about working at a gas station. I had to stay on a strict budget.

My husband would eventually realize the truth.

After dinner, I retired to the living room with my copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. Philip Carey’s failed quest to be an artist led me to my situation. I still smelled the expensive lotion on my body. In the back of our one-story house, I heard the shower run. Hot water and soap washed grime off my husband’s strong and finely muscled body. I wanted another night with him, even if he couldn’t make it in New York City, London, or Paris.

I slipped in a bookmark and closed the pages. Water continued to peal on the tiles of the shower. I left the dimness of the living room. In the bedroom, I took my clothes off, reminding myself to be more frugal — for my husband’s sake. I walked into the bathroom. It was misty, like a spring morning. As I slipped into the shower, my husband smiled at me, his blue eyes bright again. He held me. He kissed me with his softened lips. With Castile soap, my husband washed the day off my breasts, my stomach, my cunt. In that moment, I wanted him to clean me until I was perfect.

I didn’t smell like a strawberry tart anymore.

Behlor Santi lives in New York City and works as a freelance writer. She’s published fiction and poetry in such magazines as Cortland Review, The Dead Mule, and The Sidewalk’s End.

Read an interview with Behlor here.