1. Open the Bible.
2. Remember Mass and hear your father tell you, “Gracie, it’s because of God we’re on this planet; pay your respects, Sweetheart, to something bigger than yourself.”
3. Balance the closed tome on its spine; hold it up with the poise of an introvert. Look at the clock and wait until it strikes three, and then
4. let the pages fall
5. so that they gain mass and become heavy, and are, quite literally, out of your hands, their gravity like the weight of the flat line of your father’s passing through the thick, cement walls of a hospital waiting room.
6. Take a breath, and
8. read the passage that’s been chosen for you: SO SHALL YOUR JUDGMENT BE; it says, YOU YOURSELF HAVE DECIDED IT. You nod, a willing congregation.
9. Chant the words in your head like a mantra; let them lift you, and
10. float through the study into the bedroom where you find your husband. Flick on the light. He’ll flinch, burying his nose into a bed you haven’t really ever slept in.
11. Pull out a suitcase and gather enough clothes for about a week—you’ll stay at April’s—but keep that pulsing passage in your heart. Fold the garments carefully. It’s dark, now; you’ll deal with wrinkles later.
12. “It’s the middle of the night—” he’ll slur with sleep in his throat. You won’t answer because it’s not a question.
13. “God,” he’ll say. Think back to all the three AMs you’ve spent together: in the beginning, at bars, drunk with friends or high on Ambien (well, not him, he was always too scared), but, soon enough those three AMs became pure panting and dry heaving, not from sex, but from stony indecision.
14. Find your passport. Grab your wallet. Hold back tears because this is not your father’s funeral. This is just a leaving.
15. Close the suitcase. He’ll whisper, “What’re you doing?” “Go back to sleep,” you’ll say, because it is a question. Briefly feel guilty, and realize this is how you felt when you asked your brother to give the eulogy instead.
16. Pick up the suitcase and feel its weight. You could use some help lifting it, but your husband will just lie there.
17. Struggle down the stairs, knowing that you would have mustered up this courage years ago. You would have packed your bags in a fervor and thrown divorce papers in his face as evidence of his inattentiveness, his milquetoast inability, but this was never your choice, not while your father was alive; if your dad had known, he would have purged the glazed-over looks of your husband’s, expunged those empty stares directed towards long-legged waitresses, the ones with darker skin, with smoother lines, glossed up and sealed like the wood varnish on the floor of the cathedral. And so, instead of choosing conflict during your dad’s dying years, you will now creep out so silently in the middle of the night as if you are woman who simply cannot decide.
18. You take a breath, and
20. with suitcase at your side, shut the door to your tired mausoleum. Finally resurrected, remember that Christ’s three blank days are nothing compared to missing a man you loved in lieu of a man you would love to miss.

David Lerner Schwartz lives in Austin, TX where he designs products and services for various industries and performs improv throughout the state. David graduated from Tufts University in 2013 and most recently studied at the Kenyon Writers Workshop in Gambier, OH.

I am going to brush my teeth.

I am going to eat a banana.

Then. I am going to write a to-do list. I will not go overboard and put a whole bunch of things on it because I plan to accomplish all of the things on that list.

I can do this. When I feel hung up today, or in the next hour, or in the next 10 minutes, I will tell myself…I can do this.

I will say, “You can do this.”

I will scrunch my toes on the tile as I stand in front of the fridge to remind myself how awesome it is to walk around. I will feel the tile’s coolness and texture with my toes, and really acknowledge how awesome each of my little piggies are. And legs. Thank you legs.

I will remind myself that this is a marathon, this is the hand I have been dealt, this is a part of my reality.

I will not feel pity for myself because it is the 4^th of July and I want to go light things on fire and watch them explode in colors, and I want to be around others and hear the murmur of conversations and waves of laughter swell and fade and swell again. If I need to cry, I will do it. Once. But I will not stay there.

I will take a shower. Because I am gross—I mean really gross.

I am at the bottom of an abandoned well. No one is coming to save me and it’s up to me to claw my way out, all the way to the top. It is gray and dank and there are no places to really grip or any footholds to dig my toes into. The piece of visible sky is overcast and so far away. It is lonely down there, and I feel like I have nothing to draw upon.

The weight of emptiness is heavy.

I will tell myself, “You can do this.”

I am going to enjoy sitting in the shower as the water falls on me. I will stay in that moment and enjoy it and not think about the process of getting out of the shower or getting dressed or the fact that I still need to brush my teeth.

When I am brushing my teeth I will think, you are standing here and that is enough.

Michelle Hanlon is a compulsive list maker. Some of her favorite things: summer nights in West Texas, the first sip of coffee on a dark morning, and the Oxford comma. Her work can be seen in apt. and Burningword Literary Journal.

A little boy stands at his window in Scooby Doo pajamas and wet hair. He touches his fingers to the glass and feels the Texas summer hot against his skin. Downstairs his parents yell at each other, and tomorrow his father will move out, but in his hand tonight he clutches his first tooth, small and white and sharp, and he waits.

Tonight the tooth fairy will die, under a spray of chemicals sent to end the West Nile Virus.

If he had only lost his tooth last spring, had let his father yank it out when he offered, but he didn’t and this summer in Texas the West Nile Virus spread like a dust storm and a little girl died in a hospital bed and the city said that enough was enough, something had to be done. Protestors said there were other ways, but the city asked how many people had to die. They filled the sky with shining lights and helicopters that rained chemicals down over the streets, and they told the children to stay inside and shut their windows until the aerial spray was over. They must have forgotten about the fairies.

The little boy knows the tooth fairy will try to come. She will ignore the city warnings and will fly through the aerial spray to reach him, like she has flown every night to reach children. And she will die. The little boy knows she will die. He sees her struggling against the chemicals that cling like lead to her wings and fill her lungs. He sees her coughing, sputtering. A plate shatters downstairs. The little boy’s fist tightens around the tooth and a drop of blood appears on his palm.

Tomorrow he will search the woods for the tooth fairy. His mother will dress him in long sleeves and gloves to keep the chemicals from his skin. She will look relieved to send him out to play and will tell him to stay as long as he wants. She will say she is sure the tooth fairy is not dead, only distracted, but the little boy will know better. The woods will be silent, and the little boy will look under rocks and logs for trails of golden fairy dust, but he will find nothing but dead frogs and insects. He will build a fairy house in case the tooth fairy really is alive and needs a place to rest. He will rinse the house in the creek to wash the poison from it and will carpet it with pine needles and build a bed of twigs. He will hang curtains made of leaves from the windows to shelter the house in case the helicopters come again with their aerial spray.

Tonight, though, the little boy waits in his bedroom. He whispers to the tooth fairy not to come, but he knows he is too late. He stands at his window and listens.

Listens to the yelling.

Listens to the poison rain.

Listens to the fairy wings that beat faintly, and fall.

 
Courtney Craggett is a doctoral candidate in creative writing and Chicano/a literature at the University of North Texas, where she teaches English and has served as the Assistant Fiction Editor for the American Literary Review.  Her fiction appears in Mid-American Review, Washington Square Review, and Word Riot.  Her reviews appear monthly in American Microreviews and Interviews. 

I remember you smashing dishes in the kitchen, one by one, a wedding set. Blue tipped apparatus sitting on the white bathroom sink.

Traffic on Olympic is heavy, parking lot type, horns going off like car alarms. It’s a one-story brick building on the south side of the street, a white-capped gas station one one side with a tire rack near the back pumps and a desperate narrow alley for those who need a quick getaway.

You broke all our dinner plates that night. Crying in the bathroom with the door locked without me knowing why. I still don’t know why exactly.

On the drive, an old Muddy Waters song played, I don’t remember what it’s called, the funny things we remember, some old blues song playing on the radio because the car is silent, you staring away out the window, the brown curl of your hair coming up at the end when I looked over, the chorus went something like I don’t know.

The promises you made in a hotel room in Ohio after an old man died, a funeral to attend and ill talk of a wedding, an old man has died and we spoke of a possible marriage that we said we both saw the same way, the same way when the marriage took place on Ronald Coleman’s old estate where John F. Kennedy once honeymooned and how that marriage was too entwined with a death, the death of a stepfather the day after, one bad omen after another, marriage and death intertwined.

Back in the car something about a big leg woman on a simple acoustic guitar, the anger mine because of the lie that you had told me, of what was to be soon undone, what was soon to be taken, the lights of glass stars that had hung down over the vows, of you in the wronged white and me like an undertaker in a black suit while a few witnesses looked on and shared the thing that was not ultimately meant to be. You refuse to look at me on that car ride down Olympic and I too refuse to speak as well, anger wrapped tight in the fist around the black steering wheel as I remember those glass stars that we had hung above us from their chains with yellow candles burning within.

Later you found the hormone in your urine and you cried, you cried for fear of being trapped and pinned like one of those butterflies on those old boards that they had in the 60s, afraid that your freedom was taken by another or your fear of what it would do to the damage that was already done and damaged doubled was no end of trouble and what the fuck could you do: there were promises made, made in that wooden square house with the glass stars and the wedding guests, catered meals and flowers you had to buy yourself because they were forgotten, that same building that later burned down in a fire that no one knew how it started but like everything else in this relationship, life entwined with death and no symbolic rebirth, not here, not as we stop at the light on Olympic near the old Spanish-looking church and the small park with the children on the swing sets next to this busy street.

Only a few more blocks until we are there, and you still say nothing to me, the hate a silence, the silence an ultimatum that I had lost as you refused to discuss it any further, and Muddy Waters is still singing softly as he did in the Ohio hotel room the day of the old man’s funeral when those vows were made and promised only to come undone like poorly-wrapped gifts.

And the car pulls up to that small fucking brick building that I hate in my dreams and imagine I could burn down, if brick could burn, and you turn to me but still say nothing, and I open the door and, as I move, you shake your head. I stay in the car as you go in and I don’t know what to do to make the time pass so I drive around the block, once, twice, more and more, so many times that I lose track until I end up again in front of that brick building and you’re breaking plates as if you were counting out the number of pills into a pale hand or the adding up of a long unaccounted for checkbook, the ceramic white plates chipping the tiles of the floor as you drop them from a height as if to see how fast they could fall.

I sit in the car, cupping my eyes, trying to be hard because a man does not do those things except to wait and bear it out like an old tree and you come out, two hours later, the legs wobble and you look pale and frail like a ghost and I think about getting out of the car to help you but I wait as you wanted. Let you have what you want so I let it happen even though I didn’t want it to happen and I could do nothing to make it not happen but on the steps from that damned brick building you walk and put out a hand as if to grasp a rail that is not there and I bolt from the car to grab you before you fall faint from the loss of blood and more and the loss that I will feel and the loss that I don’t know if you feel and that neither of us, neither of us, will ever be able to account for ever, ever again.

Ron Burch‘s short stories have been published in Mississippi Review, Pear Noir!, Eleven Eleven, Pank and others.  His first novel, Bliss Inc., was published by BlazeVOX Books.   He lives in Los Angeles, where he is Co-Executive Producer on a TV show for DreamWorks Animation.  He is also a produced and published playwright.  Please visit:  www.ronburch.com.