jobless
bitch



a cold wind blows tonight, by noah cicero



Vasily had hope yesterday.

He sat with his sister Sasha at the kitchen table eating Taco Bell, Sasha says, "Vasily, I don't care if you get a whore. I've been making good money lately at the bar. You should."

"I know, but money, it will be gone."

"I'll give you money."

"No, the money, it will be gone, I'll die. Death."

"No, listen, you need to get laid. It has been months. Your self-esteem is withering away."

"Like the state."

"No, Vasily, not the state. Quit fucking thinking about the state. The state doesn't care about you, stop thinking about the state and start thinking about your penis. Your penis is more important than the state today."

"I'm very busy right now thinking about the state."

"No state, penis, think penis."

"Penis."

"Damn, I'm looking into your eyes and your eyes are thinking of the state."

"Okay, let me think, penis."

"Listen, take your check and go the strip joint and find a girl that will do a private with you for 200 dollars."

"But money."

"Fuck money, your penis needs this."

"My penis is lonely. A cold wind blows over my crotch. My penis resembles the steel mills of Youngstown, once populated with energy and labor, now abandoned and unused, rusting, falling apart, with leaky roofs and broken windows."

"You are so fucking dramatic. That's your problem, you out dramatic the girls and girls don't like that. They like to be the masters of drama, and there you are being all poetic and weird all the time."

"My soul is an unpicked strawberry."

*

Vasily goes to the strip joint.

It is wonderful in there.

There are women in bikinis and beer.

Vasily gets some mexican beer. He doesn't drink American beer because it gives him gas. He is convinced that American beer gives everyone gas, but Vasily is so nervous all the time making his ass tight that instead of just farting he gets bloated and hates himself.

A Puerto Rican girl comes over named Janisa.

Janisa is short, skinny, has mosquito bites for tits, and is a fine looking person.

Vasily has gotten dances from Janisa before, so Janisa knows he will probably get a dance.

Janisa says, "You want a dance?"

"Yeah."

Janisa dances for Vasily.

When Janisa leans back and puts her head near Vasily's mouth, Vasily says, "You do privates?"

"Yeah."

"How much?"

"300."

Vasily knows they always say 300, he also knows they will go lower.

Vasily says, "How about 200 and no sex."

"All right."

Janisa says, "Just wait for me outside when we close."

Vasily has to sit there for another hour, waiting, waiting, waiting, to get some loving.

He sits there, orders more beer.

Plays the touch machine.

He imagines Janisa's little Puerto Rican body naked and curled up next to his, her soft brown skin, her pretty long dark indian hair, her skinny little arms tangled up in his.

This makes Vasily very happy.

Vasily has not gotten laid in a long time. He needs this. He needs some loving, or he may die.

No one has died from not getting loving, but life feels very hard without it. Life can drag without loving, life can weigh a lot without loving, poverty, sickness, and trying to show up to work on time and care about work enough to do a good job to not lose the job seem so much easier when one is getting some loving.

But Vasily is getting no loving.

So here he is, purchasing time with a lady.

He has chosen Janisa and not the other girls, not because Janisa is the prettiest, because there are prettier ones, but because she has the best personality. Or a personality that he prefers.

Vasily dreams and dreams of the night ahead, of nakedness, softness, and eventual orgasm onto the Puerto Rican ass.

The bar finally closes.

Vasily goes outside and waits in his car.

He sits there holding his penis, getting all stupid with desire.

Janisa walks out and goes to her boyfriend's car. He doesn't hear what they are saying, but he obviously says something like, "Get in the car, we're going home."

Because after a minute of talking, she gets in the car and leaves.

Vasily sits in the parking lot, Janisa is gone.

The loving is gone.

He sits there.

He thinks about punching the steering wheel of his car.

But he realized he thought about it, and therefore has lost its power.

So he drives out the parking lot to a local 24 hour super market, buys an expensive brand of mint chocolate chip ice cream and goes home.

When he gets home Sasha is sitting at the kitchen table writing, Sasha says, "Where's your whore?"

"No whore."

"Oh Vasily."

Vasily opens the mint chocolate chip ice cream and eats it. He decides that tomorrow he will rent five movies of considerable length, go home, order a large pizza that will last him the whole day, watch the movies and not leave the house, or pick up the phone.



the fish, by lydia davis



She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her—there is no one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish, too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.



synchronized diving, by mazie louise montgomery



I am bored. I am bored with this place and this desk and this carpet. The desk is old and has "character" because it is heavy and made out of a tree that doesn't grow in nature anymore and I am supposed to like it more than, say, the fake-wood desk I could buy from Wal-Mart for $49.99, but I do not. I would rather have the fake-wood desk covered with the fake, wood-design contact paper so I could play with edges and peel it up, piece by piece, over time. The carpet has a unique design, delicate swirls of red and pink and black and it comes from a country where the people don't speak English and was made by someone who probably slaved night and day in a tent in the desert, or at least in a hot factory on the bad side of Chicago, while they put this beautiful rug together, but it is also boring and I think I would rather walk on shiny black linoleum tiles that never need to be waxed.

There are books around my desk written by people with impressive sounding names and the insides of these books are filled with substantial words like Cataclysmic and Calamitous, words that sound like they could get up off the couch and kick my ass should I come in and interrupt their cartoon watching time after work. I think the words in these books could actually drink me under the table if given the chance, and maybe kick my ass in pool too. But these words are still boring because the cartoons they watch are perverse and shocking in that over-the-top, grossly violent and overtly sexual kind of way. Sometimes I think I'd like to see Cataclysmic and Calamitous watch a pornographic cartoon in front of the kids as they are enjoying a satisfying after-school snack of Oreo cookies and a glass of 2% milk. I'd like to see the porno staged in one of those George W. Bush, No-Child-Left-Behind inspired "charter" elementary schools where the "older" and dumb yet street-wise fifth grader who can already grow a beard becomes enamored with the newly graduated, idealistic teacher who is both "youngish" and nimble and wants to save the street-wise fifth grader from the harsh streets of some heathen place like New York City, or Durham, North Carolina. But then I think this would also be boring because it seems like something I've already seen or been told about as a recent dream from a friend of mine who shall go nameless because he's currently serving in the Marine Corps as a Special Op in Afghanistan and I wouldn't want to put his security clearance in jeopardy.

Sometimes I think I'd like to take Cataclysmic out for a Budweiser or a gin and tonic and then maybe take him to bed. My feeling is that Cataclysmic has a tiny penis. I think the chip he has on his shoulder is a dead give away. Most of the words I've ever met who had such an immense hatred for the human race and a ready desire to punch a complete stranger in the face usually had a tiny penis. I'm making generalizations and I probably shouldn't do that but I'm bored and I don't really care about what I should and shouldn't do. In fact, I think I'd like to start simultaneous relationships with both Cataclysmic and Calamitous. Maybe we could have a threesome. Maybe Calamitous could play the part of the psychiatrist and tell me what a mess I've made of my life lately and give me some good advice on how I should go about fixing it; maybe he could be a judge, watch me go down on Cataclysmic and then critique my performance: That was a nice twisting half gainer, but you made too much of a splash upon entry so I'm giving you an 8.

Maybe Cataclysmic, Calamitous and I could form a synchronized diving team and compete for the Olympic gold. I think I look good enough in a bathing suit to cinch us a hefty endorsement deal. I think the three of us could stand a real chance in the 3-meter springboard event, but not the 10-meter platform, because I still have that persistent case of acrophobia. I was hoping one day to replace my fear of heights with the fear of loud noises, or at least add it in, because the fear of heights is just so common and I thought that an acrophobia/acousticophobia combination in a synchronized diver might just win the hearts of the American psyche. But I'm told the fear of loud noise is more common in pets than humans and anyway it would all still be boring unless I came up with something really intriguing, like a fear of chickens, or German culture. Only thing is, I'd have to convince the Olympic Committee into letting me compete in a bikini. You have to acknowledge your limitations: I just don't look good in a one piece.

If the three of us could just find some redneck girl from the Ukrainian team to whack one of us on the knee or the head with something original, like a yard stick, or a rolled up newspaper, that would be choice. And in front of a camera crew, even better. But it couldn't be too scripted. It would have to look spontaneous. There are just too many of those sentimental Olympic stories out there already. It's hard to compete for air time against a beautiful Romanian gymnast with a blind mother or a 139 pound multiple-world-champion Chinese female weightlifter who can snatch 250 pounds while simultaneously dealing with the emotional pain of a cancer stricken sister on her deathbed.

But even with the threesome and the fake-wood desk from Wal-Mart and the shiny black linoleum tiles and the porno and the gin and the Budweiser and the pool playing and the synchronized diving, I would still be bored. I think Cataclysmic and Calamitous would eventually leave me for some other boring words like "deserted, wet streets" and "patches of green, green grass covered with dew" and "dim streetlights" that "buzzed and crackled" in the night and then maybe Cataclysmic and Calamitous would get together with these words and make a sentence, or better yet a short story set in California in the 1960s involving poor and uneducated itinerant farmers enduring poverty and depression. Maybe there could also be a grandmother and a social worker. Or maybe they could form a sentimental poem about teenage love in which they compared falling in love to drowning in the ocean or their lover to a giant wave slamming down on them or a rip tide slowly pulling them under. Maybe they could both drown together like two virgin lovers fated to never consummate their love; maybe I could stand on the shore of a secluded sandy beach and watch. Maybe at sunset the sky would alight with the color of their love and my feelings of boredom would be replaced by empathy and a melancholy sadness that would inspire me to greatness.

Or maybe I could just stay bored and drink Budweiser alone while I watch Cataclysmic and Calamitous compete without me. Maybe it would be better for the team if I just stayed home and went to bed early, which sounds like the most boring thing of all but has a certain appeal if preceded by at least four shots of Jack and followed by one strange sex dream in which I capture gold medals in both the shot put and the long jump. Then maybe a passionate if not slightly misguided Canadian from the equestrian team might run across the infield of the arena wearing nothing but a placard that said: WAR BAD. And that right there would make all my years of hard work and self-sacrifice worthwhile.



reduced to temping, by matthew rohrer



Some people are offensively timid.
When I stand near them, and if I
haven't seen any other people for weeks,
I feel like a star's bodyguard
and the timid person is an egg or worm.
Alone, I rush across
rainy sidewalks with no umbrella,
with my shoulders drawn in. My ribcage locked.
Something moves overhead at all times:
I am sometimes more, sometimes less, aware
of this looming constant. Lean your head back
and think about that for a few seconds:
you're very tiny, you're in outer space.
You see I'm right.



an uneventful story about a person and a dog in an apartment that the majority of the population would react to by saying 'i don't understand what the point of this is,' by ellen kennedy



a person wakes up in a bed that is really just a bare twin-sized mattress set directly on the floor

the bed is in a room that only has a bed

the room is in an apartment that is only a room

inside the apartment is a bed and a laptop and a toilet and a sink and a shower and a mini refrigerator and an oven with a stovetop and a toy poodle without a name

the person walks to the toilet and pees

the toy poodle is lying in the corner staring at the person peeing

the person walks to the mini refrigerator and takes out a box of vegan burgers and looks at the vegan burgers then puts the vegan burgers back into the mini refrigerator

the person looks out of the only window that is only 2 feet by 2 feet big and a little dirty and sees a pigeon fly into a window of another apartment and fall 20 stories to the sidewalk

the person walks back to the mini refrigerator and takes out a portabella mushroom the size of their hand and washes it in the sink then eats it raw

the person eats the mushroom and thinks 'fungus, i'm eating fungus' while eating the mushroom and doesn't really laugh but opens their eyes a little bigger and then returns them to a neutral position

the person eats around the stem of the mushroom and then eats the top of the stem then feeds what is left of the stem to the toy poodle

the toy poodle picks up the stem in its mouth and then drops it back on the floor and walks back to the corner and falls asleep



five signs of disturbance, by lydia davis



Back in the city, she is alone most of the time. It is a large apartment that is not hers, though it is not unfamiliar either.

She spends the days by herself trying to work and sometimes looking up from her work to worry about how she will find a place to live, because she can't stay in this apartment beyond the end of the summer. Then, in the late afternoon, she begins to think she should call someone.

She is watching everything very closely: herself, this apartment, what is outside the windows, and the weather.

There is a day of thunderstorms, with dark yellow and green light in the street, and black light in the alley. She looks into the alley and sees foam running over the concrete, washed out from the gutters by the rain. Then there is a day of high wind.

Now she stands by the door watching the doorknob. The brass doorknob is moving by itself, very slightly, turning back and forth, then jiggling. She is startled, then she hears a foot shuffle on the other side of the doorsill, and a cloth brush against the panel, and other soft noies, and realizes after a moment that this is the doormanw ho has come to clean the outside of the door. But she does not go away until the doorknob stops moving.

She looks at the clock often and is aware of exactly what time it is now, and then ten minutes from now, even though she has no need to know what time it is. She also knows exactly how she is feeling, uneasy now, angry ten minutes from now. She is sick to death of knowing what she is feeling, but she can't stop, as though if she stops watching for longer than a moment, she will disappear (wander off).

There is a bright light coming from the kitchen. She did not turn a light on there. The light is coming from the open window (it is late summer). It is morning.

On another day, the early, low sun shines on the park across the street, on the near edge of it, so that one bare trunk, and the outer leaves of the trees on this side of the grove, are whitened with sunlight as though someone has thrown a handful of gray dust over them. Behind them, darkness.

Before her as she stands at the front window looking out at the park, the plants on the windowsill have dropped some of their leaves.

She knows that if she speaks on the telephone, her voice will communicate something no one will want to listen to. And she will have trouble making herself heard.

In the midst of the random noises from the courtyard (she catalogues them in the evening: the clatter of dishes, an electric guitar, a woman's laughter, a toilet flushing, a television, running water), suddenly a quarrel begins, between a man and his mother (he shouts in his deep voice, "Mother!").

She thinks, having come back after some years, that this is a place full of difficulty.

She watches a great deal of television, even though there is very little that she likes and she also has trouble focusing the picture. She watches anything that comes in clearly, even though she may find it offensive. One evening she watches one face in a movie for two hours and feels that her own face has changed. Then, the next night at the same hour, she is not watching television and she thinks: The hour may be the same but the night is not the same.

Later, when she lists and counts the signs of disturbance, at least two are associated with the television.

Now she can't put it off any longer. She has to go out and look for a place to live. She doesn't want to do this, because she doesn't want to say to herself that she really has no place of her own. She would rather do nothing about the problem and stay inside this apartment all day.

Several times she goes out to look at apartments. She can't afford to pay much, and so she looks at the very cheapest apartments. She looks at one above a candy store and one above an Italian men's social club. the third one she looks at is nothing but a shell with a large hole in the floor of the back room, and the garden is overgrown with brambles. The real-estate agent apologizes to her.

She is glad when it grows too late in the afternoon to look at anything more and she can go back to the apartment and watch television and eat and drink.

She often cries over what she sees on television. Usually it is something on the evening news, a death or many deaths somewhere, or an act of heroism, or a film of a newborn baby with a disease. But sometimes an ad, if it involves old people or children, will also make her cry. The younger the child is, the more easily she cries, but even a film of an adolescent will somtimes make her cry, though she does not like adolescents. Often, after the news is over, she is still catching her breath as she walks out to the kitchen.

She eats dinner in front of the television. After another hour or two she begins drinking. She drinks until she is drunk enough so that she drops things and her handwriting becomes hard to read and she leaves out some of the letters from certain words and has to read all the words over again carefully, adding the missing letters and after that printing some words a second time above the illegible script.

She is forgetting the idea she had about moderation.

She does the dishes so wildly that soap flies everywhere and water splashes on the floor and the front of her clothes. During the days he washes her hands often, rubbing them together briskly, almost violently, because she feels that everything she touches is coated with grease.

She stands by the door and hears someone whistling in the marble lobby.

*

One day she sees an apartment she is willing to take. It is not pretty, but she is ready to take it because she wants to have a home again, she wants to be bound to this city by a lease, she doesn't want to go on feeling the way she does, loose in the world, the only one without any place. She imagines that when she moves in, she will have a party. She signs some papers. The agent will call her later and tell her whether the deal has gone through or not. She walks home and shops for food with a sort of forced tranquillity, as though if she moves too quickly something will break. She continues to move this way, gently, with deliberation, the rest of the day. Then, later in the evening, the agent calls and tells her she has lost the apartment. The owner has decided suddenly not to rent it. She can hardly believe this explanation.

Now she is sure she will never find a place to live.

She lies in bed with a bottle of beer. She finished the beer and wants to put it down. She can't put it on the bare wood of the bedside table because it will leave a mark, and the table is not hers. She puts it on a book, but the book is not hers either. She moves it to another, which is hers, a song book.

Then she gets up because she sees that the clothes she took off earlier are heaped on a chair. She wants to lay them out straight in case she decides to wear them the next day, and she lays them out, but since she is quite drunk they are not straight, as she can see. She is drunk because she has had two bottles of beer, a glass of Drambuie, and then a third bottle of beer.

In spite of being drunk, she can still hold on to some things in her mind, though with an effort. She sees how well she is holding on to things and thinks that she is still smart. She thinks about how her smartness doesn't seem to count for much anymore, the way it used to. Her smartness has counted for less and less as she has grown older. She lies there in the dark trying to pull herself together. She can feel this is a cliff edge, this return. Now it is after two in the morning, but she can't let herself fall asleep.

On the white side of a truck, a dark blue eagle with its wings raised. Watching for it, she sees, outside the window, the mail truck pull up by the hydrant. She sees the mailbag tossed out of the truck onto the sidewalk and the handyman of the building drag it across the sidewalk and then stand holding it by the neck while he talks to another handyman and she grows angry as she watches because there may be a letter for her in the bag.

She is told about an apartment in a nice small street, but she won't look at it because she is also told that on the floor below lives a retarded man and his father and they argue and shout and she would have to listen to that.

The day is dark again with the threat of rain. In the yellow light she sweeps up the dead leaves of the houseplants and waters the pots. On this day there is more order.

In the dining room she pushes upright the heavy books that have been leaning far over to one side on the shelves and sprawling open for so long now that their covers are warped out of shape. There is another bookcase in the living room, with glass doors, and on top of it a clock that hisses every time the second hand passes a certain point. Now she walks down the hall, straightening more books as she comes to them. The hall is long and dark, with many angles, so that around every bend more hallway opens out and this hallway seems to her, sometimes, infinitely long.

In the bedroom, where she watches television, she can often hear the sound of a string quartet or some other classical music. It is a small sound, but perfectly clear. When she first heard it, she wondered if there was a radio somewhere in the room, listening. The walls of the room are dark, the windows are shaded, and there is a large low bureau of scratched green wood with a mirror above it into which she looks again and again, as she also looks into the three long mirrors on the three doors of the closet. The music was coming from the radiator, which stands below a framed photograph of a bearded man; he is the classicist whose books were falling over in the other room. She put her ear down near the radiator and found that the music was coming from the knob. Now she sometimes lies on the bed listening to the music. It is just low enough so that it doesn't stop her from thinking.

One day a fly walks over her hand and she feels that the fly is a friendly presence. The same day, she wants to stop a policeman in the street and talk to him. Then that impulse passes.

She decides to call several people. She tells herself she has to talk to some people. She is worried, and then she is angry at herself for worrying, for always thinking about herself and for always looking at the world so darkly. But she doesn't know how to stop.

She reads a book about Zen and she writes down on a piece of paper the eight parts of Buddha's eight-fold path and thinks she might follow it. She sees that it mainly involves doing everything right.

Even though it is late enough to go to sleep she has something to eat. Cereal, then, after the cereal, bread and butter, then marshmallows and other foods. She turns over onto her stomach and looks at the covers of some books. She can go on reading now without eating. Her stomach is so full that she can't lie on it comfortably, and she feels as though she were lying on a rock or a bundle of sticks. She has filled stomach as though she were filling a knapsack or a boat for a long journey. It will be slow and hot, and she will wake and sleep again several times and have uncomfortable dreams, or there will be no sleep but hard questions. No tears, though.

The rain continues to fall steadily just beyond the sound of an air conditioner. It is a soft drumming with an occasional louder splat into the courtyard.

She can't fall asleep. She lies with her ear on the mattress and listen to her loud heartbeat, first the rush of blood form her heart, which she can feel, then a split second later the thump in her ear. The sound is shethump, shethump. Then she starts to fall asleep and wakes again when she begins dreaming that her heart is a police station.

Another night it is her lungs; she shuts her eyes and her lungs seem as large as the room, and as dark, and enclosed in a fragile shell of bone, and in one dark lung she is crouching and the wind whistles around her, in and out.

Some things in her behavior now strike her as odd. Then something happens that should frighten her, but she is not frightened.

The way it happens: at the end of the day she turns on the news and immediately she is addressed eye to eye, with almost unbearable intensity, by a male newscaster. He is the first person who has spoken to her all day. Shaken by these few minutes of direct address, she goes out to the kitchen to make an omelette. She mixes the eggs and pours them into the pan, where the butter is beginning to burn. As the omelette forms, it bubbles and chatters, making its own violent kind of noise, and she suddenly thinks it is going to speak to her. Bright yellow, glistening, spotted with oil, it is heaving gently and subsiding in the pan.

Or rather, she doesn't expect the omelette to speak, but when it doesn't articulate something she is surprised. But when she later thinks of what happened, she sees that really she suffered something like a physical assault. The muteness of the omelette emanated from it in a large balloon and pressed against her eardrums.

But it is not this incident, but the very latest sign of disturbance, on the highway, that frightens her enough to make her list and count up the signs of disturbance, though even then she cannot always decide whether what seems to her a sign of disturbance should be counted as such, since it is fairly normal for her, such as talking aloud to herself or eating too much, or whether it should be counted because to someone else it might seem at least somewhat abnormal, and so, after thinking of ten or eleven signs, she wavers between counting five and seven signs as real signs of disturbance and finally settles on five, partly because she cannot accept the idea that there could be as many as seven.

She hopes this is all just the effect of exhaustion. She thinks it will end when she finds a place to live. She will not care very much what sort of place it is, not at first, anyway. Now there are two choices: a light and roomy apartment in a neighborhood she thinks is dangerous, or a cramped and noisy railroad flat in a part of town she likes.

What happened was that coming up to a line of toll booths on the highway, she had three quarters in her hand. The toll was fifty cents so she had to keep two quarters in her hand and put one back. The problem was that she couldn't decide which one to put back. She kept looking down at the quarters and then up again, trying to drive at the same time, coming closer and closer to the toll booths, veering left toward the center as though she knew that she might have to stop. Each time she looked down at them, the three quarters separated into groups of one quarter and two quarters, but each time she was prepared to put one back it appeared to her as one of a pair, so that she couldn't put it back. This happened over and over again as she rolled closer to the booths, until finally, against her will, she put one quarter back. She told herself the choice was arbitrary, but she felt strongly that it was not. She felt that it was in fact governed by an important rule, though she did not know what the rule was.

She was frightened, not only because she had violated something but because this was not the first time she had for some minutes lost the capacity to act. And because although she had managed, in the end, to put one quarter back, drive up to the toll booth, pay the toll, and go on where she was going, she might just as well not have been able to make any move and might have stopped the car in the center of the highway and remained there indefinitely.

And further, if she had not been able to make a decision about this one small thing, as she might not have, then she might not be able to make a decision about anything else either, because all day long there were such decisions to make, as whether to go into this room or that room, to walk down the street in this direction or the other, to leave the subway by this exit or that one. There were many ways of reasoning through every decision, and often she could not even decide which way to reason, let alone make the decision itself. And so, in this way, she might become entirely paralyzed and unable to on with her life.

But later that day, as she stands waist high in the water, she thinks that she is right: all this is probably nothing but exhaustion. She is standing without her glasses waist high in the water on a rocky beach. She is waiting for some sort of revelation, because she feels a revelation coming, but although various other thoughts have come, not one of them seems much like a revelation to her.

She stands looking full into the gray waves that come at her crossed by a strong breeze so that they have hard facets like rocks, and she feels her eyes washed by the grayness of the water. She knows it is the greater disruption of her life that is disturbing her, not just the homelessness, but finding a home will help. She thinks that all this will probably come out all right, that it won't end badly. Then she looks out at the smokestacks far away and nearly invisible across the sound and thinks, though, that this was not the revelation she was waiting for either.



untitled, by joshua beckman



The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett.
I'm sad. I make horrible sentences.
A woman alone in the park waves. The water.
The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett.
Put down the cell phone. I'm sad. The waves.
The horrible staring. A woman alone
in the park. Waves. The leaves. Leaves
alone in the park. I'm staring. The
dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett. I'm sad.
Put down your cell phone. A wave.
The sad girl alone in the park. Leaves.
Put down your cell phone. The Bartlett.
The staring. A leaf alone in the horrible
leaves. The dead girl. The staring.



la peña, by deb olin unferth



I. Pilgrimage

What we had decided to do was go to La Peña. We did not go to South America to do it. We were already in South America for another reason which we had forgotten. But then we heard of it, La Peña, and thought we should do it, though we didn’t know what it was. We asked a man and he told us we would have to go to the mountain. We took three buses and a jeep and it took two days. We arrived at last at the foot of the mountain.

The path to La Peña was winding and high and jungly. We walked, my boyfriend and I, stepped around stones and went up. On the way, we talked about it, what would it be like, La Peña? I said I thought we should light candles, that to light candles would be nice. He said he hoped there wouldn’t be any tourists. I said there would be at least two, he and I. He said that depended on whether we counted ourselves as tourists. He thought that maybe I was a tourist but he was not. In that case, I said, I was lucky because I wouldn’t see myself so when we got to the top I wouldn’t see any tourists. But poor him, he’d see me and have that horrible experience of tourism in a holy place. Yes, but you’ll still know you’re there, said my boyfriend.

II. Priest

On the path we met a spiritual guide. We would not have known that was what he was if he had not told us. He said he would guide us a little way for a small fee. We could walk on the path ourselves but we said it would be fun to be guided. The three of us walked a little way until we came to a creek. Our spiritual guide showed us the statue of the miracle man of the creek. The statue was small and it was of a man in a black suit carrying a briefcase. We thought it was an odd outfit for a South American miracle man but we said nothing. Our spiritual guide smoked a cigar in front of the statue. Nothing happened except an enormous butterfly floated by, big and blue as in a fairy tale. I didn’t see it. Everyone did except me—everyone, my boyfriend and our spiritual guide. No one thought to show me.

III. Prophecy

We left our guide by the creek and kept climbing up and winding around to La Peña. My boyfriend said he hoped, more than candles, that someone would be selling cokes at the top as it was damn hot. Then I stumbled over a tiny tiny man. He was crouched in the middle of the path. He said to us, “La Peña!” and we said, “Si, si, ahora vamos,” which means yes, yes, we’re on our way. As we walked off, I tripped over his can. It was rusty and aluminum and had a piece of string attached to it of which he held the other end. Toy? I don’t know. I shouldn’t name it. It was his.

IV. Fellowship

We climbed and climbed and it was certainly hot. Who knows how high it is, my boyfriend said. You can’t even see the top from here. Then we came upon two men going down. They stopped on the trail and held out a box. It was a small box, like for shoes, and it had flowers on top made of plastic and sparkling bits on it like glitter. We asked what was in the box and they said a virgin. It was a very small box and no one could fit in it, not even a virgin. But they insisted and even cracked it open so we could see and yes, there was a virgin inside but it was made of plaster so we didn’t think that counted but they were convinced. They said they were bringing the virgin to the waters. We talked a bit and then we said goodbye.

V. Salvation

We climbed and climbed. It went on forever. We thought we’d never make it, at this or at anything else. We thought there was no top, no end, only striving and rest to gather thoughts and strength. We thought we’d have to go back, return defeated. Then suddenly we arrived and we were there. It was the best of everything we had hoped for. We lit candles and we drank cokes. We did not count ourselves as tourists. We saw it, La Peña, and then we went back down.

That should have been the climax, La Peña, but it wasn’t. The climax came at the bottom not the top. We couldn’t find a jeep to bring us back to the buses. We walked and walked, asked the people in the dirt floor huts. No one knew or they weren’t telling. We were alarmed and sweaty. What will we do? I said to my boyfriend. There were no restaurants, no hotels, no concrete. It was a small crisis. He held my hand and we were brave. We sat on stools and waited. At last a jeep came splashing through the puddles and stopped. We were saved. We took the jeep and three buses back and later an airplane back and later other things forward and back, forward and back, with arrivals in between.

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