My classmate gave me this pencil at our high school reunion. It was decorated with yellow smileys and with her name written in golden letters: Jennie Smiles. Quite appropriate. There was no eraser at the top, but it became my favorite pencil anyway. It stood proudly in a crude wooden holder on my table in the office, and whenever I was annoyed, enraged or tired, holding it or just glancing at it brought me sudden comfort.

Enter my pencil-hungry colleague.

We are discussing a technical problem, and I don’t pay much attention to his actions, only to his words. He pauses now and then to concentrate his brain power and to chew on something he holds in his hand (chewing is part of his concentration ritual). Finally, his glorious solution to our conundrum becomes clear. He stops chewing.

“Ah,” he says, pulling a chewable object out of his mouth. “Is it yours?”

My favorite pencil, its upper part in shreds, lies on the palm of his hand. Unbelievable.

“What have you done to my pencil?” I say.

“Sorry, forgot it’s yours.”

He returns my smiley-covered invalid to the holder and hastily retreats. I take my pencil friend for the last time and throw it into a waste basket. Gone.

A damn pencil-eater. Next time I’m in his room, I pay attention to a cluster of partially shredded pencils on his table. A pennibal. Never again I bring my special pencils to work.

Pencil II

It was pitch black, topped with a dark grey eraser in a golden tube. Its only ornament was a golden cartouche with the royal name of a pharaoh written in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. It was the object of my secret pride – not the name itself, but my ability to read it.

A chapter about names was not too far into How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Step-by-Step Guide to Teach Yourself. I swallowed the book, promptly forgetting tenses, syntax and most of the hieroglyphic signs, but this chapter miraculously survived in my memory. When my friend visited King Tut’s exhibition in San Francisco and sent me a couple of trophies, black pencil among them, I was able to make out the three groups of golden symbols inside the cartouche: Amun, Tut, Ankh. I even remembered that Amun, the God’s name, always came first for sacred reasons. Here it was, the pharaoh’s name, revealed to me from the pencil’s black smooth surface: Tutankhamun.

I put this treasure on a bookshelf at home, just near the computer table. When I needed to write something down, I took Tutankhamun’s pencil from the shelf but always returned it back to the shelf’s safety.

Enter my eight-year-old son.

He’s supposed to do his homework. He sits at the computer table, his math notebook in front of him. A YouTube Spiderman clip plays on the computer; an animated movie flashes on the TV in the opposite corner of the room. My son watches both of them. The only thing he doesn’t look at is his homework.

I turn the TV off.

“A-a-a-h! Why? Turn it back!” he shouts, snatched back into banal reality from his animated parallel universe.

“Stop shouting. Aren’t you supposed to do your homework?”

“I’m doing it!”

“No, you are not. And it’s already late,” I say.

“A-a-a-h!” A tsunami of rage sweeps over his face. His hands clench into fists, and his knuckles whiten from the effort.

CRACK.

His hands relax, half of a black pencil in each of them. Of my Ancient Egyptian pencil. Now it’s my turn to be swept by rage.

“Why on earth have you done that?”

He smiles at me, savoring the sweet taste of victory.

“It was my favorite pencil! I could read the hieroglyphs!”

He smiles a bit more.

“Just a pencil,” he says, placing two broken halves on the table.

“You know it’s not just a pencil! And even if it were – who gave you the right to break things?”

“And who gave you the right to turn off the TV?”

I can’t stand it anymore.

“Do your homework!” I stomp away, dragging my anger and frustration into the shelter of the kitchen.

It takes my son ten minutes to reappear, no smile this time.

“I’m sorry, mom. I’ll break my own pencil next time.”

“Never mind,” I say, “just stop breaking pencils when you are angry. No more broken pencils. Can you?”

“OK,” he says. It takes him two weeks to break the next pencil, his own.

Pencil III

This pencil is red, with a white eraser at the top. The text on its side says “Northwest Airlines”. Not much of a pencil, but it has a special value for me: “North by Northwest” connection. I regard it as a talisman of my longtime affair with Cary Grant’s movies, all seventy-two of them now on my dusty shelves. After the untimely demise of my other glorious pencils I consider evacuating it into a remote hideout.

Enter a thought.

I picture a safely hidden pencil, perfectly preserved in a secluded den, concealed so well, that I’ve completely forgotten about its existence. Perhaps ten years later, in a process of hiding some other valuable, I’ll stumble on it – what a present surprise that would be. No, thanks.

I grab my “Northwest Airlines” pencil and place it in my purse, for everyday usage. Maybe I’ll lose it in a day or two; there is also a chance it will survive in my purse for years, scratching notes and warming my heart with its “North by Northwest” secret. Never mind.

Just a pencil.

Just a special pencil that I’ll enjoy while I can.

Irena Pasvinter divides her time between software engineering, endless family duties and writing poetry and fiction. Her stories and poems have appeared in online magazines (Every Day Poets, Every Day Fiction, Madswirl, Camroc Press Review, Long Story Short and others), in Poetry Quarterly and in Midwest Literary Magazine‘s anthology Off Season. Irena brags about her publications at https://sites.google.com/site/ipscribblings.

I should be at work, behind the desk I normally sit at on a Monday morning, in the office I have been going to regularly and without fail, as near as damn it, for the past sixteen years. I used to be reliable, dependable, predictable. Able. Miss Able. Miserable. Being miserable made me a prime candidate for Temptation, which dangled happiness in front of me only to snatch it away again once I’d reached for it leaving me with something else. Consequences. It’s too soon to say what they will lead to.

The extra room in this larger carriage means it’s actually possible for me to sit down for once. Such luxury leaves me free from the usual business of keeping myself upright and fending off encroaching office clerks and middle managers who announce the male flesh hidden beneath their thick wool coats with too much Brut. Those men were here, I can still smell traces of the aftershave, the stale scent of damp skin mingled in. But the Machinery of the Underground, such as it is, has already swept them beneath the clogged streets of London and spewed them back above ground straight to their desks. The Machinery doesn’t care about spewing me out today. Workers don’t travel at ten o’clock in the morning, so I can spin around down here as long as I like before five p.m. when everything will happen again in reverse.

With all this space, the seat, and the free movement of my hands, I am able to read a newspaper for a change. On a normal day I wouldn’t have even seen the story.

Wife Serves Husband for Dinner

Rose Deacon, 48, was arrested in Huntsville, Alabama, on Saturday for murdering her husband and cooking portions of his body. The wife of 53-year-old Stephen Deacon, manager of a used-car business, confessed to killing her husband after discovering that he was having an affair with his secretary, Emily Bradley, 32. Having lured Ms. Bradley to a ‘surprise dinner’ for Stephen, she presented her unsuspecting only guest with the gruesome meal, allegedly announcing, “If you want my husband, you’d better eat him before he gets cold.” Emily managed to flee and alert police who found Stephen Deacon’s dismembered body in the freezer.

I feel like a peeping Tom staring through the dining room window, trying to peer into the dish as Rose triumphantly lifts the lid. Which parts of her husband’s body did she serve up to his lover? I can’t help wondering and picture toad-in-the-hole.

I had hoped that reading the paper would distract me from thinking about Daniel, but the story has yanked him out from the wings and plonked him dramatically back onto centre stage. Would I be tempted to taste a few morsels of his cooked flesh if his wife offered him to me on a plate? If I were his wife and he wanted to leave me for his lover would I boil him with the spuds and serve him to her?

No, of course I couldn’t take a knife to Daniel; nothing could make me carve him into oven-ready joints. I’ve always been suspicious of butchers with their easy use of the meat cleaver and the shameless way they wear those blood-stained aprons in broad daylight; white aprons, to highlight the gore. It doesn’t seem natural to be that intimate with raw flesh, to hack through bone and slice through sinew day in, day out. A butcher could dismember a body, choose the best cuts for the pot, but not me, not an ordinary person. Rose Deacon must have been pushed over a very high, very sheer edge.

Daniel arrived at my company on a short-term contract, a consultant, an expert swooping in to sort out the mess; a kind of SAS soldier of the business world, not as macho or as deadly, but just as shadowy, just as transient. I wasn’t attracted to him at first sight, there were no bolts of lightning or hot sparks crackling up and down my spinal column. Those things have happened to me in the past so I know they’re possible, but it’s a mystery to me if all that electrical activity can really last for more than a few weeks. I’ve read that eighteen months is the sexual event horizon; beyond that the temperature plummets, fevers subside and lovers become two ordinary people again, floating calmly in space like everyone else.

Daniel wasn’t so much pushing me into a black hole as pulling me out. How could I not fall in love with someone who rescued me from all that emptiness? Because it was love. It can’t have been lust if I hadn’t been struck by lightning.

The last man I’d loved left three years ago. His things disappeared into five cardboard boxes, which I can still see piled on top of each other beside the front door. He said we had drifted apart and I agreed, but at least when he was there we could have drifted back together again. I missed his things, the masculine bits and pieces that he scattered about the place like a dog marking his territory. The house became too empty, an echo chamber in which every sound I made reverberated through the rooms as I rattled around, alone. I went to bed with a hot water bottle, there was too much empty space under the quilt for me to warm up without help. I awoke cold and tired as if I’d been walking across the wastes of Siberia throughout the night. As each day passed solitude gnawed deeper into me like a hungry rat caged on the stomach of a mediæval torture victim. By the time I met Daniel my loneliness was a gaping wound within me that needed to be healed.

I didn’t really see him all in one go, but pieced him together over several weeks like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Perhaps it was his voice that first drew me in, smooth and warm like melted chocolate, or more likely the words it delivered, all seductively coated in confidence and maturity. I began to study his lips when he spoke, noticed how small creases formed at the corners of his blue-grey eyes when he smiled. His hands were strong and masculine with no trace of those disconcertingly simian, black hairs that trail over some men’s knuckles, making the skin look unhealthy and too white. They were hands I liked to imagine touching me, it had been so long since I had been held.

Daniel’s enthusiasm was infectious, he didn’t need to drag people with him, they followed him freely. Occasionally the team went for a drink together and so I got to see other more beguiling sides of him; warmer, softer, deeper. Costlier.

He had to work closely with everyone in the department and by the time my turn came I had finished the jigsaw. It had been like having the puzzle but not the lid with the picture on it; the pieces looked promising, but the whole was more than expected.

“I’m starving,” he said, the first day we had to work late. He got Chinese takeaway from the restaurant around the corner and we ate it in the eerily deserted offices like the only survivors of biological warfare.

“Why aren’t you married?” he asked suddenly, looking up at me after scooping the remainder of the sweet and sour chicken onto his rice. It was this directness that made him so good at guiding more verbose people out of the dead ends they talked themselves into. Responding in the same fashion was harder for others to do.

What should I have told him? That I’d never been brave enough, that I’d never been desperate enough? That I thought dressing up and promising to stay together forever was a game children played? I didn’t want to accuse him of being childish, so I just said “I suppose I haven’t met the right man yet,” and it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps this awful cliché was the real reason after all.

He talked about his wife and two young sons, not hiding them or pretending they didn’t exist; he wasn’t planning a crime. To me they were as remote as Martians, as insubstantial as ghosts. It was only later, when the blood was being squeezed from my heart, that I saw them everywhere; in supermarkets, parks, walking down the High Street holding hands. They were multiplying like cancer cells, this Happy Family, and no amount of positive thinking could make them disappear.

Two old ladies are sitting opposite me chatting away to each other, their hair blue-rinsed and freshly fluffed up, still warm from the salon dryer. They must have long been immune to the male pheromones and testosterone that waft through the air; they’ll have forgotten what it’s like to be targeted. They’re well and truly in the sexual out-tray, where we all get filed in the end. They have probably already buried their husbands, as men tend to drop dead shortly after retiring. The weaker sex. The male immune system obviously can’t cope with the sudden and prolonged exposure to household dust and cleaning chemicals; someone should develop a vaccine to stop the death toll. The statistics are there for all to see – men die when their wives have to clean around them.

Last month I turned thirty-eight. Not yet in the sexual out-tray, but I feel it there waiting for me at the bottom of the hill. I keep fit and healthy, I make the effort to stop the decay – swimming, running towards heart failure on the treadmill; I even joined a Pilates class recently to stretch my muscles and improve my posture.

Despite all this hard work gravity is reaching up to my flesh and coaxing it slowly but surely down to the grave. I can see its effects in the strangest places, like the cracked skin on my elbows, as loose and dry as a tortoise’s neck, and the sausage rolls of fat above my knees. Moisturizing lotion softens the reptilian texture of my elbows, but I draw the line at liposuction of the knee-fat. Long skirts and trousers are cheaper and less drastic and will work just as well.

Life begins at forty my mother promised me when I complained about the distressing onset of middle age. It seems like I might be lucky and blossom sooner – a new life at thirty-eight.

With only two stops to go before mine a young woman gets into my carriage towing a small boy behind her, his wild, curly hair springing in all directions as he struggles to keep up. He is crying and transparent snot hangs from his nostrils, suspended. She doesn’t have any patience for his tears, scolding him for them, which does nothing to stem the flow. I glance at her wedding ring finger and find it bare. A single mother? No social stigma attached to that title any more, but that doesn’t make the job any easier. Surely no one intentionally applies for that one? Applicants wanted: hours – 24, days – 7, salary – nil, holidays – nil, duration – life. She is probably in her early twenties but she looks worn out, like someone with more past than future. Her hair is lank and trails limply to her shoulders, framing a face that is pale and blotchy. Her clothes have seen better days, probably on somebody else. I pull the flap of my coat across my knees and hug myself against a sudden chill. I want to get out, get moving to warm myself up.

It wasn’t easy seeing Daniel alone, outside the office, after we’d crossed that bridge between uncertainty and fact; the fact that the attraction was mutual. He had a home to go to and the project was keeping him away from it too much already. It was clear from the start that I was trying to take a shortcut to somewhere I didn’t have a map for and trespassers always get shot in the end.

We met for dinner a few times, but once we had something to hide we were nervous of being caught and that stopped us enjoying it. We were carefree when we were falling, out in the open, innocent, clean. Once we’d hit the ground, our hearts bruised and exposed to the elements, we hid like wounded animals, afraid of being finished off.

We were sitting on a bench by the Thames in the dark, after the last of these dinners. He was holding my hand, we both knew it was hopeless.

“I can’t offer you anything,” he said quietly, looking down, sounding ashamed. “I should never have let it go so far; I feel guilty of leading you on.”

I knew he intended to take the blame, but I didn’t appreciate being the object in the relationship, the one being led, the one taken too far.

“We got into this together, whatever it is,” I told him. “We’re not guilty of much really, we haven’t even slept together.”

“If we do that I’ll never be able to let you go.”

“Then don’t.” He was still in the driving seat, in charge of taking me further, or letting me go. I suppose he was trying to be noble, trying to regain control. But really he was as lost as I was.

It’s my stop and I stand up as the train slows down, turning my back on the mother who is now swearing as she wipes the slime from her son’s face with a scrunched-up paper tissue. I have a feeling that she would sympathise with the gourmet cannibal in the newspaper, now tucked securely under my arm. The doors open and I hurry towards the exit. I feel suffocated, buried underground, buried alive. I need fresh air.

There was a farewell party organised for him. He’d done a good job, the managers were happy and he’d won the troops over to boot. I got through it by not believing it, by not facing up to the fact that this was the end. There were drinks followed by dinner, followed by more drinks, and a hotel room booked so he didn’t need to go home drunk. We all scattered, the evening a success, but Daniel and I met up again in his non-smoking king-size bedded double with a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign hanging on the door.

We had never lain down together before; like teenagers we’d stopped at kissing and touching with all our clothes still on. His leaving made it inevitable, the alcohol kept us in a world where anything was possible and no one got hurt.

I hadn’t slept with a man for three years and I’d imagined this moment again and again for weeks. My hands discovered him slowly, touching all those familiar jigsaw pieces with care, so I wouldn’t miss anything, wouldn’t forget a single detail.

I emerge from the mouth of the Underground and suddenly the sun breaks through the clouds. I squint against the brightness, standing still while I adjust to the light, enjoying the warmth on my face. I breathe in deeply, filling my lungs. The world around me is familiar and I belong right in it. It’s like waking up from a nightmare and sinking back into the comfort of the bed, relieved that what I feared doesn’t really exist.

I walk along the streets of London to my doctor’s surgery. The sun is still shining.

“Good morning. I have an appointment with Dr. Nicholls at eleven o’clock; Denise Woods.”

The receptionist invites me to sit down and I open my newspaper, but all I see are letters which don’t link up to form words and sentences that mean anything to me.

When my boyfriend left it didn’t occur to me that he was carrying away my chance of having children in those cardboard boxes of his; my womb and ovaries packed in amongst his Rolling Stones CDs and Robert Ludlum thrillers, shrivelled and mummified like exhibits from a lost civilisation in a South American museum. It was only later, when the months mutated into years, that I believed he’d taken them as souvenirs. I resigned myself to this truth, decided I could live happily with it. Daniel changed that.

“I thought you wouldn’t be able to let me go,” I said, the morning afterwards. I was crying, feeling wretched; somehow I’d stumbled into a TV movie, corny and melodramatic; nobody would believe this was real life.

“I know,” he said, putting his arms around me. “But I just can’t do this – to anyone. I have to do the right thing.”

The right thing was obvious then, but who knows what it is now? Perhaps I should tell him, but I’ve never detonated a bomb before and I’m not prepared to deal with the mess; the lives of innocent victims blown apart. It was an accident after all, poor risk assessment by both of us, protection that obviously came too late.

So here I am, the Consequences of Temptation growing inside me. I had my womb and my ovaries all along, they weren’t stolen, they hadn’t dried up. If I hadn’t been tempted I would never have found out and I would still be that professional woman sitting safely at her desk. Miss Able. Miserable. Alone.

I won’t hide it from Daniel if he gets in touch, but I won’t contact him. His wife might be good with a meat cleaver; she might know the best cuts for the pot.

This is a reprint of work originally published in First Edition.

Corinna Weyreter was born in England and spent fifteen years working in the oil industry before she resigned to sail around the world with her boyfriend. Her book about the trip, Far Out: Sailing into a Disappearing World, is due to be published this spring (http://sunpenny.com/books.html). She won the 1998 Bridport Short Story Prize and has had several short stories published.

Before enrolling as a MFA candidate at Virginia Tech, Quinn White worked as a fishwife. Now she scales, guts, and cleans poems, rather than red snapper. Gently. Her work has appeared in The Straddler, A Bad Penny Review, and is forthcoming in Dirtflask.

Before enrolling as a MFA candidate at Virginia Tech, Quinn White worked as a fishwife. Now she scales, guts, and cleans poems, rather than red snapper. Gently. Her work has appeared in The Straddler, A Bad Penny Review, and is forthcoming in Dirtflask.

Before you die pour the crayons out.
Eat one. Strip them of names.
Stand on twelve and wobble.
Snap some like knuckles.
Melt several. Call god
with their mute flames. Mail the sharpest
to a stranger. Explain
how it longly pricked nothing,
how it composed a still life
of light bulbs in a glass bowl.

Before enrolling as a MFA candidate at Virginia Tech, Quinn White worked as a fishwife. Now she scales, guts, and cleans poems, rather than red snapper. Gently. Her work has appeared in The Straddler, A Bad Penny Review, and is forthcoming in Dirtflask.

Years later, you posted a photo of piled shelter
animals, “Everyone needs
to see this,” your caption.
I pulled my quilt from the closet
and wrapped my laptop in its squares.
So many red apples, you see,
so many sheep laughing
in their pasture of dog biscuits.

Before enrolling as a MFA candidate at Virginia Tech, Quinn White worked as a fishwife. Now she scales, guts, and cleans poems, rather than red snapper. Gently. Her work has appeared in The Straddler, A Bad Penny Review, and is forthcoming in Dirtflask.

Last fall, I failed a student.
Spring semester, I left lunch
and his conversation came behind me.
“I got an F and she has a weird moustache.”
In my office, I checked the door
mirror (mira!) and kissing distance
the moustache hedged
the corners of my mouth. That night
I plucked the dark
weeds until my face bled.

Now, lit by candy-corn
lights, listening to a playlist of screams,
I sneak to the bathroom and strip
the monkey from my shoulder, unhook
the thorn necklace, soap my penciled brow.
I let my mouth
go, lick the hair.

Before enrolling as a MFA candidate at Virginia Tech, Quinn White worked as a fishwife. Now she scales, guts, and cleans poems, rather than red snapper. Gently. Her work has appeared in The Straddler, A Bad Penny Review, and is forthcoming in Dirtflask.

The name settled in the southern-most region of Josh’s twisted-sick intestines.

“I thought we were different than everyone else. You said you didn’t care I wasn’t called. You’re cruel to leave now.”

Josh sniffled sickly into his BlackBerry. He hadn’t eaten in days. To him, the world was not round, it was Roberta.

“I hope you’ll call me back soon. I’m going now to be with a few people like me.”

He separated the phone from his face and wiped blooming tears.

“You say you talked to god. You say he told you something…”

With a beep, Roberta’s phone cut Josh’s voice message short.

Josh flopped the phone onto the passenger seat and gripped down hard on the steering wheel. The drive to the rally wasn’t far.

His parents and sister got called. Nearly all Josh’s friends got theirs months ago. Some said god was done calling.

Those who received them said they were epiphanies, absolute sea changes. People looked different after. Some lost years, even decades from their face, as if tension had dissipated and former stress lines had been pressed by a five-star Manhattan maid. Some grew inches in height after the call and women’s breasts once saggy, seemed to perk up, like gravity had lost some of its grip.

The calls came in multiple languages, in voices individuals described as ranging from their mother’s or their dead uncle’s, to the sound of an afternoon’s rain.

They conveyed a unified message:

“You’re unequivocally saved – free of guilt, pain and death. You’ll be rid of your decaying organic shell in paradise soon.”

Some said the calls were bogus. News reports said that 90 percent of humans had received them. Some received the message via dream others found mysterious handwritten notes. Most in western countries came by phone.

In other continents, more rudimentary means of communication prevailed. It was said that in the Congo an announcement came to an entire village over an emergency PA system.

Josh had some close calls – a fortune cookie, a bathroom wall scribble, but it was like falling in love, you knew when you had and when you hadn’t – and Josh just knew he hadn’t.

Insomnia gave Josh time to think about what being uncalled meant:

Was he doomed to burn forever in hell?

Josh couldn’t imagine eternity.

Were end times near?

Something is near, always.

Would he be left behind?

He already had been.

No observable events in the cosmos had occurred but on Earth, the uncalled minorities were forced to come together in rallies to feel any true camaraderie that was left for them.

Josh pumped the brakes as the highway became congested. The uncalled had come from across the U.S. to San Francisco to show solidarity. Josh’s hands ached with stiffness as he pried them from the steering wheel.

Tears formed again as he exited his car. He wasn’t sure if they were from the lack of sleep or the Prozac. Maybe his body was forcing up some tears that had been held back for too long by meds, maybe they came due to his possible damnation, maybe they were left over from Roberta’s words: “I can’t be with you anymore because of what he told me.”

It was hard to say.

Police were not present at the rally but news helicopters flew above. Called people only viewed the uncalled from a distance. There was a fear among the called that if the time came for god to take them, it may not be wise to be in close proximity to the uncalled many of whom now gathered on Lombard Street.

Josh cut his way through the crowd as a voice over a megaphone sermonized about how a god who was equitable wouldn’t call known deviants like Bill Clinton or worse, O. J. Simpson, both of whom had received notable media coverage upon receiving their calls.

“The Internet is the work of the devil himself!” declared the voice. “False prophets have come down to Earth and they have engaged in our sinful forms of worldwide communication. Take solace in the fact you were not contacted, my friends.”

Josh walked towards the voice and found a man speaking in the center of a small gathering of people. The man touched the gray stubble on his wrinkled face as Josh approached. He eyed the BlackBerry clasped in Josh’s hand. He removed the megaphone from his lips and spoke directly to Josh.

“Son, I was head usher at my church for ten years, provided for three kids, never cheated on my wife. I don’t need a phone call to tell me I done good.”

Josh became conscious of the man staring down his BlackBerry-clenched fist and touched the screen to unlock the phone, revealing no missed calls, no voice messages, no Roberta, no god.

“You know no god, do you son?” asked the old man approaching Josh. Josh considered the question, his mind now in a desperately truthful location.

“I know him – he put me here to be abandoned by the woman I love,” said Josh with a surge of uncaring, exhausted enthusiasm. “He put me on this planet as a sin-infused infant to live out a meaningless life of 80 years at best and then get eaten by worms who will shit me out and make more dirt, just to bury other miserable human beings in. He put me here to suffer with that fact every Earth-walking moment, whether I’m at work in my cubicle, talking to my mom or attempting to sleep in my bed.”

The old man with the stubble smiled.

“And now he doesn’t even call you to say hi.”

Christopher Krull was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, where he currently resides. After graduating from the University of Missouri-Columbia, he spent five years working in advertising, think Willy Loman (not-so-cool) not Don Draper (cool). Currently, he works as a graduate assistant in the communication department of Saint Louis University (SLU) and is slowly accumulating credits toward a Master of Arts degree at SLU. Chris is an avid creative writer, amateur mixed martial artist and cat lover.

Former Special Forces solider turned poet seeking artistic inspiration. Brunettes preferred but blondes will not be turned away; gingers, however, are out of the question. Must have a voice that sounds like money, a self-destructive temperament, or look good under a beret. Applicants need to be fresh: interested parties with previous experience will be turned away. 543-921-211

WANTED: Sugar Momma.

I am a young, avid collector of science fiction books and comics. One of my associates wishes to sell his first edition of Frank Herbert’s Dune for 2,000 dollars. I need it. I will do anything for you, intrigued old soul. I will mow your lawn and I will boil your tea. I took several massage classes at the local community college and would be more than willing to utilize that invaluable knowledge to soothe those aged, aching muscles. For Pete’s sake, I will feed you cupcakes with one hand while I give you sensual sponge baths with the other. I am at the mercy of your purse and your imagination. Email me at BigPoppaAtreides@gmail.com.

WANTED: New Savior.

The last supernatural entity I courted answered my prayers approximately 56.2 % of the time, and stood me up for a date we had in May. I need a REAL supreme being who isn’t all talk. If this is you, shoot me an email at Agnosticfreeagent@yahoo.com. Hindu and Christian deities need not apply.

WANTED: Seeing-Eye Man

Handicapped man in search of humanoid companion to replaced deceased canine assistant. Applicant must be willing to relocate and cohabitate with employer. Living quarters will consist of a hand-me-down cot and red plastic bowl located in corner of employer’s basement. Persons applying must have a penchant for pepperoni-flavored snack treats. Interested parties should come to 631 Carrington Street next Wednesday between 1:00 and 4:00 and bring their resumes. No women please.

WANTED: Partner in Pretentiousness

Being a genius is a lonely experience. I am searching for another brainiac to alleviate my blues. Applicant needs to be capable of having discussions pertaining to Bukowski, Kurosawa, and the latest Pitchfork interviews. Must eat organic and eschew Harper’s in favor of The Village Voice. Ironic jorts are also a necessity. I have no phone or way of obtaining mail. If you are interested, you must seek me out in East Village. Go to McGaffin’s Pub House between the hours of 2:00 and 6:00 in the morning, and ask the bartender for Rufus. Remember: bring the jorts.

Javy Gwaltney is an aspiring author, screenwriter, and essayist from South Carolina. He recently graduated from Winthrop University with a BA in English and is now pursuing graduate studies at Kennesaw State University. You can find his works in Thumb Smudge Java, The Glass Coin, The Smoking Poet, Unlikely 2.0, and his blog, which is updated sporadically. His other talents include reading prodigiously, serving as a fiction editor at THIS Literary Magazine, and making a killer oven pizza.

Ethan is not just a friend, far from it. He is not just a lover. He is not blind either.

But I have seen blind people walk on the street, sit in cars, do small things which I imagine are big for them, as effort is immense in things which require it.

Two years ago, I met a blind man who wrote poetry. He was twice the poet for being blind. One, a poet sensing and living in the dark; two, a poet grappling with the dark that was in all of us. Beauty was in all his work. How we beheld it in his lack of seeing, his sense becoming our distraction.

Once I put an apple in his hand. He held it like anyone would and wiped it against his shirt. All in a matter of seconds, so practiced, so natural. Something a normal person would do given an apple to bite. He bit it and bit it. I thought, maybe he’s hungry. And I never felt so tender. When faced with a blind man, we looked into his face as if seeing our own. To make up for his lack.

“Sam, why do you like writing poetry?” I asked him one day.

He touched his dark glasses as if to adjust a vision which included more than sight.

“Well I, funnily enough, see through poetry. That sounds pretentious but it’s actually not. See, I wasn’t born blind so I’m lucky. And with poetry, I go back to that world when I recall my life before I became blind.”

“Like a memory aid.”

“Yes, something like that.”

“What’s it like to be blind apart from having to deal with the every day practical stuff?” I asked, curious about how he felt about his blindness.

“It is like sleeping,” he chuckled when he said this. “I sleep without closing my eyes.” More chuckles.

I smiled at how easily he was amused, how the world needed it.

When Sam met Ethan, he shook his hand, hugged him, and slapped his back.

“How are you, Sam?”

“I’m still here, as you can see,” he laughed again. As if being blind made him see other people’s efforts, thankful for his own endurance.

They talked well into the night about poetry, how it helped him be less sad, less alone. Sam even wrote one. He dictated his poem into a tape recorder. Ethan wrote it down afterwards. I was in the corner listening to them talking, glad to be invisible, to be held responsible for nothing but my silent company.

Ethan and I have been together for two years. But I don’t feel like I know him any better now than at the beginning of our relationship.

It’s like we are stuck with how we want to mean with each other and not delving into understanding.

Like one time, he asked me if I wanted to be with him the rest of my life. I said, “Yes.”

And he looked like he’d just seen a ghost.

On the one hand, he kept asking me those kinds of questions; on the other, he was surprised with my assent. As if I should’ve known better.

It is not hard to think that maybe this is all just a game to him. I feel like he’s a reporter asking me all those intimate questions which he will promptly write down and forget.

It seems we are always planning to be disappointed. As if life were one big party we are unable to attend.

There is a photograph of Ethan and Sam that I like which shows them with their arms around each other’s shoulders, like brothers. Sam was laughing, teeth showing. And Ethan was suppressing a smile. I took the picture two years ago. We had just known each other then, the three of us. Sam was our neighbour, still is. Two years and we are all still grappling with the dark part of ourselves. And Sam seems to be the only one surviving.

If I am drowning, it will be too late to learn how to swim.

But there is nowhere we could be to learn how to cope with blindness. We are just shoved into it. We fall into blindness like we fall into love, instantly. Even if we lose our sight slowly, as in illness, we cannot learn how darkness invades our lives, we cannot let it. And love just comes like a neighbour or else like an art. Accidentally. Like we need it before we know we need it.

I was first attracted to Ethan because of his confidence. Now that confidence is drowning the things it is teaching. Like I need to be taught in spite of my wisdom. He has become a burden, an emotional burden. A cross.

“What are you doing, Ethan?” I said after one particularly grueling day at work.

“What do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to resist the temptation to eat this chocolate cake.”

“Why not just eat it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. As a sign that I can do what I set out to do?”

“It’s just a piece of cake. No pun intended.”

He sees beyond the obvious. In an often futile gesture. While I am the type who just does what she does for no particular reason. I am blind to duty; he is blind to chance.

And Sam is blind to nothing. He is the best reason I want to be with.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, when I first gravitated towards Sam.

Maybe it was his laugh. Maybe it was the way he held the apple. The way he bit into it, as if there was nowhere he’d rather be at that time. No one he would rather be with.

I suspected he had not been with a woman in a long time.

He laughed when I asked him if he had a girlfriend.

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes, of course. I have a lot of girlfriends. Haha. They’re all blind too,” he laughed again. I didn’t know why but I blushed.

It was good that he couldn’t see. But maybe he could sense it, the way I blushed listening to him.

He went really quiet as if listening for the part he couldn’t see.

“You and Ethan. Is it going alright?”

“Well, not really.”

“Why not?”

“The funny thing is, I don’t know why. I just know it’s not going right.”

“Heart not in it?”

“Exactly.”

“Was it in it though?”

“Ummm, I don’t know.”

“It’s a funny thing, love. I once met a woman. She had a nice voice and I fell in love. That was the only reason I liked her. Her voice. Sexy and inviting like that.”

“How did it go?”

“I didn’t let her know. I just listened to her voice whenever I could,” he smiled.

“Well, me and Ethan. Nothing like that. It was simple.”

“Nothing more simple than falling in love.”

I blushed again.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“You smiling or something?”

“No.”

So that was how it went.

I am beginning to like Sam while quietly falling apart with Ethan. Even Ethan doesn’t know we are growing apart. He is too intent with succeeding to know success. He is too intent with getting his own way after already having it.

Sometimes, I worry about Sam all alone like that. He doesn’t have a guide dog or anything. He has someone who comes in, cooks, cleans and does the laundry for him. But he is completely alone in the world. He has no family. No family near here, anyway.

I can sometimes see him through the window. He’s mostly sitting on his couch. Or standing up, getting a drink. Or speaking a poem into the recorder.

He can do all that himself. Sometimes, he goes out to the shops to do groceries.

I worry about him.

His safety, mostly.

But most importantly, for how much beauty he must be missing in his dark world. How a person never gives it up, especially a poet.

And how much of it doesn’t make sense. How much I miss of him just by his being there.

Ethan must be on his way home now. I am fixing him dinner. I have eaten because I was hungry and couldn’t wait any longer. He’s been coming home later and later these days.

And I am spending more time with Sam. Just being neighbours and friends. Saying things which mean more than my saying them.

I think it must stay like this, blindness. Between Ethan and me. We see the living room with all the coziness, the kitchen with all the desire, and stop there. And never thrive beyond that.

When he comes home, he is exhausted after having dinner. And our lives are becoming ever more stale, ever more distant. We preserve our love like fruit.

There’s so much to do and we do it blindly, hoping not to cut ourselves. We do it with our eyes open but our will paralysed. Beauty is everywhere without us. Outside, under the sky we share, the grey is growing into ever-changing effort. Colour staying as colour and never expanding into vision.

Jill Chan is a poet, fiction writer, and editor based in Auckland, New Zealand. Her poems and stories have been published in MiPOesias, Blue Fifth Review, foam:e, Mascara Literary Review, Asia and Pacific Writers Network, Otoliths, Eclectica, Snorkel, Broadsheet, JAAM, Poetry New Zealand, Takahe, Deep South, Trout, Denver Syntax, The Tower Journal, Metazen, A-Minor Magazine, 52|250 A Year of Flash and other magazines. She is the author of The Art of It: Three Novellas (2011), and five books of poetry: On Love: a poem sequence (2011); Early Work: Poems 2000-2007 (2011); These Hands Are Not Ours (ESAW, 2009), winner of the Earl of Seacliff Poetry Prize; Becoming Someone Who Isn’t (ESAW, 2007); and The Smell of Oranges (ESAW, 2003). She is one of the poets featured in the New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive. Official website: http://www.jill-chan.com.