JMWW Anthology V

Imaginary Lover

By Lindsay Ahl

In the news last week a man was arrested for filling his imaginary car with real gas.

You the other day, you who I hardly know, laid your etheric weight on me without moving. I could feel your thighs heavy on mine, and smell your forest breath, your eyes wild horses running.

From above, there were flowers strewn, coats in a heap. I just escaped.

Prescott, Presley, Preston

by Matt Bell

Know how we once believed our children would surprise us. And also how we were wrong. How there was only the shock of the first prediction coming true, and after that everything else was known. Know how our oldest told us the day and date his first brother would be born, and then together they apprised us of the youngest, disclosing the hour of my wife's water breaking, the length of her labor, the exact moment of the crowning of their brother's head.

By the end of every family breakfast we already know the rest of our day: What hour it will rain. What my wife will cook for lunch and dinner. What horrible words I will say when my sons will not stop talking, and how I will try to make them stop, to make them say anything that is not a prediction, that is not the certainty-cursed future coming our way.

Before my wife can send them to their rooms, my sons have already told her that she will.

It's there that our oldest starts his book, the book he calls his diary even though every word in it is the future, some event coming later, some doom to be afraid of, to be traumatized by both before and after. The day he turns thirteen, he tells me that I will wait another three months before I sneak into his room and read this diary, and that by then it will be too late.

He says, You could save us if you read it today, but I know you won't.

Know it's a lie, another adolescent taunt, a poke at what he knows has already happened, because I have read his diary, including the earlier entry predicting I would, and yes, because of this I do know what will happen in three months: At the end of the summer, our house will burn, and all my boys will burn too, caught in their shared bedroom because their mother cannot stand anymore to always be told what will happen next, cannot bear her entire life being scripted by her oldest son, appended and corrected in the margins by his younger brothers.

Know I could stop her. Know my sons knowing I could.

Know how when the day comes they bang their fists against the locked and nailed door, the thick-boarded windows. Know how they curse and accuse and scream for mercy when the house begins to collapse, and then again even after it crumbles, while still they struggle beneath its weight of wood and stone as my wife and I hold hands in the street, at the end of our yard, the outer edge of this widening circle of heat-blackened, smoke-wilted grass.

What joy on her face then, despite the last screams of our sons: To again have a world unknown, beset with unexpected joys, unplanned for tribulations! To again live our lives with both doubt and hope!

Know how she says, Will you ever forgive me?

And how I say, Not yet. But soon.

And then my wife staring at my face, wondering but not knowing: Whether I have stolen the diary she believed still hidden in the boy's room, secreted under their bunks.

And also not knowing: That our eldest told me I would take it. That I wouldn't be able to give up possessing the future just because he was gone.

And also: That there are only a few pages past today's date, and on each page only a single day.

Know there is not much else to know.

Know there is a finite amount of everything remaining.

Know this future is almost over, and know we will live to see it end.

And afterward: Whatever cataclysm follows, at last a surprise.

Like

by George Blecher

They said I'm nothing like Amy? Who is they, Mister Dex? Your Mother? Like I'm the bad and Amy the good? Do I look bad? Like I look in the mirror when I get up the morning and I see bad? I don't think so.

No I have not seen Lay Miz. Would I be coming with you if I did?

Though you are mad good-looking. For a Korean lad that is. But I hope you're not taking me out because I am and you are too. Siblings under the yellow skin? I don't think so. No spikee dee lingo Dex, no spikee any of that shit. When I get the money I am gonna cut the slanty eyes right out of my face.

Know what I like best? Talkee talkee. Little Miss dog-eating bitch that never shuts up. God I love Margaret Cho.

What are you Dex, like at Harvard? Stanford? M.I.T.? Amy was Brown. Nose. Oh man, you go to City University? A loser like me?

I even remember the smell of Amy's breath! I was just a fat little baby in Inwood where we lived until Daddy bought enough bodegas to get us out of Ellwood Street, no'ahm saying? Colombians playing dominoes in the street, smoking cigars, screaming they asses off (those folks don't even know how to talk normal!) Just a few of us slanty eyes, cowboys among the Indians. Amy and me in the one bedroom, Mommy and Daddy on the plastic-covered living room convertible.

And we would be playing in the school yard across the street with Mama sitting on a chair reading the TV listings, and I would scrape my knee and Amy would bend over me with her First-Aid doctor's kit with the Bugs Bunny band-aids and paste them all over me and breathe all over my body and cradle my head in her arms, her dress stained from making bahnchahn with Mom all day, eyelashes fluttering over crossed eyes like I was a runnedover cocker spaniel. Oh God Wendy. Are you OK? Talk to me! Her breath smelled like Altoids! She didn't even have to eat Altoids to smell like Altoids, her stomach was a Altoid factory!

But so that was how I spent my earliest years: figuring how to kill her.

Ooo I shock the Harvard boy! Sorry but you still look Ivy-covered to me. But I loves you anyway. Can't you take a joke?

Not exactly kill her Dex. Make her suffer. You can understand that can't you: if one gets all the good shit because she was there first, what is the other going to do? Try to take it away. That's good Dex. You learning.

When Amy was out the room, I would go through her closet and put a rip in her dresses or accidentally on purpose put Little Pretty Pony too close to the stove and light the plastic mane so it spit sparks, that shit is like dangerous, man! And Ma got a weak-tea-colored look and Amy threw herself on the floor and flopped around like a fish out the fish bowl. I knew what she was thinking: she wanted to kill me! But I was clinging to Mama's apron strings while she talked dog talk, yipyapyup, and Amy got crazier and crazier till it looked like somebody lit her hair, and she was gasping and groaning so Ma run for the inhaler and Amy like sat propped up in a kitchen chair trying to breathe deep, and Ma was on the phone talking to the doctor's retard nurse (My daughter, my daughter! Can't jew understand no English?) and Amy ends up in Jewish Memorial laying on the pillow so small and pitiful, I at bedside biting my lip and winding the lift handle back and forth. For a second Amy makes a face like she ate a mouthful of shit. I knew what she was saying. May be fat but I ain't stupid. But I just stood there tut-tutting, such a terrible thing happened to my sister, won't somebody please join our pity party? All I really wanted was to loosen her up, you can see that Dex can't you?

So where is this thee-ater we're going to? You wouldn't be taking me to where you take all your hotties? That really gives me a thrill!

But then so we move to a big house in Riverdale with screen doors and attics and rooms you go into just to look at bare walls. Amy gets into Bronx Science, me to shitty old IS 24 down the hill on the bad side of Broadway. Everybody Latina or niggers, I the only dogeater in the class.

One day the bitches surround me in the school yard. Hey girl, they say, where you live? Fuck it, none of your business. Don't give us that shit, we tell you where we live, you fucking well tell us where you live. But I knew if they ever like see the house I live in on Iselin Avenue they going to beat the shit out of me before giving me a aspirin. So I tell them I live on the street. Oh girl, don't bullshit us. We see what you wearing ain't from no Salvation Army. Where you get them from? They start pulling on my hair and slapping me upside the face. I mean it Dex this is one tough school!

Then Cecile comes along. Fat chick like two grades ahead? Michelin Man hips and big hippo space between her front teeth? She sees me like crouching down protecting my titties, and her little eyes get even littler. Look at the little Chink. Ain't she cute?

That was it for me, Dex. I teamed up with the lezzies. Don't look at me like that. I know better now but then I was just a little kid, sisters all bigger and older and blacker than me. Finally I had friends!

Sometime Cecile and me made out in dark places. I don't really know how to do this, Wendy. But you are mad pretty. Like a China doll. Me? Pretty? She really meant it! We would be sitting under the stairs or in the girls' bathroom, and I had to like put her hands where they were supposed to be but wasn't, pull her head back, her legs apart, and she was huffing and puffing like the little girl I was. Then I leaned back and sucked her tongue into my mouth-this gross you out Dex? But you got to understand. I had so much love in me. I couldn't let it go to waste!

Along the way I kind of forgot that I wanted to kill Amy. She gets into Brown and majors in Political Science, I in Substance Abuse. The second year she is up there, Daddy gets the bright idea for me to get a taste of college life. Yeah right.

At the bus station Amy is waiting for me, holding hands with Mr. Perfect Dogeater! Excuse me Dex, you almost perfect but he was a preppie asshole you wouldn't even want to be.

This is my boyfriend Kevin, she says, but she is looking real bad, like she been in bathwater too long.

Boyfriend Kevin is one wack motherfucker: smiley like a clown, sweat dripping down his piggy face, little piggy feet in bright white Adidas. He has this annoying twitch so it looks like he is coming onto you when really he couldn't give a fuck. Gives me a tour of the campus: "This is where John F. Kennedy stood (wink)