Issue Two

"Yeah, it’s me," he says.

"Hmmmm," I answer. I’m still asleep, the phone resting in a pocket between pillow and ear.

"Are you naked?" he asks.

"What?" I say.

"I’m fucked up bad," he tells me. "I’m in Tennessee or Mississippi."

"Which?" I ask.

"What?" he says.

I’m awake now.

"Dan," I say.

"Listen," he says. "You should come down here. We have all these pills lined up on the dresser. It’s snowing too. Fantastic."

"Remember Texas?" he asks suddenly, some strange brightness in his tone. "That field and the one-lane road and all those pictures we took. That was something, wasn’t it? Really something."

"It’s four a.m.," I tell him. I’m mad. I push the cat off the bed and sit up. "This has got to stop."

"I know," he says quietly, sadly. He’s crying maybe. "Don’t you love me anymore?"

I sigh, feel something like a layer peel off my chest, like duct tape ripping from skin. The cat paces on the windowsill then sits and bites through a slat of the plastic blinds.

"No," I say, but my voice catches on something. It’s like in high school gym class; I’m behind the filmy shower doors that don’t hide anything, I’m a dark silhouette and have to be careful not to put my hands anywhere that could be seen as weird.

"Remember Texas?" he asks suddenly, some strange brightness in his tone. "That field and the one-lane road and all those pictures we took. That was something, wasn’t it? Really something."

I want to tell him that it was Kansas, not Texas, and that there wasn’t any film in the camera after all, but I stop myself. I know by now that he will remember things the way he wants to anyway, and besides, I feel tender toward the image of us in that field; the air tight and dry, the sky breaking open gold above us, the ground dark and cracked beneath the shorn stalks of wheat. We were fighting and had pulled over to get away from each other when a flock of blackbirds suddenly took flight. I had just stepped outside the car and it was loud, like the air being sucked out from around us and everywhere black. He looked at me like it was the most amazing thing and then the sky was clear and bright again, open, the birds just a faint punch of dots in the distance. We were just starting out then, before the mess with my sister and the crazy words, before all this.

"I framed those pictures," I lie. "They’re on my dresser right now."

"Really?" he asks.

"Sure," I say. "A black frame, the kind with the holes already cut so you just put all the pictures in."

"Fantastic," he says.

"Your hair is sticking up in all of them," I say. I feel lightheaded, nearly high. "In some parts of the field the wheat is taller than us. We’re smiling. The car is in the background, all shiny in the sun. In one there’s a bird on the roof, one that didn’t fly away. I’m wearing a blue sweater, the one with the hole in the armpit."

"Uh-huh," he says.

"You’re not in all of the pictures though. Some of them are just me but I’m not smiling. The wind’s blowing my hair in my face."

"I was taking those pictures, probably," Dan says.

"Probably," I agree.

We’re quiet now for a minute. I can hear him breathing, the sound of someone else shuffling around in the motel room with him.

"When can I see you?" Dan asks.

"You left," I remind him.

"I know," he says.

I’m angry again now. I want him to fight back, somehow; I want him in the space next to me again so that all I have to do is open the door and stand outside of where he is for a moment to make everything clear again, and wide open.

"Where’s Susan, anyway," I ask, cruelly, wanting to slice him open.

"I–"

But I hang up before he can finish. I lie back down and close my eyes. I try not to think about anything. What would his next word have been? Love, need, want? That day our words were lost in the rustle of wind against wing, the commotion of so many bodies taking to the sky. What did we say in that field? Does it matter?

When I open my eyes again I see two small dots of light shining through the blinds where my cat’s teeth were. I hold my hand up in the dark and find the needles of light, let them shine on my palm until I imagine that I can feel them burning into my skin. The cat rustles beneath the bed and I remember the tear of blackbirds through the wheat, their sleek wings glinting like polished marble. I open and close my eyes again and again until I can’t tell the difference between light and dark, dark and light. I feel smothered and surrounded, the dark folds of blanket against my skin like the sharp edges of feathers. I stay like this for a long time and then it is morning, the night before some kind of dream that didn’t happen, or did.

Dressing, I notice the holes in the blind but they’re dark now, like tunnels, no light in them at all.

End

Exit | by Cassandra Gainer

The last shred of daylight glitters against the dirty windshield, glass streaked with the oil and debris of many miles, hours. He drives while she sits quietly, her head resting against the window. The air between them grows tired and thin.

"We should stop for gas," she suggests.

"There’s plenty," he says.

Between them they have exactly a carload. Clothing, books, a painting, some pots and pans, shoes. And the cats. A cooler of drinks, no ice.

"Cats are not meant to travel," he had argued.

"We should travel freely, and they," he said, pointing to their water bowl for emphasis, "will be nothing but balls and chains."

She would not leave them, did not. Now they sleep on the floor at her feet, their tiny cat paws curled beneath them like fishhooks, like anchors.

Between them they have just about nothing. They are leaving nothing for nothing. A new start, maybe. A new city. A new life.

"There is really nothing stopping us," he said suddenly, one night, "from doing whatever, going anywhere at all."

She agreed. They notified utility companies, landlords. They packed.

And now they travel a gray highway that cuts Oklahoma in two. The early summer sky is a fragile pink. A heat storm is piercing the night’s skin.

They are arguing still. The cat beneath the gas pedal. This exit or the next? The mountains or the sea.

He longs for the thin, dry air, the height, the delicate ice lacing the highest ridges, even in July.

She loves the smell of humid skies, salt, creatures dying in their shells. She loves the straight line of a horizon, the murky rolls of water that arrive in sets of seven, always, in tides.

He leaves easily, does not collect things. He imagines a world that is wide and long and deep.

She is torn with each place she leaves, grows into someone new, like a starfish suddenly severed from its limbs. Her life is cluttered with things she does not need, but wants. Colored rocks, ticket stubs, a chipped tea cup, matchbooks that are empty, used up.

The evening grows darker, flattens until there is only a thin, thin margin of pink striping the sky. Strange forks of electricity bristle the horizon.

He slides his hand across the sticky vinyl seat until he is touching her. She is looking at the road atlas, thinking of a picture she remembers only slightly from a wall calendar at an auto body shop. A pale, gorgeous ocean and cliffs, mountains in the hazy distance. She turns the pages of the atlas, touches each map. Neatly measured distances, the web of roads outlined in blue and yellow and red.

On the floor the cats begin to stir. He is touching her hand. Lightning lifts the world from darkness and for only a moment the flat, dry fields that stretch out beyond them are visible to the north, south, east, west.

Just ahead they will exit the highway. They will sleep in a motel, their bodies curving into each other’s heat and hollows, the cats burrowed in the blankets at their feet.

In the morning she will take a matchbook from the front desk, a pen from the room. He will carve a tiny mountain in the miniature soap with his fingernail. When she washes her face the edges of the mountain will become indistinct.