Every year they go to the Youngstown bar on the corner of Donahue and Eldridge. Every year they sit at the same table in the far left corner of the bar under an old sputnik chandelier and directly beside a red brick wall with a mounted painting of a ship traveling across an angry sea.

She says, “Do you love me?” And he smiles because he does and because she always asks this same question, every year, right after they sit.

“Of course.” He replies, and she asks.

“Why do you love me?”

“Because of your body, of course.”

And he winks, and she laughs.

“I’m serious. Why do you love me?”

And he looks at her and studies her face, scanning the freckles that rise and fall like sound waves beneath her left eye. Her nose which is small and flat, and something she is terribly self-conscious about, but that he personally loves, though there is no way to convince her of that.

You have to say that.

She always says, and he always replies the same way.

I don’t have to say anything, my love.

He scans her eyes, which in a certain light seem maroon, dark like a chestnut, but under the candelabra light bulb directly overhead, you swear they were a midnight blue. Dark like the raging ocean in the painting to her left. But that isn’t what he loves about her. Her features are beautiful, but they act like a spice does to a warm home cooked meal. They’re a wonderful addition, but they can’t mask something that tastes terrible.

“What I love about you,” he begins, “is that you live in a world within the world, but also in the real world. Your mind is like my home, yet it is as foreign as the crevices in the cut stone blocks along the Great Wall of China. You let me in just enough to know that you’re there, but not enough to penetrate the last barrier, for no matter how much we love, there still needs to be a spot only reserved for oneself. I love you because you love me, but you don’t need me. Need breeds dependency, and dependency breeds an unnatural fear of being left alone in a world that we feel we cannot navigate. You could navigate the harshest of storms, with or without me. The pain of losing me would not, in turn, blind you to your path because you set off on it long before we locked eyes. The path wasn’t created by us, it was created by you, and having someone lessen the load is a beautiful thing, but it never means that the shifted weight would crush you underneath. I love you because we’re here, a place we’re meant to be.”

She smiles, speechless. Her arms outstretch and her hands open, palms up. He traces his index finger along the lines before placing his hand in hers.

“Why do you love me?” He asks, and she smiles. "Because you say things like this."

“Easy answer,” he says.

"You’re an easy man”, she replies, and they lean over the small circular oak table and kiss each other.

"People aren’t the same,” she says. “They don’t love like the old poets.”

”Maybe not. Or maybe love moves on.”

”I don’t see love in here.”

She looks around and spots a young couple at a table by the bar. She points at a young man with short, curly black hair and the faintest hint of stubble strapped along his face from ear to ear. There’s a pretty girl in front of him with blonde hair down past her shoulders and a white top exposing bare tanned arms from her shoulder to her elbow, and on her forearm a tattoo of a tiny white arbutus flower.

”Let’s see how long it takes them to speak,” she says.

He replies, “it isn’t polite to stare, my love.”

She waves him off, and says, not like they’ll notice, anyway.

For ten minutes, no words are spoken between the young man and woman. They continuously scroll on their phones, small wry smiles rising momentarily before their mouths return to their natural dormant state. He takes small sips out of a golden ale in a mug, and she takes even smaller sips from her drink. They look too young to be in the bar, or at the youngest possible age to enter, and they’re drinking because they feel they should. They’ve earned it, yet they don’t enjoy it.

"See? There’s no love.” She says. “What would happen if I were to ask that girl who her favorite poet is? Or playwright? Or novelist? What would he say, for that matter?”

"I believe they’d ask who the hell you are and to promptly take a hike,” he answers.

And she laughs before mentioning that the servers never seem to notice them. “Is it because we’re tucked away in this small, dark corner?”

"Maybe. But the sooner they come, the sooner we must leave. I’d like to make the evening last a lifetime, if possible.”

Then he takes out an old pocket watch from his coat pocket and places it on the table.

“The watch that ages a man,” she says.

"Didn’t you just condemn the young couple for not loving like us dinosaurs?”

"Fair point,” she says, “but I condemn them for not looking into each other’s eyes and seeking stories and answers. And now I’m condemning you for your love of old antique watches. The way you stare at them can make a girl crazy.”

Now it’s his turn to laugh.

"Well, my love for antique watches trained me on how to seek out a proper woman.”

"Oh, did they now?” She laughs. “I’d love to hear this explanation with your foot forcibly inserted into that big old pretty mouth of yours.”

He winks at her, and she feels weak.

“Have you ever heard of Damaskeening?”

”Can’t say that I have. But I suppose you’re about to enlighten me?”

She says and places her hand just below her chin with just enough sarcasm in her interest to make Billy roll his eyes and tell her,

“You care, sweetheart. If curiosity killed the cat, then you’re running out of lives.”

"I care. Because you’re smart. You have a lot to say to the world and sometimes I wish you’d make a bigger effort to let that voice be heard.”

"Well, your ears are the only pair I’ve ever wanted, love.”

Then it’s her turn to roll her eyes.

"Well, how on earth did you speak before you met me?”

"I spoke only to the wind and the shadows on my bedroom wall. The ominous ones, I felt like with some lighthearted conversation, my mind would reorganize the shapes and turn them into allies.”

”Oh? And did that work?”

”Sometimes,” Billy says. “Now stop sidetracking me. Damaskeening is all about forging patterns. It’s embellishing the bridges of the watch movement.”

”I’m no nearer to understanding.” She says and sticks her tongue out just slightly.

”Patience.” Billy says and raises a finger before pressing on. “In the late 19th century, watchmakers created some of the most beautiful embellishments you’ll ever see inside of a watch. They were made by what are called rose engines, which could produce beautiful circular patterns much like those of a spirograph. And though the engine was capable of doing the work, you still needed to place it in the hands of a skilled watchmaker in order for the magic to happen.”

”And somehow this relates to us?”

”It does.” Billy says. “Because the rose engines are the space between the two of us. It’s basically free floating, waiting for someone to grab it and use it on the other. There’s beauty inside of us, and love is much like the damaskeening process. In your hands, the rose engine can display patterns of beauty that are inside of me, but only because it’s in the hands of the right artist. And I’d like to think that in my hands the rose engine can unveil the intricate beauties inside of you. But it takes time, patience and skill and, of course, never forget a healthy dose of luck.”

Then Billy opens up his pocket watch and the three-dimensional spirals dance across the movement brought on by the candelabra lights in the chandelier just above their heads.

She’s heard Billy tell that story more times than she can count, but it’s beautiful and the day she says no to hearing it, is the day she loses everything.

“Do you want to get out of here?” She asks.

“But the food hasn’t arrived.”

”I’m not hungry, anyway.”

”I guess, neither am I.”

They smile at each other and get up and exit the bar as the bell overhead dings. Still no one turns. No one cares.

Along the pier they walk as a light snow begins to fall, picturesque like a calendar. The type of snowfall that people who love snow or people who haven’t seen it before think of it. The kind that lands and doesn’t melt right away, yet it doesn’t accumulate to the point where within minutes you’re trudging through it, in need of snow shoes. The kind that illuminates an evening sky with a picture of white. There’s a breeze coming off of the water that’s chilly but not stark cold.

She places her arm around his, and rests her head gently on his shoulder. They start down towards the water along a gravel path that forms a never-ending circle, around a large body of water. It goes on for miles, how many, they’re not sure. But they walk along it, and on the edge are jagged rocks forming a layered barrier between the coldness of the dark water, and the heaviness of stone.

She stops. Billy says, “why did you stop, my love?”

And on the ground, in the frozen grass with a thinly veiled layer of snow, is something shining. She knows what it is before she approaches it, and when Billy’s eyes meet the shining object, he knows too.

She walks over and gets down on her knees. The wind is howling faster now, and her hair is blowing in front of her face. She picks up the small shard of glass. It’s about 3 inches long and 2 inches in diameter.

“It’s real, isn’t it?” She asks.

“I’m afraid so,” Billy replies.

And she looks over at the Youngstown bar and sees heart decorum forming an even bigger heart around the entrance. She sees the glass, the window where they were sitting only moments ago.

“What happened?” She asks.

“A bomb.” He replies.

“Why?” she asks.

“Terrorists, hun. A war. A way to get the people in power to listen has always been to hurt those without any.”

“On Valentine’s Day.” Billy nods his head.

“How old were we?”

“27, love.”

Then she gets up, and throws the glass back into the water, yet it doesn’t reach past the tall rocks on the edge. Billy puts his hand out, and she hesitates before placing hers in his. They continue along the path for some time, no words spoken, just the wind.

Billy hauls out his old pocket watch and tells her it’s almost time.

And she says, okay.

They walk through a heavily wooded area before coming out at a gate on the right side. The gate is tall and rusted. It’s heavy like steel, perhaps iron, and the two sides connect on top in the middle, and it says St Michael’s Cemetery. Behind is a marble statue of St Michael, the angel, the defender of faith.

They walk through and a fog climbs above their ankles but just below their knees.

”Why do you love me?” She asks.

”Because you’re my soul. My everything.”

”Not as good as before.” She smiles sadly.

”We don’t have much time.” He says. “Why do you love me?”

”Because you let me live out my fantasy when I need to, but you never lie.”

”And I never will.”

They reach two small stones placed flat in the cold dirt. There were once flowers here, but they’re gone. There were once people here, but they’re gone.

”Happy Valentine’s Day, love,” Billy says.

”Happy Valentine’s Day.”

Billy looks down at his pocket watch and looks up at her with a somber smile.

And they’re gone.

The wind continues to blow heavily, and a newspaper hovers through the winter air. On the front it reads.

40th Anniversary of Youngstown Bombing

It’s been 40 years since a bomb placed in the bathroom of the Youngstown bar went off, killing 12 people and destroying the infrastructure.

On Valentine’s Day, young lovers went out to have a drink and many lost their lives. It will forever go down as the darkest day in this city’s history. Owner of the Youngstown bar, Gerry Mason, reflects on the horror of the evening.

“I was a young bartender. Hadn’t been doing it for more than five years. It was a safe place in town. No one ever thought twice about something like this happening. I still get choked up thinking about it. There was this couple in the far corner of the bar. They came all the time, just talked and laughed. Young love, ya know? He used to bring an old pocket watch that his grandfather or something made. He’d show it to her all the time. And when the bomb hit, they were just gone. We searched through the rubble and found his old pocket watch. Still intact.”

Afterwards, Gerry believed the Youngstown bar, which was started by his father, James Mason, would never reopen.

“I didn’t think anyone would ever feel safe about the place again,” Gerry remarked. “But the resilience of these people is truly astounding. We worked throughout the entire year and were open a year to the day. Valentine’s evening, the following year, we welcome all the young lovers once again. It was really a beautiful thing. Like Springsteen says, everything dies, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back, ya know?”

And although the tragedy will never be forgotten, the Youngstown bar has become, in part, a beacon of hope. An understanding that with the power of love, is the power to rebuild anything that’s been lost. All it takes is the right machinery, and the right people to operate it.

Guilt hovers like a storm cloud when it comes to doing the things that we want to do. Not what we need to do, but the little moments in life that fill us with indescribable happiness. And not that I don’t feel happiness and liveliness throughout my day-to-day, because that isn’t a fair assessment of the life that I’ve spent so many years building. However, the routine of everyday life can breed monotony, and a feeling that you want to live. To truly grasp what it means to be alive, and experience something so filled with magic that you can almost believe in forces beyond those of the natural world.

It’s called enjoying the fruits of your labour. It answers the question of why you put in the hard work that you do, beyond simply surviving. You work to provide. Shelter, food, power. But you also work in hopes of escaping the often torturous malignancy of a brain that seems to work at the opposite end of a rope during a never-ending match of tug of war.

And for me, magic in its purest form is music. On weekends, after a long week of work, I put my favourite records on the turntable and sit in a small loveseat that I purchased for a mere 40 bucks on marketplace. I crack open a beer after the needle has been placed on the grooves, and the music starts and I close my eyes. It’s magic. It’s a time machine. It’s a world of endless possibilities, where a man can come to a fork in the road and explore multiple possibilities.

I can see a world where I chased my dreams of being a rockstar. I’m standing in the cold like I did so many years ago. I have a guitar case in my hand, and a fake leather jacket draped over a chequered plaid shirt. There’s an ominous January wind coming off of the river that in later years will fill me with dread, but on this evening, it does not because I’m playing my first rock and roll show.

I can listen to the music of Bruce Springsteen and feel my blue collar veins like roots from my family tree. Each story impactful and meaningful. The realisation that perhaps I’m one of the less fortunate dreamers from a rock and roll song, but also that maybe my life is as important as it gets. Like I said, the music is magic and the soft burn of the alcohol as it descends my throat into the pit of my belly, makes me feel lighter, like a feather but also heavy, depending on my mind set when I decide to crack open that can.

I tell my wife, “We need to see the boss live.” She agrees, and although there’s much discrepancy in our tastes in music, Bruce Springsteen is not one of them. She loves him, and we sing along to Badlands, and Adam Raised A Cain, and Prove It All Night in the car as we drive through town. Her as much a character in one of his songs as I am. Some days I look at her and see us as the two young protagonists of Born To Run, singing “I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul.” And then some days I look at her sad and defeated, living a life that isn’t so much living but just a conscious shadow walking through life feeling unseen and unheard. I think she resembles more the love interest in Racing in the Street, than she does Wendy from Born to Run. “She sits on the porch of her daddy’s house but all her pretty dreams are torn, she stares off alone into the night with the eyes of one who hates for just being born.”

Then the day comes where I buy tickets to his show in Montreal at the Bell Centre on Halloween night. Because of illness and fatigue, the show has been postponed a full year, so the rescheduled date has finally arrived and I can’t believe it’s here. I came so close to selling the tickets many times with a belief that the show would never happen.

We wake up that morning, get the kids ready for school, and then drop them off. They’re sad that we’re leaving and that storm cloud of guilt is hovering so close to my head that I can feel individual strands of hair meeting it like an electrical current. But we never take time for ourselves, and it’s been longer than I can remember that my wife and I sat alone in a car and acted like two people who fell in love before kids and mortgages entered the picture. “I promise this will be the only year we won’t take you trick or treating, okay?” I say to my kids, who are understanding. Their grandpa is going to take them, anyway. They aren’t going to miss out on Halloween.

We drive to my in-laws’ place to drop off car seats and tell them a couple of last-minute things about their few days with the kids. My mother-in-law smiles and says that she raised kids before, and she’s pretty sure she can handle it. She tells us to have fun and to drive safely.

After that, we grab coffee and we hit the road. We have a 10 hour drive ahead of us, but the day is young; the air is warm, and the sky seems undecided about whether it wants to provide us with sunshines, or hard rain. Before the drive is finished, we’ll get doses of both.

It feels strange just the two of us alone in a car. It's like a first date. She places her hand on my thigh and smiles at me. I can feel the poison being extracted from my body and in those moments on an open road with a warm cup of coffee, I ask myself, Why do we fight? We’re living similar lives and going through similar stresses, and that should bring us closer together, like the music of the boss does. When you find something that you have in common, you hold on to it; you bear hug it into submission, because if it gets loose, everything feels empty. So, again, I ask. Why do we fight?

For the first few hours, we don’t play music or the radio. We just talk. We’re excited about the concert because it’s been ten years in the making, but we’re trying not to get too excited until we get closer to our hotel, and until we actually get into the arena.

And even when we’re not talking, it isn’t an uncomfortable silence, it’s just silence where our heads are saying, Wow, there actually is silence in this world. It’s peaceful. I like it.

A few times, I can see her through my peripherals, and she’s smiling. She’s smiling the way she used to smile when I had a microsecond when I was going somewhere. When I’d get up on a small stage in a dingy bar with my acoustic guitar and my words and close my eyes and sing. I’d open them and she’d be at a table with friends and a drink that usually featured one, if not several colours of the rainbow, and she’d just smile.

Then, when the show was finished, I’d order a pitcher or two of beer and feel good. Feel happy that even if my music didn’t change the world, that at least, I put it out there. That was all a person could do.

And after we were both good and drunk, we’d stumble our way back to my apartment, and feel all the things that a person should feel. Those things that make you realise as clear as day that there is life and there is living.

And as the years go on, those smiles don’t appear as much. Those pleasures go through periods of such brevity that you forget how special that connection can be. And I don’t think that a concert will save a marriage, but I think Springsteen has been the soundtrack for our entire relationship, and that sitting together, just the two of us and hearing a 50 year catalogue in the space of three hours will let us escape into a place we used to go so often when we were younger.

The drive isn’t without its complications, because of heavy traffic and a GPS that ceased to work during crucial moments of finding our hotel, but we do arrive and we get to the show when the doors open.

My wife isn’t feeling great because she doesn’t always travel well, and the added stress of the last hour of driving had her feeling weak and sick. I was getting nervous as the show approached that she wasn’t going to enjoy it, or that she was going to throw up and have to leave.

But she powers through. We find our seats and wait for the show to begin. I still feel that heaviness sitting in my chest like an inability to relax and enjoy the moment. The anxiety is there like it so often is, but I’m still hopeful that the show will allow that feeling to subside. That it will truly allow me to live in the moment and nowhere else.

She still looks sick and unhappy that she’s making me unhappy, but I’m not. I just want her to enjoy the show and not remember it, only for the way she was feeling.

7:30PM, the show begins. We’re behind the stage, but we have full access to the huddle and prayer that the band gives before each show, and we get to see Springsteen walk on stage to a roaring crowd of over 20,000 people. All those years, saying that I needed to see him live and wondering if I ever would, because the rock stars from the 70s are now in their 70s, and like the boss says, “once you get older there are a lot more yesterday’s than tomorrows” fade away. Because there I am, watching him count off the band 1! 2! 3! 4! And the music starts, and it’s life. It’s life in its purest form.

It takes me three to four songs before I get over the shock of staring down at one of my biggest musical heroes, but once I do, it’s magic. My wife begins to feel better and I can see her staring down at him with a look of awe on her face. The pain is going away and is being replaced with magic.

As the band goes into Atlantic City, I can feel myself going back to the first time that I heard the song. Just a university student who’d recently started buying Springsteen albums. I was in my room listening to Nebraska when the second song came on. From the first seconds of, well, they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night. I was gone, baby gone.

I showed it to a friend I was playing music with and then showed it to my wife. And I was like, this is it.

This is what?

I don’t know, but this is it.

During those shows where my wife smiled at me, the way she did during the early stages of the drive. It’s all there. I’m here now, but I’m somewhere else too. I raise my hands with the crowd and I look around and I see stories. I can read them in their eyes. There are hardships in those eyes. There are worlds of people who kill themselves to survive. I can feel it.

There are two old men sitting next to us, perhaps the same age as the band, maybe younger or older. It’s hard to tell. But they’re seasoned in this world. They close their eyes and move their heads and they’re lost in it. Then when the encore comes, and it’s time to dance with the lights on, they get up and sway like they’re in their living room all alone. But it’s wonderful, it’s thousands of people doing the same thing. Our lives so different, yet so much the same, in that we all seek respite from days and nights of hardships. We all seek those moments where we live, not only exist. Where we’re using our time and living in it.

And it’s there. I can feel the weight getting lighter and the air going into my lungs easier. And I know that there are things I’ve done that I’m not proud of. There are moments where perhaps I would have chosen another path and seen where it took me, and I wonder, but doesn’t everybody? Is there anyone on planet earth that is happy with every choice they’ve ever made since they were old enough to make them? I doubt it. I sincerely doubt it.

But with music, is the power to understand that the world is filled with people who go through hardships. And the right music will tell you it also, Ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive. And that I wanna spit in the face of these badlands.

There are lyrics that tell us I’ve done my best to live the right way, I get up every morning and go to work each day. But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold. Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode.

But the same song can also tell you: There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor. I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm.

The songs are about hard times, but hard people too. That you can feel weak, like you’re going to explode, and that sometimes your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold, and that’s life. That’s life in all of its pain and glory. It’s right there. It tells you that you need to feel pain to understand the beauty of an evening without any of it.

That you need to come face to face with yourself, and especially a version of yourself that is bent on tearing down those walls that keep your sanity intact. But the songs will also tell you that the bad doesn’t always win.

Throughout the three hours of that show, I felt life the way it was meant to feel. Not always, but the way it feels for the people who lay down their lives every day, and who need a moment to say, yeah, this is fun and I’m not the only one who feels this way. There are 20,000 people here singing these songs and closing their eyes and drifting away into a world where the bad is put into submission by the power of community. By the power of love. And even as someone who is neither religious nor spiritual, you can’t deny something higher than ourselves in the rhythmic swaying and dancing of a sold-out crowd who all understand the difference between existing and living. Who are choosing, if only for a short while, to fully live and to fully experience what it means to feel your heart pound in your chest, to feel the blood flow through your veins, to allow yourself a moment where you can be vulnerable. Cry if you want to cry. Dance if you want to dance. Sing as loud as your heart desires because that is what magic is for.

And on the drive back, we listened to Springsteen music, and we reflected on an important evening. An evening where we spent time not just as mom and dad but as two adults who loved each other long before our lives changed, and wanted to make sure that it was all still there. And it was.

Sometimes we fight and ask if we’re only together for the kids. But it was nice to get away and realise that we do love each other. That we could still eat a romantic dinner on either side of a small table and look at each other and talk.

And then after another day of endless miles of open road, we finally made it back home. And as soon as the door opened, the kids came running out, hugging us in excitement and we know that our life is hard but it’s rewarding, and although there are days and sometimes weeks where we’re likely not doing much other than surviving, there is always magic around the corner. You just need to find it, see it, and make sure that when it comes, you’re living in it.

It’s 1943 and I’m fourteen years old. My father is in the South Pacific on an island called Guadalcanal. He writes to me when he can, but I hear that it’s dangerous and my mother believes that he’s never coming back. She tells me to brace myself for that storm, so when the military men come and knock on the door, there’s no shock. She says she won’t even cry because he was a fool to go, and now she has to work long days at a textile factory. She cackles with laughter when I tell her I think that he’s a hero. “Boy, men have been killing themselves since the dawn of time. Heroes look after their families.”

I go to the Drekon school for boys up in Loudon. It’s a big gray building on a hill overlooking a small town thick with industrial smog. The boys there aren’t soldiers. They’re the boys who are going to send soldiers to their death. They even say so as they walk the halls filled with framed pictures of past presidents of the school. They’re the future bankers, lawyers, and factory owners. I don’t belong here, but my grandfather attended this school, and family of past alumni could attend Drekon so long as their grades were fine.

My mother tells me I need to do something good with my life. I tell her I will, but she laughs when I say it. She tells me, “You have too much of your father in you,” as though that’s the worst thing a mother could say to her son. But secretly I think that’s a good thing. He’s a good man, a hero, whether or not she wants to believe it.

On Wednesday’s after school, I take piano lessons from an old Italian man named Victor. His hair is thin and white, and when he isn’t teaching piano lessons, he’s in the back of his shop repairing them. The shop is beautiful, and it smells like history. It smells like if these pianos and violins could talk, they could tell you stories unlike anything you’ve ever heard. And the boy in me sometimes asks them questions quietly as Victor finishes up his work in the back.

I rub thin lines of dust in the shape of musical notes and I say, “What have you seen? Where do you come from? What do you think about the war?” They never answer, though my hope is that someday they will and I’ll sit with them for hours and write what they have to say. Because I want to be a writer, it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted.

Victor takes me in the back and I sit at a Steinway piano made of Walnut and I tap the keys and play some of Chopin’s Berceuse in D Flat and Victor smiles. “You’re practicing, I can tell.” He says through his small spectacles.

“I am.”

“But your heart’s not in it?”

“It is.” I say, and he laughs. Like my mother, a big cackle. And he says,

“If you want to lie to an old man, you’ll need to do better than that.”

“I want to be a writer.” I say.

He smiles. “And what do you want to write about?”

“Soldiers.”

“Because your father is one?”

“Because I believe they sacrifice a great deal, and people like my mother think it’s all a waste of life.”

“And you don’t feel that way, young Charles?”

I stop playing Chopin and I look up at Victor. He never seems to get angry, just curious. I’ve seen a man throw profanities at him in his shop before, and Victor’s tone and his well-articulated responses never wavered. And I wonder how he can do that, because I can already feel my heart pounding at the idea of debating this old man, only to find out that he agrees with my mother.

“I think that the country called, and he answered. And that I’ll do the same thing if the war is still going on in the years to come.”

“Well, I think that’s honorable, Charles. I pray that you never have to experience war, but I do believe there is a great sacrifice in service, and that sacrifice should not go unspoken.”

“Did you serve?” I ask.

Victor pauses for a moment, rubbing the small stubble on his chin.

“In a manner of speaking, I did.”

“And did you regret it?”

He pauses again, his brown eyes staring off into the distance.

“I regret what war does to men,” He says.

“What does it do?”

“Young Charles, there are more ways to die than simply the stopping of one’s heart. There are people out here walking these streets every day who are more dead than my forefathers. And it isn’t only your father who is sacrificing.”

“I-I don’t understand.” I say.

“Maybe in time you shall. Now, enough of this. Your mother pays me to teach you piano, and she is not a woman to cross.”

He lets out a smile, and I laugh. And we play Chopin while on the other side of the world. My father kills, and like Victor says, dies as well.

I’m sixteen in May of 1945 when the war ends. My father returns home in June. When the taxi pulls up to the house, I jump up from my study and run down the stairs and out the door.

“Hey, kid.” He says and smiles as I run into his arms. Mother is working at the factory, and I’m happy about that because I want to pick his brain and finally have a story worth writing.

End of the year writing assignments are due in two weeks, and I want desperately to showcase my best work. I know that Mr Dupoint has contacts in the industry, because he himself is a published author. His novel For There Goes The Tides of War was a great and fascinating read. He wrote it when he was stationed in France back in 1917.

We walk inside, and he asks where mother is.

“At work.” I say.

“Ah, yes. And I suppose she told you she needed to work because I’d run off?”

I nod my head. He tousles my hair and smiles. Letting out a big laugh.

“Your mother never changes. I sent money in an envelope every two weeks. Enough to keep a roof over your head. And she goes out and gets a job. What a woman.”

I smile. I don’t know how long to wait before I ask. But I’m dying a slow death inside.

“H-how was it?” I ask nervously.

“I’m glad it’s over, Charlie.” Again, he tousles my hair. He sits down in the dining room and asks if I’ll get him a drink. I pour him one, and bring it over, and he shoots it down quickly before asking for another. “How’s school?”

“It’s okay.”

“Just okay? That’s a great school my father got you into.”

“I know. It’s just, I uh, I don’t want to be a banker or a lawyer.”

“No? And what do you want to be, kiddo?”

“A writer.”

Another crackle of laughter. The same one that my mother gave me when I called my father a hero, and the same one Victor gave me when he caught me lying, and now my father when I tell him I want to write.

“A writer? For the paper?”

“No. I want to write books.”

“Write about what?”

“I’d like to write about you. I’d like to write about the glory of war.”

“The glory of war?” He says, but I can see blackness in his eyes. The same blackness from when he brought my brother back from the train tracks. Holding him in his arms, and staring off like if someone made a single wrong move, it would be a swift end to their life. "There's no goddamn glory in war, kid."

I hadn’t seen him in so long. And the blackness had returned.

“Just get the hell out of here, Charlie.” He says.

“B-but I,”

“GET THE HELL OUTTA HERE, CHARLIE” He screams and points to the door. "You want to do something with your life, pay attention in that goddamned school and get a job. A real job. So just get the hell outta, Charlie. I'd like to be alone."

“But I miss you. I-I-I haven’t seen you. I just want to hear about your heroics” “

He grabs me by the collar of my shirt. “I won’t tell you again.”

I nod my head and despite my best efforts; the tears begin to fall and he scoffs. My father in his army green. The most handsome man I’d ever seen. My hero. And as I turn to the door, my mother is standing in her factory clothes, her left hand resting lazily on her hip. She’s smiling.

She wraps her arm around me, and my father grabs another drink.

“So, you made it out alive, eh? Well, I told the boy not to get his hopes up. Because a lot of men weren’t coming home. But Charlie kept his hopes, anyway. Nice for Charlie to get some one on one time with his hero, eh Walt?”

My father throws the glass against the kitchen wall.

“A bona fide real-life hero.”

Then they begin to yell at each other. He’s only been home a few minutes. I leave and grab my bike and go to the music store.

I walk in and Victor is in the back with a boy of no older than six teaching him the basics. I sit and wait at one of the grand pianos. I tell myself to calm down, that war is hard. That it was my fault. I shouldn’t have brought that on him so quickly. I should have let him rest.

I whisper to the piano, “You’ve been through it all. You’ve likely seen war, yet you are gentle and kind. Your music creates peace and warmth. You are easy and easy to love.”

Then the little boy comes out from the back crying. “I hate this,” He says to his mother, as she drags him through the store and out the door with the ring of the bell.

“It isn’t gentle and kind for everyone.” Victor says. “It takes patience and understanding before it becomes gentle and kind.”

“Oh, you heard that?” I ask, embarrassed.

“I know you talk to them and want their answers. I know you seek answers from them because you know they’ll never give them to you.”

“I suppose it’s easier that way. Because then I can create my own answers.”

“Perhaps that’s what makes you a writer.” He says, as he walks towards me, taking a seat on the bench next to me.

“Your father is home. But he will never truly be the same.” Victor says and begins playing. “He will have days when he can forget, and days when the war is so clear, he’ll forget that he’s home. In many ways, the father you knew is dead. But in other ways, he isn’t. Just like the Charles, who came here as a sulking 12-year-old boy is now dead, but in many ways, he isn’t. We all die small deaths every day. It’s all a matter of how you choose to carry on. Perhaps your father will beat the worst of it, perhaps not. But if you want to write, find the beauty in all of life’s pain.”

“What if I don’t know how?” I ask.

Victor laughs. Again, that bright big cackle of his that drives me mad, but this time I smile.

“Then you’re no writer.”

It’s 1955. I’m 26 years old and I’m promoting my first book at a coffee shop a block from my childhood home. My hair is slicked back, and the reporter smokes Lucky’s while writing in his notepad. He asks me questions about my novel, Factory Girl and says that there seems to be a large demographic of women who consider me to be ahead of my time.

“What do you think about that?” He says.

“Well, it’s based on my mother. I spent a lot of time idolizing my father as a child because I felt that, as a boy, it had to be my goal to become a man. But being a man is a little more complicated than that, I believe. My notion of manhood was certainly one devoid of happiness and of any kind of aspirations that were my own.”

“What does your mother think about your book?”

“She likes it.” I say with a laugh. “She thinks that my fictitious mind sometimes runs away from me and that the book would be better if it were a bit more grounded.

“Your father is certainly a character in this book, but he isn’t necessarily a heroic figure, is he?”

I stop and look at the newspaper on the counter. I sip my coffee and see a headline that reads. Local Music Shop Owner Dies with a picture of Victor Abate. His stubble from my childhood, grown into a jolly old Saint Nick beard.

His voice echoes in my head at that moment, clearer than the voice of the reporter in front of me.

There are people walking these streets every day who are more dead than my forefathers

“I, uh, think that my father was gravely wounded during the war. Not physically, but certainly mentally. And I feel that perhaps my fictitious mind ran away from me slightly, but he became another child to my mother. And maybe she didn’t mind for a while because I lost my brother at a young age, but it broke her down as it did to me. In my eyes, she became more of a hero, and I began to understand exactly why she wanted to work while he was away. Because she’d heard horror stories of men returning home, and she needed to ensure that a roof was kept over my head. I began to look at the everyday heroics of the women who worked and cared for their children.”

“And how long has it been since your father passed?” The reporter asks.

“Three years ago. I miss him dearly, but I believe that he is happier now.”

I think back to the day he returned. The coldness of his eyes, and the sharpness of his words. The silence was paralyzing, he never told me a thing about the war.

Somedays I fear he was never a good man. And that my memories of him before the war were just snapshots. Just another story of a boy wanting desperately to be loved by his father.

“And what are your plans for the future?”

“I’m here to visit my mother, and I plan to persuade her to leave this town and move in with me. She worked tirelessly to keep a roof over my head and I believe it is now my turn to put one over hers.”

“Do you have another book in you?”

“I believe I do. Although I couldn’t at this moment tell you what it’s about but perhaps something about the magic of pianos.”

“The magic of pianos, you say?”

“Yes. The old man who owned the music store just passed away. His name was Victor, and he was a great friend of mine. I, uh, used to be a very lonely child, and I’d go to his shop early even though I knew he had other students. I wasn’t too keen on the piano, but the smell of aged wood provided me with a great comfort. I’d even ask the piano questions.” I chuckle softly at this. The reporter raised an eyebrow quizzically. “I was a young boy looking to write, and the pianos had history. I prayed that they’d open up and tell me their story, and I could write the world’s greatest novel.”

“Did they ever answer?”

“No. No. Not in so many words. But they still helped me unfurl my own stories. If not for Victor and the pianos, I would have never written this novel.”

We finish the interview, and I shake the man’s hand. I walk out of the coffee shop and head down towards the music store. I walk in and the bell rings over my head and I picture the young boy of six years old, screaming to his mother that he hates the instrument.

There’s a young man in the back who peaks his head out and tells me he’ll be with me in a moment. I tell him to take his time, that I’m simply browsing.

I walk through the store and I sit at a couple of the pianos, and think that I haven’t played one in a decade or so. I haven’t spoken to one in the same amount of time.

So I walk and rub my hands in the light dust all along the storefront and at the end, I see a note written in the dust.

Make the piano talk, or you’re no writer

I cackle with laughter, and then I go to my childhood home to fetch my mother. She opens the door and tells me I’m late.

“You’re too much like your father for your own good.”

I smile, but I hope that I’m not completely like him.

What people don’t talk about when it comes to the market crash is the ripple effect of it all. Yes, people lost their jobs, and there was a certain horror in that, but there was also a horror in how those men and women processed the loss of their life’s work. Many drank, some skipped town, leaving their families behind, and some took it out on their families.

I lived in a small working-class suburb, and Danny lived a block away from me on Dover Street, and Brooke also lived on Dover, just further down towards the mountains. There was a small park in between all our houses where we met up most evenings when the wind wasn’t too cold, or we weren’t locked in our rooms playing catch up on homework we should have started months ago.

The park was built by the town right before the crash, with hopes of the vacant lot behind it being turned into a school, because the elementary school up on Normandy Avenue was in a serious state of disrepair.

The park got built in a hurry around election time, the only time anything really happens, and then all the money went to abroad to places where factory workers didn’t complain as much about little things like benefits, pension plans, raises, and labor laws. So, now we were left with the shadow of a town filled with disillusionment at the great lie that our parents’ generation were sold.

I was lucky, in a sense. My father was able to switch over to a management job for the railroad, which was a non unionized position. He knew the storm was coming and could switch over before many of the conductor jobs got axed along with the closures of our three major industries, which all fell like dominos within six months of each other.

But the railroad hung on by the skin of its teeth, because of the smaller industries all along the coast heading west. It wasn’t much, but he remained employed, though that didn’t always make me Mr. Popular at my high school. Danny’s father survived too. He was a cleaner who had a contract with the Walmarts in Atlantic Canada. He was on the road nonstop, but Danny, his mother and sister kept a roof over their head because of it. That was what mattered the most.

Brooke’s father, however, did lose his job. We didn’t know the severity of it until she started coming to the park with different afflictions. One evening, it would be a cut just above her left eyebrow. A week later a shiner with every color of the rainbow swirling like a vortex, and then a few days after that a swollen lip, cracked and busted.

“What’s going on, Brooke?” I finally said one evening.

“Oh, it’s nothing.” She answered, walking towards the small yellow slide where she laid at the bottom and stared up at the night sky.

I looked over at Danny, who shrugged his shoulders, and we followed her. I laid on the slide next to her, and Danny dug in the sand under the playground and grabbed three bottles of warm beer that he buried for evenings like these. We opened them up and drank warm piss, making faces like we were shooting hard liquor, and then I asked again.

“Seriously, Brooke. What’s going on?” She was silent for a moment.

“You ever wonder what you’re gonna do after high school?” She asked, then continued before Danny or I had the chance to answer. “I know that we won’t see each other anymore. I know that.”

“Brooke, that’s not tr–,” I tried to say, but she cut me off.

“My mom was going through photo albums the other night. She was a teenager here in the late 70s. There were pictures of her and she was beautiful, so full of life. She had that Charlie’s Angel’s hair, and she was so happy. Every picture she was smiling like her face couldn’t stretch anymore. Every. Single. Picture. I asked why I’d never met her friends from back in the day, and she said, that’s life, sweetie. People drift apart. People lead different lives. And she started to cry. One of them died of cancer a few years ago, and the other’s were on the other side of the country living in a goddamn glass cathedral on hills overlooking a mining town. And she was here.”

Danny and I looked at each other, unsure of what to do with our bodies. He peeled the label off of his beer, always trying to extract it in one go, and I stared at the small dark freckle just below her left cheekbone and kept my eyes locked there, not knowing where else to point them. I got lost in that freckle, and for a moment I loved Brooke, and I wanted to tell her I loved her, and that I’d keep her safe, and I’d make sure that we never drifted apart, but I couldn’t because of the pact. When Brooke first started hanging around Danny and me, she said we had to make her a promise, and we said sure, what was it? And she told us we couldn’t fall in love with her, no matter what. Danny and I had looked at each other and laughed, but she was serious, not a hint of humor in those auburn eyes, and we agreed. We spit in our hands and shook them. No one was allowed to fall in love, as though that were something within our control.

“My father isn’t handling things well.” She said in a voice just above a whisper. Almost like she was hoping we didn’t hear, but that she could still say she told us. Or at least she told the wind.

“Your dad’s doing this?” Danny asked, the half peeled label in his hand. “Jesus, Brooke. We gotta go to the police or something.”

“No, Danny. You’re not gonna do anything, you got it?” She said, sitting up from the slide and pointing a finger right between Danny’s eyes. Danny was timid and small, always a target for small town cruelty.

“You got that too, Jamie?” She turned to me, and I nodded.

“No cops, gotcha. But what are you gonna do?”

She relaxed and laid back on the slide.

“I turn 18 in six months. I’ll have to go somewhere. Anywhere. Find a place, and grow up.” She sipped her beer. Then I followed, then Danny. It was terrible, but still to this day, anytime I drink a beer, I travel back to the park, the cold sand slipping through my fingers. The frigid evening air was cold, often too cold, but feeling like being a cool teenager meant always wearing less clothing than was needed. Danny’s laugh, the way his front teeth came out, and he looked like a rabbit. Then if you got him laughing hard enough, and loud enough, he’d snort like a pig and the three of us would erupt in laughter. The kind of laughter that you thought would never end on those days when your mind didn’t care about reality because you had friends, good friends, to take you away from it. Just like best friends should do.

But we didn’t do enough for Brooke. We didn’t do enough because we respected her wishes too much, or because we were scared, most likely a healthy mixture of the two. Because the cuts and bruises got worse, and the laughter became a rarity and even when it reared its head, it wasn’t filled with life, nor escape, it was just a short cackle, that signified, hey that was funny, in better times, I would have given you more. But this is all I’ve got left.

Danny and I didn’t talk about it, because talking about it would turn into finding a solution, and the only solution was the cops, exactly what Brooke didn’t want. So we remained silent, talking about sports and superheroes, and pretending we gave a shit about anything other than what was happening to our best friend, and the helplessness we felt.

——————————————————————————-

When she died, I was asked to do the eulogy. This is the note that she left:

When you bury me, I want Jamie to do the eulogy. Jamie with his soft brown hair, and his worried eyes that always made me chuckle, but also a little bit sad. He carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, and I think that I didn’t let him talk enough. I didn’t let him talk enough because I was frightened of the truth that would come out of his lips. He’s wiser than his years. Oh, and one more thing, Jamie, I wish we would have never had that stupid pact. But it never changed the way that I felt.

So, I stood up at the altar of the Holy Cross and stared out at scattered people occupying less than half of the pews and talked about Brooke. As I looked down at her father in the front row, I realized something definite. I was going to kill him. At the altar of a church in front of a statue of the crucifixion, I decided I was going to kill a man.

That evening I sat at home, slouched on the couch, my father on his chair beside me, nursing a beer. For the first time, I felt like my old man had nothing to say. He always knew the right words to keep you going, but this time he didn’t. I could feel his eyes in my peripheral, constantly moving back and forth from the TV to the side of my head.

“I’m gonna go to the park with Danny for a bit.” I said, and my father said, “Sure, kid.”

When I got there, I laid on the slide. The one to the right, because by laying on the side that Brooke did, was admitting to myself that she wasn’t coming back. And that was something I wasn’t ready to process.

There were no stars that evening, just clouds that looked ominous in the dark sky. Like the sky understood how I was feeling, like it understood that people didn’t want sunshine and starlight every day, that some days you wanted to know that the universe could be ugly too. Like it was reminding you that you weren’t alone. We all had cloudy days.

Danny showed up a few minutes later, and he sat in the sand where he normally did. It was one of the reasons I loved Danny, because he understood the world the way I did. We saw things the same way.

“Shitty day,” Danny said.

“Yup.”

“Can’t believe she’s really gone.”

“Me neither.”

“What are you thinking about, Jame?”

Another thing I loved about Danny was that he cared what was on your mind. He wanted to have a conversation the right way. So many people spoke only to wait for their chance to speak again. That wasn’t the same as listening, that wasn’t the same as inquiring. But on that evening, I was scared to tell him what was on my mind. We thought alike, but maybe this was me descending deep into the throes of madness.

“Something’s on your mind, man. Unburden thyself.” And he smiled. I did too.

I sat up and looked at him with as much seriousness as I could muster. “Look, Danny. You might think I’m crazy, alright?”

“Too late for that.”

“I’m serious, man.”

“Okay, okay!” He put his hands up.

“I want to kill Brooke’s dad.”

The words came out of my mouth, and it felt like the entire world shut down. Everything seemed so quiet in the moments following the words, because they were out there now, and there was no way to bring them back. No way to say that it was all a joke.

“What?” Danny asked. “You’re not serious?”

I could feel the tears coming now. I closed my eyes as my mind played snapshots of every memory I had with Brooke. It was the three of us watching movies in my old man’s man cave, laughing our heads off and spilling popcorn onto the carpet. We were sneaking out of our houses and walking along the abandoned rail line that was growing its own ecosystem behind the old high school. We were sitting right where Danny and I were sitting, drinking beer that we’d stolen from Danny’s dingy basement, and trying to act like grownups. She was alive, and we were talking about getting out.

When I opened my eyes, Danny had tears coming down his too.

“He took her from us, man. He beat her until she had nothing left to live for. He did that. He killed her. He doesn’t deserve to live. HE DOESN’T DESERVE TO LIVE!” I screamed.

Then it was quiet again, and Danny looked down at his hands buried in the sand and said,

“How are we going to do this?”

“I have no fucking idea.”

And we both laughed. Bent over laughing, unable to keep it in, and as my eyes closed, I could almost hear Brooke laughing with us.

We’re doing this for you, Brooke. I love you.

——————————————————————————————

That evening I laid in bed tossing and turning, and wondering how exactly we could kill a man. A few questions continued to echo inside my head.

Could I do it?

Could I get away with it?

And could I come up with a plan?

I thought I could do it. There was enough hatred flowing through my veins. It was just how to do it and how to get away with it. Did Dylan and I just knock on the door and when he answered, just pop him in the head?

Dylan’s old man did have a collection of Ruger’s. We could probably get our hands on a gun, but how did we dispose of the body?

But then I thought about talking to Dylan about the school they were supposed to build before everything went to shit, and how it was just a deep, dark pit. You probably could put a body down there. Plus, Danny also had access to his mom’s car. She was off on disability and the little grey Toyota usually just sat in the driveway begging to be driven.

Then there was the question of Brooke’s mother. She was as much of a mess as the old man. She wallowed in her alcohol, and in another life, she’d likely deserve what the old man was going to get. Her sin was the one of pretending things weren’t happening, but then again, if I were going to kill her for that, the next bullet would need to go under my chin.

But Brooke said that her mother went to the Legion for Bingo on Wednesday nights. She always said that because Wednesday nights we stayed at the park longer, because she didn’t want to be alone with her father. She didn’t like the way he looked at her, or talked to her when it was just the two of them.

Then my heart started racing because I thought I had formulated at least a semblance of a plan. Wednesday night, we’d get Danny’s mom’s car, put some kind of tarp in the trunk, and we’d knock on the door. Boom. Point blank, we’d shoot him once in the head. Grab the body and take it to the park, where we’d bury it in the hole. 

Of course, the plan wasn’t foolproof. There were neighbors who might see what’s going on. There’s the chance he might not answer. There was also a chance that Brooke’s mom skipped Bingo that evening, and hell, there was the strongest chance of all that we just didn’t have the balls to go through with it.

But if all went right, there was also the chance of everything going as planned, and nobody finding out a thing.

Yes, Danny and I would have to live with it for the rest of our lives, but if he stayed alive, we’d have to live with that, too. And which was worse?

The following evening, I told Danny the plan and his face went pale.

“Put the body in my mom’s car?” He asked.

“We’ll make sure there’s no trace of anything. No way they could trace it back to you or your mom. We’ll cover it up and put his body on it, and then we’ll dump him.”

“You really want to go through with this, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because at night when I get scared of doing this and start trying to talk some sense into myself, I feel worse. I feel like letting him live is worse than killing him. Walking these streets every day knowing that there are monsters like that who are allowed to wake up and just go about their days. It makes me feel worse.”

“So, you want one of my old man’s guns, and my mother’s car, but you’re going to pull the trigger?”

“I’ll pull the trigger.”

“And not one soul finds out about this as long as we live?”

“Not a soul.”

We both paused, and then finally Danny said.

“Then let’s do it.”

I smiled.

“I love you, man. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He rolled his eyes. “Best accomplice to fucking murder you’ve ever had.”

——————————————————————————————

On Wednesday night, I waited at the park for Danny to show up with the car. I still had Brooke’s suicide note that told me she loved me. And if I ever lost it, I think I’d go mad.

Danny was a few minutes later, and I started to feel like it would never happen. That I should just forget it. That I was just a stupid kid.

But then I heard tires rolling down the gravel and knew it was Danny. I hopped the side of the fence to grab a green tarp that had been lying around since the contracting company pulled out, and I ran back towards the car.

“Pop the trunk.” I said.

I placed the tarp in the back and went around to the passenger’s side.

Dylan looked pale as he handed me a loaded Ruger with hands that shook. He looked like he was about to cry, and I tapped his shoulder. “Within an hour, it’ll all be over.”

We backed out slowly and drove west down Dover until we came up to Brooke’s house. It was a small one story with chipped yellow paint and shingles that direly needed repair. I told Dylan to back in, so that we would have less distance to carry the body, and at the word body, Dylan threw up on himself. Only a little, and it didn’t get in the car. But it was enough to tell me we had to do this fast.

He backed the Toyota up with expert precision, and I felt like we could get away with it. There were neighbors but not stuck together, and in front of their house was a crescent with no houses for at least 500 feet.

It wasn’t exactly the boonies, but there was a chance no one would notice anything. Of course, there was the sound of the gun, but we’d have to get the body in the trunk and leave before anyone even realized what had just happened.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

“No,” he answered with a sad smile.

The gun was loaded and ready. We walked up the three concrete steps and I knocked on the door. Christ, I hoped Brooke’s mom was at Bingo. There was no answer for a moment, so we knocked again, Danny scanning the area to make sure that no one was looking. Though it was hard to tell.

After the third set of knocks, I heard a grumpy hoarse voice call out.

“One goddamn second.”

And I waited with the gun pointed at the door. As soon as he answered, I shot. I didn’t allow myself enough time to think, and I didn’t allow him enough time to grab the gun and turn it around on me.

He dropped quickly.

“Oh my God,” Danny said from behind me.

I turned to him. His face was white, and I’m sure mine was as well. “Let’s grab him. Grab his feet, okay?”

Danny nodded, and we struggled with the body. He was a big man, at least 250 lbs. And now it was 250 lbs of dead weight.

I grabbed him from under his armpits, and Danny grabbed his legs, scooting his hands up close to his knees. And we did a three count before throwing him in the trunk.

“Okay, let’s get out of here.” I said, and we scanned the area again. A couple of lights went on, but no one had exited their homes. “Don’t peel out, Danny. Just back it out slowly.”

He listened, and we took off east down Dover Street, driving even under the speed limit. Then we got to the park, drove slowly down the gravel, and backed the car up close to the hole.

“You did great, Danny.” I said. “Other than the puking.”

He didn’t laugh, but he seemed to be over the worst of it.

We pulled the body out of the trunk and just let it drop four feet into the dirt. Danny had a small flashlight, and he flashed it inside the trunk to make sure that the body touched nothing, or that no blood splattered, making his own mother an unknowing suspect in a goddamn homicide.

I jumped in the hole, and began burying the body as deep as I could, so that even if in time somebody came back to do the job, they’d just pour the concrete over this spot and hopefully no trace of this man would ever be found.

I came back up, and Danny was leaning against the trunk of the car. “I think we’re good.” He said.

“I think so too.”

We stood there for a long time, and then I said, “want to go to the park?”

He nodded, and we sat in our spots. I grabbed three beers, handed one to Danny, who instantly began peeling off the label. I put one on the slide next to me for Brooke, and then I drank one myself.

Danny and I didn’t talk much that evening. We just said, “To Brooke,” as we raised our glasses. And we both hoped that the horror of what we’d done remained a secret.

I thought the fighting was over. I thought that even if I hadn’t killed those demons; I at least laid them to rest. Last winter I found myself staring at pictures that my son drew in school as my wife sat upstairs contemplating the future of our marriage. I’d said so many times that things would change, that the words became meaningless. They did as much as good as a man spitting on a wildfire. So, I said, “If you’ll stay, I’ll start doing therapy. I’ll work on myself. Just give me a little bit of time.” She reluctantly agreed.

So, a few days later, I locked myself in the spare room, staring at a screen with an old man from southern California, who spoke slowly as though every word meant just as much as the last. He carried a thin smile throughout his introductory speech, letting me know it was alright to laugh, and it was alright to say anything. This was indeed a safe space.

“I can’t stop fighting with my wife.” I said the first day. “I don’t know what it is, but we can’t seem to stand each other anymore.”

“Why do you think that is?” He asked.

“Partly because of my temper, and partly because I feel that she’ll forever play the victim.”

“Now, that’s interesting. Could you elaborate on the playing the victim part?”

I felt bad, almost nauseated, and I wanted to just exit the screen and take off. Just go for a drive somewhere, one of those long therapeutic drives with no destination. But, if I did that, she’d leave, and she’d take the kids with her. Whether that was the best reason for staying, I don’t know. But the house was too big, and full of life. Sitting in it, by myself in the deep quietness of solitary confinement, felt like enough to blow my head clean off. The noise, though it drove me mad sometimes, also kept me breathing.

“Well, uh, look, I love my wife. But every argument we’ve ever gotten into has ended with me saying that I’ll fix myself. That I’ll go to therapy. That I’ll stop getting mad about sex. That I’ll stop getting mad about everything, and just once, I’d love her to say, hey, I’ll work on me too. But she won’t, because in her mind, she has nothing to work on. She just married some kind of sick sadistic asshole, who makes one right move for every 50 wrong ones. And it’s hard. Call it narcissism, call it whatever you want, but I don’t feel like she’s a sweet angel with a halo hovering above her head, and I just come home from work looking to wreak havoc on her and my family. And I feel like the only way our marriage will ever stand the test of time is if I just become an obedient dog. Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am, sure, ma’am. And I think if I tried that, I’d eventually go off like a fucking atomic bomb. So, I guess I’m here wondering, what on earth should I do?”

And from there, we went back and forth for months. Me and a 75-year-old man from California, with a lifetime’s worth of stories and regrets, but a lifetime’s worth of perseverance and seeking answers to all those questions that seemed devoid of them. He was an inspiration to me, because he put things into perspective.

“Do you think that you’re relying on her too much for your own happiness?” He asked me.

“Uh, I don’t know.”

“Well, you say that you get angry if she doesn’t want to have sex, or if she doesn’t want to spend time with you when the kids go to bed. Does it make you angry because you don’t have a Plan B that just involves yourself?”

I thought about that for a moment.

And it was like a revelation.

“I think you’re right,” I said.

That same smile appeared on his weathered face.

“Look,” he said. “I’m not here to say that she doesn’t have things to work on, right? But we’re here for you. We’re here because you took that giant leap to speak with a stranger about things that you don’t speak to anyone about. That takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of courage to seek help, and to stop fooling yourself into believing that all of life’s hardships can be solved alone inside our own heads. Fools think that way, and fools drown themselves. But, I do think that there are dependency issues at work here. Issues that stem possibility from a time early on when you were attached at the hip. But the years go on and a natural drift starts to appear. Some deal with that better than others. But tell me, what do you like to do? Something that doesn’t involve another soul. Something that you could do, if like an episode of the Twilight Zone, everyone disappeared off the face of the earth. What would you do?”

“I like to write. I want to write a book. I like to play guitar and listen to my records too.”

“Do you do those things?”

“Not as much as I should.”

“Well, the next time plans with your wife don’t go as planned, take yourself out of the situation and go do those things. Unburden yourself, become more independent and seek happiness and validation from yourself, and yourself alone.”

And I did that. And it worked for a while. There were no major changes in our marriage, but I felt myself becoming less bothered by things that would have normally upset me. I played my guitar more, and that winter, I even wrote a full draft for a short story collection that eventually got published.

There was a power in independence. One that I suppose I’d forgotten about.

But the other day there was a misstep and again the verbal bullets flew. This time it started over a head cold. Yeah, you read that right. A fucking head cold. We were doing dishes together after supper, and she sniffled and said, “I’m tired of being sick.”

And I responded, “You’re always sick.” And as an added joke, I said, “I don’t really even believe that you’re sick. I believe you believe you’re sick.” A stupid joke, but a joke nonetheless.

We finished the dishes, and she went upstairs to use the bathroom. She’d been talking about taking a bath before the kids went to bed, and I said, “Oh, by the way, if you want to take a bath, go right ahead.”

Then I noticed she was crying a little, and I said, “What’s going on?”

She turned with sadness and annoyance in her eyes and said, “You really hurt my feelings.”

“About what?”

“About not believing that I was sick. I am sick. And it hurts my feelings when you don’t believe me. You think I’m just making it up?”

“It was a joke.” I said, and she stormed off into the kitchen.

I could feel that temper flushing in my cheeks. And I hated that feeling. My hands became clammy, and my heart pounded, almost as though my appendages and organs knew a fight was going to happen before it happened. And it was Friday, not even two hours into the weekend, and I was already having a premonition about a full two days of ignoring each other. A full weekend of trying to not let the kids see what was happening. But they’re getting older now, and I suppose that cat’s been out of the bag for a while.

I followed her into the kitchen where she cried some more, and I could have been sympathetic, should have been sympathetic, but anger was winning the battle of emotions.

“Why do you get to do this?” I asked. “Both kids in the living room and you’re going to have a full meltdown. Do you know what’s going to happen? You’re going to get upset and cry and hole yourself up somewhere and I’m going to have to go out and act like everything is normal with the kids. Is that it? You’re 31 years old. I think it’s time to get over having your feelings hurt over a stupid joke.”

“Jesus, you’re not sympathetic. You don’t care about me.”

“Do you think you’re sympathetic to me? When I threw my back out a couple months ago, what did you do? I couldn’t fucking breathe and you laughed your head off. What happened when my balls were so swollen, I couldn’t walk and I thought I had goddamn cancer? What did you do? You laughed. You stood over the bed and laughed at me. And yeah, fine whatever, it’s okay to make light of situations like that, but man, you have some nerve to tell me I don’t care about you because I made a joke. It was a goddamn joke.”

Then she went from the kitchen to the bathroom, getting ready to slam the door in my face. I stopped it, and she screamed.

“GET OUT OF MY FACE AND LEAVE ME ALONE!”

“You don’t get to do this.” I said. “Over a head cold.”

Then she slapped the bathroom wall, screaming as loud as she could now. How did we get here? Jesus Fuck, how did we get here?

“THAT’S NOT WHAT THIS IS FUCKING ABOUT!”

Then she approached me, moving faster than I’ve seen her move in the twelve years that we’d been together. Her nose flush against my nose, like she was getting ready to knock my head off.

“Are you trying to fight me? Are you going to hit me?” I asked.

The world was going red. The screaming and the fact that the kids were hearing it all. No longer than ten minutes ago, had you asked me how my marriage was going? I would have said, right as rain, man. Everything’s fine. Groovy.

How does it get here? Why is my wife staring at me like she hates me more than anyone else on God’s green earth? And why couldn’t I have just been more sympathetic? Sorry, you’re feeling sick. Boom. Crisis averted. Do you want me to go get you some cold medicine? Boom. I’m in her good graces now. I’m beginning to look a little like a hero.

She slammed the door of the bathroom. The noise reverberated throughout the house. And I was depleted. The anger quickly liquidizing into sadness. The walk of shame to the living room where my kids sat playing Minecraft.

They were deep into their games and, for a shadow of a moment, I thought they heard nothing. They didn’t pay attention. But that proved to be wrong. Of course, the goddamn house shook. No way they didn’t hear that.

And it was one of those moments that I’d felt several times throughout the course of my marriage. A deep discomfort in my own skin, in the world around me, wanting to run somewhere but not wanting to leave the kids behind.

Something people don’t talk about, or at least not that I’ve heard, is the difficulties in the aftermath of a blowout when you have kids. You see, when we first met, if we fought, I’d leave. Easy peasy. We’d both get our space. I’d go for a walk downtown to a coffee shop, grab a seat near the back and sit in silence until the screams of anger inside my head tired themselves out, and then I’d return. At the same time, she’d get to be alone, and we’d have crucial hours to think about what had just transpired.

But when you have kids, you can’t run away and leave your partner to take care of both of them because you’re having a tantrum. You need to parent. You always need to parent.

As soon as I sat down, my daughter asked. “Why were you and mommy screaming at each other?”

Ouff, a deep pain in my heart. An arrow right through it.

“We just got a little mad at each other. I’m sorry you had to hear that.”

“Were you being mean to her?”

Another dagger.

“I guess so.” Unsure of what to say, I added. “Do you guys want to go for a walk?”

They both leaped up off the couch and screamed in unison. “YEAHH!” And it made me both happy and sad because I realized I should do this more often, not just when I need to run away from life for a while, and happy that they wanted to be with me.

“Can I say bye to mom?” my daughter asked.

“Sure.” I said, and she went over to the bathroom and knocked on the door. She said bye and came back out to say that mommy was sad and she was sitting in the dark. I prayed these memories wouldn’t stick, but I had similar ones from a similar age, and I figured they would too. These memories weren’t going anywhere.

It was a chilly October evening, and the sun was going down in the next hour or so. Not that I thought we lived in a particularly shady part of town, but it was close to downtown and there were some characters that roamed those streets at night. So, I told them just a quick loop around the block and we’d have to go back home. Though at that moment, I could have walked to the edge of the earth.

We went up the street to the mailbox first and it was nothing but election junk mail. We walked back down to the house, and I threw it all in the recycling bin, then we kept going down towards the park along the edge of the river.

I apologized to the kids multiple times, making myself sound like a broken record.

"I don’t want you guys to hear mommy and daddy yelling at each other. I hate that you

hear it, and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

"It's okay, daddy," they both said.

I could feel a lump forming in my throat. They deserved better, and I was always sure that they were lucky to have me, that no other father could hold a candle to me. Again, it was narcissism at its finest, but it lived protected behind a thick and what I thought was an indestructible barrier inside my head. But now, the great walls had fallen, and I thought at that moment that every father that ever roamed this shitty rock was better than me. Everyone was better than me.

We made our way to the parking lot of the high school and walked along a low stone wall. The kids making a game out of it. They talked about Minecraft. And told me about all the crazy things you could do in the game, and I told them I wanted to watch them play a little before bed because I was feeling like an old head. They lit up at this, and that made me feel better.

Sure, it was a nasty fight (are there any good ones?), but it was just a fight. And we’d persevere or we wouldn’t. But one thing that was as certain as a sunrise was that I’d always be a father. If I lost their mother, then it had to be, but I’d never lose them. I couldn’t.

I thought about the therapist from sunny California, and I thought about independence. And I told myself to be happy with myself. It was hard at that moment, as hard as it had ever been, but I said that once the kids went to bed, I’d watch a movie, maybe have a beer, and in the morning, maybe my wife and I could make things right, or maybe not. But I was going to enjoy my own company, and I would not let one bad evening unravel everything I’d worked so hard for.

I wasn’t going to just be an asshole who was mean. I was going to be better. I just needed to enjoy myself.

We continued our walk and when the sun set; we came back to the house. I took a deep breath and opened the door.

And for extra measure, I said one more time.

“I’m sorry, kids.”

End of an Era - Hirath Mines Shut Doors For The Last Time

By: Robert Lindsday

It’s a sad day for the residents of Hirath as the mines close their doors after nearly 60 years in operation. The Hirath Zinc Mines which were owned by Spanish conglomerate Xelton, are the last of three major industries to close their doors, leaving locals scratching their heads and pondering the question, where do we go from here?

Chris Stalk, the manager of the mines says he has no other choice but to seek work elsewhere as the decision to shut down the mines has left him with no other alternative.

“It’s hard, but I’ll have to go out west. I want to stay here and be close to my family, but unfortunately this is all I can do. I need to go where there’s demand and it’s really heartbreaking for me, as it is for many of us. It all kind of feels like a great lie. We were sold a future that no longer exists, and if nothing replaces it, we’ll have no way of keeping the younger generations here.”

Since 1950, the Hirath Zinc Mines have employed close to 10,000 people, and towards the end still employed over 600.

A local resident, Janey Dupoint, says that the local government has been extremely quiet since the closure, and that she fears there’s no plan in place.

“There’s a ripple effect that happens when major industries close. Restaurants close, clothing stores, industrial washers that cleaned their clothes. Even arcades, and the bowling alley will close if no one has any money. Once they close they don’t reopen, because no young entrepreneur is going to come to a town like this and think this is the place to start something new. Everything crumples, and dies. People say that money doesn’t buy happiness, well no money certainly buys depression and desperation.”

The office of Mayor Walter Cantwell issued a press release stating that it is indeed a sad day, but that the residents of Hirath have always persevered and this time will be no different.

The unemployment rate is currently sitting at 24 percent, and residents fear that it’s only going to spike from there.

Retired sheriff, Andrew Giggins fears that this might raise the crime rate, something similar to 1985 when the paper mill shut down.

“Look at different countries in Europe where people are comfortable. There’s no crime. It was scary back here when the mill closed. I pray that something similar doesn’t happen. Though I don’t have my hopes up.”

Changes in federal regulations have also ended unemployment for seasonal workers early. This is a tough time for the residents of Hirath.

Chapter 1 - Deborah Lansing

Along a thin shoulder of highway, a man walked with a steady pace that declared he was in no rush. He had nothing but time. Cars and transports drove by him on either side, some of the vehicles filled with faces of quaint interest and curiosity, others of anger. One trucker blared his horn and yelled out the window, “You’re gonna get yourself killed, pal. Are you crazy?” And the man just tipped his hat to the trucker and smiled before the transport was lost along a rattlesnake curve.

In a black Honda Civic, Deborah Lansing drives with two crying kids in the backseat. “Hey, Hey! Do you need a snack, baby? Here, I have some goldfish.” She dug through a bag on the floor of the passenger side, while trying to control the car with her left hand.

Deborah grabbed the goldfish in a purple princess dish, and handed it back to Lilly, who grabbed the snack, before sticking her tongue out at her brother.

“MOM! Lilly is making faces at me. Where’s my snack? Where’s my snack?”

“You already had yours earlier, baby. You each had one snack. I told you that earlier.”

Dylan responded by kicking the back of the driver’s seat repeatedly.

“HEY!” Deborah yelled, “Do you want to kill us, eh? I’ll crash this car if you don’t stop kicking the backseat!”

At the shrill sound of the word “Kill” Lilly broke into tears in the backseat, spilling her goldfish in front of her, adding insult to injury.

Deborah began pulling at her hair, and then crying. “Christ, Bill. Why did you have to do this to me? To us? Jesus, you were better at calming these animals down. I can’t do it. Jesus, I can’t do this.” Deborah pulled over the car, and placed her head on the steering wheel, letting the tears flow like she hadn’t since Bill died.

“Mommy?” Lilly asked. “Mommy, what’s wrong?”

“Yeah, mom. What’s wrong?” Dylan added.

“Nothing, kids. Nothing. Mommy is just tired and her head hurts. I just wish you two would stop fighting. We’re almost there. Okay? We’re almost there.”

Deborah took deep breaths, beginning to calm herself when a knock on the passenger side window knocked her out of her trance, and gave her a quick scream as her head hit the driver’s side window. The man waved with a dignified smile. He looked like something out of a 1920’s silent picture.

Deborah was frightened, because she felt like this was one of those scenes she saw in scary movies. Like that one she watched as a kid with Rutger Hauer and Ponyboy from The Outsiders. She was alone on a gravel shoulder, with two small kids in the back, and light enough traffic, that she knew nobody would stop to intervene before her and her kids were both dead.

But his smile. The innocent look in his face was hypnotizing, and before she knew it, she was rolling down the window.

“Hello, maam.” He said and tipped his hat.

“Hi,” she answered unsure, looking back at the kids who were staring at the man in deep fascination.

“I don’t mean to trouble you, but I was wondering if you were heading to Hirath?”

She was, but it was still another 50km away, and this man was going to ask to climb into the front seat with her, with both of her kids in the back. She could hear Billy’s voice, telling her not to do it. To just drive off, and leave him there. If he was a good guy, someone would come along before too long, and if he wasn’t, then hopefully some drunk swiped em.

As if he was reading her mind, the man said.

“I know this is strange. You have every right to not trust me. The way the world is these days. It’s certainly not like it used to be.”

“No. No, it isn’t.”

“The truth is, is that I have some very important business in Hirath, you see?”

“Business in Hirath?” Deborah asked. “Didn’t know there was any business left.”

He chuckled at this, and she thought he was gorgeous. Oh sweet vanity, she thought. If the man was 500 pounds, wearing a skin tight Star Wars shirt, sporting a neck beard, saying the exact same thing, she would have left him in the dust. No doubt about it.

But this man had a walk of talking, and she was lonely. Lonelier than hell. But that was how Ted Bundy operated too, wasn’t it? The fact that he was handsome and well spoken. People counted on vanity to get them to where they were going, no matter how gruesome. Was this man playing the part?

Maybe.

But she didn’t think so. Deborah opened the door, and the man climbed inside, placing his suitcase gently on his lap. He turned around and said hi to the children, and thanked Deborah for putting her trust in him.

She pulled off the shoulder and hit the highway towards Hirath, with a strange man as a companion.

“So, what kind of business do you have in Hirath?” Deborah asked.

The kids were now silent, taking turns staring at the man and then staring at each other. Both uncontrollable animals when it was just Deborah, but around others, they were as shy as a battered animal.

“Well, I hear that you’ve come into some difficult times.”

“You can say that again.”

“Well, I’m something of an angel investor. I aim to get some capital running through your fine town again.”

“Sorry to tell you, Mr, but investing in Hirath now, is like throwing your money down the drain.”

He laughed at this. A big hearty laugh that made both kids jump. And that made Deborah laugh.

“If this town is in such disrepair that it’s better off dying, then might I ask, why you and your children are heading there?”

“Maybe, I’m just heading past it.” She smirked.

“Ah, well mayhap, you are.”

Mayhap? She thought. Who is this guy?

“But I have a feeling that you’re heading there.” He added. “A good feeling, indeed.”

He’s so odd. So different than the people around here.

“Fine, you got me. I’m heading there.”

“And might I ask again, why?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. It’s a bit of a long story, I suppose.” She said,

“Well, I figure we have some time. If you want to tell it, I’d like to hear it.”

“Uh, sure.” She answered, feeling her body heating up. She didn’t want to feel this way, but a man hadn’t taken any interest in her since Billy, and even the last few years with him were far from a fairy tale. She felt bad speaking ill of her departed husband and the father of her children, but he was no prince. Far from it.

“I’m from Hirath. Uh, Born and raised and when I was 18 years old, I ran away with my boyfriend, Billy. He was a dreamer, knew how to talk, ya know? My parents used to say that Billy could convince me to jump off the Jerusalem Bridge, if he had a mind to do so. She used to say I couldn’t think for myself, and looking back, I guess she was partly right anyway.”

“Ah, young love. My love is like a red, red rose. That’s newly sprung in June.” The man said.

“My love is like the melody, that’s sweetly played in tune.”

“Ah you know your Robert Burns.”

“I’m an art major. I know, one of those liberal degrees, that gets you nowhere.”

“I believe the opposite is true. Art is not nothing and nowhere, but everything and everywhere. You chose right, and though it might not seem like it, you get to look at the world much differently than your peers. And my apologies, please continue.”

“Oh, well. The sparknotes version is that there’s a fantasy to being young and not having a plan. But the world does have a plan, you see? And their plan involves steady paychecks, solid credit. The world of numbers involves leading a life based around the percentages that financial institutions can loan you money, which you can repay with interest. You know what I mean? This world isn’t the world for an artist and after Billy’s first failed novel, and two failed art shows. He realized the truth, and uh, well,” she looked back at the kids, who were now obediently staring out the window, and she whispered, “he killed himself for it. And now I’m going home. To be closer to my folks, and to help lessen the weight, you know?”

“Well that is indeed a sad story. And I feel terribly sorry for you and your kids. That is a situation that no young mother should ever have to be put into. But you seem like a fighter. What do you plan to do career wise when you get home?”

“I uh, don’t know. Well here’s my card. Come see me, if you’re looking for work. I’ll be in town for a while, and I could use an assistant.”

She grabbed the card, and it was blank except for an address. 427 Fairview, Suite 4.

“Uh, okay. Sure.” He smiled, and said,

“If it isn’t rude, I’d like to close my eyes for a few minutes before we arrive. I had quite the long day.”

“Oh yeah, no problem,” She said.

And as Deborah, her two kids and the kind stranger rolled into Hirath, she felt for the first time since Billy’s death, a hint of a smile beginning to appear on her face.

Sleep does not come willingly. It’s a fight against an opponent who does not weaken, and who does not feel the strain of stamina. It’s an opponent which I no longer step into the ring with. Laura snores softly beside me, her body facing the opposite direction. Some evenings, the poison of midnight conversations with myself, can drive me to near lunacy. It’s a world that I should not be a part of. It’s a world that should be fast forwarded while I’m deep in the trenches of REM sleep. There are monsters that live in this darkness. Not the type of monsters that you see in horror movies but the type that have no solid foundation. The type that softly echoes all of the things that you avoid during the day because there are a million things to do. At night, all you can do is sleep, or think.

I decide at 2am, to swing my legs off the side of the bed and sit upright for a moment. Then I get up and open the door slowly as the hinges creak noisily. But Laura is undisturbed, she’s a traveler, a thousand miles away. I close the door behind me and look in on the kids. They’re sleeping peacefully and I wonder what they’re dreaming about. What I’d give to slide right inside their heads and breathe in the fantasy of childhood wonder. The places they can imagine, where all is well, and the heroes always prevail.

Downstairs I open the fridge and take out a carton of milk and then pour it into a glass with a thin crack spreading down the center like varicose veins. I take a drink, and wonder why I decided to have a glass of milk. I never drink milk.

I take out my phone and begin mindlessly scrolling, hoping that by the time I look up from it, the sun will be rising, I’ll make a cup of coffee and a sense of normalcy will return. As usual, I feel that my phone is reading my mind. Because I’m thinking about parallel universes. The theory that out there in the vastness of space, there’s another me. But he isn’t sitting in the kitchen, drinking milk, and wondering how much longer his marriage is going to last, and why he can’t beat this depression. He’s happy, and sure of himself. I laugh at that idea.

Then on my phone, I see an ad for an app. The Parallel Universe Finder. All you need to do is download it, enter some of your personal information, and it’ll show you what the other versions of yourself are up to.

I go to the app store and download it. I don’t know why, other than I’m an insomniac with hours to kill, and it was a thought that was running through my mind anyway. Is this the best version of me? Or were there other versions that took opposite paths on those many forks in the road?

A screen pops up. It’s a pretty shade of orange and it tells me to enter my address. I do. Then it tells me to take a picture of myself. I sigh, but I oblige. Then it shows the top of my house like on Google Maps and then quickly it pans out. Then I can see the entire world, and then the solar system and it keeps going faster and faster, until a giant light seemingly leaps out of the phone, and I drop it.

“Ow!” I say, rubbing my eyes with the palm of my hands. What on earth was that?

I grab my phone from the floor and the tiles are different. They look like the tiles that Laura and I looked at the hardware store. Something we used to do when we were broke and bored. A way to pretend that we were of a higher class than we were. We liked to wrap our arms around each other and point at the different tiles, or go through the paint and each grab a sheet of colors, and talk about painting the exterior of a house that we didn’t own.

This was the Forest Valley flooring. I knew it. I rubbed my hands across it. It glistened unlike our tiles which were cracked and separated, an ugly brown crack filler lazily filling in the gaps. But that was gone. For a moment, I thought that I did fall asleep, but if so, this was the most vivid dream I’d ever had. I could smell new paint and hardwood, mixed with some kind of exotic fragrance.

I walked into the spare room where I had a tiny music setup in the far left corner, with an old beat up guitar hanging from a wall mount just above the turntable. But above the turntable was a dozen guitars hanging in perfect unison above a thousand vinyl records in hardwood crates like at an Indie record store.

On the far wall above a 60 inch TV was a line of gold and platinum records with my name on the bottom. “I’m a rockstar.” I said. “Fuck me, I’m a rockstar.”

I stared in awe at the man cave of my dreams and then decided to take a look upstairs. The stairs were beautiful, and the railing was something out of an early 20th century mansion. The kind that Shirley Temple would be tap dancing in. The hall upstairs was three times as long, and five or six times as wide with strange Art Deco shapes crawling along the walls like an invasive species of plant. I rubbed my hands along the walls, and I could hear giggling coming from the first room on the right.

Inside were two beautiful blonde women, laughing, drinking tall glasses of bubbly champagne and snorting white powder off of a piece of broken glass. They both looked up at me with white circles on the tip of their noses. “Tysooonnnnnnnnnn” They called out together, and continued laughing.

“Where have you been, baby? You said you were only going to be gone for just a whittle minute.” One of them said, mimicking a baby with pouting lips, while holding her thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart. “But you lied, mister. And you need to get punished.”

Without having any control over my body, I feel myself almost gliding towards this king sized bed shaped like a sphere with silk sheets the color of an Ancient Roman toga. I fall face first into the mattress and the girls corrall my body within an instant. They kiss my cheeks, then my lips, then each other. Then they put the piece of small glass in front of my face, and before I know it the powder is in my nose, then coursing through my system. Then the champagne, and more powder. The world is spinning off its axis, and I think I'm going to be sick.

I lean over the bed to throw up my guts, but nothing comes out. Then I look up into a life size mirror. Something tall and strange like you’d see at the carnival. Faces and bodies distorted, and all I could see was a mane of dirty blonde hair crawling down bumble bee sunglassed eyes, like I was the male version of Jackie O. My arms are like a connect the dots, leading me to believe that I was battling serious substance abuse issues.

“Where’s Laura?” I ask.

“Who?” The girls say in unison. Laughing.

“Laura. My wife.” They laugh again. “What’s fo fucking funny? Where’s my wife? My wife?”

“You were never married, hun. Said it wasn’t for you.”

“What?”

“You had a girl, baby. But she got pregnant. Don’t you remember? You told us the story a hundred times. You were drinking and playing guitar, getting ready for a show. Your girl said she needed to talk to you and said she was pregnant. You told her to take a hike. You had no interest in raising kids, remember?”

“I, uh, don’t remember saying that.”

“Well, hunny, don’t act like you did the wrong thing. Look at this palace. Look at us.” They started to kiss again. “You don’t need anyone holding you back, baby. You created this all on your own.”

“I, uh, I need to get my phone.”

I walk back downstairs, the world around me going in and out of focus as the drugs take over my system.

In the kitchen I find my phone sitting on the floor. I scroll through and look for the app. I can’t find it. After a few minutes, there’s a pop-up that says, “Do you want to return?” I click “Yes” then it says, “Are you sure?” and I click “Yes,” then it says, “Are you really sure, Tyson?” “Yes” “Okay. Just a reminder that in the other world you’re an insomniac bordering on depression. Who works at 9-5 and has a marriage that’s dissolving like skin in battery acid. Here? Sure. You have a little drug problem, but that’s part of the excess. You made it. You won. So, I’ll ask again. Are you sure?

And for a moment, I hesitate. I’m not happy. I’m drowning, but maybe I’m drowning for good reason. Maybe, what I think is drowning is actually just responsibility rearing its head and telling me that I need to be a good father and a good husband. Telling me that I need to slow down with the drinking and nightly self-deprecating ritual that I take part in. That without the responsibility, I could have done something, maybe, but it would have come at a cost.

My thumb hovers above the phone and I click yes.

The light hits me again and I’m back in my middle class home, my fingers on the floor placed right in the crack filler. The glass of milk with the crack, shattered to my right. It was time, I suppose. It was time.

I check for the app but it’s gone and when I search for it, there’s nothing.

I walk to the man cave and it’s the middle class one again with the barely functioning turntable, a small milk crate of records, and my old man’s beat up Fender hanging crooked on a cheap plastic wall mount. But it seems better now. I feel better, like I could sleep for a fortnight.

Is Laura upstairs? I ask myself and I drag myself feeling nervous about this fever dream. Feeling like I might have had a psychotic episode and I’m actually in a straight jacket in a padded cell somewhere banging my head against the cushion and laughing. Laughing like the blondes.

But when I reach the top of the stairs the Art Deco is gone and replaced with an old stained white color that’s peeling and in dire need of an upgrade. Then I peek my head into Laura’s room and there’s a body there, sleeping with her face against the opposite wall. I walk over to her side of the bed, and see her mouth slightly ajar, with a little bubble of drool coming out, and yup, it’s Laura.

The kids' rooms are both occupied with my children and then I decide to lay my head on the pillow.

Sleep is coming, I can feel it. I don’t fight it. I smile, but for a moment before sleep takes me, I hear Laura’s snoring and think.

“I could have been somebody.”

And then I fall asleep.

Bombs explode over Hanoi in the distance. Someone's getting the shit. People were dying. With a certain sense of disassociation, Richie could almost pretend it was the 4th of July, and he was wrapped in a thick wool blanket on a lawn chair with Betty’s leg coiled around his. I hope you’re not too tired, soldier, she whispers, because there are gonna be more fireworks upstairs. He can taste the cherry cola on her breath, and the tiny fragments of the lisp she had when she was a kid, hanging on the syllables like the hang-in-there-baby kitten on the poster dangling from a rope. The glands above his eyes would push out tears of longing if there were any tears to push out and he would heave the contents of his stomach, if there were any contents to heave.

The darkness is unforgiving and it plays tricks on the mind. Richie is on watch outside of a small makeshift firebase. He hears voices from behind him, but they’re familiar, not haunted. It’s Jacobs, and Reynolds playing cards, and it’s Jim Rockway with a Playboy magazine, singing Paint it Black by The Stones and Under My Thumb. They’re disassociating.

Rockway’s eyes are closed and he’s pretending that he’s playing with his bar band The Troubadours as a pretty thing in the front row dances and sways in perfect harmony with the rhythm of the band. Jacobs is pretending he’s Paul Newman from The Hustler. When he wins a hand, he does a Newman impression saying I just hadda show ’im. Just hadda show those creeps and those punks what the game is like when it’s great. When it’s REALLY great. And the guys laugh, no matter how many times he does it. Jacobs saw that movie as a kid in the theater a dozen times, sneaking in through the back alley and giving the usher a pack of cigarettes that he’d nicked from his old man’s underwear drawer as a rascal form of currency.

And Reynolds is talking to himself like he’s on the Johnny Carson show. He wants to be a comedian, and he smiles because when his eyes are closed, Carson is bent over his desk pounding at the mahogany with his right fist, his eyes with more than enough moisture to excrete tears stemming from belly laughter.

But Richie continues to be viciously shaken out of his fantasy with each howl of the wind coming from deep within the haunted forests of Da Nang, and each sound of crushing leaves on the valley floor. He rubs his eyes and they sting, he aims his rifle unsteadily like he’s standing on a small boat in a rocky sea, and calls out in a voice barely audible, just above a whisper, “w-w-who’s there?”

The leaves crumple again, another bomb goes off in Hanoi. Richie wipes his eyes again, and it feels like the back of his hands are doused in vinegar and the irritation is causing inflammation, and his eyes are red and swollen. He slaps at the mosquitos on his neck, and again calls out, “Who’s there?” This time without the stutter but with not much more authority. He isn’t asking from deep in his sternum like his father did when Richie stayed out too late, and he asked where he was as he sipped a beer in the darkness of their kitchen. He was asking because he demanded an answer, whereas Richie was asking in desperation, praying that there was no answer. I hope you’re not tired, soldier. Another bomb in Hanoi. Because there are gonna be more fireworks upstairs.

“Is there anyone out there?” He wipes his eyes again. Now the stinging is making him angry. He grinds his teeth back and forth like he’s sharpening them and this time screams. “Listen you gook fucks! If you’re out there you better show yourselves right now, or I’m going to open fire. You hear me? You fucking hear me?”

Another Bomb goes off in Hanoi.

She didn’t remember much about her father leaving, just that it wasn’t loud. Melissa never heard glass shattering, or loud profane words meant to break down every bit of confidence the other might have in themselves. She just remembered silence.

Then one afternoon, her father stood in the doorway with a couple of suitcases packed to the brim. He looked skinnier, and his eyes were heavy and sunken. He still smiled the way he always did, but it didn’t look right. Greg Wasteman, hugged his daughter, kissed her forehead and that was it. Gone, baby, gone.

The first thing her mother said was “forget about him, baby. It’s me and you, now.”

He’d been gone under five minutes, and it was already time to forget about him.

Angie Wasteman spent that entire summer and many subsequent summers in the backyard by the pool that was paid for by the man Melissa had to forget. Her father did something that the average layman wouldn’t understand. Something to do with stocks, and dealing with the money of people who had too much of it to keep track. Greg made a lot and the alimony payments were enough to keep Melissa and her mother in their nice suburban home on Crestfield.

Angie read, tanned and drank pink drinks by the pool for hours on end. She liked books with shirtless men wearing cowboy hats gracing the cover, and sometimes Melissa would catch her biting her lip or waving her hand in her face, “Good lordy.” she’d say, and Melissa would ask, “What is it?” “Oh nothing you need to concern yourself with yet, darling. They’ll come into your life soon enough.”

“Who will?”

“Men, honey. The best and worst thing on God’s green earth.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Will you get me a refill, sweetheart?” Was a question that Melissa heard many times during those summers without dad. She’d be swimming in the pool, or laying on the couch in the living room and she’d hear the ice shaking around in the glass, and the elevated left arm of Angie Wasteman.

Melissa became her mother’s personal bartender by the age of 6. In the fridge she mixed gin, tonic, ice ,and always threw a couple of cherries in for good measure. The drink sparkled, and it looked so eloquent to young Melissa. So much so, that she began to pour pink lemonade in a similar glass with a similar amount of ice.

She’d sit in the lawn chair next to her mother, with the glass on the left arm of the chair, like her mother. While Angie read Cosmopolitan magazine, Melissa would pretend to read another magazine that was in a little wicker basket in between the two chairs.

Melissa would occasionally peak over and wonder what her mother was reading. Articles about beauty, and sex. Top tips to get your man excited, every single time. Excited about what? Melissa asked, and Angie looked at her daughter, looked back at the magazine and let out a big hearty laugh, almost like a disney villain. Her head tilted back, her giant bumblebee sunglasses raised to the sun, and she’d let it all out. It would automatically put Melissa over the edge, into her own fit of laughter. And the two of them, in their lawn chairs, with their pink lemonades, laughing like wild hyenas about absolutely nothing.

As she got older, the glamor of constantly serving her mother drinks, no matter what day of the week it was, began to wear off. As she entered her early teens, Melissa started to understand quite well that her mother was an alcoholic with the means to do so. Plenty of people were alcoholics, she’d later discover, but it seemed glamorous when you could keep a roof above your head in a nice quiet suburb. When the man with the scraggly beard on main street begging for change, while sipping gin out of a dirty paper bag did it, it was a filthy habit. But in a nice shiny glass, with circular ice cubes, and cherries wrapped around the rim, it was fashionable. It was debonair, as her mother would say.

But what bothered Melissa the most, was Angie’s constant bashing of men. She only saw her father occasionally, and he was the first to admit that Angie gave him all kinds of hell anytime he wanted to be around his daughter. He said he was sorry, and Melissa understood. Though it pained her somedays to think like this, she knew that once she turned 18, she’d move on with her father and experience all the things that her mother never allowed them to during her childhood.

“Your father is not a good man, darling. He’s a snake, just like the rest of them. We don’t need em. Okay? We got each other. Now, get your mom a refill.”

“Yes, mom.” Melissa would say.

Her problem with her mother’s whole view on men was simple. If Angie didn’t need men, then she should go get a job and get her own place. Melissa was all for women not needing anyone, but her mother was a hypocrite, living off a handout. Plain and simple. She needed men for every drink that Melissa poured her, because her father paid for it. That wasn’t solidarity.

When her mom turned 50, the results of a couple of decades sitting poolside drinking began to show in her skin, and in her eyes. She slurred her words more, and fell asleep snoring with half-read magazines in her lap as the sun beat down on her tanned skin.

Melissa heard her mumble her father’s name in her sleep, it was hard to make it all out but she heard the words sorry, and forgive.  Then Melissa kissed her head.

But Angie still had the occasional day of laughter, and music. She loved Madonna, and when she came on the radio, she didn’t ask, rather insisted that her daughter come and dance with her.

They’d twirl each other to Material Girl, or Like a Virgin and laugh. Angie would tell her about being a teenager in the 80s. The hairspray, the music, the makeup, all of it and how badly she missed it.

“Is that when you met, dad?” Melissa asked one afternoon, and Angie stared off for a moment, a tear escaping her eye and she answered. “Yeah, I met him at one of my girlfriends houses. She threw a party and there he was. A big mess of hair and a million dollar smile. Jesus, that man could make me weak at the knees.”

“You loved him?”

“More than the world, until you.” She brushed Melissa’s cheek and smiled. Angie looked old, she looked tired, but she looked ready. Ready to answer Melissa’s questions.

“What happened, mah? Dad isn’t a bad guy. I know he isn’t. Why do you hate him so much?”

“I don’t hate him, honey.”

“Then why aren’t we together?”

Angie asked for a refill before she’d spill her guts. Madonna finished singing and Angie sat back down on the lawn chair. Melissa grabbed her empty glass and poured them both pink lemonades mixed with 7up instead. She still wrapped the cherries around the top and wondered if her mother would even know the difference. She hoped not. She wanted the story before Angie passed out again in the sun.

She took a sip and gave Melissa a sad smile, like she knew what her daughter was trying to do. It was like the guilt of years of being drunk all hit her like a tsunami with one sip of pink lemonade.

Angie told her daughter about her father. Smart as a whip, handsome. A man who knew what he wanted and didn’t question the world, or his place in it. Angie never stopped doing that. Always prone to depression and manic episodes, Greg’s constant things will get better, look at the bright side of life mentality began to drive Angie crazy.

“He was a fucking self help book, Mel. He never stopped trying to fix me, instead of just saying, I’m this way and you’re that way. He wanted me to be him. There was no one Greg was more in love with than Greg, honey. Don’t ever doubt that for a second.”

Then she paused and took another sip of lemonade.

“Then we got pregnant with you, baby. And I was scared. I wanted you to be okay being broken, because if you came from me, there was a chance you were going to inherit some of my shit. And I knew that your father wasn’t going to accept it, hun. He was going to spend every day of your life telling you to just stop being broken. To just move on. To just be a fucking humanoid robot. And I know, baby. I know that I wasn’t a great mother and your father leaving hurt me more than I expected. But I never wanted you to be anything other than what you were. That’s all I ever wanted.”

Melissa stopped asking questions, and the two of them sat in the lawn chairs, drinking pink lemonade and listening to the radio.

On her 18th birthday, her father called her. Melissa had just gone through her first real heartbreak. The boy she lost her virginity to. Benny Maxwell had dumped her for another girl, and that was it. She came home and cried, and Angie held her like a child, never once telling her to get over it, or that it would pass. She remained quiet, except occasionally telling her, “It hurts, baby. It hurts like hell.” That’s it.

“How’s my girl?” He asked.

“Not bad, dad. Still a little sad.”

“Oh well you’ll get over that, honey. You know how I know that?”

“How?”

“Because you’re my daughter, and old Greg never let a cloudy day stop him from taking a walk. And you won’t either. Pain is just weakness leaving the body, baby, remember that.”

“Yeah, thanks dad.”

“No problem, sweetie. So, you’re 18 now, are you still thinking about moving in with your old man? Making up for lost time?”

Melissa walked to the window of her bedroom and saw her mother swaying to the music, singing a lot with the radio and smiled. She laughed, and her father asked what she was laughing about, and she said nothing, just something her friend had said at school earlier.

She kept watching her mother, sway and twirl, and then watched her fall in the pool. She burst out into laughter, and her father, annoyed, said, “What’s going on over there?”

“Nothing, daddy. Just mom being silly.”

“Uh-huh.”

Angie gave Melissa a thumbs up from the pool. “I’m okay, sweetie.” She said, “Mommy is okay.” And she pulled herself back out of the pool and continued to dance, like nothing had happened.

Melissa talked to her father for a few more minutes and then told him she had to go and that she’d think about moving in with him.

Melissa walked downstairs and opened the back door. “Do you need a drink, mom? I’m going to pour myself one.”

“I’d love one, honey.”

Melissa walked to the fridge and poured them both pink lemonade with 7up. That’s all Melissa had been pouring them since they talked about her father, and Angie had not once asked her to change it back to gin.

They sat by the pool drinking their lemonades and Angie said, “I got a job interview.”

“What?”

“Yup. I’m going to get my ass back to work and I’m thinking of getting out of here. Getting a small place downtown, and be a part of the scene again, you know? This place is boring.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. And Mel, no pressure at all, but you’re more than welcome to join me.”

Melissa smiled.

Alex Hanwell paced back and forth in his small home. You’re not crazy, Alex, they are! They’re the crazy ones.

He held his head tightly, the voices getting worse. The smell of paint was nauseating and toxic. But he wouldn’t wear a mask, not him, not ever. His head throbbed as he walked over to the couch and grabbed his selfie stick, then placed his phone on it, and walked outside.

It was late summer and the tiny stream that floated lazily by would have provided comfort for many, but not for him. He hit record on his phone and decided to do a final video for his YouTube channel titled, For The People. He was currently at the end of a multi-part series detailing all the reasons the government was crooked, and why no one, under any circumstance should trust them.

“N-n-now, listen up, subscribers,” he stuttered. “The government is not for the people. No, no, no. They like to say they’re for the people, but what good do they do for us? Look around my yard. I have to pay taxes on top of taxes on top of taxes just to have this little slice of life. Just to have one spot where a man can try and find some peace. But I’ll tell you what, the government keeps jacking up the price. It keeps going up, up, up, up, up until it’s too high for the PEOPLE to even afford to live. Now tell me, are these people you should trust?”

He paced around the backyard, the mid-july sun beating down on his balding-head which was gleaming with sweat. His cheeks were flame red, and he was reeling. His heart was beating so fast, that he was sure this was it. He was 49 years old, the same age his father had been when the big one knocked him down. Alex held onto his chest so tightly he felt he was going to cave it in.

It’s not your time yet, buddy ol pal. We have something to do first. Something of great importance. And sure. They’ll call you crazy. They’ll call you a certifiable nutcase. But guess what? They said that about all the great minds in human history. Tesla was considered crazy. Even Will Rogers? Remember him? He invented the term trickle down economics. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Nothing more sane than that. You’re not crazy. But unfortunately, you won’t be around when they erect statues in your honor, poor boy. But trust me, they will. Oh, they will. You know who’s crazy? The ones who think that laying down and taking it is normal. Those are the crazy ones. Those are the dangerous ones.

“N-n-n-ow now n-now, people, listen up. This will be the last video on my channel. Thank you to my subscribers for listening to the truth. Because without it, what do we have? We have nothing but LIES! LIES! And LIES!”

He was yelling now, and the veins were protruding from both sides of his neck.

“The needles they give us. The needles. It’s all in the King James Bible people. The Number of the beast. We shall be marked. We shall be marked. But you know what? Someone is going to be marked tonight. The mayor of our town. Stephanie Andrews. The one who spends all of her time in Europe, bringing back immigrants to work here. And guess what? I just got laid off. I just lost a job I had for almost 20 years. And now guess what? I’m going to lose this. I’m going to lose this house, this yard, this stream, all of it. But I will not go down without a fight. Thank you loyal subscribers. Thank you for being for the people. This is your host, Alex Hanwell, saying if you’re not with me, then you’re against me.”

Alex put the selfie stick down and grabbed the phone. He uploaded the video to his YouTube channel and scheduled it for two hours. That would give him enough time to get the job done.

He walked back into his house, which was freshly painted black, and he grabbed his semi-automatic rifle from the closet.

People will look back on this, Alex. Books will be written.

He threw the gun in the backseat of the car and headed towards city hall. Every Tuesday Stephanie had a city council meeting. He’d gone to several, to listen to the complaints of the townspeople and to see when Stephanie was left alone.

The meetings normally went on for between an hour and 90 minutes. The councilors would then speak for a few minutes after the attendees left, and then Stephanie, with Luc Hachey, the Corporate Communications Manager would walk outside across the rainbow colored sidewalk to her car in the vacant lot next to the McMillan Funeral Home.

Most weeks they’d talk for a few minutes and then Luc would walk over to Tony’s Bar for a drink or two before doubling back to his car and driving home.

Alex decided that Luc was going to go with Stephanie. He was every bit as guilty as her when it came to bringing immigrants to HIS town, and having them steal HIS job. They were guilty as sin, and they just smiled, and shook hands as though they were doing something helpful. Something meaningful. They were the devil. Plain and simple.

People will write books about you, Alex. You’re not crazy, they are.

When the crowd cleared, it was just the three of them.

Thank you to all my subscribers. The ones who are for the people, Alex said to himself, smiling. The gun pointed at the door.