Tig

Tig had never been to sea, he had been to college. He wore a navy pea coat and a gray watch cap, and wrote songs on a harmonium squeeze organ. The high and whining melodies wheezed and huffed, and he sang a nasally verse through the top of his head. They were all about the wives of working men, their rough hands and rough poetry. His band got very popular among the college crowd. They would sway back forth singing along, songs of a common memory none of them shared. Tig read books about whaling and looked at the stern faces of the men in the pictures. He copied their beards, and way of standing like unmovable foundations, and imagined stories about them to sing a song about.

Jack

The edges had rounded and the face was scored, the detail in relief had started to flatten out, but the date on the quarter said 1965 and Jack looked meaningfully at it in his palm. He believed in small personal totems. Objects imbued with life's energy, that carried with them the memories and promises of the past, the best of each person. And these precious symbols wriggled like fish the tighter you held them, and tried to slip away into time.

He had written her name on a piece of paper the first time he met her, when he was a teenager. A small green scrap that had been an algebra test he finished early. His mind drifted, enchanted, and he drew stylized letters in the corner of the page. By the time he had gotten it back with a grade he was sure of his devotion, and he tore her away and put her in his wallet. And long after she went away he would find the scrap, always a surprise, and would feel the powdery paper between his fingers, and put it back to be forgotten and ambush him again in the future. The slow friction in his pocket ground her name to dust, and the last time he found it the paper fell apart between his fingers.

The summer came when Jack would finally graduate college. Everyone he knew there had already completed their degree. He had gotten lost along the way, and almost failed out. It was a triumph just to finally realize how bad things had gotten, and how much despair he really felt. He sat on a low stone wall feeling paranoid, anxiety dripping down his neck and hanging in the gray air. He reached down and picked up a loose paving stone, holding it tightly before looking around, pretending to lean over to tie his shoe, and dropping the stone into his bag. He took the stone feeling like he had bitten it off with his teeth, like payback for what had been taken out of him. It was the moment he would start clawing his way back, three semesters a year, ending on this summer day. After school he had packed the stone and unpacked it, packed it again and unpacked it, packed it one more time and that was it. He never found the small granite brick again.

Jack always noticed the objects people carried as if they weighed so much more than they did. They stroked them with their thumbs, and looked at them with worried eyes. Every thing he infused with significance had gotten away from him, more things than he could even remember that were instantly special that broke or disappeared or eroded in meaning by the frequency he took them out and tried to shake loose the feelings they used to give him. And here was this quarter, which no one had ever tried to keep, as sound as it had been for almost a half century. It had hidden from its' fate in plain sight, passed from hand to hand never revealing the secrets it carried, the things it witnessed in the hundreds of people who had handled it. Holding it by the edges he closed one eye and it seemed as huge as a vault door. He concentrated on the silver face like a glittering star, setting his course in an empty night on the big black sea, and flipped the coin away from him, hearing the ringing bounce once, and then silence.

Pils

He wasn't even sure why they called him Pils, something in college. It was like a worn joke between old men, who passed the punch line without a setup, as casually as a greeting, to draw a tattered laugh. But Pils wasn't really laughing anymore. He walked into his house and grumbled, finding his roommates had set up the beer pong table. By nine the guests had started arriving, making a loud Tuesday night, even though they all had work the next day.

The house was a rental they commonly called the grown up bunk beds. Pils and his two roommates had met in college and moved in together junior year. They shared the same classes and interned at the same company. He thought they would break at graduation but they all were hired on and decided to continue living with each other. They all had a good time at first, living the loose and irresponsible life so validated by the adult babies they saw all around them. A few years passed and people married off or moved on, but Pils and his roommates were still going to work in sneakers and khaki pants, button down shirts trailing long untucked tails behind them.

Mornings were bleary eyed wonders, heads heavy and cold, dragging themselves into work cracking energy drinks or first thing sodas. Pils has started drinking black coffee, a taste he felt like he had to keep to himself. His roommates drank theirs very sweet and rich with cream, but he looked forward to the toasted bitterness and the mahogany aroma. He felt like they might tease him for it. They road in a procession and the irony didn't miss Pils, they might as well be riding bikes with cards snapping in the spokes.

"This is Pils" his roommate said slapping him hard on the back, forcing his voice above the bass of the stereo, the xbox, and the mingling chatter. His roommate widened his eyes and leaned in, pushing Pils towards the girl as if that's all it took, and slipping back into the dim anonymity of the room.

She was pretty in the plain way, the way that Pils liked. She looked slightly annoyed which made him suppress a chuckle. "He was just telling me about his trip to Europe. Amsterdam, London, Madrid, it sounds like he had quite a time. Saw a lot of pubs."

"God," Pils laughed. "I really hope human history doesn't become a narrative of all the places our generation has thrown up." She was charmed by this. "My name is Phillip," and she shook his hand.

Mike E.

Mike E. had that upstairs/downstairs feeling. His head was pounding and his eyes felt hollow, he clenched his teeth against the glare of the sun and the low mournful rustle of the wind, it sounded like an echo of mistakes. The gritty inside of his skull was rough against his raw brain, his sinuses felt swollen and claustrophobic, every voice he heard was hateful, and every song was the clashing of cymbals and the dissonant shattering of glass.

He snapped off the radio in the crawling traffic and inched along in his car, leaning his head back but not being able to rest it in a place that released the tension in his neck. The quiet was the sound of an invading horde. The tenderness of his head exposed Mike to peculiar regret, for the shortcomings he became aware of too late or was helpless to change. The inadequacy that left him mute at the most important times, disguising themselves as callousness. He was ashamed for the him of the past, and afraid he was still more him than not.

Mike turned on the radio again but instantly turned if off disagreeably. He tried to shift his bones out of their joints. What could he tell Lindz now? He had apologized and they went their separate ways, but sometimes he felt the need to apologize again like the sensation of hands tightening around the back of his neck. Mike did not feel sufficiently penitent, and he wondered if all the time since had been a kind of contrition. A self imposed exile where he had learned to dislike himself even more for who he was and what he had done. A place bordered on all sides by the ambiguity and incomprehensibility of his feelings like some Chinese afterlife. He let himself drift in that space, wondering why what was clear to him now, ground gained through hard fighting, would be so damagingly absent then. And what would he say if Lindz again asked him to just say anything? All's he knew was that he wasn't the man he used to be, but he's not sure of the man he is, but that wasn't much help here in traffic.

Chloe

Chloe was fourteen and her name was not pronounced like "klo-ee" but to rhyme with "slow," which was to make it sound more unique, but as her father had come to add it might be because she would have to be drug like an anchor out of a burning fucking house. It was true Chloe liked to lag behind her family when they went out together. She wore unbuttoned flannel shirts for maximum wind resistance, and large,soft boots that made her look like she was dragging her feet even when she was standing still. She fluttered behind them like the tail on a kite, constantly texting, or reading her texts, or waiting for texts, avoiding all mishap as if she had a third eye on top of her head.

She wore dark, racoonish makeup around her eyes so her lids looked shadowed in absolute boredom, and she peered through the veil of her messy bangs. When her father called her the 'caboose' she would scowl and cross her spindly arms against the terminal embarrassment of her parents and their need to spend time with her, sticking out her bottom lip. She thought if they insisted she come along they could at least respect how much she hated being with them, and treat her like the irritable young dragon she was. Her dad would chuckle at the sourness of her expression, and her mom would put her arm around Chloe's slumped and indignant shoulder. She would pick at her food and smack her gum, and text her friends about how lame her family was. Invariably her friends would text back from similarly miserable mobile family prisons, with a blistering petulance only they understood.

Lee Harper

Lee Harper was not convinced. He came from Alabama and had the high, twangy voice that was pleasant in slide guitars but not always in people. He kept his hair cropped to his head, which made his ears seem that much bigger, but reinforced his utilitarian good looks. His shoes were durable, and his clothes were flashless. His one indulgence in life, the one place he forsook the commonsense which acted as his figurehead in all things, was with his family.

He met his wife in college because her hair was the same rich black of bottom land soil. Feeling out of place and incapable in the Northern school, self conscious of his accent and dress, he found a little bit of home with her. Inseparably they proceeded together, planning the life and family they would one day share.

His wife had many ideas with how they should raise their only son, Simon. She was a proponent of gender neutral toys, so Lee made wood blocks with his own hands. She wanted Simon to have meat only once or twice a week Before Simon was born they ate meat almost every night, and Lee didn't quite understand what had changed. But he certainly didn't want his boy tainted with hormones that didn't belong to him, or a xenophobic culinary view. Simon had play dates instead of knocking around with the neighborhood kids. Lee had once suggested in front of other parents that the children were playing "Cowboys and Indians," which brought horrified stares.

Lee wondered if it used to be easier to be a good father because his father didn't know all the different ways you could screw a kid up. Or maybe he looked at his dad differently because, as a child, he never saw him trying his best, he always just did the best. His friend had a little girl so allergic to peanuts he had to act as an advance team in every restaurant, scrutinizing the dining area before he could bring her in. His neighbor's boy stuttered, and his neighbor worked a second job to afford better speech therapy. Lee worked with a blind woman who had a newborn, and the idea that every time she heard her baby cry it was out somewhere in the dark sent chills up his spine.

Simon had been crawling around on his hands and knees all day, perching in windows and sitting in his mother's lap. She explained that Simon was identifying very much with their pet cat, and it was stifling to suggest he was a little boy. Lee shrugged his shoulders. At the top of the stairs he found Simon napping softly in the warm sunlight thrown in a window shape on the carpet. He smiled and thought of the month his mother had let him wear his plastic Lone Ranger six guns to school, scratched Simon behind the ears, and went into his bedroom to change.

Holly Ockala

Holly Ockala was just slightly too old to dye her hair black or midnight blue, but she made it work. It gleamed like a jewel and she wore it in retro styles like Betty Paige, or done up in antique ivory combs. She had a dazzling intellect which, as a child, alienated her from her peers. They called her the 'bug girl,' and to cope she developed a biting, caustic wit that revealed itself whenever she felt insecure about being too smart. All day long she made snarky comments. Holly was a data analyst for the FBI, and she could hammer out answers from the cold raw ingots of evidence. People thought the glamorous field agents sleuthed around with a magnifying glass and a calabash, recognizing fingerprints on sight and cutting sign like an Indian tracker. They actually gather lots and lots of data which then had to be interpreted by someone like Holly. But when these handsome men and women in their nice suits came to talk to her, and Holly began spouting off and digressing on the beauty of pure numbers, the perfect design of a fingerprint, she would hit the wall of self awareness as suddenly as Eve biting the apple. Her leopard print and quirky jewelry made Holly feel naked next to their sleek tailored suits, she knew she could never apply makeup as demurely as these sculpted, confident people, so she started cracking jokes.

Holly didn't realize it, but she was the reason there was a quirky, quasi gothic, tattooed science nerd on every procedural crime drama currently on television. Her cubicle neighbor, a soft and specky young man named Dill, would watch Holly work all day. He was enthralled by how she delicately navigated data, as graceful as a ballet dancer. He noticed the flourishes of her typing, her fingers arched dramatically tapping arpeggios. Sometimes Dill would consult with her even when he didn't need help, just to see her caught up in the excitement of chasing down criminals through un-erasable channels of divine justice. Dill wasn't encouraged though, he could talk to Holly professionally but didn't know how to break the ice socially, and she made always made such sarcastic jokes. Dill left the FBI to consult in Los Angeles. He thought he would be helping to design data work flows for telecoms, but after some introductions he found himself explaining crime scene technique to TV producers, and other memorable aspects of his time at the Bureau. Holly had heard about Dill's exciting new job in Hollywood, but she never made any other connections, and really wished they had stayed in touch.

Vic

Kids liked Vic, because he would listen to them. They rambled like the energy of youth shook their thoughts free from the bearings of logic. Vic appreciated the stream of consciousness of an earnest child. Reality weaved in and out of fantasy and memory for them, and he was fascinated by how they easily navigated those disparate shores. To children all things were possible because all times were now. There was no future to lose track of your plans in, or past to regret the fading of. They never ran out of time because their youth was eternal, Peter Pan and Wendy hand in hand. Vic watched his nephew look to where the sea met the sky, blending colors, sure he would see Captain Hook's ship appear on the limitless horizon.

Vic had listened to punk most of his life, and people had it all wrong. They characterize it by the desolate origins; the financially, socially and educationally deprived tribalists rejecting their traditions even as they create them. All explanations ran to nihilism, but Vic felt the exact opposite. He recognized the desire to forge a new, attainable aesthetic. The willing of a reality that did not otherwise exist, a place where they could excel, like the lost boys in pajamas and cast off remnants stepping into the air to fly. Superficially it was dissonant, petulant music, but the philosophy behind it was hugely optimistic.

Everywhere Vic looked he was told stories of winners winning. Even when sabotaged by their own short comings, their victories were just returning to the status quo. To Vic punk was the story of losers succeeding, and he saw that in the amorphous world of the young.

Ham

Ham stepped out into the lank half light of the colorless morning, and began his day. The uncommitted sun pondered just below the horizon, and the brilliant possibility of daybreak remained a mystery. It was easy for Ham to move on autopilot. His clothes all matched, and only varied in color. His commute was one long uncomplicated stretch, much like his day, followed by a night of nearly robotic leisure and the reset of sleep. Habit found him easily, his day to day activities stickily clotting together until they were routine. Ham recognized this in himself but could never make the decision to change. Potential options hung in a fog, inarticulated, and when Ham opened his mouth to speak for one it was like he suddenly spoke no language, and possessed only the impressionist notion of the idea.

It was the time of year that the sun would break the horizon on his drive, and Ham felt the weight of a man who measures time by seasons instead of days. It was the same time of year the sun twisted far enough North to shine directly in his face as it rose, making him close the blinds against the rays. He looked to where the red coal sat nearly breaching the far off hills, and was suddenly given a point of reference he had never seen before. Using the sun as his locus he felt the pivot and turn of his body on the suddenly winding road. It ranged from one ear to the other, sometimes nearly over his shoulder, making his head feel light, and warping the straight track he was on. Arriving at work the building seemed to sit at a new angle, with a different posture. Ham looked out the window over his desk, and his face was washed in gleaming color, he reached for the blinds but hesitated.

Kahn

The peel inched forward, like a molting snake crawling out of orange skin, in a narrow but unbroken ribbon from Kahn's diligent fingers. His buffed and sharpened nails delicately turned the fruit he stroked with his thumb, taking great care until he could hold up the hanging chain of orange rind, spiraling back on itself like a mobile, as if he was perfectly illustrating his point.

He gave a bored sigh. "You cant deny," he began with a flourish of his immaculate fingers, "that what truly brings us to this place is a mystery, and for all we know what we do may be beyond our control." His hair was oiled and his eyes sunk with opium heavy lids. The corners of his mouth twitched, making his murky cheeks jump, but he otherwise practiced a great economy of movement, like a fat stolid catfish, dwelling in the mud. His shirt was rich purple, in sumptuous silk, and he wore a crisp gray suit.

"I find responsibility to be an incomplete concept." He rubbed a spot from his gleaming spade shaped shoes. "You hold me here and tell me I've done something wrong." Kahn showed the tip of his tongue, taking a small piece of hair from the end and rubbing it between his fingers until it fell on the floor. "At any point in the day how many opportunities are there to be taken along a different path? A slow driver gets in front of you and makes you late, so you miss an opportunity. A stranger holds the elevator so you arrive early. You step out and bump into a woman you would've otherwise missed. She drops her purse and you help her pick it up, she left her purse home and you don't have to. It seems to me there were many, many twists and turns that put me and that man together this morning. Many, many opportunities for us to never meet. You hold me here and tell me I've done something wrong, but I don't see the woman with the purse, or the stranger on the elevator, or any of the people who no doubt shaped his morning to find me at the end of it and yet you only have blame for me. If you remove just a single one of them none of us have any reason to be here." He looked at the sharp nails at the end of his fingers and rubbed a speck of blood from his cuticle. "You're trying to understand something that is so far beyond you, and it makes me laugh."

Shaw

Shaw could not believe he was flirting with a girl in her thirties. He felt mid to late 20s was more his wheelhouse. They liked the distinguished gray cresting the tips of his hair, the fit jeans and shirts he picked to hint at his wealth, and the red vitality of his just cragging face. He knew how to make his eyes soft and fatherly, and they bit.

He had to take a mulligan on this girl though. From across the board room she looked much younger, but her back was to the sun setting a golden halo around her blond hair, and neutralizing all the features in her face so all Shaw saw was her eyes on a flawless porcelain mask. When he approached her during the lunch break, and began asking her about Kansas City or whatever place she had come from, he saw the experience around her eyes, and the lines of opinion at the corners of her mouth. She had no children and no husband, and in Shaw's experience that meant she would want them sooner rather than later.

Shaw complimented her on being so young for such an old room, but also mentioned how he thought age was an over emphasized number. Of course he usually used this line in an entirely different way, trying to narrow a wide gap, like a magician showing slight of hand to a child. She disagreed, another very unpleasant factor of her age, he found. The girl argued that each age had its' own experiences and challenges that were important to embrace, not speed through or put off. Suddenly Shaw flared, reading her as insolent, uncooperative, unpleasant and frustrating. He wanted in the worst way to contradict her. "I'll bet you cant tell how old I am?" It was a favorite gambit. Shaw knew he was dressed to the current style in the most sleek and tasteful way, he was as in shape as a man half his age, and girls often guessed too young, proving his point, so he could snatch them up in his trap.

Her smile listed to one side, and she demurely shook her head, too polite to answer. "I give up, how old?"

Triumphantly Shaw answered "I turned 40 just 18 months ago."

George

Of the IT community there are two body types, too large and too skinny, and George was the later. As bendable as gumby, baggy in small clothes, wrists always bare at the end of his long reedy arms because sleeves would never reach. He diligently calls on the frustrated and angry who use words like server, network and hard drive interchangeably, without letting his frustrations show. They peck at their keyboards with conviction, as if a computer ignores commands that are too subtle, or can be intimidated by finger width judo chops. They strike the same keys over and over in a derisive tone, and repeatedly click click click the same icons before slamming their innocent mouse like it was an old tube TV. George wondered if the office bought Hello Kitty mice if people would be nicer to them.

He appreciated technology. George understood it as its' own art form, made more beautiful by the constraints of logic, like a bonsai tree slowly coaxed from the wild entropy of nature into a manicured living sculpture. The conjuring of usable assets from what was essentially still a mystery. He though of astronauts, putting their faith in a fraction of the technology he worked on every day, being shot into the unfathomable void, and coming back from the brink safely. George was removing malware from the same computer for the third time, because the operator wont stop playing bejeweled at work. She was standing behind him, arms crossed, suggesting 'more ram' as always, like a cure all salve, the universal solvent of the office world. "You know," she said dismissively, 'weren't we supposed to have jet packs by now. And they cant even make a computer work."

George responded, "You don't even understand how to work you cell phone and you think you can handle a jet pack?" before he could stop himself.

Jean Malle

Jean Malle taught play writing to college freshman at the same university he had attended when he was their age. The chaotic and intensely somber look of his youth had matured into that of the hapless detective in a black and white French comedy, drooping eyes, a wirey mustache and shapeless suit. He spoke to his students about writing from life experience, funneling the tropes of their personal histories into the great universal themes. This was the secret, he taught, to avoiding self indulgence and academic obtuseness.

The students read their assignments in a workshop setting, handing out parts to the classmates they respected. They wielded profanity as subtly as a pick ax, always taken by the novelty of writing 'fuck' on a graded paper, and it was Jean's job to tell them their style was edgy and confrontational. They wrote about undying love, crushing disappointment, and soaring victory.

'Whose Afraid of Virginia Werewolf?' was the one play Jean had ever been able to see produced, and he used it as a text for the class. He sold them the script directly and collected their cash, never bothering to find out if it was within university guidelines. It took him several years of revising the script before he was satisfied with it. Jean completed it after his first marriage fell apart. He met her in the very building he now taught, and they were married before graduation. Every promise they made each other was eroded by the short years they had, and at the end he was left wondering how to deal with a blameless hurt.

Jean's anger was an unused knife, dulled by never being focused in one direction. But the building, as filled with memory as a grave yard, and the stupidly earnest ideas of love and responsibility he saw his young self in every day, drew the sap of anger back to the surface. He was ready to admit his own selfishness, the right decisions he never made, and her mania that drove them nearly to destruction. He hated her for the first time in his life, and knew it was a necessary ugliness, so he could finally forgive her. And he hoped he was hated too, so he could receive the same grace.

As a matter of psychology Jean always asked his students who they thought the protagonist and antagonist of his play was, the husband or the wife. They would talk about it for awhile as an illustration of the importance of ambiguity in character. The young girl in the front row raised her hand and asked what the answer was from Jean's point of view. He answered, "It was nobodies fault, except for both of ours."

Mason

As a little boy Mason had posters of Evel Knievel and Easy Rider on his wall. He was fascinated with their motorcycles. The exposed engine reminded him of a bare ribcage and two great chrome lungs. He admired the men and the bikes for their lawlessness and free spirit, but most of all how they were displayed by the machine. The motorcycle was excitement and liberation, it was a context set apart from the world that Mason wanted to frame himself in.

He learned to ride in his twenties and owned or borrowed bikes sporadically since then. When his children were grown enough and his wife agreed they had saved enough money, he went to the dealership and gave the deposit on his very first brand new Harley Davidson. Having endured years in silent inferiority when his fiends bragged about their bikes, and knowing the remarks they might make if he did any less, Mason took every option and upgrade available. For once he would have the newest and best, untoppable by his riding buddies after the slew of beaters they had ridiculed him for. Delivery on the Harley was made on the first day of spring, and Mason rode it all through the summer.

There was extensive costuming to be done before a ride. First Mason tied a bandanna around his bald head. He pulled on jeans, black boots, thick leather chaps and tucked his t shirt into his narrow waistband. He wore a leather jacket, but felt most transformed when he put on his wrap around sunglasses. He was ready to travel through the tinted world.

He liked to ride on lazy afternoons, the snoozing summer quiet split by the barking of his exhaust. It heralded his arrival. He imagined how he would look to others with a rigid jaw and stoic back, he imagined himself a mystery of kinetic stone. When Mason rode out and straight back he felt slightly guilty, a notion of buyer's remorse that he had overspent and was not getting true value for the black and silver buffalo in his garage. He made small errands on his rides, smoked cigarettes in every park, and got many cups of coffee.

Mason pulled into Starbucks and his usual spot was taken. He parked in the yellow hatched space next to the handicapped spot, directly in front of the patio. He sat in a chair and tipped his head back, slowly smoking a cigarette, imagining the anomaly of his being here, the vague intimidation these soccer moms and business men must feel. Above him a hawk circled, buffeted on the steady breeze, dipping its' straight wings first left, then right; the black kite of its' shadow racing along the concrete. Mason sat admiring the bike.

"Sir, you cant park there, it's for the handicapped spot."

He looked at the kid who had come out in his green apron to sweep cigarette butts. "Well, I'm not moving it in back where I cant keep an eye on it."

"Maybe you could pull it around to the other side?" he offered diplomatically, clearly not understanding why Mason thought anyone would try to touch his motorcycle.

"Okay," Mason said, then got on the Harley and left.

Colleen

She tossed her strawberry hair, padding down the slick block in a short jean skirt and cowboy boots, her friend in blond corkscrew curls and diaphanous green, Colleen slid out in between cars, gauging the distance of headlights, artfully jaywalking so they never had to break stride. She pressed forward with biological urging, to the over crowded bar, on a work night.

The boys were in the bar in green t shirts and torn jeans, one of them was in a furry hat. Colleen wanted to put on the same, but knew she had to make an effort and could not ward off the reproachful frown wavering on platform heels that her friend would give if she was the only one dressed cutely. Colleen had only mentioned maybe dressing casually after a long day and was met with hysteria. The boys were at the bar, and even though we don't like the boys, the boys all have friends and they might be nice, with good jobs, and ready to have children soon. Colleen didn't dare mention what she was really thinking, that she wanted to skip the bar tonight and sit home in fuzzy socks, wash dishes, finish a book. Her friend wasn't wrong though, there weren't a lot of places to meet boys, and their friends.

Her friend was giggling over the name Jimmer Fridette, and the prospect of a celibate college basketball team. The boys were discussing, at length, their brackets, and X Box. Everything was occasionally punctuated by howls of approval, or raucous jeers at the TV screens they were all watching, while talking and not looking at each other. The sound of the bar was the angry racket of bee hives, a pleasant buzz stacked upon itself until it became an aggressive, directionless clatter. Colleen realized a friend of one of the boys was talking to her. He leaned his head in, closing to an affectionate distance, trying to dock his temple with hers. He smelled lightly sweet of brew yeast, it was the first time he had talked to her. Behind her Colleen could hear her friend flirting with a boy she had slept with, he interrupted her to point out cheerleaders on TV, and hoot. Her friend waited, then kept flirting.

"Colleen? I said you don't look like you want to be here." The boy waved his hand in front of her face, pulling her attention back.

"No, sorry. Not really." She bet he had the same haircut his mom had first given him, short and easy to get even. She wasn't sure what his name was..

"Lets get out of here then." His eyes were hopeful.

"I don't even know you."

"Cmon, we've been hanging out all night. I'm a nice guy, what else do you want?" She could tell he truly didn't know what else she could possibly want. He ran his hand through her hair and it snagged, Colleen thought of making cat's cradles when she was little.

The noise of the bar dampened as the door closed and she was left in the vacuum and orange light of the street, too late on a work night, heading for home.

Ollie

Ollie Robnujab's mother looked like a paisley blue morel mushroom in her loose and tenting silk. His parents had been in the country for years but never Americanized to his satisfaction. He always had the only mother that swished. The sound of her sari was grating and enormous, especially next to the stealthy keds and surreptitious jeans the other moms wore. He secretly dreaded he smelled of the oriental spices she cooked with, and was mortified when her fingertips were stained turmeric yellow. Ollie begged for hamburgers, and referred to her as "cardi-mom" to deflect what his friends might be thinking. She wore an unsympathetic frown when he carried on about being so foreign. "Check more tags my son," she said with a waggle of her head, "all of your friends clothes were made in China. They look like little Chinese boys to me." He crossed his arms in a championship caliber frump. His mother took his chin in her hands, "Oliver Robnujab, it is a lucky thing your skin is brown, you are the most embarrassed young man I've ever known, and if you could blush everyone would know it." She clapped her hands once and adjourned to the pungent barrow of her kitchen.

Ollie kept a trim figure in college, not wanting to turn slowly into the rounded men of his father's generation. It gave his mother fits, but he ran cross country, growing longer and stringier with each year, instead of playing in the sunset cricket league like the other Indian students. They were all engineering majors, and after his freshman year, in his boldest departure, Ollie no longer was. He found he could apply his mechanical drawing talent to studying art. He secretly made sure to apply to universities that had both respected engineering and fine arts programs. In the great American tradition Ollie's parents disapproved of what he was doing, but let him pursue his own mistakes. In the great teenage tradition Ollie chafed at the expectations of family, and congratulated himself for slipping away, never noticing that he painted swirls of paisley and silk.

Smoke breaks were valuable. The entire bullpen, working at sloping architects desks drawing cartoons and advertisements, rose en masse to fume in the parking lot. It integrated their stress, and as individual deadlines approached the team simmered in unison. His bosses smoked and it was an opportunity to get their ear. It only took one instance of picking his head up to discover he was alone that Ollie decided to buy a pack of cigarettes. The young artists squinted against the sun, looking to the same horizon like a flock of birds, talking to each other. Rounding the parking lot, in a slow gyre, a team of Punjabi software engineers walked in long philosophical strides. Ollie looked down at his tennis shoes and put his hand through his messy hair.

John Jay

John Jay bought a house in a green suburban cul-de-sac after living in utilitarian apartments all the years since he left his parent's home. It was unfair to call John cheap, but his reality was distorted. He felt he spent according to his means, which were anemic but did build over the years. When he had secured a salary he could live more comfortably on he still could not shake the old habits of living frugally. John could not make himself jump at new technology when the old version still filled his needs, he wouldn't be a person gadgets were just licensed to, the upgrading they required, money for the subtlest changes, on such a regular basis, made John feel like his peers were maintaining electronic children or clandestine Best Buy mistresses. He bought well, to suit his needs, with an eye for quality, with the aim of ownership.

That is not to say John Jay was ruled by rationality in all of his decisions. Pleasure for pleasure's sake seemed like a luxury he should guard against. He had not ever allowed himself a vacation, or even been on a plane. He could not stop himself from instantly quantifying all relationships in terms of what responsibility he had to them. It wasn't what he set out to do, but the casual drape of arms around his neck would suddenly carry an alarming weight. A shooting panic found him in the middle of the night, made accusations, and by the morning John would feel like he was living a debtors life again.

The day came when John realized he had saved lots of money but not much of anything else. He found the house and bought it before he could talk himself out of it. He knew he had to force himself to face this new way of living, not saving for the indefinite tomorrow and the horizon you could never find by riding towards it. He was uncomfortable dwelling within the antithesis of his spendthrift past, but he trained himself to think of the walls as retainers against the fear, and the boundaries of sanctuary where he planned the changes of his life. In the first summer there, coming out of the garage, John stopped and held out his hands palm down. He had forgotten the amazing heat thrown off of a black tarred driveway in July. John went directly into the house but soon returned in a bathing suit with a rolled towel. He spread the towel and laid out, feet flat on the burning ground, soaking the black memory of sun through his back, and basking in the rays bouncing all around him like a fat lizard on a rock, just as he had forgotten he loved to do as a child.

Tina

Tina sucked long, light cigarettes in the claustrophobic cabin of her metallic blue, mid eighties Chevy with the heat on no matter what season it was. The upholstery was powder blue fabric, cheap and tinseled with clear plastic filaments like industrial high traffic carpet, and burned through in craters rimmed with melted crusty edges by her careless cherry, showing yellowing foam underneath like a unblinking, jaundiced eye. The car interior seethed nicotine flavor with tinges of exhaust from the climate control and decaying polymer.

Tina was always on the lookout for bumper stickers. If she saw one she liked she would try and find it for her own car, or at the very least repost it on facebook, offering it up as a mantra, wisdom on loan. She wasn’t interested in espousing religion or politics which she felt insisted themselves to any sane person, she chose stickers that made a more social criticism of the idiots in the world around her, or a general gripe. “Shut up, I have Kids.” “Learn to Drive or Get Out of the Way.” “Get Off My Ass.” And “You Should Be Ashamed.” The bumper sticker was a great way to express herself, Tina thought. It was a wonderful packet, vaguely hard to challenge and nebulously meaningful. Tina wasn’t comfortable with specifics or allowances. The bumper sticker left no room for the snakes to wriggle out from under the thumb of judgment, with their confusing rationalizations. You could hardly tell what was real and what was a lie, all the more reason for Tina to cut their fancy talking off at the knees.

Teenage celebrities were on drugs and having psychotic breakdowns, and Tina related how she and her cousins were also out of control on drugs when they were teenagers, but they could never afford enough drugs to cause a psychotic breakdown, therefore they were better. She said “The weather better not be so crumby next weekend, or at least gas prices better come down,” as if the two were related. The smell of cigarettes clung to her breath, her clothes, her bottle blond hair like the memory of a suffocatingly hot blanket. She updated her facebook status to “Its better to wear a jacket than carry it,” and went about her day.

Anthony

The Eighth Grade did not feel different enough for Anthony. He had grown into the boots of his puberty The timid movement of his emerging body became a confident gait. His screaming limbs lengthened, springy like green wood until they found the strength of bone, replacing the aimless new energy with the notion of capability. Anthony recognized the precipice he had arrived at, and was ready to go beyond it. The price of this awareness was the juvenile world that caged him. Like Tantalus, the fruit of maturity hung low, and when he reached out to take it's privilege it was snatched away.

Being in Eighth was like being the seniors of middle school. To Anthony and all of his friends this suggested elder statesmanship, utter familiarity and contempt for the mysteries of this place. But it became swiftly apparent that there was no extra latitude in this world, no hidden place for them to mold to their own purpose. They existed in the dominion of their elders for another year, and even worse none of his friends exhibited the same balmless itching Anthony could not quiet.

Anthony rode his bike in the pumpkin afternoon down deserted Sunday streets. When he came to a hill he'd extend his quickbeam legs and broaden his chest, bombing down the incline at dangerous speeds. The young wind sharpened Anthony's persistently articulating desires for girls, ambition, and travel. The faster he moved the more the impediments burned away, leaving the raw lust for achievement he felt at the core of himself. As his road flattened out he felt the entropy return, eroding his vital powers. Anthony stood on a wooden footbridge over a swollen brook, and commiserated with the restless sound of wet rocks rushing underneath.

The bus arrived in the quiet of early afternoon. His friends talked about the cars they were two years away from owning, and all the places they would go once they got them. They began to drift home but Anthony held them to the spot, the bus stop, the one small patch of land they recognized as their own. They stood with their feet far apart, taking up more space than was necessary, surveying the land they would one day lay claim, and discussing their plans.

Abigail

Abigail had selected the princess dress. It was freshly white with charming little flower buds, inspired by antique wallpaper prints, and complimented the tooled flowers on her short waisted sweater. The simplicity of the top built into an elaborate bottom, as if all of the whimsy of the dress had rolled downhill. It ballooned out from her hips like a petticoat, with textures of ruffle and lace, dotted with large yarn flowers in deep reds. The billowing garment stopped abruptly at the knee, like she had been topiarily pruned to be Alice sitting on top of a giant mushroom with the Caterpillar. The dress resembled a wedding cake in shape and design, and Abigail chose it because it reminded her of the tutu she refused to take off as a little girl, which would put her at ease for her appearance on Jeopardy.

She was worried it would all go to pieces when she first laid eyes on Alex Trebek. While filling out paperwork in a make shift corral of folding tables she saw a nest of producers and show runners begin to simmer, her throat tightened and she was sure the man had just come in. She gripped the edge of the table ready for her anxiety to explode when a production assistant cheerily plopped down and began Abigail's pre show interview. The PA's cheeks were ripe and high, her smile impossibly huge and whitened. "So, do you have any hobbies?"

Abigail had always wondered what her fact would be in the mid first round interview with Alex. You had so little time and if your story was going too long Alex was a master at politely cutting you off and moving on. But Abigail felt if her facts were too simple a nation of intellectuals would be judging her. She would be recognized at the farmer's market, and the book swap, and young people in rough organic clothing would look at her and think "It's the uninteresting poser girl that lost on Jeopardy on totally easy questions."

"Uh, I knit, and I like to bake. But I'd really prefer not to talk about that."

The PA had an uncanny ability to turn her brow down in displeasure, but keep the same smile plastered on her face. It was unsettling to Abigail. "Why not?"

"Well," Abigail fidgeted in her seat. "It's a little hipstery, isn't it? I mean, everyone started knitting. That's ok. I didn't invent knitting, I didn't even get into it until a knitting shop opened in my neighborhood so I guess I'm late to it. But I really love to do it, and I'm really good at it. And I cant show Alex something I've knitted to prove that I really am talented so I'd really rather just not mention it."

"It's okay, we find something for everyone to say. What do you bake?"

"I'd rather not say."

"Is it cupcakes?" The PA now had an air of confidentiality.

"Oh God!" Abigail was scandalized. "You cant say I bake cupcakes, it's such a cliche. I might as well tell a funny story about riding my fixie around Williamsburg."

"You ride a fixie?"

"No," Abigail said sadly. "I have a prewar 3 speed with giant fenders and a latticed dress guard and a giant grocery basket."

"Oh that's so much worse." The PA looked shamefully down at her notepad.

"His name is Phineas Pedalbuggy," she said sadly.

The PA tapped her pen on her notepad, then looked up cheerily. "You're married. Something funny always happens at the wedding, was there anything unusual about yours?"

Abigail had planned a tasteful and sedate wedding. There was a lone incursion of oddity. "I wore blue Chuck Taylor high tops during the ceremony. It is kindof a funny story why."

The PA grabbed Abigail's hands. "Okay! That's what we'll use. What happened?"

Abigail shook her head. "It's a very long and involved story."

The PA slumped. "Look, we have to use something. I'm writing "blue sneakers wedding" on this card and handing it to Alex. I'll leave it up to you what you tell him." She got up in a huff and went to the next contestant who looked like he surely had a whole championship run worth of concise and impeccable factoids.

Across the room the bustle began to thin out, and as the group parted there was Alex shuffling index cards. He was in his street clothes and he had a tan line from his sunglasses. He was shorter than she expected. He walked with a little hobble in his step. She waved when he looked up, and Alex waved back and went off to his dressing room to put on the sharp suit she was expecting to see, and the makeup she had never realized he wore. Abigail was soothed to realize she had believed wholly in the total inauthenticity of Alex Trebek for all these years. There may be hope for her yet.

Morton

They’re over there discussing whose going to come get me and wheel me to the day room,” Morton thought to himself, watching the aides clustered in their nurses scrubs from his room at the retirement home. He knew they divvied up the patients, making deals with each other, using the levels of attention needed as currency. For example, Morton had to be wheeled around but often put up a fuss, which was worth one completely mobile ward plus a small chore. He was glad he hadn’t declined to the level where his charge was a whole day’s dues, so dependent on assistance he would be a breathing penalty box to these young people. But still he remembered being new and robust, when they wouldn’t even follow him down the hall to make sure he arrived at his destination. Those days were gone and with the failing of his body Morton knew they all suspected his mind must be thick with choking weeds, too. Those days were gone and he was worried.

It was the young white kid with the pants down his ass. Morton always hoped for the Puerto Rican girl because sometimes she pressed up against him while leaning over, possibly on purpose. Morton had tried to surprise her one day by speaking Spanish, but she didn’t know it. The kid helped Morton into the chair and the routine began, “You don’t need to wheel me young man, I can walk just fine.”

“No Sir, No Sir.” He was thickly built with a Mediterranean complexion. Everywhere he was covered with his nearly black hair it had a messy fringe, his eyebrows looked like caterpillars that were tracking dirty footprints above his eyes. His clothes were baggy and posture slumped. By contrast Morton was always groomed and dressed neatly, in the business casual way that had once been as informal as a man would dress in public. He rose early and showered, wrote letters or read in his room until they came for him. Routine was coming to dominate Morton’s life and he was resigned to never being surprised again.

After the charade of trying to assert his independence Morton settled in and allowed himself to be taken. He, too, was doubting his ability to get around on his own and he knew none of them had time to walk with him. It only made him realize how glacial he moved. They were always in a hurry and he had been the exact same way. Morton had stood around with other young men, each taking a serving of the day’s tasks, and he was always happy to take a little extra because it meant he was a little better. He worked like that until the day he retired, and he couldn’t believe he had managed another quarter century.

“Now I’ve got a bald head and sagging skin, hands look like I’m a kid wearing his daddies gloves,” Morton thought as they came into the sun of the day room, where he would read the paper and talk with the other old men. He looked at the lurching aide and the white string hanging from the kid’s neck caught Morton’s eye. “That looks like a transistor radio. Kids aren’t messing with those again, are they?”

“No Sir, No Sir.” The kid took his ipod from his pocket and showed it to Morton, who immediately put the rubber bud into his bristly ear. The kid began to protest but Morton waved him off.

He had lost his interest in music as his hearing went, and he couldn’t quite make this out, but the voice was aggressively vital. There was an ambulatory rhythm and brassy squonks, like the sudden calls of geese migrating overhead.

“What’s this?”

The kid balled his pink baby fists. “It’s music, sir.”

“I know that! I’m not senile. What is it?”

“N.W.A, sir.”

He aimed a large ear at the kid. “Huh?”

“Rap music, sir.”

Morton ignored the kid’s loud frustration. “Could you write that down for me? I will have my grandson pick some up before he visits.”

Ramona

Ramona was short for her age, with inquisitive eyes and narrow shoulders. She always stood at attention, her chest puffed out, feet together, and rod straight posture extended through the top of her head. It was easy to imagine her in a bow tie because her frame was so slight, and neck so small. Her mouth was a narrow line, turned down, and she kept her lips together except when she was speaking. Ramona was Japanese, polite but insistent, and she was also a small cat.

Technically Ramona was Japanese American, her mother had birthed the litter shortly after the family arrived in the states, but her parents were xenophobes and paid extra attention to rear Ramona and her siblings with all the manners and tradition of Japanese cats. Even though she had never been there, she felt thoroughly native to Japan, and considered herself an expatriated kitten.

The time came for Ramona to move away from her parents, and she was adopted, shockingly, by a family of white people. Ramona was always taught to pad around the house silently, and moved on her paws with a smooth lightness. The people didn't even make an effort, they thumped around the house indiscreetly. The house smelled differently. It was very rare to smell fish or the earthy umami tones she was so familiar with, there was much more meat but they didn't like when she tried to get a close up look. Ramona would clean herself fastidiously, down to her tiny white gloved paws, and they would pick her up and get their smell all over her and she'd have to start over. She was used to a more aloof household. One day, in the kitchen, looking at one of their backs, Ramona decided to complain. It was a high and sustained cry, and they turned around to look at the fuss Ramona was making. They talked at her but didn't seem to understand. They gesticulated and finally settled into a sympathetic but oblivious attitude. Ramona realized it was hopeless, they didn't even speak Japanese, but to be fair she had never bothered to learn English. She decided a compromise could probably be reached.

Willy Lee

"You're a dangerous man," she said with a wide, enticing grin.

James took her hand, "No honey, I'm just reckless." She giggled bashfully, not understanding and shaking the brown ringlets that fell around her big eyes. "Dangerous happens to other people. That's the secret if you want to know the truth. People say I'm dangerous, but I'm just reckless." He leveled his sinister eyes on me, "I let other people worry about dangerous."

"It's stupid," I told the slicked down hair on the back of his head as we left the diner. "You stick out like a sore thumb when you carry on like that." He didn't turn to look at me but waved his hand. I stopped, frustrated, and looked up into the blank sky for some kind of explanation. "It's dangerous when you're us."

"Now what did I tell you about that?" He didn't stop until he reached the passenger seat of the car where he immediately settled down and waited patiently for me to compose myself and catch up

Driving him was always like this. He'd spout his rhetoric or snatches of poetry he'd written about himself, fall into melancholic staring and suddenly launch into a topic aged two days as if you were just discussing it. "You worry too goddamn much." I rolled my eyes. "Understand that James Cagney James understands the tolerable subtleties. I cant be you fretting over what I did was right or wrong, plowing your value beneath your sense of risk every second of your life. I cant be you and be me."

Rain was falling, the dots on the window cast shadows drawn across his face like a veil, his eyes shifting slowly from telephone poles streetlights, cars and me. The low appraisal of each was written in the thin line of his mouth, and I had had enough.

"Being me has kept you alive."

His expression broke with a flash of lightening, like he'd been waiting for this bait. "You really think that?" The razor smile was back. "I'm a prime mover, and you're a cog. You think you're doing favors for me?" He placed his hat on his knee, and groomed it while he spoke. "Don't be so sure I aint who they want me to be."

"And what is that?"

"Not the cull, no matter how much I look like it to you. I'm the Judas goat, I walk in the slaughterhouse just the same but come out the other side. They need this villain, they want James Cagney James to get away and twist his mustache, cackling."

"I know your name, Willy Lee." He shot me an acid look, the only sound was the rain coming down in sheets and popping off the roof with hollow metallic pings.

"How'd you know that?" He asked with taught voice.

"I just do."

"We traveled miles in dark and quiet, his mood settled in a low place like thick morning fog. "My mother named me Willy Lee after her brother, who died when she was young. I asked her what I'm supposed to be like, carrying the name of a dead man I never met, what she hoped I'd be. She told me there's always a job nobody wants to do, makes 'em sick just knowing it needs to be done. The man that steps up for that job will always have steady work and silent gratitude. My uncle was that man. I come to find out he done every shit job a pecker wood could dream up, till one day he fell of the mast of a ship and plunked down in the ocean so hard he never even bobbed back up so they could bury him. And that's the man she wanted me to be, that's the man I tried to be."

"Is that who you are?"

He let out a bitter laugh. "I wouldn't be that idiot for anything. I learned what he forgot, one hand for you, one hand for the boat. That's something I aint forgot yet."

James Cagney James

I have seen him write his name "J.James" and let the world make guesses on how outlaw he really was. "Let them hang themselves from their assumptions," he'd say. "It isn't the hook's fault for biting what takes the bait." It was the kind of thing he said to diner waitresses whose eyes were a little too big or humor a little too indulgent. One such waitress measured him, smooth skin drum tight, pale on his cheeks, making his hawk nose that much sharper, a pure white collar and impeccable fedora, just a touch of affluent softness smoothing over a care hardened body. James Cagney James knew he had a fish on the line. "A notion of fate brought us here, and brought you here, brought us together, and dictates what we'll do together." He winked an oily black eye. It was a sly trick for a man with no room for blame who believes even an assumed name carries obligations.

I met him playing cards, he wore that same suit, the only nice one he owned. "Luck does not seem like a currency you trade in," I had just walked away from the table after a parade of bad hands, and he followed unsolicited to keep me company. "Neither do I, trade in it, anyway. Take some bad luck here, be paid back with good later," he moved invisible piles of luck with his cupped hands in a gentle demonstration, "trying to keep ahead of the ledger that's chasing you your whole goddamn life." He smiled in the way only he could, his teeth were needles. "Stay in the black and get out while the gettin's good? No, I plan on overstaying my welcome. Cash out every piece of good luck the second I can, and when I run out pass as much bad paper as I can write until five seconds before everyone smartens up and beats down my door with pitchforks and torches. The last indignity will be my manufactured luck getting me clear without so much as an offending wind inconveniencing the part in my hair, and everyone else is left with my red column in their ledger and their ass backwards desire to balance the book no matter what." We were on the dirty boardwalk looking at the blackness of the sea that night. Alone and still he leaned in to whisper, "I don't have a book," he was a karmic deadbeat. "The only way not to fall behind is to have those bills sent elsewhere."

The waitress was transfixed, charmed like a snake lulling her head, hypnotized by his steel blue gaze. "The day I was born they gave me a killer's name and here I am, an artful practitioner, living symbolism, sublime predestination. James. Cagney. James. Pleased to meet you, you sweet young thing."

Allison

Allison had a short ponytail she could tuck under a hood and wore jeans loose enough to jump straight up in the air and bring her knees almost to her chest. Her t-shirts were black or navy, threadbare at cuffs and collar, not afraid of sweat or wear, some so familiar they were pocked with small holes around the waist where her belt loops rubbed, like a cheetah's spots. She wore comfortable sneakers because she knew she would be on her feet all night. Allison saw so many more female faces in the crowd these days, and they were wearing boots and slippers.

At shows when she was just into her teens Allison rarely saw other girls. They might be holding a coat so their boyfriends could go into the pit in just a wifebeater. She stood at the back too, but she was smaller than everyone. She started exploring the edges, the pulsating corona, that swayed like a lapping shore from the churning at its' center. Allison went to more and more shows and felt more rooted, understood that she belonged there as much as anyone and recognized the altruism of the crowd as she penetrated deeper. Sometimes, dancing, her hood would slip back and the singer would see a tiny girl throwing in with all the rough boys and their reckless fists, and call her out for being tough and having the spirit. Allison would pull up her hood in an Amazonian gesture, and merge with ecstatic anonymity.

The boys had all grown their hair long and the girls had all cut theirs off. The aspiration seemed to be drug smoking lumberjacks in plaid with messy beards, or smoke eyed French pixies. Everyone had an outfit and an iphone. It was a long way from the spare utility of shaved heads and hooded sweatshirts. Allison thought "Oh well," as the house lights went down and all eyes turned to the stage, "Oh well, they're here anyway." She wrapped the mic cord tightly around her hand, tapped it to her chest with three quick thumps in time with the drums that thundered to life, jumped straight up into the air and touched her knees to her chest.

Homer

It was getting to be a joke to Homer. He had a bowl of oatmeal, the bowl was clay, the tablecloth was unbleached linen, his daddy was wearing the same overalls as yesterday which were just as faded as the washed out sky, the road outside was dirt, and there was a dust colored tabby sleeping in the window. The summer leached the green out of the plants, and even magazines turned white underneath this sun. Homer had read about art and he was sure he was living through someone’s beige period.

“Bonnie and Clyde came through here, I’ll bet you didn’t know that.” Daddy said a lot of bullshit when he was pontificating, and since Homer had been drawn and sullen even more than usual, even more than was tolerable, Daddy felt it was overdue. “They were right on that road out chere, tear assin’ hell bent for leather, and I was sitting at that table right where you are now and watched ‘em go by just like I was at the picture show. I was fifteen year old, just like you are today.” Daddy found this to be a satisfactory end to the story, nodding sagely and stroking his chin like Confucius, who incidentally was a man he had never heard of.

Homer waited for the pause to become ever pregnant, and when he realized there was no post script he bunched his shoulders and cocked his head “Is that all? What did they do? Did they go rob the Mechanics Bank?”

“No,” Daddy could really make it sound like you had missed the point completely. “They just rode through, weren’t no money in that damn bank, it was the depression. Naw, we didn‘t hear it was them until week or so later, in the papers.”

Homer’s mouth dropped open in utter disbelief, “You’re fucking kidding.” Kansas had even sucked the color out of outlaws who took a break from having sex only to rob banks and shoot people. It was incredulity only a 15 year old understood.

“Mind Boy, your Momma heard you and she’d have me belt you one, neither of us wants that.”

Homer was staring hatefully at a sunflower thinking “Be more yellow.” He had collected the eggs and knew they had the same uncommitted color at the center, then washed out the coop, and had the drab afternoon to himself. He stood and shook out each leg, and started walking towards town.

He came home very pleased with himself. He had gone to meet the sailor with all his pocket money, the sailor who had been on the sea just as long as he had been on land, and who had seen a tiger in China and a Russian Cossack. The sailor put a tattoo on Homer’s whole chest, a beautiful woman with peacock feathers and a bright red rose at every corner, like a picture frame, and yellow stars around her like the sailor had seen all the way in Australia at the bottom of the world.

He strolled into the kitchen, where he had left Daddy and found him again, just as casual as could be, his plaid shirt hooked on a finger slung back over his shoulder. The sailor said not to cover it for a day or so, as if that would be a problem for Homer. The spoon dropped out of Daddies hand and clanked in the tiny china cup of milky coffee. Whispering, as not to alert Mama, but with as much urgency as he could muster Daddy said “Boy, what would you go and do a damn fool thing like that for?”

“Because I guess I’m just a damn fool.”

Chester Basilowicz

Chester Basilowicz became undyingly devoted to Krav Maga at the age of 20, and even though he wouldn't say so out loud he secretly believed it made him bulletproof.

Auf der Mar

Auf der Mar looked in the mirror every morning with bloodshot eyes, mapping the blooming sanguine rills winding a meander through the eggshell jelly, before dissolving pink to white, slowly fading out like a poorly kept trail. He decided to stop reading his horoscope, he no longer had any time for providence. It predicted the return of lost things but never the losing of them, useful divination when sailing on the Rachel, but not the Pequod. It reprimanded Auf der Mar for the behavior of the past, but never gave a clue for today. He left it on the table, with the letter that accused him in the very same way but with kinder words, looked around at four bare walls, and set out a wary traveler.

The paths up into the mountain started in pastoral fields, roiling fingers of tall grass with a squat low-canopied tree they had laid under like a blanket. Everywhere the sun yellowed was the crushing disappointment of him, the thoroughness of his failing all those he knew. He started into the hills, climbing up, chased by the memory. Auf der Mar moved quickly over the broken stones, feeling the pressure building in his chest, scouring his lungs and burning away. Coming around the ridge he saw how the day had waned, and counted it a mercy. The still, gold air broke in shafts around the treetops, falling along the dirt corridor, and Auf der Mar slowed to walk on the cobble of acorns. The slope was gradual here, and he felt the heaviness of what he carried was easier to manage after the exertion. He took it down into the shadows of trees and back up and out again, to the bluff. Facing west Auf der Mar studied the sanguine rills shot through with royal bruises, and said to the setting sun "He's only going to break your heart, and what will that do to me?"

Quibbler

Shan Tamarindo began recording music at a young age under the name Quibbler. "To get where Quibbler comes from, you kindof have to understand my whole story. I was born in New Zealand. My parents were very eccentric people, and we traveled all over. We spent lots of time in Nepal, Vietnam, and Amsterdam. My father was a bicycle mechanic and we never had any money, so we always went to places he was sure there would be lots of work. I never went to school, so my mother educated me. She taught me to read from music magazines, and bought me a tape recorder when I was 9 so I could hear the strange accent she was trying to drill out of me. I spent all of my practice time making up songs, and I think the tinny, cheap recorder really influenced where I would go with my sound."

Quibbler was first noticed after self releasing and album and EP exclusively on cassette. While not hugely prolific Quibbler gave interviews to countless blogs, websites and alternative papers. "When I was 18 I moved to New York, and got a job in a used record store. I worked for a few years but mainly spent a lot of time immersed in the local scene, working on my style. I wanted a sound that would really fill a room' but with space, you know? I wanted a spare, expansive sound, I wanted to really hear the resonance in myself. About this time I met Hax."

Seemingly on the strength of reputation and blog buzz Quibbler signed a deal with Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Records, and entered the studio. "I know people think we're lo-fi, but everything on this album is so precise. It took us 16 months to record, and we were still mixing right up until it went to press. We used all analog equipment, with an emphasis on vintage and not reproduction, which was hard to find. For the first few months we did more shopping than writing or recording. When we were looking for a sound a lot of the time Hax had to crack open the equipment and work on it, actually solder wires and stuff. Sometimes we'd burn out the equipment and have to scrap it completely and start over. There's so much reverb on this record its hard to hear what I'm saying, and I like that."

She is known for her forward thinking aesthetic. "We wanted the right look. We had to think of what people would be doing when the album came out, and then try to predict what was 6 months beyond that, because we didn't want to just get lost in the mix. And the music is that way too. We wanted beachy but not garage, and we're definately shoe gaze but not chill wave. I was listening to a lot of witch house when I wrote the album, but I wanted to go for a singer songwriter approach to space beach dub. We talked a lot about it."

The album was released to good press. "We were so happy with how it turned out. When I put it on my turntable, and that's really the way to hear it, after spending so much time crafting it for all those spaces between the sound you need an analog format that will let you hear that space between the sound, anyway when I put it on I hear the bass bounce off the corner of the room and reverb back, and that plays off of the guitar echo and the perfect hollow snare sound we got. It's like another song going on in between all the parts we're playing. When we play it out it changes in each room and really even for each crowd, because so much of the sound is how the sound bounces around. It's amazing, I might sound conceited but I think I can in this case, I honestly feel this is one of the most groundbreaking pieces of music made since the advent of the internet. I used to go to the Museum of Television and Radio when I lived in New York, and watch film of Marlene Dietrich, and Odetta, and Patsy Cline and all those icons, and I'm ready to be one of them now."

And then the radio station played the song, and it sounded like everything else.

Denielle

Denielle had a fine arts degree from a fine arts college, a path she was set on by her parents who hired her a painting mentor in high school, who had taken her on a tour of the great European museums in middle school, who had bought her professional camera equipment in grade school, who had enrolled her in an alternative education preschool, and before that named her Denielle instead of Danielle and proceeded to snootily correct every nonminority who even came close to pronouncing the name in the traditional way from birth until the present day.

She excelled in her studies, pleasing her teachers and parents. After graduation she campaigned for an NEA grant on the suggestion of her peers. She secured it, dazzling at every turn, on the premise of 'A Multimedia Exploration of America." However, when Denielle set out on this exploration, she only found a vacuum. Rudderless she traveled around the country, painting landscapes and photographing steel canyons. Challenging local mores with shocking installations in the South, recording interviews with local legends in the west, but none of it came together for her. People looked at what she was trying to do, and then turned to her and asked questions. Denielle was tired of people looking at her, they had been doing it her whole life.

Denielle found herself in the desert, photographing the craggy face of a former fitness guru in the high atmosphereless contrast of the mesa. Shots of him with his proud barrel chest, his winning smile and twinkling eyes, looking like a wrinkly version of the same photographs used in comic book strong man ads in the 50s. When they were done Denielle packed away her equipment and the guru rose to leave. He shifted his weight forward and leaned heavily on his gnarled cane, gripping it with massive paws that turned a screaming white at the knuckles, as he forced himself upright. She saw him bent and precarious, eyes closed and face obscured as he put on his hat. Denielle threw her gangly arms in the air and yelled "Stop!"

She had traveled very far to find the small Nebraskan antique shop. The proprietor met her at the door, expecting the visit from the extensive phone calls and research that proceeded Denielle. Laid out were all of the Native American pieces, and she spied what she had come all this way for. Holding up the beaded moccasins Denielle explained "These belonged to a great leader of men. A scourge of the plains who vowed to beat the cavalry back to the Atlantic Ocean. He was a transcendental mystic that haunted the dreams of presidents and the gory pages of dime paperbacks." She held them out reverently for inspection.

"But they're so small." said the shop owner.

"I know," answered Denielle opening her camera bag. "That's why I like them."

Billy

Storms came up fast in Savannah. A stirring breeze blew off the sea and the crackling air hung heavily all summer, so Billy was often caught unaware, especially when strolling under the broad limbs of Forsyth Park, where the leaves blocked out the gathering clouds. He stood at the fountain, sinking into the patter of water on marble, finding stillness in his mind and abandoning tension. Billy was prone to knots in his stomach, seemingly biologic trepidation, and his psychologist suggested that he take time to center himself in the day. Without a map Billy found that this fountain was the center. The air drew in deeply, and gave a hollow buzz followed by a metallic crash and a brilliant salvo that left spots in his eyes. Shaking off the popping in his ears Billy realized the sound of water was not the fountain, but fat drops of rain splashing down on the bricks of the park. He looked out to Gaston Street and saw business men, dressed lightly for the summer heat, dashing for shops and doorways, and he had the greatest idea of his life.

"Why isn't there a Southern film industry?" He asked the waitress who brought his sandwich in a brown paper bag. She blinked at him. He found the knot in his stomach had been replaced by a spring. He worked in a book store and in the slow times explained to his coworkers that the South had produced its' own music, sports, literature and comedy, why was it happy to let California and New York make its' movies? "In India they have Bollywood. We couldn't call it Dollywood, but I'm sure we'll think of something."

The day had turned clear and blazing. Billy walked home like he always did, and was covered in a fine sweat by the time he got there. He was restless, like the sun was an eternally stoked furnace driving the pistons of his industry, and he began working around the house. First Billy did the neglected chores; washed dishes, swept and organized the books that had built up over time like deposits of silt. The sun hung stubbornly in the sky so Billy began lugging cinder blocks from the demolished shed at the corner of his yard and stacked them neatly in the alley. When he came to the bottom of the pile he was amazed to see the sun hadn't move. It was trying to boil him out, burn away the fission of his idea into entropy, but he could not be had. Billy took up and ax and began chopping at the stout tree stump eating up his yard like a carbuncle. Billy assaulted the low table of wood and then the thick subterranean fingers, grinding it into the earth with attrition. When he was done, stripped to the waist, slick and dripping like John Henry, he looked up to where the sun cowered below the horizon, a purple crimson flag of surrender beating its' retreat, and smiled knowing he would meet the bastard first thing.