Issue Four

Paul stood at the curb with his finger hooked under the mailbox latch and his will hesitating. The wind prodded dead leaves, like children’s fingers, against his trousers and his suit coat. He’d been wrestling with the anticipation of this moment all day long—morning shower, afternoon lunch hour, minutes ago at his ex-wife’s house while he waited for his daughter Sarah to finish packing for the weekend.

Sarah clutched the steering wheel of her father’s Ford Taurus idling at the driveway’s end. She was seventeen, had a driver’s permit and an eyebrow piercing and clothes several sizes too large for her. She smoked a cigarette she was forbidden to smoke by her mother. But Paul was the noncustodial parent.

“Is it in there, Dad?” she asked, leaning over the passenger seat.

Her voice shocked his finger and it flipped the mailbox open. A bill from Niagara Mohawk, a Shop-Mor flyer, and then what he’d expected—a greeting card inside an envelope yellow like flame, the return address just Henry Alan Jacoby in blocky print. Every October 28th for three consecutive years Paul had received a greeting card from Henry Alan Jacoby. An anniversary card.

With her father back in the car, Sarah pressed the garage door remote clipped to the sun visor.

“You want me to open it?” Sarah asked.

“No,” he said. He balanced the envelope atop his fingers—nearly weightless. It was almost possible to deny its existence. But now that he possessed it, he knew only wrenching curiosity. One surge of willpower arose, and the envelope was torn open.

A cartoon elephant wore a tuxedo and a bashful grin and held a wilted flower in his curled trunk. The caption beneath—“Bet’cha thought I’d forget our anniversary!”

And inside—“Elephants Never Forget!”—in rainbow letters.

Underneath, Henry Jacoby had written in his infantile print—“And I don’t forget about Maria.” Maria had been Henry Jacoby’s fiancée, and today was the anniversary of her death. Four years ago today, when she was eighteen, Paul had killed her.

The accident was not a memory for him. It was a constant, present occurrence. He could almost feel the moment just before the collision, the sublime comfort driving home from work settled into his car like a fetus in a womb. The dashboard panel glowing with healthy readouts as if from his own mindscape—everything full, revolving, not too fast. And then the woman on the curb with her arms stretched and wobbling like a highwire act, with her teeth and Halloween costume bright in the streetlights. She seemed a world away from him outside of his windows. Until the noise came like a glass caul shattering, and the blinding glare of his new life flooded in.

“What does it say?” Sarah asked. “The card?”

“Nothing threatening.”

Sarah inched the car into the garage. Paul leaned forward, wary of the door frame, wary of the riding lawnmower in the corner, wary of the back wall.

For dinner Sarah prepared beef strips and vegetables. Paul sat at the kitchen table and watched her scoop rice onto their plates, watched the steam rise. The lenses of her glasses fogged. She’d been thirteen when she and her mother had left this house, several months after Paul’s accident. She’d been a child then, suddenly entwined with tragedy and divorce like the silk threads of a cocoon. But she’d emerged so much an adult that she seemed tired of life already. Baggy clothes and no makeup, severe expressions, raw-bitten fingernails. Paul wanted to tell her to stop visiting him, to stop ruining herself for his sake, but she’d refuse.

“No brooding at the dinner table, Dad,” she said.

His jaw shuddered. He took a snow pea and chewed on it, trying to relax the taut muscles in his throat.

Sarah dropped into her chair. She hunched and forked hot vegetables into her mouth as if food had the power to quench all kinds of hunger. He realized his daughter was now almost the same age as Maria when she’d died; he could superimpose the image of his own daughter with Maria’s—Maria tumbling limp from his hood onto the pavement and in the moment of her death curling stiff and fetal like an unborn child.

After dinner they tried to watch reality police videos on television—slow motion car chases and crashes set to the music of sirens, ballets of speeding metal. The criminals staggered out of their wrecks with their faces blurred like some mystery that couldn’t be touched. Paul wasn’t reminded of his own accident because these televised moments were too extreme, too darkly comic, like the cards Henry Jacoby sent each year. Like the razor edge of rage itself. He didn’t see himself behind those blurred anonymous circles; he saw Henry Jacoby.

Paul knew where Henry lived and worked. He’d walked past both places several times in the last few years, trying to find the courage to speak to Henry. He didn’t know why, or what he’d say—none of that occurred to him. He was just possessed by a petrifying desire to stand face-to-face with the man who’s life he’d destroyed.

“I think I should talk to him,” Paul said.

Sarah watched her own hand gripping the couch armrest. Of course she knew whom her father meant. “Why?” she asked. “He’s making our lives miserable.”

“He doesn’t do anything,” Paul said, “Just sends a card once a year. He doesn’t ask any more from me. But I feel like—”

“What if he tries to hurt you?” Sarah asked.

“He would’ve already, if he wanted to.”

At eleven in the evening Paul walked several blocks to the all-night convenience store beside the railroad overpass, bought a pack of Necco wafer, and stood in the parking lot. He crunched on the powdery disks like a whole years communions hurried into five minutes. Across the street stood Alvin’s Pizza, a concrete box of a building, take-out only, Henry Jacoby’s place of employment. It was half-devoured by weeds and underbrush and trash. Everything had lunged down upon it from the train tracks overhead. Inside Alvin’s, figures moved within the hazy plate-glass windows, but Paul couldn’t see if one of them was Henry. In the dirt lot outside the pizza parlor sat a colorless sedan with an Alvin’s topper attached above the driver’s door; this was Henry’s car.

Paul finished the Neccos standing under the dim streetlights, wearing his suit coat and tie, shivering, feeling sugar and adrenaline become a volatile compound in his veins, wishing his daughter would call the cell phone in his pocket and deliver him from this.

He’d imagined this proximity to Henry would somehow clarify his need to speak with him. But only the desperation increased, and all his horizons closed inward. He had grown accustomed to his world steadily shrinking and now believed that nothing, not even forgiveness from Henry, could reverse the process.

He felt the accident had given Henry and him identical souls. They were both pulled by the same hulking weight like two cars in a rumbling freight train. But those greeting cards—they were vindictive and misdirected and they were wrong, Paul was certain, for Henry’s soul. They were broken pieces of Henry being sent through the mail, as tangible as severed tips of fingers, ears, grafts of skin.

Paul saw Henry shove through the front doorway of Alvin’s Pizza carrying two bulging garbage bags. He was a dwarfish young man, even shorter than Paul remembered. He lurched with thick-muscled thighs, awkward inside his own body. His pale blond hair hung in tangled strands like seaweed, uncut and unkempt since the funeral four years ago.

Henry lugged the bags around the back of Alvin’s Pizza, into the shadows of the hill dropping from the overpass.

Paul’s legs were certain to fail him if he stalled any longer. He hurried across the road. In the darkness he couldn’t navigate the path leading behind Alvin’s Pizza. He stumbled over prickly weeds and glass bottles, pressing his fingers against the concrete wall. Then, as he came around back, a motion-detector spread yellow light upon the rocky path and upon Paul himself, crouched like an intruder caught in the act.

Henry Jacoby squatted a few paces up the embankment, smoking a cigarette, tearing up chunks of dead grass from the earth. His Alvin’s shirt was dusted with flour and splotched with tomato sauce. His eyes, heavy-lidded, half shut, stared at Paul without seeming to stare, a casual glance paused in time.

“Paul Devan,” Henry said.

Paul stepped backward against the wall. He was suddenly conscious of how misguided his approach had been—sneaking through the darkness, caught, with no defense except, “Yes.”

“You got my card,” Henry said. He stood and descended the embankment, caused small avalanches of gravel with his scuffed black boots. He pressed his hands into the wall, grunting at the impact.

“I thought—because you sent the cards—you wanted to speak to me,” Paul said. He had never been so close to Henry before, near enough to see the hue of his flesh and the stubble in his jaw, to see him as something alive and not just a beacon of despair blaring from a distance.

“I just wanted to send you a card is all,” Henry said.

“Then please let me just speak to you. I’d like to talk.”

“About what?” Henry said. This time Henry’s eyes shoved into Paul so roughly that he winced and couldn’t speak.

“I got a delivery coming up here,” Henry said. “I’m going to go wash my hands—then say we go—on the delivery—in my car?”

A cricket screeched near Paul’s shoes.

“If you want to talk,” Henry said and crushed his cigarette against the wall. “I mean, it’s work here.”

Paul waited inside Henry’s car. His breath frosted the windshield and retraced the intricate curls of cigarette smoke patterned into the glass. He held his teeth together so they wouldn’t chatter. He wanted to call Sarah and tell her he’d become a prisoner of his own decisions, but Henry was coming out of Alvin’s carrying a red insulated bag stuffed with pizzas.

The driver door crumbled open. Henry slumped into the car and tossed the insulated bag on Paul’s lap. “Hold those,” he said. He turned the ignition. Something inside the engine screamed and didn’t stop.

They drove through the village under the massive overhanging trees that spilled their leaves. Everywhere gutted pumpkins grinned from porch steps and skeletons and witches swung hanged from tree limbs. It was not Halloween; it was three days prior, too imprecise for the reassurance of irony.

“Your wife?” Henry asked. He’d cracked his window down and the breeze tossed his yellow hair like fire.

“My wife and I divorced,” Paul said.

“Sorry,” said Henry. “It’s a shame when that—you know. Makes you wonder if getting married was worth it in the first place. I mean, was any of it worth anything?”

“I still love her,” Paul said. “And my daughter—”

“Right, your daughter. Sarah. What’s she now? Fifteen?”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen. Yeah, so, she must be worth it—the marriage.”

Henry pulled into a driveway curving behind a three-story apartment house. There, he shifted into park and said, “Two pizzas, apartment three.”

Paul lifted the bag off his lap with both hands. Henry pushed in the dashboard lighter and began slapping a new pack of cigarettes against his palm. In the quiet, waiting for the lighter to pop, Paul searched for something in Henry’s fidgeting hands and nonexpression, some message to decode from somewhere beneath all that hair and muscle.

“I’m actually glad you showed tonight,” Henry said. “You’re sort of a reminder of what I’m supposed to—whatever my life should be right now. It ain’t delivering pizza. Six years I been—”

“I’ll bring the pizza up,” Paul said.

“Go ahead, but that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying I quit.”

“Right now?”

“After you deliver those pizzas, right now.”

Outside the car Paul glanced back at Henry. He saw nothing but a cigarette cherry hovering in the car’s darkness. The topper glowed on the roof with its caricatured Italian chef tossing the words “Alvin’s Pizza” like dough.

Paul carried the insulated bag up a makeshift lumber staircase ascending the house’s exterior. The wind shoved open the lapels of his suit coat. He grasped the red bag like it was a flotation device, like clinging for life on raging waves. This was wrong, he decided, this offer to deliver the pizzas—an insignificant ploy to place himself inside of Henry’s life, shamefully misguided.

A girl Sarah’s age answered the door. She wore white face-paint and vampire teeth and fishnet stockings and a tight black dress hoisting her cleavage into a glimmering sweaty crease. Fake blood had leaked from her lips and chin and had dripped atop her breasts. When Paul closed his eyes to stop seeing, he saw more blood.

Maria had died in a costume, a long robe that had been shining white before the accident. A ghost or a priestess or something else—he never found out.

“You’re the pizza boy?” the girl asked and laughed like gagging.

Paul heard, from somewhere below, metal resounding with glass. The vampire girl didn’t seem to hear it. She held a fan of money and a half-empty beer bottle. Behind her blurred others in costume. Techno music thumped.

Back downstairs Paul discovered the clatter had been real; the Alvin’s Topper now lay broken on the concrete, the white plastic image scattered in milky shards. Henry paced the lot beside his idling car, nodding at the discarded topper like it was some curious anomaly he’d happened upon. He’d removed his Alvin’s shirt and exposed the white undershirt below, as if prepared for a brawl.

Paul approached Henry, braced for an attack he couldn’t defend, offering the girl’s pizza money at arm’s length. Henry glared at the money seemingly without recognition.

“I told you I quit,” he said. “So you can keep it.”

“I don’t—” Paul began.

“Where’s the bag?” said Henry. “You didn’t give them the bag?”

“The bag?”

“Never mind,” said Henry, snatching the money. “We need this for celebrating anyways. Drinks are on Alvin.”

Inside Henry’s car, Paul had given over to blind trust. They drove outside the Hammersport village limits, out on Route 104 past the dark expanses of corn and cabbage fields and the gnarled reaching appendages of trees gone bare. Paul knew he could be taken anywhere; anything could be done to him. His heart thumped heavy like that techno music, but the sensation was not thrilling. This was a somber offering of himself, and like faith in God he believed in what he was doing. He believed he deserved whatever was to happen.

They came upon a roadside shack that looked like it’d been dropped from the sky. “Rudy’s,” said a hand-painted sign propped against the roof. A neon MGD flickered in the only window. Henry parked in the trampled grass lot beside two other cars and then, without a word, he exited the car.

Paul hesitated for a moment. He considered calling Sarah, but he knew the longer he watched oncoming headlights flash into streams of taillights, the greater would be his urge to escape from here. He fought the competing forces of whim and conscience, unable to identify which was which. Then he followed Henry inside.

Bare overhead bulbs shed a harsh light upon the three people already inside—a female bartender in sweatpants and flannel and frizzled black-gray hair, a plump and sweaty Mexican in a Yankee’s cap playing solitary pool at the bar’s only table, and of course Henry, already slumped on a barstool. Henry tossed back a shot of something clear without flinching at the taste. He followed it with a gulp of draft beer. No one turned toward Paul as he entered, as if he had arrived unseen, a spirit.

His shoes crushed discarded peanut shells as he moved to sit beside Henry. A lifesize cardboard Budweiser girl watched him, stoic and flat and unsexy. On a mounted TV set, ZZ Top videos intercut with Blue Angels flight footage.

Henry didn’t acknowledge Paul’s presence. Not until the bartender stepped toward Paul, raising her eyebrows, did Henry say, “Whatever he’s having’s on me.”

“You a friend of Hank’s?” she asked, smiling carefully.

Paul nodded.

“Another whiskey here,” said Henry.

“A rum and Coke, I think,” Paul said.

He hadn’t drunk—been drunk—in many years. He’d been so careful about drinking in the months and years surrounding the accident and divorce, not even daring to sip beer or a wine cooler for fear of how liquor might assault his nerves. He couldn’t remember the last time; it was lost in his mid-twenties, back when his life belonged to himself and nothing else. Back when he was Henry’s age and couldn’t have imagined this. He looked at Henry’s face in this blaring light, still dotted with acne, still young and able to disguise pain.

In body they were such different men; within twenty minutes Henry had drunk enough to poison Paul. But in spirit they were the same.

Paul drank two rum and Cokes in highball glasses and began a third. He felt the alcohol spread into his arms and legs like a euphoric flu, atrophying and awakening the muscles simultaneously, flushing through the wrinkles in his brain, killing and resurrecting as it went. He wanted to flee more passionately, but felt an unnatural comfort atop the barstool. He was ashamed to have dulled the noise of his heart with booze, but proud to have thrust himself so deeply into Henry’s world.

The radiating power of Henry’s otherness had begun to dissipate. Perhaps Paul had found the means for reaching Henry—a dual intoxication, seeping barrier by barrier through their defenses until the raw cores of their beings were simultaneously penetrated, and they bled together.

Paul spoke to the bartender—Rudy, the name on the sign—but the words from his mouth seemed foreign. She leaned on the counter, touched his hand, spoke his name as if she’d known him forever, just as she knew Henry, surely. She spoke carefully about the accident. She knew Maria; she knew Paul had killed her.

“Tragedy,” Rudy called it, instead of death.

For a moment he believed a person, maybe Rudy, could be a like surgeon, cutting into you with words instead of a scalpel, removing the malignant past.

Henry had been sitting beside Paul, but now he wasn’t. He stood with the Mexican at the pool table. Both of them held cues and watched the colored balls slip across the faded green surface. Jesus was the Mexican’s name, Paul somehow knew.

When Henry was beside Paul again, his arm slung over Paul’s shoulders, so that he smelled Henry’s acidic sweat and yet didn’t mind. They were pointing at Paul’s glass, even Paul himself, though he didn’t know why. Rudy filled it again from a bottle of rum—no Coke.

Somewhere a familiar noise, short and repeating. Everyone—Jesus, Henry, Rudy—was involved in locating the source of this sound. Everyone joined the game, but Henry became the winner because he held Paul’s cell phone, pointing at the shuddering red light as it rang again for the hundredth time.

“My daughter,” Paul said too weakly for anyone to hear.

Henry walked over by the dartboard, turned his back to them, raised the phone to his ear and spoke words that were lost by the distance. He is speaking to Sarah, Paul thought. The realization burned inside his stomach like a pill he’d unwittingly swallowed. He might’ve wrestled the phone from Henry’s grasp, but someone’s hand—Jesus’?—held him gently seated.

“Where are we going?” Paul asked. The lights of the bar had faded away, faint on the horizon. They were in the car again—warm thrusts from the heating vents in his face, the smell of burning dust. He tried to look at the road in headlight beams, but the yellow dashes shot at him fast as prizefighter punches.

“I’m driving you home,” Henry said. “Your daughter’s orders.”

“I’m sorry,” Paul said, but there were so many things for which to apologize. Paul realized now his intoxication had stranded any hope of navigating toward that island sunken inside of Henry. He was lost upon the ocean between them. He tried to deny it, sit up straight, breathe deeply, revive that sense of reason and sobriety that had drowned so far below the surface.

“Why’d you come here?” Henry said.

Paul tried to gather an answer from the garbage pile in his mind.

“You want me to stop sending the cards?” Henry said.

“No,” Paul said. “Not at all.”

“You like them or something? You think they’re funny?” Henry’s pronunciation of words was slightly askew, his tone abruptly caustic; Paul wondered without judgment how drunk Henry was himself.

“No,” said Paul. “Keep sending the cards if it helps.”

“It don’t help.”

“I came—I thought I could do something.”

“Did I ask you for anything?”

“What?” Paul asked. They seemed to be driving much faster now.

“I said did I ask you for anything. How could you help me?”

“I don’t know. I thought—”

“You thought?”

“I thought you might tell me,” Paul said.

“Money might help,” Henry said.

Paul fumbled into his pocket for his billfold.

“Jesus, Paul,” Henry said. “Put your wallet away.”

Hands grabbed at him from everywhere, clutched his shoulders and arms, tried to pull him down or keep him up. Henry’s murmuring and Sarah’s careful whisper—it was their hands that led him up the porch steps. Their hands that he brushed away, because he could walk into his own house. At least he could do that.

He was in the kitchen again, at the same table where he’d sat for beef strips and vegetables what seemed like so long ago. Years ago, he would have guessed, if not for Henry seated across from him eating the evening’s leftovers that Sarah had microwaved. Paul drank ice water from a glass and swallowed the aspirin his daughter had given him.

Where was Sarah now? Leaning against the kitchen counter, a passive observer with her arms crossed and lips pressed bloodless by her teeth. Watching Henry shovel food into his mouth and wash it down with a can of beer he must have brought from Rudy’s. Paul wished Sarah would look exhausted at this late hour, like anyone should, but her eyes peered sharply from behind her lenses. She had become so precise, and just seventeen years old, just a child who had already dissected and organized the secrets of her own instinct.

“It’s been so long since I’ve eaten something real,” Henry said. “I just don’t ever. You’ve no idea how it’s been.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Sarah said. She sat at the table now.

Paul was finally home with the smell of his own kitchen and the buzzing of his own refrigerator and the shape of his own seat cushions. But as he watched Henry across the table, invading this private landscape, Paul realized even greater unease than he’d felt at Rudy’s. Henry’s presence had always been in this room—it remained constant with Paul like his own reflection—but now Henry was here in body and Paul could see so clearly his own separateness from this man. In the familiar light of his own kitchen, Paul recognized in Henry something he hadn’t seen before, something inauthentic. It wasn’t an outright mask, but Henry seemed to have the power to calculate his own grief, to manipulate when and how it would manifest. He wasn’t making mistakes.

“Just relax, Dad,” Sarah said. She reached for his glass and raised it toward him. “Drink your water or you’ll have a massive hangover in the morning.”

His daughter had begun to untangle the ropes of an unwieldy marionette from his fingers. He felt shame that was diluted by a rush of comfort and pride, knowing that his daughter had the strength to carry Henry and him both. Even as Paul watched, Henry revealed three wallet-size photographs, wrinkled and faded atrocities that Sarah held and studied like they were priceless heirlooms. But of course they were priceless—photographs of Maria. In the pictures, Paul noticed Maria’s dark Hispanic features, a tendency toward Bohemian dress, a confident naiveté in her smile.

“You don’t know,” Henry said. “Four years and still—”

“She’s beautiful,” said Sarah.

“Not much older than you,” said Henry.

Paul felt as if he was witnessing two enemies conspiring against him, but a thread of rationality warned him not to say a word, that paranoia was groundless, that Henry and Sarah had come to a place where he couldn’t follow.

Paul drank a sip of water; he wanted to have the cold liquid washing through and dousing the alcohol that had crippled him. And then, Henry glanced at Paul. Just a flicker of his eyes.

Something like a word passed between them, a silent communication. For an instant Paul sensed the grief that had been pressing into Henry these years. Again he saw the moment on the night it had begun, when Henry came rushing into the street after Maria. Yes, Henry was there too, drunk and unstable, just as Maria had been when she slipped off the curb into Paul’s sudden car. The weight of Henry’s panic and grief must have been too much to bear, shoving him down on the concrete, forcing him to crawl on hands and knees toward Maria and her blood and her silence. Paul had watched as Henry reached for her bare ankle first and grasped it and pulled himself closer, pressed his fingers into her glistening brown shin. He grabbed like a lover overcome with lust.

But now a new image appeared in this mental film that Paul had played over so many thousands of times—the ghost of Maria: a gray, shapeless, sexless figure, a heaviness that did not float but dragged across the ground toward both Henry and Paul at the same moment, that dug its way inside them, past everything that made them different men. And now he could see the true shape of their spirits—how the ghost of Maria had sculpted them both differently. How foolish he’d been to believe they were identical—that Henry, who had loved Maria with such angry passion, wouldn’t feel so much angrier and more passionate with her death trapped inside of him.

Paul had lost only himself.

An afterimage of Maria’s ghost still lingered in Paul’s sight, here in the kitchen, settling and melting upon Sarah like snow. As if Henry saw the image himself, he reached and grasped Sarah’s forearm, shutting his eyes against the intensity of the touch.

“Don’t—” Paul said. He pushed away from the table. The water glass fell and shattered on the floor. He tried to rise, pleading, “Don’t,” but Henry and Sarah watched him as if he wasn’t really there, just a ghost himself. And he felt himself getting lighter, turning white, his body fizzing apart like tonic had supplanted his blood.

“Where am I?”

“Daddy, you’re just in bed. You passed out. We put you in bed.”

There were shapes in his bedroom. One spoke to him but the other lingered behind, watching. He felt that the one just watching could see everything about him. Everything he’d ever thought and felt.

“I have to—” Paul said.

“Daddy, please. It’s okay. I’ll take care of it.”

He awoke several times in the night believing he’d heard strange noises in distant parts of the house. He had dreams of waking and trying to stand against the oppressive weight of the air around him. Finally he stood, still wearing his tie but no jacket and no shoes, and he knew this was no dream because his brain swelled against the confines of his skull, full of fiery lesions. He would’ve vomited if his stomach hadn’t dried into a leathery sack.

Through the hallway into his living room—Paul saw the hazy shapes of furniture and the familiar colors of his home, but everything inside and out was silent. Dawn had not yet broken, but the pain in his head had granted him a gray, pale sight.

“Sarah?” His vocal cords had hardened into twigs.

Henry’s sedan was gone from the driveway. Paul observed this without passion. The liquid fuel of his emotions had evaporated. He saw but did not consider the traces of Henry still remaining in the house—the empty beer can on the kitchen table and beside it the three damaged photographs of Maria that he’d left there. Paul didn’t want to take the pictures and see Maria’s face anymore. He recognized only the heaviness in his loins, his urge to urinate.

He opened the bathroom door without wondering why it had been closed. He groped for the light switch, but his thick fingers couldn’t find it. He didn’t need the light; his mind’s fire shined into the room and illuminated the figure of his daughter sitting in the bathtub, naked, hugging her knees against her chest. Her hair was drying in knots against her back, against the rutted curve of her spine and her rib bands. The water in which she sat didn’t ripple and was cold now; Paul knew without having to touch it. He stared, not thinking of her nudity.

“Please don’t turn on the light,” she said. Her voice came from somewhere else. There were no clothes anywhere in the bathroom.

“Sarah,” he said. He hadn’t been fully awake after all, because now a stronger awakening burst into his mind.

She tried to stand—a crude fumbling of porcelain, water, and skin. “Sarah,” he said again. She did not answer. She exposed herself to him lazily, as if her shame had been anesthetized by what she’d done.
He turned away from her, back toward the kitchen where the photographs of Maria lay spread about the table. Maria smiled, and her ghost filled him with a relentless weight that no man could haul without crumbling to his knees.

Derek Nikitas has published stories in The Ontario Review. He teaches creative writing at the State University of New York at Brockport, and is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He is currently at work on a novel and a collection of stories.