Jug Wine: My NYCMidnight entry

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been entering contests. Will I win any of them? I don’t know. But I’m playing the law of averages. I submitted my book for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, the Black Lawrence Press Big Moose Prize, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for the Novel; as well as a short story contest. It is the NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge and I had eight days to write a story on a prompt. It had to have a magician, a surprise party and be in the genre of a ghost story. So here it is:

JUG WINE

She’d stayed for an extra drink at Grandma’s, even though it would make her late for Marshall.

And it had.

That’s why she was hurrying, and speeding, when the ice slush along the berm of Carpenters Corners’ curves grabbed onto her wheels and pulled her Honda, off the road and over, into the trees below, where the nose of her car would bend, then fold and tear around a thick old oak.

x x x

She was home on break and had seen him that morning, first time in eight months, at the store.

Her mother had needed flour and eggs, and Abigail had found Marshall in the canned goods, stocking shelves.

She had known him since Bible school. His hair always as yellow and his eyes always as blue as the crayons of that time. He was cute even then, and cute enough to give up her black and white cookies, lie, say she didn’t like them, then slide them on her napkin to him.

She said hi to him in the store. She’d wedged her hands into her pants pockets and watched his.

He was kneeling, moving cans from the pallets at his feet to the shelves above. He asked her about her classes, because she’d gone off to college and he wouldn’t for another half a year. She wanted to say, but didn’t, that it’s always dark there, at school. There’s no people, just books.

She lied, said classes were good, and noticed there weren’t more cans on the shelf where it had seemed he’d been placing them. There were fewer and fewer with each swipe. He was taking them.

She asked, “Where they all going?”

He blushed and flexed his fingers toward her, gave an aw-shucks shrug, said, “Magic.”

They had drifted apart before high school. She had heard he had taken up magic, that he would troll the halls, work up one side of lockers, then the other, with coin tricks, pulling flowers from places.

So Abigail waited by her locker until the day he came to her and held his deck of cards out.

She said, “Magic, huh?”

And he said, “David Copperfield’s with Claudia Schiffer, you know.”

“So you think girls are going to go for that,” she said, and his eyes stayed down at his cards and he said, “you tell me.”

He held them out again and she pulled one out, cupped her hand around it, playing along, and brought the eight of diamonds toward her eyes. She read and replaced it, and he looked deep into her, his eyes moving like he was sorting through a stack of magazines. He looked close enough, it seemed, to read each of the red squares in there, and said, “Eight of Diamonds.” She was surprised for a moment, that he had done it, and thought more. She wondered, while he was sifting through, what else had he read inside of her. What kinds of secrets had she left lying about.

With customers pushing past them, she asked if he wanted to come over. She was having a Christmas party, she joked. Just the two of them and a jug of wine. She said, “I could tell you what college is really like.” He said he wanted to, but couldn’t. He was a having a party. And she laughed as if he was joking, too. He said it was at the abandoned barn behind his parents’ house. A surprise party. For Ashley Suntheim.

Abigail pulled her eyebrows together and shook her head. She didn’t understand. He had gone into magic to impress girls, but nobody had explained to him that it wouldn’t. That it was a liability. And she didn’t mind. He could keep at it, conquer the hardest parts, learn how to make something disappear, and some Christmas she would come home from school with scars on her hands and cold inside, and by magic, he’d still be there.

He invited her though. Said she had to come. Said he was going to do a big trick. Biggest ever. He was going to disappear.

And maybe what was most confusing was that Ashley was a pretty girl. Worked too hard at it, maybe. Was 17 and dyed her hair. Tried to make it some new and perfect color between blond and brunette.

But still she was more beautiful than any girl Abigail assumed Marshall would have.

He’d have me, she thought, and that’s where the bar was supposed to be.

x x x

Abigail had tried at school. Had found a boy in her Beat literature class who wore a lot of black and perpetually carried Kerouac’s “Desolation Angels” like it held his arm to his body. And even though she knew it was backwards, she wrote him poems and used words like “midnights” and “crows” to try to explain to him the way she understood his beauty.

And eventually he bought them tickets to a show downtown. A little known guy that they both had known that wore black hoodies and strummed an acoustic guitar on a stool and moaned.

He told her to take the bus downtown, to meet him there. And she took an empty liter pop bottle and filled it with wine and stood outside with no ticket. When it was dark, when the low registers of the man moaning on stage started seeping through the walls, she took the bus back home, got another bottle of red, and stumbled back out into the night. To his apartment, under his window, calling his name over the music and female voice that vibrated through the windows. She called his name and stumbled back; and called again and stumbled back, stumbled back and fell back onto her bottle. The glass made lightning bolt lacerations down her fingers and into her hands. She went home to wash the blood away, and after she’d bloodied their door, its knob, and bloodied her own bed, her roommate drove her to the ER and the doctors sewed her up.

The roommate, and of course the boy, hadn’t looked at her since. It seemed like no one had.

x x x

Abigail stared at the burned out husk of her car. It looked as light as burnt newspaper, and seemed to flutter with the wind. She held her arms out and wondered if it’d move her too.

It didn’t. She looked to the seat where her body had been and still should have been. She wondered how long it’d been since she was gone, since her seat was empty, and wondered if Marshall, too, had already done his trick and disappeared.

She’d brought the jug wine for him. Because before, or after, his party, his magic, his Ashley, she hoped, she could use it. And if he wouldn’t admit what he felt for her, they would drink and she would convince him.

The jug was in the backseat. The door was likely sealed shut by the heat, crushed closed by the crash, but she didn’t even pull on it, just pushed her arm through, to the jug. It was wedged under and somehow protected by the seat, just its glass discolored, and she maneuvered it up and out the broken window.

She held the jug to her belly and wondered if he’d be able to see her and hear her. And as she thought of the answer, she cried for the first time. To mourn herself. To mourn being alone in the world. To mourn soon losing Marshall, too. But he was just on the other side of the trees and she hurried through them. She balled her fists around the jug and stomped as she walked, hoping to make the sound of feet through ice or snapping twigs, the sounds of life, instead of just being a whisper through the woods.

Through the other side, she found the barn, rough and old and faded. She’d heard and he had told her before, that’s where he worked on the tricks and created his magic. With her own kind of magic, she could have walked through the back wall, but hoped instead to walk around, pull open the front door, a huge hatch on wheels. She hoped he’d turn toward the sound and see her. And tell her, that they should forget all of this, the trick, the party, and just go to the woods, the two of them, hide from the people that would come and drink her wine.

But she set the jug just outside, pushed the door so it rattled, stood in the opening, and he looked, but didn’t see her.

He went back to what he was doing, up on a raised platform, where, when it was a farm, they’d stack round bales, now his stage. It was some kind of rehearsal, some choreography. He waved his arms, a cape in his hands, and stomped out a rhythm. She walked toward him and he waved the cape like a bullfighter in front of himself, then was gone, under it.

She waited for a moment and he climbed out from behind his stage and back up on it and did the dance again. And this time, as he stomped, she walked toward the stage, and through it, into the dark compartment below and waited. His stomps filled the cavern, and then he came, dropped down through, then sat a moment to breathe.

She stared at him, the gaps in the boards of the stage making yellow lines across his face. She thought of touching him. She held her hand out to do it, but didn’t.

“Marshall,” she said, hoping he’d hear instead.

But his eyes were closed, working over the trick.

And she said, “Marshall,” louder. And he didn’t hear. And she yelled again and punched the wood belly of the stage. It gave off a hollow boom and he opened his eyes and skittered back, pushing himself by his hands.

Alone again, she shook her head. She didn’t know how to do this without scaring him.

The front door rattled again, and it was followed by the muffled voices of people coming in.

Marshall crawled around, out of sight, and she walked out the stage’s front, to find the new boys, Marshall’s age, all in caps, bringing bottles and cakes. They covered a table with the things they brought and the things they’d accumulate as the barn filled with people and music, until a girl darted in, shushed the crowd and said, “she’s coming.”

Abigail pushed through the teenagers, not feeling them and them not feeling her, to see Ashley And when she did, the crowd yelled, “surprise,” and Ashley’s green eyes swelled wide and her long lashes fluttered, and she moved past Abigail, angled past a few more bodies, found Marshall and wrapped her arms around him, squeezed him and kissed his cheek.

Someone turned the music back up, and Abigail followed Marshall and Ashley outside. Ashley held his hands in hers, looked down to them, then up to his eyes, and said, “This is amazing. This so much.” And she kissed him. On the mouth.

Abigail shook her head, went back in with the crowd and paced around it. She wasn’t sure of what she’d do, but when Marshall walked up the center of the crowd and jumped on the stage, she went to stand at the front. They ratcheted the music up and he worked his hands through the air, producing coins, making them disappear. All things they’d seen before, but they clapped, because they knew it was just a prelude. Abigail looked back to Ashley, hovering in the middle of the crowd, eyes still wide like she was holding her breath, and Abigail, because she couldn’t watch, went into the stage.

She knew the dance and listened for the stomps. The trap door came down, and she knew what would come.

And she couldn’t let it.

She stood, pushed up on the door, and its edge caught his feet as he tried to fall. He shuddered, and part of him made it through, but just one leg. The other, the shin of it, smacked the stage, shot his hands forward; his face and nose smacked against the wood. He fell and the cape fell, too, and covered him in the darkness below. Then he ran, as soon as he’d landed, out the back, hand over his face. She yelled, “I didn’t mean to,” and followed him outside, to watch him run into the woods.

Abigail could hear the awws and gasps from inside, and moved around the barn, to the front, to where she’d left her wine.

He was crying when she found him. Back up against a tree. She set the jug nearby, dropped an acorn to it, and he found it by the sound. He moved back to his seat, uncapped the jug, gulped, and let the excess run down his throat.

“I’ll make it up to you,” she said, standing in front of him, talking so softly he wouldn’t have been able to hear anyway. “I could help your magic. Even Ashley.”

He was chugging from the bottle, it a quarter empty; and he chugged again and it was half empty, drinking like he meant to hurt himself.

“You just don’t know what it’s like,” she said, and wiped at her eyes like there might be saline there. “It’s just so lonely.”

And as his eyes sagged, and his head too, she realized he did know. Ashley wasn’t coming for him. They couldn’t survive this.

So she went back, to the bottom of the barn, where they kept the tools and found a length of rope. And tied it as she returned, hurrying, excited.

And she wrapped one end to the tree, and tied the other around his neck, looking into his eyes as she did, saying, “We were so lonely where you are now. But this way we won’t be.”

And he was so drunk, when she tugged on the rope, he stood. And she tugged, and he was on his toes.

Teetering, eyes rolling.

And Abigail was crying, from the tension in the rope, and pulled harder when she heard footsteps cracking. And when she saw it was the three boys that were first to the party, she panicked, pulled down hard, and he was in the air. But one of the boys had grabbed him. Had hoisted him so he could breathe, and the others were tearing at the rope. And even though they couldn’t see her, she backed away, and wandered, holding her hands around her neck, hoping she could find someone to help.

Christmas Magic

EDITOR’S NOTE: Every year, this time of year, my mother labors over a Christmas card. Sometimes it takes her months to work out the idea out of it, before even sitting down with scissors and glue, potato stamps or whatever the card requires, to actually make it, constructing each one by hand. I’ve never been good with scissors — my stars are never symmetrical — but consider this my Christmas card.

It had started after Jorge checked all the normal places – the closet, under his mother’s bed, under the big pile in the garage – and found presents, but not enough for two boys, not enough for both him and his brother.

He didn’t blame his brother for that, but when he pushed the Frosty DVD into the player, got down in his bean bag chair, and leaned onto his knees with his fingers on his mouth like he’d seen thinking people do, he meant to do something very important.

He had watched the cartoon about the living snowman each year, each and every year of his life. But all those years it had only been on TV and they played it too fast. He had stood up next to the screen, nose leaving an oil dot on the TV glass. He pried his eyes open with his fingers but all the details blurred. He couldn’t tell what he needed to know – how the magic soaked in, where it came from, if it sparked like static from the hat to the snowman’s crown.

But Jerry from School had Frosty on DVD and Jorge had pretended to like him enough to be invited over to make snowforts and stole that DVD and this Christmas would finally figure it out, how it worked, how to make his own man of snow to dance, and sing, to teach to curse and hide his brother in his snow belly like a mobile, humanoid jail.

He squeezed the remote tight in his fist, the plastic crinkling and creaking, thumbing the rubber edges of the pause button, ready to rewind and pause and rewind and pause, ready to inspect each Technicolor frame. He knew it was about 20 minutes in, but watched it all, reciting the dialogue of each child and each simple woodland rodent and then the mad magician with a snear. And when the freckle faced kid sitting on the shoulders of the plump boy with donut dust on his coat collars got the silk hat brim just over the top ball of snow, Jorge was nearly out of the bean bag, hunched over and bent in half with tension.

And just as the hat dropped, just as Jorge felt the magic like fear of heights, like goosebumps, like static, Jorge’s brother, Matthew, swooped in, his arm like a hawk wing with a claw. And because the magic had loosened Jorge’s grip, his brother, Matthew, his little brother, even, yanked, and the remote came free, and even before Jorge could understand, as he looked beside him and around him hoping to find it, hoping the magic moment hadn’t gotten too far, Matthew was sitting on his knees, nose up at the screen, calm. There, now, Frosty gone, a small cartoon boy – made with sharper lines and older colors – with thin cartoon boy hair, drug a blue blanket across a stage and spoke quietly in a darkened theater about shepherds and stars.

Jorge thought of standing, walking to his brother and punching him in his ear. But he had done it before, and still Matthew had done this.

Jorge didn’t even yell, just stood and walked to the fireplace, not far behind his brother, and found a long, thick splinter, pulled it out, carried it, carefully out from his body, its flame wavering in the air, to his brother. And because he knew it’d burn a patch down through Matthew’s orange hair and to the skin, leave enough pain and much more smell, he did and it did and the horrible stench of it filled the room and brought their mother. Matthew’s hand was on his head, over the burn, face scrunched up to fake out some tears, and their mother, who had been washing dishes and brought with her a plate in each yellow gloved hand, raised the plate in her right hand and slammed it to the carpet. It chunked and sprinkled into the shag.

Looking at the boys, and holding the other plate in the air, she pointed out the sliding glass door beside her, and before she could flinch with the hand holding the second plate, the boys had drug their snowpants and coats out the door and outside, and were scrunching up like caterpillars on the cement slab porch to pull the snowpants on, before sneaking glances through the glass at their mother, slipping on their boots and coats, their hats and then dragging their only sled, heavy with wood and runners, down the hill and into the field.

“Why’d you do it,” the younger asked. Matthew was rubbing his head but Jorge drug the sled and Matthew followed and Jorge couldn’t see. Jorge answered, “I did it for us, Matthew.”

“Don’t you believe in Santa?”

“You know that I do. And don’t you think Jesus brings us all the toys?”

“It might make more sense.”

Jorge stopped and turned and looked at his brother.

“Make more sense than what? Just a tiny bit of Christmas Magic helping Santa make all of our Christmas wishes come true? And it just takes a little bit of it, Matthew. And it’s just out there.” In one hand was the sled rope; the other he threw over his head. “Somehow this time of year it’s out there. And I’m going to prove it to you.”

Matthew’s head was down. He said, “What I understand is that we’re not supposed to hurt each other. Even Santa says that.”

“You think Baby Jesus would bring you trucks and video games? And you should see what Mom got us.”

“She didn’t get us anything?”

Jorge turned and started walking and shook his head, and said, “Not enough.”

Matthew shook his head but Jorge didn’t see. And the sled’s runners whispered through the snow, through the stubbled over cornfield, past the abandoned barn, through the woods, around its downed and rotted trunks, over the shells of puddled ice, rasped against rocks, to the hill above the pond.

“You don’t understand anything,” Jorge said. He moved the sled by the rope and pointed it, at the top of the hill, down to the ice covered pond. “Santa’s just got that tiny sled and can only bring so much. The parents have to buy the rest of the toys. And that’s how they say they love you. The more presents you get the more they say they love you. There’s magic and there’s logic. And this is logic.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Matthew said. “Mom said it’s harder with just one.”

Jorge held his hand out for his brother to get down on the sled, and when he did, Jorge said, “No, she’s saying she doesn’t love you.” And when he said it, when he thought of what he was going to do, he was telling himself that he just wanted to scare his brother. Into understanding. Jorge bent low, put his shoulder into his brother’s back, and pushed and ran behind, and pushed the whole way down the hill, as far as he could, until he was rolling, his head on the ground, his feet in the sky. He hoped the sled’s runners would hit the lake ice and be faster than Matthew had ever gone. As fast as an out of control car. So fast that he would go sidewise, hold the rope to his chin, shake his head and cry.

And when Jorge found his feet again, rolled onto his knees and looked out to the ice, his brother was sidewise, his eyes clenched tight, like having them closed would make him disappear. And then he disappeared. Into the ice.

Jorge breathed in for a minute or more, blinked the cold, dry air and that image away from his eyes, stood and ran. He tumbled in the loose snow around a patch of weeds, lost his glove, rolled and ran. And on the ice, his boots and feet jolted out from under him and he fell to his chest, and knocked the air from himself. He scrambled and pulled with his hands, the nails of his ungloved hand catching on the sharp imperfections of the ice, and he drug himself, another body’s length to where the ice had opened up, to a black hole of water. A hole big enough for a boy, his sled.

He tried to look into the black water, moving his head to look past his own reflection, and wondered if his brother was gone. He hated him, sure, he thought, but he didn’t want him gone. He was shaking his head with his answer, no, and plunged his hand into the water. Recoiled from the cold, but moved his arm around, hoping to knock into something firm, an arm, even a head, anything to grab onto and pull. But he was only splashing, and used his elbows against the ice, to pull himself closer to the hole, and when he still felt nothing, into the hole, the ice a half-foot above the water, his desperate breaths making hollow sounds in between. He reached and squirmed and kicked and found a hand.

He squeezed and pulled and yanked, and had the arm out, then the head, it wobbling and rolling as he tugged. And his brother’s body bent and curved over the lip of the ice as he did. And with his brother out of the darkness of the water, with the blue of his skin marbled in the light, Jorge’s eyes were wide and he gasped, and pulled him, his brother’s back on the ice, walking backwards with his brother’s hands in his. His brother still and his eyes closed. Jorge could see his mother yelling again, louder, the sound coming from her guts this time, and plates chunking. It was his fault.

He had seen things like CPR and mouth-to-mouth on television shows but didn’t believe them. He needed to save his brother and to save his brother, he needed something he believed in.

He pulled Matthew to the bank and to the snow and got down beside him and began to pack the snow around his head. Under his jaw and around his ear, over his head and covered his eyes. It made Matthew’s mouth obvious. His lips still and blue. Crumbles of snow around it. And Jorge took in a big breath, yanked at the cuff of his hat around his ears, then pulled it off his head. He knelt beside his brother, beside his head, and with his hat in his hands, a blue and black zigzagged stocking cap, he began to stretch the hat, to make it big enough for his brother’s snowhead. But it was too large, his snowhead, and Jorge was frantic. He knew you had to breathe and Matthew wasn’t. He was tearing at the cuff, the elastic of it, tearing it to fit. Looking from the accordioned elastic to his brother’s mouth, pulling and crying.

And as the hat began to give and stretch and reach around his brother’s crown, an arm came up, Matthew’s, and Matthew’s hand knocked away the snow, away from his nose, his mouth, spitting as he shot up, and chunks of snow falling from the top of his head. He sat up and the boys looked at each other. Matthew’s teeth began to chatter and Jorge tried to bend his mouth to look angry and not sad, as his tears betrayed.

In his nose and behind it, Jorge was filled with snot, and he snorted and gasped as he tried to clamp off the crying. He rubbed and wiped, with the ungloved hand under his nose. He said, “Mom’s going to be so mad at you.”

Jorge stood and grabbed his brother’s mittened hand with his still gloved hand, turned toward the horizon, behind which they lived, and without looking again at his brother, began to walk, and pull his brother as they climbed the hill.

It was Jorge who had burned his brother’s hair and then killed him, but Matthew didn’t ask why their mother would be angry at him, even though Jorge expected the question. Jorge worried that meant there was something still broken in his brother, but because if he began to talk, he would begin to cry, he didn’t say anything, till they were past the hill, huffing, and Matthew said, “Do you think Jesus did it?”

“What?” Jorge said.

“Well, you made me die, right? And now I’m alive, right? How else could you explain it?”

Because it seemed obvious to Jorge, he shook his head, and said, “how could it be Jesus?”

“Don’t you ever think it’s Jesus? Couldn’t it, every once and a while have to be Jesus?”

“No,” Jorge said and threw the sled’s rope down. “No. I packed snow around your head. Didn’t you feel the snow? I packed snow around your head and put a hat on your snowman head. How could it be anything but Christmas Magic.”

“That’s just a cartoon, Jorge.”

“If it was Jesus, why didn’t he make you float on water? Isn’t that what he does? I saved you with Christmas Magic. I saved you by making you a snowman. What more proof do you need? You don’t have any poof.”

“I have proof,” Matthew said, his teeth chattering again, his snow clothes still dripping. “I’m just cold.” He looked blue in the dark, even in his eyelids when he closed them, and when he opened them, he looked to the sky, now purple and darkening, and said, pointing, “there! I knew if it was Jesus there’d be a star.”

There was one star, high in the sky, still faint with the sun lingering, but one star all the same.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Jorge said.

“You’re right. We have to follow it.”

And they did, until the woods, and looked up through the bare branches and followed it through.

“Where’s it at?” Jorge asked.

“Just follow it,” Matthew said, and he took the lead. And at the barn, its walls and boards frayed, it dark, Matthew said, “Here. We’ll figure it out here,” and he shivered. He climbed the hill to the huge door, to its handle, and pulled on it, made it rumble in its track. He grunted and walked it open, tugging in fits till he gained momentum. Jorge slipped in as soon as the door would allow, scanned the dark, the straw strewn across the floor, the work bench, an old lawnmower and said, “nothing here,” before his brother had the door open.

There was more light now – the open door letting the moon in – and Matthew walked to the edge of the puddle of light and squinted into the dark.

“There really isn’t anything in here,” Jorge said.

Matthew turned, his soaked mitten on his hip, his eyebrows scrunched up, and said, nearly yelling, “You haven’t proved anything, Jorge.”

“I made you a snowman and I saved you.”

“Jesus saved me,” Matthew yelled, throwing his hands down.

“I could have made you fly like a reindeer or put you up a chimney. I saved you with Christmas Magic.”

Matthew was staring into Jorge, but his eyes drifted, beside his brother then to behind him. Matthew pointed and said, “There!”

He shuffled across the light, his snowpants swishing. Jorge had been looking out at the moon, and when he turned, to see what his brother was doing, he couldn’t see at first. He leaned forward as his pupils opened and gathered the light. His brother was still in shadow, but he could hear him, tugging on something large, something scraping the wood floor with each tug.

“Come on,” Matthew said from the dark. “Help me.”

Jorge walked to him, and soon Jorge could see, Matthew’s back, and the porcelain tub in front of him. Jorge got behind the tub and pushed. The sound of the tub’s feet against the wood constant now and higher pitched, until Matthew jumped back and yelled, “here.”

The tub was in the oval of light, and Matthew leaned on its, edge, teetered, got a leg down in, then lay down, too.

“Is this your manger?” Jorge asked.

“We need more straw,” Matthew said. Jorge went to the bales of it in the dark, brought two handfuls of it and tossed them on his brother.

“More!” Matthew said, and Jorge found a bale, and drug it over. He tore handfuls out and threw them on his brother, a game now, to bury Matthew.

But still he asked, “What’s the point of this?”

“I’m cold,” Matthew said. He pulled his head in toward his shoulders and Jorge took what was left of the bale and laid it on him.

“When’s your miracle come?” Jorge asked.

And then they heard rustling out in the yard. And then a long shadow, with a long neck, cut into the light. Jorge turned and climbing the hill, was an alpaca.

Matthew was below the lip of the tub and couldn’t see out. He asked, “Is it a camel?”

“No,” Jorge said. “It’s an alpaca. You’d just love to get your nativity, huh?”

“I’m not so sure I won’t,” Mathew said. He was sniffling and rubbed his sleeve under his nose.

The alpaca walked in to the warmth of the barn and gawked into the dark. It turned and scurried, when coming after it, was a collie.

“Is this one a camel?” Matthew asked.

Jorge turned toward his brother and shook his head. The dog went to the tub, put its paws up on its lip and looked down.

“It may not be a camel,” Matthew said, “but I think we’ll have our nativity soon.”

“And then what? I just don’t get the point.”

“Of me proving you wrong?”

“Of all those people going all that way for a baby,” Jorge said. “He’s just going to die.”

“But he was sacrificed.”

“But he just got to go to Heaven. That doesn’t seem so bad.”

Jorge was watching the animals mill about, the dog sniff and snort around the gas cap of the mower, then heard boots scraping on the cement, before stepping on the wood floor, then a boy saying, “You know, I’ve been thinking about that for a very long time.”

Jorge turned and walked toward the boy, not much older than himself.

“Who are you?” Jorge asked, pointing with his chin.

“Are you a wise man?” Matthew yelled from behind.

“Well, I’d like to think so,” the boy said.

“Really,” Jorge said, his hands on his hips. “Who are you?”

“I’m Bob.” He held his hand out and Jorge shook it. Bob leaned around him and pointed to the animals. “And those are mine.”

Jorge turned and yelled back at his brother, “See, this isn’t a nativity.”

“But he’s a shepherd,” Matthew said and Bob walked to the tub and looked in on Matthew.

“Are you trying to make a nativity?” Bob asked and looked to Jorge.

“Ask him,” Jorge said pointing down at his brother.

“Doesn’t matter,” Bob said and shook his head. “What I was trying to say is, is that I’ve been thinking a lot about what you guys were talking about. And I’ve got it figured out.”

“You’re 12,” Jorge said.

“Wanna hear it or not?” Bob asked.

But they both gawked as a light cut through the barn, slipping between the spaces between its boards.

“That’s probably the star,” Bob said, and they walked back toward the open door.

“What star?” Jorge asked.

“The star you followed,” Bob said, but looking out, flipped his hand and said, “Ah, just a car.”

But they heard it rolling over the gravel of the drive. And then it climbed the mound to the mouth of the barn. The rattle and wheeze and lights of it filling everywhere the dark had been and Jorge put his arm over his eyes.

The driver door opened, a woman stepped out, and yelled, “Jorge, what the hell did you do to your brother,” and she stormed toward him. She clamped her hand down around his arm, her eyes wide and angry, and drug him to the tub, him screaming, “Ow, he’s fine.”

And they looked down in, Matthew’s head turned and his eyes closed.

“He’s not fine, Jorge,” she yelled. “He’s not damn fine. What did you do to your brother?”

Jorge poked his brother’s leg through the straw but his brother didn’t move.

“He was fine,” Jorge yelled, so she could hear over her shaking him by the arm and yelling, “He’s not fine. He’s not fine at all. What did you do to him?” And she reached down with her palm and put it on Matthew’s cheek and yelled, “He’s frozen, Jorge.” And she was hysterical. Jorge looked into her face and wasn’t sure if she was yelling or crying. Or if she was yelling so hard she was crying.

And Jorge was yelling, “He was fine. He fell in the lake, but he was fine.”

And his mother scooped his brother up in her arms and tried to run with him, and Jorge was yelling, “He was fine.”

She rattled the car’s back door with her hands full with the boy, but got it open. She slid him in, was careful with the door as not to slam it on his feet, didn’t say anything or look at Jorge as she hurried into the driver’s side, slammed the door. The tires tore backward down the hill and it was dark again.

Jorge stood and stared at the wide open mouth of the barn. Into the glow the moon made.

“I was saying,” Bob said somewhere behind him. Jorge could hear the hollow steps of the animals on the wood, the shoosh of their feet pushing straw over it. Bob had both animals on leashes now and had led them into Jorge’s periphery.

Bob said, the animals wandering and tugging gently in opposite directions, “I think God doesn’t speak English. I had a dream about it. He talked liked an alien. He was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t understand him. It was just weird sounds. So he has to do things instead. That way we understand.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He had to give up something he really wanted.”

“Jesus?”

“Yeah. He was his kid.”

“But he came back.”

“But he made him die first. Your Mom ever make you die?”

“No. But it’s not like she’s sacrificing for me either.”

“You mean the lady who swooped in here and saved your brother?”

“Yeah, and she left me here. I have to walk home.”

“What’d she get you for Christmas?”

“All I found was some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and an Xbox.”

“Just an Xbox? You know what parents have to do to get an Xbox?” Bob had twisted his head toward his shoulder, curled up his lip and his voice had changed. “They don’t just stand in line and someone hands them an Xbox, OK? That’s sacrifice. They have to sacrifice and sacrifice and sacrifice. I mean, I chase alpacas a mile every night in subfreezing conditions, and I will never get an Xbox. Never. Ever. I’ll never even see one.” He was shaking his head and walking backwards. “Never. I don’t get you, man. You just don’t get it.”

And Bob started walking out the mouth of the barn and toward the road. his animals behind. Jorge watched him for a minute, but knowing Bob would soon be gone and that he’d be going home to a quiet, empty house and he’d have no one else to ask, he yelled, “Will my brother be OK?” after Bob.

“No,” Bob yelled without turning. “He was blue, dude.”

Jorge thought of crying, felt the pressure of it somewhere behind his eyes. He waited till he couldn’t see Bob anymore, till he was sure Bob wouldn’t hear, and let it pop out of him, his lips flapping, his tears hot on his cold face.

He rubbed his coat sleeve over his face to get the wet streams then under his nose, and because it was a long walk, he started it. He kicked his way through the stubbled over cornfield, the cold making his feet heavy.

He didn’t mean to hurt his brother, he told himself, sure he hadn’t meant to, and hoped, because there was a chance, he told himself, that he’d find the lights on when he got to the house. The car in the drive. His brother, unfrozen and breathing in his bed.

But when he peaked the last hill, the windows were dark. And when he went in, just wandering with his boots, his coats, his snowpants still on, hoping to hear coughs or clinks or whispers anywhere, he didn’t.

He plopped himself down in the couch, exhausted and frozen, and stared at the dark Christmas tree, the new wrapped boxes under it. Just a half dozen of them. The one Xbox sized box towering over the others. He looked away from it. He wanted to stomp on it and kick it.

He wanted to sit, still, too tired to even lay down. But he looked at the boxes again.

And he stood, pulling the afghan from the couch back with him as he did. He drug it to the tree. Laid it out and stacked the presents in the middle, pulled the edges together, made a bindle and put it on his back. Like Santa, he thought for a minute, then shook that thought off.

He went out again. He trudged through the stubbled over cornfield, past the abandoned barn, through the woods, around its downed and rotted trunks, over the shells of puddled ice, to the hill above the pond, and down to the hole they’d made. That he’d made.

And he set the afghan down and its presents beside the hole and sat on his knees next to it. He pulled the smaller packages out first, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, he told himself, and flipped each one in, poked them till they would sink. Till there was just the big box. He looked from it to the hole, the black that had swallowed their sled and his brother, and then he nudged it in.

‘Smartest Brother’ nominated for Pushchart Prize

Katheryn Norris, managing editor of The Cleveland Review, notified me today — they’ve nominated me, more accurately my story, “The Smartest Brother,” for a Pushcart Prize.

For those who may not know, the Pushcart Prize and its best of the small presses series is, according to Pushcart’s website, the most honored literary project in America. So of course I feel pretty honored just to be nominated. To be honest, I felt honored when The Cleveland Review agreed to publish “The Smartest Brother,” in the first place. So thanks of course goes to them for the nod and for the publication, and again, specifically Wells Addington, an editor at The Cleveland Review, who worked with me quite a bit on the piece. Thanks, guys.

Gabbie Zombie: Failing in Fiction Where Romero and Garcia Marquez Never Dared

He was introduced to the neighbor girl, her hands still pink from birth, as Gabriella; read “Gabrielle” from later grandparent birthday cards delivered, accidentally to him by the post, and “Yo Gabba Gabba” from the sign in her yard, just now, for the same occasion; but he didn’t call her those. He didn’t call her anything. He just shook his head.

He watched from the attic, on his belly, looking out the tiny window out over his roof, through the thick green limbs between, and shook his head, as they inflated the rainbow colored castle behind her house, lead in the burro for the pack of wild children to pet and ride.

Spoiled, he said to himself, still shaking. Just because a girl loses her mother.

He watched because he knew the things she’d do. The things she’d done. The missing birdhouse first. Then a pot from the back porch, painted with a yellow cat, some long-dead flower dangling over the clay. Things his daughter had made him long before she’d passed. Things he found in pieces, halved-roofs and shards, behind his work shed.

The trees he watched through, he’d made them to keep her out. Hadn’t meant to, not at first. They had floated in, dead, from the swamp behind his home, what seemed to him to be an amoeba of gray water and white limbs that crept in the night toward the steps of his back porch. The rotted stumps had stacked and climbed like two dozen giant bones up those steps, to knock gently on his windows. And when they had, he tore them down and pushed them back under the swamp’s pudding skin.

They’d be back, of course, a dog pile, a tangle, of them, knocking over his porch furniture. And to spite them, he got his ax. Filled himself with coffee and bourbon and cracked, splintered, frayed them, till the thick dermis that had wrapped their hearts laid about like clumps of manged hair.

And he let them lay, through the storm of the night, to find them the next morning, just one of them, one he hadn’t cut too deeply, like a thick wild leek pushing up through the weave of gray fibers.

He made them days later, the trees, after finding a fire in the reeds at the swamp’s edge. He’d kept a torch there and tended it, sure for a long time that his daughter might pull herself out and need a way to find her way back to her bed. He made the trees after finding the torch knocked over, after the fire, after finding the little footprints in the soft ground, after the dead trunks piled again. He started with one, pulled from the top of the pile and pulled it into his work shed, pushed its bench aside, chopped and carved with an adze, the soft and dry and old of it away, till he found something with the hardness of life and turned and carved, and dragged it to the property line, dug and buried the bottom of it, and he slept. And like the raw, exposed, green heart of the tree had been smothered before, like it had been wrapped so tight it couldn’t breathe, it had grown in the black soil of his yard, when he went to it in the morning, like it was free.

He made a line of six of them, hoping they would be a wall. Each one different, bending to the moon with the contours of his carves, limbs wild where he’d gone too deep, and wet black wounds where he’d gone deeper.

And he watched her, like he had watched the swamp. But his little window could only see so much and he lost her for a day, maybe more. He came down from his window and circled his home, took stock of his remaining exterior belongings, a wind chime of moons, a garden hose, the peppers and tomatoes that had shrunken, neglected on the vine, and found the rest as it should be, save the patches of yellow, first near the shed, grass blades dead and brittle. And another patch along the porch steps, and another just under them. And when he knelt he found her squatting, in the far corner underneath, and in the slatted dark, saw only her eyes, wide and white.

She turned and ran and he chased. An arc toward the corner of his house, then wattling at a fevered pace, through the trees, into the yard behind her home. Her arms out and moving like rope, her auburn hair caught and curling in the wind, over the white shoulders of her dress.

Her legs were cherubic, short and round, but he couldn’t catch her and he couldn’t breathe, bent over, hands in his cardigan pockets under the black limbs above; he huffed and watched her disappear around the white corner of her house.

He walked and tried to jog and found her, just her eyes again. She was laying, hiding behind her father, her raven crown, rising behind his torso. His back and head in the grass, arms out like falling. Her round eyes, then round face. Pupils propped open. From fear. But not for him. For her father. His face, his neck, his hands, everything out from under his sweatshirt, gray.

Gabriella looked up from her father’s splayed limbs to him, eyes more pupil than white, and he stepped and reached fingers toward the man’s neck. But like he knew he wouldn’t, he didn’t find a pulse.

911. An ambulance. He thought. Some way to save her. Give him back to her. And thought of running to his house for the phone. But he pulled his hand from her father’s neck and it came back cold. And he looked to her house, to the screen door open, a girl-sized hole torn from the outside in, a box of cereal, upended and on the kitchen floor, and he shook his head.

She’s lost, he told himself. A girl needs her father, just like a father needs his girl. And he thought of his own, sleeping and submerged, forever taken from him, under the mud-thick water.

He put his hand on the man’s arm and found it different in death. Cold, yes, but as rough as any limb soaked through and left to dry. And he looked to her, her head back and her eyes to the sky, breathing a hundred times in that moment, like she’d forgotten how. And he grabbed her father by the feet, and slid and pulled him on his back, grunting with each pull and trying to step around her as she smacked his legs, to protect her father, he thought, to his yard. And when they had crossed the trees, he dropped her father’s legs, and tried to catch her slaps and stop them. But her arms were spinning like a windmill, and he grabbed the feet and pulled again.

At the shed, and in the dark, he pulled him in, his chest and torso arching over the hump of the doorway, and used one hand to keep her out as he pulled the door closed.

He grabbed his adze from the bench and stood for a moment over the man, arms crossed and shook his head.

A man is gentler than a tree, he said, and got his draw knife, got down and knelt around the man’s legs, close enough to open the man’s shirt and lean the blade above his chest and draw it to himself.

And it whispered like any wood. And the blade moaned when he got too deep and tried to cut too much. And as the dead parts of him came off, in tendrils and dust, the man’s chest began to move, like the hands around his heart had let go. And his shoulders moved and his eyes turned under their lids.

He had watched closely as he worked, but when it started, it pulled his eyes from the blade; he lost his focus and got too deep, made a purple wound above her father’s heart.

And her father’s head snapped to the side and his eyes snapped open. The whites now yellow and cracked red. And her father pushed himself out from under him, and turned and pulled open the door, out past his daughter, looked for a moment back at her, his chest exploding and collapsing like it’d been opened with holes and wouldn’t hold its air. And he ran along the row of black trees, past his house, to the woods on the other side, toward some incandescent light, a blur soaking through.

And Gabriella ran too, her arms out and her fingers flexing, like she could catch onto him a hundred yards away.

And all he could do was follow, rustle through the dead leaves of the dead trees, past the torn-open screen door, and watch the woods swallow her.

They’d be going toward the light, he knew, and he pushed himself, stumbling over mossed over logs, creek water soaking into his loafers. He knew he’d find her worse than before. She had lost her father, but he had carved the scar deeper than it had to be.

So he began his Hail Marys, his crosses making him wobble as he moved.

Behind his heart he was digging for some apology a child would understand; one she could bear to hear the scores of times he’d have to repeat it before he died. Hoping for words like, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace’; words that would weather the repetition.

And at the edge, thorns and prickles dug into him and limbs and leaves slapped as he pushed out of the trees and beside a garage. The light in front of it was on, and he limped, coughed and gasped toward the pool of white on the gray cement. He turned and he found the door of the garage up and them inside. Just at the edge of what the lamp and the moon gave off.  A tangle of people. A mess. Arms and bodies confused. He could only move into the dark to see.

And when he shuffled in, he found three of them. Gabriella, her hands on her father, her father kneeling beside a woman on the pavement and his hands inside her chest. His hands wet and pushing some mass between them to his mouth. Squeezing and tearing, trying to push some fat lump down his throat. The girl tearing at her father’s arm and jumping.

And when he was done, he tossed the purple rind to the ground and  moved to her.

He knew what her father would do, and he moved to a rack along the wall and found a hammer. He could hear her screaming. She had been soundless for days, but now, his back turned, she was frantic. And he turned, the hammer pulled back behind his head, and stomped toward her father.

But her father had her down. Her father’s hands in her chest and she was wailing. And he put the hammer into her father’s head. He pulled it back and made two more holes. And she was still wailing as he cracked and dug the hammer past the bone. And he kicked her father down. But Gabriella lay, head back on the concrete floor, eyes crushed shut and wailing. A fist size hole, black and smeared purple, just below her shoulder.

And he knew what would become of her. And he knew he should have done more. And he knew there was more he could do.

And he took a knife from his pocket. And he sunk it in just below where he knew his heart should be. And he opened himself up; he dug it out, held it up to the moon, then cradled it to carve it, to shave off the old, hard parts of it, so it would fit inside of her. So it would work.

Unfiled Thoughts of a Thousand-Mile Pennsylvania Loop

We had seen the spires from across the valley. Three crosses, each with two extra arms, poked from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church into the sky above Centralia. We thought it looked like or might be the church from Silent Hill, a movie inspired by the ghost town and populated with people made of ash and embers. So we wandered into the valley and up the leftover streets, up the hill and found it, the church but no driveway. We had to pull to the side of the road, the roadway not wide enough for two cars, at a strong incline, and a 50-year coal fire underneath. And I get nervous. Always. I pushed the parking brake down and urged Anna to hurry with the camera. And that’s when the chainsaw started. Just yards off and unseen.

And I thought I was scared then. But it was the escape I should have worried about.

We had wandered miles away from Centralia, hoping to find more of it, and found coals fields and a soccer game instead. When the sun went down, we punched the hotel’s address into the GPS, and like we had before, followed the chirps of the British woman inside it.

This time, though, she took us off the primary roads, onto some pitch black, unlined loop, where some monster SUV bore down on us, forced its headlights toward our rear window, tried to run us off the road, but eventually passed. But still I trusted her, the woman in the box, because she brought us back to roads with lines, and because I did, I followed her again, off on another side road, some barely paved mountain climb. But the trust waned, as the panic set in, as the road narrowed, and the pavement seemed to slowly dissolve, washed out nearly as much as the earth around it. The world was black around us and the headlights showed only the ruts in the road and downed limbs ahead. And the road choked down to where the Impala could barely pass, tree limbs slapping at both sides of it. And I kept climbing, because I could see the headlights of some road ahead, through the trees between us and it, even though what was under our wheels had become more dirt than road.

And even though I kept climbing, the farther I got from pavement, the more I thought something had gotten into the GPS. Probably, obviously in Centralia. Because we had come to their town gawking at their catastrophe, and what was left of the people who had been there, spirit or worse, was directing us to where the Centralia faithful could remove our limbs from our bodies and drop us into the fire.

Eventually fear would get the best of me, and I would, gingerly, make an eight point turn and climb back down to safety, but I assume it was some kind of haunting. Couldn’t be a mistake in the GPS.

Like the Trojans won’t ever take in a wooden horse ever again, I’ll never fully trust GPS. But this is only one thing I learned in my thousand-mile loop around Pennsylvania:

• Although the law may frown upon it, if I was a resident of Centralia, or nearby, I would set up tours of the near abandoned town. They could guide you through the labyrinth of empty, overgrown streets, tell you what used to be there and where the plumes of coal smoke sprout, tell you the story of the place and how it still runs. But most importantly they could guide you to the abandoned portion of Highway 61. Unless we were going about it backwards, the most accessible entry-point to it is at the top of a steep incline, on a bad curve. There’s really no place to park, and because of it, and because I was driving my dad’s car, because we were afraid my 10 year old Malibu wouldn’t survive the trip, we were hurried in our exploration. We still don’t understand what we saw or what we missed, we still feel a great amount of mystery about the discarded and unused roadways, but if you were to lead an ATV expedition up that hill and around the earthen barrier, I would pay for that.

• On a much more serious note, the sites of Philadelphia do much now to make clear the hypocrisy of the founding of our nation on the subject of slavery. At the site of the President’s House, a window down into the ground, to the foundation of the home where our first two presidents lived, just yards from the Liberty Bell, placards discuss the nine slaves in Washington’s household. At Independence Hall, tour guides explain that one of the sections that Thomas Jefferson wrote into the important document that was ultimately removed during revisions, berated the British monarchy for supporting slavery. A couple signers would threaten to walk out without it in there, Jefferson wasn’t happy either, but the document went to press without it.

• I’m not a huge fan of cheesesteaks, but Geno’s Steaks in Philadelphia very well might be the best.

• It may be kind of cheap and it might be kind of a ploy, but Punxsutawney was a lot of fun, even six months after Groundhog Day. I have seen roughly 10,000 woodchucks in my life, but finding Punxsutawney Phil in his burrow at the Punxsutawney Memorial Library, all the groundhog statues around town, just the unifying whistle pig theme around the town, in short, was fun. I’ll call it the Mickey Mouse Phenomenon. Just like how every hamburger and pool of water at Disneyland is in the shape of the famous cartoon mouse, it seems when every aspect of a place is designed around the same spirit, same historical era, or in these examples, the same animal, it gives some kind of undefinable value to a place. As small towns around the country try to find ways to bring people to their town, I wonder if this something that would work elsewhere. Distill your town to its most defining or unusual moment, industry or rodent and design away. Sure it reduces a place to one dimension, but there is something comforting about a place that you can understand quickly, that you know what to expect from. But if you do it right, you’ll get nerds willing to traipse around your town looking for the groundhog dressed up as the mail man, as the mayor, as the Sottish Presbyterian.

• Probably the coolest hotel I’ve ever stayed at was the Cork Factory Hotel in Lancaster. Looking like a cleaned up, scrubbed down, shined up factory, its name adorns it in a plain, black font, indicative of its upscale interior. The rooms are warm, not only from the exposed brick walls, but the exposed wood ceilings, too. Its restaurant, Cap and Cork, serves probably the best food I’ve had in years, and maybe the best chicken, in the Lancaster County Barbecue Chicken and its crispy skin. Maybe the best chicken I’ve ever eaten. The only drawback to the place is those same exposed wood ceilings that creak and leak sound like a sieve. I lost two hours of sleep because who ever was above us sounded like a family of seven suffering through cold and flu season and holding basketball practice starting at 7 a.m.

• Second coolest would have to be The Woodlands Inn in Wilkes-Barre. The hotel faces unremarkable Route 315, but then we get into our room, opened the door onto our balcony, and looked out onto the Laurel Run Spring. It’s got a handful of restaurants, bars, one of them outdoors, and the largest jacuzzi I’ve ever seen.

• I have never been to the real Grand Canyon, and it’s probably safe to Pennsylvania’s version isn’t as grand, but Pine Creek Outfitters provide a nice little service for those who might enjoy biking through the “canyon.”

And now for the complaining:

• When I stay at a hotel I get a bed better than mine, a bathroom cooler than mine, but a TV always smaller than my own at home, usually not even a flat screen, with a picture quality and cable offerings greatly inferior to what I get on my own couch. Who is responsible for this incredible oversight in every hotel in America?

• On the highways of Pennsylvania there is a constant threat of construction, and intermittent follow-throughs. As common as construction is, it’s just as common to find signage warning of road work that never materializes, even a sign for flaggers ahead and never find them, or find them miles after the sign.

• I once thought truck drivers were the order-keepers of the interstate, but the recent trip has affirmed recent hunches that that isn’t the case. They will ride in the left lane for miles for absolutely no reason. They will tailgate at 75 miles an hour. They will pass you while you’re going 75. They will box you in. They love to pass in rain and snow to throw the garbage of the road onto your windshield. They are the bullies of the road.

What happened, truck drivers?

The Picker Sisters, Lancaster Cork, and Fossils of an Industrial Past

As we dropped down out of southern Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands, into the slopes of the City of Johsntown, we dropped further into a place that reminded me much of Pittsburgh — cut up and confused by rivers, abandoned behemoth brick structures dominating the circuitous paths through town, long stretches of rusted rails.

I wanted to pull over, to have a closer look. At the vacant mills, like rectangle red mountains, and the deep cement-walled ravines guiding the rivers, precautions from the 19th century flood that destroyed the place. But we were on a schedule, had just come from Punxsutawney and still had to get to Lancaster, three and a half hours east. But when we did get to Lancaster, as I tried to sleep even, I was still thinking of Johnstown.

We were at the Cork Factory Hotel. Built in 1865 as Lancaster Cork Works, it’s served other purposes since, a glass factory, for example, but a hotel, now, too. “Upscale” and “boutique” are the words used to advertise it, and it was, but it — its exterior and exposed interior walls — were the same brick we’d left behind in Johnstown. Just polished up by Urban Place LLC in 2005, because they saw the beauty in the old mill, the red smoke stack that stands above the entrance. And knew their customers would too.

Thinking about terms like “ruin porn,” designed to leave an aftertaste of guilt any time aesthetic value is found in places like Johnstown, the Cork Factory holds the key for me.

Whether it be a mill, a market, anything it seems, what’s made today are steel warehouses, pole buildings, aluminum shells, just larger versions of Dollar Stores. Utilitarian structures with eyes, with no room to budge, on the bottom line. And as I tried to sleep in an old cork warehouse, I had to wonder, in 150 years who’s going to want to fix up a Dollar Store, who’s going to want to stay the night in one of those?

Live fast; die young; leave a pretty corpse. And industry did, and a lot of them. But the real trick is making that beauty obvious. Making it as valuable as a steel warehouse is cheap. Taking these old, abandoned resources and making something of them.

It’s called bricolage, taking what’s on hand and making something new from it, something I first learned at Carnegie Mellon from Professor Scott Sandage in a brilliant course titled “The Roots of Rock and Roll.” It’s all rock and roll is, he explained, as he showed us the Carter Family, Woody Guthrie, Son House, Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, Nirvana, all the pieces from which they built their music, and the pieces of their music that were used to make what came after. My term paper, to illustrate, was on the bricolage of Bob Dylan — when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, making his music new by using something on hand, the electric guitar.

Bricolage was at work in not only the structure of the Cork Factory Hotel, but also what we saw on TV — the Picker Sisters, who took old silos and broken motorcycles and make custom tables and chairs — and also in its restaurant, the Cork and Cap. There we found maybe expected dish names — Lancaster County Barbecue Chicken and a beef stroganoff, more specifically Petite Filet Stroganoff — but elevated with what was on hand, culinary techniques and upscale ingredients. Our appetizer, for example, was stuffed peppers, but instead of run of the mill beef, they were filled with veal. (And maybe its vice versa, the idea or tradition of the dishes being what was on hand, like the Lancaster County Barbecue Chicken with a cucumber coleslaw and German potato salad that came to me as something that wouldn’t be confused with something found on a paper plate.)

So I guess the point is, beyond the inherent aesthetic value of these abandoned monuments to an industrialized age long gone, that these broken antiques can be and should be used to build the future. They should be considered natural resources as much as the oil and gas that were left under the soil from another age. As each rust belt town works to move from its industrialized past into some post-industrial success, it’s important to take stock of what came before, what’s left over from it, and how that can be used. Not every town is going to have a Cork Factory Hotel or Heinz Lofts. And there may only be broken windows and poisoned ground left over.

But I look to my town, Greenville. There is a railroad museum and an Erie Extension Canal museum, a historical society, and now each July to draw attention to them and the town’s heritage as a whole, there is Heritage Day. To be sure such an event won’t have the same effect as if a steel car plant opened its doors again, or Chicago Bridge & Iron, but it is, at least, a step in the right direction.

Tourists of Disaster

I had designed the trip as a loop, a tour around Pennsylvania. No theme or thread in mind, but I knew there’d be something. And sometime after Johnstown, it became clear that this was a trip of disasters.

Sure there was some argument about where we were going and how to get there — suprisingly most glaringly when trying to make the short jump from Scranton to Wilkes-Barre after losing the directions to the hotel — but that’s not what I’m talking about.

Johnstown, obviously, is the greatest flood this country has ever seen, one of its greatest disasters, and as we tried to board the city’s incline — allegedly the world’s steepest inclined plane; more superlatives — we learned we couldn’t. There was an earthquake in D.C. and they were shutting down.

We didn’t feel it — An older couple also turned away from the incline, said they had — and it really wasn’t a disaster, but there was more to come. After wandering through the ghost town of Centralia — the residents of which were pushed out in 1992 after a coal fire that had burned for 30 years under the town and continues to burn — we woke up in Frackville, about 10 miles southeast of Centralia and about 8 miles north of Pottsville, home of the Yuengling brewery. We turned on The Weather Channel to find broadcasters there and then on the 24-hour news networks staring into the clear skies of North Carolina and cranking their panic meters to 10. Hurricane Irene was coming.

The panic would follow us to Wilkes-Barre where, sitting at the Executive Lounge of the Woodlands Inn, we watched the panic grow — professional sports postponed, the east coast evacuated. Fear and loathing in eastern Pennsylvania.

As I check the headlines now, on Sunday, when Irene was supposed to ravage Philly, New York, etc., she has been downgraded to a tropical storm. A FEMA administrator is reminding people though that no one has dodged a bullet. People have lost their lives.

But is it a disaster? According to the same article in the LA Times, about 15 people have died so far, and the damage is estimated to be between 7 and 20 million dollars. We may have been expecting a bigger one, but compared to the D.C. earthquake, it most certainly is a disaster.

There is no glory in ranking these unfortunate events, but having just seen the sites of two disasters that started 50 and 100 years, respectively, before, it seems, beyond the count of the dead and the final price tag, a more accurate way to measure these earthquakes, floods, underground hell fires is how far out their shock waves can be felt.

The Jonstown Flood, on May 28, 1889, killed 2,209 and caused more than $17 million in damage. The Johnstown Flood Museum works to illustrate what that really means, through photos of the aftermath, newspaper stories, an artistic installation of white washed pieces of detritus — boards and wire and mannequin parts — attached to the wall like how they would have been left by the flood. But what does it best is a model in the center of the museum’s main room. Green lights snake through the valley as the flood builds and culminates with sounds of crashing and red lights like sirens where the fires grew after. That and the markers around town, one near the city’s famed incline. There is a walkway about 15 feet above state Route 56 that connects the incline, which is about 30 feet above the Conemaugh River bed, with the rest of town. A sign points to that walkway — well above the road and the cars on it, which are well above the river and its high cement-walled ravine, and says that’s how far the water rose.

The markers and museum are arguably the most obvious reminders of the 122-year-old flood, but it’s a much more different picture in Centralia.

A couple miles out in any direction, on state Route 61 specifically, there are road signs that advise you the little borough is there and within reach. We climbed north on 61, up out of Ashland deeper into the coal hills of east-central PA, and had read of the abandoned, former-portion of the highway, what was labeled on the map as a logging road. We looked for it as the road whipped back and forth on an incline, but as it peaked and fell, we knew we’d missed it. It wasn’t till about half way down, until we saw the St. Ignatius cemetery to our left, and then found a note to Gov. Corbett in the form of a poster board sign, that we knew we were there. We had come from Philadelphia, and because of some GPS complications coming out of the city, we didn’t have as much time, and therefore daylight, as I had budgeted for. The sun was falling and the sky was becoming orange behind the sign. The free-handed words of the sign beg the governor and the representatives of the residents of the tiny borough to leave them alone. Stop wasting money to push them out, the sign says, which the state has been doing since 1992.

Because the fire is still burning, because the state won’t let them stay, we expected the streets to be vacant and quiet. Reportedly there are still five homes in the borough, and if that’s the case, we likely saw half the town’s population. We saw two at the borough building, which is just up the hill as state Route 42 climbs north out of town, and another, a teenager washing the wheels of his truck on one of the borough’s abandoned streets.

Most signs of civilization have been removed, through eminent domain, leaving just wild bushes and grass to spill over and eventually choke off the streets. They are a network of squares around the central intersection of state routes 42 and 61. You can find a map of it on Google, but there are no street signs, and no markings. What we found most were abandoned campfires, empty beer cans and cases, graffiti warning you of the fire that is either imperceptible or dormant underneath the road. We had read of the plumes of coal smoke and steam that rise or have risen out of the road surfaces, but they appear sealed over now. Just patches of black squares. And as we drove over them the car sagged down into them, and I braced for the car to crack through and fall into the eternal fire below.

But what is most intriguing is the abandoned road, which we were yet to find. Route 61 still drops down into Centralia, but that’s not its original path. There is about a mile of roadway, which would essentially join 61 at the top of the hill and then loop back down to rejoin it just above the cemetery. In the photos we had seen, there were road markers blocking off the old road, in view of the new one. There was none of that, but we knew it was there. We drove again back up to the peak, and down a little ways again, to the first big curve. There was just enough room to pull off and we did. There was only a wall of dirt and grass, like at the edge of all the other curves, but we put the parking brake on and climbed over. And hidden back in behind the wall of dirt was the abandoned road. It was stopped off and walled off too, by more dirt, but then climbed even steeper than the road we’d just gotten off of. The aged roadway was coated nearly end to end in graffiti. Some of it crude illustrations, other more warnings as to what lies at the end of the dead road, and even some more self-aware, welcoming you to Silent Hill, a 2006 horror film inspired by the town.

The lasting evidence of the disaster isn’t as obvious as we anticipated. Nearby towns of Aristes, Ashland, Mt. Carmel, and Girardville are well inhabited, and in addition to the car washer, residents are very active, including a man near Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, the last active church in the borough, was chainsawing something. I hoped it was something.

Despite whatever evidence we gathered or missed, according to all reports, the fire is still burning, though, and the residents are still in court, fighting to stay in their homes, i.e. the aftershocks are still being felt.

What really sets apart the tragedies of Centralia and Johnstown, which came to be aligned in my life with Irene and the D.C. earthquake, is that they were man-made. Although neither was purposefully caused, them coming by the hands of man makes them that much more devious.

Heavy rains were one cause of the Johnstown Flood, but more so was the South Fork Dam. The dam, created as part of a cross-state canal system, created Lake Conemaugh. Railroad would make canals irrelevant and eventually the lake would end up in the hands of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club. The club was just about 60 miles east of Pittsburgh and had a membership of some of the richest men in the world, the likes of Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. Despite that though, little was done to maintain the dam. Over the about eight years that they owned it, it sprang leaks and inspired rumors of its impending failure, which is exactly what happened — 20 million tons of water barreled down on the city.

The cause of the Centralia fire isn’t as well documented, but the most frequently cited story involves the town’s dump. The mayor had the fire department burn it down, as was the annual convention, as the story goes, but the fire wasn’t put out properly and climbed into a nearby mine. It followed the seams of coal under the town and burned and put up plumes of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and otherwise reduced oxygen levels.

We watched a great amount of traffic just whip past the nearly abandoned center of town, past the fully abandoned portion of state Route 61, maybe listening to their radios to the disasters of Irene and the D.C. earthquake. And although the toll on life and repairs would be much greater from Irene, looking back on Centralia, I have to wonder if that little town’s plight isn’t greater. It will be expensive and heart wrenching, but the victims of Irene can rebuild. The residents of Centralia cannot, and neither will be rebuilt the homes of their neighbors, the local businesses that defined their town, the churches and social clubs, the entire culture of and memory of a community nearly erased. 

Rust Belt Fiction: Chapter 1

I’m just now finishing up all the pieces to go up on the latest Cleveland Review, and it’s not till now — having read each story and poem, the writers’ other work, their connection to the Rust Belt – that I’m beginning to fully appreciate how important The Cleveland Review is.

When I decided to really start writing about three years ago, I had to ask myself, what stories did I have to tell, what kinds of things did I have to write about. And pretty quickly I started looking at the world around me, to the places, beautiful or not, that I’d begun to catalog here as a journalist. And when I began to write about union votes and brownfields, rust and chicken pie and yinz, I started to wonder how that fit into the broad scheme of things. I started looking for the heritage of Rust Belt Literature.

Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, but I didn’t find much, and reading the remarks from other Cleveland Review contributors, it seems there’s others hungry for the same.

I think our first desire is for our culture to be represented. Through movies and music and books, it seems we have a pretty firm grasp on the culture in every tiny neighborhood of New York City and half the ones in Boston. Chicago has a whole set of characters on SNL; Austin has its art scene; Portland has “Portlandia;” and LA is LA. It goes on and on and it seems so many other regions already have representation: the Southwest has Cormac McCarthy; you could probably argue New England has Stephen King; and even the less densely populated Ozarks have representation in Daniel Woodrell.

But what about the Rust Belt? There’s Michael Chabon, who Burgh Diaspora, quoting a Guardian article, has recently mentioned, uses the “grit” of Pittsburgh as a background. And although I love “Wonder Boys” and “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” you really can’t call any of it Rust Belt Ficiton. And as fellow members on goodreads.com point out, there is the mystery writing of Les Roberts, “Crooked River” by Mark Winegardner, a “Simple Plan,” by Scott Smith, and I’d add “American Rust” by Philipp Meyer as being the closest to matching some definition of Rust Belt Fiction.

But like one Cleveland Review photographer, Bridget Callahan, put it, we’re looking for our Flannery O’Connor. And so far, the closest thing we’ve gotten is “Youngstown,” by Bruce Springsteen.

I think we’re looking for someone to set the story straight. As Cleveland Review poet, Rochelle Hurt, writes recently, most outsiders’ first impression of the Rust Belt is that it’s depressed. A recent article on The Cleveland Review, talks about how the older generation resents the term “rust belt.” But those of us that grew up after the massive layoffs and grew up living amongst the vacant monuments to industry, we embrace it all. Sure that may be a bit perverse, and surely I don’t speak for everyone, but we’re living amongst history and ruins, and now, at some kind of bottom, are surrounded by great potential.

And that’s argument one, why The Cleveland Review is important, because although we don’t yet have a Flannery O’Connor or Cormac McCarthy, there seems to be a lot of writers willing and interested and able to express what the Rust Belt is and what we really are.

Argument two is that this kind of writing and thought is important and necessary for the future of the Rust Belt. Like I said, we’re living amongst history. In Brooks Rexroat’s story, that means abandoned coke ovens and other apparati; as Hurt writes, it means our towns are “jallopy-strewn.” There are countless factories and mills, tracks and bronwfields, that sit vacant and fallow, to remind us, 1) of the great power and success these towns and cities and burghs had; and 2) The mistakes that felled them.

Sure there are overarching, nebulous lessons to be learned, that selling out on American industry while a much cheaper labor force was waiting to be tapped outside our borders, or vice versa, that fair trade and labor practices can’t be ignored, I’m thinking of something much more tangible. Like the poisoned soil of the countless brownfields around the region. That sit empty and undeveloped because of carelessness, and probably worse, with dangerous materials. And even beyond the corporate level, these ruins serve to remind us of the municipal mistakes we made, too. Here municipal mismanagement compounded the effects of the industrial fall and crippled the local government financially, even to this day.

Newspaper reports and accounts can only enumerate and express the factual causes and effects. They can’t even approach the ability that fiction has to take the emotions of all of it, parse them, and begin to present the full picture.

Fiction gives us a way to understand our struggles in a way that non-fiction never will be able to. I mean, what do you remember of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression? I remember John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.” And it’s true so many times: Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” “Slaughterhouse-Five,” etc.

This writing, Rust Belt Fiction and Poetry, reminds us of our past so we can learn from it, it helps us process the emotional burden so we can get past it, it provides a light to the future.

Until our Flannery O’Connor, our Cormac McCarthy, our John Steinbeck emerges, tapping a whole chorus of Rust Belt voices will more than suffice. Will likely do more than one voice ever could. And for that, you have to thank the editors of The Cleveland Review.

The Smartest Brother

My short story, “The Smartest Brother,” just went up Sunday at The Cleveland Review.

It’s about two guys that grew up together and ended up working together at the same plant and voting on the same contract that closes the only place they’ve worked in their adult lives. They’re on opposite ends of the vote, they find out after it’s over, and things get tense.

And it does happen. The story comes from covering union votes in Greenville. One in particular, there was a threat — pass the deal so we can sell you, they said, or we’ll close the place down.

And even when votes aren’t that dramatic, there’s always some heaviness. Not a lot of smiles. Always at least a little drinking. Because these days these votes are a gamble. Used to be you pushed for more pay and better benefits, figuring worst case scenario your union reps get negotiated down. Now, it’s pushing for a little more pay and hoping not to foot all your health insurance. And hoping, too, ownership doesn’t decide they can’t afford it.

Those thoughts aside, it’s been a good experience working with The Cleveland Review. I’ve only had a handful or so things published so far, but this was the first time a journal had notes for me. Wells Addington, especially, specifically. He suggested I take another look at the ending, among some other ideas, all of which made the story you are reading stronger than the one you’re not.

There are good people in Cleveland, it appears. I was encouraged when I found them, some place looking for Rust Belt writing. Just glad to see there’s more of us.

P.S. Read this. Great piece on The Cleveland Review.

Pittsburgh Pirates: Official Team of the Rust Belt?

Just try getting through one Steelers game without Phil Simms or Dan Dierdorf waxing poetic, drawing parallels between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the soul of Western Pennsylvania. Hard-nose, working-class football, they’ll say. They’ll point to the defense, which drew the name the Steel Curtain 40 years ago, a nickname that lingers. They’re not afraid to get dirty, they’ll say, they bring their lunch pails to work — and maybe you can picture Brett Kiesel, his feet swinging as he perches on an I-beam 15 stories up, steel lunch pail to his left, thermos to the right, half a roast beef sandwich dangling from his beard.

And I love the Steelers. I’ve been very open about that, but to say that they represent the Burgh and Western Pennsylvania better than any other, I just don’t know that that’s true.

It’s entirely possible the Pirates represent us a little better.

What do I mean?

To look over the past decade or so it’s easy to see that Western Pennsylvania is still struggling. To use Greenville as a microcosm, over that period two plants have closed, Trinity Industries and what was Warner Ladder Co., and they took with them jobs roughly equivalent to half of the borough’s population. And in Pittsburgh, although employment numbers rose to a peak in the middle of the decade, they fell again.

It’s not till now, on the other side of the recession, that things are picking up again. Rising, in most cases, even faster than the national average in recovery. And rising again in what feels like a permanent way, on the strength of UPMC, PNC, Pitt, CMU, et al. After all that time, scraping away, hoping things will get better.

And just as it’s happening, look who else is coming around. The Pittsburgh Pirates. A couple games over .500. Not much more than one game out of first. But to look over the past decade or so, it’s easy to see that the Pirates have struggled. Last year they set the North American record for consecutive losing seasons at 18. They haven’t been in the playoffs since 1992. All that time, scraping away, hoping things will get better.

Since 1992, the Steelers have been in the playoffs 13 times, in the Super Bowl four times, and won it twice. Sure they’ve had their ups and downs, specifically in the mid- to late-1980s, when Pittsburgh’s unemployment, too, was at its worst. But it seems if you could ever doubt the Steelers’ strength, you shouldn’t do it long. They’ve had their struggles but they’ve been brief.

Which is great, and it’s a testament to the Rooneys and the fan base.

But what the Pirates are doing is something different. And you can almost trace their arch along with Western Pa.’s. There’s been false starts and mistakes. You just go along each day, each game, each fiscal year, each season, just assuming it’s going to be another year of losing.

But here we are. On an upswing. And it just might be permanent.