GUEST EDITOR: MONI DEEPA

--------

FEATURED WRITER: Zafar H. Anjum

Zafar H. Anjum postgraduate from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi, currently worked as a senior editor with an Indian NGO. He has a novel, Of Seminal Fluids, and a collection of translated poetry, My Silence Speaks, published to his credit. His articles and short stories have appeared in The Times of India, The Hindustan Times, The Pioneer, Mainstream Weekly, Small Spiral Notebook (US), The Six Seasons Review (Dhaka), Britannicaindia.com (Delhi), Sulekha.com (US),
Meghdutam.com (India), and Chowk.com (US), among others. He has also scripted and produced a few short films.
E-Mail: zafaranjum@hotmail.com

--------

"Oh yes, come friend, come. You may sit here and have my company. You too are troubled like me, aren't you? Who would walk into a bar like this at this quiet hour of the midnight when most have retired to the cozy comfort of a home? Either you don't have a home or you are running away from a familiar reality. Isn't it so? I can see it in your bristly face, disheveled hair and dark-circled eyes. You are my mirror image, aren't you? Or I'm yours. Who knows? And does it really matter? May be we have different problems but their shadows run deep in our veins, don't they?

"Yes, yes, you can order the same arrack as the one I'm having. It's bitter and it goes well with the pain. And before they serve you, here it is. Take my bottle. Take a gulp from it. Why wait for them when you have a friend? One shot down the entrails and your distress will shine through, polished. You are getting me all right, aren't you, friend?

"Now that you are here, I'll tell you my story. And I'll tell you without a preface. Why waste time? I'll also soak in your tale of woe. That'll be a little later. After all, people say for good reason that pain shared is halved. What do you say to that? Fine! All right, so I go ahead.

"Did you ask my name? Is that important to know? I don't think so. Didn't somebody say what's in a name? Take his example, the guy who's sitting up there, far, far up there, who's always spinning the web of life, who's made us run blind in this labyrinth of sorrow and maze of joy: Him! People call him all names. Allah, Ishwar, God! Does his reality change with the name assigned to him? No, right? So, what of us lesser mortals? For a sensible person like you that's a useless business, a futile premise. A fish is a fish, whether you call it a koi or a rohu or a shark. I think the reality is important. The rest is immaterial.

"Or take the example of my wife. Had her name been Lata instead of Neeta, would she come out of her 16-months long coma? Look at her fate. At 25, she is no more than a vegetable, the mother of my five-year-old child. Life has come to a grinding halt for her. Neither alive nor dead, she lies on a soiled bed, the bed sheet torn and tattered, under the thatched roof of our house. And she can't move or talk or eat or even recognize anybody. Not even her son. Our son asks me when will his mother speak to him, when will she love him again, make him sit in her lap and feed him. And I tell him: son, I don't know. I really don't know, friend.

"Do you think I've not done anything for her? That is unfair to say. I've done whatever I could muster. There's nothing I've not done to bring her back to life. From doctors to courts to papers to what have you. Shall I tell you when it all started? Excuse me, can I have a puff? Give me the one you're smoking. That'll do. Oh, thanks! One long drag and I feel much better.

"So to begin at the beginning. One night, a lupine, dark night 16-months ago, I returned home from work. Neeta was pregnant for the second time. We were happy expecting another child. We thought this time it would be a girl. But my friend, that night proved to be demonic. When Neeta complained of labor pain, I rushed her to the nursing home. The lady doctor suggested an immediate caesarian. She demanded Rs. 8000 for the operation. It was a big sum for a poor man like me. I had four thousands bucks with me. I deposited that amount with the doctor and went out to arrange for the rest. Four hours later when I came back, I was told she had fallen unconscious even before she could be operated upon.

"There began my woeful journey, my friend. They say very rightly that trouble comes unannounced. The evil face of trouble had forced itself into my house. The anus-the-see-ya (anesthesia) overdose had made my wife unconscious. When I pointed this out to the doctors, they refused to admit their mistake. Would you believe it that they got us thrown out of the hospital with the help of some goons? You sure know that rich people like doctors, politicians, contractors, and bureaucrats work hand in glove with the goons in this country, don't you?

"Outside, it was raining by buckets. There was scarcely a rickshaw in sight. I had no choice but to put a cataleptic Neeta on an unclaimed cart and run to the government hospital. Within two hours, she gave birth to a baby girl. I was happy for the child. I hoped Neeta would come out of her unconscious state. Twenty-four hours later, the baby died and Neeta was still comatose. My world was shattered.

"Let's have one more round. I told you you'd like its bitterness, didn't I? Here we go. Yes, where were we? Oh yes, the baby had died and Neeta was still comatose. My world had fallen apart. But then I could not run away from it. I had to face the reality. I had to look into its ugly face. Neeta was transferred to the emergency ward. Another six days passed and she did not come out of her stupor.

"I was absolutely clueless about whatever was happening to my wife. You see I'm not much educated. So, I don't understand much of these. And what do you expect from a person who earns a salary of Rs 2,200-a-month as supervisor in a private electronic company? But all this was happening to my family, to me. I had to do some thing. From the apathy of a government-run hospital, I took my wife to another nursing home. The doctor promised me that he'd completely cure her. He demanded Rs. 9,000 for this job. Now I had no money in my account. There was some dough in my wife's account though. But she was in coma. So when I told this to the doctor, he showed me an innovative way. He took the thumb impression of an unconscious Neeta on the check and withdrew the amount. Doctors are so intelligent, aren't they? The problem was solved.

"But, you see friend, Neeta was not cured. She continued to be asleep. Not only I was running out of funds, I was also getting short on patience. Another hope came in the form of another doctor. This time at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences. There the doctor did a See-Tee scan (CT scan) of my wife. He found her having some new-ro-logical (neurological) problems. So turn for another doctor. I knocked at another clinic. For eight days, the doctor examined her. On the eighth day, the doctor asked me to take Neeta home for the treatment was expensive and slow. He also handed me a bill of Rs. 10,000, which I had to settle.

"While all this was happening, I had lost my job, had emptied the family savings, sold my ancestral home for Rs 65,000, Neeta's jewellery, our television set and household utensils. Despite all this, nothing brought her back to life. Friend, at last I had no option but to move the courts and seek mercy killing for my wife. You know mercy killing, don't you?

"Do you have another smoke? Give me one. Even a bidi would do. So, you thought that's the end of the story. No dear. No. There is more. Only if you'd listen. So, where was I? Yes, I moved the courts and petitioned for mercy killing. You know what happened then? I became a small celebrity. People in the court, and even the journalists, came to me to tell that I had started a debate on the issue of U-tha-nasia (euthanasia). That's another term for mercy killing. Tough word but interesting, isn't it, like the word anustheseeya? But for all the publicity, I did not gain much. The court rejected my plea for mercy killing my wife saying that all "artificial death” whether desired or undesired, was illegal. It simply meant that only natural death was legal. Some learned folks also informed me that last year, a 72-year-old retired headmaster, a 60-year-old cycle repair shop owner and an octogenarian in Kerala were refused the right to die by the high court. I don't understand why these people think so. Isn't a graceful death better than a disgraceful life? What do you think friend?

"But there was a little ray of hope. The court heeded my other request. It ordered that the state should bear all medical expenses in the wake of curing my wife. But that was more of a joke than a succor. When I took her to the government hospital, a paltry Rs 3.50 a day was given for her treatment under the government rules. Now, wasn't that a sad joke. When I raised my voice against this, a local leader threatened to kill me if I did not withdraw the case.

"Now that forms my quandary, friend. It's been more than a year since Neeta went unconscious. All my money is gone and I'm nowhere today. I've no answers to my son's questions. All the means of hope are blocked and sealed now. I see my wife's body, full of sores, lying on the tattered bed, like a dead body. The law refuses to give her a dignified death, a mercy killing. We too are fed up with this daily hell. What's hell after all? A place with no comfort and no hopes, isn't it? I don't even feel any sleep at night. Neeta is at least sleeping. I don't even get that. That's why I'm here, every night, telling my story to a friend like you, trying to make up my mind. Now, you tell me what should I do? Tell me, should I kill my wife? Tell me what would you do were you in my place?”

----

THE RENDEZVOUS

Morning. The time is about quarter past six. The day is grainy and sepia-tinted and muggy and musty. I find myself sitting on the stairs of the stone-sculpted amphitheatre of a college. Tall trees, dense in growth, surround the theatre in the fashion of a lush green forest. These are mainly acacia and golden showers in addition to numerous shrubs that provide unusual greenery to the campus. The sun is coy and billions of specks of dust hang over the atmosphere casting the sky in a muddy mould. The morning breeze is lazy in its blow.

And I sit there on the rough surface of the stairs, my palms supporting my cheeks. Naked. Plain naked. I feel the brutal and frank roughness of the rocks on the plum flesh of my behind. I gaze towards the road that emerges from the buildings where Rosy lives. My eyes are transfixed at a single point of deliberation:

Will Rosy come today?

My mind expresses doubt. The morning is not normal. So, she may not come. But my heart knows she will. Each dust particle of my body says a hundred prayers:

"May Rosy come!"
"May Rosy come!"

You want to know who she is? Even I don't know much about her. What I do know is that she is beautiful. And young. She has an earthy complexion with a lustre about it, like a bronze statue of an Indian Venus. An oval face; curly black hair, large, luminous eyes and full voluptuous lips look splendid on her well-proportioned figure. Her beauty strikes one with the ferocity of a thunderbolt. When I saw her for the first time, the wicked cupid unerringly shot his arrow into the pulp of my heart. And I became besotted of Rosy ever since.

And so I sit wondrously, with an impatient heart, waiting for her. Soon, I see a small figure appear on the winding road ahead. My heart says it must be her. My beautiful Rosy. The Rosy I want to hug and kiss and make love to. Today is the day when it all has to happen. Today is the day when my wait will be over, and I will enjoy the fruits of my patient worship. Today is the day when Rosy will lay bare all her priceless treasures for my eyes to feast and satiate my senses. My heart aches with the pain of acute pleasure when I see her figure walking down the road.

That small figure begins to enlarge itself, albeit slowly. First it looks colourless, just a spot in the form of a tiny human body. Now, it appears white in colour. I keep my eyes fixed. A few minutes pass, and to my delight, it turns out to be Rosy wearing a white jogging ensemble. She runs at a leisurely pace towards the amphitheatre, where I am waiting for her.
When she enters the theatre, I don't stand up from my place. She throws a faint smile at me, which I eagerly receive and promptly return. She does not stop running and starts taking a round of the theatre. She is not shocked to see me sitting there naked. She keeps on jogging playfully along with the stairs. Her charming face glistens with the beads of sweat that adorn her forehead. She has her hair braided. Her white canvas joggers shine mystically on the dull plane of rock and soil.

I wait for Rosy to finish her exercise and join me, her lover, to bless with her luscious endowments. While I am lost in the reverie of how the two of us will enjoy and please each other, there enters a young man. I don't know his name. He is tall, well built and handsome. He is also in a jogging dress. He says hello to Rosy, and neglecting my presence, joins her. They exchange a few words with each other, which I cannot hear in any case. I didn't tell you I was deaf, did I?

Now what I see is that they are doing some exercises with each other's help. They are exchanging smiles and seem to be quite glad in each other's company. Now he holds her feet and now she supports him in the sit-ups. I do frown at Rosy for doing such stupid activities with a stranger; but she scarcely notices my disapproval. They are both happy with their studied movements, which will make them physically robust. All this, though sordid-looking, is tolerable to me till something strange and unbearable happens. It is so unexpected. Rosy suddenly embraces the man and kisses him on his lips. The man returns the kiss. What further happens is provocative enough to boil my blood. Rosy and the man, after taking a look at me, look at each other, smile and languidly move towards the small cave-like room in the womb of the theatre.

While they walk towards the room, I feel shocked and cheated. I shout at Rosy but words don't roll out of my throat. At best mumbles come out, which have their own pitch and volume, but they don't mean anything to Rosy. Both of them go into the room, into an area of darkness, turning deaf to my pleadings. I can guess what will happen there. Tears of disappointment and helplessness flow from my eyes.

I come back to my street's familiar scene of the morning. The municipal water supply tap's faucet is leaking, sending long sprays of water onto the pavement. About a dozen malnourished urchins play around the tap while a few famished females shoo them away. The kids laugh when I start to piss near the tap. The females turn their gaze away from me. I pass urine till the last drop trickles out and I feel satisfied. I move on.

I see my friend Raghu coming towards me. He has a badminton racket and a white cork in his hands. He invites me to play with him. I follow him.

----

AN UNSPEAKABLE BETRAYAL

When Sam tried to press the doorbell of his house, his finger trembled. His heart throbbed out of his throat as if he had come running a hundred miles. It was the moment, the crucial moment, he thought. It was the moment he had dreaded facing for many years. A moment, he had guessed, that would be stunningly solid, and inexplicably maddening. If he handled it properly, he'd succeed, he thought. He would ring the bell. Tam would open the door. She would look into his eyes. And bingo, she'd spot it! Women are supposed to have the sixth sense, he had heard. If she didn't, well and good. But if she did, it'd be fucking tough to handle. That was what mattered. That could change his life, and hers too! Waves of anxiety stirred each cell in his body. Though it was not a hot morning, beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. He looked at his hand. It was dripping muck. He was gob smacked. His other hand held a brown leather briefcase, its handle swathed in gooey moisture. He felt his legs gone limp and wobbly, ready to crash down.

He put the suitcase down. He took out the handkerchief from the right hand pocket of his trousers and dabbed off the sweat from his hands and face. He took a deep breath. A drought of freshness spurted from his lungs and swamped his body. Yet the freshness failed to throw out the gob of anxiety that seemed to muffle his breath.

"Will Tam see it in my eyes?"

"Will she find out?"

And suddenly the dread of being naked engulfed him. No, he was not afraid of his wife, he told himself. He had become naked before her for an innumerable time. Who doesn't become naked while making love? He had been making love to her, in fact only to her, for more than five years now. No, he was not afraid of the physical nudity. What Sam feared was the nakedness of his inner self, his soul, the immaterial himself that lay within him. Will she see through his mask of innocence? Will she find out that the purity of his soul has been tarnished? Will she just smell it out?

On his way home, he was thinking about this only. And now, standing before the door, he was about to face that dreadful moment. It was not a particularly happy or a sad moment. It was a moment that could blow up his soul with just one glance of Tam. It was an unusual moment like that critical one run or one goal that could make a team win or lose a match.

His fear was more pronounced than required, he guessed. Don't all men do it? He rebuked himself for his insistence on chastity. He was not the first man on earth who had violated the vow. For five years, he had been pure and devoted. His world had not moved beyond Tam; and it was not some involuntary submission or slavery; rather, the force that bound them together was nothing but love. It was not that there weren't any temptations. Since Sam's marketing job entailed some traveling every month, he could have easily slept around. He did sometimes feel the libidinal stirrings in his groin while on one of those trips. But he had successfully resisted all such enticements. He had a happy marital life with Tam: his Tam, his sweetheart and his soul mate. He thought of her photograph in his wallet. He had especially liked that picture because he found her pretty in one-third profiles. She was smiling in that photo, her teeth sparkling like pearls. Her beautiful dark eyes also seemed to grin. She had long black hair and he loved to play with them. In her, he had nothing to grudge about.

In fact, he never had done. It was not that they did not quarrel. Like all couples, they had their share of petty squabbles. That was quite normal. Tam would sulk for a few hours but later she would make up with him. She was sentimental about him as she was sentimental about her parents and sisters. But that never bothered him. He found that acceptable in a woman, as he believed that every woman had her own idiosyncrasies. He was sure about the purity of his love for Tam until he met D'Souza.

D'Souza was one of his classmates in school. While in school, they were not particularly friends; however, they knew each other well. He had forgotten about him. And so had D'Souza. They did not even know they lived in the same city. One day Sam bumped into him in a shopping mall. That chance meeting changed much in Sam's life later.

D'Souza had become a painter. Though he was yet to become a big name in the art marquee, he sold good enough number of works to earn himself a handsome lifestyle. Sam did not think it was an eerie profession for his friend as he had been different even in the school days. He broke all the rules in school and was sort of an anti-hero-undisciplined, uncouth, and moody, always wearing a devilish smile. He had long hair now and the careless stubble gave his face a philosophical look. He still had that devilish smile which made Sam recognize his schoolmate.

"How does it feel to sell pharmaceuticals?" D'Souza had asked him later.
"How does it feel to sell paintings?" he had asked him in return.

They both then had laughed. Despite such a long gap of time, they could still communicate. Sam was very happy about this. Friends being a rarity in cities, Sam began to cultivate him. He invited him over for lunch and dinner. He often visited him in his single's pad in Hauz Khas village whenever he was in town. He liked his house, which was almost a mansion in comparison to Sam's modest flat in Patparganj. He liked talking to D'Souza because he said those things which none of his colleagues or other friends did. He found his company very soothing. He looked at his paintings and wondered what meaning they conveyed through those crisscross and multicolored lines and figures. He always failed to understand the essence of his friend's work, yet he felt proud of him.

"This is something you don't need to understand," D'Souza had said gifting him and Tam a painting on their 4th wedding anniversary. It was a landscape, oil on canvas. "Specially done for you and bhabhiji," he had said. They had put the painting on a wall in the drawing room. When the sunrays fell on the painting, the golden paint (of the river) magically shimmered.

He gifted them another painting on their fifth anniversary. It was much different from the last one. It was done in half-tone sepia color, one fourth of it in black and gray. The sepia part showed a woman's bare back, a pearl necklace on her nape, and a man's big hand, just a hand, on it with clawed fingers dug into the woman's skin. The other part, the longitudinal quarter, showed half a hand, a woman's, with unfurled fingers, in the pose of granting a blessing. A part of the moon formed the backdrop of this feminine hand, the moon's whiteness jaundiced and dirtied. The painting was signed by him. "An Unspeakable Betrayal" by Alvin D'Souza, 1999, Oil on canvas, 76 by 60 cms.

"A special wedding gift," the painter friend said, winking at the couple. Tam had really liked the artwork and she said that it was a splendid job. Sam could barely comprehend it but he believed it was an excellent creation. Tam put it on a wall in the bedroom, just in front of their bed. Whenever Sam looked at it, lying naked on his back, after making love to Tam, he tried to unravel its meaning. He never succeeded. All he could see there, before dozing off absent-mindedly, was D'Souza's smiling face.

The friendship between Sam and D'Souza was flowering now. They would often take a walk in the MCD parks or in Village Bistro and discuss about life and times. Sometimes they would go out of the Delhi, park the car on a side of the Delhi-Jaipur highway, and drink beer facing the green farms.

"Why did you divorce your wife?" Sam asked him one day while walking on the lush green carpet of Australian grass in the Lodhi Gardens. He wanted to know this for a long time now. He wondered how could a woman leave a handsome and artistic man like D'Souza. He wanted to know this but he feared it would hurt his friend.

"Because she was not as good as Tam," he said, winking and smiling at him. Then he stopped walking, put a hand around Sam's neck, and said, "Sam, I'm not as lucky as you are, friend!" His voice had a ring of melancholy. Sam became sad too and he rebuked himself for picking up such a stupid topic. The evening was ruined.

On another occasion, after he had returned from a slightly lengthy tour, he found himself discussing his sex life with his friend.

"Don't you ever feel tempted to sleep with a woman other than your wife?" D'Souza asked him.
"I do but isn't that morally wrong," he said. He was amazed at the clarity of his own answer.

D'Souza laughed at this for a long time. He laughed convulsively and seemed to choke on the cigarette smoke he had inhaled. Sam looked at him sheepishly and he found his friend as incomprehensible as his paintings.

"Why are you laughing like this?" Sam asked him.

"Because, man, twenty-first century is here and you still talk like a mullah," he said and got drowned in another bout of laughter. After a few minutes, he calmed down. He became a little serious.

"Honestly speaking, tell me, don't you get bored?" D'Souza asked him.

"Get bored of what?"

"Of eating the same homemade daal-chawal day after day," D'Souza said. His eyes seemed to have a laughter already.

Sam did not know what to say on this. One moment he found the issue too private to be discussed even with a friend. The very next moment he felt an inner wish to be honest, to come out in the open and admit that he needed change, he needed to break free of the chimera of morality. Yet the next moment he thought of his sweet Tam. How could he betray her? He felt a sting in his heart.

"Sam, you tell me, why do you think people go out to restaurants, for lunch or dinner?"

"To change taste, for breaking the monotony."

"Exactly! This is what I'm trying to tell you," D'Souza said, looking into his friend's eyes. "And no one sees any harm in that."

Later Sam wished that discussion never had taken place. On his way home, he thought about it. If it did anything to him, it confused him. That night he did not feel like making love to Tam. While she slept on innocently, like a baby, he kept on staring on his friend's painting. It seemed to throw questions at him, and the whole conversation of the evening came back to him, swaddling his other thoughts.

The next morning, he inadvertently lied to Tam, for the first time that he would go out on an official tour. He would come back the next day, he said. He did not know why he could not refuse D'Souza to attend his special party. The party was to be held in a farmhouse in Noida at night. To spend the night there, he lied to Tam.

And now, the next morning, Sam stood in front of his flat's entrance: gob smacked, hands dripping muck, sweating. The night was gone in a trice. He did not remember much now. All he remembered was a couple of drinks, dim and mysterious lights, high-voltage music, and men and ladies in semi-naked dresses. Then more drinks, some mad dancing, and the dark chambers. He was whisked into one by somebody. He could not know who it was. It was a feminine body. The darkness made a dinner of his purity. He could not believe he still had that much passion locked inside him. He was reminded of the early months of his marriage.

Now, standing before the door in morning sunlight, he felt naked. His clothes seemed transparent to him. He felt shifty. He wished none of his neighbors saw him in this state.

He put the handkerchief back in the right hand pocket of his trousers. It got tucked inside like a moist ball, making a swell in the pocket. He picked up the briefcase in his left hand. He took a deep breath and with a trembling finger, which weighed like a ton, pressed the doorbell. His heart pounded like a canon firing salvos. His body was swaddled, from head to toe, in sweat.

Here comes the moment, the crucial moment, he thought.

Tam opened the door and gave her the usual smiling welcome. She took the briefcase from Sam's hand, pulled him in and slammed the door shut. She bolted it up and turned to him.

His back turned on Tam, he tried to move towards the bathroom. He felt as if his legs were nailed to the ground.

"I love you Sam," she said, throwing herself on Sam from the behind.

"I love you too," he said in a drunken voice. He felt a knife slice open his heart.

----

CONFESSIONS OF A SERIAL KILLER

" Un… ha, don't move! Don't move, baby! It'll be all over soon. It will be calm again. Dead calm. And you will be free. All your worries will go. You'll feel the kind of peace you never have felt in life. You want that, don't you? You do. I know you do. Don't ask me how. I just know. It is kind of having a different sense, knowing beyond the normal. Yes, you are right. That makes me different.

"Hey, I told you. Hold on and stay calm. I must tell you that you look beautiful in this pose. Your slim wrists in the fold of the ropes! Look, it has an amazing grace. Just like that graceful chap we see in the churches, hanging naked on the wall! Just like that! Uff…you…you are a sensible girl, aren't you? You must understand what I'm saying. There is no point in struggling. It is useless. It'll put you in more trouble. And who wants more trouble? Not you, at least.

"What? It's gagging you? That roll of cloth in your mouth? That's your fault. I told you to stay tranquil. Breathe gently and it'll be fine. Yes? You are feeling some pain? Don't worry, honey. It will be okay. In the beginning, it feels a little painful. Slowly, but surely, you'll come to terms with it. Believe me that's how it goes. I'll help you achieve that. Yeah, take my word on that. Oh, that trail of blood on your fleshy brown thigh! Looks like a black rivulet on the African hinterland! Ha, ha! Forget about that. That is nothing to me. I have seen so much blood…

"Yes, I'll tell you. I'll tell you my whole bloody story so that you don't get bored. Stories are good, aren't they? They take your mind away from the reality. They help you fall asleep. My mother used to tell me stories and I used to fall asleep listening to her. But you know, like all good things, she went out of my life one day. Somebody killed her. Who did that? I don't know. But my game of blood began soon after, with my stepmother. I had seen blood on her belly. That was the beginning of my red journey. But, you know, it was merely an accident. Tell me, can you hold your senses after having consumed liquor and marijuana?

"Yes, she too was drinking with me-my stepmother. She was giggling all the while, and wicked she, had undone the top buttons of her blouse. Wasn't that deliberate? I am sure that was. I believe she secretly wanted me. So, when she fell on the bed and dozed off, I tried to pull off her red panties. She resisted me but it was useless before a powerful young man like me. Then she threatened to spill the beans before my father. Foolish woman! I had no choice but to make pools of blood on her belly. Ah! I still remember the first jet of the crimson juice jumping out of her slashed entrails. It thrilled me like nothing. That was the thrill of an accident. I can't see any reason why they put me in a gaol after that. To me that was unwarranted. Why do they think that pleasure is sin? Pleasure is pleasure. How come it becomes sin! This baffles me even today. Don't you think so too?

"But tell me what became of my spending so many years in that dingy captivity? Could they stop me from coming to you? Or for that matter, coming to dozens of others like you, both younger and older? How does it bother others if I have you here in this beautiful pose? It is just a matter of spending a little time with you. Then it's all over. You go to your own calm world and I go to my own universe of satiation. Would we again cross each other's paths? Hardly ever. So, tell me where does this problem come from?

"And dammit, how can people have any problem with me? I am a simple man of pleasure. I am like a journeyman, and I'm making this journey. I remember each and every halt, each little destination on my itinerary. I can even tell you the exact time I spent at every point. I can tell you how they smelled and how they looked. I cherish their memories and nurture them in my dreams. I know they are all resting in peace wherever they are. You should be glad that you'd join their company soon. Coz' I've chosen you this time.

"Oh, yes! I knew it was coming. I knew you'd ask me how I choose my partners, my destinations. If you know about it, you'd learn how hard working I am. Looking for my partners, I have to do a lot of "Peeping Tom" activities. I generally keep a watch on them and then surprise them when they are alone or asleep. But that's not the case always. Take your own case. That should enlighten you about my methods. Had you not asked for a lift from me, you wouldn't be here! Chemicals or gases or assaulting objects? No, no. I don' use them. They don't look nice on a gentleman, do they?

"Yes, I read about myself in the papers. What? How do I know how to read? I'm not that illiterate. I went to school till class VI. I learnt how to read Hindi and even picked up a little English there. You know how it is in government-run schools, unlike the spic and span convents you people come from. So my education was just preliminary till then. Once in jail, I augmented my knowledge there, thanks to one educated inmate. He said he was a doctor in social sciences. I saw this kind of a doctor for the first time in my life. He had such big hips, like a pair of mammoth-sized melons. Every night I had to dig deep in between those melons to emerge with quanta of knowledge in the day. For me, it was a small price to pay for the knowledge I got in return.

"So, any way, I was telling you about the papers. They write about my journey. They write about my destinations. They call me a rapist, a sex maniac, a paranoid schizophrenic, a man suffering from impulse control disorder. But you tell me who is not a rapist in this society? I have my own way of making the tracks. Others have their own ways. I have my own destinations; they have their own victims. If I'm a rapist then who they are?

"Don't you want to know how do I feel when I read about myself in the papers? Frankly speaking, I don't feel anything about it. I'm neither sad nor happy. And they keep on committing mistakes. Yes, it's true that I had had pleasure with that 23-year-old Japanese tourist who had come to the beach to watch the splendor of the rising sun at 6 am. I had also enjoyed the company of that 55-year-old woman who was asleep on a sofa bed in the lounge room of her ground floor house at 3 am. I also don't deny that I recently had fun with that 17-year-old girl at 5 am in the cemetery. But the papers and the law keepers wrongly attributed to me the rape and murder of a four-year-old baby whose body was found near the railway tracks. Believe me, dear, I never did that. There must be somebody else in town who's doing this. As for me, the lowest age I've touched is 9.

"Do you know why I don't like small babies? The reason is that it is very easy to control them. A few slaps are enough for them. The challenge lies in captivating the older ones. They have to be shown how futile it is to struggle! Look at yourself. Now that you are not struggling, you look serene and poised. But you are listening to me, aren't you?

"What? Sorry, I didn't catch that. Oh, now I get it. Why am I talking to you? The reason is I like talking to my partners. What is the use of remaining silent? A conversation helps in keeping things flowing. It rips up the strangeness that comes in between two new partners. In situations like these, it is always better to talk than to fall silent. No. No. This is not a mode of verbal threatening to subdue you. Tell me, do I need to subdue you?

"You don't have an answer. No problem! I'll make things simpler for you to understand. How old are you? 14-15? That's OK. Neither little, nor old. "A viable die-able age!" Ha, ha, ha! Do you see this shining cleaver? Un-ha! This is not my weapon. I keep it for my own safety. But when a partner, chosen by me, does not cooperate with me, I use it. Then I don't talk. I conclude my game and move on. But you don't be afraid: you are cooperating with me. You are a cooperative partner. Yes that's the word! C-o-o-p-e-r-a-t-i-v-e-! So, I'm talking to you! Now you know, don' you? Cheer up baby, be happy!

"You see, I'm not afraid of anything! You know why? Because I trust my partners. Because they become part of my memories and dreams. Because all of them go to the kingdom of calm and peace. So what if you have seen me sans my balaclava? So what if you have seen my black disheveled hairs and well-built body? So what if you know that I'm about 35 and my voice is gruff? So what if you know that I wear dark-colored tracksuit pants and have this cleaver with me?

"See, look closely! See, this is my face-a bristly, weary face with big flaring nostrils and fiery eyes! Look, you can touch me here-touch my thick lips, the cleft chin, and this huge Adam's apple! Touch! Touch! Oh, I'm sorry! How can you touch me when you are handcuffed?

"Excuse me, come again! Oh, you want some water! Sorry! There is no water here. But yes, there is rum! Do you want that? No? Oh, poor girl! I feel so sorry I can't help you on this score!

"Remorse? What? Do I feel remorse? No, no! I don't suffer from that disease. Sometimes if the symptoms emerge, I drown them in alcohol or knock them up with, ah, marijuana! Simple, isn't it?

"Hey, have you fallen asleep? Oh, yes, you have. Look at yourself. How cool and calm you are. I told you earlier that stories are good to put one to sleep. So, now that I've told you my story, sleep on. Rest in peace. You must excuse me now. I have to go wash myself. You have left your marks on my face and body. I don't mind that. I take them as tokens of love. So, bye bye now. Ah! The aroma of chilly chicken! It is already pulling me like mad to the dining table. So I take your leave. Au revoir, and say me, bon apetit!"

----

9/11

I'm on the bus to my office. I'm sitting by the window, The Times of India spread over the office bag on my lap.

Two years on, New York tries to leave 9/11 behind

There is a twilight picture of Ground Zero in New York.

Blasts at home force Sharon to fly back.

Rocca revives troops talk.

A grumpy middle-aged man sits next to me. His girth is more than what the seat can take. His arm touches mine, a forceful touch. The bus jerks and I feel a shove. I keep looking at the newspaper. He keeps shifting his postures till he feels comfortable. Off and on, he steals a glance at the newspaper, perhaps trying to catch a glimpse of the headlines or maybe trying to look at the picture of a woman in a towel in a bathroom at the bottom of the front page. Who knows? Maybe he doesn't even read English. Maybe. Who knows?

I look out the window. The sky is overcast-beginnings of a dull day. I read the weather report: Cloudy sky with one or two spells of rain or thundershowers in some areas. I shrug and look at the R K Laxman cartoon. In the cartoon, I see a government office where employees are sleeping or resting over their desks (it is not even midday, the wall clock shows), and an employee screams at a newspaper headline announcing cut in holidays: "What is this country coming to? Now they won't let us even relax from work a bit." I chuckle at Laxman's wit.

The bus is full of people, mostly officegoers. All the seats are taken. A few students are standing, with notebooks in one hand; the other holding the overhead steel bars for support.

The FM is on full volume. The radio jockey is interviewing a man, an Indian cab driver, who was near the Twin Towers when 9/11 happened. The television image of the aircraft darting through the WTC Building comes alive in my mind-the ball of fire engulfing top stories of the tower, the building crumpling, melting, sinking, and the trapped people jumping off the windows. I remember the words of the television commentators: "This unforgettable image has become the ultimate benchmark of terror, the metaphor for our age, the mug to the caption 9/11…."

Then other images, geographically more immediate, physically more intimate, flash through my mind. This time it is Bombay. Blast in a bus. Blast in a train. Blast in a taxi. All these blasts have rocked the city of Bombay, the commercial capital of India. Delhi, the political capital of India, is also a target of Islamic terrorists. Both the cities are on high alert, I remember reading it in the newspapers.

I am terrified of the word high alert. It forebodes something sinister, terrible, inhuman that is capable of touching the ordinary with extraordinary results. After 9/11, every little festival calls for a high alert in the city. Every bomb blast makes the police declare high alert. And we suddenly turn into timid rats, cold and careful about each little step we take.

I look around scanning the faces, my eyes trying to locate any unclaimed baggage. My eyes get fastened to a huge jute sack in the driver's open cabin with just a steel railing behind his seat. There are a few people sitting there, some on the seats, others perched on the engine's bonnet, but no one's holding the sack. I get suspicious. Who does it belong to? What does it contain? Does it contain explosives? If it does, then? My heart beats faster, and I suddenly feel cold.

I remember an incident that happened with me about two years ago. I was on a bus, again, along with a colleague. The bus was packed with people, like a can of sardines. Fortunately we had got a seat together in this rush hour crowd. I was discussing office politics with my colleague when suddenly a commotion started in the bus, coupled with the noise of sparks. People began to get off the bus and suddenly there was a mad rush to the doors. We were trapped in the middle of the bus. I don't know when my colleague disappeared from the seat. I thought my end was at hand as the bomb was to go off. Huffing and puffing somehow I got pushed out of the bus thanks to the surging crowd. The bomb didn't go off. There wasn't a bomb at all actually. It was some mechanical fault in the engine. Whatever the reason, we felt like survivors.

Should I inquire or prod about the sack or should I get off the bus? I'm not able to decide. My stop is not far away. I know that my journey is a matter of a few minutes more. Even if it is a bomb, it won't go off so soon, I reason. The thought seems to convince me by and by. Isn't it true that everyday we think that we are going to return home safe, that harm would never come our way, that we won't end up becoming TV footage? Somehow we believe in this idea of our indestructibility, which gives us the courage to step out of our homes in these days of terror.

The bus pulls over in front of the Indian Oil Corporation Building at Green Park. There is a traffic jam. I look at the neon sign on top of the building, as I always do. 9: 25. I check the time in my wristwatch. My six-year-old watch is accurate. ‘Good,' I sigh. The sign changes to show the temperature. 25.2 degree C. A relatively cool day, I think. The temperature sign goes too. An advertisement appears.

The jam starts to clear up and the bus begins to crawl. Now it begins to drizzle, proving the weather report right. Thank God there's an umbrella in my bag! I feel happy at the thought. The drizzle gets in and drenches my shirtsleeve. I pull at the glass to close the window. The glass does not move. I fold up the newspaper and put it inside the bag.

At the next stop, a pot-bellied baton-wielding constable gets on the bus. Standing near the footboard, he takes a look at the passengers. "Look under your seats. Everyone, look under your seat," he commands.

No one moves even an inch. Some girls in the bus burst into a giggle as if the constable has cracked a joke. Other passenger follow suit. I shuffle my feet below the seat, searching for objects. Just in case. Why take chances with one's ass? While a large number of passengers get down the bus, I want to shout about the sack. I want to ask the constable to check it. But I don't do it-can't gather the courage. It would be too embarrassing! The humiliated constable gets down the bus.

A young girl, a little obese for her age, along with an old man, turbaned and garbed in the traditional Sikh dress, with a flowing white beard, get on the bus. The girl walks past the bus conductor and takes a vacant seat beside a morose looking young man. The man is sitting by the window. For the sake of convenience, let's call the girl Jassi. The old man sits across the aisle on a seat opposite hers.

Jassi is in a maroon suit. Her coiffed hair is wadded together by a butterfly-shaped hair band. Her face is not attractive-it is broad like her oversized figure, with very ordinary features. An aquiline nose twisted at the tip further contributes to her sinister appearance. Perhaps Jassi knows about it. Her eyes carry a limpid sadness in them. She sits tightlipped.

The old man looks askance at her time and again. A walking stick innocently rests between his thighs. His glance is hard and has an element of uncompromising orthodoxy.

The young man sitting next to Jassi is not handsome from any angle. He is reed thin and has a soiled look. He sports thick moustache like Gunter Grass and has the two top buttons of his shirt open, exposing his chest hair. He seems to enjoy the drizzle coming through the window.

Jassi is shy. She steals intermittent glances at the young man through the corner of her eyes, with a suppressed smile. Even a plain girl deserves a little attention from an ordinary looking man, she seems to think.

The man doesn't seem to mind a little brush with the girl's body. A young girl is a young girl, however plain looking!

Both of them look as if they are feeling an eerie sensation in their arms that slowly diffuses to other body parts. The perturbation is overwhelming and they seem to wallow in its luxuriance.

Jassi enjoys her few moments of attention. The man too relishes his few seconds of exalted masculinity.

The old man is not comfortable in his seat. A twinge of repugnance stings him. He throws a chilly glance toward Jassi, his daughter perhaps. The girl looks at him again and again, between bouts of subdued pleasure and embarrassment. Pleasure and embarrassment taking turns.

The old man's eyes become more and more icy.

Now the girl looks more sheepish than rhapsodic.

A ladies' seat lies unoccupied ahead of her seat. She gets up from her seat and walks over to the vacant one. Before taking the seat, she darts a damning look at the old man. It burns down the spike of objection in the old man's eyes.

The old man looks satisfied now and casts his eyes down.

The young man sitting by the window whistles a famous song's tune, trying to hide his discomfiture at the turn of the events.

The mysterious unclaimed sack is still there on the bus.

I again look out the window at the madness of the morning traffic, anxiously waiting for my stop, which is next.

--------

FEATURED WRITER: Beverly Vines-Haines

ABSTINENCE

        Laura Gates walked off a jet in Los Angeles, pondering destiny. No matter what twists and turns life takes, some moments are inevitable. She didn't look for Boz. Since 9/11, arrival gates had been deserted and passengers had to find their own way to baggage carousels.
        She could use a little more time. She hadn't seen him for more than 40 years. Which is not to say she hadn't thought of him almost every single day. Her kids would never understand that. Let alone her grandchildren. Not one of them saw her as a woman with a past.
        Stepping off the escalator at the baggage level, the crowd slowed, mingling with people carrying balloons and flowers. A small girl showered a young man with red, white and blue confetti, triangular flakes with sharp edges that fell on Laura's skin and stuck there. A soldier? Someone home from the war? She worked her way around them. There were so many kinds of war.
        How would Boz look? She'd held him sacred for so long, no matter what had come and gone in her life: Two husbands, four children, nine grandchildren, each of them staking claim to a piece of her.
        Forced out of her life years before, Boz had recently found her, complicating everything according to her family. "Go and see him," her daughter sighed. "Get it over with. Just don't touch him. You can't do that to Dad."
        Up ahead, the baggage carousel turned lazy circles. Beyond it, she could see him. Gently changed by time, he still made her heart hammer. He waved. Sixty years of living had smoothed the rough-edged rebellion of their youth. No touching, she remembered. Rules were rules.
        Boz took her to a hotel but didn't step inside, waiting outside while she freshened up and put her things away. Then he took her on a drive along the beach, talking non-stop as if he could pour out every detail of the lost years in one afternoon. He drove to the pier at Huntington Beach.
        She'd told him how years earlier she'd stood on that pier, trembling because she could feel him, the very essence of him, so powerfully it stole her breath. He told her he lived less than a mile from that spot in those days.
        They went to a coffee shop. His hand brushed hers, shooting arrows of heat and passion through her. They walked barefoot in hot sand and ate fresh-baked pretzels from a cart. Seagulls screamed. Waves pounded. They sat on a blanket and their eyes met, an embrace more intimate than flesh on flesh.
        The sun burned orange in a lavender sky before she could look away.

Saturday afternoon movies and dime comic books lured me out on a weekly basis and inspired my surreptitious life as a superhero. I was aware, of course, that the Phantom, the Green Hornet, Superman and Spiderman were all males. That didn't bother me. My fledgling feminism took tender root and created a secret life where I rescued those fellows when they got in over their heads.

My family moved frequently and I had little in the way of social graces that would help me fit in quickly with my peers. So I gave voice to my imagining. I began to lie. I remember a particular elementary school in Chatsworth, Illinois where I endured fourth and fifth grades. Chatsworth is a small community, a bit reluctant to embrace little girls who live at least sixty percent of their lives inside their head.

This was about the time I Love Lucy enjoyed its first season and Kate Smith was a major television presence. My father owned a factory so we were one of the few families that even owned a TV. Inviting other children over to watch the Sealtest Big Top did not improve my social standing. The moment the test patterns returned, they left. I did try being friendly, even made up a dramatic past. In one story, my family had recently arrived from Holland where I had worn wooden shoes and lived inside a windmill. In another version, we lived in India and kept herds of sacred cows.

Of course, these wild tales only made my social life more abysmal. Thus, my superhero existence sustained me. The school had an enormous cylindrical tube that ran up the outside. It was a fire escape, but served before and after school and during recess as the favorite piece of playground equipment. We would climb to the top, stopping at each floor to imagine the classroom on the other side of the plywood door.

During those two years I developed strong visualization and imagination skills. In fact, I could not wait to go to bed each night because that was when my real life commenced. The school was on fire! It never varied. All students and teachers turned to weak and screaming babies as the cries filled the air. "Run for your lives." "Fire!" Oddly, not one of those fools could find the fire escape.

In my fantasy, I saved them all. While not quite flying (or maybe I did), I managed to rescue three floors of frightened children and rush back into the flaming structure for the teachers who were too frightened to move. It was soul satisfying. It was righteous comeuppance.

That pretty much took care of high school.

So now I'm a writer. I'm cynical and bitter at times and there is an edge of suppressed rage in most of my work. After I sold my first novel my mother decided my writing was a calling, some kind of divine decree. I considered reminding her of that chemistry course but instead battled three weeks of guilt when her poodle died. Being a child from the Wonder Years, I made up with them years ago, after I married a man they liked

Recently, I found my Marine and we secretly email three or four times a week. We even met one weekend in LA. It sure takes the edge off the anger.

        It's the little things that rip my attitude to shreds. Like driving in Dallas traffic. I plumb the deepest recesses of road rage before I make it six blocks.
        Every time.
        Before I leave the house, I stand at the mirror, applying makeup and psyching myself for the day. I'll be all right, I think. This one time, just this once, I'll get out there and find myself traveling with normal people instead of those asswipes and cocksuckers from last time. I talk to myself every morning, hoping, always hoping, I will not sink to an astonishing new low as I maneuver through Metroples traffic. I try to stay under the radar, everyone's radar-the cops who are never there when I encounter some cocksucker flashing lights in my rearview mirror and taking his frustration out on me that four lanes are at a virtual standstill and he cannot proceed by driving up and over my car.
        I've learned one can't be too careful. Asswipes, cocksuckers and idiots have an uncanny ability to read lips. One time a guy in a corvette managed to discern my silently mouthed "mother fucker" and he actually whipped around me and stopped. On the freeway! Thank god I was eight months pregnant. That stopped him.
        So, anyway, I make these elaborate plans to remain calm. I avoid high doses of caffeine. I promise whatever gods are listening that I will not assault my fellow humans with curses and threats. I start the engine. I back out, almost colliding with my neighbor's trashcan, which has blown into the street. Idiot!
        It takes thirty minutes to make it less than five miles to the freeway, that freaking poor excuse for a highway that is North Loop 820 between Dallas and Fort Worth. It's maxed out. I can see that from the overpass as I wait out a sixth cycle of the damn light! Okay, a deep, deep cleansing breath will help. No sooner do I maneuver into the right lane, after almost losing my right front fender to a cocksucker who refuses to let me merge, I encounter the true bane of the freeway. Now I've seen this fucker all over the country. You know the one. He's so mid-life crisis-y you cannot mistake him. He's maybe forty-five, more likely fifty. He's got a sports car, a convertible, and the top is down, summer or winter. He leans into his steering wheel and he's got a wild-eyed expression. A cigarette dangles from his lips and he hits the shoulder, and anywhere he can move in and across the four lanes, honking his horn, flipping the bird, and clearly CLEARLY unbalanced.
        Deep down, I have to confess I like this guy. Reason? I feel more sane when he's around.
        Asswipes are different. They pretend to be normal. They drive conservative cars usually, and have those fucking bumper stickers that brag about their little asswipe children and their grades, sports prowess or some other dial-1-800-who-gives-a-shit triumph.
        At this point I am less than two miles into my twenty-five mile freeway journey to Dallas. I'm alarmed. My blood pressure has to be high because I can feel my eyes bulging from their sockets. Twice I've caught myself flipping people off with both hands and realized no one was steering. I promise myself I'll calm down, that I won't let myself notice when I get cut off or have to slam on my brakes to avoid lane changers. In the midst of the solemn promising, a cocksucker nearly takes off my back bumper as he zooms in behind me. Both middle fingers wave at him through the back window. He flips me off in return and I realize he is the rare Asswipe Cocksucker!
        I turn on a Yanni CD. I take ten consecutive cleansing breaths. Calming music flows over and around me. It works. At least it works until an idiot in a silver PT Cruiser stops ten feet in front of me. My body slams toward the steering wheel and I brace for those freaking airbags to let loose. They don't.
        Fuck Yanni. I need rap. Or killing music. Something that beats in time to my horn honks and the rhythmic dance of my middle fingers. Tomorrow is another day. But deep down, I know I will never change. I drive just like my father. I learned from the master and one day I will eventually snap and kill. It's inevitable. What else can I do in this world of asswipes, cocksuckers, idiots and fools?

        Katie Taylor hurried to the Coast Guard station across the street from her apartment. She stood at the bottom of the flagpole and attempted a salute. Chains clanged. Over her head, the illuminated banner whipped and snapped in the breeze. She listened to a somber rendition of the National Anthem that played in her mind, holding her salute until it ended.
        It was five in the morning in the coastal town of Westport, Washington. The wind blowing off the ocean cut through the three sweatshirts she wore. She hugged herself. The cold didn't matter. She was alive in the pre-dawn splendor, invigorated by the salt spray and the endless sky that was eerily free of seagulls. As she walked out onto the beach, a full moon leaped from wave to wave. Closer to shore, roiling swells broke the reflections into a thousand tumbling pieces.
        Her eyes darted from surf to sand, searching for a telltale glint, a flash of light, any sign of a bottle washed up on shore. Nothing.
        Yet.
        But she had a long way to go before she reached the Chateau Westport, her turning point. Things could change dramatically out there…or on her return. Each tide carried its own promise, its own unique offerings.
        Cold air drilled under her collar and she pulled the hood up, tying the string under her chin. She caressed the cool neck of a Budweiser bottle tucked in the muff of her outer shirt. The message was inside. The cap was taped and sealed with wax.
        Lost in her thoughts, she walked more than a mile before glancing back toward the South Jetty, trying to gage the time as darkness faded by imperceptible degrees. She had to be back in Westport before the fishing boats went out. She smiled, imagining she would find an agreeable tourist quickly today, someone willing to toss her bottle overboard once they hit the open sea.
        More than one way to skin a cat, she thought, her smile broadening. Skeeter Dawson, a self-professed environmentalist, had turned her in to authorities more than a year before. Said she was polluting the ocean with her daily bottles. As if. She still fumed at the memory. Her innovation, candle wax that sealed each message, had not been enough to placate Skeeter and the other whackos.
        He was adamant...something about old chemicals, dangerous chemicals, leeching out of paper. It built up, he said. She didn't buy that. When she was a kid, she loved breathing that wonderful purple ink from the mimeograph machine at school. Stuff had never hurt her or any of the other kids. Wouldn't hurt anything now - fish, fowl or human.
        She gazed at the ocean; aware she was seeing only the barest fraction of it. She'd tried to reason with Skeeter, explaining that even after sending out a message every day for thirty years, she'd sent fewer than eleven thousand bottles, fewer than eleven thousand purple pages, all sealed tight and safe.
        Skeeter was a moron. She could dump a tank of that purple ink in the Pacific and nothing would happen. The wind picked up and Katie bent into it. Skeeter had no clue about fidelity.
        Katie had been writing to Jackson Terry since she decided he wasn't coming back from the war. They would have married, should have married. Not that they'd ever gotten to that point in their discussions, what few discussions there had been. Jackson was her older brother's best friend. Katie made up her mind when she was in the sixth grade that one day she and Jackson would marry and settle down.
        In a strict sense it was true that she'd written every day since '72, though she supposed a purist might find grounds to argue. She'd lived over in Olympia in the early days and that meant a trip to the ocean each weekend. She'd drop the seven bottles in, one by one, as the tide went out. Not all in one place. She was pretty superstitious about that. No. Here one or two. Down in Grayland another. Then to Twin Harbors for a few more and out to the Jetty where she'd toss the last ones in.
        The messages were pretty much the same. Just telling Jackson where to find her when he came home and reminding him it was his duty to return. Each day she added personal news, kind of like a journal. By now, Jackson should be pretty caught up on things. She was waiting, had waited more than thirty years for him to come back and she was eager to get on with life.
        It was a sticking point, that ‘getting on with life' thing. In fact, it was the reason she'd made a new vow a few weeks back. If she didn't get a message from Jackson by the end of the year, she was going to call it quits.
        She reached the Chateau Westport, flashed her light out as far in front of her as she could, and turned. The wind pushed on her back and she was grateful walking would be easier now.
        Katie's life had been on hold a long time. It was a dilemma, one that seemed to build in intensity every day. For one thing, it was the way she lived. She had an apartment over the Maid of the Deep Charter Fishing office. She'd moved in there in 1976 when she came to Westport. Things piled up. Like newspapers. She'd never thrown a single one away, thinking Jackson might want to read the stories he had missed.
        There was also the problem with washing dishes, cleaning, and mopping the place. The neglect had seemed logical at first. She was waiting for an answer from Jackson. When it came, she would swing into action. There would be a reason to clean, a reason to mop. She'd have plans to pursue, a home to create.
        Time had simply gotten away from her.
        The tide crashed in, bringing with it branches and sea leaves, clam shells, sand dollars and jelly fish, all dead or dying, propelled in a whirling eddy that carried no bottles this morning. Her eyes searched the surf, skilled and accustomed to sorting through beach debris quickly.
        She reached the South Jetty and turned to make her way into town. The charter boats would be waiting to depart, people scurrying back and forth with steaming cups of coffee and lunches to carry onboard. She grinned. Most of those lunches would come back in with the boats, uneaten by seasick fishermen who would spend most of their time upchucking over the railings after the boats crossed the bar into the open water.
        She'd calculated the swells at ten or twelve feet on her walk. Not bad for the locals and the crews but choppy enough to make novices queasy. She could smell greasy pastries from the donut shops and an aroma of bacon, eggs and hashbrowns from a dozen breakfast establishments up and down the waterfront.
        The seagulls were awake now. They screamed and dive-bombed fishing boats and circled endlessly overhead. Tourists, those waiting to board the charters, tossed bits of donut and last bites of toast. Katie frowned. You could always tell the folks who didn't have to live day after day with these shrieking beggars. Locals never fed them.
        An older man and woman waited patiently next to the New Snoopy's gangplank. "Hey, how you doing this morning?" she asked, hurrying over to join them.
        The woman smiled. "Great. Looks like a good day for fishing."
        "You'll love it," Katie said, hoping that was true. "Say, would you do me a favor?"
        "If I can."
        Katie pulled the Budweiser bottle out of her shirt. "I've got a little project," she said. "I'm sending these messages out just to see if anything comes back. Would you mind, once you're out in the open, well, just tossing this overboard?"
        "Not at all." The woman reached for the bottle. "Good luck. I hope it works."
        They said goodbye to the accompaniment of the screaming gulls. Katie hurried across the street to go to work.
        She made salt-water taffy. Seventy-two flavors. Had tried to make it in her own kitchen for better profit but the health department shut her down. No matter. Her needs were few. Until Jackson came home. So these days she worked in a kitchen behind one of the gift shops. They all sold the same taffy. Or most of them did. Folks who bought the famous Westport taffy almost certainly bought tiny treats that Katie made.
        She entered the gift shop by the side door. Hildy Koontz looked up and smiled. Then she pointed to her computer, monitor flickering, and Katie nodded and hurried into the kitchen. She washed her hands three times and turned in a circle four times to the left and six times to the right. She wasn't certain why this ritual was necessary whenever she inadvertently came upon a computer…it just was.
        Computers, cell phones, fax machines and VCRs were all suspect to Katie. She had an electronic typewriter she used to create her messages to Jackson and she considered the machine state of the art. The mimeograph machine was older and she knew it. She'd had trouble getting support cartridges and ink for her equipment and had scoured second hand shops and junk stores until she accumulated a lifetime supply.
        Technology frightened her. She wasn't sure why. Maybe because the world was going so fast and Jackson still hadn't answered the bottles. She feared everything would be alien to him when he got home. When he left in the late 60's, no one had a cell phone, home computers were still a dream, and fax machines, VCRs and DVD players were the stuff of science fiction.
        Progress was spinning out of control and she fought for ways to slow it down. It was like cleaning. Like throwing out trash. How could she keep everything on hold until Jackson came home? Her stomach knotted as she assembled the ingredients for a large batch of walnut taffy and set them out on the counter in a long straight line. She could hear the hum from Hildy's computer. "You've got mail," it said. She closed the door, measuring the distance between herself and the machine. Sighing, she performed the cleansing ritual just in case.
        The end of the year was getting close. A promise was a promise. Somehow the advent of the year of our Lord 2003 meant maybe Jackson really wasn't ever coming back.
        Katie stopped what she was doing and walked out to the dumpster in the alley. She dug through it, coming up with 24 beer bottles, which she carefully placed in a burlap bag. She might only have a few more weeks but nothing said she couldn't double up on her messages. Or triple up. She stood the bottles on a long kitchen windowsill where she could keep an eye on them.
        Then she washed her hands and arms, careful to follow all the rules on the Health Department's chart on the back of the pantry door. Slowly, carefully, she poured the assembled ingredients into an enormous copper bowl.
        The messages would get to Jackson. It was fate. They were fate. So what if no one had heard from him in more than thirty years? She had scrapbooks filled with stories of prisoners rescued decades after their capture, of Japanese soldiers located in caves years after World War II.
        She wrote the next message in her mind; careful words meant to entice Jackson back to the world, back to a society that had all but forgotten him. As she planned, she plunged both hands into the bowl and let the sweet magic begin.

FEATURED WRITER: Andrew Tibbetts

Andrew Tibbetts practices as a psychotherapist in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. He is an amateur fiction writer and is published in such Canadian literary journals as This Magazine and The New Quarterly.

ARIA FOR TIMPANI

I am waiting, watching her all the time and waiting. I'm a soft undulation miles below her feet that she can barely feel. But she knows I'm here, even in her sleep. She is dreaming of my fullness and wakes herself before I take her. She bolts upright in a sweaty wobble, steadying herself, seeing if there is any stillness that she can hold onto in the room. Her dream recedes as her breathing slows to what passes for normal.

As she dresses, I'm a whisper, just below the threshold of audibility. Or just above. She looks out the window to see if there is any damage. She dreads the sight of a corpse poking out from beneath a smoking pile of cement. She fears seeing footwear she recognises on the corpse.

For a few days after we met, she used to go to work, but when the dishwasher would start its violent shuddering she would drop plates of food, drinks. Whatever was in her hand. She'd go stiff and then limp and then fall to the floor. Like that warm-up from the acting class she used to love: "tin soldier; rag doll." So she stopped going to work. She sat at home thinking about me for a long time, remembering my glory, when I cracked the earth right in front of her and drew part of the world inside. Closer, I wanted her closer to me. She was attracted. She was thinking about it. I saw her hesitate before grabbing on to the lamppost. I saw how hard she had to work to resist the idea- "let go". I would have made a home for her. She remembers that day when we came so close to connecting. I like to think she remembers it with intense regret. I'm a lonely tugging deep inside of everything.

Once dressed, she locks her apartment door and heads to the treatment program. I follow her rippling through the sidewalk, imperceptible to everyone but her. I am a wave so slight, she can half believe she doesn't see the world shimmering. She has learned to balance on the wave without denying it. It's like I am licking the soles of her feet- because I go right through her sensible shoes.

I remember when she wore heels. She was poking me, in a way, prodding me to rise up. Hey. Hey, you. Hey there. You. Come on. You. The tapping was a bolero across the top of my mind, so inviting. She used to have a sensual walk. These days she walks quickly and lightly in open spaces and stops to re-collect herself once inside. She sits in the middle of the room in the treatment program, imagining herself ready to leap away from any collapsing wall.

There are others there, trying to forget other unforgettable things: biting dogs, the whoosh of airplanes, the shaky toppling feeling of high places. But I think she doesn't want to forget me. She resists their words- "He's gone. He's over. You are safe." If I feel her listening to them too closely, I vibrate a little brighter. I glow. I'm a heat she feels coming up through floor, along her legs and up inside her, swelling inside her like a tiny sperm-sized disaster site taking root in her flesh, chaos filling her body, growing inside her. I am letting her know who births the next destruction- it will be herself. I am letting her know she's as likely to draw me in to her as I am to draw her in to me. I am letting her know we share the blame, confusing her, intoxicating her will the feeling of power. She won't be so quick to let that go. She can't breathe.

She won't leave me as long as she can't breathe, as long as she's confused. Was I an earthquake, a storm, a relationship, a date? Real or imagined? Something someone did to her a long time ago, or did it happen yesterday? Or is it happening now? I find her swirl of her thoughts delicious. If there is anything still about me it is the tip of my tongue at the centre of her mind. I hold firm and let the panic bounce off my taste buds like lightening.

I remove myself- my tongue slithers back into the world- it's enough for now. She isn't listening to them. She isn't letting them fill her full of their comforting happy untruths, their bland reassurances, and their stupid fountain of probability tables. She is listening to me.

I am a humming, a song so low in pitch it throbs in her bones. A pulse. It is warm, irrefutably alive. I sing: it is the knowledge of disaster that keeps you safe. You won't be surprised again, my song says. We will hold hands and feel secure with each other, waiting. Tonight, I may take you whole. Swallow you. Open my mouth and suck you in, like drawing a breath between high notes, in a screeching aria of ecstasy as the world smashes and smashes. Or not. At present, I curl around your feet, a puddle of song, and a promise. We wait together.

----

THREE RAINDROPS,
FOR JOSEPH YOUNG

In 1981, I was sunbathing with B. on the roof of his apartment, above the grocery store, where he was the youngest assistant manager in our town's history. He was nineteen and smelled of the ocean, or his Newfoundland accent made me think he did. I was the same age, but still in high school. This made a world of difference. I felt like a baby. A dull baby.
We were on air mattresses, because he had no outdoor furniture. He did have enormous speakers and we had hauled them up and were playing Bob Marley, who I'd never heard before. I can barely believe there was a first time I heard Bob Marley, but of course there was.

A raindrop fell on B's nose.

"Let's get inside quick," he said.

He grabbed one speaker and I grabbed the other. Our sweaty thighs slid against each other
all the way down the narrow stairs.

Later, we had sex (another first for me).

In 1985, two acquaintances from university got married, S. and A. I thought they were way too young, but
A. had been planning her wedding since she was twelve and was getting impatient. I was the only male
(but a gay one, so not really) at her bridal shower.

I said something like, "so S. is just the first guy you could plug into the groom slot."

This strand of conversation was not picked up on by the girls. Turns out they all had detailed wedding arrangements they had been working on.

A bit later I said something like, "but the wedding is just the first day- what about the marriage- the whole fucking marriage- that's a long, long time- you can't plan for that."

A. said something like, "shut up."

I lurked poisonously by the buffet table for the rest of the afternoon.

Wedding day: I was playing the organ, a little portable at the end of miles of extension chords, in the middle of a beautiful woodland clearing. Just as I started to play the "before music"- Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, a raindrop fell on the back of my hand.

The whole production got hauled into an old camp mess hall at the other end of the property.
A. was seething and crying. The part of me that isn't very nice was tickled pink.

I have never been to Costa Rica, but I keep hearing about it. I picture it in my mind as the place where I will be happy. Last year, I went to a workshop and we had to visualize our inner sanctum. Mine was a pond beneath a waterfall. It looked like how I imagined Costa Rica. I didn't imagine any fish in my pond because I am scared of fish, having seen Jaws at an impressionable age. I had patches of sun and shade because I like that. I was following instructions and picturing myself calling my higher power down to visit me in my inner sanctum when a raindrop fell on my head.

"Miss C.," I asked, "is it normal for it to start raining?"

"Yes," she said, floating by my mat and tapping me on the head in the exact same spot where the raindrop had fallen.

--------

FEATURED WRITER: Clem Henriksen

Clem Henriksen lives and writes in Southern California, where he was born and raised.
E-Mail: clem_henriksen@webuniverse.net

HOLIDAY BAKE SALE

Cookie mania caught me this year. As a proud bearer of Y-chromosomes, I had thought myself immune to holiday baking, but even a baked goods consumer can be dragged to the dark side of sugar and spice.

I started with the best of intentions, to help out a local non-profit with its annual fundraiser. For some reason the women at the planning meeting seemed to have a battle weary attitude about baking. Nonetheless, while the one other man stared at me incredulously, I raised my hand to put my name was on the list, and my pride on the line. Five dozen cookies were mine to deliver and I didn't have a clue, but Halloween was yet to come and I had time to ponder my approach.

I am not a complete newbie. On the rumor of food I had in fact entered my kitchen on foraging expeditions. I myself had carried bags of groceries from car to kitchen table, and TV trays out of it. Once I even made a sandwich. But the process of converting raw materials into edible dishes was shrouded in mystery. Kitchen utensils were inexplicable, not at all straightforward like a C-clamp or a miter saw.

But how hard could it be? I threw myself into studying cookie technology. Luckily for me the holiday media was stocked with useful tidbits about sprinkles, cookie dough recipes and elaborate schemes for holiday goodies that seemed to require more planning than D-day. Clearly, too much information. I soon narrowed my interest into flat sugar cookies with sprinkles artistically applied.

I could do this.

While researching, I surreptitiously quizzed women in my circle of acquaintance. Apparently, cookie making involved work, and their conversation carried a certain lack of enthusiasm. I began to believe that the gorgeous photos in the magazines were not what most of my fellow bakers had in mind. A batch of simple chocolate chippers was their last line of defense from the shame of passing store-bought off as their own.

The horror.

If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. I started by unashamedly pressuring friends to contribute their own five dozen. This way, I could ride their success should my own become elusive. Two women caved, perhaps lured by free tickets to the fund-raiser's main attraction-a chance to visit local homes on the Christmas tour. For some reason, the chance to snoop in other people's houses had little effect on male friends. Their holiday spirit kept them from outright hooting at my foolishness, but I could see that snooping in other people's workshops would have more appeal. Men, it would seem, are descended from elves.

With this additional motivation to actually do some baking, I got serious and prepared for a trial run. I cut out cardboard sprinkle templates for sugar cookies, bought a roll of prepared dough and selected an array of holiday-themed cookie cutters. Over Thanksgiving weekend I boldly baked where no man had baked before.

Thanksgiving saved my ass.

The cookies I produced proved, beyond any doubt whatsoever, that store-bought dough was horrible and sprinkles didn't work. In a batch of two dozen cookies, I made one successful sprinkle decoration-one damned striped candy cane. The rest of the miserable experiment I took to work where they disappeared anonymously from the break area. My co-workers will eat anything.

It is now less than a week until I must produce my five dozen but I am not panicked. My hubris has been chastened and my ambitions reduced but my dear wife has volunteered to unlimber her MixMaster on a batch of sugar cookie dough. I looked for recipes that do not involve rolling pins, cookie cutters or sprinkles and found assembly-line cookie options in abundance. I am eager to try these easy ones, and claim success.

Next year, I'll support the cause by buying the cookies. And eating them.

----

FAUX CANYON AND THE THREE DAY STINK

As I walked up towards the rim I encountered more and more people who were less and less prepared for a hike. By the time the trail became paved I had encountered a stroller, a leashed dog, and kids licking ice cream cones. My ears, tuned to silence after three days of walking in the Grand Canyon, heard German, British English, French, and Farsi from the passing tourists. The Grand Canyon is a world vacation destination, even in the week before Christmas.

To the bus-borne masses I must have seemed part of the entertainment, the backcountry hiker, just another Grand Canyon attraction alongside the railway, mule ride, and gift shop. The Bright Angel trail ended at the snack bar.

One o'clock and I had been hiking with pack since 9:30. Exhausted by the aching hike up 2500 vertical feet under a full pack, I crossed the viewing area to an empty bench, my walking sticks clicking on the flagstones in the same slow pace that had got me out of the canyon. I walked into the shade under the eaves of the lodge, nodded at the middle-aged couple sitting on the next bench, shed my pack, and collapsed. To hell with my image, I was damned tired and I didn't care who knew it. I wiped the sweat from under my hat and checked heart rate on my watch.

The watch was the gizmo from the last hiking trip. This trip's purchase was instep crampons, a pound of useless weight, which mocked me from the top of my pack, where I had carried it, unused, throughout the trip. The light dusting of snow on the rim made the crampons silly. But I blamed the crampons on the park. I was misled; perhaps the snow report referred to conditions inside the lodge kitchen freezer.

A raven scrounged with bold wariness. A lodge employee picked up cigarettes butts with a long-handled tool. Children chased each other around matrons carrying shopping bags. Behind everything, the pastel backdrop of the canyon's layered geology. I inventoried my various bodily pains and found them tolerable, or at least no worse than they had been since we started hiking three days ago.

The couple on the bench was bundled up in new North Face parkas.

"You walk out?" the man smiled at me behind bifocals.

"Hiking trip. Three days."

"What is your itinerary?" I asked.

"We started San Diego, then Las Vegas, here, and back to San Diego. We are from Malaysia. The trip is a gift from our daughter. She works for HP in San Diego."

"Very good," I said. "My company resells HP products; computers and printers."

We smiled at each other. We could see we were in the same club of respectable job-holding successful people. I liked speaking in simple English. I had to think about what I said.

We chatted about family and work, and when it came time for me to leave, we shook hands. He struggled to get off his glove.

"Please don't bother," I said.

His wife extended her already bare hand. "Merry Christmas," she said.

"Merry Christmas to you, too."

Robert spotted me the instant I came in the lobby. He was wearing a ball cap and his wrap-around downhill glasses. A small grin played on his face.

"Dude, have you seen Mark?" he said. "His pack is in the car." Mark, the fastest hiker in our three-person group, had the car keys.

"Nope. We said to meet at the lodge. This is the lodge." We were a group comfortable with self-paced hiking. For the last two hours we had walked separately.

"How long have you been here?" A tall woman in a ball cap, a blonde ponytail and an open parka glided around us and entered the gift shop.

"Half an hour." Robert grinned. He nodded at the door. "My stuff is out front."

I felt as out of place as a moose in a railway depot and followed Robert gladly. I stepped around a toddler sprawled on the polished floor, and wiggled sideways through the door. The south-side sun was bright and warm. I dug out my ball cap from the pack and collapsed my walking sticks, hoping to blend in.

"I'll go scout," said Robert. I watched an ominous black tour bus trundle up, belch diesel fumes, and disgorge a horde of teenagers. The bench warmed my back.

Robert returned a few minutes later. "I just saw, I swear to God, a fat lady," here he paused, searching for the right word, "waddle up to the snack bar. The girl working behind the counter took one look and said to her, ‘Would you like some ice cream?'"

We grinned. Robert leaned back and closed his eyes in the sun. A steady crowd of people went in and out like at a bus station. There seemed to be no shortage of portly people.

"Let's wait in the bar," said Robert.

"Good idea."

Signage indicated the lodge wanted backpacks checked but our bulky passage went unchallenged. Slipping into the mostly empty bar we put our gear discreetly behind a table. The Massachusetts women who had passed us on the trail were at the bar, consuming hamburgers and cokes.

"Hey, it's the ladies of the canyon," I said, sliding onto a stool. The blonde on the closest stool turned, a doubtful look on her face. One close whiff of me and she started breathing through her mouth. I took this to be a hint that regardless of prior trailside camaraderie, three-day stink did not carry well indoors. I ordered a pint of Fat Tire Ale and joined Robert at the table.

Football played silently on the wall-mounted TV and a constant stream of oldies played from the jukebox. The Fat Tire buzzed me immediately, dehydrated and empty-bellied as I was. Where was Mark? What the hell, we were comfortable.

"We should have been more specific. ‘We'll meet in the bar at the lodge'," I said.

Robert finished his beer, got up and left the bar. Thirty seconds later he came back with Mark.

"Let's hit it," said Mark.

I hoisted my pack onto one shoulder. "You see the Kolb gallery?"

"Yeah, but it was too crowded to go in, so I went out on the deck."

We walked out of the bar and passed the gift shop.

"Last chance for a canyon fridge magnet," I said.

"Pass," said Mark.

Our car, in the same prime parking space thirty yards from the front entrance we had claimed at dawn Saturday, looked like home. We stowed packs and climbed in.

Mark backed up the SUV slowly, then straightened out, waiting for six outdoorsy people to cross our path.

"Only seven hours to a shower and a soft bed," I said. We passed a line of parked buses.

"Gawd," said Robert, "Imagine this in the summer when it's crowded."

"Roll down your window," said Mark.

----

RANCHO KOOK

The quarreling Chihuahuas tore at Sharon's sweat-soaked sleep like fat piranhas. She swam up from her uncomfortable dream to awake in the damp sheets of a hot California night, the fan on the ceiling pushing a useless breeze over her naked body. The dog's growls and yips grated like sand in the sheets and at 3AM she was in no mood to put up with the dogs' foolishness. Grabbing the air rifle leaning ready in the corner of her bedroom, she silently slid open the glass door and stepped softly out to the covered patio. From its shaded darkness, she saw the Chihuahuas under bright moonlight in the neighboring yard. If the stupid bastards could just learn to eat quietly she wouldn't have to do this.

Her neighbors, a clan three generations rooted in the California hills, fed their dogs by leaning a 50-pound sack of dog food up against their house. The dogs, the three Chihuahuas and Old Pete, an aged terrier, fed whenever they wanted. As a result, the Chihuahuas had become round and even Old Pete's ribs had filled in. The Calhoun's habits were simple, and the opinions of their neighbors mattered little, if at all.

Sharon pumped the air rifle. Twenty-five feet away Old Pete heard the sound, lowered his ears and sucked his head into his shoulder blades, his barking done for the evening. In the white moonlight the Chihuahuas continued to fight over the kibble spilling from the bag.

Sharon liked Old Pete. Brighter than the Chihuahuas, he could take a hint. She would rather sleep through the night than shoot dogs, but the stupid Chihuahuas just wouldn't learn to shut up.

Ignoring Pete, Sharon sighted in on the closest Chihuahua through the sagging wire fence that separated the yards, held her breath and squeezed the trigger slowly. The pellet struck the Chihuahua's ass, causing him to yelp and run distractedly around their fenced run. She pumped and fired. The pellet hit the next Chihuahua with a satisfying smack, like a wet rolled-up towel snapped against exposed locker room flesh. Not that Sharon had snapped anyone with a towel since junior high school nor wanted to torment the Chihuahuas but she needed her sleep.

A third shot and the remaining Chihuahua ran after its siblings, the three trying to find cover in the naked dusty yard. Sharon began pumping and firing, trying not so much for excellent individual shots, but instead for a high percentage of hits among several shots fired in quick succession. She plinked each Chihuahua several times--a challenge, even to a fair marksman like Sharon. While overfed and slow moving, they were small and hard to hit.

The Chihuahuas, unable to escape the stinging misery, coalesced into a mass of quivering dog flesh without hope of escape from the terror in the dark. Sharon continued to pump and shoot until they stopped barking, then lowered the air rifle, sweat beading at her hairline. Once the Chihuahuas reached this stage they were usually good for the rest of the night. Good shootin', she thought. If it had to be done let it be done well.

Old Pete had disappeared. The Chihuahuas whimpered in the quiet night. Rancho Cucamonga was hot, still and uninviting, even in the dark. She put one last shot into the bag of kibble and returned inside to air conditioning, hoping to get in a few hours of sleep before work tomorrow. God knows the Calhouns were sleeping through the Southern California night.

Years before this night in the valley, Sharon had discovered the end of her marriage one day on Mt. San Gorgonio. She and the rest of the Canyon Runners had waited half an hour in the tumbled gray boulders of the peak, before her husband Larry arrived, barely able to walk. Sharon knew it wasn't fair to think it, but if he didn't want to run up the mountain he shouldn't have suggested they join the Runners.

But that was Larry, always enthused about something, always waiting for her to make it happen, always finding a new way to screw it up. First it had been the Little League team he was going to coach, and Sharon ended up showing the kids how to play while Larry argued with the parents. Then it had been the house painting fiasco. His way of prepping with a heating element had almost burned the house down. And this was just one of a dozen more intimate examples of his needy incompetence.
Watching him limp up the trail only made her feel impatient. He wasn't even that nice to her. Damn. If he wouldn't prepare to get up the mountain, then why would he expect the Runners to get him down?

Sympathy died in Sharon at that moment, but she said nothing, organized a makeshift litter and helped carry Larry off the mountain. The next day, she moved out and the day after that contacted a divorce lawyer.

Once burned, twice shy. None of the eligible males she'd met in the last five years had been worth the trouble, or, to put it more exactly, were more trouble than they were worth. Fact was, she had a life of her own, an income, and friends.

Independent, and proud of it. As happy as a person could legally get, even if sometimes lonely. That was the damn catch. Somehow single life just wasn't enough. She began to think it didn't have to be enough-a match was out there somewhere.

Time to talk to Mrs. Cartwright.

Betty Cartwright, Sharon's neighbor across McKinney Lane, was a widower schoolteacher who had arranged, in her retirement, to manage a small circus of animals that, in addition to Miss Linden, her bay mare, included six cats, four dogs, an aviary of parakeets, a languid iguana named Larry, a pot-bellied pig called Mr. Cartwright, and a large tortoise that had the run of the house. Although run might be overstating the case.
 
When Mrs. Cartwright opened her fridge to get milk for their tea, her pot-bellied porker scrambled into the room, sniffed the air, and waited for food to appear.
 
"That pig has a single-minded passion for food," said Mrs. Cartwright, "and a simpleminded insistence that someone else do the feeding."
 
"All pigs are men", Sharon agreed, stirring honey into a cup of chamomile.

"That's why I named him Mr. Cartwright."

Sharon sipped her tea and mulled this explanation. Sharon had never met the late Mr. Cartwright.

"You know, I was never angry with Henry. He was lazy, but he was good company." Mrs. Cartwright pushed past the pig and placed the low-fat milk on the checked oilcloth. The pig wandered off to the living room.

Sharon wondered if good company was all there was to find. "When I was married I found out I couldn't put up with Larry's crap. I tried so hard to cut him slack I tied myself in knots."

The sun slanted in the kitchen window. Cups clinked.

"Dear, is there anyone in your life? I don't mean to pry, but you're a pretty thing, and I would expect you to have plenty of beaus."

"There's one or two." More than one or two. She'd met plenty, none had worked out, and now she wondered if the wrong was on her side. Mrs. Cartwright's gentle motherliness opened up a hurt and the words rushed out.

"Dammit, Betty why aren't men good enough?"

"Lord, child. Maybe you'd do better asking why the good partners can't find you." Mrs. Cartwright laughed. "You have so much, a man would have to work pretty hard to make it better."

"It just seems I want too much from the men I meet. Like I'm chasing them off."

Mrs. Cartwright's look changed from sympathetic to appraising. "I wouldn't give anything up, darling. But maybe you could forgive a man his faults by honoring his virtues." Her tone turned light. "Assuming you can find one with virtues." The women laughed.

Later, walking home across McKinney Lane, Sharon thought hard. She had worked her whole life and had made a success of it on her own terms. If there was a hole in her life she had put it there. And by God she could fill it in. And not with another Larry.

Living on a half-acre lot on McKinney Lane allowed Sharon to keep her quarter horse Trapper on the property. Curbless, McKinney dwindled to dirt at the uphill end. The last street before the scrub brush took over, McKinney was hard to find because someone had torn down the street sign. McKinney was home to in-breds, undocumented immigrants, survivalists, low-lifes, and poor folks with nowhere else to go.

And Sharon. The one person on McKinney who used pantyhose for something other than filtering paint.

That evening under a hard blue sky Sharon stopped her Ford F-150 pickup truck at the pedestal of locked mailboxes that marked the foot of the lane.

While Sharon looked over the latest warm offerings to Current Resident, and the more personal invitations from lenders to go even further into debt, Hiram Calhoun pulled up in his two-tone Plymouth. The rust that peeked out from under the torn landau leather roof coordinated well with sun-bleached pale blue paint. Good dependable transportation in Hiram's view and a charity-donation candidate in Sharon's.

"Hey, Hiram," said Sharon.

The skinny young man in a blue security guard uniform got out shyly and nodded at her in greeting. They had become friends since the whole neighborhood was aware that, two years ago, the pedestal replaced a row of dilapidated mailboxes whose red flags had attracted the attention of identity thieves.

Hiram's daddy Elrod had fingered the mail thief, a speed freak named Rafe, and a Calhoun relative no one, not even the Calhouns, wanted to claim. Elrod and his brood were upright, hardworking, and even a blood relationship did not blind them to wrongdoing, particularly when Elrod's bank statement disappeared. Rafe was now meditating on his crimes and family betrayal in a minimum-security slammer.

"Hidy, Sharon." Hiram Calhoun was OK. A little slow, but then so was his whole family. The Calhouns, and there were a lot of them, all worked as security guards. Seen together in uniform, they looked like a redneck drill team.

Their jobs did not require, or allow, firearms, a fact that comforted Sharon, although she suspected the Calhoun homestead was as well stocked with armament as the 3rd Infantry Division.

But Hiram was harmless and cowed in the presence of any female of marriageable age and Chihuahuas aside, the Calhouns had been good neighbors. Whenever they had a goat roast, she got invited.

"How was your day?" she asked. Any conversation with Hiram required prompting.

"Quiet." Hiram fumbled through the mail. "Quiet, mostly." He didn't look up. "Mostly quiet." Sharon imagined that keeping an eye on a warehouse of machine parts might tend to be that way. Hiram squirmed with the discomfort of trying to think of something to say. To put him out of his misery, Sharon wished him a good evening and drove home.

She wheeled the F-150 behind her house. Trapper stood at the corral fence, waiting, looking at her. Sharon quickly went into the house and changed into jeans and a tank top. She emerged from the house apple in hand. Trapper liked apples. She saddled him quickly and led the well-muscled horse through the gate. Trapper was the one true spoke in the wheel of her life, and riding him made the politics and fashion police at the accounting firm where she worked fall away.

As Sharon ambled up McKinney, she met Mrs. Cartwright riding down on Miss Linden, followed by a pack of three dogs.

"Evening. Say, aren't you missing a pooch?" asked Sharon. Effie, a not-too-bright collie, was missing from her usual position in the pack.

"She'll be along," chuckled Mrs. Cartwright, "It's gettin' to dinnertime."

Sharon wasn't too sure, but said nothing, not wanting to contradict. Still, Sharon was a little worried, even if Mrs. Cartwright wasn't. Sometimes Sharon suspected Effie didn't pack too many synapses in her narrow doggy skull.

"I'll keep an eye out for her," Sharon called back over her shoulder.

Sharon entered the chaparral on a wide stony track that soon narrowed to a tunnel through the towering brush. She followed the trail she knew Mrs. Cartwright had just ridden. Five minutes later she came upon Effie, encircled by a pack of coyotes. Effie was trying to play, paws forward, nose lowered. Four coyotes were inching closer, as if to suggest, "Let's do lunch." Sharon kicked Trapper and he charged the nearest coyote with an elan that made her proud.

"Yahh, coyote!" yelled Sharon. The coyotes scattered into the brush, leaving Effie confused in the center of the clearing, as if wondering where everybody went.

"Stick with me, kid," said Sharon. "You just escaped an unpleasant experience, you dumb-ass."

The dog grinned at her friendly tone. Dealing with the coyotes had raised Sharon's heart rate. Maybe a short ride today.

Sharon had memorized every rock and bush on the hill trail. It wasn't much of a trail, but it had a good length for an after-work ride. She liked the view where it crossed over the ridge-she could see McKinney, her house and yard, the scattered dwellings of her neighbors. Pepper trees and oleanders surrounded trailers and corrals, low-rent lots fading to chamise and prickly pear against the hills.

She sat, reins laid across the pommel, and watched the evening shadows lengthen. Trapper seemed to understand and stood patiently, his head down while she meditated. Effie panted in a nearby patch of shade while the evening calm soaked into Sharon. Feeling centered at last, Sharon decided she had kept the animals from their dinner long enough.

"All right, who wants kibble and who wants hay?" clucked Sharon as she wheeled Trapper onto the brushy trail. She smiled. As a child she had made up songs and in private moments she still sang to herself, just for fun, nonsense about whatever was on her mind. "Who wants kibble, who wants hay?"

"Hey! Watch out!" A mountain biker yelled.

Too fast down the trail, she was sure he would crash into Trapper. She reacted without thought in the second before impact, pulling on the reins and gathering her balance in the stirrups. Before impact the biker decided to instead launch himself down slope into the ravine. His front wheel slammed into a boulder and he dove over the handlebars in a graceful forward roll that became somewhat less graceful when the bike, still clipped to his shoes, landed on top of him in a jumbled cloud of dust.

Effie barked uncertainly. Trapper reared and snorted and Sharon struggled to stay on.

After calming Trapper, Sharon's first thought was that the idiot got what he deserved. Still, he had chosen to crash solo rather than take her with him, so she dismounted Trapper and left him standing on the trail. She picked her way down slope, followed by the growling collie.

"Hush, Effie."

The bike rider lay still. "Are you all right?" she called.

Lying sprawled where he had fallen, the rider began to laugh softly.

"Really, are you all right?"

"That's why I'm laughing, I guarantee."

"Can you get up?"

"Probably. I'm still taking inventory. So far, nothing broken. Lucky for me, the ground broke my fall."

If he was making jokes, he must be okay.

"Get up. Let's see if you can walk."

"What's the hurry?" the rider freed his foot from the pedal, pushed the bike to one side, and slowly levered his body into a sitting position. Sharon suddenly noticed he was missing a hand, some kind of handlebar prosthesis in its place. She noticed blood running freely down one shin and looked away, a wave of nausea rising in her stomach.

"What happened to your arm?" she blurted and immediately wished she hadn't.

"Accident. It's okay."

"I mean, how's your leg? You're bleeding."

"Wow. You're right." He inspected the wound without touching it. "I hadn't noticed. Crap."

"We need to get you taken care of."

"Wait. I'm okay. I just need to rest a bit."

"No, you're not okay." She heard herself sound a bit impatient.

He seemed to hear it the same way, and looking up at her, pushed his sunglasses back into position with the prosthesis. He seemed to be considering his words. Anyone who had lost a hand and still went mountain biking (too fast!) probably didn't take advice too well. She braced for a retort, but his next words surprised her.

"True, true." He dragged his bike closer and unstrapped a small bag from under its seat. "But thanks to this here helmet, and plenty of practice taking falls, all I have is a scrape." The rider selected items from his well-stocked first aid kit. "This is nothing compared to hits I've seen downhilling at Whistler. One time I saw a guy's shoulder torn clean off by a tree. This is nothing."

As he worked on it, Sharon could not stop staring. The patch of shredded beef just below his knee looked nasty, but once he cleaned it up she knew he was right.

Why did she feel guilty about the accident? It wasn't her fault. Horse people and bike riders had a watchful truce on the trails and she wouldn't miss them a bit if they all disappeared. And the fact that he was missing a hand and she had been rude enough to mention it had nothing to do with it.

Back on his feet, he held the front wheel between his legs and twisted the handlebars back into position. Sharon could see it was hard to do with only one hand.

"Can I help?"

"I've got it." He spun the wheels and checked the brakes, doing what he had to do and leaving Sharon with a feeling of being ignored.

"Thanks for not running into me."

"It seemed like the thing to do at the time." He started pushing the bike back up to the trail and she noticed his trim ass under the biking shorts.

"Can you get back?"

"Yep. It's not far."

Sharon remembered there had been no car parked at the trailhead. "I live just down the hill. I can give you a ride."

"On McKinney?"

"Yeah."

"Howdy, neighbor." He extended his left hand, the one with fingers. "I'm Jack Browne. Hiram Calhoun is my cousin."

Standing there, with Trapper nuzzling her neck, shaking hands backwards with Jack, she hoped the men were distant cousins. For some reason she didn't want Jack to be like Hiram.

The following Sunday Sharon sat on her patio with an afternoon Corona. From the shade she watched Jack put out water for the dogs. He held a large round bowl awkwardly with his left hand, the right having nothing to grip. Water slopped on his shirt.

She liked that he was kind to the dogs. Kinder than she was, for sure. She liked seeing and not being seen. But spying wasn't neighborly. Not the kind of neighbor she wanted to be anyway.

"Hey, Jack! Can I offer you a beer?"

His head snapped up, squinting against the sun to see into the recess of the patio.

"Hey Sharon. Yeah, sure."

When she brought out the bottle he was sitting at the table looking across at Chuck's back yard. So little separated the yards.

"Thanks," he said and took a long pull. "Look, no dog food. Those dogs won't be keeping you up."

"How did you know that?"

He grinned and tilted a cocky eye at her. "I heard the shooting gallery the other night."

"Oh." Plinking the dogs wasn't something she was proud of. Embarrassing.

"Saw you, too."

Sharon stared at him while a slow flush traveled up her neck. Shooting the dogs was one level of embarrassment, shooting them naked was another.

"You saw me."

"Yep. Good shootin' too. Made me wonder how well you'd shoot with clothes on."

Sharon wanted to crawl in her beer. She started to speak, spluttered, and closed her mouth. What did she care if he saw her last night? Damn. The patio didn't feel private now, it felt like a stage.

"Did you get a good look?" Damn him and his damn smartass expression.

"Tried to. Not every day do you get to see someone as pretty as you get in target practice. Might as well make the most of it."

Him and his damn compliments.

"So why did you move the dog food? You could've left it there and got a good look tonight." Let the pervert deal with that.

"I have to get my sleep too. Between the dogs and you things just got too rambunctious."

Hmm. Sharon took a sip of beer and examined Jack. He took her intense stare as a man with nothing to hide. He was kinda cute. And he had put the bag away.

"So you're saying that you'd rather I didn't do any more midnight shooting?"

He nodded. "Maybe you could dispense with the air rifle and just walk around in the nude. Quieter."

She hesitated, watching his face. He looked cocky. And hot. Her type, and a neighbor. Hmm. He had thick black hair that was trimmed short. Blue eyes. Very blue eyes. He moved smoothly and was very open in his gestures.

"You're mighty bold, mister."

"Maybe. But I'm not the nudist. And you haven't started shooting at me." He grinned. "Yet."

He was getting the better of her. And she liked it. Her face glowed with continued embarrassment, but it felt good. Jack was just there, not leering, not ashamed. She could at least stand his company until she finished her beer. She took a sip, a small sip.

"How's your leg?"

"About all right." She liked the way he said it, a-boot.

"So you're Hiram's cousin?"

"Canadian branch of the family. I'm vacationing."

"Here? In Rancho Kook? Not your typical resort destination."

"The accommodations are priced right."

"How long are you staying?"

And on it went. She learned Jack had been a timber cruiser in the wilds of British Columbia and then what a timber cruiser was. She finally worked up the nerve to ask him how he lost the hand. This launched him into a lengthy story that ended,

"And there I was, trapped far from camp, night coming on and it beginning to snow. Facing certain death from hypothermia."

"What did you do?" Sharon was fascinated and repelled.

"What could I do? I gnawed my hand off and tied the stump with a shoelace."

Sharon stared at him, shocked. "You gnawed… You bullshitter!"

He broke out laughing.

"Lying to me like that. You must think I'm a California chump."

"All right, all right. Chainsaw accident. Want the details?"

"No thank you," she said primly, knowing he would take great delight in supplying them.

"It didn't happen in the way you think."

"Thanks, but no."

A tough guy, but nice. They agreed in succession to have a dinner out, then a trip to the beach, then a dinner in and sex. In three weeks they had almost settled into a routine.

Sex with Jack was satisfying, as Jack was considerate, and eager to learn what turned her on. She reckoned they could be better in bed, they could be worse. She knew worse and wasn't sure she could find better.

But dammit, she couldn't get Jack's missing hand out of her mind.

She felt so guilty about feeling this way, but the stump just creeped her out.

She tried to rationalize--things happened to people, no one got through life without wounds of some sort. The important thing was how they dealt with it afterwards. Jack didn't whine about it. His missing hand was a fact of his life, as much a part of him as his blue eyes and the hard knots of muscle in his back. She liked looking into his eyes, liked the feel of his spine under her fingers as he thrust into her-why did that damn missing hand bug her so much?

"Jack…" They lay together tangled in bed sheets, her leg over his, the overhead fan beating the air. She lay on the left side of the bed so his missing right hand would be away from her.

"Shh," he whispered, moving his left hand in the slight depression between her hipbone and navel. They were in the quiet moment after sex when nothing need be said but anything could be. "I've been thinking."

"Jackie…"

"My turn first. I'm going back to BC. I've got a line on a driving job on Vancouver Island."

The words hung there while Sharon felt uncertainty rise. She lay still, his hand still caressing her while he talked. Suddenly it wasn't about Jack's hand being gone, it was about Jack being gone.

"BC is just like California, only greener. You'd like it there."

"Are you inviting me to Canada?"

"Pretty much. A vacation, and extended stay, whatever." Jack was trying to talk lightly but his words came out too quickly.

"A big step, don't you think?"

"Don't you think we have something going?"

She cuddled deeper into his arms. "Sure. I like you very much. Maybe I love you."

"Same here, but my life is back in Canada. No offense, I don't want to live here."

She rolled over on her stomach, up on her elbows, looking through her hair at him. He looked back, vulnerable and open. Turning towards her, his left hand under his head, he began to move the stump of his right arm in the small of her back.

Sharon froze.

"Jack." She swallowed, started again. "I know I'm stupid. I can't help it."

"What?"

"Your hand. Missing."

"Yes, I noticed."

"Sometimes…sometimes I get weird about it."

"Weird?" He began rubbing his stub against her ass, as if to make their flesh equal. "Me too. Sometimes it feels like its still there. Like now. It's almost as if I've got a grip on the finest butt on McKinley. With the possible exception of Mrs. Cartwright's, of course."

"Damn you Jack, I'm serious."

"What do you want me to do, grow a new one?" He stopped running his stump over her ass and flopped back, staring up at the fan.

"I said I was stupid."

Sharon was afraid to say anymore. Jack studied the fan.

"Right." He swung his feet to the floor. "Think about what I said. We could be good. If I got used to one hand, maybe you can too."

Sharon watched him dress. He came to her, leaned over and kissed her shoulder. "Bye," he said.

She hated confused feelings. Hated them. Sharon's life had been so sure until Jack entered it. And now he's leaving. You ninny, she thought, you were hoping to meet a good man, had the luck to meet one, and now you're all in a dither. Crap.

Lying there did nothing, so she got up. The kitchen offered a choice between microwaving tortillas or heating a can of soup. Sharon decided to get take out.

The first sign of trouble was the Calhouns running down McKinney towards town. Then she saw the column of black smoke rising from the end of the lane. She gunned the F-150 towards the fire, passed the herd of Calhouns, and skidded to a stop at the end of the lane. The mailbox pedestal was burning, bright yellow flames licking around the concrete base. It made no sense.

Rosa Sanchez, from the house closest to the end of the lane, was spraying water from a garden hose on the fire to no apparent effect. Sharon leapt from the cab with a small fire extinguisher and attacked the flames. Just as Sharon's extinguisher ran out and the flames began to spread again, the Calhouns arrived, bearing shovels. With four Calhouns and Jack throwing dirt on the fire, they soon doused it, leaving the mailboxes blackened, smoking, wet, and dirty.

"What the hell is going on?" Sharon suddenly felt weak and sank to the ground. Rosa came over and put her arm around her shoulder.

"I saw it from my house. Men in a truck threw a bottle. It broke and made a big fire. Why did they do that?"

Sharon shivered. Hiram Calhoun overheard them and asked "What kind of truck? Red? Did the men have long hair?"

"Si, Si," said Rosa.

Hiram compressed his mouth into a thin line and looked at his father. The Calhouns bunched together, and after a short whispered conversation, walked fast back to their home. Jack came to Sharon.

"Jack…" she wanted to ask about the fire, the Calhouns. But seeing his worried face made the words choke in her throat. He looked at her with concern.

"Hiram thinks it might be some kind of payback from cousin Rafe." That was Jack, straight to the point.

"Payback? That was over a year ago," interrupted Sharon.

"Anyway, he just got out on parole and the word is he's still pissed. Hey, don't look at me like that. I might be related to the guy, but I never met him."

"What's Hiram going to do?" Hiram might be shy around Sharon, but she had seen him butcher a goat in his back yard.

"How should I know?" He turned and walked after his clan. A dozen steps away he turned and shouted, "I'm going back to Canada," as Sharon stared wide-eyed after him.

Later that evening Jack knocked on Sharon's door. She opened it to see him leaning insouciantly against the porch post, a little boy in a man's body. Being glad to see him didn't help her think of anything to say.

"I'm sorry if I was short with you earlier," he said.

It seemed a sincere apology and Sharon accepted it with a nod.

"I just wanted to come by and tell you some stuff. I guess cousin Rafe is some kind of bad-ass. Hiram is cleaning his gun."

"Really?"

"Well, not to alarm you, but yes, really. You should keep your door locked."

"What are you going to do?"

"Take Rafe off my Christmas card list."

"Can you be serious for once?"

"Don't worry, they'll get him. According to Hiram, Rafe is as smart as a box of rocks." He stopped, looked everywhere but at Sharon. "I'm still going to BC. When the mailbox burns, it's a sure sign the vacation is over."

"Give me a little time, OK?"

He bobbed his head with a sad look that told her he had already decided for himself what her answer would be.

"Yeah." He leaned in and kissed her, a long kiss that she tried to read like a love letter.

"It's been good, hasn't it?" He said and walked away.

Jack had come into her life easily as if he belonged there. Take a chance. But three weeks was not a long time to know someone. Be sensible. Arrgh, she hated this confusion. Jack waved at her from the Calhoun yard. She waved back.

The next day, Sharon crawled home from work in close-packed freeway traffic that inched forward reluctantly in the afternoon heat. She wouldn't have to endure the I-10 rush hour if things worked out with Jack.

If this, if that. Who could think with cars so close?

The hot summer sun baked the freeway. The passenger of the jacked-up pickup truck next to her, a man with long hair and acne scars, leered over at her. Sharon ignored him. If they were going sixty she wouldn't even see him, she reminded herself, no reason to see him now. Give him the satisfaction? No way.

Sharon lurched forward, scanned her mirrors. Nothing had changed. Scanned the radio and found the same. Political opinions and out-of-date rock and roll. She drummed her fingers on the wheel and left the radio on the last button. Better to listen to anything at all than nothing. The crowding cars made her feel boxed in and she struggled to keep her panic down. An opening appeared on her right and she plunged into it. The open shoulder on her right made her feel better.

The pickup pulled ahead in its lane. She watched it disappear into the anonymous rush hour.

She had to make a decision about Jack. About her life. He was waiting on McKinney Lane. She needed someone to talk to and all she had were shock jocks shouting in her ear. She punched over to NPR for something soothing, like Click and Clack.

Jack was a good man. To be honest, he was better company than she was. He had good qualities--Didn't he take care of the Chihuahuas? Hadn't he loaned her his van when the truck was in the shop? He was nothing like Larry. Jack had showed her he cared, that it wasn't all about him, that he wasn't afraid to be vulnerable. Wasn't afraid to admit he had emotions, for God sake.

Compared to Larry, well, there really was no comparison. Getting to know Larry had been a process of discovering Larry really was as shallow as he had appeared at first. Larry had taught her to trust her instincts, and her instinct on Jack was that he was a keeper. Jack was right on top, no hidden agenda, honest to a fault. But the hand.

A tailgating semi-trailer loomed in her rearview. Damn. She hated that. Dangerous and stupid, even at five miles an hour.

Canada with Jack could be good. But so far away. What if it went bad? She could treat it as a vacation, that would be the smart thing to do. But they both knew they wanted more. He had as much as said so. He wanted her. Didn't she want him? Yes. No.

The hell with it, she thought and took the next exit. She braked for the stop light at the bottom of the offramp and read the sign-Pomona. All those years of passing by on the I-10, and she had never been in Pomona. She decided to go left, head up to the foothills, then head east on a big boulevard.

Sharon stopped somewhere in Montclair to get a cold drink at a convenience store. When she opened the car door she smelled something.

Smoke.

She pulled down her sunglasses and looked around. An odd light in the sky, but subtle, she hadn't noticed it in the car with her shades on. Nothing nearby, normal traffic, a bag lady pushing a grocery cart laden with plastic bags down the sidewalk. But something was strange, and it wasn't just her.

Sharon got a bottle of water from the cold case. At the counter, she could hear a TV going. A newscaster was talking, something about a fire.

The clerk tore his eyes from the screen. "A dollar nineteen," he said.

"Where's the fire?"

"It just started. Rancho Cucamonga."

Rancho Kook. She stared at him so hard the dark bearded man fidgeted. "I live there."

He made change. "You should get home. It is going strong." His accent was thick--Middle-eastern?

"Can I see your TV?"

"Not allowed." he replied automatically and then caught her eye. "Maybe you should see. It is live coverage."

The tiny space behind the counter was barely large enough for both of them. While the clerk rang up other customers she learned the fire was in Heyman Canyon, two miles and one ridge line to the west of McKinney Lane. The news channel was getting great footage of helicopters dropping water on the fire line, which was advancing towards her home.

"Thank you," she said and rushed out.

"Good luck lady," the clerk called after her.

Sharon continued eastward down the boulevard. A fire engine passed her, its lights and siren going. She pulled to the side. Jack didn't answer his cell phone. The sky was yellower, darker. At an intersection in Claremont she got her first glimpse of the smoke column. She was frightened now. What about Trapper? Jack? Her house?

Sharon stomped on the accelerator pedal, changed lanes with abandon, and ran a stale yellow light. What about not having a wreck? She backed off just enough to make her feel in control and raced her fears towards the ominous gray column of smoke.

A police roadblock stopped her at an intersection a mile away from McKinney, cop cars thrown crookedly in the road like dice on a bright sunny day. The smoke column towered overhead and the helicopters were lots louder than on TV. She parked and joined the crowd at the barricade. Two police cars nosed together in the road doors open, emanating static-y radio transmissions behind the confusion like wallpaper. Four sheriffs in brown uniforms stoically argued with frantic people. Sharon went to the closest deputy and tried to get his attention.

"My horse is up there."

"Fire personnel are doing all they can. The area is evacuated."

Frantic with worry, Sharon grabbed at his arm. He jerked back and stared at her. "Lady, touch me again and I'll put you in the backseat."

"Sorry, sorry. But my hors