smoov moves

(a television in Boston, MA)

One of Those Whole "You Can't Go Home Again" Deals

The main flight attendant for his section of the plane, Vincent discovered, had a buoyant sense of humor.

That’s all I need now, he thought. All he really wanted was an uneventful flying experience. Get settled and buckled, ignore the safety announcements, keep his eyes on his book, get his complimentary snack and beverage, and rest his eyes if he was that lucky.

Now he had an amateur comedian announcing the rundown of basic safety concerns. She wanted everyone to rivet their attention to her litany of bland rules and instructions, and she wasn’t afraid to misuse both her brassy voice and the very concepts of comedy to achieve this. Vincent was now certain that he was being punished for a string of unknown sins.

“In the event of a loss of cabin pressure,” the woman said, “oxygen masks will automatically descend from the panel above your seat. Simply place the mask over your face…” She mimicked the action, putting the yellow section of a sample mask she held close to her mouth and nose. “…adjust the straps…” She pulled at the pale rubber band that hooked onto either side of the mask. “…and pull on the tube to start the flow of oxygen.” She demonstrated, straightening the clear plastic tube in front of her. “Not much of a fashion accessory, but it gets the job done,” she concluded. Many of the passengers chuckled good-naturedly. Vincent made an effort not to mold his expression into more of a scowl than it already appeared.

“Now if you’re assisting someone with a mask, make sure you put on your own mask before putting on theirs,” she continued, smiling broadly at her captive audience. “You’re not going to do them a lot of good if you conk out, now are you?” More polite laughs. Vincent focused on the book he held in his lap and offered a silent plea to heaven to deliver him from this soon. Even if that deliverance necessitated the activation of the emergency oxygen system. At least then the flight attendant would be forced to shut up.

After making jests about seat cushions serving not only as emergency floatation devices but also as excellent stadium pillows, warning that smoking in the restrooms would be caught on hidden webcams, and promising that the beverage service would be delivered that evening by cart, not flung from the ends of the aisles, the routine ground to a conclusion. Vincent realized he had been reading the same sentence for the past two minutes, and closed the book for a few moments to rest.

He felt members of the cabin crew passing by his shoulder as they hurried about their duties. Vincent had recently concluded that they in fact had no real duties, apart from the little speeches and the bartending. All the hurrying, he believed, was just filler. Busywork. Justification for their salaries. Oh, wait. They also closed the overhead bins and fetched the occasional pillow. Still, Vincent thought he might prefer it if they’d just sit down and relax.

In the bag tucked under the seat in front of him, Vincent had a variety of reading materials, but the one that most obsessed him even though he hadn’t read through it in over a week was a tight stack of letters written in a familiar loopy scrawl. These were the dispatches he’d received from Pancakes over the past year or so, scattershot details that she dashed off every so often. They were always impressionistic. Pancakes didn’t much enjoy composing formal letters, but she frequently felt a desire to jot down ideas and stray thoughts for an hour or so, and then she scrawled out a quick salutation and signature and proclaimed these as letters. Most of these went to Pastina, but when they didn’t go to her, they went to Vincent or to Pancakes’s father, Emiliano.

Despite the fact that her letters rarely had much more than a general mood or theme, the trend of those he’d received over the previous dozen months was unmistakable. As rare and as unlikely as it seemed to those who knew her best, Pancakes was in love. Vincent could almost feel himself sneer as the phrase floated through his head.

Pancakes was in love. Vincent felt cheated by it, even though he thought he’d put the idea of her ever being in love with him out of his mind years ago. But then this new guy had come along, this guy Claude, and it was as if all the years he’d spent dutifully being Pancakes’s platonic friend faded in a few moments. He was jealous and he was obsessed. And he still had to go and be just her friend. He considered ordering a cocktail when the time came, but he knew it would probably just make him sick at this point. His stomach hurt already.

Vincent remembered one particular line from Pancakes’s letter back in September. It wasn’t that details about Claude flooded out at him. They didn’t, actually. Claude was mentioned only twice. But the whole personality of that letter stood in sharp contrast to the usual Pancakes Dunst missive. The tone was, Vincent realized a few weeks after reading it (after reading it, in fact, fourteen times) completely unexasperated. That, he concluded, was shockingly new for Pancakes.

Not that she sounded content. If she had, Vincent would have called immediately to ask Pastina exactly when their friend had been kidnapped and replaced with an alien drone. Instead she mentioned feeling “idiotically optimistic, and totally ashamed of it.” She called Pastina “painfully hell-bent on having good intentions even while considering what it might feel like to strangle me.” She even suggested that her mother “almost sounded like she was thinking of talking sense for a change.”

Something had most decidedly come over Pancakes. And right now, Vincent imagined, that something was looking forward to ringing in the new year with her. Unless something happened in the next few hours to make the flight attendant’s emergency warnings suddenly pertinent, Vincent would soon arrive at his destination so he could pretend to be happy for them.

Not Part of the Lesson Plan

Well, this was a new one on me.

Have you ever found yourself thrown together with a group that was basically dysfunctional? A bunch of people that collectively was just disruptive? The problems couldn’t be pinned on just a few people. There was something about the way they worked together somehow. Or worked against each other. A sum greater than its parts, in a way. In a bad way.

Yeah, so that’s my afternoon commercial art class. For two hours, five afternoons a week, I help to create a monster. Most of the students are in other classes of mine too, and none of them is reall a problem. And you guys know me. Would you ever think I was part of a bad crowd … other than yourselves I mean. But get the lot of us together, and we flagrantly and regularly break rules, talk out of turn, interrupt lectures, make inane requests, and—always, always, always—“talk with our neighbor.”

Our teacher Mr. Anson gets mad at us almost every day. Sometimes he sends people to the principal. Sometimes he suspends minor privileges or assigns ridiculous assignments in frustration. We never fail to piss him off, and we’ve gotten used to the way his face turns a very dark red when he’s really angry. We recognize what it means when his voice cracks slightly. We’ve become very familiar with the degrees of his anger over the course of this year.

So when we all came in to class at two today, we were surprised that Mr. Anson had planned a kind of “encounter session” for us. We all had to push our work tables to one side and pull up chairs in a big circle. Then he got down to it.

The whole year, he said, had been getting “worse and worse and worse.” We all needed to talk about that. He was going to talk while we listened, and then he would listen while we talked. We would fix this thing together, he said. We had to. It couldn’t go on like it had been, so we were all going to fix it together.

So we did like he said. He went over all the usual problems with our “getting out of hand.” He named a lot of events. Becky and Tonya and Melissa gossiping all the time. Doug and Robert humming heavy metal songs back and forth at each other. That one afternoon when almost everybody asked for special permission to go to the restroom … which we knew was kind of against the rules but that he felt like he had to keep giving into after making a couple of exceptions. Shavonda and Marquita’s way of asking random questions just to break their own boredom during still-life drawing exercises. I was kind of surprised at how many examples there were. I wish I’d been taking notes, because some of them were funnier than I remembered. But after about half an hour, he finally finished and invited us to talk.

After all that, though, nobody really wanted to talk. A couple of people who felt like lesser offenders made some vague comments. I didn’t know what to say. Then some more people started to pipe up about the problems with our teacher-class interaction. Some of what they said was a little stupid (“I just don’t feel like I’m at home, you know what I mean?”), some of it was insensitive (“Like, how are we supposed to get what you’re talking about when you say it the way you say it?”), some of it was almost insightful (“It’s not that we don’t like you. It’s just that you’re the teacher”).

Then things took a really weird turn. I guess what we were saying was more than Mr. Anson had bargained for. He started to look really upset, but not veiny and red the way we’re used to. Before we knew what was happening, his eyes got all watery, and then he suddenly buried his face in his hands. He sobbed, “I’m sorry, kids!” and then got up and ran out of the room. We all just sat there. Robert the metalhead laughed. Deann the cheerleader hissed, “It’s not funny!” and he shut up and looked kind of ashamed.

Mr. Anson eventually came back in about five minutes, and then we proceeded for the rest of the hour. I still doubt it will really help for more than a week or two. That second part of the discussion wasn’t nearly as interesting. Something strange had happened and everybody knew it. The more interesting part was what happened in the time Mr. Anson was gone.

“God, ya’ll, I don’t know,” Deann said. “We should do something for him.” I’m thinking, Yeah, we should be a decent class and stop giving him so much shit all the time. But we don’t know how to do that. We’re not capable of such decency. Because together we’re a mob.

Then people started agreeing with her, even though they couldn’t possibly care that much about Mr. Anson after all the crap they’ve been giving him for months ... that we’ve been giving him, I mean. But now they were talking about getting him flowers or a cake or maybe a cookie bouquet or just a card. They wanted to show how much they cared. But nobody could really agree on the right kind of sentiment after your teacher breaks down. Does Hallmark make a card with the right message? Get Well Soon? It’s Your First Breakdown? Hope the Medication Helps?

Finally we let the thing drop and just sat there. Every once in a while, somebody would wonder out loud what we should do. What would the school expect us to do? How long should we wait before we went to tell someone that our teacher ran out of the room crying?

By the time Mr. Anson came back, we had stopped talking about the idea of getting him a gift. I’m pretty sure we all were thinking “Oh, we’ll just be a better class. What better gift could we give him?” That’s the kind of Hollywood sentiment we’ve all learned to have whenever we don’t have a map for a situation. So we’d try harder. We’d fix this thing. We had to.

So I give us two weeks. Listen closely in the halls of B building in the next couple of months. If you hear a grown man bawling down one of the halls, be nice to him. We’ve been very mean to the poor bastard. And we’re really, really sorry.

particulate

Until suddenly one day, that’s all she could see. Dust was everywhere. In the end, life was a desperate bid to keep the dust cleared. Move it around, wipe it down, shake it off. But the dust kept coming, unrelenting. It was patient and slow and indomitable. And eventually one day it would overwhelm her, it would overwhelm everyone. And dust would cover the entire landscape. It would grow into a thick, heavy, swirling sea of grayish matter. In the end, the dust would win. It had only to abide.

After the Four-Color Action Has Ended

They brought the medication at 10:30 and 4:30. He knew that. They were very punctual about it. Plus, there was little else besides the less consistent meals that he could look forward to each day. He watched the light spill in his window, watched the shadows lengthen across his spare hospital room, and watched the darkness retake the room. In between, medication and meals. Very little else to do before those things but lie back and wait. Very little else to do after those things but lie back and wait.

There was a lot of lying back and waiting. Hours and days and weeks of lying back and waiting.

But it’s not like he wanted to do much else. It’s not like he could do much else. He filled his time mostly with books. There were the books his mother and his cousin had sent, and often he found himself staring at their pages.

He couldn’t concentrate long enough to read a full page of text, much less a chapter or a full book, but some of the paragraphs he quite liked. He lay there, a book open on his chest, his eyes picking their way through the orderly regiments of letters. Letters formed words, a fact he liked, and words in turn formed sentences. It all made sense to him.

Plus, when enough of those sentences joined together in as a team, they asserted themselves as a paragraph. A tight unit of unified thought. Sometimes it described action. Sometimes it meandered through a pattern of thoughts. Some mixed it up a bit with both, but in any event the paragraph was self-contained. Why read more?

He enjoyed the paragraphs on thinking more than the ones about action. The action sentences used language that was quick. It was jagged to him. It was sharp. Those passages used shorter phrases, more dynamic verbs. Maybe they were more engaging, but they were stupid, he thought, pointless. Why would someone run across a field? What would make them drive a car? To what end would they fly a kite, swim a river, or argue with their spouse? Just a lot of energy dissipating into the air, as far as he could tell. No matter how much was done, there was always more to do later. It was exhausting, and it never seemed to end. Even completing a paragraph, he realized with sadness, only implied that another one was to come.

When he thought about it too much, he felt fatigued. He tried not to think about it, to let his mind be blank. He was no less fatigued then, but at least he didn’t notice as much.

The paragraphs on thinking were different. They weren’t so concerned with achieving a concrete end. They still had things to say. She feels lonely. He wonders about the existence of God. The people hope for a good harvest, a new goat, some way to keep the Cossacks from overrunning the village. All of it happens in the head, and this he particularly liked. It was about brains, not brawn. The action paragraphs were the other way around.

Another thing he liked: The paragraphs on thinking had a different philosophical outlook. True, they also implied that things would go on and on, paragraph after paragraph. But they did so with a difference. Yes, they seemed to say, every obstacle overcome only reveals another one on the horizon. So why rush and make a lot of noise about it? Better to drift toward deeper understanding, a more varied worldview. Consider all sides. Enjoy the linkages between proposition and supposition. Ponder the relationships between statements.

All of this was a neverending puzzle box that kept his hours between meds far fuller than anyone suspected. They say him lying there, nearly motionless, day after day. They saw how he scarcely turned the pages of his books, how he ignored direct questions, how he seemed not even to notice the massive manacles that restricted his arms’ range of motion to a scant few inches.

He heard some of the staff whispering, discussing his medical chart where they stood outside his bright little hospital room. There seemed to be some disagreement between them, but he wasn’t sure why. It kept drawing his attention away from the paragraph he'd been working on all morning. Why couldn’t he be left alone to recuperate? That’s what they said he should do. Rest. Relax. Take some time off to gather his strength. They told him that he had been through quite an ordeal. That was exactly how the doctor had put it when he had woken up in this room four weeks ago: “You’ve been through quite an ordeal.”

Quite an ordeal? They had no idea. Not a single one of them would have survived it. Not even a little of it.

As he listened to the conversation on the other side of the heavy door, his thoughts were drawn away from the paragraph he had been enjoying that morning. It irritated him to be interrupted in this way. How could he not hear them? There were three speakers, he noted. Two of them he knew. The other he did not, though something about it seemed familiar. Familiar in an uncomfortable way, like a half-remembered bad dream.

“His healing is much more accelerated than expected,” Voice One said. It sounded like the day nurse who sometimes opened the blinds wider than he would have liked.

“No, this isn’t unexpected,” Voice Two corrected her. “His case isn’t typical.” This sounded like the doctor who frowned a lot but rarely said anything to him directly. “What we have to consider aren’t the physical injuries. Those are easy to mend. It’s what’s happening in his head that concerns me.”

“But as badly as he was injured—” began Voice One.

“You see how much better he is, don’t you?” Voice Two admonished. “I would remind you that this isn’t your area of expertise, it’s mine. So listen to me when I tell you that the psychological aftereffects of his injuries are the concern.”

“Of his injuries,” repeated a third voice in a tone clearly designed to show weariness.

Voice Two sounded flustered. “Well, at the … ordeal. How he received them.”

“Let me sum it up for you,” Voice Three said. This was a voice of authority, no mistake. It was no faster than the others, maybe slower, but it had a way of hurrying things. “Yes, he’s healing nicely for the most part. But the fact is he’s uncommunicative, he’s lethargic, and he seems to have lost all interest in the outside world. We have to do something about that.” Still he couldn’t place this third voice. It was low and had a nasal tone. And clearly it invited no argument.

Voice Two outlined an intensive course of drug therapy, trauma counseling, and the slow introduction into his routine of small group encounters. “He needs to see that people need him,” the voice concluded. “To show him that he’s connected to others. If that gets through, things should take care of themselves.”

“How soon will all that take?” Voice Three wanted to know.

“A few months, perhaps. Depends. Several weeks if he has a breakthrough.”

“Make it two weeks,” Voice Three insisted. “That’s all we can spare. At the outside.”

Both the doctor and nurse tried to protest, but the Voice Three cut them short. Two weeks, it was decided, was the extent of his additional recuperation. After that, he would have to be back on the job, without fail. The rest would have to come to an end.

As he listened to the conclusion, he felt anger pressing on him like a great weight. He glanced at his book, but found that he had absentmindedly crushed the heavy, leatherbound volume in his balled fist. The thick novel had been reduced to a dense kernel of wood pulp, as small and hard as a marble. Disgusted, he held it up in front of his face with two fingers. He stared intently at it and the tight sphere shimmered with heat and burst into white-hot flame. A second later, only a curl of smoke and a scattering of powdered ash remained.

More paragraphs awaited him, one after the other. None of them about thinking.

Twenty-seven Reasons It Will Simply Never Come About

1. It might set a bad precedent.

2. I am base and obvious in my desires and ambitions.

3. The world is a cruel place—all the more so when one is aware of that fact.

4. I cannot get the information I need without further upsetting the situation that I need the information in order to resolve.

5. Professional seers claim I am badly aspected and cannot escape my fate.

6. We do not learn lessons through wish fulfillment, and I am evidently being kept after class.

7. I leave little room for compromise, though compromise is the most obvious, efficient path.

8. Those involved do not know what they want to do, and they are seeking the guidance of one another as to how to proceed.

9. Karma.

10. What I am attempting to do is, in fact, impossible given our present understanding of the physical world.

11. Money, supplies, and enthusiasm are low.

12. It’s a bad plan, poorly conceived but brilliantly packaged.

13. Communications are down.

14. Despite all our talk about infrastructure, no one’s done a damn thing about it.

15. My definition of success is way more ambitious than I will ever realize.

16. The gods are angry.

17. We’re not on the same page.

18. Somebody planned the whole stupid thing for a holiday weekend, and they should have realized that everyone would be away.

19. She never got my letter.

20. A series of small, seemingly meaningless occurrences will steer things another way, perhaps revealing indirectly the intentions of an inscrutable higher intelligence.

21. They’re working with the wrong figures.

22. We’re still working out what the meaning of “is” is.

23. There’s a blood curse on the whole group owing to a foul deception perpetrated by our ancestors.

24. Sunspots.

25. Everyone will begin speaking different languages all of a sudden and will abandon the unfinished tower.

26. We forgot to account for the possibility of there being a centerless universe—random, arbitrary, and without mercy or pity.

27. Some people are born unlucky.

Dear John

She stomped away from the table, pushing through the crowded dance floor. She shoved her way toward the door of the club. She heard Nate calling after her.

“Aw, come on! What? What did I say now?” It was the question of a person who regularly asked such things, who frequently saw angry people walking away from him. She was familiar with it from the past three months She heard it a lot.

She elbowed her way through the tight crowd, interrupting dancers, drinkers, and smokers alike. They were all in her way, that’s all she could see. Her anger and elbows cleared a narrow path of escape. But even over the thunderous music and the yammer of the crowd, she heard Nate’s parting shot.

“What the hell? Is it your time of the month or something? Having a little PMS moment, baby?”

It was so stupid. That should have made it funny, made her laugh at him. But instead it was infuriating.

She held her elbows up in front of her and plowed into the crowd. She was small and slender, so she had to know how to throw out attitude and intimidation. She moved quickly, roughly jostling people, barely looking where she was going, never slowing down. She hated this club anyway. She hated the music, the people, the fact that people used energy drinks as mixers. She hated Nate and his asshole friends. She hated the fact that she wore her leather jacket tonight and that it was a hundred degrees next to the dance floor and thirty degrees outside.

At last she broke free of the throng and made it to the relatively open lobby. She wanted to run outside right away, but she saw the snow coming down outside. The temperature had probably dropped another ten degrees since they had come in a couple of hours ago. She slunk over to the far side of the lobby, backed up against a wall, fished inside the pockets of her jacket for a cigarette. She pulled out a crumpled pack containing two damaged cigarettes. One was torn near the filter, the other was still intact. She put the better one back in the pack for later and tore the filter off the other. She hadn’t smoked filterless cigs since she was eighteen and liked to prove to the senior girls how hardcore she was. She felt that way again now. She felt like hitting someone just to see that scared, surprised look on their face.

An inch-high flame from her Zippo lit the cigarette with a messy, sooty flame. She could smell that she’d singed her bangs a little bit. She took deep drags from the cigarette. At least she did at first. But the unfiltered smoke nearly made her cough explosively, so she took smaller pulls. How hardcore would it be to start choking like she’d never even smoked before?

While she smoked, she glowered at everyone who walked by, at the goth girls drinking straight gin and pretending to like it, at the rocker dude whose sideburns were as wide as a guitar neck, at the bouncer who looked like he was thinking about asking if she was okay. She wasn’t known for her easy laugh or lighthearted nature, but tonight Nate had made her feel almost murderous. She wanted to spit venom at anyone who came near. No one did.

She sighed and looked down at her hands, at the nicotine stains on her fingers, at the little blue elephant-head stamped on her by the club. She saw that she’d stopped shaking. It was weird, because until that point she hadn’t even realized she’d been shaking ever since Nate started in on her. She’d been so mad that she didn’t notice how much madder she was than she realized. She’d had had to walk away from Nate many times. Why was this time different than all the others? Even before she’d started dating him, she knew he could be insensitive, self-centered, often vulgar. He could be sweet when he wanted to—usually when he wanted something—and she’d always thought he was sexy. She used to be excited to be seen with him. Now the attention he got for his looks pissed her off. She’d started to think that a disfiguring scar might do wonders for him.

She looked across the lobby as she took the last few drags off her cigarette. There was Nate, coming right at her. Unprecedented. He had always before been content to let her blow off steam and come back when she calmed down. He didn’t even care if that meant a week later back at his apartment. She figure out early on that he was never going to come after her. Now he had, and he looked angry.

His anger made her forget how mad she was. The look on his face scared her a little bit. She became aware all of a sudden of how much taller and bigger he was than her. It was a difference she couldn’t make up just with attitude.

“Jesus goddamn Christ,” he hissed as he walked up to her. “I’m sick to death of you always running out because you can’t take a fucking joke! What the hell is up with you?”

She just stared at him, wide-eyed. Her breath came very fast.

He threw up his hands in exasperation. “What?” he yelled. “Am I supposed to check in with you every time I want to say something? Are you so goddamn sensitive that I can’t mention anything that has to do with you ever?”

She swallowed as she imagined the satisfying feel of a beer bottle in her hand as it connected with his temple. She almost smiled. “That’s not it, Nate,” she finally said, trying to get the edge back into her voice. “You know, you treat me like shit in front of your friends. You always do that!”

He rolled his eyes. “That’s what you say. All I said back there was that you didn’t seem interested in sex these days.”

She shrank back, shocked. “Nate! If that was … believe it or not, even that’s not something you’re supposed to say! But what you said—” She looked around. Her voice sounded loud to her in the small lobby. She continued more softly, “What you said was that I had cobwebs between my legs. That’s pretty fucking bad.”

“It was supposed to be funny. You don’t have get so pissed. When did you become such a bitch?”

She stared at him and thought for several long seconds about what to say. “I don’t know. Mostly since I met you.” She flicked her cigarette butt at his feet and dodged past him. She fled outside into the snow. He stared after her, but didn’t follow.

It was bitter cold outside, and she had no plan. She impulsively headed off toward the parking lot down at the end of one of the long city blocks. She walked carefully but fast, careful to measure her strides in case she hit some ice. She walked hard, bringing her boots down with excessive force with each step. The streets were nearly empty, and the few people who passed did their best to look like they didn’t notice the angry girl stomping through the snow.

She wanted so much to lash out, but how? She was twenty-two now. She couldn’t pick a fight with someone like she used to. She wished she could try beating Nate senseless, but he had the size and weight advantage on her. She’d tried it before, but never got in more than one good punch before he grabbed her tight and held her in a bear hug until she relented. He always found that funny. The idea of it now made her almost vibrate with rage. Pity she’d never thought to use a tire iron, she thought.

She saw a bottle in her path. Dark brown with a little dusting of snow on top. She too aim and kicked it violently with her boot, breaking it almost in half and sending the pieces clattering against a brick wall. A couple walking nearby hurried around a corner to avoid her. That made her feel good.

She continued down the street, looking for any objects to send flying. Plenty of bottles presented themselves. Brown, green, and clear glass went flying, ricocheting off walls, littering doorways, spraying into the street. She kicked over trash cans, jammed the toe of her boot into the side of a wet cardboard box, punted a full can of half-frozen beer across the street. She wanted to do more. She was consumed by the anger, almost enjoying it. But it didn’t seem to be going away. It was growing.

She turned the corner, heading down the adjacent block toward the parking lot Nate had found. He didn’t like to pay for parking, so he got what he paid for: It was far away, dark, and secluded. It was actually a little more dangerous than she had realized. Fucking Nate. It was his fault she was here. In the dark. In the snow. Pissed off and hurt and alone. He wasn’t the one who felt unsafe, so what did he care? He didn’t mind telling his friends about their sex life. He wasn’t the one who felt stupid just for being younger and not knowing every stupid TV show reference all his friends got. It wasn’t his concern if she didn’t think crude jokes at her expense were hilarious. Somehow in his mind, all that added up to her being a bitch.

She refused to take his shit anymore.

As soon as she found the parking lot, she started looking for Nate’s van. His ridiculous Volkswagen microbus was usually pretty easy to spot, but she couldn’t remember exactly where he’d parked. She wondered if he’d left already. He could have just left! She started feeling panicky. A fresh edge of anger emerged, and she clenched her fists. But then she caught sight of the little van on the far side of the lot and she headed straight toward it.

She checked her jacket pockets, but then remembered that she’d been frisked going into the club. She stopped and bent over, slipping two fingers inside the top of her left boot until she found what she was looking for. Carefully, she pulled out a black-handled switchblade, a Valentine’s Day present from an old boyfriend, and sprung the blade as she advanced.

Her pace remained steady until she got within twenty yards of the van, and then she involuntarily broke into a run. She almost slipped on the snow, but caught herself. The blood pounded in her head. She heard Nate’s question: “When did you become such a bitch?” She advanced quickly and raised the knife.

With all the force she could muster, she plunged the knife down with two hands. It sank easily into the cold rubber of the tire, and she felt a rush of air on her hands from the jagged gash she made. The knife was in tight, and she had to work it back and forth to loosen it. Soon she’d torn a sizable hole in the tire. It was flat and beyond repair. The microbus sagged slightly at one corner.

Breathing hard, she moved to the next tire, the left front, and pushed the knife in slowly. The blade was loose in the handle and it was narrow, not really made for cutting into thick tire walls. But her anger gave her a freakish amount of strength. Again she made as messy a cut as she could, then stepped back to admire how the microbus now leaned to one side. She really hated that goddamn microbus. She grinned as she moved around to the other side of it.

She felt a bit calmer, but she wanted to finish what she’d started. She placed the tip of the knife against the tire and pushed gently, then with increasing force until she had just punctured it. The air seeped out slowly, and while the tire lost its shape, she made several more slits through its surface, enjoying the feel of the thin metal cutting into the tough exterior of rubber and cords. She was sweating profusely, and her hands were feeling numb with cold, but she felt calm enjoyment as she destroyed the tire. She moved then to the last tire.

On the final slash, she took her time, angling in toward the tire’s valve with precision. It was almost surgical. She made light cuts around it, then made slightly deeper ones. She continued in this fashion until the air began to leak out in a steady stream, at which point she cut more deeply until she was able to cut the entire valve away. She tucked the little rubber-covered metal shaft into her hip pocket as a souvenir.

Closing the knife and placing it in her boot again, she stepped back to admire her work. The van now sat on four deflated tires, resting on its rims. The vehicle had sunk a foot lower. It looked lame, maybe dead. She smiled and brushed the snow from her jeans. She felt better already.

She had one other idea. She felt through her pockets until she found what she was looking for. The Zippo sent up a bright flame as she lit her last cigarette. Back to the filters now, so she took a deep and dramatic drag on the cigarette before approaching the van. In broad strokes, she wrote a note in exaggerated, loopy cursive with a tube of black lipstick. The dark, smeared letters contrasted sharply with the dull yellow paint of the microbus. Nate wouldn’t be able to miss her message: “Love, Monica.”

Previously On . . .

She brushes her son’s long, dark hair out of his eyes. He looks up, tears still on his cheeks. “We’ll get through this,” she says. “Together.”

* * *

A green station wagon rolls into a lonely gas station at dusk. Steam rolls out from under its hood.

* * *

“That kid, this station wagon, and about sixteen outfits that are two years out of date,” she tells the old man at the gas station. “That’s all I have left in the world.”

“That’s enough,” the man says, nodding and spitting. “Long as you don’t count on the car.”

* * *

She and her son step into a tiny motel room with twin beds and three different kinds of wallpaper. She drops her suitcases. “We’re home,” she says hollowly.

* * *

She and her son sit at bright yellow counter in a highway diner. They scour the newspaper. “What skills have you got?” the fifteen-year-old asks.

“What’re they asking? I can lie with the best of them.”

* * *

The sheriff tips his hat back and looks at her across his cluttered desk. “How soon can you start?” he drawls.

"Don’t you have to take some kind of test or something?” she asks.

“All in good time,” he says. “It’s not like we have any other candidates.”

* * *

She stands behind a low counter, buttoned up in the light brown uniform of the local police. She speaks rapidly into the microphone of a dispatch unit. “Hey, I just started!” she shouts. “I don’t know if it’s a 3120, a 4711, or a 5150! Just get over there! You can ask the damn cows if they’re being stolen or not!”

* * *

“Your boy’s starting school here in September?” the handsome man with smiling eyes asks.

“Despite my best efforts,” she says.

“I’ll keep an eye on him,” he says, holding out his hand in greeting. “Coach Byerly. Maybe he wants to come out for track?”

* * *

She watches from the stands while her son lopes around the track. Coach Byerly stands next to her. “He’s got some talent,” he says.

She smiles wistfully. “Yeah, so did his dad.”

“So where’s he these days?”

She shrugs. “What can I tell you? He was always a good runner.”

* * *

The boy, now with close-cropped hair and wearing a letter jacket, is slammed against a row of school lockers. A larger blond boy flanked by two friends, points at him threateningly. “Becky doesn’t want nothing to do with you.”

“I agree,” says the dark-haired boy.

The blond boy looks confused. “You do?”

He rolls his eyes. “If you don’t get double negatives, then maybe you’ll get this,” he says, then rushes headlong into the blond boy.

* * *

His mother stands in the doctor’s office, a mixture of anger and concern on her face as she looks at her son with his assortment of bruises and bandages. “How do you think it feels to be dispatching a patrol car to break up a fight your son is in?” she asks.

He looks up at her. “I don’t know. As bad as getting the crap kicked out of you by three football players?”

* * *

The boy sits on the tailgate of an old pickup truck, talking in low tones to a pretty blonde girl with a round face. “Darryl’s always like that,” she says, touching his bruised cheek tenderly. “Don’t let him get to you.”

The boy shrugs. “He already got to me,” he says. “But I’m not going to let him stop me.

They kiss.

* * *

Twin silhouettes of teen boys run across a darkening horizon. A thin curl of smoke rises from a building in the distance.

* * *

The boy is speaking into the telephone in the hotel room, now made much homier. “Becky’s barn?” he asks, alarmed. “Is she okay?”

* * *

Coach Byerly drives speedily through the night. The boy sits next to him, his face an emotionless mask. “This probably isn’t the time, but since your mother and I have been seeing each other, I want us to try to be friends.”

The boy nods. “You’re right,” he says. “This isn’t the time.”

* * *

She sits at her post at work, speaking into her dispatcher’s unit. “I don’t want us to fight anymore,” she says. “I want us to both be happy for a change … at least for a little while.”

Outside the police station, her son is stretched out across the front seat of a parked police cruiser. He’s been crying. The last couple of words his mother just spoke crackle over the radio. He holds the microphone to his face and clicks its black trigger. “Fine. Let’s try it and see what that’s like.”

What They're Not Telling You

These average classes are for those of you with lesser abilities.

If we took any notice of you whatsoever, you’d be fired before the end of the day.

No matter how many times you revise the first sentence of your book, there’s no way you’ll live long enough to significantly improve the ten thousand that follow it.

In fact, yes, my new boyfriend is better than you. In so many ways.

You have no novel in you.

Even the most generous and undisciplined schools of art would burn that canvas.

The size of your salary is directly proportional to how much of your soul we own.

We love your sister more than we do you. Always have.

There is no farm in the country where we sent Buster to live. Your hamster did not escape while you were away at camp. Plus, there’s no such thing as doggie heaven.

Using you? I guess you’re right. I was just using you. Thanks.

Your incompetence sometimes takes my breath away.

You deserve a much bigger raise, but we’re betting you’ll stick it out for the pittance we actually gave you.

Your music is offensive enough to anger patrons at a cockfight.

You’re just lucky all the good employees keep resigning.

Your sense of fashion would embarrass the average lobotomy patient.

Based on this resume, I wouldn’t even hire you to pack fish.

We’re really looking to sell the house to a nice white family.

The grass actually is greener on the other side, but you’ll never have the courage to do anything about it.

As soon as you’re out of earshot, we immediately compare notes on your most recent acts of outrageous idiocy.

Yes, that dress does make you look fat.

Threatened by your intellect? Oh, that’s pretty far-fetched.

If your father and I had had better contraceptives, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.

Your humor does little to mask your rage.