His father was drinking every night. Sometimes it made him late for work. He needed a woman. That was what you did if you were normal, you loved someone and married them. His mother had left a couple of years ago, gone to live in West Bromwich on her own. Mark didn’t know what was wrong with her. At least there were no more arguments. They used to keep him awake half the night, screaming at each other. Then he’d sleep and dream the house was on fire.
The fair looked like it was packing up. Blank-sided lorries were parked in the central area; some of the tents were already gone, though others were still open for business. Mark wondered what else might be on offer here. Too late to worry about that now. He patted his zip-up jacket, the pockets over his chest: two cans of lighter fluid wrapped in pieces of rag, each a small bomb that could burn down the thing’s tent. That morning at the job centre, as the rain had whipped its grey sheets against the building, he’d remembered the showers after games lessons at school. The staring, the whispering, the awkward silences. And the names. Bonetit. The Phantom. It’s Alive. The rain was still falling, but it was lighter and, for some reason he didn’t understand, slower. The drops around each lamppost seemed to trickle down a glass wall, rather than drop through the air.
The rapturous face on the tent wall was scarred with rain. The board was still outside, and there was a dim light in the doorway. Mark slipped to one side, walking slowly around a parked van, and approached the back of the tent. He felt in his side pocket for the lighter, and put a cigarette in his mouth as a prop. He’d have to be quick. Just as he was about to flick the lighter and whip the first cloth-wrapped can out of his jacket, a dark-haired girl in a blue coat approached the tent and paused for a moment, looking at the sign. Then she walked through the entrance. It was Carmel. She hadn’t seen him.
Mark spat out the unlit cigarette and turned away, running between the lorries at the end of the park and through the gap at the end of the fence, back onto the road. He ran until the pain in his chest made him slow down, struggling for breath. Rain clawed at his face. When he reached the industrial estate near the dump, where seagulls mewed in the dark like airborne cats, he took out one of the cans of lighter fluid and unscrewed the cap, then inhaled the cold fumes. He’d last done that about six years before, not quite a teenager. A wave of nausea hit him and he staggered against the wall, fell to his knees, inhaled again. And again. Slowly, the fear eased. He could see the rain falling, but not feel it on his face.
There was nothing to worry about. He and Carmel would go to bed together, and it would be perfect. Because they would be. He closed his eyes, breathing deeply, and imagined the two of them making love in the clouds, high above the city’s orange crest of light pollution, their bodies locked in a silent arc, falling together like angels.
A SMALL PART IN THE PANTOMIME
by Glen Hirshberg
Ah, there’s our Africanist,” Bemis says over the rim of his gin glass, through his beard, as Jalena Russell enters the outsized office. The other four, who’ve apparently been there awhile, look up from their drinks or turn from their bored perusals of the Great Douglas Green’s legendary bookshelves. Over by the window, Alexa Frazee even nods.
Jalena stops. She can’t help it. She knows that what she hears, every time they greet her that way, isn’t what they mean, or even what they’re thinking. What she hears is in the word itself.
Africanist. Our African.
“Professors,” she says, and drops her messenger bag into Green’s ratty recliner, where it half disappears into one of the fissures in the dry leather. Its color was probably burgundy, once, but now almost matches Jalena’s skin. A romantic — Jalena, perhaps, when she’d first arrived at Eastern Montana U. — Great Plains as an assistant professor seven years ago — would have identified the smells rising from it as properly aged whiskey, decades-old conversation. What it actually smells of is mildew, old nicotine, trapped fart.
Abruptly, Rogan and Frazee, the Lit and Comp department’s one and only functioning couple, lurch from the windows where they’ve been watching the snow and move straight toward Jalena. Rogan tilts back and forth, making frothy sounds through the floppy rubber lips of her drugstore zombie mask and bouncing a hand in the sprayed-on streaks of red in her spiky gray hair. Frazee just stretches her arms straight in front of her, bracelets jangling, her surprising smile lighting up her face under her gypsy scarves. She is the only person Jalena has met at EMU — GP with a smile that bright, and the closest thing she has to a favorite, or at least a mentor.
“One of us,” they are chanting. “One of us.”
“Hey, that’s right,” Bemis says, looking up from the Wallace Stevens first edition he has carefully removed from Green’s shelves. “Hear, hear.” His beard stirs like rabbitbrush in a breeze, and it’s possible that he smiles. Then they’re all chanting, even the Great Dr. Green behind his desk, almost as if they’re genuinely happy about her promotion, or, to be fair, even care one way or the other.
“Hear, hear.”
“Congratulations, Jalena. Tenured Professor Jalena Russell.”
“Tenured Full Professor Jalena Russell.”
“One of us!” Rogan and Frazee chant. Rogan sticks out a hand for a shake, but Frazee engulfs Jalena in a jangling hug that almost feels natural, for a second. At least, it does to Jalena, who has never exactly been a natural hugger herself.
Then Rogan joins in the embrace, which just seems strange, awkward, until finally, over Jalena’s head, Rogan and Frazee kiss. Jalena can feel their elbows and hips and breasts, as well as Rogan’s rubber mask, and wants to squirm free. At the bookshelves, Bemis lowers his gaze back to his beloved Stevens. Behind the desk, meanwhile, Green leans his formidably flabby self forward over his dog-eared Faulkners like the molting mushroom he is and grunts his disgust. Instantly, Rogan and Frazee release Jalena, join hands, and spin toward him. Rogan clamps a palm on Frazee’s ass atop her tricolored skirt. Frazee smiles, and Rogan glares through the eyes of her mask.
“You’re both going to hell,” Green murmurs, with no heat, as though reciting a line.
“And you can’t come,” Frazee says.
At the window, Darlene Parrott lets the curtain settle and leans her short, blond hair against the wall. Her face is so pallid and tired, she looks like an old, framed portrait of herself. For Halloween, atop her usual gray sweater and darker gray woolen ankle scraper, she has tied a yellow scarf with cat faces on it. She pushes her pince-nez up her nose.
“It’s still snowing,” she murmurs.
“And it’s going to snow,” Bemis says — almost sings — and the rest of them groan.
Green slaps his palms on his desk. “Bemis, if you insist on quoting Mr. Stevens and his blackbirds at us, you’re going to have to put my book back where you found it.”
“Philistines,” Bemis mutters. “And there’s only one goddamn blackbird.”