Helium

Peter’s red balloon had stopped to chat with the whispering leaves of the poplar tree before floating away in pursuit of the soft September afternoon sunshine, its yellow ribbon trailing lackadaisically behind. Earth-bound Peter looked to the sky in lamentation, and tugged on his father’s flannel shirtsleeves. Jack Hamelin was tall, and Peter was convinced that if his father stood up and stretched out, he could retrieve the red balloon that was shrinking into a speck in the sky. Peter was afraid it might disappear entirely into the clouds if his father didn’t reach out soon and seize the yellow ribbon that was trembling in the breeze as though afraid of heights.

“Peter,” said Jack, not looking up, not looking down. “I need to explain something to you, and it might be difficult to understand right now.”

The yellow ribbon had gotten tangled with a curious raven, and briefly bobbed, suspended in blue. Peter leaned back on the park bench where they were sitting, engrossed by the action above.

“Your mother and I,” Jack continued, “we’ve been going through a lot of rough patches lately.”

The raven flapped away, squawking nevermore, and the red balloon resumed its path to the sun. Peter swung his legs from the bench, his Converse brushing the tips of the grass and sending feathery bursts of dandelion seeds into the air.

“I know things haven’t been the best at home these last few months—it’s not fair to you, Peter.”

Fair. Fairness was the virtue of the month for September in Peter’s kindergarten class—after August’s Truth but before October’s Compassion.

“In a few weeks, your mother and I are not going to be living together anymore.”

The red balloon vanished entirely behind Jack’s left ear.

“Son, your mother and I are getting a divorce.”

Peter contemplated the now empty sky and rearranged the syllables of this new foreign word in his mouth. It had taken Peter longer to learn how to read than his peers; while they grappled cardboard books with sticky fingers he constructed words out of building blocks with letters and sounds painted on the front. He put the sounds of the word “divorce” together and took them back apart again. Die-verse like awful rhymes in a poem about death. Divers like in the summer Olympics, leaping from high platforms into the watery abyss below. Da Force like Yoda used in Star Wars to make his enemies tremble with fear. The syllables of the word tumbled senselessly on his tongue.

When Jack looked down at Peter, the boy had tears collecting in the corners of his eyes. Jack briefly thought that his son had actually understood what he had been told, and he gathered the little boy into an embrace. Peter snuggled his nose into flannel and smoke.

When he looked up from his father’s grasp, Peter’s forehead was scrunched in contemplation. His mouth opened into the prefatory grimace that precedes the inarticulate questions that formulate in children’s minds. His lips pulled apart, exposing two gaping holes where teeth should have been.

“Where do lost balloons go when they float away? Do they ever come back?” Peter asked his father.

Jack looked down at his son’s watery eyes, pleading for comfort in the only way a five-year-old knows how. “Lost balloons carry dreams to little boys at night,” he responded, and Peter wondered what red dreams looked like.

“Would you like some ice cream?” asked Jack, consoling his son in the only way a thirty-two year old man who had never intended to have children knows how. He even let his son splurge with a chocolate-dipped waffle cone, and Da Force drifted from Peter’s mind and joined the ranks of the red balloon amongst the gathering clouds.

“Superman with SPRINKLES!” announced Peter proudly to the aproned ice cream man, and pointed eagerly to the waffle cone in the window. He took a wide lick and stuck out his tongue to show his father the melting rainbow in his mouth.

By the time Peter had devoured his ice cream, sprinkles, and cone and all, he wanted to know what Da Force was.

Jack hesitated. “Well, when two people love each other very much, they decide to spend their lives together, and they get married.”

It was mostly true—Jack remembered loving Hannah. In high school she had kept printed portraits of Wollstonecraft and Woolf in her locker and kept her mousy brown hair cropped close to her head. Regardless, she was elected May Queen in the spring of her senior year, and her slender, boyish hips and hollow cheeks photographed well. She spoke about gender equality in her speeches, and Jack found her naïve feminism endearing and strangely erotic. Jack did not share the same fiery activism as his wife; he was simple, but sincere, and the unattainable feminist found him charming. Hannah didn’t believe in marriage, but the two fell sloppily in love when they both turned twenty-one, and married the year after.

“But then, sometimes, two people grow up and grow apart,” continued Jack, struggling with the concept and the wording.

While Hannah had completed a master’s degree in Social Work and went on to rescue little girls from abusive parents, Jack stayed home and raised Peter. Although the East Side of Cleveland kept Hannah busy with humanitarian work, the deteriorating city was not big enough to accommodate yet another enthusiastic but mediocre musician. Jack had dreamed of being a drummer, and although he thrived in the classroom and in the quiet, secure studio, he lingered on the periphery of the self-destructive lifestyle of his more liberal peers at Oberlin. He brought them water backstage when his classmates’ bands toured northern Ohio, and picked up broken drumsticks, and repaired frayed cables. When his friends skipped class to arrange chaos in parallel lines, snorting white through Washington and dousing their artistic fervor with wine, Jack would lend them his carefully scribed lecture notes. Having smothered his own musical passion in college, Jack gave up and instead trained to be a fireman, extinguishing other people’s fires.

“Then two people who were once happy together begin to fight a lot, and sometimes they just can’t work it out. And at this point they decide it might be best to separate,” explained Jack.

Separate. Like corn from mashed potatoes. Or lips, and fingers, and legs. And boys and girls bathrooms.

“And although they used to care very much about each other, they let their love go, and it just . . . drifts away.”

Peter wasn’t sure what love looked like, but if it were anything like helium, it would float away like an unattended balloon and make your voice squeak when you suck it in. But everything comes back eventually—dogs that run away, boomerangs, mosquito bites, letters to the North Pole, and even lost balloons. Da Force didn’t seem so bad.

That night, Hannah came home late from taking care of other people’s troubled children, and while they waited for her, Jack and Peter sat on the floor of the living room listening to old vinyl records and drumming on the carpet. Despite his own abandoned attempts at musical eminence, Jack still harbored a secret desire that his son, although not terribly bright at schoolwork, could be instructed in classic rock. While Peter pounded the floor with unintentional syncopation and wailed like Robert Plant, Jack glossed the greats—The Stones, Zeppelin, Floyd, Hendrix—referring to them by their surnames only like old friends, the kind you’d call up and invite for dinner. Peter liked Ringo’s beats the best since they were easy to follow, and he always requested that his father put on The Beatles first. They made it through the 1960s and had moved into the early 70s before Hannah arrived home. Hendrix was unexpectedly suffocated by her furrowed brows, and the house fell silent and still.

At the dinner table, Peter sat between Hannah and Jack, and watched the tennis match of growing resentment between his parents. He observed in subsequence his mother’s slicked back bun and his father’s wavy layers, her gin and his cognac, her tightly drawn lips and his scornfully squinted eyes, her calculated bites and his hungry mouthfuls. Hannah had made Peter’s favorite meal: barbequed pulled pork sandwiches with baked beans and fresh strawberries on the side. But the beans were runny tonight, too hastily made, oozing across his plate until the strawberries were puddled in sauce, and seeping into the corner of the sesame seed bun. Peter tried to build a wall out of his knife and spoon to keep them separate.

Like boys and girls. Mothers and fathers.

When Peter pushed away his plate having barely touched the baked beans, Hannah grew suspicious.

“Not hungry, Petey?” asked his mother, thinly veiling sharp agitation with the soft professional tone she used with her clients.

“Daddy let me get a chocolate dipped waffle cone AND sprinkles at the park today after school! And a red balloon but it floated away. . .” Peter stuck out his tongue again, hoping the rainbow was still there to show his mother. She told him to close his mouth, and turned violently to Jack.

“Ice cream, eh? Are you trying to bribe him? Get him on your side?”

“Me? Strawberries aren’t even in season, Hannah. And you don’t eat pork!”

Peter had been enjoying Da Force until his mother abruptly ordered him away from the table to take a bath and go to bed. When he protested, Jack fee fi fo fumed him, telling him that the giant at the top of the beanstalk would smell him out and turn him into a soup unless he was squeaky clean. Peter sulked upstairs.

When Jack still hadn’t come into Peter’s bedroom to read him a story two hours later, Peter decided it must have been the bubble castle he left popping in the bathtub. His mother especially hated when he did that; she would stoop to her knees on the tile and attack the tub with yellow-gloved hands and mumble angry interjections about rings and porcelain under her breath.

Peter lay on top of his blankets, watching the spider that had been slowly making its way across his ceiling navigate the canyon between two tiles. He waited for his purple raisin skin to unwrinkle and waited for his father to appear at his door, with the big book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales they had been devouring one by one for months despite Hannah’s disapproval. Secretly, the stories frightened Peter, although he liked the cadence of his father’s voice and the whisper of a page turning. Tonight, Jack had promised his son the tale of the Pied Piper, but he never came. Da Force had lured Peter with promises and ice cream and walks in the park, but led him to naught but lukewarm bathwater and bedtimes without stories.

From downstairs, Peter could hear the gruff sound of his father’s reading voice—the one he reserved for the villains’ lines or bits about monsters—although it was faster now, louder, more syncopated, echoing up the stairs and bounding into Peter’s open bedroom door. Hannah’s harsh tongue chased Jack’s fiendish words with a whip and a tongue-lashing. She rebuked Jack’s retaliation with the same sharp, reproachful tone she used when Peter pinched her in the car or when he asked her embarrassing questions about body parts in public.

“You’re a fucking selfish feminist poser!” snarled Jack.

Barbequed pulled pork sounds squelched against the wall.

“And you’re a child playing fireman!” accused Hannah.

Something crashed.

The sound of Hannah’s heels on the kitchen floor was riveting. It moved from left to right beneath Peter’s head, cyclically, backwards and forwards like Zeppelin records on his father’s turnstile.

Peter was dozing off to the escalating sound of the grim drama downstairs, but he was afraid to fall asleep. Usually, his mother would come in and flatten his tousled hair, wavy like his father’s, kiss him good night, and wish him sweet dreams before switching off the light. Lying awake in the buzzing fluorescent glow of his overhead light, Jack was afraid the sweet dreams wouldn’t come.

Since it seemed as though his mother wouldn’t be coming up to tuck him into bed, Peter resolved to call for his dreams himself. He would be a big boy, taking charge. Peter made a clearing in the Star Wars action figures that were arranged on his dresser, and clambered up the knobs on the drawers and sat among them, a pajama-clad Gulliver amongst miniature ewoks and storm troopers. He leaned out the open window, stretching his head far into the darkness, leaving his decapitated body stretched out precariously on the sill. Satellites and airplanes and constellations above were confused for wandering balloons, scouring the neighborhood roofs below, searching for little boys waiting for dreams. Cicadas hummed in the trees, their songs shrill with helium. Peter waited for the yellow ribbon tail of his red balloon to stretch across the night sky, but this time he would leap out and snag it, although his father had failed to do so earlier. Peter wasn’t afraid of heights like the quivering yellow ribbon seemed to be. He just wasn’t sure if he had enough love in him to be able to float.

The Stranger

When I met Sheila for the first time she was wearing a crimson stocking cap, a silly looking thing that must have been knit by my mother-in-law. It had red balled tassels that hung down at her forehead like a head wound, obscuring her eyes. She refused to take it off. When Tamara tried, Sheila wailed as though wounded, waving her tiny fists in the air in the most obstinate show of anger that a five-month-old infant could possibly muster. My wife had told me in letters that Sheila had quite the temper, although she certainly didn’t inherit it from me. She would hold her breath until her little plump body turned purple, and then tighten her muscles in a sort of defiant rigor mortis. Sheila was throwing a fit at the airport the day I met her, and when I reached out to kiss her pale forehead, pushing aside the tassels of the hat, she was lying stiff as a board in her mother’s arms.

Tamara and I had been married for two years before I left for Iraq. At the time we were childless but still happy, and when the fat letter came with the inescapable date and time of my departure, we rationalized that it was as good a time as ever for me to go. We knew this would happen. She was the kind of strong military wife who sent DVDs and pop culture magazines to soldier-husbands overseas, to remind them what swimming pools and neon lights looked like while they were surrounded by an invariable sea of sandy grey. She could handle distance, and blood, and fear. When I finally returned, she threw a huge party—my in-laws and my father and my brother and their wives all came over, with hamburgers and smiles for grilling and Happy Family photographs. She kept the crepe paper and banner up for days after the party, and framed the picture of my father shaking my hand at the airport and placed it on the mantle, as if to remind me that I was home, and in case I forgot that he was proud.

My father, although never in the military himself, had been in the police academy with my commander, and had the same fierce pride of a military man. Lt. Col. Chessani and my father were both strong men with wide shoulders that passed time talking about artillery and hypothetical military strategy. When I was young, my father made it an annual tradition to take my two brothers and me to the Dayton Air Force Museum. We would speed North across the Ohio River in his cop car, and to give my brothers and me a thrill, my father would sometimes turn on his lights and zoom through intersections illegally. We made it to Dayton every year in record time. On the way home, giddy with testosterone and babbling in a militaristic lexicography, we would stop at the Wolf Creek Gun Club, and pretend to be marines, shooting down imaginary adversaries that popped wearily back up after every round of fire. Although I was the youngest of three boys, I always had the fastest and most accurate shot of us all. I imagined myself as a sharpshooter, and I think my father did too. He beamed when I brought home enlistment papers for the Marines after my senior year of high school.

When I left for Iraq, Tamara didn’t know that she was nearly two months pregnant. She told me the news shortly after, and I wasn’t there to hug her gently and kiss her forehead, like I wished I could have done. I was in a small tent where sand whipped between my cheek and the phone and got between my teeth when my jaw dropped at the word. I wanted to shout, and grin, and cry, and stamp my feet and dance, but Chessani was counting minutes and observing me, so I simply nodded slowly as if she could see me, and whispered that I would be home soon.

She decided to move back in with her parents when she found out that she was pregnant. The house we shared felt too small for her expanding belly. Every day she sat at her parents’ old kitchen table, counting days and counting stretch marks, and writing letters to tell me about the size of her stomach and the daily news. She watched television at dinner and read newspapers in the bathtub, and wrote me things about my own division—the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines—that even I didn’t know. Tamara’s letters read like an adventure novel, and she made crawling through dirt on my elbows and standing guard under the incessant sun sound heroic. But I didn’t want to read about my own life—I wanted to hear about her insatiable cravings for watermelon (the evidence of which was dribbled on the stationary) or listen to her complain about sewing elastic into her jeans. I saw round, barren hills explode before my eyes in Iraq, but I never felt my baby kick.

Tamara started to worry about me soon after I returned home from my deployment. She was afraid I wasn’t bonding with Sheila like I should, and that our only daughter would grow up with a stranger for a father. At night sometimes I would creep into Sheila’s nursery, and watch the flannel ducklings on her pajamas rise and fall with the steady rhythm of her breathing. The moonlight was spilling onto Sheila’s crib, casting her figure in a white, phosphoric glow. In the strange light her skin peeled away from her small frame and lay in disjointed shadows, sloughing off her fingers like gloves. When I went to pick up her segmented body I was surprised how pale she was. My brazen hand, callous and hardy from wind and metal rifles scorching in the sun enveloped her ashen cheek. We were not of the same flesh, she and I.

She woke at my touch and her wide black eyes stared past my own with no hint of recognition. She drew her thin lips into a ghastly frown, turning down the corners of her pleasantly plump cheeks. A cobweb of spittle stretched between her gums when she tilted her head back, filling her lungs with oxygen before the inevitable scream. Tamara came running when she heard shrieks, punctuating the silence like bullet holes, and took Sheila from my arms. She knelt by the crib making shooshing noises, and I crept outside to the porch.

After a few weeks, the colorful crepe paper and the banner came down. My father’s eyes in the photograph mocked me from the mantle as I sat in front of the television in the afternoon. Tamara stopped listening to the news at home. Her eyes begged to know what we, the 3/1, had done, if the reports were really true. Had soldiers from my unit really forced citizens from their blazing homes in the Jolan District, then butchered them with calculated precision on their doorsteps? No, Tamara, we did not. I was there, I saw it all.

While storming into Fallujah I fancied myself a hero, finally a true member of the “Thundering Third,” and when the Arab rushed at me from the door to his home, gun in hand, I aimed and shot with the same deadly precision as I had at old Wolf Creek. I was surrounded by my brothers as they rushed past, muttering curses and crying prayers through dirty masks.

The amount of blood surprised me. The Arab wobbled and fell back, like my limbless rubber enemies of old, but he didn’t stand back up. A red doppa grew from the crown of his head, oozing into a keffiyeh on the doorstep where he lay. Young children dragging toddlers by the forearm and women carrying infants were spewing from the entrance of the house, rushing over the Arab, over his expanding bloody cap, over his still, swollen chest. A little girl with bare feet tripped on his outstretched, empty hands, and knelt over his purple face shrieking “Abi!” until her mother came and swept the child out of her father’s blood. Fiery tongues flicking from the doorway to the house lapped at the puddle collecting on the doorstep.

The leaves on trees don’t change color in Fallujah, they just wave to the shamal in the summer and bow to the heavy rains in the winter. In early November, the palm trees were shaking off the dust of the dry season’s prevailing winds and preparing themselves for the torrential downpour of the next five months. In 2004, we set fire to the trees. Their tips glowed in sanguine reds, and sulfuric yellows, and burnt oranges. We brought them autumn, and we brought them freedom. That’s what Chessani told us.

Once home, I took to spending my evenings on the doorstep, picking out familiar sights in the landscape—the cracked concrete slabs in my neighbor’s driveway, the scattered glass of a broken beer bottle in the gutter, the fat, grooved tires of the cars lining the street. Barren tree limbs groped at smoky winter clouds and somewhere a siren wailed. I was comforted by the drone of an airplane above, and by the whimpering of a chained dog in a kennel nearby. Inside, a child wept.

Ennui

I don’t want anyone to know that the real reason that I’m sitting alone at my cluttered desk at 3:47 on a Tuesday afternoon, contemplating suicide, is because I am bored. Boredom, although I’m sure it has killed lots of people, is simply not an acceptable motive for suicide. Unfortunately, pistol loaded and pen in hand, I cannot think of anything more exciting to write.

My wastebasket is littered with crumpled pieces of stationary that I borrowed from work on Monday. The letterhead is mocking me, and even in my most inspired moments of desolate prose, my suicide note reads like a pre-pubescent attempt at melodrama. My boredom leaks through my pen and onto the shallow lines.

If it can be judged from my utter failure to compose a suitable farewell to my family and friends, my life will be posthumously remembered as tedious. I have always been a diligent student, and a loyal employee, and a faithful husband, but after roughly 36 years of existence, I’ve come to the conclusion that diligence, loyalty, and faithfulness hardly amount to success.

My inexhaustible dedication to academia during my undergraduate studies merited me a grant for graduate work in New York City’s supposedly flourishing magazine industry. I had earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at a respectable yet relatively unheard of college in rural Ohio, and my Director of Studies himself shook my hand and patted my back in a paternalistic way, congratulating me on my “superior placement.” Dr. Briggs will never know that the internship and later the full time position that I soon landed with Ornithology Monthly had nothing to do with my magazine publishing prowess nor my particular interest in birds. Taking note of my impeccable grades in university level Latin, my boss had simply hired me as a copy editor as a solution to certain loyal readers’ irate responses to the repeated misspellings of scientific names.

But even my unquestioning devotion to my bat-brained boss at the magazine could not grant me job security, nor could it save me from the inevitable embarrassment of having to list “Ornithology Monthly, copy editor, 1996-1999” under “Work Experience” on my resume. When the magazine went out of business three years after I started working there, I conceded to take a temporary position as a mail carrier in a nearby New Jersey suburb at the suggestion of my then fiancée, Amy. The former postmaster of said town had perished suddenly when the mail truck slid off the road on an icy day in a desperate attempt to faithfully deliver the daily mail to summit of the town’s single hill. The town council, comprised mostly of the city across the harbor’s failed politicians and seasoned veterans of local affairs, voted overwhelmingly to return to the quaint tradition of delivering mail on foot in order to preserve the lives of its mail carriers. The ordinance has not been overruled since I accepted the job eleven years ago, and each day, I walk with my mailbag to the top of the very same hill that killed my unfortunate predecessor.

It would be unjust to blame the hill itself for my current state of affairs, although as I again toss crumpled US Post Office stationary into the corner, I can’t think of anything better to write. I want to detail the absurd tedium of dragging a full mailbag to the summit of this goddamn city on a hill, only to see my efforts tumble to the valley below each evening, where the next day’s gossip and news and letters collect in piles, waiting for my delivery.

This morning I did not go to work for the first time in six years. The last time I missed unannounced was in 2004 when I had to rush Amy to emergency room, as she was suffering the miscarriage of our daughter that was never born. We have not tried to have children since. I cannot blame missing work on a son having the flu, or a daughter’s field trip to the Metropolitan art museum, or a niece’s theatrical production of Little Women. This morning, I just wanted to sit at home and eat buttery popcorn for breakfast (Amy hates when I do that—she swears I always leave oily fingerprints on the freshly cleaned counter) and watch Paul Newman dig holes and then refill them in Cool Hand Luke.

Before leaving early this morning for work, Amy, in her infinite kindness, cut out today’s Charlie Brown cartoon and left it by my orange juice, like she does every morning. She says that she sees a bit of my faithfulness and dedication in the personage of Charlie, and always reminds me “Hey, you got your little red-headed girl,” and then blushes, her cheeks matching her rosy hair. Today, Lucy again dupes Charlie Brown, and for the umpteenth time, he flings ungracefully into the air and lands heavily on his back with an exasperated sigh. It pains me to know that I must have left buttery fingerprints on the thin paper when I replaced yesterday’s strip in its privileged place on our refrigerator. I’m sure Amy will find them and lament my choice of a last meal.

I’m sorry for eating popcorn for breakfast, I begin to write, then pause, scratch my temple with the barrel of the pistol that I have been playing with in my left hand, and decide it might be best to finish this ordeal without leaving a note. I collect the crumpled stationary that missed the wastebasket, then take out the trash, and return to my desk chair.

The phone rings.

It must be Mr. Walton, at the Post Office, calling to reprimand me for my absence.

“Hello?”

Amy is on the other line, asking if I’m sick. Too timid to call my home phone and confront the possibility that I simply stayed home from work without an excuse, Mr. Walton had instead called my wife’s cell phone, figuring that something must be wrong. I assure her otherwise, and when she hangs up she tells me that she loves me.

I am now ready. My desk is tidy. But as I clasp the pistol, a horrific thought paralyses my trigger finger. In my mind is a pathetic image of Amy with her little stainless steel box of cleaning tools, scrubbing away at the office carpet with a toothbrush to get the congealed blood from the beige fibers. I decide to move to the bathroom, which Amy had specifically lined with easy-to-clean tile, hoping that one day a daughter would spill nail polish on the floor or drip hair dye in the sink.

I sit on the toilet with the lid down, but am uneasy with my reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall. I do not look like a man about to commit suicide. My cheeks are slightly flushed and my tawny hair has retained its characteristic sideways puff from being exposed to eleven years of windy walks. I notice for the first time that the skin under my eyes has become slightly leathery and brazen from staring endlessly into the sun as I ascend the hill day after day.

I remember the argument that Amy and I had when we first decided to move to New Jersey. It had been her idea. She hates subways and pigeons and taxis and the smell of steam emitting from manholes in the sidewalk, and for her, a move across the harbor was perfectly logical. What she loves most about New York City is its skyline in the sunset, blazing in golden hues as the sun dips beneath the horizon. From our small but Western facing front lawn, she can stand and watch nature perfecting the art of alchemy each evening.

At the time I disagreed. I was instead looking down at the harbor, and the roof of the post office in the valley, and the winding roads that snake up the side of the hill, knowing that I would have to walk up them, but never imagining that I would do so daily for eleven years of my relatively short life. It was a frigid New Jersey February evening when Amy and I climbed to the summit of the hill for the first time. She pointed with a slender finger to the distant skyline on the glowing horizon, but I was too busy looking at the freezing ice creeping across the harbor like stretch marks on a pale liquid belly. I suppose I haven’t looked up since.

From the living room the clock reminds me of the advancing hour. Amy will be returning soon and it is too late to do anything now. I will have to go out and buy a fresh newspaper, and erase the evidence of my morning’s misdemeanor. Tomorrow I will return to work, and I will drag my mailbag like a boulder that I have been condemned to push daily to the summit of my hill before it tumbles endlessly back to its base. I’m not sure what forever feels like, but at least in this tedious mortality I am daily the champion of my hopeless hill, and standing at its apex, New York City stretches out below my feet.

Familial

Papp dropped her off at the diner at a quarter to four. Despite his best paternalistic intentions, begging her to instead come home with him, she swore that her sister would pick her up from the diner on the way to her Big City Office Job. But Eva didn’t have a sister, or a mother for that matter, and she preferred to forget her father. Besides, now she had a new one—a tubby middle aged white man who wore neither his age nor his fat well. His jowls kept time in jiggles as the van pulled into the diner’s parking lot, empty but for three scattered cars, waiting eerily in the neon glow of the restaurant’s sign like abashed solicitors outside a peep show.

The Big City lights did not reach this far out into the hills, and the fluorescent diner burned brightly, attracting road side night dwellers as insects are drawn to street lamps in the dark. Papp became suddenly aware of the advantages of the darkness as the headlights switched off and he smiled, his neck fat stretching taunt across his chin, making his wide grin look shallow and his lips thin. She looked away from his bared sallow teeth, feeling devoured by his gaze. Her stomach was grumbling but Papp was drunk and she knew that even if she turned away and ignored him she would soon feel his grubby fingers on her skin, reaching through the sticky space between them and finding their way to her hipbone. An unreciprocated yet delighted giggle bubbled deep from his stomach, followed by a ghost of that evening’s brandy, dead and fermented yet haunting his chest cavity. She waited for the worn cotton of a five beneath the elastic on her underwear, then sprung into the neon night, leaving Papp alone in the dark to his own devices.

“Daddy loves his Baby Girl!” cried Papp from the window of the van with a brandy-scented hiccup.

Leaving Papp, Eva tried to dismiss the incestuous hunger she saw in his jaundiced eyes, bulging as though strangled about the neck. But behind every incest lies a kingdom waiting to be inherited, robed in red but built on the prophecies of gods. When she felt most violated, most polluted, she fancied herself mythological. If Oedipus had been a girl, Eva mused, her mother would have perished of utter shame, wagging her mournful head the whole way to the grave, and her father would have fucked her with disturbing desperation each night in the wide backseat of a van. To the unimpressive soundtrack of squeaking springs and skin sticking to fake leather upholstery, Whiteness overcame Blackness, and Lightness consumed Darkness. Eva longed for the day that Papp, upon the sickening realization that he had railed his Daughter, would hang himself with a stiff rope, fulfilling at long last the tragic, Oedipal prophecy. Granted, Oedipus gouged out his own eyes, disgusted and ashamed at what he had done, but at least this would save Eva from the sight of her shambled life and the bruises on her thighs. Faint hints of predawn light teased the black horizon with blotchy, yellow fingers, and Eva scuttled across parking lot wishing for blindness.

Eva’s mother had, in fact, died prematurely, although not from shame of her obstinate daughter. Her eventual demise was hardly anything to merit mythological retellings. She simply withered away from overwork, worn away year after year by the demands of far too many hungry boys, so that by the end of her slighted days she was a frail and osteoporotic skeleton, threatening to break beneath the increasingly heavy demands of her men. Eva’s father was ashamed of his wife’s emaciated form.

“Don’t you ever go hungry, you hear me Baby Girl?” he preached endlessly, thrusting the rough wood of a hoe into her hands, forcing his daughter to work even before she could properly walk. “Hunger is the worst of all earthly ills,” he believed, “because if you’re hungry, it means you’re lazy. And God won’t save the idle.” And so Eva worked, but tonight her stomach growled nonetheless.

From the darkness of the diner’s doorstep, Eva could see Màna strutting in the fluorescent light with her tray in one hand and a coffee mug in the other. Her smile evoked an innocent pride, as though she were a maître d’hôtel in a lavish restaurant, and as though the mounded plates of sweet potato fries she was balancing on her elbow were no less than tiramisu. Eva was glad to see her. The rotund Greek woman had a ringing laughter that was disproportionately delicate compared to her thick body. She looked toward the diner’s door at the sound of the dinging bell with the same eager expectancy of a mother awaiting the late return of her wayward daughter.

Màna rarely asked questions of Eva, she just brought her a plate of grits with melted cheese, and asked if she’d like some coffee. Eva nodded, not looking her in the eyes. On weekdays when Eva had slow nights, Màna wouldn’t make her pay. When the girl insisted, the Greek matron would protest, and if nothing else, slip a handful of after dinner mints into her pocket or an apple in a brown paper bag for Eva on the way out the jingling door. Màna joked, “You’re too thin, Baby Girl,” placing her hand on Eva’s cheek, dwarfing her chin and cheekbones alike with a single olive palm. Though touched, Eva would slink away, as though shame were a contagious and fatal disease that could be spread upon the slightest contact. Eva was afraid that if she allowed Màna to pity her, she would infect her with indignity.

The evening had been for the most part slow; before Papp had come to pick her up, she had but a sole client. He was a sturdy man that reminded Eva of her brothers, with dirt beneath his fingernails and grease smeared under his chin, as though he had worked his way out from under the body of a car and slid right under her own black underside. He paid well, and Papp had been drunkenly gracious and generous. Tonight she would pay back Màna in full. Màna would be proud of her Baby Girl, strong and self-sufficient. Eva drank her coffee in silence, listening to the faint click of insects zooming to their death in the fluorescent lights above.

The door chimed with the entrance of a new customer, and both Màna and Eva looked up with anticipation. Sometimes she dreamed that one day a real-life sister would walk through the door on the way to her Big City Office Job, with soft, slender hands, a modest, grey pencil skirt, and perhaps even a fashionable bob haircut. But Eva did not have a sister. Instead, she saw the visage of her brothers, the same slicked back hair and skin blackened under grime. Eva quickly averted her eyes, looking into the neon night, avoiding yet again the wide grin of a drunken man, the taste of his yellow teeth familiar to her tongue. A pair of grease stained mechanic’s overalls sauntered past, and Eva could not bring herself to lift her fork to her mouth. Màna had disappeared with a pot of coffee, attending to her men. Eva left without paying, hungry.