Billie Ruth was sitting in church with her grandmother when the Spirit struck cousin Carlene. It was a Wednesday night of the revival and the one-room country church was packed. Folks had come from as far away as Corinth and Tupelo. Billie Ruth was only eleven, but she felt the powerful surge of Bro. Tipton’s altar call. Still, she did not stir from her seat. The shouting, the loud praying, the hands clapping, the speaking in tongues made her afraid. In her secret heart Billie Ruth was more afraid of that than she was of Hell. Her cousin was 13 and looked 16, with womanly curves and thick, sensuous lips, droopy bedroom eyes. Carlene whispered things about sex to Billie Ruth when they were alone, nasty things about boys and blood and babies. Billie Ruth thought Carlene was crazy. But now the Spirit had struck Carlene and she danced around the altar in a frenzy, eyes shut, arms waving, hips swaying. Men followed her hips with their eyes. Worshippers made way for her as she convulsed, knocking against pews.

“Hallelujah!” Grandma Bodine cried. “My grandbaby’s saved at last! Glory!”

“Maybe this time it’ll stick,” a woman behind them muttered. “Backsliding hussy.”

Billie Ruth glared at her.

“Well, it’s true,” the young woman said. “She’s just puttin’ on a show for the men.”

Billie Ruth did not believe her.

Carlene was at the altar, on her knees, head thrown back. Bro. Tipton’s meaty hand pressed against her skull. The whole church was electrified. Other sinners and backsliders teemed to the altar seeking salvation. It was a fine night for the revival.

When services ended Billie Ruth hurried outside to find her cousin. She wanted to see how Carlene looked, how she had changed. Perhaps she, Billie Ruth, could bask in her cousin’s reflected glory and the Spirit would fill her, too. She scanned the crowd milling about the gravel parking lot and saw Carlene leaning against a pickup truck, hip cocked, idly flipping a coin. Her jaw worked a stick of gum.

Billie Ruth had expected a radiant angel. But Carlene’s gaze was vacant, her demeanor bored. Where had the Spirit gone? Billie Ruth turned away, bewildered.

Thus the first seed of doubt was planted for Billie Ruth, age eleven.

We’d been waiting for the bus for a long time when the two little madonnas arrived.  They came from the high school down the street, moving gracefully towards us in spite of the heat and their many burdens.  In their arms they each cradled babies swaddled in pink blankets.  They were laden with back packs filled with books, shoulder bags filled with baby supplies and purses filled with the necessities of women.

But they were barely women, didn’t look older than 15.  They wore starched blue and white uniforms but they took great care to adorn these plain garments to the limit of school policy.  Their ears and necks and fingers and wrists flashed with gold rings and chains.  Their young faces were obscured by make-up; eyes and lips painted to highlight all they had learned of the world.  They were both crowned with mountains of hair sculpted into tiers of waves and curls and studded with golden hairpins.  It almost disguised the fact they hadn’t reached their full height.

I waited at the stop with a business man carrying a briefcase, a woman in a greasy fast food uniform, and a tall man in coveralls with window washing equipment.  We slumped in the heat and barely acknowledged the new arrivals.

With sweet soft voices the little madonnas gossiped about some crazy-ass bitch at school.  The babies were no bigger than loaves of bread and didn’t look more than a few weeks old.  They squirmed inside their blankets as their mothers laughed.  When the conversation lulled, they held them close and cooed.

We waited and waited.  It was one of those hot days that drains away energy and perspective.  When the woman arrived I wasn’t sure if she was real or a mirage.  She was famine skinny.  Her breasts were deflated flaps clearly visible through her thin dingy shirt, and her purple stretch pants hugged every knob of her bones.  She gripped bags stuffed with empty cups and plastic containers.  Her skin was sallow but her eyes were bright and when she spoke she smiled with a full set of white teeth.

"Do you have a green dollar for 4 quarters?"

The woman in the uniform turned away and lit a cigarette.  The two men looked in another direction. I ducked my head and studied her feet .  Her scuffed sandals revealed toenails that were curled brown spikes over an inch long.  I had many green dollars, but I wasn’t about to let her know.

The little madonnas immediately shuffled their burdens around, pushed packs and bags back, and brought purses forward.  The first one to get her wallet out handed the woman a fresh green bill.  The woman reached in one of her bags and pulled out a handful of change.  She tried to pick out four quarters but kept getting confused and shifting the money from hand to hand. 

One madonna passed her baby to the other and put her hand on the woman.  "Here, let me help."  She extracted the four quarters from the woman’s palm; then folded her fingers over the change.  "Put that away now, and be careful."

"Thank you," the woman said and crammed her money back into a bag. "God bless," she said and started to walk away.

"The bus will be here soon," a madonna said.  "Don’t go anywhere now."

"Oh, I don’t need the bus, I just need a green dollar."

"Do you have some place to stay?" the other asked.

The woman smiled and scampered away.

The one took her baby back from the other.  They both planted kisses on the plump clean faces of their daughters.  The babies burbled with contentment.  The madonnas hugged their bundles to their chests and spoke no more.

We waited and waited, the heat heavy upon us.  When the bus arrived, we were told there’d been an accident with a downtown trolley.  All the buses had to be routed around it.

My ride home was short, but the little madonnas had many miles and another transfer before they reached home.

We have just gotten off work at the restaurant, with no real plan, an ounce of pot, and no fake ID for my young friend. We walk the Vegas strip, something I still find a special treat, almost like waking up every morning and seeing the Statue of Liberty. We walk and hold hands as we duck into the sparsely spaced dark alleys of Vegas.

Sufficiently wasted, we linger at the crosswalk between the MGM and New York New York. I always want to jump. I know that I could and it would hurt like hell, but just once… I guess that’s all it would take. Johnny can barely rip his eyes from the car lights below.

He’s still a kid under that dime bag exterior. He still blushes when he tells me that he’s kissed a couple of girls. I can’t even summon the blood to my head when I see a boy’s wee-wee anymore.

Johnny has to pee, and it sends us scampering for a can. Instead of ducking into the normal casino bathrooms, we go in search of risky game, like a curb or an outdoor plaza. With luck, we run into two side-by-side port-o-johns full of toilet paper.

I crouch and hear the clunk of my keys as they clank off the shitter’s rim. God, that was close. What would happen if they really did hit the mark? Would I actually reach my hand into that dank pit? I was never one to make spare keys.

I crack my head on the door as I exit and fill Johnny in on the possibility of losing something down the port-o-crapper’s angry jowls. Johnny simply replies that he would tip it over. I counter with a theory that those shit holes could extend another five feet into the ground. I would have to go in after them, preferably not head first. But, when it comes to getting into my house, I might have to make the sacrifice. I don’t know my landlord’s number off the top of my head.

I try to explain the importance of preparation to Johnny. You have to think about these situations in advance, so if it does happen, you have a rough battle plan. He says that’s the reason why he smokes weed. It clears his head. I tell him I almost stepped on a chipmunk once. He laughs, and I ponder the reason for such a retarded memory spurt.

My stamina fades, so I drop Johnny off at his coffee house hangout. He gives a casual wave back as he runs to his hipster friends. I stand in an oversized work shirt tied under my apron, feeling like an embarrassingly-dressed mother, dropping her son off at school.

A rivulet of sweat forms on her neck and rolls down between her breasts, where it is absorbed by her long brown hair. She leans forward to be closer to the window and the hint of a breeze, but also to keep her moist back from sticking to the chair. The August heat grips the apartment, and she wonders what’s keeping him. The clock above the pharmacy across the street, the chimes from the church on the corner have both struck the hour. He will be here soon, if he comes at all.

The unrelenting morning sun angles into the room, exposing the cheap green carpet and creating a triangle of light around her small feet, the only part of her still clothed. A darker corner might be more discreet, but the window is the sole source of fresh air and, from her position there, she can see him arrive. It will give her time to throw something on before he unlocks the door. He will be in the mood; he’s always in the mood. And he likes to undress her. In a matter of moments those large hungry hands will be at her, but, even in the heat, he will do it methodically, patiently. He doesn’t sweat.

She casts a glance to the street several stories below. The asphalt shimmers. Pedestrian traffic is sparse for this time of day – no dark blue suit, no gray fedora among them. The hot sidewalks have driven the usual strollers to their own urban oases, and she longs for a refuge also. The room is stifling now, enervating. Too much to bear. A bar would be nice, or a small café. Just to sit in a booth somewhere, the air from an overhead fan on her neck, sipping something cool.  Something cool.  The lyrics of June Christy’s summer plaint come back to her and she sings the first few lines softly. Forgetting the words, she hums the tune and, for a few moments, her discomfort eases. She would like music when they are together. He says it distracts him. He needs the grind of bed springs, the hard, guttural breathing, the empty words. Even in this heat.

“Sky of a heel, is it going to rain?
if it rains you’ll have fried potatoes
unless it rains jail” -  Benjamin Peret

How I wish I could see him again that man who hit me with a book as he was leaving, all rage and self-righteousness, all power in that one thrust of his arm, outwards.  How it must have felt to connect with my chest, to feel the blunted edges of that hefty tome meet the pliable stiffness of my sternum!  How masterful he must have felt!  How like a real man, a warrior.  How like a winner. Or, let’s imagine it another way.  He comes to the bookstore, he’s had a fight with his wife, she walks with a cane and living with her is no picnic, let me promise you that buddy, and so he’s already spoiling for trouble and all he wants is a poor sales clerk to cower for him and refund his money on the book he special ordered and bought on a whim, at a time when he was feeling a little more omnipotent than he is now, entering this small bookstore he’s confronted with what the willowy young man, he may be gay, he thinks, is calling “store policy” and in a fit of pique, one irrational moment in an otherwise orderly life, he lashes out, pushing the book forward with angry words, surprised even as it makes contact with the chest of the spindly book clerk.  Let’s imagine now that our customer gets in his car as the clerk’s sputtering fury falls away behind him and he revs the motor as if he were a teenager and this his first own personal car and he rips out of the parking lot and he is suddenly stricken with remorse for what he’s done.  Suddenly he is a man confronted with the monster inside himself.  He hit someone!  He is now a man who is capable of hitting someone!  Let’s imagine he goes home and his wife limps into the living room and she half-smiles at him and in his confusion he rages at her also and calls her horrible names and let’s say she strikes back and hits him and the man is now not only a cruel bully but a man who fights physically with his invalid wife.  He can’t take it, this view of himself, he can’t make it fit.  He stands in front of his mirror and he makes himself a zero, he makes himself nothing.  Let’s imagine this man’s chagrin and self-loathing turns him inside out so that he can no longer live on the same planet as decent people and he just evaporates, he disappears.  He is no longer a man capable of harming anyone for he is vapor.  He is only the trailing vapor from a bad dream, a nightmare man.  But it’s not true.  I’ve seen him again, coincidentally in another bookstore, buying another book, blithely, as if he had never hit anyone before in his life, as if buying a book for him was not a jeopardous thing at all.  I even followed him to the checkout stand and heard him make pleasant chatter with the young sales girl there selling him his new book on model airplanes.  He exists, all right.  He’s still out there.  Sometimes I can picture him, walking toward me, I can feel him first because my back is turned, a trembling inside me like a memory; I sense him first as he gets closer.  I turn to face him and he’s hideous and I feel pity for him, pity for him and his matted fur, the tusks at which others must point, his sharp and terrible teeth!

CeCe Seeman jumps out of her seat and runs down the hall to the bathroom during final exams. Diarrhea is dribbling down her legs and leaving a trail. The whole school building smells. Everyone, taking exams, can smell something horrible, worse than the smell of the cooked cabbage or a cat’s litter box or dog poop.  

Everyone has to go outside.  

In single file line, each middle school teacher escorts students out into the hot sun. It is the first week of June and already summer.  

Everyone has her pencil and clipboard. Teachers lead their classes to different spots on the soccer field, so that everybody can finish their exams. Because of the honor code at our school, no one discusses the exams on the way outside. Actually, nobody talks; the stench keeps everybody quiet. 

Everyone has her mouth and nose covered. I breathe in the fabric of my cotton sundress. One girl, more delicate than me, gags into the collar of her dress.  

That night I prank-call CeCe and ask her if she has read the Diarrhea of Anne Frank yet, since it is required summer reading. Then I make fart noises into the phone and hang up. This is the first time I have ever done anything so ugly and mean, and it feels good as I do it. But the next day I feel horrible. My first day of summer vacation, I am eaten away with shame.

Sheri "Tater Baby" Bancroft writes and teaches in Memphis. She is a recipient of the Tennessee Arts Commission Literary Fellowship, is married to a musician and has two cats.

Blind
Chris Johnson

Make my way feeling the walls. Slam my head into the faucet, water racing out too fast, can’t find the  towel, half-miss the toilet. Research. 

Barefoot and naked with no idea if my shades are pulled, if anyone is looking in at the strange man groping around his apartment beating the left side of his head where the radio plays, on and on, voices muffled, music up and down. Punch the wrong number three times to get time seven forty-two, temperature eighty-one. Losing balance on a beam wide as the floor, but how can I know? Time seven forty-eight, temperature eighty-one. 

Democritus the Greek lived among men who no longer believed the gods controlled all. Just before him, man had realized that the Nile would rise and fall despite the contrivance of gods. That advancing storms were indeed advancing storms, not anger lashed out from Zeus, as Homer would have them believe. The Naturalists were at hand, wanting truth, wanting to know that what they had seen was exactly what it appeared to be, not a threatening performance. Democritus among them, the Atomist, profound and unprecedented in his assertions: "By convention sweet is sweet, by convention bitter is bitter, by convention hot is hot, by convention cold is cold, by convention color is color. But in truth there are atoms and the void."  

Small, rapid things. Atoms. Varied in shape, which determines their action. Sour and prickly on the tongue atoms – jagged, dramatic. Cool water atoms – smooth, slipping around with ease. Atoms and void. Table corner atoms, doorway atoms – definitely barbed. 

Time eleven thirty-three, temperature eighty-one. 

One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen steps up. Fifteen down. Up. Down. Up. Down. Time is slow, time is fast, too much time, too little time, no time at all, all the time in the world. Time two sixteen, temperature eighty-three. What now?  What if I fall and bash my skull and die and am found laying naked in the foyer, nothing but a black mask over my eyes? What then? 

Reflect. Sleep. Dream. 

Time eight forty-one, temperature eighty-two.  

Turn on the stereo. Jazz atoms – smooth. Democritus applauds. Was blind, but now I see.

Furry Loved The Water
David B. Dawson

Furry loved the water. Loved taking a dip, 1970, at the afternoon parties out past Germantown. The rich white boys who copied his licks would take him everywhere. Ancient skin, mummy skin, black skin hanging from wise bones, yellow eyes, pure white hair. The rich white boys would leave him standing chest deep in the cool water of the pond.

White boys now sitting under willow trees on the bank, smoking cigarettes, the rich white girls sitting between their legs. Oblivious to Furry. "Don't you act dumb, now, I seen dumb and you ain't got none of that. I said get me out this water. I already had one bath this month, don't need no other. You hear me? I say, you hear me?" Waving the quart bottle of Budweiser like a maestro's baton. And eventually they heard him. Forgotten old genius, forgotten songs, forgotten world. Mr Handy. The Crump blues. Throwing bones and playing slide on Beale Street. Sitting in with Will Shade when the Memphis Jug Band needed some seasoning. Pushing a broom all those years, cleaning the hot, empty streets. Was this his legacy? To be stuck in a pond, balancing in the mud on his one leg, feeling like a stork. Finally old Furry would fling the bottle toward the shore, toward the rich white boys with that hair longer than a woman's -- Furry always said a man shouldn't ever mess with a woman got hair longer than his. Rich white boys would come out there with an aluminum web lawn chair, put old Furry in it and carry him out of the cool water -- "Be careful, got-damn it, I ain't no lifeguard" -- set him down under the willows, in the shade where the white girls sat on beach towels and tried to ignore that on the foot of his one remaining leg, he's wearing the wrong shoe.

The Loons
Ed Tankersley

He stands at the window, his back to her, watching the lake and listening to the cry of the loons.

Only a few hours earlier they had crossed the Bay of Fundy, leaving Nova Scotia behind. Nova Scotia, the land of her ancestors, where they had hoped to find records, resting places of people she had never known. But they were seeking something else also, something they hoped had not died, but only been weakened through years of neglect. The census records had been found, and the gravestones. But not the other. So they headed south, through the cheerless Maine landscape – intermittent comments of the weather, directions, arrival times. Brief. To the point. Nothing more.

And he stands at the window of the latest bed and breakfast and listens. Or pretends to. This silence is an entity in itself, pressing upon them, and he is afraid to break it. He won’t start it again, it is too painful: the empty exchanges, words to fill a void – prodding, probing, like two people meeting for the first time. Not those conversations of another day, another world. Does she remember them? Years of stimulating talk, born of common interests, common loves. Acquaintances had noted it. No two people with more in common, they said. When had that couple become these two caged individuals, lost to one another in the deepening twilight? When had the lovers ceased to be friends?

A stir from the bed causes him to tense. She is coming to him now and he doesn’t know what to expect from this woman-child he once knew so well. Her arms encircle his waist, her head presses against his back before her softly uttered words destroy the best part of him: “This isn’t working, is it?”

He has to face her now, become one with her if only for the moment. Looking into her moist, resigned eyes, he brushes the hair back from her forehead and kisses it three times, the way he used to kiss her lips before they went to sleep. Remembering, she smiles faintly and tightens her embrace, and together they stand in the darkening room, defeated, hearing the cry of the loons from their nesting place.

My Friend, Bob Canaletto
Corey Mesler

I wanted to write a story about my friend, Bob Canaletto, the plumber. I wanted to describe his rise to grandeur, to the pinnacle of plumberness. How did he do it? Why him and not a dozen other plumbers, equally talented, equally blessed?

I wanted to discuss the "right place at the right time" theory, to debunk it, in a way. There is genius and there is everyone else, and no one, least of all me, admittedly, understands where that demarcation line lies. I wanted to say something about that, and about Bob, as a person, as a friend, godfather to my young daughter, Dido. So much has been written about him as a star, as the brightest plumber of his generation.

He has been revered, delineated, deconstructed, and, for all that, misunderstood. His rightfully famous "Burr Removal Treatise" has been reprinted more times than ‘Desiderata," but few have taken the time to comprehend what he was really saying. Ditto for his "Drain Snake Dialogue: A Lucubration."

But, what about the spiritual Bob Canaletto? What about the philosophical side to this worker in sanitary ware? Was his belief in metempirics consistent with his handling of flux and solder? Did his "God" create his likeness with lampblack, plumber’s soil? As of now, this has not been plumbed, if you’ll forgive the play on words.

Now that he’s gone, has anyone stood up to say, "I knew Bob Canaletto, and he was more that a great pipe cleaner"? I wanted to be that person. I wanted to add my voice to multitudes crying his name.

I wanted the real Bob to emerge from the sciamachy of myth. Did I know Bob Canaletto better than anyone else knew Bob? This does not interest me. I claim no personal glory.

I wanted to set Bob free.

But this cannot happen now. The zealots and the coven of family members and "friends," the sycophants and arcanists, have had their say. The papers are sealed, the gag order issued, the libraries mute.

But I know. I have my memories, like freshly milled dreams. I sit quietly now and replay them. They comfort me here, in my cell.

She took forever to bring us coffee. She tried not to get too close to us. Did we smell bad?

When she took our food order, she didn’t smile. She seemed offended when we ordered fries.

“We don’t have fries,” she said. “All we got here is tater babies.”

“What are tater babies?” my husband asked.

“They’re not french fries but they taste like fries, and they’re real small. About this big.” She showed us her pinky.

So we got tater babies instead of french fries.

This was a Sunday, and everyone in there except us had come from church. Everyone stared at us in our jeans and T-shirts. We weren’t in our Sunday school clothes, and they were pissed.

We ate and laughed and tried to be extra friendly to these people who hated us.

Pink ate there once and had her picture taken. On our way out, we stood by her picture and had our picture taken. Pink looks more big city than us. I wonder how her look went over when she came in the front door of the restaurant. She was probably better received than we were because she is a star. And since she is a star it doesn’t matter what you wear, even on a Sunday.