BIG GRAY CAT
For Billie

big gray cat

her terrain’s paladin
when the dog arrives
she is on guard again
though she looms like
an ash mushroom cloud
soft and dangerous
a fog spreading warning

over the dog
so timid so mild
that only appears
now and again
stays a few days

favor to a friend
the cat who was born
to life on the street
accepts the dog’s presence
a challenge to meet

shakes off the sloth
of complacent breath
she preys and she stalks with
newfound self respect
that sense of herself
not an indolent cat
but one who has reason
and courage at that
she  stalks silently
pompous threat in her stare
when i awake she hisses
you will not be there
and if you are
and the household agrees
i’ll leave you to bend
an agreeable knee
and you will go your way
and I will go mine
but never forget
that I am sublime.

The Man 
Who Collected Souls

A RURAL WINTER LANDSCAPE APPEARS ASLEEP, covered with a milky goose down duvet that bloats with every snowfall. Any attempt at pulling down that coverlet is a startling reminder of the alabaster hardness of it all. The countryside in spring can be a cruel revelation for people with secrets.

The taxi driver, a Somali man—Cheshire-cat grin, dull yellow eyes sunk into a raw-boned, eggplant-colored face— searches Ludmila Leskov’s expression. She’s lashed over the front seat like a Siren, guiding him all the way from the bus station in Freehold, New Jersey, until she urges him forcefully to a stop along Brick House Road.

“Here?” he asks warily.

She nods.

He swivels in the driver’s seat, looks across the road to
posted woodland—a fenced-off danger zone—some kind of military complex. He turns back to the shred of an entrance, just off the main road, that disappears into more forest. There is no mailbox, no sign, nothing. Just the rusted bones of a bicycle on its side, pedals stiff from disuse, like an old horse gone to its reward.

“Don’t pull into the drive. You’ll never get out,” she says. “You sure, Miss?”

“Yes. Yes. Of course I’m sure. I lived here!”

Hurried and vexed, she overtips him. Which makes him
more ill at ease.

“Okay,” he says, popping the trunk. He pockets the bills.

She is out of his cab before the meter spits out a receipt. She yanks her backpack from the trunk and tosses it to the side of the road. The driver emerges halfway from his cab, catches her eye and retreats. She wrestles with the wheels of a zebra- patterned suitcase and slams the trunk closed.

The car speeds away, leaving Ludmila enveloped by the silence she remembers of the place at certain times of the year. It is a mystical stillness, grand in the absence of snow blowers and the whipcrack of a deer hunter’s rifle. On that Monday morning, commuters have already shot through the tolls heading for Manhattan. Soon enough, gardeners, contractors and the weekend roar of the neighbors’ manic obsession with the Rolls Royce of lawn tractors will infiltrate that silence.

Ludmila steps a few feet in from the road, adjusts her backpack, before running her fingers through a boyish crop of auburn curls. She is tall, like her parents, and slender. They called her Lud as a child. She was a tomboy then and still adopts that attitude. Her girlfriend, Carmen, calls her Luddo. Her face is makeup free, her skin translucent. Her cheeks redden naturally in the country air.

The property—some twenty acres—is at the edge of the Pinelands. Sandy soil has its limitations, but seems never to hinder the forest growth of pine and oak. Holly grows everywhere, rooted in prickly insistence. In summer, mountain laurel appears in delicate clusters of pink and white, like miniature cupcakes at a tea party.

Chill morning air makes her shiver. She wears a dun-gray, short-sleeve t-shirt. On the front are two black ravens, heads turned away from each other. There’s a hoodie in the suitcase, but she will wait to unpack in the house. Deer country means ticks. Her black jeans may have been a bad idea, though it’s still early in the season.

The driveway is nothing more than an extended, overripe dump in early April, lashed by the seasons and ruined by unknowable, regretful years. Her memory, still to be disturbed, relies on an inborn compass. Her stance is battle ready, knees slightly bent for lift off. She regards her Doc Martens—her foot armor—and grabs the handle of the suitcase.

Sodden earth gives way as she plunges up the drive, towing the suitcase behind her. Crunching underfoot are metal, glass, and plastic shards reduced to an indecipherable mosaic that will eventually disappear in the undergrowth. The sound is of a broken-toothed maw sucking as hard as it can to slow her down.

A brownish furred lump darts across her path, stopping her. She blurts after the startled groundhog, “He’s dead!”

From where she stands just before the bend in the drive, Ludmila knows the return will be painful. That every memory—like every broken tree branch and every bit of poison ivy, every tick that sucks the lifeblood, every chigger that bites through remorse, every flea that irritates the itch that cannot be reached, and every downed power line lurking in the undergrowth—means there had once been a very different life here.

“I fear there will be zero fucks given,” she grumbles, pounding through the muck.

At the top of the drive, a massive boat blocks her view of the house. The sight of it brings Ludmila up sharply. It appears to be shipwrecked atop a chaotic assembly of iron railings and wood planks. Yellow caution tape, like an inert serpent, is strung around it.

The prow of the yacht soars with the conviction that glory is possible, recalling a demented character who angered the gods in a Werner Herzog film. If there are gods to be appeased, Ludmila is damned if she knows who they are.

A moan escapes her and ricochets off the surrounding forest. “Why me? Why, why, why....”

She ducks to the side of the towering castaway. Behind it stands the house, her father’s house. Its multiple windows— mismatched nearly to a one—peer down at her with schizophrenic disregard for convention. Rough patches cover the exterior in various stages of wear. Orange and gray cinderblocks are exposed in some places. Mortar is frozen mid-ooze between the blocks. There are balconies— constructed from odds and ends, secured to the sides and front of the house—that no sane human being would dare chance. The house looks back at her as if to say, “This is how we Russians do it. We scavenge.”

Ludmila approaches from a narrow tear of dirt, between broken flowerpots and a battered wheelbarrow pooled with stagnant water, slumped in defeat. She skirts an assortment of bicycle wheels and something that looks like an industrial vacuum. She pushes at one of a trio of rusted metal drums that slosh with god-knows-what. Split logs lie like desiccated limbs, piled under a blue tarp. “He had heat at least,” she murmurs.

She drags the suitcase up cement stairs that look like hardened oatmeal, onto broad weathered planks—what passes for a front porch—and stops to peer at two time-darkened windows. A memory flap opens and closes before it can strike a note. She moves clumsily among garden tools barely recognizable in their oxidized state. She steps around coils of razor wire. Plastic buckets of indeterminate material stand like sentries at the front door.

Ludmila forces the front-door lock with a skeleton key. Applying her shoulder to the door, she presses it hard. She chills at the notion that on the other side is memory’s resistance to her return.

The smell hits her right off, pungent, yet still sweet: rotting vegetables, dead animal, mold, cat food and cat piss. Pipe tobacco—the kind her father smoked—evokes caramel and honey and vanilla.

The resistance, it turns out, is a sea of detritus swept up against the front door. Ludmila leaves her suitcase on the porch. She has to pee. Rethinking her bladder, she retreats to the bottom of the porch stairs, slips behind the log pile and lowers her jeans.

Relieved, she steps carefully into a dark entrance hall. The door to the room on the left is nailed shut. A wooden ladder leans against it. The stairway to the floor above is on the right. Cardboard cartons jammed with books, all kinds of picture frames—some empty, some bordering squally seascapes—spill through another doorway into a larger room where computers and keyboards are tossed about as though a dry hurricane has ripped through it. She makes her way, looking for a kitchen table she remembers, and discovers it to be there still. Its surface is piled with camera bodies, video equipment and lenses. More than a dozen tripods—maybe two dozen—crowd around the table, tilted as if laid for a bonfire.

The room she remembers to be the kitchen is in the rear, beyond the table, darkened and crowded with shapes she cannot discern. It is nothing she wants to tackle just yet.

A glance into the main room means she will leave further exploration until later. The atmosphere is muscular and unsound. She needs fresh air, but the windows are blocked by odd bits of furniture, mismatched chairs in a towering display of single-mindedness, and heaps of crockery that will come crashing down with one wrong move. The windows are winterized with bubble wrap, giving the room a hive-like feel.

Holding her breath, Ludmila backtracks through the salvage and heads up to the second floor.

The stairway is narrow, uneven, and steep. She has to step sideways in her graceless boots. The stairs lead to another large room where she skirts a jumbled pile of careworn hats dropped among orphaned and maimed gloves. She kicks aside a disfigured snarl of shoes. She tears bubble wrap from its tape moorings and jerks open a window. Chill terrarium air oozes into the stale-smelling room.

Sliding her backpack from her shoulders, she plants her elbows on the windowsill. From above, the boat looks smaller, meaningless. A token among many tokens she knows exist in the house and around the property. Her father had the monopoly on useless things. That boat below. She’d already passed “go” on the front path when she found the wheelbarrow. She knows there is more. She is sure to unearth an old-style boot. She does not expect to come upon a Scotty dog. Her father loved cats. He was never without cats. With a start she bolts upright, banging her head hard on the window sash.

Ludmila scans the room looking for a cat, any sign that there have been cats. Certainly there is strong evidence of something animal in the stench. She dares not think that her father had been that far gone. But what does she know? She doesn’t have a cat. Maybe it’s a raccoon, or god-knows-what under a hillock of quilts in a gloomy corner of the room.

A far off pinging startles her. Like the sound a black box makes from the plane wreckage at the bottom of the ocean. She stares blankly until she realizes it’s her cell phone. Retrieving it from her backpack, she sees it is her lover, Carmen.

“Hey, babe. I was just thinking about you.”

Carmen snorts. “No, you were not.” She laughs—a deep, tantalizing whoop that conjures strawberry-shortcake martinis and bullet shots of Jameson. “Seriously. Is everything okay? Are you there? How was the flight? What shape is the place in? Have you met—?”

“Hang on,” Ludmila cries, and then shrugs off annoyance at Carmen’s persistence. Carmen is an army of one, a force to be reckoned with, a fun house on legs and all Mexican heart. Today Ludmila is relieved to hear her voice.

“Luddo? You okay? ¿Qué onda?”

“Nothing much, yet. I’m fine. Well, I just smacked my head. Got here a little while ago. I want to walk over the property while it’s still daylight.” She searches for a light switch. Flips it rapidly on and off. “Cool. The electricity is on.”

“I can fly out any time, babe. Just say the word.”

Ludmila imagines for a few seconds Carmen’s reaction to the scene. “Nah. I’m good. Gotta go. Lots to do.”
“When are you coming home? I miss your monkey arms.” “Soon. Very soon,” Ludmila says.

“Be careful, okay? Watch your head. Love you, Changa—.” “Yup. Will do. Talk tomorrow.”

She needs air. What little comes from the open window at the top of the stairs hardly makes a dent in the sensation that something in that room has died.

Making her way carefully, Ludmila missteps, animating a nest of wind chimes into clangorous objection. Panels lie separated from a white drop-leaf table, abandoned halfway through IHIVKEA instructions. Periodicals and newspapers tower in stacks of oddly configured columns circling what looks like a miniature church. It turns out to be a vintage radio missing its knobs. She manages to get the balcony doors unstuck. A dubious-looking beach chair sits stranded atop tarpaper that curls like wavelets on a winter sea. There is no railing. She is not tempted and retreats into the room, leaving the doors ajar.

Acutely aware of fatigue, she needs to sit. The drive from San Pedro to LAX had followed a lethargic crow; twenty-five miles had become a bloated hour and a half of stalled freeway. Carmen, at the wheel, was happy as a mothering clam— reassuring, and at the same time assuredly foreboding. She has a chimerical gift for sniffing out the tragic wrapped in the ordinary and then cheerily expounding on that. Ludmila has lost count of the hours she’s been in transit—the overnight flight, the subway to Port Authority, then a bus and a cab.

She shoves aside bits of clothing—limp corpses drained of their organs—on a couch pushed up against the stair banister. She unearths a black-and-red plaid wool jacket. It will do for a blanket. She unlaces her boots and kicks them off. Anticipating a restorative nap, she sinks into the funky-smelling cushions. She thinks she hears a gnawing sound.

...

LUDMILA WAKES IN HALF-LIGHT the color of honey, trapped in amber. A fitful dream disappears. She is aware of a walloping in her chest—her heart—a small animal beating against the bars of its cage. The manly scent of the wool jacket, like smelling salts under her nose, brings her back to life. She grips the jacket, her father’s jacket. Maxim. Never called Max. She remembers the light switch and rises stiffly.

There are messages from Carmen on her cell.

Carmen and Ludmila’s relationship—what Carmen thinks is love and what Lud loosely calls extended coupling—has lasted nearly nine months. They are an odd couple. Resourceful ghostwriter. Procrastinating poet. West Coast. East Coast. Short. Tall. Mocha. Vanilla. Hot. Cold. Day. Night. Lesbian. Undecided. Ludmila never had a female lover until Carmen, and she was forty before that happened. Carmen, who was nearing fifty, said she knew the first time she saw Ludmila at the poetry reading in San Pedro that she was the one. Ludmila still does not know.

She’s had only one other extended coupling. Ben was an actor in a big hurry to get out of New York. His friend Gottfried was the artistic director of the Players Workshop in San Miguel de Allende. Ben invited Ludmila to join him in Mexico. He described a charming town in a temperate climate, hidden courtyards and cobblestone streets. Little houses awash in primary colors, the lively sounds in markets and shops. That there was a week-long poetry festival nearly won her over and though she had conflicted feelings about the Beats—loved Ginsburg, hated Kerouac—she was oddly persuaded when Ben told her that Neal Cassady had partied there and then died on the railroad tracks on the outskirts of the town. She liked the sound of expat artist. She would stop wearing black.

Three months later she had had enough of mariachi music, artisan shops and galleries, and watching expat retirees navigate the inescapable cobblestone. Couch surfing played havoc with her back. In a place lousy with writers and poets, she had tried and failed to write anything of worth, or anything at all.

She returned to the city, rootless, on the scent of one roommate wanted situation to another, one hourly-rate job to another. Christopher Street, the now anorexic arm of Greenwich Village, had lost its pulse and its identity. Williamsburg—and the whole Brooklyn enterprise—scared the shit out of her, with its noisome bearded-and-tattooed army barreling through the streets, cheek by jowl alongside hordes of entitled tourists armed with slick designer shopping bags of contempt. Astoria still had no bookstores of any worth.

Ludmila had been considering, for some months, a pressing overture from her mother, Elena, to reclaim her old room uptown, in Columbia University housing where they’d lived after they left Freehold.

At odds with her mother, she felt they had abandoned her father, and that her mother had given up. Elena once thought she’d be the one to tame Maxim. She pursued him until, lathered in white lace, she waltzed up the aisle to a gilded altar in a Russian Cathedral in Howell, New Jersey. She never seemed pained by the breakup and sometimes referred to his girlfriends that had come before her. They were smart, educated, beautiful professionals: a writer, a psychologist, a literature professor, an architect, and a filmmaker. They all enabled Maxim’s eccentricity. Ludmila’s mother never thought of herself as beautiful, but she was strong-willed. She was, in fact, Garbo gorgeous.

Their wedding icon hung in Elena’s bedroom in Morningside Heights: a bearded man with an impassive, hooded gaze, a two-fingered salute raised to his fate. The Virgin eyes the infant on her knee, thinking, “I’m not entirely sure how you got here.” Ludmila’s parents were first cousins. Not that it mattered to their daughter. Ludmila turned out all right.

Elena was employed as a career counselor at Columbia University before retiring on a comfortable pension. There, Ludmila had once had a haphazard relationship with scholarship. Free tuition had done nothing to steady her aimlessness. She bounced from one subject to another. She left before she was asked to leave.
And then her mother died, leaving a respectable inheritance to her only child, but nowhere for her to live. Lud wrote to her father, hearing nothing. She was antsy and needed a change from rewriting the same poem. She shared a birthday with the poet Charles Bukowski, whom she had only lately discovered, and in early August, she flew to Los Angeles to pay homage to the man on whose headstone was engraved: “Don’t Try.”

When she moved in with Carmen, at her lover’s urging she wrote once more to her father.

That pinging sound pricks her again. She rues the iPhone Carmen talked her into, but it’s easier to do the texting thing. Carmen is a talker. She wakes up talking. Ludmila loves the sound of voices, but hates talking on the phone, or anytime, really. She prefers to be on the outside of a conversation, listening in.

She recalls her father’s voice as floatable, yet brimful of sarcasm. When she visited he always seemed surprised that he had a daughter. It had been over five years since the last time. There were fewer and fewer phone conversations, such as they were. He might make sarcastic comments about the interlopers, as he called them: Donald Trump buying the Colts Neck Golf Course or the pizza baron whose newly built mansion looked like a shopping mall. In the next town over, Bruce Springsteen was harvesting his organic garden. In breeding season, the background noise on the phone was deafening. “I can’t move them,” he’d shout, referring to the frogs. 
“They’re protected.” Some calls elicited nothing more from him than, “I think I have a family of wild turkeys I must look out for,” and “Hummingbird in the feeder this morning.”

He accused her once of being captious and she had to look it up. She called him back and asked what he meant by it. He had no idea what she was talking about. In their last conversation, Ludmila was her usual ambivalent self, unwilling to respond to his questions about her writing, her prospects, her love life. “You don’t give a fuck about anything,” he said.

Whatever a genius is, he was that. As a girl, she remembered him and his best friend, Misha, “inventing” things, like the “talking” fax machine. He lost that friendship, but he gained a computer—many computers—and entrance into the vast world of the Internet. Yet he eschewed Skype. He ignored e-mail. He was writing a novel. Or he’d been working on patents that would radically enhance an off-the-grid lifestyle. Once he alluded to having written a program that would revolutionize the stock market. There were hints in their conversations that there was something of value buried on the property.

She unfolds a letter from its padded envelope. It’s been read countless times. A single page, it still has the indentation of the skeleton key that was enclosed.

April 1, 2015
Dear Ludmila Leskov,
You do not know me. I was your father’s friend. I am very sorry to tell you that Maxim Leskov died in the early morning of the first of this year. Your father wanted you to have the house and the property. He took care of things a few years ago. Please come as soon as you can. I will explain everything.

I will explain everything. There is no signature. No return address. She folds the letter back into its envelope.
There is still time for a quick wander around the property. Ludmila wedges her feet back into her boots. The atmosphere is deceptive—humid and cold at the same time. She looks for her leather jacket and remembers it is gone.

Carmen knew the jacket was Lud’s favorite article of clothing, her security blanket. “Take this,” Carmen said. “Looks like a late spring in New York. Gonna be chilly, Luddo.” She always laughingly pronounced the city in an exaggerated imitation of a native. “Noo Yawk,” she’d say.

When she was a girl, Ludmila had found the jacket in the attic of the house in Freehold. Her father told her it was German-made. Late forties, he thought. He wasn’t sure whose it had been. The jacket hung to her seven-year-old ankles. It was double breasted and had a neat diagonal zipper pocket on the chest. She lovingly caressed the belted cuffs and leather buttons. Later it draped her lean adult frame like a second skin. The removable wool lining had long since disappeared. Her mother hated it. They left Freehold and her father that summer.

Ludmila had forgotten how stuffy it was underground in New York. On the subway ride from the airport she slipped out of the jacket. Now she pictures it in forlorn abandon, left behind on a seat on the A train.

She hurries downstairs. She kicks a little path to the front door and tugs at a string that lights a bare bulb above the entranceway.

In a space under the stairs are makeshift shelves crammed with the stuff of preppers: a hand-cranked radio, loads of batteries of all sorts, a first aid kit—a few of them–gardening shears, sun hats, thickly coiled rope and a tool belt. There are compasses and packets of iodine pills. Maps crammed into an open tin box. She grabs a flashlight, checking that it works. On the porch, she pulls up the collar of her father’s jacket and starts down the steps. She reconsiders and shoves the suitcase inside the front door.

With the fast-disappearing light the air chills markedly. Ludmilla is grateful for her wool cocoon. Making her way carefully, she heads down a ragged path, swinging the flashlight like a klieg at a Hollywood premiere, under the great unfolding canopy of night. The air is dense. Like a sponge it sucks what little pluck she has left.

She rounds a trampoline covered with a toupee of dead leaves and sets off for the woods surrounding the house. She remembers there were a few outbuildings on the property and tries to situate them in her head. In the lowering gloom she recognizes the closest bungalow, where her fiercely tenacious great-grandmother lived with her schizophrenic daughter. Ludmila approaches, catching her breath.

She peers through a window coated thickly with erstwhile grit. Tree branches have punctured other windows. Cracks have grown outward from the impact, like veins on the face of a wizened ancestor.

Night falls swiftly, the curtain on a staged denouement. What she sees spooks her. What she hears in the now-dark forest sends her scurrying back to the main house.

Ludmila taps out a message to Carmen on her cell: Are you there?

Carmen rings her immediately. She hollers over top-down traffic where it is still light. “Just left a client. Everything okay, babe?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ludmila barks. “Get off the phone while you’re driving, for crissakes. Talk later.” She ignores the incoming text from Carmen.

Closing the balcony doors, she heads for the couch. Hungry and tired, she slumps against the cushions. It is not yet eight o’clock. “This is ridiculous,” she mutters, forcing herself upright. She has a lot to do, though unsure of what that is exactly. The room burns brightly from the overhead fixture and the lamps scattered about. It’s as if she cannot get enough light. She managed earlier to drag her suitcase upstairs, and the sight of its zebra striping is oddly reassuring. Carmen gave it to her. You’ll spot it easily, she said. There are provisions in the case: coffee, tea bags, a jar of peanut butter, boxes of crackers, some energy bars, a few cans of tuna and bags of trail mix. There is a spoon and a fork and bottled water. Ludmila has packed a hoodie. There are few other items of clothing because she does not expect to be in Freehold for very long. She retrieves a pair of clogs, the hoodie, bottled water and a couple of energy bars. She needs to close her eyes, just for a bit.

...

IN THE MORNING, LUDMILA ROUSES slowly in a kind of passive resistance to circumstance. She remains perfectly still. Her eyes are slits. It’s just before seven. Her phone warns her of half a dozen missed messages. First thing, she turns off all the lights. Then she wolfs down nearly half of the crackers she’s spread thickly with peanut butter. She chugs from a bottle of water, making her way across the main room, looking for the bathroom. The sink is stained with rust-colored flume. The toilet flushes. There is an absence of toilet roll. Rags and newspapers are wedged under the sink. The tap allows a weak stream of water. She imagines being in an abandoned asylum. Tiles on the walls are broken or missing. On the floor is a sizable sinkhole of neglect. There is a small patch of window out of reach, darkened by vines. A bathtub is crowded with things that don’t belong there: an engine of some sort, paintbrushes stiff with resentment and moldy volumes of hardcover books.
To the left of the bathroom is her father’s bedroom. The back of the house is in forest shade. Old-fashioned boots peek from under the bed. Swathes of bed sheets lie dune-like on top of the mattress in the darkened room. Her bedroom had been an enclosed porch on the ground floor at the front of the house, converted for privacy and warmth.

Outdoors, the chill revives her.

Ludmila looks back at the house, as if someone has called her. To the left of the front door are two oblong rectangles, windows with shades half drawn that appear to recognize her from hooded eyes. She imagines her small face, her expression tight with indifference, peering from those bedroom windows.

She lived among men and women she called uncles and aunties—Russians in various stages of aging, disrepair and alcoholism—sitting around a kitchen table covered in oilcloth. Shouting was the norm.

They lived frugally, though a ceramic bowl filled with cherries the color of garnets always sat alongside freshly baked black bread or potato bread. Yogurt was made weekly. Glass jars of newly made yogurt were removed from an overnight stay in an unlit oven to the kitchen counter. A confluent haze from pipes and cigarettes hovered above the scent of fresh dill. The property was home to hens and roosters, a communal garden that gave them tomatoes and radishes and nearly all of the produce that came to the table. There was a bathhouse and a bunker-like building that she was warned to steer clear of. A hulking jerry-built garage housed tractors and pickup trucks. The uncles clamored over engines, wielding tools in damaged fingers, creating a metallic symphony that rang through the forest. In the fall, they caulked windows. The basement was filled with canned fruit, jars of boiled cabbage and beets, and dusty bottles of weird alcohol.

Ludmila was the only child.

She senses she is being watched. Gripped by the woodland hush, she looks back, stifling a gasp. A young buck eyes her from a distance. He sniffs the air with his hockey-puck nose. His antlers are not fully regrown. He resembles a doe-eyed Carmen Miranda more than Bambi’s majestic father.

They step cautiously from each other. The angriest she ever saw her father was when her mother called in hunters to decrease the deer population. Maxim moved out of the house. He took up residence in the Airstream trailer at the back of the property, where he stayed until his wife and daughter moved to New York. Lud’s mother claimed they left before the authorities intervened, to get Ludmila registered in a real school.

Everywhere she walks, Ludmila must do so carefully. Panes of glass tip against tree trunks and layer like ice floes in the undergrowth. China plates and cups stack in unlikely places under trees, beside a cement mixer, in the pickup of an old truck, proof that the party never happened. Cables drip from trees. She can make out the orange striping around her father’s old trailer. Thick underbrush has already claimed the front end of it.
At the cottage where she was spooked last night, a massive tree has tipped into the roof like a drunken giant. She peers through the window into the kitchen. Curtains hang like old, dried tears. Spider webs knit into corners of the room. The table is set. There is the ironing board upon which her great grandmother slept. Having lived through a time of great deprivation—hiding in dense forests before they could escape to America—she’d felt undeserving of the comfort of a bed. The only person who thought this was nuts was Ludmila’s mother. Scattered around the floor are record albums of classical music and opera. The door to a small oven is open.

Ludmila ventures further into the woods, ducking under a clock face hanging on a chain from a tree limb. She stops for a moment at a bruised-cherry red pickup truck. Windshield wipers lie powerless under composted leaves. There is a classic blue-and-white diner coffee cup on the dashboard. Ludmila circles the vehicle. The truck bed is crammed with doors never to be opened into inviting rooms.

Another cottage, this one an exhausted wreck, has shed most of its shingles. The front door hangs from one hinge. Windows and more doors lie about in sepulchral disorder, lacerated by unyielding vines. She peers into the gloom and makes out what looks like a pyre of bicycles. She can’t recall who lived in this cottage. Stacked against a still-standing side of the house are stereo speakers, nine or ten of them. The speakers, with their black holes, are apparitions caught in a silent chorus of alarm. Birds have left nests in some of them, adding to the grim feel of remains in empty sockets.

The chicken coop that was behind the cottage is a weedy foundation fending off encroaching forest. Ludmila bends at the waist, imagines plucking an egg and forgets that chickens make her anxious. She looks up and sees a pale blue water heater on its side and rusted in spots, like the carcass of a pinto pony.

Behind that is a sizeable mound of earth—as tall as she is—which she has never recalled seeing before. Two slender black locusts shoot up from the mound, looking like chopsticks stuck in brown rice. There is another mound, free standing, bigger than the first. It reminds her of something ancient, something sacred.

She starts back. Gingerly at first, then picking up speed. Spongy earth barely gives underfoot, like the footprint of a ghost.

Ludmila remembers a conversation with her father when he was, finally, the lone occupant. She stood with Maxim on the balcony outside his bedroom. They were all gone, starting with his fragile mother who was followed by his grandmother and the aunts and uncles. There was never a funeral, or at least none that she knew about. Why were there no photographs?

“I am still surrounded by them,” he said. “Nature has its own memory.” He bit down on his pipe stem. “This is Rupert Sheldrake’s theory, of course, but it makes sense.” He pointed to a squirrel on a tree limb, staring back at them, undecided. “His memory is the memory of all the squirrels that have come before him.”

She remembers the silence, staring into the lowering dark. “What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Footprints,” he said.

“Right. There’s nothing down there.”

“Keep looking,” he said.

She wants to talk to Carmen. She needs to talk to Carmen. “Babe, you don’t do emotion. What’s up?”
“I just wanted to hear your voice. Sorry about the missed
calls. I’m—.”

“S’okay. Want to hear about the widow?”

“Sure. What are you eating?”


“Some warm Indian dough balls.”

“Tell me more,” says Ludmila.

“M-m-m. Fried dough balls in rose syrup. Tastes like the most divine doughnuts drenched in yes.” “I’m starving.”

“If you were here, changa, I’d share.” “You’ll get fat.”

“Hips. That's what holds yer pants up, kid. Ha ha. My hips could hold up the fuckin’ planet!”

Ludmila laughs, relieved.

“There should be an “opt out” clause for women who don’t have the chillins. Boobs and hips, want to keep them or not?”

“I’m gonna hang around for a while,” Ludmila says.

“I hate you. How while?”

“Dunno. Until the daylilies bloom or the mystery neighbor shows up?”

“I hate you even more,” Carmen retorts.

Ludmila is silent.

“OK. I don't hate you.”

“How’s the book coming?”

“I interviewed her today, the grieving widow. Um, excuse me, the poet’s widow. She talked a lot about Sean Penn and Bono and how they don’t return her calls. We sat in her garden smoking a joint. Very unprofessional, I know. I know. That garden cost a mil, at least. Little Buddha heads everywhere. Paid for by the Japanese translations.”

“But you’ll do it?”

“I’m a ghostwriter. Of course I will,” Carmen replies. “I’m a ghost...I gotta go.”

“You know what the old man says, Changa?” “What?”

“Hold.”

...

SHE WAKES AGAIN IN A BRIGHTLY LIT ROOM, in her father’s bed, to the sound of a dull motor. The strapping ginger cat on her chest breathes hotly into her face, purring loudly. The cat kneads Ludmila’s shoulder with muffin-sized paws. She lowers her hand, gently stroking its back. “Well, hello. Where did you come from?” Her phone says nearly 2:00 a.m. No messages. Moths flit around in undecided suicide mode.

She addresses the cat. “Are you hungry?” She swings her legs and rises stiffly. “Let’s get you something to eat.”
Ludmila steps out on the balcony, testing its backbone. She pulls a tab and drops the opened can of tuna. She stands for a while looking up at the stars, chewing an energy bar. Night is pitch dark here. Stars are like chalk scratches on a blackboard. The boat glows from below in reflected light. Everything beyond has disappeared for a comforting while. The cat slurps the fish, punching the can with its nose.

“Night, night, big orange cat,” she says. And then giving him a once over she adds, “Night, night, Bricks. See you in the morning.”

A SHORT STORY

THE ART STUDENT

for Carole

“ALWAYS THE SAME.” It’s a wonder she ever agreed to move to a place that had as its Latin motto ‘Semper eadem.’ And it wasn’t just moving, but relocating her life “…across the pond” as he liked to say. It seemed only fair. He had come to America on an adventure, on blind faith. After 20 years of marriage she knew that she too needed an adventure. If risks were to be taken, it had to be sooner rather than later. That was nearly twelve years ago.

Bette met him in Paris less than six months before they married in New York where she lived. Ian was a skinny, green-eyed monster guitar player from London, younger than she by more than a decade with a ferocious fix on writing that next big hit. Leicester was his hometown. It was the midlands of England he told her when she asked, “How do you spell that?”

She was a painter then, divorced, newly 40 and freshly blonde; ready to affirm her commitment to the Muse. Paris was her Rubicon and soon she would take that step into a two-hundred-year-old cottage in the south of France. The woman she was staying with in Paris loved nothing better than to manage her friend’s life, though her own as a writer was left to flounder under the many altruistic projects she allowed to sidetrack her literary ambitions. She had a great heart and infinite generosity. Bette was her project and she could paint in peace, her friend decided, if she lived as caretaker in her cottage. Her friend would manage brief escapes from Paris but would write in another part of the cottage. The light was painter’s light. “Ce sera amusement!”

Bette had only to sublet her apartment in Manhattan. First, she would head south for a dry run; a few weeks on her own to see if life would suit her in a Romanesque village tucked into the verdant bowl beneath huge limestone cliffs the area was noted for and which her ghost-loving friend called primeval. An ancient abbey carved among the clay-shingled cottages in the village. Fresh bread and produce were available daily. Bookshops and cinemas were ten miles away. There was one restaurant in the sole hotel but it had a bar. That would have to do for amusement. There were other artists in the area. Bette’s French was rusty but her friend assured her it would return in a rush as she would have only Madame Lagarrigue to depend on to help her settle in when the robust woman wasn’t shepherding new arrivals to hotel rooms. Madame spoke no English at all.

Inescapable fate tripped her up in a restaurant the night before she left Paris. Other friends had invited her along for a raucous evening of dinner and drinks at a long table in a very tiny dining room where a trip to the outdoor toilet—or hole—meant one had to negotiate the impossibly narrow kitchen and squeeze between the voluminous buttocks of the husband and wife who ran the place as they bent over steaming cast iron pots. Ian had been visiting those friends, on a break from the London-based band, and was invited along.

They made love back in the room at her friend’s apartment in Belleville. Exhausted and hung over they watched from the terrace as grey dawn crept across Paris until it insinuated the inevitable between them. Negotiating early morning truck deliveries, she weaved with him down a steep hill to the Metro. Ian went back to London and the band. A few hours later she left for the south.

The next thing she knew he was on her doorstep in New York and then, the next, next thing she knew they were downtown at City Hall getting married. Paris and the south of France disappeared like the further reaches of the Brooklyn Bridge shrouded under the downpour on their wedding day.

Painting was a struggle after marriage. Marriage was a struggle after marriage. No matter what they say, some thing—or some one—has to give, even between those who love at first sight. Egos need nourishment and not just from impudent love. Bette went back to her old job in publishing, designing book covers for waggish young novelists who all lived in Brooklyn it seemed. In her own time she’d put down the brush and created stories with no real clue as to her future as a writer. Her colleagues read her stories and encouraged her but Bette shied away from their eagerness. Younger than she by many years, she was sure they were humoring her. She wrote a novel. One young editor, a gay man she’d formed an attachment to, was especially ‘psyched’ as he put it. Let me show this around he urged.

Ian took to New York like a plectrum to guitar strings. Here was the metronome he craved; steady chaos. Manhattan was more compact than London and more stimulating than Leicester. The city’s backbeat was familiar and yet still untried. He found his way more easily on the subway than he did on the underground in London. Connections to music did not come as quickly. He posited their upper eastside location was the reason, too far away from the downtown action. After awhile he came to love the proximity to Central Park as much as she did. He formed a band, which drew a local following.

They were meant for each other. She was sure of that. But she knew there would have to be a little bridge connecting them to keep them from getting lost. They started writing songs together. She forgot about the novel until it landed in the right place at the right time, “World’s oldest first time novelist” and all that. Not exactly true but the only way to sell a fully matured plant in a field of younger, more colorful wildflowers.

But she resisted the call of celebrity and though she managed a few book tours when Ian could join her she panicked at the mere suggestion that she appear on women’s talk shows. Everything that came after that novel, every short story, and the second novel weren’t nearly as successful because financial freedom and creative freedom had brokered no acceptable compromise. Sensitively described inner lives drawn in the first book became pretty skins in the rush to follow up that initial success. Her agent panicked and begged her for any old thing. Bette dug out a children’s book she had written and illustrated when she was painting. Surprisingly, it sold and sold well despite Bette’s resistance to reading aloud to jittery children circled around her in dusty libraries. It was the parents who ‘got’ the book anyway.

Sales from her first novel were fine as they were—there had been talk about film rights—and it brought more interest to their songwriting. Her children’s book was extra padding. The income from that book and her first novel—along with a few of their songs, which had made it to movie sound tracks—was more than sufficient. She hated being pestered by anyone, especially by an agent. So, when Ian’s mum died a few years after his father she fostered the idea that they move back to his hometown. It was landlocked and she would miss island living but they were a team. Really. And you went where your team went.

…

BETTE LIFTED THE PEN from her journal when she heard the ruckus of returning musos. “He’s home, right?” Their cat mewled and looked to her as if for permission before slipping downstairs. The only stipulation to living abroad was that their old cat in Manhattan served out his time there. Cat free but not for long, they arrived in Leicester and as soon as they were installed on Montague Road they were adopted by the grey kitten who’d entered through the cat flap they had inherited in the door to the garden.

The house was smaller than they needed it to be when they bought it. It was on a street lined with terraced Victorians, all nearly identical. The idea of settling into Ian’s family home in a village in Leicestershire after the house was left to him was quickly vetoed by Bette and they sold it. They could have afforded something bigger along Howard Road but they had a fine garden here and Ian was able to secure a vacant plot at the bottom, extending their haven. She gazed through the large window—curtain-free and augmented only with ivy—to the bottom of the garden where they had built a state-of-the-art recording studio. It was meant to be her writing shed but she was happy enough in the room at the top of the stairs, preferred it actually, especially when the band was over. They afforded extensive renovations and she’d had a conservatory added to the kitchen and there was room for friends from abroad only she could never quite take on that ‘abroad’ had been home.’

A clamorous thudding below signaled guitar cases. They were in for a night. Ian and his merry band of reprobates, as they referred to themselves, had been playing at the Saturday afternoon session at The Blessed Burro. Usually she was in attendance—they were her songs, too—catching up with the wives, lovers, and partners of the rest of the band. But lately she’d preferred the bit of gardening that she did on her own to the noise of the pub crowd on a Saturday afternoon unless it was raining. Then she curled up with a book or her journal; couldn’t remember the last time she’d completed a short story though many starts were made. Unable to sleep she watched old American films, especially the ones about New York, like Breakfast At Tiffany’s. Late last night Ian arrived home in the middle of Butterfield 8. “I’d have to call my story Astoria 4,” she joked, referring to her childhood neighborhood in New York. “Do you miss New York?” he asked and then answered for her, “’Course you do.”

Did she miss New York? The DVDs she watched recalled the massive flower beds atop the medians on Park Avenue, how the arrival of spring was marked by thousands of tulips and crisply uniformed doormen in her neighborhood who appeared like blue jays under the building canopies when the weather lightened and greeted passersby with cheerful familiarities. She watched Rent because it was filmed on the lower east side but it was an unsatisfying journey. Films like Desperately Seeking Susan were better but she connected more to Hester Street, though it was way before her time.

Never mind. Ian was happy as a clam. He played more gigs here than he’d ever done in New York with none of the pressure. He was even a bit of a star in his hometown. They liked their married life and what reassurances they had with each other.

They left New York in ’97. Bill Clinton was president. The so-called Oklahoma Bomber, Timothy McVeigh was convicted. Bette remembered feeling unsettled in ‘93 when a truck bomb exploded in the garage of one of the World Trade Center towers. The year they left New York they went with the hundreds of thousands of other ticket holders to see the remake of the movie Titanic and left the country with that same sinking feeling. The other shoe dropped for her as they watched, surrounded by friends in Leicester, the news of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11. She’d endured the vitriol that followed the sudden “We are all New Yorkers” empathy that flooded them until the rest of the world was drowned in Bush’s retaliatory rhetoric, murderously escalated and acted upon. They drove down to London to visit friends and watched America install an African American family in the White House. When they left New York China was exterminating chickens due to an outbreak of a deadly influenza. Today it was Egypt ridding the world of the porcine carriers of swine flu.

…

“HELLO LOVE.” Ian greeted her as she turned from the stairs into the front room. Bette pursed her mouth to be kissed. What a nice surprise it had been to discover his eyes were not sci-fi green but that they were blue, like hers. Contacts. And once the henna faded his ginger hair seemed finer, less fraught than the strangled dreads some stylist forced on him for the London band’s promo shots.

“Kettle, yeah?” Bette loved this return to an English turn of phrase he embraced so soon after they arrived and never lost again. The mad trips abroad from New York were particularly necessary, in her mind, for that idiomatical top up when his accent developed rounded corners. Stanley, Pete, and Neil stumbled through the door. Simon was already lighting a joint. Amazing, at his age.

“You get the tea,” she said, and then smiling at Stanley asked: “Do I need to get in some more wine?” “No worries, love,” he replied. “Carolyn will be by later with the stuff.” Simon grinned broadly and asked if it was all right for “uncle” to be invited in. “Indulging in a bit of herb now that the missus is away?” Bette quipped. “How is Maggie? I miss her.”

“’Ere, love. Can you get the car? She’s still at The Burro, in the car park.” Ian grinned sheepishly, shaking the car keys at her while the others marched their instruments through to the shed in the back garden. “Had a bit too much,” Ian winced. Bette pulled a face and then rolled her eyes. It was her signal of acquiescence. “Would ya? Could ya? ‘Course I will,” she laughed.

…

WEATHER WAS PSYCHOTIC in England. Winters had grown bitter, harsher than anyone ever remembered. Summer brought unusually hot days, and people sweltered in the absence of air conditioning. Temperatures on a spring day could run the gamut and clouds were never far from the horizon. That day was predicted to be warm, but Bette slipped into a sweater, flipping the mouse brown braid from her back. Gray hairs appeared still only sporadically. Even after a dozen English years she did not call a sweater a jumper. Some phrases had made their way into her vernacular but she slid more often into an expressive New York familiarity. Never really here nor there, her accent leapt there more often than not. She started in the direction of Queens Road, basking in the late afternoon sunshine that had sharply sent the morning clouds packing. It was still chilly though and she walked briskly.

A walk would clear her muzzy head. For a while now she had been feeling bereft, but of what she had no idea. Bette had not yet told Ian of the panic attacks because she wasn’t sure that’s what they were. Aging had its downside to be sure and what were once delicious terrors for a young woman were now fears that had less time to justify themselves as new adventures. She demurred when the joint was passed around out back in their garden. “My teeth,” she offered and nobody challenged that excuse.

She turned on to Welford Road. Thank the goddesses for the women: Amy, Maggie, Carolyn, and Imogene. All four were younger than she, not by much except for Carolyn. Bette began to sweat, anxious. She shed the sweater and tied it around her waist. She hardly saw Simon’s wife Maggie anymore. Retired, she visited her children and their families who were scattered all over the globe, the furthest being in Japan, leaving Simon to his music and his pot. There were long hikes with Imogene who adored the countryside. Clutching hand drawn maps on scraps of paper she led Bette on quests for sloe berries in late fall and nesting ospreys in spring. Even in her late 60’s Imogene looked the part of the romantic Gothic heroine, having stepped from the pages of a bodice-ripping novel. Cemeteries were just acres of storytelling and her eccentric tales of family history were always entertaining. Imogene lived up the road from them, a comforting rationale for Bette when they bought their house. Amy lived in Brighton now. People went away at Christmas—a holiday Bette never celebrated and felt some guilt over avoiding until Ian’s parents were dead and it was too late for remorse. They inherited Ian’s family’s tree ornaments and then went away to Brighton at the holiday.

Carolyn was her closest friend in Leicester, the youngest of her friends and nearer to Ian’s age. Retirement was looming for Carolyn. She’d risen in the ranks of her profession quite quickly since Bette’s arrival in Leicester. Then Carolyn was something called a Locality General Manager for the NHS. She had a sharp intellect and impressive reserves of energy that sent her off into the community of general practitioners, supporting their presence so that patients could get out from under the collective clinical thumbs of the hospital monopoly that mired them in Beckettian time waiting for appointments. Their daughter—hers and Stanley’s—had long since been on her own living the muso life up in Manchester. Carolyn had traversed a wide enough political minefield to develop a hardened skill and was mulling a run for city council after retirement.

That energy and sharp intellect proved a foil for Bette who was often antagonized into intellectual discourse with her. Or so she felt. After awhile she became impervious to the implications and soon saw it for the honesty it was on Carolyn’s part. It became less the feeling of being kept in line and more the challenge to keep up. She was glad Carolyn would be by later. She might get a chance to tell her friend about the panic attacks, the haze that descended without warning when she’d find herself gazing into the fridge or a cupboard unable to recall what she was looking for.

…

BETTE STARED from the bottom of Montague Road up at the long row of panels until they became doors but they all looked the same, like a colorful deck of cards lining the road. She’d parked the Volvo but felt like she had forgotten something. Searching her pockets she was reassured by the car keys. She drew her hand across her brow and felt the sheen of perspiration that had bloomed there. Quickly she ran through numbers in her head: phone number, bankcard. Her address, what was her address? She felt the slow release of panic being rung from her heart. This was silly. She was on her street. Imogene lived on the street. But she was away, somewhere in the Orkneys bird watching. Bette remembered that. She had not remembered to take the cell phone, a habit she never cottoned to. One button would have had Ian on the line. But what could she tell him? That she was at the bottom of the road and could not remember which was her house? She could have been asking if they needed anything bringing in—oh, and by the way, what’s our address?

The solution would be to walk, she reckoned. That’s how things got sorted between them. It was a lovely day still, the air bracing under a late afternoon sun. Bette slipped into her sweater, buttoning to the neck. She’d just let her inner tide lap at her consciousness until it tossed up her address. Ian and the guys would be in the shed and by the time he missed her she would have remembered and returned home.

Back on Queens Road she was relieved to see everything in its place. She had not suddenly been transported to a twilight zone. There was the Jones Café. Ugh, and the fast food shop with the lurid yellow and green front that seemed to have followed them from America. Bette headed for Victoria Park, passing the Cuban American bar where she had often joined her friends for a girls’ night out. When she’d first arrived in Leicester to live she was shot down practically before she could even suggest drinks at The Clarendon. That dump? So, she bowed to the majority rule. Ian often kidded her that the reason she settled so quickly on their house had something to do with the close proximity to The Clary, as they called the local pub. A hangover she recalled even twelve years later—that she remembers—put her off mojitos forever and she was content to stick with red wine forever after.

The park was still fairly crowded with weekenders making the most of the break in the weather. If she missed anything about New York it was Central Park. If she missed anything…of course she did. But apart from the obvious like the proximity to Central Park and the short trip to the ocean she wasn’t exactly sure what it was. But it was definitely something. Bette crossed the park heading for New Walk. This was nice, this walking. She didn’t feel lost. Everything was familiar. Traffic-free New Walk was her usual route into the city centre. She’d just keep walking for a bit.

Ahead was the art museum and then it hit her. The painting. She was missing the painting. They had brought some of her old canvases with them but the remainder stayed behind in a storage unit they paid for yearly. That was her decision. Without warning an emotional cap unscrewed releasing vaporous memory. Her eyes brimmed with tears. What had she done? Leaving her city, her home. She swatted weakly at the confusion. What was her address? Now she could not even remember the street…road…street—no, dammit—road! She caught the eye of a young couple. Their look of concern frightened her even more. She pulled the hem of her sweater to her eyes, smiling wanly. “Allergies, eh? What are you gonna do?”

Bette walked quickly. She felt old. For the first time she since she got here she felt old. Oh she had no illusions that she was aging. The people she loved were too. Ian looked more like his father every day. She came to the open plaza at the new theatre, called The Curve. The massive belly of glass—architecturally striking—had been insinuated into lanes more accommodating to smaller Victorian structures. Somehow it worked. Bette looked up at the building. They had been to many fine theatrical productions here. Not so much lately. A city could reinvent itself, sometimes without thinking, and appear more youthful. Humans couldn’t do that short of cosmetic surgery and that never worked.

…

LONDON ROAD. The music shop was just ahead! She would ask Liam to get her a cab; tell him she misjudged her stamina for such a long walk and now she needed a ride home. Bette brightened. Of course, this was perfect. Liam knew Ian since he was a pup and had been to their house many times. A swift but fleeting return of anxiety: she is afraid that she’ll look too relieved and he’ll know. They will all know. But no, when he called a cab for her he would give the dispatch operator her address. She nearly wept again, this time from relief and stood for a few moments beside a bicycle parked in front of the shop.

Liam had long since retired the running of the business to one of his sons but Bette knew he couldn’t let go entirely and was seen in the shop on most days. The other son, Jess, was slow. He’d been in a motorcycle accident in his youth, and now, a grown man in his forties; he had the emotional and mental capacity of a careful child. Ian had somehow gotten roped into driving Jess to his art classes out by Hallaton and Bette gently reminded him how much Liam had done for Ian and if he was going out that way to pick up Pete every week what was the difference? Jess even came to the house, leaving his bicycle in the passageway. “He doesn’t say anything.” “He’s slower than you,” Bette reminded him. “Be kind.” Ian carped but she knew he would not let Liam down.

At that moment Jess strode from the shop, backpack slung over his broad shoulders. His hands were large and he was careful in the way that made others feel clumsy. He had on a faded brown t-shirt from a well-know music shop on Bleecker Street in Manhattan which his father had brought from a business trip years before. He wore wide-wale corduroy trousers all year, even in the hottest months. Jess delivered quiet, under-the-breath commentary that unnerved some people but it made Bette laugh because it was very sharp observation if you listened closely.

He came closer to her, towering over her. His hair was unkempt but smelled clean. He smelled of turpentine and oil paint. Splotches of color, like tattoos, flowered across his knuckles. Bette smiled at him. “Want a ride?” he said. He pulled the bicycle away from the building. Bette stuttered, “No, I’m just….” Jess straddled the bicycle. “Hop on.” She protested. “At my age, don’t be silly.” He nodded to the bar where she could sit “side-saddle.” “Hop on,” he repeated. “Do you know where I live?” she asked cautiously. He looked at her as if she was daft. “Of course,” he replied and rolled his eyes crazily, as if for effect.

…

SHE FELT LIKE A GIRL gripping the handlebars between his much larger hands. He revealed that truth was he didn’t much like her husband. Well, he does but he knows he’s an inconvenience for a busy man. Oh, she laughed, he’s not so busy. Musicians are never busy. When they reached Victoria Park Jess asked her why she didn’t paint anymore. How did he know that? That painting—that was her father, right? He loved that painting. Bette, shyly pleased at his praise, promised to show him the other portrait she’d done; the one of Ian’s father. It was hanging in the recording studio.

“We could maybe paint together some time, yeah? In your garden, if it’s all right….” His voice trailed off and they were in front of her house. Her house! Carolyn was standing outside in the dwindling light, her blazing fringe of flame-red hair capping an anxious expression. “Hiya Jess,” she cried before an uncharacteristic peck on Bette’s cheek, squeezing her arm. “Everything all right?”

Ian appeared from behind the partially opened front door and waved to Jess. “Rescued the missus, eh?”

“Yes,” Bette said, sliding from the bicycle. “He rescued me.”

THE ART STUDENT is a short story by Linda Danz.

STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The use of names of actual persons, places, and events is incidental to the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. ©2009