To Have & Have Not A Sextet
I. On Again & Off Again
She liked tulips the most. Simple arrangements. An elastic around the stems. I pulled one from each of eleven pots. One for every year since we’d met. Years apart included. I got back in my car whistling. At that moment she was snatching at her oxygen mask. Row upon row of yellow tea bags dangling between the seatbacks. She secured her own before helping the baffled gentlemen beside her. The highway was backed up all the way to the airport. I tried switching lanes, worried I’d be late, that she’d be left standing outside arrivals, baggage in hand, looking for me. She was sucking cold desperate lungfulls by then. The plane’s nose tipping earthward. An attendant went tumbling the full length of the aisle. She began to speak goodbyes. The far left lane was blocked. Barrels topped with flashing bulbs. Men in reflective vests leaning on their shovels. I’ll take that job, I thought. No I won’t, I thought. The pilot’s voice crackled beneath passengers’ screams. The words calm, brace, exit-row, fire. The left wing snapped off and went flapping away. The light at the end of the exit ramp was red. Me tapping my thumbs atop the steering wheel. Both wings gone now. Sky and ocean vertical beside each other out the tiny window. Was she wailing? What did she wish she had said? I pulled up outside the terminal doors, got out, tulips in my hand. I’m late, I thought. I did not see her anywhere.
II. Give & Take
Tell me your name is always how it starts. Hours later it ends in the barracks on a couch in the dark. The one who asks is the one in power. They are not even half naked. They met in the base’s officers lounge and decided and wasted no time from there. The room too dark to see or hardly feel. She thinks of coming but ends up going. Images of interrogators barking questions over nude and bridled suspects in rooms full of light and noise. The refuge of sleep withheld. Even darkness forbidden. The first question is always the same and it is tell me your name. Give up that and you have given all. Give it to me, she says. You like that, he says, don’t you. She doesn’t say no but pushes him up, pushes him back, pushes him down, kissing him with fisted lips. Tell me what I need to know and all this can be through. That is what she would say to the one beneath the lights. She would speak in the voice of everyman’s mother. We can lower these beams. We can combine longing with shame. Just tell me your name and we will be done. Say my name, she shouts. He does and she is almost there, almost there. She unbuttons the rest of her blouse, leans all the way back. When she is through she would lay a cotton sheet across his waist. There, there, she’d say. That wasn’t so hard, now was it.
III. Those Who Shop In Grocery Stores & Those Who Do Not
The radio station that’s been playing over the intercom plays before the next song the state of the union address. Even at nine at night when the store is nearly empty she hears laughter and groans. Fuck, someone says. She’s in the aisle with the ethnic foods sign hanging at either end when the speech begins 87 years ago, our founding fathers, and they were our fathers weren’t they, they came to the shore of this big beautiful continent in the name of liberty, or in the search of it really, dedicated to idea that all men, all men, every single man, are created equal. Mijo, don’t touch that. Here. Help. Take six of those and put them there. One by one her boy lifts a sixty-four ounce can and lays it sideways on the cart’s bottom rack. But now we are engaged in a huge civil war, the hugest anybody has ever seen before, the hugest and the civilest, because I got to tell you, we are being tested, tested to see if our nation, or any nation frankly, can long survive. The store is out of the biggest cans of hominy again which means she has to take double the number of smaller ones. No, you cannot have that, mijo. That’s not even real food. Then ask your dad to buy it when he gets back. I don’t know, mijo. Soon. Go get your brother before he wanders off. Today we’ve gathered here on this big beautiful battlefield where many fine men on both sides, on both sides, have died. We have come to conseminate it, to conseminate it and to congregate it, no, and this is so important, to consecrate it, to consecrate it, that way none of these very fine men will have died so vain. She knows she’s forgetting something as she pushes the cart up to the counter but it’s late already and she still has to drop the boys off at her sister’s before her shift starts. Putting produce on the moving belt she hears believe me, we will not perish from this earth, no way we will, I mean come on, really?
IV. Caesarian & Euthanasia
The would-be mother would’ve heard the prognosis from the nurses before he came in. Breach. Heart rate. Distress. He’d be the first to say out loud the baby will be just fine. We do not have to wait. We can go to him. By now at the age of a hundred and three he has said this one thousand times. His own heart still strong. His back sort of straight. Nothing wrong with him but the world he’s stuck in. So he’s decided. He’s done. He buys a one-way ticket to Switzerland. A place where reason is legal. Caesar himself would have wanted the same. To pick the where and the when. Caesar who was never born but from a woman’s womb untimely ripped. He’d been crestfallen as a child to learn from an old medical textbook that the incision is not literally C-shaped. Euthanasia another term with so much tonal promise. Youth in Asia. To be born again on some pacific isle. Eternal childhood in the land of the rising run. His flight east lasts thirteen hours. A representative meets him at the airport, takes from him his weightless bag. Even at a hundred and three he resents the gesture. I’m no newborn, sir. My hand needs no holding. There was never any crying in his operating rooms. No legs in the air with wails and scripted breaths. No push push push, just one clean decisive pull. His own procedure is slotted for the following afternoon. Not in a hospital but a rest home. How nice. A rest in peace home. Leather couches and tea service. Chandeliers. The website lists options not unlike a menu. He used to lift newborns with that image in mind, a long list of possibilities, whispering to each of them them you have no idea what you’re in for, do you? You weren’t ready to come, but we went in and got you anyway.
V. She Sang a Song She Did Not Sing
She wanted to write a song.
She did not want to write a song.
She loved music and how it made her
feel and was born to write and play it.
She might have been tone deaf.
She never felt more alive than when
performing in front of people.
She was often terrified and never far
from bed.
She did not own an alarm clock because
she could open her eyes at any exact
minute and more often passed the entire
night pacing the villa of her imagination
in the nude and moonlight.
She kept a little black notebook by her
bedside because all little notebooks are
black and once in awhile she wrote in
hers.
She never wrote anywhere but on the
ceiling above her bed the manic languid
lyrics that visited her during the act
of love.
She hadn’t touched her mandolin in
months.
She did not so much ignore the
voicemails of suitors as encourage them
to knock directly on her door or better
yet to go and find her out wherever she
might be on the town or in the park or
down by the docks which is what one
should do when one has something
pressing to say to a person who needs
to hear it.
She hardly ever went out because she
didn’t want to spend the money.
She always waited a week to count the
fives and tens and twenties tossed into
her open instrument case whenever she
played in front of small but emphatic
audiences who often died at her feet of
revelry because she didn’t play for those
fives or tens or twenties but for the dead.
Occasionally she recalled the promise of
late high school and early college.
She could charm three-headed
megafauna to their knees by strumming
an arcane cord of Pythagoras’.
She felt like life is one big homework
assignment with death the deadline.
With her mandolin in hand she could
raid the underworld unsalted, looking
wherever she pleased.
She once calculated that the odds of
anything happening, anything at all,
are so long and so unlikely the
universe should not even exist.
She could rhyme any word with orange.
No she could not.
VI. They, I, You
They talk to everybody about everything and so know anything anybody knows
ever.
I am obviously not one of them and suspect neither are they.
You can trust me.
They are so selfish and anti-anything communal there’s no way they could ever
get along with each other long enough to successfully conspire.
I have spent a great deal of time studying the matter and even went undercover
and met absolutely no one.
You don’t need to keep turning around to see if they’re following.
They don’t care.
I am the only one who does.
You know what is real and what is not.
They hold zero sway over that.
I once asked several three-piece CEO types how to get inside and you know
what they said?
You wanna guess?
They laughed and told me if I ever figure it out then I should email them.
I realized right then and there that if conspiracies were real, if they were even
possible, the whole world would be a better place.
You worry all day about this: that people get along too well.
They would not be able to conspire effectively and keep deep secrets unless they
were able to consider the needs of the greater group and take steps to
actualize them.
I used to be scared to death of not being scared to death.
You still are, I think.
They are just like you and me, which I admit is sad and scary but not as sad and
scary as we previously thought.
I am just telling you how it is.
You can close your laptop and open your blinds.
They aren’t they at all.
I am they.
You are they.
They only occasionally have their shit enough together to be considered a they
at all.
I am finished fretting.
You should be too.
They totally agree with me.
Dan Tremaglio
Dan Tremaglio’s stories have appeared in various publications, including F(r)iction, Gravel, Literary Orphans, and Flash Fiction Magazine, and twice been named a finalist for the Calvino Prize. He teaches creative writing and literature at Bellevue College outside Seattle where he is a senior editor for the journal Belletrist.