| ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM |
| ***BIO*** I teach at an alternative high school in Baltimore County, Maryland. My stories have been published in about twenty literary magazines, which include Witness, Slipstream, 42opus.com, poeticdiveristy.com, and Stickman Review. In 2000, I won an Artist of the Year for Fiction award granted by the Maryland State Arts Council. My novel, Rat, won a contest sponsored by RockWay Press at the end of 2004, and published it in 2007. In June of 2006, I won the grand prize in the novel contest sponsored by the Maryland Writers Association; recently I won the Association’s short story prize. |
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| © 2008 zygoteinmycoffee Ink. |
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| by Kevin Lavey |
| A year, he thought. A year had passed since the last one. He'd notice a flyer announcing the company picnic, again at Harrison's farm thirty miles south of town. Jeffrey had turned five and Lisa three. In July, they had driven to the beach and stayed a week, but, here, the first week of September, he could hardly remember it. In early spring they painted the front room and kitchen, and they bought a new car. The kids grew up. Last winter, they replaced the furniture and treated themselves to a king-sized bed. Thirty-six was young, but the days were...what? Frequent? Unnoticed? On a business trip to Pittsburgh, he went into a restaurant and sat by himself at a small table. Clean white tablecloth, salt shaker almost empty, pepper shaker sticky, ashtray chipped. Alone, he read a novel. His waiter told him, you can't imagine what a pleasure it is to see someone come in here and be satisfied with a book. Admiringly. There, that had happened.
"Night, Bill," he said to the guard in the lobby. "Mr. Solevel.” Two secretaries walked ahead through the front doors. One of them said something that made the others laugh. Since teenage years he'd dealt with the foot, which pained him mightily right now. He drove out of the parking lot south toward Pratt Street to head west for home, but then remembered he'd promised Veronica that he'd stop at Lexington Market for a box of Rheb's chocolates. A neighbor needed cheering. He made a U-turn, went over two streets by way of alleys then went up Howard Street and into the lot. Bread, too. Get some fresh bread from the bakery--maybe a breakfast roll. When he went through the doors off of Euclid he smelled the odors of barbecued chicken. His stomach growled. He walked through the arcade of shops then entered the market area. An old man, head twitching like a blue jay's, passed him then disappeared into the crowd, mumbling about Jesus. A line of people had formed at Pollock Johnny's hot dog and kielbasa counter. Franky Vee's vegetables hadn't looked good all summer—the drought killed him. "Thank you," he said to the woman at the Rhebs candy counter. Across the aisle he bought two loaves of bread and a strawberry breakfast roll. Packages in arms, he checked his wallet, wondering if he should stop at the bank machine for money. A man beside him said, "Hey, what's it feel like to kill those things? You. Carnivore." Joe looked up. Tight mouth and round, studious glasses, hollow cheeks. Like a religious ascetic or a Trotskyite. He remembered seeing students like him on campus in Ann Arbor. Dreary grim. Their insides being chewed out. The six or seven people in line shifted on their feet and turned to him. Joe took a step back. The counterman, who stood behind a table with a shallow well filled with shaved ice and oysters, paid him no attention; perhaps he'd been berated by him before. "What about it? Those things are alive. You'd think with our intelligence we could learn to coexist with other species instead of murdering them." The counterman, wearing a yellow kerchief like a cowboy, dropped his hands and stopped shucking. He tilted his head downward, aiming with his eyebrows. "I'm not apologizing for my place on the food chain. All right?" "There it is," someone said. "No, man, listen," he said, "what right do we, who are we, man. We need to deal with karma my brother." Joe walked toward the Euclid Street exit, his head buzzing. The feelings that young zealot had... Sunshine had left the sky; the day shifted toward dusk. Foot hurts like hell, he said aloud. He’d thought all day about the story he'd read in the morning's paper. A sixteen-year-old boy had been so passionately in love with his girlfriend that when she thwarted him and accepted another's invitation to a school dance, he killed her then himself. Tragic, sad, but not uncommon, he told himself. But the boy's picture could have been his own from high school. He'd been sitting at the kitchen table and his eyes cleared to Jeffrey's spilled milk dripping over the edge of the table onto his pants. Jeffrey looked at him spook-eyed waiting for a scolding. Not at the sight of his wife in her wedding gown, not seeing his first child for the first time, not losing his virginity, not hearing that his father had died, never had he known such pointed, blistering feeling as that sixteen year old had. Yet he recognized the round face, the happy eyes, the wet hair combed over by his mother the morning the photographer came to his school. He got over to Franklin Street and drove to Highway 40. Three years ago they'd moved from a duplex to a house on the western edge of the city with a great big yard and an above-ground pool; an enormous beech tree shaded the house and four maples stood along the north end. The boy had gone to the attic and yelled at her to leave him alone, the mother said. Sometime in the night he left; and I mean the middle of the night, she said, because I stayed up and watched the late movie and I didn't hear a peep from up there. The father must not be around, Joe thought; it happened in Roland Park, too. You'd think with all that money. He stayed in the attic, perhaps tying and untying the line the police found on the chair where he'd been sitting, close to the window. Cigarette butts lay in an ashtray. He had rigged himself up a light and would read. The books lay on a crossbeam where he kept knickknacks—a jar of coins, baseball hat, a magnifying glass. Because of ill health his mother couldn’t climb the wooden, collapsible stairs. Alone for hours, he stared through the triangular window, seeing light leave the sky, knowing that his girlfriend would go to the dance with someone else. Joe turned right on Robinson Drive, went up five blocks, turned right again. He clicked on his blinker and slowed at the third driveway on the left. The dog circled the house like a charging buffalo, passing Jeffrey who waddled along and giggled. "Jeff," he called from the car. "Jeff! Open the gate." Jeffrey stopped and looked. Joe gestured toward the gate; his son imitated him--point point point--and puffed his cheeks with air. Joe put the car in park, and got out to unhitch it himself. The dog had stopped; he woofed once, seemingly blind behind eyes veiled by hair. He saw his wife walk past the front room window toward the kitchen. Jeffrey and the dog began running again and Joe eased the car into the driveway. The car scraped the tangled branches of the hedges. He tightened his hands on the steering wheel. A memory: he sat in the backseat, inside the car in a carwash. Up front his mother and father stared forward, silent; big drum brushes massaged the hood, moved toward the windshield, gently rocked the car. Joe parked in the carport. His wife came down the stairs of the back porch. "Joe?" Weight, pressure, thickened in him. Why the forgetfulness? He played trombone in his high school band. If he needed reassurance he would glance above his music stand to the third or fourth row of the basketball bleachers, never farther away, to see his mother staring at him with such direct and protective ferociousness that he actually feared for his music teacher who might scold him for not playing properly. "Yes," he said, opening the door and getting out. He turned and gave her a small wave with his fingers. "Did you remember to get that box of candy?" "Right here." "Terrific," she said. "I'm going over right now. Poor Sarah's mother's sick." She gave him a kiss. "I’m sorry to hear that," he said. "I'll be back in less than an hour." "Where's Lisa?" "Sitting quietly on the sofa playing with her dolls." She walked down the driveway then turned left toward the Petersons. Jeffrey continued to run around the house; when the dog roared by him, he squealed in a high-pitch voice, as he did last Sunday in the park when he spread his arms and dashed toward a small army of pigeons that erupted into flight. Joe bounded up the back porch stairs, walked through the kitchen then went into the living room. Lisa lay on her side; she had tumbled into sleep. There, he thought, picking up Sally and tucking Lisa's arm around her. As he walked upstairs he took off his coat, tie, and shirt then changed quickly to house clothes. In the hall he yanked on the cord to the attic. The stairs unfolded. He tucked his head to clear the overhanging ceiling then stopped to look. The attic smelled dry and woody. He stepped into it, the dim shadowy space. Though his children would be alone and unattended, he dared to close himself off; he reached down to the knob grounded beneath the second-to-top rung and pulled the boney ladder closed. He turned toward the triangular window, where light entered not by direct shaft, but in a bulbous glow, massing around the glass, thickening no more than a third of the room in gray, dusty illumination. The back attic space lay in nearly complete darkness. He clump-crawled along the wood floor and settled against a vertical beam. Looking through the window, the sill close enough that he could touch it with his feet, he saw the far edge of his own yard, the road, the field beyond that, and the overpass of the freeway spanning the drainage ditch. He picked at a nail head with his right thumb. The quiet house below had disappeared from his thoughts; he might have been a captain on the bridge of a ship staring into a dark sea. Listening, he hoped to hear a cry rising up from inside, a voice bellowing from a deep well. The light in the attic had decreased in the moments he'd been there, seeming to leak from the room through a pin sized hole in the roof. He remembered sitting in the front room rocking chair as a child, listening to his parents begin to fight in the kitchen. They raised their voices, though it never lasted long. Both drank too much, but not more so than the neighbors or his grandparents. He sat with his legs splayed in front of him. From somewhere Jeffrey screeched. He wanted to feel what that young boy felt— even for a moment. He wanted to blister with hurt. He bowed his head to allow something, some pain or passion or inadequacy, to seize him and take him away from himself. He wanted to be swept into a windy, tumbling spell of helplessness, to succumb to something beyond the strength of his own will. Still nothing. The attic had dissolved to pearly dark; the once visible edge of yard lay obscure. The front door shut; he heard his wife call for the kids. His feet had fallen asleep; he shifted and nerves throbbed then ached as feeling came back to them. He'd lived with his crippled foot for so long now that when it hurt, as it seemed to do each time the weather changed, it always surprised him. The scar along the top ridge of his foot where his toes had been would sometimes tighten and wrinkle with feeling. It did so now, and for a second he absurdly trusted that it had become a register of vibrations, feelings too subtle for him to receive directly. Maybe they would take form and move him, seduce him into momentary, sumptuous confusion. He sat in darkness. His wife and daughter passed through the hallway, beneath the ceiling door to the attic. Well, he must be on a walk, Lisa said. I don't know, said his wife. His listened as their sounds receded down the stairs. You see your girlfriend accept his hand in hers, you can hear her body rustle against her clothes. You see them dancing; the lights in the gymnasium of the school are dim, and they hold one another, they sway together. He slips his hand along the top of her beltloops then to the ridge of her back. She wears jeans and a t-shirt and she pulls him closer. He could not understand what that young man went through. Surely we are not so alone as that, he thought. His stomach grumbled. His wife would be anxious for him. He'd left the kids by themselves. The three of them might have eaten already, and he hadn't appeared. What could his wife believe about him? Could he have gone up to Tilly's by himself, bought the house a round. Could he have had one of the strippers sit on his lap who would steal his wallet and try to use his credit cards... He could see pinpoints of headlights coming west on the freeway in the distance. He rubbed his face with his hands then turned from his perch and crawled along the walkway to the door. He pushed downward on it and the ladder unfolded easily. Light from the hallway filled the attic and for a moment he looked down into his house as if he were a burglar pondering a set of difficulties—a seam in the carpet that might trip him, wayward toys, creaking doors. He went down the stairs, then through the kitchen, into the back room where his wife sat with their two kids. "Where have you been?" she asked, putting the magazine to her lap. Jeffrey looked at him through the thick lenses of his glasses and Lisa cocked her head up from her storybook. "Believe it or not I've been in the attic," he said. His voice sounded husky. "In the attic," she said. "Yes." "What were you doing up there?" "Well," he began. He stepped to the refrigerator for a beer, then returned. "Meditating, I guess." "Come over and sit next to me," his wife said. He did as she asked, and she resumed reading. |
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| Sept. 2008 |
| 110 |