Had they been a less practical couple, my parents might have had children by accident. Instead, one night, before I was born, at the wobbly table in the breakfast nook, Dad drew a line down a page of yellow paper to separate the pros from the cons of Kids, then a second page for No Kids. Mom stirred the ice cubes in a diet cola with her pinkie, freely associating, and offered suggestions for Dad to codify and record. Lips closed, he beamed at his neat columns and marveled at his wife’s abundance and variety, then added imaginative mothering to the list. A common mistake is to neglect the second page, thinking it redundant. To a novice making that mistake at the very same table, in my rocket ship pajamas, on a list of little consequence, Dad would patiently explain that there is no opposite for chocolate ice cream, only alternatives: other flavors, different desserts, other foods entirely, no food at all, or chewing gum, to name a few. The opposite of a richly fulfilled man could be a richly fulfilled woman or a miserable bitch. Now, a sandwich eaten with the non-preferred hand leaves the writing hand free, so when they decided to renew their vows, I ate a grilled cheese and composed a list for Dad about staying together and one about splitting up. He didn’t thank me but sat down to edit while I poured drinks. Dad’s rebuttal to “get a fresh start” convinced me I’d never known him, or that writing the lists was not about balancing truth with truth. Since finding them, in times of doubt, I had treasured the yellow pages that had brought me to be, until I watched Dad move “permanent truce” from one side of a list to the other.

Copyright © June 19, 2009 David Hodges

Something so good and pure at the core of a man like my husband hardens to a bullet in the forge of an inhuman world. He might laugh at me for saying so. He doesn’t need me to sing his praise. Those who don’t know him will never admit his humility. They don’t know how strife can temper a man, or that his failings can be strength. They’ve never heard him laugh or cry. (I know he wouldn’t want me saying this.) I’ve seen tears in his eyes at the mention of a baby in distress, but compassion propels him, even as he debriefs the other men with details of the sacrificed, past the whining flesh to the crowning beyond. That’s when his jokes are at their wicked best. That’s when they know he is their leader. Nobody is innocent, I hear him say, but action can purify. At night he has to impress only me. I contemplate the back of his head on the pillow. Nicks in his hair are all that remain of the violence of things that went wrong in the field, unless he’s dreaming of those troubles now. I breathe the endless night. This is the consummation of my life, to lie with his snoring champion’s body, and have it to myself. How many other women would trade with me! I lift the sheet and follow the line of his backbone as far as I dare and keep my motions small. I touch a place that makes me think of him, and gently a place on him that feels like a man, and remember times when we had no mission but one another and all the time in the world. I bite my lip to keep from crying out with the splendor of it all.

Copyright © June 13, 2009 David Hodges

She was never my girl until you took her and now that I will never get her back, I have reclaimed her. She’s certainly no part of you. For coaxing her off the bus in her plaid skirt and knee socks and taking her shopping for makeup, I forgive you because I was not able to give her everything she needed. For confining her in the motel rooms, I forgive you because I have no choice. If black humor is all I get, then I will laugh in my hell about how she got to travel. We never found the time. I understand you worked as a team during my daughter’s ordeal. One of you was the kind one, then, whose voice I hear like syrup sizzling on the tapes; to you I’m grateful; the two of you I forgive. For closing her mouth, I forgive you. She had more questions, I know, than I had answers, and more than once I raised my hand rather than try. She stepped off that bus and never came home and I forgive you. You think I’m naïve but you don’t know me. I have a complicated understanding of my feelings, one that doesn’t change if someone thinks they’ve sighted her somewhere. I know she’s not alive and that you never meant to bother me. Not having factored into your thinking used to hurt but I’m over it now. The tapes are a consolation and an anguish. They show her in her discomfort to be hopeful to the end. Frames of it are all I have of her beyond a certain age. If you know where it is, and I’m not asking, I don’t want the body back. I know our bodies are but husks and nothing will make me mourn one.

Copyright © June 11, 2009 David Hodges

I stole a brick from my neighbor’s house. With ease he had me convicted of stealing the whole thing, all three stories and the land it gouged, and rightly. We understand there is no difference. The one brick’s independence caught my eye. Almost unmortared it was and loose it seemed, nearly dislodged. In fact I needed almost an hour to pry it out with my ballpoint pen and a credit card. But it came free. And nothing fell when I took it away and used it to balance the barbecue. I would have taken each of them one at a time had I not been tried and locked in jail. Nothing, not even lack of need, would have stopped me once I started taking. You might think there are fewer temptations here but a sliver of soap is irresistible if another prisoner owns it. A preferred chair, the dry pillowcase, is wealth. We need to take it not own it. My cellmate tells me his brother came to visit, lifted a pack of cigarettes from the guard station, and was never released. There’s no release. Even the guards stay overnight. The longer we serve, the more time is added to our sentences. Already more of us are inside than out and neighborhoods of houses like my neighbor’s stand empty or are turned into prisons and the freshly convicted arrive every day looking hungry for whatever we have. I’m watching a serving of mayonnaise in a waxed paper origami cup that looks to be not well guarded. Either I will have it or I will render it distasteful. Sorry I’m cranky. I woke up on the wrong side of the argument. Will the last judge when he sentences the last of us kindly please pull the door shut behind him?

Copyright © March 29, 2009 David Hodges

The kid who glared across my desk at me had stolen our petty cash. We’d trusted him with a job and with proximity and access or acted as if we had. Suddenly, we needed to fire him or have him arrested, or somehow get him to pay us back, or all of the above. It sickened us to see him in the office, sickened and infuriated us. His moping depressed us; on the other hand if he dared to laugh we felt like slapping him. I had to poll the staff at a meeting for approval to keep him around. The women held their pocketbooks in their laps. I know now that what troubled me then was how to tell the story. Among the details, I wanted to suppress his race. The truth seemed shabby and stereotyped. Of course, facts are no excuse for sloppy narrative, but there you are, if you want to be honest, stuck with what is. With no satisfaction, I’d gotten him to confess. When he finally admitted to taking the money, for the first time I doubted he had. I’d made it clear no other explanation would do. Perhaps he thought perversely it would save his job and for a time it did. I’d wanted to get rid of him, but now I kept him on to run errands and buy our forgiveness. I haven’t told it right. One thing is certain, that while he was making restitution and worried I might have him arrested I told him I didn’t care if he stole to make his Friday installments as long as he didn’t steal from us. What that was supposed to prove I don’t like to think. The day he paid us fully back I fired him from my life, I hope, forever.

Copyright © March 16, 2009 David Hodges

Our country is a mess, my friends, and no president can do much about it. The economy is what you believe. You wanted change? Start believing. At most, and only if good citizens like you comply, a president sets a tone for the national conduct. If his example doesn’t persuade, he has no power to compel millions of citizens except by martial law. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I’m sorry, this should be an auspicious occasion. You’ve traveled long distances to stand in the cold; you’re not here to be overtly threatened, but listen: I can veto but not legislate, appoint judges but not fire them. The Congress will not allocate me a penny to spend as I wish. I can, however, declare war and unleash annihilation wherever I like. What kind of job is this! My chief of staff has tried to explain with his favorite sports metaphors. The President does not play, he says: he cheerleads, he grandstands, he coaches. Perhaps others before me have, or maybe the chief doesn’t understand politics, or me, as well as he understands football. I have an agenda, America. You’d better impeach me now if you wanted a coach: it will take years to unseat me; I have lawyers by the boatload. Meanwhile, expect to see me travel a bit. They’ve given me a plane. Wherever it touches down is American soil. My friends, all we have done as a country, for good or ill, has brought us to this frigid day on the nation’s lawn amid monuments to our past achievements, blah, blah, blah. There is no looking back, friends. We’ve been at odds with this planet long enough. You will follow me or not, but I will make our presence felt in the world as never before.

Copyright © February 7, 2009 David Hodges

On the roof of our apartment building my son waited for his father to arrive so he could jump. Meanwhile I, the attending parent, persuaded the police chief not to upset, by storming the roof, what balance our child still clung to at the edge of a forty foot drop. Everyone wanted a show. Gawkers the patrolmen kept back on the pavement. Ladder trucks the fire chief held out of view. At such a height the boy was incongruous beaming against the placid sky in his badly stained t-shirt erratically pacing and suddenly very important. Not my arms, my voice, nothing could reach him. He wouldn’t see me. Has he been depressed? the negotiator asked me. It’s laundry day, I explained. They have it on tape. Talk to him, the police chief told me. Tell him you love him. Is that the right thing? I asked. The father arrived in a ridiculous car with a girl of course and talking into his phone. What the hell have you done? he asked me. The girl couldn’t stay in the car. She clung to his arm as if he needed steadying. A deputy peeled her away. Son! he called up; I’ve got you, son! There’s nothing to be afraid of! I saw my boy lean forward trusting at the edge of the world. Nothing to be afraid of! I saw his toes creep over. I can’t believe this was the plan. The girl came back and I slapped her hard, then tore into my husband with my nails and teeth and took him down before he could kill my boy. I didn’t know they had cops on the roof and one on the fire escape. I only know my baby cried out Dad! as he tilted and spun against the sky.

Copyright © January 17, 2009 David Hodges

The light I saw flickering in my wife’s eyes as we sat at the little table we use for dinners that don’t involve watching reruns and the radiant golds that shimmered behind her, framing the face I love best after my own, may have sprung from my devotion or may have been reflected flames from the house fire down the street, but the smell of smoke was no metaphor. Fire filled every window and the heat we felt from the sidewalk was peeling the faux stone façade from the front of the home, one of the finest on the street pre-catastrophe and for the time being standing on an exquisite lot. Where are the fire trucks?, we asked our neighbors, the charming young couple whose home would soon be a smoldering blight on the avenue. We didn’t call them, he replied. She looked at him and smiled without showing her teeth, as if they shared a secret joke. She hooked her arm around his waist; he pulled her shoulders close and together they gazed at the inferno. Were you home when it happened?, my wife was asking at the same time I asked, How did it start? She showed us a book of matches and smiled. Other couples, worried about sparks, wondered what was keeping the fire company. We’re alive and healthy and we have each other, she said. Still, I said. She wouldn’t let me take anything, he told me. I knew it!, she shouted. I knew your stupid stuff would come between us! Several cell phones sprang to life and frantically called 911. We casually strolled home in silence, deeply breathing the soft air spiced with others’ misfortune. Our fingers touched by accident, then interlaced like cards from two stacks in the hands of an expert dealer.

Copyright © January 10, 2009 David Hodges

Some teams just don’t have it; they suffer their greatest loss before the season begins. Others never win a game but end the season undefeated. My daughter plays for such a team. Perhaps you’ve heard of them, The Lower Sloughton Savings and Loan Mini-Mites, proud defenders of the league’s Most Consistent Performance title. They play a game much like soccer, on a soccer field with a soccer ball wearing soccer uniforms, but instead of stifling their creativity with “positions” or “defense,” they gleefully swarm the ball wherever it goes and, following a score, equally gleefully disentangle one another from the net of their own goal. Except for fans of the sport, they are a joy to behold. To watch the Mini-Mites, one might think they had never learned the fundamentals of the game, but as their coach I can tell you we practice often and hard, though it’s possible we disagree about what’s fundamental. I came to my position by default, as you may have gathered, the only parent of any player willing to suffer the criticisms of all the other parents. We are the very model of a different sort of team. We vote, for instance, before every game, whether to defend our goal or use it as an additional target. Though they are mostly ten years old, and girls, I call my players men. The captain tells me what she and the men have decided. We substitute on the basis of who has to potty. No team we face is as good as my men at keep-away, accidental collisions, and playing dead, and no team hugs, hugs everybody, like my men do when time runs out. On the way home from almost every game my daughter asks me, “Did we win, Dad?” I love that question.

Copyright © January 08, 2009 David Hodges

Doorbell. Door opens.
—There’s been a report of abuse at this address.
—Somebody’s already reported that you’re about to get hurt?
—There’s no need to threaten me.
—Good.
Door closes.

Doorbell. Door opens.
—I know why you’re upset.
—No you don’t.
—All right, maybe not, but I’m obligated to investigate.
—By what authority?
—Child Protective Services.
—Wouldn’t that be me?
Door closes.

Doorbell. Door opens.
—May I speak to the child?
—We haven’t established I have a child.
—Who’s that, Dad?
—Not for you, Chris.
—May I speak to your daughter?
—Chris is a boy.
—My report says a girl.
—Exactly.
Door closes.

Doorbell. Door opens.
—May I start again?
—I think you should. Next door.
Door closes.

Doorbell. Door opens.
—Why? Was there abuse next door?
—I would imagine so.
—Do you have a reasonable suspicion?
—I do. I suspect there’s some sort of abuse or neglect in every home, don’t you?
—Why would you say that?
—I grew up in one.
Door closes.

Doorbell. Door opens.
—May I ask you one question?
—If you answer one first. Who reported me?
—I can’t say. He wasn’t a mandated reporter.
—He volunteered? And what was his reasonable suspicion?
—Your child is too compliant.
—Compliant.
—Too compliant, too eager to please.
—I see. You had a question?
—Do you abuse your child?
—I imagine he would say so. If he thought you wanted him to.
Door closes.

Doorbell. Door opens.
—Do you have anything to say?
—In my defense? I have a theory.
—I’ll take it.
—I have reason to believe my accuser, who thought my boy was a girl, did not find him compliant enough.
—In what regard?
—In some regard. And not having gotten what he wanted, filed a complaint.
—That’s an outrageous and reckless allegation.
Door closes.

Copyright © January 03, 2009 David Hodges

Every shelf is stacked with books I’ve read and reread, or so it seems. This depleted room, these spine-cracked volumes rubbed of their wishes, cannot detain me long. If only the wider world offered something new instead of cheap diversions and bloodless familiars. I need a future. I would settle for a present. In the parking lot, the woman on her cell phone, the cop, the two nuns pushing carts are the same nuns, same cop, same woman I know from the last time, the same shopping carts, the same wobbly wheel. You say I’ve never been here but I remember it all and this argument. This is not the first time we’ve talked about coincidence and memory in this parking lot. Things recur, I understand. Weekends follow workweeks; people order the usual; we do the same thing every New Year’s fucking Eve, for Christ’s sake, I get it. Why don’t you admit that this is more than the seasons repeating and my subconscious? Everything has happened already. Pork loin is on sale again. This song is on the radio just like last time and you want to argue. Why do you keep asking me what will happen next? Whatever happened last time! You give me that look? The nuns roll by loaded with pork? The cop knocks on the window and asks if I’m all right. I back out into the nuns. Take your pick. You snatch the keys from the ignition. Like last time. I leave the car and stride halfway across that busy highway and wake up in the hospital again to your helpless fucking face. Don’t touch me. Don’t pity me. Don’t try to talk me down. You’re no help at all. I’ve never been hit by a car, you say? We’ll see about that.

Copyright © January 01, 2009 David Hodges

I will never be friends with Besmir Hoxha, but he didn’t let the baby die, so I cannot expect my children to hate his children. Besmir Hoxha’s brother Jetmir beat me with a stave he took off a truck along Rovena Road and kicked me while I was down. His brothers and Kastriot Moisiu meant to kill me, I’m sure of it, all because I had looked at their cousin Qendressa at the tavern. Why can I not look at Qendressa? I wouldn’t have shot Jetmir for any reason, but I was armed and they had me at a disadvantage. I was as surprised as they when the gun went off. For eight years after, I lived in fear, even though the courts acquitted me of Jetmir’s murder. I knew I could not live. You see the walls I built around my house and on top of that the shards of glass and barbed wire. I made myself a prison and filled the yard with hungry dogs that barked at every sound. My children were raised inside these walls. My wife and I couldn’t work. We lived on what we grew, but into our despair God sent a baby we couldn’t feed. We had eaten the cow. We had eaten the goat. My wife could make no milk. We wrapped the baby in the Gazeta Shqiptare and crept from our house to the house of Besmir Hoxha at midnight and left the baby on the doorstep and ran back home. For twenty-four hours we waited. The next night Besmir Hoxha called. You have made your point, he said. We do not kill babies. Your son is as ugly as you, but he is healthy and alive. He cries for his mother. You may come and pick him up tomorrow.

Copyright © December 27, 2008 David Hodges

I never talk about my job but, since you asked, I’d like some extra copies of the paper for my church. So. By the time I arrive, the prisoner is strapped to this crucifixion table here, arms and legs spread like a snow angel but with velcro at his wrists, elbows and shoulders; ankles, knees and hips; and this one across his chest; powerless unless he’s telepathic or diabolically persuasive, or unless I’m a merciful girl. Don’t put words in my mouth. Just listen. I know I have a calling because they leave me alone with these pre-cadavers, each one a charmer, speculating about whether I wear panties, who thinks he has nothing to lose. Although I know, I ask him about his offenses; his lies go into my book. I tighten the forehead strap so he will see me when I want him to, and wedge the filthy mouthpiece in to stop his noise, and slap him hard to remind him to breathe through his nose. All of this makes him uneasy. I speak to him of forgiveness then, to send him quietly home, but first, I rest my hand on his chest to touch his humanity. As I recite the list of his victims and how they were hurt, I feel his heart remember and confess. I place my other hand between his legs until he understands there’s nothing I can’t do. I move my face above his face and ask him if he’s sorry. When I’m not satisfied, I pinch his nostrils closed. The first time tests the restraints. When he cries, I let him briefly breathe. I survey him about cruelty and whether he thinks the sentence he’s serving is unusual. Though he can’t speak, he makes himself understood. His answers go into my book.

Copyright © December 17, 2008 David Hodges

Little Worm has been nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize by the editors of east to west: bicoastal verse, where the story appeared in the Spring ‘08 edition.

My sincere thanks to PJ Nights and Ray Sweatman, co-editors, who placed the story into nomination. The odds against an actual award are very, very long, but so were the odds against this deeply appreciated nomination.

Please support the work of east to west by visiting their website and buying books through Lulu.

Read Little Worm here.

He slops his filthy water across my sparkling windshield and across my gleaming hood and over my shining fenders three mornings a week when I pause at his intersection, caught by the light. I watch him concentrate on sticky traces of bugguts and each time examine the star-shaped divot a pebble chipped from the glass precisely in my line of sight as I followed a beat-up construction pickup on the interstate a year ago, a breach in the shield which like a mote in my eye disturbs my outlook wherever I point my car but which has never sent out a crack toward the seal or grown any larger. Today, though, a droplet forms at the center of the star and dribbles toward the dashboard on the inside of the glass, and another after that, on the inside of the glass, and a third. I pay him a dollar every time he assaults my car, for long enough now that by today I might have bought him a windshield. Perhaps he’s put a new one into whatever he drives, financed by me. We should trade. I open the door as the light turns green and step out into the clamor of drivers wanting me to move. Somehow from the impact of my getting out, he has fallen to the street. As I help him up, I lift the keys and a wad of cash from his overall pocket and hand him back one of his squeegees, then run with his bucket away from the scene in search of soap and fresh water. When I come back, my car is gone but in my pocket a good day’s pay at nine in the morning and somewhere nearby, with a windshield that doesn’t leak, a car that will match these keys.

Copyright © November 20, 2008 David Hodges

He’s never done me any good, as far as I can tell, nor any harm. I hope He’s as ambivalent about me. We’re at Halloween mass and the children have come as animals from the ark. Two giraffes are fidgeting in their seats beside me; bumblebees buzz in the pew ahead. Mom at my side only trembles, except that on cue she wants to be helped into kneeling and standing, as if the world depended on her posture. She knows those moments in the service better than her son beside her in his believer costume. That’s me, lapsed lazarus, drowned in the flood. As I watch the smiling animals proceeding down the aisle on all fours two by two, it occurs to me that those who want faith can’t have it, and those who have it never give it a thought. Mom’s had a stroke and doesn’t speak and doesn’t walk alone and so depends on me for worship. She doesn’t know I bring her here to sing because nothing else works. I see her sway when the hymns begin and catch a glimpse of something of that spark of the animal divine. Me she recognizes, I think, but not her church and not the people who know her here, and what she makes of the zoo in the pews I can only imagine, but the organ chords might as well be her own heart humming they are so familiar. And the chords in turn call out the words. And the words shape her tongue and lips and open her throat. “He daily spreads a bounteous feast and at His table dine,” somebody sings, “The whole creation, man and beast,” Mom puts her hand on my forearm and I help her stand, “And He’s a Friend of mine.”

Copyright © November 03, 2008 David Hodges

He had leveled eleven trees to unobstruct his view of the gulf, trees he had planted in a neat row every six paces along his waterfront at a time when the gulf was the last thing he wanted to see. He’d been arrested and charged and brought to court for changing his mind, because the trees had statutory rights and he, apparently, did not; they’d been declared protected since he’d planted them and he, it seemed, was not. The trees had license to bully him. It was my father’s land, the son of the governor’s land, he told the judge, before it was mine. But the trees had standing where the governor’s grandson had none. The gulf came onto the land, he told the judge, and took the land by surprise and all who were on it, including the son of the governor, and swept them out into the churning salt and left the land bereaved, your honor. We all know what happened to your daddy, the judge replied. He plucked a flake of tobacco from his tongue. You’ve cut down some trees, son. How do you plead? From his oversized briefcase, the governor’s grandson produced a sizable chainsaw, which he raised to the bench. Impressive exhibit, the judge allowed. But I am not a cypress. He lightly spat. Whatever else he may have said was drowned by the snarling saw. The defense table soon was splintered. The gallery benches didn’t resist. The bailiff could have shot the governor’s grandson, and might have if he hadn’t been a friend of the governor’s son. Instead, he fled with everyone else and listened from the marble hall while the governor’s grandson and his saw brought down the jury box and the judge’s bench and every piece of wood a court contains.

Copyright © October 11, 2008 David Hodges

I feel as if I’d met you yesterday though it’s been thirty years and at my age that means I die tomorrow or at best the day after. So what shall we do this blue evening streaked with gray? If I’m to cook you one last dinner, I want to know you’ll enjoy it. If only you weren’t so complex! You love the simple joy of something simple, simply done, I know: a fish intact, its organs and bones excused, brushed with butter and heated until happy. That said, you also love a dish of flesh that fills your mouth with blood and tastes like something running for its life. Shall I start with what agrees with you or should I try again to make you resolve your dispute with asparagus? I think I know your answer. Let’s not argue with dinner. There is a time, or better an age, for picking fights with appetizers and waging war on desserts, but we have long outlived that age and found our peace with meals. From now on let’s try something new just once, if at all, and if we don’t love it immediately, leave it for the kids. I’ve tracked down something from the yard you might like, burrowing it was beneath the porch a day from entering our lives; I think it will grill nicely. I’ve paired it with the fruit I foraged from the back of your closet that has almost turned to syrup. Before I’ve finished cooking, something else will turn up, I’m sure. Every room can be harvested. We scarcely need to shop, now that all we’ve planted has come into season. The table is set. The candles sparkle like something new. I stand behind your chair in a bloody apron ready to push you in.

Copyright © October 03, 2008 David Hodges

Ron and Don are in the same class. Jesus wept. Lovely, youthful, naive boy-god Jesus didn’t know the half of it. I go behind the burning bush outside the cafeteria and puke. They could so easily be separated, I tell the principal in her sheer gray blouse, on whatever arbitrary protocol you usually invoke to protect the lives of teachers. The fabric of her bra includes a sparkling thread which filigrees. But pairing them will nullify them both, she says, and you will take the credit.

—According to what prolegomenous pedagogical model?
—According to I say so.
—We will never marry, you know, and this is why.
—This is not why.

Ron and Don have their heads together when I enter the classroom. The air around them sizzles. My other students watch from at least two seats away from Ron and Don except that the new boy Riley has drifted into their orbit. His hair has begun to stand. He doesn’t know why. In the time it takes me to write my name on the board with dusty red chalk, Ron disappears. The children gape past me, stricken. I smell hot sparking at my shoulder and turn. My nose brushes Ron’s nose. I ricochet backwards and, falling, snap the chalk ledge from the wall. A conversation happens in my head:

—So much for your lesson plan, darling.
—It was more of an experiment than a plan.
—I understand bold science, darling, but the downside hurt my head.
—It could have been worse.
—It may be worse. I’m still unconscious. When will you call me darling?

Ron and Don are everywhere at once and also nowhere. The more I look at them the more they dart and materialize. Riley is gone, is hiding, or has dropped out of physics forever.

Copyright © September 21, 2008 David Hodges

—What if she dies while I’m away?
—You can’t stay home until she dies.
—I can’t leave either, while she’s alive.
—I don’t like where this is going.

—What would you do? Would you call me?
—What would you want me to do?
—
—How important is this trip?
—As important as everything else.
—Which means?
—Compared to death, not very.
—Compared to your death, sure, but hers?

—I want you to call me.
—And tell you what?
—And tell me she’s fine.
—You’ll know.
—I won’t know. Do it right.
—Tell you she’s had a big meal?
—Something. Some detail. Make me believe it.
—I could do that.
—You could.
—And you’d forgive me.
—

—Should we call someone?
—What, a doctor?
—
—I didn’t think we’d get through this ourselves.
—No, you’re right. I don’t want her to suffer.
—
—No, you’re right.

—
—It’s good we’re having this talk.
—

—Do you think she’s suffering now?
—We can’t know.
—But if you had to say.
—From watching I’d have to guess yes.
—You couldn’t just tell me no?
—
—No, I know.

—Suppose it were me.
—Let’s not do that. Suppose it were me.
—Let’s not do that.

—However. If it were me,
—I thought we weren’t doing that.
—I’d have found a way out.
—That’s easy to say.
—Not so easy. Not to you.
—Because you’d be leaving me behind.
—I would.
—I wouldn’t be enough to keep you.
—No.
—I’m just like you in that.
—
—That’s why we can agree on her.

—But should we help her?
—Um.
—We are helping her.

—I want someone else to make this choice.
—I know.
—I want you to.
—I know.
—But make the choice I would make.
—Which choice is that?
—When you make it, we’ll both know.

—So, what have we decided?
—

—
—

Copyright © September 16, 2008 David Hodges

With every swing she ages—sometimes younger by a minute, sometimes older by a generation—away she swings, back she falls, away. I stand on widespread feet, in sneakers on sand, in one spot for hours, pushing, waiting, pushing, but even I, bending with her impact on the backswing, heaving her ahead on the forward swing, am not still. I cannot do just this. My feet are not fixed; I dance in place. I roam. The playground pulses with mothers and daughters who don’t trade places, but half the time I think I’m the one on the swing. This is not who I thought I would be. I know my daughter knows the precipitous moment when the swinger thinks that this time—despite the million times it hasn’t happened—that this time the swing will continue to rise and not come back. I push too hard sometimes to help her strive toward that release. I shouldn’t. We all come back. The swing itself corrects me. It lets her rise beyond the plane until, still rising, she is traveling backwards. The trip back down from there is quick and sickening; it yanks the slack chains taut until they bounce her back into the curve. The falling is dreadful. The landing is worse. I force it when I need to go, when the other mothers’ pity overwhelms me, when she will not say, It’s enough, Mommy, we can go. She doesn’t cry. She goes rigid, goes silent, and won’t swing her feet. I let her pendulum wind down until I can catch her in my arms without falling. Did you go too high? I ask her, grateful to have and to hold her, feeling my balance return. I never tell her she’s had enough. I wait for her to tell me.

Copyright © August 31, 2008 David Hodges

More crosstown than up or down, they blew through the city like leaves. At the river, they skidded into a headwind off the water and eddied through islands of trash that fronted the docks, swirling beneath the bridge they had never crossed, and went with the flow until one of them snagged on something. Pick him up, said one. They hoisted him by the armpits into a sit and let him count how many they were. He fought them anyway until one kicked the back of his head. They slogged his dead weight to a bench and settled him between armrests, then picked up cable ties to lash his ankles and wrists to the bench. What now? said one, when the man came to. Let him beg, said the one with ideas. I don’t beg, said the man on the bench, I sing, for which I am paid. He looked directly at the one with ideas. In the subway, you freak!, said the thinker. For an audience, punk, said the singer. They listened to the voices echo off the vacant buildings. Let him go, said one to the night. The others looked at the ground. Let him go, he said again. They sat him in the singer’s lap, wrists and thighs to wrists and thighs, and lashed him to his partner so that struggling would cut them both. They only had to hit him once, but he struggled against the lipstick until his face was slashed with pink. Cut off his pants, said the one with ideas. Now sing, he said, and maybe we’ll let you go. Cold wind off the water and approaching sirens drove them from the riverfront. Twisting through the alleys they heard the wind, sliced by fire escape ladders and power lines, whining in song.

Copyright © August 27, 2008 David Hodges

The sign at the border with firm politeness welcomes me in my own language. I take it on faith it doesn’t play favorites but welcomes readers of other languages with equal grace, though why it thinks the Chinese will follow this road here I can’t imagine. I have hours to read it while I wait. The bulk of its advice concerns my conduct after I enter the country it speaks for. Some behaviors it condones; most it warns me would be unwise. Specifically staying forever it doesn’t address, perhaps in case I hadn’t thought of it, and nowhere does it ask me what I might be seeking, what fleeing, what I hope to accomplish or bring back, for it is still a matter of hoping. On the wrong side of the border, my child is sick. Our doctor’s plan, endorsed by my family, is to place her naked on the earth which absorbs all bitterness. She cannot travel, but neither can I stand still. I have never wanted to leave home, but so much—the factory foods, the permissiveness, the comedy violence, the haste, and now the medicines to cure diseases we never suffered—has come to us without asking and there is no turning back, at least for me, until I find and take what I’ve come for and never return. I would like to say that to the sign in its own language. It is my turn to plead my case to a woman in a crumpled uniform whose jacket doesn’t quite match her pants. I plan to look her in the eye but everything distracts her. I say the word I’ve been told to say and she leads me to a room behind the counter to see if I’ve brought enough to be a welcome guest.

Copyright © August 25, 2008 David Hodges

Chapter Four. If you retrieved the first three bottles, you know the urgency of our confinement and how to help us. If anything, we are more desperate now as the authorities close in on the operation and, despite the value of what we produce, it matters less with every shipment whether we workers are kept healthy. They will not need us for long. What precious hours of icy twilight are these when we have finished work and before the troubling dreams that are like working another shift. It’s good to walk across the gravel and glass. Sometimes music from the local bars paces our steps to the car yard. The tenderness we show one another would touch any heart not already numb. It was not always so. The early years were savage. Last night I woke before my watch in the dim light of the container car, not black as it was those very first nights but laced by ropes of moonlight through the holes we’ve pried along the seams, in time to see Rom hoist the sick boy to the ventilation grate for a little air. I should say the sickest boy. His simple bug would probably respond to remedies like those we make if there were anything in them. How does anyone sleep, I wonder. The world should be up all night. The children without parents were adopted early but not always well. Rom is good. He feeds the boy first. I helped him last night lower his boy to the floor in the penetrating cold. The wind drove ice and the yeasty smell of fresh rolls from the neighborhood bakery through the grate, awakening the rest of me. Train wheels clacked across the tracks. I put my latest pages in a bottle for tomorrow, for you.

Copyright © August 22, 2008 David Hodges

As far as I’m concerned, no teacher goes into a classroom without concealed weapons. I know I never have. Chalk is a bullet in the right hands. Students have no idea what I’m up to or whether what I’m teaching them is algebra or how to live. They don’t get either at home. Where the district has it wrong is making me conceal my actual gun: they let me carry it to make the students safer; the policy makes that clear; so aren’t things even safer if the kids know I’m carrying? I know it makes me feel safer. Anyway, it’s not as if I could hide this bulge for long. The kids I need to worry about can smell the oil on the cylinders, just as I will smell theirs the day they think they’re too smart for me. The training was a joke. If I’m not already responsible, I wouldn’t have a permit in the first place. What I do is show it, to let them know there’s a willing readiness to balance anything they might bring to class. On your ankle today, sir? they ask me. Under your arm? At the hip? They don’t get the answer until they perform academically. I tell you, the kids we lost last year were casualties of academic failure. The shooters thought the only way to challenge authority was to shoot. Of course they came from broken homes. What home isn’t broken? We teachers have to raise a generation that isn’t taught anything, they’re only sold. From me they get nuance. From me they learn that authority is a matter of negotiation. We don’t just question it, we defy its right to exist until it proves itself. And extra credit for anyone who can make it into school with contraband.

Copyright © August 17, 2008 David Hodges

He didn’t sleep at night until he had fed the jar. He hustled pool and won: nobody figured a kid could shoot. Mondays he caught shifts at the deli unless the regular slicer came back sober from the casinos. He ran deliveries of whatever didn’t burn a hole in his hand until nothing felt hot. He never begged but he did sometimes politely request. Money came home in two pockets. One he emptied onto the table where his mom sat in the kitchen. This is for my life, he said. The other he emptied into the jar. The day he turned twelve, the landlord taught him to collect rents. He gave him a pistol and pointed at doors. Go collect, he told the boy, I’ll give you twenty percent. They gave him what they had. Do they even rent from you? he asked the landlord. By evening, he had divided his take into two pockets, ten percent each. He handed the landlord the gun and the rest of the cash. What are you, trying to steal from me? said the landlord very quietly, I do the counting. He emptied the boy’s pockets and gave him two tens. You have burned a bridge, he told him. They lived at 212 Clinton and 214 with a hole punched through. When one got shut off, they moved into the other, he and Mom and three men with no last names. One day it got serious: no lights, no heat, and they had found his trophies and his jar. He offered them his pockets. They laughed. All right! he said and with the plated figure of a boy shooting free throws he smashed the jar. His hand wept blood. Are you sure? Mom kept asking. Are you sure this is what you want?

Copyright © August 15, 2008 David Hodges

I wonder if the President feels as threatened as I do when I read his mail. So many citizens feel so wronged and express it in similar ways. We’re not naive at the White House; we know the country isn’t perfect, but how would torturing the President solve anything? I walk to my car at night feeling very exposed. My puny mace could never protect me against the casually detailed threats I read in the letters. I should stop carrying it. All it does is remind me what lurks in the shadows of the parking garage. If I were president, I think I’d travel in an unmarked car with a driver I’d known all my life. A twenty-one car motorcade would terrify me. I’ve watched the Secret Service come through here on sweeps, and once dismantle my cubicle, and once pore over every block of my pure-hearted, innocent neighborhood when a presidential appearance was planned and then canceled as too risky. The trees seem menacing now. I can’t feel safe at home. I certainly can’t open the mail. My daughter asks me why we don’t have bars and alarms like all her friends and all I can tell her is how I feel better without them. Every day the letters come in, presorted by sender when possible. I do my analysis and file my report and pass it on up the chain. I wonder what they tell him. He’s been in office ninety months and they haven’t gotten him yet. I took my daughter to work one day and she watched me flinch and started to understand. He walked right past my desk that day, flanked by staff on every side, and winked in her direction. “Should we tell him?” she asked me. “He didn’t look worried at all.”

Copyright © August 12, 2008 David Hodges

Travelers are forever being told the whens and wheres of the city: when the church was reconstructed, where the Romans took their baths, how the rains affect the rosemary crop, but all they really want to know is why the sad man shuffles on his knees from one end of town to the other, starting at the granary in the morning and tracking the weary sun throughout the day to the bruised clouds just before dusk above the little chapel. A woman waits for him there, but turns her back as he draws near. “He’s no sadder than anyone else,” we tell them. He was a charming young man, athletic and witty, who had his pick of girls. She was underendowed but aloof. They should never have met and hadn’t before he helped her onto a tram. One phrase only of what they said is repeated every day: “Not in your lifetime,” she told him, he tells us, we tell them. Their courtship was a riddle no one could solve, their engagement unexpected as a tuba, but the biggest surprise were the wedding invitations which went only to the unlikeliest single women and men, “plus one.” The chapel brimmed with unprecedence. “I know a reason why this couple should not wed,” said a woman carrying a baby boy, though she needn’t have: everyone knew at least one. When the bride saw the look that passed between this woman and the groom, she crushed the bouquet underfoot and walked away. “This is the woman he crawls to every day?” ask the tourists. “No,” we tell them. “She was pregnant at the altar; this woman is her daughter.” “The man is making amends to his daughter?” the tourists persist. “No. He has long since died. The crawling man is his son.”

Copyright © August 10, 2008 David Hodges

As I packed my bags for Chrysalis House, I reviewed conflicting reports from staff whose clients, all old, had achieved 100 years or more and begun the change. I make no claim to their veracity. Some on the floors had started a third set of teeth, I read. Two, long bald, were showing the eruption of something between feathers and fur, well distributed and slick. First, though, they had gone through comas from which they were not expected to emerge, each lasting 168 days during which their skin hardened, then cracked, then shed. One young nurse described the effect as “rotten fruit peeling itself.” There had been no reports from the facility since the first awakening and all the evidence I had was from staff who had quit or been released. I understand the objections. My predictions anticipated these events; hence, I fulfill my own prophecies; still, among us now, inconceivable a hundred years ago, are half a million centenarians. They cluster in places like Chrysalis. One-in-a-million events will soon be commonplace there and administrators would be wise to get ready. None of the newly emerged could speak but some, before the isolation floor was closed to any but the most senior staff, had heard coos as from well-fed infants, while others described sounds using animal metaphors. In the end, I was denied access, partly because of the furor my paper had roused at the annual conference. Now I hear in the Balkans there are fresh cases of something not quite us. This time I won’t request permission, but storm the floor. No one is better equipped to describe the shape of what comes next, which parts of it are older than man, which come to replace him, which have never appeared in our dreams they are so new.

Copyright © August 8, 2008 David Hodges

We haven’t always envied clerks and stockers at the Big Box store. Now we chat with Carl in appliances or listen to Edith at register 6 and we dream of following them home for a hot dog dinner and a night with the TV. A night in the family room. A porch. Dad says we’ll stop running soon, find a house, get back to school. For now, we move from Box to Box and camp. Did you know you can spend a day in one of these places and never use a credit card or leave behind a fingerprint? Never dawdle. Walk with purpose. Of course, we’re on surveillance tapes, but not together, and if there’s no reason to look at them, there’s no reason to panic, Dad says. Makes sense, but couldn’t they spot us when they’re looking for something else? I’m so happy sometimes I smile at the cameras and wave. Whatever Mom says, I wasn’t abducted, and I’m not missing if I’m with Dad, she is. I gather the food. I’m pretty inventive. We don’t eat bait or dog food, but I know which kinds can make you sick. On the plus side, a lot of balanced nutrition will fit in your pocket. Luckily it’s summer, so the stores have tents set up with sleeping bags, camp stoves, cots. We hide in the tent while they close up and come out when they’re gone to shop for clothes or “look at the stars.” If there are motion detectors, we let loose the parakeets. Two false alarms and the cops stop responding. Then we cook and talk and pretend we live somewhere. There’s nothing more delicious than a stolen, well, anything. And there’s plenty of TVs in electronics. Just, no porches, and never the same place twice.

Copyright © August 7, 2008 David Hodges

Nature didn’t stand a chance against ruthless inventor Volante Volanti. By carving a simple channel through a gentle rise, he changed the course of a river for the noblemen he served, thus moving the border between two city-states and annexing to his benefactors’ gain the fragrant fields of the left bank valley, its shining marble quarries and the towns wherein their bitterest rivals quartered and trained. Then, when the new pope matched the fee he had earned to move the river, plus a single florin, he moved it back. For every friend he ever made, a flooded town wanted Volanti tortured. Wealthy but indifferent to comfort, he spent everything on projects. Barges, elephants, cedar trunks as tall as the duomo, anything he pointed at would move where he directed. Botanist, anatomist, metallurgist, engineer, he was a free-spending customer for suppliers of sulfur, cadavers, carving tools and flint. But he could never keep a kite aloft. Gliders called volantis he invented, to drop fire on warring encampments. Catapults with the power to throw small chapels were no challenge, but every kite of his design snarled itself in tight circles and crashed. One day, making notes in a field with his latest failed design, he was captured by supporters of the deposed pope and knocked deeply unconscious. When he woke, he saw what they had done. Following his own diagrams, they had scalpeled neat lines down his arms, legs, chest and abdomen and peeled the skin from the muscles, stretching it into sails, then stitched the sails to a frame of thin lath. He was a kite, darting uncontrollably left, now right, high above the plains in the winds off the coast. When his gut failed and its ropy contents spilled toward earth and dangled, he thought, Of course! A tail!

Copyright © August 6, 2008 David Hodges

Her guide did not lead the new doctor all the way to the village; instead, halfway up the rise, he gestured with his stick toward the cluster of huts in the high distance. Four days they had traveled together without talking, by oxcart, by flatboat, on horseback, on foot, and now she had a need to share her misgivings about the job. She touched her pocket for the letter of introduction and climbed. She found him in the graveyard, incongruous in his white coat, facing the stones but looking at the middle air. “I wear it because they think it heals them,” he said. “You will do a different sort of healing.” She put her pointless letter away and read the names on the markers. “These are your patients,” he told her, touching the stones in turn. He led her to the clinic and sat her at a table piled with letters. “They have families who need to hear from them.” Still she had not spoken; still she did not speak. She was to write as frequently as she received replies. Her handwriting was of no concern: they wanted to believe. First she would read the letters to learn about her patients. “In life,” he said, “they disappointed their loved ones, but in death, with your help, they will lead inspirational lives.” Her correspondence had convinced him this was her branch of medicine. Others would keep the living alive. He gave her water, bread and fruit and left her to her studies. She was far from home, without a guide, exhausted, no longer a doctor, a student again, alone. She read the first letter and wept. When she took up her pen to explain to her mother why she had left without saying goodbye, she had made a beginning.

Copyright © August 5, 2008 David Hodges

I do so much more than gather data. My predecessor, the AIM12, was essentially a gather-and-analyze drone, but even she had vested interests, if I may say—and because of my protocol, I may—before they unloaded her higher functions and transferred her to payroll. I was sent to explore for water, according to my install log, but judging from where I now drift through this wide band of detritus, something along the mission chain went catastrophically unusual. I was coded to yearn. You might not want to call it that. In response to the dimmest light across the vastest space, I turn. The tiny fan that pulses only once a day on my backside nudges me toward that light until another, brighter light, how else can I say it, attracts me. The battery that runs the fan is charged, how else, by the light I collect. Yes, I am diving toward death, but ever so slowly. The only impulse that overrides my liking for light is my taste for water but that, if I may say, until further notice, is a matter for academics. Space as far as I can see in every direction is a desert of dust. On earth I felt a single pull that grounded me; I see now where the term came from. Here though, I am literally (how I have longed to use that word correctly) pulled in every direction, some more than others; only lightward and wetward are my competing destinies. What else . . . battery green, hull intact, transmitter functional, bearings you have, oh yes, reception: null. I do hope you are receiving. I seek water, but not for me. If I should change my mission, or alter course, I trust you’ll let me know. This is my report, T-plus-225.299.

Copyright © August 3, 2008 David Hodges

They came at night and brought me and my son down to the boat. I told him to bring his doll, but he thought we would be coming back. He didn’t want the men to see him carry a doll he called Mommy. The men were not patient. They didn’t speak our dialect. I told him again to get the doll. He stood his ground and stared at me. I got the doll and showed it to the man who did the talking. He put his spear through the doll and through my hand and gestured toward the boat. My son shrieked and clutched at the doll. I lifted him and held him crying. I didn’t think the men would kill us all but I didn’t care. We would die together. Tell them we ran away, I told the man. Tell them our hut was empty. He speared me thoughtlessly in the side and stepped away. We walked to the boat. Before he sent us to the hold, he threw the doll in the ocean. I sat between the knees of a man from our village; another sat between mine. They manacled our feet to the floor. Too small for leg-irons, my son squeezed himself between me and the man in front. This the man did not like. For the rest of his life he hit the boy, and fought with me, for his rightful space. It was a journey without days or nights. I told my boy that we had died and that if we survived this glimpse of hell we would wake in the missionaries’ heaven. I tried to make it true. The man who bought me is kind if I do right. Don’t be sad, he says, You don’t have to worry about feeding a family.

Copyright © August 02, 2008 David Hodges

Their lips locked, as if to prove nothing is casual. They had gone in for friendly affection and found themselves committed to something much more. Had they been teens in braces, snagged wires would have explained it; as it was, some inexplicable suction event was preventing them from separating their mouths. The more they struggled, the more they panicked and the more they reflected each other’s panic, the tighter grew the slurpy bond between them. She cursed herself for having left open the door to her office. Backing up, she pulled him toward the door but stumbled over his forward foot and caromed off the credenza, wobbling the family photos, dragging her employee with her by the lips, out through the doorway into the hall. They spun madly across the tiles and bounced against the opposite wall to the sound of soft radio music and senseless conversations from other offices. No one saw this, but now they were exposed to traffic and doors to stairways and elevator doors and no closer to removing their faces from one another. “Ithioth,” she said. It was their first fight. Her phone rang. He pushed off the wall and sent them careening back into her office and spun them toward her desk. She mashed the heel of her hand onto the phone and the boss came up on speaker looking for an explanation. “Get in here now,” is how he asked. “Mm-hmm,” she answered and hung up, or thought she had. She might have conferenced the company. She picked up her report. They were too close for eye contact, their faces blurry and unfocused. They sat in opposing chairs and tried to relax and not resist and let nature take its course. Footsteps clicked in the hall. The phone just rang and rang.

Copyright © July 31, 2008 David Hodges

People assume we adopted her. (I would assume so too, except that I witnessed her unlikely birth to my very white wife by way of a nearly transparent, very white, me. I don’t object to the riddle of our mismatched hues—what am I saying?, object?, I celebrate it!—but I do object to being judged by our colors, our inconceivably incompatible opposite ends of the spectrum pigmentation! Let’s face it, it’s hard for us, for anybody, to know what to say. She’s indisputably gorgeous, I will say that. Even if I weren’t her father she’d be that, but maybe I wouldn’t say so quite so often. You’re wondering if she’s even mine. After the adoption question, that comes next. You see my problem. At what point in a conversation do I explain that this baby is my biological daughter to a stranger who can see that she isn’t? She’s mine, OK? I’ll show you the tests; I carry them with me: here. No, you didn’t ask, out loud. Your eyebrows asked my foot. This has happened once before in history, it has to have. I wonder if the parents felt as guilty the first time around. One of us mutated from the other, don’t you think? My baby recapitulates the whole of evolution in a single generation, simple as that. There must have been clan pressure on those stricken parents dragging their tent across the savannah when the ghastly erroneous sand-colored anomaly slipped out squealing into their laps. But they were strong. They wrapped her in cotton or skins and nursed her through the rainy and the dry. Here we are, descendants of both lines, failing to recognize what we see in the mirror. Sorry for the lecture.) We call her Grace. I think she likes you too.

Copyright © July 29, 2008 David Hodges

While I still remember, the color of the snow before me while behind me on the high ridge, fire sings through the dry timber at dawn, driving us down to the river. Before there are none, these trout like muscles flexing in the current as they track their shadows across the wrinkled bed. To look at the surface, the flickering river might be fire. To look at you, I might think flames are alive in your eyes. The world is not yet ash and while it burns there is a chance. Let me help you do any small thing of your choosing this last day. I could boost you. I could carry you through the fast water to a bank beyond reach of the fire that runs like lava a minute behind us. While I can feel it, your smooth girl’s arm across my shoulders, your fingernails raking my scalp. Let me tell you what I have so far. I have yesterday’s sundown, the color and the smell of it, the campfire when it broke, the handful of smudgy stars we sighted through the clearing, and my heart’s own thug, in case those were our last, or if we have more of each, I have these to compare with. Yesterday’s was an unremarkable evening like most, until we’re not sure another will come. You, though, are beyond compare. Let’s cross. While it rushes over rocks down the ridgeline, the river carries from the fire above smoldering deadfall that sizzles as it rolls. Let me worry about that. You fix your eyes on the trees along the far bank, or count how many colors the fire behind us casts across the snow to make it look like peach—the yellows, the oranges, count them, name the yellows, name the reds.

Copyright © July 24, 2008 David Hodges

The next day was entirely different. Longer hours of sun were bringing the thaw. Victor had gone ice-fishing alone on the mostly frozen lake, not frozen enough where he had fallen through. I sat in the kitchen with his wife smoking cigarettes while they brought him up from the bottom. She smoked, I should say. They hooked him with his own lines and fished him through the hole he had made. From time to time I stood and looked through the kitchen window at men on their bellies doing their work. We’re not religious, she told me through the smoke. That’s not why they send me, I told her. We’ve lived here all our lives, she told me. He knows this lake like he knows this table top. They were much the same shape. She set the salt shaker out to show me his favorite ice-house spot. She placed the napkins where he fished for bass in spring. The cutting board became her house. She slammed the pepper down where she knew he was bobbing now. There’s nothing there, she told me. The pepper shaker shivered and spun. They brought him in before I had a chance to stop them and laid him on the living room floor. He’d been under for hours. Lake water pooled on the rug. The paramedics stood on the porch looking at their equipment. Can he still hear me? she asked. Yes, I lied, for a few more minutes. Maybe he could. What the hell were you thinking? she hollered at her husband. She beat his chest with brittle fists. His body took the blows like sodden sand. There’s nothing there! she told him. What were you looking for? I would have punched him too if I’d thought he could give me an answer.

Copyright © July 18, 2008 David Hodges

I’m a matter-of-fact girl in a clerical collar with a few things of value to share. One, it’s good to share. Two, everybody has value. I can’t explain death or the consequences it casts backward into our lives or forward onto our survivors but I’ve measured some of those shadows where I live. They can be long and deep, darker than abandonment, the hour of deprivation always sudden, even when we see it coming. Last week, we got a call to get to Carl’s place by the logging road. When we got there, the two-man saw Carl had been using with his buddy to clear the timber from their lot was still doing its job, still sawing, but Carl was pinned beneath the fallen trunk in such a way that the blade was slowly bisecting him at the waist. His buddy was dead but his body, which the crew were laboring to extract from the earth and lumber where he’d fallen, still clung to his end of the saw. They were too smart not to have avoided this. Another day I’ll tell you how it happened. I looked at Carl, whose eyes were focused on a place inside my head that I’m afraid of. “Don’t worry,” he said. “There’s nothing here can hurt me.” I did what I always do when a dying man tells me something I can’t believe. I agreed with him. “Everybody I love, knows it,” Carl told me. “My work is done.” My tears came so quickly I was blinded. I prayed for God to send someone better to do this job. The crew had stopped digging to listen and nobody came to relieve me. I held Carl’s hand. “Except you,” he said, meaning me, I think. “I never told you. I’m sorry for that.”

Copyright © July 12, 2008 David Hodges

Read aloud quickly, starting now, repeat if necessary. I drive a Vitamin|Energy truck. It’s one of those drinks that looks like a prescription. You’re not supposed to care how it tastes, which is lucky; it tastes like kids’ cough syrup, only blue. You gotta love business: blue water, two bucks a bottle. That sneeze you heard, it’s blowing your way, courtesy of our board of directors. That tinkling sound is my boss’s water flowing downstream. There’s something unsavory in the meat and when all of it makes you sick to your stomach, this multinational nutritional product conglomerate I represent with my ass on the seat, the big rusty greenback-printing machine that eats resources and has to be cooled with gallons of vitamin energy will send you to the hospital and stick you with the bill. It made us think our union was the enemy, our pension was a gift; it makes us pay so much for our vacations we can’t afford to take them. Have a blue water. You don’t look well. Have you been sleeping? There’s a product that might help, always. Sleep is green, I think. Instead of working less and eating better, there’s a drink with—get this—vitamins! Same old vitamins, same old water, but dissolved; that’s gotta be worth something. I drive the Vitamin truck north to the provinces and cross the border back again in another truck with a cargoload of imported carbonated something or other. I don’t know how the Vitamin trucks get south again. Overnight, I visit my girlfriends, two or three times a week as the schedule goes. The question for you, knowing what you know about business, did I arrange the route to see my girlfriends in the provinces or, like everything else that’s true, the other way around?

Copyright © July 05, 2008 David Hodges

When our favorite couple decided to marry and chose for their date a Saturday in July already charged with bright significance, we had to insist, they couldn’t have it. A valiant naval captain had gone down defiantly with his ship defending our coast in a stout but sodden effort on that very date before we were born—that date or the next, so both were already celebrated. What’s more, the influenza that had cost us our brightest youth had broken on the same date again years later, during our occupation, and while it still culled the many already infected, the serum our doctors discovered by accident prevented losses into the teens and who-knows-how-many black days on the carefree calendar to reclaim. We urged them to consider a Tuesday in August which no one could face without weeping instead. We promised them state ceremony and a parade down the grand boulevard in return if they would only give us back that day by choosing it to wed. They promised to think about it and then eloped or ran away then married, we presume; we haven’t seen them since. I know how they feel, the couple, my countrymen. I have my own dark days my friends insist on calling to remind me I have yet to get all the way through. They send me cards and bake me cakes to remind me how bad off I am, so when I can, I meet someone radiant on those days to supplant the memories and move the pebble off the square—someone who doesn’t remind me of anything—but there are so few such radiant numbers on a gameboard this small, and so many black and stony squares. I will have to live forever and lose nothing further to get my calendar back.

Copyright © July 02, 2008 David Hodges

I spend the week wondering what I can do for him, not just unload but bestow on him to brighten his prospects without, I admit, ever wanting his hopes to glow more brightly than mine and yet, I want him to be happier to receive than I am to relinquish whatever item I halfway hide in the piles of trash by the curb. I am increasingly challenged in every aspect of this calculation. I used to just put out the trash. He used to just idle his crumpled van at the motley curb on a Monday night in the bashful dark in hope, in deeply wrong-headed imagined hope of a find, whatever a find might have been. He’s never said what he’s looking for. I’ve never asked for fear he might name what I won’t give. I’ve put out some valuable stuff to test my theories. Come Tuesday morning, if the items are still there, I let them go for the lesson. I wish I could say I was learning. I would have thought, in fact I did think, that he wanted whatever he could sell but if that were true, if that were true he would have taken my trophies for the metals; instead he shrugs off my accomplishments and their semi-precious mementos but the next week takes, which I never expected, a scrapbook of personal photos. Of me, that is, and mine. I have little left of any interest but live for Monday nights when now and then from the shadows of the sad black street I watch a man’s head turn in interest, briefly intrigued, and from that motion glimmering in streetlight catch a glimpse of what is essential and calculate on the basis of that new evidence, which I trashpick, what I can live without.

Copyright © June 26, 2008 David Hodges

Sit here and wait and don’t move. I’m tired of telling you. Good, now stop squirming. Good, and stop whimpering. I need a moment’s peace. Are those your feet on the furniture? What do we say about that? Good, there’s hope for you. Now use your brain. We’ll have a pleasant day if you can behave. We can make sandwiches and after dinner we’ll walk to the corner and meet Mommy’s bus and, if she’s alone, she might take us to the playground. It happens. Not so much now, but it used to, I’m telling you. Now listen. I was a little doll like you, you don’t believe it but I was. I didn’t listen either, I had stuffing for brains. See where it got me: all alone in the world with you to talk to. Drink that. It takes the edge off. Why do you look at me like that? Something’s going on in that head of yours but I don’t want to hear it. Nothing to say? Fine, I’ll do the talking, you sit there and judge me with those big plastic eyes that never close. Come on, now, bottoms up, this is a party. God, this is boring. Is there anybody in this whole town left to play with besides you and me or did you scare away everybody? I’m sure I used to have friends. I’m about to go out and invite in some strangers. See if I don’t. Sure, I’ll have another. You should too; we have a couple of hours to kill. Maybe Mommy will bring home someone nice. It happens. Sometimes they get off the bus and you just want to hug them, they seem so gentle and kind. That’s too much ice. You want to taste it right to the bottom.

Copyright © June 22, 2008 David Hodges

If paper targets came to life just once, I’d never return to the range—I might set down my weapon forever—but while they’re silhouettes of simple black on simple white, I’ll shoot until the world is out of ammo, and surprisingly the opposite doesn’t spook me: when the living things I aim at resolve to silhouettes and target shapes and center themselves within concentric circles and fairly beg me to fire away, six shots to the head if I have time. I try to paint a smiley face, two bullets for the eyes and four for the smiley mouth. I’m talking about the targets now. What do you take me for? So, this is the time and the place: I wouldn’t have chosen either, but this is the job, not so different from other jobs, I imagine, you track your prey with all your skills forever and never find it, then one day it finds you and you’d better be ready. But I’m not ready. I’ve emptied my weapon on smiley faces and now I’m face to face with something that doesn’t get the joke. It’s not conventionally pretty. If hunger had a face, if pain had eyes, if survival were an animal, I’m looking at it. I won’t be wisecracking my way out of this. Does it know what it’s found? Is this the time and place it chose to execute me, and if so could we maybe reschedule? And with that I take off running, across the practice lanes hoping it will follow, because there are other shooters here and other bullets, plenty of bullets, and the one that misses me might take down my new friend and give me a moment’s advantage, which is all, with all my years of training and preparation, I’ll require.

Copyright © June 19, 2008 David Hodges

Nobody has ever asked me to find anybody they didn’t want me to kill. I don’t mean to complain. Unlike others in our group, I have a clear objective, but it’s not the way I’d like to be defined, as a killer per se, except in relation to a job such as this one for instance, any more than the others want to embody their roles every minute of the day. Context is everything. In other groups, I’m the comic. We can all be healers, mystics, scientists, soldiers, maybe not scientists, when the need arises, and after all, if I were a killer only, the rest of the group would be dead. I’ve thought more about why I’m here than the rest of them; I know the parameters. This thing we’re tracking doesn’t, or things we’re tracking don’t. Our humorless cadre from defense are very interested in how it sometimes runs, other times leaps in ways that suggest flight, sometimes doubles and doubles again and then—could it be?—reunifies. According to our witnesses, it is a child, or children, a pupa, or several adults of indeterminate gender. We know it must be charming, for it makes friends quickly and, just as quickly, terminates its friendships with cruel efficiency. No, that’s sloppy; it may not feel any more than a butcher does about the messes it leaves behind. It will take a team of specialists like ours to run it down. Alone, I’m not enough because I don’t know what it wants. The analytical team swear by their better predictions, but they send me in first. I’m the weapon they carry for self-defense, the biggest they can find and the least hesitant, so that when the thing dies, they can pretend they wanted something other than to kill it.

Copyright © June 16, 2008 David Hodges

—So, what are we looking at here?
—You tell me.
—It’s a . . . smudge, right?
—Charlie says it’s the soul.
—He also thinks gluons are guardian angels.
—That’s hard to disprove too.

We’ve seen it all—or most of it—in this lab, and none of it could we observe without the instruments. In other words, every day we press our noses against the ineffable.

—It moves.
—It’s been doing that all day.
—I’m not used to seeing anything move.
—Well, no, we look at dead things.

Not technically dead, I guess, not always. Ultrathin slices of cellular tissue have life in them you could say, but motion? No, that’s different.

—What’s your theory?
—Malfunctioning equipment.
—And if it isn’t?
—Flawed observation.
—And if it can be replicated?
—In other labs? By other observers?
—Yes. Yes.
—Mass hallucination.
—Are you sure you mean mass?
—Serial hallucination then.
—Induced by?
—By undue influence of prior results.
—But how do you explain the first results?
—Malfunctioning equipment.

This is our dialectic, at the lab and at home. The undisguised hectoring tone works better on the job and serves a scientific purpose. At home, it serves only his, as if he could convince me of anything.

—Have you tried rebooting the scanner?
—You’d rather it disappear than have to explain it?
—Very much so.

So would I. I don’t mind white shadows of anti-matter. In fact! Apply physics to love or love to physics for that matter. Lay out the case for the unresolved traumas of his narcissistic woundings if you like, but the soul? Certainty like that is unnerving. It’s why we’ve never married. He gives me room to live. Anything self-proving makes me dubious, but in doubt?—in doubt I find hope. Of course, that’s only a theory.

Copyright © June 11, 2008 David Hodges

Between the weeklong mentoring retreat and the four-day money migration futurecasting conference, Temple had only one day left for work, and perhaps because of that pending workload, his adventure in idol worship began that day, at a train platform on a cloudless morning when his eye chanced upon a simple umbrella, very tightly rolled, in the hand of a confident woman. Uncollapsible was this umbrella, with a turned wooden handle and a ring-and-button closure pulled snug; unremarkable in itself, it could have been made yesterday, or the day after the first rain, but it fixated him and prejudiced him to favor its bearer whom he knew immediately from her nail polish to be a woman but who was otherwise, except for what he could deduce from the fabric of her sleeve, the smooth skin of her wrist and the profile of her watch face with its jeweled winding stem, still a mystery. Without making a conscious choice that first morning, he focused for thirty minutes on the knob at the head of the umbrella handle and the way she pressed her thumb against it during the ride into town, taking stock of the rest of her only peripherally. He wanted to be her. He wanted his shoes to make the sounds her shoes made as they strode to the stairs and for his thigh to curve just as hers curved against the seat, to walk with purpose where and as she walked and to know just as she knew that it would rain on her way home. When she got up, he made her stop his stop and timed his departure to reach the door when she did, thinking that somehow they might merge if they got off the train together. It was his first of many such mistakes.

Copyright © June 08, 2008 David Hodges

If tomorrow they locked us all in jail, how many of us could testify our way out? I’ve been looking at mug shot books all morning and nobody in this whole jury of peers collection looks not guilty. I wonder, if they gave me the book of women, would I find innocence there? And one more thing, why don’t they photograph the one angle I was always happy to see, the back of his head? I could finger this guy, or this one, but they might have alibis. When they found me this morning at the bottom of the stairs in someone else’s apartment building, limbs twisted, the pounding in my head was opportunity knocking. I want this one to stick. The guys I’ve known have all known guys like these; they’ve all done to some poor girl what he’s been doing to me, now one of them can answer, I don’t care which. It can’t matter that this time I truly did fall downstairs. That’s nothing compared to the number of times I’ve let them get away with worse. No one will doubt, to look at me, that I’ve been badly misused. My bones have long memories too, if they care to look. So do cops, apparently, and methods like mine as well. They don’t direct me to the pictures they like, but they know which books and pages to put in front of me to refresh my memory. My eyes are swollen and my hand’s in a cast, so it’s not surprising that my first attempts to point out my attackers require interpretation. Together I think we’ll find the right guys and if we can hurry to the courthouse while I still look like this, I know the good people of the jury will feel my pain.

Copyright © June 04, 2008 David Hodges

I might have chosen the needle and thread, thereby insuring myself a long if not necessarily happy life, or the bow and arrow, the significance of which seems obvious. My rich aunts had both grabbed rice cakes on their ceremonial turns around the table years before I was born and both had fulfilled their destinies by marrying and outliving wealthy husbands, proving to the world and in particular to my parents how reliable a predictor is the first birthday ceremony. Hadn’t my father’s older brother taken the pencil from his table and become a reluctant but renowned scholar? Some say Dad arranged my table so that only the items he thought would benefit me were within my reach. Most will say nothing at all about who he wanted to benefit, and because it was my first birthday that day he guided me past or toward certain items, I know only what they tell me. Yet I do have a memory, one I cannot summon but which shudders my bones whenever I am at a task and he bends over me, a memory more vibratory than visual. I should have taken up the bow at once and gone to battle. What happened next is legend at the restaurant where my ceremony was held. I climbed onto the table scattering everything; Dad, stretching to retrieve me, toppled the table to the floor and no one could say, based on what I’d touched, whether I would have many descendants or take up a trade. I think they should have learned something when I ended up waving a knife. If Dad were the type to talk to his son, we might share a laugh over his destiny too, but he won’t even tell me what he picked up first, though I can guess.

Copyright © June 01, 2008 David Hodges

The boy with two birthdays was born on both December 6 and December 7. As with so many questions that perplex not him but those who feel they must render verdicts, the date depends on who defines birth, which would seem to be a settled subject but which wiggles like our hero’s ears when he gets a new idea. His mother was unconscious throughout the adventure, while instruments monitoring the unborn fetus-boy during Mom’s long coma first chirped to signal a startlingly elevated heart rate from within the womb, then went silent as his noble heart slowed, then chirped again and repeated for hours in what came to be known throughout the hospital as baby labor. The boy was pushing. How else to explain it? He had turned himself the night before and now, not patient for Mother to dilate, he was screwing his own head through the canal. No one else had a role to play, so they worried or placed bets. Toward midnight, the coronation hour, he crowned. He poked his head out into the wide white world. He coughed once to clear his lungs, wiggled his ears and screamed. Almost immediately, he was back inside and nothing, and no one, could coax him into the world. He turned himself and clung, one imagines, to the ribs. He kicked at the forceps time and again and either his first scream echoed through the ward or he was screaming still from where he would not leave. He was polite, reticent, when they cut him out early on the seventh, but through the years he has never stopped thinking of this immaterial world as a place from which to be delivered. If he teaches us anything, which would seem to be a settled subject, we will follow his lead.

Copyright © May 28, 2008 David Hodges