--MAY ALL YOUR FAVORITE BANDS STAY TOGETHER

                                                   Go Ahead and Dance

            Imagine this: a skinny eight year old dancer, who doesn’t know she is one, discovering her gift by breaking the embrace of gloved hands and twirling--spinning and spinning and spinning--atop the wet grave of her just-buried grandfather.

            “What the hell?”

            “Is she crazy?”

            “Whose daughter is that?”

            She hears this.  The words are like confetti at a ticker tape parade, jumbled, stringy and attached to nothing.  She can spin all day.  She’s not dizzy or tired or anything but joy-filled.

 A pastor quoted scripture earlier—something about grace and unconditional love, then more about the shadow of death.

“Stop it!” her mother screams.  When she’s angry, Amy’s mother resembles the dead old man.  “Stop with your spinning.  Amy, I mean it.”  The dirt is loose and fresh on top of the grave, dark like coffee grounds.  A clump of it sticks to Amy’s black boot as her mother pulls her back into the crowd.  Even though she’s no longer dancing, in Amy’s mind she is.

When they’re home Amy notices how the phone has a hollow cowbell sound to its ring.  That night and the next day, it rings constantly.  Amy’s mother whispers.  Much of what she says is apologies for Amy’s behavior at the funeral.  “I don’t know what’s gotten into her.”

                                                ***

            He always took his teeth out and looked at them, as if scanning for trapped food slivers before putting them back in, and that was the sign.

            “Dance for me, will ya?”

            His speech sounded gravelly and rough, same as his hands.  His whiskers were like the wire brush her mother used to scour the oven.

            “Go on,” he said, “do some dancing before we get started.  You’re prettier that way.  Go on, go ahead and dance.”

            The old man’s mouth was foamy, as if he had rabies.  Amy read a story about an entire town that ended up zombies because of getting rabies.  Her Grandpa looks the same as the zombie whose hands were chopped off, who kept right on approaching with his limbless body.

                                                                       ***

           “Dancing?” her teacher asks.  “How do you expect to make a living off of something like that?”

           Amy is fourteen now, first day of school introductions.  Her grandpa’s long buried, her father dead since forever.

           “You need to think more practical.  Be a nurse.  There are never enough nurses.  Why’re you looking at me like that?”

                                                                        ***

            “Hey, Tatiana!  Tatiana!”  This kid is twenty, tops.  They pop up, a new one, like mushrooms, all the time.  They want her.  They have something to prove, and by saving her or ravaging her they think they’ll become whole and more masculine.

She’s heels and wheels on stage.  The bottom of Amy’s corset cuts her skin above the last rib and her mind swirls with the strobe, bobbing shadows around the fire pole. 

He presses his head beneath the rope on the lowest rung and sits his square chin on the rubber ring matt.  He grins.  He’s kind of cute.  No he is, he is cute.

           “Let me take you out, to a movie, just once.  We could even go dancing, real dancing, like at a club.”

           This starts a fire.  She doesn’t mean to kick him so hard.  Her boots are tipped with metal.  He screams.  He comes through the ropes and is moving so fast, like a jaguar, and grabbing her hair and slamming his fist against her head and face, anywhere to hurt her, to transfer his shame, and the bouncer is not as tough as he looks, because he’s slow to defend her and it takes him plus another guy and the manager to get the beating stopped.

                                                                       ***

           Everett is the boy she lives with after skipping out on community college.  She dances for him in the living room and sometimes on the bed when he asks.

           “I like that,” he says.  He’s got a cruel streak but he’s the only person that ever seems to appreciate her dancing.  She can take a lot of licks, but she has to dance.

Has to.

--WHO WAS I WHEN I USED TO CALL YOUR NAME?

…I entered a contest and wrote the story below for it.  There were two judges.  One called the story “amazing” and gushed quite a bit.  The other not so much.  She didn’t say she hated it, but she had a ton of suggestions and wanted revisions.  I think I like it just the way it is. 

You tell me.

                                                                   It                                                  

            My wife’s face is always bruised now, even when it’s not.  

At breakfast, my eyes skim the flap of newspaper dangling in front of me as I steal a glance, seeing the swollen eggplant bruise around my wife’s right eye socket, her lip pulpy and blue-black, split in three places, her lower jaw stitched and covered with sheer gauze strips like a childish yet macabre railroad track.  It’s all imagination, a latent memory triggered by today’s date, yet I hate myself nonetheless because her actual face is as beautiful now as ever.

I try not to stutter or cough or choke or cry.  I reach inside of me, into my chest cavity, an invisible hand stretching fingers, tightening, forming a claw, reaching for something to tether me, to make both of us normal again, the thing we once were.

            My wife forces a smile.  She’s still not good at faking.  She’s stiff and too erect in her chair, either a puppet master or a puppet, I’ll never know which, yet she tries hard as ever, saying, “More juice, please,” while jiggling a glass in front of her across the table. 

I stand and fetch a jug and pour.  I lean down and kiss the potato-white scar where her hair is parted.  She sighs but does not reach for me, her hand on the glass, fingers firm, gripping it like a grenade.

            “You think Jess is up,” I say, “or should I wake her?”  Jess is our six year old.  We’ve woken earlier than usual for a Saturday, but neither my wife nor I mentions why, even though we both know why.

            “Give her another five minutes,” my wife says, a trite enough answer.

            I return to my seat and sit down.  I think about time, how it’s absurdly consistent, always marching, marching, marching, a dutiful soldier, unavoidable, unimpeachable, the one sure thing in life that cannot be swayed.  I think:  A year is three-hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes.  I think:  It’s three hundred sixty-five days.  I think:  A year can be torture or bliss, and for us it’s been mostly the former, a kite tail of half-truths and voids, distrust and raw reveals.  I think:  A year and a day ago my wife had not been raped.

            It’s our wedding anniversary today, as well as the anniversary of the night It happened.  It is how we used to refer to the rape in the weeks and months afterward, in bed at night, tense and unable to sleep, or else us at counseling sessions with the therapist who had a harsh German-sounding name and intense, wolf-blue eyes that always seemed to be glaring at us.  Now we never speak of It, though It permeates everything, all these days later, especially this one.

***

            The night of It and our anniversary we’d been happy, married five years, still very much lovers as well as spouses.  My wife’s mother had Jess for the night.  We were eating at La Coupole, my wife’s favorite French restaurant.  We’d feasted and had drunk nearly an entire bottle of wine.  Giddy and loose, we loitered once our meal was finished, fictionalizing the various couples and dinner guests around us, assigning them clever and absurd identities—

“He’s an Iranian spy, but his girlfriend doesn’t know it.” 

“Yes, but she’s in love with his best friend…who has is also a spy, which she does know.” 

Eventually the waiter needed our table and, rather rudely, he verbally shooed us away.  When the check came, I felt fuzzy-headed but signed the bill and threw the waiter a look he ignored.  Climbing up the parking garage steps, we paused in the stairwell for some sloppy kissing, our hands moving as feverishly over each other’s bodies as they had when we’d first started dating.  When someone passed by us, we both smoothed our hair and straightened our clothes. 

My wife asked, “You remembered your card, right?” because I was always forgetting my credit card.

“Of course,” I said. 

“Check to be sure.” 

When I pulled out my wallet and looked, I realized I’d done it again.  “Damn it.”

“You goof ball.”

“Idiot, is more like it.  And the worst part is I want you so bad right now.  You have no idea.  I’m dying.”

“You horn dog.  Go get your card and I’ll wait in the car.  We could do it there if you want.”

“It?”

“Make love.”

When I kissed her hard, she bit my lower lip and gave me an alluring grin.

“Be back in a jiff,” I said, tossing her the keys while I plunged up the steps.

Since that night I’ve bounded up those stairs thousands of times, sometimes in my dreams where my legs are cement-laden and the steps hover air-born and unreachable.  Sometimes I’ll be at work on my computer and the smallest thing will trigger a memory and I’ll be racing up the steps only to find they are just sets of stairs leading from one formation to another, like an Escher drawing, no door anywhere, nothing to do but keep climbing.

I’d been gone for a little over fifteen minutes.  The restaurant was more crowded than when we’d first arrived, a clot of people jamming the entrance.  I had to muscle my way through, warding off aspersions from patiently waiting couples.  When I found my waiter, he pointed me back to the host who seemed flummoxed and handed me off to a busboy.  No one could locate my credit card, until finally fifteen minutes later when a black-haired, acne-faced boy held it above his head like some rare medal he’d won. 

Fifteen minutes for It to happen, for my wife to be brutally attacked, for Us to be ripped asunder.

                                                      ***

During therapy my wife was persistently apologetic, as if It was somehow her fault.  She was sorry for everything—

“I’m sorry I can’t talk about it more openly.”

“I’m sorry I get angry a lot, but when I’m not angry I feel dead and wasted, like a dry sponge, and then feeling that way makes me angry all over again.” 

“I’m don’t ever want to celebrate our anniversary, no reminder.  Promise me we won’t.  I don’t want a card or a present or anything.  I know how horrible that makes me.  I’m sorry.”

I did get a card, however.  It was one of those with an illustration—just a simple sketch of a cord of rope knotted together in the center—where the two inside pages are left blank.  On them, I’ve written down how much I love my wife, how I will always love her, how she’s the best thing that’s ever happened in my life.  When I read the words over last night they sounded juvenile, something a kid in middle school would say, but they were my words, honest ones, all of them.  I didn’t write about It.  I ended with—I know our future is going to be great—thinking that too was an adolescent thing to say, but meaning it nonetheless.

I’ve hidden the card in the kitchen cupboard above the sink, under the stack of plates we got all those years ago as a wedding present when we’d registered at Bed, Bath and Beyond.  As I sit at the table staring at my wife’s pile of scrambled eggs that resemble orange entrails, I can almost hear the card in the cupboard, ticking like a detonated time bomb.

“I should wake Jess,” I say.

My wife glances over the top of my head, perhaps staring out the window over the kitchen sink.  She never looks me in the eye anymore.  When she nods in the slow, uncertain way of an aged person, a blade cuts through my chest and the air smells flat and dead again.

                                                    ***

Jess is already awake as I enter her room.  She’s reading Goosebumps and seems bored by my presence.

I want to say something funny or light, like, “What are you doing up here so late, we thought you were dead,” but that and everything else that comes to mind is anything but light or funny.

“You coming down any time soon?” I ask.

“Uh huh.”

“Like today?”

“Maybe.”

“It’s Saturday.  We can do something.”

“Uh huh.”

“I love you, you know.”  I don’t know where this comes from, or perhaps I do, and I wish I hadn’t said it but it’s out there now, the words floating and gluey, when Jess pauses for a second and looks up and wrinkles her face and then sticks her tongue out at me, as a dam breaks, tears welling in eyes at once, so that I have to leave her room and rush to the bathroom down the hall.

                                                    ***

Though my wife says she’d like to stay in, I convince her to go to the zoo.  It’s Jess’s favorite place.  She loves the giraffes--their necks and stripes and snouts, their dopey-looking ears.  The majority of our visit is spent where they’re corralled.

“Daddy, can we get a pet giraffe?  Maybe for my birthday?”

“I don’t think that’s legal.”

“Why not?”

“Giraffes are supposed to be out in the wild.”

“But this isn’t the wild.”

As with her mother, I’m often at a loss with Jess.  It doesn’t make me feel less intelligent or insignificant so much as it makes me feel cowardly, not knowing how to tell the truth in a convincing yet lenient enough way.

My wife says her stomach has started to give her fits.  She’d like to go.  Jess pouts.

“We can stop at Dairy Queen on the way home,” I say, seeing the look my wife gives me, laced with equal amounts of scorn and weariness.

“Did you not hear me?” my wife asks.

“Can I get a hot fudge sundae?” Jess asks.

We skip Dairy Queen and drive straight home.  Jess heads up to her room, presumably to continue pouting and reading Goosebumps.

My wife doesn’t even bother removing her coat, just slumps onto the couch.

“Could you draw the blinds for me?”

When I try pulling the drapes shut, they catch on the left-hand corner, the way they always do, and I’m again transported back to forgetting my credit card that night, the way I had forgotten it at other restaurants so many times, and then I’m in the parking lot stairwell again, climbing steps that shrink and jilt out of the way each time I try to take one, and I have to physically shake my head in order to get the image to disappear.

“What’re you doing?” my wife says.

“Huh?”

“You look like you’ve got wasps caught in your skull.”

I think about all the things I might say, all the lies I could spew, but I don’t say any of it.  Instead I say, “Maybe I do.”

“What’s that mean?”

I want to tell her I’m sorry, that I’m the one who should be sorry.  Fifteen minutes or sixteen minutes or however many minutes was too many.  It was me.  As much as anything or anyone, I was It.

  Still, I know she doesn’t want to talk about it.  We quit therapy six months back.  Since then the days have all been dull thunderclouds where we dance around each other and what’s brought us to this place.

It’s suddenly hard to breathe, like I’m being held underwater with a hand gripped against the bones of my throat.  I suck down a full swallow of air and hold it several seconds before exhaling, before mustering, “Hey honey, what do you think about us going out for a bit?”

My wife’s head lolls as if she has no neck muscles.  “We were just out.”

“No, I mean just us, you and me.”

“What about Jess?  You’re not planning on leaving her, are you?”

The way she’s said that, spitting out words in a speed I’ve not heard in over a year, makes me wonder if she intentionally left out…like you left me.  You’re not planning on leaving her, are you, like you left me?

But I know she didn’t mean that, didn’t think that, it’s just my discombobulated imagination taking over again.

“We can call my mother.”

“Why?”

“I told you.  So we can have a night out for our own.”

My wife’s hands are slunk halfway down the sleeves of her black coat so that it looks as if she has no hands at all, just fingers.  She brings her hands up to her face and cups her fingers across her eyes as her chest starts to buck and heave, crying softly, trying to mute the noises.

When I say, “Hey,” she flails one of her hands in the air at me.

“Just let me have a moment.”

A moment alone, is what she means.  She wants to be alone, perhaps forever.

I don’t know the right thing to do.  Part of me wants to force myself on the sofa beside my wife, pry her hands away from her face and make her look me in the eye for once.  Another part of me wants to walk out the door and get into the car and drive, just drive for miles, heading anywhere or nowhere.

One of the last things the therapist said was a kind of warning.  He said we have to fight the desire to isolate.  He told us that isolation quells fear, but it also strips away courage and any hope for resiliency.  “If you put your head in the sand too many times, and for long enough, you might as well expect to choke to death on that sand.”

I walk past my wife and go into the kitchen and reach into the cupboard.  As I maneuver the stack, the plate on top jostles loose and flies free, exploding loudly in the sink.  I stand motionless for a moment, me leaning over the counter with my left hand holding the stack of plates and my right hand clutching the card I’d placed beneath.  I expect my wife to come into the kitchen or to yell, asking what’s happened, but neither of those two things happen.

And so I take the card and carefully set the plates down.  I walk back out to the living room.  I tap the card against my ass as I walk, swatting wasps that aren’t there.

I notice that my wife’s in the middle of the couch and that there’s really not room for me to sit on either side of her, yet I do just that, cramming in on her left.

I say the words quick, like a dire confession I’ve been holding back for some time.  “Happy Anniversary.  I know what you said, and I get it, I do, but it’s our anniversary and I got you this card and wrote some dumb things in it and I want you to have it.”

I peel my wife’s fingers away from where they’re still clinging to her cheeks and brow.  I force her to grip the card, molding her hands over it.  When she does nothing else, I take the card myself and open the envelope and hold up the cover of the card and open it to the center page and read aloud what I’ve written.

When I’m finished, I say, “It might seem crazy, but I really believe it.”

She’s just been staring the whole time, without blinking, like a blind person, and I’m not sure if she’s heard anything, if she’s even coherent, or if she’s reliving It as I’ve done so many times, but then it’s like a frond breaking through ice, her cheeks pinking, her eyes flicking alert.  She leans across and buries her face against my neck, her mouth just below my ear.  I hear her breathing, feel a warm broom of air sifting through my hair.

Finally she speaks.  “Do you really think so?”

I take her hand.  I touch her face.  I say, “I can be the man you need me to be, if you’ll let me.”

“But you are.  You already are.”

“I can be better.  We can be.  We’re just going to have to work at it together.”

She lifts her face to me, her beautiful unblemished face.  He lashes flicker.  Her eyes are on mine.  Then she smiles, a familiar expression I recognize.

“Okay,” she says.  “Let’s start.”

“That sounds perfect,” I say. 

 

             

--EVEN GRIEF PROVIDES A LIVING REMEDY

 …I finished my novel last week.  Just the first draft, but it’s done.  85,000 words.  I like it.  I’m going to take this week off and then on Monday I’ll start editing and hopefully by the end of July or mid-August I’ll have it all polished up.

Instead of feeling elated about having it done, I’ve actually been a little blue.  I guess it’s spending so much time with the characters, and getting to know them, and then saying good-bye that’s made me this way.

Anyway, I’m playing shuffleboard this afternoon with a friend, so that should help get me out of my funk.

…Maybe I should stop reading and watching the news.  I read yesterday where they’re having so many beheadings in Saudi Arabia this year that there’s a shortage of executioners. 

Really. 

They’ve been offering signing bonuses and running ads says no experience necessary.

That’s a little hard to believe, yet it’s true.

…So let’s forget about the rest of the world for a few minutes and ponder these bits of wisdom:

-“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.” Lao Tzu

-“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone.  I am the best person I know.” Frida Kahlo

-“I hate the word homophobia.  It’s not a phobia, you’re not scared.  You’re an asshole.” Morgan Freeman

-“The smallest good deed is better than the grandest good intention.”  Duguet

-“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The Great Gatsby

-“I’ve had some highs, man, and I’ve had some things that gloriously didn’t work out.  The kind of failures you should be proud of.” Colin Farrel

-"It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'Always do what you are afraid to do.'" Ralph Waldo Emerson

-“There is only one real failure in life that is possible, and that is, not to be true to the best one knows.” John Farrar

-“The problem with quotes on the internet is you can never know if they’re genuine.” Abraham Lincoln

--HEY, PLEASE DON’T TELL ME THERE’S NO HELP

…I had house guests all of last week and consequently did no writing.  Last night, however, I wrote a piece for a project I’m part of called “Scabies” where a handful or writers were selected to take part by writing a story tagged from the last person’s piece.  Mine ended up being kind of freaky.  Not sure where that came from, but I had this image of random doll parts strewn on a bedroom floor and, well, here you go:

  Doll Parts

While cleaning Rose’s room, she found doll parts scattered under her daughter’s bed--heads, arms, legs, and torsos; a menagerie of plastic limbs.  They’d been ripped apart.  The fake eyeballs had even been cored out.

The discovery was unnerving, like when Sheila had found gay pornography on her now  ex-husband’s computer. 

Sheila had never seen the dolls before and where Rose got them was anyone’s guess.  Rose was only five.

Michael had Rose for the weekend.  He took her places, “grand adventures,” he called them.  He showered her with goodness and afterward when it was time to drop her back here, Rose always pouted, going silent, sometimes for an entire day.  Sheila was the disciplinarian.  Her mother had been the same way.  Spare the rod and spoil the child was just one of the many axioms Sheila upheld when it came to raising her daughter, even if Michael had complained and complained about Sheila’s parenting style, even if it had cost Sheila her marriage and many friendships.

Sheila finished cleaning the room and scooped the doll parts into a basket and headed downstairs to sit and wait for her daughter and ex in the living room.  Her skin itched and she felt anxious, as if she was guilty of something.  When the basket in her lap shuddered, Sheila jerked. 

She sorted through the heap of toy limbs, looking for the cause of the commotion, thinking she’d find a cockroach or some kind of bug, but the basket contained nothing except what she’d placed in it.  

Her mind was playing tricks on her.  That was it.  She was just upset about what she’d found under Rose’s bed.

Again the basket twitched.  This time Sheila jumped, the plastic limbs shooting through the air before raining down across the carpet.

Rose and Michael were due home any minute.

She bent down and began collecting the limbs.  She was about to pick up the last piece when she felt something pinch her calf.  Looking back at her leg, she saw one of the doll’s hacked off hands clinging to the side of the basket.

The door swung open then.  Rose rushed through and walked straight up the stairs without acknowledging Sheila, something she did quite often lately.  Michael stood in the door frame.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“No, it’s not.”  Sheila got up and carried the basket over.  “Did you give her these?”

“What the hell?”

“Did you?”

“Why would I give her chopped up doll pieces?  Those are really freaky.”

“Don’t lie to me, Michael.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say, but I have no idea where those came from.”

She closed the door on him.  Maybe she slammed it shut.  In the morning she only recalled going up to Rose’s room and the girl’s frightened expression as Sheila quizzed her about the dolls. 

And in the morning Sheila noticed her fingers were badly bent, not gnarled so much as twisted at odd angles, inches apart, looking like curled gourds.  Her toes were that way, too.  And her neck was cramped on one side so that she could not raise it upright.  One of her legs had even started to curve behind the other, as if trying to turn off its socket.

She remembered then going to a fortune teller with some college friends years ago, the woman with the turban telling Sheila what goes around, comes around, that the mind of a child has unseen strength and abilities, that sometimes our bodies are not really our own, that revenge can be subtle but in the end it’s really just a bitch.

--THINGS CHANGE.  THAT’S ALL THEY EVER DO

                                                      How to Shrink a Human Head

            One night the silence caves in around us until my husband becomes brave enough to share.  In a voice not quite a whisper he says, “You used to be so lovely.” 

            Through the fabric of my sweatshirt, I grip a rim of stomach flap as if it’s the last life raft.  My legs feel leaden, two waterlogged halves of a discarded totem pole.

            He says, “You did,” and stares.

            “Well?” I say, trying not to squeal or scream, unable to stop the little bug of cheek flesh from twitching and giving me away.  “No one’s making you stay.”

            He doesn’t slam the door when he leaves like I wish he would.  In fact, his footfalls down the hall make no more sound than house slippers.  When I press my ear to the seam, I hear the couple two doors down making crazy monkey love the way we used to do.

            In the bedroom I stand on a stool and take a box down from the closet.  Half of it is filled with candy bars, the bottom half with a shoebox of old photographs.  The girl in them is indeed pretty.  Thin.  Leggy.  A single chin.  An oval-shaped head instead of a bucket.

            When I was younger I ate whatever I wanted when I wanted.  Mother told me my metabolism would catch up to me someday, but what kid believes anything a parent tells them?  “Willpower has everything to do with this,” she’d say, thumping my skull with a finger.

            I disrobe, step on the bathroom scale, but it’s impossible to see how much I weigh because my belly hangs too far out and when I lean back I almost topple.

            I walk to the mirror to look at myself, but my eyes won’t move past my shoulders.  I know the truth, but I don’t want to see it.

            I stare at my face, the melon cheeks, the way my head has gained girth, too.  How can that be?

            I need to start somewhere.  It’s now or never. 

            On the computer, I search terms like “Top Heavy” and “Big-headed” but most are porn sites or ones linked to cures for arrogance.  When I type in “Shrunken Heads,” pictures of rubberized skulls appear, most with their eyes and lips stitched shut. 

            I tell myself that’s what I need to do-- just make a start. 

            The paragraph below the photos is titled, “How to Shrink a Human Head.”  It talks about decapitation, boiling, how red seeds are placed underneath the eyelids… It’s entirely explicit.

            Just make a start, I tell myself again.

            In the kitchen, I withdraw the biggest knife from the butcher block.  I fill a pot with water and turn on the stove.  But before I do anything else, I get my sewing kit out and thread a needle with fish line.  I pull my upper lip out and drive the tip through skin.  I do it quick.  I don’t give myself time to change my mind.

                    

           

            

--THE POWER LINES SIZZLE AND BUZZ

                                                        

                                                            Everyone Has A Story

            Each day Denny takes the bus into the city to fulfill his mandatory community service.  Since Denny’s twin sister died in a river accident, Denny’s become human dynamite, creating a fair share of destruction.

            Denny hates the bus.  Destitute grannies, drunks, mumbling lunatics, gangbangers and skin heads make up the bulk of the passengers. 

            Lacking air conditioning, the bus absorbs odors—urine, cheese, dead fish, sauerkraut, wet dog-- as if mechanically engineered to do so.  Summers are worst, because the heat intensifies every stench, leaving Denny with burning eyes, migraines and an urge to hit someone.

            Once he’s on the bus, the first thing Denny does is attach his headphones and turn on music—usually something violent-sounding like “Rage Against The Machine.”  Maintaining a sneer the whole ride, he talks to nobody.

            One morning a man Denny’s never seen before steps aboard.  He carries a cane and wears the world’s biggest shit-eating grin.  As he passes each row, he touches the seatback.  Denny assumes this is to steady himself, but then Denny notices the man’s gnarled fingers, how they flutter on the shoulder of each passenger.

            He’s blind.

            It’s clear what’s going to happen.  The blind man will travel three more aisles, then stop precisely at Denny’s row where the first available spot is.

            Denny quickly scoots into the aisle seat.

            “Would you mind letting me in?” the blind man says, “or perhaps you’d care to take the window seat?”

            Denny is so stunned by this that he returns to his former seat and promptly plucks his ear buds back in.

            The bus has just started to lurch forward when the blind man taps Denny’s arm.  Denny turns  the music up as loud as it will go, his ears burning.

            The blind man continues tapping.

            Denny tries singing aloud, “Rally ‘round the family, with a pocket full of shells!”

            More tapping.

            “Okay, hey man, what?”

            “I’m Marvin,” the blind man says, holding out his hand.

            “Sorry, bud.  I’ve got a cold.”  Denny’s not touching anyone, plus now the blind man might rethink his seat choice.

            “Fine, fine, no problem at all,” the blind man says.

            Denny’s starting to return to his music when the blind man says, “You’re about twenty-one, twenty-two, I suppose?”

            “My birthday’s next week.”

            “Fabulous!”

            “Twenty-two on Tuesday.  How’d you know?”

            “Your taste in music,” he says, pointing at Denny’s ear, “and your choice of cologne.  Aqua di Gio, I take it?”

            “How’d you know there was an empty seat here?”

            “Ah, must I give all my secrets away?”

            “What’re you smiling about?”

            “Indeed, what.  But aren’t you chockfull of questions?”

            “Hey, dude, sorry.”

            “No, I love it.  Dude!  Anyway, I thought I’d do something different today, something extraordinary.”

            “Like what?”

            “Take the bus, of course.”

            “How’s that so special?”

            “Why, this vehicle is filled with fascinating people.”

            “Fascinating’s not the word I’d use.”

            He pats Denny’s leg.  “Everyone has a story to tell.  Even you.”

            “Nah, I ain’t got nothing.”

            “Let’s start with why you’re so angry?”