Genre by Author Name
In a mansion, water pools under a leaking window and makes you wish you didn’t whisper David Bowie’s name when Peter kissed your clavicle. Even as you tried to explain away the eroticism of Bowie’s timbre at the beginning of “Modern Love,” you knew it wouldn’t matter, yet you didn’t think Peter would push you down the stairs, breaking the clavicle his lips had just touched. Peter would be here to call the contractor to come caulk the window that needs to be replaced but you won’t because the wrought-iron shadows that dance across the marble floor remind you of all the dancing you didn’t do at your daughter’s wedding. Instead, you were watching Peter fling pennies into a fountain with your cousin Jeannette’s twin girls, just like he used to with your kid at the fountain behind the manse he’d inherited from his father, which is now yours, despite the fact it’s never felt like yours at all. Peter insisted you stay with your daughter because he wasn’t going to uproot her just because he’s feckless and hot-tempered. He promised you still won’t have to work a day in your life. Rooted trees can still die in fertile soil. You wrote a play about this that brought you moderate acclaim after it was turned into a miniseries starring Meg Ryan, who people say looks like a more famous version of you. This success didn’t feel like yours, but you moved to California anyway, driving cross country in your Prius with your daughter and cats. You didn’t see Peter for several years until the day of your daughter’s wedding when neither of you were sure he’d show despite paying for the whole ordeal — no questions asked. You watched him by the fountain at the hotel and almost fell in love with him again until he handed you a dirty martini that turned into four, and you woke up in his unfamiliar hotel room with all those missed calls. You recognized the shame in your daughter’s face when you finally came down for breakfast the next morning while Peter snored naked in bed. Instead of calling the contractor, you toss pennies into the pooling water and embrace the irony that even though your clavicle has been healed for years, it still hurts when it rains.
In an apartment, a mourning dove thuds against the window. Your daughter watches its toothpicked feet spasm until they stop and discovers for the first time that the electricity within us won’t last forever. She wants to tell you this, but you’ve told her not to bother you while you’re on your work call. Out your bedroom-turned-office window, you count the tops of taxi cabs and wonder what it feels like to be able to drive while your manager berates you for your neo-noir Pepsi pitch. You aren’t able to explain that your team has focus-grouped scores of middle-aged women to ask what time they’d most want to return to and almost all said the 1980s when life seemed limitless and less wasn’t more. That brought you back to the sweaty nightclub that was all arms and legs and coke when you bumped into Peter again and couldn’t stop laughing at his mustache. He said he wanted to marry you even though you told him you would only ever marry David Bowie. In reality, you married coke for a few years until you quit cold turkey when you discovered you were pregnant. You were pretty sure it was Peter’s, but weren’t that sure, yet proposed to him anyway because it was something you thought Patti Smith might do. When you finally open the door, your daughter has lined the windowsill with candles and is dressed all in black. You think about calling Peter so he can hear your daughter’s eulogy for Uncle Feathers, but he’s in Norway drunk at an airport even though he should be inspecting a petroleum plant. This is a moment just for the two of you anyways. Uncle Feathers lingers on the ledge for over a week and becomes both the pet and the sibling your daughter has always wanted. When a strong wind finally pushes the bird to the street below, you watch it fall and narrowly miss a group of Korean tourists. Watching them scatter, you decide you’ll quit your job and go back to school to major in cultural studies like you always wanted to in order to find out what everyone is always running from, even though you know the answer is ourselves.
In a shack, your son unties your arms and feet and wonders where father has gone with the axe, but in this version of Charlotte’s Web, he wants the pig to die. Your characters haven’t eaten for weeks, and it’s not Peter but Daniel Day Lewis who shoves you when he finds you untied. Daniel Day Lewis doesn’t come out of character even though the director has yelled cut. You’ve been too scared to talk to him because he hasn’t showered since shooting started, and it makes you realize you’ll never be the artist you want to be. In your trailer, you feed the beta fish you keep to remind yourself what it means to be fierce. You search Instagram for Peter’s earthenware collections. His bio says he started selling after walking out of a meeting with a client because numbers didn’t feel the same way that rivulets of wet clay on the pottery wheel did. You comment under his last post what hands don’t destroy, they create. Would things have been different if you didn’t cry when he stuck his finger inside while you made out behind Bunk 6 on the last night of summer camp? You scroll past the Page 6 story that debates whether you have an eating disorder after pictures surfaced of your bikini falling off you last summer. You never told anyone about the precancerous tumor they removed on your thyroid because even though it coincided with losing all that weight for this role, it also scared you in ways you can’t talk to your daughter about. When shooting wraps, you buy the entire inventory of Peter’s earthenware as gifts for the cast and crew, except for Daniel Day Lewis. He gets you a Porsche for putting up with him, which you’re driving when your agent tells you the movie didn’t flop as badly as everyone says and asks if you want to record a tribute video to honor David Bowie’s death that will run at the Oscars. You call your daughter to ask her what her favorite David Bowie song is, and when she says “Solsbury Hill,” her mistake makes you feel like you have failed her until you remember how small that Romanian village seemed the day you adopted her. Peter never likes your comment. You decide to write a memoir and dedicate it to her to show her that life is just a series of small moments completely within your control.
In a house, you wait for the shower to warm. Scrolling through your phone, you discover the boy you sat next to in chemistry class who used to whisper the answers to you during quizzes has died. Somehow this makes you sadder than the news of another earthquake in Haiti and the mass shooting in Arkansas. Peter comes in from mowing the lawn and finds you crying. He doesn’t ask why. He smells like grass and mulch and Heineken when he picks you up and brings you to the bed. He says maybe the two of you should start trying again, and you make love quietly with the shades open. You stare out at the peaks of houses and hear the hum of cars and make promises to yourself you know you won’t keep — like deleting social media and eating more kale and finally adopting a rescue dog. Instead, you hunger for the promotion you know isn’t going to come because your boss still uses phrases like Lil’ Lady. You talk to the other women in the office and file a class-action lawsuit and get called names you can’t repeat. When you win, you don’t buy a mansion or vacation in Nice but start a trust for inner-city girls to pursue the arts. At the end-of-the-year gala, a thirteen-year-old plays “Changes” on the piano. Peter sits by you and squeezes your hand at just the right time. You leave in order to unabashedly cry in your Saab because life is exactly as it should be.
Brian Mcvety lives in Longmeadow, MA with his wife and three daughters. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Reckon Review, Litro Magazine, Porcupine Literary, Flash Fiction Magazine, Tiny Molecules, and elsewhere. He can be followed on Twitter @bmcvety
Arcturus 