Amidst all the destruction and chaos it survived. The smoke and fire caused from the fallen towers somehow missed the plant standing just yards away. Its white petals glistened against the charcoal grey soot that enveloped the area. Afterwards nobody had noticed that it remained standing tall, despite only being six feet tall. After all, there were far more important things to take care of like identifying body limbs and rummaging through the rubble. But as each day passed and the wreckage turned to piles of carted away remains, the tree stood there almost daring someone or something to uproot it.

            The limbs that remained were fractured and blackened like the inside of an old chimney. The actual trunk of the tree was twisted in such a shape that it more closely resembled a burnt twizzler. And even with its many deficiencies the plant soon proved to be a beacon of hope and a symbol of the embattled city itself. It’s stubbornness and refusal to wilt under seemingly insurmountable odds gave the people of the city a momentary respite and soon became the cornerstone of many of the makeshift memorials that were erected in the days that followed the attack.

            As masses of people flocked to the site with pictures of their loved ones in hand, hoping to find a clue as to what happened, the tree remained securely in the ground. Days turned to weeks and weeks into months. The seasons changed yet the tree endured. It even gained some sort of cult status as it was deemed the “survivor.”

            As the demolition and removal progressed into construction and revitalization it seemed as though the familiar facades of the corporate towers would finally surround the tree. That was the plan; at least until mother nature imposed her will.

            It started off as a rather usual day in every aspect. By mid day, though, the dark clouds had begun to form, covering the area like a bad toupee. The howling winds followed and then the torrential downpour began. Within minutes the storm intensified and soon people took cover and the weathermen warned of severe property damage and flood possibilities.

            The storm was over in less than an hour, off to terrorize another city. The tree that had stood its ground so gallantly in the attacks before didn’t stand a chance. Maybe it was that it had been weakened over the years and it was just a matter of time. Whatever the reason, the roots had been pulled from the ground and the plant was tossed some thirty yards from its original resting place. Other things such as personal property and power lines took priority in the cleanup effort.

            But in the weeks that followed news of the now famous tree had spread and local efforts were being taken to revitalize the tree back to its original health. The city’s parks department took on the job and vowed to nurse the plant back to health. The tree’s story even got a blurb in the Times local section.

            It was brought north to Van Cortlandt Park and after weeks of careful rehabilitation the tree seemed to be back to normal. Sure, there were the scars of the attacks on that beautiful late summer day in September a year back but the bones of the plant remained, somehow, intact. In a way, the marks and discoloration left from the attacks were symbolic of the city itself. Torn but not dead. Down but not out. Injured but resilient.

            Even the Mayor got in on the event as he held a ceremony to replant the tree in its original location. He claimed that it stood as a figure of hope and strength in these trying times. People stood and cheered. And for that one day even the environmentalists liked the mayor.


Patrick Trotti is a 24 year old native New Yorker pursuing a degree in Creative Writing. The rest is just needless details.

This is the fourth time today she’s vacuumed that rug, running the upright back and fourth. She’d do it ‘til the carpet was threadbare if you let her, rubbing the bloody thing back and forth right through the concrete underneath.
 
Last week, when I left a cup ring on the dining room table, I thought she was going to hit me; she screwed up her hands into tight, white fists, her face reddening as her knuckles paled. I waited for her to speak, to shout, to throw things around, but she never did. The anger burst out of her and long streams of tears washed down her cheeks, dripping onto the linoleum as she shook from sobbing.
 
Afterwards, she scrubbed the floor with a short-haired brush and lemon-scented bleach.

Rebecca L. Brown specialises in horror fiction, although her writing often wanders off into other genres and gets horribly lost. To find more of Rebecca’s work, visit her blog http://bewilderingcircumstances.blogspot.com/ 

 

I take the boat out on the lake. I crank the engine and listen to its old-man cough. I smoke clove cigarettes because that’s what I smoked in high school. No longer wearing black lipstick to smudge the filter paper, I still moisten my lips after every puff of sweet smoke out of habit. The residue tastes better without lipstick. My hair is no longer bubble-gum pink, just a dull brown like that of the other boaters on the water. They nod at me and have no idea who I am. I let them but do not nod back.

A rainbow of oil trails in my wake as I pass along the water. I watch the sun reflect a thousand colors in the slick. I do not fish. I set a slow pace. I try to make no waves, to fool the lake into thinking I am not here. I drink cheap beer and save the aluminum tabs for a little boy who lives on the floor above me. He has cancer or something. I don’t remember.

A lake rat with greasy hair and thick, smudged glasses holds up his beer in a silent toast as I coast by him. I don’t want to talk today, so I pretend not to see him. He is fishing, but he isn’t holding the pole. The line lays slack in the brown water. I see his eyes linger on my stretch marks. I am skinny enough look good in my bikini again. He saw me often enough when I was fat; he offered to carry things for me.

I pass the lake rat and reach the cove. I cut the engine. It grumbles about it. The oil will pool around me as I sit for hours staring at the shore. I am an artist with a rainbow-colored brush. Watercolor. I gaze at the yellow house. Shade from the sweet gum tree lends it a gray air. It looks cold in the afternoon heat, but I do not shiver. I have learned how not to shiver.

Time eddies like my cigarette smoke, and I do not know how long it is before the front door opens and a woman with huge sunglasses backs out of the yellow house. She is pulling a lime green stroller. Something small stirs in the blankets under the spangled canopy. I start the engine. I need its company. I need its noise to drown the sounds I make.

Coming back to the dock, I pass the lake rat. He screws up his face and asks where my little one is. He pats his gut suggestively. I pretend I don’t know what he’s talking about. I wave a fishing rod at him and do not speak.

I am going to sell the boat and dye my hair bubble-gum pink. Or perhaps lime green.

 Jessie Peacock’s work has appeared in Sand: A Journal of Strange Tales, DOGZPLOT, and Beyond Centauri. She writes with two dogs in her lap and blogs at http://jessie-peacock.blogspot.com.

Carolyn says, Did you hold a three-week old baby's head in your hands today while someone drilled a hole into it's skull? She says this to her young husband who is rattling on about what a pill his boss has been lately, at the design firm where he and other young husbands compare the relative weight of fonts, where hours evaporate as they reject countless hues of orange that fail to create the right energy when placed next to medium gray.

Carolyn says, Did you clean a 73-year old woman's diarrhea out of yards of deep purple wounds running the lengths of her 73-year old legs, wounds made on purpose to get at yards of 73-year old veins that no longer do what they're supposed to do? She says this to her young husband who is anxious about a meeting with a new client who wants a new logo, a whole new image really, for his auto detailing shop, in the city, on a block that's trending up.

Carolyn says to her young husband, Did you get milk and bagels and little applesauces for Miranda's lunches? Did you get my text with the list? Why didn't you text me back? Carolyn asks her young husband this as she rummages for a tea bag, knowing he can't hear her.  She resists exasperation. When she spots the bagels and applesauces she is buoyed.  As she heads out the door she is only mildly tempted to check the fridge for the milk.

Carolyn slips behind the garage and follows a narrow path to a sea of overgrown grass which she must flatten with her once-white clogs to reach Ingrid's back door, the Ingrid who takes Miranda after school on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Carolyn's pocket goes off. A text from her young husband: found my phone got the stuff where r u?  Miranda, a quiet child, vanishes. Her room is her cloister.  Home, u? She rescues the drowning tea bag and swallows her young husband's return volley: new client b late.

Carolyn wants to ask her young husband something. So she waits up for him. It was Wednesday, no shift tomorrow. No septic infections, no blockages, no oozing incisions.

Carolyn and Miranda do the things they do when Carolyn's young husband isn't home. Then Carolyn nests in the sofa and watches TV.   Carolyn's young husband brings soft tacos from the place they like and feeds her a bite right from the bag. She need only move her mouth to receive his gift. Her body sinks into the sofa with a kind of transcendent satisfaction that she believes, in this moment, with the whole of her heart, is only possible from still warm mesquite-grilled chicken, wet with limey guacamole and tomatillo salsa. Carolyn asks her young husband to tell her, as he has so many times before, why even a little bit of red in a blue or an orange will make one's heart beat faster. 

Margaret Eaton lives in St. Louis and longs to get back to the Northwest where you can still get a decent scone. You can read more of her stories at Opium, Rumble, and Onomatopoeia.

A group of adults, mostly men, are sitting around a table covered in heavy white cotton, its corners pressed to sharps pleats. I am among them, although I am not an adult. I am fourteen, the only teenager there. The group is drinking. They’ve already emptied three bottles at one end of the long table. I cannot account for what the other side has polished off because I have not been watching.  However, because we are in Europe, I drink with them, although I have twice tipped sparkling water into my glass because I have learned the wait staff will replenish without asking, and I, in turn, will drink it because, among these adults, the wine is a prop. Also, it is a mark of equality. I do not abuse it only because I am trying to keep up with what they say, even as my head swims from the effort.

I am not sitting with my parents, who are down the table, talking animatedly to the Austrian nationals who have congregated at that side. I do not want to be close to my mother and father because I long for independence, to be understood on my own terms and separate from them. So, I sit with a lone Swiss salesman, two Germans, and an Austrian, all of whom work for the same firm. They are speaking in English, although slurred now by the wine. They have lived in America for so long, they have begun to forget certain words of the language their mothers spoke, the language they grew up speaking. Even the alcohol does not bring it back, but instead intensifies their accents, making them sound aggravated and pronounced like blisters. I sit quietly and listen.

The man across from me is red haired, a salesman. His features are smooth, unfreckled. He is handsome in a way that my mother would call “European,” an eccentric form of male beauty I mistakenly associate with wearing woven leather loafers with white socks or jackets without traditional lapels. This man is talking about his wife and begins singing an expression from America’s Excedrin commercials, “I haven’t got time for the pain.” This causes the other men to laugh. The red haired man, named Peter, covers his face with his hand, his fingers splayed wide in a melodramatic expression. I watch this display and eventually realize that the eyes behind the fingers are staring at me. I see the dark ring of his iris against the white. The men continue talking, and eventually, the hand comes away from the face. I see, as I had not noticed before, the trim auburn beard, which follows the contours of the man’s chin. Above it is the manicured arc of his mustache.

The conversation has moved on, and the men next to me begin laughing, snorting and slapping knees. Occasionally, they include me in the joking. They are not condescending but ask what I think, and nod animatedly when I agree. The red haired man named Peter has withdrawn from the conversation. Distracted, he moves his fish knife, which is the only utensil that remains at his place setting. He signals the waiter and touches his glass. I feel his eyes again. His gaze appears level, earnest, if somewhat cloudy and unfocused. He looks down in the direction of my parents. My mother has her chin on her hand, listening to something someone at the end of the table is saying. My father is equally absorbed in the conversation at their end of the table. The men beside me continue talking, which has turned towards the subject of work, and the man named Peter leans forward and asks in a low voice, “What room are you in? Or are you with them?” He nods sideways in the direction of my parents. I smell the alcohol on him, which wafts towards me in a great billow when he speaks.

I shake my head. I tell him I have my own room. He nods, smiling. “And the number?” he asks. His hands are on the table, the fingers laced.

I glance quickly at my parents once more. “215,” I answer, looking down at the table cloth as I say it.

He nods. Fear is rising in me, but excitement, too. I do not yet really understand this power, or even that what I have at that moment is power. And I am certainly too young to recognize that it is weakness, too.

I reach for my glass and empty it, tasting more mineral water than wine. I glance at his glass. It is a flick of my eyes, almost unconscious. I know if I alert the waiter myself, it will attract my mother’s attention, which I don’t want at this moment. The man named Peter smiles and empties his glass into mine. The man beside me notices and shakes a finger at Peter mirthfully, “What do they call it in America?” the man asks, smiling. “Contributing to the delinquency of a minor?”

“Tush,” Peter says and waves away the man’s jibe.

I drink what he has poured. He again signals the waiter and touches his glass.


Savannah Schroll Guz is  author of American Soma (2009) and The Famous & The Anonymous (2004). She edited Consumed: Women on Excess (2005). Find more about her here: www.savannahschrollguz.com.

He puts me out of the Benz south of Four Corners. He’s pissed because they’ve closed the monument for construction. Not my fault but he has to blame someone.

A hot wind smacks my face as he takes off across the high desert, leaving me in motor exhaust and sand. Wouldn’t let me have my Gucci purse, my Louis V. suitcase, or my handle of vodka. Now I’m worried about my sandals, Jimmy Choos, the sun already burning stripes across my insteps.

I spy willows in the distance. If I find water, maybe I’ll be okay. It’s not like I was born to money anyway. Not me.

I don’t get a half a mile before I hear a clatter from somewhere behind me, bumping and bouncing over rock and sand and scrub. An old pick up truck, rust eating its way across the hood, catches up to me.

  At first I feel relief, but when I can’t see anyone in the front seat, my heart jolts, me wondering if this is one of those Stephen King moments when the surreal bumps into some poor sucker’s reality. I don’t believe in ghost El Caminos, but my eyes aren’t deceiving me.

The truck shivers to a stop, dust swirling. The door opens as a small figure slides off the driver’s seat. A boy, just a boy, dark skin and hair, wearing a faded plaid shirt and jeans. Barefoot.

Puts his hands on hips and says, “I ain’t gonna hurt you.”

“I guess not.” I’m feeling better now knowing I’ve got 50 pounds on him. “What are you, ten?”

“Twelve. You lost?” he asks.

“My boyfriend kicked me out of the car. He’s probably in Utah by now.”

“What’d you do?”

“I didn’t do anything. He got mad because they’ve got that Four Corners place all torn up. They wouldn’t let him sprawl across all four states at once.”

“Seems like a lot of you people think that’s important.”

“Not me. I’m heading to L.A.”

“You famous?”

I smile at this because, of course, that’s why I’m going to L.A. Best place to get your face on the cover of the Enquirer. I look him up and down. “You’re a good driver. Not just anyone could make it across rocky ground.”

“I do okay.”

“You give me a ride?”

 “Can’t let you die out here. Name’s Ruben.”

“Kim.”

We rattle into Shiprock, Ruben telling me we’re on the “Rez.” He’s Navajo, everyone’s Navajo. Then I see Gilbert’s car. Holler, “Stop the truck!”

Ruben, cool as he seems, isn’t immune to a woman’s screams and slams the brake. I stumble out before the El Camino comes to a stop and race over to the dusty Mercedes in front of a diner. Peer in the driver’s side window. Yep, there’s my Gucci bag. I yank on the door handle, but it’s locked. Smack my palm on the glass and shout, “Gilbert!”

I’m hot and sweaty and more angry than I’ve ever been. “Gilllllll-BERT!”

I head for the diner. The cold blast from an overactive air conditioner takes my breath right out of my mouth. Gilbert, in his Tommy Bahama shirt, swivels on his stool. He looks so calm and collected, I almost feel like I’ve misunderstood what’s happened to me.

He says, “You ready to apologize?”

“I could’ve died out there.”

“Looks like you didn’t. You might need a shower though.”

“That’s what you say after dumping me?”

Gilbert slaps a twenty onto the counter and slips off his stool. Strolls over and takes my upper arm. “You’ll feel better once we’re on the road.”

“Let me go.” I set my feet, stiffen my body, resist.

He drags me toward the door, but boy Ruben puts himself between Gil and the exit. He may be twelve but he’s got a man’s confidence. Everyone in the diner is watching, and it takes me a second to realize part of Ruben’s confidence comes from knowing all the customers halfway through their mac-and-cheese have his back. So this is what loyalty looks like.

Gilbert, still gripping my arm, weighs his chances. Though he doesn’t give a shit about me, he’d rather die than let me go, but outnumbered, he does. My arm stings.

Still, Ruben won’t let him out. He stands there facing down Gilbert who looms above him.

“She needs her stuff,” says Ruben. “All of it.”

Gilbert’s face goes red as chili peppers, but the diners, even the cook from behind the counter, crowd around us. Gilbert glares at me. “Bitch.”

Outside again, the air is broiling. Beads of sweat the size of dimes pop along Gilbert’s forehead. The Benz chirps twice and the trunk pops open. One of the diner customers reaches in and removes my Louis V. suitcase and my handle of vodka while another swings open the front passenger door and takes my purse.

Gilbert jumps in the car, gone with the trunk lid flapping behind him. Everyone laughs and pats Ruben on the shoulder. Suddenly I feel lost, seeing what it’s like to belong.

The men filter back into the diner, leaving my purse and vodka on the suitcase. Ruben strolls over.

“Guess I gotta thank you,” I say.

“Might be nice since I saved your ass.”

“You did, didn’t you?  Thank you.  You’re mama must be proud.”

The boy shrugs, looking at the ground, kicking dust with his big toe.

“Can I ask another favor,” I say. “Can you find me a ride to Farmington?”

Ruben turns his back and heads for his truck. I watch, biting my lip, wondering where I’m gonna find a bus out here.

 He opens the driver’s side door and bows. “Get in.”

“Thought you wouldn’t take me to Farmington.”

“That’s right. I won’t.” Then he ticks through his fingers. “I can sing, I can dance, and I don't have no folks and you—someone’s gotta watch your back—so guess what? We're going to L.A.”

Dang. This kid’s got balls.

Gay Degani’s stories can be read at Smokelong Quarterly, Night Train, 10 Flash, Emprise Review. She is the editor of EDF’s Flash Fiction Chronicles and blogs at Words in Place.