My novella, "The Anarchists Float to St. Louis" has won Quarterly West's 2009 Novella Contest. Look for it in the journal, January 2010. 

Small Change

by Kira Obolensky
"It’s like the leaves just got tired,” said Aurelia, as she and Jeremiah headed in rectilinear fashion through the neighborhood—down Liberty, up Pine Street, across Emerson, up along the river to Atlas Road. The warmth had stretched long past fall into early winter; the leaves were now shriveled by time, not a hard frost. 
 “It’s as if the leaves were hoined,” said Jeremiah, attempting to push his wife’s description farther. This was his job, he reminded her, to find the right words to explain experience. The word he used was archaic. Jeremiah had discovered it recently and put it into the archives at his Poetry Museum. Poetry, Jeremiah believed, was the trap and cage of human experience, holding its mysteries, its beauties, its strangeness in its rhythms. Sometimes when giving a toast—he tended towards 18th and 19th century rhymed verse--one could see his mouth water around the words as if they were small bites of sirloin.
 Aurelia walked with a loping gait. Her long legs and long hair stretched her narrow as a greyhound, while her husband, shorter and stouter, scurried to keep up. He walked  leaning forward—a weighty thing, his head, perhaps by virtue of everything it contained inside. He held his wife’s hand whenever they walked together outside. Anything, he said, could happen. Usually it was a half-hold, ring and pinky finger because he found her hands too warm. But as they passed the woods, Jeremiah grabbed onto Aurelia’s arm. 
 Sometimes they debated between the words forest and woods, neither word quite capturing the area’s feeling of dark neglect.  Beyond the trees, sat an abandoned city park that was rumored to now house a pack of lost boys.  At one point it  was a kind of red light district filled with lust and romance, a Dickensian ghetto—but the forest seemed now, with a new kind of swagger in the adolescent set, untouchable, gang territory, a place where people were rumored to have been murdered execution-style ininitiation rites.
 When Aurelia looked at the forest she thought about her birthday.  Older, and then old, she supposed.  She remembered how the forest had seemed when she was a child.  Thick but not dangerous. “It’s a metaphor,” she said.
 “What is?”
 “The woods, the park beyond.”
 Jeremiah’s face wrinkled with concern over her use of the word. They often bickered about literary terms.  Even when the Poetry Museum was new and Jeremiah was filled with his mission, a sense he was saving something, he’d been territorial.  “Since when is a godless place, a scourge on the city, a metaphor?” 
 “It’s my birthday soon,” she said.
 He laughed. “It’s just not a metaphor. That’s all.” 
 Aurelia looked tonight for the small change kid, the boy who sat on the corner of Liberty and Atlas. The boy, who was small, did not sell lemonade. He sat instead as if he were selling lemonade with a card table, a red and white checked cloth, a folding chair. On the table sat a sign that read “small change.” She thought the boy had picked a nice neighborhood for small change. Marked with tidy lawns and colorful painted houses, this was a place where large-scale change (the kind that sweeps buildings off the face of the earth and brings in men in uniforms) felt impossible. And yet, other nights, she had been convinced he needed small change: nickels, pennies, anything would be appreciated. Tonight it occurred to her that he was offering change to anyone who so desired. And so she crossed the street, breaking free from her worried husband.
 “Hello,” she said to the boy, and he nodded in agreement. The table bore a simple cardboard box, smaller than a shoebox, but covered with cut out pictures of birds--crows and robins, hummingbirds and hawks, all out of scale, hummingbirds larger than owls. 
 “Small change?” she wondered aloud. 
 “I wouldn’t sit out here at night with a bunch of money,” warned Jeremiah, looking over his shoulder in the direction of the woods. “You never know.” The boy seemed not to see him. 
 “It’s not money,” she scolded Jeremiah. “Something else is in the box, is that right?” she asked the boy. She noticed his pants were patterned with Army camouflage, and that he wore a very small flak vest. His gaze had both a swoop and a reckon to it, a look that seemed too old for his size. 
 The box made a slight squawk as if it needed air. “Oh,” she said, “Is there a bird in there?” and the boy nodded, encouraging her to open it. She did, carefully, and a puff of wind kissed her in the face. Jeremiah jumped as if it were a bullet, pulling his wife back to safety. She laughed--the kiss had felt delightful--a moment of something unexplainable, even as she considered how she might try to explain it. 
 Later on the way home, the sky darkening, the distant clangs of other lives echoing in the night air, she said, “It was red inside, shiny and red.”  
 “He probably had some kind of device in there,” Jeremiah thought out loud. 
 “It felt furry,” she said. “It really did.”
 “We didn’t give him our change,” said Jeremiah. He turned to look back at the boy.
 “We should take him home with us,” she said.
 Jeremiah put his arm around her.  “You should take a photograph of him, “he said.
 “You should write a poem about him,” she countered.
 Jeremiah pumped his fist like he was leading a revolution. “I could yes, I could. A sestina, or maybe a sonnet.”
 “I take it back,” said Aurelia.  “Let’s just let him be the way he is.”
 If  Jeremiah turned the boy into a poem, he would lock it up in the edifice of his website, cross-indexed with the words “coins” and “strange.” The boy would join the ranks of the other poems, saved but airless.  She couldn’t bear to think of the boy trapped where no one could find him.  She determined it could be a story she would tell; the words she used would not be archaic but filled with rapture for an experience that felt, at least for a few days after, as if it had sifted some magic dust on her shoulders. 
Birthdays, said Jeremiah, were holus bolus—a misuse of an archaic word that got at the emotional state he felt when people sang good wishes about growing older. So Aurelia had, for many years, celebrated her birthdays with a group of women at Nadine’s, a downtown establishment that sold both the atmosphere of a jazz club and complicated pastas with cream sauces. 
 She entered the restaurant with forced cheer, which was quickly dampened by the group awaiting her around the table. 
 The first comment Marthe made had to do with Aurelia’s face. “It’s odd,” she said, “you don’t look any older.” Aurelia nodded; it was true, although this was something that no longer pleased her. “It’s the lack of stress,” she said.
 “No stress?” 
 “Well, not really,” admitted Aurelia, flashing on the intricate web of worry that laced her together. “It’s not like my job is stressful.” Aurelia managed a ski shop, although this year the weather had slowed sales down to nothing, which would usually cause a ski shop manager some amount of stress. “Of course, I feel stress, it’s just…I don’t know.” It was more of a question. “I’m getting wrinkles around my eyes,” she offered.
 “But you don’t gain weight,” insisted Marthe, who did.
 “I do,” said Aurelia, “I just walk it off.”
 “Every time we get together I think of time lapse photography. A subtle change in each of us, a gradual decline. We’re the flowers that bloomed awhile ago, and then in twenty years we’ll have lost all our petals,” said Simone. “Except for Aurelia,” she said, grudgingly. Simone was Aurelia’s friend from college—a former philosopher who couldn’t find academic work and so instead worked as an account executive. Her education was beginning to melt from her like sheets of old skin; she shed it every day—all of her probing questions replaced with a kind of jokey ennui.
Bettina gritted her teeth and jiggled the wattle on her neck. “I hope you get fucked tonight,” she said. “That’s all I can think about--” jiggle jiggle—“sex.”
“It’s weird,” Aurelia continued, thinking out loud. “It’s like I want to forget everything I know.”  That wasn’t quite it, she realized as soon as she said it.
    “That is weird,” said Marthe. “My mother is losing her short-term memory,” she said to them all as a warning. “You show her your new puppy, and she asks you a hundred times how big it’s going to get.”
     “You got a new puppy?” asked Aurelia. “A new puppy, well, that is something.”  Marthe seemed tonight to have quite suddenly relinquished the idea that affection might come from another human being. She had a satisfied, new-mother kind of daze to her; a liquidity and warmth to her movement, as if to say she had found what she wanted and all it involved was a creature with fur. 
Nadine strolled over to their table; only she was a different Nadine than the one they all remembered from last year. 
“Where’s the other Nadine?” wondered Bettina.  
    “There are actually seven of us,” Nadine explained. “One for each day of the week. I’m Thursday."And Thursday Nadine sat at the piano and sang a raunchy Lucinda Williams song in a jazzy rhythm. 
Over dessert, after everyone’s final unmelodious happy birthday to you had evaporated and the smoke from the candles smudged the air, Bettina asked what Aurelia had wished for.
 Aurelia admitted that she had wished for something to change, although what she wasn’t quite sure. “Something small,” she said. “To start with.”
 Bettina said, “At least you’ve got a sex life.”
 Simone complained that change was upon them whether they liked it or not, that even though it seemed as if the present condition shuddered and gasped with lack of possibility, that the force of life was actually change. “We’re just in an artificial bubble,” she intoned. “Believe me, and there are dark clouds on the horizon.” 
 Aurelia suggested that looming disaster wasn’t quite the kind of change she was thinking of. She had found the perfect moment for her story about the boy and his box. She embellished it slightly—the boy was more sinister and Jeremiah more flustered; the wind from the box, in her version, made her jump. “I think it was some kind of blessing, or a tiny kind of, I don’t know, kiss from the future,” she said.
 “I hope it wasn’t anthrax,” worried Marthe. “Good lord, what were you thinking?”
    And in the silence of Aurelia trying to answer that question—what was she thinking--the desire for a full-transplant of her life swept over her with wings as dark as a crow’s. 
She took her time driving home, taking the curves slowly, pretending the car was a magic marker, and the streets a maze, and the house the place to find on the map.


“I want to nail you,” Jeremiah murmured from bed. He glanced up over the Journal of Metrical Verse at his wife, his eyes squinchy with low light. She slipped next to him, her satin nightgown meeting his flannel. 
 He reached for her hair. He breathed in her perfumed scent.“Did you have a nice birthday?” 
 “It was lovely,” she said. “Everyone says hi.”  
 She kissed him to keep him from saying anything more. Jeremiah’s arsenal of love talk tended towards an assortment of vaguely upsetting building terms, words that were becoming as difficult for Aurelia as the romantic lines he was also fond of spewing. 
 When she broke for air, he grabbed for her breasts, pretending he was a caveman. She whispered in his ear, “Am I better than your magazine?” and he nodded, the reading material clattering to the floor. 
“Oh,” she said suddenly. 
“What,” replied Jeremiah. He sat up as if expecting someone.
“ Look at this thing on my leg. This thing,” she said pointing to a dark mole on her left calf. Earlier in the tub, she had noticed it had grown a new petal. After her father died from a cancer that spread quickly and maliciously to his brain, she’d been in constant surveillance mode, an approach that had relaxed over the past few years. The mole, for weeks on the vague outskirts of her thoughts, now suddenly seemed like a catalyst for worry. Jeremiah picked at it with his fingernail. “I think that’s always been there. It’s an age spot.” 
“An age spot that’s always been there?” 
“It’s got a shape like an age spot. A clover, it’s a clover,” he said, counting the leaves. “Only three—”
“Like four would be better?”
“Just a joke, Aurelia. Four-leaf clover?”
 She didn’t laugh.
 “Get it checked out if you’re worried, “ he said. “I mean you  should check it out, right?
 “Yes,” she said. “I will.”
 “We’ve had scares before,” he said, lying back down. “It’s probably nothing.” He waited a few moments before reaching for her again. This time she thought she felt more tenderness in his touch, his desire tainted slightly with fear.
 On the day that the weather reports were promising at least six to eight inches of snow, Aurelia left work right after opening the shop. Her assistant assumed she was hitting the slopes early; he blessed her with a hand gesture. She took the blessing, applying it to the day before her filled with biopsies and doctors.
 The snow didn’t come, and Aurelia’s appointment was not unlike another she had a few years ago, only she left the doctor’s office feeling as if she had been infected with urges. The idea of a tattoo had not occurred to her before this day. Such a thing would slightly shock her friends, not to mention her husband, who viewed such extremes of drawing into the skin with needles as a sign of the great decline of civilization.
 The guy behind the counter was surprisingly clean cut. He had short legs and a longish torso, with an oblong lightly shaved head. He told her his name was Tommy.  
 “I want a tattoo,” she said, feeling obvious. She explained, “This is fairly spontaneous.”
 He brought out his book, which looked like an artist’s portfolio: drawings, and then close-up photographs of drawings on skin. 
 She began to page through the jaguars, the hearts, the anchors, the superheroes, the words—some people, it surprised her, tattooed segments from poems to their skin.
 “Do you already have a tattoo?” he asked.
 “I’ve always felt too old,” she said.
 “I did an eighty-four-year old woman,” he said. “She wanted a cross,” and he flipped to a photograph. “The skin gets so loose, it’s tricky business.”  Up close Aurelia guessed that Tommy  was thirty, thirty-two. 
She marveled at his artistry. He confided that he had gone to art school.
 She told him she had studied photography but much before he was there.
 “Hey, I’ve got a gallery in the back room.” 
 Aurelia imagined a series of photographs of children, of grit or exotica, evidence of the life she had not lived.  She pretended she had lots of images and even offered to bring them by. 
 “Do you know what you want?” he asked. 
 Her eyes found the framed certificates, the walls assuring her of sanitary conditions, safety, and artistic merit. She wanted something slightly abstract. “I want it to look like a clover,” she said. “With three petals. And with stripes around it, kind of psychedelic.” She made a quick drawing, and she showed it to him.  “Sort of small,” she said, “and hidden.” She pointed to a place on her other leg, by the ankle. “Private,” she said. 
 Tommy asked her to slip off her pants and put on a robe. She lay down on a massage table, her second examination of the day. 
 Dr. Hide had been too tan for a dermatologist. Not that Aurelia kept track of such things, but the doctor and his wife had four beautiful children--she could see their pictures posted all over the office—while Aurelia and Jeremiah had the Poetry Museum.  It was true that the Poetry Museum contained more than 500,000 entries and that the museum’s mission contained the word “posterity.” 
 At the exam, the dermatologist had rubbed her smooth legs, shaved for the appointment. He lingered too long on her thigh, she thought. And then with his magnifying glass and ruler he had contemplated the mark. “Mmm,” he had said, “this does look a little funky. I don’t remember this one.”  
 A shot of Novocain and then a scraper and cauterizer had been applied. The nurse handed her a sheet of paper with a phone number to call in a few days for the biopsy results. Aurelia had the paper in her purse. 
 Tommy’s hand did not linger on her leg. He was all business and rubbing alcohol, suiting himself up with magnifying goggles, a facemask. He looked like a medical spelunker. It felt like the second operation of the day, although the tattoo seemed far more serious with the light on Tommy’s visor illuminating his way. His firm reminders for her to stay still came every few minutes. The tattoo needle made a light humming sound. Tommy talked his way through every mark, as if he were a very slow driver. “I’m turning the corner now, and we’ll just fill in the curve, here…and then take it easy on the outline.”

 “Where were you?” Jeremiah asked. She was hours late; her husband was listening to Bartok, a sure sign of emotional upset. He came to greet her at the door, wine glass in hand.
 “How did it go? “
 She didn’t tell him about the tattoo. “Um, the doctor thought it looked weird, and they did a biopsy.”
 “A biopsy took this long?” 
 “I drove around.”
 “By yourself?  Is that safe?”
 “I can spend my life just being safe,” she said.
 He nodded, appreciating his wine. “When do you find out the  results?
 “Monday,” she said. 
 She kept her coat on and asked him to walk outside with her. 
 “I don’t know,” he said, “it’s late. We need to eat.”
 “A walk would help me clear my head,” she said. 
 The late evening sky bulged as if it had trapped the coming season in its sheet and had it bundled up far away. There had been no snow today; the storm had gone south, whitening prairies and flatland instead of the northern hills. 
 “Tonight, “ he said, “We have something to celebrate.” 
 “What,” she wondered. 
 “I got a lead on some Browning.”
 Aurelia nodded. Her husband hunted early drafts like other men tracked down deer. 
  “It’s the one that goes “ ‘With winters and with autumns and beyond, / With the human heart's large seasons, when it hopes/ And fears, joys, grieves, and loves? with all that strain—’ ”
     "Uh huh,” she said. “I like grieves.”
“Well,” he said, “in an earlier draft, it read  ‘when it wants.’  Not ‘hopes.’ ”  Melanoma, she knew, grew from a few errant cells. It spread horizontally but if it stuck its tendrils down into the fatty tissues, beyond the fatty tissues, it could have a field day. 
 They had come to the corner of Liberty and Atlas, the place where they had seen the small change boy. He wasn’t there. 
“I didn’t realize there was a path here that led to the woods,” she said.
 Jeremiah clapped his hands, impatiently. “I want to go now.”
“Maybe the boy is down there, ” and she indicated the park gone wild. 
 “Children, at least well-behaved children, don’t live in the woods,” said Jeremiah. 
 They walked all the way to the stop sign. “What do you want to do tonight?” asked Aurelia.
 “I want to show you the Browning,” he said and rubbed her back. “Everything’s going to be OK,” he promised. 
 So she ran, letting go of Jeremiah’s half-hold, into the woods. 
 The path through the trees had wheel ruts in it, probably from bicycles.  She ran on the path and off the path, trying to lose herself quickly. Jeremiah was shouting her name, which echoed in waves. Aura first; the  lia, a flourish of panic. His voice began to fade with distance. It surprised her how easily he gave up, and how soon he decided not to follow her.  
 She stood covered by dusk and saw below her the industry of the boys, the tents and the shacks. She was amazed by the order of it. The park had become a kind of miniature city. She felt ridiculously tall and said the word softly to herself--Brobdingnagian—her shoes, lime green hikers (because lime green was in) glowed like artificial fishing lures, their unnatural color staining the air ways, souring the dirt around them. She stood still. No one, she thought, was much over fifteen. Standing there, she imagined how old she must seem to them, how motherly—and if they might begin by hugging her around the waist, and then, perhaps, an interloper to the scene, take her down, hack her apart. She remembered the way her father looked after the surgeries for the cancers: one on his back, one on his buttocks, one on the left ear. The violent knife; they had to cut deep.  How needless it had been once the cancer found its way to his brain.
 All the children wore camouflage. The boy she had met was probably begging, she realized, although it was very twenty-first-century of him to not ask directly, to present such ambiguity, to offer no question or explanation.  
 There was a picture of a small boy tacked to a tree. His face was smudged. He had brown hair and a smile marked with new corrugated teeth. Various remnants of holidays clung to the tree: a wreath, a shriveled helium balloon in the shape of a heart, a plastic shamrock in a plastic pot. The shrine had been tended to. The photograph was laminated, and a note had been tucked in under the plastic that read, “Always love you, Trevor, Mom.” She touched the note, to see what she might feel.  It wasn’t the boy she was looking for.
 A large boy, tall and wearing an orange hunting vest, appeared from behind the tree. A compass flopped around his neck as if he were some kind of Boy Scout gone bad. He  nodded at her, checking her out. And then, their camouflage on automatic fade, more boys emerged from behind the trees. Aurelia became aware of the eyes first, little boy eyes, bits of the natural world inert and then animated by a blink. She wanted to apologize but instead she gestured to the shrine.
  “It’s sad,” she said.
  No one said anything.           
“I’m looking for a little boy. With a box?” she asked. The tall boy came closer. His skin was brown with dirt; she could see it collected even in his eyelashes.
    “Are you all orphans?”
Someone started to laugh or maybe it was the wind.            
 She held out a package of sunflower seeds. The tall boy took it. Her mind flashed on Jeremiah at the stove. Jeremiah on their walks. Maybe he would come bounding through the thicket like a watchdog.
 She emptied her wallet. A shorter boy with long dark curls tangled into dreadlocks took the money, keeping his eye on her all the time, as if she were a rattlesnake. In the background, Aurelia saw an angel hanging from a rope, until her eyes made more sense of it: no angel, a deer carcass quartered.
      One kid peed against a tree and his urine made steam. The heat from the boys felt like an Army blanket--warm, grey, with strange sharp edges buried in it. Aurelia decided they must be ghosts, except for the smell of defecation and piss, the evidence of corporeal antics. Maybe she was the ghost. But the wounds on her legs palpitated—one blooming, one erased. 
   She heard someone call the tall boy, “Ant,” and she watched him grow transparent and show the movie of a murder in his heart.
     Jeremiah would be at home stirring at the stove. He stirred to release starch from grain and to soothe himself from strange disruptions. Aurelia—run off into the woods, Aurelia, lost her head. If she listened she heard a language that seemed to have no vowels. Sh sd n, yr gng wh?
      She turned as if to go: the party was over, and she must be off. The tall boy pushed her down, hard, on a tree stump.  It surprised her that he had the power; she was the adult, she knew better, she should shake her fists, but they were looking at her hungry for something.
 Carefully, choosing each word, Aurelia remembered something from when she was a child. It felt like ancient history. She started slowly and then the memory filled her with its taste. 
 “My father took me here. When I was a kid. We picked berries. Sometimes mushrooms. Careful, he said, if you pick the wrong kind you could end up dead. In the spring it was morels under the elms. When I found one, I felt like I’d made a discovery. I carried a basket, and I filled it with mushrooms. And then, home with the dark outside, my father would fry them up in butter, and we ate them with brown bread.”  
   There was the sense of a banquet about to begin—old rules came into place, rules no one could forget. Bow your head before an adult, don’t look her in the eye. Wash your hands before you eat. If you sit quietly she’ll tell you another story. 
********************************************




 




 

"It’s like the leaves just got tired,” said Aurelia, as she and Jeremiah headed in rectilinear fashion through the neighborhood—down Liberty, up Pine Street, across Emerson, up along the river to Atlas Road. The warmth had stretched long past fall into early winter; the leaves were now shriveled by time, not a hard frost. 

“It’s as if the leaves were hoined,” said Jeremiah, attempting to push his wife’s description farther. This was his job, he reminded her, to find the right words to explain experience. The word he used was archaic. Jeremiah had discovered it recently and put it into the archives at his Poetry Museum. Poetry, Jeremiah believed, was the trap and cage of human experience, holding its mysteries, its beauties, its strangeness in its rhythms. Sometimes when giving a toast—he tended towards 18th and 19th century rhymed verse--one could see his mouth water around the words as if they were small bites of sirloin.

Aurelia walked with a loping gait. Her long legs and long hair stretched her narrow as a greyhound, while her husband, shorter and stouter, scurried to keep up. He walked  leaning forward—a weighty thing, his head, perhaps by virtue of everything it contained inside. He held his wife’s hand whenever they walked together outside. Anything, he said, could happen. Usually it was a half-hold, ring and pinky finger because he found her hands too warm. But as they passed the woods, Jeremiah grabbed onto Aurelia’s arm. 

Sometimes they debated between the words forest and woods, neither word quite capturing the area’s feeling of dark neglect.  Beyond the trees, sat an abandoned city park that was rumored to now house a pack of lost boys.  At one point it  was a kind of red light district filled with lust and romance, a Dickensian ghetto—but the forest seemed now, with a new kind of swagger in the adolescent set, untouchable, gang territory, a place where people were rumored to have been murdered execution-style ininitiation rites.

When Aurelia looked at the forest she thought about her birthday.  Older, and then old, she supposed.  She remembered how the forest had seemed when she was a child.  Thick but not dangerous. “It’s a metaphor,” she said.

“What is?”

“The woods, the park beyond.”

Jeremiah’s face wrinkled with concern over her use of the word. They often bickered about literary terms.  Even when the Poetry Museum was new and Jeremiah was filled with his mission, a sense he was saving something, he’d been territorial.  “Since when is a godless place, a scourge on the city, a metaphor?” 

“It’s my birthday soon,” she said.

He laughed. “It’s just not a metaphor. That’s all.” 

Aurelia looked tonight for the small change kid, the boy who sat on the corner of Liberty and Atlas. The boy, who was small, did not sell lemonade. He sat instead as if he were selling lemonade with a card table, a red and white checked cloth, a folding chair. On the table sat a sign that read “small change.” She thought the boy had picked a nice neighborhood for small change. Marked with tidy lawns and colorful painted houses, this was a place where large-scale change (the kind that sweeps buildings off the face of the earth and brings in men in uniforms) felt impossible. And yet, other nights, she had been convinced he needed small change: nickels, pennies, anything would be appreciated. Tonight it occurred to her that he was offering change to anyone who so desired. And so she crossed the street, breaking free from her worried husband.

“Hello,” she said to the boy, and he nodded in agreement. The table bore a simple cardboard box, smaller than a shoebox, but covered with cut out pictures of birds--crows and robins, hummingbirds and hawks, all out of scale, hummingbirds larger than owls. 

“Small change?” she wondered aloud. 

“I wouldn’t sit out here at night with a bunch of money,” warned Jeremiah, looking over his shoulder in the direction of the woods. “You never know.” The boy seemed not to see him. 

“It’s not money,” she scolded Jeremiah. “Something else is in the box, is that right?” she asked the boy. She noticed his pants were patterned with Army camouflage, and that he wore a very small flak vest. His gaze had both a swoop and a reckon to it, a look that seemed too old for his size. 

The box made a slight squawk as if it needed air. “Oh,” she said, “Is there a bird in there?” and the boy nodded, encouraging her to open it. She did, carefully, and a puff of wind kissed her in the face. Jeremiah jumped as if it were a bullet, pulling his wife back to safety. She laughed--the kiss had felt delightful--a moment of something unexplainable, even as she considered how she might try to explain it. 

Later on the way home, the sky darkening, the distant clangs of other lives echoing in the night air, she said, “It was red inside, shiny and red.”  

“He probably had some kind of device in there,” Jeremiah thought out loud. 

“It felt furry,” she said. “It really did.”

“We didn’t give him our change,” said Jeremiah. He turned to look back at the boy.




“We should take him home with us,” she said.

Jeremiah put his arm around her.  “You should take a photograph of him, “he said.

“You should write a poem about him,” she countered.

Jeremiah pumped his fist like he was leading a revolution. “I could yes, I could. A sestina, or maybe a sonnet.”

“I take it back,” said Aurelia.  “Let’s just let him be the way he is.”

If  Jeremiah turned the boy into a poem, he would lock it up in the edifice of his website, cross-indexed with the words “coins” and “strange.” The boy would join the ranks of the other poems, saved but airless.  She couldn’t bear to think of the boy trapped where no one could find him.  She determined it could be a story she would tell; the words she used would not be archaic but filled with rapture for an experience that felt, at least for a few days after, as if it had sifted some magic dust on her shoulders. 




 Birthdays, said Jeremiah, were holus bolus—a misuse of an archaic word that got at the emotional state he felt when people sang good wishes about growing older. So Aurelia had, for many years, celebrated her birthdays with a group of women at Nadine’s, a downtown establishment that sold both the atmosphere of a jazz club and complicated pastas with cream sauces. 

She entered the restaurant with forced cheer, which was quickly dampened by the group awaiting her around the table. 

The first comment Marthe made had to do with Aurelia’s face. “It’s odd,” she said, “you don’t look any older.” Aurelia nodded; it was true, although this was something that no longer pleased her. “It’s the lack of stress,” she said.

“No stress?” 

“Well, not really,” admitted Aurelia, flashing on the intricate web of worry that laced her together. “It’s not like my job is stressful.” Aurelia managed a ski shop, although this year the weather had slowed sales down to nothing, which would usually cause a ski shop manager some amount of stress. “Of course, I feel stress, it’s just…I don’t know.” It was more of a question. “I’m getting wrinkles around my eyes,” she offered.

“But you don’t gain weight,” insisted Marthe, who did.

“I do,” said Aurelia, “I just walk it off.”

“Every time we get together I think of time lapse photography. A subtle change in each of us, a gradual decline. We’re the flowers that bloomed awhile ago, and then in twenty years we’ll have lost all our petals,” said Simone. “Except for Aurelia,” she said, grudgingly. Simone was Aurelia’s friend from college—a former philosopher who couldn’t find academic work and so instead worked as an account executive. Her education was beginning to melt from her like sheets of old skin; she shed it every day—all of her probing questions replaced with a kind of jokey ennui.

    Bettina gritted her teeth and jiggled the wattle on her neck. “I hope you get fucked tonight,” she said. “That’s all I can think about--” jiggle jiggle—“sex.”

    “It’s weird,” Aurelia continued, thinking out loud. “It’s like I want to forget everything I know.”  That wasn’t quite it, she realized as soon as she said it.

    “That is weird,” said Marthe. “My mother is losing her short-term memory,” she said to them all as a warning. “You show her your new puppy, and she asks you a hundred times how big it’s going to get.”

     “You got a new puppy?” asked Aurelia. “A new puppy, well, that is something.”  Marthe seemed tonight to have quite suddenly relinquished the idea that affection might come from another human being. She had a satisfied, new-mother kind of daze to her; a liquidity and warmth to her movement, as if to say she had found what she wanted and all it involved was a creature with fur. 

Nadine strolled over to their table; only she was a different Nadine than the one they all remembered from last year. 

“Where’s the other Nadine?” wondered Bettina.  

    “There are actually seven of us,” Nadine explained. “One for each day of the week. I’m Thursday."And Thursday Nadine sat at the piano and sang a raunchy Lucinda Williams song in a jazzy rhythm. 

Over dessert, after everyone’s final unmelodious happy birthday to you had evaporated and the smoke from the candles smudged the air, Bettina asked what Aurelia had wished for.

Aurelia admitted that she had wished for something to change, although what she wasn’t quite sure. “Something small,” she said. “To start with.”

Bettina said, “At least you’ve got a sex life.”

Simone complained that change was upon them whether they liked it or not, that even though it seemed as if the present condition shuddered and gasped with lack of possibility, that the force of life was actually change. “We’re just in an artificial bubble,” she intoned. “Believe me, and there are dark clouds on the horizon.” 

Aurelia suggested that looming disaster wasn’t quite the kind of change she was thinking of. She had found the perfect moment for her story about the boy and his box. She embellished it slightly—the boy was more sinister and Jeremiah more flustered; the wind from the box, in her version, made her jump. “I think it was some kind of blessing, or a tiny kind of, I don’t know, kiss from the future,” she said.

“I hope it wasn’t anthrax,” worried Marthe. “Good lord, what were you thinking?”

    And in the silence of Aurelia trying to answer that question—what was she thinking--the desire for a full-transplant of her life swept over her with wings as dark as a crow’s. 

She took her time driving home, taking the curves slowly, pretending the car was a magic marker, and the streets a maze, and the house the place to find on the map.







“I want to nail you,” Jeremiah murmured from bed. He glanced up over the Journal of Metrical Verse at his wife, his eyes squinchy with low light. She slipped next to him, her satin nightgown meeting his flannel. 

He reached for her hair. He breathed in her perfumed scent.

“Did you have a nice birthday?” 

“It was lovely,” she said. “Everyone says hi.”  

She kissed him to keep him from saying anything more. Jeremiah’s arsenal of love talk tended towards an assortment of vaguely upsetting building terms, words that were becoming as difficult for Aurelia as the romantic lines he was also fond of spewing. 

When she broke for air, he grabbed for her breasts, pretending he was a caveman. She whispered in his ear, “Am I better than your magazine?” and he nodded, the reading material clattering to the floor. 

“Oh,” she said suddenly. 

“What,” replied Jeremiah. He sat up as if expecting someone.

“ Look at this thing on my leg. This thing,” she said pointing to a dark mole on her left calf. Earlier in the tub, she had noticed it had grown a new petal. After her father died from a cancer that spread quickly and maliciously to his brain, she’d been in constant surveillance mode, an approach that had relaxed over the past few years. The mole, for weeks on the vague outskirts of her thoughts, now suddenly seemed like a catalyst for worry. Jeremiah picked at it with his fingernail. “I think that’s always been there. It’s an age spot.” 

“An age spot that’s always been there?” 




“It’s got a shape like an age spot. A clover, it’s a clover,” he said, counting the leaves. “Only three—”

“Like four would be better?”

“Just a joke, Aurelia. Four-leaf clover?”

She didn’t laugh.

“Get it checked out if you’re worried, “ he said. “I mean you  should check it out, right?

“Yes,” she said. “I will.”

“We’ve had scares before,” he said, lying back down. “It’s probably nothing.” He waited a few moments before reaching for her again. This time she thought she felt more tenderness in his touch, his desire tainted slightly with fear.

On the day that the weather reports were promising at least six to eight inches of snow, Aurelia left work right after opening the shop. Her assistant assumed she was hitting the slopes early; he blessed her with a hand gesture. She took the blessing, applying it to the day before her filled with biopsies and doctors.

The snow didn’t come, and Aurelia’s appointment was not unlike another she had a few years ago, only she left the doctor’s office feeling as if she had been infected with urges. The idea of a tattoo had not occurred to her before this day. Such a thing would slightly shock her friends, not to mention her husband, who viewed such extremes of drawing into the skin with needles as a sign of the great decline of civilization.

The guy behind the counter was surprisingly clean cut. He had short legs and a longish torso, with an oblong lightly shaved head. He told her his name was Tommy.  

“I want a tattoo,” she said, feeling obvious. She explained, “This is fairly spontaneous.”

He brought out his book, which looked like an artist’s portfolio: drawings, and then close-up photographs of drawings on skin. 

She began to page through the jaguars, the hearts, the anchors, the superheroes, the words—some people, it surprised her, tattooed segments from poems to their skin.

“Do you already have a tattoo?” he asked.

“I’ve always felt too old,” she said.

“I did an eighty-four-year old woman,” he said. “She wanted a cross,” and he flipped to a photograph. “The skin gets so loose, it’s tricky business.”  Up close Aurelia guessed that Tommy  was thirty, thirty-two. 




She marveled at his artistry. He confided that he had gone to art school.

She told him she had studied photography but much before he was there.

“”Hey, I’ve got a gallery in the back room.” 

Aurelia imagined a series of photographs of children, of grit or exotica, evidence of the life she had not lived.  She pretended she had lots of images and even offered to bring them by. 

“Do you know what you want?” he asked. 

Her eyes flickered to the framed certificates, the walls assuring her of sanitary conditions, safety, and artistic merit. She wanted something slightly abstract. “I want it to look like a clover,” she said. “With three petals. And with stripes around it, kind of psychedelic.” She made a quick drawing, and she showed it to him.  “Sort of small,” she said, “and hidden.” She pointed to a place on her other leg, by the ankle. “Private,” she said. 

Tommy asked her to slip off her pants and put on a robe. She lay down on a massage table, her second examination of the day. 

Dr. Hide had been too tan for a dermatologist. Not that Aurelia kept track of such things, but the doctor and his wife had four beautiful children--she could see their pictures posted all over the office—while Aurelia and Jeremiah had the Poetry Museum.  It was true that the Poetry Museum contained more than 500,000 entries and that the museum’s mission contained the word “posterity.” 

At the exam, the dermatologist had rubbed her smooth legs, shaved for the appointment. He lingered too long on her thigh, she thought. And then with his magnifying glass and ruler he had contemplated the mark. “Mmm,” he had said, “this does look a little funky. I don’t remember this one.”  

A shot of Novocain and then a scraper and cauterizer had been applied. The nurse handed her a sheet of paper with a phone number to call in a few days for the biopsy results. Aurelia had the paper in her purse. 

Tommy’s hand did not linger on her leg. He was all business and rubbing alcohol, suiting himself up with magnifying goggles, a facemask. He looked like a medical spelunker. It felt like the second operation of the day, although the tattoo seemed far more serious with the light on Tommy’s visor illuminating his way. His firm reminders for her to stay still came every few minutes. The tattoo needle made a light humming sound. Tommy talked his way through every mark, as if he were a very slow driver. “I’m turning the corner now, and we’ll just fill in the curve, here…and then take it easy on the outline.”




 




 “Where were you?” Jeremiah asked. She was hours late; her husband was listening to Bartok, a sure sign of emotional upset. He came to greet her at the door, wine glass in hand.

“How did it go? “

She didn’t tell him about the tattoo. “Um, the doctor thought it looked weird, and they did a biopsy.”

“A biopsy took this long?” 

“I drove around.”

“By yourself?  Is that safe?”

“It’s all relative, this safety thing.”

“I know what you mean,” he agreed.

“I can spend my life just being safe,” she said.

He nodded, appreciating his wine. “When do you find out the  results?

“Monday,” she said. 

She kept her coat on and asked him to walk outside with her. 

“I don’t know,” he said, “it’s late. We need to eat.”

“A walk would help me clear my head,” she said. 

The late evening sky bulged as if it had trapped the coming season in its sheet and had it bundled up far away. There had been no snow today; the storm had gone south, whitening prairies and flatland instead of the northern hills. 

“Tonight, “ he said, “We have something to celebrate.” 

“What,” she wondered. 

“I got a lead on some Browning.”

Aurelia nodded. Her husband hunted early drafts like other men tracked down deer. 

“It’s the one that goes “ ‘With winters and with autumns and beyond, / With the human heart's large seasons, when it hopes/ And fears, joys, grieves, and loves? with all that strain—’ ”

     "Uh huh,” she said. “I like grieves.”

“Well,” he said, “in an earlier draft, it read  ‘when it wants.’  Not ‘hopes.’ ”  Melanoma, she knew, grew from a few errant cells. It spread horizontally but if it stuck its tendrils down into the fatty tissues, beyond the fatty tissues, it could have a field day. 




They had come to the corner of Liberty and Atlas, the place where they had seen the small change boy. He wasn’t there. 

“I didn’t realize there was a path here that led to the woods,” she said.

Jeremiah clapped his hands, impatiently. “I want to go now.”

 “Maybe the boy is down there, ” and she indicated the park gone wild. 

“Children, at least well-behaved children, don’t live in the woods,” said Jeremiah. 

They walked all the way to the stop sign. “What do you want to do tonight?” asked Aurelia.

“I want to show you the Browning,” he said and rubbed her back. “Everything’s going to be OK,” he promised. 

So she ran, letting go of Jeremiah’s half-hold, into the woods. 

The path through the trees had wheel ruts in it, probably from bicycles.  She ran on the path and off the path, trying to lose herself quickly. Jeremiah was shouting her name, which echoed in waves. Aura first; the  lia, a flourish of panic. His voice began to fade with distance. It surprised her how easily he gave up, and how soon he decided not to follow her.  

She stood covered by dusk and saw below her the industry of the boys, the tents and the shacks. She was amazed by the order of it. The park had become a kind of miniature city. She felt ridiculously tall and said the word softly to herself--Brobdingnagian—her shoes, lime green hikers (because lime green was in) glowed like artificial fishing lures, their unnatural color staining the air ways, souring the dirt around them. She stood still. No one, she thought, was much over fifteen. Standing there, she imagined how old she must seem to them, how motherly—and if they might begin by hugging her around the waist, and then, perhaps, an interloper to the scene, take her down, hack her apart. She remembered the way her father looked after the surgeries for the cancers: one on his back, one on his buttocks, one on the left ear. The violent knife; they had to cut deep.  How needless it had been once the cancer found its way to his brain.

All the children wore camouflage. The boy she had met was probably begging, she realized, although it was very twenty-first-century of him to not ask directly, to present such ambiguity, to offer no question or explanation.  

There was a picture of a small boy tacked to a tree. His face was smudged. He had brown hair and a smile marked with new corrugated teeth. Various remnants of holidays clung to the tree: a wreath, a shriveled helium balloon in the shape of a heart, a plastic shamrock in a plastic pot. The shrine had been tended to. The photograph was laminated, and a note had been tucked in under the plastic that read, “Always love you, Trevor, Mom.” She touched the note, to see what she might feel.  It wasn’t the boy she was looking for.

A large boy, tall and wearing an orange hunting vest, appeared from behind the tree. A compass flopped around his neck as if he were some kind of Boy Scout gone bad. He  nodded at her, checking her out. And then, their camouflage on automatic fade, more boys emerged from behind the trees. Aurelia became aware of the eyes first, little boy eyes, bits of the natural world inert and then animated by a blink. She wanted to apologize but instead she gestured to the shrine.

  “It’s sad,” she said.

  No one said anything.           

“I’m looking for a little boy. With a box?” she asked. The tall boy came closer. His skin was brown with dirt; she could see it collected even in his eyelashes.

    “Are you all orphans?”

Someone started to laugh or maybe it was the wind.            

She held out a package of sunflower seeds. The tall boy took it. Her mind flashed on Jeremiah at the stove. Jeremiah on their walks. Maybe he would come bounding through the thicket like a watchdog.

She emptied her wallet. A shorter boy with long dark curls tangled into dreadlocks took the money, keeping his eye on her all the time, as if she were a rattlesnake. In the background, Aurelia saw an angel hanging from a rope, until her eyes made more sense of it: no angel, a deer carcass quartered.

      One kid peed against a tree and his urine made steam. The heat from the boys felt like an Army blanket--warm, grey, with strange sharp edges buried in it. Aurelia decided they must be ghosts, except for the smell of defecation and piss, the evidence of corporeal antics. Maybe she was the ghost. But the wounds on her legs palpitated—one blooming, one erased. 

   She heard someone call the tall boy, “Ant,” and she watched him grow transparent and show the movie of a murder in his heart.

     Jeremiah would be at home stirring at the stove. He stirred to release starch from grain and to soothe himself from strange disruptions. Aurelia—run off into the woods, Aurelia, lost her head. If she listened she heard a language that seemed to have no vowels. Sh sd n, yr gng wh?

      She turned as if to go: the party was over, and she must be off. The tall boy pushed her down, hard, on a tree stump.  It surprised her that he had the power; she was the adult, she knew better, she should shake her fists, but they were looking at her hungry for something.

Carefully, choosing each word, Aurelia remembered something from when she was a child. It felt like ancient history. She started slowly and then the memory filled her with its taste. 

   “My father took me here. When I was a kid. We picked berries. Sometimes mushrooms. Careful, he said, if you pick the wrong kind you could end up dead. In the spring it was morels under the elms. When I found one, I felt like I’d made a discovery. I carried a basket, and I filled it with mushrooms. And then, home with the dark outside, my father would fry them up in butter, and we ate them with brown bread.”  

   There was the sense of a banquet about to begin—old rules came into place, rules no one could forget. Bow your head before an adult, don’t look her in the eye. Wash your hands before you eat. If you sit quietly she’ll tell you another story.