“Won’t that wake your parents?” I asked, peering back through the trees.
“Maybe. They don’t pay much attention,” said two of them.
The first bottle rocket went up, cleared the treetops, and became an invisible whistle for a moment. Before the little rocket exploded, I scanned the stars, thinking nice thoughts about fate and meaning-making, that long ago some big thing decided I should stay away from this town. I thought about my family, how my father took off, too. There weren’t bad men around here. Then, after a joyous POP, my eyes swallowed the weak purple beauty-burst of childhood pranks that littered the black sky and erased the stars.
“It’s the fear of getting caught, isn’t it?” I said while they shot off roman candles. Roman candles don’t make much noise, though. They sound like spits. I thought I heard police sirens, way off.
“Jake got caught last week,” said backwards hat.
“Fuck off.” Presumably, it was Jake who said this.
“Jerking off in the basement.”
“Shut up.”
“You’ll all get caught,” I said.
“Not me,” said backwards hat. “I do it in the shower.”
“Even there,” I said. “You get seen. It won’t matter though, if the person’s like me.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I’m good. Decent. I know what to look at, maybe, or look for, so no one hides.”
The boys weren’t interested in me anymore, though. They burned the sparklers and whipped the white-hot embers at each other. Eventually, they were galloping off, away from me.
I headed back through the woods and saw lights go on, then off at Jake’s. I thought about waiting a little while, sneaking in through the back slider and watching the rest of the sleepover, a childhood event I knew I had experienced but couldn’t possibly remember, because my eyes would have been shut.
Someone had actually locked the door at my mother’s house, so I slipped in through the porch window. A strange, professional-looking woman slept in the living room. Folded shirts lay next to her, along with needles and prescription bottles on the coffee table. I felt like I was in someone else’s house again, the fear of her waking up, seeing me and calling the cops. Even the framed pictures, I didn’t recognize them right away. I grabbed one. All of us, before Dad left, after I graduated grade school or something meaningless. Now it was Mom’s turn to go. I told the Hospice lady I’d just be a minute, but she didn’t stir.
Upstairs, I lay on my old bed, pulled back the curtain, and stared out to the neighbor’s house through the trees there. I felt like I had snuck back after being in so many people’s homes, after looking at trophies in dens, china in glass displays, souvenir magnets of zoos on fridges, calendars with tiny birthday cakes on birthday days, like when I was young. I had done it, got back in my bed without getting caught. I was here with my mom, after looking in the places I shouldn’t. But I still wanted something more. I threw open the door to the master bedroom with one sweep, which my mother did not hear, or she was too almost-gone to notice. She lay on her side of the bed with more than half the queen-size empty. A stuffed teddy bear with a scarf sat next to her. Did she hug that, in the night, and believe for a moment someone was with her? I stared down at the scene, took it all in. My mother was always pale, but now she looked so white she was see-through, made of light. She breathed thin scratches. I could have done anything right then.
I wanted to crawl in and make up a bad dream to tell her about. I wanted to feel comforted by her once more. It seemed foolish and pathetic, and she didn’t need to think her son was unstable right before she sailed to the other side.
“Hey,” I said. “Hey, you there?”
She just kept breathing, kept living a bit longer. I climbed into bed and lay on top of the sheets. I curled up. “Hey, Mom,” I said, and I watched her eyes flail under her white eyelids. I saw her. Slowly, I reached out and touched her cheek. Then I jumped out and swiped the house key off the dresser in one quick silent scoop.
I went out the way I came in. On the porch, I took one last look. Then I stabbed the key in the door lock, opened up the place, and took off.
Sometimes, I like to remember that after I split, I spun around to see a light on upstairs, that I watched as my mother forgave me with some beautiful gesture, and that I nodded knowingly. But I don’t think anyone would believe that. My mother finally went a few hours later. I spent the night far away. First in a neighbor’s foyer. Then somebody’s bedroom. Then a kitchen. One onto another. I flipped through piles of photos. I watched parents dream. I drew birthday cakes on calendars. It wasn’t that good though. Before I left town, I saw Pete again and told him to find a sweet girl and to get too busy to remember missed opportunities. He just shook his head and laughed, but he hugged me. Taking off, on the bus, I watched out the back as my old town’s green street signs grayed, the grass yellowed, the black tar went white, the blue colonials dripped sick green, the lid of a trashcan blew off and rolled to the edge of the world, the fading pink skies began to erase telephone poles and brick chimneys from their tops down, and the already-vanishing everything else back there dissolved away. But I always knew that would happen. Kind eyes get used up.
USED GOODS
I needed a lot more than what I had managed to cram in the back of my Subaru for the move. It was a hasty job, which wasn’t philosophically conceived—I simply hadn’t thought the move through enough. But I recast my anxiety about leaving things behind into a dream of starting over. I took my clothes. Some books. A few lamps. My computer and guitar. But I left almost everything else on the curb with a sign reading: “It’s All Yours Now!”
Right across the street from my new apartment, there was a used goods store. Perfect, I thought. What do I need? I made a quick list, and I promised myself I would only get what I wrote down. I was only going to get what I needed this time. No more clutter. Bed frame. Work desk. Chair. Kitchen table. Pots and pans. Bare essentials. A clean slate.
But you never know what you need until you are faced with all the things you want. Nearly everything on my list was in the first room of the store, so I told the nice people working there that I would be buying these things and coming back periodically to cart them away. Then, like a fool, I browsed.
I’ve always liked secondhand stores. Antiques warehouses. Thrift shops. The kinds of places where you might find a gleaming set of silverware in a mahogany box for hundreds of dollars on the same shelf as a tape deck missing the rewind button. You might find a bargain, or an item no longer being manufactured, or a toy that you had misplaced, years and years ago, a lifetime ago. The toy could be the very one you played with. It had its own lifespan, just like you. And here you two are, coinciding again. I always enjoyed that the items had other people’s stories and lives imbued in them. Someone may have used the desk a century ago to write unrequited love letters by candlelight. I try not to get carried away, but I wonder and hope that something lives in the material.
I pushed through a beaded curtain into a second room that housed cardboard boxes of VHS and cassette tapes, VCRs and radios, standing lamps, nightstands—actually I needed a nightstand and forgot to jot it down—shelves upon shelves of old novels, glassware, cookware, paintings, armchairs, jewelry in glass display cases, magnifying glasses, large standing brass ashtrays, rotary phones, vinyl records, and dusty turntables. Some alluring nostalgia. Useful but mostly unnecessary.
The third room, which lay behind a heavy oak door, contained much the same as the first, but these particular items, on closer inspection, were damaged. A desk missing a drawer. An upright piano with only black keys. I suppose one could take this stuff home and fix it, but I am no good at repairing anything. Better to move on.
I creaked open a beat-up screen door to enter the final room, which looked just like an old general store. Aisles stacked with cereal boxes and soup cans. Refrigerators filled with liters of milk, bottles of juice, cans of soda, cartons of eggs. Frosted, brown bottles of b
eer in six-packs. I deserved it, I thought, and pulled open the glass door. Refreshing icy breath escaped the cooler. When I grabbed and lifted the six-pack, I tumbled backward. It was incredibly light. The bottles were empty. Caps sealed to the tops. I held a bottle up to the light. Empty. I replaced the pack and grabbed another. Light as the first. It felt good to hold the six-pack of empty bottles. It felt manageable. I felt a touch stronger, a bit more capable. I carried it around the store, thinking I would inform the cashier of the beer problem when I was finished shopping.
On the other side of the registers were long tables with board games laid out. A Scrabble board with words on it, a completed game—STRETCH, perpendicular to HIRE, perpendicular to EXIT. A notebook rested next to the game. Initials were scrawled on top, and scores were written down in columns: “J.M.” had beaten out “W.M.” and “R.P.” by 20 points. Two tiles lay in the tiny wooden rack on one side of the board, and one tile lay in the rack facing me: “M” (three points subtracted from W.M.’s score). I put the notebook in my pocket and gingerly picked up the Scrabble board, balancing the game on my palm like a waiter.
At the impulse-buy section by the counter, I saw mason jars of Bic pens without caps. Blues. Blacks. One red. There were yellow Post-it pads covered with words: “TO DO: Laundry, Groceries, Oil Change.” Some words were scratched out. I placed the six-pack on the counter and withdrew a blue pen. I tried crossing off “Laundry,” because I had actually done it already. But the pen was inkless.
The old man in line in front of me paid for a pack of cigarettes, opened it, and tapped out a crumpled filter into his palm. I bought the six-pack, Scrabble game, yellow Post-it pad, and two pens. I told the cashier that I would come back for all the furniture, as soon as I made a friend to help me.
When I came home to my new place, satisfied that I had got only what I needed, with just a few small gifts to myself, I put the finished Scrabble game in the middle of the living room floor, tossed the six-pack in the fridge, and began reading over a To Do list with my dry pen in hand. At some point, I cracked an empty beer and looked out the window, thinking that I was maybe going to make it, this time, in this new place. Then, there was a knock on the door, but, whoever it was, they were already leaving.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am pleased to publicly thank the many people who supported my writing, across the country and through the years. I want to thank the editors of the magazines who originally published these stories in slightly different form:
The American Scholar: “Out of Order”;
Bellow Literary Journal: “Test”;
Crossborder: “Unidentified Living Object”;
Dogwood: “A Proper Hunger”;
Gingko Tree Review: “The Mime”;
The Pinch: “Ready Set”;
Pindeldyboz: “Camp Redo”;
The Southern Review: “Complicated and Annoying Little Robot,” “Giant,” and “The OK End of Funny Town”;
Tahoma Literary Review: “An Exact Thing”;
Third Coast: “Gracie”;
Unlikely Stories: “Used Goods”;
Wag’s Revue: “Genie” and “Porcelain God.”
“Giant” was reprinted in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).
“Porcelain God” and an excerpt of “Ready Set,” which originally appeared in POP!, are included in this collection courtesy of Stillhouse Press.
I am forever indebted to the professors in the English Department at Skidmore College and the MFA Program at the University of Arizona, especially Aurelie Sheehan, Elizabeth Evans, Greg Hrbek, Jason Brown, and Kathryn Davis. Many thanks to the writers at the UA workshop, especially Cara Adams, Donald Dunbar, Isaac Eldridge, Jamie Poissant, Lisa Ciccarello, and William Bert. Thank you to Peter Conners and the team at BOA for believing in this book. I am grateful to John Murray and Will MacLaughlin, who have been reading my stories from the get-go. Rachel Yoder, thank you for being my greatest ally in all this. Dave Polanzak and Henrietta Polanzak, your relentless encouragement sustains me. Steven Millhauser, thank you for giving me my writing life. And lastly, thank you, Alle, for your love and our life together.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Polanzak is author of the hybrid work, POP! (George Mason University/Stillhouse Press). His stories have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, The American Scholar, The Southern Review, Third Coast, The Pinch, and elsewhere. He is a founding editor for draft: the journal of process, and a contributor to The Fail Safe podcast. A graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA program in fiction, he teaches writing and literature at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Mark lives with his wife near the ocean in Salem, Massachusetts, where he thinks up and works on stories at the coffee shops and bars.
BOA EDITIONS, LTD.
AMERICAN READER SERIES
No. 1 Christmas at the Four Corners of the Earth
Prose by Blaise Cendrars Translated by Bertrand Mathieu
No. 2 Pig Notes & Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry
By William Heyen
No. 3 After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches
By W. D. Snodgrass
No. 4 Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry
By Stephen Dunn
No. 5 To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry
By W. D. Snodgrass
No. 6 You Alone Are Real to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke
By Lou Andreas-Salomé
No. 7 Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee
Edited by Earl G. Ingersoll
No. 8 I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These
By Anthony Tognazzini
No. 9 Unlucky Lucky Days
By Daniel Grandbois
No. 10 Glass Grapes and Other Stories
By Martha Ronk
No. 11 Meat Eaters & Plant Eaters
By Jessica Treat
No. 12 On the Winding Stair
By Joanna Howard
No. 13 Cradle Book
By Craig Morgan Teicher
No. 14 In the Time of the Girls
By Anne Germanacos
No. 15 This New and Poisonous Air
By Adam McOmber
No. 16 To Assume a Pleasing Shape
By Joseph Salvatore
No. 17 The Innocent Party
By Aimee Parkison
No. 18 Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in Their Own Words
Interviews by Tony Leuzzi
No. 19 The Era of Not Quite
By Douglas Watson
No. 20 The Winged Seed: A Remembrance
By Li-Young Lee
No. 21 Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories
By Aurelie Sheehan
No. 22 The Tao of Humiliation
By Lee Upton
No. 23 Bridge
By Robert Thomas
No. 24 Reptile House
By Robin McLean
No. 25 The Education of a Poker Player
James McManus
No. 26 Remarkable
By Dinah Cox
No. 27 Gravity Changes
No. 28 My House Gathers Desires
By Adam McOmber
No. 29 An Orchard in the Street
By Reginald Gibbons
No. 30 The Science of Lost Futures
By Ryan Habermeyer
No. 31 Permanent Exhibit
By Matthew Vollmer
No. 32 The Rapture Index: A Suburban Bestiary
By Molly Reid
No. 33 Joytime Killbox
By Brian Wood
No. 34 The OK End of Funny Town
By Mark Polanzak
COLOPHON
BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit publisher of poetry and other literary works, fosters readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique litera
ry talent, BOA brings highquality literature to the public. Support for this effort comes from the sale of its publications, grant funding, and private donations.
The publication of this book is made possible, in part, by the special support of the following individuals:
Anonymous
June C. Baker
Angela Bonazinga & Catherine Lewis
James Long Hale
Art & Pam Hatton
Jack & Gail Langerak
Joe McElveney
Boo Poulin
Steven O. Russell & Phyllis Rifkin-Russell
David W. Ryon
Meredith & Adam Smith
Sue S. Stewart, in memory of Steven L. Raymond
William Waddell & Linda Rubel