By Ben Leib

I waited to put my shoes on until after I jumped out of the window, by which time my socks were soaked.  My bedroom window frame was concave where I rested my knees as I lowered myself to the ground outside.  I sprinted down the unlit driveway to the bottom of the hill.  Randy honked the horn a couple of times as I ran up to the car.  He knew it pissed me off.  He and Hector were laughing when I opened the car door.

“Assholes,” I said.

It was mid-January, a Tuesday night.  A Petaluma night, so moist and dewy you could smell the cow shit for miles around.  “What are the plans, gentlemen?”

“Oh, dude, we’ve got something in mind,” Randy said.

“What the fuck, you gonna make me guess?”

We drove over to Hector’s, where I had a bottle of whiskey and a forty waiting for me.  I dove on that pint like prohibition was impending.  The first few tastes of whiskey were always nectar.  The liquid burned.  I’d get the sweats after a shot or two.  Beer didn’t do the same thing.  It was good going down, but it didn’t create that fire in my belly that could only be extinguished by more booze.  Whiskey created the fever and whiskey quelled the fever.

It was business as usual that Tuesday.

I drove Andy’s car down Payran, east on Washington.  I drove those well worn streets like I’d commissioned their construction.

“Randy,” I said as I flicked ashes out an open window, “you’re a crazy fucker, you know that?”

When we pulled up to Kenelworth, the three of us jumped out of the car.  We smoked, staring at the Christmas tree dump from across the junior high school football field.  There was almost no traffic on Washington.  The parking lot, the library, the swim center, and the streets leading to them were all deserted.  It was a cold night, and everything was motionless, felt frozen in place.  But for the buzz of power lines, the drone of Highway 101, the razor breeze, time could have been standing still, holding all lives but ours in a stasis.

“You’re gonna do it, right, Randy?”  Hector asked.

“Fuck yeah.”

It was nearly a mile around the junior high campus, some undeveloped lots, and back onto Payran.  We pulled into the drive alongside the bus stop.  I stopped the car.  It was the closest we’d gotten to the pile of trees – about fifteen yards.  The mound was at least twenty feet high.  It was thirty feet across.

“You ready?” I asked.

“Yeah, hand me the fireworks.”  Hector passed Randy a bag.

We watched Randy sprint from the car to the mound of wood.  We saw the orange of the flame as he sparked his Zippo.  We saw the sparks from the fuse as the firework soared end over end into the middle of the pile.  By the time Randy lit the second firework, a cascade of sparks illuminated the skeletal structure from within.  Randy threw the second closer to the perimeter of the pile.  He sprinted back to the car and jumped in.

“Let’s get the fuck outta here dude,” he said.

“Where we going?” I asked.  “How’re we gonna see if this thing even catches on fire?”

“Drive over the freeway,” Hector said.  “We’ll make a u-turn on McDowell, and come back from the other direction.”

The Christmas trees became a dark shadow as they shrank from view, but the fire was visible when we backtracked on the other side of the road.  It wasn’t big yet, just getting its legs.

“Holy shit, it’s going,” Hector said.

“That bitch is gonna be huge!”  Randy beamed.

There was an all night drive thru across Washington Street from the fire.  We bought ourselves burgers and ate in the parking lot, leaning against the car.  I uncapped the whiskey.  The fire raged.  We could feel the heat from across the boulevard.  We must have been a hundred yards away, but we had to talk over the roar of the flames, that inferno reflected in our gazes.

“Holy shit, that’s intense dude,” Hector murmured.

“Good idea, Randy.”  I said.

“Thank you, but the artist doesn’t know where inspiration comes from.  Thank the muses.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Randy?”  Hector said.

“The muse of vandalism, huh?” I asked.

“She’s not as popular as poetry, but much more satisfying.”

The flames were a spectrum of vividness and illuminated those things within their immediate vicinity.  They doubled and tripled the height of the nearest buildings.  It was beautiful in a way.  A fire itself is beautiful, and, at such magnitude, its consumption is awesome.

After several minutes of watching, another car pulled into the parking lot.  It was Matt Dog and his buddy DeWitt.  They were tweaking, just out cruising.

“This is fucking bad,” Matt Dog said, “you guys start this?”

“You fucking know it,” Randy said.

I heard sirens.  Several fire engines came tearing up the street, pulled around the median in front of the library, and stopped beside the bus stop.  Once situated, the firemen didn’t seem in any hurry to take action.  Five or six men dressed in reflective uniforms gleamed in the light of the flames.  They stood at the side of the road and watched the fire, but did nothing to stop it.  Then the police arrived.  They looked at the flames, then they looked into the parking lot across the street and they knew who to ask about the fire.

“Hello gentlemen.”  An officer stepped from the passenger side of the car that had just pulled in a few spaces in front of us.  “What’re you guys doing out here tonight?”

Hector spoke up.  “We were just getting some dinner when we saw this fire across the street.”

The other officer had stepped from the car and was leaning over the hood.  “Hey, I know you, don’t I?”  He pointed to Matt Dog.

“What’s up Officer Reeve,” Matt said.

“Hello Mr. Rice,” The officer said.  “Well, I know you’ve been arrested on possession, but you never struck me as an arsonist.”

“It’s a huge fire,” Matt Dog said.  “I wish I could take credit for it.”

“And you boys don’t know anything about this either?”

“Not a thing,” Hector said.

“It was already going when we got here,” I reminded him.

“Well, I think you boys have seen enough of the show.  It’s time to move along.”

Nobody argued.

“Let’s head up Sonoma Mountain.” Hector suggested once we’d piled back into Randy’s Civic, “I bet we’ll be able to see the fire from up there.”

We took a left onto Washington.  The police car followed us out of the lot and continued to follow us as we drove through the east side of the city.

“Those fuckers know it was us,” Randy said, glancing in his rearview.

“So?  What are they gonna do?  They don’t have proof,” I said.  “Besides, burning those trees didn’t do shit.  Who gives a damn if we did burn them?”

From Sonoma Mountain, three miles out and a thousand feet above the city, we watched the fire burn itself out.

“Well, good work gentlemen.”

By Ben Leib

 In my experience, folks on cross country bus rides are, as often as not, running from something.  My qualifications for such an opinion – while I have spent many, many hours aboard Greyhounds, aboard municipal locals, aboard intercity locals, I have only been subjected to two interstate expeditions.

The first was an adventure but I was running nevertheless. My dad and stepmom were on vacation that week, which made my departure less complicated.  One night I wrote a note to them, left it on their bed, hugged and kissed my little brother goodbye, and ran down the driveway to meet Colin, with whom I’d be driving to San Diego by way of Santa Cruz.  From San Diego, it was a long Greyhound ride east.

There is an ethos to bus travel in the US that I’d discovered long before my journey to Texas.  For example, though physical contact is unavoidable in such close quarters, bus etiquette stipulates that you touch the person sitting next to you as little as possible.  Do not allow your ass or legs to cross the line constituting the border from one seat to the next.  The shared arm rest is first come, first serve.

When travelling, I sit at the back of busses with the misfits, the homeless, the broken and the insane.  Leave the front seats for those who believe themselves to be upstanding, normal, pleasant-minded travelers, I’m a backseat dweller.  I bullshitted with those misfits, listened to their stories with a genuine hunger for life’s true strangeness, and was granted the opportunity to tell my own story in return.

Marijuana, booze, and narcoleptics of all forms are a commodity on long bus rides, for sleep and comfort are difficult to come by.  I have discovered that I can reliably expect three hours straight sleep on a crowded bus if I consume four Tylenol PM (a fifth pill and the likelihood that I piss my pants in a comatose-like slumber increases tenfold).  The best place to sit in a Greyhound bus is on the very back bench, by the bathroom, for, though the seats do not recline, there are three of them in a row rather than the standard two, and, if nobody sits next to you, that’s the closest you’ll come to a bed.

During much of the trip from San Diego to Texas, I sat next to two hoodlums from Georgia, with whom I shared my weed and my bourbon.  Once intoxicated, they began to talk.  They were running from something nebulous.  They’d gotten into dangerous trouble, whether with the law or with other hoodlumsm I couldn’t tell, and they’d been compelled to leave California as quickly as possible.  Late that night, as I closed my eyes, hoping desperately for a slumber that would not come, I heard those kids plotting to rob me.

“We just take his shit,” one said.  “Who’s he gonna tell?”

Let ‘em try, I thought to myself, though I dared not open my eyes to reveal that I’d heard all along.

Where is the grace on an interstate bus?  What calloused hand ushers that awkward vehicle and its awkward passengers through crossings?  At the Arizona border, in the dark of early morning, police with chained dogs circumnavigated the bus to ensure that no dope was being smuggled into their state.  And then, sometime later, I crossed the other border of Arizona, having bisected that beautifully desert state.  West Texas was a purgatory of rolling hills and roadside fast food.

That’s how we travelers were sustained: the driver would stop once every four hours or so, if not at a depot then at a corporate burger joint that seemed inexplicably to sprout from a bland and unpopulated horizon, only to recede once again into the tumble weeds, into the dust and the exhaust as the bus’ ticketholders all regrouped, re-boarded, and departed.  And what a strange and motley crew we were, after too many hours, too little personal hygiene, and nothing that could be described as restful sleep.  We were not a cross section of humanity but were humanity’s dregs: forgotten, anonymous, alone, unwanted, and unappreciated, we ran.

—

I had, days before my departure, opted to drop out of rehab after eight months’ inpatient treatment, after eight months sober.  I drank a twelve pack my first day out of the facility and I knew that I wouldn’t be going back on the wagon any time soon.  I had, that very day, moved into my own apartment.  I’d purchased furniture, groceries, household items.  I moved everything into my new place and that night I was drunk.

One twelve-pack was all it took to confirm my ever-lurking suspicions that I was not done kicking at a world which I thought deserved all the punishment I could muster.  I called my new landlords and told them that I had to break my lease.  I returned everything that I was able to get cash refunds for, storaged the rest, and quit my job by phone without notice.  I went back to my inpatient facility, allowed counselors and patients alike to yell at me for an hour or so, listened to them while they explained that the bottle, for me, held certain inescapable repercussions which, in their opinion, I was not strong enough to survive.

I heard them out, tried to defend myself a bit, and then walked back out the front door. 

—

On extended interstate bus ride number two (and by now, I’d travelled the south by bus), I was a somewhat different man than on extended interstate bus ride number one.  I wouldn’t say that this unforgiving country had broken me, because I’d found kindnesses wherever I went.  I had discovered a desire for merriment that transcended regionalism, cultural barriers, age, and personal interests.  But that said, I was tired when I boarded that bus for California.  The trip, from the moment I departed from New Orleans to the moment I stepped onto Petaluma’s familiar old streets, was seventy hours.  I was scared, for my destination was hazy at best, and the machinations of providence’s unknowable whimsy had thus far presented me with obstacles that I was unfit to surmount. 

But it was unimportant, at least over the next three days, just how I would manage to right this temporary derailment, because, for the moment, I was with my people, the transient and invisible denizens of the back of the bus. 

There was the marine, a kid, younger than me, who had illegally abandoned the military and was now running by bus, not toward a foreseeable future, but away from his would-be jailers, away from the inevitability of a fate that he could only evade for so long while AWOL. 

There was a fourteen year old, a loud mouthed, pot smoking little gangster, who, I came to find, was well used to these extended bus rides, his family having shuffled him from one relative to another, as they, one by one, succumbed to the frustration of raising an unruly child who was not their own.  He was on his way to Los Angeles, where his great aunt awaited his arrival. 

There was a mother with a talkative daughter.  At one point during the long bus ride, the little girl ended up seated next to me.  She started to tell me that Daddy went away, and she didn’t know if she would see Daddy again, but right now they were going to see Grandma and Grandpa in New Mexico.  I smiled at the little girl, but searched internally for some way to discourage her talkativeness, for others could hear as she revealed these intimate family tragedies, and, as the catalyst or conduit for her innocent revelations, I felt something approaching criminal guilt.  The little girl’s mother, a buxom redhead, emotionally tender in ways that, from what I could grasp, were justifiable considering their circumstances, sat in the seat in front of us, where she could overhear her daughter talking about Daddy, and she began to sob softly but audibly.

And where, I thought, but the close quarters of an over-night bus ride could strangers come into such intimate contact as to unwittingly find themselves the arbiters of each other’s struggles?

I wasn’t unhappy during that return trip.  I was as talkative as ever, and I let everyone know that a brief stint in county jail was a cake walk, that the only struggle I faced during a week locked into a converted gym with sixty two other inmates was boredom.  I told people on the bus that I’d used heroin for the first time and that it’d been a wonderful delight.  I recounted sitting on the porch of an abandoned home in a side street of New Orleans, where one block meant the difference between parades and crack addicts.  I’d been brought there by an alcoholic who I’d bonded with over whiskey, and I described how I agreed without hesitation when he pulled out that bag of powder.  I didn’t regret my trip, nor did I regret the unpleasantries that had befallen me, nor was I unhopeful about the future (though it did constitute a limitless unknown).

I met Clara on day two.  She, like the other back-of-the-bussers, was on the run.  She was running from an abusive relationship, and, in her flight, had to also leave behind two step children whom she loved.  Clara was a mother through and through.  She reprimanded the fourteen year old thug for being too cavalier with his pot smoking, warned him that he would get kicked off of the bus if he pissed off the driver enough, and the kid, to my surprise, capitulated to her chastisements.  She was kind and treated the weird folks, living, at that moment, a life in transit, with the humanity that they each possessed and that they desperately wanted recognized during their otherwise anonymous existences.  And Clara cried when she talked about the children who she’d helped to raise, for her one regret was that she could not take them with her, nor could she ever contact them again, because she believed, with an honesty and a clarity that sent chills down my spine, that her life was in danger. 

The two of us colonized the back row of seats on the bus, where we took turns laying on each other’s lap, seeking as much comfort as we could, for these long bus rides were characterized by a dearth in comfort.  Our mutual luggages crammed about us, I rubbed Clara’s bare arm with the tips of my fingers in an effort to impart an odd intimacy that seemed almost inappropriate.  She ran her nails through my hair when I tried to sleep, kneading my scalp and looking down at me with eyes that bespoke a need of her own.

Clara was thirty one years old, though her hair was cut at about chin length and mussed by days of travel in such a way that she looked to be in her early to mid twenties.  She also had a bit of acne and no makeup which made her look disheveled, though I accounted the plainness of her appearance to the limitations of bus travel.  She talked about taking her “sink showers” in depot bathrooms, where we all did our best to retain a personal hygiene, unsustainable within that muggy, sweaty closeness.  Clara was pretty, in a country girl kind of way, and had both an innocence and a hardness written into the lines of her eyes.  She was slender, but seemed to lack the muscle to fill her skin fully, so that her arms and her breasts (at those moments when she abandoned the restrictions of a bra) were fleshier than might be considered attractive.

I found her to be the most beautiful woman I’d spoken to in ages.  And I was relieved that when I lowered my face to hers she lifted her head to meet my own and willingly, eagerly even, kissed me.  And I don’t think that it would be an exaggeration to say that no kiss, before or since the first time that my and Clara’s lips met, has brought me the same degree of cathartic relief, as if in that one moment we confirmed, I for her and she for me, that all problems were but extended interludes between such moments as this.

In the Los Angeles depot, a hell on earth bus stop where junkies populated the sidewalks and penny hustlers sold shitty joints for three dollars apiece to anyone who happened to have a spare three dollars, Clara and I parted ways.  Her layover was longer than my own, and she kept me company as I lined up for the express to San Francisco (her route north would take her farther inland).  She held my hand as we stood there assuring one another that life would hand us unexpected but long due opportunities, and that, despite evidence otherwise, things would be okay.  As the driver called my line to board, Clara held my cheeks in her warm hands, pulled my face close, and gave me one last departing kiss.  She then slipped a five dollar bill into my hand, for I had not eaten in nearly forty eight hours.

By Ben Leib

“Wake up.  Wake up.”  My stepmother was standing at my bed, yanking my foot back and forth.  “What drugs did you guys do last night?”  She seemed more afraid than angry.

“Nothing, we didn’t get into any trouble last night.”  I’d grown so accustomed to lying that I could do it in my sleep.

“You sure?” Joanne asked, “because Hector’s acting strange.”

“Yeah, nothing.”

“Then it’s got to be his blood sugar.”  Hector was diabetic.  We’d been best friends for long enough that I’d developed a sense of his highs and lows, even at times when he himself was too hazy to recognize the need to check his blood sugar.  When Hector spaced out, when he got that lazy eyed, blind stare, I knew that he was in trouble.

“He took his insulin last night,” I told Joanne.  “He took his Lenti, so his blood sugar shouldn’t be up.”  I was rushing out of my bed at this point.  Joanne bustled me into the living room in my boxer shorts.

“Did you guys eat much before bed?”

“No, not really.”

“Then he’s having a low,” Joanne said.  “Just go in there and see what’s going on.”

My little brother looked scared as we rushed passed him.  “Hector’s not making sense,” he said.

I’d talked Hector down from a lot of things, and he had done the same for me: a bad drunk, a bad trip, a moment of fury.  And I’d talked Hector out of sugar induced stupors, so I figured that I would be able to get him up, get him moving, get some sucrose into him.  “Hector,” I called as I approached the couch, “Hector, get up dude.”

“Get him to drink some orange juice,” Joanne yelled to me from the refrigerator.

Hector blabbered, his eyes open half mast, as he laid there on the couch, stubbornly immobile.  “Get the fuck off the couch, we gotta get some juice in ya,” I yelled at him, as I tugged his arm, finally coercing him to rise, to follow me toward the kitchen.  Monosyllabic grunts fell from his lips like he was talking in tongues.  Joanne had set the glass of juice on the kitchen counter, and I took my eyes off of Hector for just one moment, just long enough to grab that beverage.  When I turned back to him, he looked different.  His naturally tan, Latino flesh had paled to a cadaverous gray.  His purple lips swelled.  His eyes were wide, stared off into nothing with a look of terror, as if the specter of life’s false promise had materialized for him alone.

Hector didn’t so much fall, he didn’t so much collapse, as he propelled himself spasmodically into my grandparents’ credenza.  His shirtless body dragged itself down the sharp lip of that wooden cabinet, and then slumped, bleeding, onto the carpet, where he began to seizure.  I jumped on him.  His eyes were veined, bloodshot whites, irises having rolled up into the sockets.  His teeth clamped sharply on his black tongue.  It took both hands to pry his jaws open, and, without forethought, I shoved my thumb into that bear trap.  The strength of his seizure, the intense rigidity, was experienced for me through the strength of his jaws on my finger. 

“Get me a wooden spoon,” I screamed to my brother.   He did as requested, and I jammed it between Hector’s teeth before he got the chance to bite my thumb off.

“Give him some juice,” Joanne instructed as she handed me the glass.  I slowly poured orange juice through the narrow slot that the wooden spoon allowed between Hector’s lips.  Moment by moment, his spasms subsided.  The cadaverous zombie transformed once again, as Hyde receding back into Jekyll.  Then he was just Hector again, lying there, unconscious, on my grandparents’ carpet.  As the adrenaline dwindled, I crashed.  If I’d been asked at that time in my life, I would have anticipated an early demise.  I was positive, in fact, that I wouldn’t live to see my thirtieth year.  And now, having caught what I interpreted as a glimpse of death, I was terrified.

By Ben Leib

J.B. had worked his way into a nook at the corner of the porch, avoiding the shoulders and the elbows of strangers, and he watched Miriam where she stood beside Shera on the back lawn. He wasn’t spying, for there’s an element of voyeurism in the spy, an expectation of witnessing the unusual or the illicit as it transpires. J.B. felt himself in love with Miriam so looking was enough.

J.B. didn’t know whose house he was at. He’d tagged along with a group of friends, including Miriam, and there he stood, out of the way, not quite morose, but not the life of the party either. The commingling of elevated voices and a reggae party mix broadcast at maximum volume made for cacophony several decibels louder than he cared for. J.B. suspected his hearing was bad, and he had difficulty differentiating conversation from loud ambient noise – more so, he thought, than anybody else. It isolated him.

—

J.B. was dreaming of Miriam, wondering where he’d gone wrong. She was dating Jim, which had, at first, felt like a savage betrayal. But J.B. and Jim weren’t that close, and to blame him would have been so blatant a projection of J.B.’s own personal feelings of failure and self-doubt.

J.B. stood on the porch recalling when Miriam lay naked in his bed. He savored the details of that exploration: recalled the curve of her breasts, large and unique enough to be interesting, his hands as they explored the tactile details of exposed flesh, her excitement and his as drunken intimacies grew feverish.

He never figured out what he’d done wrong that led Miriam to leave so abruptly. She stood from the bed and dressed quickly mumbling that things were going too fast, that too little time had passed since she’d slept with her ex, and then was gone with a kiss, an apology, and the insult of pity written in her blue eyes.

—

J.B. caught Miriam’s eye, and she began waving. He realized that she was calling him down from the porch with an urgency that bespoke subdued panic. Shera stood beside her, hands at her cheeks.

J.B. pushed through the crowd, descended the staircase into the yard, and met the girls where they stood alone on the lawn. “What’s up?”

“Something’s wrong. There’s something fucked up with that porch. We just watched the whole thing move.”

I sized up the structure from which I’d just stepped. “The porch?”

“You didn’t feel it? You’re not thinking about going back up there, are you?”

“Well…”

Miriam turned to Shera. “We should try to get the boys out of the house.”

“I can start making phone calls.” Shera pulled her phone from her purse.

—

It was an instant precluding any meaningful reaction. The electricity in the house flashed off and then back on. There was a loud groaning, a crack, beams splintering. It was as if the wood took its time breaking, as if each splinter was forfeiting molecular cohesion one by one. The porch shifted. The left corner quivered and dropped six inches. The crowd lurched and a girl screamed. The lights flickered once more and then the porch fell. The left two thirds dropped straight down – all of its supports gave way at once. It fell fifteen feet into the yard below. Dozens of kids fell with it, landing in a heap at ground level. Those standing on the right side of the porch fell into the void that had opened beside them.

There was an instant that coincided with the collapse of the porch in which Miriam clasped onto my arm. It was instinct. The noise of the disintegration, the rumble, the screams, it all culminated in an innate moment of physical contact. Miriam reached out as if some fibrous synapse of her unconscious mind fired the message, He will protect you.

I touched her arm.

She looked at me. “What should we do?”

I turned toward Shera.

“What about the boys?”

In that irreproducible confluence of circumstance, I felt an unfamiliar sensation: a need to act. If but for an immeasurable briefness, I forgot about my own powerlessness.

“I’m gonna see if I can help.”

I began to pull away from Miriam’s grip.

“Wait, where are you going?” She refused to give up my arm.

“I’m gonna see if anybody’s hurt.”

—

Iran toward the bedlam of broken lumber and college students. The kids were struggling to right themselves, beginning to find footing, and scrambling off of the deck. I figured anybody at the bottom of that heap was likely injured. I began guiding people. “To your left, you can get off this way.” I pointed. I tried to command some attention. The kids were scattered as they attempted to regain their sense of surroundings. There were only a few spots through which they could easily exit the wreckage. “Hey buddy, over there, walk to your right. Don’t step on anybody.” I reached up, took the hands of disoriented girls. “This way. You’re okay. Good, good, just step down right here.” I grabbed other hands.

There must have been forty or fifty people who had fallen at once. I was amazed: the kids got themselves off the ruins of that porch, and as they did the bare planks of the deck were exposed. No bodies remained. There were no screams of pain.

Though the wooden pylons that supported it lay disintegrated beneath, the porch itself had fallen intact. I reached down and took a hold of the structure.

“Grab a side,” I called. Within seconds, ten or twelve guys had a grip on the edge of the deck. “On three.”

We all lifted, and the deck rose as one solid piece. I looked beneath. It was dark. There was a pile of fragmented lumber but I saw no human gore, no writhing limbs, and my pulse slowed as I realized no one had been injured.

—

When I returned, the girls were pale. They awaited a report.

“Is everybody okay?” Miriam concentrated her gaze as she scanned the crowd for someone specific.

“Everybody’s fine.”

Despite that no one was injured, a general chaos ensued. Drunk kids stormed the streets as the sirens could be heard approaching in the background. Everybody was participating in a mass exodus, prompted by the mutual desire to avoid the police. Somehow, like a beacon of reality in that dreamlike culmination of small and insignificant events, I heard Jim’s voice over the mounting gratuity of noise.

“Miriam! Miriam! Miriam!” He screamed for her.

And then the girls weren’t at my side.

—

There were fire trucks and police cars wailing by the time I found Steve waiting at the car. Flashing blue and red lights made a carnival out of the chaos. Kids were searching for their friends. They screamed to each other.

“Man, can you believe that shit?” Steve asked.

“One of the craziest things I’ve ever seen.”

We continued to drink back at the guys’ apartment. I stuck around, hoping that Miriam might find her way back there, to the place where we’d started the night off at. Still feeling her grip on my arm, still remembering that it was me she’d been able to reach for, I’d convinced myself that the improbable was actually quite possible, even likely. I held out hope even after it had become obvious that she’d gone home, that she was most likely lying naked beside Jim, possibly entwined with him even at that moment. I’d thought that maybe an act of bravery, a man taking charge in a chaotic situation, maybe to witness that would cause Miriam to realize my worth above Jim’s, above that of all men.

I stumbled home drunk early in the morning, alone, my heroism spent. Everything was back to normal. But she grabbed my arm, I thought to myself. That meant something.