The Raconteurs' Muse Literary Journal Vol.I Read online

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  The Raconteurs’ Muse Literary Journal

  A Novel Group of Writers Production

  Copyright 2013 A Raconteurs’ Muse

  Thank you for your support.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One: Fish Don’t Know They Are Wet by Steven Jackson

  Chapter Two: Hitler Loves Aunt Jemima by Steven Jackson

  Chapter Three: A River Mount by Jake Connors

  Chapter Four: My Toxic Child Written by Samuel J. Bass

  Chapter Five: Homeless Story by Suzie Gumm

  Chapter Six: The Avocado Kid by Samuel R. Burns

  Chapter Seven: Shadow Under a Wave by Carly Ziegler

  Chapter Eight: One Sided Phone Conversation by Anonymous

  Chapter Nine: Road Trip by Kathryn Eng

  Chapter Ten: Jason Allen Rigney by Jeremy Pierce

  Chapter Eleven: Jason Allen Rigney II by Jeremy Pierce

  Chapter Twelve: Scott’s Story by Scott Schultz

  Chapter Thirteen: There and Back Again by Larry Van Zandt

  Chapter Fourteen: The Replacements by Larry Van Zandt

  Chapter Fifteen: Devils Er A Samuel J. Bass Poem

  Introduction

  Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Raconteurs’ Muse, the literary journal of Central Oregon Community College. The literary journal is an extension of A Novel Group of Writers, Central Oregon Community College’s creative writing club.

  The genesis of the literary journal is a conversation I had last spring with my academic advisor over the dearth of English and Writing classes offered by the college. Specifically, there is no creative writing program at the college. She explained to me, “Creative writing classes are a luxury at COCC.” Furthermore, “If I desired a wider selection of liberal arts classes I should consider transferring schools.”

  Soon after our tête-à-tête I formed the writing club at COCC. Several months later, during a summer barbecue in my backyard a group of us started The Raconteurs’ Muse Literary Journal. The journal took six months of toil to obtain funding approval from the ASCOCC, and publication authorization from the college administration.

  June 18, 2013 the writing club will publish Raconteurs’ Muse Volume II, titled Chapters and Verses. Volume II is a collection of manuscript first chapters, as well as short stories and musings created by members of the writing club and students at COCC and Oregon State University Cascade Branch.

  Sometime toward the later part of July The Raconteurs’ Muse and A Novel Group of Writers will request submissions of short stories, novellas, and novel length manuscripts for a Summer/Fall writing competition. The contest serves as a platform for several publishing projects the club is undertaking, and will announce details in the subsequent weeks.

  Please like and follow A Novel Group of Writers and The Raconteurs’ Muse via our social network venues for upcoming information and submission instructions.

  https://www.facebook.com/COCCWriters

  https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Raconteurs-Muse/172470339568956

  https://theraconteursmuse.com

  Sincerely,

  Steven Jackson

  Managing Editor

  Chapter One

  Fish Don’t Know They Are Wet

  by

  Steven Jackson

  While Jill Scott’s Crown Royal on Ice croons in the background, Jack rummages like a burglar through their suite-sized walk in closet.

  Gal emerges from the bathroom wrapped in one of those scrumptious, sandwich thick, oversized white bath towels, and strolls across the bedroom to the stereo. She tenderly lifts the needle from Jill Scott’s The Real Thing album, removes the vinyl from the turntable, and snaps the record over her knee in two pieces like a graham cracker. She leisurely tosses the halves in Jack’s empty suitcase resting on the bed, and the rest of his Jill Scott albums out of the record cabinet and dumps them in the suitcase.

  Gal cinches the bath towel tighter around her chest, tips across the bedroom’s cool bamboo hardwood floor, and enters the closet. She loiters for a moment at the door before strategically stepping between Jack and the closet length dressing table. Gal deliberately runs her hand over Jack’s Sapphire blue lightweight wool and silk blend suit draped across the end of the dressing table. To the best of her recollection the sumptuous fibers feel lush as making love. Gal side steps Jack and sits on the cedar bench athwart from him, and says, “It appears as if you are packing your replacement attire.” She crosses her right leg over left and examines the bluish varicose veins creeping up her right calf.

  Jack glances back at Gal, indifferent to whatever she said, well past any stilted pleasantries. He promptly returns to sorting through his jeans hanging in the rear of the closet.

  “Your exodus from me,” Gal scans the bright room, and attempts to overlook the assorted piles of jeans, socks, workout wear, and khaki slacks, before correcting herself, “I mean us, appears well under way.” She anxiously pulls her towel tighter around her thighs, self-conscious that Jack will scrutinize her figure for flaws, “How young are you going to go this time?”

  “I have more important things to do,” Jack dismisses Gal with an aberrant tension in his words. He enunciates each syllable with scrupulous distinction, not even bothering to make eye contact, and resumes packing.

  “Susan was twenty-eight years old,” Gal raises her plaintive voice; incensed Jack is paying no heed to her, “Michelle was twenty-four or five I believe.”

  Jack again glances over his shoulder at Gal, wishing she would disappear, and continues packing. However, he is buoyed by the fact he will disappear within minutes.

  “Thank goodness for summertime,” Gal mutters. Her self-serving comments are muffled by the wall-to-wall clothes lining the closet like a Nordstrom store. She kneels down and flips through the stack of carefully folded, short-sleeve Ralph Lauren polo shirts, colorful like a roll of Lifesavers candy, “At least you won’t have to concern yourself with boo’s school night curfews, or escorting her to the Sadie Hawkins Day dance.”

  Jack remains smugly hushed, refusing to allow his wife to bait him with the anticipated pettiness. He climbs off the floor and carries the pile of shirts out into the bedroom, closely followed like an obedient dog by Gal. Jack drapes each individual shirt across the bed, meticulously folds each using some proprietary origami technique taught to him by his mother. He smoothes every wrinkle from the garment by hand, and carefully places the tightly folded shirt in the suitcase on the bed.

  “What happened to the music?” Jack glances over at Gal standing at attention like a security guard stationed next to the bathroom door.

  Gal shrugs unconvincingly and wanders into the bathroom to do damage control on her fragile psyche. She collapses into her dressing table chair and stares in her mirror at the apparition, unable to recognize any portion of self. She chokes down two Wellbutrin to help with the identification process. Gal is powerless to rationalize, no matter how much she compromises, apologizes, or lies to herself, that Jack doesn’t want her anymore.

  “Fuck it.” Gal mutters, and returns to the bedroom. Mustering a final desperate gasp, she shimmies up next to Jack, audaciously peels the towel from her body, and allows it to fall to the floor. Gal slides Jack’s suitcase over to the opposite side of the bed, and climbs up on the firm Serta mattress. Gal kicks several of Jack’s shirts out of the way, and steadies herself on the bed as if surfing naked. Nevertheless, Jack continues folding his clothes with the veracity of a sweatshop worker, scarcely bothering with an upward glance.

  “I’m five foot eight,” Gal proclaims, deliberately massaging her hands up and down t
he front of her body, while peering down at Jack. She gently cups each breast in her hands, and continues, “You once liked that about me.”

  Jack breaths deep, and realizes the fight is on with his manhood. He ignores his appreciating erection, and folds with a newfound urgency.

  “As you can see,” Gal deliberately runs her hands up and down each sinewy leg, from upper thigh gradually down to her right ankle. Gal peers up at Jack, judging from the prolonged ellipses between her words she is anxious, “My legs are long, firm, and still look damn good for fifty-three.”

  Jack says nothing, and continues to fold his clothes.

  “Of course,” Gal extends her left leg level with her waist, and glances down at Jack. He remains poised; however, his folding technique deteriorates to stutters and spurts, “they may not be as limber as they once were.”

  “Of course,” Jack mutters. His voice is thin, with scarcely a filament of emotion.

  “Nevertheless, they get the job done.” Gal drops her left leg, mollified she has Jack pondering her. Gal balances on the bed, and extends her arms like antiquated prop plane wings. She rests on her left foot, points her right leg at Jack, and meekly tells him, “I remember when you thought my long legs were sexy,” She waves her French tipped toes at Jack, “and you couldn’t wait to bend them back, and have me wearing my ankles for earrings.” She lifts her wobbly leg overhead as if a drunken Cirque de Soleil performer, but steadies herself, “Wanna try that now mister?”

  “Your body was never an issue,” Jack says, while he rolls the weighty contemplation of ankles for earrings through his head. He clumsily folds a fuchsia hued Faconnable button down dress shirt as if it was a bath towel, and spaces on what to do with it when finished.

  “What part of my body do you like?” Gal coos, unabashedly flaunting her fusty goods in Jack’s face. Peering down at Jack, she sees him concealing his erection like an errant piss spot on the zipper of his khaki slacks.

  “Everything,” Jack stammers. Should he capitulate and fuck Gal, even he can’t muster the shittiness to climb out of bed and walk out the door.

  “For instance?” Gal presses the issue; certain Jack will submit to the power of the pussy.

  “I like your calves, feet, Achilles heel, toes, as well as your ankles,” Jack confesses. He arranges his unfolded shirts in three neat piles, and pats the sides of the heaps as if constructing a layered cake.

  “Achilles Heel?” Gal repeats, mustering a tortured smirk.

  “You heard me,” Jack says thickly.

  “Sadly,” Gal anxiously nudges the pile of shirts with her foot, “my Achilles Heel is caring more about you than I do myself.” She pinches a money green polo shirt off Jack’s shirt pile with her toes.

  “Where are you going with that?” Jack glances up at Gal, and decides against snatching it from between her toes.

  “Where would I go?” Gal answers while continuing to lift the shirt in the air, and drops it to the bed. “Even now, while I watch you pack up and walk out as if it means nothing.” Carefully pinching a white polo shirt between her toes, Gal lifts it high in the air, waving it as if her surrender flag, and places the shirt on Jack’s smooth pate.

  “That Achilles Heel thing is another exag---,” Jack starts to speak, but is unsure where and why he should place his concentration.

  “Like Jacob wrestled with God,” Gal’s voice cracks, “I am struggling not to beg---,”

  “It’s not that serious,” Jack says. He refuses to elaborate, or look directly at Gal.

  “Just like Jacob,” Gal pleads for alms of affection like a mendicant,” the struggle will cripple me.”

  “Okay,” Jack grunts, surrendering his inclination of challenging every word out of Gal’s mouth, and embracing less is more here.

  “You take any remaining modicum of my dignity and self-respect from the past eleven years,” Gal takes the shirt, folds it, and places it in Jack’s suitcase, “and place it in your suitcase as carefully as these shirts.”

  “Gal” Jack says, “I told you earl---,”

  “Take a look at my ass,” Gal apologetically interrupts Jack, and turns away from him. She deliberately runs her hands across her backside, “I know gravity is having its way with me.”

  Jack continues packing, fighting the inclination to glance up at Gal, while shielding his erection with another shirt.

  “I work out on the elliptical machine an hour every morning,” Gal rambles, her desperation seeping through, “I do lunges, squats, and workout on the bull for another hour.” Gal flexes her quad muscles, glancing over at Jack, “but you already know this.”

  “You won’t let me forget.”Jack abruptly snaps, wishing Gal would shut up, and go downstairs and take her frustrations out on the elliptical machine.

  “I would practice yoga with you if you let me.” Keeping her back toward Jack, Gal composes herself, before imploring, “I’m standing here, physically, as well as emotionally naked to you.”

  “None of this is necessary,” Jack explains, without peering up at Gal, “you asked me to leave, so I am.”

  “Don’t do this Jack,” Gal pleads, her voice barely audible, “I have no problem telling you, I do everything to please you.” Turning to face Jack, Gal glances down at her flaccid breasts, sighing, “I’m afraid of growing old alone.”

  Jack’s head remains bent, curbing his attention as well as indignity from Gal. He places a final shirt in his overstuffed suitcase, before glancing behind him at the wall of record albums. Scanning the vast collection, Jack wonders how he will go about taking the record collection later.

  Where will he store them? Also, how and where to move his library of books, file cabinets, and research material stored downstairs in the den, and half the garage. Jack ambivalently fidgets with his suitcase latches, unable to secure them shut.

  “What the hell is it with this?” Jack grumbles, incapable of squeezing his brimming suitcase shut. Jack opens the bloated luggage, and carefully sorts through the clothing. Jack reaches the bottom of his suitcase, and removes the broken Jill Scott record, as well as her entire album discography. Jack sighs and glances across at Gal. He tosses the records on the bed, and squeezes his suitcase shut.

  “This is my favorite one of your shirts,” Gal plucks the size extra-large dark mustard colored Faconnable shirt from the pile on the bed that failed to make the Peter Pan Syndrome traveling squad, “I’m assuming that’s why it wasn’t packed.”

  “Didn’t even cross my mind,” Jack shrugs, adept at lying with a botox face, and unwavering words.

  “I’m not sure if your ambivalence makes it better or worse,” Gal puts the shirt on, buttons it up to her breasts, and sulks over to the wall of albums. She flips through the covers one by one until she locates Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Gal reverently places the platter on the turntable, cranks the volume on Speak to Me, and flips the jacket to the floor beside the other suitcases.

  “If you like all my attributes,” Gal raises her voice over the warbling of Pink Floyd, “Why did you stop making love to me?” Gal sways to the psychedelic intro of her favorite song while she wanders the bedroom and gently caresses the front of the orphaned shirt. Gal enjoys the abrasive lightly starched cotton chafing against her erect nipples. Meanwhile, Jack remains at the foot of the bed, single mindedly sorting through a pile of socks and underwear, and allows Gal’s question to die from neglect.

  “Let’s affix some training wheels to the subject.” Gal realizes Pink Floyd will get back together and tour as the opening act for Justin Bieber before Jack responds to her question, “We need to remove love from the subject.”

  “What subject?” Jack asks, glancing up from his grindstone, “I didn’t know you had asked me a question.”

  “We both know love hasn’t been part of our relationship for some time now.” Gal grudgingly owns up to the distasteful reality of their life together. She trudges across the room to the stereo, turns down the volume, and rephrases the question, “Why
don’t you want to fuck me?

  “Why are you asking?”Jack slows his folding, “You have to...”

  “I’m not talking about making love,” Gal interrupts Jack to clarify her question, “but raw fucking.”

  Gal pauses when the alarm clocks in the beginning of the song Time snaps her to a jarring reality. She experiences the sensation of the truth with a concussion like certainty. Gal has stooped to begging, panhandling, and her pussy is the tin cup. Her weather beaten cardboard sign with the rain streaked faded Sharpie writing should read; Haven’t been fucked in over six months, will work for cock. God Bless.

  Jack lugs his suitcase across the bedroom and sets it next to the door. Lingering for a moment, he considers Gal’s question. Jack glances nonchalantly at her loitering amongst the suitcases still wearing his Faconnable shirt. Once upon a time, Jack loved to see Gal slink around the house wearing his dress shirts. Gal would sport some Jimmy Choo heels, with LA PERLA underneath, and no inhibitions. So long ago, Jack has difficulty recalling the last time, and when he stopped caring.

  “For the last year or maybe two,” Jack ambles over and turns down the volume. He is swathed in a mellow7 UP bottle green glow from the vacuum tubes of the Shindo stereo system, and confesses his good, good bullshit, “I have this gnawing sensation as if I settled for less when I married you.” He glances down at Gal perched amongst the suitcases; and wonders what else he should bring with him, headphones, vitamins, yoga mat, “I have this overwhelming sense that I can do better than you.”

  “Can you hurt me any deeper?” Gal screams, staring up from the empty suitcase in front of her, “Is that your objective here?”

  “I know the tongue finds the hurt tooth,” Jack peers down at Gal perched on the floor, aware this is devastating to her, but nevertheless continues, “however, you crave honesty, and this is as good a starting point as any.”

  Gal ceases bobbing her head to the saxophone solo halfway through the song, and gingerly climbs to her feet. She clutches Jack’s shirt she is wearing by the front button side and hole side with each hand. Glancing over her shoulder at Jack loitering next to the stereo, their eyes briefly convene just as Gal rips the shirt apart at the chest, sending buttons shooting in every direction.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Jack’s mouth drops as he watches what is left of his one hundred fifty dollar dress shirt slide off Gal’s back, and settle on the floor, reborn as a pricey dust rag.

  “Easy come, easy go,” Gal shrugs, kicking the scraps across the floor.

  Jack realizes this isn’t going to be a harmless exit

  “Just like your treatment of me.” Gal strolls into the closet, naked except for her shimmering spiked-heels. She returns lugging an armful of slacks Jack had earmarked to pack. She arbitrarily dumps them in one of the suitcases, while Jack watches in a hushed seethe. Gal returns to the closet, scoops his workout clothes, socks, underwear, and several hoodies off the dressing table.

  “I don’t need your assistance,” Jack implores. Nevertheless, Gal wobbles across the floor with a heaping armful of clothes, and drops them in one of the final two suitcases.

  “I love your long tall six foot five athletic physique,” Gal says on her way back to the closet. She glances over at Jack, still paralyzed next to the stereo. Gal retrieves several pairs of socks and another hoodie that missed the suitcase. She tosses them inside, and tells Jack, “I’m jealous, that at forty-nine your skin remains chocolate smooth, without one wrinkle or crease.”

  Jack watches Gal; certain her emotions are as unsteady as her last stroll across the floor. Having watched Waiting to Exhale, he is worried somewhat about his clothes going up in flames.

  “Sorry about these,” Gal says, bending down and tossing several pair of boxer shorts that missed the open suitcase on the pile of clothes.

  “Listen to me,” Jack snaps, his jaw tense, “I can do this myself.”

  “You are more witty than funny,” Gal says, ignoring Jack’s instruction and returning to the closet.

  “Gal!” Jack calls after her, taking several exasperated steps toward the closet. He sighs, “Nothing.”

  “I always played along as if you were the next great whatever,” Gal shouts from inside the walk in closet the clicking of her heels against the hardwood floor echoes as she goes about gathering Jack’s belongings with the efficiency of a pro. “You are almost as smart as I am.”

  “Almost,” Jack repeats, unwilling to take Gal to task on her claim. She schools Jack nightly in Jeopardy, understands all David Lynch’s movies, and does the New York Times Crossword in pen.

  “You have this supercilious edge to you woman find irresistible,” Gal continues rustling around inside the closet, “like heroin to a junkie.” Gal’s voice grows louder, and she emerges from the closet with an armful of his summer shorts, underwear, and several pair of his khaki slacks. She meanders across the floor inelegantly, as if a boat unmoored, and dumps the final pile of clothes in the remaining suitcase, and stops.

  “Heroin, should I consider that a good thing?” Jack asks, sorting what clothes remain on the bed.

  “However, I detest that you are a malicious, deceitful, impious, bastard of a husband,” Gal dabs at the perspiration on her brow with one of Jack’s t-shirts from the suitcase. She drops the undershirt back in the luggage, and shuts and latches each piece. She picks two toiletry bags sitting in the middle of the floor, walks over to Jack and hands them to him.

  “I said I don’t want your help,” Jack shouts, and snatches the toiletry bags from Gal’s hands.

  “I’m not deaf,” Gal bawls. She is close enough to slap Jack’s face, but fights the temptation, “I heard you the first time.”

  “So act accordingly,” Jack says.

  “I wanted to divorce you a long time ago,” Gal removes her wedding ring and band, and wanders the bedroom staring at the diamond keepsakes. “But I was afraid no one else would ever love me.” She returns to the suitcases, and lingers over the luggage, “However, when I realized you didn’t love me it didn’t matter anymore. I am only with you because I don’t want to be alone. I don’t feel guilty about this because you suck as a husband.”

  “What are you doing with your rings?” Jack asks, wondering if Gal beat him to the punch and already filed for divorce. What if she flipped the script on him, and he’ll have to pay Gal spousal support?

  “What does it matter?” Gal ponders how effortlessly the jewelry came off, and vacillates as to why she is fighting the urge to drop the rings in Jack’s suitcase.

  “Appears to me you are quitting,” Jack searches for something to occupy his attention, and starts to straighten the duvet on the bed

  “I’m not the quitter.” Gal trudges over, removes the corner of the duvet from Jack’s hand, and yanks it off the bed, sending his folded clothes and Jill Scott albums tumbling through the air and to the floor like autumn leaves. “Now who is getting shit twisted?”

  “One of us has a mess to clean up,” Jack glares at Gal, “and it’s not me.”

  “No one expects you to soil your hands with menial labor,” Gal wraps her naked body with the duvet, like an oversized fig leaf. She kicks Jack’s shirts out of her way and paces back and forth across the bedroom.

  “I gotta go,” Jack snatches the toiletry bags off the floor and slithers into the bathroom to pack his lotions and potions, “I’m not doing this.”

  “You mean gotta quit?” Gal says, while trudging behind Jack into the bathroom, and collapses in her chair.

  Jack saunters over to his dressing table, “I said what I meant.”

  Gal mutely sorts through the assorted bottles and containers on her dressing table until she finds her bottle of Wellbutrin. She shakes out eight of the 150-milligram pills, aware she can’t procure unconsciousness quite so easily, and swallows four.

  “You always assume to know what I’m thinking,” Jack says, “That make the ass out of you axiom fits quite well.”

  “You are more than adept at
making an ass out of yourself, thank you very much,” Gal says while chewing the four pills without water, voiding the time release. Gal slumps down in her chair, draping the duvet tighter around her body until she looks like a burgundy and tan burrito. She stares across her breadth of beauty products into the mirror, seeing her insubstantial, ethereal reflection, like a crinkled paper bag, once full of substance.

  “In the kitchen you were adamant about ending our marriage,” Jack says, his mind miles away at some arbitrary happy hour. He deliberately places his cologne in his toiletry bag one by one, as if packing fine china.

  “Are you sure that was me ending the marriage?” Gal asks, and checks the label on the medicine bottle for refill instructions.

  “I’m cool with your decision, no hard feelings,” Jack doesn’t bother glancing up at Gal while telling her, “I hope we can be friends.”

  Gal glares across the bathroom at Jack, figuring she’ll call for a refill tomorrow, after she finds a locksmith, and retains an attorney.

  “My Mother schooled me decades ago,” Jack continues, so enamored with his own words he fails to notice Gal’s lack of response, “that nothing lasts forever except forgetting.”

  “Your mother schooled me as well,” Gal reclines in her chair, staring in the mirror at a life mislaid, “she warned me you are a shit in shining armor.”

  “My mother didn’t say that.” Jack protests. He stands up from his chair, glances around his dressing table, making sure everything is packed. The comment stings him because shit in shining armor is what his mother called his father. Jack’s relationship with father is complicated.

  “Ask her when you move home,” Gal shrugs, “I didn’t pull that out of my ass.”

  “In relationships everyone assumes their union is bulletproof,” Jack says, raising his voice to be heard over the opening and closing the drawers of his dressing counter, checking for anything he may have missed, “and nothing can wound their love.

  “I was never secure enough in our relationship to be afforded the luxury of bulletproof.” Gal spits, detesting Jack’s self-righteous pontifications. “It was all on my shoulders to protect our love, and I caught the force of every blow.”

  “All our bullshit I love you forever pontifications,” Jack continues, strictly for his own edification.

  “All those bullshit I will love you forever pontifications.” Gal scoffs like an atheist at church, “I believed in those unicorns.”

  “Inevitably, the bullet arrives, the death of that unicorn,” Jack wanders over next to the bathtub, checking the bottles of shampoo, body wash, and conditioner, “and one partner realizes they no longer believe.”

  “I took that bullet,” Gal nods, “point blank, just like an assassination.”

  “I assume that’s the Wellbutrin talking,” Jack dismisses Gal’s metaphor, but realizes she is right.

  “Just go,” Gal shouts, unwrapping from the duvet, as if a mummy shedding his bandages, Gal frees her arms, and shoves Jack. He stumbles back, crashing into her vanity table, sending Gal’s beauty products spilling to the floor.

  “I will.” Jack glances down at the scattered toiletries, and allows them to remain where they fell.

  “You are perfect, don’t sweat it,” Gal pats Jack on the hand, “I assume all responsibility for our dysfunction.”

  “Our dysfunction?” Jack blurts out angrily, annoyed and bemused by Gal’s remark, “I don’t have any dysfunction.”

  “What part didn’t you understand?” Gal asks, and glances down at her toiletries scattered across the floor, “I confirmed your ability to walk on water.”

  “You believe I have some sort of dysfunctions?” Jack folds his arms and glares stolidly at Gal as if he does not see her, or has ceased to recognize her existence.

  “Regardless of how shitty you treat me,” Gal murmurs, so hushed it forces Jack for once to concentrate on her words, “I constructed my matchstick house atop your scorching sun, each time expecting a dissimilar outcome. I would like to end our relationship and be without shame; however, I have never been strong enough to let you go.”

  “You know,” Jack begins to offer up his customary deflection of guilt, but for once, removes his boot from her back.

  “I want to feel as if I can hold my head up among the shameless,” Gal moans, finally giving way to her tears. Glancing at Jack next to her, she is weak and willing, prepared to again take the force of the blow, “I would give anything at this moment to be ignorant.”

  “Why would anyone wish for that?” Jack asks, lamenting the words tumbling from his mouth.

  “Then I would be oblivious to the depths of ignorance to which I will once more descend,” Gal glances up at Jack, wiping her tears with a corner of the duvet, “and beg you to stay.”

  “You labeled me damaged earlier this morning,” Jack reminds Gal as he climbs to his feet, and straightens his clothes, “The fish who doesn’t know he is wet.”

  Gal glares at their reflection in the mirror, sick that she is willing to squander further emotion on him.

  “I don’t doubt that is how you have viewed me for the longest time,” Jack attempts to check his watch, but notices Gal is gazing at his reflection in her mirror. He figures two more minutes and evacuate.

  “Goodbye Jack.” Gal sighs, partially out of relief, dabbing at her tears with her knuckle, “Get help when you leave, but leave.”

  “You saw me as wrecked, like the bicycle sitting in the garage with the bent rim and two flat tires.” Jack’s words are tinged with anger, resenting the fact Gal doesn’t see him as perfect, “Broken like a promise, exhausted like hope.”

  “Broken like a promise,” Gal scoffs, wondering if Jack is biding his time, changing his mind, unsure how she feels about the possibility, “until death do us part is a promise, a vow.”

  “Every morning you roll over in bed, and survey at me with bitter contemptuous eyes,” Jack coolly snarls. He exacts his castigation by lingering, torturing, twisting the knife one final time, “I could hear the components of the scales shift as you weighed the pros and cons in your head, ‘Can I fix him, is he worth the effort?”

  “I never considered that subject until several minutes ago,” Gal says, with a sense of bliss, “now I can consider nothing else.”

  “I’m sure you thought, fuck it, I’ll pack Jack up and send him to the Salvation Army or Goodwill,” Jack seethes. He surveys the bathroom one last time for anything missed, “at the least, maybe I can get a tax deduction for my troubles.”

  “Does that assurance allow you to sleep at night?” Gal mutters, resolute in her endeavor not to beg. Jack picks up his bag, and passes behind Gal, dragging his hand across her shoulders. Clod hopping out of the bathroom, Jack treads as if unconcerned with disturbing slumbering dogs.

  “I lied to you about the orgasm, or lack thereof,” Jack says. He turns back at the bathroom door, and glances at Gal, slumped at her vanity.

  Gal stares at her mirror through Visine starved eyes, “I never would have guessed.”

  “For that I apologize,” Jack shuffles back and forth, maintaining the momentum in the direction of gone. He leans against the doorway, his pseudo contrition more of a salt than salve.

  “Alright,” Gal cries, her tears unable to wash away the bitterness, “what would you like me to do with that?”

  “You know,” Jack takes a step forward, but stops, “so often we claim that our heart has been broken, our trust compromised.”

  “Please, just go,” Gal pleads, curled up like a scared bug, unable to avoid the pitiless blow.

  “When in actuality,” Jack throws his final punch with an insincere tenderness, “it is merely our egos.”

  “You have no idea how I feel,” Gal recoils even further in her protective orb unable to muster the fortitude to look directly at Jack, “you never have.” The pain of hitting bottom gathers in Gal’s mouth like a sick person’s vomit. She mutters as if it hurts to talk, her face long and hopeless, “My heart was never
a priority to you.”

  “That’s not true,” Jack halfheartedly swallows the lies that rise in his throat like floodwater.

  “I read somewhere,” Gal says between whimpers, timidly dipping her head in Jack’s direction, “maybe I didn’t read it, who knows at this point. That the two greatest teachers in life are repetition and shame.” Surrendering, Gal sits up and glances in her mirror. She leans forward, resting on her forearms to get closer to the reflection, or further from the reality. “I have sat at the front of the class, while you repeatedly attempted to school me about shame.” The mirage, the illusion of Jack, Gal reaches out to touch, knowing it is more real than the man behind her, “For some reason I never quite understood, and needed to come back and repeat the class for eleven years.” Running her tear-dampened fingers across the cool mirror glass, Gal whispers, “Sadly, the only thing I have learned is, you will be teaching the same class again soon.” Gal attempts a feeble smile; however, she settles for making the effort, “Hey, it’s been eleven years, evidently your program does work; I mastered shameless. How is that for making chicken shit out of lemons?” Gal wipes her nose on the duvet and contrives a smile.

  “You are right,” Jack checks his watch while nodding his head in agreement, he should have been out the door five minutes ago, “your feelings were never my priority.”

  “Finally, the truth.” Gal says

  “Nevertheless, if you are expecting me to believe this scene is all about the anguish of our love. That only our protracted, fruitless, problematical love can inflict this kind of hurt, you are the one in denial.” Anxious to be on his way, Jack swings his toiletry bags front to back, anticipating the moments before celebration like a child reading the Sears Wish Book in November, awaiting Christmas morning.

  “Please Jack, just---,” Gal attempts to musters a supplication. She sits ruddy-faced, shrunken to the dwarf like proportions of her heart.

  “You want someone that I am not,” Jack interrupts Gal, and takes several conscious steps toward the door, “I have been in denial about this for years.” Jack checks his watch, and removes his car keys from his pocket. Jangling the keys like an alarm, he returns to the bathroom door and leans against the entryway, “However, let me say this about denial. How it defends and allows me to imagine what is there, actual is not there. How it shields the status quo, breathes life to all our bullshit and contradictions. How it keeps everything copacetic, however; precarious.” Jack glances at his watch again, not caring about Gal witnessing his impatience, “For a while anyway, I believe both of us were guilty of milking denial for emotional sustenance.”

  “Don’t tell---,” Gal rises to object but no longer possesses the strength or will. She realizes her pain is commensurate with Jack’s pettiness.

  “Furthermore, I believe we were both accomplices in denial,” Jack hastily talks over Gal, and continues, his words blunt, set to not only meet her objection, but to seek it out, “by accepting it to protect the frail state of our recondite relationship.”

  Breaking from her duvet cocoon, Gal emerges as a stillborn moth. Snatching the bottle of Wellbutrin off her bathroom counter, she rattles the seven remaining pills like a restless baby. Gal considers taking the pills, before setting the brown bottle down on the counter. She leans back in her chair, pulls the duvet around her shoulders, shuts her eyes, and daydreams of being the woman that Jack wants but can’t have, instead of the one he has, but doesn’t want. Gal mutters one last time, “Good bye Jack.” Gal watches Jack with an anguished gaze; she opens her mouth to speak but is now slack of words, unattended tears on her nose and cheek.

  Jack turns and walks toward the door, throwing the straps to his toiletry bags over his shoulder.

  Gal unravels the duvet from around her body, rises up out of her chair, her foremost instinct is to pursue. However, she slumps back into her chair, listens to the bedroom door squeak open, and quietly close.

  Authors Bio

  Steven Jackson is the Managing Editor of Raconteurs’ Muse. He is a writer of both fiction and creative nonfiction. Steven is a Norman Mailer Community College Writing Award 2012 Semi-Finalist for Fish Don’t Know They Are Wet.