The Main Street Rag
Winter 2008
Main Street Rag, PO BOX 690100, Charlotte, NC 28227-7001
704-573-2516, contact us
Feature:
The Three Great Secret Things: An Interview with Anthony S. Abbott
by Suzanne Baldin LeitnerEssays
To Die for A Metaphor by Jeanette Leardi
Elegance Belongs to the Conqueror by Jeffrey Douglas
Delicate Things by Robert BoisvertReviews by David Chorlton, Phebe Davidson, Sara E. Lamers, S. Craig Renfroe, Jr., Richard Allen Taylor.
of the following work:
Wolf Heart by Karon Luddy, Ordinary Time by Jackie Bartley, As If the World Really Mattered by Art Goodtimes, The Flies and Their Lovely Names by Philip Belcher, Disappearing Tattoos by Joshua Watson, The Mother-Face in the Mirror by Karen M. Peluso, Of All the Meals I Had Before: Poems About Food and Eating by Doug Holder, No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain by Doug Holder.
Poetry by
Barbara Barron, Eric Beeny, Jane Andrews, Clifford Browder, Sue Chenette, Martha Christina, Keith Wesley Combs, Thomas Rain Crowe, Steve DeFrance, Brock Dethier, Peter Goodwin, Mike Hampton, John Grochalski, Jim Hart, Alison Hicks, Michael Jurkovic, Britt Kaufmann, John Krumberger, David Lawrence, Tom Lombardo, Louis McKee, Michael Murray, John Mann, John Mylotte, Robert Michael O'Hearn, James Norcliffe, Robert Parham, Marisa Rosenfeld, David Schuster, Mary Soon Lee, Karen Sandberg, Richard Spilman, John T. Trigonis, Alice Toporoff Wallace, Leisha Wharfield.
Cover Art: Jim Fuess
Photo Feature: Paul Murphy
Images: Doug South.
Robert Boisvert
Charlotte, NCDelicate Things
Hugo tossed the empty coffee pot into the sink where it smashed against a favorite mug bought at a yard sale. Gripping the counter with his enormous hands like he meant to rip it from the wall, he then shuffled in his boxers from the kitchen to the living room, dipping his head to clear the lintel. He found Wanda perched on the arm of the sofa, peering through the window.
“Where the hell’s the coffee?” he asked. His eyes were bloodshot and red rimmed.
Wanda didn’t look at him. “Man, that woman is crazy,” she said.
He balled his hands into fists. “Did you hear me? I said where the hell’s the coffee?”
Wanda looked at him over her shoulder. “Yes, I heard you. There wasn’t any.”
“There wasn’t any,” he repeated. “Did you have some?”
She peered again out the window, squinting her eyes. “There was barely enough for one cup.”
The sound Hugo made, breathing through his nostrils, was like that of a bull ready to charge. “So why didn’t you walk a hundred yards to the store to buy some more?”
Wanda laughed. “I’m going to buy you coffee when I barely drink it? When’s the last time you bought anything when you stay at my house?”
Hugo squeezed his fists until he could feel his nails digging into his palms. Returning to the kitchen, he ate a bowl of cereal, the spoon looking like a toy from a doll’s play set in his hand, leaving the bowl, cereal box, and milk on the table. After showering and dressing, and finding a second dirty bowl on the table in the kitchen, he returned to the living room.
“I’m telling you she’s crazy,” Wanda said. “It must be nearly ninety degrees out there already.”
Hugo turned on the TV, switching the channel to ESPN.
“What I don’t get,” she said, “is why she’s spending money on flowers for a place she’s just renting.”
“Who?” he asked, staring at the TV.
“Who, who,” she mocked. “The woman who just moved in across the street, that’s who. What are you, deaf?”
Hugo pushed Wanda aside to look out the dirty window at the woman working on her hands and knees in the scrabble at the front of her house. Tall and skinny, she wore a sun dress, wide brimmed straw hat, and orange gloves that seemed as big as catchers’ mitts. Surrounding her were bags of mulch and fertilizer and green plastic pots filled with yellow and purple and pink and red flowers he didn’t know the names of that seemed to glisten like lollipops in the sun.
Straightening, Hugo said nothing before parking on the sofa and turning up the volume to watch baseball highlights from the previous night.
After Wanda left, having first loaned her twenty dollars, and after he cleaned the kitchen, Hugo changed into work clothes and stepped outside where he began changing the oil on his pickup truck. Driving the front end of the truck onto lifts, he crawled underneath onto the dirt of his driveway and emptied the oil pan and changed the filter, draining the oil into an old paint can he’d tossed into his backyard months ago. His shirt now soaked with sweat so that the dirt and grime clung to him like tar, and glancing occasionally at the woman across the street, spying on her from around a tire or the edge of the hood, he poured new oil into the engine block and changed the air filter. Later, he grabbed a bucket, sponge and dish soap from the kitchen and washed the truck, rubbing water from the hose onto his face and neck and allowing it to splash over his pants and shoes.
Because of her hat, he could not see much of her face, but guessed her to be about his own age, in her late thirties or early forties. She worked methodically in the heat, neither slowly nor quickly, arching her back as she pushed her weight onto a trowel to dig holes beneath the eves of her house where she planted her flowers whose petals and leaves flopped like puppy ears. Stopping occasionally to survey her work and to wipe her brow and under her chin with the back of a glove, she seemed separated from the world around her and the circle of her plants, like the figurine of a ballet dancer in a jewelry box, taking no notice of him or the occasional car that raced up the street, or even the three teenage boys hanging out in the front yard of the house to the right of hers. Laughing and egging each other on, the boys hollered at her about her dress and hat, calling her “Rebecca of Sunny Bitch Farms.” Hugo watched them for a moment, staring at them, before returning to his house where he showered again and ate lunch in front of the TV. A half hour later he peered out of the front window at the house across the street, then again twenty minutes after that. The woman was nowhere to be seen. He waited the remainder of the afternoon, checking to be sure, but the woman did not return, seeming to have abandoned her gardening tools and green plastic pots with plants still inside them.
That night Hugo caught up with two of the teens at the convenience store up the street where he filled his truck with gas. Ambling toward them, he said nothing and ignored their greeting, before felling one with a punch to the side of the head and the other with two quick jabs to the chin. The one who was still conscious stared up at him as if fearing for his life. Hours later, at a club where he met four men he played high school football with, he spotted the third teen in the parking lot, talking to a group of girls, and hit him so hard in the gut the kid dropped to his knees and puked. Hugo did not explain to his friends why he attacked the kid.
The next day, a Sunday, Hugo rose late and ate bacon and eggs and sipped coffee on the couch in front of the TV, watching Sports Center and a rerun of the original Star Trek. After hearing a car pull into the driveway across the street, the woman looking as if she were returning from church, he glanced out of the window every five minutes or so until she stepped outside again in her dress and hat and picked up the trowel and resumed planting her flowers. Angling an ear toward the window and turning down the volume of the TV, he sat quietly for a while, hearing only a barking dog and someone playing a radio several houses away. Afterwards, he stretched out on the sofa and napped while watching a Western.
The next day Hugo climbed out of bed at four A.M. to drive a truck for Coca Cola. It was grueling work, especially in the summer, hauling beverages to stores across Charlotte. As usual, he worked fast, since his pay depended on the amount of soda and bottled water he delivered, and did not waste time chatting with some of the store managers or clerks as some of the other drivers did. That day he stopped for only a half hour at lunch, spending the last ten minutes sitting in McDonalds and staring at the crumpled yellow wrapper of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.
After work on Wednesday he found a card in his mailbox enclosed in an unaddressed white envelope. Embossed with the words “Thank You” in gold on the front, the card read, “Thanks for looking out for me,” written in neat script, and was signed, “Mary Washington.” Hugo stood on his front stoop, examining the card a long while, looking at its front and back, and then in the empty envelope, a look of confusion on his face. He also surveyed the neighborhood, glancing up and down the street, before entering his house and tossing the card on the table in the kitchen.
The knock on the door came a half hour later. Hugo answered it in shorts and a T-shirt.
“Hello.” It was his neighbor from across the street. “It occurred to me only after I left the card in your mailbox that you might not know who I was, so I figured I’d introduce myself. Plus, I wanted to give you this.” The woman was smiling and held in her hands a pie in a tin pan.
Hugo hesitated before reaching for the pie.
“I hope you like blackberries,” she said.
He stared at the pie, the thing looking like it might have won a ribbon at a county fair, with its woven, golden crust.
“Okay. Thanks.”
“I don’t know what you did, but early Sunday morning Mr. Tremble from next door marches his grandson over and the boy apologized to me and was very sincere about it. And, first, I thought Mr. Tremble was responsible. But he told me you were the one I should thank. So thank you. It’s nice to know that neighbors look out for each other.”
Hugo nodded his head. “Sure. No problem.”
Mary’s smile grew broader so that her brown eyes creased at the corners. “Well, it was nice to finally meet you. Take care. And don’t worry about the pie tin,” she said at the bottom of the stairs. “You can bring it back anytime.”
Hugo watched her cross the street, her high heeled sandals flapping against the soles of her feet, watching her until she closed her front door, easing it shut. Carrying the pie into the kitchen and cradling the thing in two hands as if it were an injured bird, he held her gift close to his nose, closing his eyes while he smelled it, before placing it in the refrigerator. Afterwards, he retrieved and stowed the card left on the kitchen table inside the bible kept in the bottom drawer of his bureau and given to him by his mother not long before she died.
Want the rest of the story (and more)?
The conclusion to this can be read in the Winter 2008 issue which is available direct from MSR for $8 at
The Main Street Rag Bookstore or in Rob Boisvert's collection of short stories, Long Dead LoverBACK TO TOP
Thomas Rain Crowe
Sylva, NC
POEM FOR SYLVIA PLATH
WITHOUT EVEN LIGHTING THE STOVE
Even if the gas had been gone,
the heat from your eyes
would have been enough to
set the whole place on fire.
One thousand degree words
charred from the spark of space.It was all in there—behind the iris.
Beyond the synapses of imagined pain.
Brown-eyed craters of moonlight
sun-starved from the food of love.
Even the what-ifs were not army enough
to stand against the dogs at the door.
The parade of children and husbands
standing in line. Waiting to get in.If only Herodotus had known
the length of Medusa’s hair. Or
the dark color of Jesus’ blood.
The sweet taste of your own flesh,
something to help put on weight
after months of drinking nothing but ink.Where was the death mask that had been hidden
in the lantern of your face?
Or in the tinfoil baking carrots and
small potatoes in the stove—No smoky veil or body part
can haul the ocean out of books.
They should have told you
there was no wine in this carafe!
No act of love in the sink.Bees are swarming in your memory,
now, decayed with grace.
Only prophets and bald boredom
are to blame.
The salty meat in the oven
is cooked and done.
It’s juices, naked in our mouths,
tastes sweet.
James Norcliffe
Canterbury, New Zealand
DARK DAYS AT THE OXYGEN CAFE
The whole night creaks
like a broken bentwood
chair in here, a night
on its very last legs,
like the battered waiter with
his varicose veins and garlic.Is it too much to ask
for a menu without bloodstains,
a plate without the congealed
evidence of the past?I’m a music lover but, god,
this throbbing from
the seventies must be
the Migraine’s Greatest Hits.What happened to
the goddam pianist?
Did he get burnt
and chargrilled too?
Couldn’t we have some
civilized tinkling in here
instead of this throbbing,
this hissing of pipes,
this creak and strain
of overburdened bones.Why isn’t there linen
any more? I like linen.
A man shouldn’t have
to live in a world of Kleenex.
We ought to invade
that goddam country
where the linen comes from.And it’s cold in here.
Why is it so cold when
it used to be warm?And whatever happened
to gingham—red gingham?
It’d be on the table,
the waitress’s heart apron,
like a warm cheerful laugh.
God, I loved that stuff.
Robert Parham
Augusta, GA
THE EVIDENCE OF FOOD
Yesterday’s rice scattered on the counter
where the bugs enumerate them one by one,
while you scratch an eyebrow where skin mites
burrow, happy for your sloughings off, alive
with invisibility. In the night
of our bad day vision we are committed
to the obvious. The sandwich we made,
trail of crumbs unfit for Hansel or Gretel,
draws itself with a ribbon of ants.Bugs, the great detectives of the universe,
crawl inside the scale of their determined space,
comfortable with small, for it is large
that was made for appetite. Sainthood
is left for saints, although the white maggot
cleans the wound with assiduous grace.
What they find, dear sir, are the boundaries
that are real, where bone begins, flesh ends,
where no country can draw its lines so fine
there is at last an accurate account
of where begin has begun and an end is its own amen.