I Am the Leprechaun

Wedding anniversaries are challenging for anyone, but perhaps more so for my wife and I. We have been married since 1940, and what can you buy for a woman who literally has everything she wants? I hustled around Manhattan to a few stores we liked, but without success. It’s harder for me, because I am the Leprechaun.

Yes–the Leprechaun.

It wasn’t always so.

Walking down these crowded Manhattan sidewalks, I remember my life before the conversion. One day I was a modestly successful New York advertising man, going about my day of quiet frustrations like everybody else. I loved walking in Manhattan then on a hot day, deliriously anonymous and carefree. Then, up in Westchester, it was early June 1940, and the war hadn’t started for us yet. We had a picnic in the cool shade of a huge maple tree, Sadie and I, having a grand time on a classic red checkered tablecloth, minding our own business. And our business was us. We had dated for about seven months, with never a single whisper of argument between us. She was beautiful, I adored her, and I intended that day to ask her to marry me.

A wild storm blew up from nowhere and we took cover in a park shelter. It hadn’t rained for more than two minutes, probably less. The sky cleared to intense blue. The birds returned to chirp in time with raindrops falling from the shelter to the concrete. Sadie laughed and my heart smiled. And there it was.

You never see them in front of you, do you? Always far away and behind trees or skyscrapers. But it landed in the grass right next to us, so I went to look at it. Had to go out and touch it. Of course I did.

The end of the rainbow.

In conformance with the legend, there was a sizable pot of gold coins bathed in spectral Neapolitan glory there on the grass, validating the rainbow’s end (apologies to Vernor Vinge; read his book). It was soundless, but it pulsed in the color bands, just a barely noticeable glow that waxed and waned. And beckoned.

So, short story long (pardon the expression), the first thing I did was scoot out of the park shelter and go to the pot of gold. I stood in the rainbow, face and outstretched arms upturned to the azure sky and bathed in color. I felt warm, happy, saturated somehow in⎯what? Love? No, joy. Flooded with joy and the irrational certitude that I was in the right place at the right time.

The gold was like a magnet. The very moment my fingers closed around a coin, I received a mild electric shock, like you might get pulling clothes from the dryer. Just a tingle. Then the gold and the rainbow vanished, like flipping off a light switch. Instantly, my dark brown hair became Technicolor red, my tan skin became fair and freckled. Even my clothes changed into a green frock coat over green breeches, and a green top hat on my head with a Puritanical buckle. Poor Sadie, shocked, screamed and fainted dead away.

There are rules, I have learned. Some I can bend, some I must submit to. However I amend them now, my successor someday will have them back in place to discover on his own. Yes, regrettably, his own. Have you ever seen a legit female leprechaun? Neither have I, just drunk girls dressed up on St. Paddy’s Day. I tried to convert a few, through various means, but only one such wish ever took. This is a mystery of the rules I think I’ve figured out.

I can change my appearance from the default red-hair-and-freckles, though changes can only be temporary. If I don’t restore the default look within ninety-six hours, even for a moment, I snap back like a green rubber band. I set my watch timer with a margin to avoid surprises.

You’ve seen classic leprechauns, about three feet tall, more or less, all dressed in the team green uniform? They’re usually hawking a St. Paddy’s Day sale down at Mattress Warehouse, but they gotta eat, too. Those are traditionalists. Purists. I choose to be six-three and dress like a regular guy. I mean, I was six-one before, so the extra inches are just harmless self-indulgence. In all respects.

I needn’t hold the obligatory coins in each hand, but I must keep them ready in left and right pockets. In compliance with legend, I spend the left-side coins and they later are returned to my pocket. I spend the right-side coins, and they later turn to dust or stones. If anyone knew enough to “catch” me, they couldn’t make me do jack, actually. My subordinate leprechauns get “caught” from time to time, but that’s a game they play with humans to practice outwitting them.

I embraced the fair skin peppered with light freckles, and I really like the red hair in a Danny Kaye kind of way, but I’ve gone into bars as short as Peter Dinklage and to Renaissance Fairs as dark as Idris Elba, so I have a range of expression. I did discover, after too many Old Bushmills shots one night, that my transformative powers extend to gender. I tried that once. It was pretty exciting to run my hands over that body, because I didn’t hold back. I was freakin’ hot. But I made the mistake of getting a final check-out in a full-length mirror on my way out the door, and it was just too strange for my struggling 1940s sensibilities. God bless my human brothers and sisters struggling with gender identity, but mine is pretty set. I stayed home that night to satisfy some curiosities, but I’ve been my regular self ever since.

That’s enough for now, then. I succeeded in granting Sadie her wish in October of 1940. Turns out the magic ingredient is genuine love, something every songwriter knows. We’re celebrating its anniversary tonight with dinner. I love her red hair. We will grant each other’s wishes somewhat later.

That’s all, lad. May ye be in Heaven half an hour before the Devil knows ye’re gone.

Written by: Daniel Charles Ross

Photo by: Taj Lewis

Red Sky at Morning

Carey stared at me from the corner of the room, chiding me for reading (The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde, which I never finished). I ignored her while she paged through my parents’ coffee table magazines: Nantucket Yacht and an untouched Parenting. She slammed them shut, stood up and glared at me.

“What’s the point?” she sputtered, exasperated and wild-eyed, watercolor sunburn splotches down her legs from a haphazard sunscreen application the day before. I looked up from my book. In her left hand, she held a plastic beach toy: a forlorn purple profile of a fish. It was a sad, bloated shape that ballooned and bulged a misshapen tumor tail, its lips puckered in expectation like the punks at our last middle school dance. It looked frozen in shock, with a final one-eyed look of powerless recognition of fate: Caesar’s final gaze as Brutus dealt the hardest blow.

“Come on, Hen!” She shook my arm. Carey was strong: a skin-and-bone arm wrestling champion. “Hen”, short for Henry, simultaneously belittling and endearing, which she loved. She was older by a month and taller by two inches, information volunteered unprompted (“cross my heart it’s closer to two-and-a-half inches”) with enough vigor for both of us. Once, while eating our split ham and cheese on the beach, I pointed out a drip of mayonnaise on her chin. She replied that she intended it to be there and refused to wipe it off for the rest of the meal.

I smirked. “Fine.” Book closed. “What are we doing?” But we did the same thing every day. Summer vacation. Too young to do much of anything, too old to sit at home.

She clapped me over the head with the fish. “Follow me.” She spun on her bare feet and walked out with face-forward determination, knowing I’d run to catch up before she walked halfway down the street.

* * *

The beach was our kingdom. More accurately, Carey’s kingdom and she was king, not queen. With seaweed crown and driftwood staff she carried herself with an awkward, spasmodic regality, shouting orders and castigating her subjects: banishing pearl-less oysters, relegating king crab to court jester.

It was hard to distinguish most days from others. Sunshine, honeysuckle and turquoise sea glass; convincing my mother to pack lunch for two (one sandwich, a party-size bag of chips, a carton of OJ, two fun-size Twix bars), bruises that seemingly appeared from nowhere, round rocks we tried to skip but that often plopped in refusal, the smell of sunscreen and sweat.

We sat atop the steep sand throne and looked down below, across the stretch of beach and water. It was early in the season, a cool day in early June. I don’t think I would have jumped in even if my bones could stand it.

Carey paced the peak of the dune, surveying her dominion as if it were a hundred feet below. I made sad fish imprints in the sand with the toy; mute and purple with that cyclops eye wide, unable to warn you about the sea monster behind your back, impossible to change its hopeless view of things.

“Henry,” she commanded, inflection rising on the last syllable in a proper British accent. Wind swept the paint-splattered patches of seagrass along the dune. I looked up from my petrified fish platoon to see the staff lifted high above her head. I winced and held up my hand in defense. How had I offended the king today? And it was only 10am?

A moment. She rested the driftwood on the crown of my head and said, “Sir Henry, for courage so pure and deeds so bold. Knight of my Kingdom.” I smirked and grabbed the staff, throwing it aside (“Treason, Sir Henry! Treason!”) and jumped on her. She fumbled for footing, my arms wrangled around her neck and feet around her waist (“Guards!”). I seized her crown in hasty revolt and placed it askew on my head. She careened to the edge, left leg tangled up in right; we fell in slow motion (did my lips graze her cheek?) and thumped on impact, plunging down the hill.

We barrel-rolled, tangled, swirled images of sea and sand bled into one another. Blue sand, white ocean, red sky.

I landed with a muffled thud, the right side of my face glued to the beach. Lifting my head, I sputtered laughter, sand-spit spewing from my mouth. My right rib panged, and I looked down to see a viscous trickle of sand-blood flowing down my abdomen. I winced.

Carey lay limp beside me. I prodded her. “Carey.” Lifeless. I observed her. “Not funny, Carey.” I threw half-broken sea shells at her back. Nothing. Repeating, louder, “Carey.” And I wanted her name to be longer, to have a fuller sound, as though perhaps a third syllable would be the one to wake her.

The ocean continued to splash sea and salt, low waves crashing in a white noise that accentuated the silence on the beach.

I shifted to look back to the towering dune. Lifting my legs from my seated inspection, I stepped back, climbing the dune backwards to face toward Carey’s contorted form. At the top, I retrieved the plastic fish, my imprinted fortune-telling fish legion staring at me: “We tried to tell you.”

Back at the shoreline, bedsheet of white foam erasing my footsteps, I flung the fish into the water and watched the piece of floating purple plastic wash out to sea. A fish that couldn’t swim, only drift, climbing the crest of a wave in a dead man’s float.

I walked home alone. An unnaturally wide smile shined from the toddler on this month’s Parenting on the doorstep.

And then gray bedroom, blue fog sleep. Numbness: something and nothing, my entire body like a fallen-asleep foot.

Written by: Gregory Duffy

Photo by: Daniel Charles Ross

Cogito Ergo Zoom

We cruised past the closed gas station lot with a glut of hot cars parked on it. Tim shifted his 1967 Pontiac GTO down to second gear and rode the tach right up to maybe five thousand rpm, the 400-cubic-inch engine roaring and snarling like a chained dragon. My Hemi Charger R/T added to the mechanical harmony. As we wailed away in second gear, two cars rolled out into the darkness behind us. The headlights in our mirrors rocketed up Woodward like anti-aircraft missiles turning toward enemy planes.

We signaled into a wide Woodward crossover to the southbound side at Bassett Street. A wildly modified ’65 Buick Riviera rolled in next to Tim, and a crappy ’62 Ford Galaxie stopped beside my Charger. The Galaxie was not a serious street racer, just a poseur. He couldn’t or didn’t want to spend the money it took to be serious. That’s actually a thing in racing.

Speed costs money. How fast can you afford to go?

The timeless jet-black Riviera was box stock on the outside, but in its engine bay growled a throaty, modified V-8 with the kind of spiteful intent never envisioned by Buick engineers. The owner had spent a lot of money on it, and that did not work in our favor.

We shut down all four cars and stepped out into the street, like gunslingers.

“Hey,” the tubby kid from the Riv said. “You guys lookin’ to see what those things can do out here?” He stood with arms crossed, but it only accentuated his thick midsection and made him look defensive.

Advantage ours.

“We know what our cars will do,” Tim said evenly. “We wanna know what yours will do—if you have the balls.”

The Riviera kid laughed like he’d been challenged this way before, and had sent the annihilated challengers home strapped to the hoods of their cars, like trophies of war.

“Yeah man, I got the balls. You got any money?”

Tim reached into his back pocket and withdrew an envelope thick with fifties.

“Well, all right,” the Ford kid said eagerly. He had a gap-toothed grin and an oily waterfall hairstyle, that sort of surf-wave coming over the front and slicked back on the sides. We looked at him like he was a turd—Not talkin’ to you, jerk.

“You got any money, dude?” Tim demanded. The Riv kid reached into the left front pocket of his blue jeans and pulled out a roll of cash, fanning it back and forth in the air. It looked to be all hundred-dollar bills. A shit-ton of them.

“Asshole, I got the money. You got the courage to go with your daddy’s allowance?”

Tim didn’t take the bait.

“Here’s the deal,” Tim said, deadpan. “One grand, one run, no bullshit. Winner-winner-chicken-dinner. We line up over there at Hadsell Drive and race down Woodward to South Berkshire. That’s a bit more than a quarter mile, but I need less than that to put your shit on the fuckin’ trailer. The first car—the first car—to cross South Berkshire is the winner. Agreed?”

Damn, I thought. Who the hell are you, and what have you done with my college-prep pal, Tim?

“Who holds the money?” the Riv kid snarled. He was trying to sound tough now but it just came off as squeaky indignation. “Somebody needs to hold the money.”

Tim laughed an evil laugh.

“Well, it ain’t gonna be you, and this idiot”—he pointed to the Ford driver—“has an IQ about two points above plant life, so he’s out. We will hold the money.” He gestured to the Ford boy again. “Your little girlfriend here can ride with my friend and the cash, if that blows your skirt up. I get to South Berkshire first, we keep the cash. If you get there first, you get paid. But you are losing tonight, my friend. Bad. Your friends will still be laughing at your ass next September when you go back to do your junior year of vocational school over again.”

“Deal,” the Riv kid said. Tim reached out to shake hands on it and the kid slapped it away. “Fuck your handshake, asshole. Let’s race.” He gave me his cash, got back in his Riviera and burned rubber out onto Woodward.

Tim turned to face me.

“Oooooh,” he stage-whispered, “must be a tough guy.” He smiled with confidence, gave me a thumbs up, and went to his car.

Tim lined up next to the hulking Riviera. When the engines sounded like they were about to explode, I blipped my headlights once and they launched.

A smoky blue curtain of shrieks and melted rubber enveloped them, and then the black Riviera lunged forward like it came off the catapult of an aircraft carrier.

A few seconds later, I saw the flashing red lights of two police cars reflecting off the pine trees in the median between north and south Woodward.

Tim was casually driving twenty-five miles per hour in the center lane when I caught up with him. The Riviera was stopped and bracketed front and rear by two Birmingham police cars, and officers who looked angry even in the poor light.

When our cars rolled past him, the kid glared at us something fierce and Tim flipped him the bird. Seconds later, the GTO indeed was the first car to cross the finish line at South Berkshire. We pulled into the Mobil gas station about a block farther on.

“You can get out here,” I said to the Ford kid sitting next to me. “First car won. You can walk back to your little buddy. He’ll be a few minutes yet.” He got out and looked up Woodward to the traffic stop, irritated and bewildered.

We drove a few miles over to our eastside hangout. I got out of my Charger and into the passenger seat of Tim’s GTO, grabbed his right arm in two hands and shook it forcefully.

“What just happened?!”

He chuckled. “‘Situational awareness.’ I saw those cops lurking on that side street, and goaded that Riviera kid into a big-dollar race knowing he couldn’t resist the challenge. We launched hard, but I shut down.”

I looked at my mastermind friend in frank admiration.

“Then, as you saw, I was the first car to cross South Berkshire. We win. Cogito ergo zoom.”

Cogito ergo sum is a Descartes phrase generally translated into English as “I think, therefore I am.” Cogito ergo zoom was an axiom by legendary advertising and car magazine editor David E. Davis.

It means, “I think, therefore I go fast.”

Written by: Daniel Charles Ross
Photograph by: Daniel Vidal

2 Drink Minimum

The bar is small, dark, and trite, nestled in a strip mall between a prosperous and garish Korean nail salon and the upscale Gourdough’s Public House. This bar is not upscale. It survives precisely because it’s a hole people can climb into and pull over themselves.

It’s as anonymous as porn theater sex. It has no windows, no sign over the door, no chipped and faded little cigarette-company decal with a penguin proclaiming Come on in, it’s KOOL inside! The metal door is old and rusted, dented here and there, with two punctures that let in rain. It works with a scream of protest, just like most of the bar’s patrons.

The place has weathered barn wood nailed to the wall at the far end, and a few dart players of unreliable skill throw feathered projectiles at a target hung from a nail. A ragged color printout of someone’s ex-wife is taped over the ten-ring, encouraging accuracy. Most of the darts embed into the barn wood anyway.

As a celluloid Nick the Bartender said to the you-never-existed George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, this too is a place where men, and now women, are hard customers who come to drink hard liquor, and get drunk. If you can’t drink at least two, you are out of your league here. Go next door to Gourdough’s where there is better lighting and you can order your fucking Mojito.

Coincidentally, the bartender here is also named Nick. He hasn’t mixed a White Russian in two years. There was that Manhattan last month, but it was served to a regular who followed up with a triple Lagavulin neat. The woman’s date never showed—married prick, got cold feet. After almost two years on that bar stool, she never came back.

This is a destination bar, where men and women often meet with others not their spouse. Couples huddle in booths around the perimeter of the main room. A few more sit at booths and a few tables in satellite rooms even darker than the main area. There are other regulars, too. You can buy or sell information here, or plan some deal, but don’t get caught with dope or it’s your ass. If someone calls in looking for a customer—a frantic wife, an angry husband—no one is ever there. Sorry, really busy. Take a message?

Detective Inspector Douglas Lee Pavlichek is distinguishable from the other customers only to the bartender. Nick has served the cop booze since he came on the job; through two marriages, three killed partners and six promotions. He does a very passable simulation of a businessman, with his Abboud suits and Burberry trench coat. The homicide cops are well known to be natty dressers, and Pavlichek does his part. You need nice suits when you go to your partners’ funerals. Pavlichek doesn’t have a terrible average, though, for his thirty-two years. That works out to less than one dead partner per decade. But after he lost Mooney, Pavlichek decided he’d rather work solo. He’s on the glide slope to a disappointing retirement anyway, so the bosses agreed.

He also doesn’t care about any two-drink minimum, because Detective Pavlichek hasn’t had two or fewer drinks at a sitting since 12th grade, when he partied so hard that he barely graduated. Only Mrs. Ellsworth had saved that, allowing a retake of the final exam over the angry objections of Mr. Crawford, the so-called “guidance counselor” who hated Pavlichek since he was a southmore. That’s how they say it here, southmore, not sophomore. So he passed with a D-plus—still hadn’t studied—and drew the Logan green cap and gown to make the high school perp walk with almost a thousand other seniors that year.

Here’s a piece of info for that next lull in class reunion conversation: Today, a man named Logan Green is the co-founder and chief executive officer of the ride-sharing service Lyft.

No, that doesn’t mean anything. Nothing does.

Pavlichek doodles on a bar napkin. When he looks up, Nick is already watching him. The detective waves an index finger in airy, imperfect circles, ordering another round. Nick pulls a Stroh’s from an ornate tap and then pours an extra-double Johnny Walker Black while the beer foam settles. By the time Pavlichek survived the summer after high school, he could drink a whole fifth of Johnny Walker Black and still be just walking-around high, could drive and everything. That time he wrecked his car down the street from Griff’s house, where Griff’s mother always bought the party alcohol, the local uniforms didn’t even know he was wasted. That was the first time Pavlichek thought about a career in police work.

Police work is how he describes it, because cops will tell you honestly, in quiet moments, that “law enforcement” isn’t the same thing. Rookies do law enforcement; veterans do police work. Police work maintains order and keeps people safe and free, keeps the jackoffs in their own districts, at least. Those lofty goals are not always the purview of laws, so most cops don’t enforce laws. They do police work.

Pavlichek’s phone buzzes in an inside-left coat pocket, but he doesn’t have to look at it to know who it is. His personal cell is in the inside-right pocket, but it never buzzes. He downs the scotch at once, then powers down the beer.

“Gotta run, Nick. Work,” he says. He leaves a fifty on the bar, because if you tip a bartender well now, he tips a cop well later. Pavlichek gets only two steps away before turning back to Nick.

“Hey, you havin’ a good day, man?”

Nick shrugs. “Yeah. I guess. You know, it is what it is.”

“You are right about that.” Pavlichek waves a two-finger salute and turns to the door. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“Okay, Inspector,” Nick says. He wipes wet rings from the polished surface of the bar and picks up the napkin. Pavlichek has carefully torn up the business card of the department psychologist and left it in a perfect teepee of matte pasteboard on the bar.

On the napkin, Pavlichek has drawn the crude image of a handgun shooting a bullet through a cartoon badge, and all around it, over and over, he’s written the words Kill me now.



Written by: Daniel Charles Ross
Photograph by: Chris Boyles

Gone Fishing

I remember the night that myself and Blue Louis took some time out with a bottle in the abandoned petrol station before the bad times, after being freaked out of a bar by beefy rednecks, flannel shirts so stiff with sweat they were like insect shells, thin but hard and keeping all their whisky-squished innards in.

Didn’t help that Louis - Gods bless him - was all decked out like he was fresh from the jazz joint in a beat-up snazz suit and green fedora with cigarettes stuck in the band. He always had those damn cigarettes shoved in there like the press photographer in a Bogart noir. Didn’t help that I had ripped jeans and mussed blond hair and was street-skinny, like a cheap angel of the lanes bestowing miracles by the hour.

‘What brings you here, boys?’ That’s what one of the big guys says to him, and let's not forget that Louis is dark dark dark and you can see Mayan pyramids in his cheekbones, and these guys were moonshine brewers like you get out here with their terrible fucking fear of the dark.

‘Uh…I work for a paper.’ Tryin' to keep that cigar-smoke voicebox of his nice and smooth and easy.

‘Oh? There a story in these parts?’ A couple whiskeys slid over the sticky toffee bar to us. Some hulker in a shady corner mutters something as Louis pays up and the others around him chuckle like their mouths are full of gravel, and I start to hear banjo music in my head.

'He gone fishin.' One grizzled guy with a grey beard like a big smokey tongue flopping down from his lips nods at me. 'Caught a pretty one.'

And I hear the word ‘faggot’ and that's when I start praying, Oh sweet and holy Jesus let us get the fuck out of here before we get torn in two down by the river somewhere. I'll give you kind deeds and clothes for the needy and Oh holy mother of God, I'll find you some real gigantic fresh red roses, you know, the ones you like and Oh Saint Jude who watches over lost causes I'll take out that ad in the paper for you, just get us outta here or make us fireproof.

'This?' Louis looks at me like he's never seen me before. 'Stupid kid was tryin' to jump the trains. Like the old hobos.'

'Lose your life that way, son.' One of the werebears says, and the others start nodding and talking, remember when so-and-so stopped off at the railroad shack and when the train pulled up they saw something between the carriages and God above there was a leg caught up in there.

Louis shakes his head like I'm a dumb dog. 'Right? Coulda found himself landing both sides of the state,' and because these lumberdicks are rough and tumble types he looks like he's gonna cuff me round the head for a second but I see him think the better of it because let's not forget in this unbreathable place that Louis is dark dark dark.

'Huh, that's a bunch of starry-eyed crap, hopping the trains these days. You runnin' away from something?' Same guy looks me over intently, like he's trying to figure out if they need to turn me in. This place looks like it still has Wanted posters up on the walls and I'm busy winging sweet nothings up to the vaulted ceiling above this one and its golden inhabitants.

'Nossir, trying to find a job in the city, where's he's goin'.' They look up-and-down at my torn jeans and laugh.

'And you, paperboy?'

Lou shrugs like he isn't sweating blood right now. ‘Just passing through. Gotta be back in the office Monday.'

We downed our gulping whiskeys that could fireball the germs off your lips and backed out of the joint slowly, like it was full of wolves who’d leap if you moved too quick. Soon as we were out the door we whirled our bootheels away down the dust track back to the car, shrieking the banjo duel music at each other. Louis jammed it into first and pulled away from that Ol’ Boy freak circus fast as the wheels would turn. Picked up an amber bottle at some no-hope trailer and blazed out into the desolate desert road.

Hit an old gas station, looming out of the darkness all squat and skeletal. Parked up and rolled a special smoke and sat watching the stars. There’s really no light out there, see, it’s like the nicotine yellow stained sky you know in the city just peels away, and there’s all this universe underneath it. It was like when you see reflections in a lake or a puddle and wonder if you could fall through it into the reflection world. I turned my head to watch Louis all strung out along the sand like a big cat.

I believe I said something nonsensical and beautiful about the universe and the microscope of God out here and the stars being our atom-selves. He shook his head and said:

‘You know, if it had come down to pig-squealing time, I just want you to know that I woulda gone first.’

‘What the fuck, Lou?’

He turned, and in that totally unselfconscious way he had of touching other beings he stroked my hair and my star-stoned face.

‘Because I love you, man, you’re my best friend.’

I thought about this a moment and said:

'But I woulda seen what was coming, I mean, thank you for your consideration and all but...No, no...That wouldn't have helped me at all.'

At some point in that long galaxy gaze we passed out. Comes to something beautiful when you wake up in an old petrol station in the arms of your best friend still wearing his green fedora. The rest of the way we played I Spy and the sand and the scrub and the sky all began with the same S.

Written by: Natty Mancini

Photograph by: Daniel Charles Ross

Sixteen Years

Twelve hours earlier, James woke to find Catherine’s arm draped over his back. Lifting just his head from the pillow so as not to wake her, he turned to find her face inches from his. Early morning sunlight filtered through the blinds. Patches of light lined the end of their bed – no, her bed. In her apartment. Catherine stirred. She looked much younger when she slept.

James’s free hand found the wrinkles alongside his eyes. One, two, three of them. He knew what Catherine would say if she were awake. She would tell him she loved them – that they made him the James she knew. He knew she loved him, partly because she told him, but mainly because he felt it. He counted the lines with his fingers again.

Catherine awoke and pulled his hand down so there was no barrier between their faces. “Stop that,” she said.

James grinned. “Morning to you, too.”

She moved his arm over her head and pressed up against his body. “I like them.” Catherine laid her head on James’s chest and closed her eyes again.

He forgot her age whenever they spent time together – save for those few moments when Catherine would play with her hair while concentrating, or the way she didn’t quite know how to embrace his many compliments. But those moments were scarce. He’d watched her surpass her twenty-two years when she squared off her shoulders, walked into a room of his colleagues, and held her own in conversation. James loved their late evenings when they dissected their favorite novels, characters, relationships. He never felt their sixteen-year difference, even the night he recounted his messy divorce. Catherine’s eyes never flicked away from his face as he spoke. She was present. And he loved her for it.

James tried not to touch his smile lines, as she called them, again.

“Stop thinking about them.” Catherine was watching him.

He forced a smile and kissed her forehead. “I’m thinking about you.” And he was.

                                                                                                     ***

James was still thinking about her. He pulled the collar of his fleece tight around his neck against the cold, northern rain. With his free hand, he forced one of his suitcases into the car. Night blanketed the street outside his own apartment save for the harsh glow of the hanging lights above. They made the slick pavement sparkle beneath his boots. James’s phone vibrated in his pocket. It was Catherine, for the second time this evening. James tossed his phone into the trunk and headed back for his messenger bag. His fingers hovered over his bottom lip as he remembered their morning. His mind elsewhere, his legs carried him into his now empty apartment he’d called home for a few short months. James wanted to believe that Catherine would give him her usual disapproving look now, but he knew better. She would tell him he wasn’t being selfish, but it’s all he felt when he was alone. Catherine should be with someone who would experience things with her, not someone who had gone through the steps already.

Leaving was the best way. He needed to make it a clean break, for her. James pushed the nauseating feeling aside, shook his head, and began his final walk-through. It felt like the apartment was holding its breath along with him. The kitchen was bare. The bedroom seemed much smaller without any furniture. James poked his head in the bathroom and stopped. On the counter, next to the sink, was a lone bobby pin. James picked it up. He ran the delicate metal through his fingers as he checked his office and living room. Holding the bobby pin between his teeth, he took the last two bags and headed for the car. He angled them into the backseat.

The engine revved to life. James directed the vents at the driver’s seat and waited for the car to warm up. He never needed to use the heat in any of his previous vehicles. The weather in Arkansas didn’t allow for much short of air conditioning. It was something Catherine never understood. Even now, Catherine preferred to use a collection of fans to cool her apartment rather than purchasing an air conditioning unit. She put any additional income to paying off her student loans. James rubbed his hands together in front of the vent. Temperature aside, Catherine’s apartment was light years ahead of his first one. Ahead, even, of the one he was leaving now. James didn’t have a way with creature comforts. Catherine was more put together than James was at that age. He’d followed her around on his first visit to her place. He remembered hiding a smile while he watched her straighten a jar of honey on the microwave between a box of tissues and her collection of corks. James had wondered how many corks he’d have if he’d started collecting at twenty-one. He dismissed the thought, again. This was the right thing, for her. He was sure.

James spun the knob to defrost as fog took the edges of the windows. He knew it would only take him a full day of driving to get back home. Rather, it would only take him a full day of driving to get back. James removed the bobby pin from his teeth and slid it onto the sleeve of his jacket. Backing out of the parking space, he chanced one more look at the apartment building. He saw shadows of him and Catherine dancing in the moonlit windows of the living room and dodging flying bacon grease while they made breakfast in nothing but their skin. He remembered the flowery smell of her shampoo as she swept her hair into a bun and secured it with a few bobby pins. James touched the one on his sleeve. He was bringing a piece of home back with him.

Written by: Erin Davies

Photograph by: Daniel Charles Ross