00 Front Matter

PIRANHAS & QUICKSAND & LOVE PIRANHAS & QUICKSAND & LOVE STORIES Sally Shivnan Press 53 Winston-SalemX Press 53, LLC PO Box 30314 Winston-Salem, NC 27130 First Edition Copyright © 2016 by Sally Shivnan All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For permission, contact publisher at [email protected], or at the address above. Cover design by Maryam Banyahmad and Amir Khatirnia www.behance.net/amirkhatirnia Author photo by James Gerfin This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Printed on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-1-941209-42-4 For Jim and remembering Alan Cheuse, teacher and generous soul Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the publications where the following stories, some in a slightly different form, first appeared: “Dicking the Buddha,” The Antioch Review; “The Confectioner,”Glimmer Train Stories; “Simon’s Berth,” The Chesapeake Reader; “Something, Anything,” Rosebud; “Dee Told Bea,” Perpetuum Mobile; “The Mover,” The Baltimore Review; and “Lola,” So To Speak. The book referenced in “Rapture” is Sailing: a Lubber’s Dictionary by Henry Beard and Roy McKie, published by Workman Publishing, 2001. CONTENTS Dicking the Buddha 1 The Confectioner 19 Simon’s Berth 29 Piranhas & Quicksand & Love 41 Something, Anything 59 The Detectorist 65 Blood Lake 77 Dee Told Bea 91 The Mover 101 What Do You Remember? 115 The Accidental Inventor 125 Rapture 145 Lola 167 Bit and Piece 179 Dicking the Buddha I waited for my sister to sit down, before I asked her. Then I waited a respectable moment, while we sipped our coffee and looked out the kitchen window at the vinyl siding of the house next door. There is nothing interesting to look at out the windows of my sister’s home. I set my elbow in something sticky on the tabletop; I didn’t look down but shifted myself discreetly. “Would it be okay,” I asked, “if I borrowed the baby?” “Again? Jesus Christ, Tabby”—she looked toward the living room to see if her two-year-old had heard her swear— “this is getting to be a habit.” “Only for about three days.” “Four days. It’s four days.” “Well, back that morning, on the fourth day. Or I could bring him back the night before but it would be really late.” My sister Lizelle is strong, angular, with a nice clarity about her. She looks like the pictures of our mother, who was a perfect likeness of Lauren Bacall only black. Actually, biracial, mulatta: our mother’s mother was black, her father white. Lizelle could pass for our mother in those photos, including the look of her skin—color of a heavy rainy sky. 2 Sally Shivnan I don’t look like anybody, except I have the same narrow, elegant nose our father has. He, too, is half-black and even lighter-skinned. My skin is like his; people think I look ever- so-slightly different, exotic, often ask me where I’m from. He lives on the other side of the country now, with another woman, and our mother died a long time ago. There at the kitchen table, in her capris and bedroom slippers, Lizelle’s legs, I noted, were ashy. Her lips were dry and bitten. She had once plucked her eyebrows but hadn’t in at least a year and they had grown in thick, glowering, a perpetually pissed-off look. I knew she’d say yes. I knew she’d let me have the baby. “Mikie has something to do with all this, doesn’t he?” she said. “Only as inspiration.” Mikie is our brother, a former entrepreneur who lives in a large RV and follows the lawnmower racing circuit, towing a trailer for his souped-up Snapper—the only thing stranger than my mama as Lauren Bacall is my brother the redneck good ol’ boy. He says he’s like that pioneering black cowboy, Bill Pickett, except he’s on a lawnmower instead of a horse. He reinvented himself this way when he sold his internet startup company for a heinous sum shortly before it went bust. He sends cryptic postcards from obscure towns across the south, always addressed to both of us, ‘dear Tabby and Lizelle,’ or ‘dear Lizelle and Tabby’ though they only come to Lizelle’s address. “That whole ‘dicking the Buddha’ thing, I still don’t get that,” Lizelle said. “It still bothers me.” Around the time Mikie went mobile, he started teasing us about it: What do you do if you meet the Buddha on the road? I don’t know, Lizelle said, feed him? ask him stuff? I had heard something about killing him, but from the wicked twinkle in Mikie’s eye I knew this wasn’t where we were going. A ninth-century Zen master, Mikie explained, name of Lin Chi, advised Dicking the Buddha 3 killing the Buddha if you ran into him, to keep yourself from getting too caught up in celebrity worship. But if you really met the dude, Mikie said, bumped into him, just like that—I tell you what now, don’t dick the Buddha! When we asked him what that meant he just laughed, looking like a redneck Buddha himself with his beer belly hanging over his Snapper belt buckle, and his bizarre attempt at a mullet haircut. This was what money had done to Mikie. He’s an asshole and I’d just as soon he stopped sending the postcards. “I don’t get it either,” I told Lizelle. “But I don’t really care anymore.” “That’s what worries me.” Around us on the floor were toys, clothes, sippy-cups, an old baby blanket somebody had been dragging around. I wanted to point these out to her and say, this is what worries me, not this exactly but what goes along with this, what goes into the bargain. “How’s Ty?” I asked. Ty is Lizellle’s husband. He is deployed with the army in Afghanistan. She shrugged. “Okay. Everything’s okay. I get emails.” “How are you getting along with Monica?” Monica is Lizelle’s mother-in-law. She frowned into her coffee, her eyebrows lowering like a storm, their pissed-off look mutating to enraged. Just then the two-year-old started dropping things on the baby, who was asleep in the playpen—small, soft things but enough to wake him up, but in any case it was time to pack everybody up and go get the four-year-old from preschool, and so we spoke no more about it, except to agree that I could come pick up baby Cody the following day. Just a few hours south and what did I see but a Bradford pear in full, blinding white bloom—small tree, size of a Mini Cooper, a perfect oblong in shape like a giant genetically 4 Sally Shivnan engineered baking potato. It was my first sign of spring, which I was driving straight into. Then the tree was gone and I was back to staring at I-95, heading into Richmond, the baby conked out in his car seat behind me. Cody’s seat faced backwards, so to see him I looked in two mirrors: a baby-view mirror attached to my visor, aimed at a second mirror hanging on the back seat, facing him. His pacifier had fallen to his lap, he had a little drool from the corner of his mouth, and his tiny right hand rested upon his armrest in a delicate, aristocratic way. The truck drivers smiled down at me, smiles that were friendly rather than leering only because they saw the baby in the back. I had the whole thing going, bundles of Pampers, cases of Enfamil, bottles and plush toys and rattles lying all around the car, the little sunshade suction-cupped to the window, the ‘Baby On Board’ sign. It was a small but distinct pleasure to fool people this way. I had watched my sister, handing over Cody. Watched her turn into the all-aflutter mother: You have the right diapers? You have enough formula? You remember what I told you about the A & D ointment, how I stopped using that other stuff? We’d stood in the driveway, beside the open door of the car. It was early, the sky starting to lighten, the air cold, soft dew on the grass. The first cars were creeping down their driveways to begin their commutes. All the houses were boxy, stark, the trees small. I watched the upstairs windows of the house across the street light up, one and then another and another, while I stood there with Lizelle, waiting for her to let the baby go. Cody was in a traveling outfit—she had dressed him up—sweatpants and a shirt with a bear on it, and a little blue wool hat, and little sneakers that seemed so unnecessary and sort of heartbreaking. She lifted his foot and studied his shoe, pressing the shoelace into some more perfect shape, and I tried to hold still and not look like anything that could be interpreted as impatience, or anxiety, or regret, or anything else. Dicking the Buddha 5 Lizelle was supposed to put Cody in the carseat but her eyes welled up and she held him close and just stood there. She pressed her nose to the top of his head and inhaled his smell through his hat.

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