June '04


HOBART #3

ANDREW BOMBACK 20 Stories About My Dead Brother, Ollie
DENNIS DILLINGHAM Two Octogenarians Sitting at a Starbucks Drinking Orange Juice
PIA EHRHARDT Hail
ELIZABETH ELLEN The Girl at the End of the Bar
LEE KLEIN Brave Men Run
JOHN LEARY Daddy
PASHA MALLA Three Penises of Adelaide, South Australia
SHAUNA MCKENNA Chance
MAX RUBACK Introduction to Still-Life
DAMON STEWART Lost in the Static
SUSAN TOWNSEND Family Therapy

Photo of Hobart Boulevard in Los Angeles, CA generously sent by Julianne Flynn.

She walks out of the airport terminal bathroom, her posture worthy of balancing sacks of grain on her head. She looks around where she last saw me. I’ve hidden myself behind a soda machine. I just barely catch a glance of her. She doesn’t seem abandoned. She stops, stands still. I have her half-packed duffel tucked out of sight. She’s alone in the Philadelphia airport with only what she has in her pockets. She stands there, a solid figure just a few strides in front of the women’s bathroom. A barely perceptible glow on the side of her cheek. I’d jump out if I sensed the least distress. But she just stands there, not moving, probably expecting me to emerge from the men’s room any second. She reaches into her well-worn jeans, pulls out a dollar, tries to smooth it on her thigh. Then she uses the edge of a pay-phone encasement, working over the creases in Washington’s portrait until he looks much younger, more amendable to the soda machine’s discerning dollar-bill mechanism. She starts moving toward me. I duck back against the wall. Then I realize it’d be better if I continued observing her from point-blank range. I position myself so a sliver of my eye can just see the least outline of her jacket. I hear the dollar-bill mechanism inhale her bill. A moment of choice. She presses one of the rectangular glowing logos. I feel the soda machine’s internal mechanisms process her order. There’s a second between her pressing and the drop of the can, a hesitancy, and in that second I wonder if the machine’s considering whether it should honor its side of the bargain (since it already has the money), or maybe there’s something else going on: like it’s thinking how can I give this one a can of my precious soda? I feel a glass-hanging moment of potential rejection that shatters when the can drops. I peek around and see her squaring her back to the machine, probably thinking I’m in the men’s room cleansing my digestive tract of inorganic build up, that I should really get on with it. I pounce out from my blind, with the strap of her duffel diagonally bisecting my chest, and grab an orb of her buttocks. She whirls. Not like a pirouetting ballerina, not with lots of swift graceful movement and readying of limbs for a crushing retort. But rather, she turns. There isn’t much to it. She turns, reaches around, and casually grabs a handful of my ass.

“I saw you there all along,” she accuses.

I charge my eyes with purpose, stare as deeply as I can into her head, and say slowly, “No . . . you . . . didn’t.”

“I . . . did . . . not . . . see . . . you,” she says, as though hypnotized. Then she breaks our tight connection, hands me a Mountain Dew. “Looks like you could use this,” she says.

I thought I had her. But she would never drink Mountain Dew. She ordered for me.

I crack open the can.

She gives me a screwy look like how the hell can you drink that stuff?

I take a big sip, hold it, then try kissing her. I want to release the fizzing contents of my cheeks into hers. But she rejects it. Jerks away. Mocks my silliness.