Summer Contest Winners, 2009

scratch: the writing contest

The Winner

First place, publication and $150 goes to webassets/PlumEmilyscratchMAY.JPG

Dody Williams of Greensboro, NC

for Betrothed

Second place goes to

Ann Hoffman of Santa Rosa, CA

for Aroma

Third place goes to

Dan Burke of Cumming, GA

for The Killer and the Angel

Summer 2009 Judge, Patti Callahan Henry

is the National Bestselling author of six novels with Penguin/NAL (Losing the Moon, Where the River Runs, When Light Breaks, Betweeen the Tides, The Art of Keeping Secrets, and Driftwood Summer).

Patti is hailed as a fresh new voice in southern fiction. She has been short-listed for the Townsend Prize for Fiction and has been nominated for the Southeastern Independent Booksellers Fiction Novel of the Year.

Visit her website at patticallahanhenry.com

Dody rediscovered her love of writing when she began work on a masters degree in 2004. Several of her stories have been published. A special favorite, Her Benevolent Concern, will appear in the anthology When Last on the Mountain. She thanks her husband, Dan, profusely. He makes her writing possible.

Ann Hoffman lives in beautiful Sonoma County, California. After years of putting her creative energy into raising her two children she started writing, only to find the characters in her head can be just as demanding as her kids (and almost as precious). Her fiction has appeared on Flashquake.org.

Dan Burke lives in Cumming Georgia with his family. He’s a software development manager for a large transportation company and writes fiction as a hobby. Dan is a member of the Atlanta Writers Club. He recently completed his first novel and is pursuing its publication.

And now for the stories.

Judge Patti Callahan Henry said of Betrothed, "This story has what all great stories should have: an intriguing opening that makes the reader want to know more. The story takes us back and forth in time, building tension with each forward movement, and then taking us backward toward the meaning of his regret. The author builds a world around his themes and then allows the reader to go with him to the very end."

Enjoy.

Betrothed

There was a guy in my high school who made the headlines of all the newspapers in the state of Illinois by inviting two girls down into his basement ostensibly to show them his pool table. Now, that might not sound terribly heinous. The problem with the invite was this; he murdered them. Technically speaking, he became our most successful graduate if you measure success by the fifteen minutes of fame rule. The thought processes behind murder have always fascinated me. The Pool Table Murderer, as he is fondly called, is reputed to have told fellow classmates who made regular voyeuristic visits to him in the state pen that he just got kind of curious. “You know?” In other words, it was a whim. He told them he had wondered if he was capable of doing such a thing and then he said, “Hey, man, I just did it - you know? It kind of messed it up though...” Ruining the felt on the pool table seemed to be his biggest regret.

Regret has a pretty long tap root. I suppose the reasons for doing what I did percolated all the years I spent living with my less than stellar self esteem. Maybe it was a latent attempt at revenge, although I don’t consider myself to be the kind of guy who holds a grudge. Whatever the underlying emotions, don’t confuse revenge with hate. It happened more as a result of too much feeling: too much desire, too much guilt; just too much, like a kind of manic sugar high.

The town I grew up in was a dump. The biggest business in town took all the corn and soybeans from the surrounding farm communities and smashed them into some sort of obnoxious smelling pulp that blew directly into my bedroom window. I always woke to the smell of rot pervading my nostrils. My folks were church going, decent people trying to get by the best they could with mundane jobs; my dad was an insurance adjuster and my mother worked part time at the local J. C. Penney store during school hours. Having eight children didn’t help much, I suppose. We were crammed into a thirty year old, gray bungalow that had at one time, I suppose, looked charming but had seen better days.

On the positive side, a mighty benefactor had bestowed a college on the town. The sponsor was the same woman whose father thought up the idea of mushing the corn and soybeans and employed fifty percent of the town’s residents. She herself has attended some female version of an Ivy League college out east and came back to town set on the idea of recreating the campus in her home town So, the result was a surprising replica of Smith or Mount Holyoke and pretty soon all the rich farmers in the rinky-dink surrounding towns sent their sons and daughters for a degree and some sort of silk purse/sow ear upgrade. The benefactor also endowed the college with a wad which created scholarships for townies such a s myself. If local kids were able to pull off a decent grade point average and if their parent’s livelihoods were sufficiently meager we could attend at a much reduced rate. We had to pay full boat to live on campus which naturally discouraged such nonsense. Didn’t want to interfere too much with the silk purse factory, but we could attend class and receive the same degree as the rich kids and maybe use it as our ticket out of town.

So, I enrolled in 1972. By this time even townies were invited to orientation activities previously reserved for the room and board crowd. It was during this weekend filled with folderol, field games topped off with a dance, that I first saw Kitten. That was her name, Kitten. Her real name was Kathryn, but her Dad just started calling her Kitten because he watched way too much Father Knows Best and mistakenly saw himself in the role of the dad. The name was good for her, though. It summed up her entire being.

She knocked me out. I don’t think I had ever seen anything or anyone as nice to look at. She was, in a word, delectable, long hair, pretty legs. The whole nine yards. It was like going from the Kansas part of the Wizard to Oz to the Oz part of the movie. My life had been gray and here was Technicolor.

When I finally got the courage to ask her to dance at the end of folderol day, she turned me down because she had her eye on another guy, but she caught the look of disappointment in my eye and three days later, made an effort to talk to me in the long hallway of the liberal arts building. She sought me out because she wasn’t a snob. I considered myself to be a pretty scrawny guy then, but she later told me she thought my eyes and lips were nice, something I had never given much thought to and as we walked across the campus together I caught the scent of her hair on the breeze and I felt the rot leaving my nostrils. I was spiraling into a kind of despair which felt something like wiggling a lose tooth, it hurt so good.

I lost my virginity to Kitten. She had already lost hers to some other guy. I never considered his status in her affections, or how she so easily shifted from the discarded guy to me, If I had, things might have turned out differently, but the benefit of her experience only made our initial forays that much easier. We were both grateful for her limited experience and finally after many weeks of much experimentation and mutual discovery she exhaled a sigh which matched my own desire and kissed me so deeply and with such infinite gratitude I felt like I had realized my purpose in life and that was to love and be loved by Kitten.

**********************************

The four years I spent walking home at 2:00 A.M. every Friday and Saturday night were my Technicolor years and as graduation approached I knew what I had to do. I placed an ad in the paper saying I would paint houses for a song and I broke my butt for three months painting houses and collected enough money to buy Kitten the diamond she had looked at long and hard in the Jeweler’s window.

The night I asked her to marry me I took her to the only decent restaurant in town with the remainder of my painting proceeds. When she opened the tiny velvet box she smiled and leaned in and kissed me saying as she slipped the ring on her finger, “now, we are betrothed.” She was an English major with a love of Shakespeare and never failed to romanticize the moment. It was one of her gifts, romance.

Graduation came and with it came Kitten’s father who didn’t think too much of me. He hadn’t shelled out a wad to send Kitten to college to marry a townie. She was supposed to hook up with another farm and teach English until the little land barrons came along. Finally, the time came for her to leave and as I helped Kitten load her powder pink foot locker into her Dad’s Lincoln, I felt sick and jittery.

“I’ll write. Everyday.”

“Yes, we both will. Everyday.” Tears filled her eyes and she fiddled with my paint spattered shirt.

“I’ll call too and we will talk about the wedding.” I was worried. Not much had been said about this subject.

“Yes, we will ... talk about the wedding.”

In my peripheral vision I could see the edges of Kansas creeping in, low and ominous like a fog and even though she clung to me and kissed me, I could taste her tears in our final kisses, I knew by the feeling in my gut that something wasn’t right. As they drove away, I stood staring at the car as it lumbered through the gates of the college. Just as I lost sight of the Lincoln, the wind shifted and I got a nose full of soybean rot.

The next few months were rough. Her letters went from long to short. Our phone calls dwindled and then one evening, she was not there to talk to me.

“Nope,” her father took a deep drag on one of his Cuban cigars and I could hear the pleasure in his voice, “Kitten’s gone out. She won’t be home ‘til late...”

I knew that night that I had lost. I sensed before it was official I was no longer betrothed... She never really explained. She couldn’t. Her lack of explanation just wasn’t good enough. No matter, it was over. Kitten was gone. For good.

**************************************

So, if it was over how did I end up in a motel room twenty-five years later looking down on Kitten as she slept? The truth of the matter was that after Kitten disappeared from my life, I pretty much abandoned cultivating relationships. That’s not to say I didn’t have any. Just that they found me and I always went along for the ride. After five or so years the woman who ultimately became my wife tripped over me as I lay thinking in the grass at a public park. For whatever reason, she took a fancy to me and we kind of slid easily into marriage.

She was a lawyer and as it turned out her ticking biological clock quickly resulted in children. I was encouraged to indulge my hobby of craftin furniture and was able to turn it into a nice little business. With her hectic schedule it just made sense that someone should have a flexible career and so I just drifted into my world as the primary caregiver without really realizing it. I’m not sure it was the role I would have selected had I been actively making my own choices, but my wife appreciated the ballast I provided and the kids didn’t give it a second thought. It just was.

When the information about the class twenty-fifth reunion arrived in the mail my first inclination was to throw it away unopened as I had done with the tenth and twentieth reunions. I suppose middle age and a vague curiosity got the better of me and I tore into the envelope, quickly searching the roster for her name. There is was complete with a toll free telephone number beside it and so, telling myself I merely curious, that I was secure in the knowledge of my confident, successful wife and satisfactory children, I dialed.

She answered and the sound of her voice swept me away with all the bottled emotion I thought I had dispensed with all those years ago when her father said “she will be out late...”

Her voice cracked when she realized who was calling and I felt the same passionate gratitude emanating through the telephone wires that had been evident in her kisses when we were young and learning how to make love together.

“I can’t tell you how often I have thought of you, how we were once betrothed...”

At that moment I didn’t want to face another twenty five years not hearing her voice and I became temporarily insane. I was obsessed by the notion of being with her. Somehow.

She began writing long love letters to me and we both knew without saying too much what we were after because we rented secret post office boxes and the letters began to stream between us like white water rapids. Her letters were vintage Kitten, full of romance and untapped desire but also filled with a side I had never seen before. It was a sharp edge, filled with a depressing pathos describing the guy she had married and a series of disappointments and failures. The farm was gone as was her father. She worked as a paralegal barely scraping by it seemed, all the color had left her life. Listening to her talk, hearing the desire in her voice, reading the pleading in her letters a heady vindicated feeling permeated my thoughts and I was beginning to think in technicolor again.

After several months the novelty finally began to wear off and my correspondence with Kitten became just another chore. I slowly began to realize I was becoming an unwilling participant in Kitten’s master plan. I tried to convey this to her in my letters. She ignored my signals.

“I have been reading,” her voice was frantic, “ did you know that in medieval times if you were betrothed to someone and then married another the marriage was invalid?”

“Kitten, that was in what? The year 1500? I hardly think...”

“Don’t you see? Our marriages are technically invalid. Ours was the unbreakable bond.”

“Well, I have a mortgage that says otherwise...” I tried to make light of it.

She would weep softly on the end of the line and my chest would constrict, “We were joined together,” she wept, “in an unbreakable bond the night we became engaged. The rest is all a huge mistake”

This was becoming surreal. At first, I had been carried away by the clandestine nature of the romance, visiting my post office box, anticipating her letters, wallowing in the long dead emotion called desire that had flared between us. For years, I had been like a submarine existing below the surface and now I was floating above the waterline. It felt good - for a while, but as her obvious desperation increased a clammy fear began to invade my thoughts, the fear I would lose my life, myself, what I had become. My wife and kids started to take on a new sort of precedence in my priorities, I realized I couldn’t, shouldn’t leave them. I simply was not that selfish. The life I had grown into suddenly felt too difficult to leave. In fact, I discovered something I had not known about myself. I was content. I didn’t want to leave my wife and kids behind and I found I was angry. Angry at Kitten for having a toll free number. Mad at her for what she was suggesting. Pissed off that she had left me with little or no explanation in the first damn place.

It was easy enough to arrange the weekend. Kitten was all for it. She stopped crying and I was able to function knowing there was an end in sight. My wife was sympathetic to the lie I told her about a furniture workshop in the mountains of Virginia. I would have winced at the guilt, if I had not been sure I was doing the right thing. I remember the feel of her kiss on my cheek, “No! You go! We’ll have one of the interns pick up the kids, you deserve to get away for a few days.”

I persuaded Kitten to bring all of my letters so that we could go through them together. She had told no one about us. All of our calls had been made to the toll free phone line or the now discarded phone cards we had used at pay phones. The day I left, my knees were shaking as I boarded the plane and I waited until everyone had departed before I walked off. Seeing her, I realized the decision I had made was the only one I could make. Twenty five years had not dimmed her.She was still delectable. Kissing her for the first time, feeling the rightness of her hungry embrace she pulled back and whispered in my ear,“just like riding a bike.”

We held each other all night long. It was as if we had never been apart, long deep kisses I am not sure I will ever experience again. I can’t explain now why I allowed myself to indulge in Kitten’s caresses. It had not been part of the plan. I had not meant to stay long. Perhaps it was her sweet scent or the fact that her obvious need wore down my resolve, I am not a cruel man, and I told myself before I submerged for good I would allow myself the experience of belonging in the sort of relationship which exists primarily between the pages of fiction. For two nights, I was inside, not pressed against the glass. However, I reminded myself I was not a free agent anymore and I knew my own happiness, if you can even pinpoint happiness, could not be bought at this price.

Kitten didn’t want to sleep. She didn’t want the wine I had brought with me. In between kisses she said, “I can sleep later. I have been sleep walking for fifteen years.” So, I went to plan B and explained to her we would need to somehow stave off the inevitable exhaustion which was sure to follow. Accepting my rational, she dressed hastily and we walked like lovers down to a local coffee bar to order double cappuccinos. I managed to convince her to wait for me at a table.

“I want to pretend we are an actual couple...” I told her, kissing her softly, ‘I want to pretend that we do this every Sunday, I get our coffee and then we read the newspaper before we head home to a lazy day spent doing chores in our Victorian fixer-upper.” Kitten smiled and nodded, tears gathered in her eyes and I turned away to collect the coffee.

Strangely enough, as I loaded the crushed meds in her cappuccino, I felt nothing. For just a second, the guy from high school flashed through my head. Unlike his unsuspecting victims, however, I knew I wouldn’t be hurting her and I was saving us both a lifetime of grief. She was, in spite of her loveliness, just an impression of the Kitten I had known in college. If you press your palm deeply into foam rubber and then remove it, the indentation your hand makes gradually starts to loose its sharpness, it begins to blur. Kitten was like the fading impression in a piece of foam. She was becoming a blur; so unhappy with the twists in her life, looking to the past to fix her future. Something deep inside of me told me I had pulled a door ajar, but if I stepped into the room, it would signal my moral destruction. I could feel the dry ghost of my wife’s lips on my cheek, I could see my kids faces in the rearview mirror of my mind. I stirred slowly as the white powder from my ziplock dissolved into the bitter coffee...

We strolled back to the hotel. We took off our clothes one last time. We climbed into the only marital bed we would ever know. I took her into the crook of my arm and she asked me to tell her what our life would be like after we left them, when we were finally together. I was talking low and caressing her arm when her body seemed to press heavily into mine. Her breathing went from even to shallow and then finally, there was silence. I got up and looked at her laying so serenely, looking practically like the Kitten I would leave at two a.m. twenty five years earlier. I brushed a piece of her hair from her cheek and bent over, kissing her. Sleep peacefully, my betrothed...

*********************************

Some days when I am driving, running my errands, a cop car will pull up behind me and my heart starts to pound. Other times, I will see a petite woman out of the corner of my eye and for a split second I think I failed and she is coming for me. Recently, I received the alumni quarterly and I opened it to the back, to the obituary section, There it was. Kathryn Griswold Lichter an apparent suicide, 1954-2001.

I was sorry I opened the damn thing. For some reason, I had almost convinced myself she had woken up long after I had cleared out of the room taking the letters with me and realized what my leaving meant. I told myself she had summoned the strength to accept it and go on. I picked up the phone and called the college and asked them to permanently remove my name from the mailing list. It is best to remain submerged.

In Second Place, Aroma. A story that Patti called,

"This sweet, sad (a perfect combination) story takes the reader inside the thoughts of a woman trying to make sense of loss. The small, surrounding details of her life fill the story with melancholy. A beautiful exploration of the small motions, actions and words inside this character's relationship to self and lover."

Enjoy.

Aroma

“What does our house smell like?” Maggie asked when she heard the front door open. She was sprawled out on the couch, covered in her favorite blanket, a brown wool afghan she had bought herself for Christmas last year. She said it again when Mark didn’t answer, louder, the sound of the words pounding in her head. “What does our house smell like?”

“Are you drunk?” asked Mark, tossing his keys onto the top of the TV. The metallic cling they made would have annoyed Maggie had she been sober. She would have promptly scooped the keys up and deposited them in the empty basket that sat on the little side table. When Maggie had bought the basket she had had visions of a future with quiet keys readily found. The basket, instead, became a catch-all for anything and everything from useless 33 cent stamps to pink plastic coated paperclips.

“Where’s Lisa?” Mark asked falling into the worn recliner. “Did you girls have fun?”

“You didn’t answer the question. She left awhile ago and no, we didn’t.” Maggie’s voice sounded clogged and full of sludge from under the blanket. “All she wanted to do was talk about the miscarriage and how it affected us. Poor Mark, Poor Maggie. Poor us.” Maggie poked her head out and looked over at Mark. “Well?” She wished he would answer her, the light was making her nauseated. She wanted to cover her head back up but was afraid any more movement would make her throw up.

“Oh, man, you are drunk.” Mark smiled at her puffy face and static hair before reclining back and closing his eyes.

“Are you sure?” Maggie asked, “I only had one, maybe two margaritas, plus Lisa’s. She didn’t feel like drinking. What kind of person comes over for a girl’s night in and doesn’t drink?”

“My sister, and yes I am sure, and I have NO idea what our house smells like. I didn’t know it smelled like anything.”

“Lisa said it smelled like a dog. And wood. She came in and asked if we had gotten a dog. We should get a dog.”

Mark sat up; the sound of the chair hitting the floor jolted Maggie. She wanted to sit up too, wanted to be done being drunk now. It was hard to talk seriously about getting a dog when she was drunk. She could think about it drunk. She had. Before Mark had come home she had thought a lot about it, had decided that getting a dog was what they should have done before.

“But we have a cat. You would think it smells like cat,” said Mark. He took a few deep sniffs through his long regal nose. Maggie thought he looked like a king glaring down at his subjects. Or a gay designer scoffing at a cheap K-Mart ensemble. “I don’t smell anything at all.”

“Neither do I,” said Maggie, “but that’s because we live here. It probably does stink and we just don’t notice it. It’s like seeing the gunk on the bathroom molding in someone else’s house.”

“We have gunk too?” Mark sounded worried and Maggie found herself feeling protective and scared for him. She didn’t want him living in filth.

“No, no, no, there is no gunk, but IF there was, it could be something that you wouldn’t notice in your own house, but you would spot it right away in someone else’s house. Well, the general you, maybe not you Mark.” She pointed her arm at him. It was heavy. She dropped it suddenly, her knuckles hitting the thick rug hard. Her whole body felt heavy all of a sudden and she wanted stop talking, stop thinking, stop spinning. She closed her eyes and wondered what it would feel like if they had a dog. He would be curled up next to her on the couch. She tugged at the blanket, not wanting to get dog hairs all over it. It took her a moment to realize she was trying to tug the blanket out from under herself and not some imaginary dog. She thought she might be going crazy, but then remembered she was just drunk, sane but not sober. She laughed.

“It’s late. Let’s go to bed,” said Mark. He untangled Maggie from the blanket and helped her up.

Maggie squinted as he dragged her through the kitchen, the bright light magnifying her drunkenness. She spotted Oliver through her lashes and clucked at him, “Come on Oliver, want to go to bed? Maybe we shouldn’t have given him a dog’s name.”

“It’s not a dog’s name,” said Mark, bending over to scoop the cat up. “It’s an orphan’s name.”

In the bedroom Mark plopped both Maggie and Oliver down on the bed. Maggie fell on her back. Oliver landed on his feet.

“Come here boy,” she said, wiggling her fingers at him. She was too tired to reach out to him. He stared at her hand. “You don’t smell like a dog, do you? Does he? Mark, come here and smell him. Does he smell like a dog?”

Maggie could see Mark in the bathroom, his head bent over, and for a moment she thought he might be getting sick. She felt sick. She wanted him to come to bed and make the spinning stop. She wanted the cat to stop staring with judgment at her.

“GO. Go now,” she hissed. Oliver stared.

“Our molding is fine,” said Mark, turning off the light.

Maggie felt Mark crawl into bed next to her. She folded her legs up and let him pull the blankets out from under her and cover her up. She knew she should make an effort, should brush her teeth, make sure the house was locked up, change, do all the bedtime things but wouldn’t. Even if she had been sober she wouldn’t have had the energy. Lisa’s visit had exhausted her. Maggie turned sideways on the bed, away from Mark, away from Oliver. She wished she had enough energy to cry herself to sleep.

“You okay?” Mark’s hand touched her shoulder. “Honey, get some sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning. Well, after the hangover anyway.” he said, patting her. “By tomorrow afternoon you’ll be ok.”

Maggie closed her eyes and felt the room spin. She followed it, spinning around and around and wondered where she would land.

“I think Oliver is upset,” Maggie whispered. She turned back to face Mark, his shadow coming into focus slowly. “He heard me talking about getting a dog.”

Mark turned to her and rested his head in his hand; propped up by his elbow it wobbled there. Maggie reached out to touch his arm, not sure if it was his head, arm or her that was wobbling. She looked at her hand on his arm and watched the handarm wobble, and still didn’t know.

“Does our house really smell like a dog?” asked Mark.

“No. Maybe. Musty maybe? Hell, I don’t know, but I think it’s a good idea. Don’t you?”

“What’s a good idea? You lost me. I don’t know what idea you are talking about.”

Maggie could hear him getting frustrated and knew she was talking in conversation Cliff Notes. She did that a lot. It was just easier, sometimes. She didn’t always have the energy or patience to start at the beginning. “Getting a dog. It’s a good idea, don’t you think?”

“No, no, I don’t. I think a dog is a lot of work. Someone would have to walk it. Oliver would hate it. We’d have to buy those giant 800 lb sacks of dog food and store them somewhere. We have no pantry. We don’t even have room in the cupboards for the waffle iron.” They kept the waffle iron on the high shelf in the coat closet. They never made waffles.

“I would walk it.” said Maggie. “Oliver hates everything and we could keep the dog food in the office.” There was plenty of space in the office. They had taken the furniture out and stored it all in the garage to make the room into a nursery. The only thing in the room now was a changing table. They hadn’t had time to paint the room, get a crib, dresser or even a silly mobile that played tunes that lasted about 3 seconds. Maggie wrestled with the idea of getting up and going to put the table away. If she put the desk and treadmill back in the office there would be room in the garage to store it.

“Go to sleep Maggie, we can talk about it in the morning.” Mark turned over. His shoulder looked cold and small to Maggie. She pulled the covers up over it and closed her eyes. She hoped the spinning wouldn’t come back. She tried to focus on dog names and told herself they would talk more in the morning. But she knew they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t get a dog. Just in case, though, she picked the name Aroma.

And the final story for Summer 2009 is The Killer and the Angel, that Patti Callahan Henry called, "An intriguing look at memory and death. The narrative moves us quickly into the character's confusion while the metaphors of memory enrich the story, moving us closer to the character's internal dialog."

Enjoy,

The Killer and the Angel

"Someone call 9-1-1" the pimply faced college kid with curly hair and black framed glasses shouted from across the restaurant. A small crowd stood over a large well dressed man splayed out spread eagle on the sparkling red and white checkered linoleum floor. The curly haired kid straddled the well dressed man and pushed on his chest over and over. "Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen" the kid counted, then he leaned forward and performed mouth to mouth before resuming the chest compressions.
The sight of the curly haired kid's mouth pressed against the other man's made Big Mike's stomach churn. "Christ!" He pushed the plateful of uneaten food away and stared out the window. Nothing had gone as planned on this trip, and now he wasn't even going to get breakfast before making the long drive back to Queens.
His jet black Mercedes sat parked under the red and yellow Route 17 Diner sign. In the trunk, Franky Gasio's body was growing stiff. Soon it would begin to stink. He should've never agreed to bring the damn body back. It went against everything he knew about doing these kind of jobs, and no one knew more about killing than Big Mike Tortarello, but the old man wanted to see Franky's body, and he'd pay an extra ten grand for it.

The kid's voice droned on. "Three, four, five, come on big guy hang in there. The ambulance is on its way." Out the window, the heavy morning traffic streamed by. The drivers, unaware of the commotion inside or the location of Big Mike's eighty-fifth victim, passed the little diner with hardly a glance. Seemingly out of nowhere, a gleaming red motorcycle materialized and sped into the diner parking lot. The powerful bike looked familiar, but Big Mike couldn't remember where he'd seen it before. The memory lapse surprised him.

Big Mike never forgot anything. His powers of recall were so good, in fact, as a young boy, teachers and psychiatrists used words like “photographic” and “eidetic” to describe them.
Of course, having a perfect memory brings its own set of problems. When nothing is forgotten, memories pile up and enter the thoughts at all the wrong moments. As a child, he'd learned to organize his mind into an imaginary maze of storage rooms where memories could be neatly tucked away. When Big Mike needed a memory, he simply went to the right room and checked it out. Some rooms he visited often, like the room where he kept the memories of the women he'd slept with or the room that contained his favorite wines. And then there were other rooms, darker rooms, he rarely visited. Some of these held images more graphic and violent than the most explicit horror films, and others held the painful memories of his childhood, including the early deaths of his parents.

Now, Big Mike went looking for the room that held the memory of the motorcycle. He was sure he'd seen one just like it on one of the jobs he'd done for Hiram Silverstein, the orthodox Jew who wouldn't eat pork but had no problem contracting for hits on people who stood in the way of his real estate development plans. Mike remembered thinking he'd like to ride a bike like that someday. Of course, at six foot seven and nearly four hundred pounds, he was much too large for a crotch rocket. They didn't call him Big Mike for nothing.

The rooms where he kept the memories of the jobs he'd done for Hiram took up a whole wing of his memory warehouse, but when he got there he found most of the wing had disappeared. The rooms and the memories they held were all gone. Only a handful of rooms remained in the wing, and none of them held the memory of the motorcycle. This had never happened before. He'd forgotten. Disoriented and confused, he focused his attention back out the window.

The rider, dressed in a shiny black jumpsuit, guided the bike to a parking spot directly below him and remained perched on the seat. In the background, the kid's counting continued. After each number the kid grunted from the exertion of pressing on the big man's chest. "One, grunt, two, grunt, three, grunt.”
Ignoring the counting and grunting, Mike studied the rider. A black helmet and tinted sun visor hid the rider's face. There was no way to know for sure, but, Mike got the feeling the rider was staring at him. After a long moment, the rider peeled off the helmet exposing shoulder length raven hair, alabaster skin, and candy apple red lips--a woman, and a beautiful one at that. She made eye contact with him and smiled. Her eyes were an unnatural golden color he'd never seen before. Jesus, he thought, that's both sexy and spooky all at once. Maybe he would have some fun on this trip after all.

With long deliberate strides, the rider made her way into the diner and seeming not to notice the pimply faced kid or the man dying on the floor, stepped around the crowd, and to Big Mike's surprise, strutted directly up to his booth. The glistening black jumpsuit looked to be painted on. The way it flowed over her breasts and hips left very little for the imagination.
He ran his hand through his thinning greasy black hair and flashed her his best smile. "Well, well, well. What do we have here?"
"Do you mind if I sit down?" she asked in a soft, raspy voice.
"Not at all, sweetheart."
The painted on jumpsuit made a crinkly sound as she slid into the booth across from him.
"Thank you."
Without prompting, she placed her smooth white hands on the table where he could see them just as he'd instructed so many others to do. She looked as if she'd been carved from marble like one of those statues at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas.
"Have we met?" Big Mike had never asked such a question before without knowing the answer.
The gold eyes flashed. "Not formally, but we've been to many of the same places together. I've had my eyes on you for quite some time now."
"Is that so, darling. Why is it I've never seen you before then?"

"Oh, we've bumped into one another more than once."

"Yeah. How many times is more than once?"

The candy apple lips curled back in the hint of a smile. "This would be the eighty-sixth time."

That number couldn't be a coincidence. Jesus, was she some kind of cop. He rubbed his leg and felt the four-inch switch blade he concealed in his right front pants pocket; not that he'd need it to do her. She was alone, and if she was a cop she was either the ballsiest bitch he'd ever met or dumber than dirt.

Big Mike leaned across the table and peered into the golden eyes. "Listen sweetheart,” he growled, “I'm not the kind of man you want to mess around with."
There were many tough men who would wet themselves if Big Mike growled at them like that, but she was unmoved. Those improbable eyes didn't show a trace of fear.

"Relax, big fella. We're in compatible lines of business you and I. My name is Nataya Ramatayan Sadaygotan."

He leaned back into the red leather booth. "That's quite a mouthful. You're too freaking white to have a name like that."

"You can call me Natalie if you like, but my name means one who carries what remains. I'm an escort."

Big Mike chuckled. That figured. He had a whole room in his head just for the hookers he knew who called themselves escorts. "What the hell, I'll play along. Name some of the places we've been together."

Natalie rocked back in the booth and crossed her arms across her ample breasts. "Okay. This will be fun. How about Detroit, the night of July 2^nd, 1977?"

Big Mike searched the rooms of his memory warehouse until he found the memory. It was the night he knocked off Donny Pizarro for that mad Greek Niiko Pappagorgio. He'd blown Donny's face off with a blast from a scatter gun and dumped his body in a vat of molten iron at a foundry that made engine blocks. Mike sat up razor straight. "What the hell do you know about that date?"

She shrugged. "Well, I know there are pieces of Donny in twenty three Buicks made that year."

Big Mike laughed. "How the hell do you know that?"

"I told you. I was there. Don't you remember me?"

He tried to return to the room in his head to search for any memory of her from that night, but the room wasn't there any longer. In fact, all the rooms that held memories of the jobs he'd done for the mad Greek were gone. "I don't remember anything about that night."

Natalie shook her head. "That's too bad. How about Key West, February 23^rd, 1981?"

He ran through the rooms in his mind until he found the right memory. He'd slit open Gay Bobby Hernandez's throat for Pedro Martinez, the Cuban drug king, while they were alone on the little faggot’s fishing boat. Big Mike slammed his fist on the table. "How the fuck do you know these things?"

She laughed. "Don't worry, Big Mike, your secret about what bait you really used to catch that big sailfish you got hanging over the bar at the Eastside Hunt Club is safe with me."

Big Mike laughed loudly. Then, he stopped abruptly and looked around to make sure no one was watching them.

Natalie shook her head. "No one cares about us, Mike."

She was right. Everyone else in the diner had gathered around the big man lying on the floor and were watching the pimply faced kid beating on the man's chest. No one seemed to notice them at all.

"So tell me, Mike," she cooed, "how did you wrestle that big fish into the boat all alone?"

Big Mike went back to the place in his mental warehouse that held the memories of all the jobs he'd done for the Cuban, but that whole section of the warehouse had been replaced by black nothingness. "What fish? What were we talking about again?"

"One last memory, Mike. What about Garden City, Long Island, the evening of May 5^th, 1964?"

That memory room took no time to find. This Natalie, or whatever her name was, was a heartless bitch. It was a room he knew well, but he chose never to visit. It held the memory of his eleventh birthday and the night he'd intentionally tripped his grandmother down the cellar stairs causing her to break her neck.

Something hot and wet rolled down his cheek - a tear. He couldn't remember the last time he cried, and he couldn't remember why he was crying now. He wiped the tears from his eyes on his sleeve and glared at Natalie. "Damn. Who do you work for?"

"You don't know him, Mike, but he knows you."

"Is that so? Well, what does this boss of yours want?"

"He wants me to bring you to him."

"Really?"

"Yes, but I can't bring all of you."

"What are you talking about?"

"When you die, Mike, the best parts of your life here." She tapped a slender ivory finger on the table. "The love you've felt and the kindness you've shown, they endure and go with you to the next place. Everything else must stay here. It's my job to escort what's allowed to pass to the other side."
Nothing she said made any sense.

The wail of sirens drowned out his thoughts and flashing red and blue lights reflected off every polished surface. The pimply faced kid's voiced seemed to be right on top of him. "They're here, big guy. Hang on just a little longer; just a little longer."

Natalie slid out of the booth and extended her hand for him to take. Looking up at her, she seemed so big and he so small. He reached up and took her hand. He'd expected it to be cold and hard like stone, but it was warm and soft, and he held on tight like a child who fears losing a parent in an unfamiliar place.

She pulled him out of the booth, and as they slowly floated past the big man on the floor with the pimply faced kid pressing on his chest, Big Mike thought he should know the man's identity. The man's face was familiar like one he'd known a long time ago and loved. One small room left in his empty mind held a childhood memory of a long dead man with similar features tucking him in at night. "Pa-pa."
"What do you escort again?" Big Mike asked. Though, he was no longer sure he understood what the words meant.
Natalie's candy apple lips frowned. "In your case Michael, not much at all."

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