Daniele De Serto

English translation by Wendell Ricketts

 

In my dream, I was playing in the 1991 NBA finals, the first match in the five-game series. I must have taken Byron Scott’s position, because he was the only player I didn’t see on the court. Everybody else was there, though, from Magic to all the assistant coaches and even the equipment managers. The best part was that my dream included the days leading up to the game, when you had the feeling the entire U.S. of A. was about to come to a sudden halt and that millions of pairs of eyes would soon be glued to you: your moves, your shots, your one-on-one defense.

Hands-down, that moment when we ran out onto the court was the biggest thrill of all. First came the announcement over the loudspeaker, then the roar of the fans in the grandstands and the sound of the players working each other up with thunderous chest bumps. When I saw myself on the Jumbotron, I realized that neither the dream censors nor the very picky diet I’d been prescribed by the medical staff had made a dent in my 240 pounds or on the slow retreat of my hairline. And sure, I’ll admit it, that left me feeling a little down. So I tried to focus on the whoops and hollers from the crowd. There I was in the starting lineup, after all. Obviously, Coach Dunleavy believed in me; all of America believed in me. This was no time to fall to pieces. Thank God the sound of the whistle blew away my feelings of inadequacy.

Anyway, the way people show their support is incredible. Everyone — from the celebrities at courtside to the guys selling tacos in the stands — they all make sure you hear them. Halfway through the first quarter, I spied my boss from work, all the way up in the third balcony. He was bundled up in a Bulls scarf and his eyes were bugging out as he shouted insults at me, exaggerating the movements of his mouth to make sure I could read his lips: “You are fired.” No more than a minute later, I sunk a fifteen-foot shot, and I don’t need to tell you just how good that felt. I held up a thumb and forefinger in the shape of an “L” and waved it at my boss.

That was when things really started looking up.

When you’re in the zone, they say you feel yourself moving beyond your own ego, merging into something larger than yourself. You feel swept along by the current, as if you were caught in the flow of a river. Well, my friends, that’s just how it was: the flow of a river! And you’re so absorbed in what you’re doing, so focused, that you feel outside of normal reality somehow. You’re in a state of perfect harmony, and you even lose track of time.

Admittedly, there were a few shaky moments. At one point, the entire Bulls starting lineup turned into my Pakistani neighbors. Light-footed and acrobatic, they ran circles around me in complicated offensive maneuvers, all the while rudely reminding me of the fact that I’d left drips all over their front porch while I was repainting the outside of my unit. Things got very testy when one of them leered at me, showing me one of those S-shaped Sikh daggers clenched between his teeth.

“Hey, buddy,” I said, taking the situation firmly in hand, “maybe this would be a good time for us to talk about all those wires sticking out like crazy from your side of the building? Have I ever given you any grief about that? Have I ever tried to embarrass you over the fact that we’re a long ways from having an electrical system that anyone would call up-to-code?”

After that, peace returned to life on the court, thanks to my cool head and to a mutual promise to be more respectful of the shared space in our complex.

Meanwhile, the cheerleaders were seriously going for broke. Their routines were just elaborate enough, and their extremely to-the-point outfits meant that prospects for the halftime show were excellent.

During the third quarter, I once again found myself facing my boss’s hostility. Worm that he was, he’d climbed down a few rows to join a group of hooligans who were beating on drums. I could hear them chanting about how they were going to make sure I never got paid for the vacation time I had coming, and my boss was leading the chorus. That was a critical juncture, but I chose to stand my ground, honestly and bluntly, even if that meant the possibility of making things worse.

I’m guessing most of you have never had the experience of playing on the front lines during the NBA finals. Still, I feel fairly confident in saying that you can all understand how hearing the squeak of your Adidas against the high shine of the Chicago Stadium’s wooden floor would be worth the risk of losing some stupid employment benefit. And that’s exactly what I meant to communicate with the withering glare I shot into the stands. I meant it to be both extremely precise and totally frank. You want to get in my way, boss? Be my guest. I wouldn’t want to lay bets on how things will go once we’re standing in front of the labor relations board. Sure, I know you’ve got some tricks up your sleeve, like that whole story about the missing timecards or the time the office’s digital projector disappeared, only to reappear mysteriously in your car, jammed halfway through the windshield.

Whatever. But maybe you should consider taking a slightly more objective view of things. If you did, you’d realize there was no denying reality: One of us tonight, meaning me, after a nice, long, hot shower and a live interview or two with the international media, was going to get back to his house, look at himself in the mirror, and say, “You really crushed it today, man!” But at the same time, you also couldn’t deny that a certain other person, meaning you, once he got in front of his mirror, would only have one thing to say for himself, and that was to admit he was a tiny, meaningless, worthless little dot whose presence on that particular stage was justified solely by the fact that ten guys on the court were putting their hearts and souls into the game. A shitty, arrogant, worthless little dot. . . . When I sent that look, dark as a thunderhead, up into the stands, that’s what I was saying.

The very next moment, I took off in a fast break and was already rising in the air, about to slam-dunk the ball over my opponents’ heads. They were, of course, caught completely off-guard by the grace and power of my 240 pounds of aerial suspension.

During the final, dramatic moments of the game, everyone could see I’d gone into a deep physical slump and that my hairline was on the verge of unconditional surrender. But I hung in there. Our team was tight, and that made all the difference. Even the fabulous MJ had no choice but to resign himself to defeat. After a performance like that, of course, it goes without saying that my hopes were high: Any night now, I’d be seeing an invitation to an All Star Game.

Everyone is sure going to miss Chicago Stadium, there’s no doubt about that.

That place was a part of history. It was a real shame when they tore it down.

 

The trip to the stadium earlier that evening had given me a special boost. My taxi driver was a charming old Chinese guy who didn’t know the first thing about basketball. He didn’t even realize the finals were going on that night! He kept mixing up basketball and baseball, but you should have heard him chattering away, all excited. Clearly, he didn’t recognize me, which made me wonder what overcrowded hole in the ground he’d been keeping himself in.

Any of you ever been to Chicago’s Chinatown? I have. Or maybe it was the one in New York. I don’t recall, but they’re all the same anyway! Fascinating places. A slight haze hanging in the air, the streets jam-packed with run-down shops and underground gambling clubs. My last visit was in a dream only a few weeks back. That night, I was some sort of lone avenger type, one of those characters with an expression that’s both pensive and disenchanted. I was about to have it out with a gang of mobsters who had kidnapped a doll-faced young woman with a tattoo down the length of her back. Yes, that was it! The taxi driver looked just like that magnificent girl’s father.

He was a riot, really, with his dim insistence on calling the Bulls a baseball team. I almost wanted to give him a hug and reassure him that things were all going to turn out for the best with his daughter: Nothing to worry about, sir; those lowlifes are about to get the thrashing of their miserable existences, and after that there’ll be a new era of peace in good, old Chinatown.

The problem was that he didn’t understand a thing I said. God only knows how he managed to find his way to the stadium. We seemed to have spent an eternity going up one wide avenue and down another, passing leafless trees alongside the streets and leaving in our wake rows of those grim warehouses that tell you you’re in an industrial area. As we drove by, I stared at the buildings. The way they loomed up out of the darkness, and knowing there wasn’t a single living soul inside them at that hour … well, it’s the kind of thing that gets you thinking that if you look too long, something really ugly is going to happen to you.

Still, it’s more-or-less what I see when I go to work every morning, passing miles and miles of leaden gray on the way, and it’s so early that the cavernous parking lots are all but empty. The suburbs probably look the same no matter where you go in this world. It was quite a relief to tear my eyes away from that scene and look down at my gym bag with the purple-and-yellow team logo sewn onto it and think about how tonight there’d be no employee badge to pass under the reader, no time-clock to feed, no sign-in sheet, no overtime hours that needed someone else’s okay first.

Hey, you! Up in the stands. I’m talking to you. Do I look like a guy who punches a clock? Do I?

Lousy little dot.

 

 

DANIELE DE SERTO lives in Rome (Italy). His work has appeared in journals such as Fiction Southeast, Granta Italia, Gravel, Cheap Pop, Cactus Heart Press, Linus, Inutile, ‘Tina. He also works as an author for tv shows.

Becca Borawski Jenkins

 

Though the child of a four-legged woman and a lion-faced man, Edward turned out to be woefully normal. His hands each held four fingers and a thumb. His head was round. He had no extraneous appendages, twins, or otherwise intriguing assets. No one screamed on the day he was born.

He tried to gain weight and then tried to lose it. He sat in the sun hoping his skin would burn and slough off. He refused to cut his hair. He tried to pull out his teeth, but they wouldn’t budge, so he borrowed the teeth discarded by others and tried to add them in. He pierced his body with pins and nails but couldn’t pretend not to feel the pain. He was neither an unnatural nor natural freak.

Despite his father’s genes, Edward’s hair only grew on his head in all the traditional places. Despite his mother’s extra limbs, nothing he added to his body would stick. He sat in the audience each night as his parents performed, because what else was there for him to do? “Edward the Normal Boy” had no ring to it, and, in the end, this is what made Edward so very strange.

 

Though Edward’s mother had four legs, she mostly walked on two. Legs one and two were pretty much like anyone’s, while the third and fourth legs were much smaller and nestled in between. Anyone else would imagine those legs didn’t contribute much, certainly not more than they took away — but Edward and his parents knew better.

The first and the second leg helped you to crawl and then helped you to walk. The first and the second leg fit into a proper pair of pants. The first and second leg made men gasp when you lifted your skirt. The third and the fourth leg made women scream.

The third and the fourth leg got you left on the hospital doorstep. The third and the fourth leg made the nurse beg the priest to take you in. The third and the fourth leg got you sold for the same sum as it cost to refurnish the rectory living room. Sold to the man who perused all the orphanages and churches and jails and hospitals for something as unique and wondrous and horrible as you.

The third and the fourth leg got you a husband even if his face was covered in fur. If you’d had only three legs or even two, he wouldn’t have looked at you a second time. You would have blended with the rest of the world. With four legs, everyone looked again and again. The third and the fourth leg got you a job and a home and a photographer who painted your face and made you sit for a tin-type for free or a painter who made you pose in the most awkward and unnatural of positions so you could feature in the company poster. And you agreed and even smiled, because you wouldn’t say no to such a thing — for this is what the third and fourth leg brought you and if you hadn’t had these legs, you would not have these things.

Because you can’t be the four-legged woman without leg three and leg four.

 

Edward’s father parted his hair down the middle of his face. Which he could do because his face was in fact covered in hair, though he called it, for the benefit of his benefactors, fur. It wasn’t so much that he was actually lion, but that when his hair, which was plentiful, was done properly, it flowed like a regal mane — from every pore on his body. When not done right, his mane made him appear as a beast that might crawl out in the night from the New Jersey woods.

“You know of the wendigo?” Edward’s father asked him.

“I don’t,” Edward said as he picked the hairs from his father’s other brush.

“The Algonquian say he is a cannibal monster,” his father replied as he pawed the knots from his beard.

“Who is an Algonquian? And what is a cannibal?” Edward asked.

“People with dark skin, and people who eat people.”

His father held out his hand and Edward traded the second hair brush for the first. He began plucking hairs once again. A pile had grown at his side.

“Are either of them with the company?” he asked.

“Don’t be silly,” his father said. “Did you hear me? The wendigo is an actual monster.”

“How so?”

“He is transformed by greed, the Algonquian say. In winter, he sneaks into their camps and eats everything he finds. He is hungry beyond belief.” His father paused and stared at Edward. Somehow Edward knew he was raising an eyebrow. “He eats everything,” his father said.

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

Edward pictured the space between the bottom of their tent and the earth. The space where the moonlight crept in and the cold wind poked at his spine in the middle of the night.

“What does the wendigo look like?” he asked.

“A skinny man,” his father replied.

“I’ve seen plenty of skinny men.”

“You might have seen the wendigo then.”

“How would I know? What’s different about it?”

“Not so much,” Edward’s father said.

“It’s not . . . “Edward asked.

“Like us?” Edward’s father shook his head, billowing his golden mane. “No, he’s a normal man. Except sometimes his breath smells like rot.”

“Oh,” Edward whispered, exhaling his breath to the side and hating that he was a normal boy.

 

In winter, when the train was parked and the spectacle stopped moving, people still came to ride the elephants. They forfeited their change for an opportunity to ascend the stairs and walk the plank, to stand and wait for an empty elephant to circle around. The elephants hardly needed to be guided. They’d been walking in circles for years, for decades, for a memory longer than a man was capable of.

The elephants paused, their backs level with the elevated platform, while the spectators lurched aboard. When the man in the candy-cane pants whistled, their slow shuffle resumed. They shuffled in the mud, the slush, and the snow. When it rained, the water gathered and ran down their trunks and the spectators were handed a rainbow of umbrellas. Atop the backs of pachyderms, the colors of the umbrellas bobbed in the haze, keeping the damp away while the faces of the spectators glowed bright. The red cheeks of a toddler in its mother’s arms. The blue thoughts of a young man peering over the fence at the heated tank of the mermaid. The green eyes of a jealous girlfriend one elephant behind.

“Look!” they all cried to their family members spectating from around the well-trodden ring. “Do you see? It’s an elephant!”

Their families laughed and clapped. Though they could see, they could barely believe.

An elephant.

Could you even imagine?

Once, Edward asked his mother if he could ride the elephants.

His mother slapped him and said, “We don’t do that to them.”

 

When Edward was twelve he fell in love with the mermaid girl. The mermaid girl was the most intoxicating of all the special people in their traveling band. Edward thought it was true love because he thought she was true. In fact, her tail was not real, and neither was her golden hair or the make-up on her face. She wasn’t a mermaid at all. If Edward had known she was a normal girl, he wouldn’t have loved her.

He wouldn’t have loved the idea of walking along the shore while she swam in the sea. He wouldn’t have loved the idea of them each holding their breath — her because of the ocean, him because of the earth — until they caught sight of the other again. He wouldn’t have loved the idea of waiting to see if their children emerged like her, with a tail and fin, with blue eyes that sparkled the same as her scales, with shells on her bosom that he wasn’t sure weren’t part of her body rather than a garment. Or if the children would turn out plain-faced and plain-lifed like him.

The mermaid girl winked at him every time he walked past her tank, which he happened to do several times a day.

Amid the chaos of the calliope and the bedlam of the barker, he watched her as he ran his fingers along the glass, imagining the damp of the condensation was his fingers running through the tips of waves, that all he could hear was the crashing hush of the water, that he was a sailor leaning over the side to catch a glimpse of his Aquarian bride, that she poked her head from the sea just for him.

She pressed her lips to the water’s surface and whispered.

“Come back after closing.”

Her words sprayed out from her tank and onto him. They cooled his skin and smelled of tidal foam and iridescent algae. They rode on the promise of a different outcome.

He returned after the carnival lights dimmed and the hall emptied of spectators.

She awaited him — standing next to her tank with her tail in her hand.

He couldn’t take his eyes from the sight of her knees.

Before she could speak, he turned and ran.

 

When Edward was sixteen, the woman who tore the tickets in half gave birth to a child. Its skin was rough, as if it were carved with a dull misery whip, and its teeth were pointed. None of them had the luxury of raising a child at home, no matter its size, shape, or color. So at the end of each night, Edward was sent to collect her bucket of ticket-halves as she sat huddled in the booth, her boy held at her bosom, buried in layers of clothing and shawls despite the summer heat.

Edward himself could not look her in the eyes, though she was not his worry.

He held out his hand so she could hook the ticket bucket on his fingers.

He stared at the floor.

He was more jealous of the haphazardly wood-sawn boy than his heart could bear.

 

In Edward’s dreams, a horn grew from the center of his head. He wore it all throughout the day though no one else could see it. In the sunshine, it sparkled. In the rain, it glistened blue. When he stood on the shore, the flecks of airborne sand polished it, and if both he and an observer turned their heads just right a flash of it might catch their eye and make them pull down their cap.

At his first job interview, upon his becoming what others told him was something resembling a “respectable young man,” Edward held his horn high though he knew his prospective employer could not see. He hoped perhaps the man could sense it. After all, his mother and father had always told him not to despair, that he was special on the inside.

“What’s so special about you?” the man asked as if on cue and with his fountain pen at the ready to note every detail of what made Edward so different, so unique, so one of a kind and never to be seen again except for this one summer weekend before the circus left town. Or rather, so special that he should be granted the privilege of bagging the groceries of the summer people and tourists and whoever else wandered in to purchase their sundries from this overpriced shop.

Edward inhaled and sat up tall.

“So much more than anyone could ever see,” Edward replied.

The employer frowned, shook Edward’s hand, and thanked him for stopping in.

Later that evening, Edward stood on the midway observing his home.

His eyes were struck by fireworks, his ears by the man who shouted from the dunk tank, from the salesman who pitched their wares, from the music that bumped from the rides, the carousels, the instruments of the musicians who came from the city and spent their weekends here pretending they hadn’t dreamed of playing in the symphony, or at church, or at anything other than this.

He climbed up onto a nearby empty train car and let the circus seep into him.

The heartbeat of this traveling organism that inched its way across the steel spine of this country and back, that ambled up to the edge of each town and scampered away when it was slapped. The pulse of his mother and his father, somewhere in this maze of tents, sitting on display, getting paid to be there, to be who they were, nothing more, nothing less. He wished he could say the same. He wished he could stand there and demand attention.

There, in the midway.

There.

Where last week the Russian strongman had pressed his over-sized dumbbell into the sky. Where the bear had stood on its hind legs and even its handler had appeared to be afraid. Where the Oriental man had flung open his coat and revealed his conjoined twin, tucked into his side.

There.

A plain girl with freckles appeared. She stood alone in the center of midway, which for a moment was curiously empty. The dust swirled around her and settled on her clothes as she squinted at him, a spiral of tickets dangling from her hand.

“What’s so special about you?” she asked.

“So much more than anyone could ever see,” Edward replied.

“Oh, I get it,” she said.

She climbed up on the train car next to him, and the crowds flowed back into place.

They dangled their feet while the spectators walked by in an endless parade past the secret freaks.

 

 

BECCA BORAWSKI JENKINS is a writer and editor. She holds an MFA in Cinema-Television Production from USC and has short stories appearing or forthcoming in The Forge, The Knicknackery, Panorama, Five 2 One, Citron Review, and Corium. She lives with her husband in an RV they built by hand, on an off-grid homestead somewhere in the Idaho Panhandle.