Author: Jason Graff

I could hear the screech of Mother over-applying the brakes of her Beamer as I raced for the basement of my childhood home. My calloused feet beat a sharp rhythm down the stairs and across the concrete floor, as I made for the wooden door that had once held a place of pride as the main entryway to our home but was now serving out its semi-retirement in a decidedly less illustrious role. From above, I heard Mother bang her way through the garage into the kitchen. She bellowed an over operatic grunt then began barking demands for help. Matching her volume, I informed her I was lamentably indisposed and endeavored not to make a liar out of myself by trying to muster up a turd. 

“Where is he?” Father asked, arriving on the scene with his customary heavy feet.

“Bradley,” Mother screeched, “Bradley, out of the bathroom. Get up here and help us with the groceries.”

“Stop yelling,” Father pleaded. “You sound like a banshee.”

Mother’s feet padded down the stairs in their soft but purposeful manner. Straining at my task, I nearly popped my eardrums through overexertion. My bowels clenched but I failed to produce anything other than weary puffs of stale air.

“Bradley,” she cried after an urgent rap on the door, “come out of there, will you? We’re going to put away the groceries, then get cracking on the garage.”

“Get cracking? The garage? What are we doing in there?” I asked.

“Cleaning it out and getting rid of stuff. Like that croquet set you made us buy you that you never use.”

“I do too use it.”

“When was the last time?” she asked.

“Back in June or July. I used it last summer.”

“Alright, fine,” she huffed.

“You have to sink the ends of the hoops and pegs into the ground so they’ll stick,” I helpfully explained. “It doesn’t work when the ground’s still hard.”

“I said fine. We’ll keep the croquet set for now.”

“And sometimes in the spring it’s too wet and the balls could get moldy. They’re made of wood, you know.”

“Fine, I said, fine,” she spat, “now get out of there and come upstairs.” 

“Can’t. Diarrhea.” I grunted and strained some more. “Besides, won’t the dust in the garage be hard on my allergies?”

“We’ve been over this, again and again, you do not have allergies of any kind. I also suspect your current…difficulties will soon pass.”

“I can’t help it. I have to go. I can’t come out until I’m done, until it’s run its course.”

“Fine.” She huffed the huff my boyhood ears loved most, the one of resignation that signaled my duplicity had claimed yet another battle in our forever war. “When you’re feeling up to it, your father and I will be in the garage waiting for you to join us. There will be a broom there with your name on it.”

In the basket next to the commode sat a stack of literature which included several wrinkled and water-warped Reader’s Digests and a dog-eared, condensed version of Great Expectations. When, on days such as that, the racket being made on the floor above prevented me from concentrating on the abbreviated adventures of Pip or even enjoying the subtle benefits of the “Word Power” section of Reader’s Digest, I tuned instead to the outdated Guinness Book of World Records that sat in all its coverless, tattered glory at the bottom of that basket. 

I had, by then, been so steeped in the tales of the noble adventurers and gifted sportsmen that peppered the book’s closing chapters that they no longer held my interest. And the first half of that edition of Guinness’s was no more than a catalogue of the genetic freaks who grew unbelievably old or tall or obese, none of whom had ever made much of an impression on me. On that day, I began to pick way through the middle section, which was reserved for record holders with the kind of mad ambition that occasioned them to attempt to juggle the most bowling pins whilst riding a unicycle or eat the most pitted cherries in a minute, when I came upon an entry that seized my imagination.

 Longest Distance Walked on Three Legs: 8.4 miles (13.15 km)

Dieter and Heinreich Jungkinstein of Dusseldorf, Germany began competing in three-legged races at the age of 4. The twins attribute their success to their natural sense of togetherness. They hope to see three-legged endurance racing become an official Olympic Sport someday, to represent their country, to bring home a gold medal and bring glory to the God who blesses us all.

The faded black and white photo showed two gangly, fair-haired men wearing grins that held an inviting kind of cluelessness. No exertion was evident in the mechanism of their happy countenances. They’d triumphed in something only a precious few believed worthwhile. And while I admired the imagination these Germans showed in choosing a field where the competition was likely light, their mark seemed modest. Eight miles was a distance that I could easily imagine. My school was almost half that far and the bus ride there never seemed to take more than a few minutes. It seemed a mark that begged to be challenged and noting that that edition of The Guinness Book was quite old, I wondered if it already had been bested.

I let the idea marinate a bit as I continued to fill the air with my empty yet offensive sounding flatulence. Once I took it that the project upstairs had moved into the ‘straightening everything out’ phase, I made an appearance in the garage looking relieved if not exactly energized. Without much complaint, I allowed myself to be dragooned into helping Father take his little used ten-speed bike to the curb, where it joined other detritus from his outdoor adventure days, like his snowshoes and the canvas sail from the boat he’d sold the fall before.

“Why are we getting rid of this stuff?” I asked.

“Because your mother doesn’t like the idea of a garage sale,” he said.

“But why are…”

“So many questions,” he said. “You must be feeling better.”

“I don’t know why everyone makes such a big deal about it. I had to go. When you have to go, you have to go.”

“True pearls of wisdom from our resident expert in that area,” he said. “You know, Bradley, your mother and I both think these family activities are pretty important. Avoiding things is no way to go through life.”

It was no surprise to hear him parroting Mother’s thoughts. The utter dearth of original ideas sprouting from the old man’s mind had earned him, for a time, a bit of my sympathy. Especially since the woman he’d married seemed so consistently brimful of them. 

“I thought we could do something this afternoon,” said I. “Something fun that we’ll all enjoy.”

“You’re going to make a suggestion for family time?” he asked beneath a dubious-sounding chuckle.

“It’ll be more fun than cleaning out the garage.”

“Bradley, your Mother spends a lot of time and energy planning these days for us with proven ideas she gets from her magazines,” he said with the slightest hint of the moan such an idea clearly deserved.

Her magazines, indeed. Recently on the advice of one of her brunch pals, Mother had thrown herself into the world of self-help literature with her customary lack of heed. It came in stages. First, were the publications about finding the job that was right for her, then ones about living the right kind of life, then, tragically for Father and I, those concerned with engineering the right kind of family. 

Later at the bookstore, an outing whose value in terms of togetherness Mother, immersed as she was in, yes, one of her magazines, completely discounted, despite my earnest attempts to convince her; I left Father in the history section to peruse books about the great generations that preceded him. His pining to be numbered among their venerated dead was almost palpable. There, in the rear of the store on a wire carousel, among the dog calendars, origami instruction books and outdated farmers’ almanacs, I found the latest Guinness Book. Flipping towards the middle, I found that 8.4 mile mark had indeed been bettered but only to 11.1 miles. Disappointingly, the Jungkinsteins were still the reigning champs, though they now sported bushy mustaches. 

Immediately after setting the new mark, Dieter and Heinreich married twin sisters. They live next door to each other in a small village on the outskirts of Dusseldorf where they enjoy many hobbies. They hope to see three-legged endurance racing become an official Olympic Sport someday, to represent their country, win the gold medal and bring glory to the God who blesses us all.

During the ride home, as Father yammered on about the justifications for the firebombing of Dresden, I began leafing through my copy of the latest Guinness Book. As I read about fearless freaks like Ulas Ergoyen, who painted 30,000 tea cups in delicate gold leaf while submerged a quarter league beneath the Black Sea, Dieter and Heinreich’s mark seemed still achievable. I felt certain that not only could I break the record, but that it was my duty to do so. Immediately upon the heels of this invigorating glimpse of what I now saw as my chance at some small measure of glory, came one that was equally as nauseating. I would have to recruit someone else to join me in my quest. 

In school, I was on the periphery of a small clique of boys who, like me, had to that point in adolescence distinguished themselves as being wholly, thoroughly and totally unremarkable. None of us were either good enough or bad enough at anything for our teachers or classmates to take any notice. We were expected to do little more than keep to ourselves and fill in the background. I was friendly enough with that gang to sit with them at lunch and stand in their midst along the sidelines during recess. Really, it went no further than that and it would be a stretch to call them friends. Their apparitional appearance in my memories attests to what degree my association with them was due to social necessity and convenience. I had, by that age, grown into my solitude, yet lacked courage enough to be a true loner. 

Making a lifelong chum of a neighbor boy as most people did in their youth was complicated by the fact that we lived the far end of a sparsely populated cul-de-sac. Our large Victorian home, whose most obvious pretension was to be thought of as rambling, was separated from our closest neighbors, the Johnsons, by what seemed to my boyhood mind a great, impenetrable forest. By that time, it’d been many years since I had last seen Will, who was my age but attended an elite private school just outside of town. 

That meeting was far enough back in my childhood that it was actually the sort of prearranged event that parents of the era had just begun to refer to as a ‘playdate.’ I’ve only vague recollections of what went wrong on that occasion. I do remember a fight over a computer keyboard resulting in a glass tipping over and a deluge of orange juice spilling across the key and mouse pads, which, in turn, was followed by Will’s tears raining down on the spacebar. I recall with even greater distinction having been made to feel the whole affair was my fault on the brief ride home, which resulted in a backseat display of fist and leg pumping on my part which defined the word tantrum. That memory, however hazy, was still fresh enough back then that it took me some time to summon the courage needed to put my plan into motion.

Finally, one day later that week, I was awoken by what had been becoming an increasingly familiar noise in our home. From down the hall came the shrieking, abruptly unpleasant chorus of Mother and Father engaged in a rather vulgar sniping session at a volume for which their bedroom door proved insufficient cover. Feeling the dull headache that always came on when they raised their voices, I slipped downstairs, wrote ‘At Will’s’ on the refrigerator’s National Geography notepad and let myself out. 

At the back end of our property, the trees creaked against each other in thickets on either side of a dirt path that threaded its way from our back yard to the Johnson’s property. With each step, I thought of turning back, of abandoning a rather hasty plan which threatened to inconvenience the life I’d built for myself, but it took even less imagination to conjure the unpleasant cacophony that had surely increased in volume since my escape. Sooner than my imagination had allowed, the trees thinned enough to give me a view of the Johnson house. 

Modernist and striking its crudity, it sprang up from the woods like a prison for delinquent chipmunks. Constructed entirely of wood and composed of a large rectangle in the center with two smaller squares at either end, it was entirely encircled by a wooden deck. The doorbell even had an irritating, atonal chime like the recording of a fart expelled by Phillip Glass. 

“Bradley,” Will’s mother greeted me, opening the door and ushering me inside. “Come in, Will’s upstairs.”

With her full-figure, pouty lips and eyes the color of fresh algae, Mrs. Johnson was attractive, albeit in a slightly matronly way. She was fit with wide hips and thick, strong looking arms. The one feature that I found myself looking at most was her healthy, not to say heavy, looking cleavage. I feared her catching me out at it, but not so much that I foreshortened my examination of them.

“We missed you at the birthday party,” she said, leading me into the living room. “Were sick or something?”

“Allergies,” I said with confidence even though I couldn’t remember if, what was surely the social event of the season, had taken place during a time that might pass for allergy season.

“You don’t have to tell me. I take pills for it, prescription, otherwise I am useless,” she said then called upstairs for her son.

The living room’s floorboards were painted to look pale from age and use while showing this wear as proudly as an antique. A leather couch of squeaky ivory genuflected before the room’s focus, a television with an enormous screen. Skylights allowed rays of sun to come down and form themselves on the couch in blinding boxes of white. One could perch themselves at the rail of the floor above and look down, shaking his head the way God must at a particularly expensive looking, yet uninteresting cloud. 

 “Hello, Brad,” Will said from that very rail. 

“Hi Will.” 

“Why didn’t you come to my birthday party?” He walked slowly as if in a trance down the staircase.

“I have allergies and sometimes they’re so bad that I have to stay in bed,” I said repeated and got a commiserating nod from his mother. 

“Allergies.” Will nodded his head. “No one came,” he mumbled somewhat pathetically once he reached the bottom of the stairs.

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying my best to mean it. “I would’ve but I was sick. I had to stay in bed and rest.”

“Rest.” Will nodded again, this time as though the very idea made him weary.

“Listen Will, have you ever dreamt of…doing something, like setting a record?”

“A record? For what?” Will asked, his dull eyes lacking even the merest ember of inspiration. 

“Distance Walked on Three Legs.” 

“Three legs?” His face contracted into something like pained confusion. “There’s a 

record for that?”

“There is and to break it all we have to do is walk from my house to a little past where I 

go to school and then back.” 

“Do you want to come upstairs?” he asked, apparently nonplused with the logistics, 

which I’d been convinced would draw him in.

Up I went, followed by the eyes of generations of Johnson family forbearers whose photos lined the wall. The pictures faded as I ascended, clearly moving back through the generations until I reached the top, where, in now deeply muddied contrast, stood a man in a top hat next to a woman holding a parasol to her side. They were flanked by two moppets with curly hair. The girl on the left, no doubt long deceased, looked slightly older, judging not only by her superior height but by the composure she showed, holding her parasol in two hands, facing straight at the camera. Her sister held her parasol off to the side, a look of slowly dawning terror just coming to her face like a vaudevillian understudy who’d just been called to the stage.

In keeping with the rest of the house, his room at the end of that upper hall was cavernous and rather barren. A tall book case sat against the one wall. Sparsely stocked, it boasted only a few wrinkled comic books and a dictionary still suffocating under its shrink-wrapping. A large framed picture of an old crone waving a lantern over the words of some poem about a stairway to heaven hung on the wall next to the bookcase. In the far corner was a desk, which featured a rather elaborate personal computing set-up. He motioned to the desk chair while standing beside his bed as though inviting me to sit down. I froze for a moment, worried that he was bringing me back to the scene of the accident which had so spoiled that afternoon all those years ago.

“I’m glad no one came to my birthday,” he said. “I hate parties. Do you want to see something?”

Without waiting for an answer, he went slouching over to his bed, his head seemed to sink into his neck, his shoulders thrown slightly back. Then, in a surprising burst of physicality, he overturned the mattress, revealing a box spring that was partially covered by a dozen or so glossy magazines. Will pondered over them for a moment before selecting one. He brought it to me, gazing wide-eyed at the cover.

“Look at these pictures. They’re so beautiful, so professional,” he said, handing me Greenwich Girls Get Naughty.

The publication featured nubile women presumably from a nearby commuter town in various stages of undress. As I leafed through page after titillating page, a vague stirring began inside of me. Some holy and inaccessible thing had been awakened, and though it was but a kitten when compared to the lion my lust would grow into in my later years, it was purring unmistakably. I felt my face flushing, my pulse hit a newly discovered gear. Then, just as suddenly and inexplicably, a jolt of shame made me look away as I searched for surer, less illicitly invigorating stimuli.

“Really professional looking and beautiful, huh?” Will asked. “The pictures?”

“I…I’ve never seen…they’re…” I paused in order to catch the breath, which I only then realized had deserted me.

As I rose to further peruse his collection, saliva began collecting beneath my tongue. Sucking on my teeth, I noted the magazines all had glossy covers and looked as impeccable as the day they had been unsheathed from their plain brown wrappers. Women from all around the world were featured on the covers. One called Dutch Delectation had a blonde with a pixie nose and enormous breasts smiling as though she knew something that I wouldn’t yet dare to dream of learning. Another showed a ginger-haired lovely lying in a field of clovers, several of which were placed strategically about her nude form with a title, Lusty Lasses of the Emerald Isle, which I felt displayed a sophisticated understanding of alliteration. 

“Where did you get all of these?” I asked.

“I found them in the garage, inside an old toolbox. My parents were fighting about them, and I heard Mummy say she wanted that filth out of her house.”

“What if your father goes looking for them?” I asked.

“I think the photography is what makes them special,” Will said, so lost in the land of Erin, he probably hadn’t even heard my question. “Look at this one.” He pointed to the ample pubic hair of a dark Irish beauty. “It looks like…like…I don’t know…like some kind of silk thread. That isn’t all her, it can’t be. Behind that, some photographer worked his magic. It’s all in the lighting, picking the right exposure, the right lens.” He gazed for a moment longer, appraising it, apparently, for qualities that my racing mind would not even allow me to consider. “I got a camera for my birthday, a Canon. You want to see it?”

Without giving me a chance to answer, Will snatched the magazine from my hand, put it back in its place then maneuvered the mattress back onto the bed. He further secured his hiding place by re-tucking in the sheet and blanket. My hands were still extended before me, my eyes roving over an afterimage they’d enough time to devour. Will got down on his knees and reached under the bed. How advanced Will proved to be at that age, already having moved his locus solus from the frivolous haunts of boyhood play, to the altogether more adult area of the bed. The camera case was black and shaped in the same general way boxy coffins are reminiscent of human bodies.

“I can’t let you hold it,” he said. “It’s brand new, not just to me but to Canon’s line.”

He spoke the camera company’s name with heavy lips, in the same way the penitent invoke the name of Yahweh. Never one for mechanical jargon, I listened as well as my distracted mind would allow as he prattled on about aperture metering, f-stops and other terms of the devoted shutter-bug. Under normal conditions, my patience for such geekery would’ve been gossamer thin; having just peeked at the wonderland of flesh before me, it took every fiber of my being not to knock him from the bed, fling the mattress to the ground and continue my world tour.

I left the Johnsons’ in a fog that evening. Each thought I tried to hold was pierced by a tiny, warm vibration. Even the New England chill of the evening air whistling through the forest failed to quell the life awakened inside of me. Not until I got back home, did I find a suitable albeit unwelcome distraction. Two burly types in dirty overalls were carting the beautiful rosewood China cabinet, which has formerly been the center piece of our dining room, around our circular drive to a truck idling on the street. I stood frozen in the front door, watching the cabinet disappear into the darkened nether reaches of the truck.

“There were some men out in the drive just now, hauling away the China cabinet,” I said as soon as I entered the house.

“There are?” Mother asked from the nearby couch, not deigning to glance up from her Simple Style Magazine.

 “Yes.”

“Call the police!” she mock shouted. “We’re being robbed.”

“Mother,” I began with a purposeful whine, “why are we getting rid of our China cabinet?”

“We aren’t. It’s been sold and for a nice profit.”

“Why are we selling it?”

“Bradley, not now, okay? I am trying to finish this article?”

“Why are you reading that?”

“Right now, I’m not. I am sitting here answering your questions. Tell you what,” she said and dropped the magazine to her lap with a dramatic sigh. “Why don’t you let me finish this and then I’ll come and find you and tell you all about it.”

I retreated up the stairs. When my mind wasn’t wandering off down the road searching for a reason for the China cabinet’s departure, it was flashing me the titillating images that my greedy eyes had sealed there into near permanence. At that age, I lacked the self-awareness or know-how to submit to the yearning beating away inside of me like heavy horse hooves atop cobblestones. It was a relief when Father made a noisy re-entrance into the house, bellowing his customary greeting. 

That was followed by some murmuring then him asking: “Did you tell him, yet?” To which Mother responded with a hushing sound.

At that, I slipped from my room, quietly down the hall. Any amateur at domestic surveillance would’ve perched himself at the top of the stairs, vainly trying to avoid the creaky floorboard which would inevitably give him away. Instead, I made for the bathroom and opened wide the baseboard air vent which would communicate their conversation to me almost as clearly as if I were down there with them.

“Why? I don’t understand why? What possible difference could it make?” Father asked starting off loudly but then easing his volume down to a still audible whisper.

“Because it would be easier together,” Mother replied.

“I just think you are looking for ways to put the whole thing off.”

“Tell you what, then, you go tell him,” she said.

“I will. Just tell me what to say. I don’t know how to talk to that kid. You spend so much more time with him.”

“That would almost sound like a compliment if it didn’t seem that, according to you,” she said, “I’m always better at things you’d simply rather not do.”

“Come off it. You know what I’m saying,” Father said. “I don’t know what you’re so scared of. He’ll be sad, so what, kids’re sad sometimes. It’s part of life. Lord knows, I’m not happy about it.”

“While you obviously have no problem making him feel uncomfortable…”

“Wait, wait,” Father raised his voice and I could picture him looming over mother, balled up fists on hips. “What snide thing do you mean by sliding in the word ‘obviously’?”

“Obviously as in obviously you don’t mind making our son feel…uncomfortable that you don’t mind, so you should do it.”

 “So, is that what this is really all about?” Father asked with a rueful laugh.

“No. It’s not. It’s about acting as a unit so that our son will know we will both be there for him when we drop the bomb of the fact that we are moving…” here her voice caught and she inhaled, “to an apartment.”

I rolled away from the vent and lay prone on the tile floor. My head rested against the cool, slightly moist base of the toilet. I wanted to just stay there, feeling the chill of the porcelain on the back of my skull as I tried to sort out my now tortured feelings. The sadness nestled inside of me sprang forth, attacking all of my muscles at once. Tears began seeping from my eyes as blood does from a wound. Only when I heard Father plodding up the stairs, did I collect myself enough to scramble to my feet and flee back down the hall, wiping my eyes and sniffling.

Later that night, they broke the news to me together. Each took turns with their part of the script. Mother assured me I’d still have my own room. Father pointed out we still one last summer to enjoy the house and property. He even suggested, with a typically feeble attempt at enthusiasm that I let him challenge me to a game of croquet, once the weather permitted it. 

I hung my head and rubbed my fists into my eyes as I felt my part demanded. Tears wouldn’t come again that day. I was like most boys of that age, unwittingly storing mine up for the varied crushing disappointments of adulthood, so they could be shed quietly decades hence as I sat alone there atop a Texas rock formation, staring out at a vista so empty that it allowed for the most vivid of hallucinations, a daydream of memory.

How many weeks then went by after that as we prepared to move and Father constantly complained of the amount of work there was and how little I contributed while I hid, blue-bottomed in my sanctum lavatorium, I have no idea. I did, undoubtedly, pass many an hour prior to our departure perched gargoyle like on that toilet seat attempting to lose myself in the pages of the modest library stowed next to the throne. Time and again my efforts were thwarted as my mind had the habit of wandering to that which lay beneath Will’s mattress. Even the new edition of the Guinness Book was no match for the siren call of that inviting stack of pilfered pornography. Still, I managed to resist running to the Johnsons’ for I was still young enough to be distrustful and perhaps a bit afraid of these new impulses.

Then, one morning, I awoke to Mother banging at my door, ruining my midmorning sleep which I always found to be the most restful and restorative. Without waiting for an invitation, she burst inside and placed a box, in the middle of the floor. Through my falsely half-closed eyes, I made out BRADLEY’S ROOM, written on the side of it, in her thick, stern printing. She said nothing, disappearing into the hall to return with another equally sized box, horrifyingly labeled: DONATIONS. I continued faking sleep. 

“Brad,” she said, in a soft voice as though actually afraid of waking me, “Bradley, dear,” she repeated, this time gently shaking me awake. “It’s time to get up.”

“I was having a great dream,” I said, propping myself up and wiping the fake sleep from my eyes. “My room in the new place was bigger than the one here.”

 “Was it?” asked Mother in her inimitable tone, the one that thoroughly refused to even hint at the smallest morsel of curiosity. “I need you to spend the day, which is already now half over, sorting out what you really need to take to our new home from what we can get rid of. We are…” she said sighing, “…simplifying our lives and I think you will enjoy participating in this part of the process.”

The poplar outside my window, its limbs ripe with buds as green and fresh as dew, waved at me. I thought of the bygone days when I used to climb it, daring to put my weight on the reed like limbs, forever striving to reach new heights. Once I managed to get near the top and there wedged among three wispy branches of new growth, I found a bird’s nest. Its eggs, a bubblegum blue, looked so vulnerable, so tiny and alone in the world. I stayed for as long as I could, wanting to make sure of their mother’s return. Too soon though, my legs began to weaken and I had to begin my descent, which had always proved so much more perilous than the climb up. 

“Can I do it later?” I asked, my voice cracking.

Mother nodded and took me in an awkward embrace and even gave my forehead a dry peck.

To avoid dividing my worldly possessions between KEEP and OBLIVION, I went outside with the vague notion of recapturing something of those worry-free days by climbing that tree. My plans were quickly squashed as its limbs has been pruned so that the lowest of the branches were now well out of reach. I gave a half-hearted couple of leaps for those now sturdier but now higher branches on which I’d begun my climbs as a young boy but soon gave up. Behind the tree, I glimpsed the path running through the forest that led to the Johnsons’. A sudden jolt of what would take some time, we’re talking years but so few of them one might count in months, before my being able to identify it as lust quickened in my pulse, cutting through my fear and resistance. After one last look up to the window at my boyhood room for the summer anyway, I set off through the trees at a harried pace as though afraid of my mind changing on me.

  “Look who it is,” Mr. Johnson greeted me this time. He wore a pristine Ralph Lauren jogging suit that one could hardly imagine ever having been troubled by the merest bead of sweat. “Brad Mitchell, is it?”

I nodded.

  “I didn’t know Will was expecting company,” he said. “Come on in.” Then yelled upstairs to Will, “your friend is here”

He wore his thinning blonde hair slicked back. The point of retreat of his hairline was marked by a constellation of copper freckles. The areas around his eyes were much more wrinkled than the rest of his face, suggesting I was in the presence of an inveterate squinter. He was a broker or trader or some such job which required a title that ended in a hard, macho consonant in order to distract attention from the fact that he was paid vast sums of money to dress rather like a dandy and gamble with other people’s money.

“Daddy,” Will yelled, his voice breaking with petulance. “Dad.”

“Yes,” he called slightly interrogatively. 

“Tell him to come upstairs.” 

“You’ve been summoned,” Mr. Johnson said, bowing and motioning towards the stairs.

I found the budding Henri Besson seated at his desk. Will’s eyes grew wide with welcome. He rushed to the door as soon as I was inside and gently but firmly guided it closed. I made my way to the bedside and began to maneuver the mattress, anxious to make acquaintance with the Strapping Shelias of Australia, who, I was certain, were alluring and exotic due to the too fleeting glance I had stolen of the cover as he replaced the mattress on my previous visit.

“Wait,” Will said moving so as to block me. “I have something I want to show you.”

He opened the closet door and using a stepstool carefully lowered a metal box down from the shelf. He placed it on his desk, then got on his knees to retrieve the key that had been stashed under a piece of curled up carpeting next to the door’s frame. Furtively, he checked over his shoulder as if to make sure no was lurking in the shadows, before clicking the box open with a metallic snap.

“I did these.” He handed me a slender envelope fastened by two cardboard discs linked together by a wound string. I unwound it and pried open the flap, then carefully slid out a crop of photos.

They were of a woman reclining on a chaise lounge. Part of her top had slid to the side, revealing a large, dark nipple crowning a breast of impressive size. The expression on her face made it difficult to determine if she was asleep or in the midst of some passionate encounter with a lover, who was hovering just out of the frame, perhaps with the camera in hand. The suggestion of this registered inside of me as a mystery to be unlocked, one whose key I would obtain years later. I looked more closely at the face, conscious of my pulse playing a discrete rhythm inside my body until I recognized her.

“Your mother,” I gasped in a whisper that barely allowed the words to be heard. A fever spread from my ankles to the tips of my ears.

“Beautifully professional snaps, huh?” Will said, admiring one of them with a blank stare. “Look how right I got the lighting on this one.”

Not quite shocked enough to avert my eyes, I let them linger on the feast of flesh before me. The Johnson family matriarch sleeping away in various states of disrobe was on full view. In some, a dress shirt had been strategically undone, in others, tank tops had been peeled from her form. When the full brunt of the shock hit me, I let the pictures fall from my hands. Will dove to gather them, giving each a close appraisal before putting them back into the envelope. 

“Will….how could you? How…how…”

“Mixed some sleeping pills in with her allergy medication. It took some time to get the mixture right. I wanted her to sleep hard not, you know, get sick or something.”

“Why? Your own mother? That, that is…”

“What? It’s not like I can have models come over to practice on.”

“No, I guess not.”

 “Maybe I could come over to your place and…does your mom nap?”

“No way, Will.”

“Look at this one,” he said forcing it under my nose. “You can make out the tiny shadows cast by the bumps on her nipples. See?”

“Yes,” I said, pausing to wet my parched lips, “I see that.”

There was no doubt Will was an artist of true skill not to mention dedication. I’d never before been moved by any image in quite that way. I stared at them all afternoon until my eyes were dry. The photos in the magazines seemed so plastic by comparison. I even submitted to Will’s tutelage and allowed myself to see that by selecting the proper angle, he’d eliminated the crow’s feet from the corner of his mother’s eyes or by utilizing the correct F-stop, he managed to make her breasts look firmer than they were by reducing the shadows beneath. 

“You can take them with you,” he offered, when it was time for me to depart.

“No. Will, what if I get caught with them. What if…”

“Come on, please, please take them. I can’t keep them around here. I worked too hard to just throw them away. I know how much you’ll continue to appreciate them.”

More than once during our final days in my old family home, I awoke with my heart racing and my blood on fire certain I’d dreamt something about Mrs. Johnson that I shouldn’t have; a voluptuous half-dressed specter waiting for a moment when my attention wandered to seize and command it. These sensations remained new enough that for the duration of that summer I experienced a sense of shame almost as soon as my mind finished tantalizing me, making the tempting prospect of paying the Johnsons’ one last visit impossible. On a couple of occasions, I did set off across the forest, but the nearly overwhelming mix of lust and opprobrium would soon take hold, driving me to retrace my steps until the feeling subsided, which usually didn’t occur until I was back at the window in my room, staring at the poplar and trying to remember what it felt like to be the boy who had stood guard over a nest of delicate robin’s eggs.

When we moved into a condominium near the center of town, I, for obvious reasons, kept the photos in the darkened back of my closet high on a shelf. Soon, other sundry items from the twilight of my childhood years were placed atop that envelope. Edgar Rice-Burroughs adventure novels, geography bee trophies and the like soon buried the forgotten object of my young lust. As startling and erotic an effect they had once had one me, it was strange how fast that power seemed to fade until it was little more than a half-memory twinkling from the brink what I would, in time, see as the end of my childhood.

Years later, during the summer before I was to leave home for the Maritime Academy, I took the only job available to someone with my modest skill set and shoddy work ethic, that of a stock boy. The establishment was easily the town’s least illustrious grocery store. Gustavo’s didn’t boast the organic meat or local produce of Al Marvin’s Market or the lineup-at-the-register-worthy prepared meals of Fresh-N-Farm. Indeed, the bread was often stale, the canned goods lingered on the dusty shelves well past their sell by date and the milk cooler sat in a neglected corner empty and unplugged. Surviving almost solely thanks to brisk sales in lottery tickets and cigarettes, the store sat at the end of an otherwise deserted road. Its huge parking lot was being circled by half-famished sea gulls, who mustn’t have been too picky about the quality of the scraps they dined on. 

As my aversion to putting away groceries or really work in general had never waned, I found the post agreeable, if low-paying. My one complaint was that employee’s bathroom, which doubled as a janitor’s closet, lacked the charm not to mention literary choices of the one at my former home. I was often forced to while away my time there immersed in the provincial journalism of the local town gazette whose sole redeeming feature was that it didn’t require gossip to be verified as fact in order to be printed.   

One afternoon late in the summer, having finished reading an article about a local feline who’d placed at disappointing third at the statewide cat show, I emerged from the bathroom to find Gustavo waiting for me. He was dressed as always in a tattered blue sweater vest, his name stitched over the right breast. A smile lit his wrinkled face, its many crevices folding together in a rictus of pure joy. I thought for certain he’d finally hit it big on one of the scratch tickets he seemed to spend most of his time and profit on and was about to retire but not before burdening me for life by leaving me the store. 

“Look,” he said and gestured to two pallets sitting just inside the store, “the dairy made a mistake. Free milk.”

“Free milk?”

“Free milk! Get the cooler plugged in and get these stocked.”

My back was soon aching as I unloaded carton after carton of milk into the not so quickly chilling coolers. If the job had been like that from the beginning, I would’ve quit long before. Finally, with all the milk tucked inside and the cooler nearly full for the first time since I’d started working there, I sat down to rest.

 “Bradley Mitchell,” I heard a voice call out. “Is that you?”

At the end of the bread aisle stood a large figure. She poked at a couple of stale loaves and then made her way to me. It’d only been a handful of years and yet time’s terrible work had already begun on her, thinning her hair, adding flab to her arms and chest. I knew from the green glow of those eyes, eyes that I had many times watched close in my dreams, who it was.

“Mrs. Johnson,” I said, “what are you doing here?”

“Looking for a new market. I’m afraid Mr. Marvin has retired and closed shop. You remember his store? Your mother used to shop there, I think.”

“Years ago, when we lived out there.”

“You’re not making a career out of this, I hope,” she said. “I didn’t even know this place was still open until I drove by.”

“Just working here for the summer. I go away to the Maritime Academy in the fall.”

“The Maritime Academy?” she asked.  “I didn’t know you had a passion for the sea.” 

“It’s more down to a lack of passion for any pursuits on land, I’m afraid,” I said. “How’s Will?”

“Will’s…,” she paused and looked away from me, “he’s in a hospital out west.”

“Is he okay?”

“He…will be. He just needs some rest. School proved too…stressful. He took too much on, too many activities.”

“That’s too bad. I’ve been meaning to call.”

“I guess I should let you get back to work,” she said and wondered back up the aisle. I could not help watching her go. She was a large woman but appeared still fit. 

Later, as I packed for what would turn out to be my brief and rather humbling stint at the maritime academy, I found myself digging into that by now stuffed back corner of my closet for another look at those photos. At first, I barely remembered them and on looking again, observed mostly how perfect they were in terms of photographic aesthetic, lit well and thoughtfully composed. There was a beauty there that Will had a right to be proud of. I couldn’t bring myself to destroy them, so I tucked them away in the inside flap of my sailcloth knapsack, certain all the while that I’d never look at them again.

Jason Graff’s debut novel Stray Our Pieces concerns a woman extricating herself from motherhood. heckler, about lives colliding at a struggling hotel, followed. His short stories have appeared recently in places such as Louisiana Literature, Bull, TroublemakerFirestarter, Umbrella Factory, Slab and The Razor. You can follow him on X @JasonGraff1.