Curtis Smith

Fiction

Curtis Smith has published over 100 stories and essays, and his work has been cited by or included in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Spiritual Writing, The Best Small Fictions, and the WW Norton anthology New Micro. He’s worked with independent presses to put out five story collections, two essay collections, five novels, and a book of creative nonfiction. His latest book is Lovepain (novel, Braddock Avenue Books). Next year, Running Wild Press will release his next novel, The Magpie’s Return.

The Creek

Miss Houser led our excursion down the railroad tracks. Danny Tate and Alex Dell raced, arms outstretched, a test of balance atop opposite rails. Tony Atwood’s hurled stones scattered the wire-perched starlings. A mid-June morning, warm and bright and blue. Butterflies in the pokeweed. The last days of school, our summer anticipated and rightfully earned, but also in us a melancholy, for we loved Miss Houser. The girls openly, with notes tucked into her pocket and unashamed tears and whispered secrets, their hands cupped to her ear. Us boys a bit distant, watchful, the emotions we couldn’t name twisting in our guts. Last September, she’d inherited both us and our reputation. We were fist-fighters and window-gazers and more than a few of us still struggled with our multiplication tables. The grades behind us full of the teachers who’d yelled and slapped the backs of our heads. The others who’d cried. Miss Houser became ours a kindness at a time. With each applied Band-Aid. With her calm amid our tumult and the guitar she strummed during the cabin-fever weeks of indoor recess. With the lunches she secretly bought the Carney twins after their father fell from the foundry catwalk. For Miss Houser, we wrote poems. For her, we polished our shoes and kept our hands to ourselves as we sang “Silent Night” in the Christmas pageant. In these ways, we gave ourselves to her. A thanks for the gift of making us feel like we mattered.

Miss Houser turned off the tracks, and we followed. Our destination less than a half-mile from the school, those days before air conditioning and permission slips, our exit made with jeers for the others left behind, and perhaps, for once, they wished they were one of us. A narrow field separated the tracks and the creek. Miss Houser pointed skyward and asked if we remembered the name of summer’s feathery clouds. She invited us to hold out our arms and feel the sun’s touch on our skin. She asked us to close our eyes and step back into last winter’s blizzard, the chatter of teeth and the crunch of boots, the streets where nothing moved and the feeling that every clock in town had stopped. We fanned out on either side of her. The grass trembled with fleeing grasshoppers.

We paused atop the creek bank. At the water’s edge, Miss Houser slipped off her sandals. We scrambled down to join her. The water cool and shallow, these dry weeks. We carried nets and old jars and magnifying glasses. We’d come to feel the water on our bare feet, to witness the confluence of a thousand forces, the random and the eternal. Miss Houser pushed up her sleeves. On her forearm, a bruise, wide and circling. A mark those of who grew up with heavy-handed fathers understood. Our questions swallowed back when Becky Green blurted, “Miss H—black butterflies!”

Miss Houser smiled. They were damselflies, she said, and if we returned later in the summer, we’d find their exoskeletons, gray shells, delicate as whispers. Other damselflies appeared, black traces against the blue. No, Miss Houser told Becky, these skeletons didn’t mean they were dead. They simply marked a moment on their journey, a shedding of one life before they moved on to the next.

~

We met that summer at the schoolyard. Afternoons of stickball and kick the can. After July 4th, we lost track of the days, and the heat blurred our sense of time and made all the hours the same. The sun on our necks. Our talk of the lakes and pools where we wished we could swim. We rode our bikes across the playing fields, kicking up dust and, after it rained, mud. We ate Icees in the school’s shade, our tongues blue, our lips sticky. We told stories about our parents, their drinking and fights, the peculiarities that drove us mad. We told stories about our older brothers, their backroads drag races, the ones heading to prison or the army or disappearing into the mill. We told stories about our sisters, the boys they kissed, their whispered dreams of leaving the valley. We shared these tales the way we tried on hand-me-downs, our conversations less gossip than attempts to understand the world we’d soon inherit.

But after Miss Houser’s disappearance, our games lost their joy, and we returned to the gym wall’s shade. We brought folded sections of newspaper and passed them between us, careful not to tear them or smudge the ink. We talked about the reports we’d seen on TV. The footage shot outside her apartment. The search teams wading through junk-strew fields. We took turns giving each other boosts, a scraping of knees on stone, a tenuous windowsill grip as we peered into our old classroom. Inside, a new teacher, a young woman too busy to notice us as she stapled up bulletin boards and organized shelves.

~

Summer’s last week. The railroad tracks, a view straight and hazed. No rail-balancing races or throwing stones. Darting swallows feasted on gnats, and the starlings cawed. Robbed of a proper ending, the TV reporters and newspapers had forgotten Miss Houser, her story replaced by other tragedies that had nothing to do with us. At first we overshot the path, the landscape so lush, the brambles and vines. We moved through the field. The grasshoppers of our last visit replaced by the scurry of rats. We stood atop the bank and considered the water. The flow and the rocks she’d stood upon remained. The starlings fell silent. Becky Green crouched and pulled an exoskeleton off a blade of grass. She cupped it in her palm, and we gathered round. Our touch gentle, all of us remembering Miss Houser’s voice, her promise of what we’d find here at summer’s end. We broke away, pushing through the grass, a tender harvest, our hands filled with testaments to the life drawn to this shore.

“ I’ve been writing a lot about these small Pennsylvania towns—the kind of place where the factories have closed and the folks left behind have lost not only their livelihoods but also their identity. For this story, I went back to a childhood like my own and imagined the first hard lessons of loss and unanswered questions. I enjoy the first-person plural—in a longer piece, it sags beneath its own weight, but in a shorter story, I think that kind of collective voice can resonate. I’m also a fan of the triptych structure—the three separate views that can achieve a unified whole. ”

Curtis Smith

Fiction

Curtis Smith has published over one hundred stories and essays. His latest books are Beasts and Men (stories, Press 53), Communion (essays, Dock Street Press), and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Bookmarked (nonfiction, Ig Publishing).

 

Yes

His shovel patted the dirt. A gentle touch. A period, not an exclamation. Twilight had faded to ash, then black. Fireflies rose above the ragged grass, cicadas in the trees. His son by his side. In the boy’s hand, a flashlight, the beam fixed upon the rectangle of upturned earth. The boy had found the dog behind the shed. For the past week, the dog had been lethargic. The heat, the father figured. The dog older than his son. A beagle mix, a rescue, a network of wounds beneath his black and tan coat. The shelter had named him Dodge. The father wasn’t fond of the name, but he believed changing it wouldn’t be fair. The son had just turned nine, an age in which the world was ruled by giants and myths. The father was deeply aware of the shadow he cast upon his son, and he did his best to live accordingly.

The father hadn’t been a dog person. He reminded his wife of their habit of sleeping in, their impromptu road trips. He thought of vet bills and the stink of wet fur. His wife joked: “If we can’t handle a dog, how can we handle a child?” The man had no answer for that, so his wife made phone calls and signed papers. At first, the dog cowered before the father, its tail between its legs, sometimes pissing. In its dewy eyes, the father saw ghosts of violence. A bond was formed, both father and dog survivors, the keepers of secrets. The dog hiked the woodland trails the father loved, and soon, the father’s misgivings were won over by the beast’s drive, its loyalty. Its soul. The wife, now eight-months round with their son: “You love him more than I do.”

The dog, then his son, and for the next six years, the father hoped the happiness of the moment might be his forever. He breathed freely, unafraid and at peace. He forgot his past. The dog became the infant’s punching bag, ears and tail pulled but barely a yelp. The dog curled, nose to ass, beside the crib, his snout lifted to witness groggy feedings and diaper changes. Then the unraveling. Arthritis gripped the dog. Second grade a quagmire for the boy, playground bullies, the mysteries of math. His wife drifted in thought and gaze. On a warm April Sunday, their backyard cherry tree flush in pink and white, she disappeared only to emerge halfway across the country. A new man, a love she couldn’t live without. Twice a week, she Skyped with the boy, and in two days, the son would fly in his first plane to spend the rest of the summer with her and her new husband.

The father offered a final pat of his shovel. He touched the boy’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”

The boy turned off the flashlight and slid it into his pocket. Above, stars, a half moon; below, a landscape of silver-edged shadows. The boy kept his distance as the father returned to the shed. The father opened the door and fumbled in the darkness. His hands a mystery. The scent of grass and oil. He groped the wall but couldn’t find the spot where he hung the shovel. He called for his son’s flashlight but got no response. The man stepped outside. The boy was gone.

He paled, a sickened heartbeat, his tongue stone. Then a grunt, a flailing branch, and he spotted the boy climbing into the tree house. The father had built the tree house last spring; its origins, though, rooted in winter, a single-digit day. The father and his wife arguing, him still blind, unable to taste the poison in the air, and finally, the boy in tears. The wife left, a slammed door, a squeal of tires. The boy’s sobs deepened, inconsolable, the father’s appeals to calm and logic lost in the boy’s fears. Fresh air, a change in perspective—the father hoped these things would help. He bundled the boy in layers, all the while drying tears and whispering assurances. Outside, the cold still a shock. The sky crystalline and blue, the sun bright without warmth, gutter icicles, some as tall as the boy and which made the father nervous. The father lifted the boy to the cherry tree’s lowest branch then stepped back, his hands never far. The boy found a nook and sat. His boots dangled above the father’s head. Their exhaled breath rose through the naked branches. The boy calmed, and when he was ready, he jumped into his father’s arms. At the back door, the boy turned to his father. His cheeks flushed, snot on his lip. How cool it would be to have a tree house, he said. A place all his own, way up high.

A shine in the tree house’s doorway and window, white rectangles cut from the night. The beam moved, a circling inspection, the boy terrified of spiders. Light spilled over snarls of leaves and branches. Slivers escaped a section of ill-fitted floorboards, and the father waved his hand through the thin shafts. The pieces had arrived in a kit, a project marred by misread blueprints and bent nails. The boy oblivious to the structure’s imperfections. The tree house his fort and frontier, his refuge.

The flashlight clicked off. The wooden box melted back into the tree’s canopy. A breeze, the leaves rustling, the scent of chlorine from a neighbor’s pool. The father laid a hand on one of the crooked rungs he’d screwed into the trunk. The son began to speak, his voice thinned by the humidity and cicadas. He asked his father how being mean was so easy for some people. He asked if what was true now would be true forever. He asked about his airplane ride and what he would see above the clouds. He asked what his room would be like at his mother’s new house. He asked if his father remembered how the dog would yelp in his sleep, his paws twitching as if he were running on air, and what, the son asked, did a dog dream about anyway.

The man stood beneath the tree. He swatted his neck, the mosquitos buzzing. Moths danced around the back porch light. He said nothing, wanting to make sure the boy had no more questions. He spoke, a tone gentle yet full enough to rise into the tree. He apologized for all the answers he’d never be able to give, so much was a mystery after all. He’d long ago stopped trying to understand the why of others; all he could control were the actions of his hands, the kindness of his words. Truth, he believed, existed in all states of matter, as bedrock and water and mist, phase changes rooted in perspective and history. Above the clouds waited a sunshine brighter than any the boy had ever witnessed. His room at his mother’s new home would be different, but every night he stayed there, he would claim it a little more. The dog had dreamed of bones as big as table legs and never-ending fields, but most of all he dreamed of you, his boy.

He fell silent. The cicadas thrummed. Farther off, a dog the father knew by its bark, a howl taken up and echoed, dogs the father recognized (all those walks, the years of small talk and tangled leashes) and others he did not. He looked back to his house. A single light, the moths. On the boy’s bed, a suitcase the father had yet to pack.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Can I think about what you said?”

“Yes.”

“Can I think about it up here?”

“Yes.”

“Will you wait there?”

The father brushed down a lawn chair, its back, above and below the seat. He, too, was afraid of spiders. He studied the tree. The sky. He removed his socks, and his toes pulled at the dry grass. He unbuttoned his shirt and let the breeze cool his skin. “Yes,” he said. “I will be here. Waiting.”

“ I never thought I’d do a dead dog story, but here it is. I justified it to myself by putting the dog in the background—his passing isn’t the focus of the piece, although it helps set the tone. I further justified it by my late-in-life understanding about dogs. I’d never owned a dog before we took in a little stray, and I’m not ashamed to admit how much I love the thing. I’m thankful for this knowledge and for the love he’s brought to our family. ”

Curtis Smith

Fiction

Curtis Smith has published over one hundred stories and essays. His most recent books are Beasts and Men (stories, Press 53) and Communion (essays, Dock Street Press). Next spring, Ig Publishing will release his next book, a series of essays on Slaughterhouse-Five.

 

The Culvert

The boy’s father woke him after midnight. The old man’s smell in the dark. Cigarettes. The foundry’s gray dust. The boy had been dreaming. A field where the grass broke like ice beneath his steps, a sun as frigid as it was bright. The boy lost between worlds. His father’s hand on his shoulder.

“Come with me.”

The boy in his underwear. The angling of hallway light. The doorway a frame for his father’s silhouette. Rain on the roof—soft, steady—and through the window screen, a coolness rare this hot summer. He shuffled behind his father. The hallway, the stairs. Sleep still in his joints. His eyes blinking but unable to focus. The dining room. The kitchen sink cluttered with the dishes the boy had promised to wash. They stood on the stoop. The porch light stretched across the parched lawn. The rain steadier than the boy had imagined. At the light’s fringe, his older brother. His soaked T-shirt clinging to his shoulders. His shaved head upon the picnic table.

The grass was wet beneath the boy’s bare feet. The rain on his neck. They sat the brother up. The boy cradled his brother’s head and wiped the drops from his brow. They swung the brother into a sitting position, the boy and his father each taking a side, and with the count of three, they lifted him to his feet. His brother’s head pitched forward, his legs useless. His brother the football star. The Marine. A torso thick with muscle. Scabs across his knuckles. The boy a head shorter and eighty pounds lighter. He blinked the rain from his eyes and fought the push of dead weight. His feet kicked through empty beer cans. They took the porch steps one at a time. Pain in the boy’s shoulders. The brother mumbled. Names the boy didn’t know. A village in the sand half a world away.

The boy faltered inside the kitchen door. His knees struck the linoleum, his brother on top of him, a tangling of bodies until his father managed to roll the brother aside. Gasping, their hair matted and dripping, they looked upon the brother, his skin sickly in the yellow light. His father peeled off the brother’s wet clothes and slipped a couch pillow beneath his head. The boy draped him with the afghan their mother had knitted. Blood tucked deep in the knots, the needle in her trembling fingers. Those final, wasting months.

“Go back to sleep” his father said.

From his bedroom window, the boy watched his father load their deer rifles and shotguns into his car’s trunk. His retreating taillights glistened red on the wet macadam. The boy went downstairs and stretched out on the couch. He wished he could rejoin his dream, but he knew he couldn’t. Instead, he listened to the rain in the gutter. His brother’s raspy breath.

~

The boy raced after the thief who’d stolen his bike. The drumbeat built in the boy’s chest. The bike plucked from his dandelioned lawn, its front wheel still spinning, the thief making his bid before the boy could open the porch door. The thief black. In three blocks, he’d be home free, the boy risking a beating if he crossed the boundary the older boys marked with fistfights and worse. The thief in a bathing suit, a towel draped around his neck. Long legs and bony kneecaps. His bare feet slipped from the pedals, and the bike’s rusted chain caught and spit. The boy a strong runner, the winner of his school’s field-day races. His sneakers barely kissing the pavement. The bike’s lock in his hand, a length of cable sheathed in plastic, a metal clasp. Another wilting afternoon, and amid the laziness and heat, their chase elevated into spectacle. The porch sitters lowered their newspapers. One of the corner thugs hurled a rock that struck the thief’s arm. Next came a bottle, the glass shattering, a spray of sun-glistening glass. The thief veered down a narrow street. A wrong turn, a dead end into the old tool mill. His towel fell into the road.

“Get the little son of a bitch!” a corner boy yelled. Another: “Make your brother proud!”

Honeysuckle choked the lot’s sagging fence. The gate long gone. The macadam cratered, rocks and potholes, and all around, the smother of vegetation. Saplings and brown grass rose from cracked concrete. Ivy twined the glassless windows. The mill a shell of crumbling brick. The stories from inside—the dog fights and soiled mattresses. The needles and vials. The boy moving faster. Beneath him, stretches of scarred earth. His lungs filled like sails.

The thief hit a pothole. The tremor rose into the handlebars, a wobbling moment before the bike bucked sideways. Thief and bike went down, a clatter of metal, a meaty thud.

The boy thirty yards away. Twenty. Ten. A transformer high on a utility pole hissed, and in the boy, another type of electricity, the white light of clarity, of rightness. The thief stood. Blood on his elbow and knee. His side scraped raw. His eyes wide. He ran, an escape kinked by pain, strides undercut by stones and broken glass.

The boy adjusted his gait and set an arm’s length between them. Close enough to hear the thief’s gasps. Close enough to see the outline of his bony shoulders, the nubs of his spine. Close enough to smell the pool’s chlorine on his skin.

The boy swung the lock above his head, a helicopter’s orbit. The clasp whispered through the honeysuckled air. Everything clear. Everything bright. The thief’s hair cropped close; the boy’s eyes fixed on the back of his skull.

~

Crickets thrummed in the creek-bank weeds. A black sky, no moon, no stars. The heaviness of rain but not a drop. The boy peeled off his socks and tucked them into his sneakers. He slipped into his flip flops. The water cool. The creek narrow and shallow. He drifted to the middle. The sluggish current around his shins. The overgrown banks rose on either side, an erasing of the things he knew. The boy feeling as if he were lost within a scar.

His flip flops caught on hidden rocks, so he moved slowly. He turned on his flashlight and cast a halo over the water’s ugliness. An overturned shopping cart. A bald tire. A shattered sink. Oily rainbows curled around the rocks. Foam along the weedy banks. The last generation’s minnows and frogs long gone. The boy thought of his brother in their backyard, silent, home yet lost. He thought of his father fading a shift at a time in the foundry upstream. He thought of his mother.

He paused before the yawning culvert. A metal pipe he could walk through, his head unbowed, a thirty-yard passage beneath a cross street and the foundry’s rail line. He aimed his flashlight into the opening. A spider web pulsed with a moth’s struggle. Further, the dull glow of close-set eyes. The boy threw a rock. The rats clambered upon themselves, wet fur and long tails. The culvert echoed with their scrape and splash.

He knew the girl—her name, her face. At recess, she’d huddled with her friends in their winter coats, a breathy haze knitted above their heads. On Christmas Eve he’d walked behind her and her father in the communion line. Her blond hair shimmered in the candlelight; a tinsel strand on her father’s gray suit. Last spring, the police found her in the culvert. Naked, the rats upon her. In the woods beyond the culvert’s other end, her father hung from a tree.

The boy turned off the flashlight. One step, then another. The culvert’s far end waiting, an unblinking eye. A new sound, a seashell’s whisper of breeze and water. The smell of rust. Spider webs broke over him. His hands outstretched but touching nothing.

“ I write in stretches—I'll work on essays for a few months, then back to a novel, then to a cycle of stories. This is one of the five pieces I wrote during my last story cycle. They were all connected in a way—tone, mood. In this piece, I tried to arrange three quick portraits that would form a type of collage that embodied a larger idea. ”