LITMIR.BIZ

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there a moment, confused, even turned around and looked back at the staircase, somehow expecting to find Tommy and Ralph standing there, waiting. But I was alone.

      I pulled open the door and though I’d not been gone all of maybe fifteen minutes, already the light was changing – the way it seems to grow brighter right before it turns purple and disappears altogether. To my right a couple stood, arguing. The man was calling the woman names that to this day I don’t like to repeat and she was swinging at him as he cursed. The man started to turn toward me so I glanced past him toward the fruit stand where a mother paid for a bag of mango slices for her daughter, lit a cigarette for herself. I turned my head in the other direction but aside from a mangy cat rummaging through the trash, the sidewalk was empty. Taxis and cars honked at one another on the street, their headlights coming on pair by pair as the light faded. My chest felt tight and flat, like the whole of the sky was pressing down on it, like I was no more than God’s rolling board.

      I stepped out onto the pavement and heard the door slam behind me before I realized that I had no way back in without buzzing my mother. The arguing couple were walking away now and the mother and daughter were crossing the street. I scanned the sidewalk in both directions two, three times and just started running toward the stand, rounded the corner and picked up speed. Everywhere I looked, my eyes sought Ralph, tried to remember what color shirt he was wearing, whether it was blue or green, the one with Batman or the Joker. I began to feel faint and sick like when you eat too much or not enough, like I was full and empty all at the same time.

      I ran until I realized I’d circled the block three times and each time I saw new faces and the same faces but with something new about them. A scarred cheek, crooked teeth, sunburned skin. I looked them directly in the eyes, searched for some clue as to where Tommy and Ralph had gone, of who had seen them, who had taken them.

      On my fourth time around, the fruit vendor had started to pack up his goods and nodded to me as I passed. With each step I took, what light remained seemed to scatter even faster, eager to leave the world or at least my part of it, and I became less afraid of what my mother would do to me and more frightened for Ralph and what the sorcerer would do to him. I remember wishing that something big would happen, like a tornado or an earthquake, just so it would be bigger than what was happening then. The only thought that kept me from screaming right there on the sidewalk was that I had to keep running. That, and I knew Tommy had to be with him, that Tommy would follow that sorcerer to his dungeon and save Ralph, and Etan too. He’d free them and tie up the sorcerer in their place.

      Thirty minutes later, I sat on the kitchen floor, huddled in a corner while police officers went in and out of the apartment, their radios buzzing with codes only they understood. My father had gone out with a search group scouring the neighborhood on foot. Tommy’s parents had returned; his mother stood in the hallway outside our apartment screaming at the cops to go find her son while his father sat in our kitchen with his head in his hands.

      Over and over the same police officer kept asking me to repeat the story, how I’d left Tommy and Ralph on the ground floor, that maybe we had opened the door to let in air, that maybe we had taken turns going outside for just a few minutes at a time. The questions kept coming – the same ones with the words rearranged, until my mother turned to the officer and said Stop. But even then she wouldn’t look me in the eye. That’s how I remember my mother to this day, though she’d live another twenty years before dying from too many cigarettes. She kept pressing the thumb of one hand into the palm of the other, pressed so hard I thought she’d push a hole right through. She stopped only to hold up a picture of Ralph the cops had asked to see. ‘No, he’s not blond. It was the light in the photo studio. Made everything look different,’ she kept repeating.

      Neighbors showed up in turn at our door offering to pray with us and though I never knew my mother to miss a Sunday mass, she told them they’d be more useful walking the streets, searching. But I prayed anyway. Jumbled together Hail Marys and Our Fathers, promised to give Ralph my toys, to never want another thing again if only he’d appear. At some point, a cop asked me to come down to the landing, to show him exactly where we were playing, to describe who stood where and when. I looked to my mother and though she nodded, still her eyes refused mine.

      A few cops stood on the ground level of the building, the door now wide open. I could make out a news truck and reporters, more cops and neighbors. A woman in a red blazer noticed me then and rushed toward the building. The cops quickly filled the doorway and stood between us. Still, I could see her peering over their shoulders as others joined her – a mass of shifting microphones and cameras and voices. The officers ordered them to step away from the door and pulled me back but not before I heard one of them ask if I’d witnessed the disappearance.

      When the cops found Ralph tied up in the basement, my mother let out a cry so loud and terrible, a long howl that waned into a low moan. They walked in on Tommy holding the plastic gun and Ralph’s head welted where Tommy’d struck him with it. Ralph sat shirtless in that chair, his arms and legs bound, his Fantastic Four tee gagging his mouth. Dried tears ran in streaks down his neck and his pants were soaked, the stench of piss filling the room. When the cops led him through the door of our apartment and into my mother’s arms, he turned to me for no more than an instant and though his eyes neither twitched nor blinked, I understood them.

      I don’t know what became of Tommy. His parents moved out the next day and the apartment stayed empty for months. That night, my mother bathed Ralph for nearly an hour while my father stood in the doorway and watched over them both without speaking. I sat in the hallway, waiting, until my father turned to me and said it was time for bed.

      I lay in the darkness and looked across at Ralph’s bed, wondered what Etan’s bed looked like, empty like that, night after night. I waited for what felt like hours and crept out of bed and down the hallway. My parents’ bedroom door was open and I could see my father asleep in his work shirt. In the kitchen, the spaghetti sat on the table, untouched. I found my mother in the living room, Ralph wrapped in a towel and asleep on her lap. I sat next to her and for a long time I couldn’t be sure if she was awake or asleep, her breaths low and far in between, her eyes difficult to see in the darkness. Then, at around dawn, when the shadows in the room began to shift and I could make out her face and she could make out mine, she pulled me toward her.

      ONLY THOSE WHO STRUGGLE SUCCEED

      It was the night of the office Christmas party and Lina felt lucky and excited to be included as she was merely an intern, although there had been allusions to, if not promises of, a permanent position in the new year. Because she lived an hour’s drive away, and because she had to go into the office the day of the party, there was the question of how she would get ready for the outing. Her roommate reminded her that a gym membership they shared, a gift to the roommate from parents who found the roommate’s weight bothersome, was the solution to her dilemma. So, after a day of reading scripts and writing notes that summarized their strengths and weaknesses, going on coffee runs and picking up lunches, Lina said, ‘See you later,’ to her co-workers, and went to the closest gym to which the membership allowed her access and made use of its showers and changing room. She blow-dried her hair straight and carefully flat-ironed and sprayed the fine hairs that framed her forehead and which she knew would otherwise frizz and curl in the party venue’s humid indoor air. It was a nervous energy that filled her as she applied her makeup, and she recognized it as one of anticipation, the same she had felt several times before. To her it signaled that her ambitions and desires, to secure for herself a role in the company and gain acceptance into an industry that was derided in public and celebrated in private for being discriminatory and exacting, were ones she could access and with time obtain. She felt in that moment the very potential of her life revealed. Before leaving the locker-room she looked at herself in the mirror a final time, felt satisfied with the pale gold shadow that brightened her eyes, and wiped off the red lipstick she had previously thought festive but which now she deemed made her lips appear too prominent and defined.

      The party was held in a bar closed to the public for the occasion, and when she entered her co-workers were glad to see her, and she spoke to men and women who in the office spoke only to one another or to their own assistants. As she made her way

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