3 stories by Greg Tebbano
The Half of It
The last time I saw Ruth was in the driveway of the house behind the hospital, the undulating strip of concrete where time and her 1992 Volvo DL—its constant returning—made ruts. You’d have thought she’d need a push. But no, four cylinders did it fine. We will never be as useful as our machines.
The house behind the hospital wasn’t ours—a rental. Maybe that made it easier. It wasn’t our love either, just this viral load we carried for a while. In the end, I realized we hadn’t even given it to one another. We caught it from other people. Some nights she called me Jeremy. I didn’t know whether to blame him or become him, to help her pack or to watch, the Volvo filling up with half our life and rolling out of there through a shattering of archival glass, her hand reaching up over the headrest to undo her ponytail, which she did whenever she drove, she explained, because of the pull.
Missing Hiker
Leah was driving me down to see another neurologist. The vertigo came and went. The world carried on, but I wasn’t in it anymore. On the radio, Vermont Public was airing a story about the body of a missing tiger found up past Smugglers’ Notch that had gone out in questionable weather.
“What if we don’t get any answers today,” Leah said.
I was trying to think of what zoo the tiger would have come from. Burlington? Portland? And then I was imagining the creature’s slow progress cross country. How easily it might unzip a rabbit. Teeth that dared sport hunters to find out who would be wearing who’s skin next winter.
“I mean you’ve waited six months for this appointment,” she said. “Are you prepared to deal with this guy shrugging his shoulders like everybody else?”
The tiger lost track of the trail as a blizzard set in and died shortly thereafter, of exposure.
“Are you even listening to me?”
I leaned my head towards the running boards where the speakers were. Where I hoped my mind might be, rolling from side to side with the motion of the car like a favorite to-go mug, one we thought lost forever.
“Oh…” I said. “Missing hiker.”
At the trailhead was the little box where you wrote your name. Maybe that’s how they knew. Everyone else signed twice.
Leah shook her head.
At the service, too, they would sign—that same blank book.
The Procedure
It was in the back of an old laundromat where she had it done. The procedure was illegal. Other lovers would have called it a waste but her current seemed to like the idea. He was old fashioned, a romantic—showed her a video of Bette Davis on a train platform, her face streaked with tears.
He wanted to come. Some things you did on your own. She waited for the darkness to relax into day and left before he woke. The streets were empty, the sun in its cloak of clouds. Supposedly there was a time when you couldn’t even look at it.
The lover’s thing was: he wanted to taste them. She’d never been to the ocean and as far as she knew, neither had he.
The laundromat’s windows were a tight grid of bars, plywood over the door where someone scrawled in the magenta of topped beets, It’s not your eyes that are broken. It’s your heart.
Inside, every last machine had been pried apart for the coins. On the back wall an old quilt hung as a curtain and behind it was another place, a dark room with no windows, a candle burning within and a woman there. She almost didn’t see the woman at first—a shadow in the dark—slowly turning a needle in the flame. She had her papers but the woman didn’t seem to care, showing her into the chair, leaning her back, whispering what was to come. How she had to keep her eyes open the entire time. It was like a digging a well, the woman said. They dug it deep, as far back as you could remember. Afterwards, the well would fill. With what, was up to her. No guarantees. Like sorrow, it didn’t always work.
Greg Tebbano’s fiction has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, NOON, Witness, Epiphany, Southern Humanities Review, Meridian and Post Road. He lives and works harder than necessary in Nowhere, New York.
