Interview
Eniko Deptuch Vághy: Hi, Justin, it’s great to chat with you today. I also wanted to say how
awesome it is to have you be a part of Lover’s Eye Press.
Justin J. Allen: Thank you, Eni, it’s really a privilege to be a part of this. You’ve put a lot of work
in, along with the other contributors and editors so far, and it shows.
EDV: You’re our Fiction Editor and I’ve always wanted to ask you what attracted you to fiction
rather than poetry or essays. I know you write in both these forms, and well, but I also know that
you access the short story most frequently. What is it about the craft of fiction and the form of
the short story that keeps you returning to them?
JJA: I love all of these genres, but I think fiction has always been the ultimate for me because it
let me deeply inhabit other lives and worlds at times when I really needed that. I’ve always loved
losing myself in a narrative and been a pretty voracious reader, and originally wanted to write
big, ambitious novels. I always liked short stories but it was during my attempts at writing a
novel and concurrently, doing freelance journalism that I really got into short fiction in a new
way.
Raymond Carver, for sure, became an inspiration but so did many other writers, doing very
different things with the short story, like Jorge Luis Borges or Kobo Abe or Flannery O’Connor.
Or Melville, even, or Roberto Bolaño — both known as these writers of vast novels but I like
their short stories the best. I saw that it was such a flexible form, and could be used for either
these vivid snapshots of life, or experiments in form and perspective, or even contain a big and
novelistic idea scaled down and compressed. So, the short story really became my focus, and
there’s so much interesting and great writing being done with the form.
EDV: How do you approach the stories you write? Do you start them with an established idea for
a plot, or do you begin with an image or the idea of a character/narrator and move on from there?
JJA: It pretty much always starts with some kind of central image or idea — a scenario or
situation more than a plot, that’s like the seed of a story. The plot comes from following that
litttle kernel wherever it goes. I usually get ideas at unexpected times, in the middle of something
else, so I’ll take a quick note on my phone and come back to it later. I have a bunch of these,
most of which I never develop, but some will keep nagging at me. There’s always some
emotional trigger there, something I connect to that becomes like an itch I feel like I have to
scratch.
I’ll give an example of one pulled at random from my notes: “A man visits his grandmother in a
care home for dementia and finds her deep in a strange relationship with her care robot. She
speaks to the robot as if they are lovers. The robot is endlessly patient. The man observes, talks
to the robot as well, and is troubled by the depth of ‘role playing’ the robot seems engaged in.”
It’s not really a plot, because I don’t know where it’s going. It’s a scenario that strikes me, that
I’m able to visualize. Having had two grandmothers go through dementia, I have some strong
feelings about the prospect of autonomous caregiving robots.
I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything with this particular idea – it’s a more in the realm of
speculative fiction than what I usually do. Although I think that life often outpaces literary
fiction in its strangeness. To take the care robots idea — it’s not far-fetched, it’s not even science
fiction, they’ve already been testing this idea in Japan for years. I kind of think of my work as
‘dystopian realism’ or some other variant of realism that’s a little off-kilter, in a way that I hope
reflects the real strangeness of the world in its unfolding and how I’ve experienced it.
EDV: What are your greatest influences? And I’m not just talking about literary
influences—though those definitely count, and I’d love to hear them—but influences relating to
other kinds of artists or even places and people. What stokes your inspiration?
JJA: Well, I’ve already talked about some of my literary influences, but I also can throw out of a
few others whose work is super important to me. Joan Didion, as a writer from California, and of
course Raymond Carver, but also lesser-known California writers like Luis J. Rodriguez. For a
while, the Russians loomed large for me, mainly Dostoyevski and Gogol. As a young person it
was important to immerse in what felt like transgressive, adventurous writing from people on
society’s margins — Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, stuff that felt like a literary
equivalent of music I was into — punk, gothic/industrial, hip-hop.
Music has always been very important to me — the first published writing I did was music
journalism — and also cinema. With David Lynch having just passed away, I’ve got to mention
him. He was so brilliant at working in different media, and constantly trying new things. One
thing I like the most about his work is that as experimental, dark or menacing as it can be, there’s
an empathy and warmth that shines through that makes it more than some purely formal exercise,
or gratuitous in some way.
California is always a big influence — my home state, and having lived in both the small towns
and big cities and suburbs, and lived in or traveled to a bunch of different parts of it, it’s totally
something that shaped me and informed as a person. It can be such a land of extremes, of high
aspirations and utopian hopes but also of crushing realities and disappointment. Landscapes and
ecologies that are so beautiful, but also rugged or arid. Despite living in Chicago since 2018, I
still imagine most of my stories taking place there.
I think I’m constantly in need of fresh inspiration, as a person who wants to think with other
people and see what they’re thinking and feeling. Lately Teju Cole’s essays have been satisfying
that need for me, and I’m a fan of his fiction as well, and share some of his preoccupations:
cities, memory, estrangement, the role of the traveler or stranger.
EDV: I know your work pretty well by now and I’m thinking of some of the short stories you
previously published. You often address loneliness and disconnection, but you allow your
characters to inhabit these emotions in a very vibrant way. For your characters, it seems that
loneliness and disconnection don’t just constitute a lack of company or understanding, it’s
actually occupied by other emotions, influenced by other perceptions. In “Eternal Life,” you
focus on an older man whose paranoia eventually leads him to lose his wife and quality of life,
and then in your latest story “233 Hermosa Way,” you personify a house that is not selling, but
that desperately wants to be claimed. What is it about the more somber and isolated aspects of
experience that interest you?
JJA: Maybe what I’m interested in is the difficulty and complications of going towards the
opposite of somber and isolated — striving after fulfillment and community. There’s definitely a
part of me that’s still processing and working through some traumatic events and difficult periods
of my life, and my creative work is a place to make something out of those experiences. But also,
I’m attracted to stories that take the reader through a moment of crisis, where some of the big
questions about life, the self, or how to be with others get surfaced and something important is at
stake for the characters.
EDV: When you’re reading through fiction submissions for LEP, what do you look for? What
perspectives and voices do you hope to read?
JJA: You know, I’m pretty open when it comes to genre and form so it’s not a particular style and
definitely not a particular subject matter. And I’m definitely hoping for a broad range of
perspectives, standpoints, experiences informing the work, so it could really be work by anyone
and about anything. What I’m hoping to encounter is work that has an emotional core to it, that
connects, feels important to the writer and also to the reader. I’m also looking for writing that
resists the obvious, resists cliché, embraces detail and specificity, takes risks but is still coherent
or self-consistent. Writing fiction is hard. I’m just a humble practitioner and super fan of it when
it’s done well, which can be done in endlessly divergent ways.
EDV: What projects are you currently working on? What will be occupying your creativity in
2025?
JJA: I’m currently working on some stories I started writing during the Covid pandemic that
explore that time, the first of which is published in this issue. I also have a collection of creative
non-fiction, or autobiographical fiction (that distinction is still getting worked out) about a period
of time quite a while ago when I was just out of my teens, living at a treatment facility after I’d
hit a real rock bottom. I met these very interesting people there, and figuring out how to
responsibly write about them and how much of myself to include is a real challenge.
I pay the bills as a web designer, and that requires creativity in a more narrow band, but also
leads me to interesting collaborations. This year I’ll be completing work with my brother Preston
on a forthcoming feature documentary film on homelessness in Sacramento called Unhoused
Neighbors. I’m a sort of free-range creative consultant and designer on the project, building the
website, contributing music, offering feedback on successive rounds of edits. It’s been very cool
to be a part of it.
EDV: I love asking this question, so we’ll tie off our conversation with it—what are you
obsessed with? You can name one thing, or many things—a whole paragraph of things, even.
JJA: The thing that comes to mind right now is language. Kind of obvious for a writer, but there’s
a kind of tension that’s for me something particular. I’m often thinking about the inadequacies or
limits of language as representation, or how language is used to mask reality rather than map it.
I’m bad at learning other languages but am making an effort right now with Italian, and have
been going at Spanish on and off for many years. And what wrestling with another language
brings up for me is how mysterious the whole thing is, how much we take for granted, how much
is lost in the gaps between languages or what language itself can’t fully grasp. Language is a
kind of mystery; it seems to form part of the way we structure thought itself so it’s such a
powerful medium, but so powerful it’s hard to control. It’s so tricky to try and wield it creatively
because it’s the stuff of everyday communication as well as full of the affordances that poets
have made use of. It gets away from us, it exceeds us, we get lost in the labyrinths of our own
uses of language.
EDV: Thank you so much, Justin. I loved your responses.
JJA: Thank you, Eni.
Wrong turn
Six weeks into lockdown, Nathan had already exhausted his initial enthusiastic venture into nurturing his hobbies and starting new ones. Soon after retiring, he’d become a stalwart volunteer at an animal shelter. He was anxious to get back to the shelter, but his and his wife’s health conditions — ‘co-morbidities’ to Covid-19 — ruled that out.
“I like being home,” Roberta said.
“You’ve always liked being home.”
“You’ve always had to have someplace to go. This is a big change for you.”
He thought he detected a slight tone of gloating, of “you’ve never had to face yourself.” Which had some truth to it, or he could have just been hearing things. Cooped up, it was easy to get irritable. He was sent into introspection. He went back into the garage. His woodworking area was littered with half-baked projects. Through the skylight, the light turned pink; the sun was going down. Twenty minutes later, Roberta came in.
“It’s Amy calling.”
She handed over the tablet, he tapped it, and on its mirrored slate a glowing face appeared. Pale, elfin, framed in long black hair. A smile still full of baby teeth.
“Hi Grandpa,” she said.
“Hello Amy, hello!”
“What time is it there?”
“Oh, it’s first thing in the morning,” he said. This was a little game they played.
“No, it’s not!” she said.
“What time it is in Santa Monica?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have dinner yet?”
“No. Mom and dad are working.”
“Are they? Seems like it’s about time to lay off.”
The inside of the apartment jiggled, overhead lights smeared and flashed as Amy walked through with her iPad; Nathan glimpsed her mother — his daughter Sara — on the living room couch busily typing on a laptop while engaged in a conversation on a headset. It was a small apartment, and in a state of great disorder.
“I wish we could go out to the beach,” Amy said.
“Could you go wearing masks, and staying far away from people?”
“Mom says to be safe we need to just stay home right now, because people aren’t taking it serious.”
“Well, she has a point there. Some people aren’t taking it as seriously as they need to.”
“Mom says she could get extra sick from it, because she has asthma.”
“That’s right. We have to be extra careful too, because I have a heart problem, and your grandma has diabetes.”
“Are you and Grandma staying home all the time?”
“Yeah, that’s right. We even had our groceries delivered. I don’t really like doing that, because what you get delivered never turns out to be just what you expected. But we’re lucky to be able to do it.”
Amy was in her room now. The floor was strewn with toys and clothing, dresser drawers disgorged, bed a tangle, on which Amy now sat, trying on different cartoon heads using the device’s software. Amy’s head became a giant, blank gray egg, an ‘alien’ face. It rotated slightly, blinked, ponderous and tired. The mouth that opened slightly, lips made into a tube, then closed, reminded him suddenly of that embryonic fish-like weirdness of an infant.
“Ok, that was funny. How about we just be ourselves now? No more faces.”
The alien head flickered for a moment, and he saw Amy’s face, not amused or smiling, but absorbed and distracted, then it was replaced by a big cartoon frog.
“Ribbit,” she said. “Ribbit. I want to eat some flies.”
Nathan sighed, and leaned back in his seat. He wasn’t in the mood, but he’d play along. After a while, a sound grew in the room beyond Amy’s: voices colliding, disrupting each other, competing with volume and intensity. Sara’s high-strung pitch, Billy’s agitated baritone. Nathan couldn’t make out the words over Amy’s chatter and his own nonsensical responses, which were far from inspired, but seemed to satisfy Amy’s minimum expectations.
“You act like you’re the only one!” Billy’s voice cut in during a lull.
“Bullshit I do, you’re on Zoom calls all fucking day and at the end of it, who’s ...”
Amy (still a frog) spoke over the argument, apparently oblivious.
“I used to live on a pond in the bayou. Do you know what a bayou is?”
Nathan hesitated, trying to listen for what was happening in the next room.
“Grandpa, do you know what a bayou is?”
*
Roberta, in her office, had retreated into a Zen-like state of mindfulness and marijuana. Austere but plush, what little furniture in it was earth-toned and padded, low-slung. She burned incense on her little Catholic-Buddhist shrine of Marys and Buddhas, did yoga, drank tea and smoked, (always opening the screen door so it would quickly air out), listened to world music or — perhaps this more than anything else — did beadwork or knitting while listening to podcasts. She kept her phone on ‘Do not distract.’ Everything was a meditation, and she did on occasion literally meditate, sitting in silent contemplation on a floor chair on the big purple pad. Sometimes these reveries turned into naps.
How could he complain? She was nearly a model of healthy stress management, with the only drawback for him being that she was sort of frustratingly content. No, it was a more than that: she was inaccessible, adrift in her head although consistently in a generous mood. He felt he would like to commiserate with her over how frustrating this all was, but above all he didn’t want to immiserate her. Her equilibrium had not always been like this, and he feared upsetting it. So he made peace with her withdrawing into solitude.
He usually went to bed alone, these days, long before she did.
*
This morning, he slept in after Roberta, which was unusual. There was a curious fatigue in these days of isolation that set in. He felt exhausted by not going out, by doing nothing. There was a temptation to sleep it off, and that did seem to help sometimes. While pouring his coffee he heard the news on NPR: “30 million filed for unemployment.”
It was incredible, horrible. He felt adrift, floating on a suddenly liquid earth. He shuffled out into the backyard as if he’d just discovered he was a very old man, who couldn’t be bothered to completely lift his feet. Under the constant sound of the highway, there was birdsong. He tried to focus on the birdsong. But the nagging, stressful hush of the highway was something he couldn’t un-hear; a kind of gash that leaked emptiness into his mind.
He went back inside. He saw, on his phone, a missed Facetime call from his granddaughter. He went to find the tablet he used for these visits, then into the garage to call her back.
*
On the other side of the screen, the disorder of the apartment had gotten worse. It was now more than disorganized or cluttered; it looked dirty, neglected, like evidence of depression. Sara was on the couch, surrounded by piles of papers and dirty clothes, wearing rumpled sweatpants and her old Berkeley shirt. Her feet were propped on a coffee table heaped with dishes and takeout containers, above which he even glimpsed flies. Sara was haggard, hunched over her laptop, oblivious to anything but its pale glow.
Billy, meanwhile, was in an equal state of digital transfixion in the small office that had been converted from the apartment’s walk-in closet. Amy rarely passed by him when she was on calls with Nathan, but on a recent occasion that she did — once crawling under his desk as he worked while carrying on the conversation — Nathan noticed the proliferation of beer bottles. It suggested that Billy was either not always working while at his desk, or worse, working while drinking.
*
There was a sign outside the grocery store, tall and yellow with big, black lettering: “No entry without a mask.” His mask was on, from the stock of N95’s in his workshop which made him well prepared for this pandemic from its inception.
Home, he went immediately to wash his hands in the bathroom. He took off the mask and hung it on a hook. He washed up to his elbows, lathering and then rinsing. The mask itself and the elastic straps had left lines on his face so pronounced, he grew concerned about his circulation.
But it was after he washed his face, dried it, and looked at it again closely that it really alarmed him. It wasn’t the lines from the mask, or the blotchiness that had grown under it as his hot breath had warmed it. It was the lines that never left, now, the circles under his eyes, the hollows under his cheekbones. He felt suddenly certain that the pandemic, even if it spared him and his wife, was going to leave its mark on them.
*
“Let me have the iPad,” Sara said, and the screen juddered and blurred, flashing the walls and ceiling as she wrested the device from her daughter. The image settled on the newly lined face of a mother in early middle age, hair stringy, successive days of exhaustion which she hadn’t recovered from written on her like a palimpsest. She did not smile, but he did, feeling he was compensating.
“This is hell, Dad.”
“I know.”
She sighed.
“How are we supposed to do this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bill and I are running in place. That’s what I keep thinking of. Sisyphus. Groundhog Day. This apartment is a hamster wheel and we’re just going non-stop — work blurs into parenting, there’s no break between the two. I have no space — not even the space of a commute. The times I used to be bored, in between places ... like, waiting to get my bangs trimmed: that’s almost the thing I miss the most.”
She was wiping away tears, but as if this excretion were itself another annoyance: she had no space for feelings, even as she was having them.
“Work isn’t really slowing down. They want us to stay productive, so if anything it’s more meetings, more reports. Everyone’s concerned about sustainability and a recession coming, so it’s just this grant and that grant, new funding streams to look into, lists, briefs, summaries. It was always busy. But now …”
“Your mother and I are happy to talk, hang out, have storytime with Amy. As often as it helps.”
“Thank you for that. Although—”
“What?”
“It seems like mom is kind of checked out.”
“She’s managing this by taking it extremely slow.”
“Are you guys” Sara started, before an abrupt stop. “Anyway, thank you. I’m in Zoom meetings for hours every day. Thank God for the virtual background. There’s not a single presentable part of this apartment. So instead, I make it look like I’m in some library in Genoa. I don’t have time to even bathe, so I throw on some foundation and lipstick and a clean shirt. It’s this like, insane facade.”
“Could you, I don’t know, phone it in a little? Isn’t that what a lot of people are doing these days?”
“God, I know — baking sourdough and making pickles. There are people I see all over social media with this. It’s like a new form of social pressure. I just don’t have the energy for it. We’re eating, like, frozen burritos and pizza.”
Nathan took a breath, glancing up at a bottle of pickles on his shelf and feeling a pang of guilt.
“I wish we were closer. I wish there was more we could do right now.”
“But even if you were, we couldn’t see each other.”
Nathan shook his head.
“We’re going to have to start clustering at some point. To be able to support each other.”
Sara had a distant, absent look.
“There’s a couple friends here with kids that we know. If we could merge our quarantine with theirs, that would make life so much easier. But that’s just not on the table right now.”
“I know.”
Sara looked up, looked around. She got up and Nathan watched the ceiling jerk and blur as Sara went to the bedroom, closed the door. She propped up the iPad and reflexively curled up on the bed in a way that sharply reminded Nathan of when she was just eight or nine years old — feet tucked under her legs sprawled out to the side, reclining in comfort but with something girlish and vulnerable in the pose. She sobbed in earnest now, taking deep breaths in between.
“The walls are closing in.”
“I know. I know.”
“It feels like ... I don’t know, life is over. We were just starting to know people, a couple years in from the move to L.A. It’s hard here, especially so busy with a little one and working. And now it’s like a curtain came down. And the rent! What are we even paying all this money for, when we could be anywhere!?”
“This is gonna pass. It has to.”
“I’m struggling to see past this to the other side. It brings out these feelings I have, like how did I let myself get stuck doing this development shit. It’s been years now, and I’m getting older. It’s gone so fast. Nobody’s gonna let me do anything else. Not even journalism, much less ... creative writing, I mean what a joke.”
Nathan held his tongue. All the things he could think of to say were hopeful platitudes he’d voiced enough times before. Sara’s tears had again subsided, and she cocked her head as voices from the other room indicated turbulence between Amy and Billy.
“I find myself wondering if this is the last wrong turn.”
“What? The pandemic? You didn’t ...”
“No. I mean California. It’s not just starting over in another place, it’s a place that’s so huge, so complicated. Was this a wrong turn? Do I have the energy to even find my way out of this? Even before this happened, I was feeling like building our networks here was going to be like navigating a swamp. At midnight. Everybody’s out to project some idea of themselves, you have no idea what they really do or who they really know. Live here your whole life and it would be confusing — we’re dropping in at a point where we’re already old and tired.”
“You know how that sounds to someone who really is old and tired.”
“I know, I know how fucking lucky I — we — are. But I’m just being honest with myself about this middle age shit. Maybe I want to quit grasping at this fucking media career idea which is always out of reach. Maybe I want to do something less ambitious, not more. Really have time for Amy, the time she needs. I was neglecting her before, and now it’s just something I can’t escape any minute of the day.”
“Well, like I said. Anytime. However long is helpful, however long she’ll stay on the call. We can read together, play games.”
“Thanks Dad. Thanks so much.”
She had to go, she said. The sounds in the next room were escalating. Bill’s booming voice sounded terrible.
*
The row of bottles on the shelf bubbled. Air, in the clear plastic airlocks, bounced up like little glass beads thrown off by the growing ferment inside the jugs. They were at intervals, giving off random syncopated patterns of bubble — he’d shown this to Amy, and they’d turned it into a moment of music-making as she shook a maraca and whistled on her end to the close-up sound of the bubbles. It was a big consolation, having the time for pandemic hobbies.
Like the tomatoes in his garden, these little bottled galaxies of fermentation were growing while he slept. They were alive — the jugs each was its own biosphere of yeast — he had read somewhere that. It gave him — the slowly transforming jugs of blackberry and dandelion wine, of apple and herbal vinegar, of kombucha and beer — something to look forward to, not just the eventual consumption but even more critically, the small bit of work that would be required at some later date.
*
He watched a movie with Amy, an old Charlie Chaplin movie, “Modern Times” which he hadn’t seen for years. Throughout the film, he read the screen titles aloud and they talked over the film’s action.
“Why does he walk that way?” she asked.
“It’s just a funny walk he does in all his movies.”
“Are those people homeless?” she asked about the street urchins, and he said “yes, homeless is what we call them today.”
“Is he homeless?”
“Who? The tramp? Kind of, yes. He’s sort of … looking for a home.”
The slightly pixelated and cropped image, filtered through the video call, was nonetheless transfixing. The sun went down, and the garage was dark. The film held Amy’s attention right through almost to the end, when she fell asleep. He didn’t realize it at right away, watching the TV through the propped-up iPad which didn’t show Amy at all.
*
This many months into the quarantine, Nathan’s sense of time developed a strange, sharply uneven elasticity: it sped by, as if tightly contracted, then suddenly stretched out. One of these moments happened when he was in the kitchen, having wandered in aimlessly around 11 a.m. with no objective in mind. A small insect was perched on the wall above the sink. Nathan stepped in for a closer look. It had a skinny, tubular body, the color of coffee with too much cream. What was striking was the pattern over the brown, white ovals clustered and outlined in black, like tiny clouds painted on this tiny body, then covered in a coat of clear lacquer.
It was beautiful, this small beetle or whatever it was. Nathan had never seen anything like it. He remembered a saying from somewhere, some naturalist who said “God, if he exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles,” due to their nearly infinite varieties. Staring at this beetle, so small, just inches away from his nose, it was suddenly hard to believe it was natural at all, and not a toy. Maybe God had made this beetle, was in this beetle right now. The thought was absurd, and given the state of the world right now, hardly comforting. God must be a great idiot savant, a maker of genius but with a sadistic streak, who wound up his toys and then set them loose simply to watch them destroy each other, break down, and make way for new inventions.
*
Nathan read to Amy so long, one evening and into the night, that his voice became hoarse: almost the entire latter half of “The BFG.” Amy, again, fell asleep with the iPad still on. He waited for a while to be sure, first continuing to read, then finally stopping, and watching her sleeping face for signs she would reawaken, before hanging up. He sat in the lamplit clutter of his familiar garage, listening to the hum of the space heater that kept the chill away. It wouldn’t be long until there was snow.
A Facetime call from Amy’s iPad startled him. He thought it would be Amy, having woken up, but instead it was his daughter, in Amy’s room.
“Sara,” he said. “So nice to see your face.”
Which he meant. But she did not look well.
“Thank you for reading her to sleep. I was working late, and then…”
“Of course, of course.”
“Dad,” she said and then paused. “I was hoping this could be a time for reflection. But there’s no perspective, I have less of it than ever. Reflection on your life requires distance. Now, there’s no distance.”
She sighed, long and slow. She moved into her bedroom, which was lit only by one small lamp, and her face fell into shadow as she reclined on the bed.
“What I wouldn’t give to be alone right now. To have had this happen when I was single. At first, I had moments where I thought ‘oh, you know how hard it is to be a parent during coronavirus, but it must be even worse to be alone.’ I had these generous feelings of empathy. Now? Not a shred. The single people I’m working with have no idea how easy they have it.”
It was finally time to ask.
“So — how are things with you and Bill?”
Her head swiveled up and to the left. She listened for a moment, then looked back at the screen.
“Not now” she mouthed silently.
Nathan nodded.
*
A few days later, she called in the morning. Voice only, from her phone. He heard the sound of waves, then her voice. He asked if she was at the beach.
“Yeah, on a walk.”
“Good, good.”
“Trying to get out more often. Actually — it wasn’t an option not to.”
There was a pause, and the rumble of wind blowing into the phone mic.
“So yeah. Things are really not good with Bill. We take turns sleeping in the living room now, so we don’t have to sleep in the same bed.”
“How long?”
“Last few weeks.”
“What if you and Amy came out here?”
“That … I mean thank you, but that sounds risky.”
“You could test before coming.”
“But then we’d get potentially exposed on the plane.”
“You could mask.”
“You know what? We could drive.”
“It’s a long drive to Milwaukee.”
“I know. But you know what? I miss it. Especially now. In the fall. It’s just … feels like giving up, you know?”
“On what?”
“On everything. Bill, career stuff.”
“I’m just talking about a trip. You’re already working remotely.”
“Bill’s been saying we should move to Oregon. I’m like, if we’re going to consider that, why not Wisconsin? He has a real hangup about the Midwest. He’s still on this ‘West Coast is the best coast’ thing. He doesn’t know what he’s even talking about.”
“You guys are fighting a lot?”
“Unfortunately. Yes.”
“That’s really …”
“I know, it’s not good for Amy. It’s terrible. I’m embarrassed about it, every time, every time we finish yelling at each other while she’s in the next room able to hear us.”
The voice of a panhandler suddenly interjected — “ma’am, could you spare a dollar for some food?”
“Not today,” Sara said.
A moment later, she added, addressing Nathan now: “I’m not always saying no, Dad. It’s just that every time I go out, I get asked so many times.”
As she talked, he went through the hallway to the room that had once been hers. He sat down on the guest bed. He’d had the room wallpapered with blue stripes, matching a blue bedspread that had belonged to his mother. The wallpaper had covered over some cryptic scrawls and marks on the wall from Sara. That hadn’t troubled him at the time, but now he wondered what it would be like for her to sit in this room, knowing her teenage graffiti was hiding under the new wallpaper. If it were him, he’d be tempted to peel it back. Were there names, written there, that would otherwise remain forgotten?
On the other end of the line, Nathan heard the wind, and behind that, the waves crashing.
“I just don’t know,” she said. “We’re in a holding pattern.”
What could he say? He quickly rehearsed something.
The problem is, he did not say, you don’t know when you’ve made a wrong turn until later. But she was old enough to know that. Everything is a risk. You can never double back. You can only tack forward.
“You know what?” she said. And from her tone, he suddenly knew what she was going to say next, and he was happy.
Justin J. Allen was born in California and studied creative writing in San Francisco. His short
fiction has been published in journals including Catamaran, Crannóg, Cagibi and Stone Canoe.
His journalistic work has appeared in EdSource, Full Stop Quarterly and other publications. He
lives in Chicago.