The Midnight Side of Medium

Somebody told me Ana returned from her jaunt. Jaunt? That's what she said. Jaunt. I called off work and waited for her call. Three days and then the phone and that urgency in her voice again, "Oh the skies! You're everywhere in the clouds." I hung up and drove out to where the city lights couldn't reach, to the Outskirts and Goldie's. I'd wanted to end it‹figured I would lie and tell her I met someone unmarried and unmarred‹but now. I didn't feel so certain.

I'd done some pro bono work for Goldie‹pictures of her husband bent over a scarecrow stripper in a cornfield that gave Goldie this place. The stripper had been found strung up and the husband went to some other end of the world.

"Ana back." That was Goldie, statements instead of questions, because she already knew all the answers. Smoke never reached her, a clear demarcation outlined her body, as if she were cut-out and placed in this scene like a childhood doll. She had natural golden hair, like the stalks of corn or wheat catching that last slant of day.

I sat at the corner table and made myself not watch the door, watched Goldie instead, wondered about the nuance of feelings, the protectiveness I felt for her, a brotherly feeling devoid of lust. She represented some happiness that my insides kept at a distance. She winked at me and sent me a flock of Wild Turkeys, the Dirty Bird, on the rocks. I could drink a million glasses and never feel get that change from restlessness to peace.

And then Ana descended into the chair. "The sky looks like the way my daughter used to draw them. Always gray. With the white of the paper here and there." She had a solidity to her, the way women used to be built on black and white posters men carried overseas to war.

I was out with it too-quick. "I'm done," I said.

A spate of silence. The waitress interrupted. Ana ordered her steak, asked for it to be done on the midnight side of medium. The waitress wrote it down as if it meant something. The purpose of communication, I told Ana, had to do with translating your desire into something translatable.

"I went to a monastery. Up a mountain, through a forest. I sat on rocks." Ana reminded me of an archetype, the Feminine, undiluted, a direct lineage back to whom? Eve. And I was Adam, clinging to some outdated rules, a love of rightness that hid fear and weakness.

"And you found what, Ana? A oneness?"

"No. That I have. I saw this, your crying out 'enough.'"

"I didn't quite cry."

"And I didn't want you to. Remarkable. That not wanting. But so much to lose."

"Things, Ana. So many things to lose."

"Yes. A million things. That man‹the one who took her and‹what do you do to him?"

"What he deserved. Nothing more."

I'd tracked him down to a tiny hole in the city. He'd fucked Ana's six-year old in the ass, ripped her from the insides. They'd found her daughter in a dumpster, her vagina cut out. He'd been one of Ana's husband's men, someone who would've walked otherwise; instead, he ended up in tiny pieces and ground into a garbage disposal.

"Just us," Ana said. I'd finished the last Dirty Bird. Ana sipped her rusted water. "I figured it out. It took a while but I did."

"And what about the Man Upstairs?" It still had the ability to amaze me, all that one could own in this world‹not just statues and stables and motorcars, but entire buildings and everyone who worked inside. And abstract things, such as laws and judgments and even the sky that filled with one's acid and fell back upon us all in the city and beyond.

The world grew too still. I'd invoked his name and there he stood in the threshold between there and here. Ana and everyone turned toward that presence, except Goldie, who looked at me and reached under the bar. He strode toward our corner. Unlike Goldie, who shone against this backdrop, he gained a oneness with the smoke, appearing as himself and his shadow. He stood over our table. He appeared cut from something other than I, of rocks from some other age.

"She isn't yours," he said.

"No," I said. "I guess not." He would take her and then have terrible things done to me. I gestured at Goldie and she left whatever she had under that bar alone.

The steak had arrived. Ana twisted back toward it and cut it open. A joyless grin. She turned the cut toward me so I could see the abstract never made visible‹the midnight side of medium missed once again‹and the gray clouds moved across her face, the inevitability of dreams no one else could fathom.

Randall Brown teaches writing at Saint Joseph's University. He is a Pushcart nominee and holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Vermont College and a BA from Tufts University. His stories, poems, and essays have been published widely, with recent work appearing or forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, Connecticut Review, The Saint Ann's Review, Dalhousie Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Vestal Review, Cairn, King's English, and others. He has recently finished a collection of (very) short fiction, Mad To Live.

He has also had the pleasure of working closely with some amazing writers, including Douglas Glover, Abby Frucht, Nance Van Winckel, Terri-Brown Davidson, Ellen Lesser, and Pamela Painter. And he's a supporter of a number of literary journals, including Night Train, London Magazine, Zoetrope All-Story, Crazyhorse, and others.

Email: Randall Brown

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