Arthur Smid is an artist living in Portland, Oregon. He regularly writes about culture for online magazines. If you’re curious about what goes on in Portland, he invites you to comment on his site. When Smid’s not busy collaborating in his hometown, he likes to correspond with people from around the world. He has taught English as a Second Language in Japan and Spain. Currently, he is at work on a book of performance poetry to fuel the next adventure.

I hear her on the phone in the kitchen. “He’s gay,” she says. Stopping at the foot of the stairs, I try to figure out if I am gay. I have my right hand on the handrail, and it looks gay. My right hand is definitely the gayest part of me. I take my hand off the handrail, stand there a minute and listen.

“He’s nice, but he never tells me I’m beautiful. He never admires my body.” I walk into the kitchen. Jill covers the mouthpiece and tells me under her breath, “I’m talking with your mother.”

Passing the kitchen table, I take a banana from the fruit bowl and pull a chair around and sit backwards on it.

“We really look forward to seeing you,” she says to my mother in New Jersey. I don’t want to go to New Jersey. I don’t know what Jill is talking about. She isn’t talking about me.

“Do we need to talk?” I ask when Jill hangs up the phone.

“I’ve been sleeping with your brother,” she says, “and I think he’s gay.”

“Why do you sleep with Rick?” I ask.

“Because he always comes home drunk and sometimes I help him into bed,” she says. My younger brother can’t be blamed for his indifference to my wife’s body.

“He’s okay,” I venture. “Of course he won’t allow himself to get it on with you.”

Rick comes in the kitchen. His hair is flat and sticking up on one side. His eyes are puffy and half-open.

“Hey,” he says.

“Good morning,” I say.

“Hi Rick,” Jill says.

“So what’s going on?” I ask Rick.

“What?” he counters.

“Are you gay?” I ask. Rick looks in the refrigerator a minute and takes out a jug of apple juice.

“Maybe that’s what I need to figure out,” he says and sits down and drinks out of the jug. None of this really matters to me. I stand up and walk over to Jill and kiss her on the cheek.

“See you,” I say to Rick. I leave the house and then I think: maybe, this does matter. I walk over to the kitchen window and watch Jill drop her robe and start to make breakfast. Rick just sits there.

I go back in the house and holler out, “Hey, did I forget my keys in there?” In a minute Jill walks out with her robe tied. I’m standing in the nude with an erection.

“Let me try,” I say and walk past her into the kitchen.

Rhiannon Lewis-Stephenson, traveler, poet, writer, cynic, romantic, and a bit of a freak, a student (as of now) of institutionalized learnings in Humboldt, trying to move to Portland or Seattle.

Beatrice’s mind was art gone wrong, a weathered collage that had been peeling loose ever since he left her. She had led a separate life from me since the beginning, but I couldn’t mind, her innocence prevailed her. I would watch her strange rituals sometimes, her compact self completely still in the warm dirt of our garden with the bees kissing her crimson flowered t-shirt as though she sweated honey. The buzzing did not affect her in the least bit; she would close her eyes like she was listening to symphonies played by Beethoven; the music of the bees surrounding her. They were the heroes of the flowers, their rites so engraved in their communities of marigolds, daffodils, and penny royal, absorbed past distraction. Their work was thorough, gentle, and without selfishness, and I could only believe that I would have not known these simple details of the bees if it was not for Beatrice’s unprejudiced sight. So I loved her, because she took me past the judgment I had held against their stingers, and let me lose myself in their strength.

Some days I found Beatrice in her hole of sadness, having fallen too far in for even the bees. On these days, I would tell her stories of my days in college, still only a sophomore, my two years of college hardly making it a well-known experience; but I knew enough of the bustle and hum of paperwork to feel pain from it. I would explain my hatred of all the endless reference papers I constantly had to cite, the glances and the gossip. I knew that she didn’t care but I felt that one does as one can. Whether she listened to me or not, it doesn’t matter now, but I realize that I could have, and should have, tried harder. She received no one but me when she fell in such a state, and then, in these moments, we were friends.

Beatrice spoke to me less than any person I knew, but in those few words she taught me more than anyone had. “In which that you despise, you love.” Her advice would echo constantly in my head, the little sentences, the strings of poetry she spoke like the trickle of a mother’s breast. The effect of her dark redwood eyes would leave me lost, feeling as though I had been passed through a different place, one unknown to my chosen state.

When she would speak, her lashes would flicker, a half lit lamp. It’s my soul, she would tell me, it has been halfway blown out. Only then would I choose to leave because it was then that the good time would end, the quiet would enter the room, her head would bow down, and the smiles would grow fewer. Her guilt, she engulfed herself inside of it, its hungry belly eating her up until I would feel as though I did not know her.

At times when she was well, I would imagine that maybe she would take me away, her gypsy talk would light me up inside and make the wildflowers look a lot brighter; for she threw reality away like it was naught but a piece of scratch paper:

“We’re the whole thing, Damien, we walk with those who did not burn the witch, we advise those who lose themselves inside these cities. You’re only a part of me, as I can only be that part of your imagination, so I sing to you and you play me guitar. Those who tell of riches and your box houses, they’re the stingers on the bees, the venom in the snake. For whose life are they to judge? Our roads we take are dust-scattered and there the fires burn. You cannot be accepted because you look through glass windows and you do not see where the villain went, but you question why the hero’s heart was broken.”

It would be nonsense speech, and the people who would visit her would leave telling me, “She is definitely not quite right, Damien. Except for her beauty, there is nothing here for you anymore. You are passing your point of common sense, boy, it’s time to quit.”

They would offer me full paid jobs in which I could write my stories whenever I wanted to, in beautiful sites of green grass and oaks, but I could only refuse and think of who’s really all right in the real world.

Beatrice never spoke to me of him, but I knew he was there always, behind her lilted speech, I could feel the hurt inside of her. His bus had come and gone, and he had gotten off a long time ago, but she still held the ticket in her right pocket. Some nights I would find her sitting near the telephone, her wild eyes blank and sad. These moments I would feel the bees inside me bursting to come free and the jab of their precious stingers against my heart, for her love was never mine, and my love was always hers.

Stefan Lombard is a magazine editor, photographer, and freelance writer. He
lives with his wife in Portland, Oregon, and together they have no pets. See more at www.slombard.com.

We’re walking, she and I. We’re just walking, on our way home from Freddy’s. We’re earth conscious and crap, so we bring our own bag–it’s canvas–and that’s what I’m carrying. It’s got the red meat and the canned goods in it. The milk and the bleach and her new extra-special strength anti-perspirant for the one really sweaty pit. She’s got the flat of toilet paper, a 24-pack. Light but bulky.

And we’re just walking, on our way home. “Eddy,” she says. She is half a step behind me, because she is always half a step behind me. It’s an issue. “Eddy, look.”

I turn as I walk and it’s almost painful how awkward she is as she tries to balance this giant pack of t.p. on her head. It’s bigger than a ten-gallon hat, this thing, and of course there’s the slick plastic
wrapping on her shiny hair. Also, she’s just not graceful, my girl. But she tries.

Arms up, right pit dark, hands trembling, final adjustments, head just so, 24-pack of toilet paper, just so. And then, fingertips mere millimeters from the package as it rocks and slides atop her head,
“Voila.”

Wow. The 24-pack of toilet paper falls from its place, and mercifully, the display is over. “Supermodel, you are not,” I say. We’re walking.

“I hate you,” she says.

“Are you serious?”

“Why you gotta be so mean?”

“Mean?” I say. “Mean to you?”

“Yeah mean to me. Why?”

“I’m not mean to you, baby.”

“Yes you are,” she says. “That was mean.”

“Are you a supermodel?” I ask her.

“No.”

“Well then, what’s the problem? You are in fact not a supermodel.”

“You think I’m ugly,” she says.

Good Christ. We’re walking, and I shift the bag full of red meat and heavy stuff from one hand to the other. “Is that what you heard me say?”

“No, but why’d you say it that way.”

“What way? You called my attention to something you couldn’t really do, and that’s the second thing that popped into my head, so I said it.”

“What’s the first thing?”

“Traditional Moroccan woman with a woven basket on her head, you are not.”

“Oh,” she says, and catches up.