In Eighth grade, NATHAN POOLE played the French horn and learned to drive in his grandfather’s Deville. He currently lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where he runs an independent print-making company. His fiction has also appeared in loom and The Bastard Press.



WHENEVER the door to the dishwasher is left down, the dog will move in to lick the stuck food and grease off the dirty dishes. The Calphalon 2qt sauté pan that Beth used last night to “soften” the oyster mushrooms received a fair majority of his attention. Today Hippolyte is wearing a navy blue bandana around his collar imprinted with white paisley flowers. His tongue clobbers at the dishes, making the plates ring against the silverware, violently shaking the bottom drawer of the dishwasher as he fumbles to get his head in a more advantageous position. Incidentally, Hippolyte means he who freed the horses.
I’m not sure what I’m doing here. This is the main problem. I came here thinking it would be a good place to write. Beth came here after deciding that school was an “unnatural institution”, which really only means that in two and a half years Beth never managed to find a major that had, as its sacrament, sleep. Her parents told her that she could come out to their house on Broughton Island anytime she needed to take a break. A break from the rigors of what they imagined to be her long library hours, her intense exam schedule. She moved all her stuff in and has been living here with Hippo since the drop/add date.
Hippo moves on. Next is the inside of a bowl I used earlier this morning to re-heat a piece of raisin-bread pudding.
“Move the knives,” Beth mumbles.
Half-conscious, she is listening to me clean the kitchen from under a pile of red and gray knit covers on the living room sofa where she fell asleep last night. Her lanky body, the body that I’ve had every opportunity to become familiar with, is indiscernible now through the stratum of blankets. Her ungainly, but still leering form, reduced to a certain kind of subtle and unsolved topography. What might be a kneecap could also be an elbow or perhaps, a partially clinched hand, there’s no way to be sure. The undulating blankets give mild suggestions as to what might be underneath—hips, pliable thighs etc.—but still no apparent anatomy. It’s an enticing game to play. For instance, this furrow, this dale right here, what kind of warm pulse is circulating there? What kind of sleep-swollen tissue is hiding in this cleft? The only clear aspect of this amorphous situation is the head, which, if you followed the landscape far enough north, you would find turned in toward the back of the couch. And, if you were to lean over her as she lay there, you would see that tucked underneath her chin is a pale little fist—as if she is holding her mouth shut while she sleeps to ensure that no spiders crawl in.
It is important that I remember to move the knives up to the top shelf of the dishwasher. Beth is worried that the dog is going to cut his tongue again, and then bleed all over the dishwasher and the kitchen floor again—and then all over the carpet—and then the porch outside—and then his brand new kennel pillow—and then the car’s backseat—and then all over the veterinarian’s floor. The last time Hippo cut his tongue on a knife the blood just wouldn’t clot. Hippo never stopped panting and this is true of most dogs. I remember how dark the blood looked, purple, almost black, in the fur around his mouth. He looked like he had been lapping ink out of his water dish. He was excited. Drool infused blood was decanting out from the insides of his mouth onto practically everything. In the car on the way to the vet, when Hippo started barking at an elderly woman walking her Yorkshire terrier, he sprayed the entire rear driver’s window with blood and then tried to lick his own blood off the window. Smeared blood was drying into a rusty brown patina to be discovered later, on a thousand surfaces, as we waited inside the vet’s office. This is exactly why it is important that I remember to move the knives.
Before Beth left school she told me I should come with her. I could “keep her company,” she said. She was and wasn’t being serious when she said that. I was still working as a TA at the college and I was finishing the semester. I had papers to grade and my own work to avoid doing. “I can’t,” I told her. The excuse was foolproof. When she called again, almost a month later and said she was living out on Broughton Island with her dog and that I should come out, I came. I did not think about what this would mean. My coming out here. It meant something. I have also basically been living with her. That probably means something too.
I heard once that Eskimos used to hunt wolves in the artic by burying a knife covered with seal blubber handle-down in the snow. Supposedly—who knows if this sort of thing is true—the wolves would bleed to death by licking the knife clean. The salty seal blubber kept the wolf there at the knife until it eventually lost consciousness licking off its own blood. As I move the knives out of Hippo’s reach, I try to imagine a fur hooded Inuit man dragging Hippo home by one of his back legs. Would his body leave a trail in the snow? Thinking about all that blood made we want to smoke.
Outside it feels like someone is sitting directly on my chest. It is that cold out. The cold air starts by biting down hard on my fingers and then it focuses its attack on my vital organs. A low hanging ceiling of gray clouds keeps the sun off the porch and the breeze coming across the Altamaha sound is unbearably cold. South Carolina is humid and the humidity makes the temperature translate directly into the bone. Hot is sweltering and, if it ever gets cold, the cold is an aching kind of cold. On the coast, the air in January fetches over thousands of miles of wintered Atlantic and when it finds me it means to bring me down slowly. It’s impossible to keep the cold air out of my clothing. It will swim in if it has to. I feel like I am being bound up in bailing wire. I hardly have the cigarette lit before I put it out and run back inside to see about starting another fire.
In the fireplace are branches from the Christmas tree the neighbors had dumped in their backyard. I brought them in last night. Fir limbs that flashed up fast and then crackled like fireworks going off a thousand feet overhead. Beth tries to clap for me with her hands still cosseted in the blankets like thick oversized mittens. It sounds like someone beating out a rug. “Prometheus, Prometheus,” I whisper, while I blow on the branches. I watch the thin fir limbs turn white and skeletal. They growl back at me as I blow into them, provoking them. Fire is this; fuel, heat, and oxygen and I supply everyone of this ingredients in perfect order. Does Beth even notice? Does she notice how good I am at fire? The display was practically occult. My earnestness, my clean mechanized efficiency. Her clap is not enough; I need her to worship me. If only these were simpler times. Primordial women would melt in my capable promethean arms.
Like a hot bath turning cold, my stories have gotten into the habit of ending while you’re still trying to read them. I don’t exactly know what to do about it. As of right now, I’m sitting in what Beth calls the sun room writing this odd journal entry of sorts. I can tell you that I’m hoping that something will happen. That perhaps, if I wait long enough, the story will shape itself without me.
The sun room has three walls that consist entirely of large trap windows on the south side of the house. It’s cold in the mornings but warm enough in the daylight. I’ve been coming out here the last several mornings trying to make sense of things. There are two dark green couches. One is covered with a thin layer of dog hair so I mainly avoid it for the other couch. This leaves me sitting across from Hippo, who usually comes in a little after his lunch time and takes his place on the fur covered couch directly in the sun. I like to watch his fur in the light as his chest rises and falls. Sometimes I try to match my breathing to his but it’s difficult. Also, when Hippo dreams, he whimpers.
The entire house sits up on wooden piles roughly level with the tree line, which allows for a partial view of the sound out to the north west across the inlet and also a good view over the dunes on the east side of the ocean. On a clear day every direction shimmers like a stainless serrated knife. The house has virtues for someone who likes to be still.
Two mornings ago, I was sitting right here on this green couch, staring down a paragraph, crossing and then re-focusing my eyes, pretending the words were some kind of magic eye puzzle—please dear God let there be a story here—when Beth leaned in around the doorframe. She had a strange look on her face, as if she was savoring something sweet in her mouth. Buttery artichoke hearts. Cream spinach soup with roasted pecans. There was some delicious secret dissolving on her tongue.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Ok,” I said.
I laughed a little. She stood there awkwardly for a minute, not her normal self, and then asked if I wanted a cup of coffee.
“Sure,” I said.
“Ok,” she said.
Sleeping together and looking at someone like that are two different things. We knew we would sleep together. I think she expected that, I know she expected that. I knew coming out here it was inevitable, and even now it makes my hands shake just thinking about it. I was apprehensive. Beth has always scared me a little. A lot, actually. Her self-confidence has always scared me. My third night here she came into my room downstairs at three in the morning and starting mumbling. I could see the silhouette of her gaunt shoulders leaning against the open doorframe.
“Aaron?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Let’s just get this over with,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“You heard me.” And that was true. I had heard her.
Scary and sexy are sometimes indistinguishable. When she started taking off her t-shirt I stared across the room at the glass seashell lamp sitting on top of the white wicker dresser and thought about how many shells it might have taken to fill it. 110, maybe. I can be a terrible coward sometimes. The next morning I could smell her lying beside me, the bed smelled rotten, our bodies smelled rotten. I stared at her underwear, resting on the floor beside the bed in a clumped pile. Had I laughed out of shear terror when her hand found me swollen, aching, from the moment she stood in the doorway? Was it her breath that smelled boozy? Did I cry, silently, afterwards? I couldn’t think about it.
Beth is five feet seven inches tall and usually disheveled in some form of the word. She wears her brown hair cut perilously short. She cuts it herself, which leaves her looking somewhat maimed, as if a farm animal chewed all her hair off. But it’s ok for her to look that way because she’s convincing. She acts like she is the absolute coup de gras all the time, and so everyone thinks she is. That’s all that matters if you really think about it. She is constantly asserting herself into everyone else’s life. She is her own gift. It would be an understatement to say that this is merely charisma. She brings the tidings of herself everywhere she goes and everything she does looks like the very thing that she meant to do. It’s supernatural really, watching her work her magic on everyone, it’s almost impossible how she pulls it off. Even dropping out of school wasn’t a form a failure, though for anyone else it should have been. It actually became some sort of virtue. She meant to, we all thought. Of course, she meant to.
It could be this: there is another problem that I haven’t mentioned and it’s the hospital I was born in. I’m not sure how this happened, maybe it happens to lots of people. I don’t know. I realized last semester that every morning on my way to school I drive by the hospital where I was born. Roper Hospital, on Calhoun St. It’s right after the highway thirty connector and there is no way for me to get into Charleston without driving directly past it. I imagined getting in a car wreck right there in front of the hospital and dying on the curb on the side of the street, or even worse, in one of the hospital’s rooms. I would hate to know that over my entire life I only managed to get a few feet away.
There is no story here. No story of me, through the door. Me, down the stairs and out into the ice cold ocean water. It’s just me, trying to write motion into stillness, hoping stories will come to me while I wait. I hate that I didn’t look at her as she undressed at the foot of my bed. I wanted to see her, pale and exposed in the light of the doorway. I wanted to steal peeks at her body as she slept on her side in the funk of that bed. Or maybe I didn’t, I don’t know. Driving by the hospital where I was born, I always think about how I might as well start driving circles around it until my car runs out of gas. Beth is never still. She will always be going through the door, down the stairs. She will soon change her hairstyle. She will take up knitting and never knit. She will find a new recipe for tonight.


Hippo has a new bandana on today. It’s red with small black skulls and cross bones printed on it. He is lying down on the floor by the doorway watching a green lizard walk up the outside of one of the windowpanes. Its two o’clock in the afternoon and Beth is out standing on the beach. I watch her walking with her hands in her back pockets and I get a sweet taste in my mouth. Do you see her? Do you see her walking with her head down? Every so often, she finds something in the sand that interests her. She pulls her hands from her jeans pockets and squats down to examine something. It’s a piece of glass. She asks if it would like to come in for a cup of coffee, forgetting that it’s already in her pocket.