Nancy, Dixon’s wife, had thumbed the numbers on her cell phone. She expected to at least get the standard recorded message: “Peterson’s Tool & Die, Office of Dixon Mellinger. Please leave a message at the sound of the beep.” Instead, a stranger’s voice filled the flat-lined space. “Tata,” he said. “Satyajit Babur speaking. How may I help you?” Nancy didn’t know how he might help her. She stood on her tiled, kitchen floor, her socks soaking wet. She felt no movement and wondered whether she had inadvertently called the hospital.

James R. Tomlinson resides in the innermost, outer ring of Detroit, teaches in a Michigan prison, and volunteers his time at Motor City Burning Press (which is preparing its first literary journal). His concerns are mainly with the plight of the American autoworkers and the healthcare system. A flash memoir is forthcoming in Sleet Magazine. This is his second appearance in Staccato.

I marvel at the way she fusses with her hands when she is working on a stencil.  This is a kind of love she is practicing, a kind of attrition.  I stare at her from the couch as she works the pencil deep into the paper, making the lines solid, smooth.  She fiddles with her hair and mouths the eraser.  I think about how her hands are, when she is excited, like hummingbirds flashing at her sides.  I am reminded of that first night when she pushed me into her bed.  “It is so strange finally having you here,” she said.  She pinned me there and looked down at me. I could feel the strength in every finger as they held me against escape.

What I mean to say about this woman’s hands is how important they are to my memory of her.  I have always, because my father is a carpenter, believed that there is something sacred about the hands.  When she tattoos for long stretches her hands cramp and I want desperately to hold them, to rub them, to make them feel human again.  But too, secretly, I like them worn, I like the smooth spots where her tools have flattened and hardened the flesh.  I feel at home when she presses them against me, warm and worn after a day of work.  The very power of her creation charged in the joints and creases of her fingers.

I never told her, not when she was with me anyhow, how much I loved her hands.  I would, some days, when we were lying in bed, press them to my chest and trace the bones.  Maybe I knew that she would go off to another place and leave me.  But now I sit in our empty apartment, looking at a photograph of her playing with a camera.  I see her fingers searching it out, crawling over every inch, like they did when we said goodbye for the last time.  She traced my cheekbones as if she might be able, just through touch, to remember me like that.  I am looking at her hands and I am a sixteen-year-old boy again, learning what it means to love, learning how the body, which is built so much like a machine, feels pain in ways that can only be explained as phantom.  That is, this longing I feel, it is not the sharp sting of tearing flesh, the quick snap of broken bone, it is a slow ripple starting at the center, moving outward.

Jon Chopan’s work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Swink, Redivider, Hotel Amerika, and The Disability Studies Quarterly. He is a goofy guy who grew up in Rochester, New York and often writes about both being goofy and being from Rochester, New York.

Before Bobby left me I was a masseuse.  Temptations come with a job such as that, on both ends.   I’ve read about Jesus being left alone with the devil in the wilderness for forty days and coming out a stronger, better man.  Frankly, I’m impressed as hell.  It was Twain or somebody who said, “The only thing I can’t resist is temptation,” and that’s a lot like me.

Bobby’s coke habit was just a little thing, but then he got into horse and all bets were off, as they say.  He started hanging out with shady characters—Rudy and Antonio, Lorenzo, Blaze—and after a spell they started to seem normal to me, as if they were cousins visiting a little longer than you wished.  People on heroin are pretty much ghosts, even to themselves.  The only time they come back to life is on the slide down, and then it’s just Satan (funny, that’s the second time he’s come up) needling you to get your drug back on.

In order to be a successful addict, you basically have to be a millionaire.  Our bills piled up.  We sold off appliances, a car, then the other, and I had to take the bus to work.  I didn’t mind because that’s how deep my love was for Bobby.

When he suggested I take it further, accurately pointing out that all the other girls did, it hurt initially, but then he explained how love and sex were different entities, and even though I already knew that, his careful articulation was so poignant I cried afterward and hugged him so hard my jawbone nearly cracked.

Once I’d agreed, what had seemed so easy became a scary proposition (no pun meant here).  It was as if men saw me as cheap prey, hustling elsewhere, searching for a real challenge.  In time I landed a few fish, then a school of them, but still we were always broke, Bobby and I.

The fellow that changed everything was a dentist.  Starting off, he was nice enough, sort of kinky with the outfits he’d bring for me, until one day he brought along this girl he called “Sierra.”  The going rate for what he wanted was top dollar and I did it not only once but several times.

One day Sierra showed up by herself and explained how she was Mr. Dentist’s daughter.  I didn’t believe her but the pictures she produced were undeniable.

People don’t know the whole story because I never gave it until now.  The newspapers just described my wicked sinfulness, how I plunged that hypodermic needle into his neck like I knew where to aim, which I did.

Bobby found someone else naturally, but Sierra, she comes to visit me once a week.  In many respects, she’s like the daughter I never had.

Len Kuntz lives on a lake in rural Washington State with an eagle and three pesky beavers.  His short fiction appears in over thirty lit journals and can also be found at lenkuntz.blogspot.com.