In our young love, in the small but ample back upstairs apartment where E. moved in with me and I proposed and we had her folks up for a champagne toast like butter and we took our wedding party for a pre-dance drink sitting on the floor and everywhere, and where we conceived little nipper and celebrated his or her obvious genius in testing positive at the first go and where we returned two months later on a brilliant October day with not so much as a casket, we experienced also, in those days, Berniece.

Across the narrow hall lit always by the bare bulb she would ask me at times to replace at the top of the narrow stairs, behind the door nearly always cracked at least a little bit open when I came home or left, she lived out her life, and, across the way, we ours. She answered our phone, once, E. said, when E. had called home trying unsuccessfully to catch me before I left for work, Berniece did, with a mousy “Hello” and a short whimper and click as she realized her error. We often caught the whiff and creak of her, furtive, at the top of the stairs, a door closing but never hers when we’d come in from the car. Once I heard her murmur something or other then smoke—more often just a scuttling away.

It got creepy for E., dreaming of Berniece standing over the head of our bed morally adjudicating some Berniecian universe, wondering what she was looking for (porn? drugs? general untidiness?) and what she’d found (the stack of Hustlers for sure; pseudofed; a mess). For a while, we plotted—a pail of water over the door, some imperfectly conceived but assuredly shrieking alarm. It got old. For a long time, though, I didn’t mind, figuring my personal stash o’ porn, a congested medicine cabinet, some spilled milk couldn’t count for much, and I enjoyed imagining what could turn an old-school-teacher-turned-bookkeeper into a snoop. I figured her harmless mostly, an odd get-up of loneliness and say-so. Maybe a touch of true-fire-fear.

But that got old, too, when my wife woke from a sick-day nap to see her, standing over her, over the couch, like a recurring dream, in our living room. When we moved out, I waited on the landing as my wife’s footsteps faded, waited until I saw the bone white knuckles of Berniece’s right hand creep around the edge, waited breathless until the crack widened, and then I whooped and clattered down the stairs and got the hell out of there. Pure meanness, premeditated, I know.

*****

On the Occasion of the Beslippered Public Appearance
of Vice-President Cheney, circa ‘06

            It’s just the gout, Dick, the stigma
                        minimal unless you’re really guilty—
            god-and-the-NSA-forbid—of the dietary crime
                        of getting blown away, blasted, ripped
            without ingesting enough of the right stuff
                        to counter the uric acid build-up.
            We who’ve had it know it’s just chemicals, Dick, but these ones
                        are real and they’ll fuck you up.
            In short, we know the gout is serious, Dick,
                        and no fun, unlike war.

            Like war, though, it involves a type of pain
                        which must be experienced to evoke
                        the empathy former mothers display
                        at mere mention of delivery, or feel
                        for less fortunate mothers of lost
                        sons and now lost daughters
                        for erstwhile found and now lost causes.

            For those of us who’ve been there, the mention
                        of the unbearable weight of a sheet at night does it,
                        or of the pulse-pounding pain that won’t stop,
                        that spreads in waves, leg up, down, swaddled, soaking.
                        The shivering thought of axes. Chainsaws. As if one
                        could cut through water.

Not to compare the two.

           Those who haven’t had it don’t get it—
                        more’s the pity—so empathy is out, and sympathy rankles.
           Kind of like this war.
                        The limbs lost there and never seen here, blasted, ripped off
                        in places you’ll not let us see, in specific countries
                        we shouldn’t even be in, in a country whose dry throat
                        never coughed up your cooked-up and spoon-fed weapons.
            If you can’t tell us the truth about that,
            I guess there’s no reason you’d be up front with us
            about the gout, though that stigma now seems small,
            the pain only intensely personal, only self-inflicted.

*****

It’s Like This

                        In sixth grade science, we were doing units
                        individually; highly competitive, in my mind,
                        it was important to do good. I’d finished
                        two, already, something about the orbit
                        of the moon, the floatability of lead, when
                        the teacher called me over.

                        Ms. Braun (‘Rhymes with down,’ she’d say
                        but some of the kids would add ‘go’
                        and laugh heh heh but I didn’t know yet)
                        asked about my progress. This one involved
                        why the temperature dropped the higher one went
                        on a mountain, and how paradoxical that seemed
                        (lifting a manicured eyebrow) since one
                        would presumably be closer to the sun.

                        She waited, seeming to enjoy seeing me
                        stumped, before springing the truth: ‘The air
                        is colder because it’s higher and part
                        of the atmosphere!’ or something equally inane,
                        equally tautologically obscure, though, of course,
                        I didn’t know the dangers of tautologies then.

                        Even after she told me what passed
                        for the answer there was no way
                        I could understand. The unit mentioned nothing
                        about gravity, or the density of air, or any
                        of those important things we would all
                        learn much more intimately about later.

                        I did know I couldn’t have known,
                        and that she felt I should have
                        but couldn’t explain why,
                        and that sadly many lessons
                        would be learned like this.

*****

Lee Kruger has been teaching English in Valley City, North Dakota for seven years now, and is a native of Iowa. He and wife Elizabeth recently had two boys—Casey, 3, and Jake, nearly 2— "... and still have them, thankfully; we realize we should have named them Nectar and Ambrosia, but equally understand that that might have angered them later, as well seem a tad sickly-sweet right now. But there it is." His work has been published by The Cape Rock, and a now defunct street rag, The Metropolitan, out of Omaha. To contact this writer, click here.