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them anyway.
    He wished there hadn’t been three men on the scene before he arrived today, and he wished there hadn’t been three knives under the body when he’d turned it over. Three knives stupidly, amateurishly tossed, practically on top of one another. He wished he didn’t feel the sickening weight of two of the knives in his left pocket. He had left the one that most closely resembled Ernie’s description. He wished he had six months to go, like Ernie, instead of three years. Three years if he could even get Tommy Mulligan past a grand jury without stepping on his own dick.
    The bartender replaced Lew’s drink again as Tommy turned and winked at him.
    “So, after like three hours, there’s suddenly all this fucking noise. Bang. Crash. Whap, whap, whap.” Tommy emphasized every sound by pounding his hand—palm flat—on the bar. “The two New Orleans boys come out of the woods, and they’re carrying this deer. And the deer is like, all beat up. He’s been worked over. So the deer looks at the mayor, and the deer says,” and Tommy paused, savoring the moment. He was just telling a joke in a bar. Not a care in the world. He was beaming. “‘Okay, okay, I’m a rabbit.’”
    Lew raised his glass and let the laughter behind him blend in with the background bar din. It sounded distant, and somehow warm and cozy. Inviting. He wished he was there with everyone enjoying himself. He thought about where he’d toss the knives into the lake out at the West End tomorrow. He drank half his drink in a swallow and held the glass in front of him, looking through the amber fluid and ice at the bar mirror. Tommy Mulligan nudged him, hard, and some of the drink spilled from the glass and ran down his arm. He felt it inside his shirtsleeve.
    “Get it?” Tommy said. “Do you get it? ‘I’m a rabbit.’”
    “Sure,” Lew said, feeling the cold liquid almost to his elbow. He continued to look through his trembling glass at the faraway party in the mirror.
    “I get it,” he said, “I’m a rabbit.”

SCHEVOSKI
    BY OLYMPIA VERNON
    University District
    For my brother, Ricky S. Vernon
    S he vomited on Magazine Street.
    She stumbled in. The sign read, Miss Mae’s. A bar. She and the other white girls, their angular faces melting and disobedient like a blade, a glacier. She and the other white girls, laughing, laughing and stumbling about on the corner of Magazine Street in Uptown New Orleans.
    Yes, they laughed and stumbled about with their angular faces pointing eastward; everything about them—the whiteness of them collectively—caught the pupil of the eye and pinned it down. One of them, the girl on the edge of the crowd, stood dark-haired and falling apart; she spoke of her ex, the one who dumped her.
    What was his name?
    Schevoski, Schevoski was his name and she hated him now.
    The tail end of her yellow hair stood away from her shoulders, parted in the middle; there was a strand in the corner of her mouth, her lips purred upward, as if she could not help but notice that she was the dying kind in the crowd; he had, indeed, dumped her, gone back to Russia or some other place where boys go when they’re done with you.
    Where had she met him?
    At the university, at Tulane, where she’d turned the corner of St. Charles and some other street she could not remember, now that she was drunk, now that she stood amidst the other Tulane girls with their Tulane bodies and wished, she wished she could evaporate.
    Yes, now she remembered, she had turned the corner of Tulane and some other street and she wanted something to occur, something that girls her age wanted to happen without having to call out to it; help me, it whispered.
    And there, Schevoski stood.
    He had been pronouncing a singular word, like beast , and saw her, standing there before him; this is when he asked her: Can you? he asked in the beginning, but then, then when he saw how vulnerable she was, he said: Say it, beast.
    Beast, she whispered. Beast.
    How did