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He kissed Cindy on the head, shook Sadie Katherine’s hand
and shuffled out the door, letting it bang behind him. The
rattletrap Pinto sputtered off into the distance.
    He came and went so fast, Sadie Katherine barely
had time to register all of his idiosyncrasies, but it seemed as if
one of them was a gentle transparency.
    The two women just looked at each other. Then
they both jumped up and Cindy led the way to the sink.
    She upended the bag and out fell a rock, a hunk
of seaweed, a flattened juice bottle, an empty motor oil can, a
rusted fishing reel, and a fine, firm, fresh rainbow trout.
    “Stay for breakfast?” she asked.

The Bog Pole
    Kimberly paced her little living room, biting
the flesh around her thumbnail. Every once in a while she’d pause
and look down at the body of her husband, prison-thin, in new jeans
and white T-shirt, with her brand-new Gingher sewing shears
protruding primly from his right eye. She wanted to kick him, he
made her so mad, but that would be useless. She didn’t want to
touch him. Ever again.
    So she paced, and waited for Natasha. This was
the second time today she’d paced, waiting for someone to show up,
and she was damn tired of it. First, it was waiting for Cousins to
arrive on the Greyhound. She must have burned up a million calories
pacing that one off. She didn’t want him back. It had been ten
years, she’d carved out a nice little life for herself in White
Pines Junction and if there were going to be any changes in the way
she lived, it wasn’t going to be with a drunken, ex-con idiot at
her side. But she didn’t know how to tell him that. He’d been gone
ten years, and had written her faithfully every month, long
letters, pining for her and his life in the northwoods.
    And he finally did arrive, swinging down from
that bus with a light step, and a much older face. He grabbed her
up like they do in the movies, and swung her around and said, “You
and me babe,” then gave her a hard kiss on the mouth that bruised
her lips. He had only a little carry-on, like a vinyl gym bag,
which he threw in the backseat of the car. He took the keys from
her hand, and jumped into the driver’s seat. “Point me the
way.”
    Against her will, she directed him to her little
lakeside cottage, the one she had worked hard to buy and pay for,
no thanks to him. On the way home he declared his intentions: A
thick steak, a cold beer and a good fuck. In that order. Well, he
could get the first two at Margie’s if he brought his own beer, but
the rest of it would be over her dead body.
    Or his, as it turned out.
    As it turned out, he didn’t want just one cold
beer, he wanted a whole bottle of Jack Daniel’s. And then he didn’t
want anything to eat, he just wanted her. She dodged him until he
grabbed her, boozy prison breath in her face, and with desperate
strength she never knew she had, she fought her way over to her
sewing table, pulled on the fabric that was draped over it, until
those gleaming silver plated Ginghers fell right into her hand. The
next few minutes were blurred in her memory, but she remembered not
being able to breathe, and him saying something about “this is the
way it’s done around here, and if you don’t fight, you won’t get
hurt.” She swung her arm just as he turned her over and leaned
back, and instead of getting him in the back, like she thought she
would, those scissors went right into his eye.
    God.
    She kicked him off of her, stood up, hiccupped a
few times, quietly shrieked a few times, stomped and paced and
freaked out for a moment, had a deep swig of that Jack herself,
took a deep breath, straightened her clothes, and then sat down to
contemplate her next move.
    All her options were ugly. She could see nothing
but going to prison herself for the rest of her life, writing long
letters back to Natasha every month, pining for her little
lakefront cottage. So she called Natasha, asked her to come over,
“It’s very important,” she said, and then began