Marine Park: Stories by Mark Chiusano

the window, the rain on the deck. Inside, the table counters are dry, and the house is warm and empty. It is the type of empty that has a sound, like white noise, a soft light over the armchair. When Aurora puts two fingers on Vincent’s hand, nothing changes; the world outside rains and sleeps. Aurora leaves her fingers tentatively on Vincent’s hand, so long that sweat begins to grow between their skins. Her arm begins to feel heavy, to cramp up, and the skin hangs down as if she is old, truly old. She has a vision of it, of no longer retaining control over her body, of her mind, slowly, being the last thing, dimming in, dimming out. Finally her finger feels like one part of Vincent’s hand, and her arm is numb, and she wouldn’t dream of moving it. Vincent stares straight forward, and it is the only communication she knows she can expect from him.
    But in his head he’s remembering when Tommy was a boy and he put antibiotic cream on his cut knee. How Tommy said it burned, and how he told Tommy, Stop crying. She thinks about how there was a very specific type of candy that Vin used to stock in the store, twenty years ago, but she can’t remember the name now: just the chocolate taste, the peanut tang, a blue wrapper on the floor. How they took a box of them to the lake in Canada, eating them, one by one, while the miles marched by. In that moment, in the car, she remembers thinking about dancing. Outside, it gets wetter and wetter. It is an old house. The roof sometimes leaks. The walls creak with human sounds. The children’s bedrooms are made up like they’re about to come home.

WHY DON’T YOU

M y father was born at the bottom of a hill: in a basement, where the landlord didn’t allow visitors. He had brown fingers, even then. At the top of the hill was where the mafia lived, or at least the rich people. It went down in wealth from there. He liked to say this at dinner. Feel more sorry for yourself, why don’t you, my mother said. She threw salad on his plate. Lorris had his fork and knife in his hand. I left, or I would leave, or I walked out again.
    Natalia and I drank Coca-Cola in the oval in Marine Park. People played cricket there, between the baseball fields, but later it emptied out, and we brought drinks from the Russian teahouse. Inside they only used plastic cups, even though it was a nice restaurant. We mixed the soda with vodka from the liquor store down the block. On weekends, when she had no homework, we went into the city, to Times Square, no transfer on the Q. At the Marriott Marquis we rode the glass elevators up and down. We kissed pushed up against the glass, watching the hotel lounge get small below us. On every fifth floor there were platforms where you could see the lobby and Forty-Second Street. It’s incredible, isn’t it? Natalia said. It’s like from an airplane. The cars were black and small from so far up. We stood with our noses pressed against the double windowpane and watched the lights change on Broadway. In Brooklyn, in the middle of the park, the cars on the avenues sounded like waves.
    I met Natalia one night, at a friend’s house, out in Sheepshead Bay. It was an exact replica of Marine Park, except the houses were smaller and closer together. We picked up forties from the corner store next to the House of Calamari, and my friend, who was born in Moscow, used a fake Russian passport to buy our beer. Why don’t you get a fake ID like a normal person? I asked him. He muttered in Russian. When he went back to Moscow, the one time, he told me once, people had tried to kidnap him, but when he answered in their own language they started laughing and shouting. They offered him a sandwich and let him go. It was thick bread, one layer of spreading. We sat in his parents’ basement and drank from coffee mugs, listening quietly to his mother yelling at his father upstairs. He turned his head up to the ceiling like he was baring