About the Author Emmett Stinson has received Georgetown University’s Wagner Medal for Short Fiction, two honorable mentions for the Phelam Poetry Prize sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, and a poetry fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. His work has appeared in Flashquake and Close. Sightings is his first story in Nuvein.

Celia first learned to cry when she was five.

It’s not that she hadn’t cried before, but she doesn’t mean that kind of crying, the involuntary reaction our body produces in moments of emotional duress. Sure, she’d experienced that, but then she didn’t do the crying, the crying just happened. At five, though, she learned how to flood her eyes, coat her face in a red flush. Eyes blossomed into open sores. The lips unfurled in a perfect pantomime of spasm.

But she’s been smart. Smart enough to keep this to herself. To use what God gave her the way it should be used—as blackmail. She extorted her family with weeping. High school and college professors extended countless deadlines in the face of her watery onslaught. Boyfriends broke in two under Celia’s version of the Chinese Water torture. She leveled the world’s insensitivities with a slurry of sobs. She’d corrode your resolve with the bitterness of salt. Her happy life was always tears, tears, tears.

But at 25, something changed. She’d lost control completely. It wasn’t that she had forgotten how to cry, it was just that she didn’t know how (did she ever?) to stop. Tears ran down her cheeks in a faucet’s steady drip. She drank saline by the gallon-full just to keep her body stocked up on what her eyes depleted.

And she was crying too on the afternoon when she ate her lunch in the little square just near Massachusetts and 16th St. when she looked up at the statue of Daniel Webster in the park and, saw that he, too, was crying. That the great idol of granite erected in reverence to the man who told us, finally, what words really mean, had a little sprinkler stuffed inside it. Water coursed through his imitation anatomy, dribbling out in droplets just at the place where his stone eyes looked ever eastward. But looking closer, Celia began to see it wasn’t Daniel Webster. The face became blurry and the features relaxed, feminized, until she realized who she was seeing. The author of the Fatima Secret, the bearer of the virgin birth, the underwriter of the immaculate conception, the authoress of Purity. Mary. Holy, holy Mary. And Celia looked up into her crying, her eyes bleeding with the flow of the Nile.

* * *

Mary doesn’t know Celia. Not by name anyways.

Mary’s minding her own business walking around Dupont on a Friday afternoon dry enough not to be sticky. She works evenings at a lesbian bar a few blocks away and when she isn’t sleeping, she likes to spend her days walking, coolly absorbing the little city that masquerades as the capital of a great, dumb nation into her eyes. Tasting it without devouring—just letting the shapes, people, cars, slide briefly across her retina and escape somewhere back into the lower recesses of her brain. She’s got short-cropped hair, a green tank top, and baggy jeans ripped at the bottom, but she can’t help from radiating a casual flowing beauty. The kind that can only come from someone who is beautiful and really couldn’t care less that they are. The kind of beauty that makes you thirsty. And this beauty that she wears like a pair of old sweat pants makes the straight boys flock to her in droves. She can’t sit ten minutes in a bar without some guy she’s never seen before asking her if he doesn’t maybe know her from somewhere as she watches some stupid desire smolder like wet wood behind his eyes. She watches the smoke in those eyes searching for confidence and she smiles. She doesn’t mind except when she says “I’m gay,” and they look more interested instead of going away. Now she just tells them she has a boyfriend.

It’s not that she doesn’t like men. She just doesn’t think about them. Doesn’t even give them the sort of consideration hatred requires. Just never had much use for them. Never seen the point really. Her dad left when she was too young to remember much more than a three-day growth of scratchy beard running across a little girl’s face, and her sister and mother seemed to get along just fine without them, thank you. She couldn’t understand when all of her friends started talking about boys in fifth grade, couldn’t even muster the interest to pretend like she cared. Sure, she slept with one once, a man, when she was a little drunk and figured, hey, let’s see what all the goddamned fuss is about. It wasn’t unpleasant. He was nice enough and tried to be gentle and do things that would make her enjoy herself, but it was just all wrong. Like an orangutan driving a city bus. And when he was doing it, when he actually put himself inside her and started thrashing and flopping and spasming all over her, it was too much. She didn’t mean it meanly. Tried to stifle it, even. But it was too impossible. It just reminded her of the time when she was little and her mom took her fishing under a bridge in Annapolis and they pulled out a tiny Rockfish, far too little to be eaten, far too little to be legal, and it just lay there for half a minute flipping it’s head and tail away, trying to swim through the air and dirt to get back to the water. The laughter just enveloped her entire body and poured outward in big reverberating gusts. She tried to tell him it was okay, that it wasn’t anything, that he didn’t have to stop, but she couldn’t stop thinking of that fish and laughing every time he started again, and he couldn’t continue with her laughing, so that was that.

But she doesn’t beat herself up for that. Because she’s cool, cool, cool. Mary is the ice the sun can’t melt. So when she gets to that tiny little square just off Mass and sees her, the crying woman on the park bench, it surprises her as much as it would surprise anyone else that she feels something begin to go inside of her. A slow thaw somewhere past the edges of her chest.

She’s looking at this woman and knows she’s seen her, the gift Aphrodite traded for a golden apple: Helen of Troy for whom all of the useless men in the world got in their ships and sailed away to fight a battle against desire no one has ever really won.

* * *

Mary’s girlfriend has never liked her name, Helen. She spent 18 years struggling to get teachers and students to stop calling her that after the first day, when attendance was taken, and call her by her preferred name, her middle and the old family one, Morris. Which throws everyone off, because, well, it’s a man’s name. Mary’s never liked it, and because Mary ultimately does what she wants, she’s never used it, calling her by their great compromise, H.

Maybe Morris has never quite forgiven Mary for calling her H. Maybe there’s a lot of things Mary does that H doesn’t like. Maybe it’s just the fact that Mary, as nice as she is, doesn’t ever really think about people that aren’t her. Maybe these are the things that caused the small fire in Morris’s crotch when she walked into a bar and saw James Dean sitting on the other side.

H saw James Dean across the bar and felt the cinders blowing in her. A kindling of desire desiccated to flammability by ten years of disuse. She made sure she went home with him, made sure that she saw him again after that, and the only precaution she took to keep Mary from finding out was refusing to give Mr. Dean (his real name was Daniel) her home phone number, so there wouldn’t be any unpleasant calls. Surely, Mary had to know, had to at least have figured out that something was going on, that something strange explained the nights that H wasn’t at home, the several days for which she wasn’t reachable, because she was with Daniel riding through country roads on the back of his motorcycle, arms encircling the black leather jacket that for H was also James Dean’s leather jacket. But if Mary knew she didn’t care.

H isn’t sure what to think of herself anymore, whether she’s gay or straight, whether she’s in love with Mary or Daniel, if this is some fantasy or if she really is with the real James Dean. All she knows of herself these days is her desire—the fire that extinguishes itself with its burning. The desire tells her things: that she wants James Dean, that she wants Mary to care that she wants James Dean, and that when she feels the ground humming by eight inches below her feet and holds James’ body tight above the rough humming of the motorcycle’s vibration between her legs as he drives down roads where it doesn’t matter if they never end, she knows that in this moment she doesn’t care at all who she is or ever was.

* * *

Daniel isn’t really sure about all of this James Dean stuff, but to be honest, he wouldn’t even know, because he’s never even seen one of his movies, never even really thought about him until recently, and frankly, beyond the leather jacket his mother gave him a year ago and the motorcycle that he spent two years saving up for, he doesn’t see any resemblance between him and James Dean other than these outward signifiers of late 50s masculinity. Daniel frankly doesn’t know what to think of Helen, either, or the fact that she has a girlfriend. Plus Daniel’s pretty sure Helen is going to leave him for her girlfriend whenever she works whatever it is she’s going through out of her system in her little Jimmy Dean fantasy. He knows too, that he’ll be upset when she’s gone, and that he won’t do anything to make her stay, or even try to get her back, because Daniel’s not like that, something in him would rather just watch inevitability unfold, see the future reveal itself like one of those computer generated illustrations where, after you stare at it for five minutes, an image reveals itself out of a sea of dots.

Frankly, Helen’s the best thing that’s happened to him in a long time, because really, he doesn’t quite know how to talk to people, and, for him, that’s not a failing so much as just the way things are. And he accepts it. But it gets lonely, and so, when a Helen comes along and propositions him in a bar and keeps calling him after that, he’s going to keep up for as long as he can, because, well, he doesn’t know how long it’ll be until the next time. But he doesn’t tell Helen these things, and he won’t. There are a lot of things that would fall on deaf ears because of the vision shooting out of Helen’s eyes and falling like a hologram across Daniels face. Like the fact, that he’s not a rebel, he’s an accountant. And not even a partner, but an associate and a pretty mediocre one at that. He doesn’t tell her about his audits, or a bad day at the office, or how when he saw that girl crying by the statue in the square two blocks from where he works he asked her “Are you OK?” and the beautiful and clearly insane young woman, motioning to the statue of some guy who probably died a hundred years ago, babbled nonsense: “She just looks so sad, and I wish I could just tell her, don’t cry. You don’t have to cry.”