A Bag of Lottery Tickets by Laura Yan

She had been saving the lottery tickets for years. Every Monday, on her way home from work, skin tinted with the smell of Chlorox and bleach, fingers pruned, she stopped at a bodega to fill out the same set of numbers: 4, 22, 1, 13, 12, 5, for her mother’s birthday, her son’s, and her own. Her mother was dead, and her son, somewhere on the West Coast. He was traveling or playing music or trying to be an actor. He rarely called. Sometimes her memories confused her, and in her dreams she could not tell her husband from her son. Her husband had left her years ago. His drinking got worse after he lost the job and  his eyes filled with rage. She still had the scabs on her thigh, when he had rammed the edge of the table against her, the sharp of the wood cutting deep.

On Tuesday nights she waited in front of the TV, fingers poised over each number as they showed up on the screen. She did this always with calm and diligence, double checking just to make sure. She had to double check herself about other things, too. Her eyes weren’t what they used to be and her hands shook often. She didn’t think of herself as old, but perhaps it was the impression she gave to others. Sometimes people stood up to offer her a seat on the train. Maybe it was just her stooped back that gave her the look of carrying more weight than she was.

Mostly what she wanted was for her son to settle down with a nice girl. If she won the lottery she would buy them an apartment on the West side, with wood floors and big windows. She would move into a small room there and prepare their meals. She used to be a great cook, though these days she made the same thing every day: a hard boiled egg and tea in the morning, a  neat sandwich for lunch, and a vegetable casserole for the week for dinner.

One night, she couldn’t sleep. She lay awake for hours and listened to the sounds of cars outside. She felt her body like a coffin, ungainly and stiff, suffocating her. She clenched her eyes shut. She would go for a walk, she decided. She used to do it often. She pulled on a ragged coat and paused. She went to the drawer where she kept the neat stack of the lottery tickets, her history of failures. She stuffed them in a plastic bag that swung against her knees as she walked. She walked alone and slowly in the dark to the park where, once, long ago, the man she loved had gotten down on one knee and held out a ring that caught the rays of the sun. She could see it, her young, slim self and their long, hot kiss. She felt her young, slim self turning to watch her now. With relief, she met the girl’s eyes, and let the bag fall into the shallow pond. She did not look back.

The bag bobbed on the surface of the water, bloated and complacent until the daylight gave it new life, and someone walking past pointed and laughed.

Fat by Tanya Bryan

Things come easy to the young, the pretty, the thin. When you’re fat like me, your prospects narrow. As you grow older, uglier, fatter, you realize that it’s not going to get any better than the mediocre that’s already happened. I’m not bitter that I get paid less for the same job that younger and less experienced colleagues do. I’m bitter that my own body has worked against me all these years, held me back from doing better, being better.

People barely notice you when you’re fat. Or if they do, they glare. They glare at you for eating, for sitting, for breathing. The judgments passed are based on appearance without regard for the struggles and pains of being obese. Eating well and exercise work for some, but never for me. I was always this way. As a child, the teasing was unbearable. I threatened to run away every week. But I never did. I was a good girl. I ate my veggies, went to fat camps, and tried every diet my mom could find in her women’s magazines, but I remained a dumpy child. By the time I became a dumpy adult, my mom had given up. She was loathe to invite me over for Christmas dinners since the sight of me reminded her of her failure to have a beautiful, successful, thin child.

Despite all that, I try to maintain a certain weight, even if it doesn’t fall within the 0-2 range that the women in my office are. Next to them, I am a giantess. But I continue to ride my bike to work every day, and on weekends I run through Prospect Park, ignoring the people staring at my gobs of flab flopping about like uncooked cookie dough.

My vice, my only vice, isn’t pizza or chips or nachos. It’s lottery tickets, or “the idiot tax,” as my dad calls them. I buy them by the dozen, hoping for a way out. If I could just win some money, I could change things. Maybe get liposuction. Move away from the reproving eyes that have haunted me since childhood. Brooklyn is unforgiving in it sentencing.

One day, feeling nostalgic for the self I never had, I stuffed all the losing tickets I’d saved over the years into a plastic bag, and brought them with me on my morning run. As the fat shimmied one way, the bag slipped the other, two failures rubbing against each other as I ran around the pond. Halfway around, I tired of the impermeable plastic against my back making me sweat even

more than usual. I plopped it down, stared at the ripples in the water, breathing heavy. This is stupid, I thought. I’m fat. And I’m lugging around a bag of losing tickets. Why? So I did the most reasonable thing I could think of: I stood up, swung the bag around me, and flung it into the water. Then I continued running, hoping nobody had witnessed my latest failure.

The Wrong Numbers by Nate Worrell

I always thought you were a 7 11 53 but you turned out to be just another 2 38 49.   Maybe it was because I was always 8 31-ing when you wanted to just 17 19.  I tend to lean towards it being my fault that we never worked out, but a part of me blames you.  I always remember 01 10 20 11 at Prospect Park where you introduced yourself as 55 57 28 67 80.  It was the luckiest day of my life.   So yeah, there’s bitterness, but I understand.   Sometimes things are just a number or two away from being a perfect combination.

Baby Doll Heads Beached by Matt Crowley

I’m standing on Dead Horse Bay beach to see off the hurricane, to get a good look at its inconceivable proportions before it moves on to do its marauding elsewhere. And here I make an uncommon discovery: a group of simulated-ceramic baby doll heads enmeshed in a slummy cloud of soggy refuse, pitched onto the sands by the fury of the storm.

The detail of the facial features indicate fine craftsmanship: the furrows carved into the forehead and their direct configuration with the curvature of the lips, the flaring of the nostrils, the wrinkling of the eyes, and fluctuation of the cheeks, to indicate expressions of happiness, sadness, confusion, anger: each head seems to be equipped with its own custom-built emotion. Some dolls blush to accompany their smiling or crying, their smiles revealing different numbers and shapes of teeth, their crying different numbers and shapes of tears. The painted eyes are alive with color: blue, brown, green, and . . . yellow? This head’s got blue irises around dark orange pupils. I also notice that while there are freckles on one cheek, there are none on the other. If I had looked at another doll carefully enough I would have noticed that while the its eyes were crying and looking quite gloomy, its mouth was smiling, even laughing. Is this an expression that’s even humanly possible? Each head, in fact, shows some sort of slightly inhuman characteristic. What were they, some failed, mad experiment? Evidently they were part of a trial run whose prototypes were rejected, judged not worthy of bodies.

–

This whole grotesque tableaux, I envision, was the result of a rescue effort gone awry:

A stealthy group of artists who favor recycling found objects had spirited the heads away in a pickup truck before they were properly disposed of by their manufacturer, a doll-making factory upriver (as to which river, the Hudson or the East, this might be determined by a careful examination of debris caught among the dolls’ nylon hair fibers, each river’s filth being quite distinctive). During the artists’ getaway on a dark, curvy road running close along the riverbank, their driver swerved suddenly to avoid a doll which he mistook for a human child. The truck overturned, emptying its cargo straight down into the water . . .

Or maybe the fugitive artists’ trip was without incident and the truck reached its destination, a pier on the river. There the heads were loaded onto a small boat to be ferried across to the opposite side. On its way the boat capsized in the wake of a monster container ship, the heads tumbling out to be carried away in the current and lost, the sailor artists too troubled about their own survival to make any effort to retrieve them. And here the heads finally rest, as though they could be mistaken for an art installation of the kind their artist abductors had intended to use them.

Of Dreams and Dolls by Nate Worrell

One man fills another head full of powder. He wonders what sort sad story will hollow out the doll’s head for the sake of hollowing out their own. He can’t give it much thought though because several boxes of heads are waiting to be stuffed with snowy dreams.

Another man carries a doll in a garbage bag. He awoke this morning gazing into the empty eyes of the doll head. It reminded him of the daughter he once pushed on the swings. He’s on his way to give the doll to her now, the first gift he’s given her since she was stumbling through her first steps. He hopes she still plays with dolls.

A young woman sits in the sand and wipes a lonely tear from her eyes. Tossing the doll into the bay was hard, but she needed to let go. She’d lied to herself for too long, he wasn’t coming back.

Baby Doll Heads by Hailey Briggs

Samantha had listened as long as she could.  With catlike reflexes, she slinked away from her school group.  There was only so much history and intrigue to Dead Horse Bay.  She longed to swim in the waters, but even she could not come up with a likely tale as to all her wet clothes.

She searched every crevice in the land, hoping for some sort of washed up treasure.  Mostly she found cans, trash, and ugly rocks.  She stared the way she had come.  She was determined to not let this day be for nothing.

Her steps hurried.  In minutes she was running.

Something red broke up the monotony and directed her path.  She chased the crimson.

The closer she neared, the deeper the sense of dread.  The dirt, the rocks, the sparse grass, they all were painted with blood.  In a center of trampled earth was a duffle bag.  Samantha hesitated only a second before she carefully unzipped.  As soon as it was open, she stumbled back, expecting snakes or something to rush out at her.  When nothing happened, she inched the bag opened and stared inside.  Over twenty baby doll heads stared up at her.  All had different hair and eye colors.  On their foreheads they had a name inked on them.

A manila folder was stuffed in the midst of the heads.  Samantha retrieved it.  Inside she found numerous newspaper clippings about missing women and girls.  After skimming through a few of them, she focused on the heads.  The names on the dolls matched with the missing females.

As soon as she realized this, Samantha dropped the papers and rose to her feet.  She turned away from the bag, but nearly fell when she collided with something.  Steadying big hands grabbed her arms.  She stared up at the man who balanced her.  His mirrored sunglasses prevented any way to know what he was thinking.

He smiled.  “You lost, sweetheart?”

“Um, no.  My class is just right over there.”  She pointed with the shift of her eyes.

He, however, did not follow her movement.  “I have something for you.”

He dug in his pocket.  She tried to back away, but his one hand still attached to her was iron strong and unyielding.  His pocketed hand ceased moving.  His smile widened, revealing dirty brown teeth and pungent breath.  He slowly pulled out a doll’s head, with the same hair and eye color as hers.  On the forehead, her name was written.  Samantha screamed, or tried to, before everything went black.

Never Alone by Cynthia D. Witherspoon

If I was going to die, I refused to do it alone. Call me a romantic. Or insane. Whichever fits your fancy. Either way, I’d made up my mind. Just walk into the water. Never look back.

But not alone. Never alone.

Momma said only criminals and heretics died alone. I was neither, though I did leave my bible at home. Maybe that’s why I was doing this. Because I couldn’t believe.

God had abandoned me as quick as I abandoned him.

I made it to the beach of Dead Horse Bay and held on tight to my companion. The poor dear had no idea what was coming to her. As I approached the water, I remembered when she first joined me. I named her Suzy. Loved her. It was only fitting she would find her end in mine.

The water blended well with the night here. I felt the waves lapping at my toes and smiled. If I was going to do this, I would do it right. No blades. No tears. Just give up. Make it look like an accident so Momma would attend my funeral.

Wouldn’t she? I stopped when my first fear hit. What if no one attended my funeral? What if they couldn’t bury Suzy with me?

I decided to leave Suzy on the beach. I placed her just out of reach of the water with a pat on her plastic head. She deserved a funeral more than I did. The doll was my only friend. Especially after everyone left me.

Momma shunned me for being crazy.

My sisters left me for their own lives.

I shook off the sand coating my feet before I stepped into the water. It was warm tonight. I started to turn back. Grab Suzy so she could enjoy it too. But no. She had to be buried with me. So I wouldn’t be alone.

I took another step. Then another, stopping only when the water came up to my waist. The night was silent. I was grateful for that.

Just as I was about to go further, a rough wave erupted and knocked me off my feet. The salt water stung my eyes. My clothes became heavy. But it was no matter. What made my heart stop was when I caught sight of the shore.

Suzy was gone.

My beloved doll had disappeared.

“No!” I cried out, struggling against the water. I had to get back. I had to find her. I couldn’t be buried without her.

Unless I was never found.

I screamed this time. Not because of the water, but by the fear of being lost forever.

Of my only friend abandoning me.

I struggled to get back to land, all considerations of suicide gone. But it was too late. I was too far out. As I began to sink beneath the waves, I saw something that filled my heart with joy.

Suzy was floating above me.

She wouldn’t let me die alone.

Never alone.

1897 Watch by Joann Brosnan

Dan was a good father. He loved his two sons and worked hard to provide for them. When he left Ireland shortly before his seventeenth birthday, he had received his patrimony in the form of a brand new, gold-plated, pocket watch. This treasure had never left his possession.

Today, he walked the boardwalk, with his younger son on his hip. It was July of 1923, just twenty-six years from the day he had left home. As Dan strolled through the Sunday crowd, his wife and older son a few paces behind, the toddler on his hip laughed, spotting the balloon seller.

“Would you like one, Joseph,” Dan asked, and pulled a coin from his vest pocket. Joseph laughed again and pointed to a beautiful red one. Coin and balloon changed hands and Dan handed the string to his son. “Don’t let it go, now, Joseph,” he said.

Glancing at the sun’s angle, Dan reached into another pocket for his prized watch. Running his finger, lovingly over the inscribed date “1897”, he hadn’t yet opened it when the fates, in the form of a red, hydrogen-filled balloon and Dan’s lit cigar, collided explosively. The fiery bang, at the end of his nose, startled Dan badly enough that he dropped his son and staggered backwards. When the boardwalk railing hit his back, he lost his grip on the watch and it sailed into the air for several yards, landed on the boardwalk, slid another yard or two and dropped between two boards, and out of sight.

Dan’s first thought was for his son, who had landed well and now sat on the boardwalk, looking wide-eyed. “Bang, Daddy,” he said.  The second was the fate of his precious watch and in seconds, he had a small army searching the area under the boardwalk. They search for almost an hour, with no success; the watch never was found and Dan was forced to accept its loss. On the ride home, he held his son on his lap and, once, gave him a little squeeze. “I’ve got you,” he said.

Waiting by Nate Worrell

Benjamin watched the second hand step around the circle.   There was something comforting in its predictability.  He held the watch often for reassurance.  Over the years, the palm of his left hand had actually molded into a cup that fit the watch perfectly. He seemed to think as long as he saw the next second arrive, he wouldn’t be dead.   Coming to America was supposed to have given his family opportunity and freedom, but the slums had taken their toll.  His mother died of illness, his older brother was fatally stabbed in a knife fight, and his father took a cowards way out one rainy evening in April.  The only thing Benjamin had to live for was Ana, and she was due to arrive at Coney Island on the midday ferry.  Her letters gave him hope through the mud and the blood.  The ship’s horn groaned and Benjamin snapped the watch shut and placed it in his pocket.  He watched passengers stream off the boat, eagerly scanning for blond curls under a blue hat, which she promised to be wearing.  He never saw her.  He checked his watch again, making sure he had the right time and place.  He looked all over for her.  He waited all day, watching boat after boat empty and never a sign of her. He came back the next morning and the next.  For weeks, he waited for her counting the seconds between the arrivals and departures until he had their schedules memorized to the minute. Benjamin decided Christmas Eve would be the last time he would try to meet her.  It was bitterly cold, and he huddled on a bench. He shivered, alone, in the wind and icy rain.  At some point, he fell asleep, because a tap on the shoulder woke him up.  He squinted through the dreariness to see a soft face with blond curls under a blue hat.  His Ana had finally come.  He checked the watch to see what time it was, and noticed the second hand had stopped.

1897 Pocket Watch by Grady Yandell

An old man walks through empty stretches of lonely sand, remembering a night long ago. He wonders aloud. “Was it late summer, or was it early fall?” He sighs knowing recollections like time fade into the mist, but one memory refuses to die. “Melody.” Her name still brings tears to his ancient eyes. He stops near the broken pylons of a primeval pier. The sturdy dock is no longer here. Like his mind it was once so strong. Now their remains rests in depression.

“I never liked night swims so I watched Melody from here. My little bunny danced on the waves before they wrestled us to separate graves. Her watery crypt filled with a broken body and heart stopped. My body a lifeless tomb with a heart beating.” He looks left, then right. Lights from a distant ship twinkle with gathering stars in this eve’s twilight. “Alone with you forever Melody.”

First his shoes and socks come off. Then shirts and pants join them in the sand. He stops to look at his watch rusted from waters that stole his soul mate. Time frozen to the minute when their lives ended. He walks into the surf, fear in his cataract eyes. Frosty waters chill his bones, but he braves them, more afraid to be alone.

Inheritance by Rebecca Lynne Fullan

On his deathbed, our father held out his hand and called my youngest brother, Gregory.  Abernathy and I sat side by side in straight-backed chairs, in the tiring tension of a long death, eyes drooping, jaws clenched.

Our father’s mouth worked itself open.  Thin strings of spit hung from the top lip to the bottom, and yet his mouth looked frighteningly dry.

“The watch, for you,” he said to Gregory. It was a grand watch, bronzed and shining and engraved with our father’s initials.  It ticked with pleasant loudness.  When I was a child, I would wait until he took it out on our walks together and then thrust up my hand, laughing at the weight of the watch against my small palm.  We all three walked the Coney Island boardwalk with him on holidays, but only I played the watch game.

I’d expected to lose to Abernathy.  We were grown now, such games abandoned, and he was the eldest son, carrying my father’s name, though we shared his initials.

Gregory sobbed in strange, messy gasps.  He would never be grown, not really.  He did not take our father’s hand.  Gregory abhorred physical contact and would cry out as though it bruised him.

Our father smiled and held the watch out to him.  “Now you’ll always know what time it is, Greg,” he said.  I stood up.  Abernathy stood and took my arm, and I leaned against him.  He pulled me to a window seat, and we perched on the cushion.

“He’ll lose it,” I whispered.  “Or he’ll drop it—”

“I don’t want the watch,” Abernathy whispered back.  “It’s all right.”

Gregory was laughing now, persuaded to pleasure by some trick of our father’s, clutching the face of the watch in both his hands while our father held the chain.

“I want the watch,” I said, too-loudly, grabbing everyone’s attention.   “I want it.”

“Anne,” our father said.  His voice was angry despite its quiet rasp.

“I won’t get married,” I insisted.  “I won’t ever change my name.”  Gregory let go of the watch and put his hands over his ears.  Our father kept it from dropping.  “See?  You can’t trust Greg—”

Abernathy hit me.  He had a thin hand, but the force of the blow was surprising.  It drove tooth to cheek and filled my mouth with blood.

“That’s enough,” Abernathy said.  I stared.  Abernathy was quiet, kind.  He relied on me.

“Anne,” my father said, “Anne.  Anne?”  I went out of the room to clean my mouth.  He lived for a few more days in silence.  Gregory carried the watch constantly, and then one day he came up behind me and put his hands over my eyes.   It was the only time he’d touched me voluntarily.

“I gave it back to the water, where we walked,” he said, solemn, pleased.  “It’s fair.” A few days later, I noticed he didn’t have the watch anymore, but not one of us ever said anything about it.

The New York Times, August 23, 1942

At the end of what is frequently termed “the world’s biggest excursion for a nickel,” is Staten Island—this year coming into new prominence as a vacation objective. Remembered by old-timers as a place of big estates and old-fashioned farms, the island retains wooded stretches and grass uplands. Its highest hills still offer the fine panoramic vistas that attracted early settlers seeking a rural retreat within easy reach of Manhattan. Twenty minutes from the Battery, holiday-makers are finding a new field of exploration.

And surprises are in store for the Manhattanite who has never toured the island’s fifty-seven square miles. For the nature lover, there is contrast in the seascapes and the shoreline rising steeply to wooded hills. For the energetic excursionist there are plenty of amusements—South Beach with its boardwalk, picnic grounds and sports fields; thirty-five miles of water front; bathing beaches facing the open sea yet sheltered from heavy surf; Great Kills and Princes Bay with their protected harbors for small sail boats. Indeed the list is a long one.

Some of the early movies were filmed on the island and hard-riding cowboys whooped over hills that present-day hikers climb to view the bay and the skyline of Manhattan. Well-known are Wolfe’s Pond Park, Silver Lake Park and Dongan Hills. Todt Hill, on the ridge that runs across the center of the island, is said to be the highest point of land along the entire Atlantic Coast between Maine and the Florida Keys. At New Dorp and Tottenville, at Willowbrook and Richmondtown, are historic houses. One of them, Conference House, was reputedly the scene of a meeting called to discuss reconciliation between the Colonies and England. Today, horseback riders and golfers are keeping fit on acres where Benjamin Franklin and Admiral Howe once walked and talked.

Standing on New Dorp Beach, among the sea glass, the tampon applicators, the Gatorade bottles, it is possible to see remnants of the St. John’s Guild Children’s Hospital. Built in the late 19th century as a stationary counterpart to the Floating Hospital that once docked just off-shore, the institution was also known by a more romantic name: Seaside Hospital. There are metal pipes, the bases of columns, cracked bits of foundation, bricks. There is the breeze, recalling the fresh-air initiative that sought to give sick city-dwelling children a respite from their crowded tenements. And there is the sea.

But, abandoned after a brief tenure housing Italian POWs after the Second World War, knocked down to make way for a never-realized Robert Moses highway, the hospital is more ghost than anything.

Trudging across its now-littered footprint onto adjacent Cedar Grove Beach, the sand brightens, the space widens and history draws closer. For nearly one hundred years, generations of families summered in the idyllic bungalows of the Cedar Grove Beach Club until, for the sake of that phantom highway, their property was seized by the city under eminent domain. Rather than return the homes when its plans didn’t materialize, the city turned the bungalows over to the Parks Department. Residents leased them back, caring for the beach and nurturing their summer community, until, for reasons unknown, they were evicted in 2010.

The historic homes languish behind a chain link fence, boarded up, just beyond reach. HBO’s Boardwalk Empire filmed in one, and the beach, untouched by any official parks maintenance, remains clean due only to the efforts of HBO. As the homes begin to be stripped, former residents worry that proper precautions aren’t being taken against asbestos and lead. They remember the sofas, bed-frames and wind-chimes they left behind, the cabins largely emptied of mementos accumulated over decades. They remember the families that had for generations made this place a home together each summer. The former residents of Cedar Grove Beach Club still gather elsewhere for events and celebrations, still hope to win back what’s left of these buildings and rebuild their homes. But it is not hard to imagine that, before long, the well-loved slats, shingles, and beams of these bungalows will follow Seaside Hospital into the Lower Bay, drifting out of time and into memory.

-adapted from information given by Jen Fitzgerald, David Young, Josh Jakob and Eleanor Dugan, Obscura Day 2012.