It’s the heat that brings him back. Walking barefoot on hot asphalt as I cross the parking lot outside of my apartment to get the mail, he is conjured from someplace buried. I’m reminded by the way the burn against my skin feels good, by the way my tan feet look against the black, by the way the warmth simmers up from the ground and courses through and through, vein to artery, organ to organ, until I’ve been heated from the inside, a sort of melting. We lasted just the summer.

We do not keep in touch, but I want to ask him if he remembers the night we met at that bar off of Mercer Street, in the Village. The one down the stairs of the brick building at the corner, with a door you’d miss unless you knew where to look. From the street, you might watch someone walk the length of the wall and then disappear into the brick, a ghost, escaping. It was the speakeasy he swore he could never find twice, but he made it back that night, just that once. It was late — two, three, four in the morning, maybe. The hours blend together after dark, start to get a little seamless. The edges go soft.

It’s been a couple of years since that final night in August, the last night we spent together still believing we’d extend summer into fall. I want to ask him now if he remembers those black boots I was wearing. Knee high, not really like something I’d usually put on. He was the one to point this out, and he kept saying it, over and over. Somehow, not wearing ballet flats meant I wasn’t the same girl he’d met in May, and the two of us being in a new place had changed me into someone else entirely. I tried to explain, “It’s New York. There’s just something about this city,” but he only turned and waved over the bartender.

It was a trick — us being there together. We had defied the natural course of things somehow, interrupted our routine of casual weekend dinners in our own city now a hundred miles away. “I feel a little out of my element,” he said, and I connected us, palm to forearm, heat to heat, smiled, and asked, “Is it because of the boots?”

He shook his head no but mirrored my grin. He was ten years older than I was, and he looked at me often like he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with me, wasn’t sure how I had undone all of his rules about what kind of a woman he should be with. It had been just a week since we’d last seen each other, but I could never slow my heart enough when we were in the same room, could never find the type of comfort that would ease anxiety. For months I kept waiting to stop feeling so nervous, to stop calculating my next sentence whenever he was speaking, to stop thinking I had something to prove. But there was no relief.

He reached out one hand to pull a curl of my dark hair while I stirred my drink, and I was clumsy at his touch. I laughed at the way the liquid spilled down the side of the glass, at the way the liquor caught the light and shimmered as it pooled against the grain of the bar, and I let that laughter come from deep in my ribcage, from somewhere close to the heart, and then he was laughing, laughing, and I’ll remember that laugh always, no matter how many years build between.

I slipped an ice cube into my mouth, cold against the heat of my tongue, and I watched him watch the way the water shined my lips. He slid the strap of my dress off my shoulder, suddenly bold in those final hours. The room was shadowed and dark, and as it got later, that darkness seemed to creep over everything—the faces of the bartenders, the labels on the glass bottles, our clothes and our hands — but even in the dimness of that basement bar I could see the way his eyes were backlit by a certain calm; for just a second, finally, he had relaxed.

That slight brush of skin to skin, wrist to collarbone, his fingers twined through my hair, raised goosebumps. And to mark this moment — the coming or the going, I’m not sure now which, they are tied so close — he raised his glass, and I raised my glass, and he said, “to us,” as if it had always been that way, as if it always would be; and we clinked and drank, and I caught myself for just a moment thinking about that sound, about the way glass on glass rings out and echoes when we are toasting, as if the glass too is celebrating, and it’s such a curious thing that it only takes a little more force to shatter the glass instead, just a little harder, and the amount of pressure is so indiscriminate that, really, we’d hardly notice it at all.

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Kirsten Clodfelter is the Associate Editor of Pif Magazine and an MFA fiction candidate at George Mason University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Perigee, Word Riot, Bayou Magazine, and The Iowa Review. She was a finalist for Cutthroat Magazine’s 2008 Rick DeMarinis Short Story Award and The Tampa Review’s 2009 Danahy Fiction Prize. She currently lives in Virginia.

So Many Jokes, So Little Time

New years mean old years passing by. As time passes and calendars flip, success lingers in the mind. Success is a legacy of sorts — a legacy of life and death. To wit: Achilles is a protagonist. A Nobel prize is an award. We aren’t saying this is the reason for writing, au contraire. We know you’re compelled to write. And we thank you for it. In the words of Tom Waits, “yes, there is success without college.” But how much can you trust Mr. Nick? Thomas Benton says graduate school doesn’t mean success, at least as far as PhDs are concerned. On the day after the anniversary of his death, Albert Camus’ accomplishments have stirred up controversy once again. Naturally, Sarkozy is in the thick of it. The Stranger has the secret to small publishing success, and Slate has the winning (and losing) catchphrases of the 00s. Finally, David Levine was pretty successful; you knew him from the Times Book Review. But “nothing beats the drama of a bullhorn.” Ain’t that right, Rick? –- Andrew Geer

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