2021 - The Rhapsodist by Asheville Buncombe Technical Community College

The Rhapsodist Spring 2021 Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College Asheville, NC

Editors Barbie Byrd Ben Latter Erik Moellering

Readers Kenet Adamson Jennifer Browning Maggie Poist Beverly Williamson Lisa York

Design/Layout The Rhapsodist Editors with assistance from Porscha Orndorf & Dave Kareken

rhapsodist, n. Pronunciation: Brit. /’rapsěd ist/ , U.S. /’ræpsědist/ Etymology: < rhapsody n. + -ist suffix. Compare French rhapsodiste ... 1. A collector of miscellaneous literary pieces. Now hist. and rare.

This issue made possible by the generous support of

A-B Tech’s Student Services Department

Editors' Note: “Easy reading is damned hard writing.” -Nathaniel Hawthorne

_____________________________ Dear Reader, As A-B Tech’s primary venue for literature and fine art, The Rhapsodist showcases the best examples of creative expression from our college’s diverse population. We hope you enjoy this year's issue — one filled with sweet balm after a "damned hard" pandemic year. Thank you for your continued support of The Rhapsodist. Enjoy...

_____________________________

Hawthorn, Nathaniel. Writers on Writing, edited by Jon Winokur, Running Press, 1990.

Contents poetry ten girls [you] wish [you] never met Clem Turner.....................................................................

thermal dynamics Minna Honkakoski...........................................................

The Same Is Not the Same David Thunder Bortolotto...............................................

Mornings Gregor Nishino.................................................................

Sweltering Laura Dame......................................................................

Sonnet of Six Years Zainab Sayed....................................................................

The Riviére Rohan L.Q. Myers.............................................................

Things I Am Still Unsure About Dylan Harbison................................................................

As the Crow Flies Laura Dame......................................................................

Shrink Sophia Rose Walker..........................................................

Stress Michael Islas.....................................................................

Field of Dreams Joseph G. Allawos............................................................

Corners and Edges Cora D. Haas.....................................................................

Fiction

Puddles

Sky Dexter........................................................................

Oranges Adam M. Coulter..............................................................

The New Man T. Ben Latter.....................................................................

Silverton

creative non-fiction

Isabella L. Field.................................................................

The Student Who (Almost) Killed Me Jonathan Rich..................................................................

Aspect Nightmares Sirus Widenhouse............................................................

Silent Scream Jennifer C. Quayle............................................................

The Twice-Gift Piano Mark Damon Puckett.......................................................

Last Chance Ellen J. Perry....................................................................

Chippewa Street Stephany L.N. Davis.........................................................

Dysmorphia Monsters Mali Jaana Rosensweet....................................................

The Sale

Dramatic Dialogue

Mary E. Williams..............................................................

Family Mosaic

Art

Cannon Roxanne Crawford–Wilson................................

The United States of Addiction Jenna Emilie Jaffe............................................................

Carnival Lauren Victorie Lafaille...................................................

Mystery Wayne J. Scank.................................................................

Mt. Pisgah View from Fernihurst Bronwen G. McCormick...................................................

Island Stillness Lauren Victorie Lafaille...................................................

Blue and Silver Grid #1 Mark Damon Puckett.......................................................

Antelope Canyon Linda Welsh......................................................................

60° Vehemence Savannah N. Nowlin........................................................

Moon Dream Rory Moon........................................................................

The Lecter House Caleigh Robinson.............................................................

Contributors .........................................................

Call for 2022 Submissions ...........................

ten girls [you] wish [you] never met Clem Turner she asks to hold your hand. your tongue disappears and you comply. she swings you like a chain every now and then to remind you that you are hers. ten. nine. you slide into the passenger seat, dark toyota camry with red lights on the dashboard. you only ever see her in this light. you do not think it is a bad thing, yet. everything smells like perfume and you feel it stinging, percolating through the tiny holes in your skin. she tells you that you look different and doesn’t explain. you feel dirty for the rest of the night. eight. she’s always typing. no matter what you say, how much you beg, how close to the edge you are. three dots bouncing, threatening to get too close, to push you down. she is typing. when she finally messages, you wish she hadn’t. seven. she’s perfect. she’s small. 9

you carry her on your back once and she wraps her arms around your neck and rests her chin in your hair. she wears soft sweaters that show her stomach. six. every time you blink, you’re scared she will leave. and she does. five. you share the same taste in food. you wear matching sneakers you accidentally say the same things. you met on accident. your friend was her friend and the pieces all fell together, even though some of them didn’t fit. you gave her a ring and she lost it. then you gave her a piece of yourself. four. she likes your writing. she told you she liked it once and you were indebted. there is nothing you need more than praise. you are sinking and she has a rope-it doesn’t matter if it is thin and itchy. sometimes she will threaten to let go. sometimes you want her to. three. she says good morning to you. she folds your clothes into little squares. she is beautiful. [there was no chance.] 10

two. she is the kind of girl that people want to write poems about. but she never reads them. one. she speaks to you like a human. you forgot what that felt like. late night texts are routine. she has to move away to find herself. she throws her phone into a lake but not before telling you she’ll miss you. you remember that felt like a lie, because why would someone give hope to someone they plan to throw into a lake? it felt silly, for the first time, grief. your last memory of her is on a screen, a love (?) letter punctuated by a heart emoticon with an extra space. you do not cry, this time. you never talk about her. she looks plastic in her photographs but her hugs are warm. you have a space in your closet for her shoes. zero.

Family Mosaic Cannon Roxanne Crawford–Wilson

Silverton Isabella L. Field

he car hums quietly, carrying you through the rising mountain roads. Elton John plays quietly as you gaze out the window, watching the mountains climb higher and higher with each mile. You crack your window and breathe in the familiar smell of the air; you’re coming home. Your father’s hand rests strong on the wheel, steering the car into the heart of Colorado until you are riding the side of a mountain. All around you the Rockies stand like great guardians to this country, watching the tiny car’s procession into the heart of the mountains. They tower above you, dark evergreens rolling up the base of sharp white peaks that cut the cold blue sky. Their power and beauty overwhelm you, press down on you, commanding respect, radiating glory. You worship them, your soul submits to their power and cries out in awe at the everlasting strength of the mountains. The car winds down the spine of the mountain and rolls into town down Main Street, the only paved road in town. On either side of you, old wooden buildings line up shoulder to shoulder, the memories of each one swirling in your mind. Smedley’s, the ice cream parlor you used to stop at after hiking the Highland Mary trail nearby; The Orange Crate, a gift shop you used to spend hours in staring at the beautiful painted horses; Handlebars, an old mountain restaurant decorated head to toe with road signs, badges, and flashing lights. All these places strike their own unique chord in your heart, blending together to create a beautiful melody of times past. Such is the nature of Silverton; this is a place where the songs of the past echo softly off the stony walls of the mountains, flowing into your ear reminding you of the things in life that are 13

real, that matter. You breathe this song in through the thin air; you feel the melody in the chilly wind off the mountains; it brushes the dust and the grime from your heart and sweeps back the blinders from your eyes. You are alive. Oh, finally, you are alive! But now it’s time to go inside; night is falling, the light glows orange across the face of Kendall Mountain. One by one the stars twinkle to life, dusting the dark blue sky in a thousand pinpricks of diamond light. The owl flutters soundlessly, the coyote rustles through the trees, the mountain wind grows cold and brushes your skin, beckoning you to retire to the safety and warmth of the house. You step into the Assay house, the place you have called home for generations. As you open the small wooden door, a tiny bell tinkles softly. A blue heeler trots up to you, tail wagging in excitement as it brushes its soft head against your hand. The house itself is tiny, with only one floor crowded with antiques and quilting supplies. From the tiny kitchen just a few steps away, grandma makes her way toward you, bearing a smile of pure joy adorned by a head of wild silvery hair. She welcomes you into her warm embrace, holding you tight to her chest. The smell of her perfume contains a thousand treasured memories that waft gently around you, bringing a smile across your face and brimming your eyes with tears. She smiles at you once more, shining like summer rain on the mountainside. “Let’s play poker!” she laughs as she beckons you to the dining table. You squeeze yourself around the table with the rest of your family, the room filling with laughter as the game begins. While the joy of family swirls in the air, your eyes wander across the hundreds of photos that cover the walls of the house. These pictures recount the past 20 years of life in Silverton, with images such as your father, looking so young as he casts his fly line out over the glassy waters of Molas lake, and your sister when she was a baby, her round face adorned with sunglasses, squatting in her stroller with hilarious swagger. You smile as your heart swells with tremendous love 14

for the family that surrounds you now. Yet the joy cannot last forever, and your time in this awesome country must come to an end. You wake up before dawn, the stars still faintly shining in the deep blue sky. The air is freezing; it burns your throat as you inhale your lasts breaths of Silverton. The mountains are dark, still, and deathly quiet. As the car makes its way back up the mountain road and away from your home, you feel the coldness of the mountains seep its way into your heart. You think of all the time that will come to pass: when there will be faces missing from the poker table; when the pictures on the wall will decay and fade into the past; when memories of Silverton will be filled with a chill and the song of the mountains with a deep, pained groan. Outside the car, the mountains stand tall, steadfast in their place, constant through all time. They stand guard to your thoughts, they watch over your joy and your pain, freedom and loss, death and life. Every year you will return, and every year something will change in the little town of Silverton. New faces will appear; old ones will be lost. New memories will be made, and past memories will ache. The song of the town will roar brazen with hope, and whisper exhausted with devastation. And all the while the mountains will stand guard-unmoving, unchanging, unrelenting. They watch life spring up and death tear down; they live through bitter snow and brutal sun; they gaze upon blazing fire and pouring rain. Yet through it all, they stand. Powerful, steadfast, strong. For all time before and for all time to come, the mountains will stand, guardians of this aching, soaring, beautiful song of life.

thermal dynamics Minna Honkakoski my cold toes find the backs of your thighs and you let me keep them there till i hear your stuffy sighs of sleep you don’t easily stir but sometimes move, in your slumber travel through the twisted sheet for your turn to borrow a bit of heat (you can have it all). when the morning greets you and pries open your eyelids, your sleep-smeared face and gruff grunts are the beginning of my day, the warmest beginning of all.

The United States of Addiction Jenna Emilie Jaffe

The Same Is Not the Same David Thunder Bortolotto Over the phone with no Distinct way of knowing over what Massive space between She tells me how much colder in Boston Everything right now would be and Remembers red nights when her father Would come at her and call her away and She’d have to use her deep prison voice To get him to stop and get off her. But those days are over and so are the Ones I believe sometimes when I’m dead Eyed and red throated yelling high and Loud, in the first dream of tomorrow I have The same is not the same and what I am Over how massive and great is known to Me.

The Student Who (Almost) Killed Me Jonathan Rich

he last day of class before Winter Break is kind of worthless. Any instruction offered will no doubt be forgotten, and any in-class assignments made on that last day will have to be graded during the holiday, so the best a high school English teacher can hope to accomplish is contain the non-denominational festivities. This was the case when I was teaching high school freshman English at a public school. On that last day one of my kinder students presented me with a gift. As a rule, I do not accept gifts from students as it sets a bad precedent of favoritism and puts both student and teacher in an awkward situation. However, when a young woman whom I will refer to as Kimberly Jane (not her real name) placed a decorative box on my desk, the beaming look on her pubescent face made me reconsider. “Mr. Rich, I have really enjoyed class with you this fall,” she said. “I was a little worried about high school, but you make English class fun. I saved my allowance and bought you this dessert. It’s my favorite, and I hope you like it.” I started to give her the speech I always used when this had happened before, but then I thought of an acceptable out: “Kimberly Jane” – she always wanted me to use both first names – “While I appreciate the gesture and the thought behind it, I have a severe tree nut allergy. If this was prepared in a room where nuts were even out of the bag, I could get very sick. Maybe you should keep this for yourself?” I confidently responded. “Oh, my father works in the food service industry, and he made sure there were no nuts involved. It is a chocolate covered ap19

ple” she smiled. “No nuts.” An apple for the teacher, and one covered in chocolate without any traces of nature’s kryptonite? How could I refuse? “Well then, Kimberly Jane: thank you very much. It means a lot.” “You are very welcome, Mr. Rich” she grinned. “Merry Christmas.” “The same to you and yours,” I replied. I took the box home and forgot about it until Saturday when, after a nap, I woke up hungry and wanted a snack. I remembered Kimberly Jane’s generosity, unboxed my dietary demon, and took a big bite. Instantly, I knew I was in trouble; I tasted decadent dark chocolate, a crisp Western North Carolina apple, but also almonds, pecans, cashews, and maybe even a hint of pine nuts for good measure. In the past when I ingested any of these, I headed to the nearest toilet, stuck my finger down my throat, and immediately got the offending allergen out of my body. This time, however, when I propelled the offending antagonist out of my throat, I felt it begin to swell. Having been through this before, I looked for my EpiPen injector but remembered my last refill was in my desk back in my classroom desk. But, there was a drug store 5 minutes away. I grabbed my keys as well as a dry erase board because when this has happened before I have about 10 minutes before I can no longer speak clearly, and thus began the quest for emergency relief. Now, this was the weekend before Christmas, and the parking lot was packed with thrifty shoppers as well as the usual long afternoon line at the pharmacy. I could feel the hives starting to form on the back of my neck as I patiently waited in line and knew I would be unintelligible when I got my turn. I wrote EPIPEN in big letters on the board, but this only confused the pharmacy clerk. “Do you want an EpiPen?” he asked, and I groggily nodded in the affirmative. 20

“If you do, then you need a prescription,” he responded unimpressed. That only made me just underline the word “NOW” on the white board I was shaking at him. “Do you have a prescription?” he repeated. “If you don’t, then you need to get one from your doctor Monday.” I rolled my eyes, which were now starting to get blurry from the early stages of anaphylactic shock and grunted “EH-PEE-PINNN” sounding (and starting to look like) a modern-day Elephant Man. “EH-PEE-PINNN!” The other people in line were starting to stare, and I gathered from my metamorphosis my hives were spreading. They all backed away as I continued to grunt and gesture at the board, and the room started to spin. But it was then an angel appeared out of nowhere (ok, it was from the door of the adjacent Minute Clinic where somebody was being treated for an inner ear infection), and this cherub grabbed my shoulders and spun me around. “Sir, are you having an allergic reaction?” the nameless seraph calmy asked. I nodded as best I could (which is hard to do when your neck is covered in hives) and the minor-league physician/impromptu savior said, “Drop your pants.” The angel quickly disappeared behind the pharmacy desk, then returned instantly with not one, but two EH-PEE-PINNNs. “You are going to feel a pinch” she said before simultaneously jamming a syringe into each of my exposed thighs. “You may want to sit down for a minute while the needles work their magic” was the last thing I remember hearing before I woke up being strapped down to a gurney by four EMTs (who did NOT pull my pants back up) and was rolled out of the public view. However, as I passed the pharmacy desk, I was cogent enough to give the insolent pharmacy manager a hive-covered middle finger as I passed his elevated desk en route to the ambulance and grunted “MARE-EE CHRISS-MAASS.” 21

I did not speak of any of this until six months later when I was chaperoning the annual school play, and a woman approached me. “Mister Rich?” she asked. “How may I help you?” I confidently responded. “Mister Rich, I am Kimberly Jane’s stepmother, and every night at dinner she tells us about what she is reading, what she is writing, and all about what you do in English class,” Mrs. Tanner gushed. “She was really anxious about starting high school at the first of the year, but you made all of that go away.” “Did you know she almost killed me?” I replied, and then I watched her face go white after I took her aside and told her the story much as I have just done here. “Oh no.” Kimberly-Jane’s mother muttered. “I think I know what happened. My husband was very careful when he ordered the desserts, but he got one for you and then two with nuts for Kimberly-Jane and her mother. It’s their favorite. I think the tags on the boxes must have gotten switched. Does Kimberly Jane know about any of this?” she quickly whispered. “Of course not,” I said. “Well, we can never tell her. She would be crushed,” she demurred. “But, you know my husband and I own a restaurant. Come by anytime and your meal will be on us.” “Mrs. Tanner,” I interjected, “I could never accept a free meal from a parent of a student. That would set a bad precedent.” “We have the best barbecue in the county,” she countered, “and some people say we have the best ribs in the state.” "Well, in that case, a man has to eat. Thank Kimberly Jane in advance for the free meal."

Carnival Lauren Victorie Lafaille

Aspect Nightmares Sirus Widenhouse 1 “If you don’t want nightmares, then don’t eat before you go to bed.” At least, that’s what I remember being told as a kid. Maybe it was based in truth, where some white coat conducted a study with fifty kids. The results of that test were probably told and retold by mothers that just wanted to get some sleep of their own before having to wake up into their daily routine hell again. I just want to get a good six hours of recharge before I’m forced online again. Or rather, I just want to fall asleep without the hours of lying awake thinking about her. It’s been six months, and I’ve never known anyone the same way. Maybe I’ll never know anyone the same way. Of course, it was always going to be easier in hindsight. You never really know what you have until you don’t anymore. Well, not at first, but slowly. The ache of something missing. Some part of you rubbed off. That study, it was told and retold until it barely resembled the original experiment in the first place. Maybe the people you meet are just telling and retelling themselves. To someone new, you could be anyone. 2 My doctor tells me that I can’t die from insomnia. Maybe that’s the problem-not insomnia but heartbreak. But my doctor, she won’t acknowledge that my condition is a mental one. She tells me to chew some valerian root and get more exercise. My personal theory is that the part of me that rubbed off, the part that I feel missing, it rubbed off onto her. Maybe while I was actually sleeping, but maybe not. What I do know is that I never 24

had an issue falling asleep until she ended it. Now the nightmare is the lying awake, hoping that my mind will go blank enough for long enough to pass into unconsciousness. The problem is, it’s impossible to fall asleep if you’re actively trying to fall asleep. To forget the day. The past month. The past six months. 3 Whenever I used to get an idea, typically for writing into something I would never make, I used to type it up on my phone’s notepad. These weren’t very long in form, either a small joke that I came up with or an idea for a movie scene. Jokes like: “Are you sir, religious… in any way?” “Yessir, I’m a pedestrian.” More often than not, these ideas were the result of smoking too much weed and not being able to properly convey my thoughts because of it. Without context, most of my little blurbs lost their punch. Now I scroll through the list and wonder what I was thinking, but that’s the fun right? I’ll never remember what my train of thought was a whole year and a half ago. She used to say, “The future you have, tomorrow, won’t be the same future you had, yesterday.” I liked that quote. I wrote it down on my notepad to remember. I found out later it was from a movie. 4 My older brother told me he had never had trouble sleeping; instead he experienced reoccurring sleep paralysis. It’s a phenomenon in which your brain wakes up before your body. The victim usually feels trapped, unable to move, unable to see, and unable to feel, but they are very awake. The experience is surreal. To this day, I’ve only had this happen to me once. He said he got used to it after a while. It typically doesn’t last for more than a few minutes, but those few minutes were ter-

rifying. Like being in a coma. A hibernation. He said sometimes he could feel some figure standing over him. Not doing anything, just observing. The feeling of being watched. He used these episodes to inspire his final art show, to achieve a bachelor’s in photography. Another thing. That time I got sleep paralysis, I had drifted asleep next to her. And another. I woke up shivering and drenched in sweat with her freckled, concerned face looking back down at me. 5 My lack of sleep was beginning to become a problem. I grew dark circles under my eyes. My clothes took longer and longer to get washed. I got into the habit of smoking myself to sleep at night and drinking myself awake the following morning. I told her once that I didn’t like being sober. I meant it as a joke, but the look she gave said that she didn’t find it the least bit funny. Now that I don’t have a person anymore, no one to cry to or to laugh at or to sleep with, I can’t see myself just “moving on.” According to another one of those regurgitated studies, it takes an average of two years to get over your ex. I kept thinking to myself after reading this figure: “who did they profile for this study?” “how can you conjure up a number out of something so personal?” “and how do you really know if you’re ‘over it’ yet?” Before the breakup, I thought about the world as it occurred, moment to moment. Whenever she got irritated, I would ask myself what I did wrong. “What could I do better next time?” After the breakup I knew how wrong I had been. It wasn’t about me. It had never been about me. Her inner monologue was so reactionary that she didn’t need a doctor to know she had Attention Deficit Disorder – jargon for “Her brain works faster than she can 26

literally control it.” All those times that she blew up, it wasn’t my fault; I was just there for her to react to. The last real conversation we had, she was telling me how she had gone back through my Spotify and how much she missed my music. She had never liked my music when we were together. It was only after not talking to me for months that she needed to fill that ache in her gut. The last real conversation we had was lukewarm at best. 6 I suppose that it was ultimately a good thing, what happened to me. That initial thrill of the first kiss outside the Happy Death Day theater will only be a lasting teenage memory. The wonder and excitement of what that person could be is more intoxicating than what they will be. It’s almost as if by not knowing them, they’re more interesting. Like if you don’t know someone, they could be anyone. I wonder if people retell themselves, just like those studies conducted by med school students. Designed to be told and retold until it becomes a wives' tale. Like an adult game of telephone. In reality, it’s low blood sugar that typically induces nightmares, particularly in small children. Those doctors call it hypoglycemia. That’s why the nurse gives you a cookie after you donate blood; without normal blood sugar levels, you could easily pass out trying to stand up from the chair. Typical symptoms include anxiety, sweat or clamminess, confusion, irritability and feeling lightheaded. Another symptom of hypoglycemia is the slight alteration brain chemistry. This is what some doctors believe causes the occurrence of strange dreams. As it turns out, it's not eating that is linked to nightmares. I don’t remember my dreams. I’ve tried the whole “dream journal” thing where you write down as much as you can remember the second you wake up. The problem is, I always find myself in mid dream. The minute I realize that what I’m experiencing isn’t real, I jerk awake. My brain then 27

promptly deletes the dream. But this time I remembered a few things. Aspects. She was telling me that I had been replaced. In a very calm, sterile tone. I was more upset than I had ever been in my conscious life, kicking and crying and rejecting all of those emotionless, heartless words. She was telling me it wasn’t my fault, that she just didn’t care anymore. That she knew me too well, and how she felt like I barely knew her at all. That she had a new partner, who could do all the things I could do but better. I didn’t jerk awake. I wasn’t covered in sweat or breathing heavy. This was a slow realization that I had been dreaming. I knew I was awake before my eyes wanted to open.

Mornings Gregor Nishino You get up mornings and make black coffee; I lie in bed, my bed. How do you tell the truth? I go out and sit in the front yard; My neighbor's lawn chairs. They unbecome me. I think of you like the baby blue Ford in the top parking lot. I can hardly say more. I get up mornings and I make coffee, with almond milk, cinnamon, light brown sugar and a pinch of smoked sea salt. You lie in bed, yours. Things I say go out of me and back to me. I go out and sit in the back. Smooth is slow, slow is fast, fast is power, you tell me and snap your fan. Maybe you should be writing this poem. Is it because everyone can put their pants back on right after? That other boys sleep with other boys who will not sleep with me? I like you cutting onions in the kitchen, while I write this poem. You better watch your weight.

Mystery Wayne J. Scank

Sweltering Laura Dame This summer is pouring me out of my skin, is dumping me out like I’m brackish wash water and time is the slimy, inevitable drain. This summer is splashing through me like a child stomps through puddles of rain with muddy polka-dot boots and a red shiny coat. I am grey and loose. I’m spilled out and defenseless. I am tossed up in the air, broken up into liquid shreds of myself that are too small to make a whole —and it is still raining down on me. This summer is a spoiled brat, and I must sit next to them in class and I must try to ignore the way they mock my laugh and I must not let the hatred for them eat me up whole. This summer is tricking me into breaking myself in half.

This summer is spent wishing tomorrow won’t feel heavy again but finding that today always does, the heat always wins the ever-repeating fight. This summer is seeping along the grooves of my brain; an invasive vine, curling and crinkling, filling up the gaps inside my head with its gnarled arms and oily leaves, choking out the life with pervasive, incestuous growth. This summer is me weeping because I don’t know how to feel pain. This summer is the world whispering, refraining, keening: “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know” because we don’t and we know.

Silent Scream Jennifer C. Quayle

’m a ten-year-old dropped into a tragedy I never asked for. I’m a ten-year-old with a dirty face, no food in the refrigerator, and a drunk father. I didn’t know what alcoholism was before I was thrown into the ring. I wasn’t prepared. One second I was playing with Barbies, and the next I’m pleading with my dad to change his mind, that stealing that horse is a bad idea. A tenyear-old hostage negotiator with nothing but on-the-job training; and you gotta learn fast. Sink or swim, baby. I quickly learned that being a child of an alcoholic is like being held hostage. Your every waking moment is spent appeasing, bargaining, pleading. You can’t go to anyone. You can’t tell anyone. And because of that, they always have the upper hand. Somehow this unspoken agreement was made. It doesn’t matter what they do. It doesn’t matter how much they neglect you. They know that you know that you’ll never say anything. This is your life now.

Being a child of an alcoholic is like being kidnapped. Your existence has become nothing more than a car ride with your abductor, an imaginary gun jammed right up under your ribs, your vacant face turned towards the glass. You look at each passing car and notice that every person seems so normal, so unconcerned with the chaos that’s so obvious; they just choose not to see it. You aren’t sure if you remember what that feels like: leading a normal existence. You press your hollow face and shaking hands against the glass in a desperate attempt to get someone’s attention. You’re the quiet, overly-friendly kid begging for someone to see you, someone to notice your dirty hands and the terror in your eyes. When someone does look, they don’t see, but you mouth HELP ME anyway. But no one can hear your soundless pleas. Mistaking your desperation for some33

thing else, they smile from behind the safety of their lives, and turn away. Growing up in chaos is like living on a battlefield. It’s violent, ugly, and overwhelming, and you fall asleep at night amazed that you made it through another day. When you fall asleep, the sound of battle still ringing in your ears, nothing feels real. All you’re looking for is stability and refuge. All you want is for someone to wipe the blood from your face and tell you that you’re safe. This is your life now. As a ten-year-old, you don’t expect to have to learn how to live with the electricity turned off. You don’t plan on drinking out of the dog’s water bowl because the well water is off, convincing your little sister that this is just a silly game, sheltering her from what it really is. I’d play with my friends across the street and try to act like a normal kid, while trying to push away the dread of having to make a mustard sandwich when I got home because there was nothing else. I marveled at the simplicity of other kid’s lives. I bet they never had to sit in the car while their drunk father drove to the corner store to get more booze. I bet they never had to turn the radio up so loud that it drowned out the drunken sounds of their father in the house. I couldn’t understand why this was happening to me. I looked at their pristine lives and couldn’t help but wonder what it was I did in a past life that was so wrong as to deserve this. I couldn’t understand how they got so lucky. I always heard that you make your own luck, but when you spend each day just trying to make it to the next, your spirit is so broken that you couldn’t make your own luck if you tried. When you’re living simply to survive, sometimes it feels like that’s all the luck you were allotted in this life. You get to live; survival is your luck and there’s nothing else to spare. That’s all we got for ya, kid. Try again in the next life. You’re becoming accustomed to the terror, the panic, the hopelessness that cloaks you like a mantle each morning. You’ve adapted so quickly; you hide, you stay outside, you make yourself invisible, just waiting for the day to end. Waiting for it all to 34

end. You’ve realized that nothing can quell that sick lump in your stomach, so you learn to pretend it’s not there. I got so good at pretending, at hiding my real feelings. I’d slide on my mask, step into character, and I was so convincing with these feigned emotions that people wanted and expected. Everything I didn’t feel. I got so good at slipping into someone else’s skin, hoping that just once, someone would look into my eyes and see the hysteria there, the voiceless scream that is always there. This is your life now.

Is there a name for that silent scream that blooms in your heart after help passes you up? When no one sees your desperation and dread? They’re here, and then they’re gone; they think you’re fine, nobody wants to get involved. What about a word for the horror that you feel when you’re alone with the thing that scares you the most? That bewildered alarm, knowing that you just ran out of options. Because there’s a panic that comes from waking up and knowing that you’re going to have to face things beyond anything you could have ever imagined. There’s a dread born from the realization that you have to internalize it all. This is your life now. But most of all, there’s an unfathomable sorrow that comes only with the reluctant acknowledgement of three simple truths: This is the hand you were dealt; This is the life you were flung into; And that you, and you alone, are the one that has to shoulder this burden that never should have been yours in the first place. You will carry this pain, this sorrow, and these scars for the rest of your life. You’re marked now and for the rest of your life. This is your life now. After a while, when I realized that this would never end, I would fantasize about running away from everything; vanishing like a magic trick. Shedding my life like snakeskin; drop it like it was burning my hands. A hollowness began carving out a deep place 35

inside me, a deep, cavernous sad. The kind that settles in your bones and dwells there in the dark. My melancholia and I became friends. It became a pastime for me to push myself over the edge, into that black place, letting sadness drench me like a rainstorm. I dwelled on my sorrow, thrived on it. Grew a black cloud to keep over my head like a pet. Tended to my woe like a garden. As time passed, in order to swallow my panic, I began to see my life as if it were scenes in a movie. It was easier to digest that way; I could step out of the frame and watch this other person: locking the bedroom door, burying the dog. My stand-in would be the one who felt the echoing ache of loneliness and isolation, not me. The continual scream for help that was stuck in my throat was hers, not mine. This wasn’t my life. This was Her life and She was just a character; she navigated each day scene by scene. These things aren’t happening to me. (These are things that will never happen to me.) This wasn’t my life. (This couldn’t possibly be my life.) Because if it was my life, then I would be forced to see the ugliness. I’d drown in the despair and suffocate on the unfairness of it all. This wasn’t my life. This was a scene. And I waited desperately for someone to yell CUT. Now, all these years later, in those empty in-between moments, sometimes if I’m really quiet and very still, I can almost put myself back-the tattered doll of my childhood self, back in the dollhouse of my past. I can feel the empty days and nameless terrors, the silent screams closing in around me as if it were just moments ago. It’s strange. I always think I keep these moments, these sense memories, tucked far away in the recesses of my mind, and yet, they must not be all that far away because they never hesitate to rush me when I’m the most unsuspecting. Whenever they come back, it’s a flood. A forest fire. They no longer feel like thoughts or memories. 36

They’re movie moments replaying, fragments of light illuminating hundreds of squares of film negatives, cut from what I remember, projected on the silver screen of my brain. Even before it happened, when I trace my history, even my earliest memories are dipped in a waxy sadness that was so beyond the single digits of my years, that it’s no wonder this ache has been buried inside me like a past life all these years. After it happened, I felt fragmented, the story ripped from me, taken forcibly. I had been made to repeat the chain of events so many times that it became a rote recitation: detached, unfeeling. It was easier that way. It was just a story I was telling. I could call on my stand-in again and read the script in Her voice. I could hide behind this character’s life and pretend that it wasn’t my experience; I could make myself believe that I couldn’t fathom what it was like to live through such things. I was just reading the script. I became a pull-string talking doll. Pull the string! I say six phrases! My box advertised in offensively bright colors, offsetting my gray depression, my face a painted-on grin. This phony mask of happiness was blending into my real face so well. The canned silence after those pull-string phrases fell from my mouth like iron. The way I always tried to fill the vacuum with my plastic smile and morbid jokes. My detachment unnerved people. They didn’t expect a twelve-year-old to talk about such a violent event as if delivering a monologue. People never seemed to understand that it’s the detachment from the horror that allows you to wake up every morning, fall asleep at night, keep one foot in front of the other, the days coming in one endless blurry stream. It’s the detachment that keeps you from thinking too much, keeps you from picturing the blood on the walls.

Mt. Pisgah View from Fernihurst Bronwen G. McCormick

The Twice-Gift Piano Mark Damon Puckett

n March 2018 I saw my older brother for the last time. He came with Dad from Idaho, had lost a hundred pounds with throat cancer ruining his face. Had lost three teeth. Dabbed a napkin on the spittle that oozed from his mouth as he sat in my living room and said, “At least I still have my looks.” It was a brief visit, maybe thirty minutes, then Dad took him to my mom’s house in Virginia where he would die a week later in bloody sheets. Shortly afterward, Mom drove around the Smith Mountain Lake area for six hours, finally arriving at her dentist’s office for a non-existent appointment, chewing on twenty-five cough drops a day. The dentist called adult services and suddenly the sheriff was at her house. I drove up from Asheville to Moneta more than ten times that year, 2018, about a ten-hour round trip. To stay with her. My younger brother and his wife also spent time there, but Mom would suddenly vanish in the car even after the doctor told her she couldn’t drive anymore. Finally, we brought her to Asheville where she is now, January 2021, and has been for nearly three years. After we moved Mom to Asheville, I found myself alone in her home as I prepared to sell it. For weeks at a time. Quieter when the furniture began to disappear. An empty place. Except for her Kimball console piano, hardly ever played and bought as a Valentine’s gift from my father in 1979. I would come up in April of 2018 for two weeks then return to North Carolina for two. And so on through August. That gave me two weeks at the piano until the house sold in August. During that time I found a book by Norman Monath called How to Play Popular Piano in 10 Easy Lessons, and soon I started with three-note chords. I had acquired much sheet music from the Greenwich Library in Con39

necticut where I had lived for many years but had originally used it when I had learned the trumpet. Now, the chords above the notes began to make more sense. In July I was into the four-note chords and playing songs fully. A piano mover came and transported mine to Asheville where it has been in my home since August 2018. I can’t describe the emotion I feel when I sit at this musical shrine, in some ways truly a memorial to my brother. And to my mother as well who played. It is now going on three years later since I have played nearly every day, singing Charles Trenet’s “La Mer” in French or crooning “Makin’ Whoopee.” I won’t list everything which spans classical, jazz, pop, country and rock, but I will talk about one song, “Daniel” by Elton John and these moving lyrics: “Daniel, my brother, you are older than me/Do you still feel the pain of the scars that won’t heal?/Your eyes have died but you see more than I . . .” The first times I played this song, I could not stop from choking back tears as if there were so many in my eyes that they had to gush from my mouth when I sang. Sometimes the tears couldn’t be choked. I have been teaching essay writing in college classes since 1992, but whenever I sit down to pen one, I’m not sure I know how. The word essay is from the French “essayer” which means to try. And I tried, after my brother’s death on March 6, 2018, to write about him. I recently reread those pages and found that my attempt had been epistolary and raw, a journal of devastated purging, not something for others to read. But I kept at it. Because a conclusion cannot be the same as a thesis; it must move above the initial idea and be something new. Like this piano, an original gift to Mom, later given to me, the conclusion must be a gift of sorts, a final offering that goes to a new place. If you think about it, a gift is a present and a talent. I just hope my brother and my mom know how much I think of them each time I sit down to the keys. I also begin to wonder where this piano will go after I am gone.

Sonnet of Six Years Zainab Sayed Oh heart! Beware the haunt of something sought Beyond all reach, still trapped in begging to Be wronged—bewitched in traps of longing rot. That trap of missing something gone. In lieu Of touch, a vice-grip hold, a gummed-up rope; Of gentle, nothing but caress of coal, A mark to chase all doubt, abandoned hope— Mirage! Mirage! A curse to stain the soul. Oh heart! Can you not see that broken word, That promise left, that lie unsaid, silent swear? Oh heart! Will you not let my cry be heard, That you be free, need not this burden bear? Oh gentle thing, pray heed your loving mind— I wish you your joy, your peace, your rest you find.

Last Chance Ellen J. Perry

ots of folks in the South look for signs from Jesus. They might open the Bible at a random place to find the answers or see hope in a rainbow. I take note of signs along our roads – billboards, advertisements, hand-made posters, store names, church admonishments – and write about them. Here in our region there is no shortage of such signs and, thus, good writing material. “Divorce, $189: Fast and Affordable.” “Milk Bread Soft Drinks.” “Small Town Throwdown.” “Church Pew 4 Sale.” “Body Piercing, Permanent Makeup, Fine Jewelry.” “Real Close Parking Beach and Peer.” “Dead End.” A few summers ago I was traveling from South Carolina to my home in the mountains when I noticed two signs in particular: “Peach’s” and “Last Chance.” When I stopped at the roadside stand to buy some peaches, I reflected (as English teachers do) both on the choice of punctuation and the various meanings of the phrase “last chance.” In this case the sign was, I supposed at first glance, to be read literally: “If you don’t stop here, lady, you’ll cross the North Carolina state line and won’t get another opportunity to buy these delicious golden treasures, soaked in the Southern sun.” Yet there are many other ways to interpret “last chance.” As I breathed in the sweet scent of the peaches, arranged nicely in a woven basket just like the one that my parents’ neighbors use as a manger for baby Jesus in their Nativity scene, I wondered about chances. Opportunities. Invitations. How many do we get before we hit a metaphorical state line, or some sort of Dead End? Women feel this pressure on a daily basis. “Last chance to have a baby, before your eggs reach their expiration date.” “Last chance to find love, before youth and beauty fade.” “Last chance to get going on a new 42

career, before the younger crowd takes over.” “Last chance to lose those ten pounds, before menopause sets in.” “Last chance to get your kid on the right path, before he leaves home for good.” At 20 and 30, even 35, I didn’t see these signs or figured they were meant for someone else. I blazed right on by, feeling confident that there would surely be another opportunity up ahead. But now the signs are popping up everywhere. The woman selling the roadside peaches looked to be about my age, and I wanted to ask her how she felt about last chances. Did she write the words on the sign with a keen understanding of the weightier message beneath it? Maybe this was part of her marketing plan. If so, it was working. Every basket I peered into made me think of J. Alfred Prufrock’s question in the T. S. Eliot poem: “Do I dare to eat a peach?” I didn’t want to be like Prufrock – “whiny,” one of my students had called him, paralyzed and afraid to take chances – and so answered to myself: “Yes, I will buy these delectable fruits and take slow bites from them, juices pouring, like big old bites of summer freedom.” James Joyce’s Molly Bloom knew this answer well: “yes I said yes I will Yes.” Then again, Christina Rossetti recognized that the most succulent fruit might be an enticing, addictive path to destruction. “Morning and evening,” she begins, “maids heard the goblins cry: ‘Come buy our orchard fruits, come buy, come buy…bloom-downcheek’d peaches, swart-headed mulberries, wild free-born cranberries, crab-apples, dewberries, pine-apples, blackberries, apricots, strawberries – all ripe together in summer weather.’” Rossetti’s goblins lure in ripening maidens with their sensual, fruity seduction; the first bite an eager girl takes may be her last, though she has been warned by her peers: “We must not look at goblin men, we must not buy their fruits.” These timeless words become so deeply lodged in our psyches during adolescence that today’s middle-aged Southern women still hear their echo, and as a result we often pass by the various symbolic fruit stands along the road of life. It has to be a 43

trick, we think, something too good to be true. Or we think we don’t deserve such indulgence. Anyway, there will be another chance on up ahead somewhere, something safer. Something better for us in the long run. But what if the woman selling peaches in South Carolina was on to something when she wrote the “Last Chance” sign? At what point do we just pull off the two-lane road and buy the fruit (with our own hard-earned money) before it spoils, goblins or no? Coming over to check on me, the woman made friendly small talk. “Where you from?” she asked. “North Carolina. Just passing through.” “These was just picked yesterday.” She held up one of the peaches so I could breathe in its honeyed fragrance. “If you like them ripe and ready to eat, these here is it. If you want them to last longer, I got some harder ones in the back.” And this is the heart of the matter, really, isn’t it: do we want our rewards for tolerating the tedious grind of everyday life now, or later? I bought the basket of ripe, ready-to-eat, just-plucked peaches. I drove on home and shared some with family and friends. But the rest were mine to devour, mine to cut with a sharp knife, mine to pit, mine to peel. Most of all they were mine to bite into without shame or regret. I still take in the messiness of life, the juicy bits that require a lot of napkins and clean-up, but aren’t they so fine! So delicious, they’re worth the trouble. So imbued with sunshine, the heat transfers to my tongue and my skin as the juice dribbles down, and it’s nothing but a beautiful mess. I won’t pass it up. Today isn’t, surely, the last chance for me but I must try it on, like a summer sundress, to see if it holds me close in the right places, and frees me in all others.

The Riviére Rohan L.Q. Myers Living in the trampled hedges rabbits run, beneath rampant brush and scrub, collecting secrets from the serpent’s lips. Slippery, polished stones hold tailored dirt, caressing flitting, glassy, figures which glide to-and-fro amongst fetid scum and dulse. Imbibing fawns sup from the crystal swill, and swelling rapids turn and shatter on burly shelf and slag. Laden rock and mortar pose atop cascading loam and sod. Allowing for the swain and lover to peruse the rill. Yet, against the portrait of the sky, large, aching oaks grip and claw, captivating the audience of the strand. Man and wife through forked-tongue do fill their stint with booze and decanter. Sliding and slithering to bed, the couple of cotton-mouths lie patiently in the underbrush.

Island Stillness Lauren Victorie Lafaille

Chippewa Street Stephany L.N. Davis

ast year, the bodies of three women were found in an area known to local law enforcement as a hub for prostitution and drug activity. Still no leads, no death certificates, or pending autopsy results; news outlets, local and national, caught wind of a possible serial killer in the small North Carolina town, previously known for its swine houses and lagoons, and filled up every motor inn along the I-95 corridor with reporters to broadcast any breaking detail in the case. On our way to visit Lumberton, my daughter and I pass my Granny and Papaw’s farm, the home of my maternal grandparents. Papaw kept bee boxes between the blueberry bushes and the chicken coop. Granny kept a Double D lard bucket in the kitchen corner for slop. Scraps of buttermilk biscuits, half eaten egg sacks from the hens, chunks of ham hock used to flavor greens, peels of pomegranates that grew just outside Papaw’s bedroom window. All there. Brewing in my Granny’s kitchen. Even the old pecan tree is there, though its limbs have been cut back for the new powerlines. I remember my cousins’ shrieks and hollers as they run in opposite directions playing 1-2-3 get off my Papaw’s pecan tree. After it rained and water collected in the ditches, I’d imagine catching a great big fish. See its fins emerge out of the water. The sun glistening on the scales of its back. Wade in the waters and try to catch another by hand, catching ringworms instead. Feel the butter knife hours later scraping at my skin. Maybe we can stop to visit the farm on the way back to the mountains. I can tell Sylvie stories about how we played hideand-go-seek in the cornfields and caught minnows in the pond. Or chased guineas away from the electric fence that protected Papaw’s 47

Ford pick-up, jumped from barn lofts into the stuffed tobacco stacks below until Granny said no more. I can tell Sylvie how fresh morning sausage and biscuits were wrapped in dishrags left on the freezer for us in case we got hungry and cold caramels were left in the refrigerator draw when we were good. Every part of me is rooted in each layer of dirt county-wide, yet there’s an anxiety that comes now when leaving the mountains. The openness of the Piedmont leaves me vulnerable, defenseless. I miss the mountains. Miss the way the trees of the ridgeline stand at attention like soldiers ready to defend me. I can’t catch my breath among the flat fields. Each mile of country road that brings me closer to home triggers the trauma of my childhood, bits and pieces of my life’s story that wake me each night from sleep, more lately since news broke of the murders. I tell Sylvie that when I was her age, little more than six, my Memaw Helen, my paternal grandmother, gave me a book, The Little House. She’d picked it out of a gas station nickel bin next door to her house, a cinderblock building where to get to the bathroom, we’d have to enter a separate entrance from the outside. There was no shower, no tub in her house, only a spigot that ran cold water, a urine-colored, stained basin, and a hole in the dirt floor. Memaw smelled of onions and frankincense and I’d go to the station’s bathroom as often as I could to escape her odor. Her house still had in its corner a rusted through Squirt slider Pepsi machine, another one of Memaw’s trash treasures, that Mama thought would certainly give us Tetanus on one of our visits. Once, while playing hide-and-seek, my brother locked himself inside. We found him a few hours later, sleeping or suffocating, even now I’m not sure. Memaw Helen didn’t have much money so when I held the paperback, pages yellowed and corners torn, it meant something. Even as a child, its story made me sad; its pages said everything about change and loss and the passage of time. There are days still when I imagine myself as the Little House, restored from a state of 48

decay and despair back to the foundation that’s always been there, strong and solid. It was all a matter of finding just the right place. Turning onto Chippewa Street, I see my Memaw’s house three-stories high, a dark crimson, the color of blood once it hits the air, outlined in sullied cream. It sits across the street from a tobacco warehouse; many now sit empty, bulldozed down to flat sheets of concrete, cracked and crumbled. Traditions lost since farmers were paid not to farm. Not to do the thing they’ve done for generations. Like asking a fish not to swim. I’d sit in days hot and humid, choked by soil and sweat, barefoot and swaying to each meter of every line of the auctioneer’s chant. A working chant like the preacher calling his lambs to fold. Piles of cured tobacco on wooden pallets. Men shuffling along, coasting till the selling got better and faster and the crescendo of the auctioneer’s syllabic melodies became quicker and sharper. Falling asleep some days, belly full of bottled soda and peanuts. It was about the time when the tobacco market no longer thrived and the warehouses became relics when I was no longer allowed to go beyond the yard of Memaw’s house. The other houses that surrounded it had already began to fall, withering porches and rotted rooves, boarded windows of broken glass. Weeds so overgrown the dead bodies sat for weeks before any saw. Smelled them first, decomposition hitting noses like the sting of ammonia. I’d swing on the porch wonder why shoes hung on the powerline. Try to understand the words of graffiti tagged on the walls of crumbling brick and rotted wood. Count the minutes between one whistle to the next of a passing train, wondering if I’d escape one day, where I’d escape to if left untethered and unattended. Knowing in my gut that I wasn’t going anywhere. Felt my home like quicksand. Knew too much of poverty and illiteracy and crime that plagued my every day that their effects were my second skin. But, if I didn’t leave, I’d be one of those women in the reeds of grass, cause of death unknown.

Each time we visited Memaw, Daddy told me to lock the car doors and not to look anybody in the eyes. Said if we drove too slow, folks might get the wrong idea. With Sylvie alongside on this visit, I made sure the windows were rolled up. Men hustled, girls walked pigeon-toed. Looking in the rear view mirror, I saw a girl, who looked little more than thirteen, peek over her bare shoulder to see if we’d stop. “Mama, why’s that man sleeping on the floor outside?” asked Sylvie. “He’s homeless,” I said. “Well, if he was home a little more maybe he’d remember his shoes.” “He doesn’t have a home, sweet pea. That’s why he’s sleeping outside in the cold with no shoes.” Memaw Helen lived with her sisters, Eula Mae and Cleo, in the house now condemned and decayed. I worked hard to get away from the decay that sits in me like a rotted tooth. Eula Mae was so deaf you could sneak from behind and hit her upside the head with a 2x4 and she’d never notice, Daddy said. Said she’d lost her husband young in World War II, never had children, never lived much after that. Just sat and swatted flies and others’ young’uns. What Aunt Eula Mae lacked in speech, Aunt Cleo more than made up for. Nuttier than a squirrel turd, Daddy’d say. She kept stacks of back issued magazines and newspapers, hundreds, maybe thousands, piled high. You couldn’t walk down a hallway without knocking them down, mildewed and molded they choked me each time I entered the house. Once, Aunt Cleo was committed to the highest floor of the hospital. Daddy would visit her. Said she’d been sent there by her sons because she gave too much money to the televangelists and Publishers Clearing House. I went on occasion. Sat in a lobby twelve by twelve playing first to blink with a guy with carvings on his forehead and said he was a disciple of Jesus. Once when Daddy opened the door to leave, the man tried to slip out after the buzzer, told me 50

through the crack to come on in. That’s the last time I visited Aunt Cleo. Memaw Helen was the sanest of the three, and that wasn’t saying much. Once when Mama was desperate for help after being called in for a last minute shift, she left my brother at Memaw’s house to be tended to. She came back several hours later to see my brother, a toddler at the time, lying on a bathroom floor surrounded by empty medicine bottles, candy Memaw called them, so my brother, a dimwit himself, aside from age, ate as much candy as he could. Had his stomach pumped with charcoal. Other days, Memaw taught my brother to spit in light sockets. “You like fireworks?” she’d say. And my brother, the dope he was, would watch her spit into light sockets, then do the same. Those three old women kept only cat food and Goody powders in the refrigerator and skin melted from their frail frames like the wax from a candle. The only somewhat eatable thing in that old house was hard ribbon candy clumped together on a crystal candy tray covered in dust and cat hair. Sometimes, Memaw would keep butterscotch in the pocket of her housecoat, save it for the children visiting, away from those old nasty guineas, she’d say. The smell of butterscotch rooted in her clothes like the dip she’d chew. Lumps of sweet tobacco she held in the corner of her bottom lip. We picked up Uncle Johnny from the bus station on Chippewa after he found out he’d gotten cirrhosis of the liver. Mama said you could wring him out and alcohol would drip and pool like the water from a soaked rag. When he came home to stay with Meemaw, I felt like I should bring him something, a welcome home gift of some sort; so, from my mama’s bookshelf, I took a book from the Encyclopedia Britannica supplements. A book on cowboys. Seemed fitting. I’d never met Uncle Johnny but had heard stories of his lawlessness and violence. Daddy asked him how he was, soon as we met, noticing the frailness of his frame, the yellowness of his skin and eyes. “Sober, broke and disgusted,” he’d said. 51

I used those old magazines and newspapers to make collages and dioramas. Cut out advertisements of cigarettes and alcohol and drew red circles with lines through their images to get Uncle Johnny to stop smoking and drinking. Handed him get well cards of folded construction paper and dollied hearts to which he’d say fuck off and hand it back. Didn’t seem worth the trouble, I thought, or the six licks mama made me take from the switch for cutting up her book. Now standing in front of my Memaw’s house with Sylvie twisting a thread on the hem of her skirt, I don’t know the girls, victims of a tragic sisterhood. I don’t know their families or their histories, but I imagine their stories. Maybe they’re similar to my own. Once I was asked, “How did you get out?” “Truth be told,” I said, “I don’t know that I ever left.” That could have been me sinking among the sawgrass and sourweeds surrounded by cautionary police tape. I could have been the girl in my rear view mirror, torn in two, wishing that the stranger kept driving or stopped, for any hope of happiness or a shot at redemption.

Things I Am Still Unsure About Dylan Harbison the value of small talk the intentions of my lover whether I enjoy the taste of coffee the sound of my voice the face I make sleeping exactly how my eyes light up when I talk about art which direction the earth is spinning how time only accelerates how to make it stop if math even exists if anyone knows anything at all when it was that my parents stopped loving each other how I picked my lovers if I ever loved them and if not why I kept trying how to use chopsticks how to bury a ghost how to lie through my teeth

The Sale Mary E. Williams INT. LIVING ROOM

Dingy living room of what is obviously a run-down house in a rundown neighborhood. The walls will have a random crack alongside

aged children’s drawings and cloudy family photos. Piles of old mail

and bills litter the floor and table by the door and spill out of the brown milk crate by the doormat. A mustard yellow corduroy couch sits in the center of the room with an old-school, thick television with antennae

sitting in front of it. The living room opens up to a small kitchen on the

far end and a stairway is situated in front of the front door. Carpet lines

the floors, wrinkling and bunching like a fresh-fallen snow. Brown wood paneling lines the walls uniformly.

Front door opens, banging into an already formed dent in the entryway wall. Enter LAUREN, dressed in an untucked flannel shirt and work

pants with many pockets. She stands in the threshold breathing heavily with her hand still on the knob, creating a silhouette against the light

from outside. Slamming the door, she bends down to rifle through the

crate by the entrance. ALEX is sprawled on the couch in a tank top and

sweatpants with one pant leg rolled up to accommodate a bulky plaster cast. The leg is balanced on the arm rest opposite the one her head is

resting against. She has to crane her neck backwards to see LAUREN by

the door and then quickly returns her eyes to the blizzard-like TV screen to her left.

ALEX: Well, how does it feel to do good big sister deeds instead of teaching a thirteen year old how to pick pockets for fun? How did Claudia like the construction crew?

LAUREN: (still crouched, looking through the crate) Where’s the bat? I swear… ALEX: Hey. (looking over the edge of the couch toward LAUREN) Did you drop Claud off or what? LAUREN: (flustered, distracted, now loudly looking through the coat closet under the stairs) Um, well, something happened.

ALEX: (sighing, shifting on the couch) Tell me now while Mother’s out. Said she was selling something of hers. So, she’ll be gone for another half hour maybe. LAUREN: Aha! (pulls a baseball bat from the closet) ALEX: (getting up from the couch, grunting) What are you— dammit— where’s my other crutch? LAUREN: Here. (scoops up a crutch from under the couch and throws it to ALEX, who fumbles to catch it)

ALEX: Wait! Jesus. (hobbles toward the door, blocking it)

LAUREN returns from the kitchen with the bat in one hand and a paring knife in the other.

LAUREN: Move. ALEX: No. LAUREN: C’mon, Alex, this is important. ALEX: Will you just tell me what the hell happened? (looks down at the knife in LAUREN’s hand and breathes out a laugh before looking back at LAUREN) Plus, if you’re trying to use that knife on anybody, it won’t work. It’s pathetic. They both look down at the knife and LAUREN scoffs and stuffs it in a pants pocket.

LAUREN: Look, I was taking Claud to the work site like you said to, 55

and I must not’ve been watching good enough because, next thing I know, those guys from down the street— you know, the ones that sell Special K under the uptown bridge— they were behind us. LAUREN begins to pace through the living room. She tucks the bat under her arm to gesticulate.

LAUREN: They-they threw Claud’s hard hat in the harbor. And then they took her toolbox and hit me over the head with it. Look. (leans over, presenting the top of her head to ALEX) ALEX: Damn. (touches the pooling patch of red mixing with random patches of hair)

LAUREN: Ow! God. Stop. (yanks her head away) ALEX: (voice edged with restrained concern) What happened to Claud? LAUREN stops pacing and looks at ALEX and then quickly down at the floor. ALEX leans forward on her crutches and finds LAUREN’s eyes.

ALEX: (strictly) What happened to Claudia, Lauren? If she doesn’t show with a paycheck, we’re in the dark for the weekend, and you know who will be up my ass about it? Yes. Mother. LAUREN: Why do you think I got the bat? They took her. (breaks eye contact and rubs the side of her face with her free hand)

ALEX: What do you mean? LAUREN: (frustrated) What do you mean, "what do I mean?" They. Took. Her. (starts pacing again) Those bastards from down the street. They knocked me out and then when I came to, she was gone. ALEX: (leaning against the banister) Are you sure? I mean this is—

LAUREN: Yes, I’m sure. She was there and then she wasn’t, Alex! Where else would she be? ALEX: Could she have just gone straight to the work site? I mean, she wouldn’t have wanted to be late, even if it meant leaving you there. LAUREN: Do you think I’m that much of an idiot? I went straight to the worksite once I came to. The guys there said she never showed up. I checked up and down the street. I checked here. I checked everywhere she would be. She’s not there. (LAUREN’s volume rises as she becomes more desperate) It was her first day of her first ever job, Alex. She wouldn’t have just flaked. That’s not like her. She knows we’re counting on her since you’re out of commission (gestures toward ALEX’s casted leg) after that welding accident busted your leg. She’s gone. They took her. ALEX: Well, why would they want to take her? This doesn’t make sense. LAUREN: How should I know? Why does it matter anyway? We’re here gossiping like a bunch of old ladies when we should be out there getting Claud back. Move. LAUREN shoves ALEX on the shoulder, but she doesn’t move.

ALEX: What are you gonna do? Bat the neighbors to death until they tell you where she is? You’ll just pass out from that cut on your head. Sit. LAUREN stares ALEX down but then softens and shuffles to the couch,

sitting down and placing the bat across her lap. ALEX clunks her way to the kitchen and returns with a rag in her mouth and a sewing kit banging against the crutch in one hand.

ALEX: (muffled) Lean back. 57

LAUREN: (looks back and then lurches to her feet) Oh, hell no. (holds the bat loosely in one hand in a swinging position, while back-

ing away from the couch with one hand in front of her in the defensive position) No way! Get away from me!

ALEX: (places the sewing kit on the back of the couch) It needs stiches, Laur. (snapping on vinyl gloves) LAUREN: Like hell it does. ALEX: Sit back down, so I can do this. LAUREN: No. ALEX: (exasperated) Do you want to find Claudia or not? LAUREN: (mumbling quietly) Of course I do. ALEX: Then sit. (pats the back of the couch with a gloved hand) LAUREN: (slowly lowers the bat’s end to the ground and drags it as she returns to the couch) Hurry.

ALEX: We need to call together a search party or something. (talking while she threads a needle with fishing twine that she has rummaged through the box to find) I know you said you looked everywhere, but we need to look harder. And then we’ll get the boys together and start busting in doors. We’ll find those guys and get her back, I promise. Now, bite down on this. ALEX hands the rag to LAUREN who takes it in one hand and inspects

it as though it is crawling with bugs. She opens her mouth and clamps down on the rag and closes her eyes, grasping at the bat that has

returned to her lap. ALEX reaches down to her side and produces an

unopened bottle of vodka that she unscrews with a loud snap. LAUREN’s eyes flap open momentarily, but then shut again and her brows lower. ALEX holds the open bottle above LAUREN’s head.

ALEX: On three, you’ll feel a sting. One. Two. (pours a good amount of the liquid over LAUREN’s head)

LAUREN: (yells around the cloth, muffled) Jesus! That was only two! ALEX: Disinfected. Now, this shouldn’t hurt too bad. ALEX is about to plunge the needle into LAUREN’s skin when the door is flung open with a loud slap. Enter MOTHER wearing dress pants and a moth-eaten mink stole, carrying a brick of cash. ALEX’s attention turns

toward the door and her hand slips as she pricks LAUREN with the needle. LAUREN cries out as the pointed object punctures mangled skin.

ALEX: God, shit. Sorry! Sorry, Laur. (grabs the needle and quickly

snatches the rag from LAUREN’s mouth, placing it over the gash on her head)

MOTHER: (halfheartedly, distractedly leafing through the cash as she walks through the door) Hey there, girls.

ALEX: (looks toward MOTHER and then quickly looks again when she sees the cash) Where did that come from?

MOTHER: I told you I was going out to make a sale, and I did nothing short of that. Once again, it’s thanks to me that we have any source of income in this house. (flips the end of her stole over her shoulder as she walks past ALEX and LAUREN)

ALEX: (looking over MOTHER’s shoulder, standing tiptoed) What did you sell? That looks like a good 5k. MOTHER: (snatching the brick closer to her chest) Don’t worry about it. (continues toward the kitchen) ALEX: (turns back to LAUREN, quietly) We cannot tell her about Claud. Not yet. LAUREN: Well, then what the hell am I supposed to say about this? 59

(gesturing to head) ALEX: Just don’t say anything. She won’t notice. Clanging glass sounds from the kitchen as MOTHER pours a tumbler full of gin.

LAUREN: We have to say something at some point. ALEX: Shh! (leans back to look into the kitchen and then leans back towards LAUREN) Let me deal with it. (as she lifts the rag to look

at LAUREN’s head, her mouth forms an O and she blows out a steady stream of air) I think you need to go to the clinic.

LAUREN: (shakily) I think you’re right.

LAUREN leans forward and pulls herself up from the couch, still holding the rag to her head. She opens the door but stops when she realizes ALEX is following behind her on her crutches.

LAUREN: Hey, I don’t think— ALEX: I’m coming with you. (she holds LAUREN by the arm supportively as she starts to sway a little like a scarecrow in the wind) I’ll be fine. (turning toward the kitchen as MOTHER audibly refills her glass) Mother, we’re running an errand. MOTHER: (strides through the living room toward the stairs with her tumbler) Oh, before you go, I guess I should tell you this now. Claudia had a job opportunity come up. It’s much better than that shitty construction job (her face wrinkles in disgust) you tried to pass on to her, Lauren. I encouraged her to take it. Housing for the job is provided, but unfortunately, it’s out of town. (waves her hand passively) I’m just so proud of her though. (smiling and clapping her free hand against the tumbler as her cheap rings clink against the glass) She’s going to be the best breadwinner this house has seen ever since your poor father. (moves her free hand to make the sign of the cross) 60

LAUREN and ALEX look up the stairs after MOTHER and then look at

each other. LAUREN furrows her brows and ALEX blows air through her teeth at her sister’s confusion.

LAUREN: What the hell is that supposed to mean? Why would Claud just— ALEX: God, Lauren. Don’t you get it? All of a sudden, Claudia gets picked up and then Mother comes back with five-thousand dollars in cash and some story about a new job? We need to make some stops before we go to the clinic. C’mon. And keep holding pressure on your head. ALEX makes her way through the door leaving LAUREN standing in the

threshold with her hand on the rag on her head and a blank look on her face that turns into one of horrified recognition. The lights dim.

Blue and Silver Grid #1 Mark Damon Puckett

Dysmorphia Monsters Mali Jaana Rosensweet

s my chilly, winter-bitten fingers attempt to type out an inspirational story of all the phenomenally functional ways I put myself into a positive mindset every day, it feels as though I am lying. I so dearly wish I could honestly begin to write about how I wake up every morning ready to tackle the day; but, that would be a lie. The truth is, every morning I wake up and fight the same seemingly endless battle: Breakfast. The most important meal of the day, supposed to be a comfort consumed every morning, seems nearly impossible for someone whose life has been so deeply engrained with diet culture’s twisted perception of a woman’s body that it has forced them into an eating disorder so overwhelming that they have a genuine fear of pancakes. My whole, honest truth-as much as I would love for it to be a hearty bowl of oatmeal and a slice of tempeh bacon-is actually that I wake up every morning tired and scared. Or, more accurately, tired of being so scared-scared of my mirror, scared of my body, scared of food. My truth has never been that I feel hopeless, or that I do not love life, but more that getting into a positive mindset often takes more effort and discomfort than I would prefer it did. With disordered eating considered, I have always dearly loved my life and the people in it. For this reason, I have made it a priority to heal, and to put myself into the positive mindset we all hope to feel in our lives. Although every day is a process, and I am far from perfect, I have learned that the best way to pull myself away from the fear and discomfort is not to pull away at all. I feel my mindset shift the most drastically in the times that-rather than telling myself “Pick yourself up, you’ll never get anything done like this’’ or “Wow your body image really makes you useless huh?”-I 63

instead pause. I pause to recognize the discomfort, and more importantly, what sort of feelings are underneath it. “It is okay to move slowly today,” I will repeat to myself, “Take your time.” I hear my best friend’s words echo throughout my now quieting mind, “you are the kind of person that takes care of yourself even when you do not want to.” I have found that by allowing myself to feel the fear, discomfort, and anger that arise in me or toward my body, it makes it far easier to then let myself move on. When I feel the body dysmorphia monsters move past, or at least shut up and sit down for a minute, I am then able to surround myself with the beautiful things that help me move past neutral and into a positive mindset. Soft meditation, patchouli candles, green tea, and if I’m lucky, even some avocado toast. These are the things that I do and set up to remind myself that I am okay, that I am worth loving, and that I can make today a good day, even when it begins to feel endlessly uphill.

As the Crow Flies Laura Dame those birds their mono chromatic boxes larks who paint wilted flowers pretty and pretty flowers perfect somehow even the sour sounds sweet to them I am sad of their perpetual glamorous tune lashing away at my hovel like I know what they’re about: this crow without murder ensnared in that net whistling ugly but folding hands to sing looking for leftover gold in fields she can’t dock only fly over, fly over, fly sunshine weeps on to over-washed wings too tired to muster up fatigue—if she keeps beating (never ceasing) will 65

she still notice when the branches break? I sit in my crumpled up nest repetition small dirty objects dreaming about how they would taste if I could just fiddle them into gilded this is all birds-eye view but the larks need no telescope and the crow has at least two twenty zillion trillion thoughts and one throws the biggest fit: fly over, fly over, fly oozes back firecracker taunts of goodbye, goodbye, bye

Shrink Sophia Rose Walker The object in the mirror is farther than it appears. Destructive patterns dressed as self-improvement crept into the subconscious and convinced you it was your idea to desecrate your home in exchange for love and delayed gratification when the time comes to be smaller. Beauty is the highest accolade In which you will chase, (and chase), until weakness swaddles your limbs with every step, set on a path of emaciation with no remembrance of initial intention. Spoon-fed beliefs by the same figure who would then tell you to stop eating altogether. Cultivating a forest created for destruction, skin as arid as the land you undermined. The figure lights a match and drops it and Under spoiled skin fakes astonishment of how swiftly the flames consumed you. Bones feeble and chilled nothing left but steam and smoke reduced not to an image, but an idea.

Antelope Canyon Linda Welsh

Stress Michael Islas

t’s the 4th of February, my birthday. My mom is driving me around Asheville. We’re at a stoplight. She glances at her phone. I tell her I don’t think I’ll ever get a driver’s license. She notices the stoplight in my voice. She says something about my tourettes causing anxiety. I say something about the half-life of a 17 year old and asphalt. She wants to talk about how I’ve been doing. She doesn’t notice the cement already mixing in my throat. I tell her when I squint the road starts to splinter like buckshot and I swear I can already count the casualties. I tell her not to squint. I say that I hate the way my pill makes me feel. I say it makes me talk like a robot. Like my jaw is an unhinged tailgate and my mouth is an exhaust pipe. She asks me if this is how I really feel. I wanna say no. I wanna say it’s too hard to talk about how I really feel. Instead I notice how our seats start to drift apart, like little life-boats. How trauma can make anything splinter, like buckshot. Later in February, when my absence inhabits every place a good son should be; Inhabits the morning conversations, inhabits the evening dinners. Later still, when the asphalt doesn’t move, and the accident never moved, and my pills never moved. Later, when I am starting to inhabit every place my inertia used to. That I used to. That’s when I would admit to you that I’m trying, that these things take time.

Field of Dreams Joseph G. Allawos I visited her field of dreams And pretended for a minute, she was in it. What contrast of color was created when I set her breath free. Among the dainty yellow flowers and the dreamy ozone blue. And the miraculous hues of green. Swaying like gentle waves. In her field of dreams.

Puddles Sky Dexter

t felt like a pair of thick chopsticks playing my spine like a xylophone. The sound of the storm gave me goosebumps. Standing there, the rain pounding unevenly against the stretched plastic of the umbrella over my head. The turbulence of the puddle screamed at me. Droplets splashing upwards before being drowned by the rain once more. I wasn’t sure why I couldn’t walk away, as if I had some important business with this murky mass of water. But when I finally convinced myself to pass this puddle writhing at the end of my neighbor’s driveway, I was surprised to find I was already shin deep in it. My right leg had quickly sunk into the thick pool. The feeling of cold shredded its way deep into the bones in my foot and began slithering up my leg. This icy chill reminded me of the puddles of our front yard when I was small; frigid on the surface but deep down the mud was warm. I used to look up with a childish grin at my sister as I gouged my toes into the orange mud swamp meant to be a lawn. It played like a movie in my mind. Grey mid-afternoon and we were shivering, two kids drenched from eyebrow to heel. Clouds swam overhead as we stepped into the bottomless puddles, a thick fog making our yard small and dim. I promptly sat, brown water swamping up my pasty thighs. Deep in the puddle, I pushed my toes into the warm orange mud at the bottom. I looked up, giggling as I saw my sister do the same. But when she looked back at me there was no smile. I felt a pain in my throat, as if I had swallowed a handful of gravel. My lungs constricted and I felt tears claw their way to my eyes. My small, innocent hands reaching towards her, as if touching her could bring her back to me. As soon as my fingers reached her, her figure collapsed and was gone. Turned to mud, mixing with the pud71

dle where my tears joined her. Her, the earth, me, all melting in the rain together. But as I tried to pull myself out of that reconstructed memory, another surfaced. I was standing on the worn boards of the back deck, leaning against the railing, staring at where all the wood was turning black with rot. It was the twelfth of December, the day I realized I might never see her again. The clouds spit droplets, coating my nose and cheeks. The whole earth seemed dull and irritated. Like it was unimpressed with my efforts to stop her from leaving. My blue flannel rippled in the breeze, leaving the chest of my black t-shirt open to the mist. That was the last time I ever wore a flannel. The cold crept underneath my skin and I retreated inside. The house was full of clutter. Some books and mugs on a wooden side table, a heap of papers on the couch, snow globes and other knick-knacks scattered across the mantle. For all the laden surfaces, it still felt empty. Empty in a way I had never quite experienced before. When our grandparents died, we stayed here. Just the two of us, always combing through the mounds like we were looking for treasure. We missed them, but we knew they were ready to go. So, there weren’t a lot of tears shed when the phone call came. This house became our adventure into adulthood. We had been living there for two years, my sister and I. Two years and three months, and then she left. Two years and three months… and then our father committed suicide. Two bullets in the chest… the first had missed. A sharp uneasiness brought me out of my memories. Slowly, I raised my leg out of the pool of gurgling water, watching the rivers coming from my pant leg. I lifted my gaze, surveying my mother’s spotless silver Honda parked on the sweet little red brick driveway a few yards away. Right where Tera’s car used to be. Anger crept like vines down my shoulder blades, wrapping tightly around my stomach. I remember one afternoon as a child I’d been adventuring out around the neighborhood. Spring’s showers had left the air 72

muggy and the ground slick, sticking sludge to my shoes. I’d raced in the door to see my mother, knowing she’d just come home from work. Around the hallway corner and before my tongue could leap to a greeting, her pale green eyes landed on my shoes. I saw her jaw tighten and, suddenly, I didn’t know what to say. “Take them off,” she demanded. I did, and she was beside me. Father watched from across the room, hugging a steaming mug with his hands. Wrinkles of stress twitched on his face, but he was quiet. Her thick nails led me by the arm, cutting naïve skin as my socks gathered dust on the way up the stairs. The door slammed loudly behind me and my sister turned around. Seeing me standing with a hollow look on my face, it didn’t take long for her to notice the blood seeping from my arm. She let out a quiet, disappointed breath. We watched the blood slide down to my fingertips, gathering in droplets. Before they grew too heavy, I clenched my fingers against my palm. I knew better than to let it get on the floor. If I did, there would just be more mess and more blood. A cycle of repeating events if I didn’t learn my lesson. Tera and I fastened a bandana as a bandage. Two dark blue ears hung from the knot on one side, tickling my wrist. Tera smiled and dug in her dresser, pulling out a second bandana. She tied it on her arm in the same fashion as mine, matching aside from color. Hers was red. We were a pair, blue and red, brother and sister. Our parents had been anything but warm to us in all those years, a pair of corporate climbers with restless children. That’s why we packed up and moved into the house after our grandparents died, escaping their constant condemning glare. But when our father was found in a puddle of his own blood, our mother’s anguish entered that little house like a forest fire. She’d stand in the kitchen, the smell of coffee wafting through the carved archway to the living room, and then she’d flick her snake tongue and say something about how he used to do things, or how we just weren’t the way we should be. Anything to make us feel guilty. She set that house on fire with shame. Tera told me she was leaving three days after our moth73

er arrived. I told her I’d make mother leave, but Tera said it wasn’t just mother. I understood, there was too much smoke in that little house. What I didn’t understand was why Tera only left me a letter. I opened the tan curtains, one hand on either side, like a grand show. A deep relaxing breath to start the day, except when I looked down her car was gone. And a cream-colored envelope had been slid under the thick oak door of my room. A rectangle of heavy linen paper with an apology… and a request. “Please, don’t try to contact me. I care about you, but I think we both have some growing up to do.” Tera didn’t tell me where she was going, she told me not to bother to ask. On that tiny piece of parchment, she said goodbye. I called her, knowing she wouldn’t answer. I called her every morning for six months. Six months I spent in shame and guilt, waiting for Tera. I looked from the little silver car to the house’s thick log cabin walls, and tiny hand-built garden… I looked at the shiny green grass and bountiful orange trees in the front yard… I looked at the black shingles, sparkling as the sun peeked through the thick clouds, like all of heaven shining down on that one small house. And then I looked down at the layer of blind and curtain turning the windows black… and I walked away. Because Tera was right to leave, even though it still hurt me, and I could feel it like a thick ball of mud in my chest. I should have left when she did, when you could still see light coming from those little cedar framed windows.

60° Vehemence Savannah N. Nowlin

Oranges Adam M. Coulter North Carolina 1936 artha pierced the needle and thread through the fabric in her lap, pulled the stitch tight, then repeated. The stitches, like her life, turned into a long line of nothing but the same. From atop the front porch steps she worked on her sewing as the daylight brightened in the rising sun. In front of her Mount Pisgah, high on the horizon, stood surrounded by fog and ridges of the Appalachians. Her eyes were blue and matched her simple dress. Behind her, the screen door opened and out came Ed, smiling, dressed in clean work clothes. He carried a plate of orange slices in his hands. “I could enjoy this view forever,” she said. “Me too,” he winked, keeping his eyes on her until she grew self-conscious. He sat next to her and shared the orange. She put her sewing down. “Oh, I haven’t had one of these in forever. Where did you get it?” she asked. “Mr. Whitsett had some at the store, said they were from California.” Ed ate the pulp from one of the slices then lined his teeth with the peel and flashed an orange slice smile at Martha. She laughed then made her own orange slice smile and the two giggled like young people in love. “We should go there sometime,” Ed said, turning serious. “California. We can pick oranges and walk on the beach, feel the sand on our bare feet. And then we’ll see the Golden Gate Bridge.” “And the giant redwoods that everyone talks about,” inter-

rupted Martha. She gazed into the distance as if already seeing the trip take place. “California,” she whispered. They finished the orange in silent thought. She leaned into Ed and he put his arm around her. His aftershave smelled of spruce and leather and his chambray shirt was soft against her cheek. He kissed her forehead and she felt loved. “What’s stopping us?” he asked, his eyes shining with excitement. Martha thought for a moment. “Not a damn thing,” she said and grabbed her sewing. She rose to her feet, smoothed the front of her dress and marched inside, letting the screen door slam behind her. Ed laughed then followed her, leaving the orange peels behind.

Moon Dream Rory Moon

Corners and Edges Cora D. Haas I’m not really here. I slipped out before, left behind skin and bone, behind physicality. I smile and nod on cue, but I’m not really here. Not really there when my fingers singe, caught, and my blood sings. Not really there when corners catch, and edges trace delicate dances over a frail flesh surface. Not really there when my breath catches and sputters and seeps out of me in a crush of lungs, back in in a desperate inaudible prayer on loop 79

over and over again until its patterned in my brain like a tattoo suffocating and any thought separate is crushed down in in favor of my loop. But I’m not really here. I’m nice and hollow. Safe. I feel safe. Even though I’m cracking, and there’s blood on my sheets and I can’t remember how it got there, and physically I ache, and I’m suffocating on thoughts I can’t rein back. But I’m not really here.

The New Man T. Ben Latter “You look good,” I tell him, and he does. A soft grey wool blend, tidy houndstooth. “It’s too tight,” he says. “That’s how they cut them now. Is it uncomfortable?” He looks at me sideways. His eyes had always been cold blue stones, but now with his beard so white, they are ice, his face winter. “You don’t have to wear it for long,” I say. “Three hours. Four tops.” It’s more like six. He sighs the same rough sigh I’ve heard my entire life, then looks back to the mirror. “Jean Micah,” I say, “Finish him up and put it on my account.” Jean Micah says his fancy French agreement and I head out for a smoke. I can’t or won’t explain why but it’s important to me that the old man hear me give orders, hear someone speak to me in French as if I’ll understand, watch me pay for things with only my signature. My mother laughed when I told her he was visiting. He ain’t like us, she said, meaning her and me. I got more culture in my bad toenail than that man’s got in his entire body. The words keep playing over in my head and the imagery—thanks, mom—follows, equally clear. She never had her chance to get away, to go to college, to make something of herself. Not like me. But she didn’t resent it—I was her success. She would come into my bedroom with a gentle knock and say would you lookit all them books and smoke long, thin cigarettes and stir the pound’s worth of change in her apron pockets while squinting at my collection of thrift store finds and library heists, all neatly arranged on brick-n-board shelves. I’d try to read 81

her thoughts, wondering if I’d impressed her, if I’d made her proud or maybe even humbled her slightly in pursuit of some primordial, adolescent goal to surpass her. Her: You sure you’re your dad’s boy? Me: Certainly yours. We discovered early on that we were alike, she and I. Earth tones. Tandem solitaire. Salted apples. Shaggy dogs. Goddess Angelica Houston. King Perry Mason. Prince. Her, with her mystery novels. Me, with my pulp. Us, with our dime-bin finds like Maxell tapes marked Opera in attempted calligraphy or postcards with urgent Spanish messages and dried red thumbprints—blood or, more likely and less interestingly, chile. In our trailer park sea of lily white flour and tepid water, we were the butter and milk. He’d come home with bags of reality. Weeks of warm absence ruined with cold, crass stories of the road wars, told too loud through beer breath. Darling waitresses; Honey, Gracie, Dot. Good buddies; Maverick, Hangman, Duck. Bad wrecks and dead deer. Once a bear. Every highway icy, every driver shitty. In the stories, Montana had no mountains, Arizona no desert, Utah no sky. And then he’d leave again. A week gone. Two. Her, shaking the Folger’s can. Me, getting the coin tubes. Us, bound for the Findn-Save, where we’d buy the used birthday candles and inscribed matchbooks by which we’d reheat our home. One night there was yelling and the next day there was a patient emptiness where his things—those blocky, heavy, hard and dirty things only he seemed to care about—had previously sat, urgently plotting their escape. Her, playing tapes. Tammy Wynette spelling it out for me. He’d call when he got back into town, then he’d come pick me up, drive me around, deliver me on schedule. Routine maintenance efforts. Cordial exchanges of weeks-late gifts, right on time. I got an Old Spice gift set, just like mine. A box of candies I’d grown to hate, your favorites. A book about wizards, buddy a mine says his 82

daughter loved it but hell, I don’t know. He got an Old Spice gift set,

your favorite. A barrel of popcorn trifecta, a friend said his dad loved it but hell, I don’t know. A book about freedom, just like mine.

She’d remind me who he was. Who he’d been. What he’d done. I’d tell her not to worry. I was like her. Was I even really his? And we’d bond over hate and we’d smoke thin cigarettes and marvel at my books and listen to secondhand opera. Me: Who is singing? Her: Who cares? College came and passed and they both meant to visit but neither of them did. I sent her a photo and she said I looked like him and we bonded over the disappointment. I got a job and did well at it and bosses and colleagues patted my back until it hunched and tussled my hair until it fell out and I lifted my chin until it grew a beard and my god you look just like him and she couldn’t handle that disappointment. That’s when I called him. “Come visit,” I said. And now, he steps out of the shop and asks what I think. “I think you’re a new man,” I say. “I feel like I’m in a costume,” he says. “That’s good. Most of us are.” He shrugs and tries not to be impressed with himself but he can’t help it, the suit fits. He watches his reflection stretch in the tall windows along Washington Street and he smiles at the older ladies who smile first and he’s flattered when a tourist asks him for directions. “Four blocks that way,” I say. He concurs with a nod. “How much time we got?” he asks. “Some. Why?” “Can I buy you a beer?”

The answer’s yes and we drink Dogfish Head and watch the warm-blooded beautiful as they build their better world, one golden bag at a time. “Thanks for the suit,” he says. “You’re welcome.” “I feel kinda dumb.” “Why?” “You said bring a suit and I didn’t have one. What sorta man doesn’t have a suit?” I should tell him I knew that. That I did it on purpose, maybe to hurt him a little. But his face isn’t wounded; it’s proud and humbled. “Well, you’ve got one now.” He pays cash for the beers and slides the change toward the soft-R’d barkeeper. “Was that enough?” he leans in and asks me. It was. The autumn wind breaks through the tweed, hurries us faster than the curtain. I flash my phone and we’re led to our seats, center mezz, and he looks around and shakes his head at the towering columns and monolith stage, the gold trim, the upright ocean of red and purple velvet, the people, well dressed as he, people who are always smiling, people who don’t know and don’t care how their things get places, how their food and their gasoline and their milk and their meat and their furniture and cars and furs and hell, I don’t know, are all dependent on someone else’s ability to back up a seventy-seven-foot long, eighty-thousand-pound rig without running over their kid or their Shih Tzu, let alone their Tesla. “What do you think?” I ask. “It’s incredible,” he says. Then he leans in. “I guess they don’t come around with hotdogs and beer, huh?” and he laughs. And I do too. An old woman in front of us turns at the joke and asks him 84

where he’s from. He tells her. She tells me he needs to come back for a ballgame. “Maybe,” I say. “That’d be great,” he says. “But this is sure something.” She says we look alike. It is a compliment. It begins and the crowd hushes and my father is there, watching as Netrebko, finely dressed in heavy red silks (sleeves virago, beadery baroque), holds out her hands and teaches our hearts the meaning of soprano. “That’s Anna Yuryevna Netrebko,” I whisper. “She-” He gently holds up a finger. When it’s done, he claps when we clap. He stands when we stand. “What did you think?” I ask. “It reminded me,” he says, “of that book you bought me.”

The Lecter House Caleigh Robinson

Contributors Joseph G. Allawos Joseph is a full-time faculty member in the Biology Department at A-B Tech. David Thunder Bortolotto David is a full-time student who will soon be transferring to UNCW Wilmington to study Film. Adam M. Coulter Adam is a native of Western North Carolina and is a returning student to A-B Tech. He enjoys photography, growing grapes, and reading historical fiction. Cannon Roxanne Crawford-Wilson Cannon Roxanne is an 18-year-old, full-time college student and restaurant hostess aspiring to become a visual artist with an anomalous style. She enjoys painting with watercolor, oils and using other multi media including fabrics, ink, charcoal and graphite. Laura Dame Laura is a former A-B Tech student, now majoring in English at a four-year university in South Carolina. She began writing poetry in 2017, and it continues to be the genre she most enjoys. Stephany L.N.Davis Stephany lives with her family outside of Asheville, North Carolina. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in The Broad River, The Great Smokies Review, The Pisgah Review and elsewhere. "Chippewa Street" was a

semi-finalist for the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Competition and finalist for the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition.

Sky Dexter Sky is a full-time student who enjoys writing, photography, painting, and most other creative endeavors. Isabella L. Field Isabella is a high school senior at Nesbitt Discovery Academy. Although she plans to major in aerospace engineering/astrophysics in college, in her free time she loves to write short stories and personal essays and hopes to minor in creative writing. Isabella also loves hiking, fishing, horseback riding, and music. Cora D. Haas Cora is a full-time student at A-B Tech pursuing an A.A. before transferring to UNCA for a history degree. When she isn't working on homework, she is serving up lattes at Malaprops Bookstore and Cafe and spending way too much of her paycheck on books. Dylan Harbison Dylan is an Asheville-based writer and visual artist. She is a full-time student and aspiring English teacher. Minna Honkakoski Minna is a 2020 alumna who, on top of painting and printmaking, dabbles in poetry. Mike E. Islas Mike is a student who loves poetry and video games. He also digs music. Jenna Emilie Jaffe Jenna resides in Asheville, teaching music, creating art, and teaching ELA at A-B Tech. Her other passions include gender vocal/life coaching, peer counseling, gardening, and applying spiritual therapies in her trades. In addition, she is a creatrix in several disciplines including dance, music, mixed media, photography, jewelry, and more. You can hear her music online and view her art regionally.

Lauren Victorie Lafaille Lauren is a full-time student majoring in Fine Art. She has a passion for all things creative that began early on. After years of working different jobs and moving from place to place, she has finally decided to pursue her childhood dream to study art. T. Ben Latter Ben is a would-be alum of A-B Tech, if it weren't for that pesky Phys Ed credit. He plans to attend UNCA in the Fall. Bronwen G. McCormick Bronwen works as a Culinary Lab Manager and Instructor. She spends her free time exploring the amazing WNC landscapes and attempting to do them justice in watercolor. Rory Moon Rory is a full-time student enrolled in the Associate of Fine Arts program at A-B Tech. He specializes in illustration and is deeply inspired by science fiction and cartoons. Rohan L.Q. Myers Rohan is an A-B Tech student who enjoys poetry and oil painting. Gregor Nishino Gregor is a student at A-B Tech. Savannah N. Nowlin Savannah is a student at A-B Tech through the Madison Early College High School program. She is interested in and inspired by 20th century American & World history, cult classic 1980s' films, music, and fandom. Vintage vibes, not values.

Ellen J. Perry Ellen's academic interests include 17th- and 18th-century British writing, Restoration theater, Southern/ Appalachian culture, and literature of the World Wars. She has taught English and Humanities at the college level for 21 years. Mark Damon Puckett Mark (markdamonpuckett.com) is an Asheville writer, artist and musician who has been teaching college writing since 1992. Jennifer C. Quayle Jennifer is originally from Zephyrhills, Florida but currently resides in Asheville. Jennifer is full-time student at A-B Tech and will be transferring to Worsham College of Mortuary Science in Chicago next year where she will receive a degree in Mortuary Science and pursue a career as a mortician. Jonathan Rich Jonathan has taught English 111 and 112 at A-B Tech since 2017, including summer sessions. He remembers most of his time teaching high school in Western North Carolina very fondly, with notable exceptions. Caleigh Robinson Caleigh is a full-time student enrolled at A-B Tech through the Madison Early College High School program. She enjoys various things, such as visual arts, fandoms, music, animals, nature, etc. She plans to pursue a career in animation and/ or storyboarding, and hopefully bring joy to others with her art. Mali Jaana Rosensweet Mali Rosensweet is a Junior in high school and is a part time student at A-B Tech. She has been exploring her creative writing abilities and has found that Michelle Payton's English 111 class has been the perfect space for her to do so. She is passionate about spreading awareness of the toxicity of diet culture and encouraging body positivity.

Zainab Sayed Zainab is a full-time student at A-B Tech with an interest in creative writing, English grammar, and Japanese studies. She prefers writing prose, but writes the odd poem for no apparent reason. Wayne J. Scank Wayne has been photographing - in analog and digital formats - for nearly 45 years; has worked on several publications, including The Roanoke Times; and completed Digital Photography 1 at A-B Tech and Digital Photography II at Blue Ridge Community College. He prefers haptic expressionistic images. He is discovering opportunities via photo editing. Clem Turner Clem is a student and musician; he thinks clouds and words are neat. Sophia Rose Walker Sophia is a full-time student who is pursuing a career in videography. Linda Welsh Linda is an art student pursuing her lifelong dream. Sirus Widenhouse Sirus is an early college senior who doesn't think his piece will end up in The Rhapsodist but has been encouraged to try anyway.

Mary E. Williams Mary is a graduate student at Western Carolina University who writes short stories and poetry in her spare time.

Call for 2022 Submissions ENG 125: Creative Writing Interested in learning the craft of poetry, prose, and dramatic dialogue? Enroll in A-B Tech’s Creative Writing course!

The Rhapsodist will begin accepting submissions for our next issue

in May 2021. Deadline: January 31, 2022.

Please visit our webpage: abtech.edu/content/the-rhapsodist-literature-and-arts-journal

Send all other queries to rhapsodistjournal@gmail.com

Check out our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages for details (The Rhapsodist Literary Arts Journal).

2021 - The Rhapsodist

Articles inside

Caleigh Robinson

Call for 2022 Submissions

Contributors

Savannah N. Nowlin

Sky Dexter

Sophia Rose Walker

Joseph G. Allawos

Linda Welsh

Laura Dame

Mark Damon Puckett

Mary E. Williams

Stephany L.N. Davis

Dylan Harbison

Jennifer C. Quayle

Zainab Sayed

Ellen J. Perry

Rohan L.Q. Myers

Bronwen G. McCormick

Lauren Victorie Lafaille

Laura Dame

Wayne J. Scank

Lauren Victorie Lafaille

Jonathan Rich

Minna Honkakoski

Gregor Nishino

Sirus Widenhouse

Isabella L. Field

Jenna Emilie Jaffe

Cannon Roxanne Crawford–Wilson