Volume 6 issue 21 winter 2017

NEW ISSUE

The Corner Club Quarterly Volume 6 Issue 21 Winter 2017




The CCP where poetry and fiction converge

The Corner Club Quarterly

Submissions:

Founder and Managing Editor Amber S. Forbes Co-Founder Daphne D. Maysonet

The Corner Club Press accepts unsolicited material in art, poetry and ;iction up to 7000 words. Submissions must be original and unpublished and conform to submission guidelines outlined on the website.

Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis.

Please provide a brief biographical note.

Send to: thecornerclubpress@gmail.com Style: We follow the Chicago Manual of Style.

Alana Lopez

Payment: The Corner Club Quarterly is an online non-pro;it magazine. Published contributors are not paid for their submissions.

Poetry Editor

Website: thecornerclubpress.weebly.com

Trivarna Hariharan

The Corner Club Press, Augusta 30907 Copyright © 2017 by The Corner Club Press. All rights reserved.

Production Editor

Copy Editor | Screener Katherine Blumenberg Assistant Editors Samantha Mulholland Tiffany Wang

Any resemblance to actual events, persons living or dead, or locales in the poetry/Diction contained herein is entirely coincidental.

Please support our artists, poets and authors by visiting their websites.

Graphic Designer Alana Lopez

Cover art: her eye wanders by Hieu Nguyen kelogsloops.com

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Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Throwing yourself into the ink...

Alana Lopez, Production Editor The Corner Club Press Image by Ryan McGuire, gratisography.com

Welcome to the Winter issue 2017: the ;irst release after our hiatus. The CCP are so happy to be presenting this issue showcasing such a diverse group of writers, artists and poets, with some of the best work contributed to the magazine to date.

Sadly, this will be my ;inal issue as Production Editor for The Corner Club Press. I would like to thank Trivarna, Katherine, Samantha and Tiffany for their help putting together the magazine. I feel very lucky to have had this opportunity and to have shared the page with them.

This issue largely explores the twists and turns of ordinary life and love, juxtaposed against the shadowy backdrop of nature. The soft bleed between the two solidi;ies the confused experience of our authors’ characters, for a rare glimpse into the complex depths of humanity, struggling against our deepest motivations.

It becomes clear: love is the pivot upon which we twist with agony, or by which we are persuaded to wish for more.

Sincerely,

Alana Lopez

Production Editor and Graphics Designer

The Corner Club Quarterly

Contents

Poetry 3 Wednesday Night

by Holly Day 6 To be up at night

by Patrick Bower 9 Thursday Afternoon

by Holly Day 14 Waltz of Body & Soul

by Guy Traiber 17 Games

by Robert Lampros 18 Let The Sparrow Fall

by Ronald Hoffman 28 Something to Hang On To

by Guy Traiber 29 Scrawl

by Carly Dee 47 Emily as the red ants bite

by Darren C. Demaree

Fiction 4 The Implants

by Elizabeth Mastrangelo 10 Saved by a Defective Condom

by Samantha Mulholland 16 The Sea of Red

by Kennedy Ribet 20 Falling through the silence

by Nadia K. Brown 30 The Patron Saint of Letting Go

by Michelle Hanlon 31 The Projectionist

by Bret Farley 50 Petite Suite de Craie

by Robert Wexelblatt 64 Second Kings

by Jeff Nazzaro 81 The Sheep

by Marina Rubin

48 Someone Speaks

by James G. Piatt 62 Water and Rock

by James G. Piatt 80 Catskill Creek 1972

by Jack D. Harvey

87 Contributors

Poetry

Wednesday Night Holly Day

I’m washing my daughter’s hair and she tells me there’s a boy She likes in school, he’s nine years old, he says he doesn’t like her He told her best friend he doesn’t like her, she’s upset now and I Don’t know if I should laugh or cry. I carefully Rinse the shampoo out of her hair and resist the urge To wrap my arms around her tiny, bony chest and hold her Like I did when she was tiny, she wants me to give her some sort of Womanly, adult advice and I am not ready for this.

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Fiction

The Implants Elizabeth Mastrangelo

M

y breast implants were hijacked. On a Tuesday evening, I was scrubbing the casserole dish from dinner the night before. Its corners were caramelized with burned breadcrumbs and I had to

dig in with my sponge. When I did that, my pectoral muscles ;lexed and my breasts jumped. They also tingled as if they were ;illed with electricity, as if they’d been turned on. I heard something that sounded like “Breaker 1-9.” At ;irst, I thought it was James, home early, maybe with a bottle of wine and a baguette. I turned around.

No one was there. I looked out the window over the sink. The backyard was empty. I continued scrubbing.

“Agent Polastavich, do you copy?” The fuzzy voice tickled me in the right breast and I laughed. I thought that maybe if I went outside on the deck, the static would clear.

The sky was lush and purple. I didn’t see any clouds. Next door Mr. Tanini was standing in front of his grill with an extra-long spatula. He smiled at me and tipped his scally cap. “You’re looking healthy and happy, my dear,” he said.

“What’s the land-ho, cheerio?” The words from my body were crisp and bright. I crossed my arms over my chest.

Mr. Tanini looked over. “What did you say, Doll?” A breeze teased the feathers of white hair on top of his head.

I shook my head and giggled. “Mmmff-guf;le,” my boobs said.

“Speak up!” Mr. Tanini said, cupping his ear. “I can’t hear what you’re saying! I don’t have young body parts!”

I hugged myself tighter. “I think your wife’s calling you,” I told him, trying to look very serious. His wife had a stainless steel rod in her leg from a garbage truck injury and was afraid of attracting lightning so she rarely left the house. He went inside.

“Prepare to disembark,” the right one chirped. “Let’s bring these babies home.”

Both breasts rumbled and burped like engines. “Bravo to Charlie?” the left one

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The Implants Elizabeth Mastrangelo

shouted. “Charlie to Delta? Echo? Echo? Echo?”

I felt like I was going to explode. I was going to explode, right here on my deck!

This was not in the contract! These implants were duds! Only domestic products from now on!

I grabbed the railing and bent my knees to brace myself.

Mr. Tanini returned, carrying a plate of frozen beef patties. He cocked his head at me. “I’ve always wanted to do yoga,” he said loudly, over the increasing whir of my breasts.

“Mr. Tanini!” I said. “One hundred percent natural! There’s no other way to go!”

“You sure kick up a wind!” he shouted, staggering backward.

“Take care of Mrs. Tanini! Tell James I love him but I had to return my 30th birthday present!” Now I was bellowing over the sounds of swelling silicon.

“Young people!” he said, shaking his ;ist. “Ruining my lawn!”

My skin went hot and numb. And then I was in ;light, gazing down at a tiny suburban dream and a smoking deck, both in need of repair.

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Poetry

To be up at night Patrick Bower in the moon that is always rising, you turtle into rock-form, hands under knees, and call me from down there, a sluggish sob or tiny plaint that I am perfectly evolved to answer with my own low song, and so now both of us coo-cow over the moon— oh, to be so, up at night dream-singing together, careful not to shift or stop to pee for fear of letting fade the sounds that we make in this twilit statue garden room, where we try, fail again, again to sleep under the moon that is always rising, soft, over voices always waning. after “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas

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instagram.com/annaarmona

Magic wood Anna Armona

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Poetry

Thursday Afternoon Holly Day

The anhinga spreads its wings open to shed the day’s heat Looms like a bedraggled, cartoonish vampire bat Caught in the mid-afternoon sun. It ;laps its greasy wings and throws its head back, glares at the few people on the river bank watching its inglorious preening.

Behind it, a tree is ;illed with more birds, shoulders hunched Feathers drooping in the heat. A snowy egret perches In the topmost branches, its white feathers dazzling In the bright sunlight. It spreads its wings as if in mock parody Of the bird down below, position mirrored so precisely It’s almost cruel.

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Fiction

Saved by a Defective Condom Samantha Mulholland

H

e waits for her. They were supposed to meet at midnight, but it is now 3 a.m. Still he waits shivering in the dark with the temperature hovering around 33 degree Fahrenheit. He wonders if she backed out or even

worse decided to do it without him.

Tonight is the night. Tonight is the night that they were supposed to do it. A month ago, talking over lunch, they’d made a pact to kill themselves together. He was tired of the verbal and at times physical abuse he received from his father. And she was losing her battle with depression.

V. was the one who suggested it. The V stood for Vodka, a cruel joke from her mother who used to have a problem with the drink. While Vodka’s mother was turning her life around, working through the thirteen steps of A.A. and alcohol recovery, Vodka still hasn’t forgiven her for her horrible name.

Nathaniel gives up waiting any longer. Leaving Central Park, he wanders over to V’s apartment building to see if she is still awake. Her windows are completely dark.

Going around to the side of the building, he scales the drop down ;ire escape to V’s bedroom window.

Nathaniel is relieved that she hasn’t checked out without him; but the feeling is brief and bittersweet. He notices the razor blade glimmering between her ;ingers.

Killing yourself was one thing; that would be quick. It was knowing that V physically hurt herself each and every time she used that blade which made his heart break. As he opens the window, she jumps and it falls to the carpet.

“What the hell Nate?” She snaps picking the blade. “What are you doing here?”

“Tonight was the night, remember?”

V looks at him confused, “The night for what?”

Nathaniel’s eyebrows furrow, “You seriously forgot about the pact? You’re not bailing on me are you?”

“Oh shit, that was tonight.”

His shoulders droop slightly, “Yes, are you bailing on me?”

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Saved by a Defective Condom Samantha Mulholland

She sighs, “I’m sorry Nate, I have a lot on my mind.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“No I’m not bailing,” she says, running her ;ingers through her hair, “At least I don’t think I am.”

“What are you talking about V? This whole thing was your fucking idea.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I don’t want to get into it right now. We can do it tomorrow night, alright? Same time. Now come to bed, I’m tired.”

“What about your mom?”

“What about her? She went to bed already. We won’t get caught.”

As he crawls into bed with her, she moves closer to him. They spoon together, ;inding warmth and comfort at being so close to each other. As she pulls his arm over her, she whispers, “Good night Nate.”

He surprises himself, when he gently kisses her head, “Good night, V.” * The following night—midnight in Central Park—Nate is waiting for V again She is ;ifteen minutes late. When she ;inally arrives, he takes one look at her and can tell something is wrong.

“V! What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Promise you won’t get mad?”

“Why would I get mad?”

“Well, do you remember the other month when we hooked up?”

“Yeah?” He notices her arms wrapped around her belly, a gesture unlike her. The light bulb blinks on, “Wait? Really? Are you seriously pregnant?”

Her eyes start misting a little and she nods.

“What the hell?”

“Hey now, don’t go getting all pissed off at me! It’s not my fault the fucking condom broke.”

“Wait, hold on V! I’m not mad… just surprised is all. I think I’m going to shock.”

V ignores him, her voice quivers, “What are we going to do?”

“I—I don’t know.”

Looking up, the snow starts to fall. “You should go home, it wouldn’t be good for you to be out in this weather with your condition.”

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Saved by a Defective Condom Samantha Mulholland

“Oh okay, Nate… I’ll see you later, okay?”

He watches her shuf;le on shaky legs and he knows she’s crying. Nate feels like an asshole for sending her home, but he needs to process this. He was ready to die, but he can’t do it without her and how could he ask her to kill their child? * The following night, Nate climbs the ;ire escape outside V’s room. The scene punches him in the gut; she is quietly crying, her hands resting on her stomach. He taps on V’s window. After a while, she crawls out of bed, brushes away her tears and she lets him inside. “I’m really sorry V. I was an asshole for making you leave like I did. I was just in shock that’s all.”

“Well, it was a shock for me too,” more tears fall, “I’m one that’s supposed to take of this.”

“I came here to tell you that I did some thinking and I discovered something.”

“What great epiphany did you discover?” She scoffs dejectedly.

“I don’t want to be my father.” “…okay?”

“I’m saying that I want to be there for you and our child. I am going to get my act together. I will make a better effort at school to graduate and then I will get a job to support us and we could even get married if that is what you want.”

“You’re serious?’

“Yes,” he squeezes her hands in his, “I promise you, like last night’s plan, I won’t let you go through this alone. Please let me help you through this.”

She watches him for a moment before giving him a gentle kiss on the lips. “Come to bed, I’m tired.”

Nathaniel shakes his head, “V, answer me.”

“Alright Nate, we can ;igure out our new game plan tomorrow.”

They wrap themselves together tightly together beneath the bead sheets. V whispers, “Thank you for not going through with it last night.”

He kisses her head again, “Don’t worry baby, my new priority is to take of you two.”

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Saved by a Defective Condom Samantha Mulholland

Several months later He waits for her. It’s been going on ten hours now and V is exhausted; but his daughter is ;inally born a little after 11 p.m. V manages a smile and cries as the nurse hands the baby over. After a while, Nate gets the chance to hold his daughter.

Cuddling her close he says, “Welcome to the world Alexis, thank you for saving our lives.”

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Poetry

Waltz of Body & Soul Guy Traiber

“perhaps once, if everything will work out we will talk again about poetry and we’ll dream under the pine trees and ask each other questions about a lame rhyme or a fault rhythm” Manfred Winkler, Count Down, P. 147 For Zohar You are not here but I am brave enough to dream that one day we will walk again side by side and maybe then you will sing and I will be silent.

Instead of to the zoo we will go to the botanic garden and watch people dancing transferring their weight from side to side in trust.

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thecreakyattic.deviantart.com

Bus Ride Rhiannon Lee

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Fiction

The Sea of Red Kennedy Ribet

K

elada! Coach screamed. “Get your ass on this bus, or so help me God you’ll be benched the rest of this season”.

The team quickly moved upward into the bus as their already irate

coach screamed at them to scurry. It was game day. The most important game of the year and they were extremely late.

“They’re going to make us forfeit.”

“We're not forfeiting coach!” Kelada whines, “This game holds my future!”

“Blame yourself, Kelada, it’s your fault we’re late!”

“It's 1:55 coach! What are we gonna do?” The bus exited the freeway.

“Just hold tight.” Looking into the distance, the streets were overwhelmed with cars.

“Crap, take Slauson down. It should speed us up!” Coach yelled at the driver.

Though even turning down Slauson, they were still surrounded by a sea of red lights.

“Your directions suck, coach. Let me tell him where to go!” Kelada shouted.

“Not another word out of you! There sure is a lot of chatter coming from our newest benched player.”

“Benched? But coach…!”

“That's enough out of you. You've caused enough trouble!”

“Guys calm down, arguing isn’t going to ;ix anything.” The driver said “Five minutes!” Carter yelled.

“We’re gonna be late, ;loor it!” The driver stepped on the ignition, hitting a sharp right. The bus tilted, then toppled over.

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Poetry

Games Robert Lampros

The breath, before the starting whistle, open air over grass or dust, teams in formation, crashing forward in halting visions of their minds, a stillness captured by the light.

Days when battles stormed the earth like rumbling torrents of hailing skies, when shields landed silently on the dark red ground, survivors cried to each other, lifting their eyes.

What people do for sport, for glory, power, money, fame, might haunt them, cast them in a towering ;lame, the victories of yesterday may crumble into glowing ashes of one’s own shame.

Rising into sight above the ;ield, does the sun perceive the bodies, fallen temples of lost and angry souls?

Will the winners sense the shaded eyes, or feel the warmth that makes us new?

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Poetry

Let The Sparrow Fall Ronald Hoffman

When I was a boy I shot a sparrow with my shotgun, blew his head clean off, watched him fall to the ground. Now, I may not be all right where I’m thinking, I blew my heart out when I saw his body, I didn’t expect to see anything at all.

Many wheels cover the garden, many years, many faces just shadows on the wall, in my spring I turned the earth over while the fence needed mending, buried my seed too deep in the row. Now the wind is screaming bad intention threatening me with the dark and snow.

Though I cover my eyes I can’t pretend I wasn’t that bird on the fencerow, with the sound of peace in a winter grove just before I leveled my shotgun and blew my head off, blackened and bleeding, no tear to salt my angry woes.

Shhh! Grandma said. Easy now, you rest your head, their child, no need to bleed your spirit, no need to point the ;inger. That bird in the bush cleansed your passions and sickened your woes. Going forward on the path you will stumble, and on his wings that bird will carry your spirit back to the fold.

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thecreakyattic.deviantart.com

Thinking Rhiannon Lee

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Fiction

Falling through the silence Nadia K. Brown

H

e shook his head from side to side, too wary of the pain to lift off the pillow. She seemed to understand. The tray slid away from him, off the bedside table and back onto the cart. She looked at him brie;ly before

backing through the narrow space between the bed and the wall. And then she was gone. The wheels of the cart squeaked gently as it turned into the room next door.

Her look had been administrative, perhaps registering the room number to put an ‘X’ beside ‘Dinner’ on his chart.

Without warning, the pain returned. Beginning near his center, it spread slowly at ;irst, then sped swiftly in all directions until he felt that he was being torn in half. The cold seeped back in along with it, coils of it working their way under his skin. Where the hell was his blanket? Thoughts echoed slowly in his head. Tremors rose and fell again in a rhythm he could not control, the beat of it penetrating deep into his bones.

A melody, faint and familiar…

No matter what we get out of this, I know we’ll never forget… * Deep Purple crackled in and out of static as the Chevy bounced along ever more rugged roads. Beside him, Violet clenched her vise-like ;ingers around the leather bag that jumped and jerked in her lap. He rolled the volume button upwards with his ;inger and sang: ‘We ended up at the grand hotel. It was empty, cold and bare…But with the Rolling Stones truck thing just outside, making our music there.’ He sensed her apprehension as she mouthed the words along with him: ‘With a few red lights and a few old beds we make a place to sweat…No matter what we get out of this, I know we’ll never forget. Smoke on the water, Dire in the sky.’

Despite the fear, despite knowing that what ravaged his body was already beyond control, he believed that, in that moment, they had won. The truck groaned and galloped deep into the bush, and as they neared the farmhouse, he smiled.

Smoke on the water, Dire in the sky.

Day one.

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Falling through the silence Nadia K. Brown

* The storm woke him later. How much later, he couldn’t tell. Maybe ;ive minutes, maybe ;ive days. The wind rattled hard against the window and his body shook, despite his efforts to will himself still. Dammit. He mouthed the word help, but no sound emerged. The storm kept wailing, unconcerned, and his eyes drifted shut again.

“Mr. Boyd? Mr. Boyd?” A voice, distant and warped.

“Sir?” This time the voice was closer, and attached to a thread of pain. Something was touching him. His eyes ;ixed on a face, then dropped to see a gloved hand resting on his arm. Someone was telling her not to touch him. The voice was urgent, bitter; it was his voice.

“I’m sorry.” The pain in his arm eased. She stood over him, waiting, her face weaving in and out of focus. He tried to gather his thoughts into coherence, but the wind still echoed in his head.

“You called me, Mr. Boyd. Do you need something?” She motioned to his left. He rolled his head to where she pointed. The call button was clenched between his index ;inger and thumb.

“The window.” By the length of her silence, it was obvious she didn’t understand.

He tried again, patiently. “The window. Would you close it please?”

She looked at him doubtfully. “It’s closed, Mr. Boyd. They don’t open.”

“Never mind then.” It was true. The rattling had settled. There was only the hum of a fan coming from some corner he could not see, and the occasional blip of a monitor close by. Beyond that, the footsteps of the guard paced back and forth outside his room. All else was silent. Nothing but the foreboding hush that lay like a blanket over the ward.

A sigh came from the direction of the door. The fan again? Violet? The nurse cleared her throat. “Is there anything else you need, Mr. Boyd? Are you in pain?” He watched as her lips continued to move. They molded words in some predetermined sequence, marching through a list of questions by rote. It must be the end of her shift Was he late? Had Violet Dinished her shift? Was she waiting in the back hall to slip him the key?

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Falling through the silence Nadia K. Brown

“What time is it?” He blurted out urgently. Startled, the nurse smoothed the tops of her scrubs before glancing at the clock above his bed.

“It’s a quarter after six.” There was an air of annoyance in her voice. He had disrupted her routine. She looked at him skeptically and quickly made a note in her chart.

“Here’s a pain pill, Mr. Boyd. It will help.” The pill left a yellow residue on his ;ingers, and a taste of Clementine on his tongue. Quarter after six – evening, or morning? How long had he been in this room? Days? Weeks? Breathe, Mitch, breathe.

Let it kick in. He turned in the bed, took a breath—carefully—and settled. A quarter after six. The idea of it was soothing. He liked quarters of things—pumpkin pie, coins, musical notes, 4/4 time. Quarters felt solid and warm. * “Mitchell, you’re late.” Violet murmured. She was trying to be coy. Her eyes gave her away, brightness spilling out from behind their walls. She motioned to his guitar, playfully mocking the way he shifted his ;ingers from one chord to another. “That’s not where you come in. You always miss that cue.” She shook her head in mock disapproval. “Always one step behind…”

Violet started to sing again, but the sound was dampened by the thick walls and close quarters of the farmhouse. There was no resonance to hide the quiver in her voice. It was the second day, and the wind had picked up. It worked its way through the cracks, whining from within the walls and circling in colliding drafts. The bag of money that they had ‘collected’ from Violet’s husband crouched like a monster under the table. As for him, his body throbbed without relent. He ignored all of this, though, and joined Violet with a series of quick, crisp cords.

Late again! She admonished with her eyes. They sang for hours in the old kitchen, surrounded by the ;lowered walls and heady from the weed. * He had always wanted to live in a farmhouse, the kind that looks all-knowing and warm from the edge of the road. That was how Violet had described her parent’s place: a quaint oasis deep in the woods, with a lattice porch that faced the sunset across remnant ;ields of barley and corn. We’ll be safe there. No one knows about it, Mitch. Not even Jack. It’s been abandoned for so long – it’s like it doesn’t exist...

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Falling through the silence Nadia K. Brown

In the end, there was nowhere else to go. With the bag of stolen cash, weed, and with his rapidly swelling belly, they had driven North all night from the city. This was it—this was where he’d die—but his plan had always been for her to leave. He hadn’t intended for her to watch him rot and wither. Yet on the second day, he’d caught her standing dreamy-eyed by the parlor window, rearranging the clutter her family had abandoned when her parents died. And he couldn’t ;ind the rage he needed to make her go. By the third day, Violet’s eyes were sinking into the disquiet around them. She was cold. The weather had turned, and she kept her arms close to her body as she moved. He didn’t feel the cold—his own skin pulsed with heat and he kept shifting from one position to another. The farmhouse creaked in response to pressures they could not see. Outside, the trees played tricks on them, shuddering in sudden bursts, and whistling softly. Sirens? No. Not yet. But still, she wouldn’t listen. Why the hell wouldn’t she leave?

He made his voice as forceful as he could. “Just leave, V. You can be free and clear of all this. For God’s sake, just go!”

“Free and clear? I’m in it up to my armpits. You know that.” Violet wore patience like an ill-;itting pair of socks. “I can’t just dump this on you, Mitchell…” She pointed at his swollen stomach as he slumped on the chair. “You need me.”

“I can take care of myself.” He inhaled the last of the joint. “It was my decision and my signature.”

She laughed peevishly. “And my key. Mitchell, you’re an asshole. This high road doesn’t suit you.”

He looked up in time to see her pull the back door closed behind her. Violet had no tolerance for pointless conversations. She found a lip of grass behind the house, and breathed in the smells of rotting chaff and deep, rich soils. She sat there until he gathered the strength to join her. There, they smoked and watched the ;ire;lies falling through the silence: bright specks appearing out of nowhere, interrupting the dusk as it withdrew into the night.

Weeks later, he could still feel the sinking coolness of the grass and the heavy, heavy dark. *

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Falling through the silence Nadia K. Brown

When Violet did leave him—later, after the farmhouse—she didn’t need any urging.

She exited in dramatic form, surrounded by police and by the safe, cold glow of ;luorescent light.

The moment was ;ixed in his memory: her chair scraping against the concrete ;loor, her arm yanked forcefully from his hand. Her face disappeared behind two guards as they pinned him against the table. He hadn’t realized he’d grabbed her until his ;ists ached wildly with her absence.

“Let ‘er go!” a gruff voice barked needlessly. He heard the buzz of doors closing behind her. And then silence, but for the circling of a few ;lies disrupted by the ruckus.

That night, in his cell, he awoke to the feeling of being burned alive, his pillow sticky and moist with blood. He knew then that he’d seen her for the last time. * “Mitchell,” Violet began, “You have to tell them.” She cocked her head to meet his gaze. “We agreed, Mitchell. Everyone thinks you stole that money.” He waved her words away in annoyance.

“Yes! You have to talk to them, Mitch. Especially…Jack.”

“Violet…”

“He’s a good man, Mitchell.” She spoke quickly now, and her words were wellworn. She had prepared for this. “Jack will understand, and he knows what your father put you through—both of you, but especially you, Mitch. It really hurt Jack when you left—you were so young.”

“Left? I was sixteen. They kicked me out.”

“But—” “No, Violet! Jack can go to hell.”

Violet was standing now, towering over him. “Mitchell, you have to talk to him. If you don’t…”

“It’s too late.” He grasped at words in the dimming light. “No, Violet, that money is mine, and Jack knows it. I don’t need to tell him that! I’m not a thief. My brother never had the guts to stand up for anything, but he knows the truth. I deserve a piece of that pie. I won’t let him screw me over again. Again! Family be damned.”

“But Mitchell! Your brother—he’s all you’ve got now—”

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Falling through the silence Nadia K. Brown

“He can go to hell.” * “Would you like me to call someone for you?” The nurse seemed uncertain as she handed him a pill cup. He swallowed the bitter, orange tablet. Morphine? Haldol?

“If anyone wanted to talk to me, they would be here.” He glared past her into the false stillness of the ward. “They’re not here, are they? So I guess that’s that.”

“Do you want the priest?” the nurse asked timidly.

“Why not?” She nodded and stepped backwards towards the door. * “Mitchell?” Violet was nervous. “I think we should go.” He grunted his disagreement.

“We can’t stay here forever.” She was tiptoeing to the point. Day four. “You need treatment. You know that.”

He swung around to face her. Anger and pain erupted, and his ;ist ;lew. When the wall gave way, the pain in his hand was an instant relief. The drywall gave off a musty, decades-old smell of contempt, and wafts of pink dust drifted to the ;loor. Numbly, he watched the wallpaper curl, framing the hole with buckled pink ;lowers. * “You can do this, Mitchell.” Violet’s voice was soft. She nodded in the direction of the door. “Go in. You have to.”

“I don’t think I’ll come out again.”

“It’s your only choice, Mitch. If you don’t, there’s nothing.”

I’m not coming back out. He pushed against the silver plate on the door. The metal felt cold, and he pressed hard against it to resist the urge to turn around.

“I’m turning myself in.” Three police of;icers were immediately at his side. One of them helped him into a wheelchair. The gears on the handles clicked ;irmly as they locked in place. * He winced.

“It’s okay,” The nurse said cheerfully, “Your i.v. is loose. I’ll tape it good this time.”

It was when the nurse had gone that Violet’s ;inal rage tore through him. His eyes closed under the weight of her words: “You lied. You lied? This whole fucking thing

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Falling through the silence Nadia K. Brown

was a lie? You used me to get that money from your brother, didn’t you?! That’s sick, Mitchell. You are sick!”

“Violet—” “Go to hell, Mitchell.”

Had she headed back to the farm? Had she called his brother? Mitchell pictured her at the kitchen table, scraping at the soft, thick wood with her ;ingernails and cursing his name. He imagined her sweeping up the drywall and glaring at the hole he’d made while she ;inished the weed and waited for Jack. She would sob as she explained to Jack how Mitchell had manipulated—no, devastated—her, just as he had done to Jack. And she would say that she was sorry, oh, so sorry.

We ended up at the Grand Hotel, It was empty, cold, and bare…

He knew she wasn’t coming back. Still, when he opened his eyes, he half expected to see her on the edge of the bed, smoking a joint and staring out at the setting sun.

Her face would be indistinct, blurred against the walls that had turned a deep, dissatis;ied orange.

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tomipajunen.tumblr.com

Bus waiters Tomi Pajunen

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Poetry

Something to Hang On To Guy Traiber

A restrained moan from a girl, at the end of love, which I have once heard from behind a thin wall in a mountain slope hotel, attacks me softly in the hours of dim loneliness.
 Like a line from a forgotten poem suddenly appearing uninvited and replicating itself like prayer beads slowly moving between wrinkled soft ;ingers.

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Poetry

Scrawl Carly Dee The spirit left the spider as he stood on the brink the precipice between Him and the ink.

He threw himself in.

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Fiction

The Patron Saint of Letting Go Michelle Hanlon

T

he girl dug her heels into the muddy ground, bit into her bottom lip, threw her head back, and wrenching her arms pulled against the weight —yet still she slid across the slick coldness, wet mud seeping through

the little holes in her glitter pink jellies.

The chorded rope had long ago opened up the tender skin on the palms of her hands. Yet still she held. Her arms trembled from exertion and cold—every muscle convulsed in small spasms as she fought against the pull. Her tiny body was unable to counter all of the weight in the well bucket. Yet still she held.

The stone wall of the well stood before her indifferent; the rope continued to slide over its gaping mouth while the electric shocks of pain, the burning in her muscles, the numbness in her ;ingers besieged her to let go. She repeated to herself, hold tighter. She could feel the rope snaking away.

The coarse rope pulled and ripped through her raw hands; one second she was holding the rope and the next it was gone. She watched the end of the rope whip over the stone lip of the dark well.

Sinking to her knees in the mud and the rain she unleashed the agony of failure, burning her throat with the ragged chords of a half-scream, half-sob. The loss burning so hot in the center of her chest, she thought it might consume her.

When after some time she felt herself still there—still sunken in the cold mud, the sharp rain pelting her stooped shoulders, she rose.

Her perception blurred by rain and tears, she focused on the well, moving toward it, and placed her hands on its stone lip. Slightly adjusting her ;ingers to feel the rough texture of the wet stone, grounding herself in hatred for this inanimate object, she swallowed and peered over.

Nothing. There was the bottom of the well punctuated by rocks and the pieces of her shattered wooden bucket. Gazing down into the emptiness, she saw herself as a creature tethered and diminished by fear.

Seared to the bone, she knew she no longer held to this place. And so she turned and she left.

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Fiction

The Projectionist Bret Farley

Reel 3:

F

irst cold day of autumn, and I forget my hoodie. This parking lot is a ;ishbowl. Time to set my jaw. Shoulders back, neck up. They could be watching. As I pull the heavy door open, a rush of warm air, from all the

people in here, walking around, climbing the stairs, hits me. Waiting in line for the bathroom. I wonder again why I’m still here. The hours suck. The college applications are stacking up at home.

Leanne is working the concessions again. Leaning over the counter, hips in the air.

I look at the posters, the giant cardboard advertisements, standing larger than life in the middle of the ;loor, hanging from the three-story ceiling. Step up to the counter.

I think I know what I want.

Leanne, hey.

Hey Trent. Can I get you something? She’s following my eyes, down, down to where her breasts are almost resting on the counter.

Just a Coke, I guess. Since we don’t serve liquor.

Rough day already? She’s grabbing a cup, ;illing my Coke. You just got here.

I’ll tell you about it sometime.

Oh yeah? When?

She holds the Coke out. Her hands are ;lawless.

Oh, I don’t know. Next time you ;ind yourself in the booth? Grabbing the oversized cup using my left hand, because she’s holding it with her right. Because then our ;ingers will touch. Thanks.

Any time. She leans over the counter again. Relaxed. Don’t know how she gets away with it.

Well, I gotta get up there.

Yeah, you get up there.

Bossy girl.

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You have no idea.

Our conversation cycles through my mind as I'm checking the reels, running Reel ‘A’ through the sprocket and down to the takeout reel. Too fucking hot up here. Poorly insulated. My hoodie would be balled up in the corner by now anyway. Flip the magic switch, watch the projector shoot its beam through the little window and light up the room below. It’s surprising, the amount of dust that beam reveals in the air. Always more than you’d think. The tiny white spots swirling in the light. Some blurred, some sharp. A miniature nebula in a miniature galaxy.

The movie itself is slow, especially after the twentieth time. Starting to see the glue holding the dialogue together, the choices behind each cut. Nothing magical there anymore, not like the ;irst couple times. Just a bunch of best guesses. Some of them wrong. Even the right ones are a product. Art reduced to a day job.

I think about Leanne again. Her breasts jostling in her shirt as she climbs the stairs up. Top buttons undone. Don’t think about it, Trent. No erections in the control booth. What about Shannon? I could keep it under the surface, though. It wouldn’t affect us. And besides, we’re not even together right now. Not really.

Knuckles on the door scare the shit out of me.

Heart’s pounding—at ;irst because of the scare, then because it could be her. It could be Leanne. And then what would happen? Yeah, come in, I say. But it’s only Mitchell. Skinny Mitchell, looking around as he walks in. Shift manager, sure—but really just a middle man. Kind of a pitiful creature. I send a quick prayer up that I didn’t grow into a… I dunno… dork? Thank you. Amen.

Yes? Doug, uh, wants you downstairs for something else. When you get a chance.

Why doesn’t he ever come up here himself?

I couldn’t tell you.

Just keep looking at the kid, he hates that. He looks around, his eyes just glasses, two movie screens ;lashing in the dim room. There’s the shitty movie, re;lected back.

A re;lection of a re;lection. The kid trips over a box of reels, spins around to catch himself against the door. The door bangs into the wall.

You all right?

Yeah… yeah. You should get these reels off the ;loor.

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The Projectionist Bret Farley

They’re in a box.

The kid looks at them, deciding what to do.

Yeah. They’re… uh, they’re on the ;loor. They should probably be picked up.

Okay. I’ll do it later. I’ve got a changeover coming up.

Mitchell leaves. I look at the monitor and think, What the fuck does Doug need this time? He always needs something. Besides a dentist and a good shave. No one’s this needy.

Reel 1: Doug had run me through the basics, demonstrating how to change the reel over, showing me the cue marks. Like a scientist with trouble communicating. The Stephen Hawking of projectionists.

You see that second cue mark, Trent, and that reel’s gonna run out. You ;lick the switch there before one second, and I mean that. One second’s all you get.

Right, cool.

Yeah, cool. Til you screw it up. Then it ain’t cool. And on a busy night you got three hundred people down there that’ll get real squirrely real fast if they gotta wait in the dark.

Nodding that I understand. Yes, I acknowledge how very uncool that would be.

Once you change over, you can rewind the ;irst reel. Do the same for every reel, and don’t wait on it—you don’t want them laying around in reverse.

All right. Makes sense.

Pay attention is al—that’s what we’re paying you for.

Me smiling. Doug not.

Actually, that ain’t true. We got more for you downstairs. No one gets to do just one job around here. Follow me.

The thing he has to show me is clean-up, between showings. If I’m needed, which I usually am. Whenever I get to the front of the theater with that broom and dustpan, the bag of garbage, I like to look up through the projector booth window. It’s only the illusion of separateness, but it must feel like magic. If only people knew what it was like, to be in the booth—but then, why should they? I wouldn’t want to know either.

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The Projectionist Bret Farley

After a few months, I couldn’t go to a movie without feeling the dirt, smelling the underbelly. It’s a building, separate from the worlds in all the movies shown there.

It’s gross, full of real humanity. The carpets are grimy if you stop to look. Watching the monitor and sweeping the ;loor get real old, real fast. And the movie moments, they start to pale next to the real moments.

Like with Shannon.

Somewhere in those ;irst months—when was it? Shannon’s mom leaving and the two of us suddenly alone on their couch. The TV muted for commercials, but the movie comes back on and we don’t notice. We’re kissing. Gently at ;irst, but then hard. Her hand reaching down, feeling where I’ve hardened and lengthened.

Some weeks later, getting tired of the shit where Dad comes home late, and once again, there are his late keys, jingling in the late air. We’re on my couch this time.

Mom’s asleep. Kelly went to bed hours ago. We’re watching some show. I won’t turn down the volume.

He’s your dad.

Someone should remind him.

God, dramatic much?

That’s not how you use that term, Shan.

But I call after him: Night, Dad. Then to Shannon, in a whisper: See? You can like me again.

You’re a dick.

I know, babe. I’m sorry about that. She knows I’m half serious, and she pulls my head over and kisses me on the cheek. Maybe to show me there’s still something about me—something that deserves her affection.

Now I’m sweating, sitting on the hard silver reel cases. Wondering why the theater still has a damn two-reel system at all. I’d even settle for a cakestand. But I can't complain; I’ve got it made in that proverbial shade. So does my brother, and my sister for that matter. My Dad did that much for us—that, and being born white and middle class in a suburb of Kansas City. And then there are those things he chose to do. The things he still does. The shit he says to Mom. When I stop to think about it, this proverbial shade is some stuffy shit.

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The Projectionist Bret Farley

The hours go quickly, at least. Tonight’s movie doesn’t suck. Not great, but I can lose myself in it a little. And when it’s over, watch the little silhouetted heads bouncing along the bottom of the big screen, in front of the black credits that aren’t really black. Run the reel out, rewind that one too. Stack them up for the next showing.

Downstairs, I scan the schedule. Each name ;lashes an image in my brain, especially the girls. There are so many, each of them unique. Like a hundred ;lavors I’ve never tasted. I wouldn’t know what to do with any of them, given the opportunity. Maybe everything I could. Maybe what I’m already doing, with Shannon.

Not much at all.

Talking with Chase in the summer afternoon, outside the theater and around the corner where we can smoke. I’m watching that cute girl—what’s her name, Leanne?

—walking in from the parking lot. She’s walking with Skinny Mitchell, who must have arrived at the same time. Where is Shannon? I thought she’d be waiting in the lobby again.

Fuckin’ DWI. It’s killing me, Trent.

Who’s your ride, then?

Step-dad. Chase takes a greedy drag and then hands it over. Who’s yours?

The girlfriend.

You should give her a little ride in return.

You should go home and spank off to that thought.

Sounds good. Long as you don’t mind.

Fuck, on second thought, don’t. I look up to see Shannon’s brand new Kia pulling into the lot. Anyway, here’s Shannon. I hand him the cigarette.

Good. Peace the fuck out then.

Shannon pulls up. I open the door. Hi. Then, I think about it a second. Here, I’ll drive.

Shannon looks confused. Okay. Why? I’m driving.

Okay.

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I come around the front of the car, kiss her. Look at Chase. Stoop into the driver’s seat. Shannon giving him a little wave. Chase nodding, smoke rising out of his mouth.

The fucker.

What was that all about?

Nothing. I wanted to drive.

Don’t want your girlfriend driving you around? I didn’t think you’d mind.

Okay.

Okay. Then what?

Me looking forward. Checking the traf;ic in the mirror. Saying nothing.

Is everything okay?

Yes, Shannon. Everything’s ;ine. Can’t I just drive sometimes?

Sure.

Silence. More silence. Go ahead, Shannon, drag it out.

You smell like smoke.

Is that a problem?

Not if you don’t mind smelling like smoke.

I’m sure my mom knows anyway. As much as you guys chat.

Oh, is that what you think we talk about?

It’s just a guess. And—what’s the issue, exactly? Other girls don’t mind a little smoke.

What’s that supposed to mean?

Nothing.

Other girls? Seriously, Trent, what does that mean?

Nothing, Shannon.

No, it’s not nothing.

She’s right. It’s not nothing, and I do know what it means.

Shan, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking of anyone… speci;ic.

Then why did you even say it, Trent? I just don’t get it. Ever since this job, I just— I feel a little out of the loop with you.

Well, you are out of the loop. It doesn’t mean I’m looking at other girls.

It just means there are other girls in the loop, and I’m not one of them. Right?

I don’t know. I guess so.

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The Projectionist Bret Farley

You guess so?

Yup. And you know what? Sorry. What else do you want?

Shannon opening her mouth, closing it. Like she’s trying to catch the words.

She catches them: What else do I want? I want you to get out of the car.

What? I’m driving.

It’s my car. Get out of it.

We’re—we’re two minutes away.

Then you can walk it just ;ine.

I’m not walking it.

Pull over Trent, I’m not joking. Just pull over and get out.

I should. I know I should. But I don’t. Have I really said something so terrible?

Getting out would mean yes. But I won’t. We’ll talk in front of my house. We’ll make up. She’ll respect me for this.

Seriously, Trent? You’re—you’re actually going to keep driving. You asshole.

Shannon, I’m sorry, but— Oh, it’s too late for that! Something between screaming and crying. Don’t even give me that! If you were sorry you wouldn’t still be driving. And look at you.

I know there’s nothing left. I pull over. My house is right there, but I pull over.

Fuck. Get out. Stand on the sidewalk. Watch her stomp around to the driver’s side, get in, hit the gas. Past my house. Not even a look back.

Linger for a moment, think about what just happened. Something’s wrong. That’s the worst part. Something’s wrong when nothing’s supposed to be wrong. This just happened. It can never be erased. A symptom, like lesions on the skin. The thing was already dying.

Reel 2: What am I doing, waiting? Shit, I’m just standing here. Shaking. Neighbors could be watching. Probably heard most of it, too. Just walk. The house is right there, so just walk.

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The Projectionist Bret Farley

Thoughts ricocheting between what just happened and the latest movie reels on repeat. Trudging up the drive where my dad’s car should be, but isn’t. Dodging the sprinkler. Walking through the front door. Kelly’s home, watching TV, sort of. On her phone, really. Doing both. This is how eleven-year-olds relax, now. She doesn’t look up. I could be anyone.

Hello... hello Kelly… hi. Can you hear me?

Where were you?

Work.

Oh, yeah.

Mom home?

Yeah, she’s doing laundry. She sighs that last part, so bored with it all. I guess I know how she feels.

Kelly, what are you watching?

I dunno. Change it if you want.

What sounds better is throwing the TV through the front bay window. Not pulling the cord out ;irst, the power strip and the cable and everything would just trail behind and hang inside the kitchen while the TV sputters its last on the wet lawn.

Turning toward the staircase—the staircase down, where the dryer has just begun humming again and something, a button or a zipper, is ticking repetitively.

Thumping down the stairs to the same rhythm. My mom turning in some surprise to see me. She’s folding a pile of whites on the top of the dryer, but she stops.

She knows what’s wrong. It’s on my face, in my features, in my shoulders. She’s seen it, maybe felt it herself.

Hi, Trent, honey.

Hmm. Work okay today?

I don’t respond; I have nothing to say about work.

She sighs without sound—more like a deep breath. Then she sets down the shirt she’s just folded and looks at me.

You and Shannon?

Saying nothing. Looking at the ;loor. There’s dust in the corners. Clouds casting more shadows than catching light.

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The Projectionist Bret Farley

I’m sorry, Trent.

You say that like you expected it.

No. Well.

Silence. Looking up to see her face, and hating what I see there—the pity. Why should she pity me?

Is there anything I can do? You want to talk about it?

Of course I don’t.

You don’t have to answer like that. I know you’re upset.

I know.

Well. I don’t know what to say. If you need to talk, you know, you can come to me or your father.

Hah. All right.

What? You don’t think you can go to us?

Well, yeah. To you.

You don’t think you can go to your father? Her picking up the shirt, putting it down. It seems like you’re upset with him.

Hmm. Are you?

Why, are you?

Her lips tighten. Well that’s not what we’re talking about, is it?

Dad’s not going to help. Sorry. You aren’t helping, either. Shannon’s just a bitch.

She’s taking a step forward, eyes wide. You watch your mouth, I don’t care how upset you are.

I’m sorry! I laugh a little. I’m sorry.

Do I need to ask why you broke up?

I didn’t say we broke up. And no. My face growing warm. Why, you think it’s my fault? Do you think I did something to her?

Well I certainly hope not.

But you haven’t ruled it out.

Trent, you just called her a—quietly, her voice dropping an octave—a bitch.

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The Projectionist Bret Farley

Not wanting to let that word hang in the air, but it has to. Can’t think of what to say. My mother thinks this, about her son.

I want you to be a good man someday.

Mom. I’m hating that she said this, that she has to say it. She knows she’s stung me. Her eyes on me, seeing me for what I am.

I’m doing my best, I say. With the sad example I have.

I frame it enthusiastically, but it doesn’t fool her. She’s taking two quick steps, striking me on the cheek with her open hand. I stumble sideways from the shock. Not believing. Believing that she hit me, yes, but not that it’s her and me. That this is real.

Mom turning her back, stepping away. Breathing. Then folding laundry again.

I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean that.

Well, she says turning her head. I’m sorry too.

Stepping up the stairs, slowly. Tiredly. Looking back down without stopping, expecting her to be watching but ;inding her only folding. Snif;ling. My cheek burning.

Reel 4: Months pass. Not like in the movies, with a cross-dissolve. There’s stuff in there––lots of it. It’s messy. But the months pass.

God, it’s hard to drive with her talking. Kel, can you just. Stop. Talking. I’m trying to merge.

Well, sorry!

That’s still talking.

Kelly blowing air out through her teeth.

Just let me merge and then you can ;inish your story.

You weren’t even listening in the ;irst place.

Big sigh. Whatever. She’s right, but I just want to get there in silence, and she can read between the lines. I’ll have to listen to enough bullshit when I’m clocked in.

Move, you piece of shit truck, you don’t own the road.

Don’t say that word, please. In her sing-song voice.

Just don’t tell Mom and you won’t have to worry about it.

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I don’t like hearing it. I don’t like your potty mouth, Trent.

I don’t remember it mattering.

Why are you such a jerk? Seriously. When did that happen?

When it became my duty to drive you to the show.

Kelly looking out the window. She’s still a kid, Trent. My mom’s voice, from somewhere in my head. She’s not that old. Not as old as she acts. My mom’s face, imploring. Confused. Like she’s asking a question.

I park, and we get out. Don’t run, Kel, God, you’re gonna get hit by a car or something. Just stay with me til we’re in the theater, then you can run off.

You have to buy my ticket.

Okay, whatever. What crappy movie are you seeing again?

Donna’s Diary. And it’s not a crappy movie. Can you just buy me the ticket?

Yes, I don’t have a choice.

Reese is working the booth. What a cute—hold on. Is this your little sister?

Yes. One for Donna’s Diary, the noon showing.

Oh, you’re not seeing it with her?

No. I’m working.

What’s your name?

Kelly.

I’m Reese. But I’m wearing a nametag, so you knew that. Four seventy-;ive, Trent.

That’s with the employee discount.

Jesus. Push the cash under the window. Weird how warm it is just beyond the glass. Physics, I guess.

Here you go. It’s the cutest movie! You’re going to love it.

Take the tickets out of the warmth. Come on, Kel. See you Reese, I’ll be in the booth.

Okay. Bye Kelly! Nice to meet you!

That popcorn breath smell greets us, cigarettes mixed in. Someone’s cologne.

Who wears cologne to a matinee? Hand Rico the ticket.

Have fun, he says.

More fun than you.

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The Projectionist Bret Farley

Kelly walking away down the velvet hall, no drink, no popcorn. She’s ;ine. She’s got a stash in her little purse. Don’t worry about her. Walk back through and around the concession. There’s Leanne. I suddenly need a Coke, bad.

Hi Leanne, how are ya?

Oh, you know. You want a Coke, I can tell.

For starters.

She’s smiling at that one. Her eyebrows furrow, but she’s smiling.

Is there something else? Pretzel? You never get one of those.

I don’t like salt the size of softballs on my food, I guess.

I thought you liked softball-sized things.

Her tongue peeking out between her teeth. She’s ;illing up my Coke. Looking at me over her shoulder.

Here you go.

Thanks.

And here you go, she seems to be saying with her body as she leans across the counter again. Her forearms in a triangle meeting at her clasped hands. Her elbows squeeze against her sides and—oh, hello titties. I was hoping you’d make an appearance.

In the break room I look at the schedule. I’m in theater seven today. Theater seven, theater seven… and would you look at that: Donna’s Diary. Well I’m seeing it with her after all. Judge me now Reese.

I look at Leanne again as I exit. I can’t help it. Who could?

Reel 5: Climbing the stairs, hearing the sounds die away in the rickety stairwell. That familiar smell, like aging carpet. Like the roller rink downtown. I go through the setup, turn down the lights. Click on the monitor. Watch the previews and peek out the window a few times, make sure it’s all lining up. I double check Reel ‘A’ and have a seat, focusing on the monitor. Particularly annoyed at the trailers before this one.

I jump at the knock on the door, then curse. Every goddamn time. Skinny Mitchell comes in. I don’t get up.

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Hey Trent.

Sup, Mitchell.

I, uh… need someone on clean-up after the showing.

Oh yeah?

Yeah. Would you be able to do that?

Doesn’t leave me much time.

I know.

Getting up and looking out the little window. Not too many people. More than I’d like. Can’t see Kelly, but she’s down there somewhere. Bunch of kids anyway, going to be a mess.

Then I see Shannon. Shannon and some guy. Walking up the aisle in the dim light.

His hand rests on her hip as they choose their row. And when they ;ind it, she slides past him so comfortably.

Can’t you get someone else? I’m saying, distantly. I don’t mention my sister. I don’t mention my apparently ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, who is now leaning into her hair. Kissing her behind the ear.

It’s not my call, Mitchell is saying. There’s only two of you on this side today.

Just looking through the window. Not talking. Not even acknowledging he’s there.

Okay, Trent, well… I’m sure you’ll ;igure it out. Thanks.

Turning from the window, looking at him. Now walking towards him. Getting too close. I know it. Even I’m uncomfortable. I’m a lot of things.

Does it suck, Mitchell? Being the errand boy? I’m smiling, somehow, but my tone betrays my sudden bitterness.

Trent, I’m just doing my job.

I like the guy. I don’t know why. Something in his voice. It does suck, I can tell. But I can’t stop.

Okay, he’s saying. Well. He’s turning toward the door. I regret the way I spoke to him just now. I marvel at what I’m doing––like watching my character in a movie.

Mitchell.

Yeah.

You talk to Leanne sometimes, yeah?

Well… yes. Why? He turns around.

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She talk about me?

Talk about you how? Not really.

Not really? Or no.

No. Okay. Just curious, man. She just… she keeps ;lirting with me, you know? Leaning over the counter.

No, she’s not.

What?

I said no, she’s not. Mitchell’s ;ists clenching. The fuck is his problem?

I’m afraid she is, Mitch. Sorry. Oh, man, do you have a thing for her?

We’re together, actually.

Holy shit.

You’re together? I’m turning red, like some kind of asshole. I never thought of this, because, well, she’s gorgeous. Like out-of-his-league gorgeous.

I mean, well done, Mitch.

Okay, don’t call me Mitch.

Hey, all right. Putting my hand on his skinny shoulder. His movie screens just ;lashing. But underneath—underneath, I can see his eyes. They’re hard. My hand doesn’t move until he slaps it away.

Whoa. Mitchell.

Watching his expression. Trying to. He always looked small, but there something —some coiled strength just beneath. I hate that Leanne was so forward. And Mitchell doesn’t know, or he puts up with it. But she had me going. And if she hadn’t… would things have gone differently? Between Shannon and I? I shouldn’t be the fool in all this.

Just stay away, he’s saying. How about that?

Hey, girls get bored. It’s not— His arm’s coming up. Not to strike, but to warn, probably. I’m reacting anyway, pushing his chest so he stumbles back, leaning over and away. Not off balance, though. Bringing his leg up, into my stomach. I grab his leg, but it’s heavier than I planned, and I come down with it. I feel Mitchell’s ;ist strike my neck. It hurts. My

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The Projectionist Bret Farley

instincts are to stop the pain, my elbow comes up to where I guess Mitchell’s face would be, and I’m right.

Mitchell half-collapses against the projector, then falls forward. Grabbing hold of me to stay up. Both of us hitting the ground, still throwing our ;ists out, eventually gripping each other’s arms and sleeves to keep further hits from landing. Breathing hard. Feeling my limbs burning from the struggle. We’ve reached an unsaid agreement.

Now there’s pain—lots of it. But I’m also lying on something. It cracks as I roll off.

Mitchell’s glasses, broken in half. One lens out, lying there, whole and re;lecting the monitor screen behind me.

It ;lashes white for a second, then goes black. The jarring sound of ;ilm clapping against metal.

Oh, fuck.

What? Mitchell holding his face.

Scrambling to my feet. The next reel’s not ready. Reaching to grab it, tripping over Mitchell’s arm, Mitchell crying out, unable to see anything. Stretching his ;ingers out along the ;loor for his glasses.

What are you doing?

Oh fuck. Oh fuck.

Fumbling with the new reel, looking out the window. Shit, it’s dark down there.

There’s a kid crying. Turn the lights up, get back to the reel. But there’s something wrong. It’s jammed. Of course it is. Can’t think. I’m doing something wrong. It doesn’t just jam like this.

Where the fuck are my glasses, Trent? Come on, I can’t see a— They’re broken.

What?

I—They’re broken.

Mitchell on his hands and knees, searching for the wall next to the door, ;inding it.

Sitting up against it, still breathing hard. Me, backing away from the projector that isn’t projecting anything. The dumb machine. Still whirring away like there’s something to look at. I sit down hard on the box of reels, next to Mitchell. I can see his eyes now. He’s looking off into his blurry world.

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The Projectionist Bret Farley

The reel ran out, didn’t it? says Blind Mitchell.

It’s jammed. I can’t… it’s just jammed. He doesn’t know I’m crying. It’s just more heavy breaths to him.

Good, he says. Maybe you’ll ;inally get canned.

I’m an asshole, I say.

You’re an asshole, says How-The-Fuck-Did-He-Get-Leanne-While-I-Just-Lost-AJob-Running-A-Movie-Projector Mitchell.

We’re both going to pay, I’m pretty sure. But when it’s over, I’ll go see Reese. One for Donna’s Diary, the noon showing. Yeah, I know they moved it. No, no employee discount.

Then I’ll track down Kelly, fold down the seat next to her. Watch the story ;lit by on its own.

But ;irst, I’m going to hear about it, and from Doug himself. No middle man. Can’t wait.

I hear the muf;led creaks of footsteps coming up the staircase.

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Poetry

Emily as the red ants bite Darren C. Demaree

The wall isn’t shelter.

The woman isn’t a world.

You can’t be spared.

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First published in The Linnet's Wings, “I Hear Someone Speaking”

Poetry

Someone Speaks James G. Piatt Someone speaks, not as a hawk screeching in the sky soaring up and over wind currents, but like a timid wren ;lying almost motionless under the limbs of the giant Oak trees sitting in the haze of the lazy pink tinted dawn. The timorous moments of the past along with past memories, fade away into the visions of the present. I watch the blue ripples of the stream’s surface lapping at the ecru shale sides of the hill and my mind becomes accustomed to the silence that beckons me as I hold my breath in anticipation. Fading ghosts of the past surface in my mind again, and I remember tombstones with names and voices, I knew so well, etched in marble, memories, and echoes.

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cody-anderson-art.tumblr.com

Cody Anderson

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Fiction

Petite Suite de Craie Robert Wexelblatt

1. Concours de grafDitis: Concertino pour Petit Orchestre en Fa-Dièse Majeur, Précoce et Lascive

I

was in love with Olivia Bernot, the great fact of my life that year. But Olivia was oblivious to my adoration and apparently immune to any notion the least romantic—which may have been the great fact of hers. Unlike the other

girls I knew, Olivia seemed to regard emotions as super;luous. I construed her indifference as proof of a perfection as ;lawless as her pale skin, long, glossy hair, and the implacable seriousness of her great brown eyes. To this day, whenever I come across the word unrequited I picture Olivia. The same goes for any allusion to the impregnable Hellenic huntress Artemis or her Roman double, the virginal Diana.

In eighth grade we had to pick a foreign language. My guidance counselor, Mr. Shrewsbury of the argyle socks and framed Harvard Extension School diploma, frowned when I announced my choice. He urged me to be mindful that we were talking about a ;ive-year commitment. Maybe I’d like to rethink the matter. Most of my classmates, he pointed out, were taking Spanish. His tone intimated taking Spanish was like being a guidance counselor who wore argyle socks. French was okay, a distant second, but one that, Mr. Shrewsbury observed ambiguously, tended to appeal to girls. German came in third and appealed chie;ly to boys for reasons on which he did not wish to speculate. But Latin? A dead language? And so hard, too!

Moreover, unless a dozen other students chose Latin, Mrs. Honigswalt wouldn’t be allowed to offer it, no matter how much she wanted to. The last time there had been enough students was three years ago and half of them dropped it after a couple of weeks. The probability then was that Mrs. Honigswalt, “our trained classicist”, would be restricted to American History, World History and, of course, German.

I wasn’t a fool. I knew that choosing Latin was social suicide, guaranteed being labeled “brainiac” and called any number of one-syllable words ending with thudding consonants—nerd, grind, wonk, dork. But Sheila told me that Olivia was signing up for The Corner Club Quarterly

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Latin because it would help her get into Wellesley College where she intended also to master Greek. Diana ;irst, then Artemis. Apparently, Olivia aspired to follow in the footsteps of Mrs. Honigswalt. It was an affront to the imagination to think that Olivia could ever look like Mrs. H. As it turned out that was a banner year for Latin students. On the ;irst day of class Mrs. Honigswalt surveyed fully fourteen of us, beamed, and, with badly concealed gratitude, addressed us as “discipuli mei dilectissimi”—my dearest students. I was beaming too, having seated myself behind Olivia Bernot whose long silken hair hung down in easy stroking range.

Why were we there? George rolled his eyes when he told me he was there because his mother, the English professor, insisted it was a great way to build his vocabulary. Meg signed up out of intellectual pretension: “I’ve just always thought of myself as somebody who would know Latin.” Stephen had transferred from a private school and grinningly informed me that he’d already had a year and a half of Latin.

“It’ll be an easy A.” Gloria was Roman Catholic. “Why wouldn’t I take Latin?”

Alexandra, Suzanne, and Barbara all signed up because they loved mythology and each other. Fred “really dug” the Iliad and wasn’t discouraged by the news that the bloody epic wasn’t written in Latin. Harry, Philip, and Gordon dissembled but I suspected they’d chosen Latin for the reason I did—and perhaps the same could have been said of Lydia. Lydia stuck to Olivia’s heels like a terrier who’d aced obedience school.

Vocabulary lists, conjugations, declensions; Ovid, Virgil, Cicero—it was a slog and the homework was crushing. But Olivia was the star, far outstripping even Stephen, his head start notwithstanding. When Olivia ;inished reading one of her astonishingly smooth translations to the class, you could see that Mrs. Honigswalt was doing all she could do to keep from hugging her. (Me, too.) The rest of us weren’t in her league, neither as gifted nor so af;licted by perfectionism. Academically, the tag that suited the bulk of us was Medeo tutissimus ibis—you’ll go best in the middle.

Mrs. H. liked to start off each class by having one of us write our homework, the assigned conjugations and translations, on the blackboard. This practice was designed to ensure public humiliation for almost all of us and, in Meg’s case, tears and, on one occasion, a dash for the door. We all dreaded Mrs. H. would call our

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names then ritually hand over the chalk still warm from her hand, the instrument of our abasement and Olivia’s exaltation.

One day Gordon found a whole box of the stuff, an unopened one—green and orange, just like the Crayola boxes of our childhood crayons. Teachers were always rushing through the halls, loaded down with books and papers, pencils, slide trays.

One of them must have dropped it in the corridor. At lunch he furtively pulled the box from his sweatshirt and showed it to Harry, Philip, and me. “Look what I found.”

We did look, and with distaste.

“Want a piece?”

“What for? To conjugate over lunch?” quipped Philip.

A complicated, half-formed idea popped into my head; I can’t recall actually having it.

“Listen. Let’s give a piece of chalk to everybody in Honisgwalt’s class and then— then have a contest.”

“Contest?”

The idea came into better focus, materializing as I explained it. “Yeah. Everybody has to chalk something in Latin around the school—you know, on a wall, the ;loor, the driveway.”

“You mean graf;iti?”

“The Romans invented it. Remember those slides Mrs. H. showed us? Lucius Pinxit?”

“That must have been the only decent one. Roman version of Kilroy was here.”

“But what kind of contest?”

“For the best phrase or sentence or whatever.”

“Best in what sense? And who gets to decide? Jeez, not Mrs. H.” “Of course not Mrs. H. Who do you think?” I waited for one of them to get it.

Turned out to be Philip. “Olivia.”

“Of course Olivia.”

“What’s the prize?” asked Harry.

“Everybody could put in a dollar or two,” Gordon suggested.

“Why not let the winner suggest the prize,” I said, inspired.

“That’s dumb.”

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“I mean something that doesn’t cost anything.”

“Like everybody else does their homework for a week?”

“Something like that. Why not?”

They shrugged.

“Come on. Let’s at least see what everybody else thinks.”

I passed a note around in class. Meeting on the soccer ;ield after school.

Everybody showed up and I explained my idea. The girls went for it. At least it was something different, they said, something to do. The contest didn’t interest these good girls as much as the prospect of doing something that might get them in trouble.

Olivia was the exception. “It’s just silly,” she said. “And why should I be the judge?

And even if I agree, how am I supposed to decide—or even ;ind what you write. I mean the janitors are going to wash everything off right away anyhow.”

I patiently explained that she should be the judge because her grades were better than everybody else’s, that picking the winner would be entirely up to her, no questions or gripes permitted, that we’d make a note of where we chalked our phrases and that we could do it all before homeroom the next morning. “What do you say?”

“Do we have to write in Latin?” asked Meg anxiously.

“Of course in Latin,” said Gordon who was already handing the Crayola box around.

Olivia frowned—prettily. She didn’t say yes but didn’t say no either. She looked at me as if I was about ;ive years old, but I didn’t care. That she looked at me with contempt counted for far less than that she looked at me. In fact, I was inspired by that winsomely derisive look. I decided on the spot what I was going to write and where I’d write it. I’d get up early, before dawn. On the cement where the buses would later drop everybody off I’d write sub hoc pavimentum stratum lapide in litore (“Beneath this pavement, the beach!”). My imagination raced. I could already hear the applause of my classmates as Olivia Bernot, impressed, proclaimed me the winner, held out the laurel wreath she’d made overnight with her own hands, and asked me what I wanted for my prize. In triumph, I would kneel at her feet, take from my pocket the remaining nub of chalk, and indite a single, in;initely meaningful word: “Tu.”

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Petite Suite de Craie Robert Wexelblatt

2. Duo pour Violon et Alto en Sol Majeur – Kantien, Épistolaire, et Litigieux Professor, Yesterday you held up your favorite teaching tool and eyed the cylinder with, if you’ll pardon my saying so, excessively theatrical perplexity. You then wondered aloud what chalk is “in itself”. I get that Kant was determined to distinguish noumenon from phenomenon, the ding-an-sich from what the ding looks and smells and feels like. There’s the thing and then there’s what our senses tell us about it. But, honestly, Professor, and with respect, I just don’t see there’s any mystery about what chalk is.

Chalk is calcium carbonate, CaCO3, a compound found in the shells of marine organisms, also of snails and poultry eggs. The substance we call chalk accumulated over eons of sustained pressure by fathoms of water on the shells of countless defunct coccolithophores, unicellular eukaryotic phytoplankton. The chalk that you quaintly persist in using to scribble on an archaic blackboard, and which yesterday you pretended to regard with such baf;lement, was originally harvested from soft limestone, a sedimentary rock.

There you have it. Chalk-in-itself. Kreide-an-sich.

I’m unconvinced by your opinion that “in rescuing Science from Hume’s skepticism” (these were, I believe, your words), Kant undermined its objectivity, that he was a Heisenberg avant le fait, so to speak. It seems to me that, if I understood your point, Kant concocted his “noumenal world” as a repository for everything he wanted to believe in but couldn’t possibly prove, a sort of metaphysical armoire or spiritual dump. God, Free Will, Immorality of the Soul, etcetera.

True, you can’t ;ind the soul under a microscope or God at the end of a telescope, but this is hardly evidence that either exists.

At the end of yesterday’s class you dropped a pretty good apothegm on us. You said, “What everyone agrees is real is not all of reality to anyone.” I liked your one-liner enough to type it verbatim into my notes. It has a gnomic, even oracular ring to it, but also the lightness of a witticism, a dinner-party sally, un bon mot.

When Kant declared that he had “denied knowledge of God to make room for faith,” he drove a spike into the ;issure between the Humanities and Science, which

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would soon lose its original name of “natural philosophy”. After Kant, people had to choose between the two paths. Kierkegaard was candid about it, and succinct: “Faith begins where thinking leaves off.” In our corner of the intellectual world, the grimily Gothic Humanities building lies across the quadrangle from the shiny steel and glass one—devoted to the Natural Sciences. As you said, questions of how actually get answered in the latter, implying that questions of why are merely speculated about in the former. You can probably guess on which side of the Quad I’ve cast my lot.

Thanks, Professor, for your attention and for a truly illuminating class, albeit a required one.

Dear Professor, Yesterday’s class has made me think Kant might have been right. Science may be the proper way to ;ind the how of things but it tells us nothing about why. Science worked out the orbit of Mercury, the causes of continental drift, the Big Bang that started things but not why there should have been an explosion or why we have Everything instead of Nothing. Science can explain photosynthesis and the Krebs Cycle but not the meaning of life. I imagine if I asked a physics professor why the earth revolves around the sun, he’d point me in the direction of the School of Theology, and probably do it with a smirk. But maybe not. Who can say what an astrophysicist believes when she or he’s off duty? You put it so succinctly: “What all of us agree is real isn’t all of reality to any of us.” Maybe not even to microbiologists or statisticians. I tried to get my mind around Kant’s idea that science can’t grasp what things are apart from how we sense, analyze, and measure them and think I grasped it. So maybe I do understand at least a little of his business about the noumenon, the cloud of unknowing that hides the ding-an-sich. But I can’t make myself accept that things-in-themselves are entirely inaccessible, if that’s what Kant was really saying.

This is because there have been times when I personally felt that I’d grasped what a thing is in itself, especially when I read some good poems. Frost’s birches, Williams’ wheelbarrow, Rilke’s panther, Yeats’ “bee-loud glade”.

On the ;irst day of this semester I attended two classes: the opening lecture in Economics 101 and your introductory philosophy class. My economics professor exuded arrogance, as if he had the inside dope on reality, and gave a spectacular

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PowerPoint presentation, complete with a Stalin-sized picture of Adam Smith, undulating supply and demand curves, plus a bullet-pointed outline in four colors. I stared at the big screen and scarcely noticed the professor who certainly didn’t see me. Afterwards, I felt as if I’d been fed into some pre-programmed educational processor.

Your class was nothing like that. You didn’t seem so con;ident; in fact, you raised questions about every proposition you advanced. You looked at us, talked to us, even got some of us to talk back to you. You drew pictures and diagrams on the blackboard and we watched you draw them. I didn’t know what was going to happen next in your class, while in the economics lecture it was all too obvious. That lecture was dead; your class was alive. My economics professor was like a bank manager with a six;igure salary, but you were more like a drunk on the subway (in the best sense). By the end of that ;irst ;ifty minutes you’d ;illed the blackboard with the traces of a collective journey. It was the difference between a menu and a meal.

What follows isn’t a good poem, certainly not in Yeats’, Frost’s, or Rilke’s league; but I wrote it just for you.

You hold the chalk for the whole hour.

As a child I’ll bet you longed to scrawl on lots of young tabulae rasae

and across a ;lat one on the wall.

Wielding it like Velasquez, you inscribe Greek nouns and intersecting Venn balloons, Plato’s soul, Hobbes doing a split. I confess I’ve grown rather fond of your droll cartoons.

No prefab PowerPoints for you, no bullet points that murder talk, no pixilated portraits. No, your magic lantern is that bit of chalk.

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3. Sarabande pour Hautbois en Ré-Mineur, Lyrique avec un Héroïsme Rétrospective et Classique The keynote address was delivered by André Shultz-Farrar, celebrated translator of Simonides and author of The Nine Melic Poets, winner of that year’s Hellenic Prize.

His speech, a ;ine one, was followed by an equally superlative buffet. I still refuse to believe the Connaught’s salmon were spawned in earthly waters.

This was some years ago, and I had never been invited to the London Symposium before. In fact, I’d never been out of the United States. I felt like a rube and a coward.

There were scholars there whom I’d thought of as books, as in “I’ll just look that up in Warner” or “You’ll ;ind that in Heissendorf, page 357.” So much eminence in such numbers intimidated me. True, the chairman of the organizing committee was generous with praise in accepting my proposal; nevertheless, I was anxious about how my paper on the historical context of Theocritus’ Sixth Bucolic would go over, particularly with the threatened “panel of respondents”. I’d looked up a book review by one of them. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the author had vaporized as she read it.

The surroundings hardly put me at ease. The Connaught’s Mayfair Room is about ;ifteen hundred feet of sprung parquet ;loor with cream colored walls, ceilings with carved moldings, art deco chandeliers, and full-length mirrors in gilt frames. White was the theme: tall bouquets of white roses rose in white vases from the starched white cloths of round tables. To me, the place looked like the banquet hall on Olympus.

I avoided the tables near the dais where men and women, expensively dressed for academics, were either on their feet greeting each other warmly or already seated and arguing with formidable animation. I spotted an empty table at the back and took my food there, thinking SufDicient unto the day is the evil thereof. As I was marveling at the celestial smoked salmon, an elderly man in tweeds slowly wound his way toward my table, bearing a plate and a glass of water and asked if he might “intrude on my solitude.” He looked both ironic and kindly. I found his courtesy as charmingly archaic as his tweeds.

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“Of course,” I said. He looked frail, so I got up and pulled out the chair next to mine.

He nodded gratefully, laid his plate and glass on the table, sat down with that little, involuntary grunt of the aged, then looked about.

“I remember this place from in the old days, the Connaught. This room’s new, though those mirrors are authentic. Genuine antiques.”

“It looks like you could order nectar and ambrosia.”

He chuckled. “Ah, an American.”

“Through and through.”

“Not enough of you chaps at these things. Welcome.”

I thanked him.

“And thank you too. I mean for D-Day and all that. Forgave you Yanks long ago.”

“Nothing to do with me. My grandfather was on an escort carrier in the Paci;ic.

But what is it you’ve forgiven us for?”

He laughed. “Ah, the usual. Having so much when we had too little. The occasional boorishness and, of course, absconding with all those lovely young women.”

“Envy, then?”

“Envy was a national pastime— but you more than made up for it with your daylight bombing, Jeeps, and jazz.”

The old man had the long, lean face of a hanging judge but, behind his glasses, his eyes sparkled with good humor, and what I took to be benevolence.

I held out my hand and introduced myself, giving the name of my Midwestern university. He did the same. “Derek Howarth. University of London. Retired since the Triassic Period.” I was relieved not to recognize his name He surveyed the room again. “Came to the Connaught a couple of times during the Blitz. Later on, the place was more or less commandeered by your generals and diplomats. Good place to eat, convenient for affairs. You said your grandfather was on an aircraft carrier?”

“Not a pilot. He charged the ;ifty-calibers and loaded the bombs.”

“Loaded bombs?” The old man leaned back. “Now that calls to mind a story.”

“Something from the war?” It was a guess; my nationality seemed to have set him off.

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“I served under Montgomery in 1944. Ever hear of something called Operation Market Garden?”

“Oh yes. It was a mess.”

“Not completely unsuccessful, actually, but certainly a cock-up for many, especially your lot. But that Dutch affair isn’t what my story’s about.”

I wasn’t so much intrigued as feeling thankful not to be asked anything about Theocritus.

“How about I get us some tea and cake and you tell me the tale?”

“That would be very kind. But no cake for me, please.”

When I returned, Professor Howarth told me this story.

“In 1940, I was still an undergraduate, reading classics at Cambridge. When the Blitz began I volunteered for the Fire Brigade. In return, His Majesty’s government gave me a bit of training, issued me a wool uniform, and a tin hat. Wonderful bunch, the Fire Brigade, but the work was depressing. The ;ires were bad, of course, but pulling out the charred bodies was worse. And then there were the UXB’s— unexploded bombs. That’s what you reminded me of. They were unwelcome rarities and luckily my lot seldom came across one; however, for two weeks the numbers shot up. The news went around. Dozens of the things, always curiously bunched, as if they’d come from the same plane. And there was something else odd. They all had something chalked on them. It was thought to be some sort of registration code. But that seemed unlikely as it was always the same thing. And then we came on one ourselves.”

“My grandfather told me how they’d sometimes chalk messages on the bombs.”

“Both sides did. Probably made fellows with your grandfather’s job feel they were more part of the action. Einmarsch Verweigert was popular and, even less imaginatively, Für Churchill. Not much sense of humor on the other side. Bit more over here. A friend in the RAF told me about ground crews on his base running a contest for the best message to chalk on a two-ton blockbuster.”

“Did he tell you which won?”

The professor wheezed a bit. “Astounding. Not only did he tell me but and I still remember. Munch on this, Hermann. Herr Goering, as perhaps you know, was a rather chubby devil.”

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“Dropped a lot of weight at Nuremberg, though.”

“Hmm. Well, then we came across a pair of those bombs, the unexploded ones.

And there were the words chalked on both. Strange how you can recall things from decades back when you can’t remember what you ate for lunch yesterday. But then in wartime, life’s more intense, big events tumbling over each other. Homer and Virgil knew that. The writing was white, in smallish letters. Anolev Ot Omisisip Alagve.

Nobody knew what to make of it. We just called in the bomb disposal squad and headed for the next ;ire. But I wrote the phrase down. I’m sure you’ve had this experience of sudden discovery after you’ve given up, little mind-elves doing the work overnight. You toss the crossword down in frustration at midnight and then the word you couldn’t ;ind pops into your head over breakfast. That’s what happened.

When I woke up the next morning, there it was. The phrase was Greek, but backwards. Έβγαλα το ψήσιμο βελόνα.”

I had a go at translating. “I took away the ;ire needle?”

“Or, more pertinently, Removed the Diring pin. Anyway, as close as the brave fellow could get to it in Attic Greek. I reported it, of course. Brass thought I’d gone bonkers.”

“Amazing.”

“Yes. It was a message from a friend in a tight spot, doing his bit. The code wasn’t meant to puzzle us, but them. It was meant for us. You might even say it was meant for me.”

“For you?”

“Some chap who knew Greek and would come across an unexploded bomb and ;igure out what he saw on it.”

“Kind of a long shot, wasn’t it? Maybe he was just making a statement. You know, look at what I did.”

“Quite. But after two weeks it stopped. No more unexploded bombs with chalked messages in backwards Greek. You had to wonder. Did they catch him? Was he shot— or transferred? That’s what I hoped for, that he was transferred. It didn’t seem likely that he’d simply run out of chalk.”

“No.” “I’ve often thought about him, you know. We could have taken pot shots at each other at Eindhoven for all I know. Pictured him as being around my own age, a

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student of the classics like me. I wrote my thesis on Pindar. Maybe he was a Pindar enthusiast, too.”

“So, what the Germans call a doppelgänger?”

He nodded with an abashed smile. “Too romantic, of course. Back in my teaching days, picking up a piece of chalk, I’d often think of him. Wondered if he too wound up in a classroom. I was bound to think about his motives, who he was. A Jew in hiding, a communist, a homosexual, an anglophile? All four? Anyway, I think he was a patriot, a hero—certainly a decent human being and, of course, a classicist.”

“Like us,” I said carelessly.

The old man surveyed the room, raucous now with ;lattery and quarrels. “Like some of us, perhaps.”

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Fiction

Water and Rock James G. Piatt I will awaken to the morning sun, and go to the mountains And see the softly winding river, blue with moisture formed: Trod old trails covered with pebbles and stones, of granite, I will walk on the deer’s path alone and enjoy the ;lowered lea.

I will ;ind calmness there amidst the gaudy warbling birds, And as the veil of peacefulness comes tumbling slowly down, I will listen to the strident melancholy strings of busy crickets.

As the apricot sun, gleaming and bright, covers the meadow, I will sit on a boulder beside a placid pond and pen verses while Listening to frogs croaking along side its moistened edges, And try to understand the water’s missive emerging from below.

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instagram.com/annaarmona

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Journey through mountains Anna Armona

Fiction

Second Kings Jeff Nazzaro

T

he old jail in the center of town was famous for never having had bars on its windows or doors. That was the ;irst thing El Vikingo showed us. The locals called him El Vikingo because of his long white hair and beard, and

maybe because it rhymed with gringo. He’d been there longer than any other gringo, that was certain, with a local woman for a wife and a little house up on the hill, blackand-white mutt chained up outside. He made money off of visiting foreigners, mostly American, in lots of little ways, but mainly by guiding tours of the nearby sunken caves.

We were in a little fishing village on the Sea of Cortez called Salvatierra. It had its own section in the Lonely Planet guidebook, with a sidebar on the sunken caves and a picture of El Vikingo. That’s where I’d heard about him and his tour, which included explanations of the ancient cave paintings and petroglyphs, then lunch and cold beer. It involved a long hike and getting wet.

I told Luke we should check it out. Luke was one of the guys I lived with. The other was Brian. The three of us rented rooms in an old bungalow on Magnolia Avenue in Riverside from a diabetic divorcée named Maddie. The three of us had been planning a trip down to Los Cabos in Luke’s truck, but when he didn’t think it was up to the task, I suggested we do it by bus. I’d once traveled around the continental United States for a month with a Greyhound bus pass and it wasn’t bad. I figured even Mexican buses would be better than Luke’s truck. He had a buddy from his church who could give us a ride to Tijuana. He took trips there a few times a month, delivering food and household supplies to needy families up in the Cerro Colorado area of the city, as part of what he called missionary work.

Brian backed out. He never said why. Luke and I went to the mall in his truck and bought backpacks for the trip and sandals for El Vikingo’s sunken cave tour.

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“I think it was meant to be, you coming to live at the house,” Luke said.

We were stuck in traf;ic on the 10.

“It’s perfect for me living there,” I said. I was studying for a certi;icate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages at the nearby UC Extension. The rent was cheap and I could ride my bike to my classes.

“There was a girl who answered the ad too, you know,” Luke said.

“I’m just glad I got it and not the girl, nothing against her.”

“We had a vote. I voted for you. Brian voted for the girl.”

“I can’t say I wouldn’t have voted for some girl over him.”

“Touché,” Luke said. “I wish he were going with us, though. I think he’s supposed to.”

“He didn’t want to take the bus?”

“He’s in that band, but all they do is get wasted all the time.”

“They don’t hang out at the house, so it’s ;ine by me. And I got the room.”

“Yes, you got the room. You called ;irst. It was meant to be, meant to be.”

Lonely Planet recommended a certain brand and model of sandal for El Vikingo’s tour, on which the terrain was rough and you would have to at points wade through chest-deep water. We found the sandals, but they were expensive, and neither of us liked the look or feel of them, with their brightly colored nylon straps plugged into hard rubber soles, so we found cheaper pairs made with fake leather. They had adjustable velcro straps and contoured foot beds.

“I don’t know how good these will be in the water, though,” I said.

“Fine, ;ine,” Luke said. “Look at these, just like leather but not. These will be ;ine for church, as well.”

“Church?”

“Church, sure. You’re welcome to come, too. My church has Sunday morning services in San José del Cabo, just when we will be there.”

“I thought we were going to Cabo San Lucas on Saturday night.”

“San José del Cabo. San José del Cabo. Miss all that touristy crap in Cabo San Lucas, all those LA yuppies slurping their frozen margaritas at Cabo San Wabo.”

Maybe that was the reason Brian had bailed—skipping the prime Baja party spot for Sunday morning service at Luke’s evangelical church. Brian had served on a navy

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destroyer during the First Gulf War, witnessing among other things the blackened skies over the Persian Gulf after Saddam Hussein torched the Kuwaiti oil ;ields. I couldn’t imagine a few days on a bus would bother him. Church didn’t bother me. My mother always used to say, “If you can’t spare a lousy hour once a week for God, what can you spare one for?” My list easily occupied an hour’s worth of daydreaming, so I ;igured I’d make it through Luke’s service all right. And I did. A young preacher with acne-scarred cheeks delivered a spirited homily about how anyone, with the help of Jesus, could defeat the personal demon of homosexuality. I had to admit I’d been curious about the service, but I felt let down by the obvious simplicity of what the preacher said and by the intermingling of Luke’s fervent amens with those of his newfound Baja brethren. After, while Luke exchanged handshakes and email addresses, I slunk off to the side and waited, not unlike how I used to wait for my mother to ;inish talking after church.

Back in Riverside I would meet another one of Luke’s church buddies, a short, wiry, nervous type with Christian iconography tattooed on his forearms and scars on his knuckles. He rocked back-and-forth as he spoke, balling his ;ists as I told him I was raised Roman Catholic but wasn’t into any religion, and if I were, it probably wouldn’t be his. I felt safe with Luke standing there between us. He was taller than I, and bigger, tougher if it came to it I was sure, but he radiated a certain calm and peacefulness. An artlessness. It never occurred to me that he’d brought in this buddy as some kind of evangelical closer. Then and after such moments he would just shake his head and tell me that my ;inite human brain was simply incapable of comprehending the awesome reality of God. I had trouble comprehending much of anything in those days. Brian had wandered into my room one day and asked me if I’d seen Luke’s picture from Halloween. I had. Luke had shown it to me out of nowhere, ;irst asking if I’d seen it, then bounding upstairs and retrieving it from his room. He produced it with a broad smile—a grainy snapshot of him standing alone on the front porch of the house in a tight sequined dress and faux-pearl necklace, white handbag on his arm, matching ;lats on his size thirteen feet. I asked him where he had found shoes that ;it and he laughed and said Maddie happened to have a friend with really big feet.

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“I hear him all the time,” Brian had said after asking me about the photograph.

“When he gets mad, like when he drops a dish or stubs his toe he’ll be like, ‘Faggot.

Cock-sucking faggot.’ Talking to himself like that.”

I never heard Luke say anything like that. I never asked Brian what he was trying to say. Brian also told me about Luke’s stint in county jail for methamphetamine possession and how he’d joined his church while he was still inside. I always de;lected Brian’s gossip, but I wish I’d asked. Did he think Luke was gay and in denial, ;irst turning to drugs as an escape, then to evangelicalism to defeat both? Using little tricks like Halloween drag to ;ill in what gaps of desire remained, self-directed gaybashing vitriol for reinforcement? He certainly looked happy when he showed me the picture, his beaming face matching that in the photo. But so what? I didn’t get too excited over Halloween costumes after about the ;ifth grade, but wasn’t that their point? I never talked to Luke about any of it, even though I wanted to. Maybe I lacked Brian’s directness, or maybe it just never came up. I never once heard Luke use any kind of gay slur, let alone call himself “cock-sucking faggot,” and he certainly never said anything to me, hinted, made a move. In some ways, I waited for it.

I enjoyed Luke’s company far more than Brian’s, who when he wasn’t talking about Luke was up in his room drinking beer, listening to old Who records or watching videotaped M*A*S*H reruns. Luke and I didn’t hang out a lot, but we played tennis a few times and occasionally shot baskets in the park. He was six-four and had a good jump shot. He played in a men’s league. I hinted about playing with him, but he didn’t respond. He was a good ten years older than I was, and we had some interesting conversations, but always just when it seemed like I might ask something, tell something, learn something important, the conversation turned to straight proselytism.

Luke had a depth of experience I desperately wanted to mine, but for whatever reason could not. Every answer came back as some kind of dead end, mostly in the guise of his church. Was that all I was to him? A soul to be reeled in? Did I come off as spiritually needy or weak? Or was it not about me at all? The ;irst time he said that “meant to be” stuff I felt somehow ;lattered and intrigued, though at the same time indignant, sort of what it must feel like to be hit on by strangers in a bar when all you wanted was to chat with a friend.

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I didn’t want to be converted or reborn, not then, anyway, but I wanted something. I had a girlfriend I’d moved to Riverside to be with, albeit with the intention of earning my certi;icate and moving on. I told her that, but I didn’t tell her about the girls from school I messed around with. The one from Russia, the one from Japan. When I got a part-time job at Trader Joe’s, I didn’t tell her about the bisexual poet with the giant ass and tongue stud. I never even kissed her, though she would have let me do anything I wanted. Later, when she offered a threesome with a girl I’d met and thought was very cute, I said yes; when she called back and said the friend couldn’t make it but the two of us could still get together, I said, “In the used car business they call that the old bait-and-switch.” That hurt her feelings. I felt bad, but reminded her she had told me to be blunt.

Big Ass the Poet took me to a party at a house shared by art students. Most of them were gay, lesbian, or bisexual. There was a small group of young men snuggled together on a bed in the middle of a large room, the walls of which were ;illed ;loorto-ceiling with paintings in a multitude of styles. None of the paintings looked ;inished. I wanted to tell Big Ass the Poet to set up a threesome with a guy she knew, but I was too scared and shy, despite having some experience. I should have given her what she wanted. Everything else would have then fallen into place. But she scared me. Her promiscuity and her gay friends scared me. I was terri;ied of AIDS. Maybe Luke offered a safer avenue. Maybe that’s how he really meant to convert me.

Before all that back in Riverside, we’d still have to go to the service in San José del Cabo, and before that to Salvatierra to ;ind El Vikingo and the sunken caves. Lonely Planet speci;ied a bar. We rode the bus from Tijuana all night, found a cheap little hotel near the station, dropped our stuff off, and went to the bar. It was just after ten on a Monday morning. There was a man standing behind the bar and another sitting at it. They were drinking coffee and setting up large chess pieces roughly carved from soft wood onto a board etched into the bar. The seated man would be playing the white pieces, the bartender the black. We looked around for an American with long white hair and a matching beard, but there were no other Americans in the place.

There were no other people in the place except for a man sitting at a table in the corner with a spread-out newspaper and a bottle of beer. I asked the man behind the

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bar for El Vikingo. I said only, “El Vikingo.” He said something in Spanish and I asked in English if El Vikingo was there. We went back and forth for another minute until I dug the Lonely Planet out of my pack and showed him the page with the sunken cave tours and the picture of El Vikingo, after which he told us in English that El Vikingo wasn’t there. He spoke to the man sitting at the bar, and that man stood, took a sip of coffee, wiped his mouth with a cocktail napkin, moved a pawn, and ran out of the bar.

We were told to wait. We stood and waited without ordering anything. The man turned on the TV above the bar. It was showing highlights of the Lakers’ ;inals win the night before.

“God, I hate the Lakers,” Luke said.

“Me, too. Of course, I’m from Boston.”

“I grew up in Perris. Perris, California.”

“So why don’t you like the Lakers? Or at least the Clippers.”

“The Clippers are terrible, and I couldn’t stand that Showtime crap. I loved Larry Bird.”

“He was the best, but you have to go with the home team.”

“My father always said that. He was a huge Laker fan. Man, we about came to blows during the ’86 Finals. We were both drinking a lot back then. Neither of us are too into it anymore. You’re just rooting for laundry, that’s what my father says.”

The weatherman came on the TV and Luke took a step closer to the bar.

“You think there really is an El Vikingo?” I said.

“Sure, sure. He’s in that book you have there, isn’t he?”

“Lonely Planet, true. Fodor’s, too, I think.”

“And didn’t some guy run out to get him just now?”

“Like twenty minutes ago, but maybe it was just for show. Maybe he’ll come back and be like, ʻI couldn’t ;ind him.ʼ” “He’ll be here any minute, just wait.”

“Either way I’m not tipping him for going and getting him.”

After almost half an hour the guy walked in, sweating, and said something to the man behind the bar, who told us in English that El Vikingo would be there in a few minutes. It didn’t seem like he wanted a tip. He looked at the chessboard, shook his

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head, and moved another pawn. Ten minutes later El Vikingo showed up, breathing hard, as if he’d run.

“Sorry, guys, wasn’t expecting anyone today. Did you make a reservation?”

“We read about the sunken caves in Lonely Planet,” I said. “The tour.”

“The tour, yeah, can’t do it right now. Too much water in there. Too dangerous.”

He saw our faces. He said, “But I can give you the grand tour of the town here, and I can do it for, four bucks apiece, American.”

We talked it over as El Vikingo spoke in Spanish to the man sitting at the bar.

Though the town was small and there wasn’t a whole lot to see, and we probably wouldn’t need a tour guide to see it, we felt obligated after having summoned him, so we agreed to the tour.

We walked out of the bar into the blinding Baja sun and stood outside the old jail.

They were in the process of turning it into a museum, El Vikingo said, but for now it was closed.

“First time I wanted to get into a jail, but couldn’t,” Luke said.

“There’s no bars, let’s break in,” I said.

“Then they’ll throw you in the new jail,” El Vikingo said. “And that one has bars.”

He next took us to the three hundred-year-old mission, built by Jesuits and still used as the local Catholic church. Situated on a bluff overlooking the sea and the town below, it also commanded a view of the lush green oasis fueled by the Rio Santa Rosalía that had ;irst attracted the Spanish missionaries. You could tell it hadn’t changed much in three centuries. El Vikingo waited outside.

“My mother would love this place,” I said. “She’d never dream of coming down here, but I know she’d love to just see this old church, much less go to Mass in it.”

“Look at that,” Luke said. He pointed at a niche holding a statue of the Virgin Mary. “Cultic”.

“Cultic? This is like the original Christian church.”

“The original Christian cult. You see those guys riding around on their bikes in their suits and ties?”

“Mormons?”

“Another cult.”

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“What about your church? No offense, but that strikes me as a cult, not Catholics.

Mormons, maybe.”

“You met Jerry. You think someone like Jerry could be in a cult?”

Jerry was the guy who’d driven us to Tijuana. “I don’t know anything about anyone who wonders if Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist or a hero.”

“But not a cultist.”

“Maybe the biggest cultist.”

We had walked very slowly right up to the altar, and I suddenly felt self-conscious talking. We stood in the shadow of the cruci;ix. I stopped and stared at the ;igure on the cross, the spike through the feet. I wanted to cross myself, but didn’t.

We walked back out into the light and heat. El Vikingo led us back down the bluff to a place he said had the best ;ish tacos and coldest beer in town, a brown shack sitting a short, rocky expanse from the water. We ordered and waited at a small umbrella table outside, where we dipped thick, crunchy tortilla chips into a small bowl of fresh salsa and discussed which name we preferred for the body of water before us. I preferred Sea of Cortez and Luke liked Gulf of California. In the end, we agreed Sea of Cortez sounded more adventurous and Gulf of California sounded more noble, but both names were very beautiful.

“You ever read the credits after movies?” Luke said.

“I do, why?”

“I’ve been reading them lately, and I’ve been noticing how many Jews there are in Hollywood.”

“Seriously? Jews?”

“You see these names keep coming up—Cohen, Levy, anything with Rosen or Stein in it.”

“That’s the kind of thing, if you’re looking for it, then you notice it. I bet you see a lot more Wasps than Jews.”

“You can’t trust those names, either,” he said. “A lot of them are Jews who changed their name.”

Luke had a Wasp name. I didn’t say it. The food came and we ate. It was just another conversation that had taken an odd turn. What did he care if Jews ran Hollywood?

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After lunch, we walked down to the rocky shore and threw stones into the water, sometimes trying to skip them. We debated whether we should wade in the water.

After a couple of minutes, we decided to do it, but just up to our knees. Then we debated taking our sandals off or leaving them on. Since the shore was so rocky, we decided to leave them on. Anyway, we ;igured, they would dry quickly in the Baja sun.

We walked into the water and threw more stones.

“You see that guy who walks past our house all the time?” Luke said.

“The homeless guy?”

“I think he’s homeless. He must be homeless.”

“I know who you mean. The homeless guy.”

“I think, God, I was meant to rent that room in that house there.”

“It’s perfect for me.”

Luke dropped a stone into the water and turned to me. “I think I was put there to help that man. He walks by every day, both ways.”

I stood up and looked at him. “You ever talk to him?”

“I don’t know what to say. What do you say to someone like that?”

“I wouldn’t know what to say. From the looks of him there is nothing to say.”

“I’m glad you’ll be going to church with me.”

He skipped a stone through a small wave. I picked up a rock and threw it as far as I could into the sea.

We’d make La Paz the evening after the next and dine on grilled sea bass on the patio of a waterside restaurant, little lights tinkling above us, the sound of the gulf below. The tortilla chips would be thicker and tastier, the salsa fresher and chunkier, in little stone bowls replenished often by an attentive wait staff. I would spend that night into the next morning shitting my brains out in the sti;ling heat, bare feet on dusty stone.

Besides the Lonely Planet, I’d brought a single book, a little paperback copy of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, meant, if properly rationed, to last the entire trip, but which I’d left, less than three pages in, on a bench in the Tijuana bus station. While checking into the hotel in Salvatierra, I’d noticed a small bookrack in the of;ice that I assumed functioned as a sort of exchange. It held a mishmash of maps, guidebooks, novels and magazines in Spanish and English. Between Wuthering Heights and 100 Years of

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Solitude, both in English, I discovered a thin collection of stories called Second Kings by a man named Jonathan Steele. I took it. When it was clear I’d be spending more time on the toilet than in bed that night in La Paz, I dug the book out of my pack.

I’d already read the ;irst two of just a dozen stories, most of them very short, on the bus from Salvatierra. The ;irst was about a man who lives his entire adult life hounded by the intense, nagging sensation that he has forgotten something. He has a wife, children, grandchildren, and has managed to forge a successful life as a particularly attentive salesman, for he is an inveterate checker and re-checker of facts, ;igures, names, and specs, along with the wallet in his back pocket, the locks on his doors, the setting on his thermostat. One day he remembers what it is he has forgotten: on his eighteenth birthday, quite drunk, he both lost his virginity to, and strangled to death, a girl from the local high school he met at a party in the woods. He remembers this as a recurrent dream he has not had for a very long time. He remembers this ;ive seconds before police detectives, having discovered the girl’s remains and incontrovertible evidence of the man’s guilt, knock on his door.

The second story had to do with two men, one much older than the other. The younger of the two has traveled all over the world, while the older man has lived his entire life in the same small town. Over a long night of drinking a bottle of expensive single malt whisky he was gifted in Japan, and playing backgammon on an old set he acquired in Bombay, the younger man tells the older man about all his different experiences in all the places he has been. The older man listens attentively, nodding as they take turns shaking dice in leather dice cups, spilling the dice onto the leatherpointed felt, sliding and stacking thick checkers of emerald green and ivory carved from jade and from bone. The younger man doubles aggressively, redoubling at every chance, and in the end, loses several thousand dollars to the older man, who promptly forgives the debt in exchange for the backgammon set and, he adds, the tales told.

The light in the bus was bad, and I could hear the tinny din of music from Luke’s headphones, but after reading the second story I stuffed the book back into my pack and mouthed to myself, “Meant to be, meant to be.”

Sitting on the toilet in La Paz, waiting, shitting, wiping, waiting some more, I read the third story. It went like this:

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Thin Ice Steven Breen’s father took Steven and Steven’s best friend, Jeremy Devine, skating on Spyglass Pond one brisk January morning. Jeremy was excited because his father had bought him a new pair of CCM Super Tacks for Christmas, and he could now use his old CCM Tacks for pond skates. It had been several years since his father had taught him to skate on Spyglass Pond, holding his mittened hands and gliding backwards as Jeremy learned balance and stride. Oh, how his father skated when freed of his boy: long, graceful strides, hair Dlowing in the wind, the former collegiate defenseman, wiry, tough and fast. He worked most Saturdays now, like this one, and often on Sundays, too.

Steven and Jeremy sat on boulders at pond’s edge and laced up their skates. Jeremy noticed that Steven was wearing his regular hockey skates, and that they weren’t even as nice as what were now Jeremy’s pond skates. Mr. Breen, standing in his galoshes, pulled a puck from his coat pocket and tossed it onto the ice. The boys grabbed their sticks and gave chase, Dirst jostling with their sticks for the puck, then, after Steven had won control with a deft sweep check, skating side by side, passing it back and forth.

They were strong skaters, good stickhandlers, and matched each other stride for stride, pass for pass.

They raced out to the middle of the spyglass-shaped pond and stopped, trading long passes, crisper and crisper, harder and harder. Then Steven, who was always a little wild, took two strides towards Jeremy and launched a blistering slap shot straight at his head. Jeremy ducked and the puck sailed and bounced and skidded out of sight at the far end of the pond. The wider end. As the boys argued as to who should fetch the puck —Steven for shooting it or Jeremy for failing to block it—Mr. Breen slipped and slid after it in his galoshes, past the boys towards the wider end of the pond.

And disappeared.

Steven screamed and skated for all he was worth towards the wider end of the pond, where the ice was thin and his father had fallen through, and then, just as he reached the gray ice danger zone, a man he had never met and would never see again swooped in on skates and grabbed him. The man’s efforts to save Steven Breen’s father, who had hit his head on a rock, then Dloated back under the ice, were not similarly rewarded. When he was pulled from the pond after several minutes under water, Steven Breen’s father was dead.

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Everyone in town talked about how awful it was that Steven Breen’s father fell through the ice at Spyglass Pond and died, and that poor Steven was now fatherless.

Every coach in town knew of the tragedy and was extra attentive to Steven, driving him to and from practices and games, sometimes taking him for pizza or ice cream, always talking hockey. They all excused the wildness Steven never outgrew. They took him to amusement parks and baseball games with their own families, and sometimes Steven asked if Jeremy could go, too. Sometimes Jeremy went, and when he did he thought, if your father dies when you are young, he can’t work all the time anymore and other people have to pay for things for you.

The boys, best friends, played on all the same hockey teams, the same left wing position—right up until the moment when Steven made the high school varsity team and Jeremy was cut. Steven went home the night the Dinal cuts were announced and looked at the portrait of his father hanging in the living room. He said, “Dad, I made it.”

Jeremy went home and shook his head no at his mother, who was in bed watching TV. “Never mind those bastards,” she said. Jeremy’s father was not yet home from work.

I closed the book, put it on the ;loor, and shit again. It hurt to shit and hurt worse to wipe. When I ;lopped back down on my single bed, a few feet from Luke, he rolled over, but didn’t say anything. I guess I wanted him to. Something. “Are you OK?” or “Montezuma’s getting his revenge on your ass, haha.” Anything.

Two days after that would be Luke’s service, after which we’d ;ind a beach close to where the Paci;ic Ocean becomes the Gulf of California, or, if you prefer, the Sea of Cortez. Some even call it the Vermilion Sea. There would be a savage shore break with an ominous undertow. We would have the massive expanse of white sand beach all but to ourselves, and as we bodysurfed we’d be pounded into the sand, the current sucking our forms out from under us. We would know instinctively to stay close to shore, in front of the breakers, and that failure to do so would mean being swept away.

Later, Luke would rest in the hotel prior to our going out for the evening, walking around, eating, buying cheap souvenirs. I’d walk across the street to a pay phone with international service, using my calling card to call my girlfriend back in Riverside; describing the hotel to her, trying to locate our room—third ;loor, somewhere in the

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middle—when two truckloads of Federales would storm through the square in their brand new uniforms and shiny boots, assault ri;les pointing up.

Standing in the placid gulf back at Salvatierra, I didn’t know what to say to Luke about his church service. I had my own church, and I was loyal to the home team.

While I had drifted away from it, I had speci;ic reasons why, reasons I couldn’t imagine being nulli;ied by joining another team, even if it did play in the same league.

I responded to Luke with a simple af;irmative, then bent and picked up another stone. There was a call from the restaurant. Turning, we saw El Vikingo wave. We walked up to meet him. He said he’d gotten special permission to take us inside the old jail, just a brief walk-through, then he would show us his house, but only the outside. His wife was home. “That prison has bars,” he said.

The old jail in the center of town was small. The cells were tiny, with steel cots and no mattresses; there were communal showers and toilets. Inmates had been free to leave, on the condition they return by nightfall. Those who didn’t would be hunted down by those who did. But given such an arrangement, and the expansive desolation surrounding the town, escapes were rare, escapees doomed.

Outside the jail, El Vikingo guided us through the town, then onto a dirt road that wound up a long, steep hill dotted with simple old dwellings. It was hot and bright and everything was baked brown by the sun and very dry. There were no people about. We saw dogs chained to steel spikes driven into the hard ground lying here and there, snug to a dwelling in search of shade. None of them barked.

All the way through the town and up the hill, Luke peppered El Vikingo with questions about living in Salvatierra, about home and business ownership, visas and taxes and locals. He kept saying how he could really see himself living in the town. He said he thought he had been meant to visit that small town and that the sunken caves had been meant to be deluged and inaccessible so he could see the more important things, the local people and their humble little homes. El Vikingo managed to keep the conversation going without really saying anything in return. Luke didn’t seem to notice. He said “wow” to every bit of information he got, “stunning” at every new view of the sea, and, under his breath in town, every woman.

El Vikingo led us back down the hill and through the town and up some wooden steps to a thatched hut that seemed like an elaborate tree house. We entered a small

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room with a bar to the right and a few high tables and chairs to the left. There were neon beer signs and painted mirrors on the walls.

Standing in the middle of the room, El Vikingo waved his arm in a semicircle.

“And for the ;inal stop on this whirlwind tour of the quaint seaside burg of Salvatierra, Baja California Sur, Mexico, I give you the world-famous Maracas Mike’s.

And there behind the bar is the man himself, Maracas Mike.”

Maracas Mike looked up and grinned. He held no maracas. He had a large kitchen knife and a wooden bowl full of limes he was slicing into wedges.

“And this lovely creature, in her usual spot, is Mike’s better half, the illustrious Tipplin’ Tina.”

On the wall behind Mike was a large caricatural drawing commemorating the wedding of Mike and Tina some eighteen months before. In a black frame with room at the bottom for a copy of the marriage certi;icate and an American ;ive-dollar bill, Mike, in a blue Hawaiian shirt, shook his massive maracas, as Tina, wearing a grass skirt and coconut bra, cheeks rosy and hair yellow, brandished an enormous margarita glass.

The real Mike had a lot less hair than in the caricature but the same grinning face, slicing up his limes to a 1970s soft rock mixtape—Eagles, Jimmy Buffett, Jackson Browne. The real Tina sat hunched over the bar across from Mike in a tangle of dirty blonde hair, head in hands. There was no margarita. There was a ;ive hundredmilliliter bottle of grape-;lavored Pedialyte. She didn’t look up or say a word. Every so often her hands poked out of her hair to grasp the plastic Pedialyte bottle and feed her head a tiny sip of the pale purple solution.

“She’s coming off a bender, eh Mike?” El Vikingo said. “How many days was this one—two, three?”

“How many days was this one, honey?” Mike said in a loud voice. “Three?”

Four shaky ;ingers rose up out of the hair.

“Four,” Mike said.

“Four,” El Vikingo relayed.

“Four,” Luke said. “Wow.”

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Luke ordered beers for us and one for El Vikingo. After we paid for the three beers and had been chatting with Mike for a few minutes, El Vikingo said, “Hey, guys, you think I can get that eight dollars now?”

He seemed tired and a little anxious. The softer light of Maracas Mike’s brought out the deep lines in his face and the near total whiteness of his Viking hair and beard, which in conjunction with his nickname had initially leant him a sort of mythical air, but now just made him look old. We gave him ten bucks, telling him to keep it all, and he thanked us, a thank you bordering on an apology, then excused himself. On his way to the door he leaned across the bar and said something to Mike, who nodded, then he put his hands on Tina’s hunched shoulders. “Hang in there, Sister Golden Hair,” he said, and left. He never touched his beer.

While we ;inished ours, Luke asked Mike questions about home and business ownership and visas and taxes and locals and Mike gave him about the same treatment El Vikingo had. We ;inished our beers, leaving El Vikingo’s untouched, and were back on the street.

Luke looked around in a wide circle. “I really think I could see myself living down here. It’s so, what’s the word I’m looking for? Homey? Quaint?”

“Are you serious about it? I wonder if I could ;ind a job down here teaching English after I get my certi;icate.”

“Here? I doubt it. Too small.”

“Maybe La Paz or Cabo.”

“This is perfect for my father. He’s up there in Perris, getting ready to retire, but this would be perfect for him. He loves to ;ish, loves the beach. Me, too. I’m a ;ish out of water.”

Fish out of water, no shit. I didn’t for a second believe he would ever move to Mexico, much less take his father with him. But this was his way of moving through life. He’d found his Second King through his church, a host of second kings, and now he wanted to spread the good news, give something back. But what he had to offer was only what he himself had found, and that wasn’t going to work for me. Not then.

Offer something else. Fishing and the beach, beers, basketball games. Anything.

“I’d be afraid of ending up like old Tipplin’ Tina back there,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I was meant to see that.”

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Second Kings Jeff Nazzaro

“No, no, this is it. My father and I had a lot of problems we had to work through, but I have things ;igured out now. I think it’s all been meant to be.”

We were more tired than we thought from tramping around in the hot sun, up and down those dusty hills, but had checked out of the hotel and still had a few hours before the bus left for La Paz. We ate a light dinner at the bar where we’d met El Vikingo. The basketball game was on TV but we didn’t pay much attention to it. Luke tried to talk to some of the locals, but didn’t get very far with his limited Spanish and their interest in the game. There were no other Americans in the place. After dinner, we still had a wait for the bus, so we drank a couple of beers. Luke kept talking about living in Salvatierra with his father. I stopped responding. The bar got louder as the game wore on, the patrons decidedly favoring the Lakers, who were poised to win another championship. We left before the game ended. When we got on the bus Luke reclined his seat and put on his headphones. I dug the little book by Jonathan Steele out of my pack and ;lipped to the fourth story, the title story.

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Poetry

Catskill Creek 1972 Jack D. Harvey In a circle of time the hills surround the light low the air cold sliding down ravine after ravine we come to no conclusions.

She dives

luminous Ophelia carnal Circe comes up wet in the world

Beginning again and again in this cold cup

fresh cold her magic mask her broken innocence graceful child plays, swims

of the creek

across.

rushing rapids rocky backbones

She beckons; we know what songs she sings and wide Troy brought down

nestled warm and walking and above the eternal foe looms, almost benign for us.

And still in the shadow under a bridge evening becomes night.

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and bones bleaching on the shoals.

Breathless from the cold plunging deep

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Fiction

The Sheep Marina Rubin

S

he sat in front of the window, watching the trees twitch in a torrential wind.

A sure way to catch a death, she thought to herself. Her bus had pulled up to the Hilton late last night after a long day of sight-seeing in the pouring rain,

climbing into caves lit up by glowworms, visiting artisan villages and farmers' huts..

She spent the whole night coughing, a thick bark coming from inside her stomach.

The wake-up call thundered off a little before seven She stared out the window - this was New Zealand, this was their summer. It took her God knows how many days to get to Rotorua. She had only brought one coat, and it was now sprawled out on the ironing board like a star;ish, its sleeves hanging off the sides, still wet. Her prescription bottles on the dresser crowded like doctors in the doorway, warning her, Myrtle, you shouldn't go out there, not like that, not in that thin cotton blouse. Oh, but what a shame, to come all this way and stay behind, locked in a hotel room and miss even one day of her adventure.

She studied her face in the window; unlike the mirror, it hid all the age spots and creases, and there were only the eyes looking back at her. She saw something else in that re;lection. Behind her, at the foot of her queen-sized bed, a terrain of slept-in sheets, pillows, duvets, there was a green bed throw. She hadn’t noticed it last night, or bothered to take it off when she got into bed, weary and trembling with fever. She turned around, stood up slowly, walked over to the bed, and picked it up. It was long and narrow, soft like the back of a baby alpaca, pale green like the inside of a kiwi, the national fruit of New Zealand. She nuzzled it with her cheek, put it over her shoulders, wrapped it around her, once, twice, arranged the folds in the style of origami, took a deep breath…then rushed for the door and slammed it behind her. If she hurried, she could still catch the group; the bus wasn't leaving for another two minutes.

Like a fugitive crossing the border, with her head down and eyes ;irmly ;ixed on the ;loor, she walked past hotel employees in the lobby, past waiters collecting dishes

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in the dining lounge, bellboys bringing down luggage, the concierge waiting at the end of the hallway like a soldier at the ;inal checkpoint. She was afraid someone would see her leaving the hotel wrapped in the Hilton bedding, point ;ingers, whisper, stop her as if she was a common criminal, a petty hotel thief. She’d never stolen anything in her life. For forty years, she worked at a printing company in Pittsburgh, ran their payroll, did book-keeping. She counted other people's money without resentment, all the while saving softly, patiently, like a chronic illness, so one day when she retired she could travel…places far away from Pittsburgh, like New Zealand or Tahiti.

Her heart pounded as she kept walking, out of the hotel, onto the bus. She picked a seat in the back, hugging her bed throw like a coat of armor. She avoided the eyes of her tour mates.

“Oh my God!” exclaimed a young blonde from across the aisle, one of those fashionable girls whose purse always seemed to match her shoes. The same girl who sat next to Myrtle at lunch the other day, and asked her if she was traveling alone, if she was married? Myrtle scoffed at her: Would I be traveling alone if I was married?

Now she held her breath - the airhead must have recognized the throw – how could she not, the entire group, all forty of them, were staying at the same hotel, on the same ;loor. It was only logical that every suite would have the same bedding.

“What a beautiful pashmina,” the girl praised. “I love the swirl pattern and that fringe.”

"Well, thank you, my dear." Myrtle's anxious face relaxed into a smile. There was no reason to dislike the girl. After all what really set them apart? Two deaths, two births?

The bus made a circle around Rotorua. “An estimated population of ;ifty-six thousand and the second largest urban area in the Bay of Plenty. Rotorua. The a is silent.” The tour guide was muttering into the microphone up at the front. Myrtle glued herself to the ;leeting window, like a child, taking notice of every rooftop, every storefront, whispering ro-to-ru-a, her tongue curling inside her mouth as if she was sucking on a cough drop. This town too had museums, City Hall, Salvation Army, collection bins and yacht clubs, churches that looked like futuristic meeting places for the UFO's. The a is silent. Rotorua, like misconstrue.

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The tour group arrived at the Rainbow Springs conservation center in the late morning. They strolled through manicured forests and tropical gardens with trees so wide it would take ten people to embrace the trunk. There were streams and waterfalls and lakes, the largest wild trout in the world, mallard ducks dancing on slippery rocks. Twelve hundred species of rare birds lived on the preservation.

Behind a knee high fence they spotted a kiwi, the national bird of New Zealand, not the fruit. It was the size of a pregnant chicken, with brown coarse hair-like feathers and a long beak. When Myrtle reached out to feed the bird, it came over and pecked at her ;inger, something as light as a prick of a needle. She shrieked with delight like a schoolgirl, the agony of this morning a thousand miles away. The bed throw - it worked, it was perfect, it kept her warm, it glittered in the garden like a luxurious shawl, it matched the birds at the Bird Museum and the swans in the lake, it dazzled against the New Zealand landscape, it had a life, Myrtle gave it life.

“Take a photo of me please, my dear,” she said to Dina, a retired schoolteacher from Ohio.

“Okay, say cheese,” Dina laughed, pressing the top button of an old Olympus.

“What does H stand for?” she asked, pointing to the side of Myrtle's wrap.

Myrtle, morti;ied, looked down to see the monogrammed H ;lash like a scarlet letter in the left corner of the throw. “Oh, you know… it's that designer that makes scarves,” she snapped her ;ingers trying to recall the name, “He...Her…it sounds like a venereal disease.”

“Hermes,” said Dina excitedly. “I thought I was losing my memory but I still got it.”

“You still got it, sweetheart,” she said, squeezing Dina's knobby hand.

The next stop was the Agrodome Farm Show. When they walked into the auditorium, two rows of sheep were already standing on stage like a Christmas chorus. At the head of the consort was the Merino, a sheep so plush it looked like it was wearing ;ive fur coats and a muf;ler. Next to it was the Borderdale, followed by Lincoln, Romney, Cheviot, Oxford, Dorset, South Suffolk. The rugged farmer in a wifebeater introduced each sheep as if it was an old English aristocrat.

“Can I get a volunteer from the audience?” the farmer yelled, looking out at the sea of curious faces. “Anyone? Come on people, this is not the Sigfried and Roy Show

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The Sheep Marina Rubin

—these are sheep, not tigers. Anyone? How about you? Yes, you in the second row, yes, a woman in green."

Myrtle hesitated for a moment, looked around, her tour mates nudging her, go, go; the South African couple next to her getting their cameras ready. She got up on stage.

“What's your name?” the farmer inquired. “Myrtle. Where are you from, Myrtle?

Pittsburgh, USA, aha... Have you ever sheared a sheep? No?! Okay...good.”

He asked the audience to pick a sheep they wanted to see sheared and everyone screamed “the Merino, the Merino!” The farmer's helper brought the animal to a special stand on the stage. The farmer tipped the sheep over onto its back, propping its shoulders between his knees. Then he took an electric handpiece, and, in one long con;ident stroke, sheared the wool from the breast bone down to the ;lank area. He handed the buzzing comb over to Myrtle, and instructed her to glide it close to the skin. With its belly exposed and four legs up in the air, the animal trembled, alive and afraid, like something being born, Myrtle's hand quivering with the weight of her own and the sheep's heart. Hundreds of cameras ;lashed, as she stood on stage in a dense cloud of ;lying wool, and the electric razor with its thousand teeth slid down to the animal's tail, then started at the toe and worked its way up towards the hind legs.

“Don't worry, little lady,” the farmer kept saying, “it's good for him, good for his health.”

When the farm show was over and the Merino sheep looked like a shiny white unicorn, everyone patted Myrtle on the back and congratulated her on being fearless.

She worried that the people from her group, women her own age, looked at her carefully on stage, noticed the familiar fabric on her shoulders and recognized it for the Hilton bedding that it was and would mock her. Instead they complimented her, said don't you look pretty today.

Somewhere between the Whakarewarewa and the Māori haka, it occurred to her that she might actually get away with it. No one was looking at her anymore. They stood on the sidelines of what seemed like the end of the world, watching the Pohutu Geyser shooting up into the sky with a torrent of water one hundred feet tall and spurting steam in every direction like fairy dust. “Geysers like these are gifts from the Gods,” preached a large native woman, as she shepherded the group through the

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thermal village built around hot springs and bubbling mud pools. Myrtle could feel the ground beneath her feet, humid and gurgling, the smell of sulphur ;illing her lungs. The villagers made food in the hot pools, lowered potatoes, corn on the cob into the water as if it was their own personal oven; there were Christmases with twenty cousins and seven chickens cooked in a pit of hot stones with layers of ;lax and earth. To welcome the tourists, the natives - Māori, performed a haka, the ancestral dance of war. Men with curved spiral-like facial tattoos waved sticks and daggers, stuck out their tongues, bulged out their eyes, cursed and grunted. Standing in a circle, tribal furs covering their naked inked bodies, mist rising above them, they chanted: He aha te mea nui o te ao?

He tangata! He tangata! He tangata!

What is the most important thing in the world?

It is people! It is people! It is people!

They returned to the hotel around dinnertime. Myrtle walked into the lobby feeling free, like a woman with wings. She was still in danger of being discovered but somehow it mattered a little less. The clerk behind the reception desk greeted her with an upbeat, “Welcome back to the Hilton, madam.” She strolled down the corridor covered with baroque rugs - bellhops, porters, elevator men – and all the usual absent-minded gatekeepers recited, “Good evening, ma'am.” Good evening, she nodded with a small sardonic smile, hugging her elbows inside the throw. She was going to get away with it. When she reached her ;loor, she was home free. Suddenly she bumped into a maid, the woman who changed sheets, tucked covers under mattresses, plumped pillows, decorated beds with throws every day, ;ifty times a day, a hundred, depending on the occupancy. Myrtle froze. The maid walked past her with a vacant glance.

For a long time, Myrtle stood in front of her door scrabbling with electronic key cards, then turned around and ran after the maid. “Excuse me,” she called out.

“Yes ma'am,” the maid said in a cheerful on-the-job manner, “do you need more towels?”

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Myrtle paused, waiting for the woman to recognize the bed throw on Myrtle's shoulders.

“I am sorry," she ;inally spoke, clasping the green fabric in her clammy hand. "I took this bed throw out with me today...It was rather...it was very cold, actually.”

The maid stared at her, oblivious and confused, until it had dawned on her. “Oh right, yes, I see it now, well...that’s wonderful. It's never been out before, I bet you it had a great day,” she smiled. “Let me know if you need more towels, ok?” she said, pushing her cart down the hall.

Myrtle went to her suite, unlocked the door. She got away with it. She had a great day. In the dim light of the foyer, she looked in the mirror - she was an old woman wrapped in a blanket and there was no getting away with that. She threw it down on the bed where two matching lime pillows waited for it to return and complete the set.

She thought she heard it whimper in mid-air like something dying, gasping for its last breath - once again it had become a lifeless nondescript part of the bed. And just like the bed throw, in a week or eight days, she too would go back.

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Contributors Patrick Bower lives in New York City, where he writes copy for a living. His poems have or will soon appear in 805 Lit, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, and Lit.cat.

Nadia K. Brown is a physician and writer who lives with her three children and a multitude of pets. She ;inds as much inspiration in the mundane angles of every day, as in the spectacular moments that punctuate life. Previous work has appeared in the Yellow Chair Review, Into the Void, and (parenthetical), and more is forthcoming in Mulberry Fork Review and Lost Documents.

Holly Day has taught writing classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minnesota since 2000. Her published books include Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar All-in-One for Dummies, Piano All-in-One for Dummies, Walking Twin Cities, Insider’s Guide to the Twin Cities, Nordeast Minneapolis: A History, and The Book Of, while her poetry has recently appeared in New Ohio Review, SLAB, and Gargoyle.

Her newest poetry book, Ugly Girl, just came out from Shoe Music Press.

Darren C. Demaree's poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear in numerous magazines/ journals, including the South Dakota Review, Meridian, New Letters, Diagram, and the Colorado Review. He is the author of ;ive poetry collections, most recently "The Nineteen Steps Between Us" (2016, After the Pause). He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living and writing in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Carly Dee is a poet and spoken word artist from London, currently living in Berlin. She is the cofounder and editor of BLYNKT, political and literary magazine. When not editing or performing at spoken word events, she can usually be found loitering at The Ramones Museum.

Bret Farley grew up in northern California, drawing comic books and reading heaps of novels. He worked as an animator for the better part of a decade before leaving the industry to focus on his children and his writing. He now lives in Minnesota, where he consumes and produces literature in reckless amounts.

Michelle Hanlon is a compulsive list maker.

Some of her favorite things: summer nights in West Texas, the ;irst sip of coffee on a dark morning, and the Oxford comma. Her work can be seen in apt., Burningword Literary Journal, and r.kv.ry Quarterly Literary Journal.

Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, The Antioch Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The University of Texas Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal and a number of other online and in print poetry magazines over the years, many of which are probably kaput by now, given the high mortality rate of poetry magazines.

The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, N.Y. He was born and worked in upstate New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired. He once owned a cat that could whistle Sweet Adeline, use a knife and fork and killed a postman.

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Contributors

Ronald J. Hoffman authors the poetry, music, and art blog RoamingSnyder.com.. He has published one chapbook of poems titled The Songs of Barnabas Collins, as well as two Hard Rock CDs under the project name Roaming Snyder. His art work can be seen on Facebook at Facebook.com/RJHoffmanart.

Robert Lampros is an author of Christian poetry, essays, and ;iction who lives in St. Louis.

He earned a Bachelor's degree in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. His books include Fits of Tranquility, Afternoon, and Last Year's Resolution.

Elizabeth Mastrangelo is an English teacher of sixteen years, a freelance ghostwriter and editor, a graduate of Emerson’s MFA program, and a mom of two. Her work has appeared in Sheepshead Review, Black Heart Magazine, Bartleby Snopes, and other publications.

Jeff Nazzaro teaches English at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he also serves as copy editor for Tsehai Publishers.

He writes ;iction and poetry. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in several journals, including Angel City Review, Oddville Press, Dogzplot, Aberration Labyrinth and Menda City Review.

James G. Piatt's poems have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of Web awards, and his poems were published in The 100 Best Poems of 2015 & 2014 Anthologies. He has published 2 poetry books The Silent Pond (2012), and Ancient Rhythms (2014), and over 660 poems in over 87 different magazine, anthologies, and poetry books. His third poetry book is scheduled for release in December. His books are available on Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.

Kennedy Ribet resides in Los Angeles. She enjoys watching and reviewing movies on both IMDb and Metacritc. Her favorite authors are Charles Dickens and Laurie Halse Anderson.

Marina Rubin’s work had appeared in over seventy magazines and anthologies including 13th Warrior Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Dos Passos Review, 5AM, Nano Fiction, Coal City, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Jewish Currents, Lillith, Pearl, Poet Lore, Skidrow Penthouse, The Worcester Review and many more. She is an editor of MudDish, the Tribeca literary and art magazine. She is a 2013 recipient of the COJECO Blueprint Fellowship.

Guy Traiber: After a decade of travelling extensively Guy returned to the sweltering homeland where he’s in the midst of extensive studying decade. He holds a BA in Sociology & Political Science and studies and practices Chinese Medicine. He ;inds that they relate. He likes to hear from you: o13m@yahoo.com Robert Wexelblatt is a professor of Humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies.

Website: bu.edu/cgs/faculty/humanitiesfaculty/wexelblatt/

Illustrators Cody Anderson: cody-anderson-art.tumblr.com Anna Armona: annaarmona.deviantart.com Rhiannon Lee: rhiannonleeillustration.tumblr.com Hieu Nguyen (aka kelogsloops): kelogsloops.com Tomi Pajunen: tomipajunen.tumblr.com Please support our artists, poets and authors by visiting their websites.

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