American Gothic Stephen Pohl

Stephen Pohl American Gothic

I went to school once but not a lot of people remember that. I asked my daughter Susan a few years ago if she knew where her mother and I had met. A bar? she asked, but Fanny didn’t like bars. Maybe the grocery store, Susan said.

We met in college, I told her and she seemed surprised for a second then acted like she’d known all along. She gets that from her mother, can’t ever admit she doesn’t know something. Anyway, I didn’t last long, in school. After about three days of choosing my classes and choosing what to write essays about and choosing mostly not to listen to the smartass teachers, I quit. I had been in the army and the day I left school they gave me a job in the recruiting office down the road from the college, probably thinking I’d help the cause if a kid came along who hated school as much as I did.

It was a good gig, even during Vietnam when a lot of people didn’t think the army was so hot. The worst thing that ever happened was some kids from the college tried to throw a brick through our window. But they must not’ve looked at the sign really carefully because the brick went into the pawn shop next door, and set off the break-in alarm system. The cops heard the buzzer and caught them in the act which is why we knew they were gunning for us and not Larry’s Buy-Em Bin. Just goes to show that getting yourself educated doesn’t necessarily make you smarter.

Fanny would disagree, she loved school. I’d seen her walking to an English class on my second day on campus. She was wearing a soft blue skirt and holding books under her arm, and I couldn’t stop looking at her tiny waist.

She was halfway through with her degree when she got pregnant with Susan and dropped out. Later on, when we’d fight, she would bring that up. It always made me feel a little sick to my stomach, because getting her in the family was of course my doing, and sometimes it seemed like she loved school more than she loved me. But then I’d ask her what she’d rather have more, Susan or a Bachelor’s degree? I’d feel better when she said Susan, which is how she’d answered until the day she left. That happened eight years ago, and that day, before I could even finish my question, she cut me off.

“I shouldn’t have to choose,” she said, and that’s when I knew she was gone for good.

*** When I wake up on the couch on my porch, it’s hot and the mosquitoes are buzzing. Sun shimmers through the leaves of the tulip poplar overhead and a few tired birds chirp in the branches. I close my eyes and watch the shadows flicker behind my lids. I am not yet bored with my retirement.

Old friends from work or the neighborhood, and increasingly from the senior citizen’s center, try to get me to join their clubs. They’re always called clubs, which makes me think of Groucho Marx—I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that will accept people like me as a member. Sure, I’ll play some canasta or practice my swing but I don’t need them to fill my days. In the morning I’m busy watching my shows and at night I’ll drive down to Fender’s for a drink. In between those activities is the perfect space of time for sleeping on the porch couch, although I worry that the damn thing is going to give out soon. It is almost as old as I am, which is 67. I know I have some years left in me, but I haven’t been sat on my whole life.

When I push myself up and walk into the kitchen, dirt sticks to my bare toes. Reggie, Reggie, I tell myself. Let’s get this place clean sometime. What would Fanny think? But it’s getting harder to imagine what she’d think. Fanny left eight years ago and she’s been dead for six months. Diabetes, but, as she always liked to remind me, Type 1.

I unstick the refrigerator and pull out a jar of pickles, then turn the radio on for some company. It buzzes waspishly with the sound of Phil Hornbeam’s voice. “Aaand we’re back, with Phil’s Thursday Request Night. Your tunes your way. It’s what you want.” “Not what I want,” I say out loud, fishing around in the brine. I’ve always thought one of life’s great ironies is that as soon as you grab a pickle in your fist, your hand’s too big to pull it out of the jar. “Hey, Phil,” I say, “can you lend me a hand?” I crack myself up sometimes.

Phil ignores me to take a call. “Howdy,” he says. He has a real fake way of talking, I know for a fact he’s not from around here. “Congratulations, you’re on air.” “Thank you, that’s great.” The caller’s voice sounds familiar but that isn’t surprising. I live in a small town and even without joining any clubs, I’ve met just about everyone. I try to place the voice, which belongs to a young man.

“What’s your name, buddy?” Phil asks. Eric,” he answers and suddenly I remember. Eric Sutterfield, my daughter Susan’s boyfriend. Although it’s stupid to call him that: he and Susan are both in their thirties. But Susan never really grew up. She lived with us until she was twenty-five and now she’s going back to school to get her Master’s, which seems silly. Fanny was all for it, of course, brought up her own half-finished degree anytime I’d say anything. But I don’t think Susan’s that into school, I think she just doesn’t know what she wants to do and I have more experience with that feeling than Fanny ever did.

Phil cackles. “I hope that isn’t the only present you got her!” he says. “You know how women are always saying it’s the thought that counts? Well…” Phil can’t seem to remember what he should say. “Well, it sure ain’t!” The last word seems to stick in the air. “Happy birthday, Susan!”

Eric is saying something but you can’t hear it over the opening riff of “Message in a Bottle.” I’m not listening anyway; all I can think of is dammit dammit goddammit. It must be August 3rd. Yes, the water bill came yesterday. It is definitely the third. And it is too hot to be anything but August.

Fanny was pregnant that whole long, hot summer. In later years, there’d been birthday parties at the local pool. I can still smell the chlorine. Susan is thirty-seven today and this is the first year

Fanny hasn’t been around to remind me, so of course I have forgotten. These last six months have been a series of unpleasant discoveries of all the things Fanny did for me or reminded me to do. I forgot to turn in my taxes. I did not get the tires rotated. And now I have missed my daughter’s birthday.

I have to go see her, that is obvious. Each year, even after we separated, Fanny and I would take Susan out to dinner together. Those were some of the best times the three of us had, Fanny and I on our best behavior for the space of a dinner. Last year, even though Fanny was starting to fade, she still called me up and the three of us went out for Chinese.

I walk quickly into my bedroom to change, trying to think of the last time I saw Susan. Fanny’s funeral was in February. Susan came over several times in March to sign some papers. But I can’t recall seeing her after that. She is busy, after all, running Fanny’s flower shop and going to college. I too have had things to do: I read the newspaper all the way through each day and most weeks finish a mystery book. I cook and take walks to see what’s happening in the neighborhood and to keep up my health, which my doctor says is very important to do.

When I get into the car, a rusted Subaru the color of the inside of a banana, I turn the radio back to Phil’s station. I don’t believe in God, not much anyway, but I once slept with this waitress who told me about reincarnation. What if Fanny has come back as Phil Hornbeam? That cracks me up, Fanny hated Phil. The only show she’d tolerate was the one where the guys who sounded like mobsters talked about cars.

The sky is dark almost suddenly, but no stars are out yet. Phil’s laughter dies away as Johnny Cash jumps into “Ring of Fire.” Good driving music, good driving weather. Reincarnated or not, Phil is my good luck charm. I pull out of the driveway and onto the road, confident that for once and in spite of Fanny’s predictions, I am moving with the world and not against it. *** The interior of Fanny’s Floral Designs has a familiar green, cold smell: The scent of preservatives mixed with baby’s breath. There is no one in the store when I walk in, and the bells bouncing against the door seem loud. I haven’t been in here since Fanny died, but before that I came often. After she left me it was the easiest place to find her, and she couldn’t keep me out: I’d helped build the place.

To my right is a potted arrangement of ferns and one waxy red tulip. It looks fake until I pluck off a petal and discover the stalk inside is yellow and dusty. I stash the petal in my pocket and look around to see if anyone’s noticed. Instead, I see Susan.

Her frizzy hair is pulled back from her face and she is wearing a faded pink t-shirt that almost matches her pale skin. Her eyes, dark like Fanny’s, look tired. “Hi honey.” I hold out an arm. She pats me once on the back before stepping away quickly. “Hi, dad.” I frown a little. “Aren’t you happy? It’s your birthday.” She puts her hands in her pockets. “Thanks,” she says. “I’m fine, just a little tired.” “Bet you thought I’d forgotten.” She shrugs. “Did you?” “I’m here, aren’t I?” I lean against a cool glass case filled with roses. She tells me not to touch anything, which annoys me because I am her father and I have come here to celebrate her birthday. I want her to be proud of me for remembering, but for that to happen, she’d have to know I almost forgot. “I’d like to take you out to dinner. Do you think you can close early tonight?” Susan shakes her head. “Really?” I ask. “Who’s going to come in this late?” I check my watch. It’s almost eight-thirty. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t afford to miss any customers. Business is tight.” “Just an hour. We’ll get burgers.” “I said no.” In the silence that follows she wrings her hands. “Sorry, dad. I just can’t tonight. It’s not you.” “Then what is it? You’re afraid someone’s going to have a daffodil emergency?” I reach into my pocket for my wallet. “You think you’re going to miss out if you can’t sell someone a fern? I’ve got forty dollars here, take it. That’s more than you’d make tonight, guaranteed.” I smile to let her know I’m on her side. She doesn’t take the money. She doesn’t smile. Fine, Susan, throw a tantrum. Break your father’s heart. “Sorry,” she says again. “I just can’t.” “Yeah, you said that.” She looks up. “It’s not just the money,” she says. “I just think, anytime I shut the place down one of mom’s old customers might come in.” She swallows. “They don’t like me like they liked her. I’m afraid—” She shrugs. “I dunno. I want this place to do well.”

“It’s not?” I look around. I don’t know if I believe her. Paint is peeling off the shelves but the flowers are as bright as ever. Susan has a habit of exaggerating. “Look,” she says, “It may not be completely going to shit but I don’t want to be the one who kills mom’s store.” Her voice sounds high and stretched, like it could break. “Susan,” I say, taking her hand. “I think you’re doing a fine job.” She smiles and I wonder if I can still coax her to close up for the night, but then her gaze lands on the tulip behind me. “Hey, did you break the petal off this flower?” She lets go of my hand. “No,” I say. “No, I don’t think so.” Susan sighs and picks up the planter with both hands. She starts walking towards the back room and I follow her. When she opens the door, I see it looks just the same as I remember. I haven’t been back here in about eight years: after Fanny and I split, she stopped letting me come past the last display case. That seemed unfair: I had hung the yellow wallpaper in the back room myself while Susan bounced in a chair hung from the doorway.

Susan sets the plant down on a muddy countertop. “Why did you do this?” I turn the tulip in its bowl so the bad side is hidden by a spray of fern. “It’s fixed,” I say. “See?” Susan rolls her eyes. “You always think you can just fix things.” I examine the tulip from both sides. “It looks fine.” “No, it doesn’t.” I take another deep breath. “Okay,” I say. “I’ll go out and get us both some takeout. You can stay here and man the fort.” She doesn’t say anything. But how can you argue with that? I cross my arms. “I’m going out, and when I come back we’ll have a nice birthday meal, okay?” I get up. When I reach the door to the backroom, she says, “Don’t.” I wheel around, furious. “Why?” I ask. “Why, goddammit?” “I don’t want to do this.” “We always do this.” “I know,” she says. “That’s why I don’t want to do it this time.” Her face is turning pinker. “Maybe next year,” she says. “Maybe some night that isn’t my birthday. But tonight I just want to run mom’s flower shop. Alone.” She clenches her fists. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It is really nice of you to offer to take me to dinner. But I just can’t.” I run my hand over the doorframe. Paint chips off in little white flakes. “She wouldn’t have wanted you to be alone.” “How would you know?” Susan says, voice trembling. “We loved each other,” I say automatically. “Then why did she leave you?” “That’s not something you would understand.” “I’m not a child.” “Yes, you are!” Susan’s making me angry, talking about things she doesn’t know anything about. She wasn’t even born the first time Fanny and I fought, over the flowers at the wedding. Sure, I loved her but I hated her too. I never hit her but I thought sometimes about setting the whole goddamn shop on fire, watching the wallpaper peel and burn, all the roses going up in flames. There were times she hated me too. I wish there were another war and you’d die, she said once. That line kept playing through my head at her funeral and I could hear it so clearly that even though there was that coffin at the front of the church it seemed like she wasn’t gone. Eric came up to shake my hand and I was surprised to see tears in his eyes. I was surprised because I kept hearing her say the thing about the war in my head and it made me mad to hear her say it, and how could she be gone if she was still making me so angry?

“You don’t even miss her.” Susan is crying. I swipe the tulip off the counter. The platter shatters on the floor. “Of course I miss her.” Susan’s eyes narrow. She looks down at the dirt that has spilled across the white tile. “Get out of here,” she says, “Now.” I stomp out so hard my knees hurt. It takes a lot of willpower not to smash every bough, stem, and petal in the place. How dare she say that? Of course I miss Fanny. I just sometimes forget she’s gone. And when I do remember, on nights like this, I miss her more than anyone else ever could. I slam the door open, the bells jangle. When I get outside it is hot and sticky. The night is quiet. I sit in the car because I am still angry. I don’t want to cause a wreck. How would Susan feel if I crashed my car and died? Would she still hate me? Or would she realize that I loved her mother, that I had never wanted Fanny dead even though she’d wished that on me? When she gets older she will see that not everything is black and white.

I turn the keys and the radio shouts out Phil’s call-in number. Four-three-five, nine-two-one-one, four-three-five, nine-two-one-one, and I think for a moment about giving him a ring. I reach for my phone in my pocket but pull out the tulip petal instead. It is duller and uglier than it was when I was inside, and I crumple it without thinking.

Phil howls and howls. His breathing is wheezy. He is laughing with a girl named Meaghan. I press the off button. Phil is not Fanny. He is no longer lucky. I smooth out the crinkled petal and place it on the dashboard, watching it out of the corner of my eye as I shift into gear and pull out again onto the road. Although it is creased and faded, it glows a little in the lights from the street, and I believe that by the time I get home, it will look okay again.

Julian Jackson Flowers

Catherine Jagoe Cycling Home

I did not learn to ride a bike until I was sixteen, in Shropshire. My father, who cycled to work, taught me. I did not see my mother on a bike—she did not own one—until many years later. My father was an impatient teacher, and I was doubtless a terrible learner, being at once a perfectionist and a coward. Great unpleasantness ensued as I attempted to trust myself to this contraption and take both feet off the ground at once, wobbling around the flat country lane. Dad’s method of instruction was generally to express amazement that I had reached my current age without knowing how to (skate, wire a plug, play tennis or ride a bike) and annoyance at discovering that it was up to him to rectify the situation, which he did peremptorily, as if on a military expedition. Even after I had, miraculously, got the hang of propelling myself forward while seated, I continued to be extremely cautious and distinctly remember a nasty encounter with a six-foot holly hedge on a hill near our house. I was born in a place and time when few women saw themselves as athletes. I reached adolescence in rural England in 1972, a world in which, as a teenager, I felt immured. Nowadays we are so accustomed to the sight of female cyclists and joggers that we barely notice them, but they did not exist where I grew up. For a girl, engaging in anything more than walking the dog or the Sunday afternoon family hike was viewed as odd. My mother worried that sport made you too muscular—like the East German women who swept up most of the gold medals in swimming in the 1976 Olympics. She thought them ugly and unfeminine.

For seven years, I attended an all-girls’ secondary school just across the border in north Wales. We were not allowed to wear trousers. The uniform included P.E. outfits of bloomers and mini-dresses made of thick polyester in the four house colors. Mine were a sickly ocher shade that was billed as “gold.” The two sports we were taught were field hockey (in my memory it was invariably chilly and raining, but we were never allowed to don sweaters over our sleeveless mini-dresses) and netball, a women’s sport similar to basketball except it was played outdoors and you weren’t allowed to dribble the ball while running. Despite being tall, which should have been an advantage, I wasn’t at all athletic. I was bookish and self-conscious, timid, near-sighted and uncoordinated. I dreaded P.E. with its organized sadism, its cold, humiliation, pain and shouting; the danger of getting thwacked on the shins by a hockey stick, covered in gluey mud, or hit by the ball; the agony of taking off one’s clothes in front of others in the locker room with its sharp and intimate smells of stale sweat, sanitary towels and Dettol disinfectant; the alternately numbing or scalding showers.

Cycling didn’t become essential to my life until I was nineteen. I left home to study languages at Cambridge University and needed a bike to get around. My college was three miles outside the town center, and the students (who were not permitted to bring cars) used bicycles to go to lectures and socialize. I arrived with a black three-speed, 1930s “sit-up-and-beg” bicycle inherited from Mrs. Brasher, an elderly widowed neighbor. I christened this weighty vehicle “Hercules.” It had a wicker basket on the handlebars and my matriculation year and college painted in neat white letters on the rear fender by the gruff but kindly college groundsman, Mr. Whitehead, whose shed smelled of linseed oil. By the end of my first term I had mostly lost my fear of cycling and could negotiate the busy, cobbled streets of Cambridge as well as anyone else.

After finals in my last year, I was given a summer grant to spend six weeks cycling around Brittany visiting prehistoric standing stones and burial sites. With some of the money, I purchased a Peugeot ten-speed bike that I whimsically named “Cassandra,” crossed the Channel by ferry and set off for a blissful summer with my boyfriend, biking around looking for menhirs, making love in our tent, and subsisting on baguettes and cheap Camembert. Spending a whole summer outdoors, where I found myself happiest, and using my body to travel and explore, were key experiences. I learned that I had strength and endurance, and I gained a measure of confidence and self-reliance. I learned how to repair flats, navigate, put up a tent and survive in a foreign country.

During graduate school, I won a research fellowship to the University of Wisconsin, and arrived in Madison in August 1986 for what was supposed to be a one-year visit. I naïvely expected it to be like the places I had seen on the TV series “Dallas”—gleaming sky-scrapers and fast cars—but to my surprise and relief, it was green and laid-back, not citified. I moved in to a house next to a small lake that I swam across every morning. Wisconsin in the summer seemed like paradise—the space and warm weather created an intoxicating range of opportunities to swim and bike and sail and canoe and play tennis. The parks were full of people playing Frisbee and softball in the evenings. In the second week I took the bus out to the mall and bought a red Schwinn ten-speed bicycle at Sears.

It was a matter of chance and luck that Madison turned out to be one of the best places in the U.S. to ride a bike, both because of the existence of bike lanes within the city and because of Wisconsin’s history as a dairy state. There is a dense network of winding country roads that are not laid out on grids (as they are in neighboring Illinois and elsewhere) and that have to be well maintained for milk to get to market. The terrain nearby comprises rolling hillsides and small farms, wooded areas, and many one- and two-lane roads with low traffic, ideal for cycling.

During that year I met my future husband, a keen cyclist. My cycling up until that point had been primarily a means of locomotion and exploration, with no thought of speed or technique. Thanks to Ned, I learned about some of the technical aspects of road biking, like cadence and drafting. I acquired first a helmet (after an accident early on), then padded gloves (as my hands started to get numb from vibrations through the handlebars), then padded bike shorts (to avoid saddle sores) and, eventually, Lycra cycling tops with pockets in the back. By the end of my first summer, we were riding 30 miles every evening after work. Wisconsin roads were a delight after the crowded, dangerous, narrow roads of England. Instead of an engagement ring, Ned got me my first 21-speed bike, a Trek 1100, which I am still riding over 20 years later.

“Where do you ride—the bike trails?” People always ask me that. They can’t imagine the country roads. It’s a whole hidden world, the world of cyclists; the places they go, the things they do. The very same countryside that can seem so sterile viewed from within a car on a highway—occupied only by Culvers and Stop’n’Gos and Kwik Trips—is spacious and gorgeous on the rolling back roads.

If you’re a cyclist, you avoid any road with a number in its name (highway 69, say) and spend little time on those with letter names, like A or KP. Roads with nouns for names are your best bet, especially if they offer promises like “Enchanted Valley Road” or “Storytown Road.” Cyclists and drivers don’t travel the same roads, or, if we do, we don’t experience them in the same way. I sometimes think of driving as watching a place on TV instead of being in it. You see what it’s like but you don’t experience it with your other senses, and you don’t earn it physically. The cows’ sweet stink. Starlings

like a shower. Inland prairie seas of grasses, and then hay-making. You can’t smell the silage or the pine trees or the dead animal on the side of the road or the rain coming, or the fall. You don’t hear the redwings’ chee, chee or get dive-bombed by them or see herons flying with clumsy, languid grace overhead or feel every jolt in the road. You can’t be felled by a hole or a stone the size of a silver dollar. You don’t swoop out of the heat into the delicious cool of the valleys on summer evenings.

Once spring returns to Wisconsin and the temperatures reach the low fifties, a ribbon of sound begins to unroll as you ride through the countryside, with chorus frogs shrilling in all the wetlands, and later in the season crickets jingling their tiny, shrill tambourines in the dry grasses. The air is full of birdsong too, from wrens, song sparrows, towhees, swallows, woodpeckers, goldfinches, killdeer, and yellowthroats going about their business in the trees and fields. All of this is what I live for, after the long silence of winter.

Biking gives me a feeling of joy and freedom, of spaciousness. Moving through so much air—on a good year I ride some four thousand miles between April and October—my sense of smell becomes more acute. When I pass a bar I am almost overwhelmed by the hot, greasy smell of it. Clover smells so sweet when I pass clumps of it in the verge that I instinctively sense why foraging animals prefer it. The wood on a new bridge smells both sweet and acrid, like tobacco smoke. I pass an orchard on my route out of town, and in May I am regaled with the scent of apple-blossom and then, in August and September, the perfume of apples. At another point I get whiffs of a sewage treatment plant, like the marshes I remember hiking in Suffolk. Once I was puzzled by a strong odor of cut grass, but when a lawn-care company truck passed me shortly afterwards, I felt gleeful as a dog who has tracked something.

In fact, I am often reminded, on my road bike, of the vision of a dog riding in the passenger seat of a pick-up truck, with its head out the window, panting and grinning, a sight that never fails to make me smile. There’s something infectious about that deep content and excitement, that intense presence, that primal well-being at just going somewhere. Other people must see something like that in me because they often smile or wave spontaneously when I ride by.

Ironically, though, loose dogs were what most frightened me when I began cycling by myself, and the reason I had to overcome a fear of training alone. In our early rides, Ned and I had several terrifying experiences of passing isolated farms and being chased by dogs, sometimes several at a time. Our tactic was for Ned to stay on my back wheel, bellowing ferociously, as we pedaled for dear life. If a dog chases me when I’m alone, I’ve learned to dismount, keeping the bike between us, and flag down the next car that passes. Then I ask the driver to keep the car between me and the dog until I’m out of its range. Over the last twenty-five years, what were once isolated areas with little traffic have become more populous, and people generally keep their dogs indoors or chained, so riding alone has fewer canine hazards. There has also been a noticeable decline in harassment and wolf whistles from male motorists in that time—due, I assume, to my aging, a welcome upside.

I do not underestimate the danger cycling represents to life and limb. On almost every ride, although I pick my routes to avoid traffic, some cars pass too close or cut me off, either intentionally—because they don’t think cyclists should be on the roads at all—or from inattentiveness or poor driving. Although an agnostic, I begin every ride with a prayer to St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers, to bring me home safe and whole.

One of the dangers cyclists face is dehydration. One time, determined to stay hydrated on an extremely long, hot ride, I drank too much water from my newly-purchased CamelBak and developed hyponatremia, an unpleasant condition in which one’s blood sodium level drops too low because excessive water intake is diluting the blood at the same time as intense sweating is leaching the body of salt. I became disoriented and nauseated, lost my way, hit a pothole and almost came off my bike in the path of an oncoming car. Somehow I made it home and spent the rest of the day resting and recuperating. Lying there in my woozy state, I could hear a continuous low rumble. Convinced there was a machine on somewhere in the house, I went around vainly trying to track down the source of the noise, only to realize it was tinnitus—my addled brain was replicating the way the wind roars in your ears on a bike, at even relatively low speeds.

Another hazard that can’t be avoided is insects flying into your face and body—sometimes they collide quite hard. You have to develop a closed-mouth, Mona Lisa pant because they can fly in and sting you. Last fall I got hit by a hornet in the face. It got trapped in the hair at the side of my face and kept stinging me. I pulled over in a panic and ripped my helmet off so it could escape, then downed a dose of the Benadryl I now carry on the bike.

Pea gravel is perilous, too. A state joke has it that there are two seasons in Wisconsin: winter and road-construction. For a cyclist with skinny road tires, encountering a stretch of freshly graveled road can be a disaster—especially if it goes on for miles and you encounter it three quarters of the way through a long, hot ride, at a point where you can’t turn back or go another way. Highly skilled cyclists stay on, but my fear of falling is such that I can only ride on gravel for short periods of white-knuckling, interspersed with bouts of walking to steady my nerves and shaking knees.

As I was drawn into the world of cycling, it was inevitable that I would attempt a “century.” A century is the cyclist’s equivalent of a marathon—usually (although not always) a “supported” ride with designated rest stops providing food, drink and bathrooms along the way. As a teenager, around the time I learned to ride, I once asked an elderly man on the street, “Have you got the time?” And he, startlingly, replied “No, but I have the record of its passing.” That, to me, is the point of a century: not the time in which it’s completed, but the record, in memory, of its passing. It takes months to train for one, months which tend to fade in the mind, but the day of the event and the accomplishment itself stay with you.

However, the event itself can never outshine the process of preparing for it, for the simplest reason: the end is not really the point. The century is just the excuse, the motivation, the incentive for putting in all those glorious miles of training, which are reward in and of themselves. The century just provides a destination, a reason for undertaking the journey itself. The English word “journey,” from the French journée, originally meant the distance that could be covered by a traveler on land during a single day. It is that kind of conscious perception of time, of living, that is felt during a cyclist’s “century.” A hundred miles instead of a hundred years, but all in a day’s work, a day’s travel.

Random scenes from the centuries I’ve ridden remain in my head—a rest stop at Hyde’s Mill full of watermelon and peaches and wasps buzzing over the mounds of fruit. Pulling into Barneveld—a high plateau chastised by tornados—with bluegrass music issuing from the park and people and dogs lying in the grass, bikes everywhere. The stench of the Portapotties. The feel of Chammy Butt’r, a cyclist’s cream to prevent saddle sores, squelching in my shorts. The first century I ever did, we stopped for lunch near the Wisconsin River, and I slogged the last twenty miles into the wind at a snail’s pace, feeling as though I were wearing cement boots. The third—and I thought the last—century I rode was while I was pregnant in 2001. In the early years of parenting, I stopped riding altogether except for commuting; long-distance training was just too time-consuming and exhausting to be contemplated.

meant I had to change my riding habits. Heat, exercise and bright light are all triggers for me. So I started to ride in the early morning, in the cool of the day. There is a kind of magic to the dawn light, a mist and stillness and shimmer that ordinary daylight lacks. The very landscape changes. I’ve done the same ride at 5 a.m. on a very hot day and then again at 9 a.m. on a temperate day, and the second one lacked all the visual thrill.

The experience of training for a century after my return to cycling was deeply spiritual, almost existential, full of unknowns. I was coming back with an older body, and I had to train without Ned since we now exercised separately, splitting childcare responsibilities. I started 15-mile rides in May after the ice melted and the roads were finally cleared of salt and grit, with no particular goal in mind. By late June I was able to ride 40 miles. My joints seemed to be holding out. Oddly, fitness isn’t something you ever possess as a tangible presence. Instead it is an absence, the absence of effort. And there’s something magical about it; for weeks, months, I seemed to be struggling to go between 20 and 30 miles on rides and then I crossed the 40-mile threshold, then 50, and then, gradually a century came to seem possible. There was one advertised for Labor Day weekend, and I rather apprehensively signed up in July, thinking I could always drop out. By late August I had completed a couple of hilly 80-mile rides, so I knew I was capable of it. This time my goal was to complete a century but to enjoy the event as much as I enjoyed the process of training for it: to ride mindfully and joyfully.

Cycling teaches steadiness; even though your feet on the pedals are describing endless circles, you learn to make those circles as even as possible, pulling up with your hamstrings as well as pushing down with your quadriceps. When you do this, the stroke seems effortless and your power increases. Your weight has to be poised over your center of gravity.

After several weeks of training, you start to really feel the bike. You get used to reaching down for your bottle while pedaling at full speed, drinking and replacing it without lowering your cadence. Changing gears becomes second nature, something you sense in the strain or slack on your legs, in response to subtle changes in the terrain and the wind-speed. You become intensely conscious of the sources of friction—the ones beneath you and the one around you—and of road surfaces, how smooth or rough they are, the kind of noise they make, whether they make your work easier or harder. Equally, if not more, you become conscious of the air. You become attuned to the wind, its veering, the constant force or absence of it. The air is your element; riding feels like sailing on air, especially on warm days when your arms and legs and face are bare. Cyclists are like sailors in their relationship to the wind, but one’s own body is the boat.

Maybe because of the hazards and the solitary nature of long-distance cycling, riders have a series of ritualized gestures of acknowledgement and support, like motor coach drivers flashing their lights or giving that regal hand-wave. For cyclists it’s a nod, or, if you’re going very fast, the fingers of one hand just raised off the handlebars. Pointing down at the road with one hand signals to the rider behind you that there is glass or another obstacle on the road. If riding together, the first rider is a scout who shouts things like “Car up!”, “Car back!” and “Car door!”

Cyclists will almost always ask if you need help if you have stopped by the side of the road. I have taken a bike mechanics course given for and by women, so I’m now truly able to fix a flat by myself, given enough time. Still, I always appreciate having someone stop to give me moral support or lend a hand.

The few people I see on long rides tend to stick in my mind. One time, near the run-down duplexes at the outskirts of town, I came across an emaciated blond man riding slowly along the bike path on an old upright, gesticulating and obviously delusional, wearing a torn T-shirt and black jeans. I was a little nervous to pass him. Forty miles later, on my way back, I encountered him again, still riding steadily westwards and unresponsive to my wave. It was hot and I had gone through several bottles of water in the interim, but he was carrying no water. Did he just keep cycling until he collapsed? Or was he going to a place he knew? And there is another thin, clean but unkempt-looking man I see regularly, walking or sometimes running, but not in running gear. Once, when I waved, he said “hullo” in a startled, rusty sort of voice, with the flat “o” of the northerners. Another time I passed him at 1:30 p.m. instead of my usual time in the early morning, and he pointed at his watch in pantomime.

Riding for several hours a day, five or six days a week, grounds me in the body and balances my cerebral, sedentary work as a writer and translator. Cycling is meditative, and I find myself sinking to a deeper level of consciousness. I have fewer thoughts, especially sustained thoughts—just odd flashes of words or images or memories. After long training rides all I want to do is eat, sleep or read. The world is very quiet. I am profoundly, sustainably content—the kind of contentment I felt when nursing my son. Long-distance riding has an undeniably addictive quality: the more I ride, the more I want to ride. My body loves being used, and it happily makes the shift to riding being its work, its occupation.

Every ride brings a gift, if I’m paying attention: a fox, a sandhill crane chick, a couple of deer crossing, orange Turk’s cap lilies on the side of the road, an ancient cemetery, a causeway between lakes, a hillside fragrant with purple clover, a green heron. Riding alone means I’m not focused on keeping up with anyone and can ride at my own pace, stop when I want to. But I also ride with the local touring club some Sundays. Once we rode out to a homestead where a woman had baked 48 pumpkin pies and made 2 vats of chili, and we sat in the sun on the deck in our stockinged feet, eating pie with delectation.

The morning of my first solo century, a Sunday in early September, I woke at 5:20, too keyed up to sleep in until the alarm, and went out into the still and singing darkness to retrieve the newspapers from among the moonshadows. I set off alone an hour later. The drive through the countryside at dawn was heart-stoppingly beautiful and I was impatient to be out in it instead of looking at it through a windshield. There was a great, white moon on my left, south-west, as the orange disk of the sun rose to the northeast. A peach and lavender sky with a flight of small, black birds across a barn. Huge ups and downs through fields dotted with round rolls of fresh hay, like green butter. Halfway there, I ran into mist, swaths of it scarving the landscape, floating in layers like unraveled bandages and smoking in the bowls of the valleys.

Despite my resolve to be mindful, the first three quarters of the century went by in a blur. The last 25 miles were another matter: a double loop on bone-jarring, rough road with a headwind and very long, tough climb at the end. During that climb, it occurred to me that sometimes doing a century is like labor—there’s a point at which you think you are never, ever going to do this again, but you always want to when it’s over. During the last 12 miles I was so dead beat I had to keep talking to myself. Having the mileometer helped, because I kept imagining it as a short ride close to home. When the display showed 100.00 miles I screamed out loud, a little prim scream, even though there was no one in sight. Only 1.3 miles to go. It had taken me 7 hours and 17 minutes of riding—8.5 hours including the breaks at the rest stops to pee, eat and fill up my water bottles.

it on your car. Ten days later, the lid of the trunk still bore the marks where I leaned on it in exhaustion with my arms, a white inverted V of sunscreen on the green paint. But the standards in parallel universes differ wildly. As I was crawling happily towards the end, I passed people who were starting the second half of a double century, looking as if they’d just been for a spin round the block.

On the way home afterwards, whenever I drove up a hill my car lost speed dramatically. At first I wondered if I had engine problems. Suddenly, I realized that I was gauging the hills by gradient and shifting into a smaller gear, just as if I were on a bike. I had become so in tune with the bicycle after so many hours and hills that I had physically and mentally made the switch to a pre-motorized age. This may be akin to the rolling “sea legs” one feels on land when you’ve spent all day on a boat. I like the idea of “bike hands” or “bike legs”; feeling the ground in your own body, being “grounded.” My road bike has been the vehicle that has allowed me, over time, to find a way of being at home in my body, in the world, and in a new country. Cycling has allowed me to practice perseverance, endurance, self-reliance and confidence. It’s allowed me to face fear in its manifold forms—fear of falling, dogs, automobile accidents, solitude, sexual harassment or assault—and grow in the process. I have come to know my own strength, to inhabit my body with a respect and pride I never felt in girlhood. The body where, as a girl, I felt least at home has become a place I can claim as my birthright. As an immigrant from a rural background, cycling has also allowed me to explore and come to know with all my senses the land to which I’ve been transplanted. I’ve come to love Wisconsin’s undulating hills, its back roads, its lakes and barns, its woodland and farmland, and in all my cyclo-powered wanderings to feel a sense of belonging, of being at home.

Robert Ramsey Jr. didn’t have an imaginary friend, but he wanted one so badly he could taste it in the salt-rust tang of blood filling his mouth. All the other kids had one. Hunter’s friend was named Wormhole, or sometimes Blackhole, and once, Deathstar. Wormhole could shape-shift into a supernova, but usually he was a ten-foot-tall astronaut who rode on a dragon that was also an interstellar spaceship. Maylin’s friend was named Narwolf, a giant wolf with a unicorn horn who could fly by magic. Even Quiet Norman had an imaginary friend: Quiet Norbert. Quiet Norman swore Quiet Norbert was the best friend a guy could have—they played videogames together, he said, and had watergun fights on the weekends, and Norbert always let Norman win at chess.

Robert had never once seen an imaginary friend in action, though not for want of trying. Every day Hunter, Maylin, and Quiet Norman perched at the top of the jungle gym, heckling all comers, and every day Robert fought to climb to the gym’s apex despite their teasing.

“My imaginary friend has a jet pack and he picks you up and flies a million feet up into the air and drops you and you die,” Hunter would shout, but Robert started climbing anyway. Then came Maylin’s sing-song: “This jungle gym’s for people with imaginary friends. You don’t have any friends, so you can’t come up.” But Robert would squint into the sunlight and keep climbing, boot soles squeaking against metal.

“What’s wrong, new kid? Don’t you speak English?” Norman’s taunt was cruelest of all. Shy to the point of invisibility, Robert’s throat closed up whenever Mr. Hastings called him out in class. “He can’t talk; he’s too dumb. Kill him, Wormhole!” Then, with Maylin egging them on, Hunter and Norman tag-teamed Robert, plucking his fingers from the rungs one by one. In the scrabble of hands, Robert couldn’t tell if it was just Hunter and Norm, or if there really were two extra, invisible people tugging at his fingers. Then Robert’s hands slipped and he fell through the bars to land hard in the sand, teeth chomping down on his tongue. By the time he’d picked himself up from the dirt, his three antagonists had leapt down from the jungle gym, darted away through the surrounding trees, and disappeared.

All the long walk home, Robert spit red around a swollen tongue and plotted how to make friends at this, his third school in as many years. If he could just get in to the imaginary friend club.... Maybe if he made up a friend. No one would ever know. Call him Billybob Jailtime, like a real hardcore criminal with tattoos who hated ice cream and all children but Robert—BB for short, like the gun. He’d be a jewel thief and a fighter-jet pilot who stole diamonds out of bank vaults by exploding their locks with his super-powered laser.

That night, Robert ignored his math homework and doodled in his sketchpad instead, drafting a long comic strip of BB in action, complete with pictures of jewels, airplanes, and exploding buildings. Tomorrow for show-n-tell, if he didn’t chicken out, he’d reveal the illustrated Billybob Jailtime. But just in case, Robert hung his brand-new fatigues beside his backpack, matching cap included. His mom had brought home the fatigues for his birthday—desert camo, light brown and tan like coffee stains on linoleum or the Velveteen Rabbit’s fur. The sounds of television emanated from his mom’s bedroom down the hall: gunshots and a woman’s scream, then the murmur of detectives investigating. No point saying goodnight. He knew she’d already be asleep. The next day at school, he didn’t try to climb the jungle gym at recess, just stood at its base, hands on hips, willing himself to speak. “Hey, Hunter. Guess what.” “You have a stupid outfit?” Robert ignored this; he couldn’t wait to tell them all about BB, the words tripping off his tongue. “I have an imaginary friend now. His name’s Billybob and he’s got a fighter jet and a super-powered laser gun and he’s a robber like in cops in robbers, but better.”

Conversation whispered from the top of the gym as the three talked it over. Finally Hunter yelled down; “Do you and Billybob wanna play jail tag?” “Heck yeah!” Billybob Jailtime was going to rock at jail tag. “How do you play?” Robert asked. “You’re the jailer, see, and you hang out under the jungle gym until me and Wormhole bring back prisoners.” The other three dispersed, Maylin racing across the playground with Hunter in pursuit, his jersey flickering red as he shot between pine trees. Robert climbed through the rungs and hunkered down in the sand. He scratched out elaborate diagrams in the dirt detailing the lengths he and BB would go to defend the jail once Hunter captured him some captives. He waited, and he waited some more. An hour later, a furious Mr. Hastings pulled a camouflaged Robert out from beneath the bars and escorted him back to class. Befuddled, Robert realized halfway across the empty playground that he must have missed the recess bell.

Back in the classroom, Mr. Hastings ushered everyone into show-n-tell circle. “Robert, let’s begin with you.” Robert stood up, stepped into the middle of the circle. His camouflage was too hot, suffocating him, and he pulled off his hat, twisting it between his hands. In a whisper, he managed: “I brought in…I mean I wore, I’m wearing…This is my camouflage.” Some of the kids had the audacity to seem interested despite Hunter and Maylin radiating boredom; Robert was heartened. “This type of camo’s called chocolate chip, like the cookies. Its real name is six-color desert pattern because it has six colors in it.”

“Can you count all six colors, kids?” Mr. Hastings said, and Robert wilted as thirty pairs of eyes trained on his fatigues, counting. “These are like my dad’s. He was in the war, the…um. They’re for the Gulf War. This kind of fatigues.” The words stopped up against his teeth. “Your hat is stupid,” said Hunter. “Real camouflage is green. That’s brown.” Maylin chimed in.

“It’s for sand,” Robert shot back. “Now, now,” said Mr. Hastings. “So you can hide from camels?” Hunter said, and Maylin snickered behind him. “No, terrorists.” “There aren’t any terrorists in Forest Glen. And there’s no sand, either.” Except on the playground, where you left me, Robert thought but knew better than to say. “That’s enough,” said Mr. Hastings. “Robert, you may sit down. Trina?” A blonde girl clutching a Barbie still in its packaging stepped into the circle. Robert deliberately sat between Hunter and Maylin. They made way for him grudgingly. “Where’d you guys go?” he hissed. “We took a vote and decided you lied to us.” Hunter shrugged. Maylin tossed her black hair disdainfully. “Sillybob isn’t real. You made him up.” “Nuh-uh! He is totally real.” “Oh yeah? Prove it,” she said. “I can’t. He’s imaginary.” The idea came to him out of nowhere: “You prove it first.” “Fine,” said Hunter, elbowing Norman, who sat cross-legged on his other side. “Hey Norm, what’s Wormhole doing now?” Norman stared into space for a minute, then his eyes followed an invisible target across the room. “He just jumped off his dragon, walked over to Mr. Hasting’s desk, and sat in his chair. But he’s ten foot tall, so he has to scrunch all up to fit. Mr. Hastings is gonna freak when he sees a real live supernova at his desk.”

Robert was dumbfounded; Maylin giggled, staring at the empty desk chair. As if on command, the chair gently swiveled—a breeze from the open window behind Mr. Hasting’s desk, perhaps, or proof positive that Norman told the truth? “There’s nothing there!” Robert protested. “You’re just not cool enough to see him,” Maylin said. Robert heard a ripping noise and stared down at his hands. He’d torn the brim of his cap clean off. He stood up, throwing down the pieces with the righteous indignation of Billybob. “Oh yeah? Well for show-n-tell, I totally brought in my imaginary friend. His name is Billybob Jailtime, and he’s a soldier who’s also a fighter-jet pilot and a badass. And Billybob told me to tell you that he’s gunning for all your dumb friends. He’s going to find them and kill them, one by one.”

He ended up in the principle’s office, but the secretary proved unable to contact his mom and they had to let him go at school’s end, same as always. At home that night, he added another twelve panels to his comic. How Billybob grabbed Wormhole and turned him inside out until Wormhole exploded into a supernova of gore, bits of astronaut all over the page. How Billybob stalked Maylin’s narwolf through the snowy slopes of Antarctica until it took flight off a high cliff, and then Billybob Jailtime took his laser-gun and shot that unicorn-dog right out of the sky, and for good measure cut off its spiral horn besides. How Billybob switched his laser-gun to reverse and with one perfect shot turned Quiet Norbert into Quiet Norm’s shadow, so that Quiet Norbert would always be behind Norman, silent and invisible, unable to ever win a watergun fight or lose to Norman at chess.

At recess the next day, the jungle gym stood desolate. Scouting the area, Robert almost stepped in a pool of yellow-streaked vomit. No wonder the gym was unpopular. He wandered around the playground in search of the imaginary friend club, increasingly weirded out.

They found him first, cornering him at the slide. Maylin’s lips curled in a sneer, and even the usually impassive Norman looked pissed, but Hunter swayed queasily and his eyes were pinkrimmed.

“What’s wrong with you guys?” Robert asked. Hunter scrubbed the back of a hand across his eyelids and under his nose, snotting his sleeve. “Nothing,” he said. Maylin stepped between Robert and Hunter. She came up to Robert’s shoulder, and whether she shook with anger or fear, Robert couldn’t tell. “You’re stupid and your friend is a serial killer, that’s what wrong.” She pushed Robert in the chest. “Narwolf’s gonna rip your guts out.” Robert stumbled backward, then steadied himself. “I didn’t do anything.” That provoked a high-pitched hiccup from Hunter. “I didn’t! I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Robert said. Maylin howled as she launched herself at him, arms locked around his waist in a flying tackle, but Robert had learned a thing or two about self-defense before his dad died, and he held his own, even three to one—or was it five? And then Mr. Hastings was there, and Robert found himself airborne, still kicking and throwing punches, as Mr. Hastings carried him bodily to the principal’s office. Even after an hour of interrogation, Robert couldn’t explain how the fight had started.

He was determined to find out. After school, Robert didn’t head up Woodland Rd. toward his house. Instead, he stalked the imaginary friend club until they split up at Ash Dr. From there, he followed Quiet Norman. As Norman turned off into the neighborhoods, Robert sprinted down the block and caught the smaller kid by the arm.

Quiet Norman’s face twisted up in scorn, disgust, and more than a little fear. “He didn’t tell me anything. I saw it.” “Saw what?” “What you did to his friend.” Billybob had planned to turn Wormhole inside out and explode him like a bank vault. “But I didn’t see anything.” “Astronaut meat hanging from the jungle gym bars? Blood everywhere? You made Hunter barf in front of everyone.” Norman stared at him. “You really can’t see anybody’s friend.” He jerked his arm in Robert’s grasp, yelling: “Geroffame! Norbert, help!”

Robert felt a sharp pain behind his knee and his leg buckled; Norman pulled free of Robert’s grip and took off running. Robert whipped around, punching at thin air in hopes of making contact with his invisible attacker, but there was no one there, no one besides a rapidly disappearing Norman. Robert didn’t know what to think. It felt like someone’d kicked him, but maybe he’d imagined the whole thing?

He knew he’d made up Billybob Jailtime, and yet his friend had come through for him, slaughtered Hunter’s friend just like in the drawings, a real bloodbath. But even with firm proof of Billybob’s existence (or so Robert had to believe…he still hadn’t seen a damn thing), Norman still wouldn’t be his friend. Well, he’d show them--even if Robert couldn’t see his own friend, BB sure could see their friends. Maylin and Quiet Norm had to be wondering when Billybob was coming for them.

Narwolf didn’t last the week. The next day at recess, the playground was eerily quiet. Robert ran straight for the jungle gym. A wall of kids K through 3 stood in a circle around Maylin, but no one paid her much attention. They were pointing at something in front of her, something he couldn’t see. “What’re you looking at?” A blonde girl with tear-streaked cheeks recoiled from him. “Maylin’s unicorn-puppy. He’s all dead and stuff.” He remembered his illustration, a giant wolf splayed out in the snow. A jagged golden stub where its horn ought be. Intestines oozing where gunfire had ripped open its stomach. Maylin stood stiffly, flanked by Hunter and Norman. She wouldn’t look at Robert. “You killed her dog,” said Quiet Norman. “There’s nothing there,” he protested. “You’re a bully. Only bullies beat up on girls. Only bullies hurt dogs.” Robert felt tears prick his eyes, and for the first time in his life, he fled a fight. He ended up in the boys’ bathroom huddled in a stall, ripping pages out of his sketchpad and flushing them, rip, tear, flush, over and over. He would not let himself cry over someone else’s dead dog that wasn’t even real. He hadn’t cried since his dad died, and he wasn’t going to cry now.

The next morning during art class, Robert began a new comic, peaceful scenes of Billybob and Quiet Norbert playing chess, but he felt distracted. It wasn’t fair that he couldn’t he see his very own friend he’d made up all by himself; it wasn’t fair his only friend had come out evil. Robert’s eyes flicked over to Mr. Hastings’ desk, to the empty swivel chair. Concentrating with all his might, believe he’s real, believe, he stared at the slowly rotating cushions, sketching without looking down at the page beneath his pen, finishing just as the recess bell rang. He’d drawn Billybob Jailtime just as he’d seen him: seated in Mr. Hastings’ chair, a machine gun in each hand, a belt of grenades slung across his chest. Billybob’s eyes were closed, as if he were dead, or dreaming.

At recess, Robert raced to the jungle gym, praying he wouldn’t be too late to catch his imaginary enemy and stop him before he killed again. As he approached the metal cage, he saw a familiar figure crouched in the sand. “Norman? Quiet Norman shook his head, eyes staring glassily at the sand. “What do you see? What’d Billybob do?” Norm shrugged. “S’okay.” Robert couldn’t believe it. “What do you mean, it’s okay?” “You really are stupid.” Norm rolled his eyes. “He was never real to begin with.” “You—you said you played videogames with Norbert. And that he sucked at chess. You said he was your best friend.” “He was, then.” Norman shrugged again. “Now he’s not anymore.” Norman got up, brushed dirt off his jeans, and walked away, leaving Robert alone at the base of the jungle gym. Beneath its bars, pressed into the sand, an indentation like the hollow left by a small body, head at an acute angle, limbs stretched out like a victim in one of the crime shows his mom loved so well.

Robert set his foot along a rusted rung, toes sliding until his boot scrunched at the join where the points of the triangles met. Hand over hand, no one taunting, no one to stop him, he reached the jungle-gym’s summit in a spider-quick clamber. Surveying the playground, everything seemed smaller. Packs of kids traveled in loose clumps, elbowing each other, chatting, laughing together. In the distance, he could see the driveway leading up to the school and a long line of cars, mothers and fathers come to collect their children. His own mother would not be among them. Carefully, precariously, Robert planted his feet and stood up on the bars, stretching his arms out for balance. He knew how much it hurt to fall.

Author Title Contributors

Thoughtful Prose Born and raised in Finland, Arndt Britschgi spent the best part of my life in Madrid, Spain, and in 2006 completed my Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Zurich, Switzerland - my book on Newcomb’s Paradox/Free Will is available in English from Philosophia Verlag in Germany. Other writings of mine have appeared or are forthcoming in Literary Fragments, Kulttuurivihkot (Finnish), Southern Cross Review, Word Riot, milk magazine, the EOTU Ezine, Slow Trains Literary Journal, The Modern Review, Feathertale, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, Cake (UK), PostPoetry, Barnwood Poetry Magazine, and The Montreal Review.

Gina Marie Bernard lives in Bemidji, Minnesota. When not teaching English at Bemidji High School, she slips into her tattooed alter-ego, wicked vixen, a blocker for the Babe City Rollers roller derby team. She is the crazy-proud parent of two daughters, Maddie Elizabeth and Parker Diana. Her work has appeared in Red Weather, Minnesota Monthly, Lake Country Journal, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Flashquake, Wisconsin Review, Prism Quarterly, Defenestration, Duke University’s Voices Magazine, The First Line, and Front Street Review. She has work forthcoming in Skin on Skin: Art of the Lesbian, and in Collective Fallout. She won Minnesota Monthly’s 17th-annual Tamarack Award for short fiction in 2002. Her young adult novel, Alpha Summer, is available through Loonfeather Press.

Jamez Chang’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Underground Voices, FRiGG, Prime Number, Lines + Stars, Melusine, Poydras Review, and the anthology Yellow Light. After graduating from Bard College, Jamez went on to become the first Korean-American to release a hip-hop album, Z-Bonics (1998), in the United States. Jamez is a regular contributor to Blog Dot Squalorly, working in the video game industry in NYC. Visit: http://about.me/jamez_chang

Sarah Delap U is a poet and saxophonist currently living in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is the office manager of an art school by day, and member of superhero rock band The Super Friends by night, where she plays as Hawk Girl. A former Trekkie, she is absolutely terrified of outer space.

Duncan B. Barlow published one book of fiction, Super Cell Anemia, which sold very well and received very positive reviews. Although he is primarily a novelist, he has had stories published by Sleeping Fish, The Surgery of Modern Warfare, and various other small journals around the world. I run a small literary press called Astrophil Press, which released several books including Keith Abbott’s Downstream From Trout Fishing: a Memoir About Richard Brautigan and Brian Evenson’s Contagion.

Donna Girouard is an Instructor of English at Livingstone College in Salisbury, NC, and faculty adviser of the college’s literary-arts magazine, The Bear’s Tale. Her essays can be found in the current issues of Storm Cellar Quarterly and Embodied Effigies and in the upcoming issue of Writer’s Bloc. She has just completed her first book-length work, The Other Side: A Memoir.

Sue Granzella has won awards from the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition and MemoirsInk. One of her essays will appear in Rougarou’s spring issue in 2013. Sue teaches third grade in Hayward, California. She loves baseball, road trips, dogs, quilting, stand-up comedy, hiking, and reading the writing of 8- and 9-year-olds.

Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a six-time Pushcart nominee and Best of the Net nominee. She is the recent winner of the Red Ochre Press Chapbook contest with her entry Before I Go to Sleep. She has authored several chapbooks and two echaps along with her latest full-length collection of poems: Epistemology of an Odd Girl, newly released from March Street Press. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of online and print magazines including: The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Able Muse, Poets and Artists, The Foliate Oak and many more. According to family lore she is a direct descendent of Robert Louis Stevenson. www.clgrellaspoetry.com

Descended from Norwegian plumbers on one side, and bohemian Russian aristocrats on the other, Stephanie Barbé Hammer has published short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in Mosaic, The Bellevue Literary Review, Pearl, NYCBigCityLit, Rhapsoidia, CRATE, and the Hayden’s Ferry Review among other places. Her prose poem chapbook Sex with Buildings, launched with Dancing Girl Press in May 2012. She is the recent recipient of an MFA from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts and she is currently working on both a novel and a short story collection.

Philadelphia native, Melissa Hamilton considers herself to be a literary nerd passionate about comics, creative pedagogy, gardening, queer resistance, and community enhancement. Currently an English professor, she is working towards establishing a co-operatively owned hookah bar with her fabulous lover, Michelle, and their feline-child, Miss Poka Dot Nakamora. Recent publications include Cliterature, Euphemism, and Poets Against War.

Marisha Hicks resides in Austin, Texas where she is a student of creative living and writing. She shares a shotgun shack with a tattoo artist named Ray Wallace, a Siamese named June, and a boxer named Frankie. (Frankie is a boxer dog, not a boxer by trade.)

M.J.Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Her most recent poems have appeared in Poetry East, The Chariton Review, Tar River Poetry, Blueline, The Prose Poem Project, and The Centrifugal Eye, among others. Recent chapbook is As the Crows Flies (Foothills Publishing, 2008) and second full length collection, Within Reach, (Cherry Grove Collections, 2010); Forthcoming prose chapbook Between Worlds (Foothills Publishing) She is Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor program at St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY.

Julian Joseph Jackson is a professional photographer living in China with his wife. His website is jjjackson.zenfolio.com. Julian and his wife jointly blog at adamsjackson.tumblr.com.

Catherine Jagoe is a writer & translator with a PhD in Spanish Literature from Cambridge University. Poems from her collection Casting Off (Parallel Press, 2007) were on The Writer’s Almanac and Poetry Daily, and recent publication credits include North American Review, Atlanta Review, Ninth Letter, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Rattle, Kalliope, qarrtsiluni, diode, and Red Wheelbarrow. An excerpt from this essay aired on Wisconsin Public Radio in 2011: http://wilife.tumblr.com/post/5193809866/biking-warmer-weather-is-finally-here-so-its

Born in Greenville, SC. and currently living in Arizona, Isaac Kirkman is a student at the Tucson branch of the Philip Schultz-founded Writers Studio. He is also a founding member of the Low Writers collective. His work has previously been published in Out of the Gutter, Shotgun Honey, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. His work is forthcoming in Zelmer Pulp Anthology and Hey! That Robot Ate My Baby! (Vol. 1). Visit: http://about.me/isaac.kirkman

For what it’s worth, Joe E. Kraus teaches Creative Writing and American Literature at the University of Scranton where he also direct the honors program. His creative work had been published, among other places, in The American Scholar, Oleander Review, Riverteeth, and Birkensake. I also won a 2004 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial poetry prize, the 2008 Moment Magazine/Karma Foundation Prize for short fiction, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010 by Southern Humanities Review.

Don Kunz taught literature, creative writing, and film studies at the University of Rhode Island for 36 years and is an Emeritus Professor of English now retired to Bend, Oregon where he continues to write for publication, volunteer, play Native American Flute, and study Spanish. His poems have been published in over sixty literary journals including The Asheville Poetry Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Cape Rock, Confrontation Magazine, English Journal, and Midwest Poetry Review. They have won awards from the Arizona Authors’ Association, Midwest Poetry Review, Oregon State Poets Association, and Philomel.

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens is an emerging poet who was recently published in Issue #10 of Superstition Review and has poems forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal and Red Savina Review.

Katherine MacCue is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet who currently resides in New York with her family. She graduated from the George Washington University where she studied French and History. She enjoys rainy days at the beach and playing with her dog, Blue. Her poetry has been published in various journals and is forthcoming in Laundry Lines Anthology, Pirene’s Fountain, and decomP MagazinE. You can reach her via email at kvmacc@gmail.com or through her blog thenearlyfamous.blogspot.com.

J.S. MacLean is an independent poet who has been published in a variety of journals in Canada, USA, UK, and Australia. Most recent publications are or will be in Ice Flow (University of Alaska) and the Literary Review of Canada. He has a collection, Molasses Smothered Lemon Slices available on amazon.com. In his spare time he works.

Pete Madzelan resides in New Mexico with his wife and cat, Manny. Currently has fiction in The Dying Goose. Photography in Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, San Pedro River Review, Catcus Heart, convergence: journal of poetry and art, and Vine Leaves Literary Journal; and forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Pachinko, and BRICKrhetoric. Has had fiction and poetry published in literary journals, including Cigale Literary Magazine, Bellowing Ark, Wind; essays in a variety of publications including the Santa Fe Reporter and Minor League News.

Amanda Hart Miller is presently pursuing a Master of Arts in Writing at Johns Hopkins University, and she teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at a community college in Maryland. Her work has recently appeared in Literary Mama and PANK.

Jenny Taylor Moodie has been writing for her whole life-journals, short stories, novels, and poems. She has received recognition from a publisher for a children’s picture book, and had some success in a national contest in which she received an honorable mention.

Al Ortolani is a public school teacher in the Kansas City area. His poetry and reviews have appeared in journals such as Camroc Press Review, New Letters, The Quarterly, The English Journal, Poetry Bay and the New York Quarterly. He has three books of poetry, The Last Hippie of Camp 50 and Finding the Edge, published by Woodley Press at Washburn University and Wren’s House, published by Coal City Press in Lawrence, Kansas. His newest collection, Cooking Chili on the Day of the Dead, will be published by Aldrich Press in 2013. He is an editor for The Little Balkans Review and works closely with the Kansas City Writer’s Place.

Joseph Patrick Pascale’s fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Literary Orphans, Trapeze Magazine, Instigatorzine, 140 Fiction, 7x20, On A Narrow Windowsill: Fiction and Poetry Folded Onto Twitter, and other fine publications. He also helps out as an editorial assistant at the literary journal Drunken Boat

Stephen Pohl writes from Baltimore, where he has worked as a Baltimore police officer, insurance claims adjuster and background investigator. He holds a degree in Theater Arts from Towson University His articles, essays, poetry and stories have appeared in regional and national publications and online, including The Chronicle of the Horse, The National Catholic Reporter, The Business Monthly, U. S. Catholic, Urbanite, Crime and Suspense and The Right Eyed Deer.

Shenan Prestwich is a Washington, DC-based poet and graduate of the Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Writing program. Her work has appeared in such publications as Slow Trains, PigeonBike, Lines + Stars, Dirtflask, Orion headless, Dr. Hurley’s Snake Oil Cure, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Outside In, Seltzer, The Camel Saloon, and The Baltimore Review. Additionally, she edits Magic Lantern Review, a journal of writing and film.

Colleen Purcell grew up in a hotel in the Andes. She is currently a freelance photographer living in Santiago. Her photos have appeared in The Meadowland Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Subliminal Interiors, Foliate Oak, Off the Coast, and a few other publications.

Anina Robb is a poet living in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with her husband and two neat kids. She earned a MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and has published poems in Nebo, The White Pelican Review, Rivendell, The Red River Review, Blast Furnace, and Oatmeal and Poetry. In 2013 her poems will appear in the journals Juked, Emerge, Main Street Rag, The 5-2, and Ascent Aspirations.

Amanda Schroth is a professional writing major at Champlain College. She first began experimenting and writing poetry during the spring semester of her freshman year. She plans to continue working with poetry and performing for live audiences. She has been published in Teen Ink Magazine, the Champlain Current, and the first edition of StoFnehenge.

Barry Spacks has taught writing and literature for many years at M.I.T. and UCSB. He’s published individual poems widely, plus stories, two novels, eleven poetry collections, and three CDs of selected work. His first novel The Sophomore has just been brought back into print in the Faber & Faber Finds series. His most recent poetry collection (Cherry Grove, 2012) presents a selection from ten years of e-mail exchanges with his friend Lawrence E, Leone. It’s called A Bounty of 84s (the 84 being a stanza limited exactly to 84 characters, echoing the traditional notion that the Buddha left us 84,000 different teachings because humans have so many different needs, are all of them so differently the same).

Natalie Sypolt received her MFA degree in Fiction from West Virginia University in 2005. She currently teachs composition and creative writing at WVU. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review Online, Queen City Review, Potomac Review, Oklahoma Review, and Kestrel. She has had book reviews appear in Mid-American Review and Shenandoah. She’s also the 2009 winner of the Betty Gabehart Prize, sponsored by the Kentucky Women’s Writers Conference and was short listed for a Pushcart Prize in 2010. Her story “My Brothers and Me” was named winner of the 2012 Glimmer Train New Writers contest.

Hannah Thurman is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY. In 2011, she completed studies in creative writing at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where she received Highest Honors for her thesis, a collection of stories called “Good Enough Secrets.” Her stories have appeared in The Menda City Review, Fiction 365, The Rusty Nail, and others.

Steve Wheat has been writing, traveling and teaching English abroad for the last seven years. Most recently he finished a contract in Saudi Arabia. Recently his work has appeared in Chronogram, The Hobble Creek Review, Emerge Literary Magazine, and the Eunoia Review.

Brooke Wonders’ fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Electric Velocipede, and Monkeybicycle, among others. She is a graduate of Clarion 2011 and a current PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She blogs at girlwonders.com.

Vincent Wood is a Creative Writing graduate from the University of Greenwich, London. He’s had short stories published by online magazine apeironreview.com & the print publication The Delinquent as well as winning a special commendation from First Writer Magazine’s Eighth International Short Story competition for his short story A Tale of Two Heroin(e)s. He was also shortlisted for Askance publishing’s short story award 2013 which lead to his story Compatibility being published in the anthology Positional Vertigo. Also a prolific blogger, he writes about his time living in London and his experiences and relationship to the city, as well as posting various bits of poetry, stories and whatever else takes his fancy which can be found at city-sights.blogspot.com.

Diana Woodcock’s first full-length collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders, won the 2010 Vernice Quebodeaux International Poetry Prize for Women and was nominated for a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her chapbooks include In the Shade of the Sidra Tree, a nominee for the Library of Virginia Poetry Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award (Finishing Line Press), Mandala (Foothills Publishing), and Travels of a Gwai Lo—the title poem of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Toadlily Press.