Canyon Voices Issue 24

CANYON VOICES LITERARY & ART MAGAZINE

Issue 24 / Fall 2021

By Lezlie Amara Piper (Visit the Art Section to see the full painting)

FICTION | JEREMY LAWRENCE

Suppertime in Manhattanland

By Jeremy Lawrence

Before he earned the moniker of Pigeon Whisperer of Tompkins Square Park, Getty Alvarez was known as the founder of the New York City Squatters’ Supper Club.

It was the summer following his father’s death (bile asphyxiation following a stormy night at the slot machines), when young Getty quit his job at the Kroger on Main. He spit on the linoleum and walked past the crowd of patrons he recognized as the occupants of his hometown—so few in number were they it felt like the population shrunk by the hour—and picked up his girlfriend of three months, Marion Silver. They drove over the flatlands and through the night to reach a chirping Manhattan at sunrise. Buzzing with the kind of electric relief that comes with walking a tightrope and finding your balance refusing to let you down, they double parked in front of a pre-war structure with a “Rooms 4 Rent” sign posted above the entrance. Getty convinced the property manager to let them into a corner studio by flashing a portion of the cash roll he’d extracted from the exhaust pipe of the jumped van in his deceased father’s driveway.

A mattress and crates of canned goods were hauled in, fleecy cobwebs swept, obstinate window panes forced open, and love made at the earliest convenience. Marion and Getty quickly fell into the rhythm of the beastly city’s improvisation, stalking the downtown parks CANYON VOICES

and environs day and night. They watched couples holding hands, hunched old women speeding along with collapsible shopping carts, cinema students filming theses on the grassy knolls between trees, dog walkers, skateboarders, acrobats, musicians, and soapbox preachers. They waited on soup kitchen lines in the wee and waning hours of the day, snuck into matinees as the previous shows were letting out, perused thrift shops, and slouched in cafés, inhaling secondhand cigarette smoke and errant conversations as they waited for half-full mugs to be abandoned and chatted up whoever they could. A collection of identities was amassed: the names, phone numbers, and addresses of the kindred spirits frequenting the same places, a clan comprised of stagehands, chess players, dropout or parttime students, and wanton freelancers, all seekers of a vague truth they believed to be somewhere beyond the perceived limitations of their lives of privilege. While these new acquaintances wielded an intimacy with the city that neither Getty nor Marion could claim, the couple relished the private glances they shared as they listened to yet another story of a parent threatening to sever their offspring’s financial umbilical cord. Their new friends presented as erratic, superior, and cynical, but once Getty and Marion crossed their paths enough times to establish a rolling familiarity, they found the group to be at the core reliable, empathetic, and generous.

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The rented apartment served as a home base, used primarily for the act of lovemaking; in those early days Getty and Marion preferred sleeping outdoors. But when the parks became increasingly dew-covered and the great benches colder than a dissection table, they retreated to their sparsely furnished spot on East 2nd. It was on an in morning, after the steps of Judson Memorial Church proved too slick to sleep on, that Marion opened the door to Gustav, the building’s property manager. He stood in the doorway, chomping a soggy cigar, reeking of frozen sweat, letting his beady, wrinkle-rimmed eyes rove unabashedly up and down Marion’s half-clothed body, and informed her of the renovation that was about to begin in the apartment adjacent to theirs. He made an extravagant show of tipping his shapeless cap as Marion slammed the door on his wide, toothless grin.

That night, on an unnamable impulse to be in a new place, Marion pulled Getty off the floorboards and tugged him out of their apartment. The door to the apartment undergoing renovations, less than four steps from their own, had been propped open in anticipation for the early morning maintenance crew. The marginal crack it offered was invitation enough. Marion pushed it open with one hand, pulling in Getty with the other. They stepped onto the exposed concrete where the floorboards had been pried away. The place was wholly vacant, lined with sawdust, naked, and drafty. Any timidness was short-lived. Marion walked to the center of the room, spread her arms, raised her chin ceilingward, and began to spin around in tight circles.

“It’s all ours,” she sang, “all ours…all ours.”

Getty’s stomach replied with a gurgling cry for sustenance. The confluence of circumstances— CANYON VOICES

the empty apartment behind the unlocked door, the late hour, the hunger—sprung a notion.

They returned to their own apartment and called up the acquaintances they knew by name: Conrad Lee, Anthony “Weekends Only” Mondays, Nora “Bora Bora” Clyde, Leon Dean, Matty “Kook” Kuykendall, Jean “The Bean” Mulholland, Kit Holden, and Olias “Olio” Ederly. The invitations poured asynchronously from their mouths into the phone receiver as Getty and Marion sat cross-legged on the floor.

A limited time offer was on their hands…a vacant apartment across the hall…bring food and alcohol.

The guests arrived within the hour, perishables and glass bottles cradled in brown paper bags.

The Bean brought two friends, Molly Mac and Linda “Famous” Simone, who fell into the group like missing puzzle pieces. As they ushered everyone upstairs into the vacant apartment, Getty and Marion assumed the role of welcoming, gracious hosts at whose fingertips the dial for the night’s proceedings rested. Both felt deep in their marrow that this was their chance to make impressions, solidify their plots as individuals worthy of a great city.

The foldable table that Getty carried in from their own place went largely unused once it became apparent there weren’t enough chairs to go around. Everyone preferred to walk about the empty apartment or sit on the concrete floor and lean against the roughly sanded baseboards among the dust mites. Besides supporting the humble feast of cheeses, chips, bread, and booze, the table proved its worth when Getty— taking Marion’s hand and recognizing in her rosy cheekbones and swimming pupils a mirror for his own inebriation—used it as a podium to address the guests. The looseness of his lips FALL 2021

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didn’t matter. Neither did the guacamole stain on his shirt, nor the wine sweat on his upper lip, nor the lack of certainty in his own words; as long as he could wrap an arm around Marion and take in her profile, he could be certain of himself. He thanked everyone for making the trek this deep into alphabet city, providing the bounty of food and drink they shared, and giving two out-of-towners a genuine set of friends to count on. The sappiness was not lost on those in attendance. Everyone raised their glasses. Getty finished his speech to resounding applause, declaring the event the inaugural dinner of the New York City Squatters’ Supper Club. The wine was sipped to the last drop, and the name for the misfit group repeated long into the night.

425 W

14th

Street

The ringing telephone snapped Getty awake and prompted Marion to roll to the far side of the mattress, away from the uninvited alarm. It was Weekends Only on the line, calling to thank the couple for hosting a gas of a party and wondering when the next would be. Getty replied as coherently as possible, words dropping out of his mouth like pool balls. His head was pounding and his tongue was a dead fish left in the sun too long. Every joint ached.

As he replaced the handset onto its plastic cradle, the phone rang again. After thanking Getty and Marion for the swell time, Kit told them about an apartment two floors above her own that was recently vacated and gathering dust, begging for the sounds of a dinner party to echo across its bare walls.

That very night, after a day of separate, but no less intensive hair-of-the-dog treatments, the group reassembled on the wide sidewalk outside Kit’s building. Olio and Kook tandemCANYON VOICES

carried twin foldable tables. Conrad and Leon waddled over with chairs under their arms.

Bora Bora provided a radio and speaker set.

Everyone brought paper bags filled with food and bottles of alcohol.

Kit wiggled a screwdriver into the door jamb and stepped back to allow the other club members to enter the stale air of the empty apartment, hollow with neglect and scuffed with soot. It was perfect. The table and chairs were set up, the food displayed on ornate china that Famous had swiped from her parents’ cabinet.

She had managed plates, flutes, platters, and tumblers, and promised to try for silverware next time.

After the food had been consumed and sufficient booze imbibed, a translucence entered their wild eyes. When the bodies grew as liquid as their inhibitions and words, every member of the Supper Club took part in leaving some mark on the apartment using the available materials. Marion drew a cottage cheese portrait of Weekends Only on the pink bathroom tile. Conrad, the Bean, Kit, Bora Bora and Leon played spin the bottle, chucking the empties at the wall after each round. Olio, Kook, Famous, and Molly cupped handfuls of viscous leftovers—hummus, bean dips, ketchup, mustard, and butter—and tossed them overhand at the walls, creating topographical maps and splatter paintings that changed overtime as the matter dripped and dried. Getty signed his name in gravy in the lower right corner of the kitchen’s backsplash. Dishes were frisbeed into the broad walls and slick soles mopped organic detritus across the floor as the radio played into the early morning. When there was nothing left to smash, throw, smear, drink, or lick clean, they locked arms and made disoriented attempts to reclaim the goods they FALL 2021

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arrived with, or what was left of them. As the streets entered the pale orange and gray of early New York morning, Kit locked the door with the same screwdriver she’d used to jimmy it open, and the rest of the group found their way to their respective homes.

57 W 23rd Street The New York City Squatters’ Supper Club met thrice weekly, each event more extravagant, reckless, and epicurean than the last. They never returned to the same place twice, for fear of incurring the wrath (legal or otherwise) of an irate landlord or construction manager and thus threatening the future of a club that was quickly becoming their raison d’être. It was their goblin offspring, their ideology and political affiliation, a constantly evolving respite that yielded to anything the club members could provide.

They kept vigilant for neighbors moving out.

Those who lived at home payed close attention when they heard parents discussing properties entering escrow. Some of the club members contacted real estate agents and toured apartments. Others took to scouring the “For Rent” section in The Post and Voice and making mental notes of brownstones under construction that they passed on the street. In a city of livable boxes stacked high enough to get lost in nimbostrati, there were always options.

Every gathering was the result of what the members felt inspired to bring with them. Olio and Weekends Only scored a grand oak dinner table, its flared legs engraved with intricate floral designs. Getty and Marion provided a chandelier that they uprooted from a head-high trash heap in SoHo, missing just under half of its faux-crystal prisms. The quality and involvement of the meals increased as Kook CANYON VOICES

began to insist on set courses that he prepared with the help of Bora Bora, Leon, and Molly as sous chefs. Hot plates, ice chests, and portable camping stoves with hookups for compressed gas cans became necessities, as the empty apartments they invaded did not always have the luxury of gas, water, or electricity. Famous and the Bean filled duffels with select miscellany from their part-time jobs at off-offBroadway theatres: paint, makeup, costumes, musical instruments, and portable light fixtures. Every night was an event to remember, the rub lying in the short-term memory loss that the copious amounts of booze guzzled at each dinner inevitably induced. Getty, as founder, zealous participant, and de facto historian, took it upon himself to scribble mostly illegible impressions in a notebook small enough to squeeze into his shirt pocket: There was the night the Squatters Supper Club cracked a downstairs window of a Greenwich Village brownstone under major construction.

Craters of rubble and loose two-by-fours lined the ground floor, demarcating a makeshift stage for the acrobatic display Conrad provided when he climbed the ropes hanging from the ceiling, inverted his body, neck veins bulging, and balanced a miniature lava cake on his pointed toes before catching the confectionary between his teeth. Following this was the time Famous deciphered every member’s fortunes from the coffee grounds at the bottom of their mugs, prophesizing deaths, fortunes, and relationship splits, and correctly guessing the names of pets and lovers long gone. They took turns using oily paint to draw designs on each other’s shoulders, bellies, and faces in the low light of repurposed theatre lamps. It was Getty who first took his painted body—stripped to the waist, canvas shoes and stiff cotton socks tossed aside—and bear hugged a naked wall, leaving behind a FALL 2021

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splotchy Rorschach reminiscent of a human body he hardly recognized anymore. The club members devolved nightly into animalistic caricatures of their former selves, stripping their clothes at the earliest convenience and painting each other’s bodies before unleashing barrages of food, paint, and dishes upon empty apartment walls in villages east to west, towns up and down.

Getty watched from so far into the middle of it all that the individual snapshots of memory did little to help himself remember where he was.

At the center of a spinning zoetrope, it was only when he steadied his legs and caught the blur that he could make out fractions of the streaky nights—the circus of glutton and chaotic destruction framed before the grotesque murals of paint and wet food scraps, the backdrop for a newfound freedom he refused to believe was temporary, the static of midnight radio and cries of delight echoing through empty halls lit by clamshell stage lights….

Fueled by drink and the responsibility of selfappointed ringmaster, Getty became king of the troubadours. He had to be the core, the nexus, inseparable from the chaos itself. He played so hard at this role, dinner after dinner, that he hardly noticed Marion drifting further into the shadows of unclaimed closets with Weekends Only, a can of body paint and a plate of desserts in hand. Getty and Marion were celestial bodies drifting into their own orbits, crossing paths less and less as dinners of aimless celebration continued to leave empty apartments across the city trashed by sunrise.

818 W 74th Street It was Weekends Only who presented an opportunity he swore the Squatters’ Supper CANYON VOICES

Club would not be able to ignore. It had recently come to his attention that his older sister’s roommate’s aunt rented a penthouse on the Upper West Side to a Grammy-nominated pop singer, Ms. ———, and that Ms. ——— was embarking on a thirty-date European tour and her penthouse overlooking Central Park would be vacant as of this afternoon. He didn’t have to imply any more. Getty told Weekends Only he would call half the crew if he, Weekends Only, called the rest.

Getting everyone inside and upstairs, past the watchful eye of a uniformed doorman, proved a sticking point. It was a feat never attempted in the club’s history. Weekends Only, following the example of the gracious hosts that came before him, said he would volunteer as the crash test dummy and get everyone past the doorman, no matter if it necessitated beguilement, distraction, or bribe. That evening, the club members congregated on the sidewalk of 74th Street and watched Weekends Only’s animated cajoling play out like a silent film through the glass barrier of the revolving door. After a few minutes, Weekends Only turned, smiled, and scooped the lobby air with one arm to beckon everyone in.

The doorman, Earl, a genteel if naïve geriatric all-too susceptible to the charms of youth, helped carry up their accoutrements, casually noting the surprising weight of the canvas duffel he didn’t know was filled with paint, costumes, and condiments. They hardly heard him apologize for the misunderstanding regarding Ms. ———’s nephew coming to tend her orchid garden, so deafening was the beating of their hearts and the blood rushing in their ears.

The penthouse, behind a set of double doors at the end of a private corridor, was a maze of FALL 2021

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thickly carpeted hallways dotted with animal print tapestries and laced with gold crown molding. Gilded mirrors hung opposite abstract paintings and overstuffed couches. The granite dinner table matched the kitchen counter surfaces that flanked the twelve-burner stovetop range and the mammoth, fully stocked refrigerator. Chandeliers and multi-tiered minibars could be found in nearly every room.

The bedrooms boasted Cal King mattresses that faced floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the dappled greenery of Central Park treetops bristling in a gentle breeze.

through the dinner, Weekends Only stood and began a toast, one fated to go unfinished as Getty, squeezing Marion’s shoulder for support, interjected to insist upon his own acknowledgement of the feast spread out before them, and, yes, Weekends Only’s success with the first-rate venue. Getty raised his glass, looked skyward, and beheld the chandelier dangling idly above their dinner. He knew intuitively that it would not hold his weight, but that would not dissuade him from using the silver and gold uvula as his personal jungle gym for the rest of the night.

Kook and his culinary minions went to work in the kitchen wonderland. Weekends Only got on friendly terms with the minibars, filling highballs with ice and haphazardly mixing bottles of fiercely translucent liquid. Leon and Bora Bora located the internal stereo system hidden behind the collection of heavy furs in the master bedroom’s southwest closet. They had entered the penthouse under a high sun, but by the time the niçoise salad, roasted duck, seared tuna, marinated green beans, rainbow slaw, fresh oysters, roasted ratatouille, grilled broccolini, and anchovy garlic bread was ready, and every seat filled around the table whose top was polished to a point so reflective that Getty had no trouble discerning in its surface the tender eyes that Marion directed at Weekends Only, the sun was long gone. The skyline beyond the tall windows became defined against the inky night solely by the constellation of building illumination.

It was during the dessert course that Famous located the dimmer and brought the lights down as the Bean found an outlet suitable for the strobe projector she’d secured from La Mama Theatre. Bursts of flashing white light set the tone for the face painting. Getty stood on Olio’s shoulders to reach the chandelier. Conrad and Kit sat cross-legged on the living room floor, eyes closed, and, taking palmfuls of body paint, tried to guess by feel how they were being decorated. Dark liquors were splashed across the velvet furniture. Small groups disappeared into rooms, overturning mattresses, playing dress up with the luxury furs, robes, wigs, boots, and the galaxy of lipsticks and eyeshadows at their disposal. Kook won Prettiest Girl at the Dance, earning a Grammy trophy engraved to Ms. ——— that Bora Bora found stashed in a cupboard. Feathers littered the east wing halls and fluttered from the heavens when a pillow fight broke out, the stamps of faces upon the cotton surfaces growing less and less recognizable with each swing. Getty proved successful in freeing the chandelier from its ceiling anchors by swinging like a human pendulum from its curved arms. Diamonds were plucked from the dislocated decoration and either pocketed or flushed down the toilet

The meal was divine, every member concurred.

The courses were served on the delicate dinner plates Molly and the Bean extracted from an antique wood and glass armoire next to a Rothko. Sloppily mixed drinks were sipped out of hand-blown, finely etched glasses. Halfway CANYON VOICES

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until the bowl overflowed. Draped in silk, Getty proceeded to lead a merry parade throughout the multicolored rooms and halls, the participants tooting on kazoos, beating arhythmically on bongos, or strumming ukuleles.

They hoisted one another into the air and pressed their inked body parts into the ceiling, the support of many hands making it light work.

They drained the minibars and played with the stovetop range, making small campfires, singeing eyebrows, and lighting cigarettes. The eternal zoetrope was in full effect, at the center of which wobbled a dazed Getty. Fragments of images spun off their axis into a blur. Getty fought to maintain his grip as long as possible before his eyes rolled to the back of his head and his knees gave out. He collapsed like a ragdoll over the chaise lounge in the master bedroom, not far from the bed that served as the night’s copulation center.

amounting to endless dial tones and polite, if curt, declines in the form of one reasonable excuse or another: family obligations, early morning shifts, application deadlines to meet.

Individual futures, goals, and private trajectories were being plotted and in them was no time for an obligation as frivolous and juvenile as the Squatters’ Supper Club.

If Getty had known that that was to be the final dinner of the New York City Squatter’s Club, he might have enjoyed it less. But the end of an era is always vague and intangible, if menacing and inevitable.

And Marion—she who had provided the second vote necessary to get them both out of their town when Getty showed up in her driveway with promises that even he was unsure he could follow through on, she who provided an anchor and compass during an uncertain escape, the inspiration for the whole grand circus now ended so sordidly and unceremoniously—she had discovered that night in the penthouse, looking out upon the Manhattan skyline from the master bedroom while her likeness was drawn in liquid cheese on the glass in front of her, that her future lied beyond the limits of the materials with which she’d arrived. She moved in with Bora Bora and enrolled at NYU to pursue a degree in psychology. Getty thought about her every time he placed a call to an old Supper Club member, wondering if they would accept a dinner invite if Marion were around.

Getty woke up in Ms. ———’s bed, Bora Bora to his left, Kook draped perpendicular at their feet.

He rose and turned the stove’s flickering pilot light off before gathering his clothes and making for the door. With the death of that small flame came the death of the Squatters’ Supper Club. The club extinguished as instantly as it had been ignited, as if their collective consciousness decided there was nothing more for them to accomplish. A casual avoidance took hold of the members. Getty would proceed to make calls, attempts to rekindle the group and get them together for another dinner, his efforts

Getty spent the days following that penthouse dinner trying to contact the club members (to no avail), reckoning with the lack of closure associated with the abrupt dissolving of the Squatters Supper Club, and waiting for Marion to stroll through the door that he left unlocked in anticipation of her arrival. When it became clear that she would not be returning, Getty moved into Tompkins Square Park full-time. He grew fat, spoke to pigeons, flipped through his notebook filled with the chronicle of dinner party events, and watched the sky, waiting for the sun to shine through the gray clouds in a

Tompkins Square Park

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way that would remind him of the love gone to pasture.

To the weekend stroller, the casual park peregrinator, the Pigeon Whisper of Tompkins Square Park was a living statue, a totem of the park’s southwest corner. A man fixed eternally in the present with a past never considered. The years and elements eroded his exterior, motions molasses-gummed by age and neglected health, skin thick as elephant hide, slumped posture

exuding the solitude of an individual long unapproached. He transformed into a persona unrecognizable from the youth in love who once galvanized a group of disparate malcontents to form a club whose purpose was to leave an impression on a city that couldn’t differentiate them from the piles of bird shit that matured on the shoulders of park statues, only to be wiped away overnight by a strong gust of wind or substantial rain.

n n n For more information on author Jeremy Lawrence, please visit our Contributors Page.

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FICTION | ISAAC SORELL

The Pit

By Isaac Sorell

“Hey, what’s the matter with you? Aren’t you gonna play?” Graham was startled from his trance by a girl narrowing her blue eyes at him.

Her blonde hair was tied in pigtails and glowed white under the harsh fluorescents. Everywhere around them, kids ran shrieking past. The entire place reeked of sweat and greasy pizza, something Graham’s mother had crinkled her nose at when they first entered Play Palace.

The girl scowled as she awaited an answer. She looked his age, about nine. Graham opened and closed his mouth like a dying fish, trying to respond. Growing impatient, the girl took off. He anxiously watched as she leapt into the foam pit in the middle of the room. Her pigtails streamed behind her like the ribbons of a kite.

Graham caught himself spacing off frequently these days. A scrawny kid with thick glasses, he was desperate to fit in. He gave himself a sharp pinch on the arm; the coming bruise would fashion as a reminder to be less weird. But he couldn’t help it. As the pigtailed girl emerged from the foam with a laugh that echoed off the neon-painted walls, a dense stone was forming inside Graham’s gut.

For the past two weeks, Graham had begged his mother to take him to Play Palace. Every time the commercial came on TV, he would quickly raise the volume so she would hear about “the largest indoor playground in the Northeast” and ooh over the colorful images of immense climbing

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structures, trampolines, obstacle courses, and arcade games. Nonstop, he barraged her with Play Palace’s slogan, using the same sing-song voice as the narrator: Just off of Highway Eleven, it’s a kid’s version of heaven!

Although the commercials were certainly enticing, Graham’s desperation to visit had initially grown from his classmates’ first-hand stories about Play Palace. It had been the venue for Andy Wheeler’s ninth birthday party earlier that month. Graham loathed Andy: he breathed out of his mouth while he ate, creating a sound like he was suffocating in thick mud. It was usually gross enough to make Graham abandon his lunch if they were seated too close to each other in the cafeteria. Plus, Andy was a compulsive liar. He was always saying things like: “The CIA gave me a gun to protect myself because I’m on a secret mission, but I can’t show it to you now because I left it at home.” Although Graham could never prove his stories to be untrue (Andy’s gift for lying was only superseded by his gift for remembering perfectly the details of his lies), he was pretty sure that the CIA would be uninterested in a kid as dumb and gross as Andy Wheeler. But despite all that, Andy’s birthday parties were not to be missed because the Wheelers were rich. They always had the best cake and the best party favors.

However, Graham had been unable to attend Andy’s most recent party at Play Palace for two reasons. The first was the excuse his mother FALL 2021

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gave: the party fell on a Saturday, which was when Graham saw Dr. Greene once a week. The second, which went unspoken but Graham knew to be true, was that “the incident” (as it had come to be called) that initially landed Graham in Dr. Greene’s office had occurred at Andy’s previous birthday party, one year ago. Ever since then, his mother had steered him clear of the Wheelers, trying to protect her son from anything further upsetting.

“The incident” was the near drowning of Andy’s younger sister, Katy, in the Wheelers’ backyard pool. Katy was three at the time and small, even for a toddler, and Graham had been the only one near her when it happened. Despite how hard Graham tried to forget that awful day, small details would often surface unwelcomed. There was Mrs. Wheeler’s scream when she discovered the scene from above, Mr. Wheeler bounding over the deck railing like an Olympic hurdler and plunging in after his daughter, Katy motionless on the pavement with her wet dress clinging tightly to her tiny body, another parent pumping his hands against her chest in a movement that Graham had only seen in movies until then, and most prominent of all, his mother’s face when she was informed on their way out that he had witnessed the whole grisly affair.

After that, Graham started wetting the bed again (something he hadn’t done in years). He would pretend to be sick to get out of school, and he began to cling to his mother’s side incessantly.

Graham’s mother became so distraught by his behavior that she brought him to a child psychologist. And so, one year later, while his classmates were enjoying Andy Wheeler’s ninth birthday at Play Palace, Graham had been in his weekly misery with Dr. Greene.

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Graham hated Dr. Greene. He was a pudgy, bald man who constantly smelled of cleaning products. His office was painted the color of his namesake (probably as a means to amuse but Graham found it nauseating) and was full of baby toys— wooden blocks with letters, teddy bears with stitched-on hearts, and a raggedy puppet that looked like a demented hybrid between a dog and a moose. The puppet’s name was Secret Sammy, and his designated purpose was to listen to all of Graham’s “uncomfortable feelings.” Often, Graham wondered if it would be rude to tell Secret Sammy that his disturbing appearance contributed to those feelings.

Most of his visits involved answering the same questions from Dr. Greene over and over again.

“What did you do in school this week? Do you have nightmares? How often do you think about your father?” “I don’t remember. Sometimes.

Never, he died when I was a baby.” These questions bothered Graham, not because they were personal, but because he couldn’t understand how they related to each other.

However, Graham much preferred these absurd interrogations to the dreaded prompt: “Why don’t you tell me what you remember about that day.” Dr. Greene’s yellowing eyes would scan him in a rapid motion that made Graham feel like the walls were closing in. He didn’t want to talk about Katie Wheeler or the pool. He clamped his mouth so tight, for fear that something may slip out, that his jaw would ache for days following the appointment. After what felt like an eternity, Dr. Greene would take pity and return to asking him about his dead father.

As unpleasant as the time spent with Dr. Greene was, he dreaded the ends of his appointments even more. On their way out, Dr. Green would

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whisper to his mother and shake his head solemnly. Later in the car, she would glance back at Graham through the rear-view mirror with misty eyes.

Nevertheless, Graham’s newfound enthusiasm about Play Palace had encouraged both Dr. Greene and his mother, and so it was decided that she should take him on his own to reconcile missing the party. But now, after only a few minutes there, Graham’s excitement was replaced with trepidation for what hadn’t been advertised: the foam pit and its resemblance to the Wheelers’ swimming pool. It was filled with blue foam cubes, each one about the size of his own head, and as he watched the pigtailed girl wade through them, he broke out into a cold sweat. From all angles, kids jumped feet-first, head-first, on their backs, and on their stomachs, into the sea of cubes before hoisting their bodies out and propelling them back in again.

Needing reassurance, Graham turned to find his mother and spotted her talking on her phone, huddled in a corner with one hand covering her opposite ear. Smiling at him, she rolled her eyes and mouthed: It’s just work. Go play! Graham didn’t understand much about his mother’s job except that she was plagued by calls (always at the most inconvenient times) from her boss, who she sometimes referred to as “Mr. Piggy” after drinking more than one glass of wine.

In fact, it had been a call from Mr. Piggy that had made them late on the day of “the incident.” Five minutes before they were supposed to leave for the Wheelers—Graham’s shoes already on, sunscreen heavily applied—his mother’s phone rang. So, it was not until over an hour later that they were finally knocking on the Wheelers’ huge front door and Graham was mourning the slice of cake he’d surely missed. Mrs. Wheeler had CANYON VOICES

answered, wearing a pink dress and her wrists clinking with too many bracelets. Little Katy was grasping at her mother’s legs, her hair so blonde it was practically white. Mrs. Wheeler’s forehead didn’t wrinkle (no part of her face ever did) as she frowned at his mother. Her eyes narrowed like a hawk readying to capture its prey: “Oh, it’s you.”

“I’m so sorry we’re late, Mrs. Wheeler,” Graham’s mother had said, quickly brushing her hair into place. She always seemed to crumple in Mrs. Wheeler’s presence.

Mrs. Wheeler’s face broke into a smile like the people in the advertisements for the local dentist that Graham sometimes saw in the newspaper.

“You didn’t RSVP, dear.”

“I’m so sorry. I never realized—I must have forgot—” “No, it’s quite alright! I’m just afraid that I didn’t get a party favor for Graham here.” It had not seemed possible, but Mrs. Wheeler’s smile grew even larger.

Before Graham could show his disappointment, his mother had vehemently assured Mrs. Wheeler that it was no trouble at all. “Well, good,” she replied, her hawkish eyes now trained on Graham, “I wouldn’t want there to be a problem.”

But there had been a problem. As soon as Graham entered the house (the size of the living room alone dwarfed his apartment), he noticed that none of the kids were outside playing by the pool as usual. Instead, they were lumped together on the couches and floor, all completely transfixed on iPads. Graham’s heart sunk—so that was the luxurious party favor he’d missed.

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FICTION | ISAAC SORELL

Never could his mother have afforded an iPad, and so to Graham’s chagrin, he watched the kids tap their screens in a stupor. His mother’s forgetfulness over a stupid RSVP had cost him the greatest party favor the Wheelers had ever given. Feeling wretched, he lamely wished a happy birthday to Andy, who barely looked up to acknowledge him, before stomping out back to the pool.

brought more tumbling down to take their place.

The sides of the pit appeared miles away.

Back across the room at Play Palace, Graham suddenly caught the eyes of the pigtailed girl, and he quickly looked away. With his cheeks hot, he gave himself another quick pinch. Afraid that other kids were growing suspicious of his inability to play in the foam pit, Graham removed his glasses and placed them gently to the side. His near-sighted vision blurred the faces of the kids streaking past, their anonymity a surprising comfort.

Then Graham felt the sensation of a balloon deflating in his stomach as the blue of the cubes brought the pool and Katy Wheeler rushing back into his mind. Heat radiated from the foam like the afternoon sun beating down on his face.

Sweat began to form as he kicked again, trying to escape, but the sounds of the Wheelers’ backyard began to encroach on him: a neighboring lawnmower, the voices of drunk adults laughing and drifting out through an upstairs window, the buzzing of the first bugs of summer. And there was Katy, all alone, silent and waiting at the pool’s edge.

He took a deep breath. Stumbling at first, he started forward. His legs felt heavy like bricks, but he kept his pace until the last possible second when he leaped from the pit’s edge. The cool air streamed past. He squeezed his eyes shut tight as the foam cubes came rushing up from below.

Their scratchy embrace welcomed him. As he landed waist-deep with a little bounce, he laughed with relief. He craned his neck to peer out of the pit. He hoped his mother had witnessed his bravery. But when he looked, he could not make out her familiar shape. In fact, he couldn’t detect anyone. An unnatural silence had filled the space. It seemed the other kids had gone, presumably in search of other, more exciting rooms.

Graham attempted to stand, but the foam cubes beneath offered no support. Next, he grabbed at the surrounding cubes but dislodging them CANYON VOICES

He tried not to think of those illustrations of jungle adventurers trapped in quicksand that he had seen in a National Geographic magazine at the library. Desperate to move, Graham kicked his legs like he was attempting a freestyle stroke, but he only managed to sink farther into the pit.

Graham wanted desperately to stop it. He had buried the secret deep down inside himself for so long. But now, as the cubes grew higher above Graham from his feeble kicks, the memory of what he had done towered before him. He remembered placing his hand on Katy’s back.

How he had felt her small, delicate spine before he pushed.

Particles from the foam formed a thick residue that coated his lips, drying out his mouth. He could feel it in his eyes, too. Tears streaming, he itched them, but it only made the burning sensation worse. Squinting from the pain, all he could think of was Katy. He wasn’t sure why he had shoved her. He had been upset with his mother’s forgetfulness and her obligation to her work calls. Maybe he had wanted to get back at FALL 2021

FICTION | ISAAC SORELL

Mrs. Wheeler for the horrible way she had looked at his mother or perhaps he just felt cheated out of an expensive gift. But whatever the reason was, it hadn’t mattered when Katy tumbled from Graham’s extended arms and into the water with an eerily muted splash.

She hadn’t died. How often Graham had tried to console himself with that fact! Katy had spent about a week in the hospital recovering, during which time Andy had told any kid who would listen that the accident had been a failed assassination attempt from a Russian spy who knew of his involvement with the CIA. But Andy’s lie aside, that’s how Katy’s fall had been labeled—an accident. No one had seen Graham push her. In fact, Mrs. Wheeler had called his mother in hysterics later that day when it was clear Katy would survive and asked her to thank Graham for trying to save her baby girl’s life.

Falsely praised for his heroics, how could he have confessed to his mother? He certainly wouldn’t have told Dr. Greene. And so, the truth had weighed on him all this time like an immense boulder.

In the pit, Graham cried out for his mother, but his voice was raspy from the foam particles entering his lungs. No one answered. Where was she? Had she abandoned him? Had she finally uncovered what he’d done? The chemical smell of the foam infiltrated his nose as he pictured Katy: how her eyes had gazed up at him through the pool’s surface, wide with surprise, like some scared animal frozen in the sudden flash of headlights. Suspended below the surface, her blonde hair had stood away from her head in every direction as if she had touched one of those static electricity balls at the Science Museum.

Why hadn’t she struggled? In a frenzy, Graham thrust out all his limbs, kicking and punching

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and descending farther into the pit. Meanwhile, cubes landed ceaselessly on his head.

Then he felt it. His whole body tensed.

Something had brushed his left foot. Was it foam? No, it had definitely felt solid, intentional.

His tears obscured his already impaired vision as Graham frantically dug at the foam around him.

However, no matter how much he uncovered, the cubes kept appearing. As he reached deep into the pit, he felt something cold grasp his arm.

Like an apparition, the shape of a young girl emerged from the foam.

With horror, Graham watched this strange figure morph into Katy Wheeler. He had imagined her countless times, watching him on the playground, through the bus window, from the corner of his bedroom. Graham had always managed to make her disappear by shutting his eyes tightly, but the girl now in front of him was no daydream. Her distinct blonde-white hair appeared electric. He thought she would be angry; she should be angry! But as she drew into focus, her wide blue eyes showed only bewilderment.

Terrified by his own guilt, Graham couldn’t think. He didn’t question why the Katy before him was so much older or why her hair was tied in pigtails. Instead, he sobbed uncontrollably: “I’m sorry, Katy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

She was confused at first. She didn’t know who Katy was or why the boy was crying. Nevertheless, the pigtailed girl hesitantly took his hand in hers. “It’s okay,” she whispered. She carefully rubbed the smooth skin of his palm, like her mom did for her whenever she was sick in bed.

She took notice of the fresh bruises on his arm.

“It’s all okay.”

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FICTION | ISAAC SORELL

Graham’s desperate apologies diminished to a steady whimper, absorbed by the surrounding foam. As the girl cradled his hand, Graham felt the heavy stone inside himself loosen and crumble away. The two stayed joined for a long while, floating in the foam. Even when other kids returned to jump in the pit, their noise and chaos was kept at a dull drone.

Only when Graham heard the familiar sound of his mother calling did he start to move.

Gently releasing the girl’s hand, he crawled across the buoyant surface of the pit and lifted himself out. His mother was there to hand him his glasses. He put them on, his vision restored, and he didn’t look back.

n n n For more information on author Isaac Sorell, please visit our Contributors Page.

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FALL 2021

FICTION | ALFREDO SALVATORE ARCILESI

Electric Candle

By Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi

Heart pumping faster than her legs, she feared she might kill her mother, feared her father would catch up to her.

Her heart stopped.

“Cora!”

Her father caught up to her.

Oh, no! Daddy’s getting closer, she thought.

He’s s’posed to be sleeping.

Then a double crash against her small ribcage.

Her mother died.

And another.

Ignoring her father's pursuit, Cora ran past the quiet houses lining the quiet street on this otherwise quiet night. Past the bungalow, home to Mr. King, who had dressed as Santa Claus one Christmas “'cause he's too busy to do it himself,” Mr. King had explained. Past Ms. Shelley's dark, leafy lawn, where she hosted Easter egg hunts “‘cause the Easter Bunny's too busy to hide the eggs himself, so I help out,” Ms. Shelley had assured. Past Dr. Deaver's home that doubled as his dental office, where he had presented five-year-old Cora with a dollar to commemorate her first lost tooth, because, well... “The Tooth Fairy's too busy.” Past the houses that remained dark, for their inhabitants had yet to be awakened by

Another.

Her heart rediscovered its rhythm.

Her mother was still alive.

Her father—in spite of the closing sounds—had yet to catch up to her.

Cora's heart had forgotten a pair of beats, one per terrible thought: What if they knew about the lie?

What if they were in on the lie? Them. Mr. King. Ms. Shelley. Dr. Deaver. Daddy.

The doctor.

“Cora!” A breath. “Stop!”

Blazing through a dead intersection, Cora spared a thought for the archetypes on whose behalf her neighbours claimed to work during their respective seasons. She wondered where they were: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy. Wondered if they saw the X-ray, the way she had. She wondered if they saw the lie. OrCANYON VOICES

And when she thought she couldn't lose another beat: What if mommy lied to me?

No. Impossible.

FALL 2021

FICTION | ALFREDO SALVATORE ARCILESI

Though it was looking that way.

Cora didn't want to think of her mother in that light All the more reason to run.

“Cora!”

Too close.

sleeping on the other end of the couch. She had tiptoed toward the front door, and after tense moments with the loud lock and creaky hinges, made her escape. The cold air had stabbed her body, trying to get to that special spot into which it had settled three weeks ago, trying to send her back to the hospital. She hadn't intended to run, though she knew she should hurry; there was no guarantee her father would remain asleep.

He was quick for someone who was not only old, but had been asleep. They had been watching television; he had allowed her to stay up as late as she wanted, a sort of gift— including all the junk food she could pack into her sugar-and-salt-coated belly—to celebrate her recovery.

Down the front steps.

Recovery.

“Cora!”

The X-ray, she thought. The lie.

Daddy's awake! she had thought. He's coming!

The plan had formed during her time in the hospital, then solidified in her bedroom (after the doctor deemed it safe enough for her to return home) into something simple, doable. Her footsteps were light, quiet—the coughing fits had faded to wheezes—and her father had taken to marathon sleeping in the wake of the loss of their beloved matriarch. The cemetery was only seconds away, past Mr. King's, Ms. Shelley’s, and Dr. Deaver's.

Of course, Cora had to be careful, for the last time she snuck out of the house she ended up in the hospital, where the lie had waited to be discovered.

Breaking into a sprint, the race for the cemetery had begun.

Within her.

Tonight, not seconds but minutes ago, Cora had eased away from her father, uncomfortably CANYON VOICES

Down the driveway.

To the right, along the sidewalk that had led her and her father from house to cemetery every day after their first, ceremonial visit.

Now, finally, breathlessly turning into the cemetery, Cora kept an eye and ear out for zombies, though she couldn't be bothered with them at the moment. Or any moment.

Now was her only chance to learn the truth.

“Cora!”

She knew her mother's name, but not the letters of which it was comprised. She knew her mother's headstone, but not in the thick darkness. She recognized the tree against which the headstone seemingly rested, and- Yes! Made out its twisted silhouette, shaped by the streetlamp from beyond the cemetery.

FALL 2021

FICTION | ALFREDO SALVATORE ARCILESI

The frozen grass ended. The mound of earth began, a heavy blanket over her mother (if she was there), tucked in by the small yellow excavator that had patiently waited for her, her father, and the few mourners to leave before it could discreetly perform its job.

Cora dove to her knees, and began digging her short fingers into the cold dirt, yanking out pitiful handfuls. The small craters her fists made quickly filled in with seemingly more black soil than there had been. Determined, she thrashed at the dirt.

“What're you...” Quick breaths. “...doing...”

More quick breaths. “...Cora!?”

Frozen razors cut hot tracks into her cheeks. She used both anesthetized hands to investigate the conflicting sensation, but succeeded only in lodging clumps of cold, hard dirt into her teary eyes.

Stupid!

She was angry to had shed even one tear in the presence of her father. She continued to dig, furiously, but the dirt stung her eyes. She tried to ignore the annoying pain, but gave in to wiping her eyes, depositing more dirt within them.

Again, she tried to dig…

She continued the excavation as if her father hadn't finally caught up to her, as if he wasn't witnessing her apparent breakdown, too stunned to take the final steps to seize her, to stop her from spraying his pants with flung dirt.

To stop her from disturbing the ground, his wife, her mother.

Cora dug harder, deeper, numbness creeping throughout her hands.

I gotta know! she told herself.

Ignoring her father, who knelt before her.

Again, she wiped her eyes...

Tried to dig...

Wiped her eyes...

Dig...

Wipe...

With a scream of frustration, loud and fearsome enough to scare nearby zombies back into their graves, exhausted and defeated Cora collapsed onto her side, feeling nothing.

Except her heartbeat.

I gotta know!

Ignoring her father, who took a face full of dirt.

Many heartbeats—pounding her chest, neck, ears, pulsing throughout her tired legs, her unfeeling hands.

I GOTTA KNOW! He didn't stop her.

'Cause he knows I know! she thought.

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Another heartbeat joined her own. Slower.

Calmer.

Too tired to reject him, too cold to admit her body needed his warmth, Cora wondered if her embracing father's own mother or father or FALL 2021

FICTION | ALFREDO SALVATORE ARCILESI

someone he loved, someone he trusted, lived in his beating heart. Or if they had lied to him, too.

Perhaps it was the cooing, coupled with the gentle rocking.

Perhaps it was the way her heart began to slow, calm, synchronize with her father's.

Perhaps it was the pathetic progress she—a mere girl, not a professional excavator—had made, and knew she would never learn the truth, see it for herself.

Perhaps it was the way her father whispered it was okay, all okay.

lied to me.” Thinking about her mother as a liar had made her feel bad, guilty; saying it aloud made her feel outright criminal.

As she had in the hospital bed, then in her own bed, Cora replayed the lies in her exhausted, perplexed mind: “No matter what happens, I'll always be in your heart.”—her mother's final words, the night before the surgery.

“That's just Mommy giving you hugs and kisses.”—her father, shortly after the funeral, clarifying what Cora took to be a ghost in her bedroom.

“It's not okay!” Cora blasted, elbowing his chest.

His heart. She didn't need the ambient streetlamp to illuminate her father's stunned, hurt expression. “I wanna see Mommy!”

Mommy giving me hugs and kisses?

In the past couple of weeks, she had come to know what the beginning of her father's crying sounded like: a hitch in his voice, as if he was trying to prevent a sneeze. She heard it now.

But instead of speaking in tears, he spoke in words. “I... I know you do. I want to see Mommy, too, but-”

Sneaking out of the house after what her father told her.

“Where is she?”

Silence from his silhouette.

“Where. Is. She?” Three numb fists pounding against his chest.

Then it came: the not-quite sneeze, followed by the awkward sobbing. “I'm sorry, I...” He swallowed the rest.

“You lied to me, Daddy.” Whatever tears she reserved, her father used. “You and Mommy CANYON VOICES

How could that be if she's s'posed to be in my heart?

Standing in the windy backyard, receiving— and trying to return—her mother's hugs and kisses.

Her father discovering her weather-ravaged body the following morning.

The doctor showing her the X-ray of her chest, where her new-moan-yeah no longer threatened.

“But Mommy wasn't there, in the X-ray,” Cora said now, the tears brewing again. “I looked and looked and I couldn't see her.” A tear betrayed her. She didn't bother to catch it, not if her father hadn't seen it.

FALL 2021

FICTION | ALFREDO SALVATORE ARCILESI

“So if Mommy's not in my heart, and mommy's not the wind, giving me hugs and kisses,” she pointed a dirt-encrusted digit at the pile of disturbed earth, “then she's gotta be in there.

She's gotta.”

What she took for yet another tear landing on her cheek was, in fact, one of her father's.

Or's it just daddy's bedroom now?

She didn't know.

Her parents'—her father's?—bed squealed, then silenced.

She hated to ruin her father's careful work, but she needed to know.

“I saw Mommy in the coughing, and I saw them put the coughing in the ground.” She pointed at the spot where she was certain her mother was buried in her coffin.

If whimpers were speech, then Cora might have understood what her father was trying to say.

Kicking away the comforter, Cora, aware of where the creaks hid among her floor, tiptoed toward the mirror sitting atop the drawer. After minutes of careful study, she saw that her father had lied to her again, in the cemetery: she saw not a single trace of her mother within her features.

“Mommy is in there, right?”

“True talk,” daddy had said.

She tried to push against her father’s embrace, the only response he could muster.

“Right?” Cora managed, before giving in. *** In spite of her father's snug work, Cora still felt the breeze that wasn't her mother's hugs and kisses penetrating the thick comforter. He kissed each bathed cheek—one from him, one “from” her mother; they both knew, but never brought up—and left. Tomorrow they would have a talk about mommy. “True talk,” daddy had said.

Tomorrow.

Navigating the creak-mines strewn about the floor, Cora returned to bed, turned on her side, and stared at the nightlight her mother had installed. In the shape of a candle, its flame perpetually ablaze, albeit with the help of electricity, the small beacon of comfort had defended Cora from an assortment of bumps in the night. No longer fearing those bumps, she reached for the nightlight, but stopped.

A new fear.

A fear of her own making:

The creaky hallway steps she had once thought belonged to a ghost disappeared into her parent’s bedroom.

If I turn off the nightlight, how will mommy know where I am?

n n n For more information on author Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi, please visit our Contributors Page.

CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

FICTION | SABRINA AKINS

Starting Blue

By Sabrina Akins

Starting Blue.

His hands are Blue. Too Blue.

They shiver and the chill leaves nails up his spine; they rust through his quivering bones and create an ache that causes buglosses to blossom in his chest. Their stems wind into his lungs, burning every spot they touch with melancholy while its glacial petals freeze his blood.

He breathes, but only to feel the tight coiling of pain in his chest so he knows he’s alive -- that as his lungs crumble to poisonous ashes that he is alright.

He must be alright so that when they look into his eyes they won’t-His eyes are Red. Too Red. He gazes into them and thinks that maybe he should cut into the lines that are permanently etched there.

He thinks he should draw the Color out and have it soak his face so he can feel the swirling feeling of warmth and its passing hopefulness.

Because he does not like his face, it’s– His face is Green. Too Green.

Always sickly.

People do not wish to look at him with his veins contrasting against his skin; it’s an acid seeping through the snow of his flesh.

They don’t want to see what they will be when their future is long gone.

They don’t want to see how disgust can run through your veins and make the rust combust and the flowers wilt. To make a dark stain on your being.

But maybe that’s not a bad thing because-It’s Black. Too Black.

He thinks he’ll never reach out of this void, but he just wants to comfort his friends with tears streaming down their faces.

Even as he floats, and his eyes turn dark, they continue to put dirt on him.

The coffin is getting colder now, and so are their faces.

He just doesn’t want them to turn-Ending Blue.

n n n For more information on author Sabrina Akins, please visit our Contributors Page.

CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

FICTION | RUTH ROTKOWITZ

Delilah

By Ruth Rotkowitz

My name will go down in history associated with evil. With betrayal, seduction, cruelty. I will be cursed by everyone – people who never knew me, children learning about me, parents holding my name up as a warning to their onthe-cusp-of-adulthood young.

My name is – or rather, was – Delilah. Ah, yes, you recognize it. Of course, it was not my real name. My parents gave me another name, a lovely name meaning “sweetness” in our tongue. I dare not ever pronounce that name, for I do not deserve it. That girl with that name is dead.

They were good people, my parents -hardworking farmers in a small village. They had plans for me, their only daughter. Innocent plans, commonplace plans. Marriage to someone from the village, or a nearby one. A good, hardworking husband, children, a home not far from theirs.

What spoiled their plan, I suppose, was my looks. Oh, I always knew I was considered beautiful; people in the village told me that all the time. The boys became embarrassed when I appeared, and either ran off or cast sidelong glances my way. My mother worried that it would go to my head, and she made sure I assisted her in all the work in the house – preparing meals for the family, cleaning the clothes, rubbing and polishing our cooking utensils until my fingers were raw. And she taught me to nurture the qualities of hard CANYON VOICES

work, loyalty, and goodness in myself, and to prize them in others. “Looks don’t last, darling,” she would tell me. “Your character does.” Then she would pat me on the head, letting me know she loved me.

Ah, my dear mother. I wonder if she and my father are even still alive. I suppose my brothers are, somewhere, but they would hardly remember me.

You see, beauty is a curse for women – make no mistake. My large, brown, almond-shaped eyes; my long, thick, dark hair; my bronzed, smooth skin; my shapely body. As I grew older, I understood better what others, especially males, saw and imagined when they gazed upon me. I saw glittering in my father’s eyes when he heard others remark on my beauty. I am sure he imagined a good match for me, possibly one that would enrich him. My mother, on the other hand, became nervous and fussy when she heard these compliments, admonishing me to cover up my hair and scolding me for my sewing or cooking mishaps.

At one point, she wanted me to stay home at all times, shunning the outdoors. She was the one who must have known, who understood the risks.

Then that day – that horrible, cursed day – came. I was taken from my parents’ home – not by kindly invitation, but by brute force. How old was I? Oh, I don’t really know – perhaps eleven or twelve. “Where’s the beautiful girl?” the soldiers demanded as they barged into our FALL 2021

FICTION | RUTH ROTKOWITZ

house. Word had spread about my beauty, apparently. The villages were all close, and the farmers and merchants traded with one another.

I remember my father standing in our doorway, confused, as if waiting for his payment – payment that would never come.

My mother – I could hear her weeping softly inside. Perhaps this is what she had feared all along.

The armed guards who had come for me grabbed me roughly by my arms and delivered me to some big-shot general at the palace.

Terrified, I cowered in his presence when I was shoved towards him. This large man sitting on a huge chair that I thought must be a throne looked me over with cruel eyes and a coarse grimace on his pock-marked face. Then he nodded, and I was dragged away. Palace women who would not speak to me bathed and dressed me. I shook and cried the entire time, and this was completely ignored.

And then my nightmare life began. I was apparently the property of this general, and he raped me over and over again. He laughed at my crying. For the first few months, I vomited every night after he left me, even though I refused to eat and had nothing in my stomach.

I wanted to die, but that was not to be. I was haunted by his hoary breath and disgusting smell, which I could never wash off, and I cried for my parents and my village and my youth.

I thought I could not be any more repulsed until, after a night of drinking, this general invited a group of his army buddies to have a go at me, boasting of his kindness to his men.

When he found me sobbing after that, he smacked me hard across my face, and as I lay CANYON VOICES

on the floor, he kicked me in the side. “You’ll bear a child now, if you know what’s good for you,” he muttered. So that was my purpose.

After that horrid night, I lay in bed thinking about my parents and the values they had tried to instill in me. What was the point of that, if I had no control over my life? I thought of my brothers and how we played behind the houses, running along the streams and catching frogs in buckets, just to let them go, laughing as they hopped back into the water. I ached for my safe little village life, the life I believed would always be mine. I could never show my face there again.

After that night, I turned to stone. I no longer cried; I felt nothing. I was a statue. Whatever feelings and memories I had foolishly harbored were banished. They no longer existed. I rose each day in silence, ate enough to sustain myself, walked about the area of the palace where I was confined, and prayed silently in the manner I was taught. What I was praying for, I could not tell you. I became a walking shell. I knew I still had my looks due to the stares I received from the men. Since I “belonged” to this general, it was only looks I received – unless the general was in a particularly generous mood. How I cursed my looks.

Perhaps I’d been praying to turn homely and plain.

Then my master got what he wanted. I became pregnant.

Those months provided a respite of sorts. The general boasted to his comrades – even though he may not have been the child’s father – but he apparently had the right to take pride in this ‘accomplishment.’ He mostly left me alone, so that the child could grow to a healthy size. I FALL 2021

FICTION | RUTH ROTKOWITZ

had never heard of that superstition, that the child’s growth would be stunted if the mother engaged in sexual activity, but there were many beliefs dictating life in that palace that I had never heard of in my village.

Of course, when he was very drunk or very angry over some military defeat, he felt no qualms about crushing me beneath him and harshly thrusting into me. My newfound ability to turn off all feeling served me well then.

One night, returning after being wounded in a skirmish with the Hebrews, he roared in fury that they would get theirs soon enough, and that I would prove my usefulness then. I could not imagine what he meant. When I looked at the other women, the servants and concubines who lived in the same section of palace as I, they looked through me with their usual blank stares. No one gave anything away; that is, if they even knew anything to give away.

I had learned from palace gossip that the Hebrews were the enemies and that our army regularly battled them. I had never heard of them before. We Philistines had been ruling over them for many years, but apparently, the Hebrews had been rebelling and winning a number of battles and skirmishes with our soldiers, and even our best fighters were getting injured or killed.

That night, the general was in a foul temper. As the medical people tended to his wounds, I kept my distance, hovering in a back room.

Then he shouted for me. I crept out, smoothing my tunic over my protruding belly so he would not forget my condition. He was surely capable of violence. Fortunately, one of the medical women, possibly out of pity for me, gave him something to drink that immediately plunged CANYON VOICES

him into a deep slumber. His snores echoed throughout the chambers all night.

A son was born to me – a healthy, strapping, beautiful baby boy. I did not know how much I wanted him until I held him in my arms. I vowed to love and care for him with all my heart, for he was bringing joy into my life. I ran my hand over his smooth skin, the soft down on his little head, the tightly curled little fingers. With tears in my eyes, I surrendered him to the midwife so that she could wash him gently and swaddle him in soft cloths. She then handed him back to me and helped me put him to my breast.

The next two years passed in a blissful blur. I could not believe how my luck had changed. I was left alone, for the most part, and, although confined to our quarters in the palace, was free to indulge in my child.

I was a devoted mother to my baby; yes, I know I was. His eyes lit up when he saw me, and he ran to me with arms outstretched as he got older. I sang to him and played with him; I tickled him and told him silly stories when we lay down for naps. I took him for walks in the palace courtyard. Hand in hand, we strolled the grounds, examining the flowers and laughing at the chirping of the birds, waving to the other children climbing on the blocks set up in the center of the yard.

My idyllic interlude ended a little past my son’s second birthday. He had begun talking, pronouncing words with adorable intensity, looking at me for approval. He walked early, and began running, crashing into things and falling but hardly ever crying. I could not get enough of this amazing child. I kissed his round cheeks and ruffled his wavy dark hair.

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FICTION | RUTH ROTKOWITZ

He would then kiss me and ruffle my hair, and we laughed and laughed. My life was filled with sunshine and song. My drab gray world was now bursting with color. Flowers seemed to wink at us, their pinks and yellows and reds glowing.

What a naïve little fool I was! Did I really think I’d been kidnapped from my parents’ home to enjoy the fulfillment of motherhood? I didn’t think. The day came. Armed guards again, this time to take my son from me.

“You will see him again, if you do what you are told.”

“Anything! What do I have to do?” I was frantic, tearing at my hair, my clothes. My baby studied the face of the man carrying him, then looked at me quizzically. He seemed to have no fear.

“You will be told tonight!” And off they went.

My baby stared at me over the soldier’s shoulder, and I think his lip was beginning to quiver.

The general made my assignment clear that evening. The Philistine army was being frustrated by the Hebrews, whose fighting skill was defeating us. There was one Hebrew whose strength and battle skills were legendary. No man, from any tribe, had ever exhibited the kind of strength he had. The general had been obsessed with bringing down this man, whose name was Samson – not only because of his value to his people as a fighter, but also for his value as a morale-builder. The Hebrews seemed to adore him, and gained courage from his example. The Hebrews did not worship people, but if they did, Samson would be the

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one to be worshipped. He was as close to a god as they had.

Oh, when that coarse, disgusting general started expounding on this Samson, his spittle flying all over the room and his face red and swollen, I remembered overhearing the men talking of their battles, and they had mentioned a Samson – with awe and admiration, as well as fear and hatred. They had to get him. It would weaken the Hebrews and show them who were the better people and who would always rule the area.

My part was to seduce this man, this Hebrew. It was known that he liked Philistine women, and often came over the border at night, looking for a woman. I was to be waiting. I was to get him to want me and need me and trust me – and then I was to get him to tell me the secret of his incredible strength. Once I could divulge to the general Samson’s secret, they could destroy him – and I would be reunited with my child.

The story went around that it was money I was being given, but that was because the business with my child was kept secret; I was ordered to tell no one. When I asked where my baby had been taken, the general grinned. If I did what I was told….

And if I failed to obtain this secret? I never had to ask. “Your son will be killed,” the general said, flicking dirt off his sleeve. “Thrown to the wild animals in the forest.”

That night, a few women were sent to get me ready. They brushed and twirled my hair, they smudged kohl around my eyes, they draped me in silken scarves, choosing colors that set off my skin tone and eyes. I refused to look in the glass when they were done. My heart was

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pounding. I was taken to a border area in the dark, told to wait. It wasn’t long.

Samson was huge – bigger than any man I had ever seen. His arms and legs were as wide and hard as pillars of marble, and his neck was thick. I trembled with fear when I first saw him, seeing that with his size and strength, he could crush and kill me if he so chose. Yet he had a ready smile and kind eyes. He took me gently and caressed me. I watched him rub his hands along my arms and massage my stomach. His hair was long and thick, and it fell over his face and down his shoulders. He took my hands in his and placed them on his hair, on his chest, between his legs. He called me his beauty, and said he would come back.

All men want the same things, that is for sure.

Philistine or Hebrew, a man is a man. But there can be differences, I learned. For one thing, I had never seen a circumcised man. Samson laughed when he saw me staring.

“Don’t think that changes anything, my beauty,” he said. “I can give you as much pleasure – maybe more – than any Philistine man.” As if I wanted or ever expected pleasure from a man. If only he knew my misery. But I played along, with coquettish poses.

Another difference was that Samson began to talk to me, to tell me things. He was more than a warrior – he was a judge. His people did not have a king; they had judges, who solved conflicts and issued rulings. What a strange and lovely concept! He told me about some of the cases that had been brought before him, and how he had decided them. He always thought carefully about what was fair, and how the people involved would be affected. I listened in amazement. The Philistine soldiers CANYON VOICES

always spoke so harshly of the Hebrews, the enemy. Yet Samson seemed to be a good, kind, caring man. I actually looked forward to his visits, for they were a reprieve from the grief of missing my son and worrying about his fate.

Samson made me feel wanted and protected, as strange as that sounds. I hadn’t felt wanted and protected since being ripped from my childhood home.

Of course, I’d heard the rumors about Samson, how he’d killed a lion with his bare hands and how he could take on several men at once and always come out the victor. And how he took revenge on anyone who slighted him. He was attracted to Philistine women, however, and I knew this pained his family and perhaps others of his people. He had supposedly been married for a time to a Philistine. Was it just his strength that so threatened the Philistine men?

Did they sense that their time as rulers over the Hebrews and in the region was waning?

At any rate, he knew where to find me, and I was always ready for him. I’d like to think he loved me, at least a little. I know the love for my baby took up my entire heart, but I came to care deeply for Samson. Finally, after several months of our trysts, the general pressured me to get the information he wanted. “I’ve waited long enough!” he bellowed in a drunken stupor.

“If you’re worth anything…”

He could order my son killed, killed in a horrible way. I scurried out of the room to get myself prettied up for Samson.

How would I ever get him to divulge his secret, the source of his strength? His loyalty to his people was fierce, and he was well aware of his role as an example and a leader to them. He would never betray them.

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I would have to use my beauty, my womanly skills of seduction. If he felt anything for me – and I believe he did – he might trust me and give in. After our lovemaking, when we lay in bed together, our legs still entwined and my head on Samson’s broad, hard chest, I murmured that I would love to know how he could be tied up so that he could not free himself. He chuckled playfully and teased me about my sexual tastes. I let him think what he wanted, as long as he gave me the information.

“I will tell you, my darling Delilah,” he said.

He then proceeded to describe a certain kind of rope that would keep him bound so that he could not escape. He went into great detail about where such rope can be found and how he should be bound. When he fell asleep, I called the guards in and reported what I’d learned, and they instantly went in search of this rope and bound my sleeping Samson. But when Samson awoke and saw the ropes, he simply flexed his muscles and snapped them off. He then rose from the bed, and without a backward glance at me, burst from the door, breaking the door off its hinges in the process.

So he’d played me. Now he must know that I was part of a trap for him. I sulked, assuming he would never return. What would the general do? Would he really kill my baby boy? I had tried to do what he’d ordered – didn’t that count for something?

Several nights later, as I lay in bed moping and listening to the crickets chirping and other night sounds, I heard a slight shuffling and saw a large shadow moving outside my wall.

Samson slipped noiselessly into my room in the darkness. I thought perhaps he had come to kill me for attempting to betray him. But no. He CANYON VOICES

got into bed beside me and pulled off his clothes and mine. When I searched his face afterwards, he laughed.

“I thought I would never return,” he confessed.

“But you are like a drug, my beautiful. I can’t stop dreaming of you and wanting you. I need to be with you. It’s a sickness, I know. If a man came to me with the story of what happened last time, I would advise he never touch that woman again. But sadly, I cannot take my own advice.”

With that, he fell into a sound sleep, and was gone in the morning when I awoke. I had hope, then, that he would be back. I would get to see him again, and I would get another chance to save my son.

Sure enough, he did return, and I was ready to continue prying him. He was a good actor, I’ll say that. Twice more, he told me about different types of ropes that would bind him, and twice more, I called in the guards to use those ropes. And, of course, twice more, Samson easily burst out of the ropes.

Yet he kept returning.

I turned on the tears. You don’t care about me, you don’t trust me, why can’t you share this with me…on and on I went. He was either moved or annoyed by my tears, I don’t know which. But I was certain to look my most seductive as I cried. I wore a red silky garment – he liked me in red, he’d often said – and made sure the folds of the fabric clung to my heaving breasts.

He muttered and stomped around my room, and I feared he would leave and never return this time.

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I changed tactic and poured us some wine. Let us forget this, I said in my most soothing, mellifluous voice. Come, drink. He was not supposed to drink wine, I’d heard, so I added a green-tinged coloring I’d obtained from the cook so that the drink did not look like wine.

they stole me from my parents’ home, and when they took my baby. Oh, they knew.

He came to me and lay down in my bed. His long hair flowed outward. I massaged his head and shoulders with fragrant oil and sang a soft lullaby. It was an old song of my people, a lullaby I’d often sung to my child, whose soft skin and clinging arms I longed to feel. Soon enough, I thought, turning off whatever kind feelings were surfacing toward Samson. I needed to do this.

There was silence. I thought he had fallen asleep and I’d missed my chance. But suddenly, he spoke.

When his body relaxed beneath my touch, I slipped a sleeping potion the medical woman had given me into Samson’s wine, and bade him drink. He sipped carefully at first, then guzzled the rest down with gusto. He reached for me.

When Samson was still murmuring and tossing in the bed, I whispered, “My dearest, won’t you tell me the secret of your strength now?”

“My hair,” he muttered. “It’s in my hair. It can never be cut.” *** The rest is history, a history which has blackened my name, destroyed not only Samson but me as well. I must admit, however, that as I opened my door to the soldiers outside and watched them slice off Samson’s long hair, all I could think of was holding my baby again, soon. If this was the only way…. ***

“Delilah, Delilah,” he murmured. “You are so beautiful. I dream of you. You are like a drug I can’t get enough of. Come here.”

He pulled me onto the bed. His lovemaking was so fervent I almost warned him to escape while he could still walk. His beautiful, large hands on my body lulled me into a dream of my own, the dream of Samson meeting my baby, the dream of the three of us together. The dream that could never be. I had to wipe those thoughts from my mind. If not for my son, held hostage by the general, I would beg Samson to take me with him, back to his people. Why couldn’t the three of us be a happy family? But the Philistine men are the cruelest in the world; they knew exactly what they were doing when

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Oh, Samson, Samson! If I’d known what they would do to you, oh my Samson! I did love you.

Would that have made a difference? I couldn’t tell you about my baby, for then you would understand your part in my predicament, for you would surely figure it out. I could not watch them blind you, strip you, parade you before the people, humiliate you. I would never join the crowds watching that, jeering. I stayed indoors, tearing at my hair, my clothes. But I will always remember the last look you gave me, as you awoke to the soldiers dragging you away, right before they took your eyesight. Oh my Samson! If there had been any choice! My shame – for the role I played in your downfall and for the horrid nature of my people,

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cheering and laughing at you – I can never live that down.

And my child? I never saw him again. I sought out the general immediately after Samson was taken, and he assured me that my baby would be returned to me shortly. My son was being cared for at a home not far from the castle, he said, and would be fetched. After much time had passed, I pressed again. This time, I was told he was within the palace walls and would be brought to me that very day. Then he laughed and dismissed me.

“I have done what you asked,” I reminded him, frantic at this point. “A promise was made.”

“I think you fell for your big, strong Hebrew, didn’t you?” he taunted me. “Maybe we can find you another circumcised one to replace him!” He roared as he downed his drink.

The following day was the day. Samson, my strong, caring Samson, whom I’d betrayed, now blind and shackled because of me, was paraded out in front of the palace, as crowds yelled and laughed and threw things at him. I cringed. My jaw ached from clenching. I was certain Samson, in spite of his blindness, could see me at the back of the crowd, could see my evil instead of my false beauty. I turned away, ready to run inside.

Before turning away, in horror and shame, I noticed that his hair had been growing in. It was not yet as long as it had been, but was past his ears and inching toward his shoulders, curling slightly at the edges, just as my son’s often did. It was then that I noticed Samson whispering something to the boy leading him.

The next moment, he was leaning against one of the huge marble pillars outside the palace. A CANYON VOICES

sob choking my throat, I hung my head and turned away. Suddenly, chaos reigned and everyone began running and screaming as rubble rained down upon us. The entire palace was collapsing.

I backed up but would not run. People fell all around me, screaming and calling for help. My countrymen and women – reaching up from the ground to grab at my clothes. I pushed away their grasping hands. Who had helped Samson all these months? White ash floated in the air, choking me. I noticed a gash on my arm, oozing blood. What difference did that make? I coughed and tried to reach the main palace gates, but the gates were gone.

Everything was destroyed. Bodies everywhere.

I searched for children’s bodies and found a few. All dead. I turned some of them over, bloodied and mutilated. None the one I was seeking. Where was he?

Frantically, I ran through the crowd, tripping over blocks of stone and bodies, crashing into soldiers and commonfolk, covered with blood and dirt, pushing against me. I called his name, my little boy’s name. He was nowhere. And Samson? He lay dead in the rubble. I paused for a moment, standing above his broken body, the pillar lying across his crushed chest. His face looked peaceful. He’d had his revenge at least. There was some satisfaction in that for me. If only he’d waited until I’d gotten my son back.

But that was never to be. My miserable life was over. *** I was free now. Free – whatever that meant. The city was gone, the temple destroyed, my FALL 2021

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tormentors dead. The screaming and crying became a muted background noise as I gathered up a few things. Some water for a few days, some provisions for the desert. For that is where I am headed. I am no longer Delilah, if I ever was. I have no name. Nothing and nobody.

I will wander in the desert until death finds me.

It may be in the form of marauders. It may be in the form of heat, thirst, starvation. It may be simply a broken heart. It matters not. No god – Philistine or Hebrew – will receive my prayers, as none had done anything for me when I needed help. I am alone, as I deserve to be. My story will be fabricated by others, recounted by others. The truth will die in the desert with me.

◼

Samson, if I meet you in the afterlife, would you forgive me? Would your God? No matter. I don’t deserve forgiveness. I’ve cut my hair, like your hair was cut. Yes, my beautiful hair, which you always loved to caress. And I have left the ash and dirt and soot and blood on my arms and face. No one will know me.

My child goes with me, in my heart. If I meet him in the afterlife, I will tell him what my hopes and dreams were, and how I loved him.

Perhaps he was saved from living in this terrible world of cruelty. But I would have loved him so.

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CANYON VOICES

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Jacob

By Obren Bokich

Since the bank took the Clark farm and Joanie moved to California, there weren’t any other girls my age within a mile of our place. And the Shockey twins didn’t count. They weren’t right in the head, and when I told Mama what they were doing when I brought their mother her welcome cake, she said I wasn’t to go there ever again. This is by way of saying when a grownup asked me if I was excited about starting the first grade in the fall, I replied, “Very much so,” because if I wasn’t about to turn six, I likely wouldn’t have an actual friend for another year.

friends; we laughed so hard at supper one night Papa said he was going to send us to our bedrooms if we didn’t settle down. But when his new friend Gary showed up, Wade acted like he was embarrassed by me.

I know I sound like I’m lonesome and feeling sorry for myself, and on a farm there’s no excuse for that, surrounded by friendly critters doing entertaining things. There’s a canal to swim in when it isn’t full to the top and rolling like The Great Flood, populated by interesting wild things. There are trees to climb, tall pines with branches low enough I could reach one without standing on anything, and some that blossomed with cherries, apples, and pears. My favorite wasn’t for climbing, a black walnut so tall we couldn’t see the top. The green-husked walnuts fell like missiles, then Papa dumped them on the gravel driveway and ran over them with his truck until their bright-smelling green husks came off. After they were dried, I’d crack them on an anvil with a hammer, then pick out the meat with ten-penny nails.

It was a hot day. I’d already helped Mama feed the chickens and collect the eggs. Normally, I would have been following Papa around on his chores, but he had business in Boise. If Mama knew I was bored she’d have found me chores to do, so I spent most of the afternoon in the cool basement reading a book I got from the bookmobile called Freddy the Detective, about a pig who solves crimes. I’d already read it once, but I read the one where Freddy goes to the North Pole three times, so it was relatively fresh by comparison. Papa hadn’t come home by three, and I wanted to look at the barn cat’s new kittens, so I emerged into the bright sun from the basement like Lazarus and headed for the loft.

And I especially shouldn’t have been lonesome because I had a brother, Wade. Once we were

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I didn’t want to play with them anyway. Gary was crude and creepy. And what kind of teenager has a fifth-grader best friend? But I still spied on them when I had nothing better to do. That’s how I saw what they were doing with Violet, Papa’s best Guernsey milker.

I could hear Wade and Gary talking before I got to the barn. I knew Wade would be exasperated if he saw me, so I looked through a knothole in the silvery wood. Violet’s head was locked in a

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stanchion while Wade stood on a milking stool with his pants down having sexual relations with her.

Once, I asked Mama if people did the same thing as the animals. She said what people do is different. She said people do it with someone they want to spend their whole life with, to show them how much they love them. I was pretty sure Wade didn’t want to spend his whole life with Violet, and she didn’t seem to care one way or another. She just kept chewing on the alfalfa they’d tossed into her trough. I thought about running to the house to tell Mama but remembered Wade said people who tell are worse than skunks.

Anyway, if I was going to tell on Wade I wouldn’t know where to start. Boys just naturally do stupid stuff. Like when he made a dogwood bow and shot one of Mama’s Rhode Island Reds. The arrow didn’t kill the hen, but she ran off with it stuck in her side. When Mama pulled it out, some intestine came out too, so she had to cut her head off. Mama said it was a good laying hen and she had half a mind to tell Papa. I guess she wasn’t a skunk, or maybe she was worried about what Papa would do because he can have a temper. She did use it to get Wade to do extra chores. # By the end of June, Wade was gone on his bike most days doing stuff with Gary, while I followed Papa around. Sometimes he gave me stuff to do, like fetching a tool, water, or lunch, but mostly I watched him work from the shade.

Papa had two mules to plow and haul the hay wagon. Mama named them Sally and Trina,

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after his girlfriends before they met. Sally was a sweetie, but Trina was mean as a snake, and on the Fourth of July she kicked Papa so hard we had to take him to Saint Luke’s in Boise. They hung his leg in the air with ropes and pulleys, and the doctor said it would be months before he could walk again. Mama was sick to death with worry over how the work would get done.

And not just feeding the livestock and milking the cows. Papa had seeded the south pasture with alfalfa, and it was nearly high enough for reaping and ricking.

For the first few days after Papa was in the hospital, I fed the chickens for Mama, collected the eggs, and dealt with folks responding to our “Farm Fresh Eggs” sign at the end of the lane.

I’d put the money in the egg money jar in the kitchen while she and Wade fed the pigs, sheep, and cows and did the milking. But she wasn’t a big lady, and he was a little kid, no matter what he thought. When they dropped a ten-gallon can of milk wrestling it onto Papa’s cart and it poured out onto the ground, she sat down in the dirt and cried.

It was Papa’s idea to hire someone to help out.

We were near the rail line, and though the old passenger station was closed, the freight trains stopped there for water, so travelers “ridin’ the rails” would hop off to look for something to eat. Mama didn’t believe in starvation for any of God’s creatures, so she was an easy touch.

Sometimes, if Papa needed a hand and the gentlemen were forthright, he’d take them on for harvesting or for projects where he needed a hand, like when he built the new barn to replace the one that was falling down around his ears, or when he fenced the pasture for the new alfalfa field. A few times when Papa needed a

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worker, he’d take his truck to the depot and wait for a train. He’d hire them on the spot if they didn’t look like a drunk or trouble.

by himself in a clearing in the weeds. I closed the truck door quietly behind myself and walked over to his fire.

Papa said this time we couldn’t just wait for some hungry man to wander by, then hope the guy didn’t have problems. Mama should drive down there to interview somebody for the job.

They decided they could offer $30 a month, plus board. He’d have to be able to milk and tend to the animals, mend fence, and strong enough to reap and stack the hay. But she wasn’t to take on a drunkard, and she shouldn’t hire a murderer. Mama said that wasn’t funny.

He looked younger than Papa, more like Mama’s age, with black hair that touched his shoulders and strong features and hands. He was sitting on a bucket, but I could tell he was pretty tall, maybe taller than Papa. I thought he was handsome and said, “Watcha’ doin’?”

Which was stupid because there was a coffee pot sitting in his fire.

Wade wanted to go with her, but Mama said he had to stay in case of egg customers since I was too young to be left alone. I was excited to go, even though she said it wouldn’t be like when we picked up Aunt Ruth at the train station in Boise and I got candy from the newsstand. The Kuna station had been locked up for years, so there wouldn’t be any treats, but I loved adventures and riding in Papa’s nice old truck that smelled of motor oil and dried-up leather.

“I don’t drink coffee.”

We rolled past fields bright green from spring rain where huge white birds floated down to land on stilt legs among pure black cows, milkers grazed, truck gardens teemed with budding vegetables, and my favorite, a pasture where I could pick out my someday horse. That day there were two foals, and Mama stopped so we could go to the fence and say hello.

When we got to the station there were men who looked like they came on a train sitting on the steps smoking. Mama parked the truck, told me to stay put, then walked over to interview them.

But staying put isn’t my best quality, and I saw something interesting, a man with a campfire

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“Makin’ coffee. Want some?”

“You a Mormon?”

“No, I’m six years old.”

He had a friendly smile. “Oh, yeah, I see that now. You want some milk?”

He had a small bottle with the thick cream at the top, next to a frying pan and a bowl with two eggs. I said, “Doncha need it for your coffee?”

“Don’t need all of it.” He shook the bottle, then poured half in a cup and gave it to me. It was sweet like it just came from Violet. He laughed.

“You got a mustache now.”

I wiped it off in a dignified manner and said, “What’s your name?”

“Jacob Ghost Bear. What’s yours?

“Stevie McKittrick.” I shrugged. “Actually Stephanie, but everybody calls me Stevie.”

“Sorry, I just got one bucket, but you can sit on

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this, Stevie.” He put a folded blanket down by the fire.

I looked back at the depot. Mama was busy talking to one of the men. Jacob seemed nice and I decided she’d want me to be friendly, so I sat down to talk with him for a spell. He put lard in the pan, broke the eggs into it, then tore off some bread and added it to the grease. When he set the pan on the fire, I asked him if he’d come on a train.

“It’s thirty dollars a month, plus board.”

He dipped his bread and ate, as if seriously considering my proposition, then nodded toward Mama, talking to a different man on the station steps. “And she say it’s OK for you to tell me that?”

“Why’d you get off here?”

That’s when Mama cried out, “Stevie!” and hurried over to us, looking worried. I said, “Hi, Mama,” like I was glad to see her, but I could tell I was in for it so talked as fast as I could.

“This is Jacob Ghost Bear. He can milk and feed cows and pigs and sheep and mend fence and reap and he’s not a drunkard or a murderer.”

“Those freight trains got no dinin’ car.” He laughed again. His laugh was deeper than Papa’s.

Mama said, “I’m sorry, she repeats what she hears without thinking how it makes people feel.”

I said, “You looking for work?”

Jacob got to his feet and smiled down at her.

“Your daughter knows her mind well for her age, ma’am. But I understand if you already pick somebody.”

“That I did.”

He seemed surprised.

“Wouldn’t turn it down.”

“Can you milk, and feed cows and pigs and sheep?”

“S’pose I can.”

“Can you mend fence and reap and stack hay?”

He turned the bread in the hot fat and shook the pan. “You lookin’ to hire me?”

“If you’re not a drunkard or a murderer.”

He withdrew the pan from the fire, dipped the bread in the golden yolk, and took a thoughtful bite. “No, little lady, not a drinkin’ man, and I believe in the Golden Rule.”

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“No, there was no one I trusted, and Stevie has good intuition. What she said was right. That’s what we’re looking for in a hand. It’s thirty dollars a month, plus board.”

“I told him that,” I said, exasperated, but Jacob just said, “That’ll be fine.” # Mama drove us to Saint Luke’s before we went home, so Papa could meet who we hired. Papa and Jacob were both quiet men. When they met, Papa in the special bed with his leg hanging in the air, Jacob politely holding his hat, Papa shook his hand and thanked him for helping us out. Jacob only said he hoped he’d be FALL 2021

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out of a job soon. But at home, Wade acted strange when Mama introduced Jacob to him, then took off on his bicycle, probably to tell Gary.

Mama had me show Jacob the bunkhouse. It was little, with only one bed, but it was a bunk bed, naturally. It was a nice place to sleep, especially hot summer nights. When you left the door and window open there was a breeze, and you could hear the animals and wild critters talking things over. I showed him the pump to fill the cistern for the shower and the outhouse Papa dug by the barn so he wouldn’t have to walk all the way back to the house to pee. The cows were clamoring by the barn door for their afternoon milking, and he got right to work. I helped him put feed in the stanchions and pumped water into their trough, telling him how that evil molly mule kicked Papa’s leg and how good the new Freddie the Pig book was.

Mama was pleased to see the cows back in the pasture when she shooed the chickens into the hen house. She told Jacob I’d bring his supper out about six, and he asked if he could make a fire for his coffee. Mama said he could help himself to the woodshed.

When I brought his supper out, he’d chopped some wood and was carrying it to the bunkhouse. I wanted to watch him make a fire, but my supper would be ready in a few minutes and I’d get my butt chewed if I wasn’t washed up and seated for grace.

Wade started off supper in the doghouse for being late coming home from Gary’s and dug himself deeper when he asked Mama why she’d hire a thieving Indian, that they are worse than niggers. As soon as it came out of his mouth, I

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knew it was from Gary. Mama told him she wouldn’t have that language in her house, and if she heard him say those words again she’d see Papa took the hide off him when he came home from the hospital.

When I collected Jacob’s supper dish, he had his coffee pot on the fire and was building himself a cigarette. Papa smoked sometimes but Mama was against it, so he only did it when someone offered him one. Then he could tell her it was only to be polite. Jacob said, “Best meal I’ve had in don’t know how long.”

“I’ll tell Mama. It’ll make her happy. If you got any washing, she said you should give it to me.”

“That’s kind of her. I’ll do that.”

I looked at the plate in my hand, wiped clean.

“Well, good night, Jacob.”

“Good night. And, thank you, missy.” # In the morning I wolfed down my breakfast so I could watch Jacob milk the cows. Wade was doing his chores like he always did with Papa, feeding the girls, sterilizing the cans, and hosing the pee and dung from the milking room floor, but he and Jacob didn’t say a word to each other. Wade didn’t even warn him when our bull, Casanova, stuck his nose in the door. Papa once put a twelve-gauge load of rock salt in Cassie’s butt when the stupid bull tipped over a pail of milk, but Wade seemed to want something like that to happen. I threw a stanchion block at Cassie, and he ran off bellowing and kicking up his heels. But Jacob was so busy he didn’t notice.

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Close to lunchtime I had a run of egg buyers while Mama was running errands, three cars in a row, the last one buying three dozen, almost all we had. Wade and Gary were in the kitchen, Wade making sandwiches. When I came in to get the eggs and change from Mama’s egg money jar, Wade said, “So how’s your boyfriend?”

Gary said, “Yeah, I hear you’re a Indian lover now.”

When Wade first brought Gary home, I was shy around him because he was nice to look at and confident, but now all I could think of was them having sexual relations with Violet. I wanted to tell him, “Well, that’s better than being a cow lover,” but I just got the eggs and change for the people waiting in their car.

Another car came an hour later, but there wasn’t even a half dozen left. Then Mama asked me to show Jacob how to walk ditch, set the gates, and tell him the irrigation schedule. She also said to show him the alfalfa that needed cutting, the tool and tack room, and the damn mules. I was proud she asked me and not Wade, but Wade and Gary were already gone, so she probably would have told Wade to do it if he’d been there.

I had on the yellow rubber boots Papa called my “Wellies” when I walked ditch with him.

Sometimes we talked a little, but mostly we just listened and looked at stuff. We turned the water off at sunset, so we’d be out there when the sky lit up pink and orange and purple. Papa would lean on his shovel, taking in the spectacle. Jacob just nodded when I showed him the gates and told him how long for each one. The water was high in the canal, moving CANYON VOICES

too fast to swim. It would flood the pasture pretty fast.

We crossed over to the alfalfa field, which was on five acres that Papa fenced off from the pasture, then plowed behind Sal and Trina.

Jacob opened the gate and we walked out into the green-smelling rows. He said, “Your mama’s right, it’s ready for the first cut. You got a scythe?”

I showed him the toolshed. The scythe was on a hook on the wall. Papa hadn’t used it since the fall and the blade was rusty. Jacob felt the edge, then poked around till he found the sharpening stone. He said he’d start soon as he got it good and sharp. When I was helping Mama feed and water the chickens, I saw him walk back out to the alfalfa field, the blade so clean it flashed in the afternoon sun. # That night when I brought Jacob his supper his hair was still wet from the shower and he had on the pants and shirt Mama washed for him.

He told me to thank her. Papa called, and I told him it looked like Jacob made a good start with the alfalfa. I said I felt the edge after Jacob put the scythe back in the shed and it was so sharp he could shave with it.

When I went back out to collect his supper dish, Jacob was pouring himself a cup of coffee from the pot he had on the fire. He said, “Have a seat,” and gave me a turned-over bucket to sit on next to the fire.

“So, you drink coffee yet, or you still six?”

I said, “I’m still six,” as I admired his fire. “I’m sorry Wade’s acting so stupid.”

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“He don’t seem too happy ‘bout me bein’ here.”

“I don’t know why. When we play Cowboys and Indians, he always wants to be the Indian.”

Jacob took out his tobacco and cigarette papers.

“Never understood why they call it ‘Cowboys and Indians.’ Should be ‘Soldiers and Indians.’

That’s who we was always fightin’.”

I said, “Do you want to hear a joke?”

He said, “Always want to hear a joke,” as he sprinkled tobacco on the thin paper.

I sat up straight on the bucket so I’d remember it in the right order. “Big Turtle, Middle Turtle, and Little Turtle went to a café to get some coffee, but just when the waitress brought it to them it started to rain. Big Turtle said to Middle Turtle, ‘It’s raining, go home and get the umbrella.’ Middle Turtle looked at Little Turtle and said, ‘It’s raining, go home and get the umbrella.’ But Little Turtle said, ‘If I go, how do I know you won’t drink my coffee?’ Middle Turtle said, ‘We’re not going to drink your coffee. Just go get the umbrella.’ Little Turtle said, ‘Promise you won’t drink it?’ and Big Turtle said, ‘We promise,’ like he was exasperated. So Little Turtle left to get the umbrella. Big Turtle and Middle Turtle drank their coffee slow. Turtles do everything slow.

But Little Turtle still wasn’t back when they’d finished drinking their coffee. They waited all day. Finally, Big Turtle said, ‘Well, I don’t think he’s coming back.’ Middle Turtle said, ‘Yeah, I guess we should drink his coffee.’ Then, a tiny voice from behind the coat rack said, ‘If you do, I won’t go.’ ” Jacob laughed like he really thought it was funny, not just to make a little kid feel better.

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Then he said, “So you want to hear a joke?” I said, “Yes!” and he told me the best joke ever.

“A long time ago, the Dogs would gather in their great lodge to dance for the Winter moon. After years of watchin’ them, Coyote decided it looked like fun and asked if he could join them, but the Dogs laughed at him and said no, he maybe look like a Dog, but he wasn’t a Dog.” “Coyote’s feelin’s was hurt and he cried to the moon, but the Dogs still didn’t invite him.

Anyway, Coyote watched them, hopin’ they’d change their minds, and on the next Winter Moon the Dogs held the biggest gatherin’ they ever had, with Dogs from everywhere, near and far, come to dance. Like always, Coyote asked if he could join them, and like always they laughed at him because he wasn’t a Dog. That night more Dogs came to dance than ever, and soon there wasn’t enough room for everybody.

The Dogs didn’t want to stop, but they couldn’t spin around the way they like to dance without bumpin’ into each other. Then Coyote said, ‘If you take off your tails it will give you more room and you can race around much as you want.’

The Dogs decided this was a good idea. They took off their tails and hung them on the wall of the lodge. Then they danced crazier than ever half the night. But while they danced, they made a great wind and the fire grew too big, til it reached the roof. The Dogs was so busy dancin’ they didn’t see this, but Coyote did and shouted, ‘The roof is on fire, run!’ The dogs got out, but they forgot to save their tails, and Coyote, thinkin’ now he could get even for years of their bad manners, collected them in a bag.

The Dogs was happy to see Coyote saved their tails, because they felt naked walkin’ round without them. But Coyote was still mad at them for not lettin’ him join in their Moon dance and said, ‘You wouldn’t let me dance with you. I FALL 2021

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should have left your tails in the fire.’ Then the Dogs was ashamed and said they was sorry.

Coyote said, ‘I will return your tails, but when you reach in the bag, you must take the first one you find, and that will be your tail.’ The Dogs agreed to this because they was sure they would recognize their own tails. Coyote smiled to himself when the first Dog looked into the bag to claim his tail, because the fire made them sooty, so they all looked the same. The Dog said, ‘Let me clean them,’ but Coyote said, ‘No, you promised to keep the first tail you take from the bag.’ Now Coyote didn’t hide his smile as each Dog took a tail from the bag. A few was lucky and got their own tails back, but most didn’t.

And that’s why Dogs sniff each other’s butts.

They just lookin’ for their own tails.” # There was a white oak tree in the corner of the alfalfa field that had some nice grassy shade. I brought my library book to read again the next day while Jacob cut hay. He was about a quarter done, which was good since he’d spent half the day doing other chores. It was hot and I brought him a ladle and bucket of water to drink and pour on his head. I filled it for him a few times, then fetched the whetstone to restore the scythe’s edge. That’s when I saw Wade and Gary come out of the house. It looked like they were having an argument.

I didn’t think about it again until it was time for the afternoon milking, when Jacob put the scythe away and stanchioned the cows. I was on my way to the chicken coop, when I saw Mama come out of the house and go to the barn, looking upset. I followed her, and she told Jacob she knew he’d stolen her egg money.

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I wanted him to deny it, to say he lived by the Golden Rule. But all he said was, “That so?”

I started crying, and Mama told me to go to the house. I watched from the front room till he’d packed his things and walked up the lane. After he was gone, I asked Mama how she knew Jacob took the egg money, but I already knew it was Wade, and I knew he wasn’t telling the truth. When I said that to him, he said Jacob was a thieving Injun and stomped out like he was mad. But I’d seen my brother lie before. He doesn’t look you in the eye. # I know he’s just a pig, but Freddy solves crimes by asking questions and looking at the evidence.

After supper that night, I asked Wade what time he saw Jacob take the egg money. He said it was just before lunch. I didn’t say anything, but that was when I saw him arguing with Gary while I fetched the whetstone for Jacob. Then I asked him where he was when he saw Jacob go to the kitchen. He said he’d been right outside the kitchen window.

After I helped Mama with the dishes, I stood outside where Wade said he’d been. Just like I thought, I couldn’t see Mama or the egg money jar. Then I saw Wade watching me from the doorway. I said, “You didn’t see Jacob steal the egg money.”

He said, “I did so.”

“You’re lying. I can always tell.”

“It was that dirty thievin’ Injun’.”

“You sound like Gary. He makes you do and say

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bad things.”

“He’s my friend.”

“He’s not your friend. You’re just a little kid he uses. And I know he stole the egg money. You’re gonna’ tell Momma the truth, or I’m gonna’ tell her what you did with Violet.”

His eyes got really wide. “How do you know that?’

“I saw you.”

“You wouldn’t tell. Then you’d be a skunk.”

“There are worse things than being a skunk.

Like telling lies about a good person. And there’s something worse I could do besides telling Momma. Like when I start first grade and tell everyone you had sexual relations with a cow.”

Wade told Mama the truth. It was past our bedtime, but she said we were going to the depot in Papa’s truck, and she made Wade come, so he could damn well tell Jacob he was sorry. # Jacob’s fire was the only light at the depot, but there was moonlight, so we could see to walk over after Mama turned off the truck’s headlights. I guess the other men either got jobs or hopped trains because Jacob was the only one there. He didn’t look up as Mama herded us into the circle of firelight, a hand on each of our shoulders. But he did when my shamefaced brother said, “I’m sorry I told my mom you stole the egg money. It was my friend Gary did it.”

All Jacob said was, “That so?”

n n n For more information on author Obren Bokich, please visit our Contributors Page.

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The Cap Guns

By Eric Lorenz

Henry Betancourt knew he had won the moment he popped the lid off the blue Rubbermaid bin.

And by the time his mother found out — if she ever found out — there wouldn’t be boo she could do about it. *** The house sat mostly empty now. The Realtor’s signpost staked in the front yard had read “Sold” for weeks, and just yesterday, the furniture and personal effects were loaded Tetris-style into the U-Haul. The stragglers, junior varsity items one barely paid any mind until presented with the unbearable thought of throwing them out, were being ferried in the family Equinox by Mr. Betancourt on this final, sweltering day of June.

Hector to his wife Mirabel and Dad to kids Benny, Henry, and Gabriella, Mr. Betancourt’s promotion at the advertising agency had facilitated the move to The New House, a twostory stucco beaut with a swimming pool, koi pond, and backyard garden. In the days after closing on the new abode along Seaver Springs Road, Mr. Betancourt relentlessly drew his family’s attention to the small things — the dramatic uplighting on the palm trees beside the pool or the exterior paint color (he’d called it Sandy Copper or Sandy Chestnut or some other grandiloquent way of saying brown). But Mrs. Betancourt, moved to tears when Hector put pen to mortgage, didn’t so much care about color schemes as she did about having a kitchen larger than a Guantanamo cell and appliances she CANYON VOICES

wouldn’t have to thwack on their sides just to coax functionality.

Mrs. Betancourt’s first night at The New House involved precious little sleep, tossing with excitement and then up at the crack of dawn to unpack. Six-year-old Gabi, a habitually early riser, helped Mrs. Betancourt, though her contributions consisted mostly of quizzing her mother as to the origins of everything they pulled from the boxes. Benny left his mom alone (at least until lunch), spending the day sorting out things like poster and furniture placement in his bedroom now that the almost sixteen-year-old no longer roomed with his younger brother.

Henry, eschewing the others’ zeal for The New House, had volunteered to help his dad finish up the move before the real estate people came for the keys in the afternoon. There wasn’t much left, Mr. Betancourt had assured his son, no more than two loads at the most, so if he wanted to work on his room like Benny (or as Mrs. Betancourt heard it, help Gabi harass Mom while she sorts all the crockery into the cupboards), he was welcome. But Henry insisted his room could wait, insisted he’d rather help his dad load into the family Equinox gardening tools for Mrs. Betancourt’s once and future roses and a moving box with the words MOMS STUFF scrawled in Sharpie across the top. (MOMS STUFF, in this instance, numbered fifty-seven back issues of Ladies’ Home Journal, all with one recipe each Mrs. Betancourt would never prepare but liked to think she one day might.)

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So he returned with his dad to The Old House and set to work eagerly, working up a dripping sweat loading stragglers two or three at a time into the Equinox, piled so high in the backseat the rearview mirror was rendered useless as a suction-cup Garfield. The whole shebang looked at any moment capable of spilling its guts in a passel of indispensable odds and ends.

“No more,” Mr. Betancourt said as Henry came out with another box, this one labeled ART STUFF. “We have to fit in the car, too, you know.

The rest can wait.”

Henry plunked the box in the front passenger seat and turned to his dad. “Actually, I was thinking I could maybe stay behind. You know, get everything organized so the last load goes quicker.”

Hector eyed his son. “You want to stay behind?”

“Yeah.” Inside, Henry quaked with the terror of a boy trying to slip the truth past his father, and had he been younger, it might’ve shown. But he’d been practicing the fine art of lying to his parents for nigh on thirteen years, so while the nerves jangled, he presented a convincing front. But still, he knew: There would be no second chance to pull this off. “Plus, I can get the stuff dragged into the alley myself. Save you the effort.” Save him the effort? Henry’s eyes lolled in their sockets. He’s not gonna buy that. There’s no way he’ll buy that.

blowback. C) Henry, too proud to admit it to his parents, was sad about the move and wanted to spend as much time as possible at The Old House before they were officially ex-residents of 216 Orangewood Drive. Neither A nor C bothered Mr. Betancourt, and if it turned out to be B, he figured it was worth wringing some guilt-driven work out of his son before the hammer dropped. Mr. Betancourt shrugged and returned to the house. “If you want to.”

Henry slammed the passenger-side door and jogged briskly for the up the walk — until catching his father’s leery eye. Henry slowed his roll.

“Your mom will pitch a fit if you get yourself into trouble. And I’m the one who’ll get beaned.”

“I’m not gonna get in trouble,” Henry whined in that pubescent manner all teenagers develop as they learn to chafe against their parents’ rules.

Mr. Betancourt unlocked the door, and Henry stepped through. “All right. I’m trusting you to be the man of the house while I’m gone.

Shouldn’t be more than an hour, tops.”

“Got it.”

“If I pull back onto this street and see firetrucks, I’m going to be very upset.”

“I’m not gonna start a fire.”

“All right. Be good. And lock the door.”

Mr. Betancourt stood at the rear of his pitiable vehicular turducken, watching his son pick nervously at a jaggedly trimmed fingernail but otherwise frozen in place under the punishing sun. He suspected one of three things: A) Henry was angling for a payday out of all this. B) Henry had done something very bad and was building up chits in his favor to lessen the eventual CANYON VOICES

“Will do.”

Henry shut the door, flicked the brass thumbturn into the locked position, and raced to the front window for a peek between the dusty macramé curtains, careful not to send ripples through them with either his breath or touch. His heart FALL 2021

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thudded as he watched his dad climb into the steel piñata posing as an SUV. Watched him shut the door. Listened to the engine roar to life and watched as the Wigginses’ beige eyesore of an Airstream swallowed up any sight of the Equinox.

Henry turned from the curtains. He was now on a rescue mission, and his hour was ticking. *** In truth, it was a flimsy excuse. There was little left to organize, everything belonging to three well-defined castes. The remaining stragglers were bunched near the door and would be loaded quickly once Mr. Betancourt’s Equinox belched up the tchotchkes presently choking its interior.

The junk items would be dispatched quickly, too.

How long could it take to drag a spider-infested Christmas tree from the shed? Or dump the Dogseat beside it? (The Dogseat was a ratty, gnawed, urine-spotted loveseat spilling spring and batting alike that would have made the trek to the alley a year ago had Gabi not cried bloody murder over throwing out the late Bear’s napping couch.) But Henry didn’t fret over small potatoes like why the flimsy excuse worked; the flimsy excuse had worked. He was alone in the haunting quiescence of The Old House with the locus of his rescue mission — the donation pile.

A bone of contention almost from the jump, Mrs. Betancourt had set to assembling the donation pile with all the maneuvering Machiavelli would have employed had his tender arch once met with a stray Lego while hanging clothes in his sons’ room. Starting in early May, Mirabel’s pile steadily grew as she exorcised every headache, gripe, and grievance in her children’s possession (her husband numbering among her children on most days). It shrank by early June when the others got wise and rescued their preciouses CANYON VOICES

from the pile’s clutches. However, no one noticed when the pile swelled again right around the time moving boxes were being sealed up.

But one of Mirabel’s more ambitious purge attempts did not escape Henry’s notice, and the two got into it over a blue Rubbermaid bin containing his and Benny’s old toys. Henry argued that he still played with them, although was at a loss to cite a specific time in the past year that the bin had been opened. Mrs. Betancourt, meanwhile, had facts on her side; she also had Mr. Betancourt. (Had he known his favorite Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt had emigrated from the dresser to the bottom of a donation bag two afternoon’s prior while he was preoccupied watching the Angels wallop the Diamondbacks, he might have ruled differently.)

As a result, the blue bin holding all of Benny’s and Henry’s childhood treasures remained in the donation pile beside Hefty bags of outgrown clothes and old Halloween costumes, vaguely suggestive of the Bataan Death March’s forlorn POWs. But Henry had inherited his mother’s stubborn streak.

By Henry’s design, a single moving box remained in the straggler pile — one half-filled with children’s books excavated from a storage closet after the U-Haul left. Unbeknownst to them, Curious George and Co. were about to aid and abet some stowaway toys. Not all — the box wouldn’t fit every one of Henry’s childhood treasures — but enough to make his point.

It wasn’t that Henry was against the idea of charity. He knew there were others less fortunate than himself, others who could put the playthings to infinitely better use than their present use — giving purpose to the Rubbermaid bin that held them. But here was the rub: If he donated his treasures, then they’d cease to be his FALL 2021

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treasures. They’d be someone else’s treasures.

And what if these new people didn’t treat them like treasures?

With no witnesses to his subterfuge but the nailpocked ecru walls, Henry hauled the box of books over to the blue bin and yanked open the folded-in flaps. The crooked head of Brown Bear Brown Bear questioned him in the weak light filtering in between the drawn curtains. The Rubbermaid lid came free next, and a puff of stale air sluiced into his lungs. (A little voice whispered that his mom was right, but Henry brought it to heel.)

Henry’s temporal lobe pulsed with nostalgia as his eyes focused on individual denizens of the bin. The rubber band keeping his starter collection of Pokémon cards together had failed sometime in the past, leaving thirty or so cards cascading into the lower recesses of the bin. He had tried getting into Pokémon cards with the advent of Pokémon Go but was now content to let the cards cascade. Nearby that mess was a Topps Albert Pujols rookie card in a toploader.

Baseball cards belonged to Benny; it wouldn’t make the cut. Neither would Benny’s old remotecontrolled helicopter. (Henry was convinced the contraption took at least three years off Bear’s life when Benny crashed it above the poor dog, napping in the Dogseat, less than two hours after opening it Christmas morning 2014.) He shoved it aside.

A plastic bucket of Hot Wheels came out next, followed by a matching bucket of assorted Legos.

Underneath those were some rubber dinosaurs, including a gnarly T. rex-looking guy with red flesh and a blunted horn on its snout. What was its name? Cera-something. Henry checked its underbelly: CERATOSAURUS. A couple rubber snakes came out with the dinos, CANYON VOICES

and then Henry found what he’d been searching for, the item that had spurred this rescue mission in the first place. In a clear bin near the bottom of the Rubbermaid container were the few, the proud, the green and grey Army men of his youth. Henry pulled the bin free in an eruption of colorful, Chinese-made plastic and cracked this lid off, too. Twenty-five dollar-store soldiers gazed up at their commanding officer, having patiently waited over the years for new orders, a new enemy, a new hill to take. Henry rifled through their ranks, recalling the battles they’d waged. Radio Ridge. The Tent Offensive. The Siege at Lululemon.

One Army man stood out among the rest.

Nicknamed Troy by Henry, he was a lighter shade of green than the other “good guys.” Older.

More detailed, too (sporting a couple of Bear’s toothmarks). Troy was his favorite, even if for the life of him Henry couldn’t recall where he came from. Holding what appeared to be a shotgun rather than the bazookas or bayonetted rifles of his fellow infantrymen, Troy cut a distinct form from his crouched, running, or grenade-throwing comrades. He stood ramrod straight, firearm at his shoulder, waiting for the whites of their eyes to come into focus. Troy marched in the vanguard of every battle, no matter the peril, and when the smoke departed the battlefield, Troy was never counted among the fallen.

Troy was a treasure no donation-pile kid could understand. Who else would take the time to straighten the barrel of Troy’s gun so he could shoot straight? Who else would find Troy a flat surface so he wouldn’t tip over on the carpeted no man’s land of the battlefield? No one, that’s who.

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forgotten mausoleum and paging through the accompanying entries in the Compendium of Memory.

A chain’s glint hinted at the next treasure, and Henry pulled free the nunchucks. He and Benny had begged for them after seeing Bruce Lee fell a gaggle of would-be assailants in an old martialarts movie. The novelty wore off as the bruises piled up, discovering that in untrained hands, nunchucks were less a self-defense weapon than a self-attacking weapon. They still looked cool, though.

Pulling the nunchucks free wasn’t easy; they’d become tangled with a toy bow-and-arrow set.

Only one arrow had survived to the present, the arrow Benny had removed the orange suction cup from and fired into the bridge of Henry’s nose as he dove for cover in their bedroom. The blood never quite washed out of the carpet.

Among brothers who rarely saw eye to eye on anything, Henry and Benny agreed: It was a heckuva shot.

The bow-and-arrow set had been a companion item once upon a time. It paired well with the western-style revolver cap guns their grandma had given them years ago. “For Benny and Hankey” the tag had read. Henry hated the name Hank and loathed Hankey, but he chalked it up to one of those grandma things you just have to live with.

Each brother’s sidearms were easy enough to tell apart. The frame and barrel of each weapon were molded from some alloy that gleamed like silver, but Benny’s set had brown plastic handles while Henry’s were bright white. Henry preferred calling them bone. Or ivory. Or pearl. Actually, he could never quite remember what he preferred.

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Henry dug around deep in the bin, groping blind as that ubiquitous Chinese plastic jabbed into his forearms. When his fingers hit paydirt, out came a warped plastic gun belt with two holsters.

Inside each were his pearl-handled (or was it bone?) beauties, and the nostril-curling aroma of spent cap-gun rounds trailed behind like a ghost from another era. Henry pulled free the tin housing the brothers’ old ammunition stores and opened one of the paper boxes. A red spool of paper caps bounded out.

Henry flipped once more through the Compendium of Memory, recalling the afternoons and evenings after school playing shooting games with Benny in the backyard, arguing over whether one of them or the other had been shot or managed to evade the bullet by the skin of his teeth. (There were very few hits back in those days.) Then, after Benny got too old for cap guns, Henry found a new opponent: the creeping gang of marauders from whom Henry thanklessly defended the homestead on a regular basis. What was their name? It wouldn’t come, irritating him like an unscratchable itch.

The…guys. Come on, how can I not remember?

Henry thumbed madly through the Compendium of Memory’s moldering pages.

The…the…Barnabus boys! He exalted like a huckster preacher. That’s right, the Barnabus boys. As motley a lot as there ever was. He pulled free one of the cap guns from its holster, examining the orange circle painted inside the barrel. Why did I stop playing that?

The answer wasn’t complicated. He lived a modern boy’s life, one populated with diversions like video games and cell phones — the latter introducing him to mobile games and, more recently, Instagram models. That phenomenon tracked with other, ahem, developments among his female classmates at Desert Wells FALL 2021

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Elementary and a sudden, all-consuming desire to avoid anything that might place him on the fringes of what was socially acceptable. That included backyard shootouts with the Barnabus boys, no matter how sinister their scheming. But today, far removed from the withering barbs his friends might level, Henry could soak in nostalgia until his fingertips got pruny.

Henry shielded his eyes from his backyard-cumfusion-reactor before the blaring sunlight could sear his retinas like a New York strip steak.

Everything glowed with midday intensity; there were no long shadows — few short shadows, really. The only respite was a twenty-foot silver dollar eucalyptus tree in an alcove to the right of the house.

Henry pressed his thumb against the hatch on one of his bone-(ivory?)-handled peacemakers and threaded a roll of fresh caps through. He applied pressure to the trigger and watched the gun’s works feed the red strip up towards the cocking hammer. A little more pressure…a little more…a little — bang! That acrid sulfur deposited him and his curled nostrils straight back into the backyard of his youth. He marveled at how simple it had been, just grabbing his cap guns and shooting out the back door for what felt like hours at a time. Why wasn’t it so simple now? Could it be that simple now? His inner child kicked with excitement. Sure, come this afternoon the homestead would be under new management, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t send the Barnabus boys skedaddling one final time. He took his phone from his pocket: The lock screen read 11:54 against a Fortnite wallpaper.

He beat feet with the same urgency a frog shows leaping from a boiling pot and settled beside a wooden picnic table underneath the tree. The Compendium of Memory for cap-gun battles had no entry on retina-searing glare. Then again, he didn’t have his trusty cowboy hat. Hadn’t had it for some time now. Probably found its way onto the head of one of the Ungratefuls in one of his mom’s previous commissions of charity. Nothing to be done about it now.

***

The eucalyptus’s crotch came unusually low on the trunk — about knee height — with two of the codominant stems headed up normally but a third, resembling a reclining L, reaching out to the right before meandering upward. The little round, pale-green leaves that gave the silver dollar tree its name didn’t start until about halfway up, and just within the trappings of the canopy was a modest branch shooting off from the center leader that bent in a gentle concave arc, known to Henry as The Perch. It was Young Henry’s preferred vantage point for sniping baddies.

Sweat prickled Henry’s forehead and nape almost immediately upon stepping through the rattling screen door. He didn’t know today’s high temperature, but by late June in the desert, a blind man in Timbuktu could predict the weather: hot with a chance of heatstroke for anyone who ventures from the reprieve of the shade (or for fools who strap cap guns to their waist to do battle with the Barnabus boys).

Henry rested his hand against the peeling white bark as he stared up at The Perch, puzzling out a problem: He couldn’t recall how he used to reach it. The tree wasn’t rich with handholds, but he’d managed it as a kid. Now, being older, and taller, and stronger, it should be easier to climb. But it didn’t feel that way. He suspected he used to do some coconut-tree shimmy up to the branch, but this heat drained his enthusiasm for shimmying.

“I have time.”

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Still, the enthusiasm that had made him strap a too-small-by-half cap gun holster around his waist persisted. He just needed a new tack.

Henry stepped onto the picnic table bench, then the table itself. From here, he could juuuuust reach the crook of the branch he sought. With as good a grip as he could manage, he leapt and swung face first into the tree, the ensuing shaking flushing out a cadre of mourning doves in a feathery swivet. Henry, feet shearing long strips of bark as they flailed for a toehold, pulled himself up to The Perch with all the grace of a tranquilized macaque. He spat out a small hunk of bark and wiped more fragments free of his flushed face before brushing his scraped palms and forearms against his jeans. The Compendium of Memory bore no entry on treeclimbing abrasions. One thing Henry was certain of: Had climbing this tree always been so difficult, he would have fought the Barnabus boys at ground level.

Seated on The Perch for the first time in, oh, five years by his estimation, Henry took stock. Both cap guns were raring to go in their holsters — miraculously, neither had dropped as he scrabbled up the tree. Henry took his cell phone from his pocket to check the time, anachronism be damned: 11:59. He was sweaty and tired, but it was high noon. He wasn’t about to slink off like a jackalope now.

Henry thrummed his sidepieces as his eyes stalked the prickly, sun-scorched bermudagrass to the hulk that served as the Barnabuses’ outpost. (The Outpost was the mysterious base of operations for the Barnabus boys catty-corner the eucalyptus. In times of peace, it reverted to the Betancourts’ squat aluminum shed with the impossible sliding doors that induced Henry’s father to profanity.) It was high time their ugly mugs moseyed out. He’d be ready.

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Now, it’s amazing the things one can see from nine feet off the ground, especially when one doesn’t usually spend time nine feet off the ground. A sprinkler was going in the Wigginses’ backyard (the kind that jetted out a steady oscillating curtain of water, not the sht-sht-shtshoooo kind), and Henry tsk-tsked them for watering in the dead of day.

A beater truck rumbled down the alley to Henry’s right, and Henry wiped the sweat from his forehead and upper lip as he turned to look. Its rusted bed was loaded twice the truck’s height with old mattresses harvested from alley piles, and the driver had stopped so his passenger could fling two more atop the haul. It was a genuine mystery to Henry what the alley-pickers did with all that junk. Did they consider those mattresses treasures? Did they scoff at the homeowners for not treating them like treasures? The idea anyone might try to resell soiled mattresses never crossed his mind.

Henry’s attention was drawn from the alley by a colorful fluttering behind him in the Espinozas’ yard — a back nine that made the Betancourts’ Death Valleyesque backyard look like a landscaping showroom. Near the door: Tonka trucks, an upturned kiddie pool, those cheap inflatable rubber balls grocery stores sell in towering bins at the end of aisles. Set farther off: cinderblocks, bricks, an old toilet, spare steelbelteds, an oil drum. Where does one even get an oil drum? Henry imagined those alley-pickers would cream their shorts if they saw the trove back here. The fluttering, however, came from the Espinozas’ clothesline, stretched between a splintering porch column and a swing set that would dispense with more tetanus than laughs these days. The load du jour? Underwear. There were boxer briefs and some kids’ tighty-whities clipped to the line, but his eye fixed like a magnet FALL 2021

FICTION | ERIC LORENZ

on the swaying panties and boyshorts. He nearly forgot to breathe. Yes, he’d seen panties before.

Beyond the fact that two-fifths of his household was female, his phone did come with a data plan.

But these weren’t family panties or digital, Instagram panties; they were IRL panties he wasn’t supposed to see, and that was sending a unique thrill up his leg, one the barely SFW Instagram models couldn’t compete with. These had once — and would again — be nestled in the warmth between the legs of Mrs. Espinoza. Or, God help him, Amanda Espinoza. She was a grade above Benny at Blueriver High, and both Benny and Henry had a crush on her. Henry reveled in what he was seeing but, just as importantly, what Benny wasn’t.

“Focus,” Henry told himself and tore his gaze from the line. His backyard was quiet as ever; nothing moving by The (shed) Outpost. But you know where there was movement? Right behind him. On the Espinozas’ clothesline. His eyes led his head. There were white ones. Red ones. Black ones with blue dots. Frilly pink ones. All flagging in the summer breeze. His chest tightened. The thought of that lacy, dainty fabric wedged into Amanda’s girlish folds pushed his imagination’s RPMs past the red line. A second tightening proceeded further south.

Suddenly, a wave of foolishness crushed him, not because his sap was rising over a few pairs of underwear on a clothesline but because the owner of those pairs of underwear might see him sitting in a tree with cap guns slung around his waist — definitely once the report of spent caps began echoing through the neighborhood.

Gunshots might be commonplace along Orangewood Drive, ranking just behind car alarms, police sirens, and shouting in prevalence, but when the shots sounded like they were coming from next door, you still took a peek. The CANYON VOICES

urge to slink away like a jackalope was strong. I’ll be fast. No one will see.

The shadows were inching out toward the east and still no sign of the Barnabus boys — their leader Clete Barnabus, or his brothers, Dale and (uh) Jake. Sometimes Clete would press others into his gang of scalawags, but Clete, Dale, and Jake were always there, eyes darkened under the brims of their black hats. The Barnabus boys never cottoned to tardiness. So where were they today?

Henry wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Down the alley, the heat bent the asphalt in wavy ripples of mirage where the alley-pickers had been. Could this be why the Barnabus boys weren’t showing? Was it too hot? Relief flowed from this thought, undeniable relief that Henry resisted nonetheless. He pulled one of the guns from its holster and halfheartedly aimed down iron sights at the left edge of The Shed-post.

“Bang,” Henry said, pantomiming a shot. “They probably heard I was comin’ and headed for the hills. Can’t say I blame ‘em.”

As Henry returned his firearm to its holster, he thought he heard a rustling, a soft one, just on the edge of his hearing. And were those voices?

Henry drew his revolver again. They came after all.

Left or right? Which side would Clete have his brothers attack from? Henry wiped his forehead as a flush of excitement bloomed in his chest. He was nestled — Like frilly fabric between Amanda Espinoza’s legs?

— in The Perch. He had the element of surprise.

It didn’t matter whether they came from the left or the right. The Barnabus boys were going FALL 2021

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down, just as they always had.

It took a moment of waiting for Henry to realize: The chatter wasn’t coming from in front of him but behind him, and his head whipsawed at the sound of the Espinozas’ screen door slamming against the jamb. It was Amanda, holding a clothes basket.

Fuck.

Henry sat stiff as a gargoyle, afraid to move.

Amanda would have a clear view of him if she looked his way. About a foot to his right, though, the leaves closed ranks. Climbing down would get him caught for sure, but if he could get behind the leaves….

He watched Amanda busy herself at the line as he inched out on the branch, repeating some silent juju that she wouldn’t look up. Henry scooched out a little more. The leaves were just about — Crack!

By the time Henry’s brain registered what was happening, he had already ridden the Gravity Express halfway to the ground floor and there was no getting off. His keister and right elbow thudded into the dirt beneath the silver dollar tree; his teeth clacked in his skull. The cap gun clattered away, spilling its unspent rounds.

Henry writhed, face screwed into a grimace, but when his eyes found the snapped branch beside him — the one with the gentle arc that had made it such a natural sitting branch, the one Benny had shown Young Henry years ago — he stilled.

Through a cloud of bark dust, Henry located the jagged stump about nine feet up — all that remained of The Perch. The high ground he’d used to fell the hundreds of backyard marauders of his youth was gone, snapped, obliterated. In a CANYON VOICES

surge of irrationality, he considered gluing the branch back in place. His rational mind quickly took the reins and disabused him of the notion.

There was no putting it back. The branch was gone.

A wave of wistfulness crested over him as Henry sat motionless in the shade of the tree.

Something had been lost when that branch snapped. Henry felt it slip away as surely as that cap gun had fumbled from his hand, but it was a curiosity he couldn’t explain, wouldn’t until years later. His subconscious alone had taken note, like the pert ears of a wild animal that recognizes an unannounced presence. It was that primal recognition that left him awash in melancholy now.

There was no telling how long Henry might have stared up at that shiv of a branch had a voice not brought him back. “Are you okay?” Amanda asked from the other side of the wall.

It was the final indignity. Henry’s elbow throbbed and sweat stung a growing glob of blood, but his pride — oh his pride! Amanda had seen. She knew. Once, in the third grade, Henry had called his teacher Mommy in front of the class. He longed to return to that halcyon day.

Henry ginned up as much confidence as he could muster and squeaked out “Yes” to his crush, the girl whose underwear he’d seen, the girl who was probably laughing at him or thinking him a creep — or both! — behind that wall. It was time to go in, and in case he needed any more prompting, the air conditioner began to hum on the roof.

Henry returned the stray cap gun to the toosmall-by-half holster around his waist. As he limped to the back door, he cast a glance toward the shed. The Barnabus boys weren’t there. ***

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FICTION | ERIC LORENZ

Mr. Betancourt returned a half hour later than estimated, tops. He helped Henry lug the Dogseat into the alley, helped hoist the spiderinfested Christmas tree alongside it, and kept his questions about what had happened to his son’s elbow to himself. After all, the house was still in one piece. No sense going in on that now when Mrs. Betancourt would handle that for him about five seconds after they set foot inside The New House on Seaver Springs Road.

from Mirabel’s donation pile, including a blue Rubbermaid bin. Among its treasures:

Henry next helped his dad load the remaining stragglers into the Equinox. Finally, the donation pile, all dutifully spilled across the backseat.

Then it was off to the Little Sisters of Grace, where Henry and his dad unloaded everything

A Topps Albert Pujols rookie card.

Thirty-odd Pokémon cards once neatly bound.

A rubber CERATOSAURUS. A pair of self-attacking nunchucks.

A toy bow-and-arrow set with one suction-cup arrow.

Two sets of cap guns — one set with bone (ivory?) handles.

And twenty-four green and grey Army men.

n n n For more information on author Eric Lorenz, please visit our Contributors Page.

CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

FICTION | JOSEPH KUTTLER

Companion Planting

By Joseph Kuttler

They had recently fallen in love and everything they saw reminded them of each other. Jacob would pass a new vegetarian café and be reminded of Rachel’s smile knowing she could delight in any of its options. And Rachel, whenever she spotted a cool-looking old car around town, would snap a picture of it and send it to Jacob. Maybe one day, once they’d saved enough to put their eventual 3.5 kids through school, he could buy this baby blue one! Or maybe that cool red one! She smiled at the thought of getting to watch him tinker on a car the same way he was fixing up his house now and hurried over to see him; they were beyond invitations and knocking by this point.

Rachel rushed through the rusting gate into Jacob’s courtyard. A grape vine twisted around the trunk of an olive tree in its center. Behind a blooming rosemary bush a toolbox lay against a cracked wall, alongside a ladder and a metal rake. Jacob was on the roof, patching up its final bare section. He placed a piece of corrugated metal over the hole in the roof and layered it with cement overtop.

“Hey, you!” Rachel called out.

Jacob looked down at her smiling figure, still clad in scrubs, and wiped the sweat from his brow. The late fall sun was finally relenting from its perch above the desert city.

“Hey,” he responded. “Why don’t you go have a shower? There should be plenty of hot water since the tank’s been baking in the sun all day.”

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Rachel frowned. “If you finish up soon, we could shower together.”

Jacob laughed. “You’re going to make me leave this roof with a big old hole in it if you offer something like that. Give me half an hour and you can help me wipe all this grime from my hands. You’re going to end up leaving the shower just as dirty as you enter it, though.”

Rachel’s face reddened. She pulled a book from her bag and sat on the picnic table next to the grape vine. She opened her book and watched Jacob work on the roof. There were three things her grandfather said a person could watch forever without growing bored. He was definitely right that watching a man work was one.

Jacob had recently inherited this run-down shack and Rachel delighted in seeing the progress he made. Every week it seemed he made the place homier. There was the outhouse with an incinerator toilet built beside one corner of the building; the plumbing in the shack hadn’t worked in probably decades. On the opposite corner was the outdoor shower he’d built, with its waterfall-like nozzle. Rachel was already getting steamy thinking about running her hands down Jacob’s soapy torso.

The courtyard was, in contrast to the house, beautiful. The previous owner, Jacob’s friend and mentor, had filled it with life when he was young, but had been unable to maintain its splendor as he battled the cancer that finally defeated him.

Jacob had revived this mini oasis, employing the

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skills he’d acquired growing up on his father’s farm. The courtyard would be a nice place for children to run around and play in the dirt, Rachel decided.

The olive tree made a beautiful centerpiece to the courtyard, and Rachel appreciated the shade it casted. But the grape vine was the real hero of the yard. The grapes, a sweet red variety, were already all harvested, and Jacob had tinkered with making wine out of them. Rachel was excited to try the concoction when it matured.

The vine was not a thin, measly sapling, but was rather brown and thick. Its circumference was nearly a third of that of the tree it coiled around.

It was wrapped snugly about the tree. A passerby might even think it was suffocating the tree.

Jacob grunted in his labors on the roof. She tried drawing her gaze away from him but failed.

The tree standing above the vine teemed with olives ready to be plucked, pickled, and eaten, their seeds eager to be planted in ready soils. But they had to wait their time, even though they so longed to proliferate they couldn’t withstand another second in the stifling sack of the olive.

Jacob climbed down from his ladder, pulled his gloves off and placed them on his work bench.

He strode toward Rachel longing to take her into his arms, but she looked to be seated comfortably in her own space, and he plopped his body on the table, which creaked beneath his weight.

As the sun began to set, they sat on the picnic table beneath the olive tree, which stood defending the vine from above, as the sun went down. He sat up on the table and she sat below on the bench. He looked down at her attempting a loving gaze and she responded with all the love she had to give. He dropped down next to her so that sat on the same level and they gazed into each other’s glowing faces. Rachel pulled out a joint. They let the smoke fill the space between CANYON VOICES

them passing it back and forth until their nerves were calmed. They watched the sun slink down the sky like a man getting down on one knee, but it was still early, and the sun had yet to reach the ground.

Then they fell into conversation like an old couple who’d spent a lifetime together, but with the vigor and excitement of newlyweds. Their conversation flowed as if it came from one mind, yet they cherished hearing the other’s thoughts and listening to their ideas as if they were the first one to ever come up with such ideas.

“Did I tell you about the organic farmer I was talking to at the farmer’s market yesterday?”

Rachel asked. She ran her fingers up and down the curly hair on Jacob’s arm. “He was telling me about companion planting. It sounded so cool.

It’s when two plants work really well together and farmers plant them together so both plants can do really well, even better than they’d do by themselves. Like, he was explaining how he plants beans with his corn, so the beans can grow tall by holding onto the stalks. And, in return, the beans fix nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil that the corn uses to grow! Did you know that plants could do that?”

Jacob nodded and Rachel went on. “It’s kind of like the mycorrhizal fungi that we learned about it in biology lab. The fungi work as a neural network for the trees, and trees can let each other know what they need and pass nutrients or water to each other. It was interesting learning about it in the lab, but I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen it in practice.”

Jacob smiled at her. His hand sought out hers and their fingers interlocked. “It’s interesting hearing you talk about these things so scientifically. I know about them from growing up on the farm, but I never thought about it in terms of nutrients or elements or anything like that. We used to have these two big eucalyptus FALL 2021

FICTION | JOSEPH KUTTLER

trees in our yard on the farm. They were like partners. One day, there was a storm and lightning struck one of the trees, splitting it in half. It almost fell on our house. The other tree tried sending all of its life into its lost partner to resuscitate it, but it didn’t realize that there was nothing it could do to bring it back. The tree withered and didn’t survive the drought that hit the next summer.”

They looked into each other’s souls until they became the only beings in the entire world. The rain started splashing on their world, and they skipped off to the outdoor shower, stripping off their clothes, not turning the handle but bathing in the falling rain, cleaning themselves of their worries, lathering soap up and down their giggling, naked bodies, and their bodies were slippery and wet, but they clung together.

They sat there in silence, sweaty palms sticking together, looking out at the horizon. The sunset was something else you could watch forever, if only it would stay coupled forever with its partner, the sky. The pair sat and watched the sky turn brilliant colors of red and orange, and pink and purple, until it finally turned blue. Then clouds rolled in almost as if from a cold, sad abyss in foreign skies.

They hurried inside, darting through and past the rain, collapsing onto each other on the mattress lying on the floor. The power had gone out, a fact they failed to notice. The rain pounded rhythmically on the freshly sealed roof.

The wind had picked up and the leaves started to blow in both the tree and the vine. The vine snuggled up tight in the protection of the tree.

Their roots, Jacob and Rachel knew, were intertwined underground, giving each other support and strength.

Rachel remembered feeling she’d been connected similarly with an old flame. She worried that the roots she plunged into the soil of her new, shared garden would also be cut out from under her.

Jacob feared becoming like his father and the weary eucalyptus, giving everything to a partner who couldn’t reciprocate what he gave.

They turned from the deadened glow of the sky to look into each other’s faces. They shared the joint and the smoke they released into the air built an aura around each of them. To each the other became the most beautiful person they’d ever seen. But there was a tragic beauty about them.

CANYON VOICES

Their lips wedded together, and they kissed each other like kissing was a new, wondrous experience they had just discovered. They kissed until they forgot whose body was whose, until they lost all feeling in their lips and forgot what it meant not to be kissing.

Finally, their lips separated, and they looked into each other’s eyes, blinking in recognition. Jacob slipped his hand down Rachel’s body teasing her.

But Rachel wrestled Jacob, trying to please him first. They battled each other in their love, each grasping at the other’s joy, until Jacob finally pinned Rachel down and told her he what he was going to do. Rachel nodded solemnly and Jacob set upon his task, methodically kissing down her torso, meticulously using his fingers for her delight, ears perked attentively for any change in the tones of her pleasure, all leading to that final pulsating joy that he cherished giving her, as the rain slowed and pitter-pattered against the tin roof. Rachel returned to Jacob as much pleasure as he’d given her, and then they lay embracing on the mattress on the floor, panting and grinning.

After a while, the rain ceased to fall, and the skies cleared revealing the moon. Jacob walked naked

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FICTION | JOSEPH KUTTLER

with an empty jug to the spigot outside. Rachel crawled over to the record player lying on the floor against the kitchen wall. She’d gotten it for him along with several Simon and Garfunkel records, whose music he loved. He returned with the water, and they gulped it down straight from the jug.

shaped leaves, while the grape leaves were broad and more spread out. The branches and leaves began together, but the wind howled, and the leaves of the tree were pushed apart from the leaves of the vine. Each grouping of leaves stood tall and vivid on the blank wall Jacob and Rachel faced.

The power was still out. Rachel spun the record in the player, and then played the Simon and Garfunkel Concert in Central Park album on an app on her phone. Rachel started dancing while Jacob retrieved alcohol from the kitchen. He pulled deeply from the wine bottle then took a swig of whiskey and leaned against the doorway, watching her dance. He thought he could watch her twirl and dance forever.

They saw the separate leaves as their alter egos projected up on the wall. They had already reduced the entire world to each other’s presence, and now it seemed that there were two distinct worlds reflected upon the wall. The worlds swayed in the wind, drawing near to each other, but remaining divorced. Jacob broke under the strain of standing tall in the wind with no purpose; nothing sheltered beneath his sprawling arms. Rachel cracked, worrying she’d been severed from the ground beneath her feet and thrust into foreign soils. Jacob knew how Rachel felt, and longed to draw her back to safety, but he hadn’t the strength to raise his arms. Rachel saw Jacob’s anguish and longed to bind tight around him, but she was stuck and couldn’t move. They wished an expert farmer would come and stake the vine back to the trellis of the tree, telling them it would be okay, these insecurities were normal, even the best companion plants sometimes struggled in the beginning as each got its own grip in the earth, but together the right combination of plants would always flourish.

Rachel pulled him out of his trance, and they twirled and danced in the moonlit, unfurnished living room, taking swigs from the bottles, teasing each other about their stained red teeth, sometimes going over to the record, flipping it over and manually spinning it, and then returning and spinning in circles with each other.

Another joint appeared and they consumed it and they finished the wine and whiskey. The phone had died with its music and the room spun. They collapsed onto their backs on the mattress.

The moon shone through the windows. Their brains were dazed, their bodies spent, and their hearts were so full they’d burst and might have even drained. Laying naked on far sides of the bed, eyes empty but open, Jacob and Rachel withdrew into the deepest recesses of his or her soul.

But they were all alone. They shut their eyes to the desolation of the world, and they slipped into sleep, and as they fell asleep their ankles sought out and found each other, and foot twisted and wrapped around foot, and they slept until the sun came up with their roots attached, passing whatever warmth they had to the other, tenuously clinging to the soil of young love.

The moonlight struck the olive tree and grape vine, casting shadows against the opposite wall.

The leaves of each were distinct; the olive branches had clustered, thin, long, almond

n n n

CANYON VOICES

For more information on author Joseph Kuttler, please visit our Contributors Page.

FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | DANIEL GUYTON

Daffodils

By Daniel Guyton

Characters: Jeremy: Rain: (JEREMY and RAIN cross an open field. Both are in their 20’s, with jackets and mittens on. It is fall. He scans the ground carefully, as she watches for unwanted company. JEREMY stops.

RAIN stops. The remnants of a stone pillar sticks out of the ground. RAIN looks around) RAIN: Is it here?

JEREMY: Yeah.

(She nods, uncomfortably) RAIN: Ok. (He points to the stone) JEREMY: That stone was a… cement pillar. A… land marker, I guess. (He kneels) Maybe a fence? It's sort of worn down now. Into nothing. (Pause. She puts her hand on his shoulder) I remember looking up at it. It was… taller than this. I think. (Small pause) In the spring, this whole field is covered with daffodils. A… yellow sea. Could lie beneath it, beneath the waves.

And no one would ever find you.

RAIN: I'll bet it's beautiful. (He glares at her) I know. I’m… sorry. I… (He stands) JEREMY: It’s ok. My dad would take me out here every time. The… (Small pause) The stone was the only thing you could see. The… (He stands) No barn. No… road. You can’t see the neighbor’s house from here. Just… this pillar, and fourteen acres of daffodils blowing in the wind.

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SCRIPTS | DANIEL GUYTON

(She stands next to him) RAIN: I'm really proud of you, you know.

JEREMY : I’m glad he’s dead.

(Pause) RAIN: I know. (She touches his chest) I know you are.

(He moves away) JEREMY: I don’t want to be here.

RAIN: Well… (JEREMY is almost off-stage) Jeremy? (He stops) What… what are you feeling now?

JEREMY: I’m… I don’t know.

RAIN: Are you angry? Scared?

JEREMY: I don’t…

RAIN: Because you’re safe, you know? (Small pause) With me.

JEREMY: I know.

RAIN: You can tell me anything.

JEREMY: I know.

RAIN: So, we’ll come back later then? I… I really want to talk about…

JEREMY: No. I don’t ever want to see this place again.

RAIN: I know. But… you’re in charge of the estate now, so…

JEREMY: So what? So what does that mean? The… (He marches back to her) To be in charge?

Who was in charge when I was…? (He starts to tear up) When he was…? (Small pause) I hope this whole fucking place burns to the ground! (RAIN looks away from him) You think that’ll get us anywhere? You think…? (Pause) If I burned it all? Would that accomplish anything? (He sits

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FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | DANIEL GUYTON

down on the ground) Solve anything? (Small pause) I have baggage, honey. Suitcases after suitcases of overflowing baggage. Underwear falling out. Can’t even find my toothbrush. Grand Central Station in a YEAR doesn’t see as many suitcases as I’ve got. (Small pause) And if you don’t want to marry me anymore because of my luggage, I’ll understand.

RAIN: I have suitcases too, Jeremy. You know what happened to my mother. And yes, I would marry you right now, if you had… eighteen Grand Central Stations worth of suitcases. (She touches him) You’re the man I’ve been waiting for, Jeremy. My entire life. I will walk with you, follow you… Whatever you need. And these are not your suitcases anyway. These are his. You can dump all of these suitcases out, right now, in this field, and no one would ever be the wiser.

And if burning this field to the ground will help you empty the suitcases, then I will help you, Jeremy. I will light the matches. (She touches his face) Ok? (JEREMY nods) However, I think we’ll get a lot more money if we sell it, honey. Unscathed. (He starts to pull away) Fourteen acres is a lot of land. We can move to LA. Have that honeymoon in France like we always wanted…

JEREMY: But it’s blood money! This whole field is covered in blood. And then… shielded by a golden sea. No one knows the fertilizer that’s in this ground! It’s me! It comes from me! My spirit pouring out of me like a garden hose, watering the fields. I… couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t make it stop. I just… hid beneath the ocean. And fed the angry daffodils my soul. In the morning, they were bigger, stronger. The color of the sun. Blood red mixed with lemon petals like an orange grove. A… flame. The entire ocean burning. Searing off my skin. (Small pause) I walked a mile in the morning. Red… blood… running down my legs. I showered. For centuries I showered. Scrubbing off my skin like… (Small pause) And still, the blood kept running. Like Charybdis circling the drain. My body fell, in tiny droplets, on the green linoleum tiles in the kitchen. Up the stairwell. Seeping through the wooden steps. When finally I slept, my father cleaned it. He wouldn’t look at me for years. But… when finally I slept, my father cleaned it.

(Small pause) As if I’d never bled at all.

(After a moment, RAIN sits down on the grass) RAIN: If he wasn’t in that coffin, I would shoot him.

JEREMY: I’ve thought about that many times.

RAIN: I wish I could have met you sooner, Jeremy. I… I wish I could have…

JEREMY: What?

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FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | DANIEL GUYTON

RAIN: Protected you. (JEREMY looks away) I don’t know how, I… Killed him, maybe?

Screamed at him? Yelled at him to stop?

JEREMY: Believe me, I’ve tried all that. I… After momma died, he… (Small pause) He just kept telling me I had her eyes. He… said I smelled just like her. I… (He starts to cry. RAIN looks away) RAIN: Do you have any gasoline? The ground’ll never burn like this. (She stands. He looks at her) Come on, let’s torch this son of a bitch.

JEREMY: Why? RAIN: Hmm? JEREMY: Why are you willing to help me?

RAIN: Because it hurt you. I’ll destroy anything that ever hurts you, Jeremy. From now until the end of days, I will protect you, you understand me? If anyone tries to hurt you, I will… (She clenches her fists, then calms them, and takes his face in her hands) You are everything to me, you know? (She starts to tear up) The thought of what he did to you… The… (Small pause) I’m really glad he’s dead.

(JEREMY hugs her) JEREMY: I know.

(She looks up at him) RAIN: I’m sorry I made you come here, Jeremy. I… JEREMY: I know.

RAIN: I love you so much. (They kiss) We’ll do whatever you want, ok? (JEREMY nods and smiles) JEREMY: I know. I just… I’m really angry, that’s all. We don’t need to burn it. I… just need some time to think, that’s all.

CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | DANIEL GUYTON

RAIN: You have a right to be. (Small pause) Angry.

JEREMY: He wasn’t always awful. You know? And that’s what hurts the most, I think. I remember playing baseball when I was younger. He’d be watching in the sidelines. Smilin’ and… being pretty happy for me. I think. I remember being happy. Really happy for a while. And then Momma got sick, and… he stopped paying attention to me after that. We stopped going to baseball. I… stopped playing, and he stopped even looking at me until… (Small pause) August 17, 1992. Those nights I spent out here staring at this stone. This… Feeling like I… (Small pause) I remember him crying in his bedroom all day long. He… Momma planted daffodils, one by one. In a tiny corner of the yard - way out past the hickory. That was… Daddy planted cabbage, corn, potatoes. Ran a local market up in town. But after momma died, he… The daffodils grew wild. He never trimmed them. Never… cut them… They ran rampant through the cabbage plants. Choked out all the corn. Daddy said that shouldn’t happen, that the daffodils were weak. But he never cut them down. He… he said they reminded him of her. (Pause) I think that’s why he took me out here. Back behind this pillar, because… they reminded him of her…

(She tries to hug him, but with a growl, he kicks the stone with the bottom of his shoe. It doesn’t budge. He kicks it again repeatedly. He then kneels and tries to lift it with his hands. It is primal, rageful, but the stone will not be moved. Eventually, he gives up in a heap of sweat and breath. RAIN calmly wraps her arms around him) RAIN: If I could blast that stone into a million pieces, I would. If I could reverse the mortar and the flow of time, I would return that stone to dust. And water. From whence it came. For you to have to look at something so unmoving, so… cold… (Small pause) But if I did that, Jeremy, if… I destroyed that stone… (Small pause) What if I lost you in the process? What if I never met you?

What if…? (Long pause) When my mother died I… She was holding me just like this. Her arms across my chest. The tornado flattened everything. Our house, our… neighbors. (Long pause) She held me many hours before I realized she was gone. I couldn’t talk because… she was holding me so tightly. I couldn’t move because… she was holding me so tightly. For sixteen hours, I couldn’t move. I was… pinned in this position. From the time the twister hit until…

(Small pause) I thought that she was mad at me. I thought that she was… (Small pause) She wouldn’t let me go. It took twenty men to get us out of there. Twenty men to lift a house from off of my mother’s back. The refrigerator… Stove… (Small pause) Even after she was gone, she… protected me. She shielded me. She kept my body warm. (She caresses his face) Your mother loved you, Jeremy. She never left you. She couldn’t stop the storm from coming, but she never left your side. The daffodils were protecting you, shielding you. Keeping your body warm. (She whispers in his ear) I’ll never let you go, Jeremy. I’ll never let you go.

CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | DANIEL GUYTON

JEREMY: Rain?

RAIN: I’ll wash away your tears.

(He smiles sadly) JEREMY: I would like that very much.

(They kiss. Lights fade. End of play)

n n n For more information on author Daniel Guyton, please visit our Contributors Page.

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FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | FAITH DE SAVIGNÉ

Branded

By Faith de Savigné

Characters: MICA: 20’s uber-trendy female, overburdened by devices, carrying a glass ROMAN: 20-30’s, failed investment advisor, looking for another job BARTENDER: 30’s, working to pay off Master’s degree.

(BARTENDER cleaning the top of the bar. Roman sits on stool holding a beer as MICA slithers in seductively. ROMAN and MICA will be live streaming themselves continuously on their phones to their followers. The bartender will be seen in both backgrounds.)

MICA: Hi there.

ROMAN: Hi yourself.

MICA: (Looks around) Still kinda quiet. I thought it’d be more popular once they opened things up.

BARTENDER: (Both Roman and Mica ignore her) Maybe they finally realized they don’t have to pre-load. Just stay home, binge and pass out there rather than here.

ROMAN: It’s weird being able to hear what’s being said. I’m usually yelling in someone’s face like in a blizzard.

MICA: That’s if you care what people waffle on about.

ROMAN: Well seeing you made the effort, let me introduce you to something new and exciting.

MICA: (Holds up her glass and lowers her tone to sound sexier) Do you know what I have here?

(Uses her phone filming herself and directs her hands for him to come closer to include him.)

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FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | FAITH DE SAVIGNÉ

I have the finest gin made from juniper. It’s called Splash. Why don’t you buy a round? (Filming and moving glass around her face.) Yum. ROMAN: Nope.

MICA: C’mon. Time for something new.

ROMAN: I’m a beer guy. And time tells me it’s beer o’clock. (He takes a sip, then grimaces which he tries to hide) MICA: (Normal voice) Gawd, another VDD- very dull dude. (She holds up her hand as a stop sign while she puts something on her phone. She tries to direct him with her hand gestures to get a better shot of the drink, she smiles broadly around the glass and waves it in front like it’s a precious thing and says in a commercial-type voice) Everyone here just loooves this.

ROMAN: No, this. (He holds up his beer bottle to his phone and films himself using a commercial voice) Start your day with a Bonzer. # Bonzer. You won’t even know you’re swallowing.

MICA: (Beeping as she grapples with various devices) What? Wait, I’m getting alerts.

ROMAN: Yeah, alerts about this new beer, a beer to enjoy anytime, anywhere and low on cals.

So if you need to look after your figureMICA: That’s what I have you and everyone else for.

ROMAN: That’s why the alerts out. (Looks straight into phone and holding up his beer in front of her face.) Now who looks better here?

MICA: (Puts phone down) Whoa, what the hell are you doing? I’m not promoting your stuff. If you film anymore, I demand payment.

ROMAN: Then you’ll have to pay me for your last post. Delete or pay up.

BARTENDER: I’m in both your shots, where’s my residual?

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FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | FAITH DE SAVIGNÉ

MICA: (To Roman) Hey, my followers expect a certain standard of look and you, na. Edit-out.

BARTENDER: Ow, harsh. How about me? (Trying out poses, while Mica moves her phone around.)

ROMAN: I’m not here for your content. You don’t have my permission and I didn’t sign a waiver. My face is my brand.

MICA: Brand of bullshit. What kind of crap are you selling?

ROMAN: This or that. It’s nothing unless it’s tied with me and then the product becomes sellable.

MICA: (Filming herself) Here’s a great new drink called Splash, #Splash, and it’s so fab ... (to bartender) would you even have it?

BARTENDER: Let me see if ... (she turns to face the wall and does a sweeping confused motion to the wall of drinks to even take in if she stocks it) Gordon’s, Beefeater, Henricks. No one’s touch this stuff. Wow, aren’t you lucky. (she takes the bottle down like it is precious and not to be dropped).

ROMAN: Just save it.

MICA: What?

ROMAN: The hard sell. You haven’t been doing this long.

MICA: What makes you the pro? I don’t see any sales coming from your lonely corner.

BARTENDER: (To Roman) Yeah, what are you doing?

ROMAN: I use to be an investment advisor. But, well, you know the story.

BARTENDER: Oh, so you advised people on how to invest in your commission?

ROMAN: Hey, buyer beware. We lost our jobs. The banks? Quarterly returns through the roof.

So my friend’s made this new beer and asked me to market it.

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SCRIPTS | FAITH DE SAVIGNÉ

MICA: So like, what’s your platform?

ROMAN: Whatever sells.

MICA: Well taking in your profile; LL- loser-loner, clothes from what... K-mart? Splash isn’t your demographic.

ROMAN: I don’t fit your demographic? You approached me.

MICA: As a wannabe.

ROMAN: Aspirational, good selling point.

BARTENDER: So far, all sell and no buy (holds up bottle). (to Mica) What you’re doing is so yesterday. A woman selling herself to sell stuff. After all the world’s been through, don’t you want to do something worthwhile?

MICA: And being a barmaid is?

BARTENDER: Just for the time being. I’m really paying off my Masters, in marine biology.

ROMAN: Sounds fishy.

BARTENDER: It is. I make field notes here before moving onto more interesting creatures.

ROMAN: (To Mica) So what do you do?

MICA: This. (Waves phone then talks into it) I post non-stop on my YouTube channel, podcast, tik-tok. I’m instagramming vlogging and blogging.

ROMAN: To make a $100 per post you need 10,000 views. You’re not even a micro-influencer, you’re a nano. What do you really do?

MICA: Something I’m phasing out of. Office manager for rental apartments.

BARTENDER: Not even selling real estate?

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FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | FAITH DE SAVIGNÉ

ROMAN: Yeah, that’s where the money is.

MICA: I’m just getting established. Like you start with the small brands Zara, H&M and then you move on to like now (films into phone) Splash, Splash, Splashing! Wait, I have a comment...

BARTENDER: That’s Pavlovian.

ROMAN: But without the drool.

MICA: My followers know, trust and take my recommendations, seriously. (To Phone) Yes you do.

ROMAN: Especially the fake accounts and bots.

MICA: (To Phone) That’s not me.

ROMAN: Look, you’re just a walking billboard. I bet you can put a name to everything you’re wearing.

MICA: I’m me because of the way I put it together. D&G, and C. I don’t even have to say the brands, they’re just letters now.

BARTENDER: A mannequin with price tags still attached?

MICA: Don’t you have a glass to clean? Or some sticky floor to mop?

BARTENDER: You’re nothing without your brands.

ROMAN: Maybe that’s not so bad. It makes the decisions easy.

MICA: Oh a philosopher.

ROMAN: Take away your clothes and make-up? I wouldn’t even be able to recognize you.

Without your brands you’re a blank.

BARTENDER: And without drinks, you’re both boring.

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FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | FAITH DE SAVIGNÉ

MICA: We’re all what we buy.

ROMAN: But you’re selling a fantasy, you can’t afford.

MICA: What kind of commission are you getting?

ROMAN: Tonight, nothing. I’m operating at a loss.

BARTENDER: Maybe try to sell something you believe in?

ROMAN: But that’s sales. Selling a fantasy. Are you even who you film?

MICA: (Draws the word out, not sure while filming) Yeeeaaah??!

BARTENDER: To tell you the truth. I’m not crazy about what I’m pouring. The research is not good. This stuff is toxic.

ROMAN: So just as bad as us.

BARTENDER: Yup, can’t deny that. And I pour with a frozen smile. The same look you have.

MICA: Are you even allowed to talk to me? Where’s your manager?

BARTENDER: That’s if you’re a customer. You haven’t bought anything. You’re just waving an empty glass.

ROMAN: Ha. I bet you haven’t even tasted what you’re trying to push. (Points phone at her like a weapon and starts texting) MICA: Nothing’s worse than smelly, sweaty guys. And it just gets worse as the night wears on.

(Reads comment. Shocked look) THEY STAND UP AND TAKE A STANCE LIKE IN A DUAL AND START TO USE THEIR DIFFERENT DEVICES AS WEAPONS. MICA: Same to you, beer slob.

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FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | FAITH DE SAVIGNÉ

ROMAN: Even with all filters on, you can’t improve your picture.

BARTENDER: (To both who ignore her) So where do you see your selfie in 3 months?

MICA: (To Roman) Cheating old people out of their money, how low can you go? Oh yeah, beer.

The bottom of the barrel.

ROMAN: At least I know what I’m selling. You’re just ‘I post, therefore I am.’

BARTENDER: (To self) They drink therefore I pour, or they sad, therefore I pour more?

MICA: (To Roman) I can wipe you on any platform. Here’s a wack alkie-uploaded. How many likes you gotta get with that one?

ROMAN: Splash some spit on this bitch-your new slogan.

BARTENDER: Nasty. What are you two like when you actually drink?

MICA: Gawd, you’re right. I can’t waste my time with this fake.

ROMAN: Influencers and perverts-both just want exposure.

MICA: I should have known they would send me to a barn.

BARTENDER: (Laughs then moos like a cow) Moo. ROMAN: You have to work your way up.

MICA: I’m not used to this on-site stuff. I’m used to a controlled environment. With good lighting.

BARTENDER: Well shining a on light on you, it’s obvious, you’re just making this whole thing up.

MICA: And you’re just as slimy as your fish.

ROMAN: Hey, are you one of those influencers using blackmail for a freebie?

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FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | FAITH DE SAVIGNÉ

BARTENDER: Talk about slimy, you would not believe the groovy-hipster-snowflakes that try that one.

MICA: You can only collab a relationship that’s mutually beneficial.

ROMAN: It’s not mutual threatening people with bad reviews if you don’t get what you want.

MICA: Well this isn’t paying off. Some people don’t appreciate when you’re in the flesh.

(Leaving her empty glass on bar) I’m going into skin care. That’s where the money is. (She exits) BARTENDER: (Calls after her) Hey, just remember the only way to get dolphin skin is to be a dolphin.

ROMAN: (Puts beer down) This stinks. I’m going back to advising. Do you have an investment strategy?

BARTENDER: I don’t take financial advice from customers or broke people. Another beer? What brand?

THE END

n n n For more information on author Faith de Savigné, please visit our Contributors Page.

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FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | DANIEL GUYTON and COLIN THON

My Father’s Flag

By Daniel Guyton and Colin Thon (3 people stand on a stage – BRYCE, CARL, and EDGAR. BRYCE can be male or female. CARL and EDGAR are male. They are in 3 different spotlights, indicating that they are not in the same location as each other. Each one holds a folded up American flag and speaks to someone the audience cannot see. Their clothing suggests that they are from different time periods) BRYCE: Hey dad.

CARL: Pop. EDGAR: Sir. BRYCE: So, I just enrolled in the Air Force.

CARL: Marines.

EDGAR: United States Navy.

BRYCE: I thought you’d be proud.

CARL: Mom was a little bit nervous, but…

EDGAR: I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t.

BRYCE: I just keep seeing those towers.

CARL: Those burning children.

EDGAR: Those ships.

BRYCE: I had to do something.

CARL: I had to do something.

EDGAR: I had to do something.

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FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | DANIEL GUYTON and COLIN THON

BRYCE: I thought about joining your unit, but…

CARL: The marines seemed like a better fit.

EDGAR: And they attacked our navy, sir. I… BRYCE: …thought, if I’m gonna protect our country…

CARL: If I’m going to defend our nation…

EDGAR: If I’m going to make you proud…

BRYCE: Then the Air Force…

CARL: Marines…

EDGAR: Navy…

BRYCE: Was the place to be. (Beat) Now I know you loved the service, dad.

CARL: Mom says it’s all you ever talked about.

EDGAR: But it’s different today. In… many ways.

BRYCE: It’s an entirely new program. I’ll be flying drones.

CARL: Heloes.

EDGAR: (Proudly) Helping airplanes take off and land from the deck of a brand-new shiny aircraft carrier, sir, named the USS Independence.

BRYCE: (Joking) Now, if that doesn’t make you jealous, dad, then I don’t know what does. I don’t even have to leave the ground!

CARL: I’m leaving tomorrow for Cambodia.

EDGAR: I can only hope to leave a legacy, sir. Just like you.

BRYCE: I can still remember you leaving that day, in your uniform.

CARL: You looked so… impressive.

EDGAR: Like a statue. Or a god.

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FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | DANIEL GUYTON and COLIN THON

BRYCE: I was so proud to call you my father.

CARL: I still am.

EDGAR: I told everyone I met…

BRYCE: That my dad was in the military.

CARL: That my pop was in the navy.

EDGAR: That my father was the bravest man I knew.

BRYCE: I wish you could have seen me grow up.

CARL: But I know you were always watching me – from up there.

EDGAR: I hope I’ve made you proud.

BRYCE: I hope you look down on me and see…

CARL: The person that you wanted me to be.

EDGAR: Someone worth your name.

BRYCE: I have a little girl now.

CARL: A son, and a daughter.

EDGAR: A boy. His name is Carl.

BRYCE: There’s a not a day goes by that I don’t think about your final words, dad.

(CARL turns to BRYCE) CARL: Always be brave, Bryce. And never forget that I love you. (EDGAR turns to CARL) EDGAR: Carl? It’s your turn to take care of your mother now. Just know that no matter what happens, son, I love you.

CARL: I love you too, dad.

BRYCE: Yes, sir. I will be brave forever, dad. Just for you. (They face the audience)

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SCRIPTS | DANIEL GUYTON and COLIN THON

CARL: And you.

EDGAR: And you.

BRYCE: And you.

(All three of them look down at the flags in their hands, then stand at attention and salute. Lights fade)

n n n For more information on authors Colin Thon and Daniel Guyton, please visit our Contributors Page.

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FALL 2021

SCRIPTS | MAGDALENE LUNBERY

Les Paons

By Magdalene Lunbery

Since my specialty lies in menswear, I decided to create Les Paons as a fantasy film begging the question, “What if haute couture was originally made for men instead of women?” The film describes these men as flashy and competitive peacocks who are influenced by their fashion. Les Paons displays the toxic masculinity stereotype in a new way - through their couture.

(To read more about Magdalene Lunbery, please visit our Contributors Page)

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CONTRIBUTORS

SCRIPTS &

CLIPS

Faith de Savigné lives in Sydney, Australia where she finds herself a minor character in a play she hasn’t auditioned for. Her plays have been produced in Canada, New Zealand, Australia as well as the U.S.A. Recent zoom productions:: The Alternative Theatre Company, N.Y.C.-The Religionistas, Open-Door Playhouse, L.A.- Are We Doing Christmas?, and Spark Creative Works, N.Y.-Hands Off, We Bite.

Daniel Guyton is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter from Atlanta, GA. His stage plays have been produced over 500 times around the world, and he has been published in over 45 anthologies and solo publications, including several of the Best American Short Plays collections. His play Three Ladies of Orpington recently won 7 awards from the Metropolitan Atlanta Theatre Awards. He is a theatre professor at Georgia State University and Georgia Military College and is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Writers Guild of America East. In addition, he is Chair of the Professional Division of the Georgia Theater Conference. For more info, please visit: www.danguyton.com.

My name is Magdalene Lunbery and I am finishing my bachelors in December 2021 with fashion design and french language at Arizona State University. During last year’s quarantine, I met another student on Zoom who studied chemistry and French language with intent to become a perfumer. Next year we have plans to move to Paris together to begin our French fashion and fragrance journey as I start graduate school at Parsons Paris for my MFA in design!

Colin Thon is a Veteran of the U.S. Army. He served 15 months in Afghanistan as a Combat Medic with the 549th MP Co. in 2008-2009. He is currently working to build a homestead in the suburbs of Atlanta, Ga.

To view the full piece by Judith Salomon

visit the Art section

ARTWORK | EDGAR FERNANDEZ

Edgar Fernandez

Mascaras | Paintings

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FALL 2021

ARTWORK | EDGAR FERNANDEZ

Spirit of Maiz | Oil on Canvas

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FALL 2021

ARTWORK | EDGAR FERNANDEZ

Love yourSelf | Mixed-Media

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FALL 2021

ARTWORK | EDGAR FERNANDEZ

Love yourSelf | Mixed-Media

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FALL 2021

ARTWORK | EDGAR FERNANDEZ

Kukulkan| Mixed-Media

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FALL 2021

ARTWORK | EDGAR FERNANDEZ

Women Praying | Painting Edgar “8ahau” Fernandez was born in Los Angeles, California in 1990. In 2000 his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona where Edgar embraced his Xicano/x identity and his passion for creating resilient work that continues the legacy of his ancestors. It was the process of collaborating with his community that sparked his motivation to be a full-time artist.

Fernandez continued to strive towards higher education and recently completed his BFA in painting at ASU in 2019. Since 2013, he has accomplished public recognition in Arizona through solo exhibitions, group shows, awards, mural projects.

Edgar's focus is to create artwork that inspires creativity, imagination, spirit, and liberation within his audience.

Email him at 8ahau.edgar@gmail.com Visit his website at www.8ahau.com Fine him on Instagram @8ahau

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FALL 2021

ARTWORK | HANNAH SUDDARTH

Hannah Suddarth

Woman Amongst | charcoal CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

ARTWORK | HANNAH SUDDARTH

Treehouse | pen and ink CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

ARTWORK | HANNAH SUDDARTH

Metamorphosis | charcoal CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

ARTWORK | HANNAH SUDDARTH

Simple String | white charcoal

Hannah Suddarth is an oil painter/charcoal and pen and ink artist based is Mesa, Arizona. She is currently a senior at Arizona State University pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Painting. She envisions her success as being able to engage in the art community and participate and contribute to society describing her own personal thoughts, feelings, and struggles for others to consume and explore. You can find more of her work on Instagram @hannahsudd.art.h.

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FALL 2021

ARTWORK | CAROL SABO

Carol Sabo

Searching for ET III | acrylic

Heading Home| acrylic

Grand Canyon Sky | acrylic CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

ARTWORK | CAROL SABO

Joshua Tree National Park CA. | acrylic

Carol Sabo has been a professional artist for over 50 years, mastering calligraphy, watercolors and now acrylics. Carol studied at the Cooper School of Art in Cleveland, Ohio, but she considers herself a self-taught artist. She was influenced by Georgia O'Keeffe but soon developed her own style. Using lots of detail, bright, bold colors and, sometimes a touch of humor, Carol has won many awards and continues to win them today.

She is a realist so she paints what she sees or gives the images in her mind a realist application. She loves nature and enjoys painting flowers and landscapes. However, her main goal with her art is to make people smile. “Life needs more joy and painting gives me joy. A happy painting is my way of giving back to those who view or buy them.” Her work is currently on display at Mayo Clinic Galleries in North Scottsdale, Az., through August 2022. To see more of her artwork, visit her website at http://www.csabo.com and https://www.saatchiart.com/arizonapaint3r and https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/carol-sabo You can also follow her on Instagram @sabo5288 or email her at scribe14u@yahoo.com.

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ARTWORK | BOB STEFFEN

Bob Steffen

La Jolla | acrylic

Multnomah Falls | acrylic CANYON VOICES

Big Lake Sunset | acrylic FALL 2021

ARTWORK | BOB STEFFEN

Stream and Tree | Acrylic

Hogwarts Express | acrylic

Bob (Robert) Steffen is a retired school building manager who started painting at the age of 78 in the art classes at Oakwood Creative Care, a day club for seniors with memory limitations.

Although he says his only prior experience was painting the classrooms at school, his teachers noticed he had ability and encouraged him. He mostly paints in acrylics. His favorite paintings are interpretations of photographs in his personal collection. They all have special meaning for Bob as they represent memories.

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FALL 2021

ARTWORK | LEZLIE AMARA PIPER

Lezlie Amara Piper

Language Comes From This| acrylic on wood

Sky Demands You Stop | acrylic on wood

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FALL 2021

ARTWORK | LEZLIE AMARA PIPER

Grandma Nellie Watches| painting Lezlie Amara Piper is an emerging artist, writer, lover of plants, and a body-worker of over 30 years. As an artist growing up in the sage lands of Eastern Idaho, and residing in the Pacific Northwest, she is most influenced by untamed nature and it’s systems, colors, nuances, and the natural realm that is our body. She loves working with many (and often mixed) mediums; observing landscape, painting or assembling imagery and objects to invoke the imagination. For Lezlie, art is medicine, art is nourishment, art is a spiritual practice.

She attended Pacific Northwest College of Art, Oregon College of Arts and Craft, The Northwest Film Study Center, and Marylhurst University. She was recently featured on the cover of About Place Journal https://aboutplacejournal.org/ Visit her website at https://www.lezlieamarapiper.com/ To purchase her artwork visit: https://www.artpal.com/lezlieamarapiper You can follow her on Instagram @ lezlieamarapiper/

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ARTWORK | JUDITH SALOMON

Judith Salomon

Dahlia Noir | streetphotography

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FALL 2021

ARTWORK | JUDITH SALOMON

Dog Day Afternoon |streetphotography

Judith Salomon, nom de plume Juliette Lacoste, is a Chicago born American Black woman, a smoker, translator and a photographer. She is also a poet, former journalist, traveler and writer living in New York. She's an intense traveler, having seen China, Europe, South Africa, the California beaches, the Dakota plains and beautiful Arizona canyons at least twice.

Reach her at: www.griffonpress.wixsite.com/griffonpressnyc www.eyeem.com/griffonpress

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ARTWORK | SHERI LOUGHRY

Sheri Loughry

Norway Maple | watercolor

A Single Maple | watercolor

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Persimmon | watercolor and graphite

FALL 2021

ARTWORK | SHERI LOUGHRY

Washington Hawthorne | watercolor

Ginkgo Biloba| watercolor

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FALL 2021

ARTWORK | SHERI LOUGHRY

Short-eared Owl| scratchboard

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FALL 2021

ARTWORK | SHERI LOUGHRY

Peregrine Falcon| airbrush

Sheri Loughry is a watercolor and mixed media artist from Phoenix, Arizona. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Illustration and Design at Columbia College and a Bachelor of Arts in Biology at North Central College. Her interests in biology, experiencing nature and animals, are mirrored in her artwork. She also has an interest in photography, which she shares with her husband, photographer, Dion Loughry.

Together, they own Sandalo Studios. Her artwork has been published and exhibited in several literary magazines and art shows. Sheri enjoys working in watercolor but often combines watercolor with pen and ink, colored pencil, and graphite pencil. She enjoys combining mediums to create a realistic piece that reflects a real life subject or reference photo that she or her husband have photographed. Sheri’s work can be viewed on Instagram @SandalostudiosLLC, as well as, in her Etsy shop, www.etsy.com/shop/sandalostudios.

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ARTWORK | PATRICIA CLARK

SPECIAL TRIBUTE: Patricia Clark Canyon Voices honors interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor Patricia Clark from Arizona State University’s School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies. Professor Clark has spent more than 29 years creating interactive art and collaborating with artists around the world. She works in video, interactive media installations and performance, digital prints, and experimental documentary. Photographs below are from her latest exhibit, “Random Moments: IrrePLACEable Space,” at ASU. Brush fires have claimed many of the images she photographed. To memorialize them, she has created a carousel of burnt photographs. Professor Clark retires from ASU this year, but the extraordinary art she has created will live on for years to come.

Focus on Red| photography CANYON VOICES

One Tiny Magical Moment| photography FALL 2021

ARTWORK | PATRICIA CLARK

Cotton Candy Thistles| photography

Reeds, Threads and Blue Dragonflies| photography

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FALL 2021

ARTWORK | PATRICIA CLARK

Random Moments: IrrePlaceable Space Installation Photo Credit: Charles St. Clair

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FALL 2021

ARTWORK | PATRICIA CLARK

Amber Waves of Grain| photography

“Random Moments: IrrePLACEable Space" is an exhibition and a story of discovery and rediscovery told through photography, composite imagery, text, sound and video. It is a body of work that presents on a larger scale the overlooked, the extremely small, the barely glimpsed and fragile elements of life, of nature: curious bits of perfection often missed as one runs from point to point, with many that may not continue to exist as weather extremes of global warming begin to take effect upon the planet in both subtle and violent manners. Patricia Clark can be reached on Instagram @pjzambori (To see more from Patricia Clark and read her full biography, please visit our Creative Nonfiction and What Next? sections.

CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

CREATIVE NONFICTION | LYDIA PETERSEN

Icarus

By Lydia Petersen

The first time you fall in love it is with breathless, boundless abandonment. You’re standing at the edge of a cliff, barefoot and free looking out at the fire lit sky. Outstretched before you are the blithe purples, mournful blues, laughing yellows, and youthful pinks tangled in clouds. There is the rush of the height, a breeze in your hair, and your heart thundering in your chest. You think that all you can see is all that matters. The hard, cold, unforgiving ground means nothing to you when you jump because like Icarus, you think you’ll fly.

Jason was my rise.

him to a drug dealer when she found herself wasting away. His so-called surrogate father molested him and beat him for seven years until Jason found his way into the foster system.

Tossed from home to home, abuser to abuser, he was finally adopted by his family. But he was still enraged. He was still bitter. He was still untethered.

Mama says that’s why he found me and grasped me. Like a drowning boy in the ocean, he grabbed onto me, shoved me under so he could stay afloat while my lungs filled with salt water and called it love.

And he was my fall.

It’s been seven years and he still takes my breath away but in the worst possible ways.

I was sixteen and sad when I met him in the hallways of a church. A young girl who had spent her life moving all over the country, never settling down, and consistently losing friendships like water in your hands. I was the oldest of five children and the subconsciously self-proclaimed mother figure. I didn’t know what it was to belong, to feel special, to feel so valued that I could inspire poetry. It was as if there was an ocean in my soul and no way to release it.

Jason’s story came to me in bits and pieces. I knew that he was the community’s “prodigal son.” His birth mother was a prostitute who sold

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It started simply. Smiles across the pews. Shy conversations. My best friend saying she’d never seen him look at someone like that before. She’d never seen him so at peace. . . so at home.

That was the word that got me. Home. That this beautiful boy with eyes like raindrops would come to me for love and healing. The idea that I had someone to belong to solely and who I could offer a warm place to rest.

The manipulation and emotional abuse came ever so slowly, like a leaky faucet. Drip by drip.

You could tune it out if you tried and god did I try. I ignored that he didn’t let me stand with friends alone. I ignored that he spoke to other girls and said, “Did that make you jealous? It should. Don’t you want to be mine?” I ignored that I was not allowed to speak of our

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CREATIVE NONFICTION | LYDIA PETERSEN

relationship to anyone besides him. I ignored that he hated my father so much, he broke his phone in a rage against some perceived slight. I ignored the discomfort that he insisted I be ready to marry him as soon as I turned eighteen.

“I have something I have to tell you,” he said, his voice terse and sad.

“What is it?” I whispered, immediately reaching my soul out to his, ready to offer up any balm that I could.

I ignored the fact that I wasn’t eating anymore.

Jason swallowed, rubbing my back in small circles. “My dad kicked me out last night, Lydia.

He said that I couldn’t stay home and be with you. He made me choose and I chose you.”

I ignored the way my smile was fading.

I ignored the way my father cried, begging me to see what was happening.

I ignored it.

Guilt crawled up my spine and into my throat like some sort of suffocating vine. “Jason, I’m so sorry,” I choked out, tears stinging my eyes. “I didn’t ever want you to have to choose.”

I ignored it all until I couldn’t anymore.

I remember that last night so vividly. It’s the night that still makes my heart ache with old love and confusion. There was a summer wedding and the reception was outside. The air felt heavy and warm, reminding me that I was alive, that I was breathing. Jason slipped up beside me, tracing a finger down my back.

“Dance with me,” he whispered, pulling me closer.

“My dad is watching,” I murmured back.

Jason’s jaw clenched as he glared at my father’s protective form on the other side of the lawn.

“So?” “You know how he feels about this.”

Jason tugged my elbow, guiding me to a dim corner, his defined features a silhouette in the shadows. He took my hand in his, wrapped an arm around my waist, and we began to sway to the murmurs of a love song.

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He smiled at me then, so tenderly, with only a hint of sadness. “I will always choose you. The question is whether you’d do the same for me.

We may need to get married sooner, Lydia. Will you choose me like I chose you?”

In that moment, the world closed in. I walked like I was in a hazy dream. I had told him I was not ready so many times. That I wanted to wait until after college to marry him. He’d been angry and his frustration had grown every time I tried to make him see. Yet this? How could I say no when he’d given up the only family he’d found a place in? All of it, only for me?

I felt rather than saw the way my father’s shoulders were squared, prepped at any moment for a fight. Concern hovered all around my mother, clinging to the fairy light’s glow. She gently touched my father’s arm and slipped towards me.

“Lydia,” she said, ignoring Jason. “It’s time to go.

The kids are getting tired.”

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CREATIVE NONFICTION | LYDIA PETERSEN

Jason’s fingers tightened on my waist and Mama’s eyes narrowed at the gesture. A familiar battle began within. Which love? Which loyalty?

Him or them? He’d told me I had to choose; he’d warned me it was coming. Why did this feel like the moment the curtain fell and darkness shrouded the actors?

I smiled shakily at him, stepping out of the waves. “I have to go,” I whispered. “They’re waiting.”

Mama took me home that night, away from the boy I loved, away from the suffocation of his arms.

“Lydia,” she said, thick emotion in her voice.

“Baby, aren’t you ever going to tell me what’s really going on?”

I did.

I told her everything, curled up on her bed. The ocean finally had a hole to spill through. I wept from the guilt, the pain, the confusion. . . I wept because my clothes hung off me, because my heart felt so weak as if one gust of wind could blow it away.

Mama called the pastor that night and got the real story of what had happened. Jason had never been kicked out of his home. He had left, turned his back on his mother as she wept on the floor, begging him to stay. He’d taken my malleable heart and formed a story that would draw me to him, like a dragonfly into amber.

“Love isn’t supposed to be this hard,” I gasped out between sobs. “It’s not supposed to be this hard, is it Mama?”

She held back my hair as I vomited into the toilet, putting a cool hand on my sweaty neck.

“No,” she whispered. “No, it’s not supposed to be this hard.”

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I never did say goodbye to him. I just left, refused to see him, refused to speak to him.

Stories poured out about him as he screamed for my attention, banging uselessly on a locked door.

His web of lies began to slowly untangle. Girls came up to me in the same hallways I had first laid eyes on him, telling me in sympathetic voices that he had cheated.

With every veil that tore away from his facade, I shrunk further and further back. Jason couldn’t handle it. Threats slipped in and the stalking began. My family swept me away to another state, keeping me as far as they could from a boy with honey words and tightened fists. They helped me hide my heart away, the same heart I had given him so freely.

The first time you love, it’s with reckless abandonment. You fly, eyes on the sun, the wind in your hair.

Then you fall.

I am still haunted by the ghost of him. I sometimes mourn for the innocence he snatched away. I grieve for the girl I was. Each time I miss his raindrop eyes, I remind myself that he made me a safe house and then burned me to the ground. I remember an ancient boy with wings and the difference between us.

You see, Icarus fell, burnt to a pile of ash.

Like the Phoenix, I rose.

n n n For more information on author Lydia Petersen, please visit our Contributors Page.

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CREATIVE NONFICTION | SUZANNE W. DIETRICH

A Hummingbird’s Journey

By Suzanne W. Dietrich

One Saturday afternoon, while we were doing the weekly yardwork, we noticed that a hummingbird had flown into the garage through the open door. It flew along the ceiling, desperately trying to find the way out of this confining world. Oddly, the bird could not see the vast opportunity that the open door offered.

After several minutes of its futile attempts to escape, the hummingbird stopped to rest. We tried to coax the bird through the open door, by waving the bird from its perch, but to no avail. The bird continued to fly blindly on the hopeless course it had chosen.

Fearing that the hummingbird would not last much longer, we decided to free the bird by capturing it in a net and taking it outside. The bird screamed in fright as its capture was imminent. Once in the net, the bird stopped struggling.

The hummingbird, now free, no longer had the energy to fly. We fixed some sugar water and placed the bird in the shade. The sliver of a tongue desperately sought the food. We watched the hummingbird, hoping for signs that it would recover and fly away. I felt compelled to continue the vigil while my spouse resumed working on the yard.

Several minutes later, the bird rolled over on its back and took its last breath. At that moment, I realized that our journey through life is not unlike the hummingbird’s journey that day. A feeling of sadness overwhelmed me.

n n n For more information on author Suzanne W. Dietrich, please visit our Contributors Page.

CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

CREATIVE NONFICTION | HARRY GROOME

Old Bull, Young Bull

By Harry Groome

My Uncle John was the first man I ever heard swear.

those things weren’t all good, even if they were titillating.

My family, all except my father who was on duty at the Pentagon, was gathered for Sunday lunch at my grandparents’ dark and forbidding home in Chestnut Hill. Before lunch was announced, my Uncle John told us that the train from Washington, where he also served at the Pentagon, was crowded, as most trains were during World War II, and that he’d accidentally bumped into a stranger who had said, “Get out of the way, you bastard.”

It was a small but uncomfortable beginning.

At seven, I didn’t know what a bastard was, but I knew it was a curse and got very excited when I heard it because I thought any colonel in the Army with a whiskey voice, dark beard, and powerful shoulders like my Uncle John would punch anyone who called him a bastard.

I was disappointed that he didn’t punch the stranger. Instead, he laughed the incident off, quoting a family-favorite line from The Virginian: “When you call me that, smile.”

My disappointment was short-lived as my five cousins and I asked my sister, who at nine was the oldest in our group and knew everything, what a bastard was. Her answer left me even more confused because the curse not only had to do with sex but with doing something wrong. I remember sensing that there were fleeting shadows of things happening outside my small world that I didn’t understand and that many of

CANYON VOICES

The first time I heard my father swear, things shifted again. I was in my early teens, and we were standing on our back lawn when our Labrador retriever sauntered past us. Gentle and intelligent, Dongo was a statesman in creamcolored fur. My father looked at him admiringly, took a drag on his Pall Mall, and said, “Dongo reminds me of the old bull in the old bull, young bull story.”

He waited a moment before going on.

“It’s about an old bull and a young bull standing on a hillside looking down into a pasture filled with cows. The young bull starts digging at the dirt with his hoof and snorts, ‘Pop, let’s run down there and fuck one of them.’ But the old bull says, ‘No, son, let’s walk down there and fuck ‘em all.’”

I choked out a laugh and looked at the ground, watching my foot paw self-consciously at the lawn. It wasn’t just the cursing. It was the fact that my father knew something I didn’t, although I wasn’t sure what; that there were parts of his world that I didn’t understand and, for some reason, didn’t like; and that he enjoyed the idea of sex and could joke about it while I imagined it was such a big deal. It was then that I realized that he wasn’t pure, in mind or body. And I remember looking for my mother to check in on her because

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CREATIVE NONFICTION | HARRY GROOME

if my father was thinking about all that kind of stuff, she must be too.

I never saw either of them the same again, but I guess my father had felt that I was ready.

Our lawn was more than the place where I first heard my father swear. When our pool was under construction, and the workers were there, it was the place that I first refused to kiss my father goodbye as he went off to work because I thought these tough guys, who worked heavy machinery and poured concrete, would think I was a sissy.

That was an even more uncomfortable day than the day he told me the story about the bulls because I instantly sensed that I had hurt him and that I was changing, entering a world that was new and unfamiliar, a world where it mattered what people thought.

Things began to come together in the spring of 1958 when I called home from Hamilton College to let my parents know that the dean had just told me that my grades were so low that I wouldn’t be returning for my junior year. My father answered the phone, and when I gave him the news, he asked if I was disappointed.

The question caught me off guard, and the truth came spilling out. “No, sir.”

“Well then,” he said, “your mother and I aren’t either.”

Now, when I review all that I’ve done or failed to do, I’ve concluded that my father’s comment had more influence on who I am today than any other single event or piece of advice. Even during the call, as I held the heavy handset of the payphone in my hand, I knew the time had come for me to pay him back.

A few months later, I enlisted in the paratroops to begin to earn my father’s unshakeable confidence in me. On a steamy July day, he drove me to the recruiting office.

We shook hands in the car, for I was still too big a sissy to kiss him goodbye. I started down the sidewalk when I heard his voice. He had lit a Pall Mall and was beckoning me to come back for one last word. “H, remember one thing,” he said. “Fuck them fucking fuckers,” and drove away.

I wasn’t embarrassed or uncomfortable as I had been when I first heard him swear. I didn’t wonder what his words said about him.

I knew that he understood the world I was about to enter and that it was good advice, man to man. I only wish he’d given me more advice on the difference between being a man and a sissy because when he was dying, I kissed him goodbye many, many times, even after he was gone.

n n n For more information on author Harry Groome, please visit our Contributors Page.

CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

PATRICIA CLARK

Los Trabajadores

By Patricia Clark

Los Trabajadores was created in 2007 as a multi-media installation in which Patricia Clark examined the repetitive nature of labor in Cuba.

The multimedia installation included the video installation below, a print series developed from the videos and a two-part narrative, which we have also included here.

Symbolic of the everyday tasks that must be done, the three videos below depict the constant unpredictability in meeting one’s personal and familial needs and endless effort required to do so.

Featured here is the video installation and the narrative.

(To read more about Patricia Clark, please visit the Art and What Next? Section.)

CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

CREATIVE NONFICTION | PATRICIA CLARK

Los Trabajadores

By Patricia Clark

Part One It’s 3:00 a.m. and I rise to catch the horse and cart that takes me to wait for the camelo. I have to meet a man in Havana by 7:30 a.m. who says he has a pair of used tires for my father’s car that he will trade for the 10 pairs of jeans I was able to get by trading my old acoustic guitar. I haven’t been able to get a job with the bands because I don’t have a diploma from the music academy and there are many like me trying to get the same position. An accident in my teens kept me from attending school and I was unable, when recovered, to continue my studies. I am selftaught in music and in English, learning the language by watching American movies at night.

I wait for the camelo to come with others who, like me, are out to begin their day of work: waiting for transportation, trading or selling whatever they have to find food for the table or to pay for the white shirts or brown shoes for their children to wear to school, or to buy a recently found “madeusa” part for their bicycle, refrigerator, car, fan, whatever it is that has broken for the 27th time, repairing it to get just a bit more life from it. I hope to be able to see my daughter for a few hours today.... she is my hope and my dream. If I have enough pesos left after buying the meat and vegetables that she and her mother need for soup because they are both sick, I will try to find a toy or something to bring her.

There is a woman over there that I know is a nurse. She makes about 8 dollars a month CANYON VOICES

working for the hospital and in her off hours cleans houses in Miramar to make extra money to pay for her children’s school supplies and to pay the man who collects the ration books and delivers whatever was available from the bodegas that day. Next to her is the young man who is a bartender at the Inglaterra Hotel in Parque Central. He had to pay for his job to be able to have acesso to the tourist dollar market. Many of his neighbors are jealous of this as few have the means to have the same opportunity. I know him to be a good man supporting his family, his wife’s family, studying in his off hours to perfect his English and maintain his job, and studying also to become a babalawo, a high priest of La Osha.

Across from him is a man who is the ponchero for our barrio. He says he is on his way to buy used bicycle inner tubes for patching material.

There is a man he knows in Cojimar that has a few he is willing to sell, or at least this is what his neighbor has told him. He couldn’t confirm that because the phones are down and there was a blackout in that sector of Havana for several hours last night but he will take the chance and a long days journey to find out.

It is now 6:00 a.m. and the camelo has not come.

The crowd of people who have been waiting with me look for other ways to get to their destinations: hailing one of the passing trucks already loaded with others whose camelos never came, hopping on friends’ bicycles handlebars and back tires equipped with a double seat or a box and powered by a lawn mower engine, paying for the Cuban peso taxis which are few FALL 2021

CREATIVE NONFICTION | PATRICIA CLARK

out in Boyeros, (even though it is near the airport, it is still several miles from Havana and there is not much money to be made out here), or walking. I am lucky today. I see one of my neighbors who is a second cousin of my mother’s boyfriend and she agrees to take me as far as the stadium. From there I can catch a Cuban peso taxi.

missed my opportunity to see my daughter before she went to school. If all goes well, I can see her at 6 p.m. when her mother returns from working selling sewing materials in the makeshift mercado in her barrio. I have to find a place to store the tires until I am ready to return to Boyeros this evening so I go to a friend’s house with them, and have to wait for him to return.

I finally arrive at the man’s home but have missed him. His son tells me that his father left the tires for me at another house five blocks from here. Together we walk to the house, passing the long kolas that wait in the park to catch a bus, listening to the cries of “ultimo” from those looking for the end of the line, passing the viejos who are selling mani, peanuts wrapped in paper cones, for one Cuban peso. We see a group of children in their white shirts and red skirts or pants being taught how to march by a two-year conscripted soldier. We all have to take our turns: two years in the military service and then release to pursue our daily lives: looking for food, parts, acesso, items to trade or sell...dreaming of a job or a future in the areas we have been trained in, living in the reality that none such job exists or if it does, there are too few to be able to let all who want to work actually participate.

Part Two

We arrive at the man’s home and wait for him to return from another friends house where he has gone to buy 4 liters of petrol and a carburetor part for his Russian Lada. This friend works for the government’s vehicle transportation garage and had found what his friend needed in an old parts bin. We have Cuban coffee while we wait and I decline his wife’s offer of food, as is the custom. Food is offered, and then politely declined, even when hunger is bellowing louder than the singer on the radio two floors up.

I wait for him for over an hour, passing the time practicing on my guitar, thinking of my mother’s family who live in the campos and worked in the sugar cane fields and processing plants. They are now being retrained to work in the tourist industry in Havana and Veradero, near Matanzas, because the sugar cane industry has been in decline for many years and the coopertivas and processing plants have fallen into ruin. Those who are too old to retrain are left to contemplate the few ways that will be available to them to meet their daily needs.

Those who have family have hope. Those who do not, despair. Many live in the decayed structures

When he returns, it is now 9:30 a.m. and I have

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He has gone to see someone about a possible job driving one of the Cocomovils. He has to pay a fee to the owner of the cab as a security deposit, a fee to the government to get the papers to apply for an operator’s license, the license fee, the required class fee, the driver’s license test forms, and the rental fee for the cab. After this, he will have to make a certain amount of money to pay the cab agency each day before he realizes a profit. Most days it is difficult to make the fee because of the fickle tourist industry and the fact that most don’t have the money to pay for the service. He knows that he will begin to accumulate debt but he sees it as a better way to bring food to the table then to continue to try to find ways to make money in the Mercado negro or to live on the ration cards alone.

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CREATIVE NONFICTION | PATRICIA CLARK

that are left. My uncle lives in one of these and when I visited him last he took me to see the remains of slave quarters that are nearby so that I will always remember how my relatives lived and died, toiling under the hot sun to produce the sugar cane.

My friend arrives and agrees to take the tires for a few hours while I try to find the musician who invited me to audition for his band. They play twice a month in the Parque Central Hotel and twice a month in the Ambos Mundos in Havana Vieja. They are a very good band, making tips in tourist dollars to pay the security guards in the hotels and whatever other “fees” are required by the government. Because of the acesso that they have, they are able to see small profits from their work. They need a replacement guitarist for three months while a band member leaves to visit his family in Mexico. I still have one hour before my appointment with him which is enough time to walk the 16 or so blocks to his house and have time to find a Cuban peso restaurant that sells the cajitas: boxes of rice, beans, meat, and a banana.

When I get to the man’s apartment, I find that the position is no longer available. The musician who was to visit his family has been denied the visa. No one is sure why but many speculate that his neighbors reported him for buying beef on the black market. Although it was hard to prove since the meat had been consumed, several neighbors swore they smelled the cooking of it during a week when none was available in the dollar stores...where else could he have gotten it?

In any case, he was not going to be leaving anytime soon, so I thanked them and asked to be kept in mind for any other chances to perform with them. They smiled and said they would. We all knew that there would be slim chance of that happening.

I leave, disappointed, thinking of ways to be able

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to turn around my situation. I could renew my license to be a bartender but don’t know how I will raise the necessary money to pay for the job.

I know of a guy that lives in Barrio Chino who needs help selling art to the tourists in the ferria...he owes me money from the last time I helped him so I decided to go by his house to see if he has it, or if he can hire me to work again. I find that he has left the country and his wife says he will not be returning. I ask if he left anything for me and she smiles wryly and says, “he left nothing for you and even less for me......” I nod, understanding that her sense of humor is her shield, like so many others, who utter the phrase in moments like this: it is better to laugh than to cry, no?

I walk along the street across from the Capitol and the flag is hanging out, indicating that he is in office...which “he” we are not sure, because we have heard so little lately. As I wait for a camelo to come along so that I can go to see my daughter, I listen to the orchestra that has gathered in front of one of the hotels in Parque Central to entertain the tourists. The orchestra faces the street and the conductor faces the hotel where tourists sit, sipping mojitos, waiting for their tour bus or taxi. Behind him gather the Cubans, standing to listen to the music. I look at their faces and see the same face: the one that holds onto a bit of hope, the one that is wrinkled from the ages of living from moment to moment, the one that gazes through the memories of a lifetime as he listens to the sounds of Mozart, Strauss, and Stravinksy. This Viejo, in a purple shirt, stands unmoving, listening to every note as if eating a delicacy, savoring each sound that provides food for his tattered soul. At the end, he claps – his only movement during the entire piece and then resumes his stance, gazing at the conductor, waiting for the next song.

And I think to myself, at least for today, the music is free.

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POETRY | DAKOTA WILLIAM SZANISZLO

First Freeze in Fairbank Woods

By Dakota William Szaniszlo The blizzard hit like a welterweight And the lizard scurried in. He said, "My heart is cold and there's no warmth out here, The bear knows best, I'll just stay in!"

And all the while the squirrel sat Near where the bird unfurled her wings And as she ducked to leave, she heard him plead, "My dear there is no need!

I've scrimped and saved all summer long To forage for my hen And if you find no warmth in me Please see the storage in our den!"

And on the earth below, a poor snail froze Proclaiming, "I can't outrun the cold!

I'll wait for death, with every breath Exclaiming, 'Just let it not come slow!'"

Still the front moved cold as killers, Stilling life in frozen tracks, All the pine trees shook with laughter As the maples shook with frozen backs, Their canopy a blanket on the wilted flower beds And said the tulip to the marigold, "Release your seeds to dormancy, Or, you see, your deeds are dead!"

The weather quickly changes As does the colour of the hare, What once was sleek and sable Of pigment now is bare.

Yes, the weather quickly changes As do the trees and fruit they bear And the forest's last humid dying breath lingers frozen in the air.

Poet’s Recital CANYON VOICES

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POETRY | L. WARD ABEL

Claudette

By L. Ward Abel Red Tail in light rain—she rides pulses up from the gulf and announces to the canopy lining her green floor that she owns some serious airspace (subject to the anger of crows).

Up from the gulf comes that counter-clock pinwheel— she splays open the woods till mountaintops end her.

For now the heavy air finds a pond to gather, makes a cry a wing at stormy tops— just like she’s the hawk of the world.

Poet’s Recital CANYON VOICES

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POETRY | MIRIAM MANGLANI

My Granddaughter Sits on My Lap

By Miriam Manglani Generations stare back at me in her eyes shaped like almonds exactly like her mother's, her father's, her grandfather's.

They stare back at me in her eyes with my long eyelashes.

Yes, she has my eyelashes, my mother's eyelashes too!

In her eyes, I see them all.

I grip her tiny hand, her dirty hand, covered with streaks of colorful marker, marvel at its softness, its sponginess — so foreign to my hard elephant’s skin mapped with my many years.

She sits on my well-worn lap, my legs ache with her weight, with every soft, giggly, bounce of her.

Her mother sat on it too, when I was younger, with my original knees and strong legs.

She smiles at me and I smile back knowing someday she'll stand over my grave with her strong legs, almond eyes, more journeys ahead than behind, trembling and regret years away, take a good look in her eyes.

Poet’s Recital CANYON VOICES

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POETRY | MISAKO YAMAZAKI

borderland love after Gloria Anzaldúa

By Misako Yamazaki I am a woman trapped between worlds.

Persephone: eternally bound to two separate homes.

What is meant by the bridge between our differences?

I have pomegranate seed teeth and sour lips; my kiss is bittersweet like acid rain.

I’ve lain with the devil and escaped with a broken heart and scraped knees, so please, dear, be gentle with me.

I will not shatter, but even the gods have their limits.

I say this as a warning, a beckoning, a gift of opening myself to you like a flower blooming.

I would wade through the river Styx if you asked me; I don’t know how to swim, but for you I’d learn how to.

The epics of old were right: there is no long-lasting light at the end of a war.

There is always more to fight through after the peace has drained— like a river gone dry.

But there will come soft rains again sometime, and I will be there, stranded by a borderland love, waiting for a sign from either side.

Poet’s Recital CANYON VOICES

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POETRY | BIANCA PADILLA and E. MARTIN PEDERSEN

Higher

By Bianca Padilla A lonely old balloon Tied down to his fears Dreams of taking the leap To be free from constraint.

He slowly moves out of sight To a sky of static azure That is infinite and alluring.

Shackled with doubt He continues to wonder Why he just can't cut the ribbon around his neck.

Get Wasted

By E. Martin Pedersen I love to get wasted I hate my father who told me my life was wasted.

You wasted your chance, dude to have some big-ass fun in this short run.

Live it up, right? not live upright.

Don’t waste it.

Get wasted and stay wasted.

Poet’s Recital

CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

POETRY | GRACE GAY

A perfect night

By Grace Gay the english never got the memo that no one listens to 90s rap anymore, or that club bathrooms need toilet paper. unfortunately, they got a few things: men grinding up against any bit of flesh believing it’s theirs; over serving women with hazy eyes; yelling at lone girls high-wire walking towards end-of-night chips; throwing a brown boy out for his tipsy joy, for dancing too exuberantly.

it was a perfect night. I vomited three times. scraped up my knee on the pebbles of Brighton’s beach— went back to smiling, and no one noticed, so neither did I. in my pink haze and pink pleated short skirt, I pushed the hand of a man out of my linens. and I laughed, and he laughed and in the bathroom glowing lines of coke—promises. euphoria living beyond the body. then, the afterparty crashes the plane. the buzz. the joy.

all we wanted was to be young and to be strangers somewhere.

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POETRY | ROCIO ARCO

Sweet boy of Spanish country

By Rocio Arco Sweet boy of Spanish country – Planted your seed into burnt soil that was damaged in a fire.

Ashes rummage through the winds of the present – Fierce opponents of your presence, in these uncharted lands; unnavigable, unprecedented, ultimately ending in chaos for the masses.

Sweet boy, only fools fall off the edge of cliffs with falls that are too far to see and you are just another tragedy in these cursed lands

Poet’s Recital

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POETRY | JOHN GREY

The Hat

By John Grey She’s in one of those stores that’s part thrift, part costume, part what people really wore back in the day.

She takes a hat gently in both hands, twists it like a cap to fit her crown, as her mouth tries to imitate an 1890 smile.

She looks in the full-length mirror, raises her brow to the edge of the brim, turns sideways a little as if posing for a daguerreotype.

The piece is adorned in feathers, plucked from one beauty, fastened to the soft silk of another.

But then she imagines that bird, all bare patches, clucking with pain.

And the woman the hat was made for, decorated, festooned, and tightly corseted from waist to chest, gasping for breath, stumbling on ill-fitting shoes, for the admiration of men, the jealousy of other fine ladies.

She returns the hat to its appropriate century.

It’s such a relief to shake her hair out.

Poet’s Recital CANYON VOICES

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POETRY | CAITLIN MOHAMED

You’re Just That

By Caitlin Mohamed “But that’s all you are, never to be more,” This was said to me recently.

I might add, it was someone close to me and the worst part? They said it willingly.

Though they thought of it as a side comment made, for sure without much thought on their part.

But this had me in shock and broke my heart.

If I turn back the clock, I see what I once was.

I was once a child, then a student, always a friend, and a sister, even wife and lover. But when my status changed a degree, Apparently I am up for scrutiny.

All my choices now are closely looked over.

To most now, apparently, I am a sorry excuse for a mother.

All because my kids are deciding to melt down around us.

My child is always moving and has a harder time processing than many others.

So many don’t understand, or don’t have the heart to care or wonder.

I am ill equipped, they have implied.

Obviously, a sheer disaster.

Well, I had no idea that my poor kids must be suffering so much.

I guess I am their personal monster.

Even though I cook and I clean while I teach and listen to them whine and scream.

All day I meet their needs.

I read to them each night as they lie awake and say our prayers before sleep.

I discuss with them their hopes, aspirations, and far off dreams.

Just trying to inspire them to be anything they want to be.

I teach them about their faith and the importance of traditions.

All of this has been my effort.

Trying to help them sort through the ups and downs of their lives.

Setting up their lofty wishes and future ambitions.

When I ask them, they say they love me, And yet…

Apparently, that doesn’t matter because according to others, I am just an utter failure, a total disaster.

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POETRY | CAITLIN MOHAMED

But let me set this record clear, I am not just their mother I am a therapist, coach, Arabic and homeschool teacher, chef, laundromat, personal driver, Quran instructor, hair stylist, and even personal trainer and so much more.

I taught them to walk and all of their manners, I cleaned up their scrapes and held them each after their shots were taken.

I even cried along with them.

When they fall down, I have been there to push them to get back up.

I stay up at night and triple check that I locked their windows, Made sure they showered and brushed their teeth, Got them to their designated appointments all within the week.

I know I don’t get it right most days.

I am unorganized and messy in many, many ways But… I try every day to instill them with self confidence and awareness of all that is around them.

So no.

NO. No to those outrageous assumptions you made about me.

I am better than all that you make me out to be.

I am a mother, yes it may not seem like a lot, But let me say it loud enough for you to hear me, I want it to even echo into the streets.

I have a role And it is the most important thing And according to an Islamic hadith, last time I checked, Jannah (Paradise) lies beneath the mother’s feet.

So maybe that doesn’t seem like a whole lot to you, even though I am trying my hardest, But to me and my three kids, I AM important and for that I am proud of myself even if to you, it is all I will ever amount.

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POETRY | HARRISON PRICE

[elliot page, are you proud of me]

By Harrison Price upstanding and adequate: a retribution of a fake boy bio bitch (as the guys online have called me) Sounds like a perfect title just in case somebody wants to make a movie about my life center screen. cue narration what has become of the narcoleptics the hypochondriacs the semi-suicidal the god-fearing agnostics what are their motives why are they so familiar copious questions complete an insignificance, an incomplete understanding of what the hell is wrong and how the hell can things be made right he is pulling at his jeans because genital growth is marvelously painful too pussy to piss in the men’s bathroom but too proud to put a stop to telling every stranger he meets about his plans for mustache grandeur get a load of this guy get a load get a load get a load end report i am not selling my body to satan my soul is not damned stop infringing repulsing deceiving spewing or i’ll beat you with my dictionary until you gain some common sense upstanding and adequate is accurate i hope you come to see that too someday CANYON VOICES

Poet’s Recital FALL 2021

POETRY | BIANCA PADILLA

Landry’s Muse

By Bianca Padilla Twinkling chimes and droning buzzes“I love your music and your added touches!”

Why waste days and weeks composing something new If it will be genuinely appreciated by a selected few?

Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy nonetheless- might agree that Arabesque – A lovely tune indeed, could seize attention with variations, Riffs, fusions, fortissimo palpitations as a recycled creation.

Farewell to my past sticky keyboards and broken uprights From childhood to college, brought me into the YouTube limelight.

Purchasing a Steinway after all this time is an overwhelming sentiment Sleek and black as the ink from the Heiligenstadt Testament.

Limited in black and white but plays every color within my mind.

With the string tension of a harp played by a cherub in Heaven And the capability to capture Ares’s unmatchable aggression With aural booms and unceasing thunderous sounds yet can mimic the river-like echoes that make Joe Hisaishi proud.

It is an honor to call this beautiful instrument mine having never owned something so divine.

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FALL 2021

POETRY | MISAKO YAMAZAKI

Cogito Ergo Sum

By Misako Yamazaki I am beginning to think that depression is the evil demon Descartes warned us about.

“I think, therefore I am,” he said.

I think I am made of dust and plaster: there are pebbles in my lungs, sinking me deeper under the surface.

I think I am made of water— no flesh or bone, just a body, constantly moving whether I want it to or not.

There is a reason “a depression in the land that holds water” is what defines a lake.

I, too, know how it feels to drown in self-doubt.

I think I am made of fishhooks stuck in clumps of seaweed: I can never reel in what I want, never receive a reprieve from the sour sweet agony of my own destruction.

I think I am worthless, therefore I am.

Is that how this is supposed to go?

Depression will make you question your sanity: if you think self-destructive thoughts when no one else can hear them, does that make them true?

No. I think, therefore I will be better.

I must think better than the nightmares, the hollow footsteps of past love and early graves under skies with no sun.

Carve me a tabula rasa instead of a gravestone.

With sea glass bones I will build a sanctuary of self-love and odes to all the parts of me I have called mistakes.

I think, therefore I will recover.

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Poet’s Recital FALL 2021

CREATIVE NONFICTION | DANIELLE CELERMAJER

Learning to Live in Jimmy’s World

By Danielle Celermajer

Australia, January 10, 2020 As I write this on Friday afternoon, it’s been fortyeight hours, and he has barely lifted his head. We call him, but it’s only when we get right up close that he answers, and then in the softest voice — a voice very different to his usual booming baritone. I just climbed down to where he was lying and finally got him to drink a little water, but he showed no interest in food — not even watermelon, his favourite treat. I had no idea that grief could be so deep for anyone.

I’ve held off to this point telling you that Jimmy is a pig, because I appreciate that for many human beings, knowing his species would make it impossible to read this as a story about the enormity of loss. But stay with me.

About three years ago, someone who knew we had rescued a few animals emailed to ask if we could offer a home to two pigs who had been saved from being discarded as “wastage.” For the first six months of their lives, Jimmy and Katy were so weak and terrified that it seemed doubtful that they would live. But they huddled by each other’s side, and in the love of their human, until they had the strength to enter the world. By the time they came to us, at the age of four, they were physically huge, but unusually timid. It took about two years before Katy would look at me straight on; and when the chickens got into their area, Jimmy — all 150-odd kilograms of him — scurried away in fear.

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On 26 December, the fire that had been slowly advancing on our place was finally near enough to pose a real threat. When I telephoned the woman who had raised Jimmy and Katy, to see if she could, once again, offer them sanctuary, she said she’d been half-expecting my call. She said she would be here the next day to take them home, four hours to the south of us, where they could be safe until our place was no longer under threat. The very idea of being “safe,” however, is one of the many casualties of the climate catastrophe. Thirty-six hours later, we had not been touched, but a ferocious fire enveloped my friend’s place, descending upon them from three sides, razing every building, turning the fields to ash, and killing Katy. Given the nature of the fire, everyone presumed that Jimmy was also dead.

But then, miraculously, just over a day later Jimmy appeared, having somehow survived an inferno that vaporised everything else.

With roads closed, and another catastrophic fire roaring through just four days after the one that killed Kate, it took us a full week before we could get to Jimmy. Any fences that would have kept him in had been reduced to ash, but after twenty minutes calling out, he appeared, pink on the black.

He was clearly coming toward us, but when he approached, he kept about ten meters between us — as if the desire to be close could quite not break through the world in which he had been caught.

His movements were frenetic. He seemed wracked by the hypervigilance that he had acquired since his

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CREATIVE NONFICTION | DANIELLE CELERMAJER

every sense had been assaulted: darkness at dawn; the usual early-morning quiet engulfed in the roar of the flames; the intensity of the colour of the fire; the radiant heat that still emanated a week later from the ground; the taste of ash. This sensory apocalypse had come upon Jimmy out of nowhere; how could he possibly know when it would return?

When we got Jimmy home, he shuffled over to his mud bath and lowered his huge, hot, shaken body into it. We were overcome with joy as we watched him rediscover the possibility of coolness. He ate watermelon and drank cold water and slept. But he slept alone — not, as he had every night of his life before the fire, next to Katy.

The next morning, he began to look for Katy.

Everywhere. In their house, down in their woods, up under the trees. He would turn and look and stand very still, listening for her perhaps, smelling the remnants of her presence.

And then he stopped. My guess is that now that he was home, he could stop being hypervigilant. He could relax the terror that had been keeping him in movement. But with that relaxation, both the reality of Katy’s death and the trauma of his experience of the fire came to the fore. He placed his body on the cool of the earth, and he has not gotten back up. When he will get up again, and whether he will find a way back to his world, are among the uncertainties we now have to live with.

I went and sat where Jimmy has been lying. It’s way down in the bush over a gully. The light is soft, you hear the birds and the wind moving through the trees. The air and the earth are cool, and the smell is of leaves and the river. I cannot presume to know what he is doing, but it seems that he is taking himself back to an ecology not wrought by the terror of the fires fuelled with our violence on the earth. He is letting another earth heal him.

When people talk about these fires, they often speak of being overwhelmed by the enormity of the

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devastation. We don’t really have the capacity to grasp this much loss — not only to humans, but to wild and domesticated animals, to the bush, to the very possibility of regeneration. I know I don’t. But I can hold Jimmy’s enormous grieving head in my arms and be present to the gravity and finality of this loss. And at the same time, to his broken but miraculous presence.

February 18, 2020 It’s been some weeks since I wrote about Jimmy — or at least, since I wrote for a larger public of readers. Most days, I write about him to one of the people who has become part of his circle of care — and also mine, because caring for him is also caring for me. This type of care, I have discovered, is organised around neither species boundaries, nor the idea of the individual. The fire’s path knew no boundaries, and although we humans certainly provided far more protection for ourselves against its ravages than we did for other earth beings, perhaps in the end, our experience of the fire also burned through some of the boundaries that we perennially place around ourselves.

I did not write for some time because it was not clear whether Jimmy was going to make it. Well after the fire had passed, the radiant heat, the dehydration, the loss of Katy now becoming permanent, forms of violence and terror I cannot possibly know — sunk into his body. At the lowest point, he neither ate nor drank. He vomited green bile. His eyes seemed empty and grey. Jimmy turned away from us.

The array of treatments sent from afar (reiki, flower essences, herbs, antibiotics, probiotics), all paled against whatever toxins had settled in his body. At the peak of summer’s searing days, we thought we would lose him. We had no choice but to put our faith in Jimmy’s capacity to take himself to the coolest part of his world, to rest his being, and — if we were lucky — to allow the wet towels we placed over his back to stay put.

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CREATIVE NONFICTION | DANIELLE CELERMAJER

And then he turned. First, he went into the field and ate green grass. I was so excited that l stuck my arms deep into his pond, covering him with cool mud. His appetite soon returned, bowls of organic rice with lentils or adzuki beans were devoured along with bananas — one of his favourites. Jimmy was back.

But he was a different pig. Or perhaps, to return to the idea of boundaries, we were a different humanpig hybrid. At his meals we stayed close, infused with ridiculous joy at the sight (and sound) of him eating. When he was done, I rubbed his belly and he would lie down beside us. Whatever fear we had held in the face of a being who occurred to us as huge and “foreign” evaporated. Whatever hesitation he held in the face of beings who occurred to him as perhaps unpredictable and sometimes anxious vanished. In place of the hesitations that had always lurked around us, emerged new intimacies.

Now all of this raises some thorny questions about relationships between humans and other animals, especially around “the politics of care.” If a human friend was sick, you’d think nothing of making sure that every meal was prepared with the healthiest ingredients. If a human friend was vulnerable, checking in on them would be a must. If it was cold and raining, you’d ensure they had shelter to protect them. If you didn’t do these things, you’d be less of a friend. But when that friend is not a human, we tend to think of those acts as anthropomorphising, or perhaps even taking away something “natural” from the other — some notions of resilience or relationship with their environment that is essential to their “nature.”

Why, though, I began to wonder, do we consider it “natural” for humans to build ourselves shelter and improve our diet, and ethical to afford those protections and resources to other humans who might lack them, but when it comes to beings other than humans, these same acts become “unnatural”?

I’m not talking about knitting pink sweaters for

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piglets here, but acts that respond to what truly allows them to live well — feeding them whole grains instead of commercial “feed,” considering a range of health treatments instead of pills you buy at the pet store?

An obvious objection is that such acts can make them dependent on us, undermine their agency and create subtle forms of domination. But when we are talking about domesticated animals, that argument really doesn’t have many legs to stand on.

I’m not talking about erasing all differences, but about a new possibility of equality that takes seriously the circumstances of our shared lives.

Now, of course, to be consistent to the principle of equality would also mean humans taking seriously some of the affordances they have to make life better. Think me crazy, but Jimmy’s method of covering his pink skin in mud to protect him from the sun would do the job just fine for me, and without poisoning the river with sunscreen. And I’m surely not the only one who would benefit from quietly lying under the trees instead of locking myself in an office and writing about their capacity to lower temperatures.

I’m not sure what a hybrid human-animal community based on genuine respect for each other’s ways of being and knowing would end up looking like. But it might not be a bad idea for those of us also dealing with ecological grief and the trauma of the recent devastation to visit the cool of the places Jimmy built himself to heal. I’ll have to check with Jim though.

February 22, 2020 Yesterday, we drove ten hours to collect a new pig, a new friend. She is six months old, copper coloured, and we think her name will be Penelope.

Let me show you a picture, but only with words …

Jimmy is on one side of the fence and Penelope is on the other. All day they have been observing each

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CREATIVE NONFICTION | DANIELLE CELERMAJER

other — he much more than she, because everything is new to her and so everything fascinating. I fed them just on either side of the fence, so they have shared their first meal.

Now they are completely animated – chatting away very loudly and running up and down on either side of the fence. Occasionally they stop and touch noses through the wire.

In the paddock on Jimmy’s side, six donkeys are standing, staring, completely transfixed. In the paddock behind Penny, six sheep and two goats are standing, staring transfixed. It’s Saturday night at the theatre. I can’t imagine a better evening.

February 25, 2020 The rains of the last few weeks have extinguished most of the fires that ravaged the east coast of Australia during the 2019–2020 summer. Even now, though, the shadow cast by those fires over our shared present and future remains. For the most part these days, that shadow makes its way into the media in the form of reports of ongoing conflict as Australia’s political representatives fight it out between continuing our omnicidal ways, agreeing to minimal adjustments to give ourselves the impression of action, and taking the type of radical action that those who can face what is coming know has to be taken.

Beyond the political clamour, though, the lives of all the beings — human and more-than-human — who have lived through the fires, go on. Injured, homeless, grieving, trying to rebuild community, life and livelihood. Right after Kate was killed by the fire of 31 December, and Jimmy returned to us grieving and traumatised in early January, I wrote here about what going on meant for some of us. I wrote because we humans need to have some sense of how this catastrophe is being experienced by the other beings whom we have dragged into it with us.

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The chasm that catastrophe tore in Jimmy’s world was, I now see, so stark, that many people who read about it were able to bear witness with me. Many of those people wrote to me to express that witness.

Many wrote with offers they thought might make it possible for Jim to live again and live well (reiki, flower essences, homeopathy, pig friends, prayers).

Many asked for updates, and I promised I’d write again.

I wrote a first piece six days after that initial one (reproduced below) The second took weeks to write, not least because I felt that so long as people believed Jimmy would “heal,” we might be spared total condemnation for the crime of omnicide: “Some survived and thus the killing is not complete.” Partial redemption. When I feared he would die, I did not have it in me to strike that blow. Only when he was running in the rain-soaked field, did it seem safe to come out again and write, which I did just a few days ago.

But being spared total condemnation is not to be spared. My grandfather Isaac used to say, “Where there is life there is hope.” But now, where there is life, there is the presence of death. Where there is life, there is also mourning. Hope and mourning entwined. And so, I gather together here those disparate accounts that bear witness to Jimmy’s loss and mourning, his re-emergence to a world irreparably damaged — because I want to learn how to live in Jimmy’s world.

n n n This essay first appeared in ABC Religion and Ethics For more information on author Danielle Celermajer, please visit our Contributors Page.

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Connection Lost

by Ashley Gaskin

POETRY |E. MARTIN PEDERSEN

Fascination of Destruction

By E. Martin Pedersen Easy peasy to set this whole fucking forest on fire with this one little match -strike it one little bomb start a World War why not? a microgram of radioactive and/or cancerous dust into your lungs you're toast whatever oh, not hard to taint the reservoir go on do it.

And still we build, build hard we build like beavers our whole lives it's hard work weaving the safety web higher and higher walls, dikes, towers meeting at the dome enclosing knowledge, purpose, grace poison and matches.

Poet’s Recital CANYON VOICES

FALL 2021

•file: Tips on How to Win a Free Trip to Latin America 30 March - 21 April 2011

Part homage to the Chicano Movement posters of the 60’s and 70’s, and part nod to informational handbooks, Patricia Clark, media artist and Associate Professor in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance program of the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies, presents a series of posters that respond to current immigration law.

Reception: 30 March 2011 • 6pm

Artspace West and the Faculty Lounge • 2nd floor • UCB 228 Gallery Hours: M/T Noon-5pm W 11am-5pm TH Noon-4pm 4701 W. THUNDERBIRD RD ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY Park in the Visitor Lot - South on 47th Ave, RT onto University Way, 2nd RT

Casa es donde tu corazon esta Home is where the Heart is

PROfile: An Art Installation

Tips on how to Win a Free Trip to Latin America

by Patricia Clark This art installation was the first in a series of works responding to immigration policy in the United States and in Arizona. It consisted of 24 digital image prints and sound. It was held in 2011 at ArtSpace West Gallery at Arizona State University’s West Campus.

Una casa limpia es una jefa felíz

y una sirvienta cansada

A clean house is a happy boss and a tired maid . . .

Paisajismo: La familia que trabaja junta se queda sano junto

Landscaping:

Aire fresco Radiacíon solar Ejercicio físico

The family that works together stays heathy together Fresh air • Sunshine • Physical Exercise

CREATIVE NONFICTION | SALLY KRUEGER-WYMAN

Again and Again

By Sally Krueger-Wyman

News: March 4th: California Governor Gavin Newsom declares a state of emergency due to Covid-19.

News: March 19th: California issues mandatory, state-wide stay-at home order.

We begin the pandemic scared. My father has tiny crystals in his lungs from a particular allergen he was exposed to as a child in Kentucky. Plus, he was a preemie baby, and one of the last things to develop fully are the lungs.

My mother had breast cancer – she just hit her six years-free mark. But she did intensive chemo that wrecked her immune system. My health has always been an issue. I have autoimmune conditions, and I’ve been sick four times between Christmas and Friday, March 13th – when I move back home with my parents.

When life is out of control, I grasp with both hands to try to reign it in. I sensed the pandemic coming in the time before it was officially in Los Angeles. LA is just one of those places – we’re very international. There’d be no keeping it out.

Scientists have since speculated that the virus arrived in our city before any of us admitted it. I had learned to be a germophobe early on in my life. I’ve had a chronic health condition (dysautonomia) since I was nine, and my immune system has never exactly been ideal. So, as I watched the news and waited for our city to go on lock down, I started organizing. My house, like my life, has always felt just out of my control. I have a lot of interests, and I work from home. I also have very little storage space. And a habit of making piles of things. Plus, I collect books…and plants. I cleaned all my kitchen cupboards and bought lovely glass jars from Ikea to store nuts and pasta and oatmeal. I’d begun to organize the other rooms – got as far as covering my dining room table with piles meant to be organized, when the pandemic really hit, and I decided to move back to my parents’ home. I go back every week or two to water plants and get the mail, but my dining room table still waits, covered with random piles of my life put on hold.

News: March 13th: Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old black EMT in Louisville, is shot to death by police in a midnight, “no-knock” raid on her home.

At first, I tell my parents I will do my laundry and clean my room. I have to fight for this. My parents often have to help me with things in life because of my health, and it can be difficult to maintain a line between when I need their help and when I do not. When I state my line is laundry, and it is lovingly crossed, I am upset.

This is the beginning. But then we all realize the world is in isolated trauma and all we have is each other. We just try to love from then on.

Thankfully, my parents’ home allows us each our space. There’s nothing like space in relationships.

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News: April 1st: California schools are ordered to close or move to distance learning.

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CREATIVE NONFICTION | SALLY KRUEGER-WYMAN

I am twenty-seven, and, pre-pandemic, I lived alone with my dog. In January, I started college again after taking five years off due to my health.

I plan to complete my degree in August 2021, a day before I turn twenty-nine. I attend Arizona State University’s online degree program.

Nothing changes for me when schools shut down and move curriculum online. But I have the hardest time focusing, and my workload is intense. My mom makes me a paper chain to count down to the end of the session. It begins and ends with purple, our ride-or-die color.

The rest is a rainbow explosion. School sessions vary between six weeks in summer and seven to eight weeks during the schoolyear. I take two classes per session.

In Intro to English Composition (I did three years as an English major at the University of Virginia, but unlike there, you can’t pass out of this class at ASU), I peer review a classmate’s essay. She proposes a plan to combat the racism towards Asian people that has sprung up in the Arizona community as a response to Covid-19.

On the last page is a photo of a woman who was spat on. She writes of being afraid to wear a mask.

News: April 10th: Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti orders all employees and customers of essential businesses to wear a mask.

I wear my mask to clean my bookcases. A thick layer of dust outlines places where I’ve removed books. I wonder if I’m being ridiculous to wear my precious N-95 mask indoors as I clean my childhood room. I purchased it long before the pandemic for allergies and immune issues. The first few days of reorganizing/cleaning I didn’t wear a mask. The days after were full of brain fog. With my body that could be coincidence or CANYON VOICES

an allergic response to the dust. I have Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, and my body produces too many chemicals in response to environmental triggers. When I walk into my bathroom to wet a rag, dust particles look like dandruff on my hair.

I better understand the phrasing of a “light dusting of snow.” When I moved back to my parents, I brought a carryon full of books. I am constantly running out of places to put my books.

I begin trying to cull some of them. It isn’t easy.

Each has a memory attached. Chronic Resilience,

by Danea Horn. I’ve had this chronic illness manual for years and haven’t read it. Yet I need “chronic resilience” in my life now more than ever. We all do. I determine to read it and put it back on the shelf. The Odyssey, by Homer. Life is, as ever, an odyssey – though I suppose I’m more likely at this rate to be kept at home for twenty years rather than from it. Breasts: An Owner’s Manual, by Dr. Kristi Funk. Yes, I have them. Yes, they do sometimes require instructions. Add it to the list of should read. Say No to the Duke, by Eloisa James: I have become addicted to regency romance in the past year for whatever reason. My addiction to paranormal romance is nothing new: How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf, by Molly Harper. As with so many other people, you can find 1776, by David McCullough in the background of my Zoom calls.

Are all these authors white? Almost. I find I have three different versions of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. The list goes on: A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan Willful Creatures, by Aimee Bender Black Boy, by Richard Wright Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl Why We Can’t Wait, by Martin Luther King, Jr. FALL 2021

CREATIVE NONFICTION | SALLY KRUEGER-WYMAN

When I die (Dear God, let it not be of Covid and not just yet. Thank you. Amen.), bury me in books, please.

a pandemic. John Krasinski starts “Some Good News.” Then infuriates fans by selling it for big money.

News: April 13th: California, Oregon, and Washington governors sign a Western States Pact to work together to reopen the economy.

News: May 8th Ahmaud Arbery would have been twenty-six. A video taken on February 23rd of Ahmaud Arbery going for a run and being hunted and shot down by two white men (plus the man filming) circulates. Days after the video goes viral, the men are finally arrested.

Everyone is a germophobe these days. Every sane person is a germophobe these days. Though perhaps the line of sanity is increasingly blurred.

Not My President wonders if we can inject bleach into our bodies yet refuses to wear a mask. A friend of mine tells me she Cloroxes her husband before letting him in every night. I do a constant dance around the cloying scent of artificial citrus and cleaning product. A waft of air from the kitchen where my mother is disinfecting groceries drifts towards me. I silently retreat – holding my breath. Shafts of light illuminate footprints on the now dusty floor of my bedroom.

I do not hold a candle to Hortensia, our beloved housekeeper. My overactive mast cells (the source of allergies) leave my skin a constant flushed red. I’m very reactive these days.

Everything “non-essential” closes or partially shuts down: movie theaters, amusement parks, hair salons, malls, gyms, offices. Anderson Cooper gives himself a bald spot. Unknowing husbands shower in the background of their wives’ work calls. A man goes viral for the horrible haircut his loving wife gave him.

Grandfathers build amusement parks for their grandchildren in their backyards. Balcony serenades become commonplace. People play “tennis” from separate balconies. A man in socks squirts dish soap on the kitchen floor, grabs the counter, and begins to “run.” People share videos of the quirky ways we humans are surviving in isolation to combat the brutal truth of a world in CANYON VOICES

Sourdough is trending. Seeds are sold out across the country. Are we returning to a simpler time?

My flour supplier begins to ration – one bag per type per customer. How many sourdough starters will die when the pandemic ends? A friend tells me she spends hours watching British couples look at homes on television, plotting their move to the simpler, earthier country. What else are people doing to ground themselves in simplicity? To ease their troubled minds? Nature seems louder these days. I like to listen to the birds.

News: May 25th: In Central Park, a white woman calls the cops on a black birdwatcher who has asked her to put her dog on a leash. She tells the police: “There is an African American man … recording me and threatening myself and my dog … please send the cops immediately.”

Mornings are difficult for me – my blood pressure doesn’t adjust from the pronate sleeping position to the upright awake position until at least 11 am, and then sometimes it just doesn’t at all. When I’m at my own home, I’ve worked out a system that’s difficult but also doable. I know where everything is ahead of time and can go directly to the things I need. I don’t have to think.

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CREATIVE NONFICTION | SALLY KRUEGER-WYMAN

I know the kitchen will be exactly as I’d left it the night before. When I am at my parents’ house, it’s almost like I’m blind and disoriented. Every morning I have to take stock of what has changed. I have to remember that this big kitchen is not the small kitchen I’ve accustomed myself too. Other people use this kitchen – other people move stuff. Just trying to find where the eggs are in the fridge, the butter – to figure out if we have bread to toast – my brain revolts at having to ingest information with a blood flow that’s too slow. I am literally like a computer crashing. All of a sudden, I just don’t work. My parents make me breakfast almost every day of this pandemic. I am twenty-seven years old. They also make me dinner. And usually lunch.

I am talking to my mom about Ahmaud Arbery and the Central Park birdwatcher (Christian Cooper) as she makes dinner. Like always, she has the news on in the background. I see a man die.

News: May 25th: The Minneapolis police are called on 46-year-old George Floyd, a black man, for using a counterfeit $20 bill. he dies when white Officer Derek Chauvin keeps his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds.

Floyd is handcuffed. Floyd says: “I can’t breathe.” Bystanders plead with officers to help him. Officers stand by. Floyd dies.

Again and again, I fold laundry. I watch the news.

News: May 26th: Gayle King apologizes for her emotional response to the Central Park and George Floyd videos: “As the daughter of a black man and a mother of a black man, this is too much for me today…I’m so sorry…I don’t even know CANYON VOICES

what to do or how to handle this at this particular time…it feels to me like the open season and it is just not sometimes a safe place to be in this country for black men.”

I am exhausted in my mind and my soul.

As protesters swarm to the streets protesting the ingrained racism in our country, my brain swarms with a lack of blood flow. My health condition, dysautonomia, causes my cerebral blood flow (the blood pressure in my brain) to slow way down. Sometimes I can’t speak. Sometimes I collapse to the ground. Sometimes I die inside. As protesters gather outside, I’m inside in bed, drinking electrolytes, popping pills and salty popcorn, trying to stay conscious – very far from coherent. I stay this way for almost two weeks.

News: May 29th: Trevor Noah cites an unequal social contract as a reason to loot.

So many people ask me if I’ve seen the Trevor Noah video. So many white people ask me if I’ve seen the Trevor Noah video. I don’t know what to think of it. Do I like the violence? Of course not.

It breaks my heart to see fires burning and police and protesters clashing. I want to live in a safe world. A kind world. It’s never been clearer that I don’t live in the same country as black people do.

A pandemic of racism is our country’s legacy, and these protesters are doing essential work.

Every company I’ve ever subscribed to sends me an email with their stance on race and equality. iTunes offers certain movies representing black life in America for free rental. Netflix creates a catalogue of shows and movies to support the Black Lives Matter Movement. I begin watching Dear White People. A character cites the riots and looting of the Civil Rights Movement as igniting change. In another episode a character says Martin Luther King Jr. recanted his “I have a FALL 2021

CREATIVE NONFICTION | SALLY KRUEGER-WYMAN

Dream” speech two weeks before he was assassinated. They didn’t touch that at my prep school. I remember dressing up as MLK for a school project. Each student was assigned an influential person. I wish I could say it was a sign of progress that a girl was asked to dress up as a male figure, but I think it was simply that they didn’t consider many women to be all that influential. I was eight or so and my mother showed me how to tie a tie. I wore one of my brothers’ suits and let the words of that famous speech identify the man I portrayed.

5th:

News: June Breonna Taylor would have been twenty-seven. #SayHerName trends.

So much has moved online, and I have the opportunity to do an online welcome class at the church I’ve occasionally attended my whole life.

This moving online thing could really help my access to things as a disabled person. The group leader ends with a prayer saying “Say His Name.

Say Her Name. Say Their Name.”

I am twenty-seven, turning twenty-eight in just two months. The previously slow inching towards thirty suddenly feels like a sprint. I picture the next year ahead, and I can’t see myself meeting someone new. My dating history is all but nonexistent. I hate online dating. When all I’m staring at is a picture, I end up judgment-al as fuck. None of us is just a photo, none of us is just our face or our body. But really that’s all we present on a dating app. No matter how funny your “about” section. One of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2020 had been to go study at coffee shops. I wanted to meet someone in person.

I make it through three months before rejoining an online dating app. I choose OK Cupid on some vague memory that it’s the site I liked best before.

When I spend my money on a three-month subscription, I remember it was actually Match, and I’ve made this mistake before. Under who I’m looking for, I write must love books. Messages appear asking me: how u holdin’ up in quarantine?

How’s the universe treating you these days?

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What’s your pandemic been like? It’s nice to be asked, but it’s clear this is the new pickup line. It is always hard to find an opener. One guy’s profile reads No mask, no date.

I wear a mask for everything these days. I wear a mask to walk my dog. I wear a mask to water my front garden. I wear a mask to drive to my house (the only place I go). I wear a mask to bike around the neighborhood. I wear a mask to talk to my friend while six-feet apart outside.

We talk about Black Lives Matter. She grew up protesting. I didn’t. We both have dysautonomia, so joining the protests is pretty much out the question. Low blood pressure and a haywire immune system don’t go too well with crowds and coronavirus. We talk about social respon-sibility, the social contract, identifying your own bias. She tells me about a protest from home. At nine at night my parents and I hold flashlights to the sky for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. It’s an appallingly long time.

News: June 12th: Minneapolis votes to defund and replace the police system.

Tomorrow’s the last day in the latest paperchain.

I’ve attended school throughout this pandemic – constantly working given the short, intense classes.

Any free time is spent dealing with my health. My mother is ready to make me another paper chain, but I ask her to wait. How I wish I could count down the days of these pandemics. My brain is overloaded and exhausted. Requiring a constant check-in to see what’s the new status quo. The status quo is now that the status quo only lasts a few minutes at most. What will this world look like next month? In a year when I graduate? People tell me I’m lucky to be able to keep busy – to not think about it. My brain is whirling with all the not thinking I’m doing. I want a second. A moment to digest. I want a moment to breath.

News: June 12th: Atlanta Police Officers Devin Brosnan and Garret Rolfe respond to a call from a Wendy’s restaurant about a

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man asleep in his car in the drive-through.

After speaking with the officers for thirty minutes, Rayshard Brooks fails a breath test and attempts to run away. He is holding Officer Brosnan’s Taser. While running away, he is shot three times and killed by police officer Garret Rolfe.

Rayshard Brooks was a twenty-seven-yearold black father of four.

No one knows where we are anymore. The waves of an illness are shifting the landscape. The waves of racism are being revealed – in history and right now. What was once familiar is cast in strange light – the tinted glass of pandemic living. Where to find comfort? What remains steadfast?

I do laps midday in my parents’ pool and try to transport myself to the time when I was a child.

When all the cares of my world were safeguarded by my parents. My childhood has never before seemed like such a comfort. Like a blanket to catch me in my fall, wrapping me, cocooning me. Gone are the remembrances of missed school and illness, of being called fat, of having few friends. I want to live in the summer times now – the hot days scorching away the complexities of childhood, of today.

I used to think about the future, seeking comfort in what could be. A lifeline learned from years of chronic illness, of being stuck in my bedroom. Of being unable. I can’t seem to break the habit. I travel to that place in my brain where I should find comfort and recoil at its emptiness. The future isn’t friendly anymore. The future shakes with waves of unknown possibility. I’m grieving the loss of a life that never lived.

My days have never been simpler. I go nowhere; I have no appointments. I am swimming in the middle of a weekday. I am swimming in the middle

of a life. Yet I question everything. Gone are the staples of life upon which I built my foundation.

What will hold me steady? I no longer go to the bookstore. I protect my fragile immune system with delivery and Clorox. I hate online dating but can count on one hand the number of people I have touched – just touched – in four months. Gone are the hugs. Even the police are no longer the simple line of safety I, as a white American, once imagined they were. Gone are the daily rituals of community.

My neighbors don’t seem to understand that I moved back to my childhood home to avoid being alone and afraid.

What world is this now? And how do I live in it?

Will this shifting landscape ever stop moving? I shudder at the thought of the whole world asking these questions. I know that I am not alone in my ignorance, and I have never been more afraid.

My brain keeps me awake at night, showing me my gaps in knowledge. What will the world be like in six months? In three? When will I stop having to look at the news to see if I can leave my house? Are masks the new normal? Will the nose, mouth, and chin become particularly enticing in a world where only your quarantine companions see them? What is this world we live in now? I no longer enjoy science fiction. Will cop shows become a relic of bygone times? What else will change? Surely our culture of hugging has already died. Along with one-hundred-and thirty-seven-thousand Americans and counting. Will we replace the police? And how? Can we begin to heal the damage done by years of ingrained racism? Can there ever be true reparation?

I find refuge in the pool of my childhood. I hold my breath as I stare at the sunlight filtering down through the water. Every stroke and kick sets off an electric, rippling dance of light. The whole world’s shaking as I traverse the same path. Again and again.

n n n For more information on author Sally Krueger-Wyman Meister, please visit our Contributors Page.

CANYON VOICES

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SCRIPTS | KAREN FIX CURRY

Nightmare: a monologue

By Karen Fix Curry

Character: Health care worker: - 20 to 60 years old. Any gender. Any ethnicity. Exhausted, wearing scrubs and a mask.

(It’s been a long night, after a long day, after a long year. The healthcare worker removes his/ her mask.)

Health care worker: I feel like I’m getting PTSD, you know? I can’t sleep. And when I do

sleep, I dream about losing patients, forgetting to do one thing, or not doing it quite right, and the patient dies. It feels like they all die. I’m trying to save each one, and I’m running down the hall trying to get to all of them, and I just can’t. The harder I run, the slower I go, and I look down, and my feet are all tangled in oxygen lines, like octopus tentacles, wrapping around my feet, and then my calves, and now I’m wading through a sea of oxygen tubes.

I pick one up and I try to follow it like it’s a lifeline but I can’t move anymore, and the tubes are just getting deeper and deeper, and I can hear my name being called on the intercom but now the tubes are up to my chest and I can’t breathe and I’m trapped. And now I’m climbing over the top of the lines, following the one I picked up, crawling over it all until finally I reach a room. And the lines are gone.

There’s this patient lying face down and I know this one’s not going to make it. And I go over and the dial for the oxygen is turned up to 5,000. There isn’t even a 5,000 mark on the dial but I can read it and I know this patient is dying. First it’s an old man and I reach out and touch him but then I realize I have no gloves on so I’m trying to look to see if there are gloves but I can’t find any, but I find a jar of pickles, so I dip my hands in this giant pickle jar, since I figure maybe the vinegar will sanitize them.

And now I’m suddenly back to the patient but now it’s a 20 something woman, barely more than a girl, and I blink - and it’s a middle aged woman on her back crotcheting with

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SCRIPTS | KAREN FIX CURRY

her oxygen line. And I know I’m in a dream because none of this is real. None of this makes sense, and the woman opens her eyes and reaches up and grabs me with this vise grip and I scream. I’m still not wearing gloves, and she’s coughing in my face and I realize my mask is crocheted and full of holes and I can’t get my arms loose and I’m struggling with this woman coughing in my face and ... I wake up.

I’ve been asleep for about two hours. Now I’m afraid to go back to sleep because I know that I’m just going to have another nightmare, you know? If I get back to sleep. I’m so tired. I just want this all to be over and go back to the way it was. I’m a afraid to go back to work but I know they’re counting on me. These poor sick people. And my coworkers.

I have to go back for them. I have to go back.

I’m so tired.

For more information on author Karen Fix Curry, please visit our Contributors Page.

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ABOUT US CANYON VOICES LITERARY & ART MAGAZINE is dedicated to shedding light on the works of emerging and established writers and artists. Founded in the spring of 2010 at Arizona State University’s West campus by one professor, Julie Amparano Garcia, and six students, this journal strives to bring the creativity of writers and artists to light within the community and beyond. Supported by the students and faculty of the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies at ASU’s New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, CANYON VOICES accepts writing and artwork from writers and artists from all corners of our planet and from all walks of life.

The work of maintaining and producing this magazine is entirely student driven. Since its formation, CANYON VOICES has expanded into a full credit, hands-on class. Students build a full literary journal each semester, heading every aspect of production, including soliciting submissions, editing, marketing, design and layout, and publication. We strive to bring you an eclectic range of voices each semester.

OUR MISSION At CANYON VOICES our mission is to provide an online environment to highlight emerging and established voices in the artistic community.

By publishing works that engender thought, Canyon Voices seeks to enrich the scope of language, style, culture, and gender.

CANYONVOICES

CONTACT US Questions, comments, feedback? We would love to hear from you.

Contact us via email at: CanyonVoicesLitMag@gmail.com You can also visit us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/asucanyonvoices

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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

SUBMITTING WORK To submit your work, please send it to CanyonVoicesLitMag@gmail.com. Be sure to attach all the work you wish to submit to the email. You may include an author biography and a photo, which will be included in the magazine should your work be chosen for publication. We are affiliated with Arizona State University, and we uphold academic standards. If your work is accepted, we reserve the right to make changes. You will be contacted should your work require more extensive edits. We accept simultaneous submissions.

All documents submitted should be double spaced with a 12 point font, in either Times New Roman or Arial. Poetry may be single spaced. All written documents must be submitted in (.doc) or (.rtf) format. Artwork may be in JPEG format.

All work submitted must have a title.

FICTION Up to two stories may be submitted per issue. Each story may be 20 pages or fewer.

POETRY

CNF

Up to six poems Up to four stories per may be submitted issue. Two pieces may (no longer than be 20 pages. two pages each) per issue.

SCRIPTS Up to two scripts may be submitted per issue. Script maximum 15 pages.

ART Up to ten pieces, with at least 300 dpi or JPEG format (<1 MB).

Include detail on medium.

EXPLICIT MATERIALS

READING PERIOD

Because this is a university magazine, submissions containing sexually explicit material and explicit language will be reviewed and determined eligible for publishing depending on the context of the material in the work. Material deemed inappropriate or gratuitous will be rejected.

Our editors read submissions in August, September, and through October 15th for the fall issue. The reading period re-opens in January, February, and through March 15th for the spring.

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EDITORIAL

BOARD

Julie Amparano Garcia is the founder, publisher, and advisor of the Canyon Voices literary team.

Serving in the school of Humanity Arts and Cultural Studies at ASU's New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Amparano Garcia oversees the school's Writing Certificate Program and teaches a variety of writing courses that include scriptwriting, cross-cultural writing, fiction, persuasive writing, and more. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University in Los Angeles in 2006 and is working on a collection of short stories and a play about children and war.

As a writer, Editor-in-Chief of Canyon Voices Literary Magazine and ASU's book blog, The Spellbinding Shelf, Sharon Enck shares her literary passions with like-minded wordsmiths and readers. Her love of short-form creative nonfiction has proven to be the perfect outlet for an unconventional upbringing surrounded by hippies and witches. Her work and reading preferences demonstrate an obsession with character development, an appreciation for the human condition, and are dominated by a wicked sense of humor. She is currently studying English and creative writing with the ambition of entering the editing and publishing fields.

Sharon's husband and daughter support (sometimes grudgingly) her bohemian sensibilities, wild endeavors, and the ever-present threat of moving to Paris.

Courtney Corboy is a nerdy English major at ASU West. Born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, she hopes to be an editor and published fiction writer. Books comforted her as she navigated life as a physically disabled woman in a semi-accessible world. She is currently working on a third or fourth draft of her novel-in-progress. Writing gives her an outlet to be creative. She is a creative scribbler. She explored an accessible cavern in Arkansas. Courtney has three physical disabilities: Arthrogryposis, a hearing impairment, and vision impairment. Courtney rolls through life with a smile on her face, coffee, a notebook, and multi-colored pens. She believes she can help other writers hone their craft, and voices.

Makayla Lapora is a Junior at Arizona State University, West Campus. Native to Glendale, Arizona, she enjoys watching old films and movies to escape the summer heat. She is an English major pursuing a minor in technical communication. Makayla’s love for writing started young, by middle school she already knew that writing was something she was passionate about as she participated in the yearbook club for two years during her high school education. Once Makayla graduates in 2023, she plans on using her college education to get a job in the technical writing field and possibly go on to graduate school. She truly enjoys the process of writing and editing and hopes she can continue her passion for years to come.

In a constant state of trying to whittle down his never ending to-be-read pile, Benjamin Suddarth is in his final semester at Arizona State University studying History and English. After graduation he is trying to decide whether to delve into the publishing industry or continue his education in Library Information Science. Through it all, he continues to try and figure out how writers craft amazing stories and tries to squeeze some sort of musical performance group into his schedule.

Woman

by Lezlie Piper

To view the full piece by Lezlie Amara Piper visit the Art section