Bennington College – The End of the World Journal – January 2023

the end of the world

Bennington College • January 2023

The End of the World

Stories, Essays, and Poems by the 55th Graduating Class of The Bennington Writing Seminars JANUARY 2023

Managing Editor

Emily Tyler Kauffman

Poetry Editors

Rebecca Findlay

Katherine Llewellyn

Nonfiction Editors

Cathy Casriel

Emily Tyler Kauffman

Fiction Editors

Francesca de Onis Tomlinson Hannah Wilken

Cover Design Alyssa Natoci

Cover Photography

Margaret Koss (front) Diana Ruzova (back)

Journal Design

Ayla Graney

© Copyrights retained by all respective contributors.

Acknowledgments

“One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”

— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.”

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

To the Teachers & Staff at Bennington College –Thank you for your support, encouragement, and dedication to our development.

To Our Fellow MFA Students – Thank you for creating a community of writers and friends, for everything you have done, from line edits to spontaneous conversations, that helped us grow and think and wonder.

Contents

NONFICTION | Christy Rae Ammons Eulogy 7

FICTION | Michael Barry Jobstopper 9

FICTION | Erica Bittner The Eagle 12 A Day in the Life (of Lydia Davis) 16

FICTION | C.A. Carrington That Time of Day Waning 19

NONFICTION | Cathy Casriel Hatching 24

NONFICTION | Anya Chambers Swimmers 27

NONFICTION | Jen Chistensen Making a Way out of No Way in Cuthbert 33

FICTION | Laura Dean Between Wolf and Dog 39

FICTION | Francesca de Onis Tomlinson Huracan 45

POETRY | Rebecca Findlay

Fieldmouse 51 Last Fig 52 Transubstantiation 53 “Invasive” Species Unknowingly Enjoyed 54 New Year’s Eve, 1983 55 Surveying 57

NONFICTION | Kaycie Hall Once Upon a Time 59

FICTION | Mollie Hawkins Public Safety Power Shutoffs 64

NONFICTION | Emily Tyler Kauffman Rate Your Pain 70

FICTION | Margaret Koss & Alyssa Natoci The Cusp of Magic, An Interview 76

FICTION | James LaRowe Dear Edna 87

POETRY/FICTION | Kathryn Llewellyn

Philadelphia, 2012 93 Pack a Day 94 Lake Ypsilon 96 Nesquehoning, Late Summer 98

Contents

FICTION | Amina Mobley & Larissa Pham Cake and the Pen, An Interview 100

FICTION | Aaron J. Muller Heads 108

NONFICTION | Andrew Quintana Molly and Me 114

POETRY | Guillermo Rebollo Gil

I begin making resolutions 121 The Animals 122 About having children 123

FICTION | Jess Rezendes Wine O’Clock 124

FICTION | Felicia Rivers Tagger Down 130

POETRY | Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Did I Ever Tell You 136 It Is As Though 138 Quiet Times 139 It’s the First Day of June 141 Dissolution 143

FICTION | Margaret Rush Liudvika 144

NONFICTION | Diana Ruzova

The Manager’s Daughter 149

FICTION | Jennifer L. Shaw

Transformations 155

NONFICTION | Cecilia Malgeri Skidmore Untitled 161

FICTION | Zoe Stricker

The Sound of Waves 167

FICTION | Jane Stringham The Three of Wands 172

FICTION | Hannah Wilken Protest Story 175

Biographies & Recommendations 182

Eulogy

By Christy Rae Ammons

I stand in the bathroom, brushing my teeth, thinking about what will happen when I die. What is there to say about my life? My mouth hangs open, frothy blue toothpaste running down my lips and onto my chin. The sink is full of spit, and I turn on the faucet. If I were to write my eulogy, what would it say?

Christy flossed sometimes. Occasionally, after brushing her teeth, she would remember that responsible humans floss twice a day. She would take a little plastic flosser, as opposed to actual dental floss, and ram it between her teeth until they bled. I’m going to floss every day, she told herself, and then she wouldn’t for several weeks.

Christy wrote sometimes. Occasionally, after staring at a blank Microsoft Office Word document for hours on end, she would remember that words do exist, and that they are accessible. She would slam her fingers into the keyboard until a few paragraphs or pages appeared. Most of the time, she hated those words, but was happy to have accomplished something. I’m going to write every day, she told herself, and then she wouldn’t.

Christy cried sometimes. Occasionally, after holding in her feelings for a long time, she would remember that humans cry. She would put on sad music, get into the shower, and sit on the floor of the tub as water splashed her head and tears ran down her cheeks, indistinguishable from the manmade rain. She would blow her nose into her hand and then let the water wash it away. Her eyes would be red and puffy for the rest of the day, preventing her from hiding the fact that she had sobbed in the shower. I’m not

going to stuff down my feelings, she told herself, and then she did.

Christy ate sometimes. Occasionally, after realizing that it was two in the afternoon and she had been awake for eight hours, Christy would eat a frozen microwave meal, usually Amy’s Mac and Cheese. She would heat it up, scarf it down in a few minutes, and wait for dinner. At dinner, Christy would eat her meal and sometimes ten other snacks. I’m going to start eating breakfast every day, she told herself, and wouldn’t.

Christy was like most people. She liked smoking joints at four o’clock in the morning and watching Spongebob Squarepants. She always complained when it rained, and often forgot to say thank you. She never forgot her dog’s birthday. She was a human.

My reflection is pale and stares coldly back at me. My eyes move to the bag of plastic flossers on the counter. I don’t even bother. What will it matter if a small piece of toast is lodged between my teeth for another few hours or days? I walk to the bedroom and lie down for a nap. I position myself on my back, my arms tucked against my sides. Here lies Christy. She did most things sometimes.

JOBSTOPPER

By Michael Barry

On Monday I unwrapped athletic tape and dri-loc pads to unveil the skull’s red eyes and toothy grin. If all went well, Matilda would quit the next day and by Wednesday we’d be in a Sprinter Van en route to Marfa. I walked into Columbia tower, resignation letter tri-folded in my newly tattooed hand. The letter was brief and polite because the hand said it all: fuck the law firm; fuck “optional” Saturday morning cycling with the partners; fuck running paperwork to Bellevue the night Matilda learned pregnancy was “not realistic”; fuck reducing our marriage to half an hour of coffee together in the morning. McPherson, the partner not from Seattle, stood beside me on the elevator. He pointed. “Perkins, is that a jobstopper? On your hand. Good golly, it’s bright. And clean.”

I extended my folded letter. He held out a palm. “Five minutes,” he said. “My office.”

Skull-handed I closed his office door behind me. He pressed a button and the blinds shuttered. He stood up behind his desk—he’s no puny man—and took off his jacket. Was he going to beat me? His expression was cherubic or deviant.

“If you don’t mind,” he said. He turned his back to me, unbuttoned his shirt and lifted his undershirt. His entire back, beginning down past his belt and wrapping up around his shoulders, was enrobed in a violent, sensual, and clean tattoo

of a snake eating a gorilla. “Got it when I beat Hodgkins Lymphoma.” On his wall was a child’s framed crayon drawing of a snake eating a gorilla. “In 5 minutes we’re meeting a new client. Don’t speak, take notes.”

Fine, let whatever condo developer or droll corporate counsel gape at the unhinged lawyer with the sick hand ink. But there in the conference room stood Seattle’s platinum-selling rap artist. He was surrounded by grey-haired, grey-suited partners, relaying their children’s praise. His slumped posture said he was bored, until McPherson introduced me and he straightened.

“Holy shit,” he said. “Is that a jobstopper?” He pulled down the neck of his shirt to reveal a skull with a wolf’s face coming out through the temple. Turned out he and I had gone to the same artist. Now at ease, the superstar discussed charitable trusts, ecumenical governance structures, tax credits available to NGOs operating in Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador. As I typed he kept pointing at me: “Who’s investigating 501(c)(3) equivalents in Tegucigalpa—Jobstopper?” or “Jobstopper—do we file taxable entity applications before establishing local bank accounts or vice versa?” He and I shook hands. Afterwards McPherson broke it down: 945 ultra high net worth musicians from Seattle to San Francisco with “significant” legal needs but wary of lawyers who didn’t “get it.” He mentioned an eyewatering bonus for a new practice lead. “I didn’t know you had it in you,” McPherson said. “Now I see you.”

On the bus home I rehearsed how to tell Matilda. In our one-bedroom apartment she sat red-eyed on the couch. “Did you do it? How did it feel to tell them off?” On the coffee table I saw another negative applicator from another spent pregnancy test.

“I maybe got promoted,” I said.

“The tattoo did it?” she said. “I was afraid of that.”

I already felt our precious morning half-hour shrinking. We hadn’t had such a good cry together for six months, back when we threw ourselves a no-baby shower, gifting each other with yards of tube for breast pumping, tiny brushes for bottle washing. I had worn a nipple cup like an oxygen mask.

“Where will we go first in our Sprinter?” I said, palm on her leg.

“Argentina,” Matilda said. “The Plaza de Mayo, all the history. And for a few dollars, all the wine we can drink.”

“After Argentina, Tegucigalpa,” I said. “Kind of off the radar.”

“Oh, and Patagonia,” she said. “We’re just pretending though. Right?”

The Eagle

(EXCERPT FROM NOVEL)

By Erica Bittner

During the war, The Eagle became a popular spot for RAF airmen to gather, first before deployment, and then while on leave. One evening, in a moment of artistic nihilism, one of the airmen climbed on top of his table, flipped open his lighter, and burned his name and squadron number onto the yellowed ceiling. Others then followed suit, that night and in the nights to come. The pub owner pretended to mind, to give the airmen the sense of rebellious wrongdoing they so desperately needed to feel that they’d left their mark in the face of unspeakable danger. But the owner, having lost two sons in the Great War, was quietly honored that his pub was home to these last missives of the airmen.

The pub owner was now accustomed to groups of lads who gathered beneath a number, to toast their own survival, and then the names of the dead above them. On occasion, out of place patrons would stop in, usually over lunch—a middle-aged upper-class couple or a lone young woman, the diamond still sparkling on her finger. These visitors would order a pint or the uncommon glass of wine and sit at a table in the corner, their eyes roving over the numbers and names on the ceiling until they found it, the one they’d been looking for. No matter how

many times the owner served folks like this, it still gutted him— the soft gasp, perhaps a finger pointed upward, the tears welling in upturned eyes. And then there were the widows. Sometimes they would quietly ask after a name or a number, and he’d wipe his hands and help them search. Once found, he would resume his place behind the bar to give them a moment alone. That was the only time the widows took—one moment, maybe two, to confirm that they had seen it, that their lost one had once been there, alive and well, possibly a little drunk, leaving his mark in whatever way he could. Then the widows would take a breath, dab an eye with a gloved hand, and wave in the owner’s direction. Out of obligation, he would offer them tea or a drink on the house. Out of obligation, each widow would decline, thank him for his kindness, and quickly depart.

Yet one woman was distinct in the owner’s memory above all the others. She came in the evening, alone, after the dinner hour and just as the pub was filling with the younger crowd. She took a stool at the bar, handbag hung from her elbow, hat perched just so. She ordered a finger of Scotch, neat, and removed her gloves to select coins from her coin purse and place them on the bar top. Then she sipped and observed the others around her, not self-conscious yet not drawing attention to herself either, though the owner kept a protective eye on her just in case. She was still young, and because of that, she was pretty when she might otherwise have been considered plain. But there was something about her, perhaps her sense of propriety, perhaps the thin gold band on her finger, that kept her from being bothered by the men around her.

When her glass was empty, the owner pointed to the bottle behind him to offer her another. She waved to kindly decline and gathered her things. He watched her weave through the

tables and clusters of standing patrons toward the door. But then she paused at a low table in the center of the room. The owner watched her lean down to say something to the four or five young men seated there. At once and without protest, they cleared the table and stood, one gentleman quickly wiping the rings of sticky beer with his sleeve before he too made way. The woman arranged a chair and set a heeled foot on its seat before a gentleman held out a hand to steady her. She nodded her thanks with a small smile, took his hand, and then up she went to stand atop the table.

Her ascension brought a reverent hush to the entire pub as everyone watched, some glancing at one another out of surprise or confusion, waiting to see what she would do next. The woman paid them no mind at all. Instead, she unclasped her handbag to retrieve a silver tube from its contents. With an expert motion, she slid off the cap, gave it a twist, and out came a small cylinder of vibrant red lipstick. She then turned her gaze to the ceiling just within reach above her. The owner watched her inhale a steadying breath before she began to scrawl her own message in red. Once finished, she paused to consider her work, still as a statue carved from marble, and just as exquisite.

Slowly, silently, without commentary or flourish, the men in the pub began to remove their hats one by one, resting them gently over their hearts, their eyes turned upward to the woman as she gazed at her neat scarlet script above them all.

Then the woman restored the lipstick to her handbag, accepted the hand of the young man waiting to help her to the ground, and stepped down from the table. The men parted to clear a path before her, each giving her a gentle nod as she passed. Without looking at any of them, the woman walked briskly out of the pub and into the night.

When the door closed behind her, the men in the pub slowly replaced their hats. The young men gently reclaimed their table, though not without glancing upward to read what the woman had written. The pub owner resumed his service behind the bar as the general din gradually restored itself. He wouldn’t gawk at her work out of respect, and it seemed that the others there that evening felt the same way. Yet when it came time for the patrons to trickle out, he watched each of them touch their hat as they walked beneath the woman’s writing on their way to the door. This reverence, even from his more disorderly regulars, was quite something.

It wasn’t long before the busboys turned up the chairs, mopped the floor, took their cigarettes from behind their ears, and went home. Stock counted, till balanced, the pub owner finally removed himself from behind the bar to retrieve his coat. But before he switched off the last of the light, he walked to the center of the room, removed his hat, and gazed up.

To Jack, forever beloved. I am yours, always – Georgie

He never saw the woman in his pub again. But her words would linger long after his retirement, the red pigment staining the ceiling for decades to come.

A Day in the Life (Of Lydia Davis)

By Erica Bittner

The woman is a writer. A good one, though of course she does not always think so. She spends seventy-four percent of her time in one of three places: 1) her apartment, 2) the bus, 3) the café downtown. The other twenty-six percent is spent in many different and odd places—the lobby of the art museum, the park bench across the street from her ex-husband’s current apartment building, by the vodka in the liquor aisle of the grocery. (In middle age, she has decided that she is too old for vodka. She now prefers a red blend. However, she has discovered that the type of people who purchase vodka seem to have endless permutations. Whenever she gets stuck, she can always get relatively unstuck in the liquor aisle by the vodka.)

In all of these places, she observes. And she writes.

At times, she fields nervous calls from her agent, who wants to confirm that another collection of stories is in fact on the way. She tells him yes, but of course it’s not. All she has are notes. Fragments. Scribbles. Four different notebooks, and no idea what they actually contain. Every time she thinks of the notebooks, she becomes desperate for Paris. She is sure that if she had never moved back across the Atlantic, she would be able to keep better notes. Cleaner notebooks. At least more

organized thoughts. She would certainly have less awkward attempts at rekindling friendships that died more than a decade ago. She is a writer, but she is not a letter writer. Dreaming in French doesn’t help any of this. (She is, after all, a little pretentious at heart.)

As it stands, her notebooks are chaotic. She knows that they must become not-chaos. They must become more than notes in books, but an actual book. And she can’t seem to remember how she put the last four books together. So here she is, “working” on a fifth, with nothing more than scribbles under her jurisdiction. Scribbles. What a word. She writes it in the notebook she happened to throw in her purse that morning, the one she chose from the pile on the coffee table simply because her transit card was lodged between its pages. As if to underscore the meaning, the bus jolts in that very moment, turning her note about the word “scribbles” into an actual, bona fide scribble.

She thanks the pothole for the inspired moment, rather than the bus.

It is now her stop. She exits the bus through the door in the back rather than the door in the front, but not before a man in a suit protected from the rain by a clear plastic poncho pushes his way past her to avoid paying the fare. He smells very nice, and he mutters “’scuse” as he brushes by. She appreciates his manners. She also appreciates her wool sweater that repels the water he brushes onto her left shoulder.

Once she has disembarked, she stops abruptly to sit on the bus stop bench to open both her umbrella and her notebook. She writes: a man, forties, not destitute, simply unable to touch the farecard machine for fear of germs, ruminates on this to no end, writes his sister of it, she ignores him, he remembers she bought him cologne for Christmas last year, the one time of year they see each other, he sprays it on, he traps most

of the aroma under his plastic poncho to keep the scent for himself, leaves his apartment to finally put money on his fare card, the time has finally come to touch the buttons on the machine, finds he cannot do it after all, decides to sneak onto the bus through the back door reserved only for exiting passengers as he does every other morning, wonders if the bus driver knows him by now and just doesn’t care, what does this mean, that he is someone no one cares about?...

And on. The spokes of her battered umbrella drip steady drops that saturate the corner of her notebook.

This is why she scribbles with permanent ink.

THAT TIME OF DAY WANING

SHORT STORY EXCERPT

By C.A. Carrington

I’ve always pictured a pet’s death in a completely different way than I can imagine a person’s. I’ve survived so far without an ounce of religion and don’t have any particular notion of spirituality that I apply to the brief time I’m here on our planet and when that ends. But I picture a precious, loved animal’s passage like the book of children’s poems I cherished as a little girl, with watercolor shades awash and poorly off-set printed, where the colors glow beyond their objects’ defined edges in a bleeding of sorts, with my mind’s eye creating this interstitial moment:

A group of people is making a final journey. There is no apprehension, the trip across the beautiful and calm waterway is understood and accepted. They are on a large raft made of something hearty that looks like jute, but giant jute, strong and water-worthy, yet gentle and soft. They all sit, some cross-legged and relaxed, some more casual with arms stretched out stiff behind them to prop them up, looking ahead to the other side of the river.

There is a dog with them. He is skinny, long snouted, lithe

and nimble in posture, and he too sits relaxed, stretching his front legs out like sticks crossed over each other. The dog carries a great sense of calm with him and everyone is pleased he is there. The ferryman has seen a dog make the journey before, often enough to understand. The raft is a ferry by nature of its act, slowly gliding back and forth from one side of the river to the distant shore, the ferryman bringing the passengers to their destination. The sun is intense and orange near the horizon line when the raft makes the journey to the distant shore, it’s strange how the journey is always scheduled for that time of day waning.

The passengers of the ferry are silent, the ferryman too, and the only noise that can be heard above the sound of the water is the dog’s quiet chattering. His teeth click rapidly but delicately together and the quiet staccato of enamel on enamel is calming to everyone. This is the sound of happiness, of anticipation. When the ferry nears the far shore, the long grass reeds are pushed flat against the shoreline from the displacement of water. The dog gracefully leaps from the ferry onto the sturdy thickness of reeds and inspects his new kingdom as a good scout should.

The ferry’s anchor is lowered into the grassy murk, the passengers gather themselves. The lanky dog walks slowly back on the ferry, looks for a moment to the far shore from where they departed and then turns and walks next to the passengers as they disembark. A passenger, not really seeing the dog there but sensing his presence, subconsciously reaches his hand out and rests it palm-down on the dog’s head. The sun loses its intensity and orange and drops below the horizon line, and the night presents itself calm and warm.

My husband is not one to be poetic, and even if he has the

creativity and training of an artist, he has chosen the path of the very practical, down-to-earth, and is focused on accomplishing what is directly in front of him, what is tangible and needs to be done. He is stalwart, concrete.

So I was speechless when he casually said what he said, with sensitivity softening his hazel eyes, a few weeks after Gilles had died. I came home from work and while he prepared dinner in our tiny kitchen, I talked to him about our day apart. The conversation came to discussing how difficult a time my friend was having after losing Gilles, how we understood and knew it was a sad and never-ending process of grief, that time didn’t always change how it felt, how devastating and heart-hurting it was. A hole in your heart can be filled by something, someone else, but it is still there.

He thought for a second after placing a clean plate in the dishrack and turned to me.

“Did you ever think... that Gilles was her father? Didn’t you say that her father died of the same cancer that Gilles had? Lymphoma, I think? Did you ever wonder if the dog was her father and he came back to check on her, watch over her?”

And the answer was no. I was surprised he had made the correlation despite our discussion prior that Gilles was dying of the same dreaded evil that her father had, and how irony like this in life was cruel and common.

It was in total keeping with my husband’s straightforward thinking that he did not bring up the incident at the party in which Gilles had spoken. But I thought of it immediately as I wandered through the house to change out of my clothes and wash the workday from my face and hands, doing usual things but in a state of unusual surprise and wonder. I understood now that the dog had spoken and revealed his true name. Her

father’s name. Henry.

It would be difficult to first be a man, a tall ranch-hand named Henry in the wide open expanses of Montana, to find yourself at a very young age with a wife and two small children, and then suddenly be eaten alive from your own insides by cancer. It would be very unusual to awaken again as a domestic pet with a French name, to return to her, his daughter, by design of something I’ll call sacred, definitively preternatural, for a second chance for love and devotion and a dozen or so more years together.

I recognized something new in our friendship as a result, something that I could not immediately reconcile within myself. I knew she would manage her grief and survive the deep loss but I felt that her father—now gone from her life in any form— could no longer guide her, and I felt protective. She would be more vulnerable without her dog there to oversee her wellbeing.

Did I sense that he had been there to shield her from her husband? That their pet was her protector from whatever issues she dealt with from the man who pledged his love to her but secretly tracked her cell phone to know her whereabouts at all times? This man that I felt treated her as a prize and possessed a deep-seated fear that he wasn’t good enough for her. This was not something I could broach with her as a casual friend, nor something she could admit or accept in any context about the life she inhabited. It was clearly not my place to say anything and it left me feeling some kind of indescribable loss too, all this from a dog telling my husband his real name. I understood our friendship and had a concern for her I could not broach, certain I had to keep it to myself.

This was not usual for me.

I silently proposed to myself that perhaps my concern alone

would protect her. Have you ever done that, accepted a rational determination you’ve reached despite your instinct telling you otherwise? And then, silly as it sounds, managed to resolve the opposition of feelings within yourself with a completely irrational wish, like the rubbing of a genie bottle in a fable?

Perhaps I would tell my friend one day that her dog had revealed his identity, shared who he actually was and in doing so, why he was there. I knew she would at first be incredulous and might accuse me of being hurtful and absurd, as vulnerable as she was. I knew, in quiet moments later, she would understand.

Maybe she already knew that her dog was her father and would feign her reaction. But for now, I waited, for time to heal her a bit as it might do, for time to bring her a baby girl and a whippet puppy named Lewis.

I understood that Gilles had spoken to share his truth. Sometimes a pet—a dog or a cat—can stare at you in a focused, intense way that makes you wonder what is going on in their head, but it’s likely they are not thinking of anything at all. Perhaps they are just there with you, as they know they are meant to be. Watching over you.

There are things we cannot see but can sense in this world, and most of what is good is apparently not so apparent, a subtle player behind the scenes keeping a caring eye on us and creating some fairness and affection to bring balance to the brutalities. A cynical irony that profanes our lives yet sustains and upholds us too, like triumphant epiphanies. But what to do with the concept of a talking dog, a reincarnation of a man watching over a loved one? Beyond holding my cat a little more tightly despite his single squeak of protest, and loving my husband for his keen brain despite a chosen brevity for words, what to do?

Hatching

By Cathy Casriel

I was born an old soul, they say, a quiet spectator mulling over muddled thoughts, about what I don’t know, perhaps a previous lifetime. I woke to bird sounds in the trees outside my window, which made more sense to me than the hubbub of people. I could never get over how those sounds called to me in the morning, and yet I could not get outside until someone brought me out of the house, in my carriage, too late in the day to converse with the birds. They had flown, or were quiet. Either way, they were my only link to a world I simply could not reach.

There was a little girl in the house who wanted to kill me. Later, I would learn she was my sister. There was a soft-spoken man whose voice was the closest thing to the sound of the birds, my aging father. And there was a woman whose foreign smell intrigued me, but after a few weeks, she disappeared—she was the baby nurse, I guess. The most regular person in my life, besides the nurse and caretakers to follow, was a mother who talked to me in a high-pitched voice, a special voice people sometimes use for babies. You may describe that voice as singsong, but I can tell you it sounded nothing like the bird song I loved. In fact, it sounded like the voice of the little girl who wanted me dead. This scared me and thrilled me both. Every day, my mother and my sister left the house together and I was

alone with someone else, not the baby nurse, a different woman, a huge woman, in whose arms I felt both insignificant and safe. A whole cast of characters came around to see me at first. Some would be regulars in my life, so I made a study of them: what they smelled like, looked like, the sounds of their voices. Just as I felt I was getting to know them, they lost interest in me. I was powerless to draw their gaze back. But someone else wasn’t powerless: my sister, who danced and sang and played her toy piano and did every cunning thing possible to draw the attention to herself. Usually it worked. Then when nobody was looking, she’d pinch me or push me or creep up and yell “boo” to scare the life out of me. Her plan almost succeeded: several times my heart hurt so badly I thought I was dead. I cried silently. My crying has been described to me as like a slow leak from a pipe. Tears formed and dripped down, a few at a time, then stopped, then started again. But there was no sound. I was not a bawler. Perhaps I was a sort of songbird myself, but since the flock left me every morning I never learned my song. Maybe that’s why it feels as if a message is tied up in my chest, a speech, a lyric. It’s my mission, like a carrier pigeon, to get this message out. But by the time I get to a place where I can write it down, it’s gone. How could it be gone when all day long I feel the weight of it, in me or wrapped around me? I am a feminist who shakes off all kinds of girdles: clothing, rules, prescribed manners. Yet this encumbrance I bear. I carry messages I can’t see, songs I can’t sing, and the desire to take flight far away from people, though I know I will come back to them in the end.

After I came on the scene, there was one, last hatchling: a baby boy. He was not birdlike. He was round and fleshy as a panda cub and always hungry. He consumed everything in

sight and demanded more. I would wrap my arms around him and hug him like a lonely child consoling herself with a teddy bear. I hoped some of his plump satisfaction would seep into my hollowness. This was my family, I had to make it my family, now that I realized I would never sing from the treetops, but would carry my weighty messages around, able to deliver them slowly, only to people near me, in no hurry, in fact, at a crawl.

But who am I now and am I still carrying my messages only to those near me? I did that for many years. I hatched a brood of my own and watched them fledge, so they might learn beyond what I could teach. What is it I want to tell you after that pinnacle of life? Because I still want to deliver my messages, even to people I don’t know. How will they recognize me? How will you? Let me help. I am that woman walking along the street, or on the sand at the shore, or ambling straight across the lawn to the end of the world. I am that woman who tried her best to tell others what she knew. I could be anyone you meet. So treat all with kindness, with the sort of gentleness a bird deserves.

Swimmers

By Anya Chambers

The day after a storm has passed it is high tide and there is a stillness to the water. It has the consistency of a thin gel, the temperature ambient. If you close your eyes, it is not unlike being in a deprivation chamber, disconcertingly close to nothingness. We glide at a leisurely pace far beyond the red buoys of the swimming area, each extension of arms and legs not achieving any perceptible progress. We are slow moving points on the blue flatness which expands indefinitely to the semicircular horizon. I think this is how a snail might feel slipping along some incomprehensible vastness, forward its only possible trajectory. I wonder what it would be like if the shore never got closer, if this was it.

Isn’t it true that most bodies of saltwater on the planet are still all one, separated only by imagined divisions? This is the case, with the exception of the Black and Caspian Seas which are technically landlocked oceans, and a few salt lakes (these are good reminders we can’t be certain that the ground we stand on is in a fixed arrangement). Some 321 million cubic miles of salt and water are varied in degrees of temperature, concentration, or pollution, but for the most part, they are the same. So where is the line that designates where the waters of the Indian Ocean end and the Atlantic begins, where exactly do oceans become seas or bays? Are there floating welcome signs of the sort you’d

see entering a state or a country? “Welcome to the Arctic Sea, Home of the Beluga.” Without people putting up fences and squabbling over who has a right to call a territory home, the boundaries here are more plainly built of language and markings on a map devised to ease navigation. But then there’s that thing about mastering the seven seas, how having the power to navigate them was a tactical advantage, and so humanity got busy building its great flotillas in a race whose echoes could be heard in the arms and space races of the coming centuries. So then is there a boundary to be drawn between owner and master, or is it all salt on the same open wounds?

There is less ambiguity where land cedes the way to water: at these boundaries the stakes are high. Part of the dilemma is that as land dwellers we tend to consider things from the shore, particularly in our current climate predicament. The land gets defined and changed by the water as its level slowly rises. From this perspective things are looking bleak. As anyone who has tried to stop a leak or a flood knows, the dam doesn’t hold forever, eventually the water asserts its way. But what happens when we change the vantage point, look at things from the water’s perspective? What if we get in and swim.

There is a clear distinction between being at the edge of the water or inside it. Standing on the periphery you are subject to the standard laws of gravity. Your worries, while distant, are still biting at your heels. You know that once you are in everything will be different–once your feet leave solid ground the hierarchy of importance is immediately shifted and at the top there is one prerogative: not to sink. The key is not to fall into a moment of panic. The key, as it is in most situations, is to not become afraid. Objectively, as long as you know how to swim, there is no reason to be afraid. But there is something else

below the surface.

Once upon a time, out in one of the Emerald Lakes on the Karelian Isthmus, about an hour away from Leningrad, my grandmother and I began to swim to the other shore. I was heading out on an inflatable mattress at what seemed to be incredible speed for a child, smugly outpacing her steady breaststroke. With my gaze fixed on the bathing area in the distance, I imagined it belonged to a local pioneer camp. I would materialize out from the haze of distance, a strange girl, blonde hair waving in the wind. “Where has she come from?” the campers and the counselors would wonder, “Is this a returning apparition of a child lost many years ago?” Or maybe they would imagine me an athlete, an intrepid youth fearlessly traversing this great lake, not subject to the boundaries of shores, parents, or camp regulations.

The lake was expansive, larger than I had ever crossed, presumably deeper and darker somewhere toward the middle, which is where I began to think about under rather than ahead. This was a terrible mistake because underwater things are much closer to the things of the underworld and there, well, nothing very good happens there for the living. And from under I could feel it following me, the cold grasping hands or tentacles of some unknown wrapping tightly around my limbs, pulling me down to a coldness which was already beginning to grip my heart. Once it had my breath, the cold would settle in, permanently. In a panic I whirled my float around and sped back to the speck of my grandmother whom I had long left behind. When she asked me why I’d turned, I told her I’d just changed my mind about going all the way across. I imagine she was relieved to have me close again, to make our way back to the shore, where lunch and family were waiting. I didn’t tell her or anyone how close I had

felt to death that day out in the lake. From that point forward, every time I got a little too far out on my own, when the bottom would drop out of sight, I could always feel something stalking me from below.

There is a saying in Russian, в тихом омуте черти водятся, which in loose translation means devils live in quiet waters. This serves as a reminder that trouble is often stirring behind a stillness. And let’s not forget that the most diabolically evil characters often have unperturbable surfaces. If the most damning function of evil may be its capacity to deceive, I don’t know what is more disconcerting: the literal lake full of invisible perils silently claiming lives, or that the devils tempting us to fear are always traveling with us on the inside, sowing terror and suspicion towards that which may just be fish and water.

*

Our beach sits along the north shore of Long Island facing out over the sound and on clear days the Connecticut shore is visible beyond 20 or so miles of water. Unlike some beaches along this coast which line the island’s many bays and harbors, it is less likely to be plagued by the reek of stagnant water along with gnats and horseflies. That is, unless the air is still, and the tide has moved out. You can tell that this is the case when you first arrive at the beach, towel in hand, and see the waterline licking the exposed backs of the larger stones which spend most of their lives under water. These stones are swamp green, covered in seaweed, sea snails and sediment, all factors that fall into the category of slimy. This, along with the sulphury breath of salt marsh, I, like many, find repellent.

As much as I am dismayed by low tide conditions, my mother and our companions are elated—low tide means you should swim to the rock. It lies 200 meters or so from the shore,

well beyond the lifeguarded area. While usually impossible to spot from land, its location can be divined by a mirage of ripples or a lone whitecap on a low wave as the water level ebbs, but the rock never breaches the surface.

Once you’ve transformed from hesitant scout to swimmer, the visual cues are gone. Positions are hard to judge when you’re in open water because there are few reference points. Here there are only the red buoys near the shore and the green buoys way out in the distance marking the location of lobster traps; we know that our destination is somewhere to the left and in between these markers. Our route is a long diagonal, avoiding the designated swimming area entirely lest the lifeguards presume that we fall under their jurisdiction of rules or protections. After ten or fifteen minutes of steady swimming someone always says, “We have to be near it now,” and we begin to circle. At this point it’s a matter of luck and time in the sameness of the water all around us. Eventually someone first feels, then sees, the red seaweed swaying beneath their belly. They always yell “I’ve found it!” as they establish their footing and come to standing. “Really? I can’t believe it was over there!” someone else always says, as if there was any difference between a there or a there in a uniform field, until of course, the rock materializes. Maybe that is part of its magic— once someone finds it, we know where we are.

I don’t like the rock. I don’t like it for its undulating seaweed covered surface, its slimy feel beneath my feet. I don’t like its tendency to appear, sneaking under you, even when you know it’s close. What if you didn’t know and, as you came upon it, you’d smash your knee? Or, worse yet, sense its furtive stroke along your naked flesh and you’re unmoored and vulnerable, the shore so far away? And if there is one rock, how many others

are there? How many ships have met their demise on such a rock? How many adventurous spirits have bashed themselves to death on a mass concealed like this one, as they leapt from a cliff into dark waters? Or, how about that everyone assumes their relationship with this rock is special, like they’ve discovered it, and no one else is in the know? Meanwhile, every day, there are packs of swimmers making their way to Mecca, squealing in delight, and turning the sacred into a tourist destination.

But then my mother is standing in the middle of the sea, as if by miracle rising out of the water like a consort of Poseidon. The golden rays of the evening sun alight on her triumphant form, hair waving in the breeze. And I see it. She is Botticelli’s Venus and I am but a lowly mortal swimming at her feet. So, forsaking my aversion, I embrace the rock, I climb to standing to join her and the others. For a moment, we are demigods, gazing back at the little masters of the seas on their shrinking shore.

Making a Way out of No Way in Cuthbert

By Jen Christensen

About a dozen nurses huddled on the hospital’s tidy front lawn. Black and White women stood shoulder-to-shoulder. They had abandoned scrubs for matching black t-shirts stretched across waists softened with middle age. Above their hearts the shirts read, “Patterson Hospital, 1948-2020.” Imprinted on a broken heart worn on their tired backs, the words “WE GAVE ALL.”

Many had spent entire careers at this single-story 25-bed critical care hospital deep in the heart of what’s known as the historic Black Belt. The Black Belt first earned its name for the rich black soil found in this Southern region, but the name has taken on a deeper meaning and today designates the counties where Black residents outnumber White residents in the rural South. Seven decades ago, the residents of Randolph County pooled their meager resources and built a hospital that would care for Black and White residents at a time when nearly every other hospital in the state was segregated. Residents helped build the facility nearly a year after Cuthbert, Georgia’s first large-scale hospital burned to the ground in 1946. The fire made national headlines. According to the newspapers, neighbors came running when they saw the flames shooting out the

hospital’s first floor. They passed patients down ladders when fire cut off stairways. They rescued all but two of 50 patients.

This generation of neighbors who slowly gathered on the hospital lawn on a sweltering October afternoon in 2020 would be unable to save the hospital. Fire didn’t threaten this time, but a fire sale did. In a year when the county had the highest per capita number of Covid-19 cases in the entire US, the regional hospital authority decided to shut the hospital down. The aging facility needed $10 million in repairs for a leaky roof and old equipment. The county decided it couldn’t afford it. Going forward, the next time someone broke a leg or had an accident, residents with the lowest rate of car ownership in the state would somehow have to find a way to travel to Alabama to receive the closest care. It meant people having a heart attack or a stroke were in trouble.

I had called ahead of time to see if I could talk with workers at the hospital. This would be the 19th rural hospital to close in 2020. It set a record for the most hospital closings in the US in one year, but when you talk to a hospital, you enter a world of “no.” I am a medical reporter, yet a persistent PR team wanted to keep me – someone who has been described as an empathetic observer, an eager advocate for equity, a recorder of important stories – far, far away from the life and death drama playing out at Patterson Hospital.

I asked to meet the hospital PR team, whose one job is to work with media, but they said no. When I asked if they planned anything to celebrate hospital staff, they said no. When I asked if I could get video inside the hospital, they said no, absolutely not, under no circumstance, no. So, of course, I drove down from Atlanta anyway.

Cuthbert wasn’t just losing access to convenient health care.

It was losing the county’s second largest employer in one of the poorest counties in Georgia. The closing could cripple the small community.

We arrived just in time to see two maintenance men, one precariously perched on a wobbly ladder that rocked on the crabgrass. The other watched him take a large mallet to the hospital sign. The bang of mallet on metal echoed across the lawn. The sign dropped into the watching man’s hands. With no expression, he chucked it like a huge frisbee onto a flatbed. They then hoisted up a new sign and laughed a little as they shook their heads. The tacky plastic banner they put up to replace the old sign in big red letters screamed, “Effective October 22, 2020, HOSPITAL CLOSED. NO EMERGENCY SERVICES AVAILABLE AT THIS LOCATION. IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, CALL 911.”

I wanted to ask them about it, but how to do it delicately? Growing up in the blunter Midwest, my instincts didn’t always steer me away from stepping in it in the South. I learned that the hard way when I covered courts in Lexington, Kentucky. It was my first year running the investigative unit for a local TV station, and I had just been to a class on court records. The first time I went to the clerk of the court’s office could easily have been my last. I walked in and using my best reporter voice and said, “Please, may I have the files from the Aspinal murder case?” and added. “I know it is my right under the open records law.”

The clerk’s face flashed bright red, the blush so deep it spread up the part in her short gray hair. Without a word, she spun around and turned her back on me.

I was flummoxed and about to ask again, but my pal Connie, a formidable prosecutor, walked in as it happened. With a speed I didn’t know the tiny woman had in her, Connie

zipped behind the counter, put an arm around the clerk, and like a first responder at a car crash walked the stunned woman off the scene and into a side room. They were gone for what felt like hours. I stood staring out the window, shifting in my flats, wishing I hadn’t worn a wool suit that now felt ten times warmer, and wondered why everyone was acting so weird. Another five minutes, Connie came back, handed me the file, put her arm around me just like she had with the clerk, and walked me into the marble hall.

“Miss Jen,” she said in a voice that reminded me of an intellectual Dolly Parton. Connie had grown up in the real Hatfield and McCoy territory and became the first in her holler’s history to go to college. That day she schooled me gently. “Miss Jen, there are only a few sins you can commit in the South. Well, at least here in the courthouse, anyway. And one of them is to not have a conversation with clerks before you ask them for something,” she said kindly, keeping the pity out of her voice. “You can’t just walk in and ask for a file.”

I breathed in, ready to object, but saw the same look on her face that she gave murders under cross examination and kept quiet. “Yes, that’s your right,” she continued. “By law it’s yours. But by God, if you do it that way, they will bury it out back, and you or I will never see it again. We need those files. So please do not do that again.”

Grateful to my Southern translator, curiosity got the better of me. I asked Connie what she told the clerk to change her mind. “Oh, that’s easy, I just told her you were a Yankee. She pitied you.”

Before I had a chance to work up the nerve to talk to the maintenance men, the Cuthbert mayor arrived. No official ceremony was planned, but the town wouldn’t just let the

hospital close without saying how much it meant to them. An impromptu crowd of residents spontaneously started to arrive. They gathered on the sidewalk and spilled over into the parking lot across the street. Men in lab coats from the doctor’s office pulled up in their cars. There were politicians and teachers. Then the fire trucks and an ambulance came. As 75 people or so stood outside the hospital, it was then that the group of nurses in their memorial t-shirts came out to witness all who had gathered there to send them off on this warm afternoon.

One of the maintenance men who had just removed the hospital sign saw his moment and walked up to address the crowd and offer the hospital’s final prayer. “Things in life change. The one thing in life that never changes is God,” he prayed, as those around him bowed their heads.

“It was you, Lord, who has brought some of us through this pandemic,” he said. “I know, Lord, you didn’t bring us this far, this safe, to leave us now. I know the best is yet to come. Let ‘em know you got them. You will make a way out of no way. Tell them that when one door is closed, you will open another door or maybe even a window. You’ve been good to this hospital, and, Lord, we want to tell you thank you.”

The nurses said “Amen” in agreement. “If we learn to trust, we can make it through this,” he said. Then, as he paused dramatically, there was a squelch of a walkie-talkie. The nurses’ bowed heads jerked toward the EMT.

“Randolph ambulance, Randolph ambulance, please respond,” a dispassionate dispatcher called out. As the maintenance man tried to continue with his prayer, the nurses were now distracted, unable to resist their instinct to help. “Copy, this is Randolph ambulance,” the EMT responded quietly into the radio mic on her shoulder, as she and two

uniformed colleagues dressed all in gray sprinted toward the rig.

“We’ve got a hunter who fell. He may have broken his leg. I’ve sent you the location of his blind. What’s your ETA to the hospital?” the dispatcher asked, as the two of the three quickly climbed aboard.

“Well, ma’am,” the final EMT said as she climbed quickly into the rig. “It’s probably going to be awhile.”

Between Dog and Wolf

(EXCERPT FROM NOVEL-IN-PRO g RESS)

By Laura Dean

Marseille, 1916

The first wagon didn’t stop. Neither did the second. There weren’t many on the road now; most of the horses had been taken to the battlefield years ago. The ones that weren’t dead were probably wasting away under Belgian plows. When the third wagon drew level with Ibrahim he almost didn’t get up. His side still hurt from the fight and it was an effort to stand. But more than the physical pain, Ibrahim felt the vertigo of his brother’s sudden absence. He was, for the first time in this country, alone.

The driver reined in his horse and motioned to the cart behind him where four goats jostled for balance. One of them had gotten its head stuck between the bars and peered at Ibrahim with its strange slitted pupil. What now? it seemed to say. He put one narrow foot on the wheel and swung himself up into the cart, sitting down hard on its uneven slats. Perhaps if he’d been in uniform he would have been invited to sit next to the driver. Or perhaps the driver wouldn’t have stopped at all, tired of the stories, all the same, none moving anyone anymore,

least of all those who’d been there, as he probably had.

Ibrahim pondered the goat’s question. It didn’t feel like luck that he’d escaped the raid, though that was what the foreman had said when he’d walked in that morning, suddenly the only Algerian on the factory floor. It felt like fate, it felt written. And fate was something Ibrahim tried to avoid. Ibrahim did not look at the Italians, though he’d felt their eyes on him as they took their places in the first slots on the assembly lines. Theirs had always been the safer jobs. He’d made the decision to leave as he stood there, watching the liquid alloy flow from tray to tray. On the first day he’d thought it beautiful, before he’d seen it flow over the bodies of men.

He’d finished out his shift, then headed for the coastal road. He had brought his few belongings with him in an oilcloth bag. It had never yet fallen to Ibrahim to be the one to make decisions. At first, he’d imagined the gendarmes having to subdue his brother; it would have taken at least four of them. He saw Marwan’s pumping thighs as they lifted him into the air, and heard him screaming his name. But more likely, he would have gone quietly. A quick look around the room would have let him know there were too many of them—a whole regiment, perhaps, to round up every man there. No, that wasn’t right either. Not enough young men for that now. Besides, these were colonials they were dealing with; one or two Frenchmen were enough, they’d have thought.

Doubt plucked at the space between his ribs. What if Marwan had escaped? Without thinking, he worked his fingers up the neck of the goat. The beast was still. His touch usually had that effect on animals. When he reached its ears, his hands through the bars up to his wrists, he put pressure on the creature’s jawbone, guiding and pulling it gently back until its head was

inside the cart with the others. It nosed him hard under his ribs for his trouble. Its prodding felt like a question again, or an accusation: Shouldn’t you have stayed? What if Marwan were still in France? Where would he send a message now?

“Marseille?” Ibrahim asked the driver, though the road only led to one place.

“Ça va,” he said through teeth clenched around a pipe. His intonation didn’t rise. Ibrahim said nothing more.

As the cart bumped along the track, Ibrahim felt relief in spite of everything, leaning toward the pink city that appeared periodically beyond the white shoulders of rock that sloped into the sea. Every now and then, almost involuntarily, he turned back to the factory, precarious as ever atop its outcropping. Many days working there he’d imagined the whole thing, chimneys and all, tipping into the sea. All those flames extinguished, molten iron transformed in an instant to cold metal, coming to rest, twisted and useless, among the dropped cargo and lost treasures that line the seafloor of any port. He reached his hands toward the smokestacks. From here it almost looked as though he could push them in. He hadn’t confided these thoughts to his brother, who’d have told him they were lucky to have jobs. Never mind the fact they came without papers. Perhaps being the luckier one made Marwan naturally more grateful, or maybe it was the appreciation that begat the luck. Ibrahim shrugged at no one. No use trying to parse God’s agenda.

They were sick men, the ones they’d rounded up, his brother too, for all he’d tried to hide it. So sick that a police escort to the boat seemed excessive. Night after night Ibrahim had lain awake in the barracks listening to the coughing, knowing in a few weeks it would come for him too. It would start up in one corner, first an exhalation, then a clearing, then the choking

and gasping for air that could last minutes until the man took ahold of himself, usually sitting or standing to clear the phlegm. On nights when he heard the whistle in his brother’s chest and the uncatchable breath, he’d go to him, offering herbs he had foraged from the hills on his nighttime ramblings. His brother would press Ibrahim’s hands to his chest before letting them go, no breath for speaking at night. Gone now, all of them, Marwan most of all. Ibrahim pictured them in a police van in their underclothes shivering all the way to the city, the gendarmes not letting them out of their sight until their boat had left shore. Some back to their families—the women—who no doubt would place poultices on their chests at night, who would soon see them out of this life. Where would his brother go? The women who’d raised them—grandmothers, aunts—were long-dead. It was a clever game they played, the state and the company: the state spiriting these men home before too many were visibly close to death, only to turn a blind eye to boatloads more arriving that very week. No, he’d not stay here. Ibrahim set his gaze in the direction of the city. He was bound for Marseille and the openair work that awaited him there.

“Seen a lot of you out at the leadworks lately,” the driver shouted back to him, his words half-snatched by the wind.

Ibrahim nodded.

“Used to be Italians.”

Ibrahim rubbed the withers of one of the goats. Another shifted and sat on his knee, straining the joint. He had tended goats since childhood on his uncle’s farm and though he loved their rough affection, he knew to be wary of their hard skulls.

The track toward the city rose and fell on the chalk hills; the goats pushed against the latch of the cart on the way up and almost crushed Ibrahim on the way down. He hollowed his

chest away from them, guarding his wound. In the valleys lay the villages, in the lee of the mistral, while the sandy fields rose around them on the high sloping ground. As stone buildings replaced stone hills, the cart slowed. The driver tapped the bars behind him indicating it was time for Ibrahim to get off.

He staggered but kept his balance after the jump. Only the goat, its head between the bars again, looked back at him as the cart drove away: what now? Ibrahim raised his empty palms, half to the animal and half to the heavens.

The city was quieter here than the Marseille he remembered. In the brief periods he’d stayed with his brother in Belsunce, near the city center before they’d gotten the factory jobs, he’d never walked down an empty street and couldn’t remember seeing the cafes shut. Here some shutters were already closed though the sun was not yet down. The shops were unfamiliar too: hams and sausages hung obscenely in butchers’ windows, and there were flower sellers and tailors’ shops with colorful dresses on display. A young woman hissed from a doorway, and a little boy came scampering. He stared briefly at Ibrahim before being hauled inside by the wrist. Ibrahim realized it had been months since he’d seen a child. He envied him the security of his mother’s grasp.

He had the name and address his brother had given him of a distant cousin. When he’d walked out of the factory that afternoon, Ibrahim had felt sure he would find him easily, and together they would find out what had happened to Marwan. But now as shadows spread longer out of every corner, his confidence ebbed and the thing he had being trying to avoid, turning this way and that to elude its gaze, now greeted him head-on: fear. The kind that knots the gut like hunger. He walked faster. Since he’d stepped off the cart, he’d scoured alleyways

and parks for places he might sleep unmolested. When he’d first arrived in the city he’d seen clusters of men, sometimes families, asleep on sidewalks and in church doorways. Perhaps if he could bed down near one such group he’d be concealed until morning and avoid being woken by a prod from a policeman’s stick. His brother, in the open like that, would have a plan, or at least the courage to run, but he knew, if it came to that, he’d follow docilely to whatever windowless hole awaited him.

He tried to remember the names of some of his brother’s friends. But he had approached people as he had everything else in this country, not looking at them too carefully, sure that he would always have Marwan to guide him through. He felt now that he had focused on all the wrong things: the herbs that grew here, the accents, the sea. Marwan’s charisma had always been so overpowering, like the smell of a bakery, he’d long since stopped trying to make his own impressions on people.

HURACAN

By Francesca de Onis Tomlinson

I was running Guinevere around the field, and Lance chased her in circles, a game to him. Guinevere’s training came from a filly showed, she always knew when it was business and she’d settle right down into it. It was in her nature to be in this trade between man and horse.

She flowed by me like a form of the wind, long muscles smoothing and tightening, her hooves setting pretty in the ground.

My brother Ben was off on Mr. Saad’s business. Mr. Saad was staying close to home, his missus, Miss Violetta Lee was with child and he needed Ben to see to his affairs in the outlying towns.

Me, I just worried he’d put Ben in a suit or some such and we’d never get that trip up Oklahoma we’d been planning on. Ben said no how that’d happen, we’d leave anyway. He’d take Prince out on the range and catch me one of them mustang mares, jump her and let her whip herself into a spinny ‘til she stopped bucking. It didn’t take him long, I’d seen him do it at the rodeo. He never took the stallions, said they’d fool you too easy, like they were accepting their fate when of a sudden you’d be in a heap on the ground and them flying off to the horizon, back in search of their wildness.

Guinevere was skittish, tossing her head at any old thing—

the stones under her feet, the wind in the branches. Lance ran up to the edge of the wood and commenced to tearing around in a big circle that took him from the edge of the fenced pasture down to trees on the ridge. He lit off like a stone from a sling, loving the air that flew under his feet. I knew he’d circle back, he was no more going to leave his mama, so I led her down to the trough and watered her for a good morning’s work.

Ma rang the supper bell though I hadn’t expected her to, so soon. She was on the back porch studying the sky and I got myself on Guinevere to ride her in.

Lance trotted along beside, at first he seemed confused like, and then he stopped noticing, the way it is with the young ones no matter what they are, horse, child, dog. Cats they go their own way, never minding you anyhow.

“Weather’s curious, Luke,” she said. “I’m not liking the way the sky is looking.” She pointed out over the plains in the distance, and it was true, the clouds were shirring, and massing together on the horizon. The wind was coming at us from all different directions.

“Let’s get the animals put away,” she said, and she called Jim out of the barn. “You help Jim round up the sheep. The cows will come in themselves if they think there’s ought to worry about and the goats will know what to do. But those sheep’ll scatter throughout the hills and we’ll never get them back.”

“They’re branded, Ma.”

“And sheared, too I’m glad to say. Ned’s been busy while you and Ben been gallivanting. Don’t make a difference, Luke, if they scatter, they can be gone for good and if not, they have a way of hurting themselves when they’re frightened. You help Jim in with the sheep, like I told you. And let the horses go down the meadow ‘til you do.”

That was Ma’s way of saying I’d better hop to it if I wanted to make arrangements for Guinevere and Lance. I don’t think Pa’d agree with her choices but Pa wasn’t home, he was out shoe-ing by McCloskey way down on the river plain.

Ma got to herding her chickens into the henhouse. They kept hopping up in the trees and sticking their heads under their arms. It was something comical to see and Jim and I laughed and I made as if to put my head under my arms and sit in a tree branch and Jim laughed himself silly in a way he hadn’t for a long time. He needed help at the paddock latches, he fumbled with ‘em a bit. But he wouldn’t let me fasten them back up. He stuck his ground on that and I decided to let him have his way as we drove the sheep down the hill. I figured I could get back up later to close it all up. But it didn’t really matter as we were herding the critters into the barn anyhow.

The animals were right confused with the change in their day and it took a while to get the sheep into the barn. Jim threw hay down on the floor at the back of the barn, farthest from the direction of the wind that was now soughing on us. They settled down, lowering onto their fours, curling their legs under. They were a pitiful sight, all sheared and spooked and a red cross marked on their backs for the worm treatment. I threw out handfuls to settle them. They was like a pulpit of penitents, listening to the wind out beyond them barn walls, scolding like Preacher Twombley. The chickens clucked in between them, happy to see the grain and Ma kept shooing the birds in til she finally got them penned up with the sheep and the goats.

Ma called out to her cows who were massing at the fence, looking for her and their salvation.

Ma led them in, talking slow and gentle, patting their necks. They had a language they spoke to each other and I

reckon they was saying to themselves to calm down and wait this thing through.

“What is it, Ma? I ain’t never seen the animals this spooked without a big storm on the way.”

“There is a big storm on the way,” Ma said. “Down on the coast they call it the Huracan.”

“I ain’t never seen that,” I said.

“It’s early for such a storm. You usually see them later in the year. I’ve never heard of one so early, in June. I can’t figure it.”

Jim was sitting in his seat by the door and he was listening to the wind. I was starting to see it was scurrying all about, as if it were blowing at itself, or some kind of celestial struggle was under way and it was swirling down to include us all.

“It ain’t the Rapture, Ma?” Jim asked Ma. He was frightened, pale, and his hands was working themselves.

Ma took his face in her hands. “What’re you talking about the Rapture for?” she said, with a teasing tone in her voice. “Who said anything about a Rapture?”

“Preacher been talking about it.”

“Oh, phoo. Those preachers get to talking all kinds of nonsense to keep us listening to them. Don’t you worry about the Rapture. There ain’t going to be angels descending or us folks ascending. Not to heaven anyways. We don’t get some things out there tied down there’ll be plenty flying off without angels helping out any.”

But Jim was settled into his corner and he wasn’t budging.

“Okay, Jim. You comfort these dumb animals as best you can. We’ll see to what’s left outside.”

Me and Ma got to storing anything weren’t weighted down in the tool shed. Ma gave a good push to the door and fastened it shut with a cross bolt.

“I don’t expect we’ll see the worst of it ‘til night falls,” she said. “I wonder does Pa know when to get hisself back at a sensible time?”

“And Ben?” I asked. “Will he know what to do about this Huracan?”

“I expect so,” she said. “Ben’s a smart man. And you’re my big man today. Poor Jim’s unstrung by this.”

“I seen that,” I said, and it made me sad to see how far Jim was sinking and it seemed to me that I realized for the first time how Ma’s cares for him kept us all from realizing we were losing him day by day, just a little bit at a time. Now I saw that it was Ma who put the tools in his hands and Ma who told him what needed doing and as often as not after a while he’d place it on the ground and his eyes would seek out the distance as if there was something calling him from there, he was listening for it the way a dog listens to the call of a wolf, something he once was, and was no more.

“What’s he so afraid of Ma?” I asked.

“It’s the things beyond his understanding,” she said. She took her kerchief off, mopped her face and tied it on tighter, twisting the ends and knotting them hard.

“Ain’t that true of all of us?”

“What’s different for Jim now,” Ma said. “He ain’t wondering. He’s worrying. The wondering has stopped, and now it’s gone and left fear behind.”

“Why’s that? I don’t reckon I know what’s happened to him.”

“I don’t think it matters what happened,” Ma said. “Any more.”

“So what can we do for him, Ma?”

“We give him shelter in his storm, Luke.” Ma said. “Nothing else we can do.”

She moved towards the barn door as if to check on him. The wind was pulling at her skirts. She put her hands to her head and ran for the door. The sky was darkening quickly now. “See to them horses,” she called out and the wind snatched her words and sent them off in flurries like the leaves whipping off the trees.

Fieldmouse

By Rebecca Findlay

His tiny yellow teeth, bright as goldenrod, bare themselves with a rhythm as he gasps a shuddering breath I can’t hear. He can’t move –spine broken from the worrying, though no blood. I hold him like the Eucharist, palm under palm under body pried from the dog’s mouth a few moments before. I don’t know if I am helping this small thing die well and warm, or myself, but I have decided that it is better to lie under the grey winter sky than cold and alone in disrupted earth. The killing dog sits curious, watching until all three of us are still.

Last Fig

By Rebecca Findlay

Take it. Soft. It won’t last in the bowl, best to accept it now. You’ll have to share it with the ants (they were the sign of ripe readiness, rearing up in the openings), but I’ve pulled off as many as I could. I’ll watch it split under your teeth and lips: fig skin like real skin, skin skin, like yours, pliant and thin lit like van Gogh grapes, from within, with green blue vein stripes up the side, pink flesh punctuated with paper bag slits and claret of jagged ostiole, tongue darting out to gather from the gash, juice, pip, and pulp that once was flowers, once was wasp.

Transubstantiation

By Rebecca Findlay

Just a paper wafer, but still better tasting in its nothing nuttiness than the neccos we should have been practicing with. I’m afraid — if I drop it, I’ll go straight to hell, I know it. The wine is the real prize, even if it’s sour with dreg flecks and sodden Eucharist: sanctified underage drinking and public consumption. We’ve confessed and made our bodies clear, been preparing in the echoing space for months, emptied of the props wheeled out and in for the show. This military chapel is used by all: each schism and set is given one hour to go through motions, emotions, songs without dance, ignoring the ones before and after. And right now, the children are ready — we’ve studied, prayed, we know the way, and we’re waiting, thinking how best to take in the divine (by conduit hand or on the tongue?), to eat godhood and commune, while light plays on the wires holding up the cross. We haven’t started worrying how to let it out again.

“Invasive” Species Unknowingly Enjoyed

By Rebecca Findlay

Queen Anne’s Lace, bitten through to make bouquets

Kudzu when it makes ruined farms look like turf houses

Japanese water beetles rutting and roiling in a peony

Lanternflies with red petticoats and grey crepe overlay (spotted)

Wineberries for their sticky sweetness under spikes

Emerald Ash Borer pinned in a case, its wings lit leathery green

Rhododendrons large enough to cut tunnels through Armadillos moving north to escape the creep of heat

Gingko biloba leaves gold yellow in fall, not seeds that stink Cats that slink, licking their paws clean after killing robins or Murmurations of starlings stealing from feedlots of Homo sapiens sapiens, myself included, spreading like Broadleaf plantain, known as waybread or white man’s footprint, the leaf a balm against bee stings or strikes from European wasps, here called yellowjackets, whose paper nests are a marvel

New Year’s Eve, 1983

By Rebecca Findlay

“The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard” – Robert Frost,“Out, out—”

Snow, rare in the Carolinas, stretched thin from scraggle pines to the kitchen door. Before the winter sun got too dim, my not-yet father set out to cut wood.

My mother-to-be heard the door as he clanged out the back in heavy boots and only hat: Intruder written in orange on a black field: the plane he was to fly in twelve days, to another six months in the West Pacific.

The dogs whined, growled, rolled in the yard. They lunged towards him in delight each time the chainsaw rested with a rattle; he’d stamp his feet to warn them off and move his blood, and start it up again with a whining roar.

Then the saw somehow broke, spitting steel teeth, and either the unsteady saw or the steady hands slipped, and the shin stopped standing. He felt a throbbing behind the eyes, then

the dogs licking in front of them, and cold below, sitting now on the blood-spangled lawn. Mom stepped out on the porch into a scream, found herself, and fireman-carried him to the car. They didn’t know if the leg was there under the red. But the bone was steady, though pocked with rust and grease, chain oil, splinters they had to scour out. Counting at midnight: fifteen stitches inside to close the muscle tight over bone, another layer above, forty-five outside, and it was done.

He spent four months avoiding sepsis and deployment. In April he left for the carrier and took leave of his wife, just pregnant with my older brother. Three winters on, I’d come along. We learned to cut wood young, but through the years of woodstoves, hatchets, and axes, Dad never let us touch a saw. He can’t look at anyone’s blood now, not even his own, remembering the gauze spooled inside him.

I loved to wear the stained hat he’d left in the snow, faded in time to yellow on blue. The dogs had gnawed it a bit once he’d gone, enjoying the evening alone.

Out of thrift he kept the jeans, the bloody long johns, sewn up but discolored, so that sometimes, even out of season, you’d know what lay below: gnarled tissue with edges like wet paper torn. When he’d return home from months at sea, there was the familiar sign that refused to fade— oh, that old saw: knowing your father by his scars.

Surveying

By Rebecca Findlay

To measure distance, you need at least two opposites: one person to hold the transit and one to run out the reflector. Look through the lens for the surveying rod, then scribble the angles and arcseconds. But there are also the chains, the levels; better to get more people and take all the measurements at once. So like the plotter he was, my grandfather begat six children — better for business, more land per day. He’d learned it all on islands in the Pacific Theater, where a mortar wasn’t meant to hold things together, but break them apart, and angles meant lives. Now he preferred to survey in snow, to better sight his kids through the leafless trees, as they huddled into pockets and scarves, known only by the orange hats worn to avoid being shot.

The only wealth anyone had out there was land not worth much, but still helpful to have measured. When short on money, clients would give him a bit of the newly parceled land, unusable maybe, or steep, and he would accept, unable to ask for more, unable to refuse, a hoarder through and through. So he gathered up the maps and children, drove home without anything else. I was not born to be so useful, and I can’t conscript

others into my work, but I look over landscapes to collect sights and boundaries and signs, to find the shortest distance and make lines.

When he died, we found eight theodolites, eleven transits, hundreds of rolled maps, rolls of orange tape, scraps of flaggers, decades of National Geographics, all scrawled with measurements and names. No one can know or want all the belongings and longings of someone when they go out of focus. He left his cartography of the stars and pieces of land, a patchwork of roods, dekares, quarter acres worth only trouble. We got the telescope he built, bigger than belief. He had taught me how to look through lenses at far off hillsides sliding up into the night, to bridge gaps with vision, not words.

Once Upon a Time

By Kaycie Hall

Bluebeard

Open anything you want. Go anywhere you wish. But I absolutely forbid you to enter that little room, and if you open it so much as a crack, nothing will protect you from my wrath.

I once loved a man who lived in a duplex in New Orleans, the rooms sparse with a couch, a bed, a chair. A tiny kitchen with a mostly empty refrigerator. He seduced me with letters, late night phone calls and hand-rolled cigarettes. He left me alone while he went to work late at a bar, locking me inside of that little duplex. Once I cut my leg shaving but didn’t notice until, standing on his white shower mat, I saw a trickle of blood dripping down my leg into the fibers. I cut the blood spot away, afraid of his anger and accusations should he notice.

I started poking around the dark corners of our life together, questioning his long absences, the pills that he kept mysteriously acquiring for pain that should have already faded. His wrath took the form of throwing his cell phone into the duplex wall, a hole in the plaster, his maniacal laughing at my fear.

My brother threatened to drive to New Orleans, if necessary, to kill this Bluebeard if he ever again laid a hand on me.

Now my son has only just started sleeping in his crib, in his own room. We have once again gone through his naptime routine –– diaper change, sleep sack, turn on the sound machine, offer a pacifier, cry, cry, cry. I pull the footstool from his rocking chair up to his crib. I stick my finger through the crib bars and he grips it furiously in his hand, angrily tossing and turning. Even though he’s the one behind the bars, it is I who is the captive. I sigh, open the book of fairy tales on my lap, and choose Bluebeard. I know this is one especially for adults, but to my son it doesn’t matter. He just wants to hear the soft tones of my voice as he searches for sleep.

Sleeping Beauty/ La Belle au bois dormant

Il traverse plusieurs chambres pleines de Gentilshommes et de Dames, dormant tous, les uns debout, les autres assis; il entre dans une chambre toute dorée, et il vit sur un lit, dont les rideaux étaient ouverts de tous côtés, le plus beau spectacle qu’il eût jamais vu: une Princesse qui paraissait avoir quinze ou seize ans, et dont l’éclat resplendissant avait quelque chose de lumineux et de divin. Il s’approacha en tremblant et en admirant, et se mit à genoux auprès d’elle. Alors comme la fin de l’enchantement était venue, la Princesse s’éveilla; et la regardant avec des yeux plus tendres qu’une première vue ne semblait le permettre: “Est-ce vous, mon Prince?” lui dit-elle, “vous vous êtes bien fait attendre.”

I try to speak to my son in both of my languages interchangeably. I believe that he has a preference for French and each time I read to him in it, the sound of the language soothes him more quickly than the sharper clip of English. I keep a book of Charles Perrault’s Contes on the nursery bookshelf. Perrault’s version of Sleeping Beauty is a long one; my mind wanders as

I read it, my son looks overhead at his mobile. I occasionally reach up to lazily turn it, keeping him enchanted. My now cold coffee sits on the floor at my feet.

Sleeping Beauty is so docile, so sweet. She awakens and sees this man kneeling before her and sweetly asks “Is it you, my prince? You’ve done so well to wait.”

I woke up next to a man I thought I wanted. He was older than me, a born and bred New Yorker who dropped out of his Ph.D. program to write. I was new to New York, a writer who didn’t write. He invited me to a dinner party at his house where I met all of his friends and afterward he kissed me and it tasted like bourbon. He slowly unbuttoned all of the tiny buttons of the vintage dress I’d chosen because it made my waist look so tiny. In the morning he took me out for pancakes. I was under a spell that made me think I was lucky to be chosen by him.

In the light of morning, I saw my crumpled dress in a puddle on the floor. There were no curtains and the summer sunlight warmed the room. I was sticky from alcohol and sweat. I hoped that my breath wasn’t too sour. The man initiated sex but couldn’t get it up and asked me to give him a blow job. Sweetly I acquiesced but I didn’t want to. I was so pliant, so sweet. When I stopped, he said “is that it?” There was a hint of anger in his voice, a dash of exasperation. Either he was not my prince, or I had failed to be pliant enough.

We rode the train to work in silence and walked into our office together. We didn’t speak all day except for when he messaged me to ask if I could translate some copy into French for him.

The Frog Prince

So she picked up the frog with her finger and thumb, carried him upstairs and put him in a corner, and when she had lain down to sleep, he came creeping up, saying: “I am tired and want to sleep as much as you; take me up, or I will tell your father.” Then she felt beside herself with rage, and picking him up, she threw the frog with all her strength against the wall, crying: “Now will you be quiet, you horrid frog!”

One of my son’s onesies has a pattern of little frogs in crowns all over it. “Cute,” I thought when I clicked “add to cart.” For today’s last nap, I turn to this fairy tale, but it’s not quite how I remember it.

We are supposed to feel disgusted by the princess. How cruel she is to this poor frog who is only following her and demanding to eat from her plate and sleep on her pillow. This frog who had something in mind already when he agreed to fetch her golden ball from the bottom of a well.

My frog prince fooled me for nearly five years before I realized that no amount of kissing was going to turn him. After each kiss, he was still the same critical man, scoffing at my degree in literature, belittling my choice in friends. One night I was taking a bath and looked up from my book and thought “I don’t love him at all.” I was the one who transformed when the frog was thrown. I could breathe again.

Little Red Riding Hood

There is a story about another time that Little Red Riding Hood met a wolf on the way to Grandmother’s house, while she was bringing her some cakes. The wolf tried to get her to stray from the path, but Little

Red Riding Hood was on her guard and kept right on going. She told her grandmother that she had met a wolf and that he had greeted her. But he had looked at her in such an evil way that “If we hadn’t been out in the open, he would have gobbled me right up.”

I switch my son’s sound machine from the soothing sounds of drying clothes. I’m bored of it. Instead I change it to wind and it swooshes past us through the room. I open our book to “Little Red Riding Hood.” When we get to the classic lines “But Grandmother, what big eyes you have!” I do it up, exaggerating for comedic effect and my son giggles and coos in his crib. When I get to the end of the story, I know there is another version printed, one in which Little Red Riding Hood never gets eaten. She senses the danger from the start.

I have met many wolves. They have followed me up and down the platform in a Paris métro station, calling me a salope. They have stared at me on the train in New York City and said “I just want you to know that I’m going to jack off when I think about you later.” They have followed me off the train at my stop, scaring me as they trail me around the block. They have been my neighbors, pounding drunkenly on my door “I know you’re in there! Open up. I want to talk to you.” They have disguised themselves as people I loved, only to show their fangs when I got too close. They have made me smarter, faster. I walk fast through the night now, my keys gripped between my fingers as a weapon.

My son sleeps, a calm sweetness on his face, his lips puckered. It is my mouth reproduced on his little face. I smooth his hair. “You must never be the wolf,” I whisper to him.

Public Safety Power Shutoffs

By Mollie Hawkins

There are the ones that come to check out books, and then there are the ones that come to check out other things, like the new volunteer book shelver, the one that smells like lilac perfume and sunscreen. Or they’re watching YouTube videos on the internet that just barely fit within the confines of the Library Code of Conduct, so we can’t ask them to leave. There are the ones that bring their wild, sticky children and set them free during the story-time hour as if to say: here, these are yours now. Every patron has a nickname.

There’s Tambourine Tonya, speaking in tongues and wiggling with the light of the Lord in the stacks. There’s Scratch n’ Sniff Sam, sitting at the computer we will have to spray with Lysol after. There’s a whole tribe of Karens—really, their names are Karen—shaking gnarled fists and hollering across the circulation desk that she can’t believe her bad fortune, having to suffer us millennials. Didn’t we know? This place used to be perfect. She could get a new book the day it came out; now the wait can take months, and who knows how much time she has left? Her tax dollars (our salaries, she will have us know) are going to waste. And shouldn’t we do something about the people sleeping on the memorial benches outside? Can’t we figure out

why her phone won’t download the eBook app? There’re the ones that don’t talk to us as much: the Anti-Vaccine Queen, Bay Area Bob, and Andrew Ankle Bracelet.

Don’t think I am ungrateful. I have a job, a one-bedroom apartment, and two dogs that love me. Before this, I was working in a coffee shop in a small Alabama town that got wiped out by a tornado. Most people stayed, helped their neighbors pluck family photo albums, baby dolls, and the good silver out of tree limbs, and waited quietly to take their insurance checks to the bank. I ran as fast and as far as I could with no savings or furniture: California. It seemed all right. There were no tornadoes there. And no bone-freezing winter, which is what kept me away from the east coast.

I have learned, wherever you go, home tends to follow like a tired old dog behind you. There are parts of California that may as well be rural Alabama, though people back home laugh at me when I say this, one eye squinted, hands flailing when I talk about the expanse and sheer country of Pike County, California. Really, I say. People don’t bathe up there. They are missing teeth. They smoke Virginia Slims. A lot of them do drugs in the bathroom. It is the living stereotype of what people think Alabama is, but it’s northern California. They don’t want to believe me. It’s supposed to be all palm trees, movie stars, surfing, tie-dye. No one wants to think of places the way they really are, full of generic lives, mortgages, school pickup schedules.

I started working at the library because it saved me as a bored teenager, desperate to get out of the small rural town. The irony is that I ended up here, in an even smaller, even more remote version—the only difference being the accents. Instead of serving coffee, I serve books and internet guest passes.

Despite popular opinion and unpopular funding, this library stays busy. Our doors are open to all: poor and wealthy, old and young. This is a safe space, for now. But that feeling wanes when the lights go out.

They called them “Public Safety Power Shutoffs.” The lights will snap out in a blink, for days on end, to prevent rapid wildfire from spreading like kudzu across water-starved land. The signs on our doors will read: “Closed due to PSPS.” And then, “Open during PSPS,” as we are warned via email from the Pike County Public Director that this is the new normal. We should report to work. Business as usual. We are a public resource, even if nearly all our resources are nonexistent without power, lights, the internet, water. Every time I read PSPS, I think of calling a cat. Pss, pss.

At my library, there is no running water without power. We are on a well. When the water does work, it spits out like a sticky gel that smells like rotten eggs; sometimes it’s black. I signed a waiver when I started work that said I would not, under any circumstances, drink the tap water. I use hand sanitizer after washing my hands. We go through a gallon of hand sanitizer in a month. The sign on the bathroom door reads: Out of Order during PSPS. No water means no flushing. The staff will use it only when we absolutely must and there is an unspoken agreement among us; don’t talk about it. Especially those of us on our periods. Mostly: me. We’ll be as quiet as librarians.

A million Californians sat in the dark, on and off for weeks in September and October, while Pacific Gas & Electric tried to prevent another demolition of a town because of a fire that may or not have been their fault, who’s to say? Let the lawyers decide. Headlines will skew to conspiracy and misappropriation of budgets, robust bonuses, faulty powerlines, lazy workers. We

won’t stand for another Paradise, they say. So, we sit in the dark to make our paychecks and listen with burning envy to the hum of full-house generators in the distance. The clerk, Darcy, says, can you believe how loud the regular world is when you’re not paying attention?

I say, so loud.

The fires are still on the news, and it’s ironic that most of us won’t know about them—carving through LA like a match burning towards its handle—because we are in the dark, spending nine hours writing down library card numbers and barcodes on a clipboard. Our cellphones don’t work in the foothills without wifi. I tell Darcy to be extra careful walking outside to take a break because our panic button does not work. There’s nobody to help if we need it.

I am too struck by the audacity of it all to really be truly afraid, or angry, like I would be later, the mantra in my head being The institution does not love you back. The institution does not love you back. I needed to make money and I had no vacation or sick days to claim.

The days went like this.

A patron walks in through the propped-open doors, like walking into a dark haunted house. They’re bored, they might as well read a book in the park, what the heck, why not. I give them a flashlight to browse the stacks. An actual flashlight! It’s like the olden days, they say. I laugh with them. They tell me they didn’t sleep because their neighbor’s whole-house generator rattled the walls of their house all night. They have a smaller, quieter generator that only keeps their refrigerator running. We have a lot of dairy, they say, like that explained everything. I wondered if their well water was off, too, like the library’s. They smelled faintly of stale socks. We all did.

Tambourine Tonya knew this would happen, but she is praying the lights will come back on soon. It’s like the days before computers, isn’t that crazy? We never know how much we rely on something until we can’t have it anymore, she says, eager to keep talking through the anxiety we share.

In a nine-hour shift we get about ten patrons, the true believers of books, those seeking no use of the public computers or free wifi. The Karens are pleased with the checkout system: I write down their library card number, the barcode of the book, and say, bring it back in three weeks. It’s an exercise in blind trust. Later, I will discover that I’ve written some of the numbers down wrong and hope the books find their way back. They usually do. Sometimes, for my favorite patrons, I break the rules if they don’t bring them back. I mark the book as a discard, with the note: old, unpopular, taking up space. There is never enough space.

Everyone in Pike County knows someone that lost things in the famous Camp fire, just up the road in Paradise. People lost houses, cars, pets. Some lost other people. Directors were already making documentaries about it, with clever names like Paradise Lost, or Trouble in Paradise. I drove through Paradise on a detour to Chico, once. I rolled my windows down and breathed in what smelled like a freshly dug grave filled with dead skunks. Churches outnumbered the houses on the windy roads of Paradise, and it reminded me of the town where I grew up in southern Alabama, the one filled with Baptists and a tornado siren that could outblast the scream of a tea kettle. Wherever you go, there you are.

The library director, Donna, stops by on day four of the power outage, smelling stale like everyone else and a nest of black hair twisted into a knot on top of her head. She’s there to

drop off flashlights, bottles of water, and encouragement. When Darcy and I are ready to run away from this dark library in the base of the foothills with no water, she reels us back in. She says, I just want you to know how much I appreciate you. She says, in her experience, people feel less freaked out by what’s going on in the world if the library is open. It can’t be that bad. The library is open. I nod and think, yes, things aren’t that bad. The library is open. This is the new normal. This is helping pluck family heirlooms out of trees.

Rate Your Pain

By Emily Tyler Kauffman

When I was a child, I was convinced I had a brain tumor. I was prone to headaches, and I always felt them in the same spot behind my left ear. Once, at a neighbor’s house, I drank a V8 with mango in it and my mouth felt swollen and itchy. I told my mother about my brain tumor and my aching tongue and she told me I was a hypochondriac.

“What’s a hypochondriac?” I asked.

“Someone who thinks they’re sick when they’re not,” she told me.

My headaches continued and as I entered my teenage years they morphed into chronic migraines that were soothed or exacerbated as the cocktail of antidepressants and antianxiety meds I was taking was tweaked and retweaked. I still harbored a secret fear of brain tumors and aneurysms, but I learned to keep my thoughts to myself. Everyone around me thought my brain was broken enough.

A new fear took root: ovarian cancer. The silent killer of women. I bled so much each month and the pain was so bad that I was prone to fainting and nausea clawed my throat. I was supposed to hurt during those five days, though; it was in the in-between when I felt aches and stabs in my lower belly that I began to worry that my body was attacking itself. I pressed my hands against my pelvis and considered cancer, eventual

infertility, and early death.

Once, when I was sixteen I was having sex with my boyfriend and the pain was so huge that I began to cry. He froze over me, frantic.

“It’s okay,” I told him, “keep going. I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine,” he said.

He heaved himself off me, dressed me in oversized clothes, and tugged me into the kitchen where he fed me chocolate chip cookie dough and convinced me to call my OBGYN and schedule an appointment. I had an ovarian cyst the size of a tangerine on my right ovary. My doctor prescribed me birth control in the hope it would shrink and prevent more from growing. I felt vindicated: my pain recognized as real and valid.

A few years later when every inch of skin from my chin to my toes was covered in hives, I dragged myself to the university’s Student Health Center where the nurse informed me that

I had a mango allergy - she didn’t need to test me because apparently mango allergies result in a specific hive pattern, the one inflamed on my body. I called my mother as I waited for my antihistamines, “I told you!” I said, barely suppressing the urge to scratch and gloat. My mother laughed and my fingers flexed.

Growing up was a haze of doctor’s appointments: stomach ulcers, cortisone shots in my knees, lesions on my liver. Somehow, these things always made me feel guilty, like it was my fault my body hurt or my fault for complaining that it did. Even when the cause of pain was identified, so much time would have passed and I’d have to explain myself to so many people that there was no longer any sense of satisfaction in diagnosis. Any time a physician spied the list of antidepressants I was taking, my pain was attributed to my mental health and pushing to find a reason beyond that, a physical source of hurt, became an

exercise in exhaustion.

I began to avoid going to the doctor all together. They scrutinize you, weigh you, judge you, reduce your life to scaled items in an attempt to make your pain tangible. I learned to suffer silently, that my pain would either go away with enough sleep or I would learn how to work around it. I developed a routine for my migraines, saved up my sick days at work for stretches of pelvic pain or crushing fatigue and dizziness.

This is the constant: I am never sure if my pain is real because I have been made to believe that I cannot trust my body. The migraines, the throbbing in my liver, the stabbing pain in my pelvis that leads to body sweats, puking, and fainting spells. All these things fall under the verbal umbrella I don’t feel well. I don’t elaborate because elaborating feels like justifying, feels like I’m trying to prove something that is impossible to prove because I am the only one who resides within my skin and even I am not sure sometimes if I am sick or if this is just what it feels like to be alive.

One recent Sunday I woke up in pain: a tunnel of throbbing heat in my lower right belly that radiated to my lower back and down my right thigh. I whimpered. I crawled. I buried myself beneath quilts on the couch. I couldn’t eat, could barely stay conscious. Sitting was excruciating, standing impossible. The pain reminded me of the ovarian cyst I’d had in high school, but unlike then it didn’t ebb and flow, it was relentless.

Sunday bled into Monday. On Tuesday I forced down the nausea and dragged myself into work. I hyperventilated in the car and cried at my desk. I couldn’t think around the pain. My coworkers convinced me to go to the ER where I spent seven hours sweating on plastic seats, having my blood drawn, and lying beneath heated blankets in the CT. Curled on my side

on a bed in the hallway, I listened to a doctor tell me there was nothing wrong. Go home, she said. Alternate ibuprofen and tylenol until I felt better or worse. Next time, she said, don’t wait so long to come in if you’re in so much pain. I wondered about her logic - I came in and they told me there was no reason for me to be hurting.

I stayed on the couch on Wednesday, but forced myself back into the office on Thursday. I had run out of sick leave and couldn’t afford to miss more work.

“Fair warning, I might need to randomly lie down,” I told my coworkers, lifting the bundle of sheets I had tucked under my arm. “Sitting hurts too much.”

“Why are you here?” they asked.

“They said there’s nothing wrong,” I said.

I lasted until lunchtime before the tears came back. I laid on the ground, but when I tried to stand, I couldn’t. I covered my face with my arms, drew my knees to my chest, tried to breathe around the pain, tried to convince myself it was in my head. Mind over matter, Emily, my mother always used to say, mind over matter. My boss found me curled behind the desk.

“I’m calling an ambulance,” he said.

“No! I can’t afford that!”

“I’ll drive her to the ER,” another coworker volunteered.

“I just want to go home,” I said.

“Ambulance or she drives you,” my boss replied.

“Do you even have anyone at home?”

They knew I didn’t.

“Fine, but not Fairfax. I’m not going back there.”

There was a smaller ER nearby, part of a healthplex that provided emergency care but couldn’t conduct surgeries like the Level 1 Trauma Center I’d gone to two days before. The nurse

assigned to me was kind and funny and stayed by my side almost the entire time. A simple ultrasound later they diagnosed my problem: a hemorrhagic ovarian cyst. They provided me with pain medication, told me it would resolve on its own eventually, urged me to follow up with my OBGYN as soon as possible.

“I told them the other day that it felt like an ovarian cyst,” I said. “I told them that.”

The nurse shook his head. “I don’t know why they didn’t do an ultrasound in the first place,” he replied.

The earliest available appointment my OBGYN had was two weeks later. I sat in another plastic chair, blood-pressure cuff squeezing my arm, and watched another nurse confer with my doctor over my ultrasound results. They talked as if I wasn’t sitting three feet away. The nurse moved me to a private room, and I listened to the crinkle of paper beneath my shifting body as I waited for my doctor to come back to the room to speak to me.

“You didn’t need to come in,” she said. “Women in childbearing years get cysts.”

I told her I’d had one before, even though I’d been under her care then too so she should have known that. I told her I’d recognized the pain but that it had been more intense.

“I couldn’t focus or eat or anything. It was so much worse than last time, so, you know, I just wanted to check in and see what you thought. They told me in the ER to follow up with you.”

“Well, it hurt because you were bleeding into your abdomen. You’ll probably get them again, it’s just something that women deal with.”

At home I cried. Don’t wait so long to come in next time, one doctor had said. You didn’t need to come in, said the other. It’s just something women deal with. Did I have a low pain threshold? I

didn’t think so. I’d gone through labor, sliced my thumb almost to the bone while chopping vegetables, gouged my arm on glass, accidentally branded my wrist while carelessly frying churros. There were the migraines, the torn meniscus, the stomach ulcers, the scar tissue from my Caesarian Section. I’d dislocated my shoulder ten times. I was familiar with the varied textures of pain. But I was also familiar with no one believing me.

I sat on the couch and I wondered if it was because I was a woman. Because I was overweight. Because I had a history of depression and anxiety. But this is what the world does: it makes you doubt your pain, question your reality, lose faith in yourself. It isolates you from others and from yourself. Then it admonishes you when your sickness overwhelms you; the world wants to know why you didn’t just say something because in a broken system the fault is always your own.

THE CUSP OF MAGIC

An Interview by Margaret Koss and Alyssa Natoci, Both Born on June 20th

Alyssa: I was thinking about the first time we ever really interacted. I noticed right away that you were very communicative, which I really appreciated, because as a fellow Gemini I’m always wanting to be in contact. So I thought to myself, “okay, cool, Margaret Koss is on top of shit.” But [our first real interaction] was during the January 2021 residency.

Margaret: And we found out we both had the same birthday.

A: And that we’re both from the Midwest.

M: I once read about our birthday week (and I also love that we both knew it was called “The Cusp of Magic” without even needing to talk about it) that it’s described “as an interesting blend of logic and feeling” and I thought that was so interesting because I definitely think that applies to myself. But I was wondering if you think that it applies to you, too, and especially with writing?

A: Oh, definitely. To me writing itself feels like that perfect blend of logic and feeling. There’s this sort of intellectual, strategic, craft-focused element, but at the end of the day, at least for me, what I try to achieve in my writing is just kind of…

sublimating human experience, which is very emotional, almost purely emotional. I definitely resonate with that definition. And also, as Geminis, we’re ruled by Mercury, and communication is supposedly our strength. I wanted to ask you—do you feel like communication and writing has always come really naturally to you? Do you think that being a Gemini, and being a cusp, even, is part of what led you to writing in the first place?

M: Probably. Communication has always come naturally to me, especially in humor/being funny, which feels very Gemini. But I think for our cusp, specifically, it’s almost like we’re able to communicate with feeling. And I feel like that’s what makes a good writer. Like, you’re eloquent, but also there’s a reason to care about what you’re saying. What’s weird is that I have struggled with communicating my feelings with people before and I think that’s part of why I like writing so much.

A: Does writing feel like a safer outlet to be more personal?

M: Yes and I don’t know why. Even talking to friends of mine, sometimes I’d rather them just read what I wrote and then I know that they’d understand. I can’t really say it as well as I can write it.

A: That’s interesting. We’ve talked a lot before about how your work seems to draw from personal experience. Have you always written that way? Or has that style emerged more recently?

M: I would say so, because even when I was little, I would read something and then write a copy of it, basically. So, even if I wasn’t experiencing it, it was coming from something I just consumed and was trying to replicate. I also think that’s part of the Gemini thing, too, because I’m really interested in other people, and I love talking to other people and love hearing them

tell me stories about their lives, so that’s what I want my writing to feel like. Do you feel the same way? I guess I’m curious about the question of what brought you to writing?

A: I don’t know, I think that when I started writing it felt more escapist. Maybe less related to my world. But I think our goals are similar—you mentioned that you’re interested in other people and their lives, and I am, too, but I think for me writing is a chance to inhabit other lives, and not to display my life for other people’s benefit. Well, I do. I do and then I translate them into other situations. So, a lot of the subject matter I deal with is about me and my life, but I like to explore other contexts for that to live in.

M: Sometimes, I feel like the writing part is almost like my truest expression of self. And I do think that when I’ve read your writing, I can tell that it’s you.

A: When I read your writing. It feels very Marge.

M: [laughs]

A: You have a distinct voice and way of looking at the world and moving through the world. It’s very thoughtful and observant, there’s a lot of humor to it, but also there’s this devastating, raw look at the truth of what surrounds us, you know? You’re not afraid to see things the way that they really are, which I think a lot of us are.

M: Thank you for all the compliments.

A: [laughs] Of course, of course… You’re the youngest in your family, aren’t you?

M: Yeah.

A: Same.

M: I’ve always felt like I’m not a great family member. I don’t know how you feel about that statement.

A: Definitely! I mean, it’s complicated. I feel like a black sheep.

M: Right. I’ve often felt that way, too.

A: Yes, and I think I’m definitely more of a… spacey type?

M: Oh my god. When I was little, my parents were always calling me oblivious. Like always. They were like “you’re not… you don’t know what’s going on.”

A: “You’re not here.”

M: Yeah.

A: That’s sort of how I feel, though. I’m not here. I tend to occupy a more conceptual realm, day to day.

M: Right. Same.

A: It’s easy for me to forget about the reality of life and the people in my life. And it’s not something I’m proud of… I don’t know, I’m interested in family dynamics and I write about them quite a lot, but I’m not interested in accepting that the nuclear family is this given source of comfort.

M: Right. What you said about being spacey is so funny. That’s so true. And that’s probably a big part of it. Like, I’ve joked with friends before about how it’s like an input problem, where it’s like I just don’t keep it in at all, it just goes in and then right out.

A: But I feel like you’re observant! And you retain a lot of information.

M: If I find it interesting. You know, it’s kind of toxic. Like, I can’t remember where anybody is working or what anybody is doing.

A: Totally. I’m the same way. I remember really strange details about people. And maybe that’s the selfish writer in me, where I’m storing these details for later.

M: Right, like, “what could I use?”

A: Definitely. So… We’re also both from the Midwest.

M: Yeah! I have a lot to say about that actually. I just think [the Midwest] is such an interesting place to be from, and not to be like “nobody understands me” if they don’t come here, but… they kind of don’t. I don’t know… I’m surrounded by Republicans and corn, and then I go to a liberal school and just everybody talks about stuff that’s just really out of touch. It’s really important to me to write characters that are from the Midwest because I feel like the representations I’ve seen of where I live are super weird.

A: I mean, the Midwest is the real deal. Midwesterners are… we’re down to earth! We’re literally of the earth. When you live a life that’s more connected to the seasons, I think you just have a different sense of what’s important in this world.

M: I’m really glad you brought up the seasons because I think that is probably a really big thing that has to do with our writing. And my novel, right now, the way I’ve divided it is by the seasons: Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring. And actually, that kind of leads into a question I have about what you’re working on, because I know your book right now is called Green, and then you had mentioned last week that you had one that you were kind of having seeds about: Red. And I just thought it was interesting that you’re operating in these opposing concepts, a lot like, you know, the summer and winter solstice. So, I wanted you to talk more about that— if you operate in opposites.

A: That’s an amazing question. I think about polarizing concepts a lot and how they can reinforce one another. I don’t necessarily think that the Red project will be a companion to Green, but I do think overall I want the scope of my work to feel somewhat cohesive. I want to build a collection of writing that can be in conversation with one another, so in that way, I guess [they are related]. I kind of have this long-term goal that every book I write is going to be…

M: Colors.

A: Yeah, colors. [laughs] Green started with a question of “what does the color green mean?” and it just sort of unraveled into something else. I created this character that, to me, embodied green.

M: So, for you, then, what is green and what is red?

A: I think that green, there’s like a purity, like an innocence. Green is the color of life, to me. And then I guess what I’m exploring within Green is kind of like: innocence, and the loss of innocence; life, and the loss of life; the ways we exploit the good sources of life around us, and like, sources of abundance and inspiration around us.

M: Mmm…

A: And with Red—red feels super primal, it feels like the source of emotion and wrath. That’s still deep in the early stages, but I think it’s going to be pretty spooky.

M: And sexy.

A: And sexy!

M: [laughs]

A: You finished a draft of a novel already. Within three terms.

Do you want to talk a little bit more about how it came out of you? And what you’re doing with it right now?

M: I’m now in the stage where I’m letting people read it and that’s awful. [laughs] I’ve shared it with two of my friends, who are two main characters in it. It’s really important to do that, because everyone is going to have to read it!

A: That’s the thing about writing! Ideally, people will buy your book and read it.

M: I know…

A: How do you feel about that? I was actually reading something about our Cusp of Magic— “Persuading others, in and of itself, is extremely attractive to many June 20 people. Unfortunately, they may not have the highest tolerance for ideas contrary, or as they see it, threatening, to their own. In fact, some June 20th people wish there to be an unspoken feeling of consensus in their social environment which supports and sympathizes with their often extreme points of view.”

M: Yes wow that is so true. “Often extreme points of view.” [laughs] Like, I’m not really going to tolerate [them] not liking it, so I want to talk about it, but I also don’t want to, but I have to, because I have to improve it, so that means I have to hear these things that I don’t want to hear.

A: It’s interesting. I’m curious— well, I think I already know— but I’m curious to know who you write for. Because I know for me, I write for myself, and I really don’t consider the fact that other people are going to have opinions about my work. And it’s a blind spot for me, in that it’s hard for me to consider other people’s feedback, unless I really agree with it [laughs].

M: No, I’m glad that you asked that, because that’s kind of

something I explore a lot in the book, is like “why are you writing” and like “what’s this for.” I also write for myself, but I feel like when you’re doing that, you’re writing for your reader, and everybody has a reader, and that’s why you have to be so authentically yourself, and only write about what purely interests you, and like what you care about, because somebody else will [care] also, and you can’t let them down, basically.

A: Mmm…

M: Not everyone’s going to read Mrs. Dalloway and be like “oh my god, yes!” but somebody will, and that’s important, because you can’t be everybody’s favorite, and if you try to do that then you’re just lukewarm.

A: Definitely. So– back to that June 20 blurb, which is the “Day of Ecstatic Appeal” by the way–

M: Wow, I never knew that, that’s awesome.

A: It has a corresponding tarot card. It says: “the 20th card of the tarot shows Judgement or The Awakening,” and this just jogged a thought in my head about how you recommended The Awakening by Kate Chopin to me. I know that it’s a really important book for you, and it’s become an important book for me, too, and I want to talk about feminist influences in both of our works.

M: The Awakening is one of those books that I felt like it had been written yesterday. I love reading Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, all these women who have had the same feelings as me way before I did. I hope that everything I write is a feminist homage to every woman I’ve ever read. I just think it’s so comforting that she [any of them!] didn’t have to write any of it down, and she did anyway, and now it helps me,

a hundred years later.

A: I love that. I feel similarly that feminist literature is never irrelevant. Women and non-men will always be oppressed by masculine influence. I think it’s always going to be important to explore that experience, because every single non-maleidentifying person is struggling with it. This is also why I really love Elena Ferrante’s novels.

M: Mmm, mhmm.

A: I love that she hasn’t deviated from her subject matter. Her novels are always about a woman who feels trapped. It’s amazing to me that she can write the same thing over and over again and they can all be, you know, different novels. They all deserve to exist.

M: Right. I also read [The Awakening] in the summer of 2020 and it brought me back to the project that became my novel, because the relationship between Edna and Robert really reminded me of one of the relationships that I wrote about in my book. And again, that’s what’s so crazy about it, how it feels so current because those feelings are still the same.

A: Totally. It’s not like certain feelings are more modern than others, really. I think maybe our permission to feel them or express them maybe has changed over the years, but—

M: Well, what do you think? Because I still think that women aren’t really allowed to have feelings, and I think that’s why I am better at writing than speaking, because I do struggle with explaining feelings a lot of the time, especially to men. And I feel like it’s because women haven’t really been encouraged to do that.

A: Totally. I agree. I mean I just wrote an annotation about

Rachel Cusk’s new novel– you haven’t read it yet, right? She’s addressing this character named Jeffers, and you’re reading it asking yourself, who the fuck is Jeffers? It’s never explained. But she’s writing to him, it’s like this one-sided epistolary novel, and we never hear from Jeffers, but the reader becomes Jeffers. What I argued in my annotation—what I “argued”—so stupid—

M: What you uncovered—

A: What I uncovered is that the character who’s writing to this man is a woman. But as a woman, she doesn’t feel comfortable, she can’t just write her story from her point of view, you know. She needs to be twice removed, and have it be acknowledged by a man for it to feel worthy of existing at all.

M: It needs that authority.

A: Yes, and I do feel that way. I feel like, so often I need to feel affirmed by a masculine presence in order to feel confident in my own feelings and my own thoughts.

M: Right.

A: And it’s fucked up!

M: It’s kind of crazy because – there’s like these two men that Francine [the protagonist in my novel] has relationships with where she basically wants them to love her and they just don’t. But it’s crazy how even what you’re not to men, still becomes a way that you make your identity.

A: Absolutely. Similarly, the novel I’m writing is about this woman who’s controlled by the men around her. Even though the men have purpose in this world because of her. Because she is successful, and she is the source of their identity.

M: Don’t you feel that way with the Neapolitan novels also?

Where it’s like, Lila creates everything—her shoe designs become about what the men do with the shoes, and she is not even relevant anymore. It’s so frustrating to read it.

A: She is the source of life. Women are the source of life.

M: Right. Oh cool. Green.

A: Green!

M: I did have another astrology question. This can be the last one. I feel like obviously we are astrology stans because it’s what this interview is centered around. Why do you feel like astrology makes sense to you? And what do you think other people don’t get about it?

A: I think the key is to know more than just your sun sign. I think between you and I, I’m very much a Cancer and you’re very much a Gemini.

M: Totally.

A: Even though we’re born on the same day. But you know, I have a Cancer moon, and that’s important to me. It feels more like my identity. And you have an Aries moon, right?

M: The Aries moon definitely brings out the scarier Gemini side of things.

A: Totally. It makes sense. And fire and air for you makes bigger flames. And for me, water and air make—bubbles, I guess?

M: Bigger waves!

A: Bigger waves, yeah. *Both laugh about bubbles*

Dear Edna

By James LaRowe

When should I have known? You left me, so I must ask. You said you wanted to learn to swim that summer at Grand Isle and insisted that Robert teach you. Should I have known then?1

Or perhaps it was that Sunday afternoon in late July. Our boys were playing croquet with their nursemaid and the squealing Farival twins. I sat in a wicker chair on the covered porch reading day-old newspapers. My cigar struggled to hold its flame. A breeze stirred the water-oaks and nettle trees along the shore. Hazy sun glinted off the water as I watched an egret patiently stalk a brownie near the mangroves. And somewhere out of view, you and Robert were swimming together in the shallows. I puffed, I waited, pretending not to care.

Then there you were, walking with him under a parasol, up the sandy path that cut through a patch of yellow chamomile. Each of you gripped the sunshade’s narrow stem, as if it were a thing too heavy for one to lift. I shifted the newspaper’s edge so I could see only you.

Your hair was loose and curled, your face flushed. Sunlight filtered through the parasol’s rose-colored lining; you appeared to be blushing. A thin shawl covered your swimming dress, which must have still been wet and clinging to your body. You

“Dear Edna” is an excerpt from a longer piece, The Figurine, narrated by Léonce Pontellier, the husband of Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.

whispered something to Robert and tilted your head back to laugh with him. I let a corner of the paper droop to see him walking, young, bright, and vital, beside you. Robert always carried himself with an urgent air, didn’t he? I had folded the paper into tight overlapping thirds by the time I stood.

“All day in the sun. You are burnt beyond recognition,” I said as you approached. Your smile faded. Robert’s gaze drifted to the ground. “Beyond recognition,” I repeated in a whisper.

You weren’t sun-burned. It was a shabby broker’s trick, to claim a false flaw, as if you were a barge of coffee tierces and I was a wharf-side haggler. Such a ploy often worked in my business. With you, rarely.

“Burnt?” You raised a slender hand for inspection before thrusting it at me.

“Rings,” you said. I dug the rings out of the breast pocket of my vest, where they had rested while you swam, and handed them over.

As you slipped them on, you spun around and lost your balance, taking an extra step before catching yourself. Robert couldn’t stop from grinning. You looked at him and both of you burst out laughing, right in front of me. Then you composed yourselves and tried to explain. You told a story about a wave and a seashell that you had stepped on and thought was a crab. You said you screamed and stumbled but Robert had caught you.

The two of you overlapped seamlessly in the story telling, playfully correcting and building upon each other’s words. Back and forth. Back and forth. Dear Edna, was that when I should have known? When you got to the part about how he caught you, Robert made a little motion of his own – a half-step with his arms outstretched. His shirtsleeves pulled tight against thick,

muscled arms underneath.

I performed insouciance with a fake yawn and said I was headed down the beach to play billiards at Kline’s. “Robert, come join me,” I said.

He dithered, he declined. “Thank you, but no.” He said he preferred to stay, with you.

“Send him away when he bores you,” I said and left. Feigning disinterest was ruining me.

The other Grand Isle families considered Robert Lebrun to be a harmless fawner. His family owned the resort; every summer he trailed one of the women like a puppy. Two years earlier, it had been old Madam Farival. The prior summer, he glommed onto Adele Ratignolle, and who could blame him. And now it was your turn, my wife. But did no one notice that Lebrun had grown in the meantime from a gangly teen into a robust young man? Or that he had shifted from flattering ancient Mme Farival to lavishing attention on the youngest wives at the resort?

Confronting Robert would be an admission of jealousy, as well as foolish. The last punch I threw had been a decade earlier in Manhattan. I am, well, look at me, I have always been slight. But one didn’t need brawn to succeed in my trade, or once, long ago, to have won your love. You had loved me once, hadn’t you?

As I trudged down the beach to Kline’s, a brown pelican soared off of the waters as if following me. I stopped to grind out my cigar in the trunk of a nettle tree. The pelican reared up and plummeted down toward the water like a wild arrow. A splash, then the bird bobbed with its prey in the pouch. I threw the crumpled cigar remnants into the seagrass. I needed to get my mind off you and Lebrun. I could hear a band playing up ahead at Kline’s, so off I went.

You always disliked the place. Dark, smoky, and filled with men, Kline’s Hotel isn’t for everyone. But its dining room, bar, and billiards hall filled a necessary purpose. Kline’s served as refuge and impromptu mercantile exchange for every businessman vacationing with his family on the Gulf. We love our families, we love our wives, but still, sometimes we must escape.

I set up shop at a back table and disappeared into the persona of: Léonce, the buoyant broker. I shot billiards, drank whiskey daisies, and gossiped all night with the other financiers. We traded stories of crop yields and tides, partnerships and dissolutions, and money to be had. I bought several diplomatic rounds of drinks and defeated nearly all comers to my table. The sole match I threw was to a man from Mobile, after he mentioned word of a cotton barge stranded on a shoal off Horn Island.

“Tricky waters,” I said. I knew the exact spot. I could have a pair of keelboats out there the next day to offload the bales and lug them to port.

The Alabamian cheered when my final shot caught the lip of the bunker and caromed wide, giving him the win. In the brief joy of his victory, he gave me the name of the barge owner and the broker of said stranded shipment – a plump man named Tiggins whom I knew and suspected to be eating a thick steak in the Hotel’s dining room.

I waited in the dim glow of the hallway’s brass lamps with their smoky glass bulbs etched in fleur-de-lys.

“Monsieur Tiggins, quelle chance! Let us grab a drink,” I said as he waddled out of the dining room. I lighted a cigar and offered another to him as I steered us to the bar. The deal was sewn up by midnight.

I left Kline’s in high spirits with my pockets full of wadded-

up bank notes and coin from the billiards table. It’s odd how the mind works. I hadn’t forgotten about that afternoon, but my dourness was gone. I whistled on the walk back to our cabin. I whistled out at the dark Gulf. I whistled up at the moon. I even whistled at the old nettle tree smudged with my inky ash. When I arrived at the cabin, I waltzed into our bedroom, to wake you and tell you of my night.

You were so tired that you barely managed to sit up and keep your eyes open. I battled your drowsiness with ebullience and volume. I paced about, occasionally bumping into furniture; I wanted my words to rouse you as I replayed the evening shot by shot. “Oh, and I must tell you about the barge run aground!” I exclaimed at one point, droning on and on through to the final carom, to the access it unlocked, and the deal I cut. So involved was I in these reveries that I hadn’t realized, until I had finished, that you were lightly snoring.

Me: crestfallen and silent. You: lovely as always, but asleep. I turned for the boys’ room, perhaps they were awake. Our diminutive Étienne was splayed across the bed with his pillow under a thigh, the sheets twisted in a ball, and the quilt clumped on the floor. By day, he was a mousy child; at night he thrashed like a marlin. I slipped the pillow back under Étienne’s head and tucked in his bedcovers. Across the room, Raoul was perfectly still on his back with his head centered on the pillow and arms resting atop the folded quilt. The ever-serious older brother, Raoul looked nearly dead by contrast. I sat on the foot of his bed.

My stories once thrilled you. Before the boys were born, you would have tossed aside your covers and followed me to the porch. You’d rock with your arms around your knees and the candlelight flickering in your eyes and ask rapt, probing, yet

encouraging, questions. Then later, we might make love.

Did you know that one time, early in your pregnancy with Étienne, I counted all the hairs in your eyebrows? I used to treasure watching you sleep, still amazed that you had paired with me, that you were mother to my boys. One afternoon, the idea struck. You were so thoroughly exhausted and asleep that I was able to inspect your brows closely with a lorgnette to insure a proper count. Two-hundred-and-twelve on the left. Twohundred-twenty-seven on the right. Even your imperfections are bewitching.

I took this tally because I wanted to know something about you that you didn’t. Your outward beauty has always been too much for me. The scales were never even. But neither was twohundred-and-twelve and two-twenty-seven.

I wondered, as I sat on the corner of our child’s bed, what new secrets you had.

Philadelphia, 2012

By Kathryn Llewellyn

The night before my college graduation, I’m in the clearance rack flipping through limp dresses. Raindrops dot plexiglass. I didn’t bring an umbrella, so I leave emptyhanded and spend the money instead on a cab back to campus. Wet vinyl, stale airfreshener and filmi music waft back, ghazal and synthesizer, a rain of its own. How good it must be, the driver says, nearing the gates, having your whole life in front of you. He says he was a heart surgeon back in Pakistan. We reach the curb. My office job starts in a week. Do what’s in your heart, he says. I give him a crumpled bill and weigh what comes next against how much I want.

Pack a Day

By Kathryn Llewellyn

You imprint my synapse, late afternoon craving, my body’s worst best sens-ation. You draw me into the dying, negate every run I’ll ever take, every sweet I never ate, that last thing I shouldn’t do. You anchor me with this ritual: the newsstand man who never charges full price, knowing I’ll be back for tomorrow’s undoing, the languorous moments of letting the world go. I dangle you between my teeth, ignite your cylindric tinder, bloom arsenic and butane. I run

my tongue over your smoothness and warmth, soft and danger-ous, molasses and gunpowder. One day, I’ll replace you with chewing gum, never mint, and pretend strawberry satisfies my desire for what I can’t yet name.

Lake Ypsilon

By Kathryn Llewellyn

My mother spots its blue dot on a guidebook map while Uncle-Bill-who-isn’t-really-our-uncle re-tells the story of my father picking up art school girls at ragers. We need an escape. It’s my family’s first and last trip together, all of us, adults, none of us experienced in hiking or reading signposts. Sun will set in an hour. My father wears loafers. But the trail appears flat, and Uncle Bill doesn’t want to hike, so we stroll into the trees. My father keeps several paces ahead, the distance widening as the incline rises, and my mother stops each returning hiker to ask How much farther? No one has an answer more precise than Not too much. Everything becomes trees on trees on trees. Through the craquelure of boughs, the sky blazes orange, and my father says we should turn back, better to forget it than risk getting lost in the dark. My mother says it’s just a little farther, but my sister has to pee, we end up back in the parking lot and debate if it’s possible we bypassed a lake without seeing it and promise we’ll try to find it again. But time passes, and Uncle Bill moves away, I have back surgery, and my mother

brings the failed hike up at Christmas dinner, if only to blame sunset and my father’s loafers. Another year passes. My mother claims to have found Lake Ypsilon on YouTube, and Look—it’s shallow and dumpy, as if that makes our not finding it ok. She says Lake Ypsilon looks like the neighbors’ duck pond. We’ve been staring at it every day of our lives. And as she re-hashes our errors—it dawns on me: the magic of Lake Ypsilon is not in finding it but in searching—and holding onto— all we imagine it could be.

Nesquehoning, Late Summer

By Kathryn Llewellyn

We gather in Pop-pop’s kitchen, as we do every year. The uncles mix picklebacks, waiting for breakfast, and Uncle Jake asks if New York is like Seinfeld. The cousins and I used to lie on the back lawn, pull the grass from the dirt and make wishes on planes we mistook for stars. We threw the frayed blades of uprooted grass into the darkness, one for each detail of our someday lives: getting into and out of Penn State, working in offices. Unhappiness is the only inheritance everyone in this lineage shares. I consider how to explain being a “businesswoman” in New York is just another last shift that pays more but never really ends. Instead I griddle up scrapple and hash browns in Crisco—three foods I’d never admit to eating in New York. Fresh cut grass mixes with sizzling grease. I could’ve become a hairdresser, prettying up

Nesquehoning ladies for baptisms and weddings, the days we lowered them into the earth. By now I’d have popped out a few kids. For a few years, they’d love me back. I nibble a wedge of scrapple and try scrubbing the scent of fried oil out of my skin. Scrapple is the sort of meat you can really enjoy if you don’t think too hard about what it’s made of. Somewhere on the dirge of turnpike between here and Trenton, that last stretch of road to New York City, I stop

at Molly Pitcher Travel Plaza for scrapple-like fast-food and blunder toward whatever it was I had wished for, a little saturated, a little hungry, before the lard and canola oil go stale beneath my flesh.

Cake and the Pen

In workshop, Alice Mattison—who we were both fortunate to work with—once said that coincidences can be too convenient in stories. But coincidentally, we discovered we share the same birthday—December 3rd— and conveniently, we were already good friends. When Alyssa and Marge, who are also birthday twins, suggested doing some kind of interview to mark this phenomenon, we were excited to plumb the creative possibilities of such a striking coincidence. We conducted this interview across sixteen timezones, typing in the same shared Google doc, as befits the international nature of our friendship.

Amina Mobley and Larissa Pham

LP: Can we start with your note about what Alice said? I feel like that’s really beautiful. We should tell everyone about how we first realized that we were birthday twins, which was on a Zoom call if I recall properly—I think you mentioned something about your birthday coming up? And I said, that’s my birthday too!

AM: How funny. I remember it differently. Both are probably true! I remember texting you, probably whining about something, and I said something along the lines of, “I feel lame being sad on my birthday?” I can’t remember exactly, but I think this was when re-realized that we have the same birthday.

LP: I feel like this is evidence that memory is fallible… I remember it one way and you remember it another. But now that you’re saying that, I also remember texting with you! So maybe the Zoom call was when we shared this realization with a third party.

What does it mean to you to be sad on your birthday? I feel like I always end up crying on my birthday. I don’t even particularly like celebrating it, but every year I throw a party because I feel like I have to.

AM: I cry every other year and usually the day after. I’m similar in that I used to plan an elaborate event every year, but it got to be overwhelming. I would secretly like someone to throw me a birthday party but also hate that idea at the same time. I don’t particularly like surprises that I am on the receiving end of.

LP: I’m noting this so that I don’t accidentally throw you a birthday party, but then again, it would be my birthday too. Here’s a confession: I feel like we were close before, but after we learned we were birthday twins, I felt so much closer to you! It was like there was some kind of intimacy that I skipped right through (or to) because it was such a marvelous coincidence. It really isn’t that coincidental, because get enough people in a room together and two of them will eventually share a birthday. But it felt meaningful that you were one of my first friends in the program, and we knew so much about each other’s work before we even learned details like whether one of us was married or not.

AM: I love confessions. I agree that, as strange as it sounds, I felt more open with you after finding out. Somehow this all feels

less cheesy when we can’t see each other as we do this interview. It’s funny how we have different memories of the same events. Memories land differently for each person.

LP: I love that I got to see you carefully word that last sentence, because it makes a difference. It’s nice to see your writing process like that. I’m thinking about what birthdays represent right now, and what Alice said about coincidences, and it made me want to ask you if you believe in fate or destiny. A birthday is ultimately just a day, but if you believe in astrology, for example, it can say so much about you and who you are. Do you believe in fate?

AM: My thinking will likely evolve, but I imagine we are born with tendencies. Within that limitation or inclination, we have some autonomy to make things better, or worse, for ourselves. For example, we met in the program thanks to fate, but how did we become friends? It was a little bit of luck, but also care and effort on both parts.

LP: You know, I think every important encounter in my life has been the result of a coincidence, and often from a decision I could have easily not made.

AM: I want to know more about your belief in fate then.

LP: Okay, so I actually have a thought about fate now, which is that I kind of believe in it, but it never seems to come about in linear ways. And that makes me think about, drumroll, plot, because that’s something I struggle with—not just writing with plot (or making stuff happen, I guess) but writing it in a way that it doesn’t feel contrived—that it doesn’t read as though events

are merely falling into place, with no art to it. Like, if writing is like life, or resembles the truth of life somehow, then a story should be simultaneously as unpredictable and as causal as life itself.

AM: I have many follow-up questions but they all lead to different paths. A few things come to mind when you say this. I read an interview with a writer who said he was careful what he puts into his stories because they all end up happening to him down the line. This terrified me. Now whenever I write a character that resembles myself in any way, I am scared to make anything bad happen to her. Something else that comes to mind is that I just came back from Rome, a city that has a suspenseful quality to it. For example, I would be walking in a quiet alley and all of a sudden Trevi Fountain appears. I later found out that this was supposedly deliberate, that the city planners purposefully designed the city to incorporate an element of surprise. In other words, the unpredictable and often suspenseful atmosphere of the city design was intentionally manufactured.

LP: Omg. Are you going to write a story set in Rome? It’s so interesting that you feel that way, because I feel like the characters I write are always me somehow. And usually the things that happen to them are either things that have happened to me, or… equivalent emotionally to things that I’m trying to work through. It’s not that my writing is autobiographical, I guess, just that it often begins from a personal place.

AM: I really want to know how you allow yourself privacy but be true on the page. I guess this might be more related to your non-fiction work. I also sometimes make stuff happen to my

characters that I worry will happen to me. My logic is that if I make it happen on the page, it won’t happen to me in IRL. I do that less often recently though.

LP: I love hearing about this spooky, almost animist/magical relationship to writing. I have trouble making bad things happen to characters based on my family, especially at the beginning of the program, but I had to learn to break away from their real life inspirations in order to write with the freedom the story needed. Characters based on me, on the other hand… it’s fair game. I do think something often happens to young writers, which is that people assume our work is autobiographical. Some of that is because it is, and some is because people are lazy. I’ve found that it’s very helpful to maintain a boundary around creative work—that it’s something an artist makes, that there’s craft to it, that it’s been edited.

AM: That is beautiful. I want to read a story at our graduation about a woman whose ex had a cucumber fetish, but I’m afraid to. I don’t want people to think that person is based on me or my past experiences (because it’s not). I emphasize this whenever I show family members my work. But I also don’t want a disclaimer to be required for my work. That boundary you mention is very liberating.

LP: It’s a boundary we can set and reinforce, but sometimes people will be upset about it anyway. Or sometimes the writing feels emotionally true enough (which is a good thing!) that people think that means it’s true. I’ve resigned myself to beating my little drum, saying that even creative nonfiction is still created…

When you set out to write, what is the impulse that you follow? Is it that you want to find out what happens, or that you want to make something happen? Or is it something entirely different?

AM: I often work out real-world problems that don’t make sense to me, usually related to power dynamics. That’s how I often get started, but what I’ve found propels me to keep going is always thinking about the reader. Is this scene, this exchange, and this accident in service of the reader? When I frame my story that way it makes editing and revising easier.

LP: I feel similarly, actually—that there’s some kind of real world dynamic that is interesting and warrants exploration, even if there’s a supernatural or fantastical element to the story. A lot of my work is about mothers and daughters, or women and desire, or some kind of combination of that. Weirdly, I’m usually not thinking about the reader until I get to revision—but sometimes not even then. Do you have an ideal reader?

AM: Someone in their early thirties, half Japanese and half American, and hyper-sensitive. I read that Min Jin Lee did that she was surprised at how her book about a small group of people, Korean-Japanese, became so popular. I like reading about people widely different from myself, but I would be dishonest if I didn’t say that I don’t like stories that deal with characters with very similar experiences and backgrounds to mine, mostly because I don’t think there is a lot of that, yet. But really, my audience is anyone who will read anything I write who doesn’t share my last name.

LP: I love specificity too. I feel like I’m willing to read anything

as long as it is specific and true. I often think about this line from Aristotle’s Poetics, which I am going to absolutely butcher right now, but it’s basically ‘poetry is the universal, history the particular.’ I know he’s arguing for poetry being the higher form, but I think it’s the particularity of history that can extend a hand across space and time to make us feel seen in a universal sense. Like you, I also have a soft spot for writers (and readers) like myself, because Southeast Asian writers are still not really near mainstream. And there is something acutely beautiful about seeing your experience rendered by someone who is not you!

Speaking of audience, writing is such a lonely endeavor. Often we don’t have readers for a long time, and when we find readers we trust, it’s so valuable. What does community mean to you?

AM: I like to think of myself as a social person. I gain energy from being around others. Am I awkward and make weird comments sometimes, yes. But still, for the most part, I like people and being around people. The pandemic made me more physically and mentally isolated than ever in my life. As we inch our way out of isolation, I’m finding it hard to balance my social life and my writing time. How do you do it!?

LP: I literally can’t… I go into what I call my writing cave. I don’t hang out with anyone and I write until it gets done and then I celebrate. But I have to go into the cave because I’ve played too much because it’s so fun being alive in the world with people…

I really crave community too. A big reason why I wanted to go to Bennington was that I really longed to be around people who

were working on things in progress, who were open to talking about process and learning. It’s cool to go to readings in the city and I am grateful for that, but it’s so nice to get to be in a more vulnerable, exploratory space of drafting together.

AM: Yes, I agree. Should we stop here? Are you awake?

LP: I am awake! But this feels like a good place to end for now.

Heads

EXCERPT FROM THE SHORT STORY HEADS

By Aaron J. Muller

I spent the few uncertain moments after prom looking at Harry’s severed head. He was smoking in the dark and his black tux was invisible against the night, making his pale face float disembodied in the dark. A rental, and it fit him like shit. Too big in the shoulders, and the pants bunched at his feet like he was wearing pajamas. I imagined his hair slicked back, a saxophone in his hands, but he looked the same as always, just fancier.

We just couldn’t decide what to do, which is what happens when two people both know exactly what they want to do but won’t say it because the other person might not want to do it. Not sex, because he and I had talked about how weird it would be, how we didn’t want to, as the saying goes, “ruin our friendship” by sleeping together, even though there was no one else that would fuck either of us. I wanted to go back to his basement and get high and play a video game and then fall asleep, but he wanted to go to Stephanie’s afterparty. We both knew these things, but we always got high in Harry’s basement and there was only one annual Stephanie party. At the same time, we both liked getting high in Harry’s basement and someone always made a scene at the annual Stephanie party, and we both worried our turns were coming up.

I was wearing my father’s old suit. I just hadn’t been able to imagine myself in a tuxedo jacket, and this was free, because my dad was old now. It was a cool gray, surprisingly not doublebreasted as I imagined all of the 1980s having been. The pants were a little short, but I was wearing nice socks with a brown and black argyle pattern on them.

Harry turned his severed head to the side, looking out across the now-empty parking lot of the dance hall. He threw his cigarette onto the concrete, right next to a discarded soda cup, blackened by the pressure of many tires driving over it. The kind of thing no one ever threw away, because maybe the next person who saw it would be that person, and everyone thought everyone else would be the better person and that it was okay to be a shitty person just this once because who knows what kind of diseases that thing has on it.

“Either way,” Harry said to me. “I don’t have anything.”

We had gotten so used to the codewords we used them even when we were alone. Codewords, as in, a lack of words. Saying nothing in order to say ‘weed.’

“I’ll text Seth,” I told Harry.

“Man, fuck Seth,” Harry said to me.

“I’m good.”

We laughed. I texted Seth, who said we could come by his house as long as we didn’t pull any fag shit.

“Man, fuck Seth,” Harry said to me. We got in the car and Harry drove.

Between us we had seventeen dollars in cash. We used two of them to get 99 cent iced teas. We bought from Seth with the rest, and he gave us a bunch of shake in one of those sandwich bags that doesn’t have a zipper but that you have to fold over

itself then roll it up. I put it in the inside pocket of my dad’s suit, and we drove to the midway point between Harry’s house and Stephanie’s house, which was the elementary school.

Inside of the car, with the overhead light punched on, Harry’s head was back on its shoulders. I took the bowl out of the glove box and we smoked even though we weren’t anywhere yet.

“We can go to Stephanie’s,” I said. I wanted to hear music, and we weren’t allowed to play it in Harry’s basement this late. One of us had to give in first and it was probably my turn. Harry shrugged.

“Just for like an hour,” he conceded. “See if it’s fun. If it sucks, we’ll leave.”

I thought about what it might feel like to leave the party. Leaving came with a great sense of relief, usually, as I knew things were about to be quiet and we would soon be in Harry’s basement watching a movie. When we were kids, we would leave parties together, one of us having begged his mother to come get us, unable to commit to a sleepover. There were only a few places I could sleep. My bed and Harry’s basement and one time the passenger’s seat of his car while we were driving upstate because we had nothing else to do. We counted water towers. “Okay.”

I liked houses from the outside, at night. When the light looks yellow through the living room window and everything is quiet even when there are people in between the curtains with their mouths moving. In the passenger’s seat, where I always was, I’d looked into so many homes and admired their yellow happiness. Only the cleanest homes will let you see inside. People part their curtains when they have something you can be envious of. I’d think: when I have a home, I’ll mount a television

on the wall like that and in the corner there will be a small table with shimmering bottles of liquor on it. Not the plastic stuff at Stephanie’s, which had a handle on the bottle, like a milk jug. They mixed the cheap whiskey with iced tea when there was no soda.

Through the window of Stephanie’s living room I could see the still-bright party, in the hours before the lights went off and everyone found their person to kiss or fight in the yard. From the car, I could only see a cross section of the living room, leaving out the coffee table below, covered in used red cups, abandoned by their drinkers.

The car was dark and I wanted Harry to kiss me, but then he turned on the light and I still wanted him to kiss me but it was harder to pretend that he might. In the dark it was like sleeping. You can dream when you’re asleep.

I drank spiked iced tea over moon-shaped ice, the kind that comes right out of the freezer when you press a lever on the door. It tasted like this one time I was on antibiotics as a kid but I couldn’t swallow pills so they crushed it between two spoons and put it in a drink. That was when my headache was so bad I had spots in my eyes and I couldn’t turn my head and they found the red rings on my stomach where I’d been bit. I’ve felt different since then, but my parents don’t believe me, because to them it’s like I’ve just grown up and changed because they were never inside my head when it was hurting. Harry understands because he’s the closest person to being in my brain aside from me, and maybe sometimes he’s in there more than I am, because he had a headache too, and I loved him for it. For other kids maybe it would have been a revelation, but Harry wasn’t even the first boy I loved.

Harry’s black tuxedo looked like the very absence of light against the painted walls of Stephanie’s house. Her mother read a lot of magazines, so the look of the place was always changing. Every year her party was a different color. This time, everything was lavender and gold. Stephanie was rich and could afford to change things in her house. She got new shoes every year and never rode the bus, even before we were old enough to drive.

Still wearing her floor-length, maroon taffeta gown, Stephanie played hostess, scurrying around her own home, inspecting the discarded cups and listening to the conversations, looking as though she might disintegrate into a maroonish dust should anyone start arguing, should there be any obvious signal that the stability of the night was about to deteriorate. When she saw me and Harry standing by the mahogany cabinet in the dining room, her bare shoulders sloped with a refreshed ease. We’d never cause a scene.

“Sorry we didn’t get to dance,” she said to Harry. Stephanie the proto-hag, courting us both for the possibility of a lifelong friendship with a gay man who understood things.

“I’m sorry you’re not the queen,” Harry said. She’d lost to a girl on a higher tier. Cliqueless and brilliant, a friend to no one but beloved by all. She had been wearing a white dress but didn’t look like she should be at a wedding because she was too readily oozing the teenage joy of peaking at seventeen, and not knowing it.

“I don’t care,” Stephanie said. A girl-hand from the passing crowd handed her a plastic cup. She winced when she drank it, like they do on TV, and her voice sounded wet when she next spoke. Like in movies. “Tiara is from the fucking Dollar General.”

“I suppose you got yours from Claire’s,” I said.

“It was my sixteenth birthday,” she said. “I got it from Party City, like an adult.”

She was okay. Maybe I only hated her sometimes because she could hang on Harry’s arm without reproach and could wear a maroon gown without it being a fun hobby meant to entertain people, like I would have to do it. Maybe I only hated her because she seemed really happy most of the time, and because she didn’t care that she wasn’t prom queen and she had a big nice house and parents who let her do things they shouldn’t let her do. One spiked iced tea in, I laid a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it, as if I could say without saying that I was sorry for hating her, even though I’d never said it out loud and she probably thought I was just being weird.

Molly and Me

By Andrew Quintana

How do I know approaching a celebrity you see on the street can lead to great things? Because I, as a proud denizen of the city of Los Angeles, have had many a famous-person encounter. “So, there was this one time,” the story always begins: Well, really, I swear I’m not lying, I have pictures to prove it… There was this one time, I took a walk in my LA neighborhood to grab a Vanilla Blended drink from my local Coffee Bean: who should I see but comedian, actress, philanthropist, and mother of probably two amazing children Molly Shannon, fighting with her husband — an abstract artist, I later gathered by stalking his Instagram. I stopped on a bench; I sat down; I took out my phone, sweaty and disoriented from my brisk stroll, and snapped the picture, trying to look as sneaky as possible about it. I had no idea I was about to enter into a 20-minute photoshoot with this woman — and not at my request, but hers!

This part of the city was no-man’s land West LA, between Brentwood, the leafy, expensive suburb, and Sawtelle, home of my favorite Ramen spot and bonsai nursery. Once, during my time there, I noticed a homeless man at the 7-11 sitting in my Tommy Bahama beach chair, which had been stolen from the trunk of my car only two days before. I shrugged my shoulders about the theft; I guess this was my contribution to help the homeless crisis in Los Angeles. I usually feel bad about saying I

have no money to homeless people who ask me for money while

I hold my $5 coffee in my hand. Accepting this little theft felt like paying it forward. I waved at him. I told him I hoped he was having a good day.

I thought back to this as I wondered what this legend of comedy was doing, haunting my strange neck of the woods. Is this where her specialized podiatrist to treat her unusually sized bunions works?! Didn’t she have a backyard veranda to eat her baked chicken under, cooked, of course, with herbs from her garden?

You’re probably thinking around this time of the story, if you are an LA Native: no, Andrew, I beg you, do not go up to her, this isn’t done. Well, the thing is, LA native, I didn’t grow up in Los Angeles like you or my husband (the reason I’m in this town) did. I’m a Cuban from Miami who worked in a New York job as a literary agent assistant / ghostwriter, and got depressed for so many reasons, both real and completely imagined, which I won’t get into. (Maybe when I write that celebrity memoir one day I’ll tell you all the reasons I was depressed in my twenties!)

Well, when the opportunity came to move to Los Angeles for my husband’s job in entertainment reporting — “We don’t have to move here if you don’t want to,” my husband reminded — I screamed. I told him to shut up and stop pretending that I had some separate identity outside our relationship and wasn’t totally codependent on his career and talent for my sense of self. I was ready to leave behind my publishing career with the drop of a hat: I’d work retail at a plant shop at a mall! I’d go back to graduate school! I’d see a therapist and blame some outside force on my low self-esteem! Let’s just do LA now!

I was ready for my LA fantasy. Beach day trips and Palm Springs getaways and being able to hide from the abominable

human race from the safety of my air-conditioned car, which his company moved across the country. I felt important and special that his company paid to ship my car to Los Angeles, even though our move from New York had nothing to do with me: I felt like Lady Macbeth, manically encouraging him to “kill it” at whatever cost. “Screw your courage to the sticking place and you shall not fail!”

As much as I do love him, sometimes I wish I could exist in LA without him as my own separate entity: he doesn’t understand, as someone who’s totally self-assured in his identity, that celebrity encounters can be life-changing opportunities. Get this: He thinks approaching a celebrity — like I did with Molly Shannon that day at the Coffee Bean — in their native habitat (read, the city we share) is a sin. I see where he inherited his disdain for tourists like me who hunt celebrities like zoo animals: his grandmother, a classy Beverly Hills woman who lives in a condo with panoramic views of Los Angeles and particularly hates wet stains on her wooden furniture.

One evening over dinner, she told a story about how she inwardly scoffed at a “tourist” for going up to Friends actress Lisa Kudrow while she was shopping for clothes. “I would never do that,” she said as a point of pride, and, having lived in Los Angeles already for five years, I can attest that it’s a common attitude held among the natives.

I’ll admit, I was self-conscious about approaching Molly Shannon. One of the most important things to remember when greeting a celebrity is that this happens to them a lot; they are not seeing you, but the culmination of all their experiences sitting for press junkets and having to answer stupid questions while some spotlight hits them intensely: “What does this role truly mean to you?” “How did you relate to the character?” “Who do you think should play the next Spiderman?” They

are hounded for selfies by people who only want to boost their social media by appearing next to someone important. “Can we take a picture?” “Can we take a picture?” “Can we take a picture?”

In order to get the most out of my encounters, I follow the Frances McDormand rule. She has an idiosyncratic stance when approached by fans for a picture. Instead of scrunching up beside some stranger for a fake smile, she’ll engage someone in a brief conversation. “I’m not an actor because I want my picture taken,” she has said. “I’m an actor because I want to be part of the human exchange.” So — if she has time — she’ll try to engage in a human exchange with those people in binoculars on the tour bus who pay to be driven to the outskirts of celebrity mansions. But no selfies!

I follow that rule and another one to make my celebrity encounter as life-changing and meaningful as possible: I try to compliment a favorably reviewed project of theirs that didn’t get a lot of eyes on it. Celebrities love to be seen for what they can do; they typically sense when a lifetime of rejection and ennui is being projected on them. So, usually, I bring up a critically acclaimed title to distract from my own jittery demeanor.

The rules being set, now let me reset the scene of how this Molly Shannon shoot came to be: I’m sitting on a bus bench, flashing a quick selfie with her in the far background, simply for proof that this event did, indeed, happen. I notice her husband walked away. Here was my chance! Molly Shannon was standing there like a doe, no coffee in hand, alone. Maybe I’d join her in line! I looked back at my photo and caught, only in retrospect, that this exchange with her husband had been tense: uh oh, I thought. I had to be less stalkery. She probably thought I was waiting for her. I thought I’d try to pretend like I just recognized her on purpose, but the celebrity is used to having eyes on them

at all times. So, I decided to be radically honest, greet her like Oliver Twist does the scary man for more porridge, and just tell her I loved her work. Then I’d be on my way: I’d play the role of the forgettable fan. I’d sacrifice this moment of radical self-love because, maybe, it was the right thing to do.

I inched closer like some safari scientist afraid my specimen would pounce at the sight of me: cautious. “I’m so sorry,” I began. “I don’t want a picture. I know how many gays come up to you to tell you how incredible you are. I just wanted to tell you how much I loved your new movie where you play the mom who dies from cancer. You were incredible! Also, that speech you gave at the Independent Spirit Awards was so full of joy and it really lifted my spirits up. And Enlightened is my favorite show of all time and you rocked in it…” or something close to that is what I said. The celebrity craves details about what they are complimented for.

She replied something like, “I’m sorry, I’m not used to encountering fans like this…” while wiping tears from her eyes. “I just had this fight with my husband… this never happens…”

“Don’t worry about it, I can just go…” I insisted, hoping perhaps this moment of vulnerability could be used to my advantage and I could perhaps be her confidante! Instead, she replied, “Do you want to take a picture?”

This surprised me: Suddenly everything I ever believed about the LA rule — you never approach a celebrity — was flipped on its head. The celebrity asking to take a picture with me?! “You really don’t have to if you don’t want to…” “I’m happy to,” she said, as if she also meant to add it would really cheer her up. The day was especially windy: I only know this because in the pictures we ended up taking the winnowing wind blew up her hair like a stalk of corn in a yellow field. After taking five pictures, she insisted we take more pictures inside: I

let her take the lead.

Then, sensing her willingness, I asked if we could do “best friend” style photos: “Yes!” she said, and we ended up taking hugging pictures, pursed lip pictures, “we’ve just shared the biggest laugh” pictures, Molly Shannon judging my choices pictures… After that, though, we attempted to have a normal human conversation. “And what do you do?” she asked me, which was a question I hated. I had no idea what it was I did, except work at a plant store and follow my boyfriend to Hollywood parties as a plus one, which, actually, for quite a few Angelenos, truly is a career. I responded nonchalantly by saying I worked at a plant store — trying to conjure up this image of myself as a down-to-earth guy totally happy spending his days sticking thermometers into houseplants and monitoring the amount of moisture in their soil — which made me feel suddenly naked and exposed.

So, I responded loudly, “AND MY HUSBAND works right here, at the building for Entertainment Weekly. He interviews everyone.” (This was pre-Vanity Fair.) I wished I could take back those words, but I couldn’t help feeling like suddenly every other poser she’d ever encountered at a Hollywood party, clinging to that sense of belonging to the celebrity superstructure of Los Angeles that made me feel forgettable. She said she had to go. I don’t think me saying my husband worked as an entertainment reporter triggered her saying that, but in my memories, it feels like suddenly after saying that she was in a big hurry. Then, as if I was having some out of body experience, I blurted out, “I’m positive he’s going to be interviewing you soon,” and I can’t honestly say I remember what she said after that, but I play it back in my mind as, “I bet,” as she walked to the parking lot to drive home. For all she knew, I could have been some guy just made absolutely bonkers from living in Los Angeles for too long:

“It wouldn’t even be professional to mention you,” my husband clarified, “if I even ever really did interview Molly Shannon.” (Update: he did for the White Lotus.) The embarrassment and the humiliation felt palpable on all sides. I’m such a fucking poser, I thought.

Eh, fine, the high of the Molly Shannon photoshoot was incredible: I texted the pictures to my husband which caused everyone in his office to gather around them. “Everyone wants to know how you got these…” he texted back. I even texted the pictures to my high school bully who was now a famous actor in fucking Los Angeles. I cringed. I couldn’t take it back. I’m crazy!!! I finally realized. Like, actually, really, undeniably crazy. I did that. And I even exaggerated how close we were.

I wanted him to know I belonged to this town, like I owned this town. I felt, like celebrities probably do every day, that espresso shot to the brain which made me feel a jolt: wait… do you mean to say… people are talking about me?!? The espresso shot that also makes you feel sick to your stomach.

I posted the Molly Pics on Instagram. All the gays from life rallied in the comments. My family back in Miami believing I was friends with Molly Shannon and somehow “a part of Hollywood.” But this wasn’t my town. I had ended up talking about my boyfriend to Molly Shannon in that last sentence and not myself: as if I had no identity my own. What was wrong with me? Why was I so afraid to even wonder who I might be outside all this hullabaloo?

Who was I, I wondered afterwards, sipping my iced coffee. I had a lot of work to do on myself, I realized, if I wanted my own star to shine bright.

I begin making resolutions

By Guillermo Rebollo Gil

To sit outside for thirty minutes with a notebook and draw a bird. To learn to describe the animal: It looks the same as the others around it. It’s brown. It looks nothing like the ones people post pictures of.

To go on a bird walk. Though, frankly, it’s impossible to get by around here without a car. Birds, I have been told, are smarter than we once believed. Praise be to thoughtlessness, for I am innocent of ever believing a single wrong thing about a bird.

To repeat release until I feel lifted, grounded. To be okay with giving up. To learn to describe the way I look most like myself after I cry.

The Animals

By Guillermo Rebollo Gil

Yesterday he said I smelled like a chicken, and a snake, and a leopard.

Combined? I asked.

He just stared at me, in joyful anticipation of what he might smell like.

But I’m no good at this game, so I told him he smells like his mother the day of the night she gave birth to a tortoise, a goat, a goose, a sea urchin, an elephant.

About having children

By Guillermo Rebollo Gil

That thing that Hass said, that so long as you make it through the day, it’s not like the boy has to be in every poem per se, it’s that poems cannot begin without, are not even imaginable until I bring to mind what he said this morning about me smelling of socks and squash, and isn’t it sad, yes, that I’ll never grow small enough to fit under anything anymore, always having to wait at one end or the other, holding up a clean shirt for him to put on, so we can leave, please, and all the while I’m saying to myself, I should just write the poem in my head without him noticing I’ve escaped and so Hass comes up, the idea, for example, that the parent you are erases the luminous clarity of the poet you are too, are not, are too, or the notion that so long as I make it through the day without crushing his tiny fingers on the car door, I should be thankful for the true at first sight meaning of my life, which I am, as I stand here, a permanent escapee, from whatever other life the poet in me could have foreseen.

WINE O’CLOCK

EXCERPT

By Jess Rezendes

Hours later, I trudge up the stairs of my apartment building carrying the unopened bottle of Sauvignon Blanc around its neck, like it’s being dragged against its will. The hallway smells like fried something, old grease, sickening, but behind each door is silence; it’s late. I unlock my own door, fumbling, drunk-tired. In the dark hallway, a shoulder bounces me off the opposite wall as I make my way to the kitchen. The bottle smacks against my thigh. I grunt at it, at my feet, at the empty apartment. Everything is my enemy. When I pull out my cell phone to light my way, there are two missed calls and four text message notifications on the screen: my mother, my husband, and a friend I had left without saying hello to. I resolve to message them later.

There is a white-gray smudge on the skirt of my dress, which I only just notice as I flip on the yellow-y fluorescent light in the kitchen that makes everything look worse than it is. The shame, the tiny panic of knowing it has come from my body is the instant reaction: snot? Deodorant? Toothpaste? Then I remember I’m panty-less. Admittedly I had done a lot of crying, even a few seconds of ugly, mucusy crying before I got it together, but I assume this is the kind of stain I fear. I had tried to be militant about which part of the skirt I kept between

my bare ass and whatever seat I was in, ran a hand over my backside each time I stood to make sure no moisture had made a spot there. This issue is something she would have helped me keep in check. A whispered, “you’re good,” in passing as I tried to be nonchalant, smoothing my palms against my own ass for the seventieth time.

I pull the dress up over my head and leave it in a heap on the floor, unclip my bra and fling it from my elbow. It lands next to the fridge.

If I die in this spot, they’ll find my nude body laying atop my black dress with its stain, the bra way over there, one of its hooks bent out of shape from getting caught on something months ago. The investigators would likely find all of these facts suspicious.

Why would she have taken her clothes off in the kitchen?

There’s a bottle of wine, maybe she was waiting for her lover to come over.

There’s a hook bent out of shape, someone took this off in a hurry. And her underwear is missing!

There’s vaginal fluid on this dress but no sign of sexual assault. No sign of trauma.

No sign of trauma, but she’s recently given birth. Maybe it’s just deodorant.

The twelve-dollar bottle of Sauvignon Blanc is on the countertop next to the sink, label out, like it’s on display, a gift I’m proud of. This survivor. This miracle of glass and old grapes pulled from the twisted wreckage. Maybe this is our rusted iron cross beam and now I have it in my shitty kitchen. Maybe it should be behind glass with a white rectangle describing it: Sauvignon Blanc, 2020. Bottle discovered untouched in the disaster.

Who had gone through her bag and found it? Did they chuckle and say “not a ding on it,” and show it to the nearest person? Probably. They didn’t know her. They saw dead bodies all the time. I’ve heard stories about cops who snap photos at every crime scene so they can show their friends and family what they deal with, or worse, make jokes about it.

The overhead light makes the golden liquid glow, the bottleneck more elegant in its shoulder curve, its full body. Blue watercolor pinwheels cover the paper label. I pull open a drawer, retrieve the wine key, and use my nails to pull it apart. When the foam cork releases with a pop of relief, I smart. I open a cabinet and look at my wine glasses, but instead decide to swig from the bottle. It’s fruity and funky. I wrinkle my nose, then toast to the ceiling.

“It’s not good,” I say to her. I take another sip.

One of the most important tools the brain uses for survival is calculated prediction. A human sees an action, notes the consequence, and is able to predict the outcomes of future actions based on these sequences. This is oversimplified, of course; cognition requires a complex combination of neurons firing from different points in the brain.

The human brain knows and learns how to keep itself alive, but it does not “know” how to die. Yes, of course, it knows how death can happen, what happens; that is cognition. But it cannot fully accept the possibility of itself not existing; it does not truly fathom it. This too is part of survival. If one were to understand what it meant to one day not exist, then how would one overcome the fear of death long enough to find a mate and reproduce?

In the event of your death, if you’re lucky, there will be a gap

in time for the people who knew and loved you, when reality becomes too crisp and memories forever etch themselves in vivid color inside their memories. They’ll watch the sunrise as they fill their gas tank on the way to work the next day, orange and pink over the treetops, a giant stupid star shining on us as we rotate around it on this stupid planet. That disappears but always comes back. An innocuous instagram post from an ex will pop up and they’ll paste it into a text box to you, then they’ll remember, will still be stricken by the thought that you’re not at the other end of that number anymore. No one is. Not just “no one,” no person like you, with your expansive, specific you-ness. There’s no one to send it to, no one who will enjoy it the way they need it enjoyed.

All over, people will go about their business and then remember their business does not include you anymore, over and over. They’ll pause and remember, and then years later remember what it felt like to lose you, though somehow they’ve become numb to it. At first, it will be just a few folks whose deaths they must sidestep, then dozens. They will create a collection of memories of remembering the pain of remembering their dead. Is this declarative or nondeclarative memory? Will it become second nature, like riding a bike?

The bottle is half gone. I am sipping between telling her about the possible pussy stain on the dress and the way her father showed us around the cemetery where we buried her like he was hosting us in his home, how sweet it was, sweet to the point of nausea. His big glassy eyes, his quivering smile.

I have done this sitting on one end of my couch, turned toward the other like she’s there with me.

I have found the seed documentary streaming but I can’t

bring myself to play it, just let it sit on the screen.

I tell her that I sent my own daughter and husband away: “Having them here felt like holding back a sneeze.”

I am hit with jags of overwhelming sadness. I admit that I still cannot understand that she’s gone. Just gone, disappeared. It doesn’t seem real. I admit the cliche is true.

I drink more. I get to my feet, and sway a bit.

“I need a cigarette,” I say to her.

“You’re naked,” she says back.

“I’ll just put the pussy dress back on,” I say.

“Cigarettes will kill you,” she says.

I make my way back to the kitchen with the bottle in tow, the remaining wine sloshing. My pack of emergency cigarettes are in the freezer.

“Gotta die of something,” I say. Usually, I say this to be edgy, but tonight I see the inside of my lungs like the graphics in a television medical procedural. Maybe it was better not knowing it was coming, or at least, not knowing until a few seconds before it did. Maybe it was better to go from gliding along the pavement with a bottle of wine on your back thinking you’re on your way to giggle with your best friend, your sister, to being taken out by a blue Nissan Altima driven by somebody else’s mom.

I wrap my fingers around the handle of the freezer, but I don’t pull.

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll wait until tomorrow.”

I step back from the fridge and bring the bottle to my lips, tipping it up so the wine funnels in fast. As I lift the other foot back to spin myself around, it catches on the pussy dress. I am already off kilter, now full of three quarters of a bottle of wine on an empty stomach. My foot slides under me. I reach for the counter but catch a dish towel hanging from the stove instead,

which slips from the handle.

A scream escapes, a little one, from the back of my throat like a rotten yawn. When I hit the linoleum I feel it first in my shoulders, the back of my head, my tailbone; I hit hard. The bottle crashes beside me, glass splintering and wine splashing onto my naked, sad body.

I lie still. I close my eyes. The room spins. I am lying in a pile of wet, broken glass. Do I have to clean this up right now? I could sleep here. I could just sleep here on the kitchen floor.

I open my eyes to look at the skin on my torso, my flopped breasts, to check the arm that was holding the bottle for injury. I assess my lower joints for pain. There are retreating throbs but no blood, only shimmering remnants of my destroyed urn, crystalline beads of the wine that was always meant for me. I am faintly aware that I am crying again.

“I’m okay,” I say to her, “I’m okay.”

She is not here. I am drunk and alone. It’s just me.

TAGGER DOWN

By Felicia Rivers

He still had her backpack.

He had it and hadn’t looked inside since. Since.

He heard the paint cans rattling.

He felt the weight of it.

He should turn it in.

He should call the police. He should call and tell them he had her backpack. He should tell them what happened—no, he should call and tell them he found it. That she left it at his place. Oh Hell, she had never even been to his place. They’d probably be able to figure that out, right? No, he always went to her place. Her place. With the neon light shining, blinking through the bedroom window. He should leave it. Outside her building, or outside the tattoo parlor—no, in the bar. What if someone saw him? What about his fingerprints? He should throw it away—no, you fucking coward—he should tell them exactly what happened.

But what happened?

He should tell them that she was Tagger B? Yeah, he should tell them about the tattoos and the graffiti, and how he figured it all out, how he figured her out, her secret, her talent, her genius, her skin, her tattoos, how they shifted in the blinking neon light, the texture of her skin, gardenia scented, wild, wild,

hair, bright eyes, wide mouth, her tinkling laugh like that little fountain in the park where they sat on the grass eating tacos— no that wasn’t part of the story, or their business. But he should tell about her art because the story didn’t make sense without her art. How she was beautifying the city—a public service, really—just like she beautified her body, transferring the art that decorated her skin onto the skin of the city, and he had figured it out. He had cracked her code. And now he had to tell. But what if they suspected him? They always suspected the boyfriend, the husband, the lover.

Was he? Her lover? Yes. It more than sex, sex and talking and laughter, and he had met her friends, her boss, for Christ’s sake, he wanted to meet her parents. She looked at him like he meant something. She let him in. He let her let him in. She designed a tattoo for him, and he stood up to her needle. Just like he had climbed up on that roof for her—well, really for him—climbed to see Brynne become Tagger B.

After her shift at the tattoo parlor, after she finished inking a vintage Cadillac with the name, Reginald curled around it. On the fat guy from East Passyunk, they drove north with the windows down and her dreads rose in the warm night air and he asked her what she was going to do and she said wait and see and he started guessing, wracking his brain for the tattoos on her body that he hadn’t found on the walls of the city yet. See, since he’d figured her out, he’d been playing a game with her, mapping the ink on her body to the paint on the streets, and driving around town became a treasure hunt for Tagger B, so that night he guessed: the pentagram with the candle in the middle? (No.) the white roses with the drops of blood? (Nope.), the emerald ring with the inscription: He loves me not? (Ha! No.) And he’d said: Who broke your heart? I’ll kill ‘em! (Ha—no one.).

The sandcastle that looks like the Linc? (No, I kind of regret that one), and then she said we are here, and here was a decrepitlooking brick building up in North Philly and he asked which wall and she said we are going to the top baby! What top? Up there? and she said yes because way up there on the roof was a big ol’ white tank that she’d had her eye on for a while, and now she had her trusty partner—he said sidekick because all the glory was hers—okay, trusty sidekick to accompany her on her quest, and now the tank was hers, and he asked but how were we going to get up there, it was what? Six stories? and she said seven, and that she had good intel because her uncle had worked here when it was a brewery back in the day and everyone used to smoke on those fire escapes, see? But are they safe? And she said yes, and he believed her. And he was the guy, so he insisted on going first and he carried her backpack because that’s what a guy does too and they zigzagged their way up it to the top, seven creaky flights, and the view of the city was spectacular with the vast field of pinpoint lights burning in the darkness and the black band of the river winding through, and he could breathe up here and he shouted into the night, and she laughed and shushed him at the same time. Then she went into her bag and pulled out a head harness with a light on it and a camera and he asked if she was a spelunker and took the camera and said sidekicks do the filming and she grinned at him and he captured her smile through the viewfinder but she told him no faces so he pointed at the tank and she began painting cats.

She was so quick and accurate and amazing, and he immediately knew which tattoo she was tagging, freehand, not drawing, not tracing, no preliminaries, just painting, amazing cats that emerged from the white of the tank as if conjured, and

soon there were cats climbing, dancing up the side of the tank, black silhouettes against the white she painted them, with so much character, so much expression, each cat its own self, she was so brilliant. She painted them as high as she could reach, and he surprised her and lifted her up, and her shout became her tinkling laugh, and that was worth everything, and she did all five cats, five black cats like the cats that climbed up her leg, and then to the left of the string of cats she painted: October 5

and he asked her what the date signified, and she showed him her watch and it read: 12:07 | Oct 5.

Then he pointed to her leg, to where the cats climbed next to the words October 5 and said but that date is tattooed right next to the climbing cats on your leg, and she said falling cats. What? The cats are falling, she said, not climbing, ‘cause, you know, cats always land on their feet, and he said but it’s the same date. How did you know? How did you know we would be up here, on this date, and she said she didn’t know, the date just resonated with her, but when he asked why, for the first time since he met her, she became distant and quiet. She turned and looked at her work, then spread her arms and let out a Whoooo! like she had just crossed something off of her bucket list, and then turned to him and laughed and was Brynne again, and she thanked him because he made this all possible and people would be able to see the cats from the river, they were so high, and now it was time to go, so he helped her pack up her bag.

He heard the breaking glass from down below. He looked and someone was by his car, someone was breaking into his car, and he shouted down, Who’s there? and You there—stop! not at all meaning to sound like guy in one of those old black and white

movies she loved, and What the fuck! and she said Shhhh. We don’t know who’s down there, but he was pissed and told her to wait here, then he stormed down the fire escape and he saw the man and the man saw him and started jogging off—not even running because how much of a threat could a white guy who drove a Honda be?—and he chased after him—oh, why did he do that? Because he was pissed—and he lost him in the dark and he didn’t know that part of town and he went back and called for her to come down—no answer—but he heard a noise, a door slam, and he called again—no answer. Why? Then he climbed the seven zigzags of creaky black metal and—where’d she go? Backpack still here, her, no—door slam? —where’s the door? Found it. Locked. Brynne, where are you? Silence, lights in the darkness, Brynne? Brynne? What’s going on? Come on. We’ve gotta go. Cold lights in the darkness, hoisting her backpack, walking the roof, walking the roof, trying the door, Brynne. Brynne! silence, descending, zig, zag, zig, zag, zig, zag, zig, should he zag, or should he zig? You down here? What the fuck? unlocking the car, glass on the seat—fucker—turning on the headlights, beeping the horn, silence, Brynne? calling her cell, ringing in her bag, tossing her backpack in the back, driving toward the building, asphalt with grass straining through the cracks, nature’s gonna nature, circling, headlights on brick, around the corner, around, out into the street, circling, how long? back to the building, the streets, an relentless beat of helpless tire on asphalt, waiting, can’t leave, waiting, daybreak, circling, heading home. Didn’t know. Did she suffer? Didn’t know. Was she alive when he? Didn’t know, God Damnit! Didn’t know. Until.

Earnest 8 o’clock news anchor: Jane Doe found dead base of an abandoned brewery North Philadelphia.

Fallen? Accident? Pushed?

Anyone with information.

He never saw. Never saw her. Someone saw her. Someone found her. Didn’t know.

Never saw. The sixth cat had fallen. Couldn’t explain. Had to try. Didn’t he?

DID I EVER TELL YOU

By Moriel Rothman-Zecher

She squirms next to me on the giant mattress we’ve laid down on the floor. We’re worried she’ll pee on it, but we’re almost at our wits’ end with this sleep thing. It feels as though

I’ve been lying here saying “stop squirming” & “close your eyes” & “laila tov I love you” for the last six years which of course can’t be exactly precise, given that she’s two, but god damn I am anxious to go eat something or watch Netflix, but she’ll howl if I leave now so I try the Vipassana meditation I practiced for a few months at 23; I want to escape this room & I love this kid so much I want to live until she’s a great-grandparent. The boredom of this night makes me greedy for more life. Finally she slips off into sleep & the furrow

of her brow, gremlin, dissident, marvel, relaxes & of course I don’t kiss her forehead, I do not risk waking her & starting the cycle over, instead I roll over & hope to Buddha that my knees don’t crack with what they call crispus, silly little air bubbles that come from the running I do to stay congenial. They do crack, one, then the other, but she doesn’t wake, & I walk on the planks which I know to creak least, & open the door at a practiced pace. I prepare a cheese sandwich, pluck at the iPad for a bit, & as I’m doing this I begin to grow these weird antlers on my head, all mossy & fungal, I realize they are the antlers of prophecy, here to say I won’t live to see my kid as a great-grandparent, careful not to poke my wife I crawl into bed, it’s her night off, she’s fine.

IT IS AS THOUGH

By Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 58b:12

(“He who blanches the face of another…”)

We laughed, like pre-teenaged jackals, when the piece of shit fell out of his shorts one practice, we looked—stop seeking absolution in the first person plural—and laughed. He was poor and heavy, so had upon his body neither the shield of power nor sex—fuck your hifalutin poem-blather. We were glad to not be him. The shit fragment on the pale gym floor was so bare and bright we—you—could barely stand to look at it— How about you don’t write about me at all. Instead how about you march me toward the expanses of soft blue foam-padded walls, go jackals, go—so then I killed him. His name meant “friend.” He was 12 years old. His shoulders caved inwards. His light Semitic eyes clouded over with the knowledge of betrayal.

QUIET TIMES

By Moriel Rothman-Zecher

I. Shadow Chasm

This one is my friend, said my two-and-a-half-year-old, or actually my thousand-day-old, if we’re counting.

She was pointing to the author photo on the back of Sylvia Plath’s yellow-jacketed collected poems.

Her is my friend, she said again.

I responded, Right, that’s great kiddo, but she kept going, And her died. But her is still my friend.

II. Everything

Why you don’t know everything? she asked.

It came out more like “everysing,” because she hadn’t yet turned three. We were listening to a Lo-Fi song that had a refrain I’d transliterate as wop-wao, but which my daughter repeated as meow, which is way better. This quiet time, I was reading Tracy K. Smith, and she was poring over Junie B. Jones. Every minute or so, she’d ask, Why there is a monster? Why this guy mad?

I don’t know, sweetie, I kept saying. I don’t know.

I was buried in Smith’s poem about the death of her father, about how he’d been like a “lord,” but before he died -how long before?- her “view of him hardened,” and she shrunk him to “human size.” I was wondering whether it was better to be as a god, for a bit, and then be mortalized by your own child, or to be understood as fragile and flailing from the get-go.

I was thinking and thinking, wop-wao, which is to say, sinking and sinking, meow. Eventually, she got fed up, and said, Why you don’t know everything?

I laughed as the shadow chasm opened up again beneath me; welcome, welcome, welcome.

IT’S THE FIRST DAY OF JUNE

By Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Outside, a thunderstorm.

Ice water and ice cream.

Our 15-yurt commune is dissolving into acrimony and acorn flour.

My dog was sent to a canine inn whose sign flashes neon purple, All Dogs Welcome.

He is a 160-pound dingo, so they might kick him to the curb before the weekend is done.

My well-muscled legs are in the process of converting to tentacles.

Lightning once struck my first love and he gained the ability to do an ollie.

You don’t have to believe me.

I reread the teaching application I submitted in a fog of financial panic. There are so many typos it looks like a scam email:

Hi I’m Moriel! and I just need 80 dollars for a ticket on the only dollars to professor of Emblish I am stranded?

My daughter is asleep in the other room.

The vegan ice cream leaves a weird taste in my mouth.

Ice water is proof of god, rain through the thick green leaves.

Before bedtime I remind my kid that god sometimes uses she/ her and they/them pronouns.

She tells me I’d better not let him hear me say that.

Next year I drive to my new teaching job in Jerusalem, PA.

Over Route 86, a billboard:

Lost? Jesus will give you a ride home.

DISSOLUTION

By Moriel Rothman-Zecher

all the while a giant horse has been galloping a cart of trash attached to her back, sushi grass and unused condoms debris of our years, now free I walk a single lap and then another around the vulture-ridden lake still our garden is lush and rotting with fruits and that whisky a clever wind plays with my blouse enters me from between my buttons decorates or decimates our past with patterns that swill like Ohio summers all cicadas and tornados and that horse that you thought was dead even went so far as to call the neighbors to tell them hey your horse I think is dead but of course it was only sleeping we were so new here then

Liudvika

By Margaret Rush

The doorbell rang. It was an alarming ring that she hadn’t heard in months, perhaps longer. She put out her cigarette in the ashtray. She unplugged her phone and put it in her sweater’s pocket. She knew no one rang the doorbell anymore. Doorbells, like phone calls and doilies, were out of fashion. They had a peephole, but its functionality was impaired by the screen door Bene had installed years ago. All she could see was the fuzzy shape of a person in a hat. She unlocked the deadbolt while trying to recall whether she had locked the screen door when she got back from buying groceries. (She didn’t always lock that one. The fence, though, she always locked that.) The door was heavy and the floor carpeted. She heard her daughter’s voice as she opened it, telling her Ma, you need to replace this death trap or put in tile flooring or do something to make it easier to open, okay? You’re going to throw your back out someday and you of course won’t have your phone with you at the same moment she realized she could now smell everything outside—the decaying fruit in garbage trucks miles away, the tar and gravel filling potholes down the street, her ripe tomatoes ready to be picked. And as the plump, red orbs faded from her imagination, she saw the screen door’s metal hook unlatched, dangling like a dead fly wrapped and waiting in spider silk. No. She would not let her mind play anymore. This was not a time for imagining. She opened the door a little more and did her best not to draw the hatted man’s eye to the

screen door’s lock.

He was taller than her but not by much. Most definitely younger but that was most of the world. A black tattoo peeked out from under his polo shirt’s collar. His hat bore a company logo that looked like one she recognized but it wasn’t right. She didn’t doubt that. Nor did she doubt that this was one of the men from the van. His eyes were cold, his smile forcibly wide. His uneven teeth were neither white nor yellow. The clipboard he gripped held what couldn’t have been more than a couple sheets of paper.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Good morning, Ma’am. I’m with the electric company and we received a report that there were power outages in the area.” The pitch in his voice bent and snapped back up. “So?”

“Your neighbor,” he looked down at his clipboard. “Mrs. Dolinski is having an electrical problem. We think you may be at risk as well. Would it be all right if I come in and check to make sure your lights are A-ok?”

She waited for his eyes to meet hers before responding. There was determination there and some experience. Also, some strength. “I don’t know any Dolinski.”

“Well, then you can use this chance to get to know her then. Say hello.”

“You can’t check from the outside?” she asked.

“No, I would need to get inside to know for sure.”

She could feel her body forming a plan. She leaned forward and placed her hand on the doorframe. “Why?”

“Because that’s where the problem is.”

“But I don’t have a problem.”

“You might. That’s why I need to check.”

Lu flicked the porch light on and off a few times. “See, my lights are working fine. I don’t have a problem.” She slid her hand down and placed it on top of the screendoor’s handle.

“There are different circuits, Ma’am, and the lights out here in the front of your house aren’t the same as in the back.”

She gripped the door handle and pulled back on it. “Hmm. I will have to ask my Husband.”

“Is he home?”

“He’s in bed. You wait here.”

The man locked his eyes on hers. His smile didn’t waver as he tucked the clipboard under his arm and placed his hand on the screen door’s handle. “I didn’t know anyone else was home. I’m sure your husband will understand about circuits. Let me talk to him.” He pulled lightly on the handle.

Lu pulled back. His smile fell. His gaze narrowed. “Your husband isn’t home, Ma’am. I know he isn’t.”

He yanked hard on the screen door and pulled it open. There were two umbrellas in the stand near the door. Lu grabbed one and in one swift movement pushed the front door wide open with one hand so fast and with so much force it dented the drywall. She raised her other arm and brought the long, pointy umbrella down on the man’s head. He took a step back. His arms shot up in protection, blocking his view of Lu, and sending the clipboard to the ground.

Lu jabbed the umbrella’s metal tip into his rib. He gasped. “My son is a cop and he will be here at any moment. And you, you are a stupid crook!” And with a strength she hadn’t felt in some time, Lu lunged at him, elbow first. She hit him in the center of his chest and watched him stumble backward and fall down the concrete steps.

She knew better than to wait and see what he did next. She went back inside and locked one door then the other. She knelt and crawled toward the front window. She lifted the curtain up from the bottom and peeked. He was there, bent over on the sidewalk. His hat lay on her front lawn. He grabbed it and staggered up onto his feet in a forward run, managing to look up and down the street before hurrying back toward the alley. Lu rose to a crouch and tip-toed to her back window where she looked through the curtains and watched the man get into the van. He was speaking quickly to his comrade as he gestured with his hands, indicating something wide, something big. The other man looked toward her house and, in some haste, drove away.

She kept her face pressed against the glass, until she accepted it didn’t help her see farther down the alleyway. She took a step back, fumbled her way to the nearest chair, and sat. She felt her organs hitting up against one another and her muscles trying to leap off her bones. But her mind was fine. Her thoughts, unrushed and even. She should call someone. The police, perhaps, and her daughter. And as she put her hand in her pocket and touched her cell, she imagined a cop car in front of her house, its lights on but the siren off. And Mrs. Dolinski out on her front porch. And those new families with so many children spying. “Oh, forget about it,” she mumbled to herself as she lit a cigarette. She was over her smoking limit for the day. But, why not?

As she smoked, she remembered Matis and Ignas and Aldona. She saw their little hands in hers and recalled how she once pulled out a bad tooth from Ignas’s mouth. She put it in her pocket and after finding water to clean it off, let him keep it. He was so happy to have it. He showed everyone in their little

camp. Most smiled at the dear boy. He was precious. And then, Lu thought about her potatoes and beets, the coats she stole but not really stole, the children she birthed and raised, and the husband she once bore on her back. This time was different than the others. She knew that. She felt that. She had been alone and only had to save herself. There was something in that thought that pulled her wandering mind taut, that stirred her heart into feeling. And without being aware she was doing it, she put out her cigarette and cried for some time. Later, she stood and looked out the window. Her tomatoes were still there. She musn’t forget to pick those. She should grab the clipboard off the front porch, too. And now there was the dent in the drywall from the front door. She would need to spackle that later. And she should do it before her daughter came by tomorrow.

The Manager’s Daughter

By Diana Ruzova

When you are little and alone you should not open the front door. Even if someone knocks. Even if the doorbell rings. Open the door because you know they heard you. You know they heard the crinkle of your bag of cheese puffs, the jazzy Hey Arnold theme song. Feel simultaneously saved and abandoned. Know that you are responsible for too much. Know that you were brought to this country for more than just helping your parents with the building. Know that your mama can’t drive so your papa has to drive her places, places you can’t always go. Know that not all people live like this, but you do. Stop crying. Why are you crying? Dig your wet face into the stranger’s shoulder and smear orange cheese powder on his shirt.

When you are older and alone and someone knocks on the door only open it after the phone rings many times. How many times is many? Don’t ask stupid questions. Open the door if the phone keeps ringing or if the knocking won’t stop. This means it’s an emergency. This means a garbage disposal is clogged, or an A/C has stopped working, or maybe a tenant locked themselves out of their apartment, or someone is stuck in the elevator, or the cops are here to break up a domestic dispute, or

maybe there’s a flood. Why is there always a flood?

Don’t touch the rent checks or the wads of cash stuffed in white envelopes. Walk by the front door and accidentally slide your sock on a loose check. Pick it up and move it to the kitchen table. Open the front door and take the cash that is handed to you by a man with a black mustache. Don’t even think about pocketing it for yourself. Think about pocketing it for yourself. Don’t. Know that everyone else pays rent but your family. Your family pays with time and the surrender of privacy.

Eat your breakfast at the kitchen table. Don’t eat your breakfast at the kitchen table because you know at any minute the doorbell might ring. Another flood. A broken air conditioner. Someone new to sign the lease. Watch your papa shuffle his feet to the door like a maître d’ in his own home. Slurp your Froot Loops in the hallway by the closet under the flickering fluorescent light.

Mouth the word “feet,” so your mama doesn’t say “foot” yet again while on the phone with a prospective tenant. Apartment is 900 square-foot. You don’t know how you know you are right, and she is wrong, but you know, and she reluctantly listens, rolls her big blue eyes while shooing you away.

Eat crepes on Sunday mornings. When you sleep over at your friends’ houses, you eat bacon and eggs and chocolate chip studded pancakes made from creamy goop gently poured out of store-bought plastic jugs. When your friends sleep over at your apartment, your mama impresses them with homemade crepes. No, you’re not French. But your mama grew up in the

Soviet Union idolizing Sophia Loren and reading Dumas. Fill the crepes with sour cream, or apricot jam, or mashed up banana, or shredded cheese. Don’t fill the crepes with salmon roe because your friends won’t understand. The salty amber jewels, eggs pulled out of the sack too soon.

Make a “Happy Holidays” sign in Word ‘97, on a desktop computer covered in puffy stickers. Just last week the computer was sick with a pornographic virus. Pixelated naked ladies with hair in places you don’t have pouting for attention. Close the pop-ups, one by one. Make the “Happy Holidays” sign festive with clip art and exclamation points, so the tenants remember to drop off presents. Fruit Cake. Ferrero Rocher. Homemade fudge. Gifts cards. Cash. Take note of their holiday generosity when fulfilling their maintenance requests. Put up the signs in opportune places like parking garages. The mailroom. Places where people idle and think about your value.

Hide behind the couch while an angry old man waves a cane around. Try to yell stop but nothing comes out. Watch Papa say Monday and the old man say Right now! Watch Papa be a good little immigrant and shuffle his feet out the door to change the fluorescent bulb in the old man’s kitchen for a $20 tip on a Saturday afternoon. Find out the old man sues people for a living. Find out he is known to get managers drunk and fired. Find out he no longer lives in the building but pays rent just so he can continue to take the owners to court. Wonder if it’s even legal for you to write this down. Write it down anyway.

Realize that you are different, not only because you work here and live here for free but also because you are a family of

immigrants. Sure, there are other immigrants in the building, but they keep to themselves. Your family is on display. Notice how people treat your family like second-class citizens. How they mock your parents’ accents. How they barge into your apartment and linger in the living room as if it were an office. How they scrutinize your décor, a collection of discarded furniture from vacated apartments. How they assume that you are not very bright. Try to prove them wrong by over enunciating your words and making the honor roll. Don’t make friends with any of the tenants. It is a trap. They want to be your friend to use it against you for favors. Learn that people in the US are spoiled, entitled, that they walk around as if they are owed something. Listen while they complain about the manager. But when they are in a life-threatening situation the manager must save them. Try not to become one of them. Understand that your parents have a thankless job. Understand that no one owes you anything.

Remember your father is a good man. In the USSR he used to travel around for a living, building barns for farm animals, now he stays put, manages a property with your mama, saves old ladies trapped in showers. You want to be a good person too. Try. Babysit the child star who lives in the building to help your parents pay for stuff, while the child star’s young mom parties in the Hollywood Hills. Fail. Watch the child star take a shit on the soft carpet next to the bathroom door.

Celebrate Christmas on New Year’s because there was no god in the Soviet Union. Even though you are Jewish and your grandfather was a Yiddish poet who had to read the Torah in a dark room with a single candle burning to avoid being swept

away to the Gulag by the KGB. Decorate the New Year’s tree, a discarded Christmas tree your father picked up off the sidewalk. Cover the tree in handmade snowflakes cut from white printer paper bought with petty cash.

Learn about money. About how some people have it and some people don’t. How you came here with none. How the only way to have money is to save it or invest it in a sure thing. How nothing is a sure thing. How money is handed down in this country to those lucky enough to be on the list. How you must marry rich or be a lawyer or you’ll stay poor. How that one old woman died in her apartment and had no living relatives, so she split her life savings amongst her neighbors who would sometimes buy her groceries. How Papa cleaned out the dead woman’s apartment and discovered her will. How he stared at it long and hard, hoping his name was on the list.

Help your parents keep their job. Go with them to the Hanukah party at the country club the owners of the building frequent. Wear your nicest sale rack dress. Smile at the grownups and tell them how much you love your teachers, how you want to be a writer like your grandfather. Don’t mention the bullying. They call you a Russian spy. Do mention your obsession with Urban Outfitters and Emily Dickinson. Find out the girl at the table also likes these things. Translate all of this to your parents in Russian, who have been stumbling over their words between bites of slimy gefilte fish. Look around at all the money. Begin to realize you are somebody’s mitzvah, somebody’s good deed.

Think about how strange it is to live so close to people you don’t know. Think about how strange it is to share walls with people

outside your family. People that can hear you cough or sneeze or snore or yell or fuck. Think about how strange buildings are. How on the surface they seem so dull and utilitarian like one of those old jewelry boxes, but on the inside, they are filled with the music of our lives.

Grow sick of being the manager’s daughter. So responsible and kind. You are now ready for anonymity. Understand that you are now ready to secure a future outside the open music box you’ve spun around in for far too long. Because before you figure out what exactly you are meant to do with your life, you must get out of the building that raised you.

Transformations

NOVEL

EXCERPT

By Jennifer L. Shaw

What was the strange object displayed at eye level on top of the cabinet? Maria drew nearer, examining it closely. It appeared to be a sculpture of tiny skeletons among rocks and red trees, enacting some sort of drama. A macabre theater piece.

“You like my creations, then?” Ruysch said. It was more a statement than a question.

Maria hesitated. “Well, yes, I do like them.”

“Everything you see here has been preserved from the human body.”

These tiny bones couldn’t possibly be real skeletons. “But they’re so small.”

“The unborn,” said Ruysch. “That accounts for the size. These rocks at the center are stones from the bladder, kidney, and gallbladder.”

She looked again at the intricate branches of the red trees. “But the trees, are they not corals?”

“Ah! That’s where you’re wrong. Think again.” The man, his smile wide, was enjoying this guessing game. When she didn’t answer, he said with enthusiasm, “These are the vessels that carry our blood! I inject them with wax. Mix it with other substances to give it color. I’ve perfected the viscosity so the liquid can enter

the smallest vessels. Isn’t it beautiful? The patterns! But not only pleasing to the eye. Useful as well, to those who wish to observe the precise course of the arteries. Look at how delicately they branch! Observation. That is the key to knowledge. See how I’ve positioned the figure at the center, atop the stones? It’s as if he’s laughing!”

“Yes, I see,” she said, gazing at a small skeleton that appeared to be drying its eye-sockets with a cloth. “And this one is crying?”

“Right you are. And look, that handkerchief. I’ve made it out of a piece of lung tissue. Look at the detail—the membrane is so thin, filled with countless blood vessels.”

“It looks like a piece of embroidery,” she said. “Quite beautiful.”

“It reminds me of the Psalm: My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought like an embroidery in the lowest parts of the earth.”

She nodded. She knew this Psalm. David’s admonition that nothing escapes the Lord, all knowing and all seeing.

“We’re wrought in our mothers’ wombs, embroidered of vessels like these,” Ruysch said, as if entranced.

She read the engraved plaque attached to the walnut pedestal: Death spares no one. Not even defenseless babes. She took in a quick breath thinking of her own siblings. Looking around the room, she realized that each cabinet had a similar object sitting on top.

“Come,” Ruysch said, then moved quickly on to the next cabinet. This one held a much larger skeleton. “A little girl,” Ruysch said. “Must have been three or four years old. Look at the whiteness of the bones! Aren’t they marvelous? I joined all the parts together with their natural ligaments. Injected them with my red wax.” He pulled a magnifying glass out of his

pocket and handed it to her. “Look here. We see not only the capillary branches, those can be seen with the naked eye, but others that are much finer. It’s simply wrong that some parts of the body aren’t filled with blood. We are, all of us, blood and bone. Not the four humors as so many still believe.”

Maria stared at something that dangled from a silk thread tied to the thing’s right hand. “The heart?” she murmured. Then read, “All things hang by a slender thread.”

“It’s Ovid: Omnia sunt hominum tenui pendenti filo,” Ruysch said. “But come, let me show you more.”

Skeletons playing what appeared to be musical instruments— all made in one way or another from bones, stones and vessels. A skeleton lying on a bier, carried as if to the grave by two other skeletons. Everywhere, the macabre assemblages.

“So much death,” Maria said.

“Ah, but we mustn’t fear it,” said Ruysch. “That’s why I’ve made this place. The bones, vessels and skeletons are amusing, no? But come look. I’ve recently made a discovery that allows me not only to preserve the body, but to give it the appearance of life.” He led her by the arm back to the cabinet with the paned glass front and took out jars, placing them on an adjacent table well-lit by the nearby windows.

She took a sharp breath in, steadied herself on the table’s surface, forced herself not to look away. Tiny humans floated in the liquid. They were pale, somewhat gray, but posed in ways that made them appear alive, asleep. One of them sat upon a red cushion, a little white linen cap on its head. A girl, she could see from the exposed anatomy that was visible between its little thighs.

“The cap?”

“That’s just linen. Sewed by my Rachel. Several years ago.

She was no more than a girl. Before she was apprenticed to Willem Van Aelst. She has always been so adept with her hands, so precise. I think that’s why she’s become such a successful painter. That’s the placenta she’s sitting on,” Ruysch said, gesturing to the little fetus.

Maria felt her stomach turn.

Ruysch brought another jar to the table. “Compare,” he said as he placed it next to the seated fetus.

Maria flinched and put her hand to her mouth. The head of a baby floated in the clear liquid, its lips pink, plump, with little wrinkles. It had color in its cheeks, soft golden down above its brows, lashes where its closed eyes met. Around its neck, a delicate tatted lace collar. So peaceful, floating there gently, as if asleep.

“You can see that in the first, I hadn’t yet perfected my technique. There is much less detail, less color.”

The man spoke as one artist to another. As if there were nothing unusual about the kind of art he practiced. What would have happened if she had been making such objects? Any woman would be drowned for witchcraft before she ever had a chance to perfect her technique. And yet, she was as fascinated as she was horrified. For here she, and anyone who knew Ruysch or could pay the cost of admission, could see beyond the surfaces of the body—see things that perhaps God had never intended for human eyes. But in seeing them, she could learn. Observation, Rusych had said it was the key to understanding. That was certainly something she had believed for a very long time. “It’s … it’s beautiful,” she said. “The lace.”

“Rachel’s handiwork. We made it together just last year.”

“But how?”

He took out another jar. “My latest work,” he said, placing it

next to the sleeping baby head.

Maria jumped. It was like the other specimen, but its eyes were open, looking right at her.

Ruysch laughed. “They’re glass eyes. I had them made by an artisan in Venice. Quite beautiful.”

Feeling dizzy, she grabbed onto the table to steady herself. She tried to compose herself, to ward off the memories brought on by Ruysch’s creations. She closed her eyes, made a fist, opened it, closed it. Her hand. Her mother had taken her wrist and placed it on the swollen belly. Something under the skin jumped against her hand! She startled. Her mothered laughed, said: Don’t be frightened. That’s your baby brother or sister. Warm and love-filled, that voice.

But the warmth had soon been replaced by screams of pain and her sister Sara dragged her away from her mother. And then, when they returned to her mother’s room, all was quiet. She sat outside the door, listening, to make sure Mother was still alive. Pregnancy was a frightening thing. She had learned this as a young girl. Frightening and fragile and miraculous.

The next time her mother grew big and she tried to feel her mother’s belly, not a laugh, but a slap. When the screams started, she ran to her mother’s bed, held onto the frame and wouldn’t let go. A strange woman pulled her away and drew the curtains around the bed saying, It’s alright dear. Just the pains of labor and pushed her out the door. And when the screams abated, she heard only low voices, her mother’s sobs. All the mirrors were turned to the wall, the shutters closed.

Where is my baby sister? She had asked over and over again. She had received answers from no one. Finally, sister Sara told her the truth. The baby was with God in heaven. Sometimes when babes were born, they were already dead. The woman

who had sent her out of the room (she learned the woman was called a midwife) said she should thank the Lord her mother had survived. Had her mother lived in Amsterdam, one of her babies might have been a specimen in Ruysch’s collection, put on display for all and sundry.

“Madame Merian?”

Ruysch’s voice brought her back to herself. “Perhaps you’ve seen enough for one day.” Ruysch offered her a warm smile. She nodded. “Perhaps I have.”

As they walked back into the domestic portion of the house, Ruysch said, “You know, my dear, that in carrying out my work I have never harmed a soul. It’s unfortunate how many babes don’t survive childbirth, despite the best intentions and care. But it is better, is it not, to make something of beauty out of death? I’m fortunate to have the cooperation of the midwives I train.”

Untitled

By Cecilia Malgeri Skidmore

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth and every common sight, To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light —Wordsworth, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

There was a willow in our yard. Its branches draped down to the ground, making a bower under it. As a child I loved to crawl in between the leafy branches that swayed with my movements and sit with my back to the narrow trunk. I smiled, seeing the others walking around – was it a picnic? – my aunts and uncles, brothers and mother – knowing that they could not see me, that I was safe, ensconced in the arms of the willow.

There was a maple tree. She is, for me, the mother tree, my first tree. She was old, fat in the trunk. Her arms reached to the sky and held me in her leaves. I watched the light flicker on the leaves as they moved gently in the breeze. I looked far down onto the world, like a goddess or a fairy, a part and yet apart.

She lowered one branch to the ground. We sat upon it, riding it, our horse, our Pegasus, taking us wherever we could imagine.

Her roots, rising above the ground, gave us tiny homes for our dolls, our kittens, our imaginations. Her shade kept us cool

in the summer, as we, my niece and nephew, lay in the grass, food for our “playing house” dinners, narrow leaf plantain, that, twisted around itself would let us pop off its seed pod, a little playful game of war.

She is in me, all through my life. I visit her when we return to Connecticut. She has my heart. She is my mother.

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song

No more shall grief of mine the season wrong

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: —Wordsworth

I am lying on the hammock next to the patio. It’s a day that’s been advertised as hot enough to fry eggs, but with the breeze, and at this time of the day, four o’clock, it seems comfortable. The tall spruce to my left and the silver maple to my right give me shade and create an arched window of azure sky in front of me. The birds we’ve been feeding since the beginning of the pandemic seem to have found a home here. I turn over on my left side and quietly watch two little sparrows picking at the ground under the spruce. I’m only a few feet away from them, but they don’t seem to be worried. A little farther past is the mysterious bowl in the ground that was filled with garbage and ash when we moved in. It’s now curling around an oval

fountain the birds have made their own. Each afternoon groups of related birds fly in from a tree – perhaps the red cedar or the catalpa that looms over the back. They take their places on the tall flowers I’ve planted around the top of the circle, the roses or the butterfly weed. By twos and threes they drop down to the edge of the water and drink or dip their heads under, shaking the water off, and then take off, to be replaced by a few more. First the sparrows. The cardinal parents fly to the spruce and wait their turn. The bluebird peeks its head out of the unlikely bluebird box affixed to the top of the brightly painted chair, given to us by a friend just for that purpose. Then, without seeing how, the two bluebirds fly like jets across the expanse of the lawn to the double-trunked oak and wait from there.

As I lie there watching this Cirque du Soleil ballet of birds, I become aware that I am in the flight path of some other birds, probably more sparrows, who fly like, well, like birds, back and forth from their nest in the eaves of the house to my right and the spruce. It doesn’t seem to be bath time for them; I can’t discern their intent, but I can marvel at their speed and grace. And I cover my glass of water just to be safe.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: —Wordsworth

This acre of land, surrounded by the acreage owned by others and left fallow or landscaped beautifully, is a mile from a busy thoroughfare and big box stores. And yet it is quiet here, save the bird song. The sky is another bowl, edged on the

ground by tall trees, oaks, willows and catalpas. At night, after the sun sets and the sky darkens, the stars show themselves. I am up early, six in the morning, which is dark most of the year, but in the winter it is black as night even then. I let the dogs out and look up at Orion, watching over me every morning and say hello to him. At night there are the Pleiades, the Big and Little Dippers and others I cannot name. It doesn’t matter. I am a small part of this tiny piece of the universe, filled with awe and gratitude for the display. The moon rises and I watch her light through the trees as she makes her way. Or she comes late, and I wish her good morning and good night as she sets and I arise. She shines in our bedroom window, keeping watch over us as we sleep.

I loved Madeleine L’Engle’s trilogy that begins with A Wrinkle in Time and always dreamed of having a star-watching rock like her characters run to when times are difficult. There is no granite here, and certainly not one that is ten feet in diameter, as I imagine hers is. But I went to a landscaping company and asked what kinds of slabs of rock were available. The salesman showed us to the area where the boulders are available and I spied a stack of five limestone slabs, each large enough to hold a body, torso and head. Legs could extend to the lawn, bare feet could feel the soft grass. I said, “Yes, this is what I want.” He gave me a price and I paid.

When I told people what I was doing, they generally responded with, “Ohhh, that’s interesting,” their voices trailing off to let me know they had no idea what I was talking about. The day came and two men, one young, the other old, came in large trucks to place the stones. I had planted a grass around which I wanted the stone arranged. They would look like a fivepointed star from above. They asked no questions, just deftly

placed each stone and left. I took photos and sent them around. Again, “Oh, interesting.” I could read the bewilderment in the simple texts that came back.

And yet, as people come to visit, they ask about the stones. They find themselves drawn to the stones. “Your own private Stonehenge,” they say. They sit on the stones, “just to try them out.” They ask what it feels like to lay on the stones and look up at the night sky. On a few occasions, some courageous friends have joined us on the stones and watched the stars in the sky and our little stars, the lightening bugs, dance around us. Then, in the dark, among the bird sounds one can hear, “Aahhh….” And they understand.

Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call Ye to each other make; I see The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee; My heart is at your festival

I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!

—Wordsworth

When we came to this property five years ago, both of us were struck immediately with a sense of home. I grew up on an acre in Connecticut, between a house owned by my brother and his family and an easement that allowed us to imagine that we owned the property. We were the only children to use the easement, to hide in the bushes and explore the territory beyond our safe acre. There were cherry trees, grape vines and a seckel pear tree. My father had read a book called Five Acres and Independence and wanted to create his own Eden. He never did.

But I have begun to take this acre of parched soil, empty of birdsong, and begun to bring it back to a state of flourishing. I have planted prairie grasses, built rain gardens, filled the bowl and the fence by the road with native flowers. Beginning this fall I will prepare the space and soil to put in a Miyawaki forest, a woman-made forest that should create its own ecosystem and continue to replenish the soil and provide homes for more wildlife. It will contain 25 trees, some of which will be fruit and nut trees, to provide nourishment for all of us animals, including the human ones.

When the pandemic began and we were sheltering in our space, we bought two bird feeders. The few sparrows that live in the eaves of our house are now accompanied by bluebirds, cardinals, sand hill cranes, hummingbirds and goldfinches. The squirrels live in our apple tree, giving our dog something to howl at, though she cannot seem to catch one. There are deer, turkeys, owls, woodchucks and even a coyote passing through our land. It feels like Eden to me.

THE SOUND OF WAVES

By Zoe Stricker

You are in the ocean.

It is unordinary for the two of you to be swimming together, and you actually comment on it. “We’ve never swum together,” you say. And it is bizarre because your current shtetl is a beach town, and she grew up in Oahu, and both of you love the feeling of tight muscles and dry eyes that swimming gives.

You take selfies with your underwater camera and laugh as you bodysurf. You swim with sea lions and dolphins and it is extraordinary, and so the day becomes that. A woman sitting on the beach yells, wanting to know if she can come in without a top. You both scream: of course! Life is to be lived! She runs in and out, shrieking and kissing her boyfriend once back on dry sand. “I feel so young and alive!” she calls out to you and your friend from her picnic. And the two of you smile together, as you are experiencing the same jeunesse adrift in an unsteady ocean.

The waves pulse up and down, creating hills, and without warning, you are sledding together, collecting sea cucumbers along the way. This inspires some majestic feelings. Yet, the waves are off-kilter—belabored breathing—and right then you sense that the imminent imbalance is not just a phenomenon of

ZOE STRIC k ER

the sea, it is somehow impending: to be cast over someone like an ether-stained blanket used for smother. The clouds darken and this day makes you feel guilty later; she could have been with her mother instead of with you, selfish you, inside of an ocean that will always be around the corner.

* * *

Earlier that day, before sea swimming, your friend tells you she needs to buy a funeral dress as she drinks a bottle of wine before 2 pm You pour her glass and make idle suggestions for brands. She tells you about disturbing visits with her mother— how the most recent time she saw her, she was vomiting and in so doing, filling bags with blood. You wince, but look away so she can’t see tears in your eyes. You mumble mild comforts. She reminds herself that hospice gave her mother one to two weeks, and so she has time to order a black dress online, right?

Later that day, after sea swimming, you clean sand-stained skin and exchange graphic novels. She goes to the arcade with her boyfriend and arrives home well-past dark, giggling in the doorway. You hear a call she receives, quarter to the hour; it’s her sister and it’s urgent. You know this from half of a conversation, your friend saying, “you want me to come now? It’s an hour away.” From the rustling of things: bags being packed, brushing hands through hair, the sound of swiftness, you know her sister has told her it doesn’t matter, and in fact, she must hurry.

She leaves with her boyfriend without explanation, the smell of ocean spray wafting throughout your house. You send a text message saying to please write if she needs something. You tell your housemate, and the two of you fail to perfectly arrange her things so that she is comfortable upon return. You call friends crying. They put on a spa voice and tell you there is nothing you can do. You cancel your plans for the following day and you tell

your mother you love her. You turn your phone to its highest ringing volume and place it under your head so that you can be awakened in sleep. You imagine your friend must have been doing all of this since her mother’s first mammogram in 2006.

You hear her come in, early in the morning, before the sea lions have started barking, and the return is a surprise…it means she was not home for long. Your head swells with questions, and yes, you are tired, but her re-entry is bewildering. You want to help, but you don’t know how. Accidentally, you fall back asleep and reawaken later—anxious—immediately vigilant. You listen for noises, any mimicry of emotion, and after a few hours you hear it through the doorway: sniffles, mutterings, perhaps poems being read aloud. Blinds open, people whisper, feet touch the floor. Noses are blown and the door unlocks for tissues or toilet paper.

You wait, unmoving, unsure of what to do; anxious of what has happened but averse to asking. You can hear the waves crashing, pummeling the sand, as if outraged. She comes into the living room, her eyes distended and cerise, but you know she hasn’t been to the cove by your house where she likes to swim. She sits near you and you ask, unable to refrain, how her night was. She ignores the question. You talk about TV shows that went off the air 10 years ago, and the return of a housemate despised—incapable of relating to a world outside of her own—her narcissism angers everyone. You fear how she will handle an event so painful for another.

You search for answers, every subtlety illuminated—you ask if she wants a bagel, she replies she is not hungry. Not hungry. You note this, certain it means something, certain it means what you thought you knew, happened. You look down and there is quiet, yet it bellows at you: your friend is grieving, take

her to the ocean; say something; make her laugh, dance like a chicken, like you did as an eight-year old when your nanny’s mother died, she laughed when you did that, fill the quiet, fill it! But you don’t. You don’t know how to. Instead you wait and try to behave like an adult, even if adulthood is arbitrary in this moment. You don’t talk about what you will do today. You sit in silences but you don’t make her utter anything out loud; nothing she is unready to say. Through cracks in the door you see her boyfriend holding her, something they never really do. You watch his hand tenderize her back whilst exchanging “I love yous,” and you pretend you’re on your phone, not watchful or worried or suffering for her.

You bring up something scandalizing, that a public figure is pleading guilty to heinous crimes. You tell her this and she is there and she is not there and it is clear that she cannot hear you. She thinks you say she has died. She keeps repeating it, asking, as if a question, if she has died. You shake your head no. She realizes what has happened—that her thoughts concealed have been shared. But in seeing the salt water in your eyes she knows it is OK, she is safe; you were thinking about it, too.

Her mother’s mother died when her mother was 14. Now when her own mother is dying (or possibly dead) she is 23—it’s all the same ills. She has told you she doesn’t want children, you are curious if this is why. If she thinks putting them through cancer is to be passed down in genes, and in the same way people test for Tay-Sachs before they are married so as not to harm latent futures, you question if she is doing the science herself, calculating the potential for pain because there is no art of losing. You think about what motherhood has meant to her.

She leaves and you don’t ask where, you can’t demand anything of her right now. It is too much—inundating without

needing to be. You sit still, feeling contrite for not holding her and addressing the pain stinging the lightly-salted air. You realize you have never seen her cry before.

You open the door to her room, which incidentally is your room, too. You scan it, hoping to garner something, hoping to put assumptions to rest, and then you scold yourself, ‘you cannot be so thoughtlessly insensitive,’ you think with reproach; ‘she needs you.’ You find a shoebox-turned-package on the floor next to her mattress, positioned right next to her pillow, half-opened. With trepidation, your hands become shovels and you dig inside, intending to help, albeit intruding at the same time. You discover the box is filled with photographs and cards exclusively of and from her mother, and that is when you know. You graze through these pieces of paper, imbued with endearments, and in the final lines of one, delicately plastered with scrawl, you read:

I have always found peace and solace in the ocean; at the ocean, sand under my feet, salt air on my skin, in my lungs. You are part of the sea Zoë, visit it when you can, it will heal your heart, your soul. The sound of waves is the sound of my heart.

I love you forever, Mama.

The Three of Wands

By Jane Stringham

Alabama stores her husband’s obituary on top of the old piano. “I’m home,” she calls to it as she opens the apartment door. Her arms cradle a box of cookies, an apple and a pepper, which looks celebratory on her pastel green cake tray, especially when she arranges it with the barcode sticker facing the wall. Even the produce is colluding in her joy. It has been difficult to meet men since Jack died but today, cookie day, she has a date on the books with Grocer Zane. Saturday at six. Café Tin Soldier. She could sing.

She reaches for the cookie tin. The card deck inside is held together with a rotting green elastic and the four of cups has fallen away from the group, loose among the stale crumbs. Holding the deck, she dumps the cookie residue into the sink. She spreads the cards around her in an arc on her clean white sheets.

“Pull the cards?” she calls to Jack and feels his hands settling and pulling above her own.

The three of wands. A figure on a hilltop watching ships in the harbor. The four of pentacles, a seated figure clinging to his oversized coins.

“Please?” she whispers to Jack. She rubs her hands together for warmth and pulls the card she hoped for, the lovers. Two naked figures reaching toward each other and an angel watching

from above. She sighs in relief. “That’s you,” she says to Angel Jack. The reaching figures must be Alabama and Grocer Zane, who will become Just Zane by Sunday morning if she is lucky.

Alabama visits Jack’s grave on her way to Café Tin Soldier. “I’m home,” she whispers to his headstone. She nods to Cayetana in the grave next door, whose parents paid extra to shellac her high school graduation portrait to her headstone. She places a slice of apple on the “J” in Jack’s name. “What do the coins mean?” she asks. “And the ships?” Before she leaves, she shifts her body through the grass to sit on the other side of Cayetana and they hold the girl between them for a moment.

Grocer Zane waits outside the café with a bouquet of parsley. “We ran out of flowers. You look well-packaged,” he says.

She looks down at her dress. “Oh, this? It’s vintage paper.” She hopes he can already hear himself tearing it off. The dress print says “Campbell’s Soup” over and over and Grocer Zane says, “Gazpacho, huh?” as he scans the starters. Alabama arranges the still wet parsley next to her cloth napkin. They order wine. Grocer Zane asks why she and Jack never had kids. He’d seen them shopping in his market for years, Jack getting increasingly skinny, and still no little ones. Why? Alabama says that they were saving.

“You have many friends here?” asks Grocer Zane.

“A sister in LA. I’m lonely.”

“Sweet Alabama,” says Grocer Zane, and he invites her home.

She imagines his home will be color-coded like the shelves of his store, that the cereal boxes will say hello in uniform reds and yellows and the canned vegetables will know their place. They sail into his driveway. Two gnarled cacti on his porch loom like parents enforcing a curfew. She stumbles over a stack of papers

just inside his door and lets him kiss her into balance in front of a curio cabinet full of little glass mice.

“You sound like a bag of tortilla chips,” he says as he tears a little at her dress. She can feel Jack watching as they fall into a red bed of faux silk and wake a few hours later, sated but reaching for their phones. Alabama pets her screen with her thumb. She stops on a pair of knee-high boots and asks Just Zane if he’s ever been to Italy. He hasn’t.

“Maybe it could be our place,” she says.

“Let’s go right now,” he says, and she thinks of the broken zipper on her suitcase. “Google Maps does everything Delta Airlines can do.”

She stands, still naked, and follows him into his study, where her hands begin to run over the newspaper clippings tacked to his walls. They stop on Cayetana’s obituary and outline the girl’s mouth, more open here than on her headstone in the grass. Alabama pauses between Just Zane and his desk and Cayetana on the wall. She reads about how Cayetana died from stray gunfire in a protest. To Cayetana’s left she sees Jack’s fullcheeked face, a copy of the one on her piano at home.

What could she say? Are you mapping the city cemetery onto your walls? Are you collecting causes of death into a cautionary tale? But she waits to ask because she wants to go to Italy.

Just Zane clicks his mouse across the cobblestones. He clicks and she thinks, “I’m”; he clicks and she thinks, “home.”

She thinks she hears Jack say, “He’s taken all the fruit,” and Cayetana carries his voice through the choppy air like a protest.

PROTEST STORY

By Hannah Wilken

At the gas station halfway between Winchester and Washington, Aunt Bobbi bought a pack of gummy bears, and another filled with chocolate-covered pretzels that tasted like plastic. Everyone on the bus was on their way to Washington for the protest. The adults kept commenting on how mature Emma was for going down to march. Somewhere along the highway in New Jersey, she fell asleep against Bobbi’s shoulder. When she woke in the capital, her neck was stiff and her fingers were covered in artificial sugar.

The bus pulled into Union Station as the sun rose over the monuments. They disembarked and a line formed to collect the backpacks and handmade signs stored under the bus. It was exciting to think about all the people coming in from all over to stand for the same thing. But as the crowd began to walk off toward the growing crowds, Bobbi pulled her in the opposite direction.

“Come on,” she said, glancing at her watch. “Let’s go visit them first.”

When they reached the front steps of the National Gallery of Art, Emma’s feet were already tired. She probably hadn’t tied her sneakers tight enough. Bobbi noticed and stopped at a hot dog cart. She talked to the man selling the food, complimented him on his paper hat, and bought each of them a pretzel and

a coffee. The drink was bitter and unfamiliar, but Emma drank it anyway. The pretzel tasted good, so she mimicked Bobbi and dunked hunks of it into her cup. They waited for the museum to open, eating breakfast on the marble steps.

“Bobbi, why are we here? I don’t see any protesters.”

Bobbi answered with a question. “Do you know I used to live here?”

Emma shook her head. All she knew about Bobbi was that she had lived in New York for a while. That her mother worried about her aunt and whispered to her dad late at night while Emma listened through the radiator.

“I spent a summer here in my twenties.” She paused. “I wasn’t happy back then, but I found these sculptures in the museum one day and visited them most mornings. They didn’t make me happy, but they did make me feel something.”

Emma didn’t understand what Bobbi was talking about but a tenderness in her aunt’s voice compelled her to put her hand on her aunt’s shaking shoulder. She looked around the empty Mall for a sign of the protest. It was clear that this visit was important to her aunt, but it felt strange to have traveled all this way to now be away from the activity. Emma asked again why they were there and if they could return to the people from the bus, but as Bobbi began to speak a guard opened the museum’s front doors.

It was empty inside except for a few guards and despite the morning sun, the entrance was cavernous and dark. Massive marble pillars held the heavy ceiling, reminding Emma of the trees behind her house. Without a map, Bobbi walked to the left-most side of the building. Emma half-ran to keep up as they passed sculptures missing arms and legs and religious paintings showing moments she knew from nursery school. She wanted to stop and see them but Bobbi barely paused between rooms.

They walked through a few more hallways until Bobbi stopped in a small, brightly lit side gallery.

Like the rest of the museum, the room was empty of visitors. The walls were painted eggshell blue and a wooden bench faced a gold-lined panel. Two wooden statues painted in fading pastels flanked the scene. Mary and the archangel. They were propped on two white pedestals and the effect placed the figures high enough that even Bobbi, tall for a woman, only reached their waists. As soon as Bobbi saw them, she stopped, closed her eyes, and then slowly approached them. Emma held back.

When Bobbi was a few feet away from the statue on the left, she stopped and stood, as if waiting for the young man to speak. She leaned her head back to gaze into his faded face, which was frozen in a slight smile. His lips parted as if in mid-thought. Draped in yellow-tinged robes, the man’s right hand wrapped around his chest while his left reached out to the woman next to him. Emma could see his delicate fingers curved in midmovement. Instead of reaching back to him, the woman’s right hand hovered over her chest as if she were saying, Me? Am I the one you came to see?

“After all these years, they still can’t take their eyes off each other,” her aunt said. Emma worried she would start crying, but Bobbi stretched her hand out, instead, as though she might touch the painted wood. At the last second, she stopped and brought her hand to her chest, mimicking Mary’s gesture.

Outside, her aunt seemed happy. In the distance, drums beat while loud music echoed off the monuments. Bobbi waved at the man who had sold them the salty pretzels. He didn’t wave back. As they walked along the Mall, protesters milled around with signs and banners and Emma tried to read all the messages.

Each group seemed to be headed to a different kind of protest. A few people held anti-war signs while others had giant flags with anti-surveillance slogans. She kept seeing things like “fair trade,” “pro-choice,” “anti-Israel,” and “environmental destruction.” Some people looked angry; others acted as though they were walking to a circus. Children wandered around, the parents chasing some and dragging others. She felt like such an adult to be there without anyone holding her hand.

Emma was relieved. They had finally made their way to the protest. Being away from the commotion had made her feel like she was breaking her promise to her mother. She hadn’t let Bobbi out of her sight but it did feel like she had done something wrong. Her aunt was becoming more and more energized. As the crowd grew bigger, the mass of people dictated which direction they walked. Chants started with one person and then passed along from group to group like a wave. Each time a new one started, Bobbi threw her fist in the air. She yelled, her voice cracking, and the farther they walked, the more animated she became.

A man stood with his young son, watching the protest from the sidewalk. The boy, not much younger than Emma, held a piece of cardboard with a hand-drawn peace sign and was cheering on the crowd.

“This isn’t a parade,” Bobbi screamed at the boy. Scared, Emma tried to pull her away and back into the crowd but she wasn’t strong enough. Bobbi turned to the confused looking father. “You should be teaching your son about the death and destruction, not bringing him here to smile at the suffering. Fuck you.” The boy started to cry and the father looked away, embarrassed this strange woman was making a scene. She pulled harder to move her aunt away from the family.

Emma was disoriented now, too short to see over people’s

shoulders. Maybe they stood on the Mall. Maybe they were walking by the National Gallery again. Maybe they were in a different city altogether and she had been confused about what Bobbi told her in the dark on the bus. The further the protest moved, the louder Bobbi’s chants became. Emma noticed the shifting glances around them. People held on to their bags tightly as Bobbi walked past, her fist now permanently in the air. Emma handed her aunt her water bottle, but Bobbi shoved it away, causing the precious water to spill out of Emma’s hand.

It was starting to feel as though Bobbi’s anger was wearing off on the crowd. The call and response shouts were getting louder. Through a gap, Emma could see the White House. Bush was supposedly home, and she imagined him standing with his hands in his suit pockets, looking out at the thousands of people screaming his name. She felt so angry she wanted to spit on the ground, but it felt performative, so she shook her head in his direction instead.

They turned onto another street and Emma realized that Bobbi wasn’t one of the people standing next to her. She pushed her way through a trio of ex-hippies to see if she somewhere up ahead but no. She stood still, trying to spot her aunt’s familiar lavender scarf and high ponytail. A tightness clammed hard on her lungs. Bobbi was gone.

Pushing away from the crowd, Emma remembered what her mother used to say when she got lost at the department store. Find a place and wait because her mother was out there, somewhere, looking for her. If they both wandered around the maze of stores, they would never find each other. Maybe Bobbi was also out there, standing in one place and waiting for Emma to find her.

Protesters lined a chain-link fence in front of the White

House. They shook the metal and screamed swear words at Bush. Would they get in? Would he run away? Was there a payphone nearby? Emma reached into her jean jacket pocket to find any change left over from the middle-of-the-night gas station stop. All she could find was a penny and a couple quarters. Even if it was enough to call home, something told her that reporting to her mother than she had lost Bobbi was worse than being abandoned in Washington.

Emma walked away from the protest, searching the faces for Bobbi’s familiar profile. Police stood around smoking, talking, unfazed by the mass of people. A group of teenagers laughed at an encampment on the side of the lawn. The September air was warm, but she felt a chill. She walked away from the crowd to get a better look at the whole. On the edge of a nearby Avenue, Emma watched the commotion at a distance. It was like watching a movie. Her stomach grumbled. The peanutbutter sandwiches her mom had made the day before were in the backpack Bobbi carried. Emma closed her eyes against the blue sky. She couldn’t do anything right.

When she finally did look up, she saw Bobbi, huddled under a statue of a man on a horse. Burning candles, discarded homemade signs, and trash were scattered around her aunt’s dirtied sneakers. Someone had graffitied Bush Lied Thousands Died in red spray paint across the belly of the horse. Bobbi looked so small.

Emma approached her aunt carefully in the same way Bobbi had approached the statues just a few hours before.

“Bobbi, the whole world’s ending, isn’t it?”

Her aunt picked up her head from between her hands, tears dripping from her chin.

“Honey, it already did.”

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