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December 2013, Issue 16

CONTENTS Fiction: Merlin Ural Rivera

“Modicum”

Nonfiction:

Christina Guillén

“There’s a Light that Never Goes Out”

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10

Poetry: Howie Good

“Sertraline”

“Whiskey Before Breakfast”

“Bad Things”

“Bridge of Sighs”

“The Saint of Lost Things”

17 18 19 20 21

Gregory Letellier

“Portrait of a Father”

“Harpist in the Chinatown Subway Station”

22 23

Editor’s Note About Us Submission Guidlines Bios and Credits

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UMBRELLA FACTORY WORKERS Worker in Chief

Anthony ILacqua Fiction Editor

Amanda Bales Poetry Editor

Julie Ewald Copy Editor

Janice Hampton Art Editor/Design

Jana Bloomquist Nonfiction Editor/Web Developer

Mark Dragotta

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Umbrella Factory isn’t just a magazine, it’s a community project that includes writers, readers, poets, essayists, filmmakers and anyone doing something especially cool. The scope is rather large but rather simple. We want to establish a community--virtual and actual--where great readers and writers and artists can come together and do their thing, whatever that thing may be.

Maybe our Mission Statement says it best: We are a small press determined to connect well-developed readers to intelligent writers and poets through virtual means, printed journals, and books. We believe in making an honest living providing the best writers and poets a forum for their work.

We love what we have here and we want you to love it equally as much. That’s why we need your writing, your participation, your involvement and your enthusiasm. We need your voice. Tell everyone you know. Tell everyone who’s interested, everyone who’s not interested, tell your parents and your kids, your students and your teachers. Tell them the Umbrella Factory is open for business.

Subscribe. Comment. Submit. Tell everyone you know.

Stay dry

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hello there

Hello.

Welcome to Issue 16 of Umbrella Factory Magazine. As always, thanks for stopping by and checking us out. I think we got a great issue to offer to you, prose from Christina Guillén and Merlin Ural Rivera as well as poetry from Howie Good and Gregory Letellier. I think the following pages will prove that we have held true to our mission of connecting well developed readers to the best writing available.

The December issue always makes me a little retrospective of the year past and it makes me a little nostalgic for the entire course of our humble magazine. This particular issue marks the end of our fourth year. Four years does not really seem like a long time, but when I consider the lifespan of most magazines, a four year period often covers many generations of small literary endeavors. I’m not bragging, I’m just amazed and pleased that we can continue our work.

December is also the month we announce our Pushcart Prize nominees. If you don’t know, the Pushcart Prize is an award given to writers and poets who are nominated from magazine and small press editors. There are thousands of small presses and magazines who participate in Pushcart annually, and we’re proud to be among them.

Our nominees for 2013 are Alicia Lawrence and Michail Mulvey. Alicia’s poems: “To Tell You,” “Osprey Overhead” and “Rain in Sumatera” appeared in our June issue, #14. Michail’s short story “A Fist Full of Honey Grass” also appeared in the June issue. Best of luck to these two as they now compete in this competition. Make us proud.

This issue also marks the last issue for our fiction editor Amanda Bales. We first met Amanda in September of 2011, when her story “Another Kind” appeared in issue 7. We hired her the next month. Just over two years and 8 issues later we say goodbye. Amanda has been a treat to work with and a skillful colleague. I wish Amanda great fortune in all her future endeavors.

Thank you all for your continued support. Read. Submit. Tell everyone you know.

Stay Dry, Anthony ILacqua, worker

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submissions

Submission Guidelines:

Yes, we respond to all submissions.

The turn-around takes about three to six weeks. Be patient. We are hardworking people who will get back to you.

On the first page please include: your name, address, phone number and email. Your work has to be previously unpublished. We encourage you to submit your piece everywhere, but please notify Umbrella Factory if your piece gets published elsewhere. We accept submissions online at www.umbrellafactorymagazine.com

ART / PHOTOGRAPHY

POETRY

Accepting submissions for the next cover or featured artwork/photography of Umbrella Factory Magazine. For our cover we would like to incorporate images with the theme of umbrellas, factories and/or workers. Feel free to use one or all of these concepts.

We accept submissions of three to five poems for shorter works. If submitting longer pieces, please limit your submission to 10 pages. Please submit only previously unpublished work.

In addition we accept any artwork or photos for consideration in UFM. We archive accepted artwork and may use it with an appropriate story, mood or theme. Our cover is square so please keep that in mind when creating your images. Image size should be a minimum of 700 pixels at 300 dpi, (however, larger is better) jpeg or any common image file format is acceptable.zz Please include your bio to be published in the magazine.

Also let us know if we can alter your work in any way.

We do not accept multiple submissions; please wait to hear back from us regarding your initial submission before sending another. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please withdraw your piece immediately if it is accepted elsewhere.

All poetry submissions must be accompanied by a cover letter that includes a two to four sentence bio in the third person. This bio will be used if we accept your work for publication. Please include your name and contact information within the cover letter.

SUBMIT YOUR WORK ONLINE AT WWW.UMBRELLAFACTORYMAGAZINE.COM 6/

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NONFICTION Nonfiction can vary so dramatically it’s hard to make a blanket statement about expectations. The nuts-and-bolts of what we expect from memoire, for example, will vary from what we expect from narrative journalism. However, there are a few universal factors that must be present in all good nonfiction.

1. Between 1,000 and 5,000 words 2. Well researched and reported 3. A distinct and clearly developed voice 4. Command of the language, i.e. excellent prose. A compelling subject needs to be complimented with equally compelling language.

5. No major spelling/punctuation errors 6. A clear focus backed with information/instruction that is supported with insight/reflection 7. Like all good writing, nonfiction needs to connect us to something more universal than one person’s experience.

8. Appropriate frame and structure that compliments the subject and keeps the narrative flowing 9. Although interviews will be considered, they need to be timely, informative entertaining an offer a unique perspective on the subject.

Please double space. We do not accept multiple submissions, please wait for a reply before submitting your next piece.

FICTION Sized between 1,000 and 5,000 words. Any writer wishing to submit fiction in an excess of 5,000 words, please query first.

Please double space. We do not accept multiple submissions, please wait for a reply before submitting your next piece.

On your cover page please include: a short bio―who you are, what you do, hope to be. Include any great life revelations, education and your favorite novel.

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MODICUM Merlin Ural RIvera

I

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can use my lighter, but I decide to go for the big fire. The silence of the cold stove has started to be too embarrassing for both of us.

It is late October, which is like an early summer in Al-Qamishli.

We are still far from the few cold months Syria will eventually have, but I don’t care. I need the fire.

My grandmother will make a tart face when she sees her knitting needle in my hand. Not wanting me to burn the tip of her best companion, she will curse in Kurdish—without hurting me—in a way that only old women can, just like she does when I don’t shave my beard. She knows better than me that this is what happens to friends. They burn, you shut up. You acquiesce.

Besides, she was the one who taught me how to burn whatever hurts. I wonder how many sores she has had to deal with. It must feel as natural as peeling a potato by now.

prose

She knows everything that nature is willing to teach. We live in the outskirts of the town, where people still don’t trust doctors. They trust this tall woman that faces the Taurus Mountains every morning, challenging them and sucking their might. Her hands cure wounds with fire, illnesses with herbs. She washes away the pain with water, and if nothing helps she prays for you with all the air in her lungs. Perhaps this is the reason she looks ninety while she is sixty.

I hear her mumbling outside, talking to the hens that have lost their vitality. They are as tired as every stone of this town.

“How can they not eat?” Grandma grumbles entering the only room we have besides the bedroom, where we stretched a sheet a few years ago to allow more privacy to each other. It is a hall, a living room and a kitchen at the same time. The walls smell of sun-dried brick, heat, and the peach compote that she feeds me when I have high fever, ignoring my protests. I don’t get sick often, perhaps so as to avoid the compotes or simply not to cause any trouble. We have enough to worry about.

Her green eyes spot the needle at once.

She lets out a sigh with no deprecation.

“Again?”

I nod.

Her hands, familiar with every corner of the cupboards they’ve opened and closed for decades, are quick to find some stubborn garlic, decidedly unrotten.

It’s not morning yet; we are in those minutes that I can’t define as night, but that are not day either. The minutes during which Syria holds her breath, waiting for the break of day, waiting for the news, which is never good. May God forgive me for saying this, but the venomous clouds hovering over our heads make me thankful that my mother is dead, and my father is out there somewhere in Kuwait, working in the mines. He calls every Tuesday to remind us of his sacrifice, complains of his back pain.

Then I hear the dark undertone in his voice, never changing, always painful.

“How is the cotton?” he asks, in a voice that doesn’t care for anything soft, apart from the soil from which it originates.

“We have more and more bales each day, Dad,” I say, daring not smile at the irony of the codes we have to use on the phone.

I hear him sigh, “Yes, son, I see it on TV, this year is really good.”

I know he watches the news every evening, checking the death toll of the activists, praying that I am not among them.

“Oh, it’s even better than you see, Dad, it’s almost double,” I say, aware of the accusing tone in my voice, but not caring. I know he’s there to provide a better future for me, but I just don’t see that future coming. I’m nineteen and I see no future ahead.

Sometimes he calls out of the blue on a Friday night, and I know he has been drinking. He asks me how my mother is. I can never ask what he actually means, but I assume it’s Syria herself. So I tell him she’s sick and getting worse, that I’m taking care of her and praying each day. I hear him crying and I close my eyes.

At moments like this we don’t care if the next day the authorities come and ask me why I talk about my dead mother as if she is alive and beat me to death for assuming I can fool them.

“Be careful with your eyes,” Grandma says. She goes out again, and I know why. The odor of pain is more fetid than garlic. I press it to my face, waiting for the juice of the garlic clove to permeate my skin and extinguish in peace the fire burning there.

I’m alone, yet don’t feel alone at all.

They are everywhere. The sly soldiers leaving their honeydew in every corner like pernicious and disgusting mucus. They are protecting me from my own self, from my own blood, from my own brother. They are protecting me from that bump on my cheek, standing there for months, like a hostile neighbor to my left eye.

That bulge that is neither a puberty pimple, nor herpes left there by sudden fear.

You can’t detect fear when it’s impalpably condensed in the air you take in. You can’t know fear after you learn to live with it. When you’re a kid and a soldier randomly asks your name and you get poked in the ribs by his gun after your reply, your innocence dies together with your curiosity. Your mom does not reply

to your many questions, and you don’t see any difference between the eyebrows of your Syrian friends and yours. After some years you realize he is truly your brother, when you hear him in the cell next to yours moaning with pain for using “liberté” in his school column, while you patiently wait your turn, because you just couldn’t resist dancing with that girl in the street. You realize you have a name that starts with a letter non-existent in the Arabic alphabet, but you still don’t know why this makes you less human. At some point it occurs to you that it’s not you who is less human. You run with the wolves, you walk with the masses, you disobey, but they make you obey with a club, like a dog. You hear your cousin down in Damascus is killed. By accident, they say, in the riot. You never knew riots to leave burned bodies behind.

Then you become the best reader of poems, you understand all the metaphors, you feel every single line in your soul. You learn not to be happy and become an expert in smiling at strangers, who return to their countries believing strongly that the Middle East is “not that bad at all.” You learn not to trust your own face in the mirror, to make bashful love only to symbols, to scream inwardly.

They say garlic is the cure to everything.

I know it’s not. I know that there will be many mornings ahead like that. I will keep looking at the virulence of the iridescent needle, hot as hell, I will keep pressing it without any mercy to the bump on my face, hoping that this time it will dissolve the pus accumulating there for what seems like forever now. I will wait to be released of this scourge, secretly realizing that fire is nothing but a tantalizing woman.

Grandma peeks through the window, thinking I will be too busy with my pain to see her. But I see her gray scarf, in gross contrast with the sepia world outside. I don’t even feel the hot needle or the pain anymore, just the pus that I choose not to let out.

There is no sea here, but I swear I can smell the breeze coming from some place that doesn’t know anything about me. It touches my imperfect skin.

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There’s a Light that Never Goes Out Christina Guillén

“The presence of the dead person is imaginary, but his absence is very real: henceforward it is his way of appearing.”

-Simone Weil

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prose

On a moonless Saturday Belia rolled me into the night, The Smiths chiming from her silver, cherry-scented Honda. Belia was a makeup artist at Neiman Marcus. I was a guppy writer at the University of California. Neither of us were singers. But still we sang passionately offkey past the cows and horses and houses of our funny little southern California suburban country town. I chuckled inside at her voice scratching, trying to reach the high notes. It was so unabashed though, that I never did laugh out loud.

I liked it, and actually it inspired me. Her short, unpainted nails and silver Tiffany’s ring tapped the steering wheel. Her long, wavy black hair veiled her white pea coat. I saw her blush glowing from her rounded smiling cheeks.

We sang to lyrics so important we thought everyone needed to hear them, “Driving in your car, oh please don’t drop me home.”

We rolled down the windows to belt them at unsuspecting drivers, “Where there’s music and there’s people who are young and alive.”

We wailed through the greens and serenaded the reds until Mike’s Liquor came into view, its name painted on the homemade wooden sign above the door. Belia wheeled into the dirt parking lot and braked into a spot.

“Ten-thirty. Not too early, not too late,” she said with that funny leadership that seized her sometimes, reminding me there were serious depths to her I forgot about.

“The fuck?” I said under my breath, “You keep a schedule? We’re just going to Menaj.”

Menaj, short for Menagerie, our local gay bar with the greatest drag shows on earth, as far as we knew. Some of Belia’s co-workers would be there.

She didn’t respond but turned to face me slowly as she shut the engine off the way she did everything--self-aware, unhurried, with finesse.

Her full lips held the position the mouth does when forming the end of the word “comb”. I knew whatever she was about to say would be no less than profound. Her small dark eyes and false lashes blinked at me from behind her black

rectangular frames.

“Of course I have a schedule. I take going out seriously: you have to watch the time.” A smile peeked at the corner of her mouth, “Now, let’s get in there and get us some Jim Beam.”

I was still trying to understand why going out was serious business when I saw that playful side of hers peek through. I laughed, and the car jiggled as we leapt out. I knew the drill. We steadied ourselves on our heels over the pebble and dirt ground, straightened our jackets, and prepared to combat the testosterone pumped vaquero glares sure to be on the inside.

The second we giggled our way back into the car, paper-bagged glass bottle in hand, Belia rumbled the car on and raised the volume.

Feeling every word to our bones we threw up our arms like we were praising at a church sermon, chins high, chorusing the chorus. “And if a double-decker bus crashes in to us, to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die.”

Between lyrics we laughed about the men in the liquor store with the grungy paint splattered jeans who’d traced us with their eyes.

They made “chh-chh” sounds at us when we swiped by in claustrophobic aisles. Weirdly they reminded us of our fathers. Not because of their flirting, god no. But because they were hard-working Mexican men after a cold beer.

We tore out of that dingy old parking lot, leaving a cloud of dust. We took sips of the whisky. Our night poured; we had but to drink it. The bottle would be empty crashed on the asphalt somewhere before the clock struck midnight. We knew at Menaj the watered down Adios Mother Fuckers, complementary birthday blow job shots, and sloshing beers were already flowing, a glorious foam collecting that our youthful counterparts, chatting and cackling in the patios and leaning from stools, were already appreciating.

Yeah, we were borderline alcoholics like the rest of them. Twenty-two years old, the rest of our long lives ahead of us. We could have been anywhere on the planet, groomed into any form--two monks in Tibetan orange or maybe

two chicle-hawking kids flipping pesos in Tijuana. But in this life we were here, in this car, in this city, in this night. She was my best friend.

We were together. The differences were trivial. ***

For a time there was no time. Belia left a door open when she went away, and I received its draft. I cocked my head like a dog.

I didn’t need sleep. But when I slept, I didn’t feel any more or less rested than before closing my eyes. Zombielike. But not unhappy.

Life and I tangled in each other’s arms, yet I was honored, chosen to experience such intense emotion, the veil fallen from my eyes and in a bittersweet chorus, “There’s a light that never goes out.” I knew everything was precious.

Eternity brimmed in every atom. I had accepted life, its terms, and it had broken me. I knew I’d never take another moment, another person for granted, but go on living as she had--a gay man trapped in a woman’s body--embracing all, dusting all with her soft blush brushes, forever sassy, forever kind.

She had gone first, of course she had.

She always was ten steps ahead of me. She spoke a sixth grade vocabulary while I studied our third grade word list. Her bedtime story book was an encyclopedia. She was sharp. She had a way of taking information in and explaining it back, the way the teacher wanted, in her own words--describing the mystery of condensation, her small hands working themselves into water molecules and her face scrunching as though she were the one squeezing through plastic--and I didn’t doubt she could do it too, with that look of concentration on her face-enigmatic. And as for emotional intelligence, this too she had. Her compassion for animals at age eight, going without eating until her mother agreed to her dog’s surgery, the way she picked at her animals’ fur like a doctor operating on her own kid--enough to compel St. Francis himself to get her in charge of baby animal heaven.

Memories. All of this crossed my mind

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prose in the days following her car accident. Driving in my black Jeep I was most alone, I could wail like La Llorona for all the swooshing drivers around me cared. I chugged from a bottle of water and went toward the dry hill where I planned to go hiking and stop at her grave just below it. My thoughts were all I saw though making the familiar freeway, the horse crossing signs, and the river bottom slouch back. Occasionally, I noticed the hill sitting up sturdy and waiting. She’d been alone in her cherry scented car. As soon as they’d known, her two younger sisters came to my house. I thought it a nice surprise. We always did that sort of thing, honoring our “don’t-be-a-stranger” mantra. But their faces had looked strange. The older of the two had identical black framed glasses, just like her older sister had had. They each wore their dark hair long like she’d had. I led them to my room where I’d been sprawled on my bed dreaming up a poem for class.

And the moment we all sat down, they on my orange couch and I facing them from the side of my bed, the older of the two said it plain, “Belia died.”

They didn’t watch me for a reaction.

They proceeded to tell me of the police man who’d knocked at their door and their instant fear that their father was deported. So after they’d left, and I’d somehow fallen into my own father’s arms who’d said, I don’t even remember what he’d said, but he’d been there and acted as a sort of cushion. Then I’d gone back to my room for a few hours , and I felt ejected from my body. I felt how out of sequence it all was.

How real and naked. A few more hours passed and days and I felt pushed out of time and into another universe completely. I just went with it, unaware it was happening or how to describe it except that it was like entering the mind of babies, plants, and animals--pure existence, total experience, sensitive, receptive.

What was this dimension without clocks I’d entered? It was the repetition of a single moment, of the same thoughts and emotions occurring and reoccurring over a single event--a

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single person, really. Maybe it was a limbo, a realm of waiting for the estrangement to come to an end, where I waited for her to return with me to Mike’s Liquor and the Menagerie and the makeup counter at Neiman Marcus’ and our lives, days at the beach--it’d all felt like a day at the beach at her side; everything else was trivial, interchangeable--it was the entity that infused the circumstances, not the other way around. She had that kind of radiance that struck people and when it hit them they knew it.

Maybe this timeless, this newness I was experiencing was just an unleashed Belia, her body no longer containing her essence. I wondered.

And although I felt raw and vulnerable, I felt protected, too--invincible. Had the world seen my wound and hidden me in a crevice? Was I inhabiting a pocket out of time that allowed me to tuck away all the memories before their scattering into the abyss of the forthcoming years?

Was life so merciful? Always while driving, questions marked the horizon. I made it to the cemetery and looked curiously at the visitors of other graves. I had the urge to approach them and present them with my questions, but I never did.

The hike and visit cleared my mind, but only in the sense that it was ready for more. I got back into my Jeep and drove home. I thought about the other people who’d been additional cushions for me to fall upon, to them I was grateful. I’d sought a friend’s advice. His name was Millhouse, Eric Millhouse. It was funny that he carried this name and he knew it, but he didn’t have blue hair; he had red hair and was serious most of the time. They’d been dating for a few months before she’d died. I recalled the shaking of his hands as he signed the condolence card for her mother. I knew the trembling, the physical body responding as much as the emotional. Millhouse took me in, gave me tickets to his rock venue, The Glass House in Pomona, took me backstage at other venues throughout L.A. He handed me CDs, showed me the offices, LP album covers, posters, and flyers coloring the walls. We played dice in his

apartment above The Glass House.

A big group rounding a table, a guy calling out, “It’s my body,” in sing-song intervals making everyone laugh--even me.

Those who had it threw down big money, and miraculously, multiple people rolled all 6s. They rolled again to break the tie and the winner swept up the cash.

“It’s my body,” the man called again, laughing, going wild for the feel that was in the air that night.

Something was in the air that night. It was more than the Jim Beam we drank in honor.

Was it her? Hell’s Bells, Belia, Belia Padilla?

She’d loved the game, rolling 6s, her full lips holding the end of the word comb, her laughter bubbling when her roll won, the looks on the men’s faces when she’d cleaned them out--more intrigue than bitterness. She’d pop up and mix drinks. She’d been their favorite, their sweetheart, crow black hair swinging behind her on her way to the kitchen.

“It’s my body!”

After Belia on those kinds of nights, after all the guys left, Millhouse would hold me.

He never kissed me, and I didn’t want him to.

He stroked my hair and an old, broken earring through my upper ear scratched the palm of his hand; he let it scratch him. My throat hurt. I felt like I swallowed a hardboiled egg.

What about the cropped tweed jacket she let me borrow and said she wanted to start wearing again? I can never return it to her. I’m still holding a ticket for her to see a band play in a couple of weeks. Who will know me since swing sets at recess and all that childish sweetness we once embodied, the kittens we nursed, and mushrooms we dared each other to eat from the wild grass in her yard? Who’ll give me that striking advice that brought my power back?

Who’ll bring home all those great Lancôme and Shiseido cosmetics? Who’ll tell stories about Persian princesses visiting her Neiman’s store and share her gay co-workers’ hilarious tiddilybits.

Millhouse listened and touched my hair.

Then he’d have his turn. He’d tell me about the times she’d played hostess to the room of shouting men.

How she insisted on buying him drinks at his concerts.

“A woman that loving, that beautiful should never have to pay for a thing,” he said, and how special she was, how was it possible?

How did she know so well how to take care of a man? How was her skin so soft, light freckles on her face in exactly the right place?

How was her laugh like her name--like bells jingling the air? How did she lean into the turns so naturally riding behind him on his Vespa?

As he went on I listened, and nodded and nodded and nodded.

I said, “Maybe she was already so far beyond us. Ever notice how it’s the best that have to go? They leave us with their teachings, push us out of the nest, force us to go on and see what we can make of it on our own.”

“Yup.”

And then much more silence and hair stroking.

And the advice. The advice Millhouse gave me. After the funeral I’d asked him how to get over it?

He faced me with clear pale blue eyes.

They searched me and I felt I’d said something extremely naive.

Without a blink, he answered, “You don’t.”

After all the bittersweet time he and I spent together, in his place and at his music venues, those were his words to me? I’d thought they’d be better, more comforting--less honest.

They were worse than death, for I don’t think when I’m dead I’ll be able to feel the shattering of the last sliver of hope.

Then I’d absently tap my gas pedal because I’d been coasting down my street and lost the juice to get me actually up onto my driveway. I’d get there eventually and then hear the metal door slam shut. I’d soon be in my room feeling no change from the sitting in my car to

the sitting on my bed. I was like a doll carried around by a child, positioned in the exact same way, not in body but in mind. My bedroom light would be left on until the morning hours.

Late in my room, listening to old Smiths songs, I thought about these things while trying to pin down a poem that would seem more grounded than I was.

Maybe I could write poetry about the shift in reality. How hours would dissolve, and still I’d be alert as though just waking from satisfying sleep. That I existed with absolute clarity. You may have thought I was more confused--those who’d known me, known we’d been best friends, may have thought this. But I was more lucid than ever. I was fish eyes in water; they always felt fresh. I never grew tired.

That draft hit me good from the door she’d left open. Something opened before me that only I seemed awake to see; I could write about that.

Or how I watched the crumbling of unimportant priorities, my school and work schedule that’d been hard wax now feeling softened and bent.

Pliable were the hours in the day and the night.

You’d think I’d take some days off. You’d think I’d stay in bed--those who’d known me, known we were best friends might have thought that.

But no. More alive is the person who knows, really knows, that her head is but a calavera-a skull. More alive--every cell, every thought, every vision, every sensation--more heightened.

I could write about that, title it, “I am but a calavera.”

After long nights like that I’d sleep a little, wake up, and drive to my university. I’d watch how during the no-time-time my world of fears, call them walls, call them laws, rungs, homework, classes to pass, red lights, straight faces at food court registers--all of that had fallen away. But, just gently, just swiftly and quietly fainted away--in short, it did not concern me anymore. I rode above, a big rig on the highway, overlooking all--untouchable.

Once at school I’d use the library computers to research. Not my homework, but in-

formation about people like me. It was there I found an explanation, something to explain this phenomenon. It came to me through an article on the internet, meant for those with post-traumatic stress disorder. But it seemed to me we had a biological effect in common. This is what it said.

Within the Limbic System of the brain are two related areas that are central in memory storage: the hippocampus and the amygdala . . . It is believed that the amygdala stores highly charged emotional memories, such as terror and horror and it has been shown that the amygdala becomes very active when there is a traumatic threat. The hippocampus, on the other hand, stores memory of time and space—puts our memories into their proper place in our life’s time line. During traumatic events, it has been shown, the hippocampus becomes suppressed . . . The traumatic event is prevented from becoming a memory in the past, causing it to seem to float in time, often invading the present. It is this mechanism that is behind the aforementioned PTSD symptom of “flashback”—episodes of reliving the trauma.

- Babette Rothschild. (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Identification and Diagnosis. Soziale Arbeit Schweiz (The Swiss Journal of Social Work), February 1998.)

The article suggested the telling and retelling of the memories so that, I suppose, the hippocampus can then jump in and add a time stamp to the floating memories, therefore putting them in their rightful place, the past, where they could do less harm. This sounded like a hopeful solution for PTSD sufferers, but I kind of liked feeling levitated, existing in my own little Belia-infused world. Interesting that this sci-

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entific study revealed that our brain can actually acknowledge a state of timelessness. This only added to my joy; my brain was working with me. My beautiful amygdala! Oh, you sweet thing, you understand! Never leave me.

So with my chronological-less amygdala I strutted through the library doors back into the sunny California air continuing to hardly notice beginnings and endings of any sort. But even with my wonderful timeless amygdala memories, on my drive home I felt something new. What was it? Was it loneliness? I would stop at her little sisters’ house on my way back to ask about this. But our conversation swerved off track as we batted around in her makeup box, our amygdalas resonating we talked about memories of our sister-friend. She’d once made a hideous candle from old crayons and stuck needles through it, calling it beautiful, her face sincere, I told them. They laughed. That same laugh like bells--shit, did they know they did this? I mentioned it, told them they would always have that laugh with them. Her sisters and I were content when together. Things felt okay.

Then I thought it couldn’t be loneliness I felt because with her sisters I felt okay. No, not loneliness.

Hopping back into my Jeep I saw one of my books glinting the sun from the seat. It was the collected philosophical writings of Simone Weil for my memoir class. I turned to one of the dog-eared pages and read the quote that interested me.

It occurred to me that this single sentence of hers defined the new feeling I had in the no-time-time. I thought I would go to Belia’s grave to share it with her, whisper it to her headstone. I repeated the sentence as I drove past the sombreroed vaqueros on horseback down our dirt side-walks. I turned onto a bigger street and idly hung back a little, letting the speeders pass me by. I realized I’d been feeling something I didn’t feel. The feeling was the absence of feeling. It was nothing. I had never felt nothing before, so it took a while to know

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that that was how I felt toward her absence.

One never thinks to feel nothing, but the beauty of nothing is that one can feel it. To feel nothing must make it something because one cannot feel nothing without it being something.

As I pondered on this, bobbing in and out of the present moment, trying to remember to signal, I carefully neared the freeway. I warily distinguished between the side-by-side on-ramp and off-ramp entrance and exit. I swallowed and switched into the correct lane to enter the freeway. I squinted at the hill ten miles away that guarded her plot.

Belia’s nothing was her new something.

I’d wanted the relief of her knocking at my front door, the pleasure of a night out, dancing and chatting with flashy young people. I wanted to fill the nothing with something. But the nothing need not be filled because the nothing was already something.

I had her empty space. I had something.

I could look at it that way. From her, that was the only real thing I could ever continue to receive; my last connection to her on Earth. Nothing was the absence of Belia. It was the worst-or the most beautiful gift of all--to feel this connection, at least nothing, for the rest of my life on Earth.

When I saw the early sign for my exit on 6th St. and its bridge further down, I took my foot off the gas and hovered it over the brake.

But I thought, where am I going? I would soon be there, next to her, her--her what? Her body?

It wasn’t her.

I pressed my foot back onto the gas and shot under the bridge. I saw the 91 freeway sign and drove under that too. I knew that once I turned westbound I would see signs for beaches: “Huntington, Laguna, Dana Point.” Oh, I knew she wouldn’t be there either; she wasn’t any place. But the beach reminded me of the time when we rented one of those two-person bicycles and how the only way we could ride up and down the boardwalk was with a tall person in front and a short person in back. And I

laughed thinking how she’d said the whole reason, the only reason, she was made short and I was made tall was so that we could ride on it together. I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview; I knew there was not enough traffic for me to look this serious, I must’ve been in it again, that absence of time thing. I put both hands on the wheel and watched my driving.

There was a trick I’d have to master here, living in no-time-time and yet not. Driving I’d have to keep at least one foot on Earth. It would have to be mastered, I thought, determined, but I was not sure how I knew it wasn’t my turn just yet.

I’d be careful, I promised her silently. I gazed at the road in front of me and imagined what I would find at the beach without her. What would I find in the void of Belia?

I thought about the possible silence waiting for me, enveloping the birds so far in the distance they would look like tiny black mustaches flying over the pier. I pictured in the void of Belia, there would be me sitting on the sand and the calm breeze through the palm trees and my amygdala with all those precious timeless memories, watching other people create theirs on their own two-seated rental bicycles.

In the void of Belia there would be Millhouse and The Glasshouse and The Menagerie and her sisters who reminded me of her when they laughed and the tweed jacket and the blush and The Smiths and the “light that never goes out,” that raw feeling of the void--the yin to her yang, my link to her grand self forevermore--me cruising through it, flying but ultimately still tethered like the kites I’d soon see on the shore waving through her great void, me hoping she could see from her new vantage point, me and all the others hit by that draft, the one from the door when she left, that sent our hands jittering, see me writing and deleting and rewriting all these words eight years later trying to get the feeling and the person right, feeling defeated by my inarticulateness, trying to capture and convey someone who was never meant to be described as much as experienced, and see how

she permeated me like the water I drank before my hikes emerging from each of my millions of pores moving me to glisten when I reached the top of the hill, how the greatness of her presence made such gravity of sense that the release of that weight meant the splitting of an atom and the exploding of a star, a shift in reality that most people only meet through hallucinogens or intense love or violence, a shift I’ll still be able to feel whenever life gets too fast and I’m compelled to draw upon this again, choosing to close my eyes and step out of clocks and float into the no-time-time to wonder that one day I too should cross into the light that never goes out, as mystically as she had done when her time had come.

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POETRY

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Howie Good

Sertraline Something’s changed. And no one is really sure why. A team on call rushes to the scene. So may wolves. But just when the rest of the world has begun to mistake the bones of thought for thought, you try me on, and the sky erupts with flying cows, and the margins with dancing rainbow-haired crazies. One must have at least a little in one’s life that not even a hundredmilligram pill can dispel.

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Howie Good

Whiskey Before Breakfast It was fashionable to be pessimistic and drunk all the time. Sunshine, you said, looking up from a whiskey, is an overrated virtue. You spent the next day in bed curled up in the dark. A roomful of students waited the required fifteen minutes for you to show and then left. There’s an old saying, All poetry is prayer. No, you replied, I don’t want to.

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Bad Things Some take pills to help them fall asleep. Others take pills to help them stay awake. Either way, bad things happen. Anyone might be the enemy. Anyone! We act as if this weren’t true. I pound on the door. Only the dog is there to answer it, and he doesn’t even try. The sniper in the tree relaxes his finger on the trigger. Oh, how strange I suddenly feel to still be seeking word of some long-lost expedition!

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Howie Good

Bridge of Sighs Ever notice how much paper one accumulates while getting through life? It all adds up to yet more clues for one’s survivors to misinterpret. Let the phone ring. No one is sure which truth is the truth. The mad mingle anonymously with normal people, some of the crowd murmuring, Why did the cowboy have to die on the bridge? I start to wonder as much myself. This is just the way my body processes alcohol, the grass still damp and the bridge lights looking diamond-like in the distance.

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The Saint of Lost Things I never seem to know what the date is. One can’t know everything, right? The flags are flying at halfmast by order of the governor. Women in various stages of undress have spread themselves on the grass. “Tear here,” one says, nodding encouragingly. The leaves, heart-shaped and dark, shake in a sudden frenzy. Something about the looks I receive from people tells me that I’ve been passed over again for a lifetime achievement award. It’s simple math, like the four cases of children with leukemia since spring.

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Gregory Letellier

Portrait of a Father His hieroglyphic mouth is unmoving, as an iced-over pond reaching to the trees where I once found solace: a kind of peace sliced gently out of time like the tonal teeth of a Steinway’s song or the seated mother of Whistler, her posture, seemingly perfect years after sitting in a cold rain, renewed as blinking firefly-eyes of my unborn-newborn, as I paint a face on a lover’s back mellifluous jazz swimming in the kitchen’s air seeping into me like sudden memory, as if my father was screaming from that dark as if my voice is the dead one a language decayed to white noise: a cricket’s soft buzz in a pasture my hand, the wavering grass-blades, is running the length of this page, above all these inked stanzas, words I could never easily say over napkins and paper plates.

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Harpist and the Chinatown Subway Station Soft as dew-blots on milkweed leaves,

each note leaks as falling dimes

on silk motel sheets, fading in a sink bowl, below her owl-eyes,

light tones, orbital as clock-needles,

down steel drains, down a hollow space where forgotten things rain:

three pennies, maybe love,

dive into a train,

screaming from an abyss,

coiled in dirt.

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bios

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Howie Good a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Middle of Nowhere (Olivia Eden Publishing) and the forthcoming poetry chapbooks Echo’s Bones and Danger Falling Debris (Red Bird Chapbooks). He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely. http:// apocalypsemambo.blogspot.com

Christina Guillén is the creator of Half Moon Jefa, the mixed people’s super hero who lives in her blog halfmoonjefa.tumblr.com. She is currently pursuing her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in fiction. She is interested in multiculturalism, bilingualism, and mesoamerican and indigenous studies.

Gregory Letellier

is student of Writing and Literature at Emmanuel College in Boston. He has poems and stories published or forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal, Poydras Review, Linden Avenue Review, Hobo Camp Review, Indigo Rising Magazine and Clutching at Straws.

Merlin Ural Rivera was born in Bulgaria and raised in Turkey, where her short stories and a short film

script received awards and were published. Her work was also published in Ping Pong, Warscapes and Hot Street. She holds an MFA from the Creative Writing program of The New School, and she’s living the dream, as they say, in Bayonne, New Jersey.

Fabio Sassi started making visual artworks after varied experiences in music and writing. He makes

acrylics with the stencil technique on board, canvas, or other media. He uses logos, tiny objects and what is considered to have no worth by the mainstream. He still prefers to shoot with an analog camera. Fabio lives and works in Bologna, Italy. His artwork is featured on our cover. He is a regular contributor to Umbrella Factory Magazine. His work can be viewed at www.fabiosassi.foliohd.com. His feature work on our cover page is entitled Yellow Factory.

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stay dry.

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